National Socialism - Art Blart

2/19/2018 National Socialism | Art Blart
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06
Jan
17
Exhibition: ‘Soulèvements / Uprisings’ at Jeu de Paume, Paris
By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment
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capital, The Barricade of the Rue Saint-Maur-Popincourt, The Charge, the children of Argentina, the
critical eye of the artist, The Dancer Jo Mihaly, the Final Solution, The flags, the foreseeability of
history, The Habés, The Habés send a parliamentarian to make their submission to Major Pognio, The
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prisoner, The nature of things #024, the oppressed, The Route, the space within, the spatio-
temporality of photographs, the spatio-temporality of photography, the turbulent infinity, The wave
or My destiny, The Women Soldiers, Thibault, Thibault La Barricade de la rue Saint-Maur-
Popincourt, Thibault The Barricade of the Rue Saint-Maur-Popincourt, Three Glorious Days, Through
desires (fragments on what raises us), Tiananmen, Tiananmen massacre, Tiananmen Square, tina
modo i, Tina Modo i Guitar cartridge belt and sickle, Tina Modo i Guitare cartouchière et faucille,
to cross over borders, Today's Life and War, traces of imprisonment, Tract clandestin, trembling in
images, tricolor flag, Tsubasa Kato, Tsubasa Kato Break it before it's broken, turbulent infinity,
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Uprisings, urban poetry, Use photography as a weapon!,
Utilise la photo comme une arme !, Victor Hugo, Victor Hugo La vague ou Ma destinée, Victor Hugo
Le Pendu, Victor Hugo The hanged man, Victor Hugo The wave or My destiny, Vidéo Hebdo 46,
Voula Papaioannou, Voula Papaioannou Graffiti of prisoners, Voula Papaioannou Graffiti of
prisoners on the walls of the German prison in Merlin Street, Voula Papaioannou Graffitis de
prisonniers, Voula Papaioannou Graffitis de prisonniers sur les murs de la prison allemande de la rue
Merlin à Athènes, Wolf Vostell, Wolf Vostell Dutschke, Women pushed towards the gas chamber of
crematorium V of Birkenau, WORDS (EXCLAIMED), Y aun no se van!
Exhibition dates: 18th October 2016 – 15th January 2017
Curator: Georges Didi-Huberman, philosopher and art historian
soulèvement m (plural soulèvements)
1. the act of raising, the act of lifting up

2. revolt, uprising
I believe this to be one of the most complex, original and important exhibitions of 2016. Conceptually,
intellectually, ethically and artistically, the exhibition “Soulèvements / Uprisings” seems to stand
head and shoulders above most others I posted on during 2016.
Through the profound curatorship of philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman (a man
whose writing I admire), Soulèvements e/merges as a “trans-disciplinary exhibition on the theme of
human gestures that raise up the world or rise up against it: collective or individual gestures, actions
or passions, works or thoughts” actioned through five themes: Elements (Unleashed); Gestures
(Intense); Words (Exclaimed); Conflicts (Flared up); and Desires (Indestructibles), evidenced across
mediums: paintings, drawings, prints, video installations, photographs, fiction films, documentary
images, writers’ manuscripts, tracts, posters, etc., without hierarchies. Unlike the earlier
posting, Intersections: Photographs and Videos from the National Gallery of Art and the Corcoran Gallery of
Art (h ps://artblart.com/2016/12/28/exhibition-intersections-at-the-national-gallery-of-art-
washington/) at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, where I noted that the self-contained themes
of that exhibition seemed purely illusory, here the themes are active and engaging, fluid in meaning
and representation (the choice of laterally aligned art works to the themes – dust breeding, waves, sea
concertos, banners and capes, red tape, montages, posters etc…), which emphasis resistance, the
raising up, the uprising as a desirous and joyful act, one that is performative (hence the wonderful
video elements in the exhibition) and transgressive.
As one of the most important mediums of the twentieth century in terms of documenting, promoting,
obscuring and forge ing “uprisings” – gestures of resistance and joy of any kind – photography is
capable of concealing, denying and sustaining the social context in which we are living … obscuring
the ethics and morals of dubious political positions; reinforcing or obscuring the issues
behind revolution, rebellion, and revolt; or, through collective amnesia and inertia, through the
millions of forge able images produced each day, overwhelming the authenticity of living that leads
to “uprisings” in the first place. Photographs, as people do, cross borders: they are transnational and
multidisciplinary. They are global thought pa erns that can, in skilled hands, document and sustain
alternative ways of seeing the world through a “rising up” of feeling – the “soul” of soulèvement –
the act of raising up, the act of lifting ones eyes and one’s spirit from the dire circumstances of
oblivion to the hope of a future redemption.
Through photographs, we witness Insurgents killed during bloody week of the Commune (1871, below),
where “the exposure of these bodies is transformed by the photographic act. The la er confers on the
rebels a particular aura, passing thus from figures of guilty to those of martyrs.” The political act,
although a failure in reality in this case, is sustained through time and space by the performance of
the documentary image. Their monstration [the act of demonstrating; proof] – the insurgents act of
demonstrating; the photograph as an act of demonstrating their death for judicial purposes; and also
a certain monstration (proof) that these mostly young, skinny men died for a belief in a be er world –
is an evidentiary act of transubstantiation. Is the camera looking down on these bodies in cheap
coffins from above, or are the coffins propped up against a wall? How do we feel about these people
we do not know, who existed in past time now made present, without being that person who tucked
a wreath into the hands of the man at bo om right, someone’s brother, father or son.
In “uprisings” (as the hands raise the camera to the face), there is also an acknowledgment of a certain
despair at the death of an innocent. In Manuel Álvarez Bravo’s Striking worker, assassinated (1934,
below) the young, handsome youth has been killed with a blow to the head. He lies prostrate on the
ground, arm outstretched, hand curled, his body and clothes spa ered with his own blood his eyes,
open, staring at the now invisible sky. A flow of dried blood has discharged from his mouth and nose,
coating and ma ing his thick long hair and running away in rivulets, soaking into the parched
d/earth. Bits of dust and earth are still stuck to his arm through the viscosity of his blood. Earlier, he
had dressed for the day in a white singlet, put on his trousers and fastened them with an embossed
belt, then put on a crisp, stripped shirt and neatly rolled up the sleeves to his elbows. He might have
had breakfast before heading of to a meeting outside where he worked. This day he died, protesting
his rights – striking worker, assassinated! Assassinated – executed, eliminated, liquidated (to which
the congealing blood a ests) … slaughtered. For his right to strike, to protest, the conditions of his
being. Any human “being”.
And, mortally, I comment on that one photograph, that one evidence of human beings transcending
their own lives (knowing they were going to die) for the greater good – the anonymous photograph
taken by members of the Sonderkommando of Auschwi -Birkenau death camp that documents AS
PROOF of the reality of the Final Solution: Women pushed towards the gas chamber of crematorium V of
Birkenau (1944, below). The risks that these people took to capture this photograph speaks to the
power of photography to transcend even the most barbaric of circumstances, to prove to the world
what was happening in this place. As Georges Didi-Huberman affirms, “in the depths of this
fundamental despair, the “solicitation to resist” has probably detached itself from the beings
themselves, who have been promised to disappear, to fix themselves on signals to be emi ed beyond
the boundaries of the camp.” Among others, the image, this “eye of history”, is then invested with the
only hope still possible: to make the hell of Auschwi visible and therefore imaginable.”
In other words, the solicitation to resist is not singular or human, but collective and eternal, embodied
and embedded in cultural thoughts and actions. Even though they knew they were going to die
(almost none of the 2,000 prisoners placed in these Sonderkommando units survived to the camp’s
liberation), because the have been “promised to disappear”, their spirit flowed beyond the boundaries
of the camp into the ether of history, into the elemental upper air, the raising up of spirits: as an
observation and representation of the difference between right and wrong. As the world enters a
renewed period of right wing promulgation we must resist the rump of bigotry and oppression. Not
just for ourselves but for all those that have passed before.
This is why this exhibition is so important. It speaks to the need for vigilance and protest against
discrimination and dictatorship, against the persecution of the less fortunate in society. It also speaks
to our desire as human beings that our actions and the actions of others be held to
account. Intrinsically uprisings are all about desire, the desire to be stand up and be counted, to put
your reputation (as Oscar Wilde did) or your life on the line for what you believe in. The courage of
your convictions. As Edmund Burke said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for
good men to do nothing.”
Dr Marcus Bunyan
.
Addendum
Thank goodness for Google translate because otherwise I would have had no text to put under most
of these images. This becomes problematic for weak images such as Dennis Adams’ Patriot (2002,
below). Without text to support the image you would have absolutely no idea what this image is
about… it’s just a plastic bag floating in the air against the azure sky.
The text states: “… considering the serenity that emanates from the photographs of this series, to
imagine that they refer to a dramatic event: the a ack of the World Trade Center. Located in Lower
Manha an, Dennis Adams’ studio is very close to the twin towers that were destroyed on September
11, 2001. However, rather than rushing to witness the catastrophe, Dennis Adams photographed for
three months the roof of his building, the newspapers and the rubbish that fly away from the ruins.”
Who would have thunk it! From a plastic bag floating in the sky!
Such insight proffered months after the event by any plastic bag floating in the air. The image does
not invite reverie and meditation because there is nothing to meditate on. It is an example of
contemporary photography as graphic art THAT MEANS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! If an image
cannot stand on its own two feet, without the help of reams of text to support its substance, its
contention, then no wonder there are millions of vacillating images in this world. Including
contemporary art.
Out, damned spot! the stain of thy blood cannot be exacted from your feeble representation.
Word count: 1,451
Translations of soulèvement
noun
uprising soulèvement, révolte
rising soulèvement, hausse (rise), insurrection, montant, lever, élévation
insurrection insurrection, soulèvement, émeute (riot), rébellion
uplift soulèvement
upheaval bouleversement, soulèvement, agitation, perturbation, séisme, renversement
.
Many thankx to Jeu de Paume for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click
on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
00:36
Foreword
“For almost a decade, the Jeu de Paume’s exhibition program has been conceived with the conviction
that twenty-first century museums and cultural institutions cannot be detached from the social and
political challenges of the society of which they are part. To us, this approach is a ma er of
simple common sense.
The program it has shaped does not monitor market trends or seek complacent legitimacy within the
field of contemporary art. Rather, we have chosen to work with artists whose poetic and
political concerns are a uned to the need to critically explore the models of governance and practices
of power that mold much of our perceptual and emotional experience, and thus, the social and
political world we live in.
Because the Jeu de Paume is a center for images, we are aware of the urgent necessity – in line with
our societal responsibilities – to revise the analysis of the historical conditions in which
photography and the moving image developed in modernity and, subsequently, in postmodernity,
with all its alternatives, provocations, and challenges.
Thankfully, the history of images and our ways of seeing and understanding the world through them
is neither linear nor unidirectional. These are the sources of our fascination with images that don’t
tell everything they show and with images affected by the vicissitudes of the human condition.
Photography, and images in general, represent not only reality, but things that the human eye cannot
see; like us, photography is capable of concealing, denying and sustaining. It is only waiting for
someone to listen to its joys and its sorrows.
The Jeu de Paume’s programming sites its oblique look at history and contemporaneity in
this oscillation between the visible and the invisible in the life of images, creating a space for
encounter and the clashing of ideas, emotions, and knowledge, accepting that the coexistence of
conflict and antagonism are an essential part of community building.
For these reasons, and from this position, in the superb proposal by the philosopher and art historian
Georges Didi-Huberman to form an exhibition from his research on the theme of “uprisings,”
we found the ideal intellectual, artistic, and museological challenge.
While the notion of revolution, rebellion, and revolt isn’t alien in contemporary society’s vocabulary,
the object of its action is replete with collective amnesia and inertia. That is why analyzing
the representations of “uprisings” – from the etchings Goya, to contemporary installations,
paintings photographs, documents, videos, and films – demonstrates an unequivocal relevance to the
social context in which we are living in 2016. […]
Marta Gili, “Foreword,” in Uprisings, catalogue of the exhibition, p. 7-10.
Serie Declaración- Cruzar en muro
Enrique Ramirez
Cruzar un muro [Franchir un mur] (Crossing a wall)
2013
Vidéo HD couleur, son, 5’15”
Courtesy de l’artiste et galerie Michel Rein, Paris/Brussels
A series of images of people in a waiting room is in an unusual place, perhaps in our imagination, or
perhaps anywhere. The short by Enrique Ramirez addresses article number 13 of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to
return to his country”.
(h ps://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/caron-manifestations-web.jpg)
Gilles Caron
Manifestations anticatholiques à Londonderry
Anticatholic protests, Londonderry, Northern Ireland
August 1969
© Gilles Caron / Fondation Gilles Caron / Gamma Rapho
Known for his wartime photoreports, fascinated by liberating acts and the figure of the insurgent,
photographer Gilles Caron carried throughout the 1960s an interest in the social conflicts that marked
his time. At first he is led to cover is a peasant revolt which takes place in Redon in 1967. Anxious to
produce an image which appears to him as a formal translation of the anger of these peasants, he
seizes the gesture of a demonstrator sending a projectile in the direction of the forces of order.
Photogenic, this suspended gesture gives the insurrections a choreographic dimension and testifies to
the violence of the social demands that animate the demonstrators. The “figure of the pitcher” then
reappears on the occasion of the events of May 1968 and then of the conflicts that took place in
Northern Ireland in 1969. This archetype is part of the tradition of the representation of David against
Goliath: the symbol of the power carried by the faith of one who is thought weak in the face of brute
force. If there is no question of faith in the images of Caron, it is nonetheless an irrepressible form of
desire that animates those bodies which revolt: no ma er the imbalance of forces, the insurgents are
carried by a feeling of invulnerability and of power in the face of the forces of order objectively much
more armed. (Text from the Jeu de Paume website translated by Google translate)
Introduction
by Georges Didi-Huberman, curator of the exhibition
What makes us rise up? It is forces: mental, physical, and social forces. Through these forces we
transform immobility into movement, burden into energy, submission into revolt, renunciation into
expansive joy. Uprisings occur as gestures: arms rise up, hearts beat more strongly, bodies unfold,
mouths are unbound. Uprisings are never without thoughts, which often become sentences: we think,
express ourselves, discuss, sing, scribble a message, create a poster, distribute a tract, or write a work
of resistance.
It is also forms: forms through which all of this will be able to appear and become visible in the public
space. Images, therefore; images to which this exhibition is devoted. Images of all times, from Goya to
today, and of all kinds: paintings, drawings, sculptures, films, photographs, videos, installations,
documents, etc. They interact in dialogue beyond the differences of their times. They are presented
according to a narrative in which there will appear, in succession, unleashed elements, when the
energy of the refusal makes an entire space rise up; intense gestures, when bodies can say “No!”;
exclaimed words, when barricades are erected and when violence becomes inevitable; and
indestructible desires, when the power of uprisings manages to survive beyond their repression or
their disappearance.
In any case, whenever a wall is erected, there will always be “people arisen” to “jump the wall”, that
is, to cross over borders. If only by imagining. As though inventing images contributed – a li le here,
powerfully there – to reinventing our political hopes.
(h ps://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/man-ray-dust-breeding-web.jpg)
Man Ray (American, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 1890-1976 Paris)

Dust Breeding (Duchamp’s Large Glass with Dust Motes)
1920
Gelatin silver print
23.9 x 30.4 cm (9 7/16 x 12 in.)
© 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
One of Duchamp’s close friends and a member of the New York Dada scene, the American
photographer and painter Man Ray (1890-1976) was also one of Duchamp’s collaborators. His
photograph Dust Breeding (Duchamp’s Large Glass with Dust Motes) from 1920 is a document of The
Large Glass after it had collected a year’s worth of dust while Duchamp was in New York. The
photograph was taken with a two-hour-long exposure that beautifully captures the complex texture
and diversity of materials that lay atop the glass surface. Dust Breeding marks a pivotal phase in the
development of Duchamp’s masterpiece. After the photograph was taken, Duchamp wiped The Large
Glass almost entirely clean, leaving a section of the cones covered with dust, which he permanently
affixed to the glass plate with a diluted cement. (Text from The Met website)
(h ps://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/hiroji-kubota-black-panthers-in-chicago-illinois-1969-
web.jpg)
Hiroji Kubota
Black Panthers in Chicago, Illinois
1969
© Hiroji Kubota/Magnum Photos
videohebdo46. v
Claude Ca elain
Vidéo Hebdo 46
2009-2010
Vidéo pal, 4/3, couleur, son, 6 min 30 s
Collection de l’artiste
© Claude Ca elain
Entitled Vidéo Hebdo 46, this work by Claude Ca elain is part of a series of short films made between
January 2009 and March 2010, following a weekly rhythm. If many of the films in this corpus play
with the conditions of video recording (shooting conditions, sensitivity of the sensor, editing …), the
forty-sixth is more like the return of a performance. Executed with great economy of means, its
performances follow a precise protocol whose action often resembles an absurd experience of which
the body of the artist is the subject. Here, Claude Ca elain tries to raise a chair by interposing one by
one the wooden ba ens – which look singularly like slices of books – under the feet of the said chair
without ever going down or pu ing a foot on the ground. This progressive uprising of the foundation
leads inexorably to its overthrow and thus to the fall of the artist. The uselessness of this exercise is
commensurate with the concentration and a ention with which it applies to try to get to the
maximum of its possibilities. Each performance of Claude Ca elain is thus an experience of limits:
those of his balance, his strength, his concentration and gravity. By voluntarily avoiding the logics of
productivity and productivity, Claude Ca elain invites the viewer to observe a poetic action, a
possible metaphor of existential or historical situations. (Text from the Jeu de Paume website
translated by Google translate)
The exhibition
“Soulèvements / Uprisings” is a trans-disciplinary exhibition on the theme of human gestures that

raise up the world or rise up against it: collective or individual gestures, actions or passions, works
or thoughts.
They are gestures which say no to a state of history that is considered too “heavy” and that therefore
needs to be “lifted” or even sent packing. They are also gestures that say yes to something else: to a
desired be er world, an imagined or adumbrated world, a world that could be inhabited and
conceived differently.
These figures of uprising and up-raising will range freely across mediums: paintings, drawings,
prints, video installations, photographs, fiction films, documentary images, writers’ manuscripts,
tracts, posters, etc., without hierarchies.
The exhibition sequence will follow a sensitive, intuitive path along which the gaze can focus on
exemplary “cases” treated with a precision that prevents any kind of generalisation. We will be
mindful not to conclude, not to dogmatically foreclose anything. The sequence will comprise five
main parts:
ELEMENTS (UNLEASHED)
GESTURES (INTENSE)
WORDS (EXCLAIMED)
CONFLICTS (FLARED UP)
DESIRES (INDESTRUCTIBLES)
“All the uprisings failed, but taken together, they succeeded.”

“They rise, but they do not simply stand up – they rise up.”
.
Judith Butler, “Uprisings” catalogue of the exhibition Uprisings
ELEMENTS (UNLEASHED)
The elements become unleashed, time falls out of joint. – And if the imagination made mountains
rise up?
To rise up, as when we say “a storm is rising.” To reverse the weight that nailed us to the ground. So
it is the laws of the atmosphere itself that will be contradicted. Surfaces – sheets, draperies, flags –
fly in the wind. Lights that explode into fireworks. Dust that rises up from nooks and crannies. Time
that falls out of joint. The world upside down. From Victor Hugo to Eisenstein and beyond, uprisings
are often compared to hurricanes or to great, surging waves. Because then the elements (of history)
become unleashed.
We rise up first of all by exercising our imagination, albeit through our “caprichos” (whims
or fantasies) or “disparates” (follies) as Goya said. The imagination makes mountains rise up. And
when we rise up from a real “disaster,” it means that we meet what oppresses us, and those who seek
to make it impossible for us to move, with the resistance of forces that are desires and imaginations
first of all, that is to say psychical forces of unleashing and of reopening possibilities.
Dennis Adams, Francis Alÿs, Léon Cogniet, Marcel Duchamp, Francisco de Goya, William Hogarth, Victor
Hugo, Leandro Ka , Eustachy Kossakowski, Man Ray, Jasmina Metwaly, Henri Michaux, Tina Modo i,
Robert Morris, Saburô Murakami, Hélio Oiticica, Roman Signer, Tsubasa Kato, Jean Veber, French anonymous.
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Francisco de Goya
Los Caprichos
1799
Eau-forte, aquatinte et burin, 2e édition de 1855.
Collection Sylvie et Georges Helft
Photo: Jean de Calan
Between 1797 and 1799, Francisco de Goya composed a collection of engravings, Los Caprichos [Les
Caprices], in which he portrayed in a satirical way the behavior of his Spanish fellow citizens. “Y aun
no se van!” (“And yet they do not go away!”) is the 59th engraving of a set of 80. Each time the title
constitutes an ironic commentary on the image. This one refers to the group of people represented on
the engraving, with the bodies emaciated, folded on themselves, praying, looking scared. One of them
tries to prevent the tombstone from falling on them, but all seem helpless, destitute of strength,
unable to resist this final ordeal. The use of chiaroscuro, which produces a dramatic effect, as well as
the thick slice of the slab that forms the diagonal of the composition, accentuates the desperate
character of the scene. Finally, the massive aspect and the weight of the stone, opposed to fragile and
denuded bodies, complete their inexorable destiny. This engraving thus seems to illustrate the
absolute dejection felt by individuals under certain circumstances. For Georges Didi-Huberman,
degradation is one of the conditions conducive to the uprising. The imagination and the critical eye of
the artist – a fervent supporter of the Enlightenment – can constitute a force of resistance and struggle
for the oppressed. (Text from the Jeu de Paume website translated by Google translate)
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Léon Cogniet
Les Drapeaux (The flags)
1830
Huile sur toile
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Orléans
Photo: François Lauginie
The Revolution of 1830 led to the overthrow of the government of King Charles X. After the
publication of several ordinances, including a restriction on freedom of the press, this episode, which
failed to restore the Republic, The tricolor flag, abandoned by the Restoration for the benefit of the
white flag, symbol of royalty. This is evidenced by Leon Cogniet’s study of a painting that will never
see the light of day.
These revolutionary days, also called the Three Glorious Days, are symbolically represented by three
flags caught in the turmoil. The first, white, overhung by a menacing sky, is hoisted on a mast
adorned with a fleur-de-lis. The second tears apart and reveals the blue sky as a promise of freedom.
Finally, the third, torn and covered with blood, allows the reconstruction of the tricolor emblem
created during the Revolution of 1789. Thus the blood poured during these days allows the people to
reconnect with the revolutionary ideals. The unleashing of elements, a metaphor for the tempestuous
popular revolt, accompanies the transformation of the banished flag of royalty to the national flag.
This sketch is repeated and widely circulated at the time, accompanied by an anonymous poem: “To
the darkness finally succeeds the clarity / And pale shreds of the flag of the slaves / And of the azure
sky and the blood of our brave / The brilliant standard of our freedom is born. ” (Text from the Jeu de
Paume website translated by Google translate)
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Victor Hugo
La vague ou Ma destinée (The wave or My destiny)
1857
Plume et lavis d’encre brune, gouache, papier vélin
Maison de Victor Hugo
© Maisons de Victor Hugo / Roger-Viollet
This drawing is the witness of Victor Hugo’s fascination with the sea. His pen marries the movements
of the ocean, which then becomes the symbol of his exile: “It is the image of my current destiny
stranded in abandonment and solitude,” he says. On the drawing he calls ‘My destiny’, it is not
known whether the ship, alone in front of the monster of the sea, enveloped by its foam, is carried or
precipitated by the immense wave. It is a figure of his destiny, but also of the human condition.
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Man Ray
“Sculpture mouvante” ou “La France” (“Moving Sculpture” or “La France”)
1920
Musée national d’Art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, dation en 1994
Negative gelatin-silver on glass plate
9 x 12 cm
Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / image Centre Pompidou,
MNAM-CCI
Image obtenue par inversion des valeurs du scan du négatif
© Man Ray Trust / ADAGP, Paris, 2016
An active member of the Dada group in New York with Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray joined the
surrealists in Paris in 1921. He was interested in questioning the conventions of the world of art and
considered photography as a means of expression. It explores all potentialities: experiments,
diversions, portraits, advertising applications … The fixation of an element in movement constitutes
one of the specificities of photography that fascinates the surrealists because the object thus grasped
by the apparatus appears in an unexpected light: the linen which dries, inflated under the effect of the
wind, becomes a moving sculpture as the title of the work suggests. This way the title can guide the
reception of the passionate photography of Man Ray. This image is also published on the cover of the
sixth issue of La Révolution Surréaliste in 1926, accompanied by the legend “La France”. This enigmatic
title, rather than helping to understand photography, multiplies the possible interpretations and
a ests to Man Ray’s desire to subvert the use and meaning of the images. Thus this wind which
“transforms” linen into sculpture, appears as a metaphor for the surrealist project, which makes the
photographic medium the operator of a true conversion of the gaze. By this image of the “uprising”,
Man Ray thus gives a visual form to the aesthetic and political revolution that the members of the
Surrealist group called for. (Text from the Jeu de Paume website translated by Google translate)
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Eustachy Kossakowski
Le “Panoramic Sea Happening – Sea Concerto, Osieki” de Tadeusz Kantor (extrait d’une série)
The “Panoramic Sea Happening – Sea Concerto, Osieki” by Tadeusz Kantor (from a series)
2/19/2018 pp g y | Art Blart
National Socialism f
1967
Inkjet pigment print
Owner of negatives and slides: Musée d’Art Moderne de Varsovie
© Collection Anka Ptaszkowska
In 1967 Tadeusz Kantor with a group of other Polish avant-garde artists delivered Panoramic Sea
Happening. They were working in frames of artistic plain-air in Osieki (near Koszalin) organized there
every year since 1963. This complex action was in a way a preface to Kantor’s theatre. But it was also
parallel to actions of Western artists, which led to the birth of performance art. In this important
moment Kantor formulated a category of impossible. It derived from the night dream but as this one
was compromised Kantor wanted to use a new word: ‘impossible’. At the same time the very essence
of the happening, as he was saying, was to make impossible real. How did he do it? By reenactment,
repetition and documentation.
Dorota Sosnowska. From the abstract for “Impossible is Real: Tadeusz Kantor at the seashore” 2016
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Hélio Oiticica and Leandro Ka

Parangolé – Encuentros de Pamplona (Parangolé – Encounters of Pamplona)
1972
Impression chromogène (sur papier et carton)
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
Photo: Archives Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
© Projeto Hélio Oiticica / © Leandro Ka
“At the time when he was producing his first Penetrables, Oticica started to design Parangolés, banners
and capes printed in a great variety of colors and designs, and occasionally inscribed with mo oes,
advertisement lines, or found phrases. Oiticica premiered his (anti)fashion statements in 1965 in what
he called a Parangolé Coletivo, in which he distributed his creations among friends and members of the
Mangueira samba school – he had joined in 1964 – who paraded wearing them while dancing to
samba… He would continue making Parangolés and staging Parangolé events throughout the rest of
his life, at times through friends who acted as intermediaries, as in the Pamplona encounters of 1972 in
Spain when Argentinean artist Leandro Ka ran a Parangolé event on Oiticica’s behalf.”
Juan A. Suárez. “Jack Smith, Hélio Oiticica, Tropicalism,” in Criticism Vol. 56, No. 2, Jack Smith:
Beyond the Rented World (Spring 2014) pp. 310-311.
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Henri Michaux
Untitled
1975
Acrylic on paper
Private collection
© ADAGP, Paris, 2016
Photo: Jean-Louis Losi
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Dennis Adams
Patriot
2002
From the series Airborne
C-Print contrecollé sur aluminium.
Prêt du Centre national des Arts Plastiques, Paris, inv. FNAC 03.241.
© Dennis Adams / CNAP / Courtesy Galerie Gabrielle Maubrie
A plastic bag stands out on the azure sky and floats in the air. Difficult, considering the serenity that
emanates from the photographs of this series, to imagine that they refer to a dramatic event: the a ack
of the World Trade Center. Located in Lower Manha an, Dennis Adams’ studio is very close to the
twin towers that were destroyed on September 11, 2001. However, rather than rushing to witness the
catastrophe, Dennis Adams photographed for three months the roof of his building, the newspapers
and the rubbish that fly away from the ruins. These images, although directly related to this highly
publicized event have nothing of the “shock” images that then invade the press.
They carry neither sensationalism nor exaggerated patriotism, but rather invite reverie and
meditation. By adopting this a itude to the antipodes of the media and political enthusiasm that
follows September 11, Dennis Adams questions the relationship to temporality in the face of this type
of event. He denounces the “greed of politicians and military men who have a definite opinion on
moments of history”* and questions the imperative of hyperreactivity not conducive to the analysis
and the constitution of a historical consciousness. (Text from the Jeu de Paume website translated by
Google translate)
*Dennis Adams quoted by Michel Guerrin, “In Madrid, photographers face history”, in Le Monde,
June 15, 2004, p. 30.
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Roman Signer
Rotes Band / Red Tape
2005
Vidéo couleur, son, 2’07’”.
Caméra: Aleksandra Signer
Courtesy de l’artiste et d’Art: Concept, Paris
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Tsubasa Kato
Break it before it’s broken
2015
Video: color, sound, 4:49 min
© Tsubasa Kato / caméraman: Taro Aoishi
On March 11, 2011, a tsunami struck the Japanese coast and caused a nuclear accident at the
Fukushima Daiichi plant. The disastrous environmental and social consequences are still impossible
to evaluate and the inhabitants, partly neglected by the public authorities, have to face an
unprecedented crisis. Many of them have been displaced and most of their income from fishing is
reduced to nothing because of the contamination of the ocean. Tsubasa Kato then decides to get
involved with them by accompanying them daily in this difficult period. In addition to this support,
he decided on November 3rd (03/11) – the day of the celebration of culture in Japan (Bunka no Hi)
and date whose numerical writing is the inverse of that of the tsunami (11/03) – to achieve a strongly
symbolic performance.
Entitled Break it before it’s broken, the video of this action shows residents of the region invited to
overthrow the structure of a house washed away by the tsunami and destroy it definitively. Becoming
actors of destruction and no longer passive observers, participants can then transform the event
undergone into action. This festival of culture, for Tsubasa Kato, is an opportunity to initiate a
unifying artistic moment that testifies to the strength of collective movements and the mobilization
necessary to reverse the course of events. He will then reiterate this performance in other parts of the
world, which are often subject to delicate social situations. (Text from the Jeu de Paume website
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Mari Kourkouta
Remontages
2016
16 mm sur vidéo (en boucle), noir et blanc, silencieux, 4’ 10.
© Maria Kourkouta. Production : Jeu de Paume, Paris
“Body, mind and soul are uplifted by the divine energy of desire”
.
Marie-José Mondzain, “To those who sail the sea…” catalogue of the exhibition Uprisings
“To make the world rise up we need gestures, desires, and depths.”
.
Georges Didi-Huberman, “By the desires (Fragments on What Makes Us Rise Up)” catalogue of the
exhibition Uprisings
GESTURES (INTENSE)
From burden to uprising. – With hammer blows. – Arms rise up. – The pasión. – When bodies say
no. – Mouths for exclaiming.
Rising up is a gesture. Before even a empting to carry out a voluntary and shared “action,” we rise
up with a simple gesture that suddenly overturns the burden that submission had, until then, placed
on us (be it through cowardice, cynicism, or despair). To rise up means to throw off the burden
weighing down on our shoulders, keeping us from moving. It is to break a certain present – be it with
hammer blows as Friedrich Nie sche and Antonin Artaud sought to do – and to raise your arms
towards the future that is opening up. It is a sign of hope and of resistance.
It is a gesture and it is an emotion. The Spanish Republicans – whose visual culture was shaped by
Goya and Picasso, but also by all the photographers on the field who collected, the gestures of freed
prisoners, of voluntary combatants, of children and of the famous La Pasionaria, Dolores Ibárruri –
fully assumed this. In the gesture of rising up, each body protests with all of its limbs, each mouth
opens and exclaims its no-refusal and its yes-desire.
Paulo Abreu, Art & Language, Antonin Artaud, Taysir Batniji, Joseph Beuys, Désiré-Magloire Bourneville,
Gilles Caron, Claude Ca elain, Agustí Centelles, Chim, Pascal Convert, Gustave Courbet, Élie Faure, Michel
Foucault, Leonard Freed, Gisèle Freund, Marcel Gautherot, Agnès Geoffray, Jochen Gerz, Jack Goldstein, Käthe
Kollwi , Alberto Korda, Germaine Krull, Hiroji Kubota, Anne e Messager, Lise e Model, Tina Modo i,
Friedric Nie sche, Willy Römer, Willy Ronis, Graciela Sacco, Lorna Simpson, Wolf Vostell, anonymes catalans,
français, italiens.
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Gustave Courbet
Home en blouse debout sur une barricade (projet de frontispice pour Le Salut public)
Man in a smock standing on a barricade (frontispiece for Le Salut public project)
1848
Fusain sur papier
Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris
© Musée Carnavalet / Roger-Viollet
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Germaine Krull
The Dancer Jo Mihaly, danse “Révolution”
1925
Museum Folkwang, Essen
© Estate Germaine Krull, Folkwang Museum, Essen
Pioneer and adventurous, Germaine Krull is one of those women photographers of the inter-war
period who contributed largely to the emergence of a nervous and dynamic photographic approach,
in step with a modern world in constant acceleration. In photographing Jo Mihaly, she portrays a
dancer who shares this avant-garde sensibility. Indeed, a pupil of Mary Wigman, this singular figure
of dance participates in the German expressionist movement and contributes to the development of a
modern choreographic art: the unconstrained body emancipates itself from the conventions of
classical dance, the gesture of the dancer is released and regains its vitality. The movement then
becomes the result of the personal expression of the dancer whose photographer has the burden of
seizing the fulgurance [dazzling speed]. Stretched arm, smoky eyes and feverish eyes, Jo Mihaly –
who has always claimed her commitment to the Communist Party – realizes a gesture that resonates
with her time but also with the youth of Germaine Krull, marked by its proximity to the Republic of
the Soviets of Berlin in 1919. Thus, it is as much for these artists to participate in an aesthetic
revolution in their respective artistic fields as to echo the social and political uprisings that have taken
place throughout Europe since the the advent of the industrial era. (Text from the Jeu de Paume
website translated by Google translate)
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Alberto Korda
El Quijote de la Farola, Plaza de la Revolución, La Habana, Cuba
Don Quixote of the streetlamp, Plaza de la Revolución, Havana, Cuba
1959
Vintage gelatin silver print on baryta paper

Leticia et Stanislas Poniatowski collection
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Kitai Kazuo
Resistance (book)
1965
BAL
© Kitai Kazuo/ Collection privée
With a manifesto both aesthetic and philosophical, the Japanese publication Provoke proposed a
radical break in only three issues, published in 1968 and 1969. Provoke (photographers Takuma
Nakahira, Yutaka Takanashi and Daidō Moriyama, critic Kōji Taki and poet Takahiko
Okada) proposes a new visual language – rough, grainy and blurred – that captures the complexity of
the experience and the paradoxes of modernity suffered by all.
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Wolf Vostell
Dutschke
1968
Peinture polymère sur toile
Haus der Geschichte der Bundensrepublik Deutschland, Bonn
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Art and Language

Shouting Men (details)
1975
Screenprint and felt pen on paper
2/19/2018 p p p p National Socialism | Art Blart
Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona collection

Photo: Àngela Gallego
© Art and Language
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Patrick Zachmann
L’armée bloquée par la foule aux portes de la capitale
The army blocked by the crowd at the gates of the capital
1989
Gelatin-silver bromide print on baryta paper
50.4 x 60.9 cm
Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac
© Patrick Zachmann
From the early 1980s, Patrick Zachmann carried out an in-depth investigation into the Chinese
diaspora. Present in China at the time of the events in Tiananmen Square, he photographed
particularly symbolic episodes. This picture, taken on 20 May, is located just after the beginning of the
hunger strikes, and before the massive repression known as the Tiananmen massacre. The nocturnal
atmosphere and the gestures of the orator confer on this “moment before” a dramatic theatricality.
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Anne e Messager
47 Piques (47 Pikes)
1992
Soft toys, colored pencils on paper, various materials, and 47 metal pikes
270 x 570 x 70 cm
Anne e Messager and Marin Karmi collection/Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris
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Graciela Sacco
from the “Bocanada” (A breath of fresh air) series
1992-1993
Posters in the streets of Rosario, Argentina
© Graciela Sacco
This series of photographs of open mouths was immediately considered by Graciela Sacco as being
intended to circulate in the public space on various supports (stamps, spoons, stickers, posters …). It
is however in the form of a wild display that the artist has most often given to see this set. The first of
these displays took place in 1993, during a strike, in public school canteens in the town of Rosario. It
was then a question of questioning the impossibility of the municipal staff to make their claims heard
and the consequences of this movement knowing that for the majority of the children, this meal was
the only one of the day. Graciela Sacco then continues to post these posters in cities like Buenos Aires,
São Paulo or New York, often during election campaigns or close to advertising images. Are they
hungry mouths? Cries of claims? Of suffering? Or even breathing as the title suggests? Be that as it
may, this repeated but inaudible message tends to become oppressive. By exposing them in public
space, the artist seems to give visibility to those anonymous calls that we do not want or can not
hear. (Text from the Jeu de Paume website translated by Google translate)
WORDS (EXCLAIMED)
Poetic insurrections. – The message of the bu erflies. – Newspapers. – Making a book of resistance.
– The walls speak up.
Arms have been raised, mouths have exclaimed. Now, what are needed are words, sentences to say,
sing, think, discuss, print, transmit. That is why poets place themselves “at the forefront” of the
action itself, as Rimbaud said at the time of the Paris Commune. Upstream the Romantics,
downstream the Dadaists, Surrealists, Le rists, Situationists, etc., all undertook poetic insurrections.
“Poetic” does not mean “far from history,” quite the contrary. There is a poetry of tracts, from
the protest leaflet wri en by Georg Büchner in 1834 to the digital resistance of today, through René
Char in 1943 and the “cine-tracts,” from 1968. There is a poetry particular to the use of newspapers
and social networks. There is a particular intelligence – a entive to the form – inherent in the books of
resistance or of uprising. Until the walls themselves begin to speak and occupy the public space, the
sensible space in its entirety.
Antonin Artaud, Ever Astudillo, Ismaïl Bahri, Artur Barrio, Georges Bataille, Charles Baudelaire, Joseph
Beuys, Enrique Bostelmann, André Breton, Marcel Broodthaers, Cornelius Castoriadis, Champfleury, Dada,
Armand Dayot, Guy Debord, Carl Einstein, Jean-Luc Fromanger, Federico García Lorca, Jean-Luc Godard,
Groupe Dziga Vertov, Raymond Hains, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, Bernard Heidsieck, Victor Hugo,
Asger Jorn, Jérôme Lindon, Rosa Luxemburg, Man Ray, Germán Marín, Chris Marker, Cildo Meireles, Henri
Michaux, Tina Modo i, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Pablo Picasso, Sigmar Polke, Jacques Rancière, Alain Resnais,
Armando Salgado, Álvaro Sarmiento, Philippe Soupault, Félix Vallo on, Gil Joseph Wolman, German, Chilean,
Cuban, Spanish, French, Italian, Mexican, Russian unknowns.
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Raoul Hausman
Portrait of Herwarth Walden at Bonset
1921
Postcard sent by Raoul Hausmann to Theo van Doesburg
Archives Theo and Nelly van Doesburg
Photo: collection RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History
Herwarth Walden (actual name Georg Lewin, 16 September 1879 in Berlin – 31 October 1941
in Saratov, Russia) was a German Expressionist artist and art expert in many disciplines. He is
broadly acknowledged as one of the most important discoverers and promoters of German avant-
garde art in the early twentieth century (Expressionism, Futurism, Dadaism, Magic Realism).
From 1901 to 1911 Walden was married to Else Lasker-Schüler, the leading female representative of
German Expressionist poetry. She invented for him the pseudonym “Herwarth Walden”, inspired
by Henry Thoreau’s novel Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854). In 1912 he married Swedish painter Nell
Roslund. In 1919 he became a member of the Communist Party. In 1924 he was divorced from his
second wife.
With the economic depression of the 1930s and the subsequent rise of National Socialism, his
activities were compromised. In 1932 he married again and left Germany shortly later because of the
threat of the Gestapo. He went to Moscow, where he worked as a teacher and publisher. His
sympathies for the avant-garde soon aroused the suspicion of the Stalinist Soviet government, and he
had to repeatedly defend against the equation of avant-garde and fascism. Walden died in October
1941 in a Soviet prison in Saratov. (Text from the Wikipedia website
(h ps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herwarth_Walden))
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John Heartfield
Benü e Foto als Waffe !
Utilise la photo comme une arme !
Use photography as a weapon !
AIZ, année VIII, no 37, Berlin, 1929, p. 17
Revue
37.8 x 27.5 cm
Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Kunstsammlung, Inv.-Nr.: JH 2265
© The Heartfield Community of Heirs/ADAGP, Paris, 2016
In the late 1910s, members of the Dada movement practiced the first collages using images from
cheap publications. The iconoclastic dimension of these heterogeneous juxtapositions allows them to
open up the critical potential of images. Then, in the 1920s in Berlin, the Dada movement became
politicized and the idea that the affiliated artists of the Communist Party were to serve the proletarian
cause was strengthened. Few artists felt as commi ed to this mission as John Heartfield (his real name
was Helmut Herzfeld). From the end of the 1920s, he developed a practice of satirical photomontage
for the press, and in particular of the Communist journal AIZ (Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung) for which
he worked until 1938. He then produced 237 photomontages denouncing Fascist ideology, the
financing of the Nazi party by the industrialists and the extreme violence of the national socialist
program. Invited to the Film und Foto exhibition in 1929 in Stu gart, he had inscribed above the
section devoted to him the slogan found in AIZ the same year: “Use photography as a weapon!”.
Through the massive dissemination of his photomontages, he wants to mobilize public opinion and
incite him to rise up against the rise of the fascisms that threaten Europe. (Text from the Jeu de Paume
website translated by Google translate)
Heartfield lived in Berlin until April 1933, when the National Socialists took power. On Good Friday,
the SS broke into his apartment, and the 5’2″ Heartfield escaped by jumping from his balcony and
hiding in a trash bin. He left Germany by walking over the Sudeten Mountains to Czechoslovakia. In
Czechoslovakia, John Heartfield rose to number-five on the Gestapo’s most-wanted list.
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Federico García Lorca

Mierda (Shit)
1934
Calligram, Indian ink
Federico García Lorca foundation, Madrid
© Federico García Lorca foundation, Madrid / VEGAP
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Réseau Buckmaster (Buckmaster Network)

Tract clandestin (Clandestine Tract)
1942
Papier
17 x 25 cm
Collection particulière
Courtesy des éditions de L’échappée
This satirical tract was realized and distributed in 1942 by the network of the Resistance Buckmaster,
during the German occupation in France. The flying leaf, given from hand to hand or slipped into a
mailbox, the leaflet or the bu erfly (smaller) is at the same time the expression of a refusal – that of
yielding – and of an imperious desire to act and call for a start. Intended to mark the minds and to
a ract the adhesion, they can be formed of short and poetic texts, slogans or images. Open, it presents
a caricature drawing of four pigs and, in the center, an inscription in capital le ers which apostrophes
the reader and invites him to look for the fifth … Indeed, if the recipient folds the sheet according to
the do ed lines, he makes Hitler’s acrimonious face! Thus, like any clandestine message, the meaning
of the leaflet is not given immediately. The system of folding conceals and intrigues before revealing,
but also accentuates the critical and percussive nature of the subject. Opening and closing like two
wings, this bu erfly is an anonymous, ephemeral and fragile missive ready to fly in the air to carry its
message of rising. Like a firefly gleaming in the night of war, “an indication of a desire that flies, goes
where it wants, insists, persists, resists in spite of everything”*, in the words of Georges Didi-
Huberman, this image constitutes a weapon at the same time frail and powerful. (Text from the Jeu de
*Georges Didi-Huberman, “Through desires (fragments on what raises us)”, in Soulèvements, Paris,
Jeu de Paume, 2016, p. 372.
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Raymond Hains
OAS. Fusillez les plastiqueurs (OAS. Shoot the bombers)
1961
Torn poster on canvas backing
Private collection
Photo: Michel Marcuzzi
By the end of the 1940s, Raymond Hains paced the streets of Paris and sought out surprising
agglomerates of torn posters that he picked up before painting them on canvas. The artist, flâneur, is
the catalyst of a new form of urban poetry that gives rise to impromptu entanglements of words and
images. This practice of hijacking posters largely echoed the world of art and French society after the
Second World War. These torn posters formally evoke the canvases of “action painting” in vogue at
the time, which Hains enjoys by calling himself “inaction painter”. The proliferation of these posters
accompanies the rise of consumption but also the many political debates that agitate France. Thus
futile advertisements co-exist promoting an eternally joyful world and political posters whose
subjects are sometimes dramatic. In 1961, Raymond Hains realized an exhibition entitled “La déchirée
France” [The Torn France] which presents itself as a sounding board of contemporary French history,
marked by the decomposition of the Fourth Republic and what is not yet called the war of Algeria.
The work OAS. Shoot the bombers testifies to the violence of the positions taken with regard to this
organization favorable to the maintenance of French Algeria, but also to the reality of the a acks they
commit. (Text from the Jeu de Paume website translated by Google translate)
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Sigmar Polke
Gegen die zwei Supermächte – für eine rote Schweiz (1e version)
(Against the two superpowers – for a red Swi erland) (1st version)
1976
Spray paint and stencil on paper
Ludwig Forum für internationale Kunst, Aachen
© The Estate of Sigmar Polke, Cologne /ADAGP, Paris, 2016
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Henri Michaux
Untitled
1975
Indian ink, acrylic on paper
50 x 65 cm
Private collection
© ADAGP, Paris, 2016 / Photo : Jean-Louis Losi
The poet Henri Michaux has endeavored to combine writing and drawing. Already in his invention of
a new graphic alphabet in 1927, and then in his hallucinogenic experiments by absorption of
mescaline from 1955, Henri Michaux sought to liberate, unbind language and drawing and thus to
explore “the space within”. This ink on paper presents an entanglement of disorderly spots more or
less energetic or impregnated. Just as his poems try to lift the tongue, this drawing seems to express
what he calls “trembling in images”. Traces of liberating gestures, this expressive “new language”,
noisy, made of floods of forms and collisions of signs, becomes the image of the disorderly world and
the claimed insubordination of its author. In 1971, Michaux always seems to be looking for what he
calls in the turbulent infinity “a confidence of a child, a confidence that goes ahead, hopes, raises you,
confidence which, entering into the tumultuous universe … becomes a greater upheaval, a
prodigiously great uprising, an extraordinary uprising, an uprising never known, a rising above itself,
above all, a miraculous uprising which is at the same time an acquiescence, an unbounded, calming
and exciting acquiescence, an overflow and a liberation.” Thus Michaux considered drawing as a
movement, the very rise of thought and bodies. (Text from the Jeu de Paume website translated by
Google translate)
“Uprising transforms consciousness and in this movement it reconstitutes it. It gathers needs together and
turns them into demands, it turns affects into desires and wills, it positions them in a tension
towards liberty.”
.
Antonio Negri, “Uprisings” catalogue of the exhibition Uprisings
CONFLICTS (FLARED UP)
To go on strike is not to do nothing. – Demonstrating, showing oneself. – Vandal joys. – Building

barricades. – Dying from injustice.
And so everything flares up. Some see only pure chaos. Others witness the sudden appearance of the
forms of a desire to be free. During strikes, ways of living together are invented. To say that
we “demonstrate,” is to affirm – albeit to be surprised by it or even not to understand it—that
something appeared that was decisive. But this demanded a conflict. Conflict: an important motif of
modern historical painting (from Manet to Polke), and of the visual arts in general (photography,
cinema, video, digital arts).
It happens sometimes that uprisings produce merely the image of broken images: vandalism, those
kinds of celebrations in negative format. But on these ruins will be built the temporary architecture of
uprisings: paradoxical, moving, makeshift things that are barricades. Then, the police suppress
the demonstration, when those who rise up had only the potency of their desire (potency: not power).
And this is why there are so many people in history who have died from having risen up.
Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Hugo Aveta, Ruth Berlau, Malcolm Browne, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Agustí Centelles,
Chen Chieh-Jen, Armand Dayot, Honoré Daumier, Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri, Robert Filliou, Jules Girardet,
Arpad Hazafi, John Heartfield, Dmitri Kessel, Herbert Kirchhorff, Héctor López, Édouard Manet, Ernesto
Molina, Jean-Luc Moulène, Voula Papaioannou, Sigmar Polke, Willy Römer, Pedro G. Romero, Jésus Ruiz
Durand, Armando Salgado, Allan Sekula, Thibault, Félix Vallo on, Jean Veber, German, Catalan, French,
Mexican, South African unknowns.
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Thibault
La Barricade de la rue Saint-Maur-Popincourt avant l’a aque par les troupes du général Lamoricière
The Barricade of the Rue Saint-Maur-Popincourt before the a ack by the troops of General Lamoriciere
Sunday, June 25, 1848
Daguerréotype
11.7 x 15 cm
Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski
This daguerreotype is part of a series of two exceptional views of the barricades taken during the
popular insurrection of June 1848. Disseminated in the form of woodcuts in the newspaper
L’Illustration at the beginning of the following July, these photographs were realized by an amateur
named Thibault, from a point of view overlooking the Rue Saint-Maur-Popincourt, June 25 and 26,
before and after the assault. The first photographs reproduced in the press, they show the value of
proof given to the medium in the processing of information since the middle of the nineteenth
century, well before the development of photomechanical reproduction techniques. The inaccuracies
and ghostly traces caused by a long exposure time limit the accuracy lent to the medium. Also the
engraver allowed himself to “rectify” the views for the newspaper, adding clouds here and there and
specifying the posture or the detail of the silhoue es. The remarkable interest of these
daguerreotypes, however, resides in their indeterminate aspect. In fact, they reveal the singular
temporality of these events: both short (since each second counts during the confrontations) and at
the same time extended (in the moments of preparation and waiting). The temporalities proper to
events and photography are thus combined in order to offer the perennial image of an invisible
uprising and therefore always in potentiality. (Text from the Jeu de Paume website translated by
Google translate)
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Édouard Manet
Guerre civile (Civil war)
1871
Two-tone lithograph on thick paper
Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris
© Musée Carnavalet / Roger-Viollet
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André Adolphe Eugène Disdéri (a ribué à)

Insurgés tués pendant la Semaine sanglante de la Commune
Insurgents killed during bloody week of the Commune
1871
Albumen photograph
21 x 27 cm
Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris, Paris
© André A.E. Disdéri / Musée Carnavalet / Roger-Viollet
This photograph was taken at the end of the tragic Bloody Week which concluded the Commune of
Paris in May 1871. It shows the corpses of Communards shot by the Versailles troops, presented in
their coffins at the public exhibition of their bodies. This image is imprinted with brutality: that of the
authors of the massacre of these young men struggling for the independence of Paris, that of the
monstration [The act of demonstrating; proof] and, that of photography, in its realization, its
frontality and its precision. Why did one of the most famous portraitists of the Second Empire record
the image of these inanimate bodies? We know today that photography has played an important role
in anti-communard propaganda, the aim of which was to show the “exactions” of the insurgents
(barricades, vandalism, assassinations …) and to present this event not as a revolution but as a civil
war. It was also used for identification purposes, used for judicial proceedings and repression. The
value of this image, however, is due to the fact that the exposure of these bodies is transformed by the
photographic act. The la er confers on the rebels a particular aura, passing thus from figures of guilty
to those of martyrs. Gathered for the occasion and set up facing us, they form, through photography,
the image of an inseparable community. Even if the revolution has failed and power has failed, its
power remains and continues to nourish the memory of political uprisings. (Text from the Jeu de
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Allan Hughan
Installations de la colonie pénitentiaire (Installations of the penal colony)
May 1874
Tirage sur papier albuminé
14.7 x 19.6 cm
The legend of the image, wri en in the thirties, states: “In the foreground the tribe of rebels of 1878”,
while that handwri en on the original negative says “tribe of Atai revolted.” These elements drag the
meaning of this image realized by the first photographer present in New Caledonia. The photographs
he takes of kanaks, villages, but also of the prison and mining facilities in 1874, take on a new
retrospective significance after the great Kanak revolt of 1878.
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Félix Vallo on
La Charge (The Charge)
1893
Proof, woodcut on paper
Musée national d’Art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris
Gift of Adèle et Georges Besson en 1963. On loan to Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie de
Besançon
© Centre Pompidou / MNAM / Cliché Pierre Guenat, Besançon, Musée des Beaux-Arts et
d’Archéologie
Felix Vallo on made this engraving on wood in 1893 as part of his critical contributions to social
violence for newspapers and magazines of his time. Composed with great economy of means, La
Charge represents the brutal repression of a demonstration by the forces of the order. The diving point
of view testifies to the influence of photography on his work and reinforces the voyeur character of
the viewer as well as his feeling of helplessness. The formal repetition of the uniform of the
“guardians of the peace” and the resemblance of their faces, all wedged between their mustache and
their kepi, translates well the impression of mechanical unleashing of a blind violence. By contrasting
black and white, Vallo on refers to the physical confrontation between civilians and policemen. The
centrifugal force which animates the composition gives the impression that the wounded bodies
sha er like an explosion. By distorting the characteristic perspective of the Nabi aesthetic, the victims’
bodies seem to be abandoned. Through the eyes of man in the foreground, the artist denounces the
abuse of force but also takes the spectator to witness and invites him to rise up against this injustice.
The artist, known for his anarchist positions, broke as much with the traditional principles of
composition as with the established order. At the charge against the protesters, he responds by his
own charge against the authorities. (Text from the Jeu de Paume website translated by Google
translate)
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Joseph Marie Ernest Prud’Homme

Submission of Rabezavana and Rainibetsimisaraka
1897
Print on aristotype paper
12 x 17 cm
On July 29, 1897, Rabezavana and Rainibetsimisaraka, two of the greatest leaders of the Menalamba
insurrection, which began after the abdication of Queen Ranavalona III and the establishment of the
protectorate in October 1895, publicly knelt before Governor General Joseph Gallieni to signify their
submission. This ceremony is the theatrical acme of the policy of “pacification” carried out in
Madagascar by Gallieni, since his arrival in September 1896.
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Anonymous
Les Habés envoient un parlementaire pour faire leur soumission au commandant Pognio
The Habés send a parliamentarian to make their submission to Major Pognio
17 March 1910
Print on baryta paper
10.9 x 16.7 cm
The French colonial conquest of West Africa, begun in 1854, stops with the unification of its
possessions within French West Africa in 1895. It was mainly carried out by the infantry which had to
face populations hostile to colonization. The Habés (Dogons) of the Bandiagara region (present-day
Mali) resisted the French soldiers from 1894 to 1910.
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José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949)

Les Femmes des soldats (The Women Soldiers)
1926
Huile sur toile
México, INBA, Collection Museo de Arte Moderno
Photo © Francisco Kochen
© Adagp, Paris 2016
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Tina Modo i (1896-1942)

Guitare, cartouchière et faucille (Guitar, cartridge belt and sickle)
1st June 1929
Illustration de l’annonce pour la chanteuse communiste Concha Lichel, publiée dans el machete, no
168, 1
Illustration of the announcement for the communist singer Concha Lichel, published in El Machete, no
168, 1
México, INBA, Museo Nacional de Arte
Donation de la famille Maples Arce, 2015
© Francisco Kochen
The Mexican Revolution profoundly changed the structure of society: since men had gone to war or
to search for work and livelihoods, women took on new tasks, first in armed struggle and then in
rebuilding culture and education within society. Thus, the image of the soldiaderas, those women
who followed the revolutionary troops, acquired a special significance and was symbolically
compared to the “strong women” of the Bible. In the artistic field, women also played a decisive role,
sometimes called “proto-feminism”: patrons of valuable artists or artists themselves, they participated
in the quest for an aesthetic language capable of expressing their doubts and questioning. (Text from
the Jeu de Paume website translated by Google translate)
Concha Michel (1899-1990) was a singer-songwriter, political activist, playwright, and a researcher
who published several projects on the culture of indigenous communities. She was one of the few
women who performed in the corrido style. She created the Institute of Folklore in Michoacan and
was one of the first collectors of folklore and preservers of the traditions of the Mexican people. She
was a cultural icon having relationships with two presidents, and a broad range of Mexico’s most
prominent artists including Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Guadalupe Marín, Tina Modo i, Elena
Poniatowska, Anita Brenner and others. (Text from the Wikipedia website
(h ps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concha_Michel))
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Ruth Berlau
Grévistes américains (American warriors)
1941
10 x 15 cm
Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Bertolt Brecht Archiv
© by R. Berlau/Hoffmann
Ruth Berlau, actress, director and photographer of Danish origin realizes this photograph shortly
after his arrival in the United States. She fled Nazi Germany with the writer and playwright Bertolt
Brecht and accompanied him during much of his exile. In line with her commitment to the Spanish
war and her communist ideas, she photographed American social movements and showed the actors
of the struggle and the victims of oppression. This series on strikes highlights the workforce of the
workers, with the desire to get their faces out of anonymity. It is in keeping with the documentary use
of photography undertaken by social programs such as the New Deal and in particular the path
traced by Walker Evans, initiator of the “documentary style”. It chooses a frontal point of view, apt to
reveal with precision and clarity the faces of the strikers. In doing so, it applies itself to restoring their
dignity while producing the documents of a social history. The counter-drive gives the strikers a
particular scope and strength, just as the framing, which ostensibly divides the group, suggests that
they belong to a powerful and determined group. The photographic practice of Ruth Berlau seems to
embody a democratic ideal, revealing both the unity and the singularity of each and a common
political commitment, which is reflected here through the exchange of views. (Text from the Jeu de
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Manuel Álvarez Bravo

Ouvrier en grève, assassiné (Striking worker, assassinated)
1934
Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris
© Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris / Roger Viollet
© Estate Manuel Álvarez Bravo
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Inconnu
Contestation autour de la construction de l’aéroport de Narita
Contestation around the construction of Narita airport
1969
Gelatin silver prints
© Collection Art Institute of Chicago
In parallel with the dazzling rise of a consumer society on the Western model, for ten years (from 1960
to 1970) Japan went through a major identity crisis that unfolded on multiple fronts: American
military bases in Okinawa, construction of Narita airport, occupation of universities by students …
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Chieh-Jen Chen
The Route
2006
35 mm film transferred onto DVD: color and black and white, silent, 16:45 min.
© Chieh-Jen Chen, courtesy galerie Lily Robert
“To rise up is to break a history that everyone believed to have been heard. It is to break the foreseeability of
history, to refute the rule that presided, as we thought, over its development or its preservation.”
.
Georges Didi-Huberman, “By the desires (Fragments of What Makes Us Rise Up)” catalogue of the
exhibition Uprisings
DESIRES (INDESTRUCTIBLES)
The hope of one condemned to death. – Mothers rise up. – They are your own children. – They
who go through walls.
But potency outlives power. Freud said that desire was indestructible. Even those who knew
they were condemned – in the camps, in the prisons – seek every means to transmit a testimony or
call out. As Joan Miró evoked in a series of works titled “The Hope of a Condemned Man,” in homage
to the student anarchist Salvador Puig i Antich, executed by Franco’s regime in 1974.
An uprising can end with mothers’ tears over the bodies of their dead children. But these tears
are merely a burden: they can still provide the potencies of uprising, like in the “resistance marches”
of mothers and grandmothers in Buenos Aires. It is our own children who rise up: “Zero for
Conduct!” was Antigone not almost a child herself? Whether in the Chiapas forests or on the Greece –
Macedonia border, somewhere in China, in Egypt, in Gaza, or in the jungle of computerized networks
considered as a vox populi, there will always be children to jump the wall.
Francisca Benitez, Ruth Berlau, Bruno Boudjelal, Agustí Centelles, Eduardo Gil, Mat Jacob, Ken Hamblin,
Maria Kourkouta, Joan Miró, Pedro Mo a, Voula Papaioannou, Estefania Peñafiel Loaiza, Enrique Ramirez,
Argentinian, Greek, Mexican unknowns.
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Denis Foyatier
Spartacus
1830
Marble
Commande de Charles X, 1828
Département des Sculptures
© 2011 Musée du Louvre, dist. RMN – Grand Palais / Thierry Ollivier
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Victor Hugo
Le Pendu (The hanged man)
1854
Plume et lavis d’encre brune, encre noire, fusain, pierre noire, gouache sur papier
Paris, Maison de Victor Hugo
© Maisons de Victor Hugo / Roger-Viollet
While in exile in Jersey, Victor Hugo is deeply moved by the death sentence in Guernsey of John
Charles Tapner, a condemnation against which he protests and asks for a pardon that he will not
get. Hugo then makes four drawings depicting a gaunt hanged man at his gallows. The museum
preserves two (Ecce and Ecce Lex). Hugo had hung them in his room in Marine Terrace in Jersey, and
in his study under the roof of Hauteville House in Guernsey.
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Voula Papaioannou
Graffitis de prisonniers sur les murs de la prison allemande de la rue Merlin à Athènes
Graffiti of prisoners on the walls of the German prison in Merlin Street, Athens
1944
Gelatin-silver print, modern print
24 x 30 cm
Benaki Museum Photographic Archive, Athènes
Voula Papaioannou is a major figure in Greek documentary photography. Born in 1898, she made
numerous photographs of landscapes, monuments and archaeological sites in the 1930s. The Second
World War led her to wonder about her practice and she was commi ed to covering the realities of
the conflict. Her apparatus then becomes a tool to testify and publicize the misery and suffering of the
Greek population during the German occupation. It reflects the difficulties of everyday life, the
departure of the military in combat and the famines that strike civilians. During the liberation, she
made a few shots of street fights as well as these images of the walls of the prison of Athens held until
then by the Germans. It shows the graffiti (inscriptions and drawings) left by the detainees, most of
them awaiting execution. Many say their names and send a message to their families (“I want my
relatives to be proud of me”) or claim their political convictions (“Vive le KKE”, Greek Communist
Party) for the sake of transmi ing until the day before their deaths the reasons for their struggle and
the conditions of their disappearance. These photographic recordings are similar to archaeological
documents bearing the traces of the imprisonment of the Greek Resistance fighters and their hope
that these messages will one day be read in a Greece freed from the Nazi occupation. (Text from the
Jeu de Paume website translated by Google translate)
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Anonyme (membre du Sonderkommando d’Auschwi -Birkenau)

Femmes poussées vers la chambre à gaz du crématoire V de Birkenau
Women pushed towards the gas chamber of crematorium V of Birkenau
1944
Contact plate with two images
12 x 6 cm
Archival collection of the State Museum Auschwi -Birkrenau, Oświęcim
Photo: Archival collection of the State Museum Auschwi -Birkrenau, Oświęcim
This photograph was taken by a member of the Sonderkommando Auschwi -Birkenau, a special unit
of Jewish inmates commissioned by the SS to carry out the final solution. It belongs to a set of four
photographs carried out clandestinely on a piece of film, using a photographic camera infiltrated in
the camp and then concealed at the bo om of a bucket. Hidden near crematory furnace V, the author
of these photographs was assisted by other members of the Sonderkommando. To do such an act was
indeed extremely dangerous. The sloping framing and the blur reflect the perilous conditions in
which the photographer was then placed. This picture, however, clearly shows a convoy of naked
women pushed by the special unit to the gas chamber, located off-field. The film was then filtered
from the camp into a tube of toothpaste to join the Polish Resistance, accompanied by an explanatory
le er. These photographs therefore have an informative aim and constitute the only photographic
documents on the gas chambers. As Georges Didi-Huberman affirms, “in the depths of this
fundamental despair, the “solicitation to resist” has probably detached itself from the beings
themselves, who have been promised to disappear, to fix themselves on signals to be emi ed beyond
the boundaries of the camp.*” Among others, the image, this “eye of history”, is then invested with
the only hope still possible: to make the hell of Auschwi visible and therefore imaginable.
*Georges Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout, (Images despite everything), Paris, Les Editions de Minuit,
2003, p. 14.
Sonderkommandos were work units made up of German Nazi death camp prisoners. They were
composed of prisoners, usually Jews, who were forced, on threat of their own deaths, to aid with the
disposal of gas chamber victims during the Holocaust. The death-camp Sonderkommandos, who were
always inmates, should not be confused with the SS-Sonderkommandos which were ad hoc units formed
from various SS offices between 1938 and 1945. The term itself in German means “special unit”, and
was part of the vague and euphemistic language which the Nazis used to refer to aspects of the Final
Solution (cf. Einsa kommando units of the Einsa gruppen death squads).
About 120 SS personnel were assigned to the gas chambers and lived on site at the crematoria. Several
SS personnel oversaw the killings at each gas chamber, while the bulk of the work was done by the
mostly Jewish prisoners known as Sonderkommandos (special squads). Sonderkommando responsibilities
included guiding victims to the gas chambers and removing, looting, and cremating the corpses.
The Sonderkommado were housed separately from other prisoners, in somewhat be er conditions.
Their quality of life was further improved by access to the goods taken from murdered prisoners,
which Sonderkommandos were sometimes able to steal for themselves and to trade on Auschwi ’s
black market. Hungarian doctor Miklós Nyiszli reported that the Sonderkommando numbered around
860 prisoners when the Hungarian Jews were being killed in 1944. Many Sonderkommandos commi ed
suicide due to the horrors of their work; those who did not generally were shot by the SS in a ma er
of weeks, and new Sonderkommando units were then formed from incoming transports. Almost none
of the 2,000 prisoners placed in these units survived to the camp’s liberation.
Text from the Wikipedia website
(h ps://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/ken-hamblin-beaubien-street-web.jpg)
Ken Hamblin
Beaubien Street
1971
Modern gelatin silver print
Fifth Estate photo
Joseph A. Labadie Collection, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan
(h ps://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/miro-prisoners-hope-preparatory-drawing-for-the-hope-
of-the-dead-man-i-ii-and-iii-1973-web.jpg)
Joan Miró
L’Espoir du prisonnier, dessin préparatoire pour L’Espoir du condamné à mort I, II et III
Prisoner’s Hope, Preparatory Drawing for The Hope of the Dead Man I, II and III
1973
Crayons de couleur et stylo sur papier (bloc-notes)
7.7 x 12.5 cm
Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelone
© Successió Miró / ADAGP, Paris, 2016
Photo: Fundació Miró, Barcelone
This sketch is part of a series of preparatory studies for a triptych entitled The Hope of the Condemned to
Death, completed in March 1974. It is already possible to guess the overall design (three horizontal
compositions of primary colors formed of sinuous lines) and the title seems to be clarified with the
addition of these words: “the hope of the prisoner”. Sensitive to the death sentence of the anarchist
and anti-fascist militant Salvador Puig i Antich, a member of the Movimiento Ibérico de Liberación,
Joan Miró claims that he completed his triptych on the day of his execution on 2 March 1974. Thus the
artwork – initially imagined in an abstract and metaphorical way – then encounters history. This
triptych executed in very large format so as to address the greatest number, as Miró wished that the
painting would be, thus constitutes a real monument to the memory of one of the last victims of
Francoism. Judged “prophetic” by the artist, he presents a series of black lines that he interpreted as
an image of the tourniquet used for execution. Struggling or playing as much with the void as with
the spots of vivid colors, these dark lines on a light background also seem to be distended and open
like a permi ed hope. From his first studies, Joan Miró managed to preserve intact, by the energy of
the gesture and the vivacity of the keys, the “indestructible desire” to hope and resist, which
culminated the following year in the fall of the Franco regime. (Text from the Jeu de Paume website
(h ps://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/gil-nic3b1os-desaparecidos-web.jpg)
Eduardo Gil
Niños desaparecidos. Secunda Marcha de la Resistancia (Murdered children. Second Resistance March)
December 9-10 1982
Modern gelatin silver print
Eduardo Gil collection
© Eduardo Gil
Eduardo Gil was born in 1948 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. After studying sociology, he became a
photographer. Self-taught and sensitive to social struggles, his commitment was linked to the
establishment of the military dictatorship following the coup d’état of 24 March 1976. Working for the
press and as an independent author, he made a series of reports on the political situation and social
life of his country. He photographed in particular the second March for the Resistance in Buenos
Aires on 9 and 10 December 1982. Organized at the call of the Mothers of the Place de Mai in tribute
to the missing children during the dictatorship, the First march of the Resistance in 1981 ‘Is then
reproduced every year until 2006, involving the entire society, including after the end of the
dictatorship. Faced with the march, Eduardo Gil records the determined faces of the women, mothers
and grandmothers of the children of Argentina, demonstrating to obtain answers on the fate of the
disappeared. The use of black and white fla ened the composition and accentuated the juxtaposition
of the women’s faces with the banners and placards. The photographs of the children brandished by
the demonstrators thus seem to merge in the procession. All appear in this sense more united than
ever, stretched out towards us, as towards politics. Eduardo Gil seems to prove here that by recording
the image of the missing among the living, photography itself is a force of uprising. (Text from the Jeu
de Paume website translated by Google translate)
(h ps://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/francisca-benitez-garde-l_est-web.jpg)
Francisca Benítez
Garde l’Est
2005
Still frame
Francisca Benitez collection
© Francisca Benítez
(h ps://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/gohar-dashti-from-the-series-todays-life-and-war-2008-
web.jpg)
Gohar Dashti
From the series Today’s Life and War
2008
Institut des Cultures d’Islam
The photographs of the Iranian artist Gohar Dashti’s Today’s Life and War show the daily life of a
young couple against a background of war. Surrounded by tanks, bunkers and armed soldiers, the
spouses live in the middle of the fields of ruins and continue to go about their occupations. Between
impassivity and disillusionment, their a itudes show perseverance and unwavering determination to
simply continue living. With these surreal scenes, the artist is witnessing a generation caught between
the memories of ten years of war against Iraq and the permanent threat of conflict.
(h ps://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/pedro-mo a-natureza-das-coisas-024-web.jpg)
Pedro Mo a
Natureza das coisas #024, (The nature of things #024)
From the “Natureza das coisas” series
2013
Mineral print on co on paper

Private collection
Courtesy of the artist and gallery Bendana Pinel
(h ps://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/maria-kourkouta-idomeni-web.jpg)
(h ps://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/maria-kourkouta-idomeni-b-web.jpg)
Maria Kourkouta
Idomeni, 14 mars 2016. Frontière gréco-macédonienne, (Idomeni, March 14, 2016. Greek-Macedonian border)
2016
HD video loop: color, sound, 36:00 min.
© Maria Kourkouta. Production: Jeu de Paume, Paris
Jeu de Paume
1, Place de la Concorde
75008 Paris
métro Concorde
Tel: 01 47 03 12 50
Opening hours:
Tuesday: 11.00 – 21.00
Wednesday – Sunday: 11.00 – 19.00
Closed Monday
Jeu de Paume website (h p://www.jeudepaume.org/)
LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK (h p://www.facebook.com/ArtBlart)
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14
Jan
16
Exhibition: ‘New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar
Republic, 1919-1933’ at the Los Angeles County Museum of
Art (LACMA)
By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment
Categories: beauty, Berlin, black and white photography, documentary photography, exhibition,
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Hausgeräten, Tanz in Baden-Baden, The Architect (Hans Poelzig), The Black-Marketeer, The City and
the Nature of Landscape, The Danish Girl, the first gay journal in the world, The Girlfriend, The
Girlfriend: Journal for Ideal Friendship between Women, The Handtowel, The Harbor II, The Island,
The Jeweller Karl Krall, the machine in the ghost, The Paper Machine, The Profiteer, the psychic and
the machinic, The Third Gender, The Unique, The Yellow Boiler, To Beauty, Toile entisch, Untitled
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Kalkerfeld, Werner Man Entrance to an Apartment Block in the Cologne-Kalkerfeld Housing
Se lement, Wilhelm Lachnit, Wilhelm Lachnit Arbeiter mit Maschine, Wilhelm Lachnit Worker with
Machine, Wilhelm Schnarrenberger, Wilhelm Schnarrenberger Portrait of an Architect, Wilhelm
Schnarrenberger Porträt eines Architekten, Willie Vicarage, Woman with Monocle, Women in Love,
Women Love, Worker with Machine, World War I, Zusammenkunft von Fetischisten und manischen
Flagellanten
Exhibition dates: 4th October 2015 – 18th January 2016
If I had to nominate one period of art that is my favourite, it would be European avant-garde art
between 1919 – 1939. The sense of renewed creativity, inventiveness, and sustained enquiry into the
nature of things by artists, this texture of reality, just fascinates me. A hyper-sensory, objective
sobriety, yes, but more – an opposite, apposite expression of critical, cultural opprobrium that sticks
its proboscis into mental and machinic spaces.
The relations between the physical and the psychic are evidenced during this period “as a general
movement and multiplicity, rather than just a series of mechanisms.” What surrounds the
metaphysical body, its environment, is enacted as a performance upon the body through a
“continuous set of relations, multiplicities, speeds, connections. Bodies are only distinguished by
certain singularities, which are clarifications of expression drawing together certain multiplicities,
under the aegis of an event.” Bodies are (en)acted upon. Conversely, “Just as bodies can be seen as
machinic, so too does the machinic depend upon bodies wrought out of vibration [of energy, of ideas]
by clarity of expression of events.” They are folded and refolded into each other, in a series of
multiplicities and intensities – of architecture and art, of sex and gender, of flagellation and flight – so
that there is a ‘synthesis of heterogeneties’, or hetero(gene)ties that evidence the DNA of our
becoming, our diverse difference, our heterogeneic alterity. This folding, this vibration of energy,
these clear zones of expression and performance produce this dazzling, de(gene)rate art.1
In this huge posting I have tried to sequence the machinic (the spelling auto correct keeps changing it
to “mechanic” which is quite ironic) with the figurative, the painting of architecture with the
architectural photograph; the photograph of the sewing machine with the painting of the Paper
Machine; the distorted, etched face with the photographic war damaged face; the Modernist housing
estate with the alienation of the Picture of Industry. You get the picture. One is folded into the other
as performance, as vibration of energy, as (destructive, or creative) ritual of re/production. And there
we have the gay lovers, the first transgender woman who dies after operations on her body, the
climax – in an erotic sense – of the scar on the woman’s leg in Friedrich Seidenstücker’s Untitled (c.
1930, below) or the blood lines of the eyeball in Herbert Ploberger’s Self-Portrait with Ophthalmological
Models (c. 1928-30, below). Or the cool objectiveness of Sander’s photographs – Coal Carrier, Painter’s
Wife, The Architect – against the detached titles (The Jeweller, Portrait of a Lawyer, Portrait of an
Architect, name of person secondary) but outrageous colours and distortions/elongations of the
painted portraits. Fascinating archetypal, subjective/objective correlation.
This is a mad, dangerous, exciting world in which these artists lived, which they mapped and
depicted in all its glorious intensity. Flowering one minute, dead the next.
Marcus
.
Many thankx to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs
in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Further reading: New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919-1933
(h ps://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/new-objectivity.pdf) (135kb pdf)
1. Some of these ideas came from Murphie, Andrew. “Computers are not theatre: the machine in the
ghost in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Gua ari’s thought,” in Genosko, Gary (ed.,). Deleuze and Gua ari:
Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers. London, Routledge, 2001, pp. 1311-1312
“German Expressionism is an art which above all, celebrated, inwardness.”

“There’s no contradiction between being a Fascist and being an artist… I’m sorry but there isn’t. It happens
that not very many good artists have been Nazis.”
.
Robert Hughes
Georg Scholz (1890-1945)

Industrial Peasants (Industriebauern)
1920
Lithograph on wove paper
15 1/2 × 19 in. (39.4 × 48.3 cm)
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by the Robert Gore Ri ind
Foundation, Beverly Hills, CA, and the Modern Art Deaccession Fund
© 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, photo
© Museum Associates/LACMA
O o Dix (1891-1969)
Sex Murder (Lustmord)
1922
Etching
10 7/8 x 13 5/8 in. (27.5 x 34.6 cm)
© 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Photo courtesy Galerie Nierendorf, Berlin
O o Dix (1891-1969)
Card Players (Kartenspieler)
1920
Drypoint
19 7/8 × 13 ¹⁄₁₆ in. (50.5 × 32.5 cm)
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Robert Gore Ri ind Center for German Expressionist
Studies, purchased with funds provided by the Robert Gore Ri ind Foundation, Beverly Hills, CA,
and Helgard Field-Lion and Irwin Field

Photo © 2015 Museum Associates/LACMA
(h ps://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/facial-reconstruction.jpg)
Willie Vicarage, suffering facial wounds in the Ba le of Jutland 1916 Naval Ba le was one of the first
men to receive facial reconstruction using plastic surgery. Doctor Harold Gillies created the “tubed
pedicle” technique that used a flap of skin from the chest or forehead and swung it into place over the
face. The flap remained a ached but was stitched into a tube, keeping the original blood supply intact
and dramatically reducing the infection rate.
This photograph is not in the exhibition, but I have included it to show an actual case study of facial
reconstruction during WW1. While there were few books in Britain about the war, soldiers injuries
and facial reconstruction, O o Dix produced his seminal portfolio Der Krieg [War]
(h p://nga.gov.au/dix/) (below).
“O o Dix was born in 1891 in Untermhaus, Thuringia, the son of an ironworker. He initially trained
in Gera and at the Dresden School of Arts and Crafts as a painter of wall decorations and later taught
himself how to paint on canvas. He volunteered as a machine-gunner during World War I and in the
autumn of 1915 he was sent to the Western Front. He was at the Somme during the major allied
offensive of 1916.
After the war he studied at the academies of Dresden and Dusseldorf. Together with George Grosz,
he was one of the leading exponents of the artistic movement Die Neue Sachlichkeit [New Objectivity], a
form of social realist art which unsentimentally examined the decadence and underlying social
inequality of post-war German society. With the rise of the National Socialists in 1933, Dix was
dismissed from his teaching post at the Dresden Academy. He moved south to Lake Constance and
was only allowed to continue practising as an artist after he agreed to relinquish overtly political
subject ma er in favour of landscape painting. Dix was conscripted into the army during World War
II and in 1945 was captured and put into a prisoner of war camp. He returned to Dresden after the
war where his paintings became more religiously reflective of his war-time experiences. He died in
1969.
Der Krieg [War] 1924 arose out of Dix’s own experiences of the horrors of war. As outlined above, he
had volunteered for service in the army and fought as a machine-gunner on the Western Front. He
was wounded a number of times, once almost fatally. War profoundly affected him as an individual
and as an artist, and he took every opportunity, both during his active service and afterwards, to
document his experiences. These experiences would become the subject ma er of many of his later
paintings and are central to the Der Krieg cycle.
Der Krieg itself, as a cycle of prints (51 in total), is consciously modelled on Goya’s [1746-1828] equally
famous and equally devastating Los Desastres de la Guerra [The disasters of war]. Los Desastres detailed
Goya’s own account of the horrors of the Napoleonic invasion and the Spanish War of Independence
from 1808 to 1814. Goya’s cycle of 82 etchings, which he worked on for a decade after the Spanish War
of Independence were not, however, published until 1863, long after his death.
Like Los Desastres, Der Krieg uses a variety of etching techniques and does so with an equally
astonishing facility. Similarly, it exploits the cumulative possibilities of a long sequence of images and
mirrors Goya’s unflinching, stark realism in terms of its fundamental presentation. GH Hamilton
describes Dix’s cycle as ‘perhaps the most powerful as well as the most unpleasant anti-war
statements in modern art… It was truly this quality of unmitigated truth, truth to the most
commonplace and vulgar experiences, as well as the ugly realities of psychological experience, that
gave his work a strength and consistency a ained by no other contemporary artist, not even by
[George] Grosz…’ It has become a commonplace to see this cycle as an admonition against the
barbarity of war. And there is no doubt that as a human document it is a powerful cautionary work.
At a psychological level, however, its truth goes deeper than this. Dix was both horrified and
fascinated by the experience of war…
This nightmarish, hallucinatory quality pervades all of the Der Krieg images. Paradoxically, there is
also a quality of sensuousness, an almost perverse delight in the rendering of horrific detail, which
indicates that there was perhaps, in Dix’s case, an almost addictive quality to the hyper-sensory input
of war. In terms of the general corpus of Dix’s work, Der Krieg occupies a central place amongst the
large number of paintings and works-on-paper devoted to the theme of war. The work is
astonishingly powerful and, as stated above, it remains one of the most powerful indictments of war
ever conceived. It is universally regarded as one of the great masterpieces of twentieth century. Dix’s
oeuvre as a whole, and Der Krieg in particular, was hugely influential on a number of other twentieth
century artist such as Ben Shahn, Pablo Picasso and Robert Motherwell.”
Mark Henshaw. “The Art of War: (h p://nga.gov.au/dix/)O o Dix’s Der Krieg [War] cycle 1924,”
(h p://nga.gov.au/dix/) on the National Gallery of Australia website [Online] Cited 07/01/2016
O o Dix (1891-1969)
Skin Graft (Transplantation) from the portfolio War (Der Krieg)
1924
Etching with aquatint on copperplate paper
18 11/16 x 13 7/8 in. (47.5 x 35.2 cm)
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Robert Gore Ri ind Center for German Expressionist
Studies
Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA
“The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents New Objectivity: Modern German Art in
the Weimar Republic, 1919-1933, the first comprehensive show in the United States to explore the
themes that characterize the dominant artistic trends of the Weimar Republic. Organized in
association with the Museo Correr in Venice, Italy, this exhibition features nearly 200 paintings,
photographs, drawings, and prints by more than 50 artists, many of whom are li le known in the
United States. Key figures – O o Dix, George Grosz, Christian Schad, August Sander, and Max
Beckmann – whose heterogeneous careers are essential to understanding 20th century German
modernism, are presented together with lesser known artists, including Herbert Ploberger, Hans
Finsler, Georg Schrimpf, Heinrich Maria Davringhausen, Carl Grossberg, and Aenne Biermann,
among others. Special a ention is devoted to the juxtaposition of painting and photography, offering
the rare opportunity to examine both the similarities and differences between the movement’s diverse
media.
During the 14 years of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933), artists in Germany grappled with the
devastating aftermath of World War I: the social, cultural, and economic effects of rapid
modernization and urbanization; staggering unemployment and despair; shifting gender identities;
and developments in technology and industry. Situated between the end of World War I and the Nazi
assumption of power, Germany’s first democracy thrived as a laboratory for widespread cultural
achievement, witnessing the end of Expressionism, the exuberant anti-art activities of the Dadaists,
the establishment of the Bauhaus design school, and the emergence of a new realism.
This new turn to realism, best recognized by a 1925 exhibition in Mannheim, Neue Sachlichkeit (of
which New Objectivity is the English translation), has at times been called Post-Expressionism, neo-
naturalism, Verism, and Magic Realism. The diverse group of artists associated with this new realism
was not unified by manifesto, political tendency, or geography, they shared a skepticism regarding
the direction Germany society was taking in the years following World War I and an awareness of the
human isolation these changes brought about.
Germany’s financial, sociopolitical, and emotional defeat in WWI took a profound toll on the nation.
In contrast to their Expressionist predecessors – who had enthusiastically embraced the war before
confronting its harrowing realities on the ba lefield – practitioners of the New Objectivity movement
were disillusioned with the complex realities of the new Germany. Digressing from Expressionism’s
penchant for bold, abstract subjectivity, the Weimar Republic’s burgeoning group of artists favored
realism, precision, objective sobriety, and the appropriation of Old Master painting techniques,
including a nostalgic return to portraiture and heightened a ention to the appearance of surface…
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Hans Finlser (1891-1972)

Eggs on a Plate (Eier auf Teller)
1929
9 9/16 x 6 13/16 in. (24.3 x 17.3 cm)
Kunstmuseum Mori burg Halle (Saale)
© 2015 Finsler Estate, Stiftung Mori burg Halle (Saale), Kunstmuseum des Landes Sachsen-Anhalt
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Hans Finsler (1891-1972)

Electric Bulb with Parts of the Socket (Elektrische Birne mit Teilen der Fassung)
1928
Vintage print
8 5/8 x 5 7/8 in. (21.9 x 14.9 cm)
© 2015 Finsler Estate, Stiftung Mori burg Halle (Saale), Kunstmuseum des Landes Sachsen-Anhalt
Born in Munich, Hans Finsler was a gifted teacher of photography in Swi erland from the 1920s to
the 1950s, where he taught students the vocabulary of modernism and its strength of vision. Finsler
was also well-known for his stylish and innovative commercial work reflecting the contemporary
Neue Sachlichkeit (New Vision) aesthetic of describing machinery, architecture and manufactured
products with clarity and respect. His private work, however, was more profound and philosophical.
He experimented tirelessly with simple and elemental forms, developing theories of motion and
stillness with highlights and shadows, often using eggs as his principal subject ma er. Finsler’s
photographs were exhibited in the important exhibition Film und Foto in Stu gart in 1929.
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Carl Grossberg (1894-1940)

The Yellow Boiler (Der Gelbe Kessel)
1933
Oil on wood
37 x 29 in. (94 x 73.7 cm)
Von der Heydt-Museum Wuppertal, Germany
Photo courtesy Von der Heydt-Museum Wuppertal, Germany
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Carl Grossberg (1894-1940)

The Paper Machine (Die Papiermaschine)
1934
Oil on wood
35 7/16 x 45 11/16 in. (90 x 116 cm)
Private collection
Photo by Benjamin Hasenclever, Munich
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Wanda von Debschi -Kunowski (1870-1935)

Sewing Machine (Nähmaschine)
c. 1930
Photograph
7 7/16 x 5 5/16 in. (18.9 x 15.1 cm)

Galerie Berinson, Berlin
Photo: Galerie Berinson, Berlin
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Albert Renger-Pa sch

Flat Irons for Shoe Manufacture, Fagus Factory I (Bügeleisen für Schuhfabrikation, Fagus-Werk, Alfeld)
1926
9 x 6 5/8 in. (22.9 x 16.8 cm)
The J. Paul Ge y Museum, Los Angeles
© 2015 Albert Renger-Pa sch Archiv/Ann u. Jürgen Wilde, Zülpich/Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York
We still don’t sufficiently appreciate the opportunity to capture the magic of material things. The structure of
wood, stone, and metal can be shown with a perfection beyond the means of painting… To do justice to
modern technology’s rigid linear structure … only photography is capable of that.
So wrote Albert Renger-Pa sch in 1927 about the camera’s innate ability to depict the Industrial Age.
Here he studied the materials of identically shaped, finished wooden handles and industrially
produced steel heads, while also representing the flatirons as an army of tools standing at a ention
like bowling pins. Renger-Pa sch’s photograph celebrates the beauty of the commonplace object.
(Text from the J. Paul Ge y Museum website)
Renger-Pa sch was born in Würzburg and began making photographs by age twelve. After military
service in the First World War he studied chemistry at Dresden Technical College. In the early 1920s
he worked as a press photographer for the Chicago Tribune before becoming a freelancer and, in
1925, publishing a book, The choir stalls of Cappenberg. He had his first museum exhibition in 1927. A
second book followed in 1928, Die Welt ist schön (The World is Beautiful). This, his best-known book, is
a collection of one hundred of his photographs in which natural forms, industrial subjects and mass-
produced objects are presented with the clarity of scientific illustrations. The book’s title was chosen
by his publisher; Renger-Pa sch’s preferred title for the collection was Die Dinge (“Things”).
In its sharply focused and ma er-of-fact style his work exemplifies the esthetic of The New
Objectivity that flourished in the arts in Germany during the Weimar Republic. Like Edward
Weston in the United States, Renger-Pa sch believed that the value of photography was in its ability
to reproduce the texture of reality, and to represent the essence of an object. He wrote: “The secret of a
good photograph – which, like a work of art, can have esthetic qualities – is its realism … Let us
therefore leave art to artists and endeavor to create, with the means peculiar to photography and
without borrowing from art, photographs which will last because of their photographic qualities.”
Text from the Wikipedia website (h ps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Renger-Pa sch)
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Wilhelm Lachnit (1899-1962)

Worker with Machine (Arbeiter mit Maschine)
1924-28
Oil on wood
19 11/16 x 20 1/2 in. (50 x 52 cm)
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie
© 2015 Estate of Wilhelm Lachnit
Photo: bpk, Berlin/Staatliche Museen/Jörg P. Anders/Art Resource, NY
Lachnit was born in the small town of Gi ersee; his family moved to Dresden in 1906. He studied at
the Kunstgewerbeschule Dresden under Richard Guhr, and later at the Dresden Academy of Fine
Arts, where he was acquainted with and influenced by O o Dix, Conrad Felixmüller, and O o
Griebel. He joined the Communist Party of Germany in 1924 and was active in producing various
forms of Agitprop throughout the 1920s. He co-founded the “Neue Gruppe” with Hans Grundig,
O o Griebel, and Fri Skade; successful exhibitions in Paris, Düsseldorf, Ansterdam, and Dresden
followed.
After the Nazis seized power in 1933, Lachnit’s work was declared “degenerate” and confiscated by
authorities. During this period he was not allowed to make art and worked as an exhibition designer.
Much of his confiscated work was destroyed during the February 1945 firebombing of Dresden. His
1923 watercolours Man and Woman in the Window and “Girl at Table” were found in the 2012 Nazi loot
discovery. (Text from Wikipedia)
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Hans Mertens (1906-1944)

Still Life with Household Appliances (Stilleben mit Hausgeräten)
1928
Oil on canvas
25 5/8 x 27 9/16 in. (65 x 70 cm)
Sprengel Museum Hannover
Photo: bpk, Berlin/Sprengel Museum/Aline Gwose/Art Resource, NY
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Herbert Ploberger (1902-1977)

Dressing Table (Toile entisch)
1926
Oil on canvas
17 11/16 x 27 9/16 in. (45 x 70 cm)
Private collection
© 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Bildrecht, Vienna
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Arthur Köster (1890-1960)

St. Georgs-Garten Housing Se lement, Architect O o Haesler (St. Georgs-Garten Siedlung, Architekt O o
Haesler)
1920s
Vintage print
8 13/16 x 6 3/4 in. (22.4 x 17.2 cm)
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Karl Völker (1889-1962)

Picture of Industry (Industriebild)
c. 1924
Oil on canvas
36 5/8 x 36 5/8 in. (93 x 93 cm)
© Klaus Völker
Photo: Klaus E. Göl
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Unknown photographer
Karl Völker
early 1930s
Silver gelatin photograph
This photograph is not in the exhibition. It looks like the man at left in the painting above, possibly a
self-portrait.
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George Grosz (1893-1959)

Construction (Untitled) (Konstruktion [Ohne Titel])
1920
Oil on canvas
31 7/8 x 24 in. (81 x 61 cm)
Stiftung Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen
Art © 2015 Estate of George Grosz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Photo: Walter Klein
In Grosz’s Germany, everything and everybody is for sale. All human transactions, except for the class
solidarity of the workers, are poisoned. The world is owned by four breeds of pig: the capitalist, the officer, the
priest and the hooker, whose other form is the sociable wife. He was one of the hanging judges of art. – Robert
Hughes
Degenerate Art - 1993, The Nazis vs. Expressionism
This is a documentary from 1993 by David Grubin (wri en, produced, and directed) about the art
exhibit under the Nazi regime of what they considered to be the most corrupting and corrosive
examples of what they called ‘Entartete Kunst’ or ‘Degenerate Art.’ The exhibit, which opened in July
of 1937, was meant to be laughed at and despised. I ran across it in a class on Modernism and Post-
Modernism. The film is not generally available at the time of this writing (other than on VHS).
Personally, I could think of no be er backdrop for the ideas and pathos of expressionist art than Nazi
Germany, shown by a great deal of actual footage (most provided by the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art – they had an exhibit of their own based on the event that same year). The music is
similarly striking, including Schoenberg, Hindemith, and Wagner.
“You know, one of the, most grotesque kind of, unintended results of this…. I remember seeing as a
kid one of the newsreels of the liberation of the camps… I never forgot that shot of the bulldozer
rolling the mass of starved corpses, the typhoid dead, the murdered, into this mass grave… and it
always comes back to me strangely enough when I look at the distortion and elongation in German,
in certain German expressionist pictures… as though the, uh, the aesthetic distortions of
expressionism had been made real, absolute and concrete on the real suffering human body by the
Nazis, you know as though this was some kind of climactic work of art which ended up mimicking
what they had a empted to suppress. This is a very superficial way of looking at it, I know, because
it leaves out the actual content of the suffering, but for a, a gentile boy seeing that in Australia, forty-
some years ago… uh, on a grainy movie – I compare the two images and I can’t help thinking of it.” –
Robert Hughes, 50:52 (h p://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QE4Ld1mkoM&t=50m52s)
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Anton Räderscheidt (1892-1970)

Man with Bowler (Mann mit steifem Hut)
1922
Oil on canvas
19 11/16 × 15 3/4 in. (50 × 40 cm)
Museum Ludwig, Cologne

© 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn,
Photo © Rheinisches Bildarchiv
In 1934-1935 Räderscheidt lived in Berlin. He fled to France in 1936, and se led in Paris, where his
work became more colorful, curvilinear and rhythmic. He was interned by the occupation authorities
in 1940, but he escaped to Swi erland. In 1949 he returned to Cologne and resumed his work,
producing many paintings of horses shortly before adopting an abstract style in 1957.
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Werner Man (1901-1983)

Entrance to an Apartment Block in the Cologne-Kalkerfeld Housing Se lement (Eingang in einen Wohnblock
in der Siedlung Köln-Kalkerfeld)
1928
15 3/16 × 8 3/4 in. (38.6 × 22.3 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor
Company and John C. Waddell, 1987
Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, image source: Art Resource, NY
During the 1920s and ’30s Man photographed functionalist architecture such as houses, factories,
bridge constructions and motorways. The pictures are extremely detailed, and with their bold
cropping and angles they profit from architecture’s geometric and modern idiom. Man later moved
to the Netherlands where he set up a portrait studio.
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Franz Radziwill (1895-1983)

The Handtowel (Das Handtuch)
1933
Oil on canvas on wood
20 7/8 x 17 11/16 in. (53 x 45 cm)
Radziwill Sammlung Claus Hüppe, courtesy Kunsthalle Emden

Photo by Fotostudio Bla erspiel & Haftstein, Wardenburg
Radziwill spent most of his life in the North Sea resort Dangast at Varel on Jadebusen. During
the period of National Socialism he had repeatedly been banned from exhibiting, three of his early
works were shown in the exhibition “Entartete Kunst”. Despite the exhibition ban he was commi ed
to Nazism and was a functionary of the Nazi Party. He addressed the tension between art and nature.
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Aenne Biermann (1898-1933)

Ficus elastic: Rubber Plant (Ficus elastic: Gummibaum)
c. 1927
18 2/5 x 13 3/4 in. (46.7 x 35 cm)
Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich, Pinakothek der Moderne
Photo: Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Fotoarchiv
Biermann’s photographs of minerals transformed her practice from the early personal views of her
children to the close-up, direct studies of form that would define her photographs of plants and
people that followed and make her a central figure in New Objectivity photography. Thus 1926 began
a period of intense productivity for Biermann that lasted until her untimely death, from liver disease,
at the age of thirty-five, in 1933.
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George Scholz (1890-1945)

Cacti and Semaphore (Kakteen und Semaphore)
1923
Oil on hardboard
27 3/16 x 20 9/16 in. (69 x 52.3 cm)
LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Münster, Westfälisches Landesmuseum
Photo: LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur (Westfälisches Landesmuseum), Münster/Rudolf
Wakonigg
(h ps://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/radziwill-the-harbour-ii.jpg)

The Harbor II (Der Hafen II)
1930
Oil on canvas
29 15/16 x 39 3/16 in. (76 x 99.5 cm)
Photo: bpk, Berlin/Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie/Klaus Goeken/Art Resource, NY
(h ps://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/radziwill-the-street.jpg)

The Street (Die StrasseI)
1928
Oil on canvas
31 11/16 x 33 7/8 in. (80.5 x 86 cm)
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Photo © Rheinisches Bildarchiv
New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919-1933 is organized into five thematic
sections: Life in Democracy and the Aftermath of the War examines both the polar conditions
dividing Germany’s rising bourgeoisie and those who suffered most from the war’s aftereffects,
including maimed war veterans, the unemployed, prostitutes, and victims of political corruption and
violence; The City and the Nature of Landscape addresses the growing disparity between an
increasingly industrialized urbanity and nostalgic longing for the pastoral; Still Life and
Commodities highlights a new form of the traditional still life in which quotidian objects – often
indicative of mass production – are staged to create object-portraits; Man and Machine looks to
artists’ a empts to reconcile the transformative yet dehumanizing effects of rapid industrialization;
and lastly, New Identities: Type and Portraiture showcases a new trend in portraiture in which
subjects are rendered as social typecasts rather than individual subjects.
Stephanie Barron, Exhibition Curator and Senior Curator of Modern Art at LACMA, said, “Close
examinations of this period still yield new insights into a complicated chapter in modern German art.
With very different backgrounds, these artists – some among the most well-known artists of the
century, while others are virtually unknown outside Germany – eschewed emotion, gesture, and
ecstasy, and sought instead to record and unmask the world around them with a close, impersonal,
restrained gaze. Together, they created a collective portrait of a society in uneasy transition, in images
that are as striking today as they were in their own time.”
“Contemporary art and popular culture alike are preoccupied with documenting ‘the real,’ and it is
worth taking a fresh look at how artists in the 1920s dealt with the uses of realism in a time of postwar
uncertainty,” said Michael Govan, LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director. “We hope that New
Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919-1933 will shed new light on this important
intersection of art, politics, and modernization that marks one of the most crucial periods of the 20th
century.”
Press release from LACMA
Installation photograph, New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919-1933, with
photo mural showing the exterior of famous Berlin nightclub Eldorado, Los Angeles County Museum
of Art, October 4, 2015 – January 18, 2016, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA
Installation photograph, New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919-
1933, showing photographs by Albert Renger-Pa sch (left), Aenne Biermann (centre top) and Hans
Finsler (centre bo om), and Hans Finsler (right top) and Gerda Leo (bo om right), Los Angeles
County Museum of Art, October 4, 2015 – January 18, 2016, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA
1933, showing photographs by August Sander.
1933, showing Aenne Biermann, Woman with Monocle (Dame mit Monokel), c. 1928 at left, with
photographs by Friedrich Seidenstücker (right top) and Franz Roh (right bo om)
Exhibition themes
New Objectivity is divided into five sections that address the competing and, at times, conflicting
approaches that the adherents to this new realism applied to the turbulent and ever-changing Weimar
years.
The first section, Life in the Democracy and the Aftermath of the War, highlights the disparity
between victims of the Weimar Republic and the growing bourgeoisie that benefited from the
deprivation of that period. Artists such as Max Beckmann, O o Dix, George Grosz, August Sander,
and Heinrich Maria Davringhausen, portrayed urban landscapes highlighting postwar outcasts and
their environs: the unemployed, disfigured, victims of violence, and prostitutes are set amid
backdrops of bordellos, street corners and other scenes fraught with menace. In contrast, the Weimar
Republic’s burgeoning upper class was often depicted as corrupt and ruthless. Davringhausen’s The
Profiteer (1920-21), for example, caricatures a common social type of the early Weimar era: the
exploitative businessman making his fortune during the period of hyperinflation. Davringhausen
places his profiteer on the top floor of a skyscraper in a long, narrow room filled with windows that
appear to be left open, as if there may be the danger of falling out. The brick red walls add to the
psychological intensity of the hyper-modern space, in which the well-dressed businessman sits at his
desk, enjoying a glass of wine and a cigar as he stares out dispassionately, avoiding the viewer’s gaze.
In The City and the Nature of Landscape, artists respond to the tensions caused by the effects of
industrialization, which bled from cities into rural areas. As factories and jobs proliferated, Germany
experienced a mass migration of its population from the countryside to urban areas. The notion of the
city became associated with the future while the rural was nostalgically regarded as the past, and
those who experienced the transition of migration were subject to feelings of displacement. The
complex relationship between the urban and rural reflected the disparate conditions of the Weimar
Republic. In addition to artists such as Leonhard Schmidt, Gustav Wunderwald, Erich Wegner, Georg
Scholz, and Anton Räderscheidt, this section features Arthur Köster, whose photographs of architect
O o Haesler’s Georgsgarten Siedlung represented architectural spaces using high-contrast lighting
and experimental framing. In St. Georgs-Garten Siedlung, Architekt O o Haesler, Köster’s human
subjects, dwarfed by the buildings’ geometric rigor and frozen in the composition’s overriding sense
of stillness, suggest an apprehension toward the new, modernized Germany; meanwhile, his images
portraying the green spaces of Georgsgarten Siedlung distill nature through the lens of industry.
Still Life and Commodities proposes a new form of the still life, meticulously staged compositions
that might be called object-portraits. Zeroing in on disparate, banal objects of everyday life, these
images represent things as markers of modernity and mass production. This section sees a recurring
motif of cacti and rubber plants – “exotic” plants that were common in households at the time – and
includes work by Aenne Biermann, Georg Scholz, Albert Renger-Pa sch, and Finsler, among others.
Man and Machine, the penultimate section of New Objectivity, highlights artists’ a ention to the
Weimar Republic’s advancements in technology and industry. While some were skeptical about the
lack of humanity found within networks of new machinery, others acknowledged the transformative
power of technologies and sought new ways of conceiving man’s relationship to industry.
Photography plays a key role in this section, not only commenting on its newly accepted position as
an art form, but also serving as a key influence for painters such as Carl Grossberg, who executed
paintings of factories with photographic precision as seen in Paper Machine (1934). Additionally, some
artists, such as Renger-Pa ch, a empted to bridge the psychological divide between the natural and
the industrial by drawing structural parallels between machinery and botany.
The final section of New Objectivity is dedicated to New Identities: Type and Portraiture, which
examines the way artists including Beckmann, Dix, Schad, and their peers turned to portraiture.
While diverse in approach, the portraits featured numerous commonalities, including social
typecasting, unsentimental renderings, and self-portraiture. Dominating these portraits are depictions
of other artists, writers, and performers, the working class, and marginalized members of society as
well as newly established types specific to the period, such as the war veteran and the “new woman.”
One of the most iconic images to derive from this new trend informal realism is Max Beckmann’s Self-
Portrait in Tuxedo (1927) in which he wears a smoking jacket and its class connotations like a costume
and stares brazenly at the viewer. Another of the most important practitioners of this new portraiture
is August Sander, who photographed his many subjects in somber, unexpressive poses, which he then
arranged according to profession. The faces captured in his unfinished series – his subjects are only
rarely identified by name – form an indelible archive of Weimar society.
Text from the LACMA press release
Die Insel (The Island), L-R: June 1928, July 1930, April 1931
Schwules Museum, Berlin
Photo by Nana Bahlmann
Die Freundin (The Girlfriend), September 1932, and Liebende Frauen (Women in Love), 1929
Spinnboden Berlin
Niels Hoyer (editor)

Lili Elbe. Ein Mensch wechseit sein Geschlecht (Man into Woman The First Sex Change)
1932
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Lili Ilse Elvenes, be er known as Lili Elbe (28 December 1882 – 13 September 1931), was
a Danish transgender woman and one of the first identifiable recipients of sex reassignment
surgery. Elbe was born Einar Magnus Andreas Wegener and was a successful artist under that name.
She also presented as Lili, sometimes spelled Lily, and was publicly introduced as Einar’s sister.
After transitioning, however, she made a legal name change to Lili Ilse Elvenes and stopped painting.
Elbe met Gerda Go lieb at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, and they married
in 1904, when Go lieb was 19 and Wegener was 22. The two of them worked as illustrators, with Elbe
specializing in landscape paintings, while Go lieb illustrated books and fashion magazines. They
both traveled through Italy and France, eventually se ling in Paris in 1912, where Elbe could live
openly as a woman, and Go lieb a lesbian. Elbe received the Neuhausens prize in 1907 and exhibited
at Kunstnernes Efterårsudstilling (the Artists Fall Exhibition), at the Vejle Art Museum, and in the
Saloon and Salon d’Automme in Paris. She is represented at Vejle Art Museum in Denmark.
Elbe started dressing in women’s clothes one day filling in for Go lieb’s absentee model; she was
asked to wear stockings and heels so her legs could substitute for those of the model. Elbe felt
surprisingly comfortable in the clothing. Over time, Go lieb became famous for her paintings of
beautiful women with haunting almond-shaped eyes dressed in chic fashions. In 1913, the
unsuspecting public was shocked to discover that the model who had inspired Go lieb’s depictions
of petites femmes fatales was in fact Go lieb’s spouse, “Elbe”.
In 1930, Elbe went to Germany for sex reassignment surgery, which was experimental at the time. A
series of four operations was carried out over a period of two years. The first surgery, removal of the
testicles, was made under the supervision of sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin. The rest of Elbe’s
surgeries were carried out by Kurt Warnekros, a doctor at the Dresden Municipal Women’s
Clinic. The second operation was to implant an ovary onto her abdominal musculature, the third to
remove the penis and the scrotum, and the fourth to transplant a uterus and construct a vaginal
canal. At the time of Elbe’s last surgery, her case was already a sensation in newspapers of Denmark
and Germany. A Danish court invalidated the Wegeners’ marriage in October 1930, and Elbe
managed to get her sex and name legally changed, including receiving a passport as Lili Ilse
Elvenes…
In June 1931, Elbe had her fourth operation, which consisted of a uterus transplant and
the construction of a vagina, both of which were new and experimental procedures at that time. She
died three months after the surgery due to heart paralysis caused by the uterus transplant.
Text from the Wikipedia website (h ps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lili_Elbe)
Der Eigene (The Unique)

1925
Schwules Museum, Berlin
Christian Schad (1894-1982)

Boys in Love (Liebende Knaben)
1929
Silverpoint
11 13/16 x 9 1/4 in. (30 x 23.5 cm)
Museen der Stadt Aschaffenburg, Christian Schad Stiftung Aschaffenburg, Leihgabe der Kurt-Gerd-
Kunkel Stiftung Aschaffenburg, MSA Dep. KGKS 1/1986
© 2015 Christian-Schad-Stiftung Aschaffenburg/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-
Kunst, Bonn
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Self-Portrait (Selbstbildnis mit Modell)
1927
Oil on wood
29 15/16 x 24 3/16 in. (76 x 61.5 cm)
Private collection, courtesy of Tate
© 2015 Christian Schad Stiftung Aschaffenburg/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-
Kunst, Bonn
Christian Schad (August 21, 1894 – February 25, 1982) was a German painter associated
with Dada and the New Objectivity movement. Considered as a group, Schad’s portraits form an
extraordinary record of life in Vienna and Berlin in the years following World War I.
Schad’s art was not condemned by the Nazis in the way that the work of O o Dix, George Grosz, Max
Beckmann, and many other artists of the New Objectivity movement was; this may have been because
of his lack of commercial success. He became interested in Eastern philosophy around 1930, and his
artistic production declined precipitously. After the crash of the New York stock market in 1929,
Schad could no longer rely on his father’s financial support, and he largely stopped painting in the
early 1930s. In 1937, unknown to him, the Museum of Modern Art showed three Schadographs, given
by Tristan Tzara, in a show about Dada and Surrealism. The same year, Nazis included Schad in Great
German Art, their antidote to the Degenerate Art show.
Schad lived in obscurity in Germany through the war and after it. After the destruction of his studio
in 1943 Schad moved to Aschaffenburg. The city commissioned him to copy Ma hias Grünewald’s
Virgin and Child (Stuppach, parish church), a project on which he worked until 1947. Schad
continued to paint in the 1950s in Magic Realist style and returned in the 1960s to experiments with
photograms. Schad’s reputation did not begin to recover until the 1960s, when a couple of shows in
Europe dovetailed with the rise of Photorealism. (Text from the Wikipedia website
(h ps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Schad))
Rudolf Schlichter (1890-1955)

Meeting of Fetishists and Maniacal Flagellants (Zusammenkunft von Fetischisten und manischen Flagellanten)
c. 1921
Watercolor on paper
17 5/16 x 10 3/4 in. (43.9 x 27.3 cm)
Private Collection
© Viola Roehr v. Alvensleben, Munich
Photo by Christian Wirth, Munich
Meeting of Fetishists and Maniacal Flagellants (1921) is a group fantasy of clothed males, half-naked
women, old men masturbating and young women with knee-high boots flashing what Mick Jagger
once called “far away eyes”.
Gert Wollheim (1894-1974)

Untitled (Couple) (Ohne Titel [Paar])
1926
Oil on canvas
39 1/2 x 29 1/2 in. (100.3 x 74.9 cm)
The Jewish Museum, New York, gift of Charlo e Levite in memory of Julius Nassau, 1990-130
Photo: The Jewish Museum, New York/Art Resource, NY by John Parnell
Immediately after Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933 his works were declared degenerate art and many
were destroyed. He fled to France and became active in the Resistance. He was one of the co-founders
of the artists’ federation, the Union des Artistes Allemandes Libres, an organization of exiled German
artists founded in Paris in autumn 1937. In that same year, he became the companion of the
dancer Tatjana Barbakoff. Meanwhile, in Munich, three of his pictures were displayed in the
defamatory Nazi exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) in 1937.
From Paris, he fled to Saarbrücken and later to Swi erland. He was arrested in 1939 and held in a
series of labor camps in France (Vierzon, Ruchard, Gurs and Septfonds) until his escape in 1942, after
which he and his wife hid in the Pyrénées with the help of a peasant woman. At war’s end in 1945 he
returned to France, and in 1947 moved to New York and became an American citizen. He died in New
York in 1974. (Text from the Wikipedia website
(h ps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gert_Heinrich_Wollheim))
Homosexuality Is a German Invention
Nana Bahlmann, Assistant Curator, Contemporary Exhibitions
December 14, 2015
Homosexuality was invented in Germany? While this might at first sound like a rather preposterous
proposition, the idea of an identity based on a fixed sexual orientation did indeed originate in
Germany. The public discourse and political movement supporting this idea also started in Germany,
in Berlin in particular, and not, as one might assume, in London or New York. As Robert Beachy
describes in his recent groundbreaking book Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity (2014), even the
term HOMOSEXUALITÄT itself was a German invention, first appearing in a German language
pamphlet in 1869. Although the origins of the movement date back to the 19th century, it was during
the Weimar Republic (1919-1933), with its new social and democratic freedoms, that gay life
experienced its unprecedented heyday. Despite the fact that sexual acts between men (women were
simply not addressed) were still criminalized by Paragraph 175 of the penal code, homosexual men
and women were able to express their identity more visibly than ever before. By the mid-1920s,
around fifty thousand gays and lesbians lived in Berlin. With its countless nightclubs and meeting
points for homosexuals, bisexuals, or transvestites, the city became a true “Eldorado” for this growing
and vibrant community.
Our exhibition, New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919-1933 (on view until
January 18, 2016), devotes a whole section to these new social identities of the Weimar Republic. Here
you will find stunning paintings and photographs depicting the so-called New Woman, with her bob,
monocle, cigare e, and overall masculine demeanor, next to striking renderings of even more
androgynous types, whose gender identity is ambiguous and even inscrutable at times. Look at Gert
Wollheim’s Couple (1926, above), for instance, who might have come straight out of the popular
nightclub Eldorado. With its transvestite hostesses, the infamous establishment a racted an
illustrious crowd from all over Europe and featured performances by the likes of Marlene Dietrich. A
contemporary visitor described the clientele of the famous cabaret as follows: “… you had lesbians
looking like beautiful women, lesbians dressed exactly like men and looking like men. You had men
dressed like women so you couldn’t possibly recognize they were men (…) Then you would see
couples dancing and wouldn’t know anymore what it was.”
Or look at Christian Schad’s extraordinary Boys in Love (1929, above). This exquisite silverpoint
drawing is a rare rendering of male homosexuality. The tenderness of the embrace is astonishing and
congruent with the delicate subject ma er. The loving intimacy between men so sensitively
represented here seems even more provocative than a more explicit depiction of homosexual acts.
To illustrate the vast and far-reaching discourse surrounding the new identities of the Weimar
Republic and to introduce the main protagonists defining and steering the movement, we are
presenting books, magazines, and other ephemeral objects alongside the artworks. The vitrines in the
exhibition include publications by the influential physician and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, a
pioneer and principal advocate of homosexual and transgender rights. The so-called “Einstein of Sex”
founded the Scientific Humanitarian Commi ee, the first gay-rights organization and gathered more
than five thousand signatures to overturn Paragraph 175. His prolific empirical research resulted in
the publication of several anthologies examining gender and sexual identity and in the founding of
the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin, a museum, clinic, meeting point, and research center.
There, in 1930, the first sex reassignment surgery in history was performed on Lili Elbe (previously
Einar Wegener). This process is chronicled in the book Man into Woman, also displayed in the
exhibition and the basis for the film The Danish Girl directed by Tom Hooper, which is currently
playing in theaters across America.
Shining a light on the various publications – over thirty at the time – for homosexuals, bisexuals,
transsexuals, and transvestites, a selection of the most important gay and lesbian magazines is also
presented in these vitrines. They include Der Eigene (The Unique), the first gay journal in the world.
Published from 1896 until 1932 by Adolf Brand, it featured texts about politics and homosexual rights,
literature, art, and culture, as well as aesthetic nude photography. Der Eigene was followed by many
other gay magazines like Friedrich Radzuweit’s Die Insel (The Island). Surprisingly, these publications
were displayed publicly and sold at newsstands alongside other mainstream papers. They included
advertisements and announcements for various kinds of nightspots and meeting points, catering to
the respective preferences of their readers.
Throughout the 1920s, Radzuweit, who was also an important homosexual rights activist and author,
established a publishing network for gay and lesbian magazines. In 1924 he issued Die Freundin (The
Girlfriend: Journal for Ideal Friendship between Women), the first lesbian magazine, for instance, and later
Das dri e Geschlecht (The Third Gender). After his death in 1932, his son Martin took over the business.
Other lesbian magazines presented here are Liebende Frauen (Women in Love), and Frauenliebe (Women
Love).
With Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933, the vibrant movement came to an abrupt and brutal end.
The Nazis immediately raided Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Research and burned its archives.
Wisely, Hirschfeld had not returned from a speaking tour and remained in exile until his death in
1935. Gay publications and organizations were banned and homosexuals were incarcerated, sent to
concentration camps, or murdered; the Nazis eradicated the achievements and memories of this
pioneering movement in Germany. We are happy to bring it back to life here in our exhibition at
LACMA.
Nana Bahlmann. “Homosexuality Is a German Invention,”

(h p://unframed.lacma.org/2015/12/14/homosexuality-german-invention) on the LACMA website,
December 14, 2015 [Online] Cited 06/02/2016.
(h ps://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/schrimpf-reclining.jpg)
Georg Schrimpf (1889-1938)

Reclining Girls in the Countryside (Liegende Mädchen im Grünen)
1930
Oil on canvas
21 1/4 × 39 3/4 in. (54 × 101 cm)
Staatsgalerie Stu gart
Photo © 2015 Staatsgalerie Stu gart
(h ps://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/seidenstucker-untitled.jpg)
Friedrich Seidenstücker (1882-1966)

Untitled
c. 1930
Vintage print
6 15/16 x 5 1/16 in. (17.6 x 12.9 cm)
Friedrich Seidenstücker (1882-1966) is noted for his atmospheric photographs of everyday life in
Berlin during the Weimar Republic. Thanks to his compassionate studies of animals, he has an almost
legendary reputation among animal and zoo lovers, and his haunting pictures of Berlin in ruins are a
precious source of material for historians. His images seem to be spontaneous, sympathetic examples
of the kind of photography that excels at capturing the moment. They are free of any exaggeration or
extravagance, and display a sense of humor rarely found in photography. His work is buoyed by a
fundamental optimism, yet it does not ignore the harshness, poverty, and suffering that prevailed at
that time.
(h ps://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/beckmann-paris-society.jpg)
Max Beckmann (1884-1950)

Paris Society (Gesellschaft Paris)
1931
Oil on canvas
43 × 69 1/8 in (109.2 × 175.6 cm)
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Photo © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York
“My pictures reproach God for his errors.”
“We have to lay our hearts bare, to the cries of people who have been lied to.”
Max Beckmann
Unlike several of his avant-garde contemporaries, Beckmann rejected non-representational painting;

instead, he took up and advanced the tradition of figurative painting. He greatly admired not
only Cézanne and Van Gogh, but also Blake, Rembrandt, and Rubens, as well as Northern European
artists of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, such as Bosch, Bruegel, and Ma hias
Grünewald. His style and method of composition are partially rooted in the imagery of medieval
stained glass.
Engaging with the genres of portraiture, landscape, still life, and history painting, his diverse body of
work created a very personal but authentic version of modernism, one with a healthy deference to
traditional forms. Beckmann reinvented the religious triptych and expanded
this archetype of medieval painting into an allegory of contemporary humanity.
From his beginnings in the fin de siècle to the period after World War II, Beckmann reflected an era of
radical changes in both art and history in his work. Many of Beckmann’s paintings express the
agonies of Europe in the first half of the 20th century. Some of his imagery refers to the decadent
glamor of the Weimar Republic’s cabaret culture, but from the 1930s on, his works often contain
mythologized references to the brutalities of the Nazis. Beyond these immediate concerns, his subjects
and symbols assume a larger meaning, voicing universal themes of terror, redemption, and the
mysteries of eternity and fate. (Text from the Wikipedia website
(h ps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Beckmann))
(h ps://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/gunther-portrait-of-a-boy.jpg)
Kurt Günther (1893-1955)

Portrait of a Boy (Knabenbildnis)
1928
Tempera on wood
18 7/8 x 14 9/16 in. (48 x 37 cm)
Photo: bpk, Berlin/Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie/Art Resource, NY
(h ps://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/ploberger-self-portrait.jpg)
Herbert Ploberger (1902-1977)

Self-Portrait with Ophthalmological Models (Selbstbildnis mit ophthamologischen Lehrmodellen)
c. 1928-30
Oil on canvas
19 11/16 x 15 3/4 in. (50 x 40 cm)

Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich
© 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Bildrecht, Vienna
(h ps://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/sander-coal-carrier.jpg)
August Sander (1876-1964)

Coal Carrier, Berlin (Berliner Kohlenträger)
1929
9 1/2 x 6 in. (24.1 x 15.2 cm)
J. Paul Ge y Museum, Los Angeles, 84.XM.126.52
© 2015 Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur-August Sander Archiv, Cologne/Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York
Sander’s Face of our Time was published in 1929. It contains a selection of 60 portraits from his
series People of the 20th Century, and is introduced by an essay by Alfred Döblin titled “On Faces,
Pictures, and their Truth.” Under the Nazi regime, his work and personal life were greatly
constrained. His son Erich, who was a member of the left wing Socialist Workers’ Party (SAP), was
arrested in 1934 and sentenced to 10 years in prison, where he died in 1944, shortly before the end of
his sentence. Sander’s book Face of our Time was seized in 1936 and the photographic plates destroyed.
Around 1942, during World War II, he left Cologne and moved to a rural area, allowing him to save
most of his negatives. His studio was destroyed in a 1944 bombing raid. Thirty thousand of Sander’s
roughly forty-thousand negatives survived the war, only to perish in an accidental fire in Cologne in
1946. Sander practically ceased to work as a photographer after World War II. He died in Cologne in
1964.
(h ps://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/grosz-portrait-of-dr.jpg)

Portrait of Dr. Felix J. Weil (Bildnis Dr. Felix J. Weil)
1926
Oil on canvas
53 x 61 in. (134.6 x 154.9 cm)
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of Richard L. Feigen in memory of Gregor Piatigorsky Art
© 2015 Estate of George Grosz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Photo © 2015 Museum Associates/LACMA
(h ps://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/sander-painters-wife.jpg)

Painter’s Wife (Helene Abelen) (Frau des Malers Abelen)
1926
9 x 6 7/16 in. (22.9 x 16.4 cm)
© Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur-August Sander Archiv, Cologne/Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York
(h ps://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/sander-the-architect.jpg)
(h ps://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/sander the architect.jpg)

The Architect (Hans Poelzig) (Der Architekt Hans Poelzig)
1928
Vintage print
11 7/16 x 7 11/16 in. (29.1 x 19.5 cm)
© 2015 Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur—August Sander Archiv, Cologne/Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York
(h ps://artblart files wordpress com/2016/01/dix the jeweller jpg)

(h ps://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/dix-the-jeweller.jpg)
O o Dix (1891-1969)
The Jeweller Karl Krall (Der Juwelier Karl Krall)
1923
Oil on canvas
35 5/8 x 23 13/16 in. (90.5 x 60.5 cm)
(h ps://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/dix-portrait-of-the-lawyer.jpg)
O o Dix (1891-1969)
Portait of the Lawyer Hugo Simons (Porträt des Rechtsanwalts Hugo Simons)
1925
Tempera and oil on plywood
39 1/2 x 27 11/16 in. (100.3 x 70.3 cm)
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, purchase, grant from the Government of Canada under the terms of
the Cultural Property Export and Import Act, gifts of the Succession J. A. DeSève, Mr. and Mrs.
Charles and Andrea Bronfman, Mr. Nahum Gelber and Dr. Sheila Gelber, Mrs. Phyllis Lambert, the
Volunteer Association and the Junior Associates of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Mrs. Louise L.
Lamarre, Mr. Pierre Théberge, the Museum’s acquisition fund, and the Horsley and Annie Townsend
Bequest
Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Brian Merre
(h ps://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/scharrenberger-portrait.jpg)
Wilhelm Schnarrenberger (1892-1966)

Portrait of an Architect (Porträt eines Architekten)
1923
Oil on canvas
34 1/4 x 23 1/16 in. (87 x 58.5 cm)
Städtische Galerie Karlsruhe, on loan from private collection
Photo by Ernst Reinhold, Munich
(h ps://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/biermann-woman-with-monocle.jpg)
Aenne Biermann (1898-1933)

Woman with Monocle (Dame mit Monokel)
c. 1928
7 1/4 x 5 1/5 in. (18.4 x 13 cm)
Photo: Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Fotoarchiv
(h // tbl t fil d
https://artblart.com/tag/national-socialism/
/2016/01/b k lf t it j ) 176/185
(h ps://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/beckmann-self-portrait.jpg)

Self-Portrait in Tuxedo (Selbstbildnis im Smoking)
1927
Oil on canvas
54 15/16 x 37 5/8 in. (139.5 x 95.5 cm)
Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Association Fund
Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College
(h ps://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/schad-agosta.jpg)

Agosta, “The Pigeon Chested Man,” and Rasha, “The Black Dove,” (Agosta, der Flügelmensch, und Rasha, die
schwarze Taube)
1929
Oil on canvas
47 1/4 x 31 1/2 in. (120 x 80 cm)
Private Collection, loan by courtesy of Tate Gallery London
© 2015 Christian Schad Stiftung Aschaffenburg/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-
Kunst, Bonn
(h ps://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/mammen-chess-player.jpg)
Jeanne Mammen (1890-1976)

Chess Player (Schachspieler)
c. 1929-30
Oil on canvas
27 9/16 × 31 11/16 in. (70 × 80.5 cm)
Berlinische Galerie, Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur
(h ps://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/davringhausen-the-profiteer.jpg)
Heinrich Maria Davringhausen (1894-1970)

The Profiteer (Der Schieber)
1920-21
Oil on canvas
47 1/4 x 47 1/4 in. (120 x 120 cm)
Stiftung Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf
© Renata Davringhausen
Photo © Stiftung Museum Kunstpalast-ARTOTHEK
Perhaps the best-known work from Davringhausen’s New Objectivity period is Der Schieber (The
Black-Marketeer), a Magic realist painting of 1920-21, which is in the Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf im
Ehrenhof. Painted in acidulous colors, it depicts a glowering businessman seated at a desk in a
modern office suite that foreshortens dramatically behind him. Although Davringhausen rarely
presented social criticism in his work, in Der Schieber “the artist created the classic pictorial symbol of
the period of inflation that was commencing.”
(h ps://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/dix-to-beauty.jpg)
O o Dix (1891-1969)
To Beauty (An die Schönheit)
1922
Oil and collage on canvas
54 15/16 x 47 7/16 in. (139.5 x 120.5cm)
(h ps://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/grosz-eclipse-of-the-sun.jpg)

Eclipse of the Sun (Sonnenfinsternis)
1926
Oil on canvas
81 5/8 × 71 7/8 in. (207.3 × 182.6 cm)
The Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, New York, Museum, Purchase Art
© 2015 Estate of George Grosz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
(h ps://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/beckmann-dance-in-baden-baden.jpg)

Dance in Baden-Baden (Tanz in Baden-Baden)
1923
Oil on canvas
42 1/2 x 26 in. (108 x 66 cm)
Photo: bpk, Berlin/Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen/Art Resource, NY
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)

5905 Wilshire Boulevard (at Fairfax Avenue)
Los Angeles, CA, 90036
T: 323 857 6000
Opening hours:
Monday, Tuesday, Thursday: 11am – 5 pm
Friday: 11am – 8pm
Saturday, Sunday: 10am – 7pm
Closed Wednesday
LACMA website (h p://www.lacma.org/)
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2/19/2018 National Socialism | Art Blart

Posts Tagged ‘National Socialism

Exhibition dates: 18th October 2016 – 15th January 2017

Curator: Georges Didi-Huberman, philosopher and art historian

soulèvement m (plural soulèvements)

1. the act of raising, the act of lifting up

Word count: 1,451

Marta Gili, “Foreword,” in Uprisings, catalogue of the exhibition, p. 7-10.

Serie Declaración- Cruzar en muro

by Georges Didi-Huberman, curator of the exhibition

Man Ray (American, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 1890-1976 Paris)

“Soulèvements / Uprisings” is a trans-disciplinary exhibition on the theme of human gestures that

“All the uprisings failed, but taken together, they succeeded.”

Hélio Oiticica and Leandro Ka

Vintage gelatin silver print on baryta paper

Art and Language

Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona collection

Federico García Lorca

Réseau Buckmaster (Buckmaster Network)

CONFLICTS (FLARED UP)

To go on strike is not to do nothing. – Demonstrating, showing oneself. – Vandal joys. – Building

André Adolphe Eugène Disdéri (a ribué à)

Joseph Marie Ernest Prud’Homme

José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949)

Tina Modo i (1896-1942)

Manuel Álvarez Bravo

Anonyme (membre du Sonderkommando d’Auschwi -Birkenau)

Text from the Wikipedia website

Mineral print on co on paper

Jeu de Paume website (h p://www.jeudepaume.org/)

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK (h p://www.facebook.com/ArtBlart)

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Exhibition dates: 4th October 2015 – 18th January 2016

“German Expressionism is an art which above all, celebrated, inwardness.”

Georg Scholz (1890-1945)

and Helgard Field-Lion and Irwin Field

Hans Finlser (1891-1972)

Hans Finsler (1891-1972)

Carl Grossberg (1894-1940)

Carl Grossberg (1894-1940)

Wanda von Debschi -Kunowski (1870-1935)

7 7/16 x 5 5/16 in. (18.9 x 15.1 cm)

Albert Renger-Pa sch

Text from the Wikipedia website (h ps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Renger-Pa sch)

Wilhelm Lachnit (1899-1962)

Hans Mertens (1906-1944)

Herbert Ploberger (1902-1977)

Arthur Köster (1890-1960)

Karl Völker (1889-1962)

George Grosz (1893-1959)

Degenerate Art - 1993, The Nazis vs. Expressionism

Anton Räderscheidt (1892-1970)

Museum Ludwig, Cologne

Werner Man (1901-1983)

Franz Radziwill (1895-1983)

Radziwill Sammlung Claus Hüppe, courtesy Kunsthalle Emden

Aenne Biermann (1898-1933)

George Scholz (1890-1945)

Franz Radziwill (1895-1983)

Franz Radziwill (1895-1983)

Press release from LACMA

Text from the LACMA press release

Niels Hoyer (editor)