Modern Group Portraits in New York Exile Community and Belonging in the Work of Arthur Kaufmann and Hermann Landshoff

Modern Group Portraits in New York Exile Community and Belonging in the Work of Arthur Kaufmann and Hermann Landshoff Burcu Dogramaci In the period 1933–1945 the group portrait was an important genre of art in exile, which has so far received little attention in research.1 Individual works, such as Max Beckmann’s group portrait Les Artistes mit Gemüse, painted in 1943 in exile in Amsterdam,2 were indeed in the focus. Until now, however, there has been no systematic investigation of group portraits in artistic exile during the Nazi era. The following observations are intended as a starting point for further investigations, and concentrate on the exile in New York and the work of the emigrated painter Arthur Kaufmann and photographer Hermann Landshoff in the late 1930s and 1940s, who devoted themselves to the genre of group portraits. 3 New York was a destination that attracted a much larger number of emigrant artists, writers, and intellectuals than other places of exile, such as Istanbul or Shanghai. A total of 70,000 German-speaking emigrants who fled from National Socialism found (temporary) refuge in New York City, including—among many others—the painters Arthur Kaufmann and Lyonel Feininger, and the photographers Hermann Landshoff, Lotte Jacobi, Ellen Auerbach, and Lisette Model.4 Such an accumulation of emigrated artists and photographers in one place may explain the increasing desire to visualize group formats and communal compositions. In the genre of the group picture there are attempts to compensate for the displacement from the place of origin.5 This mode of self-portrayal as a group can be 1/15 found in the photographic New York group portraits where the exiled surrealists had their pictures taken together or with their American colleagues. These photos by Hermann Landshoff or George Platt Lynes, which emphasize group solidarity, were used for advertising purposes, were intended to promote exhibitions, or were published in periodicals. In turn, Arthur Kaufmann’s group portrait Arts and Science Finding Refuge in the U.S.A. – Die geistige Emigration (Arts and Science Finding Refuge in the U.S.A. – The Intellectual Emigration, 1939–1964) has archival significance. This group portrait, composed of individual portraits of German-speaking emigrants of the 1930s and 1940s, on the one hand emphasizes the expulsion of intellectuals, while on the other hand there is also a reference to the personal power of the exile community in the United States. In the following, I will first discuss how exile, group, and identity formation should be thought together. This will be followed by an analysis of the works by Arthur Kaufmann and Hermann Landshoff, which were created at about the same time in New York; here I am particularly interested in how painterly and photographic groups are produced, and what understanding of group formation can be found in the context of exile. In this context, the format and meaning of a group picture is extended: a group can also, as in the series of portraits of artists and photographers by Hermann Landshoff, be formed in the collective assemblage of individual portraits. The format of the series gives these portraits a connection and, moreover, emphasizes unlimited extensibility. Visual aspects of the construction of belonging and community should be in focus. At the same time, it discusses questions concerning the relation between the individual and the group in artistic negotiation and within the horizon of exile.6 Exile and Community The shared experience of persecution and expulsion from Nazi Germany inevitably turned individuals into émigrés. This first concerns the external impact as “emigrants,” which also affects self-perception. How could the experience of forced expulsion give expression to the plural conception of a “we” as émigrés? Significantly, it is precisely this “we” that takes center stage in emigration texts, such as Hannah Arendt’s canonical essay “We refugees”7 (1943) or Bertolt Brecht’s “Über die Bezeichnung Emigranten” (“Concerning the label emigrants,” 1937). In his poem, Brecht, who was exiled in Denmark, protested against the term emigrant, which he felt was a euphemism. For Brecht saw himself and other refugees from the National Socialist regime not as “people who had emigrated” of their own free will, but as exiles who had been forced to go abroad. He writes: I always found the name that they gave us false: emigrants. / For that means people who leave their country. But we / did not leave, of our own free will / choosing another country. Nor did we enter / a country 2/15 in order to stay there, possibly forever. / Rather, we fled. We were driven out, exiled.8 In the context of my essay, I am interested in how Brecht includes himself in the community of exiles. “Über die Bezeichnung Emigranten” emphasizes that the conditions made the author, the painter, the photographer become exiles. Thus the existence in displacement inevitably created a new identity as émigrés. Against this background, it is not surprising that social psychology in exile also dealt with group formation. The beginning of applied group dynamics as a field of research and therapeutic tool only dates back to the 1940s. Worth mentioning here are researchers who worked in the United States, like Kurt Lewin and Jacob L. Moreno, who were German-speaking (e)migrants. While Moreno came from Vienna to the United States in 1925 and did not return to his country of origin, Lewin went into American exile from Berlin in 1933. Both developed an interest in group structures, or expanded their research on the subject after entering the country.9 It can be assumed that the experience of social radicalization and the formation of communities and political organizations under National Socialism had a formative influence, especially on Lewin.10 At the same time, emigration and the self-awareness of belonging to the group of emigrants may have strengthened the research interest in groups. This is expressed, for example, in essays that Lewin has written on “minority groups” since the mid-1930s.11 In the United States, Kurt Lewin concentrated mostly on “group dynamics,” a term he first used in 1939 in an article. At the core of his theory was the relationship of the individual to the group and vice versa; he was interested in the way persons in a group change, and how they and their patterns of behavior are able to change the group.12 Jacob L. Moreno, on the other hand, was one of the originators of group psychotherapy, studying role-playing, role adoption, and interaction.13 It goes without saying that Kaufmann’s or Landshoff’s work is not an illustration of Lewin’s or Moreno’s subjects of investigation; yet it is noteworthy that group formations interested not only the émigré psychologists and analysts, but were also reflected in exile art and photography. Nevertheless, the parameters of identity formation in exile should also be important for the following work analyses. In exile, the “I” of the emigrant was perceived as part of a community in the external perception. On the other hand, the union with other emigrants could be a form of self- preservation and empowerment in the difficult times of emigration. This leads to Arthur Kaufmann’s group portrait, in which the community of emigrants is created by painting. 3/15 We Emigrants: Artists in Arthur Kaufmann’s Group Portrait Arthur Kaufmann’s Arts and Science Finding Refuge in the U.S.A – Die geistige Emigration was created only a few years after the artist had emigrated to New York in 1936, after several years of exile in the Netherlands (fig. 1). Fig. 1. Arthur Kaufmann, Arts and Science Finding Refuge in In the late 1930s Kaufmann began to work on the triptych, the U.S.A. – Die geistige which he did not conclude until 1964, after several decades’ Emigration, 1939–1964, 211 interruption. In 1969 the picture was acquired by the x 343 cm, oil on hardboard, Städtisches Museum Mülheim an der Ruhr.14 The triptych collection Kunstmuseum shows thirty-eight emigrants to the United States, Mülheim an der Ruhr. © VG representing science, literature, and the performing and Bild-Kunst, Bonn. visual arts: the writers Günther Anders, Ferdinand Bruckner, Bruno Frank, Oskar Maria Graf, Erika Mann, Heinrich Mann, Klaus Mann, Thomas Mann, Ludwig Renn, Ernst Toller, Berthold Viertel, and Arnold Zweig; the artists Benedikt Fred Dolbin, Josef Floch, George Grosz, Hans Jelinek, and Arthur Kaufmann; the composers Arnold Schönberg, Ernst Toch, and Kurt Weill; the musician Emanuel Feuermann and the conductor Otto Klemperer; the directors Fritz Lang, Erwin Piscator, and Max Reinhardt; the actor Luise Rainer; the philosopher Ernst Bloch; the psychologists Elisabeth Musset-Kaufmann, William Stern, and Max Wertheimer; the dancer Lotte Goslar; the architect and art historian Paul Zucker; the art dealer Curt Valentin; the physicist Albert Einstein; the theologian Paul Tillich; the physician Ulrich Friedemann; and the neurologist Kurt Goldstein. Arthur Kaufmann’s self-portrait appears on the left side of the left panel of the painting. Although other visual artists such as George Grosz or Hans Jelinek can also be identified in the group portrait, Kaufmann is the only one to hold a brush—the traditional attribute of painters—in his hand. The tool is in his right, raised hand and at chest level, and the artist’s gaze is focused on a point outside the picture. It is the position of a painter’s hand as he paints a self-portrait; his eyes gaze at the mirror image, his hand wields the brush. Within the group portrait, his demeanor and raised brush point to the author of the triptych—Kaufmann fecit. It is worth noting that George Grosz, who is standing in front of Kaufmann, is not holding an artist’s tool but a book.

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