WEEKLY TRANSMISSION N°07
THURSDAY 16 FEBRUARY 2017
Der Blaue Reiter Almanach, coloured plate in the first edition
MUNICH 1912, WHEN THE PATH BIFURCATES: KANDINSKY, DUCHAMP, HITLER
contents: Weekly Cartoon by Théophile : Audience of Kandinsky Munich 1912, Der Blaue Reiter Almanach Munich 1912, Marcel Duchamp Learns from Kandinsky Paris 1933, Marcel Duchamp Help the Kandinskys Adolf Hitler and The Blue Rider: Der Entartete Kunst Ausstellung WWW.PLANTUREUX.FR
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Der Blaue Reiter Almanach, Titlepage of the first edition
Der Blaue Reiter Almanach (The Blue Rider Almanac) was published in early 1912, by Piper, Munich, in an edition of 1100 copies. The volume was edited by Kandinsky and Marc; its costs were underwritten by the industrialist and art Collector Bernhard Koehler, a relative of Macke. It contained reproductions of more than 140 artworks, and 14 major articles.
The e-bulletin presents articles as well as selections of books, albums, photographs and documents as they have been handed down to the actual owners by their creators and by amateurs from past generations. The physical descriptions, attributions, origins, and printing dates of the books and photographs have been carefully ascertained by collations and through close analysis of comparable works. When items are for sale, the prices are in Euros, and Paypal is accepted.
N°07-2017 : KANDINSKY, DUCHAMP, HITLER Previous related transmissions can be found at www.plantureux.fr
Weekly Cartoon: Munich, 1912-1937 by ThĂŠophile
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VASSILY KANDINSKY &FRANZ MARC. Der Blaue Reiter, Munich, 1912. Large 4to, 295x220 mm, 2 leaves, 140 pp, 5 leaves advertisements, vintage publisher�s binding with a Kandinsky wood-cut, 4 hand coloured mounted plates, 3 music plates. A nice copy. (4000)
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Der Blaue Reiter Almanach, coloured plate in the first edition
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KANDINSKY IN MUNICH, 1912 In addition to painting, Kandinsky was an art theorist; his influence on the history of Western art stems perhaps more from his theoretical works than from his paintings. He helped found the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (Munich New Artists' Association), becoming its president in 1909. However, the group could not integrate the radical approach of Kandinsky (and others) with conventional artistic concepts and the group dissolved in late 1911. Kandinsky then formed a new group, the Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) with like-minded artists such as August Macke, Franz Marc, Albert Bloch, and Gabriele Münter. The group released an almanac (The Blue Rider Almanac) and held two exhibits. More of each were planned, but the outbreak of World War I in 1914 ended these plans and sent Kandinsky back to Russia via Switzerland and Sweden.
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His writing in The Blue Rider Almanac and the treatise "On the Spiritual In Art" (which was released in 1910) were both a defence and promotion of abstract art and an affirmation that all forms of art were equally capable of reaching a level of spirituality. He believed that colour could be used in a painting as something autonomous, apart from the visual description of an object or other form. These ideas had an almost-immediate international impact, particularly in the Englishspeaking world. As early as 1912, On the Spiritual In Art was reviewed by Michael Sadleir in the London-based Art News. Interest in Kandinsky grew apace when Sadleir published an English translation of On the Spiritual In Art in 1914. Extracts from the book were published that year in Percy Wyndham Lewis's periodical Blast, and Alfred Orage's weekly cultural newspaper The New Age. Kandinsky had received some notice earlier in Britain, however; in 1910, he participated in the Allied Artists' Exhibition (organised by Frank Rutter) at London's Royal Albert Hall. This resulted in his work being singled out for praise in a review of that show by the artist Spencer Frederick Gore in The Art News. Sadleir's interest in Kandinsky also led to Kandinsky's first works entering a British art collection; Sadleir's father, Michael Sadler, acquired several woodprints and the abstract painting Fragment for Composition VII in 1913 following a visit by father and son to meet Kandinsky in Munich that year.
BERUFE : MALER
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MARCEL DUCHAMP IN MUNICH, 1912 On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Duchamp's arrival in Munich (June 21, 1912), German artist Rudolf Herz organized an exhibition: Marcel Duchamp - Le Mystère de Munich (Munich’s Architecture Museum, June 21 – September 30, 2012) In 1912, Marcel Duchamp spent three months in Munich, three months that were to radically change his art and turn him into one of the most influential artist of modernism. He is regarded as pioneer of conceptual art influencing numerous artists from Sol LeWitt to Ai Weiwei and still today continuously inspires new generations of artists. Although, during his whole life, Marcel Duchamp (1887 – 1968) tried to erase all traces of his time in Munich, he stated about the city: it “was the scene of my complete liberation”. Rudolf Herz intensively researched the French artist’s mysterious Munich sojourn. During his investigations he stumbled across where Duchamp lived at the time and was actually able to finally identify who rented out the room to the artist: a married couple named Gress, an engineer and a seamstress. Over a period of three months they provided accommodation for the young Frenchman and were also an obviously enduring source of inspiration. Duchamp was not only fascinated by Munich as the official art metropolis, but likewise found an additional focal point of his stay in meeting up with the Gress's in the flat he rented at 65 Barer Strasse. Invited by his friend, the painter Max Bergmann, Duchamp travelled to Munich because he was curious about the art capital. There is much evidence, of course, that his everyday experiences and being witness to the budding technology of the time were at least equally momentous. Duchamp lived and worked together with the engineer and the seamstress in an extremely confined space. Traces of this situation and his environment can be identified in his pictures at the time. In Munich he found both, inspiration and material that helped him to project his thoughts and ideas into a so called art of the fourth dimension, which however, finally resulted in his inventions of readymades. Rudolf Herz has adopted an unusual mode of expressing the outcome of his diligent and persistent research. “Marcel Duchamp - Le Mystère de Munich” . He examines Duchamp’s mental milieu and his living conditions. Like a detective he discovered extremely diverse records in Munich that reveal many secrets behind Duchamp's sources of inspiration. “Duchamp’s ‘Mystère de Munich’ has been occupying the Munich artist since he happened upon the photographic portrait of Marcel Duchamp, taken by Heinrich Hoffmann (later known as Hitler’s “personal photographer”).
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reproduced from public and private collections
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When Guillaume Apollinaire asked for a photograph for his book “Les peintres cubistes”, a flattered Duchamp went round the corner to Heinrich Hoffmann’s photo studio (380 meters). Rudolf Herz was struck by the expression on the thin face, aiming at utter detachment, whose strangely stern frontal view reminded him of Dürer’s self-portrait at the Alte Pinakothek. Was this a case of somebody confidently alluding to the fact that he, like the young Dürer at the time, considered himself to be at the vaguard of a new art ?”
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. Der Blaue Reiter Almanach, b&w illustrations
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DUCHAMP PREPARES THE KANDINSKYS’ EXILE IN PARIS, 1933 At the beginning of1929, one of Kandinsky’s fervent desires is fulfilled when he has his first solo show in Paris at the small galerie Zak. In the company of Marcel Duchamp, Katherine S. Dreier visits him in early May at the Bauhaus. April 1933. Bauhaus in Berlin closed by the Nazis but negotiates to reopen. July 20, 1933. Bauhaus closes for good, with decision by faculty to dissolve. August 1933. Kandinsky paints his last work in Germany, then visits Paris, and spend vacations at Les Sablettes (Var) near Toulon. October 1933. Kandinsky stays at Hotel des Saints-Peres, Paris. Sees Duchamp. Guest of honor in sixth exhibition of Association Artistique, Les Surindependants, Surrealist group exhibition. In Paris, he also meets Klee, who is preparing to emigrate, and is busy rearranging his relations with art dealers. On October 25, they visit the galerie Vavin-Raspail together October-early December 1933. Return to Berlin. Kandinsky prepares his departure from Germany. On December 16, he and Nina leave Germany and arrive in Paris on December 21. Their travel route takes them through Bern, where they visit the collector Hermann Rupf, but just misses Klee. They move into sixth-floor apartment in a recently constructed housing complex at 135 boulevard de la Seine (now General Koenig), Neuilly-sur-Seine, suburb of Paris. Nina mentionned later Marcel Duchamp’s decisive help, finding them this apartment. In February, Kandinsky begins to paint again. In late May, Christian Zervos organizes a solo show of Kandinsky’s work at his galerie Cahiers d’art. Kandinsky cultivates contacts with some of the surrealists and other artists on the Parisian art scene, most importantly Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Alberto Magnelli, and AndréBreton.
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HITLER AND THE BLUE RIDER: DER ENTARTETE KUNST AUSSTELLUNG From 1908 to 1913, Hitler tinted postcards and painted houses for a living. He painted his first self-portrait in 1910 at the age of 21. This painting, along with twelve other paintings by Hitler, were discovered by Company Sergeant Major Willie J. McKenna in 1945 in Essen, Germany. Samuel Morgenstern, an Austrian businessman and a business partner of the young Hitler in his Vienna period, bought many of the young Hitler's paintings. According to Morgenstern, Hitler came to him for the first time in the beginning of the 1910s, either in 1911 or in 1912. When Hitler came to Morgenstern's glazier store for the first time, he offered Morgenstern three of his paintings. Morgenstern kept a database of his clientele, through which it had been possible to locate the buyers of young Hitler's paintings. It is found that the majority of the buyers were Jewish. When Hitler served in World War I at the age of 25 in 1914, he carried his paintings with him to the front and spent his idle hours doing art. The works he painted during this period were among his last before he became a politician. Although Hitler abandoned his passion for art in late August 1914 and went on to become one of the most infamous political figures in history, he would consider himself an artist throughout his life, and indeed by the time he was in power, he still used art to his advantage. From July to November in 1937, the Degenerate Art Exhibition (Die Ausstellung "Entartete Kunst") was organized by the Nazi Party in Munich to counterpoint the Great German Art Exhibition. It was recorded that over one million attended the exhibition in its first six weeks of showings. The collection had 650 works of art that were extracted from German museums and displayed them as “degenerate art.” Paintings were hung close together in uncomfortably small rooms, and were accompanied by hand written labels that often provided inaccurate information and condemning remarks. The political goal of the exhibit was to counteract the movement of modernism and claim that it was a scheme for people who were against Germany. The arbiter of what was unacceptably "modern" was Hitler. Although Goebbels and some others admired the Expressionist works of artists such as Emil Nolde, Ernst Barlach, and Erich Heckel, a faction led by Alfred Rosenberg despised the Expressionists, and the result was a bitter ideological dispute which was settled only in September 1934, when Hitler—who denounced modern art and its practitioners as "incompetents, cheats and madmen"— declared that there would be no place for modernist experimentation in the Reich... Hitler often blamed the Jewish-Bolshevist community for such and that they needed to be eliminated, even though there were only six Jewish artists out of the 112 included in the exhibit.
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The exhibition was hosted in the Institute of Archeology in the Hofgarten. The venue was chosen for its particular qualities (dark, narrow rooms). Many works were displayed without frames and partially covered by derogatory slogans. Photographs of the exhibitions had been made, as well as a catalogue, produced for the Berlin show, which accompanied the exhibition as it travelled. A film of sections of the exhibition had also been produced. The Degenerate Art Exhibition included 650 paintings, sculptures and prints by 112 artists, primarily German: Georg Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Georg Kolbe, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Franz Marc, Emil Nolde, Willi Baumeister, Kurt Schwitters and others. Ziegler also confiscated and exhibited works of foreign artists, such as Pablo Picasso, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Piet Mondrian, Marc Chagall and Wassily Kandinsky. A large number of works were not displayed, as the exhibition focused on German works. The exhibition lasted until 30 November 1937, and 2,009,899 visitors attended it, an average of 20,000 people per day. The concurrent Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung ("Great German Art Exhibition") was intended to show the more classical and "racially pure" type of art advocated by the Nazi regime. That exhibition was hosted near Hofgarten, in the Haus der Deutschen Kunst. It was described as mediocre by modern sources, and attracted only about half the numbers of the Degenerate Art one. Another Degenerate Art Exhibition was hosted a few months later in Berlin, and later in Leipzig, Düsseldorf, Weimar, Halle, Vienna and Salzburg, to be seen by another million or so people. Many works were later sold off, although interested buyers were scarce and prices dropped drastically with the addition of such a large quantity of confiscated works to the art market (totalling 17000, among them, 57 of Kandinsky’s works, according to published reports). Almost 5,000 paintings and sculptures were burned in the courtyard of the Berlin Central Fire Station on 20 March 1939. In 1991 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art staged a forensic reproduction of the exhibition. Three hundred (300) of the exhibited works were apparently stolen by art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt who reported them destroyed by bombardments. They were seized from his son's apartment in 2012. In 2014, the Neue Galerie in New York staged Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, an exhibition bringing together paintings and sculptures from the 1937 exhibition along with films and photos of the original installations, promotional and propaganda materials and some surviving Nazi-approved art from the official exhibition set up to contrast with the modernist and avant-garde works the Nazis considered "degenerate".
Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art , Jewish Museum NYC, March 2002.
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