Can art be political? Can artists help to make a revolution? Steps toward formulating a thesis

A thesis is an answer, but you have to start with a question.

What answer does George Grosz give? What answer does John Heartfield give? What answer does Hannah Höch give? Can there be more than one answer to the question?

But first, meanwhile, back in Germany at the end of World War I... (remember how important context is to historians!)

  • Continued deterioration of the economy
  • Continued deterioration of state authority
  • Continued discontent at the front
  • Continued divisions within working-class movement
  • October 1918, Kaiser abdicates
  • November 9, 1918: Majority Socialists, including Friedrich Ebert, declare a German Republic
  • Revolution of 1918 Gallery
  • Calls for elections to National Assembly that will draft a new constitution

  • The caption reads: Workers, Citizens, Peasants and Soldiers or all Stripes (Stamm suggests family ties or origins in the same tribe), Unite for the National Assembly

REMINDER: Make sure to read the article in the Course Guide & Writer's Handbook on "Analyzing Images" (116-19).

Spartacus League has a different idea (Remember Luxemburg and Liebknecht?)

  • Spartacus Manifesto (Dated when? Why is the date important?) (CR 45-7)
  • Remember: Use the glossary
  • Addressed to: Proletarians! Men and Women of Labor! Comrades!
  • Critique of war: “masses of soldiers who for four years were driven to the slaughterhouse for the sake of capitalistic profit”
  • Reference to Bolshevik Revolution: “Workers’ and soldiers’ councils have been formed everywhere” (parallel to Soviets in Russia)
  • Echoes of Marx: “the ruling classes—are not able to control their own creation”
  • World revolution: “socialism can be realized only by the proletariat of the world”
    And what song are they singing: “And the International shall be the human race.”

From Programs to Revolution

  • January 1919: Spartacist Uprising in Berlin
  • Majority Socialists in deal with military establishment use demobilized troops (Freikorps, Free Corps)
  • Deep split between Spartacists (who rename themselves, Communist Party of Germany) and Social Democrats (and Independent and Majority Socialists reunite, together, they are SPD)
  • And emergence of radical anti-Bolshevism/Spartacists/KPD (Kommunitische Partei Deutschland)
  • Spartacist/Anti-Bolshevik Gallery

And Dada's response?

  • Artistic movement with origins outside Germany, particularly Switzerland (neutral country)
  • Rejection of claims that there can be reason or logic in policies that lead to war and mass death
  • Critique of war as capitalist drive for profit

Research alert: Origins of Dada? Other forms of Dada outside of Germany? Dada's connections with the artistic movement known as surrealism? Check out Grove Art Online for Dada, surrealism

Explicitly political nature of Dada in Germany

“En Avant [Forward] Dada: A History of Dadaism (1920)” (CR, 48-51)

Dadaism demands:

  • The international revolutionary union of all creative and intellectual men and women on the basis of radical Communism.
  • Rejection of prewar aesthetic called Expressionism

Research alert: What's expressionism? What does the Grove Art Online have to say about it? Are there expressionists artists who are "makers" and "doers" who might be the subject of a research paper? And how about Impressionists?

  • “In art it aimed at inwardness, abstraction, renunciation of all objectivity.”
    Instead: “The highest form of art will be that which in its conscious content presents the thousandfold problems of the day, the art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of the last week, which is forever trying to collect its limbs after yesterday’s crash. The best and most extraordinary artists will be those who every hour snatch the tatters of their bodies out of the frenzied cataract of life, who, with bleeding hands and hearts, hold fast to the intelligence of their time. (Why cataract of life? Used your OED lately? English is a foreign language.)
  • For Dadaists, “Emphasis was laid on the movement, on the struggle.”

And Grosz and Heartfield in "The Art Scab" (CR, 56-7)

  • The occasion: “After the Kapp Putsch… a little chap by the name of Oskar Kokoschka, republican Professor at the Dresden Art Academy, displaying the traditional cowardice of intellectuals, directed the following pithy manifesto to the inhabitants of Dresden:
    • "I urgently request all those who intend to use firearms in order to promote their political theories, whether of the radical left, the radical right or the radical center, to be kind enough henceforth to hold their combat exercises away from the …[art gallery]…--on the shooting range of the heath, for example, where works of human culture will not be in danger. On Monday, the 15th of March, a masterwork of Rubens was damaged by a bullet…. Certainly the German people will later find more joy and meaning in these preserved pictures than in the collected views of the politicized Germans of today."

Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), Bathsheba

  • Why do Grosz and Heartfield care?
  • What is the worker supposed to do with art?
  •  “art remains detached”
  • Art presents “you the ideas of the Christian churches..” to disarm you”
  • “they sabotage your class consciousness”
  • Kokoschka is an “art scab” (Kunstlump) (scoundrel, rogue, but also overtones of Lumpen)
  • “The struggles of the ‘collected views of the politicized Germans of today’ are the logical outcome of the will to survive and offer future generations conditions of existence other than those which make it possible only for the divinely illumined Kokoschka to eat his fill and wisecrack about the hunger… He who wishes his business with the brush to be regarded as a divine mission is a scab. Today the cleaning of a gun by a Red soldier is of greater significance than the entire metaphysical output of all painters.”
  • “The title ‘artist’ is an insult.”
  • “The designation ‘art’ is an annulment of human equality.”
  • “The deification of the artist is equivalent to self-deification.”

But Dada proposes more than this

  • Back to “En Avant Dada”
  • “The introduction of progressive unemployment” that will make it possible “for the individual to achieve certainty as to the truth of life and finally become accustomed to experience.”
  • “Compulsory adherence of all clergymen and teachers to the Dadaist articles of faith”
  • “Introduction of the simulataneist poem as a Communist state prayer.”
  • “Dadaist advisor council for remodeling of life in every city of over 50,000 inhabitants”
  • “150 circuses for the enlightenment of the proletariat”
  • Even the title is playful and ironic--En Avant/Forward to go backward to history
  • In short, Dada wants to dance, have fun, be irreverent and ironic

NOTE: The captions I provide for images in my lectures do NOT model for you what you're asked to do in the next paper assignment. I can accomplish in my lecture much of what you'll accomplish in what you write. Use all of the 200 words you have to write a caption for each image.

First International Dada Exhibition, Berlin, June-August 1920

Grosz on the right, John Heartfield on the left (Grosz changed his first name from Georg to George, Heartfield, from Herzfelde to Heartfield, and John, out of political protest against German nationalism and anti-British sentiments in the First World War)

Hanging from the ceiling is an effigy of a police or military officer, it is a pig-headed puppet in uniform; on the right hand side is a sign that reads "Dada is political." On the rear wall, a painting by Grosz. The picture is called "Germany, a Winter's Tale."

Grosz seeks to define a revolutionary aesthetic and breaks with Dada

  • Grosz Gallery
  • But Communist party is whistling a different tune
  • Grosz denounced in KPD paper, Die Rote Fahne (Red Flag)
  • Grosz fails to portray "the heroism of the revolutionary working class"
  • Grosz's art has not "obliged itself in many cases to find the expressive means appropriate for the simple worker."
  • No positive vision, not accessible art
  • Grosz critical of "bolshevization" of German Communist party
  • Grosz: "I don't consider it necessary to satisfy the demands of 'hurrah-Bolshevism,' which imagines for itself a smoothly-coifed proletariat in ancient heroic costume."
  • The KPD alternative: No ambiguity, accessible, straightforward message

Practice Solidarity with Soviet Russia! Remember the 10th Anniversary

Helen Ernst, Fight with the Communist Party for a Free Soviet Union (1904-48)

Down with the Law that Forbids Abortion, 1924

Research alert: Note that the artist is Käthe Kollwitz. Kollwitz was not a Dadaist. Her art focused in particular on proletarian women, and many of her paintings also the losses women suffered because of the war. The war deaths included her own son. Kollwitz would be a very interesting subject for a spring reaserch paper.

  • Grosz continues to do political art and recognizes the threat of National Socialism

Siegried Hitler (a reference to the legendary character of German mythology who is also in Richard Wagner's opera of the same name), I propose that I take over the leadership of the German government tomorrow. Tomorrow we will either have a national government in Germany or we'll be dead. Those are the only possibilities."

  • But retreats to an art that offers social commentary but no explicit political program

Married Couple, 1930

  • If Communists don't know what to make of Grosz, Hitler does: Exile to the US after 1933, exemplar of the art that Nazis loath
  • Won't come back to Germany until 1959 and dies soon thereafter

John Heartfield's alternative: A revolutionary aesthetic, take two

  • Heartfield trained as stage designer and typographer
  • Politicized by World War I
  • Works closely with Grosz and Berlin Dadaists
  • Photomontage: Putting together images from different sources
  • See Raoul Hausmann, "Photomontage" (CR, 66-7) and Alfred Kémenyi, "Photomontage as a Weapon in the Class Struggle" (CR, 68-9)
  • Heartfield Gallery
  • Goes into exile in London

1939

  • Returns to Communist East Germany (German Democratic Republic) in 1950

Take Three: Hannah Höch, a feminist alternative?

  • So far, who have the makers been?
  • Do artists who support working-class revolutions come from the working class?
  • But what do one thing do they all share in common: Gender
  • Höch as member of Berlin Dada Group
  • The "New Woman" in the Weimar Republic
    • Androgyny/Gender Bending
    • Self-definition/Not definition by heterosexual relationships
    • And for some, same-sex sexual relations

The so-called "Bubikopf"--boy's head--was a symbol of a "new woman" who challenged gender stereotypes

The "new woman" was also associated with consumer culture

And particularly in big cities like Berlin, Weimar opened up a space in which it was possible for women to enjoy same-sex relations with women in public spaces

Höch and Til Brugman, her partner from 1926 to 1935

Responses of Heartfield, Grosz, and the KPD

So what about that thesis?

Started with questions: Can art be political? Can artists help to make a revolution?

  • No single answer,
    • so we could formulate a thesis about each individual artist and do a research paper on her/him
    • or we could say that examining the three very different answers these artists offer tells us much up the range of political visions that emerged in the Weimar Republic
  • What kind of thesis could you formulate? We started with a question, and a thesis is a tentative formulation of an answer.
  • I'm not happy with any of these. In each case, this would be the first step, a way to get going, to organize what materials I wanted to collect, and which parts I wanted to develop. It'd be the beginning, by no means, the end, of thesis formulation. Join in my peer criticism group! Send me an email telling me how to improve these theses.

"Beginning in 1925, George Grosz ceased began to distance himself from the German Communist party. Grosz, a German artist who supported the Communist cause and sought to define an aesthetic that would promote a radical revolution, quickly learned that it is not so easy for a 'maker' to be a 'doer.' Grosz's experience tells us much about the tensions between politics and culture in the 1920s. In this paper, I will use Grosz's experience to illuminate how difficult it is for 'makers' to be 'doers' and for artists to be revolutionaries."

[In the course of the paper, I'd want to provide some background on the KPD; some sense of the kinds of art that it promoted in posters and film; some biographical background on Grosz; then I'd focus on Grosz himself, his Dadaist origins, his artistic production, and the critiques leveled at him by the KPD.]

"The Communist Party of Germany favored aesthetic forms that were capable of communicating clear, accessible, unambiguous political messages. John Heartfield, a German artist, was able to define just such an aesthetic. Heartfield, an artist who had strong ties to German Dadaism, moved away from the abstract, sometimes confusing, highly ambiguous tendencies of his Dadaist colleagues toward forms of artistic expression that conformed to Communist party expectations. An exploration of Heartfield's photomontages can tell us much about how avant garde art found a possible accommodation with Communist politics in Germany in the 1920s. In this paper, I will use Heartfield's experience to explore the types of compromises required of 'makers' who seek to be 'doers.'"

[Again, I'd need some background on Dada, the KPD, some biography on Heartfield, some description of photomontage and the illustrated press, and an analysis of Heartfield's artistic production.]

"In the 1920s in Germany, explicitly political art was almost exclusively produced by men and offered depictions of women that clearly reflected a male perspective. Women typically appeared as the downtrodden victims of the capitalist system, forced into poverty and unwanted pregnancy, or as prostitutes, slaves in a different way to the capitalist system. Artists like John Heartfield and George Grosz had a limited artistic vocabulary for describing the 'new woman' of the Weimar Republic. Hannah Höch, like Grosz and Heartfield part of the Berlin Dadaist movement, was exceptional not only because she was a woman in an artistic world dominated by men, but also because she offered a much more nuanced commentary on the status of women in the Weimar Republic. In this paper, I will compare the three very different answers that Höch, Grosz, and Heartfield offered to the 'woman question' in the 1920s."

[Because I contrast the three artists, I'd want to say at least something about Grosz and Heartfield, then focus on Höch. I'd need some biography, some sense of Dada and her relationship to that movement, some discussion of the "new woman," as lived reality and product of advertisement, films, and consumer culture in the 1920s, then an examination of Höch's artistic production as a feminist commentary on the relationship between politics and gender in the 1920s in Germany.]