This article is based on a lecture given by the author at the forum held by the China Academy of Art "Century: A Proposal," Strasbourg, France, 2017.12.02

Visual arts began the year 1938 with a bitter metaphor: in January, to mark the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, the Galerie des Beaux-Arts in Paris presented Salvador Dalí's Rainy Taxi—an installation that showed a car containing a chauffeur with a shark's head and an elegantly dressed shop-window mannequin, drenched with the water that the artist had piped into the car interior. There was no escape; the female figure was oppressed by the rigors of the weather and the live snails that Dalí placed in the vehicle together with some food plants, and was transported into an uncertain future by the monstrous driver. Yet she was oppressed not only by the unsavory installation that Dalí staged at his fellow Surrealists' exhibition—no, like her viewers, she was oppressed by global political catastrophe which the artist could not help addressing when the seismograph of reality metaphorically revealed the horrors of the age in the surrealism of his art.

France was riven by political and economic crises, the Popular Front was on the verge of collapse. A bloody civil war was raging in Spain, and international brigades were fighting on the side of the threatened republic; General Franco's troops, supported by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, were to bring the country under dictatorial control by the spring of 1939. In May 1938, the German art historian Carl Einstein, who had taken up arms for a social revolution in the anarcho-syndicalist Durruti column, wrote in his final desperation: “The question of art is, neither more nor less, the question of human freedom.” But, as he also knew, “machine guns laugh at poems and paintings.” In the Soviet Union there was Stalinist terror, and the red dictator's opponents within the party were liquidated in the “Moscow show trials.” Trotsky fought Stalinism from his Mexican exile, and founded the Fourth International with a view to world proletarian revolution. In Germany, too, every area of life was forced under the yoke of dictatorship, the political opponents of National Socialism were suppressed, the persecution and expulsion of the Jewish population culminated in the November pogroms; mass deportations and the Holocaust extermination were to follow. Many people, including artists and intellectuals, left the country; from 1937 onwards the art of the Weimar Republic—Expressionism, Dadaism, Constructivism, the art of the Bauhaus and New Objectivity—had been vilified by Nazi cultural policy in the traveling Degenerate Art exhibition. In March 1938 Austria was annexed by Germany, and in the September Munich Agreement, Britain, France and Italy acknowledged the German Reich's claims to parts of Czechoslovak territory. Despite the “appeasement” policy, the Second World War was about to break out in Europe. By 1938 the war had long been a bloody reality in China: Japan had occupied Manchuria seven years earlier, and in the years that followed had conquered other parts of the country, which was weakened by civil war. In summer 1937 the war of resistance against Japan began; and in the winter the aggressors occupied the Kuomintang capital Nanjing, killing more than 200,000 people. In autumn 1938, despite the desperate resistance in which Chiang Kai-shek did not shrink from breaking the dams along the Yellow River, despite the destruction of numerous villages and towns and uncounted loss of civilian life, the central city of Wuhan, the new seat of the Kuomintang government, was overrun after months of fighting. Around the world the 1930s were marked by political and military conflicts, all of which were ultimately due to one and the same reason: reactionaries' defensive response to the political avant-garde, to democratic, socialist or communist tendencies.

And yet, seemingly unimpressed, the earth went on turning, with technological, scientific and commercial breakthroughs that pointed the way to the future. In 1938 the Samsung concern was founded in Korea, initially as a food company; in Switzerland Nescafé was marketed as the world's first instant coffee. In the USA the photocopy and the nylon-bristle toothbrush were invented, and the first Superman comic was published; in Germany a prototype computer was developed by Konrad Zuse; in Switzerland Albert Hofmann synthesized the drug LSD for the first time; and in France the Italian football team won the World Cup. A kaleidoscope of trivial—and less trivial—events that marked life on the eve of the Second World War, worthy of the surreal “world-theatre” staged in an ironically subversive manner in a still politically liberal France at the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme. In 1938, not only Salvador Dalí's Rainy Taxi, but also the installations by Marcel Duchamp, Wolfgang Paalen and Man Ray, the works of Hans Arp, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, André Masson, Yves Tanguy and many others produced a surrealist Gesamtkunstwerk, an absurdist environment whose claustrophobia and entropy created an uncertain image—psychologically and otherwise —of a world teetering above the abyss.

At the same time, the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme could be seen as the swansong of this crucial artistic movement; the leading Surrealists' paths would soon diverge, as would their artistic and political convictions. In 1938 Paul Éluard, one of the organizers of the exhibition together with André Breton, quit the Surrealist group after gravitating towards Stalinism; Max Ernst and Man Ray were to follow, and Breton and Dalí parted company the year after; the avant-garde front was no less divided than politically progressive forces throughout the world. While Dalí focused more and more closely on psychoanalytical theories—in summer 1938 he visited Sigmund Freud in London, and on this occasion produced a surreal drawing of the psychoanalyst (“Freud's cranium is a snail”)—Breton became more politically oriented. During a trip to Mexico the writer met Trotsky, who was sharing a home with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and together they drew up the Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art, which called on art to actively prepare for a social revolution and promote an international coalition of progressive artists: “We can say without exaggeration that never has civilization been menaced so seriously as today ... We are by no means thinking only of the world war that draws near. Even in times of ‘peace’ the position of art and science has become absolutely intolerable ... In the realm of artistic creation, the imagination must escape from all constraint and must under no pretext allow itself to be placed under bonds. To those who urge us, whether for today or for tomorrow, to consent that art should submit to a discipline which we hold to be radically incompatible with its nature, we give a flat refusal and we repeat our deliberate intention of standing by the formula complete freedom for art.”

Yet in the late 1930s hardly any works of art succeeded in forcing the constitution of the world into a valid visual form; otherwise, too, only a very few works of lasting significance were produced in this apocalyptic period, such as Constantin Brâncuși's sculptural ensemble in the Romanian town of Târgu Jiu, including the Endless Column, which attempted to translate commemoration of the First World War into an abstract form, or Marcel Duchamp's Boîte-en-valise, a mobile museum of his own works in a suitcase, which also conveyed the notion of flight and exile. Yet one work came to exemplify the conflicts of the age: Pablo Picasso's Guernica, painted in 1937, presented in the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris International Exhibition and perhaps the most important work of art in the twentieth century, used the bombardment of the Basque town—or rather, the propaganda policy pursued by Franco, who attempted to lay the blame for the crime on the republic itself—to create a painting that is used to this day as a warning against tyranny and dictatorship. Like the Surrealists before him, Picasso did not cast political reality in a true-to-life form, but raised it to a highly personal vision.

By 1938, the avant-gardes in neighboring Germany had already lost the battle. After the National Socialists came to power in 1933, their increasingly restrictive cultural policy had led to the outlawing of most modern art, although as late as the 1940s some moderate Expressionists were still trying to adapt to the new regime. Hitler and his party carried out a radical “purge”: some 20,000 works of supposedly “degenerate” art were confiscated from German museums, painters and sculptors lost their professorships at academies, and progressive-minded museum directors were dismissed from their posts; many artists, art dealers and collectors fled into exile. From 1938 onwards the “Third Reich” had attempted to sell the confiscated works of art, which Hitler had dubbed “stupid jokes from a period of Dadaist noise-makers, Cubist plasterers and Futurist canvas-smearers,” on the international market in return for badly needed foreign exchange. At first it may seem surprising that Hitler, himself a failed and untalented artist, was so fiercely opposed to the avant-gardes; yet we should not forget that visual arts—like the similarly outlawed literature and music of the Weimar Republic—kept alive the memory of a freer society, and for this reason alone had to be removed from the public gaze. Max Beckmann, in exile in the Netherlands from 1937 onwards, used his time abroad to reflect deeply on his own art. In 1938 he gave a lecture about his paintings at London's New Burlington Galleries, where the 20th-Century German Art exhibition was being held to counter the German Degenerate Art exhibition; and in that year he noted in his diary: “What I am chiefly concerned with in my paintings is the ideality that lies concealed behind surface reality ... My aim is always to get hold of the magic of reality and to transfer this reality into painting—to make the invisible visible through reality ... It may sound paradoxical, but it is in fact reality which forms the mystery of our existence!”

Capturing the “magic of reality,” and not abandoning reality to a mimetic copy of “realism” that unrealistically only showed the surface of the world and things: this was an appeal that must also have reflected the ambitions of Dalí and Duchamp, Brâncuși and Picasso, Breton and Rivera; and it is an appeal that remains no less urgent today. Even though the conflicts, the political and violent clashes, that are convulsing our present world are of a different kind than in 1938, they all have one thing in common: However different civil wars and terrorist attacks, separatist movements and nationalistic isolationism may seem, we are again ultimately faced with defensive responses that—just as in 1938—come from a common source. Today that source is the globalized economization of all areas of life, the pursuit of international economic hegemonies that are fought against in the name of nationalism and religion. A social revolution such as many artists and intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s had hoped for no longer seems a feasible political option in the twenty-first century—for the capitalization of large parts of the world appears to have triumphed on all fronts. But what is to be done? What can artists do, and what can we theorists and historians do to help them? The new century, which will come of age next year, will be a century of conflict, but also a century of opportunities; and these opportunities lie not least in globalization itself, which is currently under attack for the wrong reasons. And so, today just as in the past, let us call for complete freedom of art, an art based on worldwide exchange, an art which if only for these reasons serves reality—for it helps the “magic of reality’ to open our eyes to the “mystery of our existence.” Given the threats that currently face us, this is not a retreat into privacy, into the purely aesthetic and serene—for, to quote Carl Einstein once again, “the question of art is, neither more nor less, the question of human freedom.”

 

Translated by Kevin Cook

This article is based on a lecture given by the author at the forum held by the China Academy of Art "Century: A Proposal," Strasbourg, France, 2017.12.02

Visual arts began the year 1938 with a bitter metaphor: in January, to mark the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, the Galerie des Beaux-Arts in Paris presented Salvador Dalí's Rainy Taxi—an installation that showed a car containing a chauffeur with a shark's head and an elegantly dressed shop-window mannequin, drenched with the water that the artist had piped into the car interior. There was no escape; the female figure was oppressed by the rigors of the weather and the live snails that Dalí placed in the vehicle together with some food plants, and was transported into an uncertain future by the monstrous driver. Yet she was oppressed not only by the unsavory installation that Dalí staged at his fellow Surrealists' exhibition—no, like her viewers, she was oppressed by global political catastrophe which the artist could not help addressing when the seismograph of reality metaphorically revealed the horrors of the age in the surrealism of his art.

France was riven by political and economic crises, the Popular Front was on the verge of collapse. A bloody civil war was raging in Spain, and international brigades were fighting on the side of the threatened republic; General Franco's troops, supported by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, were to bring the country under dictatorial control by the spring of 1939. In May 1938, the German art historian Carl Einstein, who had taken up arms for a social revolution in the anarcho-syndicalist Durruti column, wrote in his final desperation: “The question of art is, neither more nor less, the question of human freedom.” But, as he also knew, “machine guns laugh at poems and paintings.” In the Soviet Union there was Stalinist terror, and the red dictator's opponents within the party were liquidated in the “Moscow show trials.” Trotsky fought Stalinism from his Mexican exile, and founded the Fourth International with a view to world proletarian revolution. In Germany, too, every area of life was forced under the yoke of dictatorship, the political opponents of National Socialism were suppressed, the persecution and expulsion of the Jewish population culminated in the November pogroms; mass deportations and the Holocaust extermination were to follow. Many people, including artists and intellectuals, left the country; from 1937 onwards the art of the Weimar Republic—Expressionism, Dadaism, Constructivism, the art of the Bauhaus and New Objectivity—had been vilified by Nazi cultural policy in the traveling Degenerate Art exhibition. In March 1938 Austria was annexed by Germany, and in the September Munich Agreement, Britain, France and Italy acknowledged the German Reich's claims to parts of Czechoslovak territory. Despite the “appeasement” policy, the Second World War was about to break out in Europe. By 1938 the war had long been a bloody reality in China: Japan had occupied Manchuria seven years earlier, and in the years that followed had conquered other parts of the country, which was weakened by civil war. In summer 1937 the war of resistance against Japan began; and in the winter the aggressors occupied the Kuomintang capital Nanjing, killing more than 200,000 people. In autumn 1938, despite the desperate resistance in which Chiang Kai-shek did not shrink from breaking the dams along the Yellow River, despite the destruction of numerous villages and towns and uncounted loss of civilian life, the central city of Wuhan, the new seat of the Kuomintang government, was overrun after months of fighting. Around the world the 1930s were marked by political and military conflicts, all of which were ultimately due to one and the same reason: reactionaries' defensive response to the political avant-garde, to democratic, socialist or communist tendencies.

And yet, seemingly unimpressed, the earth went on turning, with technological, scientific and commercial breakthroughs that pointed the way to the future. In 1938 the Samsung concern was founded in Korea, initially as a food company; in Switzerland Nescafé was marketed as the world's first instant coffee. In the USA the photocopy and the nylon-bristle toothbrush were invented, and the first Superman comic was published; in Germany a prototype computer was developed by Konrad Zuse; in Switzerland Albert Hofmann synthesized the drug LSD for the first time; and in France the Italian football team won the World Cup. A kaleidoscope of trivial—and less trivial—events that marked life on the eve of the Second World War, worthy of the surreal “world-theatre” staged in an ironically subversive manner in a still politically liberal France at the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme. In 1938, not only Salvador Dalí's Rainy Taxi, but also the installations by Marcel Duchamp, Wolfgang Paalen and Man Ray, the works of Hans Arp, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, André Masson, Yves Tanguy and many others produced a surrealist Gesamtkunstwerk, an absurdist environment whose claustrophobia and entropy created an uncertain image—psychologically and otherwise —of a world teetering above the abyss.

At the same time, the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme could be seen as the swansong of this crucial artistic movement; the leading Surrealists' paths would soon diverge, as would their artistic and political convictions. In 1938 Paul Éluard, one of the organizers of the exhibition together with André Breton, quit the Surrealist group after gravitating towards Stalinism; Max Ernst and Man Ray were to follow, and Breton and Dalí parted company the year after; the avant-garde front was no less divided than politically progressive forces throughout the world. While Dalí focused more and more closely on psychoanalytical theories—in summer 1938 he visited Sigmund Freud in London, and on this occasion produced a surreal drawing of the psychoanalyst (“Freud's cranium is a snail”)—Breton became more politically oriented. During a trip to Mexico the writer met Trotsky, who was sharing a home with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and together they drew up the Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art, which called on art to actively prepare for a social revolution and promote an international coalition of progressive artists: “We can say without exaggeration that never has civilization been menaced so seriously as today ... We are by no means thinking only of the world war that draws near. Even in times of ‘peace’ the position of art and science has become absolutely intolerable ... In the realm of artistic creation, the imagination must escape from all constraint and must under no pretext allow itself to be placed under bonds. To those who urge us, whether for today or for tomorrow, to consent that art should submit to a discipline which we hold to be radically incompatible with its nature, we give a flat refusal and we repeat our deliberate intention of standing by the formula complete freedom for art.”

Yet in the late 1930s hardly any works of art succeeded in forcing the constitution of the world into a valid visual form; otherwise, too, only a very few works of lasting significance were produced in this apocalyptic period, such as Constantin Brâncuși's sculptural ensemble in the Romanian town of Târgu Jiu, including the Endless Column, which attempted to translate commemoration of the First World War into an abstract form, or Marcel Duchamp's Boîte-en-valise, a mobile museum of his own works in a suitcase, which also conveyed the notion of flight and exile. Yet one work came to exemplify the conflicts of the age: Pablo Picasso's Guernica, painted in 1937, presented in the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris International Exhibition and perhaps the most important work of art in the twentieth century, used the bombardment of the Basque town—or rather, the propaganda policy pursued by Franco, who attempted to lay the blame for the crime on the republic itself—to create a painting that is used to this day as a warning against tyranny and dictatorship. Like the Surrealists before him, Picasso did not cast political reality in a true-to-life form, but raised it to a highly personal vision.

By 1938, the avant-gardes in neighboring Germany had already lost the battle. After the National Socialists came to power in 1933, their increasingly restrictive cultural policy had led to the outlawing of most modern art, although as late as the 1940s some moderate Expressionists were still trying to adapt to the new regime. Hitler and his party carried out a radical “purge”: some 20,000 works of supposedly “degenerate” art were confiscated from German museums, painters and sculptors lost their professorships at academies, and progressive-minded museum directors were dismissed from their posts; many artists, art dealers and collectors fled into exile. From 1938 onwards the “Third Reich” had attempted to sell the confiscated works of art, which Hitler had dubbed “stupid jokes from a period of Dadaist noise-makers, Cubist plasterers and Futurist canvas-smearers,” on the international market in return for badly needed foreign exchange. At first it may seem surprising that Hitler, himself a failed and untalented artist, was so fiercely opposed to the avant-gardes; yet we should not forget that visual arts—like the similarly outlawed literature and music of the Weimar Republic—kept alive the memory of a freer society, and for this reason alone had to be removed from the public gaze. Max Beckmann, in exile in the Netherlands from 1937 onwards, used his time abroad to reflect deeply on his own art. In 1938 he gave a lecture about his paintings at London's New Burlington Galleries, where the 20th-Century German Art exhibition was being held to counter the German Degenerate Art exhibition; and in that year he noted in his diary: “What I am chiefly concerned with in my paintings is the ideality that lies concealed behind surface reality ... My aim is always to get hold of the magic of reality and to transfer this reality into painting—to make the invisible visible through reality ... It may sound paradoxical, but it is in fact reality which forms the mystery of our existence!”

Capturing the “magic of reality,” and not abandoning reality to a mimetic copy of “realism” that unrealistically only showed the surface of the world and things: this was an appeal that must also have reflected the ambitions of Dalí and Duchamp, Brâncuși and Picasso, Breton and Rivera; and it is an appeal that remains no less urgent today. Even though the conflicts, the political and violent clashes, that are convulsing our present world are of a different kind than in 1938, they all have one thing in common: However different civil wars and terrorist attacks, separatist movements and nationalistic isolationism may seem, we are again ultimately faced with defensive responses that—just as in 1938—come from a common source. Today that source is the globalized economization of all areas of life, the pursuit of international economic hegemonies that are fought against in the name of nationalism and religion. A social revolution such as many artists and intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s had hoped for no longer seems a feasible political option in the twenty-first century—for the capitalization of large parts of the world appears to have triumphed on all fronts. But what is to be done? What can artists do, and what can we theorists and historians do to help them? The new century, which will come of age next year, will be a century of conflict, but also a century of opportunities; and these opportunities lie not least in globalization itself, which is currently under attack for the wrong reasons. And so, today just as in the past, let us call for complete freedom of art, an art based on worldwide exchange, an art which if only for these reasons serves reality—for it helps the “magic of reality’ to open our eyes to the “mystery of our existence.” Given the threats that currently face us, this is not a retreat into privacy, into the purely aesthetic and serene—for, to quote Carl Einstein once again, “the question of art is, neither more nor less, the question of human freedom.”

 

Translated by Kevin Cook