Encounters from Dada till Today E-Book

Hans Richter

• Herausgeber: Prestel
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 285

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

In English for the first time: The pioneering Dadaist’s insights and remembrances of a lifetime working side-by-side with the leading modern artists of the twentieth century.

Painter, filmmaker, writer, and teacher Hans Richter (1888–1976) was at the center of some of the most important movements in modernism, including Expressionism, Dadaism, Constructivism, and Surrealism. In contrast to the image of the lone artist creating in isolation, Richter’s long and prolific career was fueled by his encounters with others. With appearances by Calder, Cocteau, Duchamp, Eisenstein, Fellini, Höch, Kaprow, Malevich, Mondrian, Man Ray, and Tzara (to name just a few), Encounters from Dada till Today documents the collaborative aspirations of a generation of modern artists, as well as testifies to a lifetime of friendships forged in creativity. In Richter’s words, “the form, the content, and the occasion of each encounter commemorate the unrepeatable particular person, and give him the small eternity to which everyone is entitled.”

Leseprobe

Encounters from Dada till Today

Hans Richter, City College of New York, 1948

Hans Richter

Encounters from Dada till Today

Translated by Christopher Middleton

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

DelMonico Books • Prestel

Munich • London • New York

Published in conjunction with the exhibition Hans Richter: Encounters at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (May 5–September 2, 2013) and the Centre Pompidou-Metz (September 29, 2013–February 24, 2014).

Copyright © 2013 Hans Richter Estate

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any other information storage and retrieval system or otherwise, without written permission from the copublishers.

Editor: Sara Cody Associate Editor: Phil Graziadei Designer: Maja Blazejewska Photo Editor: Dawson Weber Production Manager: Karen Farquhar

LACMA Publications: Head of Publications: Lisa Gabrielle Mark Senior Editor: Sara Cody Editor: Jennifer MacNair Stitt Associate Editor: Phil Graziadei Administrative Assistant: Tricia Cochée Rights and Reproductions: Piper Severance, Jeanne Dreskin, and Dawson Weber

Copublished in 2013 by Los Angeles County Museum of Art and DelMonico Books, an imprint of Prestel Publishing

Los Angeles County Museum of Art 5905 Wilshire Boulevard Los Angeles, CA 90036 323 857 6000 www.lacma.org

Prestel, a member of Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH

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Prestel Publishing Ltd. 14–17 Wells Street London W1T 3PD United Kingdom Tel.: [phone] Fax: [phone]

Prestel Publishing 900 Broadway, Suite 603 New York, NY 10003 Tel.: [phone] Fax: [phone] E-mail: [email protected]

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013935442

eISBN 978-3-641-11754-2

Frontis: Hans Richter, Dragonfly (Counterpoint in Red, Black, Gray, and White), 1943, detail, oil on canvas, 29 ½ x 15 ½ in., private collection. © Hans Richter Estate, photo © 2013 Museum Associates/LACMA

CONTENTS

Editor’s Foreword

Preface

Introduction

I. The Search for Absolute Freedom

Mr. Dada

Dada? Dada!

Arp—Rising Behind a Cloud

Merz

Raoul Hausmann

Hannah Höch

Lajos Kassák

II. The Search for Absolute Order

Piet Mondrian

Kazimir Malevich

Mies van der Rohe—The Builder

The Search for New Sounds

III. The Search for the Marvelous (Surrealism)

Georges Méliès

Max Ernst

Joseph Cornell

Jean Cocteau

Emmy Hennings

Man Ray

Alexander Calder

The Buildings Series

IV. The Search for Reality

The Search for Reality

George Grosz

Dada Monteur

A Rare Person: Ferdinand Hardekopf

A Homeric Figure: Robert J. Flaherty

Sergei Eisenstein

Federico Fellini

V. The Search for the Future

Frederick Kiesler

Happenings, Concept Art, the Metaphysical Hole, Eternity, and Magic

VI. The Search for Nothingness

Marcel Duchamp

VII. The Search for the Facts of Art History

Art is Superfluous

Bauer and the Baroness

“Joy in Another Person’s Being”

VIII. On Growing Old

Lyonel Feininger

Piet Mondrian

Fernand Léger

Yves Tanguy

Hans Arp

Julius Bissier

Marcel Duchamp

Postscript

Artists Mentioned in the Text

Endnotes

Hans Richter, Zurich, 1959. Photo: J. Bruell, Zurich

EDITOR’S FOREWORD

This publication of Encounters from Dada till Today marks the first time that Hans Richter’s memoir, originally published in German in 1973 as Begegnungen von Dada bis heute, has appeared in English. In the chapter titled “The Search for New Sounds,” Richter comments that “in modern visual art (e.g., the use of computers), endeavors are afoot that will enlarge the range of auditory and visual experience with the aid of twentieth-century science and technology. Where this will have led to fifty years from now, only our children and grandchildren will know.” In this light, producing Encounters from Dada till Today in e-book and print-on-demand formats seems particularly apt for such a forward-thinking artist who spent his career constantly embracing advancements in technology and new ways of communicating.

Born in Berlin in 1888, Richter was a pioneering avant-garde painter and filmmaker at the center of some of most important movements of the early twentieth century, including Expressionism, Dadaism, Constructivism, and Surrealism. Forced out of Germany by Hitler’s regime in 1933, he eventually immigrated to the United States in 1941, where he became an influential film teacher and a productive writer, and continued to paint well into the final years of his life. His book Dada: Art and Anti-Art (published in German in 1964 and in English in the following year) quickly became a major reference, eventually being translated into nine languages and still in print today.

Following Art and Anti-Art, Richter turned to assembling the highly personal collection of memories, anecdotes, and episodes that are presented here. Encounters from Dada till Today reads as a virtual Who’s Who of the twentieth-century avant-garde, with Hans Arp, Alexander Calder, Jean Cocteau, Joseph Cornell, Marcel Duchamp, Federico Fellini, Emmy Hennings, Hannah Höch, Allan Kaprow, Kazimir Malevich, Man Ray, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Kurt Schwitters, Dorothea Tanning, and Tristan Tzara (to name literally just a few) all making appearances in its pages. Though Richter was fluent in English by this time—he once quipped that he taught himself the language primarily by reading Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett novels—he wrote in German, and so would eventually need a suitable translator.

In early 1967, Richter began corresponding with British poet and translator Christopher Middleton, an instructor at the University of Texas at Austin who had written about Dadaism and Expressionism and, by that time, had begun to introduce the English-speaking world to the work of Swiss writer Robert Walser. Middleton recalls that the two met in person, probably later that year, at an event organized by literary scholar Roger Shattuck at UT-Austin. Today he recalls Richter’s charisma: “a very amusing and charming man, but also someone whose significance you understood right away.” The two met again in Locarno, Switzerland, in late 1969, and probably discussed translating Richter’s new book by the early 1970s.

Begegnungen von Dada bis heute was published in Germany in 1973, and Middleton produced his translation in 1974 (with some content altered slightly from the German edition). But due to Richter’s illnesses and advancing age, the English edition remained unpublished. After Richter’s death in 1976, Middleton’s typewritten manuscript was deposited in the archives of the Harry Ransom Center at UT-Austin.

Nearly thirty years later, Timothy O. Benson, curator of the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, began working on what would become the first major Richter exhibition since the late 1980s. Inspired by Richter’s own acknowledgment of the importance of his interactions with other artists throughout his life, Benson titled the exhibition Hans Richter: Encounters, conceiving it as an examination of Richter’s work in the context of the social dimensions of his career. Additionally, with the passionate support of the Richter Estate—particularly administrator Veronica Boswell and curator/archivist Erik de Bourbon-Parme—the idea emerged to issue Encounters from Dada till Today as a companion volume to the exhibition catalogue.

In Mary DelMonico, of DelMonico Books • Prestel, we found an enthusiastic partner in this endeavor. My former LACMA colleague, Thomas Frick, kindly put me in touch with Christopher Middleton, who not only gave the project his blessing but graciously took the time to recall his own encounters with Richter more than forty years ago. Our photo editor, Dawson Weber, worked with the indefatigable Erik de Bourbon-Parme in finding just the right images to illustrate as many of Richter’s friendships as possible. Designer Maja Blazejewska created the perfect complement to her striking exhibition catalogue. My fellow editor Phil Graziadei and I have approached the material with a light hand, adding in a few necessary explications and updates while endeavoring to remain as true as possible to Middleton’s graceful interpretation of Richter’s original voice.

And what a voice it is—at turns witty and incisive, lyrical and compassionate, giving each of his subjects, no matter how obscure or famous, what he calls “the small eternity to which everyone is entitled.” Richter’s empathy, without sentimentality, is present on every page. There is Ferdinand Hardekopf, once “the idol of the pre-1914 younger generation,” whose later masterwork is lost somewhere in the French countryside as the poet flees the Nazi invasion of Paris; there is the somber gathering at dawn at a Grand Central Station café after Richter and a small group of friends witness the death of Piet Mondrian; there is the dark comedy that unfolds when collector Hilla Rebay attempts to convince Solomon R. Guggenheim that “the greatest modern artist of all” is none other than . . . Rudolf Bauer.

Richter’s assessment of Raoul Hausmann is particularly striking. Regarding the perpetually embittered Dadaist—known as much for his general misanthropy as for his seminal photocollages, assemblages, and sound poems—with genuine tenderness and respect, he notes that in a world “which for eighty years had noticed him little or not at all . . . [Hausmann] devoted his whole life to the creative element that he bore within him.”

“Meanwhile,” Richter writes, “the wheel of history goes on turning. We are all ground to powder. Grain and chaff fly up, all mixed together, until everything is clarified—until, at some turn or another, the wheel suddenly stops, and Sisyphus is finally called away from his labor.” For me, this project has felt the very opposite of Sisyphean, and I am grateful to have had the opportunity to help bring Encounters from Dada till Today into the light. It is a remarkable volume—one that not only documents an array of fascinating historical periods and figures, but ultimately suggests a more humane way to be present in the world: collaboratively, creatively, and above all, generously.

Sara Cody Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Participants at the International Congress of Constructivists and Dadaists, Weimar, Germany, 1922; left to right: Kurt Schwitters, Hans Arp, Max Burchartz, Lotte Burchartz, Hans Richter, Nelly van Doesburg, Cornelis van Eesteren, Theo van Doesburg, Peter Röhl, Alexa Röhl, Werner Graeff

PREFACE

Many of the encounters described in this book go back fifty years or more. Nonetheless, they belong to the present.

They are preserved, as present events, in countless small cells in my brain. It was the great neurologist Wilder Penfield who succeeded in localizing memory centers in the cortex, and in bringing up into surface consciousness, by electrical impulses, experiences that had been completely forgotten. Memory is a library, permanently present and of infinite capacity, or it is like a computer in which events and experiences are stored and available for recall: people, objects, situations. A postcard, a newspaper clipping, a tree, an armchair, a pair of white socks—any of these can become the impulse that brings a person, an object, a situation, back to mind again. Long-forgotten things become unforgettable.

Thus I encounter the living past of other persons, and my own. I rediscover everyday events, and most unusual events. They all manifest in the form of the original impression, and with the intensity of that impression. As I re-experience them, they gain in depth, they become signatures of a development, and they acquire importance, as signposts pointing backward or forward.

The form, the content, and the occasion of each encounter commemorate the unrepeatable particular person, and give him the small eternity to which everyone is entitled.

INTRODUCTION

The history of art unfolds through positions and counterpositions, claims and counterclaims, sayings and gainsayings: in the search for an absolute freedom, as in Dada; or for an absolute order and discipline, as in Mondrian; in the search for the marvelous, the blue flower of the Romantics,1 for a new magic; or in the search for reality, a sociopolitical content. Everywhere, again and again, there is the search for the “new,” for the future.

These are the themes of my book: I treat them, not as art historical theories, but as the life themes of particular artists, in marginalia, which may happen to speak for the endeavors of the passing generations.

We are all part of this dynamic process, which is mirrored in art, mirrored in the “Happenings,” too, which are all around us, in one form or another.

I found the materials for this chronicle in the countless letters and documents received from artist friends and colleagues over a period of fifty years. They speak of individuals, their everyday problems, and their endeavors to carry out a task set by their times and by their own natures. Men possessed, who had to express themselves. Showing what artists and art have done as agents of this process—that is the aim of this book.

I. THE SEARCH FOR ABSOLUTE FREEDOM

If everyone is mad, people who are not mad are mad. Sigmund Freud

André Breton and Tristan Tzara, 1920

Mr. Dada

Tristan Tzara, incredible aficionado of lightning intuitions, compelled by his cast of mind to construct being in the midst of nothingness: optimist, egoist, romantic Communist, individualist, iridescent salamander, as in the tale by E. T. A. Hoffmanna prince in the daytime, at night a line to hang the washing from. A self-powered satellite orbiting everything, especially itself, emitting signals of the joys of lifesensitive and aggressive, a magician with the alacrity of a weasel, arousing trust and suspicion.