Georg Simmel and Modern Art

Considerations of home—its possibilities and restrictions—precede Der Sturm. However, some of the most advanced contemporary thinking about human subjectivity, gender, and the home developed within the extended network of Der Sturm. Georg Simmel is credited both as the first sociologist of modernity4 and as one of few early sociologists “to have developed an account of gender relations as an integral part of a general theory of modernization.”5 He did so in tandem with his serious engagement with art, which he pursued at the invitation of Herwarth Walden, so let us examine his developing discourse before turning more specifically to the home as Gleichnis for art at Der Sturm and the Société Anonyme.

Simmel lectured twice for the Verein für Kunst, and he published at least two, possibly three, articles under Walden’s editorial guidance.6 In 1910 he wrote to Walden that he supported the founding of Der Sturm “in principle,” but that his own work precluded his active involvement.7 Nevertheless, Simmel’s thought resounded in Der Sturm. Over three weeks in 1910, for example, Kurt Hiller wrote a positive analysis of, and constructive response to, Simmel’s theories.8 Simmel wrote so compellingly about Auguste Rodin that Walden included the work of an otherwise obscure Polish sculptor, Franz Flaum, in Der Sturm’s very first exhibition in 1912. Walden decided to supplement the works of the Blaue Reiter with his small, yet effectively monumental, marble works, including Wave (Morning) (before 1904, Figure 4.1). In addition to evoking the Gleichnis of water, this sculpture shares Rodin’s concentration on the barely perceptible shift between unworked stone and smooth flesh—precisely the quality that riveted Simmel.9

David Frisby points to Simmel’s 1909 essay on Rodin as “one of his very few explicit references to the nature of modernity,” which the sociologist, in Frisby’s reading, characterizes as “psychologism, the experience and interpretation of the world in terms of the reactions of our inner life and indeed as an inner world.” For Simmel, Frisby believes, Rodin’s sculpture is “not merely an expression of modernity but also the resolution of its inner tensions.”10 Until now, though, scholars have missed that the essay to which Frisby refers is a revision of Simmel’s first Rodin essay of 1902.11 Even more, Simmel had the opportunity between the two publications to rethink his approach to Rodin by sharing his work in progress with the Verein für Kunst in November 1908.12 At that time the Salon Cassirer hosted many of the Verein für Kunst events, whereas this one, possibly because of the anticipated audience, was held at the Künstlerhaus—where Teloplasma had flopped some seven years before.13 One wonders how many present had attended both events; surely Walden enjoyed having found his Klaviatur in the intervening years.

We cannot know which written version more closely approximates the lecture Simmel gave, so some deduction is necessary. Frisby’s quotation about “psychologism,” for example, appears only in Frisby’s second version. That psychologism, the infusion of the outer into the inner world, calls to mind Simmel’s widely translated essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903), which situates his thought. Simmel opens that piece by asserting: “The deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society, against the weight of the historical heritage and the external culture and technique of life.”14 The urban subject must resist “being leveled, swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism.” More specifically, the metropolitan subject faces “the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli . . . with every crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life.”15 To protect itself, Simmel theorizes that “the metropolitan type . . . creates a protective organ for itself against the profound disruption with which the fluctuations and discontinuities of the external milieu threaten it.” Simmel describes the resultant psyche as hardened, indifferent, calculating, and, above all, “blasé.”16 Although Simmel claims “not to complain or to condone but only to understand,” it is hard not to recognize his concern about a growing predominance of what he calls the “objective spirit” over the “subjective,” personal one. He explains that the

growing division of labor . . . requires from the individual an ever more one-sided type of achievement which, at its highest point, often permits his personality as a whole to fall into neglect. . . . He becomes a single cog as over against the vast overwhelming organization of things and forces that gradually take out of his hands everything connected with progress, spirituality and value.17

Some months before this classic essay was published in 1903, Simmel was already thinking about threats to the modern subject. In September 1902 the first of his two essays on Rodin appeared. In the first he writes of “the problem that pressures us in all areas: how one could reject the validity of general norms, because they are valid for everyone else, without falling into anarchy and rootless capriciousness.”18 In November 1902 Simmel adds mechanization and specialization to the societal pressures on the individual.19

In “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” then, Simmel may examine what happens to the urban subject if he passively subjects himself to the city’s modernizing forces, but over the next decade, Simmel returns to aesthetics for potentially more productive responses. Art, figured by Rodin, is one. The focus of both Rodin essays is how the sculptor’s incredible amalgamation of matter and spirit, which one experiences most vividly at the unmarked juncture between raw marble and palpable human flesh, approximates the contradictory impulses of modern life.20 As Simmel puts it in 1902, “Since specialization, taken either as refinement or as tragedy, has broken every previous state apart, modern life now finds its maximum fulfillment in the reunion of elements whose special life cannot be reconstituted otherwise. I know of no better, more complete example to demonstrate this than that of the sculpture of Rodin.”21 Paradoxically, the “completion” of this example derives in part from the fact that “Rodin’s sculptures are frequently unfinished, in the widest range of degrees, down to that in which the figure projects out of the stone in barely recognizable contours.” This lack of finish requires viewer participation. As Simmel writes in 1902:

This denial of the complete form provokes the viewer’s activity in the most animated way. Wherein recent interpreters of art identify the nature of pleasure in the art lover’s reproduction of the creative process within himself,—that cannot happen more energetically than through the stimulus of the fantasy of completing the incomplete oneself, of liberating the formation that is still partially hidden in stone.22

This point is repeated almost verbatim in 1909.23

Despite general continuity, however, a difference regarding gender is frankly astonishing. Let us begin with the later version:

Michelangelo . . . found the coincidence of the two forms of our bodily existence—those of being and of movement—to have their common origin in the spirit of the epoch . . . ; in like manner for Rodin the center of the visible and corporal is to be found in the modern spirit, a spirit far more unstable, far more changing in its dispositions and its self-generated destiny. And, therefore, it is a spirit more sensitive to movement that that of Renaissance man.24

In 1902 Simmel writes: “Only in part of Rodin’s oeuvre to date does the new style predominate, the style in which Rodin blends the modern spirit with the feeling for art from Michelangelo’s time—the former considered, as it were, as the feminine, the latter as the masculine.”25

This invocation of gender is extraordinary. Scholars nearly always assume that modernity or the “modern spirit,” for Simmel, is masculine. Guy Oakes declares, for example, that for Simmel, “feminization would . . . qualify as demodernization.”26 Felski associates Simmel’s thought with “the assumption that an authentic female culture would reverse the instrumental and dehumanizing aspects of urban industrial [male or masculine] society.”27 Following such scholarship, we are unprepared for Simmel’s characterization, in the first Rodin essay, of the modern spirit as “feminine.”

Felski argues that in “Female Culture” (1911), Simmel claims otherwise, nearly confining woman to the home, while man faces adventures and produces things, including art, out in the modern world.28 Felski declares: “In reproducing the assumption that the logic of modernity is intrinsically and pervasively masculine, Simmel effectively cuts off the possibility of women participating in society as women.”29

Based on the 1911 essay “Female Culture,” Felski may be correct.30 But earlier, in the first Rodin essay, Simmel explicitly associates modernity with femininity. Why he abandons this position is not known, but his making it provides an opening. His reversal means that the binary was not always set—nor, necessarily, was any value judgment. With that in mind, it is particularly intriguing to discover that there is also an earlier version of “Female Culture” (1902).31 Its appearance four months before the first Rodin essay, when femininity was representative of the modern spirit, invites us to examine the representation of gender here, too. Once again, there are some continuities between essays, but this time the differences exceed them. Far from immobilizing and isolating women, the first “Female Culture” envisions “feminine” possibilities that resonate strongly with both the Gesamtkunstwerk and the desire to blend art and life—conventionally attributed to the avant-garde—and Simmel articulates these in his discussion of home.

In the earlier version of “Female Culture,” contrary to the early Rodin essay, Simmel identifies modern “objective culture” and its products as “absolutely masculine.”32 The division of labor and professional specialization, likewise, apply to the masculine realm, and, as in “Metropolis and Mental Life,” they produce “one-sided” subjects. However, Simmel recommends that the divided subjects look to the example of women: “The whole depth and beauty of feminine nature, which presents itself to the masculine spirit as his redemption and reconciliation, is grounded in this unity, in this organic, immediate relationship between the personality and all of its expressions, in this indivisibility of the self that knows only everything or nothing.”33

If Simmel essentialized such qualities throughout the essay, this idealized femininity would be truly lamentable. But in 1902 Simmel also qualifies his observations as “historical.”34 Furthermore, Simmel wonders how the enhancement of the rights of women could change not only women but also men and culture at large.35 Indeed, in the early “Female Culture,” Simmel appears to relish that possibility. On the one hand, he surmises that if women and men were to become more alike, then everyone would enjoy having to develop a finer, more-nuanced ability to differentiate.36 On the other, if women brought their specific skills to traditionally masculine professions, those fields would likely benefit from women’s greater ability to empathize. Thus Simmel hypothesizes that the female doctor would be better equipped to intuit and sympathize with the ills of men and women alike, and that the female historian would be more likely to understand her subjects, thereby allowing her to enrich her historical representations.37

As we know, Einfühlung was treasured as the ability to “feel into” a person or thing, and it was considered integral to the Gesamtkunstwerk. With that aesthetic link in mind, it is not surprising that Simmel turns next to the potential for women and the feminine in the arts. In 1902 he theorizes that women must free themselves from masculine ideals and training. He imagines that such liberation is most likely to occur in dance, a mode of expression from which all would learn about women’s distinct experiences of space and movement. In contrast, Simmel laments, are the visual arts, where the multitude of available (masculine) models, as well as the predominance of masculine teaching, might make it more difficult for women to produce more feminine work. Yet he acknowledges, using a nominally musical metaphor, “some quiet beginnings of a specifically feminine note are already noticeable. . . . In some pictures there is a total mood [Gesamtstimmung] that I have never experienced in masculine production.”38 He surmises that further development is in order. Nevertheless: “Even if they are just modest first steps, here, truly, the immeasurable difference between the feminine and the masculine life principle has taken something out of the flow of experience and projected it into objective culture.”39

There is more that addresses the home in particular. As he will also do in his 1911 version of “Female Culture,” Simmel suggests in 1902 that the maintenance of the home suits women: “Home management, with its inestimable significance in the totality [Gesamtheit] of life, is the greatest cultural achievement of woman; the home bears her imprint.” Significantly, though, in 1902 he immediately addresses the contemporary moment (if, at first, only to dismiss it): “There is no need to analyze just how much the modern economic and moral developments have robbed the home of this character: the division of labor, the outsourcing of so much production outside of the home, the decreasing rate of marriage, and not least the reduction in the number of children in the higher classes.” These specifics may not need to be addressed, he claims: “Only since the naturalness of the profession [of housewife] became questionable could it become a problem.”40 In other words, we have industrialization to thank for denaturalizing women’s place in the home.41

Although Simmel denaturalizes domestic activity in the 1902 essay, he identifies three characteristics of contemporary domestic experience that could alter values in the arts, were women to translate them into artistic production. First, an embrace of the home is a valorization of everyday life. Second, a considerable amount of domestic production is repetitive; originality is not the standard by which its success is judged. Third, as a corollary to the second, work in the home is not usually geared to the production of permanent objects. Simmel’s observant example is the dinner that one prepares for hours, only to see it consumed in a fraction of the time.42 It is easy to conceive of a misogynist mocking such practices. Yet Simmel does not do so. Instead, in an intriguing formulation, he wonders how they might lead to a “future growth of feminine culture production next to or between the masculine one.”43 Perhaps “feminine” art will be separate; perhaps it will be interspersed within the general culture. Either way, it is uncanny how similar these qualities are to those later attributed to the avant-garde’s goals to merge art and everyday life and to overturn the values of the institution of art (including originality and permanence). And, in the first “Female Culture,” Simmel identifies these characteristics as germane to practices that may lead to a finer appreciation of something like a Gesamtstimmung (total mood) in art. At the Verein für Kunst, Simmel may have found an audience primed to make these links along with him. Recall, for example, that Walden’s goal for Teloplasma was to achieve a Gesamtstimmung. Remember as well that the stage set for the second evening of Teloplasma was a domestic interior.

Further, one year before Simmel spoke to the Verein für Kunst about Rodin, he presented a lecture to Walden’s group that, in effect, debated the relative merits of “art” and those of the domestic environment, figured by “craft” (Kunstgewerbe). Unfortunately, a transcript of Simmel’s 1907 presentation, “The Problem of Style,” is not known to have survived, but we can assume that the text published five months later benefited in some way from its presentation to the Verein für Kunst. According to the published version, Simmel believed that there is a “principle difference between craft and art.”44 The former is general, multiple, and purposeful, a means to an end; the latter is individual, singular, and its own end. Confusing the two is “possibly the greatest caricature signifying the misunderstanding of modern individualism.”45 Simmel does not stop with these apparently conservative aesthetic observations, though; he wonders why this is so at this (his) time. Why would anyone project individuality (art-value) on (general) craft? Because one wants to secure the sense of self that one has already projected onto the object.46 Why, then, is one drawn to domestic interiors? So that one will not feel so alone.47 At home, the total feeling (Gesamtgefühl), especially when people gather together at the table, provides comfort, indeed, a reconciliation (Versöhnung) of people and objects present. The room that is well composed (komponiert) exudes a special warmth.48

The tension between art and craft reveals itself, then, to be fundamentally relational, and for modern man (and woman), deeply ambivalent. Do we need to insist on our autonomy, or can we relax into our mutual dependence? In “The Problem of Style,” Simmel seems almost to prefer the comfortable domestic setting, but he also advocates finding “aesthetic solutions to the problems of life” in a more narrowly defined “art.”49 He relates gender to both solutions, but, as we have seen, he does so inconsistently. His feminist contemporaries, such as Marianne Weber, complicated his findings, pointing out, for example, that housework needs to be learned, that being a housewife also splinters subjectivity, and that (by 1913) about half of German women worked outside the home.50 Some of Simmel’s former students, such as Georg Lukács and Siegfried Kracauer, criticized their teacher for remaining entangled in the web of society that he sought to describe.51 Lukáçs, for example, compared Simmel’s sociology with a “web of interrelationships that must remain a labyrinth and cannot become a system.”52 Kracauer admired Simmel’s representation of the “essential interrelatedness of the most diverse phenomena,” but he worried that “this wandering from relationship to relationship, this extension into the far and near, this intermeshing secures no resting place for the mind that seeks to grasp a totality: it loses itself in infinity.”53 Readers today might recognize this rebuke itself as gendered; in fact, foreshadowing the critique that he himself later incurred, Simmel notes in the early version of “Female Culture” that “among the banal accusations made of women is that they have no objectivity.”54 What I take from all of this is that Simmel was caught up in one of the greatest conflicts of his time, namely, the “woman question.” So were Der Sturm and the Société Anonyme—and a central site of the conflict was the home and its representation.

As the art historian Griselda Pollock writes, “‘Gender trouble’—to borrow Judith Butler’s now famous phrasing—must be acknowledged as one of the central symptoms and neuralgic points of modernity itself.”55 This view is not only retrospective. In 1902 Simmel recognized that the “woman question” might become bigger than the “labor question.”56 In 1904 Samuel Lublinski, a friend of Walden and Lasker-Schüler (see Figure O.5), wrote: “The women’s movement belongs to culture and aesthetics at least as much as politics does, and the liberation of woman is considered not only a political but above all a spiritual liberation.”57 There were aesthetic consequences for both sexes. Pollock elaborates: “As an effect of the bourgeois triangulation of state, family, and religion—linking modes of production, reproduction, and symbolic production—gender/sexual difference emerged as a central question in avant-gardism.” Both male and female artists, she argues, worked through their own gender questions in the form of “a metaphorical engagement with ‘the feminine’ . . . as the site of a creativity/generativity emancipating itself from the logic and discipline of patriarchal, familial, capitalist production.”58

Simmel, then, a formative voice in the development of sociology, engaged theoretically with real women and contemporary notions of the feminine. Filtering his work through the Sturm network, he charted two possible courses for the alienated, modern subject to reconcile with a lost wholeness. One was Rodin’s sculpture, the conflicted nature of which allowed the contemporary viewer, via empathy, to recognize himself and thereby to experience release—or, better, to recognize “herself,” because in one version Simmel characterizes the modern spirit epitomized by Rodin as feminine. The other site of potential reconciliation, the heart of the rest of this act, was the feminized home, where one might experience a feeling of wholeness that female artists were already translating into art as a Gesamtstimmung and that corresponds to the unity envisioned in the total work of art.

Neither Der Sturm nor the Société Anonyme was universally feminist, so we cannot idealize these “feminine” possibilities. In addition, Felski carefully details how the typically masculine appropriation of the feminine in early modernism can conceal a deep-seated misogyny.59 Further, she and others share a suspicion of a feminist nostalgia for prelapsarian bliss, with which home is associated. Butler, for example, finds Julia Kristeva’s lauding of the maternal to be suspect because it relegates the feminine to prehistory and reifies age-old prejudice, rather than disrupting power dynamics.60 Yet Felski recognizes that nostalgia is not inherently, essentially bad. Freud maintained that the desire to return to maternal fullness was regressive, but Felski suggests provocatively that nostalgia may be derided precisely because it is often linked to the feminine. Furthermore, nostalgia may allow us to envision a brighter future.61 Recall that Wagner conceptualized the Gesamtkunstwerk as both a recovery of a lost unity and as the “Artwork of the Future.” Although the desire to return to maternal fullness may be regressive, I believe that the embrace of the domestic “oceanic feeling” at Der Sturm and the Société Anonyme made it conducive to the production of the “feminine” and to the enhancement of women’s opportunities in the arts. Walden collaborated with his successive wives and engaged in the “feminine” caretaking of art and promotion of others. He also promoted women’s art more than most art dealers at the time.62 And he, like Simmel, recognized that the home was changing, so an engagement with the domestic was not necessarily or only nostalgic or feminine but also potentially radical and particularly modern. Let us turn, then, to the Gleichnis of “home” in the cultural production of Der Sturm and the Société Anonyme.

Adolf Loos in Context

The very first issue of Der Sturm thematized the home. As Hodonyi’s study of Walden and architecture reveals, Walden orchestrated the release of Der Sturm journal to coincide with Loos’s first lecture at the Verein für Kunst on 3 March 1910.63 The journal, which advertised the talk, complemented it with a reprint of Loos’s parody “The Poor Little Rich Man” (1900), about life in an overly designed apartment.64 The published version of Loos’s lecture, “Ornament and Crime,” has been deservedly reprimanded for its misogyny and racism—in it, only women and primitives ornament themselves, while enlightened white men retain their supposed purity.65 However invaluable those critiques are, I draw attention to another aspect of that piece, in conjunction with “Poor Little Rich Man.” The problem Loos identifies in too much ornamentation and in domestic clutter is that they impede, in his view, the protective function of dwelling, which he had theorized in “The Principle of Cladding” (1898). Simmel’s “Metropolis and Mental Life” reveals the particularly acute crisis for the modern, urban dweller, who must build a metaphorical shield around himself or herself. Loos, I suggest, tried to literalize such protection for the home.

“Poor Little Rich Man,” Loos’s equally influential “On Architecture” (also in Der Sturm in 1910), and one of Loos’s built homes reveal that his case is far more complex than is often acknowledged. “Poor Little Rich Man” is a parable about the overwrought interior decoration of a fictional, fin de siècle patron. His home has been so meticulously designed, from the furniture and wallpaper to the cutlery and light switches, that the designer assumes the right to chide the patron for wearing slippers in a room for which they were not designed. The accommodating patron becomes so thoroughly overwhelmed by his completely designed environment that he “was precluded from all future living and striving. . . . He thought, this is what it means to learn to go about life with one’s own corpse.”66

Hal Foster points to this essay as a critique of Jugendstil and the Gesamtkunstwerk, but I submit that it is subtler than that.67 Loos describes the house of this unfortunate man with musical metaphors: each room, for example, “formed a symphony of colors.”68 Actual, rather than metaphorical, music is integral. The title character

submitted a petition to the streetcar company in which he sought to have the nonsensical ringing replaced with the bell motif from Parsifal. However, he found the company uncooperative. . . . Instead he was permitted, at his own expense, to have the street in front of his house repaved so that every vehicle was forced to roll by in the rhythm of the Radetzky March.69

Musical rhythm was thus impressed on the home and its environs in order to complete the total work of art. Loos contends, however, that the effect was terrible. His narrator conjectures, “After all, one wants to take a rest now and then from so much art. Or,” he asks, “could you live in a picture gallery? Or sit through Tristan und Isolde for months on end?”70

Given Walden’s appreciation for the Gesamtkunstwerk, we might wonder how he could support Loos’s condemnation of the Poor Little Rich Man. The answer, I believe, lies in the way the music was played in Loos’s scenario. This total work of art forced the music onto everyone. The paved street—imagine it with irregularly spaced speed bumps—forced passengers’ bodies to respond to the rhythm of a march as they passed by. Johann Strauss the Elder had composed the Radetzky March in 1848 in honor of Field Marshal Radetzky, a popular Austrian commander.71 Walden may have found the militarism of the forced march repugnant.72 The Gesamtkunstwerk that he cultivated encouraged active engagement, not their marching in unison. Another essay in Der Sturm’s inaugural issue, Kraus’s “The Operetta,” supports this view. Kraus derides Wagnerian opera and proposes that the operetta, which makes no effort to conceal its unreality, can blend plot and music into a harmonic Gesamtkunstwerk—perhaps because it allows its audience the space to move from literal incongruence to metaphorical congruence. Echoing Simmel, Kraus also identifies such art as a necessary antidote to the “rationalization” of modern life.73 The editor Walden, then, likely shared Loos’s disdain for the constricted home.

Loos’s “On Architecture” addresses the subject of home even more directly. It appeared in mid-December 1910 and followed Loos’s lecture by the same title, advertised in Der Sturm (Figure 4.2), almost immediately.74 Resonating with Simmel’s views on art and craft, the essay distinguishes the artwork from the home; the latter “has to please everyone,” the former, “no one” (other than the artist, as Loos concedes). Art is the artist’s “private concern.” Thus Loos demarcates between private and public spheres, although it is unusual that in this instance, by inference, the home is public. Foster argues that Loos draws distinctions between private and public, inside and outside, female and male, and, further, that the architect’s model for art parallels his ideal of the human subject.75 However, if Loos constructs the home as public in this essay, should we infer that the public has invaded what had formerly been considered private? Is the assertion of a private self, the artist who must please only himself, his defense? It is too early to draw conclusions.

In “On Architecture,” Loos claims that something else is problematic. Again echoing Simmel, he writes that “the amalgamation of art and craft . . . [is] the greatest misunderstanding,” because it must serve both the “individual artist and the general public.” In his prose, more inflammatory than Simmel’s, Loos claims that the blend “has brought mankind infinite damage.” He is clearly concerned about the relationship between art (or nonart) and people. He asserts that everything that serves a purpose “must be eliminated from the realm of art,” but the question of for whom any purpose exists or should not exist appears to override the ontological question.76 Loos’s text approaches bombast, but his point is critical: “Murder and theft, everything can be forgiven, but mankind will never be forgiven for the many ninth symphonies it has prevented by persecuting the artist.” Frederic Schwartz has shown that Loos’s recurring reference to crime serves dual purposes: it shocks the reader at the same time that it infers, especially in a sentence in which “persecution” also appears, that the state may overstep its boundaries in patrolling its citizens and defining their crimes.77 Loos’s call to defend the autonomy of the subject, especially the artistic subject, reveals that it feels threatened. As suggested in act 3, one of Loos’s architectural solutions was to employ small windows, especially in homes. Analogously, the purported autonomy of the purposeless art object was also perceived to be under threat. Yet, contrary to his earlier claim, we learn in Loos’s final paragraph that the artwork does have a purpose: “Art is there to lead the people higher and higher, to make them more and more like God.” One could read Loos’s ideal as a project to make the subject increasingly narcissistic, that is, delusionally godlike. Alternatively, others might interpret it as nonautonomous art that unites people with the infinite in the life-filled pond.

If the latter interpretation appears naive, closer examination of this issue of Der Sturm reveals that purported autonomy melts again and again into relationality. To begin with, on the page facing Loos’s fragment, under the heading “Books Worth Recommending,” we find Walden’s own remarks. The mid-December date suggests that the editor may be sharing holiday gift advice, but the column offers more. Walden applauds the finely designed books by the Insel press, describing his own personal pleasure in possessing such a book: “I would not want to have to do without the good feeling of owning the Decameron [by Boccaccio] in a form that empathetically [einfühlend] adapts itself to the grace of the contents.”78

In this somewhat unusual reference to Einfühlung, Walden writes that form (rather than a person) empathizes with content, but in this context, it is not unreasonable to assume that his “good feeling” represents his empathetic response to the union as well. He wants to own the book so that he will not have to relinquish the pleasurable merging of text, image, and his desire. Interestingly, Walden’s reported engagement with the book does not square with Benjamin’s later assessment of the modern collector: “To him falls the Sisyphean task of divesting things of their commodity character by taking possession of them. But he bestows on them only connoisseur value, rather than use value.”79 Walden would have it otherwise: “Insel has turned the wish for a cover full of style into a concern of everyday use.”80 For Walden, Einfühlung unites subject and object, high style and the everyday, use, exchange, and aesthetic value.

The Sturm editor, however, feels the need to defend his domestic empathy. He recognizes that some readers might criticize his explicitly nonautonomous claims and wards off their anticipated attacks with gentle mockery that belies the stakes of the issue: “Spartan souls will despise what they will call ‘superficialities.’ But for that they will end up as vegetarians.” The implication here is that his foes would deprive themselves of meat and presumably other pleasures that they might enjoy in life. Whether such a charge would change a “Spartan” soul is doubtful, but Walden’s quip registers a keen awareness of an autonomy camp that is robust enough to require a riposte, even a hypothetical one.

Yet against this backdrop, an aesthetic of pleasurable, domestic merging emerges. “One gives oneself over” to these books “with inner pleasure,” Walden contends.81 Further, this merging of subject and object happens in the context of a blending of the arts. Walden draws on other media, especially music, to describe the effects of language and design. He likens John Keats’s poetry to a “gentle subsiding of chords,” and he admires the press catalog’s cover for its “wundervoll durchkomponierte Grazie,” which can be translated as “wonderfully, thoroughly detailed grace,” or as “grace, wonderfully set to music.” In the same review, Walden considers Insel’s collection of Arthur Rimbaud, comparing the poetry both with the poet himself and with sculpture by Simmel’s favorite, Rodin: “His life symbolizes his work: a life full of compressed energy, heroic and tender . . . like the gesture of [Honoré de] Balzac, Rodin’s work.”82 In these examples, Walden vacillates between simile, metaphor, and projected merging of subject—author or viewer—and work; in each case he draws connections between people and things, not borders between subject and object. Indeed, Walden also pressures the boundaries of the category of art, not only by determining that book design is a worthy topic, but also by explicitly melding aesthetics and use, as noted above. Under Loos’s rules on the facing page, daily use would disqualify these objects as “art,” but our resumed reading around Loos’s essay questions the legitimacy of his rules still more.

The column to the left of Loos’s “On Architecture” continues a short story from the previous page, the Czech Max Brod’s “Pilgrimage to Orazio.” Brod was only an occasional contributor to Der Sturm, but this story’s proximity to Loos’s column enhances its significance.83 In short, the tale refutes the ideal of aesthetic autonomy and offers a critique of the autonomous artist—in this case, a “marvelous spirit” who, we are warned, “unfortunately could not escape from one net of thoughts his whole life long.”84 He is an artist with extraordinary talents in all of the arts, but his sense of superiority is said to leave him lonely.

The artist’s first response to loneliness is to seek the company of women:

They [the nameless women] just stand there, and one is already enraptured. They move a little, and one is beside oneself. One wants to hold them tight in every position, at each point of their movement, just to fully enjoy, to be able to observe, their beauty and the curving lines. And of course one does not want to miss the complete impression [Gesamteindruck] of all the flowing changes along the way.85

The mere vision of the women tantalizes the artist; he is “beside” himself—he loses his delimited sense of self—as soon as they begin to move. But he is eager to regain control, fantasizing about holding them still, even frozen.

Brod reveals the superficiality of this objectification when the character turns against the very same women because they show evidence of thought. Thus the artist is incapable of connecting with real women. The only “totality” that he can appreciate is their aestheticized objectification, the Gesamteindruck. For this part of the story to make sense, Brod relies on age-old stereotypes of women as nonthinking, aesthetic objects. Just as clearly, however, Brod mocks those stereotypes, because the artist in the story is found wanting.

Women having failed him, our protagonist makes a pilgrimage to another artist, Orazio. The visitor is happily surprised by the bountiful gardens, colorfully decorated table, and the lively company gathered around the master at home: “Some praised him, while others sought his advice. They brought him little sculptures, carved stones, technical drawings, experiments on magnetism, poems by younger people, notes from rare books.”86 Orazio impresses our artist, that is, until another visitor interrupts the host’s reading to the gathering. He eagerly anticipates a “self-satisfied rebuke” from Orazio, who instead smiles and welcomes this and the suggestions that follow, penciling them into his own text.

Later, the protagonist questions Orazio: “Surely you didn’t take their suggestions seriously?” To which Orazio replies, “But why not?” Flabbergasted, our protagonist nevertheless stays for a few days, during which “a soft, evening mood, at peace with the world, prevailed over his [Orazio’s] garden and his house . . . a comfortable camaraderie with the lesser ones, a warming feeling of equality.” While the protagonist’s language betrays his continuing sense of superiority over the “lesser ones,” we recognize that Orazio has cultivated a happy, generative atmosphere throughout his compound. Our visitor admits to the reader that, during his pilgrimage, he asked himself if the people in Orazio’s community had reached “a higher stage of development” than he had. Yet as soon as he opens this possibility, he shuts it down: the artist explains that, all of a sudden, he knew he had to leave. He simply had to “reject such thoughts,” because—echoing the original narrator’s words—he “could not escape from a net of other thoughts: my task to spread clarity and to require all people to look up to me and to rise up to my level.” The tragedy of the narcissistic artist is that he knows that his rigidity is “unfortunate,” yet he persists with his worldview and self-assigned project, ending, as we suspected he would, “truly lonely, misunderstood.”87

Walden’s essay and Brod’s story—which ends, notably, just above the title of Loos’s piece—suggest that more than art is at stake: the question is how to live.88 In the Sturmian “home,” it appears that those who are willing to subject themselves to a multiplicity of art forms, to collaborate with given materials and available interlocutors, to lose themselves in aesthetic rapture, in short, to open themselves to continual transformation, will find great pleasure in creating, viewing, listening to, and participating in art. Furthermore, Brod’s artist’s inability to open either to women or to a collaborative total work of art reinforces the impression that there is a link between the two. The successful Gesamtkunstwerk may require a relinquishment of traditionally masculine autonomy. One cannot objectify women but must submit at least temporarily to the greater flow, a submission historically constructed as feminine. From Brod’s representation we learn that so-called purists will miss the sensual feast and suffer the appearance of, if not the fact of, autonomy. If art and artist mirror each other, this is the “lonely self-sufficiency” of which Wagner warned in Art and Revolution.

Another detail in Brod’s story supports this interpretation: “Orazio” is the Italianized version of the Latin “Horace,” possibly an allusion to the Roman writer. Two points deserve mention. First, Horace’s treatise, Ars Poetica (ca. 18 BCE), is responsible for the expression ut pictura poesis (as in painting, so it is in poetry), which is one of the earliest known endorsements of the blending or overlap of the arts.89 Second, “decorum,” or what is “proper” to a particular genre, is a topic of considerable concern for Horace. The principle of “decorum” might initially appear to proscribe artistic mixture and therefore to contradict ut pictura poesis. Yet the character Orazio, a modern Horace, unites these potentially conflicting principles in his domestic environment. Cultivating a collective, collaborative community, Orazio reveals that the blending of the arts is precisely what is proper to art and to life: the total work of art at home.

Finally, a brief perusal of the story that precedes Brod’s will surely sway the reader that the domestic Gesamtkunstwerk model informs this issue of Der Sturm, even if it renders that model ambivalent. It is from Scheerbart’s Emperor of Utopia, in which, we have seen, the emperor eventually espouses Weltlebenmiterleben. This earlier chapter is, however, enigmatic. “Almost all day long,” this episode begins, “the city of Ulaleipu was a giant theater. The entire populace took part in the great festival productions.”90 That night, the people experienced

a color and light show, whose incredible splendidness was so overwhelming, that the music of the fifty chapels, which was audible only for a few seconds at a time, rang within it like a liberation. The enormous light shapes swayed and rested over the city like a celestial bad dream. But then, all the monsters were below; all of a sudden the dark lake was turned into a huge light kaleidoscope—and it sparkled and glowed and flowed and poured and made spirals and corners and borders and diamond passes and jellyfish marvels, such that the eye was completely blinded. Afterward all of the residents sang the Spring Song of the poet Itambara together.91

This extraordinary passage combines theater, architecture, landscape, craft, music, poetry, and light in a festival in which all residents participate. It is a life-filled pond, yet not without its troubles. The persistent rhythm of Scheerbart’s prose reinforces the feeling of immersion. He winds together a string of flowing verbs and geometric nouns that brings the reader into such a vortex of color and sound—it is almost a relief to learn of its imperfection of blinding light.

If the pleasure of the fictional populace and the reader thus verges on pain, the residents appear at first to have the last word; in the story, they immediately reassemble in song. The people reflect on their participation. At day’s end, “people in the gardens and on the terraces talked about it over and over and explained to each other again and again that theater is not a wicked art after all—especially if the whole people [Volk] takes part and gets involved.” The passage implies that some community members were initially skeptical, but even they willingly submitted to the program. If, however, the reader remains resistant to the overwhelming character of this Gesamtkunstwerk, Scheerbart claims the last word with a surprise ending: on the morning after the festival, the emperor of utopia announces to his court that he is tired of ruling and will vacate his post for one year.92

Are we meant to condemn this “utopia” as totalitarian? Has Scheerbart provided us with a cautionary story about the potential of the Gesamtkunstwerk to invade our entire lives? Or are we to admire the conscientious involvement of all the people, living together (it is, after all, utopia)? Or is it one giant joke? Scheerbart leaves the conclusion open to the reader, signaling his invitation, rather than decree, for the reader to participate. This total work of art, however ambivalent, is pointedly left open, a consistent attribute of its unfolding at Der Sturm.

A lack of such openness is precisely what Loos criticized in his parable “The Poor Little Rich Man.” “Parable” is one of the translations of Gleichnis. In this case, Loos presented a negative Gleichnis of home for the Sturm readership, much as Brod offered a parable of the artist who fails to recognize the positive Gleichnis of the feminized domestic Gesamtkunstwerk. Although we have located some porousness in Loos’s writings in Der Sturm, especially when they are considered in the larger context of the journal, the architecture historian Beatriz Colomina maintains that the sometimes “dogmatic division in Loos’s writings between inside and outside [etc.] is undermined by his architecture.”93 Let us turn, then, to an example.

With its characteristically tiny windows, Loos’s Villa Müller (1928–30, Prague) appears forbidding from the street. Fortress-like, it clearly separates private from public, inside from out. The main floor plan (Figure 4.3) reveals an insistence on protection; the outer walls are patiently, consistently darkened with a repetitive looping reminiscent of weaving (recall his theory of Bekleidung as the origin of architectural walls). Once inside, one can get comfortable. One might find solace at the grand piano, for example, envisioned by Loos between seating arrangements in the living room (Obytný Pokoj on the plan). This recent photograph of the living room (Figure 4.4) positions us near that imagined piano. We look toward a strangely perforated marble wall. From this vantage point, we cannot see much of the dining room (Jídelna) beyond, but in the marble we notice two panes of translucent, green glass that permit some recording of movement and light. From the dining room, one could look down and survey the entire living room.

Closer at hand, there is a still odder feature. On the top right of the photograph there is another window; here it appears orange, with a simple interlock mullion pattern. The plan tells us it is the niche next to the “Boudoir.” The niche, traditionally called the “Ladies’ Room” (Plate 10), helps make sense of the stairs in the plan. One climbs up to the boudoir and further still, until one reaches this small, nearly enclosed seating area. The orange, noticed from the living room below, is due to the highly polished lemon tree wood. Through the transparent, yet mullioned, window one can survey everything below. Indeed, in Loos’s original vision, one might have looked down to watch a family member or guest play the piano in profile.

In Colomina’s profound analysis of this space, the raised sitting area is the “heart” of the house: “The most intimate room is like a theater box, placed just over the entrance to the social spaces in the house, so that any intruder could easily be seen. . . . Suspended in the middle of the house, this space assumes the character both of a ‘sacred’ space and of a point of control. Comfort is produced by two seemingly opposing conditions, intimacy and control.” She contrasts this sort of “comfort” with that theorized by Benjamin for the nineteenth-century interior:

It is no longer the house that is a theater box [as Benjamin hypothesized]; there is a theater box inside the house, overlooking the internal social spaces. The inhabitants of Loos’s houses are both actors in and spectators of the family scene—involved in, yet detached from, their own space. The classical distinction between inside and outside, private and public, object and subject, becomes convoluted.94

Inside this house, there is thus an infinite shifting between positions (subject and object, etc.), rather than a merging of them. Complete merging, after all, would mean lack of any individuation; it would mean total immersion and passivity, whereas Loos invites, shall we say, active role playing. Loos seems to offer a fortress within which to try out endless possibilities at home. To survey others, one must be willing to submit to surveillance, too; it is not a pact for everyone, but it is a fascinating approach to constructing a “safe space” where “anything goes,” to use contemporary terminology. If modern life is threatening, as Simmel argued, Loos’s response is to produce a Gesamtkunstwerk in the safety of one’s own home.

Fascinating, too, is Loos’s identification of what Colomina calls the “heart” of the house with the feminine. With the internal framing devices, there are opportunities for objectification in the Villa Müller, but in Colomina’s estimation, “Loos interiors are experienced as a frame for action rather than [or more often than] as an object in a frame.”95 Her assessment of his houses as “a frame for action” emphasizes their orientation toward the future. But elsewhere she is equally attentive to their orientation toward the distant past: “For Loos, the interior is pre-Oedipal space, space before analytical distancing that language entails, space as we feel it, as clothing . . . (each occasion has its proper ‘fit’).”96 She might have had the cushioned “Ladies’ Room” in mind. She quotes the suggestive comments on Loos by the Catalonian architect José Quetglas: “Would the same pressure on the body be acceptable in a raincoat as in a gown, in riding breeches or in pajama pants? . . . All the architecture of Loos can be explained as the envelope of a body . . . a warm bag in which to wrap oneself. . . . [It is an] architecture of pleasure . . . [an] architecture of the womb.”97 Quetglas envisions Loos’s domestic architecture as a site of prelapsarian bliss that accommodates us in our modern clothes and, by extension, modern life.

In closing this analysis of Loos’s context, I find myself extremely ambivalent about the Villa Müller. I am drawn to the give-and-take, the exchange of subject and object positions, the domestic Gesamtkunstwerk that it could encompass. I also like that the feminine inscribed at its “heart” is both passive and active. If the house is a nostalgic “womb,” it is also a site from which to engage life and build a future. How engaged with life one can be from behind fortress walls, though, I am not sure; nor am I drawn to the prospect of continual spying by family members.98 We have to remember, however, the broader context out of which Loos conceived his houses. The rights of women, for example, were far from secure, and men’s and women’s projections onto the “feminine” could be wonderful and terrible. Loos provides one model of a femininized, safe, comfortable, and potentially productive home at the onset of twentieth-century modernity; now let us turn to the Gleichnis of home in the art of others.

At Home at Der Sturm and the Merzbau

Lasker-Schüler’s writing reflects a wide range of responses to home. She idealized it, as we have seen: it was high praise when she wrote that Walden’s compositions “take [her] poems home.” She also could be more realistic about it than others. Recall her reflection that “the walls of my rest are the walls of my labor.” Did she mean housework or writing or both? On another occasion she was more explicit, writing that she escaped to the café because “there is nothing more objective than the café after one has played the lead in one’s own literature [writing] at the desk at home. Delightful to shake it off, one’s intense burden.”99 Home is the site of creativity but also, explicitly, of work.

There is yet another text that suggests just what Lasker-Schüler idealized about home (when she did idealize it). In Der Sturm in 1912, she mused:

Sometimes I have such a strong desire to sit again at a big, round table in the afternoon, next to my Mama and just so in between my sisters and brothers, and at the head my papa sits, and we drink our four o’clock coffee together from the silver coffeemaker through filtered paper—and we sit there so closed up together, like an island, all of a piece. Nothing from outside anymore; instead we flow into each other, even though my sisters and brothers and I were all different.100

This moving portrayal of protected domestic bliss is characterized by fluid relationality that nonetheless allows for difference. Lasker-Schüler’s conjuring of her feeling of safe exchange is so powerful—you can almost smell the coffee and feel the well-worn cushions on the seats—that it brings her into the present tense (“we flow into each other”) before she regains historical perspective (“my sisters and brothers and I were all different”). Following this evocation, she also confesses that she tried to replicate her experience a few times in life, including “when I married for the first time.” She acknowledges her disappointment: “But I fell into the house and scraped my knees; they have been bleeding ever since.”101 The metaphorical bleeding signals that her life with her first husband did not provide the secure emotional exchange that she remembered from her first home. Instead, she represents their home as an unsafe haven, one where she began to suffer bitterly, and alone.

Lasker-Schüler biographer Kerstin Decker surmises that the poet married again—this time to Walden—because she wanted to feel “at home” again.102 This “home,” I suggest, was not only nostalgia for the parental home but also a projected longing for the Jewish homeland (long before she moved to Jerusalem in 1937). For example, her poetry collection The Seventh Day (published by the Verein für Kunst’s short-lived press, 1905) includes a poem titled “My People,” in which she writes of feeling separated “from my blood” and orienting oneself “toward the East.”103 Lasker-Schüler conveys her experience of displacement in her poignant poem “Homesickness,” which first appeared in Die Fackel in 1910:

Whether this alienation comes from living as a Jew in Germany, as an Elberfeld (now Wuppertal) native in Berlin, as a Jewish, Elberfeld native in Jewish Berlin, some other source of conflict, or all of these, is not known. In fact, a handwritten version of the poem addressed on the back to Paul Zech—another Elberfeld poet living in Berlin in 1912—as to her “Heematsfrönd,” Elberfeld dialect for “Heimatsfreund” (friend from home), suggests that a combination of factors is likely.105 At the same time, even if her parental home had been a haven, childhood in Elberfeld had not been all rosy. When this same Zech offered to organize an anthology of Elberfeld poets in 1909, Lasker-Schüler responded: “I really have no desire to present myself to the public in Elberfeld[;] the citizens have never been able to understand my artistry[;] already in school I had to endure daily battles with teachers and students.”106

Yet despite the range of reasons to feel “not at home,” Lasker-Schüler continued to try to make a home. Another poem from The Seventh Day suggests that for a time, at least, she achieved that with Walden in Berlin. The poem is titled, appropriately, “Home”:

Prior to the publication of “An Old Tibetan Rug,” later that year in both Der Sturm and Die Fackel, Lasker-Schüler presents us with a harmonious, richly textured environment of “snugness,” unified in exchanges of bodies and souls and bathed in morning light. Despite her share of grounds for alienation, then, Lasker-Schüler works to construct a “home” in her real life, and she also endeavors to provide its aesthetic Gleichnis.108

Home was essential to Walden, too. Although he cultivated international artistic networks, Maurice Godé argues that Walden retained a respect for Prussian order because of the rule of law that it represented: his Jewish family, which had escaped Russian pogroms, was (theoretically) safe in Berlin.109 Der Sturm cultivated its Gleichnis with tighter and looser allusions to literal home(s). At Teloplasma, Walden had arranged the stage to approximate a comfortable domestic setting, complete with piano. Indeed, the First German Autumn Salon emphasized domesticity to a much greater degree than has been recognized hitherto. In act 3, we learned that the show culminated in a large room, reserved almost entirely for the Delaunays. Robert’s and Sonia’s paintings covered the walls, but this temporary room, unlike any other, also featured a large collection of Sonia’s decorative objects: curtains, scarves, pillows, lampshades, and book covers. Prior to the exhibit, Walden had written to Sonia: “I would like very much to exhibit your decorative works in the Autumn Salon, and am very happy that your Sturm covers met with such success.”110 The success that the collaged book covers allegedly met before the Sturm show, however, must have been private, because Sonia had never had the opportunity to exhibit these works prior to Walden’s international undertaking in Berlin in fall 1913.111 Reception there was profuse and wildly inconsistent—signaling just how revolutionary this decorative ensemble and its emphasis in the exhibition were.112

Close to Potsdamer Platz, the main Sturm gallery, at Potsdamer Strasse 134A as of mid-1912, presented not a Gleichnis of home at its center but the actual home of Nell and Herwarth Walden at its periphery. The Waldens regularly opened their (private) home (Figure O.11) for public viewing of their growing collection of modern art. Although Essig’s novel, Der Taifun, is fictional, its representations are highly suggestive of actual life at Der Sturm. In the novel, not surprisingly, the flow between private and public spaces is continuous and only loosely regulated. Although the Waldens therefore relinquished some control of their private lives and home, it seems that the (actual) domestic proximity enhanced the effect of “home” in the gallery. Walden’s grand piano in the gallery (Figure O.9) must have reinforced this impression.

Walden was not the first to connect modern art with the domestic environment. Nancy Troy traces the history of “the exhibition as an approximation of the intimate environment of the home” from James Abbott McNeill Whistler to art nouveau, the Maison cubiste (Cubist house) at the 1912 Salon d’Automne, and the “De Stijl environment,” while Martha Ward identifies the intersections between French impressionist exhibitions and domestic settings.113 As Katherine Kuenzli explores in The Nabis and Intimate Modernism, the French Nabis concentrated their creative energies on the decoration of the home. She maintains this was not a retreat into a “passive,” “feminine” space, as some historians have maintained.114 Instead, “the Nabis blur boundaries between masculine and feminine space, behavior, and expression, in an attempt to reconstruct the home as a site for experiencing an imaginary site of wholeness.” Noting that the “idiom” of painters such as Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard was “the same whether they painted [an interior] for a man or a woman, for a space given over to intellectual work or to a morning toilette,” Kuenzli suggests that the aesthetic experience in the home was considered a safe realm in which to loosen and perhaps lose the gender identities to which we may feel more bound in public. In other words, home was the site that might fulfill Simmel’s curiosity about what life would be like if men and women became more similar. Finally, Kuenzli holds, “The Nabis’ retreat to the domestic space was not absolute, but tactical. In the face of compromised public institutions, they identified the home as a site of renewal. They believed that painting enabled new forms of intersubjectivity that could generate a new and revitalized public culture.”115

Hers is a compelling argument about turning inward to the private space not as a retreat but as part of a strategy to improve life more broadly. Such goals were shared by many efforts across Europe after the turn of the century, as shown by Christopher Reed’s exemplary scholarship on Bloomsbury artists in England.116 Kuenzli’s recent scholarship has focused on the development of museum environments that bridge private and public spheres; particularly relevant is her work on the Folkwang Museum in Hagen, Germany, developed by the industrialist Karl Ernst Osthaus and designed by Van de Velde in 1901. Although Osthaus later moved his family to a nearby villa, he, like the Waldens at Der Sturm, initially lived with his family in rooms directly adjacent to the galleries of contemporary and decorative art.117 We must view the Waldens’ compound at Potsdamer Strasse 134A, where they lived for over a decade, in this context. Walden sought, in a sense, to emulate Orazio. The gallery’s embrace of the domestic allowed for Münter’s paintings, for example, alongside the apparently more “innovative” art that Der Sturm promoted. Modernity was not, as some Futurists may have believed, all airplanes and fast cars: it was also an arrangement of objects and textures on the sofa.

Der Sturm thematized home in longer fictional accounts as well. Unlike his Homerian predecessor, the Odysseus in Döblin’s “Conversations with Calypso” never reaches home. At the beginning, he experiences homesickness on the island with Calypso, but his homesickness is cured not by reaching home but by embracing the multisensorial life experience of art that he and Calypso articulate in the course of the narrative. One Sturmian answer, then, is to find “home’s” Gleichnis in art.

Scheerbart’s novel The Gray Cloth and Ten Percent White, published in 1914, the same year as his architectural treatise Glass Architecture, and dedicated to his “dear bear, Frau Anna Scheerbart,” is an aesthetic realization of home at the same time that it wryly comments on some of the shifting expectations of home for men and women. A fictional, famous glass architect, Edgar Krug, travels the world with his equally famous wife, the organist Clara Krug. She eventually tires of the jet-setting, however:

“You cannot imagine,” she said to her husband as they sat on the balcony of the airship and she gazed quietly at the moon, “how much I long for quiet domesticity, and how happy I am about my gray room in which the harmonium is placed. Yes!”118

Today’s reader might be disappointed to read such a reinforcement of age-old gender distinctions and expectations. But if the reader is patient, he or she discovers a classically Scheerbartian reversal soon thereafter. Once she and her husband have established a home, Clara invites her friends Amanda (a glass sculptor) and Käte (a painter) to visit:

Miss Clara said:

“Indeed, one feels more at home in one’s airship than in one’s own home. What a pity! In an earlier time there were homemaking women. They do not exist anymore.”

Miss Amanda said:

“Yes, who can own so much so as to always sit at home? One must do one’s business. But, therefore, women too must have much to do. In ten days I want to be at the World’s Fair on Lüneburg Heath.”

And Miss Käte spoke:

“I would like to travel around the world in an airship. There cannot be enough movement in this world for me.”119

Thus, even if it is only a myth that “in an earlier time there were homemaking women,” that myth is shattered here.

After liberating his female characters from the expectation of domestic servitude, however, Scheerbart does not reject “home.” Rather, the women are no longer bound to the place, and both men and women characters are allowed to experience a more complete pleasure of and in the home together. At the end, Clara and Edgar join each other in their home’s glass tower:

Edgar smoked another cigarette and stared up into the colorful top of the tower with his head leaning on the cushion.

“Dragonfly wings!” he said quietly. “Birds of paradise, fireflies, lightfish, orchids, muscles, pearls, diamonds, and so on—All that is beautiful on the face of the earth. And we find it all again in glass architecture. It is the culmination—a cultural peak!”

Then they ate roasted snails.

They drank fresh beer from nearby Brissago.

And then they both smoked good, Cuban cigars and, again with their heads leaning back, looked up—into the dome of the tower.120

Although Edgar talks more (as usual), both characters share equally in this sensual feast, another life-filled pond, at home. There are no gender restrictions to their behavior, either, as both notably relish the cigars—typically reserved for men—at book’s end.121

In the context of gender restrictions, let us go home again to Schwitters’s Merzbau. From Norway, Schwitters could look south through his window toward Hannover, but he wrote to Dreier in 1937 that it grieved him not to be able to live in his original Merzbau any longer. In contrast, when he wrote to Alfred Barr at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936, hoping to secure a commission for a new Merzbau in the United States, Schwitters emphasized that the Merzbau was not a real home: “I do not, for example, build a space in which one should live, for the new architects could do that far better.”122 Schwitters may have downplayed the domestic element because he was seeking financial support from a museum, but it seems significant that he also asked Barr to secure funds for him to build a new Merzbau either “in your museum or at the home of a private collector in America.” The Merzbau began at home, and Schwitters never stopped imagining in it the context of home.

At the same time, however, it was also something of a museum. As Gwendolen Webster has shown, several visitors responded to the environment as if it were a museum: the architect Philip Johnson claimed that Schwitters’s “mad museum” influenced his own design ideas, and the composer and writer Paul Bowles referred to the Merzbau as a “personal museum.”123 Schwitters’s collaboration with other artists on the grottoes may have elicited such responses. In addition, Schwitters began featuring a Sammlung Merz (Collection Merz) of his contemporaries’ works, so there actually was a more conventional art exhibit on view.124

Therefore, if Walden moved smoothly between gallery and home, blurring their distinctions, Schwitters moved between gallery, home, and atelier. The Merzbau also opened to traditionally feminized spaces, not only to home in general. Webster’s extensive research into the various stages of the Merzbau reveals that, in the course of the 1930s, “the Merzbau was progressively incorporated into the domestic environment, moving into new espace trouvée [found space], part of which had been the domain of women and children: Ernst Schwitters’[s] playroom (which became Schwitters’[s] bedroom), the maids’ quarters in the attic and possibly cellar rooms.”125 Ernst was grown, so his father’s adoption of his space likely did not trouble him. How the maids felt about the incursion, or whether they were given another space or even let go because of changing circumstances, is not known. It is possible, then, that Schwitters’s moves into these spaces were perceived as a masculine, higher-class usurpation of historically feminized, lower-class space, but it is equally possible that observers were pushed to encounter and question such definitions, even if the definitions were not dissolved.

We have more evidence of Schwitters’s openness to actual, identifiable women. In addition to his long and loving marriage to Helma and his collaboration with Steinitz, I draw attention to his close working relationship with Hannah Höch, who characterized her contribution to two Merzbau grottoes as a “special honor.”126 Webster offers that “this may be regarded as an implicit rebuke to the many male [Dadaist] colleagues who belittled or ignored her in their memoirs.”127 Evidence suggests that for all of their radical politics, some male Dadaists did retain traditional ideas about gender. Richter, for instance, recalled Höch as “a good girl” and a “lightweight.” Further:

Her tiny voice would have been drowned by the roars of her masculine colleagues. But when she came to preside over gatherings in [Raoul] Hausmann’s studio, she quickly made herself indispensable, both for the sharp contrast between her slightly nun-like grace and the heavyweight challenge presented by her mentor, and for the sandwiches, beer and coffee she managed somehow to conjure up despite the shortage of money.128

Richter’s desexualizing (“nun-like”) infantilization of Höch, along with his praise for her hostessing skills—and, at the same time, his regard for the loud, “heavyweight” males—exists in stark contrast to Höch’s own writing, which, as Webster points out, credits Schwitters for his respect for her as a fellow artist.129

As much as Schwitters and his Merzbau challenged traditional gender distinctions, they also required a more subtle analysis of the intersections between art, life, and class than Berlin Dadaists achieved. Webster points out the irony that the Berlin Dadaists accused Schwitters of being a Spiesser (petit bourgeois). Huelsenbeck, in particular, believed that the aims of Dada were incompatible with provincial Hannover.130 Schwitters did, in fact, inhabit a bourgeois milieu, in his comfortable home on a comfortable street in a comfortable smaller city, and Schwitters himself identified with such culture for the first half of his life. But Webster quotes a little-known statement from the artist in 1922: “The most valuable thing in art and the most important thing in life and the only way of making art and life permeate each other is to overcome the greatest possible tension by form.”131 Webster offers this insight: “When he [Schwitters] imported the ideas of Dada into the domestic environment, he began to investigate the limits of Dada’s methods by extending this process both to the intellectual and the material domain of the Spiesser.”132

In other words, it may be easier for Dada to be “revolutionary” in the great metropolis, and if so, what does it actually challenge? Is it not harder and potentially more revealing to make Dada meet the Spiesser, to bring Dada home? Webster suggests that we “regard Schwitters’s large-scale sculptural assemblages as part of his investigation of what happens when the avant-garde is directly confronted with the contingencies of everyday life.”133 Such a confrontation also provides us with the opportunity to recall how many avant-garde principles—such as embrace of the everyday, the impermanent, and the unoriginal—resonate with domestic experience, as Simmel argued long ago. Rather than point moralizing fingers at Spiesser or denigrating women, Schwitters mixed everything up and brought it home.

Dreier, Duchamp, and the Société Anonyme Come Home

If, as Griselda Pollock argues, “gender/sexual difference is a central question in avant-gardism,” Dreier is one of the few artists I have considered who took her feminist convictions to the streets. In an article for the New York Sun in 1914, Dreier proposed that women should receive wages for household labor.134 Indeed, her unpublished journal of 1917–18, besides noting almost daily rendezvous with “Dee,” records continual participation in rallies and marches in support of women’s rights, legalization of contraception, abortion, and suffrage. (Alas, Duchamp does not appear to have accompanied her.)135 Although Dreier’s explicitly political activity appears to have waned over the years, her, Duchamp’s, and the Société Anonyme’s engagement with “home”—actual and metaphorical—was part of their “metaphorical engagement,” as Pollock puts it, “with the ‘feminine’ . . . as the site of a creativity/generativity emancipating itself from the logic and discipline of patriarchal, familial, capitalist production.”136

Such a thesis contradicts that of T. J. Demos, who argues that Duchamp’s works can be best understood through the lens of exile.137 While Duchamp was certainly peripatetic, it may be more productive to consider his oeuvre in relation to home or, more precisely, to the effort to build or rebuild home, that is, to make nostalgia creative. The Bicycle Wheel (1916–17) in Duchamp’s New York apartment, after all, was a replica of the one from 1913 that he had left in his Parisian studio, one to which he attributed domestic pleasures: “I enjoyed looking at it, just as I enjoy looking at the flames dancing in a fireplace. It was like having a fireplace in my studio, the movefment of the wheel reminded me of the movement of the flames.”138 As Richard Meyer observes, “When the artist departed for America in 1915, he left the object (soon to be designated, retrospectively, the first readymade) back in that room at 23 Rue Saint-Hippolyte. Duchamp did not take his ‘fireplace’ with him. Instead, he re-fabricated it for his New York studio, and then traced its shadow onto a painting [Tu m’] custom-made for Dreier’s apartment on Central Park West.”139

Dreier, too, moved, and when she settled in Connecticut, she reinstalled Tu m’ over the bookshelves—just as it had been in New York. Photographs of her home also suggest that her taste in furnishings was traditionally bourgeois, but never stultifying, like that of the Poor Little Rich Man. On the contrary, the playful repositioning of Duchamp’s Small Glass on her piano (Figures 1.13 and 1.14), as I have shown, suggests a permeation of art and life, an overcoming of tension by form (as Schwitters advocated), and a welcoming of “Disturbed Balance” (as Dreier called the piece) into the domestic space.

Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that the gallery run by the Société Anonyme in New York from 1920 to 1924 was a modest, apartment-like space.140 Here we see it in its second year of operation (1921, Figure 4.5); an unidentified woman works at the desk, while visitors might mill about and enjoy the works on display. As Robert Herbert suggests, “The limitation of sixteen to twenty works suited Dreier’s intention that the viewer see a few works in intimate, nearly domestic surroundings that would enhance the personal experience of viewing. This experience should induce the viewer to treat art as part of everyday life, not merely as a temporary exhibition.”141

Scholars have contrasted this apparently harmonious environment with Duchamp’s purportedly alienating installation of the gallery’s inaugural exhibit in 1920. Although no installation photographs are known to survive, he is known to have “framed” the works in paper lace, covered the walls in a very pale blue oilcloth, and installed an industrial rubber mat on the floor. David Joselit asserts that the result, especially with the lace, was a “hermaphroditic exhibition in which masculinized artworks occupied a feminized salon.”142 Amelia Jones emphasizes that the industrial floor “exposed the gallery’s role in marketing art as commodity.”143 Meyer, for his part, concludes that “Duchamp’s design . . . estranged modern paintings from the frames surrounding them and the floors beneath.”144

While these scholars’ assessments are persuasive, I must complicate them with two observations of my own. First, as Meyer also reports, Duchamp became so attached to the pale blue color that he tried to replicate it on the walls of his later Paris apartment. He shared the memory with Dreier, writing in 1930 that the place “is all painted in that blue-white as near as possible of the color we had at the 1st Société Anonyme East 47th Street.”145 Whatever alienation he may have instigated there in 1920, then, the long-term effect was the desire to reexperience its color in his own living space. Thus, Duchamp used nostalgia creatively in his own dwelling. Second, Dreier’s decorating aesthetic was hardly uniformly harmonious. In fact, Dreier seems to echo Loos’s disdain for overbearing designers when she addressed an audience on the first day of the Société Anonyme’s International Exhibition in Brooklyn in 1926:

We are passing through a very dangerous period for art in American history, for we are facing a curious situation and that is the audacity of a group of people who call themselves interior decorators, proclaiming that art should not enter the home, that it is no longer chic to have pictures on the wall. . . . Unless we, as individuals, live with art, we cannot understand it. . . . If you shut out art from the home you are killing one of the most vital arteries of life for our nation.146

As Meyer sums up, “According to Dreier, professional decorators discouraged the display of art (especially modern art) in the home on the grounds that it would detract from the broader decorative scheme and coordinated ensembles of the interior.”147 Interestingly, Dreier’s lecture was delivered to a group of three hundred young girls, whom she addressed as the “future mothers of our nation.”148 As an advocate of women’s freedom herself, Dreier was neither essentializing women nor confining them to the home but realistically addressing a group that, statistically speaking, did include some “future mothers of our nation.” And she wanted to encourage them to express themselves and their families at home through modern art.

One hallmark of the Brooklyn exhibit has received surprisingly little scholarly attention until recently.149 To show people how they might integrate modern art into their own homes, the exhibition included four staged “rooms,” furnished by a local department store and “decorated” with modern art. This was not the stifling “interior decoration” that Dreier loathed. As she wrote to Duchamp, the museum would present “four quaint small rooms” in addition to the larger exhibiting halls: a parlor, a library, a dining room, and a bedroom, which “would make a charming intime background for certain pictures and water colors. I am really very happy over how we can plan the hanging of the Exhibition.”150

It is difficult to determine exactly what was in these “rooms,” since there is only one known photograph with limited views into two of the rooms (Figure 4.6). Kristina Wilson hypothesizes that the works are those in the exhibition catalog under the title “List of Pictures Hung but Not Catalogued.”151 The exemplar I have seen has no such list; however, the Société Anonyme’s Logbook at Yale University does, and its names correspond with those Wilson suggests (Figure 4.7). The Logbook version also notes where the works were to be hung. Yet we must tread cautiously: Meyer identifies a painting by El Lissitzky (l.n. 31, 1922–24, Yale University Art Gallery) and a sculpture by the American William Zorach (Floating Figure, 1922, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo), in the left-hand “room” of the photograph, yet neither appears on this list, while both works are included in the regular Logbook checklist.152 Acknowledging this uncertainty, we can still offer tentative observations about the works that were at least provisionally considered for these domestic interiors.

To begin with, Louis Eilshemius appears in the Logbook with three paintings in the “Dining Room” and two more destined for the “Passage between Parlor and Library.” Eilshemius is little known today, and he was almost certainly never known at Der Sturm. Apparently his work “languished in almost total obscurity” until 1917, when Duchamp declared one of his paintings to be one of only two significant works (out of twenty-five hundred or so) at the Society of Independent Artists exhibit.153 In October 1920 Eilshemius enjoyed his first solo exhibit at the Société Anonyme—the first granted to any artist. Dreier purchased The Pool (ca. 1920, Figure 4.8) from the artist in 1924, and one can imagine its reverie in the “Dining Room,” to which it was initially assigned. The female nude, ankle deep in a pool in the foreground, is broadly painted on a sheet of music turned sideways, such that the printed notes occasionally float through the mysterious atmosphere. Scholarship on Eilshemius is scarce, but this luminous work demonstrates the broad reach of the Gleichnisse of water and piano, for which this sheet music was likely written.154 With The Pool, likely placed in a “room” in Brooklyn, Dreier and Duchamp brought water and piano home.

If the Eilshemius harks back to romanticism, other works envisioned for the rooms represent Dreier’s and Duchamp’s capacious taste as well as the incredibly broad range of their sources. At the top of the Logbook page, “4 Watercolors by [Georges] Papazoff,” a Bulgarian living in France, were designated for the “Parlor.” His naive paintings were championed by Duchamp’s friend Henri-Pierre Roché, who supplied them for the show.155 At the bottom of the page, “2 Abstractions, watercolors, by [Willi] Baumeister [1889–1955],” planned for the “Passage between Parlor and Dining Room,” are extremely different. Baumeister, a German who had studied with Hölzel in Stuttgart, exhibited in Der Sturm’s Autumn Salon in 1913, though he turned increasingly to France for aesthetic inspiration.156 But it was Der Sturm that provided the Société Anonyme with five of Baumeister’s broadly constructivist works for the Brooklyn exhibit in 1926, as this inventory of loans for the show reveals (Figures 4.9 and 4.10). Baumeister’s works are listed on the top right of the front page identified only as “Farbige Zeichnung” (Colored drawing); nevertheless, this inventory reminds us of the range of works and nationalities (Danish, French, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, and Swiss, noted with Dreier’s pencil) that Der Sturm supported, making a wide range of works possible at the International Exhibition. Providing the Société Anonyme with fifty works for the exhibit, Der Sturm was by far the biggest donor for this landmark show, including works that likely decorated the rooms.157

It is all the more astonishing that Der Sturm was such a major source of works for the Brooklyn show when we consider that by 1926 its glory days were past. Walden, in fact, was becoming increasingly interested in the USSR, to which he immigrated in 1932. Further, the correspondence between Der Sturm (usually handled by Blümner, though sometimes by Walden) and Société Anonyme (Dreier), which clusters around two major shipments of works—for the fourteenth Société Anonyme exhibit in New York in March 1921 and for this Brooklyn show in 1926—is increasingly strained on both sides of the Atlantic. Checklists, such as that reproduced here, abound, yet misunderstandings prevail. Der Sturm, for example, never seems to know when or if its pictures are exhibited, not to mention how long the Société Anonyme plans to keep them. Dreier, for her part, admonishes Der Sturm for not following her instructions for passage through American customs; Blümner retorts that “the American customs officers appear to be the most ridiculous in the world”; and Dreier insists that she is doing Der Sturm a favor by keeping their works for sale in the potentially stronger US market.158 At Blümner’s most exasperated, already in 1921, he writes: “Quite frankly, your way of dealing with us is the most unbelievable that we have experienced in ten years of our existence in business relationships.”159 With such complications, it is clear that a shared commitment to modern art and its metaphors, rather than personal sympathy, is what kept the lines of communication open between these organizations. The persisting overlap in art and Gleichnisse, despite these difficulties, only heightens the relevance of the affinities of Der Sturm and the Société Anonyme.

With such a track record of disputes in mind, Dreier’s gift of a full-page advertisement for Der Sturm in the International Exhibition catalog (Plate 3) reveals her ability to rise above personal differences and to give credit where credit is due. That said, it is understandable that she chose to organize most of the loans directly with artists themselves. There were middlemen and -women, however, with Kurt and Helma Schwitters foremost among them. Dreier admired the Bauhaus (and also gave the school a one-page ad free of charge), but she asked the artists there to forward their works to the Schwitterses for international shipping.160 So devoted was she to Helma and Kurt that she considered the much smaller operation, Merz, equally deserving of a one-page advertisement in the catalog.161 As the Sturm loan list shows, Schwitters was still engaged with the Berlin gallery; Der Sturm supplied the Société Anonyme with one of his works for the Brooklyn show. Yet in this case, the personal connection trumped the business relationship: Schwitters sent Dreier five paintings, one sculpture, and twenty-five collages.162 Returning to the Logbook, we find that Dreier and Duchamp envisioned “5 [of these] Merz pictures by Kurt Schwitters, over the bookcase” in the “Library” at the Brooklyn Museum.

Dreier’s placement of Duchamp’s Tu m’ over her own successive bookcases suggests that she did not take such placement lightly. We cannot know which of Schwitters’s Merz pictures were selected for the “Library” in Brooklyn, but Mz 316. ische gelb (1921, Plate 11) may have been among them. Dreier bought it, along with what are assumed to have been the other twenty-four collages from the 1926 show, in 1929.163 Formally, its apparent randomness resolves itself, in part, into a succession of overlapping, though opaque, triangles that rise through the center toward the upper right.164 The overlapping thwarts desire for transparency, which the reflective silver foil near the top frustrates further. Atop the foil rests a yellowish disk that could be, but is not, a coin. That circle echoes the shape of the printed capital “O” on the upper left. Schwitters stressed the equivalence of materials for making art; these two “O’s” are materially different yet visually similar. However, these shapes, as well as the other scraps of ticket stubs, newsprint, and so forth, never wholly sever their ties to the world from which they came: modern daily life.

With this collage, we return to the questions of modernity with which we began act 4. Responding primarily to Simmel’s “Metropolis and Mental Life,” the architecture historian Manfredo Tafuri speculates: “The objects all floating in the same plane, with the same specific gravity, in the constant movement of the money economy: does it not seem that we are reading here a literary comment on a Schwitters Merzbild?”165 After noting that the term Merz was derived from Kommerz (commerce), Tafuri continues:

The problem was, in fact, how to render active the intensification of nervous stimulation; how to absorb the shock provoked by the metropolis transforming it into a new principle of dynamic development; how to “utilize” to the limit the anguish which “indifference to value” continually provokes and nourishes in the metropolitan experience.166

While Tafuri displays a profound understanding of one aspect of Schwitters’s Merz pictures, Dreier and Duchamp may have displayed a still-deeper understanding of the Merz pictures by installing them in the “rooms” in the Brooklyn Museum, fulfilling the theoretical trajectory of Simmel in another way. The Merz pictures “absorb the shock provoked by the metropolis,” as Tafuri puts it, and the Société Anonyme brings them “home,” to the original site of the nonoriginal, repetitive, and everyday, to the place where we can relax into our relationships, work, rest, and love. Simmel attributed a Gesamtstimmung to the home, and Dreier and Duchamp did their best, with the help of many others, to achieve one in Brooklyn in 1926.167 Although the Merz picture in this photograph (Figure 4.11) is unidentified, we see how comfortably it fit into Dreier’s own home, The Haven, possibly for years.168

Frederick Kiesler and Art of This Century

The International Exhibition of Modern Art ran in Brooklyn from 19 November 1926 to 9 January 1927. It was an extraordinary show, but a little-known story suggests that it might have been still more so. The story also binds Der Sturm, the Société Anonyme, and a gallery still to come, Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century (New York, 1942–47) more securely together. Frederick Kiesler, admirer of Duchamp’s Large Glass, is the tie.

Kiesler wrote to Dreier just two months before the Brooklyn exhibit opened, saying that Alexander Archipenko had told him that Dreier was interested in talking with him about the show. At this already late date, he nonetheless offered his services.169 Following a probable meeting in person, Kiesler sent an extraordinary letter on 2 November 1926, written all lowercase, Bauhaus style: “given the current circumstances I have reduced the idea for the furnishing of a modern room in my proposal.”170 Presumably he meant the circumstances of a mere seventeen days before the opening, but he did not specify. In any case, this letter suggests that Dreier had sought out Kiesler to install an additional room in conjunction with the domestic spaces already planned. Kiesler provided a sparse outline, declaring: “It is an old idea of mine to show the future way in which people can come in contact with pictures in their homes.”171

Dreier had found a sympathetic architect, but there was too little time for Kiesler’s plan to be realized in Brooklyn. Dreier wrote him on 5 January 1927 that she hoped he could realize his plan for the next venue, the Anderson Galleries, New York, 25 January to 5 February 1927, but twenty days’ advance planning were not sufficient, either.172 In a typewritten letter two days later, Kiesler confirmed both his enthusiasm and the impossibility of achieving his complete project in time. He added by hand: “Es ist zu schade” (It is too bad).173

We may never know what Kiesler might have fabricated for the gallery experience of art “at home” in Brooklyn or Manhattan in 1926 or 1927, but we have ample testimony of what he designed for a new gallery in 1942, namely, Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery in Manhattan. In the intervening years, he negotiated with Dreier about planning an actual building to house the collection of the Société Anonyme (those plans came to nothing), while in the 1930s he and his wife, Stefi, became close enough to Dreier to weekend with her in Connecticut.174 And Kiesler, Dreier, and Duchamp intensified their friendships while Kiesler researched and wrote his essay on the Large Glass for the Architectural Record (1937).175

The American heiress Guggenheim had lived abroad, primarily in Paris, since 1921; she first opened a gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, in London in 1938. She called on her “old friend,” Duchamp, whom she had known since the early 1920s, to advise her.176 Beginning in 1938, she also benefited from the insights of Howard Putzel, another American expatriate, who also rejoined her in New York in 1942.177 It was Putzel, not Duchamp, who suggested Kiesler to design Art of This Century. According to Guggenheim’s memoirs:

Finally I found a top story in West 57th Street for my museum. I didn’t know how to decorate it, and Putzel, as usual on hand said, “Why don’t you get Kiesler to give you a few little ideas?” Frederi[c]k Kiesler was one of the most advanced architects of this century. So I accepted Putzel’s suggestion, never dreaming that the few little ideas would end up in my spending seven thousand dollars.178

Kiesler set to work in February 1942. Duchamp returned from Europe in June and stayed with Guggenheim before moving into an apartment in the Kieslers’ penthouse a few weeks before Art of This Century officially opened on 20 October 1942.179 Lisa Phillips argues that Duchamp’s Large Glass was the “one work that particularly crystallized Kiesler’s ambitions for what art should be,” so it is fitting that the domestic lives of each were proximate to each other while Kiesler realized his Gleichnis of a space in which people could live with art.180

Kiesler had interpreted the Large Glass as “architecture, sculpture and painting in one.” Such a reading, however suggestive, depends on a projection into real space of the viewer’s experience of the two-dimensional artwork. At Art of This Century, however, Kiesler manipulated space to build an actual environment that incorporated architecture, sculpture, and painting, especially in the best-known spaces, the Surrealist Gallery (Figure 4.12) and the Abstract Gallery (Figure 4.13). These photographs, taken by the famed photographer Berenice Abbott, demonstrate that Kiesler’s spaces inspired creativity in others.181 A reconstructed plan by Don Quaintance (Figure 4.14) enables us to reimagine these spaces—demolished when the gallery closed in 1947—in sequence. To dissolve the frame that separates “image” from “environment,” as Kiesler put it, he literally stripped the artworks of frames and then held them in space: some with “arms” positioned to project them from the wall (in the Surrealist Gallery), others with rope systems that anchored the works to ceiling and floor but that allowed viewers to adjust the height of the work in question (in the Abstract Gallery). At one end of the Abstract Gallery, a shadow box with a lever offered alternating visual delights (originally another Klee, Magic Garden, 1926, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice).182

In “Note on Designing the Gallery,” Kiesler explains his ideal:

It is the principle of unity, primordial unity, the unity between man’s creative consciousness and his daily environment which governs the presentation of paintings, sculptures, furnishings and enclosures in these four galleries. That such unity once existed we know. We know that it was destroyed. The world today offers terrible enough proof that it must exist again. . . . Man, seeing in a piece of sculpture or a painting on canvas the artist’s projected vision, must recognize his act of seeing—of “receiving”—as a participation in the process no less essential and direct than the artist’s own.183

Thus Kiesler’s goal of achieving a unity of disparate objects, spaces, and technologies of seeing required active participants who submit themselves to “receiving” the given two- and three-dimensional experiences. Such unity that welcomes difference and participation recalls the life-filled pond of Gesamtkunstwerk. Writing in free verse years later, Kiesler confirms such allusions: “when i conduct / the orchestra of space / by grace / of the UnKnown / the endless house / has ins and out / without a door / or wall.”184

Since the Surrealist and Abstract Galleries have drawn significant scholarly attention, let us focus on another site here. The Daylight Gallery housed temporary shows in natural light, as its name suggests, as well as Guggenheim’s working desk (visible on the plan, Figure 4.14). Like the Société Anonyme’s original gallery’s desk in its domestic setting (Figure 4.5), this one, too, kept (female) labor squarely in view. To manage so much sunlight from the large windows facing the street, Kiesler covered them with “a flattened translucent pane of tautly stretched ninon that diffused the northern light,” as Quaintance explains.185 The scrim was apparently sheer enough to allow for a striking view of the city while protecting artworks on display. Complete transparency, Kiesler knew, was not the answer either for art or for society’s “destroyed” unity. In another striking photograph by Abbott (Figure 4.15), the pane between the galleries emphasizes the importance of nontransparency for viewer participation and enlightenment. The window could give us an unencumbered view of the next room, but Hans Arp’s pencil drawing Untitled (1940, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice) is suspended there, blocking part of our view and gently reminding us that all views are partial. Seeing the side of the shadow box, which appears through the right side of the window, confirms this insight. To the right of the window we see Schwitters’s Maraak Variation I (Merzbild) (1930, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice). His later, more constructivist idiom still welcomes the detritus of the everyday, including this corroded can lid, into our aesthetic world. Finally, above the interior window hangs another “window,” Robert Delaunay’s Windows Open Simultaneously, 1st part, 3rd motif (1912, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice), which had appeared with Delaunay’s other window paintings at Der Sturm in 1913. In this photograph from Art of This Century, it both faces real windows, like those it depicts, and hovers above an actual (interior) window, the juxtapositions of which must have heightened the experience of perception.

The Daylight Gallery was the most reserved of the designed spaces, but it was no “white cube.” It was a place to review where one had been, where one stood, and to contemplate diving in again to the full experience of Art of This Century. The experience was always changing, never “complete,” or dead—as this view of the same window from the other side confirms (Figure 4.16). Now the shadow box protrudes to our left, Schwitters’s Relief (1923, Museum Ludwig, Cologne), for all its material density, hovers in the middle of the glass, and the same Delaunay painting hangs over the window on this other side of the wall. Stefi and Frederick Kiesler also pose, peeking through the window. They remind me of Robert and Sonia Delaunays’ reflections in that other window picture (Plate 7), also shown years before at Der Sturm. If we let memory infuse our vision, we see them here, too: his profile is echoed in the yellow arc to the right of the green, abstract Eiffel Tower, and her signature orange may turn from the tower to its left. Memories and echoes of the metaphors of modernism resounded at Art of This Century.

The immersive, aesthetic environment remains troubling to some, and its realization at Art of This Century seems especially challenging to those who restrict their analysis to Kiesler’s Surrealist Gallery, in which curved walls and borderless, fluid space are evocative of the womb. Wagner intended for the Gesamtkunstwerk to recover a lost unity, and Freud theorized that such a search is a regressive attempt to reunite with the lost mother, also associated with “home.” In “The ‘Uncanny’” (1919), Freud refers to the mother’s body as the

former Heim [home] of all human beings . . . the place where each of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning. There is a joking saying that “Love is home-sickness”; and whenever a man dreams of a place or a country and says to himself, while he is still dreaming, “this place is familiar to me, I’ve been here before,” we may interpret the place as being his mother’s genitals or her body.186

Demos identifies Kiesler’s Art of This Century design with such regressive tendencies: “The unity of ‘vision and reality’ that Kiesler sought was nothing less than a magical and impossible reversion to a prelinguistic condition where the difference between sign and referent—made obvious by the frame, which separates picture from reality—would dissolve.”187 The built space reinforces Demos’s theoretical argument: “The Surrealist gallery was ultimately conceived as a heimlich interior of a body: concave walls suggesting a uterine form; protruding organs held up the ‘eidetic images’ of paintings; and the lighting was designed to ‘pulsate like your blood.’”188 He concludes, “The emphasis on biomorphic shapes and the attempt to fuse the viewer with an egglike or uterine surrounding betrayed the desires for spatial, linguistic, and psychic plenitude that correlated with surrealism in exile. This represented one response to the experience of geopolitical deracination: to regress to a primordial intrauterine home.”189

However, Demos’s argument is problematic on several levels. First, the Surrealist Gallery was one of four galleries at Art of This Century, and differences between them, as well as passages between them (virtual or real), ensured that no one remained fully submerged for any length of time. Kiesler invited active passivity—not passivity alone. Second, Demos neglects the fact that Kiesler’s designs were not born of exilic angst in 1942 New York (where Kiesler and his wife had lived since 1926) but developed ideas that he had introduced in 1924 in Vienna. Kiesler is explicit about this history in his “Note on Designing the Gallery”: “A method of spatial-exhibition which I had begun to develop as far back as 1924, in Vienna, seemed in the present case, the just solution.”190 Kiesler explains in a footnote: “Theater and Music Festival of the City of Vienna, 1924: this method aimed at a varied transparency of the whole room, called L [Leger, or lying part] and T [Träger, or carrier] units, used paintings without frames, sculptures on cantilevers.”191 He refers to a massive international undertaking, the Internationale Ausstellung Neuer Theater-Technik (International exhibition of new theater technique), which Kiesler organized from 24 September to 12 October 1924 in the Austrian capital.192 It was on the basis of this venture’s success that Jane Heap, coeditor with Margaret Anderson of the Little Review, invited Kiesler to help her coordinate the International Theatre Exposition in New York in 1926.193 The Kieslers came and virtually never left again.

The Kieslers’ trajectory from Vienna to New York has been traced by many scholars, but few have noted the overlaps between the Viennese project and active members of the Sturm circle. The catalog from Vienna, Katalog Programm Almanach, edited and designed by Kiesler in the latest constructivist style, opens with interspersed essays by Walden and Léger, followed by Sturm regulars Rudolf Blümner, Lothar Schreyer, Kurt Schwitters, and William Wauer, and art and essays by a pan-European avant-garde: Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, Alexandra Exter, George Grosz, Vlastislav Hofman, Marie Laurencin, El Lissitzky, Man Ray, Filippo Marinetti, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Walter Mehring, Enrico Prampolini, Luigi Russolo, Oskar Schlemmer, and so forth.194 We have seen the Schwitters piece before: in “Out of the World: MERZ” in Der Sturm in 1923, his self-named persona proclaims that “the final decision about the worth of the Gesamtkunstwerk lies despite all with the public.” Some of the “audience” members yell “Bravo!” while others yell, “Idiot!” The performative, open-ended Sturmian Gesamtkunstwerk was part of the Viennese extravaganza, then, and it was appropriately attributed at the end of Schwitters’s essay, simply, “Der Sturm.”195 By no means do I suggest that Walden or Der Sturm was responsible for the “L and T” units Kiesler dates to this event and identifies as critical for the eventual development of his design for Art of This Century, but we must acknowledge that Kiesler’s designs emerged from an entirely different context than the surrealist exile to which Demos limits him.196 Indeed, among the aphorisms that appear in Kiesler’s catalog’s margins, we find: “The stage is a Gleichnis of the whole world.”197

Finally, Demos’s critique of the Surrealist Gallery as homely womb relies heavily on Jacques Lacan’s and Adorno’s critiques of the home as regressive in the years surrounding World War II.198 So regressive, in fact, was “home” for Adorno by 1951 that he wrote, “it is part of morality today not to be at home in one’s home.”199 Vidler has traced a general European sense of homelessness since at least the eighteenth century, so Demos need not have restricted himself to wartime, although such a time surely renders the feeling of homelessness particularly acute.200 Vidler also emphasizes Adorno, in particular the latter’s theories of aesthetic estrangement as a response to uprootedness. But neither Demos nor Vidler (in this case) addresses gender sufficiently. Tom McDonough’s review of Demos’s book puts it well: “the absence of any serious consideration of the gendered nature of the critical devaluation of ‘home’ in the discourses treated by Demos; there is no discussion of the masculinist biases that might lie behind the avant-garde’s strenuous renunciations of the ‘regressive’ comforts of maternal spaces.”201

Vidler does, however, provide a theoretical opening, noting that feminist critics “from Sarah Kofman to Kaja Silverman” approach Freud—after whom Lacan developed his theories—with skepticism. Vidler acknowledges their recognition of the “obvious difficulties of a theory that privileges a male response to the ‘uncanny trauma’ of woman’s lack.”202 Thus the psychoanalytic basis of Demos’s argument is by no means secure. But even more, we simply must address the gendered expectations of home and exile. Exile is oddly heroicized as masculine suffering and challenge, whereas it is largely left to women either to stay home or to make a home. Women, historically, have often done just that, regardless of their alienation; consider Lasker-Schüler. Or they have praised the efforts of others to do so. Dreier, for example, memorialized her father for having come to America and made a home here. In her journal, on 30 April 1918, she recorded: “Today 69 years ago Father landed in America. He became an American citizen—He made this land his Home and he served it well.”203 Finally, the Schwitterses both fulfilled and defied these expectations. Helma stayed home in 1937; she cared for two sets of aging parents and the family home, including the Merzbau that the Nazis abhorred. She and the rest of the family miraculously survived the Allied bombing that destroyed their home—and the Merzbau—in 1943. How they simply persisted is impossible for those of us who have not experienced such violent displacement to imagine. Kurt, as we have seen, left for Norway with their son Ernst, where they endeavored to make home anew, in the face of terrible loss. Yet his was not the mythologized exile of the avant-garde. Schwitters looked forward in time, but he also looked backward, installing his largest window to face south toward the dear home he had left in Hannover. This was a real home built partly on the nostalgic memory of home, which he could see only metaphorically. Home was a Gleichnis that facilitated creative nostalgia. The range of spaces, including the womblike Surrealist Gallery at Art of This Century, also created a Gleichnis of home for art and for those lucky enough to experience it.