5

Kleinkunst and Gesamtkunstwerk in Munich and Zurich: Der Blaue Reiter and Dada

Deborah Lewer

MUNICH on the eve of World War I and Zurich in the midst of it: these were the contexts in which two of the most radical and innovative attempts to redefine the spiritual, material and political parameters for a vital and expanded art practice in modernity were worked out. In this chapter, I explore some of the connections between Der Blaue Reiter in pre-war Munich and the small circle of exiles in wartime Zurich who gathered at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 and who initiated Dada. Hans Arp and Emmy Hennings were involved in both contexts, as were other, more peripheral figures. The focus of this discussion, however, is on the two men whose thinking and practice were arguably the most significant for the development of Dada, and of Der Blaue Reiter, respectively: Hugo Ball, founder of the cabaret and of Dada in Zurich, and Wassily Kandinsky. The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to show how Ball’s thinking on art, dance, theatre and the role of the artist in society was significantly shaped by his encounters with Kandinsky the individual, with the almanac of Der Blaue Reiter, and with Kandinsky’s Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Concerning the Spiritual in Art), published in 1911. Of particular interest is the extent to which Ball developed, modified and eventually refuted his own notion of the artist by reference – certainly more than to any other visual artist – to Kandinsky. This was the case before, during and after the period of his involvement with Dada. More than on aesthetic questions, then, Ball’s concern was with the philosophical, theological and social concept of the artist in modernity and – in Kandinsky’s chiliastic terms – on the brink of the ‘coming epoch of the new spiritual’.¹ Further significant parallels between Der Blaue Reiter and Dada in Zurich can be seen in the ways that each involved a dynamic, eclectic relationship between ‘high’ and ‘low’, between Kleinkunst (or the ‘little arts’) and the Gesamtkunstwerk (‘total work of art’) and between tradition and modernity. But there is also a paradox, significant for the history of Dada in Zurich, which I discuss at the end of this chapter: while Kandinsky’s influence informed Ball’s initiation of Dada in 1916, it appears also to have been a factor in Ball’s renunciation, just one year later, of the nascent Mouvement Dada (as Tristan Tzara formalized it), and arguably of modern art itself.

Ball in Munich, 1912–1914

For Ball, theatre was the forum in which he developed the ideas that would underpin his artistic activity over his ‘Expressionist’ (1912–1915) and ‘Dada’ (1916–1917) years. Having studied at the Max Reinhardt School in Berlin in 1910–1911, he gained a post as Dramaturg at the Plauen Stadttheater for the season 1911–1912. He then moved to Munich in the summer of 1912 to take up a similar role at the financially insecure Munich Lustspielhaus, which he renamed the Munich Kammerspiele. Ball had some acting experience and played occasional small stage parts but it is clear that at this time he was interested more in production and in the theoretical aspect of theatre than in the act of performance. He also wrote plays: among his first were Die Nase des Michelangelo (Michelangelo’s Nose) of 1911 and Der Henker von Brescia (The Hangman of Brescia) of 1914. The first performance of the season in Munich was the German première of Leonid Andreyev’s Das Leben des Menschen (Life of Man, 1906–1907), directed by Eugen Robert. The piece became important to him and is an example of the relative continuity of Ball’s activities between his time in Munich and his subsequent sojourn in Zurich. Reprised in a new, sparser form from the precedent of its Munich premiere, it would feature in the repertoire at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. With Emmy Hennings (whom he met in Munich in early 1913), Ball performed, as a reading, parts of it at the cabaret on at least two occasions.²

Ball’s place in the theatre in Munich was precarious. In 1913 and 1914, in the months before the outbreak of World War I, he was still clinging to his position. He was now part of the vast and complex network that constituted the literary and artistic avant-garde in Germany’s major cities and was keen to forge a reputation in this context.³ He contributed to the small, short-lived Munich journals that sprang up, broadly in the manner of Franz Pfemfert’s Die Aktion in Berlin, such as Neue Kunst and Revolution. The uncertainty of his job at the impoverished Kammerspiele also spurred Ball on to explore the possibilities both for other employment and for projects and collaborations elsewhere. He was evidently driven by a powerful sense of ambition to establish himself as a vital member of the contemporary literary and theatrical milieu, confiding in a letter to his sister in May 1914: ‘Little sister, I have such a longing to become a great artist! Day and night I think of nothing else’.⁴ However, the most decisive impact on his thinking at this time came from his encounter with the work and the person of Kandinsky. This influence was crucial for the theoretical framework Ball was beginning to develop for a new, reformed theatre that would incorporate all the arts. Ball looked to Kandinsky’s own vision for a synthesis of the arts (poetry, theatre, music, dance, painting), articulated in his Über das Geistige in der Kunst. His exploration of their practical implications manifested itself in a variety of planned, if not realized, projects. In cultural terms, arguably yet more important, however, was the immense potential that lay in the artist as cultural and spiritual redeemer of an era of stifling materialism.

Ball intensely admired Kandinsky, who was twenty years his senior. He was enthralled by what he perceived as the Russian’s ‘genius’ and by the bohemian circle of international artists, writers and musicians connected to Kandinsky, Franz Marc and Der Blaue Reiter. Kandinsky’s own knowledge and interests – in Russian Futurist poetry, in anarchism, in dance and more – also fed Ball’s developing ideas about art’s potential, by international and collaborative means, to redeem an enervated and chaotic culture. An indicator of the reverence in which he held the artist was that for Ball, Kandinsky’s mere presence in the city was enough to elevate Munich to the pre-eminent German city of modernity: ‘What could be better and more beautiful for a city than for it to be home to a man whose achievements are living directives of the noblest kind?’ he wrote.⁵

Ball’s interest was focused on Kandinsky’s theoretical writing, his editorship, with Marc, of Der Blaue Reiter almanac, and on the spiritualized concept of Gesamtkunstwerk.⁶ But beyond this, it is also evident that Kandinsky himself represented for Ball the ideal and embodiment of the new artist for a new age. For Ball, Kandinsky’s ‘ultimate purpose’ was ‘not merely to create works of art, but to represent art itself’.⁷ Having renounced the Catholicism of his childhood, Ball was drawn at this time to a compelling Nietzschean vision of art in a post-moral, post-Christian condition. Like many of the Expressionist generation, he both absorbed and fuelled the apocalyptically inflected idea that his age was on the brink of a violent rupture that would herald a radically new epoch.⁸ It can already be found in his unfinished doctoral dissertation on the philosopher, where Ball wrote: ‘Already in Basel Nietzsche speaks of the gap that would open up after the annihilation of morality, and in which, instead of a new religion, one will have to place a kind of philosophical artwork with aesthetic values’.⁹ Kandinsky now represented for Ball the possibility for the genesis of new life in art and of art’s potential creatively and metaphysically to redeem humanity. Ball’s appraisal of Kandinsky was expansive, utopian and itself abstract. He was rarely specific about Kandinsky’s own practice. Indeed, the quotidian aspects of art-making, the process of crafting a work, and even formal technique appear barely to have interested him. Rather, the evidence (in the form of his private letters, his note-taking, his retrospectively edited diaries, and his public statements) all suggest that Kandinsky was important as a source of new possibilities: for personal and cultural connections and because he embodied, for Ball, the prophetic figure of the new artist. Reflecting on his contact with Kandinsky in Munich, he wrote that ‘it was as if [the artists] were the prophets of rebirth … When we spoke of Kandinsky and Picasso, we did not mean painters, but priests; not craftsmen, but creators of new worlds, new paradises’.¹⁰ While Dada, within a few years, broadly challenged this culture’s faith in the capacity of the artist to create, God-like, ‘new worlds’, it nonetheless retained something of the powerful concept of the artist-priest as mediator of the divine.

Collaboration with Der Blaue Reiter

In the spring of 1914, Ball began to reflect more intently on the practical potential for aesthetic synthesis in theatre. He was drawn to the ideas around the Gesamtkunstwerk emerging in Expressionist circles, particularly those in Munich around Der Blaue Reiter. He saw an opportunity to realize some of these ideas and collaborate with artists in the Münchener Künstlertheater (Artists’ Theatre), another theatre that was at risk of financial failure and in need of new life. However, he was disciplined in this – in a quite literal sense – by Marc and Kandinsky. When Ball invited the two artists, along with several others, to provide the visual stage setting for performances at the Münchener Künstlertheater in April of 1914, the artists’ responses were benevolent but also uncompromising, chastising Ball precisely for his apparent inclination to preserve traditional divisions between the arts. Marc replied ‘I have not the slightest desire to take part in a half thing’ and Kandinsky responded that ‘it is as impossible only to determine the colour scheme as it would be only to choose the instruments for an unknown symphony’.¹¹ Ball encountered here both the challenges inherent in a collaborative, synthetic artistic scheme and an instance of the attitude and conviction of Kandinsky and Marc that Kandinsky would later account for as follows: ‘From the beginning it was as plain as day to both of us that we had to proceed in a strictly dictatorial manner: complete freedom for the realisation of the embodied idea’.¹² In connection with the project, Ball also wrote a strident article for the short-lived Munich theatre journal Phöbus. It appeared under the title Das Münchener Künstlertheater, with the subheading ‘A principle illumination’. Describing it as a ‘very radical’ article, Ball intended that its interrogation of conditions for theatre in Munich would provoke and help towards establishing his position as a radical reformer of theatre.¹³ It was a polemical article in which he diagnosed simultaneously the decline and the emancipation of theatre. He called for ‘a break with tradition’, framing his argument in terms of psychology and psychoanalysis, and argued against mere ‘dramas’. He summarized his vision in terms that suggest he had Kandinsky, in particular, in mind:

The idea was for a ‘Theatre of New Art’, so to speak: of Expressionism. Outstanding representatives of new painterly and theatrical ideas saw new goals of revolutionary significance. It was no longer a question of a reform of the decorative scheme and stage space, but one of new creation. It was no longer at all a question of ‘decoration’ and ‘staging’. Rather of a new form of the entire dramatic-scenic, theatrical expression. It was a question of setting up a repertoire that pointed simultaneously to the future and into the past, to find plays that would not only be ‘dramas’, but that would represent the birth ground of all dramatic life, and would discharge themselves from the root simultaneously in dance, colour, mime, music and word. The emphasis here should be on the word ‘discharge’ [Entladung], with which the origin of the idea in Expressionist circles is signalled. One thought of the Bacchantes by Euripedes, of The Tempest by Shakespeare … of Chiushingura [sic] (a Japanese national play), of Elektra by Hoffmannsthal (relocated to Haiti or Catagonia [sic]), of The Yellow Sound by Kandinsky.¹⁴

This passage makes clear the many connections between Ball’s ideas about the new modern theatre and his attraction to the compelling synthetic vision of a vitalist Gesamtkunstwerk so characteristic of the circle around Kandinsky. Ball even made further explicit attempts to work in association with the artists of Der Blaue Reiter when he developed another project – closely related to the Künstlertheater idea – for a collaborative book publication under the title, Das Neue Theater (The New Theatre). The publication was to include contributions from Kandinsky, Marc, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, Alfred Kubin, the architect Erich Mendelsohn, the theatre practitioner Nikolai Jevreinov, the choreographer Mikhail Fokin and the composer (and close friend of Kandinsky’s) Thomas von Hartmann. Many of these figures had also been identified by Ball in his article as those who should – ideally – be involved in realizing the new theatre.¹⁵ Ball planned for the book’s publication in October of 1914. He considered as an alternative title ‘Expressionist Theatre’. Like Der Blaue Reiter almanac, this collection was to be published by Reinhard Piper, and Ball clearly envisaged it as of equal significance to the almanac. He wrote to Kandinsky:

I have reached an agreement with Piper, that he will produce the book on similar terms to those of the ‘Blaue Reiter’ … I already think, however, that the thing (in the interests of the idea) will expand beyond the context of a brochure and could perhaps be designed as a pendant to the ‘Blaue Reiter’ (naturally only with your agreement).¹⁶

There were also plans for an ‘International Society for New Art’. (Something of the dynamics of pre-war avant-garde art circles are revealed by Ball’s assurance to Kandinsky, in this same letter, that he would not tell Walden anything of these plans). The outbreak of war and Kandinsky’s departure from Munich put a premature end to the project. It was only later, under very different conditions in wartime Zurich, that Ball was able to make another attempt at something resembling an ‘International Society for New Art’.

Some years later, when he published his diaries as Die Flucht aus der Zeit (Flight out of Time), Ball remembered that the programme for the Münchener Künstlertheater was to have looked something like this:

Kandinsky	Gesamtkunstwerk
Marc	Scenes from The Tempest
Fokin	On ballet
Hartmann	Anarchy in music
Paul Klee	Designs for the Bacchantes
Kokoschka	Scenes and dramas
Ball	Expressionism and stage
Jevreinov	On psychology
Mendelsohn	Stage architecture
Kubin	Designs for Floh im Panzerhaus17

The outline – combining theatre, music, painting, dance and architecture – indicates the expanded sense in which Ball used and understood the word and the concept ‘theatre’, and indeed Gesamtkunstwerk as used by Kandinsky, who heads the list.

At the same time, in the summer of 1914, Ball was also drawing up plans for a series of events that he wanted to put on at the Kammerspiele. He sketched his ideas on two sides of a single sheet of paper that survives to this day in his estate.¹⁸ They provide insight into a series of themed matinées that Ball wanted to stage over the theatre’s next season – that is, from September 1914 to March 1915. These notes were never published and are barely mentioned even in the specialist research on Ball, but they indicate that Ball planned seven (or actually eight mis-numbered) themed matinees to run each month as follows:

I Japanese Matinée

II Kandinsky

III Kokoschka

IV [Heinrich] Lautensack

V ‘Aktion’ (to include Ball’s own work as well as that of others)

VI Futurists

VI [sic] Hardekopf – Hiller

VII [Paul] Claudel¹⁹

There is also a list, with projected dates, this time omitting the ‘Futurist’ matinée. Ball’s desire to integrate contemporary visual art was important in these plans and the key name – appearing in Ball’s hand-writing three times, alongside the matinée headings, is ‘Walden’.²⁰

In July 1914 Ball visited Herwarth Walden, the influential Sturm impresario, in Berlin. The purpose of the visit was to discuss borrowing artworks from Walden to show in the foyer of the Kammerspiele during the period of the planned matinees. Aware of the value of Kandinsky’s connections, Ball asked him for ‘a few lines’ to help with access to Walden in Berlin.²¹ Following the visit Ball wrote to his sister: ‘I have been successful in arranging for continuous exhibitions of the Sturm (Herwarth Walden in Berlin) in our foyer from 1^st September on’. He wrote that these exhibitions of Futurist, Cubist and Expressionist works would be ‘the most radical there is in the field of painting today’ and ‘our theatre will be in 1914/15 perhaps the most interesting in Germany’.²² We can only speculate on the significance these events may have had for the history of the avant-garde; Ball’s plans were foiled by the outbreak of World War I.

Having seen his hopes for putting these ideas into action dashed, Ball left Munich and ended up, after a brief and traumatic excursion to see the fighting on the Front, in Berlin. By December 1914, he was enthusing over the creative vitality of Berlin and the artistic milieu, where he detected ‘new life’ and a new radical impetus in contrast to the Munich he had left behind. His remarks give a sense of the disappointments he had faced in Munich:

Here in Berlin it is most comfortable. (Never again to Munich!) The city has initiative, energy, intellect. There are people here at the cutting edge with whom you can work things over … [Munich] is no place for a career. / Here a new life is getting going: anarcho-revolutionary (I think that’s what they call it). Contradictory (without its own contradictions). Active. ‘I want to see actions’.²³

The initiatives Ball took in Munich, thwarted as they were, need to be admitted more often to studies of Dada for a number of reasons. They modify the notion, which would be expressed polemically by the Berlin Dadaists in particular, that Dada represented a thorough-going refutation of Expressionism. There are also grounds for incorporating them more fully into historical accounts of Der Blaue Reiter. Shulamith Behr has pointed out that the influence did not only go one way; Ball was also instrumental in redirecting Kandinsky’s ideas about the Bühnengesamtkunstwerk.²⁴ Considering such pre-war initiatives also enables us to see how Ball later adapted some of these plans for an integration of the visual arts with a live performance programme and a collective publication at both the Cabaret Voltaire and, more formally, at the Galerie Dada in Zurich.

Ball’s reading of Kandinsky’s Über das Geistige in der Kunst

Around the time of Ball’s closest collaboration with Kandinsky and Marc, he was evidently reading at least some sections of Kandinsky’s Über das Geistige in der Kunst. An unpublished notebook from that year also survives in Ball’s estate.²⁵ It contains the jottings he made while reading Kandinsky’s book and others. His notes on Kandinsky’s text fill roughly two pages of the book. They are either short copied excerpts, or in some cases abbreviated or summarized excerpts, but they do not digress from or comment on the text (this is in keeping with Ball’s lifelong habit of reading and note-taking in the excerpt form). While it is impossible to know how and what Ball actually read, or even whether he was reading the book for the first time (though this is likely), his surviving notes mean that it is possible at least to draw some tentative conclusions about the focus of his interest. They can be conjectured as follows: Ball was not studying the full extent of Kandinsky’s theorization of the Geist in art and the forces of history or reading the book with particular attention to detail. Rather, he sought to grasp just some of the main premises of particular parts of its argument. If we take his notes as a rough indication of what he actually read of Kandinsky’s text, they suggest that in fact he may have all but skimmed about four fifths of the book. After just a couple of brief notes from early pages, Ball concentrated his note-taking on the final short sections of Kandinsky’s book: chapter VII on ‘Theory’, chapter VIII on ‘Artwork and Artist’ and the conclusion. This corresponds with Ball’s engagement, which, I am suggesting, was less with his practice, certainly less with Kandinsky’s formal aesthetic theories than with what Ball saw represented in Kandinsky and his vision for the future role of the artist: the artist redefined for the new age as redeemer, even, metaphorically, as Christ-like saviour. In Kandinsky’s Über das Geistige in der Kunst, the lengthy theoretical passages on colour and form, for example, appear to have concerned Ball very little. One of the passages he did copy reads as follows:

The artist is no Sunday’s child in life: he has no right to live without duty, he must carry out a hard task, which often becomes his cross to bear. He must know that his every action, feeling, thought are part of that pure but firm material out of which his works arise and that because of this, he is not free in life, but only in art.²⁶

Philip Mann comments on the extent to which Ball took the implications of Kandinsky’s theories:

While Kandinsky saw a work of art as something that existed in its own right, out of inner necessity, Ball regarded it as a signpost towards a utopian world, and gave the artist a messianic role. Ball perceived the division between art and society in far more extreme terms than Kandinsky, claiming that it was the theatre alone that was capable of revitalising society.²⁷

Notions of freedom and obligation, sacrifice and redemption in art run through much of Ball’s thinking over the next few years, as can be seen in his published diaries, Die Flucht aus der Zeit and in essays such as ‘Der Künstler und die Zeitkrankheit’ (‘The Artist and the Sickness of the Age’). Even after he had rejected much of Expressionism, the connection of these ideas with Kandinsky as exemplary artist remains.

A point rarely addressed in the scholarship on Dada is that Ball’s interest in dance developed under Kandinsky’s influence. Dance and choreography elements feature increasingly in Ball’s own plans for the ‘new theatre’ as a direct result of his encounter with Kandinsky. Intriguingly, he seems also to have been interested in the relatively few passages in Über das Geistige in der Kunst that deal with dance. One of the longest passages he noted addresses concepts of physical movement in relation to the ‘new dance’.²⁸ Ball also noted other remarks on dance and copied out the following passage, with which Kandinsky introduces his threefold scheme for stage composition (consisting of musical movement, painterly movement and artistic dance movement):

This dance of the future, which is placed at the height of today’s music and painting, will at the same moment acquire the ability, as the third element, to bring into being stage composition, which will be the first work of monumental art.²⁹

Given his reading of this particular passage of Kandinsky’s, it is worth also considering Ball’s own most developed published discussion of the new dance. This was an essay he wrote a few years later in Switzerland in 1917. It articulated his response to visiting Ascona and the community at Monte Verità and encountering modern dance, eurhythmics and the dance theories of Rudolf Laban and Mary Wigman. The Dadaists in Zurich had little time for the naturist colonies and sandal-wearing libertarians who retreated from modern life by gathering in the hills (there were several such groups in Switzerland at this time, many grouped around Monte Verità). Ball was certainly sceptical of them when he spent time in Ascona in the summer of 1916, writing to Tristan Tzara:

You ask about Ascona. It is a village without any comforts where currently one can hardly find a room to rent. There is a horde of imbecilic nature people wandering about in sandals and roman tunics. There is no entertainment, no books, no newspapers. There is only nice weather.³⁰

Nonetheless, the following year Ball described Laban’s and Wigman’s theories of dance as ‘an artistic communal and festival idea (Festspielidee) of rich and productive possibilities’.³¹ It is surely significant that Ball spoke in similar terms – in retrospect – of his involvement with the theatre in Munich: ‘Expressionist theatre, according to my thesis, is a festival idea (Festspielidee) and encompasses a new understanding of the Gesamtkunstwerk’.³² It is clear that the integration of dance within a broadly conceived communal Gesamtkunstwerk interested Ball. In this light, the overtly synthetic qualities of his painterly and musical description of the new expressive dance – of Wigman – also suggest Kandinsky’s influence. Ball wrote:

From the religious point of view, Mary Wigman is a Rembrandt nature. She loves the mysticism of the surface, light, dark, the counterpoint of colours and composition; the great, genial language, transfiguration of the inner line and the sudden illumination of spiritual complexes.³³

I suggest that Ball’s reading of Kandinsky’s Über das Geistige in der Kunst enabled him to work though fundamental ideas articulating an essentialist and transcendental concept of art: that progressive contemporary culture was on the brink of a ‘new epoch’ (Kandinsky) and that this epoch would be characterized by ‘the spiritual’. I have discussed elsewhere the significance of the concept of a creative practice that eschews the ‘bodily’ in favour of the ‘spiritual’ and how this accords closely with the core principles of asceticism underpinning Ball’s thought at key moments.³⁴ Certainly, Hans Arp’s later comment that ‘Hugo Ball’s dream had man resurrected, in reality, from his mystifying physicality’, was, particularly apt.³⁵ Ball’s 1914 handwritten notes on Über das Geistige in der Kunst end with his own triumphant repetition of Kandinsky’s and Marc’s slogan: ‘Es kommt: Die Epoche des großen Geistigen’ (‘It is Coming: The Epoch of the Great Spiritual’).³⁶

The Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich

How did these ideas manifest themselves in Ball’s practice and in Dada? The Cabaret Voltaire was one arena in which this was worked out. Ball founded this modest little ‘artists’ bar’ in February 1916. It can be seen to have pursued a synthesis of Kleinkunst and Gesamtkunstwerk. Its mixed social composition and its repertoire brought into close juxtaposition ‘high’ and ‘low’, international and local cultural elements. The performances were nightly; the focus on the part of Ball, Hennings, Tristan Tzara, Richard Huelsenbeck, Hans Arp, Marcel Janco and others on developing the cabaret as a site for international modern art was mediated by the more prosaic demands of the casual, local, beer-drinking clientele. Musical elements performed by Ball, Hennings and invited or spontaneous guests ranged from Debussy and Skriabin to a Russian balalaika troupe and popular cabaret songs. The Cabaret Voltaire involved both ambitions for a progressive, pointedly international, pacifist and avant-garde fusion of the arts and the need to compete with the many other forms of nightly entertainment available in that ‘amusement quarter’ of Zurich. Ball and Hennings had ample experience of both – from pre-war Munich and from several months as part of a down-market varieté troupe in Zurich just before Ball founded the cabaret.

In wartime Zurich and at the Cabaret Voltaire, Ball was hopeful for the prospects of a social and intellectual revolution. He sought to realize a tendency that he thought he could see emerging in recent literature – a nearing of what he called the ‘intellectual’ and ‘proletarian’ elements. In much later life, Richard Huelsenbeck, who had gone to Zurich to join his friend Ball at the cabaret, gave a thought-provoking, rarely quoted account of the significance of the cabaret’s name. For all its subjectivity (and bearing in mind its context, which is a discussion of Ball’s post-Dada polemic, Kritik der deutschen Intelligenz), the recollection sheds light on the cultural politics of the cabaret’s conception, as least as Huelsenbeck remembered them. Huelsenbeck wrote:

As far as I knew Hugo Ball, his most formative experience was and remained the French Revolution. It is the reason why Ball named the cabaret, in which Dada was founded, the ‘Cabaret Voltaire’. Ball believed that Voltaire’s intellect, in contrast to the Germans’ intellect, was not only revolutionary, but also a considerably humanist intellect … Voltaire had, as Ball believed, a direct connection with the people, entirely in contrast to the German philosophers such as Kant, Fichte, Hegel, whose observations needed the recognition of authority in order to gain general acceptance.³⁷

Early press reports drew attention to the cabaret’s ‘patron’, Voltaire, without missing the cabaret’s resemblance to its other model – Munich’s Café Simplizissimus.³⁸ The cabaret’s first few weeks also included elements of Parisian cabaret, such as Aristide Bruant translated into German and a ‘Madame Leconte’ singing contemporary French chansons. There were numerous other elements that originated in Munich cabaret and theatre. Indeed, the translated Bruant songs were almost certainly Ferdinand Hardekopf’s translations of the satirical chansons sung by the earthy Bruant in the clubs of Montmartre, which were themselves already part of the rich Munich cabaret repertoire. According to Marietta di Monaco, Emmy Hennings had sung Hardekopf’s Bruant translations at a one-night cabaret at the Bunter Vogel (Colourful Bird) in Munich before the war.³⁹ Other Munich elements included Frank Wedekind’s Donnerwetterlied (Thunder Song, 1911), which would have been very familiar to Ball from the Munich Kammerspiele and Erich Mühsam’s Revoluzzerlied, a favourite from the city’s Elf Scharfrichter (Eleven Executioners) cabaret.⁴⁰ All attest to the wider influence of the cultural life of Munich on Ball. These elements were further mixed with German Expressionist and French poetry, Russian drama and many other diverse ingredients, including performers’ own pieces.⁴¹ Ball read Futurist poetry by F T. Marinetti, Paulo Buzzi and Aldo Palazzeschi.⁴² There was a strong Russian component in the cabaret, including the aforementioned music recitals of Rachmaninoff, Skriabin, ‘Russian marches’ and a Balalaika group.

As well as bringing together Cubist, Futurist and Expressionist art and literature, the Cabaret Voltaire also drew very directly on popular, local traditions of Varieté and its ‘lower’ variant, Tingel-Tangel. Encounters between ‘high’ and ‘low’ are central to the cultural politics of modernist and avant-garde practice. Many factors suggest that the Cabaret Voltaire was indeed the likeliest of all Dada ventures to have, at least to some extent, like its patron, a ‘direct connection with the people’. But from its beginnings, it is clear that what was emerging under the new slogan of ‘Dada’ was only partially able to straddle what Andreas Huyssen has memorably called the ‘Great Divide’ between high and mass culture. Ball became worried about where the direction of what he sometimes thought of as Dada’s ‘eclecticism’ would eventually lead. When he founded the cabaret, he was beginning from hopes for an affirmative synthesis of the arts, of the sacred and the secular, the spiritual and the bodily. This investment in the utopian visions of an emancipated and vital modernity surely derives, in part, from his absorption of the ideas that were current in the Blaue Reiter circle. As an example it is worth considering August Macke’s essay, Masken (Masks) in Der Blaue Reiter almanac of 1912: ‘In the cinema the professor gawps beside the servant girl. In the cabaret the butterfly-coloured dancer enchants the most infatuated couples as much as the notes sounded in the service by the organ move the believers and the non-believers’.⁴³ Macke’s vision of the reconciliation of ‘high’ and ‘low’ is schematic, but its sentiment is characteristic of the hopes invested in a particularly Expressionist concept of synthesis.

By the time he opened the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in February of 1916, Ball had become interested in the prospects for a social and intellectual revolution and wanted to realize a tendency that he thought he could see emerging in recent literature – a nearing of the ‘intellectual’ and ‘proletarian’ elements – (the professor and the servant-girl, to use Macke’s terms). But the experience of the cabaret seems to have confirmed the futility of this project. After the cabaret closed, having produced ‘Dadaism’, Ball stated in a letter to his fellow Dadaist, Tzara – the same letter in which he dismissed the ‘nature people’ of Ascona – ‘I hereby declare that all the Expressionism, Dadaism and other Isms are the worst kind of bourgeoisie’.⁴⁴

The conditions of war were crucial. They represent a key distinction between Dada in Zurich and Expressionism in pre-war Munich. They also exacerbated the awareness among the Dadaists that institutionalized autonomous art had little relevance for the majority of the population, or for the individual sensitive to the temper of modernity. As Walter Serner declared in his Letzte Lockerung (Last Loosening) manifesto, ‘one can understand silk stockings, but not Gauguins’.⁴⁵ But they recognized too, that dissent and the promotion merely of an alternative, parallel culture was ineffectual. Many Dadaists would become increasingly disparaging of Expressionist irrationalism and of those other members of the avant-garde, such as the Futurists in Italy, who, with an aesthetic radicalism that implied opposition to traditional, dominant culture (and indeed that Dada itself drew on), instead glorified war. The dilemma for the Dadaists was how to maximize the effects of their actions without those actions merely excluding the audience and the institutions to whom they were directed; or put another way, how to avoid retreating into metaphysics or glorifying destruction at the expense of critical aesthetics.

Kandinsky at the Galerie Dada

In the final part of this chapter, I want to look at Ball’s last and most detailed response to Kandinsky. In April 1917, the Cabaret Voltaire had long since closed, and Dada’s operations in Zurich, lead by Ball and Tzara, had moved out of the bohemian milieu and into new premises, the Galerie Dada on the prestigious Paradeplatz. Here, exhibitions of works lent by Walden’s Sturm gallery were mounted. Pedagogy and cultured leisure met in the programme of lectures, tours, teas, performances and soirées. During the evening, there were exclusive candlelit discussions in the Kandinsky Saal. In April 1917, Ball gave a lecture on Kandinsky at the Galerie, scheduled to coincide with the close of a Sturm exhibition that included at least seven paintings by Kandinsky. The lecture is important, not least because it is Ball’s most sustained statement on visual art and one of the last things he wrote under the aegis of Dada. I would argue that it can also be read as a manifesto on ‘the artist’ as a redemptive figure in a world of chaos and that to this extent, it rehearses some of what Ball had read and absorbed from his pre-war reading of Kandinsky when in Munich. Once again, he emphasized that Kandinsky’s ‘idea of freedom is highly developed’ and he also reflected on aesthetic strategies for negating, transcending or circumventing the material, finite world:

The artists of this age turn against themselves and against art … They dissociate themselves from the empirical world, in which they perceive chance, disorder, disharmony. They voluntarily abstain from representing natural objects – which seem to them the greatest of all distortions. They seek what is essential and what is spiritual, what has not yet been profaned.⁴⁶

These passages, in particular, express Ball’s attraction to order over chaos. As such, they encourage reflection on Dada’s so-called ‘anti-art’ beyond the mere slogan to incorporate politics and the metaphysical. They would subsequently be recalled in Ball’s reminiscences and in his statement (quoted at the outset of this chapter) that ‘it was as if [the artists] were the prophets of rebirth … when we spoke of Kandinsky and Picasso, we did not mean painters, but priests; not craftsmen, but creators of new worlds, new paradises’.⁴⁷ Here, too, Ball ascribes to the ideal artist a disconnection from the material processes of art-making in favour of a purified spiritual and indeed quasi-divine creativity. The day after giving a lecture on Kandinsky at the Galerie Dada, Ball wrote in his diary: ‘The painters [are] administrators of the vita contemplativa … heralds of the supernatural language of signs’.⁴⁸ For him, this vita contemplativa, ‘logically’ connected with monasticism, had as its redemptive consequence ‘a magical union with objects and, in due course, asceticism, as a conscious methodology of simplification and quietening’.⁴⁹ At that decisive time for Ball’s own development, Kandinsky’s work was the last modern art with which Ball substantively engaged. That he sought in it this fundamental ‘asceticism’ gives an indication of how far his concerns with art had come and how remote they now were from the direction in which Dada was being taken under its directeur, Tzara.

Ball’s doubts about visual abstract art in general and Kandinsky in particular became evident not long after the lecture. By May 1917, he was questioning the value of Kandinsky’s paintings in very different terms: ‘Abstract art –: will it bring anything more than a revival of the ornamental and a new access to it? Kandinsky’s decorative curves –: are they perhaps merely painted carpets (on which one should sit, and we hang them on the wall)?’⁵⁰ This questioning seems initially to represent a paradox, emerging as it does so soon after Ball’s broadly positive lecture on the artist. It is telling, however, that Ball’s doubts appear to have stemmed from his confrontation with the physical art object – the painted canvases hanging on the wall. It is as if, having assimilated Kandinsky’s sermon on the ‘spiritual’ in art, faced with the materiality of his art Ball’s dualist concept of spirit and matter asserts itself and the work falls, profaned, almost literally, to the ground, like a carpet, a piece of furnishing, something to be sat upon. Ball may even have had in mind the acknowledgement, made by Kandinsky himself in Über das Geistige in der Kunst, of the danger of severing the ties between art and nature, and so creating ‘works that have the appearance of geometrical ornament, which would, to put it crudely, be like a tie or a carpet’: indeed, the statement appears very close to a passage Ball had recorded in his 1914 notes.⁵¹ It is instructive that – as we know from a discussion by Shulamith Behr of the reception of Kandinsky’s early works – they were already, in 1910, being compared with carpets. Marc wrote:

It is a pity that one cannot hang Kandinsky’s large composition and some others beside the Mohammedan carpets in the Exhibition Park. A comparison would be inevitable and how instructive for us all! … We have no decorative work in Germany, never mind a carpet, to which we may juxtapose it. If we try with Kandinsky’s compositions – they will stand this dangerous test, and not as carpets, but as ‘pictures’ … The grand consequence of his colours holds the balance of his graphic freedom – is that not at the same time a definition of painting?⁵²

In Ball’s eyes, Kandinsky’s compositions did not, in the end, ‘stand this dangerous test’ of proximity with the ornamental or with the applied art object. Ball’s questioning of Kandinsky’s ‘decorative curves’ as ‘merely painted carpets’ came at the same time that he was beginning to question abstraction itself as a category beyond aesthetics and indexed to his wider sense of dissolution in culture. It is also the last mention in his diaries of the artist. As I have argued in more detail elsewhere in connection with Ball’s asceticism, it is surely significant that the passage in which Ball voices these doubts about Kandinsky concludes: ‘It is perhaps not a question of art, but of the uncorrupt image’.⁵³ From the experience of Kandinsky’s works in the Galerie Dada, Ball appeared to conclude that his own aesthetic and increasingly theological, gnostic criteria for a purified relationship with the word and the image could not be met or fulfilled by art.⁵⁴

The last soirée to be held at the Galerie Dada was the soirée Hans Heusser on 25 May 1917. Ball was involved in preparations for the evening. His final (edited) diary entry of the Dada phase of his life begins with a passage concerning the preparations.⁵⁵ Included in the programme was an item noted as ‘Fragments from the stage composition “Der gelbe Klang” (by W. Kandinsky)’, which must have been planned by Ball. Significantly, however, in the end, Ball did not take part in the evening. A few days later, he left Zurich in a state of exhaustion and cut all ties with Dada for good. There were many factors in Ball’s renunciation of Dada but a major one, I suggest, was his final loss of faith in Kandinsky. It was part of Ball’s turn away from Dada, away from Expressionism, and from art, first to politics and then, in 1920 towards the different ‘freedom’ of devout, ascetic, hierarchical Catholicism.⁵⁶

My argument here has been that extending our historical view of Dada to include Munich and Der Blaue Reiter enables new insights. It sheds light on Ball’s changing engagement with modern art and the figure of the artist. It modifies an unhelpful polarization sometimes evident in the scholarship between Expressionism and Dada, where the latter is seen as a refutation and overcoming of the former. And, by extension, it also helps redress the orthodox tendency to see Dada as a beginning rather than as a continuation, or, as Michael Erlhoff has put it, ‘as the first polite coughs before the noble outburst of the surrealists’.⁵⁷

Notes

1Wassily Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst [1911] (Bern: Benteli, 1952) p. 143. The phrase concludes the book and was also repeatedly used by both Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc in several contexts, private and public. In his essay ‘Rückblicke’ (‘Reminiscences’), first published in 1913 by Der Sturm, which Ball read, Kandinsky wrote in conclusion to a markedly eschatological passage: ‘Here begins the great epoch of the spiritual, the revelation of the spirit. Father-Son-Holy Spirit’. Wassily Kandinsky, ‘Reminiscences’ [1913], in Robert L. Herbert (ed.), Modern Artists on Art: Ten Unabridged Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall 1964), pp. 19–44, p. 39. It also appears in Ball’s own notes, as discussed below.

2Ball wrote of their reading on 29 February 1916 and called it ‘a painfully legendary play, which I love very much’. See Hugo Ball, Die Flucht aus der Zeit, ed. Bernhard Echte (Zürich: Limmat, 1992), p. 83. See also Volksrecht, 3 March 1916, in Richard Sheppard (ed.), Dada Zürich in Zeitungen. Cabarets, Ausstellungen, Berichte und Bluffs (Siegen: MuK Universität-Gesamthochschule-Siegen, 1992), p. 11. Ball wrote to his sister, Maria Hildebrand, that the reading would be repeated the following week. Ball, letter to Maria Hildebrand, 1 March 1916 in Gerhard Schaub and Ernst Teubner (eds), Hugo Ball. Briefe 1904–1927, vol. 1 (Wallstein: Göttingen, 2003), pp. 100–2, p. 102. This second reading was also announced in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

3On the literary avant-garde in Munich and Berlin and its significance for Dada, see Enno Stahl, ‘Boheme in München und Berlin. Literarisches Leben zwischen Expressionismus, Club Dada und Politik’, Hugo-Ball-Almanach. Studien und Texte zu Dada, Neue Folge 1, 2009/2010, pp. 11–35.

4Ball, letter to Maria Hildebrand, 27 May 1914 in Schaub and Teubner (eds), Briefe, pp. 48–51, p. 51.

5Hugo Ball, Die Flucht aus der Zeit, ed. Bernhard Echte (Zürich: Limmat, 1992), p. 17. For a discussion of Ball’s attraction to Kandinsky with an emphasis on the development of Ball’s theological and aesthetic thinking, see Deborah Lewer, ‘“The Uncorrupt Image”: Hugo Ball, Zurich Dada and the Aesthetics, Politics, and Metaphysics of Asceticism’, in Hopkins and White (eds), Dada: Virgin Microbe (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013).

6On the ‘quasi-cultic’ concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk in Kandinsky’s theory, see Richard Sheppard, ‘Kandinsky’s Oeuvre 1900–14: The Avant-Garde as Rear Guard’, in Modernism – Dada – Postmodernism (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000), pp. 145–70.

7Ball, Flucht, p. 17.

8On the apocalyptic dimensions of Kandinsky’s theory and practice at this time see e.g. Reinhold Heller, ‘Kandinsky and Traditions Apocalyptic’, Art Journal 43:1 (1983), pp. 19–26.

9Hugo Ball, ‘Nietzsche in Basel’, in Bernhard Schlichting (ed.), Hugo Ball. Der Künstler und die Zeitkrankheit. Ausgewählte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), pp. 61–101, p. 98: ‘In Basel spricht Nietzsche bereits auch von der Lücke, die nach Vernichtung der Moral entstehe, und in die man statt einer neuen Religion eine Art philosophisches Kunstwerk mit ästhetischen Werten stellen müsse’.

10Ball, Flucht, p. 16: ‘Es konnte den Anschein haben, als sei die Philosophie an die Künstler übergegangen; als gingen von ihnen die neuen Impulse aus. Als seien sie die Propheten der Wiedergeburt. Wenn wir Kandinsky und Picasso sagten, meinten wir nicht Maler, sondern Priester; nicht Handwerker, sondern Schöpfer neuer Welten, neuer Paradiese’.

11Letter from Franz Marc to Hugo Ball in Ernst Teubner (ed.), Hugo Ball. Leben und Werk (Berlin: Publica, 1986), p. 80. Letter from Wassily Kandinsky to Hugo Ball in Ibid., p. 83.

12Wassily Kandinsky, ‘Der Blaue Reiter (Rückblick)’, in Max Bill (ed.), Kandinsky. Essays über Kunst und Künstler (Bern: Benteli, 1955), pp. 133–8, p. 136.

13See Ball, letter to Maria Hildebrand, 27 May 1914 in Schaub and Teubner (eds), Briefe, vol. 1, pp. 48–51, p. 49.

14Hugo Ball, ‘Das Münchener Künstlertheater’, Phöbus 1:2 (1914), pp. 68–74, 73–4.

15Ibid., 74.

16Ball, letter to Kandinsky, 26 June 1914 in Schaub and Teubner (eds), Briefe, vol. 1, pp. 53–4, p. 53.

17Ball, Flucht, p. 20.

18Schweizerische Literaturarchiv, Schweizerische Nationalbibliothek, Bern, Emmy Hennings / Hugo Ball Doppelnachlass, D-01-C-03a.

19Ibid.

20Ibid.

21Ball, letter to Kandinsky, 26 June 1914 in Schaub and Teubner (eds), Briefe, vol. 1, pp. 53–4, p. 53.

22See Ball’s letter to his sister, 29 July 1914 in Schaub and Teubner (eds), Briefe, vol. 1, pp. 58–60, p. 59: ‘Sie sind das radikalste was es heute auf malerischem Gebiete gibt. … Unser Theater wird 1914/15 vielleicht das interessanteste Deutschlands sein’. [Emphasis in original.] On Ball’s plans for the ‘new theatre’ in Munich, see Philip Mann, Hugo Ball: An Intellectual Biography (London: Bithell, 1987), pp. 27–49. I discuss further the connections between Dada in Zurich and Herwarth Walden in: Deborah Lewer, ‘Dada’s Genesis: Zurich’, in David Hopkins (ed.), A Companion to Dada and Surrealism (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell 2016), pp. 21–37.

23Ball, letter to August Hoffmann, 18 December 1914 in Schaub and Teubner (eds), Briefe, p. 36: ‘Es ist hier ganz gemütlich in Berlin. (Nie mehr nach München!) Die Stadt hat Initiative, Energie, Intellekt. Es gibt Menschen, die an der Spitze stehen und mit denen man sich auseinander setzten Kann … [München] ist kein Boden für eine Karriere. / Hier geht ein neues Leben los: anarcho-revolutionär (so heißt mans glaub ich). Widersprechend (ohne eigne Widersprüche). Aktiv. “Taten will ich sehen”’.

24Shulamith Behr, ‘Deciphering Wassily Kandinsky’s Violet: Activist Expressionism and the Russian Slavonic Milieu’, in S. Behr et al. (eds), Expressionism Reassessed (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993) pp. 174–88, p. 179.

25Schweizerische Literaturarchiv, Schweizerische Nationalbibliothek, Bern. Emmy Hennings / Hugo Ball Doppelnachlass, D-01-A-04a.

26‘Der Künstler ist kein Sonntagskind des Lebens: Er hat kein Recht pflichtlos zu leben, er hat eine schwere Arbeit zu verrichten, die oft zu seinem Kreuz wird. Er muß wissen, daß jede seine Taten, Gefühle, Gedanken das feine unbetastbare aber feste Material bilden, voraus seine Werke entstehen, und daß er deswegen im Leben nicht frei ist, sondern nur in der Kunst’.

27Mann, Hugo Ball, p. 37.

28Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst, p. 123.

29Ibid., p. 125: ‘Dieser Tanz der Zukunft, welcher also auf die Höhe der heutigen Musik und Malerei gestellt wird, wird in demselben Augenblick die Fähigkeit bekommen, als das dritte Element, die Bühnenkomposition zu verwirklichen, welche das erste Werk der monumentalen Kunst sein wird’.

30Ball, letter to Tristan Tzara, written in Ascona, 15 September 1916 in Schaub and Teubner (eds), Briefe, vol. 1, pp. 127–8, p. 128.

31Hugo Ball, ‘Über Okkultismus, Hieratik und andere seltsam schöne Dinge’ [1917], in Schlichting (ed.), Hugo Ball, pp. 54–7, p. 55: ‘eine künstlerische Gemeinschafts- und Festspielidee von reichen und produktiven Möglichkeiten’. For the full text in English see Deborah Lewer, ‘Translation From the German and Introduction to: Hugo Ball, “On Occultism, the Hieratic, and Other Strangely Beautiful Things”’, Art in Translation, 5: 3 (2013) pp. 403–8.

32Ball, Flucht, p. 19.

33Ball, ‘Über Okkultismus’: ‘Religiös gesehen ist Mary Wigman eine Rembrandt-Natur. Sie liebt die Mystik der Fläche, Hell, Dunkel, den Kontrapunkt der Farben und Komposition; die große, geniale Sprache, Verklärung der inneren Linie und das plötzliche Aufleuchten seelischer Komplexe’.

34Lewer, ‘“The Uncorrupt Image”’.

35Hans Arp, Unsern täglichen Traum (Zürich: Arche, 1955), p. 26: ‘Der Traum Hugo Balls läßt den Menschen aus seiner rätselhaften Körperlichkeit in der Wirklichkeit auferstehen’.

36Schweizerische Literaturarchiv, Schweizerische Nationalbibliothek, Bern. Emmy Hennings / Hugo Ball Doppelnachlass, D-01-A-04a.

37Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘Mit Dada, Voltaire und Rom gegen den Untertan. Richard Huelsenbeck über Hugo Ball’s “Kritik der deutschen Intelligenz”’, Die Weltwoche, 27:3 (1971) p. 31: ‘Soweit ich Hugo Ball kannte, war und blieb sein Haupterlebnis die Französische Revolution. Es ist der Grund, weshalb Ball das Kabarett, in dem Dada gegründet wurde, das “Cabaret Voltaire” nannte. Ball glaubte, dass die Intelligenz Voltaires im Gegensatz zur intelligenz der Deutschen eine nicht nur revolutionäre, sondern eine wesentlich humanistische Intelligenz war. … Voltaire hatte, wie Ball glaubt, eine direkte Verbindung mit dem Volk, ganz im Gegensatz zu den deutschen Philosophen wie Kant, Fichte, Hegel, deren Feststellungen obrigkeitlicher Anerkennung bedurften, um allgemein akzeptiert zu werden’.

38Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 9 February 1916 in Sheppard (ed.), Dada Zürich in Zeitungen, pp. 9–10, p. 9.

39Marietta [di Monaco] [pseud.], ‘Klabund’, in Paul Raabe (ed.), The Era of German Expressionism (London: John Calder, 1974), pp. 83–8, pp. 86–7. ‘Madame Leconte’ had her debut, singing ‘French songs’ at the cabaret on its third night, 7 February 1916, and sang at the ‘French Soirée’ held at the cabaret on 14 March 1916. See Ball, Flucht, 14 March 1916, p. 86.

40Frank Wedekind was a star performer at the Elf Scharfrichter cabaret; Munich’s first artistic and literary cabaret. The Donnerwetterlied was integrated into his Franziska, which had its première on 31 November 1912 at the Münchner Kammerspiele where Ball was working. See Echte’s notes to Ball, Flucht, p. 327, and on Mühsam’s Revoluzzerlied, Ibid., p. 328.

41These included works by Kandinsky, Else Lasker-Schüler, Franz Werfel and Jakob van Hoddis; Tzara recited Max Jacob, André Salmon and others, Arp read Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi.

42Volksrecht, 12 December 1916 in Sheppard (ed.), Dada Zürich in Zeitungen, p. 10.

43August Macke, ‘Die Masken’, in Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc (eds), Der Blaue Reiter, ed. Klaus Lankheit (München: R. Piper & Co., 1965), pp. 53–9, p. 57: ‘Im Kinematograph staunt der Professor neben dem Dienstmädchen. Im Varieté bezaubert die schmetterlingfarbene Tänzerin die verliebtesten Paare ebenso stark, wie im gotischen Dom der Feierton der Orgel den Gläubigen und Ungläubigen ergreift’.

44Letter from Ball to Tristan Tzara, 15 September 1916, in Schaub and Teubner (eds), Briefe, vol. 1, pp. 127–8, p. 127: ‘Ich erkläre hiermit, dass aller Expressionismus, Dadaismus, und andere Mismen schlimmste Bourgeoisie sind’.

45Walter Serner, ‘Letzte Lockerung Manifest’, Dada 4/5, 1919, p. 16: ‘Seidenstrümpfe können begriffen werden, Gauguins nicht’.

46Ball, ‘Kandinsky’, in Schlichting (ed.), Hugo Ball, pp. 41–53.

47Ball, Flucht, p. 16.

48Ibid., p. 152.

49Ibid., p. 153. On Ball’s understanding of asceticism, see Lewer, ‘“The Uncorrupt Image”’.

50Ball, Flucht, 17 May 1917, pp. 164–5: ‘Die abstrakte Kunst –: wird sie mehr bringen als eine Wiederbelebung des Ornamentalen und einen neuen Zugang dazu? Kandinsky’s dekorative Kurven –: sind sie vielleicht nur gemalte Teppiche (auf denen man sitzen sollte, und wir hängen sie an die Wand?)’

51Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst, p. 115.

52Franz Marc, ‘Zur Ausstellung der “Neuen Künstlervereinigung” bei Thannhauser’ (September 1910) quoted in Shulamith Behr, ‘Kandinsky, Münter and Creative Partnership’, in Hartwig Fischer and Sean Rainbird (eds), Kandinsky: The Path to Abstraction, exh. cat. (London: Tate, 2006), pp. 77–100, p. 91. In the notes to this essay (p. 214), Behr cites another critic’s response to one of Kandinsky’s paintings by comparison with carpets.

53Ball, Flucht, 17 May 1917, p. 165: ‘Es geht vielleicht gar nicht um die Kunst, sondern um das unkorrupte Bild’.

54On Ball’s gnosticism, see Mann, Hugo Ball.

55Ball, Flucht, 23 May 1917, p. 166.

56For varying perspectives on Ball’s re-conversion to Catholicism in 1920 and its impact on him, see Emmy Ball-Hennings, Hugo Balls Weg zu Gott (Munich: Kösel & Pustet 1931); Bernd Wacker (ed.), Dionysius DADA Areopagita. Hugo Ball und die Kritik der Moderne (Munich: Schöningh 1996); Michael Braun (ed.), Hugo Ball. Der magische Bischof der Avantgarde (Heidelberg: Wunderhorn 2011), especially the essays by Gerhard Deny and Michael Braun, and Mann, Hugo Ball, especially from p. 141 onwards.

57Michael Erlhoff, ‘“Dit le bonbon”: Tristan Tzara in Zurich’, in Brigitte Pichon and Karl Riha (eds), Dada Zurich: A Clown’s Game from Nothing (New York: G. K. Hall and Co., 1996), pp. 104–11, p. 104.