3
Katherine Kuenzli
WASSILY Kandinsky wrote to Franz Marc in June 1911 of his ideas for a yearly almanac, in which visual art, music and theatre would be coordinated to constitute a totality that transcended historical and geographical difference. Originating with visual art, the almanac would also include important contributions from writers and musicians. Although the publication as he conceived it would privilege recent artistic developments, it would also demonstrate affinities between contemporary artistic practice and purportedly universal, human intuition. To this end, Kandinsky proposed side-by-side juxtapositions of western and non-western art, painting and ethnographic objects, high and low art, modern art and antiquities: ‘There we will place an Egyptian next to [a child’s drawing], a Chinese alongside a Rousseau, a popular print next to a Picasso and much more of this sort!’1 Such unorthodox visual pairings, Kandinsky proposed, would demonstrate underlying spiritual affinities uniting different traditions and modes of artistic creation.
Upon its publication in early 1912, Der Blaue Reiter almanac included the image pairings that Kandinsky envisioned, but their nature and meaning were more complex and contradictory than he had initially imagined. Resulting from intense discussions between the almanac’s editors Kandinsky, Marc and August Macke in Sindelsdorf and Murnau in the autumn of 1911, image comparisons in Der Blaue Reiter presented varied views of form and its relationship to inner ‘spiritual’ content. Certain comparisons suggest stylistic similarities between modern and non-western art, for example the pairing of Vincent van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet (1890) and a detail from Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s colour woodcut, Two Chinese Warriors of the Han Dynasty (nineteenth century) (figure 3.1). The Japanese print has been cropped so that it more closely resembles the format and composition of van Gogh’s painting. In both works, flattened form and irregularly curving, asymmetrical lines convey the portrayed persons’ states of mental agitation. Such pairings of otherwise unrelated compositions suggest formal and psychological concordances between distant cultures. However, other image comparisons in Der Blaue Reiter display stylistic differences. Historical costumes, naturalistic detail, and illusionistic representation in a lithographic illustration from Grimm’s Fairy Tales (nineteenth century) contrast with Kandinsky’s Lyrical (1911), in which a few summary lines and colour patches suggest the forms of horse and rider (figure 3.2).
3.1 Der Blaue Reiter almanac, after p. 112 and before p. 113. Reproduced are Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Doctor Gachet, 1890 and Utagawa Kuniyoshi, detail from Two Chinese Warriors of the Han Dynasty, nineteenth century.
Der Blaue Reiter almanac’s pairing of ‘primitive’ art with the modern took shape in response to displays at the Folkwang Museum, where Kandinsky exhibited as early as 1909, and which hosted Der Blaue Reiter’s first exhibition in 1911. Karl Ernst Osthaus founded the Folkwang in 1902 in Hagen, a small industrial city located in the heart of Germany’s Ruhr Valley.2 He commissioned interiors for his museum from Belgian artist Henry van de Velde. Together, they constructed visually striking displays in which Neo-Impressionist, Fauvist and Expressionist art appeared alongside ‘primitive’ artworks from archaic Greece, medieval Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Oceania.3 ‘Primitive’ was a term employed by artists, collectors and critics to designate art that lay outside of the Western Beaux-Arts tradition. The designation ‘primitive’ remained sufficiently vague, eliding histories of objects and their functions in specific social settings and also minimizing significant cultural differences, for example between court and ‘tribal’ societies.4 The Folkwang’s contribution to the growing European fascination with these objects was to visually associate ‘primitive’ works with the most recent European sculptures and paintings; the resulting ahistorical arrangements constituted a central feature of what James Sheehan has termed the modernist museum.5
Together, Osthaus and van de Velde installed modern art and its ‘other’ at the Folkwang Museum in visually striking displays that evolved from the museum’s opening through its much-publicized tenth-anniversary celebration, which took place in 1912, shortly after Der Blaue Reiter exhibition. The museum housed European art from the medieval to the modern era along with Greek and Egyptian antiquities and art from East Asia and Africa. However, within these loose groupings, formal principles trumped chronological and geographical classification, and the museum’s central plan worked towards dissolving clear-cut spatial and temporal boundaries. A photograph taken around 1910, for instance, shows a display of objects from around the world arranged in the museum’s grand staircase. A gilded buddha sculpture presides at the top of the stairs, which housed changing displays of Islamic miniatures, Japanese prints and baskets, Balinese temple figures, Egyptian glass and modern sculpture (figure 3.3). In this particular photograph, two sculptures, one by Constantin Meunier and the other by Georg Minne, sit on pedestals at the base of the stairs. The coordination of modern and ‘primitive’art reached new heights in 1912, when paintings by Paul Gauguin and sculptures by Georg Minne appeared in a gallery together with ancient Korean stone carvings and Laotian bronzes.6
3.2 Der Blaue Reiter Almanac, pp. 8–9. Reproduced are Reinhold das Wunderkind, an illustration from Grimms’ Fairy Tales, according to Franz Marc, nineteenth century, and Wassily Kandinsky, Lyrical, 1911.
The Folkwang was the first art museum to exhibit modern alongside ‘primitive’ art; together, they constituted components of an architectural ‘total work of art’, or Gesamtkunstwerk that united the visual arts with musical performances and poetry readings. Displays at the Folkwang eschewed historical and geographical classification in favour of formal principles based in abstract, musical combinations of line, colour and surface.7 Rhythms of line and harmonies of colour evidenced in the museum’s visually striking installations were heighted by aural experience, for the Folkwang’s main painting gallery led directly into a lavishly appointed music room that doubled as an exhibition space. Visitors to the museum marvelled at the music room’s pinkish-yellowish coloured walls, natural oak doors and furniture, copper-coloured upholstery, and opal glass skylight with white, light blue, greennd purple glazing. Corners of the room contained shelves for displaying ceramics, and built-in cabinets housed musical scores. A wall painting by Emil Rudolf Weiss framed the door of the music room, providing a ceremonial entrance into the painting gallery. Another doorway at the far end of the painting gallery led to a small auditorium designed by Peter Behrens, which provided a forum for literary events; larger events, including avant-garde theatre performances timed to coincide with important art exhibits, took place throughout Hagen.
3.3 Folkwang Museum, grand staircase with sculptures from Bali, Japanese prints and baskets, and sculptures by Georg Minne and Constantin Meunier, c. 1912.
Displays at the Folkwang stimulated Kandinsky’s stated ambition to bring together works from seemingly unrelated historical periods and geographical regions in a publication that would address the visual arts, music, poetry and theatre. In Der Blaue Reiter almanac, as at the Folkwang Museum, artifacts were given only loose geographic identifications, for example ‘German’ or ‘Benin’; images in Der Blaue Reiter appeared alongside poems and musical scores, and essays by Arnold Schoenberg and others addressed the basis for coordinating the arts. The relationship between the Folkwang’s ahistorical installations and the almanac is all the more compelling, since Kandinsky, Marc and Macke had first-hand knowledge of the museum. Beyond exhibiting works by Kandinsky and Jawlensky in 1909, Osthaus in 1910 hosted the second exhibit of the Munich New Artists’ Association (Neue Künstlervereinigung München), of which Kandinsky and Marc were members, and in 1911 he organized an exhibition of Marc’s work at the Folkwang. That same year he financially supported Der Blaue Reiter almanac in addition to hosting the group’s first exhibition.8 Macke visited the Folkwang on a weekly basis upon his return to Bonn in 1910.
Most commonly associated with Richard Wagner’s theoretical writings and performances of his musical dramas at Bayreuth, the Gesamtkunstwerk became a field of intense experimentation and competition in the decades following the composer’s death in 1883.9 Visual artists, in particular, sought to go beyond Wagner’s focus on music and poetry and to secure for the visual arts a leading role in artistic synthesis. While Der Blaue Reiter almanac has long been understood in relationship to a general impulse to coordinate the arts, especially due to Kandinsky’s contacts with Arnold Schoenberg, we have yet to understand how this impulse structured the almanac’s image programme.10 The bewildering diversity of images and their seeming disconnection from the almanac’s literary and musical content has long been a source of both fascination and consternation.11 This perplexity is justified, for the selection and layout of images are far from coherent; they originate in not one, but at least two competing theories and practices of the Gesamtkunstwerk, which respectively focus on opposing principles of consonance and dissonance.
Together, the connected, but not identical, formal strategies of Der Blaue Reiter and the Folkwang Museum foreground how competing theories and practices of the Gesamtkunstwerk helped shape modernists’ interest in ‘primitive’ art. Most discussions of twentieth-century modernist primitivism treat the visual arts in isolation, following a standard set by Carl Einstein in his influential book, Negro Sculpture (1915). Studies of European ‘primitivism’ since Einstein consider formal borrowings, whether in isolation or in the context of colonial power relationships.12 Yet to be considered is how ideas of ‘primitivism’ informed constructions of the Gesamtkunstwerk. European artists turned to ‘primitive’ art not only for alternatives to western constructions of space, narrative and illusionism; they also saw in ‘primitive’ art ritualistic and communal meanings that had escaped European art in the modern era. The consequences of this discourse for European modernism exceeded the strict domains of painting and sculpture and prompted new experimental attempts to integrate the visual arts with music, poetry and theatre.
Any consideration of the totalizing motivations and spiritual preoccupations of Der Blaue Reiter and the Gesamtkunstwerk must confront Georg Lukács’s and others’ charges that their art was escapist, and ultimately enabled the rise of totalitarian governments in Europe. Against these critiques, I underscore the unfinished, incomplete and ambivalent nature of Der Blaue Reiter almanac.13 A close look at the almanac’s image pairings reveals how they resist any totalizing method or narrative; some confirm an expressive understanding of form as embodying a hidden psychological truth, an idea indebted to displays at the Folkwang. Yet other image pairings present a radically different conception of form in which external appearances bear no necessary relationship to spiritual essences. Beginning with Stéphane Mallarmé’s negative poetics, modernist artists approached the ‘total work of art’ through the figure of the fragment.14 Members of Der Blaue Reiter followed in the trajectory of Mallarmé’s poetics; although they sought unity, they found anarchy of parts. Their realization of the impossibility of fully realizing and representing totality provides helpful parameters for approaching Der Blaue Reiter almanac and its fascinating, if inconclusive, attempt at cultural and artistic synthesis.
The modern and the primitive at the Folkwang Museum in Hagen
The almanac benefitted from the material and moral support of a new generation of art museum directors in Germany, who shifted the focus of their institutions away from the past in favour of modern art. As James Sheehan has noted, German art museums underwent a sea change around 1900, when their directors rejected nineteenth-century historicist practices based in rational, chronological, and geographical arrangement in favour of visually striking displays that fostered a more immediate and sensual experience of objects.15 Directors, including Hugo von Tschudi in Berlin and Munich, Georg Swarzenski in Frankfurt, Gustav Pauli in Bremen, Alfred Lichtwark in Hamburg, not to mention Osthaus in Hagen, began presenting their collections in dynamic and engaging displays in an attempt to address the needs and sensibilities of a potentially broader audience. Informed by recent developments in experimental psychology, they introduced bright colours and decorative patterning into gallery installations and reduced the number of objects exhibited in order to foster an intimate, emotional relationship between viewer and artwork.16 These brightly coloured displays were well suited to modern, Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, which were the focus of new acquisitions.17 In the case of Hugo von Tschudi’s re-installation of paintings at Berlin’s Nationalgalerie in 1897, for instance, paintings by Edouard Manet and his followers appeared against pinkish-yellow and light-green-striped wallpaper and above wooden wainscoting painted bright red. Tschudi toned down the brightly colouristic effects in his 1908 reinstallation of Impressionist paintings in the same museum, where they appeared against a cloth that Peter Behrens printed with a fine geometric pattern. Both displays in Berlin show sensitivity to the purely visual framing of artworks and to their direct sensory appeal.
Kandinsky and Marc acknowledged some of these museological developments by dedicating the almanac to the memory of von Tschudi, who in 1909 became Director of Munich’s Neue Pinakothek and whose premature death coincided with the almanac’s publication. In his essay ‘Spiritual Treasures’, Marc acknowledged von Tschudi’s heroic efforts to bring the best of modern art to Germany.18 He also credited the role of von Tschudi’s friend and collaborator, Julius Meier-Graefe, whose art criticism defined a modern aesthetic for German audiences.19 In the heyday of his influence around 1900, Meier-Graefe worked closely with German museum directors to acquire significant works of modern art, above all from Paris, as a means of introducing advanced aesthetics to German artists and their public. Over the course of 1911 and 1912, aesthetically progressive directors answered requests from Kandinsky, Macke and Marc for help by supporting Der Blaue Reiter almanac and exhibit. While Marc, Macke and Kandinsky drew support from a broad range of museums, none is more relevant to the almanac’s complex illustration programme than the Folkwang Museum in Hagen. Often overlooked in favour of larger and more prominently placed German museums, the Folkwang held special significance for Der Blaue Reiter movement.
The establishment of the Folkwang coincided with the expansion of Germany’s ethnographic museums, but it broke with their scientific practices by displaying ethnographic objects for their formal and material properties alone, divorced from all cultural contexts.20 Whereas ethnographers distinguished between ‘primitive’ cultures in Africa and North America and the highly refined court cultures of South and East Asia, these distinctions proved less important to Osthaus and Blaue Reiter artists, who valued ‘primitive’ art for its formal properties, detached from its culture of origin. To be sure, the Folkwang and Blaue Reiter artists’ juxtapositions of primitive and modern objects were coloured by colonialist and imperialist biases that are an inescapable feature of early twentieth-century Germany.21 In other respects, however, Osthaus and Blaue Reiter artists adopted progressive positions by elevating ethnographic objects as art and insisting on their aesthetic importance. They looked to African, Oceanic and Japanese art for two reasons: it provided them with alternatives to naturalistic and illusionistic modes of representation and models of art’s integration into religious or social rituals. In these foreign or distant cultures, imagination and participation seemed to take precedence over description and detached observation; their willful distortions of nature seemed to spring from some deeper, spiritual source and counter what Osthaus and Der Blaue Reiter saw as modern western culture’s excessive materialism and its isolation of art from the common culture.
Following the precedent set by Meier-Graefe and von Tschudi, Osthaus broke with historicist museum practices and centred his collection on modern art. Between 1900 and his untimely death in 1921, he acquired and exhibited key works of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and, eventually, Expressionist painting. He declared the modernity of his museum when he purchased Renoir’s Lise in 1901. Paintings by van Gogh and Maurice Denis followed. In 1903, he acquired key works by Paul Gauguin following an exhibit of the artist’s work that year at the Folkwang. Before 1910, Osthaus acquired Matisse’s Still Life with Asphodels and Bathers with a Turtle along with modern sculptures, including works by Auguste Rodin, Constantin Meunier and Georg Minne. After 1910 he shifted his attention from Parisian to German artists who had carefully studied Parisian models and channelled their formal innovations, including bright colour, expressive line, and formal and spatial flattening, to advance ‘Germanic’ ideals, such as the cultivation of interiority and spirituality. Osthaus particularly favoured the work of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde, who responded in complex and fascinating ways to the work of van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse and the Fauves.22 Beyond Die Brücke, Osthaus also supported rival Expressionist groups in Munich; following an exhibit of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München that he hosted in 1910, the Folkwang acquired works by Alexey Jawlensky, Kandinsky, Marc and Macke.
Osthaus’s taste in modern art overlapped with von Tschudi’s at the National Gallery in Berlin and Munich’s Neue Pinakothek, but the Folkwang stood apart from these institutions in exhibiting modern artworks alongside ‘primitive’ art. The inclusion of art from different world cultures had been part of Osthaus’s plan from the beginning. He undertook a series of trips to North Africa, Asia Minor and the Middle East beginning in 1898, which marked the beginning of his collecting activity. Upon returning to Germany, he continued collecting non-western and pre-modern art with the help of colleagues, friends and art dealers. He purchased Japanese applied art objects and Germanic antiquities from Julius Brinckmann of Hamburg’s Museum of Applied Art. These were followed by additional purchases of Chinese and Japanese applied art from Sigfried Bing in Paris. In 1912, Osthaus visited Joseph Brummer’s gallery on the Boulevard Raspail in Paris, leading to increased purchases of African art, which he acquired in 1913 from the Hamburg dealer of ethnographic art, J. F. G. Umlauff, whom he met through Macke. That same year, Osthaus’s assistant and specialist in Japanese Buddhist art Karl With acquired objects on his research trips to Japan, China, Java and Bali. One year later, Ada and Emil Nolde sent Osthaus an important collection of Oceanic sculptures that they purchased on their trip to German New Guinea in 1914.23 In collecting, Osthaus prized quality over quantity, and his selectivity distinguished him from ethnographers’ quantitative approaches.
A series of articles published in 1913 drew attention to the Folkwang Museum’s unconventional display practices. The museum director’s wife and artistic collaborator, Gertrud Osthaus, offered the most compelling account of the Folkwang’s exhibits and their contribution to a unified world culture. She identified two principles at work in the installation of objects: first, the loose ordering of works to display the technical and stylistic characteristics of a single culture, and second the juxtaposition of works from disparate cultures to reveal their spiritual oneness. Osthaus addressed how arrangements of ‘harmoniously contrasting’ objects resulted in a heightened aesthetic effect and originated in ‘the will to skip over time, place, and history in order to unite the psychologically related.’24 Conjuring up the visually striking displays in the minds of her readers, Osthaus related how paintings by Gauguin and a sculpture by Minne appeared in a room alongside ‘sacred stones’ from Korea and Laotian bronzes. ‘How odd’, she observed, ‘the life of these works unifies itself into a seamless whole; the viewer’s gaze glides from one object to another, and the experience of one deepens one’s appreciation of another.’ She then turned her attention to juxtapositions of Honoré Daumier’s Ecce Homo with a Gothic panel painting, and Matisse’s and Nolde’s paintings with ‘demonic works from African culture.’ Art as she presented it originates in universal structures of intuition, and she noted a ‘strange psychic affinity’ between modern artists and those living in ‘distant, dusky regions.’25
By 1910, Osthaus was not alone in exhibiting modern alongside ‘primitive’ art. In his Parisian gallery, opened in 1909, Joseph Brummer sold paintings by Henri (Douanier) Rousseau, African and Oceanic sculptures, and ancient Egyptian and Syrian art. In 1913, Daniel Henry Kahnweiler organized an exhibit devoted to the relationship between Picasso’s art and African sculpture at the Neue Galerie in Berlin. Osthaus’s collecting evolved through contact with these dealers. For instance, a visit that he paid to Brummer in 1912 led to the acquisition of more African art for the Folkwang.26 And yet the Folkwang, rather than these more centrally located galleries, provided the most direct precedent for the almanac’s image comparisons. Art dealers in Paris and Berlin set up a series of purely visual comparisons, whereas the Folkwang, like Der Blaue Reiter almanac, integrated modern and primitive art into a ‘total work of art’ that included the visual arts, music, poetry and the performing arts. Rather than selling art, Osthaus’s goal was to provide viewers with an uplifting aesthetic and moral experience. He hoped that his museum would become the museological equivalent of Bayreuth as a site of pilgrimage for modern artists, industrialists and workers. The goals of Der Blaue Reiter almanac were equally non-commercial and messianic, as Franz Marc proclaimed in his essay ‘Spiritual Treasures’, in which he announced the advent of a new, spiritual era.
The roots of the Folkwang’s formal comparisons and approach to the Gesamtkunstwerk lie in a modern aesthetic as defined by art critic Meier-Graefe. Indeed, while many progressive curators in Germany, including Hugo von Tschudi, looked to Meier-Graefe, Osthaus most fully realized his idea of a modern aesthetic that originated in painting and provided the basis for coordinating all the arts.27 Osthaus originally envisioned his collection along the lines of a natural history museum that combined paintings by members of Düsseldorf’s Academy of Fine Art with natural history, ethnographic objects, folk art from the Sauerland, and Middle Eastern artifacts. Upon reading Meier-Graefe’s writings in 1900, he developed a more systematic aesthetic rooted in modern European artistic practice, especially as it took shape in Paris. Osthaus first encountered Meier-Graefe’s ideas in the periodicals Dekorative Kunst and Die Insel before reading their fully developed version in the critic’s magnum opus, Developmental History of Modern Art: Comparative Consideration of the Visual Arts, as a Contribution to a New Aesthetic (1904). In these texts, Meier-Graefe defined a modern formal language in which sensation was abstracted and distorted to constitute musical, rhythmic arrangements of line and colour.
Although Meier-Graefe located the origins of a modern aesthetic in Parisian painterly developments, above all in the work of Manet, Renoir, Georges Seurat, van Gogh, Gauguin and Denis, he saw the future development of a modern aesthetic as lying outside France. What first developed in Parisian easel painting, he predicted, would evolve into a spatial practice of art that was being developed in Flanders and Germany by van de Velde, Minne, and Behrens.28 Meier-Graefe elevated a three-dimensional aesthetic over two-dimensional easel painting, because it provided an immersive environment that surrounded the viewer and provoked a rich synaesthetic experience. His writings led Osthaus to van de Velde, and together they designed a museum and built a collection that exemplified Meier-Graefe’s aesthetic, even if they mobilized it in the service of different ideological objectives. Van de Velde yoked the critic’s writings to his internationalist aesthetic, whereas Osthaus took Meier-Graefe’s writings to support pan-Germanic ideas embodied in the museum’s name, ‘Folkwang’, the palace of the Goddess Freya in Nordic mythology.29
Although he focused on contemporary artistic production, Meier-Graefe emphasized how modern artists, beginning with the Impressionists, synthesized individual sensation with abstract, decorative principles derived from pre-modern and non-western traditions. He emphasized ‘comparative viewing’ rather than chronological narrative. In particular he signalled the importance to modern art of Byzantine mosaics and Japanese and Indonesian objects that were obtained through expanding trade and colonial networks. He also underlined the significance of European applied arts traditions, including tapestry, embroidery and fresco. Modern artists, Meier-Graefe observed, looked to art outside the western classical tradition for examples of decorative arrangement, and he compared paintings by van Gogh and Seurat to Gobelin tapestries, quattrocento fresco paintings, and ancient mosaics: ‘The joy emanating from this painting [Seurat’s Chahut] paradoxically conjures up antiquities: splendid stone mosaics that decorated palaces in Naples at the time of Alexander’s battles.’30 Meier-Graefe’s misdating of a Roman floor mosaic preserved at the Archaeological Museum Naples to the time of Alexander the Great does not affect his argument; his emphasis is not on history, but on unarticulated affinities between modern art and antiquities that share a common ornamental impulse. Modern artists, according to Meier-Graefe, looked to pre-modern and non-western art in their attempt to integrate painting and sculpture into architectural environments and to imbue them with spiritual, and even ritualistic, importance.
Meier-Graefe associated the painting of Manet, Renoir, Gauguin and Denis with a musical aesthetic and synaesthesia, particularly in the final chapter of Developmental History devoted to Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche.31 Acknowledging his predecessors’ commitments to artistic synthesis, Meier-Graefe nevertheless revised what he characterized as their limited and mistaken views of the visual arts. Sorely neglected by Nietzsche and Wagner, the visual arts play a dominant role in a ‘total work of art’ (Gesamtkunstwerk) in Meier-Graefe’s account. Before the arts could be synthesized, he cautioned, they needed to be purified into just their material components. In the case of painting, this entailed eliminating painting’s anecdotal and descriptive elements in favour of a concentration on line, colour and surface. This purified visual vocabulary was not an end, but a means of coordinating fine and applied arts and architecture and constructing unified spatial environments. Once purified, Meier-Graefe noted, the visual arts could be coordinated with music, poetry and stage performance.
Following Meier-Graefe, Osthaus and van de Velde constructed the Folkwang Museum as a Gesamtkunstwerk in ways that anticipated aspects of Der Blaue Reiter almanac. For instance, in 1909, Osthaus organized a performance of Diogenes, a play by Otto Erich Harleben that was framed by musical performances of Ludwig van Beethoven’s and Franz Liszt’s compositions. In 1911, he organized a ‘Theatre Exhibition’ at the Folkwang that featured Greek theatre masks and terracotta actor figures, Japanese masks, Javanese marionettes, and modern European designs for stage sets and costumes. The exhibit was accompanied by a ‘Dance Evening’ featuring a performance by Alexander Sacharoff, a Russian dancer and friend of Der Blaue Reiter, who conceived of dance in relationship to both painting and music.32 Sacharoff returned to Hagen in 1912, where he performed dances to music by several composers, among them Thomas von Hartmann, Kandinsky’s close associate. That same year, von Hartmann contributed an essay, ‘Über die Anarchie in der Musik’, to Der Blaue Reiter almanac and also composed music for Kandinsky’s play, The Yellow Sound, which appeared in the almanac alongside Kandinsky’s essay on stage composition.
Macke and Kandinsky: two approaches to the Gesamtkunstwerk
Der Blaue Reiter almanac’s texts and images represent a strong response to the Folkwang Museum’s alluring and synaesthetic installations of modern and ‘primitive’ art. By reproducing folk art alongside modern paintings, and Aztec carvings alongside masks from New Caledonia, the almanac’s editors affirmed the existence of a unified world culture, a central tenet of the Folkwang. However, members of Der Blaue Reiter disagreed over how unity might be achieved. Far from obtaining the desired synthesis, each artist approached the almanac through the lens of his own practice and intellectual commitments. In selecting images, Kandinsky adopted heterogeneity as his guiding principle; his arrangements of votive pictures, Egyptian shadow puppets, children’s drawings, and modern paintings foreground the spiritual, rather than formal, commonalities between objects. For his part, Marc emphasized relationships between modern painting and folk art in specific national contexts, which led him to include Bavarian Hinterglasmalerei, Russian lubki, French images d’Épinal, and German fairy tale illustrations alongside examples of modern painting from Germany, Russia, and France, respectively.33 Whereas Kandinsky was militantly internationalist, Marc saw national identity as an essential component of world culture.
However, differences between Kandinsky and Marc pale in comparison to those separating Kandinsky and Marc from Macke, whose contributions to the almanac tend to be marginalized, if not ignored, in part because Kandinsky refused to acknowledge him as co-editor on the title page of the almanac.34 Macke worked on the publication alongside Marc and Kandinsky over the course of 1911, composing a text, selecting images, and facilitating contacts with dealers and collectors in the Rhine Valley. Recovering Macke’s perspective lends new insights into the almanac and its heterogeneous and unresolved aesthetic. Among other points of disagreement, Macke diverged from Marc and Kandinsky on the nature and function of image comparisons. He shared with his co-editors an interest in Parisian painting, Old German woodcuts, and ethnographic objects, as well as a belief that some larger, universal spirit united all of these objects. However, Macke insisted that spiritual unity manifested itself through stylistic consonance, an idea that he adopted from the Folkwang, whereas Kandinsky and Marc asserted the importance of formal dissonance as a means of bringing viewers to uncover an underlying spiritual likeness. These contradictory understandings of form and totality can be traced to divergent theories of the Gesamtkunstwerk.
Macke’s essay in Der Blaue Reiter almanac, ‘The Masks’, has often been misunderstood as merely repeating the language of Marc and Kandinsky, and yet he brought his own aesthetic commitments to the Blaue Reiter circle, among them a deep engagement with Meier-Graefe’s writings, avant-garde theatre décor, and displays at the Folkwang.35 Marc acknowledged these commitments in a letter dated 1911 to Macke, in which he related the projected almanac to Macke’s interests in comparative art history (a sure reference to Meier-Graefe’s emphasis on comparative viewing in his Developmental History of Modern Art) and stage design.36 Macke’s essay for the almanac lived up to Marc’s expectations. It opens with a striking series of juxtapositions that stem from Macke’s dual interests in Parisian painting and avant-garde theatre. Employing a rich, synaesthetic language, Macke invokes plays by Maeterlinck and Ibsen, medieval mystery plays, van Gogh’s and Cézanne’s painting, cellos, bells, and the whistle of a steam locomotive. He finds these sights and sounds to be articulations of a common spirit and illustrates his essay with images of works from Brazil, the Easter Islands, Cameroon, Mexico, New Caledonia, Alaska and the Middle East. Macke associates art viewing with participation in modern and ‘primitive rituals’, including military marches, the cinematograph, and Loië Fuller’s dances ‘that absolutely enthrall everyone in exactly the same way as the fire dance enthralls the African, or the mysterious drumming of the fakirs enthralls the Indian.’37 In every case, aesthetic experience dissolves geographic, social and historical difference and provokes feelings of oneness with the environment, according to Macke’s account.
Macke’s interest in ritualistic performance led him to take part in avant-garde theatre experiments. During his studies at the Düsseldorf School of Applied Arts (which was directed by Behrens), he became a committed costume and set designer for the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus. Founded in 1905 by actress Louise Dumont and theatre director Gustav Lindemann, the Schauspielhaus featured the most advanced ideas in dramaturgy, architecture and stage design.38 Dumont had initially envisioned founding a festival theatre in Weimar and had asked van de Velde to produce preliminary designs for a theatre building in 1904. When the Weimar court rejected these plans, Dumont and Lindemann took their plans to Düsseldorf, a city less tied to the classical past, which welcomed an experimental repertoire. Influenced by van de Velde and English actor and theatre director Edward Gordon Craig, Dumont and Lindemann replaced naturalistic set designs with more expressive, abstract arrangements of line and colour. Lindemann wrote of the necessity of ‘spiritualizing’ the theatre in ways that anticipated the work and rhetoric of Der Blaue Reiter. In 1906, Macke embraced these new, ‘spiritualized’ practices. ‘I will create moods through curtains and colours alone, without imitating nature’, he wrote to his future wife, Elisabeth Gerhardt.39 His work reflects the influence of Craig, who partnered with Dumont first in Weimar and subsequently in Düsseldorf. Like Craig, Macke created flickering patterns of light and shadow by projecting coloured lights onto simplified stage décor.40
Macke’s approach to set design can be seen above all in his studies for the Schauspielhaus’s production of Little Red Riding Hood in 1906. A forest scene that he created consists of simplified and flattened trees set against a semi-circular backdrop comprised of moving, coloured curtains. Repeated vertical lines and alternating green, yellow, grey and red colours almost obscure Little Red Riding Hood’s and the wolf’s diminutive, shadowy figures.41 Such stage designs led Macke to equate a modern formal vocabulary with formal flattening and nearly abstract arrangements of line and colour, which he developed in his paintings, including Tegernsee Landscape (1910). His interest in artistic synthesis and in colour and line as independent, expressive languages brought him to discover the writings of Meier-Graefe and to undertake trips to Paris, where he studied the paintings of the critic’s preferred artists, Manet, Seurat and Denis.42
Avant-garde theatre, Parisian painting and Meier-Graefe’s writings came together at the Folkwang Museum, which Macke visited as early as 1910 upon moving from the Tegernsee back to his native Bonn. During his time in and around Munich, Macke had befriended Marc, who also hosted Macke’s cousin, painter Helmut Macke, during his extended visit. Helmut and August visited the Folkwang together on a regular basis beginning in 1910 and communicated their enthusiasm for the collection to Marc on several occasions. For instance, Macke recounted to Marc his enthusiasm for the Folkwang’s displays in 1910: ‘I was in Hagen, saw two Matisses that delighted me. A large collection of Japanese masks. Divine!’43 In so many words, Macke associates Matisse’s paintings with Japanese Noh theatre masks in ways that verbally recreate the Folkwang’s visual juxtapositions. Upon this preliminary encounter, Macke expresses amazement and enthusiasm for the Folkwang’s linkage of modern to ‘primitive’ art without defining their relationship. He would return to the topic one year later in his essay for Der Blaue Reiter almanac.
‘Masks’ drew on Macke’s experiences in Düsseldorf and Hagen. Not only does the essay’s title evoke the Noh theatre masks which Macke admired at Folkwang; it shares its title with theatre periodicals published first by the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus and subsequently by Craig.44 Macke also incorporated ideas from the Folkwang into his essay, in which he equated exterior form with spiritual essence. ‘Man expresses his life in forms’, he observes. ‘Each form of art is an expression of his inner life. The exterior of a form of art is its interior.’45 He relates this idea of ‘correspondences’ directly to the almanac’s image comparisons:
Does van Gogh’s portrait of Dr. Gachet not originate from a spiritual life similar to the amazed grimace of a Japanese juggler cut in a wood block? The mask of the Demon of Disease from Ceylon is the gesture of horror of a primitive race by which their priests conjure sickness. The grotesque embellishments found on a mask have their analogies in Gothic monuments and in the almost unknown buildings and inscriptions in the primeval forests of Mexico.’46
As at the Folkwang, Macke finds psychic affinities between western and non-western artworks evidenced in their concordant formal relationships.
By contrast, Marc and Kandinsky adopted dissonance rather than harmony as the principle that structures image comparisons in Der Blaue Reiter almanac. Although Marc and Kandinsky were familiar with visual theatre, Parisian painting, and the Folkwang, they proposed a competing conception of form indebted to the music and writings of Arnold Schoenberg, whose contributions to Der Blaue Reiter movement Macke more or less rejected.47 Macke disliked Schoenberg for the very reasons that Kandinsky and Marc identified with him. In his essay published in the almanac, ‘The Relationship to the Text’, Schoenberg dismisses outer, formal resemblances between music and text as merely superficial, noting how ‘the external congruence of music and text, which reveals itself in declamation, tempo, loudness, has … little to do with the internal congruence.’48 Thus, Schoenberg concludes that divergences in form might be necessitated by higher, spiritual concerns. Similarly, Kandinsky and Marc in their respective essays in the almanac, ‘On the Question of Form’, and ‘Two Images’, dissociate external appearances from inner content. They employ image juxtapositions to demonstrate not formal similarities, but differences.
Sharply contrasting forms, Kandinsky and Marc reasoned, would bring viewers to perceive works’ more enduring spiritual content. The side-by-side placement of a votive panel and a Delaunay painting, of a Cézanne painting and a Russian popular print, or of an African mask and Picasso painting, Kandinsky claims, provokes a series of vibrations in the viewer’s soul that awaken the beholder’s inner impulse or creative spirit.49 Marc expresses similar ideas with the memorable phrase, ‘genuine art can always be compared with genuine art, however different the expression may be.’50 Breaking with Macke and the Folkwang’s emphasis on form, Kandinsky and Marc maintain that the goal of art is not the creation of formal harmonies, but the awakening of an inner or creative spirit by means of contrast and defamiliarization.
Schoenberg’s insistence on formal dissonance between text and music provided Marc, and above all Kandinsky, with a basis for image comparisons and a stage composition in Der Blaue Reiter almanac that present startling and illogical juxtapositions. Marc deeply appreciated Schoenberg’s work at the same time that he admitted little competence in musical matters. Kandinsky’s engagement with Schoenberg was more thorough and permeated every aspect of his work, including painting, playwriting and stage design.51 In particular, Kandinsky’s insistence on the inner affinities between modern and non-western art, despite their outer dissimilarities, must be understood as a response to Schoenberg’s embrace of juxtaposition and dissonance. In his essay ‘On Stage Composition’, Kandinsky claims that the coordination of the arts results in the same ‘vibrations of the human soul’ that he associates with contrasting images.52 Such oppositions are evident in the illustrations accompanying Kandinsky’s text, including the pairing of an Egyptian shadow puppet of a lion and trainer (fourteenth to sixteenth century) with Kandinsky’s abstract Composition V (1911). Contradiction also constitutes a central feature of his play, The Yellow Sound, in which ‘vague chords’ replace musical harmonies, and dialogue consists of oxymoronic word pairings. Scenery colours change abruptly, and images accompanying the text present another layer of oppositions.53
Kandinsky and Marc’s approach to the Gesamtkunstwerk resulted in a new conception of modern art’s relationship to the ‘primitive’ based on inner affinity, not exterior resemblance. Yet it also led to a more distanced relationship to the Folkwang Museum. After his exhibit there in 1909, Kandinsky maintained a polite, but detached relationship with Osthaus. Marc exhibited at the Folkwang in 1911, but he often called upon Macke as an intermediary between Der Blaue Reiter and Osthaus. In 1912, Kandinsky donated a watercolour to the museum upon its tenth anniversary, which coincided with its hosting of Der Blaue Reiter’s exhibit. It was a kind, but modest gift. Osthaus’s view of Der Blaue Reiter group was equally sympathetic, but limited. He did not purchase any of the works that Kandinsky exhibited at his museum in 1909. He did, however, buy Marc’s Three Horses for the Folkwang following the artist’s 1911 exhibit. In 1913, Osthaus acquired Kandinsky’s large painting Improvisation for his museum, but made no further purchases. In 1913, he contributed to Herwarth Walden’s Protest für Kandinsky (1913), but his defense of the artist was hardly effusive: ‘The fact that the Folkwang Museum contains works by Kandinsky should tell you enough about my opinion of the artist.’54 By contrast, Macke enjoyed a more sustained relationship with Osthaus and his projects. Following his departure from Der Blaue Reiter group in 1912, Macke worked alongside Osthaus in organizing the Sonderbund Exhibition in Cologne. He also facilitated contacts between Osthaus and art dealers and made regular visits to the Folkwang until his untimely death in World War I. In a 1920 letter to Osthaus, Helmuth Macke referred to his and August’s memorable visits to the Folkwang, which he described as ‘our Mecca.’55
The almanac as an imperfect synthesis
Although the process of gathering images was very much a collective effort, Marc took responsibility for the final decisions regarding image layout. Rather than choosing one strategy over the other, Marc included both approaches to image comparisons and, by extension, to the Gesamtkunstwerk. He supported Kandinsky’s notion of formal difference by pairing formally dissimilar works, including a Russian folk sculpture of St. George (nineteenth century) with David Burljuk’s portrait study (1911). The sculpture’s figural language contrasts with Burljuk’s geometric, faceted planes. However, other pairings demonstrate formal and spiritual affinities between modern, pre-modern, and non-western artworks. For example, both Gauguin’s carving Pape Moë (1893–1895) and an Etruscan bronze relief Gorgo, Goddess of the Animals (6 BCE) depict stylized figures either frontally or in profile against a flat plane. In both works, figures fill the surfaces of the support and display an ornamental character, and their side-by-side layout in Der Blaue Reiter almanac heightens this sense of formal ‘affinity.’
Differences in approach among Blaue Reiter artists did not go unnoticed. Already upon the group’s exhibition at the Folkwang in July 1912, Osthaus’s assistant, Kurt Freyer, underlined the heterogeneous approaches taken by group members. He noted that they partook in different ways in the common striving towards abstraction. Kandinsky, he observed, approached it ‘through a sheer delight in colours and lines’, whereas Macke, Marc and others tended towards abstraction through ‘the dissolution of space and through bright, artificial colours.’ He concluded: ‘In sum, the interest of these works lies more in experimentation than in pure artistic pleasure.’56 Freyer astutely recognized the group’s heterogeneity, even if certain of his comments might seem surprising, above all his association of Marc’s art with Macke’s as opposed to Kandinsky’s. His comments underline the important relationships that bound Marc to Macke, even if the artists disagreed on crucial points. Differences between Marc and Kandinsky were also significant, and over the course of 1913 the artists moved in dissimilar directions. Marc continued to identify wholeheartedly with Der Blaue Reiter movement and set about publishing a second edition of the almanac, whereas Kandinsky, despite his loyalty to Marc, saw the almanac as representing a moment in time that was superseded by his ongoing experiments.
Marc’s appeasement of both Macke and Kandinsky in the image layout of the almanac had both personal and aesthetic motivations. He valued Macke’s art and Meier-Graefe’s writings, which he acknowledged in his essay ‘Spiritual Treasures.’57 He also respected Kandinsky’s intelligence, revered his work, and shared his enthusiasm for Schoenberg. Marc was less doctrinaire than Kandinsky, more willing to tolerate difference, not only between Macke and Kandinsky, but also between Kandinsky and Die Brücke artists. Marc based his aesthetic judgments on aesthetic quality and what he found to be a work’s ethical content rather than on specific intellectual or formal criteria. Unlike Kandinsky, his understanding of the Gesamtkunstwerk was radically inclusive, summing up the most advanced tendencies in German and international art and underlining their contribution to a new, ‘spiritual’ epoch.
Marc’s wide-ranging strategy suggests the principles that he, Kandinsky, and Macke had in common. Despite their different inflections of form, Blaue Reiter artists shared a common association of non-western, popular and pre-modern art with the Gesamtkunstwerk and display practices at the Folkwang. Together, the almanac’s editors identified non-western and folk art with a series of inclusive rituals that demanded active viewer engagement. Image comparisons of works from disparate cultures challenge viewers to identify a basis of comparison. Comparative viewing involves viewers in the production of meaning, which varies according to beholders’ temperament and imagination. Whatever their differences, Osthaus and Blaue Reiter artists’ interest in ‘primitive’ art stemmed from a common commitment to identify universal creative impulses. Although individual approaches to formal comparisons varied, both Osthaus and Der Blaue Reiter disrupted linear temporality and narrative through strategies of repetition and juxtaposition in an attempt to uncover spiritual likeness.
The Folkwang Museum and Der Blaue Reiter’s belief in totality and engagement with the Gesamtkunstwerk sets them apart from a later and competing discourse on the primitive and modern art that is best exemplified by Carl Einstein’s writings. Along with members of Der Blaue Reiter, Einstein learned from the Folkwang, but he entirely rejected ideas of the Gesamtkunstwerk upon which its collection and displays were founded. Einstein opposed all notions of interactive viewing, treating the visual arts in isolation and denying subjective and empathetic relationships between artwork and viewer.58 His understanding of form as self-sufficient informed Negro Sculpture’s pages of unlabeled illustrations, in which sculptures, including two pieces of African sculpture from the Folkwang, appear as isolated artworks.59 Far from following Einstein’s example, the Folkwang Museum continued, and even intensified, its display strategies based on principles of juxtaposition and the Gesamtkunstwerk into the 1920s and beyond. Following Osthaus’s death in 1921, his assistant Karl With organized an exhibit entitled ‘Exotics and Expressionists’, in which paintings by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner appeared alongside a Bayaka Mask from central Africa and an Uli figure from New Guinea (figure 3.4). This display continued the logic not only of the Folkwang’s previous practices, but also of Der Blaue Reiter almanac, in which Gauguin’s wood carving appears opposite a bronze Etruscan sculptural relief.60
World War I renewed With’s conviction that a world spirit united all world cultures and that this spirit could be uncovered by formal juxtapositions of art objects of the highest quality from around the world. Whereas up until 1918, Osthaus had aligned the concept of world culture with the expansion of the German spirit, With’s experience of Germany’s defeat in World War I led him to unequivocally associate the Folkwang’s displays with principles of internationalism, including efforts underway to found a League of Nations. In an article of 1919, With observed that modern man no longer feels himself at the pinnacle of human civilization, but instead finds his place in a larger order that is determined by essential structures of the human mind.61 In the almanac, Kandinsky put forward a similar understanding of form as an elemental human expression that, beyond belonging to a personality, people, nation, and age embodies an essential ‘inner necessity’ common to all. However, the form of this common spirit remained undecided. In 1919, With described the museum’s collection and installations as dynamically evolving; displays at the Folkwang, according to With, functioned dialectically, alternating between principles of intimacy and transition, distinctiveness and commonality, evolution and juxtaposition. Whether consciously or not, in 1919 With seems to invoke some of Kandinsky’s oppositional binaries which suggests the possibility that the Folkwang learned from Der Blaue Reiter just as Der Blaue Reiter had responded to displays at the Folkwang. Both entities approached totality haltingly, courting openendedness and multiplicity as paths to the universal.
3.4 A display at the Folkwang Museum in Hagen, 1921, depicting Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s paintings Still Life with Mask (1911), Rhaetian Railway, Davos (1917), and Portrait of Oskar Schlemmer (1914) alongside a Bayaka Mask from central Africa and an Uli figure from New Guinea.
The points of overlap, as well as tension, between Der Blaue Reiter and the Folkwang Museum reveal a new dimension to the ‘primitivizing’ impulses underlying German Expressionism. Primarily associated with matters of art’s subject matter, style and materials, the ‘primitive’, as it was understood by German artists in the early twentieth century, also encompassed a desire to forge synaesthetic, spatial environments in which the boundaries between the arts, as well as between self and other, would be overcome. The Gesamtkunstwerk, in all its multiple and conflicting definitions, served as a medium for these totalizing ambitions.
Notes
1Kandinsky to Marc, 19 June 1911, in W. Kandinsky and F. Marc, Briefwechsel, ed. Klaus Lankheit (Munich: R. Piper & Co., 1983), p. 40. Cited in Brigitte Salmen (ed.), Der Almanach der ‘Blaue Reiter’. Bilder und Bildwerke in Originalen (Murnau: Schloßmuseum Murnau, 1998), p. 7. [‘Da bringen wir einen Ägypter neben einem kleinen Zeh [Nikolaus and Oskar Zeh were the children of a friend of Kandinsky], einen Chinesen neben Rousseau, ein Volksblatt neben Picasso und dergleich noch viel mehr!’] Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.
2For a comprehensive, documentary history of the Folkwang Museum, see Herta Hesse-Frielinghaus (ed.), Karl Ernst Osthaus. Leben und Werk (Recklinghausen: Aurel Bongers, 1971), pp. 119–258. For accounts of the museum’s contributions to the development of European modernism, see James J. Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World: From the End of the Old Regime to the Rise of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Katherine Kuenzli, ‘The Birth of the Modernist Art Museum: The Folkwang as Gesamtkunstwerk’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 72:4 (December 2013), pp. 503–29.
3The Folkwang Museum is widely recognized for its outstanding collection of modern European art, but its significant collection of non-European and pre-modern art, which was relegated to storage in the 1960s, has begun to receive renewed attention. See Karla Bilang, Bild und Gegenbild: Das Ursprüngliche in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1990); Rainer Stamm, ‘Exoten und Expressionsten – Das Folkwang Museum als “Mikrokosmos des Geistes der Erde”’, Westfalen. Hefte für Geschichte, Kunst, und Volkskunde, 71 (1993), pp. 251–8. More recently, the Folkwang Museum in Essen launched an effort to study non-European and pre-modern works in its collection, and the results so far have been published in two volumes: Hartwig Fischer and Uwe Schneede (eds), ‘Das schönste Museum der Welt’. Museum Folkwang bis 1933 (Essen: Edition Folkwang, 2010) and its accompanying volume of essays, Hartwig Fischer and Uwe Schneede (eds), ‘Das schönste Museum der Welt’. Museum Folkwang bis 1933. Essays zur Geschichte der Folkwang (Essen: Edition Folkwang, 2010).
4On the concept of ‘primitivism’ in modern art, see Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Painting (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1938); Colin Rhodes, Primitivism and Modern Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994); Frances Connelly, The Sleep of Reason: Primitivism in Modern European Art and Aesthetics, 1725–1907 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). See also the Museum of Modern Art’s controversial exhibit organized by William Rubin (ed.), Primitivism in Twentieth-Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, 2 vols (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984). This exhibition generated noteworthy critical reviews, including Yve-Alain Bois, ‘La Pensée sauvage’, Art in America (April 1985), pp. 178–88, and James Clifford, ‘Histories of the Tribal and the Modern’, in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 189–214. For an excellent, recent assessment, see Joshua Cohen, ‘Fauve Masks: Rethinking Modern “Primitivist” uses of African and Oceanic Art, 1905–08’, The Art Bulletin, 99:2 (2017), pp. 136–65.
5Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World.
6On these colour relationships, see Frau K. E. Osthaus, ‘Das Museum Folkwang in Hagen’, Kölnische Zeitung, 10 August 1913.
7Van de Velde’s museum building in Hagen has been restored today and currently houses the Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum. However, the original building suffered heavy damage in World War II, and all of the original stained glass and wall treatments have been lost. A key source for reconstructing the Hagen Folkwang Museum’s interiors and early displays are the scrapbooks of newspaper clippings pertaining to the Folkwang that Gertrud Osthaus compiled, and which are held at the Karl Ernst Osthaus Archives, located in the Osthaus Museum in Hagen (SM Folkwang, Z100). I thank Dr Birgit Schulte for making these documents available to me. These clippings, in which art critics describe in great detail the museum’s colour combinations and displays, allowed me to reconstruct the Folkwang’s appearance in the first decade of the twentieth century here and in my article, ‘The Birth of the Modernist Art Museum’.
8On the relationship between the Folkwang and the Blue Rider, see Herta Hesse-Frielinghaus (ed.), Karl Ernst Osthaus; Herta Hesse-Frielinghaus, Die Neue Künstlervereinigung München, Der Blaue Reiter, und das Folkwang Museum Hagen (Hagen: Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum, 1980); Andrea Sinzel, ‘Hagen’, in Christine Hopfengart (ed.), Der Blaue Reiter (Bremen: Kunsthalle Bremen, 2000), pp. 69–70.
9On Wagnerianism in the visual arts, see Sophie Duplaix and Marcella Lista (eds), Sons et lumières: Une histoire du son dans l’art du XXe siècle (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2004); Marcella Lista, L’Oeuvre d’art totale à la naissance des avant-gardes, 1908–1914 (Paris: Institut national d’histoire de l’art, 2006); Anne Leonard, ‘Picturing Listening in the Late Nineteenth Century’, The Art Bulletin, 89:2 (June 2007), pp. 266–86; Juliet Koss, Modernism After Wagner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Katherine Kuenzli, ‘Intimate Modernism: The Nabis, Symbolist Theatre, and the Gesamtkunstwerk’, in Patrizia di Bello and Gabriel Koureas (eds), Art, History, and the Senses (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 67–82; David Michael Imhoof, Margaret Menninger and Anthony Steinhoff (eds), The Total Work of Art: Foundations, Articulations, Inspirations (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016).
10For a recent example of how Der Blue Rider almanac has been aligned with notions of totality in general without attention to the specific and competing discourses on totality in the visual arts, see Jessica Horsley, Der Almanach des Blauen Reiters als Gesamtkunstwerk (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006). Most discussions of the ‘total work of art’ in relationship to Der Blaue Reiter understandably focus on the fascinating intellectual exchange between Wassily Kandinsky and Arnold Schoenberg. For a recent example, see Esther da Costa Meyer and Fred Wasserman (eds), Schoenberg, Kandinsky, and the Blue Rider (New York: The Jewish Museum, 2003).
11For studies of the origins of particular works reproduced in the Blue Rider Almanach, see Salmen (ed.), Der Almanach ‘Der Blaue Reiter’; Katharina Erling, ‘Der Almanach der Blaue Reiter’, in Hopfengart (ed.), Der Blaue Reiter (2000), pp. 188–239. For studies of image comparisons, see Felix Thürlemann, ‘“Famose Gegenklänge”. Der Diskurs der Abbildungen im Almanach “Der Blaue Reiter”’, in Hans Christoph von Tavel (ed.), Der Blaue Reiter (Bern: Kunstmuseum Bern, 1986), pp. 210–22; Magdalena Bushart, ‘“Echtes bleibt neben Echtem bestehen”. Zum Bildkonzept des Blauen Reiters’, in Hopfengart (ed.), Der Blaue Reiter, pp. 240–7; Ursula Heiderich, ‘“Der Leib ist die Seele”. August Mackes Beitrag zum Almanach der Blaue Reiter’, in Hopfengart (ed.), Der Blaue Reiter, pp. 248–54. These studies privilege Marc and Kandinsky’s or Macke’s role in constructing image comparisons, but do not explore significant differences in the three artists’ approaches.
12Studies of modernist art and the ‘primitive’ around 1900 that have informed my thinking include Yve-Alain Bois, ‘Kahnweiler’s Lesson’, in Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 65–97; Patricia Leighton, ‘The White Peril and L’Art nègre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anticolonialism’, The Art Bulletin, 72:4 (1990), pp. 609–30; Jill Lloyd, German Expressionism: Primitivism and Modernity (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1991); Stephen Eisenman, Gauguin’s Skirt (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997); Alastair Wright, ‘Seeing Difference: Looking Otherwise at Matisse’s Morocco’, in Matisse and the Subject of Modernism (Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 193–219; Roger Benjamin, Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa, 1880–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Cohen, ‘Fauve Masks’. Despite their varied approaches, which range from the semiotic to the socio-historical, all the above-mentioned authors focus on the visual arts independent of developments in music, poetry, dance and theatre performance.
13Georg Lukács, ‘Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline’ [1934], reprinted in his Essays on Realism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980), pp. 76–113.
14On the modernist ‘total work of art’, see David Roberts, The Total Work of Art in European Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011).
15James Sheehan, ‘Museums and Modernism, 1880–1914’, in Museums in the German Art World, pp. 139–84.
16On the psychological dimensions of modernist museum displays, see Charlotte Klonk, ‘Interiority and Intimacy’, in Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000 (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 49–86.
17‘Post-Impressionism’ here is a period term used by Roger Fry in organizing influential exhibits of modern Parisian painting in London beginning in 1910. Hugo von Tschudi and likeminded German curators would have known Fry’s exhibits and writings, and they collected and exhibited the same artists ranging from Manet to Matisse whom Fry extolled. On Roger Fry and his relationship to German art criticism and collecting, see Jaqueline Falkenheim, Roger Fry and the Beginnings of Formalist Art Criticism (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1980).
18Franz Marc, ‘Geistige Güter’, in Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc (eds), Der Blaue Reiter ([Munich: R. Piper & Co., 1912]; Munich: Prestel, 2008), pp. 1–4.
19On von Tschudi, see Barbara Paul, Hugo von Tschudi und die moderne französische Kunst im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1993); Johann Georg Prinz von Hohenzollern and Peter-Klaus Schuster (eds), Manet bis van Gogh: Hugo von Tschudi und der Kampf um die Moderne (Munich: Prestel, 1996). On Meier-Graefe, see Kenworth Moffett, Meier-Graefe as Art Critic (Munich: Prestel, 1973).
20On display practices in ethnographic museums, see H. Glenn Penny, Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany (Chapel Hill, London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
21For instance, Marc reinforced the logic of colonization in a letter to Macke, in which he wrote, ‘The goal “to desire the inner” is a natural instinct that comes forth without any theoretical consideration and stems purely from a healthy instinct for colour that is common to all primitive peoples. That we want to make “paintings” and not just colourful columns, capitals, straw hats, and ceramic vessels, – is our advantage, our “Europeanness.”’ [‘Das Ziel, “auf’s innigste zu wünschen”, ist nun natürlich, so etwas ohne theoretische Überlegung herauszubringen, rein aus einem gesunden Farbeninstinkt, wie es die primitive Völker alle hatten. Dass wir daraus “Bilder” machen wollen und nicht nur bunte Säulen und Kapitäle und Strohhüte und Tongefässe, – ist unser Vorzug, unser “Europäertum”’.] Marc to Macke, 14 January 1911. Cited in Wolfgang Macke (ed.) August Macke und Franz Marc: Briefwechsel (Cologne: M. DuMont Schauberg, 1964), p. 41.
22Osthaus and his collaborators went to great, and sometimes illogical, lengths to show how work by French painters could be compatible with the cultivation of interiority that they saw as specifically Germanic. See, for instance, Emil Rudolf Weiß’s review of an exhibition of Gauguin’s paintings at the Folkwang Museum in 1903, in which he claimed Gauguin’s mysticism as manifesting the ‘northern’ spirit: ‘Paul Gauguin. Elementarische Bermerkungen anläßlich der Ausstellung von sieben Gemälden Gauguins im Folkwang’, Hagener Zeitung und Westfälisches Tageblatt, 19 December 1903. The article is preserved in the binders of press clippings at the Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum’s archives, KEOM SM, Z100, 3 1901/2.
23On Osthaus’s acquisitions of pre-modern and non-western art, see Rainer Stamm, ‘Weltkunst und Moderne’, in Fischer and Schneede (eds), ‘Das schönste Museum der Welt’, pp. 27–46.
24Osthaus, ‘Das Museum Folkwang in Hagen’. [‘ein anderes Mal erreicht ein – sozusagen harmonischer – Gegensatz eine merkwürdige Steigerung des künstlerischen Ausdrucks’; ‘In den anstoßenden Räumen dagegen hat der Wille zu einer Vereinigung des Psychisch-Verwandten Zeiten und Länder und Historie übersprungen.’]
25Osthaus, ‘Das Museum Folkwang in Hagen’. [‘Und seltsam, das Leben dieser Werke vereinigt sich hemmungslos; gleitend geht der Blick des Beschauers von einem zum andern; an dem einen für das andere vielleicht nur tiefer erregt’; ‘die dämonischen Werke afrikanischer Kultur’; ‘seltsamer psychischer Verwandtschaft’; ‘aus jenen fernen düstern Gebieten’.]
26Rainer Stamm, ‘Weltkunst und Moderne.’
27On Meier-Graefe and his role in the construction of a modernist ‘total work of art’, see Kuenzli, ‘The Birth of the Modernist Art Museum’.
28Julius Meier-Graefe, Entwickelungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst. Vergleichende Betrachtung der bildenen Künste, als Beitrag zu einer neuen Aesthetik, 3 vols (Stuttgart: J. Hofmann, 1904). Though he is known as the first ‘historian’ of modern art, this reputation is largely based on subsequent editions of his Entwicklungsgeschichte and not on the first, more influential edition that reads as a work, not of art history, but of art criticism. On the book’s complicated publication history and evolving arguments, see Catherine Krahmer, ‘Meier-Graefes Weg zur Kunst’, in Gerhard Neumann, Ursula Renner, Günter Schnitzler and Gotthard Wunberg (eds), Hofmannsthal. Jahrbuch zur europäischen Moderne, vol. 4 (Freiburg: Rombach, 1996), pp. 168–226; Grischka Petri, ‘The English Edition of Julius Meier-Graefe’s Entwickelungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst’, Visual Culture in Britain, 6:2 (2005), pp. 171–88; Jenny Anger, ‘Courbet, the Decorative, and the Canon: Rewriting and Rereading Meier-Graefe’s Modern Art’, in Anna Brzyski (ed.), Partisan Canons (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 157–77.
29On ideological tensions between van de Velde and Osthaus, see Katherine Kuenzli, ‘Architecture, Individualism, and Nation: Henry van de Velde’s 1914 Werkbund Theatre Building’, The Art Bulletin, 94:2 (June 2012), pp. 251–73; Kuenzli, ‘The Birth of the Modernist Art Museum’. On Osthaus’s intellectual biography and right-wing nationalism, see Herta Hesse-Frielinghaus (ed.), Karl Ernst Osthaus; Rainer Stamm (ed.), Karl Ernst Osthaus. Reden und Schriften (Cologne: Walther König, 2002).
30Meier-Graefe, Entwickelungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst, I: 232–3. [‘die Freude, die das Bild ausstrahlt, ruft widerspruchsvollerweise antike Dinge in die Erinnerung: glänzende Steinbilder, die zur Zeit der Alexanderschlacht in Neapel die Paläste schmückten.’]
31Julius Meier-Graefe, ‘Nietzsche und Wagner’, in Entwickelungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst, II: 739–51.
32On Osthaus and theatre, including his Theatre Exhibit, see Hesse-Frielinghaus, Karl Ernst Osthaus, pp. 59–65. On Sacharoff’s relationships with the Folkwang Museum and Der Blaue Reiter, see Frank-Manuel Peter and Rainer Stamm (eds), Die Sacharoffs. Zwei Tänzer aus dem Umkreis des Blauen Reiters (Cologne: Wienand Verlag, 2002). For Osthaus’s writings on dance and theatre performance, see Stamm, Karl Ernst Osthaus. Reden und Schriften, pp. 145–54.
33On differences between Marc and Kandinsky, see Magdalena Bushart, ‘“Echtes bleibt neben Echtem bestehen ….” Zum Bildkonzept des Blauen Reiters’, in Hopfengart (ed.), Der Blaue Reiter.
34W. Kandinsky and F. Marc, Briefwechsel, ed. Klaus Lankheit (Munich: R. Piper & Co., 1983), pp. 136–7. On tensions between Macke and Kandinsky, see Rosel Gollek, ‘Indianer, Sturm, und Masken: August Mackes Beitrag zum Blauen Reiter’, in Ernst-Gerhard Güse (ed.), August Macke. Gemälde, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen (Munich: Bruckmann, 1986), pp. 39–48.
35Felix Thürlemann underestimates the differences between Macke’s and Kandinsky’s approaches to image juxtapositions in his ‘“Famose Gegenklänge”’. Ursula Heiderich emphasizes the importance of Oscar Wilde’s art criticism on Macke’s artistic practice in her ‘“Der Leib ist die Seele”. August Mackes Beitrag zum Almanach Der Blaue Reiter’, in Hopfengart (ed.), Der Blaue Reiter, while I underline the importance of Meier-Graefe and a French painterly tradition.
36Marc to Macke, 8 September 1911; cited in August Macke, Franz Marc Briefwechsel, p. 73.
37August Macke, ‘Die Masken’, in Der Blaue Reiter ([1912]; 2008), p. 24. Translated in Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac. Documentary edition, ed. Klaus Lankheit, trans. H. Falkenstein (New York: Viking Press, 1974), p. 87. [‘die jeden unbedingt ebenso erfassen, wie der Feuertanz den Neger oder das geheimnisvolle Trommeln der Fakire den Inder.’]
38On the history of the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, see Winrich Meiszies, ‘Vorbühne des Westens – Das Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf unter Louise Dumont und Gustav Lindemann zwischen 1905 und 1914’, in Wolfgang Schepers, Stephan von Wiese and Jutta Hülsewieg-Johnen (eds), Der Westdeutsche Impuls 1900–1914: Kunst und Umweltgestaltung im Industriegebiet. Düsseldorf, eine Grosstadt auf dem Weg in die Moderne (Düsseldorf: Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf, 1984), pp. 229–40. On Macke’s designs for the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, see Irene Kleinschmidt-Altpeter, ‘August Macke – Aspekte des Frühwerks’, in Güse, August Macke. Gemälde, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen, pp. 9–22.
39Letter from August Macke to Elisabeth Gerhardt, May 1906; cited in Kleinschmidt-Altpeter, ‘August Macke – Aspekte des Frühwerks’, p. 14. [‘Ich würde Stimmungen durch Vorhänge und Farben allein machen, ohne Nachahmung der Natur.’]
40On Craig, see Denis Bablet, The Theatre of Edward Gordon Craig, trans. Daphne Woodward (London: Eyre Methuen, 1981); Uta Grund, Zwischen den Künsten: Edward Gordon Craig und das Bildtheater um 1900 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2002).
41See Kleinschmidt-Altpeter, ‘August Macke – Aspekte des Frühwerks’, pp. 9–22.
42On Macke’s engagement with French painting, see Ernst-Gerhard Güse, ‘August Macke, der Impressionismus und die Fauves. Ein Beitrag zu Mackes Rezeption französischer Malerei’, in Güse, August Macke. Gemälde, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen, pp. 23–38.
43August Macke to Franz Marc, 26 December, 1910; cited in August Macke, Franz Marc Briefwechsel, p. 32. [‘Ich war in Hagen, sah zwei Matisse, die mich entzückten. Eine grosse Sammlung japanischer Masken. Göttlich!’]
44Beginning in 1905, the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus published a bi-monthly theatre periodical entitled Die Masken. For his part, Edward Gordon Craig published a quarterly theatre periodical entitled The Mask beginning in 1908.
45August Macke, ‘Die Masken’, p. 22. Translated in Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, p. 85. [‘Der Mensch äussert sein Leben in Formen. Jede Kunstform ist Aeusserung seines inneren Lebens. Das Aeussere der Kunstform ist ihr Inneres.’]
46August Macke, ‘Die Masken’, p. 24. Translated in Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, pp. 88–9. [‘Stammt das Porträt des Dr. Gachet von van Gogh nicht aus einem ähnlichen geistigen Leben, wie die im Holzdruck geformte, erstaunte Fratze des japanischen Gauklers. Die Maske des Krankheitsdämons aus Ceylon ist die Schreckensgeste eines Naturvolkes, mit der seine Priester Krankes beschwören. Für die grotesken Zierate der Maske finden wir Analogien in den Baudenkmälern der Gotik, in den fast unbekannten Bauten und Inschriften im Urwalde von Mexiko.’]
47See Macke’s letters to Marc at the end of January 2012, reprinted in August Macke, Franz Marc Briefwechsel, pp. 97, 99. On Kandinsky’s departures from Meier-Graefe’s aesthetic, see Katherine Kuenzli, ‘Expanding the Boundaries of Modern Art: The Blaue Reiter, Parisian Modernism, and Henri Rousseau’, in Timothy O. Benson (ed.), Expressionism in Germany and France: From Van Gogh to Kandinsky (New York: DelMonico Books and Prestel, 2014), pp. 250–61.
48Arnold Schoenberg, ‘Das Verhältnis zum Text’, in Der Blaue Reiter ([1912]; 2008), p. 33. Translated in Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, p. 102. [‘die äusserliche Übereinstimmung zwischen Musik und Text, wie sie sich in Deklamation, Tempo und Tonstärke zeigt, nur wenig zu tun hat mit der innern (Übereinstimmung).’]
49Wassily Kandinsky, ‘Über die Formfrage’, in Der Blaue Reiter ([1912]; 2008), p. 99. Translated in Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, p. 186.
50Franz Marc, ‘Zwei Bilder’, in Der Blaue Reiter ([1912]; 2008), p. 8. Translated in Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, p. 65. [‘Echtes bleibt stets neben Echtem bestehen, so verschieden auch sein Ausdruck sein mag.’]
51For Franz Marc’s limited understanding of Schoenberg’s music, see his letter to August Macke in August Macke, Franz Marc Briefwechsel, pp. 40–1. On Kandinsky’s relationship with Schoenberg, see Esther da Costa Meyer and Fred Wasserman (eds), Schoenberg, Kandinsky, and the Blue Rider; Walter Frisch, German Modernism: Music and the Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), pp. 88–137. On Kandinsky’s approach to stage composition, see Peg Weiss, Kandinsky in Munich: The Formative Jugendstil Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 92–106; Rose-Carol Washton Long, Kandinsky: The Development of an Abstract Style (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), pp. 52–64.
52Wassily Kandinsky, ‘Über Bühnenkomposition’, in Der Blaue Reiter ([1912]; 2008), pp. 104. Translated in Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, p. 190.
53Wassily Kandinsky, ‘Der Gelbe Klang’, in Der Blaue Reiter ([1912]; 2008), pp. 115–31. Translated in Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, pp. 208–25.
54Hesse-Frielinghaus, Karl Ernst Osthaus, p. 76. [‘Die Tatsache, daß sich Arbeiten von Kandinsky im Folkwang-Museum befinden wird ihnen zur Genüge sagen, was ich von dem Künstler halte.’]
55Cited in Hesse-Frielinghaus, Karl Ernst Osthaus, p. 222. [‘Es war unser Mekka.’] On Macke’s role as an intermediary between Osthaus and dealers of African art, see Stamm, ‘Weltkunst und Moderne’, p. 41; Hesse-Frielinghaus, ed., Karl Ernst Osthaus, 245–59.
56Kurt Freyer, ‘Ausstellungen. Hagen’, Cicerone. Halbmonatsschrift für Künstler, Kunstfreunde, und Sammler 4, no. 20 (1912): 609. [‘durch ein reines Spiel mit Farben und Linien’; ‘durch Aufhebung des Räumlichen und durch bunte, unwirkliche Farben’; ‘Im ganzen hat man bei diesen Werken mehr Interesse am Experiment als reinen künstlerischen Genuß.’]
57On Macke’s friendship with Marc and his Rheinland connections, see Rosel Gollek, ‘Indianer, Sturm und Masken: August Mackes Beitrag zum Blauen Reiter’, in August Macke. Gemälde, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen, 39–48.
58On Carl Einstein and his relationship to Der Blaue Reiter, see Uwe Fleckner, Carl Einstein und sein Jahrhundert. Fragmente einer intellektuellen Biographie (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2006), pp. 15–98.
59In Negerplastik, Einstein reproduced a Baule figure from the Ivory Coast and a Bayaka Mask from the Congo, both of which belonged to the Folkwang. See Herta Hesse-Frielinghaus (ed.), Karl Ernst Osthaus, p. 251; Carl Einstein, Negerplastik, 2nd ed. (Munich: Kurt Wolff, 1920), pp. 57, 101. On Einstein’s image programme, see Z. S. Strother, ‘Looking for Africa in Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik’, African Arts, 46:4 (Winter 2013), pp. 8–21.
60See Stamm, ‘Exoten und Expressionsten – Das Folkwang Museum als ‘Mikrokosmos des Geistes der Erde.’
61Karl With, ‘Das Museum Folkwang und die ägyptischen Neuerwerbungen’, Die Rheinlande 19 (1919), pp. 97–107. On With’s contributions to the Folkwang Museum in Hagen as well as to the Folkwang Verlag, where he initiated a series devoted to world art entitled ‘Cultures of the Globe’ (‘Kulturen der Erde’), see Rainer Stamm, Der Folkwang-Verlag: Auf dem Weg zu einem imaginären Museum (Frankfurt am Main: Buchhändler-Vereinigung GmbH, 1999).