The Routledge Companion to Expressionism in a Transnational Context 2018007379, 9781138712553, 9781315200088

Table of contents :
The Routledge Companion to Expressionism in a Transnational Context- Front Cover
The Routledge Companion to Expressionism in a Transnational Context
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Illustrations
Color Plates
Black and White Illustrations
Acknowledgments
List of Contributors
Notes to the Reader
Expressionist Networks, Cultural Debates, and
Artistic Practices: A Conceptual Introduction
“French” Expressionism
The “Germanization” of Expressionism
Die Brücke: A Revolt Against Academic Tradition and Social Conventions
Der Blaue Reiter: From Spiritual Renewal to Abstract Painting
Austrian Expressionism: Agitated Lines and Psychological Portraits
Herwarth Walden und Der Sturm: The Networks of the Avant-Garde
The Medium of Printmaking and the Revival of the Woodcut
From Capturing War Experiences to a Socially Engaged Form of Art
Expressionism and the Art of the German Minorities
The “Jewishness” of Expressionism
The Question of Artistic Individuality
Hybrid Modernism versus Radical Avant-Garde Art
Conclusion
Notes
PART I:
Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltic States
Chapter 1: Prague—Brno: Expressionism in Context
What Is Expressionism—in Bohemia?
Prague, Expressionism, and the Osma Group
Edvard Munch and Czech Expressionism
The Tvrdošíjní Group (The Stubborn Ones)
Outsiders and “Itinerants”
Expressionism and Moravia
Notes
Chapter 2: Košice Modernism and Anton Jaszusch’s Expressionism
The City and Its Art Scene
Portrait of the Town
Modern and Avant-Garde Art in Košice
Anton Jaszusch’s Work Before the First World War
Anton Jaszusch’s Work After the First World War
The Great Cycle
The 1924 Art Discussion on Jaszusch’s Work and Exhibition
Notes
Chapter 3: Expressionism in Hungary: From the Neukunstgruppe to
Der Sturm
Exhibitions in Budapest: The Neukunstgruppe (New Art Group)
The Sonderbund Exhibition in Cologne
The Exhibition of Futurists and Expressionists
The International Postimpressionist Exhibition
Lajos Kassák and His Magazines After the First World War
Herwarth Walden and Hungarian Artists in Berlin
Notes
Chapter 4: Poznań Expressionism and Its Connections with the
German and International Avant-Garde
The First Expressionist Exhibition in Poland—Lvov, 1913
Poznań Expressionism: A Problematic Name and Its Connotations
Bunt as an International and Cross-Border Artistic Movement
Exterritorial Avant-Garde?
The Magazine Zdrój—Word and Image as a Mirror of a Supra-Regional and Multicultural Network
The Legacy of the So-Called Poznań Expressionism
Notes
Chapter 5: Expressionist Networks in the Russian Empire, Soviet Russia,
and the Soviet Union
The Russian-German Artistic Dialogue Before the First World War
Expressionism in Post-Revolutionary Soviet Russia and the Early Soviet Union
Notes
Chapter 6: Expressionism in Lithuania: From German Artistic Import to
National Art
Expressionism in Lithuanian Art History
German Expressionism in Lithuania Before and During the First World War
The Reception of German Culture in Interwar Lithuania and Adomas Galdikas’s Role in the Dissemination of Expressionism
The Artists’ Group Ars
The Offshoots of Expressionism: Jewish Painting and Graphic Arts
Notes
Chapter 7: Expressionist Originality in Latvian Art: Between
Confirmation and Destruction
The New Generation and New Art
The Expressionists’ Group and the Linocut Album The Expressionists (1919)
Expression as a Form of Manifestation
The Riga Group of Artists (1920)
A Different Kind of Expressionism
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 8: The Ambivalent Affair of Estonian Expressionism
Contacts with German Expressionism
The Suffering Artist: The Berlin Episode of Nikolai Triik
Visionary Landscapes: The Art of Konrad Mägi
Erotic Frustration: Eduard Wiiralt in Dresden and Paris
Conclusion
Notes
PART II:
Scandinavia
Chapter 9: Expressionism in Denmark: Art and Discourse
A “Paris of the North”
Concepts of Expressionism: Interiority and Decoration
The Danish Art Market During the First World War
Danish “French-Style” Expressionism
Expressionism as Recuperation of Classicism
Der Sturm in Copenhagen
Notes
Chapter 10: Expressionisms in Sweden: Anti-Realism, Primitivism, and
Politics in Painting and Print
Definitions of “Expressionism” in Swedish Art Criticism and Art History
Expressionisms in Sweden in the 1910s
Der Sturm and the Swedish Society of Original Wood Engravers
Expressionist Art in the 1930s
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 11: Nationalism, Transnationalism, and the Discourses on
Expressionism in Finland: From the November Group to
Ina Behrsen-Colliander
Expressionism and Emotion
The “Finnishization” of German Cultural Attributes
Finnish Independence and the Effects of Nationalism
Hellaakoski and Worringer
Whose Expressionism Was It?
Expressionism as a Generic (Male) Tradition
Transnationalism within the Nation State
Ina Behrsen-Colliander’s 1930s Approach
Political Implications
Notes
Chapter 12: Expressionism in Sámi Art: John Savio’s Woodcuts of
the 1920s and 1930s
An Educated Sámi Artist
Savio’s Woodcut Prints
Edvard Munch as Savio’s Idol
The Influences of Norwegian Art
The Content and Context of Savio’s Art
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 13: Early Expressionism in Icelandic Art: Jón Stefánsson,
Jóhannes Kjarval, and Finnur Jónsson
The Friends of the Arts
Kjarval and “The Corruption of Our Time”
Jón Stefánsson and the Académie Matisse
Finnur Jónsson and Expressionism
Notes
PART III:
Western Europe
Chapter 14: Early Engagements: Peripheral British Responses to
German Expressionism
On the Origins of the Term “Expressionist”
Brücke’s Connections to the British and German Arts and Crafts Movements
Rupert Brooke’s Encounters with Expressionism
The Early British Reception of Wassily Kandinsky
The Metropolitan and Regional Reception of Expressionism
Bloomsbury and the Marginalization of Expressionism
Notes
Chapter 15: Expressionism in the Netherlands
A Rapid Introduction
Kandinsky as a Source of Inspiration
The First Collectors
De Ploeg: Kirchner as a Source of Inspiration
Exhibitions and Art Criticism after the First World War
The National Socialist Period
The Breakthrough of Expressionism after 1945
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 16: Flemish Expressionism in Belgium
The Sint-Martens-Latem School
Belgian Artists in Exile in the Netherlands and Britain
The Brussels Art Scene of the 1920s
The Return to Order
The Consolidation of Flemish Expressionism
Notes
Chapter 17: Jewish Expressionists in France, 1900–1940
Other Expressionists
Soutine’s Female Counterpart
Expressionist Sculpture
Notes
Chapter 18: German Expressionism in Italy: Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm,
the Berlin Novembergruppe, and the Modernist Circles of Florence,
Turin, and Rome
La Voce and Herwarth Walden’s Early Attempts to Organize an Exhibition of German Expressionism in Florence
Curt Seidel, Nicola Galante, and L’artista moderno in Turin
The Development of an Italian Expressionist Style and the Role of L’Eroica in La Spezia
Enrico Prampolini, the Journal NOI (First Series, 1917–1920), and the Casa d’arte italiana (1919–1921) in Rome
The Esposizione Espressionisti Novembergruppe (Exhibition of the Expressionists of the Novembergruppe), October 23, 1920
The 1920s: Ruggero Vasari, Enrico Prampolini, and the Journal NOI (Second Series, 1923–1925)
Notes
Chapter 19: Expressionism and the Spanish Avant-Garde between
Restoration and Renovation
The 1926 Exhibition of Expressionist Art in Barcelona
The Spanish Avant-Garde: Cultural Upheaval between Restoration and Revolution
Between “Modernismo” and Modernity
Notes
Chapter 20: Portuguese Expressionism, or German Expressionism in Portugal?
Portuguese Society and Politics
The Portuguese Art Scene
The First Generation of Portuguese Modernism: Santa Rita Pintor and Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso
The Second Generation of Portuguese Modernism: Júlio Maria dos Reis Pereira and Mário Eloy
Modern and Expressionist Sculpture in Portugal: Hein Semke
Does Portuguese Expressionism Exist?
Notes
PART IV:
Southeastern Europe
Chapter 21: Expressionism in Slovenia: The Aspects of a Term
The Emergence of Expressionism in Slovenia
The Intellectual Framework of Expressionism in Slovenia
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 22: From Anxiety to Rebellion: Expressionism in Croatian Art
Articulating the Anxiety: Expressionism during the First World War
Short-Term Rebellion: Expressionism in Croatian Painting between 1919 and 1921
“Second Expressionism”: A Return to Van Gogh
Final Remarks
Notes
Chapter 23: On New Art and Its Manifestations: Rethinking Expressionism
in the Visual Arts in Belgrade
Art-Historical Positioning of Expressionism in Serbia
Art in Belgrade after 1918: Transnational, Interdisciplinary, and Regional Contexts
Expressionism as a Platform for Artistic Exchange
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 24: Tokens of Identity: Expressionisms in Romania around the
First World War
Saxon-German Expressionism
Hungarian Expressionism in Transylvania
Romanian Expressionism
Notes
Chapter 25: Expressionism in Bulgaria: Critical Reflections in Art Magazines
and the Graphic Arts
Chavdar Mutafov and Geo Milev: Two Views of Expressionism
The Transformation of Expressionism in Bulgarian Printmaking after the First World War
Notes
PART V:
Beyond Europe
Chapter 26: Expressionism in Canada and the United States
Expressionism as a Style, Movement, and Idea in North America
Expressionism for Social and Political Meanings
Expressing the Personal, Biographical, and Psychological
Mysticism and Spirituality in North American Expressionism
Notes
Chapter 27: Expressionism in Latin America and Its Contribution to
the Modernist Discourse
Transatlantic Expressionist Confluences
An International Community
Beginnings of a Latin American Genealogy
Traces of a Genuine Art
Contributions to the Modern Discourse
Final Remarks
Notes
Chapter 28: The Expressionist Roots of South African Modernism
South Africa’s Art Scene in the Early Twentieth Century
Irma Stern and Maggie Laubser: Two Pioneers of South African Modernism
The “New Women” in South Africa
Other Modernists: Wolf Kibel, Maurice van Essche, and Pranas Domšaitis
Primitivism in South Africa
German Primitivism and the Appreciation of African Art in South Africa
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Original Sources: Books
Original Sources: Exhibition Catalogues
General References (English Language)
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Name Index
Subject Index
Geographical Index

Citation preview

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO EXPRESSIONISM IN A TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXT

The Routledge Companion to Expressionism in a Transnational Context is a challenging exploration of the transnational formation, dissemination, and transformation of expressionism outside of the German-speaking world, in regions such as Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltics and Scandinavia, Western and Southern Europe, North and Latin America, and South Africa, in the first half of the twentieth century. Comprising a series of essays by an international group of scholars in the fields of art history and literary and cultural studies, the volume addresses the intellectual discussions and artistic developments arising in the context of the expressionist movement in the various art centers and cultural regions. The authors also examine the implications of expressionism in artistic practice and its influence on modern and contemporary cultural production. Essential for an in-depth understanding and discussion of expressionism, this volume opens up new perspectives on developments in the visual arts of this period and challenges the traditional narratives that have predominantly focused on artistic styles and national movements. Isabel Wünsche is a professor of art and art history at Jacobs University Bremen. She specializes in European modernism, the avant-garde movements, and abstract art. Her book publications include Galka E. Scheyer & The Blue Four: Correspondence, 1924–1945 (Benteli, 2006), Biocentrism and Modernism (with Oliver A. I. Botar, Ashgate, 2011), Meanings of Abstract Art: Between Nature and Theory (with Paul Crowther, Routledge, 2012), The Organic School of the Russian Avant-Garde (Ashgate, 2015), Marianne Werefkin and the Women Artists in Her Circle (with Tanja Malycheva, Brill/Rodopi, 2016), and Practices of Abstract Art: Between Anarchism and Appropriation (with Wiebke Gronemeyer, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016). Cover image: Marija Skara, Map of Europe, 2017, linocut.  Marija Skara.

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO EXPRESSIONISM IN A TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXT

Edited by Isabel Wünsche

FUNDED BY THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT COMMISSIONER FOR CULTURE AND THE MEDIA, FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY

First published 2019 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business  2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Isabel Wünsche to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wünsche, Isabel, editor. Title: The Routledge companion to Expressionism in a transnational context / edited by Isabel Wüschel. Description: New York : Routledge, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018007379| ISBN 9781138712553 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315200088 (ebook : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Expressionism (Art) | Expressionism (Art)— Influence. | Art and globalization—History—20th century. | Art and globalization—History—21st century. Classification: LCC N6494.E9 R68 2018 | DDC 709.04/042—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018007379 ISBN: 978-1-138-71255-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-20008-8 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xxviii List of Contributors xxx Notes to the Reader xxxvi

Expressionist Networks, Cultural Debates, and Artistic Practices: A Conceptual Introduction Isabel Wünsche

PART I

1

Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltic States

31

  1 Prague—Brno: Expressionism in Context Marie Rakušanová

33

  2 Košice Modernism and Anton Jaszusch’s Expressionism Zsófia Kiss-Szemán

56

  3 Expressionism in Hungary: From the Neukunstgruppe to Der Sturm András Zwickl

73

 4 Poznań Expressionism and Its Connections with the German and International Avant-Garde Lidia Głuchowska

92

v

Contents

  5 Expressionist Networks in the Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and the Soviet Union Isabel Wünsche

113

  6 Expressionism in Lithuania: From German Artistic Import to National Art Giedrė Jankevičiūtė and Laima Laučkaitė

134

  7 Expressionist Originality in Latvian Art: Between Confirmation and Destruction Ginta Gerharde-Upeniece

158

  8 The Ambivalent Affair of Estonian Expressionism Tiina Abel

173

PART II

Scandinavia 189   9 Expressionism in Denmark: Art and Discourse Torben Jelsbak 10 Expressionisms in Sweden: Anti-Realism, Primitivism, and Politics in Painting and Print Margareta Wallin Wictorin 11 Nationalism, Transnationalism, and the Discourses on Expressionism in Finland: From the November Group to Ina Behrsen-Colliander Timo Huusko and Tutta Palin

191

206

222

12 Expressionism in Sámi Art: John Savio’s Woodcuts of the 1920s and 1930s Tuija Hautala-Hirvioja

243

13 Early Expressionism in Icelandic Art: Jón Stefánsson, Jóhannes Kjarval, and Finnur Jónsson Margrét Elísabet Ólafsdóttir

257

vi

Contents PART III

Western Europe

273

14 Early Engagements: Peripheral British Responses to German Expressionism Christian Weikop

275

15 Expressionism in the Netherlands Geurt Imanse and Gregor Langfeld

295

16 Flemish Expressionism in Belgium Cathérine Verleysen

316

17 Jewish Expressionists in France, 1900–1940 Richard D. Sonn

332

18 German Expressionism in Italy: Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm, the Berlin Novembergruppe, and the Modernist Circles of Florence, Turin, and Rome Irene Chytraeus-Auerbach 19 Expressionism and the Spanish Avant-Garde between Restoration and Renovation Wiebke Gronemeyer 20 Portuguese Expressionism, or German Expressionism in Portugal? Nina Blum de Almeida PART IV

348

365

377

Southeastern Europe

393

21 Expressionism in Slovenia: The Aspects of a Term Marko Jenko

395

22 From Anxiety to Rebellion: Expressionism in Croatian Art Petar Prelog

408

vii

Contents

23 On New Art and Its Manifestations: Rethinking Expressionism in the Visual Arts in Belgrade Ana Bogdanović

426

24 Tokens of Identity: Expressionisms in Romania around the First World War Erwin Kessler

442

25 Expressionism in Bulgaria: Critical Reflections in Art Magazines and the Graphic Arts Irina Genova

465

PART V

Beyond Europe

485

26 Expressionism in Canada and the United States Oliver A. I. Botar and Herbert R. Hartel, Jr.

487

27 Expressionism in Latin America and Its Contribution to the Modernist Discourse Maria Frick

507

28 The Expressionist Roots of South African Modernism Lisa Hörstmann

525

Selected Bibliography Name Index Subject Index Geographical Index

542 553 567 578

viii

ILLUSTRATIONS

Color Plates   1 Henri Matisse, Red Room (Harmony in Red), 1908, oil on canvas, 180.5 × 221 cm, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, inv. no. GE–9660.  Succession H. Matisse/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018. Image:  The State Hermitage Museum/Photo by Vladimir Terebenin   2 Max Pechstein, Das gelbschwarze Trikot (The Yellow-Black Jersey), 1910, oil on canvas, 68 × 78 cm, Brücke Museum Berlin, on permanent loan from private collection.  2017 Pechstein Hamburg/Tökendorf   3 Bohumil Kubišta, Dvojník (Double), 1911, oil on canvas, 79 × 66.5 cm, private collection. Courtesy of private collector   4 Anton Jaszusch, Putovanie duší (Migration of Souls), 1923–1924, oil on canvas, 268 × 290 cm, Slovak National Gallery, O 2699.  Anton Jaszusch (heirs)/ LITA, Society of Authors, 2018   5 Lajos Tihanyi, Kassák Lajos arcképe (Portrait of Lajos Kassák), 1918, oil on canvas, 86.6 × 70 cm, Szépművészeti Múzeum/Museum of Fine Arts, inv. no. 70.134 T. Photograph: Tibor Mester   6 Stanisław Kubicki, Der Heilige und die Tiere/Święty i zwierzęta (The Holy and the Animals), oil on canvas, 1932, private collection, Berlin   7 Wassily Kandinsky, Fragment 2 for Composition VII, 1913, oil on canvas, 87.63 × 99.69 cm, Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York Room of Contemporary Art Fund, 1947   8 Pavel Filonov, Golova (Head), 1924, oil on paper, 49.2 × 39.2 cm, Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Photograph: Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Cologne   9 Viktoras Vizgirda, Interjeras su vieniška kėde (Interior with Vienna Chair), 1932, oil on canvas, 89.3 × 70 cm, M. K. Čiurlionis National Art Museum, Kaunas.  M. K. Čiurlionis National Art Museum, 2017 10 Antanas Samuolis, Baltoji obelis (White Apple-Tree), 1932, oil on canvas, 89 × 71 cm, Lithuanian Art Museum, Vilnius ix

List of Illustrations

11 Kārlis Padegs, Madonna ar ložmetēju (Madonna with a Machine Gun), 1932, oil on canvas, 134 × 100 cm, Latvian National Museum of Art (LNMA), VMM GL–3137 12 Konrad Mägi, Pühajärv (The Lake Pühajärv), 1918–1921, oil on canvas, 52.7 × 68 cm, Art Museum of Estonia.  Art Museum of Estonia 13 Harald Giersing, Danserinde (Dancer), 1918, oil on fibre board, Kunstmuseet i Tønder, The Museum of Southern Jutland 14 Vera Nilsson, Två barn (Two Children), 1914, oil on canvas, 64.5 × 48.5 cm, private collection. Photo: Mattias Lindbäck.  Vera Nilsson/ Bildupphovsrätt 2017 15 Tyko Sallinen, Hihhulit (The Fanatics), 1918, oil on canvas, 168 × 185 cm, Finnish National Gallery/Ateneum Art Museum, Ahlström Collection, Helsinki. Photo: Finnish National Gallery/Jukka Romu.  Kuvasto 2017 16 Marcus Collin, Elonkorjuu (Harvest), 1915, oil on canvas, 90.5 × 98.5 cm, Finnish National Gallery/Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki. Photo: Finnish National Gallery/Hannu Aaltonen.  Kuvasto 2017 17 John Savio, Gánda ja nieda (Boy and Girl), n.d., hand-colored woodcut, 19 × 18.5 cm, Saviomuseet, Kirkenes, Norway 18 Jón Stefánsson, Regnbogi (The Rainbow), c. 1915, oil on canvas, 121 × 134 cm, National Gallery of Iceland, LÍ 1616.  Bryndís Jónsdóttir 19 Jacoba van Heemskerck, Compositie (Composition), 1914, oil on canvas, 75 × 108.8 cm, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag 20 Frits Van den Berghe, De idioot bij de vijver (The Idiot by the Pond), 1926, oil on canvas, 111.8 × 95.8 cm, Museum of Fine Arts Ghent, inv. no.1962–C, ex-collection Le Centaure.  www.lukasweb.be—Art in Flanders vzw 21 Chaim Soutine, La route montante, vers Gréolières (Winding Road, near Gréolières), 1920–1921, oil on canvas, 80.3 × 49.8 cm, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia.  2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris 22 Enrico Prampolini, Frontispizio (Illustration) to “Primavera” (Spring), poem of Tre canti per dire i dolori della terra e i dolori dei cieli [Canti Mistici] by Constant Zarian, n.d. (c. 1915), xylography, 29 × 22.5 cm [image motif: 10 × 10 cm], in L’Eroica, V, nos. 8–10 (1915, due to war published in June 1916), La Spezia. Source: Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz—Max-Planck-Institut.  Anna Maria and Massimo Prampolini, Rome 23 Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, Cristal Partido Coração Diamante (Broken Crystal Diamond Heart), 1913, watercolor on paper, 23.9 × 33.2 cm, Centro de Arte Moderna da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, inv. 87DP329. Photograph: Paulo Costa 24 Veno Pilon, Portret skladatelja Marija Kogoja (Portrait of the Composer Marij Kogoj), 1923, oil on canvas, 94 × 72 cm, Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM), Ljubljana, Slovenia.  Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM) 25 Vilko Gecan, Cinik (Cynic), 1921, oil on canvas, 110.5 × 99 cm, Moderna galerija/Modern Gallery, Zagreb, inv. no. MG–2668, photograph: Goran Vranić.  Moderna galerija, Zagreb. Courtesy of Moderna galerija, Zagreb x

List of Illustrations

26 Jovan Bijelić, Borba dana i noći (Struggle Between Day and Night), 1921, oil on canvas, 55 × 68 cm, Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrad.  Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade 27 Hans Eder, Der Advokat Hermann Fratschkes und der Dichter Heinrich Horvath; Dublu portret/Avocatul Hermann Fratschkes si poetul Heinrich Horvath (Double Portrait/The Lawyer Hermann Fratschkes and the Poet Heinrich Horvath), 1923, oil on canvas, 75 × 81 cm, The National Museum of Art, Bucharest 28 Sándor Ziffer, Parcul școlii de pictură de la Baia-Mare (The Park of the Baia Mare Painting School), 1920, oil on canvas, 64 × 80 cm, The Museum of Țara Crişurilor, Oradea 29 Caven Atkins, Night (Bluish Night Scene), 1932, oil on canvas, 53.3 × 71.1 cm, Art Gallery of Windsor.  Christie A. Hewlett 30 Marsden Hartley, Fisherman’s Last Supper (1st version), 1938, oil on canvas, 22″ × 28″/55.9 × 71.1 cm, private collection 31 Cecilio Guzmán de Rojas, Cama 33 T.B. Evacuable (Bed 33 T.B. Evacuate), 1934, oil on linen, 47 × 64.5 cm, Museo Nacional de Arte, La Paz.  Iván Guzmán de Rojas 32 Irma Stern, Playing Children, 1924, oil on canvas, 79.5 × 77 cm, Rupert Foundation

Black and White Illustrations   0.1   0.2   0.3   0.4   0.5   0.6   0.7

Map of Europe. Courtesy of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), The World Factbook Cover of Paul Fechter, Der Expressionismus [Expressionism] (Munich: Piper, 1914) with cover illustration by Max Pechstein.  2017 Pechstein Hamburg/Tökendorf Cover of Herwarth Walden, Einblick in Kunst [Insight into Art], 3rd–5th ed. (Berlin: Verlag Der Sturm, 1924) with cover illustration by Franz Marc Edvard Munch, Geschrei/Skriget (The Scream), 1895, lithography, 49.4 × 37.3 cm, Sammlung Gundersen, Oslo Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, exhibition poster KG Brücke (Artists’ Group Brücke), September 1910, woodcut, 83 × 61 cm, Galerie Ernst Arnold, Dresden Wassily Kandinsky, cover of the almanac Der Blaue Reiter (Munich: Piper, 1912) Oskar Kokoschka, Zeichnung zu dem Drama Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen (Drawing for the Drama Murderer, the Hope of Women), cover illustration of Der Sturm 1, no. 20, July 14, 1910.  Fondation Oskar Kokoschka/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018 xi

3 5 5 6 7 10

11

List of Illustrations

  0.8   0.9

  0.10   0.11

  0.12

  0.13   0.14   0.15   0.16   0.17

  0.18   0.19   0.20

  1.1

Egon Schiele, Weltwehmut (World-Melancholy), cover illustration of Zenit 3 (April 1921) Oskar Kokoschka, Bildnis Herwarth Walden (Portrait Herwarth Walden), 1910, oil on canvas, 100 × 69.3 cm, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.  Fondation Oskar Kokoschka/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018 Back cover of the journal MA (Today) 8, no. 1 (1922) Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Mit Schilf werfende Badende (Bathers Throwing Reeds), 1909, color woodcut in black, green, and orange, 19.9 × 28.7 cm (5th Portfolio of the Brücke, 1910) Franz Marc, Wildpferde (Wild Horses), 1912, woodcut, illustration in Herwarth Walden, Einblick in Kunst [Insight into Art], 3rd to 5th ed. (Berlin: Verlag Der Sturm, 1924), 47 Jacoba van Heemskerck, Holzschnitt/Vom Stock gedruckt (Woodcut, printed from the woodblock), cover illustration of Der Sturm 7, no. 4, July 15, 1916 Wyndham Lewis, cover of Blast 2 (War Number), July 1915, woodcut Otto Dix, Gastote [Gas Deaths], Templeux la Fosse, August 1916, from the portfolio Der Krieg [War] (Berlin: Verlag Karl Nierendorf, 1924), 15.  VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018 Käthe Kollwitz, Die Überlebenden: Krieg dem Kriege (The Survivors: War against War), 1923, lithograph George Grosz, Ecrasez La Famine, Die Kommunisten fallen—und die Devisen steigen, Blood is the Best Sauce, from the portfolio Gott mit uns [God with Us], 1919, photolithograph, 30.8 × 45.1/30.5 × 45.2 cm (Berlin: Malik-Verlag, 1920).  Estate of George Grosz, Princeton, NJ/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018 Hans Eder, Kreuzigung (Crucifixion), 1930, oil on canvas, 59 × 72.5 cm, Siebenbürgisches Kulturzentrum Schloss Horneck e.V.  Siebenbürgisches Museum Gundelsheim Jules Pascin, The Bar of the Bal Taberin, 1912–1913, oil on canvas, 93 × 73 cm, private collection Mário Eloy, A Fuga (The Fugue), 1938, oil on canvas, 80 × 100 cm, Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, inv. no. 04P1268.  Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon. Calouste Gulbenkian Museum—Modern Collection. Photo: Paulo Costa Emil Filla, Čtenář Dostojevského (Reader of Dostoyevsky), 1907, oil on canvas, 98.5 × 80 cm, National Gallery, Prague, inv. no. O 3190.  National Gallery, Prague; courtesy of the heirs xii

11

13 14

15

16 17 17 19 20

21 23 24

25

38

List of Illustrations

Bohumil Kubišta, Vlastní podobizna v haveloku (Self-portrait), 1908, oil on canvas, 91.2 × 65 cm, Regional Gallery of Fine Arts, Zlín, inv. no. O 412.  Regional Gallery of Fine Arts, Zlín   1.3 Otakar Kubín, Figura II (Figure II/Silhouette II), 1912–1914, oil on canvas, 89.5 × 74.5 cm, National Gallery, Prague, inv. no. O 15090.  National Gallery, Prague  1.4 Josef Čapek, Strašidlo (Spectre), from the cycle Osmero linoleí (Eight Linocuts), 1919, linocut, 11 × 8 cm, Museum of Decorative Arts, Prague, inv. no. GK–11412 D   1.5 Jan Zrzavý, Antikrist (Antichrist), 1907, oil on canvas, 36 × 26 cm, National Gallery, Prague, inv. no. O 17167.  National Gallery, Prague   1.6 Josef Váchal, Bellum, 1913, linocut cycle, 17.5 × 24 cm, private collection.  DILIA, Prague 2017   1.7 August Brömse, Ukřižování (Crucifixion), 1915, chalklithography, 17.9 × 11.4 cm, Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie Regensburg, inv. no. 5770a.  Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie Regensburg   1.8 Maxim Kopf, Početí (Conception), 1920–1921, oil on canvas, 165 × 130 cm, National Gallery, Prague, inv. no. O 4209.  National Gallery, Prague   2.1 Géza Schiller, Mestský motív (Urban Motif), 1924, oil on canvas, 94.5 × 109 cm, East Slovak Gallery, inv. no. O 1294   2.2 František Foltýn, Nezamestnaní (Unemployed), 1924, oil on canvas, 94.8 × 114.8 cm, East Slovak Gallery, inv. no. O 1362.  František Foltýn (heirs)/LITA, Society of Authors, 2018   2.3 Géza Schiller, V kaviarni (At a Café), 1924, oil on canvas, 90 × 117 cm, East Slovak Gallery, inv. no. O 1331   2.4 Antal Jaszusch, Krajina so stromom (Landscape with Trees), 1923–1924, oil on paperboard, 70 × 82 cm, Bratislava City Gallery, inv. no. A 468.  Anton Jaszusch (heirs)/ LITA, Society of Authors, 2018   2.5 Antal Jaszusch, Nirvána I (Nirvana I), c. 1920–1921, oil on canvas, 110 × 130 cm, East Slovak Gallery, inv. no. O 1333.  Anton Jaszusch (heirs)/LITA, Society of Authors, 2018   2.6 Antal Jaszusch, Život človeka. Voľná kompozícia (Human Life. Free Composition), 1924, oil on canvas, 266 × 286 cm, East Slovak Gallery, inv. no. O 2341.  Anton Jaszusch (heirs)/LITA, Society of Authors, 2018   1.2

xiii

39

40 43 44 45

46 47 58

59 60

62

63

65

List of Illustrations

Antal Jaszusch, Zánik planéty (Planet Extinction), 1924, oil on canvas, 266 × 268 cm, East Slovak Gallery, inv. no. O 2343.  Anton Jaszusch (heirs)/LITA, Society of Authors, 2018  2.8 Jež (Hedgehog), 1924, vol. 3, no. 5, 5. “A new gigantic art, or Jaszusch’s salamis from Košice, are the best in the world.” Jaszusch’s painting Na kanóne (On the Canon), 1922–1924, oil on canvas, 146 × 172 cm, East Slovak Gallery, inv. no. O 1457, was destroyed by fire at the East Slovak Gallery.  Anton Jaszusch (heirs)/ LITA, Society of Authors, 2018   3.1 “Morgner Wilhelm (expresszionista): Favágók a keresztúton” [Wilhelm Morgner (Expressionist): Woodcutters at the Calvary], Vasárnapi Újság (Sunday Journal), February 16, 1913, 125   3.2 Miltiades Manno, “Hogy kell nézni a képeket a futuristák kiállításán” (How One Should Look at Pictures: In the Exhibition of the Futurists), Kakas Márton, February 2, 1913, 7   3.3 Róbert Berény, Béla Bartók, 1913, in Iván Hevesy, A posztimpresszionizmus művészete [The Art of Postimpressionism] (Gyoma: Kner Izidor, 1922), 85.  HUNGART, 2017   3.4 Cover of MA (Today) I, no. 2 (December 1916), with a drawing by József Nemes Lampérth   3.5 Iván Hevesy, Futurista, expresszionista és kubista festészet [Futurist, Expressionist and Cubist Painting] (Budapest: MA, 1919), cover by Sándor Bortnyik.  HUNGART, 2017   3.6 Aurél Bernáth, Föld (Earth), c. 1922, in Ernő Kállai, Új Magyar piktúra [New Hungarian Painting] (Budapest: Amicus, 1925), Figure 60.  HUNGART, 2017   3.7 Gyula Derkovits, Halottsiratás (Mourning), 1924, oil on canvas, 95 × 192 cm, Szépművészeti Múzeum/Museum of Fine Arts, inv. no. FK 9151. Photograph: Tibor Mester   4.1 Polish and German versions of the poster for the  (a+b) first exhibition of the Bunt (Revolt) group in Poznań, April 1918, with the linocut Wieża Babel/Der Turmbau zu Babel (The Tower of Babel) by Stanisław Kubicki, 1917, reprint, private collection, Berlin   4.2 Cover of Die Aktion (The Action) VIII, nos. 21–22 (1918), special issue on “Polnische Kunst” (Polish Art) with the linocut Bunt (Revolt) by Stanisław Kubicki, private collection, Berlin   2.7

xiv

67

68

77

78

80 81 83 84 86

96

98

List of Illustrations

  4.3

  4.4   4.5   4.6   4.7   4.8   5.1   5.2

  5.3

  5.4

  5.5

  5.6   5.7

Cover of Zdrój (The Source), III, no. 1 (1918), Zeszyt Buntu (The Bunt Issue) with the linocut Wioślarz (The Rower) by Stanisław Kubicki, private collection, Berlin Cover of Die Aktion, VI, no. 25 (1918), with the linocut Der Ruderer (The Rower) by Stanisław Kubicki, private collection, Berlin Cover of Zdrój, VII, nos. 3–4 (1918), with Drzeworyt (Woodcut) by Jacoba van Heemskerck, private collection, Berlin Cover of Die Aktion, VIII, nos. 35–36 (1918), special issue on Jerzy von Hulewicz, with his linocut Autoportret (Self-portrait), private collection, Berlin Cover of Zdrój, V, no. 4 (1918), with Rysunek Egon Schiele—Charles Pigny (Drawing Charles Pigny by Egon Schiele), private collection, Berlin Cover of Zdrój, VII, nos. 5–6 (1919), with Drzeworyt oryginalny (Original Woodcut) by Georg Schvimpt, private collection, Berlin Wassily Kandinsky, cover of Salon 2: International Art Exhibition organized by Vladimir Izdebsky (Odessa 1910) David Burliuk, Risunok (Drawing), illustration in Konstantin Umanskij, Neue Kunst in Russland 1914–1919 [New Art in Russia 1914–1919] (Potsdam: Kiepenheuer; Munich: Goltz, 1920), 29 Pavel Filonov, Komposition (Composition), illustration in the catalogue of the Erste Russische Kunstausstellung [First Russian Art Exhibition] (Berlin: Galerie van Diemen, 1922) Marc Chagall, A la Russie, aux ânes et aux autres (To Russia, Donkeys and Others), 1912, oil on canvas, 157.0 × 122.0 cm, Musee national d’art modern, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Illustration in Sturm Bilderbücher I: Marc Chagall [Sturm Picture Books I: Marc Chagall] (Berlin: Verlag Der Sturm, 1923), 6.  VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018 Käthe Kollwitz, Helft Russland! (Help Russia!), 1921, poster for the Russia Committee of the IAH, lithograph, 66.7 × 47.7 cm, Käthe Kollwitz Museum, Cologne, Kreissparkasse Cologne El Lissitzky, cover of the catalogue of the First Russian Art Exhibition (Berlin 1922) Cover of the catalogue of the First General German Art Exhibition (Moscow, 1924)

xv

99 99 102 104 106 106 115

116

120

121

123 125 125

List of Illustrations

Yuri Pimenov, Invalidy voiny (War Invalids), 1926, oil on canvas, 265.6 × 177.7 cm, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow ZhB–994.  VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018   6.1 Marianne Werefkin, Polizeiposten Wilna (Police Post in Vilnius), 1914, tempera on cardboard, 98 × 82 cm, Modern Art Museum of Ascona   6.2 Magnus Zeller, Vor der Kirche (In Front of the Church), 1918, lithography, 22.5 × 16.5 cm, Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum, Vilnius.  VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn/LATGA, Vilnius, 2017   6.3 Cornelia Gurlitt, Rachmonis (Mercy), c. 1917, India ink, 33.7 × 25.3 cm, private collection   6.4 Cornelia Gurlitt, Ohne Titel/Paul Fechter (Untitled/ Paul Fechter), 1917, lithography, 26.5 × 21.4 cm, Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum, Vilnius   6.5 Cover of Paul Monty, Wanderstunden in Wilna [Hours of Wandering in Vilnius] (Vilnius: Verlag der Vilnaer Zeitung, 1916)   6.6 Adomas Galdikas, Ortodoksas žydas iš Kauno (Orthodox Jew from Kaunas), early 1920s, oil on canvas, 160 × 71 cm, Lithuanian Art Museum, Vilnius.  Lithuanian Art Museum, 2016   6.7 Antanas Gudaitis, Natiurmortas su medine Pieta (Still Life with Wooden Pieta), 1930, oil on cardboard, 73.5 × 60 cm, M. K. Čiurlionis National Art Museum, Kaunas.  Eglė Gudaitytė-Kunčiuvienė, 2016   6.8 Antanas Samuolis, Dailininkas/Viktoro Vizgirdos portretas (The Artist/Portrait of Viktoras Vizgirda), 1932, oil on canvas, 72 × 62 cm, Lithuanian Art Museum, Vilnius   6.9 Neemija Arbitblatas, Natiurmortas su austrėmis (Still Life with Oysters), 1935, oil on canvas, 53.2 × 64 cm, M. K. Čiurlionis National Art Museum, Kaunas.  M. K. Čiurlionis National Art Museum, 2016   6.10 Viktoras Petravičius, double-page spread from the artist’s book Marti iš jaujos (The Bride from the Barn), 1938, private collection, Vilnius. Courtesy of Izidė Petravičiūtė von Braun  7.1 Jāzeps Grosvalds, Mirstošais kareivis (Dying Soldier), 1917, oil on canvas, 129.5 × 88 cm, Latvian National Museum of Art (LNMA), VMM GL–2742  7.2 Jēkabs Kazaks, Bēgļi (Refugees), 1917, oil on canvas, 210 × 107 cm, Latvian National Museum of Art (LNMA), VMM GL–826   7.3 Cover of the album Ekspresionisti (Expressionists), 1919, linocut on paper, 41.5 × 32.6 cm, Latvian National Museum of Art (LNMA)   5.8

xvi

128 137

141 141 142 143

145

147 148

151

153 160 161 163

List of Illustrations

 7.4 Jēkabs Kazaks, Sieviete ar ievainoto plecos (Woman with Wounded on her Shoulders), from the album Ekspresionisti (Expressionists), 1919, linocut on paper, 32 × 25.9 cm, Latvian National Museum of Art (LNMA), VMM GR–762   7.5 Romans Suta, Mītiņš (Meeting), from the album Ekspresionisti (Expressionists), 1919, linocut on paper, 31.8 × 25.8 cm, Latvian National Museum of Art (LNMA), VMM GR–759  7.6 Niklāvs Strunke, Kompozīcija (Composition), from the album Ekspresionisti (Expressionists), 1919, linocut on paper, 31.5 × 25.7 cm, Latvian National Museum of Art (LNMA), VMM GR–758.  AKKA/LAA 2017   7.7 Romans Suta, Skice Latvijas valsts kara ordenim (Latvian Military Order), sketch, 1919, National History Museum of Latvia (CVVM), 165101 IN 824   7.8 The Riga Group of Artist in Sukubs canteen, 1920, photograph. From left to right: Romans Suta, Niklāvs Strunke, Valdemārs Tone, Jēkabs Kazaks, Konrāds Ubāns, Oto Skulme   8.1 Ado Vabbe, Muusika (Music), 1919, watercolor and gouache on paper, 49.3 × 38.1 cm, Art Museum of Estonia.  Art Museum of Estonia/EAÜ 2018   8.2 Nikolai Triik, Märter (Martyr), 1913, Indian ink and gouache on paper, 33 × 23 cm, Art Museum of Estonia.  Art Museum of Estonia   8.3 Nikolai Triik, Vabaduse sünd (The Birth of Liberty), 1919, pastel and chalk on paper, 63.4 × 47.7 cm, Art Museum of Estonia.  Art Museum of Estonia   8.4 Konrad Mägi, Kolgata (Golgotha), 1921, oil on canvas. The whereabouts of this work are not known   8.5 Konrad Mägi, Maastik punase pilvega (Landscape with a Red Cloud), 1913–1914, oil on canvas, 70.4 × 78 cm, Art Museum of Estonia.  Art Museum of Estonia   8.6 Eduard Wiiralt, Külastaja (Visitor), 1923, woodcut on paper, 34.1 × 24.2 cm, Art Museum of Estonia.  Art Museum of Estonia/EAÜ 2018   8.7 Eduard Wiiralt, Kabaree (Cabaret), 1931, etching and copper engraving on paper, 38.8 × 45.7 cm, Art Museum of Estonia.  Art Museum of Estonia/EAÜ 2018   9.1 Harald Giersing, Fokin og Fokina (Fokin and Fokina), 1918, oil on fiberboard, 150 × 115 cm, private collection   9.2 Otte Sköld, cover image of Klingen 2, no. 3 (1918).  Otte Sköld/VISDA.dk   9.3 Karl Larsen, En Trappegang (Staircase), 1917, oil on paper on canvas, 95 × 63 cm, private collection, reproduced from Klingen 1, no. 3 (1917).  Karl Larsen/VISDA.dk xvii

163 164

164 165 167 175 178 179 180 182 183 184 195 198 199

List of Illustrations

  9.4

10.1 a+b 10.2 10.3 10.4 11.1

11.2

11.3

11.4

11.5

11.6 11.7

Vilhelm Lundstrøm, Komposition 2 (Composition 2), 1918, oil on wood, 113.5 × 81.5 cm, Statens Museum for Kunst, National Gallery of Denmark.  Vilhelm Lundstrøm/ VISDA.dk 200 Cover and pages 2–3 from the exhibition catalogue Schwedische Expressionisten [Swedish Expressionists] (Berlin: Galerie Der Sturm, 1915) 209 Anna Sahlström, Fårklippning (Sheep Shearing), woodcut, 1915, 18.2 × 29.3 cm, Sahlströmsgården, Utterbyn, Sweden.  Stiftelsen Familjerna Sahlströms och Ärlingssons Minnesfond 213 Gösta Adrian-Nilsson (GAN), drawing published in Der Sturm 8, no. 5, August 15, 1917.  Gösta Adrian-Nilsson/Bildupphovsrätt 2017 215 Albin Amelin, De sista arierna (The Last Aryans), linocut, 50.3 × 36.1 cm, published in the journal Mänsklighet (Humanity), 1934.  Albin Amelin/Bildupphovsrätt 2017 218 Viljo Kojo, Kylämaisema (Village Landscape), 1917, watercolor, 23 × 30.5 cm, Finnish National Gallery/Ateneum Art Museum, Edvard Richter and Mandi Karnakoski-Richter Bequest, Helsinki. Photo: Finnish National Gallery/Ainur Nasretdin.  Kuvasto 2017 227 Tyko Sallinen, Tutkielma Tappeluun III (Study for The Fight III), 1920, oil on canvas, 60.5 × 68.5 cm, Finnish National Gallery/Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki. Photo: Finnish National Gallery/Pirje Mykkänen.  Kuvasto 2017 228 Tyko Sallinen, Mirri mustassa puvussa (Mirri in Black), 1911, oil on canvas, 53 × 46 cm, Finnish National Gallery/Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki. Photo: Finnish National Gallery/ Jukka Romu.  Kuvasto 2017 229 Wäinö Aaltonen, Valoa ja varjoa (Light and Shadow), 1917–1919, relief, limestone (plaster version executed in 1917, chalk relief in 1919), 127 × 70 cm, Ostrobothnian Museum, Karl Hedman Collection, Vaasa. Photo: Ostrobothnian Museum/Erkki Salminen.  Kuvasto 2017 230 Wäinö Aaltonen, Kauhu (Horror), 1916–1918, marble, 66 cm, Ostrobothnian Museum, Karl Hedman Collection, Vaasa. Photo: Ostrobothnian Museum/Erkki Salminen.  Kuvasto 2017 231 Ina Behrsen, Robert Kajanus, undated ink drawing published in Quosego, sample issue, 1928: 24.  Kuvasto 2017 233 Ina Colliander, Tyttö ja hedelmiä/Nainen ja hedelmiä (Girl with Fruit/Woman with Fruit), 1933, woodcut, 22 × 34.5 cm, Finnish National Gallery/Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki. Photo: Finnish National Gallery/Hannu Aaltonen.  Kuvasto 2017 234 xviii

List of Illustrations

11.8

12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 12.5 12.6 12.7 12.8 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 14.1

14.2 14.3

Ina Colliander, Äidin iloa (Maternal Joy), 1932, woodcut, 50.1 × 31 cm, Finnish National Gallery/Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki. Photo: Finnish National Gallery/Hannu Aaltonen.  Kuvasto 2017 John Savio, Sjalusi (Jealousy), n.d., woodcut, 30 × 18 cm, Saviomuseet, Kirkenes, Norway John Savio, Israel Lønbomsplass (Israel Lønboms Square), n.d., woodcut, 32 × 40.5 cm, Saviomuseet, Kirkenes, Norway John Savio, Okto (Alone), n.d., woodcut, 18.9 × 26.4 cm, Saviomuseet, Kirkenes, Norway John Savio, Elva ved trollvatnet (The River at Trollvatnet), n.d., woodcut, 23 × 33 cm, Saviomuseet, Kirkenes, Norway John Savio, Chakcha’aeked (Evening in the Fall or Autumn Evening), n.d., woodcut, 25.4 × 17.2 cm, Saviomuseet, Kirkenes, Norway John Savio, Sommer/Gaesse (Summer), n.d., hand-colored woodcut, 27 × 18.5 cm, Saviomuseet, Kirkenes, Norway John Savio, Hoppla vi lever! (Happy Days!), n.d., woodcut, 17 × 23 cm, Saviomuseet, Kirkenes, Norway John Savio, Innover viddene (Crossing the Plains), n.d., woodcut, 19.4 × 25.4 cm, Saviomuseet, Kirkenes, Norway Jóhannes Kjarval, Jónsmessunótt (Midsummer Night), 1918–1920, oil on canvas, 100 × 110 cm, Student’s Services (FS).  Jóhannes S. Kjarval/Myndstef Jón Stefánsson, Rúmensk stúlka (Rumanian Girl), 1918, oil on canvas, 101 × 91.50 cm, National Gallery of Iceland, LÍ 1618.  Bryndís Jónsdóttir Jón Stefánsson, Stúlka í peysufötum (Girl in a Traditional Attire), 1919, oil on canvas, 91 × 81 cm, private collection Sverrir Kristinsson.  Bryndís Jónsdóttir Finnur Jónsson, Sígaunahjón (Roma Couple), 1922, oil on canvas, 68.5 × 53.2 cm, National Gallery of Iceland, LÍ 5512.  National Gallery of Iceland Catalogue cover for Modern German Art, exhibition held at the Prince’s Galleries, Knightsbridge, London, May 1906. Cover illustration by Walter Crane.  Victoria and Albert Museum, London Wassily Kandinsky, Composition II, proof before publication in Klänge [Sounds] (Munich, 1913), 1911, woodcut, 14.8 × 20.8 cm.  The Trustees of the British Museum Edward Wadsworth, Landscape: West Riding, 1920, woodcut, 25.72 × 19.37 cm; plate from Modern Woodcutters, no. 4, 1921.  Estate of Edward Wadsworth. All rights reserved, DACS 2017.  Victoria and Albert Museum, London xix

235 245 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 261 263 264 267

278 283

286

List of Illustrations

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Russian Landscape, 1919, woodcut, 52.39 × 69.85 cm, Milwaukee Art Museum (Marcia and Granvil Specks Collection).  DACS 2017 14.5 Catalogue cover for Modern German Art, exhibition held at the Twenty-One Gallery, London, February 25–March 28, 1914, with mounted illustration by Moriz Melzer on the cover. The Melzer work is Mutter und Kind (Mother and Child), 1913, colored monotype with repainting in oil on paper, on canvas, 90 × 65 cm. Current whereabouts unknown.  Victoria and Albert Museum, London 14.6 Catalogue cover for Mid-European Art, exhibition held at the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery, February 5–27, 1944. Cover illustration: Lyonel Feininger, Street under a Bridge, 1920, woodcut, 16 × 14 cm, New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester.  DACS 2017 14.7 Catalogue cover for Schmidt-Rottluff Exhibition: Graphic Works and Stone Carvings, exhibition held at the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery, September 1953. Cover features a photograph of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Steinrelief mit einem ruhenden weiblichen Akt (Reclining Female Figure), 1953, stone relief. Current whereabouts unknown.  DACS 2017 15.1 Erich Wichman, Verbeelding van een bewogen zee (Represention of a Tempestuous Sea), 1912, oil on canvas, 120 × 100 cm, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam 15.2 Theo van Doesburg, Kinderlachje (Child’s Laugh), c. 1915, pastel on black paper, 23 × 30 cm, private collection 15.3 Janus de Winter, Muzikale verbeelding: Richard Wagner (Musical Fantasy: Richard Wagner), c. 1916, gouache on cardboard, 67 × 86 cm, Centraal Museum, Utrecht 15.4 Louis Saalborn, Leeuwerikzang (Lark Song), 1915, charcoal, pastel and watercolor on paper, 47.4 × 29.5 cm, private collection 15.5 Jan Wiegers, H.N. Werkman, 1922, wax paint on canvas, 70 × 56 cm, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam 15.6 Herman Kruyder, De varkensdoder (The Pig Killer), 1925–1926, oil on canvas, 56 × 68.50 cm, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. Photo: Peter Cox 15.7 Max Pechstein, Mond (Moon), 1919, wood, h 105 cm, destroyed.  c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2018 15.8 Exhibition De Onafhankelijken, 16e jury-vrije tentoonstelling in het Stedelijk Museum te Amsterdam (16th Juryless Exhibition by The Independents at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam), 1921. In the foreground: Rudolf Belling, Dreiklang (Triad), 1919.  c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2018 14.4

xx

286

288

291

291 298 299 300 301 303 304 305

306

List of Illustrations

Erich Heckel, Badende (Bathing Figures), triptych, 1919, tempera on canvas, each section 96 × 83 cm, Städtische Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz (center panel only; location of left and right panels unknown), on long-term loan from Nachlass Erich Heckel, Hemmenhofen.  c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2018 15.10 Erich Heckel, Stillleben mit Holzfigur (Still Life with Wooden Figure), 1910, paint on burlap, 66.5 × 73 cm, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.  c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2018 16.1 Constant Permeke, Duinen (Dunes), 1914, oil on canvas, mounted on cardboard, 39.4 × 41.7 cm, Museum of Fine Arts Ghent, inv. 1957–K.  www.lukasweb.be—Art in Flanders vzw.  SABAM Belgium 2017 16.2 Gustave De Smet, De groene Koepelkerk in Amsterdam (De Lutherse kerk in Amsterdam) [Church with a Green Dome in Amsterdam (The Lutheran Church in Amsterdam)], 1919, oil on canvas, 106.7 × 131.5 cm, Museum of Fine Arts Ghent, inv. 1981–E, ex-collection André De Ridder.  www.lukasweb.be—Art in Flanders vzw 16.3 Frits Van den Berghe, De sterrenvisser (Fishing for Stars), 1920, oil on canvas, 54.9 × 68.8 cm, Museum of Fine Arts Ghent, inv. 1987–A, ex-collection Piet Boendermaker.  www.lukasweb.be—Art in Flanders vzw 16.4 Gustave De Smet, cover for Sélection, 1920, Museum of Fine Arts Ghent, Library 16.5 Gustave De Smet, De kunstenaar en zijn vrouw bij maanlicht (Wij in Deurle) [The Artist and his Wife in the Moonlight (Us in Deurle)], 1927, oil and gouache over pencil on paper, 66.7 × 51 cm, Museum of Fine Arts Ghent, inv. 1956–AR.  www.lukasweb.be—Art in Flanders vzw 16.6 Constant Permeke, De papeters (The Porridge Eaters), 1922, oil on canvas, 153 × 170 cm, Groeningemuseum Bruges, inv. 1985.GRO0025.I.  www.lukasweb.be—Art in Flanders vzw.  SABAM Belgium 2017 16.7 Gustave Van de Woestyne, Fuga (Fugue), 1925, oil on canvas, 80.5 × 80 cm, Museum of Fine Arts Ghent, inv. 1991–M.  www.lukasweb.be—Art in Flanders vzw.  SABAM Belgium 2017 16.8 James Ensor, Oude dame met maskers (Old Lady with Masks), 1889, oil on canvas, 55 × 46.6 cm, Museum of Fine Arts Ghent, inv. 1969–B.  www.lukasweb.be—Art in Flanders vzw.  SABAM Belgium 2017 17.1 Mané-Katz, Russian Shtetl, 1931, oil on canvas, 65 × 81.7 cm, Jewish Museum, New York.  2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris 15.9

xxi

309 309

318

320

321 322

325

326

327

328 338

List of Illustrations

17.2 18.1

18.2

18.3

19.1 19.2 19.3 20.1

20.2

20.3

Jacques Lipchitz, Rape of Europa II, 1938, bronze, 38.7 × 58.7 × 31.9 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York, inv. no. 193.1942.  Estate of Jacques Lipchitz Lorenzo Viani, La madre (The Mother), 1914, xylography, 29.5 × 22.5 cm. Front cover of L’Eroica, IV, vol. I, no. 1 (August 1914), La Spezia. Rome, Istituto Centrale per la Grafica. Courtesy of the Ministero dei Beni e le Attività Culturali e del Turismo Cover of the Bollettino quindicinale della “Casa d’arte italiana,” no. 1 (October 15, 1920), invitation to the Esposizione Espressionisti Novembergruppe with an untitled watercolor by Paul Schmolling. Source: Berlinische Galerie, Museum of Modern Art, Photography and Architecture. Fonds: Nachlass Hannah Höch, inv. no. BG–HHC 703/79. Photograph: Anja Elisabeth Witte.  Courtesy of Kreisgemeinschaft Insterburg Stadt und Land e.V., Krefeld Bollettino quindicinale della “Casa d’arte italiana,” no. 1 (October 15, 1920), inside (p. [2] and [3]). Source: Berlinische Galerie, Museum of Modern Art, Photography and Architecture. Fonds: Nachlass Hannah Höch, inv. no. BG–HHC 703/79. Photograph: Anja Elisabeth Witte Gaseta de les Arts (Journal of the Arts), III, no. 49 (May 15, 1926): 4. Biblioteca de Catalunya, Barcelona Otto Dix, Dompteuse (Female Animal Trainer), 1922, etching, 39.9 × 29.7 cm, courtesy of private collection.  VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017 Gaseta de les Arts (Journal of the Arts), III, no. 49 (May 15, 1926): 5. Biblioteca de Catalunya, Barcelona Guilherme de Santa Rita, Cabeça (Head), 1912, oil on canvas, 65.3 × 46.5 cm, Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado, Lisbon, inv. 2963. Photograph: Arnaldo Soares; Direção-Geral do Património Cultural/Arquivo de Documentação Fotográfica (DGPC/ADF) Júlio dos Reis Pereira, O burguês e a menina (The Bourgeois and the Girl), 1931, oil on cardboard, 78.5 × 63 cm, Centro de Arte Moderna da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, inv. 83P85. Photograph: Mário de Oliveira Mário Eloy, O meu retrato (My Portrait), 1928, oil on cardboard, 40 × 33.5 cm, Centro de Arte Moderna da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, inv. 83P198. Photograph: Mário de Oliveira

xxii

345

352

356

357 367 368 369

380

383

384

List of Illustrations

20.4

21.1 21.2

21.3

21.4

21.5 22.1

22.2

22.3

22.4

Hein Semke, Outra Vez Crucificado (Crucified Again), 1936–1939, bronze, 121 cm × 109 cm × 24 cm, Churchyard of the German Protestant Community in Lisbon. Photograph: Nina Blum de Almeida 387 Rihard Jakopič, Sava (The River Sava), 1922, oil on burlap, 84 × 114 cm, Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM), Ljubljana, Slovenia.  Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM) 398 Fran Tratnik, Slepci (The Blind), 1911, pencil and black crayon on paper, 61.6 × 44.5 cm, Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM), Ljubljana, Slovenia.  Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM) 399 Tone Kralj, V potu njihovega obraza (By the Sweat of Their Face), 1919, oil on burlap, 69.5 × 88 cm, Tone Kralj collection, Božidar Jakac Art Museum, Kostanjevica na Krki, Slovenia.  Božidar Jakac Art Museum 400 France Kralj, Snemanje s križa (Descent from the Cross), 1923, oil on burlap, 101.5 × 96.5 cm, France Kralj collection, Božidar Jakac Art Museum, Kostanjevica na Krki, Slovenia.  Božidar Jakac Art Museum 402 Nande Vidmar, Nočne blodnje II (Night Visions II), 1920, ink on paper, 17.1 × 11.1 cm, private collection, Slovenia.  Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM) 403 Jerolim Miše, Čovjek s crvenom kapom i pregačom (The Man with a Red Cap and an Apron), 1914, oil on canvas, 60 × 53 cm, Muzej za umjetnost i obrt/Museum of Arts and Crafts, Zagreb, inv. no. MUO 25849. Photo: Srećko Budek.  Muzej za umjetnost i obrt, Zagreb. Courtesy of Muzej za umjetnost i obrt, Zagreb 411 Zlatko Šulentić, Čovjek s crvenom bradom (Man with a Red Beard), 1916, oil on canvas, 100.5 × 70 cm, Moderna galerija/Modern Gallery, Zagreb, inv. no. MG–3874. Photo: Goran Vranić.  Moderna galerija, Zagreb. Courtesy of Moderna galerija, Zagreb 412 Zlatko Šulentić, Portret Dr. Stjepana Pelca (Portrait of Dr. Stjepan Pelc), 1917, oil on canvas, 100 × 68 cm, Muzej savremene umetnosti/Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, inv. no. 240.  Muzej savremene umetnosti, Belgrade. Courtesy of Muzej savremene umetnosti, Belgrade 413 Ljubo Babić, Golgota (Calvary), 1917, oil on wood, 77.5 × 81 cm, Moderna galerija/Modern Gallery, Zagreb, inv. no. MG–952. Photo: Goran Vranić.  Moderna galerija, Zagreb. Courtesy of Moderna galerija, Zagreb 415

xxiii

List of Illustrations

22.5

22.6

22.7

23.1 23.2 23.3 23.4 23.5

24.1 24.2 24.3 24.4 24.5 24.6

Marino Tartaglia, Autoportret (Self-portrait), 1917, oil on cardboard, 35.5 × 19 cm, Muzej suvremene umjetnosti/Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, inv. no. MSU 4302. Courtesy of Muzej suvremene umjetnosti, Zagreb and Vladimira Tartaglia Kelemen 416 Milivoj Uzelac, Venera iz predgrađa (Suburban Venus), 1920, oil on canvas, 96.5 × 127 cm, Moderna galerija/ Modern Gallery, Zagreb, inv. no. MG–1046. Photo: Goran Vranić.  Moderna galerija, Zagreb. Courtesy of Moderna galerija, Zagreb 419 Ignjat Job, Vela Glavica I—Lumbarda, 1933, oil on canvas, 66 × 85 cm, Moderna galerija/Modern Gallery, Zagreb, inv. no. MG–1081. Photo: Goran Vranić.  Moderna galerija, Zagreb. Courtesy of Moderna galerija, Zagreb 422 Jovan Bijelić, Apstraktni predeo (Abstract Landscape), 1920, oil on canvas, 78 × 115.5 cm, Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade.  Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade 433 Mihailo S. Petrov, Autoportret (Self-portrait), 1921, linocut, 20.4 × 16 cm, Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade.  Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade 436 Mihailo S. Petrov, Ritam (Rhythm), 1921, linocut, 12.2 × 8.5 cm, published on the cover of Zenit, no. 10, December 1921.  Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade 436 Mihailo S. Petrov, Kompozicija (Composition), 1921, linocut, 15 × 16.3 cm, Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade.  Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade 437 Mihailo S. Petrov, Bez naziva—Idejna skica za sliku (Untitled—Sketch of an Idea for a Painting), 1922, watercolor, India ink on paper, 22.7 × 16.2 cm, Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade.  Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade 438 Hans Eder, Portret de bărbat (Portrait of a Man), 1920, oil on canvas, 85 × 71 cm, The Museum of Art, Braşov 446 Hans Mattis-Teutsch, Flori sufleteşti (Soul Flowers), 1915–1924, oil on canvas, 30 × 29 cm, The Museum of Visual Arts, Galați 447 Hans Mattis-Teutsch, Maternitate (Motherhood), 1925, oil on canvas, 60 × 50 cm, The Museum of Art, Constanța 448 István Nagy, Peisaj cu figuri (Landscape with Figures), 1920, oil on canvas, 33 × 46 cm, The Museum of Țara Crişurilor, Oradea 454 Alexandru Phoebus, Țăran (Peasant), 1931, oil on canvas, 150 × 100 cm, The National Museum of Art, Bucharest 455 Apcar Baltazar, Haimanalele (The Tramps), 1907, oil on canvas, 37 × 46 cm, The National Museum of Art, Bucharest 456 xxiv

List of Illustrations

24.7 Lascăr Vorel, Cartoforii (Cardsharps), c. 1910, gouache on cardboard, 32.5 × 25 cm, The Museum of Art, Piatra-Neamț 457 24.8 Nicolae Tonitza, Convoi de prizonieri (Convoy of Prisoners), 1919, oil on canvas, 97 × 73 cm, The National Museum of Art, Bucharest 458 24.9 Iosif Iser, Odalisque, 1929, engraving, 19 × 15 cm, Artmark, Bucharest 460 25.1 Ivan Milev, Portretna risunka na Chavdar Mutafov/ Портретна рисунка (Portrait Drawing of Chavdar Mutafoff), published in almanac Vezni, 1923, typographic reproduction 466 25.2 Sirak Skitnik, Garvanŭt/Гарванът (The Raven), published in Poems by Edgar Allan Poe (Sofia 1920), typographic reproduction 468 25.3 Geo Milev, Avtoportret/Автопортрет (Self-portrait), 1921, ink on cardboard, 12 × 8.3 cm, Bulgarian Historical Archives at the National Library, Sofia, f. 26, а.е. 10, l. 75 470 25.4 Mircho Katchouleff, two pages from Ekspresionistichno kalendarche/ Експресионистично календарче (Expressionist Calendar), published in almanac Vezni, 1923, typographic reproduction 472 25.5 Vasil Zahariev, Kŭshtata na Albrecht Dürer v Nuremberg/ Къщата на Албрехт Дюрер в Нюрмберг (Albrecht Dürer’s House in Nuremberg), 1923–1924, woodcut, 34.5 × 24 сm, National Art Gallery, Sofia, inv. no. III 1612 474 25.6 Bistra Vinarova, Christus von Loretto (Christ of Loretto), 1920–1921, woodcut, 23.5 × 19 cm, Central State Archives, Sofia, F 77K, inv. 3, a.u. 47 475 25.7 Max Metzger, Golgota/Голгота (Calvary), published in Plamak, 1924, no. 3, typographic reproduction. Accompanies the literary miniature “Calvary” by Geo Milev, part of Grozni prozi (Ugly Pieces of Prose) written in Berlin in 1918–1919 477 25.8 Pencho Georgiev, Oran/Buria/Оран/Буря (Ploughing/Storm), 1930–1931, woodcut, 17.8 × 13.5 cm, National Art Gallery, Sofia, inv. no. III 1564 478 25.9 Pencho Georgiev, Bistro v Parizh/Бистро в Париж (Bistro in Paris), 1930–1931, woodcut, 17 × 15 cm, National Art Gallery, Sofia, inv. no. III 660 479 26.1 Albert Bloch, The Green Domino, 1913, oil on canvas, 51⅜″ × 33½″/130.5 × 85 cm, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri 492 26.2 Lyonel Feininger, The Green Bridge II, 1916, oil on canvas, 49⅜″ × 39½″/125.4 × 100.3 cm, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh.  2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 492 xxv

List of Illustrations

Fritz Brandtner, City of Danzig, 1928, oil on canvas, 71.5 × 92 cm, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, gift of Marc Regnier and Claudette Picard.  Kastel Gallery, Montreal. Photo: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Biran Merrett 26.4 Fritz Brandtner, Flying Figure Above Village, 1928, woodcut on paper, 11.4 × 16 cm, Winnipeg Art Gallery, gift of Robert and Margaret Hucal.  Kastel Gallery, Montreal. Photographer: Leif Norman 26.5 Fritz Brandtner, Winnipeg Lane, 1929, graphite on paper, 27.3 × 19.7 cm, Winnipeg Art Gallery, gift of Robert and Margaret Hucal.  Kastel Gallery, Montreal. Photographer: Leif Norman 26.6 Caven Atkins, Night View of a City, 1933, graphite on paper, 28.6 × 22.2 cm, formerly in the Art Gallery of Windsor (present whereabouts unknown).  Christie A. Hewlett 26.7 Oscar Bluemner, Last Evening of the Year, 1928–1929, watercolor, gouache, and resin on paper, 14″ × 10″/35.6 × 25.4 cm, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City 26.8 Alfred Maurer, Cubist Twin Heads, c. 1930, oil on gessoed board, 21½″ × 18″/54.6 × 45.7 cm, private collection 26.9 Charles Burchfield, Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night, 1917, watercolor on paper, 30″ × 19″/76.2 × 48.3 cm, Cleveland Museum of Art 26.10 Marsden Hartley, Musical Theme (Oriental Symphony), 1912–1913, oil on canvas, 39⅜″ × 31¾″/100 × 80.7 cm, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Boston 27.1 José Clemente Orozco, Cabaret mexicano (Mexican Cabaret), 1942–1943, tempera on paper, 28 × 38.3 cm, Collection INBA, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, México D.F.  Heirs of José Clemente Orozco 2017 27.2 Lasar Segall, Interior de indigentes (Interior with Indigents), 1920, oil on canvas, 83.5 × 68.5 cm, Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo.  Museu Lasar Segall, São Paulo. Photo: João Musa 27.3 Carlos Gorriarena, La casa del sofá amarillo (The House of the Yellow Sofa), 2006, acrylic on canvas, 150 × 150 cm, Private collection of Sylvia Vesco.  Sylvia Vesco. Photograph: Gustavo Lowry 27.4 Olga Blinder, Miedo (Fear), 1959, woodcut, 30 × 20 cm, Museo de Artes Visuales/Museo del Barro, Asunción.  Jorge B. Schvartzman 26.3

xxvi

494

495

496 497 499 500 501 502

509

510

511 512

List of Illustrations

27.5

27.6

28.1 28.2 28.3

28.4 28.5 28.6 28.7 28.8

Eduardo Kingman, Mundo sin respuesta (Unanswered World), 1975, oil on canvas, 120 × 160 cm, private collection of Soledad Kingman, Quito.  Soledad Kingman. Photograph: Jerónimo Zúñiga Diulio Pierri, El retorno de los restos (The Return of the Remains), from the series El matadero (The Slaughterhouse), 1987, oil on canvas, 278 × 160 cm, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires.  Diulio Pierri Irma Stern, Eternal Child, 1916, oil on board, 73.7 × 43.2 cm, Rupert Foundation Maggie Laubser, Landscape with Harvesters in Wheatfield, 1926, woodcut, 17.5 × 12.5 cm, Sanlam Foundation.  The Estate of Maggie Laubser/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 Maggie Laubser, Landscape with Cows, Fields and Mountains/ Landskap met koei, n.d., oil on cardboard, 34 × 43 cm, Sanlam Foundation.  The Estate of Maggie Laubser/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 Wolf Kibel, Interior with Bed, n.d., oil on canvas, 31 × 67 cm, Sanlam Foundation Wolf Kibel, Nude Study, n.d., oil on canvas on board, 29 × 19.5 cm, Sanlam Foundation Maurice van Essche, Congolese Women, n.d., oil on board, 54.5 × 65 cm, Oliewenhuis Art Museum, Bloemfontein.  Oliewenhuis Art Museum, Bloemfontein/Paul van Essche Maurice van Essche, Harlequin, 1960, oil on board, 28.5 × 22 cm, Oliewenhuis Art Museum, Bloemfontein.  Oliewenhuis Art Museum, Bloemfontein/Paul van Essche Pranas Domšaitis, Flight into Egypt, right-hand panel of triptych, c. 1958, oil on board, 75.5 × 63.9 cm.  Iziko Museums of South Africa Art Collections

517

520 527 529

530 532 533 534 534 535

The publishers have made every effort to contact copyright holders of images reprinted. This has not been possible in every case, however, and we would welcome correspondence from those individuals/companies whom we have been unable to trace. Any omissions brought to our attention will be remedied in future editions.

xxvii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This volume is the result of intense studies, engaged discussions, and lively scholarly exchanges between colleagues in the course of a number of research projects and various workshops and conferences from 2013 to 2017. It all began with the workshop “Avantgarde-Netzwerke und Kulturaustausch zwischen Deutschland und seinen östlichen Nachbarn, 1910–1930” (Avant-Garde Networks and Cultural Exchange between Germany and its Eastern Neighbors, 1910–1930), at Jacobs University Bremen, in October 2013. The publication itself was conceived at the international workshop “Peripheral Expressionisms: Artistic Networks and Cultural Exchange between Germany and its Eastern Neighbors in the Context of the European AvantGarde,” at Jacobs University Bremen, in December 2015. Neither of these events nor this publication would have been possible without the generous funding of the Federal Office for Media and Culture (BKM) of Germany. I am grateful for the continuous support and particularly proud to be able to make these research findings accessible to a much wider audience, both academic and otherwise, in an English-language publication. Research on this topic was further enhanced by two joint exchange programs, funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and its respective partner agencies in Croatia and Portugal in 2014–2015: “German-Croatian Artistic Relations in the Twentieth Century” and “German-Portuguese Artistic Relations in the Twentieth Century.” I wish to particularly thank my project collaborators Ljiljana Kolešnik, in Zagreb, and Lucia Matos, in Porto. A special thank-you also goes to the colleagues who have been involved in the development of this project from the very beginning: Erwin Kessler, Bucharest; Petar Prelog, Zagreb; and András Zwickl, Budapest. Scholarly collaboration and research discussions were further enhanced by events such as the symposium “Der Sturm—Literatur, Musik, Graphik und die Vernetzung in der Zeit des Expressionismus” (Der Sturm—Literature, Music, Graphic Works and Networking in the Period of Expressionism), at Düsseldorf University, in November 2013; the workshop “German-Portuguese Artists’ Relations in the Twentieth Century,” at Nova University of Lisbon, in June 2014; the international conference “Transnational Networking Practices of the Central and Southeast European Avant-garde,” at the University of Zagreb and the Institute of Art History in Zagreb, in October 2014; the international workshop “Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in the Avant-Garde and Modernism: The Impact of World War I,” at the Institute of Art History of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in Prague, xxviii

Acknowledgments

in November 2014; the symposium “Collaborative Artist Networks in the Twentieth Century and Beyond” at Jacobs University Bremen, in July 2015; and the 3rd Comparative Avant-Garde & Modernisms Workshop “Avant-Garde Migrations,” at the Institute of Art History, Nova University of Lisbon, in November 2015. A two-month fellowship at the New Europe College, Institute of Advanced Study (NEC) in Bucharest, in spring 2016, generously funded through the “Europe next to Europe” (EntE) program, provided me with the opportunity to work out the conception of this book and discuss the scope of the project with colleagues from a variety of fields in the humanities and diverse national and cultural backgrounds. The vital intellectual environment of the NEC greatly enhanced this project. I am grateful to Anca Oroveanu and the research and administrative staff of the NEC for their generous support of this research and publication project. Special thanks go to Jacobs University for its institutional support of my long-term research; I wish to particularly thank Bianca Bergman, Claudia Janetzke, and Anke Schlenger for their administrative support of my work. Publication of this comprehensive volume would not have been possible without the generous support of numerous individuals and institutions. Research was conducted at various museums, archives, and libraries all over Europe and beyond; I am grateful to the curators and staff of these institutions for their expertise and for making accessible their collections. For assistance with photographic material, image files, and copyright permissions, I wish to thank the staff of The National Art Galleries in Prague, Bratislava, Budapest, Sofia, Copenhagen, Helsinki, and Reykjavik; the National Art Museums in Bucharest, Lisbon, Riga, Tallin, and Vilnius; the Museums of Modern Art in Ljubljana and Zagreb and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade; the East Slovak Gallery, Bratislava; the M. K. Čiurlionis National Art Museum, Kaunas; the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum; the Saviomuseet, Kirkenes; the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; the Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent; the Centro de Arte Moderna da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon; the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg; and the State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow; to mention just a few. I am grateful to the artists and their heirs, art historians, art dealers, and private collectors who have generously supported this publication. Every attempt has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyrighted material. If proper acknowledgment has not been made, copyright holders are invited to inform the editor of the oversight. I am particularly grateful to Kevin Pfeiffer, Lynn Matthews Anderson, and Michael Wetzel for their patient attention to editing and proofreading. A special thank-you goes to Wiebke Gronemeyer for her careful reading and copy-editing of the manuscript. Last but not least, I wish to thank Isabella Vitti for her interest in the subject matter and shepherding of its publication by Routledge, as well as for her helpful advice, responsive feedback, and generous support. Isabel Wünsche Berlin, December 2017

xxix

CONTRIBUTORS

Tiina Abel is a senior lecturer at the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture of the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn. Previously, she was a curator and vice director of the Art Museum of Estonia (1976–2014) and directed the exhibition program at Kumu Art Museum (2006–2014), curating numerous exhibitions on Estonian art and European modernism. Her research interests include nineteenth-century Baltic-German art and problems of Estonian art in the interwar period. Nina Blum de Almeida is a PhD candidate in the history and theory of art at Jacobs University in Bremen. In her doctoral research, she examines the work of Hein Semke, a German artist active in Portugal. She studied art history, classical archaeology, Roman philology, and Portuguese at Freiburg University and also at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa in Oporto and was awarded a master’s degree from Freiburg in 2007. She has worked for institutions such as the Kunsthalle Bremen, the German-Portuguese Chamber of Industry and Commerce in Lisbon, the Ernst-May-Gesellschaft and Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt am Main, and also for several fine arts auction houses in Germany. Ana Bogdanović is a research associate in the Department of Art History at the University of Belgrade; she was awarded her PhD in 2017 for her thesis on the history of exhibitions in the Yugoslav Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1938–1990). The recipient of a DAAD scholarship, she received her MA in the history of art and visual culture from Humboldt University in Berlin in 2011. Her research fields include transnational aspects of modernism, the history of art exhibitions, and the Yugoslav art space in the twentieth century. She regularly publishes articles on modern and contemporary art in both national and international academic journals and is the 2017 recipient of the Lazar Trifunović Award for critical art writing. Toronto-born Oliver A. I. Botar completed his BA (urban geography) at the University of Alberta and holds an MSc (urban/regional planning), MA, and PhD (art history) from the University of Toronto. Professor since 2011, he has taught at several Canadian universities, since 1996 at the University of Manitoba (Winnipeg). His research has focused on early to mid-twentieth-century art, architecture, and photography in Hungary, Germany, and Canada. László Moholy-Nagy and “biocentric” elements in modernism have been of particular interest. xxx

List of Contributors

He has lectured, published, and curated exhibitions in North America, Europe, and Asia. He is the author and co-editor of several books, anthologies, and journal issues, has published many articles, and has held numerous lectures and conference presentations. Irene Chytraeus-Auerbach is an independent scholar and research associate at the Internationales Zentrum für Kultur- und Technikforschung (IZKT) at the University of Stuttgart. Her research focuses on modernism and the European avant-gardes, especially on Italian futurism and German expressionism. Her publications include Inszenierte Männerträume: Eine Untersuchung zur politischen Selbstinszenierung der italienischen Schriftsteller Gabriele D’Annunzio und Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in der Zeit zwischen Fin-de-Siècle und Faschismus (2003), Der Aufbruch in die Moderne: Herwarth Walden und die europäische Avantgarde (with Elke Uhl, 2013), and Futurismus: Kunst, Technik, Geschwindigkeit und Innovation zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts (with Georg Maag, 2016). Maria Frick is a PhD candidate in art history at the University Pablo de Olavide, Spain. She holds a graduate degree in political science from the Universidad de la República, Uruguay, a postgraduate degree in theory of communication design from the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina, and a master’s degree in Latin American studies from the Universidad de Montevideo, Uruguay. For the past fifteen years, she has been working as an international consultant, collaborating with organizations such as the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), the Organization of American States (OAS), and the United Nations Education, Science and Culture Organization (UNESCO). Irina Genova is a professor in art studies at the New Bulgarian University, Sofia, and at the Institute of Art Studies of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Her publications discuss manifestations of modernism in Bulgaria and in neighboring countries, as well as contemporary artistic practices. Among her books are: Modernisms and Modernity: (Im)Possibility for Historicising (2004) and Modern Art in Bulgaria: First Histories and Present Narratives beyond the Paradigm of Modernity (2013). She is the recipient of scholarship grants from the J. Paul Getty Foundation (1994, 1998), New Europe College, Bucharest (2004), the National Institute of Art History in Paris (2005), the Centre for Advanced Study, Sofia (2016–2017), and others. Ginta Gerharde-Upeniece is an exhibition curator and head of the Visual Arts Department at the Latvian National Museum of Art and ex-president of ICOM LATVIA. She was a lecturer in art history at the Latvian Academy of Music (1995–1998) and has taught museum theory and practice at the Latvian Academy of Art since 2016. She has organized exhibitions such as the Mark Rothko centennial (2003), France-Latvia: Étonnante Lettonie (2005), Printemps français (2007), and Wild Souls: Symbolism in the Baltic States (2018) and was curator of ‘1914’—programme—Riga Cultura Capital of Europe 2014. Her book publications include 50 Masterpieces of Latvian Painting (2013) and Oļģerds Grosvalds (1884–1962): The Role of Diplomacy in the Representation of Latvian Art on an International Scale: The 1930s (2013). Lidia Głuchowska is an art and literary historian and head of the Department of Theory and History of Art at the University of Zielona Góra. She received her PhD from Humboldt University, Berlin, in 2007 and is currently completing her habilitation at the University of Wrocław. She has curated exhibitions and published widely on Polish modernism and the avantgarde. Her book publications include Stanisław Kubicki: in transitu. Ein Poet übersetzt sich selbst (Wrocław, 2015) and the edited volumes Bunt—Expressionismus—Grenzübergreifende Avantgarde: xxxi

List of Contributors

Werke aus der Berliner Sammlung von Prof. St. Karol Kubicki (Poznań, 2015) and Transnationality, Internationalism and Nationhood: European Avant-Garde in the First Half of the Twentieth Century (Leuven, 2013). Wiebke Gronemeyer is a curator and researcher based in Hamburg, Germany. She holds a PhD in curating from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is a research associate at Jacobs University Bremen. She specializes in avant-garde movements, curatorial discourse, and the role of politics in contemporary artistic and curatorial cultures. Her publications include The Curatorial Complex: Social Dimensions of Knowledge Production (2017) and Practices of Abstract Art: Between Anarchism and Appropriation (with Isabel Wünsche, 2016). Herbert R. Hartel, Jr. received his doctorate in modern and American art history from the CUNY Graduate School. He has taught art history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Hofstra University, Parsons School of Design, and Baruch College and published numerous articles on twentieth-century American art and abstraction in America and Europe. Tuija Hautala-Hirvioja received her MA, Licentiate and PhD degrees (1984, 1993, 1999) in art history from the University of Jyväskylä. Since 2004, she has held the position of professor of art history in the Faculty of Art and Design at the University of Lapland in Rovaniemi, in the northernmost province of Finland. Before this, she served as lecturer in art history (1995–2004) and as curator at the Aine Art Museum in Tornio (1986–1995). Throughout her career, she has worked on the art and culture of northernmost Finland and published a number of articles, books, and catalogues in this area. Lisa Hörstmann is a PhD candidate in African art at Freie Universität Berlin with a thesis on transnationalism and ambivalence in South African settler primitivism in the early twentieth century. She received an MA in art history from the Open University, UK, and in curating visual culture from Sheffield Hallam University. She has previously served as fine arts officer for the City of Munich, curatorial assistant for MaximiliansForum, Munich, and research associate for Galerie Bastian, Berlin. She currently works as a freelancer; her current project is a researchbased film and theater project on the 2003 invasion of Iraq with Sebastian Hirn. Timo Huusko, Licentiate in art history, is senior curator at the Ateneum Art Museum/ Finnish National Gallery (since 1997); his work there has included exhibition and publication projects for which he has served variously as curator, co-curator, editor, and writer. His special interests include Finnish early twentieth-century modernism and its connections to nationalism and transnationalism. He is a member of EAM and ICOM/COMCOL. Recently retired from the Stedelijk Museum for Modern and Contemporary Art, Amsterdam, where he served in various positions (library director, director of research and documentation, director of staff and collections) for more than thirty years, Geurt Imanse, art historian (Utrecht University, 1980), has organized various exhibitions and published essays in several catalogues. His most recent exhibitions, as co-curator, include: Kazimir Malevich with Selections of the Khardzhiev and Costakis Collections (Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Kunsthalle Bonn, Tate Modern London, 2013/2014) and The Oasis of Matisse (Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 2015). His most recent publication, with Frank van Lamoen, is Russian Avant-Garde, the Khardzhiev Collection, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, nai010 publishers, Rotterdam, 2013. xxxii

List of Contributors

Giedrė Jankevičiūtė is a leading research fellow at the Art History and Visual Culture Department of the Lithuanian Culture Research Institute and also a professor of art history at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. She has published widely on Lithuanian modernism, curated exhibitions in Lithuanian, Polish, Italian, German, Ukrainian, and Indian museums, and organized regional and international art history conferences. Among her publications are the monographs Valstybė ir dailė: dailės gyvenimas Lietuvos Respublikoje 1918–1940 (Art and State: Art and Artistic Life in the Lithuanian Republic, 1918–1940, 2003), The Graphic Arts in Lithuania 1918–1940 (2008), and Under the Red Star: Lithuanian Art in 1940–1941 (2011). Recently, she edited, with Rasutė Žukienė, the monograph The Art of Identity and Memory: Toward a Cultural History of the Two World Wars in Lithuania (2016). Torben Jelsbak is an associate professor of Nordic literature at the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics at the University of Copenhagen, where, in 2008, he received his doctorate for a thesis on the sociology and print culture of the early twentieth-century European avant-gardes (including case studies on Italian futurism, Russian constructivism, and German Dadaism). He has published a series of articles and books on Nordic and European avant-garde art and culture, including Ekspressionisme: Modernismens formelle gennembrud i dansk malerkunst og poesi (Expressionism: The Formal Break-Through of Modernism in Danish Art and Literary History, 2005), and is co-editor of A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries, vol. 1 (Rodopi, 2012). Marko Jenko, PhD, studied art history and French at the University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts, where he was employed as a junior researcher at the Department of Art History. He now works as a curator for twentieth-century art at the Museum of Modern Art (Moderna galerija, MG+MSUM) in Ljubljana. In his theoretical work, he focuses primarily on questions concerning the intersections of art, art history, psychoanalysis, and philosophy. He has translated into Slovenian works by Gérard Wajcman, Jacques Lacan, Daniel Arasse, Jacques Rancière, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Starobinski, David Freedberg, and Monique David-Ménard. Erwin Kessler is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the Romanian Academy of Sciences and director of the Museum of Recent Art (MARe) in Bucharest. His recent book publications include Tzara.Dada.Etc. (2016), Atavistic antropogeographies (2015), x20 (2013), and I Colori delle Avanguardie (2011). He has also contributed essays on Romanian art to edited volumes such as Brancusi—the man (2016), The Search for Cultural Identity in Central and Eastern Europe 1919–2009 (2015), Art Beyond Borders: Artistic Exchanges in Communist Europe, 1945–1989 (2015), and East of Eden (2012), and to journals such as Centropa. Zsófia Kiss-Szemán studied art history and aesthetics at the Faculty of Philosophy, Comenius University, Bratislava (1982–1987). After graduation, she worked at the Ferenczy Múzeum, Szentendre, Hungary. She presently serves as the chief curator of the collection of twentiethcentury art at the Bratislava City Gallery and has mounted many exhibitions and permanent expositions and published a number of catalogues, studies, and monographs of twentieth-century art in Slovakia and Central Europe. She organized the symposium and international conference on Košice Modernism and edited the book Košice modernism. Gregor Langfeld is an assistant professor of the history of modern art at the University of Amsterdam. His books include Duitse kunst in Nederland: Verzamelen, tentoonstellen, kritieken, 1919–1964 (2004) and Deutsche Kunst in New York: Vermittler—Kunstsammler—Ausstellungsmacher, 1904–1957 (2011; English translation, 2015: German Art in New York: The Canonization of xxxiii

List of Contributors

Modern Art, 1904–1957). He was curator of the exhibition The Stedelijk Museum and the Second World War (2015), which arose from his earlier provenance research on the museum’s collection, and edited the catalogue for the exhibition. He is currently editing the correspondence between George Grosz and Herbert Fiedler. Laima Laučkaitė is the head of the Department of Art History at the Lithuanian Culture Research Institute in Vilnius. She was educated at the Vilnius Art Institute (MA, 1979), the University of Moscow (PhD, 1988), and the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich (postdoctoral fellow, 1992). Her research interests include multinational art in the early twentieth century and art of the First World War. She is author of the books Art in Vilnius 1900–1915 (2008), Expressionist Rider Marianne Werefkin (2007, in Lithuanian), Rafael Chwoles: The Search for Jerusalem (2012), and Vilnius: Topophilia (vol. I, 2014; vol. II, 2015). Margrét Elísabet Ólafsdóttir is an assistant professor in art education at the University of Akureyri, Iceland. She holds a PhD in aesthetics and art theory from the Pantheon Sorbonne University in Paris. Her research focuses on twentieth and twenty-first-century art in Iceland. She has curated several exhibitions and published various articles on art. Tutta Palin, PhD, is currently employed as a professor of art history at the University of Turku, Finland. She holds the title of docent (adjunct professor) at the University of Turku and at the Åbo Akademi University. She has taught in both art history and gender studies departments at the Universities of Turku and Helsinki, and was the recipient of visiting fellowships at Humboldt University in Berlin and at Kingston University in London. Her publications include three monographs on late nineteenth and early twentieth-century art in Finland. Her current interests involve alternative modernisms and the popularization of modernist art discourses. Petar Prelog received his PhD in art history from the University of Zagreb. He is a senior research associate at the Institute of Art History in Zagreb, where he has participated in several research projects related to Croatian modern art. He has taught courses at the Academy of Fine Arts and in the Department of Art History, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb. His research interests include the avant-gardes in Croatian art, relationships between art, ideology, and national identity, Croatian modernism in a Central European context, and Croatian art historiography. He is the author of a series of studies on Croatian modern and contemporary art published in books, journals, and exhibition catalogues. Marie Rakušanová received her PhD in art history from Charles University, Prague, in 2006, where she has been employed since 2011 as an associate professor in the Department of Art History. Her further studies included research at the University of Dortmund and postdoctoral research at the University of Dresden. From 2002 to 2009, she served as curator of modern art at Prague City Gallery (Galerie hlavního města Prahy). Her book publications include Josef Váchal, He Wrote, Engraved, Printed and Bound Books (2014), The Magic of Seeking: Josef Váchal (2014), Beings from Nowhere: Metamorphoses of Academic Principles in Painting 1900–1950 (2008), and Mouth Scream! Roots of Expressionism (2006). Richard D. Sonn received his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, and teaches modern French history and European social, cultural, and intellectual history at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. He is the author of three books: Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin de Siècle France (Nebraska, 1989), Anarchism (Twayne, 1992), and Sex, Violence and xxxiv

List of Contributors

the Avant-Garde: Anarchism in Interwar France (Penn State, 2010). His current research project, of which his contribution to this volume is a part, is titled “Jewish Modernism: Immigrant Artists in Paris, 1900–1945.” Cathérine Verleysen holds a PhD in art history from the Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne and serves as head of the Collection and Research Department at the Museum of Fine Arts (MSK) in Ghent, Belgium. She has curated numerous exhibitions, including the retrospective Gustave Van de Woestyne (MSK, 2010), The World of George Minne and Maurice Maeterlinck (MSK, 2011–2012), Nervia/Laethem-Saint-Martin: Traits d’Union (Musée d’Ixelles, 2014–2015), and Verhaeren Revealed: The Writer, Critic and the Art of his Time, 1881–1916 (MSK, 2016–2017). She is also the author of Maurice Denis et la Belgique, 1890–1930 (Leuven University Press, 2010) and numerous essays. Margareta Wallin Wictorin received her PhD in art history and visual studies from the University of Gothenburg in 2004. From 2005 to 2015, she taught at Linnaeus University in Växjö and is currently a reader in art history and visual studies and a senior lecturer in cultural studies at Karlstad University, Sweden. Her research interests are graphic art, popular prints and imagery, graphic novels, and contemporary art from Europe and Africa. Among her publications is “Föreningen Original-Träsnitt, Grafik och grafiker på ett tidigt modernistiskt konstfält” (The Swedish Society of Original Wood Engravers: Graphic Art and Graphic Artists in the Modernist Period, 2004). Christian Weikop, senior lecturer and Chancellor’s Fellow in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh, is a specialist in modern and contemporary German art and has published extensively in this field, most recently on the Brücke group and Anselm Kiefer. He has given guest lectures and published books, articles, and catalogue essays on German art with many of the most important art and academic institutions in the world, including the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Harvard University, Humboldt University to Berlin, Hamburg Arts and Crafts Museum, the Courtauld Institute, Royal Academy London, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, and Tate Modern. He is also a curator and presenter of arts documentaries for BBC radio. Isabel Wünsche is a professor of art and art history at Jacobs University Bremen. She specializes in European modernism, the avant-garde movements, and abstract art. Her book publications include Galka E. Scheyer & The Blue Four: Correspondence, 1924–1945 (Benteli, 2006), Biocentrism and Modernism (with Oliver A. I. Botar, Ashgate, 2011), Meanings of Abstract Art: Between Nature and Theory (with Paul Crowther, Routledge, 2012), The Organic School of the Russian Avant-Garde (Ashgate, 2015), Marianne Werefkin and the Women Artists in Her Circle (with Tanja Malycheva, Brill/Rodopi, 2016), and Practices of Abstract Art: Between Anarchism and Appropriation (with Wiebke Gronemeyer, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016). András Zwickl has served as curator of nineteenth and twentieth-century painting at the Museum of Fine Arts—Hungarian National Gallery since 1988 and is also an associate professor at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest. His research interests are modern art movements in Hungary, artists’ groups and colonies, exhibitions, and international contacts during the period 1880–1940. He has curated many exhibitions and edited their catalogues, among them In the Land of Arcadia: István Szőnyi and His Circle (2001), The Artists’ House 1909–1914 (2009), and Derkovits: The Artist and His Time (with Katalin Bakos, 2014). In 2005, he received the Lajos Németh Prize. xxxv

NOTES TO THE READER

Spelling, punctuation, and style in this volume are based on The Chicago Manual of Style, sixteenth edition, and the online dictionary Merriam-Webster Unabridged. Titles of artworks, exhibitions, books, catalogues, journals, and newspapers are italicized; titles of articles, manuscripts, and conferences appear in quotation marks; names of societies and institutions are presented in roman type and capitalized according to the usage of the country concerned. Generally speaking, for the transliteration of names of people and places, titles of artworks, publications, exhibitions, and other terms, we use the Library of Congress system; however, for people’s names, we tend to use the form most commonly known to English speakers or the form commonly used by authors of a particular nationality. In cases where the name of an artist, intellectual, or writer has its own long-established spelling, it has been kept: for example, Marc Chagall, not Mark Shagal, and Wassily Kandinsky, not Vasily Kandinsky. Names are provided in full (first name, surname) at first mention; subsequent references to an individual within the same essay generally carry only the surname. For the leading protagonists, dates of birth and death are provided. Names of organizations, institutions, and the like are spelled out in full on first appearance; subsequent use is with the acronym. In this volume, frequent reference is made to the German artists’ groups Die Brücke (The Bridge; Dresden and Berlin, 1905–1913) and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider; Munich, 1911–1914) as well as Herwarth Walden’s Berlin-based magazine and art gallery Der Sturm (The Storm; 1912–1932). We use the German names throughout the essays, but include a gloss for the artists’ groups on first mention in each essay. Similarly, foreign titles of artworks, books, journals, magazines, and newspapers and other artists’ groups are glossed on first appearance; this applies to the main text as well as to the notes. Unless otherwise indicated, translations included are by the respective author.

xxxvi

EXPRESSIONIST NETWORKS, CULTURAL DEBATES, AND ARTISTIC PRACTICES A Conceptual Introduction Isabel Wünsche

The artistic activities and cultural exchanges of the European avant-garde movements have been well researched, but the cultural energies set free by expressionist forces throughout Europe and beyond are less known and have never been comparatively discussed. This book looks at expressionism as a form of artistic practice and cultural encounter contextually situated within but geographically unbounded by European art and culture of the twentieth century; it investigates the forms of community and collective identity-making that have stimulated artistic practice and cultural communication in Europe and beyond. These “forms of community”—artists’ networks and cultural exchanges—formed a basis for cultural interaction, artistic cooperation and competition, and intellectual exchange; their development was shaped by socio-economic factors, technological advances, and new media developments. The book specifically focuses on the transnational formation, dissemination, and transformation of expressionism outside of the German-speaking world, in regions such as Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltics, Scandinavia, Western and Southern Europe, but also in North and Latin America, and South Africa, in the first half of the twentieth century. Given the changing political landscape of Europe during this period, we focus largely on the various geographical rather than political regions and centers of activity; this is both a methodological choice and a matter of content. The volume addresses an extensive number of regions, but is not allinclusive. Written by scholars from the various regions schooled in the fields of art history and literary and cultural studies, the individual essays address the treatment of expressionism in their particular art centers and cultural regions and examine the implications for its application in artistic practice and influence on modern and contemporary cultural production. Thus, the volume provides the basis for a more transnational, intercultural approach to modernist art practices in twentieth-century Europe and beyond than has previously been available; it opens up new perspectives to discourses on developments in the visual arts of this period and challenges the traditional narratives that have predominantly focused on artistic styles and national movements. The participating authors were in particular asked to address two points: •• ••

Expressionism’s significance in the various artistic and cultural contexts outside the Germanspeaking world Regional use of the term.

1

Isabel Wünsche

Examining expressionism as an artistic practice in the various centers and regions, three fundamental problems were then necessarily addressed: a) a definition of its stylistic boundaries b) determination of its time frame (periodization) c) its differentiation from other concurrent modernist tendencies. Rather than summarizing the individual contributions of each and every author here, I wish to address some of the major themes that shaped the reception and transformation of expressionism in Europe and beyond (Figure 0.1).

“French” Expressionism Expressionist trends in the visual arts emerged as a reaction to the success and spread of impressionism across Europe and beyond. By the mid-1890s, impressionism had become the new establishment, and impressionist painting techniques, primarily concerned with the use of color and the impromptu play of light, had been taken up by British, German, Russian, Scandinavian, Spanish, and American artists.1 The distinctive impressionist style of painting became an international signifier of modernity. The following generation, the so-called postimpressionists— Georges Seurat, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne—rejected the impressionists’ focus on optical reality and chose to concentrate instead on the subjective vision of the artist. This attention to an evocation of feeling rather than a description of nature laid the groundwork for modern art—specifically expressionism. Thus, the term “expressionism” originally was applied to what was an anti-impressionist movement that put a premium on the expression of emotion by means of highly personal distortions of color, form, and space.2 According to Donald E. Gordon, the story of expressionism began at the École des Beaux Arts sometime between 1891 and 1898, in the studio of Gustave Moreau, who told his students that “the essential, if [not] the highest, goal of art is expression.”3 His most successful student, Henri Matisse, further refined his teacher’s objective. In his 1908 Notes d’un peintre (Notes of a Painter), he summarized his objectives as follows: What I am after, above all, is expression . . . [which], for me, does not reside in passions glowing in a human face or manifested by violent movement. The entire arrangement of my picture is expressive: the place occupied by my figures, the empty space around them, the proportions, everything has its share. Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the diverse elements at the painter’s command to express his feelings.4 Matisse’s work is characterized by areas of brilliant and often unnatural color and flat, decorative patterns; one of the best-known examples today is his 1908 painting, Red Room (Harmony in Red; Plate 1). The large-scale canvas is scattered with arabesques and floral patterns; it has no conventional focal point and a strangely flattened perspective. The painting, which Matisse referred to as a “decorative panel,” is a celebration of pattern and decoration; the rhythms of the foliage pattern on the tablecloth and wallpaper are echoed in the background through the window, uniting the warm red interior with the cooler exterior. Matisse’s radical approach to painting attracted much attention; between 1908 and 1911, his studio, Académie Matisse, drew young artists from all over Europe, including the Germans Marg and Oskar Moll, Mathilde Vollmoeller, and Gretchen Wohlwill; the Swedish artists 2

A Conceptual Introduction

Figure 0.1  Map of Europe. Courtesy of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), The World Factbook.

Isaac Grünewald, Sigrid Hjerten, and Carl Palme; the Norwegians Per Krohg, Jean Heiberg, and Henrik Sørenson; Jon Stefanson, from Iceland; the Hungarians József Brummer, Géza Bornemisza, and Vilmos Perlrott-Csaba; the Russians Olga Meerson and Marie Vassilieff; and American artists Max Weber, Alfred Maurer, and Morgan Russell.5 The early use of the term “expressionism” in the art-historical discourse, specifically in England and Scandinavia, did not refer to German art but rather French postimpressionism and fauvism. The Czech art historian Antonín Matějček, the English critic Alan Clutton Brock, and the Swedish theoretician Carl David Moselius all used the term “expressionism” around 1910 to refer to postimpressionist and fauvist painting rather than German art.6 The British art critic Roger Fry initially favored the term “expressionists” rather than “postimpressionists” for his 1910 exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists at the Grafton Galleries in London because, as he maintained, “expressive design seemed the quality most evident” in the modern French paintings he selected.7 In Germany, the term was first used in connection with the opening of the twenty-second exhibition of the Berliner Secession (Berlin Secession) in April 1911. In the preface to the catalogue, young painters from Paris, among them Georges Braque, Andre Derain, Kees van Dongen, Pablo Picasso, and Maurice de Vlaminck, are referred to as “Expressionisten” (expressionists).8 Paul Ferdinand Schmidt subsequently published an article, “Die Expressionisten” (The 3

Isabel Wünsche

Expressionists), in the January 1912 issue of Herwarth Walden’s magazine Der Sturm, in which he discussed the work of the French postimpressionists (Cézanne, Gauguin, van Gogh), the Nabis (Bonnard, Denis, Vuillard), Edvard Munch and Ferdinand Hodler, and young German artists such as Max Pechstein and Emil Nolde. In the article, he speaks of “expressive art” (Ausdruckskunst) and of “finding a great synthesis,”9 thus foreshadowing a change in concept and meaning. Thus, before the First World War, the expressionist discourse meandered among a variety of theories and conflicting concepts; the multivalent character of the term accommodated various artistic ideas and aesthetic questions, but also politics and national identities. This broad, general concept of expressionism is also evident in the 1912 Sonderbund exhibition, in Cologne, which presented to the public the latest trends in painting from France, Austria-Hungary, Switzerland, Holland, Norway, and also the Russian artists based in Munich. In the introduction to the catalogue, Richard Reiche, the organizer, wrote that “atmospheric naturalism and impressionism” had been superseded by a new movement—“expressionism [which] strives for a simplification and intensification of form of expression, a new rhythm and color, a decorative and monumental configuration.”10 In this example, then, “expressionism” becomes a synonym for “modern” European art, embracing all postimpressionist tendencies. In much the same manner, the Berlin art dealer Herwarth Walden used the expressionist label to showcase a broad range of modern art at the first exhibition of his newly founded gallery, Der Sturm, in March 1912: Der Blaue Reiter/Franz Flaum/Oskar Kokoschka/ Expressionisten. Walden counted among his “expressionists” French artists such as Georges Braque, Robert Delaunay, Andre Derain, Othon Friesz, and Maurice de Vlaminck, whose works had been shown in the Berlin Secession the previous year. His fourth exhibition, Deutsche Expressionisten: Zurückgestellte Bilder des Sonderbundes Köln (German Expressionists: Deferred Pictures from the Sonderbund Cologne), was devoted to the artists of Der Blaue Reiter, but the fifth Sturm exhibition, Französische Expressionisten (French Expressionists), once again featured fauvist painters such as Derain, de Vlaminck, and Friesz.11 Walden’s famous 1913 Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon (First German Autumn Salon) presented works of the international avant-garde.12 In 1915, he exhibited Schwedische Expressionisten (Swedish Expressionists) and, in 1918, Russische Expressionisten (Russian Expressionists).13 Thus, before the First World War, expressionism had become something of a catch-all term for any kind of “radical” international modernism.

The “Germanization” of Expressionism Herwarth Walden, one of the most successful promoters of the expressionist movement, stressed the spiritual background and metaphysical content of this new art movement. To him, expressionism was not just a new artistic style but the manifestation of a new Weltanschauung or philosophy of life, one that emphasized “perception of the senses” over concepts.14 Inspired by Wassily Kandinsky’s ideas of the spiritual roots of abstract art15 and Wilhelm Worringer’s psychological theory of visual style,16 Walden viewed the expressionist art work as one of “inner necessity” and an expression of the artist’s inner self.17 In his effort to distance the new art from the superficiality of the impressionists, he noted that the expressionists “have renounced the [mere] imitation of external impressions” and rediscovered “the essence of art.”18 The ethnic conception of expressionism as a specifically German contribution to European modernism evolved around 1914; the art critic Paul Fechter, in his book Der Expressionismus (Expressionism; Figure 0.2), characterized it as “a protest against impressionist naturalism” and “a calling to mind of the old sense and spiritual meaning of creativity in general.”19 Distinguishing

4

A Conceptual Introduction

between “extensive expressionism” as exemplified by the figurative art of Max Pechstein (Plate 2) and “intensive expressionism” as exemplified by the cosmological, abstract paintings of Wassily Kandinsky (Plate 7), Fechter emphasized that both directions rejected the rationalist, materialist tradition of the Renaissance in favor of the communal, metaphysical sensibility of the Gothic.20 For him, the significance of expressionism lay in the insight that “the essential meaning of art always consists in expressing in a concentrated, direct way—the only possible way—the emotion arising from human existence on earth.”21 Relating this “metaphysical urge” to the nature of the German people22—a notion inspired by Wilhelm Worringer’s 1910 book Die Formproblem der Gotik (Form Problems of the Gothic)—Fechter sought to establish expressionism as a distinctly German national artistic phenomenon, positioning it in direct opposition to French impressionism and French art in general.23 Expressionism became synonymous with the German aesthetic concept of Ausdruckskunst—the idea that expression could denote feeling or emotion. Thus, expressionism became a national and specifically German artistic phenomenon during the First World War and was eventually presented as the German contribution to modern art in general and the avant-garde in particular (Figure 0.3). In the course of this “Germanization” of expressionism, the Norwegian painter Edward Munch (1863–1944), renowned for his evocative works depicting life and death, love and terror, and intense feelings of isolation, melancholy, and anxiety, emerged as an important source of inspiration (Figure 0.4).24 With his 1892 exhibition in Berlin, Munch challenged existing aesthetic standards and was subsequently heralded as a prophet and spiritual guide.25 Munch’s focus

Figure 0.2  C  over of Paul Fechter, Der Expressionismus [Expressionism] (Munich: Piper, 1914) with cover illustration by Max Pechstein.  2017 Pechstein Hamburg/Tökendorf

Figure 0.3  C  over of Herwarth Walden, Einblick in Kunst [Insight into Art], 3rd–5th ed. (Berlin: Verlag Der Sturm, 1924) with cover illustration by Franz Marc

5

Isabel Wünsche

on emotions aroused by external stimuli or internal experiences, his tendency to simplify and exaggerate, and his distortion of form and emphasis on the expressive power of color perfectly embodied the concept of the “expressive art.” In 1907, the Brücke artists invited him to participate in their exhibition in Dresden; upon his arrival in Germany in 1908, they adopted him as the “Übervater ihrer Rebellion” (godfather of their rebellion).26 Writing to Munch in 1913, Blaue Reiter artist August Macke enthusiastically reported: “We ‘Young Ones’ have inscribed your name on our shield.”27 Munch’s status as a precursor of the avant-garde was confirmed in 1912 with a comprehensive presentation of thirty-two works in a special gallery at the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne, where he was featured on equal terms with Cézanne, Gauguin, and van Gogh. At a time when nationalist sentiments and völkische ideas were beginning to shape German art and art theory, Munch’s “Nordic” expressionism provided a counter-model to Matisse and the fauves and was used to draw a clear distinction between the nature of Romanic culture and Germanic culture.28 Early interest in Munch also shaped artistic developments in other European countries: The encounter with Munch’s work, around 1905, influenced the painterly style of the members of the Czech Osma group—Emil Filla, Bohumil Kubišta, and Antonín Procházka; in Britain before the First World War, critics and art historians saw Munch as a pathfinder for the expressionist generation, associating the movement with qualities such as “brutal” or “barbaric.”

Figure 0.4  Edvard Munch, Geschrei/Skriget (The Scream), 1895, lithography, 49.4 × 37.3 cm, Sammlung Gundersen, Oslo

6

A Conceptual Introduction

Die Brücke: A Revolt Against Academic Tradition and Social Conventions The earliest expressionist group in Germany, Die Brücke (The Bridge, 1905–1913), was founded in Dresden, in June 1905, by the four architectural students Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Fritz Bleyl. Looking for the right appellation to convey the sense of a utopian new social order based on creative spontaneity and emotional expression, they invoked a passage from Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1883 book Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra): “What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.”29 Die Brücke was above all a revolt against academic tradition and social conventions.30 Brücke artists rejected impressionism and naturalism in favor of a primitivizing aesthetic that fused inspiration derived from the works of Munch, van Gogh, and the fauves with influences from Gothic art and African and Oceanic sculpture (Figure 0.5). Determined to liberate themselves from the repressive values of the Wilhelmine culture, they rejected the distinction between the high and low arts and experimented with a variety of media. Concentrating on emotional power and the raw expression of feeling, they sought to achieve a constructive, instinctive blending of art and life that initially even involved a communal way of living and creating art, sharing a studio and the models they hired, creating joint drawings, and drawing and painting together in the lake district near Dresden and at the Baltic coast.

Figure 0.5  E  rnst Ludwig Kirchner, exhibition poster KG Brücke (Artists’ Group Brücke), September 1910, woodcut, 83 × 61 cm, Galerie Ernst Arnold, Dresden

7

Isabel Wünsche

By 1911, almost all of the Brücke artists had moved to Berlin, where they drew inspiration from their new urban experiences and the social and emotional tensions of the bustling life in the German capital. The previous year, the jury of the Berlin Secession had famously refused to accept for entry to its annual exhibition the work of twenty-seven painters, among them several Brücke artists. The result was the establishment of a rival association, the so-called Neue Secession (New Secession, 1910–1914), which went on to closely collaborate with the artists of both Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter.31 The New Secession organized seven well-received shows in Berlin and a number of touring exhibitions and played a significant role in paving the way for the acceptance of expressionism in Berlin and in Germany; it also established contact with and showed works by artists from the Czech Republic, France, and Scandinavia. The association was among the first to present a comprehensive overview of recent developments in the international art scene, predating with its fourth exhibition, in the winter of 1911, the Sonderbund exhibition and the Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon.32 Already by 1912, however, the individual outlooks and artistic styles of the various Brücke members had begun to outweigh the strength of their communal beliefs; further conflicts over leadership and group interests led to the group’s dissolution in May 1913. Die Brücke initially functioned more like a brotherhood; its artistic relationships were built on personal contacts and held together by a shared utopian outlook and artistic sense rather than a theory of art. The group’s most important publication, the Programm der Künstlergruppe Brücke (Brücke Manifesto, 1906), was brief and not widely circulated.33 However, their striving for a renewal of art and the provocative nature of their works—the brilliant, clashing colors and jagged brushstrokes of their paintings, the rough patterns and stark contrast of their prints as well as their penetrating psychological portraits, the vital eroticism of their nudes, and the claustrophobic and tension-filled depictions of city life—contributed to the success of Die Brücke’s reception in and beyond Germany and their acceptance as true “wild ones” or fauves and heirs to the tradition of Gauguin, van Gogh, Matisse, and Munch. Close relationships to Czech artists such as Bohumil Kubišta and Willi Nowak were established in 1911, and while the art of Die Brücke remained relatively unknown in Denmark and Sweden before the Second World War, Finish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela joined the group in 1907, and the Norwegian painter Axel Revold was also briefly a member. There was also an early “passive member” (patron) in England, Edith Buckley from Crawley, Sussex, who was a friend of Emil Nolde’s wife, Ada Nolde. In the Netherlands, works by Brücke artist Karl Schmidt-Rottluff were included in the second exhibition of the Moderne Kunstkring (Modern Art Circle) in Amsterdam in fall 1912, and the later Dutch artists’ group De Ploeg (The Plow), founded in Groningen in 1918, was influenced by the art of Die Brücke. The artists’ colony in Nida, on the Curonian spit, became a favorite summer resort of Brücke artists such as Pechstein and Schmidt-Rottluff in the 1910s; the summers spent there and the exchanges with local artists formed the basis for the work of German artists and writers in Kaunas during the German occupancy in the First World War. In the interwar period, the art of Die Brücke became a model for Lithuanian artists; teachers at the Kaunas School of Art introduced it to their students, among them Antanas Samuolis and Antanas Gudaitis, as one of the highest achievements of modern art. In Finland, where society was heavily influenced by the dichotomy of a Swedish-speaking upper class vs. a Finnish-speaking lower class, the primitivism of Brücke expressionism offered an appealing national alternative, both socially and aesthetically, to the dominance of (Swedish) high culture. In South Africa, settler expressionist Irma Stern, who herself had studied art in Berlin, where she befriended Pechstein and joined expressionist circles and later the Novembergruppe, positioned herself as an “authentic” African artist and connoisseuse of “primitive” cultures; after 8

A Conceptual Introduction

her return to South Africa in 1920, she paved the way for other expressionist artists, among them Maggie Laubser, Pranas Domšaitis, and Maurice van Essche.

Der Blaue Reiter: From Spiritual Renewal to Abstract Painting In contrast to Die Brücke, Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider, 1911–1914), founded in Munich, in 1911, by Russian emigre artists, including Wassily Kandinsky, Alexei Jawlensky, and Marianne Werefkin, as well as native German artists, including Franz Marc, August Macke, and Gabriele Münter, became the driving force of a major international network of modernist artists across Europe and beyond.34 The group, inspired by theosophy and the occult, awaited the advent of an “epoch of the great spiritual” and promoted a subjective-intuitive approach to art. The spiritual aspects of their artistic program were strongly influenced by Kandinsky and Marc and included various forms of representation designed to evoke nonvisual phenomena and sensations; these were linked to the concepts of primitivism, abstraction, and expressionism. In 1912, the group published one of the most influential art publications in twentieth-century art, the almanac Der Blaue Reiter (Figure 0.6).35 Edited by Kandinsky and Marc, it set forth many of the basic philosophical tenets of expressionism and provided reproductions of artifacts from a variety of cultures, including African and Oceanic sculpture, native American and Pre-Columbian art, Chinese and Japanese painting, medieval sculpture, Renaissance woodcuts, Bavarian glass painting, Russian folk art, children’s drawings, and contemporary art; it also included articles on theatre and music. The two Munich exhibitions organized by the group, in 1911 and 1912, were international in scope and included works by the French artists Georges Braque, Robert Delaunay, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Rousseau; the Russian painters Mikhail Larionov and Kazimir Malevich; and many Brücke artists. The group dissolved at the outbreak of the First World War, with the departure of the Russian artists from Germany and the conscription of Marc and Macke, who were killed in combat in 1916. The art and ideas of the Blaue Reiter artists generated great interest and were widely disseminated for two reasons: 1) Munich, an important art center at the time, attracted artists from all over Europe; 2) the international makeup of the group and its members’ cosmopolitan outlook fostered an active international network, one that disseminated its ideas and publications and exhibited its artworks throughout Europe. The encounter with the Blaue Reiter was essential for artists such as Ado Vabbe (Estonia), Chavdar Mutafov (Bulgaria), and Albert Bloch (USA), all of whom studied in Munich in the early 1910s; the group facilitated their discovery of modern art and knowledge of a new way of painting that went beyond representation—ideas they took with them back to their home countries. The impact of Kandinsky’s ideas was far-reaching in Europe at the time and beyond. His treatise Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art) was widely discussed; the first full English version appeared in April 1914 and was reviewed by Edward Wadsworth in the Vorticist publication Blast in July 1914.36 Three of Kandinsky’s most important essays, “Über die Formfrage” (On the Problem of Form, 1912), “Über Kunstverstehen” (On Understanding Art, 1912), and “Malerei als reine Kunst” (Painting as Pure Art, 1918), were widely reproduced in exhibition catalogues and art magazines throughout Europe.37 His writings were particularly well received in the Netherlands, where Jacoba van Heemskerck, Janus de Winter, and Louis Saalborn shared his interest in theosophy and the spiritual dimension of art; the Dutch artists Erich Wichman and Theo van Doesburg thoroughly analyzed his works and texts and published their own thoughts on them.38 In Italy, Enrico Prampolini reciprocated with his own essay, “La Pittura pura” (Pure Painting), which appeared as “A Response to Kandinsky” in L’artista moderno (The Modern Artist) in January 1915.39 The Serbian artist Mihailo S. Petrov 9

Isabel Wünsche

Figure 0.6  Wassily Kandinsky, cover of the almanac Der Blaue Reiter (Munich: Piper, 1912)

translated Kandinsky’s text “Malerei als reine Kunst” and published it in the Serbian journal Мисао/Misao (Thought) in 1922, characterizing Kandinsky in the preface as “the famous father of absolute painting, well known through his texts.”40 Similarly, Lubomir Micić promoted Kandinsky as the beginning of the new art in Europe and regarded him as the first abstract and spiritual artist.41 Kandinsky’s art and ideas also shaped the development of early abstraction in North America, where Manierre Dawson, Konrad Cramer, and Abraham Walkowitz began to experiment with abstraction in the early 1910s. From the 1920s to the 1940s, American interest in the Blaue Reiter was spurred by the activities of Katherine Dreier and the Société Anonyme, Galka Scheyer, and Hilla Rebay.42

Austrian Expressionism: Agitated Lines and Psychological Portraits The influence of the Vienna expressionists, whose most prominent representatives were Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele (Figures 0.7 and 0.8), was less widespread than that of the artists in Berlin or Munich and largely limited to central Europe and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In contrast to their German colleagues, Kokoschka and Schiele retained noticeable vestiges of academic realism in their work and were strongly engaged with symbolism, particularly the work of Gustav Klimt.43 They retained the use of decorative devices associated with art nouveau, but as a means of subjective representation. Concentrating above all on portraiture and the nude, they developed highly personal, emotive styles based on expressive draftsmanship and provocative, even sexually charged, body language. Their work, a challenge to the complacency of Viennese culture, was viewed by many as scandalous, but their daring sensibilities and dedication to the decorative also brought them an enthusiastic following and wealthy patronage. 10

A Conceptual Introduction

Schiele’s life and career were unfortunately cut short, but Kokoschka went on to have a long and successful international career. The influence of Viennese expressionism was most prevalent in Budapest, where the Viennese Neukunstgruppe, which included Robin Christian Andersen, Anton Faistauer, Paris Gütersloh, Oskar Kokoschka, Anton Kolig, Egon Schiele, and Arnold Schönberg, first exhibited its works in the Művészház (House of Artists) in January 1912.44 Critics immediately drew parallels between the work of the young artists from Vienna and the members of the Hungarian group The Eight, also known as Keresők (The Seekers). The portraits of Róbert Berény and Lajos Tihanyi show similarities to those of Kokoschka in terms of their psychological characterization, often caricature-like distortions, the typically deformed hands, and their loose brushwork. In 1910, Kokoschka moved to Germany, where he held his first solo exhibition in Paul Cassirer’s gallery in Berlin. His expressionist portraits greatly impressed Herwarth Walden, who decided to publish the young artist’s controversial expressionist drama Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen (Murderer, the Hope of Women) in the first issue of his new magazine Der Sturm.45 Kokoschka joined the staff of Der Sturm, which quickly became the most significant mouthpiece for expressionism in both literature and the visual arts; he executed numerous illustrations for the magazine and exhibited in Sturm exhibitions in Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands.

Figure 0.8  Egon Schiele, Weltwehmut (World-Melancholy), cover illustration of Zenit 3 (April 1921)

Figure 0.7  O  skar Kokoschka, Zeichnung zu dem Drama Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen (Drawing for the Drama Murderer, the Hope of Women), cover illustration of Der Sturm 1, no. 20, July 14, 1910.  Fondation Oskar Kokoschka/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018

11

Isabel Wünsche

After the First World War, Kokoschka, now a well-known portraitist and landscape painter, moved to Dresden, where he held a professorship at the Art Academy from 1919 until 1926. One of his students was the Icelandic painter Finnur Jónsson; the inspiration he derived from his teacher can be found in the thick and bold brushstrokes evident in many of his oil paintings as well as in his portraits and collages.46 Kokoschka remained involved with Der Sturm throughout the 1920s, but fled to the Czech Republic in 1934 and then the United Kingdom, in 1938, when the Nazis came to power and his works were branded “degenerate” and then confiscated.

Herwarth Walden und Der Sturm: The Networks of the Avant-Garde It is no secret that Berlin gallerist and publisher Herwarth Walden (1878–1941) played a crucial role in the dissemination of expressionism throughout Europe; his name appears in almost every chapter of this anthology.47 His magazine, Der Sturm, was modeled on the Italian literary magazine La Voce (The Voice, 1908–1916). It began as a weekly and then ran as a monthly, starting in 1914, and from 1924 to 1932 it appeared quarterly. The magazine begat the likenamed Berlin gallery, which Walden opened in 1912 with an exhibition of the fauves and Der Blaue Reiter, followed by the introduction of the Italian futurists, cubists, and orphists in Germany. Der Sturm, the gallery, soon became the focus of Berlin’s modern art scene and remained so for more than a decade. Walden not only maintained strong personal contacts with the Florence-based circle of painters and writers associated with La Voce, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and other Italian futurists, but also with Dutch artists and collectors, among them Jacoba van Heemskerck and Marie Tak van Poortvliet. During the First World War, Walden, through his second wife, the Swedish Nell Walden, became active in Scandinavia. After the war, he expanded Der Sturm into an even larger cultural enterprise, organizing Sturmabende—evening lectures and discussions on modern art—and Die Sturmbühne, an expressionist theatre, as well as publishing books, postcards, and portfolios by artists such as Marc Chagall and Oskar Kokoschka (Figure 0.9). Before the war, Walden had featured the works of Der Blaue Reiter and Die Brücke, the French fauves and cubists, and the Italian futurists, but during the interwar period, he opened up to new avant-garde trends, particularly constructivism. From 1919 to 1926, he closely collaborated with another Berlin-based organization, the Internationale Vereinigung der Expressionisten, Futuristen und Kubisten (International Association of Expressionists, Futurists, and Cubists) and included works by artists such as Henryk Berlewi, László Moholy-Nagy, László Péri and Hans Mattis-Teutsch in his exhibitions. He was in touch with the Yugoslav avant-garde, serving on the editorial board of the Zagreb-based magazine Tank, contributing an article on expressionism in music to its first issue in 1927, and hosting an exhibition of the Slovenian avant-garde in his gallery in 1929, accompanied by a special issue of Der Sturm on “Junge slovenische Kunst” (Young Slovenian Art).48 Despite Walden’s efforts, the gallery declined in importance after the war and closed in 1924, leaving the magazine to carry on as a quarterly until 1932. By then, Walden had organized more than 200 exhibitions in his premises in Berlin as well as numerous touring exhibitions in Germany and also in other major European cities, such as Prague, Budapest, Brussels, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Rome, Zurich, London, Stockholm, Christiana, as well as in New York and Tokyo. Walden’s enterprising spirit and his innovative marketing strategies served as a model for artists on the European periphery. Inspired by Walden’s magazine and gallery, the editors of the Transylvanian journal Das Ziel (The Goal) established their own exhibition venue, Redoute Hall, which opened with a solo show of expressionist works by Hans Eder in May 1919. 12

A Conceptual Introduction

Figure 0.9  Oskar Kokoschka, Bildnis Herwarth Walden (Portrait Herwarth Walden), 1910, oil on canvas, 100 × 69.3 cm, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.  Fondation Oskar Kokoschka/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018

Walden’s activities also served as a model for the efforts of the Bulgarian writer and publisher Geo Milev.49 During his stay in Berlin (1918–1919), he joined Walden’s circle and acquired a large library of publications on modernist art; after his return to Bulgaria, Milev published, first, the magazine Vezni (Scales, 1919–1922), with an associated Vezni library series, and then Plamak (Flame, 1923–1925). Milev was unable to establish his own gallery, but he did organize an expressionist exhibition of sixty works, mostly graphic prints by Chagall, Kandinsky, Kokoschka, Marc, and Munch, that he displayed in his apartment in Sofia from December 1921 to January 1922. Milev also served as an outlet for Der Sturm in the Balkans; Walden sent him Sturm postcards to distribute with his own magazine. In Yugoslavia, Lubomir Micic’s magazine Zenit, established in Zagreb in 1921, mirrored in both appearance and editorial concept Der Sturm, which could be found in some of Zagreb’s bookshops and in the Süd-Ost bookstore in Belgrade.50 Zenit started out as an expressionist magazine, publishing texts by Ivan Goll and other expressionist poets along with works by Vilko Gecan and Egon Schiele. Following the Sturm model, Micić also founded a gallery of new art, in 1922, and began to organize exhibitions on avant-garde art. Avant-garde magazines played a significant role in the transnational artistic dialogue and international cultural exchange in the prewar and interwar years. Der Sturm was a central node in a wide network of such publications that readily channeled the exchange of ideas and flow of information; it was closely connected with La Voce in Florence and NOI and ATYS in Rome 13

Isabel Wünsche

Figure 0.10  Back cover of the journal MA (Today) 8, no. 1 (1922)

as well as MA in Budapest/Vienna, Zenit in Zagreb/Belgrade, and Vezni and Plamak in Sofia. The political activist magazine Die Aktion closely collaborated with the Poznań-based Zdroj. As the back cover of the 1922 issue of MA shows (Figure 0.10), the journal’s network also included 2x2 in Vienna, La Vie des Lettres et des Arts and L’Ésprit Nouveau in Paris, De Stijl in Weimar, Ça Ira in Brussels, Zenit in Zagreb, and UT in Novi Sad. Translations of literary works, generally short stories, poems and dramaturgy, and critical reviews, but also reproductions of artworks and photographs of exhibitions, provided important sources of information and served as a primary means of communication for the propagation of modernist design aesthetics.

The Medium of Printmaking and the Revival of the Woodcut The spread of expressionism across Europe and beyond is closely connected with the revival of printmaking and the graphic arts, which provided an effective medium for emotional expressiveness and artistic experimentation.51 Printmaking offered a less expensive, more immediate way of capturing raw expression than painting. In their efforts to renew German art, Brücke artists turned to a medium they considered truly German: the woodcut. The block-printing technique offered them a way to recover a German tradition and to register a thread of continuity with their late Gothic and Renaissance heritage and artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Martin Schongauer, and Matthias Grünewald.52 They not only printed their 1906 program and the 1913 chronicle by means of woodcut,53 but also used the technique to print membership cards, exhibition posters, and invitations; to reproduce paintings for 14

A Conceptual Introduction

illustrations in catalogues; and to produce print portfolios for their associated members. The stark contrasts of the xylographic image, as for example in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s woodcut print Mit Schilf werfende Badende (Bathers Throwing Reed; Figure 0.11), helped to evoke an emotional response in the viewer and convey an intense engagement with life. Likewise, the artists of the Blaue Reiter, particularly Franz Marc in his woodcut Wildpferde (Wild Horses; Figure 0.12), explored the flattened perspective and reductive aspects of the art form on their path toward abstraction. This focus on immediacy and spirituality can also be observed in the woodcuts of Jacoba van Heemskerck, which were frequently reproduced by Walden in his magazine (Figure 0.13). In the 1920s, prints by Brücke artists, particularly the work of Kirchner, inspired members of the Dutch group De Ploeg to explore a number of graphic techniques, including both etching and woodcutting, thus giving a new boost to the graphic arts in the Netherlands. Brücke expressionism also had a strong impact on Lithuanian printmaking, particularly the work of Adomas Galdikas and his students Viktoras Petravičius, Vytautas Jurkūnas, and Marcė Katiliūtė. A friendship with Schmidt-Rottluff led the South African artist Maggie Laubser, who lived in Berlin from 1922 to 1924, to briefly engage with the woodcut technique, a medium that was highly unusual in South African art at the time. It accommodated her interest in primitivism and corresponded well to her painting style, characterized by flatness and the use of bright areas of color outlined in black, and upon her return to South Africa, she was able to connect the expressionist woodcut technique to African carvings.

Figure 0.11  E  rnst Ludwig Kirchner, Mit Schilf werfende Badende (Bathers Throwing Reeds), 1909, color woodcut in black, green, and orange, 19.9 × 28.7 cm (5th Portfolio of the Brücke, 1910)

15

Isabel Wünsche

Figure 0.12  F  ranz Marc, Wildpferde (Wild Horses), 1912, woodcut, illustration in Herwarth Walden, Einblick in Kunst [Insight into Art], 3rd to 5th ed. (Berlin: Verlag Der Sturm, 1924), 47

In Sweden, the revival and use of the woodcut technique was promoted by Föreningen Original-Träsnitt, the Swedish Society of Original Wood Engravers, whose members, among them Anna Sahlström, Pär Siegård, and Harriet Sundström, shared an interest in primitivist expression. Like the Brücke artists, they were inspired by the rough contours and simplistic shapes of medieval woodcuts and eighteenth and nineteen-century broadsheets, but were also influenced by Japanese Ukiyo-e woodcuts and various kinds of popular Swedish prints.54 Rejecting a realistic depiction and the illusion of three-dimensional space, they began to use combinations of distinct contour lines and plain surfaces. The Finnish artist Ina Behrsen, too, embraced such primitivist associations and produced a cycle of black-and-white woodcuts in the 1930s consisting of images of women, couples, and families that poignantly highlighted the theme of fertility. For Behrsen, the use of the black-and-white woodcut in the expressionist tradition provided a means by which to negotiate her identity at the interface of various cultures, languages, nationalities, and nationalisms in the interwar period.55 For the indigenous Sámi artist John Savio, in the far northern regions of Scandinavia, printmaking was an opportunity to unite the traditional Sámi handicraft of duodji with his interest in depicting the northern landscape and the life of Sámi people. In his woodcuts, he portrays the coastal and mountain sceneries, the interplay between humans and nature, but also powerful emotions such as anger, frustration, jealousy, and loneliness (Plate 17). Savio’s art thus merges characteristics of both expressionist woodcut technique and Sámi cultural heritage.56 The British writers and artists Wyndham Lewis and Edward Wadsworth, who published the Vorticist magazine Blast (1914–1915; Figure 0.14), the most important avant-garde medium for the reception of expressionism in Britain, were both great admirers of the expressionist 16

A Conceptual Introduction

woodcut. Wadsworth engaged in this technique during a year he spent in Munich and was strongly influenced by the work of Kandinsky and Marc. A number of his woodcuts were shown at the Twenty-One Gallery in 1914 along with an exhibition of modern German prints. Italian expressionism manifested itself largely in the graphic arts, particularly the woodcut. The periodical L’Eroica, founded in 1911, became the official organ of the newly founded Corporazione degli Xilografi (Guild of Xylographers), which showcased Italian woodcut printmaking in Germany and Sweden (Plate 22). In Spain, the first and only exhibition of expressionist art, Exposició del gravat alemany contemporani (Exhibition of Contemporary German Engravings), held at the Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc, in Barcelona, in the spring of 1926, was a show of engravings, including works by Dix, Grosz, Heckel, Kirchner, Kokoschka, Kollwitz, Nolde, and Schmidt-Rottluff. Expressionism in Bulgaria developed above all in the graphic arts, where the use of the woodcut technique in modern printmaking was closely connected with religious imagery and the historical production of schtampa—religious engravings—and prints from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thus, the graphic work of Vasil Zahariev, Pencho Georgiev, Sirak Skitnik, and Max Metzger is characterized by a hybridization of expressionist trends with symbolist influences and traditional imagery from early Bulgarian religious engravings and printed books.57 As with the art magazines, printmaking served as an important means of communication and artistic exchange. Through the circulation of prints, postcards, and images in the magazines, almanacs, and books, artists in the peripheral art centers could keep in touch with other modernist artists and stay informed about new movements and the latest developments in the visual arts.

Figure 0.14  W  yndham Lewis, cover of Blast 2 (War Number), July 1915, woodcut

Figure 0.13  J acoba van Heemskerck, Holzschnitt/ Vom Stock gedruckt (Woodcut, printed from the woodblock), cover illustration of Der Sturm 7, no. 4, July 15, 1916

17

Isabel Wünsche

Postcards were presented in exhibitions and used for magazine illustrations; the postcards of Die Aktion and Der Sturm were among the most widely circulated images of the avant-garde.

From Capturing War Experiences to a Socially Engaged Form of Art Expressionism was particularly effective in expressing the apocalyptic war experiences that affected artists in all regions of the continent and for coming to terms with the traumatic experiences of the First World War, in particular destruction, human suffering, and death; hunger, poverty, and despair. Many expressionist artists greeted the outbreak of war in 1914 and immediately volunteered for military service, believing the war to be the apocalyptic event that would cleanse the world of self-satisfied materialism and overcome the old order, but most were eventually disillusioned by the gruesome reality of the fighting, destruction, and misery that went on far longer than most had anticipated, destroying millions of lives and devastating most regions in Europe. The expressionist visual language, with its focus on distortion and contrasts of light and darkness, proved to be most adequate for capturing the emotional intensity of such misery and devastation. Thus, the original expressionist spirit of vitalism and optimism gave way to images of apocalypse, universal suffering, and redemption, among them Otto Dix’s portfolio Der Krieg (War, 1924; Figure 0.15), Käthe Kollwitz’s anti-war prints and drawings, and Ludwig Meidner’s apocalyptic landscapes. This shift is also captured by Hermann Bahr in his 1916 book Der Expressionismus, in which he writes: Never has an age been shaken by such horror, such mortal fear . . . The whole age becomes one single scream of anguish. Art joins in, screaming into the murky darkness, screaming for help, screaming for the Spirit. This is expressionism.58 While painters such as the German-Saxon Hans Eder served as war artists (Kriegsmaler), recording battles, victories, and atrocities, others, such as Cornelia Gurlitt, who served as a nurse in a war hospital in Vilnius, created drawings, prints, and paintings to cope with their personal experiences of war and life in the occupied territories. A number of German artists and writers, among them Paul Fechter, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Magnus Zeller, and Arnold Zweig, were drafted into the German army and served as artists and writers in occupied territories such as the Ober Ost, in Lithuania, where they wrote and illustrated for newspapers such as the Kownoer Zeitung (Kaunas News) and the Wilnaer Zeitung (Vilnius News).59 Increasingly disillusioned by the war, Schmidt-Rottluff began to use religious subjects to depict human suffering, publishing a series of nine woodcuts titled Christus (Christ), in 1918. Zeller’s portfolio Entrückung und Aufruhr (Rapture and Uproar), foreshadowing the catastrophic end of the war and the November Revolution in Germany, was illegally produced in the printing house of the Ober Ost press department in Kaunas in 1917–1918. The aftermath of the First World War brought political upheavals, economic and social instability, and cultural changes. Postwar central Europe was plagued by epidemic disease, hunger, and unemployment, as well as continued violence, ethnic conflicts, and civil war. The European map was fully redrawn; with the dissolution of the German, Russian, AustroHungarian, and Ottoman empires, a number of new, multi-ethnic nation states were born, among them Czechoslovakia and Poland. Chaotic violence and terror accompanied wars for independence in Estonia and Latvia as well as the short civil war in Finland and the Polish–Soviet conflict. In parallel with deepening ethnic divisions, class conflicts intensified; life in the urban centers after 1917 was characterized by a growing wave of strikes and riots; in contrast to rural ethnicization, the workers’ movements promoted internationalism. The October Revolution 18

A Conceptual Introduction

Figure 0.15  O  tto Dix, Gastote [Gas Deaths], Templeux la Fosse, August 1916, from the portfolio Der Krieg [War] (Berlin: Verlag Karl Nierendorf, 1924), 15.  VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018

in Russia stimulated popular radicalism and Bolshevik upheavals in Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Latvia. During this period, when both right and left-wing radicalization as well as ethnic and class conflicts, riots, violence, and civil war dominated life in Europe, a universal longing for political stability, a functioning state, and law and order gradually prevailed. In the immediate postwar years, expressionist and left-wing artists devoted their attention to graphic works such as leaflets, prints, and posters; debates revolved around the artist’s social responsibility and the value of art for the masses. One of the most actively engaged artists was Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945), the first woman to be elected to full professorship at the Prussian Academy of Arts, in 1919. After the loss of her son to the war in 1914, she began to create powerful images depicting the trauma, senselessness, and evils of war. As a member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, she produced a series of lithographs of war-stricken mothers and children that were distributed as postcards. In 1924, ten years after the outbreak of the war, at the request of the international trade union movement, Kollwitz created the antiwar poster Die Überlebenden: Krieg dem Kriege (The Survivors: War against War; Figure 0.16), a depiction of those uprooted by war. Her powerful and highly emotional anti-war prints reveal compassion and empathy; they influenced left-wing artists throughout Europe, and were widely shown in exhibitions and distributed through various print media. During the interwar period, Berlin became the artistic center of a more socially engaged form of expressionism, one that offered a critical response to political developments and the social situation in interwar Germany, as exemplified in the work of artists such as Dix, Kollwitz, and George Grosz. After the November Revolution, in 1918, a number of new and for the most part politically engaged artists’ groups were founded in Germany, among them the Arbeitsrat 19

Isabel Wünsche

Figure 0.16  K  äthe Kollwitz, Die Überlebenden: Krieg dem Kriege (The Survivors: War against War), 1923, lithograph

für Kunst (Work Council for Art), the Novembergruppe (November Group), and International Association of Expressionists, Futurists, and Cubists. Collectively, their predominant message was a call for the progressive artists of all nations to unite in championing modern artistic idioms and leftist viewpoints and to take the lead in shaping contemporary cultural life and the design of a new, postwar society.60 By the early 1920s, however, the attraction of expressionism in Germany, once a movement of spiritual and cultural rejuvenation, had begun to fade.61 Ivan Goll, writing in Zenit, noted that expressionism was “being killed by the age that betrayed it . . . croaking on the bait of the revolution it had wanted to serve as high priestess.”62 Wilhelm Hausenstein noticed not only that “expressionism was dead,” but that verism had already been proclaimed its successor by its adversaries. He urged artists to return not to the object or the individual, but rather to turn to the community in search of an art that could reach the masses.63 Gustav Hartlaub, in his 1920 review of the Darmstadt exhibition Deutscher Expressionismus (German Expressionism), also noted a return to the object and identified some representatives of the second generation of expressionists who were then undertaking a new search for content: Albert Bloch, Carl Mense, Heinrich Maria Davringhausen, Kay Nebel, Ludwig Meidner, George Grosz, and Otto Dix. Hartlaub cautioned against distancing oneself from the physical world or reality because “today no metaphysical certainty, no religion, no church will give us a hold on the transcendental.”64 This shift in orientation is best exemplified in the work of George Grosz (1893–1959) whose critical imagery and politically aggressive polemics in portfolios such as Gott mit Uns (God with Us, 1920; Figure 0.17), Das Gesicht der herrschenden Klasse (The Face of the Ruling Class, 1921), and Ecce Homo (1922) earned him an international reputation. Grosz, who was active in leftwing politics and contributed to communist journals published by the Malik-Verlag in Berlin, 20

A Conceptual Introduction

equally attacked government members, the military, and the bourgeois. Grosz, who understood that naturalism was more comprehensible to his intended mass audience, was to have a great influence on artists throughout the Weimar period and beyond. Along with German artists, such as Dix and Otto Griebel, who came under his influence, artists such as the Portuguese painters Mário Eloy and Bernardo Marques (who resided in Berlin between 1927 and 1931) and the Croatian artists Ljubo Babić and Krsto Hegedušić were greatly inspired by the highly critical commentary imbued in his prints and drawings. Grosz’s works were widely exhibited, among other venues, in exhibitions in Paris (1924), Venice (1930), New York (1931), and Zagreb (1932). In the early 1930s, he applied the same harsh visual language to the National Socialists before he was forced to flee Nazi Germany. The visual language of expressionism also influenced the social realist movement in North America. In the 1930s, American social realists such as Ben Shahn and Philip Evergood used expressionist devices in their depictions of urban blight, poverty, moral corruption, and sickness; the same can be seen in the prints and paintings of the Canadian artists Fritz Brandtner and Caven Atkins, who captured the despair felt by many in Winnipeg during the Great Depression.65 In Latin America, artists adopted the visual language of expressionism to transmit political and social messages of human existence in light of the processes of modernization and the emergence and consolidation of nations. Latin American expressionist artists, in particular, addressed and

Figure 0.17  George Grosz, Ecrasez La Famine, Die Kommunisten fallen—und die Devisen steigen, Blood is the Best Sauce, from the portfolio Gott mit uns [God with Us], 1919, photolithograph, 30.8 × 45.1/30.5 × 45.2 cm (Berlin: Malik-Verlag, 1920).  Estate of George Grosz, Princeton, NJ/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018

21

Isabel Wünsche

critically denounced the human suffering due to marginalization, poverty, war, and urbanization. Artists such as the Ecuadorians Eduardo Kingman and Oswaldo Guayasamin, the Mexican muralists José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, the Argentinian Héctor Basaldúa, the Brazilian Emiliano di Cavalcanti, and the Peruvian Víctor Humareda depicted the dispossessed, forgotten, ignored, and abandoned along the path toward a modern state and capitalist system. Their work drew attention to social injustice and the need for a new society and model of development with the human spirit as its focal point.66

Expressionism and the Art of the German Minorities The “Germanization” of expressionism during the First World War raises the question of how this movement was perceived by German minorities in multi-ethnic regions such as the Baltics, Poland, and Romania. In Lithuania, expressionism arrived, with Marianne Werefkin, as a German artistic import from Munich in the 1910s and eventually became a key feature of the national school of art that arose in Kaunas during the interwar period. The expressive approach to creativity signified independence and thus seemed to offer the most fruitful path to the creation of an authentic, modern national art. (In Soviet times, it offered an alternative to Socialist Realism, and after 1990, with the dissolution of the USSR, it was briefly seen as the basis for another new cultural identity.) In contrast, in Latvia, with a very dominant German-Baltic minority, German (and Russian) culture was viewed as a hindrance to the establishment of an independent Latvian modernism; to signify their independence, Latvian modernist artists looked instead to contemporary French art. In the multi-ethnic city of Poznań, things were quite different. During the First World War and in the interwar period, the term expressionism was used as a catch-all label for various modern stylistic trends; it offered an activist, performative connotation not only to the German social-aesthetic revolution but also to the restitution and reunification of the Polish country after its partition. Artists in the Poznań artists’ group Bunt (Revolt) looked to Berlin, which offered them opportunities to participate in the international network of the avant-garde. Thus, Poznań expressionism’s association with the German art movement provided the artists with a means to move beyond the local and regional and connect ideologically and artistically with the international avant-garde.67 Embracing expressionism allowed artists in Transylvania in the German ethnic minority to become part of an established majority culture. Expressionist painting as practiced by Hans Eder, Hans Mattis-Teutsch, Grete Csaky-Copony, and Fritz Kimm thus coalesced into an ethnically charged identity, an artistic affirmation of Germanity in the troubled period following the First World War. The German community in the region, however, being quite conservative, feared the political potential behind the visual idiom of German expressionism, and thus criticized the cultural representatives of the German minority in Transylvania as being potentially subversive, leading the artists to eventually move toward a modest expressionist visual language and a more traditional subject matter (Figure 0.18).68

The “Jewishness” of Expressionism Expressionism, particularly its themes of human suffering and personal tragedy, has also been readily identified with Jewish culture and suffering and even interpreted by a few critics as a foreshadowing of the Holocaust.69 Before the First World War, a number of young Jewish artists from Eastern Europe left their homeland to study art in Paris, among them Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Emmanuel Mané-Katz, Jules Pascin, and Chaim Soutine, who later joined the École de Paris. In the aftermath of the war, when conflicts between the rural and the urban 22

A Conceptual Introduction

Figure 0.18  H  ans Eder, Kreuzigung (Crucifixion), 1930, oil on canvas, 59 × 72.5 cm, Siebenbürgisches Kulturzentrum Schloss Horneck e.V.  Siebenbürgisches Museum Gundelsheim

populations in Ukraine, Belarus, Eastern Poland, and Hungary coincided with militant antiSemitism, they were followed by Neemija Arbitblatas and others. This foreign-born group of Jewish artists was active on the left bank in the Parisian neighborhood of Montparnasse from the 1910s to the 1930s. Since expressionist tendencies in the French cultural context could not be categorized as German, they were seen collectively as Jewish, and despite significant differences in the work of Chagall, Moïse Kisling, Mané-Katz, Pascin (Figure 0.19), and Soutine, French critics tended to emphasize their similarities and Jewish ethnic background. For them, “Jewish expressionism” reflected anguish and suffering, in contrast to French fauvism, which was perceived as something more joyful. Adolphe Basler, himself a Polish-Jewish immigrant who advocated the assimilation of foreign-born Jewish artists into the French tradition, even went so far as to label some of the Jewish artists of the École de Paris as Express-Sionistes (Express-Zionists),70 thus conflating expressionism and Jewishness into one. Bernard Dorival, another French critic, reduced the so-called École de Paris collectively to “Jewish expressionists,” whose works were characterized by a spirit of pessimism, intellectualism, despair, and disquietude.71 Expressionist art practices were also pursued by Jewish artists who immigrated to North and Latin America and South Africa.72 In the United States, Max Weber started painting Jewish life and history in an expressionist style in the late 1910s and continued to do so for the rest of his life. Lithuanian artist Lasar Segall, who had studied in Berlin and Dresden before the war, settled in Brazil, in 1923, bringing with him influences from Brücke expressionism. Wolf Kibel, a 23

Isabel Wünsche

Figure 0.19  Jules Pascin, The Bar of the Bal Taberin, 1912–1913, oil on canvas, 93 × 73 cm, private collection

Jewish painter from Poland who moved to Cape Town, South Africa, in 1929, was particularly indebted to the work of Soutine and Chagall.

The Question of Artistic Individuality Like no other artistic style, expressionism served and supported the image of the lonely artist, the genius, blessed by deeper knowledge and sharper senses than his contemporaries, but often misunderstood. The image of the outsider or outcast, haunted by artistic struggle, financial strain, and personal drama, is most strongly exemplified by artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch, and James Ensor, all three of whom were major role models of the expressionist generation. Some authors have even argued that the expressionist term can only be properly applied to the work of true artistic outsiders. Examples are easily found, beginning with the work of the Bohemian painter Jan Zrzavý, characterized variously as freakish, hideous, disfigured, and emotionally deformed, and Josef Váchal, who developed his esoteric style in total isolation.73 The perennial subject of the Slovakian painter Anton Jaszsuch was the wanderer, adrift in a world whose extreme depictions alternated between one of harmony and universal unity and one of apocalyptic visions of the vanity of human quest.74 The work of Estonian artist Nikolai Triik was enhanced by personal drama, existential crisis, and the artist’s striving to visually express his own suffering and anguish.75 The loneliness of life in the metropolis left him especially receptive to the expressionistic pathos of suffering, as evidenced by his drawings of this period—images 24

A Conceptual Introduction

Figure 0.20  M  ário Eloy, A Fuga (The Fugue), 1938, oil on canvas, 80 × 100 cm, Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, inv. no. 04P1268.  Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon. Calouste Gulbenkian Museum—Modern Collection. Photo: Paulo Costa

of apocalypse and redemption, suffering and exaltation. Among the Russian avant-garde, Pavel Filonov, creator of the “made painting” (sdelannye kartiny), likewise pursued his own very singular and non-classifiable approach to painting.76 Along with the German expressionists, he shared the desire to move beyond the superficial, formal elements of an artistic style in order to reveal universal principles and intrinsic meaning, but his approach, philosophy, and symbolism extended much further. Finally, we turn to the Portuguese painter Mário Eloy, a largely self-taught artist, who drew inspiration from the work of artists such as El Greco, Cézanne, van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse, and Kokoschka (Figure 0.20). Eloy’s artistic style, which married cubist geometrization with the emotional tensions of expressionism and the subtle unrest of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), reflected a life shaped by psychological problems, strong mood swings, and the gradual progression of Huntington’s disease, which eventually led to his death.77

Hybrid Modernism versus Radical Avant-Garde Art During the interwar period, expressionism provided an artistic idiom for both anti-war and leftist political engagement, often with the inclusion of socialist ideas as well as anti-war positions built on more universal and often religious perspectives that would eventually move toward traditionalism in art and embrace Neue Sachlichkeit. This division within the expressionist 25

Isabel Wünsche

movement marks the distinction between expressionism as radical avant-garde art versus aesthetic/universal modernism. In Poland after 1918, expressionism as a German movement was perceived by some as a foreign style and an ideology dangerous to the new Polish state; at the same time, others used it as a label for various modern stylistic tendencies and related it in avant-garde terms to a socialaesthetic revolution, with Berlin as the crucial melting pot and hub for a transnational exchange network of artistic ideas. For artists in the Poznań-based group Bunt, expressionism was a means to connect with the international avant-garde. In contrast, expressionism in Estonia comprised merely a number of individual artistic approaches seeking expressive form for depicting emotional experiences and social tensions. Modernist artists in Estonia adopted various concepts and mixed artistic styles—a fauvist color palette, neoimpressionist pointillism, and the Russian fusion of cubism, futurism, and constructivism, for example—thus expressionism became just one ingredient in a hybrid modernism on the European periphery. Much the same thing happened in Slovenia, where expressionism evolved from an amalgamation of impressionism, the Secession movement, expressionist tendencies, and folk art that mixed prewar influences with new postwar tendencies. A rather heterogeneous artistic response to the new political, social, and individual psychological situation marking the immediate aftermath of the First World War and the chaotic early 1920s, expressionism was also linked with the so-called New Catholic Renaissance, i.e., the reinstatement of religious art— the return of the divine at a moment of despair and destitution, leading toward more traditional subjects and New Objectivity. Expressionism in Croatian culture manifested itself as the sum of individual contributions marked by diverse artistic influences. Its all-encompassing affirmation began during the First World War with the emergence of magazines that propagated revolt against conventional culture and traditional aesthetic forms. Immediately after the war, expressionism took up the undisputed avant-garde position on the Zagreb cultural stage. Artists such as Vilko Gecan articulated it on two levels: on the level of content and on the level of form, expressing a feeling of uneasiness, insecurity, anxiety, and even drama. In Serbia, expressionism cannot be distinguished as an art movement with a coherent style or ideology; it existed as an impulse that episodically appeared within the individual practice of various artists, marking the period of transformation from impressionism and naturalism toward what Serbia art historians call the new art, which developed after the First World War and during the 1920s. Likewise on the Iberian Peninsula, expressionism did not figure prominently in the development of modern art, but was pursued by artistic outsiders. This was not only due to the region’s peripheral geographical location but also because of the political situation—the Franco regime in Spain and the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal, who oversaw artistic production and promoted rather conservative and nationalist artistic values.

Conclusion Expressionism as a current of European modernism is most readily to be seen in central Europe, particularly in those artistic centers that were part of or closely linked with the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian empires, such as Bohemia, Poland, and Hungary. On the northern European periphery, in Scandinavia, the movement was most closely associated with French fauvism and the art of Henri Matisse. In the other, more peripheral regions of Europe, including the Baltics and the Balkans, expressionism neither appeared as a clearly defined movement with a specific program or ideological background nor succeeded in creating a distinctive and autonomous style. Instead we find a hybrid modernism that linked aspects of expressionism, cubism, and futurism in the prewar period and eventually moved toward 26

A Conceptual Introduction

more radical avant-garde art (constructivism) or toward traditionalism (new objectivity) during the interwar period. Expressionism in the United States and Canada in the 1910s often intersected with other styles, in particular fauvism but also cubism and abstraction. North American expressionists, among them Albert Bloch, Fritz Brandtner, Charles Burchfield, and Marsden Hartley, felt a particular affinity for German art, culture, and society, which separated them from the majority of the Canadian and American modernists, who were more interested in French art and culture. Thus, expressionism in North America evolved from a more personal and spiritual art form to one that became more socially aware and politically active in the 1930s and 1940s, when it also influenced regionalism, social realism, and American surrealism. In contrast, Latin American painters reinterpreted and appropriated the visual language and aesthetic principles of German, figurative expressionism in order to represent their individual countries’ particular realities, emphasizing or denouncing the challenges posed by the process of modernization. This was made possible by the establishment of transatlantic relations and cultural exchanges through travel and migration, as was also the case in South Africa, where German expressionism played a significant role in the emergence of modern art in general. The settler artists Irma Stern and Maggie Laubser, who worked closely with Brücke artists in Berlin, looked to the “primitive” sense of life they fictionalized in their paintings as a welcome alternative to war-torn Europe and a way to establish themselves as modern painters in their South Africa. This volume makes accessible in English a wealth of source materials and scholarly discussions that have to a large extent previously been restricted to less widely read languages and regional audiences. A special feature of the book is its global scope, bringing together contributions from almost all geographical regions of Europe, North and Latin America, and South Africa. We therefore hope that the book will serve as a major reference work on expressionism in twentieth-century art and culture.

Notes 1 Norma Broude, ed., World Impressionism: The International Movement 1860–1920 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990). 2 Claudine Grammont, “Henri Matisse as Herr Professor: The Académie Matisse and the Internationalization of the Avant-Garde, 1905–1914,” in Expressionism in Germany and France: From Van Gogh to Kandinsky, ed. Timothy O. Benson (Munich: Prestel, 2014), 155. 3 Gustav Geffroy, L’oeuvre de Gustave Moreau [The Work of Gustave Moreau] (Paris, 1903), 29, cited in Donald E. Gordon, “On the Origin of the Word Expressionism,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 29 (1966): 368. 4 Henri Matisse, “Notes d’un peintre” [Notes of a Painter], La Grande Revue [The Great Review], December 25, 1908. English translation in: Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory 1900– 1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993), 73. 5 Grammont, “Henri Matisse as Herr Professor,” 156–158; see also Shulamith Behr, “Académie Matisse and Its Relevance in the Life and Work of Sigrid Hjerten,” in A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1900–1925, ed. Hubert van den Berg et al. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), 149–161. 6 See Chapter 1 in this volume. 7 Manet and the Post-Impressionists, Nov. 8, 1910 to Jan. 15, 1911 (London, 1910; exh. cat.). Roger Fry, quoted in Frances Spalding, Roger Fry: Art and Life (London: Elek, 1980), 133. See Chapter 14 in this volume. 8 “Ferner haben wir noch eine Anzahl Werke jüngerer französischer Maler, der Expressionisten, untergebracht, die wir glauben nicht dem Publikum und namentlich nicht den Künstlern vorenthalten zu dürfen, da die Secession es von jeher für ihre Pflicht hielt, zu zeigen, was ausserhalb Deutschlands Interessantes geschaffen wird.” Katalog der XXII. Ausstellung der Berliner Secession [Catalogue of the 22nd Exhibition of the Berlin Secession] (Berlin, 1911), 11. See also Marit Werenskiold, The Concept of Expressionism: Origin and Metamorphoses (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1984), 5.

27

Isabel Wünsche 9 Paul Ferdinand Schmidt, “Die Expressionisten” [The Expressionists], Der Sturm 2, no. 92 (January 6, 1912): 734–736. 10 “Die diesjährige vierte Ausstellung des Sonderbundes will einen Überblick über den Stand der jüngsten Bewegung in der Malerei geben, die nach dem atmosphärischen Naturalismus und dem Impressionism der Bewegung aufgetreten ist und nach einer Vereinfachung und Steigerung der Ausdrucksformen, einer neuen Rhythmik und Farbigkeit, nach dekorativer und monumrntaler Gestaltung strebt, einen Überblick über jene Bewegung, die man als Expressionismus bezeichnet hat.” Richard Reiche,“Vorwort” [Preface], Internationale Kunstausstellung des Sonderbundes Westdeutscher Kunstfreunde und Künstler zu Cöln [International Art Exhibition of the Sonderbund Association of West-German Art Lovers and Artists from Cologne] (Cologne: Dumont-Schauberg, 1912), 3. English translation: Richard Reiche, “‘Foreword,’ International Exhibition of the Sonderbund, Cologne, 1912,” in German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism, ed. Rose-Carol Washton Long (New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1993), 17. 11 See “Ausstellungskataloge der STURM-Galerie” [Exhibition Catalogs of the Sturm Gallery], Arthistoricum, last accessed December 20, 2017, www.arthistoricum.net/themen/portale/sturm/ausstel lungskataloge. 12 The exhibition included works by the Italian futurists Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, and Gino Severini; the French cubists and orphists Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, and Jean Metzinger; the Blaue Reiter group; the Dutch Jacoba van Heemskerck and Piet Mondrian; the Czech Emil Filla, Otto Gutfreund, and Otakar Kubin; the Portuguese Amadeo de Souza Cardoso; the Russians Marc Chagall, David and Vladimir Burliuk, Natalia Goncharova, and Mikhail Larionov; and the Americans Albert Bloch and Mardsen Hartley. Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon [First German Autumn Salon] (Berlin: Der Sturm, 1913; exh. cat.). 13 See “Ausstellungskataloge der STURM-Galerie” [Exhibition Catalogs of the Sturm Gallery], Arthistoricum, last accessed December 20, 2017, www.arthistoricum.net/themen/portale/sturm/ausstel lungskataloge. 14 “Der Expressionismus ist keine Mode. Er ist eine Weltanschauung. Und zwar eine Anschauung der Sinne, nicht der Begriffe. Und zwar eine Anschauung der Welt, von der die Erde ein Teil ist.” Herwarth Walden, Die neue Malerei [New Painting] (Berlin: Der Sturm, 1919), 5. 15 Wassily Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst: Insbesondere in der Malerei [On the Spiritual in Art: Particularly in Painting] (Munich: Piper, 1912). 16 Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung: Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie [Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style] (Munich: Piper, 1908). 17 Herwarth Walden, Einblick in Kunst. Expressionismus, Futurismus, Kubismus [Insight into Art: Expressionism, Futurism, Cubism], 3rd–5th ed. (Berlin: Der Sturm, 1924), 18–19. 18 “Die Expressionisten verzichten auf die Nachahmung äußerer Eindrücke. Sie erkennen nach vielen Jahrhunderten wieder das Wesen der Kunst.” Herwarth Walden, Einblick in Kunst, 123. 19 “Im Grunde ist dieses scheinbar neue, das man, um den Gegensatz gegen den Impressionismus zu bezeichnen, mit dem zugleich guten und schlechten Kennwort Expressionismus belegte, nichts als ein Sichbesinnen auf den alten Sinn und die seelische Bedeutung des künstlerischen Schaffens überhaupt.” Paul Fechter, Der Expressionismus [Expressionism], 5th–9th ed. (Munich: Piper, 1920), 22. 20 Ibid., 24–27. 21 “. . . daß ihr wesentlicher Sinn immer wieder der ist, dem Gefühl, das die anschauliche Existenz der Welt auslöst, konzentrierten, unbegrifflichen direkten Ausdruck zu geben.” Fechner, Expressionismus, 21. English translation in Washton Long, German Expressionism, 81. 22 “Der Expressionismus ist nicht eigentlich Sache eines Wollens, sondern ein Schicksal: das innere Gleichgewicht der Seele brauchte diesen Ausgleich.” Fechner, Expressionismus, 34. 23 Gordon, “On the Origin of the Word Expressionism,” 379. 24 Erik Morstad,“Munch’s Impact on Europe,” in A Cultural History of the Avant-garde in the Nordic Countries 1900–1925, ed. Hubert van den Berg et al., 81–90. 25 Claude Cernuschi,“Sex and Psyche, Nature and Nurture,The Personal and the Political: Edvard Munch and German Expressionism,” in Edvard Munch: Psyche, Symbol and Expression, ed. Jeffery Howe (Boston, MA: Boston College McMullen Museum of Art, 2001; exh. cat.), 134–167; Reinhold Heller, “Edvard Munch, Germany, and Expressionism,” in Munch and Expressionism, ed. Jill Lloyd and Reinhold Heller (Munich: Prestel; New York: Neue Galerie, 2016; exh. cat.), 35–53. 26 Ulrike Lorenz, Norbert Wolf, eds., Brücke—Die deutschen “Wilden” und die Geburt des Expressionismus [Brücke: The German Fauves and the Birth of Expressionism] (Cologne: Taschen, 2008), 12.

28

A Conceptual Introduction 27 Reinhold Heller, Edvard Munch: His Life and Work (London: Murray, 1984), 211. 28 Van den Berg et al., A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1900–1925, 69–70. 29 “. . . daß der Mensch eine Brücke sei und kein Zweck.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra [Thus Spoke Zarathustra] (Leipzig: Alfred Kröner, 1927), 219. 30 For general references on Die Brücke, see: Donald Gordon, Expressionism: Art and Idea (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987): 71–77, 91–93; Peter Paret, “Expressionism in Imperial Germany,” in German Expressionism: Art and Society, ed. Stephanie Barron (New York: Rizzoli, 1997), 29–34; Brücke: The Birth of Expressionism in Dresden and Berlin 1905–1913 (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz; New York: Neue Galerie, 2009; exh. cat.); Christian Weikop, ed., New Perspectives on Brücke Expressionism: Bridging History (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011). 31 Anke Daemgen, “Die Neue Secession in Berlin” [The New Secession in Berlin], in Liebermanns Gegner: Die Neue Secession in Berlin und der Expressionismus [Liebermann’s Adversaries: The New Secession in Berlin and Expressionism] (Cologne: Wienand, 2011; exh. cat.), 13–83. 32 Ibid., 53–68. 33 Programm der Brücke, 1906 [Brücke Manifesto, 1906], in Horst Jähner, Künstlergruppe Brücke: Geschichte einer Gemeinschaft und das Lebenswerk ihrer Repräsentanten [Artists’ Group Brücke: The History of a Community and Its Life Work of Its Representatives] (Leipzig, E.A. Seemann, 2005), 416. English translation: “Program of the Artists’ Group Brücke, published September 1906,” in Brücke: The Birth of Expressionism in Dresden and Berlin, 1905–1913 (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz; New York: Neue Galerie, 2009), 210. 34 For general references on Der Blaue Reiter, see: Donald Gordon, Expressionism: Art and Idea (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 78–85; Peter Paret, “Expressionism in Imperial Germany,” in Barron, German Expressionism: Art and Society, 29–34; Hajo Düchting and Norbert Wold, eds., The Blaue Reiter (Cologne: Taschen, 2009); Eckhard Hollmann, The Blue Rider (Munich: Prestel, 2011). 35 Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, eds., Der Blaue Reiter (Munich: Piper 1912). English edition:Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, eds., The Blaue Reiter Almanac (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974). 36 Wassily Kandinsky, The Art of Spiritual Harmony, translated and introduced by M. T. H. Saidler (London: Constable & Co., 1914). 37 His essay “Über Kunstverstehen” (On Understanding Art) was included in the catalogue of the Blaue Reiter exhibition at the Salon Strindberg in Helsinki in February 1914; his essay “Über die Formfrage” (On the Problem of Form) was published in Zdrój in 1918. 38 See Chapter 15 in this volume. 39 See Chapter 18 in this volume. 40 See Chapter 23 in this volume. 41 Ibid. 42 See Chapter 26 in this volume. 43 Robert Fleck, “Gibt es einen österreichischen Expressionismus in der Bildenden Kunst?” [Does There Exist an Austrian Expressionism in the Fine Arts?] in Expressionismus in Österreich: die Literatur und die Künste [Expressionism in Austria: Literature and the Fine Arts], ed. Klaus Amann und Armin Wallas (Vienna: Böhlau, 1994), 113–122. For general reference, see: Peter Vergo, Art in Vienna, 1898–1918: Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele and their Contemporariers, 3rd ed. (London: Phaidon, 1993). Franz Smola, ed., Österreichischer Expressionismus: Malerei und Graphik 1905–1925 (Vienna: Belvedere; Schaan: Ed. Haas, 1998; exh. cat.). 44 See Chapter 3 in this volume. 45 Oskar Kokoschka, Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen [Murderer, the Hope of Women], in Der Sturm 1, no. 20, July 14, 1910, 155–156. 46 See Chapter 13 in this volume. 47 Georg Brühl, Herwarth Walden und “Der Sturm” [Herwarth Walden and “Der Sturm”] (Cologne: DuMont, 1983). For further reference, see: Henriette Herwig and Andrea von Hülsen-Esch, eds., Der Sturm: Literatur, Musik, Graphik und die Vernetzung in der Zeit des Expressionismus [Der Sturm: Literature, Music, the Graphic Arts and Networking in the Age of Expressionism] (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015). 48 “Junge slovenische Kunst” [Young Slovenian Art], special issue of Der Sturm 19, no. 10, January 1929. 49 See Chapter 25 in this volume. 50 See Chapter 23 in this volume. 51 Starr Figura, German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse (New York: MOMA, 2011). 52 Hans M. Wingler, Die Brücke: Kunst im Aufbruch (Feldafing: Buchheim, 1954). 53 “Programm der Brücke,” in Jähner, Künstlergruppe Brücke, 416; “Chronicle der KG Brücke, 1913,” ibid., 422–426. English in Brücke, 210, 212–213.

29

Isabel Wünsche 54 55 56 57 58

59 60

61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

See Chapter 10 in this volume. See Chapter 11 in this volume. See Chapter 12 in this volume. See Chapter 25 in this volume. Hermann Bahr, Der Expressionismus [Expressionism] (Munich: Delphin, 1916), 123. English in Stephan von Wiese, “A Tempest Sweeping This World: Expressionism as an International Movement,” in German Expressionism 1915–1925:The Second Generation, ed. Stephanie Barron (Munich: Prestel, 1988; exh. cat.), 120. See also Washton Long, German Expressionism, 90. See Chapter 6 in this volume. “Flugblatt vom 1. März 1919” [Leaflet of March 1, 1919], in Arbeitsrat für Kunst. Berlin 1918–1921 [Work Council for Art, Berlin 1918–1921], ed. Eberhard Steneberg (Düsseldorf: Ed. Marzona, 1987), 5; “Richtlinien der Novembergruppe, Januar 1919” [Guiding Principles of the November Group, January 1919], in Helga Kliemann, Die Novembergruppe [The November Group] (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1969), 57. Joan Weinstein, The End of Expressionism: Art and the November Revolution in Germany, 1918–19 (Chicago, IL; London: The University of Chicago Press, 1990). Iwan Goll, “Der Expressionismus stirbt” [Expressionism Dies], Zenit 8 (October 1921): 8. English in: Dennis Crockett, German Post-Expressionism: The Art of the Great Disorder 1918–1924 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 32. See also Washton Long, German Expressionism, 288. Crockett, German Post-Expressionism, 22. Gustav Hartlaub, “Deutscher Expressionismus, zur Darmstädter Ausstellung” [German Expressionism, on the Darmstadt Exhibition], Frankfurter Zeitung, July 15, 1920, 1–2. English in Crockett, German PostExpressionism, 22. See Chapter 25 in this volume. See Chapter 27 in this volume. See Chapter 4 in this volume. See Chapter 24 in this volume. See Chapter 17 in this volume. Adolphe Basler, La peinture . . . religion nouvelle [Painting . . . the New Religion] (Paris: Bibliothèque les Marges, 1926), 16. See Chapter 17 in this volume. Bernard Dorival, quoted by Dominique Jarrassé, Existe-t-il un Art Juif? [Does a Jewish Art Exist?] (Paris: Biro, 2006), 142–143. See Chapter 17 in this volume. Robin Reisenfeld, “Collecting and Collective Memory: German Expressionist Art and Modern Jewish Identity,” in Jewish Identity in Modern Art History, ed. Catherine M. Soussloff (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 114–134. See Chapter 1 in this volume. See Chapter 2 in this volume. See Chapter 8 in this volume. See Chapter 5 in this volume. See Chapter 20 in this volume.

30

PART I

Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltic States

1 PRAGUE—BRNO Expressionism in Context Marie Rakušanová

What Is Expressionism—in Bohemia? “An expressionist wants, above all, to express himself . . . The will of the new formulation necessitated synthesis rather than analysis, subjective transcript rather than objective description,”1 wrote the Czech art theoretician Antonín Matějček (1889–1950) in 1910 in his introduction to the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Les Indépendants organized by the Mánes Association of Fine Artists. He thus became one of the first European critics to introduce the term “expressionism” into the terminology of art history. However, he was not applying it to some German artist, but rather to describe the works of the French postimpressionists featured in the exhibition. Around this time, apart from Matějček, only a few European critics were using the term expressionism in connection with the work of French artists, including the English critic Alan Clutton Brock and the Swedish theoretician Carl David Moselius.2 For these critics, “expressionist” seemed the most appropriate way of describing the anti-naturalistic approach of the French postimpressionists and fauvists.3 The term achieved a wider currency among Czech theoreticians and artists after 1912, with the publication of the German critic Paul Ferdinand Schmidt’s article “Die Expressionisten” (The Expressionists) in the German art magazine Der Sturm.4 Schmidt’s article, which examined the work of the French postimpressionists, the fauvists and several young German artists, centered on exhibitions held in the Berlin gallery of Herwarth Walden. Since Czech artists had participated in these exhibitions, they thus had the opportunity to see up close the crystallization of this new term. During and after the First World War, Czech art criticism associated expressionism exclusively with contemporary German art, from which some members of the Czech art community, especially those associated with the Brno-based Literární skupina (Literary Group), sought inspiration, particularly due to its emphasis on expressive quality, engagement, and metaphysical significance. By contrast, other representatives of the interwar avant-garde, for example Karel Teige (1900–1951), made German expressionism the target of harsh criticism. In doing so, these writers were reflecting another semantic shift that took place in Germany between 1914 and 1916 with the publication of books by Paul Fechter and Hermann Bahr.5 In these publications, expressionism was placed in contradistinction to impressionism and identified not with any French style but with art of a purely Germanic, “anti-Romanic” character. 33

Marie Rakušanová

The fierce polemics between Czech champions and opponents of expressionism, which will be examined in more detail below, were undoubtedly marked by this ethnic conception of German expressionist theory.6 The term “expressionism” was first applied specifically to Czech art retrospectively, and remains problematic within the context of Czech art history. Not until the 1950s did theoreticians begin to associate the term more consistently with the work of the group Osma (The Prague Eight, 1907–1909), i.e., with the early work of Emil Filla (1882–1953), Antonín Procházka (1882–1945), Bohumil Kubišta (1884–1918), and others.7 The so-called “expressionist period” was regarded as a milestone on the path to cubism, and this interpretation became embedded in the Czech historiography. Unlikely as it seems, the term “Czech expressionism” manifests even less cohesion than does its German counterpart: either it is regarded as a transitional phase in the work of individual artists prior to or after cubism, or it is linked with solitary figures such as Jan Zrzavý (1890–1977) and Josef Váchal (1884–1969). Furthermore, Czech art historians always emphasize the particular genealogy of the Czech expressionism of the Osma group, which differed fundamentally from the genesis of German expressionism.8 According to this reading, Czech expressionism is closely bound to the French realist tradition of Honoré Daumier and the postimpressionism of Paul Gauguin and Paul Cézanne, as well as to the idiosyncratic Nordic psychologism of Edvard Munch.9 The traditional emphasis on France in the orientation of Czech modernist and avant-garde art, bolstered by the statements of contemporaneous artists and theoreticians, prompted Donald E. Gordon, for example, to describe Czech expressionism as an intermediary in the alignment of the values of modernist art from France to Germany along a Paris-Prague-Berlin axis.10 A reappraisal of these entrenched ideas will also form the subject of this chapter. Although the artistic community in Bohemia at that time would never have conceded the possibility of creative initiatives flowing from the direction of Germany, in reality the proximity of German culture exerted a considerable and positive impact on Czech artists and theoreticians. Another distinctive feature of the Czech variety of expressionism is the phenomenon known as cubo-expressionism,11 introduced into Czech art history by Miroslav Lamač (1928–1992) and confirming the tendency of Czech historiography to regard expressionism as a transitional phase with respect to the more dominant cubism.12 It is not only in Czech art history, however, that Lamač’s concept of cubo-expressionism has found use.13 The term was also appropriated by Donald E. Gordon,14 and Steven A. Mansbach even writes of “uniquely creative forms of cuboexpressionism” in Habsburg Bohemia.15 It took James Elkins to draw attention to the confusion arising from use of the term cubo-expressionism to delineate the originality and progressivity of Czech modernism, when, in a review of Mansbach’s book, he wrote: “it seems apparent that an innovation (cubo-expressionism) which needs to be described in terms of two prior innovations (cubism and expressionism) may be hard to present as an avant-garde.”16 This excursion into terminology is essential if we are to examine the problematic nature of expressionism in Bohemia. It allows us to identify many entrenched ideas and difficult aspects associated with expressionism in Czech art history. The following discussion will attempt to track the artistic tendencies traditionally linked with the term expressionism in Bohemia in both their period and subsequent contexts. I will focus on artistic, cultural, and social events in two centers, Prague and Brno. Emphasis will be placed on exhibition policy, art magazines, and the establishment of contacts both within the country and abroad within the framework of groups of artists and individuals. The traditional deployment of the terms expressionism and cubo-expressionism, inextricably bound up with a stylistic base that is difficult to define, and the formal manifestations of such artworks will be subjected to more detailed investigation and criticism. 34

Prague—Brno

Prague, Expressionism, and the Osma Group “Prague doesn’t let go. Of either of us. This dear old mother has claws. You have to submit or—. We would have to set fire to it on two sides, at Vyšehrad and at Hradschin, and then we might get away.”17 With these few words, Franz Kafka (1883–1924) fully encompasses the complex emotional state of life as an intellectual in Prague at the beginning of the twentieth century: a feeling of despair engendered by the provincial environment, yet at the same time a city he endearingly refers to in the diminutive as “this dear old mother” (dieses Mütterchen). Although a member of the Jewish, German-speaking minority,18 Kafka had struck up a kind of fateful, close relationship with the Czech city. Its illustrious past and its ethnic, linguistic, intellectual, religious, and artistic diversity created a fertile breeding ground. The Osma group became one of the first important points of intersection of these sundry cultural trajectories. While the Spolek výtvarných umělců Mánes (Mánes Association of Fine Artists) remained affiliated itself with the nationalist ideals of artistic associations of the nineteenth century and Czech-German members were few and far between,19 Osma seemingly liberated itself with ease from any nationalist obligations, and its members, born in the 1880s, spontaneously created a fusion of Czech, German, and Jewish cultures. The Czech caucus comprised Emil Filla, Bohumil Kubišta, Antonín Procházka, Otakar Kubín (1883–1969), Emil Pittermann (1885–1936), Vincenc Beneš (1883–1979), and Linka Scheithauerová (1884–1960). Friedrich Feigl (1884–1965) and Max Horb (1882–1907) were from German-speaking Jewish families, and Willi Nowak (1886–1977) was from a German family. The social and material background of individual members of Osma was also diverse. Filla, Kubišta, Procházka, Kubín, Scheithauerová, and Beneš came from poorer, rural families. Feigl and Horb were members of metropolitan, middle-class families, and Nowak’s family even owned what had originally been a thriving factory in Mníšek pod Brdy. Their meetings in Prague allowed them the opportunity to confront other lifestyles, resulting in greater curiosity and the desire to open themselves to more of the world, especially the foreign art world. Dissatisfied with their studies at the Prague Academy, in the studios of the Croatian Vlaho Bukovac and the German Franz Thiele, several of the future members of Osma decided to continue their studies in other European cities. Kubín and Feigl briefly studied at the Antwerp Academy (1904) and Kubišta at the Academy in Florence (1906–1907), though none of them found the classes on offer to be any more progressive than those at the Prague Academy. The first genuine sources of information on modern art were therefore the exhibitions organized from 1898 onward by the Mánes Association of Fine Artists, founded in 1887, along with information published beginning in 1896 by the organization’s magazine Volné směry (Free Directions). As already noted, the secessionist-symbolist Mánes Association still put its efforts to “open windows onto Europe” at the service of national affairs. As a consequence of the tense political situation in the Habsburg Empire, within which Bohemia felt unfairly ignored, the association focused its own artistic program on France. In 1902, it presented a large collection of the works of the sculptor Auguste Rodin.20 At another exhibition in the same year, the organization exhibited for the first time canvases by the impressionists. Mánes later organized a large impressionist exhibition in 1907.21 Large exhibitions of modern art organized by the Cassirer Gallery, in Berlin, and the Miethke Gallery, in Vienna, did not escape the attention of young artists of the future Osma group. They visited some of the exhibitions in person, though they learned about most of them prior to 1906 from various periodicals, often of German origin. In the early work of the Osma group, the German cultural environment played a fundamentally intermediary role. We know from contemporary witnesses that the art magazines Kunst und Künstler (Art and Artists), Kunst für Alle (Art for Everyone), and several others were read on a regular basis.22 35

Marie Rakušanová

The book Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst (History of the Development of Modern Art) by Meier-Graefe was essential reading for the young artist.23 Prague’s Union café was an important meeting point where the articles and essays being studied were subjected to lively debate.24 The German magazines referred to and the exhibitions held at the Cassirer Gallery collectively subsumed early examples of French art (Daumier and Manet) and, later on, overlapping postimpressionist works (Gauguin, van Gogh, and Cézanne) under the term impressionism. These were the figures that became the role models for up-and-coming Bohemian artists. Within this framework of impressionism as such, once again under the influence of German sources, they admired Max Liebermann more than representatives of the original French impressionist movement.25 Paradoxically, most of the members of what was to become the Osma group made their first acquaintance with original works by Daumier, Gauguin, van Gogh, and Cézanne in Germany. In 1906, Emil Filla, Antonín Procházka, and Friedrich Feigl set off on a trip around Europe, beginning with the important museums and galleries of various German cities. After Dresden and Berlin, they set off for Hagen in Northern Germany, where Karl Ernst Osthaus, a patron and collector of art, had gathered together an outstanding collection of impressionist and postimpressionist art.26 The three artists continued on to Bussum, not far from Amsterdam, where they perused the estate of Vincent van Gogh; then it was on to Rotterdam and Antwerp, before reaching Paris. In a demonstration of their lack of familiarity with the Paris exhibition scene, they apparently missed out on a crucial exhibition of modern art, the Salon d’Automne, by only a few days.27 Nevertheless, this first visit to Paris was a formative experience; in addition to the large museums, they visited an exhibition of Pierre Bonnard being hosted by the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery. After returning to Bohemia via Marseille, Naples,28 Rome, Orvieto, Florence, and Padua, they began drawing up ambitious plans for exhibitions, the creation of an artists’ group, and publication of an art magazine, but in the end they managed to mount only two group exhibitions under the name Osma.

Edvard Munch and Czech Expressionism Thanks to the Mánes Association of Fine Artists, the future members of the Osma group made the acquaintance of another of their important models, Edvard Munch, a year prior to their trip around Europe. The effect of his work was to create a kind of counterbalance to their fascination with French modern art. In 1905, the Mánes Association organized a large exhibition of works by Munch in Prague that was attended by the Norwegian artist himself.29 The encounter with Munch’s work is of crucial significance when defining the painterly style of the Osma group, which we nowadays term expressionism. Thirty years later Emil Filla wrote: Munch’s work exploded like a petard in our hearts. It shook us to the core and left us feeling that all of our desires, loves, and hopes seemed suddenly to have been fulfilled. We were enraptured because then as now, we had the feeling that an artist had appeared, an artist of our times, our hearts, and our will.30 The harsh, rough-hewn, dissonant accents of Munch’s paintings, along with their visionary pathos, struck a chord with young Czechs in a way that, as Filla was to write later, “could only have resonated so richly on the Central European meridian.”31 It is interesting to note that the influence of Munch’s neurasthenic, raw style of painting and simplified modeling is only to be found in paintings by members of Osma in 1907, the year the group was founded. Their 1906 tour of Europe was the catalyst behind the shock of the encounters with Munch’s work in 1905—the artists needed time to make comparisons in 36

Prague—Brno

order to get as much as possible out of the lesson offered by Munch’s work. Their extensive travels—Filla, Feigl, and Procházka’s European tour; Bohumil Kubišta’s stay in Florence; and Kubín and Pitteraman’s sojourn in Italy—also allowed other modern (and old-master) influences to enter their work. In their paintings from 1907 to 1908, we can distinguish the energetic brushwork of van Gogh; the roughly textured layering of color reminiscent of Gauguin, often bordered by expressive contoured drawing; and Daumier’s caricatural hyperbole; in 1909, these are joined by an organization of the pictorial space that draws on Cézanne. In the development of these characteristic features of the Osma painting style, we find a clear validation of concepts of hegemonic art history tracing the diffusion of influences from the artistic centers outwards to the periphery. The Osma group found it necessary to first address issues raised by European modern art before going on to pioneer their own role within Bohemia. This was, however, more than a passive reception of expanding influences; the artists fully appropriated and actively transformed European inspiration in their art. That being said, the formal aspect of their work, with its strong links to European, especially French modern art, was not the predominant element of their output. An equally important role was played by their shared interest in the contents of Munch’s psychologism and the novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Lev Tolstoy. Another feature peculiar to this region was the preference shown by the younger generation for the pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer over the incendiary ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche.32 The influences of the European centers of art were counterbalanced in Bohemia by concepts unconsciously carried over from the older art nouveau symbolist generation, especially from more advanced members of the Mánes Association, namely Antonín Slavíček (1870–1910), Jan Preisler (1872–1918), and Miloš Jiránek (1875–1911).33 The outcome of this ideological inspiration was a distinctive form of expressively exuberant symbolism typical of the early work of the members of Osma. Czech art history does not disregard the fundamental differences between Bohemian expressionism and its German version (Figure 1.1);34 however, with respect to subject matter, for example, the work of Osma was closer to the work of their German generational counterparts than that of the fauvists, who remained within the framework of the iconographic territory of French impressionism. The first exhibition of the Osma group was held in spring 1907 in an empty storefront rented for this purpose on Královedvorská Street, not far from Municipal House. The singlepage Czech-German exhibition catalogue contained an incomplete list of works, with only brief titles of the works on view, and no illustrations that might help to identify the paintings.35 Public reaction to the works on display and the indignation they aroused can be derived from period reviews. From the descriptions of the works exhibited, it would seem that Osma chose in its first exhibition to present works still reflecting a Liebermannesque impressionist aesthetic. According to the testimonies of contemporary visitors and critics, the paintings by Otakar Kubín and Willi Nowak were already more closely allied with the postimpressionism of van Gogh and Gauguin. The exhibition received a positive response in a review by Max Brod (1884–1968) published in the Berlin magazine Die Gegenwart (The Present). Brod, who knew the members of Osma personally,36 titled his article “Frühling in Prag” (Spring in Prague) and welcomed the Bohemian, Jewish, and German artists as a gust of fresh air in the mustiness of provincial Prague.37 In his review, he described with great enthusiasm the individual paintings on view, drew attention to the simplicity of form, the bold color schemes and lighting, and emphasized their non-illusory relationship to reality. Indeed, he purchased three paintings from the exhibition.38 Apart from Brod’s review, the only other positive reaction to the exhibition was an article by the kindly disposed artist Max Oppenheimer.39 The remainder of the criticism was entirely negative. 37

Marie Rakušanová

Figure 1.1  E  mil Filla, Čtenář Dostojevského (Reader of Dostoyevsky), 1907, oil on canvas, 98.5 × 80 cm, National Gallery, Prague, inv. no. O 3190.  National Gallery, Prague; courtesy of the heirs

The works shown in the group’s second exhibition, in 1908, reflected the lessons learnt from Edvard Munch. Several group members also showed a lively interest in the formal compositions of the French postimpressionists and the fauvist color schemes of Henri Matisse. Two artists featured in the first exhibition were not on view in 1908: Max Horb, who had died in the interim period, and Otakar Kubín, who was living in Paris. Vincenc Beneš and Linka ScheithauerováProcházková, wife of Antonín Procházka, were newcomers. With this second exhibition, the public’s outrage was even greater; not a single positive review.40 Nevertheless, the group’s renown clearly was beginning to grow in Bohemian artistic circles. The second exhibition was a more professional affair and took place in the well-established Topič Salon. Furthermore, in the course of the year, Osma artists had already begun to insinuate themselves into official artistic associations, the path to potentially procuring legitimacy and prestige for their works. In 1908, Filla, Kubín, and Procházka were accepted as members into the Mánes Association of Fine Artists, and Feigl, Nowak, and Pittermann became members of the Verein Deutscher Bildender Künstler (Society of German Visual Artists). The artists put down firm roots in the official structures of these organizations and participated in their exhibitions. In the case of the Mánes Association, Filla even inveigled his way onto the editorial board of the organization’s magazine Volné směry (Free Directions).

38

Prague—Brno

Figure 1.2  B  ohumil Kubišta, Vlastní podobizna v haveloku (Self-portrait), 1908, oil on canvas, 91.2 × 65 cm, Regional Gallery of Fine Arts, Zlín, inv. no. O 412.  Regional Gallery of Fine Arts, Zlín

The closing of the second exhibition essentially marked the dissolution of the Osma group, though its members maintained close relations over the next few years (Figure 1.2). A fully unified Osma style never arose; the work of its members continued to diversify from 1909 to 1911, but the individual artists reacted differently to the influence of Cézanne and early cubism. Emil Filla turned his attention more and more to the cubism of Picasso and Braque and was supported in this by the art historian Vincenc Kramář (1877–1960), who, thanks to his contacts with Picasso and Daniel Kahnweiler, had acquired his own collection of French cubism.41 Bohumil Kubišta and Otakar Kubín were also in Paris, though their links to the cubist aesthetics were considerably looser.42 As already noted, these works created between 1909 and 1912 are still branded in Czech art history as cubo-expressionism (Figure 1.3 and Plate 3). With respect to German criticism, the expressionist-cubist polarity reflected the parti­ cular characteristics of the German (Germanic) and French (Romanic) peoples;43 whereas in Bohemia, even prior to the First World War, it was used to demonstrate the interpenetrability of both movements. For example, in 1914 the critic Stanislav Kostka Neumann (1875–1947) wrote: “Without cubism, expressionism would undoubtedly degenerate into cheap decorativeness, while cubism, were it to be deprived of the possibility of a healthy subversion of doctrine, would become the most boring, limited patron under the sun.”44 In cubo-expressionist works,

39

Marie Rakušanová

Figure 1.3  Otakar Kubín, Figura II (Figure II/Silhouette II), 1912–1914, oil on canvas, 89.5 × 74.5 cm, National Gallery, Prague, inv. no. O 15090.  National Gallery, Prague

Czech art historians saw the permeation of compositional rationality by a mystical, spiritual dimension (Kubišta), sensory intuition (Filla), and irrationality (Kubín).45 After 1908, German-speaking members of Osma focused mainly on the German art centers. After a short stay in Berlin, Willi Nowak settled in Munich and enjoyed a relatively successful career as a moderately modern artist. Friedrich Feigl struck up acquaintances with young artists in Berlin and mediated contacts between Otto Mueller (1874–1930) and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938), members of Die Brücke (The Bridge), and his Prague friends. These two German expressionists visited Bohemia in the summer of 1911.46 Mueller and his wife Maschka stayed with Willi Nowak in Mníšek pod Brdy and were joined by Kirchner, who had spent several days painting with Bohumil Kubišta in the latter’s studio.47 In recent years, several researchers have begun to emphasize the importance of this meeting for Kirchner’s subsequent development.48 But it is not necessary to gather concrete proof of Kubišta’s influence on his German colleagues in order to document the success that his work met with on the German art scene; of all the Osma members, it was Kubišta who most captivated the German artists.49 He was even briefly an official member of Die Brücke and participated in several exhibitions of the Neue Berliner Sezession (New Berlin Secession), in whose activities the members of Die Brücke were also involved.50 For Kubišta, his success in Germany was very important—during his two visits to France, 1909–1910, he had not succeeded in promoting himself, and at home had also not received the recognition he felt he deserved. In 1913, severe financial straits forced 40

Prague—Brno

him to join the Austro-Hungarian army, with whom he served as a professional soldier on the side of the monarchy during the First World War; in 1918, however, shortly after returning from the front, he was struck down by the Spanish influenza epidemic.51 Other members of Osma participated in several exhibitions organized by the New Berlin Secession. They established new contacts in Germany and, above all, connected with Herwarth Walden’s gallery and magazine Der Sturm; these contacts continued after 1913.52 Czech artists were also represented at the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne in 1912 and in Walden’s Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon (First German Autumn Salon) at Walden’s gallery, in 1913.53 At a time when Bohemian artists were achieving a higher profile at exhibitions abroad, especially in Germany, generational conflicts were escalating on the art scene back home. In 1911, the conservative faction of the Mánes Association of Fine Artists revolted against Filla’s editorship of Volné směry. Filla had reproduced works by the French fauvists and cubists and published an article titled “On the Virtues of Neo-Primitivism,” in which he proclaimed the intention of the young generation to pursue a completely new direction in art, one influenced by the cubism of Picasso and Braque. The young artists presented “neo-primitivist” works at the thirty-fifth exhibition of the Mánes Association and provoked another wave of outrage among the older members. The consequence of this dispute was the departure of the younger artists from Mánes and the creation of Skupina výtvarných umělců (the Group of Fine Artists). Kubišta and Kubín, however, despite their participation in the collective walkout, did not participate in the activities of the newly formed group. At the second exhibition of the Skupina group, in 1912, at which Filla’s circle presented unabashedly cubist paintings, works by Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Otto Mueller, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff were shown. The German presence paradoxically far outweighed that of French artists, with only four paintings by Picasso, Friesz, and Derain (from Vincenc Kramář’s collection) on view.54 Active contacts between the Czech and German art communities continued until the outbreak of the First World War, despite the fact that the art scene in Bohemia was then dominated by the Skupina group, which in both theory and practice had adopted a negative stance toward German expressionism. These reservations were expressed in the pages of the group’s journal Umělecký měsíčník (Art Monthly) with respect to both German art theory and German expressionist poetry and drama.55

The Tvrdošíjní Group (The Stubborn Ones) The outbreak of the First World War found Emil Filla in France; from there he traveled to Amsterdam, where he remained until 1920. With the departure of the leading figure of the artist’s group from the art scene, activities began to focus on other creative circles. By the end of 1912, Filla’s intransigent concept of strict cubism had prompted some members to leave the group because of differences in opinion regarding modern art. Unlike those in Filla’s circle, the brothers Karel (1890–1938) and Josef Čapek (1887–1945), Václav Špála (1885–1946), Vlastislav Hofman (1884–1964), and Josef Chochol (1880–1956) were more open to other movements in modern art, for example to “minor” cubism and to Futurism.56 In 1914, the Čapek-led faction of the Mánes Association organized the exhibition “Modern Art,” which featured this more open approach. During the First World War, this circle of artists grew closer to German literary expressionism,57 and in 1917, a double issue of Die Aktion (The Action) was devoted to Josef Čapek, featuring his original linocuts and reproductions of his drawings.58 More works by Čapek, both artistic and literary, appeared in later issues of the magazine.59 In 1918, Franz Pfemfert published Čapek’s stories from the prose collection Lelio in Die Aktion,60 and the same year, the artists’ group Tvrdošíjní (The Stubborn Ones) began to participate in publishing the 41

Marie Rakušanová

cultural magazine Červen (June) in Prague; Die Aktion served as their model in terms of both form and content. The members of Tvrdošíjní first appeared together at an exhibition in Weinert’s art and auction house in Prague in spring 1918. The leading figure was Čapek who, along with his brother, vociferously professed allegiance to the tradition of French modern art and literature. An openness to German ideas on art, however, was also typical of Tvrdošíjní. The artists collaborated not only with Die Aktion, but also with Die schöne Rarität (The Fine Rarity), Der Querschnitt (The Profile), and Der Sturm, and participated in the print portfolio Die Schaffenden (The Creators), published in Germany in 1919. They exhibited together with the Viennese group Die Bewegung (The Movement) and the Dresdner Sezession Gruppe 1919 (Dresden Secession Group 1919).61 For members of Tvrdošíjní, contacts with the international avantgarde were a given and pursued on a regular basis; members of the group participated in several exhibitions in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria in 1920 and 1921.62 Despite the resurgence of nationalist tendencies after 1918, the group included artists of Czech origin and Czech Germans (Egon Adler (1892–1963), Friedrich Feigl, and Alfred Justitz (1879–1934), for example, participated in several Tvrdošíjní exhibitions). One of the theoreticians associated with Tvrdošíjní was Stanislav Kostka Neumann, whose communist ideas resonated with the radical-left program of the German expressionist interwar avant-garde, including its call for a Brotherhood of Humanity and the rehabilitation and advancement of the world. As the end of the war approached, a pressing issue in Bohemia became the question of how a future democratic republic would be organized.63 German expressionist theories found their way here into the formulations of new concepts in the public and political spheres. In artistic terms, the work of most members of the Tvrdošíjní group adhered to a more freely conceived cubism, and in the works of Josef Čapek (Figure 1.4), Vlastislav Hofman, and Václav Špála, undeniable points of intersection with the German expressionists can be found. Čapek and Hofman created many of their works using linocut, in which echoes of primitivism and Crystal cubism, i.e., characteristics of German expressionist prints, could be found. Members of the Tvrdošíjní Group not only emphasized a variety of creative techniques; they also explored a wide range of media. Hofman, originally an architect, also drew, painted, and created prints, applied art, and stage designs.64 Čapek was similarly versatile. Taking his lead from Hofman’s cycle of portraits based on heroes from the novels of Dostoyevsky, Václav Nebeský (1889–1949) came up with the term “objective expressionism,”65 which he later applied to French postimpressionist painting. His conflation “cubist expressionist naturalism” represented an attempt to reconcile the antitheses of German expressionism and French cubism.66 The expressionist core of Tvrdošíjní (i.e., excluding Rudolf Kremlička and Otakar Marvánek) was very close to German art after 1918, though it differed in respect to its creative outlook, which was oriented toward French culture. Nebeský was aware of this diversity within the Tvrdošíjní group, which is probably why he coined the umbrella term “conscious primitivism” for “expressionism.”67

Outsiders and “Itinerants” Labeling the work of the Tvrdošíjní group expressionist is not without its problems. There are those who insist that in Bohemia the term expressionism can only be properly applied to the work of artistic outsiders such as Jan Zrzavý (Figure 1.5) and Josef Váchal (Figure 1.6).68 Though Zrzavý was associated with Tvrdošíjní, his work easily transcended the otherwise accommodating ideological boundaries of the group. His early works, reflecting an emotionally lacerating,

42

Prague—Brno

Figure 1.4  Josef Čapek, Strašidlo (Spectre), from the cycle Osmero linoleí (Eight Linocuts), 1919, linocut, 11 × 8 cm, Museum of Decorative Arts, Prague, inv. no. GK–11412 D

impassioned sense of exaltation, can unequivocally be placed alongside the most important examples of instinctive, intensive German expressionism.69 In 1911, Zrzavý made the acquaintance of Bohumil Kubišta, who became his mentor. It was thanks to Zrzavý that after Kubišta’s death, in 1918, his work was rediscovered and began to influence not only the output of the Tvrdošíjní group but also the work of the up-and-coming generation of artists who, in 1920, had founded the avant-garde association Devětsil.70 In turn, thanks to Kubišta, Zrzavý’s work became less intuitive and formally more considered after the war, though it retained its expressive intensity. Referring to Zrzavý, Karel Čapek characterizied his work as “freakish,” “hideous,” “disfigured,” and “emotionally deformed”; however, he concluded that Zrzavý’s “monstrosity has its own sense and enigma.”71 After the Second World War, Zrzavý managed to find a place for his art within the confines of respected groups and enjoyed the support of important art critics and influential cultural periodicals. Josef Váchal, on the other hand, truly was an outsider and within the context of Czech art an artist in opposition to his own times.72 Prior to the war, Váchal participated in exhibitions mounted by the Sursum group, which brought together the Catholic-oriented second generation of Czech symbolists. In terms of raising the profile of the work of Váchal, who, like Zrzavý, was an autodidact, participation in the Sursum group was completely insignificant. The exhibitions of Sursum artists (1910 and 1912) were ignored by art critics and the group ceased

43

Marie Rakušanová

Figure 1.5  J an Zrzavý, Antikrist (Antichrist), 1907, oil on canvas, 36 × 26 cm, National Gallery, Prague, inv. no. O 17167.  National Gallery, Prague

to exist in 1912. Váchal broke with Jan Zrzavý and with other Sursum group members, whom he regarded as his enemies until the end of his life. Váchal ironically subverted and blasphemously mocked the values and ideals shared by artistic societies, regardless of whether they were designated as progressive or reactionary.73 He gradually severed all contacts with artistic circles and went on, working in isolation, to develop an expressive, ecstatic, esoteric, and anachronistic style, whose range extended to include books, prints, drawings, and paintings. An idiosyncratic, anachronistically articulated expressiveness was characteristic of the work of August Brömse (1873–1925), a native of Františkovy Lázně (Franzensbad), who, in 1910, was appointed professor of the German printmaking department at the Prague Academy. During the First World War, religious themes took on an increasingly important role in his work, although he had always featured biblical themes, especially New Testament motifs (Figure 1.7). Highly influenced by the symbolism of Max Klinger’s prints, Brömse ramped up the sheer expressive force of his output around 1910 by pursuing his own original style, independent of the German expressionist models,74 constructed on the basis of highly imaginative, fantastical visions. Although Brömse’s direct influence was restricted to the German-speaking students in his department at the Prague Academy, the presence of a similar type of multilayered expressionism was hugely important for the Czech art scene as a whole.75

44

Prague—Brno

Figure 1.6  Josef Váchal, Bellum, 1913, linocut cycle, 17.5 × 24 cm, private collection.  DILIA, Prague 2017

Although Czech-German artists participated in several exhibitions organized by the Tvrdošíjní group, the situation after the establishment of an independent Czechoslovakia was not conducive to more extensive cooperation between the Czech and German art communities. The group Die Pilger (The Pilgrims), which brought together the most important of Brömse’s students at the printmaking department from 1920 onwards, was made up exclusively of Czech Germans. Individual members of the group pursued their own agendas, but were united in their desire to create a living art while at the same time respecting the uniqueness and distinctive voice of the individual artist. One finds expressionistic elements in the work of some of the artists. One of the most successful members of Die Pilger was Maxim Kopf (1892–1958), whose religious and esoteric paintings from the early 1920s are highly expressive both in respect of their color schemes and in the forceful application of thick layers of paint (Figure 1.8). They are characterized by “crystalline” deformations accentuating the mysticism of the artist’s visions. The spiritual overtones of Kopf’s work were undoubtedly in part the result of the atmosphere peculiar to Die Pilger.76 Norbert Hochsieder (1879–1958), who studied in Brömse’s studio at the Prague Academy for only one semester, belonged to the group’s inner circle. In Hochsieder’s artistic renderings of religious and mythological subjects, expressiveness and symbolism acquire an abstract, disembodied character. One further artist who is noted for his distinctively expressive approach to figural themes in his work is Julius Pfeiffer, who died young and is almost unknown today.77

45

Marie Rakušanová

Figure 1.7  August Brömse, Ukřižování (Crucifixion), 1915, chalklithography, 17.9 × 11.4 cm, Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie Regensburg, inv. no. 5770a.  Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie Regensburg

A strong focus on Dresden played an important role in the work of the Die Pilger artists. In 1921 and 1922, Maxim Kopf and Mary Duras (1898–1982) left Prague to continue their studies in Dresden, where Josef Hegenbarth (1884–1962) also lived and worked for many years. A strong motivation for wanting to study at the Dresden Academy was Oskar Kokoschka’s presence there as a teacher; though, in the end, the members of Die Pilger did not establish close ties with him. In 1923, the group held an exhibition at the Salon Richter in Dresden,78 where Tvrdošíjní artists had shown their works in 1920. There they were confronted with the work of the today largely unknown “Reichsdeutsche” artists. A group show in Ústí nad Labem in 1922 was based on a similar concept: Czech-German artists exhibiting their works alongside those of their “Reichsdeutsche” colleagues.79 Die Pilger held their own show at the Galerie Rudolfinum, in Prague, in 1923. In the summer of 1923, Maxim Kopf and Mary Duras traveled to the United States, an event which marked the dissolution of Die Pilger.80

Expressionism and Moravia Expressionism also found support outside of the large urban centers in Bohemia. In 1917 and 1918, translations of the literary works of Theodor Däubler, Else Lasker-Schüler, Ludwig Meidner, Georg Heym, and others were published in the anthologies Nova et Vetera, by the

46

Prague—Brno

Catholic publishing house owned by Josef Florian (1873–1941) in Stará Říše (Alt Reisch), Moravia. In 1917, Florian also published a selection of poems by Georg Trakl in a translation by the poet and artist Bohuslav Reynek (1892–1971).81 As part of the series Nova et Vetera and Archy, Florian published essays on European expressionist artists and, under the title “Dobré dílo” (Good Work), he published books featuring illustrations by Czech and foreign expressionists. In Stará Říše, he created an environment in which artists could connect on an intellectual, artistic, and spiritual level and seek refuge on either a short- or long-term basis. One important group consisted of the Westphalian artists Willy Wessel, Albert Schamoni, Josef Horn, Otto Coester, and Anetta Engelmann. They were mainly art students, who named their improvised group Junge Westphalen (Young Westphalians).82 Florian was put in contact with them by Eberhard Viegener (1890–1967), with whom he had been corresponding since 1919 and on whom he had published an article by Will Frieg in Archy (The Sheets); Florian also owned several of Viegener’s works.83 Florian’s Stará Říše-based circle represented an isolated phenomenon in Bohemia. Far greater influence in the debate about expressionism was enjoyed by the Literární skupina (Literary Group), established in Přerov (Prerau) in 1921 and active in Brno (Brünn) until 1929. František Götz (1894–1974), the leading figure of the group, managed to inject the work of mainly Moravian writers into critical discussions and polemics of that time “under the banner of expressionism.”84 Literární skupina published the magazine Host (Guest).

Figure 1.8  Maxim Kopf, Početí (Conception), 1920–1921, oil on canvas, 165 × 130 cm, National Gallery, Prague, inv. no. O 4209.  National Gallery, Prague

47

Marie Rakušanová

The circle around Götz was dominated by writers; however, it was not long before the leading representative of the young interwar avant-garde, Karel Teige, launched into a polemic on the topic of expressionism that promoted the perspective of the visual artist from the very start. Not content with just settling his scores with expressionism, Teige also turned his fire on cubism and was acerbic in his criticism of the position taken by the generation of older artists coming together in the Tvrdošíjní group.85 The disagreement between Götz and Teige centered largely on the definition of expressionism. Götz was adamant that “expressionism is not simply a reaction or negation. It has its positive content which makes it part of a revolution in art and life . . . It contains the same utopia of love, goodness, internal purity, and peace.”86 He perceived expressionism as a revolutionary socialist belief that was to be found not only in German art but also in French and Czech culture. Teige was exasperated by the vagueness of Götz’s formulation, and in his article “On Expressionism,” he rejected the concept of a “Czech variety of expressionism,” drawing on the views of Ivan Goll, who characterized expressionism as “a typically German style.” But Teige likewise rejected the relationship between expressionism and Bolshevism that Götz hinted at;87 he deemed expressionism to be completely obsolescent and fully remote from the artistic trends of the day. Through his views on expressionism, Teige strove to confirm the superiority of his own avant-garde constructivist orientation, but undoubtedly he was also reacting to discussions on expressionism taking place in Germany at that time. By virtue of the sheer diversity of opinions and stylistic definitions surrounding it, the term “expressionism” had begun to lose what few specific contours of meaning or scope it had acquired; beginning in 1920, the first voices could already be heard proclaiming that “expressionism is dying.”88 It is interesting to note that Götz himself soon subscribed to a similar view, writing in 1924: “Expressionism has foundered . . . Its fatal flaw was that it wanted to restrict itself to a spiritual vision instead of forming a world of hard facts and searching for the meaning of the life struggle.”89 Paradoxically, Teige, who, unlike Götz, did not believe in the existence of expressionism beyond the boundaries of Germany, was one of the first to use the term in relation to the Osma group and thus concede the possibility of a positive interpretation of the term within the context of Czech art. In his article “On Expressionism,” he wrote: “If we can speak of Czech expressionism, it is only Osma that can be called expressionist.”90 For the next few decades, neither Vincenc Kramář, an unwavering supporter of Filla and Procházka,91 nor František Kubišta, guardian of his cousin’s legacy and author of the first monograph on Bohumil Kubišta,92 were readily willing to apply the term expressionism to Czech modern art. It was only in the 1950s that theoreticians, convinced of the necessity of legitimizing the Czech contribution to international modern art scene, returned to Teige’s opinion linking Osma with expressionism, and thus adopted terms such as expressionism, cubo-expressionism, and cubo-futurism. In doing so, they accepted and then modified the terminology of hegemonic art history. Although this strategy proved expedient at the time, it created a problematic legacy for the future. This study has attempted to unravel the problems associated with the demarcation of expressionism in Czech art. It indicates that the path to understanding the extent to which the application of the larger concepts of art history to a local art scene is justified and necessitates a consideration of the specific features of the place, time, and particular character of the individual groups, their members, and their retrospective degree of inclusion in an international context. The paper is a result of the research funded by the Czech Science Foundation (GA ČR) grant no. 16–06181S, The Hypnotist of Modern Painting: Bohumil Kubišta and the Unrest of the Early European Avant-Garde. 48

Prague—Brno

Notes 1 XXXI. výstava SVU Mánes—Les Indépendants [XXXI. Exhibition of Mánes Association of Fine Artists— Independent Artists] (Prague: SVU Mánes, 1910) (preface Antonín Matějček); Antonín Matějček, “Úvod k výstavě Neodvislých” [Introduction to the Exhibition of Independent Artists], Volné směry [Free Directions], 14 (1910): 136–151. The artists themselves had applied the term expressionism to the French postimpressionists in their first theoretical texts. See Bohumil Kubišta, “Paul Cézanne,” Novina [News], 3 (1910), reprinted in Bohumil Kubišta, Předpoklady slohu [Assumption about style] (Praha: Otto Girgal, 1947) 22–32. Besides Kubišta, the theoretical framing of their art was very important for Emil Filla, Josef Čapek, Vincenc Beneš, Otto Gutfreund, and many other Czech artists. We can regard this theorizing as a specific feature of the early Czech avant-garde. See, for example, Emil Filla, Práce oka [Eye Work] (Praha: Odeon, 1982). 2 Alan Clutton-Brock, “The Post-Impressionists,” The Burlington Magazine 18 (1911): 21–29; Carl David Moselius, “Impressionism och expressionism” [Impressionism and Expressionism], Dagens Nyheter [Today’s news], March 20, 1911; Donald E. Gordon, “On the Origin of the Word Expressionism,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 29 (1966): 368–385; Fritz Schmalenbach, “Das Wort ‘Expressionismus’: (Eine Ergänzung)” [The Term “Expressionism”: a Supplement], Neue Züricher Zeitung [New Zurich Times], September 21, 1962, 9. 3 This duality was also reinforced by Worringer’s concept of empathy versus abstraction that he had used in his dissertation to describe the material of older art but soon began using to characterize the psychological profile of modern artists (impressionism versus expressionism). Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung [Abstraction and Empathy] (Munich: Piper, 1908). 4 Paul Ferdinand Schmidt, “Die Expressionisten” [The Expressionists], Der Sturm 2 (1912): 734–735. 5 Paul Fechter, Der Expressionismus [Expressionism] (Munich: Piper, 1914); Hermann Bahr, Expressionismus [Expressionism] (Munich: Delphin, 1916). 6 The racial concept of expressionism was influenced by another book by Worringer titled Formprobleme der Gotik which was reflected in part in the work of Czech theoreticians and artists. Wilhem Worringer, Formprobleme der Gotik [Form Problems of the Gothic] (Munich: Piper, 1911). See also Wilhelm Worringer, “V boji o umění” [Fight for art] Umělecký měsíčník [Art monthly], 1 (1911–1912): 114–116; Vilém Worringer, “Architektura a plastika z hlediska abstrakce a vcítění” [Perspectives of Abstraction and Empathy on Architecture and Sculpture], Styl [Style], 4 (1912): 77–100. 7 Miroslav Lamač and Jiří Padrta, Zakladatelé moderního českého umění [Founders of Czech Modern Art] (Brno: Dům umění města Brna, 1957); Libuše Halasová, Antonín Procházka (Praha: Ministerstvo informací, 1949), 19. See Miroslav Lamač, Modern Czech Painting 1907–1917 (Praha: Artia, 1967); idem, Osma a Skupina výtvarných umělců 1907–1917 [The Eight Group and the Artists’ Group 1907–1917] (Praha: Odeon, 1988); Miroslav Lamač and Jiří Padrta, Osma a Skupina výtvarných umělců 1907–1917: Teorie, kritika, polemika [The Eight Group and the Artists’ Group 1907–1917: Theory, Criticism, Polemic] (Praha: Odeon, 1992). 8 The negative portrayal of German expressionism clearly finds its origins in Czech period criticism of the works of German expressionist artists and writers. See Antonín Matějček, “Der Blaue Reiter” [The Blue Rider], Volné směry [Free Directions], 16 (1912): 230–231; Karel Čapek, “K nejmladší německé poesii” [The Latest German Poetry], Přehled [Survey], 12 (1913), October 31, 104–105; November 7, 127. 9 Vojtěch Lahoda, “Smysly a výraz. Osma a expresionismus” [The Senses and Expression: The Eight Group and Expressionism], in Expresionismus a české umění 1905–1927 [Expressionism and Czech Art 1905–1927], ed. Alena Pomajzlová (Praha: Národní galerie, 1994), 37–62. The Czech reception of Edvard Munch is very specific and differs, for example, from the situation in Poland, where Munch influenced the previous generation (Wojciech Weiss et al.). 10 Donald E. Gordon, Expressionism: Art and Idea (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1987), 91. 11 The term cubo-expressionism appears in a different context in literature on German art, where it is used to describe the work of the sculptor Herbert Garbe from 1919; see Berlin 1910–1933, ed. Eberhard Roters (Berlin: Friburg, 1983), 117. For the work of the sculptor Rudolf Belling from the same year, see Stephanie Barron, “Der Ruf nach einer neuen Gesellschaft” [Call for a New Society], in Expressionismus 1915–1925: Die zweite Generation [German Expressionism 1915–1925: The Second Generation] (Los Angeles: LACMA, 1988), 37. In the context of Czech sculpture, the term cubo-expressionism is applied to the early work of the sculptor Otto Gutfreund. 12 Miroslav Lamač, “Česká malířská avantgarda ve světových souvislostech” [Czech Avant-Garde in an International Context],Výtvarné umění [Visual Art], 14 (1964): 267–283. Idem., Osma a Skupina výtvarných

49

Marie Rakušanová

13 14

15

16

17

18 19

20 21 22

23

umělců, 201. Lamač regards cubo-expressionism as “Czech pre-cubism” and, taking his lead from Kubišta, characterizes it more as a “misapprehension of cubism” of the French type and highlights the rational constituent of a painting that leads to the reinforcement of the “expressive,” “imaginative and fantastical aspect of a painting.” Vojtěch Lahoda, “Výraz, hrana a kubus: Expresionismus a kuboexpresionismus” [Expression, Edge and Cube: Expressionism and Cubo-Expressionism, in Expresionismus a české umění [Expressionism and Czech Art], ed. Pomajzlová, 91–92. Gordon, Expressionism: Art and Idea, 89–91. See also Tomáš Vlček,“Art Between Social Crisis and Utopia: The Czech Contribution to the Development of Avant-Garde Movement in East-Central Europe, 1910–1930,” Art Journal 49 (1990): 28–35; Elisabeth Clegg, Art, Design and Architecture in Central Europe, 1890–1920 (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2006); Timothy O. Benson, ed., Central-European Avant-Gardes. Exchange and Transformation (1910–1930) (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002); Alison de Lima Greene, “Czech Modernism: 1900–1920,” in Czech Modernism, 1900–1945, ed. J. Anděl (Houston, TX: Museum of Fine Arts 1990), 35–53. Steven A. Mansbach, Modern Art in Eastern Europe: From Baltic to the Balkans, ca. 1890–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 2. Mansbach’s discussion of Czech modernism rests on the argument that Czech culture developed in response and in resistance to strong German/Austrian political and cultural influences in the region. See Isabel Wünsche, “S. A. Mansbach, Modern Art in Eastern Europe: From the Baltic to the Balkans, ca. 1890–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),” The Structurist 39–40 (1999–2000): 90–92. James Elkins, “S. A. Mansbach, Modern Art in Eastern Europe: From the Baltic to the Balkans, ca. 1890–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),” The Art Bulletin 82 (2000): 783. Nicholas Sawicki sympathetically avoids the terms expressionism and cubo-expressionism in relation to the Osma group; see “Becoming Modern: The Prague Eight and Modern Art, 1900–1910” (Ph.D. Thesis, Department of the History of Art, University of Pennsylvania, 2007). Sawicki’s dissertation was adapted for publication in the Czech Republic: Nicholas Sawicki, Na cestě k modernosti: Umělecké sdružení Osma a jeho okruh v letech 1900–1910 [Becoming Modern: The Prague Eight and Modern Art, 1900–1910] (Praha: FF UK, 2014). “Prag läßt nicht los. Uns beide nicht. Dieses Mütterchen hat Krallen. Da muß man sich fügen oder -. An zwei Seiten müßten wir es anzünden, am Vyšehrad und am Hradschin, dann wäre es möglich, daß wir loskommen.Vielleicht überlegst Du es Dir bis zum Karneval.” A letter from Franz Kafka to Oskar Pollak, Prague, December 20, 1902, reprinted in: Franz Kafka, Briefe 1902–1924 (Franz Kafka: Letters 1902–1924), ed. Max Brod (Frankfurt/Main: S. Fischer, 1958), 14. Hillel J. Kieval, The Making of Czech Jewry: National Conflict and Jewish Society in Bohemia 1870–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Scott Spector, Prague Territories: National Conflicts and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siècle (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000). In German, the expression used at the time was “deutsch-böhmisch.” In Czech specialist literature, we usually encounter the epithet “Czech-German”; see Hana Rousová, ed., Mezery v historii 1890–1938: Polemický duch střední Evropy—Němci, Židé, Češi [Gaps in the History 1890–1938: Polemic Spirit of Central Europe—Germans, Jews, Czechs] (Praha: Galerie hlavního města Prahy, 1994). Most recently the term “German-Czech” is used; see Anna Habánová, ed., Mladí lvi v kleci [Young lions in a cage] (Řevnice: Arbor Vitae, 2013). Nicholas Sawicki, “Rodin and the Prague Exhibition of 1902: Promoting Modernism and Advancing Reputations,” Cantor Arts Center Journal 3 (2002–2003), 185–197. The exhibition also included works by several postimpressionists. XXIII.výstava—Francouzští impresionisté [XXIII. Exhibition—French Impressionists] (Praha: SVU Mánes, 1907). See the memoires of Willi Nowak: Václav Formánek, Vilém Nowak (Praha: Odeon, 1977), 16, 18; of V. V. Štech, V zamlženém zrcadle [In the Steamy Mirror] (Praha: Československý spisovatel, 1967), 190; See also Marie Rakušanová, “Vlivy německého prostředí na české umění před první světovou válkou” [Influences of German Culture on Czech Art Before the First World War] (MA Thesis, Prague: Charles University, 2002). Julius Meier-Graefe, Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst [Evolutionary History of Modern Art], 3 vols. (Stuttgart: Julius Hoffmann, 1904). See Elisabeth Clegg, “L’Agent provocateur: Julius Meier-Graefe et l’expressionisme tchèque” [L’Agent provocateur: Julius Meier-Graefe and Czech Expressionisms], in Prague 1900–1938—The Secret Capital of the Avant-Garde, eds. A. Pravdová and V. Havránek (Dijon: Musée des beaux-arts de Dijon, 1997), 96–99; Janne Gallen-Kallela-Sirén, “German Antisemitism and

50

Prague—Brno

24 25 26 27

28 29 30

31 32 33

34 35

36

37 38

the Historiography of Modern Art: The Case of Julius Meier-Graefe, 1894–1905,” in Jewish Dimension in Modern Visual Culture: Antisemitism, Assimilation, Affirmation, eds. M. Baigell, M. Heyd, and R. C. Washton-Long (Boston, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2009), 51–76; Kenworth Moffet, Meier-Grefe as Art Critic (Munich: Prestel, 1973). Adolf Hoffmeister, ed., Kavárna Union: Sborník vzpomínek pamětníků [Cafe Union: Memories of Witnesses] (Praha: NČVU, 1958). See Formánek, Vilém Nowak, 26; Bohumil Kubišta, Korespondence a úvahy [Correspondence and Accounts] (Praha: SNKLHU, 1960), 56; Štech, V zamlženém zrcadle, 200. Herta Hesse-Freilinghaus, ed., Karl Ernst Osthaus: Leben und Werk [Karl Ernst Osthaus: Life and Work] (Recklinghausen: Bongers, 1971). These days the collection is housed at the museum in Essen, which also took over the name of Osthaus’ original institution: Folkwang Museum. See postcard from Hagen by Emil Filla and Friedrich Feigl to Willi Nowak, 10.11.1906, National Gallery Archive, AA 3039. The Salon d’Automne ended on November 15; from Hagen the artists traveled to several cities in Holland and Belgium. See also the testimony of the participants: Feigl, Die Osma [The Eight Group], Prager Presse [Prague Press], December 31, 1933, 6; see Marie Rakušanová, “Cesta Emila Filly, Antonína Procházky a Friedricha Feigla v roce 1906 po Evropě” [European Journey of Emil Filla, Antonín Procházka and Friedrich Feigl in 1906], Umění [Art], 52 (2004): 72–83. In autumn 1906, Otakar Kubín and Emil Pitterman, future members of the Osma group, set off for Naples and Brindisi. E. A. Longen, “Ze dnů Bohémy” [Bohemian days], Přítomnost [Presence], 4 (1927): 508. Jiří Kotalík and Bente Torjusen, Edvard Munch og den tsjekkiske kunst [Edvard Munch and Czech Art] (Oslo: Munch Museet, 1971). “Dílo Munchovo vybuchlo v našich srdcích jako petarda. Otřáslo s námi v základech a všechny naše touhy, lásky a naděje zdály se najednou realisovány, byli jsme v trvalém vytržení, neboť jsme cítili již tehdy jako dnes, že přišel k nám umělec, a to umělec našich časů, našich srdcí a naší vůle.” Emil Filla, “Edvard Munch a naše generace” [Edvard Munch and our Generation], Volné směry [Free Directions], 35 (1938–1940): 16. “. . . může zníti tak výrazně jen na středoevropském poledníku . . .” Emil Filla, O výtvarném umění [Visual Art] (Praha: K. Brož, 1948), 73. Marie Rakušanová, “Sabat nucených prací ve věznici vůle”—Vliv filozofie Arthura Schopenhauera na české umění a uměleckou teorii [“Sabbath of Forced Labor in the Prison of Will”: Influences of Arthur Schopenhauer’s Philosophy on Czech Art and Theory] (České Budějovice: Halama, 2005). Regarding intergenerational continuity in Bohemia at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries see Petr Wittlich, Česká secese [The Czech Secession] (Praha: Odeon, 1982); Marie Rakušanová, ed., Křičte ústa! Předpoklady expresionismu [Scream Mouth! Roots of Expressionism] (Praha: Academia, 2006); Marie Rakušanová and Karel Srp, eds., Sváry zření [Conflicts of Vision] (Řevnice: Arbor Vitae, 2008). See Tomáš Winter, Miloš Jiránek. Zápas o moderní malbu, 1875–1911 [Miloš Jiránek: The Fight for Modern Painting, 1875–1911] (Řevnice: Arbor Vitae, 2012). Vojtěch Lahoda demonstrated this by discussing Filla’s well-known painting Reader of Dostoyevsky. Viz Lahoda, “Smysly a výraz: Osma a expresionismus,” 42. The catalogue left out paintings by Emil Pittermann. In one of his letters Bohumil Kubišta explained this omission by pointing out that, at the time the exhibition was held, Pittermann was still studying at the Academy, which banned its students from presenting their work in public. See letter from B. Kubišta to Anna Hladíková, 19.1.1908, reprinted: Kubišta, Korespondence a úvahy, 118. Franz Kafka also had contacts with several members of Osma. Franz Kafka, Tagebücher 1910–1923 [Diaries 1910–1923] (Munich: S. Fischer, 1948), 23.12.1911. See J. P. Hodin, “Memories of Franz Kafka,” Horizon 17 (1948): 26–45. See Jacqueline Sudaka-Bénazéraf, Le regard de Franz Kafka: Dessins d’un écrivain [Franz Kafka’s Point of View: Drawings of a Writer] (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2001). Max Brod, “Frühling in Prag” [Spring in Prague], Die Gegenwart [The Present], 36 (1907): 316–317. From Nowak, he purchased, according to his description: “little girls in the snow,” from Feigl “a view of the weir on the River Vltava,” and from Kubín “a marvellously saucy painting of a cabaret singer.” Max Brod, Prager Kreis [Prague Circle] (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1966), 56. See Nicholas Sawicki, “The Critic as Patron and Mediator: Max Brod, Modern Art, and Jewish Identity in Early-TwentiethCentury Prague,” Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture 6 (2012): 30–51; Gaëlle Vassogne, Max Brod in Prag: Identität und Vermittlung [Max Brod in Prague: Identity and Mediation] (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2009).

51

Marie Rakušanová 39 Max Oppenheimer, “Ausstellung der Acht” [Exhibition of the Eight], Prager Tagblatt [Prague Daily News], May 1, 1907, 9. 40 There was one short positive announcement published in Czech-Jewish weekly Rozvoj. Vysoce zajímavá výstava “Osmi” v Topičově saloně [Very Interesting Exhibition of the Eight Group in Salon Topič], Rozvoj [Development] 2, (1908): 4. 41 Vojtěch Lahoda, ed., Vincenc Kramář: From Old Masters to Picasso (Prague: National Gallery, 2000). 42 Marie Rakušanová, “L’œuvre de l’artiste tchèque Bohumil Kubišta dans le contexte de l’art modern” [The Oeuvre of Czech artist Bohumil Kubišta in the Context of European Modern Art], in Les migrations fauves: La diffusion du fauvisme et des expressionnismes en Europe centrale et orientale [Fauvist Migrations: Spreading of Fauvism and Expressionisms in East-Central Europe], Sophie Barthélémy and Valérie Dupont (Dijon: Musée des Beaux Arts, 2012), 39–48. 43 Paul Westheim, Für und Wider: Kritische Anmerkungen zur Kunst der Gegenwart [Pro and Con: Critical Comments on Contemporary Art] (Potsdam: Kiepenheuer, 1923), 38. 44 “Expresionism bez kubismu zvrhl by se bezpochyby v lacinou dekorativnost; kubism, kdyby mu byla vzata možnost zdravého rozkladu doktríny, stal by se nejnudnějším a nejomezenějším patronem pod sluncem.” Stanislav Kostka Neumann, “Kubism, čili aby bylo jasno” [Cubism: To Make it Clear], Lidové noviny, May 5, 1914, reprint in S. K. Neumann, Konfese a konfrontace [Confessions and Confrontations], II (Praha: Československý spisovatel, 1988) 259–260. Neumann saw similar interconnections in literature. In 1915, he wrote that the “new literary art” of Max Jacob or Guillaume Apollinaire revealed a “fundamental affinity with expressionism and cubism.” S. K. Neumann, “Povšechný stav českého umění před válkou” [General Conditions for Czech Art Before the War], Volné směry [Free Directions], 1915, reprint ibid., 275. 45 Lahoda, “Výraz, hrana a kubus,” 83. 46 Marie Rakušanová, “Der Besuch von Otto Mueller, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner und Maria Mueller im Jahre 1911 in Böhmen” [Visit of Otto Mueller, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Maria Mueller to Bohemia in 1911], Dresdner Kunstblätter: Zeitschrift der Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen Dresden [Dresdner Kunstblätter: Art Magazine of the Dresden State Art Collections], 50 (2006): 15–28. 47 The members of Osma always stressed the importance of art theory for their own art practice. In discussions with Mueller and Kirchner, they found a lack of theoretical background. This was perhaps one of the reasons why the Czech–German relationship declined after summer 1911. 48 Eleanor Moseman, “Expressing Cubism: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Berlin Style and Its Affinities with the Painting of Bohumil Kubišta,” (Ph.D. Thesis, Bryn Mawr College Pennsylvania, 2006); idem., “At the Intersection: Kirchner, Kubišta, and Modern Morality,” in Art Bulletin 93 (2011): 79–100. 49 Franz Marc, Wassily Kandinsky, and Arnold Schönberg found Kubišta’s works, which were exhibited at the Fourth Exhibition of the New Berlin Secession, very interesting. See Klaus Lankheit, ed., Wassily Kandinsky—Franz Marc: Briefwechsel [Wassily Kandinsky—Franz Marc. Correspondence] (Munich: R. Piper, 1983), 93–94 and Jelena Hahl-Koch, ed., Arnold Schoenberg and Vasily Kandinsky: Letters, Pictures, and Documents (London; Boston, MA: Faber and Faber, 1984), 39. 50 Anke Daemgen, Liebermanns Gegner: Die Neue Secession in Berlin und der Expressionismus [Liebermann’s Opponents: New Secession and Expressionism in Berlin] (Cologne: Wienand, 2011). 51 Mahulena Nešlehová, Bohumil Kubišta (Praha: Odeon, 1984). 52 Vojtěch Lahoda, “Excursus: Emil Filla and Herwarth Walden,” in Czech Cubism 1909–1925: Art, Architecture, Design, ed. J. Švestka and T. Vlček (Prague: Modernista, 2006) 74–77; Vojtěch Lahoda, “Herwarthd Walden and the New Art from Prague,” in Der Sturm. Band II: Aufsätze [Der Sturm.Volume II: Essays], ed. Andrea von Hülsen-Esch and Gerhard Finckh (Wuppertal: Von der Heydt-Museum Wuppertal, 2012) 507–514; Elizabeth Clegg, “‘Futurists, Cubists and the Like’: Early Modernism and Late Imperialism,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte [Art History Journal], 56 (1993): 249–277. In 1913, a group exhibition was held of Skupina výtvarných umělců (The Artists Group) in Walden’s gallery. The only two Czech artists to have solo exhibitions in the gallery Der Sturm were Otakar Kubín (1914) and Jan Zrzavý (1925). 53 Marie Rakušanová, “Die Teilnahme tschechischer und deutsch-böhmischer Künstler an bedeutenden Ausstellungen in Deutschland 1910–1914” [Participation of Czech and Czech-German Artists in Major Exhibitions in Germany 1910–1914], in Lücken in der Geschichte [Gaps in History], ed. J. Orlíková (Pirna: Mitte Europa, 2011), 26–41; Lubomír Slavíček, “‘Předně mně záleží na vystoupení!’ Emil Filla a zahraniční výstavy Skupiny výtvarných umělců v roce 1913” [“Above All I’m Concerned About the Representation,” Emil Filla and International Exhibitions of the Artists Group in 1913], Umění [Art], 61 (2013): 447–461; Franz Smola, “Der österreichische Beitrag zur Kölner Sonderbundausstellung 1912”

52

Prague—Brno

54

55

56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

69

70

[Austrian Contribution to the Sonderbund Exhibition in Cologne 1912], in 1912 Mission Moderne: Die Jahrhundertschau des Sonderbundes [1912 Modern Mission: The Centennial Retrospective of the Sonderbund Exhibition], ed. Barbara Schaefer (Cologne: Wienand, 2012), 177–191. At the group’s exhibition in 1913, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner loaned a sculpture from his collection that he held up as an example of authentic “negro sculpture.” However, recent findings indicate that this work was very likely a free variation on African art. Tomáš Winter, “Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s ‘Negerplastik’ and the Mistake of Czech Cubists,” Umění [Art], 61 (2013) 356–361. See Vojtěch Lahoda, “Excursus: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Writes to Vincenc Kramář,” in Czech Cubism 1909–1925: Art, Architecture, Design, ed. J. Švestka and T.Vlček, 72–73. See, for example, Josef Čapek, “Kandinskij, Über das Geistige in der Kunst” [Kandinsky: On the Spiritual in Art], in Umělecký měsíčník [Art Monthly], 1 (1911–1912): 236. Kandinsky’s art theories were criticized by Czech artists as being too metaphysical and vague. Czech artists-cum-theorists sought order and logical structure in new painting. See also Naomi Hume, “Context and Controversy around Prague’s Umělecký měsíčník, 1911–1914,” Centropa 10 no. 3 (September 2010): 204–220; Nicholas Sawicki, “The View from Prague,” in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, eds. P. Brooker, S. Bru, A. Thacker, and C. Weikop (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013) 1074–1098. In 1913, Italian futurism was introduced to the public in Bohemia at an exhibition in the private Havel Gallery at the Mozarteum, Prague. Translations of Czech writers by Otto Pick were published in Germany by leading publishing houses such as Kurt Wolff, Leipzig;Verlag Saturn, Heidelberg; and Verlag S. Fischer, Berlin. Die Aktion [Action], 7 (1917): Nos. 24–25. Josef Čapek, Laus [Louse], Die Aktion [Action], 7 (1917): 614–621. Josef Čapek, Lelio (Berlin: Die Aktion, 1918). Jaroslav Slavík, “Skupina Tvrdošíjní” [The Stubborn Ones], Umění [Art], 30 (1982): 192–193; Karel Srp, ed., Tvrdošíjní [The Stubborn Ones] (Praha: Galerie hlavního města Prahy, 1986); Karel Srp, ed., Tvrdošíjní a hosté [The Stubborn Ones and Guests] (Praha: Galerie hlavního města Prahy, 1987). Exhibitions were held in Dresden (the Salon Richter), Berlin, Hannover, Vienna, Geneva, etc. See: A. Hollmann, “Ein joint-venture des Expressionismus,” Umění [Art], 45 (1997): 461–476. An independent Czechoslovakia as one of the successor states of Austria-Hungary was established on 28 October 1918. Vlastislav Hofman, ed. Mahulena Nešlehová (Praha: Společnost Vlastislava Hofmana, 2004). Viz např.:Václav Nebeský, “Zu Hofmans ‘Dostojevskij’” [Hofman’s Dostoyevsky], Die Aktion [Action], 8 (1918): 99; idem., “Dědic Cézannův” [Cézanne’s Heir], Volné směry [Free Directions], 21 (1921–1922): 56–64. Václav Nebeský, “Druhá výstava Tvrdošíjných” [Second Exhibition of the Stubborn Ones], Tribuna [Tribune], 2 (1920): 1–3. Václav Nebeský, “úvod ke třetí výstavě Tvrdošíjných” [Third Exhibition of the Stubborn Ones: Introduction], Tribuna [Tribune], 3 (1921): 25, 31. Pavel Liška, “Expresionismus—k vymezení pojmu a jeho obsahu v českém umění” [Expressionism—A Definition of the Concept and its Content in Czech Art], in Expresionismus a české umění [Expressionism and Czech Art 1905–1927], ed. Pomajzlová, 29–35. Within the context of both Czech and French modern art we might also describe František Kupka, these days one of the best-known artists of Czech origin, as an outsider. In his work created in the first decade of the twentieth century we find phases in which the artist, resident in Paris, intensified the expressiveness of his paintings by means of an exuberance of color and form. However, the question remains as to what extent this was a reaction to French fauvism or, on the contrary, a result of Kupka’s central European origins. As early as 1918 Richard Weiner had described Zrzavý’s early work as expressionist. Poutník [Richard Weiner], “Jan Zrzavý (K jeho výstavě u Topiče, 7.-30. září)” [Jan Zrzavý (His Exhibition at the Topič Gallery)], Lidové noviny [People’s Paper], 26, September 17, 1918, 1–2. See also Karel Srp, “Divoká malba a niterný tvar: symbolický expresionismus Jana Zrzavého” [Savage Painting and Inward Form: Jan Zrzavý’s Symbolic Expressionism], in Expresionismus a české umění [Expressionism and Czech Art 1905–1927], ed. Pomajzlová, 123–132. Founded in 1920 as Umělecký Svaz Devětsil (the Devětsil Artistic Association), its name was changed several times; beginning in 1925, it was called the Svaz moderní kultury Devětsil (Devětsil Association of Modern Culture). From 1923 on, there was also an active group in Brno. The movement discontinued its activities in 1927 in Brno and in 1930 in Prague. The avant-garde artistic program of Devětsil was

53

Marie Rakušanová

71 72

73

74

75 76 77

78 79 80

81

82 83

84 85

formulated by Karel Teige, Jiří Wolker, Jaroslav Seifert, and Vítězslav Nezval and was focused on proletarian art, magic realism, primitivism, and, beginning in 1923, on “Poetism.” Teige explained Poetism as the transformation of language into visual art in relation to the rise of photography, film, and new developments in book printing. Karel Čapek, “Souborná výstava prací Jana Zrzavého (Topičův salon, 7.-30. září)” [Jan Zrzavý’s Retrospective Exhibition], Cesta [The Journey], 1 (1918–1919): 412–413. Alena Pomajzlová, “Rozdvojení a cesty mezi dvěma světy: expresionismus Josefa Váchala” [Duality and Journeys Between Two Worlds: The Expressionism of Josef Váchal], in Expresionismus a české umění [Expressionism and Czech Art 1905–1927], ed. Pomajzlová, 133–146. See also Marie Rakušanová, Josef Váchal: Magie hledání [Josef Váchal: The Magic of the Quest] (Praha: Paseka, 2014); idem., Josef Váchal: Napsal, vyryl, vytiskl a svázal [Josef Váchal: He wrote, engraved, printed, and bound books] (Řevnice: Arbor Vitae, 2014). It is remarkable how Váchal’s personality resists being placed in any category, even the most broadly conceived. James Elkins proposed a more subtle differentiation of forms of regionalism. However, using Elkins’ categories,Váchal’s work cannot be assigned to regionalism, parochialism, or provincialism. The way that Váchal received ideas from various foreign centers of modern art could perhaps be best described using the term “anarchism.” Elkins, rev. Mansbach, 783–784. Walter Boll expressed the opinion that Brömse sought inspiration from the expressionist group Die Brücke, though he fails to back this up with any examples. Walter Boll, “Ein Graphiker in der Spannung zwischen Symbolismus und Expressionismus” [A Printmaker between Symbolism and Expressionism], in August Brömse 1873–1925 (Regensburg: Ostdeutsche Galerie Regensburg, 1978), 5. Josef Kroutvor, Vizionář August Brömse [August Brömse: The Visionary] (Praha: Galerie Ztichlá klika, 2005); Schattenseiten: August Brömse und Kathrin Brömse [Dark Sides: August Brömse and Kathrin Brömse], ed. Gabriela Kašková (Regensburg: Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie Regensburg, 2011). Ivo Habán, Maxim Kopf 1892–1958 (Cheb: Galerie výtvarného umění v Chebu, 2002), 32–43. Other members focused largely on various new forms of realism, included Emil Helzel, Theodor Sternhell, Jost Pietsch, Mary Duras, Anton Bruder, Josef Hegenbarth, and others. The only thing that all members of Die Pilger had in common was a focus on drawing and printmaking. Brömse eventually headed the printmaking studio at the Academy. Ivo Habán, “Praha-Drážďany. Skupina Pilger a spirituální tendence počátku dvacátých let” [Prague/ Dresden: The Pilgrims and Spiritual Tendencies in the Early 1920s], in Mladí lvi v kleci [Young Lions in a Cage], ed. Habánová, 44. Kunst-Ausstellung die Gruppe “Die Pilger” und Reichsdeutsche Künstler [The Exhibition of the Pilgrims and of Reichsdeutsche Artists] (Aussig a. E.:Volksbücherei, 1922). Upon returning to Bohemia in 1931, Mary Duras and Maxim Kopf organized their own monographic exhibition at the Rudolfinum, at which the Dresden artist Conrad Felixmüller also exhibited his works. Antonín Friedl, Tři výstavy, Maxim Kopf, obrazy a kresby. Mary Durasová, sochy a kresby. Conrad Felixmüller – Drážďany [Three exhibitions: Maxim Kopf, Paintings and Drawings. Mary Duras, Sculptures and Drawings. Conrad Felixmüller—Dresden] (Praha: Krasoumná jednota, 1931). Georg Trakl, Básně, přeložil Bohuslav Reynek [Poems, translated by Bohuslav Reynek] (Stará Říše: Dobré dílo, 1917). See also Georg Trakl, Šebastian v snu, přelořil Bohuslav Reynek [Sebastian in Dream, translated by Bohuslav Reynek] (Vyškov: František Obzina, 1924). Regarding the reception given German literary expressionism in Bohemia see Eva Jelínková, Echa expresionismu: Recepce německého literárního hnutí v české avantgardě (1910–1930) [Expressionist Echoes:The Reception of German Literature in the Czech Avant-Garde 1910–1930] (Praha: FF UK, 2010). Lenka Bydžovská, “Mladí Vestfálci ve Staré Říši” [The Young Westphalians in Stará Říše], in Josef Florian: Dobré dílo [Josef Florian: Good Work] (Roudnice nad Labem: Galerie moderního umění v Roudnici nad Labem, 1992), 60–61. Will Frieg, “Eberhard Viegener,” in Nova et Vetera Mystiky, umění a vědy, založená v srpnu l. p. 1912 v den svaté Marty, panny a hostitelky páně [Nova et Vetera of Mysticism, Art and Science; Founded in August 1912 on St. Martha‘s Day,Virgin and Host to the Itinerant Christ], Sbírka 36 (Stará Říše na Moravě: Josef Florian, 1920). František Götz,“Programový leták” [Flyer program], duben 1922, reprint in Avantgarda známá a neznámá I: Od proletářského umění k poetismu 1919–1924 [The Avant-garde Known and Unknown I: From Proletarian Art to Poetism 1919–1924], ed. Štěpán Vlašín (Praha: Svoboda, 1971), 225. Karel Srp, “Tvrdošíjní a Devětsil” [The Stubborn Ones and the Devětsil Movement], Umění [Art], 35 (1987): 54–68.

54

Prague—Brno 86 “. . . expresionismus není jen pouhou reakcí – negací . . . má pozitivní obsahy, jež z něho činí částku revoluční vlny životní a umělecké, jež hýbe dnes světem . . . je v něm táž utopie lásky, dobra, vnitřní čistoty, míru . . .” František Götz, “Trochu polemiky, trochu vyznání” [A Little Bit of Polemics, a Little Bit of Confession], Socialistická budoucnost [Socialist Future], 20 (1922): 1–2. 87 Karel Teige, “O expresionismu” [On Expressionism], Rovnost [Equality], 38 (1922): 3–4. Teige was not the only avant-garde theoretician to reject out of hand expressionism as an alternative to modern art. See, for example, Bedřich Václavek, “Likvidace konkursní podstaty expresionismu” [Disposal of the Bankruptcy Estate of Expressionism], Pásmo [The Zone], 1 (1924): 3–4. See also: Josef Jodas, “Bedřich Václavek als Interpret und Kritiker des deutschen Expressionismus” [Bedřich Václavek as an Interpreter and as a Critic of German Expressionism], in Acta Universitatis Palckianae Olomucensis: Germanica Olomucensia 7 [Acta Universitatis Palackianae Olomucensis. Germanica Olomucensia 7] (Praha: SPN, 1989), 35–43. 88 See, for example, Ivan Goll, “Der Expressionismus stirbt” [Expressionism is Dying], Zenit 1 (1921): 8–9, reprint in Expressionismus: Der Kampf um eine literarische Bewegung [Expressionism: The Fight for a Literary Movement], ed. Paul Raabe (Munich: Taschenbuch, 1965), 180. 89 “Expresionismus ztroskotal . . . Jeho tragickou vinou bylo, že se chtěl obmeziti na duchovní visi tam, kde měl formovati svět těžkých světových faktů, kde měl hledati smysl životního boje.” František Götz, “Bída světové poezie dramatické” [The World’s Miserable Dramatic Poetry], Národní osvobození [National Liberation], 1, June 15, 1924, 5. 90 “Můžeme-li mluvit o českém expresionismu, je to jedině Osma, která může být nazvána expresionistickou.” Teige, “O expresionismu,” 203–204. 91 Vincenc Kramář, Umění Emila Filly a Antonína Procházky [The Art of Emil Filla and Antonín Procházka] (Opava: Karel Vavřík, 1932), 12. 92 František Kubišta, Bohumil Kubišta (Praha: SVU Mánes, 1940). Not even Johannes Urzidil, author of the small catalogue accompanying the exhibition “Osma” (Eight) in Brno in 1938, used the term “expressionism” in connection with Osma. Johannes Urzidil, Osma (Brno: Moravská unie, 1938; exh. cat.).

55

2 KOŠICE MODERNISM AND ANTON JASZUSCH’S EXPRESSIONISM Zsófia Kiss-Szemán

Košice modernism is a general term referring to art production and cultural life in the city of Košice (Kassa, Kaschau) in the 1920s,1 an extraordinary period that provided the necessary conditions for the emergence of modern and avant-garde art in Slovakia and led Košice to become one of the central European centers of modern art. One of the biggest influences on this development was the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, which led to Košice becoming a temporary home to mostly leftist artists who were forced to leave Hungary. The migration of artists introduced new artistic developments and generated a lively symbiosis of artistic ideas, resulting in an openminded, multinational, urban cultural environment. Thus, the conditions in 1920s for the emergence of modern art in Košice were extremely favorable; the city’s rich artistic heritage offered an excellent background for the development of new movements and artistic styles. The local tradition mixed well with the contributions of the newly arriving artists. Tolerance, freedom, and individual thinking brought about not only feverish artistic discussions, but also discourses on many social issues and subjects that were formerly taboo, e.g. sexual relations, conception, prostitution, etc. The role of Košice modernism in the Slovak, Hungarian, central European, and European contexts is defined by a network of contacts among artists and by various artistic parallels.2 Among the representatives of Košice modernism, one must include the visual artists Anton (Antal)3 Jaszusch, Eugen (Jenő) Krón, and Konštantín (Szilárd) Bauer; the representatives of the Czech and Hungarian avant-garde, specifically František Foltýn, Alexander (Sándor) Bortnyik, and Gejza (Géza) Schiller; the architects Ľudovít (Lajos) Oelschläger, Lajos Kozma, and Bohumír Kozák; the philosopher Ján (János) Mácza; the writer Sándor Márai; and the director of the East Slovak Museum, Josef Polák. Together they are responsible for the introduction, for the first time in the modern history of Slovakia, of the independence of visual reality and the transformation of artistic perception into an autonomous phenomenon.

The City and Its Art Scene Košice has played an important economic and cultural role in eastern Slovakia since the Middle Ages. With the growth of the Hungarian Empire, the city became a center of trade and culture in Upper Hungary—the most visible proof of which is St. Elizabeth’s Cathedral, which was built during the rule of Sigismund of Luxembourg—and flowered under the rule of Matthias 56

Košice Modernism

Corvinus. Its urban character was enhanced by the lack of fortifications, with its medieval buildings instead arranged around an elongated, lenticular square. In contrast to other towns in Slovakia, which remained part of a “relatively intact rural environment,” the “process of civilisation” in Košice, with its emerging socio-political power base, was highly developed. Košice, with its specific characteristics, possessed such a powerful awareness of urbanism that it retained its own countenance.4 The city’s renowned tolerance is probably the main reason why, at least until the Second World War, the various coexisting cultural strata were able to flourish without destroying or negating each other. Tolerance brought with it a plurality of opinions and ideas held by the various groups and factions who lived there together despite—or perhaps because of—the city’s function as a crossroads of culture, trade routes, and diverse ideological and religious convictions. In addition to tolerance, plurality, and the resulting multilayered culture, the city’s character was also determined by a gradual change in the mindset of its inhabitants, who, through their individual desires, demands, ideas, and work, helped to fashion the town’s sovereignty. Private art schools, already in existence during the first two decades of the twentieth century, helped to establish plein air and impressionist painting in Košice, the first step toward the modern scene.5 From 1921 until 1927, the artist Eugen Krón ran his own private art school. The work and personality of Konštantín (Szilárd) Kővári-Kačmarik likewise represented a significant step forward; with his determination and realization of an individual artistic program in the spirit of postimpressionism, he became an example to many (and not only artists) in the 1920s. The director of the renowned East Slovak Museum, Josef Polák, who managed to put into practice an international exhibition program and lecture series, is another well-known and thoroughly examined source of inspiration.6

Portrait of the Town As Tomáš Štrauss has noted, the so-called national modern art of Slovakia originated in the village, but also in the “folk traditions and . . . pristine mountain environment” of the rural countryside. Košice modernism, on the other hand, was almost solely the product of an urban environment, whose influence was absorbed by the artists almost without awareness of “these new civilisational realities and transformations.”7 The choice of subjects painted by artists in 1920s Košice—in general, scenes of everyday life—are much the same that might be painted anywhere in the country. But in Košice they are drawn from the city streets and public spaces, as, for example, in Géza/Gejza Schiller’s 1924 Mestský motív (Urban Motif; Figure 2.1) and Július/Gyula Jakoby’s works from the 1930s, such as Nad inzerátom (Over the Advert, 1934). They also included trade and labor, as for example in Jakoby’s Čistenie lampy (Lamp Cleaning, 1935) and Predávači (Salesmen, 1934), as well as icons of industrial development and construction, such as bridges, factories, etc., among them Schiller’s Krajina s mostom (Landscape with a Bridge, 1922) and František Foltýn’s 1924 Nezamestnaní (Unemployed; Figure 2.2). They presented an interpretation of otherwise traditional genre scenes that was somehow closer to real life in the city. One brand new thematic area was sports and leisure time activities; it is certainly no coincidence that the first Košice marathon was held in 1924, at the peak of the intellectual and cultural flowering of this interwar period. These new themes and motifs stemmed from a differentiation of society and urban community in everyday life that largely did not exist in rural life. This diversity was further reflected in the various possibilities for labor and entertainment that urban life offered. To put it simply, these new themes originated in a new way of life and a new way of thinking about and looking at the world. 57

Zsófia Kiss-Szemán

Figure 2.1  G  éza Schiller, Mestský motív (Urban Motif), 1924, oil on canvas, 94.5 × 109 cm, East Slovak Gallery, inv. no. O 1294

As the artists focused their attention on ordinary people, the environment in which these people lived shifted from mere background to real and familiar settings. Modernism in Košice also brought changes to the choice of landscape: pastoral settings of agricultural fields against a backdrop of distant mountaintops were replaced by the natural scenery of Bankov, a favorite vacation spot above Košice. Other scenes were set in the urban environment, in the bars, restaurants, and theatres in which the city’s inhabitants spent their newly found free time; see, for example, Jakoby’s V bare (At a Bar, 1929), Schiller’s V kaviarni (At a Café, 1924; Figure 2.3), and Jaszsuch’s Pred predstavením (Before the Performance, 1930–1935). But most important were the motifs directly related to this new way of thinking and a new orientation with respect to community values, which, in turn, was directly related to freedom and modernity. As a result, many formerly taboo themes became motifs for paintings. Tangential issues that, until then, had not been considered subjects of decent conversation became sought-after motifs and topics for the artist. At the same time, borders between social classes, between periphery and center, and between marginal phenomena and core ideas became blurred, much as in Jaszusch’s Na periférii (At the Periphery, 1921–1922). The aesthetics of perception in general changed, as can be seen in Jaszusch’s Návšteva u cigánky (Visit to a Gypsy Woman, 1921–1922). With the changes in the function of art and the status of the artist, the emphasis shifted to an emphasis on the authenticity of the artist’s testimony and a reality shaped by the

58

Košice Modernism

Figure 2.2  František Foltýn, Nezamestnaní (Unemployed), 1924, oil on canvas, 94.8 × 114.8 cm, East Slovak Gallery, inv. no. O 1362.  František Foltýn (heirs)/LITA, Society of Authors, 2018

artist’s own subjective vision. Finding themselves on the edge of society as a result of a new life style, a broadened horizon, and a new perspective on life, artists in Košice became more perceptive to the socio-economic situation of the city’s residents and began to lean toward leftist positions. The new thinking and perception, however, also brought with it new dimensions and perspectives on life. Traditional rituals, myths, and legends were replaced by new visions and utopias of the cosmic age, perhaps one of the more astonishing examples being Anton Jaszusch’s pictorial cycle of paintings that dealt with subjects such as the universe, the story of humanity, and the history of human evolution. Along with new thinking and new utopias, new ideas and new protagonists emerged, such as the figure of a new man, exemplified by Eugen Krón’s Muž slnka (Man of the Sun, 1927), who fulfilled new ideals associated with new criteria of beauty, grandeur, natural character, and perhaps even a mission. The eternal migration of artists has its roots in the Middle Ages: journeymen and masters would move from one town to another as necessary, following the commissions and the money. With regard to the formation of Košice modernism, the forced departure from the countryside had a more decisive cause. The migration of artists into Košice, however, was beneficial to the formation of the local art scene; Košice art was significantly influenced by the work of these migrating artists. In this regard, Košice inhabitants treated the artists arriving in the town in the same manner as the Athenians treated the foreigners arriving in their city-state; this openness to outsiders is one of the characteristic features of the modern urban community.

59

Zsófia Kiss-Szemán

Modern and Avant-Garde Art in Košice While modernism, with its openness to the acceptance and integration of new ideas, was intrinsic to the artistic culture in Košice during this period, the avant-garde, traditionally linked with the denial of the traditional, remained something foreign, and avant-garde art was rather rare in Košice. Despite the fact that both terms encompass the attitude of rejection and denial, the avant-garde is more radical and its elements appear less often on the Košice art scene, whereas modernism was an integral part of all categories of art in the 1910s and particularly the 1920s.8 The formation of modern art in Slovakia can most appropriately be defined as the relationship between old and new, the traditional and the modern. This contrast significantly marked the development of art in Slovakia during this period, and artists’ attitudes to these issues can be easily traced. Naturally, the relationship between the traditional and the modern played out on many levels. Sometimes it included a general attitude of revolt or resignation; at other times it only concerned issues of the fine arts, or individual elements, e.g., subject matter, form, means of expression, etc. A significant feature of the art, artists’ approaches, and individual works of this period was the symbiosis of traditional realistic subjects (rural or landscape scenes with mountain motifs) and modern expression (the application of formal aspects of modernist art). The relationship of a wide range of artists in the greater realm of Central Europe to the so-called naïve folk arts—their visual traditions versus efforts to create a unique, more or less purely visual world, is intrinsic to modern art.

Figure 2.3  Géza Schiller, V kaviarni (At a Café), 1924, oil on canvas, 90 × 117 cm, East Slovak Gallery, inv. no. O 1331

60

Košice Modernism

Modernist artists in Košice before the First World War, whose works were based on postimpressionism, freed themselves from the need for realistic representation and were open to a new artistic perception. Konštantín Bauer, Konštantín Kővári-Kačmarik, and particularly Anton Jaszusch, abandoned the traditional concept of figurative art and landscape painting. During the interwar period, the emphasis shifted to theoretical issues of art, with the artists preferring the idea of visual reality to the concept of figurative art. Art became autonomous and the painting an end in itself. The perception of art and the artist’s mission underwent radical changes. It was the first time in the modern history of Slovakia that art emerged as an autonomous phenomenon and the artist as the one who reserved the right to determine the character of this world. The Košice modernists were the first to grasp this independence of visual reality.

Anton Jaszusch’s Work Before the First World War Anton Jaszusch played a crucial role in shaping Košice modernism. His works from both before and after the First World War provided continuity in the development of modern art in Košice. The public responded well to his work, which met with great success. Jaszusch’s oeuvre, focused mostly on social, yet universal issues, was a counterweight to the leftist artists associated with the East Slovak Museum and its director, Josef Polak. Jaszusch dealt with universal human values and history, as well as greater dimensions and forces such as the universe. As a result of Jaszusch’s work, Košice modernism became a more complex phenomenon. Jaszusch, a native of Košice who, except for his studies and the years spent on the battlefields of the First World War, spent his entire life in the city, can be considered the most authentic figure of Košice modernism. While other representatives of modern art in Košice spent only a short time in the city, Jaszusch’s entire life and work are closely connected to its history and its art. Jaszuch’s extensive, diverse, and multilayered oeuvre, spanning over half a century, is an integral part of Slovak art history and belongs to the best examples of interwar art in Slovakia.9 Anton Jaszusch (1882–1965)10 studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich,11 and at the Académie Julian in Paris, before returning to Košice in 1908. The nature of his work was determined by a complex of postimpressionist elements. His style consisted of elements of planar decorativism, plein-air, impressionist, and mainly expressionist painting. In the very beginning, he broke away from the academic style of painting in terms of technique, subject, and interpretation of reality. His works are characterized by plain compositions, spontaneous perceptions, scenes without pathos, motifs from everyday life, and large patches of color applied by broad brushstrokes. The formal aspects of his work are derived from the inspiration he drew from works by József Rippl-Rónai, a member of the Nabis.12 One should also mention a distinctive perception, transformed by the artist’s inner feelings and experiences, and a depiction of reality based upon expressionist painting.13 The use of patches of color confirms Jaszusch’s effort to break free from a more conventional conception of figurative painting.14 Another source of inspiration was the artist’s stay in the High Tatra mountains in 1909, which deepened his perception of nature considerably and led him to revaluate the importance of landscape painting. A shift in his painting technique also occurred: broken, impasto brushwork and expressions full of tension remained (basic) characteristic features of his work, but his paintings became suffused with symbolic meaning and mystic mood. In terms of form, his pictures seemed to become more realistic, as if painted from nature, but his style of painting is exemplified by a projection of the painter’s inner experience onto the canvas. Furthermore, one can see Jaszusch’s deliberate intention to transform his feelings into the painting, to make them manifest on the canvas.15 In the period from 1910 to 1914, the artist tried to capture the mood 61

Zsófia Kiss-Szemán

and feeling of the landscape in his paintings, as can be seen in his Krajina so stromom (Landscape with Trees, 1923–1924; Figure 2.4). Gradually, he moved toward more expressive paintings with decorative surfaces in delicate colors and no perspective.16

Anton Jaszusch’s Work After the First World War The First World War, which the artist spent on the Italian and Russian fronts and later in prisoner-of-war camps in the Far East,17 shattered his spiritual world and altered his way of thinking, his inner convictions, and his artistic mission. Between 1920 and 1924, Jaszusch created a large cycle of paintings addressing such existential questions as the meaning of life and humanity’s place on earth and in the universe. During these few years, his most significant creative period, he created his stunning pictorial cycles, which aroused the greatest discussion of art in Slovakia in the first half of the twentieth century. Jaszusch had always been a prolific and creative painter, and after his return from the war, he threw himself into work. He painted a number of new pictures, including a series of twenty to twenty-four paintings18 and another series of ten paintings, both cycles of loosely connected paintings. The most striking thing about them is the choice of motif: humanity’s mission and place in the universe. This theme is represented by various subjects, both satirical and ironical; there are also scenes with didactical, moral, or educational undertones; and

Figure 2.4  A  ntal Jaszusch, Krajina so stromom (Landscape with Trees), 1923–1924, oil on paperboard, 70 × 82 cm, Bratislava City Gallery, inv. no. A 468.  Anton Jaszusch (heirs)/LITA, Society of Authors, 2018

62

Košice Modernism

visions of natural, historical, and social disasters. These themes reflect a strong moralizing aspect that entered his work. After the war, ethical questions became a frequent subject; the horrors and suffering experienced during the war aroused in him a feeling of entitlement to righteousness and justice; with paintings such as Pokrytectvo (Hypocrisy, 1922–1924), Žiarlivosť (Jealousy, 1921–1924), Na trhu dievčat (On the Women’s Market, 1921–1924), and Na colnici (At the Customs House, 1921–1924) he mercilessly exposed human weaknesses and the lust for power. His irony extended to the violation of pictorial conventions, traditional imagery, and iconography. During this period, the artist permanently returned to the subject of the wanderer, forced to find his way in the world, which he alternately depicted in harmony and unity with the universe, as in Symfónia (Symphony, 1922–1924),19 or riding a horse, as in Nirvána I (Nirvana I, c. 1920–1921; Figure 2.5).20 In the latter work, pursuing happiness and truth, Jaszusch arrives at the destination of his journey: nirvana—nothingness.21 The dreamlike horseman, perhaps a hidden self-portrait, becomes the symbol of a vain human quest, the apocalyptic vision embedded in a world burnt to ashes. The subject of the universe led the artist to pursue a number of formal experiments verging on non-representative depiction;22 many of these landscape and figural paintings are closer to the compositions of pure abstract forms than to realistic depiction. Jaszusch’s peculiar world view, typical of his work, was shaped by his deep moral convictions and principles. His personal attitude, stemming from a sarcastic approach to life and

Figure 2.5  A  ntal Jaszusch, Nirvána I (Nirvana I), c. 1920–1921, oil on canvas, 110 × 130 cm, East Slovak Gallery, inv. no. O 1333.  Anton Jaszusch (heirs)/LITA, Society of Authors, 2018

63

Zsófia Kiss-Szemán

a skeptical nature, influenced the paintings inspired by everyday life. Depicting deformed figures and shapes and grotesque scenes, these ambiguous works resembled scenes from an absurd drama. The writer’s task, Jaszusch wrote in 1924, “is not to write heroic tales, but to help people to learn to know themselves and their own destiny, and, based on this understanding, to show them the direction of their actions.”23 Along with human weakness and vice, Jaszusch also depicted his own personal vision of humankind and destiny using the metaphor of the mill, or a mighty wheel—the wheel of fortune or destiny, perhaps. The unfortunate individual, deprived of all rights, convictions, and self-confidence and unable to control his or her own destiny, is thus forced to submit to this wheel, for example in Žltý mlyn I (Yellow Mill I, 1920–1921) and Žltý mlyn II (Yellow Mill II, 1921–1922),24 and is ultimately swept away.25

The Great Cycle Between the fall of 1922 and April 1924, Jaszusch completed a great cycle of ten large-scale canvases, each about 3 × 3 meters.26 Today we know of five of these works that are still extant: Putovanie duší (Wandering of Souls, 1923–1924), Život človeka (Human Life, 1924), Posledný súd a zrod nového Adama (Judgement Day and the Birth of New Adam, 1924), Zánik planéty (Planet Extinction, 1924), and Revolúcia (Revolution, 1923). The cycle begins with the history of the universe (Planet Extinction, Flood), the story of humanity (Human Life, Source of Life, The Tragedy of Man), and the history of humanity (War, Revolution, Golgotha), and ends with Posledný súd a zrod nového Adama (Judgement Day and the Birth of New Adam), followed by a coalescence of universe and humanity, Putovanie duší (Wandering of Souls, 1923–1924).27 The three paintings Prameň života (Source of Life, 1924), Život človeka (Human Life, 1924), and Tragédia človeka (The Tragedy of Man, 1924) address the most important subject of the cycle, human life. The painting Source of Life, which depicted a “decorative whirling cycle of elliptical shapes [symbolizing] human sexual life”—its depictions of egg cells and spermatozoa provoked outrage—has not been preserved. The composition Život človeka. Voľná kompozícia (Human Life: Free Composition, 1924; Figure 2.6) is dominated by the figures of a man and a woman, forefather and foremother, encompassed within an endless stream of human life emanating from her womb.28 At the very center of the cycle, the powerful figure of the mother, in the protective embrace of the father, is giving her breast to the youngest child. The progression of life begins with the bright pale colors of the infants and young children, but these shade gradually into the dark and somber palette of old age, until the spiral finally breaks out of the lower picture frame and we are returned to the ashes and dust of death and the grave. Unfortunately, little is known about the third painting, The Tragedy of Man. From the three paintings in the series depicting the history of humanity, only one, Revolúcia (Revolution, 1923), is still known.29 The figure of an intellectual appears in the lower-right corner, observing events: at a factory courtyard, in the midst of collapsing buildings, a crowd has gathered around the figure of an agitator. An anonymous group, lacking individual features, serves to convey the historical nature of the unfolding revolution. The dark-blue color scheme references the attire of the blue-collar workers. As in the painting Vojna (War, 1923), Revolution depicts the absurdity of human effort, in this case a destructive, violent act leading to doom.30 Golgota (Golgotha, 1923), the third history painting, completed in 1923, has been lost or destroyed. The huge canvas of Judgement Day and the Birth of New Adam suggests that Jaszusch’s vision of the Day of Atonement was unequivocally skeptical.31 The main axis of the huge composition is defined by three figures. In the upper part of the painting one sees a spirit, a “Supreme 64

Košice Modernism

Figure 2.6  Antal Jaszusch, Život človeka. Voľná kompozícia (Human Life. Free Composition), 1924, oil on canvas, 266 × 286 cm, East Slovak Gallery, inv. no. O 2341.  Anton Jaszusch (heirs)/ LITA, Society of Authors, 2018

Being,” with outspread hands. The purpose of the second figure, outlined in red chalk, remains unknown; possibly it represents a future vision of mankind. In the foreground is a figure sitting with his head resting on his knees. His isolation is emphasized by the strong red line of the silhouette. To the sides, one sees death and the damned: “a man, a representative of revolt and defiance, and a priest serving mass to a pouch of gold coins.”32 Jaszusch supplemented his vision of the disaster of human history and the individual with the catastrophe of planet earth. The painting Potopa (Flood, 1924) has been lost, but in Zánik planéty (Planet Extinction, 1924; Figure 2.7)33 we see a “fantastic vision of cosmic disaster caused by a sudden change in the law of gravity.”34 Planets and the eddying remains of vegetation are overtaken by a broadly streaming ribbon of water in a powerful S-shaped curve that winds around and across the entire composition. According to a newspaper note, Jaszusch painted “the planet extinction with all the fire and the flood.”35 The large-format canvas originally titled Putovanie duší (Migration of Souls, 1923–1924; Plate 4)36 is filled by a singular enormous, darkly illuminated vortex of plasma, within which masses of multicolored zygotes tumble and swirl downward, in ever tighter spirals. Looking closer one finds the shapes of human figures, silhouetted in a blue twilight, being carried along with them, some swimming, like dolphins in the sea. The painting is among the most beautiful and most original works of the period. Jaszusch’s suggestive vision of a perfect harmony between mankind and the universe appears as an orphic dance of joy. The painting, with its 65

Zsófia Kiss-Szemán

rhythmic surface, serves as a background for a celebration of life and reflects Jaszusch’s further development subsequent to his own experiences of the horrors of the First World War. Instead of individual expression, art became his journey to find himself and his own identity.

The 1924 Art Discussion on Jaszusch’s Work and Exhibition37 During the 1924 exhibition in Košice, Jaszusch’s works were positively received by many, but widely misunderstood, particularly among some of the critics.38 The press published several articles in an attempt to explain the depth of the artist’s work: There emerged an artist holding a mirror up to postwar man, the man who is hurt, disillusioned, distrustful, and embittered. It is not a poetic depiction of reality, but X-ray vision and exaggeration which create the basis of Jaszusch’s aesthetics.39 On the first day of the exhibition, Jaszusch’s paintings were reviewed by Ignotus, one of the most reputable Hungarian art critics, who warmly praised them.40 The exhibition also traveled to Bratislava,41 provoking an extensive and passionate debate in the Bratislava dailies, Slovák (Slovak) and Slovenský denník (Slovak Daily), perhaps the most significant in the history of the fine arts in Slovakia, but as it continued, it became increasingly schematic; participants focused on the artist’s nationality and aspects of morality and the erotic in his work. Naturally, verbal attacks occurred as well. An unprecedented debate was provoked largely as a result of an enthusiastic article by Jur Koza-Matejov, a Catholic priest and journalist, which was published on the front page of the daily Slovák immediately after the opening of the exhibition: The artist presents himself as a creator of a new tendency, new form and a new religion in painting . . . Everything breaks away from the shackles of materialism and turns into mysticism of metaphysics . . . Before our eyes, a sort of pantheist world is flowing, twisting and moving, driven by an unknown eternal force, possessed by some kind of omnipotent spirit in endless universe . . . This is a gigantic labor and work of a Slovak artist . . . Gentlemen, a meteor has appeared. Whether you like it or not, you must admire him! . . . I have been always jealous of great men of foreign nations. Today I stop being jealous.42 Initially, the debate focused mainly on the question of originality: Jaszusch’s adherents emphasized his innovative approach and extraordinary painting technique, while his opponents regarded him as an epigone of German expressionism, an art movement whose import, they believed, was on the wane. This may, as much as anything, have been a result of the absence of exhibitions of foreign artists in Bratislava and a lack contacts with modern and avant-garde art.43 Some critics pointed to the subjects of Jaszusch’s works, his versatility and relationship to the universe and to metaphysics, while others regarded his works as an unsuccessful attempt to convey on the canvas what were rightly literary or philosophical problems. Jaszusch’s work, one critic noted, was “something completely indigestible and too obscure: it is literature, not fine art.”44 In contrast, Koza-Matejov pointed to Jaszuch’s intelligence and education, describing him as a “thoughtful, withdrawn man, someone above the rhythm of everyday life, looking at the world, the everyday problems, the earth and the sky from the distance.”45 Jaszusch’s opponents questioned his Slovak nationality (his father was German) as well as his painting, which they rejected as an explanatory example of “German art,” and characterized his 66

Košice Modernism

Figure 2.7  A  ntal Jaszusch, Zánik planéty (Planet Extinction), 1924, oil on canvas, 266 × 268 cm, East Slovak Gallery, inv. no. O 2343.  Anton Jaszusch (heirs)/LITA, Society of Authors, 2018

culture as something foreign, something other than Slovak. Koza-Matejov defended him with respect to his nationality—“a son of Muríňová from Orava must be Slovak”—arguing that being a Slovak is not an advantage as the members of larger nations do not have to struggle against so much prejudice. In the growing debate Koza-Matejov did not hesitate in characterizing the opponents to Jaszusch’s work as executioners: “The artist . . . has a strength and energy to push Slovak painting to the foreground of contemporary art, [but then it begins, the] moral execution of a Slovak! The articles rain down, one attack after another.”46 Koza-Matejov agreed, however, with the assertion that in terms of subject matter, Jaszusch’s work was not Slovak: “He is European in the true sense of the word.”47 Last but not least, opponents reproached Jaszusch for being immoral: “[His] art is an impudent glorification of coitus; his paintings embody brazen lechery and incest. Entering the exhibition room is like entering the brothel.”48 The humoristic magazine Jež (Hedgehog) even published a vulgar caricature of Jaszusch’s painting Na kanóne (On the Canon, 1922–1924; Figure 2.8).49 Jaszusch’s exhibition aroused multifaceted and extensive debate about art and artistic life in Slovakia—sometimes comical and petty, other times serious and current, and occasionally even timeless.50 It dealt with a number of current and taboo themes. Around half the viewers were shocked and left the exhibition without actually understanding the artist’s irony and sarcasm. The universalism and spirituality of Jaszusch’s art and its supranational or European character were unfamiliar to viewers. The topicality of art that asked questions about the artist’s role and mission in society, fashion and imitation, and the legitimacy of nontraditional perceptions of 67

Zsófia Kiss-Szemán

Figure 2.8  Jež (Hedgehog), 1924, vol. 3, no. 5, 5. “A new gigantic art, or Jaszusch’s salamis from Košice, are the best in the world.” Jaszusch’s painting Na kanóne (On the Canon), 1922–1924, oil on canvas, 146 × 172 cm, East Slovak Gallery, inv. no. O 1457, was destroyed by fire at the East Slovak Gallery.  Anton Jaszusch (heirs)/LITA, Society of Authors, 2018

visual imagery, provoked an unheard-of reaction—clear evidence of the very bold and creative approach of the painter’s artistic thinking. Jaszusch’s pictorial aesthetics in the 1920s were complex, multilayered, and overloaded in the best sense. The keynote of every painting was enhanced by the work’s composition, color, and style of painting. The artist let his inner feelings and instincts run, but at the same time did not hesitate to use techniques such as deformation or exaggeration to achieve his desired expression. Although his formal artistic language is very original and interesting, the avant-garde nature of his work lies mainly in the subject matter: revolt and rebellion, but also a disruption of traditional iconography and the introduction of new and innovative themes rendered in an original manner. Jaszusch’s oeuvre, spanning more than half a century, constitutes an integral part of the history of Slovak fine arts. The painter’s spectacular and breathtaking vision of the human mission and destiny, of its place in the world and in the universe, represents the unique confession of an artist endowed with a brave and astonishing imagination as well as with the ars poetica of the modern human existence—beaten down by fate, full of skepticism and existential fear, on the one hand, yet civilized and educated with a fine sense of beauty, on the other. Jaszusch’s oeuvre largely contributed to the development of the art phenomenon we call Košice modernism. 68

Košice Modernism

Notes 1 The term has only been established recently, between 2010 and 2013, as part of the international research project led by Zsófia Kiss-Szemán. The research findings have been published in Lena Lešková and Zsófia Kiss-Szemán (eds.), Košická moderna: Umenie Košíc v dvadsiatych rokoch 20. storočia/Košice Modernism: Košice Art in the Nineteen-Twenties (Košice: East Slovak Gallery, 2013). The book was published on the occassion of the title Košice—European Capital of Culture 2013. 2 Košice, i.e., Kassa or Kaschau, was part of Hungary until 1918, and the Hungarian culture is still strongly present in the town. 3 Throughout this article, I use the Slovak form of the artist’s name, but provide the Hungarian variant in parentheses on first mention. 4 Tomáš Štrauss, Slovenský variant moderny [Slovak Variant of Modern Art] (Bratislava: Pallas, 1992), 19. 5 Private schools of painting run by Elemír/Elemér Halász-Hradil and Ľudovít/Lajos Csordák. 6 Magda Veselská, “Josef Polák a košická moderna” [Josef Polák and Košice Modernism], in Lena Lešková and Zsófia Kiss-Szemán (eds.), Košická moderna: Umenie Košíc v dvadsiatych rokoch 20. storočia/Košice Modernism: Košice Art in the Nineteen-Twenties (Košice: East Slovak Gallery, 2013), 126–137. 7 Tomáš Štrauss, “Košice: Od klasickej moderny k avantgarde (1908–1938: myslené koordináty a súvislosti stredoeurópskeho a euroamerického umenia)” [Košice: From Classical Modernism to Avant-garde (1908–1938): Imaginary Coordinates and Connections of Central European and Euro-American Art], in Zsófia Kiss-Szemán (ed.), Košická moderna I: Umenie Košíc v dvadsiatych rokoch 20. storočia [Košice Modernism I: Košice Art in the 1920s] (Košice:Východoslovenská galéria, 2010), 13–14. 8 Different theories of modern art come up with extreme interpretations or uses of the term. But there are also radical theories denying any form of manifestation of modernism in the development of society, such as that of Bruno Latour, Nikdy sme neboli moderní: Esej o symetrickej antropológii [We Have Never Been Modern: Essay on Symmetric Anthropology] (Bratislava: Kalligram, 2003). The author argues that we have never begun to enter the modern era: “[that] we have never been modern, or critical; [that] there has never been a yesteryear or an Old Regime . . . [that] we have never really left the old anthropological matrix behind, and that it could not have been otherwise . . . The antimoderns even accept the chief oddity of the moderns, the idea of a time that passes irreversibly and annuls the entire past in its wake . . . [The] modern world . . . permits scarcely anything more than small extensions of practices, slight accelerations in the circulation of knowledge, a tiny extension of societies, miniscule increase in the number of actors, small modifications of old beliefs.” Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 47–48. 9 Zsófia Kiss-Szemán, Anton Jasusch. Maliar a vizionár [Anton Jasusch: Painter and Visionary], exh. cat. (Bratislava: Galéria mesta Bratislavy, 2007). 10 Variants of the artist’s name include: Antal/Anton, Jaszusch/Jasusch/Jassusch/Jasszusch. 11 Jaszusch was registered as a student of the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest between 1904 and 1906. See “A Magyar Képzőművészeti Egyetem hallgatói 1871-től a mai napig” [Students of the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts from 1871 up to the Present], last accessed November 22, 2017, www.mke.hu/ about/hallgatoi_adatbazis.php/i. He began to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich on 27 October 1906 (drawing class of Peter von Halm). The records do not include the date of his departure from the Academy. See “Matrikelbücher: Akademie der Bildenen Künste München” [Registration Books: Academy of Fine Arts Munich], last accessed November 22, 2017, http://matrikel.adbk. de/05ordner/mb_1884-1920/jahr_1906/matrikel-03250. 12 József Rippl-Rónai (1861–1927) was one of the most significant representatives of Hungarian modern art. He lived and worked in Paris for a long time, where he joined Nabis, a group of artists mostly associated with the Académie Julian. 13 Rozhovor (Dialogue), c. 1908, oil, canvas, 49 × 60 cm, Slovak National Gallery, inv. no. 5184; Na poli (On the Field), c. 1908, oil, paperboard, 61 × 78 cm, Bratislava City Gallery, inv. no. A 3606. 14 Dvaja muži (Two Men ), c. 1912, pastel, paper, 35.5 × 46 cm, East Slovak Gallery, inv. no. K 347. 15 The artist held his first one-man show in 1912. He presented fifty-nine paintings, of which thirty-three were landscapes. See Béla Reiter, Jaszusch Antal gyüjteményes kiállitásához [On Solo Exhibition of Antal Jaszusch], The Archives of the Slovak National Gallery, Fund of Anton Jaszusch, 15A26, exhibition catalogue, original, n.p. 16 Krajina so stromom (Landscape with Trees), 1923–1924, oil, paperboard, 70 × 82 cm, Bratislava City Gallery, inv. no. A468.

69

Zsófia Kiss-Szemán 17 For more details on the artist’s return home in 1920 see “Antal Jaszusch, košický maliar s dobrým menom, sa vrátil domov po piatich rokoch sibírskeho zajatia” [Antal Jaszusch, a reputable Košice-based artist, returned home from Siberian POW internment], Kassai Napló [Daily Journal Košice], 1920, vol. 36, no. 249, 3. For more information on the prisoner-of-war camp in Russia and artist’s homeward journey, see Kassai Napló, 1920, vol. 36, no. 252. Jaszusch describes everyday life in the camp, the cultural activities of prisoners (organizing theatre performances and concerts), his two-year stay in Vladivostok, the mentality of the Japanese and Chinese, and the way home on the former German battleship “Grand President” together with another 6,000 prisoners of war (from Vladivostok via Malacca, Singapore, Columba, Ceylon, Kandy Town, the Gulf of Aden, Bab el-Mandeb strait, the Red Sea, the Suez Canal, Port-Said and Trieste to Košice). 18 Žena (Woman, 1921–1924), Na kanóne (On the Canon, 1922–1924), Láska (Love, 1922–1924), Pokrytectvo (Veľká kompozícia I) [Hypocrisy (Large Composition I), 1922–1924], Golgota (Golgotha, 1923), Skeč lásky (Sketch of Love, 1921–1924), Na colnici (At the Customs House, 1921–1924), Na trhu (On the Marketplace, 1922), Hudba (Music, 1920–1922), Maliar a model (Veľká kompozícia III) [Painter and a Model (Large Composition III), 1921–1924], Žiarlivosť (Jealousy, 1921–1924), Moji predchodcovia (Umelcovo vyznanie) [My Predecessors (Artist’s Confession)], 1923–1924], Obdiv (Admiration, 1921–1924), Adam a Eva (Adam and Eve, 1922–1924), Samson a Delila (Veľká kompozícia II) [Samson and Delilah (Large Composition II), 1922–1924], Voľná kompozícia II (Revolúcia) [Free Composition II (Revolution), 1922–1924, East Slovak Gallery], Žltý mlyn II (Yellow Mill II, 1921–1922, Slovak National Gallery), Moc slnka (Power of the Sun, 1922–1924), Zvedavosť (Curiosity, 1921–1924, private collection)—they are each about 150 × 172 cm. 19 Symfónia (Symphony), 1922–1924, oil, paperboard, 61.2 × 75.5 cm, Slovak National Gallery, inv. no. O 2701. 20 Nirvána I (Nirvana I), c. 1920–1921, oil, canvas, 110 × 130 cm, East Slovak Gallery, inv. no. O 1333; Nirvána II (Nirvana II), c. 1922, oil, canvas, 80.5 × 95.7 cm, Slovak National Gallery, inv. no. O 2698. 21 Jaszusch did not necessarily learn of the concept of nirvana in the Far East. Dr. Ferdinánd Szerényi, for instance, published in 1923 a series of essays on nirvana in the pages of the newspaper Kassai Napló. See Kassai Napló, 1923, vol. x, no. 263. 22 See Dynamická kompozícia (Dynamic Composition [Composition III]), oil, paperboard, 57.1 × 74.5 cm, East Slovak Gallery, inv. no. O 1449; Život človeka (Life Cycle), 1922–1924, oil, paperboard, 61 × 75 cm, East Slovak Gallery, inv. no. O 1466; Kompozícia (Composition), 1922–1924, oil, paperboard, 61.5 × 77.5 cm, East Slovak Gallery, inv. no. O 1467; Zánik planéty (Planéty, Smrť planéty) (Planet Extinction [Planets, Death of the Planet]), 1922–1924, oil, paperboard, 61 × 75.5 cm, East Slovak Gallery, inv. no. O 1473. 23 The manuscript is found in the Archives of the Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava. Jaszusch wrote a play in the Hungarian language; the first version, titled A Szellem komédiája [Comedy of the Mind], comes from 1925 (original title: A majom—Monkey, Archives of the Slovak National Gallery, Fund Jasusch, 426/85, Personal documents 15A19/487/86/28). 24 Žltý mlyn I (Yellow Mill I), 1920–1921, oil, canvas, 100 × 120 cm, East Slovak Gallery, inv. no. O 1448; Žltý mlyn II (Yellow Mill II), 1921–1924, oil, canvas, 148 × 172.5 cm, Slovak National Gallery, inv. no. O 2697. 25 The motif can be found throughout the entire history of twentieth-century art; see, for instance, Das große Rad (The Great Wheel, 1920) by László Moholy-Nagy, or the Koło i lina (Wheel with Rope, 1973) by Magdalena Abakanowicz. 26 The theme and the titles of the works refer to (possibly even illustrate) Imre Madach’s play The Tragedy of Man, considered to be the greatest work of Hungarian-language theatre of the nineteenth century. The play follows the figure of Adam who, guided by Lucifer, reincarnates (with Eve) through the various historical periods; it ends in the extinction of humanity due to entropy and the cooling of the sun. The theme of the old and new Adam and Eve and the drama of humanity were very popular in Central Europe in the 1920s and inspired artists, writers, and theatre directors. For a more detailed interpretation of the art discussion see Zsófia Kiss-Szemán, “Mravné popravenie jedného Slováka, alebo gigantická práca a tvorba jedného slovenského umelca:Výtvarná diskusia o tvorbe Antona Jaszuscha v roku 1924” [Moral Execution of a Slovak, or Gigantic Work of a Slovak Artist: Art Discussion on the Work of Anton Jaszusch in 1924], ARS, 2009, vol. 42, no. 1, 94–108. 27 For the production of works see the period press: Gyula Merényi, “Jaszusch Antal,” Kassai Napló, 1922, vol. 38, no. 289, 5; József Jarno, “Három kép: Golgota, Háború, Forradalom” [Three Paintings: Golgotha, War, Revolution], Kassai Napló, 1923, vol. 39, no. 234, 10. It is generally known that Jaszusch presented

70

Košice Modernism

28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37

38

39

40

41 42

43 44

the three paintings to the public at his exhibition in Košice in December 1923 (see Kassai Napló, 1923, vol. 39, no. 284, 3). Život človeka. Voľná kompozícia (Human Life: Free Composition), 1924, oil, canvas, 266 × 286 cm, East Slovak Gallery, inv. no. O 2341. A new variant of the painting is Život človeka (Kompozícia) (Human Life [Composition]), 1958–1960, oil, cardboard, 48.5 × 61 cm, East Slovak Gallery, inv. no. O 2279. The painting was restored in 2007. Revolúcia (Revolution [Free Composition V]), 1923, oil, canvas, 223 × 290 cm, East Slovak Gallery, inv. no. O 2345. The artist’s conviction that revolution does not necessarily mean change for the better seems to be the main reason why he did not approach the leftist artists living and working in Košice. Posledný súd a zrod nového Adama (Judgement Day and the Birth of New Adam [Free Composition IV, Trial,The Day of Reckoning]), 1924, oil, canvas, 286 × 266 cm, East Slovak Gallery, inv. no. O 2344.The painting was restored in 2007–2008. Tomáš Štraus, Anton Jasusch a zrod východoslovenskej avantgardy dvadsiatych rokov [Anton Jasusch and the Birth of East Slovakian Avant-Garde in the 1920s] (Bratislava:Vydavateľstvo Slovenského fondu výtvarných umení, 1966), 71, note no. 2/e. Zánik planéty (Planet Extinction), 1924, oil, canvas, 266 × 268 cm, East Slovak Gallery, inv. no. O 2343. Tomáš Štraus, Anton Jasusch a zrod východoslovenskej avantgardy dvadsiatych rokov [Anton Jasusch and the Birth of East Slovakian Avant-Garde in the 1920s] (Bratislava,Vydavateľstvo Slovenského fondu výtvarných umení, 1966), 71, note no. 2/a; under the title The End of Planet (see above). Ignotus (Hugó Veigelsberg), “Jaszusch Antal,” Kassai Napló, 1924, vol. 40, no. 103, 3. Ignotus was a leading figure of the Nyugat (West) magazine, which united the most progressive authors before the First World War; in the 1920s he regularly contributed reviews and critical studies to the daily Kassai Napló. He was enthusiastic about Jaszusch’s works. Putovanie duší (Migration of Souls [Wandering Souls, Life Cycle]), 1923–1924, oil, canvas, 268 × 290 cm, Slovak National Gallery, inv. no. O 2699. For a more detailed interpretation of the art discussion, see Zsófia Kiss-Szemán, “Mravné popravenie jedného Slováka, alebo gigantická práca a tvorba jedného slovenského umelca: Výtvarná diskusia o tvorbe Antona Jaszuscha v roku 1924” [Moral Execution of a Slovak, or Gigantic Work of a Slovak Artist: Art Discussion on the Work of Anton Jaszusch in 1924], ARS, 2009, vol. 42, no. 1, 94–108. See Kassai Napló, vol. 40, no. 107, May 9, 1924, 5; Kassai Napló, vol. 40, no. 108, May 10, 1924, 4; Kassai Napló, vol. 40, no. 109, May 11, 1924, 4; Kassai Napló, vol. 40, no. 113, May 16, 1924, 4; Kassai Napló, vol. 40, no. 114, May 17, 1924, 6; Kassai Napló, vol. 40, no. 115, May 18, 1924, 5; “Umelecká výstava Jasuscha” [Jaszusch’s Exhibition], Slovenský východ [Slovak East], vol. 6, May 6, 1924, 3; “Výstava prác Antala Jaszuscha” [Exhibition of Antal Jaszusch’s Paintings], Slovenský východ, vol. 6, May 10, 1924, 3–4. “Zjavil sa umelec, ktorý nastavil neidealizované zrkadlo povojnovému človeku – človeku doráňanému, zbavenému ilúzií a veľkých ideálov, človeku nedôverčivému a zatrpknutému. Nie poetizácia videného, ale röntgenové osvetlenie a zveličenie tvorí základ Jaszuschovej estetiky.” Sándor Faragó, “Jaszusch,” Reggel [The Morning], vol. 4, July 8, 1924. Ignotus (Hugó Veigelsberg), “Jaszusch Antal,” Kassai Napló, 1924, vol. 40, no. 103, 3. “The viewer can see the orgies of moves and colours, where the dark flares up and turns into the light, the sparkles and vibrations set fire and arched lines activate such a motion, beat, even rotation that it seems to be unbelievable that one is actually looking at motionless patches of color.” The exhibition was opened to the public on July 1, 1924 at a gym of the Roman-Catholic secondary school (Csáky School) in Ružová Street (today Jesenského Street) in Bratislava, where a number of significant exhibitions were held in the interwar period, and was on display until July 29, 1924. “Z tejto izby vystupuje pred verejnosť ako tvorca nového smeru, novej formy a nového vierovyznania v maliarstve . . . Všetko povystupuje z pút materializmu a prejde do mysticizmu metafyziky . . . Pred nami sa valí, krúti a pohybuje akýsi panteistický svet; hnaný neznámou večnou silou, opanovaný akýmsi všemohúcim duchom v nekonečnom vesmíre . . .Toto je gigantická práca a tvorba jedného slovenského umelca. . . . Páni, meteor sa nám zjavil. Či chcete, či nechcete, predsa ho musíte obdivovať! . . .Vždy som závidel veľkých mužov cudzích národov. Dnes prestanem im závidieť.” Jur Koza-Matejov, “Jaszusch,” Slovák [Slovak], vol. 6, no. 157, July 12, 1924, 1. “Slovenská nekritičnosť” [Slovak Lack of Criticism], Slovenský denník [Slovak Daily Journal], vol. 6, no. 160.a, July 16, 1924, 1. Ibid. Other articles published in Slovenský denník daily: J.Š., “Ešte Jaszusch” [And Once Again Jaszuch], Slovenský denník, vol. 6, no. 161.a, July 17, 1924, 1; Štefan Straka, “Umenie a technická zručnosť” [Art

71

Zsófia Kiss-Szemán

45 46 47 48 49

50

and Technical Skills], Slovenský denník, vol. 6, no. 160.a, July 16, 1924, 1–2; Andrej Kováčik, “Drahý Koza!” [Dear Koza!], Slovenský denník, vol. 6, no. 163.a, July 19, 1924, 3; “Na Jaszuschovej výstave” [At Jaszusch’s Exhibition], Slovenský denník, vol. 6, no. 165.a, July 22, 1924, 1; “Maliar Kováčik: Moje stretnutie so zelenou múzou” [Painter Kováčik: My Meeting with a Green Muse], Slovenský denník, vol. 6, no. 166.a, July 23, 1924, 3. Jur Koza-Matejov, “Okolo Jasuscha” [About Jaszusch], Slovák, vol. 6, no. 166, July 23, 1924, 1. Jur Koza-Matejov, “Katovia v politike” [Executioners in Politics], Slovák, vol. 6, no. 167, July 24, 1924, 1–2. Jur Koza-Matejov, “Hozanna a či Ukrižuj?” [Hosanna, or Crucify?], Slovák, vol. 6, no. 161, July 17, 1624, 2. “Slovenská nekritičnosť’ [Slovak Lack of Criticism], Slovenský denník, vol. 6, no. 160.a, July 16, 1924, p. 1. See Jež, 1924, vol. 3, no. 5, 5. “A new gigantic art, or Jaszusch’s salamis from Košice, are the best in the world.” Jaszusch’s painting Na kanóne (On the Canon), 1922–1924, oil, canvas, 146 × 172 cm, East Slovak Gallery, inv. no. O 1457) was destroyed by fire at the East Slovak Gallery. For more information see Peter Markovič et al., Východoslovenská galéria Košice 1985: Súbor dokumentov k požiaru vo Východoslovenskej galérii [East Slovak Gallery in Košice 1985: Documents relating to the Fire at the Gallery] (Košice: East Slovak Gallery, 2005), 55. Another humoristic magazine, Koza, published a caricature by Andrej Kováčik, who used Jaszusch’s style in painting to criticize the government: “Svornosť vlády (dla Jaszuscha): Nikto ich nerozlúči. PINX XX” [Unity of the Government (after Jaszusch): Nobody disparts/disjoints them], in Koza (Vychodí keď chce) [Goat (It comes out wenn it will)], 1924, vol. 2, no. 7, 8–9, caricature signed “Jasuš-Kováčik”. For the actual extent of the debate see: “Malé obrázky z Jaszuschovej výstavy: Dobrá rada” [Small Pictures from Jaszusch’s Exhibition: A Piece of Good Advice], Slovák, vol. 6, no. 162, July 18, 1924, 1; “Malé obrázky z Jaszuschovej výstavy. Dole klobúkom!” [Small Pictures from Jaszusch’s Exhibition], Slovák, vol. 6, no. 163, July 19, 1924, 1–2; “Okolo Jaszuscha” [About Jaszusch], Slovák, vol. 6, no. 164, July 20, 1924, 3; “Okolo Jaszuscha (Pokračovanie)” [About Jaszusch (Part 2)], Slovák, vol. 6, no. 165, July 22, 1924, 1–2; “Okolo Jaszuscha (Pokračovanie)” [About Jaszusch (Part 3)], Slovák, vol. 6, no. 166, July 23, 1924, 1; “Okolo Jaszuscha (Pokračovanie)” [About Jaszusch (Part 4)], Slovák, vol. 6, no. 167, July 24, 1924, 1–2; “Okolo Jaszuscha (Pokračovanie)” [About Jaszusch (Part 5)], Slovák, vol. 6, no. 168, July 25, 1924, 1; “Okolo Jaszuscha (Pokračovanie)” [About Jaszusch (Part 6)], Slovák, vol. 6, no. 169, July 26, 1924, 1; “Okolo Jaszuscha (Pokračovanie)” [About Jaszusch (Part 7)], Slovák, vol. 6, no. 170, July 27, 1924, 1; “Okolo Jaszuscha (Pokračovanie)” [About Jaszusch (Part 8)], Slovák, vol. 6, no. 171, July 29, 1924, 1–2; Tido Jozef Gašpar, “Jasszuch pinx . . . (Anno 1924)” [Jaszusch Pinx], Vatra [Bonfire], 1924, vol. 6, no. 3, 51–55; Nemo, “Legenda (Venujem Jaszuschovi a jeho kritikom)” [Legend (Devoted to Jaszusch and his Critics)], Vatra, 1924, vol. 6, no. 3, 65–66; “Bilderausstellung Anton Jaszusch” [Exhibition of Anton Kaszusch], Pressburger Zeitung [Bratislavaer Journal], vol. 161, no. 190, July 12, 1924, 4; F. H., “Jaszusch”, Pressburger Presse [Bratislavaer Press], vol. 27, no. 1357, July 21, 1924, 3; Zd.V. Přibík, “Feuilleton o výstave Jaszuschovej” [Feuilleton about Jaszusch’s Exhibition], Robotnícke noviny [Labour Journal], vol. 21, no. 164, July 19, 1924, 5–6; j.s. (Ján Smrek), “Jasszusch,” Mladé Slovensko [Young Slovakia], 1924, vol, 6, no. 9, 274–276; “Na Jaszuschovej výstave” [In Jaszusch’s Exhibition], Slovenská politika [Slovak Politic], vol. 4, no. 164, July 22, 1924, 4.

72

3 EXPRESSIONISM IN HUNGARY From the Neukunstgruppe to Der Sturm András Zwickl

Art historians in Hungary have largely ignored any appearances of expressionism before the First World War in Hungary, particularly the early reception and influence of German expressionism; thus it is appropriate to take a close look at exhibitions of expressionist art in Budapest and examine the reaction of the public and the art critics, as well as the effect they had on Hungarian art. The success of the modern trends, “-isms,” stylistic influences, and movements in Western Europe, and the development of their local variants have been central issues in Hungarian art history, which attempts to emphasize, above all, the influence of French art; in the past decade, large exhibitions have focused on the impact of art from Paris during the period before the First World War.1 During this same time, however, Germany and Austria also provided decisive impulses for Hungarian art, especially in the exhibition hall. During the First World War, Hungarian artists had direct contact with the art scene in Germany, and by the 1920s, owing to their emigration, Hungarian avant-garde artists had become active participants.

Exhibitions in Budapest: The Neukunstgruppe (New Art Group) The first reference to “expressionism” came in January 1912, on the occasion of the exhibition of the Viennese Neukunstgruppe, in the House of Artists (Művészház) in Budapest, which featured works by Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, Paris Gütersloh, Arnold Schönberg, Anton Faistauer, Anton Kolig, and Robin Christian Andersen. Recounting his conversation with one of the participants,2 an art critic noted that in contrast to the impressionists, they call themselves expressionists, that is to say—as their haggard, full-bearded leader, Anton Faistauer explained to the author of these lines—they do not seek to convey the impressions acquired through vision, but to capture on their canvases the mediation of inner feelings filtered through consideration after viewing.3 Other art critics described their art as “ultra-secessionist” and “neomodern”—both prefixes were in common use as designators of the latest artistic trends.4 The demand for the designation of the new trends and the clarification of their relation to impressionism appeared constantly

73

András Zwickl

in the contemporary criticism.5 The term impressionism had been used to characterize modern artistic directions in Hungarian art criticism for a long time, especially after the emergence of the Nagybánya (today: Baia Mare, Romania) artists’ colony in 1896.6 In 1907, the first modern artists’ group was founded under the name MIÉNK (OURS)—the Circle of Hungarian Naturalists and Impressionists.7 It was at this time that the term neoimpressionism emerged, to describe the newer trends and the painting of the young artists. The founding members of the Nagybánya artists’ colony, whose program was based on a foundation of naturalism and impressionism, later referred to this second generation by the derogatory nickname “neos.”8 When the House of Artists organized a large-scale exhibition of international impressionists in 1910, with an art-historical overview ranging from the beginning of modernism up to contempo­rary trends, the postimpressionist movements were summarily placed under “neoimpressionists, synthetists and decorative aspirations.” Today we speak of the postimpressionists (Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin), divisionists (Cross), fauvists (Matisse, Rouault), and cubists (Picasso).9 These terms, though already in use at the time, had emerged only shortly before and thus were not prevalent, and it was not yet possible to say which of them would become the definitive designation for the artistic movement in question. With respect to the Neukunstgruppe, the newly coined term postimpressionism also appeared in the press, but according to one art critic, “the definition ‘postimpressionist,’ as some people call the young group from Vienna, only alludes to chronological order.”10 Most reports and critiques in the press echoed not only the most common derogative remarks of rejection (e.g., bluff, humbug), but also a number of specific phrases that would later return in descriptions of expressionism. These addressed—with both positive and negative connotations—­ qualities of the psychological (“nervous genius,” “hysteria”), the spiritual (“mystical,” “visions”), and the philosophical (“metaphysical torments,” “speculative meditation”) with respect to the artists and works; in reference to style and form, terms such as “archaic” and “primitive” occurred in the texts.11 Used in reference to the visual arts, “expressionism” turned up in the belletristic literature the same year as the Neukunstgruppe exhibition, in the novel In the Dust, by Gyula Török (1888–1918), who used it in connection with a fictitious artists’ group called The Nine—a direct allusion to the existing Hungarian artists’ group The Eight (Nyolcak). Török, as the art critic of the daily newspaper Magyar Hírlap (Hungarian Journal), had reported on the exhibition of the Viennese artists; his novel was serialized, in 1912, in the same newspaper.12 Some art critics immediately found equivalents to the Neukunstgruppe in Hungarian art. They drew parallels between the young artists from Vienna and the members of the group The Eight, who initially exhibited, in 1909, under the name Keresők (The Seekers).13 This name was merely a reflection of the frequent references at the time to the progressive artists as “seekers” or “chercheurs”14 and referred to both their attitude and their artistic practice. The name was also a reflection of the group’s commitment to the search for new ways in painting, experiments with problems of volume, space, surface, color, etc. Their debut in 1909 was a great sensation, as it was the first opportunity to introduce the public in Hungary to the newest trends in contemporary art in the form of an independent exhibition.15 In April 1911, the group, now as “The Eight,” organized its next show in the National Salon (Nemzeti Szalon).16 An art critic, referring to the artists of the Neukunstgruppe as “seekers,” alluded to this exhibition.17 The leading figure of The Eight, Károly Kernstok (1873–1940), organized a large retrospective exhibition in the House of Artists just before the 1912 Neukunstgruppe exhibition. The significance of The Eight and the linking of their painting to expressionism came nevertheless only later.

74

Expressionism in Hungary

The Sonderbund Exhibition in Cologne In January 1912, only a few weeks after the term’s first appearance in Hungary, expressionism was mentioned several times in reports on preparations for the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne. The critics wrote about the relation of the newer trends to impressionism and maintained that the exhibition aimed at presenting “modern artistic movements that emerged after impressionism, which may be properly defined by the term expressionism.”18 One article, titled “Expressionist Exhibition,” reported on the event before its opening in May 1912 and explained that the organizers had chosen this name because “the principles of the new radical directions start with turning against Impressionism, and seeking artistic discovery in completely different, even opposing ways.”19 The Hungarian works exhibited in Cologne were assembled by Zoltán Felvinczi Takács (1880–1964), a specialist for Old German art, who became acquainted with Walter Cohen, one of the organizers of the Sonderbund exhibition through this field. Felvinczi Takács was a curator in the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, but was also active as an art critic and published several articles about the exhibition in the Hungarian press.20 Felvinczi Takács obviously applied the term in a rather broad sense, as a collective noun for the newest trends in modern art: “The large movement that started with Impressionism and developed into expressionism quickly conquered Paris and later other countries as well.”21 He linked the emergence of these new trends in Hungary to Béla Czóbel (1883–1976), who first presented his “neo” works at the Nagybánya artists’ colony in 1906 and later became a member of The Eight.22 In another essay, titled “Expressionism,” Felvinczi Takács attempted to provide a closer and more concrete definition of the new style: “We can speak of expressionism in every case when we are faced with a certain logical enhancement of the depiction of forms and colors, and when it comes to an increase of expressive power.”23 One third of the Hungarian participants in the Sonderbund exhibition were members of The Eight. On the occasion of their last exhibition, in November 1912, they were criticized and labeled “poor imitators” of the futurists and expressionists.24 With regard to international parallels and models, one finds elements of national rhetoric. A critique of the Neukunstgruppe exhibition stated that it is only worth dealing with immature art on the grounds of chauvinism, as the meandering paths of Hungarian art will likely be closely followed by the Hungarian public . . . but why should we bother with the blunders of our Austrian brother-in-laws?25 In connection with the Sonderbund exhibition, one also finds an emphasis on national characterization. Writing about the French influences, Felvinczi Takács noted “the first great international exhibition showing the development and the program of expressionism there in the Rhine-region so full of French culture.”26 Hungarian artists also appear in this context, and Felvinczi Takács gives them their due: “We Hungarians make a good impression through the intensity of empathy and the directness of performance . . . with its warmness [the collection] shows or suggests more temperament than a whole series of official exhibitions for a complete museum.”27 The key words here thus emphasize the Hungarian character of this art. Objections by critics to the modern tendencies focused on their strangeness and outlandishness, while supporting critiques pointed out the local aspect of the Hungarian Youth as a form of legitimization.

75

András Zwickl

The Exhibition of Futurists and Expressionists Art critic Artúr Elek (1876–1944) referred to both the Neukunstgruppe and the Sonderbund exhibition when he wrote about the Exhibition of Futurists and Expressionists, the traveling presentation of works from Herwarth Walden’s Berlin-based gallery Der Sturm that was shown at the National Salon at the end of January 1913.28 This was the first time that works of expressionist artists from Germany could be seen in Budapest. In a review of the original exhibition in Berlin published in the magazine Kultúra (Culture) in the spring of 1912, the author speculated that “it is not at all impossible to imagine that Budapest would also receive [the futurists], as Budapest provides a fertile ground for everything that is foreign, new and noisy.”29 Before Budapest, the exhibition had been in Vienna, but with only twenty-four futurist paintings on display.30 Walden complemented the works by the four Italian artists with another eighty-seven works by eleven artists, among them Oskar Kokoschka; the Berlin artists Egon Adler, Ludwig Meidner, and Arthur Segal; some Berlin-based members of the Neue Secession such as César Klein and Heinrich Richter-Berlin; Neue Secession painters from elsewhere, including Wilhelm Morgner (Figure 3.1) and Moriz Melzer, and even Czech member Bohumil Kubišta; and Wassily Kandinsky and Alexei Jawlensky, two representative figures of Der Blaue Reiter.31 Although the futurists were represented by only a fourth of the works in the exhibition, critics focused on them. They viewed both futurism and expressionism as typical examples of the newest and most radical trends in art and tried to identify features they shared in common, among them novelty, fashionability, commercial considerations, as well as artistic programs and theory.32 The national viewpoint was also raised. The double cast was clear from the beginning: The German artists were the overdue followers of French painting; the expressionists were the “empty imitators of yesterday’s French revolution,”33 who at the same time—together with the French artists—all served as models for young Hungarian artists, particularly The Eight: “Gauguin- and Picasso-imitators, forebears of Márffy, Berény, Tihanyi, Pór, Perlrott-Csaba . . . and others.”34 A number of derogatory references were made to the German expressionists: “By far it is enough to say that they are weaklings as compared to their Italian revolutionary counterparts.”35 The disparagements reflect a focus on national characterology and nationalist prejudices: “[The expressionists] are cold, maneuvering and calculating; [they] work with the vocabulary of Matisse and Picasso; they are German revolutionaries on paper only.”36 And finally: “A pity, they are Germans, and by saying this I have said it all.”37 In various articles published in the periodical A Hét (The Week), Károly Sztrakoniczky (1889–1915) gave further voice to the rejection of German art and raged against its exaggerated and harmful influence. On the occasion of the exhibition of the Viennese artists (Bund Österreichischer Künstler) in the House of Artists in March 1913, Sztrakoniczky unhappily noted that “in recent years Hungarian art culture has come under German influence,” and he emphasized that “German art” included both “Viennese” and “Pan-German” art.38 Among the German influences, he also noted the “Berlin expressionism,” but was of the opinion that Hungarian artists occupied the foremost position in comparisons with the new international trends: “The art of ‘The Eight’ is so much more imposing and so much more significant even in its errors, than the languid refinedness of German expressionism!”39 Sztrakoniczky was well informed about the newest developments; in September 1912 he dedicated an entire article in A Hét to the Blauer Reiter almanac and artists.40 He identified their influence in the works of Róbert Berény (1887–1953) that were included in the exhibition of The Eight in November 1913.41 In these articles, Sztrakoniczky did not use the term 76

Expressionism in Hungary

Figure 3.1  “ Morgner Wilhelm (expresszionista): Favágók a keresztúton” [Wilhelm Morgner (Expressionist): Woodcutters at the Calvary], Vasárnapi Újság (Sunday Journal), February 16, 1913, 125

“expressionism,” which first appeared in his critique of “New Art,” one of the trends turning against impressionism.42 The sensational showing of the “ultramoderns” in the National Salon (Exhibition of Futurists and Expressionists, February 1913)—much like The Eight at the same venue two months earlier—brought great publicity and attracted a large number of visitors. Along with the reviews and articles describing the extreme reaction of visitors, several caricatures addressing the reception of new art in Budapest were also published43 (Figure 3.2). A caricaturist for the magazine Borsszem Jankó, referencing a current political issue, combined various styles and elements of the paintings with the following caption: “A Futurist—Has Drawn the Universal Suffrage Like This.”44 In another issue of the same magazine, there appears a would-be portrait gallery of artists from the three new movements: cubism, futurism, and expressionism.45 This triad of the current “-isms” is typical of the reception and the need to classify the new trends in art.

The International Postimpressionist Exhibition Three months later, Borsszem Jankó published a caricature with the title “The Vision of a Man Smacked in the Face.”46 This was in response to another exhibition in Budapest, a specta­ cular review of contemporary art organized by the House of Artists, in May 1913.47 The title, The International Postimpressionist Exhibition, harked back to the similarly named International 77

András Zwickl

Impressionist Exhibition organized by the artists’ society three years earlier, and the exhibition was regarded by some art critics as a continuation of this previous show.48 It is most likely that the 1913 futurist exhibition in Budapest and Walden’s visit on the occasion of its opening provided a decisive impetus for this venture. One of the organizers of the exhibition was Zoltán Felvinczi Takács, who, giving an account of the exhibition in Der Cicerone (The Cicerone), claimed that visitors would see paintings “they may [already] know from various exhibitions.”49 At the same time, the title suggested a connection with the postimpressionist exhibitions held in London; the press and one of the introductory texts in the catalogue falsely stated that the exhibition was “more or less the same as what was shown for the first time at the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in London,”50 although it had nothing to do with it. Two thirds of the nearly 230 artworks came from international artists and were put together by Herwarth Walden; included were, among others, the traveling Blaue Reiter collection and paintings from various exhibitions, e.g., of the Neue Secession, Der Moderne Bund, Robert Delaunay, and Henri Le Fauconnier.51 The detailed and extensive published critiques of the exhibition offered an overview of the latest trends in art; critics struggled to find their way amid the new schools and labels, i.e., the proliferation of “-isms.” The copy of the catalogue preserved in the Library of the Hungarian National Gallery includes annotations from art critic Artúr Elek, revealing his struggle with these terms; in the title listing on the cover: “neoimpressionism, expressionists, postimpressionists, Progressivists,” the third term is crossed out.

Figure 3.2  M  iltiades Manno, “Hogy kell nézni a képeket a futuristák kiállításán” (How One Should Look at Pictures: In the Exhibition of the Futurists), Kakas Márton, February 2, 1913, 7

78

Expressionism in Hungary

The reactions to the exhibition were similar to those of the futurist exhibition: expressionist artists from Germany were rejected. However, they were confronted with much more hostility than artists from other countries. In the words of one critic, their work, which attempted to be original, was “based on mere afterthought.”52 Other critics noted that their “hazy theories (‘Der Blaue Reiter’ and ‘visible music’) considerably alienated the viewer from the original source of enjoyment of art: the pictorial effect.”53 The criticism was frequently based on German national stereotypes: “About the German expressionists we cannot say much. They are so extravagant, so wild, often so brutal, as only Germans can be, when they want to be really original.”54 In terms of character, the obvious contrast was with the French: Instead of Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh, a number of Germans appear. Their truthfulness is rather dubious. No, not even dubious. The stentorian colors and thickly painted “lines” are without any reason and purpose. And what about the balance of forms and colors? A modern person from Berlin gets neurasthenia, if this is mentioned. The French demonstrate more taste and culture.55 On the other side were the Russians: “Although [they] do not even begin to approach the refinement of the Frenchmen, [they] are much more interesting and talented than the Germans participating in the exhibition.”56 Ironically, there were some mistakes concerning the nationalities of the artists. Although Kandinsky was regarded as a German, his fellow painters from Germany, Alexei Jawlensky and Marianne Werefkin, were regarded as Russian artists, who “are not so much the theoretician, like Kandinsky and his fellows; they are painters instead, trying to convince us not with abstract formulas of mathematics, geometry and arithmetic, but with the prime elements of painting: form, line and color.”57 Some of the critics’ characterizations also recall the positive stereotypes of Hungarian national characterology: “There is something appealing, instinctive in their rampancy and temperamental mixtures.”58 Some of the Hungarians in the exhibition, members of The Eight, were associated with the achievements of expressionism: “Ödön Márffy, Róbert Berény and Lajos Tihanyi are searching roughly in the direction of the theory of expressionism for a means of expressing their message.”59 Expressionism’s influence on Hungarian art appeared relatively early; already in 1912 one can trace a change in the paintings of Róbert Berény and Lajos Tihanyi (1885–1938). Comparing their portraits with the paintings of Oskar Kokoschka, exhibited in Budapest in January 1912, they show similar features. Róbert Berény’s Ignotus portréja (Portrait of Ignotus, 1912) was first exhibited at the third exhibition of The Eight in November 1912 and shows a completely different approach to forms and a new handling of light and color, compared to his Weiner Leó arcképe (Portrait of Leó Weiner) of the previous year, shown in the same exhibition. The composition of the Ignotus portrait displays similarities with Kokoschka’s painting Karl Kraus (1909), although an exact comparison is not possible because the work is now lost and known only from a black-and-white photograph. Berény participated in the postimpressionist exhibition with two works, one of them the portrait of Béla Bartók (1913; Figure 3.3). The luminous face in front of a sketchily painted, colorful background and the suggestive look are akin to Kokoschka’s portrait of Ludwig Ritter von Janikowski (1909). Critiques of the third exhibition of The Eight recognized the changes in the painting of both artists. In connection with the Ignotus portrait of Berény, Felvinczi Takács stressed the inspiration artists drew from Kokoschka.60 Expressionism as a category was cited by only one art critic in relation to the international art in the Paris exhibitions that served as model for the group of The Eight. In this case, expressionism was mentioned together with futurism and “the group of artists who divided the world into geometrical forms” (i.e., the cubists).61 Art critics mostly used the 79

András Zwickl

Figure 3.3  Róbert Berény, Béla Bartók, 1913, in Iván Hevesy, A posztimpresszionizmus művészete [The Art of Postimpressionism] (Gyoma: Kner Izidor, 1922), 85.  HUNGART, 2017

terms “futurism” and “cubism” for the art of Berény and Tihanyi.62 Even Berény, who responded to those condemning his endeavors by saying that he was merely imitating the currently fashionable “-isms” (cubism, futurism, and also Globism[!]), did not mention expressionism.63 Tihanyi’s portrait of Jenő Miklós (1911) was sent to the Sonderbund exhibition in 1912. In contrast to its closed contours and solid forms, the portrait of György Bölöni (1912) shows a new style, with compact forms of the human body and clothes dissolving into angular surfaces; the result is similar to the paintings of Kokoschka; for example, his portrait of Baron von Dirsztay (1911). The Bölöni portrait was displayed both at the third exhibition of The Eight and the International Postimpressionist Exhibition. The features of the Kokoschka portraits such as the psychological characterization of the figures with at times caricature-like distortions, the typically deformed hands, the agitated dynamism of the figures, and the loose brushwork are also to be found in the portraits of Tihanyi. The influence of works such as the portrait of Adolf Loos (1909) is evident in the period, which lasted until the end of the 1910s. The portraits of Lajos Fülep (1915) and Lajos Kassák (1918) were shown in 1918 at Tihanyi’s personal show in the gallery of the Hungarian magazine MA (Today) (Plate 5).

Lajos Kassák and His Magazines After the First World War With the outbreak of the First World War, international artistic exchanges and the movement of artists and artworks came to a stop, but the impact and reception of these new developments 80

Expressionism in Hungary

carried on. The exhibitions held in Budapest in 1913 made a strong impression on Lajos Kassák (1887–1967), a young poet, who founded his first magazine two years later. Kassák’s visits to the exhibitions of contemporary art were probably inspired by his brother-in-law, Béla Uitz (1887–1972), who was a young painter at the very beginning of his career at the time. The Exhibition of the Futurists and Expressionists had a profound impact on Kassák, who wrote a poem on the painting I funerali del anarchico Galli (Funeral of the Anarchist Galli, 1910–1911) by Carlo Carrà, which was published in two different issues of his magazine A Tett (The Action). After its interdiction, in 1916, Kassák launched a second magazine, MA (Today), which published reproductions of expressionist artworks on a regular basis (Figure 3.4). Kassák had contact to the Berlin gallery and Der Sturm, and MA distributed Sturm books and postcards from 1917 onwards. Following its example, Kassák even opened a gallery in the same year; the first exhibition was dedicated to János Mattis Teutsch (1884–1960), who had visited the International Postimpressionist Exhibition in 1913. (This is known from a catalogue of the exhibition that survived in his personal bequest with his personal notes.) After the First World War, Mattis Teutsch was in contact with Herwarth Walden and exhibited at the Sturm gallery in Berlin.64 In addition to Mattis Teutsch, MA reproduced and exhibited artists such as József Nemes Lampérth (1891–1924), who had started his career at the House of Artists, and Béla Uitz, who had visited the exhibitions there before the First World War. The exhibition reviews published in A Tett were written by Béla Uitz, who often referred to the new “-isms” when describing contemporary art shown in Budapest; for example, the work

Figure 3.4  Cover of MA (Today) I, no. 2 (December 1916), with a drawing by József Nemes Lampérth

81

András Zwickl

of artists such as Dezső Czigány (1883–1938), the members of the former The Eight, or Vilmos Perlrott-Csaba (1880–1955), a former member of the Matisse Academy in Paris and an important representative of the Neos at the Nagybánya artists’ colony.65 Contemporary art became more important in MA, and the new artistic movements, among them expressionism, too, were a permanent feature in critiques and reviews. In an exhibition review, Kassák described the latest paintings of Nemes Lampérth and his use of such intense colors as proof that “his latest work shows his development towards expressionism.”66 Writing about Mattis Teutsch in connection with his exhibition at the MA gallery, Kassák noted: If we strive to establish Mattis Teutsch’s place in the dominant artistic trends of today (he is of Saxon origin), we could find it among the expressionists, who fully represent the German psyche. Thus, his separation from us here and there is determined primarily, and I think definitively, by his ethnicity.67 The rhetoric of national characterology had already appeared in Kassák’s texts before the formation of A Tett and reappeared later in the articles published in the initial issues of the magazine.68 In 1917, MA became a sales agent for the German magazines Die Aktion and Der Sturm and also a distributor of books by authors such as Carl Einstein and Herwarth Walden; it also offered Der Sturm postcards for sale.69 Among the MA circle was the young art critic Iván Hevesy (1893–1966), whose book about contemporary art movements was published by MA in 1919 under the title Futurist, Expressionist and Cubist Painting (Figure 3.5).70 In the first edition, Hevesy tried to identify a core feature for each of the three movements and, at the same time, connect them to their national backgrounds: none [of the three] could grasp straight away and all at once the art of the future, but each captured an aspect. Futurism focused on activity, expressionism on feeling, while cubism on reason. (Interestingly, the three tasks were resolved by the three races: Futurism by the Italians, expressionism by the Germans and the Russians, and cubism by the French.)71 In 1922, a second, revised and enlarged, edition of the book was published. In the chapter “Expressionism,” Hevesy listed many names, including some of the artists (e.g., Kokoschka, Pechstein, Campendonk, and Marc) he had probably seen in Budapest. Their national backgrounds are once more significant: alongside the futurist Italians and the cubist Frenchmen stand the expressionists, “almost without exception Germans or Germanized Russians.”72 In the case of the Hungarian János Mattis Teutsch, Hevesy—echoing Kassák’s explanation of his art from five years earlier—also mentions that the artist was of “Transylvanian Saxon origin.”73

Herwarth Walden and Hungarian Artists in Berlin Given the historical situation, German-Hungarian contacts became more extensive and direct. After the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, a number of progressive artists left Hungary and immigrated mostly to Germany. Former members of The Eight went to Berlin, among them Lajos Tihanyi, who also belonged to the MA circle. The impact of expressionism was to be seen in the twenties, in the work of the Hungarian émigré artists living in Germany. Some belonged to the generation that started its career at the turn of the century, among them Károly Kernstok and Vilmos Perlrott-Csaba. The work of the younger artists who had been admitted to the Weimar Bauhaus also showed the influence of expressionism.74 Several artists 82

Expressionism in Hungary

Figure 3.5  Iván Hevesy, Futurista, expresszionista és kubista festészet [Futurist, Expressionist and Cubist Painting] (Budapest: MA, 1919), cover by Sándor Bortnyik.  HUNGART, 2017

from Hungary participated in Der Sturm exhibitions: László Moholy-Nagy, who had close contacts with Kassák, had lived in Berlin for some time, and later became a teacher at the Bauhaus, showed his works there in 1922, 1923, 1924, and 1925; the young Aurél Bernáth (1895–1982), who later repudiated his early avant-garde period, exhibited in the gallery in 1923; and Gyula Hincz (1904–1986), who went to Berlin in 1928, presented his work there in 1929. In 1924, Herwarth Walden’s book The New Painting: Expressionism was published in Hungary.75 The Hungarian edition included reproductions of works by two Hungarian artists who had exhibited several times in the Sturm gallery: Béla Kádár (1877–1956) and Hugó Scheiber (1873–1950). These two artists, as well as János Mattis Teutsch, were treated in the chapter “Expressionists” by Ernő Kállai (1890–1954), whose pivotal book New Hungarian Painting was issued by the same publisher the following year.76 In the introduction, Kállai explained that the goal of his book was to demonstrate the process by which something “specifically Hungarian” evolved in response to the inspiration drawn from the art of various European nations. His aim was “to trace this metamorphosis,” and to point out the “function of the genuine Hungarian national and socio-psychological components.”77 The search for “national traits” was to help him to “provide a proper basis for a more in-depth national interpretation of the newer trends.”78 For Kállai, the expressive character of Hungarian painting played a central role; he emphasized the local and independent aspects of this in the case of several artists and coined a new term, “expressive naturalism,” for this phenomenon. In the accordingly titled chapter, he analyzed the work of various members of The Eight (e.g., Károly Kernstok, Bertalan Pór, 83

András Zwickl

Ödön Márffy), as well as that of Béla Uitz and József Nemes Lampérth, who belonged to the core of the MA circle. In his interpretation of the art of József Egry (1883–1951), we see how Kállai tried to adapt the originally foreign features of expressionism to Hungarian art: “Egry’s Hungarian temperament tends rather to the emotionally expressive, and is less of a constructive nature in a spiritual sense,” and in his “lyrical Hungarian impulsivity, he did not know what to make of the instinctively pure and harmonic stylistic principles of the French tradition, with which he was not familiar.”79 Kállai paid particular attention to the art of the young Aurél Bernáth; he showed that “the core substance of the Hungarian temperament” was loaded with “somatic elements” and that “its earth-bound instincts . . . emerged from materiality.”80 In contrast, he characterized German and Russian expressionism as “the fusion of fully psychic experience,” and maintained that Franz Marc’s art “spiritually purified sensuality” radiated harmony.81 This “can be a psychic reality only in cultures that tend to involve mysticism,” and that is the reason why Bernáth could not achieve this—although Kállai wrote about one of the artist’s works that “it is linked to the romantic Hungarian traditions of loose picturesqueness, and it is, so far, the first relevant assimilation of European expressionism into these traditions.”82 At the same time, Kállai also stated that “only the music of Bartók, and the poetry of Kassák, Sándor Barta, and Aladár Komját offer something comparable to the primitive and determinedly expressive Hungarian character of [Bernáth’s] drawing” (Figure 3.6).83 In the following chapter, “Expressionism,” Kállai explained that there had been the possibility to create a “Hungarian expressionism” based on peasant life

Figure 3.6  A  urél Bernáth, Föld (Earth), c. 1922, in Ernő Kállai, Új Magyar piktúra [New Hungarian Painting] (Budapest: Amicus, 1925), Figure 60.  HUNGART, 2017

84

Expressionism in Hungary

in the Hungarian villages. The paintings of Kádár and Scheiber, the two central figures in this chapter, he characterized as “superficial decorativeness” and “mannered, enforced attempts,” and stigmatized them with the derogatory term “mere expressionists.”84 The assimilation of expressionism in Hungary was a long and gradual process. Publications in the 1930s already treated the movement as past history. In 1938, Ákos Koczogh (1915–1986) titled his doctoral thesis on contemporary literature “Expressionism.” The chapter dedicated to “Hungarian expressionism” begins with Kassák and his two magazines. In his characterization, Koczogh emphasized that “almost everything typifying our expressionism is based on German features placed into a Hungarian context.”85 István Genthon (1903–1969), author of the 1925 article “To the Death of Expressionism,”86 published a comprehensive monograph on modern Hungarian art in 1935. In his book, The History of New Hungarian Painting, he used the established terminology and followed Kállai in using the term “expressive naturalism” for the artists of the MA circle active before the First World War (e.g., Uitz and Nemes Lampérth). Expressionism itself was reserved for the interwar period and for artists living in Germany. Genthon also stressed the German nature of expressionism and contrasted its “flowing emotion” and “passion” to the “Gallic spirit that insists on ancient ‘raison.’”87 Nevertheless, “the endeavors of expressionism are not alien to Hungarian art.”88 Most of the artists that Genthon associated with expressionism lived in Germany (e.g., Berény, Czóbel, Bernáth);89 however, he also identified expressionist features in the work of artists who did not move to Germany, among them József Egry, who had an exhibition in Berlin at the Galerie Gurlitt in 1926, and Gyula Derkovits (1894–1934), who encountered German expressionism in Vienna, where he lived for two and a half years (1923–1925; Figure 3.7).90 Application of the term expressionism to Hungarian artists and Hungarian art history only began in the 1960s. In 1964, the volume Expressionism came out in a book series dedicated to the publication of sources related to various artistic movements.91 In the introductory essay of the subsection “Hungarian and Eastern-European Expressionists,” Ákos Koczogh wrote about Kassák and his publications and also briefly discussed the fine arts. In contrast to Kádár and Scheiber, “whose expressivity connected with Der Sturm did not leave a significant mark on Hungarian painting,”92 members of The Eight (Pór, Tihanyi, Czóbel, Berény) and other artists, such as Egry and Derkovits, were mentioned as representatives of expressionism in Hungary. The latter two were the key figures of the chapter “Hungarian expressionism” in Lajos Németh’s (1929–1991) book Modern Hungarian Art, published in 1968. In his book Németh followed earlier authors: in the discussion of the group of The Eight he referred to expressionism in connection with Berény and Tihanyi, and he stressed primarily the inspiration of Kokoschka. It is noteworthy that in several cases he tried to avoid the term, with allusions, for example, to the “German fauves,” who are only later mentioned as artists of “Die Brücke.”93 Expressionism is also mentioned in reference to the Activist movement of Kassák, both in general and with respect to artists such as Mattis Teutsch and Nemes Lampérth. Regarding Uitz, following the example of Kállai, Németh used the preferred terms “expressive” and “expressivity.”94 He provided a short overview of the artists who emigrated to Germany after the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, demonstrating the influence of expressionism on their art and the painters who exhibited at the Sturm gallery (Kádár and Scheiber), but in the introduction of the chapter, he claims that expressionism finally found a place in Hungarian art through two painters, Egry and Derkovits, who were in fact not directly linked to Germany. In the case of Derkovits, Németh went back as far as The Eight to demonstrate the domestic forerunners. He claimed that the pathway to Derkovits’s “Hungarian expressionism” was through Kernstok, with whom Derkovits had studied for a short time. His reasoning in the introductory text of the chapter “Hungarian Expressionism” echoes the well-known words: 85

András Zwickl

Figure 3.7  Gyula Derkovits, Halottsiratás (Mourning), 1924, oil on canvas, 95 × 192 cm, Szépművészeti Múzeum/Museum of Fine Arts, inv. no. FK 9151. Photograph: Tibor Mester

“[Expressionism] closely corresponded to the national character of Hungarian art, a component of which was Romanticism, as expressionism maintained many of the principles of Romanticism” and “in Hungarian art, emotion and passion often gained the upper hand over reason.”95 With respect to expressionism’s reception, beginning in the 1920s various authors turned to a strategy of division and differentiated an expressionism based upon foreign models from the “expressive” features of the Hungarian art, which are among its key components. It seems that the denial of expressionism lasted until after 1945, and was still justified by reservations against avant-garde movements regarded—now from a different point of view than earlier—as ideologically problematic. In the 1960s, when demand arose for the inclusion of Hungarian art in the international context, it became impossible to omit foreign influences in comprehensive studies of modern Hungarian. The solution that provided the necessary accentuation of the autonomy and autochthonous character of Hungarian art was the creation of a separate “Hungarian expressionism” alongside “German expressionism”—a distinction whose supporting arguments still draw on elements of national characterology.

Notes 1 The exhibitions of the so-called “Hungarian fauves” [Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest, 2006 and Fauves hongrois: 1904–1914, Ceret, Le Cateau-Cambrésis, Dijon, France, 2008–2009] were followed by the exhibitions of the group of “The Eight” [The Eight: In the Spell of Cézanne and Matisse, Museum Janus Pannonius, Pécs, 2010–2011]. 2 András Zwickl, “‘Das siegreiche Vordringen der modernen Bestrebungen’—Kunst aus Österreich im Művészház” [“The Victorious Advance of Modern Aspirations”—Art from Austria in the House of Artists], in Zeit des Aufbruchs: Budapest und Wien zwischen Historismus und Avantgarde [Period of New Departures: Budapest and Vienna between Historicism and Avant-garde], ed. Wilfried Seipel (Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Milano: Skira Editori, 2003), 513–523. 3 “Az impressszionistákkal ellentétben expresszionistáknak nevezik magukat, vagyis—mint vezérük a szikár, körszakállas Anton Faistauer e sorok írójának magyarázta—nem a látás útján nyert benyomásokat akarják visszaadni, hanem a látás után az átgondoláson megszűrt benső megérzés kifelé való közvetítését akarják vásznaikon megvalósítani.” Cs. [Andor Cserna], “Bécsi festők a Művészházban” [Painters from Vienna in the House of Artists], Egyetértés [Concord], January 6, 1912, 18.

86

Expressionism in Hungary 4 N. M. [Mihály Nemes], “A Művészház kiállítása” [The Exhibition of the House of Artists], Budapest, January 20, 1912, 11. The term “ultramodern” appeared in 1906, e.g. regarding the art of József Rippl-­ Rónai: Dezső Malonyay, “Rippl-Rónai József képkiállítása” [The picture exhibition of József Rippl-Rónai], Budapesti Hírlap [Budapest Journal], January 30, 1906, 10. 5 See, e.g., Max Deri, “Die Kubisten und der Expressionismus” [The Cubists and Expressionism], Pan, June 20, 1912 (2/31), 872–878. 6 Judit Boros and György Szücs, A nagybányai művésztelep [The Artists’ Colony of Nagybánya] (Odorheiu Secuiesc: Litera-Veres Könyvkiadó, 2008). 7 Judit Parádi, “Szintézis és megújulás a MIÉNK kereteiben” [Synthesis and Reformation within the Frames of the “MIÉNK”], in Magyar Vadak Párizstól Nagybányáig 1904–1914 [Hungarian Fauves from Paris to Nagybánya 1904–1914], ed. Krisztina Passuth and György Szücs (Budapest: Magyar Nemzeti Galéria/Hungarian National Gallery, 2006], 123–128. Enikő Róka,“A nemzeti jelleg és az ‘idegen’ hatások befogadásának kérdése a századfordulón” [The Question of the Reception of National Character and ‘Foreign’ Influences at the Turn of the Century], in XIX: Nemzet és művészet. Kép és önkép [XIX. Art and Nation: Image and Self-Image], ed. Erzsébet Király, Enikő Róka, and Nóra Veszprémi (Budapest: Magyar Nemzeti Galéria/Hungarian National Gallery, 2010), 201–223. 8 The term neoimpressionism was first used for the second generation of the colony in 1906. Ervin Plány, “A nagybányai festők kiállítása” [The exhibition of the artists in Nagybánya], Nagybánya és vidéke [Nagybánya and Surroundings], September 2, 1906, 2–3. 9 András Zwickl, ed., A Művészház 1909–1914: Modern kiállítások Budapesten [The House of Artists 1909–1914: Modern Exhibitions in Budapest] (Budapest: Hungarian National Gallery, 2009). 10 Andor Cserna, “Bécsi festők a Művészházban,” 18. 11 Rob. [?], “Neukunst: Ausstellung im Művészház” [Neukunst: Exhibition in the House of Artists], Budapester Abendblatt [Budapest Evening Paper], January 5, 1912, 3; Ervin Ybl, “Neukunst Wien a Művészházban” [Neukunst Wien at the House of Artists], Magyar Nemzet [Hungarian Nation], January 7, 1912, 10; “Modern osztrák festők” [Modern Austrian Painters], Az Est [The Evening], January 6, 1912, 5; vd. [Dániel Várnai], “‘Neukunst Wien’ a Művészházban” [“Neukunst Wien” at the House of Artists], Népszava [The Voice of the People], January 7, 1912, 5; Bgy. [György Bölöni], “Kiállítások: Kokoschka a Művészházban” [Exhibitions: Kokoschka at the House of Artits], Világ [World], January 21, 1912, 20; m.e. [Elek Magyar], “A Neukunst a Művészházban” [The Neukunst at the House of Artists], Magyarország [Hungary], January 6, 1912, 13; Bgy. [György Bölöni], “A ‘Neukunst Wien’ a Művészházban” [The “Neukunst Wien” at the House of Artists], Világ, January 6, 1912, 15. 12 The novel Porban [In the Dust] of Gyula Török was published as a book in 1917. Gergely Barki stated that this included the first mention of expressionism in Hungary: Gergely Barki, “Lassan összeáll a kép” [The Picture Slowly Becomes Clear], in Cat. Autumn Auction (Budapest: Kieselbach Galéria, 2004), 153. However, the art critique on the Neukunst-exhibition by Andor Cserna had been published earlier.The novel appeared as a serial in the newspaper Magyar Hírlap. The author also wrote a detailed report on the Neukunst-exhibition, from which it becomes obvious that he had heard Anton Faistauer speaking about their art: Gyula Török, “Bécsi festők a Művészházban” [Viennese Painters in the House of Artists], Magyar Hírlap, January 6, 1912, 5–6. 13 The exhibition opened with the title “New Pictures” at the Könyves Kálmán Szalon [Coloman Beauclerc Salon] in December 1909. N. M. [Mihály Nemes], “Bécsi művészek kiállítása” [The Exhibition of Viennese Artists], Budapest, January 6, 1912, 14;Ybl, “Neukunst Wien a Művészházban,” 10; Jean Preux [Károly Sztrakoniczky], “Neukunst Wien,” A Hét [The Week], January 14, 1912 (XXIII/2), 31; Magyar, “A Neukunst a Művészházban,” 13. 14 The term “chercheur” had already been used in 1901 for József Rippl-Rónai. —a [Miklós Rózsa], “Nemzeti Szalon. A tavaszi tárlat II. Sorozata” [National Salon.The 2nd Series of the Spring Exhibition], Hazánk [Our Homeland], May 19, 1901, 9. 15 Csilla Markója and István Bardoly, eds., The Eight (Pécs: Museum Janus Pannonius, 2010). 16 The group contained eight members (Károly Kernstok, Bertalan Pór, Ödön Márffy, Béla Czóbel, Dezső Czigány, Dezső Orbán, Lajos Tihanyi, Róbert Berény), but there were always “invited guests” in their exhibitions, too. Regarding the name “The Eight” there is an interesting parallel to the Czech artist group “Osma” [Eight] that had existed a few years earlier (1907–1908). In May 1912, the art magazine Művészet (Art) published a report about the first exhibition of the magazine Der Sturm in Berlin also showing Kokoschka’s works which could have been seen in Budapest previously. Margit Vészi, “Berlini levél” [Letter from Berlin], Művészet, 1912 (Vol. 11, No. 5), 197. 17 Ybl, “Neukunst Wien a Művészházban,” 10.

87

András Zwickl 18 N.N., “Modern magyar művészek kiállítása Kölnben” [Exhibition of Modern Hungarian Artists in Cologne], Egyetértés, February 11, 1912, 15. 19 N.N., “Expresszionista kiállítás” [Expressionist Exhibition], Művészeti krónika [Art Chronicle], May 15, 1912 (I/2), 7. 20 Zoltán Felvinczi Takács was also the Budapest correspondent of art journals Monatsschrift für Kunstwissenschaft [Monthly Journal for Art Research] and Der Cicerone. On the Sonderbund exhibiton: András Zwickl, “Ungarische Künstler und Künstlerinnen auf der Sonderbundausstellung 1912” [Hungarian Artists at the Sonderbund Exhibition 1912], in 1912—Mission Moderne: Die Jahrhundertschau des Sonderbundes [1912—The Quest for the Modern: The Centennial Exhibition of the Sonderbund], ed. Barbara Schaefer (Cologne: Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud, 2012), 168–176. 21 Zoltán Felvinczi Takács, “Művészeti programkiállítások és beszámolók” [Artistic Program Exhibitions and Reports], Nyugat [West], September 1, 1912 (V/17), 373. 22 Ibid., 373. 23 Dr. Zoltán Felvinczi Takács, “Expresszionizmus” [Expressionism], Új Élet (Népművelés) [New Life (Community Education)], July 1912 (No. 12–13), 435.The article was written after his visit in Cologne, where he had seen the exhibition and also met organizers and artists. 24 K. S. [Simon Kemény],“Nyolcak” [The Eight], Magyar Figyelő [Hungarian Observer], December 1, 1912 (II/23), 399. 25 “A kiforratlan művészettel csak soviniszta alapon érdemes foglalkozni, mert magyar művészek girbegurba útvonalait magyar műkedvelő közönség kell, hogy figyelemmel kísérje . . . De mit közünk az osztrák sógorok baklövéseihez.” bán. [László Bányász], “Művészház bécsi legújabb . . .” [House of Artists’ Newest Viennese . . .], Ország-Világ [Country-World], January 14, 1912 (XXXIII/3), 71. 26 Felvinczi Takács, “Művészeti programkiállítások és beszámolók,” 373. 27 “Mi magyarok általában az átérzés intenzitásával és az előadás közvetlenségével keltünk jó hatást . . . Melegségével több temperamentumot mutat, illetőleg sejtet, mint egy egész múzeumra való sorozat a hivatalos kiállítások anyagából.” Felvinczi Takács, “Expresszionizmus,” 438. 28 Artúr Elek,“Futuristák és expresszionisták” [Futurists and Expressionists], Az Ujság [The News], January 26, 1913, 18–19. 29 Emil Brázay: “Futuristák” [Futurists], Kultúra, May 10, 1912, (III/9), 563–566. 30 J. R., “Die Futuristen” [The Futurists], Reichspost (Morgenblatt) [Imperial Postal Service (Morning Paper)], December 14, 1912, 11. I hereby express my thanks to Irene Chytraeus-Auerbach for providing a copy of the article. 31 The exhibition was later showed in Lemberg [today: Lviv, Ukraine]; see Lidia Głuchowska, “Poznań Expressionism and Its Connections with the German and International Avant-Garde,” Chapter 4 in this volume. 32 László Kézdi Kovács, “A futuristák és expressionisták: Új kiállítás a Nemzeti Szalonban” [The Futurists and Expressionists: New Exhibition in the National Salon], Pesti Hírlap [Pester Journal], January 26, 1913, 5–6; Plume, “A futurista kalap” [The Futurist Hat], Pesti Napló [Pester Diary], February 2, 1913, 33; Md. [Dezső Malonyay], “Futuristák és expresszionisták” [Futurists and the Expressionists], Budapesti Hírlap, January 26, 1913, 17; Elek, “Futuristák és expresszionisták,” 18–19. 33 N. N. [György Bölöni], “Futuristák és expresszionisták” [Futurists and Expressionists], Világ, January 28, 1913, 15. 34 László Kézdi Kovács, “A futuristák és expressionisták: Új kiállítás a Nemzeti Szalonban” [The Futurists and the Expressionists: New Exhibition in the National Salon], Pesti Hírlap, January 26, 1913, 5–6. 35 T. Gy. [Gyula Török], “Futuristák” [Futurists], Magyar Hírlap, January 26, 1913, 17. 36 Bölöni, “Futuristák és expresszionisták,” 15. 37 Aladár Bálint, “A futuristák” [The Futurists], Magyar Nyomdászat [Hungarian Typography], February 1913 (XXVI/2), 42. 38 Jean Preux [Károly Sztrakoniczky], “Rhapsodie hongroise” [Hungarian Rhapsody], A Hét, March 16, 1913 (XXIV/11), 174–175. 39 Ibid., 175. 40 Jean Preux [Károly Sztrakoniczky], “Der blaue Reiter” [The Blue Rider], A Hét, September 1, 1912 (XXIII/35), 565–566. 41 Jean Preux [Károly Sztrakoniczky], “Nyolczak” [The Eight], A Hét, November 17, 1912 (XXIII/46), 743. 42 Jean Preux [Károly Sztrakoniczky], “Uj művészet” [New Art], A Hét, December 22, 1912 (XXIII/51), 827–828.

88

Expressionism in Hungary 43 Annie Samassa D., “Futuristák és Expresszionisták” [Futurists and Expressionists], Budapesti Hírlap, February 16, 1913, 31–33; Miltiades Manno, “Hogy kell nézni a képeket a futuristák kiállításán” [How One Should Look at Pictures in the Exhibition of Futurists], Kakas Márton, February 2, 1913 (XX/6), 7. 44 Dezső Bér, “Egy futurista—így rajzolta meg az általános választójogot” [A Futurist—Has Drawn the Universal Suffrage Like This], Borsszem Jankó, February 2, 1913 (ILVI/2356), 20. 45 “Kubista, Futurista, Paxista, Expresszionista” [Cubist, Futurist, Paxist, Expressionist], Borsszem Jankó, February 23, 1913 (ILVI/2359), 10. Besides the three new “-isms,” there appeared a fourth group: “Pax” was a newly founded conservative art group in Budapest; it had chosen its name to send the message that it stood for peace on a field of art full of conflicts between the different groups. 46 Henrik Major: “Posztimpresszionizmus: Egy pofonütött ember látomása” [Postimpressionism: The Vision of a Man Smacked in the Face], Borsszem Jankó, May 25, 1913 (ILVI/2372), 2. 47 András Zwickl, “The International Postimpressionist Exhibition in 1913 at the Budapest Artists’ House (Művészház),” Centropa, 11, no. 1 (January 2011): 34–49. 48 N. N., “Nemzetközi postimpresszionisták a Művészházban” [International Postimpressionists in the House of Artists], Egyetértés, April 27, 1913, 14. 49 Z. T. [Zoltán Felvinczi Takács], “Die Ausstellung der Postimpressionisten” [The Exhibition of the Postimpressionists], Der Cicerone, 1913 (V/12), 471. 50 Budapesti Hírlap, April 18, 1913, 15; N. N., “Postimpresszionisták a Művészházban” [Postimpressionists in the House of Artists], Magyarország, May 1, 1913, 12–13; N. N.,“Postimpresszionisták” [Postimpressionists], in Katalógus a Művészház nemzetközi postimpresszionista kiállításához [Catalogue to the International Postimpressionists Exhibitions of the House of Artists] (Budapest: Művészház, 1913), 5. The first essay contains texts by different authors (Guillaume Apollinaire, Fernand Roches); three quarters of its length is taken up by the almost complete quotation of Roger Fry’s introduction and preface of the catalogue for the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition at the Grafton Galleries in 1912. 51 One fourth of the exhibition in Budapest (fifty-four works) became the traveling “Der Blaue Reiter” ensemble. Heike Daase, “Die Tournee: Oslo, Helsinki, Trondheim, Göteborg,” in Der Blaue Reiter, ed. Christine Hopfengart (Köln: DuMont, 2000), 79–82. 52 N. N., “Postimpresszionisták” [Postimpressionists], Egyetértés, May 4, 1913, 11. 53 N. N., “A Művészház kiállításának uj képei” [The New Pictures of the Exhibition of the House of Artists], Magyarország, May 18, 1913, 14. 54 Artúr Elek, “Postimpresszionisták kiállítása a Művészházban” [Exhibition of the Postimpressionists in the House of Artists], Az Ujság, May 4, 1913, 19. 55 “Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh helyett egy sereg német. Őszinteségük nagyon kétséges. Sőt nem is kétséges. Harsogó színek, vastagon felkent ‘vonalak’, ok nélkül és cél nélkül. Formák és színek egyensúlya? Egy modern berlini neuraszténiát kap, ha ilyesmi szóbakerül. A franciák több ízléssel és nagyobb kultúrával vonulnak fel.” Aladár Bálint, “Három kiállítás: Posztimpresszionisták” [Three Exhibitions: Postimpressionists], Nyugat, May 16, 1913 (VI/10), 788. 56 N. N., “A Művészház új képei” [The New Pictures at the House of Artists], Világ, May 18, 1913, 18. 57 N. N., “A Művészház kiállításának uj képei” [The New Pictures of the Exhibition in the House of Artists], Magyarország, May 18, 1913, 14. 58 N. N., “A Művészház új képei,” 18. 59 Elek, “Postimpresszionisták kiállítása a Művészházban,” 19. 60 Zoltán Felvinczi Takács, “Négyen a Nyolcak közül” [Four from The Eight], Nyugat, November 16, 1912 (V/22), 763–768. 61 Kemény, “Nyolcak,” 399. 62 Dezső Malonyay, “Nyolcak kiállítása” [Exhibition of The Eight], Budapesti Hírlap, November 15, 1912, 3; N. N., “A Nyolcak” [The Eight], Magyar Hírlap, November 15, 1912, 11; L. G. [Géza Lengyel], “A Nyolcak” [The Eight], Pesti Napló, November 15, 1912, 14. 63 Róbert Berény, “Némely szidalmazóimhoz” [To Some of My Vituperators], Magyar Hírlap, November 27, 1912, 10. 64 Éva Bajkay et al., eds., Mattis Teutsch and the Der Blaue Reiter [Mattis Teutsch and the Blue Rider] (Budapest–Miskolc: Mission Art Gallery, 2001). 65 Béla Uitz, “Cigány [sic!] és Csaba a Tavaszi tárlaton” [Cigány (sic!) and Csaba in the Spring Exhibition], A Tett, April 20, 1916 (II/12), 200. 66 Lajos Kassák, “Nemzeti Szalon: Fiatalok csoportkiállítása” [National Salon:The Group Exhibition of the “Youth”], MA, July 15, 1917 (II/9), 147.

89

András Zwickl 67 “Ha a ma domináló művészeti irányokban helyet keresnénk Máttis Teutschnak (ő szász eredetű), a német pszihét [sic!] teljességében kifejező expresszionistáknál találnánk meg. Tőlünk való itt-ott elkülönülését tehát, elsősorban és gondolom, véglegesen fajisága determinálja.” Lajos Kassák, “Máttis Teutsch János katalógusából” [From the Catalogue of János Máttis Teutsch], MA, October 15, 1917 (II/12), 195. “Saxon” refers here to the German minority in Transylvania. 68 Lajos Kassák, “A háború értéke nálunk—és náluk” [The Value of the War at Us—and at Them], Uj Nemzedék [New Generation], October 4, 1915, 1–3; Lajos Kassák, “Egy csavargó noteszkönyvéből” [From the Notebook of a Tramp], Uj Nemzedék, November 1, 1915, 8–9; Zoltán Haraszti, “Rémy de Gourmont,” A Tett, November 1, 1915 (I/1), 13–14. 69 The first advertisement was published in the first issue of the third year (November 15, 1917). 70 Iván Hevesy, Futurista, expresszionista és kubista festészet [Futurist, Expressionist and Cubist Painting] (Budapest: MA, 1919). The title with the triad of art movements derives from the subtitle of Herwarth Walden’s book Einblick in Kunst: Expressionismus, Futurismus, Kubismus [Insight into Art: Expressionism, Futurism, Cubism] (Berlin: Der Sturm, 1917). The chapters of Hevesy’s book had originally been published in MA: April 15, 1919 (IV/3), 31–40. 71 “. . . [a törekvések] egyike sem tudta rögtön, egyszerre megfogni az uj jövendő művészetét hanem annak csak egy-egy oldalát. A futurizmus az aktivitást, az expresszionizmus az érzést, a kubizmus az értelmet. (Érdekes dolog, hogy a három munkát három faj végezte el: a futurizmust az olaszok, az expresszionizmust a németek és az oroszok, a kubizmust a franciák.).” Iván Hevesy, Futurista, expresszionista és kubista festészet, 24. 72 Iván Hevesy, A futurizmus, expresszionizmus és kubizmus művészete [The Art of the Futurism, Expressionism and Cubism] (Gyoma: Kner Izidor, 1922), 22. 73 Ibid., 23. 74 Éva Bajkay, “Expresszívek a Pécsi Művészkörből” [The Expressives from the Pécs Artists’ Circle], Jelenkor, September 1997 (XL/9), 835–847; Éva Bajkay, “Darf man malen? Vom Holzschnitt bis zum Licht-Raum-Modulator” [Is it allowed to paint? From Woodcut to the Light-Space Modulator,] in ibid., Von Kunst zu Leben: Die Ungarn am Bauhaus [From Art to Life: The Hungarians at the Bauhaus] (Pécs: Museum Janus Pannonius, 2010), 130–163. 75 Herwarth Walden, Az új festőművészet: Expresszionizmus [The New Painting: Expressionism] (Budapest: Amicus, 1924). The book was originally published in 1919 with the title Die neue Malerei [The New Painting] (Berlin:Verlag Der Sturm). For the contacts of Walden and Hungary, see “Walden és a Sturm” [Walden and the Sturm], in Péter Molnos, Scheiber Hugó: Festészet a jazz ritmusában [Hugó Scheiber: Painting in the Rhythm of the Jazz] (Budapest: Kieselbach Galéria, 2014) 91–104. 76 Ernő Kállai, Új magyar piktúra: 1900–1925 [New Hungarian Painting. 1900–1925] (Budapest: Amicus, 1925); “Expresszionisták,” 123–125. The book was also published in Germany: Ernst Kállai, Neue Malerei in Ungarn [New Painting in Hungary] (Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1925); “Expressionisten,” 100–102. 77 Ernő Kállai, Új magyar piktúra, 5–7. 78 Ibid., 8, 7. 79 “Egry magyar temperementuma inkább érzelmesen expresszív, mint szellemi értelemben konstruktív természetű.” “. . . a lírikus magyar impulzivitás, mely a francia hagyományoknak az ő számára idegen, mert ösztönösen tiszta és harmónikus stílustörvényeivel nem tudott mihez fogni.” Ibid., 86. 80 Ibid., 113. 81 Ibid., 115, 112. 82 Ibid., 120, 110–111. 83 “Bernáth rajzának koncentrált kifejezőerejű, primitív magyarságához foghatót csak Bartók muzsikája, Kassák, Barta Sándor és Komját Aladár költészete teremtett.” Ibid., 121. Sándor Barta and Aladár Komját were avant-garde poets of the magazine MA. 84 Ibid., 124. Already in 1921, Kállai wrote about the “failure” of expressionism and claimed that “expressionism died.” Péter Mátyás [Ernő Kállai], “Új művészet I–II” [New Art I–II], MA, June 1, 1921 (VI/7), 99. 85 Ákos Koczogh, Expresszionizmus [Expressionism] (Budapest: Published by the Author, 1938), 39. Koczogh gave a short but comprehensive overview of the expressionist literature in Germany, and began the chapter “Harcos évek” [Militant Years] with mentions of the magazines Der Sturm and Die Aktion (25–27). 86 István Genthon, “Az expresszionizmus halálára” [To the Death of the Expressionism], Magyar Írás [Hungarian Writing], 1925, 5, 65.

90

Expressionism in Hungary 87 István Genthon, Az új magyar festőművészet története [The History of New Hungarian Painting] (Budapest: Magyar Szemle Társaság, 1935), 240. 88 Ibid., 240. 89 Ibid., 253, 257, 264. 90 Ibid., 251, 267. 91 Ákos Koczogh, ed., Az expresszionizmus [The Expressionism] (Budapest: Gondolat, 1964). 92 Ibid., 109–110. 93 Lajos Németh, Modern magyar művészet [Modern Hungarian Art] (Budapest: Corvina, 1968), 53, 60, 87. 94 Ibid., 62. The book of Lajos Németh has been translated into English (Lajos Németh, Modern Art in Hungary, Budapest: Corvina, 1969. Translated by Lili Halápy, translation revised by Elisabeth West). It is instructive that the three mentions of “expressive” (expresszív) and “expressivity” (expresszivitás) regarding Béla Uitz had been translated only one time as “expressive” (elements); in the other two cases the translators used the terms “Expressionist style” and “Expressionism,” 71–72. In her monograph dedicated to Derkovits and published in the same year as Németh’s book, Éva Körner discussed expressionism in general and its impact on Derkovits with much more differentiation: Éva Körner, Derkovits Gyula (Budapest: Corvina, 1968), 109–112. 95 “Megfelelt ez a magyar képzőművészet nemzeti karakterének is, hiszen annak egyik összetevője a romantika volt, az expresszionizmus pedig sokat megőrzött a romantika elveiből.” “. . . a magyar képzőművészetben az emóciók és az indulatok gyakorta fölébe kerültek a rációnak.” Lajos Németh, Modern magyar művészet, 91. The translations in the English version of the book are: “This was the style which most nearly corresponded to the national character of Hungarian fine arts, for Romanticism, one component of the artistic tradition in Hungary, was also one of the elements of Expressionism.” “. . . in the Hungarian art fine arts emotions had always dominated reason.” Lajos Németh, Modern Art in Hungary, 102.

91

4 POZNAŃ EXPRESSIONISM AND ITS CONNECTIONS WITH THE GERMAN AND INTERNATIONAL AVANT-GARDE Lidia Głuchowska This essay focuses on the so-called Poznań expressionism—a unique manifestation of the expressionist artistic style that existed in parallel to the second generation of German expressionism, during the interwar period.1 The term “expressionism” was first used in a Polish context in 1911 in a review of the twenty-second exhibition of the Berliner Secession (Berlin Secession) published in Przegląd Wielkopolski (Great Poland Review)2 and then popularized in the writings of the Paris-based Polish-Jewish art critic Adolf Basler, who enthusiastically proclaimed the birth of a new style “as universal as the Gothic and similarly like the Gothic born in France.”3 His use of the term encompassed all tendencies toward a “new art,” and thus also cubism and futurism. Historical evaluations of the expressionist movement in Poland began in the 1930s, but were initially limited to studies of literature; most of the research on expressionism by Polish scholars was published in the 1960s and 1970s.4 The first general studies on expressionism in the visual arts were published beginning in the late 1970s and continuing throughout the 1990s.5 In this period, however, the German movement was often neglected because of the Francophile orientation and affinity to French art of Polish art historians. During the partition of Poland between the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian Empires from the late eighteenth century to 1918, Polish culture and language were neglected and even prohibited in some parts of the Polish territory. This historical situation and the anti-German sentiment resulting from the country’s occupation during the Second World War were the main reasons for the negative perception of expressionism, which was seen as a German movement and also rejected because of its formal features and “leftist” activism. This resentment remained until the political changes in central and Eastern Europe in 1989 made possible a re-evaluation and further research into the complex nature of expressionism; research which still continues. Early researchers stressed the differences between the German and Polish artistic idioms: while the anti-bourgeois German expressionism was largely found in cities such as Berlin, Prague, and Vienna, expressionist tendencies in Poland tended to appear in provincial centers such as Poznań, Kraków, and Lvov. Likewise, “war and revolution,” as literary historian Erazm Kuźma maintains, “defined the expressionist movement in Poland much differently than in 92

Poznań Expressionism

Germany—war and revolution would have been considered a failure there; here they brought independence.”6 Hence the social engagement typical of German expressionism was replaced by patriotic activity in Polish expressionism. Kuźma summarizes his observations on this aspect: In Germany, expressionism strove to be and was to a certain degree a political and social revolution. Rejecting bourgeois reality, it evolved into at least three separate ideas—communism, fascism and zionism. In Poland, artists spoke about a revolution which was a revolution of spirit, founded on the mystical ideas of [romantic poet Juliusz] Słowacki. The social [socialist L.G.] revolution was rejected.7 Scholars distinguish three phases of expressionism in Poland: an anticipated symbolic art nouveau about 1900; an explicitly programmatic expressionism, beginning near the end of the First World War and lasting only three to four years; and a third, historical, late expressionism in the 1930s. The first includes the work of artists such as Mikołaj Konstanty Czurlanis (Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis), Wojciech Weiss (inspired by Edvard Munch), and Stanisław Wyspiański Witkacy (compared to James Ensor) and writings by Stanisław Przybyszewski, Wacław Berent, and Tadeusz Miciński. Late expressionism of the 1920s and 1930s was identified with the visual and literary œuvre of Bruno Schulz and the poetry of the Czartak group.8 These two nonhistorical phases of implicit expressionism were both more highly valued by Polish art historians than the third phase of expressionism, which ran parallel to the second generation in Germany.9 Expressive and expressionist tendencies in Polish art are present still in contemporary art, in part as a programmatic neoexpressionism in the work of artists inspired by Bunt, in part as a movement similar to the Neue Wilde (New Wild Artists) in Germany of the 1980s and later.10

The First Expressionist Exhibition in Poland—Lvov, 1913 The Exhibition of Futurists, Cubists, and Expressionists (Wystawa futurystów, kubistów i ekspresjonistów) prepared by Herwarth Walden and staged at the Museum Przemysłowe (Museum of Industry) in Lwów/Lemberg/Lviv (Lvov, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian partition of Poland) from June 29 to August 17, 1913 was an important event in terms of introducing German expressionism and other current trends in art to a Polish audience.11 The twenty-four futurist works included in the traveling exhibition’s previous European venues were sent back to Germany before it arrived in Lvov.12 As a consequence, the Lvov show featured above all expressionist works, mostly of Sturm artists13—this despite the lure of the exhibition poster, designed by local artist Józef Wodyński,14 which prominently featured the painting The Murder by the cubist adherent Bohumil Kubišta, a former member of the Czech Osma group. The exhibition featured above all the Blauer Reiter (Blue Rider): Alexei Jawlensky, with fifty-two paintings, and Wassily Kandinsky, whose work had been included in exhibitions in Warsaw and Kraków in 1904 and 1905, respectively, showing two of his Studies.15 Die Pathetiker (“those filled with pathos”—the Berlin artists Richard Janthur, Jakob Steinhardt, and Ludwig Meidner, who exhibited in Walden’s Sturm gallery in 1912) was represented by Meidner’s Cosmic Landscapes and Self-portrait, and the Neue Sezession by Moritz Melzer, César Klein, and Heinrich Richter. The paintings by Georg Tappert, included in the catalogue, did not reach Lvov, but his student Wilhelm Morgner showed five works. Furthermore, the Polish audience could see one work each by Arthur Segal and Oskar Kokoschka. The show also included two works by Egon Adler—most likely Jankel Adler,16 a German-Bohemian artist of Jewish origin who later joined the expressionist group Yung-Yidish (Young Yiddish) in Łódź—and Die Gruppe Progressiver Künstler (The Group of Progressive Artists) from Cologne. 93

Lidia Głuchowska

The catalogue essay was most likely written by Władysław Witwicki, local organizer of the show, a member of the Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Sztuk Pięknych (Society of Friends of the Fine Arts), and also professor of psychology;17 however, the essay has also been attributed to Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, father of the painter Witkacy, and also to the Paris correspondent of Die Aktion (The Action), the aforementioned Basler,18 who introduced expressionism (and other tendencies of the new art) in Poland, a style, he noted, that “overpowers all the countries, differentiates and adjusts itself to the measure given by the genius of each race.”19 The author claims objectivity, but does not succeed in presenting the new art in a new light. Instead, he provides a guide of sorts accompanied by fragments of treatises from the adherents of the new movement and a warning to those who perceive them as pioneers of a new aesthetic and wish to follow.20 The text is based on the thesis of autonomy of artistic expression that Hans Goltz developed in the catalogue of the second Blauer Reiter show in Munich, and also makes references to Franz Marc’s Zwei Bilder (in the Blaue Reiter almanac) and Wassily Kandinsky’s 1911 treatise, Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art). It also makes free reference to Rudolf Leonard’s entire review of the 1912 Kandinsky exhibition at the Sturm gallery in Berlin. Thus, the catalogue of the Lvov exhibition was quite different from those published in the earlier venues of Paris, London, and Berlin. Much like the Budapest catalogue (written by Béla Déry), it did not include any futurist manifestos, but provided insights into the opinions of a local art critic about the latest “-isms” in an attempt, as the author noted, to inform rather than propagate. Most of the local reviewers shunned the exhibition, characterizing its works as “aesthetic deviations,”21 “inductive of headaches and eye pain,”22 and “hallucinations.”23 The well-known art critic Władysław Kozicki expressed his own negative opinion, but also referred to the artists as “revolutionaries,” writing that, “one cannot accept their art, even less admire it, and above all encourage our artists to follow them. [But one] has to admit [that the artists are] revolutionary, because in taking action against naturalism, they are the yeast: the ferment.”24 Kozicki noted that the three artistic currents of the exhibition title were closely related to one another. This reflected the generally held opinion at the time in Polish territory, introduced by Basler, that all currents of the new art are idioms of the same new universal style (largely under the umbrella of “expressionism”). However, Basler took a more critical view of futurism than he did of cubism or expressionism. He expressed this in his article in the Warsaw magazine Museion (quoted above, and probably related to his lecture at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts in 1912)25 as follows: “We can see how in Europe, schools of art spontaneously appear with characteristics identical to that which in Germany is labeled expressionism.”26 This was not typical in Poland, where, until very recently, expressionism was associated with “foreign aesthetics,” and art critics subsequent to the interwar period accepted only its late, moderate cubo-futurist forms, which—in the general opinion of Polish scholars—became an initial stadium of the Polish “national style”— Art Deco.27 Already in the interwar period, cubo-futurism was known under the local name “formizm” (formism) and was viewed as the introductory phase of the Polish avant-garde by its recognized representative and theoretician, Władysław Strzemiński, in his book Teoria widzenia (Theory of Seeing) first published in 1958.28 From a more recent perspective, however, the artist’s opinion is sometimes perceived as a false genealogy of the Polish radical modernity.29

Poznań Expressionism: A Problematic Name and Its Connotations The aesthetics commonly criticized in the context of the Sturm exhibition in Lvov was also an obstacle to the reception of Poznań expressionism for decades. The term was coined in 1964 by

94

Poznań Expressionism

art historians and then taken up in 1975 by literature specialists30 to describe the artists’ group Bunt (1918–1922), which was organized around the magazine Zdrój (The Source, 1917–1922) and held its first collective exhibition in Poznań in April 1918, during the war. Its co-founders were the artists Władysław Skotarek, Stefan Szmaj, Jan Jerzy Wroniecki, and August Zamoyski; the poet Adam Bederski; Jerzy Hulewicz, editor of the magazine; and Margarete and Stanisław Kubicki—poets, visual artists, and theorists. The latter two initiated the group’s cooperation with German galleries and magazines such as Die Aktion and Der Sturm in Berlin. As a result, several publications and exhibitions of Bunt were organized in Berlin between June 1918 and November 1922. The term “Poznań expressionism” was used again in 2013 in the title of a monumental retrospective exhibition devoted to Bunt and Zdrój.31 The distribution offices of Zdrój, located in Warsaw (Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz and later Józef Zegadłowicz), Kraków (Ludwik Essmanowski [St. T. Jazgot]), and Lvov (Józef Wittlin), ensured that the magazine reached a nationwide readership.32 The editors organized matinées and soirées, musical concerts, and open lectures in Poznań, but many of these events were repeated in Warsaw and Lvov, and contributions were encouraged from all three of the partitions of Poland, and later from the slowly unifying country as a whole. In addition to its inter-partitional mediation, Zdrój also enjoyed some of the most extensive international contacts among the early Polish avant-garde magazines.33 Various exhibitions and publications were organized together with artists from the former Austrian and Russian partitions of Poland—the Formiści (Formists, 1917–1922)34 from Kraków, and the Yung-Yidish (Young Yiddish, 1919–1923)35 from Łódź—as co-initiatives, sponsored by the greater international artistic community. Kubicki, head of the radical wing of Bunt, was also responsible for organizing the group’s last joint event, the Internationale Ausstellung Revolutionärer Künstler (International Exhibition of Revolutionary Artists), in Berlin in 1922. Of all the early Polish avant-garde groups, Bunt was the one with the strongest international orientation. The poster for the group’s first exhibition, “Bunt” Wystawa Ekspresjonistów— Malarstwo—Rzeźba—Grafika / “Bunt” Ausstellung Expressionistischer Kunst—Gemälde—Plastik— Graphik (“Revolt”: The Exhibition of Expressionists—Art—Painting—Sculpture—Graphics / The Exhibition of Expressionist Art—Painting—Sculpture—Graphics), seemed to promise a purely expressionist presentation (Figure 4.1). It promoted the explosive synergy of word and image, a conditio sine qua non of (early) avant-garde periodicals and posters, which emphasized épater le bourgeois (shock the bourgeoisie). The motif used in its design is one of the most iconic expressionist works in Polish art, Stanisław Kubicki’s linocut Wieża Babel/Der Turmbau zu Babel (The Tower of Babel, 1917). It refers to the visual language of modernity as defined by synthesized forms, strong black-and-white contrasts, spatial flatness, anti-aestheticism, and ideological bluntness. The linocut technique was the most popular at the time for works reproduced in artistic journals, in which the correspondence of word and image served to intensify the ideological message and reflected the concept of an egalitarian art. The style and design of both poster and the magazine Zdrój call to mind the layout of Berlin’s Die Aktion and, to a lesser extent, Der Sturm, a reflection of their programmatic similarities. Like the Berlin periodicals, Zdrój engaged in a wide variety of activities, including special publications, exhibitions, lectures, music events, and the production of a series of postcards. In contrast to German expressionism, however, which saw the revival of the woodcut, the most popular medium and technique among the Poznań artists was the linocut, which they called in the image captions in their magazine the “original woodcut.” In this context, it has to be stressed that the term “Poznań expressionism” was not only confusing because of the territorial connotation, but also because, as was typical for the time, it was

95

Lidia Głuchowska

    Figure 4.1(a+b)  P  olish and German versions of the poster for the first exhibition of the Bunt (Revolt) group in Poznań, April 1918, with the linocut Wieża Babel/Der Turmbau zu Babel (The Tower of Babel) by Stanisław Kubicki, 1917, reprint, private collection, Berlin

used as a label for several simultaneous currents of new art. The aesthetic and ideological sense of the spectrum of literary, graphic, painterly, photographic, and sculptural works produced by Bunt artists and published in the magazine Zdrój also included futurism, cubism, Dada, constructivism, abstraction, and, at the beginning, even art nouveau. Several issues of Zdrój were devoted to international idioms of the “new art.”36 The local community in Poznań was ambivalent toward expressionism, as it was associated not only with German art but also the occupation. Thus, the status of Bunt was similar to that of the avant-garde in the new states of central Europe—often perceived as outsiders acting like insiders, socially isolated and criticized. The position of the artists of Bunt and Zdrój was similar to those of the Weimar Republic, because they completed their higher education abroad (in Germany) and thus their views differed from the mainstream majority outlook.37 The debate about expressionism as a “German” movement, a “foreign” aesthetic and an ideology potentially dangerous to the “new” (newly restored) Polish state, was part of the discussion about the “national style.”38 In this context, the early avant-garde tendencies in art—i.e., “modernity”— invading the conservative status quo in the traditional region of Poznań were perceived as less acceptable than regarding apolitical cubism or futurism as merely formalist categories. The blanket term “expressionism” had an ambiguous activist and performative connotation39 related to the pacifist movement, but also to the German or German-like social-aesthetic revolution. In fact, the activist orientation of the movement also included the patriotic affinities of the Bunt and Zdrój circles. The Poznań expressionists supported the restitution and reunification of the Polish country and culture after more than one hundred years of territorial partition and foreign dominance. They sabotaged military actions of the German army during the First World War and took part in the Powstanie Wielkopolskie push for independence (Greater Poland Uprising, 1918–1919) and in the Polish-Soviet war (1919–1921).

96

Poznań Expressionism

One must note, however, that the association of the so-called Poznań expressionism with German expressionism was justified in the sense that Berlin was not only the closest metropolis (to Poznań) but also the crucial melting pot for the creation of a transnational exchange network of artistic ideas. These very specific characteristics of Poznań expressionism distinguish it from similar movements in Łódź and Kraków.

Bunt as an International and Cross-Border Artistic Movement The artists’ group Bunt pursued an effective strategy in positioning itself in a local as well as trans-border context. Its first contested exhibition of 1918 resounded widely in all three regions of the still-partitioned country. The bilingual exhibition poster (Figure 4.1), representing the group’s aesthetic and political program, addressed the Polish and German inhabitants of the city of Poznań, breaking with the local status quo and promoting a pacifist call for reconciliation. It also needs to be stressed that the group’s local strategy was directed against the conservatism of cultural institutions. The aforementioned poster was created in haste after the jury of the Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Sztuk Pięknych (Society of Friends of the Fine Arts) had rejected five works by Stefan Szmaj and August Zamoyski from their spring exhibition under charges of obscenity, and their colleagues, in solidarity, decided to move the entire group exposition to a hastily hired venue on Berlin Street (now 27 Grudnia Street).40 Thus, the members of Bunt deliberately created an ephemeral, local Salon des Refusés—or, rather, a Salon des Independents— with the subsequent result: a strategic succès de scandale41 and an atmosphere similar to that which prevailed during speeches of the Zurich Dadaists or at modernist exhibitions in Paris.42 Locally, the choice of visual motifs for the exhibition poster from April 1918 (the Tower of Babel) was also important. In the editorial offices of Zdrój, it was perceived in part as a symbol of “palace revolution”43 and led to the dethroning of Stanisław Przybyszewski, its first nonformal editor and theorist. This so-called revolution (the word is also found in the title of the linocut from the poster) established a caesura in the domination of modernism and the radical avantgarde in the pages of Zdrój. Although Przybyszewski, the patriarch of the Polish avant-garde, had been celebrated in Berlin in the 1890s as “the ingenious Pole” and as the first supporter of the symbolic expressionism of Munch’s work and later served as the editor of the Kraków magazine Życie (Life, 1889–1901),44 in Poznań at the time of Bunt, socio-artistic radicalism was already perceived as the inferior and partly old-fashioned form of the aforementioned, apolitical, and, to some extent, aesthetic initial phase of their movement (symbolical Protoexpressionism) in the outgoing nineteenth century. The significance of the first collective Bunt exhibition and related statements, however, was not only local. Evidence of the group’s transregional and international intent are to be found in the bilingualism of the exhibition poster as well as the group’s name: “bunt” meaning “colorful” or even “gaudy” in German, but “revolt” in Polish. Both meanings characterize the expressionist movement. Special issues of Zdrój and the Berlin magazine Die Aktion dedicated to Bunt were prepared in tandem and published within two months of each other (April and June 1918) in both Polish and German (Figures 4.2, 4.3), and reproductions of some artworks were published nearly in parallel in the magazines (Figures 4.3, 4.4). Bunt was not solely a Polish artists’ group, not least because of its one female member, Margarete Kubicka (née Schuster). Kubicka was German, but used the grammatically Polish form of her second name rather than the Germanized one, sometimes even omitting her forename and referring to herself in the very traditional manner as “Stanisławowa” (belonging to Stanisław).45 For Kubicki, an author of Polish and German revolutionary Biblical poetry who strove to come to terms with the utopia

97

Lidia Głuchowska

Figure 4.2  Cover of Die Aktion (The Action), VIII, nos. 21–22 (1918), special issue on “Polnische Kunst” (Polish Art) with the linocut Bunt (Revolt) by Stanisław Kubicki, private collection, Berlin

of the “new community,” the bilingual and international character of the group’s art was very much intentional.46 In Poznań, Bunt artists strove to address both the Polish and the German communities, two hostile populations living in one city, thus their desire for a pacifist, anti-capitalist, and antibourgeois appeal. They initiated a cross-partition and cross-border dialogue, promoting a broad anti-institutional “reform of life” and a so-called “new community.” In the same spirit, the first Berlin exhibition of the group, organized at the editorial offices of Die Aktion in June 1918, was to be seen as its access to the universal modernist and avant-garde movement. The person responsible for organizing the show, which was planned simultaneously with the one in Poznań, while other group members were still fighting on the various European fronts, was Margarete Kubicka. The exhibition was part of a series of presentations dedicated to the art of various countries and corresponded well to the anti-war and anti-nationalist ideological profile of Franz Pfemfert’s Die Aktion, which also published reproductions of Bunt’s numerous works of art as well as ideological and literary texts.47 The first Bunt exhibition in Germany consisted of fifty of the eighty-four works initially displayed in Poznań. The first Poznań and Berlin exhibitions were celebrated by special issues of Zdrój and Die Aktion, with covers featuring different versions of The Rower rowing his boat upstream, the visual motif being, as with Tower of Babel, a symbol of artistic and social revolution (Figures 4.3, 4.4). On the German cover (Figure 4.2), the figure is shown from the front, with the rower 98

Poznań Expressionism

recognized both as screaming (per Munch’s works) and as a singleton of the universal new community depicted in The Tower of Babel. The group exhibition was followed by two shows of works by individual members: August Zamoyski, June–August 1918, and Jerzy Hulewicz, in October 1918. A fourth show, January–March 1919, dedicated to the work of Margarete and Stanisław Kubicki, was damaged by right-wing militias.48 In the context of the double role of Bunt’s activities, it is important to stress once more the ambiguous symbolism of the motif of the Tower of Babel (Figure 4.1). The art historian Andrzej Turowski sees it as symbolic of a whole generation of “world builders,” who wanted to revolutionize not only art, but also society.49 But the work’s ideological meaning is ambiguous. It is not clear for what kind of revolt it was calling—for the national “new state” and independence after 123 years of occupation or for a utopian “new world” and “new community” (revolution and pacifist movement) as supported by the international avant-garde?50 Was it calling for both? Possibly, however, the internationalist movement was not acceptable for the patriotic majority of the Polish society of Poznań. It is no coincidence, however, that the faces of the figures looking out from the tower resemble those in Edvard Munch’s Skirk (Scream, 1893),51 and thus are easily recognized as symbols of individual alienation in the modern world and of the existential anxiety that accompanied the socio-political transformations following the First World War, as well as the revolutions in Russia, Germany, and Hungary (all of which affected Poland). Recalling a moment from Genesis—one of the Polish expressionists’ few depictions of the Old Testament—the ambiguity of the poster’s image of the Tower also stems from the fact that it combines politics and metaphysics. According to the Biblical narrative, revolt and defeat are followed by spiritual rebirth and the birth of a new world.52 At the same time, it represents the

Figure 4.3  C  over of Zdrój (The Source), III, no. 1 (1918), Zeszyt Buntu (The Bunt Issue) with the linocut Wioślarz (The Rower) by Stanisław Kubicki, private collection, Berlin

Figure 4.4  C  over of Die Aktion, VI, no. 25 (1918), with the linocut Der Ruderer (The Rower) by Stanisław Kubicki, private collection, Berlin

99

Lidia Głuchowska

apogee of Kubicki’s and Bunt’s utopia of the supra-spiritual “new man” and transnational “new community.” It evokes a presentiment of defeat and thus becomes a critical reckoning with the constitutive myths of this generation; it can be seen as a kind of avant-garde self-denial and para-Dadaist anti-manifesto.53

Exterritorial Avant-Garde? Another less-known aspect of Poznań expressionism is that the group’s members were actually quite widespread. Like the later group a.r. (revolutionary artists/real avant-garde, 1929– 1936),54 which was based in Łódź, Bunt, although generally associated with Poznań, could in fact be described as extraterritorial. During the First World War, its members fought on various European fronts and most were probably never assembled together in one place, their communications taking place mostly by mail. Because of their diaspora-like existence, the artists were able to establish a broad network of artistic contacts, which resulted in transnational projects and a diverse stylistic development, rather than a genuine group style or identity. Surviving documents reflecting Bunt’s international cooperation are rare; however, the pages of Zdrój themselves are proof of the artists’ relationships with other creative communities—not only in Germany, but also in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, former Austro-Hungary (including Czech artists), Russia, India, and even Iceland. The artists’ impressive activities in terms of inter-partition communication, international exhibitions, and publishing initiatives are also documented in their personal correspondence. To this day, the scarcity of visual documents results in a certain marginalization of Bunt’s achievements in Polish art historiography. The analysis of these personal accounts, however, provides new insights into the concept of Poznań expressionism.55 As a consequence of their extraterritorial activities, Bunt artists left no group portraits and even failed to document their controversial first exhibition. The only known photograph revealing the backstage of Bunt’s operations shows the publisher of Zdrój, Jerzy Hulewicz, in the company of the first unofficial editor, Stanisław Przybyszewski, at Hulewicz’s manor house in Kościanki. Documentation of the interactions with Yung-Yidish, Formiści, Kazimir Malevich,56 or the Cologne-based Gruppe Progressiver Künstler (Group of Progressive Artists) is also lacking; the photograph taken at the Kongress der Union Internationaler Progressiver Künstler (Congress of the Union of International Progressive Artists) in Düsseldorf in 1922 is one of the few tangible proofs of Bunt members’ collective and international activities. The congress, however, was only attended by the Kubickis, and only Stanisław Kubicki is depicted in the photograph, making it something of a collective Bunt portrait à rebours. No photograph of the last collective show of Bunt (including works by the Kubickis, Skotarek, and Szmaj), the Internationale Ausstellung Revolutionärer Künstler (International Exhibition of the Revolutionary Artists), in Berlin in the fall of 1922, has ever been found.

The Magazine Zdrój—Word and Image as a Mirror of a Supra-Regional and Multicultural Network The most important surviving document related to Poznań expressionism is the aforementioned magazine Zdrój: Dwutygodnik poświęcony sztuce i kulturze umysłowej (The Source: Bi-weekly dedicated to arts and intellectual culture), which was the most influential early avant-garde magazine in Poland.57 Planned as a monthly publication, sixty-eight issues appeared between April 1917 and December 1920, with the last single volume appearing in 1922. The print run at its highest point was 1,500 copies.58 100

Poznań Expressionism

Hulewicz was the main editor-in-chief, but Zdrój early activities were informally overseen by Przybyszewski, from the magazine’s inception in 1917 until the end of 1918, when he published his last contributions. Under Przybyszewski’s influence, the magazine initially promoted works of the already old-fashioned so-called Young Poland with its ideal of l’art pour l’art, as well as a historical, symbolic expressionism. Poznań (along with other parts of Poland under foreign domination) was perceived as an “unpoetic district” or “Beotia” (after the name of the Greek region Wiotịa/Boiōtía), and regarded as provincial, since being under German rule, it was reluctant to adopt new trends. Zdrój therefore initially cooperated with older literary authorities such as Wacław Berent and Jan Kasprowicz, and art nouveau dominated the magazine’s graphic design. The heroic era of the magazine ended with Zeszyt Buntu (the Bunt issue) of April 1918, which promoted on its cover early avant-garde directions (Figure 4.3). As noted previously, the term expressionism first appeared on the cover in 1917, nearly half a year before the first Bunt exhibition.59 The guiding spirit behind Bunt’s radical change was Stanisław Kubicki; in his manifesto “Notes,” he spoke on behalf of an international spiritual movement for humanity in its entirety rather than only for a nation and proclaimed an era of “Great Spirituality.”60 In his mystic appeal, “the ‘Holy Rebel,’” Hulewicz, the leader of the more moderate wing of Bunt, proclaimed an altruistic “Rebellion of Love” (Miłości Bunt).61 As in other avant-garde manifestos, Bunt promoted the unification of art and life, activism, and interaction with its audience. The artists presented their main ideas at multilingual events accompanying the group’s first exhibition. According to one eyewitness, the city, which had played no role in Polish art for over five decades, suddenly became the center of an art movement that brought to Poznań, as if to Mecca, artists from Vilnius, Lvov, Warsaw, and Kraków.62 Zdrój was illustrated with linocuts, drawings, sculptures, and paintings by Bunt artists as well as reproductions obtained through Die Aktion. The latter included works by Alexander Archipenko, Umberto Boccioni, André Derain, James Ensor, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, Franz Marc, Elie Nadelman, Pablo Picasso, Auguste Rodin, Gino Severini, Felix Vallotton, and Jacoba van Heemskerck (Figure 4.5), thus representing a wide range of nations and idioms of the new art. The magazine also published prints by the Formiści and by Yung-Yidish, as well as information about the joint exhibition projects of these groups and the Bunt artists in Poznań and Lvov in 1919 and 1920. Bunt artists contributing to Zdrój expressed their ideas in an internationally visual language: the linocuts appearing in the magazine were shocking in their use of contrasting black-andwhite areas and primitivist deformations. Władysław Skotarek’s prints resembled the apocalyptic visions in the work of Ludwig Meidner and Jacob Steinhardt; the organic abstractions of Hulewicz, Kubicka, and Zamoyski and Kubicki’s geometrical abstractions were novelties in Polish art. The explosive synergy of word and image, typical of avant-garde periodicals, highlighted Zdrój’s attempt to “shock the bourgeoisie.” Zdrój violated the local status quo in several ways: Polish patriots were provoked by its promotion of German art; in turn, the Germans (comprising approximately 40% of the city’s population) were incensed at its promotion of works by artists of the Allied Powers, and by examples of Italian futurism, French and Russian poetry, symbolism, cubism, and Dada. During the various stages of its existence, the magazine’s ideological spectrum remained flexible, ranging from a patriotic position to an international perspective. In the wake of Poland regaining its independence and the Polish-Soviet war, the authors tried to strike a compromise between the ideas of a “new world” and a “new state.”63 In this atmosphere, according to some sources, evenings of German literature took place in Poznań, and Hulewicz and Artur Maria Swinarski were scheduled to read in Hanover.64 Zdrój published poetry by Else Lasker-Schüler and Georg Heym 101

Lidia Głuchowska

Figure 4.5  Cover of Zdrój, VII, nos. 3–4 (1918), with Drzeworyt (Woodcut) by Jacoba van Heemskerck, private collection, Berlin

along with information about exhibitions in Berlin. Witold Hulewicz translated works blacklisted by Prussian censors during the First World War, including Thea Sternheim’s “Tołstoj” (Tolstoy), while Kubicki, in turn, promoted the humanitarian and revolutionary ideas espoused by Paul Adler and Franz Werfel. The internationality of the magazine was underscored by the publication of works by a number of foreign authors, both living and dead, the most prominent of whom were Guillame Apollinaire, Charles Baudelaire, Gottfried Benn, Karel Čapek, Walter Hasenclever, Georg Heym, Jiři Karasek, Else Lasker-Schüler, Mikhail Lermontov, Maurice Maeterlinck, Filippo T. Marinetti, Kurt Pinthus, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Rimbaud, Auguste Rodin, and Leo Tolstoy. It was in the pages of Zdrój that Wassily Kandinsky’s “Über die Formfrage” (On the Problem of Form) was first published in Poland.65 Despite their differences in promoting universalism vs. patriotism, politics vs. mysticism, both wings of Bunt, the more traditional and the revolutionary, were strongly anti-provincialist. Even the more traditional authors of Zdrój ran the risk of severe criticism from national and Catholic circles because of their support for the integration of partitioned Poland and opposition to the separatist tendencies of Wielkopolska. Zdrój struggled financially when Polish printing houses boycotted the magazine, and it had to be published by German printing houses.66 While living in Munich, in 1917, Przybyszewski called for cooperation with young artists such as Adam Bederski and Stefan Szmaj, but soon came to fear their radicalism. Taking a more critical view of the “German” form of expressionism, with its negative connotations in Poznań, 102

Poznań Expressionism

his articles “A Returning Wave: Around Expressionism” and “Expressionism, Słowacki, and ‘The Genesis of the Spirit’”67 promoted the same universalizing and mystical tendencies, evoking perennial debates about spirit versus matter, as had shaped Polish Romanticism. The editorial board of Zdrój was accused by some of the magazine’s readers of taking an unwelcome pro-German stand and censured for supporting the revolution that threatened the fragile state of Poland’s recently regained independence. Przybyszewski warned Hulewicz that the publication might end up “as an appendix of Die Aktion.” 68 In the face of the Polish-Soviet War, in July 1920, after the editorial board of Die Aktion had published articles supportive of the Soviet revolution and it virtually became a party magazine during the Spartacist Uprising (Spartakusaufstand),69 Zdrój officially distanced itself from the German magazine.70 Nevertheless, Zdrój continued to be censured for its alleged cosmopolitism and for “poisoning the Polish soul” with foreign, frequently Semitic, elements.71 Furthermore, it was criticized for anti-national heresy bordering on Bolshevism; it might well have been better published in German, French, or English, rather than Polish, noted one critical, conservative, and patriotic reader in his letter to the editorial board.72 Research of the last twenty years has shown that the positions of the more radical Bunt artists, particularly Kubicki, were unjustifiably associated with party ideology. Kubicki and his wife, Margarete, who both sympathized with the Spartacist Uprising and the metaphysical wing of the Bauhaus, promoted anarchism or so-called “cosmic communism.” This stance led to their later participation in projects associated with Die Kommune—for example, at the Congress of the Union of International Progressive Artists in Düsseldorf in 1922, where Poland was also represented by artists from Yung-Yidish, among them Pola Lindenfeld, Jankel Adler, Marek Szwarc, and Henryk Berlewi.73 From mid-1919 onward, Zdrój was the hub of a literary group of the same name. The main representatives included Emil Zegadłowicz, Zenon Kosidowski, and the brothers Jerzy and Bohdan Hulewicz. Despite the predominance of expressionism, the magazine remained a forum for diverse stylistic currents, as previously suggested by Przybyszewski, who, in the initial prospect of the magazine in fall 2017, called for the support of a generation of authors rather than a particular stylistic form.74 During its eclectic third stage, beginning in June 1919 when Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz of the Skamander group became its Warsaw representative, Zdrój often published poems and translations by Iwaszkiewicz’s colleagues Julian Tuwim, Kazimierz Wierzyński, Wilam Horzyca, and by Kraków-based artists. In its fourth stage, in March 1920, Zdrój became a forum for the mystical form of the so-called “integral expressionism”—the synthesis of foreign (mostly German) and ahistorical Polish traditions rooted mainly in Romanticism.75 The key ideas of this new movement were outlined by Jan Stur in the manifesto “Czego chcemy” (What we want) and put forward by Zenon Kosidowski in his article “Z zagadnień twórczości” (On the Question of Artistic Creation).76 As one of the most eminent literary critics of his time, Stur questioned the ideological and aesthetic assumptions behind the currents competing with expressionism, including Parnassianism, futurism, formism, Dada, and the neorealism of the Skamander group. Under his influence, the magazine turned from politics to mysticism and from Berlin to Warsaw. In the process of nationalizing modernism, initiated on the one side by Przybyszewski and on the other side by the Kraków-based Formiści, expressionism became more of a Polish phenomenon. The members of both the Poznań and Kraków circles saw the representatives of Polish (neo)romanticism—Adam Mickiewicz, Tadeusz Miciński, Cyprian Kamil Norwid, and Juliusz Słowacki—as the predecessors of their ideas and movement. In 1920, Zdrój published Brzask epoki: W walce o nową sztukę (The Dawn of an Era: The Struggle for a New Art), an almanac containing one hundred literary texts and sixty illustrations 103

Lidia Głuchowska

that documented the magazine’s evolution.77 Shortly thereafter, the magazine was to be converted into a quarterly, but after a one-year hiatus in 1922, only one issue was published. The writers associated with Zdrój took the magazine’s name as the name of a new literary group. They preferred more ephemeral publications in the so-called Biblioteka Zdroju (Zdrój Library, 1918–1922), a series that consisted of over twenty volumes of essays, dramatic works, and poems, including texts by the Romantic writers Mickiewicz and Norwid, and by Przybyszewski. The majority of the works published, however, were by members of Zdrój the literary group. Hulewicz’s manor in Kościanki became a sort of a cloistered community (referred to as the “Kościanki monastery”) and creative laboratory, where literature and the arts were celebrated as quasi-religious practices. Fascinated by theosophy, Buddhism, occultism, and nondenominational religion, the Zdrój poets considered themselves apostles who would bring Christ’s love and the light of the spirit into the material world. This mysticism and spiritual engagement had been a prominent ideological focus of the periodical from its beginnings—see, for example, the publication of the self-portrait as an oriental philosopher by Jerzy Hulewicz in both Zdrój and Die Aktion (Figure 4.6), also the aforementioned writings by Przybyszewski devoted to Słowacki and expressionism that appeared as a series in several issues of the magazine in 1918, in which he described mystical views of himself and the poet of Romanticism.78 Literary texts published in Zdrój followed the characteristic attitude and style of secondgeneration German expressionism: an anti-aesthetic stance; the use of hyperbole and primitivism;

Figure 4.6  C  over of Die Aktion, VIII, nos. 35–36 (1918), special issue on Jerzy von Hulewicz, with his linocut Autoportret (Self-portrait), private collection, Berlin

104

Poznań Expressionism

pacifist, altruist, and activist tendencies or anarchism; Franciscan motifs; and irrationalism. Within Zdrój circles, expressionism was viewed as an anti-naturalist, anti-symbolic, antiformalist, and anti-ludic movement of ideas, and as a poetics governed by the principle of multiple deformations—and as such, opposed to a common-sense vision of the world.79 In opposition to the literary form of German expressionism, defined as understatement, the poetics of the Polish idiom has been characterized as overstatement.80 Looking back, the overall importance of Zdrój’s contribution to the development of modern art in Poland, and to expressionism in particular, is ambiguous. For some, it represented a victory of tradition over the anti-traditional current of European expressionism, as it originated in a milieu that favored the idea of art as a medium for propagating the “new state” rather than as the avant-garde utopia of an international “new world.” For others, the visual appearance of the magazine and its consistent corporate identity, so to speak, surpassed its literary merits. As Henryk Stażewski, a founding member of the constructivist group Blok, observed, Zdrój was “the only source of modernity” in Poland for a long time.81 Thanks to its exquisite design, Zdrój remains an attractive and noteworthy magazine even today. Throughout the thirty-nine months of its publication, it contributed significantly to the development of political awareness and aesthetics in Poland, but despite its representation of a wide spectrum of artistic currents (see Figures 4.5, 4.7, 4.8) and support of the European art dialogue during a critical period of modern history, its significance regrettably remains underestimated in the national historiography of the arts and literature in Poland and Europe.

The Legacy of the So-Called Poznań Expressionism The movement traditionally known as Poznań expressionism has been characterized as largely pro-German in nature, not just because of its aesthetics, but also partly because of its activist elements as well as its exhibitions in Germany and publications in the Berlin-based journal Die Aktion, edited by Franz Pfemfert. The term, however, suggests that the movement was local and marginal in nature, observations that are neither objective nor well founded; unfortunately, a more appropriate name for the movement has so far not been established.82 The value of the internationally progressive, but at the same time patriotic, orientation of the artists was underestimated for a long time. National resentment turned attention to other groups, such as Formiści and its followers, for their perceived contributions to the Polish style of the “new state.” As for political activity, many of the artists associated with the movement were also patriotic, even if the patriotic works they produced, such as the portrait of Marshal Józef Piłsudski (the father of Polish independence) by Jerzy Hulewicz, were few and far between. Application of the Poznań expressionist label to Bunt and Zdrój also seems inadequate as it does not fully capture the aesthetics and ideology of the movement, which was, in fact, eclectic and inspired by a range of idioms, with its threads including not only a local (Poznań/Western Polish) orientation, but also integration of the cultural traditions of Poland’s three partitions and provision of access to universal European modernity and a utopian “new community” unlimited by nationalism. The activities of the Poznań expressionists thus were supra-regional and international in scope and reflected the multicultural nature of Polish culture of the period, including the promotion of art and literature of national minorities such as Jews and Ukrainians. Although sometimes still neglected by Polish scholars, who devote more attention to artistic developments in Kraków and Warsaw, the phenomenon of the artists’ group Bunt and the associated periodical Zdrój presents an alternative to the typically unidirectional cultural transfer from center to periphery. The provincial city of Poznań, with its young cultural institutions, 105

Lidia Głuchowska

Figure 4.7  Cover of Zdrój, V, no. 4 (1918), with Rysunek Egon Schiele—Charles Pigny (Drawing Charles Pigny by Egon Schiele), private collection, Berlin

Figure 4.8  Cover of Zdrój, VII, nos. 5–6 (1919), with Drzeworyt oryginalny (Original Woodcut) by Georg Schvimpt, private collection, Berlin

provided a suitable stage for the international avant-garde’s utopian experiments and ideas for a trans-border, even extraterritorial, “new world,” and a national “new community” in competition with the national approach embodied in the official policy of the “new state” in central Europe after the First World War. As far as the biographical context of the Poznań expressionists is concerned, it is interesting that its members began working on their self-created legends relatively early. In his novel Kratery (Craters),83 Jerzy Hulewicz portrayed Dariusz, an imprisoned revolutionary, betrayed by his former comrades. The literary historian Kuźma identifies the protagonist of the novel with one of the Bunt artists: Among the [programmatic] Polish [Poznań] expressionists only Kubicki [and to an even greater extent his wife Margarete Kubicka, not mentioned because she was German—L. G.] promoted radical social ideas. Still, it would seem that it is precisely Kubicki who is portrayed by Hulewicz as his protagonist, Dariusz.84 Both shared a revolutionary bent, a love of the hard sciences, a utopian faith in science, and the desire to translate principles of nature and mathematics into social and artistic theory.85 Hulewicz’s protagonist, facing the fall of the revolution, maintains that “society—is a bloodthirsty animal.”86 Kubicki likewise eventually became disillusioned with the revolution and turned to nature. This development is reflected in one of his last paintings, his quasi-self-portrait Der Heilige und die Tiere/Święty i zwierzęta (The Holy and the Animals, 1932), in which he depicted himself as St. Francis, in harmony with nature but alone and isolated (Plate 6). The work seems to be a pendant to his image of Samotnik (The Lonely Man), a linocut depicting a 106

Poznań Expressionism

lonely revolutionary that was used for the invitation to the Internationale Ausstellung Revolutionärer Künstler in Berlin in 1922, the last collective exhibition in which four Bunt artists—the Kubickis, Skotarek, and Szmaj—took part together. While The Lonely Man is a symbol of the social isolation of the radical avant-garde, Kubicki’s late painting The Holy and the Animals (also as a pastel, A Man and the Animals, 1928) seems to be an act more of sublimation and conciliation.87 From 1918, with the outbreak of the November Revolution, to 1934, Kubicki and his wife lived in Berlin. Shortly after Hitler’s rise to power, he returned alone to Poland. His last painting, Moses vor dem brennenden Dornbusch/Mojżesz przed krzewem gorejącym (Moses in Front of the Burning Bush, 1933–1934), in its composition and symbolism similar to The Tower of Babel, remained unfinished. In 1939, Kubicki joined the Polish resistance and was eventually murdered by the Gestapo in 1942. Margarete Kubicka was able to protect the prints and drawings of the Bunt artists and their friends who had remained abroad since their 1918 and 1922 exhibitions in Berlin. In 2015, their son, St. Karol Kubicki, donated these works to the National Museum in Poznań and the Leon Wyczółkowski Regional Museum in Bydgoszcz. In the course of the international touring exhibition Bunt—Ekspresjonizm—Transgraniczna awangarda: Prace z berlińskiej kolekcji prof. St. Karola Kubickiego (Bunt—Expressionism—Transborder Avant-Garde: Art Works from the Berlin Collection of Prof. St. Karol Kubicki)88 organized in honor of his bequest, use of the term “Poznań expressionism” was strongly debated. To underscore the supra-national nature of the group’s activities, the exhibition was held in key prewar centers of expressionism and the development of the graphic arts: Poznań, Bydgoszcz, Dresden, and Wrocław. The event inspired thirty-four contemporary Polish artists to produce graphic works in response to the socio-political character of Bunt’s art; these were included in collective presentations to commemorate one hundred years of Polish expressionism. Andrzej Bobrowski’s large-scale linocut Transformation M/S (Margarete/Stanisław, 2015) was created as an homage to Bunt, and thus pars pro toto symbolically stands in for the missing group portrait of the Poznań expressionists.89

Notes 1 Stephanie Barron, German Expressionism 1915–1925: The Second Generation (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1988); Jerzy Malinowski, Sztuka i nowa wspólnota: Zrzeszenie artystów Bunt 1918–1922 [Art and the New Community: The Bunt (Revolt) Artists’ Association 1918–1922] (Wrocław: Wiedza o Kulturze, 1991), 143. 2 Małgorzata Geron, Formiści: Twórczość i programy artystyczne [Formists: Work and Artistic Programs] (Toruń: Wydawnictwo UMK, 2015), 52. 3 “Jesteśmy świadkami narodzin stylu równie ogólnego, jak gotycki i tak samo jak gotyk zrodzonego we Francji . . .” Adolf Basler, “Nowa sztuka” [New Art], Museion 3, no. 12 (1913): 23; Basler, “Stare i nowe konwencje w malarstwie (od Cezanne’a do kubizmu)” [Old and new conventions in painting (From Cezanne to Cubism)], Krytyka [Criticism] 38, no. 4 (1913): 210–220, and no. 5 (1913), 260–271. 4 Karol Klein, “Ekspresjonizm Polski (grupa Zdroju)” [Polish Expressionism (the Zdrój Group)], Przegląd Humanistyczny [Review on Humanities] 4, no. 5 (1932), 457–478; Andrzej Lam, Polska awangarda poetycka. Programy lat 1917–1923 [Polish Literary Avant-Garde. Programs from the Years 1917–1923] (Kraków: Wyd. Literackie, 1969); Lam, Die literarische Avantgarde in Polen: Dichtungen, Manifeste, Theoretische Schriften [The Literary Avant-garde in Poland: Poetry, Manifestos, Theoretical Writing] (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1990), esp. 41–63; Józef Ratajczak, Krzyk i ekstaza [Scream and Ecstasy] (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 1987); Lam, Zagasły “brzask epoki”: Szkice z dziejów czasopisma “Zdrój” 1917–1922 [The Dawn of an Era: Sketches from the History of “Zdrój” Magazine 1917–1922] (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 1980). 5 Zofia Kucielska and Jerzy Malinowski, Ekspresjonizm w grafice polskiej [Expressionism in Polish Printmaking] (Kraków: MNK, 1976); Piotr Łukaszewicz and Jerzy Malinowski, Ekspresjonizm w sztuce polskiej [Expressionism in Polish Art] (Wrocław: MNWr, 1980); Malinowski, Sztuka.

107

Lidia Głuchowska 6 “Wojna i rewolucja—jak stwierdza badacz—określały u nas ruch ekspresjonistyczny zupełnie inaczej niż w Niemczech—Tam określone zostały jako klęska. Nam przyniosły niepodległość.” Erazm Kuźma, “Kategoria biografii w badaniach grupy literackiej i ruchu literackiego (Na przykładzie ekspresjonizmu)” [Biographical Categorization of Research on Artists’ Groups and Literary Movements (Using the Example of Expressionism)], in Biografia–geografia–kultura literacka [Biography–Geography–Artistic Culture], ed. Jerzy Ziomek and Janusz Sławiński (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1975), 102–104. 7 “W Niemczech ekspresjonizm chciał być i był po części rewolucją polityczną i społeczną. Odrzucając rzeczywistość mieszczańską zdążał co najmniej w kierunku trzech odrębnych koncepcji: komunizmu, faszyzmu i syjonizmu. W Polsce mówiło się o rewolucji, ale o rewolucji ducha, w myśl mistycznych haseł Słowackiego z okresu romantyzmu. Rewolucja społeczna została odrzucona.” Kuźma, “Kategoria biografii,” 113. 8 Andrzej Wirth, “Ekspresjonizm polski w perspektywie europejskiej” [Polish Expressionism in a European Perspective], Kontynenty: Nowy Merkuriusz [Continents: New Mercury] VI/ 70 (1964): 6–8; Jan Józef Lipski, “Ekspresjonizm polski i niemiecki” [Polish and German Expressionism], Dialog 10 (1975), 106–112; Edward Balcerzan, Kręgi wtajemniczenia [Circles of Initiation] (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1982), 262–286. 9 Barron, German Expressionism; Malinowski, Sztuka, 143. 10 Dorota Folga-Januszewska, ed., Ekspresje i ekspresjonizmy w sztuce XX wieku [Expressions und Expressionisms in Art of the 20th Century] (Warszawa: MNW, 1990); Jolanta Ciesielska, ed., Republika bananowa: Ekspresja lat 80. [The Banana Republic: Expressionism of the 1980 (Wrocław: OKiS, 2009); Lidia Głuchowska, Bunt—Refleks—Ulotka—Ich 7—performatywna, ekstrerytorialna i międzygeneracyjna „międzynarodówka ducha”?/ Bunt—Refleks [Reflex]—Ulotka [The Flyer]—Ich 7 [The 7 of Them]—The Performative, Exterritorial and Intergenerational ‘International Spirit”? in. Maciej Kurak, ed., Der Flyer [The Flyer] (Poznań: UAP, 2016), 16–37, 107–116; Honorata Gołuńska,“Dawni i wspołcześni ekspresjoniści w Bydgoszczy” [Old and New Expressionists in Bydgoszcz], in Bunt a tradycje grafiki w Polsce i w Niemczech [Bunt and the tradition of printmaking in Poland and Germany], ed. Lidia Głuchowska, Honorata Gołuńska, and Michał F. Woźniak (Bydgoszcz: MOB, 2015) 11–21. 11 Elisabeth Clegg, “Futurists, Cubists and the Like: Early Modernism and Late Imperialism,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte [Journal of Art History] 56, no. 3 (1993): 249–277. The exhibition was not mentioned in Der Sturm; however, Walden either selected the artists or lent their works to the show. In the catalogue introduction, he mentions “Lemberg (Polen)” as one of the exhibition venues. Cf. Zehn Jahre Sturm Gesamtschau, September 1921: Hundertste Ausstellung [Ten Years of Sturm Collective Exhibitions, September 1921: The 100th Exhibition], Sturm Archive, State Library, Berlin. 12 “A futuristák és expressionisták kiállításának katalógusa” [Catalogue of the Exhibition of the Futurists and Expressionists], Nemzeti Szalon [National Salon], Budapest, January–February 1913, MTA Archive, Budapest. See also Przemysław Strożek, Marinetti i futuryzm w Polsce 1909–1939: Obecność—kontakty— wydarzenia [Marinetti and Futurism in Poland 1909–1939: Presence—Contacts—Events] (Warszaw: ISPAN, 2012), 45–47; András Zwickl, Expressionism in Hungary: From the Neukunstgruppe to Der Sturm, in this volume; Zwickl, “The International Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1913 at the Budapest Artists’ House (Művészház),” Centropa 11, no. 1 ( January 2011): 34–49. 13 Anna Wierzbicka, We Francji i w Polsce 1900–1939 [In France and in Poland 1900–1939] (Warsaw: IS PAN, 2009), 130. 14 Katalog wystawy futurystów, kubistów i ekspresjonistów:Wystawa zbiorowa prac Pillatiego Gustawa, Lwów TPSP czerwiec–lipiec 1913 [Catalogue of the Exhibition of Futurists, Cubists and Expressionists: Collective Exhibition of the Works by Gustaw Pillati], poster reprinted in Wierzbicka, We Francji, 130. 15 Geron, Formiści, 50; Magdalena Płażewska, “Warszawski Salon Aleksandra Krywułta (1880–1906)” [The Aleksander Krywułt Warsaw Salon (1880–1906)], in Rocznik Muzeum Narodowego w Warszawie 10 (1966): 381; Wystawa Nieustająca Tow. Przyj. Szt. Piękn. w Krakowie MCMV [Permanent Exhibition of the Society of Friends of Fine Arts in Kraków 1905] (Kraków: Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Sztuk Pięknych 1905), items 48–67; Aleksander Wojciechowski, ed., Polskie życie artystyczne w latach 1890–1914 [Polish Artistic Life 1890–1914] (Wrocław, Warsaw, Kraków: Ossolineum, 1967), 77. 16 “Egon Adler,” in Hana Rousová, ed., Mezery v historii 1890–1938 [Cesura in History 1890–1938] (Prague: Municipal Gallery, 1994, exh. cat.), 119. 17 Anna Wierzbicka, We Francji, 130; Strożek, Marinetti i futuryzm, 48, fn. 88. 18 Elżbieta Grabska,“Moderne” i straż przednia:Apollinaire wśród krytyków i artystów 1900–1918 [“Modernity” and the Avant-Garde: Apollinaire among Critics and rtists 1900–1918] (Kraków: Universitas, 2003); Wierzbicka, We Francji, 130, fn. 199–203.

108

Poznań Expressionism 19 “. . .ogarniającego wszystkie kraje, różniczkującego się, stosującego wszędzie do miary, jaką mu geniusz rasy wykreśla.” Basler, “Nowa sztuka,” 23. 20 [Władysław Witwicki?], “Wstęp” [Introduction], in Katalog wystawy futurystów [Catalogue of the Futurists’ Exhibition] (Lvov: TPSP, 2013), 3; Wierzbicka, We Francij, 130. 21 Celina Stroińska, “Chwila wśród ‘futurystów’” [A Moment among ‘Futurists’], Kronika Powszechna [Universal Chronic] 32 (1913): 529. 22 AS [Artur Schröder], “Wystawa kubistów, futurystów, ekspresyonistów, owalistów i t.d” [Exhibition of Cubists, Futurists, Expressionist, Ovalists, etc.], Gazeta Lwowska [Lvov Daily], July 1, 1913, 4. 23 AS [Artur Schröder], “Majaki. (Wystawa kubistów, futurystów, ekspresyonistów, owalistów it. d.)” [Hallucinations (Exhibition of Cubists, Futurists, Expressionists, Ovalists, etc.)], Gazeta Lwowska, July 5, 1913, 5. 24 “Wracając do rewolucjonistów . . . Uznawać ich sztuki nie można, zachwycać się nimi trudno. Jeszcze trudniej zachęcać naszych artystów, by szli ich torami. Trzeba przyznać rewolucjonistom, że w akcji przeciw naturalizmowi speniają funkcję drożdży—fermentu.” Władysław Kozicki, “Nowe prądy w sztuce współczesnej: Z powodu lwowskiej wystawy ekspresjonistów” [New Currents in Contemporary Art: Concerning the Lvov Exhibition of Expressionists], Słowo Polskie [Polish Word] 368 (1913): 4; Łukaszewicz, Malinowski, Ekspresjonizm, 5; Erazm Kuźma, Z problemów świadomości literackiej i artystycznej ekspresjonizmu w Polsce [On Problems of Literary and Artistic Consciousness of Expressionism in Poland] (Wrocław, Warsaw, Gdańsk: Ossolineum, 1976), 23. 25 Rydwan [Chariot] 11 (1912), 170. 26 “Widzimy, jak spontanicznie powstają o identycznych cechach szkoły w Europie, w Niemczech pod ogólną nazwa Ekspresjonistów objęte . . .” Adolf Basler, “Nowa sztuka” [New Art], Museion 12 (1913): 23–31; Basler, “Die Maler der neuen Sezession” [The Painter of the New Secession], Die Aktion III, no. 6 (1913), 176; “Formiści. Wystawa III. Katalog” [Formists: The 3rd Exhibition Catalog], in Leon Chwistek, Wielość rzeczywistości w sztuce i inne szkice literackie [Multiplicity of Reality in Art and other Literary Sketches], ed. Karol Estreicher (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1960), 98. 27 Piotr Piotrowski, “Modernity and Nationalism. Avant-Garde Art and Polish Independence, 1912–1922,” in Timothy O. Benson, ed., Central European Avant-Gardes: Exchange and Transformation, 1910–1930 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 313–326. 28 Władysław Strzemiński, Teoria widzenia (wydanie krytyczne) [The Theory of Seeing (critical edition)] (Łódź: MSŁ, 2016). 29 See Andrzej Turowski, Budowniczowie świat: Z dziejów radykalnego modernizmu w Polsce [Constructors of the World: On the History of Polish Radical Modernism] (Kraków: Universitas, 2000), 14–15. 30 See Tadeusz Dobrowolski, Nowoczesne malarstwo polskie [Modern Polish Painting], vol. 3 (Wrocław, Warsaw, Kraków: Ossolineum, 1964); Ryszard Przybylski, “Ekspresjonizm poznański” [Poznań Expressionism], in Literatura polska 1918–1975 [Polish Literature 1918–1975], vol. 2, ed. Alina Brodzka, Helena Zaworska, Stefan Żółkiewski (Warsaw: PAN IBL, 1975), 260–273. 31 Grażyna Hałasa, ed., Bunt: Ekspresjonizm Poznański 1917–1925 [Bunt: Poznań Expressionism 1917–1925] (Poznań: MNP, 2003). 32 Stanisław Helsztyński, Przybyszewski [Przybyszewski] (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1956), 367; Józef Ratajczak, Zagasły brzask, 65. 33 Piotrowski, “Modernity and Nationalism,” 313–326.   34 Małgorzata Geron, “The Formist Group (1917–1923): Trends in Research and the Assessment of Polish Avant-Garde Art in the 20th Century,” in History of Art History in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, vol. 2, ed. Jerzy Malinowski (Toruń: UMK, 2012), 155–164; Przemysław Strożek, “Pismo Formiści i początki międzynarodowych kontaktow polskiej awangardy (1919–1922)” [Formiści Magazine and the Beginnings of the International Contacts of the Polish Avant-Garde], Rocznik Historii Sztuki [Yearbook of Art History] XXXVIII (2013): 71–87. 35 See Jerzy Malinowski, Malarstwo i rzeźba Żydow Polskich w XIX i XX wieku [Painting and Sculpture of Polish Jews in the 19th and 20th Centuries], vol. I (Warsaw: PWN, 2000); Lidia Głuchowska, “Poznań and Łódź: National Modernism and International Avant-Garde. Zdrój (1917–22), YungYidish (1919), and Tel-Awiw (1919–21),” in Modernist Magazines: A Critical and Cultural History. Vol. 3, part 2: Europe 1880 –1940, ed. Peter Brooker et al. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1208–1233. 36 Cf. Lidia Głuchowska, “In the Shadow of the Official Discourse:Towards a Revision of the History and Theory of the Polish Idiom of Cubism,” Ars: časopis Ústavu dejín umenia Slovenskej akadémie vied [Ars: Journal for Art History of the Slovak Academy of Sciences] 2 (2014): 156–171, note 34.

109

Lidia Głuchowska 37 Cf. Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 17; Eva Forgács, “In the Vacuum of Exile: The Hungarian Activists 1919–1926,” in John Neubauer and Borbála Zsuzsanna Török, eds., The Exile and Return of Writers from East-Central Europe: A Compendium (Berlin: De Gruyter 2009), 111. 38 Cf. Romana Schuler, Goszka Gawlik, eds., Der neue Staat. Polnische Kunst 1918–1939: Zwischen Experiment und Repräsentation [The New State. Polish Art 1918–1939: Between Experiment and Representation] (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2003); Piotrowski, “Modernity and Nationalism,” 313–326. 39 Cf. Lidia Głuchowska, “‘Nicht unsere Werke sind wichtig, sondern das Leben’. Performative Manifestationen der Gruppen Bunt und Die Kommune” [‘Our Works are Not Important, but Rather Life’ Performative Manifestations of the Groups Bunt and Die Kommune] in Der performative Expressionismus [Performative Expressionism], ed. Kristin Eichhorn and Johannes N. Lorenzen (Berlin: Neofelis, 2015), 15–34. 40 Cf. Agnieszka Salamon-Radecka, “Poznańskie stowarzyszenie artystów Bunt (1917–1925) i jego kontakty z niemieckimi ekspresjonistami” [Poznań Association Bunt (1917–1925) and its Contacts with German Expressionists], in “Bunt,” “Der Sturm,” “Die Aktion.” Polscy i niemieccy ekspresjoniści/Polnische und deutsche Expressionisten [Polish and German Expressionists], ed. Andreas Hüneke, Susanne Köller, and Agnieszka Salamon-Radecka (Gniezno: Muzeum Poczatków Państwa Polskiego, 2011), 18, 26, fn. 20. 41 Stanisław Przybyszewski to Jerzy Hulewicz, May 18, 1918, in Listy [Letters], vol. 2, ed. Stanisław Helszyński (Warsaw: Spółka Wydawnicza Parnas Polski, 1938), 67–68. 42 Stanisław Przybyszewski, “Powrotna fala. Naokoło ekspresjonizmu” [Returning Wave: On Expressionism], Zdrój II, no. 6 (1918): 169. Józef Ratajczak, Zagasły, 78–79. Comp. Głuchowska, Lidia Głuchowska, Stanisław Kubicki—in transitu. Poeta tłumaczy sam siebie/Ein Poet übersetzt sich selbst [Stanisław Kubicki—in transitu. A poet translates himself] (Wrocław: Ośrodek Kultury i Sztuki: 2015), 108–166; Głuchowska, “Dada-Land Poland”? “Dada Poland”? “un dadaïsme polonais”? Notes on Two Genealogical Lines of the Quasi-Dada Movement in Poland, in Hugo-Ball-Almanach Studien und Texte zu Dada. Neue Folge [Hugo Ball Almanac. Studies and Texts on Dada. New Series] 1 (2009/2010), 55; Agnieszka Salamon-Radecka, “‘Na nas jeszcze nie czas’: Kilka uwag na temat genezy i dziejów stowarzyszenia poznańskich ekspresjonistów Bunt” [“Not Time for Us Yet”: Some Remarks on the Genesis and History of the Bunt Association of Polish Expressionists], Kronika Miasta Poznania [Chronical of the City of Poznań] 2 (2014): 344. 43 Przybyszewski, “Powrotna fala,” 169; Ratajczak, Zagasły, 78–79. 44 Lidia Głuchowska, “Munch, Przybyszewski and The Scream,” Kunst og Kultur [Art and Culture] 4 (2013): 182–193. 45 For example, in her signature attached to the Manifestos of Die Kommune (The Commune) of 1922: Erstes Manifest der Kommune [First Manifesto of the Commune], Flyer, March 1922; [Zweites] Manifest der Kommune [(Second) Manifesto of the Commune], Die Aktion XII (1922), 481–482. Reprint in Helga Kliemann, Die Novembergruppe, [The Novembergroup] (Berlin: NBK, 1966), 66; Uwe M. Schneede, ed., Die Zwanziger Jahre: Manifeste und Dokumente Deutscher Künstler [The 1920: Documents and Manifestos of German Artists] (Köln: Dumont 1979), 102–103, English transl. in Between Worlds: A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes 1910–1930, ed. Timothy O. Benson and Eva Forgács (Los Angeles, CA: MIT Press, 2002), 395. 46 Lidia Głuchowska, Stanisław Kubicki—in transitu, 121, 150; Głuchowska, “‘Dadaland—Polen’? ‘Dada Polen’?, ‘un dadaïsme polonais’? Anmerkungen zu zwei genealogischen Linien der semidadaistischen Bewegung in Polen” [“Dada-Land Poland”? “Dada Poland”?, “un dadaïsme polonais”? Notes on Two Genealogical Lines of the Quasi-Dada Movement in Poland], in Hugo-Ball-Almanach Studien und Texte zu Dada: Neue Folge [Hugo-Ball-Almanac Studies and Texts on Dada: New Issue] 1 (2009/2010): 38. 47 St. Karol Kubicki, “‘Zdrój’ i ‘Die Aktion’: Współpraca dwóch czasopism w okresie pierwszej wojny światowej” [“Zdrój” and “Die Aktion”: Cooperation of Two Magazines during the First World War], in Hałasa, Bunt, 80–95; Lidia Głuchowska, Avantgarde und Liebe: Margarete und Stanislaw Kubicki 1910–1945 [Avant-garde and Love: Margarete and Stanislaw Kubicki 1910–1945] (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 2007), 41. 48 Margarete Kubicka recollected the art works by her and her husband that had been damaged within a politically motivated devastation of the bookshop (“bei einer politischen Randale in der Buchhandlung zerstört”). Information provided to the author by the son of the Kubickis, Professor St. Karol Kubicki, the member of the founding committee of the Freie Universität (Free University) of Berlin. See Peter

110

Poznań Expressionism

49 50

51 52 53 54

55

56

57

58 59 60 61 62 63

64 65 66 67

Mantis, Jörn Merkert, Freya Mühlhaupt, eds., Die Jahre der Krise 1918–1922 [The Years of Crisis 1918–1922] (Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, 1992), 12; Głuchowska, Avantgarde und Liebe, 47. Turowski, Budowniczowie świata, 9–10. Marek Bartelik, Early Polish Modern Art: Unity in Multiplicity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 35. See also Lidia Głuchowska, “Der ‘fremde Krieg’ und der ‘neue Staat’: Polnische Kunst 1914– 1918” [The “Foreign War” and the “New State”: Polish Art 1914–1918], in Totentanz: Der Erste Weltkrieg im Osten Europas [Dance Macabre: The First World War in Eastern Europe], ed. Manfred Sapper,Volker Weichsel (Berlin: Osteuropa/Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2014), 310–311; Głuchowska, “In Poland: That Means Nowhere.The ‘Foreign War’ and the ‘New State’, 1914–1918: Polish Art between Tradition and Avant-Garde,” in 1914. Latvijas Nacionālā mākslas muzeja krājums Muzeja raksti (6)/1914. Collected Writings of the Latvian National Museum of Art Museum (6), ed. Gundega Cēbere (Riga: National Museum, 2015), 204–205. Lidia Głuchowska, “Munch,” 182–193. Głuchowska, Avantgarde und Liebe, 24, 139. Głuchowska, Stanisław Kubicki – in transitu, 121, 150; Głuchowska, “‘Dadaland –Polen’?,” 38. Piotr Piotrowski, “The Avant-Garde Institutionalised? The 1932 City of Łódź Art Prize Awarded to Władysław Strzemiński,” Umeni [Art] LI (2003), 21–26; Małgorzata Ludwisiak, “Die Künstlergruppe a.r. (1929–1936): Eine Sammlung macht Revolution,” [The Artist’s Group a.r. (1929–1936): A Collection Makes Revolution], in Tür an Tür. Polen—Deutschland: 1000 Jahre Kunst und Geschichte [Door to Door. Poland—Germany: 1000 Years of Art and History], ed. Małgorzata Omilanowska, Tomasz Torbus (Cologne: Dumont, 2011), 548–553. Lidia Głuchowska, “‘Objektive’ Fotografie und konstruierte Kunstgeschichtsschreibung? Anmerkungen zur Geschichte der (kosmo)patriotischen Gruppe BUNT,” [‘Objektive’ Photography vs. Constructed Art History? Footnotes on the History of the (Cosmo-)patriotic Group BUNT/REVOLT], in Bunt— Ekspresjonizm—Transgraniczna awangarda. ed. Lidia Głuchowska (Poznań: MNP, 2015), 133–138. Lidia Głuchowska,“Station Warsaw: Malevich, Lissitzky and the Two Traces of Cultural Transfer Between ‘East’ and ‘West’,” Centropa 13, no. 3 (September 2013): 241–257; Głuchowska, “Polish and PolishJewish Modern and Avant-Garde Artists in the ‘Capital of the United States of Europe’, c. 1910–1930,” Centropa 12, no. 3 (September 2012): 216–233. Cf. Grzegorz Gazda, Słownik europejskich kierunków i grup literackich XX wieku [Dictionary of Europen Literary Currents and Groups of the 20th Century] (Warszawa: PWN, 2009), 731–734; Gazda, “Poznań and Łódź,” fn. 1; Halina Stępień, “Zdrój,” in Wojciechowski, Polskie życie artystyczne, 633–637; Józef Ratajczak, Krzyk i ekstaza [Scream and Ecstasy] (Poznań:Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 1987); Głuchowska, “Poznań and Łódź,” 1208–1216. Helsztyński, Przybyszewski, 367; Józef Ratajczak,“Lata Zdroju” [TheYears of Zdrój], in 50 lat Poznańskiego Oddziału Związku Literatów Polskich, 1921–1971 [50 Years of the Poznań Branch of the Association of Polish Writers, 1921–1971], ed. Tadeusz Kraszewski (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 1971), 85. Bohdan Hulewicz, “O pełnię życia” [On the Fullness of Life], Zdrój 1, no. 4 (1917): 98. Stanisław Kubicki, “Uwagi” [Notes], Zdrój 3, no. 1 (1918): 27; Kubicki, “Anmerkungen” [Notes], Die Aktion 8, no. 21–22 (1918): 261; English translation in Benson, Between Worlds, 178. Jerzy Hulewicz, “Do świętego buntownika” [To the Holy Rebel], Zdrój 3, no. 1 (1918): 16–17; English translation in Benson, Between Worlds, 177–178. Zenon Kosidowski, Fakty i złudy [Facts and Illusions] (Poznań: Księgarnia Uniwersytecka, 1931), 128. Piotrowski, “Modernity and Nationalism,” 313–326; Agnieszka Salamon, “Twórczość graficzna jako narzędzie w walce o niepodległość: Przyczynek do genezy i historii “Zdroju” [Graphic Work as an Instrument of the Struggle for Independence], in Hałasa, Bunt. Ekspresjonizm Poznański, 96–118; Głuchowska, Stanisław Kubicki—In transitu, 12–20, 116–117, 120–122, 146–147, 152–153, 202–244. Edward Pawlak, Życie literackie Poznania w latach 1917–1939 [Literary Life of Poznań 1917–1939] (Poznań: PWN, 1971), 24. Wassily Kandinsky, “Zagadnienia formy” [On the Problem of Form], transl. Anna Leo, Zdrój V, no. 5–6 (1918): 132–140. See e.g. backcover of the issue 1–2, vol. XI (April 1920): “odbito w tłoczni Posener Buchdruckerei T.A. w Poznaniu” (printed in the Posener Buchdruckerei T.A. in Poznań). Stanisław Przybyszewski, “Ekspresjonizm: Słowacki i Genezis z Ducha” [Expressionism: Słowacki and the Genesis of the Spirit], Zdrój 4, no. 1 (1918): 6; cf. Lidia Głuchowska, “Der Erste Weltkrieg— Unabhängigkeit Polens—Polonisierung des Expressionismus” [The First World War— Poland’s

111

Lidia Głuchowska

68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89

Independence—Polonisation of Expressionism], in Die Künste in Zeiten politischer Zäsuren und gesellschaftlicher Transformation. Agens, Arena, Projektionsraum [The Arts in Times of Political Caesuras and Social Transformation], ed. Michaela Marek, Aleksandra Lipińska, Katja Bernhardt (Warsaw: IS PAN, 2017), [1–18], forthcoming. Stanisław Przybyszewskis to Jerzy Hulewicz, Munich, before February 10, 1918, in Stanisław Przybyszewski, Listy III, 33–34. Chris Harman, The Lost Revolution: Germany 1918–23 (rev. ed.) (London: Bookmarks, 1997). See Ratajczak, Zagasły “brzask epoki,” 48–49. Stanisław Przybyszewskis to Jerzy Hulewicz, Munich, March 3, 1918, in Przybyszewski, Listy, 56; Ratajczak, Zagasły, 100, 125. Helsztyński, Przybyszewski, 90, 368–373; “Odpowiedź redakcji” [Editorial Answer], Zdrój, 12, no. 2 (1920): 27. Głuchowska, Avantgarde, 54–60, 113–114, 121–129. Przybyszewski to Hulewicz, February 15, 1918, in Helsztyński, Stanisław Przybyszewski, 37. Ratajczak, Zagasły brzask, 60. Jan Stur, “Czego chcemy” [What we want], Zdrój 10, no. 5–6 (1920): 58; Zenon Kosidowski, “Z zagadnień twórczości” [On the Question of Artistic Creation], Zdrój 11, no. 1–8 (1920): 108–110. Brzask epoki. W walce o nową sztukę, tom I, 1917–1919 [The Dawn of an Era: The Struggle for a New Art, vol. 1, 1917–1919], ed. Jerzy Hulewicz (Poznań: Ostoja, 1920). See Lidia Głuchowska, “Ezoteryka i polityka w grafice wczesnej polskiej awangardy—Formistów, Buntu i Jung Idysz” [Esotheric and Politic in the Prints of the Early Polish Avant-Garde—Formiści, Bunt and Yung Yiddish], in Michał F. Woźniak and Barbara Chojnacka, eds., Wielość w jedności: drzeworyt polski po 1900 roku [Multiplicity in Unity: Polish Woodcut after 1900] (Bydgoszcz: MOB, 2009), 49–63; Głuchowska, “Okkultismus, Esoterik, Mystik und die Ikonographie des Unsichtbaren: Das Beispiel der Posener Gruppe Bunt und des Bauhaus-Professors Lothar Schreyer” [Occultism, Esotericism, Mystics, and the Iconography of the Unvisible: The Example of the Bunt Gorup and the Bauhaus-Professor Lothar Schreyer], Europa! Europa? The Avant-Garde, Modernism and the Fate of a Continent, ed. in Sascha Bru et al. (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2009) 306–327. Edward Balcerzan, Elementy ekspresjonistyczne [Expressionist elements], Nurt [Current] 12 (1977): 17–19; Balcerzan, Kręgi wtajemniczenia, 268–279. Jan Prokop, Żywioł wyzwolony: Studium o poezji Tadeusza Micińskiego [The Liberated Element: Study on Poetry by Tadeusz Miciński] (Kraków: Wyd. Literackie, 1978), 42–43; see Głuchowska, Stanisław Kubicki—In transitu, 118, 147. Turowski, Budowniczowie świata, 35. Głuchowska, Bunt—Expressionizm, 188–189. Jerzy Hulewicz, Kratery: Psy i ludzie [Craters: Dogs and People] (Kościanki, Poznań: Selfedit, 1924). “Społeczeństwo to zwierzę żądne krwi,” quoted after: Erazm Kuźma, “Związki i przeciwieństwa między niemieckim i polskim ekspresjonizmem” [Connections and Differences between German and Polish Expressionism], Studia Historica Slavo-Germanica III (1974): 25. Hulewicz, Kratery, 47–48, 50. Hulewicz, Kratery, 47–48. Głuchowska, Stanisław Kubicki—In transitu, 122–123, 152–153. Cf. Głuchowska, Bunt—Ekspresjonizm, esp. 23, 29, 85, 100, 127, 133, 138, 148, 183, 187–191; Głuchowska, Stanisław Kubicki— in transitu; esp. 146, 184. Cf. Bunt und Bunt and also the Revolt (Bunt/Revolt and Bunt/Knall, and also the Revolt), https:// ewamaria2013texts.wordpress.com; Exhibition “Bunt” – Expressionism – Transborder Avant-Garde in Wrocław, https://ewamaria2013texts.wordpress.com/2015/11/26; Wystawa “Bunt” – Ekspresjonizm – Transgraniczna awangarda (Exhibition “Bunt” – Expressionism – Transborder Avant-Garde), http:// wroclaw.tvp.pl/22694503/wystawa-bunt-ekspresjonizm-transgraniczna-awangarda; Zapowiedź wystawy “Bunt” – Ekspresjonizm – Transgraniczna awangarda (Announcement of the Exhibition “Bunt”/ Revolt – Expressionism – Transborder Avant-Garde), http://dokis.pl/files/view/661; Bunt 3 Filme (Bunt/Revolt – 3 Films), https://ewamaria2013texts.wordpress.com/2015/09/30/bunt-3-filme, all last accessed December 10, 2017.

112

5 EXPRESSIONIST NETWORKS IN THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE, SOVIET RUSSIA, AND THE SOVIET UNION Isabel Wünsche It is widely accepted that Russian modernism, particularly Russian cubo-futurism, was based on adaptations and transformations of ideas and principles derived from French cubism and Italian futurism; however, the extent to which expressionist influences can be identified in the work of Russian modernist artists remains controversial. Among the Russian modernists, impressionism and expressionism were never clearly defined as distinct schools. Impressionism existed as a stylistic tendency that influenced the realists, symbolists, and futurists,1 yet it was never an exclusive feature of any school; it did, however, provide “a meeting ground for various schools and movements.”2 In much the same way, expressionism was broadly perceived in philosophical and psychological terms and less so as an artistic style;3 it served largely as a spiritual basis for intellectual thought, leaving art historians to conclude that, as an art movement, it either never arrived in Russia,4 or that its influence, in fact, went much deeper.5 Some scholars suggest that the prerequisites for expressionism are to be found in nineteenthcentury Russian philosophical thought and cultural debates, which were strongly shaped by German romanticism in the areas of literature and philosophy.6 Thus, to a certain degree, expressionism in Russia represents the meeting ground of Russian and German culture and the subsequent intellectual debates that carried on into the early twentieth century. Examining German-Russian literary and intellectual relations during this period, from 1910 to 1925, the literary scholar Valentin Belentschikow even goes so far as to claim that during this period Russia was able to return in kind what it had received from German culture, literature, and philosophy during the nineteenth century.7 The art historian Valeri Turchin speaks of a “Russian focus” in German expressionism.8 German expressionists certainly shared a lively interest in Russian philosophical thought (Solovyev, Kireevsky), literature (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Herzen), and anarchist ideas (Bakunin, Kropotkin, Hoy); these influences strongly shaped all genres of expressionism in Germany.9 In turn, German romanticism had a lasting impact on Russian culture, and expressionist tendencies in Russia (in cultural and intellectual terms) were closely bound up with both German romanticism and symbolism. In this essay, I look at Russian-German expressionist relations from the pre-revolutionary period up to the early days of the Soviet Union.

113

Isabel Wünsche

The Russian-German Artistic Dialogue Before the First World War In the early years of the twentieth century, Russian artists, in their pursuit of new yet authentically Russian modernist art forms, looked to a wide range of artistic influences; developments among the French postimpressionists, fauvists, Italian futurists, and German expressionists were all closely followed. The result, coined “neoprimitivism,” was a fusion of Western (Cézanne, cubism, and futurism) and Eastern (i.e., motifs and conventions of Russian folk art and crafts, specifically icon painting and the lubok) art forms.10 This synthesis of Western artistic influences and local cultural sources closely parallels the development of fauvism in France and expressionism in Germany—the proponents of all three movements shared similar ideals and a strong interest in non-Western and so-called primitive art, but drew on different sources of inspiration.11 The work of the artists Natalia Goncharova (1881–1962) and Mikhail Larionov (1881–1964), who launched the neoprimitivist style, which was shown for the first time at the third exhibition of Zolotoe Runo (Golden Fleece) in Moscow in December 1909, was characterized by bright, vivid colors, a simplification of form, flat surfaces, emphatic lines, and intense stylization— characteristics they shared with the German artists of Die Brücke (The Bridge), but its inspiration derived from icon painting, embroidery, traditional Russian toys, household items, signboards, graffiti, and popular woodcuts (lubi). At the end of 1910, the two artists founded Bubnovoy Valet (Knave of Diamonds), an exhibition society dedicated to the development of Russian neo­primitivism through techniques of “deliberate simplification and vulgarization of form.”12 The theoretical foundations of the movement were formulated by Aleksandr Shevchenko (1883–1948) in his 1913 pamphlet Neo-primitivizm (Neoprimitivism).13

Wassily Kandinsky and the Blaue Reiter German expressionism, particularly in its more spiritual form, was fundamentally shaped by the Russian-born Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), who was active in Munich between 1896 and 1914. Kandinsky was instrumental in establishing the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (New Artists’ Association Munich, NKVM) and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), which included fellow Russian artists Alexei Jawlensky and Marianne Werefkin. The influences of German, Russian, and French modernism were closely intertwined in the activities of these two groups. The first Blaue Reiter exhibition, held at the Galerie Thannhauser from December 2011 to January 1912, included works by German, French, and Russian artists.14 The second Blaue Reiter exhibition, at the Galerie Neue Kunst—Hans Goltz, in February 1912, served as a critical meeting point between the German expressionists (Heckel, Kirchner, Macke, Marc, Nolde, Pechstein), the French fauvists and cubists (Braque, Delaunay, Derain, Picasso, Vlaminck), and the Russian avant-garde (the Burliuk brothers, Goncharova, Kandinsky, Larionov, Malevich).15 The almanac Der Blaue Reiter, published in December 1911, included not only essays by Kandinsky and Marc but also contributions by Russian artists such as David Burliuk and Nikolai Kulbin. Throughout his time in Munich, Kandinsky maintained close ties to the Russian art scene. Works by Kandinsky, Jawlensky, and Werefkin were shown, for example, at Sergei Makovsky’s Salon in St. Petersburg in the winter of 1908–1909 as well as in the International Salons organized by Vladimir Izdebsky in Odessa in 1909–1910 and 1910–1911.16 Between August and October 1909, the Russian sculptor Vladimir Izdebsky (1882–1965), a native of Odessa, traveled to Vienna, Berlin, Munich, Paris, and Rome in order to gather art works for an exhibition in Odessa, which he envisioned as an international salon and cultural center, with literary evenings, 114

Expressionist Networks

Figure 5.1  W  assily Kandinsky, cover of Salon 2: International Art Exhibition organized by Vladimir Izdebsky (Odessa 1910)

concerts, and lectures by members of the creative intelligentsia.17 As he outlined in the foreword to the exhibition catalogue: “The purpose of this Salon is to present an overview of contemporary creative activity . . . and allow representatives of all tendencies to express themselves.”18 The exhibition was on view in Odessa from December 1909 to January 1910. The catalogue lists 776 works by 146 artists, among them seventy-one works by ten members of the NKVM, but no works by cubists, futurists, or Brücke artists.19 In 1910, Izdebsky’s Salon exhibition traveled to Kiev, St. Petersburg, and Riga. Thereafter he immediately organized a second Salon, held in Odessa from February to April 1911, of roughly 450 works by fifty-seven artists and additionally children’s drawings and industrial designs.20 The exhibition specifically featured works by the Moscow-based group Knave of Diamonds, which included David Burliuk, Goncharova, Larionov, Ilya Mashkov, and Petr Konchalkovsky, and the Munich-based NKVM, including Jawlensky, Kandinsky, Alfred Kubin, Gabriele Münter, and Werefkin, thus initiating a neoprimitivist-expressionist dialogue. Kandinsky, with fifty-four works, dominated the show; he also designed the cover of the initial catalogue for the opening (Figure 5.1) and the exhibition poster, and his essay “Content and Form,” as well as his Russian translation of Schönberg’s essay “Parallels in Octaves and Fifth,” were featured in the more comprehensive exhibition catalogue.21 A smaller version of the second Salon, with roughly 250 works, mostly by the Munich group, went on to be shown in Nikolayev and Kherson. 115

Isabel Wünsche

Although the Odessa exhibitions proved to be a great financial loss for Izdebsky, they were successful in providing a meeting ground for modern artists from Russia and abroad. Izdebsky was in close contact and maintained an intensive correspondence with Burliuk, Kandinsky, and Nikolai Kulbin, and it was through him that Kandinsky and Kulbin first made contact and Kandinsky established contacts with Goncharova and Larionov.

Moscow: Knave of Diamonds and Donkey’s Tail Between 1907 and 1912, the activities of the Moscow avant-garde were shaped by Burliuk, Goncharova, and Larionov. David Burliuk (1882–1967), who is often celebrated as the “father of Russian Futurism,”22 served as a crucial link between the German and Russian art scenes during this period. After art studies in Kazan and Odessa, he took classes with Wilhelm von Diez at the Munich Art Academy and also worked in the studio of Anton Ažbe; it was there that he met fellow Russian artists such as Jawlensky, Kandinsky, and Werefkin.23 Following his stay in Paris in 1904, he returned to Russia and became one of the main organizers of the aspiring Russian avant-garde, beginning with the first of a series of “Wreath-Stephanos” exhibitions in Moscow, in December 1907, and the Link exhibition in Kiev, in 1908. Between 1908 and 1919, Burliuk participated in numerous exhibitions, gave many lectures on modern art, and was involved in publishing a series of cubo-futurist manifestos, pamphlets, and books.24 He traveled through Siberia in 1919, arriving in Japan in 1920, and eventually moved to the United States in 1922.

Figure 5.2  David Burliuk, Risunok (Drawing), illustration in Konstantin Umanskij, Neue Kunst in Russland 1914–1919 [New Art in Russia 1914–1919] (Potsdam: Kiepenheuer; Munich: Goltz, 1920), 29

116

Expressionist Networks

Burliuk, who was closely connected with the German art scene, particularly with Kandinsky, the NKVM, and the Blaue Reiter group in Munich, arranged for the Blaue Reiter artists to participate in the Knave of Diamonds exhibitions.25 The first exhibition, in Moscow (December 1910 to January 1911), brought together works by the Russian Cézannists (Konchalkovsky, Mashkov, Lentulov) and the avant-garde artists David and Vladimir Burliuk, Goncharova, Larionov, Kazimir Malevich, Voldemar Matvejs, and Evgeny Morgunov, and the Munich-based artists Alexander Bechterjeff, Adolf Erbslöh, Alexander Kanoldt, Jawlensky, Kandinsky, Münter, and Werefkin.26 The second exhibition, held in Moscow in January 1912, included an extensive presentation of works by the French fauvists and cubists (Delaunay, Derain, Gleizes, Le Fauconnier, Leger, Matisse, van Dongen) and the German expressionists, including Brücke artists Heckel, Kirchner, Müller, and Pechstein, and Blaue Reiter members Kandinsky, Macke, Marc, and Münter.27 Burliuk also showed some of his works at the Berlin-based gallery of Paul Cassirer in 1911; he was in touch with Herwarth Walden and contributed works to the Blaue Reiter exhibition in 1912 and the Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon (First German Autumn Salon) in Berlin, in 1913. Burliuk’s interest and participation in the neoprimitivist movement is reflected in the crude colorful depictions of peasant life and in the raw expressiveness of his prints and drawings of the period, among them his 1915 Drawing (Figure 5.2) as well as his essay “The ‘Savages’ of Russia,” which was published as a pendant to Marc’s article in the almanac Der Blaue Reiter.28 In February 1912, Goncharova and Larionov left the Knave of Diamonds, with Larionov declaring Burliuk a “decadent Munich follower” and the Russian Cézannists as guilty of conservatism and eclecticism;29 Kandinsky’s work he strongly criticized as “decorative.”30 Goncharova and Larionov repudiated Western influences in favor of the superiority of their own cultural roots; this included a rejection of the emphasis on subjectivity and the focus on individual emotions that was typical of expressionism. In the preface to her 1913 exhibition, Goncharova proudly announced: “I have passed through all that the West can offer at the present time, and all that my country has assimilated from the West. I now shake the dust from my feet and distance myself from the West.”31 This conscious break with West European modernism also became evident in Goncharova and Larionov’s relationship with Kandinsky. As his letter to Goncharova of March 1911 indicates,32 Kandinsky was interested in their work and in fact invited them to participate in the first Blaue Reiter exhibition, but Larionov declined to invite Kandinsky to exhibit with the Osliniy Khvost (Donkey’s Tail) at their spring exhibition in Moscow the following year (1913). This show marked the culmination of neoprimitivism as an independent Russian style and was dominated by Goncharova and Larionov, but also included works by Chagall, Malevich, Morgunov, Shevchenko, Tatlin, and others.33

St. Petersburg: Nikolai Kulbin and the Union of Youth Kandinsky and the Munich artists’ groups were also in touch with the St. Petersburg art scene. In 1910, Izdebsky introduced Kandinsky to Nikolai Kulbin (1868–1917), who was one of the main organizers of the modern art scene in the Russian capital between 1908 and 1914. Kulbin was a physician who had only turned to painting and art theory in his forties;34 he organized three important art exhibitions,35 delivered many lectures, and published several articles on his psychological approach to art.36 The two men were well educated and shared similar worldviews and artistic interests, and Kulbin soon became a proponent of Kandinsky’s ideas in St. Petersburg.37 In December 1911, he presented in addition to his own papers at the Second All-Russian Artists’ Congress in St. Petersburg a Russian translation of Kandinsky’s treatise “On the Spiritual in Art.”38 117

Isabel Wünsche

Kandinsky included Kulbin’s article “Die freie Musik” (Free Musik) in the 1912 almanac Der Blaue Reiter.39 Through his correspondence with Kulbin, Kandinsky remained well informed about artistic developments in St. Petersburg.40 Although he called himself an impressionist, Kulbin’s approach to art was closer to the expressionism of the Blaue Reiter. His version of impressionism drew on his psychophysiological studies and emphasized the psychological foundations of artistic creation and human perception. In his paintings, Kulbin strove to depict not only color and form, but also “the psyche, the sounds, movement, and more—all that is necessary and essential to reflect the poetic experience.”41 In 1910, the young artists in Kulbin’s circle, who had begun to question his impressionistsymbolist approach, founded the artists’ group Soiuz Molodezhi (Union of Youth). The Union stressed artistic individuality, expressive freedom, and a wide variety of artistic approaches and stylistic expressions.42 Between March 1910 and January 1914, the Union of Youth set up a studio, founded a small library, held seven exhibitions, organized several debates on modern art, and published three edited volumes with essays by its members.43 The group was closely linked with the Munich art scene and attempted to establish working relations with Scandinavian artists;44 it also collaborated with the Hylaea poets Elena Guro, Velimir Khlebnikov, Vasily Kamensky, Aleksei Kruchenykh, Benedikt Livshits, and Vladimir Mayakovsky and staged theatrical performances of Pobeda nad soltsem (Victory over the Sun) and Vladimir Maiakovsky: Tragediia (Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy). Unlike the Moscow neoprimitivists, who were predominantly interested in icon painting and Russian folk art, the Union of Youth artists were more concerned with a variety of non-Western forms of artistic expression. This is particularly evident in the theoretical work of Hans Voldemārs Matvejs (pseudonym Vladimir Markov, 1877–1914). His essay “Principles of the New Art” was published in two parts in the first and second volumes of the Union of Youth almanac, in 1912; his book Creative Principles in the Plastic Arts: Faktura came out in 1914,45 followed by his studies of non-Western art: The Art of the Easter Islands (1914) and Negro Art (published only posthumously in 1919).46 Matvejs, who was born in Riga and only moved to St. Petersburg in 1903, wrote his books while still a student at the Imperial Academy of Arts.47 He traveled widely (in part subsidized by the Union, who also published his books) and intensively studied Byzantine art, early Italian fresco painting, and African and Polynesian art, as well as German expressionism, Italian futurism, and French cubism.48 Matvejs spent the summer of 1912 in Germany and France, where he studied the collections of African and Polynesian sculptures and acquired art works for a planned museum of contemporary painting, as well as books and journals for a planned library.49 He met with Kandinsky, Marc, and the Blaue Reiter group, in Munich, and Herwarth Walden, in Berlin, and explored the possibility of a Union of Youth exhibition in Cologne. Together with Eduard Spandikov, he also considered publication of a translation of Wilhelm Worringer’s 1907 dissertation Abstraktion und Einfühlung (Abstraction and Empathy) in the Union’s almanac.50 Matvejs’s interest in non-Western art ran parallel to a general neoprimitivist trend at the time in Russia as well as in the West; however, Matvejs preferred to emphasize the differences of these works from the Eurocentric aesthetic tradition.51 He shared with Kandinsky and Kulbin the conviction that the need to produce art originates in the human soul and is thus a form of self-reflection and expression of the artist’s own ego.52

Pavel Filonov—A Russian Expressionist? When the Union of Youth disbanded in 1914, Pavel Filonov (1883–1941) established his own group, the Intimate Studio of Painters and Draughtsmen, with whom he developed his concept of “made paintings” (sdelannye kartiny)—the “crafted completeness or perfection” that allowed 118

Expressionist Networks

a work to come to life, to “flower,” in the artist’s own words.53 Filonov was able to draw on his extensive anatomical studies and almost pathological obsession with the abnormalities and malformations of nature and also relied heavily on readings in natural philosophy and the natural sciences.54 He published his manifesto Sdelannye Kartiny (Made Paintings) in 1914 and followed it with Propeven O Prorosli Mirovoi (Chant of Universal Flowering) in 1915.55 Filonov’s artistic method was characterized by the minute detail of his craftsmanship and attention to the inner development of form. His multilayered compositions consist of dense groupings of crude and often twisted figures with significant facial features, large hands and feet, and expressive gestures (Figure 5.3). Like the expressionists, Filonov believed in “the need to distort surfaces in order to reveal the inner meaning existing beyond the world of appearances.”56 He identified two “basic principles of madeness”: analysis, i.e., the interpretation of external appearances, and synthesis, the artist’s internal developmental processes.57 The relationship between these two principles in Filonov’s work is particularly evident in his paintings of Heads, which he executed in the 1920s (Plate 8). His goal with these works was “not [to] capture the face or its surface features . . . [but to] depict a process . . . [to] portray the [internal] thoughts and any other processes.”58 Already in 1912, Filonov distinguished between “canon”—axiomatic approaches such as the outward simplification and geometrization of the visible form pursued by the cubists— and “law”—the natural, “organic pursuit of form”59 from a central point of origin that allowed for development of the forms and structural relationships inherent in the material itself.60 Rather than externally imposing form, the artist’s purpose was to trace its natural self-development. This desire to move beyond the superficial, formal elements of an artistic style in order to reveal universal principles and intrinsic meaning was also shared by the expressionists. Filonov was an excellent draftsman and the graphic qualities of his work are strongly expressionistic. But although comparisons of his work to that of the German expressionists, among them Ludwig Meidner, have frequently been made, the fit, as Irina Pronina has argued, is not ideal—his own approach, philosophy, and symbolism extended much further.61

Marc Chagall and Der Sturm in Berlin Marc Chagall (1887–1985) is another Russian artist who has often been labeled an expressionist, largely because his work does not fit easily into any group or movement. In contrast to Filonov, who only traveled once to the West, in 1912, Chagall spent the years 1910–1914 in Paris, where he developed his unique depictions of traditional Jewish life. He studied at the Académie de La Palette, lived in the notorious La Ruche in Montparnasse, and befriended the poets Blaise Cendrars and Guillaume Apollinaire and the painters Sonia and Robert Delaunay, and thus witnessed the emergence of the Parisian avant-garde firsthand.62 His colorful depictions of traditional Jewish life are fused with memory, mythology, dreams, and fantasy.63 Focusing on universal themes such as birth and death, love and hate, good and evil, he harmonized motifs of Jewish religious life with the stylistic influences he derived from cubism, orphism, and futurism. His unique visual universe has frequently been identified with an expressionist worldview, and he has also been seen as a forerunner of surrealism.64 In 1913, Apollinaire introduced Chagall to the Berlin art dealer Herwarth Walden, who invited him to show his works at the Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon in Berlin. Chagall became Walden’s “discovery” and a lively subject for Walden’s interest in Russian art and culture. Chagall was the first to be featured in Walden’s Sturm Bilderbücher (Sturm Picture Books), his nationality clearly noted: “Russian.”65 Walden also featured Chagall’s paintings along with works by Alfred Kubin in a Sturm exhibition in spring 1914 and organized his first 119

Isabel Wünsche

Figure 5.3  Pavel Filonov, Komposition (Composition), illustration in the catalogue of the Erste Russische Kunstausstellung [First Russian Art Exhibition] (Berlin: Galerie van Diemen, 1922)

comprehensive one-man show in Germany, in fall 1914. The exhibition was a success and firmly established Chagall’s reputation in Germany.66 During his four years in Paris, Chagall remained in contact with the avant-garde in Russia and participated in most of the exhibitions Larionov organized in Moscow. The painting To Russia, Donkeys and Others (Figure 5.4), created in Paris in early 1912, was addressed to Larionov’s group Donkey’s Tail, but it was shown at Walden’s Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon in Berlin. Thus, Chagall served as a significant link between the art scenes in Paris, Berlin, Moscow, and Vitebsk. Before the First World War, Russian–German cultural relations and artistic exchanges centered on Kandinsky and the Blaue Reiter in Munich. Through periodicals, exhibitions, and the many personal contacts, Russian artists were generally well informed about the work of the German expressionists, the French cubists and orphists, and the Italian futurists. With the outbreak of war in 1914, Russian artists in the various Western art centers, among others Natan Altman, Ksenia Boguslavskaya, Marc Chagall, El Lissitzky, Wassily Kandinsky, and Ivan Puni, were forced to return to Russia. Artistic life in the West was disrupted and fundamentally changed by the war and its aftermath, but, following the October Revolution of 1917, the suddenly re-united Russian avant-garde experienced a period of reinvigoration and intense experimentation. This development, however, occurred largely in isolation; relations with Western Europe were not re-established until the early 1920s. 120

Expressionist Networks

Figure 5.4  Marc Chagall, A la Russie, aux ânes et aux autres (To Russia, Donkeys and Others), 1912, oil on canvas, 157.0 × 122.0 cm, Musée national d’art modern, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Illustration in Sturm Bilderbücher I: Marc Chagall [Sturm Picture Books I: Marc Chagall] (Berlin: Verlag Der Sturm, 1923), 6.  VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018

Expressionism in Post-Revolutionary Soviet Russia and the Early Soviet Union The tremendous suffering caused by the war shaped artistic production throughout Europe and fueled an expressionist revival, but it provided only a limited impulse for artistic production in Soviet Russia, where the October Revolution became the specific stimulus for a broad range of new artistic activities, as Russian artists committed themselves to the construction of a new Soviet society. Most of the avant-garde artists were active in organizing the new art institutions and setting cultural policy in the young Soviet state. Under these circumstances, suprematism and constructivism prevailed, and expressionism was discussed only rarely. Only when contacts between Russia and the West were re-established and Russian–German artistic relations intensified in the early 1920s did the socially critical expressionism of the second wave of German expressionism gain in influence. In the summer of 1921, the Hungarian art critic Alfréd Kemény, who was living in exile in Berlin, traveled to Moscow in order to participate in the Third Congress of the Communist International. While in Moscow, he presented a lecture, “On New Directions in Contempo­ rary Russian and German Art,” at the Institute of Artistic Culture (INKhUK), in which he compared the main directions in German and Russian contemporary art, expressionism and 121

Isabel Wünsche

constructivism.67 The focus of expressionism, he maintained, is on the subjective feelings of the artist, and is thus a step removed from reality. Constructivism, on the other hand, encourages the practical application of art to life and is opposed to any form of aestheticism.68 The expressionist-constructivist debate, in other words, came down to emotion vs. rationality, subjectivity vs. objectivity. Nikolai Punin, in his memoirs of the 1930s, followed the same logic, characterizing expressionism as the origin of subjectivity, which was subsequently overcome by cubism,69 which in turn provided the fertile ground for the emergence of constructivism, etc. The identification of expressionism with subjective individuality and the expression of intense emotion through artistic distortion provided the basis for both the attraction and rejection of this artistic approach by Soviet artists and critics. The ascent of suprematism and constructivism in the early 1920s led to the marginalization of artists such as Chagall and Kandinsky and their renewed departures to France and Germany respectively.70 In the field of literature, expressionism began to attract the attention of Russian poets, critics, and scholars only after the October Revolution.71 In 1919, the poet Ippolit Sokolov, along with a small group of fellow Moscow poets that included Boris Zemenkov, Gury Sidorov, and Sergei Reksin, took up the banner of expressionism. Sokolov announced that the new movement was a synthesis of all facets of literary futurism. In his books, Revolt Expressionism (1919) and Expressionism (1920),72 he formulated its aims simply as a “maximum of expression” and “dynamism of perception and thinking.”73 In his theoretical treatise Baedeker to Expressionism (1920), he called it a “synthesis of all achievements in all arts.”74 Through Teodor Levit, Sokolov eventually encountered German expressionism and read Kasimir Edschmid’s book Über den Expressionismus in der Literatur und die neue Dichtung (On Expressionism in Literature and New Poetry).75 The following publication, the sixteen-page anthology Expressionists (1921), included writings by Sokolov, Evgeny Gabrilovich, Boris Lapin, and Sergei Spassky.76 Expressionism also shaped the literary works of the writers’ group The Parnassus of Moscow,77 who assembled two issues of miscellany for a journal. The first was never released; the second included contributions by Ivan Aksenov, Gabrilovich, and Lapin, and criticism by Sergei Bobrov and Teodor Levit, and made available in translation a large number of works by German expressionists, including Wieland Herzfelde, Alfred Lichtenstein, Jakob van Hoddis, and Georg Heym.78 Lapin, who did most of the translations, also published the last and most substantial contemporary volume of Russian expressionist writing, titled 1922 Book of Poems, in which he linked influences from Russian and German romanticism with contemporary trends in poetry such as Khlebnikov neologisms and expressionist ideas.79 The expressionist phase in Russian literature was short-lived: Sokolov turned his attention to the Soviet movie industry, Zemenkov went on to book illustrations and the visual arts, and Gabrilovich and Lapin joined the constructivists. Gabrilovich eventually went on to become a prominent film script writer and Lapin pursued a career as a travel journalist and war correspondent.80

Russian–German Artistic Relations in the 1920s As a result of the revolutions in Russia and then Germany, Berlin became home to a large Russian émigré community and a lively center of cultural exchange.81 The November Revolution in Germany had attracted Soviet interest, and German artists and intellectuals likewise took an interest in the newly founded Soviet Russia; this mutual interest found its expression in numerous publications, exhibitions, and lectures. In response to David Shterenberg’s “Call of the Russian Progressive Fine Artists to the German Colleagues” of November 30, 1918, which was published in Paul Westheim’s Kunstblatt (Art Paper),82 German artists began to create posters supporting Soviet Russia (“Es lebe 122

Expressionist Networks

Sowjetrußland!” by Raoul Haumann and “Es lebe die Weltrevolution!” by Conrad Felixmüller, just to mention two). Organizations such as the Auslandskomitee zur Organisierung der Arbeiterhilfe für die Hungernden in Rußland (IAH; Workers International Relief) and the Gesellschaft der Freunde des neuen Rußland in Deutschland (Society of Friends of the New Russia in Germany) were set up to actively support the people of Russia through a wide range of cultural activities.83 The activities intensified during the Russian famine of 1921–1922; Käthe Kollwitz, a founding member of the IAH, contributed the poster Helft Russland! (Help Russia!, 1921; Figure 5.5). Otto Nagel, deputy secretary of the artists’ relief wing of the IAH and an active member of the Society of Friends of the New Russia, played a leading role in the German– USSR cultural dialogue; at his initiative, German leftist artists and writers came together to hold exhibitions and publish manifestos, pamphlets, and print portfolios to benefit the IAH.84 Konstantin Umanskij’s 1920 book, Neue Kunst in Russland 1914–1919 (New Art in Russia 1914–1919), was an important step in acquainting the German public with the latest achievements in Russian art.85 Recognizing that few contemporary Russian artists other than Archipenko, Burliuk, Chagall, Jawlensky, and Kandinsky were known in the West, Umanskij set out to outline the emergence of “Russian expressionism.” His treatment of the development of Russian art ranges from the creations of the Mir Iskusstva (World of Art) artists and the paintings of the Russian Cézannists to the pictorial constructions of the cubo-futurists and abstract painting.86 Umanskij identified the roots of Russian expressionism in Russian folk art and Eastern primitivism and saw its culmination in the works of the members of the Knave

Figure 5.5  K  äthe Kollwitz, Helft Russland! (Help Russia!), 1921, poster for the Russia Committee of the IAH, lithograph, 66.7 × 47.7 cm, Käthe Kollwitz Museum, Cologne, Kreissparkasse Cologne

123

Isabel Wünsche

of Diamonds, among them Burliuk, Goncharova, and Konchalovsky, who were influenced by Picasso and the Delaunays;87 he also highlighted the creative work and painterly perfection of Filonov.88 Abstract painting, Umanskij noted, represented “absolute expressionism,” of which he distinguished two branches: 1) Kandinsky’s work and 2) the Malevich group, i.e., suprematism.89 Referring to Oswald Herzog’s article “Der abstrakte Expressionismus” (Abstract Expressionism), published in Der Sturm in May 1919,90 Umanskij characterized abstract expressionism as “vollendeter Expressionismus” (consummate expressionism)—“the purity of the creation.”91 Nevertheless, he saw indications that the movement had begun to exhaust its possibilities and would be followed by a return to representational art, which would nonetheless rely on expressionist principles and the achievements of the expressionist movement to show the way to a new, eternal, and classical art.92 The efforts to introduce a European audience to the artistic achievements of the “new Russia” culminated in the Erste Russische Kunstausstellung (First Russian Art Exhibition; Figure 5.6), which opened at the Galerie van Diemen in Berlin, in October 1922. The show was organized by the People’s Commissariat for Education (Narkompros) together with the Workers International Relief, with the proceeds intended for “the starving people of Russia.”93 In order to elucidate the developments in modern Russian art, the display featured specific movements as well as individual artists. Ernst Collin’s review in the Berlin Family Newspaper of October 31, 1922 highlights the place and role of expressionism in the exhibition: The halls on the ground floor are dedicated to the conservative artists and the expressionists, who are now once more regarded as conservative. Modernism is on the rampage in the upper halls, where—to no one’s surprise—it has already coined some new “isms”: suprematism, constructivism, which really signifies nothing more than that the young Russian artists in the land of revolution seem to think it necessary to also throw out all artistic tradition.94 Included among the traditional Russian art on the ground floor were representatives of the Russian Wanderers (Peredvizhniki), the Russian impressionists, the World of Art, and the Knave of Diamonds. These groups were complemented by the so-called expressionists, including, according to the exhibition catalogue: “Burliuk; Chagall, who is well-known in Germany; the interesting Filonov, whose compositions are unique in its kind although he is totally unknown abroad; and Lebedev and Lapshin, who show a variety of works. Sinezubov also belongs to the group.”95 Works by the avant-garde were displayed on the second floor, including cubist works by Stepanova, Udaltsova, Morgunov, and Puni; abstract paintings by Ekster, Lissitzky, Kandinsky, and Popova; suprematist works by Malevich, Kliun, and Rozanova; the constructivism of Gabo and Tatlin; and the utilitarian constructions of Joganson, Klutsis, Medunetsky, and Rodchenko. The display of the avant-garde works had an enormous impact,96 while the presumed expressionist works on the ground floor remained in a limbo of uncertainty, neither old nor new. The exchange of contemporary art exhibitions between Russia and Germany continued with the 1-aia Vseobshchaia Germanskaia Khudozhestvennaia Vystavka (First General German Art Exhibition; Figure 5.7), held at the Historical Museum in Moscow, in 1924, and then later also shown in Saratov and Leningrad.97 Because of organizational and financial limitations, the works on display were largely graphic works, including a broad range of about 500 works by 126 German artists representing thirteen organizations, among them the Berliner Secession (Berlin Secession), the Arbeitsrat für Kunst (Work Council for Art), the Novembergruppe (November Group), Der Sturm, the Dadaists, and the Bauhaus. Of particular interest were the socially critical works of the so-called Red Group, the first communist artists’ group to be founded 124

Expressionist Networks

Figure 5.7  C  over of the catalogue of the First General German Art Exhibition (Moscow, 1924)

Figure 5.6  E  l Lissitzky, cover of the catalogue of the First Russian Art Exhibition (Berlin, 1922)

in Berlin, among them Otto Dix’s engravings from the series Der Krieg (The War, 1924), Conrad Felixmüller’s scenes of oppressed working-class people, and George Grosz’s depictions of bloated capitalists.98 The exhibition drew large crowds and was widely reviewed in the press. A good number of works, among them Otto Nagel’s Jubilar (Jubilarian, 1924) and Heinrich Vogeler’s Internationale Rote Hilfe (International Red Help, 1924), were bought by the Russian state; the State Museum of New Western Art included them in its 1925 exhibition Nemetskoe Iskusstvo Poslednevo Piatidesiatiletiia (German Art of the Last Fifty Years). Throughout the 1920s, German expressionism enjoyed a warm reception in Soviet Russia, which led to a substantial number of Soviet publications on expressionism,99 a series of exhibitions,100 and a lasting impact on the work of the younger generation of Russian painters.

The Soviet Reception of Expressionism One of the main proponents of German expressionism in Russia was Anatoli Lunacharsky (1875–1933), commissar of Narkompros (1917–1929). As a revolutionary, Lunacharsky had been forced to spend extended periods before 1917 in exile in Switzerland, Sweden, Italy, and France. Well educated, open-minded, and a prolific speaker and art critic, he promoted a wide range of artistic expression and successfully fostered creative exchanges between the various movements during his tenure. Lunacharsky was a close associate of Aleksandr Bogdanov (who became his brother-in-law) and Maxim Gorky and knew many Western writers and intellectuals, among them Bernard Shaw, Romain Rolland, and Bertolt Brecht. He went on to serve as 125

Isabel Wünsche

a mediator between Soviet Russia and the West and also as a cultural ambassador.101 In charge of establishing a socialist culture in the fields of education and the arts, Lunacharsky’s task was to assess the work of leading Russian and foreign artists from the viewpoint of class struggle and their importance for the cultural enrichment of the working class. Lunacharsky published his first essay on expressionism in 1922, “A Few Words on German Expressionism,”102 in which he discussed the movement as a distinct cultural phenomenon in German painting, literature, and theatre. He drew a distinction between the artistic developments in France that focused on form and those in Germany, which emphasized tenor and substance.103 The German artists, he suggested, were more inclined to metaphysical inquiry and intensity of feeling, the expression of a state of mind.104 “[This] state of mind, the empathy, the experience,” comes first, he wrote. “Artistic technique is only the means of expression, not an end in itself.”105 As his letters from Paris in 1913 bear witness to, Lunacharsky was well acquainted with French modernism,106 which he criticized for its superficial refinement and decadence. In his essay on German expressionism, he went on to celebrate the emotional depth and vitality of the movement, emphasizing three characteristics in particular: its conservatism in formal terms, its stridency and rawness in terms of execution, and its inclination toward mysticism and religiosity. He further highlighted the anti-bourgeois orientation of expressionist art, the reasons for which he saw in the old conflict between the bohemian artists vs. the cultural bourgeois elite and also in the fact that German intellectuals held the bourgeois responsible for Germany’s defeat.107 In his review of the First General German Art Exhibition in 1924, Lunacharsky once more emphasized the expressionist artist’s self-understood role as prophet—the brooding figure whose images of exhortation were intended to provoke an intense and emotional response.108 He approved of the artists of the Secession, Der Sturm, and the younger generation of expressionists using elements from reality to forge an artistic language that could be understood by the masses.109 Discussing the abstract works of the expressionists and the verism of the artists of the Red Group, he praised the latter as far more advanced than contemporary Soviet art and suggested their approach as a model for coming to terms with the revolution and revolutionary art.110 Lunacharsky’s promotion of expressionism as a socially engaged form of modernism went hand in hand with a re-examination of contemporary Russian art and the revival of the private art market during the period of the New Economic Policy (1921–1928), when a new bourgeois clientele in Soviet Russia became interested in acquiring works that were neither abstract nor realist and only moderately modernist.111 The early 1920s saw passionate debate on the nature of art, its purpose, its place in society, and the role of the artist. Forced to justify the existence of art after the October Revolution, many artists of the Russian avant-garde had rejected easel painting and begun to apply their own abstract “systems,” such as suprematism and constructivism, to practical design matters—scenery for the theatre and utilitarian objects for everyday use. As Liubov Popova noted, “the role of the ‘representational arts’—painting, sculpture, and even architecture . . . has ended.”112

The Society of Easel-Painters (OST) A group of students, among them Aleksandr Deineka, Aleksandr Labas, Yuri Pimenov, and Aleksandr Tyshler, who had all studied with David Shterenberg and Vladmir Favorsky at the Higher Art and Technical Studios (VKhUTEMAS) in Moscow at the beginning of the 1920s, opposed what they considered to be the debilitating effects of constructivism; they refused to 126

Expressionist Networks

abandon easel painting, but also chose not to indulge in a retrospective naturalism intended to appeal to a mass audience. In May 1924, they held the 1-aia Diskussionnaia Vystavka Ob”edinenii Aktivnogo Revolutsionnogo Iskusstva (First Discussion Exhibition of the Unions of Active Revolutionary Art), and subsequently founded the Obschestvo Stankovistov (OST; Society of Easel-Painters).113 OST members promoted “absolute professionalism” and strove to achieve “revolutionary and contemporary clarity in the choice of subject.”114 Their goal was the continued investigation of the formal elements of art and the search for a contemporary way of painting. In striving to develop a viable and socially relevant form of modernism in painting, they found inspiration in the second wave of German expressionism and the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) and also in the work of the Italian artists associated with Valori Plastici (Plastic Values).115 OST was active for six years and organized four annual exhibitions between 1925 and 1928.116 After years of isolation, Russian artists—the younger generation in particular—were eager to communicate with colleagues in the West and to make their way into the international art scene. In December 1922, OST members organized a show of their work at the Museum of Painterly Culture in Moscow. Shterenberg gathered together most of the works for a traveling version of the 1922 van Diemen exhibition meant for Paris. Because of French–German political tensions over reparations, however, the exhibition was never realized, but the works were eventually shown in Amsterdam, in May 1923.117 In the second half of the 1920s, OST artists participated in a number of exhibitions in Germany, among them the Internationale Kunstausstellung in Dresden (International Art Exhibition; 1926), the Internationale Buchkunstausstellung in Leipzig (International Book Art Exhibition; 1927), and the Juryfreie Kunstschau in Berlin (Non-juried Art Show; 1928), where they exhibited, with the support of the Society of Friends of the New Russia in Germany, as the “Moskauer Gruppe” (Moscow Group).118 The socially engaged art of Dix, Grosz, and Kollwitz, combining formal distortion and emotional tension with expressionism’s capacity for critical social and political commentary, particularly appealed to OST artists. Sergei Luchishkin explained, We took expressionism—clearly visible in the artworks exhibited, especially in the work of G. Grosz and O. Dix—as a set of devices that emphasized the social essence of the works. It seemed to us that expressiveness helped to accent the revolutionary direction.119 Similarly, Yuri Pimenov was attracted to the expressive works of Dix and Grosz due to their “corrosive and bizarre precision.”120 His depiction of Invalidy voiny (War Invalids; 1926; Figure 5.8) is shaped by the use of distortion that he acquired from the German expressionists. Although the socially critical expressionist works of the Red Group strongly influenced Russian artists, the reception of expressionism by critics in Soviet Russia in the mid-1920s was rather mixed, ranging from reservation to outright rejection. Most critics argued that expressionism’s emotional distortions and its display of neuroses and cynicism, together with its lack of an alternative positive vision, offered little to Russian artists searching for a new art.121 Nikolai Tarabukin acknowledged that German artists did not simply illustrate events as did the members of the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (AKhRR, a group founded in Moscow in 1922 to promote the depiction of scenes from everyday life in a heroic realist style comprehensible to the masses, thus paving the way toward socialist realism),122 but maintained that their “anarchic ideology, the purely individualistic protest against bourgeois society, leads to naked nihilism, to ‘protest for the sake of protest.’”123 Aleksei Fedorov-Davydov went a step further in his criticism, rejecting what he viewed as “the hopelessness and the ‘general 127

Isabel Wünsche

Figure 5.8  Yuri Pimenov, Invalidy voiny (War Invalids), 1926, oil on canvas, 265.6 × 177.7 cm, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow ZhB-994. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018

negation,’ even in the canvases of communist artists from the Red Group and the November Group.”124 He saw the lack of “a definite positive ideal” and a “general fighting position” as an “unavoidable path to mysticism.”125 The increasing insistence of the Soviet authorities on partisanship and an optimistic outlook and the defamation of modernist approaches to painting as being too formalist paved the way, in 1932, for socialist realism and the condemnation of expressionism as social fascism.

Notes 1 Alison Hilton, “The Impressionist Vision in Russia and Eastern Europe,” in World Impressionism: The International Movement 1860–1920, ed. Norma Broude (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), 371–406. 2 Kjeld Bjornager Jensen, Russian Futurism, Urbanism and Elena Guro (Aarhus: Arkona, 1977), 188. 3 D.V. Sarab’ianov, “V ozhidanii ekspressionizma i riadom s nim” [In Expectation of Expressionism and Beyond], in Russkii Avangard 1910–1920-x godov i Problema Ekspressionizma [The Russian Avant-Garde of the 1910s and 1920s and the Problem of Expressionism] (Moscow: Nauka, 2003), 3. 4 Shimon Boiko,“Pochemu ekspressionizm oboshel Rossiiu i russkii avangard?” [Why Did Expressionism Miss Russia and the Russian Avant-Garde?], in Russkii Avangard 1910–1920-x godov i Problema Ekspressionizma, 14–25. 5 I. A. Vakar, “Kubizm I ekspressionizm—dva poliusa avangardnogo soznaniia” [Cubism and Expressionism—Two Sides of Avant-Garde Consciousness], in Russkii Avangard 1910–1920-x godov i Problema Ekspressionizma, 40.

128

Expressionist Networks 6 Sarab’ianov, “V ozhidanii ekspressionizma i riadom s nim,” 3–6. V. S. Turchin, “Nemetskii aktsent v russkom avangarde” [The German Focus in the Russian Avant-Garde], in ibid., 44. V.N. Terekhina, “Ekspressionizm i futurism: Russkie realii” [Expressionism and Futurism in Russian Reality], in ibid., 148–149. 7 Valentin Belentschikow, Rußland und die deutschen Expressionisten 1910–1925: Zur Geschichte der deutschrussischen Literaturbeziehungen [Russia and the German Expressionists 1910–1925: On the History of German-Russian Literary Relations], 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1993). 8 Turchin, “Nemetskii aktsent v russkom avangarde,” 44. 9 Belentschikow, Rußland und die deutschen Expressionisten 1910–1925, 7; Terekhina, “Ekspressionizm i futurism,” 170. 10 Aleksandr Shevchenko, Neo-primitivizm. Ego teoriia. Ego vozmozhnosti. Ego dostizheniia. [Neoprimitivism: Its Theory, Its Potential, Its Achievements] (Moscow, 1913). English translation in John E. Bowlt, ed., Russian Art of the Avant-Garde:Theory and Criticism 1902–1934 (New York:Viking Press, 1976), 41–54. 11 Sarabianov, “Vozhidanii Ekspressionizma i riadom s nim,” 6–7; idem., “Fauvismus—Expressionismus— Neoprimitivismus” [Fauvism—Expressionism—Neo-Primitivism], in Westkunst—Ostkunst (West Art—East Art), ed. Thomas Strauss (Munich: Scaneg, 1991), 45–56. 12 John E. Bowlt, “Neo-Primitivism and Russian Painting,” in idem., Russian Art 1875–1975: A Collection of Essays (New York: MSS Information Corporation, 1976), 99. 13 Shevchenko, Neo-primitivizm, English in Bowlt, Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: 41–54. 14 Among the participants were Albert Bloch, David and Vladmir Burliuk, Heinrich Campendonk, Robert Delaunay, Kandinsky, Macke, Marc, Münter, Jean-Bloé Niestlé, Henri Rousseau, and Arnold Schönberg. Donald E. Gordon, Modern Art Exhibitions 1900–1916: Selected Catalogue Documentation (Munich: Prestel, 1974) 2: 547–548. 15 Ibid., 548–550. 16 Vladimir Izdebsky:The Return Cycle (St. Petersburg: State Russian Museum, Palace Editions, 2005), 150. 17 Vladimir Kruglov, “The Vladimir Izdebsky Salons,” in ibid., 43. 18 Katalog Internatsionalnoi Vystavki Kartin, Skulptury, Graviure i Grafiki [Catalogue of the International Exhibition of Paintings, Sculptures, Prints, and Drawings] (Odessa, 1909), 5. Copy from the Special Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. 19 Ibid. See also Sergei Lushchik, “Vladimir Izdebsky in Odessa,” in Vladimir Izdebsky: The Return Cycle, 9–13; Kruglov, “The Vladimir Izdebsky Salons,” 43–47. Gordon, Modern Art Exhibitions 1900–1916, 356–362. 20 Salon 2: Mezhdunarodnaia Khudozhestvennaia Vystavka Vladimira Izdebskago [Salon 2: International Art Exhibition of Vladimir Izdebsky] (Odessa, 1910). See also Lushchik, “Vladimir Izdebsky in Odessa,” 14–18; Kruglov, “The Vladimir Izdebsky Salons,” 52–56; Gordon, Modern Art Exhibitions 1900–1916, 438–443. 21 V. V. Kandinskii, “Soderzhanie i forma” [Content and Form], in Salon 2, 14–16; idem., “Paralleli v oktavakh i kvintakh” [Parallels in Octaves and Fifth], ibid., 16–18. 22 Boris Kapelushin, Burliuk, Kniga Pervaia. Otets russkogo futurisma [Burliuk, First Book: The Father of Russian Futurism] (St. Petersburg: Apollon, 1995). Futurismus in Russland und David Burliuk, “Vater des russischen Futurismus” [Futurism in Russia and David Burliuk, the “Father of Russian Futurism”] (St. Petersburg: State Russian Museum, Palace Editions, 2000; exh. cat.). 23 Kapelushin, Burliuk, 18–33, 774–775. 24 Ibid., 36–123, 227–230, 282–285, 379–383, 741–764. 25 Ibid., 110–136. 26 Gordon, Modern Art Exhibitions 1900–1916, 2: 443–447. 27 Ibid., 536–539. 28 D. Burljuk, “Die ‘Wilden’ Russlands,” in Der Blaue Reiter, ed. Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc (Munich: Piper 1912), 13–19. English translation: D. Burliuk, “The ‘Savages’ of Russia,” in The Blaue Reiter Almanac, ed. Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), 72–80. 29 Camilla Gray, The Great Experiment: Russian Art, 1863–1922 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1962), 121. 30 Vakar, “Kubizm i ekspressionizm,” 28–29. 31 “Predislovie” [Preface], in Vystavka kartin Natalii Goncharovoi. 1900–1913 [Painting Exhibition Natalia Goncharova] (Moscow, 1913), 1. See Jane A. Sharp, Russian Modernism between East and West: Natalia Goncharova and the Moscow Avant-Garde (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1, 216, 277.

129

Isabel Wünsche 32 Gray, The Great Experiment, 121. 33 Ibid. 34 Boris Kalaushin, ed., Kul’bin. Kniga Vtoraia [Kulbin. Second book], ed. (St. Petersburg: Apollon, 1995), 233–235; Jeremy Howard, The Union of Youth: An Artists’ Society of the Russian Avant-Garde (Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press, 1992), 8–40. 35 New Trends in Art (St. Petersburg, 1908), The Impressionists (St. Petersburg, 1909,Vilna 1909–1910), and Triangle (St. Petersburg, 1910); see Gordon, Modern Art Exhibitions 1900–1916, 2: 270–271, 321–322, 364–365. 36 Boris Kalaushin, ed., Kul’bin. Kniga Pervaia [Kulbin: First book], ed. (St. Petersburg: Apollon, 1994); Kalaushin, Kul’bin. Kniga Vtoraia, 7–36. 37 John E. Bowlt, “Vasilii Kandinsky: The Russian Connection,” in The Life of Vasilii Kandinsky in Russian Art. A Study of “On the Spiritual in Art,” ed. John E. Bowlt and Rose-Carol Washton Long, 2nd ed. (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1984), 1–41. 38 N. I. Kulbin, “Novye techeniia v iskusstve” [New Trends in Art] in Trudy vserossiskogo s’’ezda khudozhnikov v Petrograde, dek. 1911–ianv. 1912 [Works of the All-Russian Artists’ Congress in Petrograd, Dec. 1911–Jan. 1912] (St. Petersburg: Akademiia Khudozhestv, 1911) 1: 40; idem., “Garmoniya, dissonans i tesnyya sochetaniya v iskusstve i zhizni” [Harmony, Dissonance, and Close Combinations in Art and Life], in ibid., 1: 35–40;V. Kandinsky, “O dukhovnom v iskusstve” [On the Spiritual in Art], in ibid., 1: 47–76. 39 N. I. Kulbin, Svobodnaia muzyka. Primenenie novoi teorii khudozhestvennogo tvorchestva k muzyke [Free Music: The Application of a New Theory of Artistic Creation in Music] (St. Petersburg, 1909), also included in idem., Studiia impressionistov [Studio of the Impressionists] (St. Petersburg, 1910). Partial German edition: N. Kulbin, “Die freie Musik,” in Der Blaue Reiter, 69–73. English translation: N. Kulbin, “Free Music,” in The Blaue Reiter Almanac, 141–146. Full English translation: see Anna Kafetsi, ed., Russian Avant-Garde 1910–1930: The George Costakis Collection (Athens: Ministry of Culture and National Gallery, 1995), 2: 442–446. 40 Evgenii Kovtun, “Pis’ma V.V. Kandinskogo k N.I. Kul’binu” [Letters by V.V. Kandinsky to N. I. Kulbin], in Pamiatniki kul’tury. Novye otkrytiia [Memorials of Culture: New Discoveries], Ezhegodnik [Yearbook], 1980 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1981), 399–416. 41 N. I. Kulbin, [Untitled], in Salon 2, 19. 42 Ustav obshchestva khudozhnikov “Soiuz Molodezhi” [Bylaws of the Artists’ Society “Union of Youth”], February 2, 1910, in Central State Archive of Literature and Art (TsGALI), f. 336, op. 5, ed. khr. 4, l. 4. English in Howard, The Union of Youth, 46. 43 T.V. Liuboslavskaia, “Khronika Ob”edineniia ‘Soiuz Molodezhi’” [Chronology of the Society “Union of Youth”], in Voldemar Matvei i “Soiuz Molodezhi” [Voldemārs Matvejs and “The Union of Youth”] (Moscow: Nauka, 2005), 240–256. 44 Howard, Union of Youth, 57, 86, 156. 45 Vladimir Markov, “Printsipy novago iskusstva” [Principles of the New Art], part 1, Soiuz Molodezhi [Union of Youth], no. 1 (April 1912): 5–14; part 2, Soiuz Molodezhi [Union of Youth], no. 2 (June 1912): 5–18. Idem., Printsipy tvorchestva v plasticheskikh iskusstvakh: faktura [Creative Principles in the Plastic Arts: Faktura] (Petrograd: Soiuz Molodezhi, 1914); English translations, see Jeremy Howard, Irena Buzinska, and Z. S. Strother, Vladimir Markov and Russian Primitivism (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015), 165–216. 46 Vladimir Markov, Iskusstvo ostrova paskhi [The Art of the Easter Islands] (St. Petersburg: Soiuz Molodezhi, 1914); idem., Iskusstvo negrov [Negro Art] (St. Petersburg: Narkompros, 1919). 47 Voldemar Matvei i “Soiuz Molodezhi” [Voldemārs Matvejs and the “Union of Youth”] (Moscow: Nauka, 2005), 3–64. 48 Howard, The Union of Youth, 210. 49 Ibid., 121–123. 50 Ibid., 120–121. 51 Voldemārs Matvejs, letter to Levky Zheverzheev, July 26, 1912, in Howard, The Union of Youth, 134. 52 Markov, “Printsipy novago iskusstva,” 2: 16–17. 53 P. N. Filonov, Sdelannye kartiny, Leaflet, 1914. English translation: P. N. Filonov, “Made Paintings,” in Pavel Filonov: A Hero and His Fate, ed. Nicoletta Misler and John E. Bowlt (Austin,TX: Silvergirl, 1983), 135–138. 54 John E. Bowlt, “Die Anatomie der Phantasie” [The Anatomy of Fantasy], in Pawel Filonow und seine Schule [Pavel Filonov and His School], ed. Jürgen Harten and Jewgenija Petrowa (Cologne: DuMont, 1990), 50–69.

130

Expressionist Networks 55 P. N. Filonov, Propeven O Prorosli Mirovoi [Chant of Universal Flowering] (Petrograd: Zhuravl, 1915). 56 John E. Bowlt, “Pavel Filonov and Russian Modernism,” in Misler/Bowlt, Pavel Filonov: A Hero and His Fate, 6. 57 P. N. Filonov, Poniatie Vnutrennei Znachimosti Iskusstva Kak Deistvuiushchei Sily, 1923, TsGALI, f. 2348, op.1, ed. khr. 11. English translation: P. N. Filonov, “The Concept of the Inner Significance of Art as an Active Force (1923),” in Misler/Bowlt, Pavel Filonov: A Hero and His Fate, 155–165. 58 Tatiana Glebova, “Vospominania i razmyshleniia. Publikatsiia Eleny Spitsinoi” [Memories and Considerations: Publications of Elena Spitsin], Experiment/Eksperiment: A Journal of Russian Culture 11 (2005): 216–245. 59 Pavel Filonov, “Kanon i zakon” [Canon and law], 1912, RO IRLI, F. 656. See E. F. Kovtun, “Kanon i zakon” [Canon and law], in Pavel Filonov (Leningrad: Avrora, 1988), 28–30. 60 Ibid. 61 Irina A. Pronina, “O Filonove i ekspressionizme” [On Filonov and Expressionism], in Russkii Avangard 1910–1920-x godov i Problema Ekspressionizma, 206–209. See also Sarab’ianov, “V ozhidanii ekspressionizma i riadom s nim,” 10–11. 62 Jonathan Wilson, Marc Chagall (New York: Schoken, 2007), 33–53; Benjamin Harshav, Marc Chagall on Art and Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 10. 63 Harshav, Marc Chagall on Art and Culture, 12. 64 Harshav, Marc Chagall and the Lost Jewish World, 39. 65 “Marc Chagall ist Russe.” Sturm Bilderbücher I: Marc Chagall [Sturm Picture Books I: Marc Chagall] (Berlin:Verlag Der Sturm, 1923), 19. 66 Wilson, Marc Chagall, 52–53; Harshav, Marc Chagall on Art and Culture, 11. 67 Alfréd Kemény,“Noveishie napravleniia v sovremennom nemetskom I russkom iskusstve,” paper delivered at INKhUK on December 8, 1921. See Alfréd Kemény, “Vorträge und Diskussionen am ‘Institut für Künstlerische Kultur’ (INChUK), Moskau 1921” [Lectures and Discussions at the Institute of Artistic Culture (INKhUK), Moscow 1921], in Wechselwirkungen: Ungarische Avantgarde in der Weimarer Republik [Interdependencies: Hungarian Avant-garde in the Weimar Republic], ed. Hubertus Gassner (Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 1986), 226–230. See also Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven, CT; London:Yale University Press, 1983), 282, note 116, 305. 68 Kemény, “Vorträge und Diskussionen am ‘Institut für Künstlerische Kultur’ (INChUK),” 226. 69 N. N. Punin, “Iskusstvo i revolutsiia” [Art and Revolution], cited in Vakar, “Kubizm i ekspressionizm,” 33–34. See also Terekhina, “Ekspressionizm i futurism,” 157. 70 Malevich evicted Chagall from the Vitebsk Art School, and Aleksandr Rodchenko and his group First Working Group of Constructivists pushed out Kandinsky from the Moscow INKhUK. 71 Vladimir Markov, “Russian Expressionism,” in Expressionism as an International Literary Phenomenon, ed. Ulrich Weisstein (Paris: Didier; Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1973), 315. 72 Ippolit Sokolov, Bunt ekspressionizta [Revolt Expressionism] (Moscow 1919) and Ekspressionizm [Expressionism] (Moscow 1920), see Russkii Ekspressionizm. Teoriia, Praktika, Kritika [Russian Expressionism: Theory, Practice, Criticism], ed. V. N. Terekhina (Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2005), 64–65, 74–80. 73 Markov, “Russian Expressionism,” 318–319. 74 Ippolit Sokolov, Bedeker po ekspressionizmu [Baedeker to Expressionism] (Moscow 1920), in Russkii Ekspressionizm, 61–64; Markov, “Russian Expressionism,” 319–320. 75 Kasimir Edschmid, Über den Expressionismus in der Literatur und die neue Dichtung [On Expressionism in Literature and New Poetry], see Markov, “Russian Expressionism,” 318; Terekhina, “Ekspressionizm i futurism,” 162–164. 76 Evgeny Gabrilovich, Boris Lapin, Sergei Spassky, and Ippolit Sokolov, Ekspressionisty [Expressionists] (Moscow: Sad Akadema, 1921), in Russkii Ekspressionizm, 118–129; Markov, “Russian Expressionism,” 322–323. 77 “The Parnassus of Moscow” was essentially the last stage of the group Centrifuge; see Markov,“Russian Expressionism,” 324. 78 Moskovskii Parnas. Sbornik Vtoroi [Moscow Parnassus: Second Volume] (Moscow 1922), in Russkii Ekspressionizm, 140–201; Markov, “Russian Expressionism,” 324–325; Terekhina, “Ekspressionizm i futurism,” 164–165. 79 Boris Lapin, 1922-ia kniga stikhov [1922 Book of Poems] (Moscow: Moskovskii Parnas, 1923), in Russkii Ekspressionizm, 201–224; Markov, “Russian Expressionism,” 324–325. 80 Markov, “Russian Expressionism,” 326.

131

Isabel Wünsche 81 Krisztina Passuth, Treffpunkte der Avantgarden Ostmitteleuropa 1907–1930 [Meeting Places of the AvantGarde East Central Europe, 1907–1920] (Budapest: Balassi Kiadó; Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 2003), 245–257. Fritz Mierau, ed., Russen in Berlin. Literatur, Malerei, Theater, Film 1918–1933 [Russians in Berlin: Literature, Painting,Theatre, Film 1918–1933] (Leipzig: Reclam, 1990). Karl Schlögel, Katharina Kucher, Bernhard Suchy, and Gregor Thum, eds., Chronik russischen Lebens in Deutschland 1918–1941 [Chronicle of Russian Life in Germany 1918–1941] (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1999). 82 “Aufruf der russischen fortschrittlichen bildenden Künstler an die deutschen Kollegen” [Call of the Russian Progressive Fine Artists to the German Colleagues], Das Kunstblatt [The Art Paper], 3, no. 3 (March 1919): 126. 83 Gudrun Calov, “Deutsche Beiträge zur bildenden Kunst und Architektur Rußlands und der Sowjetunion von 1914–1941” [German Contributions to the Visual Arts and Architecture in Russia and the Soviet Union 1914–1941], in Deutsche in Rußland und in der Sowjetunion 1914–1941 [Germans in Russia and in the Soviet Union 1914–1941], ed. Alfred Eisfeld,Victor Herdt, Boris Meissner (Berlin: LIT, 2007), 342. 84 Dennis Crockett, German Post-Expressionism:The Art of the Great Disorder 1918–1924 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 60–61. 85 Konstantin Umanskij, Neue Kunst in Russland 1914–1919 [New Art in Russia 1914–1919] (Potsdam: Gustav Kiepenheuer; Munich: Hans Goltz, 1920). 86 Ibid., 15. 87 Ibid., 16–18. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid., 18–20. 90 Oswald Herzog, “Der abstrakte Expressionismus” [Abstract Expressionism], Der Sturm, 10 (May 1919) 2: 29. 91 Umanskij, Neue Kunst in Russland, 23. 92 Ibid., 24–26. 93 Erste russische Kunstausstellung [First Russian Art Exhibition] (Berlin: Internat. Arbeiterhilfe, 1922; exh. cat.), 2. 94 “Die Säle im Erdgeschoß zeigen die konservativen und die schon wieder als konservativ geltenden expressionistischen Künstler. In den oberen Sälen tobt sich ein Modernismus aus, der sich—wie konnte es anders sein!—sogar schon neue ‘Ismen’ geprägt hat: Suprematismus, Konstruktivismus, und der eigentlich nichts weiter besagt, als daß die jungen russischen Künstler glauben, daß sie im Lande der Revolution auch alle künstlerische Tradition über den Haufen werfen müßten.” Ernst Collin, “Bolschewistische Kunst. Zur ersten russischen Kunstausstellung in Berlin” [Bolshevist Art: On the First Russian Art Exhibition in Berlin], Berliner Familien-Zeitung [Berlin Family Newspaper), no. 217, October 31, 1922. I wish to thank Miriam Häßler for this information. 95 “Burljuk, Chagall, letzterer bekannt in Deutschland, und der im Ausland ganz unbekannte, aber interessante Filonow, der mit seinen Kompositionen einzig in seiner Art dasteht, und Lebediew und Lapschin, die beide verschiedene Werke zeigen. Zur Gruppe gehört auch Sinezubow.” See Erste russische Kunstausstellung, 11–12. 96 W. Lapschin, “Die Erste Ausstellung russischer Kunst 1922 in Berlin” [The First Exhibition of Russian Art 1922 in Berlin], Kunst und Literatur [Art and Literature] 4, vol. 33 (July–August 1985): 552–575; Horst Richter, “1. Russische Kunstausstellung, Berlin 1922” [First Russian Art Exhibition, Berlin 1922], in Stationen der Moderne: Kataloge epochaler Kunstausstellungen in Deutschland 1910–1962 [Stations of Modernity: Catalogues of Groundbreaking Art Exhibitions in Germany 1910–1962], ed. Eberhard Roters (Cologne: König, 1988), Kommentarband [Commentary Volume], 115–118. 97 Sinaida Pyschnowskaja, “Deutsche Kunstausstellung in Moskau und ihre Organisatoren” [German Art Exhibitions in Moscow and its Organizers], in Berlin—Moskau 1900–1950 (Munich, New York: Prestel, 1995; exh. cat.), 187–191. 98 John E. Bowlt, “The Society of Easel Artists (OST),” Russian History 1 (1982): 212; ibid., Russian Art 1875–1975, 159. 99 Calov, “Deutsche Beiträge zur bildenden Kunst und Architektur Rußlands und der Sowjetunion von 1914–1941,” 349–351.Among the publications were: E. M. Braudo and H. E. Radlova, “Ekspressionizm” Sbornik Statei [Expressionism: Edited Volume] (Moscow, Petrograd: Gosud. Izd., 1923) with essays by Max Martersteig, Friedrich Markus Hübner, Max Krell, Julius Bab, Wilhelm Hausenstein, and Arnold Schering and illustrations of works by Chagall, Heckel, Kandinsky, Klee, Kokoschka, Marc, Meidner, Nolde, and Pechstein. M. N. Volchanetsky, Ekspressionizm v nemetskoi literature [Expressionism in

132

Expressionist Networks

100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118

119 120 121 122 123

124 125

German literature] (Moscow: Arena, 1923), discussing the work of Barlach, Borchert, Brecht, Däubler, Hasenclever, Kaiser, Lasker-Schüler, Schickele, Toller, Werfel, and others. Pyschnowskaja, “Deutsche Kunstausstellung in Moskau und ihre Organisatoren,” 188–190. Anatolii Vasil’evich Lunacharskii (Moscow: Izd. Plakat, 1975). Anatolii Lunacharskii, “Zametki o zapadnoi literature. 1. Neskol’ko slov o germanskom ekspressionizme” [Comments on Western Literature: 1. A Few Words on German Expressionism], Zhizn [Life] (Moscow 1922) 1: 76–82. Ibid., 76–77. Ibid., 77. Ibid., 79. Anatolii Lunacharskii, “Parizhskie Pis’ma” [Letters from Paris], in A.V. Lunacharskii. Ob Iskusstve [A.V. Lunacharsky: About Art] (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1982), vol. 1, 211–231. Lunacharskii, “Zametki o zapadnoi literature,” 82. Anatolii Lunacharskii, “Germanskaia Khudozhestvennaia Vystavka” [German Art Exhibition), in A.V. Lunacharskii, Ob Iskusstve, vol. 1, 319–327. Originally published in Russian in Prozhektor [Flashlight], no. 20, October 24, 1924. Lunacharskii, “Germanskaia Khudozhestvennaia Vystavka,” 324. Ibid., 327. See also Helen Adkins, “Schafft neue Ausdrucksformen! Deutsche politische Kunst der zwanziger Jahre—Vorbild für die UdSSR” [Create New Forms of Expression: German Political Art of the 1920s], in Berlin—Moskau, 237; Crockett, German Post-Expressionism, 61. Bowlt, Russian Art 1975–1975, 158. Liubov Popova, cited in Charlotte Douglas, “Terms of Transition: The First Discussional Exhibition and the Society of Easel Painters,” in The Great Utopia:The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915–1932 (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1992; exh. cat.), 451. Ibid. See also V. Kostin, OST. Obshchestvo Stankovistov [OST: Society of Easel Painters] (Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1976); John E. Bowlt, “The Society of Easel Artists (OST),” Russian History (1982) 1: 203–226. “Platforma OSTa” [Platform OST], in Sovetskoi iskusstvo za 15 let [15 Years of Soviet Art], ed. I. Matsa (Moscow, Leningrad: Ogiz-Izogiz, 1933), 575; Bowlt, “The Society of Easel Artists,” 210. Douglas, “Terms of Transition,” 451. Kostin, OST, 34–64, 81–121. Douglas, “Terms of Transition,” 453. Juryfreie Kunstschau [Non-juried Art Show] (Berlin 1928; exh. cat.), 56–58. See also Irmtraud Thierse, “Beziehungen zwischen der Moskauer Künstlergruppe ‘OST’ und der Berliner Gruppe ‘Die Zeitgemäßen’” [The Relations between the Moscow Artist Group “OST” and the Berlin Group “The Contemporary Ones”], in Entwicklungsprobleme der proletarisch-revolutionären Kunst von 1917 bis zu den 30er Jahren [Problems of Development in Proletarian-Revolutionary Art from 1917 to the 1930s] (Berlin: HUB, 1977), 135. S. A. Luchishkin, Ia ochen’ liubliu zhizn’. Stranitsy vospominanii [I Love Life Very Much: Memories] (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1988), 103. N. N. Kupreianov. Literaturno-khudozhestvennow nasledie [N. N. Kupreianov: Literary-artistic Heritage] (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1973), 27. Douglas, “Terms of Transition,” 455. Matthew C. Bown and Brandon Taylor, eds., Art of the Soviets: Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture in a One-Party State 1917–1992 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 51–72. Gertrude Zumpf, “Vystavki nemetskogo iskusstva v Sovetskom soiuze v sredie 20kh godov i ikh otsenka sovetskoi kritiki” [Exhibitions of German Art in the Soviet Union in the Middle of the 1920s and their Reviews in Soviet Criticism], in Vzaimosviazi russkogo i sovetskogo iskusstva i nemetskoi khudozhestvennoi kultury [Interrelations of Russian and Soviet Art and German Artistic Culture] (Moscow: Nauka, 1980), 186. Ibid., 186–187. Ibid.

133

6 EXPRESSIONISM IN LITHUANIA From German Artistic Import to National Art Giedrė Jankevičiūtė and Laima Laučkaitė

Expressionism in Lithuanian Art History Expressionism occupies an exceptionally important position in the development of modernism in Lithuanian art and is considered a key feature of the national school of art that arose in Kaunas in the period between the two world wars. Standing in the National Gallery, in Vilnius, the expert eye notes that the bright thread of expressionism and the modernist narrative is woven throughout the twentieth century. Expressionism is likewise reflected in past efforts to summarize the development of Lithuanian art history. In accounts of the crucial moments of twentiethcentury Lithuanian art, the concept emerges at least four times: first, in the 1910s, in a discourse on the new art; then, in 1930s polemics on the modern style of national art; once more, in the early 1960s in opposition to Social Realism; and finally, with the reactualization of expressionism that came with the efforts of Lithuanian artists (particularly painters) in the 1970s and 1980s to address, rethink, and reactualize the national expressionist artistic heritage. The Lithuanian introduction to German expressionism, an artistic import from Munich, was facilitated by Marianne Werefkin, who had strong family ties to Vilnius and Kaunas, and will be discussed in the first part of this essay. Although once perceived as something almost “prehistoric,” German expressionism is, in fact, a curious marginal occurrence of artistic culture, whose perceived influence on Lithuanian culture is greater today than at the time of its emergence. It should be clear that when we speak of expressionism in Lithuania, we are not talking about the artistic movement led by the artists of Die Brücke (The Bridge) in Dresden, in 1905, but of its retrospective perception after the war. Looking at the emergence and development of the school of national art in the newly independent Lithuania during the interwar period and examining the endeavors of a small artistic community searching for new means of artistic expression best suited to their ambitions and public expectations, we encounter the phenomenon of cultural delay—the belated reception of new ideas emerging from an important center that is elsewhere; this is found in most central, Eastern and Northern European countries, and various aspects of the phenomenon have been widely discussed elsewhere.1 Because of the delayed arrival of expressionism and subsequent evident influence on the modernization of Lithuanian art history, in the early 1980s, Lithuanian art historians first proposed a distinction between expressionism, in the form of German modernism, visible in Lithuania mainly in the form of artistic imports, and expressivism, as a quality of the local interwar 134

Expressionism in Lithuania

modernistic art, derived from a rethinking of expressionism and a more or less consistent application of its principles.2 But this distinction proved inadequate. While the early contacts with German art provided an initial expressionist impulse, artists of the interwar period, their contemporaries, and also later critics (with very few exceptions) thought and spoke not of the direct influence of German modernism, but of a concept of artistic creation common to the entire cultural sphere, one heavily influenced by early twentieth-century modernist thinking. As such it was marked by the significance of individual expression and the prevalence of the emotional over the rational. The modernist artist and writer Petras Tarulis (Juozas Petrėnas) noted in 1926 that the Italian futurist Marinetti found plenty of worldwide followers, but his futurism was something “completely different in each of the various countries.”3 The same was true of expressionism, he wrote: the “German followers of the new art, so-called expressionists, differ greatly from their colleagues in France.”4 The concept of expressionism in Lithuanian art theory and criticism did not reach the level of a meta-concept as it did in German aesthetics, but there were some attempts at the time to broaden its meaning; as with previous efforts, these were all based on the common desire for novelty.5 In the newly established independent Lithuanian state, still suffering from the postwar chaos, young poets boldly proclaimed to the public that “expressive art is not derived from the object, but from the subject . . . Creative fantasy once again reclaims its unrestricted rights.”6 This seemed crucial. The expressive approach to creation was supposed to reflect an authentic relation to reality, free from the rules of visual expression. Since the psychological expression of an emotional response was considered one of the features of the Lithuanian national character, expressionism was looked at as one of the more fruitful ways of creating an authentic, modern national art. At the same time, Lithuania’s folk art heritage, inspired by medieval and baroque religious art and created by rural craftspeople, was considered the main source of spirituality and authentic feeling. The aims and intent of the local artists were thus not so far removed from those proclaimed by Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), although they themselves did not reflect upon this kinship and did not consider it especially significant. As noted, the term expressionism was prevalent in the Lithuanian art scene throughout the interwar period, but with every occurrence in a slightly different sense; it reappeared again at the end of the 1960s together with the need for a modernization of culture. Despite its many interpretations, its basic principles of visual creation remained the same: a complicated, often critical relationship with contemporary society, the priority of personal experience, and relevant plastic expression—the distortion of form, the use of bright contrasting colors as a way of expressing emotional tension, and brushstrokes or lines expressing expansive sensuality. Critics tended to respond in accordance with general attitudes toward modernism during the respective periods: Under Soviet rule, Western influences in Lithuanian art were considered evil, and expressionism was presented as an authentic and original national artistic tradition rooted in national primitive art, the so-called rural baroque and its adaptations in folk art. After 1990, in a period of searching for a new cultural identity, the Western influence became more valuable, and various artifacts showing this influence emerged. Thus, modern Lithuanian art’s closeness to German expressionism became both an advantage and proof of its contemporaneity. In this process, the aspects of delayed culture and lack of originality were overlooked; manifestations of Lithuanian expressionism were evaluated according to their influence on the local culture, and the Lithuanian situation was compared to that of neighboring countries with the same historical destiny, particularly Latvia, Estonia, Poland, and the Czech Republic, usually to Lithuania’s advantage. 135

Giedrė Jankevičiūtė and Laima Laučkaitė

In accordance with this approach, the significance of expressionism in the Lithuanian national artistic discourse is best represented by the following trends: 1) the work of the Ars group, active 1932–1934, linked to the flourishing of the original national school of art; it was and still is considered the brightest manifestation of national modernism; 2) art works by local Jewish painters linked to expressionism: Neemija Arbitblatas, Maksas Bandas, Zalmanas Bekeris, and Černė Percikovičiūtė; 3) art works by graphic artists of the 1930s, including Mečislovas Bulaka, Vytautas Jurkūnas, Marcė Katiliūtė, Viktoras Petravičius, and Telesforas Valius. These directions were established early in the 1930s, beginning with the cultural propaganda book for foreigners, L’art Lithuanien (Lithuanian Art), edited by the director of the National Gallery of Art, Paulius Galaunė, with the help of the prominent painter and art critic Justinas Vienožinskis, and published in Malmö, Sweden, first in Swedish, then in French.7 This approach was fully canonized after the publication of the three-volume academic work XX a. lietuvių dailės istorija (History of Lithuanian Art of the 20th Century).8 Its authors reaffirmed the conviction that the expressionist approach was best suited to the Lithuanian identity and therefore this artistic trend and its creators deserved the most attention.9 The strongest arguments were based on the graphic arts, especially the work of the leftwing artists. These were mainly early works by still young artists (some, ardent supporters of the Soviet regime), but the critical views of contemporary reality they offered, expressed in dramatic, emotional images and with an obvious dependence on politically engaged expressionists such as Käthe Kollwitz, Georg Grosz, Ernst Barlach, and Frans Masereel, are today of considerable interest. Modern Lithuanian art criticism considers and examines all these aspects of expressionism. The thoughts and insights of the creators of the canonical approach—Ingrida Korsakaitė, Eglė Kunčiuvienė, Viktoras Liutkus, Laima Petrusevičiūtė, and Jonas Umbrasas10—were considerably complemented and expanded by the studies of Rasa Andriušytė-Žukienė, Erika Grigoravičienė, Raminta Jurėnaitė, Milda Žvirblytė, and especially Linara Dovydaitytė11 and Jolita Mulevičiūtė.12 The prehistory of Lithuanian expressionism has been thoroughly explored by Laima Laučkaitė-Surgailienė,13 its marginal offshoots in painting and the graphic arts by Giedrė Jankevičiūtė.14 By the end of the 1990s and early 2000s, research into nonavant-garde phenomena, including the significance of Art Deco and neotraditionalism in the interwar period, helped to further delineate the influence of French cubism, fauvism, and German expressionism on the emerging Lithuanian visual art scene. Interdisciplinary and contextual studies of artistic culture have also deepened and expanded our understanding of expressionism and its influence in interwar Lithuania.

German Expressionism in Lithuania Before and During the First World War Until the 1990s, Lithuanian art critics linked expressionism solely to the works of interwar Lithuanian artists. After the country’s independence was restored, Lithuanian art historians were free to share ideas and knowledge with greater wider academic community, thus improving access to the art and research of central and Western Europe, including artists related to Lithuania. This was further aided by greatly improved access to documents from the Lithuanian archives, which had been restricted during the Soviet era. Earlier unpublished 136

Expressionism in Lithuania

artifacts in museum depositories became accessible, and the theoretical discourse turned in a new direction: an exclusively national history of Lithuanian art was replaced by various multinational, multicultural narratives. Lithuanian art historians began to take an interest in the works of the non-Lithuanian artists living in Lithuania; their inclusion, a necessary correction to the history of expressionism in Lithuania, introduced new, previously unknown names, facts, and phenomena of artistic life. We first address the appearance of expressionism in exhibitions in Vilnius and Kaunas on the eve of and during the First World War. The debut of expressionism in Lithuania (at the time, the northwestern part of the Russian empire) is tied to the appearance of the Russian-born Munich artist Marianne Werefkin (1860– 1938) and her presence in Vilnius in 1913–1914. Werefkin grew up in Vilnius, living there from 1868 to 1876, but after her move to Munich, in 1896, she regularly returned to her childhood city to visit her relatives. Together with the Russian-born artists Alexej Jawlensky and Wassily Kandinsky and the German artists August Macke, Franz Marc, and Paul Klee, she founded the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (New Artists’ Association Munich) and exhibited her works with members of the Blaue Reiter. Her last stay in Vilnius was from autumn 1913 to summer 1914, a period when she painted her most significant expressionist paintings: Polizeiposten Wilna (Police Post in Vilnius; Figure 6.1) and Kirche Sankt Anna in Vilnius (St. Anne’s Church in Vilnius), both 1914—cityscapes filled with subjectivity, religious experiences, and foreboding of the coming war.

Figure 6.1  Marianne Werefkin, Polizeiposten Wilna (Police Post in Vilnius), 1914, tempera on cardboard, 98 × 82 cm, Modern Art Museum of Ascona

137

Giedrė Jankevičiūtė and Laima Laučkaitė

During her stay, Werefkin actively participated in the city’s cultural life and took part in the Vilnius Art Society’s spring exhibition. At the time, Vilnius was a multinational city in the Russian empire, burgeoning with growing nationalist political and cultural movements. There were two active artistic societies in Vilnius at the beginning of the twentieth century: the Lithuanian Art Society, a public organization that only included Lithuanian-born artists and patrons of art, and a professional organization, the aforementioned Vilnius’ Art Society, which catered to artists of various nations, including Lithuanians. The annual exhibitions of both societies offered mostly symbolist, impressionist, and neoromantic works; however, the Vilnius Art Society, in its 1914 spring exhibition, also included a section on the “most recent art,” in which it presented works by Paris-based, Vilnius-born Jewish painter Samuil Danishevskii and Marianne Werefkin.15 Werefkin’s selection of more than ten expressionist paintings won critical acclaim. The critic of the Russian-language Vilnius newspaper Nasha kopeika (Our Copeck) introduced Werefkin as a famous painter from Munich and described her works as belonging to the school of expressionism.16 The newspaper Severo zapadyj golos (Northwestern Voice) wrote that her “paintings might seem a little strange, as if devoid of any technique, but in the first place there is art, truly original art, and a tangible mood.”17 The critics underscored the painter’s closeness to the creators of “the new art” and her attachment to the Munich (not merely German) artistic milieu. Several factors contributed to the positive tone of the reviews. The 1914 spring exhibition had been preceded by the scandalous 1910 exhibition in Vilnius of the “Impressionists-Triangle” group of avant-garde artists from Petersburg. Moreover, Werefkin was the sister of Piotr Werefkin, the governor of Vilnius; thus her social status also certainly influenced the critics’ opinions. Though she was not in the habit of speaking in public, on March 2, 1914, Werefkin delivered a lecture on the new art at the school of the Vilnius Art Society.18 Surviving notes provide us with the creed of Munich expressionism, i.e., Der Blaue Reiter, namely a desire to express religious feeling and spiritual truth through form: “All of my feelings, all impressions, are translated into the language of lines and colors”19—thus Werefkin expressed the main thesis of expressionism, though the term itself was never used in her lecture; she referred instead to “symbolism” and stated that in art reality is represented by its signs—the symbols that are used by the artist. The commingling of expressionist and symbolist concepts in her lecture demonstrates the genetic closeness of these two movements; there was also a practical aspect: the local public would have already been familiar with Russian literary symbolism. Speaking about contemporary artists, Werefkin mentioned Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso. Notably she did not make a distinction between the work of French and German painters. Werefkin also introduced the abstract work of her “friends”—paintings by Wassily Kandinsky and music by Arnold Schönberg—who, she noted, most definitely used “primary artistic symbols in their creative work.”20 Werefkin also stated that she herself and Jawlensky, as opposed to the other artists, mainly relied on reality—the “shapes of life,” only transforming them as necessary for “the purposes of our faith.”21 Werefkin’s double artistic identity—as a locally born artist and, at the same time, a representative of the most current Western European art—allows us to consider her as a bridge between the local art scene and that in Germany. Before the First World War a number of young people from Vilnius, Jewish artists in particular, went to Paris to study the new art movements. Among them were Jacques Lipchitz, Leon Indenbaum, Chaim Soutine, Pinchus Kremegne, Michel Kikoine, and others, almost all of whom later joined the École de Paris (see Chapter 17 in this volume). Lasar Segall, who in 1906 left Vilnius to study in Berlin, was the exception, as he was strongly influenced by the work of the Brücke artists. Segall returned to Vilnius for short visits during the First World War and moved to Brazil after the 1920s. 138

Expressionism in Lithuania

Sometime in 1914 or 1915, after the beginning of the war and when Lithuania was still a part of Russia, the Vilnius Art Society organized an exhibition by German expressionists from Munich, among them Werefkin, Jawlensky, and Bencion Cukermann, a Jewish painter from Vilnius who was living in Paris. The earnings from the sale of their works went to the Vilnius Russian Red Cross committee for aid to the victims of war. The committee that arranged the showing was chaired by Sofia Werefkina, the wife of Werefkin’s brother Piotr; it is quite possible that she lent works from the family collection to the exhibition. In a kind of ideological and political paradox, expressionist works, created in the context of the German, i.e., enemy culture, were used as a means to provide charity for the victims of German war efforts from the occupied western regions of the tsarist Russian empire. The public reaction remains unknown, as the exhibition went unnoticed, without any substantive reviews. The German army occupied Lithuania in the summer of 1915, and Vilnius was occupied in autumn. The occupied territory was ruled by the military government of the Ober Ost, and this was the designation by which the occupied region was identified.22 The occupational government closed local newspapers and organized a special press section that published newspapers in German. These had illustrated supplements, and the drawings for them were provided by German artists drafted into the German army. Celebrations of the centennial of the First World War have helped to shed new light onto the works of these German artists working in the occupied territories; studies on their work are just beginning.23 Lithuanian art historians have long ignored these works, and for political reasons, German art historians have usually remained silent about this period in their artists’ biographies. Among the artists working in the Ober Ost were several representatives of expressionism; the most famous of them, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884–1976) and Magnus Zeller (1888–1972), worked for the Kownoer Zeitung (Kaunas News). German intellectuals rallied around the Wilnaer Zeitung (Vilnius News) and the Zeitung der 10. Armee (Newspaper of the 10th Army) in Vilnius and the Kownoer Zeitung in Kaunas. The writers, journalists, and artists working for these newspapers constituted a part of the propaganda machine behind them, but this did not restrain their development of a critical view of the chauvinism and militarism inherent in the German ideology. At the beginning of the war, many artists, equally affected by the mass euphoria, actively volunteered for military action, hoping that the war would “purify and cleanse” the national spirit, but after experiencing its horrors and pointlessness, most longed for and looked forward only to its end. The tools of expressionism were especially suitable for expressing the apocalyptic experiences of the war, particularly the suffering of people living in the occupied territories and their poverty and hunger. While living in Kaunas, Brücke group member Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, strongly moved by the events of the war, began to depict images of human suffering in his works of sculpture, for example Panischer Schrecken (A Panic Scream, 1917), and in the graphic arts, one example being the 1918 woodcut Mädchen aus Kowno (A Girl from Kaunas). Schmidt-Rottluff later turned to religious subjects, publishing an album of nine woodcuts on the theme of Christ’s sufferings in 1918. The experience of war also shaped the artistic activities of the German artist Magnus Zeller, who had studied in Berlin under Lovis Corinth and, in 1911, was stationed as a soldier in Kaunas. Inspired by local motifs, he created expressionist illustrations for Lithuanian folk songs and drew scenes from city life, including the markets, parks, streets; in his drawings he focused on social welfare, such as images of the poor, hungry women with babies, and homeless orphans. Sometime in 1917 or 1918, Zeller illegally printed a folder of lithographs titled Entrückung und Aufruhr (Rapture and Uproar) in the printing house of the Ober Ost press department in Kaunas.24 The lithographs predicted the catastrophic outcome of the war and became a manifesto for the approaching November Revolution in Germany. The folder contained twelve expressionist lithographs by Zeller and twelve accompanying poems by Arnold Zweig. Their very 139

Giedrė Jankevičiūtė and Laima Laučkaitė

titles—“Coffin,” “Beggar,” “Drunkard,” “Consumptive,” “Bomb,” “Conspiracy”—speak of painful wartime experiences, suffering, and finally, resistance and rebellion. The artist’s rebellious and antimilitaristic work was a clear condemnation of the militarism of Germany; his left-wing views led Zeller to support the revolution, and he became a member of the Soldiers’ Council (Soldatenrat) in Berlin. After the First World War, Zeller taught for a while at the art school Pallas in Tartu, and continued to influence future Estonian artists in his capacity as a teacher.25 Among the most recent discoveries in art history is the work of the expressionist painter Cornelia Gurlitt (1890–1919), who was a nurse at the Vilnius Antakalnis War Hospital.26 She was the daughter of Cornelius Gurlitt, a famous expert on baroque architecture, and the sister of the infamous art historian and dealer Hildebrandt Gurlitt.27 After studying painting in Paris, she had her debut exhibition at the Salon Richter, in Dresden, in 1913. Her stay in Vilnius was possibly her most intensive and creative artistic period; after her return to Germany she was unable to adapt to postwar life and ended up taking her own life, in 1919. In Vilnius, she made expressionist lithographs reflecting the experiences of a woman working in a war hospital, among them Lazaret Wilna-Antokol (Wilna-Antokol War Hospital, c. 1917). Like other German artists in Vilnius, she was greatly affected by the poverty and shocking scenes of hunger and suffering she found, and the social aspects of war became significant in her work. German artists often depicted urban beggars, for example Zeller, in his 1918 expressionist lithograph Vor der Kirche (In Front of the Church; Figure 6.2). The artists were also often drawn to the Old Town in Vilnius, whose largely Jewish inhabitants lived in a very religious, traditional, and also extremely poor community. The artists’ depictions of life in the Vilnius’ ghetto were harsh, expressive; they admired the spiritual strength they found in the people living there who even while enduring the most unfortunate of circumstances retained the strength of their faith. Cornelia Gurlitt expressed this idea in her drawing of Vilnius’ beggars titled Rachmonis (Mercy, c. 1917; Figure 6.3). In the upper part of the drawing, as a symbol of Christian mercy, she included the most famous visual symbol of (Catholic) Vilnius: The Holy Mother of God of Mercy from the Gate of Dawn. Given the amount of expressionist work created in Vilnius during the war, the question arises as to how well known the artists would have been to the general public. It must be noted, however, that during these years of German occupation, artistic life in Lithuania became almost paralyzed, as most local artists withdrew from the cities, and those remaining had no opportunity to show their work. German artists, however, organized exhibitions of their work in Lithuania. In October 1917, the exhibition Painters in Ober Ost28 opened in Vilnius; in late 1917, the exhibition Kownoer Bilderschau (Kaunas Exhibition of Pictures) was shown in Kaunas. Cornelia Gurlitt exhibited in the Vilnius exhibition; Magnus Zeller in both. These were mainly visited by German soldiers and not reviewed by the local press, which was little concerned with the artistic events of the German artists. But there were some reviews in the German press, in the Kownoer Zeitung for example, which published a review by its reporter, the writer Arnold Zweig, on the Kaunas exhibition. Zweig defined Zeller’s work as belonging to expressionism: As a German, Zeller comes from an intuitive understanding of reality. Nothing, however, would be more wrong and unfair than a naturalistic assessment of his paintings. It is true that his forms are based on a very precise and dissective vision and a fabulously enhanced expression of movement, but the compositional force that holds the divergent gestures together in the image, and his immense ability to directly express the rawness of a brawl, the unholy portent of war, the demonic hostility of survivors toward a dying man and he toward them, all serve to elevate these creations far beyond literal reproductions of nature into the realm of spiritual creation.29 140

Figure 6.2  Magnus Zeller, Vor der Kirche (In Front of the Church), 1918, lithography, 22.5 × 16.5 cm, Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum, Vilnius.  VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn/LATGA, Vilnius, 2017

Figure 6.3  Cornelia Gurlitt, Rachmonis (Mercy), c. 1917, India ink, 33.7 × 25.3 cm, private collection

Giedrė Jankevičiūtė and Laima Laučkaitė

Figure 6.4  Cornelia Gurlitt, Ohne Titel/Paul Fechter (Untitled/Paul Fechter), 1917, lithography, 26.5 × 21.4 cm, Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum, Vilnius

The text reflects Zweig’s sympathies both for expressionism and for Zeller, with whom he worked at the newspaper and maintained a close friendship during the war. Along with the artists, German art critics were also stationed in Lithuania during the First World War. Paul Fechter (1880–1958), author of the first German book on expressionism, reporter for the Berlin newspaper Vossische Zeitung (Voß’s News), reviewer of cultural events and art exhibitions, and someone with close ties to Die Brücke, was a journalist for the Wilnaer Zeitung in Vilnius (Figure 6.4). His study, “Der Expressionismus” (Expressionism), was published on the eve of the war.30 In it, Fechter characterized the movement as a purely German artistic phenomenon, its aspirations linked to the “primeval metaphysical urge of the German soul”31 and derived from the national style—the Gothic—which “expressed the soul of the German nation.”32 Fechter wrote various articles on cultural topics for the Wilnaer Zeitung and also acquainted himself with the artistic monuments of the occupied territories. He published a series titled Wanderstunden in Wilna (Hours of Wandering in Vilnius), beginning in 1916, in the Bilderschau der Wilnaer Zeitung (Exhibition of Pictures of the Vilnius News), the illustrated supplement of the newspaper. The series was later republished as a book of the same title by “Paul Monty,”33 the composite pen name referring to Fechter and to his colleague at the newspaper, theatre and literature critic Montague Jacobs,

142

Expressionism in Lithuania

who signed his work as “Monty.”34 The book (Figure 6.5) is structured as a free-form essay centered on the city’s topography (chapters are titled: Townscape, Churches and Monasteries, Ghetto, Vilnius Angles, In the Street, Celebration Hours, Outside of the Gates), and offers a vivid, emotional acquaintance with the city. Short notes on historical facts, places, and monuments are included, but the main attraction is its subjective approach, revealing an enjoyment of the city’s views, sounds, smells, and its seasonal impressions. Fechter’s aspiration to perceive the city with all his senses is very close to the syncretism associated with the expressionist experience. Wanderstunden in Wilna is characterized by an emotive relationship to the city, the “mysticism of the heart,” as Fechter described the essence of expressionism.35 The book, quite popular in Vilnius, was reprinted several times in 1917 and 1918, but the German-speaking local population was still rather small, so the book’s impact was limited. In summarizing this short overview, it must be noted that the expressionists arrived in Lithuania on the eve of the First World War as a German import. The attention the work received was limited, mainly from the press of the occupational forces; thus in the context of Lithuanian art at the time, it was a marginal, peripheral artistic phenomenon, which hardly affected the development of the local art scene.

Figure 6.5  C  over of Paul Monty, Wanderstunden in Wilna [Hours of Wandering in Vilnius] (Vilnius: Verlag der Vilnaer Zeitung, 1916)

143

Giedrė Jankevičiūtė and Laima Laučkaitė

The Reception of German Culture in Interwar Lithuania and Adomas Galdikas’s Role in the Dissemination of Expressionism In the early 1920s, Germany, and Berlin in particular, was a veritable magnet to European artists—Lithuanians, as well; its cultural tradition was venerated, and the country was viewed as a window to Europe. In its economically weakened state, Germany also had its advantages: Lithuanian publishers used cheap German printers to print books, sculptors made bronze casts of their works there, painters bought German art supplies and tools, and lovers of art and antiques could acquire art books and artifacts in Germany. None of these goods were available in warravaged Lithuania, thus the routes of cultural tourism were often directed by pragmatic interests. In addition to its cultural traditions and economic situation, the political situation in Germany was also significant. Following the Bolshevik revolution, Russia became largely unreachable; despite close political, cultural, and social ties reaching back to the Middle Ages, diplomatic relations to Poland were broken off after the country’s annexation of Vilnius; this meant much longer journeys to Warsaw and Kraków as compared to Berlin, which could be reached in less than twenty hours. Berlin was a vibrant, innovative metropolis, further enhanced by an established Russian émigré community. Such connections were among the reasons that inspired two former alumni of the St. Petersburg Academy of Art, the architect Vladimiras Dubeneckis (1888–1932), whose family had Lithuanian roots, and his wife Olga Schwede-Dubeneckienė (1891–1967), to come to Berlin. Schwede-Dubeneckienė, who had worked in Kaunas as a stage designer and choreographer, was inspired by the productions of expressive dancing she saw there. Other painters established in Kaunas, particularly those of Russian, Jewish, and German origin, including Max Band (1900–1974), Aleksandr Veriovkin, and Max Holzman (1889– 1941), also studied in Germany and brought their experiences back to Lithuania.36 The greatest influence on the Lithuanian school of art was the result of Adomas Galdikas’s acquaintance with artistic life in Germany. In 1922, Galdikas spent several months in Germany while preparing for his new position as chair of the graphics studio in the recently established Kaunas Art School, an art college that was opened in the provisional capital. Galdikas received his art education in St. Petersburg, where he graduated from Alexander Stieglitz’s school of applied art. Galdikas was initially attracted to symbolism, but after visiting Finland in late 1910s, he discovered Axel Gallen-Kallela and was inspired by his approach to creating a modern national style. In Berlin, Galdikas encountered expressionist art and found it suitable to his own stormy temper and aspirations. Despite long talks with the writer Kazys Binkis (1893–1942), one of the ideological leaders of the avant-garde group Four Winds (Keturi vėjai, 1922–1928), on the content of expressionism and its ideological program, Galdikas chose to adopt only certain external features of the style. He loved using distorted forms—bright and vivid brushstrokes and contrasting, sometimes even clashing colors—but basically remained true to the tradition and bucolic iconography of Romanticism (haymakers, bathers, rural views with wooden churches, and thatched cottages) and symbolism (mermaids, witches, heroes of Greek mythology). In his early works, there is only one exception: paintings of religious Jews—impressions from the Lithuanian Jewish shtetl, made exotic by the rapid modernization of the country (Figure 6.6). Influenced by his time in Berlin and the discussions with Binkis, in 1922 Galdikas designed an expressionist cover for Keturių vėjų pranašas (Herald of Four Winds), a collection of works by Lithuanian writers who called themselves expressionists, and in the 1930s he produced several expressionist urban landscapes. Galdikas’s greatest contribution to cultural education and the dissemination of expressionism were his extensive efforts to establish and promote the graphic arts studio program at the Kaunas Art School. Galdikas traveled to Berlin to acquaint himself with modern German art and 144

Expressionism in Lithuania

Figure 6.6  Adomas Galdikas, Ortodoksas žydas iš Kauno (Orthodox Jew from Kaunas), early 1920s, oil on canvas, 160 × 71 cm, Lithuanian Art Museum, Vilnius.  Lithuanian Art Museum, 2016

principles of teaching and also acquired the necessary materials and equipment there. He bought printing presses, lithography stones, chisels, paint, even paper; also reproductions of paintings and art books for the art history classes, among them numerous publications on expressionism and its representatives. The books and reproductions were shared with other teachers and made available to students in the art school’s library. Galdikas’s trip to Germany helped establish contacts with the Art Academy in Dresden and the Academy of Graphic Arts and Book Design (Die Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst) in Leipzig. After hosting groups of students from Dresden and Leipzig in 1928, Kaunas students then visited them in Berlin and Dresden in 1929. This provided an additional impulse to those members of the graphic arts studio in Kaunas who were interested in expressionism to deepen their interest in the style; for some, including Viktoras Petravičius, the direct contact with expressionist works of art that they had previously only seen in reproductions had a decisive influence. In 1929, an exhibition of modern German graphic art opened in Kaunas, in the building of Lithuanian Artists’ Society.37 Among its exhibits were wood and metal engravings, drawings, watercolors, and pastels by Ernst Barlach, Lyonel Feininger, George Grosz, Erich Heckel, Paul Klee, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff; also works by representatives of the Neue Sachlichkeit. According to the contemporary art critic Halina Kairiūkštytė-Jacynienė, this exhibition proved that the old-fashioned drama, mysticism, and transcendentality of expressionism were gradually being replaced by an art conscious of and attentive to visible reality. 145

Giedrė Jankevičiūtė and Laima Laučkaitė

The artists, she noted, were awed by “the inscrutability . . . of the world of objects”—their work was defined by a “precision, much like the precision of the many technical creations of the twentieth century, of the modern world of monumental buildings and bridges, and precisely defined radio waves and machines.”38 Kairiūkštytė-Jacynienė’s comments nicely illustrate the clash of ideals between the generations of artists that had arisen during the 1920s: change vs. stability, international modernism vs. a neotraditionalism based on local tradition. Resolution came only in 1932, with the public appearance of Ars.

The Artists’ Group Ars The arrival of the artists’ group Ars marked the high point of the conflict—or, rather, the series of conflicts—between the older generation and younger artists. Beginning in 1929, a wave of change in Kaunas had brought forth several new organizations and institutions, including private art studios, artistic fellowships, exhibition halls, and galleries; it also encouraged expanded art criticism. State grants, provided to young artists for study abroad since 1927, also promoted the desire for change. Alumni of the Kaunas Art School mainly chose Paris for further studies, and it was there that the idea for the artists’ group Ars was born. Its founding members were Antanas Gudaitis (1904–1989) and Viktoras Vizgirda (1904–1993), together with the writer Petras Tarulis (Juozas Petrėnas), who wrote its manifesto, which, in short, concise, and colorful sentences and with a masterful tone, states the group’s mission: creating a new art for a new Lithuania, based on the country’s national, traditional artistic heritage but incorporating the innovations of European art. Along with the painters Gudaitis and Vizgirda, the group included seven young artists: the painter Antanas Samuolis (1899–1942), the sculptor Juozas Mikėnas (1901–1964), and three graphic artists—Vytautas Kazimieras Jonynas (1907–1997), Telesforas Kulakauskas (1907– 1977), and Jonas Steponavičius (1907–1986). As a sign of approval of their former students, Adomas Galdikas and Mstislavas Dobužinskis (1875–1957), two artists of the older generation, participated in the first exhibition of Ars. Thanks to Galdikas, the exhibition was organized in the provisional building of the M. K. Čiurlionis Museum, the future National Gallery. An older generation of art lovers regarded the exhibition with disfavor, as the artists they admired were clearly cast as works of soon-to-be-foregone glory. The tone of the manifesto was deemed harsh, particularly the statement that the young artists were “start[ing] their work in an empty, sadly neglected field,” and that only by putting on “the spectacles of the age” would they be able to properly discern the “grand, distant artistic culture,” the “relics” of traditional art—wooden carvings of Christian saints faded by sun and wind, folk tales, and songs.39 As a result, little attention was paid to the group’s artistic program, and discussions tended to revolve around the arrogance of its members. The artistic program of Ars was quite abstract and metaphorical and included such generalities as a striving for modernity, the importance of revisiting traditional Lithuanian peasant art, and the necessity of joining “the great cultural race of the European nations.”40 The lack of clear artistic guidelines was symbolically expressed by the choice of images used to publicize the exhibition. The cover of the exhibition catalogue, designed by Kulakauskas, displays features of constructivism, but uses simple geometrical shapes and the colors red, black, and white, characteristic of the style. The lettering of the group’s name, drawn by hand, betrays the author’s true interests, which obviously lie closer to Art Deco. At the same time, the watercolor by Mikėnas that was used for the poster of the exhibition suggests that its author was still under the influence of the exhibition of neoclassicist works by Picasso he had seen in Paris in the summer of 1932.41

146

Expressionism in Lithuania

The works displayed at this first exhibition of Ars varied in their stylistic orientation: balanced neoclassic harmony and hedonist Art Deco in the graphics section, an open-ended emotional onslaught among the paintings. The paintings by French-school educated Gudaitis and Vizgirda were quite different from Samuolis’s works. The fluidity of Gudaitis’s wild expressivity was enhanced by light, translucent brushstrokes and vivid contrasting colors (Figure 6.7); in the landscapes and still lifes by Vizgirda, the great colorist, the influence of Matisse could be discerned, as well as the Lithuanian’s admiration for the work of Raoul Dufy (Plate 9). The painting Baltoji obelis (White Apple-Tree, 1932), a depiction of the arrival of spring in a poor Kaunas’ suburb, full of sadness and anxiety (Plate 10), was considered the very zenith of Samuolis’s work, and clearly showed its author’s closeness to the Brücke painters. In the second and last Ars exhibition, which opened in the House of Agriculture in 1934, Samuolis moves even closer to German expressionism. It is visible in his grotesque portrait of Vizgirda as the one-eyed painter (1933–1934; Figure 6.8), in the harsh social satire Nykryžiuotas buržua (A Bourgeois Crucified, 1934), and in the visionary Vaiko sapnas (A Child’s Dream, 1934). The public’s favorite was his composition Geltonoji moteris (A Yellow Woman, 1933), reminiscent of Paul Gauguin’s Polynesians, which was subsequently acquired for the collections of the National Gallery.

Figure 6.7  Antanas Gudaitis, Natiurmortas su medine Pieta (Still Life with Wooden Pieta), 1930, oil on cardboard, 73.5 × 60 cm, M. K. Čiurlionis National Art Museum, Kaunas.  Eglė Gudaitytė-Kunčiuvienė, 2016

147

Giedrė Jankevičiūtė and Laima Laučkaitė

Figure 6.8  Antanas Samuolis, Dailininkas/Viktoro Vizgirdos portretas (The Artist/Portrait of Viktoras Vizgirda), 1932, oil on canvas, 72 × 62 cm, Lithuanian Art Museum, Vilnius

An expressionist mindset can be traced in the attempts of the members of Ars to flee from the illusory reality of the city and their search for identity in the surrounding yet unspoiled countryside. Such an environment was found in Samogitia (Žemaitija), an archaic and picturesque region in northwestern Lithuania. There Gudaitis and Galdikas painted a number of primeval, elemental landscapes; they also (re)discovered the charm of the rural baroque—wooden churches with painted and gilt wooden altarpieces made by local craftsmen. The Ars group did attract some popular interest; works by its members were acquired for the National Art Gallery from both exhibitions, but Lithuania lacked private galleries and art patrons able to sustain an art focused on independent artistic expression. Both the public and the state, as the main sponsors, were looking for a different kind of art. As a consequence, beginning in 1935, the artists abandoned their attempts at self-expression, which were found puzzling, and embraced the expectations of state and nation. The late 1930s became a period of monumental landscapes and portraits, not only for Gudaitis and Vizgirda, but also for their teacher and patron Galdikas. Their efforts were amply rewarded: the artists were granted prestigious state commissions and invited to teach in the art colleges. From 1960 to 1980, the heritage of Ars became a form of modernization program for several generations of Lithuanian artists; in the critical discourse of those times, expressionism was closely linked to the de-Sovietization of national culture and the flourishing of its authenticity. Despite the fact that some members of the group were drawn toward neotraditionalism and 148

Expressionism in Lithuania

greatly admired Mediterranean neoclassicism, their significance to their contemporaries and future generations lay in their expressionistic aspirations. Admirers of Ars venerated the image of the lonely artist, the genius, blessed by deeper knowledge and sharper senses than his contemporaries. This approach was especially helpful for the growing popularity of Antanas Samuolis.42 Samuolis’s career was unfortunately cut short by his illness (tuberculosis) and early death; this is reflected in his catalogue raisonné, which contains only fifty-seven paintings.43 However, the five or ten paintings that are recognized as Samuolis’s masterpieces confirm his status as a classic of Lithuanian modern painting and an authentic representative of expressionism in Lithuanian art; we are encouraged to view his works in the context of works by Kirchner and other members of Die Brücke. Even during the darkest Stalinist years, there were those who defended the artistic significance of Ars and its heritage; in the late 1950s, there was a new attempt to revitalize this heritage. In the 1970s, as interest in their historical development grew, German expressionism came to be recognized as one of the group’s most important sources of inspiration. This was a period of extraordinary interest in expressionism, accompanied by endeavors to find ever closer links between Lithuanian artistic culture and German expressionism. To offer just one example: In 1910, Nida, on the Lithuanian part of the long, narrow Curonian spit, had been a favorite summer resort of the Brücke artists Max Pechstein and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. In the late 1980s, the former fishermen’s village became a new place of pilgrimage for the admirers of modernism. Several articles on the history of the Nida artists’ colony were published.44 The organization of regular artistic plein air meetings began in 1995; the place itself was referred to as “the cradle of expressionism,” and the efforts of the local hotel owner Hermann Blode to support the Nida artists’ colony were highly praised. Riding on this wave of interest in German artistic influences on Lithuanian culture was the East Prussian-born artist Franz Domscheit (Pranas Domschaitis or Domšaitis; 1880–1965), whose body of work was acquired by the Lithuanian Foundation in the United States in the early 1980s and shipped to Lithuania. Domscheit was an alumnus of the Königsberg Art Academy and a student of Lovis Corinth. In 1920, he acquired Lithuanian citizenship; beginning in 1938 he signed his works using the Lithuanized version of his name (Domschaitis), and tried to establish himself in Kaunas. Domscheit spent the most fruitful part of his artistic life in Berlin; after 1933, he lived in Austria and then South Africa, where he died in 1965.45 The large collection of his works currently belongs to the Lithuanian Art Museum and the National M. K. Čiurlionis Art Museum in Kaunas. In the seaside port of Klaipėda, a city with a significant German heritage, the Lithuanian Art Museum opened a permanent exhibition of his works in 2001 with the evident purpose of integrating Domšaitis’s heritage into the modern Lithuanian art discourse.

The Offshoots of Expressionism: Jewish Painting and Graphic Arts A number of artists of Jewish origin, among them Neemija Arbitblatas (1908–1999; also known as Arbit Blatas, see Chapter 17), Max Band (1900–1974), Zalmanas (Zalė) Bekeris (1896–1944?), Chaimas Meyeris Fainšteinas (1911–1942?), Jokūbas Mesenbliumas (1894–1933; also Jacques Mesene), and Černė Percikovičiūtė (1912–1942?), have been a part of the narrative of modern Lithuanian artistic culture from the very beginning of their professional careers. Their work, and the cultural activities of Jewish painters, was widely addressed by contemporary writers and critics, but a deeper and more extensive exegesis is still lacking. The art historians writing the canonic history of Lithuanian art of the twentieth century during the late Soviet period, i.e., the end of the 1970s and early 1980s, were most interested in the Jewish painters closest to the expressionist school. The art historian Jonas Umbrasas, for example, 149

Giedrė Jankevičiūtė and Laima Laučkaitė

cited Bekeris and Percikovičiūtė,46 whose paintings were favored by Justinas Vienožinskis, one of the key art critics of the interwar period and a painter himself, whose opinion was highly valued in the 1960s and 1970s.47 Bekeris and Percikovičiūtė, together with Ars members Gudaitis, Samuolis, and Vizgirda, were especially admired in the period from the 1960s to the 1980s. The few remaining works by Band, Bekeris, Mesenbliumas, and Percikovičiūtė (few of their works are held in the state collections, thus the difficulty in gaining a broader perspective) were considered a part of the Lithuanian artistic “gold find.” This also explains attempts to integrate Jewish art into the national cultural tradition. Vienožinskis, in his review of the first autumn art exhibition of 1936, organized by the Lithuanian Artists’ Union, writes, for example, about his former pupil Percikovičiūtė: She does not imitate anyone, she has not even seen any of the world-famous painters, but through her studies of our [Lithuanian] carved wooden figures of the suffering Christ and folk art, she has managed to find and create a completely different world view of her own.48 Linking Percikovičiūtė’s work with the Lithuanian folk art tradition, Vienožinskis underscores one of the main characteristics of her style: primitivism, an aspect that non-Lithuanian critics would probably insist is an integral aspect of expressionism. Vienožinskis’s attempts to Lithuanize Percikovičiūtė’s paintings clearly reflect the teacher’s desire to introduce his talented pupil into the selected circle of most promising young painters. The Lithuanian public and art critics favored those Jewish painters who were close to expressionism, seeing in their works, above all, a manifestation of the Lithuanian spirit. The manner and ability of Arbitblatas, Band, and Fainšteinas were equally admired, whether they depicted neutral motives (e.g., streets of Paris, still lifes; see Figure 6.9), or the portraits of famous Lithuanians, or Jewish traditional motifs of living. Discussions of Jewish art by the local art critics was even livelier than those of solely Lithuanian art, as these discussions took place not only in Lithuanian, but also in Russian and Jewish periodicals. One of the reasons for this attention was the international recognition of Lithuanian Jewish painters, which led many to believe and hope that other Lithuanian artists, if their art could somehow become associated with the work of the Jewish artists, might also merit international attention. Despite this inclination to draw together Jewish and other Lithuanian artists, authors such as Justinas Vienožinskis, Paulius Galaunė, and others, who wrote a Lithuanian art history of the twentieth century after the war and analyzed Jewish art as a part of the Lithuanian heritage, did not forget to mention their nationality, thus noting their difference—a distinction that in the case of Russian, Latvian, or German artists was not found necessary.49 Another characteristic in the evaluation of Jewish artists’ heritage was the silence on their political views. Writing about the work of the painter Bekeris or graphic artist Fainšteinas, scholars such as Jūratė Savickaitė and Ingrida Korsakaitė noted their critical approach to social inequality and an emotional relationship to the most vulnerable members of society—children, women, the old, and the sick.50 But this is presented as the sensitive expressions of young artists from poor families; their wish to identify with the penniless and the suffering. This is a simplified and romanticized approach without any serious attempt to search for the reasons for such a consistent interest in the lives of workers, small craftsmen, or paupers, even though the relationships of the artists to left-wing political movements are obvious. In 1931, for instance, Bekeris’s paintings were reviewed in the activist writers’ magazine Trečias frontas (The Third Front).51 Bekeris was probably close to both left-wing artists and members of the then illegal communist party, as it would otherwise be difficult to explain the artist’s rapid rise during the first Soviet occupation, when life was redefined according to the “new spirit” and he became a board member of the Soviet Lithuania Artists’ Union.52 150

Expressionism in Lithuania

Figure 6.9  Neemija Arbitblatas, Natiurmortas su austrėmis (Still Life with Oysters), 1935, oil on canvas, 53.2 × 64 cm, M. K. Čiurlionis National Art Museum, Kaunas.  M. K. Čiurlionis National Art Museum, 2016

There have been no serious efforts to relate the work of Bekeris, Percikovičiūtė, or Fainšteinas to the work of Lithuanian artists belonging to the political left-wing movements, mainly communist, but also anarchist; thus there has been little or no effort to substantiate the common features of their individual styles, which are first of all based on the closeness of worldview and ideology, and only secondarily on the same proto-images, sought by left-wing Lithuanian artists in the works of German expressionists Ernst Barlach, Georg Grosz, Käthe Kollwitz, and Belgian Frans Masereel. Female artists were especially influenced by Kollwitz’s works. The talented graphic artist Marcė Katiliūtė (1912–1937) was drawn to Kollwitz, but committed suicide when she was only twenty-five, posthumously becoming a symbolic figure of the women’s artistic movement in Lithuania.53 Reproductions of works by Grosz and Masereel were published in the influential left-wing magazine Kultūra (Culture) and other Lithuanian publications; their early monographs were eagerly sought by readers at the art school library. Interest in Masereel’s works was much broader than the circle of the left-leaning public; this is evident in the publication of Romain Rolland’s novel Pierre et Luce (Petras ir Liucija in Lithuanian) with illustrations by Masereel (1938) in the so-called “Teacher’s Bookshop” series. Fainšteinas’s work is particularly central when looking at Masereel’s influence on Lithuanian artists. Evidently, he borrowed the means of expression from Masereel’s engravings: the shapes defined by great black and white squares, which create the impression and tension of threedimensionality, a deep and at the same time curving outline, and the deliberate depiction of only 151

Giedrė Jankevičiūtė and Laima Laučkaitė

the head as intentionally too small for the flat surface of the print. Fainšteinas differed from most Lithuanian graphic artists in that he did not feel any nostalgia for nature or rural life. He was, however, sincerely interested in the life and inhabitants of the city; like a true urbanite, he was especially attentive to people, the many types and their faces. Fainšteinas’s portraits were hugely popular among his contemporaries, especially the series of images of the professors of Kaunas Vytautus Magnus University. The artist’s admirers, members of the establishment, did not mind his collaboration with Zacharia Margolin, the manager of the Kaunas bookshop Mokslas (Science), who openly expressed his sympathies for the ideals of communism and the Soviet Union. Striving to realize these ideals, he sold Soviet books and personally published books by left-wing activist writers, the latter being illustrated by specially commissioned, younger graphic artists, who thus found a possibility to establish themselves.54 In contrast, the expressionism of the graphic artist Viktoras Petravičius (1906–1989), illustrator of the Lithuanian folk tale Marti iš jaujos (The Bride from the Barn, 1938) and a representative of the modern Lithuanian national style, caused a public uproar.55 Petravičius studied at the Kaunas Art School, graduating in 1935. He then went to Paris, where he graduated from the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers and the studio of Jacques Beltrand at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, in 1938. Petravičius successfully began his artistic career with illustrations for the Lithuanian folk tale Gulbė, karaliaus pati (Swan, Wife of the King), produced in Paris, in 1937. This was for a publication for bibliophiles, ordered by bibliophiles, which found recognition at the Paris International Exhibition of 1937, receiving the Grand Prix in the category of publications and book design.56 The prize was viewed as an important sign of international recognition for the young Lithuanian state and Petravičius was widely celebrated. His next book, illustrating the Lithuanian folk tale Marti iš jaujos (The Bride from the Barn), was a true livre dʼartiste, with Petravičius not only creating the illustrations, but also combining them together with the text, page by page, as he sketched out the story, using various visual elements to influence our perception of the narrative; there were decorative insets, figurative compositions to reflect the points of the story, and scenes intended to expand and modernize the story; for example, images of naked lovers in natural settings (Figure 6.10). These proved too strong for the conservative tastes of many Lithuanian art connoisseurs of the 1930s. The same public which had admired the neoclassically reserved and balanced illustrations of Swan, Wife of the King were left cold by the nudity and celebration of bodily delights of The Bride from the Barn. Not being able to find a Lithuanian publisher, Petravičius published the book himself: six copies in 1938, and another six in 1939; in 1940 a print run of 265 copies, with a French translation of the text, was printed by Emilija Norkiene’s printing house in Kaunas for the Daira Artists’ Association. Daira, an acronym derived from “Group of Activist-Realist Artists,”57 of which Petravičius was a member, was critical of the official cultural policy of the state, which it considered too passive; the group had ambitious plans for disseminating information about Lithuanian art abroad. The success of Lithuanian book designers at the Paris and New York international exhibitions in 1937 and 1939 respectively proved that publications of illustrated books—particularly when translated into more commonly spoken languages—were a comparatively inexpensive and effective means of promoting Lithuanian art and culture. The expressionist influence, clearly visible in Petravičius’s illustrations for The Bride from the Barn and in some of his prints from the late 1930s, divided the artist’s admirers. Some loved the characteristic deformation and heightened emotional tension of his engravings—a testimony to the German influence; others preferred the works influenced by the French postfauvist school, with its elegance, softness, and decorativeness. This division of tastes fueled the discourse on the development of a modern national style in Lithuania; as elsewhere, 152

Expressionism in Lithuania

Figure 6.10  Viktoras Petravičius, double-page spread from the artist’s book Marti iš jaujos (The Bride from the Barn), 1938, private collection, Vilnius. Courtesy of Izidė Petravičiūtė von Braun

neotraditionalism finally won. It was conveniently close to the “French Petravičius,” with his fanciful characters from fairy tales, flowers growing into trees, and an abundance of bird and plant ornaments in the page margins. This Petravičius, it was felt, was a suitable representative of the “national style,” though many perhaps silently felt that he actually did not belong among the artists who tend to rethink the museum pieces, who came to the primitive via studies of the classics and by observing the rules implied by those studies. Swan, Wife of the King was well suited for the shelf marked “neotraditionalism,” but not the wild, powerful illustrations of The Bride from the Barn. The distinction between those works that met the expectations of the general public and those that were valued by a more critical minority was clearly marked by the question that arose during the late 1930s, namely: To what extent and how freely should the primitive tradition be called upon in the creation of a new tradition of Lithuanian art? The discourse was sparked by the right-wing journalist Vincas Rastenis, whose article “Strange Kind of Art” appeared in 1938 in the magazine Akademikas, published by the right-wing student group Neo-Lithuania. The article was inspired, Rastenis noted, by the campaign for the “purification” of culture that was underway in Germany. He questioned the use of the primitive in modern art, presenting as an example Petravičius’s linocut Liūtai prie bažnyčios (Lions at the Church, an illustration of the folk tale The Bride from the Barn), reproduced on the cover of the cultural magazine Naujoji romuva (New Pagan Shrine, 1938, no. 35–36). Good art, according to Rastenis, must clearly demonstrate its link to the classical tradition, based on Greco-Roman antiquity, and a craftsmanship easily measured by classical standards; works such as Lions are incomprehensible to the majority of viewers because they do not resemble the serious work of a trained artist, one who has studied abroad on a state grant, but are instead like the simple drawings of a naive child: “I asked many people to explain to me this thing, but they only shrugged their shoulders and could 153

Giedrė Jankevičiūtė and Laima Laučkaitė

not understand why this should be beautiful,”58 he wrote. One of his arguments had to do with the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition in Munich, which, he wrote, clearly showed the place and value of this kind of art. Rastenis’s article was harshly criticized, particularly by Juozas Keliuotis, editor of the magazine Naujoji Romuva (New Pagan Shrine), which published Petravičius’s work. Keliuotis expressed his indignation at Rastenis’s views on art, particularly his attempts to restrain artistic freedom and to dictate to the artist what and how he was to create; Keliuotis considered such an effort to establish a universal norm based on the views of one part of society to be dangerous.59 Still, his arguments were based on the defense of artistic freedom rather than on a sincere admiration of Petravičius’s art. In fact, Keliuotis also preferred the reserved, harmonious neotraditionalism expressed in works such as Picasso’s “bathing beauties” and sculptures by the Finnish artist Wäinö Aaltonen, which were consistently reproduced in his magazine, over the primitive brutality of Petravičius’s work. Keliuotis saw the value of the primitive, or rather of expressions of depths of feeling and the deformations of insurgent emotion, in works of religious art; for example, in the works of Georges Rouault. Being a Catholic himself, though, he did not think of Petravičius’s pagan works as being deeply religious. It is interesting to note that in opposing Rastenis, Keliuotis even tried to deny the obvious links of Petravičius’s work to German modernism and refused to recognize the influence of expressionist graphic arts, arguing instead that Petravičius’s work is “full of lyricism and attractive imagination,” as the artist “seeks inspiration in our [Lithuanian] national art, while learning mostly from the French and the Italians.”60 The nationalist discourse in art history, which dominated the history of Lithuanian art up until the late 1970s, never allowed for contextualizing the manifestations of expressionism in Lithuanian art and analyzing how expressionism was actually understood; nor did it allow an assessment of the extent to which its adoption was as a stylistic trend of German art or how it related to the originality of national modernism.

Notes 1 One of the earliest research works introducing this concept, published in the former USSR, was the monograph of the prominent art historian Dmitrij Sarabianov on Russian painting at the end of the nineteenth century: Dmitrii Sarabianov, Russkaia zhivopis XIX v. sredi evropeiskikh shkol: opyt sravnitel‘nogo issledovaniia [Russian Nineteenth Century Painting among European Schools: An Attempt of Comparative Analysis] (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1980). Prominent art historians—Lithuanian Jonas Umbrasas and Latvian Eduards Klavinš—were his followers. 2 Jonas Umbrasas, Lietuvių tapybos raida 1900–1940: srovės ir tendencijos [The Development of Lithuanian Painting, 1900–1940: Trends and Tendencies] (Vilnius: Mokslas, 1987), 220–224. Umbrasas even proposed the term “lyrical expressionism” (op. cit., p. 224). 3 Juozas Petrėnas’ thesis read on the radio concert of poetry on the December 9, 1926, Keturi vėjai [Four Winds], 1926, nr. 2, p. 8. 4 Ibid. 5 Cf. Halina Kairiūkštytė-Jacinienė,“Dvi meno parodos” [Two Art Exhibitions], Šviesos keliai [The Paths of Light], 1932, no. 11, 689–692;Viktoras Vizgirda, “Tapyba ir skulptūra Lietuvoj” [Painting and Sculpture in Lithuania], Naujoji romuva [New Pagan Shrine], 1935, no. 10–11, 243–53; Justinas Vienožinskis in Užsienių spaudos atsiliepimai apie lietuvių dailės parodą Rygoje ir Taline [Foreign Press on Lithuanian Art Exhibitions in Riga and Tallinn] (Kaunas, 1937), 15–16; Vytautas Kairiūkštis, “Mūsų meno modernizmas ir jo kritika” [The Modernism in Our Art and Its Criticism], Lietuvos aidas [Lithuanian Echoe], February 5, 1937. 6 M. Rauskas [Salys Šemerys], “Reiškiamojo meno esmės tyrimo bandymas” [An Attempt at the Study of the Essence of the Expressive Art], Sekmoji diena [Seventh Day], November 20, 1921. 7 Litauens Konst, text av Paulius Galaunė ach Justinas Vienožinskis [Lithuanian Art, text by Paulius Galaunė and Justinas Vienožinskis] (Malmö: John Kroon, 1931); Paulius Galaunė, L’art Lithuanien (Malmö: A.-B. Malmö Ljustrycksanstalt, 1934).

154

Expressionism in Lithuania 8 XX a. lietuvių dailės istorija [History of Lithuanian Art of the XXth Century], ed. Ingrida Korsakaitė a. o., vol. 1–3 (Vilnius:Vaga, 1982, 1983, 1990). 9 Ingrida Korsakaitė, “Dailės raidos ypatumai” [The Main Features of the Development of the Visual Arts], in XX a. lietuvių dailės istorija. 1900–1940 [History of Lithuanian Art of the XXth Century], ed. Ingrida Korsakaitė a. o., vol. 2 (Vilnius:Vaga, 1983), 27. 10 Ingrida Korsakaitė, Gyvybinga grafikos tradicija [The Vital Tradition of Graphic Art] (Vilnius:Vaga, 1970); Eglė Kunčiuvienė, ed., Antanas Gudaitis (Vilnius: Vaga, 1987); Laima Petrusevičiūtė, “XX amžiaus Lietuvos tapyba ir modernizmas. Modernizmo formavimosi laikotarpis: 1900–1940” [XXth Century Lithuanian Painting and Modernism. The Period of the Grow of the Modernism: 1900–1940], (Ph.D. Thesis,Vilnius: Art Academy, 1994); Jonas Umbrasas, Lietuvių tapybos raida 1900–1940: srovės ir tendencijos; Viktoras Liutkus, Viktoras Vizgirda (Vilnius: VDA leidykla, 2000); Viktoras Liutkus, Antanas Samuolis (Vilnius: LDS leidykla, 2006). 11 Linara Dovydaitytė, Ekspresionizmas Lietuvoje [Expressionism in Lithuania], Darbai ir dienos [Works and Days], Kaunas, 2001, vol. 26, 133–154; Linara Dovydaitytė, Ekspresyvumas kaip kalba ir ideologija “atšilimo” laikotarpio Lietuvos tapyboje [Expressiveness as Language and Ideology in the Lithuanian Painting of the “Thaw” period], Acta Accademia Artium Vilnensis, vol. 43, 2006, 199–112; Linara Dovydaitytė,“Constructing the Local -isms: Paradoxes of Lithuanian Expressionism,” in Local Strategies International Ambitions: Modern Art and Central Europe 1918–1968, ed.Vojtěch Lahoda (Prague: Artefactum, 2006), 159–164. 12 Jolita Mulevičiūtė, Modernizmo link: dailės gyvenimas Lietuvos Respublikoje 1918–1940 [Towards Modernism: Artistic Life in Lithuanian Republic, 1918–1940] (Kaunas: ČDM, 2001); Jolita Mulevičiūtė, ed., Išsilaisvinimas/Liberation: Antanas Gudaitis, 1904–1989 (Vilnius: LDM, 2004; exh. cat.). 13 Laima Laučkaitė, Vilniaus dailė XX amžiaus pradžioje [Vilnius Art at the Beginning of 20th Century] (Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 2002); Laima Laučkaitė, Ekspresionizmo raitelė Mariana Veriovkina [The Rider of Expressionism Mariana Veriovkina] (Vilnius: LFMI, 2007); Laima Laučkaitė, Art in Vilnius: 1900–1915 (Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 2008). 14 Giedrė Jankevičiūtė, Lietuvos grafika/The Graphic Arts in Lithuania, 1918–1940 (Vilnius: E. Karpavičiaus leidykla, 2008); Giedrė Jankevičiūtė, “Žydų dailininkai tarpukario Lietuvos meninėje kultūroje” [Jewish Artists on the Art Scene of Interwar Lithuania], Lietuvos istorijos studijos [Studies of the Lithuanian History], ed. Jurgita Šiaučiūnaitė-Verbickienė, vol. 8,Vilnius, 2010, 69–102. 15 Katalog VI-ej wiosennej wystawy obrazόw [Catalogue or the VI Spring Exhibition] (Wilno: Wileńskie Towarzystwo Artystyczne, 1914). 16 Efes, “VI vesenniaia vystavka kartin vilenskogo khudozhestvennogo obshchestva” [VI spring exhibition of Vilnius Art Society], Nasha kopeika, 24 February 1914. 17 Moskvich, “Khudozhestvennaia vystavka” [Art exhibition], Severo zapadnyi golos [North Western Voice], March 2, 1914. 18 Vilenskii vestnik [Vilnius Herald], 1914, no. 3234. 19 “Vse chuvstva moi, vse vpechatleniia perevodiatsia na etot iazyk linii i krasok.” Manuscript of Marianne Werefkin’s lecture, Fundazione Marianne Werefkin, Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna Ascona, without inventory no., 26. 20 “Oni govoriat priamo iazykom pervichnykh simvolov, n. pr. Kandinskii v zhivopisi, (29) Schönberg—v muzyke . . .”. Ibid., 29–30. 21 “No moi blizhaishie druz’ia i ia—my verim, chto po primeru vsekh velikikh proshlogo, chtoby dvigat’ zhizn’ nado tverdo stoiat’ v nei. Poetomu my ne otritsaem ee, ne ukhodim ot nee, a liubim ee i ee formy i tol’ko zastavliaem ikh sluzhit’ nashei vere.” Ibid., 29. 22 Ober Ost (short for Oberbefehlshaber der gesamten Deutschen Streitkräfte im Osten) in English means “Supreme Commander of All German Forces in the East.” This term also covered the governing military staff and the region they controlled. 23 Aya Soika, Welten Bruch: Die Künstler der Brücke im Ersten Weltkrieg. 1914–1918 [Global Break:The Artists of Brücke in the First World War 1914–1918], ed. Magdalena M. Moeller (Berlin: Brücke-Museum, 2014); Laima Laučkaitė, “The Image of an Occupied City: Walter Buhe’s Vilnius of the First World War,” Dailės istorijos studijos/Art History Studies, vol. 5: Art and Artistic Life During the Two World Wars, ed. G. Jankevičiūtė and L. Laučkaitė (Vilnius: Lietuvos kultūros tyrimų institutas, 2012), 121–140; Laima Laučkaitė, “Art at the Opposite Side of the Front: German Artists in Ober Ost in World War One,” Muzeja raksti 6: 1914 [Museum Papers] (Riga: Latvijas Nacionãlais mãkslas muzejs, 2015), 213–224. 24 Entrückung und Aufruhr: Zwölf Gedichte (handschriftlich) von Arnold Zweig zu zwölf Lithographien von Magnus Zeller, 1917–1918 [Rapture and Riot: Twelve Poems (handwritten) of Arnold Zweig to Twelve Litographs of Magnus Zeller, 1917–1918] (Frankfurt a. M.: Tiedemann & Uzielli, 1920).

155

Giedrė Jankevičiūtė and Laima Laučkaitė 25 Mythos und Abstraktion—aktuelle Kunst aus Estland [Myth and Abstraction—Current Art from Estonia], ed. Harald Herr (Karlsruhe: Badischer Kunstverein, 1992), 32. 26 Cornelia Gurlitt: širdies kelionė. Vilnius vokiečių ekspresionistės akimis/Cornelia Gurlitt: The Journey of the Heart.Vilnius of 1915–1917 in the Eyes of German Expressionist/Cornelia Gurlitt: Reise des Herzens. Vilnius mit den Augen einer deutschen Expressionistin: 1915–1917, ed. Hubert Portz, (Vilnius: Staatliches Jüdisches Gaon-von-Vilnius-Museum, 2015; exh. cat.). 27 Catherine Hickley, The Munich Art Hoard: Hitler’s Dealer and his Secret Legacy (London: Thames and Hudson, 2015). 28 “Maler in Ob. Ost” [Painters in Ober-Ost], Wilnaer Zeitung [Vilnius News], September 9 , 1917. 29 “Zeller aber kommt als Deutscher von einer intuitiv gepackten Wirklichkeit. Nichts wäre dennoch fälscher, ungerechter, als wenn man vor seine Bilder mit naturalistischen Massstäben träte. Zwar beruhen seine Gestaltungen aus einem ganz genauen und zerteillenden Sehen und einem fabelhaft gesteigerten Ausdruck der Bewegungen; aber das kompositorische Vermögen, das die auseinanderstrebenden Gesten zum Bilde zusammenhalt, und die Immense Fähigkeit, das Rohe einer Rauferei, das Unheilvolle eines Kriegsausbruchs, die dämonische Feindseligkeit von Überlebenden gegen einen Sterbenden und das Sterbenden gegen jene direkt in den Ausdruck des Bildes zu übertragen, heben diese jede Schöpfungen weit über Wiedergabe naturwahrer Gegendständlichkeit in die Sfäre geistiger Schöpfung.” Arnold Zweig, “Die Bilderschau” [Show of Pictures], Kownoer Zeitung, December 11, 1917. 30 Paul Fechter, Der Expressionismus (Munich: Piper, 1914). 31 Ibid. 32 Rose Carol Washton Long, ed., German Expressionis: Documents from the End of Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism (Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA; London: University of California Press, 1995), 84. 33 Paul Monty, Wanderstunden in Wilna (Wilna:Verlag der Wilnaer Zeitung, 1918). 34 Internationales Germanistenlexikon 1800–1950 [International Lexicon of Germanists], ed. Christoph König, vol. 1 (Berlin; New York: Walter de Gruyter), 475. 35 Fechter, Der Expressionismus, 34. 36 But it is impossible to speak extensively about their work, as it was all destroyed by the cataclysmic events of the mid-twentieth century, leaving only fragmented remains: extracts of contemporary testimonies, remarks of exhibition reviewers, etc. 37 Halina Kairiūkštytė-Jacynienė, “Dėl atidaromos moderniškos grafikos parodos” [On the Opening of the Exhibition of Modern Graphic Art], Lietuvos aidas [Echo of Lithuania], February 23, 1929. 38 Ibid. 39 Ars, Kaunas, 1932. 40 Ibid. 41 Simonetta Fraquelli, “Picasso’s Retrospective at the Galeries Georges Petit, Paris 1932: A Response to Matisse,” in Picasso by Picasso: His First Museum Exhibition, 1932, ed. Tobia Bezzola, exh. cat. (Zurich: Kunsthaus, 2010–2011; Munich: Prestel, 2010), 77–93. Mikėnas went to Paris with Galdikas, because in 1932 they were traveling across Europe by Galdikas car which at the time in Lithuania was a rarity. 42 One of the favorite discussions of the former gulag prisoner, homeless thinker Justinas Mikutis, a famous guru of the modernist artists of the 1970s, was the question of who best expressed the authenticity of being a Lithuanian—Gudaitis, an “academician,” who, in 1940, started teaching at the Vilnius Art Academy and became a professor there in 1947, or Samuolis, first and foremost a painter, then falling ill with tuberculosis (he was treated at the Kaunas sanatorium of the Red Cross in 1936, later in Switzerland, and he died in Leysin in 1942). The outcome of the discussion inevitably was the praise of Samuolis, followed by a pilgrimage to the Kaunas National M. K. Čiurlionis Museum, which holds the largest collection of his works. 43 Viktoras Liutkus, Antanas Samuolis (Vilnius: LDS leidykla, 2006). 44 Ingrida Korsakaitė, “Pėdsakai kopose” [Traces in the Dunes], Krantai [The Shores], 1990, no. 10, 35–41. 45 Kristina Jokubavičienė, ed., Tapytojo Prano Domšaičio gyvenimo ir kūrybos erdvės [The Spaces of Life and Work by the Painter Pranas Domšaitis] (Klaipėda, 2004); Rasutė Andriušytė-Žukienė, “Between Koenigsberg and Berlin: Pranas Domšaitis and the German Art Scene,” Centropa, 12, no. 3 (September 2012): 269–285. 46 Jonas Umbrasas, Lietuvių tapybos raida 1900–1940: srovės ir tendencijos [The Development of Lithuanian Painting, 1900–1940: Trends and Tendencies] (Vilnius: Mokslas, 1987), 219. 47 Justinas Vienožinskis had planned to include biographies and creative reviews of Zalmanas Bekeris, Černė Percikovičiūtė and other Jewish painters in his publication on new Lithuanian art, for which he

156

Expressionism in Lithuania

48 49

50 51 52 53 54

55 56

57 58 59 60

started collecting materials in the late 1930s, some of which are now in the archives of the Lithuanian Art Museum in Vilnius. Irena Kostkevičiūtė, ed., Justinas Vienožinskis: Straipsniai, dokumentai, laiškai, amžininkų atsiminimai [Justinas Vienožinskis: Articles, Documents, Letters, Memoirs of Contemporaries] (Vilnius:Vaga, 1970), 150. Cf. Letter by Jurgis Savickis to Paulius Galaunė, August 28, 1933,Vilnius University Library, Department of Manuscripts, f. 132, b. 59, l. 37. The letter outlines the selection of painters who were presented to foreign readers in the book on Lithuanian art. Swedish edition: Litauens Konst; French edition: L’art Lithuanien (see n. 7). See also XX a. lietuvių dailės istorija. 1900–1940, 112–141. XX a. lietuvių dailės istorija. 1900–1940, 124, 345. Petras Cvirka, “Meno parodos” [Art Exhibitions], Trečias frontas [The Third Front], 1931, no. 4, 40–41. Vilniaus balsas [Vilnius’Voice or The Voice of Vilnius], January 22, 1941. See Ieva Burbaitė, “Lietuvos moterų dailininkių draugijos (1938–1940) veikla ir jos kontekstai” [Activities and Contexts of Lithuanian Women Artists’s Society (1938–1940)] (Ph.D. thesis, Vilnius: Vilnius Academy of Art, 2016), 86–87, 96–98. Mokslas’s bookshop is well worth a closer study by an art historian. Its owner, Zakarijus Margolinas, did not only publish illustrated books. At his bookshop, he organized, for instance, the first exhibition by the young left-wing graphic artist Mečislovas Bulaka, a good friend of Antanas Gudaitis and Neemija Arbitblatas, who also took part in the exhibitions at Arbitblatas’ gallery. Giedrė Jankevičiūtė, “Representing Lithuaniannness: The Artistic Legacy of Viktoras Petravičius (1906–1989),” Centropa, 11, no. 3 (September 2011): 180–194. The illustrations were commissioned by the bibliophile society XXVII knygų mėgėjai [XXVII Books Lovers], active in Kaunas for ten years from 1930 (the society was closed by soviets in 1940, as were all other social and cultural organizations in Lithuania). The members of the society were affluent and influential people—politicians, lawyers, army officials; the director of the National Museum Paulius Galaunė was also a member. Such attention was important to the young artist, bringing useful acquaintances and future commissions. In 1940, Daira separated from the Lithuanian Artists Union, which had been established in 1935; the latter was a sort of a trade union for all professional artists, regardless of their age, views, creative style, or aims. Vincas Rastenis, “Keistas menas” [Strange Kind of Art], Akademikas, 1938, no. 15, 321. Juozas Keliuotis, “Akcija prieš modernųjų meną” [An Action against the Modern Art], Naujoji romuva, 1938, no. 43–44, 826–827. Ibid., 826.

157

7 EXPRESSIONIST ORIGINALITY IN LATVIAN ART Between Confirmation and Destruction Ginta Gerharde-Upeniece Expressionism, as a movement in modernist art and culture, is more difficult to explain in the context of Latvian modernism in the early twentieth century. This is because it is primarily bound up with the period of the First World War and the 1920s as a heightened form of visual expression; one that Latvian artists became familiar with and used to great effect as a revolutionary language to convey a message about the tragic events in the life of the nation. From a linear time perspective, the resonance of expressionism found echoes in the most diverse modifications throughout the whole of the twentieth century. The first modernist generation of Latvian artists was only indirectly and rather distantly familiar with the contributions of German expressionism—Die Brücke (The Bridge; 1905– 1910), Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider; 1911–1914); later they established contacts with the Novembergruppe (November Group), founded in Berlin in 1918, after the First World War.1 To explain the development of expressionism in the Latvian region, at the time a part of the Russian Empire, it is important to understand the historically and culturally complex circumstances of the first decade of the twentieth century—a period dominated by Baltic-German and Russian art and culture: “Local Baltic-German artists may have heard something about expressionism, but due to their provincial perspective and professional contentment, rather than expressing interest, they sooner feared this kind of radicalism,” is how the art historian Dace Lamberga described the situation.2 The defining events in the Latvian context were the establishment of the Latvian state in 1918, the Battle for Independence in 1919, and the entry of a new generation of Latvian artists into cultural life after the First World War. Latvian artists, with the waning influence of Russian culture and a growing awareness of the influence of Western Europe, began to look more closely at modernist influences. At the end of the First World War, as the currents of modernism gained a strong foothold in local art circles, artists simultaneously positioned themselves against both Russian academism and the local Baltic-German influence. A certain source of influence came from closer ties to French modernism, whereas the potential of the German avant-garde (including expressionism) as a source of influence was also indirectly hindered by certain historical psychological barriers.3 In this context, it is important to examine episodes of the expressionist movement’s presence and its specific character in the development of Latvian modernism, as well as its genesis. In order to evaluate expressionism and its connections to the development of LatvianGerman art and look at the aesthetic common denominators, one should best begin in the 158

Expressionist Originality in Latvian Art

not-so-distant past, in 2008, the year that the German cultural festival O! Vācija (Oh! Germany!) was held in Riga. The festival was a prime opportunity to review the influence of German art in twentieth-century Latvia and to focus on significant events in the complex historical and art historical setting. The associated exhibition Expressionist Graphics, organized by Dortmund’s Museum Am Ostwall, was shown at the Latvian National Museum of Art, allowing an interested public in Riga to see firsthand the graphic work of artists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Emil Nolde, Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, August Macke, Ernst Barlach, Otto Dix, and Max Beckmann.4 An associated conference, Germany and Latvia between the Two World Wars, further explored transnational manifestations of expressionism, and the preconditions for the expression and development of the movement in Latvia were analyzed and compared to other international contexts.5 As a consequence, my essay does not focus on expressionism as the evolution of a modernist movement, but looks instead at its social dimensions in the Latvian cultural space. Initially used in a much wider sense in the local Latvian cultural environment and in the press, too, the term once was used to refer to all artists of the younger generation who turned to modern art as such. That said, along with a review of Latvian art of the expressionist period, the essay sketches out the overall landscape of the Latvian art scene, which in fact had no direct connection with the expressionist movement itself. Use of the term, however, both appositely and otherwise, led to many disagreements in local art life.

The New Generation and New Art Looking at Latvian art publications of the late 1920s and 1930s, one often finds variations on the term “expression” used to describe an intensified style and subjectivity in a specific work of art. There are good reasons for art historian Jānis Siliņš to classify works by Jāzeps Grosvalds (1891–1920), among them Karavīri bēdājās (Soldiers were Grieving, 1916), Trīs krusti (Three Crosses, 1916), and Mirstošais kareivis (Dying Soldier, 1917; Figure 7.1), and those of Jēkabs Kazaks (1895–1920), such as Bēgļi (Refugees, 1917; Figure 7.2) and Uz ežiņas galvu liku (I Laid My Head on the Edge of the Field, 1918)—reflections on the dramatic events of the First World War, including war scenes, the daily life of soldiers, and the experiences of refugees—as works of “early Latvian expressionism”;6 however, their contributions are generally considered to be more an expressive display of their own individual styles. Eduards Kļaviņs characterized the local significance of the modernist movement in Latvia as follows: As the theoretical level of the first stage of Latvian modernism (the “expressionism” phase, c. 1915–1919), what was possibly a national peculiarity was considered to be an expression of the indefinable “spirit” that inevitably would arise in the very best work of an artist.7 It should be noted that the works mentioned here are significant not only for their innovation in form; they also convey a deep emotional message, a visual story of national tragedy and suffering comparable to the epic reflections in the literature of the time. A similar atmosphere is captured, for example, in writer Kārlis Skalbe’s (1879–1945) essays about people’s fortunes in wartime: And again, a flow of refugees passes by, one cart after another. Old tables, nigrescent chests which have stood for decades in some quiet corner. Old people who have lived their lives in their little village or town going off to collect their possessions. Perhaps they are treading this same path for the third time now.8 159

Ginta Gerharde-Upeniece

Figure 7.1  Jāzeps Grosvalds, Mirstošais kareivis (Dying Soldier), 1917, oil on canvas, 129.5 x 88 cm, Latvian National Museum of Art (LNMA), VMM GL-2742

Returning from this dramatic theme to an analysis of form, the artists’ attitudes and their own words are important. Artists such as Jāzeps Grosvalds and Romans Suta (1896–1944) were simultaneously active as both theorists and interpreters of the new art. Having become familiar with Western European, especially French, art, they positioned themselves as a new generation opposed to the old, traditional art. At the same time, no particular style or movement was singled out for characterization, quite the opposite: a synthesis of the various styles and an individual approach to using their expressive means was valued as the highest achievement. Furthermore, representatives of the local avant-garde maintained that, like their fellow artists in interwar and post-revolution Berlin after 1918 and elsewhere, they were creating a completely new and comprehensive style for the period, an accumulation of everything that had so far been achieved in Western European art centers. At the invitation of journalist Arthur Toupine, Grosvalds published the first reviews on the development of Latvian art in two editions of La Revue Baltique (The Baltic Review). Alongside clarifications of the political situation in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, he described the beginnings of the development of a Latvian art and also wrote about the artists of his generation in an essay titled “Latvian Art: The Young Ones.”9 In his essay, Grosvalds described the historical background that led to the attitude of young Latvian artists toward the heritage of the past: “The political and material circumstances at the end of the century were a reason for the Russian and German influences in Latvian art at the time.”10 The brief account also explained certain advantages and the significance of the Francocentric movement. Grosvalds shared his thoughts about the essay with his brother Oļģerds: 160

Expressionist Originality in Latvian Art

I think the article will fit in well with the propaganda program: that [while] rejecting the Munich school, the new Latvian art has learned from French and Latin culture and expresses the nation’s struggle for liberty, independence and special ideals.11 A similar description of his generation, introducing the term New School of Painting, was provided by a representative of modernism, Romans Suta, who among other things, positioned himself as a defender and developer of new ideas and as a spokesman for the French philosopher and founder of the Intuitivist movement, Henri Bergson,12 and his theoretical ideas and concept of the élan vital.13 Suta wrote in L’esprit nouveau (The New Spirit): The new Latvian artists undoubtedly preferred contemporary French art, and not the art values that had lived through the ages—for them this happened in a completely natural way. Led first of all by intuition, then complete awareness, they adopted the entirety of the new thinking’s vigorously advocated clear concept and means of expression. The robust, healthy and balanced Latvian character was unable to warm to either German expressionism, or French civilization’s Slavic interpretation. Our New School strictly rejected tendencies to imitate, turning to searches for means of expression which would allow the highlighting of values from an artistic problem, connected with sculpture only.14

Figure 7.2  Jēkabs Kazaks, Bēgļi (Refugees), 1917, oil on canvas, 210 × 107 cm, Latvian National Museum of Art (LNMA), VMM GL-826

161

Ginta Gerharde-Upeniece

Romans Suta characterized the artists—Aleksandra Beļcova (1892–1981), Aleksandrs Drēviņš (1889–1938), Jānis Liepiņš (1894–1964), Oto Skulme (1889–1967), Uga Skulme (1895–1963), Niklāvs Strunke (1894–1966), and Erasts Šveics (1895–1992)—as representatives of the New School and the new spirit of that time. One must, however, acknowledge a certain discrepancy in Suta’s theoretical writing when he described the works of the young sculptors Emīls Melderis (1889–1979), Marta Liepiņa-Skulme (1890–1962), and Kārlis Zāle (1888–1942, Kārlis Zālīte) as “approaching the New German School of Sculpture.”15 Along with Suta’s theoretical essays, the question remains unanswered—what were the main cornerstones of the New School? The answer can be found in Suta’s and his contemporaries’ desire to gain deeper knowledge of the latest ideas, manifestos, and European art centers. Romans Suta, for example, already adept at the use of expressionistic deformation to heighten the sense of drama and convincing in his cubist compositions, as well, at the same time took an interest in futurism. In the field of art education, however, Suta urged his colleagues not to get carried away by isms, but to come to grips with the aesthetics of modernism as a whole. Here, it is important to emphasize that in their theoretical writings, Suta and Grosvalds both used the term new in various contexts: a new generation/new art/new school/new painting/new sculpture. Although the young artists were ultimately searching for their own artistic style, the main message the authors wished to express was the conclusion that this young generation of Latvian artists was in step with the European art of their day.

The Expressionists’ Group and the Linocut Album The Expressionists (1919) With the proclamation of the Latvian State, seven days after the signing of the armistice agreement that ended the First World War, Latvian artists were eager to position themselves as adopters of Europe’s newest trends. In this case, the description of the followers of modernism—the new ones, new art, new painting—was generalized. In order to successfully promulgate their views, the artists joined forces and sought after suitable contemporary terminology. Paradoxically, the term expressionists, in its own way, served as a keyword in formulating the new generation’s adherence to modernist trends for the local Latvian public and intelligentsia, which had likewise begun to develop aesthetic views and tastes anew. In 1915, the younger group of the more radically inclined artists chose to call themselves the Zalā puķe (Green Flower). It is significant that in searching for a name, Grosvalds sought appropriate analogies, hence the similarity to the Blue Rose in Russia and the Blue Rider in Germany.16 With the end of the war, Latvian artists gradually began returning home from (Soviet) Russia.17 In 1919, Ģederts Eliass (1887–1975), Jēkabs Kazaks, Oto Skulme, Romans Suta, Niklāvs Strunke, Valdemārs Tone (1892–1958), and Konrāds Ubāns (1893–1981) established an artists’ group with the suggestive name The Expressionists. Jāzeps Grosvalds, Aleksandrs Drēviņš, Eduards Lindbergs (1882–1928), and Kārlis Johansons (1890–1929) went on to join the group in order to participate in the Retrospective Exhibition at the Riga City Art Museum.18 Latvia remained a zone of conflict during the difficult year of 1919, which saw a brief occupation first by the Red Army,19 then the Germans, and finally the Western Russian Volunteer Army under Bermondt;20 but artists carried on and life continued, with a renewed dynamism. After joint exhibitions in Petrograd (Nadezhda Dobichina’s gallery, 1915) and Moscow (Le Mercier gallery, 1916) the majority of artists returned to Riga in to participate in the Retrospective Exhibition at the Riga City Museum (October 1919); the Jacob’s Barracks in the center of Riga, near the newly established Latvian War Museum, became a kind of artists’ colony of similar thinkers. 162

Expressionist Originality in Latvian Art

Figure 7.3  C  over of the album Ekspresionisti (Expressionists), 1919, linocut on paper, 41.5 × 32.6 cm, Latvian National Museum of Art (LNMA)

Figure 7.4  J ēkabs Kazaks, Sieviete ar ievainoto plecos (Woman with Wounded on her Shoulders), from the album Ekspresionisti (Expressionists), 1919, linocut on paper, 32 × 25.9 cm, Latvian National Museum of Art (LNMA), VMM GR-762

The same year as the exhibition at the City Museum, Kazaks, Skulme, Strunke, Suta, Tone, and Ubāns collaborated on an edition of linocuts, Ekspresionisti (The Expressionists, 1919, Figure 7.3), which went on to acquire a special significance in Latvian art history. The twelve works, which were created especially for the anthology, depict the suffering of the Latvian people, their emotional states, and the general mood of the struggling country, but following a simplified or even anesthetized approach to form and line. The artists pursue a thematic development of the people’s suffering during the war, depicting it not in protest or aggressively, but rather by means of a meditative approach: “With a different kind of love, we portrayed the broken lives and broken destinies.”21 A number of allusions to European modernism and various expressionist elements are to be found in the 1919 album,22 beginning with the compositional tension in Jēkabs Kazaks’s three works Ievainotā pārsiešana (Rebandaging the Wounded), Sieviete ar ievainoto plecos (Woman with Wounded on her Shoulders; Figure 7.4), and Kaprači (Gravediggers). The line work in Romans Suta’s works Mītiņš (Meeting; Figure 7.5) and Bēres (Funeral) evidences a more delicate rhythm; rounded forms in Oto Skulme’s linocuts Pilsēta (City) and Kompozīcija (Composition) suggest a lyrical perception; Sieviete (Woman) by Konrāds Ubāns confronts us with a geo­ metricized rhythm; and finally Niklāvs Strunke introduces a dramatic atmosphere in his works Kafija (Coffee) and Kompozīcija (Composition; Figure 7.6). Writing about the album, Grosvalds noted that his contemporaries have moved in their expressionism to a “cubist geometrization” having neither mood nor expression.23 The anthology represents a set of ideas and views, 163

Ginta Gerharde-Upeniece

Figure 7.5  Romans Suta, Mītiņš (Meeting), from the album Ekspresionisti (Expressionists), 1919, linocut on paper, 31.8 × 25.8 cm, Latvian National Museum of Art (LNMA), VMM GR-759

Figure 7.6  Niklāvs Strunke, Kompozīcija (Composition), from the album Ekspresionisti (Expressionists), 1919, linocut on paper, 31.5 × 25.7 cm, Latvian National Museum of Art (LNMA), VMM GR-758.  AKKA/LAA 2017

stylistic dissociations and references to expressionism and to cubist geometrization; it serves as an unwritten, visual manifesto and simultaneously as an attestation to the creativity and intellectual thinking of the artists, something that until then had not existed as a representation of the group in Latvian art. The anthology is not an album of expressionist art as such, though several of the works are clearly based on expressionist means; in a broader sense it is a document of its age, reflecting the authors’ understanding of the art characteristic of the time.

Expression as a Form of Manifestation The consequences of the First World War, particularly for Eastern Europe, were severe. As the Latvian writer and soldier[?] Emīls Mačs noted pessimistically: We have lost the human factor, we no longer know what honest work is, and only know how to destroy values and cold-bloodedly slaughter people. Isn’t it strange that now in a civilized world the killing of people is now the most common and most recognized activity. For a long time, we’ve been burying humane ideals in holes made by grenades and have forgotten the real attractiveness and meaning of life. “Where does this course take us in the near future?”—Toward new disaster? New madness? . . . How will the world be reborn for the creative work of culture if people have been transformed into distraught or careless beasts?24 164

Expressionist Originality in Latvian Art

The old world was destroyed—the German, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian empires had collapsed—an immense challenge to the European order, leading to great sacrifice and changes in its value system. At the same time, the situation brought greater recognition of the national dimension, allowing the nations of Central and Eastern Europe to gain their national sovereignty in the shadow of the conflicts between the great powers. The Battles for Independence, in 1919, which resulted in the strengthening of the now secured Latvian state and the launching of its institutional mechanism, were associated with a positive emotional intensity. As the country’s sense of itself as a nation grew, the resulting surges of patriotism called for works of art as form of validation; the result was a unique but very brief period during which artists’ intentions became intimately aligned with matters of national importance, allowing them to express their patriotic views with innovative language. Romans Suta commented on this connection between art and the Latvian state, and the engagement of the artists, who themselves had been and were still active and present in the events associated with the newly founded state: Without “wanting” to be national, the new Latvian art was still closely connected with the Latvian soul, which was not the case with the impressionist (i.e., previous) generation. However, as this art was born of tendencies characteristic of the era, it belongs to the new Europe and its intellectual life, of which Latvia is now also a part, having declared its independence.25

Figure 7.7  Romans Suta, Skice Latvijas valsts kara ordenim (Latvian Military Order), sketch, 1919, National History Museum of Latvia (CVVM), 165101 IN 824

165

Ginta Gerharde-Upeniece

A new generation of artists was now active in the socio-political process. Destruction, deformation, or social protest as a message did not fit the mood, attesting both to the era and the nation’s visual image. This period, roughly 1919–1920, was a special stage in Latvian social and art history. Along with the introduction of state commissions and the adaptation of European traditions, however, the revolutionary fervor gradually abated somewhat and the state’s symbols were created in accordance with generally accepted canons. During this period of love for a newfound nation and fatherland, artists created stamps, postcards and other works of graphic arts conveying notions of national identity and patriotism that were surprisingly expressive and personal for their time. The album of collected sketches for medals and drawings from the National History Museum of Latvia—all intended for the Latvian army’s decorations and uniforms—is a unique example. Kazaks, Tone, Ubāns, Šveics, Strunke, Suta (Figure 7.7), Rihards Maurs (1888–1966) and Burkards Dzenis (1879–1966) all drew sketches for medals and decorations in parallel with their other creative work around 1919. Some were members of The Expressionists group at the time and thus, when not busy with the work of creating the emblems and symbols of a new nation-state, were busy contributing to the modernist front.26 The sketches for the various awards and decorations were drawn in an expressive and free patriotic style, without any specific knowledge of heraldic devices or symbolism. Upon the conclusion of this emotional phase of patriotism, which was propagated by means of expressive compositions and free flights of fantasy, a new period began, both in the nation’s development as well as in the artists’ intellectual experience. Artists sought association with the right societies and groups of similar thinkers, as well as common tribunes to express their viewpoints.

The Riga Group of Artists (1920) The group of artists known for the brief period in 1919 as The Expressionists gradually gained in recognition locally. Grosvalds, however, criticized the title: “I think that you have erred in calling the group The Expressionists. There has never been a group such as the Impressionists, or the Cubists and so on—that name was given to them later.”27 In 1920, the group renamed itself the Riga Group of Artists (Figure 7.8). The exhibition they organized in the same year at the Riga City Art Museum became a significant event in the life of the arts in Latvia and for the group, as the local public and the intelligentsia were gradually coming around to an acceptance and understanding of this new art. It must be noted that members of the Riga Group of Artists initially continued to be called “expressionists” and reviews in the press wrote specifically about the “expressionists’ exhibition.” The Riga Group exhibition made a powerful impression; the artists’ work was much admired, but as modernists, they were also criticized, specifically by the traditionalists. Paradoxically, the representatives of academic art endeavored to introduce the term “so-called expressionists” to denigrate the new art and all those involved in avant-garde movements. In a reversal of roles, the campaign of criticism against tte modernists, organized by professors Jānis Tillbergs (1880–1972) and Rihards Zariņš (1869–1939), the so-called Kasparsoniade,28 involved a revolt of the older generation, using their status as lecturers and the obedience of their students, against the avant-garde; it began with the organization of their own exhibition and a lecture denouncing the Riga Group of Artists in October 1920. In the press one finds various caricatures of the “expressionist movement,” negatively portrayed in contrast to classical art.29 Jēkabs Kazaks, the first leader of the Riga Group of Artists and undoubtedly also its spiritual leader, suffered under the public attention and harsh criticism; already in poor health, he succumbed to illness on November 30, 1920. In the end, however, despite the battle of “isms,” the ironic use of the term Bumbism30 to 166

Expressionist Originality in Latvian Art

Figure 7.8  T  he Riga Group of Artist in Sukubs canteen, 1920, photograph. From left to right: Romans Suta, Niklāvs Strunke, Valdemārs Tone, Jēkabs Kazaks, Konrāds Ubāns, Oto Skulme

denote a non-existent movement in modernism, and the “organization” of an oppositional exhibition mocking the new art, Tillbergs and Zariņš, as the defenders of traditional art, failed to stop the advance of time and were left with little more than a certain condemnatory regard among the ranks of artists and the intelligentsia for their role in preparing and implementing such a campaign. The membership of the Riga Group gradually expanded to include other artists, among them Aleksandra Beļcova, Jānis Cielavs (1890–1968), Jānis Liepiņš, Eduards Lindbergs, Emīls Melderis, Marta Liepiņa-Skulme, Uga Skulme, Erasts Šveics, Leo Svemps (1987–1975), and Sigismunds Vidbergs (1890–1970). The organization continued to favor innovation, with various moments of expressionism, fauvism, cubism, and purism occurring in the 1920s and 1930s. The mid-1920s saw a blossoming of new realism, but this was followed by a strengthening of traditionalist tendencies that nevertheless continued to be manifested with original expressionistic accents. Although the membership and leadership of the group would change, it remained a stable organization of artists and continued to hold group exhibitions every year until 1939. Members of the group also began to fill important positions, take on commissions, and become lecturers at the Art Academy of Latvia; thus a following developed, and they became recognized representatives of the cultural elite in Latvia.

A Different Kind of Expressionism The further development of expressionism as a reference point in Latvian classical modernism was tied to the artists’ searches for an individual style as well as their mastering and then interpretation of the German and Flemish traditions. The Latvian artist, Johans Valters (1869–1932), whose name should be included alongside those of Janis Rozentāls (1866–1916) and Vilhelms Purvītis (1872–1945) among the ranks of 167

Ginta Gerharde-Upeniece

the pioneers of a national Latvian art, needs to be mentioned in the context of German expressionism. Johans Valters spent much of his life outside Latvia. The first ten years were in Dresden (1906–1916) and thereafter in Berlin (1916/1917–1932). Valters’s works (also from the German period) are in the collection of the Latvian National Museum of Art as well as in many private collections. During Soviet times, his works from the German period (from 1906 onward) were only partly known to the Latvian public. There was a rehabilitation of his reputation to a certain degree in 1969 when the National Museum of Art held an exhibition dedicated to his centenary. Although there has always been an interest in Valters’s contribution, more extensive information only first became available with the publication of art historian Kristiāna Ābele’s 2009 monograph, which reaffirmed Valters’s contribution to European modernism and demonstrated his importance in the context of German expressionism. Valters’s presence in art centers such as Dresden and Berlin reflects a complex period—the 1920s and 1930s in Germany, and Europe as a whole.31 His active participation in exhibitions and his contributions as a pedagogue were summarized in a memorial exhibition at the Viktor Hartberg Galerie in Berlin, in 1933, as well as in Kurt Kusenberg’s conclusion in the weekly Die Weltkunst (World Art), in which he noted that Valters’s works are akin to those of the artists of Die Brücke.32 Another development in Latvian art of the 1930s was Flemish expressionism. The so-called “Belgian phenomenon” (or “Belgian fashion”) attracted much attention and discussion among Latvian artists and led to a particularly successful artistic collaboration with Belgium. In 1927, an exhibition of works by Belgian artists was held at the Riga City Art Museum that was acclaimed in both professional as well as public circles. Top Flemish painters such as Isidor Opsomer (1878–1967), Albert Servaes (1883–1966), Valerius de Saedeleer (1867–1941), and Philibert Cockx (1879–1949) were exhibited alongside Walloon artists Louis Buisseret (1888–1956), Armand Roseenfosse (1862–1934), and others. The collaboration of Latvia’s ambassador to Belgium and Luxembourg, Jānis Lazdiņš (1875– 1953), with Paul Lambotte (1862–1939), head of the Belgian Department of Science and Arts and government commissioner-general for exhibitions abroad, and Sander Pierron, secretary of Highest State Decorative Arts Institute in Brussels and initiator of many collaborative art events, resulted in the Latvian State Art Museum receiving a collection of fifty-one paintings by Belgian artists in 1932. The collection (now part of the art museum Riga Bourse) was later supplemented by medals and posters (269 items altogether), works of Brussels lace (forty-six items), and a sizeable collection of drawings by Armand Rassenfosse (111 works).33 These were diplomatic gifts that are held by the museum and shown in the permanent display as well in temporary exhibitions. The Belgian fashion is more a term for illustrating the life of the arts in which the Wallonian and Flemish influences were analyzed. Alongside the intellectualism of the Walloons, Flemish expressionism also acquired an original place in Latvian art in the 1930s. The aforementioned 1927 exhibition and its continuation as the collection of Belgian art served as a source of inspiration, which, after the familiarity with French modernism, was an unexpected revelation in art circles. After the explorations in modernism, it represented a return to new realism and traditionalism; at the same time, figurative painting was refreshed by a new intensity of brushwork and coloring and interplay of textures. Latvian artist Jānis Tīdemanis (1897–1964) became one of the most striking representatives of Flemish expressionism in Latvian painting, James Ensor (1860–1949) and Isidor Opsomer (1878– 1967) being the decisive influences in his work. His free use of color, temperament, and compositional texture and, at the same time, emotional tension differed greatly from other examples of Latvian painting of this period. Thus, Tīdemans is considered to be a “Latvian Belgian”—he studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts d’Anvers (1922–1927) and was then tutored by 168

Expressionist Originality in Latvian Art

Isidore Opsomer at the Institut Superieur des Beaux-Arts d’Anvers. In the 1930s, he had several solo exhibitions in Antwerp (Breckpot and Salle d’Or galleries). In 1935, he was the official artist with Latvia’s pavilion at the Exposition universelle et internationale de Bruxelles (Brussel’s Universal and International Exhibition). Tīdemanis returned to Latvia in 1936. It should be noted that Latvian painters such as Augusts Annuss (1893–1984), Ģederts Eliass, Uga Skulme, Oto Skulme, Valdemārs Tone, Konrāds Ubāns, and others also took part in the Exposition internationale d’art moderne (International Exhibition of Modern Art), which was part of the 1935 World Exposition. Works by fifteen Latvian painters and six sculptors were shown alongside such known celebrities as Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Henri Matisse (1869–1954), André Derain (1880–1954), Maurice de Vlaminck (1876–1958), James Ensor (1860–1949), and Constant Permeke (1886–1952). The Belgian influence can also be felt in the works of other artists, among them Ansis Artums (1908–1997), Eduards Kalniņš (1904–1988), Leo Svemps, Valdis Kalnroze (1894–1993), Jānis Liepiņš, Fridrihs Milts (1906–1993), and Anna Zariņa (1907–1984).34 In the late 1920s, the Latvian artist Kārlis Padegs (1911–1940) began to produce graphic works and paintings whose themes and subjects stood in cardinal opposition to the aestheticized taste of the public at the time.35 Padegs, in particular, can be considered a true Latvian expressionist, someone who was also influenced by Flemish expressionism and the works of Tīdemans. His themes and images—beggars, the crippled, prostitutes, the dregs of society—take a strikingly oppositional stance to the artistic elite of the day and formed a protest against the insularity of the time; his works, among them Madonna ar ložmetēju (Madonna with a Machine-Gun, 1932; Plate 11), are, in spirit, quite close to the essence of expressionism, but the initial lack of recognition reinforced his status as a dissident and an outsider. Thus, one needs to acknowledge that the reflections and impressions of expressionism in Latvian art are much like a fractured mosaic in which the many pieces of glass are put together from fragments; here the key word is distance. In certain cases, the connections were maintained, in others they were broken, or integrated into the local environment.

Conclusion Returning to the origins of expressionism, one can see that in the local Baltic-German environment in Latvia in the early twentieth century, there was an absence of the preconditions necessary for expressionism to take a visible place in the local art scene. In the 1920s and 1930s, however, we see signs of expressionism in various manifestations with characteristics of individual styles, but it remains fragmented and divergent. The expressionism of the 1920s, strongly associated with the message of European modernism (Jēkabs Kazaks, Romans Suta, Aleksandra Beļcova, Uga Skulme, and others), gave way in the 1930s to specific adaptations of expressionism in the works of local artists, of which the compositions of Kārlis Padegs are the most eccentric and emotionally powerful. The influence of Belgian expressionism, in turn, was felt in the presence of certain coloristic and aesthetic values in the art of this period. Expressionism provided a concentrated accent that influenced local taste, confirming that Latvian art was connected to and a part of Western European art, and that Latvian artists were now active participants. Continuing the analysis of the development of expressionism after the First World War, we should acknowledge the outstanding contributions of Latvian artists in exile who became representatives of expressionism: artists such as Jānis Kalmīte (1907–1996) and Ojārs Šteiners (1927). These artists continued the integration of the artistic experiences of the interwar period to the extent possible in the United States, Australia, Canada, and elsewhere. The following generation of Latvian artists became involved in abstract expressionism—its representatives are strikingly emotionally expressive. Among them are the artists Edvīns Straumanis (1933–1992) 169

Ginta Gerharde-Upeniece

and Sigurds Vīdzirkste (1928–1974), of the Chicago school, and Laris Strunke (∗1931), who is well known in Sweden. Australia is represented by Lidija Dombrovska–Larsena (∗1925), who studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and at the studio of Fernand Léger (1881–1955) in Paris. Together with Pierre Alechinsky (∗1927), Karel Appel (1921–2006), and Asger Jorn (1914–1973), she participated in an exhibition by the international avant-garde group CoBrA in Copenhagen in 1972. The now widely known artist Imants Tillers (∗1950), whose original form of expression is influenced by aboriginal art, is a representative of Australian abstract expressionism who first gained recognition in the 1980s.36 One should also not forget the manifestations of neoexpressionism in Latvia in the 1980s— paintings by Aija Zariņa (∗1954) and supergraphics by Ivars Poikāns (∗1952), Ojārs Pētersons (∗1956), and Kristaps Ģelzis (∗1962)—a powerful protest and anti-Soviet expression of internal freedom in Latvia at that time. In a direct and figurative sense, these artists broke through boundaries, but also symbolically became a border-crossing generation. This was not only a local trend, but can also be connected to similar developments in Europe, for example, the paintings of The New Wild Ones. Expressionism (including the neoexpressionism of 1980s Latvia) continues in various forms of expression today, transforming but at the same time existing in a variety of forms. In an interesting footnote, Latvian art was greatly enriched by the discovery of the longforgotten fact that Latvia (Daugavpils) was the birthplace of Mark Rothko (1903–1970), the well-known representative of American abstract expressionism. Rothko only gained serious recognition in Latvia with the visit of the artist’s family to Daugavpils and his first exhibition at the Latvian National Museum in Riga in 2003 with works from the National Gallery in Washington. In 2013, the Mark Rothko Center at the Arsenal Building in the Daugavpils Fortress opened with original works by the artist.37 In summary, the term expressionism is broader than an artistic style or form of expression. An expressive approach to artistic creation, it includes within it an emotional intensification, ranging in tenor from the radically negative to the utterly positive. To a certain degree, it extends its boundaries as an artistic movement through the addition of a social dimension; at times, it has even served as a synonym for everything new and associated with the experience of Western European modernism. The term, with its emotionally replete message, has a special symbolic and original place in the local Latvian art scene, especially in the 1920s and 30s, and again after the Second World War, when Latvian artists in exile adapted to life in the new circumstances, gradually playing a visible role in abstract expressionism, first in the USA as well as in Europe. With that we may conclude that for Latvian art, the movement in the second half of the twentieth century did not have fixed geographical boundaries but is defined by its connections, centers, and individual experiences in the global world. In the 1980s it served as a broader form of neoexpression as artists upped the ante by becoming socially active and speaking about the nation’s (or individual) tenacity, endurance, and spiritual strength. Paradoxically, the presence of expressionism could also be felt on the threshold of the twenty-first century, when it dominated contemporary art in its various manifestations with a completely different yet no less powerful message.

Notes 1 Aija Brasliņa, “Berlīnes episode (1921–1923) Latvijas modernisma vēsturē” [The Berlin Episode (1921–1923) in the History of Latvian Modernism], Muzeja raksti 2 [Museum Papers] (Riga: Latvijas Nacionālais mākslas muzejs, 2010), 28–33. 2 Dace Lamberga, “Dzīves un mākslas attiecības Vācijā (1900–1937): Norises latvijas kultūrā” [Relations Between Art and Life in Germany (1900–1937): Events in Latvian Culture], Muzeja raksti 2 [Museum Papers] (Riga: Latvijas Nacionālais mākslas muzejs, 2010), 9.

170

Expressionist Originality in Latvian Art 3 Romans Suta, “Rapide aperçu sur la Peinture lettone” [Quick Overview of Latvian Painting], in L’art letton [Latvian Art] (Riga: La Section de la Presse au Ministère des Affaires Etrangeres, 1926), 20. 4 Ekspresionisma grafika. Dortmundes muzeja Am Ostwall kolekcija/Expressionistische Grafik Die sammlung des Museums am Ostwall Dortmund [The Graphics of Expressionsism: Collection from Museums of Ostwall Dortmund], ed. Dace Lamberga, (Riga: Neputns, 2008; exh. cat.), 80. 5 Vācija un Latvija laikā starp diviem pasaules kariem: māklas dzīves kopsakarības [Germany and Latvia between the Two World Wars], ed. Dace Lamberga, Muzeja raksti 2 [Museum Papers] (Riga: Latvijas Nacionālais mākslas muzejs, 2010), 8–58. 6 Jānis Siliņš, Latvijas māksla: 1915–1940 [Latvian Art: 1915–1940] (Stockholm: Daugava, 1988], 14–52. 7 Eduards Kļaviņš, “The Ambivalence of Ethnography in the Context of Latvian Modernism,” in Local Strategies International Ambitions: Modern Art and Central Europe 1918–1968 (Papers from the International Conference, Prague, June 11–14, 2003), ed.Vojtĕch Lahoda (Praha: Artefactum, 2006), 61. 8 “Un atkal mums garām plūst bēgļi, vezums aiz vezuma.Veci galdi, nomelnējušas lādes, kas gadu desmitiem gulējušas kādā klusā kaktā.Veci ļaudis, kas mūžu nodzīvojuši savā miestā vai pilsētiņā, iet pakaļ savām mantām. Varbūt viņi mēra šo ceļu jau trešo reizi.” Kālis Skalbe, Sarkanās lapas: Kara laika tēlojumi [Red Pages: Portrayals of War] (Riga: J. Rozes apgāds, 1924), 109. 9 J. G. [Jāzeps Grosvalds], “L’art letton (Les Jeunes)” [Latvian Art (The Young Ones)], La Revue Baltique 1 (1919); J. G., “L’art letton (II),” La Revue Baltique 4 (1919). 10 J. G., “L’art letton (Les Jeunes),” 25. 11 Letter of Jāzeps Grosvalds to Artūrs Tupiņš of July 8, 1919. Latvian National Museum of Art, VMM JGM-1519. 12 Henri-Louis Bergson (1859–1941), French philosopher. 13 Romans Suta, “Rapide aperçu sur la Peinture lettone,” 21. 14 “Les jeunes artistes lettons n’hésitèrent pas à choisir entre un art survécu et l’art français de nos jours – il était tout naturel qu’ils donnassent la préférence au dernier, Par intuition d’abord, en pleine conscience ensuite, ils adoptèrent la conception claire et les moyens d’expressions que propage avec tant de ténacité l’esprit Nouveau . . . Le caractère letton, robuste, sain et équilibre, n’a pu se familiariser ni avec l’expressionisme allemand, ni avec l’interprétation slave de la civilisation française. Notre jeune école abandonnant résolument les tendances imitatives, se tourne vers la recherche de moyens expression qui fut ressortir les valeurs purement plastiques d’un problème artistique.” Romans Suta, “Lettonie” [Latvia], L’Esprit Nouveau, 25 (1924). 15 Suta, “Lettonie.” 16 Eduards Kļaviņš, Džo. Jāzepa Grosvalda dzīve un māksla [Joe. Life and Art of Jāzeps Grosvalds] (Riga: Neputns, 2006), 135. 17 During the First World War, artists served in the Latvian Riflemen’s regiments—among them Romans Suta, Jēkabs Kazaks, Valdemārs Tone, Jāzeps Grosvalds, Oto Pladers, and others. Ludolfs Liberts, Oto Skulme, Uga Skulme, Eduards Lindbergs. Eduards Brencēns, Ernesta Brastiņš,Valdis Kalnroze, and others were conscripted into the Russian Tsarist army. In August 1918, the Latvian Opera Troupe, with artists Jānis Kuga, Eduards Vītols, Burkards Dzenis, and others, returned to the homeland in the so-called opera train. The People’s Commisariat for Education was quite active in 1919 and artists were put to work in creating Soviet propaganda. In parallel, many people from the arts and culture took part in the battles against Bermondt and in the Battles for Independence. 18 Dace Lamberga, Klasiskais modernisms: Latviešu glezniecība 20. gs. sākumā. [Classical Modernism: Early 20th-Century Latvian Painting] (Riga: Neputns, 2004), 53. 19 The Red Army captured Riga and shortly afterwards occupied almost the whole territory of Latvia from January to May 1919. On May 22, 1919, Riga was captured by the German forces and the Soviet government retreated to Latgale. On January 13, 1920, the government of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Latvia that had fled to Velikiye Luki in Russia announced the termination of their activities. 20 November 1918 to August 1920: Latvian War of Independence. On November 11, 1919, the Latvian Army liberated Riga from Pavel Bermondt’s forces. 21 Skalbe, Sarkanās lapas: Kara laika tēlojumi, 60. 22 The collection of the Latvian National Museum of Art. 23 Kļaviņš, Džo. Jāzepa Grosvalda dzīve un māksla, 276. 24 “Esam pauzudējuši cilvēka seju, nezinām vairs, kas ir godīgs darbs, bet protam tikai iznīcināt vērtības un aukstasinīgi kaut cilvēkus.Vai tas nav savādi, ja civilizētā pasaulē cilvēku apslaktēšana tagad ir tā parastākā un visatzītākā nodarbošanās. Sen mēs granātu bedrēs esam aprakuši cilvēcības ideālus, aizmirsuši īstās dzīves pievilcību un nozīmi. “Kurp ved šī gaita tuvākā nākotnē?”—Pretim jaunam postam? Jaunam

171

Ginta Gerharde-Upeniece ārprātam? . . . Kā atdzims pasaule radošam kultūras darbam, ja cilvēks ir pārvērsts izmisušā vai bezrūpīgā kustonī?” Emīls Mačs, Viena gaita (Kareivju atmiņas un pārdomas) [One Step (Soldiers’ Memories and

Reflections)] (Riga: Daina, undated), 99. 25 “Sans ‘vouloir’ être national le jeune art letton est beaucoup étroitement lié à l’âme nationale lettone que ne l’était l’impressionnisme. Et pourtant, né des tendences se son époque, il est apparanté à la vie intelectuelle de l’Europe nouvelle dont la Lettonie fait partie depuis la proclamation de son indépendance.” Romans Suta, “Rapide aperçu sur la Peinture lettone,” 21. 26 Ginta Gerharde–Upeniece, Māksla un Latvijas valsts. 1918–1940 [Art and Latvian State: 1918–1940] (Riga: Neputns, 2016), 93–94. 27 Dace Lamberga, Klasiskais modernisms: Latviešu glezniecība 20. gs. sākumā. [Classical Modernism: Early 20th-Century Latvian Painting] (Riga: Neputns, 2004), 53. 28 A notorious episode in the local art scene, when defenders of traditional art organized an action in the form of an exhibition by six artists on October 3, 1920, and a lecture against the “so-called expressionists” on October 22. The organizers highlighted a little-known young artist, Reinholds Kasparsons (1889–1966), hence the derived name of the action—Kasparsoniade. 29 Styx, “Ekspresionistu isstahde” [Expressionsts’ Exhibition], Baltijas Vēstnesis 55 (1920): 2; “Ekspresionistu izstādē” [At the Expressionists’ Exhibition], Svari 48 (1924): 6. 30 Contemporaries described the works in the Kasparsionade episode using the invented term Bumbism (“bumba” is the Latvian word for ball), a sarcastic swipe at cubism. Its use also reflected the opposition to the emergence of “isms” in avant-garde movements, which were viewed as superficially perceived expressions of forms. The two terms, Kasparsoniade and Bumbism, thus reflected the conflict between the traditional and new art in local society. 31 Kristiāna Ābele, Johans Valters [Johann Walter] (Riga: Neputns, 2009); Kristana Ābele, “Johans Valters un vācu ekspresionisms” [Johann Walter (Walter-Kurau) and German Expressionism], Muzeja raksti 2 [Museum Papers] (Riga: Latvijas Nacionālais mākslas muzejs, 2010), 19. 32 K. [Kusenberg Kurt] Johann Walter-Kurau: Galerie Victor Hartberg, Berlin. Die Weltkunst 16 (1993), April 19, 2. 33 Daiga Upeniece. “Latvijas Nacionālā Mākslas muzeja 20: Gadsimta sākuma beļģu mākslas kolekcija. Vēsture” [History of the Collection of Early 20th-Century Belgian Art in the Latvian National Museum of Art], in Latvija-Beļģija: mākslas sakari 20. gadsimtā un 21. gadsimta sākumā [Latvia-Belgium: Art Relations in the 20th Century and the Beginning of the 21st Century], ed. Aija Brasliņa (Riga: Neputns, 2013), 29–41, 200–206. 34 Aija Brasliņa, “Iespaidi un paralēles: Latvijas un Beļģijas mākslas sakari starpkaru periodā” [Impressions and Parallels: Contact Between Latvian and Belgian Art During the Interwar Period] in Latvija-Beļģija: mākslas sakari 20. gadsimtā un 21. gadsimta sākumā [Latvia-Belgium: Art Relations in the 20th Century and the Beginning of the 21st Century], ed. Aija Brasliņa (Riga: Neputns, 2013), 42–175. 35 Jānis Kalnačs, Rīgas dendijs un autsaiders: Kārlis Padegs [Riga Dandy and Outsider: Kārlis Padegs] (Riga: Neputns, 2011). 36 Dace Lamberga, Latviešu māksla trimdā/Latvian Art in Exile (Riga: Neputns, 2013), 43–44, 46. 37 “Daugavpils Mark Rothko Art Centre,” last accessed May 22, 2016, www.rothkocenter.com.

172

8 THE AMBIVALENT AFFAIR OF ESTONIAN EXPRESSIONISM Tiina Abel

The author of the only monograph on Estonian expressionism, Ene Lamp, characterizes her book as a collection of “short discourses”1 and stresses in her introduction the absence of a grand narrative of expressionism in Estonia. Expressionist trends in Estonian art, which developed under the influence of German expressionism during the period 1910 to 1925, did not form a modernist movement with a distinct program, but rather comprised a number of individual artistic approaches seeking an expressive form for depicting human emotional experiences and social tensions. The development of Estonian modernism has been variously characterized by notions of “belatedness,” “accelerated development,”2 “hybrid character,” and “self-colonization.”3 In their desire to create a modern national culture, local artists looked to the major European art centers of the time. The poet Gustav Suits (1883–1956), who became the leader of Young Estonia, a student-based movement focused on the modernization of Estonian culture and Europe,4 formulated in 1905 the paradigm of modernizing Estonian art as follows: “Let us be Estonian, but also become Europeans!” The members of Young Estonia saw nothing deplorable in embracing various concepts and mixing different artistic styles. The stylistically hybrid character of Estonian art in the early decades of the twentieth century was a result of this artistic appropriation. Before 1923, Estonian artists lacked a unifying artistic basis. Artistic production was shaped by personal view and individual outlook. Such an individualistic dimension was favorable to the spread of the expressionist paradigm. The only shared assumptions were certain themes and tensions arising between the formal elements of the picture and the emotional strain of the times. It should be noted that themes such as the destructive results of industrialization and urbanization and direct reflections of the horrors of war and social unrest that shaped German expressionism are relatively uncommon in Estonian art. Estonian expressionism reached its peak during the period 1914 to 1924. It was preceded by pre-expressionist manifestations of inner anxiety in the drawings of Nikolai Triik. The artists Märt Laarman (1896–1979), Henrik Olvi (1894–1972), and Eduard Ole (1898–1995) were inspired by expressionism before they founded, in 1923, the Group of Estonian Artists, the only modernist art association formed on the basis of a shared platform. Eduard Wiiralt (1898–1954), in his prints of the 1920s, blended expressionism with elements from New

173

Tiina Abel

Objectivity and surrealism. As in many central East European countries, expressionist influences were also transmitted by the novelists, poets, and critics, who played a substantial role in explaining and disseminating expressionist ideas. The discontinuity of the development of Estonian expressionism (with the exception of Wiiralt) reveals that it was only a brief moment in the local art scene and not supported by strong international artistic relationships. The lack of an art museum or an art academy also affected the education of artists and the establishment of modern art in Estonia. The situation is highlighted by Peet Aren in a report about his trip to Germany in the summer of 1914: “In Munich, I visited daily the Old and the New Pinakothek. At the time an important all-German exhibition was opened in the Glass Palace [apparently, the XI. Internationale Kunstausstellung—TA].”5 The rhetoric of breaking with tradition and the idea of a rebirth of humanity and society, central to expressionism in Germany, was unpopular in Estonia in the mid-1920s; the development of an independent state required something quite different: an ideology of stability and constructive headway.

Contacts with German Expressionism Contacts with the German art scene began before the First World War; as early as the turn of the century, young Estonian artists were drawn to the liberal milieu of Munich. Ado Vabbe (1892– 1961) studied painting there with Anton Ažbe from 1911 to 1913. It was during this time that the Blaue Reiter first became active, with its first group exhibition opening at the Thannhauser Gallery in December 1911 and the second one a year later at the Goltz Gallery. Vabbe arrived in Helsinki in February 1914, in time to see the Blaue Reiter exhibition at the Strindberg Gallery in Helsinki; in his memoirs, he confesses that the abstract works of Wassily Kandinsky and his artistic method “have, in a way, had a liberating effect . . . on me”6 (Figure 8.1). The Estonian sculptor Anton Starkopf (1889–1966) studied for several months in Munich beginning in fall 1911. In the summer of 1912, he traveled to Dresden where he saw an exhibition of works by the influencial German sculptor Franz Metzner, who had a subtantial impact on the style of Starkopf’s later drawings and sculpture. After his studies in Paris at the Académie Russe and Académie de la Grande Chaumière, 1912–1913, Starkopf returned to Dresden. With the outbreak of the war, he was briefly interned as a citizen of an enemy state, but was eventually released and began working as a stonemason’s assistant in the workshops of several Dresden sculptors.7 Later he transferred to Berlin, were he first worked as an assistant to Ludwig Manzel and then, finally, at Metzner’s studio. Starkopf highly respected Metzner’s skills and art but also made other acquaintances, including members of the artists’ group Der Sturm. During several trips to Germany in the 1920s, he also acquired the works of expressionist writers, including Theodor Däubler, Walter Hasenclever, and Georg Trakl, for the library at the newly established Pallas Art School in Tartu. Contacts between German expressionist artists and writers and Estonian artists continued under sometimes peculiar circumstances during the war. During the German occupation of Estonia in 1918, writer Alfred Brust and artist Magnus Zeller were stationed in Tartu with the German army. Zeller was a soldier and worked in the printing house on the Eastern front, which was located at first in Kaunas.8 He served there together with the writers Richard Dehmel and Arnold Zweig and the artist Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. As the staff of the printing house was traveling in the occupied territories of the Eastern Front, it is possible that, in addition to Zeller and Brust, these three also visited Tartu.9 Following the November Revolution of 1918, the German army pulled out of Estonia, but a letter from Brust to Zeller indicates that some in Estonia expected Zeller to return.10 174

Estonian Expressionism

Figure 8.1  Ado Vabbe, Muusika (Music), 1919, watercolor and gouache on paper, 49.3 × 38.1 cm, Art Museum of Estonia.  Art Museum of Estonia/EAÜ 2018

In the early 1920s, the interest of Estonian artists in Germany as a place to acquire an artistic education grew significantly. From 1921 to 1922, Konrad Mägi, while on his way to Italy, stayed for some time in Berlin, Dresden, and Munich, where he visited museums and galleries and saw the works of the German expressionists, particularly Franz Marc and August Macke. The impressive display of the 1922 Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung (Great Berlin Art Exhibition) included expressionist paintings on religious themes that seem to have attracted his attention and thus found their reflection in his works Pietà (1919) and Kolgata (Golgotha, 1921). Laarman and Vabbe also had the opportunity to see the Berlin exhibition. Other possible contacts with German expressionism were facilitated by Estonian artists studying in Germany: Eduard Wiiralt was a student of the Dresden Art Academy (1922–1923); Rudolf Paris (1896–1973), author of the first monograph on Konrad Mägi,11 studied at the Weimar Bauhaus from 1922 to 1925.12 After his departure from Germany in 1918, Starkopf returned to his homeland, where he helped to found the Pallas Art School in Tartu, in 1919. Drawing on his extensive contacts, Starkopf was able initially to employ several German art teachers, among them Georg Kind, a recent graduate of the Dresden Art Academy, who taught sculpture and ran the graphic arts studio from 1921 to 1922. Although differences of opinion led him to depart after only one year, it was Kind who introduced the use of various graphic techniques at the Pallas Art School. The grotesque nature of Kind’s prints left a deep impression on Eduard Wiiralt, who was a student at Pallas at the time. Kind had been relatively unknown as an artist when he came to Tartu, but his replacement, Magnus Zeller, was recognized as one of the most distinguished artists of 175

Tiina Abel

the Weimar Republic. Zeller’s earlier acquaintance with several Tartu artists contributed to his decision to move to Estonia, and although the bad economic situation in interwar Germany doubtlessly played a significant role as well, Zeller later wrote that he wanted to help “the people who had suffered so unjustly to promote their art education.”13 He began working at the Pallas Art School in 1923 and stayed in Tartu for three terms. Zeller was not as charismatic as Kind, but maintained good relations with the students.14 The school would have liked Zeller to continue teaching and even wanted to invite Otto Dix (who was also a one-time acquaintance of Anton Starkopf), but the weak economic conditions of this regional art institution and the local cultural climate made it difficult to attract any further artists from Germany. Pallas expressionism, however, dominated the Estonian art scene of the early 1920s to such an extent that the founders of the Group of Estonian Artists saw it as their main target of criticism. The Estonian public had little opportunity to see international art at home. An exception was the Fifth Exhibition of the Pallas Art Society in 1921, which included a few etchings by Otto Dix and Georg Kind, although they did not receive any attention from the art critics. Thus, only art books and journals provided Estonians with the opportunity to familiarize themselves with expressionism.15 Before the outbreak of the First World War, two German art periodicals, Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst (Journal of Fine Arts) and Kunst und Künstler (Art and Artists), were circulated among Estonian artists and introduced the aims and ideas of expressionism as well as the works of artists such as Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke, Ludwig Meidner, Max Pechstein, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Distribution of these journals ceased with the outbreak of the war, thus giving a more prominent role to local art critics. That there were no prophets of “this new art” present in Estonia was noted by Johannes Semper (1892–1970), one of Estonia’s most erudite Estonian writers and critics, in his 1927 book, Meie kirjanduse teed (The Paths of Our Literature).16 No manifests were written, no passionate circles of supporters or opponents of expressionism were formed. In the period 1914–1919, expressionism was so little known in Estonian art circles that the movement was not even referred to by name; the terminology of modern art that was used remained ambivalent; the association between expressionism and German art was established only after the war. The writer, and later professor of literature at the University of Tartu, Gustav Suits mentioned the expressionists for the first time in an article about the 1914 Malmö art exhibition.17 Though it is not quite clear what exactly he had in mind, he did in fact introduce the term expressionism in Estonia. Bernhard Linde (1886–1954), a publicist and translator, used the term in an article on Edvard Munch, which was written in Oslo in 1910 but published in the Estonian journal Vaba Sõna (Free Word) only in 1915. In the article, he discusses aspects central to the expressionist discourse, such as the artist’s freedom of spirit, the celebration of passion, the mystery of birth and death, landscape as a mystical representation of human feeling, the extreme sensitiveness of the artist, the titanic fight of the individual against the masses, the longing for the primal and natural, and artistic production as an absolute correlate of the artist’s feelings.18 Discussing Vabbe’s abstract drawings in 1918, Semper was one of the first to offer a critical review of his work that showed a deep understanding of expressionist art.19 His review of Vabbe’s work became a crucial reference for Estonian writers in the early 1920s.20 It is interesting to note that a more enthusiastic introduction to expressionism began only as the movement was beginning to fade even in the Estonian art scene.

The Suffering Artist: The Berlin Episode of Nikolai Triik Nikolai Triik (1884–1940) is one of the three outstanding Estonian modernists of the first generation. Like almost all Estonian modernists, he began his studies at Alexander Stieglitz’s 176

Estonian Expressionism

School of Technical Drawing, in St. Petersburg,21 but was expelled because of his participation in school riots in 1905. He briefly returned to Tallinn and continued his studies with Ants Laikmaa,22 but eventually went back to St. Petersburg, where he studied at the then popular studio of Josif Brasz. In the summer of 1906, Triik worked on the picturesque Åland Islands near the mouth of the Bothnian Bay in the Baltic Sea, and in the fall he traveled to Paris—the longing of all young Estonia artists. He spent the years 1907–1909 traveling in France, Norway, and Russia. He managed to continue his artistic training at the École des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts), several free academies in Paris, and under the guidance of Nikolai Roerich at the School of the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts in St. Petersburg, experimenting with a variety of creative approaches and artistic styles of the period with the exception of cubism. In Triik’s works created before 1910, one can find elements of national romanticism, art nouveau, expressive gesture painting à la Van Gogh, and the disharmony of bright colors that remind one of the early compositions of Matisse and his circle. This stylistic hybridity, so characteristic of early Estonian modernism, was especially vivid in Triik’s early works, but it was enhanced by personal drama and the artist’s striving to visually express his own suffering and anguish. From 1911 to 1913, Triik lived in Berlin, where he saw the works of Die Brücke and Blaue Reiter artists in the exhibitions at Herwarth Walden’s gallery and also reproduced in magazines. Shortly after his arrival in Berlin, the artist experienced a period of existential crisis, which was due to his financial dependence upon Mihkel Martna, the leader of the Estonian social democrats and father of his new partner Viktoria.23 Triik, who was at his creative peak as an artist, was forced to take on work on demand, postcards for the Russian market, for example—a commission he got because the publisher was of Estonian origin. Triik’s loneliness in a bustling metropolis made him especially receptive to the pathos of suffering characteristic of expressionism. Triik’s letters to the physician and publicist Juhan Luiga (1873–1927) can be read both as an expression of personal tragedy and as a metaphor for the difficult situation facing an Estonian artist in a foreign country: I cannot take it anymore, my common sense simply refuses to be shattered every day, allowing everything that has been nurtured as right and necessary over many years with great effort and serious work to be now broken, suppressed, killed.24 Life far away from his homeland nourished in Triik the persistent feeling that he had abandoned the social mission and ideals of the Young Estonia movement: I feel that my permanent workplace is my home country where I could finally develop maximally, that’s why I would like to settle at home as soon as possible, but before I can do this, I must be quite certain in my technical ability and have an overview of the art questions of the day; and the fact is that at home we must start from the very beginning in art . . . I feel it my obligation and my right to try to be a creator in that field.25 There is only one noteworthy work painted by Triik during his Berlin period, Ants Laikmaa portree (Portrait of Ants Laikmaa, 1913), which fits well into the expressionist tradition: Triik moves beyond his sitter’s external appearance and focuses instead on Laikmaa’s spiritual life and psychological condition. The bright and vivid colors, however, remind one much more of French fauvism than German expressionism. This mixture of French and German influences in Triik’s Berlin work clearly demonstrates the eclectic nature of the regional modernisms. In Berlin, Triik also began working on a series of small drawings that are expressionist in terms of their subject matter, among them the 1913 works Orjad (The Slaves), Jaht (Hunt), 177

Tiina Abel

Figure 8.2  Nikolai Triik, Märter (Martyr), 1913, Indian ink and gouache on paper, 33 × 23 cm, Art Museum of Estonia.  Art Museum of Estonia

Metropolis, and Märter (Martyr; Figure 8.2). He later added Katastroof (Catastrophe, 1917), Vabaduse sünd (The Birth of Freedom, 1919), and Ulguv koer (A Howling Dog, 1921). These are images of apocalypse and redemption, humans in suffering and exaltation—reflections of the artist’s effort to capture human tragedy. Triik’s visions of apocalypse show similarities to Franz Marc’s attempts to express collective tension as well as personal drama;26 they are the work of a despairing and split personality, an introvert whose personal anxiety became sublimated into an archetypal and universal imagery. Triik’s expressionist drawings are composed of intricate symbols such as a burning city, a despairing figure with raised arms, an erotically tense body, the darkness of night—and these reappear in various ways in different works. The collective suffering of the slaves in his drawing of the same title reveals a personal tragedy in the depiction of a martyr (as the artist’s alter ego) carrying his head on a plate, an image that recalls St. John, the Baptist. This artist-martyr dancing with his own decapitated head paradoxically depicts not only the tragedy of execution, but also the victory of resurrection, a body full of vitality and erotic energy, a demonic Dionysian force. Ene Lamp has highlighted the disturbing parallels in this simultaneous depiction of death’s agony and the ecstasy of life.27 The expressionists often used Christian iconography and symbols. Drawing upon the story of Salome and John the Baptist provides new aspects for an interpretation of Triik’s work: here it is not Salome who is dancing with the cut-off head, but St. John. 178

Estonian Expressionism

Triik has offered an overtly positive interpretation of a human figure, in the form of a woman with upraised hands, as a repeated motif only in his drawing Vabaduse sünd (The Birth of Liberty, 1919; Figure 8.3), created under the influence of the political events associated with Estonia gaining independence. The figure of the child rescued from war and death embodies the transformation of sacrificial death into redemption, the resurrection of flesh consecrated by death. The female figure as a symbol of freedom has a long tradition in art; the authorities of the new Republic of Estonia found Triik’s visual rhetoric ideologically so appealing that the drawing was acquired for the national art collection. At the height of his recognition as an artist, however, Triik experienced a major personal setback. As one of the organizers of the 1919 exhibition of Estonian art in Tallinn, Triik’s display was harshly and unjustly assailed and he never fully recovered from this. In the fervor of “demoting the art generals to civilians,”28 the writers supporting the avant-garde artist Ado Vabbe almost broke Triik as an artist and a person when he was only thirty-five years old. His bitterness is epitomized in his last drawing Ulguv koer (A Howling Dog, 1921), which captured the artist’s state of mind with the forlorn figure of a dog baying at the moon rising over the gallows hill.

Visionary Landscapes: The Art of Konrad Mägi The tension between earthly and heavenly forces, human destiny, and the embodiment of earthly reality and the cosmic vision—such were the concerns that haunted Konrad Mägi

Figure 8.3  Nikolai Triik, Vabaduse sünd (The Birth of Liberty), 1919, pastel and chalk on paper, 63.4 × 47.7 cm, Art Museum of Estonia. © Art Museum of Estonia

179

Tiina Abel

(1878–1925). At a time when he was already seriously ill, he painted two religious scenes, Pietà (1919) and Kolgata (Golgotha, 1921; Figure 8.4),29 combining his experiences of landscape painting with his skills as a portrait painter. His unusual way of representing traditional subjects of Christian art drew the attention of the critics, who noted the deep influence that late medieval art had had on this Estonian artist30 and drew comparisons of the elongated figures in Pietà to Enguerrand Quarton’s Pietà of Villeneuve-lès-Avignon (c. 1455) in the Louvre collections31—a work with which Mägi was familiar. Kolgata, however, recalls not so much medieval art as the paintings of the German expressionists, who themselves had been influenced by such medieval works—the apocalyptic landscapes of Ludwig Meidner, the motifs of a ray of light, a crystal, or a shard of broken glass of Erich Heckel and Franz Marc come to mind. These images seem to echo the idea of an “inner crystallized form” present in Wilhelm Worringer’s treatise Abstraktion und Einfühlung (Abstraction and Empathy).32 With respect to the religious content of Mägi’s works, the visionary landscape in the background seems more important than the central figure scene. It is through the depiction of the landscape that the artist’s state of mind and soul manifest themselves. Mägi’s focus as a painter was on color, his means by which to express feelings such as ecstasy or inner repose, but also moments of despair. Hanno Kompus (1890–1974), Mägi’s first critic, noted that colors were the artist’s “carriers of psychic values and spiritual power.” Mägi was able to capture “the fantastic richness of nature through the magic of colors and on his canvases nature becomes a burning, exciting, intoxicating garden.”33

Figure 8.4  Konrad Mägi, Kolgata (Golgotha), 1921, oil on canvas. The whereabouts of this work are not known

180

Estonian Expressionism

Mägi was a self-trained painter. While working in France and Norway (1907–1912), he began to translate representations of the landscape into the language of modern art. This development is already visible in his Maastik punase pilvega (Landscape with a Red Cloud, 1913–1914; Figure 8.5) and culminated in his exceptional Lake Pühajärv landscapes, painted between 1918 and 1920 (Plate 12). Landscape with a Red Cloud, with its restless broken forms, its leaden blue and bursting skies, foretells a deeply personal vision whose impulse derived from nature but was much more a description of the inner topography of the artist’s mental landscape, where everything “lives, moves, is born, dies, raises wildly up or shrinks timidly, cries gruesomely or is dreadfully silent.”34 Mägi abandoned impressionistic naturalism in order to express his inner world, feelings, and emotions in his paintings. Mägi, who survived his first attack of a serious disease in 1916, experienced the approach of death early in his life. His deteriorating health along with the tensions of war influenced his use of color; blue—the color of sorrow and sadness—conquered his canvases by the end of the First World War. Color symbolism was important to Mägi, and this particular feature connected him with many German expressionists, among them Franz Marc. In Mägi’s paintings, the violent contrasts of red, blue, and yellow emanate a strong emotional tension. The dissonance of sharp forms and contrasting colors helped him to transform his anxiety into aesthetic experience and artistic vision. The motif of the bridge, used by Friedrich Nietzsche in his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and inspiration for the name of the group of young German artists in Dresden in 1905, helped Mägi to accept his own mortality and to find a new approach to life and art; it pointed a way to connect the temporal with the eternal, served as the gate to eternal life in an apocalyptic landscape, and provided the possibility to find entry into the harmonious state of the universe. It is not unlikely that Mägi’s thinking was influenced by Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy, whose public lectures he had opportunity to hear in Oslo (then Kristiania) in May and June 1909. According to historical tradition, Mägi even painted Steiner’s portrait (apparently from a photograph), although no documentary evidence has been found.35 In Oslo, Steiner re-interpreted the Apocalypse of St. John, the Apostle, concentrating on an allegoric interpretation of the first word of its Greek version, “apocalypse,” which led him to view human life as a path of spiritual development in the eternal fight between good and evil. During the hardships of a lonely sojourn in Norway, from 1908 to 1910, Mägi found inspiration in the breathtaking panoramas and cosmic expanses of the Norwegian landscape. The result of his efforts was described by contemporaries as “clips from cosmos, space, a merry colorful future world.”36 It seems Mägi understood early on that in moments of crisis nature could become a source of inspiration and solace. Looking at Mägi’s landscapes, with their torn edges, one could be reminded of Steiner’s idea that man bears in himself an urge for destruction, the wish to disperse everything stored in his memory.37 However, the glow from the clouds in Mägi’s paintings seems to also serve as a motif of redemption or enlightenment, and an awakening recognition of grace, perhaps even an act of ritual self-purification. In Steiner’s philosophy, the experience of Golgotha was a central aspect of human spiritual development and self-perception, which brings us back to the Mägi’s painting Kolgata, mentioned above. Like other expressionists, Mägi strove to move beyond the surface appearances of nature and to free his art from visible reality: the artist, as the bearer of creative power, expresses himself above all through composition and color. Despite a growing sense of unease that his time was growing short, Mägi managed to keep his means of expression under control and to capture the essence of the Norwegian and Estonian landscapes. With respect to teaching, Mägi, himself an autodidact, was convinced that the liberation of inherent artistic talent was more important than instruction in the correct use of artistic tools. This became the main principle of his pedagogy at the Pallas Art School, where he taught from 1919 until his death in 1925. 181

Tiina Abel

Figure 8.5  Konrad Mägi, Maastik punase pilvega (Landscape with a Red Cloud), 1913–1914, oil on canvas, 70.4 × 78 cm, Art Museum of Estonia.  Art Museum of Estonia

Erotic Frustration: Eduard Wiiralt in Dresden and Paris Expressionism was also characterized by an opposition to bourgeois moral norms, and this was reflected in the artists’ attitudes toward sexuality and sexual relationships. Early on, the Brücke artists used depictions of the human body to express pleasure, sexual as well as otherwise, and the physical signs of sensuous love. For some Estonian artists, the expression of erotic tension was more important than recognition of the equality of the sexes. This is most vividly seen in the visionary works of Eduard Wiiralt (1898–1954), the best known Estonian graphic artist, whose works often reflect his own personal sexual frustrations but also speak more generally to the human condition and thus offer a more philosophical interpretation. Wiiralt’s contemporaries remembered that Wiiralt was reading the books of Oswald Spengler, Rudolf Steiner, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Ralph Waldo Emerson during his study years, and that he also believed in the cult of artistic genius.38 The main features of Wiiralt’s art were formed while a student at the Pallas Art School (1919–1924). He began to focus on the theme of man’s inability to overcome his instincts during his period in Dresden, where he was most likely sent by his teacher, Georg Kind, who had come to the Pallas Art School from Dresden. In spring 1922, Wiiralt began studying in the master class of sculptor Selmar Werner, at the Dresden Art Academy. While studying sculpture, he was more and more drawn to experimenting with graphic techniques. This would have been due to the influence of the second wave of expressionism, the works he saw in various 182

Estonian Expressionism

exhibitions, especially the paintings by Otto Dix. The experiences of poverty, disillusionment, and disorder that filled the critical depictions of the German expressionists in the interwar period and led to verism were certainly familiar to Wiiralt from the miserable living conditions found in the suburbs of his hometown Tartu, but behind the naturalism and ugliness of life, he saw human beings facing moral dilemmas, as can be seen in his woodcut Külastaja (Visitor, 1923; Figure 8.6). By the fall of 1923, Wiiralt returned to Tartu, although rather reluctantly.39 He graduated from the Pallas Art School the next year and went to Paris in 1925, where, except for a short period during the Second World War, he remained for the rest of his life. In France, Wiiralt’s ideas were supplemented by Henri Bergson’s concept of a mystic life force, the élan vital. In 1926, Wiiralt wrote in the margin of one of his sketches in French: “Les femmes nues sont impossibles.” Although written spontaneously, it was not an accidental remark and reflects not only the emotional and erotic frustration of the artist’s destructive life style but also an aesthetic fight over the woman’s body as subject matter. In the spirit of the time, Wiiralt depicted women as grotesque, pushing sensuality toward the erotic and the fantastic. His idiosyncratic but polished style was based on his preference for the diversity of ugliness over the uniformity of beauty. Wiiralt had a highly creative period from 1931 to 1932, during which he produced his masterpieces Põrgu (Hell, 1930–1932) and Kabaree (Cabaret, 1931; Figure 8.7), combining etching and copper engraving techniques in both works. The semantic center of Kabaree, built on intersecting diagonals, is an important figure of his monotypes and drawings of 1931: the

Figure 8.6  Eduard Wiiralt, Külastaja (Visitor), 1923, woodcut on paper, 34.1 × 24.2 cm, Art Museum of Estonia.  Art Museum of Estonia/EAÜ 2018

183

Tiina Abel

violinist, representing spirituality. The scene, however, is governed by a drunken crowd in search of various carnal pleasures. Among the inebriated and amorous couples we find a dreaming Christ figure with nimbus seated at the table; the scene is once again emotionally shaped by the expressive attitude of the hands with their convulsively crooked fingers. While working on Kabaree, Wiiralt visited Colmar and saw Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece, noting: “I see those figures everywhere I look, even on trees.”40 His travel companion, Estonian artist Jaan Grünberg (1889–1969), described the impression of the altarpiece in more detail: “The same evening, sitting at the table, Wiiralt kept his hand in the same position as the disciple in the painting pointing at the crucified Christ. The next day I noticed Wiiralt’s hand in the same position several times.”41 In the case of Kabaree and Põrgu, the same veristic tendencies that Wiiralt had discovered in Dresden could be identified, but the artist, whose own sense of fantasy was very powerful at the time, was also strongly affected by the surrealist movement. Like the monsters of Hieronymus Bosch’s world, Wiiralt’s strange figures are a result of psychic rationalization. With respect to expressionism, it is interesting to note that it is difficult to find any parallels to Wiiralt’s etchings in the work of his contemporary French graphic artists. Parallels, however, can easily be found in the art of Belgium (e.g., James Ensor, Jules de Bruycker) and Germany. During his time in Paris, Wiiralt was concerned with two “enemies” that had also been central to the expressionists—mediocrity and bourgeois morality. In an effort to defy both, he stimulated his creative powers with intoxicating substances and an uncontrollable sex life.

Figure 8.7  Eduard Wiiralt, Kabaree (Cabaret), 1931, etching and copper engraving on paper, 38.8 × 45.7 cm, Art Museum of Estonia.  Art Museum of Estonia/EAÜ 2018

184

Estonian Expressionism

The motif of human corruption started to take on a more and more fantastic form in his work. Wiiralt’s artistic development was further enhanced by an interest in the subliminal and the emergence of surrealism in Paris. In his later work of the late 1920s and early 1930s, we find ecstatically stretching and sensuously buxom figures: ascetic faces with averted eyes; round, chubby cheeks and high arching foreheads; violinist’s hands with long thin fingers and flirting ladies’ fingers with bulky joints; closely buttoned collars and exposed cleavage; figures shouting with mouths wide open or dreaming with eyes half closed; angels, large and small; monsters, male and female; and multiple other forms.42 This agitated psychology was due to the artist’s growing belief that human nature is hopelessly corrupt and complex, and it eventually resulted in his spiritual and physical breakdown in 1933.

Conclusion The slogan “Let us be Estonian, but also become Europeans!,” formulated by the members of the Young Estonia movement in 1905, was the first program of the intelligentsia who valued national identity but relied on the openness of local culture. It established the paradigm of the development of Estonian modernist art for years to come. The stylistic hybridity of Estonian art during the first decades of the twentieth century, including the stylistic and thematic idioms influenced by expressionism, thus emerged as a cultural exchange similar to osmosis. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the necessary support system for realizing the adoption of modernism emerged at an explosive speed—an art museum, art schools, art societies and magazines, and exhibitions displaying modern Estonian art. Estonian expressionist art practice was fragmentary, conceptually, and stylistically extremely diverse. However, the difficulties in interpreting the local forms of expressionism seem quite universal, as they have to be confronted by everyone dealing with this multifaceted art phenomenon. The emotional and formal tension in Estonian expressionist art was intensified by the various political catastrophes, including most obviously the First World War, events related to the birth of the Republic of Estonia, and attempts to modernize society’s moral as much as its cultural visage. As shown on the basis of works by Nikolai Triik, Konrad Mägi, and Eduard Wiiralt, presented here as case studies, personal dramas played a significant role in the manifestations of expressionism in Estonia. Although these manifestations largely emerged between 1914 and 1924, they were preceded by drawings by Nikolai Triik that may be seen as pre-expressionist in nature. At the other end of the chronological axis, the line leads to the founding of the cubist-constructivist opposition group in late 1923—the Group of Estonian Artists, which demanded a rational reshaping of the environment. This event marked the artistic conversion of the group members Märt Laarman, Henrik Olvi, and Eduard Olvi. Having shaped the face of Estonian expressionism’s heyday from 1918 to 1921, their self-denial led them to even more radical art innovations. The works of Wiiralt, as the great recluse in Estonian art history, reveal existential tensions related to human nature even after the expressionist trend had faded. The small community of Estonian modernists had enough strength and will to keep up with modernist trends, but given the conditions of the still developing art scene, there was not enough creative power to work through the new ideas in a diverse and thorough manner. Intellectual and stylistic movements taking place on a wide scale of European expressionism mainly emerged in “marginal” techniques (drawing and graphic art) and in small formats. The events occurring after the independent Republic of Estonia was established did not exactly encourage expressionist nonfigurative art, as the nationalism-focused ideology during the build-up of the nationstate destroyed the social foundations necessary for cultivating cosmopolitan-individualist art. 185

Tiina Abel

Expressionism was born during social upheaval, but its grimness and frustrations failed to support the pathos of creating a new state. After the First World War, the rhetoric of breaking traditions and the rebirth of man and society, typical of radical art, were powerless to influence a European art scene that demanded “order.” The variations of pre-First World War expressionism contained some hope for the future, whereas the ideology of stability flourishing after the war did not offer support to expressionists who viewed themselves as world citizens, or any other representative of the radical art movement.

Notes 1 Ene Lamp, Ekspressionism: Ekspressionism Eesti kujutavas kunstis [Expressionism: Expressionism in Estonian Art] (Tallinn: Eesti Kunstiakadeemia, 2004), 6. See also Ene Lamp, “Deutscher Expressionismus und estnische Kunst: Kunstkontakte” [German Expressionism and Estonian Art: Artistic Contacts], in Architektur und bildende Kunst im Baltikum um 1900: Kunst im Ostseeraum. Greifswalder Kunsthistorische Studien [Architecture and the Fine Arts in the Baltics around 1900: Art at the Baltic Sea Region. Greifswald Art Historical Studies] (Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York,Wien: Lang, 1999), vol. 3, 92–97. The title of the monograph indicates that the author has limited herself to an analysis of the influence of German “classical” expressionism at the beginning of the twentieth century and has not tried to discuss the problem within a broader, international context. Naturally, she recognizes the discursive character of the spiritual foundations and art practices of expressionism, maintaining that the only unifying quality in Estonia (as in other places) might be a certain topicality and the ability to stress both style and emotions. 2 See Boris Bernstein, “Inimesekontseptsioon eesti kunstis” [The Concept of Man in Estonian Art], in Boris Bernstein, Ringi sees & Ringist väljas [In and Outside the Circle] (Tallinn: Kunst, 1979), 128. 3 See Tiit Hennoste, “Noor-Eesti kui lõpetamata enesekoloniseerimisprojekt” [Young-Estonia as an Unfinished Project of Self-Colonization], in Noor-Eesti 100: Kriitilisi ja võrdlevaid tagasivaateid [Young Estonia: A Critical and Comaprative Retrospect] (Tallinn: Tallinna Ülikooli Kirjastus, 2006), 11. 4 The Young Estonia movement mainly concerned literature and culture in general. It emerged in 1903–1904 from surreptitious student groups and became a public association in 1912. The movement faded away during the First World War. It can be regarded as a powerful aspiration of the young intelligentsia toward cultural innovation; its core members included, for example, the writers Gustav Suits, Friedebert Tuglas, and Villem Grünthal-Ridala; language innovator Johannes Aavik; publicist and translator Bernhard Linde; and others.The representatives of the movement tried to unite socialism and individualism, self-conscious creativity and national conditionality, the aesthetic and the scientific, the male and female understanding of creativity. Contacts with new trends in European culture brought about an increasing demand in style and form. The Young Estonians valued symbols as a means of aesthetic perception and enriched literary history with terminology. Through the texts published in five albums between 1905 and 1915, in journals Young-Estonia (Noor-Eesti, 1910–1911) and Free Word (Vaba Sõna, 1914–1916), the Young Estonia principles strongly influenced the visual arts. 5 Aino Kartna, “Ühest reisist lõunapoole” [A Trip to the South], Kunst (Art) 3 (1970): 43. The curtness of the later recollections is perhaps due to the fact that, after the outbreak of the war, Aren was interned and experienced the terrors of war. 6 “Ado Vabbe iseendast” [Ado Vabbe about Himself], in Tartu Riikliku Kunstimuuseumi Almanahh II [Almanach of the State Art Museum of Tartu II] (Tartu: Eesti NSV Kultuuriministeerium,Tartu Riiklik Kunstimuuseum 1967), 65. 7 Starkopf worked with L. Buntze, P. Putzschi, and K. Zähne in Dresden. 8 See the essay by Giedrė Jankevičiūtė and Laima Laučkaitė in this book (Chapter 6). 9 This is supported by German art historian Gerd Fiedler; see Gerd Fiedler, “Magnus Zeller,” Kunst 1 (1989): 47. 10 Fiedler, “Magnus Zeller,” 47. 11 Rudolf Paris, Konrad Mägi (Tartu: Ed. Roos, 1932). 12 There were also shorter study trips, among them the 1923 trip of the Pallas students to Dresden, Berlin, Leipzig, and Weimar. As a Pallas teacher, Zeller took his talented painting student Kuno Veeber along to Germany in 1923. Sculpture student Ferdi Sannamees worked at Karl Albiker’s studio in Dresden for some months. Edmund Arnold Blumenfeldt studied theatre decoration at the Reimann School in Berlin in 1920–1922, and Adamson-Eric began his studies at the Industrial Art School in Berlin-Charlottenburg.

186

Estonian Expressionism 13 Letter from Magnus Zeller to art historian Irina Solomõkova of January 5, 1966.The original is held by Solomõkova’s family. 14 Zeller’s acquaintance with Alexander von Bulmerincq, Professor of Old Testament and Semitic Languages at the University of Tartu, has been seen as the cause of the artist’s later interest in religious themes. See Magnus Zeller. Entrückung und Aufruhr [Magnus Zeller: Rapture and Upheaval], ed. Dominik Bartmann (Berlin: Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin, 2002), 121. 15 A copy of the catalogue of the 1913 Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon held at the Sturm gallery belonged to the Liphart family, known as art collectors; a copy of the catalogue of the 1922 Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung might have been in the collection of the psychiatrist and art critic Leo von Kügelgen. It is impossible to determine how many artists had access to these publications. 16 Johannes Semper, Meie kirjanduse teed [The Paths of Our Literature] (Tartu: Loodus, 1927), 11. He refers above all to Estonian literature here, but this can also be applied to the situation of modern Estonian art. 17 Gustav Suits, “Malmö näituselt” [About the Malmö Exhibition], Vaba Sõna 9/19 (1914): 287. 18 Bernhard Linde, “Edvard Munch,” Vaba Sõna 3/4 (1915): 100–109. 19 Johannes Semper, “Ado Vabbe puhul” [The Case of Ado Vabbe], Siuru II (1918): 111–115. The same article was published under the title “Ado Vabbe ja ekspressionism” [Ado Vabbe and Expressionism] in Semper’s 1919 collection of articles “Näokatted” (Masks). 20 Milli Mallikas (pseodonym of Hugo Raudsepp), “Ekspressionism” [Expressionism], Tallinna Teataja [Tallinn Daily], February 7, 1920, 5; Marie Under, “Ekspressionism saksa kirjanduses” [Expressionism in German Literature], Tallinna Teataja, February 20, 1920, 2, February 21, 1920, 6; Max Picard, “Ekspressionism” [Expressionism], Ilo [Beauty] 6 (1920): 35–41; Johannes Semper, “Läbilõige praegusest Saksamaa vaimuelust” [A Cross-Section of Spiritual Life in Germany], Kirjandus, kunst, teadus [Literature, Art, Science], July 18, 1921, 187–188; Hugo Raudsepp, Ekspressionismus: uue voolu teooriast ja praktikast [Expressionism: Theory and Practice of a New Trend] (Tallinn: Rahvaülikool, 1922). 21 The School of Technical Drawing, founded by Alexander Stieglitz, a well-known manufacturer, gave practical know-how to craftspeople who were employed in factories. Since the school did not require a certain educational level or basic artistic knowledge, but offered scholarships to its students, it was quite popular despite its conservatism; it provided the basic training to all first-generation modernist Estonian artists in 1900–1904. 22 Estonian artist Ants Laikmaa (1866–1942) had studied at the Düssseldorf Art Academy; in 1899 he returned to Tallinn, and, in 1903, opened his own art school, where many future Estonian artists were trained in the following decades. 23 Triik’s relationship with the Martna family points at his leftist orientation. Mihkel Martna (1860–1934) who, according to his sister, was a social democrat but not a communist, spent the years 1906–1917 in exile because of his political views. See “Vestlusi Nikolai Triigist” [Conversations about Nikolai Triik], Kunst 3(65) (1984): 7–8. 24 Evi Pihlak, Nikolai Triik (Tallinn: Kunst, 1969), 90. 25 “Ma tunnen, et minu alaline tööpaik kodumaa on, et ma alles seal lõplikult välja areneda saan, sellepärast tahaks võimalikult pea kodumaale asuda, kuid enne kui ma seda saan, pean oma tehnilises võimises, omas ülevaates kunsti tegevuse üle täitsa kindel olema ja ka, et meil kodumaal kunsti ala täitsa otsast peale alata tuleb . . . Ma . . . tunnen oma kohuse ja õiguse olema . . . püüda sellel põllul looja olla.” See Triik’s letter to Juhan Luiga of September 8, 1912, EKLA (= Estonian Cultural History Archives), 179, 6: 6. 26 Frederick S. Levine, The Apocalyptic Vision: The Art of Franz Marc as German Expressionism (New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco, London: Harper & Row, 1979), 14. 27 Lamp, Ekspressionism, 68. 28 August Gailit, “Kunstnikkude ülevaatlik paraad” [The Compendious Parade of the Artists)] Postimees [Postman], July 19, 1919. 29 The whereabouts of Pietà and Kolgata (Calvary) are unknown. The latter work is illustrated in Evi Pihlak, Konrad Mägi (Tallinn: Kunst, 1979), 115. 30 Paris, Konrad Mägi, 206. 31 Having arrived in Paris in fall 1907, Mägi would have seen this work, which came into the Louvre collections in 1905, on his visits to the museum. 32 Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung: Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie [Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style] (München: R. Riper, 1908). Mägi’s landcapes can be related to those of Erich Heckel not only in terms of their crystalline forms but also the motif of a hilly landscape or a panoramic closed horizon.

187

Tiina Abel 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

Kompus, “Eesti kujutav kunst 1916,” 232. Ibid., 230. Paris, Konrad Mägi, 170. Juhan Luiga, “Kolmandalt eesti kunstinäituselt” [From the Third Estonian Art Exhibition], in idem., Mäss ja meelehaigus [Revolt and Insanity] (Tartu: Ilmamaa, 1995), 439.The text was first published in the fourth number of the Estonian newspaper Päevaleht (The Daily Mail) in 1911. Ene Lamp, “Konrad Mägi ja müstika” [Konrad Mägi and Mysticism], in Kunstiteaduslikke uurimusi [Studies on Art and Architecture], 8 (Tallinn: Teaduste Akadeemia Kirjastus, 1995), 129. Mai Levin, Eduard Wiiralt (1898–1954) (Tallinn: Eesti Kunstimuuseum, 1998), 59. See Eduard Wiiralt’s letter to his parents from Dresden, fall 1922, Alfred Rõude archive, Art Museum of Estonia. Jaan Grünberg, “Wiiralt Pariisis” [Wiiralt in Paris], in Eduard Wiiralt (1898–1954): Mälestusteos [Eduard Wiiralt (1898–1954): Festschrift] (Lund: Eesti Kirjanike Kooperatiiv, 1955), 15. Grünberg, “Wiiralt Pariisis,” 15. Mai Levin, Eduard Wiiralt. Loodus ja nägemus, Inimsed ja fantaasiad [Eduard Wiiralt: Nature and Vision, People and Phantasies] (Tallinn: Kunst, 1983), n.p.

188

PART II

Scandinavia

9 EXPRESSIONISM IN DENMARK Art and Discourse Torben Jelsbak

It is a commonplace in modern art historiography to view expressionism as an art movement originating in Germany. In such a narrative, the German artists of the group Die Brücke (The Bridge), formed in Dresden in 1905, and Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky’s Munich-based group of German and Russian artists appearing in the 1912 almanac Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), are usually regarded as the first collective manifestations of expressionism as an art movement. Yet, if we trace the emergence and early history of the concept, it is well known that the first uses of the term “expressionism” in the European art discourse, around 1910–1911, were made outside of Germany and not in reference to German but mostly French art, more specifically referring to “postimpressionist” and fauvist painters, such as Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, and André Derain, among others.1 Apparently, the term was introduced by Roger Fry, in 1910, in reference to the pivotal exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists held at the Crafton Galleries in London, between November 8, 1910, and January 11, 1911. From 1912 onwards, the term was taken over by Herwarth Walden, the art impresario and owner of the Berlin-based gallery Der Sturm, as a buzzword to support his extensive exhibition program of international avant-garde art during the following decade. In the context of Der Sturm, “expressionism” was used as an inter­national umbrella term for the various schools in early twentieth-century European modernist painting—from French fauvism, cubism, and orphism to the painters of Der Blaue Reiter and Italian futurism. The multivalent international character of expressionism is important to keep in mind with regard to its history in Denmark. The short history of Danish expressionism constitutes a discursive battlefield of rivaling artists, ideas, and influences, involving not only questions of art and aesthetics but also of politics and national identities. To narrate this history requires an extended view of artistic practice that does not restrain itself to aesthetic analysis and comparisons of artists and art works but also takes into account the sociological role of networks and groupings, art dealers, patrons, and other social agents of the art field as well as the broader historical-political context. The following essay will provide an outline of the most important events and agents in the reception and transmission of expressionist art and discourses in Denmark.

191

Torben Jelsbak

A “Paris of the North” This history is essentially linked to the unique situation of Copenhagen during the First World War. Like its neighboring Scandinavian countries Sweden and Norway, Denmark remained neutral during the war. This fact together with a number of other factors created the background for a short-lived modernist boom within the Copenhagen art scene. Because of an economic upturn in certain sectors of society, the art market was flourishing, and the city boasted a great number of exhibitions and other manifestations of modernist art. Not wholly unlike Zürich in neutral Switzerland, which became the epicenter of Dadaism in 1916, Copenhagen, for a brief moment, gained the status of a “Paris of the North,”2 serving as a meeting point for Scandinavian artists and international modernist impulses. During the war, a number of important private collections of European (mostly French) modernist painting were established in the Danish capital. As a consequence, a large number of today canonized masterworks by major modernist artists, such as Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse, Derain, and Picasso, were made accessible to a Copenhagen audience and also served as a pivotal source of inspiration for local experimental artists. As this list of artists’ names may also suggest, the Danish discourse on expressionism was to a very high degree guided by French models and sources. Furthermore, the Berlin Sturm gallery, under the direction of Herwarth Walden, was present in the city with two shows of European avant-garde artists, one in 1917 and another one in 1918. Other exhibitions in Copenhagen during the war featured leading Swedish and Norwegian expressionist painters, such as Per Krohg and Isaac Grünewald, both former students of the Académie Matisse in Paris. Finally, the situation led to the emergence of local avant-garde groups of experimental artists, such as Grønningen (established in 1915) and the group of young radical painters and poets gathered around the magazine Klingen (The Blade, 1917−1920). The activities reached a climax at the 1918 Artists’ Autumn Exhibition, the Danish Salon des Indépendants, which became a succès de scandale, leading to a long and heated debate as to the causes and meanings of the “new art.” This debate was initiated by a passionate opponent of modernist art, the aged bacteriologist Carl Julius Salomonsen, in a series of public lectures and chronicle articles in which he developed the idea that expressionism—or “dysmorphism,” as he called it—was to be seen as a symptom of an infectious mental disorder. Salomonsen’s intervention contributed to the public hype surrounding the new art movement, thus encouraging some of its proponents to organize a series of “expressionist soirées” (Ekspressionistaftener) taking place in the major Danish cities of Copenhagen and Aarhus in February and March 1919. The year 1919 also saw the publication of the first Danish monograph on expressionism in painting, authored by the poet and co-editor of Klingen, Otto Gelsted. These events constitute the peak of the short-lived expressionist moment in Danish art. In the years to follow, modernist positions were quickly abandoned by leading artists in favor of a general retour de l’ordre in art and aesthetic thinking. The term “expressionism” subsequently migrated into the literary field, where it was adopted as a catchword for a new avant-garde of young poets associated with Walden’s Sturm organization. The following outline, however, will focus on the early reception and transmission of expressionism within the field of the visual arts.

Concepts of Expressionism: Interiority and Decoration According to a common definition, expressionism is an art that renders subjective modes and psychological feelings rather than depicting an outer reality. As the Encyclopædia Britannica tells us, expressionism is an “artistic style in which the artist seeks to depict not objective reality but 192

Expressionism in Denmark

rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse within a person.”3 To illustrate such a notion, Edward Munch’s 1893 painting The Scream (Skriket) is normally brought up as an early example of an expressionist work of art. By its very motif, Munch’s emblematic painting evokes a psychological feeling of anxiety or despair, which has often been claimed as a pivotal element of expressionist art. The popular notion of expressionism as an art charged with feelings or subjective emotions may be traced back to the expressionist discourse of the 1910s. Yet, this psychological way of describing the revolution of the aesthetic language of early twentieth-century painting was not the only theory available in this period. The expressionist discourses of the 1910s covers a variety of conflicting concepts and theories pointing to the multivalent international character of the art movement. With regard to the history of Danish expressionism, it is necessary to distinguish at least two different concepts of expressionism. On the one side, the spiritual and philosophical concept promoted by Walden and Der Sturm; on the other, a more formal concept that may be derived from the discourse of French postimpressionist and fauvist painting, with Henri Matisse as a key figure. A pivotal figure in the introduction and proliferation of avant-garde art and discourses in the Scandinavian countries was Herwarth Walden, the German art impresario and owner of the Berlin-based gallery Der Sturm. Walden’s activities in Scandinavia date back to the summer of 1912, his first exhibition in Copenhagen, where he presented the Italian futurist painters: Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini (a show which was taken over by his gallery after initial displays in Paris and London).4 In 1913, he returned with an exhibition of the “Cubists and Expressionists,” featuring Gabriele Münter, Marianne Werefkin, Henri le Fauconnier, and Raoul Dufy. Although these exhibitions did not have any major impact on Danish art, they contributed to the introduction and dissemination of Walden’s concept of “expressionism” in the Danish public. To support his exhibition program, Walden had developed his own peculiar concept of expressionism, stressing the spiritual or ideological background of the new art movement. In his view, expressionism was not just a new aesthetic style or school in painting, but also, and most essentially, a manifestation of a new philosophy of life, a new “Weltanschauung” or “Weltgefühl” (world view), directed against the secular ideologies of the nineteenth century—materialism, positivism, and rationalism. Inspired by Wassily Kandinsky’s ideas of the “spiritual” roots of abstract art and Wilhelm Worringer’s psychological theory of visual style, Walden offered a philosophical explanation of the genesis of the expressionist artwork. According to this theory, the expressionist artwork was generated by “inner necessity” and should be conceived as an expression or “vision” of the artist’s inner feelings.5 By stressing the interiority (Innerlichkeit) of artistic expression and by using the notion of “spirit” (Geist) to signal the specificity and novelty of abstract art, Walden’s theory of expressionism was rooted in a modern German tradition of romanticist and idealist aesthetics. Another influential contribution to this German appropriation of the concept was Paul Fechter’s 1914 monograph Expressionismus, which offered the first synthetic history of expressionism, also evoking the “spiritual” background and “Germanic” roots of the new art movement. In Fechter’s account, the expressive instinct of expressionism was explicitly set up in opposition to French impressionism and French art in general. In his vision, expressionist art reflected a peculiar Germanic “feeling of life” (Lebensgefühl) rooted “in the ancient metaphysical need” of the Germanic peoples.6 Leading Danish modernist artists and art critics regarded the spiritual and metaphysical undertones of Walden’s concept and the German discourse on expressionism with utmost skepticism. In general, Danish artists and critics refrained from such philosophical speculations as to the “inner” motivations or cultural explanations of the formal rupture in early twentieth-century 193

Torben Jelsbak

painting. Instead, the Danish discourse on expressionism was dominated by a strongly formalist approach and a preoccupation with the purely aesthetic problems of pictorial form and the plastic qualities of painting.7 As the leading Danish expressionist painter Harald Giersing (1881–1927) maintained in an unpublished essay on “Picture Value” in 1906: “Plane, color, line and space constitute the material of painting and its real essence.”8 Giersing’s argument was directed against the tradition of naturalist art and aesthetics still prevailing in leading institutions of the Danish art world in the early twentieth century. In a series of theoretical essays and programmatic statements published prior to his own breakthrough as an artist, he developed this aesthetic position claiming the primacy of the plastic qualities of art––as opposed to “Stimmung,” psychology, and the mimetic dimension of painting. Based on this position, Giersing also argued that “the so-called decorative art comes closer to the bone than mimetic art.”9 This way of aesthetic thinking had its most clear equivalent in contemporary French postimpressionist and fauvist art and aesthetics. A particularly important spokesman was Henri Matisse, the leader of the Parisian fauve painters, whose essay “Notes d’un peintre” (Notes of a Painter), published in French in 1908 and in a German translation in 1909, became a major influence for the discussion of expressionism in the Scandinavian context. While also evoking the subjective element of artistic creation, Matisse’s seminal essay presented a more formal and technical approach to the issue than Walden’s theory and the German discourse on expressionism and stressed that “expression” was first of all a matter of composition and “decorative” organization of the picture plane.10 With his insistence on the aesthetic autonomy of painting vis-à-vis its mimetic functions, Giersing had also to clarify his position with regard to the aesthetics of abstract painting as represented by Wassily Kandinsky and others. Giersing was well aware that his preoccupation with and prioritization of the formal values of painting could lead to abstraction, but he never carried out this solution in his own work and remained a true exponent of figurative painting throughout his career (Plate 13). When asked to defend this position, he did so by making reference to “the decorative” as the leading aesthetic principle: “Real subjects offer a much richer decorative material than mere colors and arabesques. Any living model holds a stronger decorative incentive for a painter then a dead motif. Therefore, the greatest painters have always depicted human beings.”11 Once again, Giersing’s idea of the “decorative incentive” points to his close affiliation with the aesthetics of Matisse and the French fauvists. In a review of the 1906 Salon des Indépendants, the critic François Crucy described the fauve painters as “those who ask of the spectacle of nature pretexts to realize decorative composition” and, correspondingly, Louis Vauxelles praised the fauvist landscape painters for their aesthetic ability to “see decoratively.”12 The Danish discourse on expressionism was guided by this French discourse on the aesthetics of early modernist painting, which viewed it as being essentially about composition and “decorative” organization of the picture plane. As will be shown, this formalist orientation of the Danish artists was coupled with an outspoken preference for French modernist art and culture in general. For Giersing and his generation of painters, French art was considered superior to any other art, and Paris was the desirable place to go for young artists to pursue their artistic training. The tradition of “modern” French art, including Eugène Delacroix, Courbet, Édouard Manet, Paul Cezanne, and others, was as Giersing formulated it in 1909, “a mountain that our artists must climb, if they want to progress.”13 In 1906–1907, Giersing traveled to the French capital. His works from the Paris period reflect the influences he drew from the French postimpressionists, the late pointillist style of Seurat, the figurative style of Gauguin, and the pre-cubism of Cézanne. On the basis of these models, Giersing was to develop his own version of expressionism, resulting in a subtle fusion of formal devices from fauvism and cubism.

194

Expressionism in Denmark

The primacy of form in Giersing’s aesthetics implied that he did not seek “modern” urban motifs in his paintings. Most often, he committed himself to a formal investigation of wellestablished genres, such as portrait painting (including a series of self-portraits) and landscape painting. However, in a series of coloristic figure paintings from around 1917–1919 he deliberately adopted modern urban motifs, such as dancers or football players. In most cases these motifs were derived from photographs found in the contemporary illustrated press. An example is Fokin and Fokina (1918; Figure 9.1), based on a press photograph of the two Russian dancers Mikhail Fokin and Vera Fokina, who gave a series of performances in a private Copenhagen theatre in 1918. In his painting Giersing exposes the motif of the original black-and-white photo to “fauve” coloration, a dynamic cubist fragmentation of the background into flat, decorative planes of arbitrary colors. A work such as Fokin and Fokina is emblematic for the decorative formalism and eminently eclectic character of Danish expressionism.

The Danish Art Market During the First World War As previously noted, the sudden rise of modernist activity within the Copenhagen art scene during the war was due to a complex interplay of a set of political, economic, and cultural factors. Like its two neighboring Scandinavian countries, Sweden and Norway, Denmark

Figure 9.1  Harald Giersing, Fokin og Fokina (Fokin and Fokina), 1918, oil on fiberboard, 150 × 115 cm, private collection

195

Torben Jelsbak

remained neutral during the war; yet for several reasons, the character of Denmark’s neutrality was a politically delicate issue. One obvious reason was Denmark’s central geographical position as a link between the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, which gave the country a particular geopolitical and strategic importance to the belligerent nations. At the outbreak of the war, the Danish government adopted a policy of strict neutrality; at the same time, however, the Danish government displayed a great willingness to adjust to German interests and needs, for instance accepting the German navy mining of Danish territory in 1915. As the historian Carsten Holbraad concludes in his analysis of Danish security policy, Danish neutrality was in fact pro-German.14 The Danish government pursued a strategy of accommodating Germany as much as possible while simultaneously trying to exploit the advantages of being a neutral state. One advantage of this was economic, as Denmark was substantially benefitting from shipping and commerce— Danish merchants were able to trade food and other goods with both England and Germany. This situation formed the basis for a sudden economic upturn and increasing affluence in certain sectors of society. In contemporary public discourse, this was often referred to as the “Goulash era”— pointing to the Danish export of low-quality tinned food products to the belligerent nations.15 This situation provided favorable conditions for cultural and artistic production; an important aspect of Copenhagen’s attraction as a Nordic art center during the war was the presence of a number of wealthy industrialists and merchants who acted as private collectors and patrons of young experimental art. A particularly prominent and exemplary figure was the merchant Christian Tetzen-Lund, who, between 1916 and 1920, built up a significant collection of international, mostly French, modernist art, including a substantial number of masterpieces by Cézanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, Derain, and Picasso, among others.16 Tetzen-Lund’s collection has been described as probably the best private collection of modern art in the world around 1920.17 Between 1916 and 1917, Tetzen-Lund acquired more than fifty works by modern French painters, including Delacroix, Courbet, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Seurat, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, and Braque, among others. In 1920, the collection contained more than twenty paintings by Picasso—including cubist masterpieces such as Violin and Grapes (Céret and Sorgue, 1912, today at the MoMA) and Violin (Violin—Jolie Eva, 1912, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart) and a corresponding number of seminal works by Matisse—among them The Joy of Life (Le Bonheur de vivre, 1905–1906, The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia). Tetzen-Lund’s collection, installed in his private residence, was opened to the general public once a week from 1917 on and remained accessible until 1924, thus offering the Copenhagen audience an opportunity to gain a first-hand experience of some of the most important artistic innovations in early twentieth-century painting. As such, the collection also provided inspiration to young Danish and Nordic artists until its dissolution and sale in the late 1920s. In addition to his role as collector of international avant-garde art, Tetzen-Lund also acted as supporter and patron for young and experimental Scandinavian artists, including the Swedish painter and leader of the Swedish “Mattisists,” Isaac Grünewald (1889–1946), the Norwegian painter Per Krohg (1889–1985), and young and upcoming Danish painters, such as Vilhelm Lundstrøm (1893–1950), and Karl Larsen (1897–1977), who will be discussed below. Another significant private collector was Wilhelm Hansen, a Danish insurance agent and councilor of state who, during the war, also built up an important collection of mostly French nineteenth-century naturalism and impressionism, including major works by Corot, Delacroix, Courbet, Cézanne, and Gauguin. Hansen’s collection became accessible to the public with the establishment of the Ordrupgaard Museum, in 1918; however, like the Tetzen-Lund collection, this collection was also dissolved in 1923, when Denmark was hit by a financial crisis. 196

Expressionism in Denmark

The principal part of Hansen’s collection was sold on the international art market. Only a small share of the paintings of both collections remained in Denmark. The emergence and particular bias of the two collections discussed here point to a fundamental characteristic of the cultural orientation and aesthetic taste of wartime Denmark, namely its strong preference for French art and culture, and conversely, its rejection or ignorance of anything German. Although in political terms, Denmark’s policy of neutrality could be said to be in some sense pro-German, the Danish art market in the first decades of the twentieth century may be described as an “aesthetic province” of France, to use an expression of the French literary sociologist Pascale Casanova.18 Although challenged in part by a cosmopolitan stance, which was promoted by Walden’s Sturm gallery, the majority of Danish artists, intellectuals, and other members of the Danish cultural elite still saw the tradition of French art and culture as superior to any other. Hence, it was a normal procedure in contemporary Danish art criticism to evaluate any art work or exhibition according to the extent to which it met the ideals and standards of French art. An example of this tendency can be found in the critical reception of the 1912 exhibition of the Italian futurist painters, who were disdained for their formlessness, bad taste, and lack of “Gallic grace.”19 Another example was the reception of the 1913 Sturm exhibition of Cubists and Expressionists: the critics clearly favored Dufy and Le Fauconnier, the two French painters in the show, as being “authentically French”—at the expense of Gabriele Münter and Marianne Werefkin, the two non-French artists in the exhibition.20 Toward the end of the war, this historically and politically motivated dislike of German art and culture became even more pronounced—also within the Copenhagen milieu of expressionist artists. Regardless of the insistence on the purity of art and the autonomy of aesthetic perception prevailing in the Danish art discourse, Danish expressionism was still embedded in the political context and power structures of wartime Europe. The tension between French and German influences in the Danish discourses on expressionism reflects this fact.

Danish “French-Style” Expressionism An important event in the emergence of expressionism as a collective movement and aesthetic position in Danish art was the creation of the magazine Klingen (The Blade) in 1917 (Figure 9.2). The magazine was initiated and founded by the painter and ceramic artist Axel Salto (1889–1961), who was also its chief editor. From its inception, Klingen served as a social platform and programmatic mouthpiece for a new generation of young radical artists, who went on to provoke a scandal at the 1918 Artists’ Autumn Exhibition in Copenhagen. The list of collaborators included wellknown members of the first generation of expressionist painters, such as Giersing (1881–1927) and Olaf Rude (1886–1957), and new and up-and-coming expressionist artists of the next generation, such as Karl Larsen (1897–1977) and Vilhelm Lundstrøm (1893–1950). The magazine also featured a high number of artists from fellow Scandinavian countries, the most prominent being the Norwegian Per Krogh and Isaac Grünewald, the leader of the Swedish expressionists. Parallel to its function as a social platform for the Copenhagen milieu of artists, Klingen also served as an important channel for a comprehensive import of European—essentially French— avant-garde art and aesthetics. Amédée Ozenfant’s Parisian cubist magazine L’Élan (1915–1917) served as a model for the publication, and the editorial agenda and contents of Klingen reflected Salto’s French orientation. The first volume featured interviews with Matisse and Picasso and longer portrait articles on Cézanne and Degas, among others; the third volume included a full Danish translation of Matisse’s “Notes d’un peintre.” Furthermore, the influence of L’Élan was also emphasized by the martial rhetoric of the magazine. The second issue from October 1917 included a forceful statement proclaiming Klingen’s artistic agenda: 197

Torben Jelsbak

Like a powerful phalanx the “new art” advances: Frenchmen, Russians, Germans, Scandinavians, Poles, Spaniards, artists of all countries are on the march. Art stands at the entrance to the new, rich land of plenty, that means it is about to rediscover the lost land. The “new art” cultivates the absolute decorative use of color, the purity of form, the severity of drawing—the strength of the eye and the skill of the hand. Expressionism, simultanism, cubism, totalism are the inscriptions on the flags that are flying in honor of the great, old art, of the Antique and the Renaissance. It is becoming more and more obvious that artistic ability is on the increase among young artists in this country. The fortuitous, non-artistic naturalism of the 1880s is now being brushed aside by our art.21 Here one sees the perception of the European avant-gardes as a joint international “phalanx” uniting artists and isms across the frontiers of the First World War. At the same time, the statement reflects the strong emphasis on formal questions prevailing in the Copenhagen milieu of painters: the “decorative” use of color and the “purity of form” were the key elements of the new aesthetics. The peculiarly classicist notion of “the new art” as a kind of recuperation or continuation of “the great, old art, of the Antique and the Renaissance” may seem odd in the context of an avant-garde manifesto. Yet, it makes perfect sense in the Danish context in which Klingen appeared, because the journal was conceived in opposition to the naturalist aesthetics

Figure 9.2  Otte Sköld, cover image of Klingen 2, no. 3 (1918).  Otte Sköld/VISDA.dk

198

Expressionism in Denmark

still dominating within leading institutions of the contemporary Danish art scene, such as the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and the established salons. The pictorial style of the Klingen artists may best be described as a decorative fusion of fauvism and cubism, having as its main aesthetic ideals and sources of inspiration the pre-cubism of Cézanne, the fauvism of the Matisse school, and high cubism of Picasso and Braque. A significant example of Danish expressionism is Karl Larsen’s debut work “A Staircase” (1917; Figure 9.3), which received much attention at the Artists’ Autumn Exhibition of 1917. This work has often been canonized as the very image of Danish expressionism. It depicts the silhouetted figure of a violinist in the process of climbing a staircase; the perspective is distorted, so that banisters, steps, and walls seem to incline in all directions. Stylistic devices from both analytic and synthetic cubism are used in conjunction to restructure the representation and challenge the perception of pictorial space. Larsen’s expressionist eclecticism also allowed for a subtle use of collage devices and new materials in painting, as the banisters in the picture consisted of shoelace mounted onto the canvas. Vilhelm Lundstrøm, the most radical and provocative of the artists in the Copenhagen milieu, developed his own variant of cubist counter-relief in a series of constructions consisting of rough materials such as frayed pieces of wooden crates (Figure 9.4). His “crate-wood pictures,” as they were baptized by the contemporary press, constituted a slap in the face of public taste and created a public scandal at the 1918 Autumn Exhibition. Critics saw Lundstrøm’s counter-reliefs as a gesture of vandalism, a violation of the very rules of art, and during the exhibition the works

Figure 9.3  Karl Larsen, En Trappegang (Staircase), 1917, oil on paper on canvas, 95 × 63 cm, private collection, reproduced from Klingen 1, no. 3 (1917).  Karl Larsen/VISDA.dk

199

Torben Jelsbak

Figure 9.4  Vilhelm Lundstrøm, Komposition 2 (Composition 2), 1918, oil on wood, 113.5 × 81.5 cm, Statens Museum for Kunst, National Gallery of Denmark.  Vilhelm Lundstrøm/VISDA.dk

themselves were vandalized by visitors who removed pieces of the compositions, thus forcing the artist to repeatedly patch up his work. The seemingly radical impetus of Lundstrøm’s gesture as an almost Dadaist attack on the integrity of the artwork was downplayed by the artist himself in a later interview in which he explained the intention of this and other works as an attempt to employ cubist principles in order to render the pictures entirely anonymous or impersonal because we believed that the personal, like the narrative, was of no consequence to the impact of the image, and so it was something to be avoided. We sought to work our way towards simplicity and painterly order.22

Expressionism as Recuperation of Classicism The strong formalist doctrine governing the Danish discourse of expressionism was furthermore emphasized by the poet, literary critic, and editor of Klingen Otto Gelsted in his 1919 monograph Ekspressionisme (Expressionism). This richly illustrated book was conceived partly as a response to Salomonsen’s dysmorphism thesis and partly as an introduction to the painters of the Klingen circle and their international precursors. From a conceptual perspective, Gelsted’s account of expressionism is interesting because it preserves a prewar understanding of expressionism, which primarily refers to the triadic canon of classic modernism: Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso. His discursive explanation of the phenomenon was no less interesting. Drawing on 200

Expressionism in Denmark

modern theories of perceptual psychology, Gelsted interpreted the formal language of expressionism as a manifestation of a basic human urge to obtain “unity,” “clarity,” and “balance” in the perception of reality.23 His basic argument was that human perception is not only due to purely receptive impressions, but also rests on productive mental forces (ideas, memories, or mental “settings”). The task of art, he argued, thus should not be to reproduce nature, but to form the artist’s experience in accordance with the logic of the medium. In Cézanne, he saw “the great representative” of the “urge towards balance and totality”24 in painting; Picasso he praised for “the most precise and absolute structure of pictorial space.”25 Thus, by explaining the formal language of expressionism and cubism as a consequence of the inherent logic of human perception, Gelsted delivered a rationalist defense of the new art movements which was directed against Salomonsen’s accusations of insanity. In accordance with the programmatic statements appearing in Klingen, Gelsted viewed expressionism as a potential recovery or restoration of the “great” tradition of art after a period of naturalist decline. In this respect, there was some accordance between his position and Walden and the German expressionists’ contemporaneous call to spiritual revolution. However, Gelsted’s conception of the psychological motivations of the new art left no room for either spiritual transcendence or metaphysical anxiety. Rather, it was governed by essentially classicist—though he preferred the term “cubist”—notions of clarity, unity, and balance. In a recent dissertation, the Danish art historian Lennart Gottlieb draws the conclusion that Danish modernism/expressionism was “ambivalent and harmony seeking,” even its most innovative instances. On the other hand, one can argue that the classicist quest for decorativeness and harmonious composition was a common trend in early twentieth-century European modernist painting, a point that has been demonstrated, for example, by Roger Paul Benjamin in reference to the landscape paintings of Matisse, Maurice Denis, and other fauvist painters.26 Gelsted’s strongly formalist conception of art and his antiseptic attitude toward any kind of spiritualism or metaphysics was further developed in his 1920 essay “On expressionism and cubism in literature.” By this time, it was no longer possible to maintain the prewar understanding of expressionism and ignore its spiritual and metaphysical connotations. The result was that expressionism was now abandoned in favor of cubism: It is not romanticism or intuition that we need, neither in science nor in art, but clarity as to the conditions of art and science. That is why I see in cubism a movement which is healthy and methodologically correct; while expressionism is symbolic, literary and romantic, cubism has radically tried to cleanse the art of painting from all symbolism and narration in favor of a systematic and badly needed work with the specific painterly values, line, color, form, pictorial balance.27

Der Sturm in Copenhagen The significance of Herwarth Walden as a key player in the introduction and dissemination of international avant-garde art and aesthetics in Scandinavia is well known. As already mentioned, this dates back to 1912 when he showed a first exhibition of the Italian futurist painters in Copenhagen. In the following decade, Walden presented another four exhibitions in the Danish capital: the above-mentioned Cubist and Expressionists (1913), the Sturm Artists (1917), International Art: Cubists and Expressionists (1918), and a final exhibition with the same title, which was held in September 1923. Parallel to these activities, he was eager to establish contacts with local modernist artists, but for a variety of reasons, he did not succeed in establishing a substantial Copenhagen network. His only close collaborator in Copenhagen before 1922 and 201

Torben Jelsbak

the only Danish visual artists to appear in Der Sturm was Robert Storm Petersen (1882–1949), a multi-talented artist, cartoonist, and comedian, who contributed to the reception of the exhibition of the Italian futurists by publishing a lampooning cartoon in a Danish journal.28 In 1913, two woodcuts by Storm Petersen appeared in Der Sturm,29 and subsequently he hosted Walden’s 1917 show of Sturm Artists, which took place on the premises of his nightclub and cabaret The Spider (Edderkoppen) in central Copenhagen. This exhibition, which included drawings, watercolors, and graphic works by Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Oscar Kokoschka, Franz Marc, Lyonel Feininger, and Gabriele Münter, was unfavorably received by the Copenhagen art critics. Yet it also furnished the basis for a certain rapprochement between the Berlin gallery and the Klingen circle of painters. On the occasion of the exhibition, Harald Giersing wrote a short commentary expressing his admiration for Kandinsky and the artists of Der Blaue Reiter while mocking the “naïve nonchalance” and ignorance characterizing the reception of the exhibition in the Danish press.30 This declaration of sympathy on behalf of the Klingen group may have encouraged Walden to initiate a cooperation between his gallery and the Copenhagen painters. Thus, in January 1918, an exhibition of the Danish expressionist painters in the Berlin Sturm gallery was announced in Klingen. The exhibition was scheduled for March; however, in March Klingen informed its readers that the exhibition had been postponed and, in the end, it was canceled, presumably because of the Danish painters’ anxiety about the political connotations of such a venue. To the Scandinavian public, Walden was officially known as a tireless advocate for “pure” and “autonomous” international art. Yet, later scholarship has revealed that his activities in Scandinavia during the First World War also included a targeted use of his autonomous “expressionist” art as a medium for a subtle kind of wartime propaganda. In an 1995 article, which was based on findings in the newly opened state archives of the former German Democratic Republic, Kate Winskell revealed that from 1915 onwards, Walden had clandestine contact with the so-called Zentralstelle für Auslandsdienst (Central Office for Foreign Services), a department under the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs responsible for distributing pro-German materials in neutral countries while also monitoring political discussions.31 As a response to the failed joint venture with Klingen, Walden contacted Germany’s ambassador in Denmark and suggested that an exhibition was sent to Copenhagen instead. The exhibition, International Art: Expressionists and Cubists, was presented in Copenhagen in the autumn of 1918 and was the Sturm gallery’s largest and most ambitious show in Scandinavia. The exhibition was facilitated by support from the German Central Office, which provided Walden with the necessary import and export concessions. It included 133 prewar works by German, Russian, French, Spanish, Czech, Dutch, and Swedish avant-garde artists associated with the Berlin gallery. As Winskell demonstrates in her article, Walden conceived of this exhibition as an act of cultural propaganda that would demonstrate to the Danish public the cultural liberalism and freedom of artistic expression in wartime Germany.32 To reassure the German authorities, Walden even argued that the exhibition was arranged to feature German art, i.e., works by such artists as Rudolf Bauer, Georg Muche, Gabriele Münter, and Franz Marc. As an attempt, however, to propagate a more positive perception of Germany in Denmark, Walden’s exhibition was doomed to fail. The increasingly hostile attitude to Walden in the Copenhagen milieu became explicit in Klingen’s critical response to the exhibition. In a detailed commentary on the exhibited works, the critic Poul Henningsen praised the exhibition’s very small section of Parisian cubists (Picasso, Léger, Gleizes, and Metzinger) and Russian and Czech artists (Chagall, Jawlensky, and Kulbin). Mostly, however, he was concerned about the “lack of talent” and “bad taste” in the major part of the exhibited works, especially those by the German and Swedish artists of the Sturm gallery, such as Bauer, Muche, Münter, and Walden’s wife, 202

Expressionism in Denmark

Nell Walden, who was also featured in the exhibition with a number of paintings. These observations led the critic to the following conclusion: Once more, one has rich opportunity to wonder about how highly superior French art is to German or Swedish art, and one is led to ponder how much the arts depend on great people, as people depend on the arts. The soil is obviously not favorable to talented painters in Germany.33 Henningsen’s dismissal of Walden’s attempts to promote modern German and northern European art as being equal to contemporary French and Russian art was just one of many examples of the strong anti-German sentiment prevailing in the Danish cultural milieu at the time. This culturally motivated antagonism toward Germany was, of course, not only a matter of culture and aesthetics, but also reflected the international political situation and power structures in Europe in the autumn of 1918, a time when Germany had not only lost the war but was also being held responsible for causing the great losses and damages of the First World War. After the war, Walden was to find a new group of dedicated supporters and collaborators in the milieu of young communist artists and student activists who gathered around the so-called Copenhagen New Student Society (DNSS). Prominent figures of this group were Harald Landt Momberg and Rudolf Broby-Johansen, two young poets who both made their debuts in 1922, each with a collection of expressionist poetry that was strongly influenced by the poetics of Der Sturm. Momberg’s Parole was a collection of abstract expressionist poems;34 Broby’s BLOD (BLOOD) represented a harsh expressionist realism that projected a grotesque capitalist universe of war, exploitation, and prostitution somewhat equal to Georg Grosz’s contemporary cartoons of bourgeois decadence.35 Both books were unfavorably received by the public. Momberg’s abstract sound poetry was disdained as being a product of “mere German literary militarism,”36 whereas Broby’s book became a public scandal: It was immediately banned and confiscated by the police and its author was charged with pornography in the Copenhagen City Court. The culmination of the process was Broby’s “Speech in defense of BLOD,” given in the City Court on January 23, 1923.37 Written and performed as a veritable manifesto, it offered a concise introduction to the aesthetic principles and political agenda behind his debut work. Broby insisted on the autonomy of the “pure” work of art, with reference to Kandinsky’s concept of the “inner necessity” of artistic creation,38 but at the same time he characterized the collection of poems as a political and revolutionary “gesture of despair” against the hypocritical “ethics” of bourgeois society.39 In the end, Broby was sentenced to fourteen days in prison. The case was later reviewed in the National High Court, and following a number of statements made by literary authorities, the sentence suspended; however, the confiscation and public ban of the book was maintained. In 1923, poems by both Momberg and Broby were published—in Danish—in Der Sturm.40 Later in the same year, the collaboration between Walden and the Copenhagen circle of artists was further developed through the organization of two exhibitions. In August 1923, the long-planned project of an exhibition of the Danish expressionists at the Berlin Sturm gallery was finally realized. This show of Die Jungen Dänen (The Young Danes) included works by members of the Klingen circle, such as Olaf Rude, Jais Nielsen, O. V. Borch, and Mogens Lorentzen, along with up-and-coming young artists from the DNSS milieu, including Eugène de Sala, and Gunnar Hansen, who presented non-figurative graphic works in the geometric style of international constructivism. In Copenhagen, Walden’s fifth and last Copenhagen exhibition, International Art, opened at The Ole Haslund House in September of the same year. Retrospective in character, this show primarily featured prewar expressionist and cubist works by Sturm artists, including Bauer, Chagall, Delaunay, Gleizes, and Klee. Yet, the exhibition also 203

Torben Jelsbak

covered new trends and innovations in contemporary avant-garde art, such as Kurt Schwitters’s Dadaist collages and the abstract constructivism of László Moholy Nagy and László Péri.41 None of these exhibitions, however, managed to attract any major attention, and none had any impact on Danish art. In the early 1920s, modernist art had lost its momentum with the Danish public as well as in the art scene. Together with Broby’s 1923 speech defending expressionist art and poetry, the two exhibitions marked the end of the expressionist moment in Danish art and literature.

Notes 1 Cf. Marit Werenskiold, The Concept of Expressionism (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1984); Donald E. Gordon, Expressionism: Art and Idea (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1987); Timothy O. Benson, “Expressionism in Germany and France,” in Expressionism in Germany and France: From Matisse to the Blue Rider (Kunsthaus Zürich/LACMA, 2014), 12–22. 2 Hanne Abildgaard, “The Nordic Paris,” in The Avant-Garde in European Art 1909–1919, ed. Dorthe Aagesen (Copenhagen: Statens Museum for Kunst, 2002), 172–187. See also Dorthe Aagesen, “Art Metropolis for a Day,” A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1900–1925, ed. Hubert van den Berg et al. (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012), 299–324. 3 “Expressionism,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, last accessed 30 April, 2016, http://global.britannica.com/art/ Expressionism. 4 Cf. Torben Jelsbak, “‘Lifeless Glaciers’: The History of Futurism in Denmark,” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies vol. 6 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 147–168. 5 Herwarth Walden, Einblick in Kunst: Expressionismus, Futurismus, Kubismus [Insight into Art: Expressionism, Futurism, Cubism] (Berlin:Verlag Der Sturm, 1917), 18–19. 6 Paul Fechter, Der Expressionismus [Expressionism] (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1914), 21, 33. 7 Cf. Torben Jelsbak, Ekspressionisme: Modernismens formelle gennembrud i dansk malerkunst og poesi [Expressionism:The Formal Breakthrough of Modernism in Danish Painting and Poetry] (Copenhagen: Spring, 2005) and Lennart Gottlieb, Modernisme og maleri: Modernismebegrebet, modernismeforskningen og det modernistiske i dansk maleri omkring 1910–1930 [Modernism and Painting: The Concept of Modernism, Modernism Studies and Modernism in Danish Painting around 1910–1930] (Århus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2011). 8 Harald Giersing, “Billedværdi” [Picture Value], in Lennart Gottlieb, Giersing: Maler, kritiker, menneske [Giersing: Painter, Critic, Man] (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1995), 294–296. 9 Gottlieb, Giersing, 296. 10 Henri Matisse, “Notes d’un peintre” [Notes of a Painter], in Henri Matisse, Écrit et propos sur l’art [Writing and Talking about Art] (Paris: Hermann, 1972), 42. Engl. trans. In Herschel B. Chipp (ed.), Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1968), 131–132. 11 “Reale emner . . . byder et langt rigere dekorativt Materiale end alene Farver og Arabesker . . . Ethvert levende Forbillede indeholder et stærkere dekorativt Incitament for en Maler end et livløst. Derfor har de største Malere malet Mennesker”. Harald Giersing: Maleri, Ord, Musik [Harald Giersing: Painting, Words, Music] (Copenhagen: Danish National Gallery, 1995), n.p. 12 Benson, “German and French Expressionism,” 17. 13 Lennart Gottlieb,“Introduction,” Modernisme: Maleriets fornyelse 1908–1941 [Modernism:The Innovation of Painting 1908–1941], ed. Lennart Gottlieb (Aarhus: Aros, 2012), 24. 14 Carsten Holbraad, Danish Neutrality: A Study in the Foreign Policy of a Small State (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 51. 15 “En Gullaschtid,” Denmark 1914–1918, last accessed 8 May, 2017, http://danmark1914-18.dk/histo rier/en-gullaschtid. 16 Cf. Gottlieb, “Tetzen-Lunds samling” [The Collection of Tetzen-Lund], Kunst og museum [Art and Museum] (1984). 17 Gottlieb, “Introduction,” 25. 18 Pascale Casanova, La république mondiale des lettres [The World Republic of Letters] (Paris: Seuil, 1999, 148). See also: Casanova, “Paris, Capitale littéraire”, Capitales culturelles, capitales symboliques: Paris et les expériences européennes (XVIIIe–XIXe siècle) [Cultural Capitals, Symbolic Capitals: Paris and the European

204

Expressionism in Denmark

19 2 0 21

22

23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

Experiences], eds. Christophe Charle and Daniel Roche (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2002), 289–296. Cf. Raaschou-Nilsen, “Storm over København” [Storm over Copenhagen], Kunstmuseets Årsskrift [Yearbook of the National Gallery] 70/1992. N. L. [Nicolaus Lützhøft], “Moderne Kunstudstilling” [Exhibition of Modern Art], Politiken, May 3, 1913. “Som en vældig Falanx rykker den »nye Kunst« frem; Franskmænd, Russere, Tyskere, Skandinaver, Polakker, Spaniere, alle Landes Kunstnere er paa March. Kunsten staar ved Indgangen til det nye, rige Land, d. v. s. den er ved at genfinde det tabte Land. Den »nye Kunst« dyrker Farvens absolut dekorative Anvendelse, Formens Renhed, Tegningens Strænghed—Øjets Styrke og Haandens Sikkerhed. Expressionisme, Simultantisme, Kubisme,Totalisme er Indskrifter paa de Faner, der flager til Ære for den gamle, store Billedkunst, for Antiken og Renæssancen.—Det bliver mere og mere øjensynligt, at den billedskabende Evne er i Tiltagen i den unge Kunst herhjemme. Det mærkes fra Aar til Aar. Firsernes tilfældige, ukunstneriske Naturalisme er ved at blive fejet ud af vor Kunst.” Anon, “Kunstnernes Efteraarsudstilling” [The Artists’ Autumn Exhibition], 1917: n.p. “Først og fremmest syntes vi, at et Billede ikke maatte blive forurenet af uvedkommende Ting, men at det skulde tale til Øjet paa samme Maade som Musik taler til Øret; men for Resten forsøgte vi ogsaa at gøre vore Billeder helt anonyme eller upersonlige, for vi mente, at det personlige, ligesom det fortællende, var noget der ikke kom Billedvirkningen ved, og som det ogsaa gjaldt om at gøre sig fri af. Det var Simpelhed og malerisk Orden, vi forsøgte at arbejde os henimod, og saa mente vi ogsaa, at vi ad den Vej kunde naa frem til en Slags endelig og fuldendt Skønhed”. Aksel Rode: “Af en Samtale med Vilhelm Lundstrøm” [From a Conversation with Vilhelm Lundstrøm], Tilskueren 1939, II, 226. Otto Gelsted: Ekspressionisme [Expressionism] (Copenhagen, 1919), reprinted in: Gelsted, Tilbageblik på fremtiden II [Retrospect of the Future] (Copenhagen: Sirius, 1977), 62. Gelsted, Tilbageblik på fremtiden, 70. Ibid., 71. Roger Harold Benjamin, “The Decorative Landscape, Fauvism, and the Arabesque of Observation,” The Art Bulletin 75(2) (June 1993): 296–297. “Det er ikke romantik og intuition, vi trænger til, hverken i videnskab eller kunst, men klarhed over kunstens og videnskabens betingelser. Derfor ser jeg i kubismen en sund og metodisk rigtig retning: mens ekspressionismen er symbolsk, litterær og romantisk, har kubismen radikalt søgt at udskille al symbolik og fortælling af maleriet til fordel for et systematisk og hårdt tiltrængt arbejde med de særlige maleriske værdier, linje, farve, form, billedmæssig balance.” Gelsted, Tilbageblik på fremtiden II, 87. Cf. Torben Jelsbak and Per Stounbjerg, “Robert Storm-Petersen’s Cartoon of the 1912 Futurist Exhibition in Copenhagen,” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 6 (2016): 458–461. Der Sturm 1913: 3, 144–145 (January 1913); Der Sturm 1913: 4, 178–179 (September 1913). Harald Giersing, “Der Sturm”, Klingen 2 (1917): n.p. Kate Winskell, “The Art of Propaganda: Herwarth Walden and ‘Der Sturm’, 1914–1919”, Art History 18(3) (1995): 315–344. Ibid., 340. “Man har her igen rig Lejlighed lil at undres over, hvor højt hævet fransk Kunst er over lysk og svensk, og man sætter sig atter til at fundere over, hvor meget Kunsten mon er afhængig af del store Folk, ligesom Folket er afhængig af Kunsten. Jordbunden er afgjort ugunstig for talentfulde Malere i Tyskland,” Poul Henningsen, “Der Sturm,” Klingen 2(3) (1918): n.p. Harald Landt Momberg, Parole: 33 expressionistiske digte [33 Expressionist Poems] (Copenhagen: DNSS, 1922). Rud Broby, BLOD. EXPRESSIONÆRE DIGTE [BLOOD: EXPRESSIONARY POEMS] (Copenhagen: DNSS, 1922). Torben Jelsbak: Ekspressionisme [Expressionism] (Copenhagen, Spring, 2005), 138. Published simultaneously by the DNSS: Rud Broby: Forsvarstale for BLOD [Speech in defense of BLOOD] (Copenhagen: DNSS, 1923). Ibid., 5. Ibid., 14. Rud Broby, “Grytåge” [Dawn Fog] and “Syd-rusland i marts 1922” [South Russia in March 1922], Der Sturm, vol. 14, no. 1, 14. Harald Landt Momberg, “Røg” [Smoke], Der Sturm, vol. 14, no. 5, 66–67, and “Kommunistvise” [Communist Song] and “La Victoire” [Victory], Der Sturm, vol. 14, no. 10, 152–154. Der Sturm: International Kunst, Ekspressionister og Kubister, Ole Haslunds Hus [Der Sturm: International Art, Expressionists and Cubists, The Ole Haslund House] (Copenhagen: Forlag Der Sturm, 1923).

205

10 EXPRESSIONISMS IN SWEDEN Anti-Realism, Primitivism, and Politics in Painting and Print Margareta Wallin Wictorin

Expressionism in Sweden in the 1920s was influenced by both German and French ideas, but the French sources, especially Matisse and the other fauves, gradually attracted the greater share of attention. The same is true of art-historical writing on Swedish expressionism, which tends to forget that Swedish artists also had contact with artists from Germany and many other areas of central and Eastern Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century. As Stephen Mansbach notes in his 1999 book Modern Art in Eastern Europe, Western art historians lost access to Eastern and central European sources for many years and this is reflected in their research and writing. Expressionism in art forms other than painting has also received less attention; there is a lack of knowledge, for example, of expressionism in the graphic arts. When Föreningen OriginalTräsnitt (Swedish Society of Original Wood Engravers) arranged the International Exhibition of Graphic Art in Stockholm in 1914, they showed both historical and modern works by Austrian, Bohemian, British, Danish, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian, and Russian artists, and earned a great deal of attention for traditional as well as “ultramodern” or “expressionist” art.1 The concept of “expressionism” is not at all as easy to define as one might at first think. As I will show, use of the term by Swedish artists and art critics at the beginning of the twentieth century, and then more specifically in the 1910s and around the 1930s, was far from consistent; hence, it is necessary to speak of “expressionisms,” in the plural. The following aspects are, in my view, essential in defining visual expressionism: It is a modernist movement, in which an artist produces a work from a subjective perspective, without necessarily choosing to realistically depict the world, but rather with the intent to express an emotional experience. In this essay on expressionism in Sweden, I focus on artistic relations, cultural encounters, and participation in the networks that shaped modernist art practices in Europe from around 1910 until the Second World War. I depart from the generally held view of Swedish expressionism by including the graphic arts, which are often omitted in the Swedish context, and by emphasizing the contribution of women artists to expressionism in Sweden, which also tends to be forgotten. But first, I look at earlier characterizations and discussions of expressionism in art criticism and art-historical texts in Sweden.

206

Expressionisms in Sweden

Definitions of “Expressionism” in Swedish Art Criticism and Art History Beginning in 1910, the Swedish artist Birger Simonson published numerous articles on French art in the Swedish press. Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Henri Matisse were often mentioned. In one of his first articles, he writes of Matisse’s search for “l’expression.” The following year, the art critic Carl David Moselius introduced the term “expressionism” as an alternative to the more frequently used “postimpressionism” when referring to these artists. Simonson and the other Swedish artists of the De unga group (The Young Generation) were often referred to as “expressionists,” as several of them had studied with Matisse.2 Matisse himself had written in his Notes d’un Peintre (Notes of a Painter), in 1908, that he was searching for “l’expression,” by which he meant not the facial expression of emotion or its manifestation in violent gesture or movement, but rather the sum total of a picture’s composition, its figures, spaces, and proportions.3 During the period 1905–1908, however, Matisse and his friends, including André Derain and Maurice Vlaminck, were also often pejoratively referred to as “fauvists” in Sweden, as elsewhere, as the fauvist use of non-realistic colors and forms was often regarded by critics and audiences as disturbing. The 1912 Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne had a strong impact on the perception and valuation of modernist art. At this exhibition, Swedish art critics, museum curators, and artists were confronted with modernist art as an inescapable fact. Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Edvard Munch, and Pablo Picasso were the most noted artists, but two Swedish members of the artist group De unga, Isaac Grünewald and Gösta Sandels, also participated. After seeing the exhibition, the Swedish art critic August Brunius wrote in Svenska Dagbladet (The Swedish Daily News), a major Swedish newspaper, “the future belongs to expressionism, and it makes no sense to try to ignore it.”4 The following year, Brunius expressed the same ideas in his book Färg och form: Studier i den nya konsten (Color and Form: Studies in the New Art). He described impressionism as the final stage of an old art movement, against which the freshness of the work by Cézanne and Van Gogh sharply stood out; the most important aspect of the new work, he wrote, was its expressiveness and its victory over illusionism and the evanescent impressionism. Brunius appreciated the expressionism of Matisse, but not Picasso’s cubism; these two movements, he noted, represented the eternal opposition between color and form, between colorism and construction, and between inspiration and calculation.5 The German expressionists (Die Brücke) went unmentioned. In 1913, the Swedish writer Pär Lagerqvist published a booklet, Ordkonst och bildkonst (Verbal and Visual Art), on the various forms of modernist art. Lagerqvist emphasized the visual arts as a model for literature and advocated both expressionism and cubism. The following year, in 1914, he published an article on primitivist ideas in which he claimed that contemporary artists preferred to reflect in their artistic creations a spirit of earlier times and a primitive, deep feeling of devotion— a reflection of medieval art in Eastern and Western Europe, of early Greek art, Egyptian art, and art from Asian cultures and indigenous peoples—and suggested that traditional art would reappear in modern art.6 Primitivist tendencies were arising in Sweden, as well as on the European continent. Concurrent with modern developments such as industrialization, urbanization, and internationalization, there arose a longing for what was regarded as an authentic culture and an expectation by some that a renewal of the arts was to be found in the utilization and reuse of themes, styles, and techniques from traditional forms of cultural expression. In 1915, Osvald Sirén, a professor of art history at Stockholm University who specialized in Chinese art, published an article, “Primitiv och modern konst” (Primitive and Modern Art), in which he claimed that the new tendencies in art had their roots in ancient forms of art dating back thousands of years.7

207

Margareta Wallin Wictorin

Following introduction of the term “expressionism” in Sweden by Simonson, Moselius, and Brunius, it was used for a number of years to refer to all forms of non-realist and modernist art in discussions of Swedish art. The artist Gösta Adrian-Nilsson (GAN) wrote in an article in Sydsvenska Dagbladet (South Sweden’s Daily News) in 1915 that expressionism encompassed cubism, futurism, and other radical art directions. It can be argued that in this and many other respects, he was here following Herwarth Walden, the director of the Sturm gallery in Berlin,8 where, in the same year, GAN participated in the exhibition Schwedische Expressionisten (Swedish Expressionists) (Figure 10.1a and b).9 Walden’s close contacts to a number of Swedish avant-garde artists were due in part to his Swedish wife. Nell Walden (1887–1975, b. Roslund) actively participated in arranging the activities of Der Sturm and built a wide network of artists, not only from Sweden, but from throughout all of Europe, including Russia. She gradually assembled a large collection of expressionist art, and was also active as a painter herself. She grew up in Landskrona in Southern Sweden, around the turn of the century, during a time when Swedish ties with Germany were generally strong, and she was one of many, especially in Southern Sweden, who became interested in the dynamism and expressiveness of the cultural life of Berlin.10 Gregor Paulson (1889–1977) was an art historian from the south of Sweden who, after studies in Lund and work as an art curator, art critic, and museum lecturer, became a professor at Uppsala University, in 1934. He was a relative of Nell Walden, and his wife Ester was acquainted with Nell’s family. From 1912 to 1914, Ester and Gregor Paulsson lived for periods of time in Berlin, where they were acquainted with Nell and Herwarth Walden and the art of Der Sturm. Paulsson’s Konstens världshistoria (The World History of Art), in four volumes (1942–1952), is regarded as one of the most important Swedish art history works of the twentieth century.11 In the fourth volume, he wrote a chapter on expressionism that begins with the assertion that in the twentieth century two main streams of expressionism arose, a German and a French movement. He also noted that the term “expressionism” was coined by Herwarth Walden in 1911 and used mainly in Germany. Paulsson devoted five pages to the German branch, especially Die Brücke (which, he suggests, turned expressionism into an art movement producing primitivist woodcuts), but also Der Blaue Reiter, Der Sturm, and the artists Oskar Kokoschka and Käthe Kollwitz, and two-and-a-half pages to the French expressionists Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck, and Dufy.12 This reflected a more Southern interest in German and central European art than was typical of people from Northern Sweden, including Stockholm, whose artists were generally more focused on French art, although there were, of course, exceptions. Another art history treatise, from 1946, by Andreas Lindblom (1889–1977), professor of art history at Stockholm University between 1925 and 1929, referred to Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse, and also Munch as the forerunners of expressionism. These artists, Lindblom suggested, had revealed a new way of seeing, one that renounced the realistic impression in favor of emotions and ideas. In expressionist art, he emphasized, proportions were deliberately altered, forms distorted, and colors intensified in order to create a stronger expression. Lindblom also claimed that it was Matisse who had given the expressionist style its classic form, using the pure color spectrum and avoiding volume and depth and the laws of linear perspective.13 The Swedish artists that he identified as expressionists were Leander Engström, Isaac Grünewald, Einar Jolin, Gösta Sandels, Sigfrid Ullman, Birger Simonsson, and Tor Bjurström—all members of De unga—but he also mentioned Axel Törneman as a forerunner.14 In Tidens konsthistoria (The Art History of the Time), a Swedish art history handbook from 1950, Lars Erik Åström writes about the “Nordic fauvists” when speaking of the same artists.15 The only Swedish artist that Åström explicitly mentions as an “expressionist” is Vera Nilsson, and he quotes the critic August Brunius’ art review after her Swedish debut in 1918: 208

Figure 10.1a+b  C  over and pages 2–3 from the exhibition catalogue Schwedische Expressionisten [Swedish Expressionists] (Berlin: Galerie Der Sturm, 1915)

Margareta Wallin Wictorin

I would like to say that there is just one real, consistent expressionist: Vera Nilsson. She has both the wild temperament and the wild technique. Give her the most pious and pale landscape as motif—and she will turn it into a dazzling apocalyptic sight: it will look as if an earthquake had very recently ruptured the crust of the earth, or as if the graves are about to open up and let the dead out, or as if a world war had just swept across the land.16 The exhibition in question was titled Yngre svenska konstnärer (Younger Swedish Artists), but it was more commonly referred to as Expressionistutställningen (The Expressionist Exhibition).17 Åström also noted that Nilsson was the only Nordic expressionist artist who could be seen as related to German expressionism, because “her paintings communicate the artist’s reaction to the motif in a way very different from the artists who were only interested in studying the expressiveness of form and color.”18 Nilsson was much admired for her approach to painting children, which gave them a natural appearance that was not stereotypically sweet or innocent, but depicted them eagerly and cautiously being busy learning to walk, discovering the world, etc.—see, for example, Två barn (Two Children, 1914; Plate 14). Like many professionally inclined women artists of the time, Nilsson never married, but she did have a daughter, whom she raised by herself and who became the subject of many of her paintings. Another Swedish art historian who later wrote about expressionism is Bengt Lärkner. In his 1984 dissertation, The International Avant-garde and Sweden 1914–1925, he focused not only on expressionism but also on various forms of avant-garde art. Lärkner pointed out that the term “expressionism” was used very loosely in the 1910s—for example, to denote the art of the Swedish Matisse disciples.19 In 1974, Elisabeth Lidén published a dissertation on expressionism in Swedish painting in which she discussed this issue and argued that the difficulties lie in the fact that “expressionism” was never used to characterize a concept of style in the same way as, for instance, impressionism, cubism, and futurism.20 In Svensk konsthistoria (Swedish Art History), a 1986 Swedish art history book by Mereth Lindgren, Louise Lyberg, Birgitta Sandström, and Anna Greta Wahlberg, Lyberg used the term “fauvists” for Swedish artists working in a Matisse-related style in the 1910s, and “expressionism” for the emotionally and politically charged art of the 1930s.21 In the important exhibition Swedish Modernism 1900–1960 that Moderna Museet in Stockholm mounted in 2000, “expressionism” was not mentioned at all; instead the exhibition focused on Swedish experiences of modern life vs. international avantgarde trends.22 In a recent Swedish art history, Konst och visuell kultur i Sverige 1810–2000 (Art and Visual Culture in Sweden 1810–2000), edited by Lena Johannesson and published in 2007, Bengt Lärkner remarks that “expressionist art, which primarily had been a coloristic liberation during and after the war, came to visualize contemporary anxiety by means of pointed shapes and disharmonic colors.”23 A comparison between expressionist art in Sweden and German and East European expressionism shows that Swedish expressionism was less revolutionary and dramatic regarding color, form, and content—at least until the 1930s. Elisabeth Lidén states that both French and German expressionism reached Sweden in the 1910s, but that French art dominated the Swedish art scene, including artists and critics. She points to the fact that Blaue Reiter artists such as Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc were introduced to Sweden by Herwarth Walden, but the radical group Die Brücke never exhibited in the country—the sole exception being the solo exhibition of Emil Nolde, who was part of the group for only a very short time.24

210

Expressionisms in Sweden

Expressionisms in Sweden in the 1910s The beginning of the twentieth century in Sweden was characterized by industrialization, rapid urbanization, food shortages, universal suffrage demonstrations, and recurrent strikes—issues that were only rarely reflected in the art of the time. The art scene was beginning to change, however, from a more nationalistic and romantic art at the turn of the century, when artists strove to depict the Swedish landscape in an ideal and moralistic way, to a freer artistic climate. In the 1910s, artists such as Tora Vega Holmström (1880–1967) and Axel Törneman (1880–1925) introduced new expressionist elements into their art, including the use of freely drawn, non-realist forms and colors. Both had studied with Adolf Hölzel in Dachau. Holmström had also studied with Carl Vilhelmsson at Valand Art School in Gothenburg and at the Académie Colarossi in Paris. She was a radical innovator with regard to the choice of colors and her use of emotion in her portraits, still lifes, and semiabstract works.25 See, for example, her paintings Figurkomposition (Figure Composition) and Systrar (Sisters), both from 1916, and Cilia—väverskan (Cilia—the Weaver), from 1937.26 Törneman, too, had attended the Valand Art School, at the same time as Holmström, and then studied in Munich, Paris, and Dachau, where Hölzel’s theories about harmony and contrasts of colors had a liberating effect on his painting. Törneman’s 1906 painting Nattcafé (Night Café) received a great deal of attention in Sweden because of its intense and “unnatural” colors, which were regarded as emphasizing the decadence of modern urban night life.27 At the beginning of the 1910s, a young generation of Swedish painters, especially those trained at the art school of the Konstnärsförbundet (Swedish Artists’ Association), returned home from Paris, where they had encountered the art of Matisse and other fauvists. Among them were Tor Bjurström, Isaac Grünewald, Edward Hald, Sigrid Hjertén, Einar Jolin, Leander Engström, Birger Simonsson, and Gösta Sandels. Several were active in the artists’ group De unga, founded in 1909.28 De unga, which only accepted men as members, has come to be associated with the breakthrough of modernism in Sweden, but there were many other Swedish artists who were also interested in modernist art, had studied abroad, and were presenting new artistic ideas in the 1910s. Many were women, and several worked in the graphic arts. To name just a few examples, one must mention Annie Bergman, Eva Beve, Maj Bring, Agnes Cleve-Jonand, Siri Derkert, Mollie Faustman, Agda Holst, Siri Magnus-Lagercrantz, Vera Nilsson, Carl Palme, Anna Sahlström, Ninnan Santesson, Elsa Ström-Ciacelli, and Harriet Sundström.29 In response to De unga’s exclusion of women and in order to provide support to its artists, whose professional situations were often difficult, an association for women artists, Föreningen Svenska Konstnärinnor, was formed in 1910.30 The situation of Agnes Cleve-Jonand (1876–1951) was typical of the difficulties facing many female artists when it came to managing both family life and a career. In the case of Cleve-Jonand, she eventually succeeded in combining the two and closely followed European artistic developments, including expressionism, but in Sweden she was not recognized as an artist of significance until quite late in life, with her first solo exhibition at the age of fifty-three. She was born in Uppsala; her mother had traveled extensively around Europe, and her father was a professor at the university. When she was twenty-one, she studied painting with Carl Wilhelmson at the Valand Art School in Gothenburg, married a lawyer there in 1901, and had two children; the marriage ended in divorce in 1912, however, and she was forced to relinquish her children to her former husband. Cleve-Jonand then returned to traveling, something she had done often before her marriage; in 1914, she went to Paris with the Swedish artist John Jon-And, whom she married in early 1915. Both continued to travel, together and separately,

211

Margareta Wallin Wictorin

as necessary, to advance their artistic developments. They studied with Le Fauconnier in Paris and also became acquainted, probably in Paris, with the expressionist painters Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky, who visited them in Stockholm in 1915. Münter and Cleve-Jonand traveled to Copenhagen, in the autumn of 1915, to study the works in Christian TetzenLund’s collection of modern art. Copenhagen (see also Chapter 9 by Torben Jelsbak in this volume) was a very active art center during the First World War, a time when artists from the Nordic countries and the European continent fled the war-affected cities of the continent and came together in the capital of neutral Denmark. In 1916, Kandinsky worked in John JonAnd’s print workshop and exhibited at the art gallery Gummessons konsthandel in Stockholm before leaving for Russia in March of the same year. Münter stayed in Stockholm until 1917 and also had a show at Gummessons. She also took part in a large exhibition arranged by the Association for Swedish Women Artists at the art gallery Liljevalchs konsthall in 1917, together with Cleve-Jonand and Sigrid Hjertén-Grünewald. In May 1916, Cleve-Jonand and John Jon-And visited New York, where Cleve-Jonand produced the painting New York (or Fire in New York), a very dynamic and colorful, expressionist composition. Back in Sweden, she had her first important exhibition, together with her husband, in 1917, at Gummessons konsthandel. Her first solo exhibition was held in the same gallery, in 1929. In her paintings, she often combined expressive colors with cubist perspectives.31 She was also inspired by vorticism, an art movement that strove to reflect the dynamics of modern urban life and the machine age.32 Anna Sahlström (1869–1951) came from a very different background than Agnes Cleve. Born and raised on a large farm in the Swedish countryside, she was well acquainted with the traditional farming life. Her father, however, had been a member of the Swedish parliament in Stockholm for two terms, and her brother studied art in Stockholm, and thus she came to know many artists. Once she had made the decision herself to study art, against her father’s will, her brother arranged a contact with the art school run by the Swedish Artists’ Association, where she studied painting and also learned wood engraving, from Tekla Lindeström-Nordström. Later she went to Paris and Rome to study art, but eventually returned to her family’s farm, where her brother helped her to build a studio. Despite her return to the farm, she stayed in contact with other artists through the Swedish Society of Original Wood Engravers (Föreningen OriginalTräsnitt) and also took part in their exhibitions in Sweden and abroad. Sahlström often made woodcuts with motifs taken from traditional farming life and culture, and these were especially well received, as urbanization and industrialization had given rise to an interest in primitivism among art critics such as August Brunius and others.33 The woodcut Fårklippning (Sheep Shearing; Figure 10.2) is a good example of the type of nostalgic motif that was favored at the time, tempered by a modernist use of reduced lines and shapes. Carl Palme (1879–1960), another artist who was not a member of De unga, traveled extensively in Europe. From 1901 to 1903, he studied art with Kandinsky in Munich;34 after his move to Paris in 1907, he became acquainted with radical international artists such as Henry Patrick Bruce, Hans Purrman, Jón Stéfansson, Max Weber, and also Leo and Sally Stein. Soon he was also introduced to Gertrude Stein and through her he met Matisse and Picasso. Palme was among the artists who invited Matisse to teach at a Paris studio where many Swedish and Scandinavian artists studied between 1908 and 1911. There is a drawing by Arvid Fougstedt showing Matisse and some of his students who were present at the studio, including Carl Palme, Arthus C-son Percy, Sigrid Hjertén, Leander Engström, Isaac Grünewald, Einar Jolin, Per Krogh, and Birger Simonsson. The encounter with Matisse’s art was a dazzling experience for most of these young Scandinavian artists, including Isaac Grünewald, who earlier had studied at the Swedish Artists’ Association school in Stockholm. Grünewald described the positive 212

Expressionisms in Sweden

Figure 10.2  Anna Sahlström, Fårklippning (Sheep Shearing), woodcut, 1915, 18.2 × 29.3 cm, Sahlströmsgården, Utterbyn, Sweden.  Stiftelsen Familjerna Sahlströms och Ärlingssons Minnesfond

shock of being confronted with the art of Matisse: “Suddenly I found myself in front of a wall that was singing, no, screaming, through its colors and streaming light,” and he was surprised at how easily the principles of traditional composition could be cast aside.35 Grünewald’s 1915 painting Det sjungande trädet (The Singing Tree) exhibits a feeling of freedom and joy such as one might experience on a sunny afternoon in a park or garden restaurant among people enjoying themselves. The tree at the center seems not only to sing but also dance, and the free use of color is evident in the red crown of the tree adjacent to the complementary green grass, yellow heavens, and a blue façade. Sigrid Hjertén-Grünewald, who had also studied with Matisse in Paris, was equally free in her choice of composition, form, and color and often praised by the critique August Brunius, who found her art deeper in tone than that of her husband. But she was viciously attacked by conservative critics, who appreciated neither modern art nor women artists. Hjertén-Grünewald painted cityscapes, interiors, views from her atelier, and portraits, including many warm and colorful images of their son Iván.36 See, for example, her 1915 painting Ivan sover (Ivan Sleeping). Isaac Grünewald was a dominant member of De unga. The group’s first exhibition in 1909 had not been very controversial, but the second one, in 1910, provoked strong objections from most of the critics, except for August Brunius, who saw interesting new ideas being expressed in their artwork. In 1911, De unga split because of internal conflicts between radical and moderate members, and a new constellation, De åtta (The Eight) was established. The new group included one female artist, Sigrid Hjertén; the other members were Tor Bjurström, Nils Dardel, Leander Engström, Isaac Grünewald, Einar Jolin, Gösta Sandels, and Birger Simonsson. Their 1912 exhibition, Svenska expressionister (Swedish Expressionists), took place without much critical attention, and afterwards the De åtta group dissolved. Following Birger Simonsson and Sigfried Ullman, Gösta Sandels, and Tor Bjurström moved to the west coast of Sweden. There they 213

Margareta Wallin Wictorin

developed a color-expressive kind of painting that came to dominate the Valand Art School in Gothenburg, where they worked as teachers.37 There were also artists who were not interested in the international avant-garde art, such as the “intimists” and the so-called “naivists,” who painted in a childlike way and included elements from popular art (Hilding Linnqvist, Eric Hallström, and Gideon Börje). The Swedish art historian Jeff Werner has pointed to this artistic movement as something very typical of Swedish modernist art, but because it did not conform to contemporary ideas abroad it was often excluded from art history writing on Swedish modernism.38 The first decade of the twentieth century saw many Swedish artists, among them Eva Beve, Agda Holst, Carl O. Petersen, Harriet Sundström, and Carl Palme, studying in Germany. From 1910 to 1914, however, Germany did not attract nearly as many artists from Sweden. One important exception was Gösta Adrian-Nilsson (usually referred to as GAN), who, according to Bengt Lärkner, was the only Swedish artist to have direct contact with Der Sturm before the outbreak of the First World War.39 GAN arrived in Berlin in 1913 and quickly became acquainted with the German and European avant-garde, whose cubist and futurist influences can be seen in his paintings of the dynamic modern city life. In 1914, on the recommendation of Herwarth Walden, he worked as a docent at the Werkbund exhibition. His plan to continue his studies in Paris fell through with the outbreak of the First World War.40 In 1915, he participated in the Sturm exhibition Schwedische Expressionisten in Berlin. After his return to Sweden, at the end of 1915, GAN lived for some time in Lund, his birthplace, in the Southern part of the country. In 1916, he moved to Stockholm and held a solo exhibition at the art gallery Gummesson’s konsthandel, where his expressionist- and cubist-inspired painting style received a great deal of critical, mostly negative attention. GAN was also active as a writer, promoting modern art in journals such as the Swedish Flamman (Flame) and Der Sturm. In 1916, he published an introduction to Kandinsky’s art in connection with his exhibition in Stockholm.41 A year later he published a drawing (without title) in Der Sturm (no. 5; Figure 10.3) and participated, together with Paul Klee and Gabriele Münter, in an exhibition at the Sturm gallery in Berlin.42 GAN’s arrival in Stockholm, in 1916, was widely viewed as a challenge to Isaac Grünewald and his position as the leading representative of radical modernism in Sweden.43 Thanks to the work of Nell Walden and other Swedish supporters, Der Sturm continued to arrange exhibitions in Sweden during and after the First World War. In 1915, Walden, together with Herwarth Walden and Isaac Grünewald, organized a Franz Marc exhibition at Gummessons konsthandel in Stockholm. This was followed by an exhibition of Kandinsky and Münter in 1916 and a group exhibition of works by Rudolf Bauer, Albert Bloch, Kandinsky, Kokoschka, Klee, Marc, Münter, and Nell Walden in 1918. In 1921, Walden arranged an exhibition with Der Sturm artists at Törnqvistska konsthandeln in Landskrona, and a similar show at Gummessons konsthandel in Stockholm, in 1922. The following year, Der Sturm showed Expressionister och kubister (Expressionists and Cubists) at Valand in Gothenburg.44

Der Sturm and the Swedish Society of Original Wood Engravers Expressionist art was also shown in other Swedish exhibitions in the 1910s such as the Baltic Exhibition in Malmö (1914), which included a special room for “Swedish expressionist art” and another for Swedish avant-garde graphic works. According to Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe, Herwarth Walden failed to introduce Der Sturm in the Baltic Exhibition, but was able to present his artists, gallery, and journal to the Swedish public at the 1914 international graphic arts exhibition in Stockholm arranged by Föreningen Original-Träsnitt (the Swedish Society of Original Wood Engravers).45 214

Expressionisms in Sweden

Figure 10.3  G  östa Adrian-Nilsson (GAN), drawing published in Der Sturm 8, no. 5, August 15, 1917.  Gösta Adrian-Nilsson/Bildupphovsrätt 2017

The main purpose of the society, in existence from 1912 to 1947, was to promote the use of woodcut printing as an artistic technique. The society’s founding members were (in order of affiliation) Harriet Sundström, Arthur Sahlén, Carl O. Petersen, Anna Sahlström, Sigge Bergström, Hjalmar Strååt, Elsa Björkman-Goldschmidt, Elsa Nordström-Toffoli, and Siri Magnus-Lagercrantz. Other artists gradually joined, so that the society eventually reached a membership of twenty-seven. To a large extent, its members abandoned the demand for realistic depiction, with its illusory depiction of three-dimensionality, and began to use combinations of distinct contour lines and plain surfaces with sharp contrasts between black and white or various colors. Some took up the crude contour lines and simplistic shapes that characterized medieval woodcuts and eighteenth and nineteenth-century broadsheets, and several were influenced by Japanese Ukiyo-e woodcuts and various kinds of popular Swedish prints. Society members shared an interest in primitivist expression and were familiar with the works by Kandinsky, Münter, and the Brücke artists.46 One of the founding members of the wood engravers’ society, Harriet Sundström (1872– 1961), was a well-versed and widely traveled artist. She grew up in Stockholm, but studied art in Munich at the school of the Künstlerinnen-Verein, an association of female artists, and with the Russian painter Franz Roubaud and the English artist Charles Tooby, in Dachau. In Dachau, she met other Swedish artists, including Tora Vega Holmström, Carl O. Petersen, and Axel Törneman, and became acquainted with Thomas Theodor Heine, who was an illustrator for the journal Simplicissimus. Between 1904 and 1914, Sundström stayed periodically in Paris, where 215

Margareta Wallin Wictorin

she studied at the Académie Colarossi and a couple of other studios, and for a while shared a work space with the Spanish painter Marie Blanchard. Around 1912, she also shared for a time a studio in Toledo with Diego Rivera and Angelina Beloff, Rivera’s wife at the time.47 Sundström was the main organizer of the international graphic arts exhibition in Stockholm in 1914. She had become acquainted with expressionist art at the Galerie Neue Kunst—Hans Goltz in Munich in 1912 and possibly also at the Sturm gallery in Berlin. In January 1914, she invited Herwarth Walden and the Sturm artists to participate in the planned exhibition in Stockholm. Walden confirmed their participation by sending a copy of every original wood engraving he had published to date. In the exhibition, Der Sturm was represented with twentynine works by a total of twelve artists; Marc was particularly well represented. A lithograph by Oskar Kokoschka, also on display, served as an advertising poster for the Sturm magazine; the cover of the third issue of 1914 included works by Marc, Kokoschka, and Münter.48 The artists are listed alphabetically in the exhibition catalogue without any indication of their affiliation. Among the artists listed are Heinrich Campendonk, Erich Heckel, Kandinsky, Marc, Wilhelm Morgner, Münter, Max Pechstein, and Karl Schmidt-Rotluff.49 The international exhibition was well attended and attracted much attention in the Swedish newspapers. Private collectors, art societies, and public museums bought many of the wood engravings on display. Der Sturm, however, failed to sell any works during the exhibition or generate interest among journalists. From the articles discussing the exhibition, one can conclude that Kandinsky and Marc were already known in the Swedish art scene, but the reviewers only occasionally mentioned Der Sturm, and the works presented under this label were seen as “ultramodern.”50 Art critic “E. R-g.” noted in the daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter (Daily Newspaper) that Vlaminck had nothing of the “violence of exaggeration that characterizes a couple of the German modernists.”51 August Brunius also mentioned Vlaminck, whom he regarded as an interesting expressionist. An anonymous critic denounced “the ultramoderns,” including the expressionists and futurists, as they had consciously abandoned representation of the visible world; the same critic also criticized Kandinsky, and in particular, Wilhelm Morgner, because he could not discern anything in his woodcut Woman in a Field.52 Several members of the Swedish Society of Original Wood Engravers, among them Harriet Sundström, Artur Sahlén, and Hjalmar Strååt, showed color woodcuts. Carl Palme, also a member of the society, developed a printing technique similar to Japanese Ukiyo-e woodcuts. While traveling from Germany to Sweden in 1914, he had visited Emil Orlik at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Berlin, where Orlik had set up an extensive woodcut studio in the Japanese style. Palme learned this art and craft and subsequently produced many color woodcuts.53 Pär Siegård was a society member who experimented with radical forms. Before 1914, he traveled for three years in France and other countries on the European continent and became interested in expressionist, cubist, and futurist art, particularly the work of Jean Metzinger and Roger de la Fresnaye. In 1919, he produced the black and white woodcut Fransmännen erövra en kanon (The French Capture a Gun), in which the martial motif is shown in an expressionist and cubo-futurist style. Repeated diagonal and horizontal lines and crossings and circles contribute to an image of a chaotic battlefield, which depicts an enormous canon surrounded by a group of fighting soldiers and horses.

Expressionist Art in the 1930s As already noted, the artists Birger Simonsson, Gösta Sandels, Tor Bjurström, and Sigfrid Ullman all settled in the Western part of Sweden; Gothenburg thus became a center for coloristic, expressionist art in the 1920s and 1930s. The Valand Art School, where several of the artists taught, 216

Expressionisms in Sweden

became a center for the further development and dispersion of expressionism in Sweden. In the 1930s, former students from the school, often referred to as Göteborgskoloristerna (Gothenburg colorists), developed a rich, coloristic way of painting. As teachers, Birger Simonsson and Tor Bjurström had a decisive influence upon their students, but other influences included the colorful decorativenesss of Matisse; Cézanne’s emphasis on structure; the expressiveness of Munch, Henrik Sörensen, and Ludvid Karsten; and also the colorful paintings of Swedish painter Karl Kylberg, which he showed at Göteborgs konsthall (art hall) in 1927. Among the students at Valand were Märta Taube, Ivar Ivarsson, and Åke Göransson, who focused on color— Göransson’s later paintings being particularly characterized by intense hues and almost fully dissolved forms—and Inge Schiöler, who was very young when he began his studies at Valand. Schiöler was a talented colorist and soon recruited by Gösta Olsson for his Svensk-Franska konstgalleriet (Swedish-French Art Gallery) in Stockholm. There he became acquainted with other color expressionists, among them Albin Amelin, Sven X-et Erixon, and Bror Hjort. Another important art gallery, Färg och Form (Color and Form), was established by a collective of artists in Stockholm in 1932. Its artists, including Bror Hjort, Sven X-et Erixon, Vera Nilsson, and Albin Amelin, regarded the artist as a legitimate contributor to society and emphasized the artist’s right to express political opinions on social and political questions.54 Albin Amelin was a socialist who painted colorful settings in a documentary style that often included people working in factories and at the harbor. These paintings were then often reproduced as lithographs and widely distributed, particularly among members of the unions and their associated art associations. The 1932 painting Arbetarcafé (The Worker’s Café) depicts a small harbor café at lunchtime crowded with men who are eating, drinking, talking, and sharing their everyday life. Edit Fischerström also made representations of industrial sites, for example her 1939 woodcut Götaverken, a monumental shipyard in Gothenburg, where she made the cranes look like huge birds with sharp beaks. In the 1930s, Swedish artists began to take note in their art of political problems, such as the heavy unemployment of the time, and to take a stand in political conflicts. Sven X-et Erixon’s linocut Jämvikt (Balance), for example, elaborates on the issue of unemployment. The image is divided into two rectangular fields; the left one shows a long queue of men in front of an employment agency; on the right is a long row of women in hospital beds with their newborn children by their side—families that need to be supported. In Ådalen, a region in Northern Sweden, with several large paper mills, a conflict, in 1931, between factory workers and employers culminated in a military guard shooting at striking workers and killing five. The resulting extremely tense political situation in Sweden attracted the attention of a number of artists. The rise of National Socialism in Germany, and the approaching war, also started to make incursions into the work of, for example, Albin Amelin, Thorsten Billman, Siri Derkert, Sven X-et Erixon, Thor Fagerkvist, Eric Hallström, Bror Hjort, Nils Nilsson, and Vera Nilsson. Several published illustrations in the radical journal Mänsklighet (Humanity), one example being Amelin’s linocut De sista arierna (The Last Aryans), published in 1934 (Figure 10.4).55 In 1936, the Spanish Civil War broke out, leading Thor Fagerkvist to publish the drawing Spanien (Spain), depicting a chaotic war scene with soldiers, aircraft, and falling bombs. Three years later came the outbreak of the Second World War and the subsequent occupation of Norway. Among many other activities of protest and comment, Swedish writers and artists produced the book En bror i nöd (A Brother in Need), which includes an illustration by Vera Nilsson for Ture Nerman’s story Till ett norskt barn (To a Norwegian Child).56 The dramatic image of a child struggling against the headwind in an open landscape evoked substantial feelings of empathy. 217

Margareta Wallin Wictorin

Figure 10.4  Albin Amelin, De sista arierna (The Last Aryans), linocut, 50.3 × 36.1 cm, published in the journal Mänsklighet (Humanity), 1934.  Albin Amelin/Bildupphovsrätt 2017

Swedish expressionist art was much more political in the 1930s than it had been in the 1910s. Both periods were confronted with serious political issues, both domestic and international, but the connection between art and social or political issues of the day in the 1910s was almost non-existent. In the 1930s, this changed, perhaps because of a greater awareness among artists and the public, and also because of the serious problems associated with war, conflict, poverty, and injustice.

Conclusion Expressionism in Sweden was inspired by art and ideas from France, Germany, and Russia; there were many contacts with artists from these countries. Matisse, Kandinsky, Marc, and Münter were particularly important for Swedish artists, but the radical expressionism of Die Brücke, and also cubism and futurism, did not fit very well with the more moderate nature of expressionism in Swedish art of the 1910s. One exception to this was GAN, Gösta Adrian-Nilsson. As noted above, different definitions of the concept of “expressionism” have been used in Sweden, as elsewhere. Following the introduction of the term “expressionism” in Sweden by Birger Simonson, Carl David Moselius, and August Brunius, it was used for a number of years to refer to all forms of non-realist and modernist art in Swedish art debates. Gregor Paulsson 218

Expressionisms in Sweden

alleged as late as 1952 that in the twentieth century two main streams of expressionism arose, a German and a French one. He was especially interested in Die Brücke, but also Der Blaue Reiter, Der Sturm, Oskar Kokoschka, and Käthe Kollwitz. However, Paulsson was an art historian, not an artist, and his interest in Die Brücke’s aesthetics does not seem to have influenced many of the Swedish artists or art lovers before the Second World War. The importance of Nell Walden’s contacts for the artistic exchange between Sweden and Germany in the 1910s and 1920s can hardly be overestimated. Carl Gummesson’s role as a promoter of avant-garde art in Sweden, especially from Germany and Russia, was also important. It is interesting to note that Gummesson, Paulsson, and Nell Walden were from Southern Sweden; the geographical as well as cultural proximity to Berlin seems to have been decisive. Many Swedish artists, such as the members of De unga, were based in Stockholm and educated by an earlier generation of artists, who had studied art in France at the end of the nineteenth century; despite their opposition to their teachers, they followed the tradition of going to Paris. Other artists, among them Agnes Cleve-Jonand, Tora Vega Holmström, Gösta Adrian-Nilsson, Carl Palme, Harriet Sundström, and Axel Törneman, studied further afield, on the European continent, including in Germany. Their transnational relations and their art were not always appreciated in Sweden, where the primitivists, the “intimists,” and the “naïvists” appealed to the critics and the public. Sundström, however, managed to mobilize her European artists’ network to exhibit at the International Exhibition of Graphic Art in Stockholm in 1914, which gave her and her organization, the Swedish Society of Original Wood Engravers, credit for having connections with the international avant-garde at the same time as it contributed to Der Sturm in Sweden. Carl Palme’s and Agnes Cleve-Jonand’s relations with Kandinsky and Münter seem to have contributed to their introduction to the Swedish art scene. For Münter, this was facilitated by the cooperation with the Swedish association for women artists.

Notes 1 Margareta Wallin Wictorin, Föreningen Original-träsnitt: grafik och grafiker på ett tidigt modernistiskt konstfält [The Swedish Society of Original Wood Engravers: Graphic Art and Graphic Artists in an Early Modernistic Field of Art], (Göteborg: Göteborgs universitet 2004), 210–213. 2 Elisabeth Lidén, “Bildkonsten 1909–1945” [The Visual Arts], in Konsten i Sverige, del 2, från 1800–1970 [Art in Sweden, vol. 2, from 1800–1970], ed Sven Sandström, (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1991), 290–291. 3 Henri Matisse, Om konst [On Art] (Stockholm: Raster, 1997), 18. 4 Folke Lalander, “Sverige och modernismen: 10-talets konst” [Sweden and the modernism], in Modernismens genombrott: nordiskt måleri 1910–1920: Göteborgs konstmuseum 12 augusti–8 oktober 1989 [The Breakthrough of Modernism: Nordic Painting 1910–1920: Gothenburg Museum of Art August 12–October 8, 1989], ed. Carl Tomas Edam (København: Nordiska ministerrådet, 1989), 65. 5 Catharina Elsner, Expressionismens framväxt:August Brunius skriver om konst 1904–1913 [The Development of Expressionism: August Brunis Writes about Art 1904–1913] (Stockholm: Stockholm University, 1993), 146–147. 6 Pär Lagerqvist, “Gammalt och nytt i det moderna måleriet” [Old and New in Modern Painting], Ord och bild [Word and Image] (1914): 211. 7 Osvald Sirén, “Primitiv och modern konst” [Primitive and Modern Art], Ord och bild [Word and Image] (1915): 47. 8 Lalander, “Sverige och modernismen,” 64. 9 Other contributors were Sigrid Hjertén, Isaac Grünewald, Edward Hald, and Einar Jolin. 10 Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe, Nell Walden and Der Sturm (Stockholm: Carlsson Bokförlag, 2015), 16–17, 124. 11 Dan Karlholm, “Handböcker i allmän och svensk konsthistoria” [Manual on General and Swedish Art History], in 8 kapitel om konsthistoriens historia i Sverige [8 Chapters on the History of Art History in Sweden], eds. Britt-Inger Johansson and Hans Petersson (Stockholm: Raster förlag, 2000), 141.

219

Margareta Wallin Wictorin 12 Gregor Paulsson, Konstens världshistoria: från Barocken till nutiden [The World History of Art, from Baroque to the Present] (Stockholm: Natur och kultur, 1971), 382–389. 13 Andreas Lindblom, Sveriges konsthistoria del III [Sweden’s Art History, vol. III] (Stockholm: Nordisk Rotogravyr,1946), 945. 14 Lindblom, Sveriges konsthistoria del III, 944–949. 15 Lars Erik Åström and Bo Lindwall, “Vår egen tids konst” [The Art of Our Time], in Tidens konsthistoria: Bildkonsten genom århundradena. Tredje delen [The Art History of the Time: Visual Art Through the Centuries,Vol. III], ed. Nils Gösta Sandblad (Stockholm: Tidens förlag, 1950), 548. 16 “Jag skulle vilja säga att här finns endast en riktigt konsekvent expressionist:Vera Nilsson. Hon har både det vilda sinnelaget och den vilda tekniken. Ge henne det mest fromma oh bleklagda landskap som motiv—och hon förvandlar det till en uppskakande apokalyptisk syn: det är som om en jordbävning just sprängt sönder jordskorpan eller som om gravarna just skulle till att öppna sig och släppa ut sina döda eller som om ett världskrifmgått förgärjande fram över nejden.” Åström and Lindwall, “Vår egen tids konst,” 568.The quotation is originally from Brunius’ review in Svenska Dagbladet [The Swedish Daily News] of May 15, 1918. 17 Cecilia Widenheim. “Utopi ochVerklighet: Aspekter på modernismen i svensk bildkonst under 1900-talets första hälft” [Utopia and Reality: Aspects on Modernism in Swedish Visual Art], in Utopi och verklighet: Svensk modernism 1900–1960 [Utopia and Reality: Swedish Modernism 1900–1960] (Stockholm: Moderna museet, 2000), 52. 18 “Hennes målningar berättar om konstnärens reaktion inför motivet på ett helt annant sätt än verken av dem, som enbart studerade färgens och formens uttryckskraft.” Åström and Lindwall, “Vår egen tids konst,” 569. 19 Bengt Lärkner, Det internationella avantgardet och Sverige 1914–1925 [The International Avant-Garde and Sweden 1914–1925] (Malmö: Stenvall, 1984). 20 Elisabeth Lidén, Expressionismen och Sverige: expressionistiska drag i svenskt måleri från 1910-talet till 1940talet [The Expressionism and Sweden: Expressionist Features in Swedish Painting from the 1910s to the 1940s] (Stockholm: Rabén och Sjögren, 1974), 23, 7. 21 Mereth Lindgren et al., Svensk konsthistoria [Swedish Art History] (Lund: Signum, 1986), 398–438. 22 Widenheim, “Utopi och Verklighet,” 42. 23 “Den expressionistiska konsten, som i första hand varit en färgens frigörelse, kom under och efter kriget att i vassa färger och disharmoniska färger gestalta tidsångestens.” Bengt Lärkner, “Från sekelskiftet 1900 till första världskriget” [From 1900 to the First World War], in Konst och visuell kultur i Sverige 1810–2000 [Art and Visual Culture in Sweden 1810–2000], ed. Lena Johannesson (Stockholm: Signum, 2007), 157. 24 Lidén, Expressionismen och Sverige, 204. 25 Barbro Werkmäster, De berömda och de glömda: Kvinnliga svenska modernister 1900–1930 [The Hidden and the Forgotten: Swedish Women Modernists 1900–1930] (Mjellby: Halmstadsgruppens museum, 2006), 83. 26 These and other images mentioned here can be found online; see, for example, www.modernamuseet. se/malmo/sv/utstallningar/tora-vega-holmstrom. 27 Bengt Lärkner, “1900–1950,” in Konst och visuell kultur i Sverige 1810–2000 [Art and Visual Culture in Sweden 1810–2000], ed. Lena Johannesson (Stockholm: Signum., 2007), 142–143. 28 Lalander, Sverige och modernismen, 61. 29 Werkmäster, De berömda och de glömda. 30 Ibid., 18–19. 31 Ibid., 79. 32 Agnes Cleve, Svensk modernist i världen [Swedish Modernist in the World] (Halmstad: Mjellby konstmuseum, 2014), 122. 33 Wallin Wictorin, Föreningen Original-Träsnitt, 141–153. 34 Ibid., 253. 35 Isaac Grünewald, quoted in Lalander, Sverige och modernismen, 63. 36 Elisabeth Lidén, Sveriges konst 1900-talet: Del 1.1900–1947 [Swedish Art, 20th Century, Vol I. 1900– 1947] (Stockholm: Sveriges Allmänna Konstförening, 1999). 37 Lalander, Sverige och modernismen, 64. 38 Jeff Werner, “Svansviftningens estetik: Modernismen ur provinsens perspektiv” [Tail Waving Aesthetics: Modernism from the Perspective of the Province], in Utopi och verklighet, 104. 39 GAN was one of the first Swedish artists to have direct contact with Der Sturm, but Harriet Sundström also had contact with German expressionism at an early stage, in 1912, at the Neue Kunst—Hans Goltz Gallery in Munich, and possibly also at the Sturm gallery. But her contacts were far from as close as

220

Expressionisms in Sweden

40 41

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

GAN’s. Isaac Grünewald also came in contact with Der Sturm at an early stage, probably at the Baltic exhibition in 1914, but he was more French oriented in his preferences. (Sjöholm Skrubbe, Nell Walden and der Sturm, 188–191). Lärkner, Det internationella avantgardet och Sverige 1914–1925, 116–117. GAN’s text about Kandinsky’s art was published by Gummesson, as an addition to the exhibition catalogue. At the last day of the exhibition Kandinsky wrote a letter to GAN in which he expressed his gratitude for his insightful text: “Es ist eine grosse Seltenheit für den Künstler, dass er verstanden wird” [It’s very unusual for the artist to be understood]. In Viviann Endicott Barnett, Kandinsky och Sverige [Kandinsky and Sweden] (Malmö: Konsthalls Katalog nr. 134, 1989/Moderna Museets katalog nr. 231, 1990), 38. Schwedische Avantgarde und Der Sturm in Berlin [The Swedish Avant-Garde and Der Sturm in Berlin] (Lund: Kulturen and Verlag des Museums- und Kunstvereins Osnabrück, 2000), 52. Lärkner, “Från sekelskiftet 1900 till första världskriget,” 163. Sjöholm Skrubbe, Nell Walden and Der Sturm, 204. Sjöholm Skrubbe, Nell Walden and Der Sturm, 188. Wallin Wictorin, Föreningen Original-Träsnitt, 354–355. Ibid., 113. Sjöholm Skrubbe, Nell Walden and Der Sturm, 188–189. Föreningen Original-Träsnitt: Internationell Utställning af Grafisk konst Stockholm 1914 [The Swedish Society of Original Wood Engraving: International Exhibition of Graphic Art Stockholm 1914], exhibition catalogue (Sahlströmsgårdens arkiv, Utterbyn, Sweden, 1914). Sjöholm Skrubbe, Nell Walden and Der Sturm, 190. “Mars som utställningsmånad” [Exhibitions in March], Dagens Nyheter [Daily News], March 5, 2014. Wallin Wictorin, Föreningen Original-Träsnitt, 213. Ibid., 253–254. Lärkner, “Från sekelskiftet 1900 till första världskriget,” 199–203. Lidén, Sveriges konst 1900-talet, Del 1. 1900–1947, 351–353. Ibid., 353.

221

11 NATIONALISM, TRANSNATIONALISM, AND THE DISCOURSES ON EXPRESSIONISM IN FINLAND From the November Group to Ina Behrsen-Colliander Timo Huusko and Tutta Palin In a nation such as Finland, having gained autonomy in 1809, while still part of the Russian Empire, and only achieving full independence in 1917, the history of art is often told from a more or less nationalistic perspective. Moreover, ethno-linguistic and class distinctions cutting across the basic duality of a Swedish-speaking elite versus a Finnish-speaking majority have functioned as a standard element in this “grand narrative.” A closer look at the historical processes by which this discursive field arose and was transformed in the course of the 1910s and the subsequent interwar decades reveals and can further articulate shifts and variations in this representation. Expressionism during this period was associated with French, German, and more generally “Nordic” (Northern European)1 art, although some influences were also mediated through Russian culture. In the first part of this essay, authored by Timo Huusko, connections between concepts of “national” modern art in Finland and expressionist art theories in Germany are explored, with a focus on the 1910s and 1920s.2 Here, the emphasis is on the reception of expressionism, with the November Group and specifically the painter Tyko Sallinen (1879–1955) being introduced as its main proponents in the field of art. The second part, authored by Tutta Palin, takes a look at a second generation, by way of sculptor Wäinö Aaltonen (1894–1966) and the October Group, the latter joining the scene in the 1930s, with expressionist vocabulary as a standard feature of the high modernist artist’s toolbox. Ina Behrsen-Colliander’s (1905–1985) early graphic production offers a symptomatic example of the ways in which an interwar artist negotiated her identity at the interface of various cultures, languages, nationalities, and nationalisms.3 Our intent, by means of a chronological account, is to highlight both continuities and variations in the implications with which expressionism could be approached as an artistic practice from the early twentieth century up until the mid-1930s.

222

Discourses on Expressionism in Finland

Expressionism and Emotion The term expressionism was first mentioned in the context of Finnish modern art by Swedish art writer Carl David Moselius, in 1911, followed by Swedish art writer August Brunius and Norwegian art historian Jens Thiis, in 1913, and subsequently the Sturm gallery’s exhibition Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) at the Salon Strindberg in Helsinki, in February 1914.4 The exhibition came to Helsinki from Kristiania (Oslo), before which it had been in Budapest and Germany. Art dealer Sven Strindberg had met Herwarth Walden in Berlin and agreed to mount the exhibition in his Helsinki gallery. Wassily Kandinsky’s essay Über Kunstverstehen (On Understanding Art) was included in the catalogue; his theoretical work Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art) had been introduced to the Finnish public the year before, in 1913.5 As Hubert van den Berg has stated, expressionism became a national, specifically German, phenomenon during the First World War, and this “nationalization” continued after the war, when expressionism was presented as a German contribution to modern art in general and the avant-garde in particular.6 The idea of expressionism as a predominantly German phenomenon was put forward by Paul Fechter in his book Der Expressionismus (Expressionism), in 1914. Finnish art critic and art historian Ludvig Wennervirta (1882–1959; until 1926 Wennerström) introduced Fechter and some of his ideas in March and April 1915 in the Finnish-language newspaper Uusi Suometar (New Maiden of Finland).7 Wennervirta contributed to the Finnish art debate by marking the importance of emotion in artistic discourse. He emphasized the emotional state of the artist, who must consider how best to impart the desired emotional impact to the viewer’s mind. This differs from the idea of Einfühlung (empathy) in the sense that the artwork remains less central.8 Fechter’s sense of empathy is based on the capacity of the artwork to affect the viewer as a spiritual being. The same notion had already been introduced into the Finnish discourse through Kandinsky.9 In the Sturm catalogue, Kandinsky explained that a work of art has a spirit (Geist) in and of itself,10 and even Wennervirta mentions Kandinsky in this connection. Wennervirta moreover emphasized that the viewer must be able to enter into the spiritual rhythm of the artwork, “as Fechter tellingly says.”11

The “Finnishization” of German Cultural Attributes Paul Fechter was especially inspired by Wilhelm Worringer’s Formprobleme der Gotik (Form Problems of the Gothic, 1911),12 which propagated the idea of the Gothic tradition and the disposition of “the Nordic people” to powerful expression, spiritual vitality, and individuality,13 but in his own book Fechter stresses the Germanic, rather than the Nordic dimension. He writes of the ancient “gothic soul” and a Germanic primeval metaphysical need, and characterizes expressionism as a liberation of spiritual energy from the Germanic primitive intellectuality.14 Though few references to his work are found in the Finnish art discourse, Worringer’s dissertation Abstraktion und Einfühlung (Abstraction and Empathy, 1907) and his habilitation thesis Formprobleme der Gotik were known in Finland. References to a primeval instinct in art and its connections to Finnishness begin to appear after 1915. It is worth noting that this is something that Finnish-speaking writers recurrently highlight; the first to do so (after Wennervirta) was Edvard Richter (1880–1956), who was a critic at another major Finnish newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat (Helsinki Times). These discussions on the nature of Finnishness in art centered mainly on the work of the November Group, especially the art of Tyko Sallinen. The November Group was supported by the art dealer Gösta Stenman; the first exhibition under this name was held in December 1918. The group, which also encouraged younger artists

223

Timo Huusko and Tutta Palin

to join, was formally established at a restaurant in Helsinki in November 1917, a few days after five of the artists—Tyko Sallinen, Alvar Cawén (1886–1935), Marcus Collin (1882–1966), Gabriel Engberg (1872–1953), and Juho Rissanen (1873–1950)—had opened an exhibition at the Strindberg art gallery. Engberg left the group before 1918; later, other artists were invited to participate without joining the group. The November Group held public exhibitions throughout the period from 1918 to 1924.15 Finnish art historian Tuula Karjalainen has already referred to similarities between the alleged national values in German expressionism and the arguments which were made when Tyko Sallinen was declared a “national” artist in Finland.16 Sallinen was said to have conveyed Finnish blood, soul, and earth in his art, which brings to mind Heinrich Wölfflin’s sense of the Germanic primeval tendency to individuality and irrationality,17 as well as Worringer’s notions of the importance of suggestivity and spiritual expressivity, or pathos, in the art of the Nordic people.18 This mythologization of Sallinen’s art and of a “national expressionism” really only occurred in Finland from 1921 onwards, and it is obviously connected, as Karjalainen has stated, to the intelligentsia’s need for the support of the peasant population after the Finnish Civil War, in 1918.19 Until this time, Sallinen had been associated with the political left.20 During the interwar years, the majority of the intelligentsia actively took part in the endorsement of a nationalist-patriotic hegemony, returning to the tradition established during the period of national awakening, in the mid-nineteenth century.21 Irrationality and primeval instinct, however, were not the widely accepted norm for expressing emotion in discourses on Finnish art. Swedish-speaking art critics such as Sigurd Frosterus, Heikki (Henrik) Tandefelt, and Signe Tandefelt resisted Worringer’s nationalist mysticism and leaned on August Brunius’ book Färg och form (Color and Form, 1913), which emphasized as its ideal French colorism and “the harmony of the Gallic spirit,” as Frosterus puts it.22 In a way, this “Gallic spirit” refers to Worringer’s idea of classical representation and Einfühlung (empathy), which is not typical of the Germanic metaphysical Gefühlsexistenz (emotional existence), to use Fechter’s term.23 Interestingly, Tom Sandqvist has pointed out how this metaphysical and partly religious emphasis, which is suggestive of a Worringer-like Abstraktion, had been typical for modern art in Eastern-central Europe since the end of the nineteenth century.24 After Ludvig Wennervirta, another important authority was the art historian and later scholar Onni Okkonen (1886–1962), whose writings appeared in the Finnish-language newspaper Uusi Suometar from 1916 until the end of 1919. Okkonen was familiar with the theories of Einfühlung, but he did not accept deviation from the illusionistic role of art, nor could he accept primitivism, which he felt was unable to convey positive emotions. Okkonen insisted that artists should have high moral standards and believed that this manifested itself in classical form, seen through Winckelmann’s and August Schmarsow’s ideals; thus when it came to modern art, it was cubism and not expressionism that, in his view, made it possible to express harmony of form.25

Finnish Independence and the Effects of Nationalism Finland gained independence in December 1917. This happened quite unexpectedly as a result of the Russian Revolution and the geopolitical turmoil brought about by the First World War. Independence soon led to civil war, which ended in the defeat of the revolutionary proletariat, the “Reds,” in spring 1918. The victors, the bourgeois “Whites,” were aided by the landing of German troops in Hanko in southern Finland.26 Naturally questions arose as to the function of art in the newly established sovereign state. In September 1919, Okkonen announced that Finland’s new status made new demands of the artist, who would be called upon to embody the significance of art and the Finnish people. 224

Discourses on Expressionism in Finland

For Okkonen, this would become reality if artists could delve profoundly into themselves and the spiritual lives of their fellow compatriots.27 It is interesting to note that this metaphysical aspect of nationalization also appeared in the Eastern-central European border states that gained independence after the collapse of the Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian empires. In Latvia, for example, painter Jēkabs Kazaks wrote in 1917 that the work of an artist brought up within a nation state will unintentionally reveal a national influence in his painting—not as a result of ethnographic, literary, or historical factors, but rather “a national spirit.”28 In his review of the November Group’s exhibition in December 1918, Richter employed arguments that closely resembled German nationalist expressionist theories. Tyko Sallinen’s The Fanatics (1918; Plate 15), for example, called to mind a “primitive medieval mosaic painting.” Richter further observed that in his landscape paintings Sallinen’s use of color was forthright and imbued with feeling, and the artist was able to capture the “true and essentially Finnish emotion,” referring to inborn affective intensities and energies.29 Along with emotionality and instinctiveness, there is also a third element in the German nationalist branch of expressionist discourse,30 which is likewise implied in the Finnish art discussion. It is the notion of Robustheit (robustness) thought to characterize the Northern art tradition and manifested, for example, in Eckart von Sydow’s Die deutsche expressionistische Kultur und Malerei (German Expressionist Culture and Painting, 1919/1920).31 The Scandinavian response to Finnish art in an exhibition of Nordic art in Copenhagen in 1919 stressed the significance of the primeval force as a particularly Finnish characteristic. In Scandinavia, it was naturally linked to the civil war in Finland and the waywardness of the uneducated masses, but in Finland it was also associated with honesty and genuineness, and seen to manifest itself, for example, in the rya (Finnish ryijy) rug tradition.32 The notion of primitive elements in Finnish culture was, in other words, assumed to be something inherently positive that could be promoted internationally as well. In a formal sense, this primeval aspect meant an emphasis on the rough structurality or “modulation” of paintings while at the same time avoiding illusionistic harmony.33 The November Group had its own section in the Copenhagen exhibition, and Sallinen’s art dealer, Gösta Stenman (1888–1947), did his best to strengthen the November Group’s reputation by publishing positive responses from Danish and Swedish papers in his newly founded periodical Stenmans Konstrevy (Stenman’s Art Review)34 and by presenting the group’s works that had been in Copenhagen and Helsinki in 1920 at his pompous Stenmans Konstsalong (Stenman’s Art Salon), which had opened the year before.35 It was typical for the published Scandinavian response in Stenmans Konstrevy to search for a semblance of a national aspect or character, and to find it as well in the November Group’s art. According to Sigurd Schultz in Illustreret Tidende (Illustrated Times), the Novembrists had been able to blend their French learning with personal and therefore Finnish characteristics; he saw in their compositions an “earth-bound logic” (Plate 16). In Fyns Venstreblad (Fyn Leftist Times), S. Danneskjold-Samsoe claimed that something truly personal, and thus Finnish, was only to be found in the traditional rugs and in Sallinen’s art. Nicolaus Lützhöft in Politiken (Politics) noted that Sallinen was able to capture the genuine pathos of the Laestadians in The Fanatics, transforming their rough faces into a sphere of mysticism.36 As can be seen, there is a clear connection with Worringer’s idea of Abstraktion to be read in Lützhöft’s commentary on Sallinen’s painting.

Hellaakoski and Worringer The Finnish geographer and poet Aaro Hellaakoski (1893–1952) wrote the first biography of Tyko Sallinen in 1921. Hellaakoski bases some of his arguments on Worringer, even though he does not mention him by name. According to Hellaakoski, long-dormant sensibilities had 225

Timo Huusko and Tutta Palin

been reawakened in expressionism, and Finnish art embodied fresh blood and lyrical, pantheistic instincts, which evolved out of the people of the wilderness. For Hellaakoski, it was as if, through Sallinen, “an awakening tribe” had suddenly found its own rich sense of color and understanding of form.37 Sallinen was known to have an interest in Gothic sacral art, which Hellaakoski found reflected in The Fanatics, in which Sallinen’s “own blood” became mixed with the distress of the fanatics.38 It is not known whether Sallinen had come across Worringer’s Formprobleme der Gotik of 1911, with its emphasis on Gothic expressiveness and Northern religious feeling,39 or other works by Worringer. The only volume on expressionism known to have been on Sallinen’s bookshelf is Georg Marzynski’s Die Methode des Expressionismus (The Methods of Expressionism) of 1921,40 but it is also known that Hellaakoski already belonged to Sallinen’s circle of friends in the 1910s.41 Some echoes of Worringer’s thoughts are also reflected in future architect Alvar Aalto’s reading of Sallinen when he implied, in 1922, that Sallinen had achieved a style that came close to the sacral painting found in medieval churches in Finland. Aalto saw in Sallinen a discoverer of the “primitive domestic landscape.”42 Here, primitiveness is something that gives access to new revelations in the same sense that it opens up expressive abstraction for Worringer in his notion of the Northern Gothic.43

Whose Expressionism Was It? Alvar Aalto saw a connection between Sallinen and Akseli Gallen-Kallela, who was already an acknowledged Finnish master,44 and suggested that a certain “racial instinct,” i.e., an innate sense of form and color, and a tendency toward traditional domestic stylistic values were the common denominators in their art.45 Wennervirta disagreed with him, claiming instead that Sallinen’s works were related to Joel Lehtonen, F. E. Sillanpää, and Viljo Kojo’s “literary characters,” which were born of “modern social, political, and moral circumstances.”46 Like the German discourse on transcendental national expressionism, Wennervirta’s statement, with its arguments in favor of a national expressionism, offers a key for understanding just who the people in Finland were that desired to strengthen their identity and social status. Expressionist arguments were an important stepping stone for those who felt that the core of true Finnishness was to be found in the lives and traditions of the uneducated Finnish-speaking agrarian population. These spokesmen—and they really were all men—often belonged to the first generation in their families to get an education, as in the case of Lehtonen, Kojo, or Sallinen. The vast majority of the Finnish-speaking population had previously represented the minority or “otherness” within Finnish cultural life, with Swedish as the dominant language. After the parliamentary reform of 1906, which brought a major upheaval in Finnish political life, including universal and equal suffrage, a unicameral parliamentary system, and the Social Democrats as the new largest party, there was room for a new Finnish-speaking cultural elite to complement or, as envisioned, even to replace the previous Swedish-speaking elite. Sallinen’s supporters also represented a certain “otherness” within the Finnish-speaking cultural life, because expressionist ideas were in conflict with ideas of Finnish culture associated with the heritage of classical antiquity. This was important for those who wanted to make a distinction between Finnish culture and Soviet-Russian “Eastern,” or “primitive,” “Mongolian” culture. Expressionism was considered to entail an element of social revolution.47 After the Civil War there was an urgent need to restore the image of the stably harmonious nature of the peasant population, something which Viljo Kojo (1891–1966), for example, tried to achieve in his novels and poems. Kojo came from the countryside, was a member of the Finnish November 226

Discourses on Expressionism in Finland

Figure 11.1  Viljo Kojo, Kylämaisema (Village Landscape), 1917, watercolor, 23 × 30.5 cm, Finnish National Gallery/Ateneum Art Museum, Edvard Richter and Mandi Karnakoski-Richter Bequest, Helsinki. Photo: Finnish National Gallery/Ainur Nasretdin.  Kuvasto 2017

Group, and defended Sallinen’s art from the mid-1910s on. Kojo’s notion of agrarian life (Figure 11.1) was romantic and it contrasted with the urbanity of Helsinki.48 In his 1922 novel Kiusauksesta kirkkauteen (From Temptation to Brightness), the only way for a young bohemian artist to find inner peace was to retreat to the Finnish countryside, marry a young woman, and begin living a traditional peasant life.49 Those German expressionist theories that aimed at social revolution thus had no bearing on Finland in this narrative. Finnish art was presented in a widely noticed exhibition of Nordic art organized in conjunction with the Gothenburg Tercentennial Jubilee Exposition, in 1923. The November Group, and especially Sallinen, were praised as representatives of the young Finnish culture and for the national character of their work. The way in which the ideas of the national and the primitive in Finnish art merged into one in the Scandinavian reception is worth noting here. Or, as the Swedish writer and critic August Brunius put it in his response to the Gothenburg exhibition, there existed two lineages in Finnish art: the one, a cultured “upper-class” tradition leading from Albert Edelfelt to the artists’ group Septem, established in 1912, and the other, a more downto-earth “lower-class” line leading from Akseli Gallen-Kallela to the November Group. This second lineage, he felt, reflected the stronger artistic quality.50 Finland was also seen as an “other” within the Nordic family. This had a lot to do with contemporary racial theories and stereotypes, in which Finns were considered to have Asian blood,51 but it was also a consequence of Sallinen’s art, in which critics saw the image of a “totally different race,” as the Norwegian art historian Jens Thiis put it. What is more, 227

Timo Huusko and Tutta Palin

Thiis claimed that the years of war, associated Germanization, and bloody anarchy had also affected art in Finland. Sallinen’s figures were symbols of “democracy at its lowest level” (Figure 11.2), but in spite of this Thiis considered Sallinen the greatest painter in modern Finland.52 Thus, it seems that Germanization in Scandinavia had become identified as one of the main causes of chaotic warfare and something that Scandinavians rather wished to forget instead of admire.53 The idea of expressionist art as an embodiment of the German soul became something that Worringer, too, could no longer support after 1920.54 There was a reaction against the November Group and its “earth-bound” values at the end of the 1920s in the form of the so-called Torchbearers (Tulenkantajat), a group of intellectuals who admired urbanity and cosmopolitanism,55 but the notion of the November Group’s ability to reflect the emotions of the common people and thus express the essential value of “Finnishness” continued to prevail at least until the end of the 1950s.56 In retrospect, Novembrism became almost a synonym for the expressionist art of the 1910s and 1920s in Finland.57 To conclude, it seems clear that the need for an artist with a primitive or instinctive ability to express the originality of his or her natural environment and fellow countrymen lived on and retained its German basis. It is also interesting to note how readily this exoticized notion of the primeval Finn, imbued with metaphysical qualities, was formulated in the Scandinavian art discourse once Finnish art was seen in Scandinavia after the independence of Finland.

Figure 11.2  Tyko Sallinen, Tutkielma Tappeluun III (Study for The Fight III), 1920, oil on canvas, 60.5 × 68.5 cm, Finnish National Gallery/Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki. Photo: Finnish National Gallery/Pirje Mykkänen.  Kuvasto 2017

228

Discourses on Expressionism in Finland

Expressionism as a Generic (Male) Tradition The prevailing air of scandal that hangs over Tyko Sallinen’s early career suggests that, while purporting to adhere to his own contemporary, international, or at least Nordic, art scene, the artist ended up exoticizing his own ethnic and religious background, in an ambivalent and potentially compromising manner. Sarah Warren has suggested that the positioning of Eastern Europe in an intermediary role between civilization and savagery within the European idea of civilization encouraged artists and intellectuals to see themselves in a dual role as both the subject and object of ethnographic and exoticizing discourses.58 This self-primitivization was enhanced by curators’ decisions to show expressionist work in parallel with examples of Finnish folk art. Sallinen’s consciously bold gestures were, moreover, clearly male-gendered: he tended to sexualize and animalize female sitters in particular, including his first spouse, Helmi Vartiainen, whom he called “Mirri” (Pussy Cat; Figure 11.3).59 Racial, sexual, and class categorizations intersected heavily in Sallinen’s early work. His misogynist gestures as an expressionist painter can be seen as part of the male bohemia’s protest against the bourgeois and noble orders, including their codes of manners, which demanded gentlemanly conduct toward “minors,” such as women. Expressionism has indeed—in the German context, as well—been identified as a “men’s movement.”60 However, it must be noted that even Sallinen’s virility had been tamed

Figure 11.3  Tyko Sallinen, Mirri mustassa puvussa (Mirri in Black), 1911, oil on canvas, 53 × 46 cm, Finnish National Gallery/Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki. Photo: Finnish National Gallery/Jukka Romu.  Kuvasto 2017

229

Timo Huusko and Tutta Palin

after the Civil War; he remarried in 1924, treated his young wife kindly, and made a trip to Italy in 1932, returning home with a more “classical” and “grown-up” attitude.61 In the 1910s and 1920s, expressionism attracted a number of male artists working in various styles. The sculptor Wäinö Aaltonen, for example—another tailor’s son like Sallinen—launched his career in 1916 by experimenting with multiple styles: expressionist, cubist, Art Deco, and classicist.62 Aaltonen exhibited with the November Group until 1921.63 On his first journey abroad, in late spring 1923, he visited the Sturm gallery in Berlin; after a solo exhibition at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris in 1927, he claimed to have received an open invitation from Herwarth Walden to exhibit in his Berlin gallery,64 a plan that remained unrealized. Aaltonen’s expressionist idiom was not distinctly German, though, but calls to mind the sensual touch and Vitalist themes of Auguste Rodin, André Derain, or even Jacob Epstein and Eric Gill, whose production he probably knew through photographic reproductions.65 Derain’s work had indeed been on show at Walden’s Sturm gallery in its 1912 launch of Der Blaue Reiter exhibition, and later the same year under the title “Französische Expressionisten” (French Expressionists).66 Aaro Hellaakoski considered Derain an important expressionist.67 In these early works by Aaltonen, human beings are a part of nature, driven by primeval instincts and basic emotions. The model for his most Gauguinesque women was his sister Elsa Aaltonen (Figure 11.4). In 1939, the primitivist theme of the chalk relief Light and Shadow (1917–1919) was identified as a Finnish Eden.68 In 1922, Hellaakoski still detected a harshly

Figure 11.4  W  äinö Aaltonen, Valoa ja varjoa (Light and Shadow), 1917–1919, relief, limestone (plaster version executed in 1917, chalk relief in 1919), 127 x 70 cm, Ostrobothnian Museum, Karl Hedman Collection, Vaasa. Photo: Ostrobothnian Museum/Erkki Salminen.  Kuvasto 2017

230

Discourses on Expressionism in Finland

Figure 11.5  Wäinö Aaltonen, Kauhu (Horror), 1916–1918, marble, 66 cm, Ostrobothnian Museum, Karl Hedman Collection, Vaasa. Photo: Ostrobothnian Museum/Erkki Salminen.  Kuvasto 2017

anxious undercurrent in the work.69 In the marble sculpture Horror (1916–1918), a naked female figure covers her ears to shield them from her own shriek in a gesture of intense distress (Figure 11.5). Onni Okkonen saw in it both a Finnish racial type and a successful rendering of human anxiety in general, crystallized from the motif of infanticide.70 Many of these works were originally purchased by Gösta Stenman for his own collection of Finnish art, which he lost through a failed loan arrangement in 1931.71 Aaltonen was good friends with Hellaakoski, who became his brother-in-law in 1924 and whose angular features recur in Aaltonen’s work.72 In 1922, Aaltonen also drew the cover art for Viljo Kojo’s above-mentioned novel sequel Kiusauksesta kirkkauteen (From Temptation to Brightness), featuring a group of men and one woman drinking and smoking together. Although frequenting the same café, Aaltonen was never a flamboyant troublemaker in the manner of Sallinen,73 and he went on to establish himself as the foremost sculptor and public artist in the republic, with his expressionist roots having been more or less forgotten. Following a salon des refusés of artists rejected in a semi-official overview of Finnish art in 1933, a more loosely expressionist Octobrist artist group was launched the following year to extend the legacy that had become a naturalized part of Finnish culture. The group programmatically opposed nationalist and language-based polarizations, and even included women among the invited members. What little cooperation the October Group enjoyed ended with the war, but the group resumed activity in 1945 and carried on for a few more years.74 231

Timo Huusko and Tutta Palin

The critical discourse attached to expressionism lost much of its former theoretical rigor, though, and became more associative and inclusive in nature.

Transnationalism within the Nation State Two of the leading figures of the October Group, painters Ernst Krohn (1911–1934) and Sven Grönvall (1908–1975), who were cousins, used to spend their summers on the Karelian Isthmus in the vicinity of the Russian border.75 Before the Second World War, the Finnish border was only about 30 kilometers away from the former Russian capital.76 One of the invited members of the artists’ group was Grönvall’s cousin from the other side of his family, Ina Behrsen, today known in Finland as Ina Colliander. Grönvall was born in Finland, but Behrsen arrived in 1923, when she was sent over the border against her will to escape the post-revolutionary situation in the Soviet Union; in 1929 she was naturalized as a Finnish citizen. Behrsen’s family on both sides was Baltic German; Grönvall’s father was a Swedish-speaking Finn. In 1930, Behrsen married the Swedish-language author Tito (Fritiof) Colliander (1904–1989), who was likewise brought up in St. Petersburg. The same year, they had their joint debut, in Helsinki, with sketches and graphic works in black and white. In her childhood, Behrsen spent her summers by the sea in Kuokkala, Finnish Karelia, at her grandmother’s summer residence, the Villa Golicke. The cousins later shared joint ownership of the villa, and the newly-weds lived there for some time at the beginning of the 1930s. Villa Golicke became a meeting place for Swedish-language modernist authors. On the Karelian Isthmus, the German influence had historically been stronger than elsewhere in Finland, and with a somewhat different outlook on German culture than that of the Novembrists, BehrsenColliander and Colliander provide an example of transnationalism within the young nation state. Tito Colliander’s engagement with the German National Socialists also adds a sinister tone to the later nostalgic mythification of the sea resorts of the Karelian Isthmus as a multicultural, artistic paradise lost during the war.77 Behrsen began her art studies in Petrograd, but went on to receive a more thorough education at the Central School for Applied Arts in Finland, where she specialized in the graphic arts, a choice which coincided with the institutionalization of graphics as a field of the fine arts in the 1930s.78 She completed her studies in 1927, complementing them, in 1930, with a course in the graphic arts in Munich, where she studied mainly the linocut technique at the private Maxon and Kallenberger art school, Die vereinigten Ateliers (The United Studios). She then worked as an illustrator and journalist. An ink drawing reminiscent of early continental expressionism, a profile portrait of Finnish conductor and composer Robert Kajanus (1856–1933), was published in 1928 in the first issue of the Swedish-language modernist “little magazine,” Quosego (Figure 11.6).79 She also translated Russian modernist poetry into Swedish. Finnish, the main language of her new home country, was her fourth language, after German, Russian, and Swedish.80 The ambivalences that were inherent in the ethnicized and racial geopolitical positioning of Finland on the border between “the West” and “the East” gained in complexity during the interwar years. As cultural critic Kobena Mercer has argued, cultural difference is a central feature of modernity, and many “interactive relationships” valorized by aspects of contemporary theory “have always been present between the western center and societies hitherto placed on the periphery.”81 Mobility, both in geographic as well as intellectual and social terms, has functioned as a privileged metaphor for the modern condition, yet it is crucial to acknowledge the role played by involuntary migration in this often idealized equation. The Behrsen family’s tragedy was the suicide of Ina’s younger sister Renata, who had been left to continue her school in the unstable environment outside of Petrograd. 232

Discourses on Expressionism in Finland

Figure 11.6  Ina Behrsen, Robert Kajanus, undated ink drawing published in Quosego, sample issue, 1928: 24.  Kuvasto 2017

Ina Behrsen-Colliander’s 1930s Approach Ina Behrsen’s first independent idiom, c. 1930–1935, aligned with an expressionist tradition that could be experienced either as specifically German or more generally international—even universalist in the high modernist sense of the term. Given her background and gender, and her generation (she was a quarter of a century younger than Tyko Sallinen), her outlook on expressionism was different. Behrsen-Colliander did not take a direct stance on “Finnish” expressionism. Her personal contacts remained mainly in Swedish-language circles, but she is known to have visited Wäinö Aaltonen’s studio in 1929 while working as a graphic artist for the publishing house WSOY.82 Her early cycle of black-and-white woodcuts, which she at first signed BehrsenColliander, but later just Colliander, consists of images of women, couples, and families, poignantly highlighting the theme of fertility, not entirely different from Aaltonen’s primitivism. As a female artist embracing primitivist associations, Behrsen-Colliander stands alone. Behrsen-Colliander’s Girl with Fruit (1933; Figure 11.7) paraphrases in quite a startling way Paul Gauguin’s imagery of Tahitian women from the 1890s,83 its strong sexualization and racialization of women notwithstanding. In Behrsen-Colliander’s woodcut, the girl’s naked breasts are juxtaposed with her offering of fruit in quite a straightforward way. Unlike the German artists Emil Nolde and Max Pechstein, who followed Gauguin’s example of traveling to Oceania in the 1910s (in their case German instead of French Oceania),84 Behrsen-Colliander had no such opportunity to travel so widely. Margaret Mead’s anthropological study Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization, published in 1928, may have served as a motivation for a renewed interest in the South Pacific Islands; however, although 233

Timo Huusko and Tutta Palin

Figure 11.7  Ina Colliander, Tyttö ja hedelmiä/Nainen ja hedelmiä (Girl with Fruit/Woman with Fruit), 1933, woodcut, 22 × 34.5 cm, Finnish National Gallery/Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki. Photo: Finnish National Gallery/Hannu Aaltonen.  Kuvasto 2017

Mead idealized the allegedly unstrained social relations of “primitive” societies where individualism and the nuclear family were absent and adolescent girls were allegedly unfettered by sexual taboos, Behrsen-Colliander showed a more normative understanding of the reproductive role of the relationship between the sexes. In Finnish critiques, Behrsen-Colliander was mainly linked to Gauguin or Edvard Munch.85 Today, we might trace an affinity to André Derain, with whom German expressionists were most likely familiar,86 and his woodcut illustrations in Guillaume Apollinaire’s first book, the prose-poem L’Enchanteur pourrissant (Rotting Sorcerer), which was published as a single volume in 1909, in Paris, by the art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler.87 Unlike Derain’s sun-filled paradise, however, the atmosphere in Behrsen-Colliander’s setting is gloomy, even ominous (Figure 11.8). In Behrsen-Colliander’s universalizing approach, human relations are reduced to an involuntary, intransigent force.88 Emotional attachment is seldom enhanced in her prints, in spite of the warm materiality and personal immediacy that the usage of wood and hand-ground colors gives to the work. The artist took up occasional blocks of irregular form, even driftwood, and preferred soft, loosely grained types of wood, which create a rough and vivid line and leave the grain pattern clearly visible. She also made use of domestic utensils such as kitchen or garden knives, along with more specialized graphic artist’s carving tools.89 In this she was following a practice taken up early on by the Brücke expressionists and their Scandinavian followers, such as Munch.90 In her Vitalist cycle, Behrsen-Colliander emphasized

234

Discourses on Expressionism in Finland

Figure 11.8  Ina Colliander, Äidin iloa (Maternal Joy), 1932, woodcut, 50.1 × 31 cm, Finnish National Gallery/Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki. Photo: Finnish National Gallery/Hannu Aaltonen.  Kuvasto 2017

organic materials and simple craftwork processes that could be performed almost anywhere. Instead of insisting on the peculiarities of local types of wood, she relied on the universal associations of her materials. Wood and ink can be found and prepared for use almost anywhere in the inhabited world; like people, such materials could also migrate from one place to another.

Political Implications In the context of 1930s Germany, the question of the “nationalization” of the woodcut, in conjunction with Gothic art,91 gains in political significance. Furthermore, during the first half of the decade, a failed attempt was made to elevate expressionism to a German-Nordic (Northern) art form par excellence. Worringer took no active part in the struggle, but his 1911 treatise Formprobleme der Gotik was frequently cited in this context. The periodical Kunst der Nation (Art of the Nation), published during the period 1933–1935, was founded to argue for the “national” propriety of expressionism.92 This question is of interest with respect to Behrsen-Colliander’s situation, as her husband comes into view as a spokesperson for the National Socialists with his favorable report Glimtar från Tyskland (Flashes from Germany), which was published in 1934, after a six-week visit as an invited guest at the Dichterhaus poets’ residence in Travemünde.93

235

Timo Huusko and Tutta Palin

In contrast, Ina Behrsen’s reportage from her visit to Munich in the summer of 1930, entitled “Grey Germany,” which together with photos by the author was published in a Finnishlanguage family magazine, described a depressed and muted atmosphere, and surmised the arrival of a new political orientation based on “German work and German science.”94 In another reportage, from Italy from the same summer, Behrsen characterized Il Duce’s influence on school children, the “little fascists,” as appearing quite oppressive to the foreign observer.95 Her work was included in an exhibition of Finnish graphic art shown in Berlin, Dusseldorf, and Hamburg in 1935–1936, on official invitation by the National Socialist ideologist, Alfred Rosenberg,96 but she likewise partook in a Finnish group exhibition in Moscow and Riga (1934–1935). In Finland, she mainly exhibited paintings at the time. Tito Colliander maintained contact with National Socialist cultural organizations well into the years of the Continuation War (1941–1944), which he regretted in retrospect.97 In latterday Finland, he has mainly been seen as a naïve victim of propaganda, a view which his preserved correspondence and networks of contacts do not support.98 Ina Behrsen-Colliander’s loyalties seem more complex. Some of the avant-gardist authors, such as Elmer Diktonius and Gunnar Björling, who belonged to the couple’s nearest circle of friends, were strongly inclined toward the political left, as was Sven Gröndahl. The question remains why Behrsen-Colliander, sometime around 1935, so abruptly abandoned her expressionist manner of working with wood and the sensual intensity attached to it and moved on to religious iconography, gentle colors, and more French-looking stylistic affiliations. Was it because work of this sort was being more and more firmly condemned by the National Socialists as “degenerate”? Or, did she, in fact, wish to distance herself from marked associations with German culture? Or, was it a question of a more general international turn? It has been argued that in Britain, too, at the same moment, artists lost their interest in the organic, Vitalist, and maternalistic themes that had been dominant since the mid-1910s.99 The Behrsen family’s trauma of abandoning a young daughter amidst political unrest with tragic consequences renders an acute moral framework to the artist’s reflections on the theme of caretaking. It motivates a universalizing claim for the essential nature of the obligation to primary care. Thus, Ina Behrsen-Colliander’s art constitutes an interesting case that multiplies the modalities and uses of expressionism in Finland. The distance from Sallinen to the Collianders may seem great, yet after the war Tito Colliander chose to publish a monograph on Sallinen (1948, Finnish trans. 1949), bridging a political gap through shared male bohemianism.100 The Novembrist painterly touch with its characteristically dark colors remained part of a loosely nationalist line of expressionism, living on in the sober, restrained iconography of a Sven Grönvall or a Gunvor Grönvik (1912–1955), both of whom had Swedish as their mother tongue.101 At the same time, the emotionalist aesthetics put forward by the early proponents of expressionism were less dependent on a specific visual language and could be realized in both Aaltonen’s realistically rendered figures and Behrsen-Colliander’s mainstream avant-gardist form, which were presented in imaginary, nondescript primitivist mise-en-scènes. The expression of emotion could serve both social and deeply personal motives at the same time. Initially expected to contain an element of social revolution, expressionism opened up a dynamic and multivalent, but also potentially hazardous field of political associations. Unlike Sallinen and Aaltonen, who came from the west coast of Finland, Behrsen-Colliander entered the scene from another, more oblique angle, in its way equally typical of Finland’s geographical location in the shifting border region between “East” and “West”—and moreover in the variously defined region of the “North.” 236

Discourses on Expressionism in Finland

Notes 1 In Finland, “Nordic” mostly refers to Scandinavian (including Finnish) culture, while in German discourses the term can refer to Northern Europe (including Germany). It can also connote Germanic languages and their speakers, among which the Finnish-speaking Finns, with their Finno-Ugrian language, are not counted. 2 See also Timo Huusko, “Finnish Nationalism and the Avant-Garde,” in The Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1900–1925, ed. Hubert van den Berg et al. (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012), 556–571. 3 The section authored by Palin begins with the subchapter “Expressionism as a Generic (Male) Tradition.” See also Tutta Palin, “Luontojen ja kulttuurien välissä: Vitalismi Ina Collianderin varhais­ tuotannossa” [Between Natures and Cultures:Vitalism in Ina Colliander’s Early Work], in Erot ja etiikka feministisessä tutkimuksessa [Difference and Ethics in Feminist Research], ed. Kirsti Lempiäinen, Taru Leppänen, and Susanna Paasonen (Turku: Utukirjat, 2012), 109–139. 4 Rakel Kallio, “Taiteen henkisyyttä tavoittamassa: Ekspressionismin tulkintaa suomalaisessa 1910-luvun taidekritiikissä” [In Search of the Spiritual in Art: Interpreting Expressionism in the Art Criticism of the Early 1910s], in Taidehistoriallisia tutkimuksia/ Konsthistoriska studier [Studies in Art History] 12, eds. Marja Terttu Knapas and Marjo-Riitta Simpanen (Helsinki: Taidehistorian seura, 1991), 71–78. 5 Salme Sarajas-Korte, “Kandinsky ja Suomi I” [Kandinsky and Finland, I], in Ateneumin taidemuseo: Museojulkaisu 1970 [Ateneum Art Museum: Museum Publication 1970] (Helsinki: Ateneum Art Museum, 1970), 6.According to Sarajas-Korte, art historian Onni Okkonen first introduced Kandinsky’s book in his review “Uusia virtauksia maalaustaiteessa” [New Tendencies in Art] in the newspaper Uusi Aura [New Aura], February 14, 1913. For the exhibition tour and the accompanying catalogue, see Ortrud Westheider, “Die Tournee der ersten Ausstellung des Blauen Reiters: Ein Rekonstruktion in Korrespondentenberichten (The Tour of the First Blue Rider Exhibition: A Reconstruction through Correspondence Accounts),” in Der Blaue Reiter, ed. Christine Hopfengart (Bremen: Kunsthalle Bremen, 2000), 49–53. 6 Hubert van den Berg, “Expressionism, Constructivism, and the Transnationality of the Historical Avant-Garde,” in Transnationality, Internationalism, and Nationhood: European Avant-Garde in the First Half of the Twentieth Century, ed. Hubert F. van den Berg and Lidia Głuchowska (Leuven: Peeters, 2013), 40. 7 Ludvig Wennervirta [L.W.], “Uusi maalaustaide, taiteilijat ja yleisö” [New Painting, Artists, and the Public], Uusi Suometar [New Maiden of Finland], March 14, 1915; March 19, 1915; April 7, 1915; April 10, 1915. 8 Oiva Kuisma, “K. S. Laurila,” in Suomalainen estetiikka 1900-luvulla [Finnish Aesthetics in the 20th Century], ed. Oiva Kuisma (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2002), 74–75. 9 Wassily Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst [On the Spiritual in Art], 7th ed. (Bern-Bümpliz: Benteli-Verlag, 1963 [1912]), 121. 10 Wassily Kandinsky, “Über Kunstverstehen” [On Understanding Art], in Der Sturm: Der Blaue Reiter [The Sturm: The Blue Rider] (Berlin: Verlag der Sturm, [1914]), 15. See also Marit Werenskiold, The Concept of Expressionism: Origin and Metamorphosis (Oslo et al.: Universitetsforlaget, 1984), 177: note 52. 11 Ludvig Wennervirta, Uusi Suometar, April 10, 1915. 12 Werenskiold, Concept of Expressionism, 178: note 60; Magdalena Bushart, “Changing Times, Changing Styles:Wilhelm Worringer and the Art of His Epoch,” in Invisible Cathedrals:The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer, ed. Neil H. Donahue (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 70. 13 Wilhelm Worringer, Form in Gothic (London: Alec Tiranti, 1964 [1927], 45, 178–181. 14 Paul Fechter, Der Expressionismus [Expressionism], 3rd ed. (München: R. Piper & Co. Verlag, 1919 [1915]), 33–34. 15 See Ragnar Ekelund, “Marraskuun ryhmä” [The November Group], Taide [Art] 3 (1950): 1–8. New members were Ilmari Aalto, Wäinö Aaltonen, Mikko Carlstedt, Ragnar Ekelund, Viljo Kojo, Anton Lindforss, Alex Matson, Eero Nelimarkka, and Antti Wanninen. Sallinen, Cawén, Collin, Engberg, and Rissanen had in fact held a joint exhibition already in 1916. 16 Tuula Karjalainen, “Tyko Sallisen suomalainen saaga” [Tyko Sallinen’s Finnish Saga], in Taidehistoriallisia tutkimuksia/Konsthistoriska studier 12, 112–113. 17 Ibid. Wöllflin formulated his idea of the German Formgefühl in 1931.

237

Timo Huusko and Tutta Palin 18 See Kallio, “Taiteen henkisyyttä tavoittamassa,” 69; Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung [Abstraction and Empathy], 4th ed. (München: R. Piper & Co.Verlag, 1916 [1908]), 34–65; Worringer, Form in Gothic, 38–45, 69–87. 19 Karjalainen, “Tyko Sallisen suomalainen saaga,” 112. 20 As elsewhere in Europe, expressionist and other avant-garde art was often termed “Bolshevik.” At a meeting of the Finnish Artists’ Association in the autumn of 1918, Sallinen articulated heatedly that he was a socialist, not a bolshevik. See Erkki Koponen, “Suomen Taiteilijaseuran vaiheita 1864–1964” [Phases of the History of the Artists’ Association of Finland, 1864–1964], in Taide enemmän kuin elämä: Muistikuvia taiteemme taipaleelta (Art Before Life: Memories from the Journey of Our Art), ed. Erkki Koponen, Jorma Tissari, and Reijo Ahtokari (Helsinki: Suomen Taiteilijaseura, 1986), 12. 21 E.g., Erkki Sevänen, “Ensimmäisen tasavallan poliittinen tilanne ja kirjallisen älymystön toimintastrategiat” [The Political Situation of the First Republic and the Strategies of the Literary Intelligentsia], in Älymystön jäljillä: Kirjoituksia suomalaisesta sivistyneistöstä ja älymystöstä [Tracing the Intelligentsia: Texts on the Finnish Cultural and Intellectual Elites], eds. Pertti Karkama and Hanne Koivisto (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1997), esp. 48–51, 55–56. 22 Kallio, “Taiteen henkisyyttä tavoittamassa,” 71–72; August Brunius, Färg och form: Studier af den nya konsten [Color and Form: Studies on New Art] (Stockholm: Norstedt, 1913). 23 Kallio, “Taiteen henkisyyttä tavoittamassa,” 69–70. 24 See Tom Sandqvist, Ett svunnet Europa: Om modernismens glömda rötter [A Europe Gone Missing: On the Forgotten Roots of Modernism] (Ågerup: Symposion, 2009), 12–15. 25 Kallio, “Taiteen henkisyyttä tavoittamassa,” 77–78;Timo Huusko, Maalauksellisuus ja tunne: Modernistiset tulkinnat kuvataidekritiikissä 1908–1924 [Painterliness and Emotion: Modernist Interpretations in Art Criticism, 1908–1924] (Helsinki:Valtion taidemuseo, 2007), 104. 26 See, for example, Seppo Hentilä, “From the Independence to the End of the Continuation War, 1917– 1944,” in From Grand Duchy to a Modern State: A Political History of Finland since 1809, eds. Osmo Jussila, Seppo Hentilä, and Jukka Nevakivi, trans. David and Eva-Kaisa Arter (London: Hurst, 1999 [1995]), 102–103, 118–128. Just before the collapse of the German Empire in October 1918, the Finns even elected a German-born prince as the Finnish monarch. 27 Huusko, Maalauksellisuus ja tunne, 126. 28 Eduards Klavinš, “The Ambivalence of Ethnography in the Context of Latvian Modernism,” in Local Strategies, International Ambitions: Modern Art in Central Europe 1918–1968, ed.Vojtěch Lahoda (Prague: The Institute of Art History, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Artefactum, 2006), 61. 29 See Huusko, Maalauksellisuus ja tunne, 125. 30 See, for example, Werenskiold, Concept of Expressionism, 53–55; Kallio, “Taiteen henkisyyttä tavoittamassa,” 70; Charles W. Haxthausen, “Modern Art After ‘The End of Expressionism’: Worringer in the 1920s,” in Invisible Cathedrals, 125–127. 31 Werenskiold, Concept of Expressionism, 54. 32 Leena Svinhufvud, “The Finnish Ryijy-Rug: Living Tradition and Artistic Interpretation,” in Ryijy! The Finnish Ryijy-Rug, ed. Leena Svinhufvud and Eeva Viljanen, trans. Jüri Kokkonen (Helsinki: Design Museum, 2009), 252–254. 33 Huusko, Maalauksellisuus ja tunne, 128–129. 34 Axel Haartman [A. G-s.], “Den finländska konsten i Köpenhamn” [The Finnish Art in Copenhagen], Stenmans Konstrevy [Stenman’s Art Review] 3–4 (1919): 37–46. 35 See Camilla Hjelm, Modernismens förespråkare: Gösta Stenman och hans konstsalong [The Promoter of Modernism: Gösta Stenman and Stenmans Konstsalong] (Helsingfors: Statens konstmuseum, 2009), 111–124. 36 Haartman, “Den finländska konsten i Köpenhamn,” 39–41. 37 Aaro Hellaakoski, T. K. Sallinen. Tutkielma [T. K. Sallinen: A Study] (Hämeenlinna: Karisto, 1921), 12–13, 22. 38 Hellaakoski, T. K. Sallinen, 54.The term “fanatics” refers to the Laestadians, a religious sect in Northern Finland; Sallinen’s parents belonged to the sect. 39 Worringer, Form in Gothic, 45, 83–87. 40 A copy of the book is in Tyko Sallinen’s archival library in Hyvinkää. 41 See Viljo Kojo, Suruttomain seurakunta [Congregation of the Sorrowless] (Hämeenlinna: Karisto, 1921), 85. In this novel Hellaakoski is called “Aappo Ylä-Koski,” while Sallinen is named “Sonninen.” 42 Alvar Aalto, “T. K. Sallinen,” Iltalehti [Evening Times], March 30, 1922. “Old churches” in Finland referred to medieval churches in a mix of Gothic and Romanesque styles.

238

Discourses on Expressionism in Finland 43 Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung, 150–151. 44 Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865–1931, until 1907 Axel Gallén) became a member of Die Brücke in 1907. For Gallen-Kallela’s connections in Berlin in the 1890s, see Anne Schulten, Eros des Nordens: Rezeption und Vermittlung skandinavischer Kunst im Kontext der Zeitschrift Pan, 1895–1900 [Eros of the North: Reception and Mediation of Scandinavian Art in the Context of the Journal Pan, 1895–1900] (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2009). 45 Aalto, “T. K. Sallinen.” 46 Ludvig Wennervirta [L.W.], “Suuri Sallisnäyttely” [The Large Exhibition of Sallinen], Uusi Suomi [New Finland], April 9, 1922. Joel Lehtonen (1881–1934) and F. E. Sillanpää (1888–1964) were Finnish authors. Sillanpää was awarded the Nobel prize in literature in 1939. 47 E.g., Kallio, “Taiteen henkisyyttä tavoittamassa,” 80–81. 48 See Satu Grünthal, “Viljo Kojo sanan maalarina” [Viljo Kojo as a Word-Painter], in Viljo Kojo: Karjalainen kulttuurivaikuttaja [Viljo Kojo: A Karelian Cultural Agent], ed. Timo Huusko (Helsinki: Viipurin Taiteilijaseura, 2010), 55–69. 49 Viljo Kojo, Kiusauksesta kirkkauteen: Toinen kirja suruttomista [From Temptation to Brightness: The Second Book on the Sorrowless] (Hämeenlinna: Karisto, 1922), 171–173, 206–207. The artist was Kalle Carlstedt. 50 See “Den nya finländska konsten: Ett uttalande i G.H.T. av August Brunius” [New Finnish Art: A Commentary in G.H.T. by August Brunius], Hufvudstadsbladet [Capital Times], June 21, 1923. 51 See, for example, Tapio Tamminen, Kansankodin pimeämpi puoli [The Darker Side of the People’s Home] (Helsinki: Otava, 2015), 36, 86. 52 See “Kunsten paa Gøteborg-utstillingen, IV: Finsk malerkunst. Av museumsdirektør Jens Thiis” [Art at the Gothenburg Exhibition, IV: Finnish Painting. By Museum Director Jens Thiis], Dagbladet [Daily Times], July 7, 1923. 53 Anti-German attitudes are known to have been manifested at least in Denmark, and in Estonia in the Baltics. 54 See Haxthausen, “Modern Art After ‘The End of Expressionism,’” 119–122. 55 See, for example, Tuula Karjalainen, Uuden kuvan rakentajat: Konkretismin läpimurto Suomessa [The Constructors of New Imagery: The Breakthrough of Concretism in Finland] (Helsinki: WSOY, 1990), 27–32. 56 E.g. Alf Krohn, “Suomalaisia taiteilijaryhmiä II: Marraskuun ryhmä” [Finnish Artist Groups, II: The November Group], in Suomen taide: Vuosikirja 1954–1955 [Art in Finland: Yearbook, 1954–1955] (Helsinki: WSOY, 1956), 7–8; Riitta Ojanperä, Kriitikko Einari J. Vehmas ja moderni taide [Critic Einari J.Vehmas and Modern Art] (Helsinki:Valtion taidemuseo, 2010), 176–194, 257. 57 E.g. Krohn, “Suomalaisia taiteilijaryhmiä II,” 7. 58 Sarah Warren, “Spent Gypsies and Fallen Venuses: Mikhail Larionov’s Modernist Primitivism,” Oxford Art Journal 26:1 (2003): 31; Mikhail Larionov and the Cultural Politics of Late Imperial Russia (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 14. Warren’s case is Russia with its Slavic satellites, i.e. excluding Finland. 59 E.g., Rakel Kallio, “Huomioita Tyko Sallisen kolmesta Mirri-kuvasta” [Observations on Tyko Sallinen’s Three “Mirri” Images], Synteesi [Synthesis] 2–3 (1990): 83–87; Rakel Kallio, “Tyko Sallisen Mirrikuvat—Halun ja inhon peili?” [Tyko Sallinen’s “Mirri” (“Pussy Cat”) Paintings—A Mirror of Desire and Disgust?], in Näköalapaikalla: Aimo Reitalan juhlakirja [At a Vantage Point: Festschrift for Aimo Reitala], ed. Anna Ruotsalainen (Helsinki: Taidehistorian seura, 1996), 115–119; Inka-Maria Laitila and Tarja Strandén, Tukaattityttö: Mirri-kuvien takaa katsoo Helmi Vartiainen [The “Ducat” Girl: Helmi Vartiainen Looks from Behind the “Mirri” Images] (Helsinki: WSOY, 2002). 60 See, for example, Frank Krause, “Expressionismus und Geschlecht: Themen und Probleme der Forschung” [Expressionism and Gender: Research Themes and Problems], in Expressionism and Gender/ Expressionismus und Geschlecht, ed. Frank Krause (Göttingen:Vandenhoek and Ruprecht, 2010), 11–20. 61 Marja-Liisa Linder, “Kaisu and Konstu in Each Other’s Eyes: Portraits and Memories,” in Tyko Sallinen: Angels and Demons in Krapula, ed. Merja Ilola, trans. Vuokko Kellomäki (Hyvinkää: Hyvinkää Art Museum, 2006), 32–53. 62 For Aaltonen’s early expressionist works, see for example Heikki Tandefelt, “Wäinö Aaltonen,” in Kirjailijain ja taiteilijain Joulukirja [Authors’ and Artists’ Christmas Book] (Helsinki: Suomalainen kirjailijaseura “Kirjallinen työ” and Suomen taiteilijaseuran maalariliitto, 1917), 134–145. 63 Aaro Hellaakoski, “Väinö Aaltonen, kuvanveistäjä” [Väinö Aaltonen, Sculptor], Aika [Time] 2 (1922): 51.

239

Timo Huusko and Tutta Palin 64 Anna-Maria Tallgren [A-M. Tn.], “Väinö Aaltosta tapaamassa” [A Visit with Väinö Aaltonen], Helsingin Sanomat [Helsinki Times], October 9, 1927. 65 For Vitalism in German and British art, see e.g. Richard A. Lofthouse, Vitalism in Modern Art, C. 1900–1950: Otto Dix, Stanley Spencer, Max Beckmann and Jacob Epstein (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2005). 66 Volker Pirsich, “Austellungen der Galerie DER STURM 1912–1919” [Exhibitions at the Sturm Gallery, 1912–1919], in Der Sturm: Chagall, Feininger, Jawlensky, Kandinsky, Klee, Kokoschka, Macke, Marc, Schwitters und viele andere im Berlin der Zehner Jahre [The Sturm: Chagall, Feininger, Jawlensky, Kandinsky, Klee, Kokoschka, Macke, Marc, Schwitters, and Many Others in 1910s Berlin], ed. Barbara Alms and Wiebke Steinmetz (Bremen: H. M. Hauschild, 2000), 258–259. 67 See, for example, Aaro Hellaakoski, T. K. Sallinen, 12; “Kubismista klassisismiin” [From Cubism to Classicism], in Taiteilijaseuran Joulualbumi 1925 [Christmas Album of the Artists’ Association, 1925], ed. L.Wennerström [Ludvig Wennervirta] (Helsinki: Suomen Taiteilijaseura, 1925), 61, 66, 74–77; see also Ulla Vihanta, “Wäinö Aaltosen maalaustaiteen henkisestä sisällöstä” [On the Spiritual Content of Wäinö Aaltonen’s Paintings], in Wäinö Aaltonen 1894–1966, ed. Heidi Pfäffli (Turku: Wäinö Aaltosen museo, 1994), 78. 68 Elisabeth Lisitzin [E. Karjalannuoli], “Wäinö Aaltonen,” Forum 2–3 (1939): 11. The article was written for a German audience. 69 Hellaakoski, “Väinö Aaltonen, kuvanveistäjä,” 55. 70 Onni Okkonen, Wäinö Aaltonen 1915–1925:Tutkielma [Wäinö Aaltonen, 1915–1925: A Study] (Porvoo: WSOY, 1926), 32. 71 See, for example, Marianne Koskimies-Envall, Jaakko Linkamo, and Erkki Salminen, The Karl Hedman Art Collection and Select Choices from Other Collections in the Ostrobothnian Museum (Vaasa: The Hedman Foundation, 2009), 796–797, 800–803, 808–809, 814–815. 72 For example, in an expressive watercolor in grisailles published in Aitta [Granary] 4:12 (1922): 30. The original is in the collections of the Museum Centre of Turku (inv. no. M 65). Cf. Ulla Vihanta, “Tuntematon Wäinö Aaltonen: Taustaa kirjankansi- ja runokuvituksille sekä niiden luonnoksille” [Unknown Wäinö Aaltonen: Some Background for His Book Covers and Illustrations of Poems, Including Their Sketches], in Wäinö Aaltonen väreissä/Wäinö Aaltonen i färg: Maalauksia ja piirustuksia/ Målningar och teckningar [Wäinö Aaltonen in Color: Paintings and Drawings], eds. Outi Flander and Aune Jääskinen (Helsinki: Suomen Taideakatemia, 1988), 45. 73 Tutta Palin, “An Italian-Looking Typically Finnish Man: Wäinö Aaltonen’s Public Image,” in Wäinö Aaltonen Poses, eds. Elina Ovaska, Marjo Aurekoski-Turjas, and Riitta Kormano, trans. Grano Oy/ Multidoc (Turku: The Museum Centre of Turku, 2017), 74–91. 74 Leena Peltola, “Kansallista modernismia/Nationell Modernism” [National Modernism], in Lokakuun ryhmä/Oktobergruppen 1933–1951 [The October Group, 1933–1951], ed. Tuula Poutasuo (Helsinki: Suomen Taideyhdistys, 1987), 4–19. The founding members Ernst Krohn, Sven Grönvall, Ragnar Relander, and Urho Taskinen, accompanied by journalist Tauno Tattari, invited ten other artists to join the group: Rabbe Enckell, Ina Behrsen-Colliander, Sakari Tohka, Helmi Kuusi, Linnea Jonsson, Torger Enckell, Tapio Tapiovaara, Carl Wilhelms, Lassi Tokkola, and Birger Carlstedt. 75 See, for example, Peltola, “Kansallista modernismia/Nationell Modernism,” 10. 76 St. Petersburg was in 1914 renamed Petrograd, and in 1924 Leningrad. 77 On this romantic cultural motif, see, for example, Maria Lähteenmäki, Maailmojen rajalla: Kannaksen rajamaa ja poliittiset murtumat 1911–1944 [On the Frontier between Two Worlds: The Border Zone of the Karelian Isthmus and the Political Fractures, 1911–1944] (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2009), 336–352; Rainer Knapas, Landet som var: Karelska kulturbilder [The Land that Used to Be: Images of Karelian Culture] (Helsingfors: Schildt and Söderström, 2015), 157–185. Behrsen-Colliander contributed to this idea with a set of jolly woodcuts depicting Karelian village life, reminiscent of Wassily Kandinsky’s and Gabriele Münter’s ethnographically inspired Munich period (e.g., Café Gratshoff,Terijoki, 1935).These woodcuts, from the same period as the ones discussed here, rely more on decorative outline and narrative content. Behrsen-Colliander made prints in both Blaue Reiter and Brücke styles. 78 See Erkki Anttonen, Kansallista vai modernia: Taidegrafiikka osana 1930-luvun taidejärjestelmää [National or Modern: Graphics as Part of the 1930s Art System] (Helsinki: Valtion taidemuseo, 2006); for Behrsen-Colliander’s oeuvre, 364–370. 79 “Robert Kajanus: Teckning av Ina Behrsen” [Robert Kajanus: A Drawing by Ina Behrsen], Quosego, sample issue (1928): 24. Why Behrsen portrayed the seventy-two-year-old maestro of the National Romanticist generation remains unclear.

240

Discourses on Expressionism in Finland 80 Ina Behrsen was the elder daughter of architect Richard Behrsen and his wife Lydia (née von Golicke). Her parents’ families had come to the Russian capital through the Baltics; as offspring of the Baltic-German ruling class, their home language remained German, while their domestic servants spoke Russian. For the biography of the artist, see her published correspondence with her cousin Sven Grönvall. Kati Bondestam, ed., Inas längtan: Ina Collianders brev till Sven Grönvall 1925–1974 [Ina’s Longing: Ina Colliander’s Letters to Sven Grönvall, 1925–1974] (Esbo: Schildt, 2005); Taina Lammassaari and Pappismunkki Arseni, Ina Colliander: Puun kosketus [Ina Colliander: The Touch of Wood] (Helsinki: Otava, 1991); Erkki Anttonen, “Colliander, Ina,” in Kansallisbiografia [National Biography] (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2000, updated 2008), last accessed October 23, 2017, https://kansallisbiografia.fi/kansallisbiografia/henkilo/7912. For the catalogue of a major monographic exhibition, see Leena Ahtola-Moorhouse, ed., Ina Colliander, trans. The English Centre Helsinki (Helsinki: Ateneum Art Museum, 2005). 81 Kobena Mercer, “Introduction,” in Cosmopolitan Modernisms, ed. Kobena Mercer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 8. 82 Letter draft of the publisher (IJ/TR) to Wäinö Aaltonen, September 9, 1929 (WSOY archive, National Archives, Helsinki). The visit concerned a yearbook cover. 83 See, for example, the oil painting Two Tahitian Women (1899), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the watercolor Tahitian Eve (1892), Musée de Peinture et de Sculpture, Grenoble; and the woodcuts Change of Residence (1899) and Women, Animals and Foliage (1898). 84 See Christoph Otterbeck, Europa Verlassen: Künstlerreisen am Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts [Leaving Europe: Artists’ Travels at the Beginning of the 20th Century] (Köln, Weimar, and Wien: Böhlau, 2007), 257. 85 See, for example, Ludvig Wennervirta [L.W.], “Grafiikkaa ja maalauksia” [Graphics and Paintings], Ajan Suunta [Direction of Time], May 15, 1934; “Vår grafiska utställning i Tyskland” [Our Exhibition of Graphics in Germany], Hufvudstadsbladet, December 31, 1936 (citing the German critic Hans H. Reeder); Edvard Richter [E. R-r], “Kolme taidenäyttelyä” [Three Art Exhibitions],” Helsingin Sanomat, October 8, 1939; Signe Tandefelt [S. T-lt], “Ina Collianders utställning” [Ina Colliander’s Exhibition], Hufvudstadsbladet, October 11, 1939. The artist’s graphics, including Girl with Fruit, were best represented in Behrsen-Colliander’s first solo exhibition in Helsinki in 1939. 86 See, for example, Stephen Eric Bronner, Modernism at the Barricades: Aesthetics, Politics, Utopia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 43, 137. 87 The thirty-two images augment the parodic poetry figuring sorcerer Merlin and a nymph. The book was soon republished in numerous new editions, the first edition remaining a bibliophilic rarity. 88 Cf. the woodcut “Immer Wieder” (“Time and Again,” 1934) featuring a naked couple sitting on three human graves suggesting a recurring cycle of life, with a title known to refer to a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, published in German for the first time in 1923. 89 Cf. Anttonen, “Colliander, Ina.” 90 Monika Wagner, “Wood: ‘Primitive’ Material for the Creation of ‘German Sculpture’,” in New Perspectives on Brücke Expressionism: Bridging History, ed. and trans. Christian Weikop (Farnham, Surrey and Burlington,VT: Ashgate, 2011), 71–88. 91 For a nuanced discussion of the phenomenon, see, for example, Maike Steinkamp and Bruno Reudenbah, ed., Mittelalterbilder im Nationalsozialismus [Images of the Middle Ages in National Socialism] (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2013). 92 See, for example, Reinhold Heller et al., “Resistance and Exile: Artistic Strategies under National Socialism,” in Confronting Identities in German Art: Myths, Reactions, Reflections, ed. Reinhold Heller (Chicago, IL:The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 125–126; Stefan Germer, “Kunst der Nation: Zu einem Versuch, die Avantgarde zu nationalisieren” [Art of the Nation: On the Attempt to Nationalise the Avant-garde], in Kunst auf Befehl?: Dreiunddreißig bis Fünfundvierzig [Art on Command? From 33 to 45], ed. Bazon Brock and Achim Preiß (München: Klinkhardt und Biermann, 1990), 21–40. 93 Tito Colliander, Glimtar från Tyskland: Några anteckningar (Flashes from Germany: Some Notes) (Helsingfors: Söderström, 1934). Behrsen-Colliander’s employer in 1928–1931, the publishing house WSOY, had professed German sympathies among its leaders. 94 Ina Behrsen-Colliander, “Harmaa Saksa” [Grey Germany], Kansan Kuvalehti [People’s Illustrated Magazine] 5:21 (1931): 25. 95 Ina Behrsen-Colliander, “Pikku-fascisteja” [Little Fascists], Kansan Kuvalehti 5:37 (1931): 22. 96 Markku Jokisipilä and Janne Könönen, Kolmannen valtakunnan vieraat: Suomi Hitlerin Saksan vaikutuspiirissä 1933–1944 [The Guests of the Third Reich: Finland in the Sphere of Influence of Hitler’s

241

Timo Huusko and Tutta Palin Germany, 1933–1944] (Helsinki: Otava, 2013), 108–111. Altogether forty-one artists’ works were included in the exhibition. See the typed list of works, “Finnische Graphik-Austellung” [Exhibition of Finnish Graphic Art], Archive of the Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki; Anttonen, Kansallista vai modernia, 158–159. 97 Tito Colliander, Nära [Near] (Helsingfors: Holger Schildt, 1971), 107–118. 98 Carl-Johan Holmlund, “Poliittisen pyhiinvaeltajan profiili: Tito Collianderin suhde kansallissosialistiseen Saksaan” [The Profile of a Political Pilgrim: Tito Colliander’s Relationship to National Socialist Germany] (unpublished Licentiate thesis in Comparative Literature, University of Helsinki, 1999). 99 Anne Middleton Wagner, Mother Stone: The Vitality of Modern British Sculpture (New Haven, CT and London:Yale University Press, 2005), 1, 11. 100 For Edvard Munch as the perennial expressionist, see Tito Colliander, Sallinen (Helsingfors: Söderström, 1948), 208. 101 Grönvik, who made her debut as late as 1939, was one of the few women artists in the country in whose work we can identify a clear expressionist allegiance.

242

12 EXPRESSIONISM IN SÁMI ART John Savio’s Woodcuts of the 1920s and 1930s Tuija Hautala-Hirvioja

This essay addresses the art of John Savio (1902–1938), in particular his graphic works, offers a brief overview of his short life as a basis for understanding the development of his art, and provides an analysis of his work, specifically his use of Western pictorial conventions and expressionism. Savio was the northern-most expressionist in Europe and the first educated Sámi artist. He concentrated on making woodcuts, and is best known for his black-and-white woodcut prints, which depict the indigenous Sámi people and scenes from everyday Sámi life as well as the landscapes, villages, and seaports of Finnmark, located in the northeastern-most region of Norway. The Sámi people are not presented as an exotic motif but rather as ordinary individuals, with familiar human emotions, busy going about their daily lives. The prints consist of clear, plain, and vivid compositions, sometimes painted with watercolors; their atmospheric expression is effective. In both style and content, Savio’s graphic works relate to expressionism.

An Educated Sámi Artist Savio was descended from the Kven, the coastal Finns, and the Sámi people. The Kvens are an ethnic minority in Norway who are the descendants of Finnish peasants and fishermen who emigrated from the northern parts of Finland and Sweden to northern Norway in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Sámi are an in part indigenous Finno-Ugric people inhabiting the Arctic area of Sápmi (Sámiland), which today encompasses parts of far northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, the Kola Peninsula of Russia, and the border area between southern and middle Sweden and Norway.1 John Andreas Savio was born in a small village on the shore of Varangerfjord and spent his early years in Kirkenes, in Finnmark.2 The family of his father, Per Savio, came from Finland, and his mother, Else Strimp, belonged to the wealthy Sámi upper class. The first few decades of the twentieth century in Norway and in many other European countries were characterized by racial theories that denigrated ethnic minorities and strongly encouraged the assimilation of the Sámi and Kven people,3 and these also had an impact upon Savio’s life and work. Savio was the oldest child; his sisters, born in 1903 and 1905, died in infancy. In 1905, his mother died of tuberculosis and, two days later, his father drowned while transporting his mother’s coffin from Vadsø.4 Savio moved to the village of Bugøyfjord, on the shore of Varangerfjord, where his maternal grandparents (Sara and Joseph Strimp) cared for him. 243

Tuija Hautala-Hirvioja

The village was a center of Norwegian-Finnish-Russian trade and Laestadianism, a Lutheran religious revivalist movement to which his grandparents belonged.5 Along with Sámi and Finnish, the people spoke a mixture of Russian and Norwegian that developed because of the Russian Pomor trade.6 Thanks to his grandparents’ wealth, Savio was able to attend school and enjoy opportunities for further development that were not available to others. Savio spoke the various languages of his home village and, at the age of ten, had acquired sufficient Norwegian language skills to be sent to Vardø, where he received a good primary and middle school education.7 In 1912, Savio’s grandmother died and, in 1920, his grandfather. Thus, Savio had lost all his close relatives by the age of eighteen.8 It is not known when Savio became interested in drawing, but his teacher Isak Saba, who was a Sámi activist and politician, encouraged him to draw. Savio attended the upper secondary school of Bodø, but without making much progress. In the fall of 1920, he moved to Christiania (today Oslo) to complete secondary school in the English program at Ragna Nielsen’s private school. During his time at Nielsen’s school, Savio also attended drawing classes in the State College of Crafts and Design, where he received a systematic education in art. In January 1921, Savio came down with tuberculosis for which he underwent surgery and, because of the poor state of his physical and mental health, he was sent to a sanatorium for recovery in December 1921. He lived in Oslo, but to recover his strength, he spent the spring and summer of 1922 in Finnmark. In the same fall, he continued his art studies at the State College of Crafts and Design.9 Between 1926 and 1928, Savio lived in several villages in Finnmark. The following years (1929–1936) were his wandering period; he visited various parts of Norway and also traveled to the neighboring countries, visiting Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki, and Turku. Savio also traveled to Central and Western Europe, his primary destination being Paris. During this trip, he spent some time in Munich and Cologne and, on his way back, visited England. It is likely that he studied (1933–1934) in one of the free art academies in Paris, where he held a solo exhibition in the summer of 1936. While it is not known how often Savio visited his home region after 1930, we know he lived in Kirkenes for some time in 1937, before he returned to Oslo in the fall. In the spring of 1938, the tuberculosis recurred, and Savio died in Oslo at the age of thirty-six.10

Savio’s Woodcut Prints Savio’s career as an artist lasted for about sixteen years, from 1922 to 1938. During this time, he produced oil paintings and watercolors, but focused mainly on relief printing techniques. We do not know much about his paintings because many of them were destroyed during the Second World War.11 Today, a total of 151 graphic motifs and versions of his prints are known. As Savio did not date his prints, most have been identified by studying his travels and the places in which he stayed.12 Savio’s main motifs were reindeer and other northern animals such as wolves; he also recorded Sámi people in a variety of situations, for example catching and herding reindeer or driving away the wolves harassing the reindeer, but also playing cards or drinking coffee beside an open fireplace. Other important themes were the villages and the coastal and mountain sceneries of northern Norway (Norland, Romsdalen, and Finnmark). Portrayed against the background of the ever-present Arctic landscape, the interplay between human beings and nature is a recurrent motif in his art. Savio also depicted emotions such as anger, frustration, jealousy, and loneliness, perhaps in response to his own feelings.13 Prints such as Sjalusi (Jealousy; Figure 12.1), Aqua vita, and Rivaler (Rivals) depict angry figures; the sky and surroundings (e.g., walls and houses) are dark, and the mood is oppressive.14 244

Expressionism in Sámi Art

Figure 12.1  John Savio, Sjalusi (Jealousy), n.d., woodcut, 30 × 18 cm, Saviomuseet, Kirkenes, Norway

During his studies in the 1920s, Savio became interested in graphic techniques; it was easy for him to engrave wood and linoleum blocks as, like every Sámi boy, he had been taught to make duodji, the traditional Sámi handicraft, and to use a knife. Duodji, made by engraving in wood or bone, were meant to be used in an everyday work environment; Savio’s familiarity with this skill provided a good basis for his woodcuts. After Savio’s lung surgery, in 1921, he continued to compose drawings at the State College of Crafts and Design, but worked independently most of the time. He also studied art history and anatomy in the library and in the collections of the National Gallery, viewing and copying the works of the Old Masters. At this time, woodcut was not taught in art schools in Norway, so Savio had to acquaint himself with this technique. He became interested in both old and new graphic art works as well as Japanese wood engraving and began to study graphic works by Albrecht Dürer and possibly also other German Renaissance artists.15 Works of the German Renaissance period typically depict extreme suffering, anxiety, and other strong emotions and are characterized by nervous, dark lines and sharp pleats. Dürer’s high-quality woodcut prints and Matthias Grünewald’s visionary paintings, with their vivid colors, expressive lines, and stark contrasts of light, established the artists’ reputation and influence across Europe. With their intensely emotional works, they continued the German Gothic tradition of unrestrained gesture and expression, using Renaissance compositional principles.16 Expressionist artists in Germany active around 1910 were interested in German Renaissance art, particularly Grünewald’s paintings. It is most likely that Savio’s interest in the depiction of 245

Tuija Hautala-Hirvioja

strong emotions was influenced and shaped by German Renaissance art; his identification with the pain and suffering depicted in German Renaissance art may have been a result of his own familiarity with disease and loss. In Oslo, the creation of art was regarded as a profession and trade, but elsewhere in Norway art was associated with leisure activities and considered to be a rather interesting hobby. People in Finnmark were not used to buying art, and the Laestadian religious influence, which was strong in the region, rejected vanity and luxury.17 In Sámi culture, beauty was associated with utilitarian objects; art was not part of either the Sámi or Norwegian folk culture, and in the Sámi language, there was no word for the fine arts until the 1970s. The North Calotte region, however, saw the gradual arrival of a new form of patronage. At the end of the nineteenth century, Hurtigruten ships began to sail from Bergen to Kirkenes, and it became easier for tourists to travel along the western coast of Norway as far as Finnmarken. While in Finnmark, they would buy Savio’s prints, helping him to earn a living with his art.18 The tourists, wanting to acquire truly authentic souvenirs, were enchanted by the expressive landscapes and the exotic motifs of Sámi culture. Unlike the handcarved duodji handicrafts, which took some time to make and were thus relatively expensive, woodcut prints were easily reproduced and sold more cheaply than paintings; from one block Savio could produce fifty to one hundred prints. Savio developed his woodcut technique by studying Malcom C. Salaman’s book The Woodcut of To-Day at Home and Abroad, which was published in London in 1927. In addition to the instructional text, the book contains numerous illustrations of a wide variety of woodcut examples. Through his study, Savio became familiar with xylography, a woodcut technique in which a block is cut across the grain of the wood, making possible very thin strokes. Much like copper engraving, an abundance of detail is thus typical of the xylographic technique; Savio’s own woodcut technique was clearly influenced by this method,19 which he used to depict animals in motion and to create dynamic compositions based on fine lines, as can be seen in his woodcut prints Reinkalver II (Reindeer Calves) and Israel Lønbomsplass (Israel Lønboms Square; Figure 12.2).

Edvard Munch as Savio’s Idol Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863–1944), whose exhibitions Savio saw in the Blomqvist gallery in Oslo in 1919 and 1921,20 was Savio’s most important role model and idol.21 Munch was already famous in Norway; his wall paintings in the entrance hall of the University of Oslo were completed in 1916, and the first book about his art was published in 1917. Munch was also one of the promoters of the Norwegian printmakers’ association, which was founded in 1919. When Rasmus Meyers Kunstsamlingen in Bergen opened as a public museum in 1924, paintings and prints by Munch constituted an important part of the collection. The largest retrospective exhibition of Munch’s art works ever were shown at the Nationalgalerie in Berlin and the National Gallery in Oslo in 1927.22 The same year, the second volume of Gustav Schiefler’s catalogue raisonnée of prints Edvard Munch: Das graphische Werk 1906–1926 (Edvard Munch: The Graphic Works 1906–1926) was published in Berlin.23 Germany artists had begun to take an interest in the graphic arts in the late 1800s; the painter and sculptor Käthe Kollwitz, for example, began making prints in 1890. Munch, who took an interest in Kollwitz’s work, was self-taught in the use of graphic techniques and made his first print in 1894, while in Berlin; he later went on to become, so to speak, a father figure of expressionism in Germany, with both Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter offering him membership.

246

Expressionism in Sámi Art

Figure 12.2  John Savio, Israel Lønbomsplass (Israel Lønboms Square), n.d., woodcut, 32 × 40.5 cm, Saviomuseet, Kirkenes, Norway

In terms of style, Savio’s woodcut Okto (Alone; Figure 12.3) shows similarities to Munch’s work, particularly his well-known work The Scream (1893). Munch drew on images of nature to depict human emotion, the depths of the soul, and experiences of urban life.24 Savio, in light of his own personal losses and similar life experiences, easily identified with Munch’s life and art. Like Savio, Munch also lost many of his family members at an early age: his mother died of tuberculosis when he was only five years old; his favorite sister, Sophie, died of tuberculosis two years later; and his sister Laura died of cancer in 1926.25 Savio lived a life very different from that of the bohemian artist Munch; he did not drink alcohol, he believed in God,26 and he remained an outsider in the Oslo art scene. In the 1930s, Savio continued to sell his woodcuts to tourists and some private collectors, but suffered equally from poverty and loneliness, separate from the Norwegian art world and without family.27 This sense of loneliness can also be seen in his other woodcuts. Most of the European expressionists, along with their interests in art and culture, were politically active, but Savio and Munch, both introverts, remained unattached to any formal groups or party programs, either political or aesthetic. Much like Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, their lives were shaped by a sense of restlessness and a need to remain on the move.28 In 1937, the Nazi regime in Germany banned all modern art as un-German, Jewish, or Communist in nature, denouncing it as “degenerate” (Entartete Kunst). Artists who were identified as degenerate artists were dismissed from teaching positions, forbidden to exhibit or to sell

247

Tuija Hautala-Hirvioja

Figure 12.3  John Savio, Okto (Alone), n.d., woodcut, 18.9 × 26.4 cm, Saviomuseet, Kirkenes, Norway

their works, and, in some cases, even forbidden to produce art.29 So-called degenerate art was eliminated from German art collections, among them thirty-eight works by Munch, which were sold in 1937.30 The backlash against expressionism, and Munch specifically, must have been a shock to Savio. Munch’s works, however, dominated the Norwegian pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair of 1937,31 and this probably strengthened Savio’s desire to continue his strong and vivid depiction of the Sámi people in an expressive style.

The Influences of Norwegian Art In Norway of the 1920s and 1930s, woodcut and linocut were not particularly popular graphic techniques. In addition to Munch, only Nikolai Astrup (1880–1928) and Gustav Vigeland (1869–1943), who both became important models for Savio, used these relief printing techniques.32 Vigeland was influenced by Munch (see, for example, Vigeland’s sculpture Fear) and also by his own father, who was a master carpenter. In his woodcuts, he depicts the dramatic nature of the sea coast as well as various human figures.33 Savio’s woodcut style is similar to but not as dramatic as Vigeland’s, as can be seen in his prints from Romsdalen: Trolltinnan (The Trolltindan Mountains) and Elva ved trollvatnet (The River at Trollvatnet; Figure 12.4). Astrup, who died of pneumonia at the age of forty-seven, lived most of his life in Jølster. With the exception of a few works, his motifs are all taken from his home region.34 Regarded today as a neoromantic painter, Astrup addressed the nature of our relationship to nature, the fertility of the earth, and the eternal cycle of life.35 Like Astrup, Savio was essentially a regionalist; he concentrated on depicting landscapes in Finnmark, Lofoten, and Bodø. A good example is Israel Lønbomsplass (Israel Lønboms Square; Figure 2), from around 1930. Savio selected as his motif the town square in Kirkenes; the woodcut offers a description of everyday life in winter and directly relates to local history— the persons depicted can be identified.36 Savio also began making colorful woodcut prints based on Astrup’s work by first printing them in black and white and then hand-coloring 248

Expressionism in Sámi Art

Figure 12.4  John Savio, Elva ved trollvatnet (The River at Trollvatnet), n.d., woodcut, 23 × 33 cm, Saviomuseet, Kirkenes, Norway

them in blue, yellow, red, and green—the traditional colors of Sámi apparel (e.g., Granda ja nieda [Boy and Girl], Plate 17 and Sommer [Summer]). The colors soften the expressiveness and add romantic overtones. The Norwegian painter Axel Revold (1887–1962) encouraged Savio’s interest in expressively depicting the northern landscape and the life of Sámi people. From 1924 to 1925, Revold operated a private art school in Oslo, and some sources indicate that Savio took lessons with him.37 Revold was a student of Henri Matisse in Paris from 1908 to 1911; he was inspired by the Fauvist painters, especially Kees van Dongen, who was briefly a member of the German expressionist group Die Brücke.38 Perhaps Savio knew van Dongen’s art via Revold. Dongen’s influence can be found in Savio’s heavy-handed cutting of the plate, as visible in his works Ulvepar (Pair of Wolves), Hvalp og reinokse (Puppy and Reindeer), and Chakcha’aeked (Evening in the Fall; Figure 12.5). Scandinavian and Norwegian art of the period in general, and specifically Munch’s art, addressed fundamental existential questions: the meaning of life and our role in the world. In literature of the period, these questions were addressed by authors such as Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg and philosophers such as Søren Kierkegaard.39 Savio explored these questions in relation to the Sámi. He was interested in the position of the Sámi in society but also in our relationship to nature, which for the Sámi could sometimes be up close and dangerous, as in Mann og bjørn (Man and Bear). At other times, the relationship was more pastoral, as in Savio’s handcolored print Sommer/Gaesse (Summer; Figure 12.6), in which a Sámi gentleman sits cross-legged, meditatively smoking a pipe, against the backdrop of a brilliantly illuminated summer landscape. 249

Tuija Hautala-Hirvioja

Figure 12.5  John Savio, Chakcha’aeked (Evening in the Fall or Autumn Evening), n.d., woodcut, 25.4 × 17.2 cm, Saviomuseet, Kirkenes, Norway

The influence of German expressionism was strongly felt in Norway in the 1930s. Rolf Nesch, a student of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, emigrated to Slependen, west of Oslo, in 1933.40 He went on to play an important role in the Norwegian art world. Many young Norwegian artists of the time had studied in Germany before the National Socialists denounced expressionism. Some of Revold’s students, among them Reidar Aulie and Arne Ekeland, went on to develop their own expressive style in their socially critical paintings.41

The Content and Context of Savio’s Art Savio spoke many languages, including Sámi, Finnish, Norwegian, English, German, and also some French. Thus, he was able to keep up with foreign art books and journals and familiarize himself with the art of other countries. During his short life, Savio traveled extensively, visiting exhibitions in Norway and also abroad.42 On his way to Paris in 1934, Savio visited Munich and Cologne.43 In Germany, attitudes toward modernism began to turn negative in the early 1930s. Even before the National Socialists came to power, writers such as Alfred Rosenberg were criticizing the Bauhaus School and its modernist style; in 1932, the Dessau Bauhaus closed, and the Berlin Bauhaus was pressured to close in April 1933.44 The fate of expressionist art in Germany, however, initially remained uncertain, with German propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, for example, arguing that some artists of German expressionist movement, such as Emil Nolde, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Ernst Barlach, represented a 250

Expressionism in Sámi Art

Figure 12.6  John Savio, Sommer/Gaesse (Summer), n.d., hand-colored woodcut, 27 × 18.5 cm, Saviomuseet, Kirkenes, Norway

truly national spirit in German art.45 During his European travels, Savio thus had at least some opportunity to familiarize himself with the work of various expressionist artists, in whom he took a great interest, in the art exhibitions and collections in Paris, Munich, and Cologne. In Germany and the Scandinavian countries, acceptance of various pseudoscientific anthropological typologies on the basis of race, particularly to justify or establish the presumed strengths and weaknesses of particular racial groups, grew steadily in the 1920s and 1930s. Thus, it is possible that the “dancing natives” of Savio’s woodcut Hoppla vi lever! (Happy Days!; Figure 12.7) were intended as a satirical or ironic response to such thinking. As with numerous tribes in Africa, the Sámi were viewed by many as the relics of an aboriginal race, intellectually inferior and incapable of rigorous abstract analysis, that had been pushed aside during human evolution.46 Savio’s art was featured in his solo exhibition in Paris in 1936, which was reviewed under the title “Un dessinateur lapon” (A Lappish artist) in the newspaper L’Illustration (Illustration, July 11, 1936). The article, which included a reproduction of his woodcut Lassokaster (Lassoing), introduced Savio as a successful example of the self-taught artist and also praised Per Savio, his father, who had risked his own life to save the lives of the Norwegian explorer Cartsen Borchgrevink and his colleagues during their expedition to Antarctica in 1898. In language and sentiment characteristic of the period, the author concludes with the thought that although the father unfortunately drowned only a few years after the polar expedition, he “gave his son John an artistic temperament that distinguishes him from the other representatives of his race.”47 251

Tuija Hautala-Hirvioja

Figure 12.7  John Savio, Hoppla vi lever! (Happy Days!), n.d., woodcut, 17 × 23 cm, Saviomuseet, Kirkenes, Norway

In 1910, the Sámi reindeer herder Johan Turi (1854–1936) became known for his book Muittalus sámid birra (John Turi’s Book of Lapland, 1931; An Account of the Sámi, 2010, in a new English translation), the first nonreligious book to be published in the Sámi language by a Sámi author. According to Harald Gaski, a researcher of Sámi literature, Turi is still viewed today as the most important tradition bearer and disseminator of Sámi values and the wisdom of the Sámi elders.48 In the text, which he complemented with his own drawings, Turi directly addresses essential aspects of the living conditions of the Sámi people; he was the first to portray the Sámi people as something more than anthropologically interesting subjects. Subsequent to the success of his book, Turi received official recognition, with the Swedish government granting him the Royal Gold Medal and a state artist’s pension.49 Savio was introduced to Turi’s book while still in school by his teacher, the Sámi activist Isak Saba. Later, Savio himself continued and extended the work of Turi. Turi portrayed the Sámi as members of a group but Savio depicted Sámi culture from an individual viewpoint, i.e. he portrayed individual people in a variety of situations. Among his motifs are reindeer herders at work, fishermen, children sucking icicles, and people drinking, fighting, and playing cards. Portraying the life of Sámi people could very well be a sign of Savio’s search for his own identity but also a desire to make the Sámi visible to others.50 In the early decades of the twentieth century, a strong and systematic policy of assimilation was in progress in Norway; the School Act of 1898 (only repealed in 1959) prohibited people from using the Sámi language in the Sámi region. The right to purchase land was dependent on the ability to speak the Norwegian language.51 252

Expressionism in Sámi Art

Figure 12.8  John Savio, Innover viddene (Crossing the Plains), n.d., woodcut, 19.4 × 25.4 cm, Saviomuseet, Kirkenes, Norway

The wolf is a recurring motif in many of Savio’s prints, for example Ulv og rein (Wolf and Reindeer); Ulv, same, rein (Wolf, Sami, and Reindeer); Jompa med ulven (Jompa with Wolf), in which a Sámi defends himself against a wolf; and Innover viddene (Crossing the Plains; Figure 12.8), which has been interpreted as a representation of the Norwegianization policy. Rasmussen describes Crossing the Plains as follows: [The] wolf in the foreground is chasing the sleigh driver. The tracks of the sleigh reveal the speed and we can realize they must be in a hurry and, at the same time, the lines create depth in the picture. The motif here is also cut; it is the terror of the moment Savio presents to the viewer, the wolf gaining on the reindeer pulling the sleigh and reindeer dog. The man is fleeing to save his life as well as reindeer.52 Savio’s pictures of working reindeer herders are contemporary to Revold’s paintings depicting people at work. In the 1920s and 1930s, so-called Social Romance prevailed in Norwegian art; the main motif of this style was the young, handsome, and strong worker. It seems that Savio wanted to show that work played an important role in the life of the Sámi people, and they were strong and skillful hunters and reindeer herders. Generally, the Sámi people were regarded as ignorant “children” or exotic or relics from prehistory; the higher Western culture had passed by them. Savio wanted to depict their unique culture and highlight their human value.53 253

Tuija Hautala-Hirvioja

Conclusion Although his own peers were less interested in the medium of woodcut than the earlier generation of Astrup, Munch, and Vigeland, Savio’s art work reflects important tendencies in Norwegian art of the 1920s and 1930s. Following the example of Munch, as many other Norwegian artists did in this period, Savio eagerly explored German expressionism, which can be seen in the sculptural, angular, and geometric features of his woodcuts. Some of the details and rhythmic compositions of his woodcut prints seem to be reminiscent of Sámi carvings and ornaments made from bone or wood, other engraving ornaments, and duodji, an important aspect of Sámi culture. Thus, Savio’s art easily merges characteristics of both expressionist woodcut technique and Sámi cultural heritage. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Sámi culture underwent a substantial transition as the traditional way of life based on a natural economy began to give way to a more modern way of life and the expansion, in the 1930s, of tourism and the establishment of mining companies and fishing factories. Savio grew up in a home rooted in Sámi culture and tradition, but had the opportunity to receive a formal education and encounter Western traditions of art, including expressionism. His prints are the visual representations of Sami culture from the inside: he depicts the Sámi not just as subjects but as active, thinking individuals with their own personalities and feelings. Even though Savio died at a relatively early age, he demonstrated that a Sámi could become a professional artist and find recognition for his art. Today his work can be found in a number of museum collections; in 1994 the Saviomuseet (Savio Museum) was established in Kirkenes, and his work continues to provide an important model for contemporary Sámi artists.

Notes 1 The Sámi is the only group recognized as indigenous peoples in the European Union. The Sámi, numbering roughly 76,000–110,000 altogether, are in the minority in all four countries. According to UNESCO’s classification, all of the Sámi languages are endangered. Jarno Valkonen and Sanna Valkonen, Johdanto, introduction to Agon, 37–38 (2013): 2–3. See also Kaija Rensujeff, Käsin, sävelin, sanoin ja kuvin. Saamelaiset taiteilijat Suomessa [With the Hands, Melodies, Words and Pictures: The Sámi Artists in Finland] (Helsinki: Taiteen keskustoimikunta, 2011). 2 Sigrun Rasmussen, John Andreas Savio 1902–1938: en samisk kunstner fra Sör-Varanger [John Andreas Savio 1902–1938: A Sámi Artist from Sör-Varanger] (Kirkenes: Saviomuseet, 2005), 28. 3 Niels Christian Bang, “En Savio-samlings tilblivelse” [Creation of Savio-Collection], in John Andreas Savio, ed. Kirvil Haukelid (Oslo: Oslo Kunstförening, 2002), 5; Sigrun Rasmussen, “John Savio og tolkninger av kunst” [John Savio and Interpretation of Art], in Finnmarksmuseene forteller: Fra andehodeamuletter til kongekrabber [The Stories of Finnmark Museums: From Duck-Head Amulets to King Crabs], ed. Heidi Johansen et al. (Vadsö: Finnmark museumsråd, 2006), 29. 4 Magni Moksnes Gjelsvik, John Savio: Hans liv og kunst [John Savio: His Life and Art] (Trondheim: NT-Forlag, 2012), 20–21. 5 Rasmussen, John Andreas Savio 1902–1938, 89; Rasmussen, “John Savio og tolkninger av kunst,” 30. 6 The trade was carried out between the Pomors of Northwest Russia and the people along the coast of northern Norway from 1740 to 1917. See Tuija Hautala-Hirvioja, “Early Cultural Links in North Calotte,” in Northern Beauty: Barenst Visual Arts in the 1970s and the 1980s, ed. Jonna Katajamäki (Rovaniemi: University of Lapland, 2014), 10. 7 Moksnes Gjelsvik, John Savio: Hans liv og kunst, 21–24; Hans Nerhus, John Andreas Savio: Same og kunster [John Andreas Savio: A Sámi and An Artist] (Oslo: Forlaget form og farge, 1982), 32–34. 8 Nerhus, John Andreas Savio, 35. 9 Moksnes Gjelsvik, John Savio: Hans liv og kunst, 42–43; Rasmussen, John Andreas Savio 1902–1938, 89; Nerhus, John Andreas Savio, 54, 60. 10 Rasmussen, John Andreas Savio 1902–1938, 89–90; Bang, “En Savio-samlings tilblivelse,” 14; Moksnes Gjelsvik, John Savio: Hans liv og kunst, 144. 11 Nerhus, John Andreas Savio, 78.

254

Expressionism in Sámi Art 12 Rasmussen, John Andreas Savio 1902–1938, 13–14. 13 Charis Gullickson, “The Artists as Noaidi,” in Sámi Stories: Art and Identity of an Artic People, ed. Charis Gullickson and Sandra Lorentzen (Stramsund: Orkana Akademisk, 2014), 11; Tuija Hautala-Hirvioja, “Early Sámi Visual Artists: Western Fine Art Meets Sámi Culture,” Barents Studies: Peoples, Economies and Politics 1 (2014): 35–36. 14 The works mentioned in this essay are all without a year of creation because Savio did not date his works. The works can be dated on the basis of the motifs and landscapes depicted because it is known where and when Savio visited these areas. 15 Anne Marie Lorck, “Savio: Den förste samiske kunstner på heltid” [Savio: A First Full Time Sámi Artist], in John Andreas Savio, ed. Kirvil Haukelid (Oslo: Oslo Kunstförening, 2002), 19–21. 16 Hugh Honour and John Fleming, Maailman taiteen historia [A World History of Art] (Helsinki: Otava, 1992), 401–412. 17 Moksnes Gjelsvik, John Savio: Hans liv og kunst, 39–40, 60–61; Bang, “En Savio-samlings tilblivelse,” 9, 12. 18 Moksnes Gjelsvik, John Savio: Hans liv og kunst, 56. 19 Svein Moe, “Savios tresnitt; Hans tekniske ferdighet” [Savio’s Woodcuts and the Finesse of His Technique], in John Andreas Savio, ed. Kirvil Haukelid (Oslo: Oslo Kunstförening, 2002), 16. 20 Lorck, “Savio: Den förste samiske kunstner på heltid,” 23. 21 Nerhus, John Andreas Savio, 53. 22 Bengt von Bonsdorff, ed., Edvard Munch: Maalauksia ja grafiikkaa [Edvard Munch: Paintings and Graphics] (Helsinki: Amos Anderssonin taidemuseo, 1979), 53; Gerd Woll, Edvard Munch: The Complete Graphic Works (Stockholm: Orpfeur Puplishing AS, 2012), 31. 23 Ilkka Karttunen, ed., Edvard Munch (1863–1944) (Punkaharju: Taidekeskus Retretti, 1999), 169. The first Schiefler catalogue of Munch’s graphic works appeared in 1907–1908. See Karttunen, Edvard Munch, 143. 24 Oda Wildhagen Gjessing, Nikolai Astrup og Edvard Munch [Nikolai Astrup and Edvard Munch] (Oslo: Sparebankstiftelse DnBNOR, 2008), 16. 25 Stang, Edvard Munch, 31–33; Karttunen, Edvard Munch, 169. 26 Nerhus, John Andreas Savio, 66, 91. 27 Hautala-Hirvioja, “Early Sámi Visual Artists: Western Fine Art Meets Sámi Culture,” 12–27. 28 Werner, Graphic Works of Edvard Munch,VI–VII. 29 Ferrari, Silva, 1900-luvun taide [Art of the 20th Century] (Helsinki: Tammi, 2000), 69. 30 Stang, Edvard Munch, 282. 31 Alfred Werner, Graphic Works of Edvard Munch (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1979),VII. 32 Lorck, “Savio: Den förste samiske kunstner på heltid,” 21. 33 “Woodcuts,” The Vigeland Museum, accessed June 5, 2015, www.vigeland.museum.no/en/collection/ woodcuts; Gunnar Danbolt, Norsk kunsthistorie: Bilde og skultur frå vikingatida til idag [Norwegian Art History: Pictures and Sculptures from Viking Age to Today] (Oslo: Det Norske Samlaget, 2001), 283. 34 “Nikolai Astrup,” accessed June 5, 2015, http://nikolai-astrup.no/en/nikolai-astrup/biography; Danbolt, Norsk kunsthistorie, 219–220. 35 Wildhagen Gjessing, Nikolai Astrup og Edvard Munch, 7–12. 36 Rasmussen, John Andreas Savio 1902–1938, 12. 37 Bang,“En Savio-samlings tilblivelse,” 10; Rasmussen, John Andreas Savio 1902–1938, 89; Kirvil Haukelid, ed., John Andreas Savio (Oslo: Oslo Kunstförening, 2002), 28; Caroline Hanssen-Serck, “Katalog,” in Nordnorske bilder og bildet av Nord-Norge [Northern Norwegian Pictures and Image of Northern Norway], ed. Anne Aaserud (Tromsö: Nordnorsk kunstmuseum, 2002), 268. 38 Danbolt, Norsk kunsthistorie, 250–251, 260, 264; “Axel Revold,” in Norsk biografisk leksikon [Norwegian Biographical Encyclopedia], accessed June 5, 2015, https://nbl.snl.no/Axel_Revold. 39 Danbolt, Norsk kunsthistorie, 230. 40 Danbolt, Norsk kunsthistorie, 273, 284. 41 Danbolt, Norsk kunsthistorie, 273, 284. 42 Rasmussen, John Andreas Savio 1902–1938, 90; Moksnes Gjelsvik, John Savio: Hans liv og kunst, 130; Nerhus, John Andreas Savio, 78. 43 Rasmussen, John Andreas Savio 1902–1938, 90. 44 Magdalena Droste, Bauhaus 1919–1933 (Berlin: Bauhaus-Archiv Museum für Gestaltung, 1991), 228–230. 45 Toby Clark, Art and Propaganda in the Twentieth Century (London: Calmann and Knight Ltd., 1997), 62.

255

Tuija Hautala-Hirvioja 46 Pekka Isaksson, Kumma kuvajainen: Rasismi rotututkimuksessa, rotuteorioiden saamelaiset ja suomalainen fyysinen antropologia [An Odd Reflection: Racism in Racial Studies, the Sámi in Racial Theories and Finnish Physical Antropology] (Inari: Kustannus-Puntsi, 2001), 145, 169; Kristin Kuutma, “Encounters to Negotiate a Sámi Ethnography: The Process of Collaborative Representations,” Scandinavian Studies, 83/84 (2011): 514. 47 See the facsimile of the original article in Nerhus, John Andreas Savio, 81. 48 Harald Gaski, Introduction, Scandinavian Studies 2003, 145–148. 49 The Sami- and Danish-language book was published in 1910, and it was translated into German (1912) and Swedish (1917). Hautala-Hirvioja,“Early Sámi Visual Artists:Western Fine Art Meets Sámi Culture,” 13–18; Tuija Hautala-Hirvioja, “Early Sámi Visual Artists,” in Saamelaista nykytaidetta, Dálá Sámi dáidda, Sámi Cintemporary [Sámi Contemporay, first title in Finnish, next in Sámi and third in English], ed.Tuija Hautala-Hirvioja, Riitta Kuusikko, and Jan-Erik Lundström (Rovaniemi: Rovaniemen taidemuseo, 2014), 110, 112. 50 Lorck, “Savio: Den förste samiske kunstner på heltid,” 26. 51 Veli-Pekka Lehtola, Saamelaiset: Historia, yhteiskunta, taide [The Sámi People: Tradition in Transition] (Inari: Kustannus-Puntsi, 2015), 72–73; John Trygve Solbakk, ed., The Sámi People: A Handbook (Karasjokk: Davvi Girjii OS, 2006), 69–71. 52 “Ulven I forgrunn forfølger føreren av pulken. I pulksporene kan vi se se farten og at de må ha det travel, samtidig skaper utformingen dybde I bildet. Også her er motivet beskåret, vi presenters for øyeblikkets skrekk, ulven som haler innpå kjørereinen og gjeterhunden. Mannen flykter for åredde livet til seg selv og reinen.” Rasmussen, John Andreas Savio 1902–1938, 7. Rasmussen’s own English translation, which I used here, is in the same book on page 13. 53 Tuija Hautala-Hirvioja, “Finnish Art Depictions of the Sámi People at the Beginning of the 20th Century,” in L’Image du Sapmi III [Image of Sámi III], ed. Kajsa Andersson (Örebro: Örebro University, 2013), 493–494; Rasmussen, “John Savio og tolkninger av kunst,” 39.

256

13 EARLY EXPRESSIONISM IN ICELANDIC ART Jón Stefánsson, Jóhannes Kjarval, and Finnur Jónsson Margrét Elísabet Ólafsdóttir In May 1920, the linguist Alexander Jóhannesson1 (1888–1965) gave a public lecture in Reykjavik on the “new art movements” with “grotesque names,” such as cubism, futurism, Dadaism, and expressionism.2 He explained that these movements were together known under the common denominator of “expressionism” and had spread from Paris and Italy to Germany and then the Nordic countries.3 To further elaborate the characteristics of expressionism, he provided examples of works by Pablo Picasso, Karl Schmitt-Rottluff, and Francis Picabia that revealed in his words “extreme malformations” of an art that for centuries had been based on the observation of nature. The expressionists reversed this trend by turning inward, toward an inner vision and away from nature.4 None of the works mentioned had been shown in Iceland, and Alexander maintained that no local artist was concerned with these movements. Nonetheless, Alexander must have been aware of the influences of these “newest trends in art” beginning to appear in works of Icelandic artists, even as he laid out the arguments that were later used to deride artists inspired by expressionism. An open debate about expressionism in Icelandic art first occurred in 1925, when Finnur Jónsson (1892–1993) returned to Iceland from Germany after having exhibited at the gallery Der Sturm. The critique, directed toward Finnur, revealed a preference for French expressionism among the group of Icelandic artists who had been living in Copenhagen. The polemics that arose around Finnur Jónsson’s works in 1925 have been the subject of many art historical studies in Iceland, most of which have directed their attention toward the relatively late recognition of a few abstract paintings he exhibited in Reykjavik shortly after he returned from Germany.5 This focus is due in part to the dominant position of abstract art after the Second World War and the reticence of the later pioneers to recognize Finnur as a forerunner in this field in Iceland in the 1950s.6 These studies have tended to pay little attention to the expressionism that characterizes many of his figurative paintings and generally described it as short-lived. The avant-garde studies of Benedikt Hjartarson and Hubert van den Berg have thus been crucial in bringing debates that took place in Copenhagen into the Icelandic context at a time when the distinction between French and German expressionism was beginning to take shape.7 This division, however, is an issue neither in Alexander Jóhannesson’s talk about the new art movements in 1920, nor in a second lecture from 1922, in which he explained 257

Margrét Elísabet Ólafsdóttir

the difference between impressionism and expressionism by comparing selected paintings by August Renoir and Vincent van Gogh, Edouard Manet and Franz Marc, and Claude Monet and Robert Delaunay.8 Sometime between the first and second lecture, he identified the paintings of the Icelandic artist Jón Stefánsson (1881–1962) as belonging to the latter movement and includes his work as an example. To understand the context of the lectures, as well as the frame of reference of their audience, it is useful to recall that only a handful of artists were living in Iceland in 1920. Reykjavik had become the capital of Iceland in 1904; in the first decades of the twentieth century, art exhibitions were rare and the display of works by local artists even rarer. The Icelandic art scene was both small and remote, though it may have been closer to the European art centers than it appeared at first sight, or at least to Copenhagen, where most of the Icelandic artists were living in the 1910s and early 1920s. Those artists traveled annually to Iceland, and from 1919 onward, they exhibited regularly in Reykjavik. In 1924, many of the Icelandic artists moved back and the situation began to change. Their decision to leave Copenhagen was encouraged by financial difficulties, but they also felt an obligation to their home country, after it gained sovereignty in 1918, following centuries of Danish rule. The nation’s newly acquired autonomy partly explains its obsession with foreign influences on local art—particularly the modern art movements—and the need to define the characteristics of specifically Icelandic art. Prior to these political changes, an increased sense of nationalism had been accompanied by a growing interest in local culture and the desire to establish a sustainable practice in the fine arts. Young men and women who had received a formal art education abroad wanted to contribute to what many saw as a “renaissance” of Icelandic art, corresponding to the “renaissance” of the Icelandic Commonwealth, in 1918. This political climate encouraged prominent artists in Iceland to pursue an artistic career, but it also led to compromises. Artists inclined to modernist views began looking for a balance between modern art influences and the search for a local artistic identity. This same atmosphere motivated intellectuals, journalists, and politicians to take a greater interest in art and the importance of education and art appreciation for the greater public. Many went on to publish articles on the emerging painters and sculptors and subsequently became the first art critics in Iceland. Most politicians and journalists had conventional ideas about art, and these were reinforced by the positions of intellectuals such as Alexander Jóhannesson. Conservatism was predominant in the 1910s and 1920s, but thereafter a new generation of artists began to claim modernist ideas for their own; during this period, which lasted until 1942, various protagonists debated the question of whether Icelandic art should rely on local traditions, Danish academism, or internationalized modernist art. Alexander contributed to the debate by characterizing expressionism as showing signs of insanity and barbarism and as being part of a merely fashionable and futile modern art form. In retrospect, his lecture on the new art movements marks a shift in the art critical discourse that culminated in heated polemics during the so-called Artists’ Quarrel, which arose in 1941, when a group of artists felt obliged to defend modernist art and its expressionist characteristics against a prevalent conservatism while continuing to claim their art as truly Icelandic. The quarrel began as a protest against the conservatism of the Council of Education, which was responsible for acquiring paintings for the National Gallery, and ended when the director of the council was supplanted by the nomination of a supporter of a small group of artists influenced by early French expressionism.

The Friends of the Arts It has been repeatedly noted that artists in Iceland were late to embrace modern art movements because of the country’s isolation. This reasoning does not take into account the circulation 258

Early Expressionism in Icelandic Art

of ideas in Copenhagen that influenced not only Icelandic artists, but also intellectuals, politicians, and journalists. These influences are apparent in Alexander Jóhannesson’s discussion of artworks that had been shown in Copenhagen when he was a student, between 1909 and 1913.9 Alexander may have seen the expressionist works he discussed, even though a comparison with two pamphlets published by the Danish bacteriologist Carl Julius Salomonsen in 1919 and 1920 shows that Alexander Jóhannesson’s examples were borrowed from Salomonsen. Salomonsen’s initial thesis was that the new works of art, in his opinion, manifested symptoms of a contagious mental illness.10 As proof he noted the spread of the illness throughout Europe and into Denmark through the exhibitions organized by Herwarth Walden, owner of the already famous gallery and publishing enterprise Der Sturm in Berlin.11 Salomonsen’s theory stirred up controversy in Denmark, where it was interpreted as an attack on recent developments in Danish art12 and caught the attention of Alexander who, apart from being a docent at the University of Iceland, was a member of the Friends of the Arts society in Reykjavik. Founded in 1916, the society’s mission was to support the fine arts through meetings, lectures, and the purchase of magazines and books from abroad.13 Its members were academics, craftsmen, artists, and officials who held key positions within the young cultural institutions in the Icelandic capital. In 1919, the society decided to organize a collective art exhibition in Reykjavik that presented works submitted by Icelandic artists living in Iceland and abroad. Alexander Jóhannesson had a seat on the exhibition committee along with Ríkarður Jónsson, the instigator of the society, and the philosopher and psychologist Guðmundur Finnbogason. In 1918 Guðmundur had published a book on aesthetics in which he argued for both an innate preference for art based on the golden section and the idea that landscape paintings heighten spectators’ sensibility for the beauty of nature.14 Alexander expressed similar views and predicted that, despite current exaggerative tendencies, expressionism would eventually lead to a balance with nature as in classical art.15 In Denmark artists were already distancing themselves from the radical aesthetics of the expressionism16 that Walden had promoted in Copenhagen during the war.17 Walden’s exhibitions had initially inspired Salomonsen, who now argued that a reduced interest in Walden’s activities only proved his theory of an epidemic of mental illness. Icelandic artists also showed a revived interest in classicism after the war, and thus Alexander’s optimistic conclusion calmed those believing that the decadent expressionism might compromise the Icelandic renaissance of art and enhance the country’s risk of being perceived as savage and uncultivated.18 In 1920, Kristín Jónsdóttir (1888–1959), Guðmundur Thorsteinsson (1891–1924), and Jóhannes Kjarval (1885–1972), who had all been living in Copenhagen since before the war and were aware of the disputes surrounding the new art movements, traveled to Rome. Of these three, only Thorsteinsson, who had moved to Denmark as a child, was close to the circle of the Danish avant-garde, through his friendship with Mogens Lorentzen and Axel Salto, the co-founder of Klingen magazine. Despite this friendship and his experiments with various media and styles, he himself does not come across as a convinced follower of any of the new movements. Klingen published images of some of his original works based on needlework, but Thorsteinsson did not exhibit these works in Iceland, where he only showed drawings and naturalist landscape paintings. In comparison, Kjarval’s experimentation with influences picked up from works representing the new art movements he saw in Copenhagen during the war is more pronounced.19 In 1919, Kjarval held two private exhibitions in the Icelandic capital and participated in the collective exhibition organized by the Friends of the Arts, in which he showed some of his more progressive paintings. Thus, the possibility remains that Kjarval’s exhibitions and their reviews did in fact spawn Alexander’s interest in the nature of the new art movements, even though he does not mention Kjarval in his lectures. As for Kristín Jónsdóttir, she did not express interest in expressionism until much later.20 259

Margrét Elísabet Ólafsdóttir

Kjarval and “The Corruption of Our Time” The society’s collective exhibitions, held regularly until 1927, and the growing number of artists exhibiting their works in Reykjavik, called for reviews, which could either be written by the artists’ friends or anonymous journalists and critics. One such anonymous critique of the first collective exhibition was published in two parts in the newspaper Tíminn (The Time), an organ of the Progressive Party, the second-largest political party in Iceland at the time. The review contains a few noteworthy observations about the “unnatural colors” in Kjarval’s paintings and the “deceptive” evolution of Ásgrímur Jónsson (1876–1958), the pioneer who had gotten “carried away by modern currents.”21 Ásgrímur had emerged in 1903 as a naturalist whose goal was to teach the public to appreciate the beauty of nature.22 He had held private annual exhibitions in Reykjavik since 1909 and was the only painter making a living from his art in Iceland. The critique notes that even though the “corruption of our times” has caught up with Ásgrímur, he was neither an impressionist, nor a cubist, nor a futurist.23 This precision indicates that the new art movements had been discussed in certain circles before Alexander Jóhannesson’s aforementioned lecture and evokes questions concerning the influences to which the author may have been referring. Knowing the identity of the anonymous author thus seems important: it was Progressive Party member Jónas Jónsson from Hrifla, who, twenty years later, as the director of the Council of Education, would become the main protagonist of the Artists’ Quarrel, during which he expressed a profound distaste for “the daubs and cubes”24 of modern art. His 1919 observations were modestly critical and in concordance with a review by Ríkarður Jónsson (1888–1977) of Kjarval’s private exhibition that had opened in the spring. Ríkarður had forged his artistic vision while he was a student in Copenhagen between 1908 and 1911 and had most likely discussed his ideas with his friend Jónas Jónsson when he accompanied him on a campaign to promote the foundation of the Progressive Party in 1916.25 Ríkarður Jónsson had trained as a woodcarver in Iceland with a renowned local craftsman, Stefán Eiríksson, before studying sculpture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. His career was marked by this twofold education and his traditionalist approach. As a sculptor, he mainly created busts and reliefs on commission, but as a woodcarver, he strove to revitalize traditional woodcarving. His approach was based on patriotic sentiment, not on theory, even though he would occasionally express his opinions on art. One such occasion was the abovementioned critique of Kjarval’s exhibition, the painter’s first in Reykjavik after he graduated from the Danish Art Academy. Kjarval was also interested in the restitution of Icelandic art, but his approach was radically different from that of Ríkarður. During his studies, Kjarval had taken a keen interest in modern art movements, particularly the paintings of the futurists, which he had seen at an exhibition organized by Walden at Den Frie Udtillingsbilding (Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art) in 1912.26 The futurists’ impact on Kjarval comes through in paintings such as Himnaför (Rising to Heaven), which he completed between 1918 and 1920. Himnaför bears a clear resemblance to the composition of Gino Severini’s 1911 Pan Pan Dance, but it was another painting from this period that was part of the 1919 exhibition in Reykjavik, Jónsmessunótt (Midsummer Night, 1918–1920; Figure 13.1), which could be described as a combination of influences from Harold Sohlberg’s27 Winter Night (1914) and William Blake’s The Lovers’ Whirlwind (1824–1827), with an atmosphere that evokes Cézanne’s Orgy (1864–1868). Jónsmessunótt captured the attention of Ríkarður. He thought that the blue color in the painting’s background perfectly depicted the depth and transparency of the sky, but that a group of abandoned figures was “unnecessarily” too similar to those found in modern painting28—referring to their synthetic features and their arrangement in a diagonal line running from the lower-left to 260

Early Expressionism in Icelandic Art

the upper-right corner, from where the figures appear to fall straight down. Nevertheless, he adds sympathetically, even though some of Kjarval’s works cannot be as easily understood as ordinary landscapes, they could be compared to music, “an art that can be enjoyed without being understood.” Ríkarður does not use the term expressionism, but a year later, Alexander Jóhannesson associates expressionism with music by comparing the “incomprehensible” expressionist art to “music for the eye.”29 Bearing in mind that both authors were involved with the Friends of the Arts, their comments suggest that the modernist art movements were discussed at its meetings. Whether the authors used the term expressionism or modern art, the art they described was perceived as threatening to the progressive development of local art and the further European cultural integration that both the intelligentsia and the emerging bourgeoisie sought to promote in Iceland.30 Kjarval did not take Ríkarður’s critique seriously at first and continued to use non-naturalistic colors in his paintings of the glacier Snæfellsjökull, which he showed in his second private exhibition, in August 1919. These new works captured the attention of a journalist who, in spite of the paintings’ “eccentric features,” was eager to justify Kjarval’s artistic choices and accept his nonconformist approach to art. The collective exhibition that opened a few weeks later revealed that Kjarval was not the only Icelandic artist influenced by the newest trends, as Jónas Jónsson had pointed out. In light of these critiques, it is noteworthy that Alexander Jóhannesson did not allude to Kjarval’s paintings or to any other Icelandic artist in his lecture in May 1920. This contradiction might be explained by the fact that even though some of the Icelandic artists were

Figure 13.1  J óhannes Kjarval, Jónsmessunótt (Midsummer Night), 1918–1920, oil on canvas, 100 × 110 cm, Student’s Services (FS).  Jóhannes S. Kjarval/Myndstef

261

Margrét Elísabet Ólafsdóttir

receptive to the new trends, they were more concerned with the rebirth of Icelandic art than with the rebellious attitude of their German and French contemporaries. Their sense of loyalty to the project of cultural restoration prevailed over the need for subversion. Furthermore, the novelty of expressionism was already beginning to wane in 1919, and there was a sense that this newest fashion would soon be outdated. Three years later, Kjarval himself, while acknowledging his fascination with the modern movements that he had encountered in Copenhagen, spoke of them as outmoded and from the past.31 He spent the coming decade searching for a compromise between the modern currents and the creation of a genuine Icelandic art, a quest that is reflected in his later paintings. Yet it was not Kjarval but Jón Stefánsson who paved the way for expressionism as an influence in Iceland.

Jón Stefánsson and the Académie Matisse Alexander Jóhannesson returned to the subject of expressionism in a 1922 lecture, “About Modern Painting.”32 Focusing on a comparison of impressionism, the “pinnacle of the old art,” to expressionism, with its revolutionary qualities, he reached a similar conclusion as before: the benefit of expressionism’s extremist standpoint was that it convinced people that art needed to represent the artist’s sympathetic relationship to nature. The emphasis on nature is important, as it was an inevitable subject for Icelandic painters, but more important here is the expressionism Alexander observed in Jón Stefánsson’s paintings. Jón Stefánsson had moved to Copenhagen to study engineering in 1900, but changed direction and, in 1903, entered the Technical School to prepare for the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. He never enrolled in the academy, though, as he eventually chose the independent art school, Kunstnernes Frie Studieskoler, Zahrtmann’s school, where he met and befriended other Nordic artists who had chosen to distance themselves from the Academy. When Kristian Zahrtmann left the school in spring 1908, Jón Stefánsson traveled with his Norwegian classmate and friend Henrik Sörensen to Norway; there they encountered Gösta Sandels and Jean Heiberg, who told them about the newly founded Académie Henri Matisse in Paris. Jón Stefánsson decided to accompany them to Paris, where he would spend the next three years until Matisse closed his school in 1911.33 The time spent at Matisse’s academy had a lasting effect on Jón Stefánsson, who destroyed all his earlier work and most of what he had made during his Parisian years. His self-criticism prevented him from showing his art, though he did not shy away from discussions about art and theory. In the summer of 1911, he returned to Reykjavik, where he told Ásgrímur Jónsson (1876–1958) of his preference for the art of the Norwegian students at the Académie Matisse and expressed his admiration for Paul Cézanne. Following their conversations, Ásgrímur planned to visit Paris, but only managed to travel to Scandinavia, in 1914; there he saw the works of Matisse’s former students in exhibitions in Malmö, Oslo, and Bergen.34 Even though it is not known whether Jón Stefánsson showed Ásgrímur his own paintings, their meeting had a perceptible impact on the development of Ásgrímur’s art. This influence was observed by Jónas Jónsson in 1919 and, a few months later, by a Danish critic who wrote about the first collective exhibition of Icelandic art in Copenhagen that opened at Gallery Kleis in March 1920. Jón Stefánsson participated in the Icelandic Exhibition, but his painting remained unknown to the Icelandic public until he had his first private showing in Reykjavik, in July 1920. He had spent the winter of 1912−1913 in Iceland, but it was not until after the war that he began to paint there every summer. He did not participate in the collective exhibition in Reykjavik in 1919, but showed his work publicly for the first time that year at the Autumn Exhibition in Copenhagen. The relatively late public appearance of Jón Stefánsson’s paintings has been

262

Early Expressionism in Icelandic Art

attributed to his self-doubt, which may have been accentuated by Matisse’s critical attitude toward students whose work he considered too similar to his own.35 This hypothesis is based on two early paintings by Jón Stefánsson. The first work, Maður og kona í landslagi (Man and Woman in a Landscape), of 1910 or later, is evidently based on Matisse’s Music (1910) even though it is smaller and only depicts two figures. The man stands erect like the fiddler in Matisse’s Music, but is playing a flute. The woman, crouching on the right, might be based on a 1907 sketch by Matisse or other similar figures appearing in the artist’s paintings of this period. While these figures and the organization of the picture plane do show a resemblance to Matisse, the work differs from those of the master in its dark colors. In Regnboginn (The Rainbow) of 1915 (Plate 18), Jón Stefánsson strives to capture some of the relaxed atmosphere of Matisse’s Luxury, Serenity and Pleasure (1904) and Joy of Life (1905– 1906). A couple standing in front of a bare tree in the center of Regnboginn expresses a serenity that is disrupted by the small figures of agricultural workers receding into a dark background; this background scene is dominated by a rainbow that is partly eclipsed by the foreground scene. The central couple stands in the hollow of hills painted in a dark red with two reclining nudes positioned on either side. A violet oval form obscuring part of the rainbow surrounds the couple, suggesting that the foreground represents the laborers’ fantasy rather than a joyful life. Jón Stefánsson may have been trying to break away from Matisse, but he was still under his spell in 1918 when he painted Rúmensk stúlka (Rumanian Girl; Figure 13.2), portraying

Figure 13.2  Jón Stefánsson, Rúmensk stúlka (Rumanian Girl), 1918, oil on canvas, 101 × 91.50 cm, National Gallery of Iceland, LÍ 1618.  Bryndís Jónsdóttir

263

Margrét Elísabet Ólafsdóttir

Figure 13.3  Jón Stefánsson, Stúlka í peysufötum (Girl in a Traditional Attire), 1919, oil on canvas, 91 × 81 cm, private collection Sverrir Kristinsson.  Bryndís Jónsdóttir

a seated nude strikingly similar to Matisse’s Nude (1908). It is not until Jón Stefánsson paints Íslensk stúlka í peysufötum (A Girl in a Traditional Attire; Figure 13.3) that he seemed to be satisfied with the result—he exhibited the painting at the Autumn Exhibition in 1919 and again at Gallery Kleis in 1920.36 On the latter occasion, a reproduction of the painting was published in the magazine Klingen.37 Alexander Jóhannesson undoubtedly saw the reproduction although he did not see the original until it was exhibited at the third collective exhibition of the Friends of the Arts in 1921. Icelandic newspapers generally carried reviews of Icelandic art exhibited in Copenhagen, and thus the public in Iceland read about Jón Stefánsson’s paintings before seeing any of his work. First, the newspaper Vísir (The Point) published a translation of Oluf Thomsen’s critique in Politken (Politics) of his paintings shown at the 1919 Autumn Exhibition. Thomsen mentioned “uncomfortably pretty colors in an image of a young girl” and the unfortunate effects of colors used in a painting of tulips.38 Then a compilation of reviews from Nationaltidene (National Time) and Extrabladet (Extra Magazine) was published in Morgunblaðið (The Morning Paper), shortly after the opening of the Icelandic Exhibition in March 1920.39 Nationaltidene reportedly described Jón Stefánsson’s paintings as tending toward a “somber” expressionism and a “biting seriousness” that is associated with the “nature of the Icelanders.” Whether it was due to this last statement or not, Jón Stefánsson’s paintings were received with slight skepticism when they were exhibited for the first time in Reykjavik, in July 1920. Jónas Jónsson’s newspaper Tíminn completely omits any mention of the exhibition and Morgunblaðið affirms the artist’s inclination 264

Early Expressionism in Icelandic Art

toward new trends in painting; only Vísir makes an effort to explain that Jón Stefánsson’s intention is to create but not imitate.40 As for the Danish critic in Nationaltidene, he sees an exception to the painter’s typically dark mood in a “beautiful image” of a young girl whom his colleague at Extrabladet describes as “unpleasantly sweet.”41 Alexander Jóhannsson also focuses on this particular painting, which he perceives as proof of the painter’s aloofness. He is almost reproachful to Jón Stefánsson for displaying “the potency of the girl’s youth,” emphasizing her fine figure instead of her psychology. About his still life paintings, which Otto Geldsted considered to be Stefánsson’s finest works,42 Alexander writes: When he paints flowers (still life), he makes the tulips redder and lusher than they appear to most of us as if he wants to emphasize the viewers’ sensuality. He sees flowers as strangers, as something extraneous. And he tries to paint this attitude of his towards the tulips but not the tulips’ attitude towards him.43 As a former student of Matisse and a friend of many modernist artists from Scandinavia, and based on the Danish reviews, Alexander understood Jón Stefánsson as an artist whose paintings could rightfully be classified as expressionist. His commentaries suggest a distance between the painter and the subject, and the absence of compassion is perceived as a symptom of the painter’s alienation, which also happens to be one of the characteristics of expressionism. In the light of his former lecture, Alexander’s assessment of Jón as an expressionist is received as a criticism, but it provokes no public debates, either about expressionism or about Jón Stefánsson. The reason may be that Jón and his Icelandic friends were still living in Copenhagen in 1922. A decade later, the critical assessment was not completely forgotten, but was labeled a “misunderstanding.”44 Jón Stefánsson returned permanently to Reykjavik in 1924, the same year Kristín Jónsdóttir came back with her husband Valtýr Stefánsson. Valtýr had been hired as editor of the newspaper Morgunblaðið, which soon would assume a pivotal position in art criticism debates. The permanent return of Kjarval, in 1922, and Jón Stefánsson and Kristín Jónsdóttir, two years later, changed the art scene in Reykjavik, where a new generation of artists was beginning to emerge, among them Snorri Arinbjarnar, Þorvaldur Skúlason, Gunnlaugur Ó. Scheving, and Jón Engilberts, all of whom are recognized today as representatives of expressionism in Icelandic art.45 Influenced in their work by Jón Stefánsson, whose advice they had sought, the timid expression of French expressionism that Jónas Jónsson had first identified in Ásgrímur Jónsson’s painting in 1919 continued to expand. After they became neighbors in Reykjavik, even Kristín Jónsdóttir, once characterized as “the purest” of Icelandic artists, gradually adapted Jón’s French-inspired style and technique. Jón Stefánsson, however, never took on students but rather directed younger artists to the Norwegian National Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo to study with Axel Revold. Jón and Revold had met at the Académie Matisse in Paris, and in 1925, Revold became a professor at the Norwegian Academy. In the following years between 1928 and 1933, the Icelandic artists Snorri Arinbjarnar, Þorvaldur Skúlason, and Jón Engilberts studied with him in Oslo. Even so, the expressionism in the work of those artists as well as in the work of Gunnlaugur Scheving is of various origins; but of the three who studied in Oslo, only Engilberts was directly inspired by the German expressionists, whom he had seen in Oslo, when a traveling exhibition of new German art opened there in 1932. A year later he participated in the exhibition Eleven Young Painters, at Kunstenforbundet in 1933, which regrouped artists such as Bjarne Engebret and Olav Strømme, who were critical of the older generation of artists in Norway that had studied with Matisse and were inspired by French art.46 Engilberts agreed with the criticism of these artists—at least while he was in Oslo. 265

Margrét Elísabet Ólafsdóttir

Finnur Jónsson and Expressionism The strong link with Denmark meant that almost all Icelandic artists had been to the Danish capital and studied there for some time. Finnur Jónsson went to Copenhagen in 1919, after having spent the war as a goldsmith’s apprentice in Reykjavik. During this time, he also took up drawing lessons organized by the Friends of the Arts. After two winter seasons in Copenhagen, where he studied with Viggo Brandt and Olaf Rude, he went to Berlin in December 1921 to take classes with Karl Hofer. In February 1922, he left Berlin for Dresden, where he attended preparatory classes with Oskar Kokoschka with the goal of studying at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. He never entered the academy, and later explained that he could not afford the fees as foreign students were charged in gold marks during the hyperinflation of 1922.47 Instead, Finnur went to Edmund Kesting’s newly founded private school Der Weg—Schule für Neue Kunst (The Path—School for New Art) where he studied from 1923 to 1925. Although Finnur has never been quoted saying he chose Dresden for the academy or as the city of the early expressionists,48 he later defended the vitality of the German art scene as compared to that of France.49 Many facts related to Finnur Jónsson’s stay in Germany remain imprecise, and his own accounts given of those years in various interviews, decades after the events, diverge. What he repeatedly states is that he met Kokoschka, but also Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy, and Kurt Schwitters. When Finnur became Kokoschka’s student, he was already a known expressionist, having published drawings and etchings in the magazine Der Sturm as early as 1910. In one interview, Finnur affirms that Kokoschka advised him to present his drawings to Herwarth Walden.50 However, it is as likely that Kesting advised him to go to Walden, as he had exhibited in the gallery in 1923. But Finnur never mentions Kesting, although he was clearly influenced by his teaching, as a comparison of their abstract works from 1923–1925 indicates.51 Kokoschka’s guidance also left its impact on Finnur, which can be seen in his emphasis on hands in various portraits and collages, as well as in the thick and bold brushstrokes evident in many of his oil paintings. Regardless of whether it was Kesting or Kokoschka who encouraged Finnur Jónsson to present his work at Der Sturm, he was already in contact with Walden in 1924. In May 1925, Finnur Jónsson’s paintings and drawings were exhibited at Der Sturm in Berlin. News about the upcoming exhibition was reported by an Icelandic student in Dresden, Emil Thoroddsen, and published in Morgunblaðið as early as June 1924.52 A year later another Icelandic student correspondent reported on the actual exhibition.53 Both expressed their enthusiasm, praising the art of Finnur Jónsson and the direction he had taken as an artist, while celebrating his success with Der Sturm. They did not seem to be aware of the questionable reputation the gallery had in Copenhagen and Reykjavik. Finnur’s own prior knowledge of Der Sturm remains uncertain. He had been a member of the Friends of the Arts since 191654 and had attended drawing classes with his brother Ríkarður as well as lessons organized by the society, where he met Guðmundur Thorsteinsson; as such, he should have been aware of the discussions that inspired Alexander Jóhannesson’s lecture on the new arts movements. He may also have heard about Der Sturm while an apprentice to Baldvin Björnsson, a goldsmith and an amateur artist.55 Björnsson lived and worked in Berlin from 1902 to 1915, from which time few expressive abstract paintings are preserved.56 The editor of Morgunblaðið, Valtýr Stefánsson, was better informed concerning Walden’s reputation in Copenhagen. He thus thought that he had good reason to mock Finnur Jónsson and his collaboration with Der Sturm and published an article, shortly after the artist’s return to Iceland, in which he compared the gallery to a “fashion shop for art” that does not hesitate to ostracize artists who “disobey” the “dominant new art movements.”57 Finnur responded in defense, Valtýr likewise, and thus began a polemic that then was rekindled when Finnur opened 266

Early Expressionism in Icelandic Art

a private exhibition in Reykjavik in November 1925. Valtýr took on the role of art critic and wrote a long article analyzing Finnur’s “inclination towards German expressionism.”58 In the critique, he asserts it is “not art” to paint merely with strong colors and rough textures. He specifically mentions the painting Sígaunahjón (Roma Couple, 1922; Figure 13.4), in which black contours outline a female figure. According to Valtýr, the portrait might have been fairly good if “a head peeking over the woman’s shoulder did not completely ruin the picture.”59 He also declares that it “is not art to make paintings based on simple drawings and strong colors” and describes Finnur’s works as “unbalanced.” Still, he suggests, the painter might progress if he were to distance himself from “the German imitation of French art” and concludes: “the French are much better than the Germans—especially the expressionists.”60 This critique captured the attention of artists and benefactors, who wrote in Finnur’s defense. Consequently, Finnur Jónsson’s 1925 exhibition became the first private exhibition in Reykjavik to raise a dispute; the resulting strife revealed divisions based on preferences for either German or French expressionism as well as friendships and family ties. Jónas Jónsson, who had formerly expressed his doubts about modern art, reported positively on Finnur Jónsson’s exhibition; in his opinion, Finnur was not nearly as radical as one might suspect. Instead of criticizing paintings such as the Roma Couple, he stressed their strong and artful characteristics, asserting that even though Finnur used strong colors, the resulting effect was harmonious, attractive, and showed strength.61 Jónas’ willingness to defend Finnur may be

Figure 13.4  Finnur Jónsson, Sígaunahjón (Roma Couple), 1922, oil on canvas, 68.5 × 53.2 cm, National Gallery of Iceland, LÍ 5512.  National Gallery of Iceland

267

Margrét Elísabet Ólafsdóttir

attributed to his friendship with his older brother Ríkarður Jónsson, but was certainly also reinforced by his dislike for cultural bourgeois such as Valtýr Stefánsson. Ríkarður, who had warned Kjarval not to get too enthusiastic about the modernist currents in 1919, did not write about his brother’s art, and what he may have said in private remains unknown. Although much has been written about Finnur Jónsson, his life and work have never been thoroughly studied. Most attention has been given to his early abstract paintings and the nature of his involvement with the European avant-garde.62 Lesser attention has been paid to the lasting effect of expressionism on his paintings and his career, which spans more than seventy years. Also lacking in the existing studies is an account of how Finnur’s position within the Icelandic art scene changed after the Second World War, when he acquired a reputation for catering to public taste. In the 1930s and early 1940s, his art was accepted by his peers, despite Valtýr Stefánsson’s criticism and the skepticism of the art critic Jón Þorleifsson, who admits to perceiving quality in Finnur Jónsson’s art despite a persistent effect of German expressionism.63 The 1925 exhibition has been so strongly associated with Finnur’s abstract paintings that it tends to be forgotten that the paintings exhibited were a heterogeneous mix of various styles and techniques from his years as student in Dresden. Hubert van den Berg has suggested that Finnur Jónsson became a conventional artist when he was cut off from the avant-garde network after his return to Iceland.64 This point is convincing from a certain perspective, but seen from the Icelandic context it is likely that his development was inspired by a desire similar to that of Jóhannes Kjarval and Jón Stefánsson: to participate in the establishment of a genuine Icelandic art. The importance of personal experience Finnur had also learned from Kokoschka; having been a fisherman from an early age, fishing boats and fishermen thus became a recurrent theme in his art. It was not until the early 1930s, after he had traveled into the highlands, that landscape gained an importance for him as a subject. When he showed his first landscape paintings, in 1934, Kjarval, in a review, applauded Finnur for having made paintings that would inspire new and unknown emotions in the viewer and declared these works to be a major contribution to Icelandic art and culture.65 Kjarval understood that Finnur Jónsson’s uniqueness of style, based on German expressionist influences, isolated him from artists preferring a moderate version of French expressionism,66 and who tended to dismiss the relevance of his contribution to Icelandic art. This was evident in 1932 when Jón Þorleifsson decided not to include him in a survey of “the most Icelandic artists.”67 It was not until 1946, though, that Jón Þorleifsson openly confronted Finnur, in a critique in which he accuses him of trying to “downgrade” Icelandic art.68 A few years earlier, in 1941, artists influenced by both French and German expressionism had risen up against the conservatism of Jónas Jónsson from Hrifla, who was president of the Council of Education, which was responsible for purchasing artworks for the collection of the National Gallery. The so-called Quarrel was an appeal to the parliament signed by fourteen artists who maintained that the council ignored progressive artworks in favor of “glossy images.”69 In defense of the council’s position, Jónas replied with a series of articles in which he declared the signatories’ paintings “ugly” and “primitive.”70 To accentuate his distaste for the “followers of Gauguin and Boccioni,” he curated an exhibition to mock their paintings. Háðungarsýningin or The Exhibition of Ignominy, as it was first referred to by the art historian Björn Th. Björnsson,71 was composed of a few carefully selected paintings he exhibited in the house of parliament, Alþingi. Shortly thereafter they were put on display in a shop window in the center of Reykjavik. Jónas’ intention was to ridicule the “cubes” and “daubs” created by the so-called degenerate artists and gain support from the parliament and the public. To reach an audience outside of Reykjavik, he published reproductions on the front page of Tíminn showing the paintings that “Valtýr Stefánsson . . . calls Modern Icelandic Art.”72 Jón Stefánsson was in Copenhagen and thus did 268

Early Expressionism in Icelandic Art

not sign the appeal, but one of his paintings was among those Jónas Jónsson considered degenerate. The others were by younger artists: Gunnlaugur Scheving, Jón Engilberts, Jóhann Briem, and Þorvaldur Skúlason. Two of the fourteen artists who initially signed the appeal were Finnur Jónsson and Jóhannes Kjarval. Neither artist signed a subsequent address from the Federation of Icelandic Artists denouncing the council’s incompetence and the conduct of its president.73 Both the appeal and the address are signed by Kristín Jónsdóttir, Jón Þorleifsson, and Ásgrímur Jónsson, as well as artists belonging to a younger generation.74 As already mentioned, Jónas Jónsson had praised Finnur Jónsson’s art in 1925, and he continued to do so in 1941, after he had criticized the council. Whether this contributed to the postwar seclusion of Finnur or whether the isolation can be attributed to the German influences on his art remains an unanswered question. Prior to the Second World War, Icelanders in general were far from hostile toward Germany and German culture, as the activities of the cultural association Germania in the 1920s and 1930s bear witness to.75 But within the circle of Icelandic artists educated in Copenhagen before and during the First World War, the focus on French expressionism prevailed. A group of similarly minded artists with Jón Stefánsson as their theoretical harbinger—aided by Valtýr Stefánsson’s hiring, in 1932, the first paid art critic at the Morgunblaðið—inspired a younger generation of artists seeking Jón’s guidance. This grouping helped establish a preference for French expressionism and later French modern art in Iceland that lasted for several decades.

Notes 1 In Iceland patronyms are more common than family names, and individuals are either called by their first name or both a first name and a patronym, for example Alexander Jóhannesson. In this essay individuals are first named by using both a first name and a patronym, and then either by first name or both. Exceptions are made when individuals have family names, for example Kjarval. 2 Alexander Jóhannesson, “Nýjar listastefnur (Alþýðufræðsla Stúdentafjelagsins 9 maí 1920)” [New Art Movements. [The Student Society’s Demotic Education], Óðinn [Odin] 1–6 (1920): 41–46. 3 Ibid., 41–42. 4 Ibid., 45. 5 Björn Th. Björnsson, Íslenzk myndlist á 19. og 20 öld. I [Icelandic Art in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Vol. I] (Reykjavík: Helgafell, 1964), 193–201; Frank Ponzi, Finnur Jónsson: Íslenskur brautryðjandi [Finnur Jónsson: An Icelandic Pioneer] (Reykjavík: Almenna bókafélagið, 1983); Júlíana Gottskálksdóttir, “Tilraunin ótímabæra. Um abstraktmyndir Finns Jónssonar og viðbrögð við þeim” [The Untimely Experiment: About Finnur Jónsson’s Abstract Images], in Árbók Listasafns Íslands 1990– 1992 [Yearbook of the National Gallery of Iceland 1990–1992], ed. Bera Nordal (Reykjavík: Listasafn Íslands, 1993), 74–101; Hannes Sigurðsson, “Landnáma hin nýja: Stjórnmál, þjóðernishyggja og íslenska landslagshefðin” [The New Book of Settlements: Politics, Nationalism, and the Icelandic Tradition of Landscape Paintings], Fjölnir 2 (1997): 26–42; Hubert van den Berg, “Jón Stefánsson og Finnur Jónsson: Frá Íslandi til evrópsku framúrstefnunnar og aftur til baka” [Jón Stefánsson and Finnur Jónsson: From Iceland to the European Avant-Garde and Back], Ritið [Writings] 1 (2006): 51–77; Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir, “Framúrstefna, töfraraunsæi og endurlit” [Avant-Garde, Magical Realism, and Flashback], Íslensk listasaga, II bindi [Icelandic Art History, vol. 2], ed. Ólafur Kvaran (Reykjavík: Forlagið, 2011), 37–47; Hubert van den Berg and Benedikt Hjartarson, “Icelandic Artists in the Nordic Network of the European AvantGarde: The Cases of Jón Stefánsson and Finnur Jónsson,” in A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1900–1925, ed. Hubert van den Berg et al. (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2012), 229–247. 6 Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir, “Framúrstefna, töfraraunsæi og endurlit,” 37. 7 Hubert van den Berg, “Jón Stefánsson og Finnur Jónsson: Frá Íslandi til evrópsku framúrstefnunnar og aftur til baka”; Benedikt Hjartarson, “Af úrkynjun, brautryðjendum, vanskapnaði, vitum og sjáendum. Um upphaf framúrstefnu á Íslandi” [Of Decadence, Pioneers, Disfigurations, Omens and Seers], Ritið 1 (2006): 79–119. 8 Alexander Jóhannesson, “Um málaralist nútímans” [About Modern Painting], Eimreiðin [The Locomotive] 28 (1922): 14–24.

269

Margrét Elísabet Ólafsdóttir 9 Alexander Jóhannesson studied at the University of Copenhagen and obtained a doctoral degree from the University of Halle in 1915. 10 Carl Jul. Salomonsen, Smitsomme sindslidelser før og nu med særligt henblik paa de nyeste kunstretninger [Contagious Mental Illnesses in Past and Present, in Regard of the Newest Art Movements] (Copenhagen: Levin & Munksgaards Forlag, 1919); Tillægsbemærkninger om Dysmorphismens sygelige natur [Additional Comments on the Morbid Nature of Dysmorphism] (Copenhagen: Levin & Munksgaards Forlag, 1920). 11 Kate Winskell, “The Art of Propaganda: Herwarth Walden and ‘Der Sturm,’ 1914–1919,” Art History 18(3) (1995): 315–344, 317. 12 Hanne Abilgaard, “Dysmorfismedebatten en diskussion om sundhed og sygdom i den modernistiske bevægelse omkring förste verdenskrig” [The Polemics About Dysmorphism as a Discussion on Health and Illness in Modernist Movements Around the First World War], Fund og Forskning [Findings and Research] 137 (1984): 131–158; Torben Jelsbak and Per Stounbjerg, “Danish Expressionism,” in A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1900–1925, 463. 13 For example, Alexander also cites: Otto Grautoff, Formzertrümmerung und Formaufbau in der Bildenden Kunst [The Fragmentation and Construction of Form in Fine Art] (Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth, 1919), Otto Geldsted, Expressionism (Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag, 1919), Hermann Bahr, Expressionismus [Expressionism] (Munich: Delphin, 1916), and the Klingen magazine. 14 Guðmundur Finnbogason, Frá sjónarheimi [From the World of Vision] (Reykjavík: Bókaverzlun Sigfúsar Eymundssonar, 1918, reprinted in 2005), 33–49, 168–169. 15 Alexander Jóhannesson, “Nýjar listastefnur,” 46. 16 Torben Jelsbak and Per Stounbjerg, “Danish Expressionism,” 464. 17 Kate Winskell, “The Art of Propaganda,” 331–333. 18 See Jón Yngvi Jóhannsson, “Af reiðum Íslendingum: Deilur um Nýlendusýninguna 1905” [Of Angry Icelanders: Polemics Concerning the Colonial Exhibition of 1905], in Þjóðerni í þúsund ár? [Nationality for a Thousand Years?], ed. Jón Yngvi Jóhannsson et al. (Reykjavík: Háskólaútgáfan, 2003), 136–138. 19 Kristín Guðnadóttir, “The Artist and His Life,” in Kjarval, ed. Einar Matthíasson et al. (Reykjavík: Nesútgáfa, 2005), 100–107. 20 See Kristín Jónsdóttir’s 1954 radio talk, “Nokkur orð um myndlist” [Few Words about Art], printed in Aðalsteinn Ingólfsson, Kristín Jónsdóttir. Listakonan í gróandanum [Kristín Jónsdóttir: The Woman Artist in the Growing Season] (Reykjavík: Bókaútgáfan Þjóðsaga, 1987), 173–182. 21 “Listsýning í Reykjavík” [Art Exhibition in Reykjavik], Tíminn [The Time], September 25, 1919, 306–308; and October 8, 1919, 318–319. 22 Júlíana Gottskálksdóttir, “Listvakning á 19 öld” [Art Awakening in the 19th Century], in Íslensk listasaga I, ed. Ólafur Kvaran, 89. 23 “Listsýningin í Reykjavík,” 1919, 308. 24 Jónas Jónsson,“Hvíldartími í listum og bókmenntum” [A Spell in Art and Literature], Tíminn, December 18, 1941, 522. 25 Eiríkur Sigurðsson, Með oddi og egg: Minningar Ríkarðs Jónssonar [With a Knife’s Point and an Edge: The Memories of Ríkarður Jónsson] (Hafnarfjörður: Skuggsjá, 1972), 99. 26 Kristín Guðnadóttir, “Jóhannes Kjarval’s Appropriation of Progressive Attitudes in Painting between 1917 and 1920,” in A Cultural History of The Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1900–1925, 492–494. 27 Kristín Guðnadóttir, “The Artist and His Life,” 107. 28 Ríkarður Jónsson, “Jóhannes Kjarval málari” [The Painter Jóhannes Kjarval], Tíminn, June 7, 1919, 198–199. 29 Alexander Jóhannesson, “Nýjar listastefnur,” 46. 30 Ólafur Rastrick, Háborgin. Menning, fagurfræði og pólitík í upphafi tuttugustu aldar [The Acropolis: Culture, Aesthetics and Politics in the Early Twentieth Century] (Reykjavík: Háskólaútgáfan, Sagnfræðistofnun Íslands, 2013). 31 “Viðtal við Jóhannes Kjarval” [Interview with Jóhannes Kjarval], Morgunblaðið, April 23, 1922, 1. 32 Alexander Jóhannsson, “Um málaralist nútímans,” 15. 33 Claudine Grammont, “Henri Matisse as Herr Professor:The Académie Matisse and Internationalization of the Avant-Garde, 1905–1914,” in Expressionism in Germany and France: From van Gogh to Kandinsky, ed. Timothy O. Benson (Munich: Prestel; London, New York: DelMinico Books, 2014), 158. 34 Ólafur Kvaran, Íslensk listasaga I, 115–116. 35 Claudine Grammont, “Henri Matisse as Herr Professor,” 158.

270

Early Expressionism in Icelandic Art 36 The exhibition was organized by the Danisk-Islansk Samfund at Gallery Kleis and showed paintings by Ásgrímur Jónsson, Jón Stefánsson, Kristín Jónsdóttir, Þórarinn B. Þorláksson, and Guðmundur Thorsteinsson. 37 Klingen 7 (March 1920), 24. 38 “Jón Stefánsson málari” [The Painter Jón Stefánsson], Vísir, December 10, 1919, 2. 39 “Íslenska sýningin í Kaupmannahöfn” [The Icelandic Exhibition in Copenhagen], Morgunblaðið, April 18, 1920, 2. 40 Leó, “Jón Stefánsson málari,” Vísir, July 20, 1920, 2. 41 “Jón Stefánson málari,” 1919, 2. 42 Otto Geldsted, “Jón Stefánsson,” Klingen 6 (March 1919), 14. 43 “Þegar hann málar blóm (“Stillebens” myndir) gerir hann t.d. túlípana rauðari og safameiri en þeir virðast flestum til þess að auka á nautnakend áhorfandans. Hann lítur á blóm eins og eitthvað sér óviðkomandi, eitthvað sem ekki er sama eðlis og hann. Túlípan vekur hjá honum nautnakend sterkari en hjá öðrum og hann reynir að mála þessa afstöðu sína gagnvart túlípananum, en ekki túlípanans gagnvart sér.” In Alexander Jóhannesson, “Um málaralist nútímans,” 19. 44 Jón Þorleifsson, “Íslensk málaralist í 30 ár” [Thirty Years of Icelandic Painting], Listviðir [Pillars of Art], May 7, 1932, 13. 45 Gunnar J. Árnason, “Expressjónismi á Íslandi” [Expressionism in Iceland], in Íslensk listasaga, II, 171–179. 46 Per Hovdenakk, “Olav Strømme,” Norsk biografisk leksikon [Norwegian Biographical Encyclopedia], last modified February 13, 2009, https://nbl.snl.no/Olav_Str%C3%B8mme. 47 Júlíana Gottskálksdóttir, “Tilraunin ótímabæra,” 80. 48 Ibid., 78. 49 Jó., “Íslenzk náttúra og lífið sjálft eru beztu lærimeistararnir: Rætt við Finn Jónsson listmálara um líf og list á Íslandi” [Icelandic Nature and Life Itself Are the Best Masters: A Conversation with the Painter Finnur Jónsson about Art and Life in Iceland], Tíminn, November 7, 1956, 7. 50 Elín Pálmadóttir, “Vor hinnar ungu listar: Spjallað við Finn Jónsson um listir í Evrópu á öðrum og þriðja áratugnum” [In the Spring of the Young Art: A Conversation with Finnur Jónsson about Art in Europe in the 1910s and 1920s], Morgunblaðið, October 19, 1970, 44. 51 See Herta Wescher, “L’art en Europe autour de 1925”, Cimaise 99 (1970): 76–85. 52 Emil Thoroddsen, “Finnur Jónsson listmálari” [The Painter Finnur Jónsson], Morgunblaðið, June 20, 1924, 2. 53 Þórður Kristleifsson, “Finnur Jónsson listmálari” [The Painter Finnur Jónsson], Morgunblaðið, May 21, 1925, 3. 54 Júlíana Gottskálksdóttir, “Tilraunin ótímabæra,” 76. 55 Júlíana Gottskálksdóttir, “Tilraunin ótímabæra,” 78. 56 “Baldvin Björnsson,” Upplýsingamiðstöð myndlistar [Informational Portal about Icelandic Visual Art], last accessed November 14, 2016, www.umm.is/UMMIS/Listamenn/Listamadur/420. 57 Valtýr Stefánsson, “Finnur Jónsson málari er nýkominn frá Þýskalandi” [The Painter Finnur Jónsson Has Recently Returned from Germany], Morgunblaðið, July 22, 1925, 3. 58 Valtýr Stefánsson, “Sýning Finns Jónssonar í húsi Nathans & Olsens” [Finnur Jónsson’s Exhibition in the House of Nathan & Olsen], Morgunblaðið, November 29, 1925, 5. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid. 61 “Finnur Jónsson listmálari” [The Painter Finnur Jónsson] Tíminn, November 28, 1925, 205. 62 Hubert van den Berg and Benedikt Hjartarson, “Icelandic Artists in the Nordic Network of the European Avant-Garde,” 229–247. 63 Jón Þorleifsson [sign Orri], “Málverkasýning Finns Jónssonar” [Finnur Jónsson’s Exhibition], Morgunblaðið, November 27, 1943, 2. 64 Hubert van den Berg, “Jón Stefánsson og Finnur Jónsson,” 72–73. 65 Disko [Jóhannes Kjarval], “Finnur Jónsson málari,” Vísir, April 22, 1934, 5. 66 Torben Jelsbak and Per Stounbjeg, “Danish Expressionism,” 468. 67 Jón Þorleifsson, “Íslensk málarlist í 30 ár”, Listviðir, May 7, 1932, 11–14. 68 Jón Þorleifsson, “Málverkasýning Finns Jónssonar” [The Exhibition of Finnur Jónsson], Morgunblaðið, March 31, 1946. 69 Þorvaldur Skúlason, Ásgrímur Jónsson, Finnur Jónsson, Ásmundur Sveinsson, Gunnlaugur Óskar Scheving, Jón Engilberts, Sveinn Þórarinsson, Jón Þorleifsson, Marteinn Guðmundsson, Jóhann

271

Margrét Elísabet Ólafsdóttir

70 71 72 73 74 75

Briem, Jóhannes Sveinsson, Kristín Jónsdóttir, Karen Agnete Þórarinsson, and Nína Tryggvadóttir. “Listaverkakaup menntamálaráðs. Ávarp til Alþingis frá listamönnum,” Morgunblaðið, May 7, 1941, 5. Jónas Jónsson from Hrifla, “Hvíldartími í listum og bókmenntum,” Tíminn, December 6, 1941, 500–501. Björn Th. Björnsson, Íslensk myndlist á 19. og 20. öld, 210. “Íslensk nútímalist,” Tíminn, May 3, 1942, 157. “66 fjelagar Bandalags ísl: Listamanna senda Alþingi skorinort ávarp út af vítaverðu framferði Menntamálaráðs” [66 Members of the Federation of Icelandic Artists Address Alþingi to Denounce the Reprehensible Conduct of the Council of Education], Morgunblaðið, April 16, 1942, 3, 6. Gunnar J. Árnason, “Expressjónismi á Íslandi,” 171–179. Ágúst Þór Árnason, “Iceland and Germany: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives,” in Norden gjenoppdager Tyskland. Nya perspective pä gamla relationer [The Nordic Countries Rediscover Germany. New Perspectives on Old Relationships], ed. Anna Florén and Emilie Höglund (Oslo: Skyline Forlag, 2013), 110.

272

Plate 1  Henri Matisse, Red Room (Harmony in Red), 1908, oil on canvas, 180.5 × 221 cm, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, inv. no. GE–9660.  Succession H. Matisse/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018. Image:  The State Hermitage Museum/Photo by Vladimir Terebenin

Plate 2  Max Pechstein, Das gelbschwarze Trikot (The Yellow-Black Jersey), 1910, oil on canvas, 68 × 78 cm, Brücke Museum Berlin, on permanent loan from private collection.  2017 Pechstein Hamburg/Tökendorf

Plate 3  Bohumil Kubišta, Dvojník (Double), 1911, oil on canvas, 79 × 66.5 cm, private collection. Courtesy of private collector

Plate 4  Anton Jaszusch, Putovanie duší (Migration of Souls), 1923–1924, oil on canvas, 268 × 290 cm, Slovak National Gallery, O 2699.  Anton Jaszusch (heirs)/LITA, Society of Authors, 2018

Plate 5  Lajos Tihanyi, Kassák Lajos arcképe (Portrait of Lajos Kassák), 1918, oil on canvas, 86.6 × 70 cm, Szépművészeti Múzeum/Museum of Fine Arts, inv. no. 70.134 T. Photograph: Tibor Mester

Plate 6  Stanisław Kubicki, Der Heilige und die Tiere/Święty i zwierzęta (The Holy and the Animals), oil on canvas, 1932, private collection, Berlin 

Plate 7  Wassily Kandinsky, Fragment 2 for Composition VII, 1913, oil on canvas, 87.63 × 99.69 cm, Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York Room of Contemporary Art Fund, 1947

Plate 8  Pavel Filonov, Golova (Head), 1924, oil on paper, 49.2 × 39.2 cm, Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Photograph: Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Cologne

Plate 9  Viktoras Vizgirda, Interjeras su vieniška kėde (Interior with Vienna Chair), 1932, oil on canvas, 89.3 × 70 cm, M. K. Čiurlionis National Art Museum, Kaunas.  M. K. Čiurlionis National Art Museum, 2017

Plate 10  Antanas Samuolis, Baltoji obelis (White Apple-Tree), 1932, oil on canvas, 89 × 71 cm, Lithuanian Art Museum, Vilnius

Plate 11  Kārlis Padegs, Madonna ar ložmetēju (Madonna with a Machine Gun), 1932, oil on canvas, 134 × 100 cm, Latvian National Museum of Art (LNMA), VMM GL–3137

Plate 12  Konrad Mägi, Pühajärv (The Lake Pühajärv), 1918–1921, oil on canvas, 52.7 × 68 cm, Art Museum of Estonia.  Art Museum of Estonia

Plate 13  Harald Giersing, Danserinde (Dancer), 1918, oil on fibre board, Kunstmuseet i Tønder, The Museum of Southern Jutland

Plate 14  Vera Nilsson, Två barn (Two Children), 1914, oil on canvas, 64.5 × 48.5 cm, private collection. Photo: Mattias Lindbäck.  Vera Nilsson/Bildupphovsrätt 2017

Plate 15  Tyko Sallinen, Hihhulit (The Fanatics), 1918, oil on canvas, 168 × 185 cm, Finnish National Gallery/Ateneum Art Museum, Ahlström Collection, Helsinki. Photo: Finnish National Gallery/Jukka Romu.  Kuvasto 2017

Plate 16  Marcus Collin, Elonkorjuu (Harvest), 1915, oil on canvas, 90.5 × 98.5 cm, Finnish National Gallery/Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki. Photo: Finnish National Gallery/Hannu Aaltonen.  Kuvasto 2017

Plate 17  John Savio, Gánda ja nieda (Boy and Girl), n.d., hand-colored woodcut, 19 × 18.5 cm, Saviomuseet, Kirkenes, Norway

Plate 18  Jón Stefánsson, Regnbogi (The Rainbow), c. 1915, oil on canvas, 121 × 134 cm, National Gallery of Iceland, LÍ 1616.  Bryndís Jónsdóttir

Plate 19  Jacoba van Heemskerck, Compositie (Composition), 1914, oil on canvas, 75 × 108.8 cm, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag

Plate 20  F  rits Van den Berghe, De idioot bij de vijver (The Idiot by the Pond), 1926, oil on canvas, 111.8 × 95.8 cm, Museum of Fine Arts Ghent, inv. no.1962–C, ex-collection Le Centaure.  www.lukasweb.be—Art in Flanders vzw

Plate 21  Chaim Soutine, La route montante, vers Gréolières (Winding Road, near Gréolières), 1920–1921, oil on canvas, 80.3 × 49.8 cm, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia.  2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

Plate 22  E  nrico Prampolini, Frontispizio (Illustration) to “Primavera” (Spring), poem of Tre canti per dire i dolori della terra e i dolori dei cieli [Canti Mistici] by Constant Zarian, n.d. (c. 1915), xylography, 29 × 22.5 cm [image motif: 10 × 10 cm], in L’Eroica, V, nos. 8–10 (1915, due to war published in June 1916), La Spezia. Source: Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz—Max-Planck-Institut.  Anna Maria and Massimo Prampolini, Rome

Plate 23  A  madeo de Souza-Cardoso, Cristal Partido Coração Diamante (Broken Crystal Diamond Heart), 1913, watercolor on paper, 23.9 × 33.2 cm, Centro de Arte Moderna da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, inv. 87DP329. Photograph: Paulo Costa

Plate 24  Veno Pilon, Portret skladatelja Marija Kogoja (Portrait of the Composer Marij Kogoj), 1923, oil on canvas, 94 × 72 cm, Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM), Ljubljana, Slovenia.  Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM)

Plate 25  Vilko Gecan, Cinik (Cynic), 1921, oil on canvas, 110.5 × 99 cm, Moderna galerija/Modern Gallery, Zagreb, inv. no. MG–2668, photograph: Goran Vranić.  Moderna galerija, Zagreb. Courtesy of Moderna galerija, Zagreb

Plate 26  Jovan Bijelić, Borba dana i noći (Struggle Between Day and Night), 1921, oil on canvas, 55 × 68 cm, Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade.  Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade

Plate 27  Hans Eder, Der Advokat Hermann Fratschkes und der Dichter Heinrich Horvath; Dublu portret/ Avocatul Hermann Fratschkes si poetul Heinrich Horvath (Double Portrait/The Lawyer Hermann Fratschkes and the Poet Heinrich Horvath), 1923, oil on canvas, 75 × 81 cm, The National Museum of Art, Bucharest

Plate 28  Sándor Ziffer, Parcul şcsolii de pictură de la Baia-Mare (The Park of the Baia Mare Painting School), 1920, oil on canvas, 64 × 80 cm, The Museum of Țara Crişurilor, Oradea

Plate 29  Caven Atkins, Night (Bluish Night Scene), 1932, oil on canvas, 53.3 × 71.1 cm, Art Gallery of Windsor.  Christie A. Hewlett

Plate 30  Marsden Hartley, Fisherman’s Last Supper (1st version), 1938, oil on canvas, 22″ × 28″/55.9 × 71.1 cm, private collection

Plate 31  C  ecilio Guzmán de Rojas, Cama 33 T.B. Evacuable (Bed 33 T.B. Evacuate), 1934, oil on linen, 47 × 64.5 cm, Museo Nacional de Arte, La Paz.  Iván Guzmán de Rojas

Plate 32  Irma Stern, Playing Children, 1924, oil on canvas, 79.5 × 77 cm, Rupert Foundation

PART III

Western Europe

14 EARLY ENGAGEMENTS Peripheral British Responses to German Expressionism Christian Weikop

On the Origins of the Term “Expressionist” It is a challenge to identify how the word “Expressionisten” first became associated with German avant-garde artists and how the English translation of this word as “expressionist” likewise became a label for a particular current of modern German art. What becomes apparent when studying avant-garde developments in the period 1910 to 1914 is that there was little consistent application with respect to the national identity of these terms. The designation “expressionist” was first associated with French rather than German art by the quintessential Englishman and art critic, Roger Fry (1866–1934),1 as his first attempt at a title for the exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists at the Grafton Galleries in London in November 1910. This was an exhibition that opened to a wave of negative conservative opinion at a time when even impressionism was still far from accepted in the public sphere. Fry initially favored the term “expressionists” rather than “post-impressionists” because “expressive design seemed the quality most evident” in the modern French paintings he selected.2 Given his close interest in Henri Matisse, it is likely that Fry was responding to Matisse’s well-known theoretical essay “Notes d’un peintre” (Notes of a Painter) of 1908, in which the artist wrote: “What I am after, above all, is expression. The simplest means are those which enable an artist to express himself best.”3 It was only when Fry and the Grafton show’s secretary, Desmond MacCarthy, were challenged by a young journalist with whom they were discussing the exhibition, and who did not like the title, that Fry lost his patience and stated: “Oh, let’s just call them post-impressionists; at any rate, they came after the impressionists.”4 It is curious that such an off-the-cuff remark would lead to this term gaining sufficient traction to enter the art-historical lexicon, a hastily generated alternative to the more considered “expressionist.” While Fry did not include German artists in Manet and the Post-Impressionists, it is known that he was influenced by German aesthetics. The art historian Matthew Potter has analyzed the importance of German aesthetic models, especially the work of Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (Geist theory) for the British academic and arts establishment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and has suggested that “German artistic theories continued to be held in the highest esteem even after the emergence of post-impressionist and French avant-garde tastes.”5 Potter has argued that Fry’s formalist ideas were “deeply indebted to

275

Christian Weikop

the German metaphysical tradition.”6 Furthermore, while Fry was interested in the aesthetics of Adolf von Hildebrand, Heinrich Wölfflin, and others, his curatorial conception of “postimpressionism” was considerably influenced by his reading of the work of Francophile German art critic and historian, Julius Meier-Graefe, and his influential two-volume study Die Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst (The Developmental History of Modern Art), published in 1904 and translated into English as Modern Art in 1908, which placed a great deal more emphasis on the stylistic innovations of modern French art than young artists of Meier-Graefe’s home nation. A fact hardly considered at all in the literature on expressionism is that the term “expressionist” had already been used in an anonymous review titled “Modern French Pictures at Brighton” and published in The Times on July 11, 1910.7 The pioneering Exhibition of Modern French Art, which opened on June 10, 1910, was organized by the Brighton Municipal Art Galleries director Henry D. Roberts and Robert Dell, the Paris correspondent for The Burlington Magazine, which he helped found with Fry, Bernard Berenson, and Herbert Horne in 1902. The exhibition included works by Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin, André Derain, Othon Friesz, Maurice Denis, and others representing various currents of contemporary French art. In the review, most likely written by Dell’s colleague Fry, the critic applauds the exhibition, although he argues that in certain cases the selection of paintings could have been bolder. Even so, the paintings were more daring than anything a British gallery-goer might have seen hitherto, with very few dealers and galleries showing symbolism or impressionism, never mind anything more stylistically progressive. In attempting to collectively define the contemporary French art on show, the critic argues: It has not yet got any single name for itself, and indeed it really consists of several movements, some reacting against impressionism, some developed out of it. There are symbolists and primitives, and intimists and neo-impressionists; and it is difficult to define any of them . . . Perhaps, therefore, we should call them expressionists rather than impressionists, since they have given up the impressionist curiosity about new aspects of reality and new methods of representing them for a curiosity about new methods of expressing the emotions aroused by reality.8 This seems to be the earliest British usage of the term “expressionists” in relation to visual art, and even predates the use of the term “Expressionisten” in art circles of the German-speaking world. At the Berlin Secession in spring 1911, eleven predominantly fauve artists were exhibited in a separate gallery designated as “Expressionisten.” And at his first exhibition of the Galerie Der Sturm in March 1912, Herwarth Walden had used the term in the title Der Blaue Reiter: Franz Flaum, Oskar Kokoschka, Expressionisten (The Blue Rider: Franz Flaum, Oskar Kokoschka, Expressionists) to refer principally not to German or Austrian artists, but to the many young French painters who had been represented in the Berlin Secession the previous year, although it seems the Brücke artists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Pechstein were included under this label. For his fourth Sturm exhibition Deutsche Expressionisten: Zurückgestellte Bilder des Sonderbundes Köln (German Expressionists: Deferred Paintings of the Cologne Sonderbund), which ran from the middle of June until the end of July 1912, Walden used the term in relation to artists of the Blaue Reiter, but then he also used the title Französische Expressionisten (French Expressionists) for the fifth Sturm exhibition the following month, when exhibiting Maurice Vlaminck and other fauve artists such as Derain and Friesz.9 It is noteworthy that Friesz had already been shown at the London Grafton Galleries in November 1910, when his work was described as being like “a repellent orgy of color” not attempting “merely to match the brilliance of nature in a rabid mood, but stridently to outblaze it.”10 276

Early Engagements

There is a transnational fluidity about the term “Expressionisten” or the English translation “expressionists” between 1910 and 1912. In Germany, this was not altogether surprising when taking into account Walden’s own vision of international modernism,11 and the fact that French and German contemporary artists, namely the fauves and artists associated with what later became known as German expressionism, had been shown in the same exhibition spaces since at least July 1908. This date marks the point when works of the Brücke were displayed in the same exhibitions as paintings by Kees van Dongen, Friesz, Albert Marquet, and Vlaminck, in the first instance at the Galerie Richter in Dresden. Further French-German intersections occurred in later Galerie Richter exhibitions, the Berlin Secession of spring 1909, the Düsseldorf Sonderbund of July 1910 (which included neoimpressionist, fauvist, cubist, Brücke, and Neue Künstlervereinigung München [NKVM] artists), the second NKVM exhibition, as well as a showing of works by the French avant-garde, including Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Henri Le Fauconnier, Derain and Van Dongen, and works by the Brücke, both at the Moderne Galerie Thannhauser, Munich, in September 1910.12 Aside from the issue of influence, which was considerable in terms of the influence of the progressive styles of French artists on German artists, there were also crossover connections in group membership. For instance, one of the eleven artists of the Berlin Secession dubbed “Expressionisten,” the Dutchman Van Dongen, had been listed as an active member of the Brücke in Dresden and the Neue Künstlervereinigung in Munich, as well as being involved with Matisse’s fauve circle in Paris.

Brücke’s Connections to the British and German Arts and Crafts Movements Curiously, the Brücke group did have an early English member, although a patron, or passive Mitglied (passive member) to use their term (as opposed to an artist “active member”). At the very end of the Brücke’s (woodcut) passive membership list for 1908, after the names of various private collectors, dealers, and academics from major German cities, as well as Switzerland, Austria, and Scandinavia, the name Edith Buckley from Crawley (Sussex, England) is given. She was a friend of Ada Nolde (Emil Nolde’s wife), who drew her attention to the work of the Brücke artists not long after their formation.13 Like Ada Nolde, she visited the famous Dr. Lahmann’s Weißer Hirsch sanatorium in Dresden for curative treatments and was enthusiastic about various aspects of anti-urban reform movements. The Buckley family had traveled to Germany on many occasions and considered introducing German natural health cure establishments to England. They were also enthusiastic about the German Arts and Crafts movement, and were inspired to seek a revival of handicrafts in Sussex country villages.14 A sense of a shared mission between British and German applied art movements was certainly in evidence before 1910. Studio magazine was very important from the 1890s onwards in terms of being a point of exchange for the British and German Arts and Crafts scenes. It often gave exposure to German artists and was also instrumental in championing the Vienna Secession and, later, the Wiener Werkstätte. It could even be argued that the stylized arboreal motif of the front cover of the first issue of Studio (April 1893) by Aubrey Beardsley might well have functioned as the model for the vigorous tree sapling of Alfred Roller’s woodcut for the first issue of the Vienna Secession magazine Ver Sacrum (1898). Both publications would be highly influential on the early woodcut culture of the Brücke group founded in Dresden in 1905. Ver Sacrum artists were also very much inspired by leading British Arts and Crafts figures, especially William Morris (1834–1896) and Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928). 277

Christian Weikop

A key figure of the British Arts and Crafts movement, who was highly respected in both Germany and Britain, was the Germanophile artist and theoretician Walter Crane (1845–1915). He placed great emphasis on the authentic use of materials and in 1888 was already strongly of the opinion that it was necessary to turn artists into craftsman and craftsman into artists,15 a notion that anticipated by many years the ideals of the Weimar Bauhaus founded in 1919. Crane’s theories were discussed by Cornelius Gurlitt and Fritz Schumacher, two important teachers of the yet-to-be-formed Brücke circle, who used Crane’s book Line and Form, translated into German in 1901, in their classes at the Technische Hochschule in Dresden, classes attended by Kirchner, Erich Heckel, and Fritz Bleyl.16 Crane also co-organized with Henry van de Velde the Exhibition of Modern German Art that was held at the Prince’s Galleries, Knightsbridge, in 1906. Van de Velde, an established Belgian designer who later became a close mentor of Kirchner and who made his most vital contributions to modern design as a teacher in Germany, not least at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Weimar from 1902 onwards, closely related to Crane’s theories. He wrote his own influential essay on expressive linearity for the periodical Die Zukunft (The Future).17 Van de Velde and Crane’s exhibition, however, was devoted not to what was later termed “German expressionism,” but artists associated with the German Arts and Crafts and Secession movements, and the catalogue included a preface written by Crane on the artistic union between Britain and Germany, as visually allegorized on the cover (Figure 14.1).

Figure 14.1  C  atalogue cover for Modern German Art, exhibition held at the Prince’s Galleries, Knightsbridge, London, May 1906. Cover illustration by Walter Crane.  Victoria and Albert Museum, London

278

Early Engagements

Asides from certain Anglo-German connections with respect to Arts and Crafts and Secession movements, British critical and artistic engagement with international modernism and the “Expressionisten” of visual culture between 1905 and 1914 was very tentative indeed. A key moment was the arrival in Germany of two English poets, namely Rupert Brooke (1887–1915) and T. E. Hulme (1883–1917), between 1911 and 1912.18 Hulme was familiar with the Sturm circle at the Café des Westens, and he proved to be very significant in terms of the earliest British reception of Wilhelm Worringer’s ideas, a figure often considered as the first aesthetician of expressionism. It was Hulme’s work on Worringer that would later inspire Herbert Read (1893–1968) who became associated with expressionist circles in Germany in the 1920s, and who translated Worringer’s influential Formprobleme der Gotik (Form Problems of the Gothic; 1911) into English in 1927, in addition to publishing Worringer’s lecture translated as “Current Questions on Art” for the August 1927 issue of T. S. Eliot’s journal The Criterion.

Rupert Brooke’s Encounters with Expressionism Brooke spent January to April 1911 in Munich, where he met Kandinsky and familiarized himself with the artwork of the NKVM, the predecessor group to the Blaue Reiter, whom Brooke referred to as “München PIS” (Munich Postimpressionists), a remark which also indicates his familiarity with Fry’s Grafton Galleries exhibition that had opened in London not long before his arrival in Germany. In March 1911, shortly after Franz Marc had joined the NKVM, he wrote: I move among the München P[ost] I[mpressionist]s. They got up an exhibition of their French masters here last year; and go on pilgrimages to all the places where Van Gogh went dotty or cut his ears off or did any of the other climactic actions of his life. They are young and beetle-browed and serious.19 Brooke returned to Germany, this time to Berlin, a year later, in April 1912, and remained until late June, returning again in November 1912. These trips to Berlin were critical because, as Bridgwater points out, Brooke had his “Stammtisch” (regulars’ table) in the “window in the legendary Cafe des Westens” on the Ku’damm,20 thereby placing him at the heart of the action in terms of the networks of the German avant-garde. Walden and his wife, Else Lasker-Schüler, held court at the Café des Westens, and the Sturm circle of artists and writers developed around them. Bridgwater indicates that while in Berlin, Brooke visited the fourth Sturm exhibition and “had also discussed expressionism with Hulme, who at that time had his head full of Worringer’s aesthetic views.”21 Furthermore, Brooke was in Berlin at the same time that the Brücke artists had an important exhibition at the Kunstsalon Fritz Gurlitt, and it is documented that Brooke later attended the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne when he left Berlin after his first trip on June 24, 1912, where he would have experienced much modern German art, including Brücke and Blaue Reiter work (and the “Modern Gothic” decorations of the Sonderbund chapel by Kirchner and Heckel), Viennese expressionism (Kokoschka and Schiele), and other European modernist movements and circles, as well as the major showcasing of Van Gogh. In the Sonderbund catalogue foreword, director Richard Reiche argued that impressionism and naturalism had been superseded by a new movement that “strives for a simplification and enhancement of forms of expression, a new rhythm and color.” And further, “the exhibition seems to survey this movement, which has been called expressionism.”22 As Bridgwater has argued: “One way or another, Brooke was becoming much better informed about German 279

Christian Weikop

modernism than most of his fellow-countrymen.”23 His experience of these key exhibitions and the fertile atmosphere of the Café des Westens was conceptually galvanizing, leading to his own use of “expressionism” published in a review of Fry’s Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition at the Grafton Galleries, London (October 5–December 31, 1912) in The Cambridge Magazine, published twice, on November 23 and 30, 1912. In this review, Brooke attempted a definition of the term as something anti-naturalist. He wrote: The chief object of a good picture is to convey the expression of an emotion of the artist, and not, as most people have been supposing, his impression of something he sees. In other words, the goodness of a good picture does not consist in its resemblance to “nature.”24 Brooke then started to make some clearer national distinctions: “In France the modernists in art are usually known as Les Fauves, in Germany as Die Wilden or Die Expressionisten. Expressionism, is on the whole, the best name that has been found.”25 In making this statement, Brooke was following the British critic Arthur Clutton-Brock, who had written a Burlington Magazine review of Fry’s first Grafton Galleries exhibition in January 1911, in which he proposed that the “misleading” term “postimpressionism” be replaced with the “less ugly” word “expressionism,”26 thereby corroborating Fry’s first instincts concerning the naming of the exhibition. Unlike Fry and Clutton-Brock, however, who were thinking essentially of French artists, German artists were at the forefront of Brooke’s mind. Brooke’s understanding of the term “Die Wilden,” for instance, may well have been due to his awareness of the recently formed Blaue Reiter and the release of the almanac Der Blaue Reiter (May 1912), in which Marc published the essay “Die ‘Wilden’ Deutschlands” (The “Savages” of Germany), which briefly surveyed the Brücke, Neue Secession, and the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (NKVM) as all representing the cutting edge of contemporary German art. And Brooke went on to criticize Fry’s selection of artists for the Second PostImpressionist Exhibition in the same Cambridge Magazine review: It is a pity that the committee could not have included works by, at any rate, Erbslöh, Jawlensky, and Kandinsky of Munich, Pechstein of Berlin, and Kokoschka of Vienna, who paint pictures at least as good and interesting as most of those here.27 This comment might also indicate that Brooke thought that “postimpressionist” was perhaps synonymous with “expressionist,” a point reinforced by his earlier reference to the NKVM as the “München PIs.”

The Early British Reception of Wassily Kandinsky It is not known whether Brooke was aware that Fry had entertained the term “expressionist” before “postimpressionist,” but either way he appeared to be objecting to Fry’s Francocentric tendencies, although Fry did include Russian artists (but not Kandinsky) and British artists in his second “postimpressionist” exhibition of 1912. The omission of Kandinsky from the second exhibition can perhaps be explained by the fact that Russian artist Boris Anrep made the Russian selection on behalf of Fry, although Fry was surely aware of Kandinsky’s presence in the London Allied Artists’ Association exhibition from 1909 onwards. A sentence in Fry’s review of the 1913 A.A.A. exhibition, which also included Kandinsky’s work, gives us some insight 280

Early Engagements

into why his appreciation of the artist was somewhat belated. In describing Kandinsky’s paintings as “pure visual music,” Fry admitted that he could not “any longer doubt the possibility of emotional expression by such abstract visual signs.”28 This mention of “doubt” signals an initial reticence—as a professional art critic Fry would have seen earlier A.A.A. exhibitions that included Kandinsky’s work. In May 1914, Frank Rutter (1876–1937) revealingly commented on the general reception of Kandinsky’s art when first seen in London, in 1909, a reception that might have contributed to Fry’s early doubts: Less than five years ago, when Kandinsky’s paintings were shown in London for the first time at the Albert Hall, they probably excited more laughter than any paintings have ever caused. Now there are earnest young painters who call him the greatest living artist.29 While Fry may have been influenced by German aesthetic theories, he seemed to have a very limited interest in modern German art practice during the period leading up to the First World War, or even later during the Weimar era, a lack of engagement for which Read would criticize Fry’s Bloomsbury circle in the early 1930s. And yet, as early as 1912, it was Brooke who was at the cutting edge of the British critical reception of contemporary artistic developments in Germany, mentally grouping, albeit loosely, the German “Expressionisten.” It could be argued that Brooke anticipated the nationalizing of the movement undertaken by Paul Fechter, who published the first book on Expressionism in German, Der Expressionismus, in 1914. Fechter argued that while expressionism was part of a Pan-European reaction against naturalism and impressionism, it actually emerged from a German Gothic tradition, a notion inspired by Worringer’s theories, resulting in “extensive expressionism” (as exemplified by the figurative art of Pechstein) and “intensive expressionism” (the cosmological abstract expressionism exemplified by the work of Kandinsky).30 Fechter’s Germanicizing of the movement must have also been fueled by heighted feelings of cultural nationalism in the build-up to the outbreak of the First World War. Brooke is mentioned by name in Kandinsky’s correspondence with Michael Sadleir (1888– 1957), son of Sir Michael Ernest Sadler (1861–1943), the Germanophile vice-chancellor of Leeds University and president of the Leeds Arts Club, who would acquire works by Kandinsky from 1911 onwards. This correspondence concerned the matter of potentially including a reproduction of one of Kandinsky’s woodcuts (that Sadleir had recently acquired) in the new quarterly art periodical Rhythm, a copy of which Sadleir had sent him. Kandinsky wrote: Thank you for sending me your periodical. I am very glad to give permission for the reproduction of my woodcut. I am very pleased that the so-called modern art movement is mirrored in your journal and meets with interest in England. Mr Brooke from Cambridge also told me about this last winter. I enclose for you the prospectus of the art periodical that I have founded; the first issue is due to appear on January 21. Also this month my book Über das Geistige in der Kunst will be published. I will send you a copy.31 The principal editor of Rhythm was John Middleton Murry (1889–1957), assisted initially by Sadleir and the Scottish colorist John Duncan Fergusson (1874–1961), who acted as art editor and who produced the distinctive cover image. Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) later joined the editorial staff not long after the publication of her collection of short stories, In a German Pension (1911). In the first issue of Rhythm, Murry argued that the true artist will perceive 281

Christian Weikop

“essential forms, the essential harmonies of line and colour” and will penetrate “the outward surface of the world,” to disengage “rhythms that lie at the heart of things.”32 While Murry and Fergusson were most enthusiastic for fauve art, this statement more clearly connects with the art of Kandinsky. In the fourth issue (Spring 1912), there is an article by Sadleir that is entitled “After Gauguin,” but is actually the first English-language review of Kandinsky’s theories,33 and it appeared in the immediate wake of the artist’s publication Über das Geistige in der Kunst (December 1911), which Kandinsky sent to Sadleir, as his letter cited above indicates. This publication closely informed Sadleir’s article, in which he discussed in some detail the artist’s treatise on abstraction, color theory, and the “spiritual development” of music and art, but also positioned, as Caroline Maclean has pointed out, “Kandinsky and Derain as ‘neo-primitive’ successors to Paul Gauguin.”34 Sadleir would immediately follow up his Rhythm article with an even more detailed essay of Kandinsky’s publication for Rutter’s Art News on March 9, 1912, an account that would in part be reproduced in the introduction of his English translation of Über das Geistige in der Kunst, originally published as The Art of Spiritual Harmony in 1914, but later retitled Concerning the Spiritual in Art.35 According to Rutter, who was an art critic for the Sunday Times from 1903 to 1937, a Director of Leeds City Art Gallery from 1912 to 1937, a key Leeds Arts Club member, a founding member of the Allied Artists Association (A.A.A.), as well as a co-editor of Art and Letters along with Herbert Read, Kandinsky’s work first came to notice in Britain at the A.A.A.’s second London Salon at the Royal Albert Hall in July 1909, when his paintings Yellow Cliff (1909) and Winter Landscape (1909), along with twelve prints, were shown.36 Thanks to Rutter, many other Kandinsky paintings were displayed in subsequent exhibitions. Sir Michael Sadler and his son, the first patrons of his work in Britain, would acquire drawings and paintings by Kandinsky, as well as the aforementioned woodcuts acquired by Sadleir, part of the proofs for Klänge (Sounds; Figure 14.2), a book of Kandinsky’s woodcuts and poems published in Germany in 1913, but perhaps the most notable early work in Sadler’s collection was Kandinsky’s Fragment 2 for Composition VII of 1913 (Plate 7), a painting that Sadler displayed at the Leeds Arts Club in 1913. Sadleir’s correspondence with Kandinsky in 1911 led to Sadler Sr. and his son visiting Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter in Murnau in August 1912 while on a tour of Germany. When the full English version of Über das Geistige in der Kunst appeared in April 1914, it was well received, and Kandinsky was pleased. In a letter to Sadleir, he wrote: “It is a constant joy to me to know that there are such friends of my art in distant England as yourself and your father.”37 Through the Sadlers, even Fry, who had not shown Kandinsky’s work in the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1912, became more interested in him. In a letter to Kandinsky, Sadler Sr. wrote: Mr Roger Fry has been staying with us and was deeply interested in your drawings. He asked if I would lend them for an exhibition which he and some friends are organizing next week in London [the first Grafton Group exhibition, Alpine Club Gallery, March 1913], and of course I gladly consented.38 In the summer of 1913, Fry continued to express his admiration of Kandinsky by writing in his review of an A.A.A. exhibition for The Nation that “by far the best pictures there seemed to me to be the three works by Kandinsky” because they had “the most definite and coherent expressive power.”39 Potter has argued that “the British reception of Kandinsky’s abstraction took place within a Germanist critical context,”40 and that might be the case when considering the interest of the British academic establishment in German aesthetics and the fact that Kandinsky, “Russian-born but Munich-based,”41 wrote his theoretical works in German. It is striking, however, that the 282

Early Engagements

Figure 14.2  Wassily Kandinsky, Composition II, proof before publication in Klänge [Sounds] (Munich, 1913), 1911, woodcut, 14.8 × 20.8 cm.  The Trustees of the British Museum

interest in him was far more significant than any of the German artists of the NKVM, Blaue Reiter, or indeed the figurative expressionists of the Brücke, probably because his experimental path to abstraction was so shockingly new. It is not at all clear that Fry identified Kandinsky as a “German expressionist” at this time; if anything he may have been attracted by his Russianness, as there was certainly a vogue for Russian culture in Britain during this period. Kandinsky’s star was also rising in his adopted home of Germany. From 1912, he was clearly a favorite of Walden’s Berlin-based Der Sturm magazine and gallery, and the international reach of Der Sturm extended to the shores of Britain. It is intriguing to see an advert written in English for Der Sturm in the pages of Rhythm, the little magazine where Kandinsky had received his earliest critical reception.42 In the advert Der Sturm is described as an “Organ of Independence” and its placement in Rhythm indicates some form of Anglo-German exchange across these avant-garde publications in the prewar period. Bridgwater has noted that Der Sturm, for instance, “used to advertise in English poetry magazines, and was available in Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop” and “English magazines such as Rhythm were available in the Cafe des Westens and elsewhere.”43 Walden’s enterprising nature is demonstrated by the fact that by 1914 he was “circulating exhibitions of prints which travelled as far as Stockholm, Tokyo and London, before his activities were curtailed by the First World War.”44

The Metropolitan and Regional Reception of Expressionism Antony Griffiths and Frances Carey, the curators responsible for the important 1984 British Museum exhibition of expressionist printmaking, have observed that Campbell Dodgson 283

Christian Weikop

(1867–1948), Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum between 1912 and 1932, while being that department’s greatest benefactor, “clearly and explicitly disliked expressionism, and acquired nothing by any member of the Brücke.”45 Between 1909 and 1911, he did, however, supplement the collection with prints by Emil Nolde and Edvard Munch. In the case of Nolde, who was, of course, briefly a member of the Brücke, seven etchings were acquired in August 1909; three were presented by Dodgson, the other four by Nolde himself. The early British interest in Munch before the First World War, a Norwegian artist who had his greatest successes in Germany rather than Norway, and who would be seen by many critics and art historians as a pathfinder for the expressionist generation, is also intriguing. In a regular feature in Studio magazine entitled “Studio Talk,” a reviewer identified only by the initials J. J. would write in 1914: “There is certainly much in Munch’s pictures that attracts one at first sight, but his expressionist style . . . is inimical to a sustained interest. Deficiencies of execution and brutalities of taste quickly dispel fascination.”46 The notion of expressionism being “brutal” or “barbaric,” and the criticism of contemporary German art in terms of its often distorted formal qualities, became a feature of the Anglophone criticism of modern German art from about 1914 onwards, and it resonated in the art writing of those who were positively receptive, such as Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) and Read, as well as in the articles of those who viewed expressionism with some suspicion. In their usage of the term “barbaric,” Lewis and Read were responding with enthusiasm to an anti-Vasarian impulse already present in German art criticism, especially after the publications of the cultural critic, Julius Langbehn, and later Worringer, Paul Westheim, Wilhelm Valentiner, and others. These German critics were exponents of a practice of defining the German character as “barbaric” in a positive sense, with the notion of barbarism closer to the Rousseauean definition of the “noble savage” than Vasari’s idea of the “vandal.” Of course, the imparting of a positive value to the term “barbaric” as an expression of artistic authenticity was also evident in the writings of Gauguin, whose Noa Noa travelogue (1901) was translated and published in the German art magazine Kunst und Künstler (Art and Artist) in 1908, and was of considerable influence on modern German artists. The mobility of avant-garde magazines in the prewar years and their potential to act as sites of international exchange constitutes part of the very earliest British reception of expressionism. The British reception of German modernism more generally was initiated earlier by a series of three articles on the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche by Havelock Ellis (the first in English), which appeared in the Savoy journal in 189647 and heavily influenced figures such as Bernard Shaw, Holbrook Jackson, A. E. Orage, Rutter, and later Read, who were all involved with the Leeds Arts Club. This club was founded in 1903 by Jackson and Orage as a cultural Gemeinschaft, and among other things, it helped disseminate modern German culture through its meetings and publications such as the affiliated journal The New Age.48 It is intriguing that a British intelligentsia provincially based in a manufacturing city of Northern England provided a more receptive environment for German modernism than any circle in metropolitan London at this time. The New Age might have been the British version of Der Sturm or Die Aktion, but it lacked the graphic interest of these important expressionist journals. Rhythm was closer to Der Sturm in terms of its visual quality. Just prior to the war, the most important British avant-garde magazine for the reception of expressionism was the vorticist publication Blast, edited by Lewis, which ran to two issues. The first appeared in early July 1914 and contained a review of Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art by Edward Wadsworth (1889–1949) entitled “Inner Necessity,” as well as Lewis’s review of an exhibition of German woodcuts by artists who had contributed to Der Sturm. This was held at the Twenty-One Gallery in the Adelphi quarter in London and is seemingly one of the 284

Early Engagements

aforementioned Walden touring shows. The exhibition, Modern German Art (February–March 1914), was the first devoted to expressionist art to be staged in the United Kingdom. Wadsworth and Lewis would have first encountered Kandinsky’s work when spending time in Munich between 1906 and 1907. Wadsworth’s father had sent him to study machine draughtsmanship in Munich, but he spent as much time on woodcut and painting at the Knirr School of Art in Schwabing as attending to the subject for which he was enrolled. Potter has argued that Wadsworth’s first creations in woodcut “relied heavily upon Der Blaue Reiter artists Kandinsky and Franz Marc as models” and that when he contributed woodcuts to Blast seven years later, he published woodcut designs “which he developed out of this engagement.”49 It is very likely that Wadsworth would have seen Kandinsky’s woodcuts during his stay in Munich (less so Marc’s work), but on considering his Blast woodcuts, it is perhaps easier to identify the differences between his prints and those of expressionist artists than similarities. In Blast I, Lewis described Wadsworth’s printmaking as a “compression of clean metallic shapes,”50 and certainly in comparison to rough-cut Brücke prints, his working processes are effaced and engineer-like in execution. Herbert Furst (1874–1945), a publisher, editor, critic, and gallerist, educated partly in England and partly in Germany, who managed the London office of Kunstverlag Franz Hanfstaengel from 1897 to 1916, was an early enthusiast for German avant-garde prints. He did more than any other writer based in Britain in the 1910s and 1920s to promote contemporary graphic art. In his milestone text, The Modern Woodcut (1924), Furst made an interesting general point about the English approach to the woodcut medium, arguing that from the “purely xylographic point of view . . . neither Wadsworth nor other English artists’ work of similar tendencies stands very high because the material—the wood—is not essential to its expression.”51 By contrast, Furst would argue that the work of German artists who fought in the war had a marked pathological quality. The generation of expressionists engaged in war “most clearly demonstrate its disintegrating and more catastrophic influence”; they were “men who sought wood . . . in order to give expression in a cathartic sense to their feelings.”52 A number of Wadsworth’s woodcuts were exhibited at the Twenty-One Gallery in 1914 at the same time as the exhibition of modern German prints, although they must have appeared strikingly different. Some of Wadsworth’s later post-Blast woodcuts from around the period 1919 to 1920 are less clean-cut and geometrically precise and do possess greater material expression, especially prints such as Landscape: West Riding (1920; Figure 14.3), which with its dynamic combed forms brings to mind the postwar woodcuts of Schmidt-Rottluff such as Russian Landscape with Sun (1919; Figure 14.4), or indeed Tarmac (1919), so reminiscent of the apocalyptic landscapes of Ludwig Meidner. Wadsworth, a Yorkshireman who was raised in a Northern industrial environment, also shared with another expressionist, Conrad Felixmüller, a desire to capture industrial landscapes in woodcut, and Jonathan Black has observed the various German and Jewish connections between the industrial parts of Bradford and “the Ruhr of the Kaiser’s Germany.”53 Richard Cork has argued that Wadsworth’s “own pictures bore scarcely any imprint of Kandinsky’s work,”54 but Potter gives a more nuanced interpretation in stating that for his Blast woodcuts Wadsworth’s “picture surface is defined by its structural tensions, inspired by Kandinsky and refined under the precisionist tastes of Vorticism.”55 Wadsworth’s interest in Kandinsky is clear, underscored by the fact that in the first issue of Blast even though he acknowledges Sadleir’s new translation of Kandinsky’s book at the head of the review, he provides his own translation as well as commentary on Kandinsky’s text.56 For Wadsworth’s vorticist colleague Lewis, it was Kandinsky’s woodcuts and his “original and bitter” use of color combinations that elevated him above other avant-garde artists.57 And yet by the second “War 285

Figure 14.3  Edward Wadsworth, Landscape: West Riding, 1920, woodcut, 25.72 × 19.37 cm; plate from Modern Woodcutters, no. 4, 1921.  Estate of Edward Wadsworth. All rights reserved, DACS 2017.  Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Figure 14.4  Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Russian Landscape, 1919, woodcut, 52.39 × 69.85 cm, Milwaukee Art Museum (Marcia and Granvil Specks Collection).  DACS 2017

Early Engagements

Number” of Blast (August 1915), the ever-restless Lewis had changed his mind, and he criticized Kandinsky’s impulse to be “medium-like” and suggested that his art avoided “almost all powerful and definite forms,”58 contradicting Fry’s earlier 1913 review for The Nation. More significant than Lewis’s assessment of Kandinsky across the two issues, however, is his appreciation of the Twenty-One Gallery exhibition of expressionist woodcuts in Blast I, an exhibition which included both figurative and abstract examples of expressionist art, and which, like Fechter’s Der Expressionismus (Expressionism; 1914), published at the same time, effectively Germanized an expressionist movement. It is extraordinary that just a year before the publication of Carl Einstein’s highly influential Negerplastik (Negro Sculpture; 1915) in Leipzig, a British avant-garde artist who invented vorticism would write a poetic review that made a number of suggestive connections between German expressionist and African woodcarving, in a manner that Einstein would never have envisaged himself, even though Negerplastik inspired many expressionist and Dada artists.59 Lewis’s review also anticipates the ideas of those enthusiasts of expressionist “wood culture” such as Valentiner, Wilhelm Niemeyer, and Max Sauerlandt, who were not opposed to the inspiration of non-European prototypes from Africa and Oceania, and who sought to explore the artistic associations between seemingly disparate cultures first initiated by Worringer’s published thesis Abstraction and Empathy (1908). It is clear that Lewis and Wadsworth both greatly admired expressionist woodcuts. Scott W. Klein has even compared Lewis’s striking Before Antwerp woodcut (1915) used for the “War Issue” cover of Blast II to Lyonel Feininger’s postwar woodcuts such as Villa am Strand IV (Villa on the Beach IV; 1918). However, while there is some expressionist quality to Lewis’s work, no doubt inspired by what he saw at the Twenty-One Gallery, as well as in the Sturm journal, the crystalline architectonic forms of Feininger’s postwar woodcuts relate more closely to the German Romantic-expressionist tradition than the machine aesthetic of Lewis’s vorticism.60 In general, neither Wadsworth’s nor Lewis’s woodcuts really possess the organic arboreal vitalism of expressionist printmaking. Lewis’s review was also inserted into the catalogue for this exhibition—which as mentioned above was simply entitled Modern German Art, the term “expressionist” being still too uncommon— staged some eight years after Crane’s exhibition of the same name was held at the Prince’s Galleries, Knightsbridge. This now very rare Twenty-One Gallery publication reproduces Moriz Melzer’s monotype Mother and Child (1913) on the cover (Figure 14.5), and Melzer was well represented in a display that also included Pechstein, Kirchner, Hanns Bolz, Walter Helbig, Wilhelm Morgner, Marc, and Kandinsky. In addition to Lewis’s review, the catalogue included an extract from an April 23, 1913, Times review for a Societé des Artistes Indépendants (Society of Independent Artists) exhibition in which Melzer’s work featured, including the aforementioned Mother and Child print. The reviewer stated: “The nude woman in Melzer’s picture is painted green. Yet the color is not in the least incredible—it justifies itself to the eyes, and it is only the mind which remembers that real women are not green.”61 This comment is revealing in showing how fauvist and expressionist art was highly radical for a British aesthetic sensibility at this time, even for a critic who expressed some sympathy with this non-naturalistic art. The critical reception of Modern German Art in the British press was extremely marginal. In a brief article in The Times entitled “Colored Woodcuts,” by an anonymous reviewer, the focus was on Melzer. While Carey and Griffiths have maintained that Modern German Art was a Sturm touring show initiated by the Berlin-based Walden, it is likely that the Melzer artworks for this exhibition were sent to London from his first solo exhibition at the Hans Goltz gallery (November–December 1913). The titles of the fourteen artworks seen in London coincided with the titles of the artworks presented in Munich with only minor changes because of the 287

Christian Weikop

Figure 14.5  C  atalogue cover for Modern German Art, exhibition held at the Twenty-One Gallery, London, February 25–March 28, 1914, with mounted illustration by Moriz Melzer on the cover. The Melzer work is Mutter und Kind (Mother and Child), 1913, colored monotype with repainting in oil on paper, on canvas, 90 × 65 cm. Current whereabouts unknown.  Victoria and Albert Museum, London

translation from German to English.62 That the Pechstein artworks shown in London all came from Walden is also not clear. In a diary entry for Monday, February 9, 1914, the progressive founder of the Twenty-One Gallery, Alice Mary Bernhard-Smith, noted that the “Pechstein artworks had arrived from Gurlitt-Berlin.” Wolfgang Gurlitt was Pechstein’s dealer with exclusive rights to his paintings and prints. Modern German Art therefore appears to have involved various lenders and associates.63 Melzer is under-discussed in Anglophone studies on expressionism, whereas in The Times review of 1914, artists whose names are more familiar today warrant no more than a nondescript sentence: “The gallery also contains some more interesting works by A. Bloch, H. M. Pechstein, and Kandinsky.”64 Conversely, the reviewer enthuses about Melzer’s woodcuts, comparing them to William Blake’s drawings in “ideas or emotions in forms of great abstract grandeur,” noting that his use of color had the “same expressive power as Blake’s.”65 The reviewer does nevertheless sound a note of caution by stating: “Sometimes his forms are a little too rudimentary and seem to be only half conceived.”66 The expressionist tendency to pare down to essentials of line and form, often combined with a use of garish color and distorted perspective, was mainly seen as technical ineptitude in the eyes of those few British critics who commented on this new German art in the prewar 288

Early Engagements

period. The only other art press response to the Twenty-One Gallery exhibition could be found buried in the pages of The Athenaeum, under “Other Exhibitions,” and here the reviewer also expressed reservations concerning the expressionist approach to artistic production, negatively characterizing it as “modern abruptness and impatience.”67 This statement is then tempered with the remark: “it is not to be denied that these qualities have their attractive side, though they are precisely the qualities which a generation ago were recognized as the hallmark of incapacity.”68 And further: “We can now see that this was a mistake, though we may not all go so far as to exalt impatience and clumsiness as essential virtues.”69 These reservations concerning the stylistic flourishes of expressionism anticipate the art criticism of Fry, who would later call into question the value of modern German art in an attempt to counter Read’s Germanophile enthusiasm for the expressionist movement. Fry referred to the expressionist generation as “German imitators of the French,” but “imitators” who appeared to be suffering from a “kind of artistic bad manners.”70 Expressionism was therefore deemed by Fry to be disharmonious, an affront to a British notion of good aesthetic taste.

Bloomsbury and the Marginalization of Expressionism In terms of the use of woodcut letterheads and invitation cards, as well as textile designs, the Bloomsbury Omega Workshops, established by Fry in 1913, actually bear some comparison to the creative craft culture of the Brücke and Blaue Reiter circles. Fry, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and other members of their Bloomsbury circle all produced original woodcuts. Bell’s woodcut illustration for Virginia Woolf’s Kew Gardens (1918) might owe something to Kandinsky’s Klänge album in terms of the arbitrary “relationship of the visual and the textual,”71 and Bell may well have seen Kandinsky’s woodcuts. Charlotte de Mille has argued that “there is a suggestive visual similarity: the scuffed blotches, diagonal emphasis, thick parallel lines.”72 One could equally argue that there is something vaguely Kirchner-esque about Bell’s dynamic promenade with two strolling women. There is something expressionistic, too, about several of Fry’s Twelve Original Woodcuts, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press in 1921, but as Furst points out in The Modern Woodcut, Fry was the “first apostle and missionary in England” of the “Parisian school of post-impressionists,”73 and Bloomsbury printmaking was closer stylistically to the fauve graphic art of Matisse, Derain, Dufy, and Vlaminck than German expressionism. Bell’s Charleston House in Firle Sussex, which carried forward the ethos of Omega into a more private domain, had a Gesamtkunstwerk quality that might arguably be compared to Brücke’s studio culture. But yet again, it is the highly decorative quality of the painted wooden objects and furniture—what Lewis criticized as dilettante daubing and Omega prettiness—that distinguishes this British Bloomsbury postimpressionism from the studio radicalism of the expressionist Brücke group. Lewis had, of course, defected from Omega, opening the rival Rebel Art Centre in March 1914, and in Blast I he appeared to situate himself against the Francocentrism of the Bloomsbury group by identifying vorticism with a Northern culture and expressionism. Clearly the First World War would seriously interrupt this nascent British reception of modern German art, when Germany became “a problematic cultural ally.”74 After 1918, expressionist graphics did have some impact on the editors of British little magazines, in publications such as The Apple (of Beauty and Discord), edited by Furst in the period 1920 to 1922, but this was still fairly marginal. The Apple might best be compared to the aestheticism of the long-running publication Studio or the Vienna Secession organ Ver Sacrum. The foreword of The Apple (2:1, 1921), with its emphasis on profiling art to be “looked at, bought, enjoyed and digested by ‘high and low’ without distinction,”75 bears 289

Christian Weikop

some resemblance to the William Morris-inspired sentiments expressed in the collective editorial of the first issue of Ver Sacrum: And for this we turn to you, without distinction of status or wealth. We do not recognize any distinction between “higher art” and “low art,” between art of the rich and art for the poor. Art is the property of everyone.76 Yet while Ver Sacrum (1898–1903) was published some twenty or so years before the advent of The Apple, it was far more visually progressive in its promotion of modernism, whereas The Apple had a rather “conservative and idealist stance.”77 The Apple did not showcase German expressionism, but represented the work of artists such as Ethelbert White, Robert Gibbings, Philip Hagreen, and Ludovic Rodo, who have not endured in the same way as their German counterparts. Nonetheless, there was clearly a moment in the early 1920s when there was a renewed British interest in the woodcut medium, something also demonstrated by the emergence of the revived little magazine Form, published from October 1921 by The Morland Press, with its first issue being a “Woodcut Number” with a cover by Rodo. The close prewar relationship of the British and German Arts and Crafts movements was ruptured in the late teens and twenties, a splintering of the artistic union of these two nations as envisaged by Crane in 1906. In 1919, a special number of The Studio was devoted to modern woodcuts by British and French artists. The fact that German artists, who had achieved so much more in this medium after Gauguin and Munch than their British or French counterparts, were bypassed at this moment reveals the marginalization of German artistic achievement. This marginalization probably had a negative impact on the evolution of the twentieth-century British woodcut, which aside from the work of Wadsworth was hardly avant-garde and in many respects rather insular. Albert Charles Sewter (1912–1983), a highly progressive curator and critic who from the 1930s onward helped advance the promotion of modern German art, ruminated on the “backwater” status of British printmaking: It could hardly be claimed, I think, that the production of modern British woodengravers amounts to a major contribution to modern art. It cannot be compared in importance, for example, with the woodcuts of the German expressionists, including Barlach, Heckel, Nolde, Schmidt-Rottluff, Feininger and others.78 It would not be until the 1930s that Read would attempt to prepare the British public “more attuned to the Paris art world—for a shift of emphasis in critical standards.”79 His interest in German art and culture originated in the Germanophile Leeds Arts Club in the 1910s, an interest that escalated as a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum in the 1920s, where he established a number of professional contacts in Germany, including with expressionist art collectors such as Alfred Hess. Read was also a close friend of Max Sauerlandt, the director of the Hamburg Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, who tirelessly championed expressionism and excited Read’s interest in the movement. Following Worringer and others, Read developed his aesthetic theories in The Meaning of Art (1931) and Art Now (1933) when he was the Watson Gordon Professor of Fine Art at Edinburgh University. Art Now was dedicated to Sauerlandt, who was dismissed from his post in April 1933 by the National Socialists. Read was really the first British art critic to condemn National Socialist cultural policy, which between 1933 and 1937 developed the ideology that avant-garde art generally and expressionist art specifically were degenerate.80

290

Early Engagements

Through the high-circulation BBC Listener magazine, Read chastised the British art world, especially the Bloomsbury circle, for failing to acknowledge the significance of expressionism and particularly the work of the Brücke artists. He argued that “in England we have for many years been content to take all our ideas about contemporary art from Paris . . . it is a disgrace that none of their [Brücke] work is to be seen in London.”81 Read would be influential, and his attempt to disrupt the hegemony of French art in his promotion of an alternative Northern tradition had an impact on other curators and critics, including successive Germanophile curators at the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery from the 1930s onwards, notably A. C. Sewter, Trevor Thomas, Hans Hess (son of Alfred Hess), and Peter Tomory.82 Today, thanks to these important figures and later curators, Leicester has the most important collection of expressionist art in the United Kingdom. Some key Leicester exhibitions include Mid-European Art (1944; Figure 14.6), which was the first exhibition of German expressionist art in a public or civic space rather than a commercial gallery, The Expressionists exhibition (1953), as well as the SchmidtRottluff Exhibition: Graphic Works and Stone Carvings, also of 1953 (Figure 14.7), the latter being the first solo showing of any Brücke artist in the United Kingdom. This was drawn from the

Figure 14.6  C  atalogue cover for MidEuropean Art, exhibition held at the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery, February 5–27, 1944. Cover illustration: Lyonel Feininger, Street under a Bridge, 1920, woodcut, 16 × 14 cm, New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester.  DACS 2017

Figure 14.7  C  atalogue cover for Schmidt-Rottluff Exhibition: Graphic Works and Stone Carvings, exhibition held at the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery, September 1953. Cover features a photograph of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Steinrelief mit einem ruhenden weiblichen Akt (Reclining Female Figure), 1953, stone relief. Current whereabouts unknown.  DACS 2017

291

Christian Weikop

collection of the German-Jewish exile, Rosa Schapire, an early passive member of the Brücke group, who also published a catalogue raisonné of Schmidt-Rottluff’s graphic works in 1924, and who escaped Nazi Germany for England in 1939. In the small accompanying catalogue to the Schmidt-Rottluff exhibition, Tomory picked up on a thread of argument first developed by Read in the 1930s. It reveals the peripheral status of expressionism in this country right up until the 1950s, a status that has since considerably improved, but some might contest is still undervalued: This school [German expressionism] has received little or no attention in England, and its importance has been sadly underrated. Perhaps there are aspects of expressionism which are so redolent of disillusion and foreboding that the Englishman, with his incurable optimism views them with distaste, but there are others, notably lyricism, the romantic conception of landscape, the ecstatic quality of color and the humanistic idea of man’s interrelationship with nature; themes, with which our own contemporary artists have made us familiar.83

Notes 1 See Timothy O. Benson et al., eds., Expressionism in Germany and France: From Van Gogh to Kandinsky (Munich: Prestel, 2014), 47. 2 Frances Spalding, Roger Fry, Art and Life (London: Elek, 1980), 133. 3 Matisse quoted in Donald E. Gordon, “On the Origin of the Word Expressionism,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 29 (1966): 368. 4 Fry quoted in Spalding, Roger Fry, 133. 5 Matthew Potter, The Inspirational Genius of Germany: British Art and Germanism, 1850–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 222. 6 Ibid. 7 The exhibition is mentioned but not discussed in Marit Werenskiold, “Concepts of Expressionism in Scandinavia,” in Expressionism Reassessed, ed. Shulamith Behr et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 21. 8 “Modern French Pictures at Brighton,” The Times, July 11, 1910, 12. 9 For a helpful list of all Sturm-Galerie exhibitions, see “Ausstellungskataloge der Sturm-Galerie [Exhibition Catalogues of the Sturm Gallery], last accessed October 11, 2017, www.arthistoricum.net/ themen/portale/sturm/ausstellungskataloge. 10 “Manet and the Post-Impressionists,” The Athenaeum, November 12, 1910, 598. 11 See Rose-Carol Washton Long, “Brücke, German Expressionism and the Issue of Modernism,” in New Perspectives on Brücke Expressionism: Bridging History, ed. Christian Weikop (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 11–30. 12 For a chronology of key avant-garde exhibitions in Germany and France between 1883 and 1918, see list by Frauke Josenhans in Benson, Expressionism, 62–85. 13 Paul Reece, “Edith Buckley, Ada Nolde and Die Brücke: Bathing, Health and Art in Dresden 1906– 1911,” in German Expressionism in the United Kingdom and Ireland, ed. Brian Keith-Smith (Bristol: University of Bristol, 1986), 22–27. 14 Buckley’s interest in the Brücke, perhaps more accidental than by design, did not seem to develop much beyond her time in Dresden.The last sentence of Paul Reece’s article on Buckley and the Brücke reads: “Towards the end of her long life Edith Buckley put to the bonfire and gave to jumble sales her collection of Brücke prints, drawings and paintings by Nolde, Kirchner, and a ‘Still-life with Jug’ by Schmidt-Rottluff.” Ibid., 26. 15 Transactions of the National Association for the Advancement of Art and its Application to Industry (London, 1888), 216. 16 See Peter Lasko, “The Student Years of Die Brücke and their Teachers,” Art History 20:1 (1997): 61–99. 17 Henry van de Velde, “Die Linie,” Die Zukunft 10:49 (1902): 385–388. 18 Patrick Bridgwater, “Three English Poets in Expressionist Berlin,” German Life and Letters 45:4 (1992): 301–322.

292

Early Engagements 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

Brooke quoted in Bridgwater, ibid., 305. Ibid., 307. Ibid., 306.  Reiche quoted in ibid., 311. Ibid., 306. Rupert Brooke, Cambridge Magazine (November 23, 1912), 125–126 (November 30, 1912), 158–159, quoted in ibid., 311. Ibid. Arthur Clutton-Brock, “The Post-Impressionists,” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 18:94 (January 1911), 216. Brooke, Cambridge Magazine, quoted in Caroline Maclean, “Russian Aesthetics in Britain: Kandinsky, Sadleir, and Rhythm,” in Russia in Britain, 1880–1940: From Melodrama to Modernism, ed. Rebecca Beasley et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 153. Roger Fry, “The Allied Artists,” The Nation 13:18 (August 1913), 676. Frank Rutter, “Round the Galleries,” Sunday Times, May 24, 1914, 7. Paul Fechter, Der Expressionismus (Munich: R. Piper & Co.Verlag, 1914). Kandinsky to Sadleir, October 6, 1911, quoted in Adrian Glew, “Blue Spiritual Sounds: Kandinsky and the Sadlers, 1911–1916,” The Burlington Magazine, 139: 1134 (September 1997), 602. Brooke had known Sadleir at least since 1906, the year they embarked on a same-sex relationship. John Middleton Murry, “Art and Philosophy,” Rhythm: Art Music Literature Quarterly 1:1 (Summer 1911): 12. Michael T. H. Sadler, “After Gauguin,” Rhythm: Art Music Literature Quarterly 1:4 (Spring 1912): 23–29. Maclean, “Russian Aesthetics,” 155. See Potter, “Inspirational Genius,” 231–332. Frank Rutter, Art in My Time (London: Rich & Cowan, 1933), 137. Kandinsky to Sadleir, June 16, 1914, quoted in Glew, “Blue Spiritual Sounds,” 606. Sadler Sr. to Kandinsky, March 11, 1913, quoted in ibid., 603. fn 31. Fry, “The Allied Artists,” 677. Potter, Inspirational Genius, 219. Ibid. Rhythm: Art Music Literature Monthly 2:14 (March 1913): 435. Bridgwater, “Three English Poets,” 310. Frances Carey and Antony Griffiths, The Print in Germany, 1880–1933:The Age of Expressionism (London: British Museum, 1984), 22. Ibid., 7. J. J., “Studio Talk,” The Studio: An Illustrated Magazine of Fine and Applied Art 61: 253 (April 15, 1914): 237. Havelock Ellis, “Friedrich Nietzsche: I,” The Savoy 2 (April 1896): 79–94; “Friedrich Nietzsche: II,” The Savoy 3 (July 1896): 68–81; “Friedrich Nietzsche: III,” The Savoy 4 (August 1896): 57–63. See Tom Steele, Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club 1893–1923 (Mitcham: Orage Press, 2009) and Michael Paraskos, English Expressionism (Leeds: University of Leeds, unpublished PhD, 1997). Potter, Inspirational Genius, 250. Wyndham Lewis, “Note (on some German Woodcuts at the Twenty-One Gallery),” Blast I (June 1914): 136. Herbert Furst, The Modern Woodcut (London: John Lane, 1924), 180. Ibid., 197. Jonathan Black, “Constructing a Chinese-Puzzle Universe: Industry, National Identity, and Edward Wadsworth’s Vorticist Woodcuts of West Yorkshire, 1914–1916,” in Vorticism: New Perspectives, ed. Mark Antliff and Scott W. Klein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 94. Richard Cork, Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), 215. Potter, Inspirational Genius, 251. Edward Wadsworth, “‘Inner Necessity’: Review of Kandinsky’s Book,” Blast I: 119–125. Wyndham Lewis, “Orchestra of Media,” Blast I: 142. Wyndham Lewis, “A Review of Contemporary Art,” Blast II (War Number July 1915): 40. For further discussion on Einstein and expressionism see Charles W. Haxthausen, “Carl Einstein and Expressionism: The Case of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,” in The Expressionist Turn in Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Kimberly A. Smith (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 273–304; and Christian Weikop,

293

Christian Weikop

60 61 62

63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

83

“Encounters with the Image of the Black: The German and French Avant-Garde (1905–1920),” in The Image of the Black in Western Art,Vol.V:The Twentieth Century, ed. David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 99–134. See Scott W. Klein, “How German Is It: Vorticism, Nationalism, and the Paradox of Aesthetic SelfDefinition,” in Vorticism: New Perspectives, ed. Mark Antliff and Scott W. Klein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 68–86. Modern German Art, catalogue of an exhibition held at the Twenty-One Gallery, London, [February 25–March 18, 1914], unpaged. “Moritz Melzer: Gemälde, Zeichnungen, Holzschnitte (= XIII. Kollektiv-Ausstellung Neue Kunst)” [Moritz Melzer: Paintings, Drawings, Woodcuts (= XIII. Collective Exhibition New Art)], Hans Goltz, München November 16–December 1, 1913. See Moritz Melzer: Streben nach reiner Kunst:Werke von 1907 bis 1927 [Moritz Melzer: Striving Towards Pure Art], ed. Gerhard Leistner] (Regensburg: Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie, 2007). I am indebted to Leistner for his suggestion (personal correspondence) that the London artworks came from Goltz. See Acc 1751: Mrs A. M. Bernhard-Smith, The Twenty-One Gallery, Adelphi: diaries, correspondence, press cuttings, biographical notes etc. City of Westminster Archives Centre, London. “Coloured Woodcuts,” The Times (London, England), March 11, 1914, 11. Ibid. Ibid. “Other Exhibitions,” The Athenaeum, March 21, 1914, 417. Ibid. Ibid. Roger Fry,“Art Now: An Introduction to the Theory of Modern Painting and Sculpture,” The Burlington Magazine 64: 374 (May 1934): 242. Herbert Read was one of the few British champions of modern German art at the time. Charlotte de Mille, “‘Turning the Earth Above a Buried Memory’: Dismembering and Remembering Kandinsky,” in Music and Modernism, ed. Charlotte de Mille (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2011), 191. Ibid. Furst, Modern Woodcut, 182. Andrzej Gąsiorek, “The Magazine as Weapon: BLAST (1914–1915),” in Modernist Magazines: A Critical and Cultural History, Vol. 1, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 308. [Herbert Furst] quoted in Rebecca Beasley, “Literature and the Visual Arts, Art and Letters (1917–20) and The Apple (1920–1922),” in ibid. “Ver Sacrum Editorial, ‘Why Are We Publishing a Journal?’,” Ver Sacrum 1(1) (1898), translated in Art in Theory 1815–1900, ed. Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger (New York: Wiley, 1998), 919. Beasley, “Literature and the Visual Arts,” 499. A. C. Sewter, “Introduction,” in Modern British Woodcuts & Wood-Engravings in the Collection of the Whitworth Art Gallery (Manchester: Whitworth Art Gallery, 1962), 9. Shulamith Behr and Marian Malet, eds., Arts in Exile in Britain 1933–1945: Politics and Cultural Identity (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 14. For a discussion on the importance of Herbert Read and Hans Hess see Christian Weikop, “The British Reception of Brücke and German Expressionism,” in Weikop, Bridging History, 237–276. Herbert Read, “Modern German Painting,” Listener (October 29, 1930): 708. For a discussion concerning the importance of these curators in the British reception of expressionism see Christian Weikop, “The Role of the Leicester Collection in Introducing British Audiences to German Expressionism,” Leicester’s German Expressionist Collection, Leicester Museums Website, last accessed October 11, 2017, http://germanexpressionismleicester.org/leicesters-collection/academic-reports/ academic-reports-on-the-collection/report-4-uk-audience-role. Peter Tomory, “Introduction,” in Schmidt-Rottluff Exhibition: Graphic Works and Stone Carvings (Leicester: Leicester Museums and Art Gallery, 1953), unpaged.

294

15 EXPRESSIONISM IN THE NETHERLANDS Geurt Imanse and Gregor Langfeld

Some fifteen years after Vincent van Gogh’s death (1853–1890), a new generation of artists found inspiration in the expressive brushstrokes, vivid color contrasts, and emotional charge in his paintings. Initially, it was not his compatriots who most strongly experienced the stylistic impact of his work, but rather French fauves and German expressionists, who made a radical break with the nineteenth-century tradition of faithfully rendering reality. This formed the beginning of an entirely new approach to art which Dutch artists then in turn applied to their own work. Thus, Van Gogh’s pictorial influence on his own countrymen tended to manifest itself via largely circuitous routes. Paris continued to exert a strong attraction on Dutch artists until after the Second World War. Furthermore, Dutch modernism is often reduced to Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) and De Stijl. However, there was considerable artistic interaction with Germany as well and the interest in German expressionism was strong. This chapter explores the varying aspects of its reception in the Netherlands. It examines its influence on Dutch artists from the early 1910s, discusses the exhibitions held, considers how private and public collections of expressionist art were assembled, and concludes with the sudden canonization of expressionism shortly after the end of the Second World War.

A Rapid Introduction Dutch soil had already been somewhat prepared for one of the most important characteristics of expressionist painting—its bright and strident colors—by the neoimpressionist and fauvist experiments of the artists Jan Toorop (1858–1928), Kees van Dongen (1877–1968), Jan Sluijters (1881–1957), Leo Gestel (1881–1941), Piet Mondrian, and Jacoba van Heemskerck (1876–1923) during the Luminist period in the Netherlands, 1906–1911.1 However, it was the presentation of work by the Italian futurist painters Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini, and Luigi Russolo at the Biesing Gallery in The Hague in early August 1912 that threw a spotlight on German expressionism. Reviews in various daily and weekly publications were mostly negative in their assessment of the exhibition, although there were some positive elements. The Amsterdam weekly journal De Kunst (Art) paid a relatively large amount of attention to the show.2 Aside from the fact that German gallery owner and promoter of the European avant-garde Herwarth Walden (1878–1941) personally brought the event to both The Hague 295

Geurt Imanse and Gregor Langfeld

and Amsterdam, the exhibition is significant because it simultaneously introduced examples of German expressionist art and literature into the Netherlands. In his first discussion of the exhibition, the critic N. H. Wolf wrote: But above all, it appears from Der Sturm that a great number of young Germans have already been taken in by the movement, painters as well as poets and novelists. Oskar Kokoschka is the foreman of the painters; Alfred Döblin and the well-known Else Lasker-Schüler (writer of Die Wupper, produced by Max Reinhardt) are the leaders of the writing Futurists.3 Several weeks later, De Kunst translated and printed entire passages of texts from Der Sturm, the expressionist magazine founded by Walden, as “contemporary reading and by Futurist writers at that,” such as “Die Bilder der Futuristen” (The Works of the Futurists) by Alfred Döblin, with accompanying woodcuts and drawings by Erich Heckel (1883–1970), Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938), Max Pechstein (1881–1955), Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980), and Lasker-Schüler (1869–1945), whom Wolf described as “all members of the Neue Sezession in Berlin.”4 The developing interest in the work of German expressionist painters became manifest at the second exhibition held by the Moderne Kunstkring, a society of artists in Amsterdam, in the autumn of 1912, where five landscapes and two portraits by a member of the Brücke group, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884–1976), were displayed in the Netherlands for the first time. The response to this initial exposure to work by a pure representative of German expressionism was not positive, however, as N. H. Wolf’s criticism of the exhibition demonstrates: he has no place in this exhibition, is a German, and paints like a child, with harsh, false colors, deliberately. He cannot be taken seriously—cannot for that matter be accommodated alongside any of the others. We take note of his work and shall continue to recall it as something hyper-overdone.5 More expressionist paintings were displayed in the Netherlands when a retrospective of the work of Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) was held at the Oldenzeel Gallery in Rotterdam at the end of 1912. The term expressionism appeared for the first time in reviews: “After the Futurists, who exhibited first in The Hague, and the cubists, who exhibited first in Amsterdam, Rotterdam now has a first in another manifestation of modern painting: Kandinsky, forerunner of the German expressionists.”6 Once again, it was Walden who brought the work to the Netherlands. As reports on futurists’ output tended to be rather sensational in character, we make particular mention of the serious tone taken in reviews discussing Kandinsky’s paintings. Although reviewers expressed some doubts about Kandinsky’s work, particularly in relation to his abstract improvisations and compositions, they all appear to have been more or less convinced that their subject was a “serious” artist.7 So the retrospective, comprising some seventy paintings by Kandinsky from the period 1900–1912, was generally approved and recommended, albeit with emphasis on his early works. A number of German, Russian, and French artists were invited to the third exhibition the Moderne Kunstkring organized in Amsterdam, in November 1913; the two-month exhibition featured a wide-ranging selection of works by painters such as Kandinsky, Franz Marc (1880–1916), Petr Konchalovsky, Ilya Mashkov, and Joseph Makovsky. De Kunst celebrated the international character of this exhibition by publishing an almost entirely French edition, in

296

Expressionism in the Netherlands

which a French-speaking critic discussed the work in a review that devoted just a few lines to the Germans and Russians. Paintings by Kandinsky, Konchalovsky, and Mashkov nevertheless sold during the exhibition.8 More of Kandinsky’s works were displayed at the third exhibition of De Onafhankelijken, a society of artists in Amsterdam, in May and June 1914.9

Kandinsky as a Source of Inspiration In the wake of these exhibitions, the influence of German expressionism became evident in the work of a number of Dutch artists. One of these was Jacoba van Heemskerck, whose paintings gradually underwent a change over the course of 1914. Having painted cubist pictures of trees and woods that displayed some degree of affiliation with Mondrian’s work during this period and had made a great impression at the Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon (First German Autumn Salon) in Berlin in 1913, she now began to produce paintings in which lines and contours were emphasized rather than interrupted—a clear departure from the cubist idiom. Walden and Van Heemskerck developed a close relationship, and Van Heemskerck, who felt strongly attracted to the views of the Blaue Reiter, consciously distanced herself from her Dutch colleagues. Her painting Compositie (Composition, 1914, Plate 19) clearly displays Kandinsky’s influence.10 Albert August Plasschaert (1866–1941) submitted two Glasgemälde (stained-glass works) to the Herbstsalon, titled Eli Eli Lama Sabachtani (1913) and De ruischende winden leven (The Rustling Winds Live, 1913), respectively. The first of these, Christ on the cross, is related to the Brücke’s version of expressionism in its visual idiom and use of line. Another work by Plasschaert from 1913, a preliminary stained-glass study, Opus 33. Klanken van de zee (Opus 33: Sounds of the Sea), displays an expressive, abstract vision of sound or music, a phenomenon close to Kandinsky’s oeuvre in this period.11 A painting by Erich Wichman from 1912, Verbeelding van een bewogen zee (Representation of a Tempestuous Sea, Figure 15.1), can be similarly characterized and viewed as an abstract image, in that the artist endeavored to capture the dynamic motion and possibly also the sound of this natural phenomenon by using light colors with several dark accents. Kandinsky’s book, Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art), published in 1912, soon became known in the Netherlands. Erich Wichman (1890–1929), like Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) as we shall see, thoroughly analyzed Kandinsky’s works and texts, and published his thoughts about them. A letter written by Kandinsky to Wichman in 1914 even mentions a finished translation of the book by Martha van Vloten, wife of the well-known psychiatrist and writer Frederik van Eeden.12 Reference to this book reveals that Wichman certainly made use of elements from Kandinsky’s color theory in Verbeelding van een bewogen zee, in which his abstract geometric forms partly followed the Russian artist’s compositional recommendations, but that he barely adopted the style of Kandinsky’s visual idiom.13 Elements which might have been inspired by Kandinsky’s work can also be identified in the early output of Charley Toorop (1891–1955), such as the color experiments in the background of her painting Vuurtoren in avond. Oostvoorne (Lighthouse at Night. Oostvoorne, 1915).14 A study of Theo van Doesburg’s critical writings and early paintings clearly reveals that his output also resonates with exhibitions of expressionist art, especially with works by Kandinsky. In his critical pieces from 1914 and 1915 for Eenheid (Unity), the weekly journal published in The Hague, he gradually emphasizes spiritualized art and representations of the metaphysical rather than of nature. During the course of 1915, it becomes evident that Van Doesburg had particularly immersed himself in Kandinsky’s book, Über das Geistige in der Kunst. In his article

297

Geurt Imanse and Gregor Langfeld

Figure 15.1  Erich Wichman, Verbeelding van een bewogen zee (Represention of a Tempestuous Sea), 1912, oil on canvas, 120 × 100 cm, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

“Over kunst- en natuurkritiek” (On Criticism of Art and Nature), Van Doesburg demands of the critic “that he be thoroughly aware of the spirit of his time, from which the work of art grows.”15 On artists, he observes: “In my view the young include any greybeard who, being himself the essence of Art, brings forth the soul of his time in colors and forms, sounds or words.”16 He calls all artists who fail to do this “backward obdurate dilettantes.”17 Kandinsky begins his book with the statement: “Every work of art is the child of its age . . . It follows that each period of culture produces an art of its own.”18 Van Doesburg’s emphasis on the contemporary character of the true artist is therefore closely related to Kandinsky’s ideas. Discussing the work of Mondrian at the Dutch artist’s group exhibition with Gestel, Sluijters, Lodewijk Schelfhout (1881–1943), and Henri Le Fauconnier (1881–1946), held in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam from October to November 1915, Van Doesburg continually returns to the “spirituality” of Mondrian’s Compositie nr. 10 (Composition No. 10, 1915).19 Van Doesburg’s involvement with Kandinsky’s work and theories also becomes evident in his paintings from the 1914–1916 period. Examples of his “emotion assuming a visible form in color and line”20 are Meisje met Ranonkels (Girl with Ranunculus, 1914), Straatmuziek I and II (Street Music I and II, 1915), Kinderlachje (Child’s Laugh, c. 1915; Figure 15.2) and Heroïsche beweging (Heroic Movement, 1916).21 In these works, he appears to have adopted Kandinsky’s fascination with theosophy as well as a related language of form, particularly evident in the first four works. Sixten Ringbom has used illustrations from the book Thought Forms, by the theosophists Annie

298

Expressionism in the Netherlands

Besant and C. W. Leadbeater, to demonstrate a significant correlation between Kandinsky’s thinking and language of form and that of theosophy.22 A painting by Van Doesburg such as Kinderlachje can only be viewed in this context—that is, as a visual representation of the sound of a child’s laugh. The sound/music-color/form relationship that Besant and Leadbeater identified and illustrated plays a significant role in Kandinsky’s oeuvre and apparently engaged Van Doesburg as well. Van Doesburg’s interest in Kandinsky’s work was further stimulated by his exposure to the work and person of the Utrecht painter Janus de Winter (1882–1951). De Winter was a medium and had visions which he endeavored to paint. He had developed his own ideas on such visions and found support for them in theosophy.23 De Winter also owned a copy of Über das Geistige in der Kunst.24 His theories on color are affiliated with those of Kandinsky, Besant, and Leadbeater. De Winter’s paintings of thought forms and auras and his color representations of music deeply impressed Van Doesburg. In 1915, for example, Van Doesburg appealed for financial support for De Winter in the weekly journal Eenheid. He began this appeal with two quotes from Kandinsky’s Über das Geistige in der Kunst, and then described De Winter as “[a]n important personality, who has grown from socialism into blossoming in Theosophy and is now displaying his inner observations in colors and forms with an unprecedented fecundity.”25

Figure 15.2  T  heo van Doesburg, Kinderlachje (Child’s Laugh), c. 1915, pastel on black paper, 23 × 30 cm, private collection

299

Geurt Imanse and Gregor Langfeld

Figure 15.3  Janus de Winter, Muzikale verbeelding: Richard Wagner (Musical Fantasy: Richard Wagner), c. 1916, gouache on cardboard, 67 × 86 cm, Centraal Museum, Utrecht

Another objective of Van Doesburg’s appeal was to organize an exhibition of De Winter’s work, eventually held in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in July 1916, thanks in part to the efforts of well-known figures such as Frederick van Eeden and journalist and critic Henri Borel. In his introduction to the exhibition catalogue, Van Eeden makes a connection between De Winter’s work and Kandinsky’s oeuvre,26 and a number of De Winter’s abstract pieces, for example Muzikale verbeelding: Richard Wagner (Musical Fantasy: Richard Wagner, 1916; Figure 15.3), do bear a superficial resemblance to works by Kandinsky.27 It is reasonable to assume that De Winter saw the Kandinsky exhibition held in Utrecht in late 1912 or early 1913. Finally, there is Louis Saalborn (1891–1957), an artist who came to prominence in 1915 with abstract expressionist work in which Kandinsky’s influence resonates. At the fifth exhibition organized by De Onafhankelijken, in May and June 1915 in Amsterdam, Saalborn had displayed two drawings representing sound, titled Scherzo (b-dur) (Scherzo [B Major], 1915) and Leeuwerikzang (Lark Song, 1915; Figure 15.4).28 Together with several other works with musical titles from this period, they form an exceptional group in the artist’s oeuvre, for Saalborn never again achieved this degree of abstract expressive representation of synaesthesia. His affiliation with Kandinsky’s work is conspicuous in these drawings, particularly in terms of the manner in which the lines erratically run across the entire picture plane. It has already been suggested elsewhere why Saalborn chose red as the predominant color in Scherzo (b-dur) and yellow for Leeuwerikzang.29 300

Expressionism in the Netherlands

Figure 15.4  Louis Saalborn, Leeuwerikzang (Lark Song), 1915, charcoal, pastel, and watercolor on paper, 47.4 × 29.5 cm, private collection

The First Collectors Several further works by German artists were exhibited in the Netherlands in 1914,30 before the First World War caused exhibition activities to stagnate. Walden, however, continued to organize exhibitions during the war years. One example is the Zweite Sturmausstellung (Second Sturm Exhibition), held at the D’Audretsch Gallery in The Hague in March and April 1916. The exhibition was publicized in the March edition of Der Sturm and Walden returned to The Hague to open the show.31 Among the artists mentioned in the catalogue are Jacoba van Heemskerck, Marc, Paul Klee, Heinrich Campendonk, Kokoschka, Georg Muche, Max Ernst, Kandinsky, Otakar Kubin, Carl Mense, Gabriele Münter, Nell Walden, Vincenc Benes, Emil Filla, Isaac Grünewald, and Sigrid Hjertén-Grünewald.32 Kandinsky and Marc received the greatest attention and were designated the most important artists; the others were simply mentioned by name and dismissed as not pertinent to a discussion of “pure modern style.”33 The Zweite Sturmausstellung prompts a brief examination of a number of private collections in the Netherlands containing works by expressionist artists, as several pieces were purchased at this show. The best known of these are Kandinsky’s Lyrisches (Lyrical, 1911) and Marc’s Das Schaf (The Sheep, 1914), both bought by Jacoba van Heemskerck’s friend Marie Tak van Poortvliet. In his overview of modern art published in 1921, F. M. Huebner provides an impression of the early collections of expressionist art in the Netherlands.34 The most important of these, 301

Geurt Imanse and Gregor Langfeld

apart from the one assembled by Marie Tak van Poortvliet, who had already started to acquire “modern” art in the early 1910s, and to whom Huebner dedicated his book, were owned by Willem Beffie in Amsterdam and by Hendricus van Assendelft in Gouda. A letter from Franz Marc to Paul Klee, written in August 1913, reveals that Beffie trav­ eled to Germany in person and visited a number of artists in order to buy works from them: “I have someone very interested in your drawings, a Mr. W. Beffie from Amsterdam, who stopped by a couple days before my departure and spent 2600! What do you think of that?”35 These included the paintings that Huebner had cited: Das arme Land Tirol (The Unfortunate Land of Tyrol, 1913), Das lange gelbe Pferd (The Long Yellow Horse, 1913), and Bos Orbis Mundi, Die Weltenkuh (The World-cow, 1913). Huebner also mentions works by artists such as Kandinsky, Klee, Kubin, Mashkov, Alexei Jawlensky (1864–1941), Marianne Werefkin, and Marc Chagall.36 Van Assendelft corresponded with Kandinsky, probably in response to the exhibition of Kandinsky’s work held at the Oldenzeel Gallery in Rotterdam in 1912.37 He bought two pieces from the artist, including Improvisation 33 (Orient 1) from 1913, as well as works by Marc. Other collectors in this early period also owned works by expressionists: P. A. Regnault (Laren) acquired graphic works by Marc; Conrad Kikkert possessed a canvas by Jawlensky; Arthur Petronio, the music critic for De Kunst and later editor-in-chief of La Revue du Feu (The Fire Review), had a painting by Kandinsky; and P. M. Broekmans, who would later become an art dealer, owned works by Kandinsky and Marc.38

De Ploeg: Kirchner as a Source of Inspiration The above chiefly discusses the effect of Kandinsky’s work on Dutch painting. However, the output of another group of Dutch artists displays the influence of the Brücke group’s form of expressionism at its purest. Founded in Groningen in 1918, the artists’ society known as De Ploeg (The Plow) came into contact with expressionism through very different channels.39 Like other artists of the period, the group’s painters had been feverishly seeking new paths. Their search acquired a definitive direction in 1921 when Jan Wiegers (1893–1959), a founding member of De Ploeg, returned to Groningen from a trip he had taken to Davos for his health in 1920. While in Davos, he had become acquainted with Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and been deeply impressed by his work. We may assume that Wiegers was already familiar with Kirchner’s early output, for he had been employed in Germany as a church sculptor and restorer around 1911, and in 1912, he had seen the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne, which included work by Brücke artists. When Wiegers began to imitate Kirchner’s working methods, his enthusiasm infected the other members of De Ploeg, Hendrik Werkman (1882–1945), Johan Dijkstra (1896–1978), Jan Altink (1885–1971), George Martens (1894–1979), and Jan Jordens (1883–1972). Inspired in part by Kirchner, they began to practice a number of graphic techniques, in particular etching and woodcutting, developing a high degree of virtuosity in these media and giving a new boost to the graphic arts in the Netherlands.40 A specific theme often found in their paintings—the numerous portraits they produced of each other, both inside and outside the studio—explicitly recalls work by Brücke artists (Figure 15.5).41 Nevertheless, the inner temperament of De Ploeg’s artists set them apart from the Brücke and German expressionism in general for the Groningen group lacked a specific emotional factor: the fierce tension that had initially been the primary force driving the Germans to paint. The influence of German expressionism on Dutch painting is clear, with Kandinsky in particular having played a significant role in this regard. Expressionist elements in later Dutch 302

Expressionism in the Netherlands

Figure 15.5  Jan Wiegers, H.N. Werkman, 1922, wax paint on canvas, 70 × 56 cm, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

paintings from the 1920s and 1930s generally have less in common with expressionism in its original form. The Bergen School, for example, simply lacks the vehemence of the Germans and seems more related to Constant Permeke’s (1886–1952) Flemish form of expressionism. The same also applies to artists such as Hendrik Chabot (1894–1949). In several paintings from the 1920s, among them De brief (The Letter, 1923) and De varkensdoder (The Pig Killer, 1925–1926; Figure 15.6), however, Herman Kruyder (1881–1935) achieves a degree of emotional intensity similar to that found in the work of German expressionists.42

Exhibitions and Art Criticism after the First World War The artists’ society De Onafhankelijken held the first major exhibition of German art in the Netherlands after the First World War at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in February and March 1921. The president of the society, Maurits de Groot, and secretary, H. F. Boot, had traveled to Berlin to invite twenty artists to contribute to the exhibition, which displayed eightythree of their works.43 The catalogue stated that the exhibition’s intention was to clarify what the majority of modern young artists, primarily members of the Novembergruppe (November Group), stood for in art.44 There was great public interest in this exhibition and the catalogues sold out quickly. The Dutch press described the German artists as young revolutionaries with long, multi-colored hair 303

Geurt Imanse and Gregor Langfeld

Figure 15.6  H  erman Kruyder, De varkensdoder (The Pig Killer), 1925–1926, oil on canvas, 56 × 68.50 cm, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. Photo: Peter Cox

and worn, paint-spattered velvet jackets, who had come together as a group during the Berlin riots.45 Their work was dismissed as gruesome, horrific, ugly, and coarse. Critics talked about the tastelessness, negation, decadence, and dilettantism of sick and degenerate art. Cornelis Veth designated Pechstein as the most adept of the painters but wrote in the same review of “deliberately wretched” horrors, deliberate ugliness, “misdrawings,” harsh colors, lack of taste, and perverse barbarity; in his opinion, Pechstein’s imitation of Negro art gave rise to nothing but aversion in the Netherlands.46 Kasper Niehaus described Pechstein’s polychrome wood sculptures inspired by African art as an invitation “to a barbaric primitivism that is not in our nature”47 (Figure 15.7). The occasional foreign artist caught a reviewer’s fancy on account of his or her “gentleness” and “mildness,” such as Swiss painter Wilhelm Schmid, who was described as “committed” and “moderate.”48 Abstract sculptors Oswald Herzog (1881–1939?) and Rudolf Belling (1886–1972) were also accorded positive assessments, although critics found the lack of any explanation accompanying works such as Belling’s Dreiklang (Triad, 1919; Figure 15.8) an issue. In 1922, a major retrospective of German art, Duitse beeldende kunst van de laatste 50 jaar (German Art from the Past 50 Years), with works by fifty-seven artists, was held in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague (with minor variations in the array of pieces on display in each venue).49 Expressionist artists were well represented, and reviewers praised the work of artists such as Ernst Barlach (1870–1938) and Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945), but mostly failed to appreciate the expressionists’ non-naturalistic representations of reality.50 304

Expressionism in the Netherlands

Figure 15.7  Max Pechstein, Mond (Moon), 1919, wood, h 105 cm, destroyed.  c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2018

The anonymous reviewer for the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant (New Rotterdam Daily), for example, typically deplored their style of painting as being divorced from nature, with forms and images that satisfied only their inner feelings.51 In Kirchner’s Zirkusreiter (Circus Rider, 1914), he saw “posturing and inadequacy,” although he valued the artist’s “lovely palette.” He found nothing to enjoy in Frau mit Katze und Papagei (Woman with Cat and Parrot, 1906) by Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) or in Pechstein’s Beerensammlerinnen (Berry Pickers, 1920), although he appreciated the latter’s sketch of a nude laid out in just a few lines. The same reviewer also wrote positive comments about Lyonel Feininger (1871–1956), Emil Nolde (1867–1956), and Marc. Cornelis Veth described Pechstein as very talented but full of fake ingenuity, and Nolde as original but cheap in his effects.52 He thought that expressionism was over in the Netherlands and no longer relevant (“vieux jeu” and “überwunden”). This was a widely shared opinion during this period, not only in the Netherlands but also in Germany, where an anti-expressionist mood arose in the first half of the 1920s, and the mantra of “expressionism is dead” was increasingly heard.53 An exception among the critics was J. H. de Bois, who continued to present expressionist art at his Haarlem gallery well into the 1920s. In his reviews, he endeavored to foster understanding for the work of Feininger, Macke, and Nolde, and for the non-naturalistic colors of Marc’s Die gelbe Kuh (The Yellow Cow, 1911). Modersohn-Becker was the artist whose work De Bois would have most liked to have seen comprehensively exhibited just once in the Netherlands, but he was well aware that she would not yet have been acceptable to Dutch artists.54 305

Geurt Imanse and Gregor Langfeld

Figure 15.8  Exhibition De Onafhankelijken, 16e jury-vrije tentoonstelling in het Stedelijk Museum te Amsterdam (16th Juryless Exhibition by The Independents at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam), 1921. In the foreground: Rudolf Belling, Dreiklang (Triad), 1919.  c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2018

Kandinsky’s work was prominently represented, alongside several drawings by George Grosz (1893–1959), at an exhibition held in the Stedelijk Museum in May and June 1927 to commemorate De Onafhankelijken’s fifteenth anniversary. Kandinsky’s sixtieth birthday had already been marked the previous year with an exhibition of his works at the Arnold Gallery in Dresden, which subsequently transferred to the Neumann-Nierendorf Gallery in Berlin.55 The 1927 exhibition was the first time his new works from the 1922–1925 period, produced after his stay in Russia, were displayed in the Netherlands. It was hung in the “gallery of honor” at the Stedelijk Museum and then moved to the premises of the Pulchri Studio society of artists in The Hague in June and July. Kandinsky’s new style met with more positive reviews in the press than works by Mondrian or other De Stijl artists with whom Kandinsky was compared.56 Mondrian’s work received scant recognition in Dutch art criticism during the interwar period. Critics may have underlined Kandinsky’s importance in the development of abstract art, but his new titles, including Gelbe Spitze (Yellow Point) and Gegenklänge (Contrasting Sounds), were met with incomprehension by a number of them, who preferred his earlier, unspecific designations such as Impression, Improvisation, and Composition. Critics furthermore revealed a preference for artists with a realistic style, who were praised specifically for their craftsmanship and sense of reality. Exhibitions held in subsequent years confirm the growing interest in realism. This preference clearly emerged in 1929, when De Onafhankelijken introduced the German art movement 306

Expressionism in the Netherlands

known as Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) into the Netherlands;57 however, expressionist art continued to be displayed alongside exhibitions of work with more realistic tendencies. Unlike artists’ societies, museums organized few exhibitions of international modern art, and therefore of expressionist art, in the period up to National Socialism. One exception was Oostenrijksche schilderijen en Kunstnijverheid 1900–1927 (Austrian Paintings and Applied Art 1900–1927), an exhibition held in the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague in 1927.58 The Gemeentemuseum was an early promotor of expressionism in the Netherlands. Around 1919, the museum began to purchase graphic works, drawings, and later paintings by Egon Schiele (1890–1918), Kandinsky, Heinrich Campendonk (1889–1957), and Van Heemskerck, although works by the first two were atypical of expressionism on account of their realistic rendering. The same is also true of a sculpture the museum had acquired by Wilhelm Lehmbruck, which still integrated Aristide Maillol’s classical influence. The Gemeentemuseum further displayed lent works from Eduard Baron von der Heydt and artist Jos H. Gosschalk, including paintings by Heckel, Jawlensky, and Modersohn-Becker, and a bronze by Herzog.59 Another museum that presented expressionist art during this period was Museum Boijmans in Rotterdam. From 1932 on, the museum displayed many works by Van Heemskerck, alongside paintings by Feininger, Kandinsky, and Marc on loan from Tak van Poortvliet’s collection, which was bequeathed to Boijmans in 1936.

The National Socialist Period During the 1930s, a clear politicization of art occurred. This became evident as early as 1930 at the Socialistische Kunst, Heden (Socialist Art, Today) exhibition, organized by the Socialistische Kunstenaarskring and held in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, to which forty-seven German artists contributed.60 During this same period, the Stedelijk Museum also began to organize more of its own exhibitions of international modern art. One of these was Abstracte Kunst (Abstract Art, 1938), at which many artists who had fled Nazi Germany were represented, including Kandinsky and Otto Freundlich (1878–1943). A year earlier, the Nazis had placed a picture of the latter’s sculpture Der Neue Mensch (The New Man, 1912) on the cover of the guide to their exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art). The general response of the Dutch press in 1938 was to decry the exhibition. The exhibition catalogue and reviewers failed to mention contemporary German cultural politics or simply played down the issue.61 The German art historian and critic F. M. Huebner, resident in the Netherlands, wrote in response to reviews of the exhibition that the public was determinedly forming a front opposed to abstract art, a phenomenon which would not have been possible a few years earlier.62 A former advocate of expressionism, Huebner himself had now come around to National Socialism in many areas of his life, including art. After the exhibition ended, its curator, Willem Sandberg, discussed with Kandinsky whether it would be feasible to hold a solo exhibition of his work in Amsterdam in the autumn of 1938.63 This gave Kandinsky the idea of leaving a large part of his work in the Netherlands for some time, as he suspected that a war in which France might be involved was a distinct possibility; in the event of such a conflict, he would have little prospect of protecting his art in France. Convinced that the Netherlands would be spared from war, Kandinsky wanted to send some forty to fifty paintings to the Stedelijk Museum immediately, fearing that these would otherwise be lost. Ultimately, however, plans for a Kandinsky exhibition at the Stedelijk came to nothing and the artist’s paintings were not transferred to the Netherlands. Nevertheless, Stedelijk Museum director David Röell did buy one of Kandinsky’s characteristic paintings, Bild mit Häusern (Painting with Houses, 1909); this was during the German occupation, 307

Geurt Imanse and Gregor Langfeld

at an auction on October 9, 1940, for the sum of only 176 guilders (including commission). This may not have been a voluntary sale,64 as the work had been owned by a Jewish lady, Hedwig Lewenstein-Weijermann, who had also loaned Kandinsky’s painting Das bunte Leben (Colorful Life, 1907) to the Stedelijk in 1933. The German-born Dutch artist Paul Citroen had acquired Das bunte Leben around 1919 from Der Sturm in Berlin, for whom he had then been working. Over time, he was responsible for various expressionist works finding their way into Dutch museums. During the Nazi period, many collections of art owned by Jewish refugees, including works of expressionist art, were entrusted to Dutch museums for safekeeping. The Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, for example, took charge of paintings by Kokoschka and Nolde from the collection of Franz Kochmann, an exile from Dresden. There were more works of expressionist art owned by refugees in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. One such refugee was the Jewish entrepreneur and art collector Wilhelm Landmann, who had fled to the Netherlands with his family from Mannheim. In July 1939, he gave his collection of art to the Stedelijk Museum for safekeeping. This included paintings by Heckel, Kirchner, Modersohn-Becker, Otto Mueller, Nolde, Pechstein, and Schmidt-Rottluff, and sculptures by Lehmbruck and Milly Steger. In 1939, the Landmanns traveled on to Toronto. During the war, the Stedelijk Museum took care of Landmann’s art collection, returning it to its owner once the war was over. By way of thanks, Wilhelm Landmann presented the museum with Kokoschka’s watercolor Mutter und Kind (Mother and Child, 1922–1923), which he had previously lent to an exhibition in Utrecht in 1939 featuring works by the artist.65 It was not the case, however, that the Stedelijk accepted all the art the refugees offered: it still had to conform to the museum’s collecting policy. For example, when the art historian Rosa Schapire came to the Netherlands from Hamburg in 1938 to discuss securing her art collection, Röell refused to accept her works on the grounds of “lack of space.”66 The emphasis in her collection was on the oeuvre of Schmidt-Rottluff, of which she owned seven oil paintings, plus sculptures, drawings, applied art, and his entire graphic output comprising over 600 works on paper. In 1939, Schapire fled to England, thereby saving part of her collection. After her death in 1954, art dealer Gustav Delbanco and art historian Nikolaus Pevsner assumed responsibility for her estate and the collection was divided among a number of European museums. They were initially unwilling to contribute works from Schapire’s collection to the Stedelijk; however, Sandberg, who had been appointed director of the Stedelijk Museum after the war, eventually managed to secure a sculpture, a drawing, and some graphic works by Schmidt-Rottluff for the museum. The Gemeentemuseum in The Hague also received an oil painting and graphic works by Schmidt-Rottluff. During the period when the Stedelijk Museum refused to take Schapire’s collection, the museum accepted a triptych by Heckel from the collection of Karl Goeritz, who had fled from Chemnitz to the Netherlands in November 1937. In 1939, Sandberg contacted him to arrange a small exhibition of Goeritz’s Wiener Werkstätte collection. In November 1939, once the exhibition was over, Goeritz presented the Stedelijk with two glass objects and Heckel’s triptych, Badende (Bathing Figures, 1919; Figure 15.9), the first oil painting by a Brücke artist to enter a Dutch museum’s collection.67 In the period following the Second World War, international interest in the Brücke group grew rapidly. Sandberg thought that the triptych that Karl Goeritz had given to the museum was not characteristic of German expressionism, so he exchanged it with the artist in 1961 for the painting Stillleben mit Holzfigur (Still Life with Wooden Figure, 1910; Figure 15.10) from the Brücke’s early period. It is conceivable that Röell was not yet ready for this early form of expressionism back in 1938, which may be the real reason he accepted Goeritz’s uncharacteristic triptych yet refused Schapire’s more extreme collection. 308

Expressionism in the Netherlands

Figure 15.9  Erich Heckel, Badende (Bathing Figures), triptych, 1919, tempera on canvas, each section 96 × 83 cm, Städtische Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz (center panel only; location of left and right panels unknown), on long-term loan from Nachlass Erich Heckel, Hemmenhofen.  c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2018

Figure 15.10  Erich Heckel, Stillleben mit Holzfigur (Still Life with Wooden Figure), 1910, paint on burlap, 66.5 × 73 cm, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.  c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2018

The relationship between the Stedelijk Museum and Max Beckmann (1884–1950), who had emigrated to Amsterdam in 1937, remained distant for a considerable time. In 1940, the museum took seven of his paintings on approval, but eventually returned them without purchasing any. Beckmann remained disappointed in the Stedelijk’s attitude toward his work until shortly before the end of the war, when Röell bought his Doppelporträt von Quappi und 309

Geurt Imanse and Gregor Langfeld

mir (Double Portrait of the Artist and His Wife Quappi, 1941) for 6,000 guilders.68 Fearing that his acquisition budget would not be worth very much after the war, Röell had decided to spend it as quickly as possible. The Stedelijk Museum did, however, maintain close contact with art dealer Herbert Tannenbaum, who had also fled Germany. From Tannenbaum, the museum purchased Lehmbruck’s Kopf der Schreitenden (Head of a Walking Girl, 1913/14) and two of Klee’s watercolors. The Gemeentemuseum in The Hague also bought pieces from Tannenbaum, including Barlach’s bronze Der Melonenesser (The Melon Eater, 1930; after a 1907 plaster model). During this period, both museums also displayed several works by Campendonk, who had been appointed Professor of Monumental and Decorative Painting at the Rijksacademie van Beeldende Kunsten Amsterdam in 1935.69

The Breakthrough of Expressionism after 1945 After the occupation, there was a strong current of anti-German feeling in the Netherlands, so one might expect museums to refrain from collecting German art. The opposite proved the case, however, as most modern museums targeted, assembled, and exhibited exemplary collections of German expressionist works during roughly the first half of the 1950s.70 Artists from the Brücke and Blaue Reiter groups were well represented, as were individuals such as Kokoschka and Modersohn-Becker. In the second half of the 1950s and early 1960s, attention increasingly shifted to works by younger artists and to art from the 1920s and 1930s, including pieces with constructivist tendencies. Prices in the art market were a contributing factor in this changed strategy, as the market value of expressionist art had risen rapidly; moreover, by this time, museums regarded their collections of expressionist art as more or less complete. To this day, expressionist works remain among the highlights in museum collections of modern art in the Netherlands. There were clear ideological reasons for the sudden canonization of expressionism around the end of the 1940s. A good guide to what the Dutch art world declared taboo and what it canonized after the fall of the National Socialist regime was the art praised by the Nazis, on the one hand, and the work the Nazis had proclaimed “degenerate,” on the other. Expressionism, one of the primary targets of the Nazi “degenerate art” campaign, thus was accorded much recognition and “degenerate” art positioned as the antithesis of fascism. Rigorously divorcing expressionism from totalitarian systems reflected the inadequate response to the Nazi past in the 1950s, as continuities and complex connections were ignored in the process of elevating the movement’s status. Expressionist works of art were endowed with a symbolic character: by representing democracy, freedom, and individualism, they contributed to the formation of identity in Western democracies.71 Various museum directors considered expressive art to be the only appropriate form of art in the wake of Nazism, which is why expressionism from the 1910s connected so well with contemporary art such as that produced by the CoBrA group of artists (who had their breakthrough during this period).

Conclusion Expressionism was received with great interest in the Netherlands from 1912 onwards. Exhibitions organized by artists’ societies and by Herwarth Walden were the primary means of exposing the Dutch public to various facets of expressionism. During the 1910s, Kandinsky exerted the strongest influence on Dutch artists; during the early 1920s, members of the Groningen-based group De Ploeg were particularly affected by Kirchner. From the early 1910s

310

Expressionism in the Netherlands

onward, private collectors focused primarily on Kandinsky and other artists of the Blaue Reiter. Museums began sporadically collecting expressionist art only around 1920, mainly through gifts and bequests. The work of Brücke artists is scarcely featured in these early collections until the Second World War. It would take until the late 1940s for expressionism to receive broad recognition and to truly win over the art world in the Netherlands. This triumph may be attributed less to the artists’ original ideas on art than to the changed political circumstances which followed the downfall of National Socialism. Translated from the Dutch by Michèle Hendricks

Notes 1 Carel Blotkamp, Ina Ewers-Schulz, and Gerda Wenderman, eds., Aufbruch zur Farbe: Luministische Malerei in Holland und Deutschland [Awakening to Color: Luminist Painting in the Netherlands and Germany] (Bönen: Kettler Verlag, 1996; exh. cat.). 2 N. H. Wolf, “De Futuristen” [The Futurists], De Kunst 4 (1911–1912, August 10, 1912), 705–714 (August 17, 1912), 727–732 (August 24, 1912), 737, 746–748 (August 31, 1912), 753–761 (September 7, 1912), 769–775 (September 14, 1912), 785–787 (September 21, 1912), 801 (September 28, 1912), 817–821; N. H. Wolf, “De Futuristen,” De Kunst 5 (1912–1913, October 5, 1912), 6–8. His contributions comprise weekly reports on the exhibition. N. H. Wolf was enthusiastic about the show and managed to bring it to Amsterdam, where it was presented at De Roos Gallery in September. 3 “Maar bovendien blijkt, uit Der Sturm, dat reeds een groot aantal jonge Duitschers zich door de beweging hebben laten meenemen, schilders zoowel als dichters en romanciers. Oskar Kokoschka is de voorman der schilders, Alfred Döblin en de bekende Else Lasker-Schüler (schrijfster o.a. van het door Max Reinhardt opgevoerde “Die Wupper”) zijn de voorgangers der schrijvende futuristen”, N. H.Wolf, “De Futuristen” De Kunst 4 (1911–1912, August 10, 1912), 708. 4 N. H. Wolf, “Aktueele lektuur” [Contemporary Reading], De Kunst 4 (1911–1912, August 31, 1912): 754–57. As Walden had brought the futurists to the Netherlands,Wolf accordingly designated everything that had any kind of connection with Der Sturm as “futurism.” Clearly, one should employ necessary caution when studying source material, for the movements to which artists were assigned in this period were not as sharply differentiated from each other as in later periods. 5 “[h]ij valt buiten heel deze tentoonstelling, is een Duitscher, en schildert als een kind, met harde, valsche kleuren, opzettelijk. Hij is niet ernstig te nemen,—kan trouwens naast geen der anderen worden ondergebracht. Wij nemen zijn werk voor kennisgeving aan en zullen het ons blijven herinneren als iets hyper-overdrevens.” N. H. Wolf, “Moderne Kunstkring: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. II” [Modern Art Circle: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. II], De Kunst 5 (1912–1913, October 19, 1912): 43. 6 N. H. Wolf, “W. Kandinsky: Kunstzaal Oldenzeel Rotterdam” [W. Kandinsky: Oldenzeel Gallery Rotterdam], De Kunst 5 (1912–1913, November 9, 1912): 81. 7 Wolf, “Kandinsky,” 82–83: “One sees at this exhibition, which is exceptionally interesting, much more interesting, much more serious [work] than that of the Futurists”; the same issue of De Kunst also printed Kandinsky’s article “Über Kunstverstehen” [On Understanding Art], 84–86. 8 Wilmon-Vervaerdt, “Exposition Internationale du Cercle de l’Art Moderne: Musée Municipal, Amsterdam, Novembre-Décembre 1913” [International Exhibition by the Modern Art Circle: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, November–December 1913], De Kunst 6 (1913–1914, November 8, 1913): 83–89; [N. H.Wolf],“Moderne Kunstkring: Stedelijk Museum” [Modern Art Circle: Stedelijk Museum], De Kunst 6 (1913–1914): 97–99. About the sale of works, see [N. H. Wolf], “Moderne Kunstkring: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam” [Modern Art Circle: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam], De Kunst 6 (1913–1914, November 29, 1913): 131. 9 N. H. Wolf, “Derde Jury-vrije Tentoonstelling der Onafhankelijken I” [Third Juryless Exhibition by the Independents I], De Kunst 6 (1913–1914): 507 and 510. 10 A. H. Huussen, Jr. and J. F. A. van Paaschen-Louwerse, Jacoba van Heemskerck van Beest 1876–1923: Schilderes uit roeping [Jacoba van Heemskerck van Beest 1876–1923: Vocational Painter] (Zwolle: Waanders Uitgevers; Amsterdam: Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, 2005), 65, 68.

311

Geurt Imanse and Gregor Langfeld 11 Herwarth Walden, ed., Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon [First German Autumn Salon] (Berlin: Der Sturm, 1913; exh. cat.), 27. Pieter Koomen, “Het schoone raam” [The Window Beautiful], Holland Express 7(1) (January 1, 1914): 19; Geurt Imanse, Albert August Plasschaert (1866–1941) (The Hague: SDU Publishers, 1988), 42 and 122; the illus. Eli Eli Lama Sabachtani in the catalog of the Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon is a mirror-image version of Christ on the Cross in Holland Express and Elseviers Geïll, Maandschrift 24(47) (1914): 136. 12 Frans van Burkom and Hans Mulders, Erich Wichman 1890–1923: tussen idealisme en rancune [Erich Wichman 1890–1923: Idealism and Rancour] (Utrecht: Centraal Museum Utrecht; Assen: Drents Museum, 1983; exh. cat.), 10. Martha van Vloten’s translation was never published. 13 Van Burkom and Mulder, Erich Wichman 1890–1923, 52 and 58–63, especially 59. 14 Piet Boyens and José Boyens, Expressionisme in Nederland [Expressionism in the Netherlands] (Zwolle: Waanders Uitgevers; Laren: Singer Museum, 1995; exh. cat.), 140. 15 “[d]at hij zeer goed op de hoogte is met den geest van zijn tijd, waaruit het kunstwerk groeit.”Theo van Doesburg, “Over kunst- en natuurkritiek” [On Criticism of Art and Nature], Eenheid 6(282) (October 30, 1915): n.p. 16 “Tot de jongeren behoort m.i. de eerste de beste grijsaard, die zelf het wezen der kunst zijnde, de ziel van zijn tijd in kleuren en vormen, in klanken of woorden, voortbrengt.” Van Doesburg, “Over kunst- en natuurkritiek”, n.p. 17 “[a]chterlijke, verstokte diletanten.”Van Doesburg, “Over kunst- en natuurkritiek”, n.p. 18 “Jedes Kunstwerk ist Kind seiner Zeit . . . So bringt jede Kulturperiode eine eigene Kunst zustande.” Wassily Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 10th ed. (Bern: Benteli, 1952), 21; Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual In Art, trans. M. T. H. Sadler (New York: Dover Publications, 1977), 1. 19 Theo van Doesburg, “Kunstkritiek” (Art Criticism), Eenheid 6(283) (November 6, 1915): n.p. 20 Van Doesburg’s clarification of his painting Girl with Ranunculus in: “De Onafhankelijken”: Catalogus voor de 7e jury-vrije tentoonstelling in het eigen gebouw Amstelveenscheweg 165, mei-juni 1916 [“The Independents”: Catalogue for the 7th Juryless Exhbition at the Society’s Own Premises at 165 Amstelveenscheweg, May-June 1916] ([Amsterdam]: De Onafhankelijken, 1916; exh. cat.), 12. 21 Els Hoek, ed., Theo van Doesburg: Oeuvrecatalogus (Utrecht: Centraal Museum; Otterlo: Kröller-Müller Museum; Bussum: Uitgeverij THOTH, 2000), 143, 146, 156, and 160. 22 Sixten Ringbom, The Sounding Cosmos: A Study in the Sprituality of Kandinsky and the Genesis of Abstract Painting (Ǻbo: Ǻbo Akademi, 1970); Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater, Thoughtforms (London and Benares: The Theosophical Publishing Society; Chicago: The Theosophical Book Concern; New York: John Lane, 1905); Kandinsky more or less recommends theosophy as a way to spiritual liberation: Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 42–43. 23 De Winter in a letter to Professor W. H. C. Tenhaeff, coll. Centraal Museum Utrecht, quoted in part in I. Spaander, “Negen biografieën: Janus de Winter” [Nine Biographies: Janus de Winter], Museumjournaal 17(6) (1972): 300. 24 Theo van Doesburg, De Winter en zijn werk: Psycho-analytische studie [De Winter and His Work: A Psycho-analytical Study] (Haarlem: J. H. de Bois, 1916), 3. 25 Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 84, 135. Theo van Doesburg, “Oproep” (Appeal), Eenheid 6(288) (December 11, 1915): n.p. 26 Van Eeden describes De Winter as “the man . . . who will turn into deeds, what has remained word and theory with Kandinsky and his circle.” Frederik van Eeden, “De schilder-mysticus De Winter” [The Painter-Mystic De Winter], in Schilderijen A. de Winter [Paintings A. de Winter] (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1916; exh. cat.), 6. 27 Ine Gevers, Janus de Winter: de schilder mysticus [Janus de Winter: the Painter-Mystic] (Utrecht: Centraal Museum, 1985; exh. cat.), 66, illus. IX.The Kandinsky exhibition held in Rotterdam (Oldenzeel Gallery, 1912) was later held in various other Dutch cities, including Leiden and Utrecht; see Van Burkom and Mulders, Erich Wichman 1890–1923, 7, 160 note 23. 28 Karin von Maur, ed., Vom Klang der Bilder: Die Musik in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts [On the Sound of Paintings: Music in 20th-Century Art] (Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie, 1985; exh. cat.), 186, cat. nos. 304 and 305. 29 Geurt Imanse, “Van Sturm tot Branding” [From Storm to Surf], in Berlijn-Amsterdam 1920–1940: wisselwerkingen [Berlin-Amsterdam 1920–1940: Interactions] (Amsterdam: Querido’s Uitgeverij, 1982), 251–264, 258, and 259; abstract, expressive representations of music inspired by Kandinsky also appear in the output of various artists in the Rotterdam group De Branding, especially the “colorform” pieces

312

Expressionism in the Netherlands

30 31

32 33

34 35

36

37

38 39 40

41 42 43

44

of Johannes Tielens (1869–1957). See Els Brinkman, De Branding 1917–1926 (Rotterdam: Stichting Kunstpublicaties, 1991), 83–88. These include work by Alfred Kubin, Kandinsky, and Marc displayed at the De Bois Gallery (Haarlem) in August 1914. The exhibition was publicized in Der Sturm 6 (March 1916): 144. Walden’s opening speech was printed in Herwarth Walden, “Bilder: Vortrag zur Eröffnung der Sturm-Ausstellung in Den Haag” [Paintings: Lecture Delivered at the Opening of the Sturm Exhibition in The Hague], Der Sturm 7 (April 1916): 2–4; cf. also critic A. C. A. Plasschaert’s review, “Der Sturm I,” Het Vaderland [Fatherland] (March 17, 1916): n.p.: “In that regard Mister Walden’s words were a disappointment to me.” Huussen Jr. and Van Paaschen-Louwerse, Jacoba van Heemskerck van Beest 1876–1923, 106–109. Theo van Doesburg, “De Expressionisten en Kubisten: Zweite Ausstellung von ‘Der Sturm’” [Expressionists and Cubists: Second Exhibition by ‘Der Sturm’], Eenheid 7(305) (April 8, 1916); for more on this exhibition see A. C. A. Plasschaert, “Der Sturm II,” Het Vaderland (March 22, 1916): n.p., and “Der Sturm III,” Het Vaderland (March 25, 1916): n.p. Friedrich Markus Huebner, Holland, vol. 1 of Georg Biermann, ed., Moderne Kunst in den Privatsammlungen Europas [Modern Art in European Private Collections] (Leipzig: Klinkhardt and Biermann, 1922). “Ich habe einen sehr ernsthaften Interessenten für ihre Zeichnungen, Herrn W. Beffie aus Amsterdam, der bei mir ein paar Tage vor meiner Abreise für 2600 kaufte! Was sagen Sie dazu?” Rosel Gollek, Franz Marc 1880–1916 (Munich: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, 1980; exh. cat.), 40. See also Ester L. Wouthuysen, “Willem Wolff Beffie (1880–1950): onthechte verzamelaar, stille mecenas” [Willem Wolff Beffie (1880–1950): Detached Collector, Silent Patron], in Gedurfd verzamelen. Van Chagall tot Mondriaan [Audacious Collecting: From Chagall to Mondriaan], ed. Huibert Schijf and Edward van Voolen (Amsterdam: Joods Historisch Museum Amsterdam, 2010; exh. cat.), 106–143, especially 119 and 128. Huebner, Holland, 62–65. It is likely that Beffie had already bought work by these painters at the third exhibition organized by the Moderne Kunstkring in autumn 1913, and by Kandinsky at the 1912 Rotterdam exhibition, as a publication issued by Der Sturm lists him as owning Kandinsky’s paintings Small Pleasures (Kleine Freuden, 1913) and Group in Crinolines (Reifrockgesellschaft, 1910). Wassily Kandinsky, “Rückblicke” (Reminiscences), in Kandinsky 1901–1913 (Berlin: Der Sturm, 1913), 6 and 46. In his text on Beffie, Huebner mentions an “O. Kubin,” although he may mean Alfred Kubin, as Beffie definitely owned work by this artist with whom he also corresponded. See Wouthuysen, “Willem Wolff Beffie,” 132.Work by O. (= Otakar) Kubin was certainly represented at the Zweite Sturmausstellung in The Hague in 1916. J. M. Joosten, “Documentatie over Mondriaan (4): 17 brieven van Piet Mondriaan aan ds.Van Assendelft 1914–1919, eerste deel” [Documentation on Mondriaan (4): 17 Letters from Piet Mondriaan to Van Assendelft 1914–1919, First Volume], Museumjournaal 18(4) (1973): 172–174; Kandinsky, “Rückblicke,” 11: Improvisation 33 Thema Oriënt with the note “Besitzer H. van Assendelft/Gouda” [Owner H. van Assendelft/Gouda]. Huebner, Holland, 67–70 and 71–72; La Revue du Feu 1(4) (1919): 62. Ad Petersen, De Ploeg: Gegevens omtrent de Groningse schilderkunst in de jaren ’20 [The Plow: Information on Painting in Groningen in the 1920s] (The Hague: BZZTôH, 1982); Adriaan Venema, De Ploeg 1918–1930 [The Plow: 1918–1930] (Baarn: Het Wereldvenster, 1978). W.A. L. Beeren in Gemeentemuseum,The Hague, Groninger grafiek, vernieuwing in de jaren ’20 [Groningen Graphic Art, Innovation in the 1920s], 1960 (exh. cat.) cited by H. W. van Os in Wobbe Alkema en de Groninger schilderkunst [Wobbe Alkema and Painting in Groningen] (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1978), 27. Jikke van der Spek, De schilders van De Ploeg [The Painters of The Plow] (Zwolle: WBooks Zwolle; Groningen: Groninger Museum, 2016), illus. 81, 82, 88, and 98. Boyens and Boyens, Expressionisme in Nederland, 76 and 180. These artists were Rudolf Belling, Hans Brass, Erika Freund, Erich Heckel, Oswald Herzog, Robert Huth, Alexej von Jawlensky, César Klein, Moriz Melzer, Albert Müller, Alexander Oppler, Max Pechstein, Franz Radziwill, Arthur Segal, Wilhelm Schmid, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Georg Scholz, Martel Schwichtenberg, Georg Tappert, and Hans Walther. Some 109 members of De Onafhankelijken also exhibited work alongside these German artists. 16e jury-vrije tentoonstelling van De Onafhankelijken [16th Juryless Exhibition by The Independents] (1921; exh. cat.), 16.

313

Geurt Imanse and Gregor Langfeld 45 “Stedelijk Museum,” De Standaard [The Standard], February 23, 1921; and M.V., “Stedelijk Museum,” Algemeen Handelsblad [General Trade Journal], February 6, 1921. 46 Cornelis Veth, “Tentoonstelling De Onafhankelijken” [The Independents’ Exhibition], Het Nieuws van den Dag [News of the Day], February 8, 1921; Cornelis Veth, “Tentoonstelling De Onafhankelijken” [The Independents’ Exhibition], February 12, 1921; and C. V. [Cornelis Veth], “De Duitschers bij De Onafhankelijken” [Germans at The Independents’ Exhibition], Elsevier’s Geïllustreerd Maandschrift [Elsevier’s Illustrated Monthly Magazine] 31 (April 1921): 283. 47 Kasper Niehaus, “De Onafhankelijken” [The Independents], De Telegraaf [The Telegraph], February 12, 1921. 48 Niehaus, “De Onafhankelijken”; M.V., “Stedelijk Museum,” Algemeen Handelsblad, February 16, 1921. 49 The Rotterdam Kunstkring had initially planned a separate exhibition; however, as the DeutschNiederländische Gesellschaft of Berlin was also engaged in organizing an exhibition of German art at Pulchri Studio in The Hague and at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the two organizations decided to join forces and hold a single large exhibition in the three major cities. Writer and scholar Max Osborn of the Deutsch-Niederländische Gesellschaft wrote the catalogue text. 50 The emphasis of the exhibition was on the older generation of artists from the nineteenth century. Works were also displayed by former members of the Brücke (Heckel, Kirchner, Mueller, Pechstein, Schmidt-Rottluff), Der Blaue Reiter (Campendonk, Helmuth Macke [1891–1936], Marc), the German Matisse school (Heinrich Nauen, Oskar Moll, Hans Purrmann), and by Barlach, Beckmann, Feininger, Karl Hofer, Kokoschka, Kollwitz, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Ludwig Meidner, Modersohn-Becker, Wilhelm Morgner, Nolde, and Christian Rohlfs. 51 “Stedelijk Museum: Duitsche kunst” [Stedelijk Museum: German Art], Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant [New Rotterdam Daily], October 27, 1922. 52 Cornelis Veth, “Tentoonstelling van Duitsche beeldende kunst: Stedelijk Museum” [Exhibition of German Visual Art: Stedelijk Museum], Het Nieuws van de Dag [News of the Day], October 11, 1922. 53 Realismus und Sachlichkeit: Aspekte deutscher Kunst 1919–1933 [Realism and Objectivity: Aspects of German Art 1919–1933] (Berlin: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 1974; exh. cat.), 11. 54 DEBS. [J. H. de Bois], “Duitsche kunst in Pulchri” [German Art in Pulchri], De Avondpost [Evening Post], September 26, 1922. 55 Wilma Veldman-Spooren, “Apostel der onderwerploze kunst: De receptie van Kandinsky in Nederland van 1912 tot 1938” [Apostle of Subjectless Art: Kandinsky’s Reception in the Netherlands from 1912 to 1938] (master’s thesis, Leiden University, 1998), 48. 56 Herluf van Merlet wrote that by taking an even stricter approach to abstract painting than Kandinsky, Mondrian, César Domela, and Vilmos Huszár had ended up in an arid desert in which all life was bound to perish. N. H. Wolf cynically compared them to house painters. Herluf van Merlet, “De Onafhankelijken” [The Independents], De Tijd [Time], June 4, 1927; N. H.Wolf, “De Onafhankelijken,” De Kunst 19 (June 11, 1927): 453–457, 454. 57 Gregor Langfeld, Duitse kunst in Nederland: verzamelen, tentoonstellen, kritieken; 1919–1964 [German Art in the Netherlands: Collecting, Exhibiting, Reviewing; 1919–1964] (Zwolle: Waanders Uitgevers, 2004), 36–37. 58 Langfeld, Duitse kunst in Nederland, 58–63. 59 Ibid., 56–58. 60 Ibid., 37–38. 61 Langfeld, Duitse kunst in Nederland, 150–153. Jan Engelman, “Zooveel jaar na dato” [So Many Years After the Event], De Groene Amsterdammer, April 9, 1938. 62 F. M. Huebner, “Holländischer Einspruch gegen Kunstentartung” [Dutch Objection to Art Degeneration], Düsseldorfer Nachrichten [Düsseldorf News], May 20, 1938. 63 Kandinsky to Sandberg and vice versa, May 6 and 10, July 28, and September 23, 1938. Amsterdam City Archives, accession no. 30041, inv. no. 3038. 64 At present, the work has been submitted to the Restitution Commission for a decision on its future. Langfeld, Duitse kunst in Nederland, 157–158; Gregor Langfeld, “Art by Exiled Germans in the Stedelijk Museum,” in The Stedelijk Museum and the Second World War, ed. Gregor Langfeld et al. (Amsterdam: Bas Lubberhuizen, 2015), 76–99, 81. 65 The Genootschap Kunstliefde organized this retail exhibition of eleven paintings, plus watercolors, drawings, and lithographs. Langfeld, Duitse kunst in Nederland, 125. 66 Langfeld, “Art by Exiled Germans in the Stedelijk Museum,” 86–87.

314

Expressionism in the Netherlands 67 68 69 70

Ibid., 87–88. Langfeld, Duitse kunst in Nederland, 159–161. Ibid., 117–118, 139, 140, 149, 150. For a detailed overview of the history of collecting and exhibiting expressionist art in the Netherlands, see Langfeld, Duitse kunst in Nederland. 7 1 See Gregor Langfeld, German Art in New York: The Canonization of Modern Art 1904–1957 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015); also Gregor Langfeld, “How the Museum of Modern Art in New York Canonised German Expressionism,” Journal of Art Historiography 11 (December 2014), https:// arthistoriography.wordpress.com; Langfeld, Duitse kunst in Nederland.

315

16 FLEMISH EXPRESSIONISM IN BELGIUM Cathérine Verleysen

The term “Flemish expressionism” was coined during the 1920s to describe an important aspect of contemporaneous modern figurative art in Belgium. The term was applied both to works by Flemish artists bearing a stylistic relationship to German expressionism, as evidenced by their distorted forms, coloration, and dynamic compositions, and to works considered to be cubist in nature with regards to their sense of balance, synthesis, and construction. The key figures within this group are Gustave De Smet (1877–1943), Frits Van den Berghe (1883–1939), and Constant Permeke (1886–1952).1 In chronological terms, Flemish expressionism was a delayed response to the development of modernism in Europe. Despite the existence of a vital and internationally-oriented avant-garde movement in fin-de-siècle Belgium—particularly in Brussels, where it was shaped by the establishment of the art circle Les Vingt (1883–1893), among other such initiatives—the early years of the twentieth century were characterized by a weakened artistic dynamism.2 This did not go unnoticed by the commentators of the day, with the Antwerp poet and art critic Paul Van Ostaijen (1896–1928) noting in his 1918 essay, “Expressionisme in Vlaanderen” (Expressionism in Flanders), that “it seemed as if the youth had lost all contact with Europe.”3 In 1931, one of the standard-bearers of Flemish expressionism, the writer-critic André De Ridder (1888–1961), looked back on the prewar period and produced the following sober analysis: We have to admit: when the 1914 war broke out we were neither very “European” nor very “modern” in Belgium. While enlightened seekers elsewhere had already begun overthrowing the form and renewing the spirit of painting and sculpture, we clung, with a peculiar stubbornness, even lust, to impressionism, or rather, to our local Neo-impressionism . . . I do not know how to explain this indifference in a country that is generally very curious about new ideas and personalities.4

The Sint-Martens-Latem School The origins of Flemish expressionism are to be found in the so-called Sint-Martens-Latem school, which takes its name from a small village on the banks of the Leie River, some ten kilometers from Ghent. This rural and idyllic setting became a magnet for artists around 1900, each of which drew yet others to the locality: George Minne (1866–1941), Gustave Van de 316

Flemish Expressionism in Belgium

Woestyne (1881–1947), Valerius De Saedeleer (1867–1941), Albijn Van den Abeele (1835– 1918), Albert Servaes (1883–1966), and Julius De Praetere (1879–1947). In theoretical terms, they were supported by Van de Woestyne’s brother, the poet and critic Karel Van de Woestijne (1878–1929), who deliberately adopted the traditional Flemish variant of his surname. Through their mutual friendship, similar outlooks, and artistic affinities, these artists coalesced into the first Sint-Martens-Latem school. The Latem artists spurned bourgeois, cosmopolitan city culture. Turning their backs on Ghent, they sought intellectual and creative renewal in the unspoiled environs of the riverside village. Inspired by rural life, the artists worked in the spirit of symbolism, although their output can be related in equal measure to other contemporaneous Belgian artistic movements such as realism and socially engaged art. In their quest for a new art based on contemplation and religiosity, these artists were greatly influenced by the Flemish Primitives, whose work they had studied in detail at the major exhibition Les Primitifs flamands et l’art ancien (The Flemish Primitives and Ancient Art) in Bruges, in 1902. The simplicity, rigor, and honesty that informed the work of the Primitives stimulated the Latem artists to create intensely spiritual and subtly poetic paintings. They distanced themselves from impressionism, which they considered superficial salon art. The expression of an experience via the unique atmosphere of a landscape or a detail from nature was, for them, of greater significance than the creation of a rich sensory impression.5 Differing in character, composition, and attitude—although not so much in chronology— was the so-called second Sint-Martens-Latem school, to which the pioneering protagonists of Flemish expressionism belong, namely Gustave De Smet, Frits Van den Berghe, and Constant Permeke. From about 1907 to 1908, they all lived and worked in the village for significant periods of time. The shared understanding among this younger generation of artists attracted the attention of André De Ridder and Paul-Gustave Van Hecke (1887–1967), the future founders of the Brussels gallery and the journal Sélection (Selection, discussed later). Through the dandyish art journal De Boomgaard, Algemeen geïllustreerd Maandschrift voor Literatuur en Kunst (The Orchard, General Illustrated Monthly Bulletin for Literature and Art; Antwerp, 1909–1911), De Ridder and Van Hecke strove to bring innovation to Flanders. They denounced the provincialism of city dwellers, whose narrow-mindedness they hoped to replace with a “fine, nervous and straightforward mentality.”6 In the prewar period, Gustave De Smet and Frits Van den Berghe painted in a postimpressionist style akin to that of Théo Van Rysselberghe (1862–1926) and Emile Claus (1849–1924) (the latter was active in Afsnee, a short distance upstream). They were inspired by the countryside, but placed their emphasis on capturing the atmospheric effects of light rather than the recognizable representation of reality. De Smet and Van den Berghe, however, soon turned away from purely visual Luminism, the distinctive style combining both realism and impressionism of which Claus was the leading exponent. Their investigation into the possibilities of a more subjective art resulted in landscapes and portraits that share an affinity with symbolism. Permeke was also painting impressionistic landscapes during this period, but quickly embraced a rougher, more impulsive style of painting under the influence of fellow villager and artist Albert Servaes. He enlarged upon this development after 1912, the year in which he left Sint-Martens-Latem and returned to the Belgian coastal city of Ostend; here, he painted subjects that had long been a source of inspiration: the fisher folk, the harbor, the sea, and the dunes. In the works produced between 1912 and 1914, Permeke used impressionistic colors and brushstrokes, while also exploring the possibilities of a more direct, expressive manner of painting, with powerful brushwork, a sense of structure and simplified forms as the focal point (Figure 16.1). 317

Cathérine Verleysen

Figure 16.1  Constant Permeke, Duinen (Dunes), 1914, oil on canvas, mounted on cardboard, 39.4 × 41.7 cm, Museum of Fine Arts Ghent, inv. 1957-K.  www.lukasweb.be—Art in Flanders vzw. © SABAM Belgium 2017

The First World War forced the artists’ colony of Sint-Martens-Latem to disband and many of the artists fled abroad, including to the Netherlands and Britain. It was during this period of exile that the seeds were sown for the subsequent renewal of the Belgian art scene during the 1920s. During the war, many exiled Belgian artists acquired first-hand knowledge of the European avant-garde movements—expressionism, cubism, futurism—and proved themselves receptive to these new artistic impulses.7 Their enforced departure, as André De Ridder also subsequently emphasized, played a crucial role in the artistic evolution of all concerned: Everything changed with the war, and the reversal was as complete as it was sudden. War was quite revealing for several of our artists. It drove quite a few of them to leave the invaded country and go into exile to Holland, France, England. Uprooted against their own will; brought out of their torpor and faced with the evidence of a new art which, at that period already, was deeply rooted in all these countries; encountering more informed foreign colleagues, exchanging ideas and opinions with them, and being introduced into new forms of life—through this exile our painters were benefited with a broadened vision, experience, and renewal of their inner being, a stimulant that is not easy to describe for each one of them, yet which resulted in most fruitful reactions.8 318

Flemish Expressionism in Belgium

Belgian Artists in Exile in the Netherlands and Britain During the summer of 1914, Gustave De Smet and Frits Van den Berghe fled to the Netherlands, a country that remained politically neutral during the conflict.9 Prior to the war, the art scene in this neighboring land had been distinctly progressive and internationally minded: various young Dutch artists, including Jan Sluijters (1881–1957) and Leo Gestel (1881–1941), forged reputations in Paris and participated in the modern European art movement. In this respect, Belgium and the Netherlands were worlds apart.10 European modernism was not unknown in the Netherlands, therefore, and its influence was already felt in certain open-minded environments, such as in Amsterdam, where Gustave De Smet and Frits Van den Berghe, after some wandering, settled in September 1914. It was in Amsterdam that De Smet and Van den Berghe, together with André De Ridder (the writer-critic had also taken refuge in Netherlands), came into direct contact with contemporary avant-garde art. The exiled Belgians visited museums and galleries, gained access to such international publications and journals as Der Sturm (Berlin, 1910–1932), and forged friendships with other artists. Dutchman Leo Gestel, for example, acted as guide to his Belgian friends, while French artist Henri Le Fauconnier (1881–1946), also a refugee, exerted a profound influence on the new generation of Dutch artists. De Smet’s and Van den Berghe’s art was popular with the leading collectors Piet Boendermaker (1877–1947) and Pierre Alexandre Regnault (1868–1954), and the artists also participated in exhibitions, including one at Heystee, Smit & Co, which paid tribute to their recent work in May 1916. André De Ridder, who had initiated the event, used the catalogue introduction to proclaim his delight at his two fellow countrymen’s definitive abandonment of impressionism.11 While Frits Van den Berghe initially continued to paint in an impressionistic style, Gustave De Smet explored new artistic possibilities from the very beginning of his stay in the Netherlands. Stylistically, De Smet was initially influenced by French Fauvism. Working indoors, he painted still lifes and interior scenes, constructing his images with vigorous, colorful, and form-defining brushstrokes. As of 1915, his attention, as well as that of Van den Berghe, turned toward the human figure, especially women. In terms of the pictorial and stylistic approaches used during this period, Henri Le Fauconnier’s “physical cubism” was extremely influential. His expressive style of cubism, which was inextricably bound to reality, stimulated the Belgian artists to augment the intensity of their own work. Furthermore, the example of the German expressionists encouraged them to concentrate on the potency of personal feelings and on translating these into an expressive visual language that was characterized by pronounced chiaroscuro effects and simplified lines and shapes. De Smet and Van den Berghe continued to develop this new aspect of their work during their stay in the artists’ village of Blaricum, located in the rural area of Het Gooi, where they settled in the summer of 1916 (though maintaining contact with Amsterdam).12 Here, the two Belgian artists realized an astonishing series of paintings that demonstrate the incremental development of their unique visual languages, as well as the influences of both expressionism and cubism. De Smet’s oeuvre from this period is distinguished by the greater emphasis that he placed on a well-organized and balanced structure. The artist moderated the distortion that had characterized his previous work during his early years in the Netherlands, resulting in a more balanced composition, and in so doing, heightened the expressivity of his art. De Smet used a color palette of warm autumnal tones and blacks that he robustly applied using broad brushstrokes to create solid masses of paint on the canvas (Figure 16.2). During his second stay in the Netherlands, Frits Van den Berghe responded to a range of different influences. While the vivid colors and brutal distortions are evocative of German 319

Cathérine Verleysen

Figure 16.2  G  ustave De Smet, De groene Koepelkerk in Amsterdam (De Lutherse kerk in Amsterdam) [Church with a Green Dome in Amsterdam (The Lutheran Church in Amsterdam)], 1919, oil on canvas, 106.7 × 131.5 cm, Museum of Fine Arts Ghent, inv. 1981-E, ex-collection André De Ridder.  www.lukasweb.be—Art in Flanders vzw

expressionism, his other paintings are more closely related to cubism in terms of hue and compositional precision. Typical of Van den Berghe’s oeuvre is an ever-recurring form of metaphysical layering and visionary power that gives rise to intriguing, poetic images (Figure 16.3). It was during the so-called Gooise period that Gustave De Smet and Frits Van den Berghe also developed an interest in wood and lino cutting. They were encouraged in this and influenced by their fellow countryman Jozef Cantré (1890–1957), a sculptor and graphic artist who had fled to the Netherlands in 1918 and settled in Blaricum.13 But it was the graphic work of the German expressionists, published in the journals Der Sturm and the newly established Das Kunstblatt (The Art Paper; Berlin, 1917–1933), that ultimately stimulated De Smet and Van den Berghe toward ever-greater synthesis, an endeavor that pushed their painting in a more expressive direction for a considerable period. Unlike the graphic work of their compatriot Jozef Cantré, De Smet and Van den Berghe’s prints were less autonomous in their origin and more an integral part of their painterly practice, especially in the recycling of images from the works executed in oils. During these years, Van den Berghe also realized powerful brush drawings that are clearly based on the expressive simplifications of the graphic medium.14 In Britain, Constant Permeke arrived at solutions similar to those of his artist friends Gustave De Smet and Frits Van den Berghe. After having been conscripted into the regular army in August 1914, Permeke was seriously wounded and sent to England to convalesce. He remained 320

Flemish Expressionism in Belgium

Figure 16.3  F  rits Van den Berghe, De sterrenvisser (Fishing for Stars), 1920, oil on canvas, 54.9 × 68.8 cm, Museum of Fine Arts Ghent, inv. 1987-A, ex-collection Piet Boendermaker.  www.lukasweb. be—Art in Flanders vzw

there throughout the war, and although working in relative isolation—his contacts were largely limited to the other Belgian artists in the country, such as Edgard Tytgat (1879–1957), George Minne, Hippolyte Daeye (1873–1952), and Gustave Van de Woestyne—he was buoyed by the letters he received from Gustave De Smet and André De Ridder. They kept their friend informed about the artistic climate in the Netherlands, and in the case of De Smet, about their own stylistic and pictorial developments. Constant Permeke essentially remained on the path that he had adopted under the guidance of Albert Servaes just prior to the outbreak of the war. Averse to all rules—no other Belgian artists living in exile in Britain made such great strides in their work during the war years—he developed an expressive visual language that he deployed in monumental images infused by a near-mythical approach to life. He ultimately attained a formalistic abstraction that was devoid of detail. The vibrant colors and depictions of light in 1916 and 1917 bear witness to the influence of William Turner, whose work Permeke had seen in the London museums, and his countryman James Ensor (1860–1949), whom he greatly admired.

The Brussels Art Scene of the 1920s By the time the artists returned from exile, the modern art world in Belgium was beginning to reorganize itself. Shortly after the war, Brussels had developed a forum for the international 321

Cathérine Verleysen

avant-garde, the driving forces of which were André De Ridder and Paul-Gustave Van Hecke.15 De Ridder and Van Hecke were extremely alert to foreign developments and their focus on the European (mainly French) avant-garde—first postcubism and later surrealism—largely determined the Belgian artistic climate of the 1920s. The attention given to the developments taking place beyond the national borders was intrinsically linked to their conviction that the new generation of Belgian artists should make an essential contribution to the international scene. As a part of this, De Ridder and Van Hecke turned to the work produced by the trio of De Smet, Van den Berghe, and Permeke—and in the margins, by the artists Jean Brusselmans (1884–1953), Gustave Van de Woestyne, Edgard Tytgat, and Oscar (1887–1970) and Floris (1889–1965) Jespers. Strategically united under the collective promotional name “Flemish expressionism,” the work of these artists was presented as a full-fledged response to the diverse nature of European modernism. De Ridder and Van Hecke launched many successful initiatives in their attempt to reinvigorate contemporary modern art in Belgium. During the summer of 1920, they opened the gallery Sélection, Atelier d’Art contemporain, in Brussels. For them, it was essential that the gallery become a focal point for everything that Europe—mainly Belgium and France—had to offer by way of modernity.16 Their plan was to focus on: the Belgian and foreign painters who bear witness to the fallacy of yesterday’s art and to demonstrate how pointless it is to follow it, especially since a new art has finally arrived, the constructional laws and synthesis of which make it more than a sensory art, and this because it aims to be the complete visual expression of our time in all its complexity.17

Figure 16.4  Gustave De Smet, cover for Sélection, 1920, Museum of Fine Arts Ghent, Library

322

Flemish Expressionism in Belgium

The gallery’s ground floor housed a shop that offered paintings, prints, sculptures, furniture, books, and a wide range of trinkets for sale. Individual and group exhibitions devoted to the work of contemporary artists took place on the mezzanine. Two years later, financial problems forced the gallery to close its doors. The journal Sélection, Bulletin de la vie artistique (Selection, Bulletin of Artistic Life; Figure 16.4), which was launched together with the gallery, remained in print, in the form of in-depth, monographic cahiers from 1928 onwards. When Sélection ceased its activities, P.-G. Van Hecke and Co. took over the gallery, from 1922 to 1927. Van Hecke also looked after the affairs of the gallery Le Centaure, founded by Walter Schwarzenberg (1885–1964), which had operated along identical lines to Sélection since its inauguration in 1921. In 1926 and for five years thereafter, the journal Le Centaure: Chronique artistique (The Centaur: Artistic Chronicle) supported this platform for art. In 1928, De Ridder and Van Hecke launched the monthly magazine Variété: Revue mensuelle illustrée de l’esprit contemporain (Variety: Monthly Illustrated Magazine of the Contemporary Spirit), which they published for two years. The artistic thrust of this new journal was an expansion of Sélection and Le Centaure and reflected the program of the gallery L’Epoque, which De Ridder and Van Hecke, along with the artists Frits Van den Berghe, Gustave De Smet, and Edgard Tytgat, had opened in the summer of 1927. The surrealist writer, musician, and artist E. L. T. Mesens (1903–1971) became the gallery manager, while Van de Berghe served as secretary. In addition to promoting Flemish expressionism and cubism, L’Epoque primarily championed the new art movement of surrealism. Variétés also covered contemporary photography and folk art in detail. Well-considered theories in numerous art criticism publications lent weight to Flemish expressionism. According to André De Ridder, the labeling of new tendencies in contemporary art was a necessary evil that did not, however, imply the endorsement of a doctrine. In his view, the Flemish expressionists were part of the “expressionist era” that was a logical sequel and necessary reaction to the “impressionist period.” While considering fauvism to be the final death throes of the artistic epoch that ended with the First World War, De Ridder saw cubism and the later surrealism as part of a more comprehensive form of expressionism. De Ridder believed that the expressionist artist should be able to create a universe from his imagination, with the distortion of the subject being a mere springboard to the attainment of a new visual vocabulary bursting with vitality. This vocabulary derived from a highly personal impulse; thus each expressionist artist could develop an oeuvre in an entirely individual way.18 André De Ridder described Flemish expressionism as a “constructive expressionism,” a term, used extensively in the journal Sélection around 1924, that highlighted the artists’ responsiveness to the visual principles of postcubism. According to De Ridder, the “constructive expressionists,” who followed in the footsteps of the French artists, expressed the “architectural structure and the visual density of a painting” more than “any other aspect, symbol or anecdote, and without neglecting the true forms of nature”: The will to construct imbues them with the powerful creative talent of an artist who builds people and things with sections and volumes, places them in groups according to a logical plan, positions them in relief and in just the right place architecturally, not from the perspective of an artificial terminology but via the tension of life and the fullness of thought and feeling, which swells the physical forms, causes the shapes to collide with one another and rearranges the pictorial signs; the view is sacrificed in favor of the overall vision that originates from the regulatory genius.19 323

Cathérine Verleysen

The Return to Order The idea of a “return to the order” that was propagated by the French artist André Lhote (1885–1962), among others, played an essential role in this development. Lhote aspired toward greater humanism in art, leading to a lyrical interpretation of the subject and a stronger emotional bond. The notion of a “return to the order” also included a nationalist aspect whereby, in the sense of a reconciliation with the past, a connection could be re-established with the country’s own artistic tradition. Through the exhibitions of his own work and his writings and essays, André Lhote was featured regularly in Sélection and Le Centaure between 1920 and 1925 and can be considered one of the most influential figures in terms of orienting Brussels artistic circles toward classicist cubism. Following Lhote, De Ridder and Van Hecke distanced themselves from new abstraction and constructivist art movements such as the Neoplasticism of De Stijl and Russian constructivism: there was no place for either of these in Sélection or Le Centaure.20 Through their confrontation with the work of André Lhote, and, by extension, artists such as Léopold Survage (1879–1968) and Fernand Léger (1881–1955), the work of Gustave De Smet, Frits Van den Berghe, and Constant Permeke entered a more classic phase in the early 1920s. An additional influence was the purity of the work produced by Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant, two artists who applied universal mathematical rules such as the golden mean in their pursuit of harmony and ideal proportions. African art also played a major role in the search for more austere forms. Many Flemish expressionists collected primitive sculptures and Sélection dedicated a double issue to L’art nègre (Black Art) in January 1922. The Flemish expressionists processed these foreign formal principles in distinctly personal ways, and the underlying creative articulation differed radically. Whereas French artists sought the visual equivalent of reality through abstraction, Belgian artists clung to a tangible and more expressive synthesis that revolved around personal emotions and daily life. In their opposition to French intellectualism, the Flemish expressionists sought to convey lyrical and dynamic movement with an eye for greater depth and spatial suggestion. Graphic, linear contours rarely dominate because color was never subordinated to form; the pictorial was always privileged, while the warm color palette was often associated with emotion. Despite their art largely being promoted from within the Belgian capital, the work of Permeke, De Smet, and Van den Berghe was deeply rooted in the Flemish countryside. This was where they had lived prior to the war and where they returned after its end. From the beginning of 1923, De Smet and Van den Berghe resided in Paul-Gustave Van Hecke’s villa in Afsnee and often saw Constant Permeke, who lived in Ostend. De Smet and Van den Berghe worked closely together and were both inspired by the rural environment. De Smet painted figurative works dominated by village scenes, fairs, and representations of married couples. In his methodical and reasoned manner of painting, the artist attached great importance to a stable and purified composition and achieved direct expression via a rigid and angular visual style. From around 1926 on, the collage-like quality of his work is reminiscent of the compositional technique used by Léopold Survage. De Smet divided the picture plane into geometric plans and alternated abstract colored areas with decorative fragments taken from urban, landscape, or still life motifs (Figure 16.5). This interest in the purely visual and geometric approach to painting significantly determined his artistic development until the end of the 1920s. Frits Van den Berghe’s creations from the first half of the 1920s are a testament to the artist’s deep connection with village life on the Leie River. Through his focus on geometry and constructive composition, his paintings reflect a tranquil mind and an atmosphere of living in 324

Flemish Expressionism in Belgium

Figure 16.5  G  ustave De Smet, De kunstenaar en zijn vrouw bij maanlicht (Wij in Deurle) [The Artist and his Wife in the Moonlight (Us in Deurle)], 1927, oil and gouache over pencil on paper, 66.7 × 51 cm, Museum of Fine Arts Ghent, inv. 1956-AR.  www.lukasweb.be—Art in Flanders vzw

harmony with nature (Plate 20). Van den Berghe developed a fascination with the work of the French artist Fernand Léger, particularly his reduction of figurative components to their most basic and sculptural forms. This sense of voluminous synthesis primarily comes to the fore in his paintings from 1924. Shortly afterwards, he began to embrace symbolic and philosophical elements in his work and to tread new paths from around 1926 on, most notably that of surrealism. As previously mentioned, De Smet and Van den Berghe maintained close contact with Constant Permeke. Although the artist was extremely alert to the new art of his time during the 1920s, his idiosyncratic development made it difficult for him to forge significant connections with influences from afar. He worked in an intuitive, organic way; through his bond with nature, he recreated and glorified the simple life of the peasants who worked the land. Daring distortions, simplifications and a dark, earthy color palette all served to intensify the expressivity of his work (Figure 16.6). In Sélection and Le Centaure, Permeke found himself described as a primitive, an immense primordial man who achieved absolute greatness through his instinctive immediacy and profound humanity. Along with the work of Gustave De Smet, Frits Van den Berghe, and Constant Permeke, many of Gustave Van de Woestyne’s paintings also adhere to the basic principles of constructive expressionism as articulated by André De Ridder. Van de Woestyne’s work from the 1920s is 325

Cathérine Verleysen

Figure 16.6  Constant Permeke, De papeters (The Porridge Eaters), 1922, oil on canvas, 153 × 170 cm, Groeningemuseum Bruges, inv. 1985.GRO0025.I. © www.lukasweb.be—Art in Flanders vzw.  SABAM Belgium 2017

profoundly meditative and mystical, filled with symbolism and, at times, a sense of alienation. Inspired by the examples he had followed from the very beginning of his artistic career in SintMartens-Latem, most notably the Flemish and Italian Primitives,21 Van de Woestyne continued to build on the symbolically infused realism that had characterized his work prior to the First World War. He gradually combined the classic simplicity of the Primitives, as well as his deeprooted desire to depict the unadulterated reality of things, with expressionistic distortions and basic, cubistic forms. The self-portraits, portraits, still lifes, religious, and—to a lesser extent—rural themes that Van de Woestyne painted during the 1920s are simply and intelligibly constructed. Using a thinly applied medium, his clearly delineated forms are meticulously completed with color and tonal gradations. Although Van de Woestyne cited Picasso as his greatest influence, these typically figurative and meticulously composed works reflect the “return to order” that was advocated by the classicist painters of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). Van de Woestyne sometimes collapsed multiple forms into one, thereby creating a composite image (Figure 16.7); this linking together of various subjective elements and depths into a compact entity recalls, as with Gustave De Smet, the work of Léopold Survage, but also that of Marc Chagall, who was greatly admired in Flemish expressionist circles.22

326

Flemish Expressionism in Belgium

Figure 16.7  G  ustave Van de Woestyne, Fuga (Fugue), 1925, oil on canvas, 80.5 × 80 cm, Museum of Fine Arts Ghent, inv. 1991-M. © www.lukasweb.be—Art in Flanders vzw.  SABAM Belgium 2017

The Consolidation of Flemish Expressionism The extinction of geometric abstraction in Belgium during the mid-1920s—one cause being the frequent lack of a financial structure and commercial circuit for the movement23—saw Flemish expressionism take center stage. In addition to the numerous essays that lent it a theoretical foundation, the achievements of the artists involved were meticulously scrutinized and reproduced in the journals Sélection, Le Centaure, and Variétés. Works by the representative elite of the “Sélectionists” were shown successfully in Belgium (for example, in the artistic circle Kunst van Heden / L’Art contemporain in Antwerp, which since 1905 had united patrons and contemporary artists with the aim of promoting their work nationally and internationally) and abroad (in the exhibitions of Belgian art shown in Basel, Grenoble, and Venice, among other cities). The precursors of expressionism were also shown on these occasions, just as they were regularly examined as a part of the art criticism of the 1920s. The recognition of a full-fledged contemporary style was, at this point, still associated with a historical search for antecedents, such as could be found in the achievements of George Minne, Jacob Smits, Eugène Laermans, and above all, the work of James Ensor (Figure 16.8). Sélection, which published Les Ecrits de James Ensor (The Writings of James Ensor) in 1921, regarded the artist as “the initiator of the entire Belgian modern movement, who enthusiastically pointed

327

Cathérine Verleysen

Figure 16.8  James Ensor, Oude dame met maskers (Old Lady with Masks), 1889, oil on canvas, 55 × 46.6 cm, Museum of Fine Arts Ghent, inv. 1969-B. © www.lukasweb.be—Art in Flanders vzw.  SABAM Belgium 2017

the way towards boldness and liberation,” and “a master of violent fantasy, lyrical evocation and beautiful color.”24 In the same vein, the expressionist movement had a crucial impact on the historical recognition of the artists’ village of Sint-Martens-Latem. The dissemination of the recent developments by the (former) Latem artists inspired a sense of nostalgia, with the village on the Leie gaining recognition as the immediate and unique source of the new art.25 As the first so-called Sint-Martens-Latem school faded into history, critics endeavored to define the village’s distinctive qualities and significance in countless texts. These publications were accompanied by the organization of exhibitions, both group and monographic, of work by the various members of the artists’ colony. As Flemish expressionism reached its pinnacle, the movement garnered official support. In contrast to surrealism, which was truly international in character, the regionally determined Flemish values that were intrinsically linked to expressionism’s authenticity resonated with the Ministry for Arts and Sciences. Furthermore, a new Flemish intelligentsia was active within the government department as a counterweight to the traditionally dominant French-­speaking bourgeoisie.26 In early 1920, the Bestuur van Schone Kunsten (Board of Fine Arts), a ministerial body responsible for national acquisitions, reached the regrettable conclusion that it was too late to start purchasing work by artists of the first Saint-Martens-Latem school. However, this led to a series of acquisitions in 1922 for public collections of work by artists who represented 328

Flemish Expressionism in Belgium

Flemish expressionism—including Gustave De Smet, Gustave Van de Woestyne, and Edgard Tytgat—or by others who were closely connected to the movement, such as Valerius De Saedeleer, Albert Servaes, and Léon Spilliaert.27 This consolidation and institutionalization of Flemish expressionism was coupled with a gradual narrowing down of the field to what eventually became a purely national concern that emphasized the independent character of the movement, which originated in what André De Ridder described as the “Génie du Nord” (the genius of the North). French classicism was rejected as academic art, and the influence of German expressionism was perceived as weak.28 After a period of openness to international relations, Flemish expressionism became more insular and overly bound, in a one-dimensional way, to the Flemish cultural identity that would eventually be regarded as a condition for a universal culture.29 The economic crisis precipitated by the Great Depression brought this period of artistic development to an abrupt end. Le Centaure declared bankruptcy in 1930, and the collections of the Walter Schwarzenberg and Paul-Gustave Van Hecke Gallery were all sold at public auction. This led to the complete collapse of the Belgian art market, with sales of contemporary art suffering the greatest decline. Unprepared for such a catastrophe, many artists ran into serious difficulties. The financial debacle was accompanied by a profound moral and artistic crisis, one that prompted artists to join forces in their pursuit of resources for shared exhibitions. It was in this climate of despair that Les Compagnons de l’Art was founded in 1937 under the leadership of critics Luc (1899–1962) and Paul (1901–1974) Haesaerts. This new artists’ association grouped various movements, including Flemish expressionism and surrealism, under the heading “living art” and in so doing reunited such icons of the past as Gustave De Smet, Frits Van den Berghe, and Constant Permeke.

Notes 1 In 1990, the Museum of Fine Arts Ghent organized the exhibition Vlaams expressionisme in Europese context: 1900–1930 [Flemish Expressionism in a European Context: 1900–1930], curated by Robert Hoozee (1949–2012), former director of the institution. Together with art historian Piet Boyens (b. 1946), among others, Robert Hoozee played a fundamental role in the recent (re-)discovery and (re-)appreciation of Flemish expressionism. This chapter is dedicated to his memory. 2 See, for example, Johan De Smet, “L’Avant-garde manqué” [The Avant-Garde Manqué] in Bruxelles carrefour de cultures [Brussels: Crossroads of Cultures], ed. Robert Hoozee (Brussels: Palais des Beaux-Arts, 2000), 205–215. 3 “[Het] scheen alsof de jongeren alle contact met Europa verloren hadden.” Paul Van Ostaijen, “Expressionisme in Vlaanderen” [Expressionism in Flanders], in Verzameld werk [Collected Work] (Amsterdam/The Hague: G. Borgers, 1974–1977), 54. 4 “Il faut bien l’avouer: au moment où éclatait la guerre de 1914, nous n’étions, en Belgique, ni fort ‘européens,’ ni fort ‘modernes’; alors qu’ailleurs des chercheurs illuminés avaient déjà commencé à bouleverser la forme et à rénover l’esprit de la peinture et de la sculpture, nous nous accrochions encore, avec une singulière obstination, presque voluptueusement, à l’impressionnisme ou, pour mieux dire, à notre néo-impressionnisme local . . . Je ne sais encore à quoi attribuer cette indifférence qui s’était emparée d’un pays généralement fort curieux d’idée nouvelles et d’hommes nouveaux.” André De Ridder, “L’école belge contemporaine” [The Contemporary Belgian School], Cahiers de Belgique [Cahiers from Belgium] 4–5 (1931): 177–178. 5 The artists’ colony is comparable with the many other late nineteenth-century artistic communities that emerged in Europe. The spirit of both Barbizon (and Tervuren, its Belgian counterpart) and Pont Aven is evident. See, for example, Piet Boyens, ed., Une rare plenitude. Les artistes de Laethem-Saint-Martin: 1900–1930 [A Rare Plenitude: The Artists of Sint-Martens-Latem: 1900–1930] (Ghent: Museum of Fine Arts, 2001), 8–11. 6 An Paenhuysen, De nieuwe wereld. De wonderjaren van de Belgische avant-garde (1918–1939) [The New World: The Wonder Years of the Belgian Avant-Garde (1918–1939)] (Antwerp: Meulenhoff |Manteau, 2010), 54, 121.

329

Cathérine Verleysen 7 Prior to the outbreak of the First World War, the Georges Giroux Gallery in Brussels organized several noteworthy exhibitions, including those dedicated to the Italian futurists, to French cubists, and to the early abstract work of Wassily Kandinsky. These presentations were overlooked at the time. De Smet, “L’Avant-garde manqué,” 205–215. 8 “Tout changea avec la guerre, et le revirement fut aussi complet que brusque. Elle fut révélatrice pour beaucoup de nos artistes. Elle en amena plusieurs à quitter le pays envahi et à s’exiler en Hollande, en France, en Angleterre. Déracinés sans le vouloir, tirés de leur torpeur, places devant l’évidence d’un art nouveau qui, déjà à ce moment-là, dans tous ces pays s’était implanté avec force, mis en présence de confrères étrangers plus avertis, échangeant avec eux des opinions et des idées, initiés à des formes de vie nouvelles, nos peintres gagnèrent à cet exode une largesse de vues, une expérience, un renouvellement de leur être intérieur, un stimulant, qu’il est peut-être difficile de préciser pour chacun d’eux, mais qui amena les réactions les plus fécondes.” André De Ridder, “L’école belge contemporaine” [The Contemporary Belgian School], Cahier de Belgique 4–5 (1931): 183. 9 See Piet Boyens, ed., De Passage: Vlaamse kunstenaars in Nederland: 1914–1922 [Flemish Artists in the Netherlands: 1914–1922] (Bergen: Museum Kranenburgh, 2000). 10 Piet Boyens,“Les saisons de l’expressionnisme: 1910–1930” [The Seasons of Expressionism: 1910–1930], in Affinités & particularités: L’art en Belgique et aux Pays-Bas 1890–1945 [Affinities and Particularities: Art in Belgium and the Low Countries 1890–1945], ed. Marc Lambrechts (Ghent: Museum of Fine Arts, 2002), 45. 11 Quoted in Piet Boyens, “Contacten met de moderne kunst in Europa: Vlamingen in Nederland” [Contacts with Modern Art in Europe: Flemings in the Netherlands], in Vlaams expressionisme in Europese context: 1900–1930 [Flemish Expressionism in a European Context: 1900–1930], ed. Robert Hoozee (Ghent: Museum of Fine Arts, 1992), 69. 12 Gustave De Smet remained in Het Gooi until 1923. Frits Van den Berghe returned to Belgium in 1917 and accepted an official post at the Ministry for Arts and Sciences in Brussels. After the ceasefire, which was ratified during the winter of 1918, however, he returned to the Netherlands, first to Blaricum, and later to neighboring Laren, where he lived until the summer of 1921. The two artists would have had frequent contact with Belgium prior to their return—De Smet’s first exhibition in the Belgian capital was held in 1920. 13 Jozef Cantré stayed in the Netherlands (Blaricum and Oosterwijk) until 1930. 14 Piet Boyens, “Moderne kunst in ballingschap: 1914–1921” [Modern Art in Exile: 1914–1921], in Moderne kunst in België: 1900–1945 [Modern Art in Belgium: 1900–1945], ed. Robert Hoozee (Antwerp: Mercatorfonds, 1992), 66–67. 15 At the outbreak of the First World War, Paul-Gustave Van Hecke remained in Belgium and settled in Brussels. As a director of a small French theatre, he moved in fashionable circles and met his future wife, Honorine De Schrijver (1887–1977). Trained as a seamstress, she awakened Van Hecke’s interest in the world of textiles and fashion. In 1916, during the war, they jointly opened the fashion house Couture Norine in Brussels, which soon became famous for its innovative creations, and later, for its collaborations with visual artists such as René Magritte. 16 André De Ridder and Paul-Gustave Van Hecke were certainly not the only protagonists in this movement. During the war, the Georges Giroux Gallery continued to exhibit contemporary artists such as Jean Brusselmans, Léon Spilliaert (1881–1946), Oscar and Floris Jespers, and Victor Servranckx (1897–1965). Sélection, however, suggested that the gallery exhibited only a few modern artists among a wide range of “Pompiers, luminists, impressionists, Postimpressionists, futurists, cubists and expressionists, all mixed up and presented in a free-for-all” (“Pompiers, luministes, impressionnistes, post-impressionnistes, futuristes, cubistes et expressionnistes, très habilement mélangés et présentés, les uns faisant le jeu des autres.”) Anon., “Petite polémique avec un grand marchand d’art” [A Small Controversy with a Great Art Dealer], Sélection 10 (1921): 23. From around 1917, an avant-garde group was active around Paul Van Ostaijen in Antwerp, although the main figures within this circle, notably Jules Schmalzigaug (1882–1917) and Georges Vantongerloo (1886–1965), remained in the Netherlands during the First World War. 17 “. . . nous nous sommes attachés . . . à situer les seuls peintres belges et étrangers, par lesquels prouver l’erreur charmante de cette peinture d’hier et l’inutilité de son prolongement, après l’apport d’un art, qui par ses lois constructives et synthétiques, sera enfin plus qu’un art d’agrément et illustratif, puisqu’il veut être toute l’expression plastique de la complexité de notre temps.” Anon., “Petite polémique,” 24. 18 Tanguy Eeckhout, “De strijd voor de Vlaamse modernen: van Sélection tot de Collectie Tony Herbert” [The Fight for the Flemish Modernists: From Sélection to the Tony Herbert Collection], in Collectie

330

Flemish Expressionism in Belgium

19

20

21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

[Collection] Tony Herbert. Jean Brusselmans, Gust De Smet, Constant Permeke, Edgard Tytgat, Frits Van den Berghe, Rik Wouters, ed. Tanguy Eeckhout et al. (Deurle: Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, 2011), 9. “. . . Ceux pour qui la composition architectonique d’une œuvre peinte et sa densité plastique importent plus que tout autre souci, plus évidemment que le symbole ou l’anecdote, et ce toutefois sans qu’ils renoncent aux formes véridiques de la nature. Leur volonté de construire leur confère ce puissant don créateur de l’artiste qui bâtit avec des masses et des volumes les hommes et les choses, les coordonne en groupe d’après des plans logiques, les campe avec relief et architecturalement à la place voulue, non pas en vertu du truc de la perspective, mais par cette tension de la vie et cette plénitude de pensée et de sentiment, grâce auxquelles gonflent les corps, se tassent les formes, s’ordonnent les signes picturaux; les apparences sont sacrifiées au bénéfice de la vision totale, sortie du génie régulateur.” André De Ridder, “Frits Van den Berghe,” Sélection 10 (1921), cited in Inge Henneman, “De Sélection-beweging” [The Sélection Movement], in Moderne kunst in België: 1900–1945, ed. Robert Hoozee (Antwerp: Mercatorfonds, 1992), 154. Sélection therefore fiercely rejected the constructivist milieu of the journals Het Overzicht, Half-maandeliks tijdschrift kunst, letteren, mensheid (The Survey, Bi-monthly Magazine for Art, Literature and Humanity; Antwerp, 1921–1925) and 7 Arts: Journal hebdomadaire d’information et de critique (7 Arts:Weekly Journal of Information and Criticism; Brussels, 1922–1928). From 1924 onwards, Sélection broadened its horizons. Eastern European, German (Marc Chagall, Ossip Zadkine, Wassily Kandinsky, Heinrich Campendonk, Otto Dix) and Italian (Giorgio De Chirico) artists were all featured in the journal during the second half of the 1920s and exhibited to acclaim in Brussels. When he returned to Belgium in the summer of 1919, Gustave Van de Woestyne settled in Waregem. He was closely involved in the activities of Sélection and Le Centaure and traveled regularly to Paris. While there, he visited exhibitions and met French artists, including Maurice Denis (1870–1943). The work of Denis and Van de Woestyne share many affinities. See Cathérine Verleysen, Maurice Denis et la Belgique: 1890–1930 [Maurice Denis and Belgium: 1890–1930] (Leuven: University Press, 2010), 151–152; Robert Hoozee, Cathérine Verleysen, “Gustave Van de Woestyne en het modernisme” [Gustave Van de Woestyne and Modernism], in Gustave Van de Woestyne, ed. Robert Hoozee and Cathérine Verleysen (Ghent: Museum of Fine Arts, 2010), 48, 49. In 1926, Marc Chagall visited his Belgian artist friends in Afsnee. He was received at the “Villa Malpertuis” belonging to Paul-Gustave van Hecke. Inge Henneman, “De jaren twintig. De Sélection-beweging” [The Twenties: The Sélection Movement], in Vlaams expressionisme in Europese context: 1900–1930 [Flemish Expressionism in a European Context: 1900–1930], ed. Robert Hoozee (Ghent: Museum of Fine Arts, 1990), 183. “L’initiateur de tout notre movement moderniste belge, le précurseur enthousiaste de toutes nos hardiesses et de toutes nos émancipitations.” Anon., “La dernière œuvre de James Ensor” [The Last Work by James Ensor], Sélection 1 (1920): 2. Piet Boyens, L’art flamand: Du symbolisme à l’expressionnisme à Laethem-Saint-Martin [Flemish Art: From Symbolism to Expressionism to Sint-Martens-Latem] (Tielt: Lannoo/Art Book Company, 1992), 113. In 1922, three Flemish intellectuals entered the Ministry for Arts and Sciences: Arthur Cornette, Firmin Van Hecke, and Fabrice Polderman. See Virginie Devillez, Le retour à l’ordre: Art et politique en Belgique. 1918–1945 [The Return to Order: Art and Politics in Belgium. 1918–1945] (Brussels: Dexia/Labor, 2002), 23–26. Georges Marlier, “Les Expositions à Anvers: L’Art contemporain” [Exhibitions in Antwerp: Contemporary Art], Sélection 8 (1924): 293. Anon., “Notes, Remarques et Nouvelles: Le banquet de Sélection” [Notes, Remarks and News: The Sélection Banquet], Sélection 6 (1926): 80.

331

17 JEWISH EXPRESSIONISTS IN FRANCE, 1900–1940 Richard D. Sonn

There was nothing new about artists coming to Paris from all corners of the globe; they had been doing so since the eighteenth century when France displaced Italy as the center of civilized life and the focal point of artistic innovation. This trend accelerated during the Third French Republic (1870–1940) as French artists challenged the authority of the official art salons as sanctioned by the École des Beaux Arts. Beginning with impressionism in the 1870s, artistic movements proliferated, and the excitement brought increasing numbers of foreign art students to Paris. The epoch of modernism coincided not only with the Third Republic but also with the movement of Jews out of Tsarist Russia. Pogroms following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 targeted the millions of Jews confined to the Pale of Settlement—the area of Lithuania, Poland, Byelorussia, and Ukraine incorporated into Russia in the eighteenth century under Catherine II. Over two million Jews left Russia between 1881 and 1914, most headed for the New World. Some Jewish immigrants found their way to France, and some enrolled in the art academies that catered to these young would-be artists. Most Jewish immigrants arriving in Paris settled on the Right Bank, in the Marais district that became known as the Pletzl of Paris. The artists, however, did not join their coreligionists in the Marais or in Belleville, but instead gravitated to the new bohemia of Montparnasse. By the 1920s, hundreds of Jewish painters and sculptors had studios near the boulevard Montparnasse and its famous cafes, La Rotonde, Le Dôme, and La Coupole.1 Of all the Jewish artists of the École de Paris, the largely foreign-born group of artists working in the Left Bank Parisian neighborhood of Montparnasse from the 1910s to the 1930s, Chaim Soutine (1893–1943) was the most original, most sui generis, and most difficult for French critics to accept. Consider for a moment the nearly unhinged commentary of Maurice Raynal (1884–1954), esteemed French critic and author of the 1928 book Modern French Painters: The art of Soutine is the expression of a kind of Jewish mysticism through appallingly violent detonations of color. His work is a pictorial cataclysm, comparable in its exasperated vision to the reckless frenzies of martyrs and heroes . . . This art is the very antithesis of French tradition . . . It defies all measure and control . . . All those distorted, devastated . . . landscapes, all of the appalling, inhuman figures, treated in a stew of unheard-of colors, must be regarded as the strange ebullition of an elementary Jewish mentality that, weary of the yoke of its rigorous Talmud, has kicked over the Tables of the Law, liberating an unbridled temperament.2 332

Jewish Expressionists in France

Raynal mixes the strongest terms he can find with repeated allusions to Soutine’s Jewishness. No one ever wrote of Soutine’s fellow Jewish painters Jules Pascin or Moïse Kisling in this way, or of Amedeo Modigliani after his death and apotheosis. Though Soutine never painted Jewish themes, and rarely even painted his fellow Jews, critics always inferred his Jewish angst; one even suggested that his work “prefigured the Holocaust.”3 Soutine demonstrated that an artist could entirely eschew his past and his native heritage, at least in terms of subject, and through style alone convey his inner psyche and cultural underpinnings. It is worth underscoring that Maurice Raynal was not some marginal anti-Semitic crank or defender of Beaux Arts traditions. Born in the same year as Modigliani, he was an ardent defender of cubism; Juan Gris painted his portrait in cubist style in 1911. He published major studies of modern French art both before and after the Second World War. Given his hostile response to Soutine, Raynal would probably have been surprised to learn that sixty years after his death a large volume called Expressionism in Germany and France: From Van Gogh to Kandinsky was published in conjunction with a major exhibition that traveled from Zurich to Los Angeles and on to Montreal in 2014.4 This exhibition foregrounded the international foundations of expressionist art in the decade before the First World War and argued that expressionism was perceived as uniquely German only after the war. Though key cubists, including Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris, were foreigners, cubism was able to be assimilated into a French tradition that prized analytical rigor and logic and could be traced to an unimpeachably French source in Paul Cézanne. Soutine represented the opposite spirit: deformation in the service of subjective emotion. It was easy to ascribe this sense of alterity to his Jewish heritage. If expressionism could not in this case be categorized as German, then it must be Jewish. In tracing expressionism among the Jewish artists working in Paris, Chaim Soutine’s art of the interwar period is the logical place to start. If his artistic style was best compared to contemporary Germanic expressionists such as Oskar Kokoschka and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Soutine did share one characteristic with Modigliani and Pascin (aside from a religious affiliation): the tendency for writers to romanticize and mythicize him. Soutine came packaged with a story line, that of the impoverished child of the shtetl who, despite his success during the boom years of the 1920s, was never able to shake off his deprived upbringing.5 Those origins did in fact contrast with many of the Jewish immigrant artists who left bourgeois families in Poland, Lithuania, and Russia to become artists in Paris. Recounting this legend of deprivation proved irresistible. Soutine’s father was not even a tailor but rather a mender of used clothing, and thus at the bottom of the social hierarchy, who nonetheless had to support a family that included eleven children. Young Chaim was able to attend art school with the 25 rubles he received as compensation for getting beaten up for sketching another boy’s father, a story meant to show not only his poverty but the degree to which art was anathema in Ashkenazi culture. The art historian Maurice Tuchman argued that the distrust of the visual in Jewish culture led to the belief that pregnant women were not to look at anything that might harm their unborn child for fear of the evil eye.6 Soutine himself allegedly adopted a furtive manner in an attempt to avoid being seen, and avoided looking people in the eye. In striking contrast to Modigliani, Pascin, and Kisling, Soutine’s oeuvre contains only one nude, done late in his career in the 1930s, marking the limits of his assimilation into French culture. Soutine’s poverty lasted for his first thirty years, and he was infamous for his poor hygiene. For most of this time, he maintained a studio in La Ruche, where he had arrived in July 1913. During the war, he worked first as a laborer, and later at the Renault factory. His fortunes improved when Leopold Zborowski took him under his wing and sent him to Cagnes-sur-Mer, in 1918, and then to the French Pyrenean town of Céret, where he resided until returning to Paris at the end of 1920. Dr. Albert Barnes arrived in Paris from Philadelphia two years later, 333

Richard D. Sonn

and when Zborowski showed him the landscapes Soutine had done at Céret, Barnes exclaimed, “this is the genius I have sought for many years.”7 Barnes bought dozens of canvases for between $15 and $30 each (he also bought several works by Modigliani, who had died in 1920, paying considerably higher prices). Barnes was not the last to compare Soutine to Vincent van Gogh, and in fact judged that Soutine would surpass Van Gogh. If this was mistaken, it was true that in terms of passion and wildness Soutine’s landscapes outdid Van Gogh’s. Soutine’s colors were no more vivid than the Dutch artist’s, but his use of thick impasto exceeded Van Gogh’s and, perhaps because of the steep inclines of the Pyrenees, his houses and trees often appeared to be collapsing. Above all, Barnes must have perceived that in Soutine’s very conventional subjects, landscapes, and portraits, the artist’s emotions always dominated the representation of reality, and did so in a manner more extreme than even Van Gogh had done. Soutine’s landscapes of Céret and Cagnes-sur-Mer approached abstraction, but were nothing like the calm, analytical works of the cubists. The most descriptive term that comes to mind is anguish. One learns little about Céret but much about Soutine. Two works that Barnes purchased, one a landscape and the other a portrait, make this point. Winding Road, near Gréolières (Plate 21) and Praying Man, both painted around 1921, are studies in interiority. When Soutine’s friend Jacques Lipchitz sculpted the head of Gertrude Stein in 1920, he retreated from cubism to make her features recognizable. At this early stage of his career, at least, it is impossible to imagine Soutine doing something similar for the sake of intelligibility. Albert Barnes made Soutine’s name; his prices increased dramatically and he began to dress and live more modishly. Yet the legend of the disheveled immigrant artist was perpetuated by the Lithuanian Jewish artist Neemija Arbitblatas (1908–1999; also Arbit Blatas), who arrived in Paris in 1926 during Soutine’s heyday.8 Arbit Blatas reported in his memoir that when he visited Soutine’s studio in the early 1930s it was the most chaotic of any he had seen—and he was used to painterly disorder. He saw a bathtub filled with clothes and shoes, making it appear that Soutine never bathed. His pockets were filled with cigarettes, including the American brand Lucky Strikes, testament to his newfound prosperity. They spoke in Russian and fractured French; Arbit Blatas noted that Soutine had left Lithuania before its independence and thus had never felt the need to learn the official language. Soutine posed for him in 1939 wearing hat and coat, hands always jammed into his pockets. Arbit Blatas also commented that Soutine longed to visit the Rue des Rosiers in the Marais and eat pickled herring, a traditional Jewish food that his ulcers made it hard for him to digest. Though it would stand to reason that immigrant Jewish artists living in Montparnasse would frequent Right Bank Parisian Jewish neighborhoods, there is little evidence of them doing so.9 Unlike many of his peers who on arriving in France became Marc, Jacques, and Jules, Soutine remained Chaim. He never painted images of the shtetl he left behind, but aspects of the shtetl never left him. If Soutine’s art is reminiscent of Van Gogh, arguably the first expressionist, one can also look forward to Soutine’s impact on later artists, notably abstract expressionists such as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Jean Dubuffet, and Francis Bacon.10 This positions Soutine as a forerunner of some of the most important painters of the twentieth century, for whom the process of painting was integral to their art. Soutine was an action painter avant la lettre, who frequently damaged his canvases by attacking them with his brushes and palette knife and destroyed those with which he was unsatisfied (Zborowski sometimes intervened to save paintings from his wrath). He also damaged his canvases by stacking them on top of each other. His patron of the 1930s, Madeleine Castaing, wrote, “when inspired he would paint in a frenzy, using up to forty brushes that he tossed about wildly and discarded on the spot.”11 If this accurately described the mature Soutine when his painting was relatively controlled, he must have been even more frenetic at the height of his expressionist phase. 334

Jewish Expressionists in France

The myth of Soutine’s anguish and awkwardness obscures the artist’s appreciation of the great masters of realist art that he saw in the Louvre. He admired Courbet and especially Rembrandt. Many Jewish artists saw Rembrandt as a predecessor, a quasi-Jew who portrayed sympathetically the residents of the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam among whom he lived in the seventeenth century. Soutine traveled to Amsterdam to view Rembrandt’s works numerous times. The year after his death, during the Second World War, his friend Henri Sérouya paid tribute to him in an article titled “Rembrandt’s Successor: Soutine,” which appeared in an underground proresistance newspaper.12 It was in imitation of Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox, in the Louvre, and not from some atavistic desire to strip away the veneer of civilization and arrive at raw nature, that he hung a beef carcass in his studio in 1925. On the other hand, Soutine admired the way it changed color as it hung there day after day, and did not seem perturbed by the increasingly pungent smell. He did reportedly make the metaphorically freighted statement, “In the body of a woman, Courbet was able to express the atmosphere of Paris—I want to show Paris in the carcass of an ox.”13 Perhaps Soutine was aware of the performance-art quality of his act, which led to the neighbors protesting vociferously and calling the police. Soutine’s respect for the traditions of Western art and his penchant for realism reflect a degree of assimilation as well as the difficulty of classifying him as an expressionist, a category he might have rejected. The archnaturalist writer and proponent of impressionism, Émile Zola, defined art as “a bit of nature seen through a temperament,”14 which rather neatly defines Soutine’s approach to empirical reality. Soutine’s realism underscores how he filtered the external world through his own personality and his modernist sensibility: “reality” was always there, and was even enhanced by his vibrant colors and use of impasto. The same fidelity to reality held true for nearly all of the Jewish artists working in Paris before 1940. Those who turned to pure abstraction did so only after 1945. It is worth underscoring this fact, since critics such as Clement Greenberg argue that Jewish modernism was aniconic and abstract, reflecting the religious bias against graven images.15 American Jewish artists working in postwar abstract expressionism such as Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Barnett Newman are cited “not because images are forbidden, but because the absolute cannot be rendered in an image. It is a purely abstract conception, imageless, like the Jewish God.”16 Yet if one compares their works, or those of Jackson Pollock, allegedly a disciple of Soutine, one sees the distance between expressionism and abstract expressionism. Soutine and his fellow artists expressed a hunger for the world unsatisfied by the ascetic transcendentalism of a Rothko. This argument can be stated even more forcibly: that modernism can be equated with a Jewish opposition to pagan idolatry. In The Artless Jew, Kalman Bland suggests that aniconism was due more to Kant, Hegel, and German Jewish idealists who emphasized Judaism’s universalistic ethical ethos than it was to Jewish fear of idolatry.17 Yet the first artist to banish the real world entirely from his art, Kazimir Malevich, not only was not Jewish but also succeeded in evicting Marc Chagall from his post as art commissar in Vitebsk in the years following the Russian Revolution. The Suprematist black square floated over Vitebsk instead of Chagall’s wandering Jews (the conflict is spotlighted in a 2014 full-length Russian film called ChagallMalevich). The Jews of Chagall and Soutine’s generation mostly felt liberated by their contact with French art and its comfortable relationship to their world. This adherence to representation may have diminished their avant-gardism in the era of nihilist Dada and irrational surrealism, but the Jewish artists of Paris were nonetheless modernists. The central figure of Parisian modernism, Pablo Picasso, remained representational as well. Though peintre maudit was a familiar category in which the French might place Soutine, it primarily romanticized suffering. In the Jewish case, it suggested that Soutine was maudit, cursed, because the very wish to become an artist meant he must transgress his culture of origin. From Soutine’s own perspective, he was not cursed but fortunate to escape from his 335

Richard D. Sonn

aniconic background and enabled to express his inner sensibility. Like most of his fellow Jews, he was labeled an expressionist, which also signified a kind of naiveté, the unrepressed expression of subjectivity. Chagall cultivated this naiveté in his overt primitivism and shared with Soutine a lack of interest in the theories that motivated other artists to pursue cubism or neoclassicism. Soutine’s naiveté was more instinctual and violent than Chagall’s and reflected his sense of isolation. Unlike Chagall, he never married, was never comfortable in the world, and was never nostalgic about his origins. “Soutine’s shudder” of subjectivity marked the ghetto Jew who, though freed from the limitations of his birth could never psychologically overcome those origins.18 Despite these differences, the French emphasized the Jewish artists’ similarities. In a show in 1928, Soutine was grouped alongside Chagall, Modigliani, Kisling, and such non-Jewish artists as Georges Rouault, Maurice de Vlaminck, and Marcel Gromaire as French expressionists. In 1935, he was included along with Chagall, Modigliani, Pascin, and Utrillo and Rousseau in an exhibition pointedly called Instinctive Painters: Birth of Expressionism.19 Labeling artists as expressionists might have served to distance them from the French mainstream, but the fact that native-born artists were included as well as immigrants suggests that French expressionism was a conceivable category. A Jewish artist left out of the shows cited above and yet one who better deserved to be labeled an expressionist was Mané-Katz (1894–1962). Soutine was born in 1893, Emmanuel “Mané-Katz” a year later; both arrived in Paris in 1913, and they worked together in Cormon’s studio during their first year in Paris before the outbreak of the war. Both were also realists who employed an expressionist style, and both matured as artists in the years after the First World War, being too young to fully experience the prewar avant-garde (Fernand Cormon’s reputation was based on his having taught Toulouse-Lautrec and Van Gogh, but he specialized in historical “costume” pictures).20 In 1914, their paths diverged, and though both had brilliant careers in interwar Paris, Soutine remained the dour loner and Mané-Katz the sunny artist who embraced his origins and who remains today the most important portrayer of Jewish traditions after Chagall. Emmanuel Katz, who went by Mané-Katz (reminiscent of Emmanuel Radnitsky becoming Man Ray; perhaps a name meaning “God is with us” was too heavy to bear), came to Paris from Ukraine, where he had briefly attended art school in Kiev. His very short stature may have played a role in determining his future, as he was refused entry into the French Foreign Legion due to his height when he volunteered in 1914. He traveled to London, then back to Russia and his native town of Kremenchug, where his father served as sacristan (schamesh) in the synagogue, assisting the rabbi. In fact, when he arrived in Paris, Mané-Katz was still wearing traditional Jewish sidelocks. He arrived knowing two sentences in French, “I don’t understand” and “I want to eat.”21 After the revolution of 1917 enfranchised the Jews, Mané-Katz was named professor of art at Kharkov. In this way, his career ran parallel to that of Marc Chagall, whom the revolution made an art teacher in his home town of Vitebsk. Both also experienced the disruptions of civil war, though these were likely worse in Mané-Katz’s case, as Ukraine witnessed terrible pogroms against the Jews. In any case, he lost all of his art students and returned to Paris in 1921, two years before Chagall.22 It is inevitable that Mané-Katz would be compared with Chagall since they were the two French-based artists to dwell on images drawn from the “old country” from which they both came. They are the two preeminent painters of the Jewish diaspora, who arrived on the artistic scene at a critical juncture, able to accurately depict as well as imagine Jewish life in the shtetl as it existed before the Russian Revolution and the abolition of the Pale of Settlement, and able to portray that experience in a modernist idiom. A large number of Polish artists had been depicting Polish Jews at least since the eighteenth century.23 With Chagall and Mané-Katz, Jews 336

Jewish Expressionists in France

participated in their own representation. Chagall was better at situating his figures in their surroundings, depicting villages, farm animals, and the accoutrements of life in the shtetl (though in fact his native town of Vitebsk was a city rather than a small town). Because he was more a realist than a fantasist like Chagall, Mané-Katz was better at portraying the range of Jewish types who inhabited that world. Still, there is considerable overlap in their subject matter, if not in their styles. Mané-Katz was not solely a painter of scenes of Russian Jewish life; he also painted nudes, still lifes, landscapes, and portraits, as, for example, portraits of the Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg in 1922 and the French writer Paul Valéry in 1937.24 In Paris, the Yiddish writer Lupus Blumenfeld encouraged him to become the Yiddish painter of the diaspora, perhaps in part because he knew Mané-Katz had a stronger religious upbringing than did Chagall, having studied Hebrew in a rabbinical school from the age of four.25 One area that inevitably overlaps in the art of Marc Chagall and Mané-Katz, and for that matter, of earlier Polish artists, lies in the depiction of Jewish musicians. Judging from the frequency of the theme among nineteenth-century Polish artists, Jewish musicality was well known. Instruments shown include violins, tsimbls (a kind of hammered dulcimer), cellos, drums, and horns, with violins predominant.26 From the mid-1920s, Mané-Katz painted traveling Jewish musicians; in 1927, for example, he painted musicians playing a violin, trombone, and bass in a flat, simplified style. Very often he showed musicians performing for a wedding celebration, a classic use of klezmer music of the Ashkenazi Jews. These paintings would often include the bride and groom, sometimes under the huppah or wedding canopy. Marriages, rabbis, and musicians were among his commonest subjects. It is difficult to imagine Mané-Katz painting an abstract instrument lying on a table in the manner of Georges Braque; he always painted music-making and placed it in a cultural context. It was not the form of the instrument that intrigued him, but rather the auditory environment in which he was raised. By contrast, Chagall’s famous violinists are placed in physical context, standing on a roof in a Russian village setting, or even transmuting into a cow-headed harlequin as in the 1950–1952 work Dance, but they are not shown performing at a Jewish wedding. The main instruments Chagall painted were violins and cellos, and it is as unlikely for Mané-Katz to indulge in the phantasmagoria of a cow playing a violin as it is for Chagall realistically to portray a group of klezmer musicians. As early as November 1924, the artistic editor of the Jewish journal L’Univers Israélite (The Israelite Universe) reported on a show that Mané-Katz had at the Galerie Percier. Jacques Biélinky, himself a Russian émigré from Vitebsk who had arrived in France in 1909, traced Mané-Katz’s life and career, asking, “who is this young artist, so little, appearing so juvenile, and whose labor and talent have already acquired a great renown?” The critic wrote that he had studied at a yeshiva until 1909, when at age fifteen he left for art school in Vilnius. Lacking money to continue, he returned home, and then spent a year at Kiev. The Parisian press referred to his “Slavic soul”; Biélinky remonstrated, and wrote: A specifically Jewish sentiment dominates his canvases. Very typical are his Young Boys, his Old Men, his Hassidim, it is Jewish and archaic Poland. His Sabbatai Zevi is a bold work and even a little disconcerting. His pastels are fine and tender. His portraits (Rabbi Liber and others) carry the personal cachet of the artist. A visit to that show will be a revelation for many of our coreligionists.27 Biélinky reported on many of the Jewish artists working in Paris, but none besides Chagall were so unequivocally committed to Jewish art. At the Salon d’Automne of 1924, Biélinky counted fifty-eight Jewish artists showing 145 works; at the 1929 Salon des Indépendants, the other art show that attracted many Jews, Biélinky counted 106 Jews out of 357 artists, of whom one-third 337

Richard D. Sonn

Figure 17.1  Mané-Katz, Russian Shtetl, 1931, oil on canvas, 65 × 81.7 cm, Jewish Museum, New York.  2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

were French Jews. The remaining seventy-one Jewish artists from abroad included thirty-seven Russians, fourteen Poles, six Hungarians, three Americans (probably born in Russia), two Romanians, and three from Palestine. At the Salon des Tuileries in 1930, he counted eightytwo Jewish artists contributing 193 works out of a total of 2,944. Biélinky gave these numbers in part to reassure critics who feared a Jewish invasion of the arts.28 The work chosen for this volume to illustrate Mané-Katz’s style, the 1931 oil painting Russian Shtetl, both is and is not typical of his work (Figure 17.1). On the one hand, it highlights the world known to the artist in his youth, yet its dark colors and somber mood are markedly different from the many joyful portrayals of wedding musicians. This painting would have conformed to French critics’ assumptions about Jewish expressionism, i.e., it reflected anguish and suffering (unlike French fauvism, which was perceived as being joyful). Mané-Katz first visited Palestine in 1928 and returned in 1935 and 1937; Chagall made the trip in 1931. Mané-Katz was naturalized as a French citizen in 1927, Chagall not until a decade later. Both artists became refugees themselves in 1940, and both spent the Second World War in New York and then returned to France after the war. Back in Paris, Mané-Katz’s studio was filled with Jewish artifacts plus the instruments played by “his” musicians: double bass, violin, trombone, etc.29 He was also an accomplished sculptor, creating such Judaica as Moses holding the tablets of the law aloft, and David battling Goliath, thus underscoring that despite his Orthodox origins he had no inhibitions about creating graven images. Beginning in 1948, Mané-Katz spent part of every year in Israel, but always returned to Paris. That year was the 338

Jewish Expressionists in France

Jewish war for independence, and the Israeli public was moved that he brought so many of his paintings to Israel, risking them as the Jewish state fought to survive. He died in Tel Aviv in 1962, and a Mané-Katz Museum was opened in the artists’ former home in Haifa to celebrate the artist and his works portraying the world of the Jewish diaspora. The fauves, particularly André Derain, stylistically influenced Mané-Katz. The style he evolved in the 1920s after returning to Paris could be called expressionist, as can the style that the French designated as fauvist. Seeing fauvism as merely a French variant of expressionism, with overt counterparts among German artists in the contemporaneous Brücke and the Blaue Reiter movements, would have gone a long way to internationalize the discourse regarding modernism, and allowed critics to see Soutine and the other Jewish expressionists as less alien to French tradition. On the other hand, an artist such as Mané-Katz would have confirmed the attitude of a critic like Adolphe Basler, himself a Polish-Jewish immigrant who advocated for the complete assimilation of foreign-born Jewish artists into the French tradition and was consequently hostile to those who did not simply absorb French styles. In 1926, before Mané-Katz ever traveled to Palestine, Basler was already eager to label some of the Jewish artists of the École de Paris with a bad pun: Express-Sionistes (Express-Zionists).30 Most of the young artists were probably not ardent Zionists; Basler more likely intended to conflate expressionism and Jewishness in one portmanteau term. At the end of the Second World War, another French critic made a similar assumption. In 1945, Bernard Dorival reduced the École de Paris to Jewish expressionists marked by a spirit of pessimism and intellectualism, despair and disquietude—a generalization which scarcely fit artists such as Kisling or Chagall.31 This assumption reveals a tendency to essentialize Jewish artists as given to suffering and interiority, hence likely, like Soutine, to resort to expressionism—perhaps an inevitable conclusion coming just after the Holocaust.

Other Expressionists There were many talented Jewish immigrant artists who fell into this category. Many of them have been forgotten, overshadowed by Soutine. One of those who was once close to Soutine and resented his success was Pinchus Krémègne (1890–1981), who was three years older than Soutine and also attended art school in Vilnius. He came to Paris in 1912 and encouraged Soutine to do the same, which he did the following year. Both had studios in the unheated, poorly lit warren known as La Ruche. Like Modigliani, Krémègne initially considered himself a sculptor, but during the war he switched to painting, also like Modigliani. He also visited the Pyrenees town of Céret the year before Soutine got there, in 1918, and that year did a vibrant landscape showing strong rhythmic rooftops and sky. It is not hard to see why he resented being pushed into the shadows by Soutine’s celebrity a few years later. Perhaps if Albert Barnes had “discovered” Krémègne in 1922, the story would have turned out differently, but in truth Krémègne was more balanced between cubist formal rigor and expressionist dynamism than was Soutine, making his canvases more subtle and less radical. One of his biographers says he was at the center of the multiple tendencies of modern art and made a synthesis of them.32 Some of his early works during the war have both symbolist and expressionist tendencies, much as did the prewar paintings of Leopold Gottlieb and Modigliani. Symbolist dreaminess tended to drop away, leaving a more raw expressionism. He was finally able to leave La Ruche in 1927, which was a good thing since by that time he was supporting a wife and a son. His wife was Swedish and had worked as a governess for the Nobel family.33 In 1939, he sent the two of them to Sweden but strangely chose to remain in France. He survived the war as did most of those who remained in France by moving to the south, in his case to Corrèze. Like most of these artists, he painted the usual range of subjects, and was particularly skilled in rendering flesh tones, as in 339

Richard D. Sonn

Nude from the Back, of 1923. He was able to convey both solidity and color. Many of his paintings feature musical instruments, including violins and saxophones. In 1960, Krémègne built a small house in Céret and lived there as well as in Paris for twenty years, until his death at ninetyone. A decade later, on the centenary of his birth, the Musée d’art moderne of Céret presented sixty of his canvases. In striking contrast to Pascin the bon vivant, Krémègne told Arbit Blatas that “it is not the man which is of interest, it is the work.”34 Arbit Blatas praised the tranquility and balance of his landscapes and still lives; then when he came to Krémègne’s portraits he became more forceful, describing them as poignant work, pierced by profound psychological observation. Work which evokes the existence of the poor, which recalls to us the moving painting of an Israel . . . The art of Krémègne is all an intense vibration of poetry, all an explosion of humanity, and it awakens some profound resonance.35 This praise strikes a familiar chord, sounding almost too typical a description of the Jewish artist more interested in representing psychological depth than in surface decoration. The third of the “three magi” from Vilnius was Michel Kikoïne (1892–1968), a year older than Soutine and a close friend in their youth. Both Soutine and Krémègne have overshadowed this talented painter, who spent fifteen years living in poverty at La Ruche before achieving some artistic success. During the First World War, he joined the auxiliary corps and dug trenches; he became a French citizen in 1924. Originally from Belorussia, he was the son of a banker, which may explain why his disposition was sweeter and less bitter than that of Soutine. Unlike Soutine, he enjoyed life, and infused his art with Jewish mysticism. He married and had a family, again unlike Soutine, and was eventually able to buy a summer home in Burgundy. Conscious of his relation to his adopted country, he said, “because we Jews are different, we do not have traditions of painting such as the Italians, Spanish or French do, we must assimilate and appropriate them to our own characteristic outlook.”36 This suggests his equanimity in fusing his Litvak origins with French style. In 2004, the University of Tel Aviv dedicated a wing of an art gallery at the University in Tel Aviv to his memory, and his daughter contributed many of his works to the gallery. Among the many artists of the École de Paris, one stands out to exemplify the remarkable role that Jews played in developing European modernism. Isaac Grünewald was a Swedish Jew who arrived in Paris in 1908. He wrote that one day at Café Versailles I told my Swedish comrades about my experience at the Salon d’Automne, where suddenly I stood in front of a wall that sang, no screamed, color and radiated light, something completely new and ruthless in its unbridled freedom.37 This experience led him to study at Matisse’s academy, which attracted mostly foreign art students. He got to know the poets André Salmon, Max Jacob, and Guillaume Apollinaire, and was part of the German-Scandinavian set that frequented the Café du Dôme in Montparnasse, along with Pascin.38 His own brilliant palette shows the fauvist influence, which never left him. He met Sigrid Hjertén in 1909, convinced her to join him to study painting in Paris, and married her in 1911. They returned to Stockholm before the war and Grünewald moved back and forth between France and Sweden in the interwar years. His impact on his home country, however, was perhaps unparalleled, since he played the central role in introducing Parisian modernism to Sweden (see Chapter 10). Dark complexioned and very Jewish in appearance with dark wavy hair, he must have stood out in Sweden, where he became the number one target of anti-Semitism from the 340

Jewish Expressionists in France

time he first showed his expressionist canvases in 1910 and through the 1920s. By the 1930s, he had become professor at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts; in 1941, he opened his own art school before dying in a plane crash in 1946. His grandson Bernard Grünewald produced a book about him; the works included there show that he was a world-class modernist who remains little known outside his country of origin.39 One could of course cite many more Jews who studied in Paris for a few years and returned to their native countries; the American Max Weber comes to mind as a contemporary of Grünewald. But Grünewald did return to France, executing an excellent portrait of the critic Adolphe Basler in 1927 and still painting landscapes at Collioure on the Mediterranean in 1933. That Grünewald returned home while most of the Polish and Russian-born Jewish artists stayed in France underscores the difference between being a willing expatriate and an immigrant who felt liberated in France compared to his more hostile homeland. Grünewald did experience some anti-Semitic reaction in Sweden, but it was not enough to hinder his career there.

Soutine’s Female Counterpart Though these immigrant artists became well known in the interwar era (Grünewald before that), they all arrived in Montparnasse before the war, with the exception of Arbit Blatas, who was born in 1908. Many more immigrant Jews arrived in Paris in the 1920s, heyday of the Montparnasse scene; some became significant artists, yet none of those who arrived in Montparnasse for the first time after the war achieved the fame that came to Chagall, Soutine, Modigliani, Pascin, and a few others. The generation born in the 1880s and early 1890s (Mané-Katz was the youngest, born in 1894) alone attained critical and commercial success. There is one significant exception among the immigrant Jewish artists of Paris, who was born in the 1870s and arrived in France from her native Poland in 1901, earlier than almost any other artist of her cohort. She became known as Mela Muter (1876–1967); when she arrived in Paris she was already twenty-five years old, married with a child, and determined to make her artistic mark. Though not well remembered today, she is arguably the most important Jewish expressionist based in Paris after Chaim Soutine. She has the additional distinction of being called “the first professional Jewish woman painter in Poland.”40 Muter was a decade older than most of the other immigrant artists, and arrived in France a decade before Chagall, in 1901. By 1911, when Chagall arrived in Paris, she had a studio on the boulevard Montparnasse. Critics such as Florent Fels later compared her style to that of Van Gogh, as many would do for Soutine. Perhaps for biographical reasons she is less well known than Chana Orloff or Sonia Delaunay-Terk, and if she was less stylistically radical than Delaunay-Terk, she was perhaps more typical of the artists of the École de Paris. Maria Melania Mutermilch, née Klingsland, came from a prosperous, assimilated Jewish family from Warsaw. After taking private art lessons, she enrolled in the School of Drawing and Painting for Women, which had opened in Warsaw in 1892. That same year, 1899, she married the writer, critic, and socialist Michał Mutermilch, who was also Jewish. She bore her only child in 1900, and the following year they decided to move to France. She took art lessons at the Académie Colarossi in Montparnasse, which was known for being open to women and provided equal access to nude models of both sexes. Other artists who later studied there were Pascin, Modigliani, his model and mistress Jeanne Hébuterne, and Lipchitz. In the summer of 1901, Mela first visited Concarneau, Brittany, where she would return many times and be inspired by the people, landscape, and the art school of Pont-Aven. Spending the summer in Brittany does not seem unusual, especially in the wake of Paul Gauguin, Paul Sérusier, and many other late nineteenth-century artists who had made southwest Brittany famous. On the other hand, to leave Paris on vacation one’s first year there was very unusual 341

Richard D. Sonn

for immigrant Jewish artists, for most of whom reaching Paris was a sufficient goal. Most arrived with few funds and little French, and the great majority were single men. Muter arrived with a husband and infant son in tow, and with the resources and interest to decamp from Paris for the countryside, though Concarneau was considerably larger than Pont-Aven. She returned to the region often, especially between 1905 and 1911. Though she was capable of painting landscapes, it was always portraiture that most interested her, which suggests that she had the means to pay models to pose for her. A 1906 work by Muter called Sad Country shows a group of Breton peasants waiting for the men to return from a fishing trip, portrayed sympathetically but still realistically. If her style did not become expressionist until several years later, when she layered her paint and showed distinct brushstrokes, she already displayed the brooding, melancholy quality that characterized nearly all of her work.41 Muter’s prewar nostalgia for the archaic, rural, and peasant Brittany and Spain, and her appreciation of avant-garde forebears such as Gauguin, separate her from slightly later Jewish immigrant artists who were attracted unambiguously by Paris modernity. Muter’s Warsaw sophistication led her to Concarneau; artists from Vitebsk and Vilna were unlikely to seek out peasants and fishermen in preference to the Eiffel Tower. The artist began calling herself Mela Muter in 1907 and showed in many of the major art salons, including consistently at the Salon d’Automne from 1905 on (she was invited to sit on the salon jury in 1921). She featured in a solo show in Warsaw as early as 1907, only the second such show by a female artist.42 She received a one-woman show in Barcelona in 1911, and the following year exhibited at the same gallery with fellow Polish artists; her husband wrote the catalogue. In the three years before the First World War, she traveled frequently to Spain and was fascinated by the landscape as well as the painting of Goya and El Greco. In 1913, she met Diego Rivera there and painted his portrait. By the decade before the war, her style became recognizably expressionist in her two major genres of landscape and portrait painting. She was best known for her pictures of children and the aged as well as many mothers and children. She described one early painting, Fruits of Pain (1900–1907), as inspired by an old village woman, with almost sculpted features, carved out by pain. I did not know her life, but looking at this face destroyed by tears, I could not resist repeating in my soul, “this is the mature fruit of pain.”43 Muter’s fascination with peasants and the poor is reminiscent of Camille Pissarro and had similar leftist political roots, though Pissarro was an anarchist and Muter a socialist. The Jewish impressionist was still alive when Muter arrived in France, in fact he was still painting; Pissarro did his last self-portrait in 1903, not long before his death at seventy-three. Paul Gauguin had recognized Pissarro as his master; they only broke around 1885 when Pissarro moved toward neo­ impressionism, which did not appeal to Gauguin. The next year, in June 1886, Gauguin first came to Pont-Aven, soon attracting his own followers, and began diverging from impressionist and neoimpressionist style and ideas.44 Mela Muter did not have to choose sides in these fin de siècle quarrels, and in fact added another artistic source of inspiration in Vincent van Gogh. Though Van Gogh never visited Brittany, the influence of all three artists can be seen in her work. Literary as well as artistic influences on Mela Muter suggest her affinity for traits usually identified as expressionist. She admitted to being inspired by Dostoyevsky’s sympathy for the downtrodden. It has been argued that Muter was stereotyped as Dostoevskian because of her Eastern Jewish heritage; French critics even expected her to resemble her paintings and were surprised to find her an attractive woman.45 At the end of her life, she admitted, “there is no doubt that feelings of certain melancholy, certain sufferings and sadness are closer to me than elegance and happiness,” and cited Dostoyevsky as the literary analogue to her art.46 Her awareness of 342

Jewish Expressionists in France

suffering was not due to pogroms, given her privileged Warsaw background, but rather was due to leftist politics and possibly to a specifically feminine sensibility. It was also a Jewish sensibility insofar as it empathized with the suffering poor and registered the marks of time on their weathered, worn flesh. If classical and Latin art was meant to be idealized and timeless, Jewish art was the opposite, which is why interwar critics were too ready to stereotype Muter’s art as displaying a ghetto sympathy born of suffering. Muter’s father died in 1922; her only son in 1924. The artist converted to Catholicism in 1923 and became a French citizen in 1927. Her socialism makes conversion seems like a strange choice and may have registered her distress at the loss of so many people close to her. It was also a politically wrought period in that her Polish homeland had become independent again after 130 years, and Muter was still a Polish citizen. On the other hand, one can see a Catholic sensibility emerging in works such as the 1916 Mother and Child with Haloes, which shows a non-idealized mother and child in contemporary dress in an urban scene, both with small yellow haloes suggesting the Madonna and child. In 1924, the year she lost her tubercular son, she did another mother and baby painting, this one called Maternity, also featuring an older mother, with the mother’s breasts exposed and the baby naked in her lap, now lacking haloes. Maternity was painted from a higher vantage point, the mother’s worn, solemn face perfectly foreshortened.47 Testifying to her considerable status, in the 1930s the Société des Femmes Artistes Modernes (Society of Modern Women Artists) invited her to join them, and she showed with them regularly. In 1937, she refused consideration as a candidate for the Legion of Honor.48 Her interwar art mixed evocations of working-class women with society portraits of many well-known people, including musicians such as Arthur Honegger, Maurice Ravel, and Erik Satie, and her fellow female Jewish artist Chana Orloff. She painted the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, with whom she shared a friendship and correspondence, not long before his death in 1926. Like Van Gogh, she also painted several unsmiling self-portraits, standing in front of her easel or holding her brushes. In Mela Muter, we see a modernist artist whose considerable career has become obscured because she was not identified with a particular movement and was not avant-garde, yet was closely involved in the artistic and political movements of her time. Her position as a female artist may also have contributed to her neglect relative to the best-known Jewish male artists, but so might her uncompromising seriousness. There is no fantasy like that employed by Chagall, no sensuousness as in Pascin and Modigliani. The maternity theme was typed feminine even when rendered in a modernist idiom in the hands of artists of the caliber of Mary Cassatt or Mela Muter. Mela Muter was almost a generation older than Chaim Soutine and her distinctly expressionist style emerged a decade before his did. Both Muter and Soutine painted landscapes and portraits. Her stylistic influences are more clearly traced; Soutine appears more distinctly original: both the privileged Polish Jewess and the impoverished and solitary son of Smilovitchi were identified with a melancholy temperament that French critics identified as Slavic and Jewish.

Expressionist Sculpture Expressionism as has been discussed in this essay has two components: one stylistic, the other a matter of temperament. To a remarkable degree, one can observe a dramatic change in both components in the work of the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz (1891–1973) in the 1930s as a response to the rise of fascism in Germany. Lipchitz arrived in Paris at a young age from his native Lithuania in 1909. He remained in Paris during the First World War and made rapid strides in those years, emerging after the war arguably as the premier cubist sculptor. During the war years, he received a stipend from the dealer Léonce Rosenberg, and he maintained this style in works in stone and bronze well into the 1920s. Though he did experiment with forms that 343

Richard D. Sonn

diverged from cubism in the 1920s, the dramatic break in his style correlates with the rise of National Socialism in Europe. One can contrast, for example, his major piece Song of the Vowels (1931–1932) with the much smaller David and Goliath (1933). Song of the Vowels repeats a theme that characterized much of Lipchitz’ cubist work, that of music and musical instruments. It shows a highly abstracted female musician playing her harp, with musician and instrument fully integrated formally. The surface is smooth, the overall effect abstract and impassive. David and Goliath by contrast is rough and powerful; the giant Goliath is adorned with a swastika as he takes on the Jewish hero. This trend would culminate in the huge sculpture Lipchitz created for the 1937 International Exposition held in Paris. Prometheus Strangling the Vulture was both impossible to avoid and controversial. What it was not was subtle. Prometheus wore the Phrygian cap that signified proletarian revolution; the vulture embodied fascism. One might think this political art would have endeared Lipchitz to the France of the Popular Front era, but the sculpture was both too expressionist and visible to please some of the Parisian public. The mainstream newspaper Le Matin actually ran a campaign in 1938 to have the plaster piece removed from its public site and demolished. This was in fact accomplished, causing Lipchitz considerable bitterness. He later modified it and cast it in bronze (1943/1953), but not until he had left France for exile in the United States during the Second World War. It is true that in 1938, when the campaign against Lipchitz’ sculpture was waged, both the World’s Fair and the Popular Front were over. French public opinion favored appeasement with Germany and feared that the Jews, including those fleeing Nazi Germany, were likely to instigate another war. By favoring an expressionist style, Lipchitz had signaled his alien status vis-à-vis the sculptural mainstream of an Aristide Maillol, who had three rooms devoted to his serene classical nudes at the 1937 art show attached to the International Exposition.49 Maillol’s works were untroubled by political currents (and did not trouble the perpetrators of the National Revolution that collaborated with the Germans in the coming years). For that matter, Soutine also never overtly displayed any political or social themes in his art. It took the rise of Nazism for Lipchitz’ anguish to approach the angst which came naturally to Soutine, and which led to a recognizably expressionist style. Lipchitz’ pursuit of mythological themes to express the torment that Nazi anti-Semitism and aggression was causing the world did not cease with Prometheus. In 1938, he produced Rape of Europa II, one of a series of sculptures with this dramatic name. In the classical myth, Zeus, disguised as a bull, captures the nymph Europa and takes her to Crete; Lipchitz identified the bull with Hitler (Figure 17.2).50 Lipchitz merged the figures of Zeus and Europa in this version, so that they are hard to distinguish, implying that the fascist threat was ubiquitous and overwhelming. The next version of this sculpture, executed in American exile, showed Europa stabbing the bull, as if in evocation of wartime resistance. Lipchitz’ iconic title has been used to refer to the Nazis’ seizure of art works throughout Europe.51 The example of Lipchitz is not meant to be exhaustive in terms of Jewish sculptors working in Paris, but is particularly significant in underscoring that expressionism could still be viewed with alarm by French critics and the public, and that sculpture was viewed as more dangerous than easel painting when it was public and visible. The damage to Lipchitz’ pride and career was nothing compared to that of German and Austrian expressionists after they were condemned as degenerate by Hitler and Goebbels in 1937. A month after Lipchitz’ Prometheus sculpture was destroyed, in June 1938, the great German artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner killed himself. The Second World War started just over a year later, and with that, the heyday of Montparnasse ended, never to revive. The most international artists’ colony of all time was unable to withstand the savage assault of hyper-nationalism. When these events took place, Jacques Lipchitz had lived in France for nearly thirty years, and had carved out for himself a successful career as a sculptor. Yet when he turned from cubism 344

Jewish Expressionists in France

Figure 17.2  Jacques Lipchitz, Rape of Europa II, 1938, bronze, 38.7 × 58.7 × 31.9 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York, inv. no. 193.1942.  Estate of Jacques Lipchitz

to expressionism to express his anguish at the rise of Nazism, he faced hostility and found himself treated like an outsider in his adopted country. Chaim Soutine also found success in France, but French critics, including those who were themselves Jewish immigrants, like Adolphe Basler, saw in his vibrant art the expression of his alterity. Though he never painted scenes of the shtetl from whence he had come, critics invariably underscored his Jewishness, which they equated with angst. Both artists had certainly had reason to feel angst at the end of the 1930s. With the coming of another war, Jacques Lipchitz decamped for the United States, and, unlike Marc Chagall, who also fled to the United States, Lipchitz never returned to work in France after the war. Chaim Soutine remained in France during the war but had to flee German-occupied Paris. He moved from place to place with Marie-Berthe Aurenche, former wife of the surrealist painter Max Ernst, but finally returned to Paris in an ambulance in the summer of 1943 to seek treatment for a stomach ulcer. The operation failed and he died on August 9, 1943. He was fifty years old, and had lived in France for exactly thirty years. Pablo Picasso, who had remained in Paris, attended his funeral ceremony in Montparnasse Cemetery.52 Difficult as his last years were, one must feel that Soutine was lucky to escape deportation to Auschwitz. The Nazis sent to their deaths over a hundred other Jewish immigrant artists, including Otto Freundlich (1878–1943), whose 1912 sculpted head, Der Neue Mensch (The New Man), adorned the cover of the Nazis’ Degenerate Art catalogue. The collaborationist government of wartime France, based in Vichy, was much more eager to hand over foreignborn Jews to the Germans than native French Jews, so the artists of the École de Paris were especially vulnerable. Despite having lived in France for many years, Freundlich was unable to 345

Richard D. Sonn

obtain naturalization papers and equally unable to make it to the United States.53 The School of Paris revived in France after the war, at least in name, but it was no longer the cosmopolitan art scene it had been for the thirty years before the Second World War. For that matter, Paris itself would never regain its former status as artistic center of the world; it was supplanted by New York and another group of expressionists, now called abstract expressionists, in the postwar era. Once again, Jewish artists such as Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Adolph Gottlieb featured prominently in this movement, but that is another story.

Notes 1 Nadine Nieszawer et al., Artistes juifs et l’Ecole de Paris [Jewish Artists of the School of Paris] (Paris: Somogy, 2015), gives capsule biographies of 178 Jewish artists and sculptors, and estimates that over 500 Jews were painting and sculpting there in the 1920s. 2 Maurice Raynal, Anthologie de la Peinture en France [Anthology of Painting in France] (1927), quoted by Esti Dunow,“Rethinking Soutine,” in Chaim Soutine, Catalogue Raisonné, I (Cologne:Taschen Verlag, 1993), 58. Alfred Werner quotes the same passage from Raynal in Chaim Soutine (New York: Abrams, 1977), 28, 32. 3 Avram Kampf, Jewish Experience in the Art of the 20th Century (1975), quoted by Alfred Werner, Chaim Soutine (New York: Abrams, 1977), 16. 4 Timothy Benson, Expressionism in Germany and France: From Van Gogh to Kandinsky (Munich, London, New York: Prestel, 2014). 5 Maurice Tuchman, Chaim Soutine, Life and Work (Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1968), 14. For another account of Soutine’s impoverished background, see Alfred Werner, Soutine (New York: Abrams, 1977). Marevna Vorobëv, who knew him, wrote about Soutine in Life with the Painters of La Ruche, (New York: Macmillan, 1974). 6 Tuchman, Chaim Soutine, 14. 7 Antanas Andrijauskas, Litvak Art in the Context of the Ecole de Paris (Vilnius: Library of Vilnius Auction, 2008), 106–107. 8 See also chapter on Lithuania in this volume (Chapter 6). 9 Neemya Arbit Blatas, Portraits de Montparnasse (Paris: Ed. de l’Albaron, 1991), 39–54. 10 See Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow, The Impact of Chaim Soutine (1893–1943): de Kooning, Pollock, Dubuffet, Bacon (Cologne: Gallery Gmurzynska, 2002). In Expressionism in Germany and France, Benson argues that Van Gogh was the model for subsequent expressionists both in Germany and in France. 11 Ellen Pratt, “Soutine Beneath the Surface: A Technical Study of His Painting,” in An Expressionist in Paris: The Paintings of Chaim Soutine, ed. Norman Kleeblatt, Kenneth Silver, and Romy Golan (New York; Prestel, 1998), 122. 12 Romy Golan, “Blind Alley: Soutine’s Reception in France after World War II,” in An Expressionist in Paris, ed. Kleeblatt, Silver, and Golan, 68. 13 Werner, Soutine, 122. 14 Kenneth Silver, “Where Soutine Belongs: His Art and Critical Reception in Paris Between the Wars,” in An Expressionist in Paris, ed. Kleeblatt, Silver, and Golan, 21. 15 Louis Kaplan, “Reframing the Self-Criticism: Clement Greenberg’s ‘Modernist Painting’ in Light of Jewish Identity,” in Jewish Identity in Modern Art History, ed. Catherine Sousloff (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 192–195. 16 Avram Kampf, Jewish Experience in 20th-Century Art, quoted by Anthony Julius, Idolizing Pictures: Idolatry, Iconoclasm and Jewish Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000), 42. 17 Kalman Bland, The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 15, 16, 52. 18 Donald Kuspit, “Soutine’s Shudder: Jewish Naiveté?,” in An Expressionist in Paris, ed. Kleeblatt, Silver, and Golan, 77–86. 19 Kenneth Silver, “Where Soutine Belongs: His Art and Critical Reception in Paris Between the Wars,” in An Expressionist in Paris, ed. Kleeblatt, Silver, and Golan, 27, 28. 20 Werner, Soutine, 21. 21 Michel Ragon, Mané-Katz (Paris: Georges Fall, 1960), 10, 14. 22 Ragon, Mané-Katz, 27; Mané-Katz, 1894–1962, Exposition retrospective (Haifa: Musee d’Art Modern, Municipalité de Haifa, 1985).

346

Jewish Expressionists in France 23 See Halina Nelken, Images of a Lost World: Jewish Motifs in Polish Painting, 1770–1945 (Oxford: Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies, 1991). 24 Peillex, “L’Art au service de la paix,” in Mané-Katz et son temps: L’Aube du XXe Siècle. Peintres expressionistes et surréalistes de Montparnasse [Art in the Service of Peace: Mané-Katz and His Times. Dawn of the Twentieth Century, Expressionist and Surrealist Painters of Montparnasse] (Geneva: Petit Palais, 1969), 4–5. 25 Peillex, “L’Art au service de la paix,” 5–6. 26 Nelken, Images of a Lost World, passim. 27 Jacques Bielinky, “Une Exposition Mané-Katz” [A Mané-Katz Exposition], L’Univers Israelite [The Israelite Universe], 7, November 7, 1924. 28 Annette Gliksman-Weissberg, Les artistes immigrés juifs de l’Ecole de Paris dans la société française du début du XXième siècle à la Seconde Guerre Mondiale: du Shtetl à Paris: Intégration et mode de vie [The Jewish Immigrant Artists of the School of Paris in French Society from the Beginning of the Twentieth Century to the Second World War: From the Shtetl to Paris] (Mémoire du Maîtrise d’Histoire, Université Paris VII, 1994–1995), 154, 155, 157. 29 Ragon, Mané-Katz, 32 on instruments, 86 on travels. 30 Adolphe Basler, La peinture . . . religion nouvelle [Painting . . . the New Religion] (Paris: Bibliothèque les Marges, 1926), 16. 31 Bernard Dorival, quoted by Dominique Jarrassé, Existe-t-il un art juif? [Does a Jewish Art Exist?] (Paris: Biro, 2006), 142, 43. 32 Huyghe, in Krémègne: 1890–1981 (Paris: Pavillon des Arts, 1993), 24. 33 Andrijauskas, Litvak Art, 174. 34 Blatas, Memoirs de Montparnasse, 52. 35 Ibid., 56. 36 Andrijauskas, Litvak Art, 166. 37 Billy Klüver and Julie Martin, Kiki’s Paris: Artists and Lovers 1900–1930 (New York: Abrams, 1989), 40. 38 Klüver and Martin, Kiki’s Paris, 30–31, showing Grünewald and Hjertén at the Dôme. 39 Bernard Grünewald, Orientalen: Bilden av Isaac Grünewald I svensk press 1909–1946 [Pictures of Isaac Grünewald in the Swedish Press] (Stockholm: CKM Forlag, 2011); because this text is in Swedish, I also consulted “Isaac Grünewald” on Wikipedia for biographical information. J. P. Hodin, Isaac Grünewald (Stockholm: Ljus, 1949), is also in Swedish. 40 Natasza Styrna, “Mela Muter: 1876–1967,” Jewish Women’s Archive, last accessed July 30, 2015, http//jwa. org/encyclopedia/article/muter-mela. 41 Lazowski, “Mela Muter,” 22. 42 Catherine Puget, Mela Muter: la rage de peindre d’une femme [Mela Muter: a Woman’s Fury for Painting] (Pont-Aven: Musée de Pont-Aven, 1993), n.p.; Styrna, “Mela Muter.” 43 Muter quoted in Urszula Lazowski, “Mela Muter: A Poet of Forgotten Things,” Woman’s Art Journal 22(1) (Spring/Summer 2001): 22. 44 Charles-Guy and Judy Le Paul, Gauguin and the Impressionist at Pont-Aven (New York: Abbeville, 1987), 76–82. 45 Paula Birnbaum, Women Artists in Interwar France: Framing Femininities (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 80–81. Birnbaum accuses many French critics of stereotyping Muter, but does not mention that the artist herself made the Dostoyevsky connection. 46 Quoted by Lazowski, “Mela Muter,” 22. 47 Birnbaum, Women Artists, plate 18 for Mother and Child with Haloes, plate 17 for Maternity. 48 Birnbaum, Women Artists, 78, 80. 49 Bernadette Contensou, “Autour de l’expo des maîtres de l’art indépendant” [Around the Exposition of the Masters of Independent Art], in Paris 1937, L’art independent [Paris 1937, Independent Art] (Paris: Paris-Musées, 1987), 49. 50 Josef Helfenstein and Jordana Mendelson, eds., Lipchitz and the Avant-Garde: From Paris to New York (Urbana-Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 114. 51 Lynn Nicholas, The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War (New York: Knopf, 1994). 52 Werner, Soutine, 44. 53 Colette Zynicki, ed., Terre d’exil, terre d’asile [Land of Exile, Land of Asylum] (Paris: Editions de l’éclat, 2009), 40–41. For Jewish artists deported by Vichy and the Nazis, see Sylvie Buisson, Montparnasse déporté, artistes d’Europe [Montparnasse Deported, Artists of Europe] (Paris: Musée de Montparnasse, 2005).

347

18 GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM IN ITALY Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm, the Berlin Novembergruppe, and the Modernist Circles of Florence, Turin, and Rome Irene Chytraeus-Auerbach To say with any certainty when and how German expressionist art was first received in Italy is a virtually impossible enterprise.1 Nevertheless, a closer look at some of the most important Italian cultural and artistic centers, the artists or artists’ groups operating there, and the magazines they published can help to trace its dissemination. This essay focuses on the cultural circles of Florence, Turin, and Rome, where modernist artists and artists’ groups were particularly active in the years immediately before and after the First World War, and looks specifically at their role in promoting modernist art and, to a certain extent, German expressionism in Italy. A study of the early reception of German expressionism in Italy must also take into consideration that an independent expressionist style developed in Italy at almost the same time as in Germany—in the period between 1905 (founding of Die Brücke [The Bridge] in Dresden) and 1911 (founding of Der Blaue Reiter [The Blue Rider] in Munich). Described by Renato Barilli as a “submerged continent” (continente sommerso), Italian expressionism has been rediscovered and celebrated in two exhibitions, one in Turin (1990) and one that was held in La Spezia and Viareggio (2014).2 In contrast to its northern equivalents—expressionism and fauvism—Italian expressionism had a far more volatile and inconsistent character: it was neither programmatic nor organized, and it involved artists in several geographical regions of the Italian peninsula who were not necessarily connected to each other. As Renato Barilli described it, At that time (the first and second decade of our century), no organized group carried expressionism on its banner nor gave itself a program that corresponded to such coordinates. There was nothing in our country that could be compared to the “strong” consolidation that took place in France, and more precisely in Paris, around fauvism, or in Germany around Die Brücke. And yet the same cogent stylistic factors were as active in our country as they were on the other side of the Alps, where they gave birth to those very precise and identifiable “isms.”3

348

German Expressionism in Italy

Driven by the same desire to leave the dominant artistic styles of the fin de siècle behind, many Italian artists of the generation born in the 1880s experimented with various expressive means, in particular xylography, in the first decade of the twentieth century.4 Living and working mostly in northern and central Italy, they oriented themselves on the cultural centers of Milan, Turin, Venice, Florence, and Rome, or collaborated with the periodical L’Eroica (The Heroic; 1911–1944), published in La Spezia. This essay also explores how the development of an Italian expressionist style was directly influenced by the reception of German expressionism in the above-mentioned circles of Florence, Turin, and Rome.

La Voce and Herwarth Walden’s Early Attempts to Organize an Exhibition of German Expressionism in Florence La Voce (The Voice), published by Giuseppe Prezzolini and Gaetano Salvemini as a reformist political and cultural weekly, beginning in 1908, was an important early twentieth-century Italian periodical. Since its early beginnings, La Voce tended to look beyond national borders, in part due to the collaboration of the writer and critic Giovanni Papini (1881–1956), the painter and art critic Ardengo Soffici (1879–1964), and a group of young Triestine writers, among them Scipio Slataper (1888–1915), Alberto Spaini (1892–1975), and Italo Tavolato (1889–1963). Ardengo Soffici, who had lived in Paris from 1900 to 1907 and began collaborating with La Voce after his return to Italy in 1908, focused on the presentation and discussion of artists and currents in contemporary French and Italian art, while his colleagues from Trieste provided, among other items, news and information about cultural life in Wilhelmine Germany to the Florentine audience. A particular receptiveness of La Voce toward German culture in late 1912 and early 1913 certainly had to do with the direct contacts established between the editorial staff of La Voce and Herwarth Walden (1878–1941), publisher of Der Sturm in Berlin. An advertisement for Der Sturm, published in January 1912 in La Voce,5 dates the first contacts back to late 1911 or early 1912, the period in which Walden began his activities as an art promoter and gallery owner.6 In return, Der Sturm published an advertisement of La Voce in February 1912, followed in June by a short introduction of the Florentine journal, written by German art critic Curt Seidel (1886–1913), who lived in Turin.7 Likewise in June, Italo Tavolato introduced a new heading, “Dalle riviste tedesche” (From the German Magazines) to the “Bibliographic Bulletin,” a supplement to La Voce, in which he sharply criticized the direction pursued by Walden and Der Sturm, specifically Walden’s support and promotion of Italian futurism, the Italian movement founded by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944), in 1909 in Milan: [Der Sturm] was an avant-garde cultural journal, presenting good articles by Walden, sketches by Altenberg, poems by Dehmel and Mombert, lyric poetry and prose by Else Lasker-Schüler, drawings by Hodler, Kokoschka, and Pascin; it was serious, frank, militant. And now, nobody knows why, the poor little thing has caught the Futurist bug and drums up support for Marinetti and Co.8 Clearly not all of Walden’s new partners in Florence appreciated the changing artistic orientation of Der Sturm, but by giving representation to the Blaue Reiter expressionists and Italian futurists in Berlin, Der Sturm was evolving into an important platform for modernist and avant-garde art.

349

Irene Chytraeus-Auerbach

This may be why Ardengo Soffici approached Walden in summer 1912, sending him photographs of his work and asking for an opportunity to exhibit in Berlin. Walden responded enthusiastically and invited him to show his work at the newly opened Sturm gallery.9 A few months later, in December 1912, Soffici sent twenty-five paintings and drawings (influenced by French cubism) from the years 1908–1912 to Berlin, and asked Alberto Spaini, who was going to be staying there, to take care of the exhibition. Spaini wrote from Berlin that he met with Walden and helped him hang Soffici’s works after their arrival in the German capital.10 The exhibition opened on January 30, 1913, featuring Soffici’s works together with works by Robert Delaunay and Julie Baum.11 Soffici’s exhibition and the cooperation between Walden and Spaini gave rise to the idea of an exhibition of modern art in Italy.12 Walden was enthusiastic about this project and eager to proceed with the organization, while Spaini was more skeptical.13 In a formal letter to Soffici, the Berlin publicist and gallery owner sketched out his proposal to send expressionist paintings to Florence: Mr. Spaini tells me just now that you have a possibility of exhibiting German expressionists in Florence. Since all modern painters are represented by Der Sturm, it will be technically easy to organize it. I would like to send you a collection of 54 paintings, all first-rate, by the following artists: Albert Bloch/D. Burljuk/W. Burljuk/H. Campendonk/E. Epstein/ Gontscharova/Erich Heckel/A. von Jawlensky/W. Kandinsky/E. L. Kirchner/Paul Klee/August Macke/Franz Marc/G. Münter/Max Pechstein/M. von Werefkin. Please let me know in which month it will take place.14 Unfortunately, there is no record of Soffici’s answer to Walden, although the latter returned to the subject in a postcard in May 1913.15 This makes it difficult to explain why no works of German expressionists were shown in Florence, although some reasons may become more apparent after taking a closer look at the situation in Florence, which had changed since autumn 1912. Giovanni Papini and Ardengo Soffici had in the meantime left the editorial staff of La Voce and subsequently reached a rapprochement with the Milanese group of futurists around Marinetti (Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo), whom Soffici in previous years had repeatedly criticized. The newly formed coalition led to the foundation of a new and more progressive literary and artistic journal, Lacerba (1913–1915), which soon became the mouthpiece of Florentine futurism. Soffici and Papini’s change of direction was probably one reason that Walden’s Florentine partners did not take up his proposal. A further reason may have been the attitude of the Milanese futurists: they had continued their collaboration with Der Sturm after the first exhibition of futurist paintings in Berlin and were annoyed that Walden had organized a traveling exhibition of twenty-four futurist paintings in Europe without informing them in advance. Also, he had complemented this exhibition on several occasions with works by expressionists and cubists, with whom the futurists did not want to be associated. In their efforts to make futurism known in Italy and abroad, cooperation with Berlin remained primarily unidirectional: the futurists had little interest in promoting the artistic trends they were competing with. As a result, the opportunity to show German expressionists in prewar Italy went unused.16

350

German Expressionism in Italy

Curt Seidel, Nicola Galante, and L’artista moderno in Turin We do not know very much about Curt Seidel and his activities in Turin, but it was certainly no coincidence that he had been in touch with Der Sturm and La Voce, and probably acted as intermediary between them.17 In April 1905, Curt Seidel had moved to Turin, where he worked as a draftsman for lace patterns, a writer, and an art critic, and where he established close contacts with L’artista moderno (The Modern Artist, 1901–1935), an “Illustrated Magazine of Applied Arts.” Here he met the cabinetmaker Nicola Galante (1883–1969), in 1911, and convinced him to experiment with xylography. A first result were twelve woodcuts depicting Turin city motifs that were used to illustrate Seidel’s 1912 booklet Torino mia: Impressioni di uno straniero (My Turin: Impressions of a Foreigner).18 As Galante later remembered, the booklet provoked “general astonishment in those days because of both the polemic text and the woodcuts.”19 At the time, Curt Seidel was already in contact with Walden in Berlin and Soffici in Florence, making him a link between German and Italian modernism. In his art criticism, he advocated a radical renewal of Italian art and dissemination of the expressionism of Die Brücke, Der Sturm, and Der Blaue Reiter in Italy. His suicide, on November 4, 1913, put an abrupt end to these efforts; nevertheless, his last article, “La xilografia italiana” (Italian Xylography), published after his death in a commemorative issue of L’artista moderno, can be read as a legacy text that clearly called for a radical change to the revitalized contemporary Italian woodcut. By turning against the dominant symbolist and art nouveau style of Adolfo De Carolis (1874–1928) and his school, Seidel advocated an “original xylography,” conceived as a manifestation of the artistic temperament of a personality, the originality, the effect and the manner of a certain way of understanding, intuiting and interpreting the visible things of life and of praising them in an expression of pure art.20 With regard to book illustration, he saw this ideally realized in Oskar Kokoschka’s illustrations for some books by Albert Ehrenstein, and he deplored the lack of similar works in Italy. Furthermore, he showed his familiarity with Italian futurism by quoting from Boccioni’s Manifesto tecnico della scultura futurista (Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture), while Soffici and Galante were presented as pioneers of Italy’s artistic renewal.21 The commemorative articles of his colleagues in the same issue of L’artista moderno describe Seidel as a rebel and innovator in artistic matters; before his death he had already expressed a modernist position in other articles and had been accused of being a “futurist.” His occasional collaboration with Der Sturm and La Voce lasted for more than a year, until his premature death.22

The Development of an Italian Expressionist Style and the Role of L’Eroica in La Spezia As mentioned, German expressionism had been a topic of discussion in the modernist circles of Florence and Turin in 1912 and 1913, but its reception remained, intentionally or not, fragmentary. In this context, it seems helpful to examine more closely the development of an Italian expressionist style to gain a better understanding of the general situation in Italy during the first decade of the twentieth century. An entire generation experimented with new expressive forms and devices to try to capture and depict the profound changes provoked by modernity and industrialization. This distinctive characteristic united young Italian artists from different

351

Irene Chytraeus-Auerbach

geographical regions, among them Galante in Turin, Lorenzo Viani (1882–1936) in Tuscany, Arturo Martini (1889–1947) in Veneto,23 and Boccioni (1882–1916) and Russolo (1885–1947) in Milan. They all formed part of Barilli’s “submerged continent” of Italian expressionism, but while some remained within this expressionist artistic experience (at least for a certain time), others such as Boccioni and Russolo looked toward new horizons and passed through expressionism as a short but important phase of their artistic evolution before arriving at futurism.24 Also as mentioned, Italian expressionism manifested itself largely but not exclusively in the graphic arts, particularly xylography. The periodical L’Eroica, founded by Ettore Cozzani (1884– 1971) and Franco Oliva (1885–1952) in La Spezia in 1911, became an important platform for modernist artists.25 Right from the beginning, the periodical’s graphic design was characterized by xylography: it included woodcuts by the dominant school of De Carolis (so heavily criticized by Seidel) as well as the more progressive works of the younger generation. The juxtaposition of both groups was a feature of the first exhibition organized by L’Eroica, which took place in Levanto, August to September 1912. At the same time, L’Eroica became the official organ of the newly founded Corporazione degli Xilografi (Guild of Xylographers), and presented Italian xylography in Germany and Sweden.26 In Stockholm, L’Eroica exhibited simultaneously with Der Sturm; the Italian artists included xylographers of both the De Carolis school and the more progressive artists, as well as nine woodcuts by Nicola Galante.27 When Franco Oliva gave up the direction of the periodical in

Figure 18.1  Lorenzo Viani, La madre (The Mother), 1914, xylography, 29.5 × 22.5 cm. Front cover of L’Eroica, IV, vol. I, no. 1 (August 1914), La Spezia. Rome, Istituto Centrale per la Grafica. Courtesy of the Ministero dei Beni e le Attività Culturali e del Turismo

352

German Expressionism in Italy

1913, the artistic orientation of Cozzani and L’Eroica shifted in favor of the progressive group, leading to the separation from the De Carolis wing in 1914, and giving space to the expressionist styles of artists such as Viani, Martini, and Galante—and even to works by the young futurist painter and stage designer Enrico Prampolini (1894–1956). Outstanding examples of this new orientation are found in the August 1914 and January– March 1915 issues, dedicated to contemporary Italian xylography. The first introduced Lorenzo Viani’s original woodcut La madre (The Mother) on its front cover (Figure 18.1),28 while the latter presented, among others, six woodcuts by Viani, three by Galante, and two by Martini.29 In his text accompanying this issue, Cozzani characterized Galante as “the most futurist” among the featured xylographers.30 This assessment was certainly based on Galante’s interest in futurism31 and on his friendship with Enrico Prampolini, who in 1916 published thirteen colored original woodcuts in Cozzani’s L’Eroica. Among these was the frontispizio (illustration) to “Primavera” (Spring), one of the poems of the Tre canti per dire i dolori della terra e i dolori dei cieli [Canti mistici] (Three cantos telling About the Pains of the Earth and the Pains of the Skies [Mystic Cantos]) by Constant Zarian (Plate 22).32 In the same year, economic problems and the critical reaction of his readership forced Cozzani to abandon his ambitious project and to return to a less progressive graphic style until he had to suspend publication of L’Eroica due to the First World War. It is interesting to note that it was Prampolini who, in 1920, acquainted the Italian audience with the German expressionists of the Novembergruppe (November group), thus re-establishing contacts between Italian futurists and German expressionists immediately after the war.

Enrico Prampolini, the Journal NOI (First Series, 1917–1920), and the Casa d’arte italiana (1919–1921) in Rome Prampolini came into contact with Italian futurism and European avant-garde art in Rome, where he studied first at the Academy of Fine Arts and then at the studio of futurist painter Giacomo Balla.33 Like Seidel and Galante, Prampolini established contacts with L’artista moderno in Turin and published an enthusiastic review on the first Italian exhibition of futurist painting shown at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome in March 1913.34 The following year, Prampolini participated in the Esposizione libera futurista internazionale (International Free Futurist Exhibition; April–May 1914) organized by Giacomo Balla at Giuseppe Sprovieri’s permanent futurist gallery in Rome.35 The show presented a wide range of avant-garde artists from several countries. Although Wassily Kandinsky’s works are not mentioned in the exhibition catalogue, as their arrival was delayed, they were shown together with works of Russians Alexander Archipenko, Alexandra Exter, Nikolai Kulbin, and Olga Rozanova.36 Giovanni Lista ascribes to this exhibition a key role in Prampolini’s artistic development because it gave him the opportunity to confront himself practically and theoretically with the most advanced positions of European modernist and avant-garde art.37 The theory and works of Kandinsky in particular led Prampolini to write down his own ideas in a short essay entitled “La Pittura pura” (Pure Painting). It appeared in L’artista moderno in January 1915 and was launched as a “Response to Kandinsky” and, more precisely, as a response to an article by the Russian artist that had been published by means of Herwarth Walden in the Roman review La rassegna contemporanea (The Contemporary Review) in September 1914.38 Although Prampolini contributed regularly and continuously to the futurist movement during this period, theoretical differences as well as personal controversies and animosities kept him marginalized from the futurist group around Marinetti and Boccioni.39 He therefore searched for new partners in and outside of Italy and began to establish his own network of contacts and collaborators. A successful step in this direction was the publication of the journal NOI. 353

Irene Chytraeus-Auerbach

The first series of NOI has been described as “not associated with Futurism but with modernism,” and it strove for a more literary character and “sophisticated graphic design,”40 along with the intent “to Europeanize Italian culture” through a “fusion of artistic tendencies.”41 In the following years, Prampolini centered his activities on Rome and, together with the art critic Mario Recchi, founded the Casa d’arte italiana, a cultural and artistic meeting point that allowed him to combine his work as painter, stage designer, decorative artist, and publicist with organizing exhibitions, lectures, concerts, and re-creative events. In January 1919, NOI announced the activities of the newly founded Casa d’arte italiana and the artistic program of the following months. By affirming that the Casa d’arte italiana responded to the “spiritual need” of the “best” of the young artists’ generation, the editors deplored the “reign of individualism” that had caused a “rupture between the personal I and the collectivity” in the arts. They defined their objective as “[fighting its] remainders and [supporting] faithfully the concretization and affirmation of the new modern collectivism from which alone the new contemporary artistic consciousness can emerge.”42 About a year later, in summer 1920, this argument was taken up again in a brochure containing a detailed presentation of the Casa d’arte italiana, its artistic program, and the upcoming events in the season 1920–1921.43 At the time of this publication, Prampolini could look back on an intense calendar of exhibitions and cultural activities at the Casa d’arte italiana between February and July 1920. Among them was a first presentation of German expressionism in Italy.44 The Mostra Espressionisti Tedeschi (Exhibition of German Expressionists) was on display from June 16 to July 22, 1920, and showed works of four artists belonging to the Berlin Novembergruppe and Walden’s Sturm circle: Arthur Goetz, Thomas Ring, Willy Zierath, and Margot Stuckenberg. Although the print version of the invitation-catalogue included only the first three artists and their works, a copy preserved at the Prampolini Archives in Rome shows the handwritten name “Stuckenbergh” [sic] added, confirming that the exhibition comprised more than the fourteen works listed.45 Surprisingly at first sight, the introductory text was signed by Elli (or Elly) Hirsekorn, a German translator and poet. Information about her is still scarce: Gerrit Borgers notes that at the time, she was the secretary of Herwarth Walden’s gallery in Berlin.46 In 1914, she had been the German translator of the English poet, writer, and translator Edward Storer (1880–1944),47 who moved to Italy in 1916. From December 1919 on, she contributed almost regularly to Storer’s international modernist journal, ATYS: Rivista d’arte e letteratura (ATYS: Program of Modern Art and Literature; 1918–1921), published in Rome. In ATYS, Hirsekorn presented her own expressionist poetry in the style of August Stramm and reported on the literary and artistic life in Berlin in the “Post Cards/From Our Correspondents” section.48 Her first report from Berlin included “some notes on the Sturm movement and German expressionism” and introduced Herwarth Walden and other artists of Der Sturm to the readers of ATYS.49 It is quite conceivable that thanks to her a group of expressionist artists and writers connected to Der Sturm and the Novembergruppe (Moriz Melzer, Thomas Ring, Wilhelm Schmid, Hans Mattis-Teutsch, F. W. Bischoff, and Georg Schrimpf) published illustrations and poetry in the pages of ATYS between 1920 and 1921. Furthermore, Storer was a good friend of Prampolini, and the close cooperation between ATYS and NOI suggests that the same applied to ATYS and the Casa d’arte italiana.50 This could be the reason why Hirsekorn wrote the introductory text acquainting the Roman audience with the German expressionists. In her text, Hirsekorn focused on the revolutionary artistic and political character of the Novembergruppe and on the sociopolitical significance attributed to expressionism by its members: 354

German Expressionism in Italy

A group of German artists founded the “Novembergruppe” after the Revolution of 1918 (which they supported fervidly by professing themselves socialists and revolutionaries), affirming the need that the artistic revolution should not be separated from the political one that it had preceded. Thus, they do not admit that the term “expressionism” should be dissociated from the term “revolution” as many would like to believe. Expressionism and revolution must complement each other and ascend in order to become one meaning—“rebellion against every concrete reality”; this is why the term “expressionism” does not define the characteristics of a painting technique, or a literary one, but responds to a complex of artistic and social manifestations that are striving for a renewal by leaving the past behind.51 In her description of the specific aims of the association, Hirsekorn also referred to the program of the Berlin Arbeitsrat für Kunst (Work Council for Art), closely connected to the Novembergruppe: The “Novembergruppe” wants to realize a vast program of reform and diffusion both in the artistic and in the social field. United for that purpose with the Arbeitsrat für Kunst . . . they attend to the renewal of art schools, galleries, museums, and to the participation of all people in artistic activities. The German expressionists declare that art does not exist for the pleasure of a few, but has to bring happiness and life to all people.52 There can be no doubt that the Novembergruppe’s revolutionary approach to artistic and political matters corresponded well to the Casa d’arte italiana’s artistic program and its notion of a spiritual collectivism. By offering the exhibition space of the Casa d’arte italiana to likeminded German artists, Prampolini transformed these ideas into action and introduced himself as an ally in the context of the European avant-garde. His Berlin partners seemed to realize this immediately and invited him to become a member of the Novembergruppe in September 1920.53 Yet the Mostra Espressionisti Tedeschi was only a first step, followed in October and November by a second and more comprehensive exhibition of German expressionism at the Casa d’arte italiana in Rome.

The Esposizione Espressionisti Novembergruppe (Exhibition of the Expressionists of the Novembergruppe), October 23, 1920 The Novembergruppe exhibition included around thirty artists and nearly sixty works, comprising watercolors, drawings, and woodcuts. It proved to be an event of particular importance, because its opening on Saturday, October 23, 1920 served as an inauguration ceremony for the new “season of avant-garde art,” 1920–1921. Furthermore, Marinetti and the futurist movement now explicitly supported Prampolini and the Casa d’arte italiana’s activities. The opening ceremony included a lecture by Marinetti, a recital by futurist poet and NOI and ATYS collaborator Luciano Folgore, and a performance by pianist Augusta Coen. On this occasion, Prampolini published the first issue of the Bollettino quindicinale della “Casa d’arte italiana” (Fortnightly Bulletin of the “House of Italian Art”; Figure 18.2) which also served as exhibition catalogue (Figure 18.3).54 In contrast to the invitation-catalogue of the June–July show, Prampolini wrote the introduction and presented expressionism in a somewhat different manner than Hirsekorn had done: 355

Irene Chytraeus-Auerbach

Figure 18.2  C  over of the Bollettino quindicinale della “Casa d’arte italiana,” no. 1 (October 15, 1920), invitation to the Esposizione Espressionisti Novembergruppe with an untitled watercolor by Paul Schmolling. Source: Berlinische Galerie, Museum of Modern Art, Photography and Architecture. Fonds: Nachlass Hannah Höch, inv. no. BG-HHC 703/79. Photograph: Anja Elisabeth Witte.  Courtesy of Kreisgemeinschaft Insterburg Stadt und Land e.V., Krefeld

EXPRESSIONISM—the new artistic tendency of the northern people— (Germany, Russia) was not generated by a social revolution, but matured by it. Before the Great War (1914), Kandinsky and Chagall had already laid the foundation for this art of expressionist painting, which should map out the path in order to overcome the period of Naturalism in contemporary painting and to arrive, by means of the abstraction of form, at the expression of content. Exterior absorption of cubism, plunge into Futurism.55 In light of the futurists’ changed attitude, Prampolini’s localization of expressionism between cubism (concerning form) and futurism (concerning content) tied in perfectly with embedding the exhibition opening in an event that possessed a markedly futurist character. His statements illustrated the notion of a cultural and sociopolitical renewal through avant-garde art and offered a link between the Italian futurists and the German Novembergruppe: Abstract art, freedom of will, rebellion against all spiritual logic. Revolution, freedom of will, rebellion against all social logic. 356

German Expressionism in Italy

The parallelism of these two expressions—abstraction and revolution—explains the reason for the evolution and easy development of expressionism in Germany and Russia. / Nations awaiting a new belief, who rightly see the social renewal hidden in avant-garde art.56 According to a review that the editors of ATYS sent to Moriz Melzer, the exhibition was a “triumphant success.” Highranking politicians, Italian, German, and English artists and writers, as well as Italian and international press correspondents attended the opening ceremony, while the interested public queued on the street to see “the expressionist cultural movement that is currently moving through Europe and upsetting everybody.”57 This success was also reflected in the sale of three works (one each by Heinrich von Boddien, Otto Dix, and Paul Goesch), communicated in a following issue of the Bollettino quindicinale della “Casa d’arte italiana,” this time dedicated to an exhibition of works by Nicola Galante.58 Maria Elena Versari provides a convincing analysis of the cultural and political contexts in which the exhibitions of the German expressionists took place in Rome. As she pointed out, “the opening of the exhibition of the Novembergruppe coincided with a new stage of open support of Prampolini’s artistic activity by some personalities of the new government.”59 Moreover, the year 1920 was also characterized by Marinetti’s “return to art as totalizing aesthetic-political action,” which has to be seen in the context of both the failure of his coalition with Mussolini at the general elections of November 1919 and the “failure of the alliance between the artists of the avant-garde and the Bolshevik revolutionaries in Russia.”60

Figure 18.3  B  ollettino quindicinale della “Casa d’arte italiana,” no. 1 (October 15, 1920), inside (p. [2] and [3]). Source: Berlinische Galerie, Museum of Modern Art, Photography and Architecture. Fonds: Nachlass Hannah Höch, inv. no. BG-HHC 703/79. Photograph: Anja Elisabeth Witte

357

Irene Chytraeus-Auerbach

In view of this situation, it is understandable that Marinetti finally supported Prampolini’s activities, which were aimed at strengthening the position of the younger generation of progressive and modernist artists in Italy and uniting the avant-garde on a European scale. But while Marinetti’s backing aspired foremost after “official recognition” of futurism within both the international avant-garde art community and the sociopolitical reality of the Italian nation, Prampolini’s intention was to “integrate Italian modernism into a European context.”61 Nevertheless, Prampolini’s international orientation, the revolutionary climate of the immediate postwar period, and Marinetti’s reorientation of futurism meant that at least for a certain period in the early 1920s, a more balanced cooperation and exchange between Italian futurists and German expressionists was established.

The 1920s: Ruggero Vasari, Enrico Prampolini, and the Journal NOI (Second Series, 1923–1925) According to the memoirs of Herwarth Walden’s second wife Nell, both traveled to Italy in 1919.62 Unfortunately, aside from Florence, which Nell mentions, there are no documents that shed further light on the other places they visited, or on the Italian artists they met on their journey. In contrast, the guest-books of Der Sturm provide us with information about the presence of Prampolini, Marinetti, and other futurists at the Sturm gallery in Berlin. The first entry for Prampolini is dated “October 29, 1921” (together with Federico de Pistoris [Federico Pfister]); the second entry “December 24, 1922,” this time together with Marinetti.63 At about the same time, the young Sicilian poet and playwright Ruggero Vasari (1898– 1968) became the promoter and representative of the futurist movement in Germany, replacing Walden, who nevertheless remained an important contact for the Italian futurists. In 1922, Vasari opened a futurist gallery in Berlin and published, between March and October, the journal Der Futurismus (Futurism), which served as official platform of Italian futurism in Germany.64 His cooperation with Walden and William Wauer led to his election as Italian representative of the Internationale Vereinigung der Expressionisten, Kubisten und Futuristen (International Association of Expressionists, Cubists, and Futurists) in May 1922, while Marinetti became an honorary member in 1926.65 With regards to Prampolini, the years 1921–1922 were characterized by a further intensification of his connections and collaborations within the field of European modernist and avant-garde art: apart from his membership in the Novembergruppe and his relationship to Der Sturm, he established contacts with Russian artists living in Berlin (especially the circle around Ivan Puni); with Theo van Doesburg, the founder of De Stijl; and with Walter Gropius and the artists of the Bauhaus in Weimar. In the period from 1920 to 1921, he organized the Italian section at the First International Art Exhibition in Geneva and a futurist exhibition, shown first in Prague and then in Berlin, where it was presented as Grosse Futuristische Ausstellung (Great Futurist Exhibition) at I. B. Neumann’s Graphisches Kabinett in March 1922. The following May, Vasari, de Pistoris, and Prampolini participated in the first inter­ national congress of the Union internationaler fortschrittlicher Künstler (International Union of Progressive Artists) in Düsseldorf, where Prampolini also exhibited with a small group of Italian artists at the concomitant I. Internationale Kunstausstellung (First International Art Exhibition), shown until July at the Kaufhaus Tietz.66 Furthermore, in 1920 and 1922, Prampolini exhibited as a member of the Novembergruppe at the Kunstausstellung Berlin/Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung (Berlin Art Exhibition/Great Berlin Art Exhibition).67 Forced to close the Casa d’arte italiana in 1921 for economic reasons, Prampolini issued a second series of NOI, running from 1923 to 1925. In the meantime, the political situation 358

German Expressionism in Italy

in Italy, and with it its cultural politics, had changed significantly. Nevertheless, Prampolini and Vasari’s international activities remained important, as Claudia Salaris summarized: “After Mussolini came into power, Futurism returned to the Fascist fold and aimed to be recognized as the art of State, while still hoping to maintain its relationships with the international avantgarde.”68 Given the altered political situation, in which futurism had to defend its position and struggle against its marginalization within fascist cultural politics, Prampolini transformed himself again into a promoter of European modernist and avant-garde art in Italy—but now within an explicitly futurist framework.69 In fact, the second series of NOI presented side by side an interesting mix of futurists, expressionists, and other avant-garde artists until it ceased publication in 1925. From then on, contacts and connections between futurists and expressionists are difficult to trace and seem to have ended, with the exception of Vasari and Walden, who remained friends until Walden left Germany for Moscow in 1932. The altered political situation in Italy, the “return to order” especially in the Valori Plastici and the Novecento groups; the changes within the European avant-garde; and not least, the development of the futurist movement itself during the 1920s and 1930s left little space and even less common ground between expressionists and futurists, thereby bringing to an end their mutually fruitful exchange in the immediate postwar period.

Notes 1 If acquaintance with the works of Edvard Munch can be seen as an indicator of a more general reception of Nordic expressionism in Italy, the date narrows to between 1904 and 1907, when Vittorio Pica published the first reproductions of Munch’s works in the journals Emporium and Attraverso gli albi e le cartelle (Sensazioni d’Arte) (Through Albums and Files [Sensations of Art]). See Flavio Fergonzi, “Boccioni verso il 1910: qualche fonte visiva” [Boccioni Toward the Year 1910: Some Visual Sources], in L’uomo nero: Materiali per una storia delle arti della modernità [The Black Man: Materials for a History of the Arts of Modernity], I, no. 2 (June 2004), 22–23 resp. 36 (n. 18). 2 Renato Barilli, ed., L’espressionismo italiano [Italian Expressionism] (Milan: Fabbri, 1990; exh. cat.), 7; see also Marzia Ratti and Alessandra Belluomini Pucci, eds., L’urlo dell’immagine: La grafica dell’espressionismo italiano [The Scream of the Image:The Graphic Art of Italian Expressionism] (Turin: Allemandi, 2014; exh. cat.). 3 “Bisogna infatti riconoscere che a quei tempi (primo e secondo decennio del nostro secolo) nessun gruppo organizzato assunse come propria bandiera l’Espressionismo, o si diede un programma corrispondente a quelle coordinate. Nulla di simile, nel nostro Paese, al coagulo ‘forte’ che si ebbe in Francia, e più precisamente a Parigi, attorno al Fauvisme o in Germania attorno alla Brücke. Eppure anche da noi erano in azione i medesimi fattori stilistici cogenti che di là dalle Alpi portavano alla nascita di quegli ‘ismi’ così identificabili e precisi.” Barilli, L’Espressionismo italiano, 7. 4 For a detailed map of the various manifestations of Italian expressionism (both painting and graphic arts), see the exhibition catalogues cited in note 2.This essay focuses on graphic arts, and more precisely, on xylography. 5 La Voce, IV, no. 3 (January 18, 1912), 738, www.vieusseux.it/coppermine/displayimage.php?pid=22176. La Voce published two articles dealing with Germany in the same issue: Fausto Torrefranca,“In Germania: Civiltà di seconda mano” [In Germany: Second-Hand Civilization], and Scipio Slataper, “Del Teatro” [About Theater], La Voce IV(3) (January 18, 1912): 735–736. 6 His first two exhibitions showed Der Blaue Reiter/Franz Flaum/Oskar Kokoschka/Expressionisten (The Blue Rider/Franz Flaum/Oskar Kokoschka/Expressionists; March 1912) and Die Futuristen (The Futurists; April–May 1912). 7 Der Sturm II (97) (February 1912): [778]; Curt Seidel, “La Voce,” Der Sturm III (113/114) (June 1912): 72–73. 8 “Era una rivista culturale d’avanguardia, portava buoni articoli di Walden, schizzi di Altenberg, poesie di Dehmel e Mombert, liriche e prose di Else Lasker-Schüler, disegni di Hodler, Kokoschka e Pascin; era seria, franca, battagliera. E ora, poveretta, non si sa bene per quali cause, s’è infettata di lue futurista e batte la grancassa per Marinetti e C.” i.t. [= Italo Tavolato], “Dalle riviste tedesche” [From German Magazines], La Voce IV(23) (June 6, 1912): 832, www.vieusseux.it/coppermine/displayimage. php?pid=960.

359

Irene Chytraeus-Auerbach 9 Letter Ardengo Soffici to Giovanni Papini, August 8, 1912, in Giovanni Papini—Ardengo Soffici, Carteggio, II, 1909–1915: Da ‘La Voce’ a ‘Lacerba’ [Giovanni Papini—Ardengo Soffici, Correspondence, II, 1909— 1915: From ‘The Voice’ to ‘Lacerba’], ed. Mario Richter (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura e Fondazione Primo Conti, 1999), 310–311. 10 Alberto Spaini to Ardengo Soffici, January 28, 1913, Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Fondo Soffici: Serie I, Corrispondenza, 24/5. 11 Der Sturm.Wochenschrift für Kultur und die Künste, ed., Zwölfte Ausstellung: Robert Delaunay, Julie Baum, Gedächtnisausstellung, Ardengo Soffici [Twelfth Exhibition: Robert Delaunay, Julie Baum, Commemorative Exhibition, Ardengo Soffici] (Berlin: Der Sturm, 1913; exh. cat.). In the above-mentioned letter of January 28, 1913, Spaini informed Soffici that the opening of the exhibition was scheduled for January 30, 1913, and not for January 27, 1913, as stated erroneously in Der Sturm. 12 Soffici also mentioned this project in a letter to Giuseppe Prezzolini; see Mario Richter, ed., Giuseppe Prezzolini—Ardengo Soffici, Carteggio, I, 1907–1918 [Giuseppe Prezzolini–Ardengo Soffici, Correspondence, I, 1907–1918] (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1977), 243–244. 13 Alberto Spaini to Ardengo Soffici, January 28, 1913, Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Fondo Soffici: Serie I, Corrispondenza, 24/5. 14 “Herr Spaini teilt mir soeben mit, dass in Florenz durch Sie eine Ausstellungsmöglichkeit für Deutsche Expressionisten gegeben ist. Da der Sturm alle modernen Maler vertitt [sic], ist die Angelegenheit technisch sehr einfach. Ich möchte Ihnen eine Kollektion von 54 Gemälden senden, alle I. Ranges, und zwar von folgenden Künstler [sic]: Albert Bloch/D. Burljuk/W. Burljuk/ H. Campendonk/E. Epstein/Gontscharova/Erich Heckel/A. von Jawlensky/W. Kandinsky/E. L. Kirchner/Paul Klee/August Macke/Franz Marc/G. Münter/Max Pechstein/M. von Werefkin. Bitte teilen Sie mir mit, um welchen Monat es sich handeln würde.” Herwarth Walden to Ardengo Soffici, February 3, 1913, Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Fondo Soffici: Serie I, Corrispondenza, 28/5. The original letter is published, together with an Italian translation, in Luigi Cavallo, ed., Soffici: Immagini e documenti (1879–1964) [Soffici: Images and Documents (1879–1964)] (Florence: Vallecchi Editore, 1986), 150. 15 Herwarth Walden to Ardengo Soffici, May 15, 1913. Preserved at the Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Archivio Soffici: Serie II, Documenti, 29/31. (The original postcard in Italian language is published, together with the transcription, in Cavallo, Soffici: Immagini e documenti, 163.) 16 In Florence, Lacerba organized only one exhibition, the Esposizione di pittura futurista di “Lacerba” (Exhibition of Futurist Art by “Lacerba”), mounted at the Galleria Gonnelli from November 13, 1913 through January 18, 1914. 17 For information on Curt Seidel see Renzo Guasco, ed., Le xilografie di Nicola Galante [The Xylography of Nicola Galante] (Turin: Fògola Editore, 1974), 9–12; Margherita Crema Giacomasso, Incontro fatale: Curt Seidel, Nicola Galante: Amicizia, tragedia, successo [Fateful Encounter: Curt Seidel, Nicola Galante: Friendship, Tragedy, Success] (Turin: Editrice Il Punto, 1996), and Elena Chiarelli, “Curt Seidel nella Torino Anni Dieci” [Curt Seidel in the Turin of the 1910s], in Studi Piemontesi [Piedmontese Studies] XXXIV(2) (December 2005): 421–429. 18 Curt Seidel, Torino mia: Impressioni di uno straniero [My Turin: Impressions from a Stranger] (Turin: Stab. Tipografico Moderno di F. Mittone, 1912), http://digit.biblio.polito.it/id/eprint/1105. 19 Guasco, Le xilografie di Nicola Galante, 9. 20 “. . . alludo soltanto . . . alla xilografia originale, attraverso la quale si manifesta il temperamento artistico di un’individualità, l’originalità, l’effetto, la maniera di un dato modo di comprendere, d’intuire e di interpretare le cose apparenti della vita e d’esaltarle in un’espressione d’arte pura.” Curt Seidel, “La xilografia italiana” [The Italian Xylography], L’artista moderno XII(22) (November 25, 1913), 359, www. storiaememoriadibologna.it/files/vecchio_archivio/certosa/a/Am_1913_11b.pdf. 21 Ibid., 365 resp. 366. Seidel’s text was accompanied by several woodcuts, among them three by Soffici and two by Galante (taken from Seidel’s book Torino mia). An endnote to the article specified that Seidel had intended to include further woodcuts by Soffici and expressionist artists such as Segal, Marc, Münter, Korteweg, and Kandinsky, but the works had not been delivered in time. 22 After Seidel’s death, Walden published a short obituary in Der Sturm: “Unser italienischer Mitarbeiter, Curt Seidel, Thurin, ist am 4. November, 27 Jahre alt, freiwillig aus dem Leben geschieden. Er war ein energischer und tapfererVorkämpfer für die neue Bewegung in Italien und hat sich insbesondere stark für Kandinsky und Franz Marc eingesetzt. Er nahm sich in einem Augenblick der Entmutigung das Leben.” (Our Italian collaborator, Curt Seidel, Turin, 27 years old, ended his life voluntarily on November 4.

360

German Expressionism in Italy

23

24 25

26 27

28 29 30 31 32

33 34

35 36

He was an active and courageous champion of the new movement in Italy and especially supported Kandinsky and Franz Marc. He committed suicide in a moment of discouragement.) Herwarth Walden, “Mitteilung” [Notification], Der Sturm IV(190/191) (second issue of December 1913): 151. The painter and writer Lorenzo Viani (1882–1936) and the sculptor Arturo Martini (1889–1947) were among the most representative figures of Italian expressionism. See Barilli, L’espressionismo italiano, 12–13, and 16–17, as well as Alessandra Belluomini Pucci, “‘Impronte terribili’: xilografie di Lorenzo Viani” [Terrible Imprints: Woodcuts of Lorenzo Viani], and Nico Stringa, “Matrice d’espressione: a proposito della grafica giovanile di Arturo Martini” [Matrix of Expression: About Arturo Martini’s Juvenile Graphic Art], both in Ratti and Belluomini, L’urlo dell’immagine, 19–24 resp. 41–46. Barilli, L’espressionismo italiano, 8–12. See also Giuseppe Virelli, “I Primitivi di una nuova sensibilità tra Espressionismo e Futurismo” [The Primitives of a New Sensibility between Expressionism and Futurism], in Ratti and Belluomini, L’urlo dell’immagine, 47–51. L’Eroica was published until 1917 in La Spezia and from 1919 to 1944 in Milan. It was not published between 1917 and 1919 due to the First World War. For further information on L’Eroica, see Giuseppe Virelli, “L’Eroica’ e la xilografia italiana dal tardo Liberty all’Espressionismo (1911–1917)” [The Heroic and Italian Xylography from Late Liberty to Expressionism (1911–1917)] (Ph.D. Thesis, University of Bologna, 2012), http://amsdottorato.unibo.it/5069. L’Eroica participated in three international exhibitions: the XI International Exhibition of Art in Munich (1913), the International Exhibition for the Book Trade and Graphic Arts in Leipzig (1914), and the International Exhibition of Graphic Art in Stockholm (1914). Furthermore, the section “Bökker Illustrerade med Originalträsnitt” (Books illustrated with original woodcuts) presented a year’s issues of L’Eroica, an exhibition catalog, and Seidel’s Torino mia. See Föreningen Original-Träsnitt: Internationell Utstellning af Grafisk Konst [The Swedish Society of Original Wood Engravers: International Exhibition of Graphic Art] (Stockholm: Bröderna Lagerström, 1914; exh. cat.), 18–21, and 44. On the Stockholm exhibition, see the essay of Margareta Wallin Wictorin in this volume (Chapter 10), and also Margareta Wallin Wictorin, Föreningen Original-träsnitt: grafik och grafiker på ett tidigt modernistiskt konstfält [The Swedish Society of Original Wood Engravers: Graphic Art and Graphic Artists in an Early Modernistic Field of Art], (Göteborg: Göteborgs universitet 2004). L’Eroica: Rassegna di ogni poesia [The Heroic: Review of All Poetry], IV, vol. I., no. 1 (August 1914). L’Eroica: Rassegna di ogni poesia,V, nos. 1–3 (January–March 1915). Ettore Cozzani,“La Bella scuola,” L’Eroica. Rassegna di ogni poesia,V, nos. 1–3 (January–March 1915): 108. In 1915, Galante published two woodcuts in the Florentine futurist journal Lacerba. Renzo Guasco pointed to the influence of futurism and cubism (via Soffici) on Galante between 1914 and 1915, as well as his proximity to Nordic expressionist xylography in Le xilografie di Nicola Galante, 13. L’Eroica: Rassegna italiana [The Heroic: Italian Review], V, nos. 8–10 (planned for 1915, but published in June 1916). On Prampolini’s work as illustrator in general and specifically for L’Eroica, see Gabriella De Marco, “Prampolini illustratore” [Prampolini, the Illustrator], in Enrico Crispolti, Prampolini: Dal futurismo all’informale [Prampolini: From Futurism to the Informal] (Rome: Edizioni carte Segrete, 1992; exh. cat.), 56–78, and the related “Illustrazioni” [Illustrations], ibid., 91–97. For the biography and the work of Prampolini in the context of the European avant-garde see Giovanni Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista europeo [Enrico Prampolini, a European Futurist] (Rome: Carocci, 2013). Enrico Prampolini, “Pittura Futurista: Prima Esposizione Italiana in Roma” [Futurist Painting: First Italian Exhibition in Rome], L’artista moderno XII(6) (March 25, 1913): 103–106. The same issue presented a short essay by Seidel on the rediscovery of some precursors of modern Italian art (Medardo Rosso, Daniele Ranzoni, Giovanni Fattori). Curt Seidel, “I sacrificati” [The Sacrificed], L’artista moderno XII(6) (March 25, 1913): 95–98, www.storiaememoriadibologna.it/files/vecchio_archivio/certosa/a/ Am_1913_03b.pdf. Esposizione libera futurista internazionale: Pittori e scultori italiani, russi, inglesi, belgi, nordamericani [International Free Futurist Exhibition: Italian-Russian-English-Belgian-North American Painters and Sculptors] (Rome: Galleria Futurista G. Sprovieri, 1914; exh. cat.). Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista europeo, 39. In a letter dated April 6, 1959 to Arnaldo Ginna [Arnaldo Ginanni Corradini], Sprovieri remembered the exhibition and stated that it was the first time Kandinsky’s abstract works were on display in Italy. See Massimo Scaligero and Giuseppe Sprovieri, Arnaldo Ginna: Un pioniere dell’astrattismo [Arnaldo Ginna: A Pioneer of Abstract Art] (Rome: Studio Tipografico B. S., 1961), 3–4. I thank Lisa Hanstein for pointing me to the reference.

361

Irene Chytraeus-Auerbach 37 Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista europeo, 39–40. 38 Ibid., 42. A typescript of the article is preserved at Roma Capitale, MACRO, Centro Ricerca e Documentazione Arti Visive, Archivio Prampolini. Accusing Kandinsky of mere cerebralism, Prampolini advocated a concept of pure painting that gave room to artistic sensibility. He concluded his text with the statement: “La pittura pura si sintetizza in questa espressione: prodotto psico-fisico = costruzione plasticocromatica.” (Pure painting can be summarized in this equation: psycho-physical product = plastic-chromatic construction.) Enrico Prampolini, “La pittura pura” [Pure Painting], ed. Palma Bucarelli, Enrico Prampolini: 1894–1956 (Rome: De Luca Editore, 1961; exh. cat.), 36–37. 39 Günter Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre 1909–1944 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 268–270, 275–278. 40 Claudia Salaris, Riviste Futuriste: Collezione Echaurren Salaris [Futurist Magazines: Collection Echaurren Salaris] (Rome: Fondazione Echaurren Salaris/Pistoia: Gli Ori 2012–2013), 446. 41 Francesca Rocchetti, “NOI (1917–1925),” Catalogo Informatico Riviste Culturali Europei (CIRCE), http://circe.lett.unitn.it/le_riviste/riviste/Noi.html. This intention is also illustrated by the list of contributors, which included, among others, Nicola Galante; the earlier futurists Gino Severini and Carlo Carrà; Tristan Tzara and the Dadaist group in Zurich; the French poets Pierre-Albert Birot, Pierre Reverdy, and Blaise Cendrars; Igor Strawinsky, Edward Storer, Alexander Archipenko, and the futurists Paolo Buzzi, Luciano Folgore, and Volt [Vincenzo Fani Ciotti]. 42 “[A] combattere i residui di esso, come aiutare con fede a concretare e ad affermare il nuovo collettivismo moderno dal quale solo potrà uscire la nuova coscienza artistica contemporanea.” “Casa d’arte italiana,” in NOI: Raccolta internazionale d’arte d’avanguardia [We: International Collection of Avant-garde Art], first series, III, no. 1 (nos. 5–7, January 1919): 25, http://circe.lett.unitn.it/ZwebSvr/Zetesis.ASP?WCI=Ge neric&WCE=MENU&WCU=Main3_ita.htm. According to Diego Arich de Finetti, the juxtaposition of “individualism” and “collectivism” that characterizes the text should be ascribed to theoretical reflections by Mario Recchi. See Diego Arich de Finetti, “Prampolini teorico e pubblicista” [Prampolini, the Theorist and Publicist], in Enrico Crispolti, Prampolini: Dal futurismo all’informale, 38–55, esp. 45–46. 43 Programma della Casa d’arte italiana [Program of the House of Italian Art] (Rome: Casa d’arte italiana, 1920–1921), 3. The document is preserved at Roma Capitale, MACRO, Centro Ricerca e Documen­ tazione Arti Visive, Archivio Prampolini. 44 Fundamental to my subsequent exposition is Maria Elena Versari’s essay, “I rapporti internazionali del Futurismo dopo il 1919” [The International Relations of Futurism after 1919], in Il Futurismo nelle avanguardie. Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Milano [Futurism Within the Avant-Gardes], ed. Walter Pedullà (Rome: Edizioni Ponte Sisto, 2010), 577–606. 45 Invitation-catalogue Mostra Espressionisti Tedeschi (1920), front cover. The document is preserved at Roma Capitale, MACRO, Centro Ricerca e Documentazione Arti Visive, Archivio Prampolini. The brochure about the Casa d’arte italiana further specifies that the exhibition included works by Margot Stuckenberg and not by her husband, Fritz Stuckenberg. Programma della Casa d’arte italiana, [6]. 46 Gerrit Borgers, Paul van Ostaijen: Een documentatie [Paul van Ostaijen: A Documentation], 2nd ed. (2 parts) (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Bert Bakker, 1996), www.dbnl.org/tekst/borg006paul01_01/borg 006paul01_01_0044.php. 47 Edward Storer, Fabeln und Epigramme [Fables and Epigrams], trans. Elly Hirsekorn (Berlin: Reuss & Pollack Verlag, 1914). 48 Hirsekorn’s first “Post Card” appeared in ATYS, no. 7 (December 1919); the last, from Munich, in ATYS, no. 13 (August 1921). ATYS. Rivista d’arte e letteratura (Rome: 1918–1921). Issues 7–10 (December 1919; March, May, and August 1920) of ATYS are preserved at the Berlinische Galerie, Museum of Modern Art, Photography and Architecture, Artists’ Archives. The journal is also available online at http://api cesv3.noto.unimi.it/site/marengo. 49 Elli Hirsekorn, “Post Cards/From our Correspondents/Berlin,” in ATYS. Rivista d’arte e letteratura, no. 7 (December 1919), [7] http://apicesv3.noto.unimi.it/img/marengo/0000-0024/(191912)7/index.djvu. 50 For Storer’s biography and his activities, including ATYS, see Valeria Petrocchi, Edward A. Storer, il poeta dimenticato: dalla School of Images ad Atys [Edward A. Storer, the Forgotten Poet: From the School of Images to Atys] (Napoli: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 2000). Storer and Prampolini met through Francesco Meriano, who was also a NOI collaborator. Prampolini published several texts of Storer’s in NOI and publicized ATYS, while Storer published woodcuts and linocuts by Prampolini in ATYS and publicized NOI and the Casa d’arte italiana. Both journals had the same objectives and in part the same collaborators. On Prampolini’s graphic work for ATYS, see Antonello Negri, “Enrico Prampolini illustratore di ‘Atys’” [Enrico Prampolini, Illustrator of ‘Atys’], in L’Uomo nero [The Black Man] I(2) (2004): 108–115.

362

German Expressionism in Italy 51 Elli Hirsekorn,“I pittori espressionisti tedeschi,” Invitation-catalogue Mostra Espressionisti Tedeschi (1920), [1], Roma Capitale, MACRO, Centro Ricerca e Documentazione Arti Visive, Archivio Prampolini. 52 Ibid. For the program of the Arbeitsrat für Kunst, see Helga Kliemann, Die Novembergruppe [The November Group] (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1969), 14. 53 Unknown sender to Enrico Prampolini; see Siligato, Rosella, ed., Enrico Prampolini: Carteggio 1916– 1956 (Rome: Edizioni Carte Segrete, 1992), 214, and Versari, “I rapporti internazionali del Futurismo dopo il 1919,” 582. 54 Bollettino quindicinale della ‘Casa d’arte italiana’: Esposizione Espressionisti Novembergruppe [Fortnightly Bulletin of the ‘House of Italian Art’: Exhibition of the Expressionists of the Novembergruppe], no. 1 (October 15, 1920). The document is preserved at the Berlinische Galerie, Museum of Modern Art, Photography and Architecture (Fonds: Nachlass Hannah Höch, Inventory Number BG-HHC 703/79), and bears a handwritten notice by Hannah Höch that the exhibition had just been closed when she arrived in Rome. It was impossible to identify or obtain information about the watercolor by Paul Schmolling: I thank Kreisgemeinschaft Insterburg Stadt and Land e.V., Krefeld for their support in this regard. Copies of the Bollettino are also preserved at Roma Capitale, MACRO, Centro Ricerca e Documentazione Arti Visive, Archivio Prampolini. 55 Enrico Prampolini, “Esposizione Espressionisti November-Gruppe,” in Bollettino quindicinale della ‘Casa d’arte italiana’: Esposizione Espressionisti Novembergruppe [Fortnightly Bulletin of the ‘House of Italian Art’: Exhibition of the Expressionists of the Novembergruppe], no. 1 (October 15, 1920), [2]. 56 Ibid. 57 “[D]ie gegenwärtig alles erschütternde, expressionistische Kulturbewegung, die durch Europa sich bewegt.” Siligato, Enrico Prampolini: Carteggio 1916–1956, 215. 58 Bollettino quindicinale della ‘Casa d’arte italiana’: Esposizione Nicola Galante [Fortnightly Bulletin of the “House of Italian Art”: Exhibition Nicola Galante ], no. 3 (November 30, 1920), 1, preserved at Roma Capitale, MACRO, Centro Ricerca e Documentazione Arti Visive, Archivio Prampolini. Writer and art collector Renato Fondi purchased works by von Boddien and Dix; lawyer, socialist, and member of parliament Luigi Salvatori purchased Goesch’s Leggenda. The work of Dix is the gouache Apfelschimmel unter Blütenbaum, which was erroneously entitled Melo Fiorito; the work of von Boddien is the watercolor Composizione con apparecchio telefonico.Versari, “I rapporti internazionali del Futurismo dopo il 1919,” 587 (n. 35 and 36). For more on the works of von Boddien and Dix, see also Edoardo Salvi, Roberto Cadonici, and Rosanna Morozzi, eds., Il cerchio magico: Omaggio a Renato Fondi (Pistoia 1887–Roma 1929) [The Magic Circle: Homage to Renato Fondi (Pistoia 1887–Rome 1929)] (Pistoia: Nuova Fag, 2002; exh. cat.), 127–131. 59 Versari, “I rapporti internazionali del Futurismo dopo il 1919,” 583. 60 Ibid., 579–580. 61 Ibid., 588–589. In a similar manner, Lista attributes to Prampolini a constant commitment to this objective; see Lista, Enrico Prampolini futurista europeo, 13. 62 Nell Walden and Lothar Schreyer, eds., Der Sturm: Ein Erinnerungsbuch an Herwarth Walden und die Künstler aus dem Sturmkreis [Der Sturm: A Memorial Book to Herwarth Walden and the Artists From the Sturm Circle] (Baden-Baden: Woldemar Klein Verlag, 1954), 15. 63 Nell Walden and Herwarth Walden, Gästebuch: 1920–1933 [Guestbook: 1920–1933], Staatsbibliothek Berlin—Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung, Sturm-Archiv, Hdschr. 120; Aija Brasliŋa, “Latvian Modernists in Berlin and Rome in the 1920s: Encounters with ‘Secondo Futurismo’,” in Futurism in Eastern and Central Europe: Special issue of International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, ed. Günter Berghaus,Vol. I (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), 235. 64 On Ruggero Vasari’s activities, see Maria Elena Versari, “Enlisting and Updating: Ruggero Vasari and the Shifting Coordinates of Futurism in Eastern and Central Europe,” in Günter Berghaus, ed., Futurism in Eastern and Central Europe, 277–298. 65 See Irene Chytraeus-Auerbach, “Marinetti in Berlin,” in International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, Vol. II, ed. Günter Berghaus (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 104–140, esp. 129. 66 See the section “Italien” in Das junge Rheinland, ed., I. Internationale Kunstausstellung Düsseldorf 1922, 28. Mai–3. Juli [International Art Exhibition Düsseldorf 1922, May 28–July 3] (Düsseldorf: Das junge Rheinland, 1922; exh. cat.), n.p., as well as Maria Müller, “Der Kongress der ‘Union Internationaler Fortschrittlicher Künstler’ in Düsseldorf ” [The Congress of the “Union of International Progressive Artists” in Düsseldorf] and Bernd Finkeldey, “Die ‘I. Internationale Kunstausstellung’ in Düsseldorf: 28. Mai bis 3. Juli 1922” [The ‘I. International Art Exhibition’ in Düsseldorf: May 28 to July 3, 1922] both in Bernd Finkeldey et al., Konstruktivistische Internationale Schöpferische Arbeitsgemeinschaft: 1922–1927.

363

Irene Chytraeus-Auerbach Utopien für eine europäische Kultur [Constructivist International Creative Partnership: 1922–1927. Utopias for a European Culture] (Ostfildern-Ruit bei Stuttgart: Cant’zsche Druckerei, 1992; exh. cat.), 17–22 resp. 23–30. 67 I would like to thank Janina Nentwig who provided me with this information. See also Versari, “I rapporti internazionali del Futurismo dopo il 1919,” 588. 6 8 Salaris, Riviste Futuriste: Collezione Echaurren Salaris, 450. 6 9 This is reflected by Marinetti’s manifesto, “The artistic rights promoted by the Italian Futurists— Manifesto to the Fascist government,” which opened the first issue of April 1923. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti,“I diritti artistici propugnati dai futuristi italiani—Manifesto al governo Fascista” [The Artistic Rights Promoted by the Italian Futurists—Manifesto to the Fascist Government], in NOI. Rivista d’arte futurista (second series) I(1) (April 1923): 1–2 http://circe.lett.unitn.it/ZwebSvr/Zetesis.ASP?WCI=G eneric&WCE=MENU&WCU=Main3_ita.htm.

364

19 EXPRESSIONISM AND THE SPANISH AVANT-GARDE BETWEEN RESTORATION AND RENOVATION Wiebke Gronemeyer Almost every reference to expressionism in Spanish art at the beginning of the twentieth century is closely followed by the admonishment that expressionism as an art form did not resonate with Spanish artists and was largely irrelevant to Spanish art production.1 Surrendering to such a judgment, however, would speak to a very narrow perspective on art-historical research, one that limits the importance of one artistic style by comparing it to others prevalent in the early twentieth century. In such a comparison, expressionism in Spain would surely fall short. But what can be gained from discrediting the importance and even denying its existence in the Spanish context? In its effort to contribute to a compendium that focuses on the periphery of expressionist art production, this essay does not attribute to the peripheral existence of an art style any lesser importance or relevance; nor does it condone the unreflected transfer of terms such as “expressionist” or “expressionism” from one linguistic context into another. Researching expressionist art in Spain requires a detailed, nuanced approach to the use of terminology, as well as to considerations of the conditions for artistic production in Spain, whose political history was quite different from that of Europe throughout much of the twentieth century. While expressionist art does not play a major role in Spanish art history and scholarship, Spanish artists did indeed produce, exhibit, and review art that is recognizably expressionist in style and in its application of expressionist characteristics—the use of exaggeration and distortion of form and color for emotional effect, and the depiction of subjective responses rather than objective reality. This essay maneuvers through the complex cultural history of early twentieth-century Spain up until 1936 in its search for examples, tendencies, or lineages of expressionism. Such an approach is not intended to be conclusive with respect to expressionism vs. the other “isms,” which are fruitfully discussed in many publications.2 The intent is to shed light on the reasons that expressionism did not assume a similar role or receive the same recognition on the Iberian Peninsula that it did in other geographical contexts. The issue of marginalization in art-historical practices3 can be understood as a direct extension of how scholars Derek Harris and Jaime Brihuega contextualize the Spanish avant-garde and modernism: a confusion of styles originating in the European avant-garde centers that slowly spread into peripheral contexts—often with a temporal delay—before being assimilated 365

Wiebke Gronemeyer

and imitated by local artists, resulting in a contexture of sometimes incompatible aesthetics.4 In order to explore this “confusing coexistence”5 of different styles imported into the local centers of cultural production, the first part of this essay examines the only exhibition of expressionist art in Spain prior to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, in 1936, when much of the country’s creative production came to a halt. The second part provides an account of Spain’s cultural landscape from 1900 to 1936 that explores the few direct references to expressionism in Spanish art and literature and addresses characteristics of expressionist art in contexts that have not hitherto been referred to as specifically expressionist.

The 1926 Exhibition of Expressionist Art in Barcelona As art historian Jaime Brihuega has noted, the first and only exhibition of expressionist art in Spain in the first half of the century was a show of engravings titled Exposició del gravat alemany contemporani (Exhibition of contemporary German engravings) at the Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc, in Barcelona, in the spring of 1926.6 The exhibition included works by Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Emil Nolder, Oskar Kokoschka, Käthe Kollwitz, Otto Dix, Ernst Barlach, Georg Grosz, Max Liebermann, Max Slevogt, Lovis Corinth, Hans Thoma, Hans Meid, Emil Orlik, Adolf Schinnerer, Lesser Ury, Paul Kleinschmidt, Karl Caspar, Alexander Kanoldt, Ludwig Kirchner, Carlo Mense, Lyonel Feininger, and Walter Gramatté. A review of the show by Gertrud Richert, a native German art historian,7 in the Catalan bimonthly art journal Gaseta De Les Arts (Journal of the Arts), was published on May 15, 1926 (Figure 19.1).8 Richert identifies two contrasting styles in the exhibition: nineteenth-century impressionism, “which also blooms in Catalan art to great splendor,” and “the modern tendency of expressionism” as led by Germany.9 She goes on to describe the works in the exhibition, starting with the impressionists, represented by Max Liebermann, Max Slevogt, and Lovis Corinth, among others. Deliberately contrasting the two sections of the exhibition, Richert criticizes the impressionist artists in the exhibition for “not have created anything new” in opposition to the “newer, more radical and revolutionary expressionism . . . the art of the future.”10 Her characterization of what she calls an “expressionist tendency” is remarkable in that it attempts to articulate a new philosophy of life: This new form . . . aspires to convey a spiritual meaning, or better said, an intellectual one, claiming willingness, human energy, wanting to be the image of a new concept of life in general, not wanting art to be for art, but art to be for life.11 Richert’s acclaim of expressionism’s potential for forging a new relationship between art and life is supported by her characterization of the works in the show: the portraits by Heckel, SchmidtRottluff, and Emil Nolde “[fight] against the old ways of life and [evoke] the need to use all of our energies in this terrible existential fight.”12 A portrait of the poet Walter Hasenclever by Oskar Kokoschka and a self-portrait by Walter Gramatté are characterized as less unilateral in their ambition, but more varied, more realistic, and thus better able to describe the inner aspects of the soul: “Certainly there has been no other art so far as poignantly and psychologically precise as this one.”13 Another category Richert defines is “works of historic character,” meaning depictions of scenes from history.14 With the exception of two works, Richert does not include precise titles, but using her descriptions, it is possible to track down some of the works that might have been on view; for example, Käthe Kollwitz’s series of watercolors on the peasants’ wars (Bauernkriege, 1901–1908) and Otto Dix’s series of etchings, Der Krieg (The War, 1924). For another work by Otto Dix 366

Expressionism and the Spanish Avant-Garde

Figure 19.1  G  aseta de les Arts (Journal of the Arts), III, no. 49 (May 15, 1926): 4. Biblioteca de Catalunya, Barcelona

(1891–1969), Richert provides the Catalan title “Domptatora,” which can be translated into German as either “Dompteuse” or “Zirkusdame.” In English, this can refer to a female animal tamer or trainer, or more generally, a woman employed as a circus performer. There are three works by Otto Dix with the title “Dompteuse” on public record that, on the basis of medium and date of production, could have been exhibited in Barcelona in 1926. All three are works on paper, produced around 1922, four years prior to the exhibition: the first, a watercolor, was recently (1994) auctioned off by Ketterer Kunst, the German auction house;15 the second is a black and white etching from an edition of fifty, size 39.9 x 29.7 cm, that was most recently exhibited as part of the exhibition Naked Truth: Approaches to the Body in Early-Twentieth-Century German and Austrian Art, at the Middlebury College Museum of Art, in the United States (Figure 19.2);16 the third is a watercolor, size 58.6 x 42.8 cm, that came to light in 2013 as part of “the Gurlitt case” (which involved the rediscovery in a Munich apartment of more than a thousand works of modern art, many of which are believed to have been seized in the 1930s by the National Socialist Party as “degenerate art”);17 according to an interim task force report published in 2016, the work’s provenance was still incomplete.18 We do not know which of these three works (if any) was exhibited in Barcelona. Dix devoted considerable attention to the theme of the circus and animal trainers, producing other works such as Maud Arizona (Suleika, das tätowierte Wunder) (Suleika, The Tatooed Wonder; 1922, etching, 48.8 x 42.9 cm, private collection). Art historian Jung-Hee Kim characterized 367

Wiebke Gronemeyer

Figure 19.2  Otto Dix, Dompteuse (Female Animal Trainer), 1922, etching, 39.9 × 29.7 cm, courtesy of private collection.  VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017. This work is the second possible candidate for the work in the exhibition mentioned by Richert

Dix’s fascination with the woman as tamer of wild beasts as a “masochistic male fantasy that finds expression in the affection for cruel women.”19 Bettina Matthias and Eliza Garrison, curators of the 2015 exhibition Naked Truth: Approaches to the Body in Early-Twentieth-Century German and Austrian Art at the Middlebury College Museum of Art, attribute to Dix’s work the set of “cultural phenomena and taboos that rose to the surface after World War I,” including not only sado-masochistic sexual phantasies but also “the danger of female emancipation.”20 Richert, in her 1926 review, does not provide such precise interpretations of the artworks shown in the exhibition, but does share the sentiment that the expressionist artists’ language reveals provocative allegories suggesting atrocious experiences and dark feelings. Referring to the depiction of landscapes by artists such as Alexander Kanoldt, Ludwig Kirchner, and Carlo Mense, Richert argues that “everything in the works is an expression of strength and eagerness, not just a representation of an aesthetic sentiment.”21 This analysis refers back to an earlier statement of Richert’s on the contradiction between impressionst and expressionist art, in which— referring to the representation of landscapes—she emphasizes that expressionist art focuses on schematizing form and evokes a new sense of distance.22 Such a description could apply to the only image that accompanied her review, a reproduction of Alexander Kanoldt’s lithograph “Subiaco” (1924; Figure 19.3). Richert concludes with an attempt to cast expressionism as a new art form of the avant-garde: 368

Expressionism and the Spanish Avant-Garde

It is possible that the prevalence of expressionism in Germany with all its psychological force, with its intention to touch the soul, is at fault, because art, in its essence, requires more tranquility, more harmony, less intellectuality. But contemporary art is, after all, an art of transition that has not yet reached perfection. Will Germany be the country to destined to come up with the art of the future? This cannot yet be determined; we have to let a few years pass and see. However, despite the difficult and sad times Germany had lived through, in recent years it has managed to find new ways for art, which must be received with pride and satisfaction.23

The Spanish Avant-Garde: Cultural Upheaval between Restoration and Revolution The phenomenon of the avant-garde, with its constant striving to disrupt tradition, overcome boundaries, and implement change, affected Spain as much as any other European country at the beginning of the twentieth century. The term La Vanguardia is broadly used in Spanish literature to group a number of artistic manifestations characterized by their confrontation with the prevailing aesthetic canon. The social and economic contexts in which the Spanish avantgarde developed were equally volatile. The various avant-garde movements in Spain shared in common the denial of mere contemplation, paired with the demand that a work of art reflects and intercedes on a social level. Spanish art historians Javier Pérez Bazo and Jaime Brihuega

Figure 19.3  G  aseta de les Arts (Journal of the Arts), III, no. 49 (May 15, 1926): 5. Biblioteca de Catalunya, Barcelona

369

Wiebke Gronemeyer

both characterize la Vanguardia as a strictly recurrent category, a temporary assembly of cultural facts that can hardly be grasped without running the risk of overlooking and neglecting the diversity, the interdisciplinarity, and the general transversality of the artistic manifestations of the avant-garde era (which in the specific case of Spain encompasses the years of the early twentieth century up to 1936).24 One of the Spanish avant-garde’s most important innovations, one that greatly affected the production of art and literature in the cultural sphere was the establishment of new vehicles for disseminating criticism. At the turn of the century and after the First World War, a large number of print publications were established by newly founded publishing houses, artists’ groups, and political activists to encourage aesthetic criticism of established canons in literature, art, music, and popular culture, as well as to promote new intellectual and artistic ideas.25 The majority of these periodicals were text-based and without illustrations or reproductions and included artists’ essays or manifestos, reports on regularly held intellectual meetings in social gatherings (tertulias), and critical reviews of exhibitions of contemporary art or literary readings. In 1996, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, in collaboration with the Museo des Bellas Artes de Bilbao, dedicated an entire exhibition to the relationship between the evolution of modern art and the rise of avant-garde publications in Spain between 1898 and 1936.26 Assembling hundreds of creative, literary, and artistic magazines, the exhibition addressed the decisive role of these publications as platforms for the emergence of artistic innovation and modern Spanish criticism. Crisis as both a symptom as well as a cause of political instability has often served artistic and intellectual innovation. The time frame of 1898–1936 is bounded by two such crises in Spain: in 1898, the country lost the Spanish-American war and with it its former colonies of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines. While this year marked the height of the country’s crisis of foreign affairs, the internal political situation was equally fragile. The political system known as the Restoration was in its terminal phase and the country’s administration was largely corrupt, with control of the government alternating between prime ministers from liberal and conservative parties within the framework of the constitutional monarchy. The reign of Alfonso XII saw not only the Spanish-American war of 1898, but also the First World War, in which Spain remained neutral; the influenza pandemics in 1918 and 1919; the Spanish Rif War in Morocco (1920–1926); the rise of the dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera (supported by the monarchy from 1923 onwards); and the establishment of the Second Spanish Republic (1931–1936), upon which the king fled the country. The second great upheaval, in 1936, came with the start of the Spanish Civil War, which marked the end of a rich and abundant cultural life. Administration of the country was centered in Madrid, although the Catalan region and the Basque country fought for their political autonomy with varying degrees of success. The lack of a centralist government explains the dispersion of cultural activity prevalent at the time, further aided by the various languages and dialects prevalent in everyday life in the Spanish regions.27

Between “Modernismo” and Modernity Against the background of this complex political situation, it comes as no surprise that neither the avant-garde period nor the influence of modernism in Spain can be described in a single tale. Modernist advances in the philosophical, literary, or artistic realms were sometimes annihilated in their very earliest stages due to an equally strong interest in restoring traditional patriotic values. This intellectual rivalry between innovation and restoration can best be understood by pointing out the difference between the Anglo-Saxon use of the word modernism and the Spanish modernismo, which many scholars writing on the Spanish avant-garde prefer so as to 370

Expressionism and the Spanish Avant-Garde

emphasize the complexity of the Spanish intellectual and artistic landscape during this period.28 Derek Harris notes that the Spanish term “modernismo” refers to a particular movement of romantic influence on realist art that gained dominance toward the end of the nineteenth century, but the Spanish term should not be mistaken for the English term, rather: It is the response of the American and European Spanish worlds to the influence, initially, of French Parnassian poetry and, later, French symbolism . . . Along with the sad princesses and Versaillesque gardens of aestheticism, modernismo carried a particularly heavy impedimenta of romantic angst, which was responsible for a dual direction in its development, towards the avant-garde and away from it.29 This characteristic that Harris refers to as enabling the avant-garde was a growing awareness of the symbolic function of words, which increased the “freedom and arbitrariness” of language in Spanish literature. But the romantic evocation of mood also led to a “retrogressive attitude hostile to the modernization and the Europeanization of Spain.”30 The Spanish avant-garde was an experimental field whose boundaries were modernity on the one side and tradition on the other; the very term “avant-garde” thus referred to a literal conquest and dissolution of boundaries. In many ways, Spanish literature in early twentieth-century Spain can be characterized in such terms. Today, those representing the Spanish “modernismo” are indeed viewed as the first example of modern literature in Spain—first and foremost the “Generación del ’98,” represented by poets such as Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936), Antonio Machado (1875–1939), and Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881–1958). This group of writers, steeped in symbolist poetics, took Spain’s political crisis of 1898 to heart and looked for reasons and means by which to of resurrect Spain from its frail political and social condition. While linguistically these poets championed an innovative use of language and narration, in great part simplifying the language so that it more closely resembled the language used in everyday life, the subjects they chose look to the past rather than the future: the Golden Age of Spanish culture with Miguel de Cervantes, Francisco Goya, and Diego Velázquez as its main stakeholders; evocative descriptions of rural Castilian landscapes or the use of abandoned villages as sites of theatrical performance; and sentiments such as inwardness, loneliness, and romanticism.31 The conflict between old and new, the retro and the progressive, the modern and the traditional, is nowhere more apparent than in works such as Miguel de Unamuno’s essay El individualismo español (Spanish Invidualism)32 or Antonio Machado’s poem Proverbios y Cantares (Proverbs and Songs),33 in which Machado paints the picture of “two Spains,” painfully describing the inner turmoil of a nation headed toward civil war. Spanish interest in the development of new aesthetic languages was evident in the multitude of avant-garde magazines, whose function—and the basis of their success—was to make visible in each moment that which was new and modern. These magazines, as well as their associated artistic circles, served as centers for artistic production and places of reception and dissemination. The high rate of literary production and the large number of magazines, however, can also be understood as a phenomenon of escapism: art and culture as a way to assert a modern and cosmopolitan lifestyle unrelated to the harsh political and social reality that resulted from the structural and ideological crisis of 1898.34 In parallel to the country’s political struggles, the cultural sphere and its many heralds become a reflection of and contributed a voice to the regionalist and nationalist conflicts that lead to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936. Brihuega describes the way in which Spanish artists and writers incorporated new artistic influences into the cultural sphere as “a process of hybridization of aesthetics” from diverse primary sources.35 This process takes place in a peripheral situation, leading to a conglomeration of styles and elements of certain artistic languages that do not necessarily fit together, and 371

Wiebke Gronemeyer

whose subsequent manifestation in the cultural sphere seems displaced. Brihuega speaks of an “amorphous mass of elements of diverse origin, linked into a persuasive discourse which is sometimes innocent, sometimes Machiavellian and sometimes merely opportunistic.”36 To understand such an assessment, it is important to realize that artists considered representative of Spanish art today—Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, and Julio Gonzàlez, for example—did not live in Spain in the first decade of the twentieth century, having emigrated to Paris before or at the very beginning of the development of the avant-garde in Spain. Infrequent visits to their home country meant that their avant-garde notions were of little influence for local art production in Spain. Instead, Brihuega identifies Rafael Barradas (1890–1929) as one of the first modernist painters working in Spain. Barradas, born in Uruguay, traveled extensively around Europe before settling in Spain in 1914. During his travels, he also spent time in Paris and Milan, where he established relations with Italian futurists. His work evidences a number of influences, from impressionism and cubism to futurism, leading Brihuega to call the origins of the Spanish visual avant-garde “a collage of poetics.”37 The Spanish cultural sphere that this image suggests is nonetheless a homogeneous one, since from a peripheral perspective, the authenticity, integrity, and overall representative function of the arriving influences was unquestionable, despite being divorced from their original cultural and chronological context, especially during the First World War. On the one hand, while the artistic theory and practice of modernism achieved equality in their ability to function as poetic expression, information about theory and practice did not always arrive together and at the same time . . . Also, information arrives divorced from its original cultural and chronological context, wrapped up in a vague package where the avant-garde is presented as compact and homogenous, just as those in a peripheral situation will wish, and indeed require it to be.38 One example of how such influences traveled to Spain is the Argentinian poet Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), whom Linda S. Maier describes as “practically single-handedly responsible for bringing expressionism, the reigning avant-garde movement in Germany from 1910 to 1933, to the attention of the Spanish-speaking world.”39 During the First World War and before coming to Spain in 1919, Borges lived with his family in Geneva, Switzerland, where the young poet learned German and not only started reading the works of Immanuel Kant and Heinrich Heine, but also became acquainted with German expressionism in literature. Upon his arrival in Spain, primarily residing in Madrid and Sevilla, Borges started translating expressionist poems by August Stramm, Wilhelm Klemm, and Ernst Stadler40 that had been published in magazines such as Der Sturm and Die Aktion. In 1920, Borges wrote the “Antología expresionista” (Anthology of Expressionism) for the Spanish literary journal Cervantes, in which he translated German expressionist poems into Spanish and commented on them, characterizing the expressionist movement as exalting the expression of emotion and the sensual perception of reality into what he called an “ultra-reality.”41 Regina Samson characterizes the significance that expressionism had for Borges as a literary model “on loan,”42 one that served to help him find his own literary identity and linguistic style. While translating expressionist poets he familiarized himself with the expressionist semantics in poems and essays, which he imitated in his early works that he disseminated to those in Madrid’s literary circle, including Spanish avant-gardists Ramón Gómez de la Serna and Rafael Cassino Assens. Though Borges’s presence in Spain was brief (he returned to Buenos Aires in 1921), he is nonetheless considered to be one of the founding fathers of Spanish ultraism, the reduction of language to emotionally charged, often shocking and pessimistic metaphors in the service of 372

Expressionism and the Spanish Avant-Garde

aesthetic revolution. Borges was involved in writing texts and manifestos for the movement, which turned against the symbolism of Spanish Modernismo and the Generación del 98; these were disseminated in journals and magazines associated with the movement, such as Grecia (Sevilla-Madrid, 1918–1920) and Ultra (Madrid, 1921–1922).43 In the visual arts, 1925 proved an important year for consolidation of the diverse and confused Spanish cultural landscape; it saw, for example, publication by the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) of “The Dehumanization of Art,”44 an essay that moved the questions raised by avant-garde artists to the center of political debate in Spain. Ortega y Gasset recasts the aesthetic principles of non-representational art—cubism, for example—as a condition for the avant-garde in Spain to leave behind the realism and romanticism favored by much of Spanish art of the nineteenth century. The prerogative to “dehumanize art” was meant literally rather than metaphorically and spoke of abstract art’s virtue in neglecting figurative representation. Because of its publication in a prominent journal among Madrid’s intellectual and artistic circle, the essay quickly rose to fame, but was met with criticism as well as acclaim. While some considered it a pioneering attempt of ordering the new artistic context in Spain beyond the iconoclasm of the past, others criticized Ortega y Gasset’s clear separation of art and life as traditional and elitist45 and a contradiction of avant-garde efforts to bring art and life together in the effort of social progress.46 The same year, the newly founded Iberian Artists’ Society held an exhibition in Madrid’s Retiro Park. The exhibition was a response to the need for cultural renovation that was felt at the beginning of the 1920s in Spain, particularly in the early years under the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera (1923–1931). The artists whose works were included ranged from known realists such as Juan de Echevarría and José Gutiérrez Solana to artists with more avant-garde tendencies, such as Salvador Dalí, Norah Borges (sister of Jorge Luis Borges), and Benjamín Palencia. Noticeably absent were the main protagonists of Spanish painting, at least on the international scene, such as Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris, who lived abroad. Recreating this particular show in an exhibition that curators Jaime Brihuega and Concha Lomba put together for the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid in 1995 titled La Sociedad de Artistas Ibéricos y el arte español de 1925 (The Iberian Artists’ Society and the Spanish Art of 1925), the curators identify a “return to order” in the pictorial language, one that is inclined toward a refined traditional figurative style rather than an expansion of the cubist and postcubist heritage from Paul Cézanne.47 This echoes the ultimate understanding of modernism that Ortega y Gasset’s essay conveys and pursues, which is, according to Juan José Lahuerta, to conceive modernism as a religious sentiment, seeking cultural redemption in the field of artistic creation as a new form of spiritual order.48 By the late 1920s, Spain’s cultural scene was largely moderated by a desire to counter the political turmoil with varying degrees of a return to order. This might also serve to explain why the aforementioned 1926 exhibition in Barcelona failed to produce a greater echo at the time. Neither a “dehumanized,” nonfigurative approach to abstract art, nor the desired return to a somber, realist representation and figurative style, would have provided a suitable nurturing ground for a Spanish expressionism.

Notes 1 For example, see José María de Azcárate Ristori, Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez, and Juan Antonio Ramírez, Historia del Arte [Art History] (Madrid: Anaya, 1983), 109. 2 Sam Phillips, ed., -Isms: Understanding Modern Art (New York: Universe Publishing, 2013); Mary Ann Caws, ed., Manifesto: A Century of Isms (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2001). For the specific case of Spain, see Juan Eduardo Cirlot Laporta et al., eds., Diccionario des los ismos [Dictionary of

373

Wiebke Gronemeyer Isms] (Madrid: Ediciones Siruela, 2006). Ramón Gómez de la Serna, one of the founders of the Spanish avant-garde, undertook the effort in 1931 to categorize the aesthetic manifestations of the cultural scene he was part of; see Julían Díaz Sánchez et al., eds., Los ismos de Ramón Gómez de la Serna y un apéndice circense [The Isms of Ramón Gómez de la Serna and a Circus-Like Appendix] (Madrid: SEACEX y Museo Reina Sofía, 2002; exh. cat.). 3 Michael Hatt and Charlotte Klonk describe the question of what is perceived by art history and how it is a complex “political, historical, and moral problem” for which they suggest a postcolonial perspective based on notions of hybridity and cultural exchange. See Michael Hatt and Charlotte Klonk, Art History: A Critical Introduction to Its Methods (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 11–12. 4 Derek Harris, ed., The Spanish Avant-garde (Manchester: Manchester University Pres, 1995), 3–4; Jaime Brihuega, “The Language of Avant-Garde Art in Spain: A Collage on the Margin,” in Harris, The Spanish Avant-Garde, 85. 5 Brihuega, “The Language of the Avant-Garde Art in Spain,” 88. 6 Unfortunately, there is no information or records about the exhibition in the venue’s archives. Maria Valdés, e-mail message to author, January 10, 2017.The list of artists in the exhibition is gathered from a review of the exhibitoin by Gertrude Richert and from the comments Jamie Brihuega makes, who also refers the reader to Richert’s review. See Gertrud Richert, “L’Exposició del gravat alemany contemporani,” Gaseta de les arts, May 15, 1926: 4; Jaime Brihuega, Las vanguardias artisticas en España: 1909–1936 [The Artistic Avant-Gardes in Spain: 1909–1936] (Madrid: Ediciones Istmo, 1981), 268. 7 Gertrud Richert (1885–1965) was born in Upper Silesia and studied Roman and German philology and history in Berlin, Paris, and Heidelberg. She received her Ph.D. in German romanticism in 1913 in Berlin. From 1920 until 1934, she spent time in Spain, first in Madrid and then from 1921 on in Barcelona, where she was funded by the city of Barcelona to research painting in the Middle Ages. In 1933 she became lecturer for German art history at the University of Barcelona, before moving back to Berlin to assume a position at the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin, where she oversaw the department on art history for Spain and Latin-America. In 1948 Richert began teaching at the Pädagogische Hochschule and the Freie Universität, Berlin, where she taught Spanish, Portuguese, and Spanish art history until her death in 1965. “Gertrud Richert: Leben und Schaffen” [Gertrud Richert: Life and Work], Romanistinnen, accessed April 21, 2017, www.romanistinnen.de/frauen/ richert.html. 8 Gertrud Richert, “L’Exposició del gravat alemany contemporani,” Gaseta de les arts, May 15, 1926, 4. 9 “Són aquests l’impressionisme del segle XIX—que en l’art catalá floreix encara amb gran esplendor— i la moderna tendencia de l’expressionisme; Alemanya ha pres activa part en aquesta fonda revolució artística que s’estén per moits paisos d’Europa.” Richert, “L’Exposició,” 4. 10 “Tots aquests artistes no han fet més que continuar les regles establertes ja d’antic d’un art nascut en altres temps que els nostres; no han creat res de nou, no han fet altra cosa que perfilar i refinar l’estil impressionista que tan fortes i profundes arrels ha tingut en terra alemanya. No és estrany, doncs, que aquest art hagi tingut a Barcelona, en l’Exposició, una acollida general ben favorable i que davant d’ell l’altra tendència més nova, més radical i revolucionària, l’expressionisme hagi estat rebuda amb més dificultat. Nonobstant, aquesta ha estat apreciada en tota la seva importància i significació com a l’art del futur.” Richert, “L’Exposició,” 4. 11 “D’aquesta tendència expressionista han estat admirats especialment els boixos, que representen en la seva forma i en el seu estil, amb les seves línies dures i fortes en apariència, en les seves superfícies planes, una nova expressió artística sumament decorativa, mai atesa en tota la història del gravat en fusta. Al costat d’aquesta forma nova correspon també, i potser amb més personalitat encara, el nou contingut, ja que aquest art no vol sacrificar-ho tot a l’estètica, sinó que aspira a tenir una significació espiritual, millor dit, cerebral; vol despertar el sentiment de la voluntat, de l’energia en els homes, vol ésser la imatge d’una nova concepció de la vida en general, no vol fer l’art per a l’art, sinó l’art per a la vida.” Ibid. 12 “Són els retrats de Herkel, Schmidt-Rottluff i Nolde, que semblen lluitar contra la vida mateixa i ens volen fer sentir la necessitat d’emprar totes les nostres energies en aquesta lluita terrible de l’existència.” Ibid. 13 “Indubtablement no ha existit cap altre art fins ara de tanta exactitud i finor psicològica com aquesta.” Ibid. 14 “. . . les obres de caràcter històric.” Ibid. 15 “Auktion 197—Lot 61, Otto Dix Dompteuse, 1922,” Ketterer Kunst, accessed January 7, 2017, www.ket tererkunst.de/kunst/kd/details.php?obnr=101971417&anummer=197&detail=1.

374

Expressionism and the Spanish Avant-Garde 16 “Naked Truth: Approaches to the Body in Early-Twentieth-Century German and Austrian Art,” Middlebury College Museum of Art, accessed January 10, 2017, http://museum.middlebury.edu/exhibi tions/past/2015-2016/node/1455. 17 For a detailed chronology of these events, see “Chronology,” Taskforce Kunstfund, accessed January 9, 2017, www.taskforce-kunstfund.de/en/chronology.htm. 18 “Object record excerpt for Lost Art ID: 477893,” Lost Art Database, accessed January 9, 2017, www.lostar t.de/Content/041KunstfundMuenchen/_ORE/Dix_ORE_477893.pdf?__ blob=publicationFile&v=11. Furthermore, the German TV program Kulturzeit showed a special on Dix’s Dompteuse on December 3, 2015, during which the authors of the program speculate that the work was created in 1929 in Düsseldorf or Dresden and was aquired by Ismar Littmann, a Jewish lawyer who lived in Breslau at the time. The art collector committed suicide in 1934, at which point the work was probably confiscated. How it came into the hands of Hildebrand Gurlitt is unknown. The object record published by the taskforce, however, does not comment on this theory. “Gurlitt’s Schatzkiste, Teil 3, Dompteuse von Otto Dix” [Gurlitt’s Treasure Chest, Part 3, Otto Dix’s Dompteuse], accessed January 3, 2017, www.3sat.de/page/?source=/kulturzeit/themen/173743/ index.html. 19 The original quote reads:“wobei die sich dem Sexus unterwerfende, masochistische männliche Phantasie in der Zuneigung zu grausamen Frauen ihren Ausdruck fand.” Jung-Hee Kim, Frauenbilder von Otto Dix: Wirklichkeit und Selbstbekenntnis [Images of Women by Otto Dix: Reality and Self-Confession] (Münster/Hamburg: Lit Verlag, 1994), 31. 20 Bettina Matthias, e-mail message to author, January 10, 2017. 21 “Tot en ell és expressió d’una força i voluntat actives, no és representació única d’un sentiment estétic viscut per a l’art i sols per l’art.” Richert, “L’Exposició,” 4. 22 “Tampoc el paisatge és estrany a la nova tendència i el tracta de manera ben distint al paisatge impressionista donant-hi el trets més importants esquematizats i la perspectiva amb un nou sentit de la distància.” Ibid. 23 “Es possible que él predomini de l’expressionisme en Alemanya amb tota la seva força psicológica, amb el seu intent d’influir en l’ànima sia un defecte, ja que l’art, com a tal, requereix més calma, més harmonia, menys intellectualitat. Pero l’art contemporani, al cap i a la fi, és un art de transició que no ha arribat encara a la perfecció. Será precisament Alemanya el país destinat a formar l’art deis temps futurs? No és fac tible dir-ho ara; deixem passar uns quants anys i podrem veure-ho. De tetes maneres, Alemanya, malgrat l’época trista i difícil que ha travessat, en els últims temps ha lograt donar camins nous pera l’art i aixó ha d’ésser per a ella motiu d’orgull i de satisfacció.” Richert, “L’Exposició,” 4. 24 Javier Pérez Bazo, La vanguardia en España: arte y literatura [The Avant-Garde in Spain: Art and Literature] (Toulouse/Paris: Cric & Ophrys, 1998), 8–29; Brihuega, Las vanguardias, 15–21. 25 “Folleto: Arte Moderno y Revistas Españolas: 1898–1936” [Leaflet: Modern Art and Spanish Journals: 1898–1936], Museo Reina Sofía, accessed August 28, 2017, www.museoreinasofia.es/sites/default/ files/exposiciones/folletos/1996019-fol_es-001-arte-moderno-revistas-espanolas_0.pdf. 26 Arte Moderno y Revistas Españolas: 1898–1936 [Modern Art and Spanish Journals: 1898–1936] (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 1996; exh. cat.). Published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name, shown at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, October 29, 1996–January 9, 1997, and at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Bilbao from January 23 to March 16, 1997. 27 Carlos Seco Serrano, Alfonso XIII y la crisis de la Restauración [Alfonso XIII and the Restoration Crisis] (Madrid: Ediciones Rialp, 1992), 48–50. 28 Juan Manel Bonet, “Las revistas madrileñas: del modernismo a la modernidad” [The Madrid Journals: From Modernism to Modernity], in Arte Moderno y Revistas Españolas: 1898–1936, 41–52; Silvina Schammah Gesser, Madrid’s Forgotten Avant-Garde: Between Essentialism and Modernity (Brighton: Sussex Academic, 2015), 24–46; Pérez Bayo, La vanguardia en España: arte y literatura, 7–31;Victoriano Alcantud, Hacedores de imágenes: propuestas estéticas de las primeras vanguardias en España (1918–1925) [Image Makers: Aesthetic Propositions of the First Avant-Gardes in Spain (1918–1925)] (Granada: Comares, 2014), 51–57. 29 Harris, The Spanish Avant-Garde, 4. 30 Ibid. 31 José Luis Abellán, El 98: cien años después [The 98: 100 Years After] (Madrid: Alderabá Ediciones, 2000), 12–20. 32 Ibid., 85–87.

375

Wiebke Gronemeyer 33 Geoffrey Ribbans, ed., Antonio Machado: Campos de Castilla, 16th ed. (Madrid: Cátedra, 2007); Nicolás Fernández-Medina, The Poetics of Otherness in Antonio Machado’s “Proverbios y cantares” (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011). 34 Bonet, “Las revistas madrileñas, del modernismo a la modernidad,” 41–53. 35 Brihuega, “The Language of Avant-Garde Art in Spain,” 85. 36 Ibid, 87. 37 Ibid. 38 Brihuega, “The Language of Avant-Garde Art in Spain,” 88. 39 Linda S. Maier, “Jorge Luis Borges and German Expressionism,” Romance Notes 27 (Winter 1986), 143–148; Laura Sager Eidt, “Borges’s Translations of Expressionst Poetry: Spaniardizing Expressionism,” The Comparatist 32 (2008): 115–139. 40 Efraín Kristal, Invisible Work: Borges as Translator (Nashville,TN:Vanderbilt University Press, 2002), 42–44. 41 Jorge Luis Borges, “Antología expresionista,” Cervantes (1920): 100–112. 42 Regina Samson, “Der junge Borges und die ultraistische Avant-garde. Das Populäre als Taktik” (The Young Borges and the Ultraistic Avant-Garde: the Popular as a Strategy), in Regarding the Popular: Modernism, the Avant-Garde and High and Low Culture, ed. Sascha Bru et al. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), 160–174. 43 Arte Moderno y Revistas Españolas: 1898–1936, 243–253. For more on ultraism, see Leticia Pérez Alonso, “Futurism and Ultraism: Identity and Hybridity in the Spanish Avant-Garde,” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 3(1): 154–180. 44 José Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968). The essay was originally published in Spanish titled “La deshumanización del arte” in 1925 in the journal La Revista del Occidente (The Journal of the West), founded by Ortega y Gasset in Madrid in 1923. 45 See Juan José Lahuerta, Decir Anti es decir Pro. Escenas de la vanguardia en España [To Say Anti Is to Say Pro: Scenes of the Avant-Garde in Spain] (Teruel: Museo de Teruel, 1999), 13–17. 46 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 50–53. 47 “La Sociedad de Artistas Ibéricos y el arte español de 1925,” Museo Reina Sofía, accessed January 30, 2017, www.museoreinasofia.es/en/exhibitions/sociedad-artistas-ibericos-arte-espanol-1925. 48 Lahuerta, Decir Anti es decir Pro, 20–21.

376

20 PORTUGUESE EXPRESSIONISM, OR GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM IN PORTUGAL? Nina Blum de Almeida

In this essay, I explore the course of modern art in Portugal, particularly the reception of expressionism. In this context, my central questions are: How did modern art in Portugal develop? To what extent might the Portuguese art scene have been inspired by artistic trends and movements from other countries, for example from France and Germany? Can we ascertain modernist aspirations in both painting and sculpture? And more specifically, does a genuine Portuguese expressionism exist? As a result of its long history and rich cultural traditions, the development of art in Portugal, especially at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, took a different route than, for example, in Germany and elsewhere. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, Portuguese art had been rooted in a sentimental and romantic naturalism, but in the two decades following the turn of the century, a number of Portuguese artists left to study the artistic developments in other parts of Europe. The majority went to Paris, and some even further than France. Central European avant-garde art reached Portugal in two waves, both closely related to specific personalities yet at the same time differing considerably from each other in terms of the relevant figures’ personal backgrounds, the political situations, and the historical circumstances they faced. I will look into the lives of some of the central characters and also explain the historical and cultural context in order to clarify the connections and developments that led to a Portuguese expressionism.

Portuguese Society and Politics At the beginning of the 1900s, Portugal was a country with a very low level of urbanization and an essentially agricultural economy.1 Lisbon, the capital, was the only urban center; in comparison to Paris (c. 2.7 million inhabitants in 1900)2 and Berlin (c. 1.9 million inhabitants in 1900),3 the city was relatively small, with only around 351,000 inhabitants. Being also home to the country’s largest university, however, it was not only a center of politics, but also the epicenter of new intellectual and artistic developments. Historically speaking, the turn of the century was truly the beginning of a new era in Portugal, as the early 1900s were turbulent years. After the abolishment of the monarchy in 1910, Portugal became a republic; the constitution was approved in 1911, followed by tempestuous years of political instability. A permanent struggle for power and influence between 377

Nina Blum de Almeida

republicans, monarchists, socialists, communists, and anarchists paralyzed the government. In its sixteen years of existence (1910–1926), the first republic delivered forty-four governments, seven parliaments, and eight presidents; twenty uprisings and coups occurred; more than 150 strikes took place; and in Lisbon alone, more than 300 bombs exploded.4 Sidónio Bernardino Cardoso da Silva Pais (1872–1918), a member of the Portuguese parliament since 1911, took advantage of this chaotic situation. Ambassador in Berlin from 1912 to 1916, he left Germany only when Portugal joined the First World War on the side of the Allied forces. Until then, Portugal had maintained its neutrality. In 1917, Sidónio Pais seized power in a coup, abolished the constitution, and tried to establish the República Nova (New Republic), in which he intended to serve as a charismatic and strong leader who would bring back traditional values.5 He was assassinated, however, in December 1918, and after Pais’s death, the Portuguese republic reestablished the constitution of 1911. In 1926, the First Portuguese Republic finally came to an end. A military coup installed a national dictatorship, the so-called “Second Republic,” which developed into the Estado Novo (New State), led by António de Oliveira Salazar (1889–1970), in 1933. The corporatist authoritarian regime of Estado Novo repressed democratic aspirations and aimed, in conjunction with its colonies, at creating a self-sufficient system. The secret police, PIDE,6 was one of the pillars of the new state, and its highly efficient network of espionage touched the lives of almost everyone. Also integrated into the state machinery was the Secretariado de Propaganda Nacional (S.P.N.),7 created in 1933 under the leadership of António Joaquim Tavares Ferro (1895–1956), a writer, journalist, fervent sympathizer of modernist aspirations, and supporter of nationalist and fascist ideas. Ferro understood the importance of cultural projects for the transmission of ideological goals and thus focused his efforts on activities easily accessible to the public, among them the publication of books, broadcasting, cinema, theatre, dance, and journalism. Under his supervision, the S.P.N. organized the annual Exposições de Arte Moderna do S.P.N./S.N.I. (S.P.N./S.N.I. Exhibitions of Modern Art). These exhibitions were linked to coveted awards, but in the lengthy period between 1934 and 1960, not a single foreign artist was granted such recognition.8 This can be traced back to the Portuguese government’s decision to prohibit state commissions and acquisitions from artists who had not graduated from the art academies in Lisbon or Oporto.9 Amended in 1941, the law expanded its protection of domestic artists by excluding commissions to foreign artists. This tightening of legislation can be seen mainly as a consequence of the Second World War, when many German and other European artists and intellectuals fleeing the Nazi regime left Europe via Lisbon.

The Portuguese Art Scene During the nineteenth century, two styles of art had firmly established themselves in Portugal: Romanticism and naturalism. In both, landscape and portrait painting and the depiction of popular traditions and ways of life played a preponderant role. Since audiences easily identified with such subjects, both artistic directions became institutionalized in Portuguese society as official frames of reference and ultimately became a major obstacle for the acceptance of modern aesthetics.10 In this context, the development of Portuguese modernism11 underwent two distinct phases and was closely connected with the Parisian art scene. This was principally because many young Portuguese artists relied on scholarships granted by the art academies—especially the Academia de Belas Artes de Lisboa (Lisbon Academy of Fine Arts)—to complete their artistic education abroad.12 The majority chose to spend a prolonged period in the French capital, which attracted 378

Portuguese Expressionism

the most well-known artists of the time and had become a melting pot and starting point for the emergence of modern art in the twentieth century. Contact with those artists and their works, directly or indirectly, soon inspired Portuguese artists, too, to put aside the norms of their academic training, push the boundaries, and try out new techniques and forms of representation. The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 meant the return of these artists to Portugal. They brought new ideas and tendencies home with them and are therefore considered the key figures of the first generation of modernists in Portugal. Among them were Eduardo Afonso Viana (1881–1967), José Sobral de Almada Negreiros (1893–1970), Guilherme Augusto Cau da Costa de Santa Rita (nom d’art Santa Rita Pintor, or Santa Rita the Painter, 1889–1918), and Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso (1887–1918). The second generation of Portuguese modernists, who differed considerably from their predecessors, consisted of artists who either returned to Paris after the war or traveled there for the first time in the 1920s. Among them were Diogo Cândido de Macedo (1889–1959), Abel Abrantes Manta (1888–1982), Simão César Dórdio Gomes (1890–1976), Mário Eloy (1900– 1951), and Júlio Maria dos Reis Pereira (1902–1983). Some of these artists refused an academic education, considering it an outdated artistic tradition. They developed their own pictorial language, borrowing freely from various influences and experimenting with the validity of their compositions.

The First Generation of Portuguese Modernism: Santa Rita Pintor and Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso The first wave of Portuguese modernism was associated with the Lisbon-based journal Orpheu, which published only two issues, both in 1915. The journal showcased the development of modern art in Portugal and, by publishing provocative and unprecedented avant-garde literature and visual art, caused a furor that made it the day’s top story.13 Orpheu is generally seen as the first confirmation of modernist art in Portugal.14 Not only were such well-known writers as Luís de Montalvor (founder and director of the first issue; 1891–1947), Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa (1888–1935), and Mário de Sá-Carneiro (1890–1916) involved, but also two painters who had just returned from France: José Sobral de Almada Negreiros, one of the most wellknown Portuguese painters today, and Santa Rita Pintor. De Montalvor appointed nineteenyear-old António Ferro (the future propaganda minister of Estado Novo) as the journal’s editor, which allowed the latter to make his first appearance on the stage of modern art. Of particular interest is the second issue of Orpheu. In contrast to the first issue, which consisted only of poems and short stories, the second included four reproductions of collages that Santa Rita Pintor had produced in Paris between 1913 and 1914.15 Santa Rita Pintor had studied at the Escola Superior de Belas Artes de Lisboa (Lisbon School of Fine Arts) and gone on to Paris in 1910. In Paris, he shared a studio with Amadeo de SouzaCardoso and met, among others, Pablo Picasso, and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the founder of the futurist movement. Deeply impressed with Marinetti and his Manifesto of Futurism, Santa Rita Pintor decided to become the official representative of Marinetti’s theories and futurism in general in Portugal. His well-known sentence, “there is only one declared Futurist in Portugal, and that is me,”16 shows how convinced he was of this art movement and of himself. After the outbreak of the First World War, Santa Rita Pintor returned to Portugal, where his participation in the journal Orpheu brought him the attention he desired. However, this was related more to his behavior rather than to his art: the “boys of Orpheu” became known for “throwing various sorts of follies onto paper and expecting, rubbing their hands, that the scandalized bourgeois [would understand] them.”17 379

Nina Blum de Almeida

In April 1917, Santa Rita Pintor and Almada Negreiros organized the I. Conferência Futurista at the Teatro da República (today: São Luiz Teatro Municipal) in Lisbon, during which the audience heard several texts, among them the Manifeste Futuriste de la Luxure (Futurist Manifesto of Lust) by Valentine de Saint-Point (1875–1953), two texts by Marinetti, and the Ultimatum Futurista às Gerações Portuguesas do Século XX (Futurist Ultimatum to the Portuguese Generations of the 20th Century) by Almada Negreiros.18 Santa Rita Pintor enlivened the spectacle from the auditorium. Admittedly, the impact of this event was limited because of its very small audience of curious intellectuals and students, but only a few months later, in November 1917, Santa Rita Pintor issued the first and only number of his own journal, Portugal Futurista (Futurist Portugal). The publication caused a scandal; he was arrested by the police at the doorstep of the printing company for offenses against morality and the state,19 and the remaining journals distributed for sale were confiscated. This marked the first occasion when the dictatorship publicly exerted its influence on culture in Portugal. Santa Rita Pintor, who never participated in any exhibitions in Portugal, died of pulmonary tuberculosis in 1918 at the age of twenty-eight. Before his death, he explicitly gave his family orders to destroy every piece of art he had created.20 Nevertheless, some pieces survived, among them the four works which had been published in Orpheu, and his most well-known painting, Cabeça (Head, 1910; Figure 20.1). These five works show a completely new dynamism in

Figure 20.1  G  uilherme de Santa Rita, Cabeça (Head), 1912, oil on canvas, 65.3 × 46.5 cm, Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado, Lisbon, inv. 2963. Photograph: Arnaldo Soares; Direção-Geral do Património Cultural/Arquivo de Documentação Fotográfica (DGPC/ADF)

380

Portuguese Expressionism

painting that led away from the naturalism which had dominated Portuguese art. In spite of an early death and the small remainder of his portfolio, by introducing futurism, Santa Rita Pintor had a genuine impact on the Portuguese art scene. The artist who had the most significant and lasting influence on the development of modern art in Portugal and beyond was Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso. Although he did not participate in the journal Orpheu, but only in Portugal Futurista, he is nonetheless considered a pioneer and innovator of the Portuguese avant-garde. His success is not limited to Portugal, as recent exhibitions in Germany21 and France22 have shown. Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso began his studies in 1905 at the Academia Real de BelasArtes (Royal Academy of Fine Arts) in Lisbon. In 1906, he moved to Paris and settled in Montparnasse, the intellectual heart of the city, where he spent the following eight years. There he met other Portuguese artists, including Eduardo Viana,23 as well as Amedeo Clemente Modigliani, Constantin Brâncuși, and Alexander Archipenko. In 1913, American critic Walter Pach invited Souza-Cardoso to participate in The Armory Show in New York, in which eight of his works were shown.24 The same year he exhibited three paintings in the Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon (First German Autumn Salon) organized by Herwarth Walden who ran the highly influential Sturm gallery in Berlin.25 During a visit to Barcelona in 1914, Souza-Cardoso met his future wife, Lúcia Peretto, a niece of the Spanish architect Antonio Gaudí, and with the outbreak of the First World War, the couple went to Portugal. One year later, Sonia Delaunay-Terk (1885–1979) and Robert Delaunay (1885–1941), who paved the way for the transition from cubism to abstract art, took refuge in Vila do Conde, a small village to the north of Oporto. They had been on vacation in Spain at the outbreak of the war and first decided to stay in Madrid, but then moved to Portugal. The Delaunays knew the Portuguese artists Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, Eduardo Viana, and José Almada Negreiros from their time in Paris, and now in Portugal, the couple’s presence would further influence those artists’ work. By introducing their Orphic cubism26 to the Portuguese art scene, they left a lasting impact upon the Portuguese art community, especially on Souza-Cardoso and Viana. In his art, Souza-Cardoso connects typical Portuguese elements, such as views of Portuguese landscapes, groups of figures in traditional clothing, or portraits of well-known personalities, with influences drawn from cubism and futurism; although his pictorial language is rooted in cubism, one can detect a movement toward expressionism. In the watercolor Cristal Partido Coração Diamante (Plate 23), Souza-Cardoso creates a colorful scene of two persons dressed in costumes typical for the rural Portuguese population. Only at second glance does the viewer recognize that this is not a depiction of a peaceful, popular scene; on the contrary, the man kneeling in the left half of the picture has just cut out the heart of his companion and thrown it behind himself. Blood drips onto the ground from both knife and eviscerated heart—a glaring repudiation by Souza-Cardosa of otherwise overwhelmingly positive presentations of rural life in Portuguese art. Violence and crime dominate the visual space and starkly contrast with the lively color palette. In contrast to Santa Rita Pintor, Souza-Cardoso did not strive to attract attention and impress the public, but lived rather isolated near Oporto. He did, however, participate in a number of exhibitions in Portugal and abroad—for example, in Berlin, London, Milwaukee, Munich, and Moscow. Much like Santa Rita Pintor, his artistic recognition and international breakthrough was prevented by his early death at age thirty during the influenza epidemic of 1918. The short lives of Santa Rita Pintor and Souza-Cardoso were unfortunate for the development of modernism in Portugal, but the two did provide the groundwork for the next generation. 381

Nina Blum de Almeida

The Second Generation of Portuguese Modernism: Júlio Maria dos Reis Pereira and Mário Eloy Following the end of the First World War, and after the deaths of the first generation’s two most important personalities, Santa Rita Pintor and Amadeo Souza-Cardoso, another generation of artists traveled across Europe, mainly to France, but also to Spain and Germany. As already noted, some were autodidacts, who had chosen not to study at art academies and thus were perhaps more open to new impulses and the development of their own artistic ideas; however, such freedom meant that they also had to overcome other limitations, such as the subsequent lack of support from the government for artists who had not graduated from the art academies in Lisbon or Oporto. Júlio Maria dos Reis Pereira (1902–1983), known as a poet under the pseudonym Saúl Dias, studied simultaneously at the Escola de Belas-Artes and in the Faculty of Science and Engineering in Oporto in 1919. After two years of study, he left the art academy, but eventually finished his degree in engineering in 1928. Throughout the 1920s, Júlio illustrated texts for his older brother José Maria dos Reis Pereira (1901–1969), writer and editor of the journal Presença, in which Júlio published some of his written work, as well. His illustrations reveal the influences of Marc Chagall, Georges Rouault, and Henri Matisse. In 1933, Júlio traveled to France to see the work of his artistic sources. Although he never went to Germany, his oeuvre shows parallels to the sharp critical eye and biting irony of George Grosz (Figure 20.2). In Júlio’s O burguês e a menina (The Bourgeois and the Girl) of 1931, the viewer immediately feels reminded of the harsh, cynical, and critical illustrations of Grosz’ Ecce Homo, a collection of sixteen watercolors and eighty-four lithographs published in 1922/23, in which Grosz illustrates a draft of a society that is, in his point of view, about to decline. He depicts crime, prostitution, bohemians, avaricious businessmen, and the legacy of past times: wounded, begging soldiers and former high-ranking members of the military. Júlio’s painting also shows an obese bourgeois in expensive clothes, equipped with medals and a gold-colored cane, smoking a huge cigar. He approaches a naked, emaciated girl wearing only a worn-out rag and is clearly intent on taking advantage of her poverty for his own purposes. Double moral standards, egoism, and the deterioration of society are the subjects here, as well, while the figures themselves seem to be set pieces from various depictions by George Grosz. Júlio’s short period of study at the Escola de Belas-Artes provided him with the freedom to experiment, to imitate, and to create his own language; the Portuguese audience, however, found his visual language strange and unfamiliar: he aesthetically . . . revealed a style of painting that has no references in Portuguese art, far away in its attitude and taste from the sophisticated modernities of Chiado—highlighting the autonomy of his intervention, but making it difficult to understand as well.27 In addition, he did not receive any commissions from the state and was excluded from public exhibitions, as he had not graduated from the Escola de Belas-Artes. He participated only in a small number of shows such as the SNBA’s28 1930 I Salão dos Independentes (First Independent Salon) in Lisbon. From 1935 onwards, he pursued a more direct approach and held solo shows in various galleries.29 Because of the difficulties he faced, Júlio ended his artistic career in 1937 and moved to Évora, where he started working as an engineer for a governmental institution. A few years later, he began to amass a large collection of Portuguese traditional folkloristic dolls and figures

382

Portuguese Expressionism

Figure 20.2  Júlio dos Reis Pereira, O burguês e a menina (The Bourgeois and the Girl), 1931, oil on cardboard, 78.5 × 63 cm, Centro de Arte Moderna da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, inv. 83P85. Photograph: Mário de Oliveira

made of glazed ceramics, known as Bonecos de Estremoz (Dolls of Estremoz). The collection is housed today in the Museu Municipal de Estremoz,30 while the artist himself is nearly forgotten. Mário Eloy de Jesus Perreira (1900–1951), today seen as one of the most important modernist painters in Portugal, took up studies at the Escola de Belas Artes de Lisboa at the age of thirteen. His independent and free mind were soon apparent: he refused to participate in classes on naturalistic painting, considering them to be antiquated and unreasonably academic.31 As a result, he left the Escola de Belas Artes in 1915 but continued to paint. His parents, who did not want their son to become an artist, tried to force him into a banking apprenticeship in 1919, but Eloy escaped to Madrid, where he spent his time visiting museums. After his return to Portugal in the same year, Eloy had the opportunity to work in the studio of Teatro Dona Maria II, in Lisbon, where he learned various drawing techniques. In the following years, he developed his artistic abilities and became interested in the art of the Portuguese painter Eduardo Viana, one of the first generation of modernists—who had been a friend of SouzaCardoso and deeply influenced by the Delaunays and the postimpressionist style of Paul Cézanne. In January 1925, Eloy participated in the I Salão de Outono (First Fall Salon) that Viana organized in Lisbon. An art critic commented, “Some spiritual baths in Paris or Berlin will complete him, they will give him a new strength that he cannot find in our artistic environment.”32 Soon afterwards, Eloy left for Paris, where he stayed until 1927. As before in Madrid, he spent most

383

Nina Blum de Almeida

of his time there sketching at various museums and admiring the works of, among others, El Greco, Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse, Vlaminck, Modigliani, Friez, Lhote, and Kokoschka, whom he called “the best German painter, master, of expressionism.”33 Because of his admiration for German expressionism, Eloy traveled in 1927 to Berlin, where he made the acquaintance of German art dealer, art collector, journalist, and publisher Alfred Flechtheim, who commissioned him to illustrate Portuguese topics.34 Eloy spent the following years alternating between Berlin and Lisbon, participating in exhibitions and becoming internationally known. In Portugal, his work was viewed as foreign: “the art works exposed seemed not to belong to the time and cultural space of the Portuguese capital, due to the violent appearance of an expressionistic aesthetic that had not been seen since certain works of Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso.”35 This assessment becomes obvious in his 1928 self-portrait O meu retrato (My Portrait). With dark colors and rough brushstrokes Eloy presents a bleak picture of himself. The eyes of the portrait seem to be black holes; the facial expression is grim and strained. Through a reduction of the number of colors and simplified physiognomy, Eloy reflects his inner state and expresses his innermost feelings (Figure 20.3). In 1932, Eloy decided to live permanently in Lisbon, leaving behind his wife, his son, and many of his artworks in Berlin. After his return from Germany, he resided for a while in the studio of the German sculptor Hein Semke, who had just moved to Portugal.36 Because of a psychological disorder that first became apparent in 1936 or 1937, the artist withdrew from

Figure 20.3  Mário Eloy, O meu retrato (My Portrait), 1928, oil on cardboard, 40 × 33.5 cm, Centro de Arte Moderna da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, inv. 83P198. Photograph: Mário de Oliveira

384

Portuguese Expressionism

public; he began to have hallucinations, and eventually started visually recording his grueling visions. Thus his art, which became a way of expressing his inner struggles, shows a unique synthesis of thought, delusion, and emotion. In 1945, his family placed him into a psychiatric hospital in Lisbon, where he spent the remaining years of his life, dying in 1951.

Modern and Expressionist Sculpture in Portugal: Hein Semke Expressionism not only manifested itself in painting—it can also be found in sculpture. Portuguese sculptors, however, were predominantly untouched by the world-weariness, the sarcastic irony, and the apocalyptic visions that dominated German expressionist sculpture. There were mainly three reasons that sculptors chose to continue in the traditions of the nineteenth century: 1. They depended much more on public commissions than painters, with the state commissioning the majority of the life-sized and larger-than-life-sized works for decorative or commemorative purposes (public buildings, parks, squares, etc.); these came with distinct expectations of visual imagery, and the few private commissions that did exist were usually given only to well-established artists. 2. The materials, workspace, and processes needed for creating sculpture were much more extensive and cost- and labor-intensive; rejection of a work thus involved a severe financial loss. 3. Sculptors received fewer state grants and scholarships than painters,37 making it difficult to study abroad and thus receive inspiration from outside the country. Despite these factors, there was one sculptor who managed to create a unique position for himself and his work in the Portuguese art scene—however, he was German, not Portuguese. In light of the difficult situation of sculptors in Portugal as well as the artistic and cultural constraints, the position of Hein Semke (1899–1995), who defined himself as an expressionist sculptor and saw his art in line with that of Edvard Munch and Ernst Barlach, stands out. Semke settled permanently in Portugal in 1932 and soon came to realize that both the audience and the art critics hardly accepted his religiously motivated and seeming archaic visual language, which was described by some as “barbaric,” “primitive,” or as “blatant simplicity.”38 Born in Hamburg, Semke grew up in an orphanage. He enlisted as a volunteer to fight in the First World War and returned home in 1919 a pacifist. To earn a living, he tried out several professions and eventually joined the anarcho-syndicalists’ movement in Hamburg. He participated in several politically motivated uprisings, including the unsuccessful Hamburger Aufstand protest in October 1923, after which he was sentenced to six years in prison. He was released in 192839 and traveled to Portugal for the first time in 1929. In Chelas, near Lisbon, he found a job in a factory, but because of psychological and physiological exhaustion, he returned to Hamburg in 1930 and was declared unable to work.40 Lacking any prospects, he followed a friend’s suggestion to study art—an idea which, in his own words, hit him like “a lightning bolt.”41 Although he had no prior education and no work to show, Semke went to the director of the Arts and Crafts School in Hamburg, asked to be accepted as a student, and was admitted to study ceramics.42 Because of health problems, Semke left Hamburg for the south in 1931 and enrolled at the Art Academy in Stuttgart. Remembering the mild climate of Portugal, he returned there in 1932 and settled down in Linda-a-Pastora, a village about 20 kilometers from Lisbon. His home soon became a meeting place for the most important intellectuals and artists of twentiethcentury Portugal; among his frequent guests were Almada Negreiros, Sarah Afonso, Mário Eloy, 385

Nina Blum de Almeida

Oliveira Martins, Abel Manta, António Ferro, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva e Arpad Szenes, Carlos Queiroz, and others.43 In 1932, Semke participated in the SNBA Salão de Inverno (Winter Salon), one of the most important art exhibitions in Portugal at that time. Despite being a foreigner, he even managed to present four large-scale reliefs in a prominent position in the Estado Novo’s decisively nationalist exhibition O Mundo Português (The Portuguese World, June 23–December 2, 1940).44 When, in 1941, the Portuguese government strengthened the law protecting local artists, which prohibited commissions to non-nationals and foreigners, Semke, out of protest and in answer, organized an exhibition in his studio in Lisbon, dedicated to “all artists suffering from the intolerance of their time.”45 In 1949, Semke settled in Lisbon and took up ceramics. Although he was seen by the public and the critics as a renovator of Portuguese ceramic art,46 he still struggled financially. His dedication to ceramics came to an end in the early 1960s, when he developed silicosis.47 From then until his death, Semke predominantly produced watercolors, oil paintings, xylographs, and artists’ books. Semke’s artistic development and artistic oeuvre were mainly shaped by his tremendous role model Ernst Barlach. Although the expressionist movement had already passed its peak (considered to be between 1905 and 192548), Barlach’s artistic style and his ways of expression became a vital factor and major influence for Hein Semke. In the sculptural group Outra Vez Crucificado (Crucified Again; Figure 20.4), which Semke created for the churchyard of the German Protestant community in Lisbon, the viewer finds a visual language similar to Barlach’s. Three block-like figures, with static facial expressions, are standing behind the lifeless, weakened body of Jesus. He is supported by two soldiers of the First World War, identified by their steel helmets, framing the scene from the sides. The arrangement of the presentation is reminiscent of Barlach’s wooden group of figures, Magdeburger Ehrenmal (Magdeburg cenotaph, 1928/29). In 1932, when Semke moved to Portugal, Eloy had just returned from Germany and was about to extend his success to his home country. Both artists were deeply impressed by the German expressionist sculptor Ernst Barlach, and it is assumed that Semke, through the heavy and mystic sculptures he produced by that time, might have had an influence upon Eloy.49 Thus, Semke’s art, even if at first rejected, appeared to be an extension of Eloy’s expressionist paintings into the three-dimensional space. Nevertheless, looking at both artists, Eloy and Semke, one journalist asserted in 1936: “These two artists deserve serious, careful and persistent evaluation, but from doctors of psychiatry”50—thus expressing the suspicion toward their unfamiliar visual language, with its roughness and unembellished depiction. In contrast to Eloy, Semke would gradually gain artistic recognition over the years. Although he experienced a number of setbacks, he stubbornly defended his position as an expressionist artist; in his diary of June 2, 1950, he wrote, My artistic production . . . is unfamiliar to the Portuguese. For them it is too modern and too strict. I play too little with the superficial and do not care at all about the taste of the audience. The public loves the baroque playfulness, elegant and easy to understand. Just do not start thinking.—Maybe I am wrong with this assumption of mine, and it might be that my work is considered as non-art by the Portuguese.—In either case, I am too heavy, too brooding for the Latin, the Portuguese.51 Semke even went so far as to promote expressionism, not only through his own art but also by publishing an article about his artistic idol, Ernst Barlach, introducing him, his life, and his work to a Portuguese audience52—his way of doing “quiet propaganda for the real German culture.”53 In the article, he compares the work of Barlach with “the first gothic sculptors”54 of 386

Portuguese Expressionism

Figure 20.4  Hein Semke, Outra Vez Crucificado (Crucified Again), 1936–1939, bronze, 121 cm × 109 cm × 24 cm, Churchyard of the German Protestant Community in Lisbon. Photograph: Nina Blum de Almeida

Northern Germany and recognizes in it the same profound sincerity: simplicity and the omission of primarily decorative details would grant clarity and significance to his work and reveal a vivacious truth. His article on Barlach demonstrates the artist’s importance to Semke. By highlighting similarities between Barlach and himself in terms of origin, education, and being misunderstood as an artist, Semke describes what he actually wanted to achieve in his own work: “As a man from the north of Germany, Barlach wanted to explore what lies behind things, he wanted the inner truth, but he wanted it in its entirety.”55 Semke indirectly continued the path of the first and second generation of Portuguese modernists and is one of the key influences on expressionism in Portugal. Nevertheless, there is a clear creative development in his oeuvre that is connected to the duration of his stay in Portugal. While his work initially seems heavy, it changed to a lighter, more decorative style over the years. Gradually, brighter colors entered his work, along with colorful flowers and fantastic animals; but even so, his art remained “strange” to the Portuguese audience.56

Does Portuguese Expressionism Exist? Portuguese expressionism had its own unique development, shaped not only by history (the First World War, dictatorship/Estado Novo) but also by the lives of the few modernist artists 387

Nina Blum de Almeida

in Portugal. An application of Western European standards cannot fully take into account the background against which two generations of artists tried to strike out in a new direction. As discussed above, the war forced the artists living abroad to return to their home country, a situation that sometimes served as a catalyst to trigger the development of modernist tendencies in Portuguese art. Without these foreign influences from Paris and Berlin, modernism—and as a consequence, expressionism—would not have been able to develop in the Portuguese cultural microclimate. The first generation of Portuguese modernists, including the futurist Santa Rita Pintor and the highly talented Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, paved the way for modernism in Portuguese art, but could not fully develop because of their tragically early deaths. The second generation freed itself from academic limitations and traditions, but the outstanding work of Mário Eloy would not have been possible without the influences he derived from his stays in France and Germany. The work of Júlio Maria dos Reis shows the influence of the state upon artistic production in Portugal. The selection and exclusion of artists on the basis of their academic training gave the regime of Estado Novo the possibility to influence artistic production. The following words of Hein Semke about Mário Eloy, to be published in an article57 in 1952, after Eloy’s death, illustrate the circumstances of the second generation of modernist artists in Portugal: For Mário Eloy, art was not a way to earn his daily bread, nor a business, nor a profitable speculation, but a mission that had been assigned to him by fate. And having this mission as a basis, Mário Eloy never had sufficient resources to maintain himself. He, the real artist, who could have given to his people great works of art, became a plaything of the narrow-mindedness of society’s conceptions.58 The second generation of modernist artists in Portugal extended the existing artistic vocabulary by adding their own preferences, such as irony and the expression of the psychological state of mind. The influence of other European artistic trends, some from Germany, became more obvious and manifested themselves in an imagery that was adapted to the Portuguese reality. But because artists such as Júlio and Eloy, without an academic degree, were not supported by the state, they faced severe difficulties and could not realize their artistic ideas and succeed as artists. Portuguese cultural politics limited the possibilities of artistic development and the emergence of new forms of expression. One has to further consider that the situation of artists in Portugal differed substantially from that of artists in Germany or France. Although Santa Rita Pintor and Mário Eloy pushed the limits to some degree, the focus on traditional sujets remained predominant. Another facet of expressionism in Portugal appeared with Hein Semke in 1932. Up until this time, sculpture had been excluded from the formal and conceptual innovations which had occurred in painting. In António Ferro, a strong advocate of any kind of modernism in art who published articles and gave radio speeches59 on the politics of Estado Novo, modern art gained an influential supporter. His ministry, Secretariado de Propaganda Nacional, of which he was the director between 1933 and 1950, was responsible for the organization of the annual Exposições de Arte Moderna do S.P.N./S.N.I., in which the German Hein Semke was able to participate. This ended, however, in 1941, when the law protecting local Portuguese artists changed; afterwards, it was almost impossible for Semke and other foreign-born artists to continue their artistic production as they would receive neither commissions nor financial support. The same law also helped the state to exert an influence upon artistic production and limit the possibilities for the presentation and creation of modernist art—a sentimental and romantic naturalism, praising Portuguese 388

Portuguese Expressionism

traditions and ideals, dominated artistic production and brought a temporary end to modernist aspirations. The pressure put on the artists can be seen in the work of Hein Semke, “the last German expressionist,”60 who tried to integrate himself and his art into the Portuguese art scene and gradually adapted his German-influenced view to the Portuguese concept of modernism, which differed from his original perception and resulted in an interesting mixture of decorative, colorful elements and thoughtful heaviness. In conclusion, there did exist a Portuguese expressionism, but it depended greatly on artistic relationships with other countries; foreign (French and German) influences were necessary to allow the development of a Portuguese expressionist language, although such influences were at first rejected by a cultural scene that preferred traditional art over “foreign experiments.” Artists adapted their artistic and visual expressions in accordance with Portuguese traditions and requirements thereby creating a unique character dominated less by aggressive depictions of inner psychological processes or social criticism and more by a withdrawal into a conceivable Portuguese sense of norm. The country’s historical and geographical situation and political and cultural circumstances must always be considered; it is “not possible to identify a Portuguese expressionism in a meaningful way by simply referring to the one of Northern and Central Europe.”61

Notes 1 The continental part of the country had a total number of around 5.5 million inhabitants, of which 2.5 million were employed. Of those 2.5 million, around 58% worked in agriculture. Illiteracy affected around three-quarters of the population. See Walther L. Bernecker and Horst Pietschmann, Geschichte Portugals [Portugal’s History] (München: C. H. Beck, 2001), 95, and Direcção Geral da Estatistica e dos Proprios Nacionães, Censo da População do Reino de Portugal, Nº 1 de Dezembro de 1900, Volume II [Population Survey of the Kingdom of Portugal, No. 1 of December 1900, Volume II] (Lisbon: Typographia da “A Editora,” 1906). 2 “Paris Arrondissements: Post-1860 Population & Population Density,” Demographia, accessed February 27, 2016, www.demographia.com/db-paris-arr1999.htm. 3 Amt für Statistik Berlin-Brandenburg, “Bevölkerungsstand in Berlin von 1861 bis 1917” [Population in Berlin from 1861 to 1917], Zeitschrift für amtliche Statistik Berlin-Brandenburg [Journal for Official Statistics Berlin-Brandenburg] 1+2 (2012): 90. 4 Bernecker and Pietschmann, Geschichte Portugals, 100. 5 “Sidónio Pais,” O Portal da História [The History Portal], accessed February 12, 2015, www.arqnet. pt/portal/portugal/temashistoria/sidonio.html, and “Sidónio Pais,” Presidency of the Portuguese Republic, accessed February 12, 2015, www.presidencia.pt/?idc=13&idi=3340&idl=2. 6 PIDE: Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado (International and State Defense Police). 7 Ministry of National Propaganda, renamed Secretariado Nacional de Informação, Cultura Popular e Turismo (S.N.I.; National Ministery of Information, Popular Arts and Tourism) in 1945. 8 Jorge Ramos do Ó, Os anos de Ferro: O dispositivo cultural durante a “Política do Espírito” 1933–1949 [The Years of Ferro: The Cultural Mechanism During the “Politics of the Spirit” 1933–1949] (Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, 1999), 124–125. 9 Teresa Balté, A coragem de ser rosto [The Courage of Being a Face] (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional–Casa Moeda, 2009), 75. 10 João B. Serra et al., Portugals Moderne 1910–1940: Kunst in der Zeit Fernando Pessoas [Portugal’s Modernity: Art at the Time of Fernando Pessoas] (Zürich: Edition Stemmle, 1997), 34. 11 In fact, the word Modernismo was used first in 1915, during the exhibition Exposição dos Humoristas e dos Modernistas (Exhibition of the Humorists and the Modernists) in Oporto. See Lidia Pinto, Fernanda Meireles, and Manuela Cernadas Cambotas, História da Arte Ocidental e Portuguesa, das Origens ao Final do Século XX [The History of Western and Portuguese Art, From the Origins to the End of the 20th Century] (Oporto: Porto Editora, 2006), 804. 12 “Academia Nacional de Belas-Artes de Lisboa,” Arquivo Nacional Torre do Tombo, accessed February 15, 2015, http://digitarq.dgarq.gov.pt/details?id=4601727.

389

Nina Blum de Almeida 13 In a letter to Armando Cesar Côrtes-Rodrigues, Fernando Pessoa, a friend and an Orpheu collaborator, wrote on April 4, 1915: “‘Somos o assunto do dia em Lisboa’; sem exagero lho digo. O escândalo é enorme. Somos apontados na rua, e toda a gente—mesmo extra-literária—fala no Orpheu.” (“‘We are the topic of the day in Lisbon’; I tell you this without exaggeration. It is an enormous scandal. On the street they are pointing at us, and everybody—even the ones who have nothing to do with literature— speaks about Orpheu.”) See Joel Serrão, ed., Cartas de Fernando Pessoa a Armando Côrtes-Rodrigues [Letters from Fernando Pessoa to Armando Cortês-Rodrigues] (Lisbon: Confluência, 1944), 63. 14 Serra et al., Portugals Moderne 1910–1940, 27. 15 The following works were reproduced in the second issue of Orpheu: 1. Estojo scientífico de uma Cabeça + aparelho ocular + sobreposição dynamica visual + reflexos de ambiente ∗ luz (sensibilidade mechanica), Paris, 1914. 2. Compenetração estática interior de uma cabeça = complementarismo congénito absoluto (sensibilidade lithographica), Paris, 1913. 3. Syntese geometral de uma cabeça ∗ infinito plastico de ambiente ∗ transcendentalismo phisico, (sensibilidade radiographica), Paris, 1913. 4. Decomposição dynamica de uma mesa + estylo do movimento (interseccionismo plástico), Paris, 1913. See Mario de Sá-Carneiro, and Fernando Pessoa, “Orpheu–Revista Trimestral de Literatura No. 2” [Orpheu-Quarterly Journal of Literature No. 2], Lisbon, 1915. 16 “Futurista declarado, em Portugal, há só um, que sou eu.” See João Alves das Neves, O Movimento Futurista em Portugal [The Futurist Movement in Portugal] (Lisbon: Dinalivro, 1987), 49. 17 “[E]m vez de virem nus para o meio da rua darem cambalhotas, lançam ao papel várias maluquices e esperam, a esfregar as mãos, que o burguês escandalizado os descomponha.” See O Século Cómico [The Comical Century], April 8; also April 22, June 3, July 8, July 22, 1915. 18 José-Augusto França, A Arte em Portugal no Século XX 1911–1961 [The Art in Portugal in the 20th Century 1911–1961] (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 2009), 41. 19 Ibid, 51. 20 Fernando Rosa Dias, Ecos Expressionistas na Pintura Portuguesa Entre-Guerras (1914–1940) [Expressionist Echoes in Portuguese Interwar Painting (1914–1940)] (Lisbon: Campo da Comunicação, 2011), 103. However, at least thirteen paintings survived the painter’s last wish; see Joaquim José Lopes de Matos Chaves, Santa Rita, vida e obra: precisões e considerações [Santa Rita, Life and Work: Accuracies and Considerations] (Lisbon: Quimera, 1989). 21 Exhibition at the Ernst Barlach Haus—Stiftung Hermann F. Reemtsma, Hamburg, December 2, 2007, to March 30, 2008: Amadeo Souza-Cardoso (1887–1918). Ein Pionier aus Portugal. Werke aus der Sammlung der Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, accessed September 18, 2016, http://ernst-barlach-haus.de/ Ausstellungen/Archiv/ausstellungen_cardoso.html. 22 Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, exhibition at the Grand Palais, Paris, April 20–July 18, 2016; accessed September 18, 2016, www.grandpalais.fr/en/event/amadeo-de-souza-cardoso. 23 França et al., A Arte em Portugal no Século XX, 110. 24 Raquel Henriques da Silva, “Sinais de Ruptura: ‘Livres’ e ‘Humoristas’” [Signs of Disruption: “Independent” and “Humorists”], in História da Arte Portuguesa. Terceiro Volume [History of Portuguese Art. Third Volume], Paulo Pereira (Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores, 1997), 371. 25 Herwarth Walden, Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon [First German Autumn Salon] (Berlin: Verlag der Sturm, 1913), 29. 26 The couple Delaunay-Terk was the main representative of Orphic cubism. They extended the color palette of cubism aiming for unadulterated color painting based on contrasts. See Hubert van den Berg, Walter Fähnders, Metzler Lexikon Avantgarde (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 2011), 249. 27 “Esteticamente, Júlio revelou uma pintura sem referências na arte portuguesa, distanciada na atitude e nos gostos das modernidades mundanas do Chiado, o que salientou a autonomia da sua intervenção, mas também a tornou pouco compreendida.” Dias, Ecos Expressionistas, 178. 28 SNBA: Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes, Lisbon. 29 Lisbon: Galeria UP, 1938; Galeria Buchholz, 1944; Galeria Pórtico, 1955; Galeria do Diário de Notícias, 1959 and 1964; Oporto: Salão da Livraria Portugália, 1945. 30 “Colecção Júlio Maria dos Reis Pereira,” Museu Municipal de Estremoz, accessed January 31, 2016, http://museuestremoz.wikia.com/wiki/Colec%C3%A7%C3%A3o_J%C3%BAlio_Maria_dos_Reis_ Pereira.

390

Portuguese Expressionism 31 Serra et al., Portugals Moderne 1910–1940, 300. 32 “Uns banhos espirituais em Paris ou em Berlin completa-lo-hão, dar-lhe-hão um vigor novo que não pode encontrar no nosso meio artístico.” Mario Domingues, “Mário Eloy,” A Capital – Diário Republicano da Noite [The Capital – Republican Journal Evening Edition] 4844 (1925), 1. 33 “O pintor Mário Eloy comunica-nos as suas impressões da França e da Alemanha de hoje,” Diário de Lisboa [Lisbon Daily], 2272 (1928), 4. 34 Serra et al., Portugals Moderne 1910–1940, 300. 35 “As obras expostas pareciam não pertencer ao tempo e espaço cultural da capital portuguesa, sendo a violenta aparição duma estética expressionista que não se via desde certas obras de Amadeo de SouzaCardoso.” Dias, Ecos Expressionistas, 217. 36 Ibid., 222. 37 Almeida, Escultura em Portugal, 49 f. 38 Luís Forjaz Trigueiros, “Hein-Semke, escultor de almas,” Juventude, February 1939. 39 Ibid., 12, and Patrick von zur Mühlen, Fluchtweg Spanien-Portugal: Die deutsche Emigration und der Exodus aus Europa 1933–1945 [Escape Route Spain-Portugal: The German Emigration and the Exodus from Europe 1933–1945] (Bonn: Dietz, 1992), 166. 40 Hein Semke, “Escultura” [Sculpture], Sudoeste Europa Portugal 3–Revista Portuguesa [Southwest Europe Portugal 3-Portuguese Magazine] (1935), 34. 41 Ibid., 31–35. 42 Ibid., 31–35. 43 Balté, Coragem, 16. 44 Agência Geral das Colónias, Exposição Histórica da Ocupação [Historical Exhibition of the Occupation], 97–103, 231–236; and Balté, Coragem, 72–75. 45 Balté, Coragem, 75. 46 “A sua actividade entre nós faz bem à arte portuguesa de cerâmica . . . Estamos muito atrasados em artes decorativas. O que por aí se faz, e se vende, nas melhores lojas e nos mais pretensiosos locais, infelizmente, é de um lamentável atraso e de um mau gosto desafiante. Nem os riquíssimos materiais da nossa porcelana ou do nosso vidro . . . escapam à onda de mediocridade fatigada. Precisávamos de um Semke para o cristal, como para a cerâmica e a porcelana.” (His activity among us is good for Portuguese ceramic art . . .What is done and sold here in the best shops and in the most pretentious places is unfortunately of a lamentable backwardness and challenging bad taste. Not even the richest materials of our porcelain or our glass escape from a wave of tiring mediocrity. We needed a Semke for crystal, as well as for ceramics and porcelain.”) L[eitão] de B[arros], “A Exposição de Hansi Stael e de Hein Semke nas Belas-Artes” [The Exhibition of Hansi Stael and of Hein Semke in the [School of] Fine Arts], O Século, March 23, 1951. 47 Silicosis is a lung disease caused by inhaling crystalline silica dust, which can be an occupational hazard to people working with ceramics. 48 As, for example, in Harald Olbrich et al., Lexikon der Kunst: Architektur, Bildende Kunst, Angewandte Kunst, Industrieformgestaltung, Kunsttheorie. 2 Cin-Gree [Encyclopedia of Art: Architecture, Visual Arts, Applied Arts, Industrial Design Art Theory. 2 Cin-Gree] (Leipzig: E.A. Seemann, 2004), 405. 49 Dias, Ecos Expressionistas, 222. 50 “Estes dois artistas merecem crítica séria, atenta e demorada, mas feita por médicos psiquiatras.” João Augusto Silva, “A 2ª Exposição de Arte Moderna e o Homem das Multidões”, Acção, July 10, 1936. 51 “Meine Kunstproduktion . . . ist den Portugiesen fremd. Sie ist ihnen zu modern und zu streng. Ich spiele zu wenig mit dem Oberflächlichen und kümmere mich gar nicht um den Publikumsgeschmack. Das Publikum liebt die barocke Spielerei, elegant und leicht verständlich, nur nicht nachdenken.— Vielleicht irre ich mich auch mit meiner Auffassung, und es kann sein, dass meine Arbeiten von den Portugiesen als Nicht-Kunst angesehen werden.—Auf alle Fälle bin ich dem Lateiner, dem Portugiesen, zu schwer, zu grüblerisch.” Translated from Hein Semke: Die innere Stimme [The Inner Voice] (Leipzig: Leipziger Literaturverlag, 2014), 13. 52 The article was divided into two parts and published in two subsequent editions. Hein Semke, “Ernst Barlach,” O Mundo Literário 38 (1947): 1, 9, 16; and Hein Semke, “Ernst Barlach”, O Mundo Literário 39 (1947): 7–8. 53 Translated from a letter Hein Semke wrote to the German the Restitution Office in 1962. Semke tried to claim financial compensation for the years of the Nazi dictatorship, presenting himself as professionally harmed by the members of the Nazi party in Lisbon. The record is unpublished. Staatsarchiv Hamburg, 351–11, Wiedergutmachungsakte Hein Semke, Amt für Wiedergutmachung Nr. 22638.

391

Nina Blum de Almeida 54 Translated from: Semke, “Ernst Barlach,” 38, 8. 55 Translated from: Semke, “Ernst Barlach,” 38, 16. 56 On October 27, 1952, Hein Semke noted in his diary, “Meiner Arbeit stehen sie fremd gegenüber. Sie ist für diese Leute etwas ‘Geheimnisvolles’” (“Strangely do they face my work. It is for these people something ‘mysterious.’”) Cited in Balté, Hein Semke: Die innere Stimme, 156. 57 The article was supposed to be published in the journal Acto - fascículos de cultura [Act – Supplements of Culture] 2 (1952). Although Hein Semke’s name appears in the index, the article has not been printed. Semke mentions this incident in his diaries: “In der Zeitschrift ‘Acto’ (Nr. 2) sollte ein Artikel von mir Justiça para Mário Eloy [Gerechtigkeit für Mário Eloy] abgedruckt werden. Er war schon gesetzt, wurde dann gedruckt—aber später aus der fast fertigen Nummer herausgenommen. Im Inhaltsverzeichnis blieb aber mein Name stehen.” (“In the journal ‘Acto’ (No. 2) an article written by me Justiça para Mário Eloy [Justice for Mário Eloy] was supposed to be printed. It was camera-ready, then it was printed—but later on it was taken out from the almost completed edition. But in the index my name remained.”) Cited Balté, Hein Semke: Die innere Stimme, 138. 58 “Para Mário Eloy a arte não era um ganha-pão, nem um negócio, nem uma especulação com êxito, mas sim uma missão que lhe fôra[sic] dada pelo destino. E tendo como base esta missão, Mário Eloy nunca podia defender a sua situação material. Ele, o verdadeiro artista, que podia ter dado ao seu povo grandes obras de arte, tornou-se o joguete da mesquinhês [sic] de concepções da sociedade.” In Hein Semke, “Justiça a Mário Eloy,” 1951, courtesy of Fundação António Quadros, unpublished. 59 For example: António Ferro, A Política do Espírito e a Arte Moderna Portuguesa [The Politics of Spirit and the Portuguese Modern Art] (Lisbon: Edições SPN, 1935); António Ferro, Artes Decorativas [Decorative Arts] (Lisbon: Edições SNI / Oficina Gráfica, 1949); António Ferro, Arte Moderna. Discursos Pronunciados em 23 de Maio de 1935 e 6 de Maio 1949 [Modern Art. Speeches Held on May 23, 1935 and May 6, 1949] (Lisbon: Edições SNI, 1949). 60 “Hein Semke, die Wucht der Seele” [Hein Semke, the Power of the Soul], Portugal Kultur, accessed January 30, 2015, http://portugal-kultur.de/semke.html. 61 “[N]ão se podia identificar com sentido um expressionismo português através da mera referenciação do que nele houve de norte e centro europeu.” Dias, Ecos Expressionistas, 20.

392

PART IV

Southeastern Europe

21 EXPRESSIONISM IN SLOVENIA The Aspects of a Term Marko Jenko

This essay offers a brief and general survey of expressionism in Slovenia, both the short-lived currents (1918–1924) and expressionism proper (1922–1923), focusing predominantly on the visual arts. It is structured as a general introduction (with a few twists) and subsequent inquiry into the reception of expressionism in Slovenia, which at the time of expressionism’s local emergence after the First World War was already a part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1918– 1945, but known until 1929 as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes). This will mainly underline the distinctive aspects of the local use of the term and explore the issue of whether expressionism, which is now deemed in Slovenia to be nothing more than “mere modernism,” can actually be counted as an avant-garde movement, together with or parallel to Slovenian constructivism. What ultimately interests me here and will add its special color to this essay is what I would like to provisionally call the “frame of mind” of Slovenian expressionism. This will perhaps enable me to overturn a certain predominant usage or meaning of the terms “expressionism” and “expression.” And what does usage define if not the meaning of a term? The question is not simply one of naming a certain artistic current, style, ism, or period. The goal is to unearth the economy, logic, or disposition of expressionism’s visual thinking and ultimately to disclaim a certain all too commonsensical understanding of “self-expression,” or “expressiveness.” In Slovenia, the much later issue of avant-garde (as constructivism) vs. modernism (as expressionism, for instance) had inadvertently (or even intentionally) already been raised in the second half of the 1920s, though not using those terms. This was done by avant-garde artists mainly influenced by Russian constructivism who were trying to identify their genuine forerunners (as well as their contemporary allies) in a typical “self-historicizing,” perhaps even “self-mythologizing,” move. Particularly at the outset, their work was in fact a special mixture of many, sometimes even mutually exclusive, artistic currents: from expressionism, constructivism, Dada, and futurism to suprematism, De Stijl, etc. The years following the First World War were difficult, especially at first, and they were extremely disillusioning for those who had welcomed the war with open arms as some sort of giant cleansing of society or even the whole of humanity, an attitude that had been quite typical before the war. From the standpoint of art, art criticism, and art theory, the interwar period was also a time of utter confusion—a typically Slovenian amalgamation of both older currents and new ideas, accompanied by a closely related call to re-establish order in both art and society. This paved the way for new institutions, but also for 395

Marko Jenko

openly radical leftist artists and attacks against capitalism, the bourgeoisie, and both old and new art establishments. This was the case, for instance, with Anton Podbevšek’s (1898–1981) proto-avant-garde manifesto “Political Art,” which was published in his magazine Rdeči pilot (The Red Pilot), in 1922, after his split with the modernist Novo mesto circle and in particular with the magazine Trije labodje (Three Swans), which strove for “pure art” and not for a more general revolutionary orientation.1 This will ultimately be the first difference between what is considered avant-garde and what is merely modernist: a proper avant-garde, as we now see it, has to display the obvious will to change or revolutionize the nature of humanity and society as a whole—it reflects an inherently leftist, self-declared socialist or communist artistic current. From this point of view, the striving for “pure art” cannot but appear as conservative—a conservative, even decorative modernism vs. the revolutionary avant-garde.2 No wonder, then, that the modernists (including the expressionists) had obvious and strong political and social backing in Slovenia (the Kingdom of Yugoslavia), as opposed to the so-called Slovenian constructivists, who were quite unimportant locally in their own time. All in all, in the 1920s, modernity in art would begin to institutionalize and organize itself even more (from artists’ societies to calls for a museum of modern art, etc.).3 At exactly this point, it also becomes clearer why most expressionist artists, in their search for spiritual peace and order, quickly turned to a Slovenian variant of the New Objectivity, or Neue Sachlichkeit. The case of Veno Pilon (1896–1970), who was also partly influenced by Valori Plastici (Plastic Values), and the case of the brothers France (1895–1960) and Tone Kralj (1900–1975) will perhaps explain this shift more precisely.4 As always in art history—or in its particular temporal logic, which also opens up an ahistorical perspective on the always present, falsely moralizing problem of anachronism—and this is perhaps best expressed by the Lacanian appropriation of the futur antérieur, the historicity one should have in mind here is that of “a new perception already being present, yet still struggling to find its proper means of [future] articulation.”5 The articulation retroactively posits what it articulates: Expressionism sheds some light on certain prewar achievements—e.g., “expressionist” tendencies in Slovenia’s “impressionism” (which more often than not rejected expressionism proper) and also in secessionism—and the New Objectivity sheds its own light on expressionism as its immediate chronological antecedent in Slovenia, and so on. In other words, the future anterior also makes us see that it is only with the advent of the avant-gardes that we can truly start to grasp the nature of the modern rupture in art (in Slovenia, starting with “impressionism”) and, perhaps, the advent of modernity as such.6 This is not simply a question of an a posteriori illusion. We could even say that the avant-gardes make it possible for us to grasp, from our contemporary perspective, the then still-evolving modernity or modernity-inprogress as an ultimately unfinished, open-ended, and even inherently or constitutively limited project (its inner limit actually being its motor)—or as an opening and closing as such and a continuous series of discontinuities. Generally speaking, the central question for modern artists was thus almost always: How to make a break? How to break out? This is only one side of the previously mentioned issue of avant-garde vs. modernism: Beneath the seemingly conservative aspect of “restoration” in modernism, we must recognize the will to cause, introduce, or inaugurate a rupture—or to inadvertently display a certain predicament and inner tension of modernity that modernism itself tries to heal or mask by calling for order or by mobilizing the mythical, religious, or “premodern,” etc. From this point of view, it will not be surprising that Slovenian expressionism contributed its fair share to the so-called Catholic Renaissance in Slovenia, as can be traced in literature as well. (Some will call this mere nationalism.) At a certain point in its development, we could even speak in a more general manner of a “spiritualized” expressionism. I am prepared to claim that this “spiritualization” is the somewhat narcissistic self-expression 396

Expressionism in Slovenia

or expressive aspect of Slovenian expressionism, which unwittingly reveals its predicament in the face of questions of subjectivity and objectivity that will later on be tackled from a different angle, namely by the New Objectivity.

The Emergence of Expressionism in Slovenia What is expressionism’s official genesis in Slovenia? After 1910, many art critics and painters professed that “impressionism,” which in reality was also an amalgamation of many influences, traits, or currents, had officially won the battle in art and was no longer the “militant” movement it had once been.7 It could now be seen literally as an institution, if we also consider the 1909 opening of the Jakopič Pavilion, the first (privately owned) gallery of modern art in Slovenia. The later myth of the impressionists, which is still very much present today, despite (or perhaps actually due to) the constant attempts to demythologize them and their work as the primary example of national, or nation-building, art also very much attests to their ultimate success. After the First World War, it was expressionism that, in a manner, repeated the break of modernity initiated by the impressionists, but by going against them or simply against the grain. The impressionists, who traveled widely and attended exhibitions throughout Europe, were themselves already well acquainted with pretty much everything: postimpressionism, symbolism, fauvism, secessionism, early expressionism; however, as Tomaž Brejc writes,8 they rejected the radical forms of both fauvism and German expressionism. Matija Jama (1872–1947), for instance, later acknowledged expressionism as the most adequate artistic language during the cruel war years; he himself studied the works of Franz Marc, Wassily Kandinsky, and Oskar Kokoschka, but he rejected it all in favor of his own “subjective naturalism.” The only impressionist who actually does display an almost continuous “expressionist” or, rather, “expressive” trait in his work is the grandest and most important of them all: Rihard Jakopič (1869–1943). A certain dialogue with expressionism is already detectable in his work from 1905 onwards, but only as a psychological trait, sometimes indistinguishable from fauvist formal aspects.9 It could be said that he achieved an “expressive color setting,” only after the First World War, especially in some of his Sava landscapes (from 1918 onward; Figure 21.1) and his monumental and psychologically intense Slepec (Blind Man, 1926). Here, the art-historical link to expressionism again must employ the typical psychological or introversion-to-extroversion aspect of expression (as if it were only some sort of hysterical acting out) and the gestural aspect: expressionism is “existentialist and metaphysical” here, transforming objective data into powerful subjective visions, all underlined by the strength of the artist’s gesture or brushstroke and color scheme—i.e., “color expression.” To quote Tomaž Brejc: Jakopič’s theory of art has its origin in the art concepts of the turn of the century: To him, genuine art is only the “impression and expression combined” as he does not follow [Paul] Fechter in his understanding of expressionism but considers it to be the “art of expression.”10 Here, “expression” has to be thought of within Slovenian impressionism as some sort of connotation or expansion of its visual field and primarily as a deeply humanist, allegorical or metaphysical, spiritual message or aura. It is difficult to link it to expressionism proper, which is incomparably more alienated, sexualized, and also urban in feeling. However, it might not be wrong to link it to “mannered expressionism,” best seen in Slovenian expressionism’s religious work, which combined with an older artistic current. No wonder then that this line of Jakopič’s work is perhaps closest to the work of Fran Tratnik (1881–1957)—who was actually a sui generis 397

Marko Jenko

Figure 21.1  Rihard Jakopič, Sava (The River Sava), 1922, oil on burlap, 84 × 114 cm, Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM), Ljubljana, Slovenia. © Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM)

secessionist, adept at depicting human suffering (Figure 21.2), but deemed to be the first expressionist and by the Slovenian constructivists to actually be the true forerunner of their own work. This is based on Ferdo Delak’s (1905–1968) statement in the Slovenian avant-garde magazine Tank (1927). Delak was a key figure in Slovenian theatre and would later write the article “Die Revolutionisierung der Kunst in Slovenien” (Revolutionizing Art in Slovenia), together with Heinz Lüdecke, for the special issue “Junge slovenische Kunst” (Young Slovenian Art; 1929) in Herwarth Walden’s magazine Der Sturm magazine, in which Tratnik is no longer mentioned as a forerunner.11 The article also mentions Veno Pilon and other artists whom most people today would not include in the avant-garde. The avant-garde was thus simply searching for breaks in the past as a rationale for its own break. It found this in Tratnik and other contemporary modernists and not in the prewar success of “institutionalized” impressionism.12 If we now set aside the pre-expressionist line, which is more or less attached to the general question of expression, the protagonists of expressionism proper, so to speak, were artists who first appeared in public after the First World War. The movement was heterogeneous and had no unified program, showing the characteristics of many (also regionally conditioned) influences. All in all, it is possible to posit three stages in the development of expressionism: (1) 1918–1921: a period that was still caught between older currents (secessionism, symbolism, etc.) and expressionism; (2) 1922–1923: expressionism proper or the moment of the greatest concentration of expressionist tendencies; and (3) 1924–1928: the move away from expressionism toward New Objectivity. There were two main regional starting points for the expressionist movement, which closely connected the efforts of writers, poets, and visual artists: the Dolenjska region, especially the town of Novo mesto, with the brothers France 398

Expressionism in Slovenia

Figure 21.2  Fran Tratnik, Slepci (The Blind), 1911, pencil and black crayon on paper, 61.6 × 44.5 cm, Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM), Ljubljana, Slovenia. © Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM)

and Tone Kralj and Božidar Jakac (1899–1989); and the Primorska region, with the so-called Gorica circle, where we find Veno Pilon as the most important representative. The springboard for a renewal of the arts (not just of modernism) was definitely Novo Mesto Spring, almost a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk that took place in 1920. It included an exhibition, recitals, music, etc. Here we find all the names that we connect with expressionism in Slovenian art, literature, and music—even Rihard Jakopič. This manifestation or event officially culminated in 1921, when the first issue of the magazine Trije labodje (Three Swans) was published and the Young Artists Club was established, led by the expressionist France Kralj. The club did not have a programmatic character; it was more an organizer and successful promotor of artists and exhibitions in Slovenia and abroad. From here onwards, we could say that expressionism had succeeded, but it then quickly ossified into “spiritualization,” afterwards transforming into New Objectivity. As we can see, it is not a great insight to note that the beginning of expressionism in Slovenia did not coincide with its emergence in Germany. Slovenian impressionism had appeared in the Carniola, or central region of Slovenia, only at the dawn of the twentieth century and initially found little acceptance among critics or the public, but it then quickly became the most wellestablished prewar art movement in Slovenia. Taking this into account, it might seem pertinent to also emphasize the long “delay” in the case of expressionism. This would mean little more than stating the obvious and perhaps deeming a whole (geographically determined) generation 399

Marko Jenko

of artists as “backward” without regard to the specific circumstances of their life and work. It is more significant to point out that both the Slovenian impressionists and the expressionists simply wanted to be in touch, stay as informed as best they possibly could, and to recognize and keep up with the latest European developments in making and thinking about art. In other words, they were trying to inaugurate a break with what was before, but also as a (preemptive) strike at the future. The Slovenian expressionists were born under Austro-Hungarian rule at the turn of the century, with no properly established system of local art schools at their disposal. We can therefore immediately note that the expressionists were all very young when they entered the stilldeveloping art scene, and many were mobilized during the war. For instance, Božidar Jakac (b. 1899) was in his teens and early twenties, Veno Pilon (b. 1896) and France Kralj (b. 1895) were in their early and mid-twenties, and France’s brother Tone Kralj (b. 1900) was in his teens and early twenties. Like their predecessors the impressionists, for whom the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna became the usual and most obvious choice, they were able to travel and educate themselves abroad. After the war, these generations were still very much shaped by the same central European geographical framework, especially cities such as Munich, Vienna, and increasingly Prague—even before the First World War, both in terms of Pan-Slavism and scholarships—followed by Zagreb in the 1930s. However, if we speak of two generations (the impressionists and expressionists), we must say that expressionism, appearing after the First World War and truly lasting for only a couple of

Figure 21.3  Tone Kralj, V potu njihovega obraza (By the Sweat of Their Face), 1919, oil on burlap, 69.5 × 88 cm, Tone Kralj collection, Božidar Jakac Art Museum, Kostanjevica na Krki, Slovenia.  Božidar Jakac Art Museum

400

Expressionism in Slovenia

years, began as a reaction to impressionism. This also applied to the latter’s prewar success and the prewar way of life and mentality, which not only the expressionists deemed too materialist and the main cause that had led to the war and ultimately failed with it. Expressionism was therefore, first and foremost, attached to this failure or to the particular mental or physical state, feeling, or emotion obviously derived from the firsthand experience of war and the simultaneous collapse of prewar society and the Self, and, to the extent that they are interconnected: misery, suffering, exhaustion, destitution, angst, and anxiety (Figure 21.3). This can easily be detected in the “mood” of the artists’ work, its formal aspects and subject matter, etc., but also in the growing interest in or sometimes simply involvement in the sacred and/or religious (especially in the oeuvre of the brothers Kralj)—as an expression of the will to question and heal. The sacred and religious thus not only imply the obvious terms of subject matter and commission, they went hand in hand with the rebuilding processes in interwar society in general.13

The Intellectual Framework of Expressionism in Slovenia Let us now ask another question: What is the mental framework of expressionism in Slovenia? What is the economy, disposition, or regulation of its psyche? Is it simply about the interwar period and the aftermath of the war, being (very much) linked to concrete historical circumstances? Or does it, through its attachment to these circumstances, bring out general and even philosophical questions that concern human nature, perhaps not only in modern times? It could be that our theoretical attachment to empiricism (or pretheoretical empiricism)—namely, the basic art-historical or art-historicist perspective of placing things in their concrete social, temporal, political, etc. contexts—simply does not suffice. These more general questions will also enable us to overturn the predominant meaning or use of the term “expressionism” as some sort of self-expression of angst, fear, or phobias, and also of spirituality, etc., or as merely being attached to a strictly subjective framing or distortion of reality, afterwards supposedly amended by the inner calm of New Objectivity. When it comes to the question of a certain mental framework, an interesting Job-like narrative or aspect of expressionism reveals itself. It is as if misery and the sacred spring up together or as if the theological is called upon to explain or heal the simultaneous collapse of society and the Self. It could be argued that, in this context, the sacred is also a reaction, expressing or simply showing the will to put things in order and rebuild them—or perhaps to (quite visibly and obviously) mask a certain predicament. We could also say that the return of the sacred or its sudden intensification is a sure sign of its failure and also of its being retroactively posited, almost in terms of “once upon a time,” as some sort of guarantee: The return of the sacred is therefore a rebuilding of the sacred. The sacred is perhaps literally saving itself. From this point of view, it is not surprising to see that a part of Slovenian expressionism is very much connected to the reinstatement of religious art, commissioned or not. It became closely tied to the logic of religiosity (in the form of any presupposition of a beyond), not simply or only in terms of a certain well-defined subject matter. And the divine has not only returned in order to help the artists and society: underneath this massive resurgence, we feel that the artists are helping God (reconstructing Society with a capital S). Even if we link it to conservative modernist currents, the perception of the divine is ambivalent: is it a cruel, testing, and capricious authority, or is it a healing and pacifying one? How could God do this to us—push us into war? Has he forsaken us, to paraphrase Christ? Is there a deeper meaning to it all? In the moment of utter despair and destitution, the divine returns in all its might (Figure 21.4). 401

Marko Jenko

Figure 21.4  France Kralj, Snemanje s križa (Descent from the Cross), 1923, oil on burlap, 101.5 × 96.5 cm, France Kralj collection, Božidar Jakac Art Museum, Kostanjevica na Krki, Slovenia.  Božidar Jakac Art Museum

If we flip through the pages of monographs or catalogues dedicated to Slovenian expressionist artists,14 we cannot escape the impression that expressionism or its attachment to a certain interwar state of mind and body quickly turned into or became an end in itself. It is all too easy—albeit true—to say that war is dehumanizing and tragic. Tragedy as such, however, still presupposes an ordered (premodern) universe of fate. With the expressionists, the emphasis on misery, anxiety, etc. starts to feel increasingly melodramatic and mannered, especially when we recognize the remnants of a certain prewar secessionist, not to say decorative, serpentine line. It almost seems like an ossification of what had initially been very much real. It is as if the quest for the real turned into a series of semblances of the real. Instead of social and personal catastrophe, we quickly get a melodrama of the beautiful soul binding itself with relish to misery, impotence, suffering, and negative affects. What at first was a passionate attempt at a genuine expression of suffering, anxiety, etc., quickly became a decorative illusion, a turn not only or not simply due to art being commissioned as church decoration. It could also be said that the real or genuine nature of the hurt and suffering is always connected to bodily pain, meaning that the convulsions of the body offer the visual correlative of the injured psyche expressing or even trying to heal itself. But why did the world of the expressionists become increasingly plagued by apparitions? It seems that the hurt is not simply about the devastation of corporal reality. Now, we have a split view before us: physical 402

Expressionism in Slovenia

reality and apparitions, with the line between them becoming more and more unstable. At the moment of an utterly real and genuine devastation, we get (not only) the wounded physical reality but more and more apparitions. This should not only be understood as a mere expression of disbelief in the face of wartime experiences and their psychological aftermath. What we get are Nande Vidmar’s (1899–1981) nightmare visions on a street (Figure 21.5), Božidar Jakac’s haunting images of dramatically lit cafés with menacing figures, and Veno Pilon’s raw, uncompromising, and angst-ridden view of the poor or the empty streets of villages or towns. This is no ordinary melodramatic fantasy or hallucinatory phantasmagoria, not a mere critique of social conditions, etc., nor is it simply about the nitty-gritty of reality, a postwar loss of illusions and the like. In fact, the immediate interwar period already seems afflicted by an almost “postmodern” derealization or virtualization of everyday reality that actually turns out to be the true origin or the proper locus of the real in expressionism, not only in Slovenia. It is not simply reality but the distortion of—or contained in—reality itself: a blind spot of reality both outside and inside of us. Here is the proper tension: not simply between reality and apparition, or hallucinatory illusion, but in the reality of the existential confusion, in the blurred virtual existence that causes suffering which is not that of the body and which the bodily pain actually tries to “ground” or do away with. Not knowing what actually is real, is a sure sign of the intrusion of the now illusory real. I claim that expressionism, roughly speaking, shows us two things. First, there is a loss of reality that actually exposes something more real than reality (and this is not metaphysical, though

Figure 21.5  Nande Vidmar, Nočne blodnje II (Night Visions II), 1920, ink on paper, 17.1 × 11.1 cm, private collection, Slovenia.  Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM)

403

Marko Jenko

it calls for or even encourages it) and necessarily appears as a distortion of reality (“everyday apparitions,” phantoms, etc.). Second, there is the attempt to regain a stronghold or normalcy through the realness of the body, to firmly ground our ego in our bodily reality—braced against the unbearable anxiety of perceiving ourselves as nonexistent. To grasp, recreate, or simply create the apparition of the everyday is already to tame it and keep one’s distance. From this perspective, it is almost ironic that the move of some Slovenian artists from expressionism to New Objectivity merely rearticulates the same problem from a different angle; that is, in the very move away from supposedly subjective distortions and apparitions—from everything that seems off the rails, a drunken, derealized, hallucinated “reality”—to the cool and calm objective rendering of things as they supposedly are. This is immediately recognizable in the change of the color scheme and the approach to volume and figure, which become much more sculptural, i.e., physically present, having weight and mass. In short, this objective rendering again ends up struggling with the same spectral reality of an illusion. This logic could be illustrated in a more linear way: the attempt to passionately and dramatically deliver that which is real, beyond everything imaginary, beyond all ideological or other illusions (something that is, according to Alain Badiou, very much a twentieth-century phenomenon),15 turns into a sequence of semblances that then once again merely face the real. We are not only dealing with the (actually healing) bodily real versus the virtualization of reality, a merely imaginary subjective and angst-ridden distortion, but with an objectively existing distortion from which expressionism actually emerged and which it has always and already shown to us, albeit in a much more dramatic fashion. What is the “real” then? It is the reality of a cut, a separation of a thing from itself; that is, its non-coincidence with itself that “redoubles” or “spectralizes” it. This non-coincidence is not visually present in a way that we could pinpoint it in the artwork, yet it is the motor of the expressionist dramatic manner or setting. Grasping it means creating it and vice versa. This can complicate matters further: if expressionism in Slovenia, as a term, denotes a certain period in general and phases in certain oeuvres as well as any tendency toward self-expression, it would be wrong to understand expressionism as some sort of narcissism of inner expression, an inner psychological wealth, as almost a clearing of some sort of blockage. Except in its later, more “decorative” phase, expressionism is on the side of the external, not merely the internal: It is on the side of the “objectively subjective”—of that which is outermost, yet already innermost.16 The innermost is outside. In expressionism, things are not simply subjectively distorted, they are already objectively distorted. It should therefore also become quite evident that it is consequently difficult to fully accept the following understanding of expressionism and the difference between expressionism and New Objectivity in Slovenia: [Expressionism] manifested itself as an exceedingly introverted art concerned with spiritual values and as such was directly opposed to the mainstream of Slovene aesthetics, which emphasized external appearances or beautiful, harmonious compositions. However, it was soon supplanted by the more realistic New Objectivity. This phenomenon, interpreted according to the prevailing [communist or socialist] ideology as equivalent to Catholicism, was forgotten after the Second World War . . . but with the breakthrough of interest in modern art [after 1948, especially from the early 1950s onwards], it was renewed.17 This would-be definition relies too heavily on an all too commonsensical understanding of introversion (subjective) and realism (objective). Let us take the example of Veno Pilon. After the First World War, during which he was mobilized and became a Russian prisoner of war, 404

Expressionism in Slovenia

he studied in Prague and then attended special graphic arts workshops in Florence and Vienna. He also traveled to Berlin, Munich, and Dresden. In 1922, he returned to Slovenia and settled in Ajdovščina, southwest of Ljubljana. That year marked the end of his expressionist phase. He suddenly felt the need to abandon the black-and-white world of the graphic arts.18 In one of his letters to a Slovenian art historian, he writes that he is sick of expressionism because it is turning him more and more into a nervous wreck.19 He begins to opt for something more objective and peaceful: in color and on canvas. During his Ajdovščina period, Pilon painted a series of portraits, landscapes, and still lifes. One of these portraits, which are generally still deemed to be halfway between expressionism and New Objectivity, is especially interesting: the 1923 portrait of a fascinating local figure, the expressionist composer Marij Kogoj (1892–1956) (Plate 24), who wrote the music for the opera Black Masks (1924–1927) and contributed a text on new Slovenian music to the previously mentioned 1929 special issue of Walden’s Der Sturm.20 (Pilon’s Marij Kogoj was also reproduced in this issue of Der Sturm.) This portrait is still marked by expressionism insofar as its subject matter is an expressionist composer or even expressionism itself: Marij Kogoj—an objective portrait of Slovenian expressionism? Pilon’s intentions, however, are no longer expressionist; he aims instead at objectivity by trying to objectively render the very gist of expressionism. Throughout his life, Pilon was a sharp observer of people, their character, and natural mannerisms. Even in his expressionist phase, he was already keenly observing and depicting in his art the ways by which the social and political inscribe themselves onto the body, giving it almost a second nature, a spontaneous and natural affectation, constitution, or pose. He even speaks of the “defects of the civilization of the body.”21 His New Objectivist work, supposedly more realistic, is actually a “transformed” expressionism. The intent or nature of the new manner or style is to be “objective” or “realistic,” yet the goal is still the same: to grasp, even transpose, this strange kernel of a certain person and external reality. Within just a couple of years, New Objectivity retroactively revealed that the very thing which was then (and for decades afterwards) deemed introverted or a mere subjective distortion was in fact an already objective distortion or deformation (and always had been): an objectively subjective distortion located outside and not simply within one’s mind. This portrait is therefore also a self-portrait—Ogni dipintore dipinge se (every painter paints himself), as the Tuscan Renaissance proverb goes. It is unknowingly a self-portrait, in spite of Pilon’s intentions, which are also clearly colored by his fascination with Kogoj’s unusual nature. It is as if Pilon is, unbeknownst to himself, trying to reach behind himself by portraying another person.22

Conclusion If expressionism was initially an objective reaction to impressionism, naturalism, and realism, its essence ultimately turns out to be very much bound to an objectivity that it in fact topologically redefines as the interplay of the innermost and outermost. It is redefined not simply as something beyond or independent of us, but as something that is related to us, although we perceive it as something independent of us. This appearance—the way something presents itself to us within reality—is very much real. When it is detected or gets too close, anxiety arises. It is precisely here that New Objectivity, the calm and cool approach, was made to intervene in the deadlocked state of expressionism in Slovenia, even though it necessarily appears to be a move visually away from expressionism. Within this framework, it is difficult to see France Kralj’s Družinski portret (Family Portrait, 1926), posited by art historians as New Objectivity’s programmatic artwork, as being totally removed from the logic of expressionism. Even if the work itself shows no immediate visual expressionist traits, it nonetheless clearly points to a suffocating intimacy. 405

Marko Jenko

The redoubling or “spectralization” of the artist’s wife and child with a “dead” sculpture is enhanced by a seemingly objective color scheme that is dark—almost too dark, and far from being intense or rich. This clearly presents a better articulation of what expressionism was aiming at: not simply an objective rendering of things as they are, beyond any intensely subjective, angst-ridden, emphatically nervous intervention, but a rendering of the objectness of a redoubling or spectralization. Slovenian New Objectivity could perhaps be defined as a sober expressionism, not as a continuation but as a re-articulation, or more precise articulation of what was at work in expressionism. It is in this sense that I wish to apply Alenka Zupančič Žerdin’s thoughts on this entire issue: art is no longer what comes from the artists, or germinates within them in some sort of creative subjectivity . . . the subjective creation already leans on and lives on that interval or non-coincidence which is—strictly speaking—objective or an object, so that in a paradoxical way what is created precedes and enables the very act of creation.23 I would claim that this is exactly what expressionism tried to convey, but at some point it simply became too unbearable, and it was here that New Objectivity and Catholic “spiritualization” had to intervene in their own way, taking the edge off its avant-garde constitution.

Notes 1 See Tank! Slovenska zgodovinska avantgarda [Tank! Slovenian Historical Avant-Garde] (Ljubljana: Moderna galerija, 1998; exh. cat.). For Podbevšek, this will be a short-lived phase, convenient for those that will attribute it to nothing but the fervor of youth or lack of artistic strength. 2 However, we must keep in mind that certain avant-garde movements, for instance Italian futurism, are themselves conservative inasmuch as they perceive the advancement of modernity, be it in terms of modernization, industrialization or technology, in a “mythical,” “spiritual,” or “religious” way. This conservative streak is part of modernity itself—basically produced and upheld by modernity as its inner core and not as a mere remnant of past times. 3 Here we must take into account the shining precedent: the locally notorious, even (and unfortunately still) mythical Jakopič Pavilion in Ljubljana (1909–1962), named after its founder, the dominant “impressionist” painter Rihard Jakopič. This was the first modern, then contemporary art exhibition venue in Slovenia. The term “Slovenian impressionism” is quite dubious, if not completely misleading or wrong: from a chronological point of view, and from the point of view of its inner logic, it is very much not a mixture of late nineteenth and turn-of-the-century influences. It would therefore be more pertinent to simply call it, as Beti Žerovc has succinctly proposed, the entry of modernism into Slovenia. See, for example, her monograph Slovenski impresionisti [Slovenian Impressionists] (Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga, 2013). 4 Igor Kranjc, the former curator of Moderna galerija (Museum of Modern Art), Ljubljana, is perhaps still the biggest connoisseur of the brothers’ work. His written contribution to the understanding of their oeuvre is, of course, quite extensive. 5 Slavoj Žižek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway (Seattle, WA: The Walter Chapin Simpson Center for Humanities, 2000), 39. 6 Here I rely on Alenka Zupančič Žerdin’s stunning observations in her book The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003). 7 This is a paraphrased statement by Izidor Cankar, a key figure in Slovenian art history, and actually the first who reported on expressionist painting, already in 1912, in the literary monthly Dom in svet (Home and World). Another, this time a very negative report by Albin Ogris, springs up in 1914 in the paper Slovan (The Slav). In 1918, the perspective becomes more positive thanks to Ivan Dornik. The first “official” mention or use of the term “expressionism,” in view of a truly general public and the avant-gardes, appeared only in 1920 in the newspaper Slovenec (The Slovenian), in the article “Expressionism, Futurism, Cubism, Dadaism, Tatlinism”. For more on reception, see Lado Kralj, Ekspresionizem [Expressionism] (Ljubljana: DZS, 1986).

406

Expressionism in Slovenia 8 Ekspresionizem in nova stvarnost 1920–1930 [Expressionism and New Objectivity 1920–1930], ed. Milček Komelj and Igor Kranjc (Ljubljana: Moderna galerija, 1986; exh. cat.), 126. 9 This is perhaps astonishing, but one must insist on the mixed aspect of reception and amalgamations or combinations of styles or approaches. 10 Ekspresionizem in nova stvarnost 1920–1930, 126. 11 Walden was in touch with the Slovenian avant-garde artists and the Yugoslav avant-garde, particularly Ljubomir Micić and his Zenit magazine; he also served on the editorial board of their magazine Tank. The Slovenian issue of Zenit supposedly accompanied an exhibition of Slovenian art in Berlin. We can now almost safely say that this show did not take place. I would like to thank Dragan Živadinov (Zavod Delak) for this information. For more information, see the already mentioned Tank! Catalogue and the catalogue of the exhibition Der Sturm and the Slovene Historical Avant-Garde (Ljubljana: Muzej in galerije mesta Ljubljane /MGML, 2011). 12 This is interesting considering how important the Pavilion was for the exhibitions of the expressionists. Avgust Černigoj, the Slovenian avant-garde figure, held his second, “didactic” exhibition, which showed the development of art from impressionism to constructivism, in the Pavilion in 1925. After this exhibition, he had to flee to Trieste since he was accused of being a communist. 13 Tone Kralj’s numerous church wall paintings in the Primorska region were actually never completely satisfying for the Church. One has the feeling that the times will change only with the advent of Slavko Pengov, who will, after the Second World War, become one, if not the most, prominent socialist-realist painter. 14 The best (and the only one) being the exhibition catalogue Ekspresionizem in nova stvarnost 1920–1930, already quoted here. 15 See his The Century (Cambridge; Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007). 16 It was Jacques Lacan who claimed in his eleventh seminar that expressionists dare to show things how they truly are—how we truly see them. Here, our seeing is already inscribed into the outside, the “objective”—it appears to us as objective, as an already existing outer distortion. 17 Ekspresionizem in nova stvarnost 1920–1930, 125. 18 In fact, one could say that the graphic arts are the expressionist media. 19 See the texts in the retrospective catalogue Veno Pilon (Ljubljana: Moderna galerija, 2002). 20 Walden contributed a text on expressionism in music to the first issue of the Slovenian avant-garde magazine Tank in 1927. 21 Retrospective catalogue Veno Pilon. 22 When it comes to the particular case of Veno Pilon, we must add that another Slovenian combination is at work here: he came from Slovenia’s littoral region and was also well acquainted with the Valori Plastici, which he, after his expressionist period, combined with aspects of New Objectivity. Pilon himself spoke of a clash between the North and South in his work. 23 “gesta, ki za vselej ovrže simplistično, pa vendar izjemno razširjeno predstavo, po kateri je umetnost v svojem jedru tisto, kar prihaja od umetnikov, se poraja v njih, kreativni subjektivnosti . . . subjektivna kreacija [se] vselej že naslanja na in živi v tistem intervalu oziroma razmiku, ki je strogo vzeto objektiven oziroma objekten, da na paradoksalen način ustvarjeno predhodi samemu dejanju ustvarjanja in ga omogoča.” Alenka Zupančič Žerdin, “Realno v igri” [The Real in the Play], Problemi [Problems], 1–2 (2006): 93. She completely redefines the question of the object, away from anything sensory or physically palpable: the minimal difference between an object and itself already is an object. The same could be said of “spectralization.”

407

22 FROM ANXIETY TO REBELLION Expressionism in Croatian Art Petar Prelog

The expressionist complex is a significant component of Croatian modern culture that made its appearance primarily in literature and painting—with rare but important reverberations in theatre, film, architecture, and music. By focusing on the ambivalent sentiments emerging from modern industrial society, it affirmed the subjective perspective and individual values. Its significance from its German point of origin surpassed strict stylistic determinations, and thus it became an umbrella term for often diverse art phenomena exhibiting various levels of resistance to the conventions of bourgeois society and the canonical values of national culture. Croatian expressionism, therefore, can be understood as the sum of a number of individual contributions, marked by various influences, with a social and artistic significance that justifies its consideration within this large and important transnational artistic phenomenon. In the 1960s and 1970s, Croatian art historians approached expressionist tendencies with a certain degree of caution arising from the rigid application of the interpretative model regarding center–periphery relations. Given that Croatian and German expressionist painting cannot be directly compared and that expressionism is understood as a style and not as an idea,1 it was perceived as only one of the influences originating from large art centers that informed the hybrid features of Croatian modern painting. In his first study on the Spring Salon, the exhibition event that functioned as an important place for artists’ networking during the war and interwar periods, the art historian Božidar Gagro concluded that expressionism must be understood as only one of the factors in the formation of individual artists’ physiognomies, as a certain atmosphere under which hybrid artistic expressions thrived; thus, the characteristics of style were only partial, sporadic and, in most cases, imperfectly encapsulated by the term expressionism, which refers to the well-known phenomenon in German and Central European painting.2 Several years after Gagro, in his analysis of the Spring Salon’s initial period from 1916 to 1919, Josip Vrančić identified “early expressionism” as the most important contemporary tendency, noting that expressionism in Croatia is “one of the variants of European expressionism, with which it shares its distinctive relationship to reality, the subject and the artwork,” while, in a formal sense, its “appearance was independent.”3 By breaking away from the strict framework of literal formal comparison, Vrančić created new opportunities for analyzing and understanding 408

From Anxiety to Rebellion

manifold reactions to expressionism in Croatian visual culture. Vladimir Maleković, the author of the 1980 exhibition catalogue Expressionism and Croatian Painting, emphasized anti-dogmatism as one of the features of Croatian-specific expressionism, founding his interpretation on two basic assumptions. First, he believed it was necessary to speak out—clearly and without hesitation— about the expressionist tendencies present within modern Croatian painting.4 Second, he claimed that it was not always expedient to look for “clean” and uniform formal features in the works of Croatian expressionism,5 arguing that the expressivity of the content and the gestural or coloristic exaltation—which in some works emphasizes the individual and emotional aspects of the experience—were enough to justify their expressionist reading. Contrary to an understanding of expressionism as only one among equally valuable pieces of the “puzzle” of hybrid modernism in Croatia, this approach offered a broader perspective and enabled the recognition of potentially expressionist influences and their emergence at places and times when we might not have otherwise expected them to appear. However, adopting such a perspective bore within it the dangers of misinterpretation, since it tended to simplify the reading of all kinds of visual expressivity and subjective experiences as a sign of expressionism.6 Given the arguments put forward by the various opposing interpretations, it is understandable that a consensus on the scope and the identity of expressionist tendencies in Croatian modern painting could not be reached at the time. Generally, there were three basic problems of interpretation regarding expressionism in Croatian art: the problem of defining stylistic boundaries, the problem of determining the time frame (i.e., the periodization problem), and the problem of correlating and interweaving interpretations with concurrent tendencies.7 During recent decades, Croatian art historians have invested a great deal of effort in clarifying the last of these problems: the hybrid identity of the national modern visual culture.8 Unlike cubism or surrealism, however, which appeared sporadically during various periods, almost as exceptions within the oeuvres of several artists, expressionism in Croatian culture was more clearly pronounced, manifesting itself primarily as a Zeitgeist, a kind of prevailing cultural atmosphere condensed to within a short period of time (during and immediately after the First World War). Consequently, numerous monographs on key artists have been published presenting arguments fostering a more precise definition of the scope and meaning of this phenomenon. Two large exhibitions held in 2007 contributed to these advancements by presenting different layers of avant-garde tendencies in Croatian art. Each of the exhibitions, however, adopted a different stance on the embeddedness of expressionism within the national avant-garde complex.9 A recent (2011) exhibition, in the Klovićevi dvori Gallery, strove to present expressionist achievements in several fields of art production, from painting and graphic arts to theatre and film; it also helped confirm expressionism as unquestionably one of the most important chapters in Croatian culture.10 However, if we focus only on the visual arts (i.e., primarily painting), it can be concluded that some issues in the interpretation of expressionism still remain unanswered. In this regard, we must emphasize the need to clearly define the position and the meaning of expressionism within the corpus of Croatian modern art: in relation to the avant-garde, on the one hand, and moderate modernism—as the dominant ideology of bourgeois culture in interwar Croatia—on the other. Expressionism in Croatian painting manifested itself in a variety of ways that are characterized by specific approaches and personal interpretations and testify to the importance of the role of the individual in the transfer of international cultural complexes to the local environment. The result of this transfer might well be partial and heterogeneous, of varying significance, and often formally distant from its source, but it has proven to be crucial to the identity of Croatian modern art and its contribution to expressionism as a transnationally established idea. 409

Petar Prelog

Articulating the Anxiety: Expressionism during the First World War The comprehensive affirmation of expressionism in Croatian culture began during the First World War with the emergence of literary magazines advocating revolt against conventional culture and traditional aesthetic forms. In the history of the national literature, this handful of magazines, founded and edited by writers and journalists, was closely related to the period of the Croatian literary avant-garde, with expressionism as its dominant paradigm. Although some texts published in Tito Strozzi’s (1892–1970) Krik (The Scream, 1913–1914) and Vladimir Čerina’s (1891–1932) Vihor (The Storm Wind, 1914) had already exhibited an obvious reliance not only on futurist but also on certain expressionist postulates, it was in Ulderiko Donadini’s (1894–1923) magazine Kokot (The Rooster, 1916–1918) and Antun Branko Šimić’s (1898– 1925) Vijavica (The Snowstorm, 1917–1919) that expressionism took hold on multiple levels. Kokot was unquestionably “the first phase or the training ground for expressionism in Croatian literature.”11 In fact, after Donadini became acquainted with the essentials of expressionism through Hermann Bahr’s interpretations, he wrote programmatic texts in his own magazine, adopting a critical stance toward the canonized culture and institutions that made up the foundations of bourgeois society. Šimić initially took the matter a step further in Vijavica and then, after the end of the war, in the short-lived magazine Juriš (The Storming, 1919), where he clearly articulated his expressionist beliefs via programmatic texts and manifestos influenced by Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm. Often adamant in his beliefs, which called for the destruction of tradition, a parting with the conventional understanding of aesthetics, and the ascendance of introspection as a fundamental principle of art production, Šimić was definitely one of the most prominent creators of the prevalent expressionist atmosphere in Croatian culture. Clearly many of the key texts which shaped and influenced the Croatian literary avant-garde were promoting expressionist poetics.12 These magazines, however, were primarily promotional platforms for the attitudes espoused by their founders and editors and thus did not function like true nodes of an artists’ network, which might have triggered a deliberate intermedial conceptualization of expressionism. The visual arts were not granted sufficient space in the publications and were therefore unable to achieve the affirmation necessary to enable the formation of artists’ groups with clearly formulated artistic objectives based on expressionist tenets. Furthermore, there were no manifestos whose content would influence the possibilities of expressionist articulation in painting in any significant way. Although certain artists did contribute to the graphic design of these magazines, and contemporary exhibitions were a subject often written about, the visual arts were undoubtedly more passive than literature in their acceptance of revolutionary demands for a change in aesthetic values. Nonetheless, it cannot be denied that the influence of this kind of penetration by expressionism into local modern culture and art certainly extended to painting. The call to rebellion, however—compared with literature, modeled as it was on Berlin’s periodical Der Sturm, where it was clearly pronounced—remained out of focus among painters, where center stage was occupied by a general impression of anxiety; thus initial expressionist efforts in Croatian painting during the First World War arose out of the fundamental existential uncertainties triggered by a major international conflict. On a formal level, the genesis of expressionism in Croatian painting does not significantly differ from that of the central European instances. It was Peter Selz who, in his pioneering study of German expressionist painting, noted that “symbolism, Jugendstil, and expressionism share above all their emphasis on form and its evocative potentialities, both in the expression of the artist and in the response of the spectator.”13 Accordingly, the formal and poetic predecessors of early Croatian expressionism were the prolific and lasting achievements of symbolism and the local variants of the Secession style. 410

From Anxiety to Rebellion

Figure 22.1  Jerolim Miše, Čovjek s crvenom kapom i pregačom (The Man with a Red Cap and an Apron), 1914, oil on canvas, 60 × 53 cm, Muzej za umjetnost i obrt/Museum of Arts and Crafts, Zagreb, inv. no. MUO 25849. Photo: Srećko Budek.  Muzej za umjetnost i obrt, Zagreb. Courtesy of Muzej za umjetnost i obrt, Zagreb

One of the most evident and important examples of expressionism’s emergence on the basis of precisely this foundation is a series of portraits by Jerolim Miše (1890—1970), created in 1914 (Figure 22.1).14 Although Miše first trained briefly in Zagreb and then, for a longer period, in Rome and Florence—thus Italian influences could be expected—the most prominent influences on his work were Viennese, along with some references to Ferdinand Hodler’s oeuvre. Analyzing the previously mentioned portraits, one might conclude that the painter’s intentions were ambiguous and seemingly contradictory. On the one hand, he strove toward generalization, intending to represent selected types, as evidenced by the titles of the portraits: Peasant Woman, Young Man, Philosopher, Critic, etc. On the other hand, one cannot deny his tendency toward psychological immersion and a desire to reveal individual character. Donadini, the most eminent representative of the Croatian literary avant-garde, wrote positively and in accordance with his own understanding of expressionism about Miše’s painting, describing the portrayed figures as “heroes” who are “souls and not bodies.”15 Almost twenty years after the creation of Miše’s portraits, Miroslav Krleža (1893–1981)—a writer who partially espoused expressionist poetics during the First World War, although he constantly criticized it in principle—likewise viewed them from an expressionist perspective, identifying “psychology” as the artist’s main motivation and noting that his paintings exhibit “an indiscreet . . . entry into the subcutaneous, into what is hidden, bloody, intimate, into the 411

Petar Prelog

Freudian of these models.”16 The critics therefore recognized Miše’s undoubtedly successful articulation of the general impression of anxiety. His undivided attention was directed toward the individual, expressing the state of mind through pronounced deformities and unusual cropping. Miše’s paintings possess a high degree of personal sensitivity that articulates not only the drama of the subject portrayed, but also the feelings experienced by the painter himself during these frustrating times of war. Zlatko Šulentić (1893–1971), who accumulated diverse experiences while studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and living in Paris and Vienna, was another artist who contributed to early Croatian expressionism. At first, he sought to unite the Jugendstil traces of linearity and rhythm with an almost impressionist tendency to capture the moment. Then, like Miše, he attempted to conjure up in his portraits the existential individual dilemmas triggered by war. Šulentić sought and acquired heterogeneous influences without restriction and united them in his painting Čovjek s crvenom bradom (Man with a Red Beard), painted in 1916 (Figure 22.2); three years later the work was exhibited, in 1919, at the Spring Salon exhibition, where it further stimulated the already spirited expressionist atmosphere. By placing the figure within spatially indeterminate surroundings, in a restless and abstract situation, as well as the use of intense blue tones in the clothing and the coloristic emphasis on the beard and features of the face, Šulentić inscribed his painting with a restrained but nonetheless predominantly expressive atmosphere.

Figure 22.2  Zlatko Šulentić, Čovjek s crvenom bradom (Man with a Red Beard), 1916, oil on canvas, 100.5 × 70 cm, Moderna galerija/Modern Gallery, Zagreb, inv. no. MG-3874. Photo: Goran Vranić.  Moderna galerija, Zagreb. Courtesy of Moderna galerija, Zagreb

412

From Anxiety to Rebellion

Unlike the case with this strange amalgamation—containing, among other things, elements derived from Cézanne’s style—we can discern the direct influence of deformative tendencies from Egon Schiele’s expressionist repertoire in the Portret Dr. Stjepana Pelca (Portrait of Dr. Stjepan Pelc, 1917; Figure 22.3). This dark and ominous painting, featuring only a few accents of color and light, an expressive face with a “blank” stare, and a typical fist with elongated fingers and deformed, thickened joints, is undoubtedly much more than a conventional portrait. Wanting to portray the “soul” and capture the full depth of the human drama, Šulentić modeled his painting on the work of one of the key figures of early Austrian expressionism. He thus infused his own oeuvre with an extraordinary expressive potential, making an important contribution to the expressionist atmosphere of that time. While Miše and Šulentić primarily articulated the general feeling of anxiety through their representations of individually embodied emotional states, Ljubo Babić (1890–1974)—a painter, critic, art historian, and versatile intellectual—strove to address the collective psychosis triggered by war in a different way. Before the beginning of the war, this student of Franz von Stuck notably exhibited his works at the Glaspalast in Munich and at the Vienna Secession. Upon his return to Zagreb, he began work on the short, but distinctive expressionist segment of his oeuvre. Although he also painted a series of portraits with a generally expressive mood originating from unrestrained brushstrokes and an attempt to gain a deeper insight into the

Figure 22.3  Zlatko Šulentić, Portret Dr. Stjepana Pelca (Portrait of Dr. Stjepan Pelc), 1917, oil on canvas, 100 × 68 cm, Muzej savremene umetnosti/Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, inv. no. 240.  Muzej savremene umetnosti, Belgrade. Courtesy of Muzej savremene umetnosti, Belgrade

413

Petar Prelog

character and emotions of the sitters, Babić’s contribution to Croatian expressionism is more conspicuous in his other paintings from that period and is the result of his personal approach. Moreover, despite his extended stay in Munich and frequent visits to Vienna, during which he certainly became familiar with the basic tenets of German and Austrian expressionist painting, his work does not reveal any direct formal expressionist influences. A series of paintings with flag motifs—including Black Flag from 1916, the painting most often associated with expressionism—testifies to the way in which the painter used the urban landscape as a stage for articulating a difficult and ominous atmosphere.17 With bold compositions usually seen from an elevated viewpoint, looking down, for example, from a multi-story building onto the street, and with the dramatic juxtaposition of light and dark passages, Babić created a distinct form of expression that allows him to be viewed within the context of expressionism despite the lack of a typical iconography. During those years, the painter was additionally preoccupied with religious themes, especially with the theme of Christ’s crucifixion, which with its multifaceted symbolism, presented itself as a highly topical wartime leitmotif. Visibly agitated brushstrokes painted in various directions, contrasting intensities of light, and an extremely stage-like presentation of the scene emphasizing its dramatic quality are present in the two versions of Golgota (Calvary, 1916 and 1917; Figure 22.4). Babić uses these elements to assert his unequivocal intent to create an expressive situation; thus did Croatian expressionism acquire yet another distinct dimension. All three of the artists previously mentioned achieved their recognition at the Spring Salon exhibitions. During their existence from 1916 to 1928, these events were a place where diverse influences of contemporary European art were assembled and absorbed.18 Founded in the middle of the war, in Zagreb, a small and predominantly traditional cultural center on the edge of the disintegrating Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Spring Salon became an important place for the networking of artists, a kind of a platform that, with its open-door policy, attracted many artists from all over Croatia, but also from Slovenia and Serbia. Since it adhered to neither a manifesto nor a precisely formulated artistic foundation and its membership was relatively large and often changing (as evidenced by the membership lists occasionally published in the exhibition catalogues), the Spring Salon was not exclusively tied to expressionism in the beginning. The general modernist orientation, as its basic feature, can be discerned in the preface to the first exhibition catalogue, in which the journalist and writer Milutin Cihlar Nehajev (1880–1931), arguing that “our gaze is always focused on the future,” calls for the “pushing of boundaries.”19 Contrary to the approach of Donadini or Šimić, the need for change within the entire national art complex is conveyed in a more subtle and oblique manner. The notion of a young generation of artists as bearers of this change was articulated by a former Viennese student, Tomislav Krizman (1882–1955), on the poster for the first Spring Salon exhibition, using a visual vocabulary still similar to the Secession style. In an almost poignant manner, the poster shows a number of elderly people fleeing in terror before a gigantic naked young man, who symbolizes the dawn of new values. Thus, in the sense of a complex set of ideas, expressionism did not exist; nor did the signs of a radical resistance against conventional culture. The only thing present was the moderately modernist call for change and a firm belief in the progress of art. However, even this very general attitude, with which the Spring Salon entered the national cultural scene, enabled the articulation of specific reactions to the hopelessness of the wartime period, among which we can unquestionably identify expressionist aspirations. After the end of the war, Croatian expressionism gained a new dimension due to its acceptance of various influences, and this was once again most notably present within the framework of the Spring Salon exhibitions.

414

From Anxiety to Rebellion

Figure 22.4  Ljubo Babić, Golgota (Calvary), 1917, oil on wood, 77.5 × 81 cm, Moderna galerija/ Modern Gallery, Zagreb, inv. no. MG-952. Photo: Goran Vranić.  Moderna galerija, Zagreb. Courtesy of Moderna galerija, Zagreb

Short-Term Rebellion: Expressionism in Croatian Painting between 1919 and 1921 During the first couple of years after the First World War, expressionism in Croatian art occupied an unequivocal avant-garde position. It was often written about, and the expressionist label was often applied to art production presenting disparate features; that is, to works exhibiting a certain degree of conceptual deviation from the traditional concept of art and its perception. Works created during the war that, in various ways, contributed to the re-actualization of expressionism under new, postwar circumstances were also displayed at the Spring Salon exhibitions. One of the most notable works from the period was definitely Marino Tartaglia’s (1894–1984) Autoportret (Self-portrait; Figure 22.5), a small oil painting made in Rome in 1917 and exhibited the following year at the local gallery L’Epoca, along with works by Giorgio De Chirico and Carlo Carrà. This unusual painting is a morphological deviation of sorts; almost without exception, it is analyzed independently of the rest of the painter’s oeuvre.20 It was created within the complex Italian art scene, drawing influences from Italian art nouveau, expressionism, and, marginally, futurism. The painting has a vertically elongated format and shows a deformed face constructed from blotches of color and quick, uneven brushstrokes. With its exhibition in Zagreb at the Sixth Spring Salon in 1919, Tartaglia’s Autoportret, with its unconventional features, signified the continuation of the expressionist atmosphere in Croatian painting.

415

Petar Prelog

Figure 22.5  Marino Tartaglia, Autoportret (Self-portrait), 1917, oil on cardboard, 35.5 × 19 cm, Muzej suvremene umjetnosti/Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, inv. no. MSU 4302. Courtesy of Muzej suvremene umjetnosti, Zagreb and Vladimira Tartaglia Kelemen

The members of the younger generation who emphasized some of the new role models also contributed to this situation. Following the end of the First World War—especially for the work of Milivoj Uzelac (1897–1977), Vilko Gecan (1894–1973), and Marijan Trepše (1897–1964)—Miroslav Kraljević’s (1885–1913) painting, in particular, became one of the most important influences for the efforts of young Croatian artists to create art that specifically distanced itself from traditional principles. But what was it that made Kraljević’s work so deserving as to be set out as the undisputed role model? The reasons were numerous: his training in Munich, his prolific stay in Paris, the advanced features of his work (in the context of Croatia), and ultimately his premature death. Kraljević was a member of an informal group of Croatian artists who studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich between around 1905 and 1910 and are thus referred to as the Munich Circle in Croatian art history. His death from tuberculosis in 1913, when he was only twenty-seven years old, granted his life and work an undisputed mythical status. At the same time, the painters of the Munich Circle, with Josip Račić (1885–1908) and Miroslav Kraljević as central figures, had in fact introduced an entirely new dimension to Croatian painting. Their views on art were not in any way connected with the postulates of cultural nationalism or the need to establish a national expression or style, which was one of the central objectives of Croatian art in the prewar years; their affinities were far removed from depictions of events from Croatian history, national allegories, or idealized local landscapes. Unlike the older generation of Croatian painters, many of whom also studied in Munich, Račić 416

From Anxiety to Rebellion

and Kraljević did not aspire to narrativize their paintings. The art they produced contained features that were new and important in Croatian art at the time; specifically, their attention to the painting as a primarily autonomous artistic fact. Ultimately, it was the painters from the Munich Circle, especially Kraljević, with his interest in Cézanne, who moved the focus of Croatian painting away from the central European cultural sphere (i.e., Vienna and Munich as traditional destinations for Croatian students) to Paris, which was considered the most important center of modern art.21 Bringing the spirit of cosmopolitanism right to the edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Kraljević had also opened up new perspectives for many young Croatian artists. His exhibitions held in Zagreb’s Salon Ullrich—the first one in the autumn of 1912 and the second one posthumously, a year later—had a powerful impact on the art community in Zagreb.22 His work displayed resistance to all types of traditionalism. Kraljević’s interpretation of Cézanne’s painting is identifiable in the similar use of color in his landscapes, in the arrangements of still lifes, and in his attempts to achieve a disciplined construction and well-conceived composition, and was regarded as an important contemporary orientation. At the same time, his conscious elaboration on the expressivity of form—present in his paintings from the Parisian period as well as in his quick sketches of nightlife and his erotically charged studies of the female form made for the Parisian magazine Panurge—has been interpreted as the beginning of expressionism in Croatian art; this was validated by Antun Branko Šimić, who, back in 1917 in the magazine Vijavica, examined Kraljević’s work in the context of expressionism, noting that “in comparison with contemporary expressionists he does use somewhat older forms,” but nonetheless, “breaks the so-called laws” and “reveals to us his unadorned inner self.”23 It was due to Kraljević’s influence that not only expressionism but also Cézanne’s position as a role model was also reinforced at the Spring Salon exhibitions between 1919 and 1921. This temporary focus on Cézanne’s approach as seen through Kraljević’s prism can be identified in a number of landscapes, still lifes, and portraits, and it proved to be crucial in setting the course of Croatian interwar painting. At that time, the receptive capabilities of the audience were such that this belated evocation of Cézanne—that is, this derivative of his style—was accepted as a kind of a paradigm of artistic modernity comprehensible to all. Therefore, paintings by Uzelac, Gecan, and Trepše that variously referred to Cézanne appeared simultaneously with their most significant expressionist works. In this sense, the conclusion reached by the art historian Grgo Gamulin, that Cézannism was “the interpolation which . . . delayed, weakened, or hindered the growth of expressionism,”24 seems to be right on the mark. The understanding of expressionism— among the audience as well as the protagonists of the Croatian art scene—was thus additionally hampered by a strong drive to carry Cézanne’s lessons to fruition, since they constituted the foundations of modern painting. With the end of the war, in addition to Kraljević, another fertile source of stimuli and influences emerged. As an important central European art center, Prague was a desirable destination for Croatian artists. Before the war, the city had hosted a major solo exhibition of Edvard Munch; works by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and André Derain could be seen in exhibition; and the city was home to art historians and collectors such as Vincenc Kramář, whose activities decisively influenced the identity of Czech modern art. All things considered, Prague was definitely an important place for Croatian artists wishing to acquaint themselves with the recent achievements of European art. For a younger generation of painters who had received recognition at the Spring Salon exhibitions after the war for the new impulses they brought to Croatian painting, Prague was especially attractive; thus, Croatian art historians characterize Milivoj Uzelac, Vilko Gecan, Marijan Trepše, and Vladimir Varlaj (1895–1962) as the Prague Four.25 Even though they, with the exception of Uzelac, spent a relatively short 417

Petar Prelog

period of time in the city, these four friends were able to exploit their presence there to extract information crucial to the formative periods of their artistic production; Prague was, of course, also a great place to learn about expressionism. Direct connections with Czech expressionism, however, are absent from the works of Croatian artists. Its stimulus was undoubtedly present, primarily due to Prague’s vital and heterogeneous artistic atmosphere, but its solutions were not reflected in the adoption of particular formal models. Expressionism was thus recognized as an important concept, but it was subjected to transformations or adaptations conditioned by rather traditional features of the local culture. Despite these specific aspects of Croatian expressionism and the strengthening of Cézanne’s influences, the situation immediately after the war was, as noted above, exceptionally permeated with expressionist influences. Iljko Gorenčević (1896–1924) was one of the most talented and educated Croatian art critics of the period; in the catalogue of the Spring Salon exhibition held in Osijek in 1920, he noted—regarding the works of painters trained in Prague—that Croatian art was characterized by “action and a fighting spirit of protest” and had “severed all ties with its past and tradition,” before concluding that “new people want new art.”26 But what were the features of this temporary expressionist rebellion? Milivoj Uzelac received informal training from Jan Preisler, a professor at the academy in Prague. His works provide a good example of the sort of amalgamation in which one can identify the influences of Kraljević and Cézanne, the mild deformative tendencies that could point to expressionism and, finally, the extreme juxtaposition between light and dark passages, all with the intention of creating a distinctive, bleak atmosphere. Because of the lack of a more standard expressionist vocabulary, it has often been claimed that there are no elements of expressionism in Uzelac’s painting;27 however, several works from the painter’s Prague-Zagreb period exhibit a high degree of consistency in creating a personal expressionist poetic characterized by a general impression of anxiety. Venera iz predgrađa (Suburban Venus, 1920; Figure 22.6), one of the key works of Croatian modern painting, exhibits the most important elements of Uzelac’s expressionist achievements: the provocative subject matter (a prostitute lying on the bed), the unstable composition, arbitrary proportions, and the transformation of physical beauty (the woman’s body) into something ugly and repulsive. After his stay in Paris in 1921, Uzelac began to demonstrate a tendency toward pronounced voluminosity and the derivation of certain cubist elements, but he continued to aspire toward expressivity, especially in his works with urban themes. Marijan Trepše spent a year studying graphic art under Professor Max Švabinský at the academy in Prague, and he initially, sometimes even literally, relied on Kraljević’s expressive impulses. Trepše’s shift away from Kraljević’s style and themes can be seen in the works created after he returned from Prague in 1919, which was when his work started to exhibit elements derived from Czech influences—visible in the pronounced attempts to achieve spatial fragmentation, the tendency toward flatness, and the use of multiple focal points, alongside the general impression of discomfort and anxiety that was as a common feature of many Croatian exponents of expressionism in the interwar period. In his prints, Trepše often insisted on an intense juxtaposition of light and shadow and a distinctive fragmentation of volume and space. There is only a suggestion of this strategy in his paintings, which he sought to intensify in some of his prints. As a result, in the lithograph Čovjek, konj i pas (Man, Horse, and Dog, 1920), for instance, one can identify a distant allusion to the famous work by Franz Marc. Although both Uzelac and Trepše fill some of the most important pages in the story of expressionism in Croatian painting, Vilko Gecan was the one whose approach to expressionism was the most systematic. Between 1919 and 1921, he “began and fully completed the first expressionist phase in his oeuvre,”28 although, like his contemporaries, he simultaneously 418

From Anxiety to Rebellion

Figure 22.6  Milivoj Uzelac, Venera iz predgrađa (Suburban Venus), 1920, oil on canvas, 96.5 × 127 cm, Moderna galerija/Modern Gallery, Zagreb, inv. no. MG-1046. Photo: Goran Vranić.  Moderna galerija, Zagreb. Courtesy of Moderna galerija, Zagreb

followed the styles of Kraljević and Cézanne. Gecan’s expressionism likewise manifested itself in a correspondingly specific manner. Although he spent a year at the Art Academy in Munich,29 gaining direct insight into the work of German expressionists, the distinct expressionist sensibility articulated in some of his paintings and drawings, even from the prewar period, was not determined by direct formal influences. The most important thing for Gecan, as well as for other Croatian painters, was the general impression that the work left with the viewer: the feeling of uneasiness, insecurity, anxiety, and even drama. Dramatic tension in his drawings, articulated through unrestrained and swirling strokes and intense contrasts in light—these are the foundation of Gecan’s expressionism, which would reach its peak in the cycle of ink drawings titled Klinika (Clinic), created in 1920, during his stay in Prague. His painting Cinik (Cynic; Plate 25) was exhibited as the centerpiece (and item number one in the catalogue) at the eleventh Spring Salon exhibition in 1921—Gecan’s big solo exhibition at the Art Pavilion in Zagreb—and represents the pinnacle of expressionism in his painting, his most well-considered and deliberate approach to the expressionist perspective. The immense significance of this work to the painter himself is evidenced by the fact that in its production it was preceded by several preparatory works. One of the studies for Cinik was exhibited in 1920, at the ninth Spring Salon exhibition; another, Konstrukcija za portret cinika (Construction for the Portrait of a Cynic), which served as the direct template for the painting, was published by Ljubomir Micić (1895–1971) in the magazine Zenit (Zenith).30 The scene is of a man sitting at a table with newspapers spread out in front of him. Gecan articulates the expressionist essence on two levels: content and form. 419

Petar Prelog

Among the elements of content, the most noticeable is the name of the newspaper: Der Sturm, the key expressionist publication, which could be found in at least some of Zagreb’s bookshops. The deformation and contortion of the figure’s face, as well as of his right fist placed on the newspaper, suggest the figure’s mood. Because of the arrangement of the defining elements, the composition is unstable: the surfaces framing the scene are fragmented, and there are multiple focal points; the psychological sense of uncertainty is penetrating. Zvonko Maković defines such a spatial construction as “collapsing,” comparing it to the stage of an expressionist theatre; in some elements he recognizes a connection with German expressionist film.31 At the beginning of the 1920s, with his painting Cinik, Gecan gathered certain expressionist elements—as he, himself, understood them—into an explicit and manifest whole. In doing so, he marked not the beginning but the end of an era. This noteworthy work of Croatian modernism can therefore be considered the dénouement of the expressionist chapter in Croatian art. It was in 1921—the year Gecan’s work marked the crest of expressionism in Croatian art— that Ljubomir Micić began to publish his avant-garde magazine Zenit, in Zagreb. Although he succeeded in creating a strong international avant-garde network based around the magazine, Micić’s concept—of continuously advocating regional, Balkan values, embodied in an authentic Barbarogenious, in opposition to the universal idioms upon which Western European avantgardes were founded—seemingly ran contrary to his desire to break away from the relatively closed local culture of interwar Yugoslavia. He began, however, by promoting expressionism. The first few issues of Zenit, in both appearance and editorial concept, unquestionably reflect the role of Walden’s Der Sturm as main role model, thus endowing expressionism as its logical starting point. In the programmatic text “Man and Art,” published in the first issue, Micić mentions expressionism several times: it creates “new values and new forms,” it is “an imperative for the soul striving for the strongest expression in the work of art,” and “zenithism and expressionism are mirrors in which we see our horrible inner pain—the drama of our soul.”32 Clearly the understanding of expressionism had not significantly changed since it was first brought up during the war. In Zenit’s third issue, Micić engages in a critical discussion of the concept of expressionism, claiming that the term had been used too lightly, without knowledge of its meaning, leading to unrelated manifestations being declared instances of expressionism. Thus, he notes: “Expressionism is everywhere today. Rolling off everyone’s tongues. But there is none in one’s soul—in one’s work!” However, he does admit that there are some expressionist elements in painting (by Marino Tartaglia, Sava Šumanović, and Vilko Gecan) and even more in poetry, where he identifies a discernible following. In the end, he concludes that “expressionism is, without a doubt, the art of our time in all of Europe.”33 The fact that Zenit was indeed an expressionist magazine in the very beginning is also supported by its publication of Egon Schiele’s and Vilko Gecan’s works, Ivan Goll’s texts and the comprehensive analysis of his expressionist poetry,34 and a short obituary of a little-known poet from Zagreb, Marijan Maršik (1893–1921), a contributor to Der Sturm.35 Nonetheless, Zenit did not have any significant impact on the conceptual and formal patterns of Croatian expressionist painting, whose key works were largely created before 1921. Zenit, in its expressionist origin, thus serves primarily to mark the pinnacle of the expressionist atmosphere in Croatian culture; shortly thereafter, Croatian art, as well as Zenit, embarked on new paths, with different conceptual, poetic, and stylistic preoccupations.

“Second Expressionism”: A Return to Van Gogh Given that expressionism in Croatian art did not arise from a clearly formulated foundation and that there was no direct or unambiguous influence of German expressionism, which would probably have provided a somewhat greater coherence, it is understandable that its duration 420

From Anxiety to Rebellion

was limited. Without the existence of any close-knit expressionist networks, the situation during and immediately after the war was defined by the sum of the individual artists’ reactions as sparked by the various stimuli comprising the general expressionist atmosphere. “After the expressionist emotional discharge, the accumulation of an opposite charge naturally followed,” wrote Ivanka Reberski in the introduction to her book on neorealist tendencies in Croatian painting of the 1920s.36 These diverse, influential, and widespread variations on realism that emerged in Croatian painting as a timely response to the “return to order,” and similar tendencies in French, Italian, and German art, demonstrate the general inclination of Croatian culture at the time toward traditional art forms and a relatively conservative understanding of the role of art in society. They were definitely one of the logical consequences of the broad elaborations of Cézanne’s principles that appeared simultaneously with expressionism. In addition, in the early twenties, due to the turbulent social and political situation in the interwar Yugoslav multinational state, a crisis of national identity began to emerge that would once again led to a strong focus of issues of identity; that is, on an attempt to devise a national style or form of expression that would by all means express national particularities and yet also correspond to modern tendencies in European art. In such a constellation, expressionism—conceived as the pursuit of personal emotional and psychological tensions and the rebellion against canonized cultural values—simply ceased to be timely. In Croatian painting at the end of the 1920s and during the 1930s, it once again became possible to recognize references to certain attributes associated with the expressionist heritage, articulated primarily via coloristic and gestural exaltation—features that did not directly correlate with German expressionism. One such tendency, where color takes on a fundamental role in expressing the artist’s elevated emotional state, is evident not only in works by several Croatian artists, but also in Serbian and Slovenian painting; hence, it is held to be an important general feature of the predominantly non-unified Yugoslav art space of the time, under the descriptive label of coloristic expressionism.37 Zvonko Maković has proposed the term second expressionism for this tendency in Croatian painting.38 His intent, aside from the knowledge that the protagonists of German expressionism during and after the First World War were known as “the second generation,”39 was to emphasize the general difference in character between those adherents and the first expressionist articulations in Croatia, as they had no clear poetic or formal connections. However, the German second generation and the Croatian second expressionism do not have much in common, either. Even though Croatian painters turned primarily to French painting for inspiration, their greatest role model was Vincent van Gogh, with his liberated use of color and swirling brushstrokes. These individual interpretations of one of the key precursors of expressionism appeared among painters from different generations, artistic directions, and destinies. The intensity of color as the main characteristic of expression can thus be found in the work of Oskar Herman (1886–1974), who, living in Munich until 1933, was one of the four painters of the Munich Circle during the first decade of the 1900s and exhibited his works with the Münchener Neue Secession (Munich New Secession). Herman continued with his coloristic liberation even after the Second World War, when his expressionist articulation, based precisely on the intensity of color, achieved consistency. In the early 1930s, in an attempt to establish a national form of artistic expression within a deterministic model, Ljubo Babić painted Dalmatian landscapes in which his distinct affinity for color comes to the fore. Even Vilko Gecan, after six or seven years, returned to expressionism, but this time, under the influence of his stay in Paris, using thick layers of paint and more unrestrained strokes. Elements more explicitly derived from Van Gogh’s oeuvre appear in the works of a painter who only saw his paintings via books and reproductions: elaborating upon the Dalmatian landscape and depicting daily life in small villages on the Adriatic coast, 421

Petar Prelog

Figure 22.7  Ignjat Job, Vela Glavica I— Lumbarda, 1933, oil on canvas, 66 × 85 cm, Moderna galerija/ Modern Gallery, Zagreb, inv. no. MG-1081. Photo: Goran Vranić.  Moderna galerija, Zagreb. Courtesy of Moderna galerija, Zagreb

Ignjat Job (1895–1936) spent the last few years of his short life striving to translate emotion into painted canvas by means of pure color and spontaneous brushstrokes (Figure 22.7). One of the common features of almost all the adherents of expressionism mentioned here was their articulation of optimism and a joie de vivre. During the war and immediately after it, existential inquiry dominated; hence, almost every painting emanated restlessness and anxiety. During this second expressionist surge, however, it was the sense of freedom and serenity which prevailed. It should be noted that many other Croatian painters at the time—regardless of their previous personal poetic choices—tried their hand at the development of the expressive possibilities of color. Consequently, many of their works can be considered within this non-paradigmatic corpus of a so-called Croatian second expressionism.

Final Remarks The emergence of expressionism in Croatian culture bears witness to the importance of the individual in the transfer of avant-garde postulates. The national and transnational process of artistic networking enabled that transfer, while individuals—as actors within relatively loose and fluctuating artists’ networks extending beyond all national, state, or collective cultural and artistic strategies—were those who defined its intensity and content. This had a special bearing on Croatian expressionism. Particularly prominent were writers and artists who determined the 422

From Anxiety to Rebellion

features of expressionist tendencies in accordance with their own capacity for understanding this phenomenon. They generated a multitude of diverse interpretations and personal approaches that often substantially differed from German models. If we, accordingly, concede the possibility of a direct comparison with German expressionism as a paradigm, then Croatian expressionism can undoubtedly be regarded as peripheral. However, if we interpret expressionism as “a highly complex movement of cultural protest, which sought to overturn the prevailing aesthetic and social values on a universal scale,”40 as stated by Stephan von Weise, then all instances should be considered equally valuable components of this phenomenon, even those appearing outside the space we usually perceive as its point of origin. Moreover, without knowing all the pieces of this complex puzzle, we would be deprived of the panoramic view that enables us to better understand expressionism on all levels. If we take into account the fact that even German expressionism was not as strictly German as contemporary art historians often believe, its international aspects could, in its place, take center stage, as Hubert van den Berg has recently elucidated.41 Therefore, the expressionism created by Croatian artists—contributing to the great diversity of form, content, and meaning—can also be viewed and interpreted as one of the many confirmations of the international nature of the expressionist movement. Translated from the Croatian by Dunja Opatić. This chapter is the result of research conducted at the project IP-11-2013-6270-ARTNET, supported by the Croatian Science Foundation.

Notes 1 Donald E. Gordon insists on recognizing expressionism as one of the most important ideas of the twentieth century, as an open and often contradictory transnational concept in art, whose emergence and content are deeply ingrained in the intellectual achievements of modern society. Donald E. Gordon, Expressionism: Art and Idea (New Haven, CT; London:Yale University Press, 1987). 2 Božidar Gagro, “Slikarstvo Proljetnog salona” [Painting of Proljetni Salon], Život umjetnosti [Life of Art] 2 (1966): 46–54, 52. 3 Josip Vrančić, “Prvo razdoblje Proljetnog salona i rani ekspresionizam u hrvatskoj likovnoj umjetnosti (1916–1919)” [The First Period of the Spring Salon and Early Expressionism in Croatian Art], Radovi Filozofskog fakulteta u Zadru [Journal of Faculty of Philosophy in Zadar] 12 (1973/1974): 177–187, 180. 4 “Croatian expressionism as an art historical category was written, and sometimes still is, in quotation marks; the intention of this exhibition is to overcome these terminological obstacles.” Vladimir Maleković, Ekspresionizam i hrvatsko slikarstvo [Expressionism and Croatian Painting] (Zagreb: Umjetnički paviljon, 1980; exh. cat.), n.p. 5 Maleković, Ekspresionizam i hrvatsko slikarstvo, n.p. 6 At the abovementioned exhibition, the term expressionism was therefore broadly applied to the painters and their works that make up the foundations of Croatian modernism, covering the period from the end of the 1900s to the beginning of the Second World War. 7 Petar Prelog, “Nekoliko problema interpretacije ekspresionizma u hrvatskom slikarstvu” [Some Problems Regarding the Interpretation of Expressionism in Croatian Painting], in Zbornik I: kongresa hrvatskih povjesničara umjetnosti [Proceedings of the 1st Congress of Croatian Art Historians], ed. Milan Pelc (Zagreb: Institut za povijest umjetnosti, 2004), 263–268. 8 In an almost excessive pursuit of labeling individual phenomena in Croatian art, attempts to establish categories, which would have the effect of emphasizing the aforementioned hybridity, were anything but rare (i.e., secessionist expressionism, Cézannesque expressionism, and constructivist expressionism). 9 While expressionism was presented only partially at the exhibition Flashes of Avant-Garde in the Croatian Art of the First Half of the 20th Century, as one of the reverberations of the avant-gardes from European art centers, at the exhibition Avant-Garde Tendencies in Croatian Art, it occupied one of the central positions. See Prodori avangarde u hrvatskoj umjetnosti prve polovice 20. stoljeća/Flashes of Avant-garde in the Croatian

423

Petar Prelog Art of the First Half of the 20th Century, ed. Jadranka Vinterhalter (Zagreb: Muzej suvremene umjetnosti, 2007; exh. cat.); Avangardne tendencije u hrvatskoj umjetnosti/Avant-garde Tendencies in Croatian Art, eds. Zvonko Maković and Ana Medić (Zagreb: Galerija Klovićevi dvori, 2007; exh. cat.). 10 “Never before had one model, one cultural and artistic strategy, one poetic principle been accepted so comprehensively and without hesitation—while achieving quality results in many fields and relevance in a wider sense—as expressionism had been in Croatian art.” Zvonko Maković, “Umjetnost rođena iz kaosa” [Art Born from Chaos], in Strast i bunt—ekspresionizam u Hrvatskoj [Passion and Rebellion—Expressionism in Croatia], ed. Zvonko Maković (Zagreb: Galerija Klovićevi dvori, 2011; exh. cat.), 7–11, 11. 11 Branimr Donat, Ulderiko Donadini (Zagreb: Zavod za znanost o književnosti Filozofskog fakulteta Sveučilišta u Zagrebu, 1984), 123. 12 For more on the subject, see Hrvatska knjižavna avangarda: programatski tekstovi [Programmes and Manifestos of Croatian Literary Avant-Garde], ed. Ivica Matičević (Zagreb: Matica hrvatska, 2008). 13 Peter Selz, German Expressionist Painting (Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA; London: University of California Press, 1974), 64. 14 For more on these portraits, see Ivana Mance and Petar Prelog, “Opažanja uz rani portretni opus Jerolima Miše” [Remarks on the Early Portraiture of Jerolim Miše], Radovi Instituta za povijest umjetnosti [Journal of the Institute of Art History] 35 (2011): 227–236. 15 Ulderiko Donadini, “Pred slikama Jerolima Miše” [In Front of Jerolim Miše’s Paintings], Kokot [The Rooster] 3 (1916): 38–39. 16 Miroslav Krleža, “Jerolim Miše,” Hrvatska revija [Croatian Journal] 3 (1931): 178–179. 17 Ivanka Reberski, the author of the most recent of Babić’s retrospective exhibition, asserts that the flag motif was “the main theme of Babić’s expressionist period.” Ivanka Reberski, “Slikarstvo” [Painting], in Ljubo Babić—Antologija [Ljubo Babić—Anthology], eds. Ivanka Reberski and Libuše Jirsak (Zagreb: Moderna galerija, 2010; exh. cat.), 11–159, 47. 18 On the genesis, context, proposed periodization, and features of the Spring Salon exhibitions, see Petar Prelog, Proljetni salon 1916–1928/The Spring Salon, 1916–1928 (Zagreb: Umjetnički paviljon, 2007; exh. cat.). 19 Milutin Cihlar Nehajev, Hrvatski proljetni salon [Croatian Spring Salon] (Zagreb: Salon Ullrich, 1916; exh. cat.), n.p. 20 Tonko Maroević, one of the authors of Tartaglia’s retrospective exhibition held in 1975, noted how this painting is frequently analyzed separately from the rest of the painter’s oeuvre; namely, that it is perceived as an exception, or even as a coincidence, and argued that it should be considered within the context of the Roman art scene of that time, where expressionism was well known. Tonko Maroević, Marino Tartaglia (Zagreb: Umjetnički paviljon, 1975; exh. cat.), 9. On the other hand, Grgo Gamulin boldly interpreted this Self-portrait as an isolated phenomenon similar to certain works of Emil Nolde. Grgo Gamulin, Hrvatsko slikarstvo XX. stoljeća [Croatian Painting of the Twentieth Century], vol. 1 (Zagreb: Naprijed, 1987), 13. 21 On Paris as the ultimate goal of this group of Croatian students in Munich, see Petar Prelog, “Od Münchena prema Parizu: slikarstvo Münchenskog kruga/Von München nach Paris: Die Malerei des Münchner Kreises” [From Munich to Paris: Painting of the Munich Circle], in Akademija likovnih umjetnosti u Münchenu i hrvatsko slikarstvo/Die Akademie der Bildenden Künste in München und die kroatische Malerei [Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and Croatian Painting], eds. Irena Kraševac and Petar Prelog (Zagreb: Institut za povijest umjetnosti, 2008), 62–85. 22 See more on the influence of Kraljević’s exhibitions at the Salon Ullrich in Zvonko Maković, Vilko Gecan (Zagreb: Matica hrvatska, 1997), 33–39. 23 Antun Branko Šimić, “Proljetni salon” [The Spring Salon], Vijavica [The Snowstorm], 1 (1917). Cited from Antun Branko Šimić, Sabrana djela [Collected Works], vol. 2 (Zagreb: Znanje, 1960), 43–44. 24 Gamulin, Hrvatsko slikarstvo XX. stoljeća, 76. 25 For more on this informal art group and the influence of Prague on Croatian painting immediately after the Great War, see Zvonko Maković, Praška četvorica: Uzelac,Trepše, Gecan,Varlaj/The Prague Four: Uzelac, Trepše, Gecan,Varlaj (Zagreb: Umjetnički paviljon, 2013; exh. cat.). 26 Iljko Gorenčević, VIII izložba Proljetnog salona [TheVIII Spring Salon Exhibition] (Osijek, 1920; exh. cat.), n.p. 27 Božidar Gagro claimed that despite Uzelac’s tendency to articulate tensions in character relations and to create ironic and melancholic situation, no real argument can be made to support the attribution of these features to expressionism as a style. Gagro, “Slikarstvo Proljetnog salona,” 53. 28 Maković, Vilko Gecan, 72.

424

From Anxiety to Rebellion 29 His studies were discontinued because of the outbreak of the First World War. He was mobilized soon afterwards. Captured in 1915, he spent a long time in captivity in a military camp on Sicily. As a reminiscence of that period, in 1921, he created a print portfolio, Ropstvo u Siciliji (Slavery on Sicily), possessing a specific expressionist charge. 30 Micić published Gecan’s drawing Luđak (Madman) from the Klinika (Clinic) cycle on page seven of the first issue of Zenit, while the Konstrukcija za portret cinika (Construction for the Portrait of a Cynic) was published in the second issue on page three. 31 Zvonko Maković claims that the method of spatial representation in the painting Cinik was more influenced by film—that is, by Walter Reimann, who designed the stage for Wiene’s film Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari)—than it relied on the original concepts of Kirchner or other German expressionist painters. For more on this, see Zvonko Maković, “Geneza jedne slike:Vilko Gecan, Cinik” [Genesis of a Painting:Vilko Gecan’s Cynic], Radovi Instituta za povijest umjetnosti [Journal of the Institute of Art History] 18 (1994): 87–99, 88. 32 Ljubomir Micić, “Čovek i umetnost” [Man and Art], Zenit 1 (1921): 1–2, 2. 33 Ljubomir Micić, “Putujući ekspresionizam i Antikulturni most” [The Travelling Expressionism and the Anti-Cultural Bridge], Zenit 3 (1921): 9–11, 9. 34 Goll was one of the most important members of Micić’s collaborative network and he immensely contributed to the Zenit’s internationalization. An extensive study of his work was published in Zenit: Boško Tokin, “Evropski pesnik Ivan Goll” [The European Poet Ivan Goll], Zenit 1 (1921): 5–9. 35 Ljubomir Micić, “Marijan Maršik,” Zenit 2 (1921): 14. See also on Maršik in Branimir Donat, “O nepoznatom zagrebačkom pjesniku, suradniku najuglednijeg glasila njemačkog ekspresionizma, časopisa Der Sturm” [About an Unknown Poet from Zagreb, Contributor to the Most Prominent German Expressionist Magazine, Der Sturm], Dani Hvarskoga kazališta [Journal of Days of Hvar’s theatre] 29 (2003): 91–99. 36 Ivanka Reberski, Realizmi dvadesetih godina u hrvatskom slikarstvu [Realisms in Croatian Painting of the 1920s] (Zagreb: Institut za povijest umjetnosti and ArTresor studio, 1997), 29. 37 Ješa Denegri concluded that the complex of colouristic expressionism constitutes the most homogeneous tendency in the entire 1930s. With the inclusion of its earlier harbingers and later reverberations, it also represents one of the leading aesthetic ideas in Yugoslav art in the first half of the twentieth century. Ješa Denegri, “Koloristički ekspresionizam četvrte decenije” [Colouristic Expressionism in the Fourth Decade], in Četvrta decenija: ekspresionizam boje, kolorizam, poetski realizam, intimizam, koloristički realizam [The Fourth Decade: Expressionism of Colour, Colourism, Poetic Realism, Intimism, Colourist Realism], ed. Miodrag B. Protić (Beograd: Muzej savremene umetnosti, 1971; exh. cat.), 14–24. 38 Zvonko Maković introduced the term second expressionism by analyzing Vilko Gecan’s and Ignjat Job’s oeuvres. See Maković, Vilko Gecan, 231–274; Zvonko Maković, Ignjat Job (Zagreb: Umjetnički paviljon, 1997; exh. cat.), 46–47. 39 See German Expressionism 1915–1925: The Second Generation, ed. Stephanie Barron (Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1988; exh. cat.). 40 Stephan von Weise, “A Tempest Sweeping This World: Expressionism as an International Movement,” in German Expressionism 1915–1925:The Second Generation, ed. Stephanie Barron (Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1988; exh. cat.), 117–123, 118. 41 Hubert F. van den Berg, “Expressionism, Constructivism and the Transnationality of the Historical Avant-Garde,” in Transnationality, Internationalism and Nationhood: European Avant-Garde in the First Half of the Twentieth Century, ed. Hubert F. van den Berg and Lidia Głuchowska (Leuven, Paris,Walpole: Peeters, 2013), 23–41.

425

23 ON NEW ART AND ITS MANIFESTATIONS Rethinking Expressionism in the Visual Arts in Belgrade Ana Bogdanović We don’t need museum anachronisms, we will break them, we need people from Today, who create Tomorrow.1

Undertaking research about expressionism and its manifestations in a particular locale, in this case in the Serbian context, is a task accompanied by many complex questions. Which definition of expressionism should we rely on as a point of departure? Which methodological perspective should we use to approach the subject as a local phenomenon while keeping in mind the international character of expressionism? How should we interpret the manifestations of expressionism in a cultural setting for which the previous art-historical research has pointed out a problem in historicization due to the rather sporadic appearance of expressionist tendencies? Bearing these questions in mind, I present an overview of the current state of research on the contextualization of expressionism in Serbian art history and propose a methodological outline for examining expressionism in Belgrade.

Art-Historical Positioning of Expressionism in Serbia When writing about expressionism in the development of modern art in Serbia, art historians have predominantly followed a formalist approach. Studies on modernism dating back to the late sixties and early seventies locate the emergence of expressionism in Serbian art in a short period encompassing several years after the end of the First World War. Viewed largely as a fragment within the more extensive development of modern art, expressionism has not yet been thoroughly examined as a singular phenomenon in the visual arts in Serbia. The reason for this lies in the consensus among scholars that expressionism in Serbia was not a clearly defined movement with a specific program or ideological background, nor did it succeed in establishing a distinctive and autonomous style. In recent surveys and studies of the avant-garde movements operating within the so-called Yugoslav art space, expressionism is identified as an impulse, but has not been the subject of a more thorough analysis.2

426

On New Art and Its Manifestations

In the pioneering examination of the development of art in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes during the 1920s—the seminal exhibition catalogue Treća decenija: Konstruktivno slikarstvo (Third Decade: Constructive Painting), published by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade—Miodrag B. Protić emphasized the “lack of a clear chronological succession” of art movements that could be reconstructed during this period.3 Setting out from the shared experience of Cézannism, artists progressed in several directions simultaneously, though at uneven pace: toward expressionism, cubism, neoclassicism, and neo-traditionalism, all of which were interlinked with one another at certain points.4 Protić observed that most artists during this period experimented with a full register of styles, following an inverse direction that led from expressionism and cubism toward traditionalism.5 He accordingly introduced the term Expressionism of Form (ekspresionizam forme), characterizing it as a phase within a more complex range of research into the formal language of painting as well as a stage in the process of emancipating painting from its earlier mimetic function and orientation toward naturalism and impressionism.6 Protić also used the term in reference to the initial stage of artistic experimentation carried out within a framework of radical explorations in the visual arts, for example the avant-garde activities in the Yugoslav art space during the 1920s. Another prominent scholar, Lazar Trifunović, recognized the impossibility of establishing expressionism as a distinctive programmatic movement.7 Expressionism, he argued, was a stimulus that occasionally occurred within the work of various artists as an undeveloped stylistic and contextual tendency based upon contradictions between abstract forms and classical realism.8 The common starting point for locating expressionism within the history of art in Serbia was the requirement of a precise chronological and stylistic definition by means of comparison with expressionist ideas and developments in the greater European (primarily German) context. Based on formal features such as the distortion of form and the manifestation of abstraction, non-descriptive use of color, etc., short phases in the oeuvres of several artists, including the painters Jovan Bijelić, Petar Dobrović, Mihailo S. Petrov, Ivan Radović, and Vasa Pomorišac, have been identified as expressionist. Keeping in mind the difficulties of identifying and interpreting manifestations of expressionism within the narratives of Serbian modern art—particularly the problem of defining its formal characteristics, its sociopolitical contextualization, and the semantics of expressionism in the local context—this chapter attempts to look at the phenomenon of expressionism in Serbia from within. Concentrating on the simultaneous processes of translation and articulation, expressionism will be addressed not as the realization of a certain set of formal characteristics, but rather as a dynamic (and instable) framework for the initiation and exchange of experiences among artists in situations of transnational and interdisciplinary dialogue. Focusing on the period from 1919 to 1922, I examine expressionist tendencies in the visual arts, in particular art exhibitions and published texts that were significant in the local context, specifically those art practices that actively contributed to or influenced the dynamics of the local art community in Belgrade during this period. Drawing on Richard Murphy’s remark that “the expressionist generation was such a broad and varied group of writers and artists, that it is unlikely to yield to any single definition or generalization,” I will avoid treating expressionism as a distinctive national style or stylistically homogeneous phenomenon, because this would neglect the multifaceted and transnational nature of its concept.9 Therefore, my point of departure is based on an understanding of expressionism as a “diverse and multidisciplinary cultural event,” whose manifestations in Belgrade will be investigated in the following text.10

427

Ana Bogdanović

Art in Belgrade after 1918: Transnational, Interdisciplinary, and Regional Contexts There are three specific contexts—transnational, interdisciplinary, and regional—within which we can observe the emergence of expressionist impulses in Belgrade. The atmosphere in Belgrade after the First World War was one of postwar reconstruction, socially as well as culturally; during the war the majority of artists had been on the front lines or living in exile and abroad. The end of the war marked the advent of a new political reality, one in which Belgrade became the capital of the newly established multinational Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia). These new sociopolitical conditions were followed by structural changes to the local art scene. Many of the artists who had been actively exploring advanced ideas in the arts prior to 1914 were now dead; the re-establishment of cultural life in Belgrade after 1918 thus was marked by the arrival of many young artists who had recently completed their studies in various art centers across Europe. This generational shift influenced the transformation within the dynamics of artistic life in a significant manner. The protagonists (artists and art critics) of various ideas and tendencies in the visual arts, including expressionist inclinations, were on the move during this period, with the city of Belgrade serving as a base for their artistic activities at the time. The majority spent periods of time in various cities of Western and Central Europe, or only settled in Belgrade after having lived abroad or in other towns of the Yugoslav Kingdom. The earliest expressionist impulses, therefore, arose in a transnational atmosphere characterized by intensive, short-term migration, active networking, and a dynamic exchange of ideas that had been cultivated in various urban, cultural, and artistic settings. It seems rather problematic to consider the emergence of a phenomenon that occurred under such conditions within a static, national, or isolated local framework, as this would offer only a fragmentary view of expressionism and its distinctive transnational character. Instead, I would suggest viewing Belgrade and its art scene during this period as a base, or starting point, from which several pathways toward other art centers were being established—trajectories of diverse and dynamic dialogue and exchange. These trajectories and their effects should not be overlooked in the context of Belgrade’s art scene, as they are indispensable and vital elements for understanding and elaborating the many artistic impulses concurrently arising within this local setting. The topographical biography of the artist Petar Dobrović (1890–1942) presents one of the best examples of this flux of artists. Born in the Hungarian town of Pécs (at the time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), Dobrović was educated in Budapest, where he was active in progressive modernist artistic circles. In 1912, he traveled to Paris for the first time, where he remained (with brief interruptions) until 1914, researching Cézanne’s concept of painting. During the First World War, Dobrović was associated with a circle around the Hungarian avantgarde poet Lajos Kassák. It was at this time that his drawing Оplakivanje Hrista (Pietà, 1915) was published in the second issue of the revolutionary periodical A Tett (The Action). He was also involved in the activities of the Hungarian artists’ group The Seven, with whom he exhibited in Budapest during the war. His brief experimentation with expressionism occurred against this background, in works such as his 1913 Autoportret (Radnik) [Self-portrait (Worker)] and the aforementioned Pietà, which, from a formal as well as an ideological (antiwar and revolutionary) perspective, both reflect an expressionist disposition.11 The painting Pokolj u Šapcu (Massacre in Šabac, 1918) reveals the artist’s immediate reaction to the events of the First World War. He subordinated expressionism to classicizing tendencies in his painting, thus anticipating (as he often stated) “the revolutionary new art—the monumental style of the twentieth century.”12

428

On New Art and Its Manifestations

In 1919 Dobrović temporarily moved to Novi Sad; he then left for Paris, where he took part in the Exhibition of Yugoslav Artists, and afterwards stayed in Belgrade for a short time. By the end of 1919, he had his first solo exhibition in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, namely at the Salon Ullrich in Zagreb, where he actively exhibited in the years following. In 1920 Dobrović became president of the Pécs Arts Society and had his first exhibition in Belgrade. In 1921, he was elected president of the newly founded Serbo-Hungarian Republic of BaranyaBaja; after its abolition, the Hungarian authorities sentenced him in absentia to death. At the end of 1921, he permanently settled in Belgrade.13 Even though he was not always living in Belgrade at the time, Dobrović’s role in the process of affirming the so-called new art during the interwar period is of great importance: not only because of his practice of painting but also due to his writings. Dealing with the first exhibition of artists from the Yugoslav area to be held outside the borders of the newly established mutual state—namely at the Petit Palais in Paris—Dobrović articulated the context that would mark the aspirations of artists in the succeeding period. “New painting,” he wrote, has shifted its emphasis from history (which had been articulated by means of eclecticism and literary illustration) toward nature, underlining Cézanne’s concept of art as occupying an important place in this process of emancipation from subject matter:14 the goal of art lies in nature; the language of a sculptor is form and that of a painter is color. Neither anecdotes nor history, but nature. Variations, space, light, color, form, the conjunction of objects into each other—that is the goal of the fine arts.15 Dobrović published this and several other articles in the journal Дан / Dan (Day), which was published in Belgrade and Novi Sad in the second half of 1919. The journal also published the essays and poems of other authors (mainly from the field of literature) associated with expressionist tendencies in Belgrade during this period and participated in the organization of several exhibitions in Belgrade during the interwar period.16 Even though Dobrović’s texts do not refer directly to expressionism, they are significant for understanding the broader context of the new art in which the expressionist impulses occurred, which brings us to the second context for understanding the currents of Belgrade’s art scene: in addition to the transnational perspective, we also must consider the interdisciplinary context, primarily the interrelationships with concurrent tendencies in literature. Writers and poets played a prominent role in the theoretical articulation of various developments occurring in the visual arts, as well as in their public promotion, through their involvement in the realm of art criticism. By contrast, the writer Miloš Crnjanski17 (1893–1977) emphasized that, during the interwar years, painters readily contributed to the proliferation of new concepts, not only in painting but also in literature.18 As this process was reciprocal, it was through such exchange and cooperation that the art community took shape. By deploying strategies of self-articulation and self-organization while promoting the ideas of a new art, the artists gained prominent positions in the public and cultural life of Belgrade. The third important aspect for understanding the development of art in Belgrade during this period is its regional context within the aforementioned Yugoslav art space. This term, introduced by the art historian Ješa Denegri, encompasses the polycentric, interlinked artistic life and its development in the Yugoslav region, which was particularly characterized by vivid collaboration between visual artists during the period from 1900 to 1991.19 Geopolitically, the region underwent various ideological and sociopolitical transformations during this time:

429

Ana Bogdanović

1) 1900–1918: existence of various political entities (Austro-Hungarian Empire, Ottoman Empire, Serbia) in which South Slavic peoples lived with an aspiration to national liberation and unification in a common state, during the beginning of the twentieth century; 2) 1918–1940: initial Yugoslav unification as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (later the Kingdom of Yugoslavia), characterized by a capitalist economic system and bourgeois culture; 3) 1945–1990: establishment of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia as a second project aspiring to unification. During the first period (before the First World War), young artists drawn toward modernist ideas had been engaged in the cultural unification project of the South Slavs. This involved organizing “Yugoslav” art events,20 as well as fostering a visual culture based on the language of early modernism (symbolism, secessionism, impressionism) to communicate a repertoire of mythological and historical content from the South Slavic past. After the foundation of the combined Yugoslav state, the conceptual background of the visual arts underwent a process of transformation: the idea of art’s emancipation from the historical narrative was established, while the intellectual and artistic exchange progressed under this altered ideological framework. The diffusion of new art and associated ideas within the overall Yugoslav region during this period represents an important context for understanding the developments in the visual arts in Belgrade at that time.

New Art: Events and Protagonists The expression new art was a phrase frequently used by artists and art writers during this period. Terms such as new art and new painting were often used to refer to a set of formally and conceptually diverse tendencies in art that appeared simultaneously during the interwar period. Their semantic framework is meant to encompass the various painterly idioms, including expressionism, fauvism, and cubism, that developed out of a critical stance toward naturalism and impressionism.21 The usage of these phrases by artists and art critics in Belgrade can be related to the expression “new art” as introduced by Franz Marc in his writings on “new painting” published in the article “Die neue Malerei” (New Painting, 1912) and by Guillaume Apollinaire in his essay Les Peintres cubistes: Méditations esthétiques (The Cubist Painters: Aesthetic Meditations, 1913). At the same time, Ljubomir Micić (1895–1971) employed the term “new art” to define the program of Zenitizam (Zenithism), which developed out of the critical appropriation of expressionist ideas complemented by features of the Balkan spirit. His international review of new art, Zenit (Zenith), was founded in Zagreb in 1921. It was distributed in Belgrade and became well known and was discussed within the city’s advanced art circles. Micić used it to promote the concept of new art as the expressive force of the new man—Barbarogenije (Barbarogenius—barbarian genius), who would create a new culture by means of spiritual transformation.22 In both cases, the term new art functions as a signifier for “advanced.” On the one hand, there is the progressive modernist and, on the other, radical avant-garde manifestations in the visual arts; the articulation of both is based on a critique of previously accepted and institutionalized trends. New art acted transnationally, opposing the preceding national aspirations in art and assuming an active role on the part of the artist in the process of rebuilding and transforming society within the new geopolitical situation after the First World War. Since the concept of new art involves differing artistic articulations sharing a commitment to overturning the prevailing models of representation by pursuing universal methods of communication, we need to take into consideration the wider context of expressionism’s manifestation. 430

On New Art and Its Manifestations

The advance of new art into postwar artistic life in Belgrade was announced by several public events. The first was the exhibition of the Group of Artists, which was founded by artists, writers, and composers in 1919 and consisted of a circle of young people who gathered at the Café Moscow, the central place for discussions among artists.23 This group organized various art events: exhibitions, literature and poetry readings, and concerts intended to “initiate direct contact between artists,”24 and “activate the organization of all contemporary artists in Yugoslavia . . . as a natural consequence of the new conditions and the new needs.”25 Contemporaries recognized this group as an active agent and mediator of the local art scene, as well as the “first attempt at the collaborative propagation and cultivation of art—the first time that painting, literature, and music joined to perform a mutual task.”26 This task was the affirmation of new art by means of engagement through artist-organized public events. The group had an open and inclusive character; it published neither a manifesto nor a specific program, and the number of contributors varied from one event to another. The Group of Artists supported an individualist approach to artistic practice, but insisted on collaboration between artists in terms of public exhibitions. The first exhibition organized by the group opened in the hall of the music school Stanković in November 1919.27 (There were no permanent exhibition spaces in Belgrade at the time; exhibitions were usually held in alternative locations, such as public schools.) The show gathered together artists of diverse stylistic orientations. Contemporary critics emphasized that the correlations between the exhibited artworks lay in the new temperament and the pursuit of new means of expression, rather than in their formal coherence. The variety of individual painterly approaches was perceived as exceptionally valuable for artists’ collaborative work.28 This suggests that the young generation of artists’ primary interest was not in the promotion of an artistic practice defined by specific aesthetic terms, but rather in the affirmation of art as a necessary aspect of public life in the newly established social and political atmosphere. Artist-organized events and exhibitions played an important role in initiating the process of modernism’s institutionalization in Belgrade during this period.29 The artists were motivated more by a desire to properly situate art within the organizational structure of the newly founded society rather than a transformation of society by means of artistic engagement. In this context, expressionist impulses could not have been developed as a programmatic platform for critiquing existing social conditions. Instead, they served to support the establishment of a cultural foundation in the newly established Yugoslav society. The participants in the first exhibition of the Group of Artists included the young painter Jovan Bijelić (1884–1964), whose first public exhibition was in Belgrade. Bijelić moved there in 1919, after several years spent studying in Kraków (1909/1913), Paris (1913/1914), and Prague (1915) and teaching at a public school in the Bosnian town of Bihać (1915/1919). He exhibited several landscapes, in which he drew on principles of Cézanne’s painting, as well as a group of recent works that indicated a shift toward expressionism and include Prometej (Prometheus), Tragedija ljudskog roda (The Tragedy of Humanity), and Idiot (The Idiot).30 By developing the expressive potential of Biblical compositions, he succeeded in creating “metaphorical representations of war”31 that gained a reserved but nevertheless affirmative response from his contemporaries, who recognized his work as an example of the newest tendencies in contemporary painting. Along with Bijelić’s expressionist experiments, the Zagreb-based artist Ljubo Babić also found a rather positive reception among the progressive literary circles for visually articulating the ideas of expressionism in painting.32 The first exhibition of the Group of Artists thus not only introduced a new model for artists’ involvement in the public sphere, it also articulated the first expressionist impulses in the artistic context of Belgrade. As for the theoretical articulation of expressionism, there were no local periodicals in Belgrade serving as its platform. Magazines like Мисао/Misao (Thought, established in 1919) 431

Ana Bogdanović

and Прогрес/Progres (Progress, established in 1920) did offer several articles on expressionism, among other conceptually diverse content, with the first appearing in 1920: “Ekspresionizam Jugoslovena” (Expressionism of Yugoslavs), by the writer and journalist Boško Tokin (1894– 1053), and “Manifest ekspresionističke škole” (The Manifesto of the Expressionist School), by the writer Stanislav Vinaver (1891–1955). Both appeared in the journal Progress and were concerned with expressionist tendencies in literature. Vinaver’s “Manifesto of the Expressionist School” offered an inclusive concept of expressionism as a framework for the activities of writers and poets of the interwar generation.33 He asserts: “We are all expressionists. We all use reality as a means of creation. Our goal is creation, not the creative product.”34 Free expression based on individual intuition, Vinaver insisted, is an important feature of the expressionist attitude. A crucial point of reference was the philosophy of Henri Bergson and his understanding of the importance of intuition and dynamism; Vinaver was introduced to Bergson while studying in Paris in 1910/1911.35 The dialogue with French philosophy was of great importance for Belgrade-based artists of this period; many spent their formative intellectual years in Paris, where they became acquainted with the latest developments in philosophy and art theory. In contrast, Tokin, in “Expressionism of Yugoslavs,” described expressionism as the spirit of a new generation of Yugoslav artists. This Yugoslav expressionist spirit was characterized by a dynamism achieved as a result of the synthesis between East and West. His elaboration on expressionism as a spiritual setting for the Yugoslav temperament was based on a critique of the Eurocentric disposition of modern culture.36 The views of both authors allowed for expressionism to become a framework for the initiatives of the new, interwar generation of artists in the Yugoslav space. Confirmation of the new art and its decisive breakthrough in the public life of Belgrade was achieved with an exhibition of the work of the painters Jovan Bijelić, Petar Dobrović, and Sibe Miličić, which was held in the hall of the music school Stanković in November of 1921. This exhibition, known as The Exhibition of Three, offered a significant platform for the presentation of expressionist impulses within the local art context. The art-historical literature has already acknowledged Bijelić’s abstract compositions, first shown at the exhibition, as being the result of a dialogue with German expressionist painting.37 During the second half of 1920, the artist visited Berlin, Dresden, and Prague, where he became acquainted with German expressionism, particularly the works of Max Pechstein, Heinrich Campendonk, Franz Marc, and Wassily Kandinsky.38 Stimulated by these encounters and particularly interested in the paintings of Franz Marc, Bijelić created a group of abstract works, including Apstraktni predeo (The Abstract Landscape; Figure 23.1), Borba dana i noći (Struggle Between Day and Night; Plate 26), and Planinski predeo (The Mountain Landscape, 1920).39 Bijelić’s contemporaries also recognized his position as expressionist: Miroslav Krleža described his paintings as abstractions whose provenance lies in Der Sturm, while Mihailo Petrov described Bijelić as a great admirer of German expressionism, specifically Marc and Kandinsky.40 In order to grasp the wider context of Bijelić’s gesture, its theoretical reception will be analyzed. Two significant articles elaborating the concept of new art were published in response to the exhibition. One was by the author and art writer Rastko Petrović (1898–1949) and the other by Petar Dobrović, a participating artist, who interpreted the exhibition as a meeting of diverse individual artistic poetics that overlapped in their common pursuit of a new, cosmic concept of art in which “all matters lose their ephemeral and arbitrary shapes, in order to become their essential form.”41 Dobrović affirmed the universal character of the new art, writing “the artist is the one who achieves the mystical laws of nature by means of his intuition and intellect.”42 He elaborated on this further, taking the abstract paintings by Bijelić as his example: “[Bijelić] went so far as to dematerialize the objects . . . he constructed his paintings in large geometric planes, 432

On New Art and Its Manifestations

Figure 23.1  Jovan Bijelić, Apstraktni predeo (Abstract Landscape), 1920, oil on canvas, 78 × 115.5 cm, Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade.  Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade

not relying on any reminiscences of things. He arrived at the pure, essential principles of painting by performing these abstract gymnastics.”43 Petrović’s text focused on the constitution of painting as an autonomous reality. As a way of understanding the broader context of the exhibition, Petrović insisted “that for the construction of a new world of art—which is the painting—one needs to employ the elements of nature through their material forms, and not only through their relationships.”44 The main preoccupation of new art, he emphasized, is the problem of expression, which means resolving the construction of individual pictorial elements as well as their relationships within the composition. However, expression is not the goal, but only an instrument for achieving the work of art; that is, the autonomous reality of painting. According to Petrović, the focus on expression in painting represents the emancipation of art from subject matter. As an example of a successful solution to this problem, he discusses Bijelić’s painting Borba dana i noći, in which “the most important thing is to achieve a new and complete possibility of life within the painting and regardless of its subject.”45 Like other authors, Petrović used the contrast with impressionism to illuminate the character of new art, which was more objective and more individual than impressionism because it rejected the lyrical mood and looked instead to a subjective conception of nature. Moreover, the new art is marked by a constant “rearrangement of nature” that is manifested through dynamism (as opposed to the transience of nature in impressionism): The elements of nature have lost their schematic reality for a more comprehensive one, which is painting. To construct a painting means to rematerialize an already dematerialized nature—nature is dematerialized only so that it can experience a painterly reality that is necessary and conditional.46 433

Ana Bogdanović

This idea of dematerializing nature as a quality of new art had been emphasized before in regard to Bijelić’s paintings.47 In terms of expressionism, the process of dematerialization represented the basic precondition for any further elaboration in the visual arts; that is, for the creation of a painterly reality based on the principles of the individual experience of nature. In both articles, the principles of cubism and expressionism—placed in a dialectical relationship—are used for postulating the ideology behind the new art. The complementarity of the rational cubist structure and the intuitive and liberating expressionist attitude toward the elements of painting, particularly color, creates the autonomous life (existence) of a painting, which was the goal. For both interpreters, Bijelić’s painting Borba dana i noći offered a successful example of what new art might be. Thus, expressionism occupied an important position in the process of introducing the concept of new painting in the artistic context of Belgrade, even though it appeared only as a phase within the oeuvre of this artist. For a short period of time, expressionism was a vital tendency in art and relevant to the establishment of the modernist model as the dominant language of the visual arts in Belgrade during the interwar period.

Expressionism as a Platform for Artistic Exchange The Belgrade exhibition—the work of Bijelić, Dobrović, and Miličić, augmented with paintings by Živorad Nastasijević, another young Belgrade-based artist—then traveled to Zagreb. As the Exhibition of the Belgrade Four, it was included in the thirteenth exhibition of the Proljetni salon (Spring Salon), at the Art Pavilion. The work of Bijelić and Dobrović was already known to the Zagreb art scene, as both painters had had successful solo shows at the Salon Ullrich in 1919. As already mentioned, the fluctuation of artists within the Yugoslav space was very common and the lively exchange between Belgrade and Zagreb was a significant aspect of this. During the years following 1918, this was particularly the case for the younger generation of artists, who decisively pursued their aim of transforming existing structures in the Yugoslav art scene and establishing the practice of new art in opposition to the current cultural and social context. The introduction to the exhibition catalogue establishes the ideological background for the Exhibition of the Belgrade Four: For the first time after so many years, a work of long ago continues. The mutual efforts to finally bring about a leveling of our two centers persist, so that Belgrade and Zagreb may be the sources of the same spirit, hearts of the same yearning. The initiators, those who paved the way for unification, the first to plant the flags hoisted high by our common glory of freedom—the artists—march on. Weary from the great endeavor of consolidation, they appear to be wavering; so the young ones, inspired by the noble idea of the race, are laying the foundation of cooperation in the struggle toward a new and more magnificent liberation, our common liberation of spirits.48 The introductory text was signed collectively by the members of the Thirteenth Spring Salon.49 Viewing the public exhibition as a field for collaborative action rather than representation and as a place of dialogue between the two art centers, the artists aimed to organize life as a collaborative platform for dynamic exchange—a transnational community at a micro level, so to speak. The practice of affirming the new art offered a basis for stimulating exchange and collaboration between young artists from Belgrade and Zagreb while at the same time enabling them to establish their individual positions within their own local art milieus. The “common liberation of spirits” proclaimed in the preface of the catalogue refers not only to the concept of a new art, but also to the wider context of the desired transformation of social 434

On New Art and Its Manifestations

and cultural life. This led many contemporaries as well as some later scholars to distinguish an expressionist slant to the exhibition. Returning to expressionism as a platform for the engagement of artists in the Yugoslav space after the First World War, the Exhibition of the Belgrade Four in Zagreb can in fact be seen as an expressionist gesture, in conceptual terms, proposing the creation of a distinctive Yugoslav culture based on spiritual liberation. The manifestation of the expressionist spirit in regard to this exhibition is noted by Ljubomir Micić, who praises Bijelić as the most positive representative of the Belgrade Four, the only expressionist among us. He has felt color in terms of music and offered it as a symphony in his paintings (Kandinsky). The painting titled Borba dana i noći (which is irrelevant) presents the experience as such— pure, spiritual, abstract. It is the closest to our melancholic soul and song.50 For Micić, Bijelić’s experimentation with abstraction embodies the very concept of Zenithist painting (Zenitističko slikarstvo)—his vision of the new art, which is founded on the expressionist idea of the transformation of culture by means of the spiritual, the abstract, and the absolute— principles he discovered in the experience of Kandinsky and Marc Chagall.51 The Struggle between Day and Night was published in the tenth issue of Zenit, thus revealing another context in which the Exhibition of the Belgrade Four reflected the complex meaning of expressionism in the local as well as the Yugoslav setting. Bijelić’s expressionist work operated within two contexts—the advanced modernist framework of the Belgrade art scene and the radical Yugoslav avant-garde concept of Zenithist painting. The confrontation with the aesthetics of German expressionism played an important role for Mihailo S. Petrov (1902–1983), a young artist from Belgrade who had been cooperating with several avant-garde periodicals since 1921, including Micić’s Zenit. Petrov was familiar with the visual language of German expressionism through Der Sturm, which was available at the Süd-Ost bookstore in Belgrade during the war. The experience of seeing original works had a significant impact on him during the two months he spent in Vienna in 1921. Afterward, he returned to Belgrade with the September 1913 issue of Der Sturm, which includes Kandinsky’s article “Malerei als reine Kunst” (Painting as Pure Art) and a portfolio of drawings by Paul Klee.52 On the recommendation of Vinaver, who was at the time engaged as a writer for Zenit, Petrov’s linocuts were sent to Micić, and his Autoportret (Self-portrait; Figure 23.2) was published in the sixth issue of Zenit. Until May 1922, Petrov’s prints continued to be regularly published in Zenit (Figures 23.3 and 23.4). The young artist collaborated with other avant-garde periodicals, including Dada Tank and Dada Jazz (published by Dragan Aleksić in Zagreb) and Út (published by Zoltán Csuka in Novi Sad). According to Petrov, his work grew out of his examination of ideas related to Kandinsky, Dadaism, and Russian constructivism,53 and was fostered by his participation in the avant-garde circles of the time. The main focus of his research was on nonobjective painting (obespredmećena slika)—the outcome of Kandinsky’s idea of the absolute and pure art. Kandinsky’s rhetoric of spirituality in art and his views on abstraction resonated with the protagonists of the new art in Belgrade. Theoretical elaborations of expressionism in the visual arts were published sporadically in the Belgrade-based Мисао during the time when Vinaver and Ranko Mladenović were its editors. Petrov translated Kandinsky’s text “Malerei als reine Kunst” and published it in the journal in 1922.54 In the short preface to the translation, Petrov recognized Kandinsky as “the famous father of absolute painting, well known through his texts”55 and emphasized the advancement and thorough understanding of modern art among Belgrade artists. Kandinsky’s contribution to the development of modern art, however, had been 435

Ana Bogdanović

Figure 23.2  M  ihailo S. Petrov, Autoportret (Self-portrait), 1921, linocut, 20.4 × 16 cm, Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade.  Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade

Figure 23.3  M  ihailo S. Petrov, Ritam (Rhythm), 1921, linocut, 12.2 × 8.5 cm, published on the cover of Zenit, no. 10, December 1921.  Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade

mentioned before in articles that had circulated in Belgrade: Vinaver underlined his importance for rejecting the impression in favor of pure expression in the 1920 “Manifesto of the Expressionist School”;56 Dobrović described him as the “apostle of expressionism, who uses colors to express a feeling without positivist forms of nature.”57 In contrast, Micić understood and promoted Kandinsky as the beginning of all new art in Europe and regarded him as the first abstract and spiritual artist.58 According to Lazar Trifunović, Rastko Petrović was also familiar with Kandinsky’s writings on art, as expressed in early texts on contemporary art in Belgrade and Zagreb, particularly those elaborating the concept of the autonomy of art.59 Kandinsky’s rejection of tradition and nature as sources for artistic creation also attracted much attention in Belgrade art circles. Nonetheless, if we recognize liberated individual expression as one of the most important features of the new art, we must also acknowledge that, in terms of formal painterly language, Belgrade artists—apart from a few of Petrov’s experiments (Figure 23.5) that in terms of form and composition are very similar to Kandinsky’s abstract compositions—were little influenced by his painting style. The reception of his theoretical writings in Belgrade, however, is very much in line with the phenomenon of his reception in the broader European context at the time.60 The only theoretical elaboration and defense of expressionism in the visual arts in Belgrade was a 1921 article in Мисао by Momčilo Selesković (1890–1950), who had studied German literature. Although his contribution did not discuss the expressionist situation in the local context, it did offer a comprehensive explanation of the conceptual background of expressionism in 436

On New Art and Its Manifestations

Figure 23.4  M  ihailo S. Petrov, Kompozicija (Composition), 1921, linocut, 15 × 16.3 cm, Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade.  Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade

general. Selesković was responding to the misinterpretation and negative reception of expressionist painting among the broader local public in Belgrade. Asserting that “art is a manifestation of a human being, through which he reveals his inner self,”61 Selesković elaborated on expressionism’s affiliation with painting by comparing it to the relationship an individual creates with the outside world, thus claiming a connection between expressionism and everyday life. An important feature of expressionism, he insisted, is its capacity for human empathy—the ability to find both positive and negative psychic values in everyday life and articulate them in the domain of the visual arts; that is, in the painting, which therefore appears as an event (in contrast to the painting as a static object merely illustrating a scene from life).62 Expressionism is understood to be a universal language, since it communicates with viewers by means of familiar experience. The bridge between art and everyday life is established through the expression rather than imitation of nature, argued Selesković, highlighting the Improvisations by Wassily Kandinsky as the most thoroughgoing examples of this anti-mimetic tendency in art.63 In this and other examples, the anthropocentric character of expressionism in painting and its promotion as a universal artistic gesture is supported through correlations with expressionist manifestations in other cultural milieus. The dialogue that artists at the local level initiated with various forms of expressionism from other social and cultural environments represents the foundation of the short-lived, but nevertheless significant manifestation of expressionist impulses in the visual arts in Belgrade. 437

Ana Bogdanović

Figure 23.5  M  ihailo S. Petrov, Bez naziva—Idejna skica za sliku (Untitled—Sketch of an Idea for a Painting), 1922, watercolor, India ink on paper, 22.7 × 16.2 cm, Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade.  Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade

Conclusion In June 1922, the Fifth Yugoslav Art Exhibition opened in Belgrade. It was a large show, encompassing works of about 150 artists from the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. The exhibition displayed a wide range of artistic practices from traditional to the most advanced and presented a survey of the ambivalent and heterogeneous concepts of art concurrently developing within the Yugoslav art space.64 The dominant tendency among the Belgrade artists with the most advanced orientation, who were represented as the Group of Free Artists, was marked by the classicizing, synthetic transformation of previous experiments with the language of expressionism and cubism. Set within the institutionalized framework of the Yugoslav exhibition, new art thus shifted its models of manifestation toward a moderate modernism and new realism, as it had achieved the anticipated affirmation in the public domain. Even though expressionist impulses appeared only sporadically and during a short period in the Belgrade art scene between 1919 and 1921, their manifestation played a significant part in several important processes occurring in the local art scene. As a conceptual impetus, expressionism offered an ideological framework for the postwar restoration of artistic life in the local context that was accepted and carried out through the combined efforts of the young generation of artists and writers. This model of the artist’s engagement with society was temporary and subsequently assimilated by the bourgeois culture, resulting in the institutionalization of modernism 438

On New Art and Its Manifestations

in interwar Belgrade. During their brief appearance, however, expressionist impulses not only provoked the proliferation of theoretical discussions among art circles in Belgrade but also simultaneously contributed to the realization of a dynamic exchange between Yugoslav artists. Expressionism, however, did not fully realize its potential as a platform for the joint engagement of Yugoslav artists. Its complexity, its understanding, and its degree of engagement is revealed by the fact that a single expressionist gesture operated in different registers at the same time, as was the case with Jovan Bijelić. This was the result of the diffusion of ideas as well as the mobility of the artists, which was a precondition for the development of their art practices. Expressionism therefore appeared as a transformative agent employed to articulate transnational dialogues and experiences. In the greater context of new art, expressionism, through its affirmation of the autonomy of art and its introduction of radical experimentation, contributed to the semantics of the visual arts, thus setting off the initial avant-garde engagement in the Belgrade cultural environment.

Notes 1 Петар Добровић [Petar Dobrović], “Поводом изложбе југословенских уметника у Паризу 1919. г” [Regarding the Exhibition of Yugoslav Artists in Paris in 1919], Дан [Day], 1.8.1919, No. 3,Year I, 44. 2 Dubravka Đurić and Miško Šuvaković, Impossible Histories: Historical Avant-gardes, Neo-Avantgardes, and Post-Avant-gardes in Yugoslavia 1918–1991 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). 3 Miodrag B. Protić, Treća decenija: Konstruktivno slikarstvo [Third Decade: Constructive Painting] (Beograd: Muzej savremene umetnosti, 1967), 19–20. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 20. 6 Ibid., 26–27. 7 Лазар Трифуновић [Lazar Trifunović], Српско сликарство 1900–1950 [Serbian Painting 1900–1950], 2nd ed. (Београд: Српска књижевна задруга, 2014), 119. 8 Ibid., 160. 9 Richard Murphy, Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and the Problem of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 5. 10 Ibid. 11 Dobrović’s short expressionist phase will not be analyzed in detail, since it was not primarily related to the art context of Belgrade. 12 Simona Čupić, Petar Dobrović (Beograd: Prosveta, 2003), 25. 13 For detailed analysis of Dobrović’s life and work, see Simona Čupić, Petar Dobrović (Beograd: Prosveta, 2003). 14 Петар Добровић [Petar Dobrović], “Поводом изложбе југословенских уметника у Паризу 1919. г.” [Regarding the Exhibition of Yugoslav Artists in Paris in 1919], Дан [Day], August 1, 1919, 44. 15 “Озбиљно упозорујем наше уметнике, да је циљ уметности природа, а да је језик вајарев форма, сликарев боја. Не анегдоте, не историју, него природу. Варијације, простор, светлост, боја, форма, укопчавање предмета један у други, то је циљ ликовне уметности, а не Југ Богдан.” Ibid., 43. 16 Accodring to Miloš Crnjanski, “Posleratna književnost: Literarna sećanja” [Postwar Literature: Literary Memories], in Miloš Crnjanski II, ed. Gorana Raičević (Novi Sad: Izdavački centar Matice srpske, 2011), 402. 17 Miloš Crnjanski, a poet whose literary work of this period is recognized as expressionist, was one of the editors of the journal Дан [Day]. He occasionally wrote articles about visual arts during this period as well. 18 Crnjanski recounted this in an article that reconstructs the intellectual atmosphere of Belgrade during the 1920s. See Crnjanski, Posleratna književnost, 403. 19 For detailed elaboration of the term Yugoslav art space, see Ješa Denegri, Ideologija postavke Muzeja savremene umetnosti: Jugoslovenski umetnički prostor [Yugoslav Art Space] (Beograd: J. Denegri, 2011), 5–28. 20 Events such as Yugoslav Art Exhibitions (founded 1904) and Yugoslav Art Colony (founded 1905). 21 As comparison, for the use of the term in the field of literature, see Радован Вучковић [Radovan Vučković], Поетика српске авангарде [The Poetics of Serbian Avant-garde] (Београд: Службени гласник, 2011), 130.

439

Ana Bogdanović 22 Although he relied on the ideas of expressionism during 1921 and 1922, Micić later rejected its concepts and turned toward constructivism. For detailed elaboration of new art according to Micić, see Ljubomir Micić, “Savremeno novo i slućeno slikarstvo” [Contemporary New and Anticipated Painting], Zenit 10 (1921): 11–12. 23 Protić, Treća decenija. Konstruktivno slikarstvo, 10–11. 24 The idea behind the founding of the Group of Artists was presented by one of its members Sibe Miličić according to Милоје Милојевић, “Вечери ’Групе уметника’” [Nights of the Group of Artists], Политика [Politics], December 5, 1919, 1–2. 25 Милоје Милојевић [Miloje Milojević], “Једна уметничка новина” [One Artistic Novelty], Политика [Politics], November 23, 1919, 2. 26 В(еља) Живојиновић [Velja Živojinović], “Акција ’Групе уметника’” [Action of the Group of Artists], Мисао [Thought], 3 (1919): 317. 27 The exhibition included the following artists: Branko Popović, Sibe Miličić, Jovan Bijelić, Milan Nedeljković, Ljubo Babić,Tomislav Krizman, Milan Minić,Vladimir Becić, Miho Marinković, and Moša Pijade. 28 Живојиновић, “Акција ’Групе уметника’” [Action by the Group of Artists], 317–319. 29 I have written about this in Ана Богдановић [Ana Bogdanović], “Уметничке везе између Београда и Загреба на примеру сарадње између Групе уметника и Прољетног салона (1919–1921)” [Artistic Connections Between Belgrade and Zagreb on the Example of the Exchange Between the Group of Artists and the Spring Salon (1919–1921)], in Зборник народног музеја [The Journal of the National Museum], XXI–2 (2014): 281–293. 30 Simona Čupić, Jovan Bijelić 1884–1964 (Beograd: Jugoslovenska galerija umetničkih dela, 2000), 9. 31 Ibid., 10. 32 Милош Црњански [Miloš Crnjanski], “О изложби сликара ‘Групе Уметника’” [About the Exhibition of Painters of the Group of Artists], демократија [Democracy], December 5 (1919): 1. 33 Вучковић, Поетика српске авангарде, 183. 34 Станислав Винавер [Stanislav Vinaver], “Манифест експресионистичке школе I” [Manifesto of Expressionist School I], Прогрес [Progress], September 22, 1920, 2. 35 Вучковић, Поетика српске авангарде, 148. 36 Бошко Токин [Boško Tokin], “Експресионизам Југословена” [Expressionism of Yugoslavs], Прогрес [Progress], September 16, 1920, 2. 37 Čupić, Jovan Bijelić, 11–13. 38 Ibid., 11. 39 Ibid., 12–13. 40 For the reception of Bijelić’s work, see Smail Tihić, Jovan Bijelić: život i delo [Jovan Bijelić: Life and Work] (Sarajevo:Veselin Masleša, 1971), 122. 41 Petar Dobrović, “Izložba G. Emanuela Vidovića—Izložba G. G. Jovana Bijelića, P. Dobrovića, Siba Miličića” [Exhibition of Mr. Emanuel Vidović—Exhibition of Mr. Jovan Bijelić, P. Dobrović, Sibe Miličić], in Simona Čupić, Petar Dobrović (Beograd: Prosveta, 2003), 139. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. 44 Rastko Petrović, “Izložba Bijelića, Dobrovića i Miličića” [Exhibition of Bijelić, Dobrović and Miličić], in Rastko Petrović: eseji, kritike [Rastko Petrović: Essays, Critics], ed. Radmila Matić-Panić (Beograd: Muzej savremene umetnosti, 1995), 30. 45 Ibid., 31. 46 “Elementi prirode, da bi bili što naturalističnije rešeni u ramu like, izgubili su svoju šablonsku realnost za jednu sadržajniju, koja je slikarska. Graditi sliku značilo bi ponovna materijaliziranje jednom već dematerijalizirane prirode, dematerijalizirane jedino zato da bi mogla proći kroz slikarsku realnost, neophodnu i uslovnu.” Ibid. 47 Црњански, “О изложби сликара ‘Групе Уметника’,” 1. 48 “Prvi put, posle toliko godina: davno započeto djelo se nastavlja. Zajednički rad između naša dva centra se produžuje da se nivelacija provede do kraja i da Beograd i Zagreb budu izvori jednog istog duha, srca istih čežnja. I oni, koji su i pre započeli i utrli put ka ujedinjenju, oni koji su prvi poboli barjake, koje je visoko digla naša zajednička slava slobode, umjetnici, kreću dalje zamoreni velikim naporom sljubljivanja, prvi začetnici, izgleda da su sustali; stoga, mlađi, zanešeni visokom idejom rade, udaraju temelje saradnje u borbi, ka novom i veličanstvenijem oslobođenju, zajedničkom oslobođenju duhova.” XIII. izložba Proljetnjog salona [XIII Exhibition of Spring Salon] (Zagreb, 1921), n.p.

440

On New Art and Its Manifestations 49 As specified in the catalogue, the profit made during the exhibition was dedicated to the construction of the Art Pavilion in Belgrade. 50 “Bijelić: najpozitivniji reprezentant beogradske ‘Četvorice’ Jedini u nas ekspresionista. Osetio je boju kao muziku i daje ju u svojim slikama kao simfoniju (Kandinski). Slika br. 9 koja je označena sa ‘Borba dana i noći’ (što je sporedno) daje doživljaj kao takav, čist, duhovan, apstraktan. Ona je najbliža našoj melanholičnoj duši i pesmi.” Ljubomi Micić, “Makroskop: Savremeno novo i slućeno slikarstvo” [Makroskop: Contemporary New and Anticipated Painting], Zenit 10 (1921): 13. 51 For thorough elaboration of Micić’s concept of Zenithism and Zenithist painting, see Ljubomir Micić, “Savremeno novo i slućeno slikarstvo” [Contemporary New and Anticipated Painting], Zenit 10 (1921): 11–12; Видосава Голубовић, Ирина Суботић [Vidosava Golubović, Irina Subotić], Зенит 1921–1926 [Zenit 1921–1926] (Београд: Народна библиотека Србије, 2008), 45–77. 52 All information in regard to his stay in Vienna was provided by the artist; see Mihailo S. Petrov, “Moj biografski autoportret” [My Biographical Self-portrait], in Mihailo S. Petrov: slikarstvo, grafika, crteži, primenjena grafika, umetnička kritika [Mihailo S. Petrov: Painting, Graphics, Drawings, Applied Graphics, Art Criticism], ed. Sreto Bošnjak (Beograd: Umetnički paviljon Cvijeta Zuzorić, 1979), 49. 53 Ibid. 54 В. Кандински [W. Kandinsky], “Сликарство као чиста уметност” [Painting as Pure Art], trans. M. С. Петров, Мисао [Thought], X/2 (1922): 1379–1382. 55 Ibid., 1379. 56 Станислав Винавер [Stanislav Vinaver], “Манифест експресионистичке школе III” [Manifesto of Expressionist School III], Прогрес [Progress], October 17, 1920, 3. 57 Петар Добровић [Petar Dobrović], “Сликарски правци XIX. и XX. века” [Developments in Painting during the 19th and 20th Century], Дан [Day], 9–10 (1919): 152. 58 Ljubomir Micić, “Makroskop: Kandinski” [Makroskop: Kandinsky], Zenit 5 (1921): 10. 59 Трифуновић, Српско сликарство, 116. 60 See Leah Dickerman, “Vasily Kandinsky, Without Words,” in Inventing Abstraction 1910–1925: How a Radical Ideal Changed Modern Art, ed. L. Dickerman (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 50–53. 61 Момчило Селесковић, “Експресионизам” [Expressionism], Мисао [Thought],VII/4 (1921): 248. 62 Ibid., 245. 63 Ibid., 243. 64 For more details about this exhibition see Драгутин Тошић [Dragutin Tošić], Југословенске уметничке изложбе 1904–1927 [Yugoslav Art Exhibitions 1904–1927] (Београд: Институт за историју уметности, 1983), 129–145.

441

24 TOKENS OF IDENTITY Expressionisms in Romania around the First World War Erwin Kessler

With the end of the First World War, Romania more than doubled its territory and population, and its ethnic constituency accordingly also changed, with a population that was now 72% Romanian, 8% Hungarian, 4% German, and 4% Jewish; 80% of the population lived in rural areas, with agriculture contributing more than 30% to the national income.1 Romania thus inherited various cultural narratives; the modern artistic histories constituted perhaps the only possible convergence platform for these multiple ethnic constituencies. In literature, theatre, and music, each could look back to its own nineteenth-century lineage. Many prominent creative figures, regardless of ethnic or geopolitical status, followed a similar educational path, one that generally led to Munich or Paris. Most of the artists active in Romania before and after the First World War had studied in one or the other or successively in both of these two European cultural centers. Many studied with the same professors, or attended the same studios. One might therefore expect local artistic realms in Romania to show signs of mergence, but beyond certain retrospective stylistic similarities, this was hardly the case. What little coherence existed was provided by the general postimpressionist framework of the art instruction in Munich and Paris and the consistent influence of art nouveau. The differences that existed were instilled by the flourishing expressionism of the first decades of the twentieth century, which was divergently absorbed and interpreted by artists of the various ethnic constituencies. Expressionism was particularly attractive to local Romanian artists because it yoked together tradition and modernity, individualism and community, homeland and the spiritual, universal longings, criticism and eroticism, activism and utopia, and fueled a certain national-ethnic, self-defining sense of cultural competition that characterized the first decades of the twentieth century in the multicultural societies of East-Central Europe. Ironically, the national constituencies preferred expressionism as a means of artistic differentiation, but this frequently amounted to propelling what were indistinct differences—an assortment of pathos, vitalism, romantic visionarism, nostalgia, and loads of rhetoric and idiosyncratic kitsch. The deliberate differences generally were based on a similar framework, which in retrospect could be called localized or situated expressionism. Its main asset was its view of the world as a unitary phenomenon, not enhanced by (impressionist) intensified external sensation, but rather internal, visionary perception, and alternatively backed by utopias of ethnic or social, collective solidarity.

442

Tokens of Identity

Few autochthonous artists were open to the radical avant-garde; cubism, futurism, and postimpressionism were global artistic idioms with little national relevance. Expressionism, a more palatable modernism, was the only modern idiom so deeply assimilated as to become a means of localism and regionalism, instead of the typical avant-garde cosmopolitanism. Expressionism segregated and exacerbated the ethnic, cultural, and social particularities of the national constituencies in Romania. Instead of becoming a visual lingua franca of the new state, however, a proliferation of expressionisms promoted culturally competing identities in the visual realm, with the Saxon-German representation focused more on the urban and bourgeois, interior life; the Hungarian devoted to mythical, regional landscapes; and the Jewish and Romanian converging toward socially biting caricature. In general, the theoreticideological debates surrounding expressionism were more about radicalism; expressionism in the region was marked by ethnic divisions and chronological waves and thus requires a pluralist approach.

Saxon-German Expressionism Expressionism constituted a very short-lived, but intensely debated cultural moment for the German ethnic minority in Transylvania during the period after the First World War and up until the mid-1920s. This more stylistically consistent form of expressionism was not the direct product of a local school in Transylvania, but largely European, with Transylvanian artists of an expressionist inclination following an educational trajectory that began in Kronstadt/Brașov and passed through Budapest, Vienna, and Berlin, but especially Munich and Paris. Thus, although expressionism was generally regarded as a Pan-Germanic style, it was perceived as a cultural import by the conservative local Saxon-German milieu. Following the war, the German minority in Romania became much larger and diversified enormously. Three German ethnic constituencies—the Transylvanian Saxon-Germans, the Swabian-German group from Banat and Satmar, and the Austrian (and Jewish) Germanspeaking minority from Bukovina and Bassarabia—with few links previously were joined together as a ponderous minority in the new state. In the competition for the cultural leadership of this newly emerging group of about 800,000 inhabitants,2 the more numerous and influential Transylvanian Saxon-Germans took the lead. Their cultural and political landmarks were the progressive and open city of Kronstadt/Brașov and the rather conservative, traditionalist city of Hermannstadt/Sibiu. Receptiveness to expressionism was intertwined with Brașov’s challenge to Sibiu’s prior supremacy as the center of the Saxon-German minority in Transylvania. Cultural life in the wealthier commercial city of Brașov was characterized by a mix of modernity in thought and conservatism in action. The artists Arthur Coulin (1869–1912) and Friedrich Miess (1854–1935) had jointly run an open atelier in Brașov since 1901, promoting art as a refiner of public taste and civic consciousness. They advocated for a local “German” approach, intertwining Biedermeier reminiscences, academic mastery, Secession aestheticism, and modernist missionarism. In a manifesto-like statement, Coulin linked together art, society, and ethnicity: Under the emblem of art we recognize the large field of things whose visible forms were created by a sensitive spirit and an educated hand, focused on the home and its interiors, and on the city with its places and streets. Consequently, the promotion of art means for us to confer a specific character upon all these things, one derived from the character of our people.3

443

Erwin Kessler

Art as ethnic and civic mission, as promoted by Coulin and Miess, shared neither the reveries of Jean-François Millet, nor the social pathos of Gustave Caillebotte. Despite its denial of cultural and political privileges, it boosted the prestige of a still prosperous minority. Reinforcing the German sense of Kulturnation—the sense that a nation is defined by its shared cultural history; in Transylvania through depictions of people and cityscapes infused with ethnic “character”—was an answer to the pressure exerted during the Austro-Hungarian dualism (1867–1918) to assimilate the diverse ethnic constituencies into an all-encompassing “Hungarian political nation.” Its effect was felt by the German minority, which declined in population from 580,000 in 1900 to 560,000 in 1910.4 The local impact of the desired Ausgleich (compromise) between Austria and Hungary was the cultural and educational primacy of the Hungarian element. Between 1880 and 1913, the number of schools taught only in Hungarian more than doubled, while the number of schools with instruction in minority languages declined by half.5 The ethnic and culturally competing self-definition of the Saxon-German minority in Transylvania during the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy prepared it for a self-assertive entrance into the cultural scene of Greater Romania after 1918.6 A keystone of this cultural and political self-definition was Die Karpathen (The Carpathians), the influential cultural magazine of the German minority in Transylvania, published in Brașov from 1907 to 1914. Die Karpathen linked Saxon-Germans with both the German minority in Hungary and with the cultural tenors of the Transylvanian Romanians and Hungarians. Competing with the concept of cultural Transylvanism favored by the Hungarian constituency, Die Karpathen promoted Carpathianism, a cultural concept that extended beyond the geopolitical limitations of the German minority in Transylvania, providing it with a larger, transnational context. Carpathianism associated the German constituency with a certain landscape and geographic surrounding, inspired by the “anthropogeography” of Ratzel,7 theorist of the Lebensraum (later heavily exploited by the Third Reich). The colonizing German element was equated with progress and civilization set against a background of endemic barbarism. The visual arts were a part of this, in the hope that the nonverbal idiom would gradually eliminate “inner roughness”8 through an awakening the public’s sense of beauty and good taste. Brașov-born artists Hans Eder, Hans Mattis-Teutsch, Eduard Morres, Fritz Kimm, and others received their first training in Miess and Coulin’s joint studio, where they were introduced to the ideology of a specific German Kulturnation, together with the Carpathianist myth. The development of this generation, born around 1885, was also shaped by the founding of the Kunstverein in 1903 and launch of the magazine Die Karpathen in 1907; together, the three institutions constituted Brașov’s modern artistic milieu: an educational facility, be it, however, so informal; a collecting-promoting entity; and a forum for critical debate. For expressionism in Transylvania one must look to the art influences (though not thoroughly expressionist) fomenting in and around Munich in early 1900s and to those Brașov disciples of Miess and Coulin who discovered, assimilated, and then frequently went on to further distort them, after time spent later in Paris. Most of these artists returned to Brașov after the First World War, which dramatically influenced the social, cultural, ethnic, and artistic priorities of at least some of the Brașov artists; it re-situated their sense of expressionism too. One prime example of this generation is Hans Eder (1883–1955). After studying with Miess and Coulin in Brașov, he moved to Munich in 1903, where he first worked with Moritz Heymann and then studied with Hugo von Habermann, at the Art Academy. In 1908, he moved to Paris to work with Lucien Simon at the Atelier La Palette. While in Bruges (1910– 1911), Eder showed early expressionist inclinations, but he fully turned to expressionism after 1914. During the war, he served as a Kriegsmaler (official war painter) in the Austro-Hungarian army. His depictions of the war’s catastrophes, of human tragedies such as the retreat of the 444

Tokens of Identity

Austro-Hungarian troops or civilizational disasters such as Kolomea (Kolomyia) and its destroyed factories, helped him to develop his mastery of expressionist artistic devices such as electrified strokes of color and distortions or contractions of the painterly surface. Eder’s turn to expressionism and its employment as a cultural brand for the local German community transpired in Die Karpathen.9 One of his darkest war works, Szene in Turka (Scene in Turka), was heralded as expressionist in Das Ziel: Kultur und Satyre (The Goal: Culture and Satire),10 the only avant-garde magazine of the German community in Transylvania, founded in early 1919. Das Ziel sought “a meeting place for spiritual youth and progressive thinking” and promoted “a flourishing of Saxon-German painting”;11 it did, however, not promote SaxonGerman artists in general, rather only those Brașov-based artists who shared its radical ideals. Eder’s depictions of war resonated with the publication’s avant-garde objectives: “war against bourgeois reactionarism, against comfort and callophilia.”12 It deflected the typical, expressionist autarchic individualism in the direction of an ethnic, community-targeted rhetoric, one almost unchanged since the pre-war aesthetic-ideological statements of Coulin and Miess. The typical expressionist, subjective vitalism, and visionary rebirth were proudly introduced in the name of the Saxon-German minority, a “small people” under the spell of its own historical momentum. The adherence to (international) expressionism turned the ethnic minority complex of the Saxon-Germans culturally into a majority complex. They now saw themselves as the bearers of European high culture to the Eastern periphery. This standpoint was dear to Heinrich Zillich,13 founder of the magazine Klingsor, and later advocate of Nazi politics in Romania. The optimistic ethos of the progressive ideals assimilated the older, traditional-conservative ethos, as both centered on ethnicity. The nationalization of situated expressionism as moderate avant-garde is not inadvertent, but consistent with the process of rebranding style as ideology, and blending eccentricity back into collectivity. Inspired by Herwarth Walden’s gallery and magazine, Der Sturm, Das Ziel established its own exhibition facility, Redoute Hall, and opened, in May 1919, with a solo show of fifty expressionist works by Eder, mostly war themes from 1914–1918. Concurrently, Eder published his programmatic text, “Über neue Kunst” (On New Art) in the magazine, outlining the cosmopolitan, postimpressionist-based expressionist foundations of his art by acknowledging that the evolution of modernist painting was based on the work of “three artists . . . Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, and Pablo Picasso.”14 No German artists were mentioned by Eder. With Eder and Das Ziel, expressionism, stylistically defined by French postimpressionism, intellectually shaped by German revolutionary ideals, and ethnically stamped by Saxon-German localism, became associated with novelty in Transylvanian art following the war; it was the first avant-garde-like movement in Greater Romania. Even the competing, more conservative cultural magazine Ostland, from Sibiu, devoted an article to Hans Eder,15 in 1919, and discussed his work more extensively in 1921.16 Dissenting from Eder’s own statement that his work was rooted in French fauvism, Ostland singled him out as a friend of Oskar Kokoschka and a pupil of Lovis Corinth, thus forging the Germanization of his artistic profile. Essentially a portrait painter, Eder depicted his prominent friends, German cultural figures like Fritz Blei or Heinrich Mann, but also local German-Saxon intelligentsia, such as the lawyer Hermann Fratschkes and the poet Heinrich Horvath (Plate 27), or fellow painter Fritz Kimm. He captured his subjects in expressive, yet shallow, anxious poses, sometimes in an uncanny, or even delirious, hallucinatory appearance inspired by the skeptical, interwar bourgeois mindset, such as in Portret de bărbat (Portrait of a Man; Figure 24.1), which depicts a trance-like, drugusing urban intellectual. During the 1930s, Eder portrayed famous Romanian figures, such as the poet and politician Octavian Goga and the composer Tiberiu Brediceanu, in a colder, more 445

Erwin Kessler

Figure 24.1  Hans Eder, Portret de bărbat (Portrait of a Man), 1920, oil on canvas, 85 × 71 cm, The Museum of Art, Brașov

official Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) fashion. Eder integrated himself so well into the Romanian artistic scene that he was able to move his summer studio to Balcic (the Southern Romanian resort and art colony modeled after the impressionist French Riviera), instead of the Nagybánya/Baia-Mare artistic colony, which was preferred by most of the Transylvanian artists. In 1924, he participated in the first Romanian Official Salon opened in Bucharest after the First World War, and later became a member of the Salon’s jury. By 1925, Eder turned to more traditional religious themes, painted in a blatant, kitschy manner reminiscent of expressionism, in an effort to reinsert himself into the more spiritual paradigm of the Saxon-German community. In 1924, the Brașov cultural magazine Klingsor (1924–1932) dedicated to Eder a series of articles by the local, German-speaking art theorist Oscar Walter Cisek,17 the Austrian religious (and later Blut und Boden) writer Richard Billinger,18 and the chief editor, Germanocentrist politician Heinrich Zillich.19 Romanian ethno-metaphysician and expressionist writer Lucian Blaga also dedicated a chapter of his 1926 book Ferestre colorate (Colored Windows) to Eder. Blaga celebrated in Eder’s work an “awe close to religion and fright . . . a primary feeling”20 and saw the artist as an epitome of German art: “The painting of Hans Eder is obviously a German art . . . [but] this art has nonetheless nothing local . . . [because the artist is] in full control through the experience of expressionism.”21 For Blaga and others, Eder was clearly a German artist, because of his expressionism; yet his (international) expressionism alienated him from the local, too narrowly traditionalist Saxon-German community. This paradoxical position of Eder as both model and exception is mirrored by his attempts to forge 446

Tokens of Identity

connections with the Romanian intelligentsia. During the 1930s, in another endeavor to stay attuned to the developments of the greater German cultural world, Eder gave up the progressive features of early expressionism and fell under the spell of the new Pan-German artistic ideology of Neue Sachlichkeit. Like Eder, Hans Mattis-Teutsch (1884–1960) began his artistic training with Miess and Coulin in Brașov. From 1901 to 1902 he continued his studies with József Rippl-Rónai, in Budapest, and from 1903 to 1905 followed the sculpture classes of Wilhem von Rümann at the Art Academy in Munich. He then left for Paris, where he lived until 1908, before returning to Brașov. During the war, Mattis-Teutsch participated in the Budapest avant-garde circles; Lajos Kassák introduced him to Herwarth Walden. He also collaborated with the “a-z group” in Cologne, and the Bauhaus. Mattis-Teutsch began to paint works with increasingly expressionist and abstract features around 1913. He had his breakthrough in 1917 with an exhibition organized by the magazine MA (Today), in Budapest, where he showed oil paintings, watercolors, and linocuts. His landscapes, with human figures turning into stormy trees and hills, displayed his preference for pure, powerful colors and clear-cut lines, influenced above all by the work of Franz Marc, yet with a rather ecstatic-depressive touch. Nature motifs disappeared from his work around 1918, when he began to ignore the visible world, creating works based instead on an inner, intellectual, and emotional painterly reality. An adherent of Der Sturm from 1921 to 1925, he developed an almost purely abstract idiom; his series of Flori sufleteşti (Soul Flowers; Figure 24.2), dominated by a central kernel of concentration and stability, emerged out of a striking and contrasting turmoil of lines, shapes, and colors.

Figure 24.2  Hans Mattis-Teutsch, Flori sufleteşti (Soul Flowers), 1915–1924, oil on canvas, 30 × 29 cm, The Museum of Visual Arts, Galați

447

Erwin Kessler

Figure 24.3  Hans Mattis-Teutsch, Maternitate (Motherhood), 1925, oil on canvas, 60 × 50 cm, The Museum of Art, Constanța

In connection with his exhibition at Redoute in July 1919, Mattis-Teutsch published a theoretical article in Das Ziel.22 Similar to Eder’s militant tone in his 1919 Ziel essay, Mattis-Teutsch insisted on the spiritual, but also the progressive, humanist, and mass-oriented mission of the “new art.” Works like Maternitate (Motherhood; Figure 24.3) condense this socialist creed, further stressed in his 1931 treatise Kunstideologie (Ideology of Art).23 In support of Mattis-Teutsch, Das Ziel also reprinted a lengthy essay by the Budapest art critic Iván Hevesy that was originally published in MA. Hevesy insisted that the works of Mattis-Teutsch were neither decorative nor naively symbolic, but rather “expressions of emotions” rendered through “absolute painterly means.”24 In a review one month later, Das Ziel stressed that “the expressionists, a category into which Mattis Teutsch also belongs” could be characterized as the painters who reject everything objective because any concrete object would hinder their “freedom to manipulate lines and colors.”25 Mattis-Teutsch’s theoretical statement and the positive exhibition reviews encountered criticism in the Sibiu newspapers, which presented the phenomenon as “radical expressionist barrage” and “artistic hallucinations.”26 Erwin Reisner of the Sibiu newspaper Deutsche Tagespost (The German Daily) explicitly targeted the progressive stances of Das Ziel and of Mattis-Teutsch, expressing doubts about their supposed strategy of “épater les bourgeois,” much like that already consecrated by the avant-garde. To Reisner and his Sibiu acolytes, the expressionist outburst in Brașov took advantage of the local German inhabitants, inciting them to “revolution” through “decorous,” but politically charged artworks. The rejection of expressionism in the Saxon-German conservative 448

Tokens of Identity

milieu is understandable if one takes into account the fears associated with the avant-garde. Looking at expressionism from a Pan-German historical perspective, one would see the Spartacist uprising in Berlin in January 1919 as throwing the Weimar Republic into a revolutionary nightmare. Artists of diverse genres who identified themselves as both expressionists and “avant-garde” joined the radical Novembergruppe (November Group) and held collective exhibitions in the following years. Their activism was inspirational for Brașov artists. After the attack by Reisner, Das Ziel answered through Emil Honigberger, in an open letter to the editor in which he proclaimed: Our motto is For Progress! And we pave the way for all those who wish to advance . . . If you fear a revolution in art, we say that revolutions are evil but necessary and inevitable evils. We are convinced that through the present-day revolution the German people are heading towards a great future.27 The relationship between the Berlin revolutionary movements and the local artistic developments in Brașov is obvious, although none of the Saxon-German artists was truly involved in them. The Sibiu detractors grouped around Richard Csaki, who established the conservative magazine Ostland: Monatsschrift für die Kultur der Ostdeutschen (Ostland: Cultural Monthly of the Eastern Germans) the same year (1919), as if to counter Das Ziel and the Brașov radical art. Ostland provided a medium for Pan-German ethnic politics.28 Drawing on the concept of Ostdeutschtum,29 Csaki advocated the unity of the German minority and founded, in 1922, Das Deutsche Kulturamt in Rumänien (The German Cultural Office in Romania), ensuring the political representation of the “German national constituency” before the Bucharest government.30 The painterly work of his wife, Grete Csaki-Copony (1893–1990), is typical for the search for a Germanizing, local visual idiom. Born and trained in Brașov, she began painting in Munich in 1909, with Moritz Heymann, and moved to Berlin before the war, where she ventured into colorful expressionism, accompanied by a striking subjective pathos in describing the social turmoil. Having resettled in Sibiu in 1917, by the mid-1920s she had already turned her passionate forms into static compositions with massive, well-defined traditional characters in dark, even dull, colors and submissive gestures. Heimatkunst and Neue Sachlichkeit fused together in a clichéd drama reminiscent of her expressionist background. Mattis-Teutsch’s 1919 exhibition sparked a dispute between Ostland and Das Ziel. Ostland art critic Alfred Witting tried to turn expressionist drama into farce: The sight wanders through the halls as if haunted by a nightmare. The inexperienced tries to get rid of the frightening colors, to put an end to the artistic hallucination exiting in the street, to sunlight . . . This art gives you nothing, it excludes empathy and raises problems to be solved by psychology . . . I contest its appreciation as painting.31 Witting’s rendering of Mattis-Teutsch’s work as product of a troubled mind allowed him to evoke notions of chaos and disruption associated with the revolutionary movements in Weimar Republic. The much too fresh Berlin mayhem led the Saxon-German petty bourgeoisie to view any collective and progressive movement in the artistic milieu as alien. Despite the legitimation of expressionism as a German artistic movement by the activities of Die Brücke (The Bridge) in Dresden and Berlin, Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in Munich, and Herwarth Walden’s Berlin Sturm Galerie, from late 1919 onwards, it was perceived as a threat to national identity in the conservative cultural milieu of the Saxon-German minority in Transylvania. 449

Erwin Kessler

The avant-garde in Brașov was short-lived. Das Ziel was followed by Das neue Ziel (The New Goal; 1919–1920), but the ideology and tone had changed. Das neue Ziel aligned with Ostland, proclaiming that “a magazine has the right to exist and persist in the future only if it is anchored in the local realities and develops together with them.”32 Controversial but admired only a few months earlier, Mattis-Teutsch now became suspect. Edith Herfurth-Sachsenheim found that the paintings of Hans Mattis-Teutsch are just decorative . . . but it is not easy to decipher the ideas and the states of mind of the artist. The beholder, unable to enter this new direction, cannot rid herself of the conviction that the works are more so constructions of the intellect rather than the result of lived experience.33 From a similar anti-elitist standpoint, painter Erwin Neustädter also scorned Mattis-Teutsch, decrying him as alien to common sense and apparently unable to understand “such uncommon works of art, towards which no previously known path leads.”34 The turn from radicalism to conservatism, from progress to populism, was rapid and thorough. A few years later, Hans Wühr summarized the situation of the local expressionist artists: “Transylvania has a distant public, doubting the artistic manifestations of today more than anywhere else in the world . . . This is why the Transylvanian expressionist painter enjoys at home the precious right of being prophet elsewhere.”35 By 1924, both Hans Eder and Hans MattisTeutsch had turned their eyes toward Bucharest. Mattis-Teutsch joined the Romanian avantgarde, publishing in Contimporanul and Integral, teaching at the Academy of Decorative Arts (a Bauhaus-like institution led by M. H. Maxy), and moving toward constructivism and socialism; Eder became linked with the right-wing Romanian cultural establishment and explored religious, spiritual themes. Their shared, early expressionism had only been a temporary artistic platform.

Hungarian Expressionism in Transylvania Hungarian expressionism in Transylvania produced less powerful individual figures than did the Saxon-German. But its assimilation by the Hungarian cultural constituency in Transylvania was much stronger than that displayed by either the majority Romanian constituency or the German minority, because the emergence of expressionism was linked to the increasing cultural insularity of the Hungarian ethnic constituency in Transylvania after the First World War. The Hungarian minority had two major cultural centers, Temesvár/Timișoara in Banat and Kolozsvár/Cluj-Napoca in Transylvania. The earliest Hungarian expressionist wave was progressive, urban, and internationalist, mainly focused on the subject matter of the active human figure.36 This socially engaged form of expressionism was related to the most influential avantgarde Hungarian publication, MA, edited by Lajos Kassák and Timișoara-born, political artist Béla Uitz (1887–1972). A gifted draughtsman, engraver, and master of a typical, German expressionist line, brisk and firm, Béla Uitz was already involved in Kassák’s earlier, socialist-anarchist magazine, A Tett (The Action, 1915–1916). No matter what medium he used, Uitz preferred that his human subjects—depicted as half- or full-length figures, in portrait or group ensembles—be engaged in rhythmic, mechanically ordered movement. His statuary basrelief-like figures were derived from postimpressionist Cézannism, while the particular hatching technique (transferred to his paintings) evoked the tradition of German engraving, but also suggested incisions on primitive wooden sculptures, a mix reminiscent of early Picasso and Matisse expressionist works. Uitz was a prominent figure in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic (1919); as a member of the Artistic Council, he was director of the Arts School for Workers. After 1919, he emigrated to Vienna and, after hesitating between Berlin and Paris, progressively lost the avant-garde traits of the earlier expressionism in favor of Neue Sachlichkeit-like realism. 450

Tokens of Identity

He settled in the Soviet Union during the mid-1920s, and became a reliable fixture of communist Proletkult—propaganda art. The expressionist outburst concerning Kassák’s “activism” surfaced in the early writings of another Timișoara-born poet and theorist, Róbert Reiter (1889–1989). His expressionist poetry in Hungarian made him a powerful contributor to MA, which between 1917 and 1919 published eighteen of his poems. When the group around Kassák fled to Vienna in 1919, Reiter returned to Timișoara, engaging in socialist journalism until 1922, when he joined the MA group in Vienna and published theoretical statements suffused with expressionist-radical subjectivism challenging communist propaganda realism: the efforts through which nowadays . . . some try to link art to some social movements and thus to reduce it to an instrument of agitation, of propaganda, are in fact a degeneration into naturalism, causing the death of art. Where imitation begins, all possibilities to create cease. It does not matter in this sense, whether the object of copying is a landscape or the given social structures.37 Béla Uitz was the artist promoted most strongly by Kassák and MA (next to Hans MattisTeutsch), while Robert Reiter was the most promoted poet. But Uitz’s increasing alienation from the Budapest and Vienna circles of the Hungarian avant-garde, during the 1920s, was similar to that of Mattis-Teutsch who, after 1919, returned to Brașov and heavily contributed to the Romanian avant-garde, distancing himself from expressionism. Similarly, after returning to Timișoara for good, in 1924, Reiter’s dissociation from his earlier poetry was such that he gave up not only radical expressionism, but also the Hungarian language and published only in his mother tongue, German. He later coined the pseudonym Franz Liebhard, which he used for the remainder of his life.38 Instead of praising the earlier, rebellious nature of the hypertrophied, expressionist self and its universal pathos, all three major representatives of the first, local Hungarian expressionism gradually became integrated into confined communities. They echoed their mentor’s, Kassák’s, own turning from expressionism to collectivist constructivism after 1920, when he argued in favor of nonrepresentational art, which, subjectless, only demonstrates itself by “representing the collective individual.”39 Significantly, the later re-insertion of Kassák’s theories into the Transylvanian art scene, through articles published from 1926 onward in the Cluj-based Korunk (Our Age, first series 1926–1940), must be related to the epigonic (conservative) avant-garde wave of the late 1920s. In the first issue of Korunk, its founder László Dienes criticized the historical avant-garde and especially futurism for its lack of interest in history and the past, while István Dési Huber, one of the leading contributors, stressed on a more nationalist tone that “every art is the expression of the present, as well as the continuation of the past; this is a continuity in which the historical experience of the people lives alongside the cultural historical achievements of the nation.”40 The aesthetic and political reframing during the late 1920s of the earlier avant-garde from an internationalist to nationalist movement reflected the cultural changes of the interwar Hungarian minority in Transylvania. Before the First World War, Hungarian culture was dominant in Transylvania. As the art historian Neubauer notes, the local government pursued “an aggressive policy of Magyarization that increasingly forced Transylvania’s embittered Romanian and Saxon political elite to seek help and alliance beyond the borders [of Transylvania].”41 After 1918, the Hungarian culture in Transylvania, Banat, and Maramureș turned from a majorityculture to a minority-culture. Expressionism, itself a minority and marginal paradigm in the new Romanian state, fit the Hungarian cultural isolationism. 451

Erwin Kessler

The assimilation of Hungarian expressionism into the larger Romanian culture differed from the assimilation of German expressionism: the former was less participative and preferred the ethnic self-determination in the limits of its own cultural geography, delineated by the concept of Transylvanism, “based on the belief that the national diversity of this land and the coexistence of those groups . . . influenced the development of some common features.”42 Transylvanism43 and expressionism merged into a cultural-political forma mentis, whose localist-ethnic sense was grafted onto the traumatic subjectivism and seen as a key identity-structuring experience. Transylvanism as a concept emerged in the Austro-Hungarian Empire before 1918, fueled by the new orientation of the province toward Budapest as a center; at the same time, the Saxon-German and Romanian elites saw their careers slowing down if not obstructed “by the aggressively assimilating politics of the Hungarian State.”44 During the 1920s and 1930s, the regionalist utopian idea of Transylvanism claimed the primacy of a multi-ethnic, synthetic “Transylvanian identity” over the ethnic splits, and it went deep into the cultural fiber of the Hungarian minority, turning into a vindication of the political and ethnic rights of the Hungarian minority.45 The earlier avant-garde expressionism centered on Timișoara; the latter, conservativeTransylvanist, variant was centered on Cluj, where already in 1921, the artist, theorist, and key Transylvanist, Károly Kós (b. Karl Kosch, 1883–1977),46 published his messianic manifesto, “Kiáltó Szó” (The Clarion Call), claiming that “Transylvania is a separate historical entity, with its own consciousness, culture and self-standing dignity.”47 Later, he stated that “Transylvanian man is thoroughly determined by this land . . . there is a Transylvanian psyche, which is not the privilege of the Hungarian Transylvanians, but also a predestination for the German and Romanian communities in Transylvania.”48 Writer Ferenc Balázs, in the publication Tizenegyek (The Eleven), outlined the dramatic anthropogeography of Transylvanism with respect to the background of the traumatic war and its outcome: when facing a great failure, “man kisses, first of all, the land” and then plunges into the depths of the innermost self, “flourishing in tears.”49 Land and landscape became the focal point of Transylvanism, both in literature and art, as the Transylvanian people were “bound to their natural environment [and] devoted to their land.”50 The Cluj magazine Erdélyi Helikon (Transylvanian Helikon, 1928–1944) became its main proponent.51 Transylvanism capitalized on the various threads of a messianic, ethnic rhetoric and introduced them into the visual arts, culminating in Károly Kós’s leadership, in 1929, of the Miklós Barabas Guild, the (exclusively Hungarian) association of artists from Transylvania.52 Transylvanist theories gradually infiltrated the earlier, postimpressionist productions of the prominent Nagybánya/Baia-Mare School. Born in Maramureș, whose capital city is Baia-Mare, its founder, Simon Hollósy (1857–1918), was a typical representative of the Munich art scene, where he had opened a private art school in 1886. In 1896, he opted for Baia-Mare as a summer resort location for his Munich school, and the informal art school developed over the course of half a century into a full-grown institution. Much like the artists’ colonies in Barbizon and Pont-Aven, or Worpswede and Neu-Dachau, the Baia-Mare artists’ colony was built upon a powerful connection to the local landscape. The hills, parks, forests, and the Săsar river banks, too, became iconic subjects of paintings by the earliest postimpressionist Baia-Mare pupils, such as István Réti, Károly Ferenczy, and János Thorma. In their landscapes, soft and exquisite human figures (often female muses) pursue futile, idyllic tasks, bask in reverie, or stroll aimlessly, much as in the works of Émile Bernard, so evocative of la belle époque. The second wave of the Baia-Mare School, during the mid-1920s, was marked by a washedout form of expressionism that mingled Paris fauvism and Munich expressivity. The local landscape remained the preferred subject matter, but the often candy-like colors preferred by the founders of the School were replaced by darker tones and harsher contrasts consonant with the 452

Tokens of Identity

pathetic and gloomy reigning ideological Transylvanism, which turned geography into brutal, aesthetic determinism.53 Transylvanism drew together elements of the landscape theory of Sauer and Nadler,54 who ascribed creative-mind imprints to specific geographical settings and linked them to an essentialist definition of Transylvanist art, based on a self-styled “Transylvanian color scheme,” the “couleur locale of lilac red and black,” supposedly “hinting at tragedy.”55 Artists Sándor Ziffer, Sándor Szolnay, János Krizsán, Vilmos Perlrott Csaba, and József Klein shaped the painterly style of the later Baia-Mare School: bright yellows or reds and cutting greens fighting back dark, deep blues. Sharp contrasts characterized their landscapes now, emptied of any human presence. The earlier soft melancholy was no longer poetic and inspirational, but stiff and biting, exuding anxious despondency, as in the emblematic works of Sándor Ziffer (1880–1962). Ziffer studied in Munich with Anton Ažbe (1901–1902) and Simon Hollósy (1902–1904), and continued his work in France (1906–1907) and Berlin (1914–1918). Based in Baia-Mare from 1918 onward, he produced powerful landscapes depicting the colony’s bare surroundings, including the hill above Baia-Mare, the park in which Hollósy set up his school, and the empty streets of the city, which became a trademark of the Baia-Mare School after the First World War (Plate 28). The foundation of the ideological and stylistic conflation of expressionism and Transylvanism into an identity-building, ethnic framework focused on the local landscape as embodied, despondent homeland developed in the late 1920s, when “political Transylvanism got into a dead-end . . . surviving among Hungarians only as a cultural . . . ideological orientation . . . supportive of an archaic society, reigned by peaceful social classes.”56 The idiosyncratic Transylvanist gloominess penetrated the works of the Baia-Mare School, but also those of other Hungarian artists, among them the influential Cluj-based painter István Nagy (1873–1937). After studies in Munich (1899–1900) and at Académie Julian, in Paris (1900–1902), Nagy settled in Cluj, where he produced ghostly local landscapes filled with desolation—expressionist visions of a barren, murky nature, against the background of which humans seem to be merely stranded creatures (Figure 24.4). Following the writings of expressionist theorists such as Wilhelm Worringer and Paul Fechter, who promoted expressionism as a centuries-old German national feature inherent in a specific Kunstwollen, writers such as László Dienes, in 1924, held that expressionist painting is dominated by “an abstract, metaphysical law, an imagined universal principle, an intuition.”57 Thus, the painting is seen more as an object of revelation than a proper depiction of visual reality. The expressionist, Transylvanist landscape apparently entailed a spiritual revelation that eventually would elevate the individual aspect above its condition. In 1934, historian and cultural theorist Elemér Jancsó, writing on Transylvanism, noted that the nervous anarchy of the form and content, the aspiration to universality, to reaching a superior order and harmony, and the concomitant, total disharmony of views and aims of the artistic expressions, typifies this controversial trend, still unable to legitimate itself through major artistic creations.58 Perceiving the artistic and ideological dead end, the Baia-Mare School was closed down by painters János Thorma and István Réti in 1927, but was then taken over in part by Romanian artists, who had already been welcomed by Thorma in Baia-Mare in 1919. Hungarian Transylvanism, promoting the “suprematist Hungarian identity . . . of an organized minority community,”59 was ideologically challenged by the Transylvanian Romanians in the 1930s. Again, it was philosopher Lucian Blaga who stressed the diverging cultural outlook of the three main ethnic constituencies in Transylvania as a “polyvalent Transylvanian mindset.”60 453

Erwin Kessler

Figure 24.4  István Nagy, Peisaj cu figuri (Landscape with Figures), 1920, oil on canvas, 33 × 46 cm, The Museum of Țara Crișurilor, Oradea

Connected with the Baia-Mare School, artists like Aurel Popp (1879–1970) and Alexandru Phoebus (1899–1954) injected their expressionist approach with the social dynamics of collective unrest and protest and thus revived the rather melancholic Hungarian expressionist Transylvanism with the tensions of class struggle. Thus, the earlier, ethnically tainted expressionism was turned into an ethical, social form of expressionism, with the menacing figure of the destitute peasant at its core (Figure 24.5).

Romanian Expressionism Munich and Paris attracted artists from various regions of Romania. In addition to the bohemian atmosphere of places such as Café Stefanie in Munich and the many cafés of Montmartre and Montparnasse in Paris, the artists profited from the powerful print culture. Satirical journals such as Simplicissimus, in Munich, and Le rire or Gil Blas, in Paris, provided a lively atmosphere for artistic, social, and intellectual exchange. They also provided opportunities for draughtsmanship as well as political commitment and strongly shaped the creative abilities and ambitions of artists from East-Central Europe. The Romanian cultural milieu was ambivalent to expressionism, which, in contrast to symbolism and cubism, never moved to the center of the artistic debates because there were no organized groups pursuing it.61 Lucian Blaga, who discussed expressionism in the works of Hans Eder and István Nagy, noted that “one has to do with an expressionist work if it depicts an entity in a manner that transcends it by means of the internal tension of the depiction, making visible a cosmic relationship with the absolute and the infinite.”62 Even though the best of Romanian 454

Tokens of Identity

Figure 24.5  Alexandru Phoebus, Țăran (Peasant), 1931, oil on canvas, 150 × 100 cm, The National Museum of Art, Bucharest

expressionism resided mainly in theory, one still cannot ignore artists such as Apcar Baltazar and Lascăr Vorel, both of whose careers were cut short because of their premature deaths. Painter, ceramist, and critic Apcar Baltazar (1880–1909) was educated in Bucharest. He readily and swiftly explored most of the artistic trends of the time, including expressionism. In Țărani (The Peasants, 1907), Baltazar depicted a tight group of destitute but resilient and defiant ploughmen transfixing the guilty beholder. Painted in connection with the bloody peasant uprising of 1907, as if to embody the tragic fate of the village world, the work has as its counterpart Haimanalele (The Tramps, 1907; Figure 24.6), depicting a group of boorish suburban demimonde (a cliché of profligate city life) shamelessly scorning the viewer. These two works show Baltazar as a powerful master of typologies, imbued with social criticism verging on caricature, while his energetic brushstrokes evoke the refined and ironic, indulging whip of James Ensor. Baltazar’s contemporary, Lascăr Vorel (1879–1918), was a master of expressive social masks. Born in Piatra-Neamț, Moldova, Vorel settled in Munich in 1899, where he studied with Franz Stuck. Influenced by Daumier, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Ensor, he became a key figure at Café Stefanie and a friend of Albert Bloch, Emmy Hennings, and Marcel Duchamp.63 His diary is a map of daily cultural life in expressionist Munich during the period 1910 to 1918; according to philosopher Nae Ionescu, who fondly remembered the evenings with Vorel, Bloch, Marc, and Wedekind at Café Stefanie, “expressionism fomented in his head.”64 Vorel published expressionist caricatures in satirical journals such as Simplicissimus and Komet, shaping an imagery of grim, philistine bourgeois pursuing their ritual modern entertainments—at the cabaret, hippodrome, 455

Erwin Kessler

Figure 24.6  Apcar Baltazar, Haimanalele (The Tramps), 1907, oil on canvas, 37 × 46 cm, The National Museum of Art, Bucharest

theatre, or casino, for example, in Cartoforii (Cardsharps, c. 1910; Figure 24.7), where the cruel portrayal of social sludge and fiendish cynicism prefigures the works of George Grosz. In June 1916, Vorel exhibited his works in the twenty-ninth Neue Kunst show together with Erich Heckel and Hans Richter at Hans Goltz’s influential Munich gallery. From 1910 on, he also exhibited his works, characterized by “typical human expressions . . . of deep psychology,”65 in Romania, alongside those of Constantin Brâncuși, Theodor Pallady, and Nicolae Tonitza, with the group Tinerimea Artistică (The Artistic Youth). In his Munich studio, Vorel welcomed many Romanian artists and intellectuals, among them his friend Nicolae Tonitza. Tonitza (1886–1940) first studied with Hugo von Habermann, in Munich, before moving to Paris, in 1908, where he continued his education at the studio of Pierre Laprade, from 1909 to 1911. After his return to Romania, he established himself as a leading caricaturist, forging his own style, a mixture of art nouveau contours, expressionist morphology, and a mellow neoimpressionist chromaticism. Tonitza was also an excellent essayist; he not only contributed caricatures but also articles to the leading journals of the time, among them Adevărul and Furnica. Left-wing in his political views, he was drawn to the poverty of the Romanian peasants and the decaying urban milieu. Influenced by the kitschy social criticism of the Paris “titis” and “gamins” depicted by Théophile Steinlen and Francisque Poulbot, Tonitza drew his own vulnerable juveniles (especially nude girls), suggestive of both compassion and a degree of sexual promiscuity. 456

Tokens of Identity

Figure 24.7  Lascăr Vorel, Cartoforii (Cardsharps), c. 1910, gouache on cardboard, 32.5 × 25 cm, The Museum of Art, Piatra-Neamț

Tonitza was conscripted into the Romanian army in 1916; after the Romanian defeat at Turtucaia by the Bulgarian-German alliance, he was sent to the Bulgarian prisoner-ofwar camp of Kirjali, where he captured his sojourn as a prisoner in a series of expressionist engravings. His wartime experiences shaped his painting production after the war, too. Convoi de prizonieri (Convoy of Prisoners, 1919; Figure 24.8) is a gloomy, depressing rendering of the human chain of prisoners, with their dark, brownish-green clothes and figures seemingly molded out of the same substance as the muddy landscape around them. Under the motto “Celui qui veut creuser jusqu’à la verité doit simplifier” (He who would dig down to the truth must simplify, taken from Henri Barbusse’s 1919 socialist novel, Clarté), Tonitza exhibited his war works in Bucharest in 1921. It was not a snobbish reference to current literary authorities, but a self-definition of Tonitza’s intentional concentration and simplification of shape and narrative, an ideological landmark. Paintings such as Coadă la pâine (Queuing for Bread, 1920), Femei la cimitir (Women at the Cemetery, 1920), and La azil (In the Madhouse, 1921), depicting the destitute figures of orphans, widows, maimed persons, and other victims, are characterized by intentional exaggeration, synthetic forms, and cruel, stark colors. Between 1919 and 1925, Tonitza exhibited his works for the benefit of war orphans and published his caricatures in militant leftist journals such as Socialismul (The Socialism). By the end of the 1920s, however, his progressive ideals had cooled and his work became increasingly marketable and aestheticized. As a member of the artists’ colony in Balcic, he concentrated on his newly favorite subject, Tatar women, with their ritualistically rendered 457

Erwin Kessler

Figure 24.8  N  icolae Tonitza, Convoi de prizonieri (Convoy of Prisoners), 1919, oil on canvas, 97 × 73 cm, The National Museum of Art, Bucharest

mysterious exoticism. He approached them in a lyrical yet somehow colonialist manner, taking their despondency merely as a beneficial given for his art. Much like Tonitza and other expressionist Romanian artists, Iosif Iser (Isidor Rubinsohn, 1881–1958) mastered a caricature-driven social pathos, ranging from the tragic to the humorous. He served in the First World War, and later became a member of the Balcic art colony, likewise seduced by the Tatar women as subjects. Iser also studied first in Munich, from 1899 onward, with Anton Azbé and then with Nikolaus Gysi, Ludwig von Herterich, and Carl von Marr, at the Art Academy, until 1904. In 1905, he published his first caricature in the popular Romanian journal Adevărul (The Truth). The same year, he began to contribute caricatures to Simplicissimus. In 1908, he moved to Paris, where he worked in the Ranson studio until 1909, becoming friends with André Derain, Juan Gris, Albert Marquet, and Pablo Picasso. Yet, Iser was ideologically closer to the caricaturist Forain and started to publish caricatures in Le rire (The Laugh) and Le Témoin (The Witness). At the same time, he started a fervent campaign of publishing caricatures in the satirical Romanian magazines Furnica (The Ant), Facla (The Torch), Rampa (The Ramp), and Flacăra (The Flame). His socially engaged and politically biting caricatures, with their simplified forms, grotesque physiognomies, and mask-like characters, combined formal elements of Paris School expressionism and art nouveau decorum with a militant and rebellious ethos derived from his Munich years. Iser reacted vigorously to the last great peasant rebellion in Europe, the 1907 uprising in Romania, in which hundreds of peasants were killed and some of the rebellious villages sieged 458

Tokens of Identity

and destroyed by the army. The bloodshed strongly affected not only Iser, but the entire local artistic mindset (as seen in the case of Apcar Baltazar), and it thoroughly modified the representation of the peasant and the village world in Romania until long after the First World War. In 1909, Iser organized the first show of modern art in Romania, exhibiting his works along with those of his friends Derain, Forain, and Galanis, at the Romanian Athenaeum. The exhibition assimilated everything from modernism to expressionism; its essentially urban, subjective, anti-realistic, and socially critical viewpoint challenged the reigning, local artistic paradigm—a soft version of the Barbizon School preoccupied with nostalgic and conventional, descriptive rural scenes and sugary landscapes. The show, conceived by Iser to justify and promote his own viewpoint, fused together the noisy fauvism of Derain, and his eccentric use of color and distorted perspective, with Forain’s and Galanis’s mawkish criticism of bourgeois life, of dancers, gamblers, and filles perdues. Iser contributed his own biting images of social unrest, thus revealing the politically charged, confrontational side of art. Both the subjects and their artistic treatment challenged the conventional Romanian aesthetic. The modernity of expressionism was equivocal and provocative, but also rather conservative, as it was still readable and enjoyable, and thus still far removed from the true avant-garde or the radicalism of futurism, for example. And though Marinetti’s 1909 Futurist Manifesto was translated and published in Romanian in February of the same year by the magazine Democrația (The Democracy),66 its immediate public reception was null. Its avant-garde features were not assimilated into modernity, as in the case of expressionism. The equation of expressionism and modernism was once again an issue in 1910. Then Arthur Segal (1875–1944), a Romanian artist working in Berlin but regularly exhibiting in Bucharest opened an exhibition heralded as the first solo show of a modern artist because of its progressive, pointillist painting technique and its subjects derived from city life. Segal was maybe the only Romanian expressionist lacking an affinity for caricature. Like Iser, he had studied in Munich, but then moved to Berlin. There he developed his own style, a mixture of formalist rigor and subjective, fauvist colorful expressivity. The concatenation of the exhibitions by Iser and Segal in 1909 and 1910 turned expressionism into a brief cultural headline. In 1913, when Iser was conscripted into the Romanian army during the second Balkan war, he discovered the Southern-Dobroudja and Balcic, the site of the future Romanian artists’ colony. Iser was fascinated by the local Tatar minority and their particular, passive attitude and appearance; but he heavily commodified them: his uncritical depictions of Tatars were shaped by a colonialist gaze—enthusiastic but shallow, alien to any insight into the authentic life of the indeed destitute and mostly illiterate population. His previously caricature-prone expressionism became then a rather decorative postimpressionism, with nudes (odalisques, Figure 24.9) and landscapes (sunny, southern ones) at its core. In his 1922 review of the Arta română group show, prominent collector and art critic Krikor H. Zambaccian concluded: “Iser . . . started with caricatures, and still displays expressionist remains, teasing nature . . . or mutilating it, as André Lhote would put it, in order to reach a concise and powerful expression, a deformed and angular one.”67 To the moderate modernist Zambaccian, Iser and expressionism were seen as an outdated alteration of reality, counterpoised to André Lhote’s more objectivist, call for a return to order of the mid-1920s. Expressionism was critically viewed even by the local avant-garde. Inspired by futurist diagrams like “Sintesi futurista della Guerra” (Futuristic War Synthesis), Iser’s own pupil, M. H. Maxy, published his Cronometraj-Pictural (Painterly Chronometer, 1924), in which cubism and constructivism, attended by their half-brother Dadaism, fight against “sentimental romanticism,” and its “monotheism, lyricism, individualism” rooted in “historical artistic representation, narrative painting, and illusion.”68 Expressionism was at stake, as precursor and enemy of the 459

Erwin Kessler

Figure 24.9  Iosif Iser, Odalisque, 1929, engraving, 19 × 15 cm, Artmark, Bucharest

avant-garde. “There is a flagrant difference between my ideas,” Maxy noted, “and German art. This is why expressionism . . . although influential for many Romanian artists . . . was of no interest for me.”69 The central European avant-garde, including Maxy and Karel Teige, scorned the “sentimental kitsch” of the “individualistic expressionism in its German form.”70 Like Eder, Tonitza and Iser were successful interwar painters, with no revolutionary ideals. Their temperate criticism slowly became a commodity of modern visual culture, backing the given order. Most Romanian and Jewish expressionists focused in their works on current history and social status, not on their ethnic identity. They were guided by a proletarian mindset, though they lacked that social status. Romanian art historiography after the Second World War, from Petru Comarnescu to Amelia Pavel and Dan Grigorescu, frequently diminishes the spiritual aspects of the local versions of expressionism, inflating instead the ideological posturing of the expressionists71 and reading their knack for caricature as political statement. However, there is no progressive stance in the artists’ use of common modernist motifs such as the Lumpenproletariat, the jugglers, and the prostitutes. They simply denote the picturesque, colorful side of modern, urban life. The various forms of expressionism in Romania reflected either ethnic (utopian) goals and aspirations of integration in the high-culture, global Germanism, as in the case of the SaxonGermans, or a vindictive localism, as in the case of the Transylvanist, Hungarian expressionism. The social-political ambitions of the Jewish and Romanian expressionists, captivated by stirring mass events, echoed the increasing urbanization of Romania and its parting of ways with the traditional visual culture centered on the affable, rural world. 460

Tokens of Identity

In the end, most of the expressionist artists who had studied in Munich and/or Paris returned home, either to Brașov (Eder, Mattis-Teutsch), Baia-Mare (Ziffer), or Bucharest (Tonitza, Iser). Active as artists and teachers, they established local art schools and pursued integration in the generalized, classic modernism of the interwar period. After 1945, when Romania was absorbed into the communist cultural camp, expressionists such as Eder, Mattis-Teutsch, Ziffer, and Iser eagerly campaigned for the Soviet-based, regressive socialist realism.

Notes 1 Dimitrie Gusti et al., “Recensământul General al populaţiei României din 29 Decembrie 1930” [The General Census of Romanian Population, December 29, 1930], in Enciclopedia României [Romanian Encyclopedia] (Bucharest: Imprimeria Naţională, 1938), vol. 1, 149–151. 2 Bianca Bican, Deutschsprachige ulturelle Presse Transsilvaniens [German Cultural Press in Transylvania] (Vienna: Literatur Verlag, 2013), 147. 3 “Wir verstehen unter Kunst das ganze weite Gebiet der Dinge, deren sichtbare Form von empfindendem Geist und geschulter Hand geschaffen, also das ganze Haus und alle Geräte darin, die Stadt mit ihren Straßen und Plätzen, und demnach heißt Förderung der Kunst für uns, allen diesen Dingen Charakter, und zwar den sich aus unserem Volksempfinden ergebenden Charakter, aufzuprägen.” Arthur Coulin, “Unsere bildende Kunst” [Our Fine Arts], Siebenbürgisch-Deutsches Tageblatt [GermanTransylvanian Daily], March 1904, 11. 4 Iosif I. Adam, I. Pußcaß, Izvoare de demografie istorică. Secolul al XIX-lea – 1914, Transilvania [Sources of Historical Demography: From the 19th Century to 1914, Transylvania] (Bucharest: The General Direction of State Archives, 1987), vol. 2, 506–507. 5 Ignác Romsics, Magyarország története a huszadik században [A History of Hungary in the 20th Century] (Budapest: Osiris Editions, 2010), 85–86. 6 “The Germans entered the new Romanian state with self-confidence and clear-cut identity.” See Hildrun Glass, “Wer ist ein Deutscher? Anmerkungen zum Selbstverständnis der Deutschen in Rumänien (1919–1944)” [Who Is a German? Notes on the Self-Definition of Germans in Romania, 1919–1944], Halbjahresschrift für südosteuropäische Geschichte, Literatur und Politik [Biannual Journal of Southeast-European History, Literature, and Politics], 2 (November 1997): 16. 7 Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904), founder of human geography, with his book, Anthropogeographie (1882–1891). His Lebensraum (1901) was written under Darwinist influence, theorizing biogeography and environmental determinism, and later on turned into expansionist ideology by the national socialists. 8 Arthur Coulin, “Ein Verein für heimische Kunstbestrebungen” [A Society for Local Art Aspirations], Siebenbürgisch-Deutsches Tageblatt [German-Transylvanian Daily], November 1904, 9. 9 Notices about the artist coming back from Belgium appeared already from 1911 to 1914; eventually the previous notices were replaced by larger articles, devoted to his dramatic, expressionist war scenes. See ZF, “Eine Ausstellung in Hermannstadt: Hans Eder, Hans Hermann” [An Exhibition in Hermannstadt: Hans Eder, Hans Hermann], Siebenbürgisch Deutsche Tagespost [German-Transylvanian Daily News], 252 (October 31, 1918), 6. 10 Trude Geissler, “Szene in Turka” [Scene from Turka], Das Ziel, 4 (1919): 9. 11 “An unsere Leser” [To Our Readers], Das Ziel, 1 (1919): 1. 12 Ibid. 13 John Neubauer, “Introduction,” in History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, ed. John Neubauer and Marcel Cornis-Pope, vol. III: The Making and Remaking of Literary Institutions (Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 2007), 52. 14 Hans Eder, Über neue Kunst [On New Art], Das Ziel, 3 (1919): 40. 15 Arnold Sigmund, “Chronik” [Chronicle], Ostland, 11 (June 1919): 31. 16 Heinrich Zillich, “Die Gemälde des Hans Eder” [The Paintings of Hans Eder], Ostland, 1 (April 1921): 12. 17 Oscar Walter Cisek, “Chronik” [Chronicle], Klingsor (April 1924): 8. 18 Richard Billinger, “Der Weg” [The Way], Klingsor (August 1924): 6. 19 Heinrich Zillich, “Eder und der Ausdruck der Farbe” [Eder and the Expression of Color], Klingsor (December 1924): 14. 20 Lucian Blaga, Încercări filosofice [Philosophical Essays] (Cluj-Napoca: Facla Editions, 1977), 214.

461

Erwin Kessler 21 “Arta lui Eder e desigur o artă germană. . . deßi această artă nu are nimic local. . . Hans Eder a trecut cu mult control de sine prin experienţa expresionismului.” Ibid., 215. 22 Hans Mattis Teutsch, “Betrachtungen über die neue Kunst” [Considerations on New Art], Das Ziel, 2 (1919): 21. 23 Hans Mattis-Teutsch, Kunstideologie, Stabilität und Aktivität im Kunstwerk [Art Ideology, Stability and Activity in the Work of Art] (Potsdam: Müller & Kiepenheuer, 1931). 24 Iván Hevesy, “Mattis Teutsch.Vorbesprechung” (Mattis Teutsch: Prolegomene), Das Ziel (July 1919): 6, 91. 25 “Kollektiv-Ausstellung Mattis Teutsch” [Collective Exhibition Mattis Teutsch], Das Ziel (August 1919): 8, 140. 26 Erwin Reisner, “Mattis-Teutsch,” Deutsche Tagespost [German Daily], August 18, 1919, 6. 27 “Für Fortschritt ist unsere Devise und in unserem Bestreben, jedem Vorwärtsstrebenden den Weg zu bahnen schrecken wir nicht. . . Sie befürchten eine Revolution in der Kunst?. . . das deutsche Volk durch die gegenwärtige Revolution einer neuen, großen Zukunft entgegen geht.” Emil Honigberger, “Dem Kritiker der Deutsche Tagespost” [To the Critic of the German Daily], Das Ziel, 10 (September 1, 1919): 179–180. 28 In 1926, the title was changed to Ostland: Halbmonatschrift für Ostpolitik (Ostland: Bimonthly for Eastern Politics). The explicitly political magazine was published until 1943, eventually boosting the regional Germanizing process of the Third Reich. 29 Ostdeutschtum (Eastern Germanity) referred to the easternmost German colonists, up to the Baltic countries and Russia, and the (cultural) politics related to them, backed by the expansionist slogan that Germany is wherever Germans live, as they presumably civilized the areas around them. The influential geographer Albrecht Penck, in his essay “Deutscher Volks- und Kulturboden” (German National and Cultural Soil), published in Volk unter Völkern (People among Peoples), ed. Carl Christian van Loesch (Bresalu, 1925), 62, insisted that “the German Kulturboden is the greatest power of the German nation. The islands of German Volksboden spread in Central Europe are accompanied by the German Kulturboden.” He distinguished between two interrelated concepts: Volksboden (national soil) and Kulturboden (cultural soil). Kulturboden appeared as the main asset of Ostdeutschtum. 30 When the NSDAP came to power in 1933, Richard Csaki was appointed chief of the influential propaganda institution, Das Deutsche Ausland-Institut (The German Foreign Institute in Stuttgart, today IFA), whose Germanizing policy he led until 1941. 31 “Wie unter der Vision eines schweren Traumes irren die Blicke in dem Raum. Der nicht Versierte sucht dem Schrecken der Farben zu entfliehen, und diesem Kunstspuk beim hellen sonnenlicht der Strasse den Garaus zu machen. . . und Probleme aufstellt, die psychologisch zu lösen sind. . . Als Malerei nehme ich entschieden dagegen Stellung.” Alfred Witting, “Kollektivausstellung Mattis Teutsch in Kronstadt” [Collective Exhibition Mattis Teutsch in Kronstadt], Ostland, September 4, 1919, 210–211. 32 “Eine Zeitschrift nur dann Zukunftsberechtigung und Dauerwert besitzt, wenn sie aus unseren Verhältnissen organisch herauswächst.” “An unsere Leser” [To Our Readers], Das neue Ziel: Halbmonatschrift für Kultur, Kunst, Kritik [The New Goal: Bimonthly of Culture, Art, and Criticism], 1 (October 15, 1919): 2. 33 “Mattis-Teutsch’s seltsame eindimensionale Stimmungsbilder wirken alle dekorativ. . . jedoch ist es gewiss nicht leicht, die Gedanken und Stimmungen des Malers herauszulesen. De Beschauer, der in diese neue Richtung nicht eindringen kann, wird das Gesicht nicht los, dass diese Bilder mehr ein Produkt des Verstandes, als tiefen künstlerischen Erlebens sind.” Edith Herfurth-Sachsenheim, “Weihnachtsausstellung” [Christmas Exhibition], Das neue Ziel, 6 (January 1, 1920): 103. 34 “Solch fremdartige Kunstwerke, zu denen so gut wie keine Brücke von etwas schon Bekanntem herüberleitet.” Erwin Neustädter, “Mattis Teutschs Bilder” [The Paintings of Mattis Teutsch], Kronstädter Zeitung [The Kronstadt Newspaper] (August 7, 1921): 8. 35 “Es gibt aber in Siebenbürgen auch ein Publikum, und das steht den künstlerischen Äußerungen der Gegenwart fremder und kühler gegenüber als jeder andere in der Welt. . . Der Expressionist hat also in Siebenbürgen das unschätzbare Recht, anderswo ein Prophet sein zu dürfen.” Hans Wühr, “Siebenbürgische Künstler” [Transylvanian Artists], Klingsor 9 (1924): 336. 36 Imre Balázs, Avangarda în literatura maghiară din România [The Avant-Garde in the Hungarian Literature from Romania] (Timißoara: Bastion, 2009), 55, mentions that most authors “placed the entire corpus of the Transylvanian Hungarian avant-garde under the cumulative concept of expressionism,” whereas “almost all the Hungarian avant-garde authors shared left-wing convictions (some were social-democrats, communists, radical-socialists, or no-party idealists).”

462

Tokens of Identity 37 Robert Reiter, Vázlat: Társadalom, művész, művészet [An Outline: Society, Artist, Art], MA (1922): 2–3, quoted in Imre Balázs, “Shift of Languages in the Works of Robert Reiter,” Banat Biographies, www. dvhh.org/banat_biographies/reiter_balazs.htm, accessed on November 22, 2017. 38 Balázs, Avangarda, 113. 39 Lajos Kassák, MA (March 1921): 10. 40 Lajos Kántor, “The Two Series of Korunk and New Art (1926–1986)”, in Szücs, Destiny and Symbol, 67–72. 41 John Neubauer, “Conflicts and Cooperation between the Romanian, Hungarian, and Saxon Literary Elites, 1850–1945,” in Cultural Dimensions of Elite Formation in Transylvania (1770–1950), ed. Victor Karády and Borbála Zsuzsanna Török (Cluj: Ethnocultural Resource Center, 2008), 161. 42 Gyula Dávid, “Transylvanian People and Transylvanian Literature,” in Literary Anthropology: A New Interdisciolinary Approach to People, Signs and Literature, ed. Fernando Poyatos (Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1988), 257. 43 “Kós, the leading and most consistent spokesman for Transylvanianism (sic!), held that the externally imposed decisions of 1848, 1867, and 1918 were neither desired nor accepted by the majority of Transylvania’s inhabitants”; see Neubauer, “Conflicts and Cooperation between the Romanian, Hungarian, and Saxon Literary Elites, 1850–1945,” 175. 44 François Bocholier and Stefano Bottoni, “Elites et ethnicité en Transylvanie d’un après-guerre à l’autre,” in Le communisme et les élites en Europe centrale [Communism and Elites in Central Europe], ed. Nicolas Bauquet and François Bocholier (Paris: PUF, 2006), 110. 45 Ibid., 112. 46 Also a politician, Károly Kós founded, in 1921, the Transylvanian Popular Party, which became in 1922 The Hungarian Nation Party from Transylvania. For more on this subject, see Gerhard Seewann, “Divided Loyalties, Uniform Communities: Germans and Magyars within the Romanian Nationalising State,” in Integrating Minorities: Traditional Communities and Modernization, ed. Agnieszka Barszczewska and Lehel Peti (Cluj-Napoca: Kriterion, 2011), 107. 47 “. . . de külön históriai egység ezer esztendő óta, saját külön erdélyi öntudattal, önálló kultúrával, . . .” Károly Kós (with journalist István Zágoni and politician Árpád Paál), Kiáltó Szó (Cluj 1921): 16. 48 “Az erdélyi embert minden vonatkozásban determinálja ez a föld. . . . Van erdélyi psziché, amely nem az erdélyi magyarság privilégiuma, de predesztinációja az erdélyi németségnek és románságnak is.” Károly Kós, manifesto, Erdélyi Helikon 1 (Cluj, 1928): 57. 49 Ferenc Balázs, “Erdélyi magyar irodalom” [The Transylvanian Hungarian Literature], in Tizenegyek [The Eleven] (Cluj: Minerva Editions, 1923), 15. 50 Dávid, “Transylvanian People and Transylvanian Literature,” 259. 51 In the preface of the first issue of Erdélyi Helikon (1928–1944), the editors insisted that the Transylvanian orientation was no provincialism but an “observation deck unto the world.” See Neubauer, “Conflicts and Cooperation,” 173–174. 52 “Organized on the model, and under the auspices of Erdélyi Helikon,” the elected president of the Guild was Kós himself. See György Sümegi, “Works, Models of Life, Institutions,” in Destiny and Symbol: Hungarian Art in Transylvania 1920–1990, ed. György Szücs (Budapest: Hungarian National Gallery, 2015), 42. 53 Jenő Szentimrei, “Transzilvanizmus az irodalomban” [Literary Transylvanism], Napkelet [Orient] (9/1921): 551. 54 Imola Katalin Nagy,“Transylvanianism as Identity Discourse” (Târgu-Mureß: Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica, 6 (December 2014) 3: 318. 55 Elemér Illyés, quoted in Szücs, Destiny and Symbol, 16. 56 “Transilvanismul politic a ajuns însă în impas . . . această ideologie nu mai putea funcţiona în mijlocul maghiarilor decît ca orientare cu accente cultural-literare . . . adepţii acestei ideologii reflectau la o societate arhaizantă, în care domnea pacea între clasele sociale.” Nándor Bárdi, “Momente de cotitura ßi grupări generaţionale în istoria minorităţii maghiare din România (1918–1989)” [Turning Points and Generational Groupings in the History of the Hungarian Minority in Romania], in Agoston Olti, Attila Gido, Minoritatea maghiară în perioada comunistă [The Hungarian Minority in the Communist Period] (Cluj-Napoca: Kriterion, 2009), 40–41. 57 László Dienes, “Az expresszionista kép” [The Expressionist Painting], 1924, reprint in Sejtelme egy földindulásnak [The Feeling of an Earthquake] (Bucharest: Kriterion, 1977), 150–152. 58 “A különcség, mesterkéltség, a nagy szavak levegőbe való pufogtatása, ideges ziláltság formában és tartalomban, egyetemességre való törekvés, a magasabb rend és harmónia óhajtása és ugyanakkor a gondolatok, célkitűzések és a művészi kifejezések teljes diszharmóniája jellemzi ezt a sokat vitatott, de

463

Erwin Kessler

59 60 61 62

63 64 65 66 67

68 69 70 71

magát igazi nagy művészi alkotásokkal soha igazolni nem tudó költői irányt.” Elemér Jancsó, “Az erdélyi magyar líra tizenöt éve” [Fifteen Years of Hungarian Poetry in Transylvania], reprint in Kortársaim [Contemporaries] (Bucharest: Kriterion, 1976), 76. Gábor Egry, “Minority Elite, Continuity and Identity Politics in Northern Transylvania,” in Cultural Dimensions of Elite Formation in Transylvania (1770–1950), ed. Victor Karády and Borbála Zsuzsanna Török (Cluj: Ethnocultural Resource Center, 2008), 215. Grigore Popa, “Fenomenul literar românesc din Transilvania” [The Transylvanian Romanian Phenomenon], Pagini literare (Literary Pages), II (1935): 6–7. Alexandru Dima and Dan Grigorescu, “Rumanian Expressionism,” in Expressionism as an International Literary Phenomenon, ed. Ulrich Weisstein (Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing, 2011), 269. “De câte ori o operă de artă redă astfel un lucru încât puterea, tensiunea interioară a acestei redări transcedentază lucrul, trădând relaţiuni cu cosmicul, cu absolutul, cu ilimitatul, avem de-a face cu un produs artistic expresionist.” Lucian Blaga, “Probleme estetice” [Aesthetic Problems], 1924, reprinted in Zări ßi etape [Horizons and Stages] (Bucharest: EPL, 1968), 78. Frank Baron and Jon Blumb, Albert Bloch and the Blue Rider:The Munich Years (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2014), 11–12. Nae Ionescu, “Lascăr Vorel,” in Roza vânturilor [Wind Rose] (Bucharest: Cultura Naţională, 1937), 243. Petru Comarnescu, Lascăr Vorel (Bucharest: Meridiane, 1968), 37. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Manifestele futurismului [The Futurist Manifestos], translated and commented by Emilia Ene Drogoreanu (Bucharest: Art, 2009), 9. “Iser . . . pornise de la caricatură, mai păstra încă rămăßiţele expresionismului, care violentează natura . . . o mutilează, după cum ar spune André Lhote, pentru a ajunge la o mai lapidară ßi mai puternică expresie, ceva mai deformată ßi mai colţuroasă.” K. H. Zambaccian, “Societatea Arta Română. Ressu, Iser, Steriadi” (The Arta Română Society: Ressu, Iser, Steriadi) 1922, reprint in K. H. Zambaccian, Pagini despre artă (Pages on Art) (Bucharest: Meridiane, 1965), 234. M. H. Maxy, “Cronometraj Pictural” [Painterly Chronometer], Contimporanul (November 1924): 50–51. “Există o deosebire flagrantă între gîndirea mea . . . ßi arta germană. De aceea expresionismul, chiar romantismul german, de care, la noi, mulţi artißti au fost influenţaţi, nu m-au interest.” Mihai Drißcu, “Retrospective: M. H. Maxy,” interview, Arta 4–5 (1971): 53. Petr Ingerle, Lucie Cesalkova, Brno Devetsil and Multimedia Overlaps of the Artistic Avant-Garde (Brno: Moravian Gallery, 2014), 67. Amelia Pavel, Expresionismul ßi premisele sale [Expressionism and Its Premises] (Bucharest: Meridiane, 1978), 77.

464

25 EXPRESSIONISM IN BULGARIA Critical Reflections in Art Magazines and the Graphic Arts Irina Genova

Early twentieth-century artistic phenomena in Bulgaria do not conform neatly to the terminology and classifications of West European art, which is why the use of terms such as cubism, fauvism, expressionism, and constructivism has always required further clarification. This is not to say that these movements were not felt in Bulgaria. Artistic exchanges brought Bulgarian artists into contact with West European centers of cultural influence, leading to the transfer of these ideas and developments into a local, Bulgarian context, but with a variety of meanings. A study of its critical practice and leading practitioners in this local context is important for understanding the role of expressionism—and the language by which it was discussed. In the case of Bulgaria, a keen interest in modernist art and the European avant-garde movements, specifically expressionism, began shortly before and then continued to grow during the First World War. The first part of my essay discusses the uses of the term “expressionism” by the Bulgarian artistic milieu and focuses on Bulgarian contacts with the protagonists of expressionism in Germany, specifically the links to Munich and the circle around Wassily Kandinsky, and to Berlin and those associated with Herwarth Walden.1 The graphic arts played a key role in the reception and spread of German expressionism beyond its original borders. The training, specialization, and experiences of Bulgarian artists and art protagonists in the centers of German expressionist printmaking were of utmost importance for the reception of expressionism in Bulgaria. In the Bulgarian artistic milieu, these influences mixed with those from late symbolism and art nouveau, constructivism, futurism, and primitivism. This potential “impurity,” i.e., the interplay of a variety of stylistic features, characterizes to varying degrees local print cultures in the artistic centers of both Southeast Europe (Sofia, Belgrade, Bucharest, Athens) and in central Europe (Prague, Bratislava, Budapest, Zagreb). The second part of my essay explores the importance of printmaking and the circulation of graphic works for the reception and distribution of expressionist art and aesthetics in the Bulgarian artistic milieu.

Chavdar Mutafov and Geo Milev: Two Views of Expressionism Chavdar Mutafov (1889–1954) and Geo Milev (1895–1925), two pivotal figures of the Bulgarian avant-garde of the 1920s, shared similar views on German expressionism and the French and Russian avant-garde movements; they also shared ties to members of Kandinsky’s circle and to 465

Irina Genova

manifestations of these movements in Munich and in Berlin. They viewed expressionism in Germany before and after the First World War as essentially an international movement; this knowledge they acquired through exhibitions and publications of the Blaue Reiter group in Munich and Herwarth Walden’s Sturm circle, in Berlin. Mutafov (Figure 25.1) was a writer, art critic, and architect.2 His art criticism from the period up to about 1928 is impressive for its topicality in respect of the artistic events and debates going on in the European avant-garde. From 1908 to 1912, and later in 1913 and 1914, Mutafov resided in Munich, where he studied machine engineering at the technical university. His studies were interrupted by the First World War, but he returned to Munich in 1922 and enrolled to study architecture in 1923.3 During the period 1908 to 1914, Mutafov’s first extended stay in the Bavarian capital, Kandinsky was at the center of artistic events. Exhibitions were organized by the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (New Artists’ Association of Munich) in 1909 and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in 1911 and 1912, and a number of catalogues, almanacs, and books on new art were published, sparking heated discussions. Among them was Kandinsky’s influential 1912 book Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art) and the almanac Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), published in May 1912. In October 1912, the Berlin magazine Der Sturm published a number of articles and prints by Kandinsky, placing his article “Über Kunstverstehen” (On Understanding Art) on the very first page. Later issues included further articles and graphic works by Kandinsky.

Figure 25.1  Ivan Milev, Portretna risunka na Chavdar Mutafov/Портретна рисунка (Portrait Drawing of Chavdar Mutafoff), published in almanac Vezni, 1923, typographic reproduction

466

Expressionism in Bulgaria

The first exhibition of the Blaue Reiter was held at Heinrich Thannhauser’s Moderne Galerie in Munich, running from December 19, 1911, to January 30, 1912. It was international in character and included works by German artists such as Franz Marc, Gabriele Münter, and August Macke, but also by Kandinsky, Henri Rousseau, Robert Delaunay, and the brothers David and Vladimir Burliuk. The second Blaue Reiter exhibition, in 1912, was also largely international. Hans Goltz’s Galerie Neue Kunst organized the Blaue Reiter exhibition of graphics, Black and White, in February and April 1912, and exhibitions of new art in Munich in October 1912 and in August and September 1913, showing paintings by artists from Der Blaue Reiter and Die Brücke (The Bridge), together with influential representatives of the Parisian art scene. At the time of the first Blaue Reiter exhibition, which triggered a flood of negative reviews, Mutafov was in Munich and most probably in the middle of his exams; his impressions of the exhibition are not recorded in his early extant letters; however, articles he wrote in the early 1920s provide us with evidence that he visited both the Galerie Thannhauser at Theatinerstrasse 7 and the Galerie Goltz at Brienner Strasse 8. Among these texts, the most significant with respect to the Blaue Reiter, expressionism, and aesthetic ideas in the Munich art scene before the First World War are: “The Line in Fine Art,”4 published in Zlatorog (Golden Horn)5 magazine in 1920; “Problems in the Fine Arts,” an undated manuscript in Mutafov’s personal archive, published in its entirety only in 2001;6 “Landscape and Our Artists,”7 published in Zlatorog, in 1920; and paragraphs about the autonomy of the image and its elements, the “visual art elements beyond representation,” in his article about the drawings by Sirak Skitnik8 in Edgar Allan Poe’s Book of Poems9 (Figure 25.2), printed in the magazine Vezni (Scales).10 The art criticism that Mutafov began to publish after the First World War and continued until 192711 reveals his experience of the expressionist movement from the time of his first stay in Munich as crucial to the development of his artistic judgment. Mutafov’s encounter with the Blaue Reiter exhibitions was essential for his discovery of modern art and his understanding of a new image beyond representation. His view on the role of Kandinsky is documented indirectly in a letter from Vasil Pundev to Mutafov, probably dating from 1923, in which Pundev asks whether he “still think[s] that Kandinsky’s form and composition searches are artistic revelations.”12 Mutafov had a particular interest in film. He was one of the founders of the Union of Friends of the Movie in Bulgaria, in 1926, and collaborated on the journal Our Cinema, edited in Sofia (1924–1935). He discussed recent films in the letters to his wife from Munich.13 In a manuscript from his personal archive, in which he discusses Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), he wrote that he considered German silent film of the 1920s to be a paradigmatic example of expressionist cinema.14 “Maybe expressionism is a kind of madness: Doktor Caligari impersonates it,” he concluded.15 Mutafov then went on to formulate his own definition of expressionism: What is expressionism?—For many this notion is still a joke or a sign of ignorance; for others it is a deception; yet, it is a viewpoint. Expressionism is the soul’s struggle with the world: it sets real forms against their reflections on us, their symbols: then life becomes a regularity of images, a basic combination of marks, of signs: life becomes stylized. Studies of modern aesthetics (Worringer, Curtius) consider the style form to be primary in art: primitive man began to acquire things not only in their visible form but through their abstract mark—he stylized things; initially art is ideoplastic, i.e., it is art of the spiritual form.16 This understanding reveals the extensive nature of Mutafov’s artistic sense and temperament, which drew on information about contemporary events, knowledge of art history and aesthetics, and on his own intuition, both critical and artistic.17 467

Irina Genova

Figure 25.2  Sirak Skitnik, Garvanŭt/Гарванът (The Raven), published in Poems by Edgar Allan Poe (Sofia 1920), typographic reproduction

Before leaving Munich a second time, after his graduation from university, he wrote to his wife Fany Popova-Mutafova in a letter dated July 20, 1924:18 “On leaving, I’ll visit once more Glaspalast and Neue Secession and 50 Jahre Deutsche Kunst, a magnificent retrospective exhibition at the Staatsgalerie.”19 This exhibition, of which Mutafov was very fond, included works by academic artists of the nineteenth century, among them Franz von Defregger and Franz von Lenbach; important representatives of the Secession, including Arnold Böcklin, Franz von Stuck, and Max Liebermann; and protagonists of the Blaue Reiter such as Franz Marc, August Macke, and Paul Klee; but there were also other expressionists, among them Emil Nolde, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Oskar Kokoschka.20 Kandinsky’s work was not shown in this exhibition. After his return to Sofia, Mutafov published an article, “Munich Art,” in the newspaper Slovo (Speech),21 in which he concluded that everything seemed to be nothing but repetition and even expressionism did not seem new: “the trams have long been full of expressionist posters . . . even the large concert hall at the noble Four Seasons Hotel has been turned into a Futurist cabaret.”22 It is interesting to note that in 1924 the expressionists were part of a panoramic retrospective at the Staatsgalerie in Munich and no longer subject to the sort of criticism that they experienced in 1912. Expressionism had become a part of everyday life; in other words, there was no presentiment of “the fight against degenerate art” that was to come when Hitler came to power.23 During Mutafov’s second period in Munich, from 1922 until 1924, the art scene changed. The atmosphere became something entirely different; Mutafov often dreamed of the earlier days before the horrors of the First World War.24 This was not just nostalgia for youth but also for that unattainable ideal of refuge in the arts. Unlike many Bulgarian artists and writers who arrived in Munich for the first time after the war, Mutafov had lived there for almost six years already before the dramatic events of the time overtook Europe. After the war, Kandinsky went elsewhere. There was no shortage of exhibitions in Munich, but the creative energy of that earlier era was gone. Geo Milev (Figure 25.3) was a poet, art critic, translator, and journalist, a key figure in the Bulgarian art scene until his assassination in 1925.25 Before the First World War, he studied 468

Expressionism in Bulgaria

German in Leipzig. Mobilized during the war, Milev was badly wounded; after a long medical treatment in Berlin, he returned to Sofia without finishing his studies. There he launched the magazine Vezni (Scales), publishing a total of thirty-seven issues in the years 1919–1922.26 Editorially, the magazine reflected a heterogeneous taste for various kinds of contemporary art. Walden’s Der Sturm was a leading example; another German model for Milev was Die Aktion, published by Franz Pfemfert. Chavdar Mutafov, who wrote for Milev’s magazine Vezni from the very beginning, most likely met Geo Milev in Sofia in 1919. Mutafov and Milev viewed expressionism from differing perspectives: Mutafov’s focus was on Munich and Der Blaue Reiter, whereas Milev looked to Berlin and the circle around Der Sturm. Kandinsky, however, was equally important to both of them, which was not a surprise; the close connection of the artist and theoretician to Russian culture probably strengthened his impact on Milev and Mutafov. In issue no. 7 of Vezni, February 29, 1920, Milev published Kandinsky’s color woodcut Two Women in a Lunar Landscape (1911), under the title Evening. The woodcut had been part of an album of twelve color and forty-four black-and-white woodcuts, called Klänge (Sounds).27 The previous issue of Vezni, no. 6, of January 31, 1920, included in its “Critical Reviews” section an article on Kandinsky by Milev along with a reproduction of Kadinsky’s painting The Song of Volga River.28 This painting was probably included in Kandinsky’s first solo exhibition at the Sturm gallery in Berlin in 1912 and was later also shown at Galerie Goltz in Munich. The artistic activities of Der Sturm, both magazine and eponymous gallery, became known in Bulgaria through the efforts of Milev and his two magazines, Vezni (Scales) and Plamak (Flame). Among the books Milev received from Berlin were Gesammelte Schriften (Collected Writings, 1916) and Die neue Malerei (The New Painting, 1919), both published by Herwarth Walden.29 Der Sturm (1910–1932) and its affiliated gallery (1912–1932), both under the leadership of Walden, embraced expressionism as an artistic movement and showed works by eminent figures of the European avant-garde, including Alexander Archipenko, Umberto Boccioni, Marc Chagall, Natalia Goncharova, Paul Klee, Mikhail Larionov, Fernand Leger, Gino Severini, and many others.30 Milev probably first received publications on the Russian avant-garde from Walden; these included Kazimir Malevich’s book From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting (1916)31 and copies of the Veshch/Gegenstand/Objet magazine (1922), edited by El Lissitzky and Ilya Ehrenburg in Berlin. The second edition of the almanac Der Blaue Reiter, published in Munich in 1914, also reached the personal library of Milev. Through his contact with Walden, Milev was clearly familiar with the art manifestos and theoretical writings of Kandinsky and the Blaue Reiter circle. In the above-mentioned article in Vezni, he provided a laconic but precise characterization of Kandinsky’s painting: “Kandinsky followed the path of aesthetic digression from substance, from form . . . and reached an amazing minimum of means—paint and line (the primary elements of painting)—which provided the absolute expressionist artistic manifestation,” and he then concluded categorically: “Kandinsky is an epoch in modern painting.”32 There was a unity of opinion between Milev and Mutafov on Kandinsky’s importance. Milev stayed in Berlin from February 1918 to March 1919. There he joined the circle around Walden and Der Sturm33 and became familiar with the expressionist ideas and artistic practices of the artists the gallery promoted. During his time in Berlin, Milev also acquired a library rich in the avant-garde art of Europe, including expressionism, futurism, and cubism. Upon his return to Bulgaria in 1919, he started publishing Vezni and the associated Vezni library series. In contrast to Walden, Milev did not run a gallery, but he did organize an expressionist 469

Irina Genova

Figure 25.3  Geo Milev, Avtoportret/Автопортрет (Self-portrait), 1921, ink on cardboard, 12 × 8.3 cm, Bulgarian Historical Archives at the National Library, Sofia, f. 26, а.е. 10, l. 75

exhibition in his apartment in the center of Sofia that ran from December 1921 to January 1922. The popular exhibition featured about sixty works, mostly prints, from artists such as Marc, Chagall, Kandinsky, Kokoschka, and Edvard Munch.34 Unfortunately, this collection of works was broken up in the course of the following years, but based on those that are still preserved in Milev’s archive today, one can assume that the majority of the works were provided by Walden, with some also being illustrated in Der Sturm, for example a drawing by Chagall published in February 1918. The contacts between Milev and Walden are also confirmed by the surviving correspondence. In a letter to Geo Milev of November 19, 1920, in connection with a reproduction of a painting by Marc Chagall, Walden advised Milev that the 1,000 Sturm postcards he had ordered could be affixed to the magazine.35 Chagall’s 1912 painting The Cattle Dealer, from his exhibition in the Sturm gallery in June 1914, had been reproduced as a postcard issued by the magazine; such postcards, with reproductions of art works issued by Die Aktion and Der Sturm, were widely circulated as representative images of avant-garde art. A list of artist postcards (Künstlerpostkarten) can be found in some issues of the magazine, for example in numbers ten, eleven, and twelve of 1929.36 Obviously, Milev found another solution and reproduced Chagall’s painting in black and white in Vezni, issue no. 11, of 1919–1920.37 From the articles and art works published in Vezni, including reproductions by Chagall, Paul Gauguin, Goncharova, Jacoba van Heemskerck, Kandinsky, Kokoschka, Marc, Luigi Russolo, and others, it is evident that expressionism was presented alongside other art movements, all of 470

Expressionism in Bulgaria

which were often promoted by Walden under the umbrella term “expressionism.” This broader range of interest in contemporary art practices, including the fields of theatre, film, and other art forms, unites the Vezni project with Walden’s Sturm enterprise. In 1923, Milev wrote in the almanac Vezni: “Expression, a manifestation from within, turns art into creation—not representation or even imitation: it is the creation of new forms, not the copying of existing forms, given from the outside, from reality.”38 He uses the term “expression” here to designate all those works of art whose formal elements emancipate the works from mimetic tasks, every painting in which the “oil-paints have an autonomous power.”39 Thus, the stylistic attribution “expressionist” was a term of the greatest regard for Milev, which he applied to only a few Bulgarian artists. “Among all of Sirak Skitnik’s works exhibited at this time, the one that captures our attention most is City Corner because it is a giant leap towards the perfection of the expressionist style,”40 Milev wrote in his review of the 1921 Jubilee Exhibition. However, in the same article, he maintains that Sirak Skitnik “follows the path of expressionism, cubism, and Futurism.” He saw no contradiction in this, as in all of them “forms and colors are forms and colors of their own.”41 What was most important to him was the perception of their autonomy. In 1920, Vezni published an article on expressionism by Walden42 and another one on the new art by Adolf Behne, with the title “Two Messages from Berlin” (both translated into Bulgarian by Milev).43 Walden defined expressionism, as opposed to impressionism, as the complete rejection of the representation of the object and exclusively focused on the study of colors and forms. Similarly, Behne, in the essay “The New Art,” wrote: “painting is an action with colors and lines, light and dark, it is a filling up of a given plane—paper or canvas—with paints and lines.”44 Both texts supported the widely held view of expressionism, both in terms of their definitions of the style and in the artists’ names mentioned. Walden stated: “So, along with Franz Marc, Campendonk, Klee and others, it is Marc Chagall (Russian by origin) who created paintings, which through reassessment of objectivity gives us a wealth of shapes and colors, substantial in absolute painting.”45 Another aspect which is important for this study is Milev’s stance on pre-academic art. In his article on the 1921 Jubilee Exhibition, he maintained that Bulgarian medieval painting, a branch of Byzantine art, included works of art that are “no less remarkable than the paintings by Giotto, van Eyck or Holbein.”46 His interest in pre-academic art is visible in the reproduction of one of seven figure drawings from an Egyptian shadow play, taken from the almanac Der Blaue Reiter47 and then republished in almanac Vezni.48 After the First World War, Ljubomir Micić (1895–1971), publisher of the art magazine Zenit (Zenith, Zagreb; February 1921–May 1923 and Belgrade, June 1923–December 1926), became an important contact for Milev and his promotion of expressionism in the local art milieu.49 It is highly likely that Milev and Micić met through Herwarth Walden, as both had long-standing ties to Walden and Der Sturm. Following the Sturm model, Micić founded in 1922 an international gallery of new art, Zenit, and began to organize exhibitions. The first of these events was the well-known international exhibition in Belgrade in April 1924, which included more than 100 works by twentieth-century European artists, among them Delaunay, Gleizes, Kandinsky, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, Prampolini, and Zadkine, and works by Yugoslav artists such as Branko Ve Poljanski, Jo Klek (Josip Seissel), Mihajlo Petrov, Vilko Gecan, and others. At Milev’s urging, three Bulgarian artists participated in the first Zenit exhibition: Anna Balsamadjieva (Balsamadzhieva), Ivan Bojadjieff (Boyadzhiev), and Mircho Katchouleff (Kachulev) (Figure 25.4).50 In the first issue of Zenit, Micić published the program of the Zenitist movement, laying out in the manifesto the main values of the new art: “Zenitism strives for the creation of supreme 471

Irina Genova

Figure 25.4  Mircho Katchouleff, two pages from Ekspresionistichno kalendarche/Експресионистично календарче (Expressionist Calendar), published in almanac Vezni, 1923, typographic reproduction

forms. Zenitism is an abstract meta-cosmic expressionism. Zenitism and expressionism are mirrors in which we see our terrible inner pain—the drama of our soul.”51 Like Walden, Micić’s initial attraction to expressionism was based on a widely held “cosmopolitan” perspective. He wrote in the first issue: Art belongs to all nations. Art is universal—it embraces the whole of humanity. Therefore, there is no specifically national art even less class art. We poets—artists of this world—we extend our hands to those who think like us to all for everything over splintered human skulls.52 From 1922 onward, Zenit began to align itself more closely with constructivism and the Russian avant-garde; this new direction was shared by Milev in his later magazine Plamak (Flame, 1924–1925). A comparison of the views on expressionism held by Mutafov and Milev shows fundamental differences: Mutafov viewed expressionism as a historically determined artistic idea or trend whose time had run out with the end of the First World War. In Milev’s case, the notion of expressionism, as can be seen on the pages of Vezni during the first years after the war, did not derive from a historical understanding of the activities of the Brücke or the Blaue Reiter, but rather from discussions on the autonomy of the artistic form and the defense of expression versus representation, a common topic in the debates of the Bulgarian art scene at that time. 472

Expressionism in Bulgaria

The Transformation of Expressionism in Bulgarian Printmaking after the First World War Engravings in wood and metal have been known in the Bulgarian territories since the eighteenth century; religious engravings, shtampa, from the “national revival” period, were circulated by the monasteries. A local printing school based on a family practice developed in the first half of the nineteenth century in the small town of Samokov (about 40 kilometers from Sofia). The State Arts School (predecessor of the State Art Academy) founded in 1896 initially offered only further specialization in lithography and etching. It had neither the instructors nor the printing facilities for providing training in a wider range of graphic techniques. Only in the decade following the First World War did graphic printing techniques become widespread in Bulgaria; this was due to training and experience acquired abroad by Bulgarian artists. As an appreciation for the graphic arts grew, prints were displayed together with paintings and sculptures in the exhibition halls. The unique features of the graphic image and the particularities of experimenting with graphic techniques stimulated modernist exploration during the 1920s. More and more artists in Bulgaria showed an interest in developing graphic expressiveness in art. Certainly such an interest in the graphic arts in the interwar period was in part an attempt to compensate for the belated adoption of this means of Western expression, but at the same time, it was during and immediately after the First World War that the attention of numerous Bulgarian artists turned to the graphic images of late secessionist and art nouveau art and avant-garde trends in Europe, specifically German expressionism. The emergence of expressionism in Germany in the early twentieth century and its impact on artistic production in other European regions was inseparably linked with the development and spread of graphic printing techniques and the circulation of graphic works. The training, specialization, and experiences of Bulgarian artists and art protagonists in the field of printmaking, especially in Germany, were of utmost importance. At the end of 1922, Vasil Zahariev (1895–1971),53 recently graduated from the Decorative Arts Department of the State Art Academy in Sofia, went to Germany for further training. He studied as a full-time student in the etching and woodcut departments at the Academy of Graphic Arts and Book Design (Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst) in Leipzig. After his graduation in 1924, Zahariev became a full-time lecturer in graphic arts at the Arts Academy in Sofia, the only art institution of higher education of its kind in Bulgaria. The first years of his teaching career coincided with a growing interest in the graphic arts in Bulgaria; in particular, the woodcut. Zahariev’s presence as a lecturer and artist was of vital importance for the education of the next generation of artists. Although many of Zahariev’s students did not work in the field of graphic arts, the graphic works they encountered during their studies provided them with vast opportunities for experimenting, and several of his students who attended his studio in addition to taking painting classes at the Academy did go on to work in the field of graphic arts. Zahariev did not embark too freely on adventures in the world of modernism, nor did he radically alter his sense of cultural belonging during his studies in Leipzig. The range of his various graphic works from Germany included etchings of nature impressions as well as woodcuts with sharp contrasts and distortions. Among these prints are Self-portrait, A Castle in Touraine, From the Old Leipzig, and A Portrait of Nietzsche. What Zahariev drew from his expressionist experience in the field of the graphic arts was a striving for the entity of the contrastively organized composition. In his experience, the modern taste for primitivism and the concern for the material, especially in the expressionist woodcut, were closely related to the style of expression and technique of the early Bulgarian religious engravings and printed books. The desire to reduce the space and activate the image plane, and 473

Irina Genova

the choice of cruder lines, were characteristic for Zahariev’s early block prints. Kŭshtata na Albrecht Dürer v Nuremberg (Albrecht Dürer’s House in Nuremberg; Figure 25.5) is a good example in this respect. In the 1920s, the popularity of graphic prints attracted a number of artists of different backgrounds: the sculptor Ivan Lazarov, for example, who worked in linocut. Influenced by German expressionist printmaking, he began his linoleum and woodcut pieces as a side project during his studies at the Art Academy in Munich (1917–1918) and the Art Academy in Dresden (1922–1923). His linocut with deer, published in Milev’s Plamak,54 distantly reminds us of images by Franz Marc in various techniques, among them woodcut. Other linocuts, which confirm Lazarov’s interest in expressionist graphics, are preserved in the House Museum of Ivan Lazarov, Sofia.55 The artist Bistra Vinarova (1890–1977), who has recently attracted the attention of Bulgarian art historians,56 studied in Vienna and Dresden, where she specifically specialized in the graphic arts. She participated in group exhibitions in Munich and Vienna and, in 1923, held a solo exhibition in Vienna. Her graphic work shows a preference for expressionism; her drawings with various materials (pencil, ink, and charcoal on different types of paper) from 1915 until the early 1920s reveal her explorations of the human body and face as possibilities for enhancing the expression of human states and emotions by intensifying mimics and gestures. Her woodcuts from the early 1920s are characterized by sharp contrasts and crude lines. The plots

Figure 25.5  Vasil Zahariev, Kŭshtata na Albrecht Dürer v Nuremberg/Къщата на Албрехт Дюрер в Нюрмберг (Albrecht Dürer’s House in Nuremberg), 1923–1924, woodcut, 34.5 × 24 сm, National Art Gallery, Sofia, inv. no. III 1612

474

Expressionism in Bulgaria

are varied: love and passion; the mystery of the mountains; the performances of ballerinas, acrobats, jugglers, and magicians; and Christ’s passion and sufferings (Figure 25.6). Although Vinarova’s work and acclaim occurred abroad, she remained part of a small Bulgarian milieu that existed and communicated beyond the country’s borders. In Germany, during the 1920s, she had encounters with Zahariev, Dechko Uzunov, and Bencho Obreshkov. Among the works in the family collection of Vinarova and her husband, Simeon Radev,57 are works by Otto Dix and Conrad Felixmüller. Most probably they were shared with the circle of her friends. In Bulgaria, Andrey Protich58 devoted a paragraph to Vinarova in his article “The New Bulgarian Art,” published in 1935. He stated The sole expressionist pieces at the time came from the young artist Bistra Vinarova, who studied under Hans Hofmann in Munich . . . It was with her portraits and sketches in Sofia and through her meetings with young artists that she then became an “apostle” of the new style in Bulgaria. This style was only granted access to private households in recent years.59 The expressionist transformation in Bulgarian printmaking was linked with an important iconographic motive—Christ’s suffering and passion. As a response to the traumatic experiences of the First World War, images of the Pietà and Crucifixion often appeared on the pages of literary collections and in artistic magazines and art exhibitions. For the German expressionists, Christian symbolism and iconography were linked to reflections on the human condition, particularly in

Figure 25.6  B  istra Vinarova, Christus von Loretto (Christ of Loretto), 1920–1921, woodcut, 23.5 × 19 cm, Central State Archives, Sofia, F 77K, inv. 3, a.u. 47

475

Irina Genova

the graphic arts. Two of the many artists exploring these themes were Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Käthe Kollwitz, both of whom were well known to Bulgarian modernist artists from their formative stays in Germany, from private collections in Bulgaria, and from various publications. During the same period, the French artist Georges Rouault created his graphic cycle “Miserere and War” (1916–1917; 1920–1927) in the Parisian cultural milieu. His works stand apart from the manifestations and transfers of the avant-garde in the broader sense, but I mention them here because of Rouault’s interest in Christian iconography, specifically Christ’s suffering, an interest shared by many Bulgarian artists. The importance of Roault for the local cultural circles that were linked with Paris is confirmed by artists’ testimonies and critical references, as well as by the reproductions of Roault’s self-portraits in the twelfth and last volume of the History of Plastic Arts60 by Nikolay Raynov (1889–1954), a Bulgarian art historian and writer.61 This historical survey was a result and a summary of his lectures on art history that he gave at the National Academy of the Arts in Sofia. The themes of pain, death, and redemption, central to Rouault’s image of the world, link him to the Christian themes and symbols in German expressionism. I wish to draw particular attention to a number of works in the Bulgarian graphic arts that express inconsolable grief and mourning, among them Zahariev’s woodcut Golgota (Calvary, 1915–1918); Pencho Georgiev’s woodcut Pietà (1920s); Sirak Skitnik’s ink drawing Skarbyashti mayki (Mourning Mothers, 1920–1921); and Max Metzger’s drawing Golgota (Calvary; Figure 25.7), which is reminiscent of a woodcut. These works are characterized by a hybridization of expressionist trends with symbolist experiences and traditional visual cultural imagery. During the 1920s, it should be noted, the iconographic foundation of Bulgarian art, the materials, and the manner of elaboration were often reminiscent of the so-called “native art.” The woodcut technique was closely associated with the experience of religious imagery and prints from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.62 An ideological similarity, albeit distant, between expressionism, conceived as a German version of modernism, and the broader hybrid movement of modernism in Bulgaria, was the striving to be both local and national. Walden wrote: “we should know that through Expressionism the German and Slavic conception of art prevailed over the Roman, which gave birth to impressionism.”63 As French researcher Joyeux-Prunel has discussed recently, referring to the German art historians and critics Wilhelm Worringer and Paul Fechter, the notion of expressionism as a German version of modernism was based on the reception of Gothic art, presented as German, and eventually became an important part of the genealogy of expressionism, including expressionist woodcuts.64 In Bulgaria, art critics associated the woodcut technique in modern graphic prints with the technique and practice of schtampa—religious engravings—and early printed books. There are numerous examples in this respect. Chavdar Mutafov, for instance, wrote that it was in Germany where Vasil Zahariev mastered the modern graphic printing techniques, mainly the woodcut. He concluded: “Certainly our artist has yet to penetrate the secrets of the medium’s culture, while he purified his eye and hand for the secrets of our native culture.”65 The Bulgarian artist Pencho Georgiev (1900–1940) created most of his graphic works during the late 1920s and early 1930s. He graduated from the Department of Decorative Arts at the Art Academy in Sofia in 1925 and was one of the students in Zahariev’s graphic studio. Initially attracted, as were most Bulgarian artists, writers, and composers of the 1920s, to the idea of presenting a “national identity,” the young artist began his studies in Paris creating works with scenes of traditional rural life and funeral rituals, among them the woodcut Pogrebenie (Funeral, 1929–1930). Another woodcut from this period, Oran/Buria (Ploughing/Storm; Figure 25.8), is dynamic in its composition, with expressive black-and-white contrasts. Caught up in the artistic milieu of Paris, Georgiev gradually abandoned the influences of the “native 476

Expressionism in Bulgaria

Figure 25.7  Max Metzger, Golgota/Голгота (Calvary), published in Plamak, 1924, no. 3, typographic reproduction. Accompanies the literary miniature “Calvary” by Geo Milev, part of Grozni prozi (Ugly Pieces of Prose) written in Berlin in 1918–1919

art” movement; typical for European (including French) art of the interwar period, he chose to focus on free expressions of the urban environment; this coincided with his search for a new and more expanded objectiveness in contrast to his early Bulgarian artistic experience. In the numerous scenes of Parisian streets, bistros, and cafés (Figure 25.9), Georgiev was able to overcome difficulties related to the expressiveness of object images in a perspective space. Frames, close-ups, delicate suggestions of color and light in his works—all are impressive. The etchings At the Bar and Cabaret achieve their object-space proportions through delicate nuances of silvergrey tones together with the gradation of the strokes. Georgiev propped up the flat plane of the paper by the areas of pure white at the center of the compositions. The whiteness functions as an interval, an interruption and denial of representation, thus strengthens the figurative impression. The silhouette of the tiny singer in Cabaret stands out against the whiteness of the sheet of paper that “wraps” her figure in light, in the otherwise dusky interior. In some of his woodcuts, the artist looked for the suggestion of slightly rougher lines and silhouettes in the trend of primitivism, the impression of exaggerated movements, as in Drunken Fishermen and Dance, experimenting with graphic expressiveness. Zahariev’s lessons were not in vain. The case of Georgiev demonstrates that the reception of German expressionism in Bulgaria was never isolated from the influences of other artistic milieus, including the French, Italian, and Russian. As Timothy Benson notes, with respect to Franco-German artistic transfers, we should recognize that there was “an understanding of national cultures as intertwined with one another, rather 477

Irina Genova

than substantively opposed to one another.”66 Benson’s efforts to reestablish “the perspective of expressionism as a broader movement beyond a particular nation’s borders” are undoubtedly relevant for the Bulgarian art scene.67 For the most part, the development of expressionism in Bulgaria developed mainly in the field of the graphic arts and typography. In the 1920s, printmaking was an innovative form, both as a modern artistic practice and as a medium of social communication. In the subsequent two decades, the circle of graphic artists widened, but the graphic arts ceased to be a domain of experimentation and change. The First Exhibition of Contemporary Bulgarian Graphic Art, in 1928, was mostly an affirmation of the common values of the graphic arts in a broader sense. A solitary artistic phenomenon echoing German expressionism in his use of typography during the 1930s was Boris Angelushev (1902–1966), who, after his artistic training in Bulgaria, spent a long period in Berlin (1923–1933) and then shorter stays in Prague and Zürich before returning to Bulgaria in 1935. Under the pseudonym Bruno Fuck, he published drawings and caricatures in the German left-wing press, in newspapers such as Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag), Illustrierte Arbeiter Zeitung (Illustrated Workers Newspaper, AIZ), and Die rote Front (The Red Frontier). His collaboration with John Hartfield and his enthusiasm for the work of artists such as Käthe Kollwitz, George Grosz, and Otto Dix were crucial to Angelushev’s artistic development.68 His proficiency enriched the graphic quality of printed media in Bulgaria, both in the sense of stylistic references and typographic implementation. In his works, the impact of sketch-like images in India ink or chalk replaced the woodcut technique that was common in the modernist experiments of the 1920s. Angelushev’s way of drawing was exceptional; it was characterized by his energetic touch, resulting in carefully sketched images, without any thick

Figure 25.8  Pencho Georgiev, Oran/Buria/Оран/Буря (Ploughing/Storm), 1930–1931, woodcut, 17.8 × 13.5 cm, National Art Gallery, Sofia, inv. no. III 1564

478

Expressionism in Bulgaria

Figure 25.9  Pencho Georgiev, Bistro v Parizh/Бистро в Париж (Bistrot in Paris), 1930–1931, woodcut, 17 × 15 cm, National Art Gallery, Sofia, inv. no. III 660

or dense black lines, and dynamically charged compositions. In the 1950s and 1960s, during the communist rule, he was most actively involved in the field of book design and illustration for children and young people. This activity echoed his experience with German expressionism and turned him into a model for the next generation of Bulgarian book design artists. In the artistic milieu of Bulgaria, the impact of various versions of expressionism during and after the First World War was often hybridized with the influences of other trends. Graphic printing techniques and typographic reproductions, but also the means for circulating images, were of key importance for modernist artists. In Bulgaria, too, graphic prints played a significant role in the formation and transformation of the concept of expressionism. The early assimilation of and response to German expressionism in Bulgaria were limited to a few individuals, who formed their own small circles that extended beyond national borders. The idea of expressionism and its transformation were more widely disseminated only after the First World War. Significant factors in this respect were the formative stays in Germany of a large number of Bulgarian artists as well as the distribution of avant-garde and modernist-oriented magazines—both in German and Bulgarian. The traumatic experiences of the war were of crucial importance. In the Bulgarian artistic milieu, the transformation of German expressionism into artistic imagery and critical practice was intertwined with transformations of other artistic tendencies and concerns about the local pre-academic experience, resulting in various hybrid variants. The politically engaged version of German expressionism was echoed in the sketch-like images and caricatures in the Bulgarian left-wing press. In response to the pressure of local political struggles and the various confrontations in Europe from the late 1920s onward, the echo of the return to order in Bulgaria marked the end of the brief moment of response to expressionism in local art circles. 479

Irina Genova

Notes 1 A version of this first section was published in Umění/Art, no. 4, 2010. 2 Chavdar Mutafov’s articles in the magazines Vezni [Scales], Zlatorog [Golden Horn], Iztok [East], Streletz (Rifleman), and other newspapers were very influential in the Bulgarian art scene. His experimental literary writings, especially the novel Marionettes (1920), are important examples of the avant-garde in Bulgaria. On Chavdar Mutafov see: Kiril Krustev, “Chavdar Mutafov,” in Chavdar Mutafov, Izbrano [Selected Writings] (Sofia: GAL-IKO, 1993); Dimitur Avramov, “Podraniliyat modernist” [The Modernist Ahead], in Dialogue Between Two Arts (Sofia: Balgarski pisatel [Bulgarian Writer], 1993); Katya Kuzmova-Zografova, “Chavdar Mutafov: Vazkresenieto na Diletanta” [The Resurrection of the Dilettante] (Sofia: IK [Publishing House] Vanyo Nedkov, 2001). 3 A letter from the musician Manto Zagorski to Chavdar Mutafov in Munich, dated January 29, 1922, proves that Chavdar Mutafov was in the Bavarian capital at this time. See Katya KuzmovaZografova, Chavdar Mutafov, 1:149–50. However, Mutafov’s name is not listed in the student yearbook (Personalstände der Königlich Bayerischen Technischen Hochschule zu München) for the academic year 1921–1922, neither for the fall nor the spring semester. 4 Chavdar Mutafov, “Liniyata v izobrazitelnoto izkustvo” [The Line in Fine Arts], Zlatorog [Golden Horn] I(4) (1920): 337–340. 5 Zlatorog magazine (1920–1944) was a monthly magazine for literature and art, edited in Sofia. Its profile was dominated by an interest in contemporary issues, keeping a distance from the radical leftist avantgarde. Together with the Bulgarian avant-garde magazine Plamak [Flame], Zlatorog was mentioned as an important art edition on the pages of Zenit avant-garde magazine, edited in Zagreb and Belgrade. 6 Chavdar Mutafov, “Problemi v izobrazitelnoto izkustvo” [Problems in the Fine Arts], in KuzmovaZografova, Chavdar Mutafov, 2:372–406. 7 Chavdar Mutafov, “Peyzazhat i nashite hudozhnitsi” [Landscape and Our Artists], Zlatorog I(2) (1920): 153–166. 8 Sirak Skitnik (Panayot Todorov Christov, 1883–1943) was an influential figure in modern art and cultural life in Bulgaria. An artist and art critic, he was interested in book design, stage design, and other forms of integrating art into the life of the modern city. 9 Chavdar Mutafov, “Risunkite na Sirak Skitnik v knigata Poemi ot Edgar Poe” [The Drawings by Sirak Skitnik in Edgar Alan Poe’s Book of Poems], Vezni IІ(2) (1920–1921): 88–90. 10 The magazine Vezni (Scales, 1919–1922) and the 1923 almanac Vezni were edited by Geo Milev, a key figure of the Bulgarian avant-garde after the First World War. 11 Some of Mutafov’s articles were re-published in Chavdar Mutafov, “Izbrano” [Selected Writings], 263–419. 12 Kuzmova-Zografova, “Chavdar Mutafov,” 2:301. 13 See his letters to his wife Fani Popova-Mutafova of 1924 published in Kuzmova-Zografova, “Chavdar Mutafov,” 2:323, 326–327. 14 Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari [The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari] was directed by Robert Wiene; produced by Rudolf Meinert and Erich Pommer; written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer; starring: Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt, Friedrich Fehér, Lil Dagover, and Hans Twardowski. The film was screened for the first time in Sofia in 1925. Alexander Alexandrov, Stefan Vlaskov, and Dimitar Novachkov, eds.,V sveta na kinoto [In the World of Cinema] (Sofia: Narodna prosveta [National Education], 1982–1983, vol. 2, 43). 15 Kuzmova-Zografova, Chavdar Mutafov, 2: 429. 16 “Що е експресионизъм? – За мнозина това понятие е все още повод за шега или невежество; други го смятат за измама; всъщност това е един мироглед. Експресионизмът е борбата на душата със света: срещу реалните форми на нещата той противопостави техните отражения в нас, техните символи: тогава животът се превръща в някаква закономерност от образи, в едно основно съчетание на белези, на знакове: той се стилизира. Изследванията на модерната естетика (Ворингер, Курциус) откриват стиловата форма като първична в изкуството: примитивният човек започва да узнава нещата не в тяхната видима форма, а чрез техния абстрактен белег, - той ги е стилизирал; първото изкуство е идеопластично – т. е. изкуство на духовната форма. ” Ibid., p. 428.

17 About Mutafov’s text see also: Vasil Markov, “Caligari v Balgariya, Za edna retsenziya na Chavdar Mutafov” [Caligari in Bulgaria: Notes on a Review by Chavdar Mutafov], Problemi na izkustvoto/Art Studies Quarterly 4 (2009): 56–57. 18 Fany Popova-Mutafova (1902–1977) studied piano at the Munich Conservatory. She became a famous Bulgarian writer of historical novels. By the end of the Second World War, she had published more than thirty books.

480

Expressionism in Bulgaria 19 Kuzmova-Zografova, “Chavdar Mutafov,” 2: 344. The exact title of the exhibition mentioned by Chavdar Mutafov was “Deutsche Malerei in den letzten 50 Jahren, 1924” (German Painting of the Past Fifty Years, 1924). 20 See Deutsche Malerei in den letzten 50 Jahren: Ausstellung von Meisterwerken aus öffentlichem und privatem Besitz [German Painting of the Last 50 Years: Exhibition of Masterpieces of Public and Private Ownership] (Munich: München Neue Staatsgalerie, 1924, exh. cat.). 21 Slovo (Speech, 1922–1944) was a daily newspaper with a regular column for cultural events. 22 Chavdar Mutafov, Munich Art, Slovo, 1924, no. 668. 23 In 1937, an exhibition titled Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) opened at the Archaeological Institute in Munich on July 19, just a day after the opening of Hitler’s first Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great German Art Exhibition) at the Haus der Kunst.The Degenerate Art exhibition displayed works by cubist, futurist, expressionist, and other modernist artists. After the exhibition had toured to several German cities, more than 4,800 works were publicly set on fire in Berlin. See Anita Kühnel, “Entartete Kunst,” in The Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner (Oxford: Grove, 1996):Vol. 10, 413–414. 24 Letter to Vladimir Vasilev of July 29, 1923. See Kuzmova-Zografova, “Chavdar Mutafov,” 2: 294. 25 The protagonists of the independent press in Bulgaria were subjected to prosecution after the bombing attack, organized by the communists in “St. Nedelya” Church in Sofia in April 1925. In this terrorist act many government officials and generals were killed. In 1925, as a response, a wave of terror swept the country and editors and authors, poets and publicists—leading figures of the critical thinking in the independent press like Geo Milev, Iosif Herbst, Christo Yasenov, Sergey Rumyantsev, and others— were killed or disappeared without a trace. 26 Vezni magazine has a phototype edition (Sofia: Zahari Stoyanov Publishers and Geo Milev International Fund, 1999). 27 This woodcut was exhibited, together with the other works of the album, in a large Kandinsky retrospective held in Munich in 2008–2009, included in the exhibition’s graphic works section in Lenbachhaus. 28 It was exhibited alongside other works from that period in the same retrospective exhibition of Kandinsky when it traveled to Paris (8 April–10 August 2009), where it included a collection of work donated by Nina Kandinsky and was supplemented by works provided by Centre Pompidou. 29 “Geo Milev House Museum in the city of Stara Zagora,” accessed Nov. 22, 2016, http://geomilev.com/ osnovenfond.html. 30 See Nell Walden, Der Sturm: Ein Erinnerungsbuch an Herwarth Walden und die Künstler aus dem Sturmkreis [The Sturm: A Commemorative Book for Herwarth Walden and the Artists of The Sturm Circle] (Baden-Baden: Klein, 1954), 257–268; Krisztina Passuth, “Der Sturm: centre de l’avant-garde internationale” [The Sturm: International Avant-Garde Center) in: Paris–Berlin 1900–1933, ed. Pontus Hulten (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou/Gallimard, [1978], 1992), 132–143. 31 Казимир Малевич [Kasimir Malevich], От кубизма и футуризма к супрематизму: Новый живописный реализм [From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting], 3rd edition (Moscow, 1916). “Geo Milev House Museum in the city of Stara Zagora,” accessed Nov. 22, 2016, http://geomilev.com/osnovenfond.html. 32 “Кандински тръгва по пътя на едно естетическо отлъчване от веществото, от формата . . . и достига до удивителния минимум от средства – боя и линия (първичните елементи на живописта) – които му доставят абсолютния експресионистичен художествен израз.” “Кандински е епоха в модерната живопис.” Geo

Milev, Kandinsky, Vezni I, No. 6, 31.01.1920. 33 On this question, see also: Ruzha Marinska, Geo Milev risuva [Geo Milev Draws] (Sofia: 1995), 126–139. 34 See: Vezni III, 1921, no. 10, 195, and no. 14, 260; “Писма от София: С. Чуканов. Експресионистична изложба,” [Letters from Sofia: S. Chukanov. Expressionist exhibition], Лебед [Lebed], no. 1, City of Gorna Oryahovitsa, 1922. 35 Гео Милев [Geo Milev], Литературен архив [Literary Archive], Sofia, 1964, 414; “Letter to Geo Milev by Herwarth Walden, November 19, 1920,” accessed Nov. 22, 2016, www.europeana.eu/portal/en/ record/9200377/BibliographicResource_3000115528944.html. 36 “Künstler-Postkarten/Verlag Der Sturm,” [Artists’ Postcards/Der Sturm Publishing], Der Sturm, no. 10, 345, and no. 11–12, 377. 37 Marc Chagall, “The Cattle Dealer,” Vezni I(11) (1919–1920): 335. 38 “Експресията, изразът отвътре, прави изкуството творчество – а не възсъздаване, или дори подражаване: творчество на нови форми, а не копиране на готови – дадени вън, в действителността – форми.” Geo Milev, “Muzikata drugite izkustva” [Music and Other Arts], almanac Vezni, 1923, 82–83. 39 Ibid., 83. 40 Geo Milev, “Yubileyna izlozhba” [Jubilee Exhibition], Vezni III(2) (1921): 24–25.

481

Irina Genova 41 Ibid. 42 Herwarth Walden, “Ekspresionizam” [Expressionism], Vezni I(10) (1920): 315–316. The translated text, signed as an adapted translation, is a fragment of Herwarth Walden, Expressionismus: Die Kunstwende [Expressionism: The Turn in Art] (Berlin: Der Sturm, 1918). 43 Adolf Behne, Новото изкуство [The New Art], Vezni I(1) (1920): 317. The translated text, signed as an adapted translation, is a fragment of Adolf Behne, Zur neuen Kunst [On New Art] (Berlin: Der Sturm, (1915), 1917): 8–9. 44 “живописта е действие с бои и линии, със светло и тъмно, тя е запълняне с бои и линии на една дадена плоскост – хартия или платно,” Vezni I(10) (1920): 317. 45 “Така, покрай Франц Марк, Кампендонк, Клее и други, най-вече Марк Шагал (русин по произход) създаде 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58

59

60 61 62 63 64

картини, които чрез преоценяване на предметностите ни дават онова богатство от форми и бои, което е същественото в абсолютната живопис.” Vezni I(10) (1920): 316.

Geo Milev, “Yubileyna izlozhba” [Jubilee Exhibition], 19–20. “Egyptische Schattenspielfigur” [Egyptian Shadow Puppet], Der Blaue Reiter, (Munich: Piper 1912), 128. “Egipetska risunka” [Egyptian Drawing], almanac Vezni, 1923, 49. On this topic see: Irina Subotić, “Satrudnichestvoto na spisanie Zenit s balgarskite hudozhnitsi” [The Collaboration of Zenit Magazine with Bulgarian Artists], Izkustvo [Art], 1986, no. 3, 7–14. The catalogue of the exhibition was published in Zenit IV, 1924, no. 25, 1, accessed Nov. 26, 2016, https://monoskop.org/images/2/26/Zenit_25.pdf. See Irina Subotić and Vidoslava Golubović, eds., Zenit 1921–1926, Fototipsko izdanie [phototype edition] (Belgrade: National Library of Serbia; Zagreb: Institute of Literature and Art, 2008). “Ljubomir Micić, Čovek i umetnost” [Man and Art], Zenit I(1) (1921): 1, quoted in English in Aleš Erjavec, “The Three Avant-Gardes and Their Context,” in Impossible Histories: Historic Avant-Gardes, NeoAvant-Gardes, and Post-Avant-Gardes inYugoslavia, 1918–1991, ed. Dubravka Djurić and Miško Šuvaković (The MIT Press, 2003), 40. Vasil Zahariev was born in Samokov, a center of Christian art, graphic prints, typography, and early photography since the nineteenth century. Ivan Lazarov, Untitled black and white reproduction, Plamak, 1924, no. 7–8, 256. Ivan Lazarov, Two Female Figures, black and white reproduction, in Irina Genova, “Graphic Arts in Bulgaria from the 1920s,” in Art in Bulgaria during the 1920s, ed. Irina Genova and Tatyana Dimitrova (Sofia: Institute of Art Studies, 2002), 111. Plamena Dimitrova-Racheva, ed., Bistra Vinarova (Sofia: Agato, 2013; exh. cat.). In 2010, the artist’s estate, donated by her son, became part of the Central State Archives, Sofia. Simeon Radev (1879–1967) was a Bulgarian writer, journalist, diplomat, and historian. Andrey Protich (1875–1959), a Bulgarian art historian, critic, and writer, first studied philosophy in the universities of Heidelberg (1895–1896) and Dresden (1896–1897) and then in Leipzig (1897–1901), where he graduated. According to the documents stored in the Archives of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (Andrey Protich’s archive, fund 147k, a.e. 15, 17 and 18,). Protich did courses and exams in art history in Dresden and Leipzig. “Единствени експресионистични произведения по това време даде младата художница Бистра Винарова, ученичка на Ханс Хофман в Мюнхен . . . Със свои портрети и скици в София, в срещите си с млади художници, тя стана още тогава “апостолка“ на новия стил в България. Този стил можа да намери едва през последните години достъп в частните къщи.” Андрей Протич [Andrey Protich], “Novoto balgarsko izkustvo” [The New Bulgarian Art], SOBIM Magazine II, 1935, no. 9–10, 21, quoted in Bistra Vinarova, ed. Plamena Dimitrova-Racheva, 23. Nikolay Raynov, Istoriya na plastichnite izkustva, tom 12 Moderno izkustvo. Pred velikata tayna [History of Plastic Arts, Vol. 12. Modern Art. In Front of the Great Mystery] (Sofia: Stoyan Atanasov, 1935), 48, 50. This interest continued later in Bulgaria. Rouault’s works entered the National Art Gallery as donations from collectors. Other similar examples of the crossover from modernist and avant-garde trends to local, pre-modern practices can be found in Greece, Latvia, and Finland. “трябва да знаем, че чрез Експресионизма немското и славянското схващане за изкуството надделява над римското, което роди импресионизма.” Herwarth Walden, “Expressionism”, Vezni I(1) (1920): 315–316. Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Les avant-gardes artistiques 1848–1918: Une histoire transnationale [The Artistic Avant-Gardes 1848–1918: A Transnational History) (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2016), 596–597. This topic has a long research history in the German discourse on expressionism; see, for example,

482

Expressionism in Bulgaria

65 66 67 68

Magdalena M. Moeller, ed., Dokumente der Künstlergruppe Brücke (Documents of the Artists’ Group Die Brücke) (Munich: Hirmer, 2007) and especially Christiane Remm, “‘Es sollte nach meinem Plan eine ideale Gemeinschaft warden.’ Zu Struktur und Organisation der Künstlergruppe Brücke” [“According to My Plan, it Should Have Become an Ideal Community.” On Structure and Organisation of the Brücke Artist Group] in Dokumente der Künstlergruppe Brücke, ed. Magdalena M. Moeller, 9–24. Chavdar Mutafov “Grafikata na Vasil Zahariev” [The Graphic Art of Vasil Zahariev], Literaturni novini [Literary News], 1929, 3 March. Timothy O. Benson, “Expressionism in Germany and France,” in Expressionism in Germany and France: From Matisse to the Blue Rider, ed. Timothy O. Benson (Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Munich: Prestel, 2014), 49. Ibid., 57–58. See Denitsa Kisseler, “Belezhki za balgarskoto hudozhestveno prisastvie v Germaniya mezhdu dvete svetovni voyni” [Notes about Bulgarian Artistic Presence in Germany between the Two World Wars], Problemi na izkustvoto/Art Studies Quarterly 4 (2001): 51–56; Atanas Stoykov, Boris Angelushev (Sofia: Balgarski hudozhnik [Bulgarian Artist], 2003).

483

PART V

Beyond Europe

26 EXPRESSIONISM IN CANADA AND THE UNITED STATES Oliver A. I. Botar and Herbert R. Hartel, Jr.

Expressionism was a powerful impulse among North American artists, one that resonated through a number of local developments and attitudes, though received in very different ways in the United States and Canada. While the movement influenced numerous American artists within five years of its birth in Germany, in 1905, it was not until 1928 that it had a direct impact on Canadian art. Many of the earliest North American expressionists were in fact immigrants from Germany or of German ancestry. This firsthand contact with early expressionism afforded artists in the New World opportunities to see exhibitions, read publications, and meet some of the leading artists—contacts that were essential in bringing the movement to Americans who otherwise would have had little exposure to it. In the United States, there arose two parallel paths in the development of modernism in art: a more reserved, analytical, and formalist French approach and a more personal, emotive, and intuitive German approach. The tension between the two is apparent in the work of artists such as Oscar Bluemner, Lyonel Feininger, Marsden Hartley, and Bror J. O. Nordfeldt, which often combines aspects of fauvism, expressionism, and cubism. Interest in German expressionism in the United States started shortly before the First World War and tended to favor prints over paintings. Expressionist prints by Käthe Kollwitz, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, and Max Pechstein were exhibited at the New York Public Library and the New York branch of the German Photographic Company in 1912. The vigorous, angular rendering typical of these prints was praised by American critics for its masculine strength and virility; even Kollwitz’s works were praised for these qualities.1 German expressionist painting did not receive much attention until the mid-1920s. Although Alfred Stieglitz admired Wassily Kandinsky’s work, he organized no exhibitions of German modernist art for his Gallery 291, and almost none of the artists of Die Brücke (The Bridge) were included in the 1913 Armory Show—Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, for example, being represented by only one painting.2 The affinity for German culture in Canada was perhaps not as strong, because its German population was much smaller, and its close ties to Great Britain, France, and the United States encouraged Canadian artists to align themselves with British, French, and American artistic trends.3 In general, Canada was seen as a backwater by European modernists; thus most of those immigrating to North America went to the United States. Some examples of Canadian art from the interwar period look expressionist, including the paintings of the Group of Seven members A. Y. Jackson, Arthur Lismer, and Frederick Varley as well as some works 487

Oliver A. I. Botar and Herbert R. Hartel, Jr.

by Kathleen Munn, Lowrie Warrener, Charles Comfort, Carl Schaeffer, and Emily Carr, but in most cases other artistic movements had a more direct impact. Munn’s “Passion” drawings were not inspired by the expressionists, even though she collected German books on art.4 Warrener designed expressionist-style sets for plays produced by Herman Voaden, which the latter described as “symphonic expressionism,” and yet there is no mention of German expressionism in the literature on him.5 It was in the work of Friedrich Wilhelm (Fritz) Brandtner, a German immigrant, that expressionism is first manifest in Canadian art. Brandtner studied European modernism before he left Germany in 1928; this included occasional trips from his native Danzig to Berlin after the First World War, during which he would have visited centers of German modernism such as the National Gallery at the Kronprinzenpalais, as well as the many private galleries, among them Herwarth Walden’s Galerie Der Sturm. As with Bluemner, Feininger, Hartley, and Nordfeldt, Brandtner worked simultaneously in expressionist, cubist and abstract styles. In both the United States and Canada, expressionism proved useful in depicting and commenting on social issues and political problems. In the 1930s, some of the leading social realists, including Ben Shahn and Philip Evergood, were influenced by expressionism in their depictions of urban blight, poverty, moral corruption, and sickness. It was at this time that expressionism manifested itself in Canadian art, particularly in the prints and paintings of Brandtner and Caven Atkins depicting the despair felt by many in Winnipeg during the Great Depression. A number of American artists painted for the sake of personal exploration and psychological revelation. Bluemner, Burchfield, Hartley, and Maurer used their work to cope with problems of anxiety, depression, loneliness, personality disorders, and identity crises, all of which were exacerbated by the artists’ lack of critical and financial success. Expressionism also interested a few Americans who were involved with mysticism and alternative spirituality, particularly Hartley. For some of the pioneers of abstraction in America, such as Konrad Cramer and Abraham Walkowitz, expressionism was useful in exploring the emotive, synaesthetic, or spiritual aspects of purely non-mimetic imagery.

Expressionism as a Style, Movement, and Idea in North America A number of North American artists became interested in the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) soon after the group was formed by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc in Munich in 1911.6 Immediately upon its publication in 1912, they read the group’s anthology Der Blaue Reiter as well as Kandinsky’s book Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art), excerpts of which were included by Stieglitz in his journal Camera Work,7 with the treatise being published in English in its entirety in 1914.8 Kandinsky’s art was less known; the 1913 Armory Show included only one of his paintings, Improvisation 27 (Garden of Love II) of 1912,9 but his engaging writing promoting abstraction as universal and timeless was widely received. Arthur Jerome Eddy, the wealthy Chicago businessman and art collector, became interested in Kandinsky around 1913; he began to acquire his works, among them Improvisation 30 (Cannons) of 1913, and published his insightful book Cubism and the Post-Impressionists in 1914.10 After his death in 1920, a large part of his collection was donated to the Art Institute of Chicago. The art and ideas of Kandinsky and Marc also shaped the development of early abstraction in North America. Manierre Dawson (1887–1969), Konrad Cramer (1888–1863), and Abraham Walkowitz (1878–1965) experimented with abstraction in the early 1910s. Dawson visited Munich in 1910; it is not known whether he met Kandinsky and other Blaue Reiter artists or saw their works during this trip,11 but his works of this period are similar to Kandinsky’s 488

Expressionism in Canada and the US

early expressionist paintings and seem to be related to his design theories. Cramer was the first American to paint in an abstract style clearly influenced by Kandinsky and Marc. His Abstraction–Composition (1913), which is densely packed with squirming black, brown, red, and blue forms, resembles Kandinsky’s early abstractions; his Strife (1913), with its long, diagonal streaks of black, green, and red before more broadly painted areas of red, yellow, and light blue, shows similarities to Marc’s Tierschicksale (Fate of the Animals).12 Cramer was in Munich in 1910–1911, where he met the artists of the Blaue Reiter and became acquainted with their works and ideas. Following his emigration to the United States, in October 1911, he still kept abreast of developments in Germany.13 Walkowitz’s Symphony in Creation in Eight Movements (1913–1914), a series of eight crayon and pastel drawings filled with shimmering, biomorphic red, purple, blue, green and yellow shapes, resembles Kandinsky’s improvisations and their evocation of synaesthetic effects.14 From the 1920s to the 1940s, American interest in the Blaue Reiter was spurred by the activities of Katherine Dreier, Galka Scheyer, and Hilla Rebay. On behalf of the Société Anonyme, Dreier organized the first American solo exhibition of Kandinsky’s work in New York City in 1923.15 The Société’s International Exhibition of Modern Art, held at the Brooklyn Museum in 1926–1927, included examples of early abstraction from across Europe and the United States, including works by Kandinsky and Marc, but almost no examples of Die Brücke. The show was presented in an altered form at the Art Gallery of Toronto (now the Art Gallery of Ontario) in April 1927. Although it is not known what exactly was shown in Toronto, the exhibition likely included works by Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Marc, and Heinrich Campendonk. Although the show was well attended and enjoyed a strong and surprisingly sympathetic response in newspapers and magazines, it found little resonance among Canadian artists outside a small circle that included Lawren Harris, Bertram Brooker, Munn, and Warrener, none of whom were interested in German expressionism per se.16 Galka Scheyer, who came to the United States in 1924 to promote the work of the newly founded “Blue Four,” i.e., Feininger, Alexei Jawlensky, Kandinsky, and Klee, organized many exhibitions of these and other German artists in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco between 1924 and 1944.17 Hilla Rebay, who was enthralled with Kandinsky’s early expressionist work, brought this enthusiasm to the United States in 1927. She became an advisor to Solomon R. Guggenheim, who began to build his collection in the late 1920s and 1930s; exhibited work from his collection in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston from 1936 to 1939; and was instrumental in developing the Museum for Non-Objective Painting, now the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.18 It was Rebay who recognized the Canadian Edna Taçon’s talent and affinity for the work of Kandinsky and first showed her work, in 1941, at the Museum for Non-Objective Painting.19 While a few Canadian artists did read On the Spiritual in Art early on, it was not until the early to mid-1940s that a definite stylistic impact became apparent, specifically in the work of Taçon and Jock Macdonald. In the case of Macdonald, the stylistic influence was conveyed through the British surrealist and medical doctor Grace W. Pailthorpe.20 The impact of the more representational trends in German expressionism and the work of the Brücke is less easily traced. The Brücke was a small and loosely organized group and had difficulty generating interest among dealers and collectors in Germany during its eight-year run, so the modest interest abroad at the time is not surprising. The Brücke members were still discovering themselves artistically when they established their alliance and did not adhere closely to a shared style, nor were they eager to embrace expressionism as a unifying identity.21 The group’s nationalist themes and scrutiny of modern German life also may have isolated it from international trends, and the politics of the First World War further complicated its international reception. 489

Oliver A. I. Botar and Herbert R. Hartel, Jr.

By comparison, abstraction was removed from these concerns and spread globally before 1914. The Brücke also lacked the engaging writings of the sort produced by Kandinsky; its most important publication was Die Brücke Manifesto, which was brief and not widely circulated.22 The Brücke artists were not shown in Canada at all until after the Second World War. This lack of attention probably related to the strong bias toward French modernism in North America and the presumption that expressionism was derived from fauvism. At this time in the United States, any modernist art that was emotive and personally revealing was thought to be “expressionist,” while in Canada even the term “expressionist” was rarely encountered.23 This began to change in the mid-1920s as more dealers, collectors, critics, and curators became curious about German modernism, and anti-German sentiment faded. It was at this time that Dreier, Scheyer, Jsrael Ber Neumann, and William R. Valentiner started exhibiting works by German, Austrian, and Swiss modernists in the United States. Neumann and Valentiner were German-born and educated art historians, curators, and dealers who immigrated to the United States in 1923 and 1907, respectively. Neumann had operated a book store and art gallery in Berlin, but thought he would find a better market for selling art in the United States. In 1924, he opened a gallery in New York, where he exhibited works by German, Austrian and Swiss modernists.24 Valentiner studied Dutch art in Europe, but became increasingly interested in modern German art and started collecting it in 1920. He curated the first exhibition of German modernism in the United States, in 1923, for the Anderson Galleries in New York and helped the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and other American museums to develop their collections, making sure that they included German modernism. By 1930, museums and collectors across the United States were starting to acquire German modernist art,25 and in 1931 the Museum of Modern Art held a large survey exhibition of modern German art. In Canada, German expressionist works did not appear in private collections until a few German and Austrian collectors immigrated to the country, starting with the German Jews Frederick Mendel and Wilhelm Landmann, who moved to Saskatoon and Toronto, respectively, in 1939–1940. Landmann had a large collection of works, part of which he sold to Mendel; he also later donated works to the Art Gallery of Ontario, the McMaster University Art Gallery, and the National Gallery of Canada. Max Stern, a German art dealer who settled in Montreal in 1940 after fleeing Nazi-occupied France, began working as director of the Dominion Gallery in 1941 and assumed ownership of it in 1947. He sold some German expressionist works, which he had purchased from refugees and émigrés such as Mendel and Landmann.26 The National Gallery of Canada did not make a purchase of a German expressionist work until 1952, when it bought works directly from the German illustrator and cartoonist Werner Mayer-Gunther, who had settled in Whitevale, Ontario, in 1951.27 In 1953, the Viennese art historian Ferdinand Eckhardt and his wife, the Russian-Jewish composer Sonia Eckhardt-Gramatté, moved to Winnipeg with their extensive collection of German expressionist art, particularly the work of Walter Gramatté, Sonia’s first husband. In the 1920s, American art critics disagreed on expressionism’s significance as a style and as an expression of German identity.28 Some stressed such an identity, relating it to the artists’ sensibilities and the suffering of the German people during and after the First World War and even characterizing it as part of a process of catharsis that would promote healing. Others considered it indicative of a hostile, intolerant, militaristic attitude toward the world and considered expressionism morally repugnant in the aftermath of the war. There were yet other critics who viewed expressionism as a more global trend of emotional and personal content detached from nationality and politics. Critical attention slowed dramatically when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, but the idea that expressionism had moral and regenerative qualities was 490

Expressionism in Canada and the US

revived after the 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition. Hitler’s fierce condemnation of modernism led to renewed American interest in German modernism as it countered Nazi politics and values.29 In Canada, there was little critical discussion of German expressionism until after the Second World War.

Expressionism for Social and Political Meanings In the United States, younger artists began to expand on the subjects and themes explored by their immediate predecessors, the artists of the Ashcan School, who were interested in the problems of American urban life.30 This new, expressionist generation of artists sought to elicit outrage, sympathy, humor, and irony through the use of intensely distorted imagery. Compared to the Ashcan School, their subjects were less particular with respect to time and place, more complex and ambiguous, and even somewhat philosophical; personal, biographical, and psychological meanings sometimes merged with the social and political. Like the Ashcan School artists, Bloch and Feininger began their careers as illustrators and cartoonists for newspapers and periodicals and incorporated elements of their commercial work into their paintings.31 Albert Bloch (1882–1961) was the only North American member of the Blaue Reiter. Soon after settling in Munich in 1911, he came to know Kandinsky and Marc, joined the Blaue Reiter, and showed six paintings at the group’s first exhibition in 1911 and eight drawings at the second in 1912.32 Influenced by the idea that a painting should be spiritual even when exploring modern life and that imagery may be exaggerated and distorted to convey meaning, Bloch devoted himself almost entirely to painting after his arrival in Europe. Between 1909 and 1914, he drew heavily on the commedia dell’arte, depicting clowns, acrobats, dancers, and singers—figures who also had been frequent subjects of the Ashcan School. The Green Domino (1913; Figure 26.1) depicts a tall, thin figure with a mask-like face, green dress, black hat and ruffles, standing and looking directly at us, surrounded by actors, clowns, circus performers and the stock figure of the “long-nosed doctor.” The figure in green may have been based on Marya Delvard, a singer in the Munich cabaret group Die Elf Scharfrichter (The Eleven Executioners), who was probably an alter ego of Alexander Sakharoff, an androgynous Russian dancer well known in Munich at the time.33 Upon closer examination, the white face becomes surprisingly real—tender and sad. Bloch’s interest in mask-like faces was shared by other expressionists, including Emil Nolde, Paula Modersohn-Becker, and Karl Schmidt-Rotluff. His painting is one of expressionism’s most compelling images of the tragedy of the individual who feels lost in modern society. Its figures are similar to Kirchner’s in their alienation and emotional strain, but differ in their introverted confusion. Although best known for his evocative cubist paintings, Lyonel Feininger’s (1877–1956) early paintings are expressionist. Feininger, who moved from New York City to Berlin at the age of seventeen to study music and then remained in Germany for fifty years, devoted himself entirely to painting by 1907 and encountered the work of the Brücke the following year. Feininger’s witty satire, his interest in peculiar social types, and his cartoon-like exaggeration of demeanor and expression are central to his expressionist style; in his early works, he combined aspects of expressionism with what he had learned from his magazine work. The Green Bridge II (1916; Figure 26.2) is an irritatingly abrupt combination of purple houses, a crooked green bridge, and a winding road populated by a motley cast, including a portly laborer with a pickax, lanky dandies, a tipsy wanderer, overdressed women, and haughty priests. Feininger’s visions of modern urban life bear some resemblance to those of the Brücke artists, though he was never directly involved with them.34 491

Figure 26.1  Albert Bloch, The Green Domino, 1913, oil on canvas, 51⅜″ × 33½″/130.5 × 85 cm, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri

Figure 26.2  L  yonel Feininger, The Green Bridge II, 1916, oil on canvas, 49⅜″ × 39½″/125.4 × 100.3 cm, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh.  2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Expressionism in Canada and the US

Max Weber’s (1881–1961) early paintings of nude women in forests and jungles and late works treating social issues and Jewish subjects were clearly influenced by expressionism. The enigmatic Fleeing Mother and Child (1913) depicts a nude woman holding her baby as she escaped some danger symbolized by the barren tree with two perching birds.35 A third bird flying in the distance echoes the woman’s plight. The figures are expressionist in their crude black contours and chunky, angular limbs and torsos. The tree is dark purple and the ground and sky blood red. Such intense colors demonstrate the affinities between expressionism and fauvism. This painting may depict the suffering of innocents in war or the pogroms in the Russian Empire that forced many Jews like Weber and his family to flee. By the late 1910s, Weber started painting Jewish life and history in an expressionist style and continued doing so for the rest of his life. Sabbath (1919), for example, depicts a scene of ordinary life at home for traditional Jews.36 Two bearded men in black suits and hats and two women in simple house dresses sit in their living room reading scripture. Exaggeration and distortion for personal expression were always important to Oscar Bluemner (1867–1938), but expressionism particularly shaped his work of the mid-1920s and thereafter. Around 1913, Bluemner created large oil paintings of houses, factories, and bridges, which he depicted as tightly linear, geometric forms with vibrant hues.37 In 1916–1917, he expanded on what he had learned from Cézanne and cubism, eventually enhancing it with an expressionist use of color. For Bluemner, the color red symbolized life, passion, power, energy, and struggle; he used this color, which is traditionally associated with left-wing positions and revolution, to express social and political meaning in his 1917 painting Jersey Silk Mills, which was devoted to the silk worker labor strikes that erupted in Paterson, New Jersey, and nearby towns in 1913.38 Bluemner was sympathetic to the strikers and their allies in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and supported labor unionization. Thus, the crimson of the factories symbolizes the power of the laborers and their unions, and their eventual, if transient, victory.39 Social realist artists in North America during the 1930s and 1940s depicted poverty, homelessness, unemployment, harsh working conditions, prejudice, and legal injustice. Although more realistic styles became popular, modernism never disappeared and some artists found expressionism particularly useful in emphasizing meaning. Ben Shahn’s style of the 1930s reflects expressionism in his angular, wiry use of line and distorted shapes. This is apparent in The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (1931–1932),40 a work that elicits sympathy for the two executed immigrants while exuding scorn toward the judges and lawyers who prosecuted the case and the investigative commission that upheld the verdict. The three men on the commission stand by the coffins of the dead Italian immigrants and two of them hold lilies, symbols of purity, honesty, and fairness—qualities that Shahn and many others were certain they lacked. The distorted countenances, sagging jaws, overly round or sunken cheeks, and long, bulbous noses of the men suggest the disdain and contempt in which they were held.41 Philip Evergood’s style of social realism tended toward severe, almost surreal distortion. His belief that ugliness reflected the struggles that people endure to survive explains why his figures are sometimes strangely repugnant.42 In Canada during the 1930s, the jagged linear rendering of expressionism became essential to Fritz Brandtner’s (1896–1969) and Caven Atkins’ (1907–2000) images of the effects of the Great Depression on Winnipeg. Atkins was born into a working-class family in London, Ontario, raised in rural Saskatchewan, and moved with his parents to Winnipeg at the height of the economic boom in 1913.43 One of the causes of the recession of the early 1920s, the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike, had been the most intensive and prolonged labor action of its kind in North America and left the city economically divided and with a radicalized proletariat. The collapse of wheat prices and a long, severe drought led to economic devastation 493

Oliver A. I. Botar and Herbert R. Hartel, Jr.

in the prairie regions of North America that was worse than that experienced by most of Canada and the United States.44 The response in Canada was widespread political organization and polarization, out of which the Socialist Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) was born. Brandtner’s stylistic uniqueness was well captured by Edwy F. Cooke, who wrote: Here is a painter who during his earliest Canadian years was a prophet of the unknown German expressionism in art which, in contrast to French Impressionism, has been examined critically on this continent only during the last fifteen years. No wonder that . . . [he] was received with skepticism by Winnipegers.45 Danzig (1928; Figure 26.3), a view of the city that Brandtner painted soon after his arrival in Winnipeg, demonstrates his mastery of expressionist style and techniques. Flying Figure Above Village (1928; Figure 26.4), a roughly hewn woodcut of a figure floating above houses, confirms Atkins’ view that “Brandtner swiftly cut his blocks with the gusto of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.”46 Brandtner continued to work in the expressionist style he had started to develop in Danzig, but by 1930 expanded it as he experimented with cubism and abstraction. He also continued to pursue his left-wing politics in a city with a decidedly active socialist community and became active in the CCF.47

Figure 26.3  Fritz Brandtner, City of Danzig, 1928, oil on canvas, 71.5 × 92 cm, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, gift of Marc Regnier and Claudette Picard.  Kastel Gallery, Montreal. Photo: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Biran Merrett

494

Expressionism in Canada and the US

Figure 26.4  Fritz Brandtner, Flying Figure Above Village, 1928, woodcut on paper, 11.4 × 16 cm, Winnipeg Art Gallery, gift of Robert and Margaret Hucal.  Kastel Gallery, Montreal. Photographer: Leif Norman

In a way, Brandtner anticipated Eckhardt, who became director of the Winnipeg Art Gallery in 1953. From 1954 to 1972, Eckhardt organized exhibitions of works by Feininger, Jawlensky, and Kollwitz as well as Ernst Barlach, Walter Grammatté, Erich Heckel, and Christian Rohlfs. The art-loving public of Winnipeg was thus perhaps more knowledgeable about the movement than most any other community in Canada.48 The 1958 exhibition German Graphic Art of the 20th Century, which included 100 works on paper by thirty-eight expressionists, opened at the Winnipeg Art Gallery before traveling to five other galleries in Canada; it was the first exhibition of its kind in Canada.49 Soon after arriving in Winnipeg, Brandtner looked up Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald, widely considered to be the city’s preeminent artist at the time, who became his chief supporter. By November 1928, FitzGerald had organized an exhibition of Brandtner’s work at the Winnipeg School of Art, which allowed the city’s small, conservative art community to become acquainted with Brandtner’s radical style. A reviewer for the Winnipeg Free Press wrote that “nothing for a very long time has caused so much stir or has provided such a fine opportunity for the critics as these paintings . . . Is this the ultra-modern before which one must stand mute?”50 It was likely FitzGerald who secured work for Brandtner at Brigden’s, a graphic design firm that provided employment for many artists in Winnipeg, and it was at Brigden’s that Brandtner met Atkins. They became fast friends and went on sketching outings together. This changed Atkins’ style as he began to experiment with more expressionist approaches to line and color. Brandtner and Atkins demonstrated their socialist politics and personal responses to the economic suffering in Winnipeg during the Great Depression in their drawings, prints, and occasionally in their paintings. Their styles echoed Harris’s paintings of the slums of Toronto 495

Oliver A. I. Botar and Herbert R. Hartel, Jr.

and Halifax of the early 1920s, but the execution was much rougher and featured the jagged linear rendering common in expressionism. Their work palpably depicts the despair of a city in which a large percentage of the workforce was unemployed, in which people were going hungry due to the insufficiency of relief being offered by the government, and from which unemployed single men were being sent to work camps by the thousands. Prior to 1919, artists had celebrated the impressive buildings, warehouses, and public structures of Winnipeg, the “Chicago of the North” and pre-eminent site of the pre-First World War Canadian economic boom between Toronto and Vancouver. Brandtner and Atkins inverted this boosterish image of the city, turning their backs on the boulevards and skyscrapers and focusing instead on the back lanes and industrial and working-class neighborhoods. This is evident in Brandtner’s Winnipeg Lane (1929; Figure 26.5) and Atkin’s Night View of a City (1933; Figure 26.6). These works depict a deserted city whose buildings flanking the narrow lanes close in on the nocturnal flaneur, a metaphor for the feelings of claustrophobia, displacement, marginalization, alienation, and despair experienced by many urban dwellers at the time. As Dan Ring notes, Brandtner and Atkins depicted Winnipeg industrial sites and street scenes starkly and expressively as alien and hostile environments, emptied of human presence. Although there is little overt political reference, the mood and intent are clearly a reflection of the sombre environment of economic collapse.51

Figure 26.5  Fritz Brandtner, Winnipeg Lane, 1929, graphite on paper, 27.3 × 19.7 cm, Winnipeg Art Gallery, gift of Robert and Margaret Hucal.  Kastel Gallery, Montreal. Photographer: Leif Norman

496

Expressionism in Canada and the US

Figure 26.6  Caven Atkins, Night View of a City, 1933, graphite on paper, 28.6 × 22.2 cm, formerly in the Art Gallery of Windsor (present whereabouts unknown).  Christie A. Hewlett

Atkins’ Night is the only major oil painting to come out of this series (Plate 29); Ted Fraser writes that “Night resolves the tension of desolate nightmare and near-Edenic surreal peace. Slivers of light from curtained windows penetrate the darkness as moonlight reveals subtle graduated color. Transformative life awakens in this somnambulant picture.”52 In 1934, Brandtner moved to Montreal on FitzGerald’s advice; he continued working in several styles, including a strongly expressionist one, until his death. Atkins also left Winnipeg in 1934, turning to expressionist landscapes as one of his primary means of self-expression.

Expressing the Personal, Biographical, and Psychological No American artist equals Marsden Hartley’s (1877–1943) assimilation of expressionism for personal revelation and psychological introspection. Hartley was lonely, withdrawn, melancholy, and anxious his entire life. He was uneasy with his homosexuality, had difficulty creating lasting personal relationships, suffered from low self-esteem, and saw painting as a means of reaffirming his identity and bonding with places that felt like they could be home.53 His best paintings express his worries, fears, and anxieties; his joys, comforts, and loves; and his spiritual beliefs. While living in Europe, from 1912 to 1915, Hartley explored the possibilities of expressionism in his “intuitive abstractions,” “Amerika” series, abstract portraits of German officers and “Berlin Ante-War” visionary scenes. After a year in Paris, he moved to Berlin, where he enjoyed the city’s large, thriving gay subculture and fell in love with Karl von Freyburg, a 497

Oliver A. I. Botar and Herbert R. Hartel, Jr.

handsome young German officer.54 His enthusiasm for Germany was expressed vividly when he wrote about Berlin’s “spick and spanness in the order of life” and its “organized energy and the tension [that] was terrific and somehow most voluptuous in the feeling of power— a sexual immensity.”55 Portrait of a German Officer (1914) is the best known example of his abstract, symbolic visualizations of military figures composed of fragments of garments, medals, and other paraphernalia; it is a memorial to Freyburg, who was killed in battle in October 1914, leaving Hartley distraught.56 The painting is among the earliest works in which an artist dealt with the physical and emotional suffering of the First World War—experiences that would shape the works of German artists such as Max Beckmann, Georg Grosz, Kirchner, and Kollwitz. Sickly and impoverished, Hartley returned to New England in 1935, hoping to reconnect emotionally and spiritually to its rugged terrain and way of life, which he had known since childhood. In late 1935, on a trip to Canada, he met the Masons, a family of fishermen in Blue Rocks, Nova Scotia, and quickly befriended them and moved into their house. He was sexually attracted to Donny and Alty, the two handsome, muscular sons. He claimed that they reciprocated these feelings and thought he might one day have a lasting relationship with Alty, who supposedly had professed his attraction for men and frustration with his relationships with women. When Donny and Alty were killed on September 19, 1936, after their boat capsized during a storm after a night of hard drinking, Hartley was devastated. His paintings of the Masons extol the simple, wholesome, sincere qualities of these hardworking people by rendering them as blunt, angular, almost painfully awkward forms filled with striking, barely modulated colors. In his two versions of the Fisherman’s Last Supper, the five members of the family sit somberly in a line along a dining table in a simply furnished room. In the first version, from 1938 (Plate 30), the colors are lighter and more natural and there are more symbols; in the second version, from 1941, the colors are darker and the faces are crimson. The eight-point stars over the heads of the brothers in the first version sanctify them. The words “Mene, Mene” written on the tablecloth in the painting refer to God’s warning to Belshazzar about the sin of pride, which alludes to the sons’ foolish decision to dare the power of nature. In both versions, there is a painting depicting a ship on the wall, referring to the dangers of the sea and the family’s tragedy; in both, the sons’ shirts are unbuttoned, subtly sexualizing them.57 Expressionism took on a particular meaning for Bluemner during the last fifteen years of his life, a time dominated by psychological, financial, and personal problems that made him increasingly bitter, depressed, and anxious. The death of his wife, the lack of critical attention and financial success, and his declining health eventually led him to commit suicide in 1938. The towns, villages, and landscapes he depicted during these years are equivocally foreboding, melancholy, and lonely, as the colors get more intense, moody, and personal and the forms become contorted, blurred, and unstable. Bluemner described the sun and the moon in his nocturnal landscapes as “outward symbols of hidden ideas, forces . . . the Ego and the Altera [the other] . . . the Duality in ourselves as well as in nature.”58 Last Evening of the Year (1928–1929; Figure 26.7) is one of his most enigmatic nocturnal scenes. The glowing moon illuminates a dark, strangely cool red sky filled with heavy black clouds. In the foreground is a rustic, cool gray cottage rendered with broad brushstrokes, adjacent to a creek whose surface reflects the surrounding red and gray tones. The house is surrounded by barren trees and purple bushes partly covered in snow. Considering Bluemner’s symbolism, the image of this dwelling—done shortly after he bought a house in Braintree, Massachusetts—may represent a quietly melancholy refuge from a world laden with anger, fear, and doubt. Alfred Maurer (1866–1932) was acclaimed early in his career for his impressionist and tonalist paintings, but his embrace of fauvism when it was new made him an under-appreciated, 498

Expressionism in Canada and the US

Figure 26.7  Oscar Bluemner, Last Evening of the Year, 1928–1929, watercolor, gouache, and resin on paper, 14″ × 10″/35.6 × 25.4 cm, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City

ridiculed modernist pioneer. Although much of his personal life is shrouded in mystery, he apparently suffered from psychological problems. He never married, had no children, and was emotionally controlled by his overbearing parents, particularly his father Louis, a famous artist working for Currier & Ives, who disapproved of his son’s modernist painting. Maurer committed suicide in 1932, only sixteen days after his father died. Although disappointed by his lack of success as a modernist painter, Maurer never abandoned fauvism, cubism, and expressionism. He moved from a fauve style into expressionism, his work being characterized by peculiar distortions and exaggerations of figures and portraits. His enigmatic paintings in the 1920s of homely young girls and cubist heads seen in three-quarter views seem to have started as portraits but evolved into distorted fictional figures. Their narrow faces, long noses, large eyes, wide eyebrows, and large lips contrasted with weak chins seem to reveal the emotional struggles of the sitters as well as the artist. Their faces are rendered as flat shapes with firmly drawn contours accentuating their homely, possibly annoyed countenances, demonstrating how fauvism could transform into expressionist bleakness. Maurer did several paintings of heads in an expressionist variation of cubism that constitutes the most portentous theme of his oeuvre. They are crudely angular and disjointed and their paint surfaces are rough with heavily blended grays and browns. Cubist Two Heads (c. 1930; Figure 26.8) is fraught with the sitters’ and artist’s unspoken anxieties. This and related paintings have been interpreted as indicative of neurosis, split personality disorders, and repressed homosexuality.59 499

Oliver A. I. Botar and Herbert R. Hartel, Jr.

Figure 26.8  A  lfred Maurer, Cubist Twin Heads, c. 1930, oil on gessoed board, 21½″ × 18″/54.6 × 45.7 cm, private collection

Charles Burchfield (1893–1967), who also suffered from anxiety, shyness, and depression, was fascinated with the moods and emotions that he encountered in nature and small-town, suburban America. He projected his emotions, mental states, and outlook on life onto scenes of gardens, meadows, forests, houses, stores, factories, and churches. In spite of his success in selling his work when Regionalism and American Scene Painting were popular, he often felt that his paintings were inadequate, misunderstood, or unappreciated.60 Around 1916, he developed an expressionist style characterized by angular or curvilinear shapes repeated and densely clustered, sometimes rendered in electrically vibrant colors. His exaggeration and distortion of nature was often based on the personal visual “shorthand” that he recorded in his notes and journals, including Conventions for Abstract Thought (1917), intended for efficient rendering and maximum impact on the viewer. Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night (1917; Figure 26.9) depicts a dreary church rendered with twisted, sagging forms. Inanimate objects seem alive and moving and are distorted to the point of bizarreness and morbidity, almost like ghosts. Rain is described with drips of black paint and fierce winds in the sky are indicated by sweeping arcs of gray corresponding to Burchfield’s drawing in Conventions for Abstract Thought: Untitled (Fear 1).61 The sounds of the bells are brilliantly conveyed by streaks of blue and the bulging of the spire. Arched windows, stone walls, buttresses, sculptures, and stained glass are suggested by dramatically intense, oddly decorative forms related to the series of images in Conventions for Abstract Thought, including expressions of

500

Expressionism in Canada and the US

Figure 26.9  Charles Burchfield, Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night, 1917, watercolor on paper, 30″ × 19″/76.2 × 48.3 cm, Cleveland Museum of Art

fear, brooding, morbidity, melancholy, loneliness, the “fascination of evil,” and the “memory of things that are gone forever.”62 By the mid-1920s, Burchfield minimized personal content in favor of sensitive depictions of America’s small towns, industrial areas, and suburbs. As his sales slowed during the Great Depression and the Second World War and he reevaluated his life and art in middle-age, he gradually returned to a more personal style. During the last twenty-five years of his life, he reworked and enlarged many of his early watercolors, making them more spiritual and visionary.

Mysticism and Spirituality in North American Expressionism Marsden Hartley was one of the first American modernists to convey spiritual experiences and emotional states of being by combining aspects of expressionism, fauvism, and cubism to create what he called “intuitive abstractions.” In his spiritual approach, he combined elements from New England Protestantism, transcendentalism, Medieval German mysticism, and theosophy. His interest in theosophy was influenced by Kandinsky’s writing, which he read at the time. Musical Theme (Oriental Symphony) (1912; Figure 26.10) is one of the first paintings in which he successfully visualized his search for spiritual awareness and enlightenment in an expressionist style. The work is composed of several large triangles outlined in

501

Oliver A. I. Botar and Herbert R. Hartel, Jr.

Figure 26.10  Marsden Hartley, Musical Theme (Oriental Symphony), 1912–1913, oil on canvas, 39⅜″ × 31¾″/100 × 80.7 cm, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Boston

black and filled in with smudgy areas of bright red, yellow, and orange with scattered areas of white, dark green, and lavender—shapes which are similar to those in works by Kandinsky such as Composition No. 4 (1911). In the upper right, one can see the sketchy figure of a seated Buddha, based on a small sculpture that Hartley owned; next to it in the center appears a hand that forms the abhayamudrā, Buddha’s gesture dispelling fear. Asterisk-like stars, circles, arcs, triangles, zigzags, fragments of musical notation, and other linear configurations, with various mystical and occult meanings derived from theosophy and Jakob Böhme are drawn with somewhat nervous yet precise strokes in red and blue.63 While Hartley’s forms are cubist, his colors and the application of paint are expressionist. For artists in the United States and Canada, the cultures of indigenous or ancient societies were inspirational, rejuvenating, and spiritually enlightening. Artists of European descent turned to Native American cultures because they seemed primordial, and were alternately thought of as morally pure and unspoiled, or savage and crude, depending on the current social and political circumstances. A strong fascination with indigenous cultures and the unique terrain of North America can be seen in many of Bror Julius Olsson Nordfeldt’s (1878–1955) paintings, which convey awe, curiosity, and brutality. Nordfeldt did several paintings of the religious and spiritual practices of Mexican-Americans and Native Americans in the Southwest, one of the few places in the United States where indigenous peoples and cultures were still thriving in the early twentieth century.64 Paintings such as New Mexico Penitentes—The Crucifixion (1925) evoke the violent fervor of Mexican Catholics who formed a cult near Abiquiú and periodically reenacted 502

Expressionism in Canada and the US

the crucifixion of Jesus by tying one of their own to a cross to hang until his suffering brought him dangerously close to death, at which time the man was freed and thus “restored” to health.65 Nordfeldt contrasts the dark red skin of the men against the pale tans and blue of the landscape, emphasizing the bold, angular, muscular forms of their bodies. His treatment is reminiscent of representations of indigenous peoples by Modersohn-Becker, Nolde, and Schmidt-Rottluff. Brandtner also experimented with the spiritual in his expressionist works. His 1932 triptych The Truth Shall Set You Free (also known as The Dawn of Knowledge) is the most symbolic artwork undertaken in Winnipeg up to that point. The critic Robert Ayre saw it at Brandtner’s first Montreal exhibition and described it as “visual music,” adding that “innumerable beings, spirits rather than bodies, rise like living flames towards the central sun.”66 Is it Christian (the first title and the Christ-like figure at center wreathed in light suggest this) or humanist (as the second title suggests)—a reflection of Brandtner’s leftism—or a combination of these (like many German expressionist works of the immediate postwar period)? Whatever Brandtner’s intended meaning, it is arranged like a scene of the Last Judgment, with figures ascending and descending on either side of the central “Christ” figure. It speaks to the ambience of “end times,” entirely in keeping with the apocalyptic mood of the Great Depression.67 Expressionism, with its intense emotion and spirituality expressed through distorted forms and strong colors, has comprised a powerful impulse on North American, particularly American art since the 1910s. As an artistic influence, expressionism slowly faded during the period after the Second World War, but has resurfaced periodically. Its stylistic features and ideological foundations spread further with the rise of abstract expressionism in the United States. German expressionism also influenced mid-century abstract painting in Canada, as is visible in the Montreal Automatistes and the Painters 11 in Toronto. Eventually international expressionism resurfaced in North American neoexpressionist painting of the 1980s. As a style and as an impulse for expressing emotions and ideas such as despair, economic problems, and spiritual exuberance, expressionism served as an important model and method of working for North American artists.

Notes 1 Cécile Whiting, “Regenerate Art:The Reception of German Expressionism in the United States, 1900– 1945,” Art Criticism 9(1) (1994): 73–74. 2 Milton Brown, The Story of the Armory Show, 2nd ed. (New York: Abbeville Press, 1988), 79, 116. 3 Cassandra Getty, “Kathleen Munn and Lowrie Warrener: The Logic of Nature, the Romance of Space,” in The Logic of Nature, the Romance of Space: Elements of Canadian Modernist Painting, ed. Cassandra Getty in Getty et al. (Windsor and Oshawa: Art Gallery of Windsor and The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 2010; exh. cat.), 37–38; Adam Lauder, “It’s Alive! Bertram Brooker and Vitalism,” in ibid., 85–86; Leslie Dawn, “The Britishness of Canadian Art,” in Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity and Contemporary Art, ed. John O’Brian and Peter White (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2007), 193–201; Roald Nasgaard, Abstract Painting in Canada (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2007), 18–19. 4 Georgiana Uhlyarik, “The Passion of Kathleen Munn,” in Getty et al., The Logic of Nature, 66, note 29. 5 Lisa Daniels, “Lowrie Warrener: Towards a Synthesis of Artistic Expression,” in Getty et al., The Logic of Nature, 73–78. 6 Gail Levin and Marianne Lorenz, Theme and Improvisation: Kandinsky and the American Avant-Garde, 1912–1950 (New York: Little, Brown, & Co., 1992), 10–17, 22–24. 7 See Camera Work, No. 39, July 1912. 8 Wassily Kandinsky, The Art of Spiritual Harmony, translated and introduced by M. T. H. Saidler (Boston, MA; New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1914). 9 Alfred Stieglitz bought the painting and subsequently exhibited it often. 10 Arthur Jerome Eddy, Cubism and the Post-Impressionists (Chicago, IL: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1914). 11 Levin and Lorenz, Theme and Improvisation, 82–85.

503

Oliver A. I. Botar and Herbert R. Hartel, Jr. 12 Franz Marc, Tierschicksale (Fate of the Animals), 1913, oil on canvas, 195 x 263.5 cm, Kunstmuseum Basel. 13 Patricia McDonnell, Concerning Expressionism: America and the German Avant-Garde (New York: Hollis Taggart Galleries, 1998; exh. cat.), 56–61; Lorenz and Levin, Theme and Improvisation, 27–28. 14 Lorenz and Levin, Theme and Improvisation, 26–27; Gail Stavitsky, “Creation,” in American Pastels in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ed. Doreen Bolger et al. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), 119–121. 15 Dickran Tashijan, “‘A Big Cosmic Force’: Katherine S. Dreier and the Russian/Soviet Avant-Garde,” in The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America, ed. Jennifer Gross (New Haven, CT; London:Yale University Press, 2006; exh. cat.), 45–73. 16 Kristina Wilson, “‘One Big Painting’: A New View of Modern Art at the Brooklyn Museum,” ibid., 75–96; Katherine Dreier, The International Exhibition of Modern Art for the Brooklyn Museum (New York: Société Anonyme, 1926); Larry R. Pfaff, “Lawren Harris and the International Exhibition of Modern Art: Rectifications to the Toronto Catalogue (1927), and Some Critical Comments,” Revue d’Art Canadien/Canadian Art Review 11(1/2) (1984): 79–96; Cassandra Getty, “Kathleen Munn and Lowrie Warrener: The Logic of Nature, The Romance of Space,” in Getty et al., The Logic of Nature, 15–53; Nasgaard, Abstract Painting in Canada, 27; Victoria Evans, “Bertram Brooker’s Theory of Art as Evinced in his ‘The Seven Arts’ Columns and Early Abstractions,” The Journal of Canadian Art History 9(1) (1986): 36. 17 Vivian Endicott Barnett, “The Founding of the Blue Four and their Presentation in New York in 1924– 1925,” in The Blue Four: Feininger, Jawlensky, Kandinsky, and Klee in the New World, ed. Vivian Endicott Barnett and Josef Helfenstein (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1997; exh. cat.): 15–28. 18 Vivian Endicott Barnett, “Re-Reading the Correspondence: Rebay and Kandinsky,” in Art of Tomorrow: Hilla Rebay and Solomon R. Guggenheim, ed. Vivian Endicott Barnett et al. (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2005, exh. cat.), 86–101. 19 Nasgaard, Abstract Painting in Canada, 46. 20 Ibid., 41–42, 46; Linda Jansma, “Jock Macdonald, Dr. Grace W. Pailthorpe and Reuben Mednikoff: A Lesson in Automatics,” in Jock Macdonald: Evolving Form, ed. Michelle Jacques, Linda Jansma, and Ian M. Thom (Vancouver: Black Dog Publishing, 2015), 39–73; Cassandra Getty, “Kathleen Munn and Lowrie Warrener,” 32; Evans, “Bertram Brooker’s Theory of Art,” 36; Nasgaard, Abstract Painting in Canada, 35; Ted Fraser, Caven Atkins:The Winnipeg Years (Windsor: Art Gallery of Windsor, 1987; exh. cat.), n.p. 21 Andrew Robison, “Kirchner in America and Britain,” in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: The Dresden and Berlin Years, ed. Jill Lloyd et al. (London: Royal Academy of Fine Arts, 2003, exh. cat.), 39–42. 22 Donald Gordon, Expressionism: Art and Idea (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 71–77, 91–93; Peter Paret, “Expressionism in Imperial Germany,” in German Expressionism: Art and Society, ed. Stephanie Barron (New York: Rizzoli, 1997), 29–34. 23 Whiting, “Regenerate Art,” 72–73. 24 Ibid., 74–75; Penny Bealle, “J.B. Neumann and the Introduction of Modern German Art in New York, 1923–1933,” Archives of American Art Journal 29(1–2) (1989): 3–15; Margaret Stearns, The Passionate Eye: The Life of William Valentiner (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1980). 25 Whiting, “Regenerate Art,” 74–75. 26 Anabelle Kienle Ponka, “Bringing German Expressionism to Canada,” in Storm and Spirit:The EckhardtGramatté Collection of German Expressionist Art, ed. Andrew Kear et al. (Winnipeg: The Winnipeg Art Gallery, 2013; exh. cat.) 28–29; Francois-Marc Gagnon, “The Classical Taste of Max Stern,” in Max Stern: Montreal Dealer and Patron, ed. Edith-Anne Pageot et al. (Montreal:The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2005; exh. cat.), 78. 27 Kienle Ponka, “Bringing German Expressionism to Canada,” 28–31. See also Ihor Holubitzky, “The German Expressionist Collection at McMaster Museum of Art,” in Living, Building, Thinking: Art and Expressionism, ed. Carol Podedworny and Ihor Holubitzky (Hamilton, ON: McMaster Museum of Art, 2016; exh. cat.), 127–133. 28 Whiting, “Regenerate Art,” 75–78. 29 Ibid. 30 Rebecca Zurier, Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006). 31 Bloch began his career producing illustrations for The Mirror, the literary and political newspaper published in his native St. Louis; Feininger worked as a cartoonist and illustrator for German and American newspapers and magazines, including Harper’s, Humoristische Blätter [Humurous Papers], Berliner Tageblatt [Berlin Paper], Ulk [Joke], Das Narrenschiff [The Ship of Fools], and The Chicago Herald-Tribune in the 1890s.

504

Expressionism in Canada and the US 32 Henry Adams, “Albert Bloch: The Invisible Blue Rider,” in Albert Bloch: The American Blue Rider, ed. Henry Adams et al. (New York: Prestel Verlag, 1997; exh. cat.), 34–36. 33 Annegret Hoberg, “Albert Bloch in Munich: 1909–1921,” in Adams et al., Albert Bloch, 63–65. 34 Barbara Haskell, “Redeeming the Sacred,” in Lyonel Feininger: At the Edge of the World, ed. Barbara Haskell et al. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2011; exh. cat.), 26–29. 35 Max Weber, Fleeing Mother and Child, 1913, oil on canvas, 40” x 24”, New Jersey State Museum, Trenton. 36 Max Weber, Sabbath, 1919, oil on canvas, 12¾” x 10”, Jewish Museum, New York. 37 Barbara Haskell, “Oscar Bluemner: A Passion for Color,” in Oscar Bluemner: A Passion for Color, ed. Barbara Haskell (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2005; exh. cat.), 64. 38 Oscar Bluemner, Jersey Silk Mills, 1917, oil on canvas, 20¼” x 30”, private collection. 39 Roberta Smith Favis, “Painting ‘the Red City’: Oscar Bluemner’s ‘Jersey Silkmills,’” American Art 17(1) (Spring 2003): 26–47. 40 Ben Shan, The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, 1931–1932, tempera and gouache on canvas mounted on composition board, 84” x 48”/ 213.4 x 121.9 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Gift of Edith and Milton Lowenthal in memory of Juliana Force. 41 “Ben Shahn, The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, last accessed March 12, 2017, http://collection.whitney. org/object/1022. 42 Herbert Hartel, “Philip Evergood’s The Story of Richmond Hill: Issues of Urbanism and Social Class in a New Deal Mural,” Source: Notes in the History of Art 26(2) (Winter 2007): 40–48. 43 Fraser, Caven Atkins, n.p. 44 Barry Lord, The History of Painting in Canada:Towards a People’s Art (Toronto: NC Press, 1974), 179. 45 Edwy F. Cooke, Fritz Brandtner 1896–1969: A Retrospective Exhibition (Montreal: Sir George Williams University, 1971), 10. 46 Fraser, Caven Atkins, n.p. 47 Roland Penner, A Glowing Dream: A Memoir (Winnipeg: J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing, 2007). 48 Stephen Borys, “Introduction,” in Kear et al., Storm and Spirit, 17. 49 Kienle Ponka, “Bringing German Expressionism to Canada,” 26–27; Jean Sutherland Boggs and Ferdinand Eckhardt, foreword to Erich Heckel: Paintings, Watercolours, Drawings, Graphics (Ottawa and Winnipeg: The National Gallery of Canada and Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1971; exh. cat.), n.p. 50 “J.M.B.” and “Ultra-Modern Art on View at W.S.A.,” Winnipeg Free Press Evening Bulletin, November 24, 1928, quoted in Frances K. Smith, “Fritz Brandtner in Canada,” in The Brave New World of Fritz Brandtner, ed. Frances K. Smith (Kingston: Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen’s University, 1982; exh. cat), 22. 51 Dan Ring, “The Urban Prairie 1880 to 1960,” in The Urban Prairie, ed. Dan Ring, Guy Vanderhaeghe, and George Melnyk (Saskatoon: Mendel Art Gallery and Fifth House Publishers, 1993), 73. 52 Fraser, Caven Atkins, n.p. 53 Bruce Robertson, Marsden Hartley (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995), 11–17. 54 He often saw Karl von Freyburg in Berlin, but it remains uncertain whether this relationship was reciprocal and physical. Patricia McDonnell, “‘Portrait of Berlin’: Marsden Hartley and Urban Modernity in Expressionist Berlin,” in Marsden Hartley: American Modern, ed. Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser et al. (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2004; exh. cat.), 46–53. 55 Hartley in letters and notes quoted in Robertson, Marsden Hartley, 49. 56 Marsden Hartley, Portrait of a German Officer, 1914, oil on canvas, 68¼” x 41⅜”/173.4 x 105.1 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949. 57 Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser et al., Marsden Hartley: American Modern, 312–314; Robertson, Marsden Hartley, 103, 109. 58 Haskell, Oscar Bluemner, 98. 59 Alfred Maurer: Aestheticism to Modernism, ed. Stacy B. Epstein (New York: Hollis Taggart Galleries, 1999; exh. cat.), 48–51, 55. 60 Matthew Baigell, Charles Burchfield (New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1976), 73–77, 81, 87, 90; Michael Kammen, “Charles Burchfield and the Progression of the Seasons” and Henry Adams, “Charles Burchfield’s Imagination,” in The Paintings of Charles Burchfield: North by Northwest, ed. Nannette V. Maciejunes (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997; exh. cat.), 38, 110–111. 61 Charles E. Burchfield (1893–1967), Conventions for Abstract Thought: Untitled (Fear 1), 1917, china marker on paper, 9½” x 6⅛”, Charles E. Burchfield Foundation Archives, Gift of the Charles E. Burchfield Foundation, 2006, Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State.

505

Oliver A. I. Botar and Herbert R. Hartel, Jr. 62 “Charles E. Burchfield (1893–1967), Conventions for Abstract Thoughts, 1917,” last accessed June 4, 2016, www.burchfieldpenney.org/collection/object:a2006-008-104-conventions-for-abstract-thought. 63 Gail Levin, “Marsden Hartley and Mysticism,” Arts Magazine 60 (November 1985), 16–21; Robertson, Marsden Hartley, 41–45. 64 W. Jackson Rushing III, Native American Art and the NewYork Avant-Garde:A History of Cultural Primitivism (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1995), 1–12. 65 Van Deren Coke, Nordfeldt the Painter (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1972), 58–61. 66 Robert Ayre, “Expressionist in Montreal,” New Frontier 1(2) (May 1936): 29–30. Quoted in Smith, “Fritz Brandtner in Canada,” in Duffy and Smith, The Brave New World of Fritz Brandtner, 29. 67 Ibid., 29, 67.

506

27 EXPRESSIONISM IN LATIN AMERICA AND ITS CONTRIBUTION TO THE MODERNIST DISCOURSE Maria Frick It is often assumed that expressionism is a European trend and one that only occasionally appears in Latin America; however, a quick overview of regional painting is enough to give a sense of the existence of an independent expressionism, with its own local features but also sharing similarities with the European movement. Numerous and significant works attest to the fact that Latin American artists participated in the expressionist movement with a creative intensity and avant-garde vocation similar to that of the European painters. There are no studies, however, that delve into the mechanisms of influence or appropriation of expressionism in the region. Reference is usually made to artists’ biographies or to specific characteristics of local movements, but not to their ties and interactions with the European movement. Those who used expressionist language tend to remain immersed in vernacular movements, denied of any common identification or qualitative equivalence with their European peers. In this sense, it is still necessary to recognize the Latin American painters who participated in the international expressionist movement as well as the mechanisms by which they embraced its principles and adapted its values to their individual historical contexts—not only to advance the definition of a Latin American expressionism but also to enhance the work of these artists in national anthologies and the constitution of local canons. In this regard, this chapter aims to make a critical contribution to the discourse. It assumes that a group of Latin American painters became identified with and contributed to this artistic trend through diverse dialogues and exchanges, and in so doing, created a body of work that shares core ideas and expressive modalities with the European movement, but has its own vision of the modern world. I begin by introducing the influences of the expressionist movement on the cultural milieu of the Latin American countries; second, I describe the types of connections that enabled and determined the processes of appropriation of the movement’s principles and values in the region; third, I approach the contribution of expressionism to the creation of a local discourse regarding social problems and aspects of modernity specific to Latin America. This analysis is supported by description of the themes addressed by some of the most representative artworks in the region. Finally, I propose some problems for further debate and analysis of transatlantic expressionism.

507

Maria Frick

Transatlantic Expressionist Confluences The Brazilian critics Stella Teixeira and Ivo Mesquita have noted that the expressionist movement is liable to be permeable to different realities precisely because it is rooted in an idea of universal revolution that extends beyond the field of aesthetics. Born in a pre-First World War Europe, expressionism is an opposition art of anti-positivist origin that looks for purer forms of knowledge and a more affective presence in politics in order to transform societies and cultural traditions in search of a new world. Thus, this spirit is easily adaptable to diverse regions and helps to explain the cosmopolitan character that expressionism has had from its genesis.1 Almost at the same time of its outburst in Europe, the expressionist movement expanded internationally in successive waves that, despite their heterogeneity of contents and forms, shared an opposition to norms and conventions, the violence of primordial impulses, and the transposition of emotions.2 In Latin America, expressionist tendencies developed in architecture, painting, sculpture, and engraving, but these also extended to literature, theatre, dance, music, and film. To a large extent, this was due to the links established among the diverse arts and disciplines by the avant-garde magazines. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, these publications promoted profuse cultural interconnections that channeled the processes of adoption and transformation of modernity. Among them were Revista de Avance (Journal of Progress) in Cuba; Prisma (Prism), Proa (Bow), Claridad (Clarity), and Martín Fierro in Argentina; Klaxon (Claxon), Terra Roxa e outras terras (Purple Land and Other Lands), and Revista de Antropofagia (Journal of Anthropophagy) in Brazil; Teseo, La Pluma (The Pen), and Alfar (Pottery) in Uruguay; and Amauta in Peru. Expressionism was a strong influence, particularly in the field of painting; it shaped Ecuadorian indigenism, mainly through the works of Oswaldo Guayasamín and Eduardo Kingman, and can also be related to Peruvian painters such as José Sabogal, Ricardo Grau, and Macedonio de la Torre. Furthermore, it contributed to Magic Realism and the Brazilian New Objectivity (for example, through Iván Serpa’s works) as well as to the Generation of 1940 in Chile (Israel Roa, Ximena Cristi, Augusto Barcia, and Sergio Montecinos). Expressionism is also associated with Mexican muralism, including the works of José Clemente Orozco (Figure 27.1), David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Diego Rivera, as described by Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz: The two great European movements to which Mexican muralism shows affinities and similarities are fauvism and expressionism . . . Undoubtedly our painters were not only familiar with these currents and tendencies but also assimilated and adapted them, almost always with talent and in a very personal way . . . And what is more, the common sources of fauvism and expressionism were Van Gogh and Gauguin . . . So the muralists drank from the same sources as the expressionists and the fauves. Beyond this common origin, the affinities between the muralists and the expressionists are continuous, constant. Similarities that are not always influences but coincidences, or rather, convergences.3 Expressionism also influenced many artists in different periods of their careers, sometimes coexisting with a broad range of styles and approaches. As Stella Teixeira and Ivo Mesquita have pointed out, among Brazilian artists, for example, Marina Caram and Iberê Camargo remained in the movement, while painters such as Anita Malfatti and Lasar Segall (Figure 27.2)—although never having lost their “expressionist soul”—subsequently aimed at the dematerialization of the object and pictorial formalism, respectively.4 Other cases include Emiliano Cavalcanti (Brazil),

508

Expressionism in Latin America

Figure 27.1  José Clemente Orozco, Cabaret mexicano (Mexican Cabaret), 1942–1943, tempera on paper, 28 × 38.3 cm, Collection INBA, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, México D.F. © Heirs of José Clemente Orozco 2017

Aldo del Pino (Paraguay), Aníbal Villacis (Ecuador), and Cecilio Guzmán de Rojas (Bolivia), among many others that are mentioned in this chapter. This first wave of expressionism was followed by the development of abstract expressionism, represented by artists such as Sarah Grilo and Kazuya Sakai (Argentina); María Luisa Pacheco and Oscar Pantoja (Bolivia); Fernando de Szyszlo (Peru); Francisco Hung (Venezuela); Alejandro Obregón (Colombia); Tomie Otahake, Manabu Mabe, and Kazuo Wakabayashi (Brazil); Luis Díaz (Guatemala); Armando Morales and Rolando Castellón (Nicaragua); Lola Fernández and Rafael Ángel García (Costa Rica); Alfredo Sinclair and Guillermo Trujillo (Panama); and Manuel Felguérez and Vicente Rojo (Mexico). Abstract expressionism is also present in the New Figuration, in Mexican “interiorism”5 and in the Argentine neoexpressionist movement,6 as well as in the works of the Bolivians Gildaro Antezana, Diego Morales, and Edgar Arandia;7 Chileans Gracia Barrios, Carmen Silva, Manuel Gómez Hassan, and Benjamín Lira;8 Colombians Lorenzo Jaramillo, María Teresa Vieco, María de la Paz Jaramillo, Rafael Panizza, Carlos Enrique Hoyos, Marta Guevara, and Raúl Fernando Restrepo;9 and Argentines Guillermo Kuitca, Schvartz, Carlos Gorriarena, Pablo Suárez, Miguel Dávila, Felipe Pino, Duilio Pierri, Ezequiel Rosenfeldt, and Ariel Mlynarzewicz. The work of Carlos Gorrierena (Figure 27.3), for example, shows the prevalence of expressionist influences beyond the above-mentioned first generation of expressionist artists. His art demonstrates the appropriation and synthesis carried out by Latin American artists in representing

509

Maria Frick

Figure 27.2  Lasar Segall, Interior de indigentes (Interior with Indigents), 1920, oil on canvas, 83.5 × 68.5 cm, Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo.  Museu Lasar Segall, São Paulo. Photo: João Musa

their own reality. As Argentine historian Jorge López Anaya writes, Gorriarena’s painting is an example of the contemporary connections among expressionist qualities, capable of emphasizing individual experiences and the realism “of meaning” that aims at social criticism.10

An International Community Despite its reach, the dissemination of expressionism was not the result of collective attitudes toward the European avant-garde. On the contrary, the movement mostly spread through individual encounters by means of the relationships and ties established by the artists through their various travels, visits, and migrations. Thus, it was the artists who acted as intermediaries, disseminating expressionist values in terms of creative results and attitudes toward modernity. These ties were first established by the Latin American painters who traveled to Europe and were exposed to the methods and cultural environment of the time. Cities like Paris, Berlin, and Madrid were still cultural and historical landmarks for Latin American artists; painters traveled with the aim of improving their training and then, upon their return, contributing to local artistic environments. Examples include the careers of Lasar Segall and Xul Solar, both emblematic of the South American vanguards. As the Brazilian sociologist Sergio Miceli explains, Segall engaged in dialogue with Lyonel Feininger and Erich Heckel and the representatives of the Russian-Jewish avant-garde Issachar 510

Expressionism in Latin America

Figure 27.3  Carlos Gorriarena, La casa del sofá amarillo (The House of the Yellow Sofa), 2006, acrylic on canvas, 150 × 150 cm, private collection of Sylvia Vesco.  Sylvia Vesco. Photograph: Gustavo Lowry

Ber Ryback and Marc Chagall; Solar was influenced by the Brücke artists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and the Blaue Reiter artists Wassily Kandinsky, Alexei Jawlensky, Franz Marc, and Paul Klee. Miceli further notes that this influence was so strong that it is possible to identify in some of their paintings the choices the artists made in response to the artistic languages they were introduced to during their sojourns in Europe.11 This is also the case for many others: Israel Roa (Chile) was granted a Humboldt scholarship to study art in Berlin, Diego Rivera (Mexico) spent nearly fifteen years in Europe and participated in the artistic life of Paris, Anita Malfatti (Brazil) studied in Berlin, José Cuneo Perinetti (Uruguay) met Chaïm Soutine in Europe, Raquel Forner and Horacio Butler (Argentina) studied with Othon Friesz in Paris, and Macedonio de la Torre (Peru) studied in Germany and Paris. At the same time, the artistic life of the region was nurtured by the European artists who migrated to Latin America to escape from war. In their new countries, they developed the trends that were latent in their previous cultural contexts. Prominent examples are the Germans Guillermo Widemann and Hans Michaelson. Widemann had studied in Munich and was also close to Die Brücke (The Bridge) before he settled in Colombia, where he influenced the work of artists such as Alejandro Obregón, Fernando Botero, and Enrique Grau. Michaelson first studied in Munich with Ludwig Schmidt-Reutte before becoming a professor at the School of Fine Arts in Ecuador, where he taught artists such as Caesar Andrade Faini. 511

Maria Frick

Reference can also be made to Juan Rimsa (Lithuania), who taught a generation of artists in Bolivia; Wolf Bandurek (Poland), who settled in Paraguay; Adolfo Winternitz (Austria), who passed on an expressionist legacy in Peruvian painting; Carla Witte (Germany), who settled in Montevideo and taught students who would later go on to exhibit their own works; Axel Leskoschek (Austria) who studied with Käthe Kollwitz and then taught Brazilian artists such as Iván Serpa, Renina Katz, Edith Behring, and Fayga Ostrower; and German art historian Paul Westheim, who settled in Mexico and actively disseminated his knowledge of German contemporary art. The contacts established by this first generation of artists and immigrants promoted, in turn, exchange networks at a regional level. These networks linked painters, artistic centers, and workshops that operated as exchange mechanisms, which—although informal in nature—enabled the “traffic of forms” and the establishment of contexts, thus supporting the incorporation of expressionist language in the Latin American countries.12 An example is Ofelia Echagüe, one of the main representatives of modern art in Paraguay, who studied in Montevideo with Domingo Bazzurro (who himself had been educated in Buenos Aires and spent time in Europe during the First World War) and in Buenos Aires with Alfredo Guido and Emilio Centurión (the latter a member of the Florida Group along with painters of expressionist influence such as Raquel Forner, Héctor Basaldúa, Horacio Butler and Xul Solar). Among Echagüe’s students was Olga

Figure 27.4  Olga Blinder, Miedo (Fear), 1959, woodcut, 30 × 20 cm, Museo de Artes Visuales/Museo del Barro, Asunción.  Jorge B. Schvartzman

512

Expressionism in Latin America

Blinder, a Jewish painter of importance in the Paraguayan art scene (Figure 27.4). Blinder was a founding member of the New Art Group, the first to introduce avant-garde attributes in the local scene. She was close to artists such as the Brazilian Joäo Rossi, a Brazilian expressionist who was educated partly in North Europe, but had a marked admiration for Mexican muralism.13 Blinder also worked with the Brazilian Livio Abramo, who, in turn, was influenced by Oswaldo Goeldi and the German expressionists. Livio Abramo became acquainted with Goeldi’s expressionism through his work as illustrator in Rio de Janeiro, the works of Käthe Kollwitz featured in the lectures given by art critic Mário Pedrosa, and with other German artists through the exhibitions organized by the Deutscher Werkbund (German Association of Craftsmen) in Brazil. Through the Brazilian writer Geraldo Ferraz, a contributor to the magazine Antropofagia, among other publications, he also met Lasar Segall, who saw his drawings and gave him guidance. In addition to regional networks, contacts among artists spawned intergenerational relationships that also had a direct impact on the most contemporary expressionist trends. This is the case, among others, with Jorge Demirjian, a member of the Argentine neofiguration. Demirjian took classes with Horacio Butler; after being granted a scholarship, he traveled to Milan, Paris, New York, and London, where he met Francis Bacon. In 1980, he settled for good in Buenos Aires and has contributed to the education of currently active artists such as Ezequiel Rosenfeldt. Something similar happened with Ariel Mlynarzewicz, who was a student of expressionist Carlos Alonso, who, in turn, studied with Lajos Szalay, a Hungarian painter residing in Argentina, who had studied with Georges Rouault. Notwithstanding, the expressionist influence has not left a lasting impact in many of these cases. Not only because artists usually go through various periods and styles throughout their careers, but mainly because of its appropriation and transformation within the framework of local contexts. In most cases, artists achieved some sort of balance between aesthetic innovation and the artistic traditions of their own countries.

Beginnings of a Latin American Genealogy In the first decades of the twentieth century, in Latin America there was intense concern for regional identity. Conflicts such as the struggle for Cuban independence and the Spanish-American war, as well as a generally interventionist US foreign policy, had stirred up anti-imperialist sentiment; while in the political arena Positivism had also become weaker in the face of the search for local models of progress. In the 1930s, in addition, the establishment of the so-called Good Neighbor policy of the US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt raised interest in Latin American culture and the idea of a new Pan-Americanism.14 In this context, although Europe was considered an artistic landmark, Latin American artists were concerned about the nature of their cultures and their place in the world, especially in view of the peaceful coexistence of Latin American countries in the interwar period. Furthermore, the demands for originality and authenticity of the new nationalisms forced them to rethink their cultural traditions. In this context, their main problem was not the avant-garde movement or a search for a change, but modernity itself, and the emergence and consolidation of nations.15 It was in this context that artists acknowledged the power of the expressionist aesthetic language to give form to and address local concerns in a universally understandable language. In doing so, they prompted transformative reception processes through which they assumed the European influences, selectively incorporating them into their environment. As Cuban painter Marcelo Pogolotti explained about the Cuban avant-garde:

513

Maria Frick

Horacio Butler (Buenos Aires, 1897–1983)

Marc Chagall (Vítebsk, 1887 - Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, 1985)

Raquel Forner (Buenos Aires, 1902–1988) Xul Solar (Buenos Aires, 1887–1963)

DIE BRÜCKE (Germany)

Emilio Centurión (Buenos Aires, 1894–1970)

Hans Michaelson (Anhalt, 1872- Guayaquil, 1937)

Alfredo Guido (Rosario, 1892–1967)

Ludwig Schmidt-Reutte (Wernek, 1863– Munich, 1909))

Domingo Bazzurro (Montevideo, 1882–1962)

Guillermo Wiedemann (Múnich, 1905 – Key Biscayne, 1969))

César Andrade Faini (Quito, 1913- Guavaquil, 1995) DER BLAUE REITER (Germany)

Alejandro Obregón (Barcelona, 1920 – Cartagena, 1992)

Alfred Kubin (Litoměřice, 1877 – Vienna, 1959) Ofelia Echagüe (Asuncion, 1904–1986)

Olga Blinder (Asuncion, 1921–2008)

Sérvulo Guetiérrez (Ica, 1914 – Lima, 1961)

Oswaldo Goeldi (Rio de Janeiro, 1895–1961)

SCHOOL OF PARIS (Paris)

Lasar Segall (Vilna, 1891– São Paulo, 1957)

Diego Rivera (Guanajuato, 1886- Mexico, 1957)

Käthe Kollwitz (Germany, 1867–1945) Livio Abramo (São Paulo, 1903–1992)

MEXICAN MURALISM (Mexico) Axel Leskochek (Graz, 1889 - Vienna, 1975) Iván Serpa (Rio de Janeiro, 1923–1973)

“NEW ART” GROUP (Asuncion)

Joao Rossi (São Paulo, 1923–2000)

Description of the connections between expressionist painters from different regions, countries and periods (partial approach based on the information available)

Contact through publications / conferences

Contact through third parties (artists, intellectuals, friends)

Direct contact (classes, groups)

No specific information on the link

They understood that it was absurd to represent the Cuban natural and human landscape with formulae from other geographical, cultural and, particularly, temporal realities . . . nor did it make sense to limit the issue to the establishment of a Cuban theme . . . So, they had to seek the essence within themselves and abandon the more or less exalted and novel reproduction of exterior appearances. This implied many difficult pictorial problems and forced their incorporation into the new aesthetic trends. The more anxious painters traveled to Paris—the world’s center of pictorial experiments and discoveries—in search of suitable means to solve their problems.16 The result was a Latin American avant-garde that—framed within a broader international phenomenon—sought historic pertinence and legitimacy through its roots in local social transformations. As Uruguayan historian Ivonne Pini writes: To make a rooted art of their own was an insistently repeated statement. The idea of modernity was linked to the concerns for the new, but that notion of novelty reflected

514

Expressionism in Latin America

an attitude that, far from being a simple appropriation, emphasized a strong sense of self-affirmation. It was not about importing models but about proposing one that went beyond the incorporation of foreign trends, revisiting those aspects that distinguished it from the foreign one. This explains the quest for issues regarding the indigenous past, the African inheritance, the landscape, with the aim of finding the bases for creation in their own space.17 This process implied what the Argentine art historians Argentines Sandra de la Fuente and Diana Wechsler refer to as a “dialectic situation between the import of European patterns and their combination and processing in the various Latin American centers”;18 in other words, a “mixed culture” combining elements of diverse origin in an active cultural field that is receptive to foreign influences, even in terms of the work of immigrant artists who had to reexamine their cultural identity in the light of the demands of their adoptive countries. This mixed culture had strong repercussions within the debates on culture and national identity, since it necessarily implied the creation of a new balance between innovation and local traditions. In many cases, it provoked a strong rejection by the representatives of the prevailing aesthetics, as can be seen in texts such as El expresionismo como síntoma de pereza e inhabilidad en el arte (Expressionism as a Symptom of Laziness and Inability in Art), by Colombian conservative politician Laureano Gómez.19 At the same time, it enabled the emergence of a visual repertoire based on the creative selection of the elements best suited to the social and political events of each country as well as their own searches for identity and their paths toward development. This often occurred with a marked simultaneity with respect to European movements. As Argentine curator Irma Arestizábal has emphasized: The Latin American pictorial avant-garde is marked by a brilliant creativity, important new features, undeniable influences and smart answers to the hegemonic centers and, at the same time, by a return to its origins, taking inspiration from native cultures, creating new features, making “domestic” incorporations to the canons of the aesthetics of rupture that were determined in Paris . . . In contrast to the European art, which has a slow maturation process and maintains—even in its revolutionary landmarks—an ongoing theoretical thought process, Latin American artists take sudden appropriation of the result of years of experimentation, jump over the barriers, and indiscriminately combine, juxtapose, and synthesize, thus expressing a reality and values that are completely different from the original ones. This is the beginning of our own artistic genealogy.20

Traces of a Genuine Art The existence of a Latin American expressionist repertoire can be traced through plastic elements and compositional values. With the European avant-garde, it shares the abandonment of the artistic motif and traditional painterly and compositional values—especially those referring to the use of strong and firm lines, abnormal proportions, monumentality of form, modulation and transposition of color, expressive rhythms, brushwork, and impasto. This is noticeable, for example, in works such as Homem amarelo (Yellow Man) by Anita Malfatti,21 Llamas (Llamas) by José Sabogal,22 Pareja con bicicleta (Couple with Bicycle) and La cosecha (Harvest) by Ximena Cristi,23

515

Maria Frick

Suburbios Florida (Suburbs of Florida) by José Cuneo,24 and La casa del sofá amarillo (House of the Yellow Sofa) by Carlos Gorriarena (Figure 27.3). To a greater or lesser extent, these works share many of the expressive features of Kirchner’s Half-Naked Woman with a Hat (1911) and Marzella (1910), Marc’s The Large Blue Horses (1911), Schmidt-Rottluff’s Double Portrait of S. and L. (1925), Constant Permeke’s Daily Bread (1923), and Othon Friesz’s La Ciotat 1907. But the existence of a uniquely Latin American expressionism becomes even more distinct when analyzing the array of themes chosen, which are, to a large extent, similar to those of the European movement. Latin American artists, too, addressed the representation of the individual and life outside the conventional limits of bourgeois society. Like their European counterparts, they tried to represent the disorder and suffering of psychiatric patients as in La idiota (The Idiot Woman) by Luis Felipe Noé,25 Los idiotas (The Idiots) by Iberê Camargo,26 and A boba (The Fool) by Anita Malfatti,27 and they gave prominence to erotic themes as in La haitiana (Haitian Woman) by Carlos Enríquez,28 El cerdo y su amante (The Pig and its Lover) by Leopoldo Presas,29 Amantes en interior I (Lovers in Interior I) by David Herskovitz,30 and Desnudo parado (Nude Standing) by Carlos Gorriarena.31 Much as European painters took refuge in transcendentalism in response to feelings of existential angst, Latin American artists turned to religious themes, mainly in the context of local events and the process of cultural secularization that characterized the twentieth century. Carlos Enríquez, for example, depicts crossbreeding and religious syncretism in the Antilles in works such as Virgen del Cobre (Copper Virgin),32 while Sérvulo Gutiérrez draws on elements of popular belief in his painting of Christ (Cristo).33 Eduardo Kingman addresses the religiosity of indigenous peoples in works such as Mujeres y santos (Women and Saints), Mundo sin respuesta (World Without Answer), and Devotamente (Devoutly),34 while David Alfaro Siqueiros expresses a more radical and politicized vision in El diablo en la iglesia (The Devil in Church) and Excomunión y fusilamiento del Padre Hidalgo (Excommunication and Execution of Father Hidalgo).35 Latin American expressionists also depicted the countryside and nature, as can be seen in José Cuneo Perinetti’s moon series, Cecilio Guzmán de Rojas’ series on Inca ruins, Israel Roa’s Angol landscapes, and Macedonio de la Torre’s forests. This was less in resistance to bourgeois culture and more a response to the need for representing the still unexplored national landscape; a significant example is found in Sérvulo Gutiérrez’ works devoted to the huarango, a tree of great importance to the worldview of the Peruvian people.36 Known as the “miracle of the desert,” this tree provides food and timber and was used in pre-Hispanic times for the manufacture of weapons, utensils, and religious and artistic items. Its representation thus speaks of “the survival of society, its dominion, and the settlement of many generations . . . within a hostile environment.”37 As a part of the landscape, the animal world was also depicted by Latin American artists— not as a description of the local fauna but as symbols of identity and portraits of political and social events. This would include, for example, Oscar Corcuera’s oxen, Gíldaro Antezana’s gamecocks, Carlos Enríquez’s horses, and Alejandro Obregón’s condors.38 In his work, Obregón does not propose a contemplative or idealized vision of nature; rather, he refers to it in light of his country’s political context and cultural scene.39 Colombian artist and researcher Nicolás Gómez Echeverri explains: Throughout the 1950s, a decade in which political conflicts intensified, Obregón conceived a series of symbolic elements to refer both to the landscapes that moved him and to events related to the massacres experienced by Colombia. So, there appear condors flying over mountain ranges, sometimes mixed with oxen, to designate the landscape of the Andean countries and their geographic, historic and cultural links.40 516

Expressionism in Latin America

Contributions to the Modern Discourse Latin American expressionism becomes even more distinct when we analyze artworks in the light of social and political events; the appropriation and adaption of the expressionist language to local realities and identities is revealed in a very direct way. Such works demonstrate how expressionism transmitted political and social messages of human existence in the light of the processes of modernization and the emergence and consolidation of nations. The artists particularly refer to and critically denounce human suffering due to marginalization, poverty, war, and urbanization. Thus, their work depicts the cry of the dispossessed, forgotten, ignored, or abandoned on the path toward a modern state and capitalist system. The works draw attention to social injustice and the need for a new society and model of development with the human spirit as its focal point. As in Europe, the expressionist attitude is particularly evident in works whose subject is the human figure. Paintings such as Eduardo Kingman’s Mundo sin respuesta (Unanswered World; Figure 27.5) deal with issues of anguish, loneliness, sadness, and resignation. But these are not the existential problems of the interwar European world, as in works such as Karl SchmidtRottluff’s Sinnende Frau (Reflective Woman, 1912), which expresses a sense of inner emotion and subliminal disquiet. Rather, they are directly related to the disparity of the modernization process and the need, from the artist’s point of view, for social revolution. Unlike indigenous painters, Kingman does not represent indigenous people as a symbol of national identity or the

Figure 27.5  Eduardo Kingman, Mundo sin respuesta (Unanswered World), 1975, oil on canvas, 120 × 160 cm, private collection of Soledad Kingman, Quito.  Soledad Kingman. Photograph: Jerónimo Zúñiga

517

Maria Frick

“authentic ethnicity.” On the contrary, in paintings such as Hundimiento, he emphasizes their degraded status, portraying their exploitation, despair, and suffering in contemporary Ecuador.41 A similar example is Oswaldo Guayasamin’s Páramo (Plateau, 1945–1952), in which pain and loneliness pierce the universe in allusion to the cry of the dispossessed. Works by David Alfaro Siqueiros, among them Mujer en angustia (Woman in Anguish, c. 1950), El llanto (The Cry, 1939), Víctima proletaria (Proletarian Victim, 1933), Madre niña (Girl Mother, 1936), Calles de México (Streets of Mexico, 1956), and Suficiente (Enough, 1961), and by Gíldaro Antezana, including Basura (Garbage, 1972), El aguatero (The Water Carrier, 1970), and ¿Y ustedes qué han hecho? (And What Have You Done?, 1971), deal with the same issues. Another important theme was modern life in the city, but here the focus was neither on the dynamics of the streets, as in the paintings of August Macke, nor on the feeling of displacement and violence in large cities, as in the works George Grosz, but on the dramatic experience of the people who live on the margins of urban life. Víctor Humareda’s stylization of Lima, for example, refers to the transformation that resulted from the massive migration of peasants into the city. Humareda, Peruvian researcher Raúl Rosales León maintains, appears as the representative of the provincial people who “leave the deepest Peru to face a ‘creole Lima’ that marginalizes and discriminates against them.”42 According to Rosales León, Humareda appears as the archetype for the emergence of “another modernity,” in which the indigenous migrant becomes the master of his own destiny and conquers city spaces without asking permission from the oligarchic elites or the nation state that represents them. Another example is Emiliano di Cavalcanti’s work Mangue (1929), in which the figure of the prostitute refers to the trafficking of young immigrant women who arrive in Rio de Janeiro after having been sold or deceived by their own European families.43 A similar reality is expressed in the works of Héctor Basaldúa about a Buenos Aires that is moving from large village to cosmopolitan city, with elements associated with the social imagery of the slums and modernity: compadritos, working-class people, wagons.44 A third theme that is frequently addressed is that of war. After two world wars, many European artists became more pessimistic in their outlook and were affected by a sense of tragedy and bitterness,45 as can be seen, for example, in Ludwig Meidner’s Die brennende Stadt (Burning City, 1913), Otto Dix’s Sturmtruppe geht unter Gas vor (Shok Troops Advance Under Gas) from Der Krieg (The War, 1924), and George Grosz’s Glad to Be Back (1943). A similar tendency can be found in Latin America with respect to events such as the Chaco War in Bolivia, the Mexican revolution, and Stroessner’s military dictatorship in Paraguay. Cama 33 T.B. Evacuable (Bed 33 T.B. Evacuate; Plate 31) is one of a series of works on the Chaco War painted by Cecilio Guzmán de Rojas in which he reflects on the human drama of war and the awful life of the advance parties. Although the artist previously was known for his images of a proud and triumphant indigenous people, he adopted, during this period, an expressionist style to depict the maddened faces of ungainly soldiers, haunted by loneliness, fear, and disease. These paintings show the needs and difficulties that Bolivia was facing in its civic construction, not only in military terms, but in the discernment of opponents and the acknowledgment of and control over its landscape and natural resources. Between 1924 and 1928, José Clemente Orozco did a series of oil paintings and drawings depicting a disenchanted vision of the Mexican revolution. Mexican historian Luz Mainero has suggested that in these paintings Orozco was proposing a discourse that “unveils the excesses, vices, and abuses of a society that leaves the most underprivileged people aside, depicting everything with a strong expressive force.”46 Orozco’s revolution is marked by parades of stretchers with wounded people, thunders of bells and bullets, and intrigues and factional struggles with an irrepressible desire for power and revenge.47 The artist featured a chaotic world, one 518

Expressionism in Latin America

devastated by violence, mechanization, spiritual debacle, and moral decay, and fully devoid of any sense of the then prevailing nationalist optimism. In this framework, works like La Cucaracha 1 (Cockroach I, 1928) suggest “the animalistic revolutionary movement: saturated with acts of robbery, plunder, barbarity, looting and murder.”48 Another case is that of Olga Blinder, whose works, among them Miedo (Fear; Figure 27.4), took on a clearly political sense of commitment and denunciation in the 1960s. As Paraguayan painter Osvaldo Salerno described it: Olga Blinder did an engraving entitled Miedo, which in that context could only refer to the situation of fear, insecurity and shock experienced by citizens. Her xylographic series boldly entitled El torturado (1963) addresses without euphemism the issue of torture, which was already established as a repressive practice and information strategy . . . In 1970, the engraving Espía also points openly to the shameful and sinister figure of the informer or pyragüe, an essential device of the dictatorship’s information system . . . In 1975, the artist came up with the work Ser, which reiterates the figure of ill-treated political prisoners.49 A similar focus is visible is the series Federal (1959–1961) by Luis Felipe Noé, which addresses the dictatorial times reign of Juan Manuel de Rosas, in Argentina, or later, Incendio en el Jockey Club (Fire at the Jockey Club, 1963), which refers to the attack perpetrated by Peronist demonstrators in 1953. There are also the depictions of the Cuban artist Carlos Enríquez, who denounced the unfortunate living conditions of many peasant families in the Republican period (1902–1958) in works such as the cynically titled Campesinos felices (Happy Peasants, 1938). Likewise, the series El matadero (Slaughterhouse, 1987; Figure 27.6) and Ulmen (2011; a Mapudungun word meaning “rich man”), by Argentine Duilio Perri, depict the genocide of the indigenous Mapuche during the desert campaign, while the series Los Machu Machus (The Machu Machus, 1971) by Bolivian Gíldaro Antezana refer to the dictatorship of Hugo Banzer. Further relevant works include La guerra (War, 1943) by Ricardo Grau, Presagio (Omen, 1972) by Ximena Cristi, and Hombre gato y dos aves (Cat-Man and Two Birds, 1986) by María Teresa Vieco. Beyond the absence of collective strategies or aesthetic groupings, expressionism in Latin America has made a traceable contribution to the representation of reality and the search for a new cultural and political identity. As in other regions, at various moments, Latin American expressionist painters have highlighted the painful human experience as a consequence of the modern discourse and the processes of industrialization, urbanization, rationalization, and secularization; they have pointed out and criticized these aspects of regional development and called for a different society, one reaffirming the humanist ideal.

Final Remarks My discussion has shown that expressionist influences were at work among a number of painters in Latin America, influences that, beyond their natural coexistence among diverse local movements and groups, can be seen as part of a larger, international expressionist movement. Expressionism clearly influenced the ideas and expressive modalities of these artists, as well as their attitudes and values regarding modernity. In this sense, the existence of a Latin American expressionism comprising the artistic and cultural milieu of the countries in the region can be postulated. And despite being neither collectively organized nor strongly opposed to the established art institutions, these artists used expressionist means and instruments to insert political and social messages into local debates on culture and identity; they appropriated and reinterpreted 519

Maria Frick

the plastic elements and aesthetic principles of European expressionism to represent the reality of their own countries and the challenges posed, in human terms, by the modernization process; and they used expressionist language to overcome traditional models in art and the political discourse of modernity, particularly with respect to the role of people and human suffering in this developmental process. This was possible because of the transatlantic ties and communities that enabled longdistance exchanges between the various regions and artistic and cultural movements. More specifically, this took place through the establishment of relationships, transfers, and connections resulting from the travels and migrations of artists between the Old and New World. The existence of complex networks of relationships can be empirically traced; they usually started with a transatlantic contact and then resulted in numerous associations that—although not always definitive—took place both within and among the countries of the region, and also within or among various generations of artists. In terms of artistic themes, it is clear that Latin American artists appropriated ideas and formative principles of European expressionism in accordance with their own intentions and expressionist and representational needs within the framework of local debates on culture and national identity. That is, they adapted general principles of expressionism to the creation of a new and singular art that represented their own desires and utopias given the objective conditions of

Figure 27.6  Diulio Pierri, El retorno de los restos (The Return of the Remains), from the series El matadero (The Slaughterhouse), 1987, oil on canvas, 278 × 160 cm, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires.  Diulio Pierri

520

Expressionism in Latin America

their place of production. Thus, Latin American expressionism neither copies nor addresses the position of European artists regarding the change of an era or the cultural renovations of the avant-gardes, but focuses on the reality of its people in the light of the process of modernization, emergence, and consolidation of the nations. In this sense, it incorporates and adapts the pictorial solutions developed by European painters to channel political and social messages about the human condition that could influence the path of nations toward political and economic development.

Notes 1 Stella Teixeira and Ivo Mesquita, Expressionismo no Brasil: Heranças e Afinidades, parte da 18a Bienal de São Paulo—O homem e a vida [Expressionism in Brazil: Inheritances and Affinities, part of the 18th Biennial of São Paulo “Man and life”] (São Paulo: Imprensa Oficial do Estado, 1985; exh. cat.), 13. 2 Jorge Romero Brest, La pintura europea contemporánea (1900–1950) [Contemporary European Painting (1900–1950)] (Mexico, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1958). 3 Octavio Paz, Essays on Mexican Art, translated by Helen Lane (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1993), 119. 4 Teixeira and Mesquita, Expressionismo no Brasil, 18. 5 Ramón Gutiérrez and Rodrigo Gutiérrez Viñuales, Historia del Arte Iberoamericano [History of IberoAmerican Art] (Madrid; Barcelona: Lunwerg, 2000), 326–327. 6 María José Herrera,“Los años setenta y ochenta en el arte argentino. Entre la utopia, el silencio y la reconstrucción” [The Seventies and Eighties in Argentine Art: Between Utopia, Silence and Reconstruction], in Arte, política y sociedad (volume I) [Art, Politics and Society, vol. I], ed. José Emilio Burucúa (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1999), 159–160. 7 Margarita Vila, “La influencia de las vanguardias en el arte boliviano del siglo XX” [The Influence of the Avant-Garde in Bolivian Art of the 20th Century], Revista Ciencia y Cultura [Journal of Science and Culture] 4 (December 1998), last accessed August 20, 2017, www.scielo.org.bo/pdf/rcc/n4/a03.pdf. 8 Marcelo Rodríguez Meza,“La constante expresionista en la pintura chilena” [The Constant Expressionist in Chilean Painting], in Arte y crisis en Iberoamérica: segundas Jornadas de Historia del Arte [Art and Crisis in Ibero-America: Second Conference of Art History], ed. Fernando Guzmán Schiappacasse, Gloria Cortés Aliaga, and Juan Manuel Martínez Silva (Santiago de Chile: RIL Editores, 2004), 315. 9 Compañía Central De Seguros, ed., Arte y artistas de Colombia: una contribución a la divulgación del arte nacional [Art and Artists from Colombia: A Contribution to the Dissemination of National Art] (Bogota: G. Páez D., 1972), 33. 10 Jorge López Anaya, Historia del arte argentino [History of Argentine Art] (Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1997), 271. 11 Sergio Miceli, “Artistas ‘nacional-extranjeros’ en la vanguardia sudamericana (Lasar Segall y Xul Solar)” [“National-Foreign Artists” in the South American Avant-Garde (Lasar Segall and Xul Solar], Prismas Revista de historia intellectual [Prismas Journal of Intellectual History] 13(2) (2009): 176. 12 Olga Fernández, “Notas sobre un relato migrante: vanguardias artísticas entre Latinoamérica y España” [Notes on a Migrant Story:Artistic Avant-Gardes between Latin America and Spain], lecture at the international conference “Encuentros Transatlánticos: discursos vanguardistas en España y Latinoamérica” [Transatlantic Meetings: Avant-Garde Speeches in Spain and Latin America], July 11–13, 2013, Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, last accessed December 11, 2017, www.museoreinasofia.es/multimedia/notassobre-relato-migrante-vanguardias-artisticas-entre-latinoamerica-espana. 13 Ticio Escobar, “Texto de Ticio Escobar” [Text by Ticio Escobar], in Pasión docente y vocación plástica: Olga Blinder [Passion for Teaching and Plastic Vocation: Olga Blinder], ed. Josefina Pla (Asuncion: Centro Cultural de España Juan Salazar, 2007). 14 Corinne Pernet,“La cultura como política: los intercambios culturales entre Europa y América Latina en los años de entreguerras” [Culture as Politics: Cultural Exchanges between Europe and Latin America in the Interwar Years], Journal Puente@Europa, year 5(3–4) (2007), last accessed December 14, 2017, www. alexandria.unisg.ch/60884. 15 Eric Hobsbawn, Historia del siglo XX: 1914–1991 [History of the 20th Century: 1914–1991] (Barcelona: Editorial Grijalbo Mondadori, 1997), 195.

521

Maria Frick 16 “Comprendían que resultaba absurdo interpretar el paisaje humano y natural cubano con fórmulas surgidas de otras realidades geográficas, culturales y, so- bre todo, temporales . . . Tampoco debía reducirse la cuestión al establecimiento de una temática cubana . . . Había que buscar, pues, las esencias den tro de uno mismo y abandonar la reproducción más o me- nos exaltada y novedosa de las apariencias exteriores. Ello comportaba numerosos y arduos problemas pictóricos que obligaban a incorporarse a las nuevas corrientes estéticas. Los pintores más inquietos se dirigieron a París, centro mundial de experimentos y descubrimientos pictóricos, en busca de medios aptos a resolver sus problemas.” Marcelo Pogolotti, La república a través de sus escritores [The Republic through Its Writers] (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 2002), 157, last accessed December 14, 2017, www.encaribe.org/ Files/Personalidades/marcelo-pogolotti/texto/La%20republica%20al%20traves%20de%20sus%20 escritores.pdf. 17 “Hacer un arte propio, raizal, era una afirmación que se repetía con insistencia. La idea de modernidad se ligaba a la preocupación por lo nuevo, pero esa noción de novedad reflejaba una actitud alejada de la simple apropiación, para destacar un fuerte sentido de autoafirmación. No se trataba de importar modelos sino de proponer uno que fuera más allá de la incorporación de modas externas, reencontrando aquellos aspectos que lo distinguiera frente al otro. De allí la indagación en torno a temas como el pasado indígena, la herencia africana, el paisaje, procurando que fuera su propio espacio el que le diera las bases para crear.” Ivonne Pini, “Arte latinoamericano desde 1930 hasta la actualidad” [Latin American Art from 1930 to the Present], in Historia general de América Latina VIII: América Latina desde 1930 [General History of Latin America VIII: Latin America since 1930], ed. Marcos Palacio (Paris: UNESCO Publishing, 2008), 502. 18 Sandra de la Fuente and Diana Wechsler, “La Teoría de la Vanguardia: del centro a la periferia” [The Theory of the Avant-Garde: From the Center to the Periphery] (lecture presented at the V Jornadas de Teoría e Historia de las Artes [V Conference on Theory and History of the Arts] at the Centro Argentino de Investigaciones de Arte Centro [Argentine Center of Art Researchers], Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1993), 52, last accessed December 14, 2017, www.caia.org.ar/docs/06_de%20la%20 Fuente-Wechsler.pdf. 19 Laureano Gómez,“El expresionismo como síntoma de pereza e inhabilidad en el arte” [Expressionism as a Symptom of Laziness and Inability in Art], Revista Colombiana [Columbian Journal] 85(VIII) (January 1937): 385. 20 “La vanguardia pictórica latinoamericana está marcada por una brillante creatividad, importantes novedades, innegables influencias e inteligentes respuestas a los centros hegemónicos y, al mismo tiempo, por un volverse a sí mismos inspirándose en las culturas autóctonas, creando novedades, haciendo incorporaciones ‘nacionales’ a los cánones de esa estética de ruptura que se dictaban en París . . . En contraste con el arte europeo, que tiene un lento proceso de maduración y que conserva, aún en sus hitos revolucionarios, una continuidad de pensamiento teórico, los artistas latinoamericanos se apropian de golpe del fruto de años de experimentación, saltan las barreras y combinan, yuxtaponen, sintetizan indiscriminadamente, expresando una realidad y valores totalmente diferentes de los originales. Es el comienzo de nuestra propia genealogía artística.” Irma Arestizábal, “Cubismos y arte moderno en América Latina: Años 20” [Cubisms and Modern Art in Latin America: 20s], in El cubismo y sus entornos en las colecciones de Telefónica [Cubism and Its Surroundings in Telefónica’s Collections] (Madrid: Fundación Telefónica, 2005), 46. 21 Anita Malfatti, Homem amarelo, 1915–1916, oil on canvas, 61 × 51 cm, Mário de Andrade Collection, Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros da Universidade de São Paulo (SP) [Institute of Brazilian Studies of the University of San Pablo], São Paulo, Brazil. 22 José Sabogal, Llamas, n.d., oil on canvas, 75 × 75 cm, Museo del Banco Central de Reserva del Perú, Lima, Perú. 23 Ximena Cristi, Pareja con bicicleta, n.d., oil on canvas, 82 × 65 cm, Galería del Cerro, Santiago, Chile. 24 José Cuneo, Suburbios de Florida, 1931, oil on wood, 73 × 100 cm, Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales Cerro, Montevideo, Uruguay. 25 Luis Felipe Noé, La idiota, 1960, mixed media on canvas, 190 × 100 cm, private collection, Buenos Aires, Argentina. 26 Iberê Camargo, Los idiotas, 1991, oil on canvas, 200 × 250 cm, Fundação Iberê Camargo, Porto Alegre, Brazil. 27 Anita Malfatti, A boba, 1917, oil on canvas, 61 × 50 cm, Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidad de São Paulo Camargo, Brazil.

522

Expressionism in Latin America 28 Carlos Enríquez, La haitiana, 1945, oil on wood, 30 × 50 cm, Cernuda Arte, Coral Gables, Florida, United States. 29 Leopoldo Presas, El cerdo y su amante, 1960, oil on cardboard, 122 × 138 cm, Museo de Arte de las Américas, Organización de los Estados Americanos, Washington DC, USA. 30 David Herskovitz, Amantes en interior I, 1982, oil on canvas, 188 × 238 cm, private collection. 31 Carlos Gorriarena, Desnudo parado, 2000, mixed media on canvas, 70 × 50 cm, private collection. 32 Carlos Enríquez, Virgen del Cobre, c. 1933, oil on canvas, 72 × 50.5 cm, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, La Habana, Cuba. 33 Sérvulo Gutiérrez, Cristo, 1961, oil on nordex, 46 × 36 cm, private collection of Benjamin Roca de la Jara, Lima, Peru. 34 Eduardo Kingman, Mujeres y santos, 1953, oil on canvas, 0.60 × 0.70 cm, La Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, Quito, Ecuador; Devotamente, 1991, oil on canvas, 70 × 90 cm, private collection of Soledad Kingman. 35 David Alfaro Siqueiros, El diablo en la iglesia, 1947, pyroxylin, 218 × 156 cm, National Institute of Fine Arts, Mexico, Mexico and Excomunión y fusilamiento del Padre Hidalgo (mural), 1953, vinolite and pyroxylin on masonite, 300 × 300 cm, University Cultural Center, Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, Morelia, Mexico. 36 El Comercio S.A., Maestros de la pintura peruana: Sérvulo Guetiérrez [Masters of Peruvian Painting: Sérvulo Guetiérrez] (Lima: Punto y Coma Editores, 2010), 30, 75, 76, 80, 87. 37 Víctor Acosta, “Los huarangos de Sérvulo Gutiérrez” [The Huarangos of Sérvulo Gutiérrez], Zonas Áridas [Arid Zones] 12(1) (2008): 218. 38 See, for example, Alejandro Obregón, Condor I, 1989, oil on canvas, 173 × 170 cm, Galería El Museo, Bogotá, Colombia. 39 Clemencia Arango, “El regreso de Obregón” [The Return of Obregon], Revista Diners [Diners Magazine] 378 (2001), n.p., last accessed December 14, 2017, www.colarte.com/colarte/ConsPintores. asp? idartista=11&pest=critica&pagact=1&dirpa=%24%241col%24%24recuentos%24%241col%24%2 4O%24%241col%24%24ObregonAlejandro%24%241col%24%24Expo2001%2Ehtml. 40 “A lo largo de la década de 1950, una década donde el conflicto político se vio recrudecido, Obregón concibió una serie de elementos simbólicos para referirse tanto a los paisajes que lo conmovían como a los hechos inscritos en el itinerario de masacres que vivía Colombia. Entonces aparecen los cóndores sobrevolando cordilleras, algunas veces fusionándose con toros, para designar el paisaje de los países andinos y sus vínculos geográficos, históricos y culturales.” Nicolás Gómez Echeverri, “Alejandro Obregón—Violencia” [Alejando Obregón—Violence], in Textos sobre la Colección de Arte del Banco de la República [Texts on the Art Collection of the Bank of the Republic] (Bogota: Banco de la República, 2011). 41 Michele Greet, “Pintar la nación indígena como una estrategia modernista en la obra de Eduardo Kingman” [Painting the Indigenous Nation as a Modernist Strategy in the Work of Eduardo Kingman], Procesos Revista Ecuatoriana de Historia [Procesos, Ecuadorian History Journal] 25 (2007): 93–119. 42 Raúl Rosales León, “Humareda no es cholo: entre la promesa chola y el baile de los que sobran” [Humareda is Not Cholo: Between the Cholo Promise and the Dance of the Remaining], in Dispersión Revista electrónica [Dispersión Electronic Journal] 8, year III, ISSN 1811–847X (2006), www.ipside.org/ dispersion/2006-8/8_rosales.pdf, last accessed March 31, 2016. 43 Florencia Garramuño, “La modernidad en tránsito de Lasar Segall” [The In-Transit Modernity of Lasar Segall], in Revue ARTELOGIE: Dossier thématique: Brésil, questions sur le modernisme [Review ARTELOGIE: Focus: Brazil, Questions about Modernism] 1 (2011): 121–133. 44 “Pinacoteca del Ministerio de Educación” [Art Gallery of the Ministry of Education], Ministerio de Educación de la República Argentina, last accessed March 31, 2016, www.artedelaargentina.com.ar/artista. php?id=1&id_art=51. 45 = Hobsbawn, Historia del siglo XX, 192. 46 Luz Mainero, “El muralismo y la Revolución Mexicana” [Muralism and the Mexican Revolution] (Mexico D.F.: Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de las Revoluciones de México—INEHRM, 2011). 47 Kenia Aubry, “Caricatura política, episodios revolucionarios y prostitutas: una singularidad ideológica vuelta imagen” [Political Caricature, Revolutionary Episodes and Prostitutes: An Ideological Singularity Turned Image], ULÚA. Revista de Historia Sociedad y Cultura [ULUA, Journal of History, Society and Culture] 4, year 2 (2004): 21.

523

Maria Frick 48 Ibid., 23. 49 “Ya en 1959, poco tiempo después de haber subido Stroessner al poder y de haber llegado el arte moderno al Paraguay, Olga Blinder realizó un grabado titulado ‘Miedo’, que en ese contexto no podía sino referirse a la situación de temor, inseguridad y sobresalto sufrida por la ciudadanía. Sus xilografías llamadas osadamente ‘El torturado’, 1963, tratan sin ningún eufemismo el tema del suplicio que ya estaba instalado como práctica represiva y como estrategia de información . . . en 1970, el grabado ‘Espía’ señala, también sin tapujos, la figura vergonzosa y siniestra del informante o pyragüe, un dispositivo fundamental del sistema de informaciones de la dictadura . . . En 1975, la artista realiza la obra ‘Ser’, que reitera la figura de los prisioneros políticos maltratados.” Osvaldo Salerno, “Los archivos de la imagen: el arte en los tiempos de Stroessner” [The Archives of the Image: The Art in the Times of Stroessner], in Paraguay: los archivos del terror [Paraguay: The Archives of Terror], ed. Alfredo Boccia, Rosa Palay, and Osvaldo Salerno (Asunción: Editorial Servilibro, 2008), 89.

524

28 THE EXPRESSIONIST ROOTS OF SOUTH AFRICAN MODERNISM Lisa Hörstmann

South African modernism was greatly influenced by the expressionist painters Irma Stern (1894–1966) and Maggie Laubser (1886–1973). Born to immigrant families in South Africa, both studied and lived for a time in Germany, where the two women developed a new pictorial language that departed from the German expressionism and primitivism of artists such as Max Pechstein and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Upon their return to South Africa, in the early 1920s, they attempted to introduce this new mode of painting into the conservative South African art scene, but were met at first with almost complete rejection. Irma Stern, in particular, sedulously fought against the intractable resistance of her peers to new ideas and is now commonly considered the pioneer of South African modernism. Her paintings, which exoticized Southern Africa’s black population, paved the way for other modernists and especially women artists to establish themselves in the country’s art scene. The lack of any male artists working in modern styles in South Africa when Stern and Laubser began to exhibit their expressionist works allowed them to eventually thrive in an environment that typically marginalized women artists. It is also likely that their confidence was further strengthened by the concept of the “new woman” that emerged in Weimar Germany at that time and which promoted greater independence and professionalization of women. Stern, for example, is said to have been influenced in her work and lifestyle by the expressionist poet Else LaskerSchüler, who led an autonomous life. My essay pursues this line of thought further. In addition, I will relate how Wolf Kibel (1903–1938), who migrated from Lithuania via Vienna and Tel Aviv to South Africa in the early 1930s, introduced a form of expressionism derivative of the French tradition into the country’s art scene. Finally, I look at the primitivist tendencies within South African expressionism and show how they were employed in a new national current within South African art. This can best be seen in the development of Stern’s and Laubser’s careers as well as in those of two other settler expressionists influenced by the two women: Belgian artist Maurice van Essche (1906–1977), who arrived from the Belgian Congo in 1940, and Pranas Domšaitis (1880–1965), a German-Lithuanian expressionist who came to South Africa in 1948.

South Africa’s Art Scene in the Early Twentieth Century To understand the problems that Stern and Laubser faced in pursuing their expressionist ideals, it is vital to start with a description of the South African art scene at the beginning of the twentieth 525

Lisa Hörstmann

century. Foremost, it was characterized by an almost fanatical adherence to British romantic naturalism as the only true art form and by the presence of a large group of amateur artists. The first already hints at the importance of European ideals. According to the most prominent chronicler of the history of South African art, Esmé Berman (also a woman, significantly), “the first Western painters that the country knew were visitors attracted by the call of the exotic— explorers, chroniclers, and topographical reporters, for whom painting was usually a useful accomplishment rather than a creative medium of expression.”1 Their works were intended mainly for the European audience at home. In 1851, the first art exhibition was held in Cape Town—with almost exclusively European works on display and close to 3,000 viewers in attendance.2 In 1902, the South African Society of Artists was founded, its membership a mix of white South Africans and European settlers,3 most of whom were autodidacts or amateurs4 and generally unaware of developments in the European art centers.5 Granted, in Europe, too, artists were only just beginning to become aware of art production in other parts of the world;6 however, European artists had their own artistic traditions upon which to build. South African artists lacked such a basis, I would argue; they were still pursuing a romantic naturalism (with Cape impressionism only a very small deviation from this) that had been taught at English art academies in the nineteenth century and which was firmly inculcated by the British in most of their colonies as “good taste.”7 This became the South African tradition, and until the efforts of Irma Stern and Maggie Laubser were finally broadly acknowledged in the 1940s, no actual progression was tolerated.8 The person who saw to this most critically was the English painter Edward Roworth (1880–1964), who had been educated at London’s Slade School and had come to South Africa in 1902 with the British forces engaged in the Second Anglo-Boer War. He gained more and more power by occupying posts such as president of the South African Society of Artists, director of the South African National Gallery, and head of the Michaelis School of Art, which he held for more than thirty years. By the time Stern and Laubser returned to Cape Town, he was already firmly in control of the national art scene as well as public opinion about what could be considered art.9

Irma Stern and Maggie Laubser: Two Pioneers of South African Modernism Irma Stern was the daughter of German Jews who had immigrated to the Transvaal area in the late nineteenth century. She spent her life and career between Africa and Europe and purposefully made use of these transnational links to establish herself as a successful artist. By the age of eighteen, Stern had spent exactly half of her life in Germany and half in South Africa. She studied at the Großherzoglich-Sächsische Kunstschule (Grand Ducal Saxon Art School) in Weimar from 1913 to late 1914, when she moved on to study with Martin Brandenburg at the Lewin-Funcke-Studio in Berlin. She decided to stop her formal training in 1916 after her teacher, Martin Brandenburg, disapproved of her new interest in expressionist styles exhibited in her work Eternal Child—a portrait of a little girl marked by the deprivations of war (Figure 28.1);10 shortly thereafter she met Max Pechstein, who was very much taken by her new work.11 The two artists felt an immediate connection due to their similar imagery and interest in primitivist subjects.12 The parallels in their work can be seen when comparing works such as Pechstein’s 1910 painting Sitzendes Mädchen (Sitting Girl; in the collection of the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin) and Stern’s 1924 work Playing Children (Plate 32). Pechstein introduced Stern into Berlin’s expressionist circles, where she was able to position herself as an “authentic” African artist and connoisseur of “primitive” cultures, a theme with which many of the important artists were working at the time. Her pictures of black women whom she claimed 526

South African Modernism

Figure 28.1  Irma Stern, Eternal Child, 1916, oil on board, 73.7 × 43.2 cm, Rupert Foundation

she had grown up among demonstrated her superiority to her German colleagues, who knew their subjects only from occasional travels or from ethnological museums. The press took this up as well, frequently mentioning her special role as an “African” artist and hence often attributing to her a greater genuineness than even to Gauguin or Pechstein.13 This gave a substantial boost to her career and she became a founding member of the influential Novembergruppe (November Group) in 1918. A year later, she had her first solo exhibition, at Wolfgang Gurlitt’s gallery, which also represented the Brücke artists. In 1920, Stern returned to South Africa and took up residence in Cape Town. In 1922, she had her first exhibition at Ashbey’s Gallery, which she boldly called “An Exhibition of Modern Art by Miss Irma Stern.” It was the first time the word “modern” had been used in reference to South African art, and this as well as her following exhibitions received an extremely negative response from the conservative South African art scene under Edward Roworth.14 Before the rise of National Socialism, Stern often returned to Germany, where she continued to exhibit, and traveled as well to other European countries until the outbreak of the Second World War. She used these occasions to further propagate her image as an “authentic African” artist. For the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung (Great Berlin Art Exhibition) in 1927, 1928, and 1929, she chose works such as Markt in Lorenço Marques (Market in Lorenço Marques), Zulu-Frauen (Zulu Women), and Negermädchen mit Frucht (Negro Girl with Fruit).15 In 1927, the German art historian Max Osborn published a monograph on Stern in the series Junge Kunst (Young Art), which had also included editions on Picasso and Pechstein.16 The fact that the monograph included an English translation of the German text (the Picasso book, for 527

Lisa Hörstmann

example, was only in German) shows that the publishers already had a South African audience in mind. In South Africa, Stern’s legitimization through her European success even caused local newspapers to reproduce word-for-word translations of her German critiques.17 Additionally, Osborn’s monograph contributed to Stern’s exoticizing as he wrote (with great exaggeration): With the exception of a few trips to Europe there was no time in which she did not find herself surrounded by dark peoples, by the woods, gardens and mountains, the nature which she tried to reproduce in her paintings and drawings. And this it is which has given her an individual position in the art world.18 Stern was also aware that it was not easy for women of her time to successfully establish themselves within the European art centers. In her article “How I Began to Paint,” published in Cape Argus on July 12, 1926, she wrote that she considered it a great honor to have been invited by Pechstein to become one of the founding members of the Novembergruppe—together with only one other female sculptor. In this clever self-portrayal that was largely appropriated and reproduced by the press, she also describes the strong support given to her by Pechstein and thereby increased her credibility in Germany as well as in South Africa.19 Most exhibition reviews still portrayed her as an autonomous artist who was developing in an independent direction beyond Pechstein’s range of influence.20 This was especially unusual for women artists of the time as they were usually accused of “imitating” their male colleagues and not being able to produce anything original.21 It is likely that in this case Stern is an exception because she was able to set herself apart from even major European expressionists due to her positioning as an “authentic African” artist. At that time, male African artists working in an expressionist manner were virtually non-existent. When comparing Stern to another South African woman expressionist, it becomes obvious how successful this strategy was. A few years older than Stern, Maggie Laubser began her artistic career later in life. This was probably because the conservative farming community in which she grew up did not support women in learning a profession.22 Laubser studied painting in Cape Town—for a short time under Edward Roworth—and became a member of the amateur South African Society of Artists in 1907. As her works did not generate any financial success, she soon moved back to her parents until her admirer Jan Hendrik Arnold Balwé provided her with financial support to go to Europe in 1913 to study there. Laubser attended classes at London’s Slade School from 1914 to 1919; after longer sojourns in Belgium, Northern Italy, and South Africa, she moved to Berlin in 1922,23 where she stayed until her return to South Africa in 1924. Like Stern, Laubser, too, was attracted to German expressionism and formed a friendship with Brücke artist Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.24 This friendship is likely to have led to Laubser’s temporary engagement with the woodcut medium; between 1922 and 1926, she produced a number of woodcuts, among them Landscape with Harvesters in Wheatfield (Figure 28.2). The woodcut medium, which was very unusual in South Africa at the time, must have fit well with her interest in primitivism. Béchie Paul N’guessan reasonably argues that the use of wood, a so-called “primitive” material, places expressionist woodcuts in the vicinity of African carvings.25 The woodcut medium also corresponded well with Laubser’s flat style of painting in which she usually hems areas of bright color with black outlines. Laubser’s possession of one of Schmidt-Rottluff’s woodcuts further points to him as a source of inspiration.26 In contrast to Stern, however, Laubser denied any influence by Schmidt-Rottluff or any other artist, as her autonomy was especially important to her.27 She did not even think that art could or should be taught.28 Unlike Stern, she also did not position herself as “authentically 528

South African Modernism

Figure 28.2  Maggie Laubser, Landscape with Harvesters in Wheatfield, 1926, woodcut, 17.5 × 12.5 cm, Sanlam Foundation.  The Estate of Maggie Laubser/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016

African” in Europe, or as a connoisseur of the European avant-gardes in South Africa. Laubser’s success subsequently came a lot slower than Stern’s because of this, but this may have been in accordance with her own strategy. The Laubser Collection at the University of Stellenbosch’s J.S. Gericke Library contains several journals that Laubser bought during her time in Germany. Among them is a 1922 edition of the German journal Cicerone containing an article by Wilhelm Hausenstein on the expressionist painter Richard Seewald. The works reproduced remind one very much of some of Laubser’s later animal works that also show parallels to Franz Marc’s animal studies (for example, Figure 28.3). The text is very informative as well, since Hausenstein describes Seewald as a “naïve” boy without any formal training, who does not follow a specific style but simply develops his art out of himself, nature, and his Christian beliefs.29 Laubser, too, was very much influenced by the Christian faith—Christian Science, to be exact—but also the natural environment of her parents’ farm, Oortmanspost.30 The considerable parallels suggest that Laubser was likely influenced by Hausenstein’s text, which she read at the very beginning of her modernist career, and wished to position herself within the same discourse. This strategy is closely related to what she believed to be the essence of art: feeling, expression of nature’s beauty, spiritual transcendence.31 This certainly explains why she would repeatedly assert her alleged autonomy from styles, schools, or individual artists, and the natural immediacy of her work,32 even though it meant that she would find a broader audience for her art only from the late 1930s onward, when Stern had already done the pioneering work and paved the way for further expressionists in South Africa. 529

Lisa Hörstmann

Figure 28.3  Maggie Laubser, Landscape with Cows, Fields and Mountains/Landskap met koei, n.d., oil on cardboard, 34 × 43 cm, Sanlam Foundation.  The Estate of Maggie Laubser/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016

The “New Women” in South Africa It is unusual that this pioneering work was the accomplishment of two women artists.33 One reason certainly is that there were no male artists working in a modernist style in South Africa at the time. Another reason might be that Stern and Laubser typified the image of the “new woman” that was gaining momentum in Weimar Germany in the 1920s. So far, this idea has not been properly explored. True, Arnold does call Stern a “representative of the ‘new woman’” in her essay on South African women painters, but she does not explain this in any detail or contextualize the concept.34 During the First World War, the professionalization of women and the successes of the women’s rights movements induced women in Weimar Germany to leave the private home and gradually enter the public sphere; this was also the case for female artists. In his prominent reaction to the feminist movement, Die Frau und die Kunst (Woman and Art) of 1908, German art critic Karl Scheffler wrote that to a man, a woman is always a servant or saint, but never a comrade.35 He considered women incapable of any creative act or even being able to truly understand art.36 In contrast to this, German art historian Hans Hildebrandt, in his 1928 book, Die Frau als Künstlerin (Woman as Artist), defended female artists distinguishing themselves as “new women” from their male colleagues.37 In feminist studies, the “new woman” is universally considered a construction whose basic idea stems from women’s emancipation movements but which has since been coopted by the advertising and media industries.38 Thus, women gained a social position that was, on the one 530

South African Modernism

hand, characterized by greater sexual and professional independence, but on the other hand was still mainly subject to an idealization of their role as wives and mothers. In line with this, Hildebrandt wrote that the ideal woman artist is mainly characterized by her innate social instinct as mother and housewife.39 I would like to emphasize that the “new woman” was not simply an identity constructed and imposed on women by society but also one that women helped shape and adopted themselves. As I have already noted, Stern was very aware of the mechanisms excluding female artists from the international art scene and tried to counteract them by stylizing herself as an “authentic African” artist.40 At the Great Berlin Art Exhibitions of 1927, 1928, and 1929, she exhibited in the section curated by Käthe Kollwitz’s Frauenkunstverband (Women’s Art Association) and kept up a long-lasting friendship with the association’s second chairwoman, German sculptor Katharina Heise.41 Neville Dubow, founding director of the Irma Stern Museum in Cape Town and one of her most influential biographers, compares Stern to the expressionist poet Else Lasker-Schüler, who, like Stern, was Jewish.42 According to the German art historian and Stern researcher Irene Below, Stern was not only influenced by Lasker-Schüler’s style of writing and drawing, but also saw her as a role model for an autonomous and unconventional Jewish women making her art her purpose in life.43 Although Below does not offer any proof for this assumption, it is known that Stern owned works by Lasker-Schüler and the characterization certainly captures the life she led.44 The latter can also be said of Maggie Laubser. Early in her career, she rejected her benefactor and friend J. H. A. Balwé’s proposal to marry him because she considered her art more important.45 She stuck to this conviction throughout her life. A note in the diary of the influential cartoonist D. C. Boonzaier (1965–1950) shows just how unusual this was considered for women artists at the time. After visiting Laubser at her parents’ farm in October 1925, he writes: Maggie Laubser has had a romantic and interesting career in Europe, where she subsequently spent a number of years, learning more of love than of art, as far as I can gather . . . If a girl goes to Europe to “study art” . . . her career there can only have one ending, the old, old one. It has been so with her and it will be so with all those who come after her. Well, her little romance has ended—the man died . . . But she would not be a woman if her head is not stuffed also with many foolish and childish ideas, to which alas she clings obstinately.46 A few years earlier he had visited Irma Stern in her studio and written, “Poor Irma Stern! In a few years you will forget all about art as so many other women have done and no one will trouble about your nude girl with the strange crescent breasts.”47 These quotes show clearly what little standing women artists had in South Africa’s patriarchal art scene of the 1920s. Boonzaier was accompanied by other influential men such as Edward Roworth, who in the late 1930s told his students at the Michaelis School of Art that the internationally successful painter Cecil Higgs (1898–1986) was “a little girl from Stellenbosch who can neither paint nor draw.”48 The fact that these women were still successful and able to lead the way for many others to come is due to their efforts to introduce modernist styles not already occupied by male South African artists, but also the professionalism with which they pursued their careers—a professionalism reinforced by the Weimarian concept of the “new woman.”

Other Modernists: Wolf Kibel, Maurice van Essche, and Pranas Domšaitis Among those in South Africa who followed Stern and Laubser in their fight for modernism were three prominent settler expressionists: Wolf Kibel from Poland, Maurice van Essche 531

Lisa Hörstmann

Figure 28.4  Wolf Kibel, Interior with Bed, n.d., oil on canvas, 31 × 67 cm, Sanlam Foundation

from Belgium, and Pranas Domšaitis from Lithuania. The Jewish painter Wolf Kibel fled from pogroms organized by Polish nationalists in 1923. He intended to make his way to Paris on foot but had to break off his flight in Vienna, where many refugees were living after the AustroHungarian Empire’s demise following the First World War. His situation there was extremely precarious, however, and he left for Palestine in 1924, as he did not have the papers that would allow him to continue his journey to Paris. This period saw the arrival of many European artists in Palestine, thus a thriving artistic exchange existed in the country.49 Kibel was mainly interested in Eastern European expressionists such as Chaim Soutine and Marc Chagall, even though the latter was considered a “romantic” by his Tel Aviv colleagues (who at the time fanatically adored Paul Cézanne).50 In the late 1920s, Kibel received Palestinian citizenship, and in 1929 moved on to Cape Town where his brother was living. He brought a different branch of expressionism with him that differed slightly from the German derivations pursued by Stern and Laubser.51 Soutine’s influence especially is obvious throughout Kibel’s oeuvre and can, for example, be seen in works such as Interior with Bed (Figure 28.4) or Nude Study (Figure 28.5), both undated. They are highly personal and affecting depictions that follow the expressionist tradition of rendering a subjective reality. Unfortunately, Kibel died very young (age thirty-four), in 1938, and thus did not live to see the fruits of his or his predecessors’ efforts. Belgian painter Maurice van Essche was very much influenced by Stern and Laubser. In 1924, he studied at the Brussels Academy of Fine Art under James Ensor and received support from the Belgian government to go on a study trip to the Belgian Congo in 1939. The occupation of Belgium by German troops in 1940 left him in colonial exile and van Essche subsequently decided to move on to South Africa, as the Congolese climate did not agree with him.52 He took on Stern’s and Laubser’s struggle for a change in the conservative South African art scene and became a significant member of the modernist movement. In 1943, he joined the 532

South African Modernism

Figure 28.5  Wolf Kibel, Nude Study, n.d., oil on canvas on board, 29 × 19.5 cm, Sanlam Foundation

very influential New Group, which had been founded five years earlier by modernists such as D. C.’s son Gregoire Boonzaier (1909–2005), Lippy Lipshitz (1903–1980), and Terence McCaw (1913–1978). The group’s aims were to professionalize the art world by controlling membership, organizing nationwide exhibitions, and supporting professional artists in various respects.53 Its members exhibited both nationally and abroad and determined the face of South Africa’s modernism. In 1948, van Essche also became a founding member of the South African branch of the International Art Club, which furthered an artistic exchange between South Africa and Italy, and whose efforts resulted in South Africa’s inclusion in the Venice Biennale from 1950 on.54 Van Essche was also a lecturer at the Wits Technical Art School from 1943 to 1945, and a lecturer and then professor at the Michaelis School of Fine Art from 1952 until his retirement in 1970. He regularly represented South Africa at international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale, in 1950 and 1954, and the São Paolo Biennale in 1957, 1961, 1963, and 1965.55 While the influence of Laubser and Stern on van Essche is obvious in works such as Congolese Women (Figure 28.6), his painting Harlequin (Figure 28.7) also hints at his debt to Ensor. Pranas Domšaitis, too, was strongly influenced by German expressionism. Changing his name to Franz Domscheit, the Lithuanian painter moved to Berlin in the early twenties but retreated to Austria when some of his works originally acquired by the National Gallery in Berlin were listed as “degenerate art” by the Nazis in 1935. At this point, he also reverted to the Lithuanian version of his name.56 When his wife, Adelheid Armhold, a successful singer, was offered a teaching post at the University of Cape Town, in 1948, they decided to leave their war-marked exile for a supposedly more prosperous one. 533

Figure 28.6  M  aurice van Essche, Congolese Women, n.d., oil on board, 54.5 × 65 cm, Oliewenhuis Art Museum, Bloemfontein.  Oliewenhuis Art Museum, Bloemfontein/Paul van Essche

Figure 28.7  M  aurice van Essche, Harlequin, 1960, oil on board, 28.5 × 22 cm, Oliewenhuis Art Museum, Bloemfontein.  Oliewenhuis Art Museum, Bloemfontein/Paul van Essche

South African Modernism

Even though he was already sixty-nine years old when he moved to South Africa, he soon became part of the modern movement led by the European settlers. Domšaitis’s expressionist primitivism, with its focus on religious themes, became very popular,57 as it made reference not to African art forms, but rather to mediaeval traditions—as was common in various currents of German expressionism. This is best illustrated in his work Flight into Egypt (Figure 28.8) showing the Holy Family’s journey to Egypt as they flee King Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents. With its black outlines and strong colors, the painting resembles the stained glass windows found in mediaeval churches. There is also some similarity to Franz Marc’s depiction of horses, thus connecting Domšaitis to Maggie Laubser. In his later years, Domšaitis shifted his focus from religious themes to the Karoo landscape and group scenes portraying tribal African customs.

Primitivism in South Africa With the exception of Wolf Kibel, who was more influenced by the Russian painters Chagall and Soutine, all of the artists addressed so far concentrated on the primitivist tendency inherent in German expressionism. Judith Weiss summarizes attempts to define primitivism by employing the terms “hard” and “soft” coined by authors such as George Boas and Arthur Lovejoy (1935) and Rosalind Krauss (1984). The “hard primitivism” of Boas and Lovejoy harks back to the image of the “noble savage” defying nature; Krauss views the hard primitivists as abiding by a strict ethnographical treatment of “primitive” peoples and by their cultural-philosophical contextualization. With “soft primitivism,” Boas and Lovejoy refer

Figure 28.8  Pranas Domšaitis, Flight into Egypt, right-hand panel of triptych, c. 1958, oil on board, 75.5 × 63.9 cm.  Iziko Museums of South Africa Art Collections

535

Lisa Hörstmann

to the longing for a “primitive” state of being, reflected in an egalitarian society and individual freedom, while Krauss refers to a purely aesthetic appropriation of “primitive” forms in modern art.58 The South African artists discussed here fall into the category of hard primitivism.59 Their ethnographical treatment and cultural-philosophical contextualization, however, is often not very differentiated, but has an underlying idealization and at the same time patronization of the “primitives” under discussion.60 Most of the portraits of black individuals by Stern, Laubser, and van Essche are intended to render types. According to Homi K. Bhabha, “the fetish or stereotype gives access to an “identity” which is predicated as much on mastery and pleasure as it is on anxiety and defence.”61 Domšaitis’s pictures of African people do not portray individuals at all, but market or village scenes with groups of people. Christoph Otterbeck reasons that this was a common way for artists to show these “others” as simple and natural people in an earlier stage of human development, one that placed greater importance on groups than on individuals—a view shared by the artists’ European contemporaries.62 It is important to recognize, though, that the artists under discussion all believed that their art honored the “primitive,” rather than denigrating it. Like the Brücke artists in Germany, South African settler expressionists such as Irma Stern or Maurice van Essche considered the “primitive” sense of life they fictionalized in their paintings as an alternative to war-torn Europe.63 In Germany, this led to a fundamental debate on expressionist primitivism that surfaced most prominently in a dispute between Georg Lukásc and Ernst Bloch in 1938. In her essay in Susan Hiller’s The Myth of Primitivism, Jill Lloyd aptly summarizes their opposing stances: While Bloch saw expressionist modernism as an oppositional force, Lukásc insisted that, because of the romantic individualism of the expressionist world-view, the artists unwittingly colluded in the “ideological decay of the Imperialist bourgeoisie,” and failed to effect anything more than a “pseudo-critical, misleading abstract mythicizing form of Imperialist use of the art of non-European cultures.” Bloch claimed that the expressionists’ interest in tribal and folk art showed that they wanted to create an art of and for the people.64

German Primitivism and the Appreciation of African Art in South Africa In South Africa, this debate had not yet arrived. The general public was only just beginning to stop being appalled by Stern’s portrayal of blacks in her paintings, even while claiming to be part of the European avant-garde.65 Objects and artifacts produced by black South Africans were for a long time also not considered to have any aesthetic or cultural value. According to Sandra Klopper, even in the 1940s and 1950s, “hardly anyone in South Africa was interested in African art.”66 A Prussian Jew, Maria Stein-Lessing (1905–1961), was one of the first collectors of “primitive” art in South Africa. An art historian with a Ph.D. from the University of Bonn, she introduced an appreciation of African art into the curriculum at the Pretoria Technical College, where she obtained a teaching position in 1937.67 This was at the same time that Martin Lourens du Toit (1897–1938) introduced a discussion on the impact of African art on German expressionism in his course on modernism at the University of Pretoria.68 This shows how the appreciation of African art became interlinked with the appreciation of German expressionism in South Africa. Stein-Lessing had studied art in Germany and started collecting African artifacts there, but fled from the Nazis to London in 1933. In 1936, she moved to South Africa and started her 536

South African Modernism

teaching job in Pretoria, organizing an exhibition of what was then called “Bantu” art in the early 1940s.69 As the Technical College did not employ married women, upon her marriage, in 1943, Stein-Lessing resigned her position and went on to open the presumably first shop for African arts and crafts in downtown Johannesburg.70 In an interview with the Jewish Times, Stein-Lessing explained that she was led to this step by the Department of Native Affairs’s refusal to provide help for opening a non-profit depot where black craftsmen could sell their work.71 Stein-Lessing’s wish was later fulfilled, and from 1945 to 1949, she was the director of the Native Affairs Department’s Depot of Bantu Art and Craft. Beginning in 1952, she taught at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Stein-Lessing must have been in a more or less regular exchange with Irma Stern, as she was very interested in German expressionism, moved in the same (Jewish) circles—she knew, for example, the Feldmans, with whom Stern stayed with whenever she was in Johannesburg— and bought African artifacts as well as some of Stern’s own works from the latter’s collection.72 Additionally, both women introduced into South African society new ideas about appreciating African culture—Stern in the Cape and Stein-Lessing in the Transvaal (now Gauteng).73 The fact that Stein-Lessing organized African art exhibitions in South Africa and that Stern at least planned to do so in Europe74 indicates that both women considered such works worthy of exhibition in the same manner as European artworks. This was very much in the spirit of Carl Einstein’s influential book Negerplastik (Negro Sculpture), published in 1915. This standard reference for today’s scholars found its way to South Africa via Irma Stern, who took a copy with her when she moved from Berlin to Cape Town, and via South African sculptor Lippy Lipshitz, who was given another copy by his Russian teacher Herbert Vladimir Meyerowitz (1900–1945).75 Meyerowitz lived in Berlin after the First World War and migrated to South Africa in 1925. There he started teaching at the Michaelis School of Art, where Lipshitz was one of his students. Lipshitz’s biographer Bruce Arnott calls Einstein’s monograph “the first presentation of Negro carving as Art to be written.”76 In this influential text, Einstein criticizes the Europeans’ tendency to not think of African art as art at all, to consider the “negro” inferior, or to idealize the people as “Völker ewiger Urzeit”—eternally primeval.77 He argues that in Europe, nothing is known about these artworks, and therefore one should not make any presumptions but simply talk about their formal qualities.78 Consequently, the 119 photographs of African carvings he included do not include any further information on the works depicted. It seems peculiar that interest in African art was brought from Germany to South Africa by artists and scholars primarily interested in German expressionism. I would argue the reason for this was that through their physical proximity to South Africa’s black population and their concurrent need to justify the domination and abasement of the latter, the settlers were blind to the indigenous people’s artistic accomplishments. This attitude was deeply rooted in the belief of European superiority and also in the promotion of European identity among South Africa’s white settlers: “Eurocentrism in South Africa expresses the settler’s desire to claim cultural difference from the native and hegemony over him.”79 It is significant that the public approach to African art forms and the general appreciation of primitivist art changed in the 1940s, when white South Africans embarked on emancipating themselves from their European—and especially British—mother nations. I would propose that the interest in cultural objects produced by South Africa’s black peoples promulgated by Stein-Lessing, Stern, and other modernists helped advance the appropriation of the “primitive” within a new South African identity. However, the fact that black culture was still referred to as “primitive”—even when used within a positive discourse of self-distinction from Europe— shows that this new identity did not oppose apartheid views, but rather often enforced them. 537

Lisa Hörstmann

In line with Nicholas Thomas’ correlation of Australian settler primitivism and national identity, Fred Myers argues that “often, the effort to escape the anxiety of European influence and to express a unique experience has resulted in an appropriation of the ‘native,’ the ‘indigene,’ as a component of an authentic national culture.”80 This idea of an authentic national culture resulted in a greater appreciation not only of “primitive” art works, but also of the primitivism inherent in the works of the early expressionists Stern, Laubser, van Essche, and Domšaitis, and of later artists such as Battiss, Preller, and Constance Stuart Larrabee (1914–2000).

Notes 1 Esmé Berman, Art and Artists of South Africa: An Illustrated Biographical Dictionary and Historical Survey of Painters and Graphic Artists since 1875 (Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1970), 1. 2 Berman, Art and Artists of South Africa, 1. 3 Black South Africans’ works were not considered art or even remarkable craftsmanship until some decades later; see the section on the importance of Maria Stein-Lessing in this essay. 4 Exceptions were, for example, D. C. Boonzaier (1865–1950), Robert Gwelo Goodman (1871–1939), Hugo Naudé (1869–1941), Frans Oerder (1867–1944), Ruth Prowse (1883–1967), Nita Spilhaus (1878–1967), and Pieter Wenning (1973–1921). Prowse, Naudé, and Wenning were among the artists who developed a style called Cape impressionism in the first decades of the twentieth century. See Berman, Art and Artists of South Africa, 59–60. 5 Berman, Art and Artists of South Africa, 2, 261. 6 While Japanese or Chinese artworks had started influencing Western artists in the nineteenth century, African and indigenous Australian art was only “discovered” by artists such as Picasso, Derain, and Matisse in 1906. See Klaus Berger, Japonismus in der westlichen Malerei 1860–1920 [Japonism in Western Painting 1860–1920] (Munich: Prestel, 1980); Julia Meech and Gabriel P. Weisberg, Japonisme Comes to America:The Japanese Impact on the Graphic Arts, 1876–1925 (New York: Harry N Abrams, 1990); Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Painting (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1938); William Rubin, ed., “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984). 7 Partha Mitter, “Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery,” The Art Bulletin 90 (2008): 532. 8 Berman, Art and Artists of South Africa, 2; Marion Arnold, “European Modernism and African Domicile: Women Painters and the Search for Identity,” in Between Union and Liberation: Women Artists in South Africa 1910–1994, ed. Marion Arnold and Brenda Schmahmann (Oxford: Routledge, 2005), 52–54. 9 See Berman, Art and Artists of South Africa, 253; Marion Arnold, Women and Art in South Africa (Cape Town: Fernwood Press, 1996), 65. 10 Marion Arnold offers a good contextualization of the “Eternal Child” in Irma Stern: A Feast for the Eye (Stellenbosch: Fernwood Press/Rembrandt Van Rijn Art Foundation, 1995), 47–48. 11 Irma Stern, “How I Began to Paint,” Cape Argus, July 12, 1926. 12 The exchange of letters between the two artists is analyzed in Irene Below, “‘. . . wird es mir eine Freude sein, Ihnen Ihren eigenen Weg zu zeigen.’ Irma Stern und Max Pechstein,” in Liebe macht Kunst. Künstlerpaare im 20. Jahrhundert [“. . . the pleasure will be mine to show you your own way,” Irma Stern and Max Pechstein in Love Makes Art: Artist Couples in the 20th Century], ed. Renate Berger (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000), 37–64. 13 E.g., Fritz Stahl, “Ausstellungen,” Berliner Tageblatt [Berlin Daily Paper], January 13, 1918. 14 Arnold, Women and Art, 80. 15 The racism inherent in Stern’s works is extremely problematic. For a detailed discussion, see LaNitra Michele Walker, Pictures That Satisfy: Modernist Discourses and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Nation in the Art of Irma Stern (1894–1966) (PhD diss., Duke University, 2008). 16 Max Osborn, Irma Stern: Junge Kunst 51 [Irma Stern:Young Art 51] (Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1927); Georg Biermann, Max Pechstein: Junge Kunst 1 [Max Pechstein:Young Art 1] (Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1919); Oskar Schürer, Pablo Picasso: Junge Kunst 49/50 [Pablo Picasso: Young Art 49/50] (Berlin: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1927). 17 E.g., N. N., “Miss Irma Stern: Success in Germany,” Cape Argus, November 20, 1923; Rozilda, “Out of the Ordinary. Irma Stern: An Artist of Renown,” The SA Jewish Chronicle, November 30, 1928; Hilda Purwitsky, “South African News-Letter,” The Reform Advocate, January 26, 1929.

538

South African Modernism 18 Osborn, Irma Stern, 24. It is obviously not true that Stern only occasionally traveled to Europe. Osborn must have been aware of this as he later refers to Stern’s time at a school in Berlin (25–26). 19 Stern, “How I Began to Paint.” 20 E.g. Fritz Stahl, “Zur Sache” [As to the Matter], Berliner Tageblatt, July 20, 1923; B. E. W., “Die Malerin Irma Stern” [The Painter Irma Stern], Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung [German General Newspaper], February 27, 1927. 21 E.g., see Renate Flagmeier, “Camille Claudel, Bildhauerin” [Camille Claudel, Sculptor], kritische berichte [Critical Reports] 16 (1988): 36–45; Karl Scheffler, Die Frau und die Kunst [Woman and Art] (Berlin: Bard, 1908), a book that was extremely influential at the beginning of the twentieth century. 22 See Esmé Berman, The Story of South African Painting (Cape Town: Balkema, 1975), 58. 23 Stern and Laubser met on one of Stern’s trips to Europe in 1922. Stern put Laubser in contact with some of her friends in Berlin and the two artists enjoyed a brief friendship, including a joint summer holiday at the Baltic Sea; see, e.g., Berman, Art and Artists of South Africa, 175; Johann van Rooyen, Maggie Laubser (Cape Town: C. Struik, 1974), 13; Dalene Marais, Maggie Laubser: Her Paintings, Drawings and Graphics (Cape Town: Perskor, 1994), 41. 24 A letter from Schmidt-Rottluff to Laubser of January 21, 1931, for example, shows that she sent him pictures of her works long after her return to Cape Town. He then critically judged her progress (J.S. Gericke Library, University of Stellenbosch, Special Collection 79). 25 Béchie Paul N’guessan, Primitivismus und Afrikanismus: Kunst und Kultur Afrikas in der deutschen Avantgarde [Primitivism and Africanism: Africa’s Art and Culture in the German Avant-Garde] (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2002), 93. 26 Van Rooyen, Maggie Laubser, 22. 27 See van Rooyen, Maggie Laubser, 13; Marais, Maggie Laubser, 18. 28 Marais, Maggie Laubser, 18. 29 Wilhelm Hausenstein, “Richard Seewald,” Cicerone 14 (1922): 491–493. 30 E.g., van Rooyen, Maggie Laubser, 15. 31 Maggie Laubser, “Art,” J.S. Gericke Library, Special Collection 79 (n.d.). 32 E.g., Maggie Laubser,“What I Remember” and “On Art,” J.S. Gericke Library, Special Collection 79 (n.d.). 33 For another example of influential women expressionists, see Margareta Wallin Wictorin’s essay on Swedish expressionism in this volume (Chapter 10). 34 Marion Arnold, “European Modernism and African Domicile,” 64. 35 Scheffler, Frau und Kunst, 15. 36 Scheffler, Frau und Kunst, 29–30. 37 Hans Hildebrandt, Die Frau als Künstlerin (Berlin: Mosse, 1928), 106. 38 See Katharina Sykora and Annette Dogerloh, eds., Die neue Frau. Herausforderung für die Bildmedien der Zwanziger Jahre [The New Woman: Challenges for the Visual Media of the 1920s] (Marburg: Jonas, 1993); Marsha Meskimmon and Shearer West, eds., Visions of the ‘Neue Frau’: Women and the Visual Arts in Weimar Germany (Aldershot: Scolar, 1995). 39 Hildebrandt, Frau als Künstlerin, 24. Also compare Shearer West, “Introduction,” in Meskimmon and West, Visions, 1. 40 Also see Below, “. . . ‘wird es mir eine Freude sein,’” 43–44. 41 Documents on the Women’s Art Association and its members are housed in the archive of the Verein Berliner Künstlerinnen [Association of Women Artists in Berlin] in the Berliner Akademie der Künste [Berlin Academy of Fine Arts]. 42 Neville Dubow, Paradise:The Journal and Letters (1917–1933) of Irma Stern (Plumstead: Chameleon Press, 1991), 73. 43 Irene Below, “Irma Stern (1894–1966). Afrika mit den Augen einer weißen Malerin. Moderne Kunst zwischen Europa und Afrika. Zentrum und Peripherie und die Debatte um moderne Kunst in nichtwestlichen Ländern” [Irma Stern (1894–1966). Africa in the Eyes of a White Painter. Modern Art between Europe and Africa. Center and Periphery and the Debate on Modern Art in Non-Western Countries] kritische berichte 25 (1997): 58. 44 For example, in 1933, when she was still married to Johannes Prinz, she learned how to drive so that she could travel through areas such as the Belgian Congo by herself. See Johannes Prinz, letter to Irma Stern, January 7, 1933, South African National Library, Special Collections, MSC31, 2(5). Mona Berman, daughter of Stern’s close friends Richard and Freda Feldman, also describes how Stern’s utmost priority was her art: Mona Berman, Remembering Irma. Irma Stern: A Memoir with Letters (Cape Town: Double Storey Books, 2003).

539

Lisa Hörstmann 45 See Marais, Maggie Laubser, 26–27. 46 D. C. Boonzaier, diary entry, October 25, 1925, diary no. 25, South African National Library, Special Collections, MSC4. 47 D. C. Boonzaier, diary entry, December 12, 1920, diary no. 21, SA National Library, MSC4. 48 Quoted in Dieter Bertram, Cecil Higgs: Close Up (Rivonia: W. Waterman Publications, 1994), 44. 49 Freda Kibel, “A Brief Sketch of his Life and Work,” in Wolf Kibel, ed. Freda Kibel and Neville Dubow (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1968), 13. 50 Kibel, “A Brief Sketch of his Life and Work,” 14. 51 Also see Neville Dubow, “Wolf Kibel, a Critical Assessment of his Work with a Note on its Place in South African Art,” in Wolf Kibel: Retrospective Exhibition, ed. Kibel and Dubow (Cape Town: South African National Gallery, 1976). 52 Berman, South African Painting, 120. 53 Also see Schoonraad, “History of the New Group,” in Nuwe Groep/New Group: 1938–1954 (Cape Town: South African National Gallery, 1988); Berman, Art and Artists of South Africa, 103–105. 54 Berman, Art and Artists in South Africa, 147–148. The other founder members of the SA International Art Club were Walter Battiss (1906–1982), John Dronsfield (1900–1951), Cecil Higgs, Lippy Lipshitz, Alexis Preller (1911–1975), Le Roux Smith Le Roux (1914–1963), and Irma Stern. 55 Also see Carl Büchner, Van Essche (Cape Town: Tafelberg-Uitgewers, 1967). 56 Laima Bialopetravičienė, Pranas Domšaitis (Vilnius: Lietuvos dailės muziejus, 2002), 35; Berman, South African Painting, 116–117. 57 E.g., Elsa Verloren van Themaat, Pranas Domsaitis (Cape Town: Struik, 1976). On religious themes in German expressionism, see also Horst Schwebel, Die Kunst und das Christentum [Art and Christianity] (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2002), 95–110. 58 Judith Weiss, Der gebrochene Blick: Primitivismus—Kunst—Grenzverwirrungen [The Broken Gaze: Primitivism—Art—Border Confusions] (Heidelberg: Dietrich Reimer, 2005), 67. Compare George Boas and Arthur O. Lovejoy, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press: 1935), 7–10; and Rosalind Krauss in Rubin, Primitivism, vol. II, 503–534. 59 Also see Anitra Nettleton, “Primitivism in South African Art,” in Visual Century: South African Art in Context. 1907–2007/2: 1945–1976, ed. Mario Pisarro (Johannesburg:Wits University Press, 2011), 145. 60 This was not unusual. Still in 1984, Donald E. Gordon “defends” the German expressionists as being superior to the “exotic” subjects they depicted. Donald E. Gordon, “German Expressionism,” in Rubin, Primitivism, vol. II, 369–404. For criticism of this, see Christoph Otterbeck, Europa verlassen: Künstlerreisen am Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts [Leaving Europe: Artists’Travels at the Beginning of the 20th Century (Cologne: Böhlau, 2007), 323–324, 341. Contemporary criticism of the imperialist aspects inherent in primitivism is rendered in Georg Lukásc, Essays über Realismus [Essay on Realism] (Neuwied: Aufbau-Verlag, 1948). 61 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 75. Also see Kea Wienand, Nach dem Primitivismus? Künstlerische Verhandlungen kultureller Differenz in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1960–1990: Eine postkoloniale Relektüre [After Primitivism? Artistic Negotiations of Cultural Difference in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1960–1990: A Postcolonial Rereading] (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015), 43–44. 62 Otterbeck, Europa verlassen, 333. 63 Compare Reinhard Wegner, Der Exotismus-Streit in Deutschland: Zur Auseinandersetzung mit primitiven Formen in der Bildenden Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts [The Exoticism Dispute in Germany: Addressing Primitive Forms in the Visual Arts of the 20th Century] (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1983), 36. 64 Jill Lloyd, “Emil Nolde’s ‘ethnographic’ still lifes: primitivism, tradition, and modernity,” in The Myth of Primitivism, ed. Susan Hiller (London: Routledge, 1991), 92. 65 Compare Arnold, Irma Stern, 18; Walker, Pictures That Satisfy, 83. 66 Sandra Klopper, “South Africa’s Culture of Collecting: The Unofficial History,” African Arts 37 (2004): 25. 67 Paula Girshick, “Maria Stein-Lessing: Setting the Stage for African Art,” in l’Afrique: A Tribute to Maria Stein-Lessing and Leopold Spiegel, ed. Natalie Knight (Johannesburg: David Krut Publishing, 2009), 37. 68 Girshick, “Maria Stein-Lessing,” 38. Further details on du Toit’s own collection can be found in Jeanne van Eden, “Collecting South African Art in the 1930s: The Role of Martin du Toit,” Historia 53 (2008): 162–196. 69 The adjectives “Bantu,” “negro,” “primitive,” and “native” were used in an equally disparaging way by white South Africans to refer to their black compatriots. It was common even in South Africa’s art circles to consider blacks lesser beings. As indicated before, the romantic ideals the artists discussed here created around their black South African subjects did not mitigate their racism.

540

South African Modernism 70 71 72 73 74 75

76 77 78 79 80

Knight, l’Afrique, 10. Stein-Lessing was assisted in this by Irma Stern’s friend and patron Freda Feldman. Girshick, “Maria Stein-Lessing,” 38. Knight, l’Afrique, 15–16. Below, “Irma Stern,” 47. A lot of Stern’s still lifes also feature art works from the Congo that she collected on her travels. For an overview of her collection see Steven Banks, Irma Stern as a Collector (Cape Town: University of Cape Town, 1986). Below, “Irma Stern,” 51. Arnold, Irma Stern, 47; Bruce Arnott, Lippy Lipshitz (Cape Town: A.A. Balkema, 1969), 7. It is very likely that Stein-Lessing, who collected African art in Berlin up to 1933, was also familiar with Negerplastik. Like Stern, Kibel, and Stein-Lessing, both Lipshitz and Meyerowitz were Jews. On the influence of Jewish émigrés in the art worlds of the lands in which they took refuge, see Roben Reisenfeld, “Collecting and Collective Memory. German Expressionist Art and Modern Jewish Identity,” in Jewish Identity in Modern Art History, ed. Catherine M. Soussloff (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 114–134. In general, the influence of religion and Jewish identity on South African modernism requires further attention. Arnott, Lippy Lipshitz, 7. Carl Einstein, Negerplastik (Verlag der Weissen Bücher: Leipzig, 1915),V. Einstein, Negerplastik,VII. In general, he does not consider art adequate for drawing any ethnological or anthropological conclusions from the objects. However, he later contradicts himself when claiming that all African art is produced for religious purposes (XIII–XV). Daniel Herwitz, “Modernism at the margins,” in blank_Architecture, Apartheid and After, ed. Hilton Judin and Ivan Vladislavic (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 1998), 407. Fred Myers, “‘Primitivism,’ Anthropology and the Category of ‘Primitive Art,’” in Handbook of Material Culture, ed. Christopher Tilley et al. (London: SAGE, 2006), 277. See also Nicholas Thomas, Possessions: Indigenous Art Colonial Culture (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999), 12.

541

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Original Sources: Books Bahr, Hermann. Der Expressionismus [Expressionism]. Munich: Delphin, 1916. Fechter, Paul. Der Expressionismus [Expressionism]. Munich: Piper, 1914. Kandinsky, Wassily. Über das Geistige in der Kunst: Insbesondere in der Malerei [On the Spiritual in Art: Particularly in Painting]. Munich: Piper, 1912. English edition: Wassily Kandinsky, The Art of Spiritual Harmony. Translated and introduced by M. T. H. Saidler. London: Constable & Co., 1914. —, and Franz Marc, eds. Der Blaue Reiter. Munich: Piper, 1912. English edition: Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, eds. The Blaue Reiter Almanac. Translated by Henning Falkenstein with the assistance of Manug Terzain and Gertrude Hinderlie. London: Thames and Hudson, 1974. Matisse, Henri. “Notes d’un peintre” [Notes of a Painter]. La Grande Revue [The Great Review], December 25, 1908. Schmidt, Paul Ferdinand. “Die Expressionisten” [The Expressionists]. Der Sturm 2(92) (1912): 734–736. Walden, Herwarth. Einblick in Kunst. Expressionismus, Futurismus, Kubismus [Insight into Art: Expressionism, Futurism, Cubism]. Berlin: Verlag Der Sturm, 1917. —. Die neue Malerei [New Painting]. Berlin: Verlag Der Sturm, 1919. Worringer, Wilhelm. Abstraktion und Einfühlung: Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie [Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style]. Munich: Piper, 1908. —. Formprobleme der Gotik. Munich: Piper, 1911.

Original Sources: Exhibition Catalogues Manet and the Post-Impressionists, Nov. 8, 1910 to Jan. 15, 1911 (London, 1910). Katalog der XXII. Ausstellung der Berliner Secession [Catalogue of the 22nd Exhibition of the Berlin Secession] (Berlin, 1911). Internationale Kunstausstellung des Sonderbundes Westdeutscher Kunstfreunde und Künstler zu Cöln [International Art Exhibition of the Sonderbund Association of West-German Art Lovers and Artists from Cologne] (Cologne: Dumont-Schauberg, 1912). Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon [First German Autumn Salon] (Berlin: Der Sturm, 1913). “Ausstellungskataloge der STURM-Galerie” [Exhibition Catalogues of the Sturm Gallery], Arthistoricum, last accessed December 20, 2017, www.arthistoricum.net/themen/portale/sturm/ausstellungskataloge.

General References (English Language) Barron, Stephanie. German Expressionism 1915–1925: The Second Generation. Munich: Prestel, 1989. Exhibition catalogue.

542

Selected Bibliography —, and Wolf-Dieter Dube, German Expressionism: Art and Society. London: Thames & Hudson, 1997. Behr, Shulamith, David Fanning, and Douglas Jarman, eds. Expressionism Reassessed. Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press, 1993. Benson, Timothy O., ed. Expressionism in Germany and France: From van Gogh to Kandinsky. Munich: Prestel; London, New York: DelMinico Books, 2014. Brücke: The Birth of Expressionism in Dresden and Berlin 1905–1913. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz; New York: Neue Galerie, 2009. Carey, Frances, and Anthony Griffiths. The Print in Germany, 1880–1933: The Age of Expressionism. London: British Museum, 1984. Exhibition catalogue. Crockett, Dennis. German Post-Expressionism: The Art of the Great Disorder 1918–1924. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. Dube, Wolf-Dieter. Expressionism. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1977. —. Expressionists and Expressionism. New York: Skira, 1983. —. The Expressionists. London, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985. Düchting, Hajo, and Norbert Wold, eds. The Blaue Reiter. Cologne: Taschen, 2009. Figura, Starr. German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2011. Exhibition catalogue. Gordon, Donald E. “On the Origin of the Word Expressionism.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 29 (1966): 368–385. —. Expressionism: Art and Idea. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987. Hollmann, Eckhard. The Blue Rider. Munich: Prestel, 2011. Selz, Peter. German Expressionist Painting. Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1957. van den Berg, Hubert, et al., eds. A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1900–1925. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. Vergo, Peter. Art in Vienna, 1898–1918: Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele and their Contemporariers. 3rd ed. London: Phaidon, 1993. Washton Long, Rose-Carol. ed. German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism. New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1993. Weikop, Christian, ed. New Perspectives on Brücke Expressionism: Bridging History. London: Routledge, 2011. Weinstein, Joan. The End of Expressionism: Art and the November Revolution in Germany, 1918–1919. Chicago, IL; London: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Weisstein, Ulrich, ed. Expressionism as an International Literary Phenomenon. Paris: Didier; Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1973. Werenskiold, Marit. The Concept of Expressionism: Origin and Metamorphoses. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Chapter 1 Anděl, Jaroslav, ed. Czech Modernism 1900–1945. Houston, TX: Museum of Fine Arts, 1990. Exhibition Catalogue. Habánová, Anna, ed. Mladí lvi v kleci [Young Lions in a Cage]. Řevnice: Arbor Vitae, 2013. Jelínková, Eva. Echa expresionismu: Recepce německého literárního hnutí v české avantgardě 1910–1930) [Expressionist Echoes: The Reception of German Literature in the Czech Avant-garde 1910–1930]. Praha: FF UK, 2010. Lamač, Miroslav. Modern Czech Painting 1907–1917. Praha: Artia, 1967. —. Osma a Skupina výtvarných umělců 1907–1917 [The Eight Group and the Artists’ Group 1907–1917. Praha: Odeon, 1988. —. Osma a Skupina výtvarných umělců 1907–1917: Teorie, kritika, polemika [The Eight Group and the Artists’ Group 1907–1917: Theory, Criticism, Polemic]. Praha: Odeon, 1992. —, and Jiří Padrta. Zakladatelé moderního českého umění [Founders of Czech Modern Art]. Brno: Dům umění města Brna, 1957. Pomajzlová, Alena, ed. Expresionismus a české umění 1905–1927 [Expressionism and Czech Art 1905–1927]. Praha: Národní galerie, 1994. Exhibition Catalogue. Rakušanová, Marie, ed. Křičte ústa! Předpoklady expresionismu [Scream Mouth! Roots of Expressionism]. Praha: Academia, 2006. Exhibition Catalogue.

543

Selected Bibliography Rousová, Hana, ed. Mezery v historii 1890–1938. Polemický duch střední Evropy—Němci, Židé, Češi [Gaps in the History 1890–1938. Polemic Spirit of Central Europe—Germans, Jews, Czechs]. Praha: Galerie hlavního města Prahy, 1994. Exhibition Catalogue. Sawicki, Nicholas. Na cestě k modernosti: Umělecké sdružení Osma a jeho okruh v letech 1900–1910 [Becoming Modern: The Prague Eight and Modern Art, 1900–1910]. Praha: FF UK, 2014. Srp, Karel, ed. Tvrdošíjní a hosté [The Stubborn Ones and Guests]. Praha: Galerie hlavního města Prahy, 1987. Exhibition catalogue.

Chapter 2 Kiss-Szemán, Zsófia, ed. Anton Jasusch: Maliar a vizionár [Anton Jasusch: Painter and Visionary]. Bratislava: Galéria mesta Bratislavy, 2007. Exhibition catalogue. —. Košická moderna I: Umenie Košíc v dvadsiatych rokoch 20. storočia [Košice Modernism I: Košice Art in the 1920s]. Košice: Východoslovenská galéria, 2010. Lešková, Lena, and Zsófia Kiss-Szemán, eds. Košická moderna: Umenie Košíc v dvadsiatych rokoch 20. storočia/Košice Modernism: Košice Art in the Nineteen-Twenties. Košice: East Slovak Gallery, 2013. Štrauss, Tomáš. Anton Jasusch a zrod východoslovenskej avantgardy dvadsiatych rokov [Anton Jasusch and the Birth of East Slovakian Avant-Garde in the 1920s]. Bratislava: Vydavateľstvo Slovenského fondu výtvarných umení, 1966. —. Slovenský variant moderny [The Slovak Variant of Modern Art]. Bratislava: Pallas, 1992.

Chapter 3 Bajkay, Éva, ed. A magyar grafika külföldön: Németország 1919–1933/Ungarische Graphik im Ausland: Deutschland 1919–1933 [Hungarian Graphic Works Abroad: Germany 1919–1933]. Berlin: Haus der Ungarischen Kultur, 1990. —, Hubertus Gaßner, László Jurecskó, Zsolt Kishonthy, eds. Mattis-Teutsch und Der Blaue Reiter [MattisTeutsch and The Blue Rider]. München: Haus der Kunst, 2001. Gaßner, Hubertus, ed. Wechselwirkungen: Ungarische Avantgarde in der Weimarer Republik [Interdependencies: the Hungarian Avant-garde in the Weimar Republic] Marburg: Jonas, 1986. Koczogh, Ákos. “Magyar és kelet-európai expresszionisták” [Expressionists in Hungary and Eastern Europe]. In Az expresszionizmus [The Expressionism], edited by Ákos Koczogh, 96–109. Budapest: Gondolat, 1964. Markója, Csilla, and István Bardoly, eds. The Eight. Pécs: Janus Pannonius Múzeum, 2010. Passuth, Krisztina. Tranzit: Tanulmányok a kelet-közép-európai avantgarde művészet témaköréből [Transit: Essays on the East-Central European Avant-Garde]. Budapest: Új Művészet, 1996. —. Treffpunkte der Avantgarden in Ostmitteleuropa 1907–1930 [Meeting Points of the Avant-Garde in Eastern Central Europe]. Dresden: Verlag der Kunst; Budapest: Balassi, 2003. Pataki, Gábor. A “dekoratív avantgárd”: Az expresszionizmus mint csapdahelyzet a 20-as évek magyar művészetében [The “Decorative Avant-Garde”: Expressionism as a Trap Situation in the Hungarian Art of the Twenties]. Ars Hungarica XXI 1 (1993): 107–112. Szabó, Júlia. A magyar aktivizmus művészete [The Art of Activism in Hungary]. Budapest: Corvina, 1981.

Chapter 4 Bartelik, Marek. Early Polish Modern Art: Unity in Multiplicity. Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 2005. Geron, Małgorzata. “The Formist Group (1917–1923): Trends Research and the Assessment of Polish Avant-Garde Art in the 20th Century. In History of Art History in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, vol. 2, edited by Jerzy Malinowski, 155–164. Toruń: UMK, 2012. —. Formiści: Twórczość i programy artystyczne [Formists: Work and Artistic Programs]. Toruń: Wydawnictwo UMK, 2015. Głuchowska, Lidia. “Poznań and Łódź: National Modernism and International Avant-Garde. Zdrój (1917–1922); Yung-Yidish (1919); and Tel-Awiw (1919–21).” In Modernist Magazines: A Critical and

544

Selected Bibliography Cultural History. Vol. 3, part 2: Europe 1880–1940, edited by Peter Brooker, Andrew Thacker, Christian Weikop, and Sascha Bru, 1208–1233. Oxford University Press, 2013. —, ed. Bunt—Ekspresjonizm—Transgraniczna awangarda: Prace z berlińskiej kolekcji prof. St. Karola Kubickiego/ Bunt—Expressionismus—Grenzübergreifende Avantgarde: Werke aus der Berliner Sammlung von Prof. St. Karol Kubicki [Bunt—Expressionism—Avant-Garde Crossing Borders: Works from the Berlin Collection of Prof. St. Karol Kubicki]. Poznań: MNP, 2015. —. Stanisław Kubicki—in transitu: Poeta tłumaczy sam siebie/Ein Poet übersetzt sich selbst [Stanisław Kubicki— in transitu: A Poet Translates Himself]. Wrocław: Ośrodek Kultury i Sztuki: 2015. —, Honorata Gołuńska, and Michał F. Woźniak, eds. Bunt a tradycje grafiki w Polsce i w Niemczech [Bunt and Tradition of Printmaking in Poland and Germany]. Bydgoszcz: MOB, 2015. Hałasa, Grażyna, ed. Bunt: Ekspresjonizm Poznański 1917–1925 [Bunt: Poznań Expressionism 1917–1925]. Poznań: MNP, 2003. Kuźma, Erazm. Z problemów świadomości literackiej i artystycznej ekspresjonizmu w Polsce [On Problems of the Literary and Artistic Consciousness of Expressionism in Poland]. Wrocław–Warsaw–Gdańsk: Ossolineum, 1976. Malinowski, Jerzy. Sztuka i nowa wspólnota: Zrzeszenie Artystów Bunt 1917–1922 [Art and the New Community: Bunt Association of Artists 1917–1922]. Wrocław: Wiedza o Kulturze, 1991. —. Malarstwo i rzeźba Żydow Polskich w XIX i XX wieku [Painting and Sculpture of Polish Jews in the 19th and 20th Century]. Vol. I. Warsaw: PWN, 2000. Piotrowski, Piotr. “Modernity and Nationalism: Avant-Garde and Polish Independence, 1912–1922.” In Central European Avant-Gardes: Exchange und Transformation 1910–1930, edited by Timothy O. Benson, 313–326. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Ratajczak, Józef. Zagasły “brzask epoki”: Szkice z dziejów czasopisma “Zdrój” 1917–1922 [The Dawn of an Era: Sketches from the History of the “Zdrój” Magazine 1917–1922]. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 1980. —. Krzyk i ekstaza [Scream and Ecstasy]. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 1987. Schuler, Romana, and Goszka Gawlik, eds. Der neue Staat: Polnische Kunst 1918–1939. Zwischen Experiment und Repräsentation [The New State: Polish Art 1918–1939. Between Experiment and Representation]. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2003.

Chapter 5 Russkii Avangard 1910–1920-x godov i Problema Ekspressionizma [The Russian Avant-Garde of the 1910s and 1920s and the Problem of Expressionism]. Moscow: Nauka, 2003. Russkii Ekspressionizm: Teoriia, Praktika, Kritika [Russian Expressionism: Theory, Practice, Criticism. Moscow: Imli RAH, 2005. Voldemar Matvei i “Soiuz Molodezhi” [Voldemārs Matvejs and “The Union of Youth”]. Moscow: Nauka, 2005. Belentschikow, Valentin. Rußland und die deutschen Expressionisten 1910–1925: Zur Geschichte der deutschrussischen Literaturbeziehungen [Russia and the German Expressionists 1910–1925: On the History of German-Russian Literary Relations]. 2 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1993. Bowlt, John E., and Rose-Carol Washton Long, eds. The Life of Vasilii Kandinsky in Russian Art: A Study of “On the Spiritual in Art.” 2nd ed. Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1984. —, and Nicoletta Misler, eds. Pavel Filonov: A Hero and His Fate. Austin, TX: Silvergirl, 1983. Calov, Gudrun. “Deutsche Beiträge zur bildenden Kunst und Architektur Rußlands und der Sowjetunion von 1914–1941” [German Contributions to the Visual Arts and Architecture in Russia and the Soviet Union 1914–1941]. In Deutsche in Rußland und in der Sowjetunion 1914–1941 [Germans in Russia and in the Soviet Union 1914–1941], edited by Alfred Eisfeld, Victor Herdt, and Boris Meissner, 336–371. Berlin: LIT, 2007. Harshav, Benjamin. Marc Chagall and the Lost Jewish World: The Nature of Chagall’s Art and Iconography. New York: Rizzoli, 2006. Howard, Jeremy. The Union of Youth: An Artists’ Society of the Russian Avant-Garde. Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press, 1992. Kostin, V. OST: Obshchestvo Stankovistov [OST: Society of Easel Painters]. Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1976.

545

Selected Bibliography Mierau, Fritz, ed. Russen in Berlin: Literatur, Malerei, Theater, Film 1918–1933 [Russians in Berlin: Literature, Painting, Theatre, Film 1918–1933]. Leipzig: Reclam, 1990. Passuth, Krisztina. Treffpunkte der Avantgarden Ostmitteleuropa 1907–1930 [Meeting Places of the Avantgarde East Central Europe 1907–1920]. Budapest: Balassi Kiadó; Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 2003. Pyschnowskaja, Sinaida. “Deutsche Kunstausstellungen in Moskau und ihre Organisatoren” [German Art Exhibitions in Moscow and its Organizers], in Berlin—Moskau 1900–1950, 187–191. Munich; New York: Prestel, 1995. Exhibition Catalogue. Schlögel, Karl, et al., eds. Chronik russischen Lebens in Deutschland 1918–1941 [Chronicle of Russian Life in Germany 1918–1941]. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1999. Umanskij, Konstantin. Neue Kunst in Russland 1914–1919 [New Art in Russia 1914–1919]. Potsdam: Gustav Kiepenheuer; Munich: Hans Goltz, 1920.

Chapter 6 Dovydaitytė, Linara. “Constructing the Local -isms: Paradoxes of Lithuanian Expressionism.” In Local Strategies International Ambitions: Modern Art and Central Europe 1918–1968, edited by Vojtěch Lahoda, 159–164. Prague: Artefactum, 2006. Jankevičiūtė, Giedrė. Lietuvos grafika/The Graphic Arts in Lithuania, 1918–1940. Vilnius: E. Karpavičiaus leidykla, 2008. Korsakaitė, Ingrida, et al., eds. XX a. lietuvių dailės istorija [History of Lithuanian Art of the 20th Century]. Vol. 1–3. Vilnius: Vaga, 1982, 1983, 1990. Laučkaitė, Laima. Ekspresionizmo raitelė Mariana Veriovkina [The Rider of Expressionism Mariana Veriovkina]. Vilnius: LFMI, 2007. Liutkus, Viktoras. Antanas Samuolis. Vilnius: LDS leidykla, 2006. Mulevičiūtė, Jolita. Modernizmo link: dailės gyvenimas Lietuvos Respublikoje 1918–1940 [Towards Modernism: Artistic Life in Lithuanian Republic 1918–1940]. Kaunas: ČDM, 2001. Umbrasas, Jonas. Lietuvių tapybos raida 1900–1940: srovės ir tendencijos [The Development of Lithuanian Painting 1900–1940: Trends and Tendencies]. Vilnius: Mokslas, 1987.

Chapter 7 Ābele, Kristiāna. Johans Valters [Johann Walter]. Rīga: Neputns, 2009. Brasliņa, Aija. “Berlīnes episode (1921–1923) Latvijas modernisma vēsturē” [The Berlin Episode (1921– 1923) in the History of Latvian Modernism]. In Muzeja raksti 2 [Museum Papers], 23–33. Rīga: Latvijas Nacionālais mākslas muzejs, 2010. [Grosvalds, Jāzeps] J. G. “L’art letton (Les Jeunes)” [Latvian Art: The Young Ones]. La Revue Baltique [The

Baltic Review] 1 (1919). —. “L’art letton (II)” [Latvian Art (II)]. La Revue Baltique 4 (1919). Kalnačs, Jānis. Rīgas dendijs un autsaiders: Kārlis Padegs. [Riga Dandy and Outside: Kārlis Padegs]. Rīga: Neputns, 2011. Kļaviņš, Eduards. Džo: Jāzepa Grosvalda dzīve un māksla [Joe: Life and Art of Jāzeps Grosvalds]. Rīga: Neputns, 2006. —, et al. Art History of Latvia. V: Period of Classical Modernism and Traditionalism 1915–1940. Rīga: Institut of Art History of the Latvian Academy of Art, 2016. Lamberga, Dace. Klasiskais modernisms: 20. gadsimta sākuma māksla Latvijā. [Classical Modernism Early 20th-Century Latvian Painting]. Edited by Laima Slava. Rīga: Neputns, 2004. —. Jēkabs Kazaks. Rīga: Neputns, 2007. Suta, Romans. “Rapide aperçu sur la Peinture lettone” [Quick Overview of Latvian Painting]. in L’art letton [Latvian Art], 19–21. Riga: La Section de la Presse au Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, 1926. —. Compiler: Laima Slava. Rīga: Neputns, 2016. Upeniece, Daiga. “Latvijas Nacionālā Mākslas muzeja 20: Gadsimta sākuma beļģu mākslas kolekcija. Vēsture” [History of the Collection of Early 20th-Century Belgian Art in the Latvian National Museum of Art]. In Latvija-Beļģija: mākslas sakari 20. gadsimtā un 21. gadsimta sākumā [Latvia-Belgium: Art Relations in the 20th Century and the Beginning of the 21st Century], edited by Aija Brasliņa, 29–41, 200–206. Rīga: Neputns, 2013.

546

Selected Bibliography

Chapter 8 Lamp, Ene. “Deutscher Expressionismus und estnische Kunst: Kunstkontakte” [German Expressionism and Estonian Art: Contacts in the Arts]. In Architektur und bildende Kunst im Baltikum um 1900: Kunst im Ostseeraum [Architecture and Visual Arts in the Baltic Region around 1900: Art in the Region of the Baltic Sea]. Greifswalder Kunsthistorische Studien [Greifswald Art Historical Studies], edited by Elita Grosmane et al., vol. 3, 92–97. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999. —. Ekspressionism: Ekspressionism Eesti kujutavas kunstis [Expressionism. Expressionism in Estonian Art]. Tallinn: Eesti Kunstiakadeemia, 2004.

Chapter 9 Aagesen, Dorthe, ed. Avant-Garde in Danish and European Art 1909–1919. Copenhagen: Statens Museum for Kunst, 2002. Abildgaard, Hanne. Tidlig modernisme [Early Modernism]. Ny dansk kunsthistorie 6 [New Danish Art History 6]. Copenhagen: Fogtdal, 1994. Gottlieb, Lennart. Modernisme og maleri: Modernismebegrebet, modernismeforskningen og det modernistiske i dansk maleri omkring 1910–1930 [Modernism and Painting: The Concept of Modernism, Modernism Studies and Modernism in Danish Painting around 1910–1930]. Århus: Aarhus University Press, 2011. Jelsbak, Torben: Ekspressionisme: Modernismens formelle gennembrud i dansk malerkunst og poesi [Expressionism: The Formal Breakthrough of Modernism in Danish Art and Poetry]. Copenhagen: Spring, 2005.

Chapter 10 Elsner, Catharina. Expressionismens framväxt: August Brunius skriver om konst 1904–1913 [The Development of Expressionism: August Brunius Writes about Art 1904–1913]. Stockholm: Stockholm University, 1993. Lärkner, Bengt. Det internationella avantgardet och Sverige 1914–1925 [The International Avant-Garde and Sweden 1914–1925]. Malmö: Stenvall, 1984. Lidén, Elisabeth. Expressionismen och Sverige: expressionistiska drag i svenskt måleri från 1910-talet till 1940-talet [The Expressionism and Sweden: Expressionist Features in Swedish Painting from the 1910s to the 1940s]. Stockholm: Rabén och Sjögren, 1974.

Chapter 11 Huusko, Timo. Maalauksellisuus ja tunne: Modernistiset tulkinnat kuvataidekritiikissä 1908–1924 [Painterliness and Emotion: Modernist Interpretations in Art Criticism 1908–1924]. Helsinki: Valtion taidemuseo, 2007. Kallio, Rakel. “Taiteen henkisyyttä tavoittamassa: Ekspressionismin tulkintaa suomalaisessa 1910-luvun taidekritiikissä” [In Search of the Spiritual in Art: Interpreting Expressionism in the Art Criticism of the Early 1910s]. In Taidehistoriallisia tutkimuksia—Konsthistoriska studier 12 [Studies in Art History 12], edited by Marja Terttu Knapas and Marjo-Riitta Simpanen, 67–90. Helsinki: Taidehistorian seura, 1991. Krohn, Alf. “Suomalaisia taiteilijaryhmiä II: Marraskuun ryhmä” [Finnish Artist Groups, II: The November Group]. In Suomen taide. Vuosikirja 1954–1955 (Art in Finland: Yearbook, 1954–1955), 7–24. Helsinki: WSOY, 1956. Ojanperä, Riitta. Kriitikko Einari J: Vehmas ja moderni taide [Critic Einari J. Vehmas and Modern Art], 176–194, 257. Helsinki: Valtion taidemuseo, 2010.

Chapter 12 Danbolt, Gunnar. Norsk kunsthistorie, Bilde og skultur frå vikingatida til idag [Norwegian Art History: Pictures and Sculptures from Viking Age to Today]. Oslo: Det Norske Samlaget, 2001. Moksnes Gjelsvik, Magni. John Savio—hans liv og kunst [John Savio—His Life and Art]. Trondheim: NT-Forlag, 2012. Stang, Ragna. Edward Munch. Helsinki: WSOY, 1980.

547

Selected Bibliography

Chapter 13 Gottskálksdóttir, Júlíana. “Tilraunin ótímabæra: Um abstraktmyndir Finns Jónssonar og viðbrögð við þeim” [The Untimely Experiment: About Finnur Jónsson’s Abstract Images]. In Árbók Listasafns Íslands 1990–1992 [Yearbook of the National Gallery of Iceland 1990–1992], edited by Bera Nordal, 74–101. Reykjavík: Listasafn Íslands, 1993. Guðnadóttir, Kristín. “The Artist and His Life.” In Kjarval, edited by Einar Matthíasson et al., 100–107. Reykjavík: Nesútgáfa, 2005. Hjartarson, Benedikt “Af úrkynjun, brautryðjendum, vanskapnaði, vitum og sjáendum: Um upphaf framúrstefnu á Íslandi” [Of Decadence, Pioneers, Disfigurations, Omens and Seers]. Ritið [Writings] 1 (2006): 79–119. Kvaran, Ólafur, ed. Íslensk listasaga. Vol I–II [Icelandic Art History. Vol. I–II]. Reykjavík: Forlagið, 2011. van den Berg, Hubert. “Jón Stefánsson og Finnur Jónsson: Frá Íslandi til evrópsku framúrstefnunnar og aftur til baka” [Jón Stefánsson and Finnur Jónsson: From Iceland to the European Avant-Garde and Back]. Ritið [Writings] 1 (2006): 51–77.

Chapter 14 Behr, Shulamith, and Marian Malet, eds. Arts in Exile in Britain 1933–1945: Politics and Cultural Identity. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. Bridgwater, Patrick. “Three English Poets in Expressionist Berlin.” German Life and Letters 45(4) (1992): 301–322. Calvocoressi, Richard. “Modern German Art in British Collections: Reflections on Some Recent Exhibitions.” The Burlington Magazine 156 (October 2014): 670–674. Glew, Adrian. “Blue Spiritual Sounds: Kandinsky and the Sadlers, 1911–1916.” The Burlington Magazine 139 (September 1997): 600–615. Holz, Keith. Modern German Art for Thirties Paris, Prague and London: Resistance and Acquiescence in a Democratic Public Sphere. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 2004. Keith-Smith, Brian. German Expressionism in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Bristol: University of Bristol, 1986. Paraskos, Michael. “English Expressionism.” PhD diss., University of Leeds, 1997. Potter, Matthew. The Inspirational Genius of Germany: British Art and Germanism, 1850–1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012. Steele, Tom. Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club 1893–1923. Mitcham: Orage Press, 2009. Watling, Lucy. “Documents of a Forgotten Network: Émigré Loans to Twentieth-Century German Art 1938.” PhD diss., Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 2016. Weikop, Christian, ed. “‘The British Reception of Brücke and German Expressionism.” In New Perspectives on Brücke Expressionism: Bridging History, 237–276. London: Routledge, 2011.

Chapter 15 Boyens, Piet, and José Boyens. Expressionisme in Nederland [Expressionism in the Netherlands]. Zwolle: Waanders Uitgevers; Laren: Singer Museum, 1995. Exhibition catalogue. Huussen, A. H., and Jaqueline van Paaschen-Louwerse. Jacoba van Heemskerck van Beest 1876–1923: Schilderes uit roeping [Jacoba van Heemskerck van Beest 1876–1923: Vocational Painter]. Zwolle: Waanders Uitgevers; Amsterdam: Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, 2005. Imanse, Geurt. “Van Sturm tot Branding” [From Storm to Surf]. In Berlijn-Amsterdam 1920–1940: wisselwerkingen [Berlin-Amsterdam 1920–1940: Interactions], edited by Kathinka Dittrich, Paul Blom, and Flip Bool, 251–264. Amsterdam: Querido’s Uitgeverij, 1982. Langfeld, Gregor. Duitse kunst in Nederland: verzamelen, tentoonstellen, kritieken; 1919–1964 [German Art in the Netherlands: Collecting, Exhibiting, Reviewing; 1919–1964]. Zwolle: Waanders Uitgevers, 2004. Petersen, Ad. De Ploeg: Gegevens omtrent de Groningse schilderkunst in de jaren ’20 [The Plow: Information on Painting in Groningen in the 1920s]. The Hague: BZZTôH, 1982. Venema, Adriaan. De Ploeg 1918–1930. Baarn: Het Wereldvenster, 1978.

548

Selected Bibliography

Chapter 16 Boyens, Piet. L’art flamand: Du symbolisme à l’expressionnisme à Laethem-Saint-Martin. [Flemish Art: From Symbolism to Expressionism to Sint-Martens-Latem]. Tielt: Lannoo/Art Book Company, 1992. —, ed. Une rare plenitude: Les artistes de Laethem-Saint-Martin, 1900–1930. [A Rare Plenitude: The Artists of Sint-Martens-Latem] Ghent: Museum of Fine Arts, 2001. De Smet, Johan. “L’Avant-garde manqué” [The Avant-Garde Manqué]. In Bruxelles carrefour de cultures [Brussels: Crossroads of Cultures], edited by Robert Hoozee, 205–215. Brussels: Palais des Beaux-Arts, 2000. —, and Cathérine Verleysen. Variétés: Spiegel van de dolle jaren [Variétés: Mirror of the Crazy Years]. Ghent: Museum of Fine Arts, 2004. Exhibition Catalogue. Devillez, Virginie. Le retour à l’ordre: Art et politique en Belgique, 1918–1945 [The Return to Order: Art and Politics in Belgium. 1918–1945]. Brussels: Dexia/Labor, 2002. Eeckhout, Tanguy, et al. Collectie [Collection] Tony Herbert. Jean Brusselmans, Gust De Smet, Constant Permeke, Edgard Tytgat, Frits Van den Berghe, Rik Wouters. Deurle: Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, 2011. Fairclough, Oliver, et al. Art in Exile: Flanders, Wales and the First World War. Ghent: Museum of Fine Arts; Cardiff: National Museums & Galleries of Wales, 2002. Gariff, David, et al. Flemish Expressionism: A Modern Vision. Washington, D.C.: The Kreeger Museum, 2015. Hoozee, Robert, ed. Vlaams expressionisme in Europese context 1900–1930 [Flemish Expressionism in a European Context 1900–1930]. Ghent: Museum of Fine Arts, 1990. —, ed. Moderne kunst in België 1900-1945 [Modern Art in Belgium 1900–1945]. Antwerp: Mercatorfonds, 1992. —, and Cathérine Verleysen. Gustave Van de Woestyne. Ghent: Museum of Fine Arts, 2010. Exhibition Catalogue. Lambrechts, Marc, ed. Affinités & particularités. L’art en Belgique et aux Pays-Bas 1890–1945 [Affinities and Particularities: Art in Belgium and the Low Countries 1890–1945]. Ghent: Museum of Fine Arts, 2002. Langui, Emile. L’expressionnisme en Belgique [Expressionism in Belgium]. Brussels: Laconti, 1970. Paenhuysen, An. De nieuwe wereld: De wonderjaren van de Belgische avant-garde (1918–1939) [The New World: The Wonder Years of the Belgian Avant-Garde (1918–1939)]. Antwerp: Meulenhoff |Manteau, 2010.

Chapter 17 Andrijauskis, Antanas. Litvak Art in the Context of the Ecole de Paris. Vilnius: Art Market Agency, 2008. Kleeblatt, Norman, and Kenneth Silver. An Expressionist in Paris: The Paintings of Chaim Soutine. Munich and New York: Prestel, 1998. Meisler, Stanley. Shocking Paris: Soutine, Chagall and the Outsiders of Montparnasse. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Silver, Kenneth, and Romy Golan. The Circle of Montparnasse: Jewish Artists in Paris, 1905–1945. New York: The Jewish Museum and Universe Books, 1985.

Chapter 18 Chiarelli, Elena. “Curt Seidel nella Torino Anni Dieci” [Curt Seidel in the Turin of the 1910s]. Studi Piemontesi [Piemontese Studies] XXXIV 2 (December 2005): 421–429. Crispolti, Enrico. Prampolini: Dal futurismo all’informale [Prampolini: From Futurism to the Informal]. Rome: Edizioni carte Segrete, 1992. Exhibition Catalogue. Ratti, Marzia, and Alessandra Belluomini Pucci, eds. L’urlo dell’immagine. La grafica dell’espressionismo italiano [The Scream of the Image: The Graphic Art of Italian Expressionism]. Turin: Allemandi, 2014. Exhibition Catalogue. Versari, Maria Elena, “I rapporti internazionali del Futurismo dopo il 1919” [The International Relations of Futurism after 1919]. In Il Futurismo nelle avanguardie. Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Milano [Futurism Within the Avant-gardes], edited by Walter Pedullà, 577–606. Rome: Edizioni Ponte Sisto, 2010.

549

Selected Bibliography

Chapter 19 Arte Moderno y Revistas Españolas: 1898–1936 [Modern Art and Spanish Journals: 1898–1936]. Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 1996. Exhibition Catalogue. Alcantud, Victoriano. Hacedores de Imagenes: Propuestas estéticas de las primeras vanguardias en España (1918–1925) [Image Makers: Aesthetic Propositions of the First Avant-Gardes in Spain (1918–1925)]. Granada: Comares, 2014. Brihuega, Jaime. Las vanguardias artisticas en España: 1909–1936 [The Artistic Avant-Gardes in Spain: 1909–1936]. Madrid: Ediciones Istmo, 1981. Harris, Derrick, ed. The Spanish Avant-Garde. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Lahuerta, Juan José. Decir Anti es decir Pro: Escenas de la vanguardia en España [To Say Anti is to Say Pro: Scenes of the Avant-Garde in Spain]. Teruel: Museo de Teruel, 1999. Pérez Bazo, Javier. La vanguardia en España: arte y literatura [The Avant-Garde in Spain: Art and Literature]. Toulouse/Paris: Cric & Ophrys, 1998. Schammah Gesser, Silvina. Madrid’s Forgotten Avant-Garde: Between Essentialism and Modernity. Brighton: Sussex Academic, 2015.

Chapter 20 Dias, Fernando Rosa. Ecos Expressionistas na Pintura Portuguesa Entre-Guerras (1914–1940) [Expressionist Echoes in Portuguese Interwar Painting (1914–1940)]. Lisbon: Campo da Comunicação, 2011. França, José-Augusto. A Arte em Portugal no Século XX 1911–1961 [The Art in Portugal in the 20th Century 1911–1961]. Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 2009. Matos, Lúcia Almeida. Escultura em Portugal no século XX (1910–1969) [Sculpture in Portugal in the 20th Century]. Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 2007. Serra, João B., et al., eds. Portugals Moderne 1910–1940. Kunst in der Zeit Fernando Pessoas. [Portugal’s Modernity: Art at the Time of Fernando Pessoas]. Zürich: Edition Stemmle, 1997.

Chapter 21 Badovinac, Zdenka, et al. Veno Pilon. Ljubljana: Moderna galerija, 2002. Exhibition Catalogue. Bernik, Stane, et al. Tank! Slovenska zgodovinska avantgarda [Tank! Slovenian Historical Avant-Garde]. Ljubljana: Moderna galerija, 1998. Exhibition Catalogue. Komelj, Milček, and Igor Kranjc, eds. Ekspresionizem in nova stvarnost 1920–1930 [Expressionism and New Objectivity 1920–1930]. Ljubljana: Moderna galerija, 1986. Exhibition Catalogue. Kralj, Lado. Ekspresionizem [Expressionism]. Ljubljana: DZS, 1986. Kranjc, Igor. France Kralj. Ljubljana: Slovenska matica, 2001. Žerovc, Beti. Slovenski impresionisti [Slovenian Impressionists]. Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga, 2013. Živadinov, Dragan. Der Sturm and the Slovene Historical Avant-Garde. Ljubljana: Muzej in galerije mesta Ljubljane (MGML), 2011. Exhibition Catalogue.

Chapter 22 Denegri, Ješa. “Koloristički ekspresionizam četvrte decenije” [Colouristic Expressionism in the Fourth Decade]. In Četvrta decenija: ekspresionizam boje, kolorizam, poetski realizam, intimizam, koloristički realizam [The Fourth Decade: Expressionism of Colour, Colourism, Poetic Realism, Intimism, Colourist Realism], edited by Miodrag B. Protić, 14–24. Belgrade: Muzej savremene umetnosti, 1971. Exhibition Catalogue. Gagro, Božidar. “Slikarstvo Proljetnog salona” [Painting of Proljetni Salon]. Život umjetnosti [Life of Art] 2 (1966): 46–54. Maković, Zvonko. Vilko Gecan. Zagreb: Matica hrvatska, 1997. —, ed. Strast i bunt—ekspresionizam u Hrvatskoj [Passion and Rebellion—Expressionism in Croatia]. Zagreb: Galerija Klovićevi dvori, 2011. Exhibition Catalogue. Maleković, Vladimir. Ekspresionizam i hrvatsko slikarstvo [Expressionism and Croatian Painting]. Zagreb: Umjetnički paviljon, 1980. Exhibition Catalogue.

550

Selected Bibliography Prelog, Petar. “Nekoliko problema interpretacije ekspresionizma u hrvatskom slikarstvu” [Some Problems Regarding the Interpretation of Expressionism in Croatian Painting]. In Zbornik I. kongresa hrvatskih povjesničara umjetnosti [Proceedings of the 1st Congress of Croatian Art Historians], edited by Milan Pelc, 263–268. Zagreb: Institut za povijest umjetnosti, 2004. —. Proljetni salon 1916 –1928/The Spring Salon, 1916–1928. Zagreb: Umjetnički paviljon, 2007. Exhibition Catalogue. Vrančić, Josip, “Prvo razdoblje Proljetnog salona i rani ekspresionizam u hrvatskoj likovnoj umjetnosti (1916–1919)” [The First Period of the Spring Salon and Early Expressionism in Croatian Art (1916– 1919)], Radovi Filozofskog fakulteta u Zadru [Journal of Faculty of Philosophy in Zadar] 12 (1973/1974): 177–187.

Chapter 23 Bošnjak, Sreto, ed. Mihailo S. Petrov: slikarstvo, grafika, crteži, primenjena grafika, umetnička kritika [Mihailo S. Petrov: Painting, Graphics, Drawings, Applied Graphics, Art Criticism]. Beograd: Umetnički paviljon Cvijeta Zuzorić, 1979. Čupić, Simona. Jovan Bijelić 1884–1964. Beograd: Jugoslovenska galerija umetničkih dela, 2000. Golubović, Vidosava, and Irina Subotić [Видосава Голубовић and Ирина Суботић]. Zenit 1921–1926 [Зенит 1921–1926]. Belgrad: Narodna Biblioteka [Београд: Народна библиотека Србије], 2008. Protić, Miodrag B. Treća decenija: Konstruktivno slikarstvo [Third Decade: Constructive Painting]. Beograd: Muzej savremene umetnosti, 1967.

Chapter 24 Crohmalniceanu, Ovid S. Literatura romana si expresionismul [Romanian Literature and Expressionism]. Bucharest: Minerva, 1967. Pavel, Amelia. Expresionismul si premisele sale [Expressionism and Its Premises]. Bucharest: Meridiane, 1978.

Chapter 25 Avramov, Dimitur [Димитър Аврамов]. “The Modernist Ahead” [Подранилият модернист]. In Dialogue Between Two Arts [Диалог между две изкуства]. Sofia: Bulgarian Writer [Български писател], 1993. Genova, Irina. “Two Views on Expressionism: Chavdar Mutfov and Geo Milev.” Umĕní/Art 4 (2010): 312–320.

Chapter 26 Adams, Henry, et al. Albert Bloch: The American Blaue Reiter. New York: Prestel, 1997. Ayre, Robert. “Expressionist in Montreal.” New Frontier 1(2) (May 1936): 29–30. Baigell, Matthew. Charles Burchfield. New York: Watson-Guptill, 1976. Coke, Van Deren. Nordfeldt the Painter. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1972. Cooke, Edwy F. Fritz Brandtner 1896–1969: A Retrospective Exhibition. Montreal: Sir George Williams University, 1971. Dijkstra, Bram. American Expressionism: Art and Social Change, 1920–1950. New York: Abrams, 2003. Duffy, Helen, and Frances K. Smith. The Brave New World of Fritz Brandtner. Kingston: Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen’s University, 1982. Fraser, Ted. Caven Atkins: The Winnipeg Years. Windsor: Art Gallery of Windsor, 1987. Haskell, Barbara. Oscar Bluemner: A Passion for Color. New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 2005. —, and Ulrich Luckhardt. Lyonel Feininger: At the Edge of the World. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2011. Hunter, Sam. B.J.O. Nordfeldt: An American Expressionist. Pipersville, PA: Richard Stuart Gallery, 1984. Kienle Ponka, Annabelle. “Bringing German Expressionism to Canada.” In Storm and Spirit: The EckhardtGramatte Collection of German Expressionist Art, edited by Andrew Kear, et al. Winnipeg: The Winnipeg Art Gallery, 2013.

551

Selected Bibliography Kornhauser, Elizabeth Mankin, et al. Marsden Hartley: American Modern. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Levin, Gail, and Marianne Lorenz. Theme and Improvisation: Kandinsky and the American Avant-Garde, 1912– 1950. New York: Little, Brown, & Co., 1992. MacIejunes, Nannette V., et al. The Art of Charles Burchfield: North by Northwest. New York: Abrams, 1997. McDonnell, Patricia. Concerning Expressionism: American Modernism and the German Avant-Garde. New York: Hollis Taggart Galleries, 1998. Robertson, Bruce. Marsden Hartley. New York: Abrams, 1995. Silcox, David, and Robin Skelton. Maxwell Bates: A Canadian Expressionist. Edmonton: Art Gallery of Alberta, 2004. Whiting, Cécile. “Regenerate Art: The Reception of German Expressionism in the United States, 1900–1945.” Art Criticism 9(1) (1994): 72–92.

Chapter 27 Brest, Jorge Romero. La pintura del siglo XX (1900–1974) [20th-Century Painting (1900–1974)], Chap. 3. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1979. Müller-Bergh, Klaus, and Gilberto Mendonça Telles, eds. Vanguardia latinoamericana: historia, crítica y documentos, Tomos I/V [Latin-American Avant-Garde: History, Criticism and Documents, Vol. I/V]. Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2015. Payro, Julio. Introducción a la pintura expresionista [Introduction to Expressionist Painting]. Buenos Aires: Colección Esquemas, Ed. Columba, 1970. Rodríguez, Marcelo. “La constante expresionista en la pintura chilena” [The Constant Expressionism in Chilean Painting]. In Arte y crisis en Iberoamérica: Jornadas de Historia del Arte en Chile [Art and Crisis in Ibero-America: Workshop of History of Art in Chile], edited by Fernando Guzmán, Gloria Cortéz, and Juan Manuel Martínez. Santiago de Chile: RIL Editores, 2004. Traba, Marta. “Capítulo 6: el arte expresionista” [Chapter 6: Expressionist Art]. YouTube video, 23:28, from the television series La historia del arte moderno contada desde Bogotá [History of Modern Art Told from Bogotá]. Bogotá: Rodrigo Castaño Valencia, 1983. Last accessed September 9, 2017, www.you tube.com/watch?v=Oteenw8dUv0. —. “Capítulo 9: el expresionismo abstracto” [Chapter 9: Abstract Expressionism]. YouTube video, 24:11, from the television series La historia del arte moderno contada desde Bogotá [History of Modern Art Told from Bogotá]. Bogotá: Rodrigo Castaño Valencia, 1983. Last accessed September 9, 2017, www.you tube.com/watch?v=ZPHaAbQmLZw.

Chapter 28 Berman, Esmé. Art and Artists of South Africa: An Illustrated Biographical Dictionary and Historical Survey of Painters & Graphic Artists Since 1875. Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1970.

552

NAME INDEX

Aalto, Alvar 226 Aaltonen, Elsa 230 Aaltonen, Wäinö (Väinö) 154, 222, 230, 231, 233, 236, 237n15 Abakanowicz, Magdalena 70n25 Ābele, Kristiāna 168 Abramo, Livio 513, 514 Adler, Egon 42, 76, 93 Adler, Jankel (Jankiel) 93, 103 Adler, Paul 102 Adrian-Nilsson, Gösta (GAN) 208, 214, 215, 218, 219 Aksenov, Ivan 122 Alechinsky, Pierre 170 Alfaro Siqueiros, David 22, 508, 516, 518 Alonso, Carlos 513 Altenberg, Peter 349, 359 Altink, Jan 302 Altman, Natan 120 Amelin, Albin 217 Andersen, Robin Christian 11, 73 Andrade Faini, Caesar 511, 514 Angelushev, Boris 478 Annuss, Augusts 169 Apollinaire, Guillaume 52, 89, 102, 119, 234, 340, 430 Appel, Karel 170 Arbitblatas, Neemija (Arbit Blatas) 23, 136, 149, 150, 157, 334, 340, 341 Archipenko, Alexander 101, 123, 353, 362, 381, 469 Aren, Peet 174, 187 Armhold, Adelheid 533 Artums, Ansis 169 Åström, Lars Erik 208, 210 Astrup, Nikolai 248, 254 Atkins, Caven 21, 488, 493–97

Aulie, Reidar 250 Aurenche, Marie-Berthe 345 Ayre, Robert 503 Azbé, Anton 116, 174, 453, 458 Babić, Ljubo 21, 413, 414, 421, 424, 431 Bacon, Francis 334, 513 Badiou, Alain 404 Bahr, Hermann 18, 33, 410 Bakunin, Mikhail 113 Balázs, Ferenc 452 Ball, Hugo 110n42, 110n46; almanac 110n42, 110n46 Balla, Giacomo 28, 193, 353 Balsamadjieva (Balsamadzhieva), Anna 471 Baltazar, Apcar 455, 459 Balwé, Jan Hendrik Arnold 528, 531 Bandas (Band), Maksas (Max) 136 Bandurek, Wolf 512 Bányász, László 88 Banzer, Hugo 519 Barbusse, Henri 457 Barki, Gergely 87 Barlach, Ernst 133, 136, 145, 151, 159, 250, 290, 304, 310, 314, 366, 385, 386, 387, 495 Barnes, Albert 333, 334, 339 Barradas, Rafael 372 Barta, Sándor 84 Barthélémy, Sophie 52 Bartók, Béla 79, 84, 90 Basaldúa, Héctor 22, 512, 518 Basler, Adolphe (Adolf) 23, 92, 94, 339, 341, 345 Battiss, Walter 538 Baudelaire, Charles 102 Bauer, Rudolf 202, 203, 214 Bauer, Szilárd (Konštantín) 56, 61 Baum, Julie 350

553

Name Index Beardsley, Aubrey 277 Bechterjeff, Alexander 117 Beckmann, Max 159, 309, 314, 498 Bederski, Adam 95, 102 Beffie, Willem 302, 313 Behne, Adolf 471 Behring, Edith 512 Behrsen, Renata 232 Behrsen-Colliander, Ina (Ina Behrsen, Ina Colliander) 222, 232, 233–36, 240 Bekeris, Zalmanas (Zalė) 136, 149, 150, 151, 156 Beļcova, Aleksandra 162, 167, 169 Belentschikow, Valentin 113 Bell, Vanessa 289 Belling, Rudolf 49, 304, 313 Beneš, Vincenc 35, 38, 49, 301 Benn, Gottfried 102 Benson, Timothy O. 477, 478 Berenson, Bernard 276 Berent, Wacław 93, 101 Berény, Róbert 11, 76, 79, 80, 85, 87 Bergman, Annie 211 Bergson, Henri-Louis 161, 183, 432 Berlewi, Henryk 12, 103 Berman, Esmé 526 Bermondt-Avalov, Pavel 162, 171n17, 171n20 Bernard, Emile 452 Bernáth, Aurél 83–85 Besant, Annie 298–99 Beve, Eva 211, 214 Biélinky, Jacques 337–38 Bijelić, Jovan 427, 431–35, 439 Billinger, Richard 446 Billman, Thorsten 217 Binkis, Kazys 144 Birot, Pierre-Albert 362n41 Bischoff, F.W. (Fritz Walter Bischoff, Friedrich Bischoff) 354 Björling, Gunnar 236 Bjurström, Tor 208, 211, 213, 216, 217 Black, Jonathan 285 Blaga, Lucian 446, 453, 454 Blake, William 260, 288 Blatas, Arbit see Arbitblatas Blei, Fritz 445 Bleyl, Fritz 7, 278 Blinder, Olga 512–14, 519 Bloch, Albert 9, 20, 27, 28n12, 129n14, 214, 288, 350, 455, 491, 504n31 Bloch, Ernst 536 Blode, Hermann 149 Bluemner, Oscar 487, 488, 493, 498 Bobrov, Sergei 122 Boccioni, Umberto 27n12, 101, 193, 268, 295, 350, 351–53, 469 Böcklin, Arnold 468 Boddien, Heinrich von 357, 363n58

Boendermaker, Piet 319 Bogdanov, Aleksandr 125 Boguslavskaya, Ksenia 120 Böhme, Jakob 502 Bojadjieff (Boyadzhiev), Ivan 471 Bölöni, György 80 Bolz, Hanns 287 Bonnard, Pierre 4, 36 Boonzaier, D. C. 531, 533 Boonzaier, Gregoire 533 Boot, H. F. 303 Borch, O. V. 203 Borchgrevink, Carsten 251 Borel, Henri 300 Borges, Jorge Luis 372, 373 Borges, Norah 373 Börje, Gideon 214 Bornemisza, Géza 3 Borsszem, Jankó (John Pepper) 77 Bortnyik, Sándor (Alexander) 56 Bosch, Hieronymos 184 Botero, Fernando 511 Brâncuși, Constantin 381, 456 Brandenburg, Martin 526 Brandtner, Fritz 21, 27, 488, 493–97, 503 Braque, Georges 3, 4, 9, 39, 41, 114, 196, 199, 277, 337, 417 Brass, Hans 313n43 Brastiņš, Ernesta 171n17 Brasz, Jozsif 177 Brecht, Bertolt 125, 133n99 Brejc, Tomaž 397 Brencēns, Eduards 171n17 Bridgwater, Patrick 279, 283 Bring, Maj 211 Broby-Johansen, Rudolf 203 Brock, Alan Clutton 3, 33, 280 Brod, Max 37 Broekmans, P. M. 302 Brömse, August 44, 45, 54n74, 54n77 Brooke, Rupert 279–81, 293n31 Bruce, Henry Patrick 212 Bruder, Anton 54n77 Brummer, József 3 Brunius, August 207, 208, 212, 213, 216, 218, 223, 224, 227 Brusselmans, Jean 322, 330n16 Brust, Alfred 174 Buckley, Edith 8, 277 Buisseret, Louis 168 Bukovac, Vlaho 35 Bulaka, Mečislovas 136, 157n54 Burchfield, Charles E. 27, 488, 500, 501 Burliuk (Burljuk), David (Dawid) 114, 115, 116, 117, 123, 124 Burliuk (Burljuk), Vladimir (Wladimir) 114, 117, 467

554

Name Index Butler, Horacio 511–14 Buzzi, Paolo 362n41 Caillebotte, Gustave 444 Camargo, Iberê 508, 516 Campendonk, Heinrich 82, 129n14, 216, 301, 307, 310, 314n50, 331n20, 350, 432, 471, 489 Cankar, Izidor 406n7 Cantré, Jozef 320 Čapek, Josef 41, 42, 49n1 Čapek, Karel 43, 102 Carey, Frances 283, 287 Carolis, Adolfo de 351–53 Carr, Emily 488 Carrà, Carlo 81, 193, 295, 350, 362n41, 415 Cassatt, Mary 343 Cassino Assens, Rafael 372 Cassirer, Paul 11, 35–6, 117 Cavalcanti, Emiliano di 22, 508, 518 Cawén, Alvar 224, 237n15 Cendrars, Blaise 119, 362n41 Centurión, Emilio 512, 514 Černigoj, Avgust 407n12 Cervantes, Miguel de 371 Cézanne, Paul 2, 4, 6, 25, 34, 36, 37, 39, 74, 79, 114, 138, 191, 192, 194, 196, 197, 199, 200, 201, 207, 208, 217, 260, 262, 276, 333, 373, 383, 384, 413, 417–19, 421, 423n8, 428, 429, 431, 445, 493, 532 Chabot, Hendrik 303 Chagall, Marc xxxvi, 12, 13, 22–24, 28n12, 117, 119–20, 122–24, 131n70, 133n99, 202, 203, 301, 326, 331n20, 335–39, 341, 343, 345, 356, 382, 435, 469–71, 511, 514, 532, 535 Charles, Malcolm see Salaman, Malcolm C. Chirico, Giorgio de 331n20, 415 Chochol, Josef 41 Cielavs, Jānis 167 Cisek, Oscar Walter 446 Citroen, Paul 308 Claus, Emile 317 Cleve-Jonand, Agnes 211, 212, 219 Clutton-Brock, Arthur 280 Coen, Augusta 355 Coester, Otto 47 Cohen, Walter 75 Colliander, Tito (Fritiof) 232, 236 Collin, Marcus 223 Comarnescu, Petru 460 Comfort, Charles 488 Corbusier, Le see Le Corbusier Corcuera, Oscar 516 Corinth, Lovis 139, 149, 366, 445 Cork, Richard 285 Corvinus, Matthias 57 Coulin, Arthur 443–45, 447 Courbet, Gustave 194, 196, 335

Cozzani, Ettore 352, 353 Cramer, Conrad (Konrad) 10, 488, 489 Crane, Walter 278, 287, 290 Cristi, Ximena 508, 515, 519 Crnjanski, Miloš 429, 439n17 Cross, Henri-Edmond 74 Crucy, François 194 Csaki-Copony (Csaky-Copony), Grete 22, 449 Csaki, Richard 449, 462n30 Cserna, Andor 87n12 Csordák, Lajos (Ľudovít) 69n5 Cukermann, Bencion 139 Cuneo Perinetti, José 511, 516 Curtius, Ernst 467 Czigány, Dezső 82, 87n16 Czóbel, Béla 75, 85, 87n16 Czurlanis (Čiurlionis), Mikołaj Konstanty (Mikalojus Konstantinas) 93 Daeye, Hippolyte 321 Dalí, Salvador 373 Danishevskii, Samuil 138 Danneskjold-Samsoe, S. (Sophus Adam) 225 Dardel, Nils 213 Däubler, Theodor 46, 133n99, 174 Daumier, Honoré 34, 36, 37, 455 Davringhausen, Heinrich Maria 20 Dawson, Manierre 10, 488 Defregger, Franz von 468 Dehmel, Richard 174, 349 Deineka, Aleksandr 126 Delak, Ferdo 398 Delaunay, Robert 4, 9, 28n12, 78, 114, 117, 119, 124, 129n14, 203, 258, 350, 381, 383, 467, 471 Delaunay-Terk, Sonia 341, 381, 390n26 Delbanco, Gustav 308 Dell, Robert 276 Delvard, Marya 491 Demirjian, Jorge 513 Denis, Maurice 4, 201, 276, 331n21 Derain, André 3, 4, 101, 114, 117, 169, 191, 192, 196, 207, 208, 230, 234, 276, 277, 282, 289, 339, 417, 458, 459, 538n6 Derkert, Siri 211, 217 Derkovits, Gyula 85, 90n94 Déry, Béla 94 Dias, Saúl 382 Dienes, László 451, 453 Diez, Wilhelm von 116 Dijkstra, Johan 302 Diktonius, Elmer 236 Dirsztay, Viktor Baron von 80 Dix, Otto 17–21, 125, 127, 159, 176, 183, 331n20, 357, 363n58, 366–68, 475, 478, 518 Dobichina, Nadezhda 162 Döblin, Alfred 296 Dobrović, Petar 427–29, 432, 434, 436

555

Name Index Dodgson, Campbell 283, 284 Dombrovska-Larsena, Lidija 170 Domela, César 314n56 Domšaitis (Domscheit), Pranas (Franz) 149, 156n45, 525, 533, 535, 536 Donadini, Ulderiko 410, 411, 414 Dorival, Bernard 23, 339 Dornik, Ivan 406n7 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 37, 42, 342, 347n45 Dovydaitytė, Linara 136 Drēviņš, Aleksandrs 162 du Toit, Martin Lourens 536 Dubeneckis, Vladimiras 144 Dubow, Neville 531 Dubuffet, Jean 334 Duchamp, Marcel 513 Dufy, Raoul 183, 193, 197, 208, 289 Duras, Mary 46, 54n77, 54n80 Dürer, Albrecht 14, 245, 474 Dzenis, Burkards 166, 171n17 Echagüe Vera, Ofelia 512 Echevarría, Juan de 373 Eckhardt, Ferdinand 490, 495 Eckhardt-Gramatte, Sonia 490 Eddy, Arthur Jerome 488 Edelfelt, Albert 277 Eder, Hans 444–48, 450, 454, 460, 461 Edschmid, Kasimir 122 Egry, József 84, 85 Ehrenburg, Ilya 337, 469 Ehrenstein, Albert 351 Einstein, Carl 287, 537 Ekeland, Arne 250 Ekster, Aleksandra 124 El Greco 25, 342, 384 El Lissitzky see Lissitzky, Lazar Elek, Artúr 27n7, 76, 78 Eliass, Ģederts 162, 169 Elkins, James 34, 54n73 Ellis, Havelock 284 Eloy, Mário (Mário Eloy de Jesus Perreira) 21, 25, 379, 382–86, 388 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 182 Engberg, Gabriel 224, 237n15 Engelmann, Anetta 47 Engström, Leander 208, 211, 212, 213 Enríquez, Carlos 516, 519 Ensor, James 24, 93, 101, 168, 169, 184, 321, 327, 455, 532, 533 Epstein, Elisabeth 350 Epstein, Jacob 230 Erbslöh, Adolf 117, 280 Erixon, Sven 217 Ernst, Max 301, 345 Evergood, Philip 21, 488, 493 Exter, Alexandra 353

Fagerkvist, Thor 217 Fainšteinas, Chaimas Mejeris 149, 150, 151, 152 Faistauer, Anton 11, 73, 87n12 Fani, Vincenzo (Volt) 362n41 Fauconnier, Henri le see Le Fauconnier, Henri Faustman, Mollie 211 Favorsky, Vladmir 126 Fechter, Paul 4, 5, 18, 33, 142, 143, 193, 223, 224, 281, 287, 397, 453, 476 Fedorov-Davydov, Aleksei 127 Feigl, Friedrich 35–38, 40, 42, 51n27, 51n38 Feininger, Lyonel 145, 202, 287, 290, 305, 307, 314n50, 366, 487–89, 491, 495, 504n31, 510 Feldman, Freda 537, 539, 541n70 Feldman, Richard 537, 539 Felixmüller, Conrad 54n80, 123, 125, 285, 475 Fels, Florent 341 Felvinczi Takács, Zoltán 75, 78, 79, 88n20, 88n23 Ferenczy, Károly 452 Fergusson, John Duncan 281 Ferro, António Joaquim Tavares 378, 379, 386, 388 Filla, Emil 6, 28n12, 34–41, 48, 49n1, 51n27, 51n34, 301 Filonov, Pavel 25, 118, 119, 124 Finnbogason, Guðmundur 259 Fischerström, Edith 217 FitzGerald, Lionel LeMoine 495, 497 Flaum, Franz 4, 276, 359n6 Flechtheim, Alfred 384 Florian, Josef 47 Fokin, Mikhail 195 Fokina, Vera 195 Folgore, Luciano 355, 362n41 Foltýn, František 56, 57 Fondi, Renato 363n58 Forain, Jean-Louis 458, 459 Forner, Raquel 511, 514 Fougstedt, Arvid 212 Freund, Erika 313n43 Freundlich, Otto 307, 345 Freyburg, Karl von 497, 498, 505n54 Friedl, Antonín 54n80 Frieg, Will 47 Friesz, Othon 4, 41, 276, 277, 511, 516 Frosterus, Sigurd 224 Fry, Roger 3, 89n50, 191, 275, 276, 279, 280, 281, 283, 287 Fuck, Bruno 478 Fuente, Sandra de la 515 Fülep, Lajos 80 Furst, Herbert 285, 289 Gabo, Naum 124 Gabrilovich, Evgeny 122 Galante, Nicola 351, 352, 353, 357, 360n21, 361n31, 362n41 Galaunė, Paulius 136, 150, 157n49, 157n56

556

Name Index Galdikas, Adomas 15, 144–46, 148, 156n41 Gallen-Kallela (Gallén), Akseli (Axel) 8, 144, 226, 227, 239n44 Galli, Angelo 81 Gaudí, Antonio 381 Gauguin, Paul 2, 4, 6, 8, 34, 36, 37, 74, 76, 79, 147, 191, 192, 194, 196, 207, 208, 230, 233, 234, 247, 268, 276, 282, 284, 290, 341, 342, 384, 470, 508, 527 Gecan, Vilko 13, 26, 416, 417, 418, 419, 420, 421, 425n30, 425n38, 471 Gelsted, Otto 192, 200, 201 Ģelzis, Kristaps 170 Genthon, István 85 Georgiev, Pencho 17, 476, 477 Gestel, Leo 295, 298, 319 Gibbings, Robert 290 Giersing, Harald 194, 195, 197, 202 Gill, Eric 230 Ginna, Arnaldo (Arnaldo Ginanni Corradini) 361n36 Giotto 471 Gleizes, Albert 28n12, 117, 202, 203, 471 Goeritz, Karl 308 Goesch, Paul 357, 363n58 Goetz, Arthur 354 Goll, Ivan 13, 20, 48, 420, 425n34 Goltz, Hans 94, 114, 174, 216, 220n39, 287, 294n62, 467, 469 Gomes, Simão César Dórdio 379 Gómez, Laureano 515 Gómez de la Serna, Ramón 372, 373n2 Gómez Echeverry, Nicolás 516 Goncharova (Gontscharova), Natalia (Natalija) 114–17, 123, 350, 469, 470 Gonzàlez, Julio 372 Göransson, Åke 217 Gordon, Donald E. 2, 34, 423n1, 540n60 Gorky, Maxim 125 Gorriarena, Carlos 509, 516 Gosschalk, Jos H. 307 Gottlieb, Adolph 335, 346 Gottlieb, Leopold 339 Götz, František 47, 48 Goya, Francisco de 342, 371 Gramatté, Walter 366, 490 Grant, Duncan 289 Grau, Ricardo 508, 519 Griebel, Otto 21 Griffiths, Anthony 283, 287 Grigorescu, Dan 460 Gris, Juan 333, 372, 373, 458 Gromaire, Marcel 336 Grönvall, Sven 232, 236, 240n74, 241n80 Grönvik, Gunvor 236, 242n101 Groot, Maurits de 303 Gropius, Walter 358 Grosvalds, Jāzeps 159, 160, 162, 163, 166, 171n17

Grosz, George 17, 19–21, 127, 136, 145, 151, 306, 366, 382, 456, 478, 498, 518 Grünberg, Jaan 184 Grünewald, Isaac 3, 192, 196, 197, 207, 208, 211–14, 219n9, 220n39, 301, 340, 341, 347n38 Grünewald, Matthias 14 Guayasamín, Osvaldo (Oswaldo) 22, 508 Gudaitis, Antanas 8, 146–48, 150, 156n42, 157n54 Guggenheim, Solomon R. 489 Guido, Alfredo 512, 514 Gummesson, Carl 219, 221n41 Gurlitt, Cornelia 18, 140 Gurlitt, Cornelius 140, 278, 367 Gurlitt, Fritz 85 Gurlitt, Hildebrandt 140, 375n18 Gurlitt, Wolfgang 288 Guro, Elena 118 Gütersloh, Paris 11, 73 Gutfreund, Otto 28n12, 49n1, 49n11 Gutiérrez, Sérvulo 516 Gutiérrez Solana, José 373 Guzmán de Rojas, Cecilio 509, 516, 518 Gysi, Nikolaus 458 Haesaerts, Luc 329 Haesaerts, Paul 329 Hagreen, Philip 290 Halász-Hradil, Elemér (Elemír) 69n5 Hald, Edward 211, 219n9 Hallström, Eric 214, 217 Halm, Peter von 69n11 Hansen, Gunnar 203 Hansen, Wilhelm 196 Harmenszoon van Rijn, Rembrandt 335 Harris, Lawren 489 Hartberg, Viktor 168 Hartlaub, Gustav 20 Hartley, Marsden 27, 28n12, 487, 488, 497, 498, 501, 502 Hasenclever, Walter 102, 132n99, 174, 366 Hausenstein, Wilhelm 20, 132n99, 529 Hébuterne, Jeanne 341 Heckel, Erich 7, 17, 41, 114, 117, 132n99, 145, 159, 176, 180, 187n32, 216, 250, 278, 279, 290, 296, 307, 308, 313n43, 314n50, 350, 366, 456, 495, 510 Hegedušić, Krsto 21 Hegel, Georg Wilhem Friedrich 275, 335 Hegenbarth, Josef 46, 54n77 Heiberg, Jean 3, 262 Heine, Thomas Theodor 215 Heise, Katharina 531 Helbig, Walter 287 Hellaakoski, Aaro 225, 226, 230, 231 Helzel, Emil 54n77 Hennings, Emmy 455 Henningsen, Poul 202

557

Name Index Herfurth-Sachsenheim, Edith 450 Herskovitz, David 516 Herterich, Ludwig von 458 Hertjén, Sigrid 2, 211, 212, 213, 219n9, 340 Herzen, Aleksandr 113 Herzfelde, Wieland 122 Herzog, Oswald 304, 307, 313n43 Hess, Hans 291 Hevesy, Iván 82 Heydt, Eduard Baron von der 307 Heym, Georg 46, 101, 102, 122 Heymann, Moritz 444, 449 Higgs, Cecil 531, 540n54 Hildebrand, Adolf von 276 Hildebrandt, Hans 530, 531 Hincz, Gyula 83 Hirsekorn, Elli (Elly) 354, 355 Hitler, Adolf 344, 468, 490 Hjartarson, Benedikt 257 Hjertén-Grünewald, Sigrid 212, 213, 301 Hjort, Bror 217 Hladíková, Anna 51n35 Hochsieder, Norbert 45 Hodler, Ferdinand 4, 349 Hofer, Karl 266, 314n50 Hofman, Vlastislav 41, 42 Hofmann, Hans 475 Holbein, Hans 471 Hollósy, Simon 452, 453 Holmström, Tora Vega 211, 215, 219 Holst, Agda 211, 214 Hölzel, Adolf 211 Holzman, Max 144 Honigberger, Emil 449 Horb, Max 35, 38 Horn, Josef 47 Horne, Herbert 276 Horzyca, Wilam 103 Huebner, Friedrich Markus 301, 302, 307 Hulewicz, Bohdan 103 Hulewicz, Jerzy 95, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104, 105, 106 Hulewicz, Witold 102, 103 Hulme, T. E. 279 Humareda, Víctor 22, 518 Huszár, Vilmos 314n56 Huth, Robert 313n43 Ibsen, Henrik 249 Ignotus see Veigelsberg, Hugó Il Duce see Mussolini, Benito Indenbaum, Leon 138 Ionescu, Nae 455 Iser (Rubinsohn), Iosif (Isidor) 458–61 Ivarsson, Ivan 217 Iwaszkiewicz, Jarosław 95, 103 Izdebsky, Vladimir 114, 116, 117

Jackson, A. Y. 487 Jackson, Holbrook 284 Jacob, Max 52n44, 340 Jacobs, Montague (Monty) 142, 143 Jakoby, Gyula (Július) 57 Jakopič, Rihard 397, 399, 406n3 Jama, Matija 397 Jancsó, Elemér 453 Janikowski, Ludwig Ritter von 79 Jaszusch, Antal (Anton) 56, 61–67, 69n10, 69n11, 70n17, 70n21, 70n23, 70n27, 71n35, 72n49 Jawlensky, Alexei 9, 76, 79, 93, 114–17, 123, 137–39, 202, 280, 302, 307, 313n43, 350, 489, 495, 511 Jespers, Floris 322, 330 Jespers, Oscar 322, 330 Jiránek, Miloš 37 Job, Ignjat 422 Joganson, Karl 124 Jóhannesson, Alexander 258, 259, 261, 262, 264, 269n1, 270n9 Johannesson, Lena 210 Jolin, Einar 208, 211–13, 219n9 Jon-And, John 211, 212 Jónsson, Ásgrímur 260, 262, 269, 271n36 Jónsson, Finnur 12, 257, 266, 268, 269 Jónsson, Jónas 260, 261, 262, 265, 267, 268, 269 Jónsson, Ríkarður 259, 260, 268 Jordens, Jan 302 Jorn, Asger 170 Joyeux-Prunel, Béatrice 476 Jurkūnas, Vytautas 15, 136 Justitz, Alfred 42 Kádár, Béla 83, 85 Kafka, Franz 35, 51n36 Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry 39, 234 Kairiūkštytė-Jacinienė, Halina 145 Kajanus, Robert 232 Kállai, Ernő (Mátyás, Péter) 83, 84, 85, 90n84 Kalmīte, Jānis 169 Kalniņš, Eduards 169 Kalnroze, Valdis 169, 171n17 Kamensky, Vasily 118 Kandinsky, Wassily 5, 9, 10, 13, 17, 52n49, 53n55, 76, 79, 93, 94, 101, 114–18, 120, 122–24, 129n14, 131n70, 132n99, 137, 138, 159, 174, 194, 202, 210, 212, 214–19, 221n41, 223, 237n5, 266, 279–83, 285, 287, 288, 296–302, 306, 307, 310, 311, 311n7, 312n22, 312n26, 312n27, 312n29, 312n30, 313n36, 314n56, 330n7, 331n20, 333, 350, 353, 356, 360n21, 360n22, 362n38, 397, 432, 435–37, 465–71, 481n27, 481n28, 488–91, 502, 511 Kanoldt, Alexander 117, 366, 368 Kant, Immanuel 275, 335, 372 Karasek, Jiři 102

558

Name Index Karjalainen, Tuula 224 Karsten, Ludvid 217 Kasparsons, Reinholds 172n28 Kasprowicz, Jan 101 Kassák, Lajos 80–85, 428, 447, 450, 451 Katchouleff (Kachulev), Mircho 471 Katiliūtė, Marcė 15, 136, 151 Katz, Renina 512 Kazaks, Jēkabs 159, 162, 163, 166, 169, 171n17, 225 Keliuotis, Juozas 154 Kemény, Alfréd 121 Kernstok, Károly 74, 82, 83, 85, 87n16 Kesting, Edmund 266 Khlebnikov, Velimir 118, 122 Kibel, Wolf 23, 525, 531, 532, 535, 541n75 Kikkert, Conrad 302 Kikoïne, Michel 138, 340 Kimm, Fritz 22, 444, 445 Kind, Georg 175, 176, 182 Kingman, Eduardo 22, 508, 516, 517 Kirchner, Ernst Ludvig 7, 15, 17, 40, 41, 52n47, 53n54, 114, 117, 149, 159, 176, 250, 276, 278, 279, 287, 289, 292n14, 296, 302, 308, 310, 314n50, 333, 344, 350, 366, 368, 425n31, 487, 494, 498, 511 Kireevsky, Ivan 113 Kirkegaard, Søren 249 Kisling, Moïse 23, 333, 336, 339 Kjarval, Jóhannes 257, 259–65, 268, 269, 269n1 Kļaviņš, Eduards 154n1, 159 Klee, Paul 101, 108, 132n99, 137, 145, 202, 203, 214, 266, 301, 302, 350, 435, 468, 469, 471, 489, 511 Klein, César 76, 93, 313n43 Klein, József 453 Klein Scott, W. 287 Kleinschmidt, Paul 366 Klek (Seissel), Jo (Josip) 471 Klemm, Wilhelm 372 Klimt, Gustav 10 Klinger, Max 44 Kliun, Ivan 124 Klutsis, Gustav 124 Kochmann, Franz 308 Koczogh, Ákos 85, 90n85 Kogoj, Marij 405 Kojo, Viljo 226, 227, 231, 237n15 Kokoschka, Oskar 4, 10–13, 17, 25, 46, 73, 76, 79, 80, 82, 85, 87n16, 93, 101, 132n99, 202, 208, 214, 216, 219, 266, 268, 276, 279, 280, 296, 301, 308, 310, 314n50, 333, 349, 351, 359n6, 366, 384, 397, 445, 468, 470 Kolig, Anton 11, 73 Kollwitz, Käthe 17–20, 123, 127, 136, 151, 208, 219, 246, 304, 314n50, 366, 476, 478, 487, 495, 498, 512–14, 531

Komját, Aladár 84, 90n83 Kompus, Hanno 180 Konchalovsky, Petr 124, 296, 297 Kooning, Willem de 334 Kopf, Maxim 45, 46, 54n80 Körner, Éva 91n94 Korsakaitė, Ingrida 136, 150 Korteweg, Adriaan 360n21 Kós (Kosch), Károly (Karl) 452 Kosch, Karl see Kós, Károly Kosidowski, Zenon 103 Kővári-Kačmarik, Szilárd (Konštantín) 57, 61 Koza-Matejov, Jur 66, 67 Kozák, Bohumír 56 Kozicki, Władysław 94 Kozma, Lajos 56 Kralj, France 399, 400, 405 Kralj, Tone 396, 399, 400 Kraljević, Miroslav 416–19 Kramář, Vincenc 39, 41, 48, 417 Kraus, Karl 79 Krémègne, Pinchus 138, 339, 340 Kremlička, Rudolf 42 Krizman, Tomislav 414, 440n27 Krizsán, János 453 Krleža, Miroslav 411, 432 Krogh, Per 197, 212 Krohn, Ernst 232, 240n74 Krón, Jenő (Eugen) 56–59 Kropotkin, Petr 113 Kruchenykh, Aleksei 118 Kruyder, Herman 303 Kubicka, Margarete 97, 98, 101, 106, 107 Kubicki, St. Karol 107 Kubicki, Stanisław 95–107 Kubin, Alfred 115, 119, 302, 313n30, 514 Kubín, Otakar 28n12, 35–41, 301 Kubišta, Bohumil 6, 34–43, 48, 76, 93 Kubišta, František 48 Kuga, Jānis 171n17 Kulbin, Nikolai 114, 116–18, 202, 353 Kunčiuvienė, Eglė 136 Kupka, František 53n68 Kuźma, Erazm 92, 93, 106 Kylberg, Karl 217 Laarman, Märt 173, 175, 185 Labas, Aleksandr 126 Lacan, Jacques 396 Laermans, Eugène 327 Lagerqvist, Pär 207 Laikmaa (Laipman), Ants (Hans) 177, 187n22 Laipman, Hans see Laikmaa, Ants Lamač, Miroslav 34 Lamberga, Dace 158 Lamp, Ene 173, 178 Landmann, Wilhelm 308, 490

559

Name Index Landt Momberg, Harald 203 Langbehn, Julius 284 Lapin, Boris 122 Laprade, Pierre 456 Lapshin, Georgy 124 Larionov, Mikhail 9, 28n12, 114–17, 120, 469 Lärkner, Bengt 210, 214 Larsen, Karl 196–99 Lasker-Schüler, Else 46, 101, 102, 133n99, 279, 296, 349, 525, 531 Laubser, Maggie 9, 15, 27, 525–38 Lazarov, Ivan 474 Lazdiņš, Jānis 168 Le Corbusier 324 Le Fauconnier, Henri 78, 117, 193, 197, 212, 277, 298, 319 Leadbeater, C. W. 299 Lebedev, Vladimir 124 Léger, Fernand 28n12, 117, 170, 202, 324, 325, 469 Lehmbruck, Wilhelm 307, 308, 310, 314n50, 487 Lehtonen, Joel 226 Lenbach, Franz von 468 Lentulov, Aristarkh 117 Leonard, Rudolf 94 Lermontov, Michail 102 Leskoschek, Axel 512 Levit, Teodor 122 Lewenstein-Weijermann, Hedwig 308 Lewis, Wyndham 16, 284–89 Lhote, André 324, 384, 459 Liberts, Ludolfs 171n17 Lichtenstein, Alfred 122 Lidén, Elisabeth 210 Liebermann, Max 36, 37, 366, 468 Liebhard, Franz 451 Liepiņa-Skulme, Marta 162, 167 Liepiņš, Jānis 162, 167, 169 Lindbergs, Eduards 162, 167, 171n17 Lindblom, Andreas 208 Linde, Bernhard 176, 186n4 Lindenfeld, Pola see Lindenfeldówna, Apolonia Lindenfeldówna (Lindenfeld), Apolonia (Pola) 103 Lindeström-Nordström, Tekla 212 Lindgren, Mereth 210 Linnqvist, Hilding 214 Lipchitz, Jacques 22, 138, 334, 341–45 Lipshitz, Lippy 533, 537, 540n54 Lismer, Arthur 487 Lissitzky, Lazar (El) 111n56, 120, 124, 469, 471 Liutkus, Viktoras 136 Livshits, Benedikt 118 Loos, Adolf 80 López Anaya, Jorge 510 Lorentzen, Mogens 203, 259 Luchishkin, Sergei 127 Lüdecke, Heinz 398

Luiga, Juhan 177 Lukásc, Georg 536 Lunacharsky, Anatoly 125, 126 Lundstrøm, Vilhelm 196–200 Lützhöft, Nicolaus 225 Luxembourg, Sigismund of 56 Lyberg, Louise 210 MacCarthy, Desmond 275 McCaw, Terence 533 Macdonald, Jock 489 Macedo, Diogo Cândido de 379 Machado, Antonio 371 Macke, August 6, 9, 114, 117, 129n14, 137, 159, 175, 176, 305, 350, 467, 468, 518 Macke, Helmuth 314n50 Mackintosh, Charles Rennie 277 Maclean, Caroline 282 Mačs, Emīls 164 Mácza, János (Ján) 56 Maeterlinck, Maurice 102 Mägi, Konrad 175, 179–85 Magnus-Lagercrantz, Siri 211, 215 Magritte, René 330n15 Maillol, Aristide 307, 344 Mainero, Luz 518 Makovsky, Joseph 296 Makovsky, Sergei 114 Malevich, Kazimir 9, 100, 114, 117, 124, 335, 469 Malfatti, Anita 508, 511, 515, 516 Mané-Katz, Emmanuel 22, 23, 336–41 Mann, Heinrich 445 Mansbach, Steven 34, 206 Mansfield, Katherine 281 Manta, Abel Abrantes 379, 386 Manzel, Ludwig 174 Márai (Grosschmid), Sándor 56 Marc, Franz 9, 13, 15, 17, 52n49, 82, 84, 94, 101, 103, 114, 117, 118, 129n14, 133n99, 137, 159, 175, 178, 180, 181, 191, 202, 210, 214, 216, 218, 258, 279, 280, 285, 287, 296, 301, 302, 305, 307, 313n30, 314n50, 334, 350, 360n21, 360n22, 397, 418, 430, 432, 447, 455, 467, 468, 470, 471, 474, 488, 489, 491, 511, 516, 529, 535 Márffy, Ödön 76, 79, 84, 87n16 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 12, 102, 135, 349, 350, 353, 355, 357–79, 380, 459 Marques, Bernardo 21 Marquet, Albert 277, 458 Marr, Carl von 458 Maršik, Marijan 420 Martens, George 302 Martini, Arturo 352, 353, 361n23 Martna, Mihkel 177, 187n23 Marvánek, Otakar 42 Marzynski, Georg 226

560

Name Index Masereel, Frans 136, 151 Mashkov, Ilya 115, 116, 296, 297, 302 Mason, Alty 498 Mason, Donny 498 Matějček, Antonín 3, 33 Matisse, Henri 2, 6, 8, 25, 26, 38, 74, 76, 117, 138, 147, 169, 177, 191–94, 196, 197, 199–201, 206–13, 217, 218, 249, 262–65, 275–77, 289, 340, 382, 384, 417, 450, 538n6 Mattis Teutsch, János (Hans) 12, 22, 81, 82, 83, 85, 354, 444, 447–51, 461 Matvejs, Hans Voldemārs 117, 118 Maurer, Alfred 3, 488, 498, 499 Maurer, Louis 499 Maurs, Rihards 166 Maxy, M. H. 450, 459, 460 Mayakovsky, Vladimir 118 Mayer-Gunther, Werner 490 Mead, Margaret 233–34 Medunetsky, Konstantin 124 Meerson, Olga 3 Meidner, Ludwig 18, 20, 46, 76, 93, 101, 119, 133n99, 176, 180, 285, 314n50, 518 Meier-Graefe, Julius 36, 276 Melderis, Emīls 162, 167 Melzer, Moritz 76, 93, 287, 288, 313n43, 354, 357 Mendel, Frederick 490 Mense, Carlo 20, 301, 366, 368 Mercer, Kobena 232 Meriano, Francesco 362n50 Mesenbliumas (Mesene), Jokūbas (Jacque) 149, 150 Mesene, Jacque see Mesenbliumas, Jokūbas Mesens, Edouard Léon Théodore (E. L. T.) 323 Metzger, Max 17, 476 Metzner, Franz 174 Meyerowitz, Herbert Vladimir 537, 541n75 Miceli, Sergio 510, 511 Michaelson, Hans 511, 514 Micić, Ljubomir 10, 13, 407n11, 419, 420, 425n30, 430, 435, 436, 471, 472 Miciński, Tadeusz 93, 103 Mickiewicz, Adam 103, 104 Miess, Friedrich 443–45, 447 Mikėnas, Juozas 146 Miklós, Jenő 80 Milev, Geo 13, 465, 468–72, 474 Milev, Ivan 466 Mille, Charlotte de 289 Millet, Jean-François 444 Milts, Fridrihs 169 Minne, George 316, 321, 327 Miše, Jerolim 411–13 Mlynarzewicz, Ariel 509, 513 Modersohn-Becker, Paula 305, 307, 308, 310, 314n50, 491, 503 Modigliani, Amedeo Clemente 333, 334, 336, 339, 341, 343, 381, 384

Moholy Nagy, László xxx, 12, 70n25, 83, 204, 266, 471 Moll, Marg 2 Moll, Oskar 2, 314n50 Mombert, Alfred 349 Mondrian, Piet 28n12, 295, 297, 298, 306 Monro, Harold 283 Montalvor, Luís de 379 Monty, Paul 142, 143 Moreau, Gustave 2 Morgner, Wilhelm 76, 93, 216, 287 Morgunov, Evgeny 117, 124 Morres, Eduard 444 Morris, William 277, 290 Moselius, Carl David 3, 33, 207, 208, 218, 223 Muche, Georg 202, 301 Mueller, Otto 40, 41, 308 Mulevičiūtė, Jolita 136 Müller, Albert 313n43 Munch, Edvard 4–8, 13, 24, 34, 36–38, 93, 97, 99, 176, 193, 207, 208, 217, 234, 246–49, 254, 284, 290, 359n1, 385, 417, 470 Munn, Kathleen 488, 489 Münter, Gabriele 9, 115, 117, 129n14, 193, 197, 202, 212, 214–19, 282, 301, 350, 467 Mussolini, Benito (Il Duce) 236, 357, 359 Mutafov, Chavdar 9, 465–72, 476 Muter, Mela 341–43 Nadelman, Elie 101 Nagel, Otto 123, 125 Nagy, István 453, 454 Nauen, Heinrich 314n50 Nebel, Kay 20 Nebeský, Václav 42 Negreiros, José Sobral de Almada 379–81, 385 Nemes Lampérth, József 81, 82, 84, 85 Németh, Lajos 85 Nerman, Ture 217 Nesch, Rolf 205 Neubauer, John 451 Neumann, Israel Ber (Jsrael Ber; J.B.) 358, 490 Neumann, Stanislav Kostka 39, 42 Neustädter, Erwin 450 Newman, Barnett 335, 346 Niehaus, Kasper 304 Nielsen, Jais 203 Nielsen, Ragnar 244 Niemeyer, Wilhelm 287 Nietzsche, Friedrich 7, 37, 181, 284, 473 Nilsson, Nils 217 Nilsson, Vera 208, 210, 211, 217 Noé, Luis Felipe 516, 519 Nolde, Ada 8, 277 Nolde, Emil 4, 8, 17, 114, 133n99, 145, 159, 210, 233, 250, 277, 284, 290, 305, 308, 314n50, 366, 468, 491, 503

561

Name Index Nordfeldt, Bror J.O. 487, 488, 502, 503 Nowak, Willi 8, 35, 37, 38, 40 Obregón, Alejandro 509, 511, 514, 516 Obreshkov, Bencho 475 Oelschläger, Lajos (Ľudovít) 56 Ogris, Albin 406n7 Okkonen, Onni 224, 225, 231 Ole, Eduard 173 Oliva, Franco 352 Olsson, Gösta 217 Olvi, Henrik 173, 185 Oppenheimer, Max 37 Oppler, Alexander 313n43 Opsomer, Isidor 168, 169 Orage, A. E. 284 Orbán, Dezső 87n16 Orloff, Chana 341, 343 Orozco, José Clemente 22, 508, 518 Ortega y Gasset, José 373 Osborn, Max 527, 528 Osthaus, Karl Ernst 36 Ostrower, Fayga 512 Ozenfant, Amédée 197, 324 Pach, Walter 381 Padegs, Kārlis 169 Pailthorpe, Grace W. 489 Pais, Sidónio Bernardino Cardoso da Silva 378 Palencia, Benjamín 373 Pallady, Theodor 456 Palme, Carl 3, 211, 212, 214, 216, 219 Papini, Giovanni 349, 350 Paris, Rudolf 175 Pascin, Jules 22, 23, 333, 336, 340, 341, 343, 349 Paulsson, Gregor 208, 218, 219 Paulsson, Ester 208 Pavel, Amelia 460 Paz, Octavio 508 Pechstein, Max 4, 5, 8, 82, 114, 117, 132n99, 145, 149, 176, 216, 233, 276, 280, 281, 287, 288, 296, 304, 305, 308, 313n43, 314n50, 350, 432, 487, 525–28 Pedrosa, Mario 513 Penck, Albrecht 462n29 Pengov, Slavko 407n13 Pepper, John see Borsszem, Jankó Percikovičiūtė, Černė 136, 149, 150, 151, 156n47 Percy, Arthur (C-son) 212 Pereira, José Maria dos Reis 382 Pereira, Júlio Maria dos Reis 379, 382, 388 Peretto, Lúcia 381 Peri, László 12 Perlrott Csaba, Vilmos 3, 76, 82, 453 Permeke, Constant 169, 303, 316, 317, 320–29, 516 Pessoa, Fernando António Nogueira 379, 390n13 Petersen, Carl O. 214, 215

Pētersons, Ojārs 170 Petravičius, Viktoras 15, 136, 145, 152–54 Petrėnas (Tarulis), Juozas (Petras) 135, 146 Petronio, Arthur 302 Petrov, Mihailo S. 9, 471, 427, 432, 435, 436 Petrović, Rastko 432, 433, 436 Pevsner, Nikolaus 308 Pfeiffer, Julius 45 Pfemfert, Franz 41, 98, 105, 469 Pfister, Federico see Pistoris, Federico de Phoebus, Alexandru 454 Pica, Vittorio 359n1 Picasso, Pablo 3, 9, 25, 39, 41, 74, 76, 101, 114, 124, 138, 146, 154, 169, 192, 196, 197, 199, 200–02, 207, 212, 257, 277, 326, 333, 335, 345, 372, 373, 379, 384, 417, 445, 450, 458, 527, 538n6 Pick, Otto 53n57 Pierri, Duilio 509 Pierron, Sander 168 Pietsch, Jost 54n77 Pilon, Veno 396, 398, 399, 400, 403–05 Piłsudski, Józef 105 Pimenov, Yuri 126, 127 Pini, Ivonne 514 Pino, Aldo del 509 Pinthus, Kurt 102 Pissarro, Camille 342 Pistoris (Pfister), Federico de 358 Pittermann, Emil 35, 38 Pladers, Oto 171n17 Plasschaert, Albert August 297 Podbevšek, Anton 396 Poe, Edgar Allan 102, 467 Pogolotti, Marcelo 513 Poikāns, Ivars 170 Polák, Josef 56, 57, 61 Polderman, Fabrice 331n26 Poljanski, Branko Ve 471 Pollock, Jackson 334, 335 Pomor Trade 244 Popova, Liubov 124, 126 Popp, Aurel 454 Pór, Bertalan 83, 85, 87n16 Potter, Matthew 275, 282, 285 Poulbot, Francisque 456 Praetere, Julius de 317 Prampolini, Enrico 9, 353–59, 471 Preisler, Jan 37, 418 Preller, Alexis 538, 540n54 Presas, Leopoldo 516 Preux, Jan see Sztrakoniczky, Károly Prezzolini, Giuseppe 349 Procházka, Antonín 6, 34–38, 48 Pronina, Irina 119 Protich, Andrey 475 Przybyszewski, Stanisław 93, 97, 100–04 Pundev, Vasil 467

562

Name Index Puni, Ivan 120, 124, 358 Punin, Nikolai 122 Purrmann, Hans 314n50 Purvītis, Vilhelms 167 Quarton, Enguerrand 180 Račić, Josip 416 Radev, Simeon 475 Radziwill, Franz 313n43 Ramón Jiménez, Juan 371 Ranzoni, Daniele 361n34 Rastenis, Vincas 153, 154 Ratzel, Friedrich 444 Ray, Man 336 Raynov, Nikolay 476 Read, Herbert 279, 281, 282, 284, 289–92, 294n70 Rebay, Hilla 10, 489 Recchi, Mario 354, 362n42 Regnault, Pierre Alexandre 302, 319 Reiche, Richard 4, 279 Reinhardt, Max 296 Reisner, Erwin 448, 449 Reiter, Róbert see Liebhard, Franz Reksin, Sergei 122 Rembrandt see Harmenszoon van Rijn, Rembrandt Reverdy, Pierre 362n41 Revold, Axel 8, 249, 250, 253, 265 Reynek, Bohuslav 47 Richert, Gertrud 366–68, 374n7 Richter, Edvard 223, 225 Richter, Hans 456 Richter, Heinrich 93 Richter-Berlin, Heinrich 76 Ridder, André de 316–25, 329 Rimbaud, Arthur 102 Rimsa, Juan 512 Ring, Thomas 354 Ringbom, Sixten 298 Rippl-Rónai, József 61, 447 Rissanen, Juho 224, 237n15 Rivera, Diego 216, 342, 508, 511, 514 Rivera, General Primo de 370, 373 Roa, Israel 508, 511, 516 Roberts, Henry D. 276 Roches, Fernand 89n50 Rodchenko, Aleksandr 124, 131n70 Rodin, Auguste 35, 101, 102, 230 Rodo, Ludovic 290 Röell, Jhr. David C. 307–10 Roerich, Nikolai 177 Rohlfs, Christian 314n50, 495 Rolland, Romain 125, 151 Roller, Alfred 277 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 513 Rosales León, Raúl 518 Rosas, Juan Manuel de 519

Roseenfosse, Armand 168 Rosenberg, Alfred 236, 250 Rosenberg, Léonce 343 Rossi, Joäo 513, 514 Rosso, Medardo 361n34 Rothko, Mark 170, 335, 346 Rouault, Georges 74, 154, 336, 382, 482n61, 513 Rousseau, Henri 9, 129n14, 284, 336, 467 Roworth, Edward 526–28, 531 Rozanova, Olga 124, 353 Rozentāls, Janis 167 Rubinsohn, Isidor see Iser, Iosif Rude, Olaf 197, 203, 266 Russell, Morgan 3 Russolo, Luigi 295, 350, 352, 470 Rutter, Frank 281, 282, 284 Ryback, Issachar Ber 511 Sá-Carneiro, Mário de 379 Saalborn, Louis 9, 300 Sabogal, José 508, 515 Sadleir, Michael 281, 282, 285 Sadler, Michael Ernest 281, 282 Saedeleer, Valerius de 168, 317, 329 Sahlén, Artur 215, 216 Sahlström, Anna 16, 211, 212, 215 Saint-Point, Valentine de (Valentine Marianne of Glans of Cessiat-Vercell) 380 Sakharoff, Alexander 491 Sala, Eugène de 203 Salaman, Malcolm C. (Malcolm Charles) 246 Salazar, António de Oliveira 26, 378 Salerno, Osvaldo 519 Sallinen, Tyko 222–33, 236 Salomonsen, Carl Julius 192, 200, 201, 259 Salto, Axel 197, 259 Salvatori, Luigi 363n58 Salvemini, Gaetano 349 Samuolis, Antanas 8, 146, 147, 149, 150, 156n42 Sandberg, Jhr. Willem J. H. B. 307, 308 Sandels, Gösta 207, 208, 211, 213, 216, 262 Sandqvist, Tom 224 Sandström, Birgitta 210 Santa Rita, Guilherme Augusto Cau da Costa de (Santa Rita Pintor) 379–82, 388 Santesson, Ninnan 211 Sauerlandt, Max 287, 290 Savio, John 16, 243–54 Savio, Per 243, 251 Schaeffer, Carl 488 Schamoni, Albert 47 Schapire, Rosa 292, 308 Scheffler, Karl 530 Scheiber, Hugó 83, 85 Scheithauerová-Procházková, Linka 38 Schelfhout, Lodewijk 298 Scheyer, Galka 10, 489, 490

563

Name Index Schiefler, Gustav 246 Schiele, Egon 10, 11, 13, 73, 279, 307, 413, 420 Schiller, Géza (Gejza) 56–58 Schiöler, Inge 217 Schmarsow, August 224 Schmid, Wilhelm 304, 313n43, 354 Schmidt, Paul Ferdinand 3, 33 Schmidt-Reutte, Ludwig 511, 514 Schmidt-Rotluff, Karl 7, 8, 15, 17, 18, 41, 139, 145, 149, 174, 176, 216, 250, 285, 290–92, 296, 308, 313n43, 314n50, 366, 468, 476, 491, 494, 503, 511, 516, 517, 525, 528 Scholz, Georg 313n43 Schönberg, Arnold 11, 52n49, 73, 115, 129n14, 138 Schongauer, Martin 14 Schopenhauer, Arthur 37, 182 Schrijver, Honorine de 330n15 Schrimpf, Georg 354 Schultz, Sigurd 225 Schulz, Bruno 93 Schumacher, Fritz 278 Schwarzenberg, Walter 323, 329 Schwichtenberg, Martel 313n43 Schwitters, Kurt 204, 266 Seewald, Richard 529 Segal, Arthur 76, 93, 313n43, 360n21, 459 Segall, Lasar 23, 138, 508, 510, 513, 514 Seidel, Curt 349, 351–53 Seissel, Josip see Klek, Jo Selesković, Momčilo 436, 437 Semke, Hein 384–89 Semper, Johannes 176 Serpa, Iván 508, 512, 514 Sérusier, Paul 341 Servaes, Albert 168, 317, 321, 329 Seurat, Georges 2, 194, 196 Severini, Gino 28n12, 101, 193, 260, 295, 362n41, 469 Sewter, A. C. 290, 291 Shahn, Ben 21, 488, 493 Shaw, Bernard 125, 284 Shevchenko, Aleksandr 114, 117 Shterenberg, David 122, 126, 127 Sidorov, Gury 122 Siegård, Pär 16, 216 Siliņš, Jānis 159 Sillanpää, Frans Emil 226 Šimić, Antun Branko 410, 414, 417 Simon, Lucien 444 Simonsson, Birger 208, 211, 212, 213, 216, 217 Sinezubov, Nikolai 124 Siqueiros, David Alfaro 22, 508, 516, 518 Sirak Skitnik 17, 467, 471, 476 Sirén, Osvald 207 Sjöholm Skrubbe, Jessica 214 Skalbe, Kārlis 159 Skitnik, Sirak 17, 467, 471, 476 Skotarek, Władysław 95, 100, 101, 107

Skulme, Oto 162, 163, 169, 171n17 Skulme, Uga 162, 167, 169, 171n17 Slataper, Scipio 349 Slavíček, Antonín 37 Slevogt, Max 366 Słowacki, Juliusz 93, 103, 104 Sluijters, Jan 295, 298, 319 Smet, Gustave de 316, 317, 319, 320–26, 329 Smits, Jacob 327 Soffici, Ardengo 349–51 Sokolov, Ippolit 122 Solar, Xul 510–12, 514 Solovyev, Vladimir 113 Sørenson, Henrik 3 Soutine, Chaim 22–24, 138, 332–36, 339–41, 343–45, 511, 532, 535 Souza-Cardoso, Amadeo de 379, 381–84, 388 Spaini, Alberto 349, 350 Špála, Václav 41, 42 Spandikov, Eduard 118 Spassky, Sergei 122 Spengler, Oswald 182 Spilliaert, Léon 329, 330n16 Sprovieri, Giuseppe 353 Starkopf, Anton 174–76 Stażewski, Henryk 105 Stéfansson, Jón 212, 258, 262–65, 268, 269 Stefánsson, Valtýr 266, 268, 269 Steger, Milly 308 Stein, Gertrude 212, 334 Stein, Leo 212 Stein, Sally 212 Stein-Lessing, Maria 536, 537 Steiner, Rudolf 181, 182 Šteiners, Ojārs 169 Steinlen, Théophile Alexandre 456 Stenman, Gösta 223, 225, 231 Stepanova, Varvara 124 Stern, Irma 8, 27, 525–38 Stern, Max 490 Sternheim, Thea 102 Sternhell, Theodor 54n77 Stieglitz, Alexander 144, 176 Stieglitz, Alfred 487, 488 Storer, Edward 354, 362n41, 362n50 Strååt, Hjalmar 215, 216 Stramm, August 354, 372 Straumanis, Edvīns 169 Štrauss, Tomáš 57 Strawinsky, Igor 362n41 Strimp, Else 243 Strimp, Sara 243 Strindberg, August 249 Strindberg, Sven 29, 223 Ström-Ciacelli, Elsa 211 Strunke, Laris 170 Strunke, Niklāvs 162, 163, 166 Strzemiński, Władysław 94

564

Name Index Stuart Larrabee, Constance 358 Stuck, Franz von 413, 455, 468 Stuckenberg, Fritz 362n45 Stuckenberg, Margot 354, 362n45 Stur, Jan 103 Suits, Gustav 173, 176, 186n4 Šulentić, Zlatko 412, 413 Šumanović, Sava 420 Sundström, Harriet 16, 211, 214–16, 219 Survage, Léopold 324, 326 Suta, Romans 160–63, 165, 166, 169, 171n17 Šveics, Erasts 162, 166, 167 Svemp, Leos 167, 169 Swinarski, Artur Maria 101 Sydow, Eckart von 225 Szalay, Lajos 513 Szmaj, Stefan 95, 97, 100, 102, 107 Szolnay, Sándor 453 Sztrakoniczky, Károly (Jan Preux) 76 Szwarc, Marek 103 Tacon, Edna 489 Tak van Poortvliet, Marie 12, 301, 302, 307 Tandefelt, Heikki (Henrik) 224 Tandefelt, Signe 224 Tannenbaum, Herbert 310 Tappert, Georg 93, 313n43 Tarabukin, Nikolai 127 Tartaglia, Marino 415, 420 Tarulis, Petras see Petrėnas, Juozas Tatlin, Vladimir 117, 124 Taube, Märta 217 Tavolato, Italo 349 Teige, Karel 33, 48, 53n70, 460 Tetzen-Lund, Christian 196, 212 Thiele, Franz 35 Thiis, Jens 223, 227, 228 Thomas, Trevor 291 Thorma, János 452, 453 Thoroddsen, Emil 266 Tīdemanis, Jānis 168, 169 Tielens, Johannes 312n29 Tihanyi, Lajos 11, 76, 79, 80, 82, 85 Tillbergs, Jānis Roberts 166, 167 Tillers, Imants 170 Tinerimea Artistică 456 Tokin, Boško 432 Tolstoy (Tołstoj), Leo (Lew, Lev) 37, 102, 113 Tomory, Peter 291, 292 Tone, Valdemārs 162, 163, 166, 169, 171n17 Tonitza, Nicolae 456–58, 460, 461 Toorop, Charley 297 Toorop, Jan 295 Törneman, Axel 208, 211, 215, 219 Török, Gyula 74 Torre, Macedonio de la 508, 511, 516 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri 336, 455 Toupine (Tupiņš), Arthur (Artūrs) 160

Trakl, Georg 47, 174 Tratnik, Fran 397–98 Trepše, Marijan 416–18 Triik, Nikolai 24, 173, 176–79, 185 Tupiņš, Artūrs see Toupine, Arthur Turchin, Valeri 113 Turi, Johan 252 Turner, Joseph Mallord William 321 Turowski, Andrzej 99 Tuwim, Julian 103 Tyshler, Aleksandr 126 Tytgat, Edgard 321–23, 329 Tzara, Tristan 362n41 Ubāns, Konrāds 162, 163, 166, 169 Udaltsova, Nadezhda 124 Uitz, Béla 81, 84, 85, 91n94, 450, 451 Ullman, Sigfrid 208, 213, 216 Umanskij, Konstantin 123–24 Umbrasas, Jonas 136, 149, 154n1 Unamuno, Miguel de 371 Urzidil, Johannes 55n92 Utrillo, Maurice 336 Uzelac, Milivoj 416–18, 424n27 Uzunov, Dechko 475 Vabbe, Ado 9, 174–76, 179 Váchal, Josef 24, 34, 42, 43, 44, 54n73 Valentiner, Wilhelm 284, 287, 490 Valius, Telesforas 136 Vallotton, Felix 101 Valters (Walter), Johans (Johann) 167, 168 Van Assendelft, Hendricus 302 Van de Velde, Henry 278 Van de Woestijne, Karel 317 Van de Woestyne, Gustave 317, 321, 322, 325, 326, 329 Van den Abeele, Albijn 317 Van den Berg, Hubert 223, 257, 268, 423 Van den Berghe, Frits 316, 317, 319–25, 329, 330n12 Van Doesburg, Theo 9, 297–300, 358 Van Dongen, Kees 3, 117, 249, 277, 295 Van Eeden, Frederik 297, 300, 312n26 Van Essche, Maurice 9, 525, 531–33, 536, 538 Van Eyck, Jan 471 Van Gogh, Vincent 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 24, 25, 36, 37, 74, 79, 138, 177, 191, 196, 207, 208, 247, 258, 279, 295, 333, 334, 336, 341, 342, 343, 346n10, 384, 420, 421, 445, 508 Van Hecke, Firmin 331n26 Van Hecke, Paul-Gustave 317, 322–24, 329, 330n15, 330n16, 331n22 Van Hoddis, Jakob 122 Van Ostaijen, Paul 316, 330n16 Van Rysselberghe, Théo 317 Van Vloten, Martha 297 Varley, Frederick 487 Vartiainen, Helmi (Mirri) 229

565

Name Index Vasari, Giorgio 284 Vasari, Ruggero 358, 359 Vassilieff, Marie 3 Vauxelles, Louis 194 Veigelsberg, Hugó 66, 71n35, 79 Velázquez, Diego 371 Veth, Cornelis 304, 305 Viana, Eduardo Afonso 379, 381, 383 Viani, Lorenzo 352, 353, 361n23 Vidbergs, Sigismunds 167 Vīdzirkste, Sigurds 170 Viegener, Eberhard 47 Vienožinskis, Justinas 136, 150 Vigeland, Gustav 248, 254 Vilhelmsson, Carl 211 Villacís, Aníbal 509 Vinarova, Bistra 474, 475 Vinaver, Stanislav 432, 435–36 Vītols, Eduards 171n17 Vizgirda, Viktoras 146–48, 150 Vlaminck, Maurice de 3, 4, 114, 169, 207, 208, 216, 276, 277, 289, 336, 384 Voaden, Herman 488 Vogeler, Heinrich 125 Vollmoeller, Mathilde 2 Volt see Fani, Vincenzo Vorel, Lascăr 455–56 Vuillard, Édouard 4 Wadsworth, Edward 9, 16, 17, 284, 285, 287, 290 Wahlberg, Anna Greta 210 Walden, Herwarth xxxvi, 4, 11–13, 15, 33, 41, 76, 78, 81–83, 93, 117–20, 177, 191–194, 197, 201–3, 208, 210, 214, 216, 223, 230, 259, 260, 266, 276, 277, 279, 283, 285, 287, 288, 295–97, 301, 310, 349–51, 353, 354, 358, 359, 381, 398, 405, 410, 420, 445, 447, 449, 465, 466, 469–72, 476, 488 Walden, Nell 12, 203, 208, 214, 219, 301, 358 Walkowitz, Abraham 10, 488, 489 Walters, Johann see Valters, Johans Walther, Hans 313n43 Warren, Sarah 229 Warrener, Lowrie 488, 489 Wauer, William 358 Weber, Max 3, 23, 212, 341, 493 Wechsler, Diana 515 Wedekind, Frank 455 Weiner, Leó 79 Weiner, Richard 53n69 Weiss, Wojciech 49n9, 93 Wennerström, Ludvig see Wennervirta, Ludvig Wennervirta (Wennerström), Ludvig 223, 224, 226 Werefkin, Marianne 9, 22, 79, 114–17, 134, 137, 138, 139, 193, 197, 302, 350 Werefkina, Sofia 139 Werkman, Hendrik Nicolaas 302 Werner, Jeff 214

Werner, Selmar 182 Wessel, Willy 47 Westheim, Paul 122, 284, 512 White, Ethelbert 290 Wichman, Erich 9, 297 Widemann, Guillermo 511 Wiegers, Jan 302 Wierzyński, Kazimierz 103 Wiiralt, Eduard 173, 174, 175, 182–85 Wilhelmson, Carl 211 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 224 Winter, Janus de 9, 299–300 Winternitz, Adolfo 512 Witkacy, Stanisław Ignacy see Witkiewicz, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Witkacy), Stanisław Ignacy 93–94 Witte, Carla 512 Witting, Alfred 449 Wittlin, Józef 95 Witwicki, Władysław 94 Wodyński, Józef 93 Wohlwill, Gretchen 2 Wolf, N. H. 296 Wölfflin, Heinrich 224, 276 Woolf, Virginia 289 Worringer, Wilhelm 4, 5, 49n3, 49n6, 118, 180, 193, 223–26, 228, 235, 279, 281, 284, 287, 290, 453, 467 Wroniecki, Jan Jerzy 95 Wühr, Hans 450 Wyczółkowski, Leon 107 Wyspiański, Stanisław 93 Zadkine, Ossip 330n20, 471 Zahariev, Vasil 17, 473–77, 482n53 Zāle, Kārlis see Zālīte, Kārlis Zālīte (Zāle), Kārlis (Kārlis) 162 Zambaccian, Krikor H. 459 Zamoyski, August 95, 97, 99, 101 Zariņa, Anna 169 Zariņš, Rihards 166, 167 Zborowski, Leopold 333, 334 Zegadłowicz, Emil 103 Zeller, Magnus 18, 139, 140, 142, 174, 175, 176, 186n12 Zemenkov, Boris 122 Žerovc, Beti 406n3 Zierath, Willy 354 Ziffer, Sándor 453, 461 Zillich, Heinrich 445, 446 Živadinov, Dragan 407n11 Zola, Emile 335 Zrzavý, Jan 24, 34, 42–44, 52n52 Zuckermann, Ben see Cukermann Zupančič Žerdin, Alenka 406 Zweig, Arnold 18, 139, 140, 142, 174 Þorleifsson, Jón 268, 269, 271n69

566

SUBJECT INDEX

1-aia Diskussionnaia Vystavka Ob”edinenii Aktivnogo Revolutsionnogo Iskusstva (First Discussion Exhibition of the Unions of Active Revolutionary Art; Moscow, 1924) 127 1-aia Vseobshchaia Germanskaia Khudozhestvennaia Vystavka (First General German Art Exhibition; Moscow, 1924) 124–25 I. Conferência Futurista (The First Futurist Conference; Lisbon, 1917) 380 I. Salão de Outono (First Fall Salon; exh., Lisbon, 1925) 383 I. Salão dos Independentes (First Independent Salon; exh., Lisbon, 1930) 382 A Hét (The Week) 76 a.r. (revolutionary artists/real avant-garde) 100 A Tett (The Action) 81–82, 428, 450 Abstracte kunst (Abstract Art; exh., Amsterdam, 1938) 307 Academia de Belas Artes Lisboa (Lisbon Academy of Fine Arts) 378 Academia Real de Belas Artes (Royal Academy of Fine Arts; Lisbon) 381 Académie Julian (Paris) 61, 453 Académie Matisse (Paris) 2, 192, 262, 265 Académie de La Palette (Paris) 119 Academy of Fine Arts: Amsterdam see Rijksacademie van Beeldende Kunsten; Berlin see Prussian Academy of Arts; Budapest 61, 69n11; Copenhagen 170, 199, 260, 262; Dresden 12, 23, 46, 145, 175, 182, 266, 268, 474; Kraków 94; Leipzig see Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst; Munich 61, 69, 116, 412, 416, 419, 447, 458, 474; Lisbon see Academia de Belas Artes Lisboa and Academia Real de Belas Artes; Oslo 265; Rome 353; Stuttgart 385; Vienna 400

Adevărul (The Truth) 456, 458 African art: “Bantu” art 501, 541; carvings 15, 528, 538; in general 7–8, 118, 304, 324, 525–38; inheritance 515; Negro Art (publication) 118; Negro art 287, 304, 527, 537–38, 541; primitive art 526; sculpture 9, 537; woodcarving 287 Aktion, Die see Die Aktion Alexander Stieglitz’s School of Applied Art (St. Petersburg) 144, 176 Alfar (Pottery) 508 Allied Artists’ Association (London) 280, 282 Alpine Club Gallery (London) 282 amateur artists 25, 266, 382, 526 Amauta 508 American abstract expressionism 27, 170, 335, 488–89, 501, 503 anarchy 228, 253 Anderson Galleries (Beverly Hills) 490 angst 333, 344–45, 371, 401, 403–04, 406, 516 anthropogeography 444, 452 anti-bourgeois 98, 126 anti-expressionist 305 anti-impressionism 2 anti-naturalism 33, 105, 280 anti-realism 206, 459 anti-Semitism 23, 333, 341, 344 anti-war 18–19, 25, 98 anxiety 5, 26, 99, 147, 173, 178, 181, 193, 201–02, 210, 231, 231, 245, 401–02, 404–05, 408, 412–13, 418–19, 422, 488, 500, 536, 538 Apple (of Beauty and Discord), The see The Apple (of Beauty and Discord) appropiation 173, 396, 430, 507, 509, 513, 515, 517, 536, 502 Arbeitsrat für Kunst (Work Council for Art) 19–20, 124, 355

567

Subject Index archaic: characteristic of place 148, 301, 342; society 453; style and form 74, 385 Archy (The Sheets) 47 Armory Show, The 381, 487, 488 Ars group 136, 146–50 art criticism 33, 74, 136, 146, 197, 207, 265, 84, 289, 303, 306, 323, 327, 351, 395, 429, 466–67 art deco 136, 146–47, 230 Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto) 489–90 Art and Letters 282 art nouveau 1 96, 101, 177, 351, 415, 442, 456, 458, 465, 473 Arta română 459 arts and crafts movement 277–79, 290, 385 Ashbey’s Gallery (Cape Town) 527 Ashcan School 491 assimilation: cultural 23, 243, 252, 233, 339; of expressionism 85, 335, 450, 452, 480, 497 Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (AKhRR) 127 Atelier La Palette (Bruges) 444 Athenaeum see The Athenaeum Atheneum Art Gallery see National Gallery/ Atheneum Art Gallery ATYS. Rivista d’arte e letteratura (ATYS. Art and Literature Magazine) 13, 354–55, 257 Ausdruckskunst (expressive art) 4–5 Auslandskomitee zur Organisierung der Arbeiterhilfe für die Hungernden in Rußland (IAH; Workers International Relief) 123 Australian abstract expressionism 170 Austro-Hungary (Habsburg Empire) 10, 18, 26, 41, 92–93, 100, 165, 225, 400, 414, 417, 428, 430, 444, 445, 452, 533 autodidacts see amateur artists Automatistes 503 avant-garde: as general movement 6, 12–13, 25, 166, 193, 223, 343, 369, 396, 422, 445, 513; British 16, 287; Croatian 26, 409–11, 415; Czech 33–34, 42, 48, 56; Danish 192, 257, 259; Estonian 179; European 1, 197–98, 214, 268, 295, 318, 322, 353, 355, 358–59, 377, 460, 465–66, 470–71, 507, 510, 521, 529, 537; exterritorial 100; French 119, 197, 277, 336, 476; German 5, 18, 22, 42, 98, 158, 160, 192, 275, 279, 372; groups 144, 170; Hungarian 73, 83, 87, 445, 448, 450–52; international 4, 26, 92, 99, 105–06, 191, 196, 201, 214, 316, 322; Latin American 513, 514–15; Polish 94–97, 100; Portuguese 377, 379, 381; publications incl. magazines 13, 100–01, 283–35, 349, 370, 379, 398, 409–15, 420, 435, 445, 480, 508; radical 27, 107, 396, 430, 449, 459; Russian 25, 114, 116–17, 120–21, 124, 126, 138, 473; Slovakian 56, 60, 66; Slovenian 12, 395, 398; Spanish 365, 368, 371–73; Swedish 202, 208, 201, 215, 219; transborder 107; Yugoslav 12, 426–27, 435

Balcic (art colony) 446, 457–59 Bauhaus 83–85, 103, 124, 175, 250, 278, 358, 447, 450 BBC Listener 291 Belgian Congo see Congo Bergen School 303 Berliner Secession (Berlin Secession) 3–4, 8, 92, 124, 276–77 Bernheim-Jeune Gallery (Paris) 36, 230 Bewegung, Die see Die Bewegung Biblioteka Zdroju (Zdrój’s Library) 104 Biedermeier 443 Biesing Gallery (The Hague) 295 Blast 9, 16–17, 284–85, 287, 289 Blaue Reiter, Der see Der Blaue Reiter Blomqvist Gallery (Oslo) 246 Bloomsbury circle 281, 289, 291 Blue Rose 162 Bolshevism 48, 103 Bonecos de Estremoz 383 bourgeois 21, 92, 93, 95, 98, 101, 126–27, 147, 182, 203, 224, 229, 261, 268, 317, 328, 333, 379, 382, 383, 396, 408–10, 438, 443, 445, 449, 459, 516, 537 British Museum (London) 284 Brücke, Die see Die Brücke brushwork 11, 37, 61, 80, 168, 317, 515 Bubnovoy Valet (Knave of Diamonds) 114–17, 123–24 Buddhism 104 Bund Österreichischer Künstler (Association of Austrian Artists) 76 Bunt (Revolt) 22, 26, 93–106 Burlington Magazine see The Burlington Magazine Byzantine art 118, 472 Café Stefanie (Munich) 454–55 Café des Westens (Berlin) 279–80, 283 Cambridge Magazine see The Cambridge Magazine Camera Work 488 Cape impressionism 526 capitalism 396 caricature 11, 67, 72, 77, 80, 166, 443, 455–60, 479–80 Casa d’arte italiana (Rome, 1919–1921) 353–58 Catholicism 343, 404 Central School for Applied Arts (Helsinki) 232 Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc (Barcelona) 17, 366 Červen (June) 42 Cézannism 417, 427, 450 Chaco War 518 characterology 76, 79, 82, 87 Charleston House (Firle, Sussex) 289 Chinese art 9, 207, 526n6 Christianity/Christian faith 140, 146, 178, 180, 475–76, 503, 529 Cicerone, Der see Der Cicerone

568

Subject Index Čiurlionis Art Gallery (Kaunas) 146–47, 149, 151 civil war: in Europe 19; Finnish 18, 224–26, 230; Spanish 217, 366, 370–71; Ukranian 336 Claridad 508 classicism 200, 259, 329, 336 CoBrA 170, 310 colorism 207, 224 communism 93, 103, 152 compadritos 518 Congress of the International Union of Progressive Artists see Kongress der Union Internationaler Progressiver Künstler constructivism 12, 26–27, 121–22, 124, 126, 146, 203–4, 324, 395, 435, 450–51, 459, 465, 473 contemporary art 9, 67, 74, 77, 81–82, 93, 121, 124, 145, 170, 291, 311, 329, 369–70, 423, 427, 436, 469, 471, 512 Contimporanul 450 Copenhagen New Student Society (DNSS) 203 Corporazione degli Xilografi (Guild of Xylographers) 17, 352 cosmopolitan 9, 185, 197, 228, 317, 346, 417, 443, 473, 508 craftsmanship 114, 135, 148, 150, 153, 217, 235, 259–60, 278, 289, 305, 537 Criterion see The Criterion cubism 26–7, 35, 39, 41–42, 48, 77, 80, 92, 94, 96, 101, 113–14, 122, 128, 136, 167, 177, 191, 194, 198–99, 201, 207–08, 201, 219, 257, 318–20, 322–24, 333–34, 336, 344, 350, 356, 373, 381, 409, 427, 430, 434, 438, 443, 454, 459, 465, 470–71, 487–88, 493, 494, 499, 501 cubo-expressionism 34, 39, 48 cubo-futurism 48, 94, 113, 116, 123, 217 cultural identity 22, 135, 329, 515 Currier & Ives (New York) 499 Czartak 93

Dada/Dadaism 96–97, 101, 103, 124, 192, 200, 204, 257, 287, 335, 395, 435, 459 Das neue Ziel (The New Objective) 450 Das Ziel (The Objective) 12, 445, 448–49 D’Audretsch Gallery (The Hague) 301 De Åtta (The Eight) 11, 74–77, 79–80, 82–85, 214 De Bois Gallery, J. H. (Haarlem) 305 De Branding (Rotterdam) 300n29 De Kunst 295–96, 302 De Onafhankelijken (Amsterdam) 297, 300, 303, 306 De Ploeg (The Plow) 8, 15, 302, 310 De Stijl 14, 295, 306, 324, 358, 395 De unga group (The Young Generation) 207–08, 211–12, 214, 219 degenerate art (Entartete Kunst) 248, 305, 311, 345, 367, 469, 534: exhibition (Munich, 1937) 154, 307, 491 Department of Native Affairs (Depot of Bantu Art and Craft, Johannesburg) 537

Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider): almanac 94, 114, 117–18, 280, 470, 191, 280, 466, 469–70, 472, 488; artist group xxxvi, 6, 9–10, 12, 15, 78–79, 114, 117–18, 120, 137–38, 158, 174, 177, 191, 202, 208, 210, 223, 230, 246, 279–80, 283, 285, 289, 297, 311, 339, 348–49, 351, 449, 466–67, 469–70, 473, 488–89, 491, 511, 514 Der Cicerone 78, 529 Der Futurismus (The Futurism) 358 Der moderne Bund (The Modern Alliance) 78 Der Querschnitt (The Profile) 42 Der Sturm: artist group 12–14, 76, 83, 93, 124–26, 174, 191–93, 197, 201–03, 208, 214, 216, 219, 266, 279, 350–52, 354, 358, 447, 469–71; exhibitions 11–12, 83, 94, 197, 201–03, 214, 223, 230, 276, 279, 287, 301, 466–67, 469; gallery 4, 11–12, 76, 81, 83, 93–94, 119, 202, 208, 223, 230, 467, 214, 216, 223, 230, 257, 259, 266, 308, 350, 358, 381, 445, 449, 469–71, 488 Der Sturm (magazine) 4, 11–13, 16–18, 33, 41–42, 82, 95, 124, 192–93, 202–03, 208, 214–6, 283–4, 287, 296, 319–20, 349–51, 372, 398, 410, 420, 432, 434, 445, 466, 469–70 Der Weg (The Path) 266 despair 18, 21, 23, 26, 35, 178, 180, 193, 203, 329, 339, 401, 488, 496, 503, 518 Deutsch-Niederländische Gesellschaft (German-Dutch Association) 314n49 Deutsche Expressionisten: Zurückgestellte Bilder des Sonderbundes Köln (German Expressionists: Deferred Pictures from the Sonderbund Cologne, 1912) see Sonderbund exhibition Deutsche Tagepost (German Daily) 448 Deutscher Expressionismus (exh., Darmstadt, 1920) 20 Deutscher Werkbund (German Association of Craftsmen) 214, 513 Deutsches Kulturamt in Rumänien (Hermannstadt/Sibiu) 449 dictatorship: in Bolivia 519; in Paraguay 518; in Portugal 26, 380, 387; in Spain 26, 370, 373, 378 Die Aktion (The Action) 14, 18, 41–42, 92, 94–95, 97–99, 101, 103–5, 284, 372, 469, 471 Die Bewegung (The Movement) 42 Die Brücke (The Bridge): artist group 6–9, 12, 14–16, 23, 27, 40, 85, 114–15, 117, 134, 138–39, 142, 147, 149, 158, 168, 177, 182, 191, 207–08, 210, 216, 219, 240–41, 246, 249, 276–80, 283–85, 289, 291–92, 296–97, 302, 308, 311, 314, 339, 358, 351, 449, 467, 473, 487, 489–91, 514, 527–28, 536; manifesto 8, 489–90 Die Elf Scharfrichter (The Eleven Executioners) 491 Die Karpathen (The Carpathians) 444–45 Die Kommune (The Commune) 103 Die Pathetiker (“those filled with pathos”) 93

569

Subject Index Die Pilger (The Pilgrims) 45–46 Die Progressiven/Gruppe Progressiver Künstler (The Progressives) 93, 100 Die Schaffenden (The Creators) 42 Die schöne Rarität (The Fine Rarity) 42 Die Zukunft (The Future) 278 distortion 2, 6, 11, 80, 122, 127, 135, 319, 323, 325–26, 365, 401, 403–05, 407, 427, 445, 474, 493, 499, 500 DNSS (Copenhagen New Student Society) 203 Dobré dílo (Good Work) 47 Dr. Lahmann’s Weißer Hirsch Sanatorium (Dresden) 277 Dominion Gallery (Montreal) 490 Dresdner Sezession Gruppe 1919 (Dresden Secession Group 1919) 42 Duitse beeldende kunst van de laatste 50 jaar (German Art from the Past 50 Years; exh., Netherlands, 1922) 304 duodji 16, 245–46, 254 dysmorphism 191–92 easel painting 126–27, 344 East Slovak Museum (Košice) 56–57, 61 École des Beaux Arts (Paris) 2, 177, 332 École de Paris 2, 22, 138, 332, 339–41, 345 Edderkoppen (The Spider) 202 Edinburgh University 290 Eenheid (Unity) 297, 299 Elf Scharfrichter, Die see Die Elf Scharfrichter emigration 73, 489 emotion: emotional tension: 8, 127, 135, 152, 168, 181, 185, 303, 490–91, 508, 507; expression of 2, 5–8, 14–16, 18–19, 25, 35, 42–43, 84, 87, 117, 122, 126–27, 135–136, 152, 169–70, 193, 206–8, 211, 223–28, 234, 236, 244–47, 280–81, 288, 295, 298, 302, 365, 372, 421–22, 447–48, 501–03; states of 159, 163, 165, 168, 173, 324, 334, 385, 401, 409, 413–14, 421, 498–501 engravings 17, 125, 145, 151–52, 216, 366, 457, 473, 477 Entartete Kunst see Degenerate Art Entwicklungsgeschichte der Modernen Kunst see Meier-Graefe, Julius Erdélyi Helikon (Transylvanian Helikon) 452 Erste Russische Kunstausstellung (First Russian Art Exhibition; Berlin, 1922) 120, 124 Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon (First German Autumn Salon; exh., Berlin, 1913) 4, 8, 41, 117, 119–20, 297, 381 Escola Superior de Belas Artes de Lisboa (School of Fine Arts, Lisbon) 379 Esposizione espressionisti Novembergruppe (Exhibition of the Expressionists of the Novembergruppe; Rome, 1920) 355–56 Estado Novo 378–79, 386–88

Eugen Krón’s private art school 57 eurocentrism 538 European modernism 4, 26, 117, 163, 168–70, 319, 322, 340, 488 Exhibition of Modern French Art (Brighton, 1910) 276 Exhibition of Modern German Art (London, 1906) 278 exoticism 229, 458, 528 exploitation 203, 518 Exposició del gravat alemany contemporani (Exhibition of Contemporary German Engravings; Barcelona, 1926) 17, 366 Exposições de Arte Moderna do S.P.N./S.N.I. (Exhibitions of Modern Art; Lisbon, 1935) 378, 388 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (International Exhibition of Art and Technology in Modern Life; Paris, 1937) 169 Express-Sionistes (Express-Zionists) 23, 339 expressionism: characteristics of 16, 42, 94, 97, 104, 126, 177, 254, 257, 265, 295, 308, 365–66, 421, 427; as movement 4, 26, 29, 97, 158–59, 250, 287, 289, 328, 372, 386, 298, 423, 467, 507–8, 519; national 224, 226; settler 8, 27, 525–26, 531, 536–38; situated 442 Expressionists, The see The Expressionists Expressionistutställningen (The Expressionist Exhibition; Stockholm, 1918) 210 expressivity 85, 91, 147, 224, 319, 325, 409, 417, 418, 452, 459 Facla 458 Färg och Form (Color and Form) 207, 217, 224 fascism 93, 128, 310, 323–44 fauvism 3, 4, 6–8, 12, 23, 26–27, 33, 37–38, 41, 53, 74, 85, 114, 117, 136, 152, 167, 177, 191, 193–94, 199, 201, 206–08, 210–11, 249, 276–77, 280, 282, 287, 289, 295, 319, 323, 338–40, 348, 397, 430, 445, 452, 459, 465, 487, 490, 493, 498–501, 508 feminism 530 figure, human 179, 319, 517 First World War 4–6, 8–9, 12, 18, 22, 26, 33, 39, 41, 44, 61–62, 66, 73, 80–81, 85, 93, 96, 99, 100, 102, 106, 114, 120, 136–40, 142–43, 158–59, 162, 164, 169, 174, 176, 181, 185–86, 192, 195, 198, 212, 214, 232–34, 269, 281, 283–84, 289, 292–93, 301, 303, 318, 323, 326, 333, 336, 342–43, 348, 353, 356, 368, 370, 372, 378–79, 381–82, 385–87, 395, 397–98, 400, 404, 410–11, 415–16, 421, 426, 428, 430, 435, 442–44, 446, 450, 451, 453, 458–59, 465–68, 471–75, 479, 487–90, 496, 498, 508, 512, 530, 532, 537 Flacăra (The Flame) 458 Flamman (The Flame) 214 folk art 9, 26, 114, 118, 123, 135, 150, 229, 323, 536

570

Subject Index Föreningen Original-Träsnitt (Swedish Society of Original Wood Engravers) 16, 206, 212, 214 Föreningen Svenska Konstnärinnor (Association for Swedish Women Artists) 211 Formiści (Formists) 95, 100–05 formism 94, 103 Französische Expressionisten (French Expressionists; exh., Berlin, 1912) 4, 230, 276 Frauenkunstverband (Women’s Art Association) 531 fresco painting 118 Friends of the Arts Society (Reykjavik) 259 Furnica (The Ant) 456, 458 Futurism 26, 41, 48, 53, 76–77, 79, 80, 82, 92, 94, 96, 101, 103, 113–14, 116, 119, 122, 135, 162, 191, 208, 201, 218, 257, 311, 318, 349–59, 372, 376, 379, 381, 415, 443, 451, 459, 465, 469 Futurismus, Der see Der Futurismus Futuristák és expresszionisták (Futurists and Expressionists; exh., Budapest, 1913) 76–79

Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung (Great Berlin Art Exhibition) 175, 358, 527 Group of Estonian Artists 173, 176, 185 Group of Seven 487 Gruppe Progressiver Künstler see Die Progressiven Gummessons konsthandel (Gummeson’s art store; Stockholm) 212, 214

Galerie Arnold (Dresden) 7 Galerie Cassirer (Berlin) 11, 35–36, 117 Galerie Gurlitt (Hamburg) 85 Galerie Miethke (Vienna) 35 Galerie Neue Kunst—Hans Goltz (Munich) 94, 114, 116, 174, 216, 287, 456, 467, 469 Galerie Neumann-Nierendorf (Berlin) 306, 358, 490 Galerie Rudolfinum (Prague) 46 Galerie Thannhauser (Munich) 114, 174, 277, 467 Galerie van Diemen (Berlin) 120, 124, 127 Gallery 291 (New York) 487 Gemeentemuseum Den Haag (The Hague) 307–10 Generación del 98 (Generation of 98) 371, 373 German Graphic Art of the 20th Century (exh., Winnipeg, 1958) 495 German Matisse School 314n50 German Photographic Company 487 Germanization 4, 5, 22, 228, 445 Gesellschaft der Freunde des neuen Rußland in Deutschland (Society of Friends of the New Russia in Germany) 123 Gestapo 107 Gil Blas 454 glass painting 9 Golden Age 371 Good Neighbor Policy 513 Göteborgskoloristerna (Gothenburg colorists) 217 Gothic 5, 7, 14, 92, 142, 223, 226, 235, 245, 279, 281, 386, 476 Grafton Galleries 3, 89, 275–76, 279–80 Grafton Group 282 Great Depression 21, 329, 488, 493, 495, 501, 503 Grecia 373 Green Flower (Zaļā puķe) 162

iconography 1, 63, 68, 144, 178, 236, 414, 475–76 impasto 61, 334–35, 515 impressionism: as style 2, 26, 36, 75, 113, 118, 138, 196, 207, 276, 279, 281, 319, 342, 398, 412, 430; Cape 526; exhibitions of 35; French 3–5, 1, 193, 207, 332–35, 383, 446, 494; German 366, 372; in contrast to expressionism 7, 33, 73, 77, 258, 262, 275, 317, 323, 400–01, 405, 433, 471; international 74, 166, 281, 442, 476; Russian 124, 138; Slovenian 396–400 Impressionists-Triangle 138 indigenism 508 indigenous culture 52, 243, 512, 538, 551, 573–74 indigenous people 16, 207, 243, 502–03, 517–19, 537 industrialization 173, 207, 211–12, 351, 519, 396n2 influenza 41, 370, 381 innovation: artistic 34, 146, 167, 185, 196, 204, 317, 332, 370, 513, 515; of form 159, 388 Institute of Artistic Culture (INKhUK; Moscow) 121 interiorism 509 International Art Club 533 International Exhibition of Graphic Art (Stockholm, 1914) 206, 219 International Impressionist Exhibition (Budapest, 1910) see Nemzetközi impresszionisták International Postimpressionist Exhibition (Budapest 1913) see Nemzetközi postimpresszionistá Internationale Ausstellung Revolutionärer Künstler (International Exhibition of Revolutionary Artists; Berlin, 1922) 95, 100, 107 Internationale Buchkunstausstellung (International Book Art Exhibition; Leipzig, 1927) 127

handicraft 16, 245–46, 277 Heimatkunst (German literary movement) 449 Herbstsalon see Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig (Academy of Graphic Arts and Book Design Leipzig) 145, 473 Host (Guest) 47 Hungarian National Gallery (Budapest) 78 Hungarian Soviet Republic 56, 82, 85, 450 hybridity/hybridization of styles 17, 177, 185, 371, 476 Hylaea 118

571

Subject Index Internationale Kunstausstellung (International Art Exhibition; Dresden, 1926) 127 Internationale Vereinigung der Expressionisten, Futuristen und Kubisten (International Association of Expressionists, Futurists, and Cubists) 20, 358 internationalism 18 interwar period 8, 12, 13, 16, 19, 22, 25, 27, 33, 48, 57, 61, 85, 92, 94, 134–35, 144, 150, 160, 169, 176, 183, 222, 224, 232, 306, 336, 340–41, 343, 395, 401–03, 408–09, 417–18, 420–21, 429, 430, 432, 434, 439, 445, 451, 460–61, 477, 487, 513, 517 Intimate Studio of Painters and Draughtsmen 118 intimists 214, 219, 276 Irma Stern Museum (Cape Town) 531 Jakopič Pavilion (Ljubljana) 397 Jewishness 22–23, 333, 339, 345 Jež (Hedgehog) 67–68 judaism 335 Junge Westphalen (Young Westphalians) 47 Juriš (The Storming) 410 Juryfreie Kunstschau (Non-juried Art Show; Berlin, 1928) 127 Karpathen, Die see Die Karpathen Kasparsoniāde 166 Keresők (The Seekers) 11, 74 Keturi vėjai (Four Winds; artist group) 144 Keturi vėjai (Four Winds; magazine) 144 Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes 427–30, 438 Kingdom of Yugoslavia 395–96, 428, 430 Klaxon (Claxon) 508 Klingen (The Blade) 192, 197–203, 259, 264 Klingsor 445–46 Knirr School of Art (Munich) 285 Kokot (The Rooster) Komet 455 Kommune, Die see Die Kommune Kongress der Union Internationaler Progressiver Künstler (Congress of the Union of International Progressive Artists; Düsseldorf 1922) 100, 103, 358 Konstnärshuset (The Artists’ House; Stockholm) 211 Könyves Kálmán Szalon (Coloman Beauclerc Salon, Budapest) 87n13 Kronprinzenpalais (National Gallery; Berlin) 488, 533 Kultúra (Culture) 76, 161 Kunst für Alle (Art for Everyone) 35 Kunst und Künstler (Art and Artists) 35, 176, 284 Kunst der Nation (Art of the Nation) 235 Kunstverlag Franz Hanfstaengel (Munich) 285 Kunstwollen 453

La Pluma (The Feather) 508 La rassegna contemporanea (The contemporary review) 353 La Revue du Feu (Fire Review) 302 La Voce (The Voice) 12–13, 349–51 Lacerba 350 laestadianism 244 L’artista moderno (Illustrated Magazine of Applied Art) 9, 351, 353 Lassokaster (Lassoing) 251 Le Rire (The laugh) 454, 458 Le Témoin (The witness) 458 Lebensraum 444 Leeds University 281 L’Élan 197 Leon Wyczółkowski Regional Museum (Bydgoszcz) 107 L’Eroica (The Heroic) 17, 349, 351–53 Les Indépendants (The Independents; exh., Prague, 1910) 33 Lewin-Funcke-Studio (Berlin) 526 Liljevalchs konsthall (Liljevalch’s Art Hall; Stockholm) 212 L’Illustration (Illustration) 251 Literární skupina (Literary Group) 33, 47 lubok 114 luminism 317 MA (Today) 14, 80–81, 447 Magyar Hírlap (Hungarian Gazette) 47 Malik-Verlag (Berlin) 20 Malmö art exhibition (1914) 176 Manet and the Postimpressionists (exh., London, 1910/11) 191 Manifeste Futuriste de la Luxure (by Valentine de Saint-Point, 1913) 380 Manifesto del Futurismo (Manifesto of Futurismby Filippo Marinetti, 1909) 379, 459 Mänsklighet (Humanity) 217–18 marginalization Martín Fierro 508 materialism 5, 18, 66, 193 maternalism 236 medieval art 9, 15, 57, 135, 180, 207, 225–26, 238, 471, 501 metaphysics 66, 99, 201 Michaelis School of Art (Cape Town) 526, 531, 533, 537 Mid-European Art (exh., Leicester, 1944) 291 MIÉNK (Circle of Hungarian Naturalists and Impressionists) 74 migration 23, 27, 56, 59, 73, 82, 85, 192, 232, 235, 243, 250, 309, 372, 450, 487, 489–90, 510, 511, 518, 520, 525–26, 537 Mir Iskusstva (World of Art) 123–24 Mirror see The Mirror

572

Subject Index Modern German Art Exhibition (London, 1914) 285, 287–88 modern literature 42, 66, 74, 85, 105, 113, 159, 176, 204, 207, 296, 354, 366, 370–72, 379, 396, 399, 408, 410, 431–32, 508 Moderna galerija (Ljubljana) 398–99, 403 Moderna galerija (Zagreb) 412, 415, 419, 422 Moderna Museet (Stockholm) 210 moderne Bund, Der see Der moderne Bund Moderne Kunstkring (Amsterdam) 8, 296 modernism: aesthetics of 26, 162, 335, 395, 426, 430, 443; classic 200, 461; Croatian 409, 420; Czech 34; Danish 204; Dutch 295; European 4, 26, 117, 163, 168–70, 177, 316, 319, 322, 365, 388; French 114, 126, 158, 168, 340, 490; German 114, 126, 134–35, 154, 250, 280, 284, 340, 351, 476, 488–91; hybrid 25–26, 409, 443, 476; international 4, 146, 277, 279; Italian 351, 358; Košice 56–71; Latvian 22, 158–59, 167; Lithuanian 134–36; national 10, 136; Portuguese 378–79, 380–81, 389; regional 177; Russian 113–14; Serbian 431, 438; South African 525–38; Swedish 210–11, 214; universal 26, 372–73, 396 modernismo 370–71, 373, 375–76 modernity 2, 58, 94–96, 105, 146, 232, 322, 342, 370–71, 396–97, 417, 442–43, 459, 507–08, 510, 513, 515, 518–20 modernization 21, 27, 135, 144, 148, 173, 185, 371 modulation 225, 515 Moskauer Gruppe (Moscow Group) 127 Mostra Espressionisti Tedeschi (Exhibition of German Expressionists; Rome, 1920) 354–55 Münchner Neue Secession (Munich New Secession) 421, 468 Münchner Secession (Munich Secession) 468 muralism 508, 513–14 Museion 94 Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid) 370 Museu Municipal de Estremoz 383 Museum Boijmans van Beuningen (Rotterdam) 307 Museum of Fine Arts (Budapest) 75 Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe (Museum of Art and Design; Hamburg) 290 Museum of Modern Art (New York) 196, 356–57, 362–63, 396, 490 Museum of Non-Objective Painting (today Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; New York) 489 Művészház (House of Artists; Budapest) 11, 73 mysticism 45, 65, 84, 102–04, 126, 128, 143, 145, 224–25, 332, 340, 488 Nabis 4, 61 naivists 214

Nation see The Nation nation state 18–19, 148, 166, 174, 185–86, 196, 225, 232, 380–82, 388, 422, 43, 452, 517–18 National Gallery (Berlin) see Kronprinzenpalais National Gallery (Copenhagen) 200 National Gallery (Prague) 38, 40, 44, 47 National Gallery (Vilnius) 143, 136, 147–50 National Gallery (Washington) 170 National Gallery/Atheneum Art Gallery (Helsinki) 227–29, 234 National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa) 488, 490, 526 National Gallery of Iceland (Reykjavík) 245, 258, 263, 267–69 national socialism 21, 217, 232, 235–36, 247, 250, 290, 292, 307–08, 310–11, 344–45, 367, 378, 445, 490–91, 527, 533, 536 nationalism 42, 52, 62, 71, 78, 112, 134, 141, 174, 221, 247, 258, 260–61, 267, 272, 294, 317, 360, 380, 407, 414, 432, 452, 549, 555, 568 Native Americans 9, 502 native cultures see indigeneous culture naturalism 4, 7, 21, 26, 42, 47, 83, 85, 94, 127, 181, 183, 196, 198, 279, 281, 356, 377–78, 381, 388, 397, 405, 427, 430, 451, 525 Naujoji romuva (New Pagan Shrine) 153–54 Nazi see national socialism Nemetskoe Iskusstvo Poslednevo Piatidesiatiletiia (German Art of the Last Fifty Years; exh., Moscow, 1925) 125 Nemzeti Szalon (National Salon; Budapest) 74 Nemzetközi impresszionisták (International Impressionists; exh., Budapest, 1910) 77 Nemzetközi postimpresszionistá (International Postimpressionists; exh., Budapest, 1913) 77, 80 neoclassicism 146–47, 149, 152, 427 neoexpressionism 93, 170, 503, 509 neofiguration 513 neoimpressionism 26, 74–75, 78, 276–77, 295, 316, 342, 456 neologism 122 neomodernism 73 neoplasticism 324 neoprimitivism 41, 77, 114–15, 117–18, 282, 324, 336 neorealism 103, 421 neoromanticism 103, 138, 284 neotraditionalism 136, 146, 148, 153–54, 427 networks: artistic 1, 9, 12–14, 22, 26, 56, 97, 100, 113, 191, 201, 206, 208, 219, 236, 279, 353, 408, 410, 414, 420–22, 428, 512–13, 520 Neue Künstlervereinigung München (New Artists’ Association Munich, NKVM) 114–15, 117, 137, 277, 279, 280, 283, 466 Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) 25, 127, 145, 173–74, 307, 326, 396, 399, 401, 404–05, 446–49, 450

573

Subject Index Neue Secession, Berlin (New Berlin Secession) 8, 40–41, 76, 78, 280 neue Ziel, Das see Das neue Ziel Neukunstgruppe (New Art Group) 11, 73–76 New Age see The New Age New Catholic Renaissance 26, 396 New Economic Policy (NEP, 1921–1928) 126 New Group 533 Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant (New Rotterdam Daily) 305 noble savage 284, 535 NOI 13, 353–55, 358–59 non-Western art 114, 118 Nordic/northern art 6, 34, 196, 208, 210, 212, 222–25, 227, 229, 235, 257, 262 Norwegian Printmakers’ Association 246 Nova et Vetera 46–47 Novecento 359 November Revolution see revolution Novembergruppe (November Group; Berlin) 8, 20, 124, 128, 158, 303, 348, 353–58, 449, 527–28 Novembergruppe (November Group; Helsinki) 222–28, 230 nude/nudity 8, 10, 152, 263–64, 287, 305, 333, 337, 340–41, 344, 456, 459, 493, 516, 531–33 Nyolcak (The Eight) 74 O Mundo Português (The Portuguese World) 386 Obschestvo Stankovistov (Society of Easel-Painters, OST) 126–27 occultism 104 oceanic art 7, 9 October Revolution see revolution Okto (Alone) 247–8 Oktobergruppe (October Group) 222, 231–32 Old Masters 245 Oldenzeel Gallery (Rotterdam) 296, 302 Omega Workshops (London) 289 Oostenrijksche schilderijen en Kunstnijverheid 1900–1927 (Austrian Paintings and Applied Art 1900–1927; exh., The Hague, 1927) 307 Orpheu 379–81 orphism 119, 191 Osliniy Khvost (Donkey’s Tail) 116–17, 120 Osma (The Prague Eight) 6, 34–41, 48 osmosis 185 Ostdeutschtum 449 Ostland 445, 449–50 pacifism 96, 98–99, 105, 385 Pallas Art School (Tartu) 140, 174–76, 181–83 Pallas Art Society (Estonia) 176 pan-Americanism 513 pan-European 281 pan-German 76, 443, 447, 449 pan-Slavism 400

Parnassus of Moscow see The Parnassus of Moscow partition of Poland 22, 92–3, 95–8, 100, 102, 105 Pathetiker, Die see Die Pathetiker Peredvizhniki (Russian Wanderers) 124 PIDE Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado (International Police and State Defense) 378 Pilger, Die see Die Pilger Pobeda nad soltsem (Victory over the Sun) 154 pointillism 26 political discourse 1, 191, 197, 224, 226, 232, 258, 517, 519–20 politics 4, 20, 99, 102–03, 191, 264, 307, 343, 359, 377, 388, 445, 449, 452, 489–91, 494–95, 544 Polynesian art 118, 147 popular art 214 popular culture 370 Portugal Futurista (Futurist Portugal) 380, 381 Portuguese Second Republic 378 postimpressionism: French 3, 34 37, 57, 74, 207, 275, 280, 289, 397, 443, 445, 459; British 275, 289; German 279–80 poverty 18, 21–22, 139–40, 183, 218, 247, 333, 340, 382, 456, 488, 493, 517 Presença (Presence) 282 Primitives 317–19, 326 primitivism 7–9, 15–16, 27, 42, 74, 84, 101, 104, 114, 123, 150, 153–54, 206–08, 212, 215, 219, 224, 227–28, 230, 233, 234, 236, 336, 465, 473, 477, 525–26, 528, 525, 535–38; settler 538 printmaking 14–17, 44–45, 283, 285, 287, 289–90, 465, 473–75, 478 Prisma (Prism) 508 Proa (Bow) 508 progress: economic; models of progressive art 20, 34–35, 44, 259, 261, 268, 276–77, 288, 352–53, 358, 371, 428, 430–31, 443, 447–48, 449–51, 459–60 Progressive Party 260 Progressiven, Die see Die Progressiven progressivists 78 proportion: in art 2, 207–08, 324, 418, 477, 515 prostitutes 169, 418, 460, 518 Prussian Academy of Arts (Berlin) 19 Przegląd Wielkopolski (Wielkopolska Overview) 92 psychiatry 297, 385–86, 516 Pulchri Studio (The Hague) 306 Querschnitt, Der see Der Querschnitt Quosego 232–33 race 82, 94, 146, 226–27, 229, 231–33, 243, 251, 434, 537n69 Rampa (The Ramp) 458 Rasmus Meyers Kunstsamlingen (Rasmus Meyer’s Art Collection) 246

574

Subject Index rationalization 184, 519 Rdeči Pilot (The Red Pilot) 396 realism: anti- 206; art movement 10, 167–68, 173, 203, 306, 317, 326, 335, 373, 404–05, 421, 427, 438, 451; Magic 508; social 27; Socialist 22, 127–28, 134, 317, 451, 361, 493 Rebel Art Centre (London) 325 Red Group 124–28 Redoute (London) 12, 445, 448 Redoute Hall (Brașov) 12, 445, 448 religion 20, 66, 104, 446 Renaissance 5, 9, 14, 26, 198, 245–46, 258–59, 396, 405 República Nova (New Republic) 378 restoration 201, 262, 369–70, 396, 438 Revista de Antropofagia (Antropographic Magazine) 508, 513 Revista de Avance (Progress Magazine) 508 revolution: concept of revolution in art 64, 102–03, 124–27, 396, 398, 449; French 76; German 99; Hungarian 99; Italian 76; Mexican 518–19; November Revolution (Germany) 18–19, 139–40, 160, 174, 303, 354–57; October Revolution, Bolshevik/Soviet Revolution (Russia) 18–19, 99, 103, 120–23, 144, 224, 232, 335; social-aesthetic 20, 22, 26, 48, 92–94, 97–100, 102–3, 106, 139, 210, 226–27, 236, 262, 336, 369, 373, 396, 410, 445, 508, 517–29; spiritual 201 Rhythm 281–84 Rif War 370 Rijksacademie van Beeldende Kunsten (Academy of Fine Arts; Amsterdam) 310 Rivaler (Rivals) 244 Romanic 6, 33, 39 Romantic/Romanticism 84, 86, 93, 103–04, 113, 122, 144, 150, 177, 193, 201, 211, 227, 249, 287, 292, 333, 335, 371, 373, 377–78, 388, 442, 526, 531–32, 536 Rousseauean 284 Royal Danish Art Academy (Copenhagen) see Det Kongelige Danske Kunstakademis Russische Expressionisten (Russian Expressionists) 4 S.N.I. (Secretariado Nacional de Informação, Cultura Popular e Turismo/National Secretariat of Information, Popular Culture and Tourism; Lisbon) 378–78 S.P.N. (Secretariado de Propaganda Nacional/ National Propaganda Secretariat; Lisbon) 378–78 Salão de Inverno (Winter Salon) 386 Salon d’Automne (Autumn Salon; Paris) 36, 337, 340, 342 Salon des Indépendants (The Independents’ Salon; Paris) 192, 194, 337 Salon des Refusés (Salon of the Refused; Helsinki) 231

Salon des Refusés (Salon of the Refused; Paris) 97 Salon Richter (Dresden) 46, 140 Salon Strindberg (Helsinki) 174, 223–24 Salon des Tuileries (Tuileries Salon; Paris) 338 Salon Ullrich (Zagreb) 417, 429, 434 Saviomuseet (Savio Museum; Kirkenes) 245–54 Savoy 284 Saxon-German 13, 82, 370, 443–46, 448–52, 460, 526 Schaffenden, Die see Die Schaffenden Schmidt-Rottluff Exhibition: Graphic Works and Stone Carvings (Leicester, 1953) 291–92 schöne Rarität, Die see Die schöne Rarität School of Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts (St. Petersburg) 213 schtampa (religious engravings) 17, 476 Schwedische Expressionisten (Swedish Expressionists) 4, 208–09, 214 sdelannye kartiny (made paintings) 25, 118–19 secessionist 35, 73, 398, 402, 473 Second All-Russian Artists’ Congress (St. Petersburg, 1911) 117 Second World War 8, 43, 57, 92, 170, 83, 206, 217, 219, 232, 257, 268–69, 295, 308, 311, 333, 335, 338–39, 344, 346, 378, 404, 241, 460, 490, 491, 501, 503, 527 self-affirmation 515 self-colonization 173 self-expression 148, 395–96, 401, 404, 497 self-primitivization 229 Septem 227 Simplicissimus 215, 454–55, 458 Skupina 41, 93 Slade School (London) 526, 528 Slovák (Slovak) 66 Slovenský denník (Slovak Daily) 66 SNBA (Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes/ National Society of Fine Arts; Lisbon) 382, 386 social issues 56, 61, 218, 421, 488, 493, 515, 517 socialism 299, 343, 450 Socialismul (The Socialism) 457 socialist realism see realism Socialistische Kunst-Heden (Socialist Art, Today; exh., Amsterdam, 1930) 307 Socialistische Kunstenaarskring (Socialist Artist Circle) 307 Societé Anonyme 10, 489 Société des Artistes Indépendants (Society of Independent Artists) 287 Soiuz Molodezhi (Union of Youth) 117–18 Sonderbund: 4, 6, 8, 41, 45–46, 80, 207, 276–77, 279, 302; Sonderbund exhibition (Cologne, 1912) 4, 8, 41, 45–46, 80, 207, 276–77, 279, 302 South African National Gallery (Cape Town) 526–27, 533 South African Society of Artists (SASA) 526–28, 531, 536–37

575

Subject Index Spanish-American war 370, 513 spirituality 15, 67, 101, 135, 184, 298, 401, 435, 488, 501, 503 Spolek výtvarných umělců Mánes (Mánes Association of Fine Artists) 35 Spring Salon (Zagreb) 408, 412, 415, 417–19, 434 State College of Crafts and Design (Christiania/ Oslo) 244–45 Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam) 298, 300, 303–06, 308–10 Stellenbosch University 529 Stenmans Konstrevy (Stenmans Art Review) 225 Stenmans Konstsalong (Stenmans Art Salon; Helsinki) 225 stereotype 79, 227, 342–43 Strindberg Gallery (Helsinki) 174, 224 Studio 277, 284, 289–90 Sturm, Der see Der Sturm Sturm Bilderbücher (Sturm Picture Books) 119, 121 Sturm exhibitions see Der Sturm Sturmabende (evening lectures) 12 Sturmbühne (expressionist theatre) 12 succès du scandale 97, 192 Sunday Times 282 suprematism 121–22, 124, 126, 395, 469 surrealism 27, 119, 174, 185, 322, 323, 325, 328–29, 335, 409 Svensk-Franska konstgalleriet (Swedish-French Art Gallery; Stockholm) 217 Svenska expressionister (Swedish Expressionists; Stockholm, 1912) 213 symbolism 10, 17, 25, 35, 37, 43–45, 99, 101, 107, 113, 118–19, 138, 144, 166, 181, 201, 276, 317, 326, 339, 351, 371, 373, 410, 414, 430, 465, 475–76, 498 synaesthesia 300 synthetists 74 Tank 12, 398 Terra Roxa e outras terras (Purple Land and Other Lands) 508 Teseo (Theseus) 508 The Apple (of Beauty and Discord) 289–90 The Athenaeum 289 The Burlington Magazine 276, 280 The Cambridge Magazine 280–81 The Criterion 279 The Expressionists (exh., London, 1953) 291 The Great War see First World War The Mirror 491n31 The Nation 282, 287 The New Age 284 The Parnassus of Moscow 122 The Times 276, 287–88 theosophy 9, 104, 298–99, 501–2 Third Congress of the Communist International (Petrograd, 1921) 121

Times see The Times Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Sztuk Pięknych (Society of Friends of the Fine Arts; Poznań) 94, 97 traditionalism 25, 27, 166–67, 260, 417, 427, 443, 446 transatlantic relations 27, 520 transcendentalism 335, 501, 516 transnational relations 1, 13, 26, 97, 100, 159, 219, 277, 408–09, 422, 427–30, 434, 439, 444, 526 transnationalism 252 Transylvanism 444 Travemünder Dichterhaus (Poets’ House, Travemünde) 235 Trečias frontas (The Third Front) 150 Trije labodje (Three Swans) 396, 399 Trolltinnan (The Trolltindan Mountain) 248 Tulenkantajat (Torchbearers) 228 Tvrdošíjní (The Stubborn Ones) 41–48 Twenty-One Gallery (London) 17, 284–85, 287–89 Typenporträt (type portrait) see stereotype Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art by Wassily Kandinsky,1912) 9, 92, 117, 223, 284, 297, 466, 488–89 Ukiyo-e woodcuts 16, 215–16 Ultra 373 ultra-secessionist 73 ultraism 372 ultramodern 77, 206, 216, 495 Union internationaler fortschrittlicher Künstler (International Union of Progressive Artists) 103, 358 University of Bonn 536 University of Cape Town (UCT) 533 University of Iceland 259 University of Oslo 246 University of Pretoria 536 University of Stockholm 207–8 University of Tartu 176 University of Uppsala 208 University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg) 537 urban life 57, 212, 460, 491, 518 urbanization 22, 173, 207, 211–12, 377, 460, 517, 519 utopia 7–8, 48, 59, 97, 99–100, 105–06, 442, 452, 460, 520 Valand Art School (Gothenburg) 211, 214, 216–17 Valori Plastici (Plastic Values), 127, 232, 356–59 Vasárnapi Újság (Sunday Newspaper) 77 Venice Biennale 533 Ver Sacrum 277, 289–90 Vereinigte Ateliers (Maxon and Kallenberger art school; Munich) 232 verism 20, 126, 183 Vienna Secession 277, 289, 413–14

576

Subject Index Vijavica (The Snowstorm) 410, 417 violence 18–19, 216, 381, 508, 518–19 vitalism 18, 287, 442, 445 völkische ideas 6 Volné směry (Free directions) 35, 38, 41 vorticism 9, 16, 212, 284–85, 287, 289 Vysshie Khudozhestvenno-Tekhnicheskie Masterskie (Higher Art and Technical Studios, VKhUTEMAS) 126 Weg, Der see Der Weg Western art 118, 120, 125, 206, 135 Wiener Secession see Vienna Secession Wiener Werkstätte 277, 308 Wilhelmine culture 7, 349 Wits Technical Art School (Johannesburg) 553 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom 19 woodcut 14–18, 50, 77, 85, 114, 139, 202, 208, 212–17, 233–35, 245–54, 277, 281–93, 296, 302, 351–53, 469, 473, 476–79, 494–95, 528–29 World War I see First World War

World War II see Second World War Wystawa Ekspresjonistów/Ausstellung Expressionistischer Kunst (Expressionist Exhibition; Poznań/Posen, 1918) 95 Wystawa futurystów, kubistów i ekspresjonistów (Exhibition of Futurists, Cubists and Expressionists; Lvov, 1913) 93 Young Artists Club (Slovenia) 399, 147 Young Estonia 173, 177, 185 Young Poland 101 Yung-Yidish (Young Yiddish) 93, 95, 100–01, 103 Zahrtmann’s school (Copenhagen) 262 Zdrój (The Source) 95–106 Zeitschrift für Bildende Kunst (Fine Art Journal) 176 Zenit 11, 13–14, 20, 419–20, 430, 435–36, 471–72 Zenitizam (Zenithism) 430 Ziel, Das see Das Ziel zionism 93 Zolotoe Runo (Golden Fleece) 114 Zukunft, Die see Die Zukunft Życie (Life) 97

577

GEOGRAPHICAL INDEX

Africa 1, 7, 8, 9, 15, 23, 24, 27, 118, 149, 251, 287, 304, 324, 515, 525–38 Amsterdam: Abstracte kunst (Abstract art; exh., 1939) 19, 36–37; De Onafhankelijken 297, 300, 303, 306, 313n43; Moderne Kunstkring (Modern art circle) 22; Rijksacademie van Beeldende Kunsten (Academy of Fine Arts) 310; Roos Gallery, De 311n2; Socialistische Kunst, Heden (Socialist Art, Today; exh., 1930) 307; Stedelijk Museum 298–310, 314n49, Antarctica 251 Antwerp 35, 36, 169, 287, 316, 317, 327 Argentina 508–13, 519 Austria 4, 10, 42, 73, 75, 95, 149, 206, 276, 277, 307, 344, 367, 368, 413, 414, 443–46, 490, 512, 533 Baia Mare see Nagybánya Baltic states 22, 26, 214, 239n53, 462n29 Banat 443, 450, 451 Barbizon: School of Barbizon 329n5, 452, 459 Barcelona: Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc 17, 366; Exposició del gravat alemany contemporani (Exhibition of Contemporary German Engravings, 1926) 17, 366 Basque Country 370 Bassarabia 443 Belgium 100, 168, 316–31, 461n9, 528, 532 Bergen: Bergen School 246, 262, 303 Berlin: Arbeitsrat für Kunst (Work Council for Art) 124, 355; Berliner Secession (Berlin Secession) 3–4, 8, 92, 124, 276–77; Café des Westens 279, 280, 283; DeutschNiederländische Gesellschaft (GermanDutch Association) 314n49; Erste Russische Kunstausstellung (First Russian Art Exhibition, 1922) 124; Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon

(First German Autumn Salon; exh., 1913) 4, 41, 117, 187n15, 381; Französische Expressionisten (French Expressionists, 1912) 4, 230, 276; Galerie Cassirer 11, 35, 36, 117; Galerie Neumann-Nierendorf 306, 358, 490; Galerie van Diemen 120, 124, 127; gallery 4, 11–12, 76, 81, 83, 93–94, 119, 202, 208, 223, 230, 467, 214, 216, 223, 230, 257, 259, 266, 308, 350, 358, 381, 445, 449, 469–71, 488; Große Berliner Kunstausstellung (Great Berlin Art Exhibition) 175, 358, 527, 531; Internationale Ausstellung Revolutionärer Künstler (International Exhibition of Revolutionary Artists, 1922) 95, 100, 107; Internationale Vereinigung der Expressionisten, Futuristen und Kubisten (International Association of Expressionists, Futurists, and Cubists) 20, 358; Juryfreie Kunstschau (Non-juried Art Show; 1928) 127; Kronprinzenpalais (National Gallery) 488; Lewin-Funcke-Studio 526; Malik-Verlag 20; Neue Secession (New Secession) 8, 76, 78, 280; Novembergruppe (November Group) 8, 20, 124, 128, 158, 303, 348, 353–58, 449, 527–28; Preußische Akademie der Künste (Prussian Academy of Arts) 19; Sturm exhibitions 11–12, 83, 94, 197, 201–03, 214, 223, 230, 276, 279, 287, 301, 466–67, 469; Sturmabende (evening lectures) 12; Sturmbühne (expressionist theatre) 12 Beverly Hills: Anderson Galleries 490 Blue Rocks, Nova Scotia 498 Bodø 244, 248 Bohemia: Habsburg Bohemia 26, 33–42, 46, 47, 126, 206, 227–29, 247 Bolivia 509, 512, 518, 519 Brașov (Kronstadt) 443–61 Brazil 22, 23, 138, 508–13

578

Geographical Index Brighton: Exhibition of Modern French Art (1910) 276 Brindisi 51n28 Brno (Brünn) 33–48, 53n70, 55n92 Bruges: Atelier La Palette 444 Brünn see Brno Bucharest 446, 449, 450, 455, 457, 459, 461, 465 Budapest: Academy of Fine Arts 61, 69n11; Futuristák és expresszionisták (Futurists and Expressionists; exh., 1913) 76–79; Hungarian National Gallery 78; Könyves Kálmán Szalon (Coloman Beauclerc Salon) 87n13; Museum of Fine Arts 75; Művészház (House of Artists) 11, 73; Nemzeti Szalon (National Salon) 74, 76; Nemzetközi impresszionisták (International Impressionists; exh., 1910) 77; Nemzetközi postimpresszionistá (International Postimpressionists; exh., 1913) 77, 80 Buenos Aires 372, 512–14, 518 Bugøyfjord 243 Bukovina 443 Bussum 36 Bydgoszcz: Leon Wyczółkowski Regional Museum 107 Cape Town: Ashbey’s Gallery 527; Irma Stern Museum 531; Michaelis School of Art 526, 531, 537; South African National Gallery 526; University of Cape Town (UCT) 533 Central Europe 10, 18, 26, 36, 56, 60, 96, 106, 206, 208, 377, 389, 400, 408, 410, 417, 428, 460, 465 Chicago 170, 488, 489, 496 Chile 508–11 Christiania see Oslo Cluj 450–53 Cologne: Sonderbund exhibition (1912) 4, 8, 41, 45–46, 80, 207, 276–77, 279, 302 Colombia 509, 511, 515, 516 Congo: Belgian Congo 525, 532, 539n44 Copenhagen: National Gallery 200; Royal Danish Acadamy of Fine Arts 170, 199, 260, 262; Zahrtmann’s school 262 Croatia 21, 26, 35, 408–23 Cuba 58, 370, 513–14, 519 Czechoslovakia 18, 45 Danzig (Gdańsk) 488, 494 Darmstadt: Deutscher Expressionismus (German Expressionism; exh., 1920) 20 Dessau 250 Detroit: Institute of Arts 490 Dobroudja 459 Dresden: Art Academy 12, 23, 46, 145, 175, 182, 266, 268, 474; Dr. Lahmann’s Weißer Hirsch Sanatorium 277; Dresdner Sezession Gruppe 1919 (Dresden Secession Group 1919) 42; Galerie Arnold 7, 306; Internationale Kunstausstellung (International Art Exhibition,

1926) 127; Salon Richter 46, 53n62, 140, 277; Technische Hochschule 278 Düsseldorf: Kongress der Union Internationaler Progressiver Künstler (Congress of the International Union of Progressive Artists, 1922) 100, 103, 358 England 3, 8, 196, 244, 277, 281–85, 289, 291, 292, 308, 318, 320 Estremoz: Museu Municipal 383 Europe 1–27, 33–37, 47, 56, 60, 67, 73, 83, 92, 94, 96, 98, 100, 105, 106, 117, 120–24, 134, 136, 144, 158–68, 170, 173, 185, 191, 192, 197, 198, 203, 206–08, 211, 212, 216, 219, 222, 224, 229, 243–45, 251, 258, 259, 279, 295, 308, 316, 318, 319, 322, 340, 344, 350, 353–59, 365, 369–72, 377, 378, 382, 388–97, 400, 408, 410, 414, 417, 420, 421, 427, 428, 436, 442–45, 454, 458, 460, 465–69, 471, 473, 477, 479, 487–91, 497, 502, 507, 508, 510–18, 520, 521, 526–29, 531, 532, 535–38 Finland: Civil War 18, 224–26, 230; Finnish Independence 224–25, 228; Finnish-language culture 226; Finnish rug tradition 225; Finnishness 223, 226, 228; Karelian Isthmus 232; Swedish-language culture 233 Finnmark 243, 244, 246, 248 Firle, Sussex: Charleston House 289 Florence 12, 13, 35–37, 348, 349, 350, 351, 358, 405, 411 France 4, 8, 34–35, 40–41, 92–100, 114, 118, 122, 125–26, 135, 177, 181, 183, 197, 204, 216, 218–19, 266, 280, 283, 307, 318, 322, 333–35, 337–45, 348, 377, 379, 381–82, 388, 453, 483, 487, 490, 543 Franzensbad (Františkovy Lázně) 44 Geneva 358, 372 Germany 3–21, 33–36, 40–42, 48, 73, 76, 79, 82, 85, 93–96, 98–100, 105, 113, 114, 118, 120–27, 138–40, 144, 145, 153, 159, 162, 168, 174–76, 184, 191, 196, 202, 203, 206, 208, 214–19, 222–36, 245–47, 250, 251, 257, 266, 269, 277–85, 289, 290, 292, 295, 302, 305, 307, 310, 333–44, 348, 349, 352, 356–59, 366, 369, 372, 377, 378, 381–88, 399, 465, 466, 473, 475, 476, 479, 487–89, 491, 498, 511, 512, 514, 525–30, 536, 537 Gothenburg: Göteborgskoloristerna (Gothenburg colorists) 217; Gothenburg Tercentennial Jubilee Exposition (1923) 227; Konsthall (Art Hall) 217; Valand Art School 211, 214, 216–17 Grønningen 192 Haarlem: J. H. de Bois Gallery 305, 313n30 Hagen 36

579

Geographical Index Hague, The: Biesing Gallery 295; D’Audretsch Gallery 301; Gemeentemuseum 307–10; Oostenrijksche schilderijen en Kunstnijverheid 1900–1927 (Austrian Paintings and Applied Art 1900–1927, 1927) 307; Pulchri Studio 306 Halifax 496 Hamburg: Galerie Gurlitt 85; Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe (Museum of Art and Design) 290 Helsinki: Central School for Applied Arts 232; National Gallery/Atheneum Art Gallery 227–29, 234; Novembergruppe (November Group) 222–28, 230; Salon des Refusés (Salon of the Refused) 231; Salon Strindberg 29n37, 174, 223–24; Stenmans Konstsalong (Stenmans Art Salon) 225 Hermannstadt see Sibiu Holland 4, 318 Hungary 4, 19, 23, 26, 56, 73–86, 99, 100, 444 Hurtigruten 246

Real de Belas–Artes 381; Escola Superior de Belas Artes 379; Exposições de Arte Moderna do S.P.N./S.N.I. (Exhibitions of Modern Art, 1935) 378, 388; SNBA (Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes) 382, 386; S.N.I. (Secretariado Nacional de Informação, Cultura Popular e Turismo, National Secretariat of Information, Popular Culture and Tourism) 378, 388; S.P.N. (Secretariado de Propaganda Nacional, National Propaganda Secretariat) 378, 388; Teatro Nacional Dona Maria II 383 Lithuania 8, 15, 18, 22, 23, 134–54, 160, 332, 333, 334, 343, 512, 525, 532, 533 Ljubljana: Jakopič Pavilion 397; Moderna galerija 398–99, 403 Lofoten 248 London: Allied Artists’ Association 280; Alpine Club Gallery 282; British Museum 283, 284; Exhibition of Modern German Art (1906) 278; Grafton Galleries 3, 89n50, 275, 276, 279, 280; Modern German Art Exhibition (1914) 285, 287, 288; National Gallery; Omega Workshops 289; Rebel Art Centre 289; Slade School 526, 528 Los Angeles: County Museum of Art 490 Lvov (Lemberg, Lviv): Wystawa futurystów, kubistów i ekspresjonistów (Exhibition of Futurists, Cubists and Expressionists, 1913) 93–94

Italy 9, 37, 100, 125, 175, 230, 236, 257, 332, 348–59, 528, 533 Japan: painting 9, 538n6; Ukiyo-e woodcuts 16, 215, 216 Johannesburg: Department of Native Affairs (Depot of Bantu Art and Craft) 537; University of the Witwatersrand 537; Wits Technical Art School 533 Jølster 248 Kaunas: Čiurlionis Art Gallery 146, 149; School of Art 8, 144, 146, 152 Kirjali 457 Kirkenes: Saviomuseet 254 Kola Peninsula 243 Košice: East Slovak Museum 56–57, 61; HalászHradil’s private school of Painting 69n5 Kraków: Academy of Fine Arts 94 Kronstadt see Brașov Kven 243 Latin America 21, 23, 27, 507–21 Leeds: Arts Club 281, 282, 284, 290; Leeds University 281 Leicester: Leicester Museum and Art Gallery 291–92; Mid-European Art Exhibition (1944) 291; Schmidt-Rottluff Exhibition: Graphic Works and Stone Carvings (1953) 291–92 Leipzig: Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst (Academy of Graphic Arts and Book Design) 145, 473; Internationale Buchkunstausstellung (International Book Art Exhibition, 1927) 127 Lisbon: I. Conferência Futurista (The First Futurist Conference, 1917) 380; I. Salão de Outono (First Fall Salon, 1925) 383; I. Salão dos Independentes (First Independent Salon, 1930) 382; Academia de Belas Artes de Lisboa 378; Academia

Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia 370 Maramureș 451, 452 Marseille 36 Mexico 502, 509, 511, 512, 514, 518 Milan 349, 350, 352, 372, 513 Mníšek pod Brdy 35, 40 Montmartre 454 Montparnasse 23, 119, 332, 334, 340, 341, 344, 345, 381, 454 Montreal: Dominion Gallery 490 Moravia, Moravian 46, 47 Moscow: 1-aia Vseobshchaia Germanskaia Khudozhestvennaia Vystavka (First General German Art Exhibition, 1924) 124, 126; 1-aia Diskussionnaia Vystavka Ob”edinenii Aktivnogo Revolutsionnogo Iskusstva (First Discussion Exhibition of the Unions of Active Revolutionary Art, 1924) 127; Institut Khudozhestvennoi Kultury (Institute of Artistic Culture, INKhUK) 121; Moskauer Gruppe (Moscow Group) 127; Nemetskoe Iskusstvo Poslednevo Piatidesiatiletiia (German Art of the Last Fifty Years, 1925) 125; The Parnassus of Moscow 122 Munich: Art Academy 61, 69, 116, 412, 416, 419, 447, 458, 474; Café Stefanie 454–55; degenerate art exhibition (1937) 154, 307, 491; Galerie Neue Kunst—Hans Goltz 94, 114, 116, 174, 216, 287, 456, 467, 469;

580

Geographical Index Galerie Thannhauser 114, 174, 277, 467; Knirr School of Art 285; Kunstverlag Franz Hanfstaengel 285; Münchner Neue Secession (Munich New Secession) 421, 468; Münchner Secession (Munich Secession) 468; Neue Künstlervereinigung München (New Artists’ Association Munich, NKVM) 114–15, 117, 137, 277, 279, 280, 283, 466; Vereinigte Ateliers (Maxon and Kallenberger art school) 232 Nagybánya (Baia Mare, Romania) 74, 75, 82, 446, 452, 453, 454, 461 Naples 36 Neu-Dachau 452 New Mexico 502 New York: 291(gallery); Currier & Ives 499; Museum of Modern Art 196, 356–57, 362–63, 396, 490; Museum of Non-Objective Painting (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum) 489; Public Library 487 Norland 244 North Calotte 246 Norway 4, 177, 181, 192, 195, 217, 243–54, 262, 265, 284 Novo Mesto 396, 398, 399 Orvieto 36 Oslo: Academy of Fine Arts 265; Blomqvist Gallery 246; State College of Crafts and Design 244–45 Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada 488, 490, 526 Padua 36 Paraguay 509, 512, 513 518, 519 Paris: Académie de La Palette 119; Académie Julian 61, 453; Académie Matisse 2, 192, 262, 265; Bernheim-Jeune Gallery 36, 230; École de Paris 22–23, 138, 332, 339–41, 345; École des Beaux Arts 2, 177, 332; Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (International Exhibition of Art and Technology in Modern Life, 1937) 169; Salon d’Automne (Autumn Salon) 36, 337, 340, 342; Salon des Indépendants (The Independents’ Salon) 192, 194, 337; Salon des Refusés (Salon of the Refused) 97; Salon des Tuileries (Tuileries Salon) 338 Peru 22, 508, 509, 511, 512, 516, 518 Piatra-Neamț 455 Pont-Aven 341, 342, 452 Porto (Oporto) 378, 381, 382 Posen see Poznań Poznań (Posen): Bunt (Revolt) 22, 26, 93–106; Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Sztuk Pięknych (Society of Friends of the Fine Arts) 94, 97; Wystawa Ekspresjonistów/Ausstellung Expressionistischer Kunst (Expressionist Exhibition, 1918) 95

Prague: Galerie Rudolfinum 46; Les Indépendants (1910) 33; Mozarteum (Havel Gallery) 53n56; National Gallery 38, 40, 44, 47; Osma (The Prague Eight) 6, 34–41, 48; Weinertova umělecká a aukční síň (Weinert’s art and auction house) 42 Prerau (Přerov) 47 Pretoria: Technical College 536–37; University of Pretoria 536 Reykjavik: Friends of the Arts Society 258–59, 261, 264, 266 Rome: Academy of Fine Arts 353; Casa d’arte italiana (1919–1921) 353–58; Esposizione espressionisti Novembergruppe (Exhibition of the Expressionists of the Novembergruppe, 1920) 355–56; Mostra Espressionisti Tedeschi (Exhibition of German Expressionists, 1920) 354–55 Romsdalen 244, 248 Rotterdam: De Branding 312n29; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen 307; Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant (New Rotterdam Journal) 305; Oldenzeel Gallery 296, 302 Ruche, La 119, 333, 339, 340 Russia 9, 18, 19, 25, 26, 62, 79, 82, 84, 92, 95, 99, 100, 113–28, 137–39, 144, 150, 158, 160–65, 177, 191, 195, 198, 202, 203, 206, 208, 212, 215, 218–22, 225, 226, 232, 243, 244, 280, 296, 297, 306, 332–38, 353, 356–58, 395,404, 435, 465, 469, 471, 472, 477, 490, 493, 510 St. Louis, Missouri 504n31 St. Petersburg (Petrograd): Alexander Stieglitz’s School of Applied Art 144; School of Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts 177; Second All-Russian Artists Congress (1911) 117; Third Congress of the Communist International (1921) 121 Sámiland 243 San Francisco 489 São Paolo: Biennale 533 Săsar 452 Saskatoon 490 Satmar 443 Scandinavia 1–3, 8, 12, 16, 26, 118, 92–202, 212, 225–28, 234, 249, 251, 262, 265, 277, 340 Sibiu (Hermannstadt): Das Deutsche Kulturamt in Rumänien (The German Cultural Office) 449 Skamander 103 Slovenia: Young Artists Club 399 South America 510 Soviet Union 113–28, 152, 232, 451, 451 Stockholm: Expressionistutställningen (The Expressionist Exhibition, 1918) 210; Gummessons konsthandel (Gummeson’s art store) 212, 214; International Exhibition of Graphic Art (1914) 206, 219; Liljevalchs konsthall (Liljevalch’s Art Hall) 212; Moderna

581

Geographical Index Museet 210; Svensk-Franska konstgalleriet (Swedish-French Art Gallery) 217; Svenska expressionister (Swedish expressionists, 1912) 213; University of Stockholm 207–08 Stuttgart: Art Academy 385; Das Deutsche Ausland-Institut (The German Foreign Institute, today ifa) 462n30; Staatsgalerie 13, 196 Sweden 8, 11, 16, 17, 125, 136, 170, 192, 195, 206–19, 243, 339, 340, 341, 352 Switzerland 4, 42, 125, 156n42, 192, 277, 372

Vadsø 243 Vancouver 496 Varangerfjord 243 Vardø 244 Vienna: Academy of Fine Arts 400; Galerie Miethke 35; Vienna Secession 277, 289, 413–14; Wiener Werkstätte 277, 308 Vila do Conde 381 Vilnius: National Gallery 143, 136, 147–50

Tartu: Pallas Art School 140, 174–76, 181–83; University of Tartu 176 Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario 489–90 Transylvania 12, 22, 82, 443–53 Turku 244

Washington: National Gallery 170 Western Europe 73, 120, 136, 138, 158, 160, 169, 170, 207, 244, 388, 420 Wielkopolska (Greater Poland) 96, 102 Winnipeg: German Graphic Art of the 20th Century (1958) 495; Winnipeg School of Art 495 Worpswede: art colony 452

United States of America 23, 27, 46, 116, 149, 169, 170, 344, 345, 346, 367, 487–503 Uruguay 372, 508, 511, 514

Zagreb: Moderna galerija 412, 415, 419, 422; Salon Ullrich 417, 429, 434; Spring Salon 408, 412, 415, 417–19, 434

582