Whatever happened to Expressionist Architecture?

 

Einstein Tower in Potsdam 1919-22 Erich Mendelsohn

‘From 1912 to 1922…there flourished in German speaking countries a school of so-called expressionists…this movement was rapidly pushed into the limbo labelled “romantic”…only to emerge again with force and authority as a prophecy of what would happen to modern architecture in the nineteen-fifties.’ (Reyner Banham). Though undoubtedly sweeping, Banham’s statement does convey the feeling that Expressionist architecture somehow died a premature death, only to rise from the grave…at least as an influence.

Expressionism is a loosely used term applied to architecture from 1911 to 1925 that is not old-fashioned, but that does not conform to the approach that gave rise to the International Style. Expression of the functions of a building through its form is normally associated with the latter. Expressionism is rather the expression of artistic and spiritual feeling which may, or may not, be functional. The Expressionism is commonly associated with painters like Kokoschka and Nolde, and sculptors like Barlach. But whereas self-expression is central to these artists, the architects coupled it with a social consciousness.

Expressionism is often linked to post-war Germany in an attempt to see it as the product of a specific set of circumstances: the disillusionment of losing a war and the need for some great social and spiritual renewal. A new age ushered in by visionary architects. When these feelings receded, the theory goes, such a localized architecture could not survive: it belonged only to a specific time. Leaving apart the question of time for a while, it might be useful to point out the existences of Dutch Expressionist architecture in the Amsterdam School. In 1918 an estate was commissioned from JF Steel and became the Park Meerwijk colony Some of the plans, particularly Blaauw’s (one of the architects Staal employed on the project) have crystalline shapes. The crystal was an Expressionist symbol of the soul, which they borrowed from the writer Wilhelm Worringer. The buildings have an organic approach to shapes similar to the Expressionists plus there is also a considerable influence from the English Arts and Crafts Movement in the use of materials such as thatch,  brick, vertical tile-hanging and wood.

This, and similar work such  as P Vorkink and JP Wormser or Bernhard Hoetger, might be seen to be part of the same thought process that produced the German Otto Bartning’s house for a director in Zeipau in Schleswig (1923-25). A more explicitly Expressionist building is JM van der Meij’s Het Scheepvaarthuis headquarters for the Navigation Company in Amsterdam (1916). The sculpted ornamentation creates a feeling of nervous energy and symbolizes the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans as well as the Great Bear star constellation. Electric light bulbs mark the position of the stars. In other words the building is used as a vehicle to express concerns other than purely architectural. Working with van der Meij on this building was M de Klerk, who built the Eigenaard estate (1913-15) and the triangle formed by the Oostzaanstraat, Zaanstraat and Hembrugstrat (1918-21). He has tried to introduce movement in the wall surfaces by using broad sweeps of brick and imbalance, or eccentricities, of proportion.

Another criticism levelled at Expressionism is that it is “paper architecture”; nothing was ever built, it was purely visionary sketches. Admittedly the crystalline structures of Bruno Taut’s Glass Pavilion (1914) or J Lambert, G Saake and P Bailly’s Pavillon des Diamantaires  or W Luckhardt and R Belling’s Mercedes-Stern Publicity Pavilion, were only temporary buildings for exhibitions but many Expressionist ideas not only passed the paper stage but stayed up; not as follies but as usable, viable buildings or structures.  Structures include Walter Gropius’ War Memorial in Weimar (1919), Max Taut’s Wissinger Tomb in Stahnsdort (1920) or Hermann Obrist’s Tomb of Karl Oertel (before 1911). Amongst the fully realised buildings is W Wurzbach and R Belling’s Scala Restaurant in Berlin (1921), the interior of which shows the use of crystalline structures in a permanent building.  There are also examples of interior design such as Bruno Taut’s Club Room in Berlin (1919-21) which attempts to bring movement and dynamic tension into the room by use of a plaster spiral with a colour scheme provided by Franz Mutzenbecher. Sculptural qualities can be seen in Eric Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower Observatory in Potsdam (1921) which appears to have been moulded with the ease of a soft material like clay. It is in fact brick, cut and given the appearance of concrete.  In 1912 the newly formed Anthroposophical Society decided on the construction of ‘a free high school for spiritual science’, to be named after another famous thinker: Goethe. Goetheanum I burned down on New Year’s Eve 1922/3 but the architect, Rudolf Steiner, designed another, which was to be put up between 1925 and 1928. Both buildings display a sense of arrested motion in the otherwise static forms, as it the building were capable of movement but frozen at a specific moment. The sculptural forms are treated as motifs which metamorphose organically from one part of the building to another. As Steiner describes it, ‘it is necessary so to allow one concept to grow out of another that in the progressive living metamorphosis of concepts there come to light images of that which appears in nature as a being possessing form.’

Rudolf Steiner, as far as we know, had no contact with the other Expressionists, and there were a number of architects working in Germany at this time who were not in what we might call the inner core of Expressionism, but who were profoundly influenced. Hans Poelzig’s Bismark Monument near Bingerbrück (1911) is an early example of a building Bruno Taut much admired. It has the overall form of an oriental temple with a rippling, textured surface. In 1919 Poelzig had the opportunity to convert the Schumann Circus, in Berlin, into a new theatre – the Grosses Schauspielhaus. This building exploits spatial effects, false walls of roughly rendered brickwork, colour and rings of stalactite forms to literally theatrical effect. Through the stylized stalactites were not purely decorative, they had an acoustic function, but they seemed to have been picked up in the decoration of Wilhelm Kreis’ Rheinhalle Planetarium in Düsseldorf (1926). Among Poelzig’s other buildings the Capital Cinema in Berlin, of 1925, was another attempt to capture the irrational world of fantasy in a building of public entertainment. Peter Behrens, another architect associated with the Werkbund, built his IG Farben chemical and dye works (1920-24) in Hoechst-am-Main with almost as many Gothic overtones as his Cathedral Masons’ Lodge of 1922. He demonstrated that the aesthetics of a building that had no other function than to celebrate the tradition of the ‘spiritual brotherhood of religious artists’ could also work in industrial architecture.

The pre-war Werkbund was much tougher in their architectural ideas, and more intent on producing architecture which reflected industry rather than transforming it. Many post-war architects revitalised this strain of modern architecture under the influence of Russian ideas, like those of Lissitsky, Werner Graeff and the G group. In Holland the Amsterdam School was bitterly opposed by De Stijl, with architects like JJP Oud trying to impose order, unity and harmony in buildings by use of geometric forms. A group called the Ring was formed in Germany and included such Expressionist-type architects as Bruno and Max Taut, Erich Mendelsohn, the Luckhardt brohers, Hans Scharoun, Hans Poelzig and Otto Bartning. In the late twenties this group changed noticeably in style, for example Bruno Taut’s Gehag housing in Berlin-Britz of 1927. It would be wrong to ascribe this change wholly to the emergence of Functionalist and Rationalist theories. Though it is not hard to see how a theory based on architecture might have more appeal to an architect than one based on art and spirituality. But it was the practical facts of their trade which had the most direct influence on the evolution of their work. From about 1924 onwards local governments began to commission and build designs for large-scale, low-cost, domestic housing developments. The Ring were heavily engaged in the suburbs of Berlin until after 1930. Given the financial condition of the country at the time, these housing estates had to be built to the most stringent budgets, and a Functionalist/Rationalist approach was necessary to extract the maximum possible performance from materials, machinery and every square meter of floor space and site.

Expressionist architecture generally fared much better in buildings of public and community interest, such as churches, theatres and monuments, than it did in the economic and functional demands of industry and mass housing. But it was not really until the 1960s in Germany that anything of real force or original vitality emerged due to changed economic conditions. Back in the assumed Expressionist period proper Dominikus Böhm built or rebuilt many Catholic churches in the Expressionist style. In the sixties, his son Gottfried Böhm also maintained that churches must be more than just functional, that they must show spatial qualities of a purely expressive nature. His Catholic Pilgrims Church in Neviges (1966-68) has no visible geometric order or system of measurement, the complex faceting of the walls and ceiling show a sculptural and suprarational approach to architecture. Dieter Baumewerd, in his Church of the Holy Spirit in Emmerich am Niederrhein (1965-66), uses reinforced concrete mushroom-like shapes to create a large number of different heights and light effects inside, as well as more angular mushroom shapes on the outside to provide a distinctive profile. Helmut Striffler uses contrasts in interior light and darkness by narrow window slits in solid concrete walls, with an acute pitch of the roof, in his Church on the Blumenau in Mannheim in 1961. An Expressionist distribution of contrasting heights and shapes and sizes of rooms is consolidated in his Memorial Chapel in Dachau, built in 1967. The sculptural handling of space to spiritual intent is also evident, but perhaps to a lesser extent, in the church work of the collective – Wolfgang Hirsch, Rudolf Hoinkis, Martin Lanz, Paul Schütz and Dieter Stahl, and in the work of Rainer Disse, Klaus Franz and Carlfried Mutschler.

Though Expressionism is given its fullest reign in Germany, in church architecture, it is not an isolated phenomenon; it can be seen to contribute to a liberalisation of what might be called post-Brutalism. The basic elements are still concrete cubes, but they are handled with greater freedom. Numerous examples could be given, because of the vague nature of the influence, so Reinhard Gieselmann’s Home for the Aged in Karlsruhe (1964-66) will have to suffice. A less relevant, and totally improvable, example could be Denys Lasdun’s work at the University of East Anglia, which even has the graffiti ‘Post-Brutality Architecture’! In other words it is a distribution of concrete cubes and rectangles designed to break up the monotony of a façade in a manner justified more by art than by function. Gottfried Böhm’s town hall at Bensberg, in 1967, has more explicit romantic/Expressionist content and is attached to an old castle; his Bethany Children’s Village (1966-68) situated in Bensberg, has some of  the same playful fantasy. Günther Bock describes his community centre at Sindlungen (1961) as a ‘bizarre concrete structure’ and Roland Rainer, M Saume and G Norer also seem to use concrete in an expressive, rather than purely logical, manner in Bremen City Hall (1962-65). The irrational, or seemingly irrational, has great appeal for these architects though they are reticent about their sources and inspiration. Some of the influence is likely to be sculpture which may or may not have Expressionist style and intent. Johannes Peter Hölzingert and Herman Goepfert’s Lakeside Restaurant at Karlruhe (1966-67) which uses fluorescent tubes in the manner of contemporary sculpture but inserted into a supporting steel frame at different levels. This results in a complex sculptural canopy to the building. Other materials, such as plastics, now offer the architect new possibilities of creating expressive, sculptural forms – for example in Dieter Schind’s work.

It is probably most relevant to look at German architects in an attempt to trace the influence of Expressionism but there are several other architects whose style became more fluid and Expressionist during the fifties and sixties. The most famous of these is Le Corbusier. From 1950 to 1954 Le Corbusier’s church Notre-Dame du Haut at Ronchamp, Vosges, was being constructed. It contains a towering silo-like chapel and a boldly projecting brown concrete roof, which Le Corbusier says was inspired by the shell of a crab. The two white walls meet like the prow of a ship, and have a surface texturing produced by rough timber shuttering. Water is drained off using an oriental system. The south wall has an irregular series of small square and rectangular windows, splayed to produce a lighting effect inside expressive of mystical experience. It also produces a sense of movement, since the viewer can only see one or two windows at any one time. Instead you see the light diffused from the other invisible windows so the full range of effects can only be seen by moving around the building. Le Corbusier’s Palace of the Assembly in Chandigarh (1953) has a brise-soleil like the roof at Ronchamp. The roof of this building is distinctive in outline with a triangular projecting council chamber and a similarly projecting large assembly hall shaped like a cooling tower. His Maison de l’Homme (Centre Le Corbusier) in Zurich (1963-67) has two large steel screens fitted together to provide an angularly panelled brise-soleil, which breaks up the space of the roof terrace into an ever-changing system of heights. Le Corbusier denies the influence of Expressionism on his work, but this is perhaps not to be taken too seriously. In 1926-7 he visited Steiner’s Goetheanum II in progress and was described as being enormously impressed. But even so it took a long time for anything similar to emerge in his own work.

Other architects of note include Hans Scharoun. Some of his hostels and high rise apartments follow a typical international box style but his Berliner Philharmonie concert hall (1956-63) is of especial note but other projects and individual houses maintain an eccentric conjunction of angles. Emile Aillaud was determined in his Citė de l’Abreuvoir, avenue Ėdouard Vaillant at Paris-Bobigny, that he would avoid the sterile discipline of endless right angles and geometrical exactness of post-Expressionist architecture. He wanted a fluid approach which would provide ever-changing visual variety. At Bobigny he created a long, wavy, broken line of apartments in five-storey towers, some cylindrical, others three-pointed. The three-pointed plan also appears at the eastern end in a series of three-storey buildings.

The Finnish architect and designer Alvar Aalto reverses the German trend and extends from an early functionalism to greater experimentation with distinctive, strong and irregular shapes for commissions from museums and churches to town halls and public buildings including the Helsinki University of Technology (1949-64) and the Finlandia Hall (1976). His thorough knowledge of furniture design and traditional Scandinavian materials like wood led to a sculptural approach to larger structures.  The Vuokseniska church at Imatra, by Alvar Aalto, has a copper roof with windows above an uneven, bulging, façade. The interior volumes bear little relation to the exterior bulge though there are three humps in the internal ceiling (not reflected in the roof-line) which correspond to the windows. These sections can be divided by sliding partitions, part of the path of which is curved, going past two small curved vaults.

Adventurous modern church architecture is not something that only happened in Europe. In America Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Unitarian Church of Madison, in 1947, on a triangular plan, with a triangular copper roof as an expression of hands held together in prayer. His Beth Sholom Synagogue of 1954 is likewise a symbol and expression, this time themed on the tenets of Judaism. Lloyd Wright’s regard for what he called ‘organic architecture’ is evident in the expanding spiral of the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York (1956). You could also go to Australia, for the Sydney Opera House, or to South America, but the links with previous examples of Expressionist architecture become increasingly difficult to establish in moving outside Europe. Europe, and largely Germany with the notable exception of the Amsterdam School, contained the Expressionist buildings of the teens and twenties. And a substantial number of completed buildings there were considering the visionary nature of their sketches. These were practicing architects with sound structural understanding. It was not that Expressionist architecture couldn’t be built that led to its decline but that it couldn’t be built in the economic conditions of Germany during the late twenties and thirties. Meanwhile the rise of the Machine Age aesthetic and the International Style provided an alternative for modernists. In some cases this was a reaffirmation of ideas, to which Expressionism only formed an interlude. This was the case with Walter Gropius who started the Bauhaus with an Expressionist/Arts and Crafts style and ideology but evolved to a more functionalist position compatible with the Werkbund era. In the fifties and sixties there was a reaction against this approach to architecture, and a revival of interest in the work of Gaudi, Art Nouveau, Gothic and Oriental architecture that echoed some of the same sources of inspiration as the Expressionists. So there is a sense in which Expressionism is the most directly linked in time and, in Germany at least, in place to the origins of post-Second World War architecture. But Expressionism is only part of an overall heritage of influences. It failed to establish itself as an ‘International Style’. Perhaps the very concept is anathema to the personal expression of spiritual and sometimes eccentric passion. Yet paradoxically it has served well as a stylistic influence in the building of churches and many other buildings of community focus where the aspirations and experiences of visitors is more important than the basic functions of domesticity and economy.

Copyright c.1980 Adrian Annabel

Berlin 1920

 

One poster in Berlin in 1920 read, quite simply, ‘Dada is political’. Berlin Dada was political and to understand its character and actions is to feel the atmosphere of Berlin at this time. In 1918 disillusion with the war led to the flight of the emperor and the establishment of a republic. During 1918 and 1919 street battles raged in Berlin between the new government and the Spartakusbund, which wanted to replace the corrupt middle-class republic with a working-class republic. In 1919 Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, leaders of the Spartakusbund, were assassinated. But the fighting and accusations of corruption did not cease. After the war ‘the unscrupulous profiteering began,; every moral restraint disappeared’ (Huelsenbeck in Dada siegt 1920).

War profiteers would be indulging themselves in restaurants and brothels while legless war-wounded had to beg or sell matches outside. The enormous war reparations imposed by the allies (‘squeezing Germany until the pips squeak’) had brought the Mark from just over four to the Dollar to over four billion to the Dollar. Unemployment was very high, so was the suicide rate.

The different sociological, political and economic conditions in Berlin to, say, Zurich, created a different Dada art movement. ‘While in Zurich people lived as in a health resort, chasing after the ladies and longing for nightfall that would bring pleasure barges, magic lanterns and music by Verdi, in Berlin you never knew where the next meal was coming from.’ Huelsenbeck, writing in En avant Dada in 1920, is describing his move from Zurich Data to Berlin as a search for a less aesthetic Dadaism, and quotes his and Raoul Hausmann’s earlier manifesto, ‘Dadaism demands the international revolutionary union of all creative and intellectual men and women on the basis of radical Communism.’ The cover to this history of Dadaism was by Richard Huelsenbeck himself and consciously avoided the pictorial. But the script is decoratively arranged into sections by diagonals from a central rectangle. Apart from sentences along these diagonals, the words are all horizontal but are given variety by the large number of types.

One of the Zurich publications Phantastiche Gebete, when it appeared in Berlin in 1920, showed the shift to the more aggressive, social consciousness under Huelsenbeck. Instead of Arp woodcuts, from the time Arp had spent in Berlin in January, it showed the satirical drawings of George Grosz. There was a stress on obscene works on corruption, decay, death, sex and offal – Grosz’s drawings showed man as beast. Grosz’s art was aimed at the masses rather than literary and artistic cliques. The third number of Der blutige Ernst published in 1920 has How the State Courts Ought to Look on the cover. Grosz has put the old military aristocracy on trial, while the proletarians judge from under the gaze of Liebknecht’s portrait. The issue also includes the Pimps of Death which has the Generals Ludendorff and Hindenberg, and one other, acting as pimps to skeletal prostitutes. The bitter satire Ludendorff’s Diary, written by Carl Einstein, was also included. The fourth number of Der blutige Ernst attacked the profiteer which Grosz’s cover allies with the prostitute; a double-page drawing in the centre of the issue portrays wealthy profiteers in the whorehouse. Mehring and Huelsenbeck wrote poems and Einstein discussed profiteers as the product of bourgeois attitudes.

 1920 saw the third and final issue of Der Dada. The previous tow had been edited by Hausmann but, for the third, he was aided by Heartfield and Grosz (or as they called themselves ‘Groszfield, Hearthaus, Georgemann’). The cover, a montage by Heartfield, combined newspaper clippings, with tyre and toothbrush advertisements, with the names of Hausmann, Baader, Grosz and, of course, Dada. The issue contains collages, photographs, illustrations, poetry and advertisements with a deliberately international flavour. For example an American cartoon of Dada taken from Collier’s. Heartfield’s montage of Jedermann sein eigner Fussball reappears in this issue. Der Dada, however, rarely had the inflammatory power of the Jedermann sein eigner Fussball magazine. Die Pleite would be more comparable in tone to the latter. Early in January of 1920 an issue of Die Pleite was published and was immediately banned. On the cover, by Grosz, a capitalist and a general, each hanging from a gibbet, wish each other a Happy New Year. The articles, poems and short plays were serious or satirical; but they all incorporated the themes of the massacre of the revolutionaries, the increase in militarism and the failure of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Die Pleite resurfaced at the end of the year in the satirical section of the journal Der Gegner which was published by Wieland Herzfelde and Julian Gumperz. Der Gegner combined Grosz’s drawings with an idolization of Soviet art and life.

Huelsenbeck, Hausmann and Baader, the latter having just formed the Deutsche Freiheitspartei, started a Dada tour in February 1920. The audiences, who probably came expecting a polite and rather dull cultural lecture, were treated to political propaganda, verbal abuse, simultaneist poetry and general fooling around. The tour began in Leipzig on 24^th February with a performance in the Zentraltheater attended by two thousand people. They then proceeded to the Kaiserbad, Teplitz-Schönau, in Czechoslovakia on 26^th February. In a drunken stupor they appointed Hugo Dux chief of Czech Dada, while Baader wallowed in wine, women and roast pork at the Bawdy House of the Bumblebee. On 1^st March they appeared at the Prague Bourse des Produits. Despite the fact that Baader deserted at the last minute taking half the script with him, and all their money, it was regarded as a success and was attended by two thousand five hundred people. On 2^nd March the two remaining RHs appeared before a smaller audience at the Mozarteum and on the 5^th March in Karlsbad. Overall the tour was a great success, albeit a succés de scandale, in publicizing the Dada movement in Berlin to a wider European audience.

They returned to a Berlin still in political turmoil. On 12^th March the Ehrhardt Freikorps marched on Berlin with the swastika on their helmets. The government fled to Dresden and Stuttgart. The Freikorps tried to install Wolfgang Kapp, a nationalist civil servant, as chancellor but within five days the putsch fell apart. Gustav Noske, the SPD minister of defence, who had used the Freikorps against the Spartacists so thoroughly in 1919, resigned; but the rest of the government survived intact. On 15^th March there was a battle on the Postplatz, Dresden, between the Reichswehr, under General Maercker, and demonstrating workers. Sixty people were killed and a hundred and fifty woundecd. Bullets also penetrated the Zwinger Gallery and slightly damaged Rubens’ Bathsheeba. Oskar Kokoschka, then a professor in the Dresden Academy, wrote an article protesting about the damage and suggesting the inhabitants of Dresden settle their petty squabbles elsewhere. Incensed by Kokoschka’s insensitivity, Grosz and Heartfield published Der Kunstlump in Die Aktion. They attacked Kokoschka’s attitude to works of art as heiligsten Güter. For Grosz and Heartfield these ‘holy heirlooms’ must be viewed in human terms as expressions of creative people, not as objects which could be used for profit and investment by the capitalist class. An artist cannot be indifferent to human strife, for it art is not about that then it is about nothing, they wrote.

The Collective Dada Manifesto, published in April, went further in proposing a robust, realistic art which reflected the dynamism of events. “The highest art will be that which in its conscious content presents the thousandfold problems of the day, the art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week, which is forever trying to collect its limbs after yesterday’s crash.” There was no shortage of events to activate the Dadaists. In 1920, particularly in April in the Ruhr, the Free Corps would descent on any protest or demonstration. People would be ‘shot while attempting to escape’ or sentenced to death by impromptu ‘court-martials’. In a letter written to his family a student who was in the Von Epp Free Corps revels in the atmosphere, “No pardon is given. We shoot even the wounded. The enthusiasm is terrific – unbelievable. Anyone who falls into our hands first gets the rifle butt and then is finished off with a bullet. We even shot ten Red Cross nurses on sight because they were carrying pistols. We shot those little ladies with pleasure – how they cried and pleaded with us to save their lives. Nothing doing!” Under the circumstances it is easy to see why the Berlin Dadaists turned to the idea of Communism as the most viable counter-force to this foretaste of Fascism. On the  5^th of April the KAPD was formed as a splinter group of the KPD and Franz Jung quickly became one of the more prominent members. In late April Jung and Franz Appel hijacked the trawler Senator Schröeder and sailed to Murmansk. Franz Jung had been one of the signatories of the Collective Dada Manifesto, along with Tristan Tzara, George Grosz, Marcel Janco, Richard Huelsenbeck, Raoul Hausmann and may others. Some of the other signatories are possible but also  included a liberal sprinkling of the highly improbable.

The military being used to brutally put down the working class was most viciously portrayed by Georg Grosz. He had plenty of material to work from since forty-two people were killed and a hundred and five injured during a protest outside the Reichstag in January 1920. Grosz’s portfolio of lithographs Gott mit uns, published in June, referred to the inscription on German military belts highlighting the hypocrisy of using moral and spiritual decorative trimmings. Irony is also evident in the lithographs entitled The World Made Safe For Democracy. A man is being handcuffed, beaten and whipped by soldiers. He is being enslaved in the name of freedom, by a democracy in which free speech is not allowed.  The Faith-healers shows the military authorities declaring a rotting skeletal figure fit for active service. The portfolio also includes the Pimps of Death. But, as The Communist Fall, and the Mark Rises points out Grosz felt the military, by its very nature, is just the blunt instrument designed to follow orders without judgement. The real villains were the financial interests at play trying to grab what little money there was exclusively for the financiers.

As might be expected, sponsorship to take exhibition space was not easily forthcoming for the Dadaists. Grosz had one exhibition in 1920 in Hans Goltz’s Galerie Neue Kunst in Munich during April and May. However in June the opportunity arose for all the Dadaists to exhibit and to invite others to contribute. Dr. Otto Burchard, who thus earned himself the title of Finanz-Dada, offered his gallery at Lutzowufer 13 in Berlin. The exhibition was given the rather orthodox title of the First Grand International Dada Fair, though the newspapers tended to refer to it as the Great Dada-Monster Show, and it ran from 24^th June to 5^th August. It was largely organised by Grosz, Hausmann and Hertfield. Heartfield designed the folding catalogue for the exhibition. The front cover used his Dada-Fotomontage of that year as backdrop for the words. The piece was also included in the exhibition and demonstrated his love for all things American (which had inspired the anglicisation of his name from Herzfelde). Not a single German word was used, it was all taken from American newspapers, magazines, film advertisements and so on. Phrases like ‘Cheer, Boys Cheer!’, ‘Son of a Gun’, ‘The Return of …Bronco Bill’ were set against photocopied heads, drawn heads, bits of film, a wheel, part of a telephone and skyscrapers. Superimposed on the reproduction from the exhibition is the information on the exhibition including the phrase, ‘the Dada movement leads to the disappearance of the artistic market.’ The back cover featured Gerhard Preiss (Obermusikdada) in a skin-tight body covering with shoes and bowler hat executing a ‘dadaistischer Holzpuppentanz’. It also catalogued the exhibits and was further embellished with a pair of spectacles and several small bicycles. Most of the Heartfields in the exhibition were photomontages taken from various Dada publications. Whether Heartfield, with Grosz, or Hausmann, with Höch, first used photomontage it served as an excellent medium for them. It could exploit the whimsical and illogical conjunction of images (later beloved of the surrealists), was against the fine art tradition of hand-crafted representation, and it offered familiar contemporary imagery from escapist and realistic everyday life.

In rejecting the hand-made fine art aesthetic Heartfield became an engineer in his own mind, or Monteurdada, as illustrated in Grosz’s picture Heartfield the Mechanic. The picture portrays Heartfield in Grosz’s typical pose – in profile with bald head with a mischievous grimace and clenched fists. As well as watercolour Grosz used photographs of mechanical parts and architectural details.

Gott mi tuns was on display with its scratchy cartoon lines and political intent. Grosz’s graffiti inspired art was a more obvious rejection of the spiritual and formal preoccupations of contemporary abstract artists. An analogy could be made between Heartfield the Mechanic and Hausmann’s Tatlin at Home. Both represent particular people as rather characterless types, part machine, and combining painting and collage/montage, set in simplified classical de Chiricoesque interiors. Hausmann’s Dada Siegt (not the publication of the same name) was another montage in this style.

There was also a hairdresser’s mannequin with a number and scale, together with a number of other appendages, which confirms the impact of the scuolo metafisica on Berlin Dada. But, in the exhibition at least, Hausmann the Dadasophe (see his self-portrait) is more purely art-orientated than the anti-military propaganda of Marschall G. Grosz.

Hanna Höch exhibited collages, reliefs ad doll-like figures; the most impressive of which was the collage Cut with a Kitchen Knife. The new metropolitan masses on the lower left are contrasted with the old culture of Kaiser Wilhelm at the top right – his moustache is replaced by two wrestlers, a soldier and a top hat. A mass of machinery dominates the composition, but there is also Baader in a swimsuit, Lenin and Radek as acrobats, Marx, Hausmann, Grosz, Heartfield, Mehring, Höch herself, and several others. In fact Baader appears twice, once at the bottom with one large eye as a comment upon the Dadaists affectation of using a monocle. Baader himself exhibited mostly manuscripts and constructions. For example:

the luggage of Oberdada at the time of his first escape from the insane asylum, 18 September 1899. A Dada relic. Historic.

Why Andrew Carnegie rolls his eyes

A project for an animals’ paradise in the Paris zoo, containing compartments for all the French and German Dadaists in the Hagenbeck style without bars.

The largest was a quasi-architectural structure called The Great Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama: Germany’s Greatness and Decline[…] Or The Phantastic Life Story of Oberdada.

It contained five storeys, three gardens, one tunnel, two lifts and a cylindrical top reminiscent of a top hat. His exhibits combined his skill as an architect with an abuse of Germany and growing rage and mental state. The flysheet threatening to ‘blow Weimar sky-high’ was included.

One of the most striking exhibits was Rudolf Schlicter’s mannequin of a German soldier with the head of a pig. It was suspended from the ceiling, having been ‘hanged by the Revolution.’ Schlicter’s brother ran a restaurant where the Dadaists used to meet. John Heartfield’s brother Wieland Herzfelde, also exhibited. Otto Schmalhausen, who called himself Dada-oz, created a head of Beethoven given a sacrilegious moustache and cross-eyes. Otto Dix showed his social realist caricatures which, particularly in the prostitutes, are akin to Grosz’s work.

Dadamax Ernst exhibited his Dadafex maximus and National Codex and Index of the Refinements of Dada Baargeld. Johannes T. Baargeld, who, like Ernst, came from Cologne and used photo-montage, was also in the exhibition. The mechanistic art of 391 by Picabia was on view, as were the abstract reliefs of Hans Arp. With the exception of Hans Arp the Dada-Messe was remarkably homogeneous, expounding photo-montage, whimsical objects or socially critical drawings in most of the one hundred and seventy four items. Some of the other named contributors are less well known and a good deal are entirely fictitious.

Officers of the Lütwitz Corps who visited the Messe lodged complaints for slander in the name of the German army. The prosecution was brought against Burchard, Grosz, Heartfield and Schlicter in April 1921. Baader’s house had been searched in September after the exhibition but he was beyond any criminal responsibility. The others were found guilty of insulting the Reichswehr; Grosz and Heartfield were given six weeks in jail and all were fined. However the affair proved rather anti-cliimactic in political terms. It transpired that no-one took Berlin Dada seriously as a threat to society and they were dismissed as stupid, but essentially harmless, fools.

At about the same time as the exhibition the Dada Almanach was published. It was edited by Huelsenbeck and featured contributions from Huelsenbeck, Tristan Tzara, Walter Mehring, Francis Picabia, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Adon Lacroix, Hugo Ball, Philippe Soupault, Citröen-Dada. Hans Arp, Paul Dermeé, Roual Hausmann and Vincente Huidobro – a largely non-German lineup. The cover carried the Schmalhausen head of Beethoven and Baader’s Great Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama was also discussed in the issue. Some of the Almanach’s coverage of the exhibition, like the reproduction of Schlicter’s pig-headed German soldier, obviously conveyed Berlin Dad’s political polemic but otherwise it was purely poetic and aesthetic. Tzara, Ball and Lacroix published sound poems and Tzara also traced the history of Zurich Dada. Hausmann merely attacked abstract painting and even that was counter-balanced by the opposing argument by an admirer of Arp.

Grosz continued the fight against artists who he perceived served the bourgeois. ‘Your brushes and pens which should be weapons are hollow straws’, according to the Statt einer Biographie dated 16^th August. Statt einer Biographie traces Grosz’s idea of Tendenzkunst, since art must serve its own time and class therefore serving the struggle of the proletariat. Zu meinen neuen Bildern, written in November but published in January 1921 in Das Kunstblatt, introduces Grosz’s new paintings of ‘Republican automatons‘. They extend Grosz’s fascination with the scuola metafisica of Carrá and de Chirico but do not share their metaphysical intention. Paintings like The Cyclist and Berlin C present faceless, nameless mannequins in an architectural dreamworld with exaggerated perspective.

By the end of the year the Berlin group had gradually dissolved. Hausmann undertook one final Dada tour to Prague with Hanna Hoch and Kurt Schwitters. Schwitters, significantly, was despised by the other Berlin Dadaists. Baader left Berlin and founded his Interplanetary Academy in Potsdam. Wieland Herzfelde and John Heartfield’s publications became less Dadaistic and more purely political in their approach to art: for example Herzfelde’s Society, Artist and Communism of 1921. Walter Mehring moved to Paris and Huelsenbeck travelled the world as a ship’s doctor.

Some of the personal tensions leading to their breakup can be surmised from Hausmann’s Dada Riots, Moves and Dies in Berlin. ‘The members of Club Dada were jealous of each other and sometimes indulged in rather shabby fights. The Heartfield-Herzfelde brothers and Mehring adored George Grosz, that pseudo-revolutionary. Huelsenbeck adored Huelsenbeck…I formed an alliance aside with Baader who was, unhappily, too often obsessed by his religious paranoiac ideas.’ The Berlin Dadaists were of different natures and had different intentions that frustrate the art historian’s mental compulsion for tidy labels, groups and movements. Baader’s undermining of reality contrasted strongly with Grosz and the Herzfelde brothers’ concern for political events. While Huelsenbeck became increasingly anti-art, Hausmann and Hoch leaned towards Schwitter’s fine art conscious aestheticism. There was something in the nature of Berlin 1920 that made its Dadaism implode. According to the Dada-Almanach the Dadaist ‘can compensate for the citizen’s lack of inner urgency and vitality, and shake him into new life.’ But in Berlin at that time if the shattering events could not stir or wake a person then nothing would. The Dadaist could make a row or shatter the tranquility of a place like Zurich, or on the Dada tours, but in Berlin their voice was drowned by much graver anarchy.

 

Partial Bibliography and apologies for omitting visiting artists like Moholy-Nagy and other movements such as the Novembergruppe and the Arbeitsrat für Kunst.

Annely Juda 1978 – The 20s in Berlin

Hess – George Grosz

Huelsenbeck – Memoirs of a Dada Drummer

Institute of Contemporary Arts – Berlin: A Critical View

Lewis - George Grosz

Ed. Motherwell – The Dada Painters and Poets

Richter – Dada Art and Anti-Art

University of Iowa Museum of Art – Dada  Artifacts

 

Chronology of Events

1905 – Hausmann meets Baader in Berlin.

 

1910 3rd March – First issue of Der Sturm (ed. Herwarth Walden, Berlin). Last issue March 1932.

 

1911  20^th February – First issue of Die Aktion (ed. Franz Pfemfert, Berlin). Last issue August 1932.

 

1912 August – Ball meets Huelsenbeck in Munich.

 

1913 20^th September to 1^st December – The Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon in Walden’s Sturm-Galeria, Berlin.

 

1914 4^th August – Outbreak of war. Grosz and Jung volunteer for service. Ball turned down on medical grounds but goes to the front as a civilian volunteer. Returns to Berlin in November in disgust and is joined by Hennings who was released from prison for forging passports for those who wished to avoid military service.

 

1915 early February – Herzfelde returns from the front to Berlin.

12^th February  - Ball speaks at the memorial celebration in the Berlin Architektenhaus for five writers who were killed in the war.

11^th March – Herzfelde meets Grosz who had been released from the Army that Spring.

12^th May – Ball and Huelsenbeck organise an Expressionist evening in the Berlin Harmoniumsaal in which Johannes R. Becher, Hennings and Resi Langer participate. Huelsenbeck declaims ‘negro poems’ and Ball nonsense poems.

Late May/early June – Ball arrives in Zurich.

4^th September – Die Aktion publishes the manifesto Der Impertinentismus by A. Undo (pseudonym).

Autumn – First issue of Die freie Strasse (ed. Jung etc, Berlin)

 

1916 – Ernst meets Grosz and Herzfelde at a Sturm exhibition while on leave in Berlin.

               Herzfelde founds Neue Jugend.

               26^th February – possible date of Huelsenbeck’s arrival in Zurich.

               21^st March – Baader visits the peasant poet Christian Wagner near Stuttgart and lectures on his philosophical views.

               March/Apri – Discovery of the word ‘Dada’, possibly by Ball.

               July – First issue of Neue Jugend (ed. Heinz Berger and Herzfelde, Berlin). Last issue June 1917.

               Autumn – Baader writes a pacifist letter to Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia and is certified insane.

               Late December – Huelsenbeck leaves Zurich for Germany.

 

1917 early January – Huelsenbeck arrives in Berlin.

               February – Huelsenbeck links up with Hausmann and Jung.

               1^st March -  Heartfield founds the Malik Verlag.

               October – Bolshevik revolution in Ruissia.

               9^th October – Baader stands as a candidate for the Reichstag in Saarbrücken.

 

1918 January – Foundation of Club Dada in Berlin. Later that year Huelsenbeck rejects Schwitters’ application.

               19^th January – Schwitters hears Rudolf Blümner read Sturm poetry in the Kestner – Gesellschaft, Hanover. As a result he goes to Berlin in late June to meet Walden.

               22^nd January – Dada evening in I.B. Neumann’s Graphisches Kabinett on the Berlin Ku-Damm. Huelsenbeck reads his First Dada Speech in German.

27^th January – spoof announcement in the Vossische Zeitung names Ferdinand Hardekopf, Theodor Däubler, Max Herrmann-Neisse and Anselm Ruest as members of the Club Dada.

April – Huelsenbeck leaves Berlin.

12^th April - Huelsenbeck reads the First German Dada-Manifesto in the Berliner Sezession, Ku-Damm.

April to December – Huausmann and Baader cause spoof announcements to appear in Berlin newspapers, especially BZ am Mittag.

6^th June – Dada evening in the Café Austria, Berlin. Hausmann reads sound poems.

Late June – Hausmann claims to discover photomontage while on holiday with Höch on the island of Usedom.

23^rd July – Hausmann and Baader celebrate Gottfied Keller’s birthday with readings from his work in the street.

29^th August – Baader referred to as Oberdada for the first time in print (Die Weltbühne).

September – Berliner Tageblatt and Tägliche Rundschau report that Baader is standing as the Reichstag candidate for Berlin First District.

October – Hausmann publishes Material der Malerai, Plastik, und Architektur.

8th to 9th November – Revolution. The Kaiser abdicates. Fritz Ebert becomes Chancellor.

11^th November – Armistice.

17^th November – In a widely reported incident Baader publicly shouts ‘Christus is uns wurscht!’ Arrested but released because of his certificate of no criminal responsibility.

3^rd December -  Novembergruppe meets for the first time. Hausmann, Höch, Grosz, Richter and Arp associate themselves.

12^th December – Freikorps set up.

24^th December – Revolutionary element of the Navy defeats government troops in Berlin fighting. Ebert’s government insecure.

29^th December to 1^st January 1919 – founding congress of Spartakusbund.

31^st December – Grosz, Heartfield and Herzfelde join the Communist Party (KPD).

 

1919 January – Communist riots in Berlin. Gustav Noske becomes Minster of Defence.

               15^th January – Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg murdered in Berlin by the Freikorps. End of Berlin uprising.

19^th January – Re-election of socialist SPD.

6^th February – Dada meeting  in the Kaisersaal des Rheingold: Baader is proclaimed ‘Präsident des Weltballs’.

12^th February – The Ebert majority socialist government re-takes office.

15^th February – Jedermann sein eigener Fussball (ed. Wieland Herzefelde) sells 7600 copies on the Berlin streets before it is banned.

March – First issue of Die Pleite (ed. Herzfelde). Last issue 1924.

“1^st April” – Proclamation of the Dada-Republic of Berlin to be inaugurated 1^st April.

3^rd to 13^th March – Fighting in Berlin between Noske’s troops and workers as a result of General Strike called by the Communists. On 10^th March between 1500 and 2000 revolutionaries killed and 10000 wounded.  Leo Jogisches, Charman of the KPD, is murdered.

7^th March – Herzfelde arrested for editing Jedermann sein eigener Fussball. Imprisoned until 20^th March.

April – First issue of Der Gegner (ed. Julian Gumperz, Herzefelde and Karl Otten). Last issue September 1922.

1st April – proclamation of Oberdada’s death.

2^nd April – proclamation of Oberdada’s resurrection.

30^th April – Dada evening in I.B. Newmann’s Graphishes Kabinett, including Jefim Golyscheff’s three part anti-symphony.

May – First exhibition of Dada painting and sculpture in the Graphisches Kabinett.

Mid-May – Baader donates to the German National Assembly a large picture of Schiller inscribed with the prophecy that the Weimar Republic will be destroyed for despising the rights of the spirit.

24^th Masy – Dada evening in the Meistersaal.

June – First issue of Der Dada (ed. Hausmann, Grosz and Heartfield). Last issue April 1920.

23^rd June – Treaty of Versailles.

28^th June – appearance of Baader’s Hado scrapbook with commentary.

16^th July – probable date of Baader’s leaflet distribution at the Weimar National Assembly.

August – Huelsenbeck agrees to produce Dadaco with help from Zurich and Paris.

30^th November – Dada Matinee at the Charlottenburger Tribune Theatre.

7^th to the 13^th December – possible dates of further matinees at the Charlottenburger Tribune.

8^th December – Max Reinhardt’s caberet Schall und Rauch reopens at the Grosses Schauspielhaus. First performance is Mehring’s Orestie with puppets by Grosz.

 

1920 early January – Die Pleite banned.

               19^th January – Hausmann, Huelsenbeck and Baader’s Dada-Tournée in the Saal der Kaufleuten, Dresden.

February – Baader founds the Deutsche Freiheitspartei.

12th February – Huelsenbeck lectures on Dada in the Kurt Wolff Verlag, Munich. Wolff cancels Dadaco.

               18^th February – Hausmann and Baader – Dada-Tournée in the Curio-Haus, Hamburg.

               24^th February – Hausmann, Huelsenbeck and Baader - Dada-Tournée in the Festsaal of the Zentraltheater, Liepzig, before an audience of 2000.

               26^th February - Dada-Tournée in the Kaiserbad, Teplitz-Schöenhau, Czechoslovakia.

               1^st March - Dada-Tournée in the Bourse des Produits, Prague, before an audience of 2500. Baader absconds with funds and half the script.

2^nd March - Dada-Tournée in the Mozarteum, Prague.

5^th March - Dada-Tournée in Karlsbad.

12^th March – the Ehrhardt Freikiorps march on Berlin wih swastikas on their helmets. The government flees to Dresden and Stuttgart. The Freikorps try and fail to install Wolfgang Kopp. Noske resigns.

15^th March – 60 people killed and 150 wounded in Dresden. A stray bullet hits a Rubens in Dresden Art Gallery. Kokoschka recommends the people settle their petty squabbles elsewhere. Grosz and Heartfield reply in Der Kunstlump published in Die Aktion (12^th June).

April – Huelsenbeck’s Dada seigt published.

4th to 5th April – Foundation of splinter group from the KPD, the KAPD, of which Jung becomes a prominent member.

April-May – Grosz exhibition in Hans Goltz’ Galerie Neue Kunst, Munich.

Late April – Jung and Jan Appel hijack the trawler Senator Schröder and sail to Murmansk.

24^th June to 5^th August – First Grand International Dada Fair in Otto Burchard’s Gallery. As a result, in April 1921, Burchard, Grosz, Herzfelde and Shlicter are summoned for insulting the Reichswehr. All are fined. Grosz and Herzfelde get six weeks in jail.

28^th June – appearance of Hado 2.

4^th September – Baader’s house is searched because of his involvement with the Dada Fair.

15^th October – Erwin Piscator opens the Proletarisches Theater.

15^th December – Dada evening in the Berliner Sezesion.

 

1921 20^th January – Baader organises a Dada Ball in Marmorsaal am Zoo, Berlin.

               10^th February – Hausmann, Höch and Mynona lecture evening in the Berliner Sezession.

20^th February to 13^th March – Grosz contributes to an exhibition in Hanover.

 

               Late June – Baader invites all those interested to take part in his First Grand Dada Academy, Potsdam.

               July – Freiland Dada (ed. Baader, Potsdam).

               6^th and 7^th September – Hausmann, Höch and Schwitters organise Dada -Tournées in Prague entitled Anti-Dada-Merz.

               16^th October – Baader gives a speech in Leipzig.

 

1922 – Hausmann’s Optophone.

               April – Grosz exhibition in the Galerie von Garvens, Hanover.

               Summer – Grosz spends five months in Russia.

30^th September – Schwitters, Arp, Tzara and Hausmann organise an evening called Dada-Revon in the Galerie von Garvens, Hanover.

               Autumn – Baader moves to Stettin.

               1^st October to 22^nd November – Schwitters, Gleichmann and Grosz exhibition in the Galerie von Garvens.

 

1923 – Grosz exhibits in the Kunsthandlung Würthle, Vienna, and the Galerie Flechtheim, Berlin.

               July – First issue of G (ed. Hans Richter). Last issue May 1926.

               December – Hausmann and Schwitters stage a MERZ-Matinee in Hanover.

 

1924 November – Grosz exhibits in the Galerie Joseph Billet, Paris.

 

Copyright Adrian Annabel 1981

The leading figures in New York Dada

 

The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors Even by Marcel Duchamp

Alfred Stieglitz

In 1903 Stieglitz founded an influential journal initially called Camera Work. Under its subsequent name of 291 it became a fairly independent American anti-art art development enriched by some subsequently famous European émigrés, for example from 1913 contributors included the French Cuban artist Francis Picabia.

The photographer Alfred Stieglitz stated ‘Art is dead, long live Art’. Primarily he was talking about the development of photography and encouraging people to think of it as art rather than journalism but, retrospectively, it also has a Dadaist anti-art ambiguity. Stieglitz and Edward Steichen founded a group called Photo Secession in 1902 echoing this withdrawal from mainstream painting in the definition of art. In 1905 their gallery opened at 291 Fifth Avenue, New York. Ironically modern painters were also represented by a group Stieglitz founded called the Association of American Painters and Sculptors. They included John Marin, Alfred Maurer, Charles Demuth, Abraham Walkowitz, Max Weber, Morgan Russell, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Patrick Bruce, Arthur Dove, Joseph Stella and Marsden Hartley.

The Association of American Painters and Sculptors, founded in 1911 by their chairman Arthur Davies and secretary Walt Kuhn, organised an International Exhibition of Modern Art in the armoury of the 69^th Infantry Regiment on Lexington Avenue. It became known as the Armory Show and opened on 17^th February 1913. The most celebrated painting in the exhibition was Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase of 1911. It introduced modern art to a much larger American public and press albeit controversially.

In 1915, when Camera Work changed its name to 291, it published Picabia’s diatribes against art, together with some of his ‘machine pictures’. In one of 291’s successors, 391, Picabia extended his ideas of freedom from all values associated with art.

Arthur Cravan

Another figure from Europe that had an impact on the New York cultural scene around this time was the Swiss boxer and literary agent provocateur Arthur Cravan. He arrived in New York on 13^th January 1916 on the same ship as Leon Trotsky. Cravan already had a reputation for provocative and often violent gatherings earning him the admiration of Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, André Breton and the hatred of Guillaume Apollinaire. His career in New York was short lived, including a drunken lecture on “The Independent Artists of France and America”, and he moved onto Mexico on 1^st September 1917 where he disappeared the following year presumed drowned at sea.

Marcel Duchamp

Most famous for the “ready-mades” such as the Bicycle Wheel, Bottle Rack and Fountain of 1915. These objects became art works merely by the artist saying so and presenting them for exhibition. Duchamp was trying to make people aware of the inherent beauty of utilitarian objects as a philosophical gesture to challenge accepted concepts of crafted hand-made works of art. As a member of the jury of the First New York Salon des Indépendants he submitted the Fountain signed R. Mutt (the name of a firm of sanitary engineers). When it was rejected Duchamp resigned from the jury.

Further works, with or without minimal personal intervention, included Mona Lisa with moustache, Cheque (completely hand drawn in payment for a dentist’s bill), a closed window with the title The Battle of Austerlitz and Why not sneeze Rose Sélavy? in which Duchamp had marble cut to look like sugar lumps and put them in an iron cage. The recurrent theme of these works was to blur or ridicule the barriers between high art and mundane reality.

The Great Glass or the bride laid bare by her bachelors, even was largely completed in 1918. He let New York dust settle on one section of the structure. Then he cleaned all but the cones on which he secured the dust with a fixative. The glass was fractured in transit and, acknowledging the element of chance, Duchamp declared if thus finally completed in 1923. By this time Duchamp had more or less given up spending time on art in favour of playing chess. But produced the Glass Machine of 1920 in which segments of circles revolve to create the illusion of a continuous form. In 1925-6 he designed a number of similar optical machines or ‘rotoreliefs’ exploring the nature of vision. He incorporated some of his discoveries into a film Anémic-Cinéma of 1926 in which he brought the reality of science into art.

Duchamp said, “the solution of this artistic problem finally came with the Discs (1925) in which true three-dimensionality was achieved, not with a complicated machine (for example the Glass Machine of 1920) and a complicated technique (such as development by hand using four hundred nails) but in the eyes of the onlooker, by a psycho-physiological process.”

Man Ray

Man Ray began his career as a painter but, influenced by Stieglitz, he also took up photography. He became known for “the invention of the useless” or anti-art objects such as Boardwalk of 1917 or Object To Be Destroyed of 1923 which was shot at in the Paris Dada Exhibition of 1957. It was a metronome with a photograph of an eye clipped to the swinging arm. The machine with its usefulness taken from it enables the elements of humour, and potentially pathos, to enter an otherwise sterile object. Man Ray also used photographic techniques to produce images by shining lights on photographic paper. These he called ‘rayograms’.

Both the American Man Ray and the Frenchman Francis Picabia shared a disklike of conventional art and  a contempt for many of the tropes and habits of mankind and share a passion for the game of chess. As well as Stieglitz they shared an association with the patron Walter Arensberg, the Life caricaturist Marius de Sayas, the composer Edgar Varèse and the cubist Albert Gleizes. They found publicity, political and cultural support from de Haviland who was editor of the Washington Post. From 1915 to 1923 Walter Arensberg had a salon on West 67^th Street in New York that was regularly used.

Francis Picabia

To avoid the war in Europe Picabia travelled to New York in 1915. He contributed to Stieglitz’ magazine 291. 1915 also sees the start of his mechanomorphic style. In an interview with the New York Tribune in October 1915 he said, “Almost immediately upon coming to America it flashed on me that the genius of the modern world is in machinery, and that through machinery art ought to find a most vivid expression…of life. It is really a part of human life – perhaps the very soul. In seeking forms through which to expose human characteristics I have come at length upon the form which appears most brilliantly plastic and fraught with symbolism.”

Picabia seems to use the machine, not as an object in itself, but as the modern image of the human, with all that the term ‘human’ implies ie. pathos, wit etc. Picabia was familiar with the Italian Futurists who glorified the modern, machine-orientated era. He also knew the robot-like figures of Léger. The description of the machine as being ‘born of man without a mother’ was used for Picabia’s first metamorphic drawing Girl Born Without a Mother (1916-18) and his Portrait of a Young American Girl in the State of Nudity (1915) is a spark plug. With Here, This is Stieglitz (1915) the choice of camera is obvious. The faint form behind the camera on the right is formed from the gear and brake levers of an automobile. The gears are in neutral and the camera is broken. This may be interpreted as a parody of Stieglitz who often seemed to be criticised in his own magazine 291. His lithograph portrait published in 291 as the Saint of Saints is purely diagrammatic and taken from technical camera documentation. A diagrammatic approach can also be found in De Zayas of 1915.

But in Here She Is the sexual symbolism of pistol and target form a fairly obvious metamorphosis from human to mechanical and represent an automatic repeat-firing love machine. There are other examples of sex as a mechanical action in Amorphous Procession (1917) and The Marquesas Island (1916-17) which was a sketch for a work called Universal Prostitution. You could draw parallels with Marchel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even. In American (1917) a retouched photograph of a light bulb associates it’s on/off switch with a flirt/divorce dichotomy.

Picabia helped to launch a sequel to 291 which was 391. One of the covers of the New York edition was his Mechanical Ballet of 1917. This was an automobile which resembled a circle of dancing figures. Ballet mécaniques were quite a common theme. The best known being Léger’s 1924 film of the same name. Picabia’s other mechanomorphic works have the same symmetrical diagrammatic frontal presentation. Other examples of mechanomorphic work from 1915 to 1919 include: Machine without name, Girl born without a mother,  Guillaume Apollinaire irritable poete, Very rare picture on the earth, Amorous Procession, The Child Carburetor, Composition Mecanique, Mona Lisa with Moustache, Femme!, Voila Elle De Zayas and Dada 4-5 (Picabia with Tzara).

Man Ray

Man Ray’s early mechanomorphic wrks were rather painterly compared to Picabia’s. In the following years he mastered the technique of the air brush and would use it in conjunction with whatever happened to be lying about. La Vallière (1919) was made from a dressmaker’s dummy which his landlady had abandoned in the studio; Composition with Key and Triangle (1919) derived from items picked up on his drawing desk. He also used his sculptures as stencils in pictures eg. Sclulpture By Itself II (1918) and Untitled (1919). ‘I put all kinds of things in it, a press for holding wood together, parts of a camera, pieces of cut out cardboard, some of my draughtsman’s instruments etc. I moved everything around and sprayed, and moved again and sprayed, changing their position all the time.’  Man Ray used found objects in both painting and sculpture. The idea of the found object is something which was pursued by Surrealists and used to create novel semi-sculptural objects indicative of a dream state of mind. New York (1917) is Man Ray’s first sculpture to incorporate bits of found wood. Sculpture By Itself I and II (1918), Portrait of Marcel Duchamp (photographed in 1920), Gift (1921) and Emak Bakia (1926) followed.

Emak Bakia is an interpreted found object. It is the neck of an old cello picked up in the Paris fleamarket. The horse hair is taken from its bow and hung loose. The cello had grown old so Man Ray gave it a long white beard. The top of the cello neck is a spiral which is a form that appealed to Man Ray. ‘Nature,’ he said ‘from the sea shell to the galaxy, is full of spirals; when I was a young man, I was already obsessed by this form.’

Lampshade (1919) was the first fully Found Object. It was a discarded paper wrapping of a lampshade, attached to the top of a log rod, around which it revolved. However, when it was later exhibited, the janitor thought it was a paper wrapping for the stand, so crumpled it up and threw it away. Man Ray hurriedly had some metal cut, twisted and painted it white, and so, by the time the exhibition opened, it had become a metal sculpture.

In 1918, two years before his first true Found Object, Man Ray chose his first object which he subsequently termed a Readymade. A Readymade is a common manufactured object which is redesignated as a work of art by the artist. Unlike the Found Object, which may be a product of the action of time, weather and accident, the Readymade is an artifact used in its original unaltered state but within an altered context: that of art. The assisted Readymade is an extension of this concept which may be equated to the interpreted found object; though in both cases the intervention of the artist may only be slight. Man (1918) is an egg-beater. Woman (1918) is an assemblage of two hemispherical reflectors (symbolising vanity) and six laundry pins (to indicate domestic duties) pinching a sheet of glass with a strong light to exploit the shadows. Man Ray was in a difficult marriage at the time and so his satire included the idea of woman being symbolised by the egg and himself as the egg-beater. His wife’s name was Donna which is related to the Italian for woman. Certainly Man was a pun on his own name.

Gift (1921) was an assisted readymade . Man Ray was in Paris in an exhibition when the composer Erik Satie approached  him and they went off to a corner café to talk. On leaving the café they passed a shop of household utensils and bought a flat iron, tacks and glue/ Back in the gallery Man Ray stuck some tacks to the bottom of the flat iron, added it to the exhibition and called it the Gift since he wanted to give it away by drawing lots amongst his friends.

 

Marcel Duchamp

Considering the dates of Man Ray’s readymades it is almost certain that their inspiration lies with his close friend Marcel Duchamp. Influential pieces include Apollinaire Enameled (1916-17), Nine Malic Moulds (1914), The Coffee Mill (1911), Chocolate Grinder No.1 (1913), Cover of the Blind Man (1917),  Nude descending a staircase (1911), Large Glass and Tu’m in K Dreier’s library (1937), LHOOQ (1919), Dust Breeding (1920?), Revolving Glass (1920), Rotoreliefs (1935), With Hidden Noise (1916), Fountain (1917), Bottle-rack (1914), Fountain etc (1917), Why Not Sneeze? (1921), In advance of the broken arm (1915), Duchamp’s studio with Bicycle Wheel and Trap (1917-18), Revolving Glass in Motion’ (1920), Rotary demi-sphere (1925), 3 Standard Stoppages (1913-14) and Pharmacy (1914).

Duchamp’s interest in mechanical imagery may be traced to a much earlier date than Picabia’s (1915). In 1911 Jacque Villon decided it would be nice to have some paintings to decorate his kitchen. Marcel’s contribution was The Coffee Mill (1911). It was the first of his paintings to display an interest in mechanical objects and the first to use the sequenced overlapping phases of representation to depict movement which he used in Nude descending the staircase.

The International Exhibition of Modern Art in the Armoury of the 69^th Infantry Regiment on Lexington Avenue which opened in 1913. The Armoury Show, as it became known, is often credited with introducing modern art to America. Whether that is the whole story or not, it is significant that the most talked about painting in the exhibition was Duchamp’s Nude descending a staircase.

Duchamp’s first painting after his declared renunciation of traditional painting was Chocolate Grinder No.1 and confirms his interest in the world of machines. It was inspired by a chocolate grinder featured in a shop window. It is basically a still life of a machine.

As for readymades as early as 1913 Duchamp conceived the idea that a work of art, such as the Bicycle Wheel (1913), could be made by choice of standardised objects with very little intervention by the artist. The following year, in a shop for artists materials, Duchamp bought three copies of a sentimental winter landscape. To each he added two small marks: one in read and the other yellow. These rectified readymades, or readymades aided, incorporated the idea of limitless quantity.-

Bottleneck (1914) was purchased in the same year. Duchamp was not necessarily trying to show the inerent beauty of these objects, he was showing that art could be produced by the action of choice upon commercially available materials. After all the tubes of paint an artist uses are manufactured readymade products. A painting is a sort of readymade aided. Duchamp first coined the term readymade in 1915 in association with his work In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915).

Apollinaire Enameled (1916-17) was originally an advertisement for Sapolin Enamil but Duchamp has crossed out the S and added the rest of Apollinaire’s name.  In pencil, in the mirror above the chest of drawers, he added the reflection of the hair of the girl. The commercial slogan at the bottom right was altered to make it nonsensical.

In 1917, as a member of the First New York Salon des Indépendants, Duchamp submitted the Fountain signed R. Mutt. Although there was no jury system the work was rejected and Duchamp resigned. A unsigned anonymous letter from Duchamp complained ‘Whether Mr. Mutt, with his own hands, made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.’

Duchamp has always regarded the reverence bestowed upon artists and the financial values placed upon their products as ludicrous. If a common object can be made into art then art can be made into a common object. His Ready Reciprocal L.H.O.O.Q. (1919) asks us to ‘use a Rembrandt as an ironing board’. L.H.O.O.Q., when spelled out in French, sounds like ‘elle a chaud au cul’ which in American slang would be ‘she’s got a hot ass’.

Throughout this period Duchamp was working on a Large Glass machine entitled The Bride Stipped Bare By Her Bachelors Even. Working on the glass solved the problem of provided a background since the transparency of the glass would provide a readymade one.  He used lead wire, oil paint and lead foil; he also allowed New York dust to settle on part of the structure - Dust Breeding.  Several parts of the composition were tried out as independent works eg. Nine Malic Moulds (1914). The first version was broken in transit. Duchamp accepted the breaks as a chance contribution to the composition. The composition itself is impossibly complicated, as witnessed by the body of literature that was  part of the work, but is basically a seduction machine. The bottom half is the bachelor’s domain and the upper half is the bride’s. The object of the machine is to ‘strip the bride of her garments’ and spark off the bride’s points of desire.

Other machines were designed by Duchamp to explore visual perception such as Revolving Glass (1920) in which segments of circles revolve to create the illusion of continuous circles. In 1925 and 1926 he produced a number of optical designs or rotoreliefs such as  Rotary demi-sphre (1925). Some of these were incorporated into a film Anémic – Cinéma (1926).

 

Chalk, Wood and Water

 

Eric Ravilious - Chalk Paths (1935) 

This exhibition is on at the Pallant Gallery in Chichester until 23rd April 2023. It features the Sussex Downland landscape from Blake and Turner through the Bloomsbury Group and beyond. The highlights are probably early twentieth century when the style of simplified, watercolour and print landscapes best show the whale-back shapes of this unique landscape. Highlights include Edward Burra, Ivon Hitchens, Vanessa Bell, Lucien Pisarro, Graham Sutherland, Paul Nash, Gwenda Morgan, John Piper and Eileen Agar.

Futurism and Fascism

Speeding Train - Ivo Panaggi

Amongst art historians it seems generally acknowledged that the Futurists were Fascists despite the fact that their period of peak activity is usually taken as 1909 to 1915 when Mussolini called himself a Socialist and the term Fascism hadn’t yet been articulated.

But, to be fair, such a glib equation can be found in the early anti-Fascist writers. Benedetto Croce, writing in La Stampa on 15^th May 1924, said, “For anyone who has a sense of historical connections, the ideological origins of Fascism can be found in Futurism.” Croce argues on the basis that they both glorify street fights and are youthful and revolutionary in outlook. Not unique qualities, to be sure. The case for Marinetti being a Fascist is rather more complex and one has to be wary of remarks like those of Wyndham Lewis in Blasting and Bombadiering, “Marinetti, for instance. You may have heard of him! It was he who put Mussolini up to Fascism. Mussolini admits it. They ran neck and neck for a bit, but Mussolini was the better politician.” Certainly it was Futurism that made Fascism attractive to Lewis and Ezra Pound rather than Mussolini’s pragmatic political manoeuvres and alliances which influenced the likes of the Fabian George Bernard Shaw.

According to Marinetti’s First Futurist Political Manifesto the Futurists “sole political programme is national pride, energy and expansion”. Both in style and idea there are more straightforwardly political writings which Marinetti may well have read but not copied. Compare the Nationalist Enrico Corradini’s Discorsi politici: “the programme involves the sole plank: the grandeur of the fatherland.” It would be a mistake merely to view Futurism as a hyperbolic literary expression of nationalism, but Corradini has expressed the concept of war as a moral hygiene which liberates heroism from the manacles of liberalism and democracy, which relates to the most often quoted founding manifesto with reference to Fascism. “We will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for.” Corradini, in The Principles of Nationalism, put it this way: “a moral imperative. In a word, we propose a ‘means of national redemption’ which we sum up, extremely concisely, in the expression ‘the need for war’. War is the last act.” Both this strain of Nationalism and Futurism believe that parliament shows that the rule of the majority cannot work – it just becomes the tool of base interest. For both of them only the “intoxicating intuition” of revolution and war can restore the vision of life as a constant struggle for change. Violence, then, is a moral necessity. This is 1909 when the reality of the First World War is unknown and when Nationalism is not the same as Fascism, not least because the term doesn’t yet exist although clearly some themes can be traced building in European culture from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Futurism is a minor not a major part of this trend. Marinetti’s second political manifesto was written to celebrate the Italian conquest of Tripoli in 1911. The same themes of danger, violence, patriotism and war are praised in “this great Futurist hour of Italy” and he coined the expansionist phrase “Panitalianism”.

Marinetti also commented on the Balkan War but how important the Futurists were in any encouragement of Italian intervention, and their entry into the First World War, is difficult to determine. Giovanni Giolitti was in power and pursued the moderate line of pacification. The majority of Italians, at first, were opposed to war. Giolitti was supported by the Catholics, socialists and liberals. The Nationalists and the Futurist movement campaigned actively for war and were subsequently joined by the Syndicalists and other radical groups. In turn some liberals and socialists, including Mussolini, agreed on the basis that war could force Italy out of a sense of useless stasis. The Futurist’s contribution to the debate included a contribution to the literary journal Lacerba devoted exclusively to interventionism and was the only publication to do so. The Syndicalist Sergio Panunzio, writing in 1910, had attacked the Futurists for their irrationalism and exaltation of violence but in 1914 the Syndicalists supported intervention to bring order and justice out of chaos. Mussolini’s L’Avanti! ridiculed the Futurists but they still met on the same side in the massive interventionist demonstrations. The Futurist’s burning of the Austrian flag in Trentino and the demonstration in Milan, for which they were arrested, were spectacular publicity for Boccioni, Marinetti, Mazza and Piatti but they were never a popular or populist movement capable of influencing government policy or were significant enough to prevent other disparate groups who despised or ridiculed the Futurists generally from joining the highly vocal minority in Italy clamouring for intervention.

The art of this period is noticeably more patriotic and, as in Germany, collage became a new tool to reference contemporary conflicts. Carlo Carra, in particular, started to make ‘free-word paintings’, for example Patriotic Celebration contained phrases like ‘Long Live the Army!’ and ‘Long Live the King!’ These seem to be selected to reflect war fervour as an objective observer rather than being a particularly personal or Futurist statement. Marinetti and, one assumes, other Futurists usually have a less cheery recipe for monarchy. Carra’s Pursuit is built up mostly from sports and entertainment clippings but under the horse’s mouth is the word ‘JOFFRE’. Marshall Joffre was the French Commander in Chief during the early years of the First World War and widely celebrated as a hero for success at the First Battle of the Marne in September 1914. These war collages were illustrated in Lacerba and also formed the basis of Carra’s publication Guerrapittura. Boccioni didn’t use collage except for Cavalry Charge of late 1914 which includes clippings of news from the war in France. Balla took a less literal approach but used the colours of the Italian flag in his Patriotic Chant in Piazza di Siena and The Flag on the Altar of its Country. Severini produced The Armoured Train which was first exhibited in Paris in January 1916 in the First Futurist Exhibition of Plastic Art of the War.

The death of Boccioni and Sant’Elia does not seem sufficient explanation for the death of Futurism, however what concerns us here is that the second wave of Futurism is not generally regarded in such esteem. The second wave of Futurism is officially aligned to Fascism whereas supporting patriotism and militarism in the immediately pre-war period could equally apply to many European countries. The later Futurist artists are, perhaps, written off unfairly and, more importantly, they did not create the ideal Fascist art despite attempts like Enrico Prampolini’s Cosmic Synthesis of Fascist Italy and Fillia, Oriani and Rosso’s The Revolution Continues. A tighter conjunction of ‘modernistic’ art serving the cause is provided by Mario Sironi and Arturo Martini. Sironi was art critic for Il Popolo d'Italia and helped design numerous Fascist exhibitions including the tenth anniversary of the regime in 1932. Sironi and Martini’s group Novecento in Milan managed to blend modernism, classicism and propaganda in an easily digestible form that made modernism more appealing to the public. Bontempelli, in the Novecento journal, writes, “Futurism was necessarily avant-gardist and aristocratic. Novecentist art must make itself ‘popular’ and attract the ‘public’…Marinetti has conquered and courageously held certain advanced trenches. Behind these I have been able to begin the city of the conquerors.”

Fascism shares some philosophical background with Futurism. In Replica a Graziadei Mussolini says he was influenced by Henri Bergson, though he does not say in what way. Nietzsche is less important to the Italians. Rather than the superman or übermensch there is Georges Sorel’s myth of heroism and virility, “the formation of aggressive and conquering elites driven to conquest by expansiveness and vitality. There is something of this in the programme of the so-called Futurists but they are limited to an aesthetic and literary conception of life.”

Both Mussolini and Marinetti borrowed terminology from French philosophers and, as one would expect, Italian politics; but there are two phrases or slogans referring to what became common concepts that Mussolini may have borrowed from Marinetti. The first is referring to war as “igiene del mondo” or ‘hygiene for the world’. “We might accept war…as the only hygiene for the world” would seem to refer back to the Futurist slogan “War is the only hygiene for the world.” The term ‘race’ is used a lot by Marinetti which he conceived as ‘people’ or ‘nation’ possessed of a “will to conquest and adventure” in phrases such as “racial pride”, “a new national consciousness”, “the prestige of our race”, “the Italian race”, “Italian blood” and “Italian people”. Mussolini had a similar interpretation of the word ‘razza’ in phrases like “racial solidarity” and “a union of free spirits in the Italian nation”. In other words the interpretation was not racist in terms of a natural assumption of racial supremancy. It was a call to action: an appeal to the will of the Italians rather than their genes, to their heroism rather than their heredity. As in Roman times the Italian view of citizenship was about granting rights for your achievements or by agreement of good behaviour under conquest. Anti-semitism, for example, had no place in Italian fascism until 1938 and the Italian army’s record in Africa or the Balkans may be no better than any other but at least they were not justified by spurious intellectual doctrine.

In the manifestos War, the World’s Only Hygiene 1911-15 and Futurist Democracy 1919 there are suggestions of programmes to reduce the birth rate, for the benefit of health and sport, and to create a credit bank for artists. Both these ideas seem to have interested Mussolini and he even promised a credit bank although one was never set up. Marinetti’s tract Portrait of Mussolini is often quoted to show how close they had always been. In fact it was written in 1929 in reverence to a President of seven years standing. It is hard to believe that there were no manifestos in the art world before the Futurists but certainly they seem to have encouraged the idea in the media and common consciousness of it being a political vehicle. Previously it often referred to a poster although there is a link to political demonstrations which were known as manifestazione.

It’s worth appending some of the politcal history and military activity that connects Marinetti to Mussolini’s Fascist era to add that perspective. 1918 saw the foundation of a Futurist Party which founded clubs in Ferrara, Florence, Rome and Taranto. Marinetti used his techniques of public disruption to drown out a speech by Bissolati at La Scala. Mussolini was also there and seems to have developed the same talent for creating torrents of abuse that a rational lecture cannot penetrate. The Fasci di Combattimento was formed at the Piazza San Sepolcro in 1919 with Marinetti in attendance. A few weeks later he staged a “patriotic demonstration” with the Arditi (special forces veterans) and the Fascists. They attacked a Red rally in Milan. The resulting ‘battle of Via Mercanti’ is said to have been conducted by Marinetti from the back of one of the lion monuments. They wrecked and burned the offices of L’Avanti after the main confrontation. Mussolini knew about and approved the action but did not take part personally. In the elections of 1919 Marinetti and Mussolini stood as Fascist candidates along with eighteen others. The party received 4,657 votes out of a possible 270,000 in Milan. Perhaps this result was key to Mussolini realising he needed the support of conservatives, nationalists, industrialists and landowners more than a few Futurist intellectuals and was the start of broader alliances. Before the elections of May 1921 Mussolini, who was an atheist, even began to make overtures to the Catholic church for their support.

Around this time Marinetti ceased his active support and referred to Mussolini in characteristic style as “this extravagant buffoon who wants to play politics and whom nobody in Italy, least of all me, takes seriously.” Marinetti left the Fascist party in 1920 and in 1924 stated that the Futurists “intervene in political contests only in hours of great danger for the Nation.” He was not completely estranged, however, and in 1929 was made Secretary of the Fascist Writers’ Union and a member of the Accademia d’Italia. In 1930 he performed propaganda on Giornale Radio. He volunteered for active service in the Second World War and fought on the Russian front even though he was in his mid-Sixties by then. He was given a state funeral when he died a couple of years later peacefully in Italy whilst working on a collection of poems about the Navy commando unit Decima Flottiglia MAS.

In 1913 Papini declared that “Futurism means frantic love for Italy and for her greatness…an Italy greater than the one we have known, more modern, more courageous, more progressive than other nations.” The patriotism of Futurism proper seems no more complex than that, a desire to drag Italy into the Twentieth Century. Patriotism is not Fascism, though they seem to derive their patriotism from a movement capitalised as Nationalism and which, like Syndicalism, contains embryonic elements of Fascism. Both Fascism and Futurism originated in Milan in the metropolitan industrial heartland of northern Italy (closer in mind and body to the rest of Europe) and formed part of a general shift in political and cultural weight since the unification of Italy in the late nineteenth century and only really complete in 1918. The Bernheim-Jeune catalogue of 1912 states that “If our paintings are futurist, it is because they are the result of absolutely futurist conceptions, ethical, aesthetic, political and social.” Yet it is primarily Marinetti’s writings that claim to address this broad spectrum. The link with Fascism rests heavily on the assumption that Marinetti is Futurism. Since Futurism is primarily known for the plastic arts rather than as a literary movement, ie. by its artists and their paintings and sculptures, this is hardly fair.

Fascism, once established in the mainstream, follows hierarchy, tradition and respect of the law; it sets it’s standards by the Roman empire, the Renaissance and the Catholic Church. The spirit of Futurism is anti-clerical, anti-tradition and perpetually revolutionary, rather than being revolutionary to a reactionary end. Futurism, despite it’s national focus, had blood brothers in other countries such as Russian Futurism, which aligned itself with Bolshevism, and Dada which expressed anti-war anarchism. In 1919 Marinetti wrote, “To the oppressed classes, to the impoverished workers, let the entire parasitical plutocracy of the world be sacrificed.” For similarities with Dadaism one could quote from the first Futurist manifesto which called for “the abolition of museums, libraries and academic institutions of every kind, and a campaign against ethics and aestheticism.” Fascism represented something new and exciting and modern in Italy between the two world wars. Marinetti saw in it some of his own tendencies – the craze for speed and violent action, the extolling of war and patriotism, a hatred of Parliament and bureaucracy - and carried his second generation of Futurists with him.

Copywright 1982 Ade Annabel 

Selective Bibliography:

Futurism – Jane Rye

Futurist Manifestos – ed. Umbro Apollonio

Futurism – Joshua C Taylor

The Syndicalist Tradition and Italian Fascism – David D Roberts

The Ideology of Fascism: The rationale of totalitarianism – A James Gregor

Fascism in Italy: Its Development and Influence – Elizabeth Wiskermann

Fascism – Giuseppe Prezzolini

Italian Fascisms: From Pareto to Gentile – ed. Adrian Lyttelton

Mussolini – Laura Fermi

Marinetti: Selected Writings – ed. R W Flint

The Fascist Experience: Italian Society and Culture 1922-45 – Edward R Tannenbaum

Kunst und ideologie des Faschismus – Umberto Silva