Leuven University Press Chapter Title: Kiesler’s Imaging Exile in Guggenheim’s Art of this Century Gallery and the New York Avant-garde Scene in the early 1940s Chapter Author(s): Elana Shapira Book Title: Arrival Cities Book Subtitle: Migrating Artists and New Metropolitan Topographies in the 20th Century Book Editor(s): Burcu Dogramaci, Mareike Hetschold, Laura Karp Lugo, Rachel Lee, Helene Roth Published by: Leuven University Press. (2020) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv16qk3nf.9 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Funding is provided by European Research Council (ERC); KU Leuven Fund for Fair Open Access. Leuven University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Arrival Cities This content downloaded from 67.83.7.91 on Sat, 09 Jan 2021 17:10:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Kiesler’s Imaging Exile in Guggenheim’s Art of this Century Gallery and the New York Avant-garde Scene in the early 1940s Elana Shapira On 20 October 1942 the American-European art collector Peggy Guggenheim opened her gallery, Art of this Century, on New York City’s West 57th Street with a vision to challenge viewers’ perceptions and offer new aesthetic experience tinged with an awareness of the political, social and psychological repercussions of Nazi Germany’s looming occupation of Europe and the realities of World War II. The immediate neighborhood of 57th Street enabled the returning Guggenheim to integrate more quickly into the professional environment of the city’s commercial art scene. The groundbreaking exhibition space would offer a novel strategy for acculturation into the urban setting through the confrontation of New Yorkers with the alienating experiences of displacement and exile that persecution and war had made prevalent. Guggenheim was the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family and niece of the well-known art collector and founder of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, Solomon R. Guggenheim. She had moved to Paris in 1920 and had been involved with avant-garde literary and artistic circles before moving to London in the late 1930s. With the help of revered advisors such as artist Marcel Duchamp, she began collecting modern art. She opened a modern art gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, in London in January 1938 (Gill 2001, 186–245). Unable to realize a more ambitious plan to found a modern art museum under the directorship of art historian Herbert Read in London, however, she closed her gallery in July 1939. After her return to Paris in 1939, she further considered pursuing the idea of founding a modern art museum and even rented a place in April 1940 (Rylands 2004, 22). Yet, it was soon dropped following Germany’s invasion of France. In July 1941, Guggenheim returned to the US after 20 years of absence. Having fled Nazi-occupied France she opened Art of this Century Kiesler’s Imaging Exile in Guggenheim’s Art of this Century Gallery 123 This content downloaded from 67.83.7.91 on Sat, 09 Jan 2021 17:10:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms feeling a social responsibility in her endeavor. In a press release for the opening of her gallery she explained its aims: Opening this Gallery and its collection to the public during a time when people are fighting for their lives and freedom is a responsibility of which I am fully conscious. This undertaking will serve its purpose only if it succeeds in serving the future instead of recording the past. (Peggy Guggenheim & Frederick Kiesler 2004, 179) Guggenheim’s Art of this Century would showcase a new exhibition model designed by Austrian Jewish émigré designer Frederick Kiesler. As this essay will explore, Kiesler’s avant-gardist strategy in the gallery would be to “un-key” viewers’ perception by challenging their expectations regarding modes of interaction with artworks, dismissing their need to orient themselves within a given space and questioning fixed notions of “place” and “time”. Kiesler experimented with what Austrian émigré art historian to Britain Ernst Gombrich would later observe regarding visual perception, that “we respond differently when we are ‘keyed up’ by expectation, by need, and by cultural habitation” (Gombrich 1987, 304). Gombrich would suggest in his book Art and Illusion (originally published in 1959) that viewers’ perception of an artwork is a construction according to contextual expectations (ibid., 304f.). In order to disrupt viewers’ projection of a hypothesis proper to the situation at hand (Gombrich’s “schema”), Kiesler, independent of his fellow Viennese’s later theoretical work, deliberately disrupted the viewer’s contextual expectation, which would have guided the projection of a given (rationally justified or emotionally loaded) image in the process of reading the artwork (ibid, 231). Kiesler did so by displaying artworks as ‘exiled bodies’. He would stage artworks and visitors in such a way as to make them participants in a tableau vivant as though they were a group of exiles. Transforming two tailor shops Guggenheim had rented on 57th Street into a ‘living performance’ space Kiesler set artworks as part of the stage set, yet both the artworks and visitors were meant to participate in this grafted cultural action scheme as ‘actors’. Visitors could engage with and handle the artworks, granting them new meanings by participating in a constructed artistic unity (Guggenheim 1960, 100; Rosenbaum 2017, 14). It is suggested that through this Kiesler imaged the frightening experience of ‘exile’ – the state of being expelled or barred from one’s native country or home – as a new ‘cultural construction’ that would be critical to the understanding of contemporary European and American art. He grafted this 124 Elana Shapira This content downloaded from 67.83.7.91 on Sat, 09 Jan 2021 17:10:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ‘exile’ template onto his exhibition display using a Surrealist language, while also turning it into a Gesamtkunstwerk (Total-Art-Work). It was a space that projected ‘exile’ on many levels – also mirroring the contemporary interrelations within New York’s bohemian society, offering exiled (‘displaced’) European artists and local (‘placed’) American artists/visitors a cultural platform for a shared future. In this way, Kiesler envisaged and realized a new and radical perceptual experience of contemporary art. He set the stage for complicating what Gombrich noted, that perceiving art from the standpoint of experience is identical with observing differences, relationships, organizations and meanings (Gombrich 1987, 218). Furthermore, what is being stressed here is that Kiesler was participating integrally in creative dialogues occurring in parallel within émigré and American artistic networks and that these discourses would be critical to his career in the US. In her essay “Concerning Exile Art in the US”, art historian Sabine Eckmann argued that the mid-20th-century “art world that the exiles needed to develop was an international one, focused on gaining support for European modernism and its complicated aesthetic languages” (Eckmann 2011, 444). Guggenheim’s achievement through the opening of Art of this Century, furthermore, was not only introducing European exiled artists to the public discourse but forging “aesthetic relations between the younger American artists such as Jackson Pollock and European surrealists like Max Ernst” (ibid., 445). It was the inspired dialogue between Guggenheim and Kiesler and their artistic networks of lovers of art and artists that successfully achieved this mission. The question arises how Kiesler envisaged this new community in this gallery. How did his own network contribute to his exhibition design? This essay further introduces the involvement of Americans art dealer Howard Putzel, art collector and patron Sidney Janis and gallerist Julien Levy, yet focuses on the close artistic exchange with the French exiled gentile artist Marcel Duchamp. All four would contribute creative input to Kiesler’s design for Art of this Century in New York City’s 57th Street. Émigré designer Kiesler as a creative translator Kiesler succeeded in reworking his dialogues with different artistic producers/art dealers, combining these with his impressions of the commercial and museum scenes, and translating a European Surrealist artistic language into a novel American exhibition design language – which is defined here as a chosen form of shared communication. In the early 1930s, aware of the rise of fascism in Germany and Austria and sensing that his visionary ideas may have more chances of realization in the US than in Europe, Kiesler decided to remain in the US. In December Kiesler’s Imaging Exile in Guggenheim’s Art of this Century Gallery 125 This content downloaded from 67.83.7.91 on Sat, 09 Jan 2021 17:10:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 1936, he received American citizenship (Friedrich Kiesler: Life Visions 2016, 196).1 Nevertheless, he followed political events in Austria, informed by Austrian visitors, émigrés and refugees with whom he regularly met, and was aware of the persecution of Jews specifically after the Anschluss of Austria to Nazi Germany in March 1938. Furthermore, through letters he and his wife Stefi Kiesler received from his nephew Walter (for example from Bologna, Italy: Kiesler/Walter 1940), he was aware that his closer family was in danger.