Circle and Square

 Cercle et Carré

 

The exhibition organised by the group Cercle et Carré (Circle and Square) took place at the Galerie 23, Paris, between 18^th April and 1^st May 1930. It included roughly 140 works by 50 artists including Piet Mondrian, Georges Vantongerloo, Luigi Russolo, Jean (Hans) and Sophie Taeuber Arp, Otto and Adya Can Rees, Joaquín Torres-García, Wassily Kandinsky, Louis Moholy-Nagy, Kurt Schwitters, Henry Stazewski, Joseph Stella, Vordemberge-Gildewart, Domela, Ferdinand Léger, Amédée Ozenfant, Le Corbusier, Antoine Pevsner and was co-ordinated by Michel Seuphor.

Some of the events leading to this group forming were:

1921      Michel Seuphor and Josef Peeters in Antwerp founded the magazine Het Overzicht which published a review of international modern art.

1923      Seuphor met Mondrian in Paris.

1927      Seuphor and Paul Dermée founded the magazine Les Documents Internationaux de L’Esprit Nouveau.

In 1929 the group was formed which became known as Cercle et Carré to further abstract art and to oppose the Surrealists’ regression to academicism.

They published a magazine which reached three issues and had a circulation of around 1200 copies. There was no precise editorial policy. It was a loose aggregate of the aforementioned artists who contributed articles on whatever they pleased. The movements represented by the artists were diverse and no longer on the cutting edge of the avant-garde. They represented de Stijl and neo-plasticism, Purism, Futurism and Constructivism. What united the contributors was, of necessity, fairly vague, internationalist and sometimes mystical. It is probably best expressed by Seuphor’s Pour la Défense d’une Architecture in Cercle et Carré 1. He agreed with the Futurists that artists must express and even accelerate time. He mentions such Purist concerns as logical construction, rationality and mathematics. It also aligns well with Constructivism but the ultimate aim of art in this non-manifesto is the De Stijl and Kandinsky priority which is expressing the spiritual quintessence of universal reality, beauty and truth.

To summarise, in Seuphor’s words, the role of the artist is ‘to establish upon the basis of a severe structure, simple and unadorned in all its parts, and according to a principle of close unity with this undisguised structure, an architecture that , by the technical and physical methods peculiar to the age, expresses in a clear language the imminent and immutable truth and reflects in its particular organisation the magnificent order of the universe.’

It is, then, something of a ragbag of styles and ideas which had been separately and more clearly enunciated earlier. It failed to sufficiently revitalise the ideas and ideals of the abstract tendency in those artists. It merely, like its birthplace Paris, offered a meeting ground for contemporary trends and bore witness to the fluctuations of past and future fashion.

 ©Ade Annabel 1980

 

Bauhaus Theatre

 

Der Gelbe Klang (The Yellow Sound) - Spectra Ensemble

The Bauhaus began under utopian Expressionist auspices and so, naturally, their theatre was grounded in the Expressionist style and values of the time. Lothar Schreyer came from Der Sturm circle of Herwarth Walden. Schreyer was Director of the Sturmbühne in 1918. From 1911 to 1918 it was the Deutsches Schauspielhaus and from 1919 to 1921 the Kampfbühne. Schreyer’s view of the purpose of theatre was pretty much the same as Kandinsky’s on art: it should evoke sympathetic spiritual vibrations in the audience through expression of the artist’s inner spiritual necessity. The arts are synthesized but without compromise to the individual components. This aesthetic is in keeping with the Bauhaus idea of embracing the arts and crafts under the guidance of architecture. But although the Bauhaus is utopian in concept the architect and leader Walter Gropius is not impractical enough to pretend that it fully embraces literature or music. In the theatre it could use them more genuinely in its mix of arts aspiring to a semi-religious experience. Although it must be said that Expressionist theatre tends to emphasise the visual and abstract forms, like dance, where words play a reduced role to sound and vision eg. The Yellow Sound. The priorities of Bauhaus theatre are the solutions for co-ordinating space, bodies and movement, forms, light, colour and sound into a primarily spiritual aspiration as being a show for the gods (or at least the slightly mesmerized students).

Schlemmer leans towards the formal problems, in accordance with the emerging values of the Bauhaus, but still works firmly in an Expressionist aesthetic. He was invited to the Bauhaus as a painter and sculptor though he had produced modern dance in Stuttgart.  The reduced role of the actor and of words in the Bauhaus and Expressionist theatre can be seen to be vaguely analogous to the development of abstraction in painting. Character, plot and dialogue  are abandoned in the same way as figurative and historical or narrative content for the more formal and spiritual values of pure shape, colour and movement. Also depth and space are created in the theatre by the play of coloured lights on the human form rather than by scenic and illusionistic backdrops of interiors or landscapes. The other element of abstraction is in the treatment of the human form. Schlemmer’s paintings and sculptures (and the  course he taught which he entitled Man) relate directly to the stage both in style and in the common problem of placing a human-type form in spatial relation to other forms and environment.  He would treat the human figure as an abstract element in the solution of painterly problems which lead to stylized mechanical puppet-like figures. In fact puppet and shadow theatre enjoyed a revival in early 20^th Century Germany because it represented a break from the slavish dependence on natural appearance. The idea of a theatre of marionettes was current, for example Gordon Craig said, ‘The actor must go and in his place comes the inanimate figure – the Ûber-Marionette’ taking up Heinrich von Kleists’s earlier 1810 essay Ûber das Marionetten theater and Frank Wedekind;s plays in which characters speak, move and behave in a jerky, mechanical way. This fused some ideas of Nietzsche in a part-formal, part-material ballet mechanique such as the work of Kurt Schmidt and Schlemmer’s Figural Cabinet.

 

Chronology

1910                     Ûber das Marionetten theater – Heinrich von Kleist published.

1812                     The Birth of Tragedy – Friedrich Nietzsche published.

1895                     La Mise en scene du drame Wagnerien – Adolphe Appia published.

 1907                    Composition of Oskar Kokoschka’s Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen.

1909                     Composition of Wassily Kandinsky’s Der gelbe Klang, Schwarzweiss and Der grüne Klang.

1910                     Kokoschka’s Mörde, Hoffnung der Frauen, published in Der Sturm April 1914.

1911-18               Lothar Schreyer Dramaturg of the Deutsches Schauspielhuas.

1912                     Ûber das Geistige in der kunst and Der Blauae Reiter including Kandinsky’s Uber Buhnenkomposition and Der gelbe Klang published.

1917                     First full production of Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen.

Picasso’s ‘cubist‘ figures for the Ballet Russes‘ Parade.

1918                     Schreyer becomes Director of the Sturmbühne.

1919                     Program of the Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar published in April.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari by Robert Weine.

1919-21               Schreyer is Director of the Kampfbühne.

1920-29               Oskar Schlemmer taught at the Bauhas.

1921                     Foundation of the Bauhaus Stage Workshop under Schreyer.

1922                     Die Bauhausbbühne published.

First performance of Schlemmer’s Figural Cabinet at a Bauhaus party.

First performance of Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet at the Landestheater, Stuttgart, in September.

1922-33               Kandinsky taught at the Bauhaus.

1923                     Schreyer’s resignation and Schlemmer’s appointment. Bauhaus week in August included the Figural Cabinet at the Jena Municipal Theatre, the Triadic Ballet at the National Theatre in Weimar and Kurt Schmidt’s Mechanical Ballet at the Jena Municipal Theatre.

1923-28               Laszlo Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus.

1924                     Schlemmer’s Meta or Pantomime of Scenes.

Schmidt’s The Adventures of the Little Hunchback.

Alexander Schawinsky’s Circus.

1925                     First performance of Schlemmer’s Treppenwitz.

Die Bühne im Bauhaus published das Volume 4 of the Bauhausbücher including Mensch und Kunstggur by Schlemmer; Theater, Zirkus, Varieté by Moholy-Nagy; U-Theater by Farkas Molnár. Molnár’s design for U-Theater. Joost Schmidt’s design for a mechanical stage. Andreas Weininger’s design for a Spherical Theatre. Private publication of Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack’s Reflected Light Compositions.

1925-27               Schlemmer’s Space Dance.

1926                     Stage Workshop and Experimental Stage built into new building at Dessau.

First version of Schlemmer’s Musical Clown.

1926-27               Schlemmer’s Dance of Gestures.

1927                     Walter Gropius’ design of Total Theatre for Erwin Pisscator.

Schlemmer’s Dance of Hoops, Dance of Slats, Equilibristics. Xanti Schawinsky’s Olga-Olga.

1928                     Kandinsky’s adaptation of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition at the Friedrich Theatre in April.

Bauhaus stage at the Second German Congress of Dance in Essen in June.

1928->                 Moholy-Nagy’s stage designs for Piscator and for the State Opera.

1929                     Bauhaus Stage Tour including Berlin Volksbühne, Breslau Stadttheater, Frankfurt on Main Schauspielhaus, Stuttgart Landestheater and Basel Stadttheater. Performance included Dance in Space, Dance of Forms, Dance of Gestures, Dance of the Stage Wings, Box Play, Dance of Slats, Dane in Metal, Dance with Glass, Dance of Hoops, The Wives’ Dance, Company of Masks, House Py and Three Against One.

                              Schlemmer left to accept a professorship at Breslau Academy. His position at the Stage Workshop was left vacant and despite some students attempt at operating a Junge Bühne am Bauhaus the Workshop collapsed.

 Ade Annabel copyright 1980

Bauhaus 1925-33

On 26^th December 1924 the declaration of the closing of the Weimar Bauhaus was announced effective from 31^st March 1925. On the 1^st April 1925 the Bauhaus moved to Dessau and began a new era both geographically and culturally.

In 1924 Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer had had the opportunity to work on a design for an international Academy of Philosophy in Erlangen. They wanted to unite teaching and living in one set of buildings. This is an idea that Gropius carried over to the Bauhaus building and the two designs have a vague similarity.

Although you can’t view the whole of the Dessau Bauhaus building from any one viewpoint, except the air. The composition as viewed from the air was important to Gropius as he said, ‘Air traffic routes place a new demand on the builders of houses and cities: to deliberately shape the appearance of the building as seen from the air.’ He avoids symmetry and reinforces a concrete skeleton with brick masonry and large areas of glass, particularly in the cantilevered glass wall of the workshop wing. This was connected to the technical school wing by “the bridge” on columns. Gropius aimed for ‘proper utilisation of the exposure to the sun; short time-saving communicating passages, clear separation of the individual departments of the organism.’ The students’ studio apartments were connected to the workshop by a single-storey section which housed the stage, flanked by the auditorium and the canteen. Partitions could be opened on both sides, making both the auditorium and the canteen into spectator arenas and integrating the sequence of canteen-stage-auditorium-vestibule into a ‘large festival area’. This flexibility in the arrangement of rooms can also be seen in the workshop wing, which, as well as housing workshops and the heating plant, had lecture rooms which could be recombined into a single display room. The two-storey bridge contained administrative offices and later the architectural department. The technical school wing was originally planned as an arts and crafts school and was used for classrooms, library etc. The gym was in the basement of the students’ building just below the canteen kitchen. Gropius’ idea was to design the building to be functional and economic and yet not sacrifice the social/psychological needs of its users. However the emphasis is very much on technology and away from arts and crafts. ‘Technology does not need art, but art very much needs technology – example: architecture!’

Gropius’ Master Houses. Sited in a group of pine trees close to the Bauhaus are seven units: one single house for the Director and three duplexes. Using duplication of design reduces the cost, ‘the floor plan of one of the two homes is the mirror image of floor plan of the other one, interlocked, and turned by 90° degrees.’ Yet ‘Studio, stairwell, kitchen, pantry and bathroom face north avoiding the direct rays of the sun; living, dining, bedrooms and children’s room with garden, terraces, balconies and roof gardens face the sun.’  The orientation is achieved by having a fixed central unit but rotating (with the north facing windows) but rotating the rest and placing windows on the requisite wall eg. South. Smooth white walls, horizontal rows of windows, spacious terraces, including roof which is flat. In other words fairly typical international style.

In the Bauhaus at this time, in charge of the Preliminary Course, was Lazlo Moholy-Nagy. He was concerned with making students aware of three-dimensional, sculptural relationships and tensions. Construction exercises were conducted in wood, sheet metal, wire, string and other materials. Josef Albers also taught in this course and took it over in 1928. His approach was to study individual materials in greater depth. For example,, working with scissors and paper. By the action of cutting and folding, the student had to produce interesting patterns and structures while still using the material economically. Albers also become head of the furniture workshop in 1928 and stayed until the Dessau Bauhaus closed in 1933.

The Printing Workshop (Typography and Commercial Art) was lead by Herbert Bayer from 1925 to 1928. Words were often emphasised by playful changes in colour, usually from black to red on an otherwise ‘contourless shadow script’. Another favourite device was to change the orientation of part of the text by 90 degrees. The use of blocks and lines in and around the text broke up the type for which sans-serif or ‘universal type’ was typical with dropped capital letters. This provided a clarity of design and a contrast between the text and the paper with strong blacks on white: no use of grey. The influence of Lissitsky can be seen in the decorative handling of type in the reproductions of Mayokovsky’s poems. Schmidt took over from Bayer in 1928.

Georg Muche and Gunta Stölzl were officially in charge of the Weaving Workshop but, in effect, it was a co-operative with students like Ann Albers contributing greatly. Designs tended to become much more clear-cut and geometric over time. The one-of, hand-made, craft object was rapidly submerged in what Gunta Stölzl called ‘the slogan of this new area: prototypes for industry!’

Up to 1928 Moholy-Nagy was in charge of the Metal Workshop which produced things like light fitments. They used aluminium quite a lot but the idea of attaching shallow glass dishes directly to the ceiling, with or without metal frames, probably originated at the Bauhaus. Similarly the idea of combining opaque and frosted glass. Jointed, movable lamp arms were another innovation. Several of these designs were taken up by manufacturers.

Upon the move to Dessau the Furniture Workshop was given over to Marcel Breuer who consequently bought himself his first bike to get about the campus. So the story goes, he was innocently admiring his new possession one day when the handle bars suddenly gave him the inspiration for tubular steel furniture. His tubular steel chair of 1925 was made out of nickel-plated tubing with the seat, back and arm rests made from iron yarn. The objective was to design furniture which did not hinder the movement of the body or the eye and was functional and standardised. He also designed stools, ordinary chairs, swivel-chairs, folding chairs, theatre chairs, tables and so on in tubular steel. They were very light and mobile but strong. Above all they were relatively cheap to manufacture. Breuer left the Bauhaus in 1928.

Gropius’ Dessau Labour Office of 1927-29 was a steel skeleton structure filled in with leather-coloured brick. The plan had to make it possible for a small staff of officials to cope with a large number of people seeking employment. From that basic requirement has resulted a semi-circular floor plan enabling large waiting rooms, divided into segments according to vocational groups to funnel towards the smaller counselling rooms. Changes in demand for different groups could be accommodated by re-arranging flexible partitions in the interior passages. The offices in the inner part of the semi-circle received daylight from skylights. The part of the Labour Office not dealing directly with the public were accommodated in an adjacent two-storey administrative block.

Gropius’ Dessau-Törten Housing Development of 1926-28 was sited on sand and gravel usable for concrete mixing. The units were therefore cheaply constructed on site including a co-operative store. The development was for working-class families who had to rely on extra income or self-support from garden produce and keeping a few farm animals. So Gropius constructed small two-storey houses, each for a single family, arranged in rows where each had access to a long narrow strip of garden. Other buildings at Törten included one by Carl Fieger, a draftsman in Gropius’ architectural studio, who designed and built his own house on the periphery of the development in 1927, plus Georg Muche and Richard Paulick’s steel house of 1926.

Gropius’s Prefabricated House was designed and built for the Werkbund Exhibition of 1927 in Stuttgart. This was an economic, industrially manufactured, single storey dwelling.

Under personal attack and criticism from outside the Bauhaus, Gropius decided to leave in 1928. He asked Mies van der Rohe to become his successor, but he declined. So Hannes Meyer took over on 1^st April 1928. Hannes Meyer had been appointed head of the newly created architecture department the year before.

Hannes Meyer now designed the second phase of the Törten Housing Estate which was built between 1928 to 1930 for some 8000 inhabitants. Meyer’s approach to design was much more collective. He regarded building as no longer being an individual task in which individual ambition and fantasies are realised. He designed it in collaboration with the building section of the Bauhaus, regarding practical experience as essential for the student. Twelve students, along with Meyer, were responsible for the plans as well as helping to superintend the work on site. Zigzag rows of one-storey self-contained houses with gardens were planned for middle-class income families. Working class families were to live in three-storey blocks, each containing eighteen three-room flats, or in four-storey blocks along the western edge of the site. However only five of the three-storey blocks were constructed by 1930.

Meyer reorganised the architectural course with a scientific and social rather than formal emphasis. In the manifesto bauen in the bauhaus magazine of 1928 he wrote that building is a biological process involving social, technical and economic organisation. ‘What is modern about this estate is not the flat roof and vertical-horizontal division of the façade but its direct relationship with human existence.’ In other words he is anti-formalist and regards the Dessau Bauhaus as a social rather than artistic influencer. ‘We are not seeking a Bauhaus style or a Bauhaus fashion. No modishly flat plane surface ornamentation divided horizontally and vertically and all done up in neoplastic style. We are not seeking geometric or stereometric constructions, alien to life and inimical to function.’ His practice and teaching was basically along functional and collectivist lines. He taught that building was not art but a piece of machinery that served the needs of body and mind. All thinking in functional and biological terms would lead logically to pure construction.

Other teachers in the architecture department were Ludwig Hilberseimer who conducted classes in construction design, Anton Bremner who was head of the building studio, Mart Stam who was a guest lecturer in city planning and architectural principles, Alear Rudelt who taught structural engineering and Wilhelm Müller who gave instruction in building materials.

Meyer’s Federal School of the General German Trade Unions Federation was built in Bernau, near Berlin, in 1928 to 1930. Six architects were invited to submit designs in a competition. They were Max Berg, Alois Klement, Willy Ludewig, Erich Mendelsohn, Max Taut and Hannes Meyer. Although this was a private commission for Hannes Meyer the fact that he says he never designs alone suggests that other people at the Bauhaus also contributed to the design. The 120 Trades Union students of both sexes were organised into 12 cells, each of 10 members. Within these cells were five double rooms. Each cell ate together, studied together and formed a section in physical training. The purpose of the rigid grouping was to give the individual worker, during their comparatively short stay, the opportunity to identify with the communal life of the school as quickly as possible through having a room-mate and contact with a small group within each cell. All twelve cells could be assembled together with the teaching staff and guests in the big lecture hall, the dining room or stadium. The teaching staff lived with their families in separated flats, not as a gesture of social superiority but in order to preserve the character of family life in their own group or unit. The buildings were constructed of reinforced concrete and had an oil-fired heating system. Colour coded lights were used to help the visitor navigate through the settlement. The concourse was green, yellow, blue or red and inside the three residential wings the basic reddish colour changed from scarlet to vermilion, to pink and to three cell colours on the wall of the entrance to each corridor. The main lecture hall, with its 200 seats, incorporated a number of technological innovations. At the touch of a button the lecturer could increase or decrease the size of the 45 foot wide hall window in the manner of a camera aperture. Another button set maps, diagrams or pictures into position and another button determined the level of lighting. In the residences there was only one WC, shower and bath per level which seems inadequate. There is a glazed connecting corridor from the school building, past the residences, to the community building. This corridor was designed to look out upon the surrounding forest landscape.

Another building partly designed and executed by the Bauhaus building students was Hans Volger’s Physician’s Residence at Mayen in the Eifel region in 1928.

Meyer’s leadership, and in particular his suppression of the artistic ambitions of his students, was controversial within the Bauhaus. There was also mounting opposition from outside the institution stemming from Meyer’s political stance. In August 1930, while the Bauhaus was officially on holiday between terms, the Mayor of Dessau took the opportunity of Meyer’s voluntary contribution as a private person to the International Workers’ Aid Fund for the assistance of striking miners’ families, to dismiss him from post without notice. Yet Meyer’s spell at the Bauhaus had already been productive. Essential funds were coming in from royalties on designs which had been picked up by industry, travelling exhibitions were helping to publicise the work of the Bauhaus and there were several outstanding commissions for the building department. The town council had asked for a tourist office, model houses for the lower middle-classes, plans for housing 15000 new inhabitants and proposals for restructuring the town market. Other clients had asked for the physician’s house in Mayern, a tuberculosis sanitorium and an angler’s village near Berlin.

The school reopened in the autumn of 1930 under the more formalist Mies van der Rohe. Mies’ approach to architecture during this period was to concentrate on one-of, fairly luxurious, residences. Balance was maintained by Ludewig Hilberseimer who continued to teach the problems of economics and standardisation in housing developments. Mies invited the interior designer Lilly Reich to the Bauhuus and merged the workshop for interior design (which was already the metal workshop and furniture workshop combined0 with the architecture department.

Mies designed a house in 1930 for the manufacturer Tugendhat in Brünn. It has a free-standing partition of onyx and a semi-circular wall of Macassar Ebony. He utilises a simple arrangement of distinctive materials. The outdoor garden patio was designed to make the transition from inside to outside flow more easily. The large glass planes help integrate the two, some of which can be lowered into the floor. At night the glass is hidden by untreated silk curtains. The chairs, upholstered with white sheepskin, natural coloured pigskin, and pale green cowhide, are set against white linoleum and sheepskin rugs. The house is entered from the top floor. Most of the space in the interior is continuous, divided only by free-standing walls; except for the bedrooms, which are enclosed boxes.

 In the Berlin Building Exhibition of 1931 Mies’ house has only the kitchen and servant quarters isolated from the main space. Two bedrooms, screened from the living area, are partially separated from each other by a bathroom. The inner walls are largely glass and a patio adjoins the bedrooms. Regularly placed metal columns are contrasted with the freely placed outer walls.

In October 1932 the government of Dessau, which had acquired a National Socialist majority, closed the school and illegally terminated its contract. Mies then converted the Bauhaus into a private institution and transferred it to an abandoned telephone directory building in Berlin. However in April the Gestapo, searching for Communist literature, closed it down.

Copyright Ade Annabel 1981

Whatever happened to Expressionist Architecture?

 

Einstein Tower in Potsdam 1919-22 Erich Mendelsohn

‘From 1912 to 1922…there flourished in German speaking countries a school of so-called expressionists…this movement was rapidly pushed into the limbo labelled “romantic”…only to emerge again with force and authority as a prophecy of what would happen to modern architecture in the nineteen-fifties.’ (Reyner Banham). Though undoubtedly sweeping, Banham’s statement does convey the feeling that Expressionist architecture somehow died a premature death, only to rise from the grave…at least as an influence.

Expressionism is a loosely used term applied to architecture from 1911 to 1925 that is not old-fashioned, but that does not conform to the approach that gave rise to the International Style. Expression of the functions of a building through its form is normally associated with the latter. Expressionism is rather the expression of artistic and spiritual feeling which may, or may not, be functional. The Expressionism is commonly associated with painters like Kokoschka and Nolde, and sculptors like Barlach. But whereas self-expression is central to these artists, the architects coupled it with a social consciousness.

Expressionism is often linked to post-war Germany in an attempt to see it as the product of a specific set of circumstances: the disillusionment of losing a war and the need for some great social and spiritual renewal. A new age ushered in by visionary architects. When these feelings receded, the theory goes, such a localized architecture could not survive: it belonged only to a specific time. Leaving apart the question of time for a while, it might be useful to point out the existences of Dutch Expressionist architecture in the Amsterdam School. In 1918 an estate was commissioned from JF Steel and became the Park Meerwijk colony Some of the plans, particularly Blaauw’s (one of the architects Staal employed on the project) have crystalline shapes. The crystal was an Expressionist symbol of the soul, which they borrowed from the writer Wilhelm Worringer. The buildings have an organic approach to shapes similar to the Expressionists plus there is also a considerable influence from the English Arts and Crafts Movement in the use of materials such as thatch,  brick, vertical tile-hanging and wood.

This, and similar work such  as P Vorkink and JP Wormser or Bernhard Hoetger, might be seen to be part of the same thought process that produced the German Otto Bartning’s house for a director in Zeipau in Schleswig (1923-25). A more explicitly Expressionist building is JM van der Meij’s Het Scheepvaarthuis headquarters for the Navigation Company in Amsterdam (1916). The sculpted ornamentation creates a feeling of nervous energy and symbolizes the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans as well as the Great Bear star constellation. Electric light bulbs mark the position of the stars. In other words the building is used as a vehicle to express concerns other than purely architectural. Working with van der Meij on this building was M de Klerk, who built the Eigenaard estate (1913-15) and the triangle formed by the Oostzaanstraat, Zaanstraat and Hembrugstrat (1918-21). He has tried to introduce movement in the wall surfaces by using broad sweeps of brick and imbalance, or eccentricities, of proportion.

Another criticism levelled at Expressionism is that it is “paper architecture”; nothing was ever built, it was purely visionary sketches. Admittedly the crystalline structures of Bruno Taut’s Glass Pavilion (1914) or J Lambert, G Saake and P Bailly’s Pavillon des Diamantaires  or W Luckhardt and R Belling’s Mercedes-Stern Publicity Pavilion, were only temporary buildings for exhibitions but many Expressionist ideas not only passed the paper stage but stayed up; not as follies but as usable, viable buildings or structures.  Structures include Walter Gropius’ War Memorial in Weimar (1919), Max Taut’s Wissinger Tomb in Stahnsdort (1920) or Hermann Obrist’s Tomb of Karl Oertel (before 1911). Amongst the fully realised buildings is W Wurzbach and R Belling’s Scala Restaurant in Berlin (1921), the interior of which shows the use of crystalline structures in a permanent building.  There are also examples of interior design such as Bruno Taut’s Club Room in Berlin (1919-21) which attempts to bring movement and dynamic tension into the room by use of a plaster spiral with a colour scheme provided by Franz Mutzenbecher. Sculptural qualities can be seen in Eric Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower Observatory in Potsdam (1921) which appears to have been moulded with the ease of a soft material like clay. It is in fact brick, cut and given the appearance of concrete.  In 1912 the newly formed Anthroposophical Society decided on the construction of ‘a free high school for spiritual science’, to be named after another famous thinker: Goethe. Goetheanum I burned down on New Year’s Eve 1922/3 but the architect, Rudolf Steiner, designed another, which was to be put up between 1925 and 1928. Both buildings display a sense of arrested motion in the otherwise static forms, as it the building were capable of movement but frozen at a specific moment. The sculptural forms are treated as motifs which metamorphose organically from one part of the building to another. As Steiner describes it, ‘it is necessary so to allow one concept to grow out of another that in the progressive living metamorphosis of concepts there come to light images of that which appears in nature as a being possessing form.’

Rudolf Steiner, as far as we know, had no contact with the other Expressionists, and there were a number of architects working in Germany at this time who were not in what we might call the inner core of Expressionism, but who were profoundly influenced. Hans Poelzig’s Bismark Monument near Bingerbrück (1911) is an early example of a building Bruno Taut much admired. It has the overall form of an oriental temple with a rippling, textured surface. In 1919 Poelzig had the opportunity to convert the Schumann Circus, in Berlin, into a new theatre – the Grosses Schauspielhaus. This building exploits spatial effects, false walls of roughly rendered brickwork, colour and rings of stalactite forms to literally theatrical effect. Through the stylized stalactites were not purely decorative, they had an acoustic function, but they seemed to have been picked up in the decoration of Wilhelm Kreis’ Rheinhalle Planetarium in Düsseldorf (1926). Among Poelzig’s other buildings the Capital Cinema in Berlin, of 1925, was another attempt to capture the irrational world of fantasy in a building of public entertainment. Peter Behrens, another architect associated with the Werkbund, built his IG Farben chemical and dye works (1920-24) in Hoechst-am-Main with almost as many Gothic overtones as his Cathedral Masons’ Lodge of 1922. He demonstrated that the aesthetics of a building that had no other function than to celebrate the tradition of the ‘spiritual brotherhood of religious artists’ could also work in industrial architecture.

The pre-war Werkbund was much tougher in their architectural ideas, and more intent on producing architecture which reflected industry rather than transforming it. Many post-war architects revitalised this strain of modern architecture under the influence of Russian ideas, like those of Lissitsky, Werner Graeff and the G group. In Holland the Amsterdam School was bitterly opposed by De Stijl, with architects like JJP Oud trying to impose order, unity and harmony in buildings by use of geometric forms. A group called the Ring was formed in Germany and included such Expressionist-type architects as Bruno and Max Taut, Erich Mendelsohn, the Luckhardt brohers, Hans Scharoun, Hans Poelzig and Otto Bartning. In the late twenties this group changed noticeably in style, for example Bruno Taut’s Gehag housing in Berlin-Britz of 1927. It would be wrong to ascribe this change wholly to the emergence of Functionalist and Rationalist theories. Though it is not hard to see how a theory based on architecture might have more appeal to an architect than one based on art and spirituality. But it was the practical facts of their trade which had the most direct influence on the evolution of their work. From about 1924 onwards local governments began to commission and build designs for large-scale, low-cost, domestic housing developments. The Ring were heavily engaged in the suburbs of Berlin until after 1930. Given the financial condition of the country at the time, these housing estates had to be built to the most stringent budgets, and a Functionalist/Rationalist approach was necessary to extract the maximum possible performance from materials, machinery and every square meter of floor space and site.

Expressionist architecture generally fared much better in buildings of public and community interest, such as churches, theatres and monuments, than it did in the economic and functional demands of industry and mass housing. But it was not really until the 1960s in Germany that anything of real force or original vitality emerged due to changed economic conditions. Back in the assumed Expressionist period proper Dominikus Böhm built or rebuilt many Catholic churches in the Expressionist style. In the sixties, his son Gottfried Böhm also maintained that churches must be more than just functional, that they must show spatial qualities of a purely expressive nature. His Catholic Pilgrims Church in Neviges (1966-68) has no visible geometric order or system of measurement, the complex faceting of the walls and ceiling show a sculptural and suprarational approach to architecture. Dieter Baumewerd, in his Church of the Holy Spirit in Emmerich am Niederrhein (1965-66), uses reinforced concrete mushroom-like shapes to create a large number of different heights and light effects inside, as well as more angular mushroom shapes on the outside to provide a distinctive profile. Helmut Striffler uses contrasts in interior light and darkness by narrow window slits in solid concrete walls, with an acute pitch of the roof, in his Church on the Blumenau in Mannheim in 1961. An Expressionist distribution of contrasting heights and shapes and sizes of rooms is consolidated in his Memorial Chapel in Dachau, built in 1967. The sculptural handling of space to spiritual intent is also evident, but perhaps to a lesser extent, in the church work of the collective – Wolfgang Hirsch, Rudolf Hoinkis, Martin Lanz, Paul Schütz and Dieter Stahl, and in the work of Rainer Disse, Klaus Franz and Carlfried Mutschler.

Though Expressionism is given its fullest reign in Germany, in church architecture, it is not an isolated phenomenon; it can be seen to contribute to a liberalisation of what might be called post-Brutalism. The basic elements are still concrete cubes, but they are handled with greater freedom. Numerous examples could be given, because of the vague nature of the influence, so Reinhard Gieselmann’s Home for the Aged in Karlsruhe (1964-66) will have to suffice. A less relevant, and totally improvable, example could be Denys Lasdun’s work at the University of East Anglia, which even has the graffiti ‘Post-Brutality Architecture’! In other words it is a distribution of concrete cubes and rectangles designed to break up the monotony of a façade in a manner justified more by art than by function. Gottfried Böhm’s town hall at Bensberg, in 1967, has more explicit romantic/Expressionist content and is attached to an old castle; his Bethany Children’s Village (1966-68) situated in Bensberg, has some of  the same playful fantasy. Günther Bock describes his community centre at Sindlungen (1961) as a ‘bizarre concrete structure’ and Roland Rainer, M Saume and G Norer also seem to use concrete in an expressive, rather than purely logical, manner in Bremen City Hall (1962-65). The irrational, or seemingly irrational, has great appeal for these architects though they are reticent about their sources and inspiration. Some of the influence is likely to be sculpture which may or may not have Expressionist style and intent. Johannes Peter Hölzingert and Herman Goepfert’s Lakeside Restaurant at Karlruhe (1966-67) which uses fluorescent tubes in the manner of contemporary sculpture but inserted into a supporting steel frame at different levels. This results in a complex sculptural canopy to the building. Other materials, such as plastics, now offer the architect new possibilities of creating expressive, sculptural forms – for example in Dieter Schind’s work.

It is probably most relevant to look at German architects in an attempt to trace the influence of Expressionism but there are several other architects whose style became more fluid and Expressionist during the fifties and sixties. The most famous of these is Le Corbusier. From 1950 to 1954 Le Corbusier’s church Notre-Dame du Haut at Ronchamp, Vosges, was being constructed. It contains a towering silo-like chapel and a boldly projecting brown concrete roof, which Le Corbusier says was inspired by the shell of a crab. The two white walls meet like the prow of a ship, and have a surface texturing produced by rough timber shuttering. Water is drained off using an oriental system. The south wall has an irregular series of small square and rectangular windows, splayed to produce a lighting effect inside expressive of mystical experience. It also produces a sense of movement, since the viewer can only see one or two windows at any one time. Instead you see the light diffused from the other invisible windows so the full range of effects can only be seen by moving around the building. Le Corbusier’s Palace of the Assembly in Chandigarh (1953) has a brise-soleil like the roof at Ronchamp. The roof of this building is distinctive in outline with a triangular projecting council chamber and a similarly projecting large assembly hall shaped like a cooling tower. His Maison de l’Homme (Centre Le Corbusier) in Zurich (1963-67) has two large steel screens fitted together to provide an angularly panelled brise-soleil, which breaks up the space of the roof terrace into an ever-changing system of heights. Le Corbusier denies the influence of Expressionism on his work, but this is perhaps not to be taken too seriously. In 1926-7 he visited Steiner’s Goetheanum II in progress and was described as being enormously impressed. But even so it took a long time for anything similar to emerge in his own work.

Other architects of note include Hans Scharoun. Some of his hostels and high rise apartments follow a typical international box style but his Berliner Philharmonie concert hall (1956-63) is of especial note but other projects and individual houses maintain an eccentric conjunction of angles. Emile Aillaud was determined in his Citė de l’Abreuvoir, avenue Ėdouard Vaillant at Paris-Bobigny, that he would avoid the sterile discipline of endless right angles and geometrical exactness of post-Expressionist architecture. He wanted a fluid approach which would provide ever-changing visual variety. At Bobigny he created a long, wavy, broken line of apartments in five-storey towers, some cylindrical, others three-pointed. The three-pointed plan also appears at the eastern end in a series of three-storey buildings.

The Finnish architect and designer Alvar Aalto reverses the German trend and extends from an early functionalism to greater experimentation with distinctive, strong and irregular shapes for commissions from museums and churches to town halls and public buildings including the Helsinki University of Technology (1949-64) and the Finlandia Hall (1976). His thorough knowledge of furniture design and traditional Scandinavian materials like wood led to a sculptural approach to larger structures.  The Vuokseniska church at Imatra, by Alvar Aalto, has a copper roof with windows above an uneven, bulging, façade. The interior volumes bear little relation to the exterior bulge though there are three humps in the internal ceiling (not reflected in the roof-line) which correspond to the windows. These sections can be divided by sliding partitions, part of the path of which is curved, going past two small curved vaults.

Adventurous modern church architecture is not something that only happened in Europe. In America Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Unitarian Church of Madison, in 1947, on a triangular plan, with a triangular copper roof as an expression of hands held together in prayer. His Beth Sholom Synagogue of 1954 is likewise a symbol and expression, this time themed on the tenets of Judaism. Lloyd Wright’s regard for what he called ‘organic architecture’ is evident in the expanding spiral of the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York (1956). You could also go to Australia, for the Sydney Opera House, or to South America, but the links with previous examples of Expressionist architecture become increasingly difficult to establish in moving outside Europe. Europe, and largely Germany with the notable exception of the Amsterdam School, contained the Expressionist buildings of the teens and twenties. And a substantial number of completed buildings there were considering the visionary nature of their sketches. These were practicing architects with sound structural understanding. It was not that Expressionist architecture couldn’t be built that led to its decline but that it couldn’t be built in the economic conditions of Germany during the late twenties and thirties. Meanwhile the rise of the Machine Age aesthetic and the International Style provided an alternative for modernists. In some cases this was a reaffirmation of ideas, to which Expressionism only formed an interlude. This was the case with Walter Gropius who started the Bauhaus with an Expressionist/Arts and Crafts style and ideology but evolved to a more functionalist position compatible with the Werkbund era. In the fifties and sixties there was a reaction against this approach to architecture, and a revival of interest in the work of Gaudi, Art Nouveau, Gothic and Oriental architecture that echoed some of the same sources of inspiration as the Expressionists. So there is a sense in which Expressionism is the most directly linked in time and, in Germany at least, in place to the origins of post-Second World War architecture. But Expressionism is only part of an overall heritage of influences. It failed to establish itself as an ‘International Style’. Perhaps the very concept is anathema to the personal expression of spiritual and sometimes eccentric passion. Yet paradoxically it has served well as a stylistic influence in the building of churches and many other buildings of community focus where the aspirations and experiences of visitors is more important than the basic functions of domesticity and economy.

Copyright c.1980 Adrian Annabel

Berlin 1920

 

One poster in Berlin in 1920 read, quite simply, ‘Dada is political’. Berlin Dada was political and to understand its character and actions is to feel the atmosphere of Berlin at this time. In 1918 disillusion with the war led to the flight of the emperor and the establishment of a republic. During 1918 and 1919 street battles raged in Berlin between the new government and the Spartakusbund, which wanted to replace the corrupt middle-class republic with a working-class republic. In 1919 Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, leaders of the Spartakusbund, were assassinated. But the fighting and accusations of corruption did not cease. After the war ‘the unscrupulous profiteering began,; every moral restraint disappeared’ (Huelsenbeck in Dada siegt 1920).

War profiteers would be indulging themselves in restaurants and brothels while legless war-wounded had to beg or sell matches outside. The enormous war reparations imposed by the allies (‘squeezing Germany until the pips squeak’) had brought the Mark from just over four to the Dollar to over four billion to the Dollar. Unemployment was very high, so was the suicide rate.

The different sociological, political and economic conditions in Berlin to, say, Zurich, created a different Dada art movement. ‘While in Zurich people lived as in a health resort, chasing after the ladies and longing for nightfall that would bring pleasure barges, magic lanterns and music by Verdi, in Berlin you never knew where the next meal was coming from.’ Huelsenbeck, writing in En avant Dada in 1920, is describing his move from Zurich Data to Berlin as a search for a less aesthetic Dadaism, and quotes his and Raoul Hausmann’s earlier manifesto, ‘Dadaism demands the international revolutionary union of all creative and intellectual men and women on the basis of radical Communism.’ The cover to this history of Dadaism was by Richard Huelsenbeck himself and consciously avoided the pictorial. But the script is decoratively arranged into sections by diagonals from a central rectangle. Apart from sentences along these diagonals, the words are all horizontal but are given variety by the large number of types.

One of the Zurich publications Phantastiche Gebete, when it appeared in Berlin in 1920, showed the shift to the more aggressive, social consciousness under Huelsenbeck. Instead of Arp woodcuts, from the time Arp had spent in Berlin in January, it showed the satirical drawings of George Grosz. There was a stress on obscene works on corruption, decay, death, sex and offal – Grosz’s drawings showed man as beast. Grosz’s art was aimed at the masses rather than literary and artistic cliques. The third number of Der blutige Ernst published in 1920 has How the State Courts Ought to Look on the cover. Grosz has put the old military aristocracy on trial, while the proletarians judge from under the gaze of Liebknecht’s portrait. The issue also includes the Pimps of Death which has the Generals Ludendorff and Hindenberg, and one other, acting as pimps to skeletal prostitutes. The bitter satire Ludendorff’s Diary, written by Carl Einstein, was also included. The fourth number of Der blutige Ernst attacked the profiteer which Grosz’s cover allies with the prostitute; a double-page drawing in the centre of the issue portrays wealthy profiteers in the whorehouse. Mehring and Huelsenbeck wrote poems and Einstein discussed profiteers as the product of bourgeois attitudes.

 1920 saw the third and final issue of Der Dada. The previous tow had been edited by Hausmann but, for the third, he was aided by Heartfield and Grosz (or as they called themselves ‘Groszfield, Hearthaus, Georgemann’). The cover, a montage by Heartfield, combined newspaper clippings, with tyre and toothbrush advertisements, with the names of Hausmann, Baader, Grosz and, of course, Dada. The issue contains collages, photographs, illustrations, poetry and advertisements with a deliberately international flavour. For example an American cartoon of Dada taken from Collier’s. Heartfield’s montage of Jedermann sein eigner Fussball reappears in this issue. Der Dada, however, rarely had the inflammatory power of the Jedermann sein eigner Fussball magazine. Die Pleite would be more comparable in tone to the latter. Early in January of 1920 an issue of Die Pleite was published and was immediately banned. On the cover, by Grosz, a capitalist and a general, each hanging from a gibbet, wish each other a Happy New Year. The articles, poems and short plays were serious or satirical; but they all incorporated the themes of the massacre of the revolutionaries, the increase in militarism and the failure of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Die Pleite resurfaced at the end of the year in the satirical section of the journal Der Gegner which was published by Wieland Herzfelde and Julian Gumperz. Der Gegner combined Grosz’s drawings with an idolization of Soviet art and life.

Huelsenbeck, Hausmann and Baader, the latter having just formed the Deutsche Freiheitspartei, started a Dada tour in February 1920. The audiences, who probably came expecting a polite and rather dull cultural lecture, were treated to political propaganda, verbal abuse, simultaneist poetry and general fooling around. The tour began in Leipzig on 24^th February with a performance in the Zentraltheater attended by two thousand people. They then proceeded to the Kaiserbad, Teplitz-Schönau, in Czechoslovakia on 26^th February. In a drunken stupor they appointed Hugo Dux chief of Czech Dada, while Baader wallowed in wine, women and roast pork at the Bawdy House of the Bumblebee. On 1^st March they appeared at the Prague Bourse des Produits. Despite the fact that Baader deserted at the last minute taking half the script with him, and all their money, it was regarded as a success and was attended by two thousand five hundred people. On 2^nd March the two remaining RHs appeared before a smaller audience at the Mozarteum and on the 5^th March in Karlsbad. Overall the tour was a great success, albeit a succés de scandale, in publicizing the Dada movement in Berlin to a wider European audience.

They returned to a Berlin still in political turmoil. On 12^th March the Ehrhardt Freikorps marched on Berlin with the swastika on their helmets. The government fled to Dresden and Stuttgart. The Freikorps tried to install Wolfgang Kapp, a nationalist civil servant, as chancellor but within five days the putsch fell apart. Gustav Noske, the SPD minister of defence, who had used the Freikorps against the Spartacists so thoroughly in 1919, resigned; but the rest of the government survived intact. On 15^th March there was a battle on the Postplatz, Dresden, between the Reichswehr, under General Maercker, and demonstrating workers. Sixty people were killed and a hundred and fifty woundecd. Bullets also penetrated the Zwinger Gallery and slightly damaged Rubens’ Bathsheeba. Oskar Kokoschka, then a professor in the Dresden Academy, wrote an article protesting about the damage and suggesting the inhabitants of Dresden settle their petty squabbles elsewhere. Incensed by Kokoschka’s insensitivity, Grosz and Heartfield published Der Kunstlump in Die Aktion. They attacked Kokoschka’s attitude to works of art as heiligsten Güter. For Grosz and Heartfield these ‘holy heirlooms’ must be viewed in human terms as expressions of creative people, not as objects which could be used for profit and investment by the capitalist class. An artist cannot be indifferent to human strife, for it art is not about that then it is about nothing, they wrote.

The Collective Dada Manifesto, published in April, went further in proposing a robust, realistic art which reflected the dynamism of events. “The highest art will be that which in its conscious content presents the thousandfold problems of the day, the art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week, which is forever trying to collect its limbs after yesterday’s crash.” There was no shortage of events to activate the Dadaists. In 1920, particularly in April in the Ruhr, the Free Corps would descent on any protest or demonstration. People would be ‘shot while attempting to escape’ or sentenced to death by impromptu ‘court-martials’. In a letter written to his family a student who was in the Von Epp Free Corps revels in the atmosphere, “No pardon is given. We shoot even the wounded. The enthusiasm is terrific – unbelievable. Anyone who falls into our hands first gets the rifle butt and then is finished off with a bullet. We even shot ten Red Cross nurses on sight because they were carrying pistols. We shot those little ladies with pleasure – how they cried and pleaded with us to save their lives. Nothing doing!” Under the circumstances it is easy to see why the Berlin Dadaists turned to the idea of Communism as the most viable counter-force to this foretaste of Fascism. On the  5^th of April the KAPD was formed as a splinter group of the KPD and Franz Jung quickly became one of the more prominent members. In late April Jung and Franz Appel hijacked the trawler Senator Schröeder and sailed to Murmansk. Franz Jung had been one of the signatories of the Collective Dada Manifesto, along with Tristan Tzara, George Grosz, Marcel Janco, Richard Huelsenbeck, Raoul Hausmann and may others. Some of the other signatories are possible but also  included a liberal sprinkling of the highly improbable.

The military being used to brutally put down the working class was most viciously portrayed by Georg Grosz. He had plenty of material to work from since forty-two people were killed and a hundred and five injured during a protest outside the Reichstag in January 1920. Grosz’s portfolio of lithographs Gott mit uns, published in June, referred to the inscription on German military belts highlighting the hypocrisy of using moral and spiritual decorative trimmings. Irony is also evident in the lithographs entitled The World Made Safe For Democracy. A man is being handcuffed, beaten and whipped by soldiers. He is being enslaved in the name of freedom, by a democracy in which free speech is not allowed.  The Faith-healers shows the military authorities declaring a rotting skeletal figure fit for active service. The portfolio also includes the Pimps of Death. But, as The Communist Fall, and the Mark Rises points out Grosz felt the military, by its very nature, is just the blunt instrument designed to follow orders without judgement. The real villains were the financial interests at play trying to grab what little money there was exclusively for the financiers.

As might be expected, sponsorship to take exhibition space was not easily forthcoming for the Dadaists. Grosz had one exhibition in 1920 in Hans Goltz’s Galerie Neue Kunst in Munich during April and May. However in June the opportunity arose for all the Dadaists to exhibit and to invite others to contribute. Dr. Otto Burchard, who thus earned himself the title of Finanz-Dada, offered his gallery at Lutzowufer 13 in Berlin. The exhibition was given the rather orthodox title of the First Grand International Dada Fair, though the newspapers tended to refer to it as the Great Dada-Monster Show, and it ran from 24^th June to 5^th August. It was largely organised by Grosz, Hausmann and Hertfield. Heartfield designed the folding catalogue for the exhibition. The front cover used his Dada-Fotomontage of that year as backdrop for the words. The piece was also included in the exhibition and demonstrated his love for all things American (which had inspired the anglicisation of his name from Herzfelde). Not a single German word was used, it was all taken from American newspapers, magazines, film advertisements and so on. Phrases like ‘Cheer, Boys Cheer!’, ‘Son of a Gun’, ‘The Return of …Bronco Bill’ were set against photocopied heads, drawn heads, bits of film, a wheel, part of a telephone and skyscrapers. Superimposed on the reproduction from the exhibition is the information on the exhibition including the phrase, ‘the Dada movement leads to the disappearance of the artistic market.’ The back cover featured Gerhard Preiss (Obermusikdada) in a skin-tight body covering with shoes and bowler hat executing a ‘dadaistischer Holzpuppentanz’. It also catalogued the exhibits and was further embellished with a pair of spectacles and several small bicycles. Most of the Heartfields in the exhibition were photomontages taken from various Dada publications. Whether Heartfield, with Grosz, or Hausmann, with Höch, first used photomontage it served as an excellent medium for them. It could exploit the whimsical and illogical conjunction of images (later beloved of the surrealists), was against the fine art tradition of hand-crafted representation, and it offered familiar contemporary imagery from escapist and realistic everyday life.

In rejecting the hand-made fine art aesthetic Heartfield became an engineer in his own mind, or Monteurdada, as illustrated in Grosz’s picture Heartfield the Mechanic. The picture portrays Heartfield in Grosz’s typical pose – in profile with bald head with a mischievous grimace and clenched fists. As well as watercolour Grosz used photographs of mechanical parts and architectural details.

Gott mi tuns was on display with its scratchy cartoon lines and political intent. Grosz’s graffiti inspired art was a more obvious rejection of the spiritual and formal preoccupations of contemporary abstract artists. An analogy could be made between Heartfield the Mechanic and Hausmann’s Tatlin at Home. Both represent particular people as rather characterless types, part machine, and combining painting and collage/montage, set in simplified classical de Chiricoesque interiors. Hausmann’s Dada Siegt (not the publication of the same name) was another montage in this style.

There was also a hairdresser’s mannequin with a number and scale, together with a number of other appendages, which confirms the impact of the scuolo metafisica on Berlin Dada. But, in the exhibition at least, Hausmann the Dadasophe (see his self-portrait) is more purely art-orientated than the anti-military propaganda of Marschall G. Grosz.

Hanna Höch exhibited collages, reliefs ad doll-like figures; the most impressive of which was the collage Cut with a Kitchen Knife. The new metropolitan masses on the lower left are contrasted with the old culture of Kaiser Wilhelm at the top right – his moustache is replaced by two wrestlers, a soldier and a top hat. A mass of machinery dominates the composition, but there is also Baader in a swimsuit, Lenin and Radek as acrobats, Marx, Hausmann, Grosz, Heartfield, Mehring, Höch herself, and several others. In fact Baader appears twice, once at the bottom with one large eye as a comment upon the Dadaists affectation of using a monocle. Baader himself exhibited mostly manuscripts and constructions. For example:

the luggage of Oberdada at the time of his first escape from the insane asylum, 18 September 1899. A Dada relic. Historic.

Why Andrew Carnegie rolls his eyes

A project for an animals’ paradise in the Paris zoo, containing compartments for all the French and German Dadaists in the Hagenbeck style without bars.

The largest was a quasi-architectural structure called The Great Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama: Germany’s Greatness and Decline[…] Or The Phantastic Life Story of Oberdada.

It contained five storeys, three gardens, one tunnel, two lifts and a cylindrical top reminiscent of a top hat. His exhibits combined his skill as an architect with an abuse of Germany and growing rage and mental state. The flysheet threatening to ‘blow Weimar sky-high’ was included.

One of the most striking exhibits was Rudolf Schlicter’s mannequin of a German soldier with the head of a pig. It was suspended from the ceiling, having been ‘hanged by the Revolution.’ Schlicter’s brother ran a restaurant where the Dadaists used to meet. John Heartfield’s brother Wieland Herzfelde, also exhibited. Otto Schmalhausen, who called himself Dada-oz, created a head of Beethoven given a sacrilegious moustache and cross-eyes. Otto Dix showed his social realist caricatures which, particularly in the prostitutes, are akin to Grosz’s work.

Dadamax Ernst exhibited his Dadafex maximus and National Codex and Index of the Refinements of Dada Baargeld. Johannes T. Baargeld, who, like Ernst, came from Cologne and used photo-montage, was also in the exhibition. The mechanistic art of 391 by Picabia was on view, as were the abstract reliefs of Hans Arp. With the exception of Hans Arp the Dada-Messe was remarkably homogeneous, expounding photo-montage, whimsical objects or socially critical drawings in most of the one hundred and seventy four items. Some of the other named contributors are less well known and a good deal are entirely fictitious.

Officers of the Lütwitz Corps who visited the Messe lodged complaints for slander in the name of the German army. The prosecution was brought against Burchard, Grosz, Heartfield and Schlicter in April 1921. Baader’s house had been searched in September after the exhibition but he was beyond any criminal responsibility. The others were found guilty of insulting the Reichswehr; Grosz and Heartfield were given six weeks in jail and all were fined. However the affair proved rather anti-cliimactic in political terms. It transpired that no-one took Berlin Dada seriously as a threat to society and they were dismissed as stupid, but essentially harmless, fools.

At about the same time as the exhibition the Dada Almanach was published. It was edited by Huelsenbeck and featured contributions from Huelsenbeck, Tristan Tzara, Walter Mehring, Francis Picabia, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Adon Lacroix, Hugo Ball, Philippe Soupault, Citröen-Dada. Hans Arp, Paul Dermeé, Roual Hausmann and Vincente Huidobro – a largely non-German lineup. The cover carried the Schmalhausen head of Beethoven and Baader’s Great Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama was also discussed in the issue. Some of the Almanach’s coverage of the exhibition, like the reproduction of Schlicter’s pig-headed German soldier, obviously conveyed Berlin Dad’s political polemic but otherwise it was purely poetic and aesthetic. Tzara, Ball and Lacroix published sound poems and Tzara also traced the history of Zurich Dada. Hausmann merely attacked abstract painting and even that was counter-balanced by the opposing argument by an admirer of Arp.

Grosz continued the fight against artists who he perceived served the bourgeois. ‘Your brushes and pens which should be weapons are hollow straws’, according to the Statt einer Biographie dated 16^th August. Statt einer Biographie traces Grosz’s idea of Tendenzkunst, since art must serve its own time and class therefore serving the struggle of the proletariat. Zu meinen neuen Bildern, written in November but published in January 1921 in Das Kunstblatt, introduces Grosz’s new paintings of ‘Republican automatons‘. They extend Grosz’s fascination with the scuola metafisica of Carrá and de Chirico but do not share their metaphysical intention. Paintings like The Cyclist and Berlin C present faceless, nameless mannequins in an architectural dreamworld with exaggerated perspective.

By the end of the year the Berlin group had gradually dissolved. Hausmann undertook one final Dada tour to Prague with Hanna Hoch and Kurt Schwitters. Schwitters, significantly, was despised by the other Berlin Dadaists. Baader left Berlin and founded his Interplanetary Academy in Potsdam. Wieland Herzfelde and John Heartfield’s publications became less Dadaistic and more purely political in their approach to art: for example Herzfelde’s Society, Artist and Communism of 1921. Walter Mehring moved to Paris and Huelsenbeck travelled the world as a ship’s doctor.

Some of the personal tensions leading to their breakup can be surmised from Hausmann’s Dada Riots, Moves and Dies in Berlin. ‘The members of Club Dada were jealous of each other and sometimes indulged in rather shabby fights. The Heartfield-Herzfelde brothers and Mehring adored George Grosz, that pseudo-revolutionary. Huelsenbeck adored Huelsenbeck…I formed an alliance aside with Baader who was, unhappily, too often obsessed by his religious paranoiac ideas.’ The Berlin Dadaists were of different natures and had different intentions that frustrate the art historian’s mental compulsion for tidy labels, groups and movements. Baader’s undermining of reality contrasted strongly with Grosz and the Herzfelde brothers’ concern for political events. While Huelsenbeck became increasingly anti-art, Hausmann and Hoch leaned towards Schwitter’s fine art conscious aestheticism. There was something in the nature of Berlin 1920 that made its Dadaism implode. According to the Dada-Almanach the Dadaist ‘can compensate for the citizen’s lack of inner urgency and vitality, and shake him into new life.’ But in Berlin at that time if the shattering events could not stir or wake a person then nothing would. The Dadaist could make a row or shatter the tranquility of a place like Zurich, or on the Dada tours, but in Berlin their voice was drowned by much graver anarchy.

 

Partial Bibliography and apologies for omitting visiting artists like Moholy-Nagy and other movements such as the Novembergruppe and the Arbeitsrat für Kunst.

Annely Juda 1978 – The 20s in Berlin

Hess – George Grosz

Huelsenbeck – Memoirs of a Dada Drummer

Institute of Contemporary Arts – Berlin: A Critical View

Lewis - George Grosz

Ed. Motherwell – The Dada Painters and Poets

Richter – Dada Art and Anti-Art

University of Iowa Museum of Art – Dada  Artifacts

 

Chronology of Events

1905 – Hausmann meets Baader in Berlin.

 

1910 3rd March – First issue of Der Sturm (ed. Herwarth Walden, Berlin). Last issue March 1932.

 

1911  20^th February – First issue of Die Aktion (ed. Franz Pfemfert, Berlin). Last issue August 1932.

 

1912 August – Ball meets Huelsenbeck in Munich.

 

1913 20^th September to 1^st December – The Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon in Walden’s Sturm-Galeria, Berlin.

 

1914 4^th August – Outbreak of war. Grosz and Jung volunteer for service. Ball turned down on medical grounds but goes to the front as a civilian volunteer. Returns to Berlin in November in disgust and is joined by Hennings who was released from prison for forging passports for those who wished to avoid military service.

 

1915 early February – Herzfelde returns from the front to Berlin.

12^th February  - Ball speaks at the memorial celebration in the Berlin Architektenhaus for five writers who were killed in the war.

11^th March – Herzfelde meets Grosz who had been released from the Army that Spring.

12^th May – Ball and Huelsenbeck organise an Expressionist evening in the Berlin Harmoniumsaal in which Johannes R. Becher, Hennings and Resi Langer participate. Huelsenbeck declaims ‘negro poems’ and Ball nonsense poems.

Late May/early June – Ball arrives in Zurich.

4^th September – Die Aktion publishes the manifesto Der Impertinentismus by A. Undo (pseudonym).

Autumn – First issue of Die freie Strasse (ed. Jung etc, Berlin)

 

1916 – Ernst meets Grosz and Herzfelde at a Sturm exhibition while on leave in Berlin.

               Herzfelde founds Neue Jugend.

               26^th February – possible date of Huelsenbeck’s arrival in Zurich.

               21^st March – Baader visits the peasant poet Christian Wagner near Stuttgart and lectures on his philosophical views.

               March/Apri – Discovery of the word ‘Dada’, possibly by Ball.

               July – First issue of Neue Jugend (ed. Heinz Berger and Herzfelde, Berlin). Last issue June 1917.

               Autumn – Baader writes a pacifist letter to Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia and is certified insane.

               Late December – Huelsenbeck leaves Zurich for Germany.

 

1917 early January – Huelsenbeck arrives in Berlin.

               February – Huelsenbeck links up with Hausmann and Jung.

               1^st March -  Heartfield founds the Malik Verlag.

               October – Bolshevik revolution in Ruissia.

               9^th October – Baader stands as a candidate for the Reichstag in Saarbrücken.

 

1918 January – Foundation of Club Dada in Berlin. Later that year Huelsenbeck rejects Schwitters’ application.

               19^th January – Schwitters hears Rudolf Blümner read Sturm poetry in the Kestner – Gesellschaft, Hanover. As a result he goes to Berlin in late June to meet Walden.

               22^nd January – Dada evening in I.B. Neumann’s Graphisches Kabinett on the Berlin Ku-Damm. Huelsenbeck reads his First Dada Speech in German.

27^th January – spoof announcement in the Vossische Zeitung names Ferdinand Hardekopf, Theodor Däubler, Max Herrmann-Neisse and Anselm Ruest as members of the Club Dada.

April – Huelsenbeck leaves Berlin.

12^th April - Huelsenbeck reads the First German Dada-Manifesto in the Berliner Sezession, Ku-Damm.

April to December – Huausmann and Baader cause spoof announcements to appear in Berlin newspapers, especially BZ am Mittag.

6^th June – Dada evening in the Café Austria, Berlin. Hausmann reads sound poems.

Late June – Hausmann claims to discover photomontage while on holiday with Höch on the island of Usedom.

23^rd July – Hausmann and Baader celebrate Gottfied Keller’s birthday with readings from his work in the street.

29^th August – Baader referred to as Oberdada for the first time in print (Die Weltbühne).

September – Berliner Tageblatt and Tägliche Rundschau report that Baader is standing as the Reichstag candidate for Berlin First District.

October – Hausmann publishes Material der Malerai, Plastik, und Architektur.

8th to 9th November – Revolution. The Kaiser abdicates. Fritz Ebert becomes Chancellor.

11^th November – Armistice.

17^th November – In a widely reported incident Baader publicly shouts ‘Christus is uns wurscht!’ Arrested but released because of his certificate of no criminal responsibility.

3^rd December -  Novembergruppe meets for the first time. Hausmann, Höch, Grosz, Richter and Arp associate themselves.

12^th December – Freikorps set up.

24^th December – Revolutionary element of the Navy defeats government troops in Berlin fighting. Ebert’s government insecure.

29^th December to 1^st January 1919 – founding congress of Spartakusbund.

31^st December – Grosz, Heartfield and Herzfelde join the Communist Party (KPD).

 

1919 January – Communist riots in Berlin. Gustav Noske becomes Minster of Defence.

               15^th January – Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg murdered in Berlin by the Freikorps. End of Berlin uprising.

19^th January – Re-election of socialist SPD.

6^th February – Dada meeting  in the Kaisersaal des Rheingold: Baader is proclaimed ‘Präsident des Weltballs’.

12^th February – The Ebert majority socialist government re-takes office.

15^th February – Jedermann sein eigener Fussball (ed. Wieland Herzefelde) sells 7600 copies on the Berlin streets before it is banned.

March – First issue of Die Pleite (ed. Herzfelde). Last issue 1924.

“1^st April” – Proclamation of the Dada-Republic of Berlin to be inaugurated 1^st April.

3^rd to 13^th March – Fighting in Berlin between Noske’s troops and workers as a result of General Strike called by the Communists. On 10^th March between 1500 and 2000 revolutionaries killed and 10000 wounded.  Leo Jogisches, Charman of the KPD, is murdered.

7^th March – Herzfelde arrested for editing Jedermann sein eigener Fussball. Imprisoned until 20^th March.

April – First issue of Der Gegner (ed. Julian Gumperz, Herzefelde and Karl Otten). Last issue September 1922.

1st April – proclamation of Oberdada’s death.

2^nd April – proclamation of Oberdada’s resurrection.

30^th April – Dada evening in I.B. Newmann’s Graphishes Kabinett, including Jefim Golyscheff’s three part anti-symphony.

May – First exhibition of Dada painting and sculpture in the Graphisches Kabinett.

Mid-May – Baader donates to the German National Assembly a large picture of Schiller inscribed with the prophecy that the Weimar Republic will be destroyed for despising the rights of the spirit.

24^th Masy – Dada evening in the Meistersaal.

June – First issue of Der Dada (ed. Hausmann, Grosz and Heartfield). Last issue April 1920.

23^rd June – Treaty of Versailles.

28^th June – appearance of Baader’s Hado scrapbook with commentary.

16^th July – probable date of Baader’s leaflet distribution at the Weimar National Assembly.

August – Huelsenbeck agrees to produce Dadaco with help from Zurich and Paris.

30^th November – Dada Matinee at the Charlottenburger Tribune Theatre.

7^th to the 13^th December – possible dates of further matinees at the Charlottenburger Tribune.

8^th December – Max Reinhardt’s caberet Schall und Rauch reopens at the Grosses Schauspielhaus. First performance is Mehring’s Orestie with puppets by Grosz.

 

1920 early January – Die Pleite banned.

               19^th January – Hausmann, Huelsenbeck and Baader’s Dada-Tournée in the Saal der Kaufleuten, Dresden.

February – Baader founds the Deutsche Freiheitspartei.

12th February – Huelsenbeck lectures on Dada in the Kurt Wolff Verlag, Munich. Wolff cancels Dadaco.

               18^th February – Hausmann and Baader – Dada-Tournée in the Curio-Haus, Hamburg.

               24^th February – Hausmann, Huelsenbeck and Baader - Dada-Tournée in the Festsaal of the Zentraltheater, Liepzig, before an audience of 2000.

               26^th February - Dada-Tournée in the Kaiserbad, Teplitz-Schöenhau, Czechoslovakia.

               1^st March - Dada-Tournée in the Bourse des Produits, Prague, before an audience of 2500. Baader absconds with funds and half the script.

2^nd March - Dada-Tournée in the Mozarteum, Prague.

5^th March - Dada-Tournée in Karlsbad.

12^th March – the Ehrhardt Freikiorps march on Berlin wih swastikas on their helmets. The government flees to Dresden and Stuttgart. The Freikorps try and fail to install Wolfgang Kopp. Noske resigns.

15^th March – 60 people killed and 150 wounded in Dresden. A stray bullet hits a Rubens in Dresden Art Gallery. Kokoschka recommends the people settle their petty squabbles elsewhere. Grosz and Heartfield reply in Der Kunstlump published in Die Aktion (12^th June).

April – Huelsenbeck’s Dada seigt published.

4th to 5th April – Foundation of splinter group from the KPD, the KAPD, of which Jung becomes a prominent member.

April-May – Grosz exhibition in Hans Goltz’ Galerie Neue Kunst, Munich.

Late April – Jung and Jan Appel hijack the trawler Senator Schröder and sail to Murmansk.

24^th June to 5^th August – First Grand International Dada Fair in Otto Burchard’s Gallery. As a result, in April 1921, Burchard, Grosz, Herzfelde and Shlicter are summoned for insulting the Reichswehr. All are fined. Grosz and Herzfelde get six weeks in jail.

28^th June – appearance of Hado 2.

4^th September – Baader’s house is searched because of his involvement with the Dada Fair.

15^th October – Erwin Piscator opens the Proletarisches Theater.

15^th December – Dada evening in the Berliner Sezesion.

 

1921 20^th January – Baader organises a Dada Ball in Marmorsaal am Zoo, Berlin.

               10^th February – Hausmann, Höch and Mynona lecture evening in the Berliner Sezession.

20^th February to 13^th March – Grosz contributes to an exhibition in Hanover.

 

               Late June – Baader invites all those interested to take part in his First Grand Dada Academy, Potsdam.

               July – Freiland Dada (ed. Baader, Potsdam).

               6^th and 7^th September – Hausmann, Höch and Schwitters organise Dada -Tournées in Prague entitled Anti-Dada-Merz.

               16^th October – Baader gives a speech in Leipzig.

 

1922 – Hausmann’s Optophone.

               April – Grosz exhibition in the Galerie von Garvens, Hanover.

               Summer – Grosz spends five months in Russia.

30^th September – Schwitters, Arp, Tzara and Hausmann organise an evening called Dada-Revon in the Galerie von Garvens, Hanover.

               Autumn – Baader moves to Stettin.

               1^st October to 22^nd November – Schwitters, Gleichmann and Grosz exhibition in the Galerie von Garvens.

 

1923 – Grosz exhibits in the Kunsthandlung Würthle, Vienna, and the Galerie Flechtheim, Berlin.

               July – First issue of G (ed. Hans Richter). Last issue May 1926.

               December – Hausmann and Schwitters stage a MERZ-Matinee in Hanover.

 

1924 November – Grosz exhibits in the Galerie Joseph Billet, Paris.

 

Copyright Adrian Annabel 1981