Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (33 page)

Dada, no less than other modern movements, harboured a paradox. For though they doubted the moral or social usefulness of art, the Dadaists had little choice but to remain artists; in their attempt to restore the mind to health, they still supported the avant-garde idea of the explanatory and redemptive powers of art. The only difference was that, rather than follow any of the ‘isms’ they derided, they turned instead to childhood and chance in an attempt to recapture innocence, cleanliness, clarity – above all, as a way to probe the unconscious.

No one succeeded in this more than Hans Arp and Kurt Schwitters. Arp produced two types of image during the years 1916–20. There were his simple woodcuts, toylike jigsaws; like children he loved to paint clouds and leaves in straightforward, bright, immediate colours. At the same time he was open to chance, tearing off strips of paper that he dropped and fixed wherever they fell, creating random collages. Nonetheless, the work which Arp allowed into the public domain has a meditative quality, simple and stable.
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Tristan Tzara did the same thing with poetry, where, allegedly, words were drawn at random from a bag and then tumbled into ‘sentences.’
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Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) made collages too, but his approach was deceptively unrandom. Just as Marcel Duchamp converted ordinary objects like urinals and bicycle wheels into art by renaming them and exhibiting them in galleries, Schwitters found poetry in rubbish. A cubist at heart, he scavenged his native Hanover for anything dirty, peeling, stained, half-burnt, or torn. When these objects were put together by him, they were transformed into something else entirely that told a story and was beautiful.
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Although his collages may appear to have been thrown together at random, the colors match, the edges of one piece of material align perfectly with another, the stain in a newspaper echoes a form elsewhere in the composition. For Schwitters these were ‘Merz’ paintings, the name forming part of a newspaper advertisement for the Kommerz- und Privat-Bank, which he had used in an early collage. The detritus and flotsam in Schwitters’s collages were for him a comment, both on the culture that leads to war, creating carnage, waste, and filth, and on the cities that were the powerhouse of that culture and yet the home of so much misery. If Edouard Manet, Charles Baudelaire, and the impressionists had celebrated the fleeting, teeming beauty of late-nineteenth-century cities, the environment that gave rise to modernism, Schwitters’s collages were uncomfortable elegies to the end of an era, a new form of art that was simultaneously a form of relic, a condemnation of that world, and a memorial. It was this kind of ambiguity, or paradox, that the Dadaists embraced with relish.
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Towards the end of the war, Hugo Ball left Zurich for the Ticino, the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, and the centre of gravity of Dada shifted to Germany. Hans Arp and Max Ernst, another collagist, went to Cologne, and Schwitters was in Hanover. But it was in Berlin that Dada changed, becoming far more political. Berlin, amid defeat, was a brutal place, ravaged by shortages,
despoiled by misery everywhere, with politics bitterly divided, and with revolution in the wake of Russian events a very real possibility. In November 1918 there was a general socialist uprising, which failed, its leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg murdered. The uprising was a defining moment for, among others, Adolf Hitler, but also for the Dadaists.
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It was
Richard Hülsenbeck
who transported ‘the Dada virus’ to Berlin.
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He published his Dada manifesto in April 1918, and a Dada club was established. Early members included
Raoul Hausmann, George Grosz, John Heartfield,
and
Hannah Hoch,
who replaced collage with photomontage to attack the Prussian society that they all loathed. Dadaists were still being controversial and causing scandals: Johannes Baader invaded the Weimar Assembly, where he bombarded the delegates with leaflets and declared himself president of the state.
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Dada was more collectivist in Berlin than in Zurich, and a more long-term campaign was that waged by the Dadaists against the German expressionists, such as Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Emil Nolde, who, they claimed, were no more than bourgeois German romantics.
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George Grosz and Otto Dix were the fiercest critics among the painters, their most striking image being the wretched half-human forms of the war cripple. These deformed, grotesque individuals were painful reminders for those at home of the brutal madness of the war. Grosz, Dix, Hoch and Heartfield were no less brutal in their depiction of figures with prostheses, who looked half-human and half-machine. These mutilated figures were gross metaphors for what would become the Weimar culture: corrupt, disfigured, with an element of the puppet, the old order still in command behind the scenes – but above all, a casualty of war.

No one excoriated this society more than Grosz in his masterpiece
Republican Automatons
(1920), where the landscape is forbidding, with skyscrapers that are bleak in a way that Giorgio de Chirico, before long, would make menacing. In the foreground the deformed figures, propped up by prostheses of absurd complexity and yet at the same time atavistically dressed in traditional bowler hat, stiff high collar, boiled shirt,
and
sporting their war medals, wave the German flag. It is, like all Grosz’s pictures, a mordant image of virulent loathing, not just of the Prussians but also of the bourgeoisie for accepting an odious situation so glibly.
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For Grosz, the evil had not ended with the war; indeed the fact that so little had changed, despite the horror and the mutilation, was what he railed against. ‘In Grosz’s Germany, everything and everybody is for sale [prostitutes were a favourite subject]…. The world is owned by four breeds of pig: the capitalist, the officer, the priest and the hooker, whose other form is the socialite wife. It was no use objecting … that there were some decent officers, or cultivated bankers. The rage and pain of Grosz’s images simply swept such qualifications aside.’
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Tristan Tzara took the idea of Dada to Paris in 1920.
André Breton, Louis Aragon,
and
Philippe Soupault,
who together edited the modernist review
Littérature,
were sympathetic, being already influenced by Alfred Jarry’s brand of symbolism and its love of absurdity.
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They also enjoyed a tendency to shock. But unlike in Berlin, Dada in Paris took a particularly literary form, and by the end of
1920 there were at least six Dada magazines in existence and as many books, including Francis Picabia’s
Pensées sans langage
(Thoughts without Language) and Paul Eluard’s
Les Nécessités de la vie et les conséquences des rêves
(The Necessities of Life and the Consequences of Dreams). The magazines and books were reinforced by salons and soirées in which the main aim was to promise the public something scandalous and then disappoint them, forcing the bourgeoisie to confront its own futility, ‘to look over into an abyss of nothing.’
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It was this assault on the public, this fascination with risk, this ‘surefootedness on the brink of chaos,’ that linked Paris, Berlin, and Zurich Dada.
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Unique to Paris Dada was automatic writing, a psychoanalytic technique where the writer allowed himself to become ‘a recording machine,’ listening for the ‘unconscious murmur.’ André Breton thought that a deeper level of reality could be realised through automatic writing, ‘that analogical sequences of thought’ were released in this way, and he published a short essay in 1924 about the deeper meaning of our conscious thoughts.
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Called
Manifeste du Surréalisme,
it had an enormous influence on artistic/cultural life in the 1920s and 1930s. Even though surrealism did not flower until the mid-1920s, Breton maintained that it was ‘a function of war.’
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Across from the Austrian front line, where Wittgenstein was writing and rewriting the
Tractatus,
on the Russian side several artists were recording hostilities. Marc Chagall drew wounded soldiers. Natalya Goncharova published a series of lithographs,
Mystical Images of War,
in which ancient Russian icons appeared under attack from enemy aircraft. Kasimir Malevich produced a series of propaganda posters ridiculing German forces. But the immediate and crude intellectual consequence of the war for Russia was that it cut off the Russian art community from Paris.

Before World War I the Russian artistic presence in Paris was extensive. Futurism, begun by the Italian poet Filippo Marinetti, in 1909, had been taken up by Mikhail Larionov and Natalya Goncharova in 1914. Its two central ideas were first, that machinery had created a new kind of humanity, in so doing offering freedom from historical constraints; and second, that operating by confrontation was the only way to shake people out of their bourgeois complacencies. Although it didn’t last long, the confrontational side of futurism was the precursor to that aspect of Dada, surrealism, and the ‘happenings’ of the 1960s. In Paris, Goncharova designed
Le Coq d’or
for Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Alexandre Benois worked for Serge Diaghdev’s Ballets Russes. Guillaume Apollinaire reviewed the exhibition of paintings by Larionov and Goncharova at the Galérie Paul Guillaume in
Les Soirées de Paris,
concluding that ‘a universal art is being created, an art in which painting, sculpture, poetry, music and even science in all its manifold aspects will be combined.’ In the same year, 1914, there was an exhibition of Chagall in Paris, and several paintings by Malevich were on show at the Salon des Indépendants. Other Russian artists in Paris before the war included
Vladimir Tatlin, Lydia Popova,
Eliezer Lissitzky, Naum Gabo, and Anton Pevsner. Wealthy Russian bourgeois collectors like Sergey Shchukin and
Ivan
Morozov collected some of the best
modern pictures the French school had to offer, making friends with Picasso, Braque, Matisse, and Gertrude and Leo Stein.
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By the outbreak of war, Shchukin had collected 54 Picassos, 37 Matisses, 29 Gauguins, 26 Cézannes, and 19 Monets.
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For Russians, the ease of travel before 1914 meant that their art was both open to international modernistic influences and yet distinctively Russian. The works of Goncharova, Malevich, and Chagall combined recognisable themes from the Russian ‘East’ but also images from the modern ‘West’: Orthodox icons and frozen Siberian landscapes but also iron girders, machines, airplanes, the whole scientific palette. Russian art was not backward before the revolution. In fact, ‘suprematism,’ a form of geometrical abstraction born of Malevich’s obsession with mathematics, appeared between the outbreak of war and revolution – yet another ‘ism’ to add to the profusion in Europe. But the explosion of revolution, coming in the middle of war, in October 1917, transformed painting and the other visual arts. Three artists and one commissar typified the revolution in Russian art: Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, Alexandr Rodchenko, and Anatoli Lunacharsky.

Lunacharsky was a sensitive and idealistic writer of no fewer than thirty six books who was convinced that art was central to the revolution and the regeneration of Russian life and he had firm ideas about its role.
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Now that the state was the only patron of art (the Shchukin collection was nationalised on 5 November 1918), Lunacharsky conceived the notion of a new form of art, agitprop, combining agitation and propaganda. For him art was a significant medium of change.
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As commissar for education, an authority on music and theatre, Lunacharsky had Lenin’s ear, and for a time several grandiose plans were considered – for example, a proposal to erect at well-known landmarks in Moscow a series of statues, monuments of great international revolutionaries of the past. Loosely interpreted, many of the ‘revolutionaries’ were French: Georges-Jacques Danton, Jean-Paul Marat, Voltaire, Zola, Cézanne.
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The scheme, like so many others, failed simply for lack of resources: there was no shortage of artists in Russia, but there was of bronze.
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Other agitprop schemes were realised, at least for a while. There were agitprop posters and street floats, agitprop trains, and agitprop boats on the Volga.
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Lunacharsky also shook up the art schools, including the two most prestigious institutions, in Vitebsk, northwest of Smolensk, and Moscow. In 1918 the former was headed by Chagall, and Malevich and Lissitzky were members of its faculty; the latter, the Higher State Art Training School, or Vkhutemas School, in Moscow, was a sort of Bauhaus of Russia, ‘the most advanced art college in the world, and the ideological centre of Russian Constructivism.’
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The early works of Kasimir Malevich (1878–1935) owe much to impressionism, but there are also strong echoes of Cézanne and Gauguin – bold, flat colour – and the Fauves, especially Matisse. Around 1912 Malevich’s images began to break up into a form of cubism. But the peasants in the fields that dominate this period of his work are clearly Russian. From 1912 on Malevich’s work changed again, growing simpler. He was always close to Velimir Khlebnikov, a poet and a mathematician, and Malevich’s paintings have been
described as analogues to poetry, exploiting abstract, three-dimensional forms – triangles, circles, rectangles, with little colour variation.
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His shapes are less solid than those of Braque or Picasso. Finally, Malevich changed again, to his celebrated paintings of a black square on a white background and, in 1918, a white square on a white background. As revolution was opening up elsewhere, Malevich’s work represented one kind of closure in painting, about as far as it could be from representation. (A theoretician of art as well as a painter, he entitled one essay ‘The Objectless World.’)
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Malevich aimed to represent the simplicity, clarity, and cleanliness that he felt was a characteristic of mathematics, the beautiful simplicity of form, the essential shapes of nature, the abstract reality that lay beneath even cubism. Malevich revolutionised painting in Russia, pushing it to the limits of form, stripping it down to simple elements the way physicists were stripping matter.