Lyonel Feininger’s formulations of shapes and architectures pulsate with inner movement. Space, time, and motion can be captured in silhouette. Shape and space are depicted as being splintered in his early works, yet clear and precise. His compositions are filled with powerful momentum, the lines are bent and bent in angular fashion, and surfaces seem to waver within themselves, energised by a secret power. People stand as if embedded in a secret force field; the objects and the architecture interact with one another. The environment and the atmosphere, the vibrations and oscillations become noticeable; their silhouettes beat with inner movement. Their movements, those in the present, past, and those being contemplated seem as if they were implanted into the outlined shapes. Feininger wrote:
I try to formulate a perspective for the objects that is entirely new and wholly my own. I would like to place myself into the painting and from there observe the landscape, the objects that are painted in it.
During the time he worked at the Bauhaus, Feininger’s imagery became more anxious. He moved towards clear, prismatic structures, to bright, diaphanous colour planes. His transparent vision of architectural objects creates an almost immaterial world full of wide spaces and unreality. Glass-like fields of colour are superimposed and implanted into one another. Bundles of light coat the scene in the painting with crystal light. Feininger returned to America in 1937.
Josef Albers, Tribute to the Square, 1964.
Oil on cardboard, 78 × 78 cm. Tate Gallery, London.
Hannah Höch, Cutting Dada with a Kitchen Knife through the GermanCulture of the Paunch at the Time of the Last Weimar Republic, 1919.
Collage, 114 × 89.9 cm. Neue Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin.
One Turn of the Screw Tighter During World War I
Dada and Its Surroundings
The war radically changed the art scene in the vibrant cities of Europe. The international links that had brought forth artistic masterpieces, primarily between France, Italy, Germany and Russia, were abruptly torn apart. Many artists were conscripted into active service; some ‘enthusiastically rushed to the colours’; talented, influential, and gifted ones like Franz Marc, August Macke, Wilhelm Morgner, Umberto Boccioni fell in the war. Some suffered lasting psychological wounds like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Wieland Herzfelde, or they returned to their homelands, like Wassily Kandinsky or the brothers David and Vladimir Burliuk.
The intellectual elite that had stayed at home and those who had come back from the war sobered, sought new ways to express their experiences and insights. Some believed the most effective way to do something against the war was to publish a magazine. In Berlin, Neue Jugend (New Youth) appeared, since the existing magazines were either pre-censored or were politically neutral. Among the contributors were Hugo Ball, Franz Jung, Martin Buber, Theodor Däubler, Walter Benjamin, Else Lasker-Schüler, and Salomo Friedländer-Mynona, as well as the painters George Grosz, Ludwig Meidner and Heinrich Maria Davringhausen. Herzfelde organised poetry readings against the war in Berlin and other cities. The magazine Die freie Straße (The Free Street), published in 1916 in Berlin, by the poet Franz Jung and the painter Raoul Hausmann, followed a similar path.
In 1917, Richard Hülsenbeck came to Berlin from the Zurich Dada movement and, in this ‘prepared’ environment, was ‘stage-managing’ the Berlin Dada movement by February 1918. The Dada movement was joined in Berlin by George Grosz, Hannah Höch, Johannes Baader, Raoul Hausmann, the brothers Herzfelde/Heartfield, Yefim Golishev from Russia, and the poets Carl Einstein and Walter Mehring. George Grosz described the situation:
As Dadaists, we held ‘meetings’ for which we charged a few marks admission and where we did nothing else but tell people the truth, which means, in other words, insult them. …The meetings quickly sold out and were full of people angering and amusing themselves…We derided simply everything. Nothing was sacred to us. We spit on everything, and that was Dada. It was neither mysticism nor Communism nor anarchism…We were, however, the complete and pure nihilism, and our symbol was the nothing, the vacuum, the hole.
Dada shocked the world between the years 1916 and 1922. As the Dadaist Hans Richter put it, Dada was ‘not an art movement in the normal sense. It was a storm that broke over the art scene of the time, as the war upon the peoples.’ They consciously staged anti-art events. According to Max Ernst, it was the ‘outbreak of anger and zest for life’ at the same time. The indignation about the monstrous genocides during World War I was great and equally at the ‘civilisation that had brought it about.’ Dada was an international uprising.
‘Our demonstrations, provocations and opposition were just the means,’ said Hans Richter, ‘to enrage the square petty bourgeois and through rage to bring them to a shameful awakening. What really moved us was not so much the noise, or the contradiction, but rather the very simple elementary question, where to?’
In Zurich, in neutral Switzerland, at the start of 1916, Hugo Ball founded the Cabaret Voltaire out of which the Dada movement arose. The Romanian painter Marcel Janco, as well as Hans Arp, Tristan Tzara and Richard Hülsenbeck joined Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings. The word Dada was found coincidentally by picking through the Le Petit Larousse dictionary with a knife. The most dynamic of all the Dadaists was Tristan Tzara:
Always in movement… what would Dada be without Tzara’s poems, without his manifestos, not to mention the quarells, which he did masterfully evoke? He declaimed…interrupted his presentations with ringing, whistling, drum beating, shouting, sobbing, and with cowbells. Slamming the table or empty boxes gave voice to the wild demands for a new language in a new form.
The numbness was finally beaten out of the audience to the point that a veritable frenzy of participation exploded.
In his writings on psychoanalysis, Carl Jung defined the coincidence as ‘order outside of causality.’ The purpose of this ‘confused rush’ of everything by means of simultaneous poetry, asynchronous theatrical performance, and typography was to realise the principle of coincidence as a new stimulant.
Dada took ideas primarily from Futurism and established anti-art. Dada expressed itself in consciously chaotic manifestos and with bruitist poems that were also performed simultaneously in improvised theatrical presentations. Dada utilised slips of paper, leaflets, and posters, consciously mixing their typography. They discovered the collage as a suitable means of expression. Since Dada, collage has been an autonomous art medium. Dada was adapted in New York by Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia. The Alfred Stieglitz gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue became their base of operations.
Kurt Schwitters established Dada in Hanover and created his own distinctive image. Schwitters presented his Merz-paintings. He remained faithful to Dadaism and collage for his entire life. He built and created his collages out of ‘estranged’ materials. ‘I called my new creations made from, as a rule, any material Merz, clippings from an advertisement of the Commerzbank. Later the term Merz was extended to my poetry and in the end to all my related activities. Now, I call myself Merz.’ The Parisian Dada movement was almost exclusively made up of writers; few artists were found in their numbers. In 1920 Hans Arp, Max Ernst, and Johannes Baargeld joined together in Cologne. In Berlin, Dada took on more of a political hue.
Kurt Schwitters, Merzbild 25A, 1920.
Miscelleanous materials, collage on cardboard, 104.5 × 79 cm.
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.
Otto