Between the 1910s and 1930s, the German avant-gardes set about inventing a “religion of art” in various forms. According to art historian Maria Stavrinaki, it was a question of inscribing art in the social space deprived of a center that is modern democracy.
The question that runs through the book by art historian Maria Stavrinaki is not immediately readable in its title; it consists of grasping the religious component of the German avant-gardes through the collection of eight essays written between 2002 and 2012.
Across Europe, the avant-gardes – that is, the artists and movements that radically reoriented the practice and thinking of art from the eve of the First World War to the eve of the Second (Expressionists, Dadaists, Constructivists, etc.) – resorted to a “critical rupture with inherited formal procedures,” a rupture that coincided in particular with the “dissolution of the integrating force of religion” (p. 11). The contestation of the repertoire of biblical subjects and the sphere of representations associated with it is one of the driving forces behind the formation of modern art in the XIXe century, and at the origin of tensions experienced by artists who, like Mondrian, had to note that compensation for this loss, that is to say the desire to recreate a common language, was difficult for the individual to achieve alone. But the loss of such a foundation did not, however, cut art off from the religious question: what was going to be played out, within the avant-gardes, was precisely the reinvention of a religion (of art), of a transcendence, of a sacredness. This religion of art, however, takes on a different meaning and relationship to time depending on the case, and the author places, for example, at opposite poles the fantasy of an exit from history among certain expressionist artists and the claim of an “immanence pregnant with transcendence” among the Dadaists.
Reversal of the Incarnation
The hypothesis of the book is stated very clearly: the religion of art that followed the dissolution of Christianity appropriated its central dogma, that of the Incarnation, by reversing it: “spiritual organon par excellence, art could promise immediate salvation thanks to its sensitive support” (p. 12). To reverse the Incarnation is to ensure that art becomes a mediation, by its sensitive nature, of a spiritual content that must be determined each time.
The choice of Germany as the field of study gives the problem a particular importance: the German avant-gardes were born in the soil of Romanticism, which had already rejected the idea of art as an artificial illustration, by means of a repertoire of themes, biblical figures and symbols, of an already constituted religion. It was no longer a question of showing the other world under the features of the visible world, but of “revealing” this other world, this religion that Philipp Otto Runge, quoted by M. Stavrinaki, conceived as “lighter”, more “aerial” than all the Christianities of the past. Franz Marc inherited from Runge in particular the idea that art should not be the “fruit” of a religion, Christianity, but the “germ” of a new religion (p. 19). The author thus places the events, trends and protagonists studied (Franz Marc, Max Beckmann, Hugo Ball, Hannah Höch, etc.) within a longer history of German culture, explaining for example the importance of Novalis for individuals such as Walter Gropius or Hugo Ball.
In inheriting the dogma of the Incarnation, however, the avant-gardes also inherited its aporias: how to reconcile the two natures of art, material and spiritual? For Maria Stavrinaki, this is a productive tension, the turn of which must be examined in particular works, in singular artists. How did the avant-gardes deal with this aporia? How to assume both a spiritual content and be grappling with a sensitive and singular work? The essays that make up the book examine this articulation through specific cases.
The first text, on Franz Marc, sheds light, for example, on the paradox that ran through the painter, caught in a double belief, on the one hand in the necessity of the suppression of the sensitive regime, on the other hand in the possibility despite everything of an absolute, flawless painting (p. 18). The essay analyzes the evolution of Franz Marc’s painting, which, first by an empathetic projection into the animal and a thought of the predicate, then by even more abstract forms, aimed to escape from the human Self, from the divided state of man, to get closer to the completeness of God, to pure truth. The problem from which Franz Marc never emerged, and which explains the periods of total detachment from life that the text describes, was due to the desire to build a “bridge” allowing one to pass from life to death – which fascinated him – from nature to the Spirit, while being aware that this bridge itself was destined to disappear.
The fifth essay, devoted to the expressionist utopias of German architecture articulated with the dream of forming a socialist community (Bruno Taut, Hans Scharoun), analyses a similar paradox. The “building” (Building) was to make a cosmic unity immediately perceptible, but Taut also drew conclusions for architecture from the negative theology of Meister Eckhart and from his own conviction in the infigurability of God; he aimed, both in his World Heritage Site that in the Crystal houseto which the summit of the Stadtkrone was reserved, the self-dissolution of the architectural object, the consumption of its material character by light. Taut never really resolved this oscillation between negative theology, which pushed him towards a pure architecture, stripped of painting and sculpture, and a pantheistic conception inherited from Romanticism, which attracted him towards the total work of art. On the one hand, therefore, the dream of an “earthly-political community”, on the other, that of a “cosmic community” (p. 148).
The subject and its environment
The problem that interests Mr. Stavrinaki has a directly plastic implication indicated by the title of the work – “the subject and its environment” – which Hugo Ball, to whom the third essay is devoted, expresses very clearly: the “destruction of the figure and the abstraction that resulted from it could not, he said, be understood independently of the decentering of the modern subject, of the loss of the exceptional place that religion, then the philosophy of Reason, had formerly granted to man” (p. 70). Ball thus saw a “dissolving power” at work in modernity, an observation that the author takes up to analyze its plastic consequences: “Hugo Ball was not mistaken: the dynamic of modern art was indeed based on a decentering of the subject, in both the pictorial and ontological sense of the term” (p. 71). All the European avant-gardes were thus animated by the desire, often explicit, to make man a thing; For example, in Cubism, the interpenetration of figures and background and the disintegration of the closed form were at play. But in Germany, the dissolution of man in the painting took a particular turn in that it intersected, from Romanticism onwards, with a questioning of the relationship between art and religion: Caspar David Friedrich decentered the human figure at the threshold of an imposing nature, also making it disappear in favor of a ruin, because, according to a visionary mysticism and a spiritual apprehension of the landscape, the painter saw in each element of nature a divine manifestation.
It is not insignificant that Ball, a German, steeped in this culture, in the reading of Novalis in particular, analyzed from 1917 through the prism of Christianity the desire for inhumanity that he perceived in Picasso and Kandinsky, and Mr. Stavrinaki relativizes the break usually seen between Ball’s Dada experience at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916 and his conversion to Christianity the following year. At the Cabaret Voltaire, the costumed and masked dances replayed, in a field wider than that of the painting, the damnation of modern man that Ball saw in Picasso, the dissolution of this man in the hell of his environment; but what happened after 1916 in Ball’s life was an attempt at redemption, at recomposition of the self. The Picasso/Kandinsky couple, very important for Hugo Ball, serves Mr. Stavrinaki to interpret the latter’s trajectory: loss of the “celestial face of man” at the Cabaret Voltaire, in the manner of Picasso, then an attempt at Salvation, in the manner of Kandinsky whose abstraction, for Ball, had broken with the representation of the “mother and child” because it was now up to painting itself to engender the divine child.
The penultimate essay – “Inhuman Dada, the Subject and His Environment” – also deals very directly with this question. It comments on the plastic techniques – collage, photomontage, assemblage, prosthetics, etc. – by which the Dadaists aimed at the “reification” of the human in a “logic of material assimilation of man to his environment” (p. 204), for example in portraits made up solely of press excerpts. Hannah Höch’s watercolor, There and his environment (Him and his environment1919), which appears on the cover of the book, is part of this logic.
In addition to breaking the idea of the autonomy of the subject, this contact with the “material forces” produced by modern metropolises was, for the Dadaists, supposed to produce a therapeutic effect, since it was a question of ensuring that the environment would travel through, pass through the subject, not to restore the lost autonomy, but to “cure evil with evil” (p. 213).
As this penultimate essay shows, the order of the texts follows a certain chronological progression, but the coherence of the collection lies more in the fact that its movement captures a shift in relation to expressionism, of which Franz Marc, who opens the series, is a representative. If the expressionist artist considers man as a primordial subjective instance threatened by a hostile modern environment from which it would be a question of escaping, Dada is a virulent critique of this idea. The Dadaists also reject the expressionist desire to compensate for the absence of worship by transforming art itself into an object of worship. But, breaking with the religion of art, Dada nevertheless conferred on it a magical, conjuratory function. Hausmann, having repented of his expressionist temptations, developed the idea of an “immanence pregnant with transcendence”, and tried to replace the vertical relationship of man to God with the horizontal relationship of man to man, of man to things, in a “utopian cartography of relationships” (p. 227).
The last essay in the book, on the first Bauhaus, completes the demonstration: in the paradoxes of Gropius, its founder – who oscillates between confidence in industry and belief in ritual –, in the replacement of Professor Johannes Itten by Lászlo Moholy-Nagy, Mr. Stavrinaki detects the passage from an expressionist conception of art, as a means of access to transcendence, to a “magical”, horizontal conception, specific to the avant-gardes of the 1920s, which entrusted to “relations” the care of re-enchanting the world and transmitting the “virus of life”.