“Overture” in “Four Metaphors of Modernism”
Overture
It is typical for the artistically untalented person to search anxiously for roots. . . .
Where do the roots of art lie?
In the people? Behind the mountains?
Behind the planets. He who has eyes to hear, feels.
—Herwarth Walden, “Art at the Roots” (1915)
Herwarth Walden (born Georg Lewin, 1878–1941), impresario of modern art in early twentieth-century Berlin, implies that one need not search for the “roots,” the origins of art. Rather, true art is immediately available to the senses: “He who has eyes to hear, feels.”1 Oskar Kokoschka’s Portrait of Herwarth Walden (Plate 1), painted while the young Austrian artist was helping launch Walden’s Der Sturm journal in 1910, reveals the multisensory sensitivity attributed to its pivotal founding figure: note the intensity of the red marks that emanate from his sensory organs, his hands, his lips, his nose, his eyes, his ears, in addition to a red aura radiating from his back. Art historians schooled on Greenbergian modernism—even those schooled in anti-Greenbergian postmodernism—will recognize in Walden’s words the immediacy that the American critic Clement Greenberg also attributed to the experience of modern art. Nearly immediately thereafter, however, they will recognize the impropriety with which Walden makes his claim. Most offensively, Walden mixes the senses; eyes, of course, are meant to see, not to hear, let alone to feel. A modernist medium, by extension, is supposed to restrict its appeal to the appropriate sense: painting, to vision; music, to hearing, and so on. But Walden, of course, does not mean literally that eyes assume the function of ears or other sense organs. Walden’s pronouncement is figurative—and therein lies his second offense, for it is well known that postmodernism, not modernism, exhibits a rhetorical or an “allegorical impulse.”2 In its simplest sense, allegory is metaphor extended over time. Modernism, we think we know, abhors metaphor and allegory.3
We might conclude that Walden’s confusion of the senses and figurative turn are reasons enough to legitimate his not being accorded a central position in the pantheon of modern art. Indeed, Walden and Der Sturm (the journal, gallery, performance venue, press, theater, bookstore, and art school in Berlin from 1910 to 1932) have never been the subject of a book-length study in English.4 A representative journal cover from October 1912, featuring a woodcut and essay by the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky (Figure O.1), reveals not only the identity of a Sturm favorite but also the organization’s commitment to an international, multimedia modernism in its literal presentation of image and text and in its enumerated contents related to visual art, literature, poetry, music, and dance.5
This legacy has received renewed attention in Germany. A major German exhibition and two-volume scholarly catalog, marking the centennial in 2012 of the founding of Der Sturm’s gallery, boldly asserted the organization’s significance. The retrospective exhibition’s subtitle, Zentrum der Avant-Garde, positioned the Berlin concern as center of the avant-garde.6 In the United States, the progeny of Der Sturm has in recent years been celebrated, although the genealogy has remained obscure. I refer to the Société Anonyme, a maelstrom of avant-gardist activity centered in New York from 1920 to 1950. A little-known but enormously significant fact is that the group’s founders, Katherine Sophie Dreier, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray, modeled its practices on those of Der Sturm.7 Only in considering the two organizations together can we grasp the extent of their respective influences. Although scholars have questioned the legitimacy of Greenbergian modernism for some time, no other theory of modernism has yet to replace its hegemony. The premise of the present book is that the figurative mixing of the arts promulgated by Der Sturm and the Société Anonyme was in fact essential to Euro-American modern art, theory, and practice.
Figure O.1. Herwarth Walden, editor, Der Sturm 3, no. 129 (1912): 137. Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell College Art Collection.
The first contact between the two organizations is difficult to date. Dreier, born to German American parents in New York in 1877, lived comfortably enough to learn painting and travel extensively to Europe; she spoke German and English equally well.8 She was also in a position to attend pivotal modernist venues and events: she frequented soirées at Gertrude and Leo Stein’s home in Paris in 1907–8, and she visited the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne in the summer of 1912, where she bought a painting by Vincent van Gogh.9 Back in America in early 1913, she, like many Americans, was thrilled to see New York’s International Exhibition of Modern Art, better known for its location (the Sixty-Ninth Regiment Armory) as the Armory Show—which featured two of her own paintings as well as the Van Gogh she had recently purchased.10 There is, however, no record of her having attended the third major event in this triumvirate of groundbreaking, international exhibitions of modern art, namely, the Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon (First German Autumn Salon), hosted by Der Sturm in Berlin in the fall of 1913 and named after the Parisian Salon d’Automne.11 For the immense gathering of almost four hundred works by nearly ninety artists, Walden rented a large hall, measuring twelve hundred square meters, in a new commercial building at Potsdamer Strasse 75, just one mile from the bustling Potsdamer Platz (home to Europe’s first electric traffic light in 1924).12 The exhibit was arguably both more radical and more international than either of its predecessors.13 Duchamp, who had spent some months in Munich in 1912, unfortunately also missed this show, although records reveal that organizers had considered inclusion of his work.14 Before leaving Germany in 1912, he traveled north to see the Berlin Secession’s annual show, a visit to which he later attributed his “soft spot for Berlin.”15
Dreier is reputed to have been “much impressed by Herwarth Walden’s Sturm gallery” in mid-1919.16 The earliest known correspondence (which refers to a recent visit to the Berlin gallery) dates to August 1920.17 A pair of little-known photographs reveals that Duchamp accompanied Dreier to Berlin on at least one occasion. In her photo album, Dreier labeled the first “Duchamp in Berlin 1924” (Figure O.2). The photograph of herself on the facing page (Figure O.3) needs no inscription because Dreier stands on the same balcony, in just about the same spot, also gazing to the viewer’s right. The similarities end there, though. Slender and dashing, Duchamp sports a makeshift turban on his head, and his pocketed hands and inscrutable look suggest boredom or impatience. In contrast, Dreier is rather conservative in her dress, but her smile and her left hand that lightly touches the ornate balustrade suggest eagerness to explore the city’s art with Duchamp. Admittedly, they make an odd pair, yet that dissonance makes their work together all the more fascinating. This odd couple collaborated on the presentation and collection of modern art on and off for thirty years. Their continuation of the work of Der Sturm underscores the significance of both organizations for the development and circulation of international modernism.
Figure O.2. Marcel Duchamp in Berlin, 1924, in photo album of Katherine S. Dreier. Katherine S. Dreier Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
The musicality of Der Sturm, for example, remains audible in the word choice for the Société Anonyme’s catalog for its own blockbuster show, the International Exhibition of Modern Art at the Brooklyn Museum in 1926.18 On the constructivist cover, we learn that the show was “arranged” by the Société Anonyme, while the title page—facing a reproduction of Kandinsky’s painting Blue Circle (1922, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum)—announces that Dreier and the Russian artist Constantin Aladjalov “composed” the book (Figure O.4). At the catalog’s close, the society advertises itself—foregrounding the roles of Dreier, Kandinsky, and Duchamp (Plate 2)—followed conspicuously (in mirror image) by a gratis promotion for Der Sturm (Plate 3), an acknowledgment of its debt to Walden and his organization. The American publication incorrectly dates the inauguration of Der Sturm to 1907, but it correctly ascribes to the concern its “fighting for modernism” in “painting, sculpture, music, literature, and theatre,” by way of its “bookstore, gallery . . . [and] magazine,” all emanating (as of mid-1912) from Potsdamer Strasse 134A, just off Potsdamer Platz, Berlin.19
Figure O.3. Katherine S. Dreier on same Berlin balcony as Marcel Duchamp, in photograph on facing page of her photo album, 1924. Katherine S. Dreier Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
The major exhibition and catalog Société Anonyme Modernism for America (2006) highlighted the extraordinarily international networks that Dreier and Duchamp developed.20 The cultivation of such networks was an exemplary accomplishment of Der Sturm as well. Another trait that secures their kinship and encourages us to reconsider the greater modernism that they represent is their deep and abiding commitment to metaphor. The name Der Sturm, to begin with, suggests a torrent of (storm) water—a frequent invocation in the rhetoric of modern art and the subject of extended analysis here. The name Société Anonyme also invites us to engage the figurative: its literal meaning, “anonymous society,” extends in French to mean “incorporated.” Dreier, Duchamp, and Man Ray embraced this double entendre in what has been understood to be a typically Dadaist gesture.21 Interpreting their choice as typically modernist, however, restores such play—sometimes serious, indeed—to modernism as well. We will see that the segregation of the “historical avant-garde” from the rest of modern art makes little sense at Der Sturm or the Société Anonyme. “Avant-garde” simply cannot be limited to “institutional critique” and a blending of art and life practices (purportedly in opposition to “autonomous art”), as followers of Peter Bürger contend.22 Well before his reductive reification, avant-garde was deeply metaphorical; it refers, of course, to the brave souls who venture ahead of their fighting comrades to register and transmit the sights, sounds, and feeling of unfamiliar territory. Lives depend on their multisensory sensitivity and the success of their transmission. Such were the keenly felt stakes of modern art.
Figure O.4. Katherine S. Dreier, ed., International Exhibition of Modern Art (New York: Société Anonyme, 1926), title page. Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Libraries.
Walden suggests the gravity of the movement in a 1904 essay for the anarchist journal Kampf (Battle). More than a century later, it is difficult for us to appreciate that (not overtly politicized) aesthetics could warrant such a venue, but Walden’s polemic was not out of place there. In “Music Lesson” he observes that media are not limited to particular senses, noting that a supposed “confusion of the senses” is associated precisely with the modern. Walden stages a critique of casual music appreciation as a dialogue. First, a dedicated music lover voices his disapproval:
You hear music. You enjoy it, so to speak, with hands and feet and still other parts of your self.
But your heart?
But your soul?
Do you listen with your heart?
Do you listen with your soul?
Because the following does not hold for music: “He who has ears, listen!”
Walden’s fictive, inattentive listener responds: “You are wrong! There we have it: misuse of concepts, confusion of the senses, disastrous influence of the ‘Modern,’ in short, Secession!”23 Walden employs the rhetorical strategy of having the unenlightened interlocutor unexpectedly speak the truth about the “Modern.” This brief exchange suggests that there was an embodied, multisensory modernism in the early twentieth century. Recall Kokoschka’s portrait: it was Walden’s mission to bring that intense feeling—in all sense organs—to everyone. This was the “lesson” of Der Sturm and, later, of the Société Anonyme.
Gleichnis
For many art historians in the United States, it still seems “natural” to assume that modernism and autonomy are linked, if not synonymous. To denaturalize that assumption, let us return briefly to some foundational texts. In “Towards a Newer Laocoön” (1940), Greenberg articulates his position that the arts, in modernism, “have been hunted back to their mediums, and there they have been isolated, concentrated and defined.”24 By 1960 this position was entrenched. In “Modernist Painting,” Greenberg opines, “the task of self-criticism became to eliminate the specific effects of each art and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art. . . . [Modernist art pursued this] self-criticism with a vengeance.”25
Modernism’s purported striving for identity of medium and sensual effect contrasts sharply with postmodernist theory and practice. Craig Owens’s two-part essay, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” remains one of the seminal texts that defined the incipient movement against modernism. In it he contrasted modernism’s purported “autonomy, its self-sufficiency, [and] its transcendence” with postmodernism’s “contingency, insufficiency, [and] lack of transcendence.”26 Addressing then-contemporary art, Owens identified six now-familiar tendencies of postmodernist art: “appropriation, site specificity, impermanence, accumulation, discursivity, [and] hybridity.”27 Together, he maintained, these characteristics render postmodernism “allegorical.”
Although the art historian Hal Foster has worked to undermine Greenbergian modernism—he has called its supposed autonomy a “fiction”—modern art’s rejection of metaphor remains an attribute even in his scholarship.28 In an investigation into the work and theory of the Viennese Adolf Loos, whom Foster regards as an exemplary modernist architect, the historian likens Loos’s hatred of attached, purportedly inessential ornament to the critic Karl Kraus’s rejection of metaphor. Kraus, as Foster reports, equated metaphor with “perversion” of speech.29 Metaphor, in this account, expands a word’s meaning beyond its “proper” range (just as ornament is thought to exceed proper form). Foster does not himself deplore metaphor, as far as we know, but he reinforces the impression that modernism did.
If we return to Greenberg’s writing, however, we notice that his own case for modernist medium specificity depends on an analogy with music. In “Towards a Newer Laocoön,” Greenberg describes a nineteenth-century “confusion of the arts,” in which “each art would demonstrate its powers by capturing the effects of its sister arts or by taking a sister art for its subject.” Impressionist painting borrowed from music, and music “was striving to describe and narrate (program music).”30 Yet:
Aside from what was going on inside music [i.e., its own confusion], music as an art in itself began at this time to occupy a very important position in relation to the other arts. Because of its “absolute” nature, its remoteness from imitation, its almost complete absorption in the very physical quality of its medium, as well as because of its resources of suggestion, music had come to replace poetry as the paragon art.31
Wisely, Greenberg addresses the potential inconsistency in his logic: “But only when the avant-garde’s interest in music led it to consider music as a method of art rather than as a kind of effect did the avant-garde find what it was looking for. It was when it was discovered that the advantage of music lay chiefly in the fact that it was an ‘abstract’ art, an art of ‘pure form.’”32 In this, he claims Walter Pater as his forebear: “The ideas about music which Pater expresses in The School of Giorgione [1888] reflect this transition from the musical and the abstract better than any single work of art.”33 Pater’s ideas are encapsulated in a famous line from said text: “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.”34
The name that art history, following Greenberg, conferred on this “condition” is “pure form.” The figure of “music” often becomes the ideal in discourse on the arts, so its subsumption under the modernist ideal of “pure form” is not surprising. Yet music is rarely, if ever, identical to pure form. Let us look at Pater’s actual text. For him, the form and matter of music are “welded together.”35 It is their “union” that proves to be so moving: “In its [music’s] consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression; they inhere in and completely saturate each other.”36 Prefiguring Greenberg, Pater also considers the propriety of using one art as a model for developing another’s supposedly essential characteristics. Unlike Greenberg, though, he does not claim not to do so. Instead, Pater undermines the very premise of essence:
Each art may be observed to pass into the condition of some other art, by what German critics term an Anders-streben [striving to be other], a partial alienation from its own limitations, through which the arts are able, not indeed to supply the place of each other, but reciprocally to lend each other new forces. Thus some of the most delightful music seems to be always approaching figural or pictorial definition.37
Pater’s position as modernist precursor is complicated by such apparent heresy. It invites us to reexamine the position of music in other accounts of modernism as well. Charles Baudelaire’s “Richard Wagner and Tannhäuser in Paris” (1861) is paradigmatic, yet any expectation that it might buttress Greenbergian modernism will be disappointed. As is well known, the essay addresses Wagner’s music in part to develop the author’s own theory of artistic and sensual “correspondences.” Baudelaire quotes from his own poem “Correspondences”: “Vast like the night and like light / Perfumes, colors, and sounds respond to each other.”38 In this couplet, sensual materials (perfumes, colors, and sounds) mingle and merge. Each of them (or, perhaps, their union) is like something else; Baudelaire employs the similes of night and light to picture them more completely. To bolster his case, Baudelaire cites long passages from Franz Liszt’s writings on Wagner. As the literary theorist Susan Bernstein has shown, however, “music,” even in the words of a musician, immediately becomes metaphor.39
Following Bernstein, I quote Baudelaire’s quotation of Liszt (on Wagner’s prelude to Lohengrin) at some length:
This introduction contains and reveals the mystical element[,] which is always present and always hidden in the piece. . . . To teach us the unnarratable power of this secret, Wagner first shows us the ineffable beauty of the sanctuary. . . . He makes glitter before our eyes the temple of the incorruptible wood, with its sweet-smelling walls, its doors of gold, its joists of asbestos, its columns of opal, [its vaults of onyx: omitted by Baudelaire], its partitions of cymophane. . . . It does not make it perceptible to us in its imposing and real structure, but instead, as if managing our feeble senses, he first shows it to us reflected in some azure wave or reproduced by some iridescent cloud.40
Bernstein’s astute analysis warrants its own lengthy citation:
Liszt narrates here the very substitution of the “letter” of music by metaphor, by that which is perceived by the receiver who is not in a position to understand or see clearly what is yet to be revealed. . . . The italics Baudelaire has added to Liszt’s text bring out the mystical element; this consists of the concealment of compositional strategy, a rational plan or structure, hidden and “reflected” in the opaque metaphoric materials as they are experienced over time by a sensible subject, a member of the audience. The artist’s calculation organizing the work is both present and absent to the receiver; it functions precisely by not being evident in its real structure, which is covered over by a vaguely sensible mass, wave, and cloud of color. This [is an] experience of an immediacy that is not immediate.41
Metaphor, in this analysis, is a teaching aid—even for a student as brilliant as Liszt, followed closely by Baudelaire. “Opaque” metaphors provide initial access to those who lack (metaphorically) transcendent vision and understanding. The art’s “real structure” is “covered” by something seemingly aqueous, a “wave” or a “cloud.” The receptive audience experiences an explicitly mediated effect of immediacy.
This mediating factor—the medium—is metaphor. With music as the repeated metaphor of modernism, coupled with the very metaphorical condition of music, it behooves us to consider the role of metaphor more closely. In his lucid study On Deconstruction Jonathan Culler writes:
In theory, metaphors are contingent features of philosophical discourse; though they may play an important role in expressing and elucidating concepts, they ought in principle to be separable from the concepts and their adequacy or inadequacy, and indeed separating essential concepts from the rhetoric in which they are expressed is a fundamental philosophical task. But when one attempts to perform this task, not only is it difficult to find concepts that are not metaphorical, but the very terms in which one defines this philosophical task are themselves metaphorical.42
Although Culler addresses metaphor in philosophy, his analysis recalls Kraus’s rejection of metaphor as inessential, a determination that Foster parallels with Loos’s rejection of ornament. In my book Paul Klee and the Decorative in Modern Art (2004), I traced the role of ornament in philosophical discourse in terms similar to Culler’s. Reviewing Jacques Derrida’s analysis of Immanuel Kant’s “Analytic of the Beautiful” from the Critique of Judgment (1790), I observed:
Derrida deconstructs the presumed limits of these [Kant’s] examples—frames on pictures, clothing on statues, columns on palaces—showing that it is difficult, if not impossible, to discern in each case where one ends and the other begins. . . . Derrida explores the supplemental logic of the parergon, para (beyond, by, beside) + ergon (work), the Greek word Kant introduced. The parergon, as supplement, describes a supposedly extraneous element that is nevertheless necessary for the completion of the object.43
If I argued then that ornament and/or the decorative is supplemental in the Derridean sense—that is, it is supposedly extrinsic but actually intrinsic—to modern art, I submit here that metaphor is equally so. Yet while ornament and metaphor share this supplemental logic, the mechanisms by which these supplements operate in practice are not identical because of their differing relationships to the visual. Ornament and the decorative have their place in classical rhetoric, but they may also describe actual visual forms, and they often consort, even at a distance, with the decorative arts. They can be figuratively and literally aesthetic. Metaphor, however, has only a figurative relation to visual art.
How, then, does metaphor work in relation to visual art? Paul Ricoeur offers valuable insight into the mystical element of metaphor. It is not, he insists, a mere substitution of terms, because an interaction must occur.44 For a metaphor to be successful, the recipient must experience a transition from understanding “literal incongruence” to “metaphorical congruence.” To make the cognitive “leap,” the receiver must possess the imagination necessary to “see the likeness despite the difference.”45 That difference is always maintained, but its “suspension” allows the respondent to “see” the world in a new way.46 Significantly, Ricoeur maintains, “feeling” plays an equally vital role: imagination helps the subject make his cognitive “leap,” but the landing must “feel” “right.” The metaphor must feel “attuned” to reality, even though that reality is now “seen” differently.47
Following Ricoeur, metaphor is interactive in that listeners must assimilate their thought and feeling to the speaker’s cognitive intent. They must actively participate in passive reception to “get it.” And “getting it,” finally, implies transformation of one’s worldview. Although metaphor is not literally visual, the visual metaphor of seeing is often invoked to describe its process, as Ricoeur demonstrates. Yet it is also corporeal in that it “feels” right. If metaphor invokes the visual, the metaphorical quality of modern visual art complicates visuality by insisting on its conceptual and bodily components as well.
I propose that this theory of metaphor approximates a model for the reception of modern art that Walden and his associates promoted at Der Sturm, that Dreier and Duchamp supported through the Société Anonyme, and that resonates throughout much of modern art. Although Walden made occasional claims for aesthetic autonomy, his repeated emphasis on art as Gleichnis (translated variously as metaphor, simile, allegory, and parable) is especially instructive.48 Walden’s written record is vast. In addition to offering regular commentary in Der Sturm, the journal he edited from 1910 to 1932, his concern included a press that published prints, postcards, poetry, music, and books, including two volumes that summarize Walden’s aesthetic theory: Einblick in Kunst: Expressionismus Futurismus Kubismus (Insight into art: expressionism futurism cubism, 1917) and Die neue Malerei (The new painting, 1919).49 In both, art is Gleichnis.
In Einblick in Kunst, much like in the epigraph with which I began, Walden bemoans the conventional desire to “understand” art. Walden explains that everyone has the ability to experience art, but most people, he laments, “live in concepts they have not understood but they hold on to.”50 Just as Greenberg will do a little over two decades hence, Walden turns to music to make his case: “We experience music, but we do not understand it. It moves us, it compels us.”51 To appreciate modern art, we must “learn to see” again; we must remember that “painting is an art of the surface,” “a relationship between colors and forms.” To perceive these relationships clearly, to allow them to move us, we must refrain from the conceptual impulse to compare, that is, to look for mimesis. Building on the German linguistic root gleich (same), Walden declares that “art is no comparison [Vergleich]; art is metaphor [Gleichnis].”52 This Gleichnis is what allows us to see into, to gain insight into modern art, as Walden appropriately titled his book (Einblick in [modern] Kunst).
In Die neue Malerei Walden pursues the consequences of this theory and emphasizes its significance. “Expressionism,” by which he means all modern art, “is a worldview [Weltanschauung]. Namely, an impression [or visualization, Anschauung] of the senses, not concepts.”53 Again, Walden uses the same linguistic root, this time highlighting a fluctuation of schauen (to view) between literal and figurative registers: one comes to have a worldview through one’s sight and other senses. Walden’s own writing thus performs the figurative assimilation that Ricoeur identifies as intrinsic to metaphor. The gallery director underscores the importance of art in the following passage, rife with wordplay:
The child sees, hears, and feels living life. One teaches it [the child] to understand life. Is life to be understood? Do we understand life? At most we can learn to stand. But does this learning protect us from falling [or from the fall]? Do we not lapse again and again in life [or fall away from life]? We feel life deeply only in metaphor [Gleichnis]. And art is metaphor [Gleichnis].54
Walden consistently returns to Gleichnis as highest praise for art, which teaches us about our own lives and about life itself. This purpose accounts for the prevalence of the word Gleichnis, especially in the many obituaries Walden found himself called on to write during the First World War. For example, when his beloved painter of animals, the Blaue Reiter artist Franz Marc, was killed, Walden honored him thus:
His kingdom is not of this world. But he was at home on earth. The earth, which produces life and carries life. The earth appeared to him; the animals, forests, and rocks spoke to him. You do not know what you do. You are of the earth and it gave you the sensory image [Sinnbild]. The metaphor [Gleichnis].55
When the Futurist sculptor and painter Umberto Boccioni fell the following autumn, Walden praised that artist’s appreciation for Gleichnis and explained, quoting Goethe, “Everything transitory is only a metaphor [Gleichnis]. Art is metaphor [Gleichnis] and metaphor [Gleichnis] is deed.”56
Gleichnis is, for Walden, the condition of all the arts, including the spoken poetry of August Stramm, whom he also eulogized with reference to this principle:
If only I had been able to bring all those who want to hear before the bodily voice of your mouth. Then they would have understood, that there is nothing to be understood. They would have been able to see without eyes how words flowed through you, out of you, how you were beside yourself and beyond them and how they gathered within you. How you, the strong man, the one without nerves, would fall, exhausted, gracious and blessed, to be art, container for the eternally flowing, for the metaphor [Gleichnis].57
In this representation, the person, Stramm, rather than a painting or a sculpture, holds and transmits the transitory metaphor of life.
Another close friend, the novelist and architectural theorist Paul Scheerbart, is pictured here with his wife, Anna; Samuel Lublinski; Salomo Friedländer (known as Mynona); Walden’s first wife, Else Lasker-Schüler; and Walden in a press photograph about Berlin café life circa 1905 (Figure O.5). When Scheerbart, too, passed away (in 1915), Walden invoked his fabulist fiction by cleverly turning some of this Gleichnis philosophy around:
While the artists of your time concerned themselves lovingly with the earth, you concerned yourself with the world on the other side of love and the earth. While the artists of your time found the inhuman to be more foreign, you were intimate with the world. Not everything transitory, for you everything permanent was a metaphor [Gleichnis]. And you, like only a few artists, were granted the ability to find your own form for that metaphor [Gleichnis].58
Considering that Scheerbart’s extraordinary science fiction, in Walden’s estimation, upset the expectation that the transitory, not the permanent, is Gleichnis, it is all the more striking that art, of any medium, remains, consistently, Gleichnis.59
Many contributors to Der Sturm shared Walden’s understanding of metaphor. The range of their interests further substantiates both the term’s viability and its applicability to modernism in any media. To be sure, the earliest appearance of art as Gleichnis in Der Sturm refers to music. The first sustained articulation of a Sturmian aesthetic, Alfred Döblin’s “Conversations with Calypso: On Music,” unfolds over eighteen issues in the first year of the journal’s publication (1910). There music is likened to
the art of time. . . . It is truer than reality, music, because it comes out of material that is like nothing; it develops completely in balance, in repetition, in the basic form of relationships; it gives [us] the schema [Schema] of our lives. . . . [With] the shortness and length of tones, non-contradictory reality waltzes into music; here the form of happening, of time itself, appears as an art’s very own purpose, as its characteristic activity, a delight and fruitful metaphor [Gleichnis] for the wise, who love becoming.60
If in this passage Döblin points to music’s special ability to provide the “schema” of our lives, others turn later (as he does as well) to the possibility of Gleichnis in other arts. For example, Jacques Rivière’s essay on Baudelaire (from the issue of Der Sturm whose cover is pictured in Figure O.1) asserts that “every poem of Baudelaire is a movement. . . . It is a short phrase, but it is supported by metaphors [Gleichnissen], which, leaning on each other, fill each other with life.”61 Or, in the essay “On the Musical in Architecture,” Fritz Hoeber builds on August Wilhelm Schlegel’s well-known aphorism, “Architecture is frozen music,” proclaiming, “In art everything sensual appears only as metaphor [Gleichnis]. Therefore, absolute musical harmony must also build the highest form of stylistic unity in architecture as well.”62
Figure O.5. “The ‘Moderns’ at Their Regular Tables in a Café in the West”: (left to right) Anna Scheerbart, Paul Scheerbart, Samuel Lublinski, Salomo Friedländer / Mynona, Else Lasker-Schüler, and Herwarth Walden, in Der Welt-Spiegel, biweekly of the Berliner Tageblatt 41 (21 May 1905), 2. Berlinische Galerie—Landesmuseum für Moderne, Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur, Abteilung Künstler-Archive, BG-Ar 8/84, Erworben aus Haushaltsmitteln der Berlinischen Galerie, Berlin, 1984.
Hoeber’s essay appeared, significantly, in September 1913, when Walden opened the First German Autumn Salon. Hoeber’s piece was surely intended to buttress Walden’s opening speech, reproduced in the same issue of the journal: “The painter paints what he sees in his innermost senses, the expressions of his being; all that is transitory is for him only metaphor [Gleichnis]; he plays life; every impression from outside becomes an expression from within for him. He is the carrier and the carried of his inner visions.”63 Walden articulates an active passivity: impressions become expressions, and the “carrier” is also the “carried.” Walden goes on to ask: “Did the ninth symphony come [klang, lit. sound] to Beethoven directly from the beautiful landscape? Was its rhythm marched before him? But he sent forth armies of men of his own will, storming out to victory or death.” If one read Walden’s words in isolation, one might conclude that he devalued the transitory that is “only metaphor.” In the context of Walden’s broader usage, as well as that of his peers, dating back to Goethe, it becomes apparent that metaphor, for him, is a mighty force.
Introducing abstraction to the broader public at this relatively early date, Walden tries to explain the relevance of nonmimetic art and turns to the example of music. He is unwilling to follow Döblin’s claim that the very structure of life impresses itself on music. Walden feels obliged to account for the fact that modern, often nonrepresentational painting appears at first to be different from life, so he infers that life does not, in fact, impress itself directly on music (for no landscape could issue a musical score directly to Beethoven). Walden asks whether in fact the symphony’s rhythms were “marched” before him. Of course not. But something happened between the landscape, Beethoven, and the music he composed: metaphor effected a movement between them that the composer sought to play. There was no literal marching on a field, but Beethoven, in Walden’s view, unleashed a metaphorical army.
Gleichnis remained vital at Der Sturm throughout many years of shifting taste. In fact, its repetitive invocation in an essay by the theater expert Lothar Schreyer in 1923 could render it pedantic, were it not for the interspersed reproductions of multimedia constructivist art, including Aurél Bernáth’s painting Erde (Earth); Teresa Zarnower’s sculpture Architektur; Mieczysław Szczuka’s sculpture Raumkonstruktion (Spatial construction); and an untitled linoleum cut by Paul Fuhrmann.64 Although Schreyer, who went on to secure renown at the Bauhaus, does not mention any of these works in his essay, exhibition records demonstrate that he showed his own theater and costume designs alongside the work of the first three of these artists at Der Sturm gallery the same month that his essay appeared.65 Bernáth, a Hungarian, and the two Poles Zarnower and Szczuka may be lesser known, but they reveal the ongoing internationalism, the openness to women, the commitment to multimedia, and new ways of visualizing Gleichnis at Der Sturm, even if the gallery’s heyday in the transitory world of art appeared to be waning.
Finally, this issue of Der Sturm also stages a dialogue—evoking, perhaps, the exchange between Walden’s music lover and an inattentive music lover back in 1904—between [Kurt] “Schwitters” and “Das Publikum” (The audience) about Merzbühnenwerke (Merz theater works). Penned by the occasional Dadaist himself, “Schwitters” exhorts the audience and other artists to embrace those typically Dadaist attributes, chance and the accident, as part of the Gesamtkunstwerk that they might create together with a live audience.66 This audience cheers, “Bravo!—Bravo!—Bravo!” A falsetto voice cries, “Hoch Anna Blume!!” (Cheers for Anna Blume [title and character of Schwitters’s earlier poem]!!) But everyone turns on this figure, calling out “Idiot!” before departing.67 Thus Schwitters’s “audience” happens to condemn the lone fool who defends the real artist and poet’s characteristic work. Schwitters invites us to embrace this (scripted) chance response as part of the total work of art—to assimilate our own thought and feeling to the Gleichnis he offers.
Nietzsche Evenings
Friedrich Nietzsche also offered his readers such challenges, and his immense output in various media—philosophy, poetry, music—is a likely source for Walden’s appreciation of Gleichnis. The art historian Riccardo Marchi suggests that The Birth of Tragedy (1872) was relevant for Walden’s circle.68 In that text, Nietzsche attributes the peculiar power of music to Gleichnis. Building on Arthur Schopenhauer’s view that we understand music more directly than any other art, Nietzsche writes: “Music stimulates us to metaphorical contemplations [gleichnissartigen Anschauen] of Dionysian universality, and it causes the metaphorical image [das gleichnissartige Bild] to emerge with the highest degree of significance.”69 For Nietzsche, the significance of this realization is equally clear: “From these facts, which are inherently intelligible and not inaccessible to deeper examination, I conclude that music is able to give birth to myth, i.e., to the most significant example, and in particular to tragic myth, myth that speaks of Dionysian knowledge in metaphors [Gleichnissen].”70
Döblin’s “Conversations with Calypso” follows Nietzsche in assigning special force to music. Yet Walden and other writers at Der Sturm—including Döblin—neither focus exclusively on music nor belabor Nietzsche’s conclusion that tragic myth is its logical end. Instead, they embrace Gleichnis as the medium of any art or of all art. As Robert Hodonyi discovered, Walden brought “Nietzsche” to the stage, orchestrating three “Nietzsche Evenings,” one each in Berlin, Jena, and Weimar in 1905.71 Walden organized the events under the auspices of his newly founded Verein für Kunst (Society for art), a forerunner of Der Sturm.72 What we learn from the contents of these evenings is that Nietzsche provided Walden not only with a textual account of Gleichnis but also material for an early theatrical realization of Gleichnis.
As the program (Figure O.6) for the Nietzsche Evening in Berlin suggests, Walden orchestrated a multisensory performance for his guests.73 Max Klinger’s marble bust of Nietzsche, commissioned by Henry van de Velde for the opening of the Nietzsche Archive in 1903, was brought to each site for the evening.74 Walden played the piano. In addition, there were readings from a broad range of Nietzsche’s texts: The Gay Science (1882), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), and Dithyrambs of Dionysus (1888).
Unsurprisingly, given its more popular prose-poem form, Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the Nietzsche Evenings’ most cited work. In “On the Vision and the Riddle,” for example—from the third part of Zarathustra and presented near the end of each Evening—the prophet, while sailing out to sea, tells intertwined tales in order to suggest Nietzsche’s great insights of the Übermensch and “eternal return.” He then interrogates his interlocutor—and Walden’s audiences—“what did I see then as a parable [was sah ich damals im Gleichnisse]?”75 The senses and the literal-figurative registers are mixed, for one must literally “hear” a metaphor or parable, although one can “see” it metaphorically. Indeed, Zarathustra encouraged audience members to use their eyes and ears just as Walden later conceived: “He who has eyes to hear, feels.”
The evening opened with Walden playing Nietzsche’s Lieder: the philosopher’s musical responses to the words of others and a poem of his own.76 The back of the program included all the words, so the audience might follow along. An actor, Dr. Emil Geyer, brought the text to life with readings in the middle of the program. Next, Walden played others’ musical responses to Nietzsche’s poetry, including those of Walden’s own piano teacher, Conrad Ansorge. Then, near the end of the evening, Walden modeled—or provided a Gleichnis of—the active engagement Zarathustra called for by playing his own response to a Nietzsche poem on the piano.
Figure O.6. Herwarth Walden, editor, program for Nietzsche Evening, Verein für Kunst, Berlin, 1905. GSA 102/599. Photograph from Klassik Stiftung Weimar.
Unlike other poems that evening, “Vereinsamt” (Isolated) was culled not from a larger work but likely from its first publication in Das Magazin für Litteratur (1894).77 Walden sent his handwritten score to Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, immediately after the premiere in Berlin. He asked her if the “glowingly reviewed” evening’s program might be repeated just as it was in Weimar and Jena, but the answer must have been no, for Walden’s composition, included in the Berlin program, disappears from that in Weimar and Jena.78 Ironically, however, it is thanks to his having sent the music to Weimar in 1905 that it survives, Walden’s heretofore lost opus 14 (Figure O.7).79
Although it was rejected for Weimar and Jena, let us listen now. It is a dark, gloomy, insistent piece, very chromatic and nearly, though not completely, atonal. It opens with the direction to play “Mit grossem Ausdruck, nicht schnell” (With great expression, not fast), and closes with a veritable pounding of keys: three lines (ten measures) of “fff bis zum Schluss” (triple fortissimo [very loud] until the end). With these words, Walden directed how it would be played and also, in all likelihood, tried to channel the “great expression” he sensed Nietzsche had brought to the poem. In the text, crows shriek as they enter town at the onset of winter. One wonders if Walden was drawn to the poem in part for its reminder of another crow in a lonely winter landscape, namely, that in Franz Schubert’s famous song cycle Winterreise (Winter journey), opus 89, composed to poems by Wilhelm Müller in 1828. That echo may have resonated with Walden. Nietzsche’s words must have, too. Nietzsche’s lyrical “I” declares “happy is he who still has a home!” But the speaker then chastises a “fool”—possibly himself—who leaves the town because of the encroaching winter landscape.80 The fool soon flies with other birds and joins the smoke that rises to the skies. The poem closes with a repetition of the first stanza, except that the last line is changed to a warning: “woe unto him who has no home!”81 The voice in Walden’s Lied ends on an eighth note, quickly disappearing, it seems, as he flies away; then the pounding of chords resound for measure after measure, insisting on the severity of his choice.
Although this lonesome, flying figure in the poem and Walden’s pianistic supplement feel ominous in isolation, the Lied might not have struck that chord (or that chord only) in the context of the complete program in Berlin. It was followed by “On the Vision and the Riddle,” in which Zarathustra tells intertwined tales and asks his audience, “What did I see then as a parable [Gleichnis]?” Each audience member, then, was encouraged to find a way to leap into metaphorical congruence. The evening closed with “To the Mistral: A Dance Song.”82 It is an ecstatic song about joining the “mistral,” the strong north wind on the Italian and French Riviera. The poem’s “I” calls to the wind, “I run to you dancing, gliding, / dancing as you pipe and sing: / You without a ship and rudder, / you as freedom’s freest brother, / over raging seas do spring.”83 There may be terrible loneliness, then, as “Isolated” powerfully intimates, but the greatest joy comes with embracing the mistral: “Let us chase the overcasters, / world maligners, rain-cloud pastors, / let us tear the dark sky’s veil! / Let us roar . . . Free spirits’ spirit, / joy uplifts me when you’re near, / it makes me blow like a storm gale [dem Sturme gleich]!—.”84 The overarching goal might be to make the storm one’s home. We do not know if the mistral suggested it, but such a storm would one day blow as Der Sturm in Berlin, and its effects would be felt far across the ocean.
Figure O.7. Herwarth Walden, “Vereinsamt” (with text by Friedrich Nietzsche), op. 14, unpublished score, 1905, 1. GSA 72/3035 Seite 1 Blatt 1 verso, Klassik Stiftung Weimar.
Thus, the Nietzsche Evenings presented many a Gleichnis and coalesced into their own musical and poetic Gleichnisse. Far from Berlin, at his medical residency in the Black Forest city of Freiburg im Breisgau, Walden’s friend Döblin wrote that he had heard about the “overflow crowd” in the northern metropolis; apparently there were many souls eager to dance with the Nietzschean storm.85 Each member of the audience was invited to consider and possibly to assimilate the presentation as revelation. J. Hillis Miller invites us to experience Gleichnis in Nietzsche in just this way. He cites Zarathustra from “The Homecoming”:
here you are in your own home and house; here you can speak everything out and pour out all the reasons, nothing here is ashamed of obscure, obstinate feelings. / Here all things come caressingly to your rhetoric and they flatter you, for they want to ride on your back. Here you ride on every parable [Gleichnis] to every truth.86
In this special (metaphorical) home, parable (Gleichnis) leads to truth. Miller offers this penetrating gloss, which I quote at length:
In Nietzsche’s covert little parable, Nietzsche the parabolist of Zarathustra is Dionysus to whom things come crowding around as caressing, flattering, beseeching animals asking to ride on Dionysus’s back. This figure then instantly reverses. The things-become-words are now animals on whose backs Nietzsche-Dionysus “rides to every truth.” This strangely reversible image is of course a figure for the figure of metaphor. The word metaphor means “transport.” A metaphora in modern Greek is a truck on which you might send your luggage or other valuables from here to there. A metaphor is a means of transportation, the vehicle of its meaning, the tenor, but in order for the metaphor to become the vehicle on which the inspired poet might ride to truth, the poet has first himself to be the vehicle, the broad back on which all things ride as language. The breakdown of the distinction between literal and figurative language, tenor and vehicle, occurs in that reversal or chiasmus. The carrier becomes the carried.87
Note Miller’s word choice: “The carrier becomes the carried.” We have heard that before, when Walden opened the First German Autumn Salon: “The painter paints what he sees in his innermost senses; the expressions of his being; all that is transitory is for him only metaphor; he plays life; every impression from outside becomes an expression from within for him. He is the carrier and the carried.”88
Miller carries this idea still farther: “The hidden truth is opened up or reached in a moment of ‘transport’ in another sense, transport in the sense of—insight, elevation, revelation.”89 Gleichnis is, then, the medium for the revelation of truth. As such, it is—or was shortly to become—the medium of modernism, infinitely reversible and flouting of distinctions; it embraces a free flow of genres and roles. The modernist subject in formation passively responds to what is given and actively flies away upon the same. He, too—or she, as the blending of passive and active might suggest—becomes the medium of vital forces and gives them, in turn, to the world. Miller suggests: “Another way to put this extraordinary linguistic experience would be to say that the things themselves are catachreses, the expression of a truth which can be said in no other way.”90 He then rephrases his extraordinary claim: “In parable [Gleichnis] the realistic narrative is the vehicle of a meaning, the magical opening up of a meaning which is incapable of being expressed in any other way.” Magical? Have we returned to the mystical element that Liszt found in Wagner and that Baudelaire found in Liszt? Maybe we have. Miller concludes: “Commentary on a parable [Gleichnis] can only in one way or another repeat it, that is, present itself as another parabolic expression.”91 The way is clear, then, as if opened by a storm. For truths of modernism to open up to us, we must avail ourselves to the vehicles—Gleichnisse—that come to us lovingly when we find ourselves at home, when we are ready to ride and be ridden.
The Metaphors of Modernism
There are Gleichnisse in modernism that reveal truths that we cannot “see” any other way. Paying close attention to metaphor is also consistent with the approach of Walden’s contemporary, the sociologist Georg Simmel, who spoke at the Verein für Kunst and remained tangentially connected to Der Sturm. Quoting Simmel, David Frisby writes: “To fully grasp the significance of an epoch, we cannot search for laws and causal explanation: ‘Rather, only in symbols and examples can this deep living opposition in all that is human be grasped.’”92 Walter Benjamin’s attention to metaphor as potentially revelatory is analogous.93 Given the importance of Gleichnis to Der Sturm and the Société Anonyme, it has become clear to me that we can approach their truths only if we try to apprehend their metaphors.
We need not look far—neither for the roots of art, as Walden wrote in 1915, nor for the metaphors of modernism. Allegorizing the musical and theatrical impetus for Walden’s initial approach, each of the present volume’s four chapters, following this “Overture,” is called an act. “Piano,” “Water,” “Glass,” and “Home” have presented themselves to me, after many years of reading in and around Der Sturm and the Société Anonyme, with the involuntary rush of revelation. Baudelaire’s citation of Liszt already provides most of them, and it becomes all the more significant when we learn that Liszt taught Ansorge, that is, Liszt was Walden’s piano teacher’s teacher. Thus, act 1 is “Piano,” coming first, as it did for Walden. His earliest piano compositions, written for the poet Else Lasker-Schüler (Figure O.8), demonstrate his penchant for an aesthetics of empathy and response. This photograph of Ivan Puni’s exhibit at Der Sturm in 1921 (Figure O.9) reveals that at some point Walden obtained a grand piano for the gallery; he is known to have played regularly and ardently. It is no wonder, then, that Kandinsky found his first great sympathizer in Walden. In Kandinsky’s synesthetic treatise, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912), the artist repeatedly describes artistic communication with the extended metaphor of the piano. In an excerpt that Walden selected to reprint in Der Sturm, Kandinsky writes, “the artist is the hand that purposefully sets the human soul vibrating by pressing this or that key (=form).”94 The metaphor helps us appreciate embodied, multisensory reception of art.
Act 2 turns to the next most accessible metaphor in Baudelaire’s citation of Liszt: “Water.” Recall that for Liszt, the “wave” or “cloud” hides the composition behind or beneath it. It is not superficial, though; it is the metaphor that helps us apprehend the whole structure. Water flowed freely at Der Sturm, not least in its very name. Döblin’s “Conversations with Calypso,” one of the earliest appearances of Gleichnis in Sturmian texts, presents aesthetic theory as a dialogue between the mythical Odysseus and the Siren Calypso. In this version, Odysseus is the sole survivor of a storm at sea, from which he washes up on the shores of Calypso’s island. As he becomes intimate with the Siren, the two discuss the nature of music, which is said to be like water.
Water carries ambivalence at Der Sturm and at the Société Anonyme, however. In the Sturm book Kandinsky, 1901–1913 (Figure O.10), the Dutch poet Albert Verwey likens Kandinsky’s painting to flowing water, but the painter’s text about his Picture with White Edge (1913) reveals his need to shore up the flow in his painting with a framing edge. The appearance of water in canvasses by Kandinsky’s longtime partner, Gabriele Münter (whom Walden also championed), complicates our perception of gender differences in modern art. Then, Kurt Schwitters, another favorite of both Der Sturm and the Société Anonyme, introduces the Gleichnis of water as the repetitive drip of a faucet, the plumbing that humankind invented to control water that cannot be controlled, however rhythmically it echoes the rhythm of life.95 Such imaginary plumbing resonates unexpectedly well with pivotal avant-garde art conceived on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean, to wit, with Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) and the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s infamous pipe on a wooden base, titled God (ca. 1917).
Figure O.8. Cover of Herwarth Walden, “Dann” (with text by Else Lasker-Schüler), op. 1, no. 1, 1901, illustrated by Marc Chagall, in Gesammelte Tonwerke (Berlin: Der Sturm, 1912). Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin—Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Sturm-Archiv, Handschriftenabteilung. Photograph from bpk Bildagentur / Art Resource, New York.
Figure O.9. Interior of Der Sturm gallery, Berlin, 1921, with installation by Ivan Puni and grand piano at left. Copyright 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.
The subject of act 3, “Glass,” is not as immediately apprehensible as that of “Water,” but Liszt’s “real structure” that “glitter[s] before our eyes” also suggests this third Gleichnis. Susan Bernstein interprets this “structure” that reveals itself in time as “compositional strategy,” but it is also architectural.96 Liszt’s shiny, bejeweled temple resonates with the expressionist resurgence of interest in ancient, brilliant, and transformative glass temples, as documented by Rosemarie Haag Bletter.97 With these connections in mind, it becomes less surprising that Paul Scheerbart’s Glasarchitektur (Glass Architecture, 1914), which proved inspirational to a generation of modernist architects, was published by Der Sturm. A fresh look at the book reveals its heretofore forgotten endpapers, designed for the volume’s limited edition by Scheerbart’s wife, Anna. That same year, the visionary architect Bruno Taut’s Glashaus (1914) was erected for the famous Cologne Werkbund exhibit. It is well known that Taut’s building’s cornice included Scheerbart’s aphorisms about the transformative power of glass and that Scheerbart dedicated his book to Taut, but it deserves to be more widely known that Walden exhibited a model of the Glashaus at Sturm gallery in the months before the exhibit opened in Cologne.
Figure O.10. Cover of Herwarth Walden, editor, Kandinsky, 1901–1913 (Berlin: Der Sturm, 1913). Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin—Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Abteilung Historische Drucke, Signatur: 4″ Nt 3450 / 20 : R. Photograph from bpk Bildagentur / Art Resource, New York.
Although architecture is a major focus of act 3, I also explore the metaphorical value of glass in other media. Glass, we discover, is rarely just glass. While its use is advocated and its transformative properties are hailed, its potential for transparency looms large over modern art, architecture, and theory. Recognizing that modernist glass architecture is not all transparent, the architects Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky distinguished between “literal and phenomenal” transparency half a century ago.98 Following their example, I make a case for transformative translucence in the art of Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Paul Klee, August Macke, Jacoba van Heemskerck, and László Moholy-Nagy. Schwitters and Duchamp reappear in this context; I argue that their techniques to render glass specifically nontransparent underscore the role of glass as Gleichnis in modern art.
Finally, act 4 is “Home.” For Nietzsche, home is the figurative site where one is most receptive to the revelation of Gleichnis. Home is both more figurative and more literal for Walden and Der Sturm than it was for Liszt. It is more figurative in that Liszt does not specify “home” in the passage that Baudelaire cites—that “structure” is a temple—but for Der Sturm, home approximates the experience of music that Liszt describes. Indeed, Lasker-Schüler confessed that she knew nothing about musical composition (its “structure”), but she felt that her husband’s music “takes the [her] poems home.”99 For Walden, too, art meant “home.”100 Neither of them meant this literally, as both experienced the “homelessness” familiar to Jews in Germany at the time.101 Lasker-Schüler had fond memories of childhood Elberfeld in the Ruhr region, but she found her poetry and bohemian ways unwelcome when she ventured to return. For his part, Walden’s family had emigrated from Russia to escape the pogroms; his father became a Berlin doctor and his family was comfortable, but surely the young Georg Lewin, as Walden was named at birth, registered his family’s lack of local roots.102 His second wife, Nell, later recalled that “he cherished no memories.”103 Walden lived in the present and for the future.
However, I argue that Walden’s acceptance of his nom de guerre—which Lasker-Schüler purportedly bestowed on him circa 1901 and which he used from then on—does not signal an acquiescence to homelessness but an effort to make a home, a metaphorical site of creativity and renewal. No one knows for sure, but it has been suggested that Walden’s adopted surname referred to the Walden of Henry David Thoreau (1854), to a cabin by a pond in the woods where the philosopher and poet went to be at one with the world. On first glance, the solitary, rural retreat might make little sense in connection with an urban networker par excellence like Herwarth Walden, but its utopian unity of home, embrace of the real present, and creativity ring true.
Here the metaphorical home turns literal, as Walden always lived where he worked and created art. With Lasker-Schüler, this was in cramped apartments, but after Walden founded the gallery in 1912, he and his new wife Nell always lived in an apartment directly adjoining the public space (Figure O.11). Given Walden’s commitment to the “immediacy” of art, it seems fitting that the historian Freya Mülhaupt describes the building’s layout as follows: “On the first floor the apartment was attached directly [immediately, unmittelbar] to the exhibiting rooms.”104 In addition, the Waldens amassed a spectacular collection of modern art, which they opened to the public twice a week (in addition to the current exhibit in the gallery). This very modern mix of public and private was literally their home and figuratively a home for art, but it was not home in a conservative, nostalgic way.105 Their metamorphosing home echoed the extraordinarily prescient—and conflicted, especially regarding gender—assessments of the modern home in the writing of Simmel, who formulated some of his groundbreaking and influential theory of modernity under the auspices of the Verein für Kunst, which Walden folded into Der Sturm.
Figure O.11. Herwarth and Nell Walden in their dining room, Potsdamer Strasse 134A, Berlin, with paintings by Marc Chagall: Half-Past Three (The Poet) (1911, Philadelphia Museum of Art), on left, and Flying Carriage (1913, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), on right. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin—Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Sturm-Archiv, Handschriftenabteilung. Photograph from bpk Bildagentur / Art Resource, New York.
Modernism was ambivalent about home, and a close examination of its “place” in the art of Der Sturm is instructive. Schwitters’s close relationship with Der Sturm leads us in this context to his Merzbau, that endlessly shifting installation, “cathedral,” and “atelier” bridging the private and public spaces of the artist’s family’s home in Hannover. Schwitters named Walden one of three people who truly understood his creation.106 Schwitters’s Merzbau provides the opportunity to consider the gender of home and of exile as well. The latter often enjoys a vaunted position in the heroicizing rhetoric of modern art, but its position as a masculine prerogative requires closer attention. With the rise of Nazi Germany, Schwitters was forced to leave home for Norway and then England, but his loving wife, Helma, stayed home to care for both sets of aging parents, and to survive the house’s destruction by bombing, only to die of cancer before she ever saw Kurt again. I dare say neither was more heroic.
Home, finally, underscores the remarkable links between European and American modernism, as the Schwitters–Dreier correspondence suggests. Although the connections have passed nearly invisibly into the historical record, the Société Anonyme—arguably the most influential early transmitter of modern art to and within America—modeled its practices on Der Sturm and supported many of the very same artists, in particular, Kandinsky and Schwitters, but also many others, including many women.107 As Richard Meyer has demonstrated, the Société Anonyme encouraged a domesticity long believed to be antithetical to (masculine) modernism.108 The organization’s first gallery was partially furnished to look like a home “decorated” with modern art. Even more, the major International Exhibition in Brooklyn in 1926 staged various domestic “rooms” and, again, “decorated” them with modern art.
Act 4 concludes with a third nexus, that of Peggy Guggenheim and her Art of This Century gallery. T. J. Demos has criticized the homey, womb-like space that Frederick Kiesler designed for the surrealist portion of Guggenheim’s gallery. Echoing the typical heroicization of exile, he prefers what he regards as the uncanny (unheimlich: lit. unhomely) space that Duchamp designed for the First Papers of Surrealism exhibit in New York the same year (1942).109 But I see both spaces otherwise—Kiesler’s, in particular—as a Gleichnis of home for art. I also trace the heretofore lost genesis of Kiesler’s ideas, which circumstances prohibited him from realizing earlier for Dreier and Duchamp at the Société Anonyme, and which, incredibly enough, he first theorized in collaboration with Herwarth Walden in 1924.
Finally, having made a home in this other, pre-Greenbergian modernism, in the “Reprise” I review some moments in the construction of Jackson Pollock, who got his start at the Art of This Century gallery. It is generally accepted that Guggenheim’s adviser, Howard Putzel, recommended the budding abstract expressionist to her. Much less frequently reported is Putzel’s background in art and music criticism; for the former, notably, “musical” qualities garnered the highest praise. Did Putzel hear music in Pollock’s painting? Further, Pollock’s first gargantuan canvas, Mural (1943), was a commission from Guggenheim for the foyer to her private apartment. It was reportedly Duchamp who suggested canvas rather than the wall as material support for the painting; that way the vast work could be both “permanently” installed in the vestibule between private and public spaces and transportable, should Guggenheim choose at some time to make her home elsewhere.110
It was four years later, in 1947, that Pollock made his first two breakthrough “drip” paintings, Cathedral and Full Fathom Five. How might this “cathedral” resonate with the communal work of architecture, graced by stained glass, which proved so inspiring to German expressionists and modernist architects the world over? Having considered the metaphors of modernism, we will see this painting afresh. As for the latter work: its title, reputedly suggested by Pollock’s neighbor, came from a Siren’s song in a play, namely, William Shakespeare’s Tempest. Viewed from this perspective, the painting, which itself boasts a multitude of found objects wrapped in the skeins of paint, becomes a mixed-media, impure appeal to the aqueous medium, the sea, which produces and holds life and death and which is forever host to change. As such, it becomes an allegory of modernism.
Indeed, we find Sirens remain behind the scenes in one last allegory of modernism, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s retelling of the Odysseus myth in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1940). In their version, Odysseus has himself bound to the mast and his ears plugged with wax so that the Sirens’ songs could not tempt him.111 If we follow their lead, we cannot fathom the thrill of the song ourselves or, for that matter, ascertain the presence of any danger. In Döblin’s far-different account, Odysseus not only listens to a Siren; he lives with her. Der Sturm and the Société Anonyme produced metaphorical homes where it was safe to listen to—and potentially to see—the world differently. The only way we can know this modernism is to listen for its songs; let us listen, look, and feel our way to the revelations of the metaphors of modernism.
We use cookies to analyze our traffic. Please decide if you are willing to accept cookies from our website. You can change this setting anytime in Privacy Settings.