Material Modernity

Innovations in Art, Design, and Architecture in the Weimar Republic

Deborah Ascher Barnstone,Maria Makela

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350228764
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

Material Modernity explores creative innovation in German art, design, and architecture during the Weimar Republic, charting both the rise of new media and the re-fashioning of old media. Weimar became famous for the explosion of creative ingenuity across the arts in Germany, due to experiments with new techniques (including the move towards abstraction in painting and sculpture) and inventive work in such new media as paper and plastic, which utilized both new and old methods of art production. Individual chapters in this book consider inventions such as the camera and materials like celluloid, examine the role of new materials including concrete composites in opening up fresh avenues in the plastic arts, and relate advances in the understanding of color perception and psychology to an increased interest in visual perception and the latent potential of color as both architectural ornament and carrier of emotional force in space. While art historians usually argue that experimentation in the Weimar Republic was the result of an intentional rejection of traditional modes of expression in the conscious attempt to invent a modern art and architecture unshackled from historic media and methods, this volume shows that the drivers for innovation were often far more complex and nuanced. It first of all describes how the material shortages precipitated by the First World War, along with the devastation to industrial infrastructure and disruption of historic trade routes, affected art, as did a spirit of experimentation that permeated interwar German culture. It then analyzes new challenges in the 1920s to artistic conventions in traditional art modes like painting, sculpture, drawing, architecture, textiles, and print-making and simultaneously probes the likely causes of innovative new methods of artistic production that appeared, such as photomontage, assemblage, mechanical art, and multi-media art. In doing so, Material Modernity fills a significant gap in Weimar scholarship and art history literature.

Part One

New Materials in Artistic Applications

1

Making Lemonade out of Lemons

Merz and Material Poverty

Maria Makela

The disquiet had only just begun. At last I felt free, and I had to vent my jubilation in a loud scream. Not being wasteful, I took everything that I could find, for we were an impoverished country. One can also shout with rubbish—and this I did, nailing and gluing it together.¹

Kurt Schwitters, 1930

“I am a painter, I nail my pictures together.”² It was with this intriguing description that Kurt Schwitters supposedly introduced himself to Raoul Hausmann in Berlin’s Café des Westens sometime in 1918.³ Intriguing, because there is no mention of canvas, the material with which painters up until that time had normally been associated. There is the reference to nails and by association to wood, but nothing of the woven cotton or linen cloth that since the Renaissance had been an essential tool of the painter’s trade. In fact, the so-called “Merz” pictures that Schwitters began to produce around the same time he met Hausmann are collages on paper and assemblages of objects affixed to planks of wood or pieces of cardboard nailed to wooden frames.

Interestingly, the cloth Schwitters no longer used for the ground of his pictures now articulated the surface of them. Though difficult to see in reproduction, bits of lace, gauze, velvet, cotton, wool and linen structure his early Merz pictures as much as the more easily recognizable fragments of paper, wire, string, metal, and wood. Though it has been said, for example, that Schwitters’ celebrated Merz Picture 32A (The Cherry Picture) of 1921 (Plate 1; Figure 1.1) “is dominated by rectangular pieces of paper,” in fact scraps of textiles animate the composition as much as they, countering their flat, matte surfaces with a soft tactility that guide the eye through the “painting.”⁴ Most notable is the bit of rough burlap just below and to the left of the cherries at center. Its color echoing that of the fruit, its shape that of a droopy leaf, it leads via the edges of the green straight-cut paper below to the trapezoidal creamy-pink scrap of cloth near the bottom of the picture, which in turn points to the white-dotted sky-blue poplin above and to the right. The poplin’s verticality and eye-catching pattern then lead to the more densely woven two overlapping fragments of dark blue cloth above, near the protruding dowel. They, in turn, scatter focus, one pointing upwards to the left, the other also upward but to the right, where our eyes come to rest at the top two corners of the composition.

Textiles similarly activate many other Schwitters’ assemblages from about 1918 to 1924, which make frequent, considered, and liberal use of cloth, especially cloth that is tattered, torn, soiled, and frayed.⁵ In and of itself, Schwitters’ use of cloth on the surfaces of his works is unsurprising, insofar as textiles were formative for him from the start. His mother, Henriette, was a talented seamstress. Together with her husband, she opened a women’s clothing store in Hannover at the remarkably young age of twenty-one. So successful was it that when they sold it in 1898 there were enough proceeds to purchase five rental properties in Hannover, the income from which the family lived on comfortably for the rest of their lives.⁶

Figure 1.1 Kurt Schwitters, Merz Picture 32A (The Cherry Picture) [Merzbild 32A. Das Kirschbild], 1921. Collage of cloth, wood, metal, gouache, oil, cut-and-pasted papers, and ink on cardboard, 91.8 × 70.5 cm. New York: Museum of Modern Art. ©2020 ARS, NY/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photo: MoMA/Scala Art Resource, NY.

Much of the artist’s early work indicates an awareness of his mother’s profession, and in 1924 Schwitters was even engaged in writing a book on fashion, which, however, was never published.⁷ Notably, the artist’s home from the time he was six until his exile at the age of fifty was located but a mile from the Döhrener Wollwäscherei und Kämmerei (Döhrener Wool Laundering and Combing), Germany’s largest wool processing plant.⁸ Founded in the 1860s on the site of a dam in the Leine River, Döhrener Wolle employed some two thousand workers on the eve of the war. Schwitters depicted the exterior of the plant in at least one oil painting,⁹ and, when he became serious about typography, designed ads for local businesses dependent on the firm, like Buchheister’s, Hannover’s largest retailer of handicraft supplies.¹⁰

Even larger and older than Döhrener Wolle was the Mechanische Weberei zu Linden (Mechanical Weaving Mills of Linden). Together with Döhrener Wolle, it made the textile industry one of Hannover’s most important.¹¹ Founded in 1837, the company employed some three thousand workers on the eve of the war and produced the award-winning Lindener Samt (Lindener Velvet), an upscale cotton velvet known for its rich blue-black color, the dye recipe of which was closely guarded by the firm. The blue-black plush that Schwitters often used in his early Merz pictures was doubtless this very velvet, but in his work it is soiled and frayed rather than sewn into sumptuously elegant clothing.

Merz Picture Thirty-One of 1920 (Plate 2; Figure 1.2) is a case in point. Of the various shapes that direct attention from the outward edges of the picture to the tilted “31” of the title near center, a large scrap of tattered dark blue velvet anchors the composition on the right, its frayed top edge and soft texture serving as counterpoints to the crisp, triangular scrap of cream-colored, precisely dotted gauze to its left. Two additional bits of scruffy Lindener Samt—one triangular, the other curve-edged and irregularly shaped—are sandwiched between the other “31” at the top edge and the right angle traced below by a white-tipped, knife-edged scrap of newsprint and a green and white wooden stick.

Figure 1.2 Kurt Schwitters, Merz Picture Thirty-One [Merzbild Einunddreissig], 1920. Assemblage of oil, paper, wood, metal, textile, cotton, on carton, mounted on wooden frame, 98 × 66 cm. Hannover: Sprengel Museum (D12). ©2020 ARS, NY/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photo: bpk Bildagentur/Sprengel Museum/Michael Herling/Aline Gwose/Art Resource, NY.

It is the unexpected lack of cloth as ground and its tawdry presence as figure in Schwitters’ work of the early Weimar era that is of note, for this was a time of extreme material shortages in Germany, when cloth of any kind was hard to come by, as were so many other items. Though all combatants suffered deprivation during and after war, the Germans and Austrians were most affected due to the Allied blockade and the harsh terms of the Versailles Treaty. Critical as regards the conception and reception of new media like photomontage, found object “sculpture” and, in particular, Merz, this unprecedented material poverty and how it affected contemporaneous artists is the subject of this essay.

I begin with an in-depth contextual history of the shortages, especially that of cloth, and elaborate on the Ersatzkultur (culture of substitute materials) that developed in Germany as a result. I the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part One New Materials in Artistic Applications
• 1 Making Lemonade out of Lemons: Merz and Material Property
• 2 Experimentation and Invention in Weaving at the Bauhaus
• 3 Paper Promises: Inflation and the Insufficiency of Ersatz in Weimar Germany
• 4 Abject Objects: Til Brugman, Evidentiary Representation, and Sexology’s Celluloid Fixation
• Part Two New Chemicals and Reprographic Processes
• 5 Visual Explosion in the Weimar Era’s Print Media
• 6 László Moholy-Nagy: Adventures in Light, Space, and Time
• Part Three Traditional Materials in New Applications
• 7 The Emperor’s New Glass: Transparency as Substance and Symbol in Interwar Design
• 8 Inverted Cubism or the Spatial Painting: Adolf Rading’s Dr. Rabe House
• 9 Renée Sintenis, Wendt & Kühn, Lotte Pritzel: Modes, Markets, and Materials in Domestic Objects, 1910–30
• Index
• Plates
• Copyright