Unless otherwise noted, all translations in the book are mine.
1. The Modernist Impulse: Subjectivity, Resistance, Freedom
1. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 75ff.; Friedrich von Schiller, On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime, trans. Julius A. Elias (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966).
2. Note the 1962 introduction by Georg Lukács in his Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1974).
3. “Pictorial perception must be like the repetition, the redoubling, the reproduction of the perception of everyday life. What had to be represented was a quasi-real space where distance could be read, appreciated, deciphered in the way that we ourselves see a landscape. There, we enter a pictorial space where distance does not offer itself to be seen, where depth is no longer an object of perception and where spatial positioning and the distancing of figures are simply given by signs which have no sense or function except inside the picture.” Michel Foucault, Manet and the Object of Painting, trans. Matthew Barr (London: Tate, 2009), 41–42.
4. Peter Gay, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy from Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond (London: Vintage, 2007), 18.
5. Note the fine collection of articles for Die Aktion by its editor Franz Pfemfert, Ich setze diese Zeitschrift wider diese Zeit, ed. Wolfgang Haug (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1985).
6. Stephen Bury, introduction to Breaking the Rules: The Printed Face of the European Avant-Garde, 1900–1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 6ff.
7. Janet Lyon, Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).
8. Note the standard biography by Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Vintage, 1988). A fresh perspective that offers an important look at the gay culture in which Wilde participated is provided by Neil McKenna, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde (New York: Basic Books, 2006).
9. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), 83ff.
10. “There is a similarity between logical empiricism and surrealism that does honor to the latter. It is in total agreement with the modern empirical tendency to eliminate all ‘non-constitutive’ concepts as suspicious atavisms.… Surrealism not only has made the realities of the dreaming individual equal to the perceptions of the waking individual but has ranked them higher. Surrealist paintings are basic protocols about dream experiences. Protocols also constitute the only substance for logical empiricism, on which the entire field rests. If scientific philosophers finally proceed to formally affirm these protocols not only as substance but as something to actually execute, libraries would appear whose every page would convey a surrealistic character.” Max Horkheimer, A Life in Letters: Selected Correspondence, ed. and trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 96–7.
11. Of particular interest are Michael Curtis, Three Against the Republic: Sorel, Barres, Maurras (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2010); and Vincent Sherry, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Note also the unsparing essay by Wyatt Mason, “Uncovering Celine,” New York Review of Books, January 14, 2010, 16ff.
12. Douglas Kellner, “Expressionist Literature and the Dream of the ‘New Man,’” in Passion and Rebellion: The Expressionist Heritage, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas Kellner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 166ff.
13. For a different perspective, which highlights the postmodern assault on the binary distinction between high and popular culture, see Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).
15. Andrew Hewett, Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-garde (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).
16. Max Horkheimer, Dawn and Decline: Notes 1926–1931 and 1950–1969, trans. Michael Shaw (New York: Continuum, 1978), 204.
17. Note the revealing appendix, “Karl Marx, der Tod und die Apokalypse,” in Ernst Bloch, Geist der Utopie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971).
19. Modernist works were to be presented as “as documents illustrating the depths of that decline into which the people had fallen.” In the exhibition, which would serve as “a useful lesson,” “racially impure,” “decadent,” “Jewish,” “pacifistic,” and “bolshevist” artists would be enshrined as a warning. Induced prejudice and genuine curiosity led thousands to attend and hear the poorly played music of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill as they looked at the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky, Oskar Kokoschka, Paul Klee, and their modernist comrades. Indispensable is the translation of the brief 1937 catalogue Hitler’s Degenerate Art, ed. Joachim von Halasz (London: Foxly Books, 2008). Also see the excellent study by Reinhard Merker, Die bildenden Kuenste im Nationalsozialismus: Kulturideologie, Kulturpolitik, Kulturproduktion (Koln: DuMont, 1983), 163ff.
20. Bury, Breaking the Rules, 13.
21. “I will try to distinguish the essay as sharply as possible in order, that I might thereby depict it as a form of art.” Georg von Lukács, “Ueber Wesen und Form des Essays,” in Die Seelen und die Formen (Berlin: Luchterhand, 1971), 8.
22. Of particular interest is Ambroise Vollard, Recollections of a Picture Dealer, trans. Violet M. MacDonald (New York: Dover, 1936).
23. It was as if “a space had to be kept between painting and representing: the two procedures must never quite mesh, they were not to be seen as part and parcel of each other. That was because (the logic here was central to the modernist case) the normal habits of representation must not be given a chance to function; they must somehow or other be outlawed. The established equivalents in paint—between that color and that shadow or that kind of line and that kind of undergrowth—are always false.… So painting put equivalence at a distance.” T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 20–21.
24. T. W. Adorno, “Versuch das Endspiel zu verstehen” in Noten zur Literatur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1961) 2:188ff.
25. André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), p. 47.
26. Yvan Goll, “Two Superdramas,” in An Anthology of Expressionist Drama, ed. Walter H. Sokel (New York: Bantam, 1963), 9.
27. H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930 (New York: Vintage, 1958), 118.
28. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberiam (Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books, 1990).
3. Experiencing Modernism: A Short History of Expressionist Painting
1. Note the fine survey by Dietmar Elgar, Expressionism: A Revolution in German Art (New York: Taschen, 2007); and the indispensable German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism, ed Rose Carol Washton Long (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
2. Jean-Michel Palmier, L’Expressionnisme comme révolte (Paris: Payot, 1978), 184ff.
3. This theme is developed in the exhibition catalog Expressionism: A German Intuition, 1905–1920 (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1980).
4. Note the classic study by Bernard S. Myers, The German Expressionists: A Generation in Revolt (New York, 1966), 40.
5. Barbara Drygulski Wright, “Sublime Ambition: Art, Politics, and Ethical Idealism in the Cultural Journals of German Expressionism,” in Passion and Rebellion: The Expressionist Heritage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 82ff.
6. Note the important work by David Pan, Primitive Renaissance: Rethinking German Expressionism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001).
7. With his integration of multiple styles, his use of animals to transfigure nature, his anticipations of conflagration, his daring use of color and plane, and the immediacy of his depictions and the simple joy they produce, Marc is among the most important—and undervalued—figures of modern art. See Frederick S. Levine, The Apocalyptic Vision: The Art of Franz Marc as German Expressionism (London: Icon, 1979).
8. Richard Hamann and Johst Hermand, Expressionismus (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1977), 69.
10. Palmier, Expressionnisme en révolte, 172ff.
11. Peter Paret, The Berlin Secession: Modernism and Its Enemies in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1980), 200ff.
12. Peter Selz, German Expressionist Painting (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 53ff.
13. Peter Vergo, Art in Vienna, 1898–1918: Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele and Their Contemporaries (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 199.
14. Quoted in Hans Fehr, Emil Nolde: Ein Buch der Freundschaft (Munich: Paul List Verlag, 1960), 62.
15. Frances Carey and Antony Griffiths, The Print in Germany, 1880–1933 (London: British Museum, 1984), 18.
16. Herman Bahr, Expressionismus (Muenchen: Piper Verlag, 1918).
17. John Willett, Art and Politics in the Weimar Period: The New Sobriety, 1917–1923 (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 72ff and 95ff.
18. Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Harper and Row, 1968).
19. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), 59.
20. Willett, Art and Politics in the Weimar Period, 95ff.
21. Steve Plumb, Neue Sachlichkeit, 1918–1933: Unity and Diversity of An Art Movement (New York: Rodipi, 2006). See also Margot Morgan, “The Decline of Political Theater in Twentieth-Century Europe: Shaw, Brecht, Sartre, and Ionesco Compared” (PhD dissertation, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J., 2010), 69–83.
22. George Grosz, Ecce Homo (New York: Dover, 1976).
23. Eckhard Siepmann, Montage: John Heartfield: Vom Club Dada zur Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (Berlin: Elefanten Verlag, 1977).
4. The Modernist Spirit: On the Correspondence Between Arnold Schoenberg and Wassily Kandinsky
1. Arnold Schoenberg and Wassily Kandinsky, Letters, Pictures and Documents, ed. Jelena Hahl-Koch and trans. John C. Crawford (London: Faber and Faber, 1984). Note also the work deriving from an exhibit by the two men at the Jewish Museum in New York: Fred Wasserman, Schoenberg, Kandinsky, and the Blue Rider (New York: Scala, 2007).
2. Alma Mahler-Werfel, Mein Leben (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1963), 145 and passim.
3. Note the letter by Schoenberg written on April 9, 1923, and the poignant response by Kandinsky five days later, along with the draft of yet another letter by Schoenberg on May 4, 1923 in Schoenberg and Kandinsky, Letters, Pictures and Documents.
4. Henry A. Lea, “Musical Expressionism in Vienna,” in Passion and Rebellion: The Expressionist Heritage, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas Kellner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 315ff.
5. Note the sketch and description by B. F. Dolbin and Willy Haas, Gesicht einer Epoche (Munich: Bertelsmann, n/d), 125ff. See also Marc A. Weiner, “Hans Pfitzner and the Anxiety of Nostalgic Modernism,” in Legacies of Modernism: Art and Politics in Northern Europe, 1890–1950, ed. Patrizia C. McBride (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 17ff.
6. Paul Hofmann, The Viennese: Splendor, Twilight, and Exile (Anchor: New York, 1988), 8, 138ff.
7. Peter Selz, German Expressionist Painting (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 185ff.
9. Jelena Hahl-Koch, “Kandinsky and Schoenberg,” in Schoenberg and Kandinsky, Letters, Pictures, Documents, 148.
10. Schoenberg and Kandinsky, Letters, Pictures and Documents, 23.
12. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), 3:1090.
13. Schoenberg and Kandinsky, Letters, Pictures and Documents, 35.
14. Theodor W. Adorno, “Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951),” in Prismen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1955), 181.
15. Quoted in “Die ‘Philosophie’ von Klimt und der Protest der Professoren,” in Die Wiener Moderne: Literatur, Kunst, und Musik zwischen 1890 und 1910, ed. Gotthart Wunberg (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981), 522. The article concerned the 1894 protest by a number of reactionary professors on allowing three nudes by Klimt to adorn the ceiling of a university building. Note the discussion by Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Vintage: New York, 1981), 225ff.
16. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 330.
17. Schoenberg and Kandinsky, Letters, Pictures and Documents, 27.
20. Thomas Mann, The Genesis of a Novel, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (London: Secker and Warburg, 1961), 40.
21. Note the fine discussion by John Bokina, Opera and Politics: From Monteverdi to Henze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 155ff.
22. Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New: The Hundred-Year History of Modern Art; Its Rise, Its Dazzling Achievement, Its Fall (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980), 202.
23. Meyer Schapiro, “Nature of Abstract Art,” in Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries; Selected Papers (New York: Braziller, 1978), 201.
24. Hahl-Koch, “Kandinsky and Schoenberg,” 142.
25. Schoenberg and Kandinsky, Letters, Pictures and Documents, 21.
26. Apollinaire once said of Kandinsky that “the only thing he obeys is chance.” Guillaume Apollinaire, “The Opening,” in Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews, 1902–1918, ed. Leroy C. Breunig and trans. Susan Suleiman (New York: MFA Publications, 1972),214.
27. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 327.
28. Adorno, “Arnold Schoenberg,” 187; Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 361.
29. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 351.
30. Schapiro, “Nature of Abstract Art,” 210.
31. Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Dee, 1973), 250ff.
32. Kandinsky, “Commentaries on Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony,” in Letters, Pictures, Documents, 131.
33. Janik and Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna, 106–7.
34. Kandinsky, “Commentaries on Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony,” 131.
5. Modernism in Motion: F.T. Marinetti and Futurism
1. All quotations are from the anthology Marinetti: Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint, trans. T. W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971). See also the excellent new collection by Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, eds., Futurism: An Anthology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
6. Ecstatic Modernism: The Paintings of Emil Nolde
1. Martin Gosebruch, ed., Nolde: Watercolors and Drawings, trans. E. M. Kustner and J. A. Underwood (New York: Praeger, 1973), 7.
2. “There is no doubt, however, that Nolde’s contempt for rationality contributed subliminally to the popularity of his pictures. His appeal to the instincts has become a threat to his art. For one would misunderstand the work itself if one were to take it only as the testimony of a blind, eruptive painter.” Emil Nolde, Gemälde aus dem Bestlz von Frau Jolanthe Nolde, text by Jens C. Jensen (Heidelberg: Kurpfälzisches Museum, 1969), 12.
3. Paul Klee described Nolde as an “elemental spirit” and a creature of the “lower regions” in his contribution to Rudolph Prosbt and others, Festschrift für Emil Nolde: Anlässlich seines 60 Geburtstages (Dresden: Neue Kunst Fides Verlag, 1927).
4. Peter Selz, German Expressionist Painting (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 124.
5. Thus Alfred Hentzen asserts that, “certainly, the significance of a work of art is absolute and independent of the circumstances under which it was created.” Alfred Hentzen and Martin Urban, Unpainted Pictures: Emil Nolde, 1867–1950 (New York, Knoedler, 1966).
6. Peter Gay, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy from Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond (London: Vintage, 2007), 424.
7. Quoted in Hans Fehr, Emil Nolde: Ein Buch der Freundschaft (München: Paul List Verlag, 1960),54.
8. On the conflict over French influence and the call for a new German art, see Peter Paret, The Berlin Succession: Modernism and Its Enemies in Imperial Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980),156ff.
9. Emil Nolde, Das eigene Leben: Die Zeit der Jugend, 1867–1902 (Flensburg:Verlagshaus Christian Wolff, 1949), pg. 44.
10. “Idealism and materialism face each other like opposite poles of a magnet, attracting and repelling each other.” Nolde, Jahre der Kämpfe (Berlin: Rembrandt Verlag, 1934), 124.
11. Emil Nolde, Briefe aus den Jahren, 1894–1926, ed. Max Sauerlandt (Berlin: Rembrandt Verlag, 1927), 35.
12. “Instinct is ten times more important than knowledge.” Nolde, Das eigene Leben, 200.
13. Rudolf Probst, introduction to Festschrift für Emil Nolde, 16.
14. “This early watercolor is also important in determining Nolde’s place in the history of European art. Werner Haftmann’s repeated assertion in his Painting in the Twentieth Century that Nolde’s style did not crystallize until around 1905, when he came into contact with French Post-Impressionism, is true enough as regards execution or realization—that ‘working himself up’ to his true level of which we have been speaking—but it is certainly not of the essentials of his painting, which were anticipated in the Sunrise watercolor long before Nolde had any knowledge of the achievements of the Post-Impressionists.” Gosebruch, Nolde, 18.
15. “I walked around in the city, a stranger, with blue-black glasses, and often could hardly find the streets. Life seemed as if lost to me.” Nolde, Das eigene Leben, 270.
16. On Kaiser Wilhelm II’s birthday celebration Nolde wrote, “Once again I’m walking around here: everything is repugnant to me. This metropolis—no one is close to my heart, I’m more lonely than ever before. These straight, long, fog-choked streets—I don’t like being here.” Nolde, Briefe aus den Jahren, 38.
17. Probst, Festschrift für Emil Nolde, 12.
18. Quoted in Fehr, Emil Nolde, 62.
19. Nolde, Briefe aus den Jahren,99.
21. Emil Nolde, Welt und Heimat: Die Südseereise, 1913–1918 (Köln: Dumont, 2002).
22. Nolde, Das eigene Leben, 197.
23. Nolde, Briefe aus den Jahren, 98.
24. Nolde, Das eigene Leben, 199.
25. Nolde, Jahre der Kämpfe, 90ff.
26. Werner Haftmann, Emil Nolde (New York, 1959). 4.
27. Max Sauerlandt, Emil Nolde (Munich, 1921), 58.
28. Oskar Schlemmer, entry for September 19, 1935, in The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer, ed. Tut Schlemmer and trans. Krishna Winston (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1972), 341.
29. “Psychic and natural forces that the Germanic middle ages drove from [their] sanctuary and banished outside, as chimeras and grotesques on roof ridges and towers, fill this world as if there had never been a Cross. Not until Emil Nolde does German art take possession of its Germanic/nordic heritage, a great hope of the earth, nipped in the bud more than a thousand years ago and buried under Christian-oriental and antique material. Christian piety here—humanism, classicism, Weimar and the Greek spirit there—between both poles glides the German, passionately grasping, turning abruptly back and forth in fulfillments that ebb away, because his own history prevents him from taking possession of a sunken heritage.” Heinrich Zimmer, Festschrift für Emil Nolde, 35.
30. In that letter to Joseph Goebbels, Nolde wrote the following: “When National Socialism also labeled me and my art ‘degenerate’ and ‘decadent,’ I felt this to be a profound misunderstanding because it is just not so. My art is German, strong, austere, and sincere.” Nolde to Goebbels, Voices of German Expressionism, ed. Victor Meisel (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 209.
7. Modernism, Surrealism, and the Political Imaginary
1. Note the excellent survey by Mary Ann Caws, Surrealism (London: Phaidon, 2010); and the standard work by Maurice Nadeau, A History of Surrealism, trans. Richard Howard (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).
2. André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Lane and Helen Seaver (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), and What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings, ed. Franklin Rosemont (New York: Pathfinder, 1978).
3. Note the listing of authors according to the criterion of “Read … Don’t Read” in André Breton, “The First Dalí Exhibition,” in What Is Surrealism? 46.
4. Lenin highlighted the primacy of consciousness in revolutionary theory and thereby legitimated carrying through the proletarian revolution in Russia under conditions of economic underdevelopment with his famous claim that “intelligent idealism is closer to intelligent materialism than stupid materialism.” Lenin, “Philosophical Notebooks,” in Collected Works (Moscow: International Publishers, 1961), 38:276.
5. William S. Rubin, Dada and Surrealist Art (New York: Abrams, 1968), 64.
6. “My ‘politics’ is only concerned with the ‘spiritual’ [Geistigen] and, in Germany, it’s useless to upset oneself.” Hugo Ball, Briefe, 1911–1927 (Zurich: Bensinger Verlag, 1957), 41.
7. Julius Braunthal, History of the International (New York: Praeger, 1967) 2:36ff.
8. Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism,” in Reflections: Aphorisms, Essays, and Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz and trans. E. Jephcott (New York: Harcourt, 1978). Also note the fine discussion by Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 126ff.
9. “The immoderation of the Surrealists attracted [Benjamin] more profoundly than the studied pretentiousness of literary Expressionism, in which he discerned elements of insincerity and bluff.… Benjamin was not an ecstatic, but the ecstasies of revolutionary utopias and the surrealistic immersion in the unconscious were to him, so to speak, keys for the opening of his own world for which he was seeking altogether different, strict, and disciplined forms of expression.” Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1981), 135.
10. Breton, “The Automatic Message,” in What Is Surrealism? 101.
11. “An appeal to automatism in all its forms is our only chance of resolving, outside the economic plane, all the antinomies which, since they existed before our present social regime was formed, are not likely to disappear with it. … [These] are the contradictions of being awake and sleeping (of reality and dream), of reason and madness, of objectivity and subjectivity, of perception and representation, of past and future, of the collective sense and individual love; even of life and death.” Breton, “Limits Not Frontiers of Surrealism,” in What Is Surrealism? 155.
12. Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, 47.
13. For some interesting reflections, see Herbert Marcuse, “Letters to the Chicago Surrealists,” in Arsenal 4 (1989): 31–47.
14. Breton, “Interview with ‘View’ Magazine,” in What Is Surrealism? 203–4.
15. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the “Phenomenology of Spirit,” ed. Allan Bloom and trans. James H. Nichols Jr. (New York: Basic Books, 1969).
16. Breton, “What Is Surrealism?” in What Is Surrealism? 129.
17. Stephen Eric Bronner, “Sketching the Lineage: The Critical Method and the Idealist Tradition,” in Of Critical Theory and Its Theorists, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002), 16ff, 21ff.
18. Breton, “What Is Surrealism?” 130; italics added.
19. Surrealism in “its very definition holds that it must escape, in its written manifestation, or any others, from all control exercised by reason.” Ibid., 128.
20. Herbert Read, “Surrealism and the Romantic Principle,” in The Philosophy of Modern Art (New York: Meridian Books, 1955), 110ff.
21. Theodor W. Adorno, “Looking Back on Surrealism” in Notes to Literature, 2 vols., trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 88.
22. Breton, “What Is Surrealism?” in What Is Surrealism? 125.
23. Breton, “On Proletarian Literature,” in What Is Surrealism? 89ff.
24. See Breton’s beautiful “Visit with Leon Trotsky” in What Is Surrealism? 173ff.
26. Breton, “Declaration on the Second Moscow Trial,” in What Is Surrealism? 168ff.
27. Note Breton’s “Speech to Young Haitian Poets,” which inflamed the intellectuals of that impoverished country in 1945 and sparked a successful uprising against a dictatorial regime. What Is Surrealism? 258ff.
28. “But the painting quickly became legendary and has remained legendary. It is the most famous painting of the twentieth century. It is thought of as a continuous protest against the brutality of fascism in particular and modern war in general. How true is this? How much applies to the actual painting and how much is the result of what happened after it was painted?” John Berger, Success and Failure of Picasso (Penguin: Baltimore, 1965), 165ff.
29. Sara Cochran, “Spellbound,” in Dalí and Film, ed. Matthew Gale (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008), 174ff.
30. Fixing a call for radical forms of worker democracy with a critique of “total consumption” and the prefabrication of experience through the “spectacle” of commodity culture, the situationists were a blend of vanguard and avant-garde who sought to bring the revolution into everyday life by staging what might be termed counterspectacles and deconstructing the givenness of our perceptions. Their most famous representative, who became something of a cult figure in the 1960s, was Guy DeBord. See his book The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Fredy Perlman and John Supak (Chicago: Black and Red, 1983).
31. “None of the painters ever took the trouble to study the writings of Marx and Lenin whose names on occasion they evoked. Even Modigliani, whose brother was an outstanding leader of the Italian Socialists, knew nothing of the literature of Marxism. Mastering political and economic treatises was not their métier. All that Diego [Rivera] ever knew of Marx’s writings or of Lenin’s, as I had ample occasion to verify, was a little handful of commonplace slogans which had attained wide currency.” Bertram D. Wolfe, The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera (New York: Stein and Day, 1969), 419.
33. Luis Martin Luzano and Juan Coronel Rivera, Diego Rivera: The Complete Murals (New York: Taschen, 2008).
8. Modernism Changes the World: The Russian Avant-Garde and the Revolution
1. Stephen Eric Bronner, “In the Cradle of Modernity: The Labor Movement and the First World War,” in Moments of Decision: Political History and the Crises of Radicalism (New York: Routledge, 1992), 13ff.
2. Quoted in Augustin Souchy, Erich Mühsam: Sein Leben, Sein Werk, Sein Martyrium (Karlsruhe, 1984), 43–44. Also see the relevant sections in Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 1901–1941, trans. Peter Sedgwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963).
3. Antonio Gramsci, “The Revolution against ‘Capital,’” in Selections from Political Writings, 1910–1920, ed. Quintin Hoare and trans. John Matthews (New York: International Publishers, 1977), 34ff.
4. Franz Pfemfert, “That is Bolshevism,” quoted in Helmut Hirsch, Experiment in Demokratie: Die Geschichte der Weimarer Republik (Wuppertal: Peter Hammer Verlag, 1972), 38.
5. John Willett, Art and Politics in the Weimar Period: The New Sobriety, 1917–1933 (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 40.
6. Note the outstanding study by Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art, 1863–1922 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1962), 93ff and 143ff; and the classic work by Vladimir Markhov, Russian Futurism: A History (Washington, D.C.: New Academia, 2006). Also see Anna Lawton, ed., Words in Revolution: Russian Futurist Manifestoes, 1912–1928 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).
7. Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, trans. Rose Strunsky (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1971),256.
9. Note again the excellent discussion in Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art, 226ff.
10. Boris Nikolaevsky, “Letter of an Old Bolshevik,” in Power and the Soviet Elite: “The Letter of an Old Bolshevik” and Other Essays, ed. Janet D. Zagoria (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1975).
11. The difference is illustrated starkly through the characters of the Bolshevik Ivanov and the apparatchik Gletkin in what remains a seminal novel by Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon (New York: Bantam, 1969).
12. Tony Judt, The Burden of Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 80.
13. The tragic dimensions of this drama of communist lies and internecine murder is wonderfully portrayed in one of the greatest and least recognized novels of the twentieth century, Manès Sperber’s Wie eine Träne im Ozean (Munich: DTV Verlag, 1980).
9. Modernists in Power: The Literati and the Bavarian Revolution
1. Note the seminal work by Pierre Broué, The German Revolution, 1917–1923, ed. Ian Birchall and Brian Pearce, and trans. John Archer (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005).
2. F. L. Carsten, Revolution in Central Europe, 1918–1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 263.
3. Note the excellent study by Bernard Grau, Kurt Eisner: Eine Biographie (München: Beck, 2001).
4. Kurt Eisner, Sozialismus als Aktion: Ausgewählte Aufsätze und Reden, ed. Freya Eisner (Frankfrut: Suhrkamp, 1979).
5. Stephen Eric Bronner, “Working Class Politics and the Nazi Triumph,” in Moments of Decision: Political Crises in the Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 1992), 35ff.
6. The standard biography is by Eugene Lunn, Prophet of Community: The Romantic Socialism of Gustav Landauer (Chicago: Charles Kerr, 1973). Landauer’s most important writings are connected in Revolution and Other Writings: A Political Reader, ed. Gabriel Kuhn (Oakland, Calif.: PM Press, 2010).
7. Marta Feuchtwanger, Nur eine Frau (München: Knaur, 1984), 133.
8. Augustin Souchy, Erich Mühsam: Sein Leben, Sein Werk, Sein Martyrium (Reutlingen: Trotzdem Verlag, 1984), 10.
9. Erich Mühsam, Unpolitische Erinnerungen (Berlin: Aufbau, 2003).
10. Max Nomad, Dreamers, Dynamiters, and Demagogues: Reminiscences (New York: Waldon, 1964), 16ff.
11. Henry Pachter, “Erich Mühsam (1878–1934): A Centenary Note,” in Weimar Études (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 252.
12. A beautiful portrait of Erich Mühsam is provided by Erika and Klaus Mann, Escape to Life: Deutsche Kultur im Exil (Reinbeck: Rowohlt, 1996), 33ff.
13. Quoted in Charles Bracelen Flood, Hitler: The Path to Power (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), 4.
14. Rosa Leviné-Meyer, Levine the Spartacist (London: Gordon and Cremonesi, 1973), 6ff.
15. “It has often been asked in communist literature why the party let itself be forced into a policy that from the onset it judged disastrous. Very simply, the communists could not resist the drive of the Munich workers who, irritated after the garrison coup, wanted to defend Munich.” Ruth Fischer, Stalin and German Communism: A Study in the Origins of the State Party (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2006), 105.
10. Exhibiting Modernism: Paris and Berlin, 1900–1933
1. Paris and Berlin, 1900–1933 exhibition catalog (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1978)
2. Michel Foucault, interview, Der Spiegel, October 20, 1978.
11. The Modernist Adventure: Political Reflections on a Cultural Legacy
1. Erika and Klaus Mann, Escape to Life: Deutsche Kultur im Exil (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1996).
2. “No. There was no exile-literature in the sense of a genuinely vocal movement. Each author stood alone, found his own contacts, while looking with a particular penchant to the past.” Georg Stefan Troller, “Sprache und Emigration: Vom Überleben der deutschen Künstler in erzwungenen Fremde,” in Lettre International 87 (Winter 2009): 95.
3. Eduardo Subirats, “Kritik der Avantgarde: Die Beseitigung und die Wiedereroberung der Autonomie der Kunst,” in Lettre International 85 (Summer 2009): 65.
4. See Stephen Eric Bronner, “In the Shadow of the Resistance: Albert Camus and the Paris Intellectuals,” and, for an analysis of the context, “The Sickness Unto Death: International Communism Before the Deluge,” in Imagining the Possible: Radical Politics for Conservative Times (New York: Routledge, 2002).
5. Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010).
6. Note the fine discussion by Annie Cohen-Solal, Painting American: The Rise of American Artists, Paris 1867–New York 1948 (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2000).
7. It is worth noting that American techniques of mass production and mass consumption were exported to Europe with remarkable effect in the aftermath of World War I. See Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance Through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006).
8. Irving Sandler has provided a thorough study in Abstract Expressionism and the American Experience (Manchester, Vt.: Hudson Hills, 2009). See also Dore Ashton, The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). A fine compilation of writings and statements by the major artists is provided in Ellen G. Landau, ed., Reading Abstract Expressionism: Context and Critique (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).
9. Note the interesting documentary American Road, directed by Kurt Jacobsen and Warren Leming (Chicago: Cold Chicago Productions, 2010).
10. Eliot Katz, “Radical Eyes: Political Poetics and ‘Howl,’” in The Poem That Changed America: “Howl” Fifty Years Later, ed. Jason Shinder (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 183–211.
11. Peter Brooker, Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces (New York: Routledge, 2005); Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, eds., Geomodernisms (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); and Vinay Dharwadker, ed., Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2000).
12. Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
13. Meyer Schapiro, “The Introduction of Modern Art in America: The Armory Show,” in Modern Art, 19th and 20th Centuries: Selected Papers (New York: Braziller, 1978), 136–7.
15. Schapiro, “Recent Abstract Painting,” in Modern Art, 19th and 20th Centuries, 232.
16. T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methune, 1920).
17. Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: New Left, 1973), 85ff.
18. Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz Jr. with Dirk Baecker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
19. “It is certain that modern music is shattering forms, breaking away from conventions, carving its own road. But exactly to whom does it speak of liberation, freedom, will, of the creation of man by man—to a stale and genteel listener whose ears are blocked by an idealist aesthetic. Music says ‘permanent revolution’ and the bourgeoisie hear ‘Evolution, progress.’ And even if, among the young intellectuals, a few understand it, won’t their present impotence make them see this liberation as a beautiful myth, instead of their own reality.… The artist has no language which permits them to hear him. He is speaking of their freedom—since there is only one freedom—but speaking of it in a foreign tongue.” Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Artist and His Conscience,” in Situations, trans. Benita Eisler (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1965), 145.
20. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). See also the economistic yet provocative work by Ralph Sassower, The Golden Avant-Garde: Idolatry, Commercialism, and Art (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006).
21. “We need to go back and try to understand what [modernists] were up to as writers, not dismiss them as reactionaries or misogynists, or adulate them as gay or feminist icons.” Gabriel Josipovich, What Ever Happened to Modernism? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 177.
22. The impact of music on the political struggle of African-Americans—or at least on the sensibilities generating and underlying that struggle—is an important theme. Consider the discussions of a “blues people” by Cornel West in Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism (New York: Penguin, 2005); and see also Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Vintage, 1999).
23. Seth Taylor, Left-Wing Nietzscheans: The Politics of German Expressionism, 1910–1920 (New York: de Gruyter, 1990).
24. See the touching yet cynical poem by Bertolt Brecht about Karl Korsch, his ultra-left teacher in Marxism, “Über meinen Lehrer,” in Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1967) 10:65ff.
25. Stephen Eric Bronner, “Postmodernism and Poststructuralism: Deconstruction, Desire, Difference,” in Ideas in Action: Political Tradition in the Twentieth Century (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 187ff.
26. Tony Judt, “Words,” in New York Review of Books, July 15, 2010, 4.
27. Socialist realism was introduced in 1934 by Andrei Zhdanov in his “Rede auf dem 1. Unionskongress der Sowjetschriftsteller” in Marxismus und Literatur: Eine Documentation in Drei Bänden (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1969) 1:347ff. See also the famous critique by the former Soviet dissident Abram Tertz [Andrei Sinyavsky], The Trial Begins/On Socialist Realism (New York: Doubleday, 1960).
28. Thomas Mann, The Genesis of a Novel, trans. Ralph and Clara Winston (London: Secker and Warburg, 1961),115.
29. André Malraux, The Voices of Silence, trans. Stuart Gilbert (London: Secker and Warburg, 1953).
30. Bronner, Ideas in Action, 26ff.
31. Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
32. Frederic Spotts, The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
