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Light Art and Technology in 1920S Germany

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Light Art and Technology in 1920S Germany Copyright Amy Melissa Venator 2016 ABSTRACT The Spotlight, the Reflector, the Electric Sign: Light Art and Technology in 1920s Germany by Amy Melissa Venator This dissertation examines mechanical light art made in 1920s Germany by Raoul Hausmann, Nikolaus Braun, Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, and László Moholy-Nagy. It reframes Moholy-Nagy’s Light Prop for an Electric Stage, which begins most accounts of light art, as the last in a decade of sustained artistic engagement with electric light. Although these artists worked in different circles, in different cities, and over a span of ten years, each responded to Germany’s rapid electrification during the mid-twenties, a process symbolized by the streetlights and lighted advertisements of the nighttime metropolis. In reconstructing these lost works, I argue that artists’ encounters with light technologies inspired them to repurpose electric light as an artistic medium. Here the similarities end, for the light arts were as different as the technologies that inspired them. Dada artist Raoul Hausmann’s optophone of 1921 was an unbuilt device that projected colored light and transformed it into corresponding sound using photoelectric cells. This technology and the science behind it proved light’s unstable materiality, the central theme of Hausmann’s optophonetic art. In 1923, November Group member Nikolaus Braun exhibited his alternating light pictures, reliefs lit internally by hidden lightbulbs and inspired equally by his teacher’s light studies and his work in his father’s brilliantly lit cafés. His light art’s affinity with the café’s sculptural light fixtures engaged with contemporary debates about café culture. The same year, Bauhaus student Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack premiered his color-light plays, pseudo-cinematic projections of moving colored shapes synchronized with music. The color-light plays used electric light to create the absorptive psychological state the artist experienced while making art and, in his late pedagogical work, observed in children at play. The final chapter returns to László Moholy-Nagy’s Light Prop at the 1930 Paris Werkbund exhibition. I argue that the Light Prop constituted Moholy-Nagy’s critique of the exhibition’s message of standardization, while also betraying the artist’s inability to come to terms with electric light’s commercial origin in lighted advertising. Despite their differences, Weimar Germany’s light artists shared a deep, often conflicted, relationship with electric light that spoke equally to its potential and limitations as an artistic medium. Contents List of Figures .................................................................................................................... v Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 1 Raoul Hausmann’s Optophone ...................................................................................... 13 1.1. Constructing the Optophone ....................................................................... 19 1.2. The Photoelectric Cell and Light’s Wave-Particle Duality ........................ 33 1.3. Materiality and the Optophone ................................................................... 39 1.4. Excursus: Einstein, the Dadaist .................................................................. 49 Nikolaus Braun’s Alternating Light Pictures .............................................................. 63 2.1. Arrival ........................................................................................................ 67 2.2. Segal’s Studio ............................................................................................. 79 2.3. Café Interiors .............................................................................................. 94 2.4. Illuminating Light .................................................................................... 106 2.5. Excursus: Braun after Light Art ............................................................... 124 Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack’s Color-Light Plays ........................................................... 128 3.1. Color-Light Plays ..................................................................................... 132 3.2. Color Science ........................................................................................... 137 3.3. Gesamtkunstwerk and Absorption ............................................................ 149 3.4. Play and Pedagogy ................................................................................... 172 László Moholy-Nagy’s Light Prop for an Electric Stage ............................................ 182 4.1. Standardized Goods and the 1930 Paris Werkbund Exhibition ................ 182 4.2. Room 2 ..................................................................................................... 192 4.3. Reluctant Industry Collaborator ............................................................... 204 4.4. Theater Arts .............................................................................................. 211 4.5. Excursus: Reconstructing the Light Prop ................................................. 215 4.6. Machine as Productive Technology ......................................................... 227 4.7. Electric Light as Lichtreklame ................................................................. 234 References ...................................................................................................................... 246 Appendix A: Nikolaus Braun Biographical Timeline............................................... 259 Appendix B: Nikolaus Braun’s Light Art .................................................................. 260 List of Figures Figure 1.1 – Raoul Hausmann, Optophone Diagram (Simplified), after 1964. Figure 1.2 – Raoul Hausmann, Self-Portrait of a Dadasoph, 1920. Collage and photomontage on handmade Japanese paper, 14¼ x 11 in. Private Collection. Figure 1.3 – Huttenlocher fuel gauge advertisement. From Motor: Monatsschrift für Kraftverkehrs-Wirtschaft und -Technik, March/April 1919. Figure 1.4 – August Sander, Inventor and Dadaist [Raoul Hausmann], 1929, printed 1990. Gelatin silver print on paper, 10⅛ x 7⅝ in. Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. Figure 1.5 – Ernst Ruhmer’s photographophone film. From Ernst Ruhmer, “The ‘Photographophone’,” Scientific American, vol. 85, no. 3 (July 20, 1901) 36. Figure 1.6 – Raoul Hausmann, Poster Poem, 1918. Letterpress print on green laminated paper, 12¾ x 18¾ in. Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Figure 1.7 – Raoul Hausmann, ABCD, 1923-24. India ink and collage of magazine illustrations cut out and pasted on paper, 15⅞ x 11⅛ in. Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Figure 1.8 – August Sander, Inventor and Dadaist [Raoul Hausmann], 1929, printed 1990. Gelatin silver print on paper, 10⅛ x 7⅝ in. Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. Figure 1.9 – Portrait of Albert Einstein. From the cover of Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (December 14, 1919). Figure 1.10 – Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through Germany’s Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch, 1919-1920. Photomontage and collage with watercolor, 44⅞ x 35⅜ in. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie. Figure 1.11 – Detail from Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife […], 1919- 1920. Figure 2.1 – Nikolaus Braun, Alternating Light Picture II, 1924. Lost. Figure 2.2 – Photographer unknown, [Nikolaus Braun], 1920. Photograph, 8⅝ x 6¾ in. Anne Ratkowski-Wanger Collection, Leo Baeck Institute, New York. Figure 2.3 – Photographer unknown, [Nikolaus Braun and Anneliese Ratkowski], 1920. From Jörn Merkert and Carolin Förster, Anne Ratkowski: eine vergessene Künstlerin der Novembergruppe (Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, 1996) 70. Figure 2.4 – Nikolaus Braun, Berlin Street Scene, 1921. Oil on masonite, 29⅛ x 40½ in. Berlinische Galerie, Berlin. Figure 2.5 – Ludwig Meidner, Street in Kreuzberg, Southwest Berlin, from the series Streets and Cafés, 1918. Photoengraving after original drawings of 1913, 11⅜ x 14½ in. New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester. vi Figure 2.6 – Nikolaus Braun, Alternating Light Picture Phase 1, 1924. Lost. Figure 2.7 – Nikolaus Braun, Alternating Light Picture Phase 1 and Phase 2, 1924. Lost. Figure 2.8 – Light source location. Nikolaus Braun, Alternating Light Picture Phase 1, 1924. Lost. Figure 2.9 – Left: Lajos Kassák, Dynamic Construction. From Der Sturm, vol. 15, no. 2 (March 1924): 79. Right: El Lissitzky, from Proun 1. Kestnermappe, 1923. Figure 2.10 – Left: Lajos Kassák, untitled linoleum cut. From Der Sturm, vol. 15, no. 2 (March 1924): 57. Right: Vilmos Huszár, De Stijl, 1917. Offset lithograph, 8 13/16 x 5 13/16 in. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Figure 2.11 - Arthur Segal, Heligoland, 1923. Oil on canvas, 46⅛ x 58¼ in. Berlinische Galerie, Berlin. Figure 2.12 – Detail. Arthur Segal, Heligoland, 1923. Figure 2.13 – Nikolaus Braun, Alternating Light Picture Phase I, 1924. Lost. Figure 2.14 – Photographer unknown, [Segal (seated) and Braun in Segal’s studio], 1923. From Wulf Herzogenrath and Pavel Liska, Arthur Segal, 1875- 1944 (Berlin: Argon, 1987) 120. Figure 2.15 – Detail. Photographer unknown, [Segal (seated) and Braun in Segal’s studio], 1923. Figure 2.16 – Arthur Segal, Prismatic Composition, 1923. From Arthur Segal and Nikolaus Braun, Lichtprobleme der Bildenden Kunst (Berlin: [self-published], 1925). Figure 2.17 – Arthur Segal, Sill Life – Fruit and Pitcher, 1923. From Arthur Segal and Nikolaus Braun, Lichtprobleme
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