Transgressing National Borders and Artistic Styles

ISABEL WÜNSCHE Transgressing National Borders and Artistic Styles The November Group and the International Avant-Garde in Berlin during the Interwar Period The discourse on the avant-garde, particularly in the English-speaking academic world, has traditionally focused on Paris prior to the Second World War and New York in the post-war period. More recent studies on the avant-garde movements in Central and Eastern Europe have opened up the field to a broader discourse and taken a more diversified look at the European avant-garde.1 One of the most vibrant centres of the international avant-gardes during the interwar period was Berlin. A dynamic metropolis, fraught with political as well as social tensions, the city’s social space inspired the artistic production of the avant- garde and shaped cultural exchanges between East and West. The city also provided a home for a large cultural and artistic diaspora; the artists active in Berlin in the 1920s included Alexander Archipenko, Henryk Berlewi, Béla Czóbel, László Mo- holy-Nagy, László Péri, Ivan Puni, and Arthur Segal.2 However, because of its post-Second World War status as an outpost on the frontier between East and West, the essentially Western orientation of the Cold War narratives, and a pre- dominantly formalist approach to avant-garde art, discussions of the 1920s art scene in Berlin have not extended far beyond Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm (The Tempest) and Berlin dadaism. Influential organisations such as Die November- gruppe (The November Group) and the Internationale Vereinigung der Expres- sionisten, Futuristen und Kubisten (International Association of Expressionists, Futurists, and Cubists), later Die Abstrakten (The Abstractionists), have attracted little attention although they served as important platforms for the artistic ex- change of avant-garde artists from various national and cultural backgrounds, rep- resenting a variety of stylistic orientations and artistic expressions. This essay examines Berlin’s role as a centre of the international avant-gardes in the 1920s, with particular emphasis on the activities of the November Group, the intensive collaboration of the second generation of expressionists with the dadaists and constructivists, as well as the productive cooperation between visual artists, designers, architects, and musicians. Most of the artists’ groups arising in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe were founded as a result of discontent with the selection criteria of the major exhibition venues and their respective juries. Beginning in the last decade of the nineteenth century, progressive artists in cities throughout German-speaking Europe began to secede from the official salons, traditional artists’ societies, and art academies in order to form their own, independ- ent exhibition associations.3 These new associations primarily focused on providing 292 ISABEL WÜNSCHE artists with alternative exhibition opportunities and a platform to present and sell their work to the public. The secessionist movement was a protest against the re- strictive exhibition policies that favoured elite artists over their more experimental and less established colleagues; it challenged the authority of the royal academies, as well as the influence of imperial patrons and a conservative public, and champi- oned modernist styles such as impressionism, naturalism, and symbolism.4 One of the first of these new artists’ groups in Berlin was the Berliner Secession (Berlin Secession), whose founding in May 1898 was preceded by the establishment of similar groups in Munich (1892) and Vienna (1897). Following a period of generally growing dissatisfaction, the decision to finally break with the traditional art establishment in Berlin came with the decision of the jury of the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung (Great Berlin Art Exhibition) to reject a landscape painting by Walter Leistikow, a key figure among a group of young artists who were strongly interested in modern developments in art.5 The new artists’ association was intended to be a more open and progressive organisation and to serve as an alternative to the conservative state-run Verein Berliner Künstler (Association of Berlin Artists). At the first general meeting of the Berliner Secession, the founding members elected Max Liebermann as president and Walter Leistikow as first secre- tary; together with an executive committee they were entrusted with conducting the group’s affairs in accordance with the constitution that defined membership qualifications and members’ rights and could be amended only by a three-fourths majority.6 Along with Liebermann, Leistikow, and later Lovis Corinth, the cousins Bruno and Paul Cassirer, owners of a Berlin gallery and publishing house, became the executive secretaries and played a key role in the organisation of the group, which successfully supported modernist styles (particularly impressionism) and promoted an alternative to the traditional history and landscape painting and monumental sculpture glorifying Germany and the Hohenzollerns.7 The close collaboration of the Secession, an exhibition society, with the private gallery and publishing house of the Cassirer brothers brought each advantages: professional ad- ministration of the Secession’s affairs coupled with extended business opportunities for the Cassirers. Although founded as an alternative to the Berlin art establishment, the Secession originally intended to cooperate with the Association of Berlin Artists and the Art Academy, the organisers of the annual Great Berlin Art Exhibition.8 When negoti- ations failed, the Secession opened its own exhibition space, first at Kantstraße 12 and then in 1905 at Kurfürstendamm 208/209, and established its own annual exhibitions: paintings, watercolours, and sculptures in spring-summer and an exhibition of graphic works in fall-winter (fig. 1).9 It was at these shows that the German public was first introduced to French impressionism and the post-impressionists, as well as works by painters such as Paul Cézanne, Gustav Klimt, and Edvard Munch and sculptors such as Auguste Rodin and Constantin Meunier. With its close connections to the art market and the opening of its own exhibition building, the Berlin Secession provided artists with organisational, cultural, intellectual, and financial support and established .

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