On her book Four Metaphors of Modernism: From Der Sturm to the Société Anonyme
Cover Interview of May 20, 2018
In a nutshell
Four Metaphors of Modernism follows artists, who
participated in the German organization Der Sturm (the storm) and the American organization
Société Anonyme (anonymous society), and who found inspiration in metaphor. Beginning
with Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm (the journal, gallery, performance
venue, press, theater, bookstore, and art school in Berlin, 1910-1932), I trace
Walden’s aesthetic and intellectual roots to the composer Franz Liszt and the
philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche—forbears who led him to embrace a literal and
figurative mixing of the arts. Then I follow many artists across the Atlantic
to Marcel Duchamp and Katherine Dreier’s Société Anonyme in New York (1920-50),
for it is a little-known fact that the founders of the Société Anonyme based
their organization’s practices on those of Der Sturm.
The book is a chronological excavation of the histories of
these intertwined arts organizations and at the same time an exploration of the
metaphors central to their creative output. Each chapter considers one of four
metaphors—piano, water, glass, and home—as it evolves at Der Sturm and then at the
Société Anonyme. Each of the chapters retells the history of the organizations
from the perspective of a different metaphor. They can be read in any order,
although piano came to prominence first, followed by water, etc.
More specifically, we learn in “Piano” that Walden’s
earliest piano compositions, written for the poet Else Lasker-Schüler,
demonstrate his penchant for an aesthetics of empathy and response. Walden
admired the painter Wassily Kandinsky, who himself wrote about artistic
communication with the extended metaphor of the piano. Marcel Duchamp and
Katherine Dreier used the piano to mediate and problematize relationships.
“Water” features Alfred Döblin’s Conversations with
Calypso, a foundational aesthetic of Der Sturm, in which music is likened
to water. Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter, Kurt Schwitters, Duchamp, and Elsa von
Freytag-Loringhoven reveal their joy and ambivalence about autonomy and relationship
in their aqueous works in Germany and the United States.
“Glass” reveals that Der Sturm published Paul
Scheerbart’s groundbreaking treatise Glass Architecture and supported
Bruno Taut’s revolutionary Glashaus (glass house). However, neither
project subscribed to modernism’s purported ideal of transparency. Rather, the
metaphorical possibilities of translucent glass inspired Scheerbart,
Taut, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Paul Klee, and László Moholy-Nagy—the latter
two also at the Société Anonyme.
Finally, in “Home” we learn that sociologist Georg Simmel
formulated some ideas about gender, art, and home while lecturing for Walden.
Adolf Loos’s homes shuffled public and private, and the First German Autumn
Salon highlighted Sonia Delaunay’s domestic art in Berlin in 1913. Is it any
wonder that the Société Anonyme’s 1926 Brooklyn exhibition included staged
“rooms” for art? A “Reprise” finds startling and unexpected resonances in the
work of later American modernist Jackson Pollock.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
Four Metaphors of Modernism follows artists, who participated in the German organization Der Sturm (the storm) and the American organization Société Anonyme (anonymous society), and who found inspiration in metaphor. Beginning with Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm (the journal, gallery, performance venue, press, theater, bookstore, and art school in Berlin, 1910-1932), I trace Walden’s aesthetic and intellectual roots to the composer Franz Liszt and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche—forbears who led him to embrace a literal and figurative mixing of the arts. Then I follow many artists across the Atlantic to Marcel Duchamp and Katherine Dreier’s Société Anonyme in New York (1920-50), for it is a little-known fact that the founders of the Société Anonyme based their organization’s practices on those of Der Sturm.
The book is a chronological excavation of the histories of these intertwined arts organizations and at the same time an exploration of the metaphors central to their creative output. Each chapter considers one of four metaphors—piano, water, glass, and home—as it evolves at Der Sturm and then at the Société Anonyme. Each of the chapters retells the history of the organizations from the perspective of a different metaphor. They can be read in any order, although piano came to prominence first, followed by water, etc.
More specifically, we learn in “Piano” that Walden’s earliest piano compositions, written for the poet Else Lasker-Schüler, demonstrate his penchant for an aesthetics of empathy and response. Walden admired the painter Wassily Kandinsky, who himself wrote about artistic communication with the extended metaphor of the piano. Marcel Duchamp and Katherine Dreier used the piano to mediate and problematize relationships.
“Water” features Alfred Döblin’s Conversations with Calypso, a foundational aesthetic of Der Sturm, in which music is likened to water. Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter, Kurt Schwitters, Duchamp, and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven reveal their joy and ambivalence about autonomy and relationship in their aqueous works in Germany and the United States.
“Glass” reveals that Der Sturm published Paul Scheerbart’s groundbreaking treatise Glass Architecture and supported Bruno Taut’s revolutionary Glashaus (glass house). However, neither project subscribed to modernism’s purported ideal of transparency. Rather, the metaphorical possibilities of translucent glass inspired Scheerbart, Taut, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Paul Klee, and László Moholy-Nagy—the latter two also at the Société Anonyme.
Finally, in “Home” we learn that sociologist Georg Simmel formulated some ideas about gender, art, and home while lecturing for Walden. Adolf Loos’s homes shuffled public and private, and the First German Autumn Salon highlighted Sonia Delaunay’s domestic art in Berlin in 1913. Is it any wonder that the Société Anonyme’s 1926 Brooklyn exhibition included staged “rooms” for art? A “Reprise” finds startling and unexpected resonances in the work of later American modernist Jackson Pollock.