To Dance Beyond Yourself: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’S

Rachel Thornton

2016

TO DANCE BEYOND YOURSELF: ERNST LUDWIG KIRCHNER’S

WOODCUT PRINTS OF MARY WIGMAN

Rachel Thornton

ABSTRACT

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s legacy as a founding member of Die Brücke (The Bridge), and one of the leading figures of German Expressionism, has made his work of the period between

1905 and 1918 the subject of considerable scholarly attention. Less often considered are the works Kirchner produced after leaving Germany for Switzerland immediately following the end of World War I. The works he made during this later period of his career are generally dismissed as stylistically deficient, derivative, and out of step with the current developments of the artistic avant-garde.

Refuting this view of Kirchner’s post-Brücke work, my thesis will examine two series of

Kirchner’s dance-themed woodcut prints created in the years 1926 and 1933; works inspired by acclaimed Expressionist dancer Mary Wigman. As I will show, the stylistic elements of the two images in the later series, decidedly different from the dance-themed works that he created in

1926, cannot be interpreted entirely within the context of Expressionism. I interpret these works by relating Kirchner’s interpretation of Wigman’s Ausdruckstanz (Expressionist dance) to his interest in Georges Bataille’s concept of the informe (formlessness), disseminated widely in the

French Surrealist magazine Documents.

My analysis of Kirchner’s dance imagery centers on the collaborative, cooperative model that Wigman modeled at her school of dance, founded in 1920. I suggest that the negotiation of the dichotomy between individuation and association that Kirchner witnessed in Wigman’s school provided a framework through which he investigated Surrealist concepts as well as his ii

own Expressionist past. Ultimately, I demonstrate that Kirchner continued to modify his style beyond Expressionism throughout his career, and that his artistic investigations remained in dialogue with the avant-garde through the early 1930’s.

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“You Higher men, the worst in you is that none of you has learned to dance as a man ought to dance—to dance beyond yourselves!”

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One (1883)

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... vi

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ...... vii

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER 1 EXPRESSIONISM, THE WOODCUT PRINT, AND DANCE ...... 12

CHAPTER 2 KIRCHNER, WIGMAN, AND THE “PROBLEM OF THE GROUP” ...... 29

CHAPTER 3 WIGMAN SOLO: METAKINETIC TRANSFER AND THE INFORME...... 51

CONCLUSION ...... 66

ILLUSTRATIONS ...... 69

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 71

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I offer my sincere gratitude to Dr. Juliet Bellow for her wise advice and encouragement throughout this project, and to Denise and Mike for all of their incredible love and support.

vi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Programm der Künstlergruppe Brücke, 1906. Woodcut. Museum of Modern Art, New York...... 69

Figure 2: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Somersaulting Acrobatic Dancers, 1913...... 69

Woodcut. Museum of Modern Art, New York...... 69

Figure 3: Unknown Author, Mary Wigman in Idolatry,’ 1919. Photograph. Courtesy of the Mary Wigman Archive...... 69

Figure 4: Unknown Author, Mary Wigman and her dance group in ‘Chaos,’ 1924. Photograph. Courtesy of the Mary Wigman Archive...... 69

Figure 5: August Scherl, Mary Wigman and Group: Death Dance II, 1926. Photograph. Courtesy of the Mary Wigman Archive...... 69

Figure 6: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Dance Group, 1926. Woodcut. Galerie Henze & Ketterer AG, Wichtrach, Switzerland...... 69

Figure 7: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Oppositional Dance, 1926. Woodcut. Galerie Henze & Ketterer AG, Wichtrach, Switzerland...... 69

Figure 8: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, A Group of Artists, 1926-27. Oil on canvas. Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany...... 69

Figure 9: Henri Fantin-Latour, A Studio in the Batignolles Quarter, 1870. Oil on canvas. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France...... 69

Figure 10: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Dancing Mary Wigman, 1933. Woodcut. Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany...... 69

Figure 11: Pablo Picasso, The Three Dancers, 1925. Oil on Canvas. Tate Modern, London, England...... 69

Figure 12: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Color Dance I, 1930-1932. Oil on Canvas. Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany...... 69

Figure 13: Unknown Author, Mary Wigman in ‘Storm Song,’ 1929. Photograph. Courtesy of the Mary Wigman Archive...... 69

Figure 14: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Palucca, 1930. Woodcut. Kirchner Museum Davos, Switzerland...... 70

Figure 15: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Mask Dance, 1929. Woodcut. Bündner Kunstmuseum, Chur, Switzerland...... 70 vii Figure 16: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Profile Head (Self Portrait), 1930. Woodcut. Kirchner Museum Davos, Switzerland ...... 70

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INTRODUCTION

Between 1926 and 1933, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner completed two series of woodcut prints on the theme of dance. The model and inspiration for these prints was Mary Wigman, the famed

German dancer and choreographer who later was credited as a founder of Ausdruckstanz, or

Expressionist dance. In the winter of 1925, Kirchner spent several days ensconced in Wigman’s

Dresden studio, watching and sketching the choreographer and her students. Afterwards, he wrote in his diary,

I feel that there are parallels [with my work], which are expressed in her dancing in the movement of the volumes, in which the solitary movement is strengthened through repetition. It is immeasurably fascinating and exciting to make drawings of these physical movements. I will paint large pictures from them. Yes, what we had suspected has become reality: there is the new art. M[ary] W[igman] instinctively took much from modern pictures, and the creation of a modern concept of beauty operates just as much in her dancing as in my pictures.1

In this entry, Kirchner indicates that he views Wigman as an artist of a stature equal to his own.

Indeed, he declares there to be a direct parallel between his work and hers, and relates his act of drawing her to the physicality of the movements she performed. Moreover, in Wigman’s dancing, Kirchner sees a manifestation of the “new art” that he and the artists of Die Brücke (The

Bridge) had aimed to develop twenty years prior.

Kirchner did in fact go on to make one large painting of Wigman and her dance company as he originally envisioned. However, the primary medium he employed to depict Wigman was the woodcut print: he made at least five woodcuts with Wigman as the subject. In this thesis, I argue that the formal and expressive qualities that Kirchner achieves in these prints stem from

1 Colin Rhodes, “The body and the dance: Kirchner’s Swiss work as Expressionism,” in Expressionism Reassessed, ed. Shulamith Behr, David Fanning, Douglas Jarman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 140.

the way they weave together the media of dance and the woodcut. Moreover, I propose that it is in these prints and through the subject of Mary Wigman dancing that we may best understand the continuous evolution of Kirchner’s ideas about art. In his images of Wigman, Kirchner explores and re-examines his relationship to Expressionism, and experiments with new artistic affiliations, primarily Surrealism.

The significance of the woodcut print as a primary medium for Expressionist art, and specifically within Kirchner’s oeuvre, has been investigated in great detail. By contrast, Wigman is largely absent in the scholarship on Kirchner. Her influence is considered primarily in terms of her status as one of the many female “muses” Kirchner represented over his long career as a painter, printmaker and sculptor.2 In this thesis, I restore a greater complexity to the way

Wigman’s image functioned in Kirchner’s oeuvre. Though he represented her only a handful of times over a period of ten years, the above-quoted passage clearly shows that Wigman’s effect on his art was profound and far-reaching. She was not simply a model for Kirchner, but also an artistic equal with whom he participated in a synergistic exchange of ideas. Wigman herself echoed these sentiments of artistic collaboration when she wrote about Kirchner sketching in her dance studio, writing that, “…I could always sense his presence, which made itself felt in a strangely inspiring way.”3 It is clear then, that though Kirchner and Wigman were artists working in profoundly different (if related) media, their association served to emphasize the importance of collaborative contexts for image making, whether in a two or three-dimensional format. In

2 This relegation of Mary Wigman to muse-status is problematic since Wigman was a very different subject and model for Kirchner than was young Franzi, or even his girlfriends Dodo and Erna. In 1926 Mary Wigman was forty years old, and was a successful and celebrated artist in her own right.

3 Susan Laikin Funkenstein, “There’s Something About Mary Wigman; The Woman Dancer as Subject in German Expressionist Art,” Gender & History 17, no. 3 (2005): 826-859.

other words, and to quote Kirchner, the solitary movements of their individual art praxes were strengthened through the repetition of their collaboration.

While there is much to be said about the effect of their meeting on both Kirchner and

Wigman, this thesis focuses on the way the encounter with Wigman impacted Kirchner, with an emphasis on his ongoing exploration of the properties of the woodcut print. As is well known, the woodcut had deep-seated symbolic meaning for Kirchner and fellow artists of Die Brücke, and had served as a catalyst and signifier in their establishment of an Expressionist artistic program. The artists’ group Brücke, formed in Dresden in 1905, was among the first to develop a mode of expression that valued personal experience and authenticity of feeling over classical representation of form. Eager to advance a specifically German model of modern art for consideration in an international market, the artists of Die Brücke eschewed the popular precedent of French Impressionism for the pursuit of a new model of free expression. Originally founded by Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, the group later came to include Max Pechstein, Emil Nolde, and Otto Müller. Kirchner described Die Brücke’s ethos as, “…Driven by a totally naïve, pure need to bring art and life into harmony with each other.” In their own practice, it was the studio that the group shared that was the locus for this convergence.4 More than just a workshop, the studio was central to the Brücke artists’ idea of a fusion of art and life. There, the artists of Brücke worked and socialized together, and actualized their oppositional bohemian lifestyle. This rebelliousness, both social and artistic, served to define an elemental component of Expressionism and cemented Brücke’s role within the movement.

4 E. L. Kirchner, “Chronicle of the Artists’ group Brücke (Chronik der KG Brücke),” in Brücke: The Birth of Expressionism in Dresden and Berlin, 1905-1913, ed. Reinhold Heller (New York: Neue Galerie, 2009), 213.

The woodcut itself had been chosen in part because of the anti-elitism perceived to be an inherent quality of the medium. Through the choice of the woodcut, and in a variety of other ways, Brücke artists and others associated with Expressionism openly flouted the values and mores of bourgeois propriety. Rather than celebrate the evolving urban landscape and bourgeoning ideals of modernity, they favored regression, and sought to reconnect with the primal aspect of nature as a way to convey emotionally authentic experience. Successors to the

Jugendstil avant-garde, Die Brücke’s aim was to integrate art and life, and primitivism with the modern state. Through their art, and specifically through their woodcut prints, the Brücke artists exhibited primitive forms and a gestural faux-naiveté in direct response to their modern milieu.

The medium of the woodcut has a particular significance within Kirchner’s oeuvre: he was a prolific print-maker throughout his career, both during and after his partnership with the

Brücke. Associating the woodcut with an artist’s temperament, he maintained that, “Nowhere can one get to know an artist better than in his prints.”5 Kirchner’s images of Wigman complicate but ultimately affirm this understanding of the print. I put forward that it is through his woodcut representations of Wigman dancing that Kirchner explored his own self through art.

Furthermore, in translating Wigman’s Expressionist dancing through the medium of the woodcut, Kirchner was able to revisit the conceptual and stylistic principles of Expressionism; through that exploration, he retrospectively reworked his changing relationship with the Brücke.

As I show, Kirchner recognized in Wigman’s choreography, and in the methodology of her school, a new model of artistic cooperation that struck a balance between individuation and affiliation. It was the conflict between the individual and the group that had ostensibly caused a rift between the members of Die Brücke; I suggest that through Wigman’s model, Kirchner was

5 E. L. Kirchner, “Concerning Kirchner’s Prints,” in Voices of German Expressionism, ed. Victor H. Miesel (London: Tate Publishing, 2003), 25.

encouraged to revisit the role of artistic association in his own practice, long after the dissolution of the group. In what follows, I relate Wigman’s influence to two key moments in Kirchner’s post-Brücke career. First, I maintain that Kirchner’s understanding of Wigman’s model of association underlies the subject of his painting Group of Artists (1926-27), Kirchner’s first and only depiction of Die Brücke as a distinctive and cohesive group. Second, I advance that it was

Kirchner’s return to the subject of Wigman circa 1933—as an illustration of Surrealist concepts of anti-materialism—that demonstrates his continued interface with modernism.

This mode of analysis of Ernst Kirchner’s later body of work presents a new perspective on a much-maligned period of his artistic production. His legacy as a founding member of Die

Brücke, and one of the leading figures of German Expressionism, has made Kirchner’s work of the period between 1905 and 1918 the subject of considerable scholarly attention. Less often considered are those works he produced after leaving Germany for Switzerland in the years immediately following World War I. Although Kirchner continued to produce artworks over the next twenty years, up to his death in 1938, these later works are largely discounted as derivative of his earlier work, and out of step with new developments in the art world. Kirchner’s images of

Mary Wigman have the potential to complicate this assessment of his post-Brücke period. I suggest that these works reveal developments in, and modifications to, his earlier Expressionist period in both subject and style.

Most analyses of Kirchner’s work—particularly his late period—have approached his artistic production through the lens of his biography, with emphasis on his reputed mental illness and his eventual death by suicide.6 Scholars generally label Kirchner’s work of the nineteen- teens as fueled by the anxieties of his experience and the upheavals of the First World War, and

6 Notable Kirchner scholars Roman Norbert Ketterer and Donald Gordon both consider Kirchner’s work in light of this trajectory.

assess the works created in Switzerland as symptomatic of Kirchner’s gradual decline. This approach to Kirchner oversimplifies the complexities of his style and the multiple determinants on his approach to art making. Even a cursory review of his oeuvre demonstrates that Kirchner’s style did develop in new ways after his association with the Brücke, and after the wartime years.

For example, during his first years in Davos, Kirchner abandoned the urban subject matter and Arcadian “primitivism” that had been his mainstay with Die Brücke. Instead, he focused on observations of his new surroundings and the lives of the Alpine peasantry, which he executed with a careful fluidity of form that was absent in his earlier images.7 Most notable among these early works are the many paintings and woodcuts of the Davos landscape Kirchner created between 1918 and 1925, for which he received modest attention as one of the foremost modern landscape painters of the Alps.8 Yet even in these bucolic scenes, writers continue to focus on allusions to Kirchner’s mental health. In his essay “Alpine Imagery and Kirchner’s

Winter Landscape in Moonlight,” for example, Victor Miesel conjectures that the Tinsenhorn mountain, which features prominently in many of Kirchner’s Alpine landscapes, acts as a talisman for his recuperation and artistic production.9 Similarly, in Roman Norbert Ketterer’s monograph Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Drawings and Pastels, Ketterer goes so far as to write about

Kirchner’s changing style and artistic production after 1926,

The recognition that this was not his language and that in using it he stood among the second-rate, was certainly one reason he turned away from it in 1933.

7 Victor Miesel, “Alpine Imagery and Kirchner’s Winter Landscape in Moonlight,” Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts 66, no. 4 (1991): 4-17.

8 Bernhard Bürgi, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Mountain Life; the early years in Davos 1917-1926 (Ostfildern- Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2003), 13.

9 Miesel, 4-17.

And not to be avant-garde must have seemed to him like failure. This is probably one of the reasons for his suicide at the age of 58.10

Such reductive disparagement of the later works as “second-rate” and insufficiently avant-garde is a common scholarly trope in the consideration of Kirchner’s oeuvre.

In this thesis, I recuperate Kirchner’s later career, and lend validity to his post-Brücke production. Kirchner’s style and aesthetic motivations were already in flux by 1926 when he first began to portray Wigman. His artistic reputation, established by his early association—beginning in 1905—with Die Brücke was increasingly becoming a burden for him. When Kirchner withdrew for Switzerland in 1917, his departure served not only as a retreat from the war and from Germany, but also from the charged atmosphere of the artistic sphere he had broken with four years prior following Die Brücke’s dissolution. Along with that rupture began Kirchner’s first forays as an independent artist, free from the group’s infighting. Yet although Kirchner continued to work for more than twenty years after separating from Die Brücke, he was never able to completely bypass identification with the group. Kirchner, all too aware of the enduring hold of the Brücke on his own production and reputation, actively tried to distance himself from the group. 11 The works I discuss in this thesis attest to his negotiation of the Brücke’s legacy.

Like Kirchner, Wigman spent much of her career negotiating the tension between the creative freedom of the individual and the need to construct artistic affiliations. Although

Wigman’s fame and the degree to which scholars have examined her life and work is far surpassed by that afforded to Kirchner, several books and many essays have been published about her contributions to the history and theory of dance. While most of these accounts can be

10 Roman Norbert Ketterer, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Drawings and Pastels (New York: Alpine Fine Arts Collection, 1982), 12.

11 See the writings of Louis de Marsalle (E. L. K.)

categorized as dance history, scholars like Susan Manning have recognized the potential for a cross-disciplinary discourse in examining Wigman’s artistic legacy.12 In her book Ecstasy and the Demon: The Dances of Mary Wigman, Manning lays out a framework for this kind of method through a nuanced description of the choreographic elements of Wigman’s dances.

Manning notes that Wigman’s dances were characterized by a negotiation of feminist and nationalist concepts, and argues that Wigman was motivated throughout her career to modify her dances in response to the changeable socio-political climate of Germany from the 1910s through the 1930s. This manner of approaching Wigman’s career has given me a strong foundation on which to build my own analysis.

Art historians have considered Wigman within the context of Kirchner’s oeuvre on select occasions; primarily, these analyses offer formal readings of Kirchner’s images without attention to the specific characteristics of Wigman’s dance. Shelly Cordulack, in her essay “Dancing to the

Piper: A Study of Kirchner’s Dance Images,” makes note of the mutual esteem shared between

Kirchner and Wigman, but reduces Wigman’s influence on Kirchner’s work by arguing simply that her example pushed him towards a greater degree of decorative stylization.13 Conversely,

Colin Rhodes argues in “The Body and the Dance: Kirchner’s Swiss Work as Expressionism,” that Kirchner’s images that he created after 1918 remain stylistically Expressionistic—a continuation that, he states, is most visible in Kirchner’s later dance images. Rhodes suggests that the modernity of Wigman’s approach to dancing is characterized by the process of change that is revealed through the expression of movement, which he describes as the process of

12 Susan Manning, Ecstasy and the Demon: The Dances of Mary Wigman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xxiv.

13 Shelley Cordulack, “Dancing to the Piper: A Study of Kirchner’s Dance Images,” Bruckmans Pantheon 55 (1997): 162-171.

“…unfolding in time and space.”14 Rhodes claims that this same process is apparent in

Kirchner’s dance imagery, in which movement, though always implied, is arrested in a two- dimensional format. Although I do not disagree with Rhodes’s analysis, I contend that there are greater objectives at play in both Wigman’s dancing and in Kirchner’s decision to represent her at two key moments in his career. A notable exception to these analyses is Susan Funkenstein, who in her essay “There’s Something about Mary Wigman: The Woman Dancer as Subject in

German Expressionist Art” recognizes the connection between Kirchner’s 1926 images of

Wigman and her dance company, and the system of cooperative association that existed in

Wigman’s studio. My own study builds on Funkenstein’s analysis to examine Kirchner’s misrepresentation of Wigman through his portrayal of her dancing in the nude, and to establish the effect of Wigman’s model more generally on Kirchner’s oeuvre. Unlike Funkenstein, I bring

Surrealist concepts to bear on the dialogue between Wigman’s and Kirchner’s work.

In the following three chapters I substantiate my argument that Mary Wigman’s dancing and choreography prompted Kirchner to reevaluate vital components of his artistic production and identity. In Chapter One I demonstrate that woodcut prints took on a charged ideological significance that closely aligned the medium to the aesthetic and cultural aims of both

Expressionism and dance. Dance was a common theme in the art of Die Brücke, and I propose that it functioned for Expressionist visual artists as a correlate to the woodcut, related by its associations with physicality and with the natural world. I outline the theoretical importance of nationalism, primitivism, and naturalism on Expressionist visual art, and detail how these components were carried on into the development of Expressionist dance in the 1920’s.

14 Rhodes, 141.

The second chapter turns to the encounter between Kirchner and Wigman in 1926, which manifested in two significant, related artistic projects Kirchner began later that year. First, I discuss his making in 1926 of two woodcut prints that represent Wigman: Dance Group and

Oppositional Dance. These works by Kirchner can be directly tied to specific dances in

Wigman’s repertoire during this period. They reveal not only their source, but also specific principles of Wigman’s model of Ausdruckstanz; notably, the fluid relationship between the individual dancer and the rest of the dance ensemble. I cast Kirchner’s career as a pattern of affiliation and individuation, but argue that through Wigman’s dancing and choreography, he found a model through which to resolve these tensions in his working practice. The tension between individual and collective identity was manifest in both visual art and in dance, where solo artists seeking to make a name for themselves found both artistic support and increased opportunities when they banded together. However, I suggest that modern dance—which demonstrated a clearly choreographed negotiation of the space between individual dancers— provided Kirchner with a new way in which to analyze the individual’s relationship to the collective. This new reading of Kirchner’s woodcut prints of Wigman allows me to connect these images to a major painting of the same year, Group of Artists. This painting is the only example in Kirchner’s oeuvre that directly addresses the legacy of Die Brücke; to date, no scholars have provided an analysis of his motivations in returning to a consideration of the group at this time. I argue that it was Wigman’s Ausdruckstanz that precipitated Kirchner’s retrospective analysis of the Brücke dynamic, and that provided him with the formal language to do so.

In the third and final chapter I propose that Kirchner returned to Wigman and the subject of dance in the early 1930’s as a way to work through his interest in Surrealism. Kirchner’s oeuvre is largely identified with the Expressionist movement, including his late career; this

designation simplifies his range of interests in several art movements of the 1920’s and 30’s, including Surrealism. I demonstrate that Kirchner used Wigman’s art to help him grapple with

Georges Bataille’s concept of the informe, with which he became acquainted through the French

Surrealist magazine Documents. My analysis centers on Kirchner’s three later dance prints,

Dancing Mary Wigman (c. 1930-33), Mask Dance (c. 1929-30), and Palucca (c. 1930-33), modeled after Wigman’s former student Gret Palucca. I contend that these prints visually engage with Bataille’s concept of the informe, a violent challenge to the containment of body boundaries. I point to areas of contiguity between Bataille’s informe and the concept of metakinetic transfer—the idea that dance can trigger an empathetic, corporeal memory of movement in a spectator—explored in the dancing of Mary Wigman. I ultimately suggest that through Mary Wigman’s dancing, and through his understanding of the informe, Kirchner was able to explore new dimensions of dance and to negotiate and reframe his own artistic past.

CHAPTER 1

EXPRESSIONISM, THE WOODCUT PRINT, AND DANCE

The Expressionism of Die Brücke was marked by an inherent contradiction. Although the

Brücke artists were interested in revealing the self through visual representations of the subjective experience, they were also dependent on affiliation with each other to lend validity to their efforts, and to distinguish themselves from the Academy and from bourgeois society. The woodcut print—the hallmark of German Expressionism—demonstrates a similar opposition, as it was thought to reveal both a personal temperament and a national identity. In this chapter, I discuss Expressionist attitudes toward the woodcut, and the implications of Die Brücke’s use of the medium. I argue that Ernst Kirchner and the artists of Die Brücke viewed dance—especially

Mary Wigman’s Ausdruckstanz—in parallel terms to the woodcut.

Both Ausdruckstanz and the woodcut print were associated with a subjective, expressive corporeality and connections to the natural world. Furthermore, both were similarly charged with a national German sentiment that in the early years of the twentieth century closely aligned both media to the aesthetic and cultural aims of Expressionism. For Kirchner and the artists of Die

Brücke, dance provided a visual language through which to depict expressive movement. To translate that movement into a two-dimensional format, Expressionist artists like Kirchner found no artistic medium as suitable as the woodcut, which arrested the physicality of the carving process that was so similar to dance’s embodied expressivity. In order to unpack these claims, I consider three tenets of Expressionism in both visual art and dance: nationalism, nature, and creative independence. I demonstrate that all three aspects were present in the work of both

Kirchner and Wigman, and that these Expressionistic elements were reinforced through the association and intersection of dance and the woodcut print.

The woodcut was central to Die Brücke’s Expressionist ideology from the group’s outset.

In 1906, the artists held an exhibition at the Seifert Gallery in Dresden where they introduced themselves to the public through the Programm der Künstlergruppe Brücke (Program of the

Brücke Artists’ Group). Kirchner, the Programm’s author, gave voice to Die Brücke’s self- conscious aesthetic radicalism, proclaiming,

With faith in progress and in a new generation of creators and spectators we call together all youth. As youth, we carry the future and want to create for ourselves freedom of life and of movement against the long-established older forces.15

Presented as a woodcut (Fig. 1), and printed alongside an illustration of a bridge spanning a placid river, the text and accompanying image of the Programm jointly reveal the distinct characteristics of Die Brücke’s aesthetic agenda.

The most fundamental component of this is the symbolism of the bridge, from which Die

Brücke took their name, and which is doubly emphasized through the Programm’s illustration.

The referent for the bridge as symbol was most likely taken from Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1883-84,

Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen (Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for

Everyone and No One). In his text—compulsory reading for progressive German youth of the period, and frequently referenced by Brücke artists—Nietzsche stated, “What is great in Man is, that he is a bridge and not a goal.”16 Brücke artists similarly saw themselves as conduits, and believed that through art they could actively create social change and transformation.

15 E. L. Kirchner, “Programme of the Brücke,” in Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 65.

16 Peter Lasko, The Expressionist Roots of Modernism (New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), 36- 37. 13

The aesthetic and philosophical “bridge” that Die Brücke hoped to build was literally dispersed and symbolically reinforced through the medium of the woodcut. First, the woodcut established a connection between the past and present. Not only was the woodcut considered an outmoded medium by 1906, but to emphasize its archaic nature, the text style of the Programm was purposely modeled after medieval text. Second, the leaflet spanned the divide between the national and international. The Programm was a declaration of the Brücke group’s status as artists to the greater international art market, but was presented through a medium that had a historically local, German connotation. By consciously declaring themselves as separate and free from the conventions of “the long-established older forces,” the artists of Die Brücke also made explicit their endorsement of the free individual as one who was unconstrained by the burdens imposed by society. The hierarchy of genres was a well-established tradition in the art academies of Europe, and through their embrace of the woodcut, Die Brücke forcibly disassociated themselves from those institutions. Lastly, the formal and stylistic choices Kirchner and Die

Brücke made in their art work generally and specifically in their woodcut prints, demonstrate a renunciation of the studied draftsmanship of academic form in favor of unstructured expression.

Thus, positioning themselves as a bridge between the old and the new, Die Brücke deliberately sought to stand themselves apart as creative individuals, and to position themselves in marginalized opposition to the conventions of middle-class society.

The development of Expressionism in dance was motivated by similar ideals, even though the dissolution of Die Brücke in 1913 predated the invention of an Expressionist dance genre by Wigman and other early twentieth-century German choreographers. Nevertheless,

Wigman was connected to Expressionist circles during the century’s first decade, and specifically to artists involved with Die Brücke while the group was active; she had, for example,

served as a model to the painter Emil Nolde as early as 1912.17 As with Expressionist visual artists and Die Brücke, Wigman and other Expressionist dancers were motivated by a drive to create an innovative new German form of dance that celebrated nature, and was unconstrained by the stylistic exactitude of classical ballet.

The Woodcut Print as Expressionist Medium

The advent of Expressionism in Germany—first in visual art and then in dance—has largely been considered as a concerted attempt to establish a distinctly German tradition and style. This concept of a German style closely followed the conception of the very idea of

“Germanness” that followed the formal unification of the country under Otto von Bismarck in

1871. Political unification, and the expansion of the German economy, saw a dramatic upsurge in nationalism and patriotic display. Germany could now affirm itself as a political and economic power, and contest the hegemony of France and the United Kingdom.18 These assertions of political power and German nationalism were mirrored in the art world, where the conception of a German aesthetic was formulated as one that could compete with and counter French artistic dominance.19

Germanness was thus both a social construct and an artistic agenda, and it came to be tied closely to a new affinity towards nature and a desire to connect both physically and spiritually with the natural world. Particular focus was placed on the country’s legendary dense forests as the wellspring of German culture. Through association, wood, the elemental material therein— which for centuries had been the most pervasive cultural medium in both art and architecture— was bestowed a similar status. German nationalists first constructed an affirmative link between

17 See Nolde’s Candle Dancers (1912).

18 Reisenfeld, 297. 19 Peter Lasko, The Expressionist Roots of Modernism, (New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), 9. 15

wood, woodcut printing, and the idea of a German ethos in the mid-nineteenth century. In the years following, the tradition of equating patriotic sentiment with wood and the forest steadily became so engrained in the German ethos that in 1920, art historian Wilhelm R. Valentiner stated,

From the time of the oldest timberwork architecture of the Germans, from the wooden sculpture of the German Gothic and Renaissance, from the art of the woodcut of Dürer’s time, the German artist has preferred the use of wood for the expression of his ideas in architecture, sculpture, and printmaking. It is as if the structure of the rough trunk, with its knotty, misshapen form that nevertheless submits to the passionate carving knife, were especially suited to the half-barbaric, half-sentimental, self-sacrificing German character.20

Building on the symbolic status of wood in German culture, the artists of Die Brücke transferred the patriotic symbolism of the forest into wood itself through their use of the medium of the woodcut.

Although the seeds of this ‘patriotic arborealism’ had been planted earlier, it did not fully come into prominence as a uniting nationalist concept until the turn of the twentieth century. 21

Not coincidentally, it was then that the Brücke group formed and the Expressionist movement emerged. By the early 1900’s the industrial revolution had gained full steam in Germany, which saw the country drastically transformed from an agrarian to an industrial society with the advent of the modern capitalist state.22 Formerly rural landscapes were quickly becoming centers of urban commerce. To curb this shift, there emerged an ethno-environmental activism that saw an

20 Wilhelm R. Valentiner, quoted by Ida Katherine Rigby, “The Revival of Printmaking in Germany,” in German Expressionist Prints and Drawings, vol. 1 (Los Angeles: Prestel, 1989), 39.

21 Jeffrey K. Wilson, The German Forest: Nature, Identity, and the Contestation of a National Symbol, 1871-1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 4.

22 J. Adam Tooze, Statistics and the German state, 1900-1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 43-46.

increased emphasis on the preservation of Germany’s forested landscapes.23 Yet it was not only

Germany’s physical landscape that was transformed through industrialization and globalization.

So too was its cultural landscape reconstructed, as the familiar social order of a generation of newly minted “Germans” was overhauled by the market economy.

German society as it moved into the twentieth century was characterized by the rise of the individual and the bourgeoning importance of subjectivity, and it was these elements that came to define the Expressionism of Die Brücke. Germany’s urban centers were sites of sweeping changes, cultural shifts, and the initiation of a new societal model to which scholars applied great scrutiny. Sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies described the modern cultural climate as demonstrating a switch from Gemeinschaft—a community based on kinship and cooperation—to

Gesellschaft—an impersonal, selfish and disjointed society.24 (A further analysis of this concept as it applies to the arts is discussed in Chapter 2.) In 1903, philosopher and sociologist Georg

Simmel examined the effects of urbanization on the human psyche, which he published in the influential essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” Therein, Simmel described the modern state as one characterized by both alienation and freedom, and argued that, “…a structure of the highest impersonality… [has] promoted a highly personal subjectivity.”25 Simmel further contended that

This results in the individual’s summoning the utmost in uniqueness and particularization, in order to preserve his most personal core. He has to

23 Wilson, 14.

24 Douglas Kellner, “Expressionism and Rebellion,” in Passion and Rebellion: The Expressionist Heritage, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas Kellner (South Hadley, MA: J. F. Bergin Publishers, Inc., 1983), 3-39.

25 Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood ( Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 133.

exaggerate the personal element in order to remain audible even to himself.26

Tönnies thought that Germany had been transformed into a coolly indifferent society. Building on this idea, Simmel maintained that modernity’s inherent indifference required the individual to fend for himself, and to effectively market, almost as a commodity, that which made him most unique.

The artists of Die Brücke echoed these very same sentiments in their prints, paintings, and sculptures, and thus recorded the transitional nature and the prevailing concerns of contemporary German society in the early 1900’s. Echoing the conflicts described by Tönnies and Simmel, Die Brücke’s mandate was to describe the personal within the impersonal: to find freedom of expression in their subjective experience, within a collective mass of people.

Depicting the “Natural” Body

The focus on the subjective element in the early years of the twentieth century was also manifest in a national preoccupation with the body; in both Expressionist visual art and in dance, freedom of expression was connected to an idea of bodily freedom. It was this link that led Die

Brücke to consider the medium of the woodcut as one that was especially suited to an

Expressionist depiction of the natural body. Not only did the woodcut have strong material connections to nature, but the print itself could also record the gestural processes of its making.

Whereas prints by “Old Masters” like Albrecht Dürer reveal a careful exactitude and studied draftsmanship, Die Brücke’s dynamic Expressionist images relay the immediacy with which the artists attacked the wood in order to graphically translate fleeting emotion, sensation, and perception.

26 Simmel, 136.

The appeal of bodily freedom was a notion that extended beyond Die Brücke, and was emblematic of Körperkultur (body culture), a larger cultural obsession with the human body that was evidenced in new emphases on physical fitness. Nudism, or Freikörperkultur (free body movement) was a popular component of Körperkultur, and the naked body—especially outside and in nature—was seen as a form of social reform and as an antidote to the malaise of the modern condition.27 Not surprisingly then, Expressionist dance, with its connotation of unburdened, energetic movement was one of the primary activities that aligned with an interest in bodily improvement that was sought out by disciples of Körperkultur. As with the graphic arts, Expressionism in dance resisted the tried mechanics and sanctioned steps of classical form, namely ballet. Dance was reconceived as free, expressive movement, and as the absolute and most essential means through which to convey emotional dynamism. Practitioners often danced outside and in the nude to reinforce connections between themselves, their dancing, and the natural world.

Die Brücke artists’ interest in nature and depictions of the natural world also extended to dance, which they viewed as a ‘primitive’ form of expression. The Brücke artists first became familiar with dance and the language of movement through the Dresden cabarets in the years before World War I, and were later introduced to new styles through performances by dance pioneers Nina Hard and Mary Wigman in the 1920’s. At the turn of the century, the exoticism of

Germany’s cabaret scene was a major locus of counter culture activities within the urban environment, and Die Brücke frequented many of the cabarets in Dresden as an affirmation of their outré bohemian lifestyle. The cabaret also provided the Brücke artists with extensive artistic

27 Karl Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910-1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 30.

source material, since it was there that period conceptions of the ‘primitive’ were presented for display and for erotic delectation.

The primitive impulse served the Brücke’s Expressionist program in two critical ways: it provided an aesthetic language through which to convey the personal, subjective experience, and it fused the modern with the anti-modern, with Die Brücke as the bridge between the two. Jill

Lloyd argues that through the use of a self-consciously ‘primitive’ aesthetic, artists were able to mediate their positive and negative associations of the modern state. In this same way, Die

Brücke unified these oppositional notions by seeking to integrate art and life, and primitivism with their contemporary reality.28 In agreement with these aims, their art exhibited primitive forms and a gestural faux-naiveté, while simultaneously serving as a direct response to their modern environment.

Kirchner’s 1913 print Somersaulting Acrobatic Dancers (Fig. 2), which he created during the Brücke era, exemplifies this dichotomy: the dancers he portrays are dressed in contemporary urban clothing, but occupy an ambiguous, almost wild environment. Based on the showgirls and cabaret performances of Dresden, Kirchner’s print depicts a blur of five female acrobats bounding across the stage in low-cut dresses that reveal both their décolletage and frilled undergarments. This focus on fashion, coupled with the palm trees and tangled plant-life at the edges of the frame illustrates the concept of otherness, since the women moving within that primordial setting are presented as objects of titillation, for consumption by the implied

European male spectator.

Carol Duncan, in her feminist analysis of Expressionist images of women, forwards the idea that Kirchner and other avant-garde artists treated the female body as a commodity for the

28 Jill Lloyd, German Expressionism: Primitivism and Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), vi-x.

male gaze. She contends that these portrayals, which primitivize the female form, reflect a growing masculine unease about the changing roles of women in society. Duncan defines the avant-garde artist as one who proclaimed freedom and individuality, but she counters that their art instead acts to subjugate the female subject to the fears and fantasies of the middle class male.29 In Kirchner’s print, Duncan’s reasoning is supported in his treatment of the women, whose personhood he denies, and who he parades across the stage like marionettes. Furthermore,

Die Brücke and other male artists of the period thought that women had an intrinsic connection to the natural world, and they used the symbolism of the female body to suggest the primitivist impulse, and to convey the idea of a regression back to nature.

Yet there is another reading of the print that can exist in tandem with an analysis centered on Kirchner’s dominating male presence. Looking closely, one notices that the two tumbling women in the center of the scene are stacked spatially one on top of the other, their movements contained within an aureole of activity. Perhaps rather than illustrating five individual women,

Kirchner here depicts just one of the acrobats, who is visually arrested in phases as she catapults her way across the stage. This analysis places an emphasis on Kirchner, the stationary subjective viewer, acting as witness to the activity on display before him (the consequences of which are discussed in Chapter 3). Kirchner’s Somersaulting Acrobatic Dancers therefore demonstrates two parallel ideas: the subjugation of the female body as a primitivized Other, and ecstatic acrobatic movement—or dance—as a primal, physical activity that gives the dancer agency vis-

à-vis the viewer.

29 Carol Duncan, “Virility and Domination in Early Twentieth-Century Vanguard Painting,” in Feminism and Art History; Questioning the Litany, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 293-313.

The importance of the cabaret scene in Die Brücke’s oeuvre thus extends beyond its role as a motif, one that uses modern urban entertainment as a vehicle for exploring the ‘primitive’ and the erotic. Cabarets also introduced Brücke members to dancing and dancers, providing a means through which these artists could explore the expressive qualities of movement. For the

Brücke artists, the quality of abandon exemplified by dancers at the cabaret served as an illustration of the freedom of movement that they had collectively espoused in the Programm, and within the context of nonconformity that was the group’s ideal. For these reasons, Die

Brücke may have seen dance as even better equipped to achieve the ideals of Expressionism than the woodcut. Whereas dance is a form of expression unmediated by anything other than the human body, the woodcut removes that immediacy by one degree: through the translation of intangible expressive movement into the fixed form of the woodcut print.

Dance as Expressionist Medium

The concept of movement as a form of expressive rebellion, both physical and social, correlates closely with Expressionist forms of dance developed during this period by Wigman and other choreographers. In their work, “artistic” dance was redeveloped as free movement in a reaction against the rigidity and artifice of ballet. The “new dance” abandoned the narrative form in order to focus instead on expression and the communication of aesthetic emotion.

Furthermore, like Expressionism in visual art, the new dance in Germany was also imbued with a nationalist spirit and primitivist impulse, the latter of which was informed by a homogenization of ancient and other non-Western cultures by both Expressionist dancers and Die Brücke.

The validity of dance itself as Expressionist subject was, in a sense, predetermined, since there was no other artistic medium that could match dance’s apparent immediacy of expression through the human body. Dance’s expressive potential was also central to Nietzsche’s influential

Zarathustra, in which he stated, “You Higher men, the worst in you is that none of you has learned to dance as a man ought to dance—to dance beyond yourselves!”30 For Nietzsche, dance served as a symbolic release, and was therefore a manifestation of the uncontrolled revelry of the

Dionysian principle.31

As I have stated, Expressionism, as a movement, demonstrated the integration of three core principles: creative independence, a celebration of nature, and nationalism. This was certainly true in danced Expressionism, which although it is most closely associated with the developments of Wigman and Laban, was not a purely German phenomenon. Among the very first to introduce dance-expression to a wider audience was American dancer Isadora Duncan, who first toured Europe in 1902 along with fellow American dancer Loïe Fuller. Duncan, who was not classically trained, originated her style and technique as a kind of anti-technique, one that was motivated by the dancer’s revelation of her own spirit rather than a result of her training.32 Duncan distinguished her dancing through her expressive, visually unstructured, and seemingly improvisational movements. These movements were not saved just for the stage, but were explored while dancing barefoot outside on the beach and in the forest, where Duncan sought to commune with nature through dancing.

In 1927, in an essay entitled “I See America Dancing,” Duncan described her vision of dance as “…the living leap of the child springing toward the heights, toward its future

30 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Thomas Common (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1999), 213.

31 See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy.

32 Valerie Preston-Dunlop et al., Schrifttanz: A View of German Dance in the Weimar Republic (London: Cecil Court, 1990), 4.

accomplishment, toward a new great vision of life that would express America.”33 Following

World War I and the rise of national patriotism around the Western world, Duncan was keen to establish her dancing within the context of Americanism. As such, there was an intrinsic component that positioned her dancing in opposition to the European establishment, and that aligned it with the youthful free-spirited quality that was coming to define the American temperament.

In Germany, Wigman and Laban developed Ausdruckstanz, building on the tradition set in motion by Duncan. Yet unlike Duncan, whose choreography was always directly connected to sound, the dancing of Wigman and Laban was not dependent on music, nor did it follow a story line. Instead, Ausdruckstanz was meant to be a pure celebration of movement in space, a form of dance and dancing for its own sake.34 Ausdruckstanz was a German style of dance for a German audience, and dancers, who were no longer able to rely on the pictorial method for empathetic communication, had to find a new means through which to convey their individual aesthetic emotion to a greater audience.

One of the primary strategies that Wigman employed to reconcile the individual dancer with her collective audience was the use of masking agents, whether masks that covered the face, or costumes used as masks to obscure the body. Susan Manning places great emphasis on

Wigman’s use of masks in her reconstructions of Wigman’s dances. If, as Manning contends, nationalism requires “…imagined connections between the individual body and the collective body,” then by concealing her individuality, Wigman removed the barrier between herself and her audience. This allowed for her individual danced experience to be representative of the

33 Isadora Duncan, “I See America Dancing,” in The Art of the Dance, ed. Sheldon Cheney (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1928), 47.

34 Manning, 19.

whole, thereby breaking down the fourth wall between herself and the audience.35 Furthermore, by relating herself to her public, and by ostensibly speaking for them as a group, the relativity of

Wigman’s danced Expressionism could be expanded ever outwards to extend beyond the space of the theater, and to appeal to cultural conceptions of a German national identity.

Wigman herself demonstrated the foundational aspects of Expressionism in her own practice prior to the establishment of Ausdruckstanz as a definitive style. She first became directly acquainted with Expressionism via Nolde in Hellerau outside Dresden, where she had started formal dance training at Émile Jacques-Dalcroze’s Institute two years prior.36 Dalcroze, who had developed the method of “Eurhythmics” as a way to increase appreciation of the experience of music through physical movement, had been invited to set up a school of dance at

Hellerau in keeping with Germany’s preoccupation with Körperkultur.37 Although it was at

Dalcroze’s Institute that Wigman first became familiar with methods of improvisation that she would use throughout her career, she disagreed with a key component of Dalcroze’s philosophy of Eurhythmics. Dalcroze was first and foremost a musician and composer, and his technique was originally designed to facilitate musical training for musicians, thus placing movement in a position of subservience to music. Wigman’s desire to reverse this hierarchy in favor of dance, and to subsequently free dance from its reliance on music, ultimately led her to seek out Rudolf von Laban at Monte Verita in Ascona in the Swiss Alps in 1913.

35 Ibid, 28-41.

36 Ibid, 52-54; Hellerau was a planned community established in 1909, as a result of Gartenstadtbewegung (Garden City movement). Advocates of Gartenstadtbewegung, a reform movement, sought to alleviate the sense of alienation that was seemingly inherent to factory towns and centers of industry, by re-establishing community ties within an industrial context. See Marynel Ryan Van Zee, “Form and Reform: The Garden City of Hellerau-bei- Dresden, Germany, between Company Town and Model Town,” in Company Towns: Labor, Space, and Power Relations across Time and Continents, ed. Marcelo J. Borges and Susana B. Torres (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

37 Manning, 51-52.

Monte Verita was a resort and colony that attracted adherents of Freikörperkultur and others who were fleeing the pressures of city living, and was positioned as an ideal primitivist community and as a modern alternative to bourgeois social norms. There, Laban, who also believed in divorcing dance from its dependence on music, set up a dance school during the summers of 1913 and 1914. At Monte Verita nudism was commonplace, free love was consummated, natural healing cures were espoused, and visitors were served from a vegetarian menu, all in keeping with the mores promoted through the philosophy of Freikörperkultur.38

Laban’s dancers also frequently danced in the nude, and were encouraged to work together to improvise dances that culled the spiritual essence of nature.

Wigman performed her first solos at Monte Verita, among which was her 1917 solo concert “Ecstatic Dances.”39 Ecstasy in the title refers to Nietzsche’s construction of Dionysian ecstasy as laid out in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), which he later revisited in Zarathustra.

Wigman, like so many of her contemporaries, was highly influenced by Nietzsche and the concept of ecstasy, which offered a reprieve from the mandates of bourgeois morality and rational decorum. Wigman associated the ecstatic body that Nietzsche described with the body in motion: a contrast to the stasis of rationality. For Wigman, the ecstatic body was also closely related to constructions of the primitive body, which Westerners believed to be linked to the ecstatic emotion in ways that were inaccessible to the modern urbanite.

In her dances, Wigman embodied the ‘primitive’ through her use of masks, her seemingly uninhibited movement, and references to the natural world. In Idolatry, a dance from the revised

“Ecstatic Dances” (1919), Wigman played the role of the Strohbär (Straw Bear, Fig. 3), a

38 Toepfer, 30.

39 Manning, 62.

personification of winter that had long been performed in traditional German agricultural communities. A studio photograph of Wigman in costume shows the dancer obscured by a cape of straw that surges out from her body as she spins in place. Wigman’s head is concealed, and only her right arm and stockinged legs reveal the dancer underneath the swirling cluster of straw.

In Idolatry, Wigman’s faithfulness to Nietzsche’s conception of Dionysian ecstasy is readily apparent in her choreography, which according to Susan Manning, was composed solely of a spinning figure, overtaken and consumed by ecstatic movement. When exhausted by the seemingly endless rotation, Wigman, the dancer, would collapse, thus signifying the end of the number.40 Wigman described the character she danced as “…a being [that] crouches in the middle of the primeval forest,” thereby also enforcing the connection between ecstasy and an idea of a primitive impulse.41 In Idolatry, then, Wigman illustrates multiple temporalities through her dancing: an ancient, primitive source, exposed through modern movement in a contemporary scene.

Wigman, acting as a living bridge between past and present, ‘primitive’ and ‘modern,’ echoed and extended the Expressionist ideals of Die Brücke. The Ausdruckstanz that Wigman choreographed and performed placed primary emphasis on a free and spiritual expression, which she conveyed through the moving form of her body. Die Brücke sought the same result, albeit through a mediated format that exposed the physical workings of their hands. In these ways

Wigman and Die Brücke were connected, as was their work, through the elemental and expressive corporeality of dance and the woodcut print.

40 Ibid, 64.

41 Ibid.

CHAPTER 2

KIRCHNER, WIGMAN, AND THE “PROBLEM OF THE GROUP”

In 1926, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner completed two woodcut prints based on the sketches and drawings he had made of Mary Wigman and her company at her studio in Dresden earlier that year. Both images—titled Dance Group and Oppositional Dance—depart markedly from the primitivist eroticism of his earlier images of dance in the cabaret. We see in these works a concerted shift in the representation of dance: Kirchner moves his dancers off the stage, and thereby reframes dance as a high art form rather than a commercialized, sensationalized entertainment. Even more significantly, the later prints alter the implied relation between the dancers and the spectator. In the cabaret images, completed during the Brücke years, Kirchner arguably peddles the sexuality of his dancers: they directly appeal to the desiring gaze of the viewer. By contrast, in his 1926 depictions of Wigman’s dance company, Kirchner makes the implied relations internal to the group of dancers within the image, thereby emphasizing the association between them over their relation to the spectator’s gaze. The viewer here is de- emphasized: Kirchner portrays the dancers in a way that makes them appear to be directed internally, consumed in the movement and expression of the dance.

I believe that the shift in Kirchner’s treatment of dance is rooted in his attentive viewing of Wigman’s dance company and his understanding of the institution’s central tenets. While he sketched the dancers at Wigman’s studio, Kirchner encountered an iteration of an idealized collective. Wigman’s school, founded in 1920, was premised upon a model of collective association formed around her techniques and systems of dance. There, devotées of modern dance and Wigman’s model of expressive movement gathered around their mentor to experience 29

and absorb her philosophies first hand. Within the structure of the school, and in the choreographies of the group dances that she performed with her students, Wigman animated a cooperative vision of group dynamic. She was both the leader of the company and a participant in group dances. Wigman was therefore a distinct and individual dancer who also performed a crucial role as a member of the collective body.

In this chapter I argue that Kirchner’s contact with Wigman prompted him to revive the theme of dance in his art. Once again, his exploration of dance was not merely an end in itself, but also functioned as a means to explore aspects of his own artistic practice. Kirchner used dance as a vehicle through which to reconsider the concept of an artistic collective or association, and to meditate upon the process of artistic cooperation. That is to say, Wigman’s dance allowed

Kirchner to revisit his own participation in Die Brücke. His encounter with Wigman was timely in that regard: just prior to meeting her, Kirchner had begun to distance himself from his past associations with the Expressionist group. Yet Kirchner’s images of Wigman and her company are decidedly Expressionist in style. I suggest that these prints constitute a circuitous return to

Kirchner’s prior style, a return enabled by the mediating lens of dance and its association with the collective ideal of the woodcut.

Wigman’s new group dances presented to Kirchner the optimal model through which to investigate both his relationship to Expressionism and to the group dynamics of that movement.

As I note above, Kirchner’s early work and Expressionist output had been dominated by his association with Die Brücke. Although that group disbanded in 1913, Kirchner did not commemorate their partnership until thirteen years later, immediately following his association with Wigman. I contend that Kirchner’s decision to revisit Die Brücke’s foundational legacy through his painting Group of Artists (1926-27) was directly influenced by the model of

Wigman’s school; I relate this painting to the aesthetic principles that he portrayed in his 1926 woodcut prints of group dance.

Kirchner’s Disengagement from the Group

Kirchner’s growing ambivalence about his role as a solo artist and his relation to artistic groups was reflected in the way he engaged with the affairs of the art world—mostly at some distance. In December 1925, Kirchner returned to his native Germany for the first time since beginning his self-imposed exile in the Swiss Alpine town of Davos seven years prior.42 Over the course of three months, he visited Frankfurt, Chemnitz, Berlin, and Dresden to see first-hand the work of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, and that of the other artists he followed through the numerous magazines and journals he subscribed to in Davos. These periodicals, and the extensive correspondence he maintained with his friend and longtime patron Gustav Schiefler, the philosopher Eberhard Grisebach, and other friends and acquaintances in Germany served to keep him abreast of the developments of the avant-garde.43 After returning to Davos in March,

Kirchner wrote in a letter to Schiefler,

I am overflowing with experiences which are all awaiting realization. I can sense how good the years of isolation have been for me, how I have matured, if indeed one can speak of maturity in the midst of so much experiment and effort when I cannot even use my former technical skills but must begin all over again.44

The trip back to Germany had clearly reinvigorated Kirchner. But his attitude toward his seclusion from the goings-on of the German art world was conflicted.

42 Annemarie Dube-Heynig, Kirchner: His Graphic Art (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1961), 96.

43 Sandra Oppmann, “The ‘New Style,’” in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Retrospective, ed. Max Hollein (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2010), 199.

44 Dube-Heynig, 96.

Despite Kirchner’s frank proclamation to Schiefler, scholars have found it difficult to pinpoint exactly how Kirchner’s experiences in Germany manifested in his art of this period.

Studies most frequently focus on the interface between Kirchner and his better-known contemporaries in the visual arts. These address Kirchner’s apparent stylistic appropriations in the years after 1926, deemed to be largely informed by Cubism and the work of Klee and

Kandinsky at the Bauhaus.45 But these investigations focus primarily on comparative visual analyses, implying that Kirchner was simply miming the work of those artists who were making headlines and selling well. The substantive concepts that motivated Kirchner’s images are ignored through such formal analyses of the later works.

Reducing Kirchner’s later oeuvre to pastiches of other styles fails to recognize the extent of his continued critical involvement with the theoretical concerns that were motivating the avant-garde. Chief among these is Kirchner’s preoccupation with the question of how the individual artistic “self” relates to the larger group. Of all of Die Brücke’s former members,

Kirchner showed the greatest engagement with the work of the various avant-garde styles and affiliations of his contemporaries. Arguably, this same level of engagement is demonstrated in the self-consciousness and critical awareness that Kirchner demonstrated in his letter to Shiefler, and was further reflected in his compulsion to publicly comment on his own artistic developments. In 1921, Kirchner adopted the nom de plume “Louis de Marsalle,” and presented the fictional de Marsalle as a French critic who lauded Kirchner’s oeuvre both past and present in a variety of journals and newspapers. Kirchner conceived of de Marsalle to function as a seemingly objective critic: to assert his reputation internationally, and to maintain Kirchner’s public relevance through consistent references and appeals to his work. In a 1925 essay about his

45 Oppmann, 199.

own sculptures, Kirchner wrote under the guise of de Marsalle, “Thus he (Kirchner) transposed a form from one mode of artistic expression to another, until he found the solution offering the strongest expression.”46 This confirms that for Kirchner, reinvention was a legitimate form of experimentation: one that is not only evident in Kirchner’s artistic sense of self, but in his stylistic forms and aesthetic program.

Kirchner’s trip to Germany, in other words, coincided with a concerted effort to recuperate an image that had been damaged over his many years away from the center of avant- garde artistic production, and to distance himself from associations with the Brücke and the artistic legacy of his past. Despite his disassociation from the group in the years since moving to

Switzerland, Kirchner’s individual artistic reputation was still overshadowed by his involvement with Die Brücke, and he had been unsuccessful in shedding identification with the group.

Although by 1920 Kirchner was considered a major figure of contemporary German art, this assessment was based on the Expressionist vanguard of the Brücke years.47 While several catalogs of Kirchner’s drawings and graphic works were published between 1925 and 1931, the focus of these was on Kirchner’s early production, with just a cursory overview of his more contemporary work.

Furthermore, the art world’s constant association of Kirchner with Die Brücke was problematic to Kirchner in the 1920’s, since the group’s breakup was often attributed to arguments that followed the publishing of Kirchner’s 1913 Chronik der KG Brücke (Chronicle of the Artists Group Brücke). Although the project—an account of the Brücke’s activities and

46 Louis de Marsalle (E. L. Kirchner), “On the Sculpture of E. L. Kirchner,” Der Cicerone, 1925, in German Expressionism, Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 120.

47 Lucius Grisebach, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: 1880-1938 (New York: Taschen, 1999), 169.

artistic innovations that Kirchner illustrated with woodcut prints—was undertaken at the behest of the Brücke’s members, it was ultimately rejected by the those who believed that Kirchner had taken too much credit for a deceptively programmatic initiative.48 The Chronik-centered story of the end of the Brücke partnership perfectly exemplifies the issues that the members of Die

Brucke faced as a collective band of solo artists. The concept of the collective had served as an animating idea for Die Brücke within the context of Expressionism, but it was an inherently problematic approach since conflict frequently arose between the contrasting pulls of affiliation and individuation.49 As an artists’ collective, Brücke functioned to give merit to the ideas and stylistic innovations of the artists involved. It also served as a means by which to secure patronage and to establish gallery representation. However, Die Brücke was still a group of distinct individuals who were in competition with each other for recognition and acclaim.

The formation of Die Brücke and the need those artists had to affiliate themselves was symptomatic of broader trends in German society at the turn of the twentieth century. As I discuss in the first chapter, Georg Simmel had stated that specialization was inherent to a commodity-based economy within a modern social order. He maintained that this method of selectivity “…makes one individual incompatible to another, and each of them indispensable to the highest possible extent,” but also admitted that “specialization makes each man the more directly dependent upon the supplementary activities of all others.”50 The intrinsic contradiction between affiliation and individuation in Die Brücke can be seen as just one example of the broader pattern of competition and cooperation that, Simmel argues, was endemic to modern

48 Deborah Wye, Kirchner and the Berlin Street (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2008), 29.

49 See Bridget Alsdorf, Fellow Men: Fantin-Latour and the Problem of the Group in Nineteenth-Century French Painting, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).

50 Simmel,132.

capitalist society at large. Though ostensibly formed as a collective of like-minded young artists who united in order to produce new stylistic forms through “directness and authenticity” (as stated in the 1906 Programme of the Brücke), the group also functioned to promote the artists as individuals and to increase their commercial viability. Thus, in order to appeal to the similarly specialized taste of the moneyed patron, it became necessary for the artists to relay their own expressive genius. This competition born of individuation ultimately proved incompatible with the model of collective association exercised by Die Brücke, and led to the group’s dissolution.

Wigman’s Model of Collective Association

Although the problems of the Brücke might suggest that Kirchner would have become disillusioned with the idea of group affiliation, I argue that the concept of collective association reintroduced through Wigman’s school and dancing is what brought Kirchner back to the subject of Expressionism in the 1920's. At Wigman’s studio, Kirchner experienced an alternative to the model of collective association that he had been a part of in Die Brücke. Instead of a grouping of artists who were ostensibly equals like with the Brücke artists, Wigman’s school offered an alternative model of affiliation, one that balanced autonomy with cooperation.

Rather than acting as an absolute authority, Wigman’s role at the studio was that of director and moderator. Although she acted as activating agent to the artistic production of the group, her activity as teacher was centered on encouragement rather than on control. Wigman’s leadership within the group was always clear. But through group dances, power distinctions between the individual and the group were effectively resolved. When she herself participated in an ensemble, Wigman’s role was that of a catalyst, set to provide an impetus for the ensemble to move or act. Upon seeing these dances, critic Hans Fisher observed, “In all her group dances

Wigman functions as a leader, as center, or as opposition to the moving mass of dancers. She

pulls the others after her without resistance, holds them in balance, allows them to circle her like planets around a sun.”51 Wigman herself and in her studio served as a unifier, and the structure of her dances and ensemble performances demonstrated principles of mutual cooperation. Wigman brought together individual dancers as one would disparate elements, and developed a model of collaboration that reaffirmed Tönnies’s notion of Gemeinschaft (discussed in the first chapter).

Wigman’s reputation had been steadily growing since she herself left Switzerland for

Germany in 1920. In 1924, four years after she opened her school of dance in Dresden, dance critic Hans Fischer proclaimed her to be “decidedly the greatest and last solo dancer, and as the first master of group dance.”52 Wigman’s model of Ausdruckstanz was characterized by her rejection of the techniques and precision of ballet, and by her abandonment of narrative realism.

For Wigman, a spiritual motivation and the pursuit of transcendence through dance were paramount, as was her innovative relationship to space as a partner in the dance.

When Wigman established her school in Dresden in 1920, it was as a specifically feminine environment and women’s collective, a marked contrast to the machismo of the Brücke group. At Wigman’s school, further autonomy and self-individuation among the students was encouraged. In a 1933 essay in which she clarified the philosophy of the school and her method

Wigman stated that

The development of each dancer ought to be considered from a twofold viewpoint: On the one hand, perfecting the dance personality as an individual; and on the other hand, blending this individuality with an ensemble. Briefly and seen from an over-all viewpoint: Solo and Group Dance. These two orientations do not necessarily have to exist in contrast to one another. Whether both can be harmonized depends on the dancer’s will and strength to attend to these two tasks

51 Manning, 97.

52 Ibid, 85.

and to muster enough understanding that subordinating his own personality to a multiform organism is not synonymous with giving up his individuality.53

Wigman’s emphasis in developing her dancers was therefore both on cultivating their individual skills and expression, while simultaneously integrating their personalities within an amalgamated and unified group. According to Susan Manning, when a dancer participated in a group dance at

Wigman’s company she “transcended her individuality,” and in doing so moved beyond the personal in order to become an individual representative of the collective whole.54

Wigman’s method of enacting a Gemeinschaft and coalescing distinctive dancers was twofold. First, she created choreography that emphasized the push and pull of dancers— differentiating themselves as individuals during brief solo movements, and then joining together again as a unified collective group of dancers. Second, as in her earlier solo works, she used masks and cloaking costumes to shield the identities of her dancers. The effect of this was to visually unite the dancers through the general forms of the masking agents, while simultaneously separating them as individuals through small costuming details that made them distinct from one another. Manning contends that the mask also functioned to free the performer of her gendered identity, thereby elevating the dance into a pure manifestation of energetic movement and free of gender division or distinction.55 In this way, Wigman’s choreography and group dances enacted a dialogue between the individual and the group. Additionally, through the use of masks and by emphasizing the relational aspect between the dancers on stage, Wigman’s dances subverted the exchange between the dancer and the spectator. The latter could no longer claim active visual

53 Mary Wigman, “Group Dance/Choreography,” in The Mary Wigman Book: Her Writings Edited and Translated, ed. Walter Sorell (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 129.

54 Manning, 87.

55 Ibid, 71.

ownership of the concealed dancer, and was thus positioned in a position of passive observation of the performed movement.

Wigman gradually incorporated and employed the complex strategies for group dance in works throughout the early 1920’s. Scenes from a Dance Drama, her 1924 program of dances, provides a demonstration of the first of Wigman’s methods of establishing a Gemeinschaft by emphasizing the fluidity between affiliation and individuation. In the Scenes, Wigman effectively removed all narrative allusion, putting the focus on the constant exchange between the group as a whole, and the individual solo dancers within the ensemble.56 In Chaos, the midpoint in the Scenes from a Dance Drama sequence, Wigman’s character, fighting for autonomy, is symbolically killed and absorbed into the group.57 Though she plays the role of an individual, Wigman’s assimilation into the group—a stand-in for society at large—emphasizes the notion that a greater whole is made up of distinct parts. In this way, the experience of the one stands to illustrate the experience of everyone. This corresponds directly with the underlying ethos of Expressionism, which emphasizes the revelation of personal experience as universal truth. In the pictured scene from Chaos, (1924, Fig. 4), recreated in a studio setting for the photographer, Wigman kneels in the center, framed by thirteen of her dancers. The difference between Wigman and the other dancers explicitly marked through variations in costuming; while the company is clad in dark blousy tunics and bared legs, Wigman is dressed in white and bares her midriff. Together all of the dancers throw back their heads and claw at the air. In the photograph, the relationship between Wigman and the dancers in the ensemble is unclear since

Wigman is set apart from the group through her costume, but is then integrated into the group by

56 Ibid, 109-113.

57 Ibid, 110.

her stance. Similarly, Wigman’s positioning on her knees at the center of the group results in contradictory readings. Either she is the group’s captive, overwhelmed by the force of their raised arms, or she is the animating authority within the group, from whom their power to rise emanates.

Building on this interplay, Wigman added masks and masking agents to subsequent group dances, like the program Dance of Death, which was produced the same year that

Kirchner visited Wigman’s studio. Wigman wrote in later years that she had conceived of Dance of Death through the phrase, “The graves open up and the dead arise…” thus setting the stage for a ghostly encounter of lifeless forms recognizable by their frozen wooden visages.58 The otherworldliness of these masks is visible in August Scherl’s photograph of a staged scene from

Dance of Death (1926, Fig. 5). All of the pictured dancers wear masks and gauzy costumes, and in the foreground figure, one can see how the dancer’s body is just faintly adumbrated through the diaphanous material of her costume. Wigman described the result of these modes of masking when she stated, “They were not like individuals. However, seen one by one, they made the impression of variations on a theme, gaining independence in different phases, only to melt into a many-headed body in its tense grouping.”59 Wigman’s account of the transitory identity between solo/ensemble is in this case strengthened by the mask, and retroactively explains the uncertain relational aspect between Wigman and her dance company in Chaos. In both instances, and in Wigman’s choreography more generally, it is the interplay back and forth between individuation and association that animates the dance.

58 Sorrell, 97.

59 Ibid, 100.

Kirchner Reconsiders the Group Through Dance

When Kirchner saw Wigman’s company dance, he rightly understood that the interplay between the individual and the collective was a crucial component of Wigman’s choreography.

Kirchner’s attention to these details, and his decision to visually represent this element in his own portrayal, reveal how important this give and take was to his evolving ideas not just about dance, but about art-making and group identity more broadly. At the same time, in analyzing

Kirchner’s prints it is important to take into consideration what he took directly from Wigman’s dancing and choreography, and in what ways he altered her work. In his prints of Wigman’s dances, Kirchner altered elements of her dance in order to express his own ideas. Kirchner’s

“partnership” with Wigman was thus a balancing of their shared project with his individual ideas and method. Although Kirchner was highly influenced by Wigman—as this thesis makes explicitly clear—he was also a solo artist with an aesthetic motivation to convey his own emotional experience with an expressive immediacy.

Kirchner’s print Dance Group (1926, Fig. 6) reflects the dichotomy of Wigman’s influence coupled with Kirchner’s need to assert a unique agenda. Through bold, crudely formed linear cuts and a strong tonal contrast, Kirchner’s image emphasizes the difference between the individuated solitary figure in the foreground and the anonymous grouping in the back.

Kirchner’s simplification of form serves also to simplify the form of the dance. In so doing, the woodcut emphasizes the inherent oppositional attraction between areas of light and dark, heightening the Expressionist aesthetic, and thereby also symbolically negotiating movement between the two poles.

In Dance Group, Kirchner illustrates Wigman’s Dance of Death: the figure in the foreground of the print is dressed in the same costume as the central figure in Scherl’s photograph, thus confirming the specific dance source material for Kirchner’s image. In the 40

photograph, Wigman is in the center, the prisoner of the dance group that surrounds her. A solo dancer in front of and to the left of the group seductively beckons their hostage. Considering the scene through the vocabulary of the individual versus the group that has heretofore been determined, what is striking is that all of the dancers pictured maintain an individual expression through their movement. Additionally, while all of the dancers are wearing masks and costumes made of a similar material, the masked faces have different expressions, and the costumes appear to be of different cuts and colors.

Kirchner declares his interest in group dynamics through the title of his print Dance

Group, and his representation of Dance of Death focuses on the contrast between Wigman’s character, dressed in a black striped dress in the foreground, and the group of dancers behind her.

Three of these four dancers in the background have been conjoined into one collective, hydra- like entity, and appear as if ready to subsume the fourth ambiguous figure. Only Wigman, in the role of the martyr tormented and summoned by death, stands out—perhaps only temporarily— from this milieu. The discrepancies between Kirchner’s image and Scherl’s photograph are striking, despite Kirchner’s faithfulness in his depiction of Wigman’s costume. Rather than a part of the mass, Wigman is depicted front and center in Dance Group. Her features and form are particularized, in stark contrast to the vagueness of the other figures. She and they are clearly not one and the same in Kirchner’s eyes. But Manning writes that in Dance of Death, “Wigman’s charismatic leadership took a surprising turn, no longer an active force but a passive state of being.”60 Dance Group suggests the opposite: that Wigman is chief soloist, and that the group is subordinated to her leadership. Kirchner, seemingly not yet able to reconcile his attitude toward the group/individual dynamic, distinguishes Wigman so as to assert her artistry and influence.

60 Manning, 122.

Kirchner’s consideration of the danced interaction between the individual and the group is a central theme in the print Oppositional Dance (1926, Fig. 7), which also provides a study in the contrast between the actuality of Wigman’s dance and its representation by Kirchner. Aptly titled, the print depicts a differentiated ensemble of nine dancers in two rows who crouch and step in opposite directions. The five dancers in the back move to their right with hunched-over steps, while the four dancers in the front crawl to their left. To distinguish the dancers and create a further separation between those in the foreground and background, Kirchner depicted the dancers in the back row with inked black hair, while the hair of those in the front was left light.

Although the dancers are all unified in the action of the dance, their individual movements and steps are differentiated from each other, as are their faces and body types. Through these distinctions in the dancers, Kirchner in Oppositional Dance has clearly manifested the concept of the individual within the group.

However, Kirchner’s figural representation is problematic because the dancers in his image are naked. This is significant because while many artists associated with the world of modern dance regularly performed in the nude, Wigman and her company did not. Wigman believed that nudity and modernity did not go hand in hand as did so many of her contemporaries. Furthermore, Wigman thought nudity would become a spectacle in itself, thus detracting from the primacy of dance. It is therefore safe to assume that Kirchner’s representation of the dancers as nude was not in keeping with what he had actually seen at the

Wigman School. Rather, it was a modification that connected his print aesthetically to the idea of a return to nature and the primitivism embraced in Expressionism and by Die Brücke.

Stripping the dancers bare, so to speak, allowed Kirchner to individuate the dancers as separate and distinct bodies, while simultaneously unifying them both visually and

philosophically as a cooperative or a Geimeinschaft of women. In other words, through his print of nude dancers, Kirchner visually realized the philosophic basis of Wigman’s school in ways that perhaps even she could not. Although at first glance the dancers in Oppositional Dance recall the erotic nature of the cabaret images, there is a discernible reversal of power in the relationship between the dancer and the spectator. In her analysis of the status of the nude female in German Expressionist art, Carol Duncan argues that through depictions of the female nude, male artists asserted their power over the female figure in order to affirm their masculinity as a counter to the feminine Other.61 Yet rather than subjugating these dancers as erotic, nudity in

Oppositional Dance functions to emphasize the separate forms of the individual dancers who collectively function to take on the greater expression and structure of the dance.

Author and Authority in Die Brücke Revisited

Perhaps it was his understanding of a new concept of cooperation, modeled by Wigman and her troupe, that inspired Kirchner in 1926-7 to paint a retrospective group portrait of the members that had constituted the core of the Brücke at the time of its dissolution in 1913. A

Group of Artists (Fig. 8) is the only self-reflective group portrait of Die Brücke by Kirchner or by any of the other former Brücke members. Surprisingly, no major studies of this painting have heretofore been undertaken. I argue that the portrait, which Kirchner began to work on immediately after he returned from Germany, demonstrates Kirchner’s re-evaluation of artistic collectivity within his oeuvre—a re-evaluation deeply indebted to the model of artmaking he witnessed at Wigman’s studio.

A Group of Artists depicts, from left to right, Otto Mueller, Ernst Kirchner, Erich Heckel, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. The four men are tightly, almost claustrophobically, framed in a

61 Carol Duncan, 293-313.

small dormered room that corresponds dimensionally with the space of the canvas. Painted in greys, blues, and pinks, the painting shows Mueller seated and contained, his legs and arms crossed. Kirchner stands tucked in the eaves behind Mueller, his face in profile framed by the room’s only window. To Kirchner’s left is Heckel, and Schmidt-Rottluff brackets the painting facing left with his back to the viewer. The faces of the artists are all clearly represented, but their overlapping arms and legs thwart an easy comprehension of their bodies’ borders, and make it unclear where one figure ends and the other begins. But despite the closeness and physical fluidity between these men, none of them make eye contact. Instead, all of the men look past and through each other rather than meeting anyone else’s gaze. In A Group of Artists, Kirchner formally forces Die Brücke together in a charged and intimate room, but the only factor that truly unites is their physical proximity to one another.

Most conspicuous in Kirchner’s painting is his inclusion of the Chronik der KG Brücke, which features prominently on Kirchner’s lap. His palm, face-up on the page, appeals to and summons the viewer’s attention. While the other members of the group appear confident or self- contained, Kirchner’s deliberate gesture and open hand seem to seek a resolution. Kirchner’s inclusion of the Chronik is significant: it was, after all, a woodcut print, the medium with which

Die Brücke was most closely associated. As such, the Chronik references the entire history of the group; from Die Brücke’s inception and first public statement through the woodcut Kirchner created for the Programme of Die Brücke, to the Chronik itself, and the group’s final separation in 1913. This is achieved not just through the referential nature of a painted representation of the

Chronik, but also because Kirchner’s possession of the document singles him out as an animating individual within the pregnant space of the group. It cannot be known whether

Kirchner’s Chronik der KG Brücke and his perceived self-aggrandizement were in fact to blame

for the Brücke’s break-up. However, Kirchner’s self-definition as the group’s central figure and artistic guide is clearly illustrated in this portrait where only his own artistic production is included.

Kirchner’s decision to turn to the genre of the group portrait to address the question of collective affiliation was not without precedent. Nor was Kirchner unique in his ambivalence about the desire for community combined simultaneously with the need for individuation. Half a century earlier, Henri de Fantin-Latour had addressed the same concerns in a series of group portraits that focus explicitly on self-definition within the context of a collective. Fantin-Latour’s portrait A Studio in the Batignolles Quarter (1870, Fig. 9) depicts eight of the artists and writers associated with Impressionism who regularly gathered at the Café Guerbois in the Batignolles

Quarter of Paris. As art historian Bridget Alsdorf notes, uncertainty about the need to both affiliate and individuate is paramount in A Studio. Here, I apply Alsdorf’s model of analysis to

Kirchner’s group portrait, which confronts a similar set of issues.

The artists of the Batignolles School represented in Fantin-Latour’s painting physically share the same space and are placed in close proximity to one another. But there is no other sense of cohesion or relationship between the artists, all of whom avoid eye contact with each other.

Though ostensibly a painting of a collective, the emphasis of A Studio in the Batignolles Quarter is the status of the individual within the group, and on the tension between the need for creative autonomy and individuality and the need to affiliate oneself. In her analysis of the painting,

Alsdorf addresses these conflicting pressures as part of a broad consideration of the role of the group portrait in the establishment of artistic associations in the late nineteenth century.62 Alsdorf maintains that

62 Alsdorf, 67.

…When portraits of specific individuals are deliberately combined within the frame of a picture, regardless of the degree of compositional harmony in their arrangement, some form of mutual identification is strongly implied. The tableau is meant to transcend the constitutive individuals, although formed out of the relationships and charged spaces the artist established between them.63

Here Alsdorf echoes Wigman’s approach to integrating individual dancers within an ensemble, and Susan Manning’s interpretation of those dancers as “transcending their individuality.”64

Alsdorf sees in Fantin-Latour’s portrait an illustration of the conflict between independence and affiliation, and a presentation of the question of how to balance the drive for creative autonomy and individuality with the need to affiliate oneself.

Alsdorf describes the tension between the conflicting drive towards affiliation and individuation through the notion of interiority, a term she uses to describe both the physical space occupied by the figures, and their individual mental states.65 Within the frame of the enclosed studio, Alsdorf sees Fantin-Latour’s artists as “showing just enough ‘association’ to convey a common purpose while still maintaining distinctly separate realms of attention.”66 In

Fantin-Latour’s portrait, cohesion among the figures is achieved through a restricted somber palette and extremely intimate physical closeness. The space of the studio is constricted, and the individual bodies of the darkly clothed men are difficult to discern in the dimly lit room. Yet all of the men are uniquely portrayed and readily distinguishable, and are each arranged so as to emphasize their individuality.

63 Ibid.

64 Manning, 87.

65 Ibid, 108.

66 Ibid, 127.

Kirchner’s group portrait advances the same ideas and applies the very same strategies.

Closely following Fantin-Latour’s model, Kirchner evinces the struggle between individuality and creative autonomy, and the artist’s desire to affiliate himself publicly as belonging to a larger collective. The formal similarities between A Group of Artists and A Studio in the Batignolles

Quarter are too considerable to be coincidental, so it seems likely that Kirchner was familiar with

Fantin-Latour’s painting. In fact, Kirchner appears to have taken the posture and arrangement for his Brücke artists directly from four of the central figures in Fantin-Latour’s portrait. These figures are from left to right, August Renoir in profile, his face and shoulders surrounded by the empty frame on the wall, Zacharie Astruc, seated with book in hand, Emile Zola facing forward with his right hand raised, and Frederic Bazille who brackets the painting facing towards the left.

In Kirchner’s reconfiguration for A Group of Artists, Renoir and Astruc have been turned so that they face stage left. Renoir becomes Kirchner, his face framed by a window instead of a picture- frame; the seated Astruc is replaced by Mueller, Zola by Heckel, and finally Bazille by Schmidt-

Rottluff.

By thus transposing artists of the Ecole Batignolles with the artists of Die Brücke,

Kirchner’s portrait offers a meta-commentary on artistic association. In A Group of Artists

Kirchner does more than just establish a dialogue about the strains within Die Brücke between artistic individualism and cooperation. In referencing A Studio in the Batignolles, Kirchner connects that struggle to Impressionism, and to avant-gardism in general. Furthermore, by enacting this discussion through the tradition of group portraiture, Kirchner establishes a statement about self-definition and affiliation that is inherent to the conventions of the genre.

Portraits have historically been considered as vehicles through which both artists and their subjects can publicly define themselves, and an individual’s association with a group or

cooperative offers the same kind of definition, and similarly makes a public statement about the nature of that individual.

For Kirchner, the need to both individuate and affiliate himself persisted even after his separation from the Brücke and his move to Switzerland. Just prior to traveling to Germany, he had once again cultivated an artistic association with another group of artists. Rot-Blau (Red-

Blue) was formed in Basel, Switzerland on New Year’s Eve 1924-5 by four young Swiss artists:

Albert Müller, Paul Camenish, Hermann Sherer, and Werner Neuhaus. Similar to the original aims of the association of Die Brücke in which a partnership was formed primarily for the purposes of self-promotion, Rot-Blau’s cooperation was aimed at obtaining exhibitions and facilitating the sales of their work. But the artists of Rot-Blau were also stylistically unified through their paintings, sculptures, and prints that responded to Kirchner’s Alpine

Expressionism. The members had in fact come together over their mutual appreciation of

Kirchner and his work, after they saw his first major Swiss exhibition at the Kunsthalle Basel in

1923.67 Although never an active member of the group, Kirchner did exhibit his work alongside that of the Rot-Blau artists on several occasions. Kirchner it seems, was struck by the artists’ youthful admiration, and was compelled to serve as their mentor and teacher. As such, he invited the artists of Rot-Blau to his home on many occasions, where they participated in communal painting exercises and drew simultaneously from the same model, as had Die Brücke in its early days. In this way Kirchner informed much of Rot-Blau’s artistic production which they created in tandem with him and with each other.

Whereas Kirchner fully participated in Die Brücke, he kept arm’s-length distance from

Rot-Blau: he created work alongside the group’s members, and saw himself as their creative

67 Beat Stutzer, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Friends: Expressionism from the Swiss Mountains (Bern: Scheidegger and Spiess, 2007), 268.

associate. The group fell apart following Sherer’s sudden death in 1927, but then reformed the following year and pledged allegiance to Kirchner as their leader and guide. Kirchner, clearly averse to this degree of affinity, and wishing to instead have his contributions be ancillary to that of the group, publicly distanced himself from Rot-Blau by publishing “An open letter to the

Basel Red-Blue group” in a 1929 issue of Das Kunstblatt.68 In the letter, Kirchner denied his leadership within the group, and stated that he preferred to be viewed as a comrade, not a patron of art. Thus, Kirchner’s involvement with Rot-Blau and his contempt for the group’s deference towards his authority demonstrate his equivocation about artistic independence and group affiliation.

That this ambivalence persisted even after his meetings with Mary Wigman and his woodcut explorations of the status of the individual within the group confirms that for Kirchner there was no easy way to resolve the conflicting pulls of affiliation and individuation. Although she championed the idea of a Gemeinschaft, Wigman was definitive about the authoritative role necessary for its establishment. In an article published in 1929-30, Wigman declared that

“Community requires leadership and recognition of leadership. The mass that refers to its own collectivity never forms a community.”69 As his account in the Chronik would suggest, Kirchner sought recognition for his artistic initiatives, including an acknowledgement of his role as an innovator and the pioneer of a movement. But for Kirchner, this did not translate into the model of leadership that Wigman demonstrated at her school. The social agreement invested in the idea of community that was manifest in Wigman’s group dances became a catalyst for Kirchner’s reevaluation of the concept of association within the context of the artist’s collective. It provided

68 E. L. Kirchner, “Offener Brief an die Basler Vereinigung Rot-Blau,” in Das Kunstblatt 13 no. 5 (1929): 155.

69 Manning, 147.

a model for Kirchner to develop and modify his earlier Expressionism and constructs of the collective through dance imagery, and to then visit that same analysis on the foundational legacy of his first associations with Die Brücke. But Kirchner, ever the individual, could not fully subsume himself into Wigman’s model and finished out his career on his own as a fully independent solo artist.

CHAPTER 3

WIGMAN SOLO: METAKINETIC TRANSFER AND THE INFORME

Ernst Kirchner’s woodcut print Dancing Mary Wigman (Fig. 10), completed sometime between the years 1930 and 1933, departs in both content and style from the artist’s previous images of Mary Wigman and other dance subjects. Dancing Mary Wigman takes the dancer/choreographer out of the context of the group dances that Kirchner represented in 1926, and abstracts the now solitary performer so that she appears to blend into the space that surrounds her. This figure, in other words, is not depicted with the clarity of bodily form employed in Dance Group and Oppositional Dance. Instead, in Dancing Mary Wigman, the dancer’s body seems almost to explode. Only the grounding stability of Wigman’s sturdy legs helps the viewer to make out that the winding, partially dissolved forms represent a solid, organic mass of flesh.

Along with two related prints produced around the same time, Mask Dance (c. 1929) and

Gret Palucca (c. 1930-33), Dancing Mary Wigman marks a turning point in Kirchner’s representation of dance and the values and ideas he previously associated with the medium.70

With these works, I will argue in this chapter, Kirchner moved beyond the concept of collective association and the link of the latter to an Expressionist aesthetic—the subject that he explored in his dance prints upon first meeting Wigman in 1926. My analysis of this second set of dance

70 In regards to the dating of these images, it is necessary to note that Kirchner routinely failed to date his works and often returned much later to assign a date and signature. It is therefore impossible to know in exactly what year these three images were created. However, the two figures in Mask Dance show a marked similarity to the arrangement of the central figure and the dancer to her right in Picasso’s Three Dancers. Since it is unlikely that Kirchner would have been familiar with this work prior to its publication in Documents in 1930, Mask Dance should also be dated as being completed after that date.

prints by Kirchner hinges upon noting significant parallels between major shifts in Wigman’s and Kirchner’s approaches to their work during the late 1920s and early 1930s. In that period, both artists began to stress the value of individuation and individual identity in ways that mark a clear break from their earlier explorations of collective identity.

While I argue that Wigman served as a significant catalyst for Kirchner, and that it was their continuing association that ultimately initiated a shift in Kirchner’s work, the marked shift in Kirchner’s representation of Wigman was only partly due to changes in her approach to dance.

Significantly, it was at this time that Kirchner became familiar with the writings of the French

Surrealist author and critic Georges Bataille, a connection that no other scholars have heretofore asserted. My claim that Kirchner’s dance prints constitute a Surrealist-inspired approach to representation runs counter to that of most Kirchner scholars, who continue to associate his work primarily with the Expressionism of his early career. This is troublesome since, although

Kirchner in Switzerland was geographically far removed from Berlin—the central locus of avant-garde art production in Germany—his practice demonstrates his continued close engagement with a variety of other art movements scattered around Europe. Furthermore, in pigeonholing Kirchner as an Expressionist, a judgment based principally on his work of the late

1910’s, art historians fail to recognize the new, Surrealist-inspired system of representation that

Kirchner developed in his dance woodcuts of 1930-33. The fact that art historians have not noted the influence of Surrealism on Kirchner’s work can in part be explained by the fact that these prints are not stylistically related to the work of other Surrealist artists of the period. However, in

Kirchner’s prints and in works by dissident Surrealist artists, a link can be found in their destructive negation of form.

Here I suggest that through the publication in Documents of both Bataille’s “Critical

Dictionary” and Picasso’s Three Dancers, Kirchner came to associate concepts of formlessness with modern dance, thus inspiring him to once again revisit Mary Wigman and Ausdruckstanz as a subject. Kirchner’s new approach to the representation of dance was, in part, a reflection of his experimentation with Bataille’s concept of the informe (formlessness), defined as a debasement, a renunciation of form, and as a violent challenge to the containment of body boundaries. For

Bataille, the informe served to devaluate art by taking it down off its pedestal, and to bring it into the space of everyday life. Bataille’s informe, understood in these terms, bears striking philosophical affinities to the concept of metakinetic transfer—the notion that a dancer conveys feeling and emotion to spectators by mobilizing the latter’s empathetic response to the sight of physical movement. Wigman explored this principle extensively—albeit through a strikingly different aesthetic style than followers of Bataille—through her choreography and in her performances.

I argue that Kirchner’s later dance prints demonstrate that he perceived an overlap between elements of Bataille’s informe and Wigman’s dance, in terms of their interest in breaking down the barriers between art and life. The prints of 1929-33 exhibit Kirchner’s application of both the informe, and the idea of a transference of emotion between dancer and spectator that was a vital element of Ausdruckstanz. In this chapter I expose the ways in which

Kirchner’s dance images link Bataille’s concept of the informe to dance and metakinesis, and reveal Kirchner’s evolving attitudes toward Expressionism and his exploration of ideas associated with later developments in the European avant-garde.

Breaking With the Group

The evolution of Kirchner’s approach to dance took place during a short hiatus between his earlier and later dance images. Following the original woodcut prints and paintings of

Wigman and her studio dancers in 1926, Kirchner left behind the theme of modern dance for several years in order to concentrate on images of rural peasant life and idyllic scenes in nature.

These he created within the solitary confinement of his mountain home Wildboden. There, following the final termination of his association with the artist’s group Rot-Blau, art production became a personal and private pursuit. Thus Kirchner’s move away from scenes of dance in the modern context coincided with his own retreat back to “primitive” pastorals that had originally captivated him in the earliest years of Die Brücke. Yet dance remained a constant presence in

Kirchner’s work, and came to the fore again in 1930 in his plans for an ultimately unrealized commission for a large mural at the Folkwang Museum in Essen.71 Kirchner’s original intention for the mural project, as evidenced by his early sketches, had been the representation of various components of Körperkultur within the Swiss landscape. However, Kirchner’s sketches reveal that, by 1930, he had reconceived the mural in order to focus solely on dance.72

During the same period, Mary Wigman had also withdrawn from collaborative and cooperative contexts for artistic production, abandoning the group dance format that had initially inspired both her and Kirchner. Wigman’s successes after opening her first school of dance in

Dresden in 1920 had allowed her to open another, larger, school in Dresden, and to oversee the establishment of ten franchise schools that were modeled on her teaching but were commercially

71 Although Kirchner spent many years preparing for this commission, it was eventually curtailed following the rise of the Nazi party and its classification of Kirchner’s works as “degenerate” in 1933.

72 Toepfer, 70.

separate entities.73 By the late 1920’s a flood of new dance schools that had been opened by former students of Wigman, Laban, and others had saturated the market, while at the same time, an interest in newly developing models of modern dance in Germany had stagnated. Younger practitioners sought to quell the tide of this diminished interest by once again fusing modern dance with ballet within the setting of the opera-house, a fusion to which Wigman was adamantly opposed.74 Unable to financially sustain her troupe and unwilling to forsake her pursuit of artistry and creative independence for the commercial stability of opera-house performances, Wigman chose to disband her troupe and to concentrate once again on the solo choreography that had been the wellspring of her practice during the 1910s.

While the trajectory of both artists’ careers thus followed similar patterns of individuation during this period, Wigman and Kirchner did not literally converge again after Kirchner’s visit to

Dresden in 1926. Kirchner therefore did not directly witness Wigman’s artistic transformation or the new mode of production that could be evidenced in her solo choreographies. Yet Kirchner’s existing interest in Wigman, coupled with his extensive correspondence and continuous scrutiny of advancements in avant-garde art movements through journals and newspapers, makes it likely that Kirchner kept himself abreast of changes taking place in the dance world generally, and in

Wigman’s career more specifically. Whether or not Kirchner was familiar with the equivalent direction that Wigman was undertaking in her career at that time, his decision to return to representations of Wigman and modern dance after a three-year hiatus reveals that Kirchner attributed to both a symbolic value, and directly associated both with his own artistic practice.

73 Manning, 132.

74 Ibid, 134.

Key to my argument about the way that Kirchner uses Wigman to negotiate his relations to both Expressionism and Surrealism is the fact that, all accounts to the contrary, Kirchner was far from isolated in Wildboden. It was his persistent drive to keep his finger on the pulse through the study of current trends in art making that led him, in the late 1920’s, to a new artistic impetus to explore questions of self-representation. This Kirchner pursued through his research on

Surrealism—which by then was a confirmed movement of the avant-garde—and in particular through the writings of French philosopher and writer Georges Bataille, which he read in issues of the Surrealist journal Documents.

Poet André Breton had initiated the Surrealist movement and articulated its foundational ideas in the “Manifesto of Surrealism,” originally published in 1924. There Breton defined

Surrealism as “pure psychic automatism,” which he defined as “the dictation of thought, in the absence of all control exercised by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.”75

Galvanized by Sigmund Freud’s writings on dreams and his emphasis on the motivation of human nature through the role of the unconscious, Breton and artists such as André Masson,

Max Ernst, and Salvador Dalí sought to create work that fused lived and dreamed reality into what Breton described as a “surreality.”

In 1929, only a few years after Breton founded the movement, the Surrealist group famously split into opposing factions. Bataille, who rejected Breton’s Freudian and Marxist leanings, led the “dissident” Surrealist group. At the heart of the opposition between Breton and

Bataille was the former’s idealism, countered by the latter’s pessimism. Breton was a believer in historical materialism, an orientation he made explicit in his 1937 essay “Non-National

75 Franklin Rosemont, André Breton and the First Principles of Surrealism (London: Pluto Press Limited, 1978), 23.

Boundaries of Surrealism,” where he called for the “primacy of matter over thought.”76

Accordingly, Breton and his followers sought to harness the creative impulse by superseding thought through psychic automatism in order to see beyond perceived reality. Bataille instead favored an anti-materialism or “base” materialism, rooted in the compulsion to destroy. He was resistant to the perception of matter as having a single, definable structure, arguing instead for the legitimacy of the formless. In “Critical Dictionary” published in Documents issue number 7, the last of 1929, Bataille defined this concept as the informe:

A dictionary should begin from the point when it is no longer concerned with the meaning but only with the use of words. Thus formless is not only an adjective with a certain meaning, but a term serving to deprecate, implying the general demand that everything should have form. That which it designates has no rights to any sense, and is everywhere crushed under foot like a spider or a worm.77

According to Bataille, the essence of informe was more than just a precept that countered the primacy of form and the physical integrity of matter. It was also a challenge to the notion that ideal form existed, and a resistance to the idea that matter had a specific definable structure. To illuminate this concept, Bataille presented the notion of bassesse (baseness). Bataille argued that by debasing form and removing the hierarchy of the body—by making horizontal what once was vertical—form is subverted, thus leading to the informe.

Dissident Surrealist artists employed informe and bassesse in a variety of ways, and their renderings were used to illustrate the pages of Documents. In works like Alberto Giacometti’s

Suspended Ball (1930-1), and in the photography of Jacques-André Boiffard, informe and bassesse were presented as violent disruptions of standards of categorization that were normally

76 André Breton, Free Rein, trans. Michel Parmentier and Jacqueline d’Ambroise (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 9.

77 Georges Bataille, “Critical Dictionary,” in Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 483.

taken for granted. Artists of the Documents circle found special significance in debasing the human form, and used imagery associated with the body to subvert the body, and to demonstrate informe and bassesse as destructive acts that could dissolve corporeal integrity.

Informe and Dance

Though only published for two years, Documents quickly achieved an influential status within the European art world for its status as a “war machine against received ideas.”78

Kirchner, in apparent exile from the artistic and urban centers that had earlier defined his practice, remained attuned to the latest developments in the art world and newest theories of modernism through journals such as Documents, which he carefully scrutinized, even going so far as to make note of his critiques of its content in a letter sent from Davos to Swiss painter

Andreas Walser in 1929.79 Kirchner’s shift back to the imagery of modern dance, and in particular the dance of Mary Wigman, directly coincides with the publication history of

Documents, and his demonstrated familiarity with the journal.

I believe Kirchner would have noted that dance was a subject presented in the pages of

Documents in the 1930 issue subtitled “Homage to Picasso.” There, Bataille’s essay on bassesse,

“Rotten Sun,” is illustrated with Picasso’s 1925 painting Three Dancers (Fig. 11).80 Bataille’s essay describes the sun as the most abstract object, which he classifies as such because it cannot be viewed through the unmediated lens of the human eye. Bataille describes man’s fascination with the sun as producing insanity, and states that “…the scrutinized sun can be identified with a

78 Dawn Ades, Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents (London: Hayward Gallery Publishing), 11.

79 Hyun Ae Lee, “Aber ich Stelle doch nochmals einen neuen Kirchner auf”: Ernst Ludwig Kirchners Davoser Spätwerk (New York: Waxmann, 2008), 93.

80 Ades, 214.

mental ejaculation, foam on the lips, and an epileptic crisis.”81 Three Dancers, though completed five years prior, seems to illustrate this very idea. Picasso’s central figure looks upwards as if compelled to stare at the sun, while the backward bending figure on the left appears to have been driven mad in the attempt.

The echoes between Kirchner’s dance prints of this period and Picasso’s painting strongly suggest that Kirchner was inspired by Three Dancers, and there is little reason to assume that Kirchner could have known the painting at this exact moment through any context other than Documents. Indeed, the same year that Three Dancers was published in the journal,

Kirchner began to work on the stylistically similar Color Dance I (1930-1932, Fig. 12), which he intended as the central image for the Folkwang mural.82 In Color Dance I, Kirchner makes the connection to Bataille’s essay more explicit through his inclusion of the sun, but portrays his dancers as succumbing to the ecstasy of movement, rather than delving into madness.

The three dance woodcuts that Kirchner created between 1930 and 1933 pointedly demonstrate his recognition of the link between Bataille’s concept of the informe and Wigman’s dancing. Kirchner seems to connect the informe’s challenge to the containment of body boundaries with the way that dance inherently collapses the boundary between the body and space. The dancing body, as it moves, restructures and re-engineers the surrounding space. This conception of movement and space was integral to the theories of modern dance of the period, and especially to Wigman’s formulation of Ausdruckstanz. Wigman’s aesthetic philosophy was grounded in the recognition of physical movement as the ideal aesthetic language through which

81 Hal Foster et al., Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2011), 277-278.

82 Grisebach, 185.

to convey an authenticity of feeling in order to describe the essential human emotion.83 In collaboration with her teacher Rudolf von Laban, Wigman had come close to realizing a purified ideal of absolute dance. But it was Wigman herself who had brought this notion to its final fruition by abandoning any allusion to pictorial representation or narrative. As dance theorist

André Levinson contended in 1925, by thus abstracting dance from representation, dance was reduced to an unadulterated “configuration of motion in space,” and pure manifestation of movement.84 Susan Manning, in adopting Levinson’s description, reconsiders Wigman’s dance not as Expressionism, but as Gestalt im Raum (configuration of energy in space.)85 Through this labeling, the conceptual nature of Wigman’s dancing is emphasized, thus further accentuating the separation of Ausdruckstanz from older models of narrative movement.

Key to Wigman’s concept of Ausdruckstanz was the idea that in order to create a fully abstract dance form, it was necessary to integrate the dancer’s body into her spatial environment.

Wigman achieved this abstraction through the use of costumes that masked her body, and denied the viewer access to the contours of her physical form. Through costumes like the billowing cape she wore in Storm Song (1929, Fig. 13), Wigman’s costumes-as-masks not only prevented the audience from fully deciphering the contours of her body, but they also collapsed the boundaries between her body/self and the space around her through which she danced. As the dancer began to spin around in a circle—a key choreographic element in many of Wigman’s dances—the costume would surge out from her body, thus blending the boundary between her self and her environment, and creating the illusion that she was becoming one with the empty space around

83 Sabine Huschka, “Pina Bausch, Mary Wigman, and the Aesthetic of ‘Being Moved,’” in New German Dance Studies, ed. Susan Manning and Lucia Ruprecht (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 182.

84 Manning, 19.

85 Ibid, 41.

her. As the spinning dancer would then slow down, the costume would fall close to her figure, making clear the separation of form and space once again. Costumes thus played an integral function in Wigman’s dances and choreography, making empty space a partner of sorts in her dances.86 As Hanya Holm, Wigman’s protégé, would later write, “In her (Wigman’s) dances she alternately grapples with space as an opponent and caresses it as though it were a living sentient thing.”87 As with an actual dance partner, Wigman’s dances with space could be characterized by a joining and separating, seizure and release. This reading of the dancer’s form as an unstable entity in a constantly shifting physical space bears striking affinities to the concept of informe as formulated by Bataille.

Informe in the Woodcut Print

That Kirchner linked Wigman’s dances to Bataille’s concept of the informe is clearly recognizable in his woodcut print Dancing Mary Wigman. In the print, the corporeal integrity of

Wigman’s dancing figure is uncertain. Rather than a solid body, the represented figure suggests a discordant clash of forms. The figure’s arms, rising up from an ambiguous torso, twist upon themselves like seemingly flat sheets of paper. Breasts in triplicate inaccurately suggest nudity for a woman who never danced unclothed, while the folds of a dress, billowing out behind the dancer’s legs, implies that she is in fact clothed. In this woodcut, Kirchner employs no shading.

Instead, he uses areas of light and dark to distinguish between adjoining shapes, rather than to lend clarity to the form.

Yet perhaps most telling is Kirchner’s portrayal of Wigman’s face, which is partially obscured by a second, more absurd visage. This second face can only be read as a mask, around

86 Mary Anne Santos Newhall, Mary Wigman (New York: Routledge, 2009), 83.

87 Hanya Holm, “The Mary Wigman School in New York,” in The Mary Wigman Book: Her Writings Edited and Translated, ed.Walter Sorell (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1975), 161.

which the dancer’s hair levitates like a solid impermeable mass. Here, Kirchner makes the face mask explicit by revealing Wigman’s bare face beneath the disguise. In this same way, Kirchner also calls for the costume as a mask, which he similarly suggests by revealing Wigman’s nude body enveloped beneath the disguise of her dress. Furthermore, by denying the viewer clear access to the figure’s form and by obfuscating the boundary between figure, costume, and background, Kirchner makes Wigman’s greater masking of and integration with space central themes in his arrangement.

Kirchner employs the same formal strategies to represent the explosion of bodily boundaries in two other dance woodcut prints of the period, Gret Palucca (c. 1930-1933, Fig.

14), and Mask Dance (c. 1929-33, Fig. 15). In the latter print, a dancer in motion forcefully peels herself away from her motionless, impassive partner. The dancer herself is marked as female through the representation of two round breasts, and a black hairdo that mimics the bob of the

Neue Frau (New Woman), a style that was worn by Mary Wigman in many contemporary photographs. The two figures are undeniably grotesque, with massive feet and faces that are featureless other than one large eye centered in the middle of both of their nebulous heads. When considered together, these eyes read as a match set, a pair that together make a whole. Thus it becomes possible to understand that rather than two separate figures, Kirchner’s representation is of a single entity, rent asunder.

I suggest that Mask Dance is a portrait of Wigman, depicted during the transition between a masked and unmasked state, and who in this transformation, becomes formless.

Kirchner’s representation of this liminal space also demonstrates the violence associated with

Bataille’s informe; the corporeality of both figures is destroyed by the dancer’s extraction from her other half. Perhaps one of Kirchner’s earliest attempts to capture the concept of the informe

through dance, Mask Dance can be read as a literal interpretation of the distintigration of the body/form through costumed masking and movement in space.

In Kirchner’s second woodcut of the series, Gret Palucca, Kirchner portrays Wigman’s former student, who by 1925 had opened her own competing dance school. Unlike Wigman, who employed terrestrially based movements and the repeated use of a spinning motif, Palucca was renowned for her soaring and athletic leaps and jumps. Surprisingly, Kirchner neglects to capture this element of Palucca’s dance, which he observed first hand when she performed at Davos in

1930. Rather, Kirchner portrays Palucca, whose dancing would have been a recent memory, in the same manner as Wigman, who he hadn’t seen dance in at least four years. This suggests that

Kirchner’s consideration of formlessness did not include the medium of dance generally, but was specific to Mary Wigman. Kirchner’s portrayal of Palucca is similar to his print of Wigman in the upward gesture and twisting lines of the arms, and in Kirchner’s qualification of Palucca as female through his emphasis on her breasts. But here Kirchner also incorporates graphic elements, seen in the darkly delineated lines of Palucca’s legs, which call to mind the simplicity of Wassily Kandinsky’s line drawings in Dance Curves: On the Dances of Palucca (1926). Since

Kirchner was an ardent admirer of Kandinsky, it is highly probable that he was familiar with

Kandinsky’s drawings of Palucca, who was a mainstay at the Bauhaus. In his own image of

Palucca, Kirchner acknowledges Kandinsky’s graphic precedent while still incorporating a

Surrealist interest in the informe. In this print, and in a painting of Gret Palucca that followed,

Kirchner places particular emphasis on the figure’s torso. This he renders separated and in front of the rest of the body, as if the torso is leading the figure into space. Like Kirchner’s print of

Wigman, Palucca’s body resists a fixed corporeality. It is through this ambiguous separation of

torso and body that Kirchner’s Palucca becomes a malleable, elastic form, arrested in constant movement.

The question of this passage between the materiality of the body and the immateriality of space is a primary concern in both Mary Wigman Dancing and Gret Palucca, and is an integral component of dance itself. But to understand how form and space relate in dance, it is helpful to consider form and space in regards to the three-dimensionality of sculpture. Rosalind Krauss has suggested that as the embodied viewer moves around a sculpture, the sculpture’s shape and form changes to accommodate each new perspective, thereby asserting that form is never entirely fixed.88 Yet unlike the embodied viewer of sculpture for whom the form is always different depending on the viewer’s location in space, dance presents movement in the work itself, to be consumed, received, and understood by a motionless viewer. Critic John Martin terms this transference ‘metakinesis’: in 1933, he stated that

When we see a human body moving, we see movement which is potentially producible by any human body and therefore by our own; through kinesthetic sympathy [metakinesis] we actually reproduce it vicariously in our present muscular experience and awaken such emotional associations.89

In other words, the form of the dance, though emanating from the dancer, is physically understood and recognized by the viewer. Through metakinesis, the boundaries between viewer and dancer are broken as the viewer becomes partner to the dancer, and a motionless participant in the dance.

In his woodcut prints of dance, Kirchner demands of his viewers that they ascribe those movements of which they are intrinsically aware, onto the represented two-dimensional figure.

But not only do these images capture the movements of the dancer represented. As woodcut

88 Rosalind Krauss, “Brancusi and the Myth of Ideal Form,” Artforum (January 1970): 35-39.

89 Newhall, 79-80.

prints, they also expose the workings of the artist’s hand. Kirchner’s interest in capturing the temporal and spatial immediacy of dance through the medium of the woodcut thereby invokes

“kinesthetic sympathy” in the viewer on two fronts and through two media: dance and the woodcut print.

Metakinetic transfer, as understood through the medium of dance, allows for an expanded reading of the informe that is visible in Kirchner’s dance woodcuts of the period. In these images, Kirchner’s figures swell beyond their own corporeal boundaries not just into the space within which they are moving, but through metakinesis, into the bodies of the viewers themselves. Furthermore, the explosion of bodily boundaries as represented by Kirchner can be considered as a threat to the integrity of the individual, and a challenge to artist’s revelation of subjective experience in relation to the group. The informe therefore speaks to the greater formlessness of all reality, or as Bataille writes in Critical Dictionary, “To affirm…that the universe does not resemble anything and is nothing but formless.”90 While Kirchner had considered emotive transference in his 1926 dance woodcuts examining the status of the individual within the group, it is only in these later images that transference becomes an analogy for the formless.

90 Bataille, 483.

CONCLUSION

As I have demonstrated in this thesis, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner returned to the theme of dance through the medium of the woodcut print throughout his career. Yet the woodcut prints that he created after his association with Die Brücke—especially the dance images that he created between 1926 and 1933—are afforded little scholarly attention, and often are labeled as stylistically derivative. I make an intervention in this discourse on Kirchner, arguing that it is through these woodcut prints of dance that the artist negotiated his relationships both with the artistic groups of his past and with the current developments of the avant-garde. In particular, I demonstrate that it was the dancing and choreography of Mary Wigman that compelled Kirchner to reexamine the artistic affiliations he participated in during his career, and to integrate

Surrealist principles into his art.

In Wigman’s group dances and in the structure of her school of Ausdruckstanz, Kirchner learned a different model of artistic cooperation than what he had experienced while working alongside the artists of Die Brücke. This new model that Wigman exemplified mediated the tension between the contrasting drives towards individuation and affiliation, and prompted

Kirchner to retroactively attempt to resolve the tense cooperation between the Brücke artists through the genre of group portraiture, and in his painting Group of Artists. In subsequent years, it was Kirchner’s acquaintance with the writings of Georges Bataille through the magazine

Documents, and his familiarity with Wigman’s construction of space as a partner in the dance, that prompted Kirchner to develop a unique interpretation of the concept of the informe. Though

Kirchner’s dance prints of 1930-33 are at a stylistic remove from the model set forth by other

dissident Surrealist artists, they demonstrate a similar dissolution of corporeal boundaries that render figures as formless.

Kirchner’s portrayal of the informe through dance, thereby invoking connections to the concept of metakinetic transfer, was not wholly unconnected to the ethos of Surrealism. Bataille himself had noted a connection between the two when he wrote in 1945, “It was André Breton who rightly recognized that a poet or a painter does not have the power to say what is in his heart, but that an organization or a collective body could. This ‘body’ can speak in different terms from an individual.”91 Bataille’s statement suggests that individual artists cannot successfully express themselves unless there are others to receive and interpret their work. In other words, the individual artist produces form, which is then rendered formless as it is consumed and metaphorically dispersed among the group that is the audience.

Ultimately, it is through an amalgamation of the informe and metakinetic transfer that one can interpret a final dance woodcut of the period, Profile Head (1930, Fig. 16). The print, a self- portrait, shows Kirchner in profile, his face overtaken by an enormous eye encircling the figure of an androgynous nude dancer. Smoking a cigarette, Kirchner characterizes himself as a spectator who, at a remove, observes the movements of the dance. Yet even though he is himself motionless and physically does not participate, dance itself is still a part of him, as the dancer communicates metakinetically through the formlessness of their physical bodies and the spaces between. Ernst Kirchner’s use of dance and Mary Wigman as a subject to explore and interpret

Bataille’s informe demonstrates that like other dissident Surrealist artists, he understood the symbolic and expressive potential of the human body to achieve the disintegration and state of formlessness that Bataille described. In using his own body as a site of transference between

91 Georges Bataille, “Surrealism and How It Differs from Existentialism,” in The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism, ed. Michael Richardson (New York: Verso, 1994), 60.

himself and the dancer, Kirchner makes explicit the connections between producer and consumer, artist and audience, and self and group through which metakinesis is expressed.

Through the framework of the analysis laid out in the final chapter and demonstrated in

Profile Head, it becomes possible to reconsider Kirchner’s portrait Dancing Mary Wigman as not just a portrait of the dancer, but also as a self-portrait of Kirchner through the metakinetic transference between artist and audience. Kirchner and Wigman had in fact served as audience and witness to each other’s production.92 In this case, as Wigman’s audience, Kirchner’s print both legitimizes the form that she produces and destroys it. We, as audience to both Kirchner’s print and Wigman’s dancing, participate in this fluid exchange and metakinetic transfer, and continuously challenge the status of the individual within the context of the group. In essence, in

Kirchner’s translation of the image of Wigman for our consumption, Kirchner, Wigman, and we the audience, all collectively participate as individuals within the group, and are thereby rendered formless.

92 See Chapter 1. 68

ILLUSTRATIONS

Note: Due to copyright restrictions, the illustrations are not reproduced in the online version of this thesis. They are available in the hard copy version that is on file in the Visual Resources Center, Art Department, Katzen Art Center, American University, Washington, D.C.

Figure 1: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Programm der Künstlergruppe Brücke, 1906. Woodcut. Museum of Modern Art, New York

Figure 2: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Somersaulting Acrobatic Dancers, 1913. Woodcut. Museum of Modern Art, New York

Figure 3: Unknown Author, Mary Wigman in Idolatry,’ 1919. Photograph. Courtesy of the Mary Wigman Archive

Figure 4: Unknown Author, Mary Wigman and her dance group in ‘Chaos,’ 1924. Photograph. Courtesy of the Mary Wigman Archive

Figure 5: August Scherl, Mary Wigman and Group: Death Dance II, 1926. Photograph. Courtesy of the Mary Wigman Archive

Figure 6: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Dance Group, 1926. Woodcut. Galerie Henze & Ketterer AG, Wichtrach, Switzerland

Figure 7: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Oppositional Dance, 1926. Woodcut. Galerie Henze & Ketterer AG, Wichtrach, Switzerland

Figure 8: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, A Group of Artists, 1926-27. Oil on canvas. Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany

Figure 9: Henri Fantin-Latour, A Studio in the Batignolles Quarter, 1870. Oil on canvas. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France

Figure 10: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Dancing Mary Wigman, 1933. Woodcut. Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany

Figure 11: Pablo Picasso, The Three Dancers, 1925. Oil on Canvas. Tate Modern, London, England

Figure 12: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Color Dance I, 1930-1932. Oil on Canvas. Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany

Figure 13: Unknown Author, Mary Wigman in ‘Storm Song,’ 1929. Photograph. Courtesy of the Mary Wigman Archive

Figure 14: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Palucca, 1930. Woodcut. Kirchner Museum Davos, Switzerland

Figure 15: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Mask Dance, 1929. Woodcut. Bündner Kunstmuseum, Chur, Switzerland

Figure 16: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Profile Head (Self Portrait), 1930. Woodcut. Kirchner Museum Davos, Switzerland

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