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
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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?
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- “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.
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- 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.]
