The Glashaus

Taut’s Glashaus (Glass house, photograph and plans, 1914, Figures 3.3 and 3.4), a monument of modernist architecture, stood on the eastern bank of the Rhine River, across from the cathedral of Cologne, for only two years. It was accessible to the public for shorter still: a few weeks during the German Werkbund exhibition in the summer of 1914. The outbreak of war—and the need to garrison soldiers on the exhibition grounds (site plan, Figure 3.5)—darkened this temple of light forever.32 Despite its brief existence, the Glashaus aspired to an ideal of glass as Gleichnis in order to enhance clarity of vision, understanding, and empathy for mankind.

The Glashaus had to compete with larger buildings by architects far more prominent than Taut. Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer’s administrative office for a model factory, for example, was an impressive edifice that did, in fact, deliver transparency. Richard Sennett writes:

In this building you are simultaneously inside and outside. . . . From the outside you can see people moving up and down between floors. . . . You can see through walls, your eyes move inside to outside, outside to inside. . . . Gropius and Meyer have used glass in and around the doors so that you can literally look through the building to people entering from the other side.33

Gropius carried this experience to the Bauhaus, first in theory in Weimar, in 1919, then in material glass and steel in his design for the school’s famous complex in Dessau in 1926. In 1941 Siegfried Giedion pointed to such Gropius buildings as illustrative of “space-time,” of which a primary characteristic is “the extensive transparency that permits interior and exterior to be seen simultaneously.”34 A precursor, in his view, was the Eiffel Tower (designed by Gustave Eiffel, Paris, 1889). Giedion writes of that edifice: “To a previously unknown extent, outer and inner space are interpenetrating.”35 The goal of the Bauhaus was to turn this visual union into material union of the arts and social union of their makers, all in order to build a more united society for all. The American artist Lyonel Feininger, who had exhibited works at Der Sturm before joining the Bauhaus in 1919, produced an aptly titled woodcut, The Cathedral of Socialism (1919), to grace the institution’s published manifesto.36 His image symbolizes this synthesis with its interlocking facets ascending to the sky and simultaneously spreading across the whole page.

Such transparency, to be sure, shares in utopian dreams—which accounts, in part, for its staying power. Yet, as Burgin argues, transparency

is also at the origin of the social isolation in and between apartment houses, the death of the street as a site of social interaction, and the practice of “zoning,” which establishes absolute lines of demarcation between work and residential areas, and between cultural and commercial activities. The transparent wall, used by such socialist modernists as Gropius to unite interior with exterior, was destined to become the very index of capitalist corporate exclusivity.37

Even more alarming, as Andre Schuetze observes, “Glass is a building material not only for utopias, promising clarity, openness, and candour; at the same time, its transparency offers the possibility of observation and surveillance.”38

Schuetze, however, gestures toward the characteristic that preserves the utopian spirit of glass: translucence. Regarding the writing of Scheerbart—whom Benjamin also admired and to whom Taut dedicated the Glashaus—Schuetze declares: “One cannot compare Scheerbart’s glass world with contemporary architecture, not even with modernist buildings that were constructed immediately after the First World War, because glass is not the same as glass. With Scheerbart, the invisible was not yet to be revealed, the transparent was not yet to be seen all the way through.”39 Schuetze does not explain how the “transparent was not yet to be seen all the way through.” Yet there was a metaphorical transparency, I contend, that Scheerbart and Taut embraced, and it was, in fact, “not . . . to be seen all the way through”; literally, translucence produced the desired effect of transparency.

The attentive reader will notice that I dropped Schuetze’s “yet” in the previous sentence. I do so not to imply that Schuetze’s “not yet” is incorrect, for transparency did largely eclipse translucence in the history of architecture, even in its textual records. In 1929, for example, the architect Ludwig Hilbersheimer already recognizes a difference between glass and glass, identifying one as “romantic” and the other as “constructive,” while he also declares, matter-of-factly, that the “characteristic effects” of glass are “lightness and transparency.”40 My reason for avoiding Schuetze’s “not yet” is that the phrase assumes an inevitable development. Instead, I want to recover the moment when Hilbersheimer recognized that different glass effects were in play. To restore translucence to the history of architecture, let us return to Cologne in 1914.

Taut’s Glashaus entry for the Werkbund exhibition in Cologne had been accepted so late in the planning stages that it was not included in the area reserved for buildings by master architects.41 Indeed, it was not ready when the exhibition opened in June 1914, so its construction became part of the exhibition; it was, literally, a work in progress. It gradually took shape just beyond the entrance of the park. According to the surviving site plan (Figure 3.5), one entered the exhibition gate (number 1 on the plan) and saw the stepped entrance to Taut’s pavilion (number 2) directly ahead. Looking left (west), beyond the trees in the contemporary photograph, one would see the Rhine, which flows south to north and, at that time, paralleled the axial orientation of Taut’s pavilion. As noted above, Cologne’s great cathedral rises considerably higher just across the river. But the Glashaus’s more immediate neighbor, to the right of the exhibition’s entrance, was the amusement park (numbers 65–111), which offered the latest electric rides and thrills.42 It is tempting to read the Glashaus as the union of these two worlds, the sacred and profane, the ancient and the modern, the substantial and the electric. The flow of the river and the flows within and between the structures—water, electricity, people, even cash—brought them into an ever-rushing and -shifting counterpoint.43

What was the Glashaus like? According to photographic and written records, Taut’s pavilion gleamed at night, as any glass structure might, but its glow emanated through two layers of glass: the outer, larger panes, which by day reflected the surrounding atmosphere, and an inner layer of small, colorful “Luxfer prisms.” The latter were semitranslucent, colored tiles whose interior ridges increased illumination through refraction.44 Visiting by day, one climbed the steps that rose in the direction of (and parallel to) the neighboring Rhine’s current. After paying a nominal fee, one was directed due right or left, up one of two sets of gracefully curving, glass brick stairs (Figure 3.6) rising to the cupola. Daylight filtered through its blue, green, and yellow prismatic ceiling (Figure 3.7). As darkness began to fall, multicolored electric bulbs radiated light. Thus both natural and artificial light entered from beyond the structure, yet from within one could not see outside.

After soaking in the atmosphere of the dome, one could look down through the oculus. In this rare photograph taken inside the structure (Figure 3.8), we see a group of men, including Scheerbart, on the far left, standing at the railing around that oculus. Following another set of stairs down to the darker, more mysterious room below, one discovered a glass-tile atrium with a cascade of water streaming still farther down (Figure 3.9). It flowed south, reversing and symbolically counterbalancing the great stream of the Rhine just beyond. Now one joined the flow of the water (metaphorically); the carefully orchestrated itinerary led one down steps alongside the waterfall. Taut, in fact, specified that the path through the building was “komponiert” (composed).45 Then one came, finally, to the darkest space, a niche lined in purple velvet, where, perhaps most surprising of all, one heard the whirring and clicking of a machine behind a translucent glass screen. It was a kaleidoscope. Although there are no known photographs of the space, we can identify its location in Taut’s drawings (Figure 3.4). In the center-right section, the machine, the translucent screen, and the slightly angled floor and ceiling of the niche stand in profile on the far right. According to the prospectus, the artists Adolf Hoelzel, Franz Mutzenbecher, and “others” had selected the colored-glass fragments that appeared in an infinite number of random yet symmetrical combinations over time.46 The viewer perceived this ever-changing and blending symphony of colors both in its projection on the two-dimensional screen that separated him or her from the machine and in the viewer’s own (metaphorical) melting and mixing with the colors as they enveloped him or her in this space. After this rich, sensory experience, the viewer ascended to the light of day—and the everyday.

Evidence suggests that when visitors left the Glashaus, their recollections lost the specificity that I have endeavored to provide. Nonetheless, their accounts are striking not only for their jubilation but also for their collective imprecision. “The sight that opens above you is overwhelmingly beautiful,” reads one of many similar accounts.47 “The warm, mild waves of light surge through the dome and spread an indescribable fantasy mood throughout the space,” that writer continues.48 Behne—who later (mistakenly) praised Taut and Loos for light-filled windows—gives more precise detail, but he lost his restraint when concluding: “Anyone who enters the cupola and has any receptivity for beauty at all will be excited by this wonderful impression. That is a space that has never existed before: in its purity and ease and in this glorious unity of light.”49 Years later, Taut offered his own telling impression: “For the most part the puzzled men tried to find crutches for their understanding, but women and children, without exception, gave themselves over to the effect.”50

Whether or not this gendered interpretation holds, these quotations, taken together, suggest that experiencing the Glashaus was something like the oft-reported experience of the “oceanic feeling” or the Gesamtkunstwerk: an overwhelming flow and mixture of colors and sensations all resolving in harmony. Such an experience requires that one give oneself over to it, which many contemporaries interpreted as feminization and, thus, may account for Taut’s evaluation, demonstrable or not. How cognizant were participants of the Gesamtkunstwerk model, though, and what might it have signified for them?

To begin with, the flyer circulated on-site recorded Taut’s (and Scheerbart’s) conviction that “the Gothic cathedral is the prelude to glass architecture.”51 Not only did the cathedral across the river literally precede the Glashaus’s construction, but it preceded it in a visitor’s consciousness, its soaring visual rhythms remaining with him or her as a prelude or an overture does in memory while one experiences an opera. The allusion to music is reinforced by Taut himself in Der Sturm in February 1914, mere months before the Werkbund exhibition opened. In “A Necessity,” he writes:

The Gothic cathedral is the sum of all of its artists; filled with a wondrous sense of union, they achieved an all-encompassing rhythm that rang through the architecture of the building. . . . Let us [today] work on a magnificent building! One that is not architecture alone but in which everything—painting, sculpture, all together—forms a greater architecture, and in which architecture is once more subsumed into the other arts. . . . The whole will ring with a single, magnificent harmony.52

Architecture, in this representation, makes music.

Although Taut did not publish his theatrical production, The Builder of the World, until 1920, its subtitle alone affirms the direction that I am attributing to his work: “Architecture-Play for Symphonic Music.”53 Indeed, Angelika Thiekötter has identified many parallels between the guided tour of the Glashaus and the development of the abstract “plot” of Builder of the World.54 The Glashaus may have inspired this visual opera, the central figure of which was, not unexpectedly, a cathedral.55

Thus, although the Glashaus was in all likelihood silent—aside from the murmurs of delight and the whir of the hidden kaleidoscope—it calls out to be understood as a Gesamtkunstwerk, as some historians have recognized.56 Perhaps most significant, the architecture historian Kai Gutschow recognizes that a close “antecedent of Taut’s work can be found in the wide array of Gesamtkunstwerk theory and experiments that blossomed amidst eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romanticism, as well as the turn-of-the-century applied arts movements that influenced Taut’s early training.”57 He foregrounds the “immersive, theatrical, and experiential” aspects of the exhibition building; these, he argues, render it a forerunner of today’s “installations.” Gutschow concentrates on the Glashaus as “among the first exhibition buildings designed primarily as a mechanism to create vivid experiences throughout, from exclusively optic to partly haptic.” Finally, he, too, cites visitors who “frequently remarked on the profound emotions they encountered, not merely the experiences of the five senses, but of the psychic and often visceral reactions they had.”58

Gutschow’s research contributes to our understanding of visitors’ metaphysical, if not spiritual, responses to this aesthetic environment. In their anthology on the aesthetics of the Gesamtkunstwerk, Anke Finger and Danielle Follett argue that the total work of art fulfills three purposes: aesthetic, metaphysical, and political.59 Building on Gutschow’s scholarship, I suggest that the Glashaus fulfills all three. The Glashaus materialized a radical utopian vision to improve humankind. Receptive visitors together experienced a glorious aesthetic unity; Richard Wagner’s Art and Revolution (1849) had sparked the hope that such shared aesthetic pleasure would translate into a harmonious people.60 More concretely, to help visitors make the connection between the Glashaus and its politics, a ring of sayings was inscribed around its architrave. Scheerbart, a committed pacifist, wrote the sayings, including “Colored glass destroys hatred,” which one read overhead upon entering.61 This mixture of language, color, and architecture underscores the Gesamtkunstwerk ideal of unifying the arts for a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Translucence is essential here. Pondering the utopian potential of glass while traversing the space of the pavilion might lead one to think expansively about the world. Precisely because one could not see outside, the visitor might be more likely to relinquish control of time and space, that is, to allow for the charged atmosphere to work its magic. (Taut’s statement notwithstanding, women and children were not the only ones to submit to this marvelous effect.) Thus the Glashaus activated a power traditionally attributed to theater, a darkened space explicitly shut off from the outside world. Here one might engage in the fantasy of people coming together in harmony worldwide, just as the colorful light pervaded the space and the lovely rush of the cascade. It would remain a fantasy, of course, but it could be far more profound than an experience with ordinary glass might have been. Imagine the Glashaus with transparent glass: from within one could have watched the people lining up outside, wondered why this particular pavilion was so close to the front gate, considered whether to visit the amusement park before or after the more serious architecture in the distance—that is, one could have remained anchored in daily life. Even more, the controlling personality might not just look around but monitor the layout of the ground, the people, their movements—that is, experience the power of surveillance. Translucence, it seems, may lend itself better to utopia.

Scheerbart’s pacifist sayings introduce another critical aspect of this project—collaboration—and collaboration opens Taut’s Glashaus beyond its temporary site in Cologne to Berlin, to other participants, and to other moments of synthesis. The nexus of this expanded network is Walden and Der Sturm, and it spread across the Atlantic with the Société Anonyme. Robert Hodonyi was the first to discern the centrality of Taut and architecture to Der Sturm.62 Walden’s world of mixed media also opens the potential of translucent or otherwise “framed” glass to art not literally (or not entirely) made of glass.

In fact, Walden wanted so much for the Glashaus to succeed that he sent the Swedish painter Gösta Adrian-Nilsson to Cologne to guide tours of the pavilion, to run the kaleidoscope, and to sell copies of Scheerbart’s book, Glass Architecture, which was fresh off Der Sturm’s own press.63 (In the group photograph above, Adrian-Nilsson stands to the far right: Figure 3.8.) I return to Scheerbart’s book below, but first I trace the long-standing creative bond between Scheerbart and Walden; it reveals a collaboration increasingly mediated by the promise of glass.

Scheerbart, fifteen years Walden’s senior, nevertheless belonged to the latter’s longest-standing set of artistic friends in Berlin. Although earlier meetings have been postulated, the earliest surviving correspondence between them dates to 1903.64 The first letter to Walden, from Scheerbart and the anarchist writer Erich Mühsam, is an invitation to collaborate on a proposed pacifist journal with an ironic title, Das Vaterland (The fatherland).65 The journal did not materialize, but that gesture opened a rich vein of collaborative possibilities over the years to come. In early 1904 Walden wrote that he was so taken by Scheerbart’s play Genie Battle that he planned to compose music for it.66 The writer, in turn, was so enthusiastic about the possibility that in subsequent correspondence he referred to the work as “our” Genie Battle.67 Neither the Genie Battle collaboration nor another potential journal came to fruition, but Scheerbart became one of the first speakers at Walden’s newly founded Verein für Kunst in 1904. That lecture, too, became an opportunity to blend the arts: Walden and Scheerbart conferred back and forth by mail before they decided on the proper timing, type, and amount of music to complement the literary presentation.68

The subject of glass appears in their correspondence for the first time in 1905. Scheerbart wrote to consult about the stage set Walden was preparing for a production of Scheerbart’s: “The shiny paper seems just too dangerous to me. Simple walls are supposed to be the ‘background’ behind the actors; for that reason they can’t be too intense—otherwise they don’t stay in the background. I might experiment with a shiny backdrop (maybe with glass) at some later date.”69 Scheerbart was interested in glass not for its own sake but for its potential to contribute to the specific effects he desired.

Walden and Scheerbart must have had passionate discussions about the possibilities of modern theater. In the spring of 1908 they dreamed of founding their own theater (along with Rudolf Blümner, an acting coach and another longtime associate of Walden’s).70 That dream remained just that, but Scheerbart recorded a possible version of it—or, at least, of his own dream—in 1910 in a short story titled, simply, “The Glass-Theater,” in which one character muses:

Just imagine so-called shadow plays with transparent and opaque glass sheets. On to these glass sheets, which can be in all colors, shadows from colored glass can be projected. . . . Cannot extraordinary moods be achieved with these colored shadows? Will this not give a whole new direction to theater art in which glass plays the dominant role?71

The architecture historian Rosemary Haag Bletter recognized that Scheerbart’s “proposed nonobjective color play” dates to the same period in which artists such as Kandinsky were discovering “pure” color in painting, and that it also foreshadows the kaleidoscopic display in Taut’s Glashaus of 1914 and László Moholy-Nagy’s light experiments at the Bauhaus and beyond.72 Let us take her cue, leave Scheerbart for a while, and turn more specifically to visual art.

Walden rented a villa at Tiergarten Strasse 34A for Sturm gallery’s first two exhibits in the spring of 1912. In a potential crossing of paths, Taut worked on a construction site at the same address—but it is likely that he was associated with the project to replace Walden’s villa after its planned destruction.73 Thereafter, Walden opened a permanent gallery at Potsdamer Strasse 134A, off the bustling Potsdamer Platz. In the fall of 1913, though, he rented a still-larger space for the First German Autumn Salon: twelve hundred square meters at Potsdamer Strasse 75, about a mile south of the gallery. Taut may have missed the first two shows, but this extraordinary international exhibition appears to have crystallized his ideas about architecture.

Taut found architectural inspiration essentially from paintings and, to a far lesser degree, prints and sculpture, at the Autumn Salon.74 Architecture historians have called the essay Taut wrote for Der Sturm, “A Necessity,” the “first manifesto of Expressionist architecture.”75 He wrote:

The Gothic cathedral too is the sum of all of its artists. . . . Let us [today] work on a magnificent building! One that is not architecture alone but in which everything—painting, sculpture, all together—forms a greater architecture, and in which architecture is once more subsumed into the other arts. . . . The building must contain rooms that incorporate the characteristic manifestations of the new art: the luminous compositions of [Robert] Delaunay in great stained-glass windows; on the walls Cubist rhythms, the painting of a Franz Marc, and the art of Kandinsky. The piers without and within must await the constructive sculptures of [Alexander] Archipenko; the ornament will be provided by [Heinrich] Campendonk. . . . The whole will ring with a single, magnificent harmony.76

Taut aspires to combine all the arts in a construction that would achieve the social and aesthetic union that he, like many of his contemporaries, projects onto the Gothic past and into the utopian future.77 Each artist he names figured in the recently closed Autumn Salon. Robert Delaunay, in fact, was represented there by the second-largest collection of any other living artist (twenty-one); his wife, Sonia, whose collection included decorative arts objects, was the only one to have more (twenty-seven).78 Correspondence reveals that Walden offered Robert as much space as he wanted; it is possible that the pair enjoyed as much as one-tenth of the twelve-hundred-square-meter space otherwise shared by more than eighty artists.79

Turning to these artists’ nonarchitectural works brings us, surprisingly, still closer to the ideal of nontransparent glass. Earlier in 1913, Robert Delaunay had enjoyed his first solo exhibition at Der Sturm. The paintings that won him wide acclaim belong to his colorful, abstract window series. The most famous of these, Simultaneous Windows (1st Part, 2nd Motif, 1st Replica) (1912, Plate 7), features as the only color reproduction in the Album that Robert and Sonia conceived together and that served as the catalog for that show. The Album actualizes simultaneity in its juxtaposition of orange-and-blue sheets of paper and its orange-and-red braided cord that binds the whole together.80 Highlighting the Album’s significance, Sonia included it among her fancifully collaged book covers at the Autumn Salon that fall.81

Gordon Hughes has recently paid renewed attention to the long-admired painting at the center of the Album. He argues persuasively that the work replicates the process by which we learn to see, that is, to make sense cognitively of the flat color on our retinas (as nineteenth-century science had explained the process). Although other cubists prioritized form over color, inferring from modern optical theory that vision cannot be trusted, Delaunay prioritized color, building on the “realization that infantile vision is initially experienced as pure optical sensation prior to the learned perception of form and space,” a learning process that depends on memory of other things seen and touched in the past.82

From this perspective, Hughes opens up what is otherwise a flat, opaque painting, despite its titular claim to represent a window. If one looks closely, though, opacity becomes translucence, and our eyes accustom themselves to the depth that Delaunay sought to achieve in this “glass” work without glass. Delaunay explains his objective in a letter to Marc: “I am not talking about a mechanical movement, but rather about a harmonic one, because it has to do with simultaneity (simultanéité), that is, depth.”83 Delaunay’s title foregrounds simultaneity, so we know that the prismatic colors that we see are what they appear to be precisely because of their placement adjacent to each other, their “simultaneity.” The colors painted on the canvas and the attached wooden frame read at first as flat pattern, yet they awaken our tactile sensitivity as we recognize their different texture on the separate, though contiguous, supports. Surmising from the title that we are supposed to be seeing through a window, despite the obvious materiality of the actual work, we most easily identify the elongated green triangle in the center of the painting as a view of the Eiffel Tower in the distance.84

Viewers typically stop there, but Hughes encourages us to keep looking. He identifies two broadly brushed, intentional marks in the center of the bottom of the frame as other “windows” seen in the distance. Then he points out something that has long gone unnoticed—miraculously so, because it is one of those things that you cannot not see once you have seen it. Hughes identifies “a face in the yellow field of the viewer’s right-hand side of the painting. The dark green patch of paint, two-thirds of the way down the right-hand side, functions as lips, while the quarter-circle of yellow beneath it forms the chin. The ear nestles in the right-hand corner of the base of the tower” (Figure 3.10).85 It represents a reflection, of course: vague enough to be our own, which we know from experience, and vague enough also to be a record of Delaunay’s own view of the “window” long ago, as Hughes suggests.

With remarkable acuity, Hughes identifies an overlay of an aerial view of the Eiffel Tower, as well as intersecting support beams that one might see from beneath and within the tower. The juxtapositions help us appreciate Giedion’s later perception of interpenetrating interior and exterior spaces. In fact, Giedion writes that the Eiffel Tower “found its artistic revelation” in the paintings of Delaunay.86 However, the historian’s claim of complete transparency for the tower cannot be extended to the paintings. Instead, Hughes’s invitation to look closely at the painting leads me to another startling revelation: there is a second face (Figure 3.11). It materializes out of the orange facets near the top of the viewer’s left-hand side of the painted canvas. Just as the right side of Robert’s face is nearly contiguous with one side of the Eiffel Tower, the curve of the left side of the second face echoes the slope of the other side of the tower, with the important difference that the second profile, however parallel to the tower’s curve it may be, is an inch or two removed from it. Thus this “face” is higher on the canvas and smaller, too, than his, suggesting that “she” stands a bit behind “him” and off to the side. A horizontal bar of deep-orange, overlapping strokes, parallel to the frame just above it, forms her left eye; her nose emanates from the lighter orange that descends close to the vertical edge of the frame (on the viewer’s left-hand side); the suggestion of her dark orange lips seems to emerge from behind some otherwise inexplicable green marks (below and to the right of which her chin gently curves).

I have used “she,” for who is this if not a specter of Sonia Delaunay, looking over the painter’s shoulder, while “her” colors and shapes simultaneously provide the colorful sweep of curtain drawn to the (viewer’s) left side of the painting? And is it not, after all, double vision; does she appear again, a little higher (Figure 3.12)? What had been “eye” in the first Sonia “face” suddenly transforms itself into her “mouth” in the second, overlapping face. Is she simultaneously in two places, or is one or both a memory? She is certainly “there”—wherever that is—and as soon as one looks at and for her.

Sonia’s later Self-Portrait (1916, Figure 3.13) makes the simultaneity of face and abstract arcs and circles more apparent, so we can be reassured that we are not “seeing things.” There is Sonia with orange lips, again: would that we knew her favorite shade of lipstick!87 Further, Sonia and Robert both identified with their work.88 Analyzing a photograph of Robert in front of another painting, the First Disk (1913, private collection)—the photo is inscribed, in part, “Exhibited in Berlin 1914 [sic] at the Autumn Salon” (Figure 3.14)—Hughes argues for its simultaneous representation of the artist and his work, both of which were “exhibited” at the Autumn Salon.89 Following that logic, it makes sense that in the window painting, the edge of the orange face is contiguous with what can only refer to a drawn curtain, for Sonia also made “simultaneous curtains,” some of which were also shown at the Autumn Salon. In the catalog, they are listed as Depth Movement Curtains.90 Sadly, those curtains are likely lost, but this photograph of Sonia (1915, Figure 3.15) shows her surrounded by her appliquéd, quilted, and otherwise assembled clothes, wall hanging, throw, tablecloth, boxes, jewelry, and a fabulous hat with a disk or two reminiscent of the circles in her Self-Portrait. The more we look, the less un-likely it becomes that Robert painted both of them into Simultaneous Windows. Sonia’s ensemble may be more filled with incident than many “modern” interiors, but it also reminds us once more that modern interior, figured by glass, did not prohibit its occupants from leaving traces.

After being prompted by Hughes to see all these layers, I wonder why he did not recognize Sonia in the painting. Presumably he was not looking for her, because in his text he emphasizes Robert’s “increasingly evident individualism.”91 In this sense, Hughes follows the traditional, modernist narrative of the solitary, male, genius artist. Here again is Odysseus, bound to the mast. But we opened our analysis with the fact of collaboration: Sonia and Robert designed the Album together, and, as Whitney Chadwick has shown, their lives and their work from the period are closely intertwined.92 Now, with their simultaneous creativity in mind, something else in the painting suddenly appears, light as day. Those two daubs of paint on the bottom of the frame—the ones that Hughes identifies as “windows” in the distance—transform themselves into the backs of Sonia’s and Robert’s heads as they stand at ground level gazing together at the Eiffel Tower in the distance (Figure 3.16). That is, now they “stand” not in the space of the “window” and their own “reflections” but out of doors, on the Champs de Mars, in the area around the tower itself. Memory, as we learned from Döblin’s Odysseus, shapes the layers of visual perception in this simultaneously singular and retrospectively collective work.

Expectations do as well. Sustained attention to this painting’s initial opacity leads us forward and backward in time to a simultaneously multilayered and clear vision of a world and a life of collaborative production. Feininger expressed it well, although the paintings were not his ostensible subject: “Delaunay and his wife are quite amazing, an optical working together [Zusammenarbeit].”93 Macke wrote about Delaunay’s window paintings: “They are not at all abstract, rather the greatest reality, I see it quite clearly.”94 The significance of his words becomes all the more clear. It is impossible to know how much of this Taut might have recognized, but the fact remains that conscientious vision—what might seem like a metaphorically “transparent” view of our perception of the world—emerges here from the most opaque of “windows.” It is this sort of simultaneously flat and deep, visually arresting and cognitively challenging painting that he proposes as model for the actual windows in his utopian building. Indeed, scholars believe that Taut chose the yellows, blues, and greens of the interior prisms of the Glashaus in overt emulation of Delaunay’s paintings of windows.95

Whatever Taut actually saw at the Sturm gallery and at the Autumn Salon, he was enmeshed in that network during the early months of 1914, during which he planned and executed the Glashaus in Cologne. In the Sturm issue immediately following the one with Taut’s “A Necessity,” Behne published a glowing review of Taut’s new apartment building in Berlin.96 Taut and Scheerbart were introduced and became friends. Taut much admired Scheerbart’s architectural fantasies, which appeared regularly in Der Sturm, and Scheerbart recognized the man who might bring his glass dreams to fruition. Taut invited Scheerbart to write the sayings for the Glashaus, and Scheerbart gladly complied. Walden wanted to publish all the slogans in Der Sturm—but for some reason, Scheerbart said no. Walden may have been disappointed by this refusal. If so, it was tempered by the offer of a different opportunity: Scheerbart asked Walden if Der Sturm might publish his book, Glass Architecture.97 Within a week, their correspondence reveals Walden said yes; the two old friends would collaborate again. It was March 1914; Scheerbart was eager for the book to appear already by May, when the Werkbund exhibition would open. With remarkable speed, the team completed the book in time for Adrian-Nilsson to peddle it at the exhibition in Cologne in July 1914.98

Before a close look at that book, there is another Der Sturm exhibition that warrants attention. As Hodonyi has reported, the April 1914 exhibit included a model (1:15) of Taut’s Glashaus (Figure 3.17), when the headline show was Klee’s first solo exhibit at that venue.99 Presumably because Klee was not widely known, Walden printed only a flyer for the show—a record previous scholars missed, likely because of its flimsy, transitory nature.100 Yet as Hodonyi discovered, the flyer’s list of Klee’s works faces a one-page essay about the Glashaus by Taut.101

This juxtaposition expands the reach of the “framed” glass ideal still farther. Taut’s description confirms what scholars have been able to glean from photographs and descriptions of the actual Glashaus in Cologne. In addition, its proximity to Klee’s list of drawings and paintings leads to another recognition: Klee’s works were shown together with Taut’s model in what we can only assume was a purposeful combination. Their simultaneous exhibition welcomes our consideration of Klee’s paintings in terms of glass. It is easy to do so (this is also one of those things, like the Delaunays’ reflections, that is obvious once you see it). In Paul Klee and the Decorative in Modern Art, I argued that the order of listed works reveals the artist’s slow assimilation of decorative color and drawing. This mixture of means, if not media, reaches its then current apogee in a group of five watercolors from early 1914: Houses Rising (1914), Town with the Three Domes (1914, Plate 8), The Window (1914), Park (1914), and Memory of a Garden (1914, Figure 3.18).102 No other group of Klees at this time could be, in fact, more window-like.

Park’s current location is unknown; the last data that the Klee Catalogue Raisonné includes is Klee’s note to himself: “Walden-Sturm Nov[.] [19]19 notified as sold and not yet paid.”103 Unfortunately, there are no known reproductions. We do glean one piece of information from this paltry evidence: for five years Walden showed this painting, in rotation, in Berlin and presumably in traveling shows as well.

The Window and Houses Rising are also missing today, although we are fortunate to have reproductions that reveal networks of abstract facets that build uniformly across the picture plane. From Klee’s records, we also know that Walden either bought or sold them in 1916, so they stayed with Der Sturm for two years of at least occasional viewing.104 It is hard to tell from black-and-white reproductions, but the watercolor of The Window appears somewhat transparent, as watercolor often is, but the medium of Houses Rising appears less so. Klee records that he used chalk along with watercolor here, and the small, black-and-white reproduction reveals the chalky substance on the page; therefore, this is no transparent vision but one that requires sustained attention to make out beyond the nearly crusty surface of the cardboard support.

The two remaining works, Town with the Three Domes and Memory of a Garden (the first of which Walden bought, the second of which Klee gave to Walden), remain in all their prismatic, colorful glory.105 Memory of a Garden is the more translucent of the two, although a knot of graphic marks with a ponderous dark area below it in the middle of the painting prohibits any illusion of transparency. Perhaps the titular memory metaphorically blocks the view. Town with the Three Domes is a magical checkerboard of light, with three half circles becoming the suggested “domes.” Klee uses gouache here, and the areas of opacity across the picture reflect that choice. There is a visible “horizon” far in the distance. The angled facets above it suggest colored searchlights, yet their larger shapes emphasize the materiality of the work as a whole. Klee also specially mounted it on green-gray cardboard, which immediately ties the greens in the painting to this flat base and heightens the intensity of the contrasting reds. The mount also explicitly frames the image; it mediates between our world and that of the painting, connecting us all.

Klee, we know, admired the Delaunays, whom he visited in Paris in 1913. Elsewhere I have written about the likely influence of Sonia’s quilting on Klee’s visual imagination.106 Here I underscore Klee’s admiration for Robert’s painting. In 1912 Klee reviewed Robert’s recent work and likened it to “a fugue by Bach.”107 The Frenchman was so pleased that he chose Klee to translate his own essay “On Light” for Der Sturm in 1913.108 It is a loose translation, one that emphasizes the musicality of Robert’s principles (or the reception thereof). In a striking example, the French l’harmonie (harmony), which might have appeared in the German simply as die Harmonie, transforms instead on two occasions into “der Zusammenklang.”109 The latter also means harmony, but it has a distinctively more aural connotation than the former; literally, it is a “sounding together.” These artists all believed in the transformative power of light mediated by glass.

Peering into the future of the Société Anonyme, we notice an odd lacuna: neither Robert nor Sonia Delaunay ever exhibited there. Dreier’s attention to Klee, however, compensates in part for this oversight. Dreier began purchasing Klees at Der Sturm in 1920. His inclusion in the fourteenth Société Anonyme exhibit in New York in spring 1921—an exhibit dedicated entirely to Sturm artists—was his works’ first public appearance in the United States.110 After meeting Klee in Weimar in October 1922, the two began to plan Klee’s first American solo exhibit.111 Among the paintings shown at the Société Anonyme’s new gallery in January–February 1924 was Red/Green Architecture (yellow-violet gradation) (1922, Yale University Art Gallery), which Dreier bought at Der Sturm in 1922.112 The oil (with watercolor around the edges) is dark, moody, and more opaque than the watercolors above. The different medium accounts partly for the shift. Even more, Klee appears to have explored the other side of light that he once admired in Delaunay. This near opacity nevertheless reveals incredibly delicate and refined juxtapositions of tone and hue, and it reveals a continuing interest in the transformative possibilities of colored glass.

Surely, then, Klee’s window-like paintings and Taut’s model of the Glashaus were together by design at Der Sturm in 1914. They were in any case complemented by the appearance of Scheerbart’s book, Glass Architecture, to which we now turn. In honor of their mutual respect, Scheerbart dedicated the volume to Taut. Scheerbart’s collection of 101 “chapters” opens with the following:113

We live for the most part in closed rooms. These form the environment from which our culture grows. Our culture is to a certain extent the product of our architecture. If we want our culture to rise to a higher level, we are obliged, for better or for worse, to change our architecture. And this only becomes possible if we take away the closed character from the rooms in which we live. We can only do that by introducing glass architecture, which lets in the light of the sun, the moon, and the stars, not merely through a few windows, but through every possible wall, which will be made entirely of glass—of colored glass. The new environment, which we thus create, must bring us a new culture.114

Let us open up our dark rooms, Scheerbart says, and the light will make us better people. In chapter 73, he writes: “Our hope is that glass architecture will also improve mankind in ethical respects. It seems to me that this is a principal merit of lustrous, colorful, mystical and noble glass walls” (63). Scheerbart’s Glass Architecture speaks to the aesthetic, metaphysical, and political aspects of the Gesamtkunstwerk of glass. This is the dream of the “Cathedral of Socialism” in its incipient form.

What about transparency? Here I must ask for the reader’s patience, because an early reference in Scheerbart’s book appears to laud transparency. Yet we need to remember that the proper apprehension of translucence takes time. In chapter 15, Scheerbart writes, “Reinforced concrete is a building material which is very strong and weather-resistant. It has been rightly acclaimed by architects as the ideal material. A pity that it is not transparent: only glass is” (45). Clearly, Scheerbart approves of reinforced concrete, but he values the propensity of glass to be transparent. But is this literal transparency? Salomo Friedländer, who also belonged to the Walden–Scheerbart circle (Figure O.5), wrote in 1913 that Scheerbart’s “adventurous predilection for glass in all lights and colors” was linked to an “ardent need for purity, clarity, transparency, penetration.” Scheerbart’s ideal, Friedländer believed, represents the “the most radical banishment of all possibilities of darkening.”115 What Friedländer does not say, and what scholars to date have missed, is that this metaphorical transparency is not dependent on actually transparent glass—even if glass can have that remarkable quality.

A closer reading of Glass Architecture supports this claim. Scheerbart, we discover, has utopian hopes for the possibilities of translucent glass. He writes, in chapter 35, “It will seem very natural that ventilators should have a principal part to play in a glass house, and will supplant everything window-like. When I am in my glass room, I shall hear and see nothing of the outside world. If I long for the sky, the clouds, woods and meadows, I can go out or repair to an extra-veranda with transparent glass panes” (52). He reinforces this idea in chapter 47: “The word ‘window’ will disappear from the dictionaries. Whoever wants to look at nature can go on to his balcony or into his loggia, which of course can be arranged for enjoying nature as before” (55).

Is it possible that the widely claimed literary impetus for modernist glass architecture envisioned not only colored glass, which already differs from most expectations, but also non-transparent, colored glass? Scheerbart has no problem with the continuation of human pleasure in viewing nature. We simply will have to go outside to see it (or go to a transitional space that Scheerbart concedes may have transparent glass). We will not be able to see outside from inside the ideal glass architecture. Scheerbart, writing about Taut’s Glashaus, confirms these conclusions: “Glass, in its translucent (not: transparent) [lichtdurchlässigen (nicht: durchsichtigen)] state, has in fact not [yet] fulfilled its potential as material for walls, because there is no other building material with which one could achieve similarly magnificent effects.”116 Scheerbart’s specific formulation, “translucent (not: transparent),” is surely an effort to highlight the distinction that many others gloss over. Addressing building professionals, Scheerbart stresses the practicality of his promotion of translucent glass, declaring: “It is by no means a utopian claim.”117 Yet he does not abandon what, in hindsight, we would have to consider a utopian dream: “Due to its nature, glass architecture strives toward cathedral-like effects, because of which, in my opinion, ethical effects might also be derived from it.”118

Finally, although Scheerbart was primarily a writer, in the present context it is illuminating to explore some of the visual aspects of his work.119 To do so, it is worth the effort to locate one of the special editions of Glass Architecture. Advertisements in Der Sturm reveal that the regular edition cost two marks, but this limited edition cost twenty-five marks. It was very special; it was available in “twenty numbered and signed copies on Van Gelder paper, cover and endpaper by Anna Scheerbart.”120

So this, too, was a collaborative project (beyond Walden’s editing of Scheerbart’s prose). With blue swirls, accented by streaks of red and green, the cover by Scheerbart’s wife, Anna, attains a resplendent marbleized effect.121 It might call to mind the wonderful world of color that Scheerbart prophesies within the pages of the book. The surprise comes, though, when one opens the cover, front or back, and looks closely at the pasted-paper endpapers. Let us start at the front (Figure 3.19). There is no color here; the dirty gray does not invite the eye to luxuriate in it. But if we spend a little time gazing at the endpaper inside the front cover, we begin to believe that this gray is not abstract for abstraction’s sake (or not only that); rather, we think that we are looking at water streaking down a pane of glass.122 The lower-left corner, especially, has this dripping effect; the darkest spots on the right make us think of some actual smudge that the water might collect and then wash away. Perhaps only those of us who have washed windows see this right away. From another perspective, in Glass Architecture, Scheerbart idealizes water in relation to glass; he writes that its reflective properties make it a natural partner with glass.123 Taut echoes that call with his cascade in the Glashaus.124 Here the paper itself appears as if it were a pane of glass. But we cannot see through it. The patterns of dripping water preclude that, not to mention the fact that the paper, too, is nontransparent, especially as it is permanently affixed to the cover and first page of the book. An impression of translucence emerges through an opaque medium.

Another delight is the endpaper at the other end of the book (Figure 3.20), which shares the gray tones of the front endpaper, but looks like something altogether different. It appears to be a hard surface from which parts have crumbled away; or maybe it was never smooth and even. It does not look like paper, though. It recalls an uneven plane of concrete—that other building material Scheerbart recommends.125 In his writing, Scheerbart seems to regret that concrete is not transparent, but here, in Anna Scheerbart’s paper, we enjoy a translucent vision of the strength and beauty of its opacity. Scheerbart’s published letters to his wife demonstrate that he found her handmade paper “exquisite” (köstlich).126 He dedicated Glass Architecture to Taut, but his contemporary novel about glass architecture, The Gray Cloth and Ten Percent White (1914), reveals his debt to his wife’s inspiration, in art and life: “To my dear bear, Frau Anna Scheerbart.”127

In the early twentieth century, Ersoy maintains that “the substance [glass] that had been recognized as the philosopher’s stone in the hands of the alchemist was transformed into an industrial commodity bound by the logic and rules of technology. Seemingly, the redefinition of glass as an industrial artifact without any precedent reframed it as an emblem of modern technology in its most advanced form.”128 As such, “glass” was subjected to the splintering routinization of industrialization—the same alienation that Wagner had sought to combat with the Gesamtkunstwerk already in the mid-nineteenth century. Is it still possible to regain some of the forsaken potential? The translucent artwork promises transformation. But part of its point is not to position the viewer as omniscient. The way to greater spiritual and intellectual growth—and potential communion with humanity, if not the universe—is to look very closely and experience something that we cannot see all the way through or the limits of which are marked by a frame. It is a multisensory beholding, joined with the intellect, a relationship with the world imagined by Nietzsche, Bergson, and Döblin. In fact, in 1910, Walden serialized an earlier novel by Scheerbart, The Emperor of Utopia (1904), which makes this clear. The emperor—who forsakes his rule for one year so as to discover the purpose of his country and his role in it—learns that “thought is, naturally, only a knot of sensual images,” only some of which are conscious and all of which influence each other. The emperor discovers that his purpose is to facilitate heightened sensitivity in his people—what Scheerbart encapsulates in the neologism Weltlebenmiterleben (lit. world-living-with-experience).129 In the word we see on the page, “to live” (leben) is repeated as the root of “to experience” (erleben); we also “hear” a sensual, rhythmic repetition that reinforces the premise, so we experience an integrative, empathetic knotting of senses and intellect that Scheerbart depicts.

Such knots are not “transparent.” Behne, finally, may have exaggerated Loos’s and Taut’s use of clear windows in one publication, but he tried to communicate the significance of translucence, in particular, when he reflected, after the Werkbund exhibition, on his experience of the Glashaus:

That is a space that has never existed before: in its purity and ease and in this glorious unity of light. This hall is radiant and shining like a jewel, yet full of gentleness and expanse. Of course it is not meant to be a lookout or observation room! The appeal is not that we can now see everything that goes by outside; the walls, rather, are non-transparent [undurchsichtig]. So why does one not just stick with brick, and what is glass for, if it is in fact not transparent [durchsichtig]? Yes, the value of glass is not exhausted by the fact that one can see through it. That is just one, purely practical quality of glass, the one that we have put to our service. But over and above that, glass is in itself a material of unique beauty, and even when we cannot see through it, it has an inestimable significance as wall, as enclosure of a space.130

Behne then builds on a quotation from the Glashaus brochure: “‘The Gothic cathedral is the prelude to glass architecture.’ A glorious prelude!”131 However, the “inestimable significance” that Behne ascribes to translucent glass has remained opaque for some time. If we attend more closely, more patiently, to the Gleichnis of glass, might we not rediscover at least some of its utopian potential?

Macke, Van Heemskerck, Moholy-Nagy

Scheerbart’s Glass Architecture and the Delaunays’ and Klee’s “glass” paintings unite in the Gesamtkunstwerk of Taut’s Glashaus, but they represent just part of the legacy of glass as Gleichnis. Here we explore the complementary contributions of Macke, Jacoba van Heemskerck, and Moholy-Nagy, whose careers were also entwined with Der Sturm and the Société Anonyme (with the exception of Macke, who died in 1914).

Unlike the other artists under consideration here, Macke is well known for his representations of glass, and his subject is the ostensibly transparent glass of shop windows.132 Such “transparency” is, however, fraught: shoppers can see through the glass, but the display is shallow, and the processes of “commodity aesthetics” render viewers’ relationships with the display objects highly artificial. As Wolfgang Fritz Haug established in the 1970s, building on Karl Marx’s theories, the sensual arrangement of colors, shapes, and textures in commercial display robs the objects of use-value and engages potential consumers in the fantasy that characterizes exchange-value.133 Macke’s shop window paintings may illuminate the fetishization of transparency in glass architecture; that is, they may provide a frame through which we recognize its capitalist, masculinist bias.

From 1912 to 1914 Macke made at least twenty-six paintings featuring shop windows.134 He reputedly made the first, Large Bright Display Window (1912, Städtisches Museum, Wuppertal), after having seen Boccioni’s The Street Enters the House (Figure 2.3) and some of Robert Delaunay’s window paintings. He saw the former when Der Sturm’s Futurist show of April 1912 traveled to Cologne in October; he saw the latter when he and Marc traveled to Paris to visit the Delaunays in September that year.135 If he did not see Delaunay’s Simultaneous Windows (Plate 7) then, he would have seen it with the rest of the collection in March of the following year, again in Cologne, and again thanks to Walden’s organization: this was Delaunay’s January 1913 Sturm show on tour. It was after seeing this show that Macke described Delaunay’s paintings as “not at all abstract, rather the greatest reality, I see it quite clearly.”

Historians have stressed similarities between the paintings of Macke, Boccioni, and Delaunay. For example, Johannes Langner points to Macke’s and Boccioni’s shared motif of a female figure seen from behind, looking forward, and Sherwin Simmons notes Macke’s and Delaunay’s shared emphases on connections of “external with internal reality” and the transformative power of light.136 Yet neither historian addresses the paintings’ profoundly different relations between viewers and windows. Both Boccioni’s figure and Delaunay’s figure(s) (revealed in reflection) stand before a window on the interior, looking out (indeed, Boccioni’s has opened the window and moved to the balcony). Yet Macke’s figures stand before a (shop) window on the exterior, looking in from the street.137 Aesthetic merging is, however, promised here, too. Writing in 1913, Karl Ernst Osthaus describes how the display window should entrance its viewer: “The product should take on meaning for him, should insist on itself, such that the intoxicating sheen is forgotten and the product is alone with the person. So alone, that the magical suggestion its threads spin and the affected one cannot rid himself of the idea: I must possess you.”138 Such seduction is at the heart of Adorno and Horkheimer’s later critique of the “culture industry.”139

That said, in the early twentieth century such potentially intoxicating powers already produced ambivalence, which likely explains why vulnerability to them is projected onto women, as Andreas Huyssen argues.140 Taut’s observation about his Glashaus is instructive: “The puzzled men tried to find crutches for their understanding, but women and children, without exception, gave themselves over to the effect.” The ecstasy of the Gesamtkunstwerk may require such feminized relinquishment of control. Art historians, however, have largely missed how men could be susceptible as well. Simmons argues, for example, that Macke’s Hat Shop (1913, Figure 3.21) constructs two specific gazes: the finely clothed woman’s, as she peers from under her own hat at a glass-cased display of more hats, and our own, as we look at her from our safe, critical distance. For Simmons, the right elbow of this female shopper appears to cross the plane of the window, emphasizing her absorption.141 He maintains that Macke’s critical beholder is “best seen” in two of the artist’s paintings that reveal a figure’s own reflection, especially in the watercolor Reflection in the Display Window (1913, Figure 3.22). Here the figure on the right, identifiable as male thanks to his hat, regards either a mannequin or his reflection in the figure to the left. Simmons argues that the probability of reflection over mannequin encourages metaphorical reflection on the part of the beholder as well. In contrast, he maintains: “Woman is provided no such ‘reflection’ in Macke’s series[;] rather her gaze is directed toward the supplement that fashion provides, conforming thereby to the social view of women’s susceptibility to advertising.”142

I am not so sure. In Hat Shop, the (masculine?) beholder’s view is structured by fantasy at least as much as the female figure’s. From our viewing perspective, it seems that there is no window there at all; the completely transparent view of the hats and their stands and hooks in the display is unrealistic. Macke reserves all distortion for the walls behind the display. Yet glass that recedes at an angle (about forty-five degrees from the picture plane, parallel to the presumed plane of the beholder), with daylight before the glass and electric illumination behind it, simply could not disappear—unless it were subject to the fantasy of glass transparency. By the same token, Reflection does suggest a man viewing his own reflection in a shop window, but his purported critical distance is hardly secure. The face he sees is featureless; does he lose a sense of self when he contemplates his image? Even more, both figures are enmeshed in a play of abstract shapes. Initially the “mirror”-image blue and green backgrounds for each face suggest separability. However, consider the angle inscribed from the reflected figure’s right shoulder down to the left edge of the picture and back to the right in a subtle arc that traverses over half of the page to the bottom right (the lower part of the angle borders four shapes below it in succession: green, a reddish brown, bright yellow, and a darker brown—the last one serving also as extension of the body of the main figure on the right): this angle enfolds the two figures together. Critical distance is thus a fantasy here, too. This man is as caught up in the web of light, reflection, and aesthetic effect as any female is in Macke’s paintings—arguably more so than a tentatively projected feminine elbow in Hat Shop suggests.

Behne wrote somewhat cryptically in Macke’s obituary in 1914: “The women in front of the shop windows, the hat displays and the idle ones in the streets and parks were lovingly transposed in the form of a kind joke [in Formen liebenswürdigen Witzes], in a way that did not seem possible to any other of our painters, as they were in no way to be borrowed from [Robert] Delaunay.”143 A “kind joke”? We would do well to remember Sigmund Freud’s instruction to locate truths in apparent jokes.144 Macke’s repetitive instinct to work through this motif—in at least twenty-six paintings—signals at the very least a fascination with it. If “Woman” was represented as or constructed as susceptible to intoxicating display, did he not envy her? Maybe he joined “her” in aesthetic ecstasy more than we have realized. Or maybe “her” elbow was meant to break through the fantasies of transparency and critical distance.

Jacoba van Heemskerck is likely the least known of the artists under consideration here, but she was much admired both by Der Sturm and by the Société Anonyme. Although her work has not held up to the reputation attributed by her partner, Maria Tak van Poortvliet, in the 1924 text for Van Heemskerck’s Sturm Bilderbuch (where Van Poortvliet claims that fellow Dutch recognized Van Heemskerck as heir to Vincent van Gogh), Van Heemskerck is relevant here both as an example of another woman artist supported by these organizations and as another advocate of the Gleichnis of glass.145 She previously exhibited at the 1913 Autumn Salon. Behne praised her, if condescendingly, in 1915: “Such wonderful pictures as these, who could expect them? . . . Courage took the place of what one might have taken for shy restraint. . . . Color tempered until now, has thrown away her veils and stands before us in full glory, victorious.”146

In any case, Walden treasured her, honoring her with a Bilderbuch, and Dreier followed suit, although the two women never met before Van Heemskerck’s untimely death in 1923. Dreier purchased at least seven of Van Heemskerck’s woodcuts at Der Sturm gallery.147 One of them, the two-color woodcut Composition (ca. 1918–20, Figure 3.23), is exemplary of her typically flat designs in stark contrast. Its overall shapes are rooted in landscape—the central black vertical seems to set down roots into the bottom of the image, while other bands meander as branches or streams across the page. Although the design is bound by black around its perimeter, it appears on the verge of spreading, a characteristic that Van Poortvliet addresses: “She [Van Heemskerck] had set the ideal of letting the picture grow into the architectonical surroundings. Although being a thing in itself, yet it could never exist as a mere adornment of the drawing-room wall.”148

In later years Van Heemskerck turned to glass design. According to Van Poortvliet, she designed stained glass for a country house in Wassenaar near The Hague, and

found a welcome occasion to let her composition join in the display of line which the architect had designed, the colors of the glass on the other hand giving the decisive note in the general concert of light playing through them. So we understand how an artist who feels their [sic] mighty impulses must long for the light to fall through her colors, giving them life in a much more intense way than when it simply shines on them.149

Such a characterization of Van Heemskerck’s collaborative efforts with architect, site, and light makes one long to experience this concert in light in person. Walden, who with his second wife, Nell, often visited the artist and her friend in Holland, likely did, but Dreier missed that chance.

By the time Moholy-Nagy arrived in Berlin in 1920, the Great War was over, and revolution had filled the streets, leading to the establishment of the Weimar Republic in 1919. Moholy was an exile. He and many left-leaning Hungarian radicals had sought refuge in Vienna after years of turmoil at home: the progressive Chrysanthemum Revolution (1918–19) was succeeded by the Hungarian Soviet Republic (1919), only for the latter to collapse before Romanian troops invaded Budapest in August that same year. By November Moholy had left for Vienna.150 By March 1920 he had tired of feeling “lost among the depressed conformists” in Vienna, so he made his way to Berlin.151

Berlin initially disappointed Moholy as well. According to a letter to fellow Hungarian Iván Hevesy, he was appalled by what he saw in Der Sturm: “In the latest issue of Sturm a man named Kurt Schwitters makes up pictures from newspaper clippings, railway tickets, hairs and hoops. What for? Are these pictorial problems? Besides, the idea is not even new. . . . This is really a complete failure, not a fresh start.”152 Moholy also bitterly attacked Walden’s purported commercialism, referring to the Berlin Dadaist Raoul Hausmann’s own denunciation of Walden, “The German philistine gets upset,” from 1919.153 Thus Moholy initially aligned himself with the more overtly politicized wing of Dada that developed in Berlin and included Hausmann and Richard Huelsenbeck; both rejected Walden and Schwitters (for a while) as well.154

However, Moholy and Schwitters eventually found respect for each other, and Moholy was able to reconcile differences with Walden. Beginning in 1921, Moholy became the official Berlin correspondent for the Hungarian exile journal MA (Today), edited by Lajos Kassák in Vienna. MA and Der Sturm shared many of the same artists and authors; Kassák looked to Der Sturm journal as a role model for his own concern.155 Likely thanks to these connections, Moholy overcame his reservations to accept a solo exhibit at Der Sturm—paired with a smaller collection by another Hungarian, László Péri—in February 1922.156 After that, Moholy enjoyed three consecutive solo shows at Der Sturm: in 1923, 1924, and 1925.157

As Detlef Mertins contends, Moholy’s art responded to Russian suprematist painting, on the one hand, and to “Behne’s programmatic writings for a futurist cubist glass architecture, on the other.”158 Although Moholy’s first two years in Berlin reveal a broad range of stylistic experimentation, a broadly constructivist idiom, informed by the Gleichnis of glass, became apparent in his first Der Sturm show. Five lost reliefs were made of “wood, glass, metal, porcelain, fabric, and paper.”159 Soon, analysis of glass and its properties turned more metaphorical; Moholy made a series of paintings and prints that are called his “Glass-Architecture” works. This one, Glass-Architecture (1922), appeared on the cover of MA in May 1922 (Figure 3.24).

The title, Glass-Architecture, reveals a debt to Scheerbart’s sometimes fantastic classic of the same name. As such, it encourages us to consider the irrational or utopian impulses that might undergird the rationality usually ascribed to Moholy. Foregrounding the rational experimentation, Mertins notes that “Moholy developed a distinctive preoccupation with transparency involving a complicated play of planes showing through one another, first in paintings, then photograms, lithographs, photographs, photocollages, stage sets, and films, as well as in his Light-Space Modulator of 1922–30 [Busch-Reisinger Museum, Cambridge, MA].”160 Yet a curious comment by Steven Mansbach points obliquely to something far less objective or scientific: “Moholy’s ‘glass architecture’ operates as an idealist symbol through which he made transparent his aspiration to redeem the world through abstract art.”161

As of 1922, Moholy’s “Glass-Architecture” was entirely symbolic; it presents a Gleichnis of transparency with apparently transparent panes achieved through the careful juxtaposition of actually opaque or semitransparent paint (or layers of ink in his prints). After his move from the (German) Bauhaus to the New Bauhaus in Chicago in the 1930s, Moholy’s description of his breakthrough series is both soberly objective and oddly reminiscent of the kaleidoscopic projection in the Glashaus of 1914: “I painted as if colored light was projected on a screen, and other colored lights super-imposed over it. I thought this effect could be enhanced by placing translucent screens of different shapes, one behind the other, and projecting the colored lights over each unit.”162 Moholy uses the word translucent here. Elsewhere he calls the works his “‘transparent’ pictures,” but his own quotation marks around transparent reveal his understanding of “literal incongruence” that must move to “metaphorical congruence.”

A stunning color print in Der Sturm of one of Moholy’s “transparent” works, Black-Orange-Yellow (1924, Plate 9), underscores the illusory nature of complete transparency as much as it points to the utopian promise of translucence and even opacity. The expensive (and rare, for Der Sturm) multicolored printing technique makes layers of ink appear glowingly transparent before our eyes, but transparency is not complete, in that each color shifts the nuance of tone and value of the one behind it, and especially in that the series of transparencies hits a wall of opacity on the material of the page. The black ground is very shiny, reflective of all light that hits it. In contrast, the printed colors are matte, which lends them an opaque materiality that contradicts our initial response to them. The print’s actual (near) opacity becomes materially palpable as we take the page in our hands and turn it: the image does not show through, except for a shadow of its shape, revealing the limited translucence of the paper in our grasp. We are not granted transcendence, but we can turn it back and experience transformation of juxtaposed color again, and again.

Such transformation is admittedly more sober, less potentially intoxicating than some works engaged with the Gleichnis of glass. As Moholy explains, “I wanted to eliminate all factors which might disturb their [the works’] clarity—in contrast, for example, with Kandinsky’s paintings, which reminded me sometimes of an undersea world.”163 The “oceanic feeling” could not appeal to him—but his sobriety did not foreclose a different sort of Gesamtkunstwerk. A line from Moholy’s Bauhaus book, Painting Photography Film (1925), affirms his utopianism: “What we need is not the Gesamtkunstwerk, alongside and separated from which life flows by, but a synthesis of all the vital impulses spontaneously forming itself into the all-embracing Gesamtwerk [total work] (life) which abolishes all isolation, in which all individual accomplishments proceed from a biological necessity and culminate in a universal necessity.”164 Like Schwitters, Moholy wanted a Gesamtkunstwerk that embraced all of life. Schwitters’s answer was to recognize Merz everywhere, incorporating chance and even failure. Moholy’s answer was to take the art (Kunst) out, yet Joyce Tsai argues that “art” remains even in Moholy’s later projects:

For Moholy, the most effective means of reaching the masses is not by providing the correct political message but by reconfiguring the senses to enable a new perception of historical and political conditions. According to this logic, human beings must first learn to perceive relationships within a work of art and become attuned to the ways in which subtle shifts in color, form, and space might fundamentally alter the balance of a composition. And in this process, as if by way of analogy, the newfound ability to discern formal relationships might expose the mutability of other kinds of relationships in the world—political, economic, and social.165

The “art” in Moholy’s utopian Gesamtwerk depends, I suggest, on Gleichnis. The difference between Tsai’s “analogy” and other Gleichnisse we have examined is that Moholy’s shifting relationships of color and form are not meant to approximate those given already in life but those that might yet be. Moholy’s Gesamtwerk is not total or transcendent; it frames our attention to heighten it and to allow us to envision a better world.

Dreier, too, was receptive to Moholy’s utopian vision. She began corresponding with him in 1923 (although he did not exhibit at the Société Anonyme until 1926). She grew close to Moholy and his first wife, Lucia, after visiting them at the Bauhaus in 1926, but that did not stop her from being equally welcoming to Moholy and his second wife, Sibyl, when the latter couple came to the United States in the 1930s.166 Moholy contributed text for Dreier’s own collection of hand-colored lithographs, Forty Variations (1937), and he exhibited with the Société Anonyme at least eight times.167 A fitting tribute was Dreier’s selection of one of his woodcuts to grace the invitation to the inaugural Société Anonyme exhibition after the gift of the collection to Yale University Art Gallery.168 Moholy’s design invited guests to pay closer attention to material qualities and juxtapositions and then bring that heightened awareness to life beyond art.

Schwitters, Duchamp, and Glass

I close act 3 with two canonical works by Schwitters and Duchamp: the former’s Merzbau (Hannover, 1919–37) and the latter’s Large Glass (1915–23), both of which are illuminated afresh by the Gleichnis of glass. The Merzbau, initially constructed in Schwitters’s family home in Hannover, engages all four metaphors of modernism. In addition to emerging within Schwitters’s actual home, it encapsulated a broken keyboard, and it opened to a water source beneath the house. Glass, finally, plays a previously unacknowledged role: it mediates between visitors and the world in a framed, yet limitless, Gesamtkunstwerk.

The Merzbau was an ongoing realization of the Merz project as Schwitters had first articulated it at Der Sturm in 1919. He began with two-dimensional works such as Merzz. 19 (Figure 1.11), but his self-reported construction of “pictures out of materials I happened to have at hand, such as streetcar tickets, cloakroom checks, bits of wood, wire, twine, bent wheels, tissue paper, chips of glass, etc.,” may have led inevitably to works in three dimensions.169

The first Merzbau began with columns, including the Kathedrale des erotischen Elends (Cathedral of erotic misery), or KdeE, which served as an alternate name for the whole environment. The first column was topped with the death mask of Schwitters’s first son, who had died in infancy in 1916; it signals that Schwitters, like Döblin’s Odysseus, accepted death as part of life. The Merzbau eventually spread into several rooms, a balcony, and down through the floor to the watery grotto. This spreading or centrifugal movement has led Megan Luke to theorize that Schwitters built purposefully “from the inside out.”170

Equally compelling, however, is Maria Stavrinaki’s opposing argument. Stavrinaki stresses the Merzbau’s enclosing, incorporative activity, which we might call centripetal.171 Schwitters’s collaborative practice, such as his planned performance with Walden at Der Sturm in 1919, contributed to this gathering impulse. Schwitters, as historians have noted, dedicated “grottoes” to historical figures and to friends. These became sites for accumulation of fragments and memories from the world beyond. Hans Richter remembered, referring to the grottoes by other names: “He cut off a lock of my hair, and put it in my hole. A thick pencil, filched from Mies van der Rohe’s drawing board, lay in his cavity.”172 Theo van Doesburg reportedly sacrificed part of a tie, Kate Steinitz a key, and Schwitters purportedly filched a bra for this purpose from Sophie Taeuber-Arp.173 Hannah Höch recalled: “You could regard it as a special honor when Kurt Schwitters allowed a guest to design a cave in his Merz column. Then he would put the whole of his material at your disposal. Built-in secret depots opened up and he let the material flood out all over the place to allow you as much freedom as possible in your choice.”174 Schwitters also solicited contributions, writing, for example: “Well-known artists have already participated in the construction of essential parts, artists such as Walden, Hannah Höch, [Friedrich] Vordemberge-Gildewart, and others. I would greatly appreciate it if you, too, could contribute to the construction of a small grotto.”175

Material flooded out (as Höch suggests) just as it flooded in; the Merzbau was an ongoing, open-ended, centripetal and centrifugal Gesamtkunstwerk. The connections it rendered visible were critical. Schwitters’s surviving son, Ernst, recalled:

His pictures would decorate the walls, his sculptures standing along the walls. As anybody who has ever hung pictures knows, an interrelation between the pictures results. Kurt Schwitters, with his particular interest in the interaction of the components of his work, quite naturally reacted to this. He started by tying strings to emphasize this interaction. Eventually they became wires, then were replaced by wooden structures which, in turn, were joined with plaster of Paris.176

These material connections extended to the personal. Dorothea Dietrich connects the “cathedral” of the KdeE to this ideal: “It was thought to typify Gemeinschaft (community) rather than Gesellschaft (society), an example of collaboration at its best, leading to the creation of a total work of art.”177 Leah Dickerman writes, “Can we imagine a Gesamtkunstwerk, then, without purity, without even the semblance of wholeness? Schwitters did.”178 If there are moments when Schwitters makes residual claims for the autonomy of art—for example, his 1923 remark, “The image is an artwork that rests in itself. It refers to nothing outside itself”—the building of the Merzbau appears to have convinced him of the provisional relationships between all things and all people in a Döblinian “life-filled pond.”179 Stavrinaki makes the politics of his project explicit: “Kurt Schwitters’s ideal revolution seeks to lead to a socialist world in which the ‘relative’ humans who have destroyed nothing but their egotism will establish relations among one another.”180

Dickerman contends that Schwitters’s accumulation of paraphernalia, either hidden away in caverns or partially visible in assemblages, reveals an emphasis on leaving traces that Benjamin theorized as characteristic of the domestic interior.181 What Dickerman leaves out, however, is that Benjamin identified such traces as a preoccupation of the nineteenth-century interior, and that he believed that the modern, twentieth-century interior was devoid of traces—specifically because of the development of glass. The Merzbau did collect traces, it grew from a domestic interior, and it was quintessentially modern. However, Benjamin’s glass was not Schwitters’s glass.

The Merzbau thematized glass for display as well as glass windows, one of which was translucent, the other, transparent. In October 1932 Schwitters apparently began to enclose the grottoes behind glass. In Luke’s estimation, “the grottoes became explicitly pictorial as the glass united their disparate material components like a painterly gaze, alluding to the conceit that the picture plane is a transparent yet physically impenetrable surface.”182 This may have been true for grottoes covered by a single pane of glass, but it is likely less so for the assemblages in three-dimensional glass cases. See, for example, the “Gold Grotto” and the “Grotto with Doll’s Head” in this photograph, which Schwitters published in 1933 (Figure 3.25). Such glassed cases surely remind viewers of commercial and museum vitrines. They directly engage the potential conflicts between commodity, domesticity, and high-art aesthetics, conflicts that Gwendolen Webster suggests were already in visitors’ minds (she points out the “ironic correspondence” between the sound of KdeE and the nickname of Berlin’s largest department store, KaDeWe: Kaufhaus des Westens, department store of the west).183 Further, reflection and refraction through intersecting glass panes reduces the likelihood of complete transparency, heightening the viewer’s awareness of his or her absorption into—or repulsion from—each display. Yet the viewer never imagines wielding control over the objects; some are hidden, most are used, and all bear traces of lives lived by others.

Window glass in the Merzbau is equally intriguing. Many commentators mention the “Blue Window,” which was textured, producing tonal variations, and which overlooked the balcony beyond the west wall of the “studio,” the principal room, shown here in a reconstructed plan (Figure 3.26). A period photograph shows the Blue Window, left of center, with a conglomeration of mostly white, painted constructions in front of and around it (Figure 3.27). The window’s tinted, partial translucence apparently produced a “spiritual” effect. Thus an abstract sculpture placed before it (not in this photograph) was nicknamed “The Madonna.” As Ernst recalled, “She was hardly planned as a ‘Madonna’ at first, but rather simply only as an abstract form, but when she was finished, you simply could not avoid the impression that this was a ‘very pious,’ stylized Madonna. So she was given this name and it came from my father and myself.”184 In this case, Schwitters and son were receptive to the suggestions that the environment made on them, rather than insisting on authorial control.

Far fewer commentators remark on the large, transparent glass window on the northern side of the “studio” (see top of Figure 3.26). But on a visit in 2010 to the reconstruction of this room in the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, I was taken by the contrast between impersonal, industrial glass and intricately combined, shaped, and painted complexity (however reconstructed) in the rest of the space. No period photographs of the window are known, but the very lack of photographic evidence and commentary suggests that it was simply left alone. Visiting the former site of Schwitters’s family home at Waldhausen Strasse 5, I noticed that the forest behind and to the north of the original house still grows; it is an antidote to modern life now more than ever. With this one large window I believe Schwitters allowed the greatest of glass transparency: to nature, untouched except for friendly paths for people and dogs, not extensively “developed” as in the Faustian dream of modernity. Complete transparency, he seems to say, need not open to control and surveillance but to changes in the weather and season, the birds, maybe laughter in the distance. In a letter from 1935, Schwitters records passive contemplation of the scene, mediated further by an internal mirror: “And just now 2 bicyclists are passing by.”185

Rather than subscribe to the myth of transparency, then, Schwitters explored the potential mediating effects of glass. Although the Merzbau was never open to the general public, Webster has documented more than fifty examples of friends and acquaintances who visited. Schwitters almost always gave a personal tour, interjected with his characteristically “mischievous comments,” inviting a lucky few to spend the night inside.186 He paid close attention to others’ responses and was especially pleased when he felt that visitors “got it,” when the “literal incongruence” with which they were faced shifted to “metaphorical congruence.” In 1930 he recorded his first explanation of the Merzbau, sometimes referred to in shorthand as the “column,” concluding: “Only three men, I venture to suppose, would fully understand what I am doing with my column—Herwarth Walden, Dr. S. Giedion, and Hans Arp (though I should be delighted if others came forward in support).”187

Although we cannot know what Schwitters believed these three understood, let us take his list seriously and consider them briefly in reverse. For Arp, the collaborative spirit presents itself as a likely bond. Arp and his wife, Sophie Taeuber, themselves contributed to the Merzbau, and Arp and Schwitters worked together as well, most concretely in their jointly offered double issue of Merz 6 (1923), which, when opened from the opposite end, is titled Arp 1.188 Obler examines at length the private working relationship between Arp and Taeuber.189 That context makes Arp’s appreciation for collaboration, especially in a private setting, all the more pertinent here.

Giedion’s case is less “transparent,” as it were, considering his valorization of interior–exterior spatial penetration, first promised with the Eiffel Tower and realized in Bauhaus architecture. Such transparency seems at odds with the hidden and revealed, internal and external dynamics of the Merzbau. Perhaps, however, we have oversimplified Giedion’s case from his writing in Space, Time, and Architecture in 1941. His own historical theories may have developed discontinuously. In 1948 Giedion wrote Mechanization Takes Command, which, as we saw in act 2, traces the networks of plumbing, electricity, and so forth in lived space. It is tempting to imagine that Giedion’s increasing awareness of multiplicity and sedimentation owes something to the Merzbau understanding that Schwitters attributed to him.

The third member of this triumvirate is Walden, whose piano practice, embrace of Gleichnis, and love of collaboration no doubt contributed to his reputedly deep understanding of the Merzbau. There is still another sympathetic guest, however—despite the fact that Schwitters needed to be ever more careful in sharing his creation. As of 1933 Nazi publications “reviled” his works, which were exhibited alongside others considered “degenerate”; already by 1934, as Cardinal and Webster report, Schwitters “had been robbed of all prospects of pursuing his former careers.”190 The Merzbau, once centrifugal and centripetal, focused its energies inward. Schwitters whitewashed the exterior windows to protect himself, his family, and his work from surveillance; the dystopian side of the transparency myth had become reality. Finally, in 1937, he fled to Norway and wrote to Dreier in New York, begging her to visit the Merzbau in Hannover: “You belong to the few for whom it is built, who can understand it.”191

Of all of the artists surveyed here, Dreier’s greatest affection was likely for Schwitters, whose works she first saw at Der Sturm in 1920 and which the Société Anonyme exhibited more than thirty times.192 In preparation for the Société Anonyme’s International Exhibition in 1926, Dreier visited Kurt and Helma Schwitters in Hannover, where she had the opportunity to experience the Merzbau firsthand. She loved it. Afterward, Schwitters wrote to her: “I live in a world of nuances, and it makes me so happy, that you have recognized exactly that essence of my art.”193 As Webster was the first to detail, Dreier appointed Kurt and Helma Schwitters to be her German agents in planning the upcoming international exhibit, positions they filled enthusiastically and successfully. When Schwitters organized the new group, “abstrakten hannover,” in 1927, he wrote to Dreier that with her photograph presiding over their meeting, they all paid tribute to her efforts on behalf of modern art in America.194

Also in 1927, Schwitters wrote to Dreier that he planned to visit Duchamp in Paris; whether he did so is not known.195 If he did go, he might have seen Duchamp’s own aesthetic intervention into lived space. As Marcia Brennan details, in 1927 Duchamp had a door installed at the intersection of his bedroom, bathroom, and studio; it could close either of two apertures but never both at the same time.196 What conversations with Schwitters might have ensued we may never know. We do know that in 1929, Dreier brought Duchamp with her to visit the Schwitterses in Hannover.197 After visiting Hannover again in 1931, Dreier contemplated bringing the first column, the KdeE, to exhibit in the United States, but presumably all parties determined that it was too fragile to travel. By 1936 the situation was dangerous in Hannover. Schwitters wrote to Dreier, “Naturally I can show no one my studio [the Merzbau]. . . . It upsets me terribly that I cannot show it to anyone.”198 It was then that he told her that he had whitewashed the windows, forever closing the monument to the dream of transformative metaphor, which she, like Walden, Giedion, and Arp before her, apparently understood.199

It is impossible to know, in contrast, what Schwitters and Duchamp thought of each other or their work. Schwitters’s ebullience, in life and art, contrasts with Duchamp’s inscrutability. However, in closing act 3, let us consider how the Large Glass may in fact endeavor, like the Merzbau, to facilitate transformation through glass.

Dreier knew of the Large Glass at least as early as 1918, when Duchamp gave her a drawing of some of its misfiring “bachelors” for safekeeping. It was in the Walter and Louise Arensberg collection as of 1920, but Dreier acquired it when they feared packing it for their move from New York to California in 1921.200 The work did crack in transport after the Société Anonyme’s International Exhibition in 1926, and Duchamp made an extended stay at Dreier’s home in 1936 to make necessary repairs.201

In The Optical Unconscious, Rosalind Krauss argues that Duchamp’s campaign against solely “retinal art” was not one in favor solely of conceptual art. Rather, Krauss maintains that the Large Glass underscores the carnality of vision, the bodily aspects of visual desire.202 Freytag-Loringhoven might beg to differ, since her poem accuses Duchamp’s passion of being frozen forever in “glassiness,” but perhaps she conflates her own frustration with that of the bachelors forever separated from their bride. Several ways to look at the Large Glass converge to confirm, and complicate, Krauss’s theory.

First, Duchamp’s beautiful refutation of Benjamin’s claim that modern glass allows for no traces: in 1920 Man Ray photographed a curious buildup of dust on the Large Glass in progress in Duchamp’s studio, Duchamp titled it Dust Breeding (Figure 3.28), and the two published it in 1922 in Andre Breton’s surrealist journal Littérature.203 They coauthored the accompanying text: “Behold the domain of Rrose Sélavy / How arid it is—How fertile / How joyous—How sad!” The photograph’s credit reads: “View taken from an airplane by Man Ray 1921.”204 Indeed, it appears to represent some desert or lunar landscape with curious concatenations of material. But the credit is false and reflects only a historically masculine affectation of objective distance. Close-up and in real life, this is, in fact, the domain of the historically feminine, claimed in their text for Duchamp’s feminine alter ego, Rrose Sélavy. Her world of dust and cleaning is everything: arid and fertile, joyous and sad; it also contains eros (the French pronunciation of “Rrose”) as it is everything every day (“Sélavy,” or c’est la vie). Molesworth observes that “Duchamp exhibits an uncanny ability to make sense of women’s roles.”205 One hears the words, sees the image, combines them with knowledge of lived experience, and the work blasts open the myth of glass transparency, including the labor required to maintain it.

Second, David Joselit demonstrates that we must consider the Large Glass in the context of the shop window.206 He cites the extraordinary note from 1913, in which Duchamp himself reflects on its power:

The question of shop windows∴

To undergo the interrogation of shop windows∴

The exigency of the shop window∴

The shop window proof of the existence of the outside world∴

When one undergoes the examination of the shop window, one also pronounces one’s own sentence. In fact, one’s choice is “round trip.” From the demands of the shop windows, from the inevitable response to shop windows, my choice is determined. No obstinacy, ad absurdum, of hiding the coition through a glass pane with one or many objects of the shop window. The penalty consists in cutting the pane and in feeling regret as soon as possession is consummated. Q.E.D.207

In Duchamp’s view, the shop window warrants attention: it is characterized by “exigency”; it makes “demands” and receives an “inevitable response.” Such demands are placed on everyone, not simply foolish female shoppers, as contemporary lore often had it. No, when “one” considers the shop window, “one also pronounces one’s own sentence.” The desire of the potential transaction is absolutely bodily, sexualized in Duchamp’s formulation as “coition through a glass pane with one or many objects of the shop window.” If one assumes Duchamp’s gender to be male, one might deduce that he means phallic penetration of the object, but he is far too subtle for that reduction or gender restriction. “Coition through the glass” does not specify who or what does exactly what to whom, but it identifies a sexual merging of one sort or another. And there is no point, Duchamp suggests, in “obstinacy,” in denying the allure, “ad absurdum.” But there can be no ultimate satisfaction, either; consumption results, as anyone will tell you, in the desire for more consumption. In the Large Glass Duchamp allegorizes the inherent frustration with the impossible union of the bachelors and the bride, but he also makes us aware, bodily, of our own consuming desires as we have stood before many a large glass shop window. Finally, even if our experience before the glass is solitary—even if its aesthetic is instrumentalized so as to induce purchase—the shop window can draw into consciousness the world beyond: it offers “proof of the existence of the outside world.”

Third, several artists close to Duchamp—Dreier herself and the painter Roberto Matta, on the one hand, and the architect Frederick Kiesler, on the other—wrote eloquently about the spiritual effects of engaging with this multimedial glass work that becomes, in their representations, another sort of open-ended, multisensorial Gesamtkunstwerk.208 According to Dreier and Matta:

Painting—glass—mirror: these are the three substances in dynamic interrelation to the final image of the “Glass.” While we gaze upon the bride—there appears through the glass the image of the room wherein we stand and on the radiating design of the mirror lives the image of our own bodies. This dynamic reality, at once reflecting, enveloping and penetrating the observer, when grasped by the intentional act of consciousness is the essence of a spiritual experience.209

“Painting—glass—mirror”: this work is opaque, transparent, and reflective. Combined with the willing, attentive viewer, Dreier and Matta suggest that the experience of the work can be transcendent.210

Kiesler, for his part, had known Duchamp in New York since the late 1920s. Born in present-day Romania, he trained and worked in architecture in Vienna, possibly with Loos.211 After arriving in New York for the International Theatre Exposition in 1926, Kiesler unexpectedly stayed on, negotiating with Dreier about plans for the Société Anonyme’s International Exhibition, as well as designing shop window displays for Saks Fifth Avenue and publishing Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display (1930).212 As his book’s title suggests, Kiesler believed that both “art” and shop window display should have a magnetic effect on the viewer.213

Kiesler brought all this experience to his 1937 review of the Large Glass, which he called the “masterpiece of the first quarter of the twentieth-century” and identified as “architecture, sculpture and painting in one.”214 He preferred not to address the represented figures, concentrating instead on the material and its possibilities: “Translucent material such as glass, being used more and more in contemporary buildings[,] finds its manufacturing not for commercial but spiritual reasons.”215 Such a claim in the generally pragmatic Architectural Record may have struck American readers as esoteric, but he goes on to echo both Scheerbart’s and Behne’s ideas about glass:

Glass is the only material in the building industry which expresses surface and space at the same time. Neither brick nor stone, nor steel, nor wood can convey both simultaneously. It satisfies what we need as contemporary designers and builders: an enclosure that is space itself, an enclosure that divides and at the same time links.

Normally one looks through a translucent plate glass from one area to another, but in painting an opaque picture (like this one) also accentuates the space division optically. The painting then seems suspended in mid-air, negating the actual transparency of the glass. It floats. It is in a state of eternal readiness for action, motion and radiation. While dividing the plate glass into areas of transparency and non-transparency, a spatial balance is created between stability and mobility. By way of such apparent contradiction the designer has based his conception on nature’s law of simultaneous gravitation and flight.216

Kiesler then turns to Duchamp specifically, noting how his work undoes the myth of glass transparency: glass, in fact, provides a “space division,” rather than eternal union between self and other, and Duchamp’s figures against the “ground” of glass force us to acknowledge that division. The Large Glass thus provides a Gleichnis of the reality of glass in our built environment.

But Kiesler does not conclude with glass as division. Rather, he turns to Duchamp’s “joints,” pointing out that “everything in nature is joined” and that “all design and construction in the arts and architecture are specific calculations for rejoining into unity, artificially assembled material, and the control of its decay.” Regarding the Large Glass:

Duchamp’s painting’s outstanding (tectonic) achievement is its new joint-design. The ligaments of steel-or-what-not, single[-] or double[-]spaced, wires that are used, instead of paint strokes, for contourings, make wider and narrower outer and inner contours to create precise form achievement. Those heavier and lighter lines thus divide all shapes and at the same time link them!217

The excitement signaled by that exclamation mark only builds. Kiesler advises that “the Marcel-imprint should not be imitated; but important is its spirit, guiding lost sheep and the collective herd back to juicy roots embedded in nature’s creative subconscious instead of encouraging them to take refuge in research and statistitching [sic].”218 Kiesler urges designers to reject rational science and return to Nietzschean, Bergsonian nature. “Juicy roots” are fluid, growing, and deeply intertwined with the sources of life. For Kiesler, Duchamp’s architectural, sculptural, painterly Large Glass is a Gleichnis of that eternal, though fragile, natural unity; all art and architecture, he says, aims to rejoin all and sundry material. Duchamp was apparently pleased with the essay, and Dreier liked it, too: Kiesler wrote to Dreier, “I just want to thank you for your nice letter regarding the article on the Duchamp glass. I also received last week a very happy letter from Marcel in Paris.”219

Given his evaluative terms, Kiesler might have called the Large Glass a Gesamtkunstwerk. There was, however, growing anti-German sentiment in the United States. In 1937 Adolf Hitler had been in power for four years, and his international politics were increasingly aggressive.220 Kiesler could not then, but now we can acknowledge the Large Glass as a Gesamtkunstwerk. Like the Merzbau, it is an open, visual, bodily, multisensory, relational, desirable, provocative, frustrating, conscious, unconscious, material, immaterial, fragile, sturdy, spatial, and spiritual work, thanks to the Gleichnis of glass.