Close
About
FAQ
Home
Collections
Login
USC Login
Register
0
Selected
Invert selection
Deselect all
Deselect all
Click here to refresh results
Click here to refresh results
USC
/
Digital Library
/
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
/
Speculating on paper: print culture and the German inflation, 1918-1924
(USC Thesis Other)
Speculating on paper: print culture and the German inflation, 1918-1924
PDF
Download
Share
Open document
Flip pages
Contact Us
Contact Us
Copy asset link
Request this asset
Transcript (if available)
Content
SPECULATING ON PAPER:
PRINT CULTURE AND THE GERMAN INFLATION, 1918 – 1924
by
Erin Sullivan Maynes
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ART HISTORY)
June 2014
2
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Index of Figures................................................................................................................. 3
Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................... 9
Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 13
Chapter One .................................................................................................................... 31
Impressions of the Inflation: the Scheine-Welt of Postwar Print Culture
The Inflationary Decade and the (Over) Production of Money .................................... 34
Material Value and the Value of Material .................................................................... 43
Collecting Money, Speculating in Art .......................................................................... 57
Circulation..................................................................................................................... 80
Chapter Two .................................................................................................................... 92
Speculation and Publication: Dealers, Publishers, and the Postwar Print Boom
Predecessors in Print ................................................................................................... 101
Print and a Professional Calling .................................................................................. 116
Participation through Publication ............................................................................... 124
Publishing and Partisanship ........................................................................................ 134
Creation, Cooperation, and Control ............................................................................ 143
Prints and Price: Managing the Edition ...................................................................... 153
Identities in Print ......................................................................................................... 161
Chapter Three ............................................................................................................... 175
Processing Trauma: Printmaking and the Aktuelle
Processing Trauma ...................................................................................................... 178
All the News is Fit for Print: The Graphic Arts and the Journalistic Mode ............... 205
Chapter Four ................................................................................................................. 226
Speculating on Process: Manual versus Photomechanical Printmaking and States in
Between
The Shared and Separate Histories of Manual and Photomechanical Processes ........ 233
The Revival of the Fine Art Print in Germany ........................................................... 242
Transfer Lithography, Photolithography, and the Halftone ........................................ 257
The Marées Gesellschaft ............................................................................................. 278
Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 285
Illustrations .................................................................................................................... 289
Bibliography .................................................................................................................. 351
Index of Figures
Figure 1.1: George Grosz, Seid fruchtbar und mehret Euch (Be Fruitful and Multiply),
1922, reed pen and pen and ink, 64.8 x 52.1 cm, Private Collection.
Figure 1.2: Karl Arnold, Soll und Haben (Debit and Credit), cover of Simplicissimus 28,
no. 34, (November 19, 1923) (Munich: Albert Langen Verlag)
Figure 1.3: Three Mark Notgeld voucher, stamp and handwriting on quartered playing
card, Estate of Lopischewo bei Ritschenwalde, 1914, Collection Kurpfälzische
Münzhandlung, Mannheim.
Figure 1.4: Olaf Gulbransson, Die Sintflut (The Deluge), in Simplicissimus 28, no. 20
(Aug. 13, 1923), 255.
Figure 1.5: Erich Schmidt, Gutenberg und die Milliardenpresse (Gutenberg and the
Billion-Mark Press), in Simplicissimus 27, no. 33 (Nov. 15, 1922), 469.
Figure 1.6: Gera Notgeld (Serienschein), 4 notes, 75, 50, and 25 Pfennige, issued May 1,
1921, Collection of the author.
Figure 1.7: Pößnecker Ledergeld (Leather Note issued by the Town of Pößneck), 5
Billion-Mark note, issued Aug.11, 1923, leather with gold leaf, 13.9 x 9 cm.
Figure 1.8: Pößnecker Ledergeld (Leather note issued by the town of Pößneck), 1.50
Gold Mark Tauschwert-Schein, issued Sept. 27, 1923 (contemporary impression, printed
in silver)
Figure 1.9: “Moderner Tauschhandel” (“Modern Barter”), published in Hans Ostwald,
Sittengeschichte der Inflation (Berlin: Neufeld & Henius, 1931), 114.
Figure 1.10: Eduard Thöny, “Das ausgehungerte Deutschland” (Famished Germany), in
Simplicissimus 24, no. 33 (Nov. 12, 1919), 456.
Figure 1.11: “Der verstümmelte Muse” (“The Mutilated Muse”) in Lustige Blätter, no. 5
(1921), 7.
Figure 1.12: Advertisement promoting Bielefeld Notgeld, issued by the Stadt-Sparkasse
Bielefeld, n.d.
Figure 1.13: Bielefeld “Stoffgeld,” Twenty-five Mark note, white silk note in red and
purple with “Jungbrunnen” motif, printed by city of Bielefeld, issued July 15, 1921, 11.4
x 8.5 cm.
4
Figure 1.14: Bielefeld “Stoffgeld,” Twenty-five Mark note, white silk note in green,
orange, and purple with “Jungbrunnen” motif, printed by city of Bielefeld, issued April 2,
1922, 18.1 x 13.1 cm.
Figure 1.15: Bielefeld “Stoffgeld,” 100 Mark Note, pink Seidenschein (silk note) issued
by the city of Bielefeld with decorative braided border, issued July 15, 1921
Figure 1.16: Olaf Gulbransson, “Sylvesterserie,” Notgeld for city of Kahla, recto, issued
Dec. 1, 1921, 12.8 x 8.6 cm, Collection of the author
Figure 1.17: Olaf Gulbransson, “Der deutsche Merkur” from the “Sylvesterserie,”
Notgeld for city of Kahla, verso, issued Dec. 1, 1921, 12.8 x 8.6 cm, Collection of the
author
Figures 1.18a and 1.18b: Olaf Gulbransson, “Starkbier macht Einigkeit” and “Einigkeit
macht stark” from the “Sylvesterserie” Notgeld for city of Kahla, verso, issued Dec. 1,
1921, 12.8 x 8.6 cm, Collection of the author
Figure 1.19: Karl Arnold, “Wie Steht der Dollar?” (“Where Does the Dollar Stand?”)
in Simplicissimus 28, no. 20 (13 August 1923), 247.
Figure 1.20: George Grosz, “Von Geldsacks Gnaden” (“By the Grace of Moneybags”),
cover of Die Pleite, no. 1 (1919) (Berlin: Malik Verlag).
Figure 1.21: George Grosz, “Aus dem Leben eines Sozialisten” (From the Life of a
Socialist), photolithograph, Das Gesicht der herrschenden Klasse, (Berlin: Malik Verlag,
1921), 4.
Figure 1.22: Herbert Bayer, One Million Mark Notgeld notes in red and yellow, issued by
the State of Thuringia in August, 1923, 13.8 x 7 cm
Figure 2.1: Max Liebermann, “Ich kenne keine Partei mehr...” published in Kriegszeit:
Künstlerflugblätter, no. 1 (Aug. 31, 1914) (Berlin: Paul Cassirer Verlag).
Figure 2.2: Max Beckmann Andenken an einen gefallenen Freund (Portrait of the artist’s
brother-in-law, Martin Tube), lithograph, published in Kriegszeit, no. 11, (4 November
1914)
Figure 2.3: Max Slevogt, Masthead for Der Bildermann, no. 1, (April 5, 1916) (Berlin:
Paul Cassirer Verlag)
Figure 2.4: Max Beckmann, The Disillusioned II (Die Enttäuschten II), from the
portfolio, Berliner Reise (Berlin Journey), lithograph, 1922
5
Figure 2.5: Photograph of the German heavyweight champion Hans Breitensträter
(right); and the artist Renoir in his studio (facing page). Published in Der Querschnitt, no
2/3 (1921), 138-39.
Figure 2.6: George Grosz, Cover of pamphlet Schutzhaft (Protective Custody),
March 1919 (Berlin: Malik Verlag).
Figure 2.7: George Grosz and Helmut Herzfeld, Cover of Jedermann sein eigner Fußball
(Everyone His Own Soccer Ball), no. 1 (February 1919) (Berlin: Malik Verlag).
Figure 2.8: Caricature of Munich publishers, including Reinhard Piper (second from
right), Georg Müller (first from left) and Rudolf Oldenbourg (fourth from left).
Originally published in Zeit im Bild, vol. 11, 1913; republished in Edda Ziegler, 100
Jahre Piper: Die Geschichte eines Verlags (Munich: Piper Verlag, 2004), 21.
Figure 2.9: Portrait of Reinhard Piper with his dog, Treff, undated. Published in
Reinhard Piper, Mein Leben als Verleger: Vormittag, Nachmittag. (Munich: Piper
Verlag, 1964).
Figure 2.10: Max Beckmann, Im Hotel (Der Dollar) (In the Hotel [The Dollar]), 1923,
drypoint, published by J.B. Neumann, Berlin.
Figure 2.11: Max Beckmann, Double-Portrait of J.B. Neumann and Martha Stern, 1922,
lithograph, published by J.B. Neumann, Berlin.
Figure 2.12: Otto Dix, Portrait of the Art Dealer Alfred Flechtheim, 1926, mixed media
on wood, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Neue Nationalgalerie,
Berlin.
Figure 2.13: Otto Dix, Portrait of Karl Nierendorf (also titled The Collector), 1923, oil
on canvas, location unknown.
Figure 2.14: Otto Dix, Portrait of J.B. Neumann, 1922, drypoint and etching, published
by Karl Nierendorf, Berlin.
Figure 2.15: Max Beckmann, Portrait of Reinhard Piper, 1920, drypoint, published by
R. Piper & Co., Munich, c 1921.
Figure 2.16: Max Beckmann, Portrait of Reinhard Piper, 1921, lithograph, published by
R. Piper & Co., Munich.
Figure 2.17: Undated photograph of Reinhard Piper standing next to the 1921
lithographic portrait by Beckmann. Published in Ziegler, 100 Jahre Piper, 88.
6
Figure 3.1: A Siege Attack, photograph with labels of the a) Russian trench, b) the
German siege trench, c) the German trench, and d) a dead Russian, from Die große Zeit:
illustrierte Kriegsgeschichte, no. 24 (1915) (Berlin: Ullstein & Co.), 25.
Figure 3.2: Cover of Die große Zeit: illustrierte Kriegsgeschichte, no. 23 (1915) (Berlin:
Ullstein & Co.).
Figure 3.3: Max Liebermann, “Ich kenne keine Parteien mehr...” cover of Kriegszeit:
Künstlerflugblätter, no. 1 (August 31, 1914) (Berlin: Cassirer Verlag).
Figure 3.4: Julius Wolfgang Schülein, Die Mutter der Helden (The Mothers of Heroes),
1914, lithograph, in Kriegsbilderbogen Münchner Künstler, first portfolio (Munich: Goltz
Verlag, 1914).
Figure 3.5: Otto Theodor Wolfgang Stein, Lüttich (Liège), 1914, lithograph, in
Kriegsbilderbogen Münchner Künstler, first portfolio (Munich: Goltz Verlag, 1914)
Figure 3.6: Max Beckmann, Théâtre du Monde - Grand Spectacle de la Vie, also titled
Mann mit Krücke im Rollstuhl (Man with Crutch in Wheelchair) 1914, pen and ink
drawing, 15.7 x 12.8 cm, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Graphisches Kabinett.
Figure 3.7: Max Beckmann, Untitled, drawing for “Die erste Kriegswoche in Berlin,” in
Kunst und Künstler, XIII, 1914/15 (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer Verlag), 55.
Figure 3.8: Max Beckmann, Scene from the Destruction of Messina, 1909, oil on canvas,
100 1/4 x 105 3/8 in. (254.6 x 267.7 cm), St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, Bequest of
Morton D. May.
Figure 3.9: Max Beckmann, Die Granate (Grenade) state III, 1915, drypoint, plate: 38.9
x 28.9 cm; sheet (irreg.): 54 x 45 cm, published by Paul Cassirer, Berlin.
Figure 3.10: Die Granate (Grenade), state II.
Figure 3.11: Otto Dix, Field of Craters near Dontrien Lit by Rocket Flares (Trichterfeld
bei Dontrien von Leuchtkugeln erhellt), First Portfolio, No. 4, from Der Krieg, 1924,
etching and aquatint on cream wove paper, 25.1 x 19.3 cm (plate), published by Karl
Nierendorf, Berlin.
Figure 3.12: Otto Dix, Wounded Soldier (Autumn 1916, Baupaume) (Verwundeter
[Herbst 1916, Baupaume]), First Portfolio, No. 6, from Der Krieg (War), 1924, etching,
aquatint and drypoint on cream wove paper, 29 x 19.7 cm (plate), published by Karl
Nierendorf, Berlin.
7
Figure 3.13: Otto Dix, Dying Soldier (Sterbender Soldat), Third Portfolio, No. 6, from
Der Krieg (War), 1924, etching, aquatint and drypoint on cream wove paper, 14.3 x 19.3
cm (plate), published by Karl Nierendorf, Berlin.
Figure 3.14: Max Beckmann, Self-Portrait in Hotel (Selbst im Hotel), sheet 1 from Berlin
Journey (Berliner Reise), 1922, lithograph on cream wove paper, 32.6 x 45.4 cm
(composition, irregular), published by J.B. Neumann, Berlin.
Figure 3.15: Max Beckmann, The Chimney-Sweep (Der Schornsteinfeger), sheet 10 of
portfolio Trip to Berlin (Berliner Reise), 1922, lithograph on cream wove paper, 33.4 x
45.1 cm (composition, irregular), published by J.B. Neumann, Berlin.
Figure 3.16: Max Beckmann, Untitled, drawing for “Die erste Kriegswoche in Berlin,” in
Kunst und Künstler, vol. XIII, 1914/15 (Bruno Cassirer Verlag, Berlin) 53.
Figure 3.17: Max Beckmann, Die Kriegserklärung (Declaration of War), 1914, drypoint,
state II, plate: 20 x 24.7 cm; sheet: 32.7 x 46.8 cm, published 1918 by J.B. Neumann,
Berlin.
Figure 3.18: “The Battle in the Newspaper Quarter,” (Kampf im Zeitungsviertel) Berliner
Illustrirte Zeitung: Berliner Sturmtage, Sonder-Nummer (1919) (Berlin: Ullstein Verlag),
8.
Figure 3.19: (top) Fritz Koch-Gotha, “Streetscenes near the Ullstein House during the
fighting. Shots from out of the dark”; (bottom) Edmund Fürst, “A dangerous corner.”
Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung: Berliner Sturmtage, Sonder-Nummer (1919) (Berlin: Ullstein
Verlag), 7.
Figure 3.20: Max Beckmann, The Last Ones (Die Letzten), sheet 10 from Berlin Journey
(Berliner Reise), 1919, lithograph on cream wove “japan” paper, 47.6 x 67 cm
(composition, irregular), published by J.B. Neumann, Berlin.
Figure 3.21: “The devastation of a private apartment in the Vorwärts house caused by the
bombardment.” Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung: Berliner Sturmtage, Sonder-Nummer (1919)
(Berlin: Ullstein Verlag), 10.
Figure 3.22: Max Beckmann, Self-Portrait (front cover) (Selbstbildnis [Umschlag]) of
Hell (Die Hölle), 1919, lithograph on cream wove paper mounted on cardboard,
composition: 41.7 x 63.4 cm (composition), published by J.B. Neumann, Berlin.
Figure 3.23: Max Beckmann, Martyrdom, (Das Martyrium) and detail, plate 3 from Hell
(Die Hölle), 1919, lithograph on cream wove “japan” paper, 75. x 54.7 cm (composition),
published by J.B. Neumann, Berlin.
8
Figure 3.24: Käthe Kollwitz, Memorial for Karl Liebknecht (Gedenkblatt für Karl
Liebknecht), 1920, woodcut (photomechanical edition, state VI), 53.66 x 40.32 cm,
published by Emil Richter, Dresden.
Figure 4.1: Cover of William M. Ivins, Prints and Visual Communication (New York: Da
Capo Press, 1969).
Figure 4.2: The head of Laocoön, as it appeared in Sandrart’s Sculpturae veteris
admiranda, sive delineatio vera, Nuremberg, 1960 (fig. 74B).
Figure 4.3: The head of Laocoön, as it appeared in Murray’s History of Greek Sculpture,
London, 1890 (fig. 77B).
Figure 4.4: George Grosz, “Die Religion muß dem Volke erhalten bleiben!”(Religion
must be preserved from the people!) from Abrechnung folgt!, 1923, offset
photolithograph, Collection of the Getty Research Institute.
Figure 4.5: George Grosz, “Völker Europas, wahrt eure heiligsten Güter,” (Peoples of
Europe, Protect Your Most Precious Possessions!) from Abrechnung folgt!, 1923, offset
photolithograph, Collection of the Getty Research Institute.
Figure 4.6: Edition page from Ecce homo, offset photolithograph, Edition “C”, 1921,
Collection of the Getty Research Institute.
Figure 4.7: George Grosz and John Heartfield, Neujahrsgrüss (New Year’s Greeting)
(detail), 1920-21, Zeitungdruck, 18.5 x 7 cm, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin.
Figure 4.8: George Grosz, Daum Marries Her Pedantic Automaton “George” in May
1920. John Heartfield is Very Glad of It (Meta-Mech. Constr. After Prof. R. Hausmann),
1920, watercolor, pen, and collage on card stock, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin.
Figures 4.9 – 4.11: George Grosz, full page and details, Mit Pinsel und Schere, 7
Materialisationen, 1922, offset photolithographs, Collection of the Getty Research
Institute.
Figure 4.12: George Grosz, Whisky, plate II from Ecce homo, 1923, color offset print,
15.7 x 27.7 cm, Collection of the Getty Research Institute.
Figures 4.13-4.14: Details from Whisky, plate II from Ecce homo, 1923, color offset print,
Collection of the Getty Research Institute.
Figure 4.15: Installation view of “Meister-Facsimiles” exhibition from the Drucken der
Marées-Gesellschaft in the Staatlichen Graphsichen Sammlung, Munich, 1920.
Published in 75 Jahre Piper (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1979).
9
Acknowledgements
A dissertation necessarily requires the support of many institutions and
individuals if it is to reach the finish line. This project is no exception, and it would not
have been possible without the encouragement of a number of academic mentors,
intellectual interlocutors, and personal friends who were in it for the long haul.
Special thanks are due first and foremost to my dissertation advisor, Megan Luke.
She came to the project at a moment when it felt permanently stalled and invigorated it
with new life and direction. She took the stakes of my dissertation seriously and
encouraged me to think bigger. Her example, passionate and enthusiastic but also sincere
and rigorous, has set a high, worthy standard for my own scholarship. This dissertation
might eventually have been written without her intervention, but I am certain I would not
be as proud of the final result, or as inspired to continue the work.
My long and formative relationship with Karen Lang, my first advisor and
mentor, was also fundamental to the development of this dissertation. Karen has been a
supportive and intellectually inspiring presence throughout my time at the University of
Southern California. She is an academic of both range and precision in the best tradition
of German scholarship and I owe much to her example.
I am also indebted to Paul Lerner in the History Department at USC. Paul is a
generous scholar who always engaged with my work in a way that took it on its own
terms while pushing me to think critically and not rely on tired clichés—an all-too-easy
escape hatch for those of us struggling to come to terms with the complexities of
twentieth-century German history. Sean Roberts in my own department provided
10
important feedback that expanded my thinking about print media beyond the confines of
my particular period and introduced me to the important scholarly debates. Finally, I
want to thank Timothy Benson, Curator of the Rifkind Center for German Expressionist
Studies. I have relied on his intimate knowledge of this material more than once during
the course of my research and I hope to continue the conversation as I further develop
this project.
The kernel of my dissertation took shape during my early years of graduate study
in Massachusetts. Carol Solomon Kiefer first introduced me to the pleasures of prints
and without her example, I would not have become a “print person,” nor would I have
been trained to look at prints in the ways that allowed me to pursue this project. Over the
course of several summers, the curatorial staff in the Department of Prints, Drawings, and
Photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston—especially Clifford Ackley,
Stephanie Stepanek, Sue Reed, and Patrick Murphy—permitted me to peruse boxes of the
MFA’s boundless collection of prints and photographs and shared their own deep
understanding of print media with me. It was my encounter with Beckmann prints in the
MFA’s collection that ultimately led to this dissertation. Finally, Aprile Gallant, Curator
of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at Smith College Museum of Art kept my larger
passion for prints alive when my energy for this project flagged. She has been a mentor,
a trusted advisor, and a friend.
In addition, I have greatly benefitted from intellectual exchanges with and the
support of my friends, colleagues, and peers at USC and beyond. Special thanks to
Nicole Antebi, Catherine Clark, Colin Dickey, Émilie Garrigou-Kempton, Brian
11
Jacobson, Aynne Kokas, Ryan Linkof, Samuel Solomon, Raphaelle Steinzig and Mary
Traester for their support, companionship, and inspiring example during the endurance
sport that is graduate school. Within my own disciplinary cohort Priyanka Basu,
Kathleen Chapman, Sarah Goodrum, Anca Lasc, Aleca Le Blanc, Kristine Tanton, Amy
von Lintel, and Katharine Wells offered helpful advice and welcome guidance.
I received indispensable financial support from several sources throughout my
years of graduate study. The University of Southern California sponsored my work with
several Merit Scholarships as well as a Russell Endowed Fellowship during the 2012-
2013 academic year. A Ralph and Joan Hovel Scholarship supported a semester of
language study in Germany. The Visual Studies Research Institute funded several
summers of exploratory research in New York and Washington D.C. My year of
research in Munich, Nuremberg, and Berlin during 2010 and 2011 was financed by a
Borchard Overseas Fellowship. Finally, the support of a Completion Fellowship from the
University of Southern California helped simplify and focus my final year of writing.
My dissertation would have been impossible to research without the remarkable
resources of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Early research into
Beckmann’s dealer J.B. Nierendorf was also undertaken at the Museum of Modern Art in
New York and the Archives of American Art in Washington D.C. My research in
Germany was conducted with the assistance of archivists and librarians at the following
institutions: the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte and the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in
Munich, the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, and the Akademie der
Künste in Berlin. I owe thanks to Dr. Christian Lenz at the Beckmann Archiv for
12
providing me with access to his files on J.B. Neumann. I am also grateful to Wolfgang
Erler at the Berlinische Galerie and to Florian Karsch at the Galerie Nierendorf for
sharing the correspondence and journals of Otto Dix’s dealer, Karl Nierendorf.
This dissertation is dedicated to my partner, Joel Maynes, and our daughter,
Hildegard. Joel’s trusting patience and steady encouragement sustained me throughout
this process. He has been with me through the ups and downs of graduate study on two
coasts, a trusty companion for the adventures of research travel, and a comrade-in-arms
for the even bigger adventure of parenthood. Hildy joined us during the writing and has
expanded my life and my understanding of myself in ways large and small. She has
made my professional endeavors more meaningful while also keeping them blessedly in
perspective.
13
Introduction
The Weimar Republic (1918-1933) embodies a certain brand of artistic
modernism in the historical imagination, a modernity that has come to be identified with
a handful of moments, movements, and media: Dada, the Bauhaus and the Neue
Sachlichkeit, photomontage, film and the photographic essay, for instance. But it was not
‘new’ media such as photography and film, but established graphic media that
engendered and rehearsed key aspects of Weimar modernity during the Republic’s
earliest days before it became the version we now recognize. Germinating in the print
portfolios of artists like Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, and George Grosz are debates that
would later take fuller form; questions about mass production and mass audiences,
popular versus fine art, the status of the reproduction, and objectivity and representation.
The post-World War I inundation of printed pictures was the beginning of the image glut
of the Weimar period. The photograph was not, in fact, the ubiquitous visual medium of
the illustrated press until mid-decade. It was initially the print that primed audiences for
their encounter with the visual subjects of the Weimar Republic. The print boom
preceded the photographic boom and set the terms of the latter’s reception.
My dissertation asserts that prints were the first modern media of Weimar-era
Germany. But they were modern in a way that is distinct from the progressive prewar
work with which they are often considered. Postwar prints were modern in the ways they
engaged with media—the variety of manual, but also photomechanical processes—and
with the possibilities of a mass cultural public sphere. They were also modern in the
sense that they were aktuelle, or current; artists frequently presented up-to-the-minute,
14
topical treatments of newsworthy events and individuals that had immediate, if
ephemeral, relevance. This type of modern print was quite different and distinct from
progressive prewar prints such as those produced by the artists’ group Die Brücke.
Contemporary scholars and critics made note of these tensions as prints faced an identity
crisis that wavered between the modern print as embodied by the rough-hewn and low-
edition hand-printed woodcuts of Die Brücke on the one hand, and the possibilities
represented by the postwar mass editions of photomechanical prints by artists like George
Grosz on the other.
This study is not focused on the specific locations, movements, or groups that
concentrated artistic practice. The boom in print production bridged the cities,
ideologies, and -isms that typically frame and separate the variety of art production
present at any given time. Progressive artists were making prints in greater numbers
throughout Germany—in Berlin, certainly, but also Düsseldorf, Dresden, Frankfurt,
Munich, Cologne, and in the small town of Weimar where the Bauhaus and its print
workshop were first located. Nor do graphic works privilege a particular style or
medium. The first and second generation of Expressionist artists made prints—
particularly woodcuts—a significant part of their artistic output, but so did artists who
rarely experimented with print media before these years and who would stop making
prints almost entirely after 1924. Some were affiliated with Berlin Dada, others with
progressive artists groups in Dresden and Cologne (the Dresdener Sezession Gruppe and
the Gruppe progressiver Künstler, respectively).
15
I consider the pervasiveness of the graphic arts to be in itself significant and ask
why graphic media were most appropriate for presenting and processing the experiences
that followed the end of World War I and the establishment of the Weimar Republic.
Although scholarship has recognized that print production did increase between 1918 and
1924, it has not effectively dealt with why this happened or considered in a fuller way
why print media offered—for material, cultural, and ideological reasons—such an
effective means of representing the experience of these years.
1
I argue that artists ably
responded to the challenges created by economic and political instability in and through
the print, challenges that constrained other artistic practices. The print’s particular
material characteristics, formats—especially the narrative structure of the portfolio—and
its mode of address, both intimate and potentially very public, offered artists a novel way
of presenting contemporary subjects. But I also argue for a reconsideration of the way
that the modern German print is periodized, viewing postwar graphic production as less
the continuation, or tail end, of prewar print culture than something distinct, something
thas more in common with the photographic production of later Weimar, for instance,
than with earlier graphic work. At stake is not only the way print is incorporated into
histories of the interwar period, but also that graphic media are accorded the same
attention given to newer media, such as photography and film, and established artistic
media, such as painting, in the shaping of Weimar’s artistic culture.
1
An important recent contribution is the catalogue of the recent MoMA exhibition German Expressionism:
The Graphic Impulse. Curator Starr Figura notes that the years 1919 and 1920 were especially prolific for
the production of single prints and print portfolios. Starr Figura, ed., German Expressionism: The Graphic
Impulse (The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2011). The catalogue includes an index of information
on print publishers as well as artists, acknowledging the essential role of publishers and dealers to the print
boom.
16
Stephen Bann has called nineteenth century France a “golden age of printmaking”
because a great variety of graphic techniques flourished simultaneously—reproductive
engravings and ‘original’ lithographs, fine art etchings and the wood engraved prints of
the illustrated press—influencing one another as much as they struggled for dominance in
a clamorous and cluttered visual field.
2
One reason Paris produced such a rich and
varied graphic culture is that in France there was still considerable “tension between old
and new,” meaning new practices were not able to immediately supplant old processes.
3
Photomechanical techniques in particular, which brought together the innovations of
photography with elements of familiar intaglio, relief, and planographic processes, often
borrowed their visual syntax, to use William Ivins’s term, from older print media in order
to compete for audiences.
The early years of the Republic were a similar “golden age” for German graphic
art. Before the so-called “golden twenties,” of mid-decade, Weimar cultivated a diverse
print culture. Etchings, woodcuts and linocuts, lithographs, and photomechanical prints
such as the photolithograph were used for newspaper and journal illustrations, political
broadsides and pamphlets, in portfolios and as single-sheet prints, as original and
reproductive media. This situation was short-lived and contingent upon larger economic,
political, and cultural factors. Print thrived because it was able to adapt to the austerity
and uncertainty of the inflationary period. When the economy stabilized, artists largely
2
Stephen Bann, Distinguished Images: Prints in the Visual Economy of 19th Century France (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2013).
3
Ibid., 3.
17
abandoned graphic media and returned to familiar media such as painting, or explored
alternatives in photography, film, or graphic design.
Scholarship has focused on artists’ responses to the First World War and the
Revolution that followed as well as representations of the chaos and vitality of urban life
during these years.
4
But comparatively little attention has been paid to the way inflation
affected artistic practice and the art market more generally.
5
Its effects, however, were
profound. The German Inflation lasted roughly a decade, from the beginning of the war
in 1914 until the stabilization of the currency in late 1923 and early 1924. Although the
advent of inflation and the advent of war occurred simultaneously, inflation continued to
plague the Germany economy for years after the end of the war, with its most destructive
period yet to come. In 1922, hyperinflation set in and the Mark depreciated daily at a
fantastic pace, finally reaching an exchange rate of 4.2 Trillion to the dollar in November
1923.
Economic uncertainty and financial hardship did encourage artists and their
dealers to experiment with print media for practical reasons. Printmaking was simply a
less expensive undertaking with more immediate potential rewards. Artists could
produce prints—particularly lithographs—more quickly than paintings. And, because of
4
The seminal example is Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1975). Studies that deal specifically with artists’ responses to the war include Kenneth E Silver,
Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914-1925 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1989), Matthias Eberle, World War I and the Weimar Artists: Dix, Grosz,
Beckmann, Schlemmer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
5
One important exception to this is Bernd Widdig’s excellent Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Dennis Crockett also addresses the inflation briefly in his
study German Post-Expressionism: The Art of the Great Disorder, 1918 - 1924 (University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999).
18
its reproducible nature, a print was something one could sell again and again, a
convenient commodity in a climate of ever-rising prices. In certain cases, the print even
collapsed the distinction between currency and commodity; the Dresden painter and
printmaker Conrad Felixmüller would later recall that he and other artists used prints as
items of exchange to barter for basic goods. This slippage was facilitated by the fact that
a print, like a banknote, was essentially a reproducible image printed on paper. At the
same time, as economies became more local and the financial value of money more
unstable, currency itself took on the characteristics of a collectible. Numerous regional
interests—both public and private—issued their own emergency money, called Notgeld,
valid for only brief periods and in circumscribed areas. Financially strapped
communities even hired artists to design special collectible Notgeld to sell directly to
collectors. Not only did these notes have aesthetic appeal, they also had the potential to
retain their value as a collectors’ item in a way that their value as depreciating currency
did not. Thus prints and paper money not only charted similar paths during this period—
both were produced and circulated in greater and greater numbers—they ultimately
served similar functions as well.
The boom in graphic production during these years was not viewed without
alarm. While a number of contemporary art critics wrote approvingly of the prewar print
production of Die Brücke as a high point for modern graphic art and a model for present
day printmakers, some pointed to recent trends with more anxiety and suggested that
19
much of the increase in graphic production was of lesser quality.
6
The art historian Curt
Glaser wrote extensively about the state of the modern print and characterized the
postwar situation as such:
We stand at a new moment of the blossoming of graphic techniques.
Never in the course of the nineteenth century was there so much that was
enduring and worthwhile being created in etching, woodcut and
lithography as in the course of the last decade. But the bulk of it is not
necessary, and is dangerous if it threatens to drown out [work of] quality.
In art, only the individual counts, and of his work only the best.
Therefore, the ideal graphic collection, in so far as it is not afflicted with
the responsibility of instruction and inventory, is small in comparison to
the limitless flow of production, it is carefully selected, is sifted through
ten times over, and its pride is already the opposite of completeness, in its
composition is reflected the image of a distinctive will, not one of false
example and not merely a collector’s ambition of misleading independent
judgment.
7
6
More research needs to be done on quantitative details regarding the “boom.” The most important study
remains the PhD dissertation by Waltraut Neuerburg, “Der graphische Zyklus im deutschen
Expressionismus und seine Typen, 1905-1925,” which offers the most comprehensive overview I have
found of print portfolios (not single prints) produced in this twenty-year period and offers a catalogue of all
the portfolios produced by known artists during these years. Although she lumps pre- and postwar print
production based on what she sees as shared styles and subject matter, she does note that there was a
difference in postwar production, notably the “völlig unüberschaubare Zahl” of print porfolios created in
the years after the First World War, “was sowohl mit dem literarisch orientierten Geschmack der Zeit, als
auch mit der inflationären wirschaftlichen Entwicklung in Deutschland zusammenhing, die genauso auf das
Verlagswesen und auf den Kunsthandel übergriff.” She argues that this surge in production resulted in a
flood lower-quality work, both by established artists as well as “eine Heerschar von Epigonen.” Waltraut
Neuerburg, “Der graphische Zyklus im deutschen Expressionismus und seine Typen, 1905-1925,” (PhD
Diss., Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Bonn, 1976), 286.
7
“Wir stehen in einer neuen Blütezeit der graphischen Techniken. Niemals im Verlaufe des 19.
Jahrhunderts und zu keiner Zeit in Deutschland seit der Epoche der großen Meister des 16. Jahrhunderts ist
in Radierung, Holzschnitt und Lithographie so vieles an Bleibendem und Wertvollem geschaffen worden
wie im Verlaufe der letzten Jahrzehnte. Aber nicht die Masse ist notwendig, und sie ist gefahrlich, wenn sie
die Qualität zu ertränken droht. In der Kunst gilt nur der Einzelne und von seinem Werke nur das beste.
Darum ist die ideale Graphiksammlung, sofern sie nicht mit der Verpflichtung zu Belehrung und
Inventarisierung behaftet ist, klein im Vergleich zu der uferlos strömenden Produktion, sie ist vorsichtig
gewählt, ist zehnfach gesiebt, und ihr Stolz ist das gerade Gegenteil der Vollständigkeit, in ihrer
Zusammensetzung spiegelt sich das Bild eines ausgeprägten Willens, eines durch kein falsches Beispiel
und durch keinen bloßen Sammlerehrgeiz zu beirrenden, selbständigen Urteils.” Curt Glaser, “Vom
Graphik-Sammeln,” in Deutsche Graphik des Westens, ed. Hans von Wedderkop (Weimar: Feuerverlag,
1922), 13–19.
20
Certainly, Glaser saw some positive outcomes to this expansion of print media. Graphic
artists had more options than ever before and engaged with the possibilities presented by
print media in innovative ways. In addition, more—and more prominent—artists were
choosing to explore printmaking as an outlet for their talents. But Glaser saw a serious
downside to the print boom as well, and his anxiety was evident in the language he
employed to describe it, language that captured the threat of excess. Glaser’s anxiety was
about the sheer volume of printed works being produced, a mass for which drowning,
choking, and other deadly metaphors of inundation seemed apt. As Glaser argued, the
flood of print media undermined the value of quality artistic production. So much of it,
he argued, was cynically produced to appeal only to an audience of what he termed
“Auch-Sammler,” literally “Also-Collectors,” who had hopped on the print bandwagon
when it became fashionable to do so.
8
They were catered to by a coterie of “Auch-
Verleger” (“Also-Printers”) and the “Auch-Künstler” (“Also-Artists”) who provided
them with material. There was a circular quality to this market that was self-sustaining, it
catered mainly to collectors who were either feeding a compulsion, or to opportunists.
But this overproduction did have pernicious effects on the larger market for
contemporary prints. This was because the mass of material drowned out work of high
quality, making it more difficult for it to find an audience. Most damaging, Glaser
believed, was the larger perception this situation created. If the market for prints boomed
8
No less a figure than Heinrich Stinnes, the brother of the industrialist, politician, and inflationary
speculator Hugo Stinnes, could be counted as one of these “Auch-Sammlers.” Heinrich compiled a very
large collection of prints and artist’s books during this period. Waltraut Neuerburg says as a collector he
was much more interested in comprehensiveness and in collector’s values—early impressions, for
instance—than artistic quality. Neuerburg, “Der graphische Zyklus im deutschen Expressionismus,” 56.
21
and then crashed, the public would be convinced that the cultural and financial value of
fine art was, like so much in inflationary Germany, built on pretense and speculation, that
contemporary graphic art was not worth supporting.
As curator of the Kupferstichkabinett, the state print collection, Glaser had an
interesting perch from which to make these observations. He was also an early patron of
Expressionists artists, and had a considerable personal collection of Expressionist prints
as well as Japanese graphics. Glaser was trying to convince collectors to police the
market as much as he was using his own position to call attention to the problem. He
insisted on a restricted graphic canon policed by well-trained connoisseurial collectors
who needed to be ever more discerning if they were to compile collections of quality and
distinction. The modern print collection was not comprehensive, he argued, it was
ruthlessly culled and curated by those with correct knowledge.
Gustav Hartlaub, director of the Mannheimer Kunsthalle, had a different response
to the graphic boom and its potential to expand the print’s audience beyond a traditional
group of knowing connoisseurs. He ended his book-length essay on German graphic art,
Die neue deutsche Graphik, with an appeal to would-be collectors, asking them to
...close our large print portfolio, whose contents also may give us an
example of how prints should be collected today…It is…no longer an art
for fanciers of minor masters’ artistic translation, of technical refinements
and variations. Therefore, it must be collected differently than before. It
absolutely demands a new type of collector who unhesitatingly proceeds
more on the basis of artistic content, [and is] less [concerned with] rarity
and all sorts of connoisseur’s values…Today one does not collect early
proofs, unique impressions, etc., for the sake of the extra-artistic sport of
collecting, for science, or even—for profit!…After all, print collecting
today should not be undertaken in private cabinets with private capital.
Today printmaking is public and popular. Today printmaking…does not
want to be stored motionless in portfolios. The print wants to fly, a
22
broadsheet fluttering downward from spiritual heights to a great people
with arms outstretched!
9
Hartlaub was, like Glaser, addressing the collector, but with the hope of expanding rather
than restricting the collecting public. Hartlaub wanted to make the print an accessible art
object and art collecting an activity for the masses. The print, in turn, should respond to
the immediate and spiritual needs of the people; “a broadsheet fluttering downward from
spiritual heights”! Hartlaub’s text retains some of the idealism and possibility of the
early days of the November Revolution, when the print was a vehicle for progressive
political and artistic messages. The tension between these two positions—Glaser’s
insistence that quality production should necessarily be limited on the one hand, and
Hartlaub’s call for a mass audience to embrace a popular and populist print that rejects
“connoisseurial values” on the other, are the two extreme positions that would
characterize much of the debate about the status and function of the graphic arts during
the print boom.
Print media—and the act of printmaking itself—were central to the artistic
identity of the prewar artists’ group Die Brücke, and it was the quality and innovation of
their graphic output that set high expectations for postwar print production. But with the
9
“Schließen wir unsere große graphische Mappe, deren Inhalt uns zugleich ein Beispiel geben mag, wie
heute Graphik gesammelt werden muß…Darum ist sie nicht mehr Kunst für Liebhaber kleinmeisterlich-
artistischer Übersetzungen, technischer Verfeinerungen und Abarten. Darum mußte sie auch anders
gesammelt werden als bisher. Sie verlangte gebieterisch nach einem neuen Typus von Sammler, der
unbedenklich mehr auf den künstlerischen Gehalt, weniger auf Seltenheit und alle möglichen
Liebhaberwerte ausgeht…Frühdrucke, Unica usw. vereinigt man heute nicht um des außerkünstlerischen
Sammelsportes, um der Wissenschaft, oder gar - um des Geschäftes halber! Graphiksammeln sollte heute
letzten Endes nicht mehr kabinetthaft, privatkapitalistisch betrieben werden. Graphik ist heute öffentlich
und volkstümlich. Die graphische Kunst, vor allem ihr heute wichtigster Exponent, der Holzschnitt, will
heute nicht unbeweglich in Mappen bewahrt sein. Das Blatt will fliegen, ein Flugblatt, herniederflatternd
aus Geistwolken auf ein großes händeaufreckendes Volk!” Gustav Hartlaub, Die neue deutsche Graphik
(Berlin: E. Reiss, 1920), 94-96.
23
end of the war and the collapse of the monarchy, the print was pressed into public service
for political reasons that prioritized accessibility over artistry.
10
The November
Revolution demanded a larger, more public role for progressive art. It was, according to
Joan Weinstein, “one of those brief moments when the avant-garde fervently believed it
could make a difference, not only remaking the art world in its own image, but actively
taking part in revolutionary politics.”
11
Groups like the Arbeitsrat für Kunst, the
Working Council for Art, believed that progressive art could play an edifying role that
would renew the cultural and spiritual life of the nation after years of war and the
divisiveness of the Revolution. The print was the ideal vehicle for this populist and
progressive message, combining the aesthetic of Expressionist art with the disseminative
possibilities of print. It was quickly deployed for political uses as broadside, leaflet, and
newspaper illustration.
As the enthusiasm and idealism of the Revolution waned, the immediate political
usefulness of the print receded. But inflation would continue to influence the debate
about the proper role of the modern print as populist or precious. As previously
discussed, inflation encouraged circumstances that permitted the print to thrive, but these
same circumstances would ultimately threaten the print’s status as a fine art medium.
There were two reasons for this. First, dealers and publishers began to experiment with
new ways to package and present prints to attract a broader audience. They offered prints
10
See Ida Katherine Rigby, An Alle Künstler!: War-Revolution-Weimar: German Expressionist Prints,
Drawings, Posters and Periodicals from the Robert Gore Rifkind Foundation (San Diego: San Diego State
University Press, 1983).
11
Joan Weinstein, The End of Expressionism: Art and the November Revolution in Germany, 1918-19
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 2.
24
and portfolios in tiered editions—with and without covers, bound and loose leaf, on
different types of papers, with and without signatures and handwritten addenda, for
example—that were also offered at a range of price points. Edition numbers likewise
expanded to accommodate this array of options. To a number of collectors and critics,
this seemed a cynical development that commodified and artificially induced the
“collectors’ values” that had previously been incidental and infrequent occurrences.
Dealers including Alfred Flechtheim and Hans Goltz also advertised a number of
portfolios on subscription before they were even produced, suggesting that prints were
not being collected the way that Glaser advocated, on a selective basis based on sound
connoisseurial judgment, but as a product with a promised market value.
Second, and more importantly, the material character of graphic art—printed
paper—and its overproduction conjured up dangerous associations with the
overproduction of worthless paper money during the inflation. Glaser’s description of
the “limitless flow” of contemporary graphics is remarkably similar to the visual and
textual descriptions of the tide of inflationary money that inundated the public from 1922
on. Although prints were, as one contemporaneous report of art auctions in 1922 had it,
“paper that still holds its worth quite well,”
12
this was not true for much recent
production. As the economic situation worsened, new prints often failed to find an
audience and remained unsold. Prints that were sold on subscription—like the portfolio
series, Neue europäische Graphik, issued by the Bauhaus—lost money because their
12
See Chapter One, footnote 33.
25
initial price could not keep pace with the declining value of the Mark. By the time these
portfolios were printed, they cost far more to produce than they had to purchase.
The term speculation describes the production and promotion of prints during
these years in a way that accommodates the commercial and conceptual sides of these
activities as well as the risk they entailed. Speculation is, according to Steven Pinson,
“both a financial and aesthetic enterprise.”
13
Pinson is referring to nineteenth-century
Paris, specifically the commercial and aesthetic conditions that attended the advent of the
daguerrotype. But this statement also applies to the print in interwar Germany.
Speculation can help us frame the print boom of the postwar period in both financial and
theoretical terms. Speculation in the financial sense is defined as engaging in risky
behavior in order to profit from short- or medium-term fluctuations in the market value of
exchangeable goods. The economic climate of inflation encouraged speculation because
it upset conventional commercial practices and because there was great potential for large
gains. Speculating in foreign currencies or the value of durable goods against an ever-
depreciating Mark, for instance, offered a way one could capitalize on skyrocketing
exchange rates. But speculation also had negative connotations with deception and
chicanery in the German context that were bound up with the profession of the modern
art dealer and, in particular, his association with Jewishness.
Progressive dealers were, certainly, engaged in a certain form of speculation,
which was less about immediate financial rewards than acquiring what Pierre Bourdieu
13
Stephen C. Pinson, Speculating Daguerre: Art and Enterprise in the Work of L. J. M. Daguerre
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 3.
26
referred to as “symbolic capital”: the prestige and status one drew from one’s position
within the ever-shifting field of cultural production.
14
Dealers of “young” art acquired
symbolic capital if and when their artists became a success. The modern dealer, then, had
to select a stable of artists he believed would be successful in a commercial, but also in a
cultural sense. Here the other meaning of speculation—as insight or inner vision; acting
based on intuition rather than evidence—describes the behavior of the modern dealer in a
particularly apt way. The modern dealer gambles on his artists just as the financial
speculator gambles on the market.
The print and publishing—as both marketing tool and as artistic practice—bring
together the commercial and conceptual sides of speculation. Print was simultaneously
an artistic practice and a promotional product. But there were also risks to symbolic
speculation; the modern print had, in the previous two decades, accrued its own symbolic
capital as the graphic arts again increased in stature. The aggressive commodification of
fine art prints then, combined with the climate of inflation, threatened to again devalue
the print in a financial and a symbolic sense. The print, more sensitive than other fine art
media to perceptions of value given its material and multiple character, was threatened by
overproduction.
My dissertation consists of four chapters, divided by theme. I pay particular
attention to the graphic production of three artists—Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, and
George Grosz—whose work demonstrates the variety of ways that progressive artists
14
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984).
27
made print a distinctive part of their artistic practice during these years. Max Beckmann
bridges the Wilhelmine and Weimar periods, and did produce a limited number of prints
before the First World War, but it was not until the publication of his first postwar
portfolio, Gesichter, a collection of wartime subjects, that graphic work became an
important part of his oeuvre. Beckmann used print as a way to explore contemporary
subjects, but also to distance himself from them, which is especially apparent in the
lithographic portfolios he produced of J.B. Neumann: Die Hölle (Hell) and Berliner Reise
(Trip to Berlin). Otto Dix’s five portfolio series Der Krieg (War) is a strange marriage
between an exquisitely produced fine art portfolio and its horrifying subject matter.
Krieg suggests the way that the köstlich, or high-quality, presentation of graphic works
could be in uneasy relation with their content. George Grosz, finally, is an artist who
embraced the mass-produced print as a means to an end and employed a great variety of
photomechanical processes in order to reproduce his drawings as quickly, efficiently, and
cheaply as possible.
My first chapter, Impressions of Inflation, examines how the inflation, which
unleashed a flood of paper money on the German public, created conditions that
permitted prints to thrive but also threatened perceptions of their value. I look at the way
that this inundation of printed paper was often visualized in the illustrated press as a flood
or other natural disaster that left death and destruction in its wake. I also consider the
design of emergency money called Notgeld—distinct from the official inflationary money
issued by the Reich—which was in constant production from 1914 through 1923 to
address the persistent shortage of paper money. Notgeld notes, issued for temporary
28
periods to address immediate needs, were produced in thousands of different designs and
were immediately popular with collectors. Soon local governments as well as private
interests were commissioning notes by well-known artists as instant collector’s items. At
the same time, artists reverted to bartering their art—prints in particular—for basic goods
as the money economy broke down.
The second chapter, Speculation and Publication, considers how the activities of
dealers and publishers encouraged the postwar print boom. Dealers used the artist’s print
and their own publications—including art journals, gallery publications, even
newspapers—to create a very public identity for themselves as cultural creators in their
own right. The identity of the modern art dealer was tied to publishing and reached a
new level of prominence with the Berlin-based dealer Paul Cassirer, who made
publishing a central part of his professional persona. In the immediate postwar period, a
new generation of progressive art dealers looked to Cassirer as a model, and took up
publishing as a way to promote themselves and their artists. They did so at a moment in
which publishing had larger political and ideological stakes. Print became the means
through which they both answered the call for progressive art that was more public and
populist and made their own role and personae visible.
In chapter three, Processing Trauma, I examine what it was about the print that
made it particularly suited to depicting the immediate, or aktuelle, content of life during
this period—both the extreme experiences of war and revolutionary violence, and the
details of everyday, urban life. I consider two aspects of the aktuelle: first the trauma of
the war and the way that artists turned to graphic works to depict the experience of life on
29
the Front. I examine the way Dix’s Der Krieg employed the acid bite of the etching
process as a way to access the visceral experience of the war’s violence and destruction.
The second kind of aktuelle content I consider is what I call the journalistic mode, an
observational style that evokes the expositional and reportorial forms of the Weimar
press, comparing, for instance, the portfolios of Max Beckmann with the feuilleton essay
of mid-decade.
The final chapter, Speculating on Process, considers the split between manual, or
“fine art” print practices and the photomechanical processes that enabled the reproduction
of the image on a mass scale. It examines the shared technical and historical bases of
both types of media and considers how photomechanical prints defined their
representational role in relation to existing manual processes. Finally, the prewar
emphasis on the woodcut and the postwar anxiety about the mass tended to set the debate
about fine art graphics versus popular prints in sharper relief. The halftone, which was
the apotheosis of the high-volume photomechanical print, was itself a visual metaphor for
the mass, dissolving the image into thousands of tiny dots.
My dissertation insists that the immediate postwar period represented a brief
moment when print culture was, to borrow Glaser’s term, flourishing, and yet print media
faced an existential crisis, wavering between mass and limited production, and trying to
determine the appropriate role for both types of production. During these years the
functions and fields of the fine art and mass print temporarily overlapped and converged.
In spite of this, the future of graphic art was as uncertain as ever. The inflation created a
climate that encouraged the boom in print production and acted as a temporary check on
30
the growth of the photographically illustrated press, which was poised to undergo
dramatic expansion and would come to dominate the visual landscape of Weimar
Germany by mid-decade.
15
But inflation also brought persistent questions about the
future of print media to the surface—questions about mass versus limited production,
about reproduction and value, and about the function of print media as populist
progressive art form or as limited and exclusive collector’s item.
15
Wilhelm Marckwardt demonstrates that while the number of newspapers expanded almost immediately
after the war—an initial “Gründungseuphorie”—inflationary pressures, particularly the dramatic increase in
the price of paper, caused many new publications to quickly fold. Others could not last out the inflation
because their readers could no longer afford untenable subscription and newsstand prices. Publications that
did survive were acquired by industrial monopolies—Hugo Stinnes is a notable example—or survived on
their advertising dollars. The situation turned around almost immediately in 1924 when the financial
situation stabilized and the price of paper dropped again. Die Illustrierten der Weimarer Zeit:
Publizistische Funktion, ökonomische Entwicklung und inhaltliche Tendenzen, Minerva-Fachserie
Geisteswissenschaften (Munich: Minerva Publikation, 1982).
Chapter One
Impressions of the Inflation: the Scheine-Welt of Postwar Print Culture
“Be fruitful and multiply.” The priest in George Grosz’s 1922 drawing (figure
1.1) extends his hands over bags of money bursting with coins and stacks of cash
gathered at his feet. The bags, marked in the amount 100,000,000, suggest that the
drawing was made late that year, by which time the value of the Mark had dropped so
precipitously that 10-, 50-, and 100,000 Mark notes were introduced into circulation for
the first time, soon to be followed by denominations in the millions and billions. Thus, as
early as late summer or fall of 1922, the drawing’s caustic humor might have elicited a
shiver rather than a chuckle. The priest’s invocation, echoing God’s appeal to Adam in
the Book of Genesis, is certainly meant ironically, but his wish had already been granted
all too literally, and with disastrous results. Money was more than plentiful, but real,
stable value was completely absent.
A November 1923 cover of the satirical weekly Simplicissimus presents a
different take on the situation. By the end of the month, it took 4.2 trillion paper Marks
to achieve the purchasing power of a single American dollar. Karl Arnold’s illustration
(figure 1.2) represents the declining value of the German nation based on the declining
value of its material wealth. Three of four scenes show us the treasuries of church,
crown, and the “Schieber” or profiteers. All are in yellow, emphasizing material—
usually gold—as their source of value. In the final scene is the foundation of Germany’s
present-day economy: paper money. Bills in black and white fill the frame, but the
appearance of plenty is misleading. It is just so much material; so much, in fact, that its
scale makes it not a blessing but a curse; the figures trapped in this sea of notes are
32
corpses.
1
The tide of paper overwhelms; it destroys life and livelihood. This paper-based
prosperity is an illusion. It is, to use the German term, Schein, or appearance.
Schein, however, also refers to currency, to the paper notes themselves. The
inflationary period, and the Weimar Republic itself, were built on the promises of this
paper, and nearly collapsed when the promises were exposed as nothing more than
appearance. Schein, then, in both senses, embodies the contrast between the appearance
of plenty and the reality of poverty during the inflation. Others expressed this contrast by
calling the period a time “als alle Millionäre waren,” that is, when everyone was a
millionaire, yet all but the profiteers and speculators starved.
A flood of both official and emergency money, or Notgeld, inundated Germany
during the six years between the end of the war and the end of the Reichsmark, and more
than ten billion bank notes were printed during the inflationary decade that began in
1914. The mountains of paper money that materialized between 1921 and 1923 made
strikingly apparent that value was not inherent to the currency that was its institutional
medium. The Paper Mark undermined Germans’ faith in the assurances of the issuing
authorities, and therefore, their faith in the currency itself. Money was increasingly seen,
and depicted, as nothing more than paper.
This chapter will explore both sides of this Schein. I will consider how the
functions of the graphic arts and money overlapped and converged. How did the
1
Bernd Widdig has pointed to the ways that satirical illustrations of the inflation evoke certain
photographic representations of the Holocaust, but cautions against any overly deterministic interpretations
of such similarities. The affinities are striking, however, and he argues that the inflation, which stripped
individuals of their possessions and their social status, had a dehumanizing effect, which anticipated some
of the ways that Jews and other targets of National Socialism were also deprived of their humanity. See
Bernd Widdig, Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
33
devaluation of the Mark and the overproduction of paper money affect perceptions of
prints and their value? The fate of graphic art was closely tied to the fate of the paper
Mark. Both behaved similarly, even swapped roles; prints became a medium of
exchange and money became a collector’s item, for instance. Production of both likewise
boomed until the end of 1923, when the market for prints crashed soon after the
Reichsmark was pulled from circulation.
The inflation was the primary reason for the dramatic increase in print production
in postwar Germany, and prints were the primary media of the inflation. Printed
material was pervasive and different categories of printed objects converged in
unexpected ways; some inflationary money, for example, was designed by fine artists,
and certain fine art print portfolios resembled the satirical illustrations of the weekly
press in their narrative preoccupations. The inflation created new ways for prints to be
produced and consumed; their expanded circulation encouraged artists and dealers to
make the graphic arts a focus of their artistic practice, to rethink their function and
purpose, and to imagine new audiences for progressive art via the print. There was
increased flexibility about the material character of fine art prints as well. Artists and
dealers experimented with larger editions and with new reproductive technologies. The
connection between the inflation and print media is borne out by their parallel
trajectories. The flourishing of the print was a temporary phenomenon, and its rise and
fall mirrors the inflation closely. The post-inflationary world was one in which fine art
printmaking had again retreated into a connoisseurial context. Populist or mass-produced
34
experiments in print were continued in other media such as photography and graphic
design.
Historians have long considered the inflation a pivotal event with serious
implications for the short-lived Weimar Republic and twentieth century German history
in general. Art historians, however, have not attended to the effects of the inflation on art
practice. Although art historical scholarship has treated the obvious disruptions of war
and revolution as natural “breaks” that either interrupted creative production or inspired
artistic action, this chapter argues that ten years of inflation, which spanned war,
revolution, and the establishment of the Republic, was itself a transformative experience
that had a lasting impact on the making, marketing, and collecting of art—especially
prints.
The Inflationary Decade and the (Over) Production of Money
In his seminal work Philosophie des Geldes (The Philosophy of Money) Georg
Simmel describes money as “a sociological phenomenon, a form of human interaction.”
2
For Simmel, money is no less than “pure interaction in its purest form.” He continues,
…[money] makes comprehensible the most abstract concept; it is an
individual thing whose essential significance is to reach beyond
individualities. Thus, money is the adequate expression of the relationship
of man to the world, which can only be grasped in single and concrete
instances, yet only really conceived when the singular becomes the
embodiment of the living mental process which interweaves all
singularities and, in this fashion, creates reality.
3
2
Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. David Frisby (New York: Routledge, 2011 [1900,
1907]), 184.
3
Ibid., 138.
35
Money’s significance thus transcends its economic role; it is “…the adequate expression
of the relationship of man to the world,” both central to modern social and cultural
relationships and an instantiation of those relationships. Given the centrality of money to
modern life, there are psychological and social as much as financial consequences when
the system breaks down.
Money itself is not worth anything, it is the mediator, “merely the expression of
value…This condition of money is obviously the same as what is called its lack of
qualities and lack of individuality.”
4
Thus, the idea of money is as important for the
functioning of the financial system as its physical presence; a theoretical shortage of
specie can, for instance, lead to a shortage in fact as prices increase and individuals hoard
necessities. Price increases indicate a decrease in the value that money represents, and,
Simmel argues, “when that occurs the stability of money value is destroyed.”
5
The more modern the financial system, the more abstract and dematerialized the
money that serves it: “The functional value of money exceeds its value as a substance the
more extensive and diversified are the services it performs and the more rapidly it
circulates.”
6
Paper money represents money’s almost complete dissolution into function.
It is money realized largely in a conceptual, ideal form, since paper possesses little value
as substance. In spite of paper’s tenuous connection to material value, Simmel argued
that money’s attachment to a physical material in some form is nevertheless important.
4
Ibid., 130.
5
Ibid., 132.
6
Ibid., 153.
36
Gold reserves, for instance, remain an important “psychological representation of
money,” if nothing else.
7
But paper money only functions as a symbolic representation
of value under certain conditions, namely:
“Only in a stable and closely organized society that assures mutual
protection and provides safeguards against a variety of elemental dangers,
both external and psychological, is it possible for such a delicate and
easily destroyed material as paper to become the representative of the
highest money value.”
8
It is precisely those conditions that ceased to exist under inflation. The Wilhelmine
world that Simmel himself inhabited epitomized the “stable and closely organized
society” that “assures mutual protection and provides safeguards.” That world was
eroded, however, by years of war, then exploded with the instant upheaval of the
revolution that followed. The Weimar government that moved into the vacuum left by
the abdication of the Kaiser was never able to establish the legitimacy necessary to
reassure individuals that it could guarantee the currency it issued.
Inflation was the defining experience of the postwar period for many Germans; it
uprooted whatever remained of the old Wilhelmine social structure. In just a few years,
the most stalwart elements of the imperial order were among those most dramatically
affected by inflation. This included many members of the so-called “old” Mittelstand of
artisans and shopkeepers, as well as pensioners, salaried intellectual workers, and
individuals who lived on their interest from long-term investments—in other words, those
7
Ibid., 183.
8
Ibid., 184.
37
on a fixed income whose purchasing power declined in tandem with the depreciation of
the Mark.
For many Germans, the effects of this transfer of wealth were less financial than
psychological. A kind of moral relativism replaced the conservative, bürgerlich rectitude
of the Wilhelmine period. There was a feeling that one was powerless to secure one’s
own wellbeing regardless of his or her social station. Fortunes were lost overnight.
Wealth was redistributed in arbitrary ways. Those who benefitted most from the inflation
were unscrupulous individuals who either speculated against the German Mark or
engaged in less legitimate forms of business such as smuggling.
Although the inflation lasted nearly a decade, its pace was not constant. Detlev
Peukert divides the period into three distinct phases: wartime inflation, demobilization,
which lasted from 1918 to 1922, and hyperinflation, which began in August 1922 and
ended with the introduction of the Rentenmark, a provisional currency, in November
1923.
9
Gerald Feldman, who has written one of the most thorough histories of the period,
identifies four distinct types of inflation distinguished by their pace and the rate of
depreciation: creeping, trotting, galloping, and hyperinflation.
10
Germany experienced
them all between 1914 and 1923.
11
9
Detlev Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, trans. Richard Deveson (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1992).
10
Inflation “creeps” when prices rise at a rate of up to 10 percent in a year. Inflation begins to “trot” at a
10 to 50 percent per year increase. Galloping inflation occurs when prices rise more than 50 percent per
year. And hyperinflation is defined as price increases above 50 percent every month. Gerald D Feldman,
The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics, and Society in the German Inflation, 1914-1924 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993).
11
Feldman, however, cautions against confusing the trauma of hyperinflation with the entire inflationary
experience. The inflation was, at certain moments, even a stabilizing force for both private and public
entities. It enabled the German government as well as individuals to discharge debts, it permitted the
38
Historians typically begin the inflationary decade on August 4, 1914, when the
German Mark was decoupled from the Gold Standard with the passage of the Loan
Bureau Law. This law enabled the government to finance the war without taxing the
populace; the war was bankrolled largely through the sale of war bonds and by printing
money. During this first phase of wartime inflation, the civilian population was less
aware of the inflation as a distinct problem because the war itself led to shortages of food
and other durable goods, driving up prices. In addition, inflation was viewed by the
government as a temporary state of affairs that would be reversed once the German army
emerged victorious and was able to pay off its debts with money from the defeated Allies.
These hopes were dashed by Germany’s defeat and unequivocal surrender in
November 1918. After the war, the German state, now a Republican government,
continued to print money to pay down domestic war debts and deal with the most
immediate needs of post-war reconstruction.
12
The German economy stabilized
somewhat in 1921, but the pace of inflation again accelerated dramatically in 1922. This
was due, in part, to the German government’s policy of Erfüllungspolitik, or compliance
with the terms of Treaty of Versailles, which included meeting Germany’s crushing
reparations obligations.
uninterrupted funding of state obligations, and allowed the government to meet expanded financial
commitments during the disruptions caused by the revolution. Inflationary spending also curbed what could
have been devastating unemployment for returning soldiers at the end of the war. In the short term,
inflation helped ease the transition from a wartime to a demobilized economy.
12
The state was the greatest beneficiary of the inflation. All war debts—which totaled 154 Billion
Marks—were worth only 15.4 Pfennigs in 1913 money by November 1923. See Bernd Sprenger, Das Geld
der Deutschen: Geldgeschichte Deutschlands von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Paderborn: F.
Schöningh, 1991), 218.
39
Other events precipitated the tailspin into hyperinflation from a period of already
high inflation in mid-1922. Most significant was the French invasion of the Ruhr region.
The German government encouraged the passive resistance of its citizens there in order
to deny the French any material advantage; this required that the Reich pay all striking
workers their full salaries for the duration of the occupation. The government again
relied almost exclusively on the printing presses to finance this policy and to meet its
other obligations. In December 1922, the consumer price index was 685 times larger
than it had been in 1913. But by the end of 1923, it was 1.2 trillion times larger than its
1913 level. Finally, on November 15, a provisional currency, the Rentenmark, was
established which took German property assets as security. In 1924, the new Reichsmark
was introduced which was again tied to the Gold Standard, ending the inflationary
decade.
Notgeld, or emergency money, appeared shortly after the declaration of war in
August 1914 and was produced almost continuously throughout the inflationary decade.
Many Germans, worried about the declining value of the Mark, stashed their gold and
silver coin and paid whenever possible with paper money.
13
The Reichsbank hoarded its
own reserves,
14
resulting in an immediate shortage of Kleingeld, small denominations
13
By 1916, for instance, the value of silver had increased enough that silver Mark coins were worth more
than the coins’ stated value. See Hans Otto Eglau, Mehr Schein als Sein. Als die Mark Kapriolen schlug;
deutsches Notgeld, 1914 - 1923 (Düsseldorf: Dodos-Verlag, 1997).
14
Gerald Feldman points out that the Reichsbank’s campaign against gold hoarding preceded the war. This
was, in part, because the Bank was permitted to print currency as long as at least 1/3 the amount in
circulation could be covered by the gold reserves of the Reichsbank. The more gold it had, the more
money the Bank was permitted to print. The Loan Bureau Law, passed on August 4, 1914, however,
effectively abandoned the Gold Standard and put no check on the amount of money the Reichsbank could
print. See Feldman, The Great Disorder, 34. At the beginning of the war, the Reichsbank attempted to
further strengthen their gold reserves by requesting that citizens return gold money in exchange for paper
40
between 1 Pfennig and 5 Marks that were in coin.
15
To address the problem, the
Reichsbank offered its own provisional currency, called Darlehenskassescheine. These
were issued on the basis of credit, and although they did not represent legal tender, all
public Kassen had to accept them as payment. But this did not bridge the gap between
demand and supply, and cities, parishes, and municipalities, as well as Sparkassen
(savings banks), businesses, and private estates were forced to issue their own Notgeld
for limited, short-term circulation. This Privatgeld challenged the exclusive issuing
privilege of the Reichbank; to keep from provoking the authorities, which reluctantly
tolerated the situation, issuers avoided the designation “Geld,” marking their notes
instead as “Gutschein” (vouchers), “Anweisung” (essentially a money order),
“Wechselschein” (exchange note) or simply “Good for …” Other bills indicated their
provisional status with the label “Notgeld” or “Kriegsnotgeld.”
The earliest Notgeld bills were a response to immediate necessity, and were
typically printed at a local Druckerei (printer) on cheap paper or card stock. Their
appearance reflected the bills’ provisional status. They were of simple design, often
hand-stamped and sometimes handwritten. Some issuers reused scraps of old paper or
recycled other at-hand items, such as the quartered playing cards with handwritten
amounts issued by the estate of Lopischewo outside the town of Ritschenwalde (figure
1.3). Most early Notgeld was offered in small denominations, between 50 Pfennig and 5
currency. At the end of 1913, the Reichsbank had a gold reserve of 1.2 Billion Gold Marks. By the end of
1914 the amount increased to 2.1 Billion through collection actions and hoarding. In 1915, the amount
went up further to 2.4 Billion. See Sprenger, Das Geld der Deutschen.
15
Before 1914, 52-65% of the money in circulation in the German Empire was coinage, which included 10
and 20 Mark gold coins, 1 and 5 Mark silver coins, 5, 10, and 25 Pfennig nickel coins, and 1 and 2 Pfennig
coins made of copper. See Feldman, The Great Disorder.
41
Marks; these small denominations represented the most frequently circulated currency
and enabled the countless small transactions throughout the Reich.
16
To keep the
potentially destabilizing power of this tender in check, the bills remained valid for only a
short period, typically a few months.
The first Notgeld period ended by mid-1915. Around 450 Ausgabestellen, or
issuers, had produced approximately 1,600 different notes; combined with the “official”
bills issued by the Reichsbank, the total number amounted to around eleven million
numbered Marks.
17
After a brief hiatus, Notgeld was again in circulation by 1916 due to
the persistent shortage of Kleingeld. The number of notes in circulation in 1916
exceeded those produced between 1914 and 1915, and by 1918, so-called
Großgeldschein, or notes in larger denominations, began to appear as well.
By late 1918, the Kleingeld shortage was so severe that the Reichsbank no longer
simply tolerated the printing of Notgeld by secondary issuers, but actively encouraged it.
The Bank asked cities, regional banks, and large businesses to produce their own Notgeld
and even offered to cover half the cost of its production. They required one condition
intended to curb the Notgeld’s destabilizing effect: a short Gültigkeitsdauer, or period of
validity. The years between 1920 and 1922 represent the high point for German Notgeld;
around 10,000 Sammlerscheine, or collector’s notes, appeared at this time. The design
16
These notes are called Kleingeldschein, as well as Verkehrs- or Bedarfsausgaben. This is still the
terminology used by collectors to refer to all Notgeld that appears in Pfennig amounts. See Hans-Ludwig
Grabowski, Notgeld der besonderen Art: Geldscheine aus Stoff, Leder und sonstigen ungewöhnlichen
Materialien, Deutsches Notgeld 9 (Regenstauf: Gietl, 2005).
17
See Eglau, Mehr Schein als Sein.
42
and appearance of Notgeld was in many ways considered as important as its function as
legal tender.
By July 1922, the government had decided to end the Notgeld madness and forbid
the printing of private money. In September, however, workers at the Reichsdruckerei
went on strike, bringing the supply of paper money almost to a halt. Thus, only two
months after the activity was suspended, the Reich government was forced to ask private
issuers to resume printing Notgeld. The Notgeld produced from the end of 1922 to
November 1923 constitutes by far the largest portion produced. Rapidly rising prices at
the beginning of 1923 forced the printing of notes in denominations between 5,000 and
50,000 Marks. Eventually, notes were issued in Million, Billion, and even Trillion Mark
amounts.
18
There were more than 5,800 private issuers in 1923 alone. The bottom was
reached in November 1923, when the Paper Mark was set at 4.2 Trillion to the Dollar.
The provisional Rentenmark eventually replaced the devalued Paper Mark. In the
interim, Sachscheine, or money guaranteed against a durable good such as rye, sugar, gas,
or margarine, and other so-called wertbeständiges Notgeld, or money tied to stable
values, filled the void.
In the final year of inflation, more paper money—including both official and
emergency currencies—was in circulation than ever before. In this Schlußphase of the
inflation, there were 133 firms involved in the production of Million, Billion, and
Trillion-Mark notes. In addition, more than thirty paper manufacturers were responsible
18
The largest bill that was printed and put into circulation was a 100 Trillion Mark bill. See Sprenger, Das
Geld der Deutschen.
43
for “feeding” the 1,723 printing presses that were marshaled for printing the
Reichsbank’s official notes.
19
Countless others were ceaselessly producing the
immeasurable number of Notgeld bills that were put into circulation during
hyperinflation, which began in late summer 1922. Five hundred Quintillion Reichsbank
Marks were in circulation by the end of 1923, but even that amount was dwarfed by the
total value of Notgeld in circulation, which by one estimate reached 700 Quintillion
Marks, and by another was six times the value of Reichsbank notes in circulation.
20
Material Value and the Value of Material
As the value of metal increased due to wartime demand, the government relied on
substitutes when issuing new currency. Gold and silver coins were hoarded almost
immediately, and after 1916, the material value of copper Pfennig coins surpassed their
stated value and gradually disappeared from circulation as well. The Reichsbank minted
new coins in iron, then zinc, and last, aluminum.
21
This ersatz money traces a
depreciation of material that mirrored the depreciation of the currency and the declining
wealth of the German nation: gold became iron, iron turned to aluminum and finally,
metal disappeared from circulation as the government and private issuers relied almost
exclusively on paper.
The production of paper, meanwhile, boomed; manufacturers ramped up supply to
meet the ever-increasing demand. The paper industry operated at full speed throughout
19
Ibid.
20
Ibid., 217.
21
In 1913, coinage still made up 56% of the money in circulation (Stückgeldmenge). By the end of 1914,
this sank to 33%. By 1918, coinage was only 0.5% of the money in circulation. See Ibid., 210.
44
the postwar inflationary period, avoiding supply bottlenecks and earning hefty profits.
22
The decentralized nature of paper manufacturing also helped Notgeld producers avoid
problems that plagued the production of official money; regional producers could rely on
local printers and paper producers rather than the official state Druckerei.
23
Floods became a popular visual metaphor for expressing the sense that Germany
was awash in a tide of paper. Karl Arnold’s November Simplicissimus cover, discussed
earlier, depicted paper money as a crushing or drowning force that left corpses in its
wake. Olaf Gulbransson’s version of this flood, titled “Die Sintflut” or “The Deluge,”
depicts a similar sea of notes (figure 1.4). Hands strain to keep above the waves of paper;
a dead mother and child float in the foreground. The only individual who has managed to
keep his head above water has a Semitic nose, caricatured shorthand for the Jewish
businessman. The poem that accompanied this illustration referenced the illusory nature
of this paper-based bounty: “We have money and the world belongs to us / But oh, we
have so much, yet we have next to nothing / the number is our judgment. / We don’t live,
we don’t die / we count.”
24
Just as the excessive production of paper money was transformed into a
devastating flood in the popular imagination, the printing press was anthropomorphized
and depicted as a menace to the German populace. Another illustration in Simplicissimus
by Erich Schilling titled “Gutenberg and the Billion-Mark Press” depicts the father of the
22
See Grabowski, Deutsches Notgeld. Bd. 9, Notgeld der besonderen Art, 17.
23
For example, the strike of state workers at the Reichsdruckerei in 1922 almost brought the flow of
official money to a halt. See Eglau, Mehr Schein als Sein.
24
“Und haben wir Geld, / Gehört uns die Welt— / doch ach, wir haben gar so viel / und uns gehört kein
Pappenstiel / die Zahl ist unser Strafgericht. / Wir leben nicht, wir sterben nicht—, wir zählen—”
45
printing press clutching the Bible that bears his name (figure 1.5). Stunned, he holds his
hand to his head and exclaims, “This is not what I wanted!” Behind him, the steam press
expels a steady stream of Mark bills from its “mouth.” The press, earlier identified as an
instrument of progress with special ties to the German nation, had become an agent of the
economic suppression of the German people, a kind of Moloch in reverse, which spewed
more and more worthless paper at an already overwhelmed populace. Hans Fallada
included a similarly sinister description of this monstrous machine in his novel about the
inflationary period, Wolf among Wolves:
Somewhere in this town there was a machine…which vomited paper day
and night over the city and the people. 'Money' they called it; they printed
figures on it, beautiful neat figures with many noughts, which became
increasingly rounder. And when you had worked and sweated to put by a
little for your old age, it all became worthless paper, paper muck...
25
This machine turns one’s hard earned money into so much “worthless paper.” Paper
itself, the material of the devalued currency, becomes vomit, the “muck” that turns a
lifetime’s savings into worthless refuse.
Paper’s ability to destroy personal, regional, and national wealth is also the
subject of a four-note Notgeld series that recounts the history of the Thuringian town of
Gera, a story of success reversed by the inflation (figure 1.6). Echoing the economic
situation, the notes depreciate as the narrative approaches the present, from 75 to 50 to 25
Pfennigs. The first two notes depict the destruction of the town by the Hungarians
followed by the subsequent victory of Heinrich I, the father of the Ottonian dynasty and
the first king of the medieval German state. The third and fourth document Gera’s recent
25
Hans Fallada, Wolf Among Wolves, trans. Philip Owens (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2010), 54–55.
46
history. The 50-Pfennig note references Gera’s rise as a thriving textile center during the
Industrial Revolution in the mid-nineteenth century. The last note, worth only 25
Pfennigs, summarizes its recent downfall due to the inflation: “Arm nun wieder und nur
ein Schein-Leben” (Poor again now and just a Schein Leben). The notes create two
rhyming pairs, the first tracing Gera from a low point followed by its success and rise,
while the second marks the opposite course—a period of prosperity is succeeded by the
town’s current depressed state. The sets mirror one another visually as well; in each note,
single or multiple figures form a stable triangular composition that is balanced by a series
of objects on the upper right: the medieval city on the hill in the first note becomes a
fortified Renaissance town in the second, is transformed into an industrial center in the
third, and finally disappears entirely in the last note behind by a flurry of Notgeld. The
Gera notes thus literally illustrate the way that inflation has destroyed personal and
regional wealth, dissolving things of material value into a cloud of worthless paper.
The “Schein-Leben” of the final Gera note has two meanings in this context;
Scheinleben means literally a life of appearances, here denoting the appearance of money
itself, which resembles a stable currency in form, but not in function. The hyphenated
Schein-Leben, however, also connotes the other meaning of Schein as a bill or note. The
cloud of fluttering paper in the upper right of the image is this Scheine Leben. An
emaciated family in the foreground sits below the bills on a barren field. There is money,
but no prosperity; the family starves, the fields are fallow. The Scheine Leben embodies
the contradictions of the inflationary experience, the contrast between an appearance of
47
plenty and the reality of poverty. Paper was the medium that exemplified this
contradiction.
According to Simmel, all values stand between the extremes of the absolutely
singular object on the one hand and the completely interchangeable object on the other.
The latter is money. Money must be interchangeable in order to fulfill its function as the
universal mediator of value; “The significance of money shows itself…in an empirical
way, as stability of value, resulting from its interchangeability and lack of specific
qualities.” And no material embodies this interchangeability as well as paper. Paper has,
as material, little to no inherent value, and is fragile and provisional rather than durable
and permanent. It would seem, therefore, to be a poor embodiment of the value that
money is meant to signify. But for Simmel, the historical transition to paper money
represents the move to more sophisticated social, cultural, and financial systems; “paper
money” he said, “signifies the progressive dissolution of money value into purely
functional value.”
26
Paper embodies the function of money as abstract value because it is
nearly worthless, because it retains value only in its association with things of value, such
as money or art, and because its material qualities enable money to perform its modern
functions better and more efficiently. Ephemeral paper is the perfect medium for the
modern financial system and its sped up rates of circulation, for instance. It is cheap to
produce, cycles through the system quickly, and can be easily replaced.
But if money is the interchangeable mediator of value, Notgeld represents the
entropic devolution of this sophisticated abstract economic system, a reversion to earlier
26
Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 184.
48
forms that were more local and individual. It stands between the interchangeable and the
singular. And if paper’s material qualities enabled money to evolve and perform more
effectively in a modern financial system, these same material qualities were also what
facilitated money’s failure during the inflation. In the face of this assault of worthless
paper, some regions took refuge in things of concrete value. Just as the third Gera note
associates the town’s success with its textile production, other areas also placed their
hope for future stability on the return to a self-sufficient ideal tied to a vibrant
manufacturing or agricultural base. And some regions communicated this by printing
their Notgeld on materials other than paper, materials associated with a given area’s
manufactured goods such as leather, aluminum, linen and lace.
27
Many of these notes
also identified the region with a tradition of quality products or luxury goods—traditions
that persisted in spite of the economic situation.
The Lederscheine, or leather notes, from the town of Pößneck promote the town’s
leather products both through their message and their material (figure 1.7).
28
The
embossed image on a five million Mark Lederschein unites material and manufacturing
on its verso, depicting the variety of leather goods the region produces and naming the
firms responsible for their manufacture around the silhouette of a cowhide. These
“products made from Pößnecker Leather” include sofas, jackets, shoes, suitcases and
27
In spite of these notes’ material value, the bills themselves were not exempt from the general
depreciation of the Mark. There was, however, a psychological benefit to dissociating one’s currency from
the omnipresent paper that was circulating elsewhere and many of these notes were produced exclusively as
Sammlerscheine, or collector’s notes.
28
Interestingly, Simmel calls leather money the first step toward the “dissolution” of money value into
functional value that is represented by paper money. But importantly in this context, he notes that,
“Leather money preserves, out of all the qualities that characterize money as a substance, the quality of
relative indestructibility…” Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 184.
49
handbags. The front of the bill announces the bill as Notgeld from the “‘old’ tannery city
of Pößneck,” connecting Pößneck’s present-day products with an established tradition of
leather fabrication and again asserting the practical and enduring value of one’s goods
over and above the insecure financial value of the currency.
Another Pößnecker note called a Stiefelsohlengeld also serves as a promotion of
Pößnecker’s leather products, but is, at the same time, a functional version of one of these
items; the bill is both banknote and a leather shoe sole (figure 1.8).
29
This presentation
seems to suggest that if the bill fails as a banknote, it can be put to other, more practical
purposes. The poem embossed on its surface also offers a sardonic take on the current
financial crisis and at the same time promotes manufacturer Neptunie’s soles as a
solution of sorts to both the economic woes and worn out shoes. Two stanzas from the
poem read:
Der Geldschein ist nur Scheingeld Banknotes are money only in appearance
Das nicht mehr seinen Wert hält; They no longer hold their value;
Doch Pößnecks Leder Ihr achten sollt But you should respect Pößneck leather
Wie altes Geld von echtem Gold Like real money made from real gold.
…
Die deutsche Mark kam auf den Hund The German Mark has gone to the dogs
Doch deutscher Arm ist noch gesund! But the German arm is healthy still!
Was der an Werten täglich schafft What daily appreciates in value
Der Börsenschwindel an sich rafft The market swindle seizes
29
The “bill” is a Tauschwert-Schein, a type of Notgeld produced toward the end of the hyperinflation that
attempted to again tie the value of the currency to the value of gold. This note is “worth” 1.50 Gold Marks,
which it states in word and image, illustrating a one Mark and a half Mark coin embossed with the date
1914, the last year that money held its “old” value. An advertisement for Pößnecker Stiefelsohlengeld
notes there were three pieces of Sohlengeld produced: a 1.50 Gold Mark note, which was printed on a shoe
sole, and two notes of 50 and 25 Gold Pfennigs that were printed on leather shoe heels, or
Absatzsohlenleder.
50
The poem references Pößneck soles simultaneously as legal tender—it asks you to
“respect” them like real money—and as practical and high-quality shoe leather. Even if
the sole loses its abstract monetary value—a real possibility when the Mark has “gone to
the dogs”—it retains its literal use value. In another stanza, the poem proclaims that he
who obtains Sohlengeld will be safe from both the profiteer and from colds and the
cracking of his shoe soles. The poem finally reassures us that the German arm—or rather
German labor and the things produced by it—is still healthy and capable of creating
goods of real value even as the “Börsenschwindel,” the swindle of the stock market,
erases monetary value. Pößneck’s Notgeld thus retreats into more primitive forms of
asserting and assessing value, as money—the universal mediator in the exchange
relationship—became an increasingly unstable referent. The value of shoe soles, but also
many other everyday objects, were calculated based on the object’s use value, which Karl
Marx defined as “the utility of a thing” rather than its exchange value, a more developed
measure which Marx attached to monetary price.
The failure of conventional currency caused many to turn to the most primitive
form of exchange: barter. A contemporary photograph published in Sittengeschichte der
Inflation documents the interior of a shop that advertises “Sale and Repairs in Exchange
for Food” (Verkauf und Reparaturen gegen Lebensmittel) (figure 1.9).
30
A shopkeeper
unwraps an item for the customer before him as she hands him a sausage in exchange for
his work. According to Simmel, money, as the representative of abstract value, is meant
30
Hans Ostwald, Sittengeschichte der Inflation, ein Kulturdokument aus den Jahren des Marktsturzes
(Berlin: Neufeld & Henius, 1931).
51
to even out the irregularities of object exchange by providing a common denominator
between uncommon things. But in the context of inflation, money was no longer an
adequate mediator; barter actually restored some balance in the exchange relationship by
providing an opportunity for people to offer at hand goods and services in exchange for
immediate needs.
However, the relationship between needs and wants had been distorted by years
of privation for most Germans. In the climate of inflation, exchange value had ballooned
beyond recognition. But use value was likewise distorted by those basic and immediate
needs—food, above all—that were harder and harder to meet for an increasingly
impoverished populace. Simmel also recognized that extreme conditions would
necessarily alter exchange relationships:
…during a famine somebody will give away a jewel for a piece of bread
because under the given conditions the latter is more valuable to him than
the former. It always depends upon circumstances whether sentiments of
value are attached to an object, since every valuation is supported by an
elaborate complex of feelings which are always in a process of flux,
adjustment and change.
31
This does not mean the man trading the jewel for the bread is being swindled, Simmel
argued, only that during a famine, the bread is worth more to him. This is dramatically
illustrated in “Famished Germany,” a drawing by Eduard Thöny from Simplicissimus
(figure 1.10). A disheveled man holds a portrait painting in an elaborate frame. Too thin
for his clothes, he is likely a member of the landed aristocracy, whose wealth relied on
property and investments, and who were among those hit hardest by the inflation. Behind
31
Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 91.
52
him, a well-fed American smokes a pipe next to a barrel of bacon.
32
The caption reads:
“Well, give me your old painting, and I’ll give you my old lard.” The illustration hits on
several widespread anxieties—first, that pervasive poverty and desperation had caused
Germans to auction off their cultural patrimony to the highest bidder to address
immediate material needs. But the other anxiety on display here is the leveling of
distinctions; if an “old” painting could be said to have an exchange value equivalent to
“old” lard, both economic and cultural values had radically shifted.
Artists were among those able to barter their work for basic goods and services.
Like other producers and service providers, artists had a ready source of payment at their
fingertips as long as they could find the right partner. Conrad Felixmüller, a young artist
active in the Dresden Secession group, remembers that cultivating barter relationships
with certain collectors during the inflation offered special advantages:
With the inflation came many people interested in art, some speculators
who sought out art as a ‘commodity’ [Ware] to save themselves, but also
collectors who became true friends for the painters. They traded their
‘wares’ [Ware] for prints. From one, suits, dresses for the wife, wardrobes
from head to toe for the children; from another ‘tropical fruit and fruit in
bulk’ to fifty kilograms of Walnuts. As the collector and confectioner
Robert Graetz said: this business with the artists is our best.
33
32
The second man’s nationality is suggested by the use of “Well” at the beginning of the statement (further
set off by the use of serif rather than Gothic font) as well as the label on the barrel, which reads in part
“American Bacon … USA.”
33
“Mit der Inflation kamen zahlreiche Kunstinteressenten, zum Teil Spekulanten, die in die Kunst als
'Ware' sich zu retten suchten, aber auch Sammler, die zu treuen Freunden für die Maler wurden: Sie
tauchten ihre 'Ware' gegen Graphik. Anzüge, Kostüme für die Frau, Garderobe vom Scheitel bis zur Sohle
für die Kinder, die einen - ein anderer 'Südfrüchte und Obst en gros' bis zum Zentnersach Walnüsse [next
page, 34] - wie der Sammler und Konfektionär Robert Graetz sagte: Diese Geschäfte mit den Künstlern
sind unsere besten.” Quoted in 1920-1970, funfzig Jahre Galerie Nierendorf. Ruckblick,
Dokumentation, Jubilaumsausstellung. (Berlin, 1970), 33–34.
53
Selling one’s art for cash, however, was far less beneficial in such a climate.
Felixmüller also recounts that J.B. Neumann, Beckmann’s dealer, came to visit him in his
studio in 1921 and parted with a “moving van” [Möbelwagen] full of pictures and a
“höher Stapel” or large pile of graphic works. But, “the inflation robbed me [brachte
mich um] of my profits. Artist’s bad luck!”
34
The pile of prints and moving van full of
paintings of Felixmüller’s recollection evokes the stuff of German nightmares: the pile of
inflationary money, or the wheelbarrow of cash that was required to buy basic goods
during the final year of inflation. It also suggests a kind of inflationary logic taking hold
in art production—especially the production of prints. Even if more equaled less, one
had to ramp up production to stay afloat.
Prints were handy as objects of exchange, as Felixmüller notes. Graphic art was
an effective substitute for the devalued currency, and in many regards prints behaved like
prewar paper money. Not only were the basic materials the same, prints were produced
in multiple, yet there were checks on supply that helped ensure their value. But like
inflationary money, prints were also being produced in larger and larger numbers during
the inflationary period as the definition of an edition became more and more elastic.
This, and the print’s unavoidable association with the dreaded paper “muck,” helped
undermine attitudes about the value of fine art prints.
How, then, to distinguish the muck from paper that supposedly held its value? As
late as spring 1923, Alfred Kuhn assured collectors of the investment potential of prints,
34
“Bei J.B. Neumann's Besuch 1921 in meinem Klotzscher Atelier kaufte er einen Möbelwagen voll BIlder
und dazu einen hohen stapel Graphik - die Inflation brachte mich um den Gewinn, Künstlerpech!” Ibid., 34.
54
noting that graphic art in general represented “paper that still holds its worth quite
well.”
35
Even the Luxussteuer, or luxury tax, which codified certain markers of value as
objective measures of worth for taxation purposes, included prints on its list of luxury
goods. The tax, which stood at 15% in 1922,
36
was more descriptive than prescriptive;
that is, it did not dictate which works were of value, but responded to existing standards
that marked some goods as more or less valuable in order to create uniform rules.
Contemporary prints were labeled luxury items if they met certain conditions. This
included the print’s materials; even paper was considered a luxury material under certain
circumstances. For example, if the work was printed on a special support, such as
leather, vellum, silk or a specialty paper such as handmade Bütten, real China paper, real
Japan paper, or rice paper, it would qualify as a luxury item.
37
If the print was produced
in a limited edition and the impressions were numbered, it also qualified under the law.
A limited edition was defined as a case in which, “because so few numbered prints are
created, the individual print attains a higher value because of its rarity and condition.”
38
35
“Zusammenfassend kann man sagen, dass graphische Bluatter noch immer ganz gute ‘werhaltende
Papier’ darstellen.” Alfred Kuhn, “Versteigerungs-Ergebnisse: Graphikauktion Bei M. Perl, Berlin,”
Kunstchronik Und Kunstmarkt: Wochenschrift Fur Kenner Und Sammler 58, no. 23 (March 9, 1923):
462.
36
First there was an Umsatzsteuer, or general sales tax, passed as part of the Reich stamp law in June 1916,
and which stood at 0.1%. The Umsatzsteuer was raised to 0.5% in July 1918 and was expanded to include
“gewerbliche Leistungen aller Art.” The 1918 law also introduced the Luxussteur. By 1923, the general
sales tax was at 2%, while the luxury tax reached 15%. Information regarding the luxury tax is taken from
an article published in Kunstchronik und Kunstmarkt written by a Dr. Felix Szkolny, a Justizrat the journal
designates an “expert on the material.” The article was published to clear up “misinformation” regarding
the law, and offered a general summary of the most recent regulations of the law. See Felix Szkolny, “Die
Luxussteuer auf Kunstwerke,” Kunstchronik und Kunstmarkt: Wochenschrift fur Kenner und Sammler
58, no. 21 (February 23, 1923): 397–404.
37
Handmade Bütten paper is high-quality handmade paper made with a mold. Japan, China, and rice paper
were considered “real” if they originated in Japan or China, respectively.
38
“Eine beschränkte Auflage liegt vor, wenn so wenig nummerierte Drucke hergestellt werden, dass der
einzelne Druck wegen seiner Seltenheit und Güte einen höheren Wert gewinnt.” Szkolny, “Die
55
Hans Goltz, a Munich art dealer and the publisher of Der Ararat, labeled the
luxury tax one of the main opponents of progressive art in Germany, and criticized the
mindset that would equate the value of art with that of other luxury goods: “A Nation
which labels the production of its artists luxuries and puts them on par with an
automobile or a case of Sekt ceases to be a nation of culture.”
39
Another Kunstchronik
editorial chimed in: “Once again, ‘art objects’ are pulled in amongst the decorative goods
and other luxury items. Once again the financial authorities see art as nothing more than
a convenient means to disguise one’s wealth.”
40
Taxing works of art as luxury goods was indeed controversial; some were
ambivalent about equating the products of Kultur with more superficial extravagances.
Luxussteuer auf Kunstwerke,” 398. The law did not specify number, but a limited edition was typically
understood as fifty or fewer impressions. Of course, in the case of trial proofs, artist’s proofs, annotated
proofs, or proofs “before the text” (avant la lettre), these rules applied as well since they were, as a rule,
rarer than the numbered impressions. Interestingly, a print was exempt from the luxury tax if it was printed
by the artist him or herself and if it was delivered by the artist rather than a dealer or publisher. Thus, the
more direct contact a work had with the artist, the less likely it was to be designated a luxury good. This
rule was actually designed to protect artists from the burdens imposed by the tax. These changes were in
force by October 1922, and the new law represented significant improvements over the previous version in
the concessions it made for artists and other cultural producers. Art printers also benefitted, since the
earlier law also subjected photomechanical prints—which included four-color prints, Farbenlichtdrucke,
and photogravures—to the luxury tax. Now, with only a few exceptions, only Vorzugsdrucke, or luxury
prints, sold by dealers and at auction were subject to the tax. Other conditions exempted contemporary
prints from the luxury tax. A contemporary print counted as a work printed during the artist’s lifetime or
up to twenty years after his death. In the latter case, if the work was delivered by a member of the artist’s
family or one of the artist’s representatives it would be exempt. Works sold at exhibition were also tax
exempt. Finally, the luxury tax would not be imposed on up to five trial proofs and 10 edition impressions
from the same plate, as long as the trial proofs were so labeled and the edition impressions were numbered.
These exceptions attempted to give some leeway for contemporary artists and those who bought their
works.
39
“Eine Nation, welche die Produktion ihrer Künstler als Luxus bezeichnet und sie gleichstellt mit einem
Automobil oder einem Korb Sekt hört auf eine Kultur-Nation zu sein.” Hans Goltz, “Die Abwürgung der
jungen Kunst in Deutschland,” Der Ararat 1, no. 9/10 (October 1920): 124.
40
“Wieder einmal sind die “Kunstgegenstände” mitten unter die Schmucksachen und sonstigen
Luxusartikel hineingeraten. Wieder einmal sehen die Finanzsachverständigen im Kunstwerk nichts anderes
als ein bequemes Mittel der Kapitalverschleierung…” “Kunststeuern,” Kunstchronik und Kunstmarkt:
Wochenschrift fur Kenner und Sammler no. 17 (January 20, 1922): 277.
56
Others were concerned that such penalties would have a chilling effect on the production
of art; critics of the tax argued that art was not private property, but part of the national
patrimony and the common property of the German nation. W.A. Wellner satirized these
fears in “Die verstümmelte Muse” (“The Mutilated Muse”), an illustration published in
the Berlin-based satirical magazine Lustige Blätter (figure 1.11). A tax collector stands
behind the eponymous Muse, removing the flight feathers from her giant wings. “I am
impounding these beautiful colored feathers as luxury goods,” he tells her. Sobbing, the
Muse asks, “Then how am I to take flight [hinaufschwingen] in the realm of fantasy?”
41
The illustration suggests that the tax deters creative production, grounding the Muse by
punishing art makers.
But the real threat to art acquisition was the Vermögensteuer, the tax on assets. It
caused one Kunstchronik editorial to warn that, “…the end of the private art collection is
before us.”
42
Unlike the luxury tax, which levied a penalty at the point of sale, the
Vermögensteuer taxed existing collections. What the editorial objected to most
vociferously was the way that the tax was assessed; authorities taxed the value of an
existing collection based on the price paid rather than its current market value. This
meant that most works acquired before the war at pre-inflationary prices were often
exempt or taxed only slightly, while works purchased afterward at inflated rates were
almost always subject to the tax. The penalty began for single objects at 5,000 Marks and
for a collection of similar objects at 50,000 Marks. (The editorial notes that based on
41
The caption reads “Der Steuerfiskus: ‘Die schönen bunten Federn sind Luxus, die pfände ich.’ Die
Kunst: ‘Wie soll ich mich dann hinaufschwingen ins Reich der Phantasie?’” From Lustige Blätter, (1921)
5.
42
“…das Ende des privaten Kunstbesitzes steht bevor.” “Kunststeuern,” 277.
57
stated rates, a collection worth a total of 2 Million Marks would be subject to a 42,000
Mark/year tax). But, the editorial argued, prices for art works only appeared to be higher;
they were only “scheinbar:”
…measured in relation to the Gold standard, few prices have remained the
same or even increased. On the whole, the value of art works has, if
anything, sunk…When the German Mark recovers, a reverse movement
must also naturally begin with us anyway. All those works that were paid
for with poorly valued Paper Marks would sink in value, while the
acquisition tax would remain unchanged and must even be paid for in a
better foreign currency at that.
43
In addition, the Vermögensteuer fell hardest on those new collectors who began amassing
their collections at inflationary rates. The editorial argued that the law would force those
who could not afford such high taxes to liquidate their collection to avoid the penalties.
The only other way to avoid the tax was to stick to buying cheap kitsch: “He who would
decorate his apartment with cheap junk remains free from the tax, even when he has paid
just as much money for it [as those subject to the tax]. But he who would acquire a
worthwhile work of art is required to pay a yearly penalty.”
44
Collecting Money, Speculating in Art
For years, for at least the first third of its existence, my library consisted of
no more than two or three shelves which increased only by inches each
43
“Aber diese Wertsteigerung war in den meisten Fällen nur eine scheinbare, da an dem Goldstandard
gemessen nur wenige Preise Standgehalten oder sogar sich erhöht haben. Im ganzen ist der Wert von
Kunstwerken eher gesunken…Steigt die deutsche Mark wieder, so muss überdies naturgemäß eine
rückläufige Bewegung auch bei uns eintreten. Alle mit schlechter Papiermark bezahlten Kunstwerke
werden im Werte sinken, während die Vermögensteuer unverändert, noch dazu in einer besseren Valuta,
abgeführt werden muss.” Ibid., 278.
44
“Wer seine Wohnung mit billigem Schund tapeziert, bleibt von der Steuer befreit, auch wenn er noch so
viel Geld darfür ausgegeben hat. Wer aber ein wertvollen Kunstwerk erwirbt, muss dafür jährlich sein
Strafgeld abführen.” Ibid.
58
year…I might never have acquired a library extensive enough to be
worthy of the name if there had not been the inflation. Suddenly, the
emphasis shifted; books acquired real value, or at any rate, were difficult
to obtain.
45
This is how Walter Benjamin describes the expansion of his library and the
evolution of his activities as a collector. The inflation was the impetus for them both.
This was in part because it endowed books, the objects of Benjamin’s obsession, with
“real,” i.e. financial, value. But the logic of inflation also made a certain attitude about
acquisition increasingly prevalent. The expansive collection, whether composed of boxes
of rare books or piles of prints, had affinities with the stacks of inflationary money
accumulating everywhere; the only thing that set the two apart was intention—that is, the
unintentional accumulation of bills against the careful organization and purposiveness of
the collection.
Thus, in spite of the Vermögensteuer and other deterrents to collecting, many
collectors thrived in the atmosphere of inflation. In part, this was because the act of
collecting mimicked one’s options during the inflation; one could acquire things of value
and hoard them, as many did with the gold and silver Mark coins that gradually
disappeared from circulation. Or one could speculate on the value of the objects in one’s
collection, setting them in motion by bringing them back onto the market when
necessary. Collections were made and lost, assembled and dissolved, at greater and
greater speeds. And while traditional collector’s items such as luxury goods and fine art
45
Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2: Part 2:
1931-1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Gary Smith, and Howard Eiland (Cambridge: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2005), 488.
59
were seen as stable values, a bulwark against the tide of devaluing money, many other
objects also became attractive to potential collectors—including inflationary money
itself.
Collecting was for some a means of countering the chaos of inflation, offering the
illusion of control—especially control over objects and their value. The collector,
Benjamin tells us, “manifests a dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and
order.”
46
The role of the collection is, to some extent, to impose order on disorder, “For
what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such
an extent that it can appear as order?”
47
A collection retained value, even if it was only of
a subjective, personal kind. Moreover, the collection was always greater than the sum of
its parts. Unlike inflationary money, which offered less value the greater the number of
notes, or the number of zeros printed on those notes, the value of a collection was
determined by its size and/or its comprehensiveness. The collection was a space in which
the old truth held: more is more valuable, rather than the inverted logic of the inflation
that suggested more was inevitably worth less.
The inflation thus offered both practical reasons for collecting and presented
conditions ideal for the creation and cultivation of collections. But it also teased out
those hidden or unknown collectors, encouraging them to reveal themselves among the
speculators and opportunists. Because the activities of collector and speculator could be
described in much the same terms, these two categories became blurred. The acts that
46
Ibid., 487.
47
Ibid., 486–7.
60
one could describe as opportunistic or undertaken for self preservation were easily
transformed into those undertaken for pleasure, and the activities of the collector could be
seen in much the same terms as those of the speculator.
Hans Fallada’s fictional account of the hyperinflation, Wolf Among Wolves, offers
insight into the accidental collectors created by this unprecedented economic situation, as
financial opportunism became a gateway to acquisition for its own sake. Wolfgang
Pagel, the novel’s protagonist, finds himself in desperate need of cash after losing all his
money at roulette. He searches out an old school friend turned speculator who, Pagel
imagines, “[wouldn’t] mind parting with a handful of 1,000,000-mark notes.”
48
This
friend, von Zecke, was a born opportunist, one who was certain to have “backed the right
[horse],”
49
in other words, to have profited from the devaluation of the Mark. And,
indeed, Zecke is one of the inflation’s winners; Pagel finds him not only living well, but
acquiring medieval wood carvings and rare books, what he calls investing in “stable
values.”
50
When Pagel asks about Zecke’s collecting, the latter corrects him: “Not
collect, no. Invest money in.”
51
Yet, even Zecke sheepishly concedes that the legitimate
(for Zecke) activity of investing and profiting has given way to a less justifiable pleasure:
“I don’t know what’s happened, it’s beginning to amuse me.”
52
That “it” is collecting. Von Zecke’s transformation from speculator into collector
takes him by surprise. He expresses some unease with the label, and tries to qualify his
48
Fallada, Wolf Among Wolves, 69.
49
Ibid.
50
Ibid., 74.
51
Ibid.
52
Ibid.
61
status by explaining that he knows nothing of books or art—he is, in other words, not
trying to capitalize on their cultural cachet or to present himself as a connoisseur. Yet he
finds unexpected amusement in the acquisition of these objects. Pointing Pagel to a
medieval carving of St. Peter, he underscores this point, “I don't understand anything
about it, it doesn't look much, not at all impressive and so on—but I like it...”
53
Elias, the servant of the von Teschow family, also becomes a surprise collector,
but the object of his fascination is money itself. Elias discovers the joys of collecting by
hoarding pre-inflation 1,000 Mark notes, what he describes as a “capital investment.”
54
Although the Reichsbank had claimed it would no longer redeem bills for gold, Elias
“…refused to believe in a general devaluation…it did not require much thought to
convince him that ‘real money’ from prewar times would remain ‘real.’”
55
He has
outsmarted the bank by holding onto his notes: “He waited; he could afford to wait; one
day he would receive gold, as was plainly stated on the notes.”
56
Elias has such faith in
the promised value of pre-war printed money he insists that the bills will again be worth
their figurative weight in gold. For him, value is not relative, but absolute—its guarantee
rests in the statement printed on the bills, and in the strength of the institutions that stand
behind them.
But this “capital investment” soon gives way to the delights of collecting. Elias
becomes caught up in the minutiae only a collector could love. As he gathers bills, he
53
Ibid.
54
Ibid., 269. Thousand Mark notes were the largest denomination bills available until 1922. See Sprenger,
Das Geld der Deutschen.
55
Fallada, Wolf Among Wolves, 268.
56
Ibid., 269.
62
notes the subtle distinctions that exist among the same type of objects which make them
more or less valuable, rare, or precious to the collector:
There were so many kinds of brown 1,000-mark notes! ...there were notes
with one red stamp and some which bore two red stamps; bank-notes with
no fiber strips and notes with a blue fiber strip on the left side and others
with the strip on the right side. There were notes bearing eight signatures,
some with nine, and some even with ten. There were notes with the series
letters A, B, C, D, followed by seven and eight figures. Yet it was the
same brown 1,000-mark note, pictures and text never changing—but with
what a multitude of variations!
57
Eventually, Elias is “no longer collecting 1,000 Mark notes” but instead, “he was
collecting variations, differences, distinctions…He was firmly convinced that its
distinctive features were secret signs made by connoisseurs for connoisseurs. They
possessed a significance.”
58
Seeking out “variations, differences, distinctions,”—this is
the language of the collector, and the “secret signs” he deciphers intended for the small
population of connoisseurs conjures up those members of the imagined community of
collectors that find value in the unique qualities that distinguish otherwise worthless
inflationary money: variations, differences, distinctions that are here the result of the
constant churn of money in circulation being issued, devalued and replaced or reused at a
breakneck speed. Of course, Elias’s “capital investment” would eventually prove
financially worthless in terms of its stated monetary value. But as a collection, Elias’s
stash could be said to have value of a different sort, built on quantity, its size, and rarity,
the uniqueness of individual objects within the collection. Elias begins to value the bills
for subjective reasons that exceed their monetary value: “[Elias] would think twice before
57
Ibid.
58
Ibid.
63
going so far as to change these notes for gold. They were so beautiful with their
engravings of human forms…The bank-note presses in Berlin harassed the people in an
ever-increasing delirium—but they had presented Elias with happiness, great
happiness. With beautiful notes."
59
Elias’s nascent passion was not, in fact, an unusual one. Many individuals began
to collect inflationary money, especially Notgeld, the moment it was issued in 1914.
Initially, would-be collectors contacted issuing authorities by mail, requesting invalidated
notes.
60
Soon a market sprang up which catered to these collectors with its own
dedicated dealers, fairs, exhibitions, and even magazines and catalogues.
61
In 1918,
issuers began to offer Sammlerscheine, or collector’s notes, elaborate, colorful bills
designed to attract a broad collecting audience. These notes were intended solely for
circulation among collectors rather than as conventional currency. Sammlerscheine were
seen as a way for cash-strapped cities and districts to earn extra money, and for
businesses, they offered the opportunity to advertise one's products and brand. The return
on Sammlerscheine was significant enough that entrepreneurial individuals offered small
towns and Gemeinden a fee to print and sell money in their name, promising a one-time
payment between 10,000 and 50,000 Marks for the right to do so.
62
Some issuers boasted
that their Scheine had reached far beyond their borders and were in demand by an
59
Ibid., 270.
60
See Hans-Ludwig Grabowski and Manfred Mehl, eds., Deutsche Serienscheine von 1918-1922; (A -
K), Deutsches Notgeld 1 (Regenstauf: Gietl, 2003).
61
See Eglau, Mehr Schein als Sein.
62
These offers were often advertised in collector’s magazines. One of the most notorious producers of
such third-party notes was Heinrich Appel from Süderbrarup. In total, 65 different notes originated from
his press and were sold personally by him. On one note, Appel identified his home as the "Notgeld Palast."
See Grabowski and Mehl, Deutsches Notgeld. Bd. 1.
64
international audience.
63
Around 10,000 different Sammlerscheine appeared between
1920 and 1922.
64
Collecting inflationary money presented benefits that more traditional collecting
practices did not. If collecting offered a means of imposing order and a measure of
control over objects, then collecting Notgeld offered the illusion of control over that
object most out of the collector’s control: money. Moreover, if, as Jean Baudrillard
argues, “…madness begins once a collection is deemed complete,” then this kind of
collecting promised to distract one forever from not only personal neuroses, but also the
collective madness of inflation. For those mired in collecting money at the moment of
issue, it must have seemed a potentially endless task.
65
It was this kind of collecting that
distracted—one would never reach the “death” as Baudrillard described it, of completing
one’s collection.
Issuers typically took several approaches to designing collector’s notes that
appealed to a broad collecting audience. Some offered the famous, or at least, familiar
63
An advertisement for Bielefeld Stoffgeld boasted, “Das Bielefelder Stadtgeld hat weit über die Grenzen
des Deutschen Vaterlandes Aufsehen erregt und glänzende Anerkennung gefunden. Nach Amerika und
Java, auch Indien und Australien, nach Schweden, Spanien, der Schweiz und Holland, sind zahlreiche
Serien des Bielefelder Stadtgeldes gesandt worden. Die kostbare Seltenheit wird im In- und Auslande
geschätzt.” See Grabowski, Deutsches Notgeld. Bd. 9, Notgeld der besonderen Art, 18.
64
Eglau, Mehr Schein als Sein.
65
A recent catalogue of Notgeld warns potential collectors that it would be foolish even now to attempt
gathering a comprehensive collection as even Dr. Arnold Keller, the preeminent expert of German Notgeld,
was missing tens of thousands of examples from his collection. Dr. Arnold Keller became the most
respected authority on German Notgeld of the Inflation period, and in 1959, he sold his collection of nearly
200,000 items to the Bundesbank of the BRD. He began the collectors’ magazine, Das Notgeld, and later
authored many of the books and catalogues that are still a standard reference for collectors. However, even
Dr. Keller’s collection remained incomplete. After nearly a half century of collecting, Dr. Keller had
acquired around 109,860 notes of the estimated 163,000 notes of German emergency paper money.
Although this estimate includes Notgeld produced during the Nazi period and World War II, the vast
majority was printed between 1914 and 1923. Courtney L. Coffing, A Guide & Checklist of World
Notgeld, 1914-1947 and Other Local Issue Emergency Money (Iola, WI: Krause Publications, 2000), 5.
65
people, places, and views of the regions they represented. Others depicted scenes from
local history or regional folklore. Another popular theme was satirical scenes and
sayings that took a position, usually humorous, on current events. Popular topics
included the inflation and the hoarding and smuggling it encouraged, the Versailles
Treaty and reparations payments, and the Ruhr crisis. Issuers printed prospects
advertising their bills and ran advertisements in collectors’ magazines. An advertisement
produced by the Sparkasse of Bielefeld proclaimed, “Verschwendung hasse / Spar Geld
in Masse / Trag’s schnell zur Stadt-Sparkasse” (Down with waste / Save money en masse
/ Make haste to the Stadt-Sparkasse) which aligned the collecting of Notgeld with
responsible money management (and also, it seems, with hoarding). (figure 1.12)
It was less big cities that catered to collectors with elaborate Sammlerscheine than
smaller towns and mid-sized communities. Because these places were less familiar to
audiences, issuers recognized it was important to somehow set one’s notes apart in order
to attract collectors. The city of Bielefeld in North-Rhine Westphalia capitalized on its
700
th
anniversary and designed a number of Jubiliäumsscheine celebrating the event,
issuing the notes in a variety of colors and designs.
66
(figures 1.13 and 1.14) Bielefeld
also made the most of their connections to the textile trade by printing many of their
Sammlerscheine on linen, silk, and velvet, sometimes including an elaborate lace or
braided border to endow the notes with special collector’s status (figure 1.15).
66
It is not uncommon for cities and towns in Germany to mint honorary coins in celebration of an
important anniversary; however, the price of metal and economic uncertainty made this impractical for
Bielefeld.
66
Bielefeld excelled in attracting collectors in other regards as well. Its bills were
offered in an assortment of colors, sizes, and denominations. There were several benefits
to such an approach; it was more economical, certainly, to stick to a few designs and
reprint them as needed. But Bielefeld also recognized something about the psychology of
the collector. For a true collector, it would not be enough to own a single note of one
design; one must have that note in every iteration available—every color combination,
material, and amount. The design of Bielefeld’s notes also catered to the collector’s
obsession with detail. Each note was crammed with visual and written minutiae, a horror
vacui that incorporated biblical verses alongside allegorical representations of the
German nation and satirical statements about the inflation.
Hiring a well-known artist or illustrator to design one’s Sammlerscheine was
another approach employed by issuers to make their Scheine stand out, and Notgeld did
offer a windfall for the many artists and printers commissioned to design notes. Olaf
Gulbransson, an illustrator for Simplicissimus, designed a number of Notgeld notes,
including a series of 75-Pfennig bills, the so-called “Sylvesterserie,” for the town of
Kahla. The six-note set had little obvious connection to the town itself, but the satire of
the bills held a much wider appeal. The design on the recto depicts paper money falling
like leaves around the trunk of a German oak, referencing, perhaps, the material of
Notgeld and its profusion as well as its brief life, which, in this case, had only a one-
month Gültigkeitsdauer between its date of issue and date of expiration (figure 1.16).
The verso designs are arranged as three pairs; in one set, titled “Deutsche Merkur,” an
obese woman in a breastplate with a plaque that reads RF (for Republique française)
67
shoots arrows into the German “Mercury,” the god of commerce, who appears as an
emaciated old man with a winged cap and shoes (figure 1.17). He is lashed to a tree in a
pose that resembles representations of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. In the second
of the two notes, Mercury is on the phone, taking orders for the delivery of reparations
payments in his own blood. In a second set, men of different nationalities raise their
glasses in unison, the caption announces: “Starkbier makes us unified.” In the second
image, this unity has dissolved into a ferocious skirmish; the caption states: “Einigkeit
macht stark,” or “Unity makes us strong.” (figures 1.18a and 1.18b)
67
With the Sammlerscheine, Notgeld performed a function that was closer to art
than money. These bills were being designed with an eye for aesthetic value and created
as a collector’s item first and foremost. Sammlerscheine were also issued in series, the
Serienscheine, which typically consisted of 2 to 6 notes. Serienscheine were the monetary
analogue to the print portfolio, a format that gained tremendous popularity in the
inflationary period. Portfolios were a collection of graphic works that were by a single
artist or group or otherwise united by a shared theme and presented together loose in a
folder or bound as a book. Their popularity stemmed in part from their status as an
instant collection, and the logic that favored Serienscheine also promoted the portfolio as
a way for one to cultivate a collection more quickly and efficiently.
67
The final pair depicts “Sylvesternacht 1921-22, Deutscher Spuk in Paris” (New Year’s Eve 1921-22, A
German Spook in Paris), a skeletal Michel, an allegorical representation of the German people, writes
“Mene, mene, Tekel, U-pharsin” upon a Paris Litfaßsäule. The reference is to the literal writing on the wall
at Belshazzar’s Feast in the Book of Daniel, which foretells the downfall of Belshazzar’s kingdom,
suggesting that a similar fate awaits the French for their treatment of Germany. The second note in the pair
shows another figure in the same Phrygian cap sweeping up a pile of refuse left over from the night before,
including a Bible and sheets with verses from the Ten Commandments written on them.
68
For collectors of inflationary money, success was determined less by acquiring
hard-to-obtain or rare objects and more by economies of scale—acquiring all the notes
from a particular region, obtaining different versions of various bills, or acquiring all of
the Scheine in a popular series, for instance. Art collectors, however, still leaned heavily
on other indices of value; rarity, established market value, and “quality” were the
standards by which fine art was measured. These values were more or less set for
recognized art works, such as the oeuvres of Old Masters, and auction prices did not
fluctuate dramatically during the inflation. Thus, by buying medieval woodcarvings,
Fallada’s von Zecke is not speculating in the art market, he is investing in “stable
values.” Acquiring contemporary art, on the other hand, was a form of speculation on the
future success of the artist and value of his work. In contrast to investing in the work of
Old Masters, collecting contemporary art did not promise a return on one’s initial
investment. There was a gamble to it.
Investing in contemporary graphic art was even more speculative. A 1923 report
on a recent print auction even compared it to trading stocks, noting that,
“One may regrettably find that today art works are traded like stocks
(Börsenpapiere), that large circles of people have invested their money in
them, we will simply say, for speculative purposes. But one must come to
terms with this fact, and it is pointless to drape oneself in Cato’s cloak and
preach about morality.”
68
68
“Man mag es bedauerlich finden, dass Kunstwerke heute wie Börsenpapiere gehandelt werden, dass
weite Kreise ihr Geld in ihnen, sagen wir es ruhig, zu spekulativen Zweken anlegen. Aber man muss sich
mit dieser Tatsache abfinden, und es ist zwecklos, sich in Catos Mantel zu hüllen und Moral zu predigen.”
Alfred Kuhn, “Über das Sammeln von Graphik. Überlegungen anläßlich der Auktion bei Graupe,”
Kunstchronik und Kunstmarkt: Wochenschrift fur Kenner und Sammler 58, no. 30 (April 27, 1923): 594.
69
There were two reasons that prints were riskier investments than painting or other fine art
media: prints were works in multiple and they were works on paper. The overproduction
of paper money had done much to erode the perception of paper as a material with
material value. Artists and dealers recognized this and made concessions to make prints
more attractive to potential collectors, particularly in the way they marketed portfolios.
Dealers and publishers including J.B. Neumann, Wieland Herzfelde, and Alfred
Flechtheim experimented with tiered editions, offering audiences the choice between
luxury and popular versions of the same portfolio. Prints were offered on different
papers, with and without the artists’ signatures, and in limited as well as unlimited or
extensive popular editions. For instance, Ecce homo, a collection of 100 of Grosz’s
“unpublished” works from the years 1915 to 1922 including eighty-four lithographs and
sixteen watercolors published as offset prints, was offered in five different versions.
These ranged from a luxury portfolio priced at 600 Marks in an edition of fifty that
included all 100 works, hand-signed by the artist, with each sheet separated by tissue
paper, to 20 Marks for an unsigned unlimited edition which included only the eighty-four
lithographs sold in a “Chromokarton” (color cardboard) folder. The more expensive
portfolios were meant to justify the higher price tag for what were essentially mass-
produced prints. Lower-market portfolios were offered at dramatically reduced prices,
but in very large or unlimited editions, on cheaper paper, and without signatures.
Although prints had long been seen as a way to expand an artist’s collecting
audience and build a base of support, some seasoned collectors, critics, and dealers
expressed anxiety about the effects that the Sammelwut, or collecting madness, was
70
having on the market for prints. The collector’s magazine Kunstchronik und Kunstmarkt,
which focused on issues affecting the art market and reported on art auctions throughout
Germany, is an effective barometer of changes in the way graphic art was produced and
consumed during the inflationary years. It characterized the problem as such in an article
by Alfred Kuhn titled “On the Collecting of Prints” (“Über das Sammeln von Graphik”):
The reality that on the one hand a relatively certain appraisal of graphic
prints is now possible, and on the other that these [prints] can be placed in
portfolios when they are not serving as interchangeable wall decoration
has…led to an extraordinary increase in the collecting activity in this area,
supported by a few large publishers who, through the publication of
individual prints and portfolios by living masters, have nurtured and
sustained the public’s interest…The idea that art has become a marketable
good…has also gripped artists, and there are many that work for the day or
for the moment.
69
This manifested itself in larger edition sizes, the printing of new impressions from old
plates and blocks, and a decline in the quality of individual impressions overall,
particularly in those media such as woodcut and intaglio methods, that required a careful
printer with hands-on expertise to achieve the best results. Another brief article in
Kunstchronik und Kunstmarkt by the art historian Rosa Shapire described the ways that
market demand was degrading the quality of fine art prints and how the portfolio itself
was contributing to the problem:
69
“Die Tatsachen nun, dass auf der einen Seite eine ziemlich sichere Bewertung graphischer Blätter sich
ermöglichen läßt, auf der anderen Seite diese in Mappen gut untergebracht werden können, wenn sie nicht
als leicht auswechselbarer Wandschmuck dienen, hat in den letzten Jahren eine außerordentlich gesteigerte
Sammeltätigkeit auf diesem Gebeite herbeigeführt, unterstützt von einigen großen Verlagen, die durch
Herausgabe von Einzelblättern von der Hand lebender Meister wie durch Mappenwerke das Interesse des
Publikums dauend genährt haben. Zweifellos ist da und dort etwas viel geschehen. Der Begriff, dass
Kunst Handelsware im platten Sinne geworden ist, hat auch die Künstler erfaßt, und es ist eine Menge für
den Tag, ja für den Augenblick gearbeitet worden.” Ibid., 595.
71
The publication [of prints] in portfolios comes into conflict more and more
with the growing demand for good original graphics. [Portfolios] revive
the great risk that when assembled in an edition that is much too large out
of publication considerations, they destroy the feeling for the quality of the
print.
70
Kunstchronik’s Berlin editor and art historian Curt Glaser criticized contemporary
collectors’ obsession with artists’ signatures and edition numbers as the primary markers
of a print’s value. It is naïve, he argued, to view the artist’s signature as an endorsement
of the quality of an individual impression. Edition numbers and signatures do not make a
work more rare or valuable, rather,
Rarity is an element of chance and is capable of increasing value, which
coincides with artistic significance. But artificially produced rarity
appears instead as something of great strangeness, and that it counts as an
absolute requirement again significantly highlights the methods of today's
graphic collections.
71
Certainly, this obsession with “artificially produced rarity” was a function of the way
prints were created and collected during the inflation. Proof of an individual work’s
value was necessary if one were to invest in it as a stable value. Such markers were also
necessary because the market value of contemporary art was unproven. Otherwise,
dealers and artists had few means of promising new collectors that a given artist’s work
would increase in value. Glaser calls for collectors to trust their own eye. He believes it
70
Dem wachsenden Verlangen nach guter Originalgraphik kommen immer mehr Veröffentlichungen in
Form von Mappen entgegen. Sie bergen die große Gefahr, dass sie aus verlegerischen Rücksichten in einer
allzu großen Auflage hergestellt, das Gefühl für die Qualität des Druckes vernichten. Rosa Shapire, “Kreis
graphischer Künstler und Sammler. Zweite Mappe. 1921.,” Kunstchronik und Kunstmarkt: Wochenschrift
fur Kenner und Sammler no. 46 (August 18, 1922): 762.
71
“Seltenheit ist ein Zufallselement, das wertsteigernd zu wirken vermag, wenn es mit künstlerischer
Bedeutsamkeit zusammentrifft. Aber künstlich erzeugte Seltenheit erscheint doch als etwas höchst
Eigenartiges, und dass sie als unbedingte Forderung gilt, wirft wiederum ein bezeichnendes Streiflicht auf
die Methoden heutigen Graphiksammelns.” Curt Glaser, “Vom Graphiksammeln, Künstler-Signatur, und
Verlags-Nummer,” Kunstchronik und Kunstmarkt: Wochenschrift für Kenner und Sammler 58, no. 17
(January 26, 1923): 333.
72
is not the size of the edition that will improve or impair a print’s value, but its aesthetic
significance and, in some cases, its provenance—that is, the accidental life of an
individual object. Glaser thus argued for a return to traditional connoisseurial standards.
But the artificial methods that Glaser derides were too useful for dealers and too
reassuring for collectors to abandon entirely, particularly in the context of inflation.
In an editorial responding to Glaser’s article, also published in Kunstchronik,
author Friedrich Kurtz countered Glaser’s argument that edition size was irrelevant. He
agreed that the system was often abused and cited ways that some artists exploited
numbering, using “special” impressions and signatures to eke more saleable impressions
out of an edition:
The statement of the edition should in contrast represent something
irreproachably authentic. But that is, in reality, very often not the case!
Typical for the lax morals in this regard are those ‘also-Etchers’ [Auch-
Radierer] who, in the advertisement for their personal press, very
innocently and selectively offer numbered and unnumbered prints, which
naturally are 50 – 100% more expensive…And I could name countless
cases, always amusing, in which further impressions were printed after the
numbered edition was sold out. The production of numerous trial proofs,
artist’s prints [Sonderdrucke], and archival prints is also unseemly.
72
Nevertheless, the numbered edition served a real function—it acted as a “promise,”
assuring the buyer that only a certain number of impressions were circulating,
guaranteeing that the work would not be devalued through the continuous and unbound
72
“Die Angabe über die Auflage dagegen sollte doch etwas einwandfrei Zuverlässiges darstellen. Das ist
aber in Wirklichkeit sehr oft nicht der Fall! Typisch für die laxe Moral in dieser Hinsicht ist jener Auch-
Radierer, der im Prospekt seines Selbstverlags ganz naiv wahlweise numerierte und unnumerierte Drucke
anbietet, jene natürlich um 50-100% teurer…Und ich könnte zahlreich Fälle nennen, wo nach dem Verkauf
der numerierten Auflage immer lustig weiter gedruckt wird. Auch die Herstellung zahlreich Probe-,
Sonder-, Archivdrucke…außer der numerierten Auflage ist ungehörig.” Freidrich Kurtz, “Aus
Sammlerkreisen: Künstlersignaturen und Verlagsnummer,” Kunstchronik und Kunstmarkt: Wochenschrift
für Kenner und Sammler 58, no. 29 (April 20, 1923): 571.
73
printing of new impressions:
For those right-thinking individuals, for whom the delirium of money-
making has not confused their thinking, the indication of the edition
through numbering, through a press catalog, through a letter, or through
verbal promise offers the precise guarantee that other than this edition,
once and for all, there are no further impressions, with the exception of at
most a few ‘important’ trial proofs. Because for the price the buyer
invests, it is of justifiable interest, whether in total 30 or 100 or some
arbitrarily large number of impressions exist, and it is viewed in this light
a breach of trust – in order that no stronger hard copy is required – if after
the numbered edition another one appears.”
73
The promise of the limited edition, enacted by marking the impression number on the
print itself, thus acted as a control against the edition’s unchecked expansion. Because
the inflation was the result of the unrestricted production of paper money, the
significance placed on “trust” in the edition was no small thing.
Kurtz still championed the print, however, as a medium that was accessible to
middle-class collectors, and even saw in the expanded edition “the highly desired
possibility” of reaching new audiences by offering prints at cheaper prices:
The fact that an etching as well as a litho stone delivers the largest number
of good impressions, produces additionally the highly desired possibility
to offer truly good works of art at a cheaper price and with it to again
popularize in those circles in which before the war graphics often found
their most humble but sympathetic and loyal customers, and who have for
years been deprived…One could perhaps with such cheap, but quality,
works of art even open some of the thousands of eyes who today buy
‘etchings’ simply because it is in fashion, and permit themselves to hang
73
“Für jeden rechtlich denkenden Menschen, dem der Taumel des Geldverdienens die Begriffe nicht
verwirrt hat, bedeutet die Angabe der Auflage durch Numerierung, durch einen Verlagskatalog, durch
einen Brief oder durch mündliche Zusage die bestimmte Gewähr, dass es außer dieser Auflage ein für
allemal keine weiteren Drucke gibt, höchstens mit Ausnahme einiger weniger ‘wirklicher’ Probedrucke.
Denn für den Preis, den der Käufer anlegt, ist es von berechtiger Bedeutung, ob im ganzen 30 oder 100
oder beliebig viele Abzüge existieren, und es ist bei Lichte betrachtet einfach der Bruch eines Versprechens
– um keinen härteren Ausdruck zu gebrauchen – wenn nach der numerierten Ausgabe eine andere
erscheint.” Ibid., 571–2.
74
up all sorts of worthless stuff.
74
For Kurtz, the problem was not necessarily expanding editions; he merely protested the
dishonest accounting of the number of circulating impressions. Kurtz was most
concerned with the way “the collection of graphic art has become a new type of capital
investment.” In this, there was little sunlight between his position and that of Glaser.
Acquiring a collection simply for its potential investment value was not something
connoisseurs could celebrate.
While portfolios in general became more prevalent during the print boom,
compilation portfolios, which brought together the works of different artists based on
little more than shared milieu, were especially popular with dealers and publishers
because they could be offered to buyers as an instant collection with established market
value. Compilation portfolios often repurposed single prints that had appeared previously
and which dealers and publishers then re-presented in much larger editions by steel-
facing intaglio plates or transferring lithographs to new printing stones.
75
Printers and
publishers aimed for consistency and uniformity, so that the markers of value rested less
74
“Die Numerierung der Drucke muss aufhören, einerlei, ob die Auflage von vornherein begrenzt ist oder
nicht. In ersterem Falle müßte die Gesamtzahl aller gezogenen Drucke rückhaltlos angegeben
werden…halte ich es für das grundsätzlich Richtigere, die Auflagehöhe nur von der Eigenart der Platte
abhängig zu machen. Die Tatsache, dass eine Ätzradierung ebenso wie der Stein meist eine große Zahl von
guten Abdrucken liefert, ergäbe nebenbei die höchst erwünschte Möglichkeit, wirklich gute Kunstwerke
billiger anzubieten und damit wieder jenen Kreisen zugänglich zu machen, in denen vor dem Kriege die
Graphik ihre oft bescheidenen, aber verständis- und liebevollen Käufer fand, und die jetzt seit Jahren
darben, seit das Graphiksammeln eine der neuen Arten von Kapitalsanlage geworden ist. Vielleicht könnte
man mit solchen billigeren Qualitätswerken auch gar manchem von den Tausenden die Augen öffnen, die
heute einfach weil es Mode ist, ‘Radierungen’ kaufen und sich allerlei minderwertiges Zeug aufhängen
lassen.” Ibid., 572.
75
Steel-facing an intaglio plate involves electroplating an already etched copper plate with a very thin layer
of pure iron. This strengthens the printing plate, enabling it to last longer and to produce larger, more
consistent editions.
75
on accidental factors, which often resulted in variations between impressions, and more
on the artificial ones mentioned derisively by Glaser such as the artist’s signature or
edition number.
The Bauhaus series, Neue Europäische Graphik (New European Graphics), was
one such set of compilation portfolios. Bauhaus director, Walter Gropius, initially
envisioned the Neue Europäische Graphik as a way for the applied art school to raise
funds for its operating budget. The project was, he argued, an opportunity for the
Bauhaus to demonstrate its self-sufficiency and gain financial independence from the
conservative Thuringian government. The Bauhaus would use tools already at its
disposal—the print workshop and bookbindery—to create five portfolios that would be
sold by advance subscription. These subscription fees could then be used to offset the
material and production costs of the portfolios, leaving whatever was left over to the
school. There seemed to be little risk or downside associated with the plan. Gropius
even likened printing the portfolios to printing money: “To build freely also means: to
have money; [but] because we don’t have much cash on hand, our work in stone is our
medium of exchange.”
76
This “work in stone” referenced not only the school’s primary
works in stone—that is, architecture—but also the printing surface of lithography, giving
heft to the print itself as a financial building block and aligning printed paper with
something more substantial.
76
"Bauen freilich heisst auch: Geld besitzen; Da wir nicht schwere Banknoten besitzen, wechseln wir
unsere Arbeit in Steine um.” Quoted in Klaus Weber, “Zu Ehren unserer Sache": Das Mappenwerk Neue
Europäische Graphik,” in Punkt, Linie, Flache: Druckgraphik am Bauhaus, ed. Bauhaus-Archiv (Berlin: G
+ H Verlag, 1999), 24.
76
From the beginning, the portfolios were marketed as a wise investment in times of
economic uncertainty. Gropius initially praised their affordability in a draft version of
the advertising Prospect, stating: “We present to the German public a work that has not
yet been offered in this inexpensive form.” In the economic climate of inflation,
however, prints that were cheaper and more readily available were not necessarily viewed
as a good investment. The Potsdam publishing firm Müller and Company, who took over
distribution responsibilities for Neue Europäische Graphik, worried that Gropius’s
statement would undermine perceptions of the product’s value and advised him to take
another approach:
The Prospect you sent to us does not seem entirely appropriate for the
handling of this collection. We worry that the perception that it is
connected to a charitable undertaking will make dealer circles skeptical of
the quality. We think…that it is better for the product and the public to
make it clear that in these portfolios [something of] international value is
acquired, which would otherwise be unattainable with today’s foreign
exchange rate.”
77
Gropius complied; the published Prospect did acknowledge the portfolios’ attainability,
but did so using language that stressed their investment potential as a collection of
“fundamental importance”: “For the first time, we invite the collector to acquire an
international collection of graphic works of fundamental importance, works that would
otherwise be impossible to acquire because of the economic rates, in which Germany,
77
“Der Prospekt scheint uns für die Bearbeitung des Sortiments in der uns von Ihnen gesandten Form nicht
ganz geeignet. Wir fürchten, dass die Empfindung dass es sich um ein Wohltätigkeitsunternehmen handelt,
in kaufmännischen Kreisen skeptisch machen wird gegen die Qualität. Wir dachten deshalb, dass es besser
ist, dem Sortiment und Publikum klar zu machen, dass sie in diesen Mappenwerken internationale Werte
erwerben, die sonst bei den heutigen Valuta unerschwinglich sein würden. ” Quoted in Weber, “Zu Ehren
unserer Sache”: Das Mappenwerk Neue Europäische Graphik,” 24.
77
France, Holland, Italy and Russia are represented by their best artists.”
78
The prospect
thus presented the NEG as a way for the consumer to obtain an instant collection of
international works by artists who were both avant-garde but also of “recognized
importance,” taking some of the risk out of speculating on the value of contemporary art
and suggesting the profit potential of these portfolios.
The Werkmeister, the printing workshop’s skilled craftsman, was to supervise the
printing of all impressions; invited artists were asked to send their intaglio plates, wood
blocks, or transfer drawings so everything could be printed on-site. This promised
consumers a consistent and skillfully made, if entirely uniform, finished product. Other
measures further removed the finished prints from the artist’s hand and those “accidental”
connoisseurial factors discussed by Glaser. For intaglio prints such as etchings and
drypoints, plates were to be steelfaced, a process that allowed the copper plates to yield a
larger number of prints of consistent quality, but which also eliminated the softer, velvety
lines that collectors prized in early impressions. Lithographs, meanwhile, were to be sent
on transfer paper and would then be moved to the limestone or zinc plates for printing at
the Bauhaus, giving the printer far more control over the finished product. In at least one
case—the submission from Léger—the work was a “Steinkopie,” a copy from the
printing stone.
79
78
"Zum erstenmal bieten wir dem Sammler die sonst durch die wirtschaftlichen Verhältnisse
ausgeschlossene Möglichkeit, eine internationale Sammlung graphischer Werke von grundlegender
Wichtigkeit, in welcher Deutschland, Frankreich, Holland, Italien, Rußland durch ihre bedeutendsten
Künstler vertreten sind, zu erwerben.” Quoted in Ibid.
79
Max Ernst’s first submission was rejected, a photograph of his collage La belle jardinière, what Ernst
called a “Photographik” on the grounds that it was not a graphic work at all. See Ibid., 30.
78
When the Prospect was published, the NEG was still a hypothetical project; it
could not offer specifics regarding individual works because it did not have any in hand.
Instead it offered names in the place of works, and advertised artists rather than images,
promising profitability and collectability based on name recognition and anticipated
market value. Moreover, the names listed in the Prospect were not those who had agreed
to participate, but those who had been invited to contribute—a list of familiar avant-garde
artists working in Germany, France, Italy, and Russia.
Neue Europäische Graphik was ultimately an economic failure for the Bauhaus.
The instant collection of important avant-garde artists did not materialize as promised;
more than one third of the names printed in the Prospect never responded to the
Bauhaus’s initial invitation and were not represented in the finished portfolios. This
included Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Robert Delaunay, Ludwig
Meidner, and Edvard Munch. Only four of the artists invited to contribute to the French
portfolio sent in plates. The promised five portfolios were reduced to four, and in the end
an “international” compilation of works by Russian, Italian and French artists filled out
only a single portfolio. And although the title page for all portfolios carries the year
1921, the year the first portfolio appeared, the final portfolio was not completed until
1924.
But most importantly, the failure of the NEG also suggested that the market for
contemporary prints had been somewhat inflated by the wishful thinking of print
producers—both artists and their agents. Speculating on the value of contemporary art
for financial gain was one thing when one was able to quickly turn over works at auction
79
or in the gallery, but the Bauhaus portfolios were initially sold on advance subscription at
a set advertised price. That price was 2200 Marks for a single basic portfolio and 5000
for the “Vorzugsexemplar,” or luxury version. For the full set, subscribers were asked to
pay 10,000 Marks for the basic portfolios, and 22,500 Marks for the luxury set. As the
value of the Mark plummeted, however, those portfolios that were sold in advance had to
be produced at considerable loss, while the remaining portfolios had to be marked up
from their advertised price to prevent further financial hemorrhage. By October 1922,
the Edition Prospect was marked with a stamp that read “200% Aufschlag auf
Grundpreis” (200% surcharge on base price). This price had to be continually adjusted
upward as the Mark fell further during hyperinflation. By the time the last portfolio was
completed, a number of single portfolios remained unsold. Ownership ultimately
reverted to the government of Thuringia when the Bauhaus moved to Dessau.
Indeed, although dealers and artists tried different tactics to attract collectors and
encourage them to buy graphic works, there is evidence that the prices for prints,
particularly contemporary German prints, dropped during the period. This can be
measured by price paid at auction, which helped to gauge demand among dealers and
artists. A November 1922 report in Kunstchronik und Kunstmarkt on an auction of both
modern and “older” prints notes that while the prices for certain artists remained very
high, including such nineteenth-century notables as Edward Munch, Anders Zorn and
James Whistler, for German artists, inflationary prices had not kept pace with premarket
values. This held even for favorites with relatively stable market prices such as Max
Liebermann and Käthe Kollwitz. The prices of “young” artists like Max Beckmann took
80
an even bigger hit: “If one approaches the [work] of younger artists such as Erich Heckel,
Max Pechstein, [and] Max Beckmann, one may easily say that in these cases the prices
are exceptionally low, and that certainly in a while an adjustment [Angleichung] will
have to take place to these purely domestic art prices.”
80
Yet, the same report notes, the
public still favored portfolios to individual prints and also preferred the excitement of
acquiring works at auction: “Above all, it appears that the public is holding to its
preference for portfolios and illustrated books and gladly lets itself get carried away with
strong bids at auction without considering whether the sought-after item is not to be had
at a much cheaper price in the book dealer’s shop [Buchhandel].”
81
Circulation
The dual nature of money, as a concrete and valued substance and, at the
same time, as something that owes its significance to the complete
dissolution of substance into motion and function, derives from the fact
that money is the reification of exchange among people, the embodiment
of a pure function.”
82
Simmel, who characterized the “shocks” of the metropolis as central to the
experience of modern life and the physiological makeup of modern man, viewed the
financial system in similarly expansive terms. In place of Marx’s forces of production,
80
"Kommt man gar zu den jüngeren Künstlern wie Erich Heckel, Max Pechstein, Max Beckmann, so darf
man ruhig sagen, dass hier die Preise noch außerordentlich niedrig sind, und dass sich bestimmt in diesen
rein inländischen Kunstwerten in einiger Zeit eine Angleichung vollziehen wird." “Versteigerung
moderner und alter Graphik,” Kunstchronik und Kunstmarkt: Wochenschrift fur Kenner und Sammler 58,
no. 8 (November 24, 1922): 156.
81
"Überhaupt scheint das Publikum an seiner Bevorzugung von Mappenwerken und illustrierten Büchern
festzuhalten und lässt sich gern auf Auktionen zu starkem Bieten hinreißen, ohne Rücksicht, ob die
begehrte Ware im Buchhandel nicht viel billiger zu haben ist." Ibid.
82
Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 188.
81
money, or rather, the exchange relationship, was the base on which the superstructure of
modern culture and society was built. For Simmel, money was a function that performed
through movement. And money’s circulation was as central to its modernity as its
material. Simmel offers us an evocative image of this movement in The Philosophy of
Money, an image that appears as stasis and stability. The supply of money, he says, “In
normal times…seems to be larger than it actually is…just as a glowing spark, rotated
quickly in the dark, appears as a glowing circle, but dwindles again to a minute speck of
material as soon as the movement ceases.”
83
It is, according to Simmel’s description, a
kind of Schein. Even in times of relative stability, it is only sufficient because of its
ceaseless movement. When this movement slows or stops, the Schein is exposed: the
spark is not a circle but a spot.
During hyperinflation, however, circulation did not cease; it increased at a
frenzied pace. The drop in the value of the Mark demanded the faster movement of
money, and, at the same time, required that the supply of money increase in order to
bridge the widening gap between available currency and skyrocketing prices. More and
more money was put into circulation not only because existing supplies were inadequate,
but also because available denominations were unable to keep pace with rising prices.
By late 1922, the Mark was dropping at such a rate that individuals were forced to
spend paper money as soon as they received it. Germans became obsessed with the latest
exchange reports. Karl Arnold’s “Wie steht der Dollar?” (Where Does the Dollar Stand?)
offers his take on the preoccupation of all of Berlin with the latest exchange rates (figure
83
Ibid., 208.
82
1.19). A cross-section of Berlin society—an elderly couple in bed, a man at dinner, a
woman at her stove, even an infant, dwarfed by the newspaper he holds before him—pore
over the latest reports on the depreciation of the Mark against the American dollar and
other foreign currencies. Workers spent their wages as soon as they received them to
avoid getting caught with worthless paper. They ran to the market to buy whatever
durable goods they could afford before the Mark dropped again. It is from this period
that the wheelbarrow full of cash, the total value of which was equal to a loaf of bread or
a dozen eggs, hails; this is the image that would haunt Germany’s collective unconscious
long after economic stability was restored.
84
Hyperinflation was, therefore, a moment during which the inadequacy of the
money supply was exposed and one’s faith in the value of the currency was completely
shaken. Yet, the performance of exchange was enacted again and again at a desperate
pace. Simmel had described exchange as an expanded present, destroying the flow of
time and obscuring past and future in favor of the immediacy, and repetition, of the
moment of exchange: “A flow of time can only be established in something that itself
84
Bernd Widdig discusses the persistence of the wheelbarrow in the memories of Germans who lived
through the inflation and articulates the irony of the wheelbarrow as such a symbol: “I heard the story of
the wheelbarrow full of inflationary money told so often by older Germans…There were many variations
on the theme: one of my grandfather’s friends, for example, told me that his wheelbarrow got stolen, and
the thief left the money in it behind. The legend of the wheelbarrow must have captured something
essential about the inflation, because it entered German popular memory so thoroughly. It became an
allegory for depicting inflation. It might have been the striking contrast between the archaic, primitive
vehicle and its peculiar freight of money, those piles of banknotes, the stuff elegant bankers and
businesspeople usually work with…The legend also addressed a bitter paradox: a wheelbarrow full of
money invokes peasant fantasies of wealth and prosperity as if in a painting by Pieter Brueghel, and yet this
inflated money would by no means buy a wheelbarrowful of precious goods…The wheelbarrow, the
quintessential tool for farming and construction, aquires a new, rather strange function as the carrier of
piles of money. During inflation money became so overwhelmingly central that it invaded all spheres of
society, everywhere displacing objects from their traditional contexts.” Bernd Widdig, Culture and
Inflation in Weimar Germany, 5-6.
83
does not flow. In contrast, a time that merely flows away, that is, as it were, devoid of
memory – for all memory already certainly signifies a completed element – is no time at
all, but rather an undimensional now.”
85
Inflation encouraged one to live in the moment. People were cut off from the past
by the war and its aftermath and the social upheaval it caused. There was no returning to
Wilhelmine normalcy.
86
The future was likewise difficult to picture or plan for as
republican Germany struggled to find its footing. Therefore, why not enjoy the present
moment? An unnamed speaker gives voice to this attitude in Wolf Among Wolves:
“Nothing has any value but money. Money. But in point of fact money has no value; the
greatest possible enjoyment has to be squeezed out of it moment by moment. Why save
oneself up for tomorrow? Who knows where the dollar will stand, who knows whether
we shall still be alive tomorrow?”
87
Fast living found several outlets. There were the excitements of the nightlife; the
cabaret in particular became a favorite subject for artists who either wanted to attack the
moral decay of modern life or celebrate its liberating possibilities. The underground
casino was also a popular destination; in Wolf Among Wolves, Wolfgang Pagel’s
addiction to gambling is a metaphor for living in the present, where the momentary thrill
of roulette is more valuable than the promise of a devalued monetary reward. For the art
85
From Georg Simmel, “Philosophie der Kunst,” reproduced in Critique & Humanism International,
Special Issue, 1922, 77. Quoted and translated in David Frisby, “Preface to the Third Edition,” in The
Philosophy of Money, Reprint (Routledge, 2011), xxiii.
86
Peter Fritzsche argues that the sense that one is living in a distinct and “new” period, cut off forever from
an irretrievable past is a particularly modern sensibility. He contends that it first appears in the aftermath of
the French Revolution and marks a new, more melancholic, attitude toward history. See Peter Fritzsche,
Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Harvard University Press, 2004).
87
Fallada, Wolf Among Wolves.
84
collector, the equivalent was the excitement of the auction house; as a previously cited
Kunstchronik report noted, buyers were willing to pay more at auction for prints and
portfolios for the thrill of bidding on an item, even though it could be had for cheaper at
the booksellers or in the art gallery.
Not only money moved, of course. Art was potential capital, and was mobilized,
as previously discussed, for the purposes of exchange, investment, and speculation.
Prints were especially peripatetic; their increased mobility was enabled, in some cases, by
the easy transportability of their materials and the fact that they existed in multiple. But
prints also moved as dematerialized images, crossing the borders between formats,
migrating from a portfolio to the pages of an art journal to a book or pamphlet, for
instance, or reappearing in another portfolio with a larger edition size. Technologies such
as photolithography and the advances made in offset printing facilitated these
movements, enabling the image to be decoupled from its original medium. Drawing,
woodcut, and etching became a lithograph or offset print. Offset printing in particular
allowed a drawing to be enlarged or reduced and to be printed in many thousands of
impressions without compromising the quality of the reproduction. A single print might
appear first in a portfolio dedicated to the work of a single artist or group, then reappear
as a photolithographed illustration in an art journal, a gallery catalogue, or even a book.
Grosz’s drawings were well traveled in this regard. Grosz’s “prints” were usually
pen and ink illustrations that were reproduced using either a photolithographic process
(whereby the work is photographed and transferred to a lithographic surface), or an offset
85
printing method.
88
These processes were inexpensive, offered a faithful representation of
the original, and permitted very large runs to be printed with consistent results. Grosz
favored these same commercial methods for presenting his works for sale as either single
prints or in thematic portfolios, getting as far away from the “connoisseurial” print, with
its attendant variations and small edition numbers, as possible. For Grosz, the reasons
were as much ideological as economic. He derided the commodification of art for
wealthy collectors and sought to undermine any preciousness it might possess, describing
the artist himself as a “banknote factory” and “investment machine” exploited by the
interests of the “rich exploiter and aesthetic fop.”
89
Thus, his personal beliefs favored
accessibility and mass production over the print as a fine art medium.
A single drawing by Grosz might be reproduced first as a photo or offset
lithograph in one of the newspapers put out by Wieland Herzfelde’s Malik Verlag with a
caption that connected it to some present issue or concern. It would then reappear,
sometimes a few years later, in a portfolio of the artist’s work, also published by Malik.
It might then resurface in a mass market book length collection of Grosz’s reproduced
drawings. Grosz’s drawings—made to address current events with a Communist spin—
were often generic enough, featuring familiar types and recurring narratives, that they
could accommodate these movements without losing too much in translation.
Sometimes, the story these images told changed as well, depending on context.
88
Grosz also reproduced his drawings using a transfer method up to 1918, but this was less efficient and
did not allow the drawing to be resized. He therefore relied almost exclusively on offset or
photolithography after 1918. See Alexander Du#ckers, George Grosz: Das Druckgraphische Werk = The
Graphic Work, 1st English ed (San Francisco: A. Wofsy Fine Arts, 1996).
89
Quoted in Robin Reisenfeld, The German Print Portfolio, 1890-1930: Serials for a Private Sphere
(London: David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, the University of Chicago, 1992), 104.
86
One such work is a pen and ink drawing of President Friedrich Ebert, the first
President of the Weimar Republic, which Grosz completed in 1919 (figure 1.20).
Grosz’s portrait shares many physical similarities with the artist’s depictions of the crass
capitalist, a familiar figure from his catalogue of types. Ebert is caricatured as a physical
embodiment of the bourgeois as philistine. His corpulent body bulges in an ill-fitting
suit, a phallic cigar smokes near his crotch. He wears the imperial crown, now bent and
damaged, cocked on his head; it appears reduced on his bloated, porcine features. Ebert
is depicted as, in Brigid Doherty’s words, an “ersatz Kaiser.” Portraying the president of
the new Republic as an overfed bourgeois, “Left-wing caricaturists consistently opted for
that mocking embodiment to tell the story of undignified middle-class rule, believing and
wanting to show that there was something new, something especially petty and grotesque,
about the Weimar Republic’s body politic.”
90
The drawing first appeared as a photolithograph or offset print on the cover of the
inaugural issue of Die Pleite (Bankruptcy). The drawing was titled “Von Geldsacks
Gnaden,” which roughly translates “By the Grace of Moneybags,” a play on “Von Gottes
Gnaden,” or “By the Grace of God.” The portrait mocks Ebert as a would-be republican
Kaiser, and was topical in 1919. Ebert had recently ascended to the presidency, and was
derided on the radical left for his continuation of certain imperial policies in a supposedly
“democratic” guise. On the cover of Pleite, a Malik journal that replaced the banned
Jedermann seid eigener Fußball, the picture was a takedown of the new government and
90
Brigid Doherty, “Figures of the Pseudorevolution,” October 84 (Spring 1998): 68.
87
its figurehead who, according to the caption, owed his position thanks to “Geldsacks”
rather than his qualifications or convictions.
Grosz reproduced the drawing again in 1921 in Das Gesicht der herrschenden
Klasse (The Face of the Ruling Class), a collection of fifty-five of the artist’s political
drawings published for a mass audience in book form.
91
The drawing appeared on page
four with the caption “Aus dem Leben eines Sozialisten” (“From the Life of a Socialist”)
(figure 1.21). Ebert was still President of the Republic in 1921, but the new caption
redirected the picture’s criticism. The target became the Socialist Party more generally, a
craven bunch who had sold out their principles for material comforts.
Grosz’s images—circulating in dematerialized form rather than as material
objects—behaved like inflationary money. They were set in motion, decoupled from a
stable referent, and repurposed to address current crises and agendas. The functions of
art and money merged most directly, however, in the design of inflationary money itself.
It has already been noted that many artists were involved in the creation of Notgeld notes,
particularly the Sammlerscheine, with their elaborate and eye-catching designs. The
preciousness of these earlier bills gave way to practical necessities during hyperinflation,
however. The sped up circulation of money demanded the faster and faster creation of
bills to meet rapidly rising prices. Until mid-1922, the largest bill in circulation was a
1000 Mark note. But by late 1922, bills in 10 and 50 thousand Mark amounts were first
91
Das Gesicht der herrschenden Klasse. 55 politische Zeichnungen. Kleine revolutionäre Bibliothek, vol.
4. Berlin: Malik Verlag, 1921. First edition in two printings of 6,000 and 12,000. A 3
rd
revised edition
(with 57 drawings) of 25,000 copies. Three Marks for cardboard binding, 15 Marks for half-linen binding.
A deluxe edition produced in 50 copies, signed and numbered in a half-vellum binding for 100 Marks. See
Beth Irwin Lewis, George Grosz: Art and Politics in the Weimar Republic, Rev ed (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1991), 272–3.
88
introduced. These were followed by notes in Million, Billion, and, finally, Trillion Mark
amounts.
It was in this context that then-Bauhaus student Herbert Bayer received a contract
to design Notgeld bills in amounts ranging from 1 to 500 Million Marks. Weimar, where
the Bauhaus first resided, was in the state of Thuringia, and it was the Thuringian
government that approached the Bauhaus about designing large-denomination state-
issued Notgeld. This was, in fact, the first contract anyone from the Bauhaus had
received for a mass-produced product. It anticipated the school’s collaborations with
industry only a few years later, which presented modern design to the marketplace.
The design of the Thuringian Notgeld, however, was not as important as its quick
and efficient production, and ostensibly Bayer was chosen less for his portfolio and more
for his experience designing on a deadline.
92
He was given fewer than 48 hours to
present his template before the notes were printed on August 10, 1923. In addition to the
time constraints, Bayer’s design options were also quite limited. He was permitted only
to use the type that the printers had at hand in their Setzkästen, or type cases, and was not
allowed to include any decorative illustrations on the notes themselves. Decoration was
limited to the textured patterns one could achieve by using existing pattern blocks.
Bayer made a virtue of the limitations the project presented. The restrictions
pushed him to create a pared down, streamlined design for his bills—particularly the one
92
Bayer had previously designed Notgeld for the town of Lembach in 1920. These bills depart
significantly from the design of his later notes, incorporating decorative elements including a drawing of a
plow in a field and handwritten rather than typeset text. See Nele Heise, “Das Bauhaus in allen Taschen:
Notgeldscheine als Vorboten der Neuen Typografie,” in Bauhauskommunikation: innovative Strategien im
Umgang mit Medien, interner und externer Öffentlichkeit, ed. Patrick Rössler (Berlin: Mann, 2009), 270.
89
Million Mark notes (figure 1.22). He selected a simple san-serif font rather than the
traditional, Gothic Fraktur for the text, favoring legibility and clarity. He achieved a
kind of decoration by repeating the bills’ denomination over and over—an unbroken
pattern of zeroes and ones, the disturbing binary code of the inflation—in a background
color on the lower half of each note. Finally, he made the bills’ amounts their most
prominent feature, turning the number into a design element by simultaneously
accentuating the large denomination and abstracting it through the repetition of zeroes,
signifying both value and void.
The practical necessities that inspired the creation of Bayer’s notes would become
aesthetic principles a few years later. Some scholars argue that the Thuringian notes
mark Bayer’s, and by extension, the Bauhaus’s, first foray into Neue Typographie design,
the graphic style identified with the school in its emblematic Dessau period. Nele Heise
in particular argues that the notes, as widely (and indiscriminately) disseminated objects,
acted as messengers of the new style. Bayer’s bills were, in fact, among the most widely
distributed objects the Bauhaus ever produced, ensuring that the school’s design
principles circulated along with the currency. The bills were, as Heise argues, a “mass
disseminated, aesthetic and simply designed everyday medium.”
93
The notes thus
performed a dual role as a medium of exchange and a messenger of the Bauhaus’s
progressive design principles.
Unfortunately, that message was tied up with a moment and a medium that had
very negative connotations. Heise points out that many of the Bauhaus Thuringian notes
93
"…als massenhaft verbreitetes, kunstvoll einfach gestaltetes Alltagsmedium." Ibid., 276.
90
were probably thrown into furnaces and destroyed. This is what happened to much of the
circulating Notgeld toward the end of hyperinflation, as the value of the Mark continued
to plummet and more and more notes became effectively worthless. Bayer’s notes thus
became the muck that Fallada derided in Wolf among Wolves, wastepaper rather than
symbols of progressive design.
Bayer, who became a Bauhaus teacher in 1925, was seminal in directing the
school’s print workshop away from fine art print production—the major achievement of
which had been the unsuccessful Neue Europäische Graphik portfolios discussed
previously—toward the work of a graphic design studio cum commercial print shop. In
Dessau, the print workshop produced letterheads, product catalogues and advertisements,
but not fine art prints.
In November 1923, the paper Mark was replaced by a provisional currency, the
Rentenmark, which stabilized the exchange rate. The market for fine art prints, however,
had already dried up. For those artists who flirted with printmaking during this period,
the end of inflation marked the end of their experiment with the graphic arts. Fine art
printmaking again became a more limited practice directed at a targeted audience of
collectors. The most prominent collector’s magazine, Kunstchronik und Kunstmarkt, was
itself a casualty of inflation, a reminder that the collapse of the market had wide-reaching
effects.
Just as the Mark was delegitimized by overproduction, the print was itself
damaged by its excessive proliferation during the inflationary period. Nevertheless, the
sheer number of prints produced in the latter half of the inflationary decade underscore
91
the central role of the graphic arts to the artistic and popular culture of early Weimar and
to the experience of the inflation itself. The next chapters will examine how the
centrality of the graphic arts to the visual culture of early Weimar affected their subject
matter as well as the messages they transmitted.
Chapter Two
Speculation and Publication: Dealers, Publishers, and the Postwar Print Boom
Perhaps it is the case that today the ‘graphic Kabinett’ is no longer with the collector, but
is realized with the publisher and art dealer. They have large stockpiles whose material
directly incorporates the artistic life of the present.
1
Dealers and publishers were instrumental to the print boom of 1918-1924.
Dealers encouraged their artists to create graphics when the market for works on paper
appeared more promising than that for painting and sculpture. They promoted and
published their artists’ prints—woodcuts, lithographs, and etchings—in a variety of
formats to appeal to different collecting audiences. They advertised these prints in their
self-published art journals, or reproduced them in catalogues for which they
commissioned scholarly essays that argued for the artist’s importance and placed their
work in a larger, established art historical context.
But the prominence of the graphic arts in this period, and the willingness of
dealers to turn to them so heavily, was not only a situation born of postwar austerity.
Publishing had already become central to the persona of the progressive art dealer by the
early 1920s. Publishing was, in fact, the most creative act of the modern dealer.
Moreover, it was the one enterprise in which the dealer was able to significantly shape
outcomes. Although modern dealers took on other activities in addition to their
traditional roles exhibiting and selling art—including sponsoring Salons and hosting
poetry readings, lectures, and musical events—publications in the form of original
1
“Vielleicht liegt es so, daß heute das "graphische Kabinett" nicht mehr beim Sammler, sondern beim
Verleger und Kunsthändler verwirklich ist. Sie haben große Stapelplätze, deren Material unmittelbar in das
künstlerische Leben der Gegenwart einfuhrt.” Edwin Redslob, “Der Weg zur Graphik,” in Das graphische
Jahr vol. 1 (Berlin: Fritz Gurlitt Verlag, 1921), 18.
93
graphics, self-published art journals, scholarly catalogues, and illustrated books are
dealers' enduring contribution to the art of this period.
The modern dealer is both a type and a series of historical personae. The figure of
the modern art dealer developed over the course of several generations and was the result
of successes achieved by both charismatic entrepreneurs and larger institutional changes
in the production and distribution of contemporary art in Europe—especially France—in
the mid- to late-nineteenth century. The quickly evolving role of the modern art dealer
represented a change in art world convention, but it also represented, in line with Pierre
Bourdieu's model of the artistic field, a jockeying for power among existing institutions
and individuals to fill a vacuum left by the decline of the officially-sanctioned Salon
system and the rise of the creation of works for an open market.
Christian Kennert characterizes the evolution of the modern dealer as follows:
The European avant-garde joined forces. In the process, the dealer took
on a new role: he became a manager and propagandist, a carrier of ideas
(Ideenträger) and a politician. He worried personally about ‘his’ artists
and exerted influence over their life; he closed ranks with the artists’
group (Künstlervereinigung) as platforms for the new directions in art; he
conducted public relations work through self-founded journals; he
committed himself to art critics and art writers in order to put the power of
words on the side of the new in the contested public sphere; he had to win
collectors for the new art, then, slowly but surely, change the visual habits
of his contemporaries; in short: he had to organize a whole new market.
2
2
“Der europäische Avantgarde schloß sich zusammen. Der Kunsthändler nahm dabei eine neue Rolle ein:
Er wurde zu einem Manager und Propagandisten, zu einem Ideenträger und Politiker. Er sorgte sich um
'seine' Künstler persönlich nahm Einfluß auf ihr Leben; er hielt die Künstlervereinigung als Plattformen der
neuen Kunstrichtungen zusammen; er betrieb Öffentlichkeitsarbeit über eigens dafür gegründete
Zeitschriften; er band Kunstkritiker und Kunstschriftsteller an sich, um den Neuerern eine Wort-Macht in
der umkämpften Öffentlichkeit an die Seite zu stellen; er mußte Sammler für die neue Kunst gewinnen,
langsam aber sicher die Sehgewohnheiten der Zeitgenossen verändern, kurz: er mußte einen neuen Markt
organisieren.” Christian Kennert, Paul Cassirer und sein Kreis: ein Berliner Wegbereiter der Moderne
(Frankfurt am Main [u.a.]: Lang, 1996), 88.
94
Robert Jensen and Nicolas Green in particular have documented the ways this
type evolved. In their framing, the modern dealer not only offered a new means of
marketing contemporary art, he also propelled the evolution of -isms, a narrative of the
"development" of modern art, by adopting certain artists and styles and creating for them
a context that set each on a trajectory of progression and placed them in relation to
earlier, respected stylistic traditions. The rise of the "ideological dealer" as Jensen calls
him, is central to this, “…the ideological dealer marketed his artists vis-à-vis a supposed
historical position."
3
The great achievement of the first modern dealer of note, Paul
Durand-Ruel, according to Jensen, was to "transcend" the image of the merchant by
emphasizing the thing traded, that is, the art, over the trade, or rather, the business of art
selling.
Hans Peter Thurn, focusing on the history of the art dealer and the evolution of
the profession, marks the shift between modern art dealers and their predecessors by
distinguishing between the Händler, or dealer, and a new figure, the Gallerist:
…next to the old art dealer’s shop entered the modern gallery. Its
initiators exercised a new professional role. As gallerist, the art dealer
emerged in the guise of public relations professional. The cultural milieu
the modern gallerist built was in certain ways the successor to the former
bourgeois Salon…with the diverse new duties that the modern gallerist
had to cope with and account for, he wanted to succeed culturally as well
as economically.
4
3
Robert Jensen, Marketing Modernism in Fin-De-Siècle Europe (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University
Press, 1994), 49.
4
“…neben die alte Kunsthandlung tritt die moderne Galerie. Deren Initiator praktiziert eine veränderte
Berufsrolle. Als Galerist schlüpft der Kunsthändler in das Gewand eines Öffentlichkeitsarbeiters. Das
Kulturmilieu, das der moderne Galerist herstellt, tritt in gewisser Weise die Nachfolge der vormaligen
bürgerlichen Salons an. …mit der Vielfalt der veränderten Aufgaben muß der moderne Galerist rechnen
95
Though taking part in a new role as public relations professional, the modern dealer, or
gallerist, as Thurn calls him, engaged in these activities by mimicking familiar and
established cultural venues such as the private bourgeois Salon. Paul Cassirer, for
instance, called his gallery a Kunstsalon, and supported many different cultural activities
under the same roof that were once the purview of the private Salon—not only art
exhibitions, but also literature and poetry readings, music recitals, and lectures.
Because many of the artists these dealers managed had not yet been endorsed by
outside institutions or the mediating forces of history and hindsight, and because there
were competing artistic trends at any given moment vying for prominence, gallerists had
to work hard to prove that their product merited the attention and support of collectors.
However, they could only vouch for the worth of the artists they represented by
emphasizing their own enthusiasm; therefore, they had to prove that their passion was
pure, divorced of economic self-interest and motivated only by sincere love of new art.
Otherwise, they were open to the charge that they were simply trying to wring economic
profit from an unproven product. Dealers attempted to prove this passionate disinterest in
many ways. But publishing was one of the most prominent ways that dealers
demonstrated their disinterest, their larger commitments to culture and to the cultural life
of the nation. Print was the most effective media for communicating this message.
Dealers' publishing activities promoted and reinforced a certain image of the
modern dealer as a disinterested connoisseur and committed proponent of scholarship
und zurechtkommen, will er nicht kulturell wie ökonomisch scheitern.” Hans Peter Thurn, Der
Kunsthändler: Wandlungen eines Berufes (München: Hirmer, 1994), 124.
96
with a sincere devotion to the aesthetic trends represented by his artists, a devotion that
went beyond financial gain or professional reward. Bourdieu connects such “interest in
disinterestedness” to what he calls the “economy of symbolic goods.” The art business,
which is "a trade in things that have no price,” can function, "only by virtue of a constant,
collective repression of narrowly 'economic' interest and of the real nature of the practices
revealed by 'economic' analysis."
5
That is, the art trade is an economy based on the
disavowal of the economic. However, this negation of the commercial contains its own
logic; instead of purely economic profits, dealers are after the acquisition of symbolic
capital, or "economic or political capital that is disavowed, misrecognized and thereby
recognized, hence legitimate, a 'credit' which, under certain conditions, and always in the
long run, guarantees 'economic' profits.”
6
The art dealer and the publisher are among
those cultural actors for whom, "the only legitimate accumulation consists in making a
name for oneself...a capital of consecration implying a power to consecrate objects...and
therefore to give value, and to appropriate the profits from this operation."
7
Publishing enabled dealers and publishers to make this name for themselves—
literally to list their names alongside those of their artists and authors on title pages and
advertisements—while also asserting their economic disinteredness. As Nicholas Green
has argued in connection with Paul Durand-Ruel, the literary and academic "backup" of
catalogues in particular, "helped to mold cultural definitions of the dealer as disinterested
5
Pierre Bourdieu, “The Production of Belief: Contribution to an Economy of Symbolic Goods,” in The
Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1993), 74.
6
Ibid., 75.
7
Ibid.
97
patron of art and sponsor of serious learning."
8
By including essays by leading critics
and scholars into their catalogues and promotional materials, dealers were also asserting
the art historical importance of their artists, and, at the same time, contributing to a
developing narrative about modern art that would influence the coming canon. Yet, in
another sense, with these activities dealers were also operating, as Kennert and Thurn
suggest, as public relations professionals, crafting a certain professional image of their
artists for the public.
Publishing was, certainly, a scholarly enterprise. But publishing also served a less
selfless educational function; it was meant to awaken potential collectors to the virtues
and value of progressive art. Through publications, the dealer made a case to the
progressive connoisseur and collector that certain contemporary trends were worthwhile.
Indeed, the centrality of publishing and printing to the modern art trade can be
demonstrated by the fact that two of the figures I consider—Reinhard Piper and Wieland
Herzfelde—were book publishers. Both became important promoters of modern art and
engaged in many of the same activities—publishing single prints and print portfolios,
artist's publications, monographs, and catalogues—as their dealer colleagues via their
access to the press. Dealers, likewise, behaved like publishers. Paul Cassirer’s
Kunstsalon began as a gallery cum art press. Hans Goltz started out as a bookseller in
Munich and gradually moved into displaying art and publishing art prints. J.B.
8
Nicholas Green, “Dealing in Temperaments: Economic Transformation of the Artistic Field in France
During the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” in Critical Readings in Impressionism and Post-
Impressionism: An Anthology, ed. Mary Tompkins Lewis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007),
37.
98
Neumann, similarly, began his training as an apprentice in a bookshop before opening his
own Graphisches Kabinett and publishing the prints of chosen artists.
Dealers acting as publishers also brought new art into being, and in the immediate
postwar period they began to publish prints as never before. Graphics were the ideal art
object for the economic and cultural conditions of the early years of the Weimar
Republic. They offered dealers a way to reward collectors, entice connoisseurs and
cultivate new audiences. They possessed fine art credentials and had an established
connoisseurial tradition but were at the same time inexpensive to produce, could be easily
reproduced in art journals and catalogues, and were a ready source of promotional
material. Prints could be, in other words, both exclusive and accessible at the same time.
The ambiguious status of the graphic arts is apparent in the ways that dealers of this
period chose to market graphic art. Prints could be populist or they could be exceedingly
precious, depending on how they were presented. Paper, medium, packaging and
context all projected a certain message about the intended audience of the works. Dealers
became increasingly sophisticated about the ways they marketed their prints and print
portfolios. Dealers included prints in first-run or specialty publications and portfolios as
incentive for early purchase, or offered them within luxury edition portfolios at a
premium price. But they also reproduced their artists' graphics in reduced format and
offered them at a fraction of the cost, or included them as illustrations in other texts or
journals. They experimented with a wider variety of print media (not only woodcuts and
intaglio prints, but also lithography), formats (portfolios, illustrated books, single prints),
and editions (a wide variety of luxury and popular editions).
99
And just as dealers brought art works into being by publishing prints and print
portfolios, dealer-produced publications mobilized these art works for larger audiences.
By publishing illustrated catalogues and journals, dealers brought art works to
consumers. They decoupled the physical space of the gallery from the art object and, to a
certain extent, in Benjamin’s sense of the effects of the work of mechanical reproduction,
brought the art closer to the audience. The publication also mobilized the other functions
that the modern gallerist had adopted—those of Salon organizer and cultural mediator. In
journals such as Cassirer's Pan and Flechtheim's Querschnitt, poetry and literature were
brought onto the page and shared with the audience. The publication was, moreover, an
object that connoted a community of like-minded supporters, and gave the owner a
physical talisman of his or her membership in that community.
9
Much of the modern dealer's identity as a cultural figure was, indeed, connected
to print, and many of his creative acts were expressed in print. Men like Paul Durand-
Ruel and Ambroise Vollard in France and Paul Cassirer in Berlin, role models for
progressive German dealers of the 1920s, were pioneers in the use of the graphic arts.
They published prints both to cultivate less wealthy collectors and to attract connoisseurs.
They also communicated via print, offering their own catalogues and journals and using
them as vehicles to promote their artists and present their own ideas about art and culture.
9
Robin Reisenfeld has demonstrated how the artists of the group Die Brücke were able to build a base of
support without the institutional framework of either academy or gallery by producing and printing their
own annual portfolios, called the Jahresmappen, which they then distributed to subscribers, who then
became so-called “passive” members of the group—creating a very direct sense of community via print.
See Robin Reisenfeld, “Cultural Identity and Artistic Practice: The Revival of the German Woodcut.
(Volumes I and II)” (PhD Diss., University of Chicago, 1993).
100
The dealers who came of age with the artists they represented in the 1920s used
print in the ways their predecessors had, but also expanded its reach and significance.
J.B. Neumann used print to forward a certain idea of modern art. Print was central to his
activities as a dealer, both in the publications he supported and the prominence he gave to
the graphic arts in his gallery. Reinhard Piper’s early career demonstrates the overlap
between publishing and dealing—he was a book publisher, but in important ways he was
engaged in the same types of promotional activity as art dealers, a combination of
education, advocacy and advertisement. Karl Nierendorf, Otto Dix’s dealer, was a
member of Neumann’s Kunstgemeinschaft, and represents the collapsing of dealer and
artist identity in “Nierendix,” the moniker he earned while promoting the artist’s most
prominent graphic series, Der Krieg. Wieland Herzfelde was, like Piper, a publisher, but
his relationship with Grosz was a collaborative one, and publications were the product of
this collaboration. Other figures I will consider more briefly, such as Alfred Flechtheim,
were important dealers of progressive art whose activities influenced, overlapped with, or
were in line with the practices of their colleagues.
The figures I present in detail are those with whom Beckmann, Dix, and Grosz
had significant interaction. My inquiry could have included a number of other prominent
individuals whose activities were also dominated by a devotion to the graphic arts or
whose business combined publishing with art sales: Hans Goltz in Munich, for instance,
who served as George Grosz’s dealer during these years, or Herwarth Walden in Berlin,
whose activities while head of the gallery/publishing concern Der Sturm have been well
documented. In spite of my limited focus, I hope to demonstrate that the practices of
101
these individuals were not isolated, but represent a synthesis of dealers and publishers
adopting prior practices and adapting to the demands of the moment. These individuals
view and present themselves as cultural contributors, and it was largely in print—as both
an artistic medium and as a medium of communication—that they were able to contribute
to the culture they sought to forward.
Predecessors in Print
Although Paul Durand-Ruel is often considered the first modern dealer, or
“galerist” in Thurn’s sense, Ambroise Vollard, is perhaps a better model for figures such
as Neumann in terms of the way he made print publication central to his activities as a
dealer. Vollard made major creative contributions to modern print culture in France, and
his practices were instrumental in shaping his predecessors’ approaches to producing and
promoting modern original graphics.
10
For instance, Vollard recruited the artists he
represented to make prints for his albums rather than approaching professional
printmakers. Because Vollard’s painters were often inexperienced in the technical side of
printmaking, the dealer arranged for them to work side by side with master printers who
could solve difficult technical problems and supervise the printing process. The early
print portfolios, such as the Album des peintre-graveurs (1896), were filled with work by
Vollard’s chosen peintres-graveurs, or painter-printmakers. These were revolutionary in
France, which had a long tradition of academic printmaking and hierarchical divides
10
Ann Dumas argues that Vollard was the key figure in the rebirth of printmaking at the end of the
nineteenth century. See Ann Dumas, “Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde,” in Cézanne to
Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde, ed. Rebecca A. Rabinow (New York: Metropolitan
Museum of Art, 2006), 2–27.
102
between print media.
11
Vollard flaunted these distinctions; he combined sophisticated
and technically refined original color lithographs by Bonnard and Vuillard with etchings
and woodcuts in the same portfolio.
Vollard also published his own illustrated books. The livres d’artiste were the
product of Vollard’s particular vision and perfectionism. He was consumed by details
such as the choice of paper, font and binding. For early editions, he had specialty paper
made for each work; for later editions he used fine Montval paper, embedding either his
name or the title of the text into the paper as a watermark. Again, he approached painters
for these projects and often had them choose the text they were to illustrate. For Vollard,
the artist’s contribution was primary, the text was secondary. Yet, it was ultimately
Vollard who choreographed the diverse elements—artist, text, and materials—bringing
them together to create a sublime outcome. As he once stated, “I am the architect of my
books.”
12
Because of the innovative nature of his projects, Vollard’s prints and publications
did not meet with immediate success and he had difficulty finding the right market. Print
collectors were more interested in the work of professional printmakers, and were often
dismissive of, even offended by, the liberties that Vollard and his peintres-graveurs took
with the print. Some critics considered certain prints, such as those by Cézanne and
11
On the studio-based, academic system of printmaking, particularly reproductive engraving, and the
changes brought about by the introduction of lithography and photography in nineteenth-century France,
see Stephen Bann, Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters and Photographers in Nineteenth-Century France
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
12
Quoted in Una E. Johnson, Ambroise Vollard, Éditeur: Prints, Books, Bronzes (New York: Museum of
Modern Art; New York Graphic Society, 1977), 27.
103
Sisley, to be after drawings, which made their status as “originals” questionable.
13
Vollard faced similar resistance from bibliophiles, who did not agree with his use of
lithography for book illustration.
14
The livres d’artiste were also financially
unsuccessful, and very expensive to produce.
15
But Vollard did become more sophisticated and shrewd in his publishing
activities over time. For his livres d’artiste, he offered a “hierarchy” of formats: a variety
of sizes and materials, from basic to deluxe editions printed on special papers and
containing original loose prints. He began to include trial proofs and signed sheets in his
portfolios to appeal to collectors. In 1913, Vollard bought a number of copper plates
from Picasso, including the early Saltimbanques works, and had them steel-faced so he
could produce larger editions. Vollard would later make a case for the early financial
failures of his prints and livres d’artiste, emphasizing their artistic importance: "… if the
collectors were indifferent, the painters themselves were becoming more and more
interested in this alternative mode of self-expression."
16
The risk was justified by the
outcome. Vollard was the mediator that gave his artists access to this “alternative mode
13
Vollard’s albums did complicate the notion of an original print in other ways – for instance, these same
artists sometimes submitted only color maquettes to Vollard’s lithographer Auguste Clot for reproduction.
Clot would then be responsible for transferring the image to the lithographic stone (or in the case of a color
lithograph, stones) and for printing it. Because many of these artists were not familiar with these more
complex printmaking techniques, their designs were not made with feasibility in mind. This demanded
much patience, and innovation, on the part of the master printer. See Johnson, Ambroise Vollard, Éditeur;
Pratt and Druick, “Vollard’s Print Albums.”
14
Bibliophiles typically shared the opinion of William Morris and his Kelmscott Press: illustrated books
should employ the same printing methods as the text in which they are printed. This restricted illustrations
to relief methods such as woodcut or, more often, wood engraving. The idea was to create an aesthetic
unity of image and text.
15
See Rebecca A. Rabinow, “Vollard’s livres d’artiste,” in Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron
of the Avant-Garde, ed. Rebecca A. Rabinow (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2006), 197–212.
16
Ambroise Vollard, Recollections of a Picture Dealer, trans. Violet M. Macdonald (New York: Dover
Publications, 1978), 247–248.
104
of self-expression,” and who was ultimately responsible for the products of this creative
collaboration. Vollard himself became creator as much as the artists he commissioned to
produce these works and his name is mentioned as prominently as that of his artists in
association with these publishing projects.
Paul Cassirer was the first dealer of modern art in Germany whose stature and
methods were comparable to those of his French predecessors. Cassirer would proclaim
Durand-Ruel as his model, but it was Vollard, in many respects his contemporary, whose
publishing practices he would adopt and adapt.
17
Like Vollard, Cassirer presented
himself as a promoter rather than a profiteer, someone interested in forwarding the cause
of modern art in the conservative climate of late Wilhelmine Berlin. He eventually
wielded enormous influence over the promotion of modern art in Germany prior to World
War I, and his approach to marketing his artists would be emulated and expanded by his
immediate successors.
18
Cassirer framed his activities as intended to promote art rather than profit from it.
He was, like Vollard and Durand-Ruel before him, determined to represent his role as an
advocate, and to distance himself from the negative connotations of the dealer—in
17
Vollard opened his first gallery in 1893 in Paris; Cassirer opened his gallery in 1898. Vollard (b. 1866)
was only five years older than Cassirer (b. 1871). The former ultimately outlived the latter, however.
Vollard died after a car crash in 1939. Cassirer committed suicide in 1926.
18
For instance, Paul and his cousin Bruno became managers of the Berlin Secession in 1899. The two
asked for only a small commission on sales to cover operating expenses, but sought far more in terms of
administrative and aesthetic control. They demanded a share in the leadership as well as the right to advise
on the selection of art works. The two were named "Secretaries of the Berlin Secession," and were given a
seat and advisory vote in the meetings of the Secession. They were also listed as members of the exhibition
committee, which permitted them to assist in the selecting and hanging of works. The Cassirers were, in
fact, the only non-artist members of the Secession. Paul Cassirer was ultimately elected president of the
Secession ten years later. For more information on the founding of the Secession and Cassirer’s role, see
Peter Paret, The Berlin Secession: Modernism and Its Enemies in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980).
105
particular, the profession’s association with speculation and profit. In a two-part essay
published in 1911, Cassirer responded to accusations leveled by artist Karl Vinnen in his
infamous contributions to Ein Protest deutscher Künstler (A Protest of German Artists),
19
particularly Vinnen’s charge that the modern art dealer speculated in “foreign” (i.e.,
French) art for personal gain. Titled, “Art and the Art Trade” (Kunst und Kunsthandel),
Cassirer argued that today’s artist is no longer dependent on a patron, but instead relies
on four institutions that connect him to a broader public: the newspaper, the art
exhibition, the art trade, and the gallery. “In our times, as state, municipal, and charitable
establishments (Einrichtungen) break down,” Cassirer argued, “the great role of the art
trade begins.”
20
The dealer seeks out the artists he believes in and exhibits their work.
He acts on the assumption that it is his role to “correct public opinion, indeed, as a
businessman.”
21
The dealer fights with and for his artists against the rigidity of official
art policy, and his exhibitions and publications act as criticism of that policy. In these
essays, Cassirer took a free market approach; he insisted the only way to correct the
mistakes of the state and ensure the financial security of talented German artists was
through a vigorous private market, not protectionist measures designed to keep out
foreign art. In other words, more gallery directors, more critics, and more dealers were
needed, not fewer.
19
Vinnen’s essay “Quousque Tandem,” was published in Ein Protest deutscher Künstler (Jena: Eugen
Diederichs, 1911). Vinnen, a landscape artist who was part of the Worpswede artists’ colony, edited Ein
Protest… and wrote the introductory essays.
20
"In dieser Zeit, als die staatlichen, kommunalen, gemeinnützigen Einrichtungen zur Kunstpflege
versagten, fing die grosse Rolle des Kunsthandels an." Paul Cassirer, “Kunst und Kunsthandel: Teil II,”
Pan 1, no. 17 (July 1, 1911): 568.
21
"Der Kunsthändler, der sich in die Öffentlichkeit flüchtete, ging meist von dem Gedanken aus, die
öffentliche Meinung zu korrigieren, und zwar selbstverständlich wie ein Kaufmann." Ibid., 569.
106
Although Cassirer believed in the private market, he nevertheless insisted that it
was ridiculous to argue, as Vinnen did, that one chose to be a dealer of modern art to
make easy money. In fact, he insisted, he would have been more financially secure if he
sold art by Germany’s established artists. Cassirer argued for his trade in national and
cultural terms—he did not choose to become a dealer of progressive French art because it
promised easy profits. He chose to deal French art “because I viewed the introduction of
French art into Germany as a cultural deed…because I loved Manet, because I saw in
Monet, Sisley and Pissarro artists of great strength, in Daumier and Renoir genius, in
Degas one of the great masters, [and] in Cézanne I beheld the bearer of a philosophy
[Weltanschauung].”
22
In other words, his profession had both personal and cultural
imperatives; he was motivated by his own passion, but he also viewed the promotion of
progressive art as a “cultural deed,” one that would help elevate the arts in his own
country.
Print and publishing were central to Cassirer’s professional identity. By the time
he was 23, Cassirer had published a prose poem (printed in Blätter für die Kunst), a play,
and the following year his first and only novel, Josef Geiger. When he opened the
Kunstsalon Cassirer at Viktoriastrasse 35 in 1898, he and his cousin Bruno combined the
gallery with a publishing house. The two published works by artists, critics, and
22
"Weil ich diese Einführung der französischen Kunst in Deutschland für eine kulturelle Tat gehalten
habe...weil ich Manet - liebte, weil ich in Monet, Sisley und Pissarro starke Künstler sah, weil ich in
Daumier und Renoir Genies, in Degas einen der grössten Meister, in Cézanne den Träger einer
Weltanschauung erblickte." Paul Cassirer, “Kunst und Kunsthandel: Teil I,” Pan 1, no. 14 (May 16, 1911):
468.
107
historians including Henri van de Velde,
23
Max Liebermann, Wilhelm von Bode, and
Alfred Lichtwark. When working difficulties caused the cousins to split the business in
1901, Cassirer waited until the non-competition clause in his contract expired, and then
opened his own press, the Paul Cassirer Verlag, in 1908.
24
Cassirer also took up the
mantel of Pan, a short-lived but influential cultural journal from the turn of the century,
by reviving the publication from 1910 to 1912, and initiated the Pan-Presse, a special art
imprint, in 1909.
The Pan-Presse put out nineteen illustrated books and portfolios between 1909
and 1921, as well as a number of single prints. Cassirer stressed the artistic merits of the
Presse, which was intended, in part, to elevate the status of the illustrated book into an
objet d’art.
25
He promised that the Presse would be run and directed by artists, and that
all books and graphics would be printed by hand.
26
Like Vollard, Cassirer never
subordinated the contribution of the artist to that of the craftsman. The artist’s vision
took precedence; it would not be compromised in order to create an aesthetic unity with
the text. The illustrated book was, for Cassirer, an independent art form, but at the same
23
The Cassirers also hired Van de Velde to design the interior of their gallery. He outfitted it with
Jugendstil furniture and fittings, making the gallery space itself into a seamless environment that married
art and design as an advertisement for the kind of progressive aesthetic that Cassirer was offering through
his gallery and press.
24
Bruno took over the publishing half of the firm, while Cassirer retained control over the gallery and the
art publications, including the publication of original graphics. See Rahel E. Feilchenfeldt, Paul Cassirer
Verlag, Berlin 1898-1933: eine kommentierte Bibliographie (Munich: Saur, 2002).
25
Both the Paul Cassirer Verlag and the Pan-Presse were also a means for Cassirer to rival his cousin’s
press, the Bruno Cassirer Verlag. Advertisements for the Paul Cassirer Verlag warned the consumer to be
attentive to the name and address of the press, lest they end up directed to the more established (and
successful) Bruno Cassirer Verlag.
26
See Stephanie Jacobs, “Wider den ‘Unrat der Gründerjahre’: Paul Cassirer und die ‘Pan-Presse’,” in Paul
Cassirer, der Kunsthändler als Verleger, ed. Rahel E. Feilchenfeldt (Munich: Beck, 2006), 102–121.
Jacobs also argues that this may have been a way for Cassirer to further distinguish the products of the Pan
Presse from the publications of his cousin Bruno Cassirer.
108
time, an effective tool of propaganda to promote his artists and aesthetic ideas to a wider
audience.
In a similar vein, Cassirer’s role as publisher was arguably as much about
education as it was about promotion—or, rather, education in the service of promotion.
The Paul Cassirer Verlag counted among its first publications Die Kunst des Radierens
(The Art of Etching), a technical manual written in accessible language intended as both a
handbook for artists as well as a tool to educate collectors interested in identifying and
collecting modern intaglio prints.
27
The book included five original prints which changed
with each new edition, making the book itself a collector’s item. Judging by sales—it
appeared in five editions between 1909 and 1923—it was quite successful. The inflation-
related boom in the market for luxury editions and portfolios made the heavily revised
1923 edition in particular a success among collectors.
28
In his memoir, Die fetten und die mageren Jahre (The Fat and Lean Years), Karl
Scheffler described Cassirer as someone who wanted to make his mark on culture; like
museum directors Hugo von Tschudi or Alfred Lichtwark, he wanted his views to shape
institutional art policy. But the “soziale Bewertung” (social estimation) of his profession
always stood in the way of developing these gifts; at best he could only act through the
27
Catalogue raisonnés, such as the indispensable twenty-one volume reference by Adam Bartsch, Le
Peintre-Graveur (which appeared in five updated editions since its original publication between 1803-21,
including one published in 1920 in Würzburg), had long been available as handbooks for collectors of Old
Master prints. They included information on states, existing impressions, and any other details that might
indicate the relative value of a given print to a collector. No such guide, however, existed for modern
prints.
28
See Inka Bertz, “‘Und das Buch, das du geschrieben, Ist ein wirkliches Verdienst’: Hermann Strucks
Erfolgsbuch ‘Die Kunst des Radierens’ und sein Einfluß auf die Künstler im Paul-Cassirer-Verlag,” in Paul
Cassirer, der Kunsthändler als Verleger, ed. Rahel E. Feilchenfeldt (Munich: Beck, 2006), 122–138.
109
talents of others.
29
Catherine Krahmer argues that Cassirer was, like Vollard, “a hidden
writer, a creative individual, who could only produce through others.”
30
Yet, Cassirer did
view himself as more than a middleman, and he made his own contributions to German
culture through the Pan-Presse and the Paul Cassirer Verlag. Although Cassirer primarily
dealt French art, significantly, no French artists were chosen to illustrate works for the
Presse, making it a venue for German artists to explore the possibilities of graphic art by
giving them, as Cassirer stated, “…the opportunity to express themselves in the technique
[print medium] that is adequate to their talent and temperament.”
31
Max Beckmann, for instance, received his first significant graphic commission
from Cassirer. He was asked to illustrate Johannes Guthmann’s Eurydikes Wiederkehr
(Eurydice’s Return), which became the third volume put out by the Presse. Beckmann
was known primarily as a painter who exhibited with the Secession; he was not at all
recognized as a graphic artist. Cassirer’s commission gave Beckmann the opportunity to
present himself to a wider public—collectors of graphic art and livres d’artiste, who
29
“Sein stiller Gram und seine laute Wut war, daß der Anerkennung seiner Begabung, die immer wieder zu
einem zündenden Streichholz wurde, dis soziale Bewertung des Berufs im Wege stand. Eine
ungewöhnliche Energie war verdammt, nur mittelbar schöpferisch zu sein, Paul Cassirer konnte bestenfalls
wirken wie ein Galerieleiter, wie ein Verleger oder ein Theaterdirektor: durch die Begabung anderer.” Karl
Scheffler, Die fetten und die mageren Jahre: ein Arbeits- und Lebensbericht (Munich: P. List, 1946), 121–
122.
30
“Paul Cassirer war wie Vollard ein verborgener Schriftsteller, ein schöpferischer Mensch, der nur durch
andere wirken konnte…” Catherine Krahmer, “Julius Meier-Graefe und Paul Cassirer: die ‘Pan’-
Connection,” in Paul Cassirer, der Kunsthändler als Verleger, ed. Rahel E. Feilchenfeldt (Munich: Beck,
2006), 87–101.
31
“…zur Herstellung von Büchern die größthen lebenden Künstler heranzuziehen und ihnen Gelegenheit
zu geben, sich in der Technik auszudrücken, die ihrem Talent und Temperament adaequat ist.” Jacobs,
“Wider den ‘Unrat der Gründerjahre’,” 106.
110
would not necessarily have been familiar with his work.
32
This introduction would prove
to be a fruitful one for Beckmann, as prints would come to form a significant part of his
oeuvre in the following years, as I will explore further.
Moreover, the products of Cassirer’s presses did reflect the interests and
preoccupations of the dealer himself. The books and journals he produced were often
stamped with his evolving political and cultural views. This became especially evident
during the war. Cassirer, who volunteered in August 1914 and was put into service as a
dispatch driver, continued to publish and to initiate new projects from the Front. The first
was the journal Kriegszeit (War Time), which appeared soon after the declaration of war
at the end of August 1914. It came out weekly for the first year and less frequently after
summer 1915. The final issue appeared in March 1916. The issues track Cassirer’s, and
the larger artistic community’s, changing moods about the war. The first issue contained
unrestrained and unequivocally patriotic statements. On the cover is a lithograph by Max
Liebermann after a now famous photograph of a crowd gathered to hear the declaration
of war by the Kaiser (figure 2.1). Liebermann includes Wilhelm II’s most famous line as
caption: “I no longer see political parties. Today, I see only Germans.” Repeating the
line in his own handwriting and carefully adhering to his photographic source,
Liebermann implicitly conveys solidarity with the statement. Meier-Graefe’s
contribution in the same issue echoed this assent and included a call to arms for cultural
32
See Christiane Zeiller, “Der junge Max Beckmann und die ‘Firma C.’: der Illustrationsauftrag zu
‘Eurydikes Wiederkehr’,” in Ein Fest der Künste: Paul Cassirer, der Kunsthändler als Verleger (Munich:
Beck, 2006), 139–150. The size of the edition, however, should not be overstated. It remained, as did most
of Cassirer’s illustrated books, an exclusive collector’s item. Only 60 were printed. See Feilchenfeldt,
Paul Cassirer Verlag.
111
producers: “All political parties now march toward the same goal and art must follow.”
By the end of the war’s first year, however, some of the visual and written contributions
became less jingoistic and more equivocal. Although attacks on the enemy—particularly
allegorical depictions of the British sea lion, the Gallic rooster, and the Russian bear—
remained a popular theme throughout the paper’s run, some began to confront the
collateral damage of war: Ernst Barlach’s ambiguous images of peasants or Beckmann’s
posthumous portrait of his brother-in-law, Martin Tube (figure 2.2), who was killed in
action in October 1914, for instance. These images mirror Cassirer’s own evolving views
about the war and its effects both at home and on the front.
Cassirer was demobilized in 1916. He returned to Berlin and started a new
publication: Der Bildermann. An announcement for the new bi-monthly published in
Börsenblatt für den deutschen Buchhandel made no secret of the ideological focus of the
new paper and its skeptical take on the war and official policy. Rahel Feilchenfeldt calls
the publication “one of the most revealing documents of the times, which can be
considered characteristic of both a fundamentally changed attitude toward the war as well
as of the ethos of Cassirer and [Leo] Kestenberg.”
33
The title, literally “picture man,”
was the name of a popular attraction in which a man wearing display boards coated with
pictures would describe them in song or verse.
34
The masthead (figure 2.3), designed by
33
“…als höchst aufschlußreiches Zeitdokument sowohl für die seit Erscheinen der Kriegszeit grundlegend
geänderte Einstellung dem Kriege gegenüber gelten kann, als auch das verlegerische Ethos Cassirers und
[Leo] Kestenbergs treffend charakterisiert.” Quoted in Feilchenfeldt, Paul Cassirer Verlag, 511.
Kestenberg, Bildermann’s editor, was a well-known pacifist.
34
Victor H. Miesel, “Paul Cassirer’s ‘Kriegszeit’ and ‘Bildermann’ and Some German Expressionist
Reactions to World War I,” Michigan Germanic Studies 2, no. 2 (1976): 153.
112
Max Slevogt,
35
depicts two men standing above a crowd. The eponymous figure, his
body punctuating the title, wears a four-sided display board tacked with images from the
daily news. At his feet is a stack of papers, which the man on the right, a barker, is
hawking to the crowd below. Transformed into a kind of human Litfaßsäule, or
advertising column, the Bildermann exhibits through images; he projects the day’s stories
to the crowd. The crowd is able to comprehend the content from a distance because of the
paper’s clear visual representations. Thus, the masthead proclaims both the form and
function of Der Bildermann: an illustrated, popular paper intended for the masses. It was
an experiment, an argument for the influence that art could have on larger political and
social outcomes and the part that artists could play in contributing to change. Cassirer
and Kestenberg explained further that during the months of war, a “desire for beauty and
inwardness has been awakened in all of us,” and that along with a “conclusive moral
victory” in the war, art and the support of art would bring about a “new spring.”
36
The animating idea of Bildermann also indicates the mediating role of print itself
in addressing the masses through the visual language of progressive art. Print was the
vehicle for communicating the message—it enabled the quick and consistent
reproduction of itself on a mass scale—but it also provided a framework for that
35
Slevogt also designed the signet for the Paul Cassirer Verlag, which depicted a panther lounging on a tree
trunk, and illustrated the first book brought out by the Pan Presse, a translation of James Fenimore
Cooper’s Lederstrumpf-Erzählungen (Leatherstocking Tales). See Krahmer, “Julius Meier-Graefe und
Paul Cassirer: die ‘Pan’-Connection,” in Feilchenfeldt, Paul Cassirer Verlag.
36
“Trotz aller Schicksalsschläge und Mühsale ist die Sehnsucht nach Schönheit und Innerlichkeit in allen
gewachsen, und es scheint, dass mit dem Glauben an den endgültigen moralischen Sie auch die Hoffnung
erwachsen ist, der Kunst und der Kunstpflege erstehe ein neuer Frühling.” Feilchenfeldt, Paul Cassirer
Verlag, 511. This second statement, also published in Börsenblatt, appeared as a “foreword” at the same
time as the announcement for the press.
113
communication. That is, if sending a direct message that was capable of addressing itself
to the general public rather than to an elite or initiated audience was the goal, the imagery
itself would also have to be direct, accessible, and in line with the model provided by
popular illustrated papers. Victor Miesel calls both Bildermann and Kriegszeit “picture
books,” because the bulk of each issue was taken up by four full-page original
lithographs.
37
Cassirer and Kestenberg spoke in the foreword of offering to the reader of
Bildermann “artist’s ornaments, appropriate for tacking to the wall as speaking
pictures.”
38
Cassirer and Kestenberg assured the audience that the journal would become a
“people’s art paper in the truest sense of the word, and in spite of its low price, will meet
all technical printing requirements.”
39
Cassirer was able to keep the price of Bildermann
low; he charged only 30 Pfennigs per issue, and it was printed on cheap paper in order to
keep production costs down. Der Bildermann emphasized print as an ideal medium that
enabled artistic expression as well as an accessible, direct means of reaching a larger
audience. The subtitle for Der Bildermann was “Steinzeichnungen fürs deutsche Volk”
(Lithographs for the German People). The announcement in Börsenblatt explained:
Twice a month Der Bildermann will publish lithographs by masters...What
we will publish are not reproductions. A print taken from the lithographic
stone is an original. The photographic process does not come between the
artist's drawing and its reproduction. The lithographic line is as alive as
the line of a sketch. The artist's unconscious, expressed in minute
movements of the hand that can never be exactly reproduced, remains
37
Miesel, “Paul Cassirer’s ‘Kriegszeit’ and ‘Bildermann’.”
38
My italics. “…Künstlerzierat, geeignet, an den Wänden als sprechendes Bild angeheftet zu werden.”
Feilchenfeldt, Paul Cassirer Verlag, 512.
39
“Der Bildermann wird ein Volks-Kunstblatt im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes werden und trotz des billigen
Preises buchtechnisch allen Anforderungen entsprechen.” Quoted in Ibid., 511.
114
present in the artist’s lithograph. Der Bildermann hopes to bring a broad
public directly in touch with art…
40
By stressing the direct, unmediated qualities of the lithograph—an unusual way to
describe any print, which is inherently one step removed from the artist’s hand—as well
as drawing attention to the “broad public” he hopes to attract, Cassirer was emphasizing
the populist functions of print media. The hope was to use graphics to expand audiences
for the progressive artists represented by Cassirer and make them a vehicle for the
expression of social and political dissent that was becoming more widespread.
Unfortunately, Bildermann did not enjoy the same success as Kriegszeit. Only
eighteen issues appeared between the 5 April and 20 December 1916, when it was
abandoned. Cassirer, however, continued to print politically charged material following
the war. Between 1919 and 1921, for instance, the Paul Cassirer Verlag published a
series of “sozialistische Schriften” (Socialist Writings), including works by Gustav
Landauer, Kurt Eisner, Rosa Luxemburg, Ernst Bloch, and Georg Lukács. The series
was also the brainchild of Leo Kestenberg, the editor of Bildermann, and Otto Jenssen,
who became editor of the series. Both held socialist sympathies and were members of the
USPD.
41
The Socialist Writings were advertised with the statement: “The spiritual
40
“Zweimal monatlich wird Der Bildermann Originallithographien von Meisterhand bringen…Was wir
bringen, sind keine Reproduktionen. Der Druck vom Stein ist ein Original. Die photographische Platte ist
nicht zwischen die Zeichnung des Künstlers und den Druck getreten. Der Strich der Lithographie ist nicht
so wie der Strich der Zeichnung. Das Unbewußte des Künstlers, das sich ausdrückt in den leisen, niemals
zu reproduzierenden Bewegungen der zeichenden Hand, bleibt der Künstlersteinzeichnung erhalten.”
Quoted in Ibid.
41
The Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or Independent Social Democratic Party of
Germany, began when left-leaning members of the SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) broke
with their party over the financing of war credits. They became an official party in 1917. They remained
more committed to left-wing socialist causes—including pacificism—however, they were never as radical
as the Spartakusbund (Spartacist Group), later the KPD or Kommunistisches Partei Deutschlands.
115
Revolution requires its soldiers [Garde]. We allow the army of the socialist spirit to
march onward.”
42
However, the series was discontinued by 1921, and Cassirer curbed
his own political activities after 1919, as the actions of the majority socialist government
and the violence of the Revolution left many questioning the possibilities for real change.
Max Beckmann’s print Die Enttäuschten II (The Disillusioned II) (figure 2.4) confirms
Cassirer’s change of heart; the dealer is depicted with Leo Kestenberg, the artist Max
Slevogt, and his wife, Tilla Durieux, as emblematic of the “disillusioned” socialists who
abandoned political and agitational activity soon after the Revolution. The pamphlets in
Durieux’s lap are inscribed with the names of leftist heroes such as [Karl] Liebknecht,
[Rosa] Luxemburg and Marks[sic], but both Durieux and Kestenberg yawn, their lethargy
signifying a waning enthusiasm for action. Barbara Buenger suggests that the
misspelling of Marx’s name is “perhaps [a caricature] of the hastiness of
pamphleteering,”
43
but haste appears ironic here; Cassirer’s interest in using his press to
agitate for immediate political and social change had passed.
Cassirer was not only a model for, but also a competitor to his successors,
including Alfred Flechtheim and J.B. Neumann. He was, however, ultimately of an
earlier generation; his politics and his aesthetics were of the previous period. Just as
progressive artists were encouraged by Baudelaire in the essay “The Painter of Modern
Life” to be “of their time,” the modern dealer was also bound up with the aesthetic
42
“Die geistige Revolution bedarf ihrer Garde. Wir lassen die Armee des sozialistischen Geistes
marschieren." Lars Lambrecht, “‘1919 interessierte er sich für Politik’: die sozialistischen Schriften im
Paul-Cassirer-Verlag,” in Paul Cassirer, der Kunsthändler als Verleger (Munich: Beck, 2006), 255.
43
Barbara C. Buenger, “Max Beckmann’s Ideologues: Some Forgotten Faces,” The Art Bulletin 71, no. 3
(September 1989): 457.
116
imperatives and struggles of the generation with which he came of age—this too became
part of the modern dealer trope.
In his autobiography, J.B. Neumann relates that around 1912 the Berlin Secession
was beginning to experience a “hardening of the arteries” as a result of Cassirer’s
leadership. It had become a market place for an entrenched group of artists and was no
longer open to younger artists or challenging aesthetics. “About that time, Cassirer came
to my gallery, took hold of my lapel and said, ‘I can see, you want to become the second
Cassirer.’ I pushed him back and said, ‘You are wrong, I want to become the first J.B.
Neumann.’”
44
Thus, there was something of the generational struggle among dealers as
well as the artists they represented. However, the model that first emerged with Durand-
Ruel, took shape in Vollard’s enterprise, and became a type with Cassirer did greatly
influence the way dealers of Neumann’s generation conducted business and presented
themselves and their profession—especially in and through print.
Print and a Professional Calling
The modern dealer in Germany was heavily influenced by Cassirer’s example,
and it was largely because of Cassirer that the person of the dealer increased in stature.
As Christian Kennert has suggested, it was with Cassirer that the modern dealer took on
the multiplicity of roles he would embody in the coming years including manager and
propagandist, entrepreneur (Ideenträger) and politician. He also took on the role of
44
J.B. Neumann, “Sorrow and Champagne,” in “Confessions of an Art Dealer” (unpublished manuscript,
1956) 3. J. B. Neumann Papers, II.B.1.a-b. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York
117
publicist through the journals he published and by cultivating relationships with art critics
and historians.
45
As before, the dealer had to win over progressive collectors to provide a
stable financial base for himself and his artists. But really, his goals were much more
ambitious—he sought to change the way his contemporaries viewed art. “In short,”
Kennert argues, “[the art dealer] had to organize a new market” for the progressive art he
chose to represent.
According to Howard Becker, "Dealing in contemporary work requires an
entrepreneur, someone willing to take risks...they cannot and do not wait for history to
speak; they actively try to persuade the other whose actions will make history. They do
this through their galleries."
46
A sense of the modern dealer’s historical role was perhaps
first understood and exploited by Durand-Ruel in France, who was careful to construct a
context for his artists through exhibitions and publications that made them the heirs to
and carriers of the west’s great artistic traditions.
47
Progressive dealers in Germany
recognized that they too had a historical role to play. They realized that they needed to
establish a market for progressive German art just as Durand-Ruel and Cassirer had done
for French and German Impressionist art. As Neumann stated in his memoirs, “…I could
45
I will be referring to “the dealer” with the masculine pronoun because all the individuals I discuss are
men. There were women who, as either dealers or advocates of progressive art, played important roles in
advancing progressive German art. Probably the most notable in this period was Johanna “Mutter” Ey, an
important promoter of the Düsseldorf School in the early 1920s. She had significant influence on Dix’s
dealer Karl Nierendorf.
46
Howard Saul Becker, Art Worlds, 25th anniversary ed., updated and expanded. (Berkeley, Calif.#;
London: University of California Press, 2008), 110.
47
See Jensen, Marketing Modernism in Fin-De-Siècle Europe. Robin Reisenfeld has also laid out the way
that the woodcut medium itself was a way of constructing a kind of nationalistic art historical context for
progressive German printmakers, particularly the Expressionists, before the war in her compelling
dissertation. See Reisenfeld, “Cultural Identity and Artistic Practice.”
118
not bury myself in the art of the past…if I were to justify myself as art dealer, I must play
a very positive role in the emergence of the art of our own time.”
48
Much of this was articulated in and through print. In fact, the attempt to win
converts, to “organize a new market,” was bound to rely heavily on print media to do its
work. First of all, fine art prints were an affordable lure, an accessible point of entry that
could attract avid collectors but also introduce the uninitiated to modern art and art
collecting. Second, self-published journals, catalogues, and books, as Cassirer had
demonstrated, were an effective way to articulate one’s own viewpoint as well as to
effect the change in the art world that one wanted to see. It was the private market filling
the void that official art policy ignored, as Cassirer had argued in his article “Kunst und
Kunsthandel.” This private and market-driven approach to effecting cultural change also
promised recognition, if not in an immediate then in a historical sense, to the dealer for
his contribution to forwarding progressive art in a hostile atmosphere and paving the way
for artistic change.
The positive role that prints could play in introducing collectors to young art was
often borne out by the personal experiences of these young art promoters, who recall
collecting their first prints at a young age, or of having contact with graphics that fueled
48
Neumann, “Miracles? Mostly Minor,” in “Confessions of an Art Dealer,” 5. Neumann, II.B.1.a-b.
MoMA Archives, NY. Neumann devotes his memoirs to the four “winners that I picked.” These were
Munch, Beckmann, Georges Rouault and Paul Klee. Neumann never published his memoirs (the
manuscript is a part of the J.B. Neumann archives at the Museum of Modern Art), and he experienced little
financial success during his long career as a dealer and consultant, first in Germany, then in the U.S. But
he takes care to argue that his lack of success was less a result of the artists he represented than the outcome
of poor business sense. His memoirs not only focus on his “winners” (all of whom became successful
either after Neumann stopped representing them, as in the case of Beckmann, or they were not represented
solely by the dealer), he also takes care to note when a particular work he owned ended up in an important
collection. Above all, he argues that, “most of my energies in a half-century of art dealing have gone into
the promotion of artists not yet accepted by the public at the time I took them up.” (Ibid).
119
an early passion for art in their memoirs. Their exposure to the graphic arts was about the
different points of access it afforded—not only in the gallery or museum, but on the street
and in bookshops. For both J.B. Neumann and Reinhard Piper, prints played a formative
role in directing them toward the path of art promotion. One could browse the selections
of street vendors, known as Bouquinistes, in Paris, pick through stacks of prints offered
for sale in bookshops, and obtain original or reproductive prints with a subscription to art
and cultural journals. Neumann and Piper both discuss coming across prints in such
settings, and how the experience turned them into young collectors and early devotees of
progressive artists whom they soon championed.
Neumann’s autobiography “Confessions of an Art Dealer,” for instance, relates
how he “discovered” the work of Edvard Munch. After turning away from the lucrative
career in oil and lumber for which he had been groomed, he became an apprentice at the
firm of Schuster and Bufleb, booksellers who specialized in art and architecture
publications and sold original prints out of their shop.
49
Neumann, who was drawn to
modern art and theater while a student in Vienna, was dismayed by the conservatism of
the firm, which was “too stodgy” and “recognized nothing outside the established order
of taste.” But he soon understood that the situation was actually to his advantage:
Since the proprietors would inevitably reject anything unorthodox, it was
certain that it would be offered as a last resort to the lowly apprentice.
From the stream of unwanted and despised, often soiled and torn,[sic]
49
Such a setup was not unusual at the time. Many publishers also published prints and print portfolios or
offered them for sale in their shops. Hans Goltz, like Neumann and Piper, also entered into publishing and
selling prints through his work as a bookseller. Some booksellers in Germany still offer prints for sale in
their shops—Hugendubel, for instance. The shared origins of book and print often made the arrangement a
convenient one.
120
prints I began to fish out certain works of a strangely compelling inner
emotional power.
50
Moreover, the prints “suited my purse…out of the modest pocket money of an
apprentice, I began to buy, at a few Marks each, the prints of Edvard Munch before I
even knew the artist’s name.”
51
He says that he was soon regarded as a “Munch expert”
and the inaugural exhibition of his first gallery in 1911 was devoted to Munch’s graphics.
In fact, Neumann’s familiarity with Munch’s prints constituted his first real success in the
art world, for he was soon consulted by the famous art historian Max Friedlander about
the artist’s graphics. This “recognition from ‘insiders’ in the art field strengthened my
conviction that I was on the right road.”
52
Neumann’s approach to exhibiting and marketing art was also affected by his
experience with the graphic arts. Neumann’s belief was that art should speak directly to
the viewer was one that came from his early experience marketing prints. The sale of
prints required a space different from that of a traditional gallery. In bookstores, prints
were often arranged in boxes and leafed through by viewers. In his gallery, Neumann
combined elements of these two spaces, displaying works on the wall and on tables and
featuring books and other items that could be handled alongside works of fine art.
Wilhelm Valentiner, the German-born director of the Detroit Museum of Art, recalled
visiting Neumann’s gallery on the “old Kurfürstendamm,”
It was one of those wonderful combined book art shops which have
become rare nowadays, where one could browse without being
50
Neumann, “A Son of the Midnight Son,” in “Confessions of an Art Dealer,” M1. Neumann, II.B.1.a-b.
MoMA Archives, NY.
51
Ibid., M2.
52
Ibid., M6.
121
disturbed...Displayed on a large table in the center were books not only on
modern art but poetry illustrated by Kokoshka[sic], Chagall, James Ensor,
Franz Marc and Beckmann, and woodcuts or etchings by the masters of
the “Brücke,” Kirchner, Nolde, Schmidt-Rottluff, Heckel, Pechstein and
Modersohn, as well as water colors and drawings by Klee, Kandinsky,
Munch and Feininger. Any of these objects could be acquired for a few
dollars, but even this price was too much for most of the visitors. Excited
customers were leaning over the tables, messing up the display, or were
shifting quietly in a corner reading books without paying for them…You
[Neumann] were in the midst of it, always helpful and friendly, giving
advice and explaining enthusiastically the works of the new and upcoming
artists.
53
Neumann articulated what he thought the role of such a gallery/bookshop should be in a
1919 pamphlet: “The bookshop should be an assortment of all that is good, exhibitions
and art sales, intermediary of words without any narrow-minded limitation on the artists
who belong to me as an art dealer.”
54
Similarly, Reinhard Piper’s memoir, Mein Leben als Verleger (My Life as a
Publisher), betrays the author’s love of the printed word and image in the rich
descriptions he offers of his memories of and with books. Calling himself, “…a man of
line and of black and white,”
55
he recounts details such as the size, weight, and format of
his first books, the illustrations they held and the types of paper they were printed on.
These haptic details—his memories of the texture and thickness of the paper in his
favorite books, for instance—suggest an intimate physical engagement with the printed
53
W.R. Valentiner, “W.R. Valentiner to J.B. Neumann”, August 7, 1956, J.B.N. Papers, Roll N69-93, 43-
44, Archives of American Art (AAA) Smithsonian Institution.
54
“Die Buchhandlung soll ein Sortiment alles Guten sein, Ausstellungen und Kunstgeschäft, Vermittler
von Worten ohne jede kleinliche Beschränkung auf die Künstler, die mir als Kunsthändler gehören.” J.B.
Neumann, “Im neuen Bunde” (Berlin, March 6, 1919), I.B. Neumann Papers, Roll no. N69-96, 4, AAA,
Smithsonian Institution.
55
“Ich meinerseits bin mehr ein Mensch der Linie und des Schwarz-Weiß.” Reinhard Piper, Mein Leben
als Verleger: Vormittag, Nachmittag. (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1964), 305.
122
page. He even notes, somewhat facetiously, that it was the unpleasant feel of school
paper that made homework hateful to him; “if it had been printed on beautiful, smooth
paper, I would have gladly occupied myself with it.”
56
Piper recalled receiving with his
subscription to Ferdinand Avenarius’s Kunstwart a set of reproductive prints including
Dürer’s three master engravings Knight, Death and the Devil, Melancholia I, and St.
Jerome in his Study, all at the price of only 25 Pfennings.
57
But Piper’s collecting began
in earnest during a trip to Paris, when he bought original prints by Goya, Daumier, and
Callot. These early acquisitions formed the core of a print collection that continued to
expand throughout his life. His collection was in turn influential to his practice as a
publisher. It would inspire him to commission books on artists he admired, or he would
reproduce their works in original or reproductive portfolios.
Other modern dealers also discussed their early encounters with prints, and how
they were formative to their development as collectors or connoisseurs. Daniel Henry
Kahnweiler, best known as Picasso’s dealer during the artist’s Cubist period, also bought
prints as a young man, which became a gateway to collecting and connoisseurship. He
describes in his memoirs, Mes galeries et mes peintres (My Galleries and My Painters),
"I bought reproductions of the paintings I liked. That was what I put on the walls at first.
It wasn't until later, when I passed shops selling prints, that I realized that the modern
56
“…ich lerne deshalb so ungern, weil die Grammatiken so rauhes Papier hätten, das sei so unangenehm
anzufassen; wenn sie auf schönes, glattes Papier gedruckt wären, würde ich mich viel lieber mit ihnen
beschäftigen.” Ibid., 83.
57
Robin Reisenfeld’s dissertation addresses in greater detail the technical and artistic recovery of the
medieval and Renaissance woodcut in 19
th
century Germany, and the proliferation of facsimile
reproductions of the prints of famous German graphic artists such as Albrecht Dürer and Albrecht
Altdorfer. See Reisenfeld, “Cultural Identity and Artistic Practice.”
123
painters I liked had also made prints, that these prints were not very expensive, and that I
could buy them.”
58
Although Kahnweiler did not ultimately become a publisher of
prints, he nevertheless recalled that prints were the first original works of art he was able
to afford, and thus he was collecting works by artists he admired when their paintings
were out of reach.
Prints were also a way for a dealer to get established and to begin to build a base
of support for his lesser-known artists. In a 1922 letter to Otto Dix, Karl Nierendorf
outlines the details of the contract he wants to secure with Dix ensuring his
representation. Nierendorf requests the right of first access and exhibition to all of the
artist’s prints, drawings, watercolors, and “little paintings” because he is able to show
these to best advantage in his small gallery. Larger paintings, however, are another
matter: “I can’t show large pictures [Bilder von großen Maßen] well in my small
rooms.”
59
To make up for this, he promises to stage watercolor exhibitions for the artist
and to undertake vigorous promotion and publication campaigns on his behalf: “I have
enough relationships to collectors who let themselves be advised by me to be able to
guarantee steady and increasing sales, and would naturally achieve much with some
fanfare [TamTam] through appropriate promotion [Propaganda], the production of
58
Daniel Henry Kahnweiler, My Galleries and Painters, trans. Helen Weaver (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1971), 38.
59
“Bilder von großen Maßen kann ich in meinen kleinen Räumen nicht gut zeigen... ” Karl Nierendorf to
Otto Dix, April 14, 1922, Dix Nachlass, I.C.524a, Germanisches Nationalmuseum (GNM).
124
reproductions [Klischees], Publications, etc.”
60
This also includes, he notes, initiating
essays on the artist’s work in art journals and other periodicals.
Participation through Publication
Dealers of this generation shared a similar pedigree. Just as Cassirer pursued his
art exhibiting and promotional activities in tandem with his publishing work, dealers like
Neumann and Hans Goltz in Munich began their careers either as booksellers or
publishers. At the same time, publishers who were heavily involved in the arts, such as
Reinhard Piper and Wieland Herzfelde, found it easy to direct their presses toward artists
and causes they favored. And many dealers, including Alfred Flechtheim and Karl
Nierendorf, founded their own journals, which featured the artists they represented but
also expressed their interests and personalities. Some of these journals were a
provocative and philosophical blend of art and culture, suggesting the broader ambitions
of their undertaking as well as the degree to which these communities—literature, theater,
music, the visual arts and “mass” culture including film and sports—interacted. Others
focused largely on art and literature, but nevertheless contained implicit arguments about
aesthetic matters—the display of works, the role of the dealer and the way one ought to
engage an audience.
Flechtheim’s journal Der Querschnitt (Cross Section) in particular became a kind
of scrapbook of the dealer’s interests, which included pieces not only on art and artists,
60
“Ich habe genügend Beziehungen zu Sammlern, die sich von mir beraten lassen, um einen ständigen und
steigenden Verkauf garantieren zu können und würde natürlich durch entsprechende Propaganda,
Herstellung von Klischees, Publikationen etc mit etwas TamTam viel erreichen. ” Ibid.
125
but also café life, film, art-world gossip, and sporting events—especially boxing,
reflecting the cosmopolitanism of the dealer himself.
61
In its first year, articles on
Cézanne, Modigliani, and Braque appeared in French alongside poetry and book
excerpts. There were also essays on the power struggles within the Dadaist group (“Dada
est mort, vive dada!”) and the decline of Expressionism (“Die Lage der neuen Kunst”).
These were followed by articles that described the significance of the new dance the
Shimmi (“Die Shimmi greift ein”) and Charlie Chaplin. The magazine’s layout—its
juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated photographs, reproductions of artworks, and
essays—underscore the heterogenous mix of art and culture Der Querschnitt embraced
(figure 2.5). The subtitle of Querschnitt was “Marginalien der Galerie Flechtheim,” and
indeed, Der Querschnitt had evolved from the small, gallery catalogues that Flechtheim
had been publishing in-house since 1913, the so-called “marginalia.”
In a section titled “Urteile über den Querschnitt,” (Judgments of Der Querschnitt)
the journal provided brief reviews that commented on the publication’s timeliness and its
amusing, conversational quality as a welcome contrast to the standard pretentiousness
and partisanship of other art journals. A review from the Düsseldorf Nachrichten noted
that while gallery catalogues have largely disappeared thanks to the luxury tax, in their
61
Erika Esau notes in her essay, “‘The magazine of enduring value’: Der Querschnitt (1921-36) and the
world of illustrated magazines,” that although the editor of Querschnitt, Hermann von Wedderkop,
eventually took a stronger hand in determining the content and layout of the journal, from about 1921 to
1923 the content still mirrored Flechtheim’s own interests. Wedderkop eventually transformed Querschnitt
from a Zeitschrift into a Magazin, that is, from an art periodical into a general interest magazine. See Erika
Esau, “‘The Magazine of Enduring Value’: ‘Der Querschnitt’ (1921-36) and the World of Illustrated
Magazines,” in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, ed. Peter Brooker, vol. 3
(Oxford University Press, 2013).
126
place these informal “Mitteilungen” offer “a publication as interesting as it is amusing.”
62
The Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung praised it for its accessibility, “New pictures and books
are discussed without pointed polemics, mostly by artists themselves. This small journal,
which bears an emphatically Rheinish character, is, already for this reason, to be highly
recommended to all who want to follow the existence of our new art.”
63
Finally, Der
Ararat, the journal of Hans Goltz’s gallery Neue Kunst, commiserated, “I sympathize
with this little journal, because it is compiled completely without timidness and pedantry.
An editor must not be a bureaucrat! A short note of three lines is more important than a
multi-page essay of ten parts. It is more commendable to be amusing than boring. The
editor of Querschnitt appears, thank God, to understand this truism.”
64
Flechtheim did understand how to amuse, and he and his editor Hans von
Wedderkop employed unconventional tactics to market art throughout Querschnitt. Like
many art magazines, the bulk of the material could be said to function as promotion of
the gallery and its artists. Flechtheim announced current and upcoming publications—
books, but especially portfolios—in the journal to generate audience interest in and
anticipation for his upcoming publications, and he took care to emphasize the special
qualities of the luxury portfolios by noting any additional materials that might be
62
“…eine ebenso interessante wie amüsante Publikation.” “Urteile über den ‘Querschnitt,’” Der
Querschnitt, 1, no. 2/3, 1921, p. 108.
63
“Ohne scharfe Polemik wird, meist von Künstlern selbst, über Neuerscheinungen von Bildern und
Büchern geplaudert. Das Heftchen, das einen betonten rheinischen Charakter trägt, sei - gerade deswegen -
jedem sehr empfohlen, der dem Leben unserer neueren Kunst folgen will.” “Urteile über den
‘Querschnitt,’” Der Querschnitt, 1, no. 4/5, 1921, p. 194
64
"Ich sympathisiere mit dieser kleinen Zeitschrift, weil sie ganz ohne Ängstlichkeit und Pedanterie
zusammengestellt ist. Ein Redakteur darf kein Bureaukrat sein! Eine leichte Notiz von drei Zeilen ist
wichtiger als eine mehrseitige Abhandlung von zehn Spalten. Es ist verdienstvoller amüsant zu sein als
langweilig. Die Herausgeber des Querschnitts scheinen gottseidank diese Binsenwahrheiten zu wissen."
Ibid, 194-5.
127
included such as an essay by the artist or a well-known writer or original drawings.
Typically, an article or two would also appear before the portfolio was to be published
that made the case for the work’s or the artist’s significance.
Flechtheim seemed to take a more personal interest in marketing Rudolf
Grossmann’s portfolio Boxer-Mappe (Boxer Portfolio).
65
The September 1921 issue of
Der Querschnitt printed two essays that were also included with all editions of
Grossmann’s portfolio: an excerpt from Hans Breitensträter’s autobiographical “Mein
erster Sieg” (“My First Victory”), offered as the foreword to the Boxer-Mappe, and
Scofield Thayer’s “Gladiators.” The issue also included an essay by von Wedderkop
entitled “Hans Breitensträter,” an account of his and Flechtheim’s meeting with the
German heavyweight champion. But interest obviously went further. In issue 6, two
further articles were published that were ostensibly related to Grossmann’s portfolio, but
referred to it only obliquely. The first was “Wie gewinnt der Boxsport das allgemein-
Interesse?,” (“How will boxing win the general interest?”), followed by “Ist der Boxsport
roh?” (“Is boxing barbarous?”). One picture from the boxing portfolio appeared as
illustration; there was also a portrait painting of Breitensträter and photographs of boxers
in the ring. A note following the first article stated: “Querschnitt considers it its
responsibility to make boxing popular in German artistic circles. In Paris, Braque,
65
Hans Breitensträter was the German heavyweight champion. Scofield Thayer was the editor of the
American publication The Dial.
128
Derain, Dufy, Matisse, Picasso, and Vlaminck are enthusiastic fans, and Rodin hardly
ever misses a match.”
66
Most dealer publications were less idiosyncratic, but they nonetheless reflected
the agendas of their producer in other ways. Neumann’s Bilderhefte (literally picture
volumes), which first appeared in May 1920, is a far less eclectic publication than Der
Querschnitt. Nevertheless, there is an implicit argument in the journal’s layout
concerning the way art should be shown and marketed. An issue of Bilderheft usually
began with a brief introduction to the artist or artists featured in a given issue, but the
remaining pages contained only images uninterrupted by any accompanying text other
than basic label information. Neumann prided himself on his sensitivity to the size and
material of the works he reproduced, often noting details such as a work’s medium and
dimensions. The argument that Neumann implicitly advanced through his Bilderhefte
was that art should be permitted to speak directly to the viewer. The mediating voice of
the dealer, critic, or historian should not dictate viewer response. Only by cultivating a
personal engagement with art among the audience, Neumann believed, would he create a
stable and broad-based foundation of support for his artists and their art.
Neumann introduced the first issue with a brief foreword, “I imagine dealer
catalogues with art historical standing. That is what I am aiming for. That is all that
66
“Der Querschnitt hält es für seine Pflicht, den Boxsport auch in den deutschen Künstlerkreisen popular
zu machen. In Paris sind Braque, Derain, Dufy, Matisse, Picasso, de Vlaminck begeisterte Anhänger, und
Rodin fehlte in kaum einem Kampf.” Ibid, 221.
129
these Bilderhefte have to say in words.”
67
The issue contained no further text, and was
followed by 35 illustrations, including works by Beckmann. The following issues were
in similar format, with introductory cover text that introduced the issue and listed the
content of previous issues, followed by pages of reproductions. Although paintings,
watercolor, and sculpture made an occasional appearance, reproductions of graphic works
dominated each issue. In part this reflected the fact that graphic works were what
Neumann primarily dealt, and indeed, nearly all of the works he reproduced were
available through or on sale at his gallery. But the format also favored graphics—printed
works were made for reproduction, and they did not suffer the compromises in
reproduction that occurred with paintings and sculpture, which were diminished by the
black and white photograph and the reduced format of a small hand-held publication.
Piper, although not a dealer in the traditional sense, did direct his press toward
artistic ends. He became one of the most prominent publishers of prints and progressive
art books beginning in the immediate pre-war period. He first became well known
among artists and dealers as the publisher of Der Blaue Reiter, famously known as the
Almanac. He also published Kandinsky’s Über das Geistige in der Kunst and Klänge,
68
67
"Ich kann mir Kunsthändlerkataloge mit Kunstgeschichtsrang denken. – Solche strebe ich an. – Das ist
alles, was diese Bilderhefte in Worten zu sagen haben." J.B. Neumanns Bilderhefte. (Berlin: Verlag
Graphisches Kabinett, n.d.), no. 1, May 1920, unpaginated.
68
Klaus Lankheit, a scholar of the Blaue Reiter, credits Piper with certain features of the Almanac. Piper,
he notes, contributed plates he had made for Wilhelm Worringer’s Altdeutsche Buchillustration, as well as
old German prints from his own collection and photos of Etruscan and Romanesque sculptures for the
illustrations. He also advised both Kandinsky and Marc to “enrich” the Almanac with reproductions of
works by Gauguin, van Gogh, and Matisse, and ultimately rejected the use of “Almanac” in the title,
requesting that Kandinsky remove the word from the woodblock used for the print on the cover. However,
as Lankheit points out, Piper, although willing to take the “moral risk” of having his press associated with
the progressive project was not willing to accept financial risk—in other words, the role of the publisher
did not extend to patronage. Kandinsky and Marc, therefore, had to find 3000 Marks to cover printing and
130
as well as Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraktion und Einfühlung after its initial limited
dissertation printing in 1908. In his memoirs, he insists that one of his motivations for
beginning his own publishing house was to help those unknown poets and artists “no one
yet recognized, or whom the lethargic public resisted,” become successful.
69
He also
relates with pride his encounters and friendships with artists including Franz Marc, Paul
Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Alfred Kubin, and Max Beckmann.
The so-called “Kunstprogramm” (art program) of the Piper Verlag (Piper Press),
which included art books, facsimile prints, and original graphics, was a major focus of
the press in its early years, reaching its peak in 1923 and 1924, when art publications
constituted 21 of the 23 new publications for that year. Edda Ziegler characterizes the
Kunstprogramm’s “recipe for success” as follows: “Innovation through a concentration
on the art of the present, the highest standards of quality in illustrations and art
prints…united by the founding principle of enabling access to original graphics among a
broader public.”
70
Piper continued to forward the cause of the arts when he teamed up
with Julius-Meier-Graefe to found the Marées-Gesellschaft (Marées Society). Named
images. The majority was borne by Bernhard Koehler, the uncle of August Macke's wife Elisabeth; an
additional 500 Marks was donated by Marc's father-in-law. See Klaus Lankheit, “A History of the
Almanac,” in Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and Klaus Lankheit, eds., The Blaue Reiter Almanac (New
York: Viking Press, 1974). Andreas Meier highlights the more contentious nature of the relationship
between the artists and their publisher; the opinions of Kandinsky and Marc expressed in their letters
ranged from frustrated to favorable; at one point Marc refers to Piper as a “Setzerlehrling”—a typesetter’s
apprentice, that is, an amateur—while Kandinksy later calls his press “die feinste Firma” (the finest firm).
He notes that Kandinksy also had to bear the production costs of Über das Geistige in der Kunst. See
Andreas Meier, “Das Umfeld des Verlegers: Reinhard Piper und der ‘Blaue Reiter’,” in Der Blaue Reiter,
ed. Hans Christoph von Tavel (Bern: Kunstmuseum Bern, 1986), 227–237.
69
Piper, Mein Leben als Verleger, 180.
70
“Innovation durch Konzentration auf die Gegenwartskunst, höchste Qualitätsstandards für Abbildungen
und Kunstdrucke und deshalb bei Mappenwerken und Einzelblättern zunächst Beschränkung auf die -
technisch einfachere und authentischere - Reproduktion von Graphik; das Ganze auf der Grundidee, einem
breiten Publikum den Kauf von Originalgraphik und guten Kunstreproduktion zu ermöglichen." In Edda
Ziegler, 100 Jahre Piper, Die Geschichte eines Verlags (Munich: Piper Verlag, 2004), 52.
131
after Hans von Marées, a then-obscure nineteenth-century German artist championed by
both Piper and Meier-Graefe,
71
the Gesellschaft was conceived as a cultural venture to
publish the works of not only Marées but also other artists, including contemporary
painters and printmakers. The Gesellschaft published facsimile editions as well as works
that qualified as fine art objects such as original illustrated books and print portfolios.
Piper claims credit for the beginnings of the Marées-Gesellschaft in his
autobiography, but although Piper may have provided the impetus for the project, the
ideas of Meier-Graefe—particularly the selection of facsimile prints and publications—
were obviously a guiding influence.
72
The catalogue of the Gesellschaft included not
only established masters such as Rembrandt and Dürer, but also prominently featured less
recognized artists that Meier-Graefe had promoted as seminal links in his teleological
chain of modernism—artists such as el Greco, Manet, Cézanne, and, of course, Hans von
Marées. Also decisive were Meier-Graefe’s connections and early experience with the
journal Pan. Rather than electing a board—a factor that had forced Meier-Graefe out of
the editorship of Pan—Piper and Meier-Graefe elected to have subscribers named
members of the Gesellschaft through the Verein der Freunde der Marées-Gesellschaft
(Friends of the Marées Society). These members would receive an annual Jahrbuch, as
well as a selection of the facsimile reproductions and original graphics of the
71
Marées featured prominently in Meier-Graefe’s seminal Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Malerei.
Piper also convinced Meier-Graefe to write a monograph on the artist, a work which eventually ballooned
to three volumes (it consisted of a biography, an oeuvre catalogue, and a collection of earlier articles and
published observations about the artist), which the Piper Verlag first published in 1909.
72
Kenworth Moffett gives all the credit for the Marées Gesellschaft to Meier-Graefe, calling Piper only the
publisher. Piper foregrounds his own role in Mein Leben, although it remains clear that Meier-Graefe
played a major role in determining the artistic program and agenda of the Gesellschaft. See Kenworth
Moffett, Meier-Graefe as Art Critic (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1973), 121–123.
132
Gesellschaft. Their subscription fees were directed toward, among other things, financial
support for young artists. This arrangement offered contributors a sense of importance
without forcing Piper or Meier-Graefe to relinquish any decision-making power.
Plans for the Marées Gesellschaft were laid in 1913 but the war delayed any
official announcements until 1916.
73
The prospect promised exquisite (köstlich) objects
to Gesellschaft subscribers, items difficult to produce and procure in time of war. The
timing was perfect; many still had disposable income, but the scarcity of imports and the
general focus of the domestic market on war production meant that the actual supply of
luxury goods was quite limited, and demand high. Piper noted that after the initial
stagnation of the market in 1914, the public gradually turned to books and luxury
publications again: “One could buy little else! Why then not books and pictures?”
74
After only a week, preorder subscriptions reached around 40,000 Marks. The first four
imprints of the Marées-Gesellschaft appeared in winter 1917. In all, the Gesellschaft
published thirty-four portfolios and thirteen books with original illustrations between
1917 and 1929, as well as publishing a journal for subscribers, Ganymed, from 1919 to
1924.
Although these catalogues did much to expand the audience of these galleries and
disseminated the works of their artists to a far larger circle of potential collectors than
would have otherwise been possible, their scale should not be overstated. The first
volume of Der Querschnitt appeared in an edition of only 400. Neumann’s Bilderhefte
73
Publication was delayed after Meier-Graefe volunteered to work for the Red Cross at the beginning of
the war. He was captured in Russia and sent to Siberia as a prisoner of war. He returned to Germany in a
prisoner exchange in 1916.
74
Hall, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art, 139.
133
had a similarly modest run. However, there was commercial sense in limiting the edition
of these journals that went beyond keeping costs low. Flechtheim, for instance, published
the size of the run on the inside jacket of his journal as well as the edition number of a
given issue to give it collector’s status—a practice that was standard in the issuing of
print portfolios.
75
To enhance the value of the journal as collector’s item, Flechtheim
also included an original woodcut by Frans Masereel facing the title page of the 1921
bound issue (a woodcut by Masereel also opened the 1923 bound issue). Offering these
amenities to collectors was not an uncommon practice. The dealer journal was a means
of expanding a gallery’s community of supporters, but it also constituted that sense of
community among those supporters. By emphasizing in small ways the exclusivity of the
journal, dealers strengthened the sense of cohesiveness among supporters of progressive
art.
These journals could also be products of necessity. As one of the commentators
reviewing Der Querschnitt noted, magazines and journals largely replaced standard-issue
gallery catalogues, which were scaled back due to the luxury tax. In addition, paper
shortages made publishing in general more uncertain. Most of these publications
appeared at inconsistent intervals; sometimes promised publications failed to materialize.
In the first issue of Bilderhefte, published in May 1920, a statement followed the list of
upcoming woodcuts, etchings, and lithographs that were to be published by the
Graphisches Kabinett printed on the inside front cover: “Some of these works will be
75
The edition number of the first volume (1921) of Der Querschnitt owned by the Getty Research Institute
is 348/400. Volume two (1922) is 111/400.
134
reproduced in the Bilderhefte. Because of paper shortage, no special prospects will
appear.”
76
In the first issue of Der Querschnitt from 1922, Flechtheim and Wilhelm Graf
Kielmansegg (listed, along with Flechtheim and von Wedderkop as one of the editors)
published the following statement:
Your entreaties, dear Reader of Querschnitt, causes us to continue to bring
out this publication; we do it reluctantly, because it costs us time and
money. It will appear irregularly and only when there is something to say.
It will continue to include articles on art, dancing, sport, etc; it will say
less about acting and film because enough is already said on these topics
in the daily paper. We will keep the price of Querschnitt as low as
possible, because we don’t want to be seen as trying to milk profits from
its sale [da wir ihn nicht als Milchkuh betrachten].
77
The articles in the issues following this statement were printed in tiny font with reduced
illustrations, underscoring the message that desperate times called for concessions, but
also signaling to readers that Querschnitt was not one of those luxury quarterlies that
appealed only to an elite audience, but rather, a scrappy publication kept alive by the
passion of its reading public.
Publishing and Partisanship
76
“Ein Teil der neuen Verlagswerke wird in diesen Bilderheften reproduziert werden. Aus Papiermangel
können keine Sonderprospekte erscheinen." J.B. Neumanns Bilderhefte, no 1, May 1920, unpaginated.
Demand for paper was heavy throughout the inflationary decade and supply was sometimes inconsistent.
The cost of paper itself, which rose dramatically during this period, is another likely reason for this
“shortage.” The ever-rising cost of materials was a primary reason for the failure of many new publications
during the early Weimar period. See Wilhelm Marckwardt, Die Illustrierten der Weimarer Zeit:
Publizistische Funktion, ökonomische Entwicklung und inhaltliche Tendenzen, Minerva-Fachserie
Geisteswissenschaften (Munich: Minerva Publikation, 1982).
77
“Inständige Bitten verständiger Leser des ‘Querschnitts’ veranlassen uns, denselben weiter
herauszugeben; wir tun es ungern, da er uns Zeit und Geld kostet. Er wird unregelmäßig erscheinen und
nur dann, wenn etwas zu sagen ist. Er wird Aufsätze über Kunst bringen, über Tanzen und Sport und so
weiter; über Schauspielerei und Film wird er wenig sagen, da hierüber schon genug in den Tageszeitungen
erscheint. Den Preis des ‘Querschnitts werden wir niedrigst bemessen, da wir ihn nicht als Milchkuh
betrachten.” Der Querschnitt, vol, 2, no. 1 (March, 1922), 13.
135
Dealers of “young” German art following Cassirer often described their
professional activities using martial metaphors, portraying their "struggle" for new art as
a battle for the cultural and spiritual life of the nation. They also characterized
themselves as an embattled group, one that would have to invest in a long and difficult
fight for recognition if they were to succeed. This feeling of isolation and
marginalization gave them a sense of solidarity with their artists, but it also made them
aware of their need to convince the public of the legitimacy of the artists and aesthetic
trends they represented. While progressive artists could remain somewhat marginalized,
even boast of their isolated status, for dealers it was not professionally feasible to
romanticize ostracism. They had to make a case for themselves and their artists, which
they did, in part, through journals and other publications.
But dealers, like artists, could also turn their defensive feelings as a maligned
minority, as well as the vehicles they used to address this status, toward other ends, and
their desire to transform the cultural status quo could be easily extended toward more
ambitious goals. The timing could not have been better; the dealer’s new sense of self as
history-maker was given urgent purpose during and after World War I. The extreme
experiences of the years between 1914 and 1919, which encompassed war, defeat and
revolution, gave both artists and dealers the opportunity to explore a more expansive
social role for their art as well as reconsider their own responsibility in shaping society.
This exploration often took place in print or was facilitated by access to the printing
press.
136
I have already discussed how Cassirer's Kriegszeit and later Der Bildermann
represented the intersection of the dealer's political beliefs with his professional practices
as publisher and art promoter. But other dealer publications offered a more aggressive
political and social agenda. Particularly during the war and immediately after, when
revolutionary turmoil made the stakes of any cultural pursuit seem more profound and
potentially transformative, some dealers and publishers turned their publications into
platforms for their agendas and beliefs. Indeed, the rhetoric of both word and image rose
to a fever pitch beginning with the end of the war and leading through the Revolution.
While some would turn their attentions back to practical matters after the political turmoil
subsided, others, such as Wieland Herzfelde, continued their work as members of the
oppositional press to agitate for revolutionary change.
Prints were the media of the November Revolution, and graphics offered a visual
narrative that critiqued events on the street and charted the constantly shifting political
landscape and its warring factions.
78
As artists lent their skills to various political and
ideological causes, their choice of medium, often lithography or woodcut, underscored
their populist intentions. Artists created graphic works for posters and broadsheets that
were plastered throughout German cities, especially Berlin, or which decorated illustrated
political pamphlets. These works often demonstrated their willingness to participate in
mobilizing the masses in favor of progressive (i.e. Socialist) to radical (Spartacist)
political causes. Other publications were aimed directly at artists, calling them to join
78
Although scholars such as Joan Weinstein have analyzed the activities of artists and dealers during this
period in detail, little has been said about the significance of medium. See Joan Weinstein, The End of
Expressionism: Art and the November Revolution in Germany, 1918-19 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1990).
137
together on artists committees such as the Arbeitsrat für Kunst (Working Council for
Art), or called for the creative class to lend its talents to the cause of the proletariat in
order to build a better society.
Before Neumann began publishing the Bilderhefte, he was involved with the
progressive art magazine Der Anbruch (Beginning or Advent), already in its second year
when the dealer’s name was added to the masthead as editor. The first article to appear
under his leadership was Ludwig Meidner’s revolutionary call, “An alle Künstler,
Dichter, Musiker.” (“To all Artists, Poets, Musicians”). The essay was an appeal to
artists to join ranks with the working class and place their art in the service of a socialist
ideology. Not only did Meidner urge artists to “unite with the poor in holy solidarity!,”
79
but he also argued that artists had a special duty to do so: “Painters, poets…..[sic] who
else but we should struggle for the righteous cause?! The conscience of the world still
beats powerfully in us.”
80
Neumann did not share Meidner’s radical views. After all, the artist attacked
those bourgeois collectors who were the dealer’s most reliable clientele: “Painters,
architects, sculptors to whom the bourgeoisie pays high wages for your work…listen: it is
an unclean profit…We no longer want to be clowns for the good digestion [gute
Verdauung] of rich fools, snobs and fanfarons!”
81
Yet Neumann’s activities during the
79
“Uns Maler und Dichter verbinde mit dem Armen eine heilige Solidarität!” Ludwig Meidner, “An alle
Künstler!,” Der Anbruch 2, no. 1 (January 1919): 48.
80
“Maler, Dichter. . . . .[sic] wer sonst sollte für die gerechte Sache kämpfen als wir?! In uns pocht noch
mächtig das Weltgewissen.” Ibid.
81
“Maler Baukünstler, Skulptoren, denen der Bourgeois hohe Löhne für eure Werke zahlt…höret: das ist
ein unreinlicher Gewinn… Wir wollen keine Spaßmacher mehr sein für die gute Verdauung der reichen
Naaren, Snobs und Fanfarons!” Ibid.
138
revolutionary months suggest that he did try to find a means of bringing together artists
and audience that honored the spirit of the social changes that were taking place around
him without making his profession obsolete. Neumann became, as Joan Weinstein
argues, “The art promoter in Berlin most closely identified with the revolution.”
82
His
Graphisches Kabinett hosted two of the more significant art exhibitions of this period: the
first Dada artists’ evening and the Exhibition of Unknown Architects. Moreover,
Neumann’s support of these trends did precede the Revolution; he had hosted the first
“Autorenabend” (authors’ evening) that Wieland Herzfelde organized through the Neue
Jugend in September 1916, as well as two others in 1916 and 1917.
83
Neumann wrote and published a pamphlet in March 1919 that suggests his
activities and attitudes were more than opportunistic posturing. In it, he articulated a
political position more clearly and forcefully than anywhere before or after. It began, “In
the new unity of all arts with…a free socialist society the preconditions for a new human
culture must be created.”
84
It continued: “What has been announcing itself for decades
becomes apparent in modern art: the unity of thought and action [Handeln]. The work of
J.B. Neumann’s Graphisches Kabinett should have been led from the beginning in this
spirit.”
85
Neumann thus tried to align his professional practices with the more optimistic
ideological impulses of the moment without writing himself out of the picture. He
82
Weinstein, The End of Expressionism, 49.
83
Ulrich Faure, Im Knotenpunkt des Weltverkehrs: Herzfelde, Heartfield, Grosz und der Malik-Verlag;
1916-1947 (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1992), 48.
84
“Im neuen Bunde aller Künste mit einer…freien sozialistischen Gesellschaft müssen die Vorbedingungen
einer neuen Menschheitskultur geschaffen werden.” Neumann, “Im neuen Bunde.”
85
“Was sich seit Jahrzehnten angekündigt hat, wird offenbar in der modernen Kunst: die Einheit des
Denkens und Handelns. In diesem Geiste sollte von Anfang an die Arbeit des graphischen Kabinetts J.B.
Neumann geführt werden.” Ibid.
139
concluded: “Artists ‘belong’ neither to me nor to other art dealers…but to humanity.
Exhibitions, book sales, lecture evenings, gatherings, concerts, pamphlets should help to
create [mitschaffen] what to us all, to the mental and physical victims during these years
of murder, has become duty and movement [Pflicht und Sendung].”
86
Therefore, the
dealer and his activities—organizing exhibitions, gatherings, concerts, and lecture
evenings, arranging booksales and publishing pamphlets—were a necessary supplement
to the activities of the artist—mitschaffen means literally to co-create. By emphasizing
the dealer as more than a middleman or money maker, and by stressing the fact that an
artist does not belong to him, but “‘belongs’…to humanity,” a position not all that far
from Meidner’s in “An alle Künstler,” the dealer could be the mediator who brought
together artists and audience and helped both realize a better world through culture.
For Wieland Herzfelde, publishing itself was a political act, and under certain
circumstances, punishment and persecution proved the sincerity of one’s ideological
convictions. The narrative Herzfelde created of his earliest years as a writer and
publisher of the nascent Malik Verlag emphasize the obstacles he had to overcome to
establish his periodicals, which included not only money troubles, but also the evasion of
wartime censors and emergency laws against freedom of the press, as well as the
repression and confiscation of his publications, charges of indecency, and even
incarceration.
86
“Die Künstler ‘gehören’ weder mir noch anderen Kunsthändlern…sondern der Menschheit.
Ausstellungen, Buchhandel, Vortragsabende, Versammlungen, Konzerte, Flugschriften sollen mitschaffen
helfen, was uns allen den seelischen u. leiblichen Opfern während dieser Mordjahre Pflict und Sendung
geworden ist.” Ibid.
140
Herzfelde turned the most harrowing experience—his two-week detainment
during a violent period of the revolution—into material for a pamphlet entitled Schutzhaft
(protective custody). The cover featured a drawing by Grosz that depicted a figure
similar in appearance to Herzfelde, with a large, bloodied head wound, defiant stare and
set jaw (figure 2.6). The brochure’s subtitle, “Experiences with the Berlin Security
Troops from March 7 – 20, 1919,” and a statement in the afterword emphasize that the
“Goal of this brochure is to expose the true nature [Wesen] of the concept of order
[Ordnung].” To that end, Herzfelde promised, “[to] put value on remaining completely
objective in this report.” The pamphlet appeared in the place of the second issue of Die
Pleite, “the compilation of which,” Herzfelde explained on the inside cover, “could not
be completed because of my detainment, [infolge meiner Schutzhaft].”
87
The account
begins on the evening of March 7
th
, when Herzfelde was visited by armed soldiers and
confronted with a product of his press, the recently published newspaper, Jedermann sein
eigner Fußball (Everyone his own Soccerball) (figure 2.7). Asked only, “Are you the
editor?,” he was then taken to the Eden Hotel, the notorious interrogation and temporary
detainment facility of the Freikorps, without charge.
88
During his detention, Herzfelde
reports that he witnessed fatal beatings and had his life threatened on multiple occasions.
In one instance, his confiscated journals sat on a table nearby while he stood among his
fellow inmates. As Freikorps soldiers leafed through the issues of Jedermann and Neue
87
“Diese Broschüre erscheint statt Nr. 2 der Halbmonatschrift ‘Die Pleite’ deren Redaktion infolge meiner
Schutzhaft nicht abgeschlossen werden konnte.” Wieland Herzfelde, “Schutzhaft. Erlebnisse vom 7. bis
20. März 1919 bei den Berliner Ordnungstruppen” (Malik-Verlag, March 1919), 2.
88
The soldiers also confiscated “200 to 300 issues [Exemplare] of the newspaper, as well as 100 special
prints on Bütten paper, more posters…an original drawing and outdated press correspondence [Verlagspost
aus früherer Zeit],” as well as one of each issue of the Neue Jugend published between 1916 and 1917.
141
Jugend, they became increasingly agitated and threatened to use the editor himself as the
soccer ball on the cover “until his hearing and sight go and he could no longer make it out
of prison.”
89
Herzfelde was protected by the fact that these soldiers had no idea who he
was, and remarks that his publications actually served the purpose of distracting the
soldiers, who would otherwise have continued to beat and abuse the prisoners before
them.
Herzfelde was, however, used to punitive attention from the authorities. Each
issue of Neue Jugend had been confiscated and banned. Nor was it his last encounter
with the Weimar censors. The authorities continued to seize his publications—
particularly Grosz’s drawings and portfolios—and he received punishment—usually fines
with the threat of jail time—for them. In 1920, both he and Grosz were put on trial in
criminal court for the display of Grosz’s portfolio Gott mit uns at the First International
Dada Fair. Grosz and Herzfelde shared responsibility for the offending material, the
former as creator, the latter as the publisher. The judge’s ruling weighed more heavily on
Herzfelde than it did on Grosz; the publisher was forced to pay a 600 Mark penalty,
double what Grosz was fined, and plates from the offending portfolio were confiscated
and publication rights given to the Reichswehr ministry.
90
In 1923, the authorities again
moved against a Malik/Grosz portfolio, confiscating all unsold copies of Ecce homo.
Grosz and Herzfelde, along with Julian Gumpertz, who also worked for the Malik Verlag,
were put on trial in February 1924, and charged with publishing obscene material. All
89
“…werde mit ihm Fußball gespielt, bis ihm Hören und Sehen verging und er nicht mehr aus dem
Gefängnis herauskäme.” Herzfelde, “Schutzhaft,” 8.
90
This means that because Herzfelde no longer held the rights, any future publication and sale of the
portfolio would be illegal.
142
defendants were ultimately found guilty and fined 500 Marks each. Again, the plates
were confiscated, along with all remaining copies.
This notoriety ultimately helped increase the profiles of Grosz, Herzfelde and the
Malik Verlag and confirmed their subversive credentials. The authorities’ attacks also
confirmed the political position of the press as anti-government and radical, and affirmed
one of its consistent critiques of the collusion between governmental and police powers
and the ways that institutional structures were aligned against the interests of the working
class. It was not an accident that Herzfelde would later relate these stories with pride.
For his intended audience they demonstrated his—and Grosz’s—commitment to their
cause.
Such notoriety, however, was not as valuable for other dealers. Karl Nierendorf,
for instance, did not seek out scandal as Herzfelde did. Although he did stand with Dix
on those occasions when his work received official reprimand, he tried to steer his artist
clear of any controversy he did not think it worthwhile to court. In July 1924, he wrote
the artist concerning Der Krieg:
I am advised from all sides not to publish Soldier and Nun and Soldier and
Whore in [Der Krieg]. It would be too bad for the beautiful plates, which
do really belong in it. But one risks the confiscation and destruction of the
prints [Einstampfung]. W[ieland] Herzfelde spent one month in prison
because of the ‘beautification’ of Ebert in Pleite.”
91
91
“Man rät mir von allen Seiten die 2 Blätter ‘Soldat u Nonne’ ‘Soldat u Hure’ nicht in der Mappe zu
veröffentlichen, sondern als Einzeldruck herauszubringen. Es wäre schade um die schönen Platten, die
doch eigentlich dazu gehören. Aber man riskiert Beschlagnahme und Einstampfung. W. Herzfelde hat 1
Monat Gefängnis wegen Verschönerung von Ebert in ‘Pleite.’” Karl Nierendorf to Otto Dix, postcard, July
1924, Dix Nachlass, I.C.524f, GNM. The “Verschönerung” or “beautification” that Nierendorf refers to
here is actually from the cover of Jedermann sein eigener Fußball, which included a mock “beauty” contest
featuring photos of figures from government (including Friedrich Ebert) and the military pasted on a fan
143
For Nierendorf, then, Herzfelde’s experience was cautionary. He did not want to attract
the same kind of attention for Dix’s work that Herzfelde attracted for Grosz’s portfolios.
Such attention would hurt his business, and Dix’s sales. He emphasized again in another
letter that publishing these two plates with the rest of the portfolio meant putting the
entire work at risk: “your representation of the war in itself is a slap in the face for
everyone who celebrates our ‘heroes’ during the anniversary week and who overflow
with fighting spirit and recklessness.”
92
The portfolio was already a lightning rod for
controversy. Why make it worse? In his promotion efforts, Nierendorf had tried to keep
Der Krieg in the context of an antiwar statement. But prints such as Soldier and Whore
threatened to alienate those sympathetic to a more general pacifist message. He wonders,
”Isn’t it possible to concentrate the entire work just on the war and bring out the sheets
involving life behind the front lines [Etappe] separately?”
93
Thus, Nierendorf tried to
walk a fine line between provocation and propriety, or risk losing his audience.
Creation, Cooperation, and Control
In Mein Leben als Verleger, Piper emphasizes that the Marées Gesellschaft was
responsible for the production and promotion of new art: “The Marées-Gesellschaft did
with the headline “Wer ist der Schönste?” (Who is the most beautiful?). Herzfelde is detained for
publishing Jedermann, which he details in the previously-discussed pamphlet, “Schutzhaft.”
92
“...deine Darstellung des Krieges an sich ein Schlag ins Gesicht ist für alle, die in der Jubiläums-Woche
unsere ‘Helden’ feiern und von Kampfeist und Draufgängertum überströmen. ” Karl Nierendorf to Otto
Dix, July 17, 1924, Dix Nachlass, I.C.524f, GNM. The “Jubiläums-Woche” refers to the 10-year
anniversary of the beginning of war, which was to be celebrated sometime in August 1924. The event was
a magnet for both pro- and anti-war forces to rally around their cause. Nierendorf was interested in
drawing the attention of the various anti-war groups to Der Krieg, and advertised the portfolio among them.
93
“Ist es nicht möglich, das ganze Werk nur auf den Krieg zu konzentrieren und die Blätter der Etappe
gesondert zu bringen? ” Ibid.
144
not confine itself to the reproduction of the already available. It also brought art into
being by giving the artist a commission to create graphic works in fixed and unified
graphic cycles or to illustrate works of world literature with woodcuts, lithos, or etchings,
which were printed in the text.”
94
He cites the Beckmann portfolios Gesichter and
Jahrmarkt as instances of bringing new art into being, thus taking some responsibility for
the works’ conception and creation. The message is clear: without the Gesellschaft, these
works would not exist. Piper and Meier-Graefe are owed some credit for their creation.
Indeed, prints helped marry artist and dealer identities by associating both with
the same creative act. A dealer’s name was more closely affiliated with the prints he
published than with any paintings or sculpture he sold. He also frequently appeared in
advertisements, prospects, and on the title pages of portfolios as the publisher or printer,
his name listed just under that of the artist. Just as publication offered the dealer
visibility, the absence of a written record meant erasure from the (art) historical record.
Neumann, for instance, remarks in his memoirs that he has never been credited with two
early achievements—staging the first Brücke exhibition and giving Lionel Feininger his
first one-man show—because he could not afford to print catalogues.
95
There were, however, many complications associated with the joint production
and ownership of artworks. For instance, dealers and publishers often retained control of
the printing plate or lithographic stone, and so had control over the edition. Oftentimes,
94
“Die Marées-Gesellschaft beschränkte sich aber nicht auf die Wiedergabe von schon Vorhandenen. Sie
rief auch Kunst hervor, indem sie Künstlern die Aufgabe stellte, graphische Blätter in bestimmten
geschlossenen Zyklen zu schaffen oder Dichtungen der Weltliteratur mit Holzschnitten, Lithos oder
Radierungen, die in den Text eingedruckt wurden, zu illustrieren.” Piper, Mein Leben als Verleger, 375.
95
Neumann, “Miracles? Mostly Minor,” in “Confessions of an Art Dealer,” 14. Neumann, II.B.1a-b.
MoMA Archives, NY..
145
they also owned the reproduction rights to a given work or set of works, and thus could
decide where and when reproductions of a given print or portfolio would appear.
The battles between Neumann and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner over the right to
reproduce the latter’s graphic works illustrate these tensions. The artist was particularly
protective of his art; he retained copyright on all his prints, and often refused
reproduction requests, requested substantial fees for the right to reproduce, and/or
insisted on seeing trial proofs of a publication before it appeared. He was also very
cautious about where and how his works were to be reproduced, carefully considering not
only the publication, but also the size and appearance of reproductions as well as the
paper and ink. Because he was wary of cheapening his prints through reproduction—he
worried that if the reproduction was too similar in appearance to the original work, it
would serve as a substitute and devalue the original—he tended to agree to their
reproduction only when the goal was to make his work more widely known among an
unfamiliar audience (such as in America), or when the publication itself could be made
into a kind of luxury item that counted as an objet d’art (as the correspondence over his
oeuvre catalogue suggests).
The first battle occurred in 1919, when Neumann published Kirchner’s woodcut
Schuh anziehendes Mädchen (Girl putting on a shoe) in an advertising prospect for his
journal Der Anbruch. In a letter dated 16 October, Kirchner reminded Neumann that “I
once again draw your attention to the fact that the permission for reproduction of my
146
works is only to be received from me.”
96
He would later request 2000 Marks for the
right to reproduce this work, a very high sum even when one considers the effects of
inflation.
97
This issue again came up in 1926; Kirchner agreed to let Neumann publish
two photos of new works (probably paintings) in his publication Artlover, but, he
emphasized, “Permission applies only in this case and only for America.”
98
Little more
than a month later, Kirchner was informing Neumann that “if your publication is
distributed in Europe, and with it, in Germany, you are not permitted to publish my
pictures in it and I request the return of the unprinted photos immediately otherwise each
illustration costs 100 Mk and the printing plate must be delivered after the printing.”
99
In
1921, Kirchner even brought a lawsuit against Neumann to expose what he called the
latter’s “Unsauberkeit” (literally “uncleanliness”). In a letter to Gustav Schiefler, the
author of Kirchner’s oeuvre catalogue, Kirchner stated, “He claims to be my benefactor.
Just imagine this gentleman, who unscrupulously exploits for business purposes two
plates that he bought at that time for 60 Mk. If they were good, I would not have wanted
96
“Ich mache Sie erneut darauf aufmerksam, daß die Erlaubnis zur Reproduktion meiner Arbeiten nur von
mir zu erhalten ist.” Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Gustav Schiefler, Briefwechsel, 1910-1935/1938: Ernst
Ludwig Kirchner, Gustav Schiefler, ed. Wolfgang Henze (Stuttgart: Belser, 1990), 140, letter 126. It
appears that Kirchner was also considering Neumann as a potential publisher for the oeuvre catalogue of
his graphic work, but ultimately decided not to go with the dealer because he did not trust Neumann to let
him and Schiefler (the author) retain creative control.
97
He requested the same fee for any additional reproductions (Neumann had asked him for the right to
reproduce other prints directly in Der Anbruch), and also stipulated that the works to be reproduced would
be selected by him. These were particularly onerous conditions. See Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Der gesamte
Briefwechsel, ed. Hans Delfs (Zu#rich: Scheidegger und Spiess, 2010), 416, letter 817.
98
“Die Erlaubnis gilt nur für diesen Fall und nur für Amerika.” Ibid., 1048, letter 1705.
99
“wenn Ihre Zeitschrift in Europa verbreitet wird und damit in Deutschland, so dürfen Sie meine Bilder
nicht darin bringen und bitte ich um Rücksendung der unclichierten Photos sofort jede Abbildung kostet
sonst 100 Mk und das Clichée muss nach dem Druck ausgeliefert werden.” Ibid., 1067, letter 1726.
147
to say anything, but they are mediocre works, which now are thrown en masse into the
public.”
100
Print dealers like Neumann did attempt to gain control over entire graphic
oeuvres, and thus keep their names and professional identities inseparable from their
artists’ outputs. Remarking on Neumann’s desire to represent “mein ganzes Werk mit
allen Platten” (“my entire production with all plates”) Kirchner declared his resistance to
this arrangement: “I must be free, and every commitment constrains artistic creation.”
101
Neumann was able to claim more control over Beckmann’s graphic production by
publishing many of the artist’s portfolios and prints himself, but he was unable to secure
an exclusive contract, and Beckmann was free to produce works for other dealers and
publishers. When Beckmann created prints and portfolios for Peter Zingler and Reinhard
Piper, for example, Neumann countered by offering to buy up these works, as his
announcement in the first special Max Beckmann edition of the Bilderheft suggests.
102
He also, it appears, asked Beckmann to either stop making prints for competitors or,
conversely, to provide more printed works for him to market. He may even have
100
“Er behauptet, mein ‘Wohltäter’ zu sein. Denken Sie, dieser Herr, der skrupellos 2 Platten, die er
seinerzeit für 60 Mk kaufte, geschäftlich ausnutzt. Wenn sie noch gut wären, wollte ich nichts sagen, aber
es sind mittelmäßige Arbeiten, die nun in Massen ins Volk geschleudert werden.” Kirchner and Schiefler,
Briefwechsel: 1910-1935/1938, 181, letter 158. The works he refers to are the previously mentioned Schuh
anziehendes Mädchen (also titled Frau Schuh zuknöpfend”) and the etching Erna und Gewecke, which was
unsigned and was published in an unknown edition size by Neumann in 1913. It is unclear from the letter
why he initiated the lawsuit when he did—the Anbruch prospect, for instance, appeared in 1919—but in a
letter from 1923, nearly two years later, he mentions that the lawsuit appears to be ending “mit Vergleich,”
that is, with a compromise.
101
“Ich muß frei sein, und jede Bindung hemmt das künstlerische Schaffen.” Ibid., 117, letter 105.
102
Neumann announced that his gallery was purchasing the portfolio Gesichter, published by Piper and the
Marées Gesellschaft, in the April 1921 issue of Bilderheft.
148
requested that the artist destroy certain prints—referring either to the plates themselves,
or to impressions not yet sold. Beckmann protested,
Concerning the case of Piper, you are also of the opinion that it can only
help [stützen] our business. But to entirely break off [loszureißen] from
my work of well-thought out individual pieces is not acceptable. I’m not,
after all, an art-sausage machine [Kunstwurstmashiene], who promptly
turns out another art sausage, rather, I am dependent on mood and
nerves…I also cannot destroy completed works (portfolios or similar
works) for you in principle, because it goes against my artistic
conscience.”
103
Although Beckmann insists he is not some “Kunstwurstmashine,” who can pump
out an “art sausage” at the dealer’s whim, it was not inappropriate or unusual for
Neumann to suggest material for new graphic works. That, as well as selecting prints for
portfolios and books, was a standard part of the publisher’s practice by this time.
Reinhard Piper and Julius Meier-Graefe, for example, made the selection of works for
Beckmann’s portfolio Gesichter (Faces) from a number of prints the artist sent to the
publisher.
104
Meier-Graefe even chose the portfolio’s title, to which Beckmann
responded: “Concerning the title of the portfolio, I happily defer to your expert
knowledge. I find ‘Gesichter’ very good as well.”
105
The artist, however, pushed back
on other suggestions. He informed Piper that he did not want to include any of his works
103
“Was den Fall Piper anbelangt so sind Sie ja auch der Meinung, dass es unsere Sache nur stützen kann.
Aus einer ganzen von mir durchdachten Arbeit einzelne Stücke aber loszureißen geht nich an. Ich bin
schließlich keine Kunstwurstmashiene, die prompt eine neue Wurst macht, sondern auch von Stimmung
und Nerven abhängig…Einmal abgeschlossene Arbeiten (Mappenwerke oder so etwas) kann ich im
Pri[n]zip auch nicht für sie zerreißen, da es gegen mein künstlerisches Gewissen geht.” Although we do not
have Neumann’s preceding letter to Beckmann, we can make assumptions about what the dealer requested
based on Beckmann’s response here. See Max Beckmann, Max Beckmann, Briefe 1. Band I: 1899 - 1925,
ed. Uwe M. Schneede (München: Piper Verlag, 1993), Letter 212, 207.
104
Beckmann sent at least two batches of prints and drawings to Piper, one in March and another in June
1917, from which the plates for Gesichter were chosen. See Ibid., Letters 153 and 159; pp. 159, 163–4.
105
“Was den Titel der Mappe anbelangt, füge ich mich gern Ihrer größeren Erfahrung. Auch ich finde
‘Gesichter’ sehr gut.” Letter 172, Ibid., 176.
149
that referred directly to the war; he felt that those should be published together and would
have their greatest impact once the war was over. “I think that the choice that Meier-
Graefe struck [getroffen hat] in Berlin represents my form very clearly [rein] and the
selection already has enough to do with our times.”
106
A few years later, as Piper
prepared to publish Jahrmarkt (Annual Carnival), his second portfolio with the Marées-
Gesellschaft, Beckmann wrote to the publisher requesting that he forego a foreword: “I
am not very happy with the foreword idea. I would strongly request that you and Meier-
Graefe not do it this time. I have constructed [habe…gedacht] just for this case really
something of a set form and it would be very unpleasant to me if a text preceded it. It is
no longer necessary.”
107
Karl Nierendorf made even more direct suggestions to Otto Dix about the content
of prints and print portfolios he wanted the artist to create. In May of 1922, he wrote,
“Wouldn’t you like to publish a ‘Circus’ portfolio with me, or an illustrated book,
something like the ‘Gesicht der herrschenden Klasse’ [Face of the Ruling Class] by
Grosz?!”
108
What followed was Zirkus (Circus), the first portfolio Dix published with
Nierendorf. Similarly Nierendorf made suggestions that were significant to the
development of Dix’s most important graphic cycle, Der Krieg, which consisted of five
106
“Ich glaube daß die Wahl die Meier Gr. in Berlin getroffen hat meine Form sehr rein repräsentirt und
indirect hat die Auswahl ja schon genug mit unserer Zeit zu tun.” Ibid., Letter 163, 167.
107
“Nicht sehr glücklich bin ich über die Vorword Idee. – Ich möchte Sie und Meier-Gr. dringend bitten,
das dismal nicht zu machen. Ich habe mir für diese Sache wirklich etwas rein Formales gedacht und es
ware mir sehr unangenehm, wenn ein Text vorneweg kommt. Es ist jetzt auch nicht mehr nötig.” Ibid.,
Letter 218, 212.
108
“Wollen Sie nicht mit mir eine Mappe ‘Zirkus’ herausbringen oder ein Bilderbuch, etwa wie das
‘Gesicht der herrschenden Klasse’ von Grosz?!” Letter, Nierendorf to Dix, May 2, 1922, Dix Nachlass,
I.C.524.a, GNM.
150
portfolios that Nierendorf published in 1924.
109
It was during this period, when
Nierendorf was marketing and exhibiting the artist’s work constantly, that the dealer
earned the nickname “Nierendix,” a title that collapsed dealer and artist into a single
entity.
110
Anja Walter-Ris argues that Nierendorf’s contributions to Dix’s creative work
“clearly exceeded the otherwise typical, quite limited influence of art dealers on an
artist’s production and document Nierendorf’s own creative energy...”
111
However, there were limits to the dealer’s persuasive powers. Nierendorf could
only encourage Dix to create works that the artist himself found engaging. In a 1924
letter to Dix, the dealer reports that he showed off the Krieg portfolio to an industrialist
who was looking to commission a progressive artist to create prints illustrating modern
industry. Such a work could, like Der Krieg, serve as a “Dokument der Zeit,” a
document of the times. Anticipating the artist’s objection, and preempting his criticism,
Nierendorf wrote:
You have often said you would gladly work on commission (as the old
Masters also did), but whenever one makes a suggestion, such as to make
another handful of portraits of Nelly [Dix’s daughter], you are ‘moody’
[‘schnüssig’]. In any case, I am of the view that such a generous
opportunity [Angelegenheit] is more important and more artistic than any
book illustration. For small pictures can be created directly from reality
and you need not make accompanying music [Begleitmusik] to other
people’s text.
112
109
Anja Walter-Ris suggests that the idea for the Krieg portfolio originated with Nierendorf. See Anja
Walter-Ris, Die Geschichte der Galerie Nierendorf: Kunstleidenschaft im Dienst der Moderne. Berlin, New
York 1920-1995 (Berlin: Freie Universität, Diss., 2003), 81.
110
Ibid., 111.
111
“…übertraf die sonst übliche, recht geringe Einflußnahme von Kunsthändlern auf das Schaffen eines
Künstlers deutlich und dokumentiert Nierendorfs eigene creative Energie...” Ibid., 81.
112
“Du hast oft gesagt, dass Du gerne nach Aufträgen arbeitest (wie es die alten Meister ja auch taten) aber,
wenn man einmal einen Vorschlag macht, wie ein paar Porträts Nelly mehr zu machen oder so, dann bist
Du ‚schnüssig[sic]’. Jedenfalls bin ich der Ansicht, dass eine so großzügige Angelegenheit viel wichtiger
und künstlerischer ist, als alle Buchillustrationen. Für Bildchen unmittelbar aus der Wirklichkeit heraus
151
Just as Nierendorf and Dix were helping shape one another’s professional
identities, culminating in the singular, “Nierendix,” so does Wieland Herzfelde suggest a
shared, cooperative effort in the development of the professional personas of George
Grosz, his brother John Heartfield, and himself.
113
He depicts his first encounters with
Grosz as decisive to the future careers of both in his autobiographical short story, “The
Curious Merchant from Holland.” In the account, Herzfelde proposes that their meeting
was mutually beneficial, one that pushed both to the next stage in their careers.
Herzfelde was encouraged to start his first paper, the Neue Jugend, which he proposed on
a whim as a vehicle for the dissemination and promotion of Grosz’s works. Grosz’s
work, in turn, first became known in the pages of Neue Jugend.
114
As Herzfelde not-too-
modestly proclaims at the end of the essay, “…in May 1916, the first issue of the art
magazine Neue Jugend appeared. And it made famous the artist George Grosz.”
115
In a
later essay, “Die Macht der Freundschaft,” he further develops the idea that he was
responsible for Grosz’s popular success: “An important portion of Grosz’s drawings were
spread through portfolios and books…And a majority of his early graphic work became
schaffen kannst und nicht Begleitmusik zu andere Leute Text zu machen brauchst. ” Nierendorf to Dix,
undated letter, Dix Nachlass, I.C.524f, GNM.
113
Nancy Roth emphasizes the co-creation of the artistic personas of these three individuals, particularly
Heartfield, and explores the performative aspects of artistic identity in her dissertation, “The Politics of
Collaboration: Brothers, Friends, the Party and the Performance of John Heartfield, 1915-1938” (PhD diss.,
City University of New York, 1996).
114
Beth Irwin Lewis similarly concludes: “Grosz’s art would have been a useless weapon without Wieland
Herzfelde. The Malik Verlag…was a monument in the first years after the war to the enthusiastic
collaboration of the Herzfelde brothers and George Grosz. Of the 36 titles which the press published from
1919 to 1921, 18 were illustrated by Grosz and 3 were Grosz portfolios.” Beth Irwin Lewis, George Grosz:
Art and Politics in the Weimar Republic, Rev ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 122.
115
Wieland Herzfelde, “The Curious Merchant from Holland,” Harper’s Weekly 187, no. 1122 (November
1943): 576. Herzfelde later republished the essay in German as a chapter in his 1966 memoir Immergrün.
152
known thanks to the fact that between 1917 and 1928, seven [of his] portfolios appeared
in the Malik Verlag.”
116
But he also stresses the decisive role that Grosz played in
directing his own practice as a publisher and in helping his brother John Heartfield
[Helmut Herzfelde] develop his interests in photomontage. He states:
[Grosz’s] art was for us a revelation. And, at the same time, a cold
shower: a shock to the system [schockartig], sobering, prickling, and
invigorating…He awoke in us both a new, very critical relationship to our
own previous attempts at artistic form: Helmut burned everything that he
had drawn or painted up to that point in charcoal, pencil, chalk, ink,
tempera, and oils. Around the end of the war, I wrote my last
expressionist poem, completely gave up my attempts to draw and paint,
and focused on the publishing and editing of Malik Verlag works…
117
Here the creative relationship between dealer and publisher is represented as less
suggestive and more active, with artist(s) and publisher effectively shaping the
professional personas of one another through their shared artistic enterprise and interests.
Each adopts a certain role and works toward common goals. Certainly, Herzfelde’s
accounts, written years after the events themselves transpired, are veiled in a nostalgia
that retrospectively celebrates certain aspects of the creation story of these individuals
and is guided by other imperatives. Nevertheless, Grosz’s artistic practice in the
immediate postwar period was shaped by his work for Herzfelde and Malik, and
116
“Ein bedeutender Teil der Grosz-Zeichnungen wurde damals in Mappen und Büchern verbreitet…Und
doch ist sein grafisches Frühwerk großenteils bekannt dank dem Umstand, daß zwischen 1917 und 1928
sieben Mappen im Malik-Verlag erschienen sind.” Wieland Herzfelde, “George Grosz, John Heartfield,
Erwin Piscator, Dada und die Folgen - oder Die Macht der Freundschaft,” Sinn und Form 23, no. 6
(November 1971): 1249.
117
“[Grosz’s] Kunst aber was für uns eine Offenbarung. Zugleich eine kalte Dusche: schockartig,
ernüchternd, prickelnd und belebend…Er weckte in uns beiden ein neues, sehr kritisches Verhältnis zu
unseren bisherigen Versuchen künstlerischer Art: Helmut verbrannt alles, was er bisher mit Kohle,
Bleistift, Kreide, Tusche, Tempera und Ölfarbe geschaffen hatte. Ich schrieb gegen Kriegsende mein
letztes expressionistisches Gedicht, gab meine Versuche, zu zeichnen und zu malen gänzlich auf,
konzentierte mich auf Herstellung und Redaktion der Malik-Produktion…” Ibid., 1230–31.
153
similarly, the products of Malik throughout the 1920s are unimaginable without the
distinctive stamp of Grosz’s artistic contributions.
Prints and Price: Managing the Edition
According to Bourdieu, there are two “economies” that make up the cultural field.
One is the economy of restricted production, the other of large-scale production. On a
basic level, these subfields mark the split between the restricted production of avant-
garde or progressive art on the one hand, and the mass production and distribution of
commercial or bourgeois art on the other. Printmaking and print production in interwar
Germany, however, problematizes this distinction because the artists and dealers who
engaged in restricted production did flirt with the possibilities of larger-scale production
during this period, as dealers experimented with the size of print runs, the use of
materials, and the price of their products in order to expand audiences beyond established
collectors and promote their artists among a wider public. This attempt to win over new
audiences was often described by dealers and publishers in terms of accessibility and
education—quasi-democratic concepts that were not all that different from the patriarchal
tones of the Kaiserzeit. In a post-Kaiserreich environment, however, success was gauged
in part by market share, not by the legitimizing symbols of established institutions
supported by the state. Therefore, increasing edition sizes had to be met by increasing
sales.
These efforts were marked by certain tensions, however. While dealers wanted to
promote their artists to a larger audience using the tools at their disposal—including
154
increasingly sophisticated and faithful reproduction techniques—they also needed to
balance this desire with a continued emphasis on the exclusiveness of the artists and
works they represented; to argue, that is, for the value of the work of art based in part on
its rarity and originality. Both of these competing forces were influenced by the realities
of the Inflationszeit. There was a boom in the demand for graphic works that was fueled
in part by a desire to invest one’s money in stable luxury goods. Thus, dealers and artists
had to ensure that the edition maintained or increased its value in the face of rising
demand. This required an adherence to the promise of the edition—a promise that had
been made suspect by the overproduction of inflation currency and its dramatic loss of
value which threw the price of all reproducible works into doubt.
As noted above, artists like Kirchner felt that the mass reproduction of prints
devalued the original, especially when those reproductions were of similar scale or
materials. Addressing his frustration with Neumann’s reproductions in Der Anbruch, he
stated, “The type and size of the reproductions in Anbruch [sic] represents a devaluing of
the originals, because the illustrations can serve quite well as substitutions for the
originals, and are likely also viewed that way.”
118
But others emphasized the benefits of expanding access, and audiences. Karl
Nierendorf, for instance, used the rhetoric of “educational” access and ideological value
when promoting Dix’s most prominent graphic cycle, Der Krieg, by offering it up in a
condensed booklet form for museums, newspapers and high-value collectors. The book,
118
“Die Art und Grösse der Reproduktionen im Anbruch bedeutet eine Entwertung der Originale, da die
Abbildungen recht gut als Ersatz der Originale dienen können und wohl auch so gedacht sind.” Kirchner,
Der gesamte Briefwechsel, 416, letter 817.
155
produced as “Propagandamittel” (propaganda material), contained twenty-four
photomechancially produced offset lithographs selected from the cycle of fifty prints.
Nierendorf edited the book himself, which was ultimately such an undertaking that he
called his brother Josef, who was at the time in charge of his Cologne gallery, to Berlin
for assistance. In spite of these challenges—including two months of missed rent
because of debts amassed publishing it—Nierendorf did not regret producing the booklet
rather than an advertising prospect because he believed it would receive far more
attention: “All of the newspapers will have discussed it and we shall be able to count on a
great success.”
119
Nierendorf sent out review booklets free of charge to “all the more
important authors…also to Vienna, Paris, Zurich, for example, Shaw, Barbusse, Rolland,
Kraus…but also to many less well known.”
120
He also sent them “to all the most
important left-leaning newspapers…and also to the most important justice papers
[Rechtsblätter]. In addition, 235 to local groups of the Peace Society
[Friedensgesellschaft]…also to the board of the League for Human Rights, the so-called
‘Bildungsinstitut’ [Educational Institute], etc. etc.”
121
Trade unions had ordered 1500
copies for their “Antikriegstag” (anti-war day). Then, last but not least, he sent the
booklet to larger museums and important collectors free of charge. In a postcard from
August 1924, he tells Dix, “I am very pleased with the success of the book. Daily,
119
“Ich bin froh, das ich das Buch statt eines Prospektes hergestellt habe. Es wird in allen Zeitungen
besprochen werden und wir dürfen auf einen grossen Erfolg rechnen.” Undated letter to Dix from
Nierendorf. Dix Nachlass, I.C.524f, GNM.
120
“Ich habe an alle bedeutenderen Schriftsteller ein Expl. gesandt, auch nach Wien, Zürich, Paris etc.; z.B.
an Shaw, Barbusse, Rolland, Kraus. Aber auch an viele weniger bekannt...” Ibid.
121
“Dazu an alle linksstehenden[sic] grösseren Zeitungen über 200 und an die bedeutendsten Rechtsblätter.
Ferner an 235 Ortsgruppen der Friedengesellschaft, immer an die Vorsitzenden, auch an die Vorstände der
Liga für Menschenrechte, der soz. Bildungsinstitute etc etc.” Ibid.
156
review copies are demanded, even for little daily papers, so that the intended propaganda
goal has been fully accomplished.”
122
He bragged, “A bigger campaign [Propaganda] has
not yet been waged for a portfolio.”
123
Nierendorf’s Der Krieg booklet did obviously succeed in heightening the work’s
visibility and underscoring its additional virtues—its perceived ideological (anti-war)
value, for instance—that had the potential to expand the portfolio’s audience beyond
progressive art supporters, as suggested by the list of recipients. But Nierendorf
experienced something that Kirchner worried about: the availability of inexpensive and
faithful reproductions initially made the originals less necessary, particularly in the period
immediately following the inflation. He complained,
Money is still the rarest thing in the world and no one pays. So far, only
one subscription is in hand, and people write me from many sides [to say]
that the portfolio is excellent, but too expensive. No one wants individual
portfolios, instead, those who are interested want to have the entire work.
But because 100 M[arks] is again a fortune, there isn’t anyone who can
give up 1000 M[arks] at the moment...
124
It was actually Neumann who pioneered the use of the so-called “Heftausgabe”
(booklet edition) several years before Nierendorf was able to undertake his “propaganda”
122
“Mit dem Erfolg des Buches bin ich sehr zufrieden. Täglich werden Besprechungsexemplare, selbst für
kleine Tageszeitungen eingefordert, sodass der Propagandazweck voll erreicht wird.” Postcard dated
8.18.1924. Dix Nachlass, I.C.524f, GNM.
123
“Eine grössere Propaganda ist für ein Mappenwerk noch nicht gemacht worden.” Dix Nachlass,
I.C.524f, GNM..
124
“Geld ist noch immer das rarste Ding in der Welt und niemand zahlt. Bisher liegt eine einzige
Subskription vor und man schreibt mir von vielen Seiten, dass die Mappe grossartig, aber zu teuer sei.
Einzelmappen will man nicht, sondern wer sich interessiert, möchte das ganze Werk haben. Aber da 100
M wieder ein vermögen sind, gibt es keine Leute, die jetzt 1000.-M ausgeben können...” Dix Nachlass,
I.C.524f, GNM. Der Krieg was broken into five individual portfolios, each containing ten impressions
from the series. In the contract for Der Krieg, Nierendorf stated that each individual portfolio would cost
300 Marks, but if the buyer were purchasing the entire series, they would go for 200 Marks each, for a total
price of 1000 Marks. Typed contract dated Berlin, 23 June 1924. Dix Nachlass, I.C.524f, GNM.
157
campaign with the booklet for Der Krieg. Beckmann’s lithographic series, Die Hölle
(Hell), which Neumann commissioned from the artist for 7000 Marks and published in
fall 1919, was printed in an edition of seventy-five hand-signed and titled prints.
125
But
Neumann also offered the series as a reduced photolithographed booklet of 1000 copies
at a drastically reduced price, “so that this extraordinary work could be put within reach
of people who could not afford original lithographs.”
126
Alexander Dückers argues the
booklet was meant to serve primarily as a means of expanding the audience for
Beckmann’s prints beyond a core of collectors and print lovers to reach a larger public.
The booklet was distinct from the portfolio for several reasons. First, it contained an
“Inhaltsverzeichnis,” a kind of table of contents, that ordered the prints in the portfolio,
suggesting a narrative that was missing from the larger, unbound portfolio, where no such
order was indicated. Second, the sheets were reduced by more than half, from a size of
86.5 x 60.5 cm to 39.5 x 26 cm (approximately 15 3/5 x 10 1/5”), making them easier to
“read.” Neumann’s transfer of the series into book form thus made it more palatable to a
general public by lending it a narrative and making it easier to view while held in one’s
hand.
The booklet also contained printed remarks, repeated in the first Beckmann
Sonderheft of Bilderhefte that stated: “The original stones were stripped after the
production of the edition of 75. The photolithographic reduced booklet edition
125
Of the seventy-five, fifty were sold together in the portfolio, and twenty-five were offered as loose
sheets.
126
Neumann, “Sorrow and Champagne,” in “Confessions of an Art Dealer,” 10. Neumann, II.B.1a-b.
MoMA Archives, NY.
158
[Heftausgabe] appeared in a one-time edition of 1000 copies.”
127
Here, Neumann
emphasized the rarity of the full-size edition on the one hand while acknowledging the
wider availability of the popular Heftausgabe on the other. The booklet edition, however,
did not sell well: “there was no popular response. And I was compelled to give away
most copies of this edition of one thousand…”
128
Neumann took the lesson to heart.
When he published Beckmann’s next lithographic portfolio Berliner Reise (Berlin
Journey, also titled Berlin 1922), he took a different approach. He advertised the new
cycle as “…printed in a unique numbered edition of 100 impressions in Winter 1922 in
Frankfurt am Main. Of these, numbers 1 – 50 appeared as portfolios, and numbers 51 –
100 as single prints. The stones were stripped after printing.”
129
That is, the dealer
reverted to emphasizing the rarity of the edition and avoided the popular edition entirely.
Like Neumann, Wieland Herzfelde also experimented with tiered editions, but the
options he offered audiences were more extensive than the choice between luxury and
popular versions of the same works. He presented prints on different papers, impressions
127
“Nach Herstellung der Auflage von 75 Exemplaren wurden die Originalsteine abgeschliffen. Diese
Heftausgabe in photolithographischer Verkleinerung ist in einer einmaligen Auflage von 1000 Exemplaren
erschienen.” J.B. Neumanns Bilderhefte, Beckmann Sonderheft I, April 1921. The reference to the
stripping of the stone after printing is particular to the lithographic process—the printed image remains on
the stone, ready to be reprinted, until its surface is ground down, polished, and prepared for a new print.
The edition size is only guaranteed when the original image is removed from the stone, ensuring that no
further impressions can be made after the initial printing. As Alexander Dückers points out, however, in
this case, such claims are a bit deceptive because the prints in Die Hölle were so-called “transfer”
lithographs—that is, they were drawn first on special paper and then their designs were transferred to the
printing stone. Destroying the image on the stone was not, in a sense, destroying the original. Alexander
Dückers, ed., Max Beckmann: Die Hölle, 1919 (Berlin: Kupferstichkabinett Berlin, Staatliche Museen
Preussischer Kulturbesitz, 1983).
128
Neumann, “Sorrow and Champagne,” in “Confessions of an Art Dealer,” 10. Neumann, II.B.1a-b.
MoMA Archives, NY.
129
“Dieser Zyklus wurde in einer einmaligen numerierten Auflage von 100 Exemplaren im Winter 1922 in
Frankfurt a.M. gedruckt. Davon sind Nr. 1 – 50 als Mappen, Nr. 51 – 100 als Einzelblätter erschienen.
Nach Herstellung der Auflage wurden die Steine abgeschliffen.” J.B. Neumanns Bilderhefte, Beckmann
Sonderheft II, December 1922.
159
with and without the artists’ signatures, and limited as well as unlimited or extensive
popular editions. For instance, Ecce homo, a collection of 100 of Grosz’s “unpublished”
works from the years 1915 to 1922, including eighty-four lithographs and sixteen
watercolors published as offset prints, was offered in five different versions, ranging from
600 Marks (an edition of fifty that included all 100 works, hand-signed by the artist, with
each sheet separated by tissue paper wrapping [Seidenmappe]), to 20 Marks, for an
unsigned unlimited edition which included only the eighty-four lithographs sold in a
“Chromokarton” (color-printed board) folder. This practice was not necessarily unusual;
other dealers, particularly Alfred Flechtheim, also perfected the art of the tiered edition at
this time, offering three or more options to prospective subscribers at different price
points. What was unique to Herzfelde’s approach was the size of his popular editions:
these were far larger, if not unlimited. Herzfelde was aware of the distinction; he noted
in a later essay: “A novelty in the practice of art publishers was the publication of two of
the same portfolio in the same format, one very expensive on Bütten paper and signed by
the artist for the art market, the other offered as a popular edition [Volksausgabe]
unsigned on plainer, but good paper for the price of 3 Marks.”
130
Herzfelde did understand that emphasizing quality and rarity mattered to
marketing prints and to legitimizing his product.
131
But it was also his goal to
130
“Ein Novum in der Praxis von Kunstverlagen war die Herausgabe zwei gleicher Mappen in gleichem
Format, einer sehr teuren, signiert auf Büttenpapier für den Kunsthandel und einer unsignierten auf
einfacherem aber gutem Papier als Volksausgabe zum Preis von 3,- Mark. ” Herzfelde, “George Grosz,
John Heartfield, Erwin Piscator, Dada und die Folgen - oder Die Macht der Freundschaft,” 1249.
131
A telling anecdote in this regard concerns Herzfelde’s selection of a printer for his first publication Neue
Jugend. He requested estimates from a number of printers, and then accepted the most expensive offer,
made by the Hof-, Buch- und Steindruckerei of Dietsch & Brückner in Weimar. His rationale was this:
160
disseminate the works of artists like Grosz in the service of promoting a political
ideology as much as advancing the artist himself. Although it was the special editions
that tended to sell out, it was the prominence of the popular editions that were crucial to
making a certain point about Herzfelde’s (and, implicitly, Grosz’s) political
commitments. Herzfelde, in fact, associated the production of these “popular” editions
with a political act: “It was considered a demonstration against the exclusive role of
collector’s art [produced] in small editions. If Grosz approved of this provocative
application of the principle ‘Art for the People,’ he did so certainly as a former Dadaist,
but also thanks to the political influence that my brother and I exercised on him.”
132
Although Herzfelde claimed that because of the mass distribution of his works,
“No other German Graphic artist in our century achieved [Grosz’s] political and artistic
mass effect,” we have much less information about how Malik’s popular editions sold
among a wider public than we do about how the limited editions fared. For instance, A
1922 issue of Kunstblatt announces among the publications available from the Malik
Verlag, Grosz’s Gesicht der herrschenden Klasse (Face of the Ruling Class), fifty-five
political drawings already in a third edition of 13,000 to 25,000.
133
This portfolio
first, that he was purchasing everything on credit, second, if the publication was a success, he would be
able to pay for its printing, and finally “je schöner es ist, um so besser geht es.” In other words, an
expensive-looking paper would be easier to market and sell than a cheap one. Wieland Herzfelde, ed., Der
Malik-Verlag: 1916 - 1947 (Berlin, Ost: Deutsche Akademie der Künste, 1966), 12.
132
“Das war gedacht als eine Demonstration gegen die exklusive Rolle der Sammlerkunst in kleinen
Auflagen. Wenn Grosz diese provozierende Anwendung des Prinzips ‚Die Kunst dem Volke’ guthieß, so
tat er es gewiß als ehemaliger Dadaist, aber auch dank dem politischen Einfluß, den mein Bruder und ich
auf ihn ausübten. ” Herzfelde, “George Grosz, John Heartfield, Erwin Piscator, Dada und die Folgen - oder
Die Macht der Freundschaft,” 1249.
133
In the essay “Dada und die Folgen – oder die Macht der Freundschaft,” Herzfelde notes that Gesicht
quickly went into an edition of 25,000, and “Und ungezählt sind die Nachdrucke aus diesem Band.” Ibid.,
1248.
161
consisted largely of previously published works; the prints had appeared in other
portfolios, in Malik’s satirical journals, or as book illustrations. It ranged in price from a
bound (broschiert) version offered for 6 Marks to a “Vorzugsausgabe” (special edition)
with gold lettering, numbered and signed by the artist for a price of 150 Marks in an
edition of fifty. A 1923 Malik announcement in Querschnitt advertises the same series,
but by then the price of the bound version had dropped to 1.50 Marks,
134
while the special
signed edition was, according to the advertisement, sold out.
135
Whether it was poor
sales or the economic situation that drove the press to drop the price of the popular
edition by 75 percent is unclear. But the fact that the portfolio had reached a third edition
of 25,000 by 1921 is significant. Moreover, demand for all prints waned during the later
stages of the inflation, as has been discussed in Chapter One.
Identities in Print
“I ask that you publish the work under the name ‘Wieland Herzfelde,’ since Ms.
Lasker-Schuler referred to me as such in issue 4, and I also like it better.”
136
Wieland
134
The price announced (1.50 Marks, for example) was not the actual price charged. Because of inflation,
a disclaimer clarified that the “Ladenpreis” or market price was equal to the Grundpreis (base price)
multiplied by the Buchhändlerschlüsselzahl, a code number for book dealers. This Schlüsselzahl was not
tied directly to the deflation of the paper currency (the so-called “Entwertungsziffer”), but rather
established a special kind of “Buchhändlermark” specific to the industry which gave book dealers and
publishers a measure against which to price their product so as to regain production costs and earn profit.
See Georg Jäger, Dieter Langewiesche, and Wolfram Siemann, Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels im
19. Und 20. Jahrhundert: Die Weimarer Republik 1918-1933; Teil 1 (Walter de Gruyter, 2007), 267.
135
The Malik announcements/advertisements from Kunstblatt (XII, 1922) and Querschnitt (Summer 1923)
were found in a file of similar press announcements in the George Grosz Archive at the Akademie der
bildenden Künste. George Grosz Nachlass, Indexnummer 1049, Akademie der bildende Künste.
136
“Ich bitte Sie, die Arbeit unter dem Namen ‘Wieland Herzfelde’ zu veröffentlichen, da Frau Lasker-
Schuler mich in Heft 4 so nannte und es mir auch besser gefällt.” Wieland Herzfelde, Immergrün:
162
Herzfelde, born Herzfeld, declared this subtle, but significant change in his professional
identity in a letter to Franz Pfemfert’s Die Aktion regarding the publication of his article
titled, “Ethik der Geisteskranken.” Herzfeld had been baptized Herzfelde in print by the
spelling error of the famous poet and author Elsa Lasker-Schuler. Herzfeld would adopt
the name for all his further professional activity—which included not only writing, but
also editing and publishing—from that point forward. As an orphan, Herzfelde was
perhaps less attached to his given name and more likely to reinvent himself with a new
one. Although he did not change his name legally, it was enough that his new name was
tied to his professional persona as a writer and publisher.
137
It was Herzfelde who
warranted mention by one of Germany’s most respected avant-garde poets; it was
therefore Herzfelde who became the editor of Germany’s most polemical and satirical
left-wing newspapers during and after the war, and finally Herzfelde who founded the
Malik Verlag. Herzfelde also credits the name of the Malik Verlag itself to Lasker-
Schuler, whose novel, Der Malik, was published in installments in the Neue Jugend,
Herzfelde’s first publication.
138
In Mein Leben als Verleger, Piper notes with pride that with the publication of
Der Blaue Reiter, he earned a reputation as a progressive (avanciert) publisher. In a
Merkwürdige Erlebnisse Und Erfahrungen Eines Fröhlichen Waisenknaben (Berlin: Aufbau Taschenbuch
Verlag, 1996), 117.
137
Herzfelde’s brother, Helmut, also changed his name to the Anglicized “John Heartfield.” In Leben and
Werk, the first comprehensive biography of John Heartfield, the name change is explained as a response to
the chauvinism of the war—specifically the motto “Gott strafe England,” or “God punish England.” In her
dissertation, Nancy Roth suggests a more gradual shift from Helmut to John, noting that the name John
Heartfield does not appear in print until the publication of Jedermann sein eigener Fußball in February
1919, where it appears in the masthead, and Helmut does not entirely disappear until the publication of the
third issue of Die Pleite in April 1919. See Roth, “The Politics of Collaboration,” 89.
138
Malik is also the name of the hero of the story. Herzfelde says that it has the same meaning as the
Hebraic “Melech,” which means “King, Duke, leader.” See Herzfelde, Der Malik-Verlag, 21.
163
caricature of Munich publishers printed in Zeit im Bild in 1913, he appears with the book
under his arm, “which acted as my characteristic,” (figure 2.8).
139
What the image
caricatures, however, is in question. In the illustration, he appears with other leading
Munich publishers including Georg Müller (far left) and Rudolf Oldenbourg (publisher of
Jugend). Likely the youngest of the bunch, he is represented with his characteristically
long forehead, further extended by his perpetually erect hair. Although the depiction
could be seen as exaggerated, the portrayal is actually a very gentle one; the features are
remarkably close to Piper's own, and do not overly exaggerate the publisher's physical
eccentricities (figure 2.9). Der Blaue Reiter, however, is not represented so faithfully.
The caricature bears little resemblance to Kandinsky's original woodcut, and the image
would be difficult to identify by likeness alone; only its explicit reference to the horse
and rider and the text "Der … Reiter" on the upper margin of the image make plain the
source. The "rider," in fact, appears to be seated backward on the horse, hat in hand,
gazing cluelessly “ahead”—hardly the representation of a forward-looking or avant-garde
work. At the same time, however, the illustration does reference the nature of the
publication; Piper's "characteristic" has the appearance of a work of art—the format of
the work, the way he seems to hold it upright on a surface to display it to the viewer, and
the apparent frame around the image all suggest a painting rather than a book.
Ambivalence about the content of the Almanac aside, the illustration does indicate Piper's
connection to the progressive visual arts.
139
“…in einer Karikatur der Münchner Verlegergruppe wurde ich mit ihm unterm Arm als für mich
charakteristisch vorgeführt.” Piper, Mein Leben als Verleger, 297. A reproduction of the caricature
appears in the introduction to the 1974 edition of the Blaue Reiter Almanac, as well as 100 Jahre Piper.
See Ziegler, 100 Jahre Piper, Die Geschichte eines Verlags, 21.
164
I have discussed how dealers used print and publishing as a way to forward an
agenda or express their own views about art and culture. Print gave a voice to the
otherwise invisible middleman by offering a creative outlet to the one expected to
promote but not produce. But print also gave this middleman a face and form. Print
helped the dealer or publisher create a kind of alternate professional identity, as the case
of Wieland Herzfelde illustrates. Or it cemented a professional identity by linking that
individual with certain characteristics, as the caricature of Piper makes clear. Finally,
print became a vehicle for making that most personal of depictions public through the
printed dealer portrait. Printed portraits became a favored form of representation for the
dealers and publishers I have discussed here; several were represented many times over.
These depictions commemorate certain aspects of the relationship between the artist and
his dealer even as they reveal some of the tensions inherent in that relationship. They
also suggest a contradiction in the modern dealer’s enterprise—the desire to be
recognized for their labor even as their careers were predicated on forefronting the work
of others.
According to Bourdieu, the artistic field is a space of contestation, in which
jockeying for position leaves one open to cooperation only so long as both parties stand
to benefit. This demands a certain amount of “misrecognition” of the motivations and
priorities of others. Referring specifically to publishers and gallery directors, whom he
calls “merchants in the temple,” Bourdieu argues that, “…they need to possess,
simultaneously, economic dispositions which…are totally alien to the producers and also
properties close to those of the producers whose work they valorize and exploit…this
165
favors the relationship of trust and belief which is the basis of an exploitation
presupposing a high degree of misrecognition on each side.”
140
Typically, artists and
dealers were working toward shared goals, and the success of one was shared by or
benefitted the other. When this was not the case, however, when divergent interests were
recognized, it threatened the dealer/artist relationship and forced both to find (or, to again
misrecognize) common cause if they were to continue the partnership.
Beckmann played on these feelings of common cause in his correspondence with
Neumann.
141
Beckmann frequently wrote to Neumann that their bond transcended that of
artist and dealer; they were friends and colleagues, they had the fundamental
understanding of one another that most men lacked. Beckmann called Neumann “the
one…who has the closest and most direct relationship to my work.”
142
In another letter,
Beckmann professed, “You know that I regard you still as the closest friend and fellow
fighter that I have in the world! I am convinced that no one will bring the intuition and
deep understanding to my work that you will.”
143
Money and the dealer’s professional priorities, however, were a constant source
of tension. Beckmann complained often that the dealer was not doing enough to forward
140
Pierre Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production, or The Economic World Reversed,” in The Field of
Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1993), 39–40.
141
Beckmann’s correspondence with his dealer has been published in the three-volume collection of
Beckmann's letters, Max Beckmann, Briefe, ed. Uwe M. Schneede, 3 vols., (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1993) as
well as Max Beckmann, Max Beckmann: Briefe an I.B. Neumann. Einschliesslich 38 bisher
unveröffentlichter Briefe und 3 Briefen von I.B.Neumann (Berlin: Mayen Beckmann, Peter Neumann,
1997). Neumann’s letters to Beckmann have, for the most part, been lost.
142
“der Mensch…der das nächste und unmitte[l]barste Verhältnis zu meiner Arbeit hat.” Undated letter
(number 212 from Max Beckmann, Briefe, vol. 1). Beckmann, Max Beckmann: Briefe an I.B. Neumann, 6.
143
“Sie wissen dass ich Sie nach wie vor als den mir nächsten Freund und Mitkämpfer ansehe, den ich in
der Welt habe! Ich bin davon überzeugt, dass keiner die Intuition und das tiefe Verständnis für meine
Arbeit aufbringen wird, wie Sie!” Previously unpublished letter dated June 18, 1927. Ibid., 25.
166
his career. Neumann’s move to the United States in 1923 deepened this divide.
Although Neumann insisted that his move would open up a whole new audience for
Beckmann and promised success, he discovered too late that the American market for
progressive art, especially German progressive art, was still very soft, and he had little
luck making headway with his stable of artists across the Atlantic. Meanwhile,
Beckmann felt underrepresented and underappreciated in Germany and France; with
Neumann concentrating on establishing himself abroad, only the junior partners in
Neumann’s Kunstgemeinschaft (Art Community), Günther Franke at the Graphisches
Kabinett in Munich and Karl Nierendorf in Berlin, were minding the market at home.
Meanwhile, Beckmann felt the place to make a move and assert his position as a great
contemporary artist was Paris, not New York. To address his feelings of insecurity,
Beckmann negotiated contracts with Neumann that locked in a guaranteed monthly
stipend. He also frequently decamped to other dealers, exhibiting with Cassirer and
Flechtheim, and publishing prints with Reinhard Piper and Peter Zingler.
144
Some of these tensions are apparent in Beckmann’s several printed portraits of
Neumann. The most telling is Beckmann’s 1923 etching Der Dollar, probably published
during the beginning of the hyperinflation and around the time of Neumann’s departure
144
Beckmann also negotiated a contract with Flechtheim. It is not entirely clear when Neumann’s first
contract with Beckmann was initiated. In his memoirs, Neumann argues that they agreed to a contract
before the publication of Die Hölle—that is, before 1919. Their correspondence does not begin until 1920,
so there is no written record of the contract. Beckmann pressured Neumann into new contracts on two
occasions (first in 1925, then in 1927) by claiming that other dealers were on the verge of making a bigger
offer. In 1927, he did negotiate a three-way contract between Neumann, himself, and Flechtheim. See the
unpublished letters from 7.26.1927, 7.27,1927, and 9.9.27, Ibid., 26–30. Peter Zingler published five prints
by Beckmann through his Graphisches Kabinett in Frankfurt and also exhibited the artist’s work. See
James Hofmaier, Max Beckmann: Catalogue Raisonné of His Prints. Volume 1 (Bern: Gallery Kornfeld,
1990), 461.
167
for the United States (figure 2.10). The title itself refers to the instability of the German
Mark. During 1922 and 1923, inflation was so rampant that artists often asked to have
their fees paid in more secure foreign currencies, or even resorted to bartering art for
basic goods. In the print, Beckmann faces off with Neumann, the two mirroring one
another’s stance. But the dealer, standing in the middleground, appears reduced next to
the central and foregrounded figure of the artist. Neumann appears to have been caught
off-guard, his momentum blocked by Beckmann’s body. Was the dealer about to
depart—perhaps on his journey to America—or has he just arrived somewhere?
145
Neumann’s girlfriend, Martha Stern, affects an attitude of impatient indifference; she
casually smokes a cigarette and sits waiting for the two to conclude their business.
Meanwhile Beckmann—his back to us, his chin thrust forward, his face in shadow—
strikes a confrontational pose. His attitude and Neumann’s response suggest that the
latter’s gesture—handing over money in the public space of a hotel lobby—was not
planned, but was instead a way of addressing an immediate problem, appeasing the artist
for the time being.
146
145
The interpretation of the space as a hotel is suggested by an alternative title for the work—it is listed as
Im Hotel (Der Dollar) in a later single-sheet announcement, the “Erst-Anzeige neuer Beckmann-Graphik,”
for an exhibition at Günther Franke’s Graphisches Kabinett in Munich. In auction catalogues that appear
before the first catalogue-raisonné by Klaus Gallwitz, the work is also titled Im Gespräch (In
Conversation). The figure in the far background also resembles a doorman, and is similar to the doorman
in the far background of Beckmann’s earlier print Das Martyrium (Martyrdom), from Die Hölle. See
Hofmaier, Max Beckmann: Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. 1, vol. 2.
146
Both the title and the fact that Neumann appears to be handing over only a single note does suggest that
he is indeed giving Beckmann a “dollar.” The now infamous documentary photographs of Germans
hauling wheelbarrows full of rapidly devaluing Marks to the market to buy basic necessities remind us that
handing over a single bill in 1923 would not have amounted to much if the bill were in the German
currency.
168
Beckmann's depiction of Neumann exposes the dealer’s abandonment of
professional responsibility; Der Dollar portrays Neumann’s actions as motivated by self-
interest rather than by a selfless focus on art and his artists.
147
Martha Stern, the woman
depicted in Der Dollar, and in an earlier lithographic portrait by Beckmann (figure 2.11),
was Neumann's girlfriend between 1921 and 1923;
148
Neumann, however, was already
married. He wed Antonia (Toni) Propper in Vienna in 1911, and the couple had two
children. By 1923, his disintegrating marriage was one of the dealer’s dominating
concerns. His marriage contract made him liable for supporting his spouse with a
residence and a monthly alimony payment should one of the parties apply for separation
or divorce.
149
Beckmann’s letters to his dealer suggest that Neumann complained as
much about the money his wife demanded for support as he did about the poor state of
the art market. The artist inquires about “Sternlein,” a term of endearment that suggests
familiarity,
150
while at the same time he exasperatedly tells Neumann to get his house in
order and settle matters of a "sexual character.”
151
One of the main motivations for
147
In his memoirs, Neumann does not mention his first marriage, but rather stresses that this move was the
result of a sense that he wanted to expand his Kunstgemeinschaft internationally, and felt that the American
market was ripe for it. He says, “I was convinced that I had to make a big leap for the rainbow, and bring
back the pot of gold for Beckmann.” He also had received assurances that he was known in America—
notably, from Katherine Dreier, who mentioned his gallery in one of her Société Anonym reports, and
Wilhelm Valentiner, the German-born director of the Detroit Institute of Art. Neumann, “Sorrow and
Champagne,” in “Confessions of an Art Dealer,” 21–22. Neumann, II.B.1a-b. MoMA Archives, NY.
148
The first reference to an unnamed girlfriend is in a letter from Beckmann to Neumann dated April 15,
1921. See Beckmann, Max Beckmann: Briefe an I.B. Neumann, 2.
149
The monthly alimony payment mentioned in the marriage contract is 150 Austrian Crowns. In addition,
Tony held a bond for 5,000 Austrian Crowns, which she could request from Neumann at any time. A
transcription of the marriage contract between I.B. Neumann and Antoni Propper is in the Lily Harmon
Papers, Box 5 of 6, AAA, Smithsonian Institution.
150
See Brief 211, Beckmann, Beckmann Briefe: Band I, 206.
151
In letter 264 from August 1924, Beckmann states: “Sie haben hier in Deutschland zu viel Kraft auf
Dinge geschlechtlichen Charakters verwendet um das Maß von Kraft und Intelligenz auch nach außen hin
so zur Geltung zu bringen, wie Sie es nach Ihrer Begabung und Talent fähig gewesen wären.” “(Here in
169
Neumann's move to the United States may have been his relationship with his wife.
Emigration was a way for him to avoid many of the day-to-day obligations of paying to
support her and his children; it seems he also hoped to force his wife to agree to a more
favorable divorce settlement.
152
Beckmann knew that the distractions of his personal life
took the dealer away from his principal professional concerns—for Beckmann, first and
foremost, the artist himself—and clouded his reasoning. Therefore, depicting Martha in
Der Dollar also sends a message to the dealer: it reminds him of his obligations and
points to his reasons for ignoring them.
The printed portrait, however, was not only a way for an artist to acknowledge
and express his side of an often difficult relationship. It was also a means of
commemorating a more positive alliance between the artist and his dealer in a medium
that could be shared with a larger community, one connected to the dealer’s professional
activities. This invited a certain amount of recognition among the audience, who
obtained or viewed the portrait of the dealer himself. The printed portrait acknowledged
the subjects’ contribution to the arts in general as well as to the artist depicting him,
underscoring his connection to print in particular. Otto Dix was particularly sensitive to
Germany you spent too much energy on things of a sexual character to exert the extent of [your] energy and
intelligence from the outside in, as would have been possible given your talent and ability”). Ibid., 254.
152
The problems with his wife are most apparent in his correspondence with the dealer Karl Nierendorf,
who took over the management of Neumann’s Graphisches Kabinett when Neumann moved to the US in
1923. Neumann’s wife often approached Nierendorf as the go-between and made demands to him directly.
The situation was still problematic for both as late as 1928. In a letter dated 9 October 1928, Neumann
reveals something of his reasons for leaving Germany: “Meine Gattin das Biest ist aus einer anderen Welt.
Ihr ist Nichts heilig, sie kennt keinen Respekt. Ich hatte die Wahl: Mord, Selbstmod oder Flucht.” He also
notes that because of the difficulties with his wife, who was, he argues, demanding unreasonable sums for
the divorce, the firm Neumann & Nierendorf (a limited liability corporation that had been formed by the
two in a 1926 contract) should not be dissolved just yet—a business decision that Nierendorf had been
pressing for some time. Lily Harmon Papers, Box 2 of 6, AAA, Smithsonian Institution.
170
this distinction. His painted portraits of the two dealers important to his career, Alfred
Flechtheim and Karl Nierendorf, depict the men holding or surrounded by the types of
works they marketed (figures 2.12 and 2.13).
153
His portrait of Neumann, however, is an
etching, and the view is a close-up rather than the three-quarter view he uses to represent
Neumann’s colleagues (figure 2.14). In the etched portrait, the print medium itself
substitutes for the artworks that serve as props of the dealer’s trade in the painted
portraits. The printed portrait thus offers a further means of associating the dealer’s
identity with his trade if it does not show him engaged in commerce. Similarly, all but
one of Beckmann’s depictions of Neumann were in print, as were the majority of his
portraits of Piper.
The printed portrait also both directly and indirectly acknowledged the
contributions of the publisher and print dealer. That is, the portrait became a tangible
form of Bourdieu’s symbolic capital through its assertion of the dealer or publisher’s
position within the artistic field. At the same time, the printed portrait was not contained,
as was the painted portrait, by its singularity. As symbolic capital, it was in a way
“worth” more than the individual painting because it could be disseminated. Printed
portraits were intended for propagation—they were made, at least in part, for public
promotion. Thus, the dealer and his image are simultaneously associated with both the
153
Dix’s famous portrait of Flechtheim is also full of the ambivalences apparent in some of the printed
portraits I discuss above. The painting depicts Flechtheim as a dealer of a generic Cubism in the style of
Picasso or Gris. Dix signature appears, somewhat comically, inside one of these paintings. In
Flechtheim’s other hand are papers, as if the dealer is engaged mid-transaction with a customer. Our
viewing position places us, the viewer, in the position of customer; our engagement of the work becomes a
kind of commercial transaction. Finally, Flechtheim’s nose, which earned him the moniker the “Cyrano de
Bergerac” of the auction houses from George Grosz, and which was a frequent target of anti-Semitic
attacks against the dealer, is here his most prominent feature, exaggerated for effect.
171
artist’s creative act as well as their own singular (but often unrecognized) creative
activity: the publication and promotion of the artists’ works. Prints are the
dealer/publisher’s contribution to the artistic field and become, through the dealer
portrait, one of the forms of symbolic capital he deploys to assert his position within the
field. Far from being an invisible middleman, the contribution of the dealer/publisher
becomes visible, literally and figuratively. In this sense, the dealer portrait print
acknowledges the collaborative nature of the artist/dealer relationship, and of artistic
practice in general.
The ways in which dealers and publishers shared or discussed these portraits
makes plain that they did see them as a form of public promotion and a confirmation of
their roles as cultural actors. Neumann regularly reproduced his portrait prints in the
Bilderhefte, offering them for sale alongside the other graphic works he sold at the
gallery.
154
Piper reports in his memoirs that he was depicted in print by eight artists,
including Beckmann. Beckmann alone portrayed Piper nearly a dozen times, primarily in
print. The publisher notes the positive aspects of the printed portrait over other forms of
depiction: “A graphic print is an unpretentious and handy (handlich) thing. One can
allow a number of prints to be made, to gift to friends or give to public print collections.
154
For instance, in the first issue of Bilderheft, dated May, 1920, Neumann reproduces Ludwig Meidner’s
etched portrait of him. The Beckmann Sonderheft (special issue) of April 1921 reproduces Beckmann’s
1920 etched portrait of Neumann, as well as a reproduction of the painting Fastnacht, supposedly his only
painted portrait of Neumann, in which the dealer appears dressed as a clown for the celebration of Carnival.
Finally, the second Beckmann Sonderheft from December 1922 reproduces Beckmann’s double-portrait
lithograph of the dealer and Martha Stern.
172
In the process, one does something for art, for the artist, for one’s friends and for oneself,
all at the same time. Who could want more?”
155
That does not mean that the publisher was unconcerned with leaving his public
presentation to the artist; he also attempted to shape his printed image for posterity. For
example, in a letter to Beckmann, Piper made plain that he did not consider the artist’s
first printed portrait of him a success; he asked that the artist not etch his portrait again,
but rather, draw him, because “one could transfer the drawing and print it as a lithograph
and also make a facsimile print after the lithograph.”
156
In other words, one could
potentially get a much larger number of impressions from a lithographic print than from
an intaglio plate. He also felt that the small size of the drypoint portrait and the nature of
the medium affected the depiction; there would be more “likeness” in a spontaneous
lithographic drawing: “…Meier-Graefe…saw nothing of me in the portrait. He said that
the etching underestimated me. The one represented appears as a thoroughly
unintellectual type [ungeistiger Typ]…I had the intention of disseminating the etching,
not only as a print by Beckmann, but also as a depiction of me to my good friends. My
appearance should live on in your print, just as Cranach’s prints allowed his good friends
to live on.”
157
Beckmann responded somewhat cheekily: “I am very sorry that you do not
155
“Ein graphisches Blatt ist eine anspruchslose, handliche Sache. Man kann davon eine Menge Abzüge
machen lassen, sie an Freunde verschenken und öffentlichen graphischen Sammlungen stiften. Man tut
zugleich etwas für die Kunst, für den Künstler, für die Freunde und für sich. Was will man mehr?”
Beckmann, Beckmann Briefe: Band I, 206.
156
“Die Zeichnung könnte man dann als Lithographie umdrucken und auch einen Faximilielichtdruck
danach machen.” These comments also suggest that Piper commissioned his portraits, he was not gifted
them by the artist.
157
"Schließlich möchte ich Sie bitten, mich doch noch auf die Dauer zu wenig von mir drin. Dies wird mir
immer wieder bestätigt. Soeben noch von Meier-Graefe, der die drei neuen Radierungen, die Zingler hat,
[...] aufs äusserste bewunderte, in meinem Porträt aber garnichts von mir fand. Er sagte, die Radierung
173
appear to be happy with your print. Believe me, any ill effect was not my intention
[irgend welche böse Absicht dabei vollkommen fern gelegen hat]. Of course, one cannot
be so comprehensive in such a relatively small work. I can only advise you, therefore, to
have the courage to some day commission me to paint your portrait in oil.”
158
The source of Piper’s displeasure was a 1920 drypoint (figure 2.15), a diminutive
print (only 29.5 x 14.8 cm or 11.6 x 5.8”) that showed Piper in ¾ profile on a blank
background. Perhaps the dealer was unhappy with his limp-wristed pose, or maybe it
was the slight grin that made him appear unserious—“ungeistig,” a capacious German
term that can refer to both the spirit and the intellect. The size of the print and the
medium also clearly displeased him; he wanted something he could share with “friends”
but also, as his quote above suggests, an image worthy of posterity and for gifting to
public print collections.
Beckmann’s next attempt gave the publisher what he wanted. In Beckmann’s
1921 lithographic portrait (figure 2.16), the publisher appears very “geistig” indeed. His
face is a mask of seriousness, his hands are folded in his lap. A black band is tied around
his arm, a reference to the recent passing of the publisher’s father and his grief over the
unterschätze mich. Der dargestellte wirke durchaus als ungeistiger Typ, wie ein besserer Kommis [...]
Aber ich hatt[sic] nun mal die Absicht, die Radierung nicht nur als ein Blatt von Beckmann, sondern auch
als eine Darstellung von mir an meine guten Freunde zu verteilen. Meine Erscheinung sollte in einem
Blatte von Ihnen weiterleben, wie Cranach in seinen Blättern gute Freunde hat weiterleben lassen.” In
Hofmaier, p 432, letter dated 19 March 1921(87)
158
“Sehr leid tut es mir, dass Sie mit Ihrer Radirung [sic] nicht recht glücklich zu seien scheinen. Sie
können mir aber glauben, dass mir irgend welche böse Absicht dabei vollkommen fern gelegen hat.
Natürlich ist, dass man be einer relative so kleinen Arbeit nicht ganz umfassend seien kann. Ich kann Ihnen
daher nur raten gelegentlich doch noch den Mut zu haben, Ihr Portrait in “Öl” bei mir zu bestellen…”
Letter 187 dated 15 October 1920. Beckmann, Beckmann Briefe: Band I, 187.
174
event.
159
Piper sits before an open window, an easel in the background—the
iconographic props of a well-rounded intellectual and a reference to Piper’s connection to
the arts. The size is also much bigger: 59.2 x 41.5 cm (23.3 x 16.3”). Piper’s pleasure
with this new depiction is suggested by a later photographic portrait, in which the
publisher poses smiling before the framed depiction of his much younger, and more
serious, self (figure 2.17). Here, apparently, is a print for posterity.
159
Beckmann sends his condolences in a letter to Piper on the 1 of March, 1921 (letter 194). In a letter
dated 1 June 1921 (letter 201), Beckmann thanks Piper for sending the small biography of his father. See
Ibid., 192, 197.
Chapter Three
Processing Trauma: Printmaking and the Aktuelle
Gustav Hartlaub, director of the Mannheimer Kunsthalle, immediately recognized
the expanded role of the graphic arts after the war. In his 1920 book, New German
Graphics (Die neue deutsche Graphik), Hartlaub observed the effect of the Revolution in
particular on the omnipresence of prints in public life:
Out of the almost furious hunger of our young generation for [the relief
print’s] grotesque and, at the same time, magical black-and-white effects
which everywhere decorate the pages of their political and artistic journals
and pamphlets and have already begun to permeate (durchfärben) the
whole being of posters, books, and pictures, appears the burning
presentness (Aktualität) of this graphic medium. Already the months after
the Revolution have shown observers that the lino- and woodcut
(Formschnitt) have moved from the narrow realm of the connoisseur and
regional art (Heimatkunst) to become the medium of public intellectual-
political (geistespolitischen) propaganda.
1
Hartlaub’s book celebrated the woodcuts of Die Brücke as Germany’s major aesthetic
contribution to modern graphic art; Die neue deutsche Graphik is suffused with the
language of Expressionism, elevating the importance of the artist’s inner vision.
However, Hartlaub also recognized the distinct Aktualität of contemporary graphics,
acknowledging their recent ubiquity on posters and in journals, pamphlets, and books.
1
“Aus dem beinahe wütenden Hunger unserer jungen Generation nach seinen grotesken und zugleich
magischen Schwarzweißwirkungen, welche überall die Seiten ihrer politischen und künstlerischen
Zeitschriften und Flugblätter bedecken und schon beginnen, das gesamte Plakat-, Buch- und Bildwesen zu
durchfärben, zeigt sich die ganz brennende Aktualität dieses graphischen Mittels. Gerade die Monate nach
der Revolution haben den Beobachter gelehrt, daß der Formschnitt aus der Enge der Liebhaber und der
Heimatkunst zum öffentlichen geistespolitischen Propagandamittel geworden ist.” Gustav Hartlaub, Die
neue deutsche Graphik (Berlin: E. Reiss, 1920), 28–9.
176
The print had moved beyond what he termed the “narrow” niches of “Heimatkunst” and
collectible to become a “medium of public intellectual-political propaganda.”
2
Hartlaub was writing in the aftermath of the November Revolution, when prints,
especially relief prints such as woodcuts and linocuts, had indeed moved into the public
realm as never before. They were media of both necessity and choice for groups like the
progressive Arbeitsrat für Kunst, who used them to decorate posters and broadsides with
political slogans, ideological messages, and proclamations about the importance of art to
the fledgling Republic. Artists like Lyonel Feininger, Max Pechstein, Conrad
Felixmüller, Käthe Kollwitz, and others contributed their woodcuts, linocuts, and
lithographs to the political and artistic causes they favored.
In an essay in his publication Zeit-Echo, writer and critic Ludwig Rubiner also
emphasized the significance of prints for the present moment, noting less the
particularities of any single graphic medium—indeed, he seems to conflate printmaking
and painting—than gesturing to their potential for widespread dissemination:
The painter of the future draws broadsheets as models to live by, as
passionate as the woodcuts of Dürer and his contemporaries—which were
in their own time not luxurious, but living, exemplary, and newspaper-
like!—these Apocalypses and these Life of Marys which were responsible
for the shocks experienced by all those into whose hands they fell.
3
2
The term “Heimatkunst” is difficult to translate. Its most literal translation would be “homeland art,” but
more accurate would be “folk art,” and the term had ideological associations even during this period.
3
“Die Maler der Zukunft zeichnen Flugblätter, als Vorbilder zum Leben, so intensiv heutig brennend
gedacht, wie die - auch ihrer Zeit nicht kunstgenießerisch, sondern lebendig vorbildlich und zeitungshaft
wirkenden! - Holzschnitte Dürers und seiner Genossen aus einer damals neuen Religionsepoche, diese
Apokalypsen und Marienleben, Erschütterungen und Verantwortlichmachungen für jeden Menschen, dem
sie in die Hand fielen.” Ludwig Rubiner, “Neuer Inhalt,” Zeit-Echo 3, no. 1–2 (May 1917): 4–5.
177
Rubiner celebrates Dürer’s prints—in particular, the populist woodcut portfolios The
Apocalypse and Life of Mary, as the predecessors to contemporary graphic art. Dürer’s
“newspaper-like” prints were not luxury articles but works that “fell into the hands” of
the masses and gave them a “shock.”
Newspaper-like refers in Rubiner’s quote to the widespread availability and
accessibility of images. But in the immediate postwar period, “newspaper-like” also
referred to a print’s subject matter, to the immediate, or aktuell, nature of its content.
This presentation of modern life as a major subject of and for contemporary graphic art
represented a shift in the content of art during and after the war. This was not the stuff of
“modern life” as Baudelaire imagined it—that fleeting momentary quality that is present
in women’s fashion or forms of middle class leisure. This was modern life as a series of
newsworthy events that began with the declaration of war in August 1914. This was a
moment in which the role of photography and the role of the print overlapped; a moment
in which neither print nor photograph had a direct claim to documentary authenticity.
Nor did either have a distinct representational role; both had strengths and weaknesses
that exposed and occluded. Importantly, both treated the immediate moment. There was
therefore significant overlap in the content of humor magazines, the illustrated press,
print portfolios, and other forms of visual mass media.
At the same time that publishers were finding new places for the print by using
the medium more broadly—as a political, agitational, and reportorial tool—there was
debate about how to directly represent the fantastic events of recent years. Unlike the so-
called rappel à l’ordre that took place in France, the figurative turn in Germany was not a
178
turning away from experience as much as an attempt to come to terms with it. Print
experimented with the possibilities for representing the extreme in a direct and
‘authentic’ way. Although the supposedly clinical view offered by the photo lens has
obscured the contributions of print to the ‘objectivity’ of the Neue Sachlichkeit, print was
initially the medium in which artists experimented with how to present experiences that
were both highly individual and yet shared by millions of Germans; encounters on the
battlefield, with urban and revolutionary violence, and with hyperinflation.
Processing Trauma
The First World War is often described as a rupture that severed the experiences
of those who lived through it into before and after. For Germans, this sense of schism
was compounded by additional traumas that included defeat and unconditional surrender,
the overthrow of the monarchy, violent nationwide revolution, and the establishment of a
new national government, all of which occurred in a very brief span of time.
Initially, representing the war in a way that captured the distinct experiences of
the Materialschlacht, or mechanized warfare, presented real challenges for artists and
authors. In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell argued that British writers
did not immediately have the tools capable for describing or depicting World War I in
writing. Language was as yet inadequate for addressing the experience of modern
warfare.
4
This inability to immediately process the extraordinary character of the war
4
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, Illustrated Edition (New York: Sterling, 2012 [1975]).
179
extended to the way it was waged; the war was so lethal in part because the most
technologically developed weaponry made standard battlefield practices obsolete.
Peter Jelavich has similarly argued that visual artists, like writers, did not initially
have the formal or aesthetic means for expressing the horrors of the First World War.
5
Representation only gradually caught up to the war’s horrifying realities. Part of this lag
was conceptual; it was impossible for anyone to conceive of the destructiveness of
modern war based on the experiences of previous conflicts. The other lag was aesthetic
and technological; that is, the technological limitations of the photograph and, for the
print, the aesthetic limitations of artistic precedent.
These limitations are on display in Die große Zeit: illustrierte Kriegsgeschichte
(The Great Age: [An] Illustrated History of the War), an illustrated serial publication
which documented the war and was published at irregular intervals by the Ullstein
Verlag.
6
The publication presented the latest reports from the Western and Eastern
Fronts and provided photographic and printed illustrations—often photographically
reproduced paintings, watercolor sketches, or drawings—to accompany the text. The
uses to which photographs were put in Die große Zeit underscore its current limitations as
a documentary medium; photographs are used to depict static scenes—the aftermath of a
battle, for instance, rather than the battle itself. A number of photographs show destroyed
bridges and buildings, the topographical features of a given landscape or village, or
genre-like scenes which depict the particulars of modern military life. But even as a
5
Peter Jelavich, “Graphic War” (presentation, “Disseminating Expressionism: The Role of Prints, 1905-
1924,” The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, May 6, 2011).
6
The cover notes that issues appear every 8 – 14 days.
180
visual catalogue of details, the photograph still lacked precision and required the
assistance of labels and other textual description. Consider, for example, a photograph
with the caption: “Ein Sappen-Angriff” (roughly, “A Siege Attack”—a Sappe is a siege
trench) (figure 3.1). The photograph is labeled with four letters and arrows indicating the
a) Russian Trench, b) German Siege-Trench, c) German Trench, and d) a Dead Russian.
The labels indicate what the visual image cannot. The photo itself presents a flat
landscape interrupted by several horizontal strips of piled dirt and one vertical strip on the
right side—the trenches—and an indistinct smear in the left middleground that the label
indicates is a Russian body. The photo is not legible in even the most general sense;
neither the body nor the trenches are identifiable elements, let alone identifiable by
nationality. Moreover, although the photo is meant to illustrate the strategic and
harrowing aspects of modern battle, its subtext unintentionally points to the stasis and
boredom of trench warfare, contradicting the patriotic and hawkish tone of the
publication.
Meanwhile, the prints in Die große Zeit show themselves to be anachronistic less
in the technical means at their disposal than in the visual language they employ, and in
the subjects the artist chooses to depict. The printed scenes often show dramatic
battlefield action, but these are obviously not based on actual observation of the war as it
was being fought on the ground. What is shown are heroic scenes of soldiers in action,
often on horseback, fighting hand to hand with swords (figure 3.2). There is a generic
quality to the printed scenes, which, like the photographs, require a caption to identify
their subject, but for different reason. While the photograph demands textual additions to
181
clarify and identify inarticulate visual content, the print requires a caption in order to
name and make specific content that is otherwise generic and unremarkable. One
clarifies text, the other subtext.
In between the photographs and the prints of Die große Zeit, there was a
representational blind spot that occluded those subjects that would preoccupy artists in
the postwar period: for instance, battle scenes that depicted the disturbing effectiveness of
modern weaponry and the physical toll these weapons took on the landscape and on the
bodies of soldiers and civilians caught in their path. They also overlooked the collateral
damage that was not technically unrepresentable, but which was rendered invisible by the
politics of the moment. These subjects in the later years of the war and after included the
tremendous number of Kriegskrüppel or war cripples, subjects whose disfiguration
collapsed the technological advances of military and medicine, technologies that could
damage bodies as well as put them back together (in one form or another) as never
before.
So how did one represent the conflict to a public hungry for news of the war and
visualizations of it? Many publications did turn to artists to filter and re-present the
wartime experience in a way that was both familiar and exciting. Consider, for example,
the inaugural issue of Kriegszeit (War Time), Paul Cassirer’s first wartime publication, a
bi-weekly journal that began publication on August 31, 1914. The cover presents a
lithograph by one of Germany’s best-known contemporary artists, Max Liebermann, the
source image for which was a photograph capturing the crowd gathered around the
Kronprinzenpalais, where Wilhelm II first declared war in Berlin in August 1914 (figure
182
3.3). One would have to know the photograph to recognize the subject of Liebermann’s
lithograph; the artist gives his audience some assistance by writing the most famous line
from the speech below the image in his own hand: “Ich kenne keine Parteien mehr, ich
kenne nur noch Deutsche,” (I no longer recognize [political] parties, now I only
recognize Germans), but otherwise, the source image is unremarkable. We can therefore
assume that it was already familiar to a broad audience—probably through the illustrated
press—and that it was chosen for its historical rather than aesthetic significance. For
although the photograph successfully relays visual data and the facts of the moment—the
size of the crowd or the brightness of the sun on that hot August day—the photographer’s
ability to document anything beyond these general visual facts is stymied by the
blurriness of the photograph and the strong contrasts of light and dark that eliminate
detail. In addition, the Kaiser is not visible and there is little to connect it to what it
purports to document; the photo, taken out of context, could depict almost any crowd,
anywhere, on any day. Photography is not yet, or at least not here, the superior prosthetic
eye celebrated by Moholy-Nagy that sees and records what our eye cannot.
7
Liebermann’s lithograph, meanwhile, does not try to make up for the
photograph’s limitations by adding or enhancing visual details such as the missing faces
in the crowd. He is faithful, more or less, to his source image, but at the same time
supplements it with some of the emotion missing from the original by visually fusing the
populace in form and feeling. Bodies are rendered with the same strokes as the
7
Moholy-Nagy celebrates the camera’s ability to “make visible existences which cannot be perceived or
taken in by our optical instrument, the eye; i.e., th photographic camera can either complete or supplement
our optical instrument, the eye.” László Moholy–Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film, trans. Janet Seligman
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969), 28.
183
surrounding trees and sky; they become an indistinguishable mass, a figurative sea
resembling a literal one. Liebermann furthers this theme of unity and assent by
transcribing the famous line from the Kaiser’s speech below the image in his own hand,
aligning himself with the sentiments it expresses. The Kaiser is not visible, but he is
present through his words and in the body of the people, together in common cause.
Liebermann has visually articulated the famous Burgfrieden, or party truce, that the
Kaiser’s speech expressed in words.
But as Cassirer became increasingly critical of the war, his publications followed
suit. Kriegszeit halted publication at the end of 1915, and was followed by Der
Bildermann in April 1916. Bildermann presented more skeptical artistic responses to the
war: Beckmann’s portrait of his wounded brother-in-law, Martin Tube, who was killed at
the Front, or Ernst Barlach’s macabre vision of Death as a giant sower wielding a
hammer above a field of corpses, for instance. As discussed in chapter two,
Bildermann’s masthead proclaimed the magazine’s objective: to present the news of the
day in clear visual form to a wide audience. That clear visual form was not the
photograph, but the lithograph. Although Bildermann did not enjoy widespread success,
it demonstrated both how publications were responding in real time to events, and also
how graphic art was a part of that response, a tool for offering the artist’s immediate
reactions to the public. But the prints published in Bildermann belied the idea that the
visual image was necessarily more transparent and legible than the written word.
Certainly, Die große Zeit and Bildermann addressed different implied audiences.
Die große Zeit aimed for a broad readership, and kept its content unambiguously patriotic
184
and affirmative. Both Kriegszeit and Bildermann, meanwhile, had a more limited
audience from the outset given the subset of wartime content, which involved more
overtly artistic representations of and reflections on the war rather than illustrations (in
addition to lithographs, both publications included poetry and other brief written pieces).
From the beginning, the content was mixed, and gradually, more ambiguous images
appeared alongside the patriotic ones. If the role of Cassirer’s publications was to make
artists’ work more accessible, the subjects of the lithographs in Kriegszeit and especially
the later Bildermann were ambiguous in a way that made their messages unclear.
Another art publication, Hans Goltz’s portfolio series Kriegsbilderbogen
Münchner Künstler (“War Pictures by Munich Artists”), suggests there was more
freedom still in small-edition publications. The Kriegsbilderbogen was a series of three
print portfolios by Munich-based artists published by the Goltz Verlag. The subscription
advertisement announced that it was, “a document of the first attempts of Munich artists
to form impressions of the war.”
8
Each contained twelve hand-colored “original”
lithographs. The portfolios were produced in tiered editions totaling 1000 impressions—
hardly limited—yet the subscription advertisement, written only one month after the
declaration of war in September 1914, pressed collectors to subscribe immediately,
insisting that, “after the end of the war, the price of still available impressions normally
will go up in peace time.”
9
8
“…ein Dokument der ersten Versuche der Münchner Künstler sind, die Eindrücke vom Krieg zu formen.”
“Subskriptions-Einladung,” Die Kriegsbilderbogen Münchner Künstler, Goltz Verlag, 1914.
9
“Nach Beendigung des Krieges wird der Preis der etwa noch vorhandenen Exemplare auf den in
Friedenszeiten sonst üblichen erhöht.” “Subscriptions-Einladung,” Ibid.
185
The advertisement is permeated with attitudes prevalent during the war’s early
days. For instance, the call for subscribers to act now suggests that both author and
audience believed the war would be of limited duration at a time when the common
refrain was that it would all be over before Christmas. The portfolios were quickly
produced in part because there was anxiety that this long-anticipated conflict might even
be over before the portfolios went to press. The subscription announcement also hinted
at certain positive collateral effects that the war might have; artists, it stated, were already
turning their gaze from the inner “individual” problems that characterized Expressionism
and looking outward once again: “…before this overpowering event, the problem of
today: war! The transformation (Umformung) of the world! Enormous masses of men
collide with one another and search out salvation.”
10
Here, the war is seen as a
constructive force for both the culture at large and for the creative powers of the
individual artist; it is celebrated as an opportunity for artists to have authentic experiences
and to use those experiences to transform their art: “The artist stands shocked with us
and it pushes him into a new formation of his experiences and impressions.”
11
This announcement, however, appears tempered next to the foreword to the
Kriegsbilderbogen entitled “Volk und Kunst” (“The People and Art”) by writer,
10
“[Der Künstler] hat seine individuellen Probleme zurückgestellt vor dem überwuchtigen Ereignis, vor
dem einen Problem des heutigen Tages: Krieg! Umformung der Welt! Ungeheuere Menschenmassen
prallen aufeinander und suchen die Lösung.” “Subskriptions-Einladung,” in Kriegsbilderbogen Münchner
Künstler, 1914.
11
“Erschüttert steht mit uns der Künstler und es drängt ihn zur neuen Gestaltung seiner Erlebnisse und
Eindrücke.” Ibid. Max Beckmann expressed a similar sentiment as early as 1909 in his diary: “Martin
[Tube, his future brother-in-law] meint es giebt Krieg… Wir wurden einig daß es für unsere heutige
ziemlich demoralisierte Kultur garnicht schlecht wäre, wenn die Instinte und Triebe alle wieder mal an ein
Interesse gefesselt würden.” Quoted in Alexander Dückers, ed., Max Beckmann: Die Hölle, 1919 (Berlin:
Kupferstichkabinett Berlin, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, 1983), 72.
186
philosopher, and critic Michael Georg Conrad, which takes a more metaphysical, even
chiliastic, tone. Conrad praises the Volk and the artist who is “God’s most faithful
collaborator, the interpreter and glorifier of his world, without whom the homeland
misses the best piece from the treasure chest and arms cabinet (Kleinodien-
Waffenkammer) inherited from the fathers.”
12
He continued:
Art on the day of battle and the evening of mercy is the consecration of
tomorrow, when the hardest is done and the dance song for the celebration
of victory prepares [one] for the new battles and the exaltations
(Erhöhungen) of life. Art is always present with the heroes who bring
their people great blood sacrifices, and it has tempered (gemildert) and
blessed the horrors of the holy war with beauty. In the hour of need (in
der großen Not), [art] has given the people the sign for their rebirth, made
their eye[s] bright, their spirit[s] glad, their heart[s] strong, and taken the
terror from death...Let its flags of victory wave over the graves and from
the musty smell of spring rise to fresh hope. …See, art will not tire, it will
be a blessing and a salvation to itself and its people, a fire on the
mountains that is never extinguished! God bless the people and art! Lift
hearts and eyes to the eternal heights!
13
In spite of the jingoistic tenor of the announcement and introduction, the images
from the Kriegsbilderbogen are nevertheless quite equivocal. Conrad’s words imply that
art will serve the state by beautifying battle and giving it a higher purpose. Art is with
the heroes he tells us. But Julius Wolfgang Schülein’s lithograph Die Mütter der Helden
12
“Der Künstler ist Gottes treuester Mitarbeiter, der Erklärer und Verherrlicher seiner Welt—ohne ihm
fehlte der Heimat das beste Stück ihrer Kleinodien- udn Waffenkammer im Erbe der Väter.” Michael
Georg Conrad, “Volk und Kunst,” Die Kriegsbilderbogen Münchner Künstler, Goltz Verlag, 1914.
13
“Morgenweihe ist die Kunst am Tage des Kampfes und Abendsegen, wenn das Schwerste getan, und
Tanzlied zur Siegesfeier, die zu neuen Kämpfen und Erhöhungen des Lebens rüstet. Die Kunst ist immer
mit den Helden gewesen, die ihrem Volke die großen Blutopfer gebracht—und die Schrecken des heiligen
Krieges hat sie mit Schönheit gemildert und gesegnet. In der großen Not hat sie dem Volke die Zeichen für
seine Widergeburt gegeben, ihm das Auge hell, den Geist fröhlich, das Herz stark gemacht und dem Tode
das Grauen genommen…Über Gräber läßt sie ihre Siegesfahnen wehen und aus Moder den
Frühlingsgeruch frischer Hoffnung steigen…Siehe, die Kunst wird nicht müde, sich und ihrem Volke ein
Segen und eine Erlösung zu sein, ein Feuer auf den Bergen, das nie erlischt! Gott grüßt Volk und Kunst!
Erhebt Herz undAugen zu den ewigen Höhen!” Ibid.
187
offers a less noble take on the fate of fighters (figure 3.4). A horizontal stream of bodies
in various states of decay—some, it seems, freshly fallen, others appear more skeletal—
are attended by an equally endless procession of mourners—the mothers of the title. At
the head of the procession, a figure bends over a prostrate body while others wait behind
her. They are veiled, indistinct; they blend into the background, resembling a ridge line
or a rock wall. The hand-coloration here stands out as smears of red paint, blood on the
ground. The streams of both standing and stretched-out bodies resemble geographical
features that are not unlike the appearance of the trenches in the photograph from Die
große Zeit. There, the piles of dirt become horizontal and vertical strips, abstracted in
their lack of identifiable detail. Here, bodies emerge out of abstract formations.
Another lithograph, this one by Otto Theodor Wolfgang Stein, defies Conrad’s
notion of heroism entirely. Titled Lüttich (Liège, figure 3.5), the caption reads: “‘As I
came into Liège, I saw German soldiers sleeping under a tree on which three [illegible]
were hanging.’ (from a soldier’s letter).”
14
What shocks is not Stein’s depiction—there is
nothing particularly grotesque or even Goyaesque about his portrayal of hanging bodies
or the soldiers who slumber beneath them. What shocks is the subject, the caption that
identifies it, and the source—the soldier’s letter, an eyewitness account that vouches for
its accuracy. The reference to Liège is also significant; the Battle of Liège was the war’s
first significant battle, and although it was ultimately a tactical victory for the German
army, it came to be considered a moral victory for the Allies because neutral Belgium
14
“Als ich nach Lüttich kam, sah ich deutsche Soldaten unter einem Baum schlafen auf dem drei …
hingen. (aus einem Soldatenbrief)”
188
was resisting an invading German army that was pummeling it on the way to France.
Although the artist’s position is unclear, the ambiguity of the image does not match the
explicit Hurrahpatriotismus of Conrad’s introduction or of wartime publications such as
Die große Zeit. Titles of other selected lithographs from Kriegsbilderbogen—
“Leichenrauber” (Grave or Corpse Robber), “Vermisst” (Missing in Action)—indicate
similarly equivocal subjects that do not present a uniformly celebratory or heroized vision
of the war for their audience. This suggests that graphics produced in limited editions for
a circumscribed audience—here, collectors of modern prints—could offer representations
of war that contained ambiguity and contradiction, even during the conflict's earliest,
most enthusiastic, days.
In spite of the seemingly subversive nature of their subject matter, there is nothing
formally radical in the presentation of subjects in the Kriegsbilderbogen. There is little
that separates them aesthetically from prewar prints, and they are in line with what Albert
Boime would call the juste milieu, situated somewhere between the poles of the academy
and avant-garde, and in line with the work of the progressive establishment of the
Secession. The most interesting feature of the series may well be Goltz’s attempt to turn
it into an immediate collector’s item by referencing the war. And lithography offered a
quick turnaround for both artist and publisher and gave the former relative freedom with
choice of medium and presentation. The result was as much opportunism and timing as it
was about artistic imperatives.
Contemporaneous works that documented the battlefield and associated wartime
subjects were often works on paper—drawings and prints—because of the practicality of
189
these media. They were portable and inexpensive, and they permitted an immediate
transcription of one’s impressions of both battle and life behind the fighting lines.
Lithography enabled the artist to capture everyday life with the speed of his drawing
hand, as Benjamin would later note in his Work of Art essay.
15
And the artist’s hand and
eye were still quicker than the speed of the camera’s shutter. Artists also experimented
with aesthetic styles and processes that might help them get closer to depicting not only
the look, but also the feel and experience of modern war.
Ken Silver has argued that the aesthetic language of Cubism remained popular
among those artists who were soldiers on the fighting lines and were searching for a way
to capture something of the war’s dynamism and destruction:
For a war that—with its trench fighting, new incendiary devices, modern
artillery, and poison gas—was unprecedented in almost every way,
Cubism’s lack of association with the past was the analogue of the poilu’s
general sense of dissociation. As a new visual language with a radically
altered perspective, Cubism was an excellent means for portraying a war
that broke all the rules of traditional combat. For those who had actually
been in the trenches, the image of a wounded cuirassier could not possibly
translate or epitomize lived experience: Cubism, on the other hand, for
rendering one’s comrades whether at leisure or in the midst of battle,
seemed to have the ring of truth.
16
While Picasso and others who had been associated with Cubism before the war turned
increasingly to a precise, classicizing style of representation often termed the rappel a
l’ordre (return to order) at home, for soldiers at the Front, even those who were more
15
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in The Work of Art
in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael William
Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y Levin, trans. E. F. N Jephcott (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press
of Harvard University Press, 2008).
16
Kenneth E Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914-
1925 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 84–5.
190
aesthetically conservative in their civilian lives, Cubism became a means of finding
representational forms that did justice to what they saw and experienced. Interestingly,
as Silver notes, it was a way of expressing both the psychic and physical shock of the
war, of registering the mental as well as the material trauma of blasted apart earth and
bodies.
17
Similarly, a number of German artists who focused on the war evinced changes in
that works’ style and subject matter over the course of the conflict. The technological
leaps represented by the new means of waging war inspired some artists to reexamine
their own processes of art making, while for others it was the experience of war that
occasioned an aesthetic reassessment. Peter Jelavich has also discussed the
“monochromatic” character of the war, which given the dominance of browns and
blacks—churned earth, mud, camouflage, and the subdued palette of soldier’s
uniforms—meant that graphic art was particularly suited to depicting it.
18
Max Beckmann’s experience of the war is instructive in this regard. Beckmann
was, like many of his colleagues, enthusiastic about the opportunities the war offered for
17
The Italian Futurists were also interested in finding an appropriate formal language to depict the war’s
sights, sounds, and materiel, but these were not far from their earlier interests in the multi-sensory
dynamism of modern life, which preceded the war. For instance, the Futurist Manifesto, written in 1909,
famously announced, “We want to glorify war — the only cure for the world — militarism, patriotism, the
destructive gesture of the anarchists,” as well as proclaiming a speeding automobile “more beautiful than
the Victory of Samothrace.” There is much continuity, therefore, in their prewar and wartime work. See
Christine Poggi, Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2009).
18
Stephen Kern has made a more explicit link between the “monochromatic” and fragmented character of
Cubism and camouflage. He notes that Lucien-Victor Guirand, an inventor of camouflage, knew of
Picasso, and later stated that, “In order to totally deform objects, I employed the means Cubists used to
represent them.” Artists were likewise later employed as camoufleurs by the French army. See Stephen
Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983),
chap. 11. “The Cubist War.”
191
new experiences, as well as the overall cultural effect it promised to have. As early as
1908, Beckmann wrote in his diary after a conversation with his brother-in-law, Martin
Tube that, “Martin thinks there will be a war. Russia France England against Germany.
We agreed that it really would not be so bad for our present quite demoralized society if
the instincts and drives were all to be focused again by a single interest.”
19
Beckmann
volunteered in autumn 1914 for ambulance service and was sent to the eastern Front.
His early observations contain a sense of fascination with what he was witnessing mixed
with an eagerness to assimilate his visual impressions in an artistic way; while working in
a hospital in Flanders he wrote: “I’ve seen some wonderful things. In the semi-darkness
of the emplacement, half-dressed men streaming with blood to whom white bandages
were just being applied. An embodiment of grandeur and pain. New ideas for the
Scourging of Christ.”
20
By the end of 1914, however, Beckmann’s visual responses to the war were less
lofty. His drawing Théâtre du Monde - Grand Spectacle de la Vie [sic] (World Theater –
The Great Spectacle of Life) (figure 3.6), depicts a soldier with a crutch and head wound.
The unsettling character of the drawing lies less in its subject than in Beckmann’s manner
of depiction; it exhibits a shaky line that scratches out only the rough contours of the
19
Matthias Eberle, World War I and the Weimar Artists: Dix, Grosz, Beckmann, Schlemmer (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1985), 76. It should be noted that Beckmann was aware that both his written and
visual impressions of life on the Front would be published. His early letters and drawings were printed in
Kunst und Künstler (Art and Artists), the established art publication of Paul Cassirer’s cousin and
professional rival, Bruno Cassirer. In 1916, Bruno Cassirer then published a collection of letters compiled
by Beckmann’s wife, Minna, as Briefe im Kriege (Letters in Wartime), which was edited in consultation
with the artist. This suggests that there is a certain amount of self-consciousness to both diary entry and
drawing; these are intended for public posterity, not (only) as records of personal, internal reflection.
20
Ibid. Beckmann transferred to the western Front at the end of 1914.
192
soldier’s body and renders his hands and feet as claw-like forms. Stephan von Wiese
diagnoses Beckmann with physical and mental exhaustion through a formal analysis of
the drawing; Beckmann’s “fluent calligraphy,” here “has split into separate, strangely
awkward ciphers—strokes that obviously reveal a state of extreme mental shock. The
same disorganization has communicated itself to the style of the drawing.”
21
Around the
time that Beckmann’s written musings about the war became darker and more cryptic, he
discussed drawing itself as a means of self-defense, a kind of talismanic act that protected
him from harm. “I have been drawing,” he wrote in a letter to his wife, Minna, “that
protects from death and danger.”
22
Much of the scholarly discussion of Beckmann’s work during the war has focused
on aesthetic shifts that were, in part, the result of psychological trauma the artist
experienced during his time as a paramedic (Santitäter) in military hospitals on both the
eastern and western Fronts in 1914 and 1915. As von Wiese points out, that experience
had the potential to be more traumatic than time in the trenches; one saw not only the
horrifying results of battle up close, but was also exposed to the unique horrors found in
improvised military hospitals.
23
Certainly, surgical operations, heavily bandaged
soldiers, and dead bodies are frequent subjects in Beckmann’s wartime drawing. And
21
“Die flüssige Handschrift Beckmanns ist einzeln gesetzen, seltsam gestelzten Buchstaben gewichen—
Schriftzüge, augenfällig einen Zustand vehementer psychischer Erschütterrung zum Ausdruck bringen.
Dieselbe Desorganisation teilt sich auch im Stil der Zeichnung mit.”
Stephan von Wiese, Max Beckmanns zeichnerisches Werk: 1903 - 1925 (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1978),
68.
22
…“Ich habe gezeichnet, das sichert einen gegen Tod und Gefahr.” See Max Beckmann, Briefe im Kriege
(Mu#nchen: Piper, 1984), 46.
23
Von Weise also points out that Beckmann would have seen the victims of the first poison gas attack,
which the Germans used against the Allies in the Second Battle of Ypres in April 1915.
193
Beckmann did suffer a mental breakdown and took a medical leave that turned out to be
permanent in 1915.
Von Wiese, in particular, sees psychological trauma instantiated through aesthetic
changes in Beckmann’s work. He charts this change in the artist’s drawings, which move
from impressionistic tonality and atmospheric perspective toward hard lines and
contours; “Step by step, one is able to see as if reading from a temperature chart how the
waking horrors led to an uncertainty with the old medium: his system of drawing (das
zeichnerische System) became disorganized, the line became limp and stringy (lasch
faserig)…”
24
The “impressionistic” pre-war drawings include sketches documenting the
Kriegseuphorie in Berlin in August 1914 (figure 3.7) which are very similar to
Liebermann’s own lithograph for the cover of Kriegszeit. Both exhibit the same
indistinct line, the emphasis on tones and shapes rather than hard contours or defined
forms. Beckmann, in fact, seems to reference the same photograph documenting the
crowds outside the Kaiser’s imperial palace that Liebermann used as the source for his
lithograph. Here, the camera is a substitute for the eyewitness, it provides the detail of
the event minus the emotional involvement, which is recovered and reimagined by the
artist.
Beckmann had relied previously on photography as a substitute for personal
experience of an event. He used photographs published in the press as source material
for his two most significant pre-war paintings: The Sinking of the Titanic, and Scene from
24
“Schritt für Schritt läßt sich wie auf einer Fieberkurve ablesen, wie das wachsende Erschrecken zu einem
Unsicherwerden der alten Mittel führte: Das zeichnerische System desorganisiert sich, der Strich wird lasch
faserig…” von Wiese, Max Beckmanns zeichnerisches Werk: 1903 - 1925, 45.
194
the Destruction of Messina (figure 3.8). The latter depicts the horrific aftermath of an
earthquake in the Italian city of Messina in late 1908. Beckmann had no direct
experience of either event; he encountered both indirectly through newspaper reports.
25
Following the example of nineteenth century French artist Théodor Géricault, Beckmann
studied both photographs and first person accounts and combined them with his academic
training in order to present the dramatic scenes of death and destruction as modern, yet
timeless, tragedies. The trauma, however, was kept at arm’s length through literal
distance—these events happened in other places to other people—and through the
universalizing tropes of art historical reference.
26
Photography was a reference tool, a
way to get at the physiognomic details of a particular place or to capture some of the
specifics of a given tragedy, but was not a substitute for the artist’s presentation of
events.
Photography, as has been argued, was less helpful as a reference tool for
accessing the experience of life on the Front, however. Beckmann relied instead on his
own experience of events, and his graphics and drawings demonstrate ways that the
artist’s depiction might transcend the photograph, not only by representing what that
medium could not given current technological limitations, but also by incorporating some
of the photographic into the final product. In the print Die Granate (Grenade) (figure
3.9), for instance, Beckmann compresses a series of events—a grenade before, during,
25
For his Messina painting, Beckmann used photographs published in the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung as
source material. See Ibid, 45.
26
Peter Chametzky singles out Sinking of the Titanic as a particularly striking example of the anachronism
of history painting for depicting current events in the face of film and the photograph. Peter Chametzky,
Objects as History in Twentieth-Century German Art: Beckmann to Beuys (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2010).
195
and after its explosion—into one image, collapsing a narrative sequence into a single
frame. Thus, not only can Beckmann depict the decisive moment before the
contemporary photograph is actually able to capture such momentary action—that sliver
of a second when the grenade explodes, expanding outward in a blinding ball of light—
the print also depicts the before and after. We see a frenetic man in the right
middleground standing between us and the grenade, whose body shouts, “MOVE!,”
propelled forward by the energy of the explosion. Then, in the foreground, we see the
effects of the blast, including ripped apart faces, torn flesh, and blood. An earlier state of
the print also included a standing soldier on the lower right, a compact figure which
added a different temporal register to the image, suggesting the idealized German soldier
before the reality of the Great War intervened (figure 3.10).
Otto Dix, like Beckmann, would use photography as a reference tool, but he
believed that art exceeded photography through the imaginative contribution of the artist,
who can, in the tradition of Baudelaire’s Painter of Modern Life, fuse the momentary of
the photograph with the totality of the subject to create something that transcends the
‘real’ of photography. As he put it in a statement from 1955,
Photography can only record a moment, and that only superficially, but it
cannot delineate specific, individual form, something that depends on the
imaginative power and intuition of the painter. A hundred photographs of
a person would only result in a hundred different momentary aspects, but
never capture the phenomenon as a whole.
27
We know that Dix did employ photographs when he was creating his graphic magnum
opus, the five portfolio series Der Krieg (War). His friend and occasional collector, the
27
Eberle, World War I and the Weimar Artists, 46.
196
photographer Hugo Erfurth, referred to the “war photographs” that he had sent the artist
“for your etching cycle (Radierwerk)” in exchange for a few drawings or perhaps a
watercolor by the artist.
28
As Andreas Strobl argues, Dix wanted to create an alternative to photography in
his painting, one that was infused with the haptic.
29
This haptic quality is something
Franz Roh also notes about contemporary painting in his seminal postwar text, Nach-
Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus. Franz Roh referred to the still and film camera
as those “marvelous machines” that would “trampl[e] to death” painting if the latter were
to “degenerate” into “simple external imitation.” Roh emphasizes that the special
contribution of the “new art” is the way it “principally evokes…a most prolific and
detailed tactile feeling.”
30
This haptic quality of recent art over and above its
representational veracity is, according to Roh, where painting and print trumps
photography.
This haptic element, however, emerges in a particular, and particularly effective,
way in Dix’s graphic work. Otto Dix had an even closer encounter with the war than
Beckmann, and was on the fighting lines far longer than most of his contemporaries. Dix
volunteered at the beginning of the war, was assigned as a gunner, and remained in active
service throughout most of the war. Like Beckmann, Dix was initially enthusiastic about
28
See letters from Hugo Erfurth to Otto Dix dated 12.20.23 and 9.20.24, GNM Dix Nachlass, I.C. 205.
29
Andreas Strobl, “Otto Dix und Hugo Erfurth: der Maler im Zeitalter der Photographie,” Münchner
Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst 3, no. 44 (1993): 181–199.
30
Franz Roh, “Magical Realism: Post-Expressionism,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 19.
197
the conflict. But unlike Beckmann, Dix’s also affirmed some aspects of his wartime
experience:
The war was a horrible thing, but there was something tremendous about
it, too. I didn’t want to miss it at any price. You have to have seen human
beings in this unleashed state to know what human nature is…I need to
experience all the depths of life for myself, that’s why I go out, and that’s
why I volunteered.”
31
Eberle points out that Dix’s wartime drawings ignored the “horrible thing[s]” that are so
present in his later Der Krieg portfolios. “Dix largely excluded the horror of war from
his drawings. Nowhere do we find the mangled, decaying corpses, the worm-eaten
cadavers, the grotesquely deformed masses of humanity that are so characteristic of his
later etching sequence, War…”
32
Krieg was, in fact, completed in conjunction with the tenth anniversary of the
beginning of the war, an anniversary that inspired ambivalent responses from both
prowar and pacifist groups. Dix had had, in other words, ten years to process the
conflict; the prints of Der Krieg are not, therefore, like Beckmann’s wartime prints, an
attempt to come to terms with the war, but a retrospective response to the conflict after a
decade of reflection and a number of artistic reactions to it.
Some of the inspiration for Krieg, however, may have come from a
contemporaneous event and the suggestion by art historian Wilhelm Waetzoldt, then
secretary in the Prussian Ministry of Culture (Preußischer Kultusministerium) in Berlin
and later the General Director of the Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin, in a letter written to
31
Quoted in Eberle, World War I and the Weimar Artists, 22.
32
Ibid., 33.
198
Dix in 1923. Waetzoldt encouraged Dix to create a series of drawings suitable for
publication that would represent “the suffering of the German populace and the assault of
foreign occupying forces in the Ruhr region...in order to appeal to domestic and
international [opinion] through these absorbing drawings as is possible with the printed
word.”
33
He referenced the etchings of Goya and Belgian artist Ramaeker as inspiration
for the “suggestive power that inheres in figurative representation.”
34
Goya and
Ramaeker, he noted, lived through similar wars of occupation in their homelands and
recorded the horrors of those conflicts for posterity in their graphic work. Waetzoldt
suggested that Dix’s work should focus primarily on the suffering (his underline) of the
populace, particularly women and children, instead of the “heroic resistance” of Ruhr
men. He continues: “The motifs would have to be simple. Allegorical representations:
vampires, or the [allegorical German] figure of Michel, or of La France are to be
avoided.”
35
Waetzoldt’s suggestions point in the direction of Käthe Kollwitz’s sensitive and
affecting representations of starving women and children. Ostensibly, Waetzoldt hoped
to influence immediate international public opinion regarding the occupation of the Ruhr
while also laying claim to artistic ends, and he saw the print—a medium with an artistic
legacy appropriate to such content that also offered the possibility of mass distribution—
33
“Es besteht die Absicht, in künstlerischer Form die Leiden der deutschen Bevölkerung und die Übergriffe
der fremden Besatzung im Ruhrgebiet zur Darstellung bringen zu lassen, um durch diese Zeichnungen
packender, als es das gedruckte Wort vermag, auf die Heimat und das Ausland einzuwirken.“ Letter from
Prof. Dr. Waetzoldt to Dix, 7.20.1923, GNM, Dix Nachlass, I.C. 70.
34
“Wieviel suggestive Kraft der bildlichen Darstellung innewohnt...“ Ibid.
35
“Die Motive müssten einfache sein. Allegorische Darstellungen wie: Vampyre, oder die Gestalt des
Michels, oder der La France etc. wären zu vermeiden.“ Ibid.
199
as a means to do this. He emphasized in the letter that Dix’s drawings would be copied
as prints and distributed among a mass audience in various formats:
The choice of technique and determining the size of the sheet will
naturally fall only to you, I ask you only to keep in mind [im Auge zu
behalten] that the manner of reproduction will not permit [the works] to be
too costly and complicated and also to be reproduced and distributed
[trennen] as posters, for newspapers [Zeitschriften], as well as for
broadsheets.
36
There is a tension apparent here between the distance of artistic precedent—
relating the topic to iconic images of suffering, for example—and the raw proximity of
current events. To make the works transcend the immediacy of illustration, to elevate
them to the level of artistic production, both Dix and Waetzoldt relied on the reassuring
support of art historical reference. Dix, like Waetzoldt, had art history in mind during the
creation of the plates for Der Krieg. He later remarked that while working on the series,
he found inspiration in earlier graphic depictions of war and suffering: “[Francisco]
Goya, [Jacques] Callot, and earlier still, Urs Graf—I asked to be shown prints of theirs in
Basel. It was fabulous…how human matter was demoniacally transformed.”
37
This notion that “human matter was demoniacally transformed” also references
the violent alchemical process of etching itself. Etching is an act of creative destruction.
It requires that the artist take a copper plate that has been treated with an acid-resistant
resin, and then expose parts of that plate with a pointed drawing instrument called a
burin. The plate is then placed in an acid bath and the acid eats away at the areas of the
36
“Die Bestimmung der Technik und Größe der Blatter zu entscheiden, wird naturgemäß einzig Ihnen
obliegen, nur bitte ich, im Auge zu behalten, dass die Vervielfältigungsart keinen zu kostspielige und
komplizierte sein darf und in eine solche für Plakate, für Zeitschriften wie für Flugblätter zu trennen sein
wird.“ Ibid.
37
Eberle, World War I and the Weimar Artists, 39.
200
copper plate that are exposed. It is then these areas—the bitten, exposed parts of the
plate—that retain ink and print on the page. When ink is applied to the plate, the plate is
wiped and ink is pushed into the incised lines.
Dix’s etchings are unique in that his plates are etched very deeply. And Dix’s
plates are often most deeply bitten in those areas of the print that are meant to represent
the physical damage wrought on bodies and on the landscape. Dix, in other words, enacts
real violence on his materials in representing the violence of the war. This reenactment
and literal reproduction of violence, I would argue, exceeds the representational
possibilities for photography, at least as they existed at that moment. It recovers some of
the immediacy of the war’s violence, which was by then a decade old, and brings it back
to the present moment.
There is something else that Dix’s process of etching viscerally commemorates,
and that is the First World War as the first chemical war.
38
World War I was the first war
in which chemical weapons were used in combat, as well as the first conflict in which
there was extensive use of chemical agents for other military purposes—for example, as
flares to light up the trenches and No Man’s Land during nighttime battles. Field of
Craters near Dontrien Lit by Rocket Flares (figure 3.11), an etching and aquatint from
the first portfolio of Der Krieg, graphically demonstrates this effect of chemical flares,
the searing light of which transforms a field in France into a nightmarish lunar landscape.
38
L. F. Haber, The Poisonous Cloud: Chemical Warfare in the First World War (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1986).
201
Art historians have long referred to the indexicality of the photograph given its
direct connection to the thing it represents. Carol Armstrong calls the photograph a trace
of the object it pictures, “caused by a chemical reaction to light reflected off those
objects.”
39
Rosalind Krauss has put in another way:
…photography is an imprint or transfer of the real; it is a photochemically
processed trace causally connected to that thing in the world to which it
refers in a manner parallel to that of fingerprints or footprints or the rings
of water that cold glasses leave on tables. The photograph is thus
generically distinct from painting or sculpture or drawing. On the family
tree of images it is closer to palm prints, death masks, the Shroud of Turin,
or the tracks of gulls on beaches. For technically and semiologically
speaking, drawings and paintings are icons, while photographs are
indexes.
40
The etching is, at least in the Krieg prints, both an icon and an index of a different sort. It
is not a trace of the thing represented, but instead a trace of the destructive act demanded
by its making. The burning of the acid reenacts the destruction it depicts. Consider, for
instance, a work like Verwundeter (Wounded Soldier) (figure 3.12). The soldier’s twisted
face and stunned expression scream with physical pain, but the visceral reaction of the
viewer is inspired as much by Dix’s use of the aquatint medium; his depiction is vague in
specific detail, but all too graphic in evoking the gore, the pulp, the viscera, of a blasted
apart body. The splashed aquatint above the soldier’s arm, for instance, suggests bits of
bone and flesh spraying forth as the bullet tears apart the arm; the dark pool of blood
beneath the shattered limb could be what remains of a damaged appendage, or it could be
viscera. This imprecision actually makes the depiction more disturbing; we are forced to
39
Carol M Armstrong, Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843-1875 (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 2.
40
Rosalind E Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1986), 110.
202
decide what the flecked, spotted, splashed areas really are. Are those the folds of a
garment, or bits of intestine spilling out of an open stomach wound?
Dix’s correspondence with the printer of the plates for Der Krieg and with other
printmakers reveals that the artist’s use of aquatint was—as a non-expert printmaker—
experimental, and that he wanted to learn to use the acid to achieve the most intense
effects possible. Dix was intentionally burning his plates in an excessive way; he was
experimenting and searching out certain effects in a medium he was not entirely familiar
with, but the possibilities of which he nevertheless understood and appreciated based on
his experience of the prints of artists like Goya and Nolde.
His struggles with intaglio methods are apparent in works such as Sterbender
Soldat (Dying Soldier) (figure 3.13). We see several areas where the acid has burned
deeper holes in the plate, creating small puddles which mimic destroyed or decaying
flesh. One can see that the ink is not distributed uniformly within these areas, it gathers
around the edges, creating a darkened outline with lighter greys in the center. This effect
may not have been intentional; because intaglio prints are produced through a process of
inking and wiping, larger exposed areas would have some of the ink wiped out of them,
and excess ink would be pushed to and gather in the edges of these hollows. That Dix
was looking for ways to achieve larger areas of dark tone without the lighter greys to
dampen their effect is evident in several letters produced during and just after the
production of the plates for Der Krieg. In September 1924, Otto Felsing of the PanPresse
Druckerei, who was hired to print the series, wrote to Dix notifying him that all the
203
aquatint plates had deteriorated considerably.
41
This could be due, he says, to them
having been etched without the correct application of aquatint medium (Aquatintakorn)
to the plate, or that they were in the acid bath too long and burned (verbrannt); the
ultimate effect is that the etched tonal areas now print grey (graudruckt). Felsing asks
Dix to come to Berlin so that they might discuss their options. He concludes “What is to
be feared above all is that the plates will deteriorate further.”
42
Dix asked other printmakers how he might effectively etch very dark tones. A
letter from Wilhelm Herberholz, a printmaker, offers Dix advice on the handling of the
acid and aquatint medium. He tells Dix, “[Emil] Nolde must have meant something else
when he said that he applies acid directly to the plate without aquatint.”
43
He continues,
“Dark tones are so impossible to etch because only the borders of the area [Fläche] hold
ink and in the middle it etches completely blank.”
44
Dix’s workaround appears to have
been combining aquatint with a network of tight crosshatched lines so that the recessions
created by the crosshatching would catch and hold ink otherwise wiped away during the
printing process. The effect is tangible; in those areas representing bloody wounds,
41
What Felsing describes is what typically occurs when an intaglio plate has produced too many
impressions; the lines in the copper plate are flattened through the constant pressure of the plate being run
through the printing press. As a result, the quality of the impression degrades, printing uniform greys
rather than the sharp blacks and tonal areas of early impressions. Felsing suggests this process has
occurred much earlier with Dix’s aquatint plates because he probably kept them in the acid bath too long.
42
“Anscheinend haben Sie den Ton ohne richtiges Aquatintakorn geätzt oder das letztere war verbrannt,
sodass der geätzte Ton nun graudruckt. Kommen Sie in der nächsten Zeit nach Berlin, dass wir an Hand
der Platten die Angelegenheit besprechen können? Sicherheitshalber übersende ich Ihnen je ein Blatt zu
Ihrer Orientierung. Soll eventl. So weiter gedruckt werden? Allerdings ist zu befürchten, dass die Platten
noch mehr nachlassen werden.” O. Felsing (Panpresse Druckerei) to Otto Dix, 9.26.1924, Otto Dix
Nachlass, I.B.16.b, GNM.
43
“Nolde muss zwar anderer meinen, wenn er sagt, dass er direkt ohne Aquatint mit Saure auf die Platte
geht.” Wilhelm Herberholz to Otto Dix, 12.9.1925, Otto Dix Nachlass, I.B.16.b, GNM.
44
“Tiefe Tone sind so unmöglich zu ätzen, weil nur die Ränder der Fläche die Farbe festhalten u in der In
Mitte aller blank ätzt d.h. das Raster fehlt u. so die Farbe nicht haftet, also grau druckt. ” Ibid.
204
decayed flesh, viscera, and the indistinct and indistinguishable gore that no longer
resembles the human body, Dix has recovered something of the revulsion and horror of
the war experience for his audience ten years out. Scratching and scraping, the artist is
picking at the wound.
In a later interview about his wartime works, Dix stated, “I had…the feeling that a
side of reality was not yet represented: the ugly.”
45
It is this aspect of Dix’s work that is
perhaps best addressed by Theodor Adorno, who expanded upon the affective power of
the ugly in his Aesthetic Theory. The social aspect of the ugly, Adorno explains, is that
“...in the ugly, art must denounce the world that creates and reproduces the ugly in its
own image.”
46
He continues, “In the penchant of modern art for the nauseating and
physically revolting...the critical material motif shows through: In its autonomous forms
art decries domination...and stands witness for what domination represses and
disavows...Powerful aesthetic valeurs are liberated by social ugliness.”
47
Adorno argues
that a critical element is retained in the ugly which “stands witness for what domination
represses and disavows.” Specifically, it is in modern art, with its “penchant” for the
“nauseating and physically revolting,” that the critical element shines through; in the
excess of the ugly, the ugly as the unassimilated and the critical exposes and indicts
rather than affirms things as they are. This is why the ugly is dangerous, and why when
45
“Sehen Sie, ich habe vor den früheren Bildern das Gefühl gehabt, eine Seite der Wirklichkeit sei noch gar
nicht dargestellt: das Hässliche.” Quoted in Hans Kinkel, 14 Berichte. Begegnungen mit Malern und
Bildhauern. (Stuttgart: Goverts, 1967), 75.
46
Theodor W Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Greta Adorno and Rolf Tiedeman, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor
(Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 48-9.
47
Ibid, 49.
205
the status quo condemns the ugly, it equates it with the “expression of suffering” and thus
despises it.
Dix’s deployment of the etching process offered a way of accessing the extreme
experiences of the war and bringing them back to the present. Max Beckmann’s use of
process and material was also connected to the aktuelle content he was depicting in his
graphic works, but in a different way. In Beckmann’s postwar lithographic portfolios,
current events are brought together with the pulpy, material characteristics of the
illustrated newspaper to intensify the images’ immediacy.
All the News is Fit for Print: The Graphic Arts and the Journalistic Mode
World War I created a new relationship between the press and the reading public
in Germany. The fracturing of the media landscape that had begun before the war
accelerated after its end. The postwar press—the huge number of daily newspapers,
weeklies, and journals—became more critical, its readership more skeptical, and the
competing voices more cacophonous. The reading public was increasingly made up of
factions that demanded different messages and forms of presentation.
During the revolutionary months, the press was literally on the fighting lines in
Berlin. Press offices were at the center of some of the most intense street fighting
between revolutionary and counterrevolutionary forces in January 1919. In the
Zeitungsviertel, the newspaper quarter located near the publishing houses of Mosse,
Scherl, and Ullstein, revolutionary forces dug in behind piles of undistributed newspapers
and rolls of paper that were used as improvised barricades. Armed Spartacists took up
206
near the Vorwärts building, (the paper of the Social Democratic Party, the SPD), which
was nearly destroyed in the fighting.
The press responded to these literal and figurative assaults by becoming more
partisan; a number of journals on both the left and the right emerged during this time.
These joined a number of more mainstream publications which were offered up to three
times a day in major cities. By the mid-1920s, there were more than 4,000 titles
published throughout Germany. These included daily newspapers, tabloids, weeklies,
journals, the illustrated press and magazines.
48
The proliferation of publications speaks
to the diverse and disparate quality of Weimar culture, the fracturing of interests, such
that “Every political and cultural subgroup…seems to have had its own illustrated
publication, often featuring well-known contributors.”
49
Berlin had the greatest density
of newspapers of any city in Europe; by the 1920s, a total of 93 newspapers appeared in
that city,
50
including 45 morning papers, two mid-day papers, and 14 evening papers.
51
In addition, each political party had its own national paper and local variants. These
included the Communist Die Rote Fahne, the National Socialist Völkischer Beobachter,
the Social Democratic Vorwärts and the right-wing nationalist Die Deutsche Allgemeine
Zeitung. Circulation figures for these publications varied widely, but several weeklies,
including the popular Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (BIZ), distributed more than one million
copies per issue.
48
Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, eds., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994).
49
Ibid., 641–2.
50
Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).
51
Kaes, Jay, and Dimendberg, The Weimar Republic Sourcebook.
207
Certainly, the press’s major cultural and social role preceded the interwar period;
newspaper readership in Germany had exploded as early as the late nineteenth century.
A few papers—like the well-respected Frankfurter Zeitung—could even count on a
national audience. Peter Fritzsche, writing about Wilhelmine print culture, calls Berlin
the “word city,” a place in which “the city as place and the city as text defined each other
in mutually constitutive ways.”
52
The “word city” constituted a “second-hand
metropolis,” which “gave a narrative to the concrete [city] and choreographed its
encounters.”
53
The newspaper, Fritzsche argues, shaped reality for the city’s inhabitants
as much as it recorded that reality. It also challenged older hierarchies of knowledge and
information, elevating contingency, discontinuity, and experience over more authoritative
or institutional forms of knowledge. The newspaper reproduced those disruptions and
upheavals described by Georg Simmel in his famous essay “The Metropolis and Mental
Life” in its form—on the front page, for instance, with its clashing of unrelated
headlines—and its content, which changed daily, from one edition to the next.
But if Berlin was a word city circa 1900, by the 1920s it had become a place of
pictures—printed and, to some extent, photographed. At this moment, the press did not
yet have to compete with the radio or newsreels;
54
newspapers were the dominant form of
information and communication. The early Weimar print portfolio entered this
expanding and expansive environment of print media, offering artists a format in which
52
Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900, 1.
53
Ibid.
54
UFA did not begin producing its newsreel, the Wochenschau, until 1925. For more on the development
of radio as a medium of mass culture and communication see Peter Jelavich, Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio,
Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
208
to present their visions of modern life in a serial form to an audience that was hungry for
such visual presentations.
In part, the increasing use of the portfolio as format demonstrates the way that the
print was trying to find new audiences just as many of these new publications were also
catering to a media-hungry public as well as find the appropriate audience for progressive
art. It is not insignificant, then, that print portfolios resemble the narrative and thematic
observational essays that would become prevalent in the Weimar-era press of mid-
decade. This observational mode I will call the journalistic mode because the subjects as
well as the format in which many of these works were presented correspond to
journalistic styles and formats popular in the Weimar period. I will consider the work of
Max Beckmann as one example of this journalistic mode.
The Weimar-era portfolios of Max Beckmann resemble the observational
approach of the feuilletonist. The writing of the feuilleton is characterized by wry and
detached observations that expose certain truths about modern, especially urban, life.
The writing of the feuilleton is not partisan or propagandistic, rather, it is subtle, packed
with detail, and the critique is implicit or indirect rather than explicit or direct. Two of
Beckmann’s Weimar-era portfolios in particular, Die Hölle (Hell, 1919) and Berliner
Reise (Trip to Berlin, 1922), are emblematic of this approach. In each of these portfolios,
Beckmann examines life in Berlin at a very particular moment. He is also present in both
portfolios, a guide to the activity around him who nevertheless remains largely on the
margins of that activity. Beckmann is, like the feuilletonist, a kind of flâneur, although
not of the sort that Baudelaire imagined.
209
The middle years of the Weimar Republic comprised the golden age of the
German feuilleton. The form had existed in the Wilhelmine period, but only began to
play a truly prominent role after the war. The feuilleton offered everything from book
reviews to analyses of intellectual developments and cultural life, to the “realm of the
quotidian,” which Thomas Levin sums up as, “unemployment offices, arcades, travel
experiences, dance troupes, bestsellers and boredom, neon-light displays and mass
sporting events.”
55
He describes Kracauer’s feuilleton writing in particular as “…a sort
of physiognomic essayistics, a minute decoding of the surface phenomena of modernity
as complex historical ciphers.”
56
Many iconic thinkers of the Weimar period published
some of their most important work in the feuilleton. Siegfried Kracauer, Walter
Benjamin, Joseph Roth, Wilhelm Hausenstein, Theodor Adorno, and Ernst Bloch all
wrote essays for it. For many intellectuals, it offered the most prominent public forum
for expressing their ideas. Kracauer’s famous study of white-collar workers, Die
Angestellten, first appeared as a series of feuilleton essays in the Frankfurter Zeitung; he
later became the paper’s editor. Joseph Roth, another prolific feuilleton essayist and
writer, wrote that the feuilleton “is as important as politics are to the newspaper, and to
the reader it’s vastly more important…I don’t write ‘witty columns.’ I paint the portrait
of the age. That’s what great newspapers are there for. I’m not a reporter, I’m a
journalist; I’m not an editorial writer, I’m a poet.”
57
Roth’s working definition of the
55
Thomas Y. Levin, “Introduction,” in Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans.
Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1995), 6.
56
Ibid.
57
Quoted in Ibid.
210
feuilleton was “saying true things on half a page.”
58
Michael Hofman, describing Roth’s
feuilleton essays, called it, “…a counterform. Inversion, reversal, subversiveness seem to
be built into it. What is small is inevitably made to seem vast, and vast things are shrunk
into a witty perspective.”
59
In spite of this “quotidian” focus, the feuilletonist did play a public role as a
cultural critic. Levin argues that Kracauer conceived of himself as an engaged
intellectual. Benjamin defended Kracauer’s brand of engagement in two reviews of the
former’s book Die Angestellten. Benjamin praised the intentions of Kracauer’s project,
which, he argued, was directed at Kracauer’s own social class, the writer and intellectual,
and toward that class’s politicization. Benjamin concluded that the writer remains an
outsider, “[s/he] stands alone. A malcontent, not a leader.”
60
He then famously
characterized Kracauer as a ragpicker, “picking up rags of speech and verbal scraps…and
tossing them…into his cart…A ragpicker, early on, at the dawn of the day of the
revolution.”
61
By sifting through and collecting the cast-offs of modern life, the
author/artist disenchants the world and unmasks reality.
The role of the artist as cultural critic, engaged but independent, and focused on
the details and detritus, is one that Max Beckmann seems to have embraced. Beckmann’s
last major Weimar portfolio, Berliner Reise (Trip to Berlin), is bookended with two self-
58
Joseph Roth, What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933, trans. Michael Hofmann (New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 2011), 19.
59
Michael Hofman, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Ibid.
60
Walter Benjamin, “An Outsider Makes his Mark,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2:
Part 2: 1931-1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Gary Smith, and Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA.: Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 310.
61
Ibid.
211
portraits. The first, Selbst im Hotel (Self-Portrait in Hotel) (figure 3.14),
62
shows the
artist at a hotel desk chomping a cigar, affecting the pose of a writer working through a
difficult text. With pad in hand, he is preparing his critical eye and pen for a visual,
rather than a verbal, record of city life. The mirrors above his head reflect him from
behind and in profile, suggesting a view from all sides. In the eight plates that follow, the
artist moves to the margins, observing the action as our eyes and ears. But in the final
image he again takes center stage; the self-portrait that ends the series, Schornsteinfeger,
(Chimney Sweep) (figure 3.15), suggests the artist’s willingness to delve into the dark and
dirty corners and expose them to light. He stands above the city, giving him, and us, a
bird’s eye view of life on the ground. Among the people on the street below are two
figures hidden from the view of others on the street: a man dragging, or fleeing from, the
prostrate body of another man.
63
Beckmann, the chimney sweep, with eyes both above
and inside the city, makes the violent side of the urban experience visible for his
audience.
In both these self-portraits, Beckmann styles himself as a quasi journalist, the
writer preparing to put pen to paper in the first sheet and the roving reporter in the last.
Peter Beckmann, the artist’s son, said of his father’s observational style that, “…he is
never an observer of the object, but always himself appears to be an organ of the
62
The print is listed as Im Lokal on the title page of the Berliner Reise portfolio, but is given the title Selbst
im Hotel in Hofmaier’s catalogue raisonné of Beckmann’s graphic work. See catalogue number 213, James
Hofmaier, Max Beckmann: Catalogue Raisonné of His Prints. Volume 2 (Bern: Gallery Kornfeld, 1990).
63
This small episode recalls another in one of the lithographs from Beckmann’s portfolio Die Hölle. The
plate Die Strasse also depicts a man dragging the body of another badly beaten man down a street. In that
lithograph, the disconcerting element is that no one seems to notice, although the street is bustling with
other people. Here, the crowd beyond seems to be unaware of the violence if only because it is out of sight.
212
observing object without also losing something of his own individuality.”
64
Beckmann,
in other words, mimics the attentiveness of the camera’s prosthetic eye without himself
becoming a machine.
Beckmann’s most prolific period as a printmaker coincided with a decidedly
narrative stretch of his career. Not only did he take up the portfolio for the first time,
starting with Gesichter in 1918, but between 1918 and 1924 he produced three additional
portfolios—Die Hölle (1919), Jahrmarkt (1921), and Berliner Reise (1922), —illustrated
the book of poems Stadtnacht (1921), and wrote and illustrated his play Ebbi (1924) and
Das Hotel (1923). He also grew into the portfolio’s narrative format; while Gesichter is
an ‘accidental’ collection of thematically related works selected by Meier-Graefe, the
remainder were created as intentional collections.
Beckmann also had a connection to one of the most important papers of the
interwar period, the Frankfurter Zeitung. Beckmann was, in fact, living in the home of
its editor, Heinrich Simon, while working on the sheets for Die Hölle in 1919. The artist
had enough familiarity with the paper and the people who worked there to represent its
editorial offices in a 1923 drawing. It was also through Simon that Beckmann was
introduced to many of the city’s intellectuals at the editor’s famous Freitagtisch
gathering.
In spite of these correspondences, the artist’s skepticism toward the press—or at
least the partisan uses to which it was put on both left and right—is nevertheless apparent
64
“Es entspricht genau dem Charakter der Malerei Max Beckmanns, der nie ein Beobachter des
Gegenstands ist, sondern immer ein Organ des beobachtenden Gegenstandes selbst zu sein scheint, ohne
auch nur etwas von seiner Individualität zu verlieren.” Peter Beckmann, “Nachwort,” in Beckmann, Briefe
im Kriege, 73.
213
in two sheets from Berliner Reise: Die Enttäuschten I and Die Enttäuschten II (The
Disillusioned Ones I and The Disillusioned Ones II). The first depicts a gathering of
depressed- and deflated-looking upper class characters who sit with the leading paper of
the conservative Prussian aristocracy, the Kreuzzeitung (the popular name of the Neue
Preußische Zeitung), on the table before them. Their disillusionment is surpassed by the
individuals in the second sheet, who include several prominent leftist intellectuals
Beckmann knew well: Paul Cassirer, Beckmann’s erstwhile dealer and a publisher of
some of his prewar prints, and Leo Kestenberg, the editor of Cassirer’s progressive
publication Der Bildermann, discussed previously. For Cassirer, who became a member
of the far left USPD, initial optimism gave way to reality during the long and violent
months of the Revolution. By the time Berliner Reise was published, political idealism
had succumbed to disappointment and disenchantment. Beckmann effectively portrays
the dampened optimism of these individuals who were emblematic of their cohort. In the
print, Tilla Durieux, Cassirer’s wife, and Kestenberg are caught yawning; Liebknecht’s
“Call” is open on Durieux’s lap, but rather than being roused by its imperative, she
affects a blasé attitude. Also visible are Marks [sic] Werke, and a text by Luxenburg [sic],
whose names are intentionally misspelled as if to suggest the carelessness with which
their work was handled in the rush to deploy it to a mass audience of would-be
revolutionaries. Beckmann was all too familiar with the ways Cassirer had used his press
to promote his political views, but he was also aware that the Cassirer Verlag had stopped
214
printing socialist publications after 1921— not because these works were no longer
profitable, but because of the changed political, cultural, and social climate.
65
Beckmann had a different relationship to the press prior to the war, as did Cassirer
and many other Germans. As previously discussed, his two most significant paintings of
the prewar period relied on written reports and photographs published in the press for
their veracity. In the early days of the war, Beckmann even contributed seven drawings
to the journal Kunst und Künstler for a segment titled “The First Weeks of War in Berlin:
From Reports in the Berlin Daily Press.” The drawings are not only visual reports, but
are indicative of the larger aesthetic and representational challenges presented by the
conflict; they range from semi-allegorical images of war, such as the drawing that
appears on the title page depicting a vaguely classical martial figure next to a veiled
mourning woman (figure 3.16), to plein air sketches (figure 3.7).
The war, however, would change Beckmann’s relationship to the press as both a
consumer and producer of content. Die Kriegserklärung (Declaration of War) (figure
3.17), an etching completed in 1915 but published in his first postwar portfolio Gesichter
(Faces) in 1918, suggests something of this changed attitude. It depicts a shared
historical event as experienced through the press—the declaration of war in August 1914.
In the foreground, two men are buried in the daily paper, examining its contents, while
other individuals orbit them, their faces registering a variety of reactions. These
individuals may be listening to the news being read aloud or perhaps they are caught in
65
Lars Lambrecht, “‘1919 interessierte er sich für Politik.’ Die sozialistischen Schriften im Paul Cassirer
Verlag” in Ein Fest der Künste: Paul Cassirer, der Kunsthändler als Verleger, ed. Rahel E. Feilchenfeldt
(Munich: Beck, 2006), 253-66.
215
their own thoughts; all appear isolated even as they are forced into close physical
proximity with one another. The mood is one of solitude in spite of the claustrophobic
closeness of bodies pressing together on a public street and in spite of the import of the
event. This is a far cry from the Burgfrieden depicted in Max Liebermann’s lithograph
(figure 3.3), or from the similar drawing Beckmann published in Kunst und Künstler one
year earlier that registered the crowd’s enthusiasm and unity in energetic lines (figure
3.7). In Beckmann’s depiction, there is no one narrative that can bring together these
disparate experiences.
Julius Meier-Graefe, co-founder of the Marées Gesellschaft which published
Gesichter, argued in his introduction to the portfolio that the war had transformed
Beckmann’s art, making it less mediated, more immediate:
That is how a primitive [artist] arises. That is the only way a primitive can
arise today, not out of aesthetic necessity, not out of a history of art, but as
the result of conditions that the primitives first brought forth, the
consequence of one with much common experience of a worldwide event
[Weltereignis]…
66
The work is, he continues, the product of “the reflex of muscles which have not yet found
time to take the matter historically.”
67
Meier-Graefe thus emphasizes the works’ direct
quality, depictions that were not yet tempered by time or mediated by historical
reference, but were unfiltered, a “reflex.” Meier-Graefe is describing the contents of
66
“So entstand ein Primitiver. Nur so kann heute ein Primitiver entstehen, nicht aus ästhetischen Bedürfnis,
nicht aus der Entwicklung einer Kunstgeschichte, sondern als Resultat der Bedingungen, die einst die
Primitiven hervorbrachten, Folge eines mit vielen gemeinsamen Erlebnis, eines Weltereignis…” Julius
Meier-Graefe, “Gesichter: Vorrede zu einer Mappe mit 19 Radierungen von Max Beckmann,” in Blick auf
Beckmann: Dokumente und Vorträge, Schriften der Max Beckmann Gesellschaft#, vol. 2 (Munich: R.
Piper, 1962), 54.
67
“…Reflex von Muskeln, die noch nicht Zeit gefunden haben, die Angelegenheit geschichtlich zu
nehmen.” Ibid.
216
Gesichter as aktuelle. Even if the portfolio is comprised of many prints that were already
several years old by the time of their publication, something of the immediate—what
Meier-Graefe called “primitive”—still inhered in them.
Paul Westheim agreed that Beckmann’s subject matter and style were timely, and
noted that these qualities were particularly suited to graphic presentation:
Beckmann’s painting is always on the borderline with drawing. Also
intellectually. He is the happiest—and also the most convincing—on the
black and white sheet, when he notes down the reflections of curious
experiences and very subjective observations. Then the distortions of an
intellectual vision and a psychological deformation become a style that
justifies the all-too-timely and time-bound.
68
For Westheim, then, the medium is itself part of the aktuelle nature of Beckmann’s
content. He describes it in terms that connect the sketch to the first person account: it is
on the “black and white sheet,” that the artist “notes down” his “curious experiences and
very subjective observations,” as if trying to capture their transitory nature. But the
immediate nature of this content, “the all-too-timely and time-bound,” is transformed and
personalized through the power of Beckmann's artistic, “intellectual” vision and his
“subjective observations.”
Beckmann’s postwar portfolios do register a tension between the proximate
depiction of current events and the measure and distance of artistic representation. Die
Hölle, in particular, is about specific events and individuals. The ten lithographs were
68
“Beckmanns Malerei bewegt sich immer auf der Grenze zur Zeichnung. Auch geistig. Er ist am
glücklichsten - und auch überzeugendsten - im Schwarz-Weiß Blatt, wenn er Reflexe merkwürdiger
Erlebnisse und sehr subjektive Beobachtungen aufnotiert. Dann werden die Verzerrungen eines
intellektuellen Sehens und einer psychischen Deformation zu einem Stil, der das Allzuzeitliche und
Zeitgebundene rechtfertigt.” Paul Westheim, Für und Wider: kritische Anmerkungen zur Kunst der
Gegenwart (Potsdam: G. Kiepenheuer, 1923), 104.
217
inspired by Beckmann’s trip to Berlin from mid-March to mid-April 1919 to visit his
dealer, J.B. Neumann, and his son, Peter, who was then living in the city with his mother-
in-law.
69
Beckmann was therefore present for the general strike that began in early
March, and which was ultimately brutally suppressed by government sanctioned
Freikorps troops.
The content of the portfolio, however, recalls an earlier phase of the Revolution:
the dramatic Spartakusaufstand, or Spartacists’ Revolt, of January 1919, which was
documented in a special twenty-five page issue of the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung titled
“Berliner Sturm-Tage,” or “Berlin’s Days of Upheaval.” The special issue of BIZ not
only chronicles the days of disorder, it also suggests something about the state of the
illustrated press as a documentary medium at that moment. Most interesting, and
prescient, perhaps, for the future role of the press are the photographs that record the
street fighting in the Zeitungsviertel, the newspaper quarter, which show Spartacists
taking cover behind rolls of unused newsprint and stacks of bound newspapers, using
them as improvised barricades (figure 3.18). The issue’s content indicates that the
possibilities for the illustrated press had expanded because strict censorship laws that had
restricted wartime content were no longer in place. But it also suggests the ability of
photography to visually record events as they were unfolding was still limited; like the
illustrated issues that documented the war, the photographs in “Berliner Sturm-Tage” are
often static—typically showing the aftermath of events—or they appear staged. It is
69
For details regarding this trip, see Dückers, Die Hölle and Barbara C. Buenger, “Max Beckmann’s
Ideologues: Some Forgotten Faces,” The Art Bulletin 71, no. 3 (September 1989): 453–479.
218
artists’ drawings, incorporated among the photographs, that add visual drama to written
accounts and bridge the representational gap between the text and the photograph (figure
3.19).
Beckmann’s prints are not filling representational gaps, though the portfolio does
incorporate details similar to those shown in the photographs in “Berliner Sturm-Tage.”
The artist marries this content with his own personal visions and allegorical
preoccupations, creation a fantastic version of events. Take the print Die Letzten (The
Last Ones) (figure 3.20), sheet 10 from Hölle. The compressed setting of the lithograph
is strikingly similar to a photograph that appears on page ten in the special issue (figure
3.21). The photograph offers a kind of still life of the Revolution, the aftermath of battle.
Its caption reads: “The devastation of a private apartment in the Vorwärts house caused
by the bombardment.” In Die Letzten, Beckmann presents a space with the same lower
left angle perspective and view from the blasted open wall to the uniform windows of an
apartment building on the opposite side of the street. It imagines the bombardment in
medias res, and is populated by a rag tag group of revolutionary fighters, some wounded
or fallen, others with guns smoking as they shoot into the street. The man firing a
machine gun at the center of the image looks suspiciously like the artist himself,
suggesting not only the artist as surrogate for the viewer, but as active participant in the
violence around him. Here, the artist’s claim to objectivity is questionable, but so is the
content—the meaning of the image is not transparent but multivalent.
The immediacy of Hölle is enhanced in more tangible ways as well, in particular,
through the portfolio’s evocative connections to the look and feel of the illustrated press.
219
The title sheet suggests the attention-grabbing layout of the Illustrierten’s front page,
with a large central image dominating the available space, followed by the portfolio’s
title above and a caption below (figure 3.22). The portfolio's material characteristics
reinforce this connection; the paper has a rough, pulpy quality, and evidence indicates
that the lithographs were drawn and printed quickly and on readily available rather than
high-quality paper. Scott Gerson, paper conservator at the Museum of Modern Art,
believes that Hölle was printed without the attention typical of fine art publications.
70
The frayed edges of individual sheets are not a true or imitation ‘deckle’ edge—a feature
of papers typically used in fine art printing—but are the result of the individual sheets
being torn from a larger roll the way newspaper pages are cut.
71
The images were also
printed indiscriminately on both smooth and screened sides of the paper (i.e, the “right”
and “wrong” side). Finally, there are visible flaws in the final prints; certain images
appear to have been imperfectly transferred to the printing stone. Consider the ‘halo’ that
surrounds the figure in the foreground of Das Martyrium (Martyrdom) (figure 3.23).
This thin white line is the result of changes made to the original transfer drawing.
72
70
Both DieHölle and Berliner Reise were published by Neumann, but printed by C. Naumann’s Druckerei
in Frankfurt am Main, where Beckmann lived. The quality control issues may have to do with a number of
factors: for instance, a limited supply of high-quality paper in the immediate postwar period, or the fact that
Beckmann himself had not worked in lithography for several years before Hölle was produced, and was
therefore less familiar with the challenges of transfer lithography. By the time Berliner Reise was printed,
however, he had completed a number of lithographs and commented in a letter to Neumann that he wanted
to supervise the printing and work out any problems on the printing stones. Berliner Reise is a more
polished portfolio compared with Die Hölle; the edition of 100 is printed on individually produced velin
sheets, and visual flaws resulting from the transfer process are less evident, suggesting that more care was
taken with the printing.
71
This and all additional information about the paper on which Die Hölle was printed was taken from a
conversation with Dr. Scott Gerson, Paper Conservator at the Museum of Modern Art, on May 8, 2011.
72
The original transfer drawing for Das Martyrium is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in
Boston.
220
When the drawing was transferred to the lithographic stone for printing, the artist and
printer failed to eliminate the irregularities that resulted, leaving a visible seam between
figure and ground. Rather than diminish the overall effect of the portfolio, however, I
would argue that these qualities ultimately increase its immediacy.
Given the proximity between current events and the content of the prints, was
Beckmann ‘illustrating’ specific incidents? Or is the portfolio a more general meditation
on and critique of the outcomes of both state-sanctioned and revolutionary violence?
Scholars such as Barbara Buenger and Christian Lenz have singled out certain sheets and
connected them to specific incidents and individuals. Lenz, for instance, identified
Martyrdom as a representation of the murder of Spartacist leader, Rosa Luxemburg.
73
The print had long been viewed as a metaphorical representation of the suppression of the
revolutionary councils by the counterrevolutionary Freikorps, but Lenz connected certain
elements—the Eden Hotel, the soldier at the door, the hotel attendant—with the story of
Luxemburg’s murder as it had been reported in contemporary press accounts.
Lenz’s identification was not made until the 1970s, however; contemporary
audiences missed the connection.
74
If Beckmann’s goal was to explicitly depict the
murder of the Spartacist leader, he failed to make his image legible to a large audience—
or even, it seems, to an informed audience of art critics. It’s not that the subject matter
was obscure; there was no shortage of depictions of either Luxemburg or Karl Liebknecht
in the days and months following their death. Take Käthe Kollwitz’s Gedenkblattfür
73
Christian Lenz, “Max Beckmann: ‘Das Martyrium’,” Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 16 (1974): 185–210.
74
Contemporary press accounts mentioned in the catalogue show that none mentions Luxemburg
specifically in reference to Martyrium.
221
Karl Liebknecht (In Memoriam Karl Liebknecht) (figure 3.24) or Conrad Felixmüller’s
Menschen über der Welt (People Above the World), both of which were eventually
offered in large unnumbered photomechanically produced editions intended for
widespread distribution. Like Beckmann’s lithograph, these single-sheet prints also
borrowed familiar religious iconography to associate the murdered political figures with
secular saints. But unlike Beckmann’s print, the connection to Luxemburg and
Liebknecht is made explicit; Kollwitz even added a commemorative text to the mass-
edition which reads, “The Living to the Dead. In Memoriam, the 15 January 1919.”
Beckmann’s images court ambiguity, however; not only in their subjects, but also
in the meaning that might be drawn from them. At the time Beckmann produced Hölle,
he was surrounded by artists who were engaged in overtly political work, or who aligned
themselves with specific parties and positions, as both Kollwitz and Felixmüller did. Yet
he remained aloof from such ideological commitments. As a consequence, his work has
consistently invited multiple expansive interpretations. Consider Die Letzten, mentioned
above. Stefan von Wiese argued that the subject was the battle between revolutionary
sailors and counterrevolutionary forces in March in Frankfurt.
75
Alexander Dückers
believed that the work was “a timely image [Zeitbild] of the ‘German Revoltion’ but at
the same time a metaphor for a trait of mankind, his aggressive nature, that results in his
own downfall.”
76
Jörn Pabst, finally, took this line of argumentation even further,
arguing that Die Letzten is emblematic of the series as a whole, and deals not with
75
Stephan von Wiese, Max Beckmanns zeichnerisches Werk.
76
“‘Die Letzten’ sind ein Zeitbild der ‘deutschen Revolution,’ zugleich aber Metapher für einen
Wesenszug des Menschen, seine Aggressivität—die im eigenen Untergang resultiert.” Alexander Dückers,
Die Hölle, 108-109.
222
specific events, but general, even universal, themes: “The sheets of Hölle form in their
entirety a timeless image of human social life [Zusammenleben], which can become Hell
for one or the other, it depends only on the circumstances.”
77
Beckmann’s portfolio evades categories like illustration, and collapsing the work
with the event it depicts—i.e. viewing the portfolio as a product of the November
Revolution—is problematic. But neither is Dückers nor Pabst’s argument regarding
Hölle’s timeless or universal meaning entirely convincing given the singular character of
those Revolutionary months. Beckmann confronted these events in the press, but he also
encountered them on the ground. These works are distinct from his prewar ‘modern
history’ painting because of this personal encounter. Yes, Beckmann retains references
to larger themes in Hölle; the religious imagery in Martyrium, for instance, is hard to
ignore. But the series is unthinkable without an experience of the Revolution behind it.
The press and the photographic illustration are no longer a way to access events, as they
were in Beckmann’s prewar work, instead, they offer a way to distance himself from
those events by allowing him to process the violence on his own terms and make sense of
it.
Like the feuilletonist, Beckmann is an observer who nevertheless holds to his very
personal interpretation of events. This makes his prints, like the content of the feuilleton,
both personal and public. In Hölle he is, as Peter Beckmann argued, “an organ of the
observing object without also losing something of his own individuality.” The ambiguity
77
“So bilden die Blätter der Hölle in ihrer Gesamtheit ein zeitloses Bild menschlichen Zusammenlebens, in
der jeder dem anderen zur Hölle werden kann, es kommt nur auf die Umstände an.” Jörg Pabst
“Anmerkung zur Genese der Mappe Die Hölle von Max Beckmann,” in Max Beckmann, Aufsätze (Munich:
Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen; Max Beckmann Archiv, 2002), 13.
223
of the artist’s identity in Die Letzten is therefore useful, perhaps intentional. Beckmann
seems to be asking himself the question as much as he is asking it of us: what does it
mean to be an engaged artist in a time of violent Revolution? For many of Beckmann’s
colleagues, it meant offering up their art for political purposes. For Beckmann, this was
not the answer; the independence of the artist’s voice was vital.
George Grosz’s work was radically different; his prints were the visual
accompaniment to the agitational journalism of the partisan press. Grosz did publish
most of his drawings from this period as prints in the newspapers and illustrated weeklies
put out by the Malik Verlag, a Communist press run by Grosz’s colleague, Wieland
Herzfeld. Malik also repackaged Grosz’s prints in books and portfolios that were sold in
both luxury and unlimited popular versions. Grosz’s images were timely—usually they
responded to current events with a communist spin—but were also generic enough that
they could be reused and repurposed. This was consistent with Grosz’s circular
conception of history, a narrative that was about the repeated and continuous suppression
of the working class. For Grosz and others who subscribed to the materialist narrative of
history, the only way to break free from this cycle of dominance and repression was to
help along the coming revolution, the triumph of the working class over the capitalist
class and the means of production. It also suggests something about Grosz’s conception
of the ‘current’ that differed from that of Beckmann.
Grosz’s stock characters fit these narratives and the narratives of the Communist
press; they included the capitalist, the proletarian, the prostitute, and the Spießer, the
petit-bourgeois philistine. His images were aggressive, with none of the ambiguity and
224
little of the observational detail of the works of the feuilletonist Beckmann. Grosz was
putting his art in the service of an ideological cause, and his messages were incendiary
and unequivocal.
Grosz’s take on the day’s news was necessarily less ambivalent than Beckmann’s,
less determined by the details, and unapologetically partisan. Alexander Dückers, who
edited Grosz’s graphic oeuvre catalogue, notes that this was most apparent in his work
from the early 1920s when the artist was a committed Communist. “…the portfolios
which are central to Grosz’s graphic work—Gott mit uns (1920), Im Schatten (1921), and
Die Räuber (1922)—may be described as outstanding examples of militant ‘journalistic
work.’”
78
And the print—or rather, the printed drawing—was the natural vehicle for
Grosz’s conception of “journalistic work.” The print, multiple and adaptable, was the
appropriate means for delivering his message to as many people as possible.
Grosz characterized his work in similar terms. In the foreword to the book Der
Spiesser-Spiegel, a collection of previously published drawings that largely lampooned
the German bourgeoisie, he stated:
I am convinced that the journalistic work of a good politically educated
artist is very important and necessary. One can, of course, also retreat,
with or without rancor, into oneself, in nihilistic skepticism, rising above
the active struggle against stupidity, on the ground that this struggle is
ridiculous and useless. Most of the so-called intellectuals do just this at
present. Themselves members of this ‘juste milieu,’ they do nothing to
help eradicate its injustices. Alternatively, if they do try to help, they do
it in an obsolete, arrogant manner that is beside the point in our
mechanized age.
79
78
Ibid.
79
George Grosz, Der Spiesser-Spiegel: Image of the German Babbit (New York: Arno Press, [1925] 1968),
vii.
225
Grosz criticizes artists like Beckmann who “retreat…into [themselves], in nihilistic
skepticism.” For Grosz, “journalistic work” is about the content but also the means that
are used to communicate that content with an audience. Grosz’s own notion of the role
of the engaged artist was therefore much clearer than Beckmann’s: it was one who used
both medium and message as means rather than ends to effect change. It was imperative
for such an artist to take advantage of the most advanced technological means at one’s
disposal, to embrace “our mechanized age.” Grosz speaks of his affinity for those artists
who “…responded to the practical needs of the day, the illustrators, the poster painters
and the journalistic draftsmen…By now I have known for a long time that such
journalistic work relates far more vividly to life and influences it more than the art of
galleries, museums and other graveyards.”
80
In the final chapter I will explore in part how Grosz used photomechanical
technologies as a way to mobilize his graphic art, and how medium and message were,
for Grosz, inseparable. Grosz’s deployment of the photomechanical print was consistent
with his views regarding the function of art and the role of the artist. But these views
differed significantly from a number of artists and critics who believed that the modern
print ought to keep its distance from mass media processes that devalued graphic art's
already precarious status as a fine art and severed its connection with the hand of the
artist.
80
Ibid, vi.
226
Chapter Four
Speculating on Process: Manual versus Photomechanical Printmaking and States in
Between
The path that German graphic art has taken is as follows. It begins with
the woodcut, then turns to copperplate engraving; then it leads to wood
engraving, a servile imitation of hand drawing. It becomes again
technically pure, artistically free in the etching, conquers the realm of
lithography and turns toward the woodcut in a new sense, longing for
handicraft and generosity [Größzugigkeit].
1
This is how Edwin Redslob, first Reichskunstwart of the Weimar Republic,
outlined an abbreviated history of German graphic art in 1921. Redslob’s timeline of
German print production keeps its focus on fine art practice; the path print follows
wavers between a gradual debasement of graphic media—from woodcut, to engraving, to
the “servile” wood engraving—back to the artistic integrity of the etching and the
lithograph, until coming full circle with a return to the woodcut. The new woodcut is
then revived through a focus on the artistic values that characterize the etching and
lithograph rather than the imitative paths pursued by the engraving and wood engraving.
These “artistic” values emphasize both “technical purity” and “artistic freedom”—the
latter a celebration of the artist’s ‘hand,’ the former of the skilled manual labor demanded
by the artist or artisan cutting a woodblock.
The distinction between the “servility” of wood engraving and the “freedom” of
etching and the modern woodcut is similar to the distinction between manual and
1
“Damit is der Weg angedeutet, den die deutsche Graphik gegangen ist. Er beginnt beim Holzschnitt, geht
zum Kupferstich; dann führt er zur dienenden Imitation der Handzeichnung, zum Holzstich. Er wird
wieder handwerklich echt, künstlerisch frei in der Radierung, erobert das Gebiet der Lithographie und
wendet sich, verlangend nach Handwerk und Großzügigkeit, in neuem Sinne dem Holzschnitt zu.” Edwin
Redslob, “Der Weg zur Graphik,” in Das graphische Jahr, vol. 1, 2 vols. (Berlin: Fritz Gurlitt Verlag,
1921), 14.
227
photomechanical processes: the former is considered an art form, the latter a precise, if
low-skill mechanical operation. Although photomechanical processes were, by the early
1920s, hardly new—they had been a feature of reproducible image making since the
middle of the nineteenth century—Redslob maintains the divide by ignoring the latter
entirely.
William M. Ivins’s seminal Prints and Visual Communication, presents an
entirely different narrative of the modern reproducible image; Ivins describes the
“functional” history of visual media as an inexorable march toward the “exactly
repeatable pictorial statement without syntax.”
2
For Ivins, the photograph, or, rather, the
photographic reproduction, is the wish fulfillment of all prior image-making
technologies:
…the great events in the nineteenth-century history of prints were the
discoveries of photography and its attendant photo-mechanical processes.
The tradition of snobbery is still so strong, however, that neither of these
things is ever mentioned in any of the general histories of prints.
Actually they have worked one of the major revolutions not only in
vision but in the recording of its observations, and they have very
completely changed taste and valuations in the field of the older prints.
3
Because his study focuses on the reproducibility of the printed image as its reason for
being, any return to earlier practices—such as the etching revival or the reexamination of
the woodcut in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany—is ignored,
perhaps intentionally, by Ivins’s “functional” history. Less technologically sophisticated
media are deemed necessarily less modern.
2
William Mills Ivins, Prints and Visual Communication (New York: Da Capo Press, 1969).
3
Ibid., 116.
228
Redslob’s history of graphic art is cyclical, characterized by rise, fall, and rebirth.
This was a familiar model for art historians who had charted recurring rise, peak, and
decline models (or birth, growth, decay) repeatedly in both the careers of individual
artists and in the trajectory of artistic periods. Meanwhile, Ivins’s technologically
determinist narrative celebrated progress and the seeming inevitability of certain
developments, but also anxiously anticipated further improvements. Neither narrative
adequately addresses the extent and variety of graphic production. Both fine art
production and advances in photomechanical processes need to be considered together in
order to present a fuller picture of print culture in this period.
The overlap of photomechanical and hand processes did influence fine art
practices from the late nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth
century, as photomechanical printing began to squeeze out manual processes for use in
industrial-scale production. The revival of the artist’s etching and woodcut in the late
nineteenth century was in part a self-conscious embrace of manual processes;
foregrounding printmaking’s handicraft was a response to the alienating effects of
mechanization. But artists’ embrace of earlier processes had other motives as well. In
the case of the German woodcut, this included the medium’s connections to German
nationalism and its material associations with a mythic Teutonic past.
But the struggle between manual and photomechanical processes took on a
different character in the postwar period. While scholars have focused on the crisis, or
“death,” of Expressionism following World War I, what has not been explored is the
similar existential crossroads that faced the graphic arts in these years. The increasing
229
visibility of photomechanical prints in fine art contexts—they appeared as illustrations in
art journals and publications, in ‘high quality’ facsimile portfolios, and were even at
times presented as ‘original’ prints—coupled with a perceived decline in the overall
quality of contemporary print production forced many to question the future of graphic
art in Germany. While there were prints appearing in more places, in more formats and
media than ever before, critics and collectors, as well as artists and their dealers cum
publishers, wondered what the proper path for the print might be. Who was the print’s
intended audience and how should graphic works be made? Had the woodcut again
receded in the past, or was it the way forward for postwar German art? What was the
proper venue for the fine art print?
Critics and scholars who wrote about graphic art in the 1920s did celebrate the
recent flowering of German print media, particularly the output of the artists of Die
Brücke. Curt Glaser, curator of the Kupferstichkabinett, summarized the recent past as
“a new moment of the blossoming of graphic techniques.” He added, “Never in the
course of the nineteenth century was there so much that was enduring and worthwhile
being created in etching, woodcut and lithography as in the course of the last decade.”
But Brücke had disbanded in 1913, and there were few coherent trends that continued the
group’s legacy in the graphic arts, particularly its attentiveness to the material bases of
various print media. Some writers worried this all-too-brief renaissance of German
printmaking had already passed, and that the prints one encountered by the youngest
generation of progressive artists did not exhibit the same mastery of media or
230
attentiveness to materials. They speculated that the recent interest in graphic art was
perhaps driven more by commercial interests than creative ones.
Certainly there was less commitment to specific processes among post-Brücke
printmakers. All print media in this period moved increasingly into what Victor Strauss
termed a “zone of interchangeability;” that is, printmakers moved away from the self-
conscious embrace of medium and freely imitated the effects of other media in their
prints, drawing in particular. And photomechanical printmaking was the ultimate
interchangeable process; it sought nothing so much as its own invisibility, to reproduce a
given source image as accurately as possible without interjecting its own graphic syntax,
as Ivins called it.
At the same time, established criteria for determining the value of fine art prints
were also being challenged. This involved not only the way the print was made, but also
the way it was packaged and presented. Editions were zealously managed so that the
maximum price could be squeezed from them without eroding any of their potential value
through overproduction. Portfolios were routinely presented in multiple editions, with
more and more incentives incorporated into the most expensive ‘luxury’ editions to
distinguish them from the cheaper ‘mass-market’ editions also on offer.
In chapter one I discussed ways in which the value of contemporary prints was—
like paper money itself—heavily reliant on perception, particularly a perception of
scarcity. Yet in the economically uncertain climate of inflation, it was also this
procreative potential which made prints immediately attractive to artists and dealers alike.
As a speculative artistic practice, the multiple nature of graphic works made them less
231
risky for dealers of contemporary art to take on (their size also made them much easier to
store), and artists found that print production was less costly in terms of both the raw
materials needed for their manufacture and the time invested in their production.
Thus, in the span of less than two decades, contemporary German prints
experimented with the possibilities of both extremes of graphic production: on the one
hand, the print as a quasi-unique, fine art object exemplified by the small and varied
editions of Die Brücke, and on the other, the print prized above all for its propagative
possibilities, particularly as a vehicle for the dissemination of the artist’s drawing, as
embodied in the graphic oeuvre of George Grosz and the Malik Verlag. These extremes
are characterized by the numbers each type of production represented: the limited edition
and contained audience of the collector’s print versus the measureless mass of the
photomechanical print.
The threat the mass represented also took on new dimensions in the context of
inflation and was conceptualized in ways that incorporated photomechanical processes
themselves. As discussed in chapter one, the sense of inundation occasioned by the
production of inflationary money was often visualized through the metaphor of a flood.
Photomechanical prints and their potentially limitless editions offered their own
synecdoche of exploding numbers: the dots of the single color halftone, the process that
became synonymous with the illustrated press of mid-decade. Siegfried Kracauer, a
frequent critic of Weimar modernity, employed his own disaster metaphor to describe the
halftone and its effects—that of a blizzard, which captures the way the “millions of little
dots” that make up the halftone actually obscure vision. What Kracauer found distressing
232
about mass media as embodied by the halftone was less that it destroyed value and more
that it inflicted uniformity on everything it represented. This was an anxiety shared by
Walter Benjamin, who worried that while the reproduction brings everything closer it
also destroys the art object’s singularity in the process, what Benjamin referred to as its
aura. This effect was pervasive—it reached out beyond the individual objects reproduced
to infect the whole canon as the concept of great works swelled to accommodate a new
kind of popular demand for reproductions.
The most influential photomechanical technologies—the photolithograph and the
halftone, for example—were more than half a century old by the early 1920s. What is
distinct about the print culture of this period was less the way technological innovations
shifted art practice than the influence of larger contextual factors: namely, the postwar
environment, inflation, and continuations from prewar print culture. In the following
sections, I will discuss different responses to this situation in Germany in the first
decades of the twentieth century: on the one hand, the modern fine art print as
represented by the production of the artist’s group Die Brücke, and how these constituted
a complete rejection of photomechanical printing in their embrace of graphic medium
specificity; at the other extreme, the transfer print and the halftone, which embody the
high-volume, low-skill print that favored flexibility and higher yield editions but offered
little opportunity for the artist to intervene in the process . Finally, I will look at an
example in which publishers tried to thread the needle between quality and access: the
facsimile prints of the Marées Gesellschaft, which insisted that the photomechanical
process employed by their press—the collotype—constituted a higher-quality product
233
appropriate for the fine art subjects it was reproducing. First, however, I will explore
how the development of photomechanical printing has long influenced manual, fine-art
practice, although histories have not often addressed the shared side of this narrative.
The Shared and Separate Histories of Manual and Photomechanical Processes
The shift from an economy of man-made images to photographed ones as the
dominant medium of mass visual communication represents a continuum more than an
abrupt transition dictated by technological developments. Print and photography were
mutually constituted media, and they met in the photomechanical processes that made
their mass distribution possible. Therefore, the important milestone in the history of
mass-produced images is less the sudden appearance of the photograph than the gradual
deployment of photomechanical printing, a process that involved shifts in cultural
attitudes as much as technological changes. The distinction between hand printing and
photomechanical printing does not concern the type of process—relief or intaglio, for
instance—but rather how the print is made. Hand prints are pulled by an individual,
typically the artist or a master printer trained in a given technique, while photomechanical
prints are printed and pulled by a machine.
This was in part because photography did not immediately offer its own
possibilities for large scale reproduction. The daguerreotype produced only a single
image on metal that could not be duplicated. Talbot’s calotype did produce a negative
from which positive images could be printed, but the process was labor intensive and
impractical for large-scale production. Other early photographic processes required
234
skilled hand labor for the production of finished prints. For decades after the discovery
of photography, in fact, the photograph was still made available to a mass audience, both
the illustrated press and other wide distribution publications, largely via hand carved
wood engraving which remained the most reliable high volume relief process in which
both text and image could be printed simultaneously.
The history of photomechanical printing, like earlier histories of photography,
tends toward teleological narratives driven by technological progress. This narrative has
privileged moments of discovery and invention and the move toward ever more exact,
efficient, and prolific forms of reproduction which puts the focus almost entirely on the
years between the mid-nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, an era Estelle Jussim
has referred to as “The Forty Years War of the Media.”
4
These were the years just after
the “invention” of photography, when a slew of new photomechanical technologies were
developed and modified for the reproduction of printed pictures, including photographs.
Stephen Bann, however, has compellingly documented how nineteenth century
France’s “culture of reproduction” was, in fact, a “blend of tradition and modernity.”
5
Different image-making practices existed alongside each other—reproductive engraving
beside lithography and photography—performing different functions but also valued
based on very different criteria than those we have come to accept. Reproductive
engraving was, for example, a more respected and sought-after medium than its more
technologically advanced successors for much of the nineteenth century. The important
4
EstelleJussim, Visual Communication and the Graphic Arts; Photographic Technologies in the Nineteenth
Century (New York: R.R. Bowker Company.), 1974.
5
Stephen Bann, Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters and Photographers in Nineteenth-Century France
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 15.
235
qualitative distinction was speed. Reproductive engraving had a more elevated status
based in part on its labor- and skill-intensive production—a process which lasted years—
versus the nearly immediate gratification offered by the lithograph and photograph.
Tom Gretton similarly argues that what conferred financial value on printed
pictures before the twentieth century was the visual evidence of the labor that inhered in
the finished product.
6
That is, the way a print was made—in particular, the amount of
skilled labor that went into its production—had a profound effect on its price. It was
initially lithography that destabilized the traditional signifiers of labor value in pictures
because it lacked a “specifically lithographical graphical syntax…”
7
Other factors also
eroded its potential value, such as the fact that lithographs were far quicker and cheaper
to produce, and larger print runs were possible without the loss of image quality and the
built-in scarcity of other printmaking processes.
The photograph and the lithograph do indeed obscure, if not erase, the evidence of
the labor demanded by their production, retaining traces of their maker perhaps as an
observing eye, in the case of the photograph, or a drawing hand in the case of the
lithograph. The site of virtuosity is similarly displaced from the human artist or skilled
artisan onto the technical apparatus. But this process should not be overstated; it was
indeed gradual. Traditional printmaking processes were not so easily displaced, and as I
will discuss, new photomechanical methods typically recreated the look of earlier
processes, or attempted to make their specific graphic “syntax,” as William Ivins calls it,
6
Tom Gretton, “Signs for Labour-Value in Printed Pictures After the Photomechanical Revolution:
Mainstream Changes and Extreme Cases Around 1900,” in Oxford Art Journal 28, no. 3 (October 2005):
371 –390.
7
Ibid., 374.
236
virtually invisible. Therefore, elevating the photograph as the culmination, the “historical
fulfillment,” of the promise of the print is, according to Stephen Bann, a twentieth-
century phenomenon initiated by figures like Walter Benjamin in his “Work of Art”
essay, and by William Ivins, who prioritized reproducibility over the print’s other
characteristics.
Photomechanical processes addressed two competing demands; the first was to
reproduce an original source image as faithfully as possible, and the second was mass
producing an image efficiently at the least expense. As Bann points out, older processes
informed the emergence of the “new” photomechanical technologies that enabled the
mass reproduction of both printed and photographed pictures. In fact, most of these
married existing processes with the photograph, putting it in the service of the print.
Photographs were developed on wood and metal surfaces that employed relief, intaglio,
and planographic processes in an attempt to strike a balance between a reproduction that
was cheap, efficient to produce, and/or as faithful as possible to the source image.
In The Printing Industry, Victor Strauss formulates three distinct zones for
printing processes based on their ability to relay visual information: first, the zone of
uniqueness, in which effects and results are specific to one method; second, the zone of
interchangeability, in which the effects and results are interchangeable between media;
and third, a zone of disability, in which the effects and results for a given method are not
at all appropriate to the material.
8
Much of the territorial negotiation between hand
8
Victor Strauss, The Printing Industry: An Introduction to Its Many Branches, Processes, and Products
(Washington D.C. and New York: Printing Industries of America and R.R. Bowker Company, 1967).
237
printing processes that developed in the centuries before photomechanical printing had
been about deciding the zone of uniqueness for a given technique and creating a distinct
representational space for it. These spaces were full of signifiers that, for scholars like
William Ivins, connoted other meanings: class status, for instance, or value. Ivins, in
particular, associated each medium with an intended audience and function; single sheet
woodcuts, for example, “seem to have been made for a very simple people.” In contrast,
engraving was an “article of luxury,” representing “bourgeois” subjects and information.
9
Photomechanical printmaking, however, firmly occupied the second zone, the
zone of interchangeability. It eroded other media’s methods of signifying value by
mimicking the look and even the feel of earlier print practices. Over time,
photomechanical processes also became more standardized and offered a more consistent
product. In contrast to hand printing, in which variation could create desirable
differences that would increase the value of an impression, uniformity was of paramount
importance to the commercial success of machine-made prints. An inconsistent product,
or one that could not be printed quickly and efficiently, was not appropriate for mass
production.
For Ivins, the photograph was the culmination of attempts to create an “exactly
repeatable pictorial statement without syntax.” This “syntax” refers to the various mark-
making systems artists had developed since the appearance of printed pictures in the
fifteenth century to indicate tone and depth—hatch marks, bosses, stippling—in different
relief and intaglio processes. Ivins called these graphic syntaxes a “net of rationality;” for
9
Ivins, Prints and Visual Communication, 28-29.
238
Ivins, the net was “tyrann[ical],” “[it] subjected large parts of the world to the rule of a
blinding and methodically blighting visual common sense.”
10
That the image was rendered through a “blighting” intermediate visual syntax was
not what most troubled Ivins; it was the fact that it was left to the artist to translate the
original into graphic form for reproduction. Thus, the benefits the reproduction provided
through increased access were diminished by the printed facsimile’s imperfections, which
created a new kind of distance from the object by inserting a second mediating version
between the viewer and the original. To illustrate this point, Ivins inserted into his text
ten examples of different graphic versions of the famous first century sculpture, Laocoön
and His Sons (figure 4.1). Sculpture, of course, would always require a translation to be
carried over into two-dimensional form, but what he demonstrated here was the great
variety that translation could take, from versions in which the details recede into a jumble
of crosshatched lines (figure 4.2) to a clunky line engraving that eliminates any feeling
for the third dimension entirely (figure 4.3).
Ivins did not have the same problem with the graphic syntax of photomechanical
prints. Ivins found the tonal systems of photomechanical processes superior to manual
methods because their graphic syntax was not imposed by the artist, but was standardized
by the use of screens or grids. It was, in other words, arbitrary. He even argued that a
photomechanical process such as the halftone is the true realization of the possibilities of
10
Ibid., 70.
239
the aquatint: “It is in them that the aquatint with which Goya made his prints has come to
its final great fruition.”
11
Estelle Jussim challenged Ivins’s assertion, and insisted that photomechanical
processes were no less syntactical than print. For Jussim, what was important was the
capacity of the process for “informational transfer.” But like Ivins, she prioritized their
modes of mark-making as a key distinction separating photomechanical from manual
processes. According to her equation, the formula channel (the physical medium such as
wood or copper) plus the code (the visual unit such as lines, dots, or hatch marks)
together equal the medium.
So what, then, distinguished manual from photomechanical processes other than
the exactness or larger edition sizes of the latter? For Ivins, who prioritized the print as a
“repeatable pictorial statement” above all, there was nothing preferable about the
handmade image. Jussim similarly referred to “book illustration, periodical illustration,
prints” simply as “modes of communication which have required the development of
appropriate codes for the effective transmission of messages.”
12
Printmaking was always central to the development of photomechanical
processes, but it was also a part of photography’s early history. Stephen Bann has
pointed out the way that Nicephore Nièpce’s early heliographic experiments were
actually used to copy engravings onto photo-sensitive plates from which impressions
11
Ibid., 126.
12
Jussim, Visual Communication and the Graphic Arts, 14.
240
were pulled.
13
Similarly, Daguerre’s background was in printmaking and other ‘popular’
ventures such as the panorama.
14
Once the goal was to make photography a high-volume
reproductive process, the application and modification of more traditional printmaking
technologies were essential to achieving that goal. That is because photomechanical
techniques often married existing processes—relief, intaglio, and planographic—with
photography to create a hybrid that tried to achieve the efficiency and reproducible
character of the print with the exactness of the photograph.
Another reason there was so much continuity between photomechanical and
manual processes had to do with the psychology of the audience. As Dorothea Peters has
argued, many of the earliest photomechanical screen processes were too unfamiliar, and
therefore too disruptive, for audiences accustomed to looking at the aquatint, the
engraving, or the wood engraving. For this reason Georg Meisenbach, who developed
one of the first successful halftone methods, aligned his new process not with
photography but with the “parallel visual culture” of the wood engraving, “which…had
strongly impressed itself upon the visual habits of the general public.”
15
Therefore,
photomechanical processes sought to either imitate the visually familiar or, as was the
case later, create a tonal patterning process that fell below the threshold of vision. The
13
Stephen Bann, Distinguished Images: Prints in the Visual Economy of 19th Century France (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).
14
Stephen C. Pinson, Speculating Daguerre: Art and Enterprise in the Work of L. J. M. Daguerre (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2012).
15
“Meisenbach orientierte sich ästhetisch also nicht an der Photographie, sondern an der parallelen
Sehnkultur des Holzstichs, der im (Hoch-)Druck die Sehngewohnheiten des Massenpublikums nachhaltig
geprägt hatte.” Dorothea Peters, “Die Welt im Raster: Georg Meisenbach und der lange Weg zur
gedruckten Photographie,” in Konstruieren, Kommunizieren, Präsentieren: Bilder von Wissenschaft und
Technik, ed. Alexander Gall (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2007), 201-2
241
intention of the photomechanical print was not, in other words, to transform aesthetic
values, but to revolutionize production. To do this, photomechanical media tried to hide
in plain sight, either by masquerading as another, more traditional process, or by making
themselves as unobtrusive as possible for easy visual consumption by the audience.
But a number of new photomechanical processes were also incredibly labor
intensive, if not in the production of the image, then in the transfer of that image to the
printing surface, and finally to the paper. And some of these adopted the earlier signifiers
of value to either signal the effort demanded in their manufacture or to set them apart
from mass market reproductions—fine papers, or color, or elaborate packaging, for
instance. A hierarchy of photomechanical pictures appeared not unlike the hierarchy of
hand-printed pictures, with value determined by criteria similar to those of other
nineteenth-century printed pictures: quality, efficiency of production, volume, and the
cost to produce. Those processes that were the most inexpensive and prolific were
reserved for the ephemeral mass-produced pictures of the daily press. More sophisticated
processes that offered finer results at greater cost and in smaller editions were often
employed for luxury products such as high-quality illustrated books or the reproduction
of art works.
The demand for high-quality photomechanical reproductions was met by a
handful of methods, each with its own advantages and adherents. Photogravure and
heliogravure were most popular; the former an intaglio-based technique, the latter a
planographic process. Photogravure, also called the heliogravure, was similar to aquatint.
It offered rich tonal variations and was the best method for reproducing etchings.
242
Photogravure was also used quite often to make high-quality images in photographically
illustrated books. The collotype employed light-sensitive gelatin to develop a
photographic image on the printing surface, and was the process most faithful to the
precise details of the source image.
16
Both the photogravure and the collotype processes, however, required the
expertise of a highly skilled printer and the plates they produced were good for only a
limited number of impressions, which restricted their potential for mass reproduction.
The high-relief single color halftone, however, best met the requirements for efficiency
and volume; the dots it produced were visible in close proximity, but were visually
coherent as fields of tone when one viewed the image at a reasonable distance.
Given all these options—the presence of and possibilities offered by new
technologies inspired a certain self-consciousness about one’s use of the media that had
not existed before—one was inclined to think critically about the use of older graphic
media for fine art prints, or justify the adoption of newer technologies for reproductive
images.
The Revival of the Fine Art Print in Germany
New technologies did not resolve the tension between the fine art imperatives of
the hand print and the possibilities for the image’s reproduction and dissemination on a
truly mass scale. In fact, they set them in greater relief. But the deployment of different
16
Luis Nadeau, calls collotypes “practically indistinguishable from photographs…” Luis Nadeau,
Encyclopedia of Printing, Photographic, and Photomechanical Processes (Fredericton, N.B., Canada:
Atelier L. Nadeau), 1994, 75. Both Richard Benson and Luis Nadeau worked as professional printers and
have technical experience of the photomechanical processes they write about.
243
graphic media was not only about the embrace or rejection of photomechanical
technologies. Therefore, histories that focus on technological development cannot
accommodate events such as the revival and reexamination of the German woodcut that
began in the mid-nineteenth century.
This revival was not simply a response or reaction to technological developments.
As the scholarship of Robin Reisenfeld and Christian Weikop has shown, both medium
and material had symbolic value in the politically tumultuous period preceding and
following German unification in 1871 as Germany searched for cultural icons with the
power to unify the fractious new nation.
17
Reisenfeld in particular documents the way
that the woodcut became a potent symbol of German artistic identity beginning in the
middle of the nineteenth century.
Initially, “woodcut” did not describe a process as much as the appearance of a
process; the term encompassed photomechanical reproductions of historical woodcuts by
celebrated German artists such as Dürer. It also was used interchangeably with the term
xylography, or wood engraving, a technique used to reproduce an archaized line style
favored by revivalists like the Nazarene artist Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld because it
was seen as closer in nature to German art of the past. Xylography was also given some
artistic cachet as a process in its own right by Adolf Menzel, who had his hand-drawn
illustrations for Franz Kugler’s biography of Frederick the Great reproduced by expert
cutters trained to reproduce the artist’s very fine and energetic drawn line.
17
See Robin Reisenfeld, “Cultural Identity and Artistic Practice: The Revival of the German Woodcut.
(Volumes I and II)” (University of Chicago, 1993); and Christian Poul Weikop, “Arboreal Expressionism:
Myth, Medium, Material and Memory: The Aesthetics of Cohesion and Subversion in Brücke’s Woodcut
Culture” (University of Birmingham, 2005).
244
The celebration of medium in this earlier period therefore separated the look of
the woodcut from its means of production so that a general “woodcut” aesthetic could be
produced using a variety of processes and media. Reisenfeld argues that this aesthetic—
although evolving—had unifying power, and that the medium had two nationalistic
imperatives: to unite a politically fragmented people through shared cultural icons, and to
offer a German counterpoint to French aesthetic values.
By the end of the nineteenth century, however, Jugendstil artists including Otto
Eckmann, Emil Orlik, and Peter Behrens began to explore the woodcut process itself by
choosing to cut their own blocks—rather than trusting the work to artisans—and by
carving directly onto the plank in order to experiment with the expressive possibilities of
wood. This was ultimately the basis for the “reinvention” of the modern woodcut and the
prints of Die Brücke. There were several reasons for this, one of which was the Arts and
Crafts principles of many Jugendstil artists, which prioritized a return to the knowledge
of the craftsperson as part of a broader reaction to industrialization, a reversion to the
supposed authenticity of pre-mechanized fine and applied art forms. But the focus on
process also led to some surprising results, encouraging aesthetic experimentation with
more abstract, simplified forms. A tension thus arose between the exploration of the
medium-specific features of the woodcut and the more illusionistic and pictorial effects
that one could achieve with the xylograph.
This increased focus on process can be seen in Otto Bierbaum’s article “Moderne
Holzschnitte,” published in Ver Sacrum, the journal of the Vienna Secession, in 1898.
Bierbaum argued that the exploration of process had engendered a new style that was
245
more faithful to the essence of the woodcut itself. This exploration, again, had national
dimensions; while for the French, line had almost disappeared in the pursuit of painterly
values, the Germans had responded with a return to line. In this “Linienlust,” he
continued, “the spirit of Dürer awakens.” But, Bierbaum cautioned, this is not simply a
revival of old styles. If one were speaking only of, “an imitative reproduction of the old
manner, an archaizing in the approximate style of Dürer,” he says, “it would not be worth
the effort to make a great fuss about it.”
18
But, “The great promise evidenced in these
revived woodcuts in the true spirit of this beautiful art is that they are at the same time of
the modern spirit…and yet still strive for the [woodcut’s] unique aims and know to
conform their means [Mittel] to these aims.”
19
But photomechanical techniques and the wood engraving’s attempt to compete
with the representational possibilities of the photograph had estranged the print from its
process of production:
We know the way these [wood engravings], which had previously
flourished so gloriously in Germany, first slowly and then rapidly
[schritt- und sturzweise] degenerated, as the wood engraving has from
the xylographic process [Holzschneidekunst], because we have seen
how, in the foolish desire to compete with photomechanical
[phototypischen] techniques, [these prints] have been alienated from
their own, most unique being.
20
18
“…ein nachahmendes Aufnehmen der alten Weise, ein Archaisieren im Stile Dürers etwa, so verlohnte es
sich nicht der Mühe, ein grosses Aufheben davon zu machen.” Otto Bierbaum, “Moderne Holzschnitte,”
Ver Sacrum 1, no. 10 (October 1898): 6
19
“Das Verheissungsvolle an den Beweisstücken des wiederauflebenden Holzschnittes im echten Geiste
dieser schönen Kunst ist, dass sie zugleich modernen Geistes sind…doch ihren eigenen Zielen zustreben
und ihre Mittel diesen Zielen anzupassen wissen.” Ibid.
20
“Wie diese, die ehedem in Deutschland so herrlich geblüht hat, erst schritt- und dann sturzweise
heruntergekommen, wie aus der Holzschneidekunst die Xylographie geworden ist, wissen wir, denn wir
haben es mit angesehen, wie sie sich, in der thörichten Begierde, mit den phototypischen Techniken zu
wetteifern, ihrem eigensten Wesen entfremdet hat.” Ibid., 5.
246
Bierbaum argued that what motivated artists such as Behrens and Eckmann was not a
desire to create as many cheap reproductions as possible, it was the creative drive of the
artist working both through and against the material to discover its innate possibilities
and realizing something greater in the process, the material elevated through the talents of
the maker:
One sees that for these artists it is in no way a question of the intention to
create as great a number of cheap reproductions [Abklatschen] as
possible; they do not cut in wood in order to have an original means of
duplication, rather they dedicate themselves to this technique because it
allows them to achieve effects that only the handmade [persönliche
Abdruck] impression from wood yields, and because the technique itself
forces the strong use of line and a consideration of flat planes like no
other. But for this reason the decorative moment that is inherent to the
modern woodcut is instantly given. The more its essence is recognized
by the artist, the more generous [großzügig] it becomes. True, it allows
many nuances and great refinement, but in the main it has something
monumental, simply expressive. Just as its technique stands between
painting and sculpture, so is its inner being also related [mitverwandt] to
the sculptural.
21
Bierbaum is not writing about the prints of Die Brücke—the group did not form
until 1905—but Brücke would become the apotheosis of the values Bierbaum champions
here. The Brücke artists were heavily influenced by the principles and the aesthetic
experimentation of Jugendstil; one member of Brücke, Max Pechstein, was trained in the
21
“Man sieht: es handelt sich bei diesen Künstlern keineswegs um die Absicht, eine möglichst grosse
Anzahl von Abklatschen herzustellen; sie schneiden nicht in Holz, um ein originales Mittel zur
Vervielfältigung zu haben, sondern sie widmen sich dieser Technik, weil sich mit ihr Wirkungen erzielen
lassen, die nur der persönliche Abdruck vom Holze ergibt, und weil die Technik selbst zu einer so strengen
Linienführung und Flächenabwägung zwingt, wie keine andere. Damit ist aber sofort das decorative
Moment gegeben, das dem modernen Holzschnitte innewohnt. Je mehr sein Wesen von einem Künstler
erkannt wird, um so grosszügiger wird er. Zwar lässt auch er viele Nuancen und grosse Feinheiten zu, in
der Hauptsache aber hat er etwas Monumentales, einfach Ausdrucksvolles. Wie seine Technik zwischen
Malerei und Plastik steht, so ist auch sein inneres Wesen dem Plastischen mitverwandt.” Ibid.
247
xylographic method and produced wood engravings in a decorative, Jugendstil style that
served as advertisements and catalogue covers before joining the group.
22
The Brücke woodcut was not, therefore, a reinvention of the medium, nor was it a
“rediscovery” of the medieval woodcut. It was the culmination of recent experiments
with process and another response to debates surrounding the national legacy of the
woodcut. While Brücke artists proclaimed the influence of medieval or “primitive” art
forms on their work, at the same time they embraced a progressive aesthetic that had
more in common with the graphic work of Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin.
23
Their
actual connection to the legacy of the German past was more conceptual and crafted. As
Robin Reisenfeld in particular has shown, the woodcut was central to the collective
identity of Die Brücke, which was modeled in part on a premodern notion of
Gemeinschaft (influenced by Ferdinand Tönnies binary of a premodern Gemeinschaft
versus a modern Gesellschaft) and the supposed unity of the Dürerzeit.
24
It was even the
means and the medium through which the group presented its manifesto. Kirchner
carved the text from a single block of wood rather than setting it in type, asserting not
22
It should be noted that the xylographic, or wood engraving, technique, which many Jugendstil artists
practiced, did not have the same sculptural, or “arboreal,” qualities as woodcuts cut from the plank. The
xylographic print was cut at the end of the block—that is, it engraved a cross-section of the wood which
produced a much finer line—while the woodcuts of the Brücke artists, for example, were cut with or along
the grain of the wood, which allowed one to achieve the “woody” effects offered by the irregular surface of
the wood grain as well as the splintered or chipped lines that were characteristic of these prints.
23
Christian Weikop makes this point extensively in his dissertation. Christian Poul Weikop, “Arboreal
Expressionism: Myth, Medium, Material and Memory: The Aesthetics of Cohesion and Subversion in
Brücke’s Woodcut Culture” (University of Birmingham, 2005). The connection, however, was also made
by contemporaries such as Curt Glaser in Die Graphik der Neuzeit: vom Anfang des XIX. Jahrhunderts bis
zur Gegenwart (Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1922).
24
Robin Reisenfeld, “Cultural Identity and Artistic Practice: The Revival of the German Woodcut.
(Volumes I and II)” (University of Chicago, 1993).
248
only the importance of the woodcut to the group’s program, but also evoking the earliest
medieval block books, which were produced in the same manner.
Brücke’s connection to the German past was about process but it was also about
material. As Monika Wagner has argued, wood itself was useful both for those wishing
to assert a return to “authenticity” and for the powerful national connotations that wood
possessed. Its use addressed a double loss—the loss of ancient craft traditions, and the
distance from a supposed, mythic, German past, whose spirit was expressed through the
material.
25
Thus, the favored status Expressionist artists gave to wood had nationalistic
and ideological imperatives that went beyond the “truth to materials” rhetoric of
Jugendstil and took on a metaphysical dimension; in particular, it was folded into Alois
Riegl’s notion of Kunstwollen so that the use of wood was viewed as having a higher,
spiritual significance for German artists in particular.
Wilhelm Worringer, for instance, wrote in his 1908 study of Lucas Cranach that
the “strong linearity” of German art is exemplified in the woodcut, “the sine qua non of
Teutonic artistic volition…”
26
Wilhelm Valentiner made a more poetic connection
between the Volk and Holz in an article about the work of Brücke artist Karl Schmdt-
Rottluff:
From the time of the oldest timberwork architecture…from the art of the
woodcut of Dürer’s time, the German has preferred the use of wood for
the expression of ideas…It is as if the structure of the rough trunk, with
its knotty, misshapen form that nevertheless submits to the passionate
25
Monika Wagner, “Wood - ‘Primitive’ Material for the Creation of ‘German Sculpture,’” in New
Perspectives on Brücke Expressionism: Bridging History, ed. Christian Weikop (Farnham, Surrey:
Ashgate, 2011), 71–88.
26
Quoted in ibid., 79.
249
carving knife, were especially suited to the half-barbaric, half-
sentimental, self-sacrificing German character.
27
Christian Weikop has termed the Brücke artists’ relationship to wood as material and the
wood as concept “arboreal expressionism,” something he has also called the group’s
“wood culture.”
28
It should be noted that the Brücke artists’ attentiveness to material was not limited
to wood. Their works evince a similar sensitivity to the material bases of other graphic
media. According to Weikop, “Whether through etching, lithography, woodblock
printing, or wood sculpture they chose to expose rather than conceal the inherent
properties of artistic materials.”
29
In other words, in the etching the artist attempted to
make plain that the print was pulled from a metal plate, and in the lithograph that the
image was drawn or painted on stone. Emil Nolde, for instance, was expert at making
material haptically palpable, whether in etching, woodcut, or lithography. And Max
Pechstein often took his drawings to the very edges of the lithographic stone, making an
improvised frame of something that had otherwise remained invisible.
Sensitivity to the specific visual and haptic properties of material and of process
was therefore central to the group’s conceptual connection to the past. And Brücke
prints—their etchings, lithographs, but especially their woodcuts—were the antithesis of
the mass produced, photomechanical print in all aspects of their execution. As Weikop
has pointed out, the terms “Eigendruck” or “Handdruck” (roughly “individual” and
27
Quoted in Wagner, “Wood - ‘Primitive’ Material for the Creation of ‘German Sculpture,’” 74.
28
See Weikop, “Arboreal Expressionism: Myth, Medium, Material and Memory.”
29
Christian Weikop, “The Arts and Crafts Education of the Brücke: Expressions of Craft and Creativity,”
The Journal of Modern Craft 1, no. 1 (March 2008), 86.
250
“hand” print) were often written in the margin next to the artist’s signature and the
edition number.
30
This meant in the case of woodcuts that they were printed by rubbing a
sheet of paper against an inked block by hand—the most rudimentary process available.
This also resulted in small editions with variation between impressions, the gold standard
for the collectible fine art print, and another counterpoint to the consistency and
widespread availability of the mass-produced image.
On the one hand, the Brücke’s deployment of process and material fit into larger,
longer-term debates surrounding the dehumanizing effects of industrialization: namely,
the denigration of material and the loss of the knowledge of the craftsperson, as labor was
displaced from the human hand to the machine. These debates also had metaphysical and
ideological dimensions. Monika Wagner has written of the way that Expressionist wood
carving—both sculpture and the cutting of the wood block for printing—was a physical
and metaphysical act; the artist, it was said, revealed innate forms that lie embedded
within the wood by doing battle with the material. The finished work, either as sculpture
or as woodblock, retained “traces of the struggle against the material,” becoming a kind
of physical record of the creative act itself. Such traces also became an extension of the
artist’s signature.
31
The delayed celebration of the Expressionist woodcut by the next generation of
art critics, curators, and historians writing about modern prints in the early 1920s did not
romanticize process over product in the same way, but many did notice a difference in the
30
Ibid., 85.
31
Wagner, “’Wood,’” 80.
251
way young progressive artists approached graphic media. Prominent art critics, curators,
and historians such as Paul Westheim, founder of Das Kunstblatt, Curt Glaser, head of
the Kupferstichkabinett (Department of Prints) of the State Museums in Berlin, Gustav
Hartlaub, Director of the Mannheimer Kunsthalle, and Edwin Redslob, the first
Reichskunstwart of the Weimar Republic, all wrote extensively about modern prints in
the early 1920s. Glaser, Hartlaub, and Westheim even devoted book-length projects to
the subject; from the long history of the woodcut (Westheim’s Das Holzschnittbuch), to
the recent history of all graphic art (Glaser’s Graphik der Neuzeit), to a study of German
graphic art (Hartlaub’s Neue deutsche Graphik), most of these authors put recent art
production in conversation with art of the past.
Several celebrated the dramatic increase in the number of prints being produced.
This was not necessarily a bad thing; Gustav Hartlaub in particular wrote effusively of
the populist possibilities of the print, the exciting way that its dissemination might bring
more people to contemporary art:
In the final analysis, print collecting today should not be undertaken in
private cabinets with private capital. Today printmaking is public and
popular. Printmaking today, above all its most important contemporary
exponent, the woodcut, does not want to be stored motionless in
portfolios. The print wants to fly, a broadsheet fluttering downward
from spiritual heights to a great people with arms outstretched!”
32
But Hartlaub also viewed with some ambivalence the way the connection between
process and product had broken down. He celebrated the woodcut as the art form for the
32
Gustav Hartlaub, Die neue deutsche Graphik (Berlin: E. Reiss, 1920), quoted in Rose-Carol Washton
Long, ed., German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of
National Socialism (New York: G.K. Hall, 1993), 143-4.
252
new century, “the woodcut is better adapted to the new expressive intention than any
other technique…It is the most original stylistic product of the new art.”
33
In the newest
art, he finds, it is no longer medium specificity which motivates the artist, but the
intended function or “task” of the work. And indeed, graphic art had again been
mobilized for a purpose:
For not a few, and already for the youngest, newly emerged [artists]…the
correlation to a certain graphic process becomes generally meaningless.
If we had tried to separate not the medium, but the task or the function
(for example, single prints for the wall or for portfolios, graphic series as
‘poetry without words’ or as ‘illustration,’ periodical newspaper graphics
in the political or illustrative sense) always based on the fact that an artist
himself chooses precise functions from his most inner nature, external
motives and mandates are capitalized on or falsely created and afterward
his style is formed—: some of today’s creators would confront us as
stronger and more singular in such an adjustment.
34
But a more common critique concerned a perceived decline in the quality of
recent graphic work. Hartlaub for instance, was critical of the use of print media when it
was employed merely as a means of reproducing an artist’s work. Take his comments
about the lithographs of George Grosz, one of several talents whose “purest
fulfillment…one perhaps finds in the original drawing…Already the most radical and
most individual strengths of the young generation belong here.” Grosz is one of several
artists Hartlaub mentions who “are not painters, but also not really printmakers in a strict
33
Ibid., 142.
34
“Bei nicht wenigen und gerade bei den Jüngsten, Neuauftauchenden…wird die Zuordnung zu einem
bestimmten graphischen Verfahren überhaupt gegenstandslos. Hätten wir nicht nach den Mitteln, sondern
nach den Aufgaben und Funktionen zu sondern versucht (etwa nach Einzelblättern für Wand oder Mappe,
graphischen Folgen als ‘Dichtung ohne Worte’oder als ‘Illustration’, periodischer Zeitschriftengraphik im
politischen oder im illustrativen Sinn) - immer von der Tatsache ausgehend, daßein Künstler nach innerster
Veranlagung sich bestimmte Funktionen wählt, äußere Anlässe und Aufträge ausnutzt oder künstlich
schafft und danach seinen Stil bildet - : so würden in einer solchen Anordnung manche der heutigen
Schaffenden stärker und eigentümlicher uns entgegentreten.” Gustav Hartlaub, Die neue deutsche Graphik
(Berlin: E. Reiss, 1920), 86-7.
253
sense.” “Certainly,” he says, “a George Grosz, a Ludwig Meidner, an Albert Bloch,
employs the graphic reproduction not infrequently…” But Grosz’s lithographs
“frequently provid[e] nothing other than a mere repetition and transmission of the free
drawing.” “Grosz,” he continued, has created hundreds of such pen and ink drawings,
whose hand-drawn acidity and intensity already lose spirit [Temperament] in their
lithographic reproduction.”
35
Here Hartlaub outlines the way that careless reproductions—done not with a mind
to the aesthetic appropriateness of the medium, but only for its reproductive
possibilities—neutralize the more caustic and powerful elements of an artist’s work. In
Grosz’s case, then, the process that makes their widespread dissemination possible
ultimately reduces their effectiveness as propaganda. This misuse of the medium, when
employed as a means rather than an end, does much to devalue fine art prints in general;
again it reduced its aesthetic singularity and makes of it one among a group of
reproductive processes that prioritize reproducibility over the medium’s other
possibilities.
But even more troubling for Hartlaub were works that retained an aesthetic
semblance of the Expressionist aesthetic without the content. For Hartlaub, the best
35
“Auch innerhalb der neuen Ausdruckskunst gibt es viele Begabungen, die vielleicht ihre reinste Erfüllung
in der Originalzeichnung finden, die nicht Maler, aber auch nicht eigentlich Graphiker im engeren Sinne
sind. Gerade die radikalsten und die persönlichsten Kräfte der jungen Generation gehören hierher.
Gewißbedient sich ein Georg Grosz, Ludwig Meidner, Albert Bloch nicht selten der graphischen
Vervielfältigung, ein Meidner etwa des Kupfers, ein Grosz des lithographischen Steins, der ja, wie wir
gesehen haben, häufig nichts anderes leistet als bloße Wieder- und Weitergabe der freien Zeichnung. Aber
die einmalige explosive Niederschrift mit Feder und Pinsel, die keinen Zwang erträgt, nicht einmal einen
wenn auch noch so anregenden und reizvollen Kompromißmit dem Material eingeht, tut ihrem Willen zu
hemmungsloser direktester Aussprache doch am besten Genüge! Grosz hat Hunderte solcher
Federzeichnungen geschaffen, deren handschriftliche Schärfe und Heftigkeit schon in der lithographischen
Wiedergabe an Temperament verliert.” Ibid., 89-90.
254
Expressionist works were a unity of medium and style. What he saw among recent bad
actors was a kind of Baroque excess, with a “high level of formal development” but also
something that has become maudlin and caricatured,
Flipping through the newest portfolios and volumes one experiences
almost everywhere their cries and gestures! They become stereotypical,
like so many works of recent graphic art in expression and in medium.
Above all in the medium! We had the courage to speak of a new
blossoming of graphic art in Germany, of a high level of formal
development, but at the same time also - in view of the avalanche
(lawinenartig anschwellender) [of production] of an ever more ominous
threat of leveling and devaluation (Nivellierung)! Within modern graphic
art is the heroic age, the period of strong personalities, already behind us?
“In any case,” Hartlaub concluded, “the selective collector does not have it easy in
regards to the youngest generation of artists.”
36
It is this threat of leveling and of aesthetic devaluation, really, that Hartlaub
wishes to guard against. His caution goes beyond an anxiety about the ‘end’ of
Expressionism to something deeper: the fear that Germany’s preeminent art form might
be past its prime, that graphic art may have enjoyed only a brief flourishing in the modern
age before quickly declining into repetition and reproduction in the cheapest sense. What
also seems to trouble Hartlaub, Glaser, and others is the way that the woodcut was being
used in a strategic way to transmit a calculated and thoroughly commodified content, and
that the medium itself was part and parcel of this commodification.
36
“Wer die neuesten Mappen und Hefte durchblättert, meint fast überall seien Schreie, seine Gebärden
wahrzunehmen! Sie werden stereotyp, wie so manches im Ausdruck und in den Mitteln der jungen
graphischen Kunst. Vor allem auch in den Mitteln! Wir hatten den Mut, von einer neuen Blüte deutscher
Graphik zu reden, von einem hohen formalen Niveau, zugleich aber auch - angesichts der lawinenartig
anschwellender immer bedrohlicheren Gefahr der Nivellierung! Liegt etwa - innerhalb der neuen Graphik -
das heroische Zeitalter, die Periode der starken Persönlichkeiten schon hinter uns? Auf alle Fälle hat es der
wählende Sammler gegenüber der jüngsten Generation nicht leicht.” Ibid., 93-4.
255
Paul Westheim takes a less alarmist tone regarding the commercialization of the
print in his essay, “Der arrivierte Öldruck” (The Upstart Oleograph). Rather than lament
the ways that changes in technology and shifts in attitudes threatened to erode enduring
artistic values, Westheim wonders if progressive art ought to embrace popular
photomechanical processes. For Westheim, the oleograph is an example of the cozy
relationship between an art for the masses and mass media. An oleograph is a type of
chromolithograph in which the color print was either pressed onto canvas or the printing
surface was otherwise textured so that the finished product had the full sensual semblance
of an oil painting. The technology was used to reproduce familiar and favored paintings
beginning in the late nineteenth century, and was prized for its ability to mimic not only
the look, but also the look of the feel of paint on canvas.
37
The oleograph was, for Westheim, emblematic of mass media in the way it
embodied kitsch sensibilities. After all, he noted, “It is the addiction to kitsch, an inborn
sentimentality, to be certain, that a quite substantial part of humanity acts out its need for
art that way.”
38
The oleograph, unlike progressive fine art, was able to get close to the
hearts and bodies, if not the minds, of the masses; it achieved an emotional and physical
37
The definition of oleograph in the Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms, although brief, nevertheless highlights
the dangerously deceptive and alluring nature of this facsimile print. It warns: “Framed oleographs still lie
in wait in antique shops to trap the unwary into believing they are acquiring a genuine oil
painting.”"Oleograph." The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms. Oxford Art Online. Oxford
University Press, accessed March 7, 2014,
http://www.oxfordartonline.com.libproxy.usc.edu/subscriber/article/opr/t4/e1203.)
38
“…es sei der Hang zum Kitsch, sei eingeborene Sentimentalität; fest steht,daßein recht erheblicher Teil
derMenschheit auf die Art sein Kunstbedürfnisauslebt.” Paul Westheim, “Der arrivierte Öldruck,” in Für
und Wider: kritische Anmerkungen zur Kunst der Gegenwart (Potsdam: G. Kiepenheuer, 1923), 175.
256
intimacy with a large cross section of the populace, “[tacked by] the sailor on the wall of
his cabin, and the soldier on his locker, and the cleaning girl over her bed…”
39
Yes, Westheim acknowledges, “The masses are artistically amoral, they are
corrupted by kitsch.” But is this situation really the “problem of the masses,” he asks, or
is it “the problem of art”? He continues,
Perhaps art is corrupted by artistry? Perhaps the masses are healthier in
their behavior when they want to know nothing of the art of critics and
experts [Kunstleute] and are not afraid to rejoice in that which is pleasing
at once: the drastically objective, the blatantly obvious and hyper-obvious,
the pristine smoothness [Glatten], cosmetic [geschminkt] colors, and
maudlin sentimentality.
40
What is needed is for art—progressive, contemporary art—to meet the masses where they
live, like the oleograph, on the wall of the soldier’s cabin, or the soldier’s locker, or
above the cleaning girl’s bed:
…that we must get out of the isolation of our artistry, that the situation
must somehow be false, that we are on top of Olympus and painting into
the void, while down below the world goes on its way, it has its oleograph
and asks not a whit of our fine art painting. Perhaps it refreshes us,
perhaps it also refreshes art, if we attempt once in a while to come down
from our high horse [Kothurn] and to introduce the living force which
streams into any “nonart” into our creative work [Schaffen]. We (should)
attempt it once with the drastically objective, with art that looks like the
oleograph.
41
39
“…so papptder Matrose an die Wand seiner Kabine und der Soldat an sein Spind unddas Dienstmädchen
über sein Bett einen Buntdruck…” Ibid., 174.
40
“…die Masse sei künstlerisch amoralisch,sei im Kitsch verkommen. Vielleicht seidie Kunst in Artistik
verkommen? Vielleichtsei die Masse in ihrem Verhalten gesunder,wenn sie von der Kunst derKunstleute
nichtswissen wolle und sich nicht scheue, Freudean dem zu haben, was ihr nun einmal Freudemache: am
drastisch Gegenständlichen, kraßDeutlichen und Überdeutlichen, am geleckt Glatten, geschminktFarbigen
und rührsam Sentimentalischen.” Ibid., 176.
41
“…daßwir heraus aus der Isolierung unseres Künstlertums müssen, daß der Zustand irgendwie falsch sein
muß, daßwir oben auf dem Olymp insLeere hineinmalen, während unten die WeIt ihren Weg geht, ihren
Öldruck hat und nach unserer Kunstmalerei nicht einen Deut fragt. Vielleicht frischt es uns, vielleicht
frischt es auch die Kunst auf, wenn wireinmal versuchen, von unserem Kothurn herunterzusteigen und
dielebendige Kraft, die einströmt in jene "Unkunst", unserem Schaffen zuzuführen. ” Ibid., 176-77
257
The oleograph, Westheim suggests, could be the means with which avant-garde
artists bring progressive art to the masses. One could meet the sensibilities of the
populace halfway by adopting a medium they had already embraced. Yes, he concludes,
the “upstart oleograph” might represent “another kind of derailing from the traditional
path of art.” But “because the mountain does not come to the prophet, the prophet
attempts it with the oleograph.” Yet, he admitted, “It still remains to decide whether the
masses are also now really prepared to accept the oleograph, or whether some of them are
finished with it, that tickled nerves are able to take more delight in a sensation.”
42
In
other words, have the masses only responded to “tickled nerves” or will the oleograph
prove to be the Trojan Horse in which progressive art and the ideas that sustain it can be
smuggled out of its intellectual boroughs to influence a wider world?
Transfer Lithography, Photolithography, and the Halftone
But the oleograph was not really the mass print that most concerned cultural
critics. The printing process synonymous with a truly mass media, and with the
inflation’s dizzying arithmetic, was the single-color halftone print. That is, if the Brücke
print represents the extreme of the print as an almost singular fetishized high modern art
object, a reproducible work that nevertheless remains rare and retains aura, then the
42
“…zu wieder einer anderen Art des Herausspringens aus demtraditionellen Weg der Kunst . . . Da der
Berg nicht zum Prophetenkommt, versuchts der Prophet mit dem Öldruck. Bliebe noch festzustellen,ob die
Masse nun auch wirklich bereit ist, den arrivierten Öldruckzu akzeptieren, oder ob etwa das Ganze damit
endet, daßgekitzelte Nerven sich an einer Sensation mehr zu delektieren vermögen.” Ibid., 178.
258
halftone represents the other extreme, the complete dissolution of the aura into a million
tiny indistinguishable dots.
The halftone is the apotheosis of the high-volume, low-skill print and was so
successful because it maximized all the major advantages of photomechanical printing: it
was cheap, efficient to make and print, and its printing plate could be transferred to a
cylinder for printing on a rotary press, allowing image and type to be printed
simultaneously.
43
It also offered results that were suitable to the immediate needs of
publishers of newspapers and illustrated weeklies. “[The] surprising thing about the
[halftone] technique,”says Richard Benson, “is that it changed so little between its
invention and its demise.”
44
The halftone dominated mass-produced photographic publications from the turn
of the century until offset photolithography was refined for efficient mass publication in
the 1960s. As the preeminent process of the illustrated press, it was essential to that
format’s dominance of the “goldener zwangizer Jahren” of roughly 1925-1929, when
photographic magazines and journals commanded the visual landscape. But it was also
employed during the inflationary period by art publishers who wanted to reproduce
paintings and watercolors as well as prints in large volume editions, and by artists such as
George Grosz, who were not precious about the means of producing their graphic art.
43
The first halftone was introduced in 1877 in Vienna and it was perfected and used for the first time in the
New York Daily Graphic in 1880. London’s Graphic used halftones as early as 1884, and the Illustrated
London News from 1885. Several figures who perfected their own processes for halftone printing were
Georg Meisenbach in Munich and Frederic Ives in Philadelphia. The original halftone process was in use
from the 1880s until the 1950s. It employed both a transfer and an etching process similar to aquatint to
create the printing plate.
44
Richard Benson, The Printed Picture (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2008), 222.
259
The halftone is not the only high-volume photomechanical process, certainly, but
it is emblematic of what these processes had come to represent for several reasons.
45
It
brings together long-held tensions regarding the status and value of printed pictures as
well as more recent anxieties raised by the inflation in its very process. The halftone was
not a process commonly used for graphic works, however, if only because prints typically
provide their own tonal registers—the “graphic syntax” derided by Ivins which includes
lines, hatch marks, and stippling—and did not require the grayscale registers that the
halftone offered. I will therefore also consider two other high-volume, low-skill
reproductive processes that were increasingly used during this period for the larger-
edition reproduction of graphic works: transfer lithography and photolithography.
Transfer lithography was not new, but its increased use during these years
demonstrates the way that artists had moved from the material exploration of the Brücke
artists to more expedient uses of print media. Transfer lithography had been primarily a
commercial process before the advent of photomechanical printing because of its ability
to closely reproduce an existing source image. The process was almost as old as
lithography itself and employed the same basic chemical principles. The artist made a
drawing on transfer paper, a thin, tissue-like paper coated with a soluble substance.
When the drawing was finished it was placed on the printing stone and saturated with
water. The soluble parts would wash away, leaving the greasy ink of the image to adhere
to the surface of the stone from which impressions could then be printed.
45
The halftone itself is not a single process—rather, it ranges across processes. There are planographic and
high-relief halftones, for example. The halftone is really an intervention during the photographic stage, via
the use of screens, of producing printing plates. I have referred to it as if a single process here, however,
for clarity.
260
As a purely reproductive process for drawing, the transfer lithograph offered a
ready solution to the immediate demand for prints, both for those artists who had never
worked in print as well as publishers and dealers who wanted to offer quick editions for
collectors by well-known artists. The advantages of the transfer lithograph were all too
apparent: the artist did not need to make any real concessions to the process nor be well-
versed in the technical details of printmaking, s/he only had to draw an image on transfer
paper, and from there things were usually left to the master printer to transfer the image
and pull impressions.
46
The artist did not even need to reverse the drawing, as one would
if drawing directly on the stone, because the image would be reversed when transferred to
the printing surface and impressions would print with the drawing’s original orientation.
Max Beckmann’s two most important lithographic series from these years—Die
Hölle and Berliner Reise—consisted entirely of transfer lithographs. As discussed in
chapter three, the prints for Hölle were quickly made: the paper for the portfolio was
ripped from a larger roll (rather than mold-made sheets, as was more typical with fine art
prints), and impressions were printed on both verso and recto sides of the paper,
suggesting that less attention was paid to quality throughout the printing process. As I
argued in chapter three, the rapidity of their production, intentional or no, was
nevertheless wholly appropriate to the subject matter; Hölle is Beckmann’s most
‘journalistic’ portfolio and its production offered a kind of sensual immediacy that was
felt as much as seen. Beckmann’s lithographs, particularly those from Die Hölle,
46
Debates about the status of the transfer lithograph as an ‘original’ graphic process go back to the earliest
uses of the medium, and are examined in connection with their employment by Whistler and others in late
nineteenth century England in Meaghan Clarke, “Seeing in Black-and-White: Incidents in Print Culture,”
Art History 35, no. 3 (2012): 574–595.
261
therefore, occupy an in-between space of expedient and experimental production that
exploited the ‘newspaper-like’ directness of the medium to its greatest advantage.
Nevertheless, there is a gulf that separates the connoisseurial prints of the Brücke
from these lithographs by Beckmann. Certainly, Beckmann was not only an expedient
printmaker; his numerous etchings and drypoints from these years attest to his
appreciation for the particularities of graphic media. His use of low-volume processes,
like drypoint, also suggest that he did not prioritize dissemination above all else.
47
Reinhard Piper, a frequent publisher of Beckmann’s graphic work, states that the artist
saw “elaborate etchings almost as a relic of the good old days,” and kept a hand intaglio
press in his studio in Frankfurt in order to check the progress of his impressions
throughout the production of his plates.
48
But the material characteristics of Beckmann’s
lithographic series that do suggest the commercial calculus of producing prints had
changed—that quick and dirty had become acceptable for not only publishers and
dealers, but also the artists they represented, even artists as fastidious about their
professional image as Beckmann.
49
Significantly, Die Hölle was also reproduced as a reduced-size, collectible booklet
in an edition of one thousand copies. For the booklet edition, Beckmann’s transfer
47
Drypoint is one of the lowest-yield intaglio processes because the burr of the plate, which creates a dark
velvety line in early impressions, wears out very quickly under the pressure of the press.
48
“Das umständliche Ätzen empfand er fast als ein Überbleibsel aus der guten alten Zeit.” Reinhard Piper,
Mein Leben als Verleger: Vormittag, Nachmittag. (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1964), 321.
49
The episode discussed in chapter one that resulted in a lawsuit between J.B. Neumann and E.L. Kirchner
offers a contrast in this regard, however. Kirchner felt that the reproduction and dissemination of his
graphic works cheapened the originals, while Neumann expressed genuine exasperation with the artist’s
reservations. He wanted to promote Kirchner’s work—to make it more valuable to collectors—while
Kirchner felt this kind of promotion actually eroded the value of his graphics.
262
lithographs were photographically reproduced, reduced, and printed using a
photolithograph or offset process. These double reproductions had little claim to
connoisseurial value—they were photomechanical reproductions in a mass edition with
none of the cues, such as artist’s signature or fine papers, that would signal value for avid
collectors. But the appearance of a ‘mass’ edition further indicates a willingness on the
part of Neumann and Beckmann to experiment with photomechanical processes in order
to gain new audiences, and an acceptance of the idea that prints were elastic media that
could accommodate the shifts in format, modes of reproduction, and presentation that
such editions entailed.
Although other artists also produced photomechanical ‘mass’ booklet editions of
their works—a previously discussed selection from Otto Dix’s Der Krieg is a notable
example—it was George Grosz and his frequent publisher and collaborator Wieland
Herzfelde who specialized in this type of mass market publication. Grosz’s graphic
output during this period was made possible through an assortment of different
photomechanical processes, primarily photolithography and offset printing, but also
included line etchings, heliographs and rotogravures. The majority of these, however,
were described by their publishers simply as lithographs. Before 1918, the majority were
transfer lithographs, but afterward Grosz relied almost exclusively on photolithography
and offset printing. Indeed, much of Grosz’s artistic career would not be possible without
the photomechanical print, and he owed his productivity during this period to his embrace
of these practices. Photomechanical processes provided the artist and his publishers with
maximum flexibility. Images could be resized from a source drawing and easily
263
rephotographed for the production of new plates for use in a new context. Between 1917
and 1925, Grosz published eleven portfolios and collections, consisting of more than 350
images.
50
Many of these works appeared more than once, reissued across multiple
collections or moved from the pages of partisan journals such as Die weißen Blätter,
Neue Jugend, or Die blutige Ernst to the pages of a book or portfolio.
Alexander Dückers, editor of Grosz’s complex graphic catalogue raisonné, points
out that the artist’s ‘original’ printed oeuvre really consists of only a handful of works: a
few etchings and lithographs. The rest is made up entirely of reproductions after the
artist’s drawings. As Dückers notes, for Grosz and for the Malik Verlag which published
much of the artist’s work, “graphic art was primarily a means of reproducing
drawings.”
51
The idea, he argues, was to disseminate Grosz’s decidedly political work to
as wide an audience as possible, and their intended audience was not one attuned to the
difference between ‘original’ graphic work and reproductions after graphic works.
Therefore Dückers has used the term “facsimiles” to describe Grosz’s graphic
oeuvre, in part to capture the inclusive variety of reproductive practices the artist
employed, and in part to note that these works are not at all fine art prints in the
50
Because of the more limited nature of Dückers’s catalogue, this list is taken from Beth Irwin Lewis’s
checklist, and includes Erste George Grosz Mappe (1917), Kleine Grosz Mappe (1917), “Gott mit uns.”
Politische Mappe (1920), Das Gesicht der herrschenden Klasse (1921), Im Schatten (1921), Mit Pinsel und
Schere (1922), Die Räuber (1922), Abrechnung folgt! (1923), Ecce homo (1923), Samfundet uden Slør:
Prostitutionens Profeter, Moralsatiriske (1924), and Der Spiesser-Speigel (1925). See Beth Irwin Lewis,
George Grosz: Art and Politics in the Weimar Republic, Rev ed (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1991).
51
Alexander Dückers, George Grosz: Das Druckgraphische Werk / The Graphic Work, 1st English edition
(San Francisco: A. Wofsy Fine Arts, 1996), 256.
264
traditional sense—not even in their luxury versions.
52
Another useful way of conceiving
of Grosz’s printed work is through Michel Foucault’s notion of resemblance versus
similitude. Resemblance, Foucault says, serves representation. Resemblance is also,
according to Devin Fore, the mode of representational art in the nineteenth century. With
resemblance the distinction between original and copy has meaning. Similitude,
however, “serves repetition, which ranges across it. Resemblance predicates itself upon a
model it must return to and reveal; similitude circulates the simulacrum as an indefinite
and reversible relation of the similar to the similar.”
53
With similitude, there is no
original and no copy, only a network of semblance. Fore argues that this is the mode of
the postwar return to representation.
Grosz, more than most, embodies the mode of similitude in his art in both process
and product. That is, for Grosz, semblance was of two orders: first that of the
photomechanical editions themselves, which offered no real original, but were often
copies of copies (or promised to be in the future), and second, that which ranged across
and within his portfolios.
54
Grosz, as I have discussed, used the same stock characters, as
well as the same images, updated with new captions, over and over. Consider the
52
Emmanuel Pernoud traces the first uses of the term “facsimile” in nineteenth century France to describe
anything “which aspired to reproduce exactly a manuscript, drawing or engraving.” The neologism
“facsimile” (from the Latin meaning “make [it] similar”) was accepted by the Académie Française in 1835
to mean “copy, exact reproduction.” The word was used on albums to replace the term engraving, and, she
suggests, connotes a change in attitude: “reproductions were no longer designated by the craft that went
into them but by their ability to stand for something else, to simulate.” Emmanuel Pernoud, “The Art of
Facsimile: Alfred Jarry and Reproduction,” Word & Image 16, no. 4 (2000): 352.
53
Quoted in Devin Fore, Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature, (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2012), 297-98.
54
The question of the original is a complicated one—sometimes a source drawing does exist, but just as
often the drawing from which the plate for the print was produced was destroyed in the process of making
the print (as in the case of the transfer lithographs) or was discarded entirely.
265
drawing that opens chapter one: “Seid fruchtbar und mehret such!” (Be Fruitful and
Multiply!) (figure 1.1). The drawing is a related sketch for a work that appears in the
1923 collection Abrechnung folgt! with the caption “Die Religion muß dem Volke
erhalten bleiben!” (Religion must be preserved from the people!) (figure 4.4). Some
changes are apparent between the sketch and the photolithograph. In the latter, for
instance, the money bags have sprouted legs and kneel before the priest that blesses them.
There seems to be less connection between the caption and the priest’s invocation,
directed at the bags of money: “be fruitful and multiply!” The priest also appears more
full of face, less desiccated than the drawn man, but also more prosaic. Comparing these
two works, one understands Hartlaub’s critique, quoted earlier, that the drawings, “los[e]
the acidity and intensity in their lithographic reproduction.” But that former face is still
familiar, and indeed, it appears earlier in the same collection, this time buried within a
grouping of Grosz’s other familiar stock types: the judge, the military man, and the
prostitute with her prosperous john (figure 4.5). The caption “Völker Europas, wahrt
eure heiligsten Güter” (Peoples of Europe, protect your most precious possessions) is
similarly vague—broad enough to apply across multiple images in the collection rather
than suggest a specific context or content for this assemblage of characters.
55
The cut-
and-paste quality of both image and text recalls Grosz’s earlier montage work in form if
not exactly in function.
55
The caption is perhaps an ironic reference to a bombastic history painting by Heinrich Knackfuß from
1895 of the same title which was given as a gift by Kaiser Wilhelm II to Tsar Nicholas II. The painting is
an allegorical scene with the Archangel Michael (the patron saint of Germany) surrounded by women
representing the different nations of Europe. It was meant to symbolize the struggle Christian nations must
together undertake against the religious and ethnic threat from Asia (sometimes referred to as the “Gelbe
Gefahr”).
266
Grosz and Herzfelde were also quite sophisticated in their deployment of tiered
editions, which included both limited and mass market runs. Nearly all of Grosz’s books
and portfolios from this period appeared in multiple versions, usually several ‘special’
editions and later, unlimited mass editions. Grosz’s largest collection from this period,
Ecce homo, is perhaps the exemplary tiered edition within Grosz’s oeuvre in this regard.
Although more than ten thousand copies of the collection were ultimately published, it
was produced in five different versions: two special editions of fifty and one hundred
impressions, respectively, and three mass editions, one of which, edition “C,” was printed
in 5,000-8,000 copies. A page within edition “C” carefully lays out the differences
between each version (figure 4.6). Some offer only the “watercolors,” others only the
black and white drawings, some are bound, some not. The special editions were signed
and numbered by Grosz himself and carried another special distinction: they were “pulled
with special care” from a hand press.
56
Although this does not technically alter their
medium—they remain photolithographs—the intervention of the hands of the artist and
printer is meant to separate these impressions from the mass editions by associating them
with fine art practices and endowing them with collectible value. These impressions,
Dücker tells us, were further dressed up with the addition of artificial plate marks—an
almost comical addendum to a collection of planographic prints.
57
Perhaps these
embossed frames were intended to confirm that the prints were indeed hand printed and
pulled. Unfortunately they were sloppily done; Dückers notes that the images often
56
The text reads: “Die Vorzugsausgaben enthalten mit besonderer Sorgfalt abgezogenen
Handpressendrucke.”
57
Plate marks rarely appear on planographic prints, but are a common feature of intaglio plates, which are
pressed into the paper in order to transfer ink out of the incisions made below the plate’s surface.
267
extend beyond the borders of the plate mark, indicating that they are not the traces of the
printing surface itself, but an ersatz plate mark. This suggests that either Grosz and
Herzfelde wanted the trappings of collectible art objects without the content, or, as seems
more likely, they are a sly indication of the derision that both had for such markers of
value and the collectors who lived by them. Thus, although they made efforts to signal to
collectors the value of the portfolio in a fine art sense, they were happy at the same time
to ironically undermine those values.
Indeed, eschewing connoisseurial notions about the fine art print was fully in line
with Grosz’s artistic persona. The artist’s use of media was at one with his politics—he
argued against the preciousness of any original art object in word and deed. This ‘anti-
art’ stance was shared by his dada colleagues and close collaborators, the brothers
Wieland Herzfeld and John Heartfield. Consider the “Neujahrsgruss” that Grosz
produced jointly with the latter (figure 4.7). The card is an ironic advertisement for
“Grosz-Heartfield-Werke,” and announces the many services the two will readily
perform for money. Though their specialty is listed as “guidance for artistic theater, film,
and publishing,” they also work in any genre one might require: “illustration, caricature,
portrait, landscape, still life, art history, the direction of whole exhibitions, posters of any
movement,” as well as “excellent execution in any style: expr., futur., dada, meta-mech.
guaranteed.” By advertising art as a kind of manual labor that can be performed in any
style one might choose, Grosz was not only skewering notions about art and originality
and calling the high-art pretensions of the final product into question, he was also
aligning his craft with working class sensibilities.
268
Grosz's derision for the fine art object carried over into the way he carried out his
graphic work. In other words, Grosz could claim not expediency but conviction as the
reason behind his commitment to the mass produced print. Grosz’s statement, “On my
new pictures,” published in 1921 is more straightforward on this point as well as the
artist’s attitude toward the role of reproduction and photographic technologies:
Painting is a manual labor like any other, which can be done well or
poorly. Today we have a star system, as in other branches of art—that
will disappear. Photography will play a greater role, today it is already
much better and cheaper to photograph oneself than to allow oneself to be
painted. Furthermore, it [should] be added that today’s artists distort
everything in their manner—and have a peculiar aversion against
similitude in representation…There will come a time, in which the artist is
no longer a vague, quasi-bohemian (bohemehaft) Anarchist—but a clear
healthy worker in the collective community…Art will then surge from the
thin bed in which it today anemically trickles through the life of the top
‘ten thousand’ and again as a full on river inform the whole of working
humanity. The monopoly of capital on things of spiritual value has then
found its end.
58
Grosz’s position was not an isolated one; the idea that photomechanical media could
provide a bridge between the artist’s work and ideas and the “collective community” was
articulated by Westheim in “Der arrivierte Öldruck,” for instance.
59
For both Grosz and
58
“Malerei ist eine Handarbeit wie jede andere, die kann gut oder schlecht gemacht sein. Heute haben wir
ein Starsystem wie in anderen Kunstzweigen auch—das wird verschwinden. Die Photographie wird eine
große Rolle spielen, heute ist es ja schon viel besser und billiger, sich photographieren als sich malen zu
lassen. Außerdem kommt hinzu, daßdie heutigen Künstler in ihrer Art alles verzerren—und eine
eigenartige Abneigung gegen Ähnlichkeit des Dargestellten haben…Es wird eine Zeit kommen, in der der
Künstler nicht mehr jener bohemehafte schwammige Anarchist ist—sondern ein heller, gesunder Arbeiter
in der kollektivistischen Gemeinschaft…Erst dann wird die Kunst aus dem dünnen Bett strömen, in dem sie
heute blutarm durch das Leben der oberen ‘Zehntausend’fließt und wieder als voller Strom sich der ganzen
arbeitenden Menschheit mitteilen. Das Monopol des Kapitals auf geistige Dinge hat dann ein Ende
gefunden.” George Grosz, “Zu meinen neuen Bildern,” Das Kunstblatt 5 (January 1921): 11–14.
59
Speaking of the political potential of the mass media print, Westheim calls Grosz out specifically as an
artist who has taken advantage of these possibilities. He states: “Möglich, daßes uns damit gelingt,die
Kunst aus ihren Atelierproblemen herauszubringen, möglich auch,daßwir es fertigbringen, damit die
Vielen, die breite Masse, anzusprechen,und da in diesen Malern: den Grosz, Schlichter, Scholz,
269
Westheim, the lack of pretension and ready access provided by photomechanical media
such as the oleograph, for Westheim, and the photolithograph and offset print, for Grosz,
were central to their appeal; the masses could only be reached through a mass medium,
one that met them where they lived rather than one that stuck to the rarefied spaces and
institutions of fine art.
Nevertheless, Grosz’s embrace of photomechanical technologies and mass editions
would give his work a questionable status. Consider the collection Mit Pinsel und Schere
(With Brush and Scissors). It includes reproductions of now-familiar works such as the
mixed-media “‘Daum’ marries her pedantic automaton ‘George’in May 1920, John
Heartfield is very glad of it (Meta-Mech. Constr. after Prof. R. Hausmann)” (figure 4.8).
The subtitle, “7 Materialisationen,” is more honest in regards to process than the vague
designation of his other collections as “lithographs” because it indicates the collection’s
constructed nature; the images are collages materialized from diverse sources such as text
clipped from the newspaper, Grosz’s own drawings and watercolors, and photographs.
For the book, earlier collages were photographed and reproduced using the halftone
process (figure 4.9). Through this process, the work underwent a double de- and
rematerialization: diverse elements that had been assembled together into a pastiche for
the collage were then rephotographed to create the semblance of a seamless whole which
was again dispersed through its translation into the dots of the halftone (figures 4.10 and
4.11).
Masereel,Davringhausen, Dix, Max Ernst überdies die Tendenz war, auchpolitisch auf die Masse
einzuwirken, lag in dieser Möglichkeit doppelte Verlockung.” Westheim, “Der arrivierte Öldruck,” 176-77.
270
The “materializations” in Mit Pinsel and Schere were reproduced using the
autotype (halftone engraving) process, “whose dot-pattern structure,” Dückers argues,
“makes it impossible for anyone to consider the works as original graphic art.”
60
Dückers
does not include the prints in Mit Pinsel within the catalogue raisonné for this reason.
Such distinctions are rather problematic, however, as Dückers himself readily admits.
This is because Grosz employed the halftone process in his photolithographed collections
and portfolios whenever he reproduced watercolors, which required the tonal gradations
of the halftone. All the color reproductions after watercolors in Ecce homo, for instance,
were reproduced using an offset method that employed colored halftone screens. Nor
were these halftones of a particularly high quality; the screens were often mis-registered,
so that the image appeared slightly fuzzy at a distance (figure 4.12) and acquired
phantom-like ‘outlines’ when viewed up close (figures 4.13 and 4.14). But it is
nevertheless significant that Dückers mentions the “dot-pattern structure” specifically as
that which “makes it impossible for anyone to consider the works as original graphic art.”
That is, it is the obvious nature of these reproductions as halftones that makes it
impossible to incorporate them into Grosz’s already quite permissible catalogue raisonné.
As I have argued, the halftone embodied in a particularly apt way the anxieties of
the inflationary moment: it united both earlier, enduring questions about the multiple
nature of print media and the mass commodification of art as well as the unease
occasioned by the gross overproduction of money during the inflation. The dot matrix of
the halftone signaled in its very structure both the infinite and identical quality of the
60
Dückers, George Grosz: The Graphic Work, 257.
271
mass. But the single color halftone print was also a harbinger because it was, more than
the photograph, the embodiment of the future of Weimar print culture.
The halftone was the first photomechanical process that eliminated hand-
engraving for use in large-scale reproduction. What Benson calls the cheap and
“reasonably adequate” single-color halftone met the challenge for a mass-produced
ephemeral photograph that was lacking before the turn of the century. The process
translated the image into dots of varying size which read as tone when viewed from a
sufficient distance. This dot matrix was produced by placing one or more screens over a
source image—often a photograph, but prints and drawings were also used—and
rephotographing the image.
61
Henry Fox Talbot, inventor of one of the first
photographic processes known as the calotype, created a very early version of this
technique which described the screen as a “photographic veil” placed between the image
and the apparatus.
It was the halftone that permitted the mass-production of photographs in
illustrated magazines and newspapers. “Rapidly produced—often weekly—their editions
routinely went into the hundreds of thousands, and the industrialized world was quickly
61
Luis Nadeau describes the original halftone process in use from the 1880s until the 1950s as follows: “In
this process a screened negative, usually obtained from a photograph, was printed down upon a sheet of
copper coated with sensitized fish glue, the exposure being such that the fish glue underneath the clear
areas separating the dots was rendered completely insoluble, whereas that underneath the opaque dots was
unaffected. The unhardened fish glue was then washed away and the copper plates placed in an etching
bath which ate away the exposed surfaces. As a result, the final image on the copper consisted of raised
metal dots, and it is from the surface of these dots that an even layer of ink was transferred to the printing
paper in the printing press.” A later halftone process employed from around 1960 was a photolithographic
(planographic) process. Nadeau, Encyclopedia of Printing, Photographic, and Photomechanical
Processes, 122.
272
wrapped in cheap photographs printed as ink halftones.”
62
It was the “window of
efficiency” provided by the halftone that “gave rise to millions of photographs that could
be looked at, read about, and then casually discarded until the next set arrived at the
newsstand or in the mailbox.”
63
Because the dots of the halftone fall below the “threshold of normal vision,” Ivins
argued that, “At last men had discovered a way to make visual reports in printer’s ink
without syntax, and without the distorting analyses of form that syntax necessitated.” He
was not sparing in his praise for the innovation, noting that, “…it represents one of the
most amazing discoveries that man has ever made—a cheap and easy means of symbolic
communication without syntax.” Thus, for Ivins, the photographic halftone provided the
potentially limitless access to mass-produced pictures promised by the print from its
earliest days without the negative effects of an artist’s mediating hand.
Certainly, the halftone had disadvantages. It was temperamental; the letterpress
halftone only printed well on a smooth sheet, and the impression had to be inked just so
or it would print incorrectly, a not infrequent occurrence.
64
But the halftone suited the
immediate needs of mass production. The halftone print was a disposable medium that
complemented the ephemeral visual culture of the illustrated press. It produced images
that were good enough for an audience which could consume and then immediately
discard its products without compunction for the next day’s, the next week’s, offering.
62
Benson, The Printed Picture, 224.
63
Ibid.
64
Offset printing solved these problems to some extent, but it would be decades before the rubber “sheet”
was developed to transfer the image and perfect this technique.
273
Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin’s writing about the pervasiveness of
photographic images in such essays as the former’s “Photography” and the latter’s “The
Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” were often really
commenting on the omnipresence of the halftone. Kracauer, in particular, discussed the
halftone and the photograph almost interchangeably in “Photography,” in which he
narrated the experience of looking at a mass-media portrait photograph of a “film diva”
reproduced as a single-tone halftone on the cover of an illustrated magazine. Kracauer
does not reveal who she is; any individuality she might possess is twice subsumed, first
by the celebrity narrative into which she is slotted, and second by the halftone itself,
which literally dissolves the diva and all else into its tone-translating dots. Describing the
appearance of the reproduction, he stated: “If one were to look through a magnifying
glass, one could make out the grain, the millions of little dots that constitute the diva, the
waves, the hotel.”
65
Thus, the image is not composed of discrete elements—the woman,
the waves, the beach hotel—but of a field of tonal grain, the “millions of little dots.” For
Kracauer, the halftone imposes a sameness on everything it represents, eliminating
difference and distinction. This is the larger effect of mass culture; the “millions of little
dots” of the halftone image are a synecdoche of the “mass of images” that “assault” the
public
For Kracauer then, the halftone is an extreme version of the photograph, and as
such offers a more direct understanding of the photograph’s true social effects. The
65
Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, Thomas Y. Levin trans.,
(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1995), 47.
274
photograph presents the viewer with a “past” that is actually just a mass of details that no
longer have meaning. This, he says, is at odds with the way memory retains images in
the mind because memory prioritizes those things that have significance, “since what is
significant is not reducible to either merely spatial or merely temporal terms, memory
images are at odds with photographic representation.”
66
In contrast, the photographic
image provides overwhelming visual detail without any prioritization: “from the
perspective of memory, photography appears as a jumble that consists partly of
garbage.”
67
For Kracauer, photography and reproduction do not aid one in recalling the
past, they act as an ersatz memory, destroying the ability of the individual to make and
take meaning from his or her own image of the past.
This is even more true of the halftone reproduction of the photograph. While the
photo elevates all visual elements to the same level of importance, the halftone carries
this sameness over into the medium itself. The image is atomized into dots that eliminate
difference and distinction. The closer one comes to its surface, the more the world
dissolves. Miriam Hansen elaborates on this point in Kracauer’s essay: “The abstraction
of the image into minimal units—halftone dots, a precursor to pixels—defamiliarizes the
resemblance with a particular living being; it also deflates the authority of the indexical
bond…”
68
66
Ibid., 50.
67
Ibid., 51.
68
Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Kracauer’s Photography Essay—Dot Matrix, (An-)Archive—Film,” in Culture in
the Anteroom: The Legacies of Siegfried Kracauer, Gemünden, Gerd, and Johannes Von Moltke, eds. (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 95.
275
While the inflation had inspired artists to employ the metaphor of a flood of
biblical proportions to describe how one might ‘drown’ in a sea of printed paper,
Kracauer used a different disaster metaphor to describe the inundation of the halftone
photograph: a blizzard. He tells us that “The blizzard of photographs betrays a kind of
indifference toward what the things mean.”
69
A blizzard blankets and obscures, but the
blinding wall of tiny flakes is also an apt analogy for the mass of dots that compose the
halftone itself, dots which have the effect, even at a distance, of dulling the sharpness of
the photographed image. For Kracauer, the halftone is a synecdoche of the mass media
itself: the hundreds of thousands or millions of images appearing day after day, week
after week, piling up ceaselessly. As Kracauer notes, the mass production of
photographic images gives them a kind of double ephemerality. They are, in the form of
the halftone, completely disposable given the cheapness and haste of their manufacture.
And they are disposable in their content: “Once a photograph ages, the immediate
reference to the original is no longer possible.”
70
The halftone is also, perhaps, a sobering reminder of the recent past and the way
mass production itself could have an all too frightening effect on value. In this sense, the
dots of the halftone recall the obscene calculus of inflation: millions, billions and trillions
of abstract Marks almost matched by the actual number of notes created to confront these
nightmare numbers. For Kracauer, this value is not of a monetary sort. The
overproduction of photographs, Kracauer argues, erodes the viewer’s ability to determine
69
Kracauer, “Photography,” 58.
70
Ibid., 54.
276
significance, to make memories and to critically engage with the world. For Kracauer,
the millions of dots that make up the insipid halftone image are a synecdoche of the mass
of photographic images that appear daily through the illustrated press. Kracauer
describes their effects in violent terms, again invoking the catastrophic imagery that
seems to haunt such inundations in the popular imagination: “The assault of this mass of
images is so powerful that it threatens to destroy the potentially existing awareness of
crucial traits.”
71
The effects of photography on art are particularly acute. “Artworks,” Kracauer
tells us, “suffer this fate through their reproductions…rather than coming into view
through the reproductions, it tends to disappear in its multiplicity and to live on as art
photography.”
72
That is, through its reproduction, the work disappears; as in the halftone,
it is the confrontation with the mass that results in the dissolution and disappearance of
the original.
Many of Kracauer’s ideas in “Photography”—certainly those about the effect of
reproduction on art works—are echoed in Walter Benjamin’s later “Work of Art” essay.
But for Benjamin, the problems posed by reproduction have less to do with numbers and
more to do with distance. Reproduction, according to Benjamin, brings things closer:
“Every day the need to possess the object in close-up in the form of a picture, or rather a
copy, becomes imperative.”
73
Prior to the photographic reproduction—a reproduction
71
Ibid., 58.
72
Ibid.
73
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in The Work of Art
in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael William
277
that is more appropriately described as photomechanical than photographic—the work of
art had a quality Benjamin refers to as its aura, what he describes as “the unique
appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close it may be.”
74
As reproductions
bring works of art closer to the viewer—for instance, the oleograph Westheim described
above the cleaning girl’s bed—they also make those works more available: “Everyone
will have noticed how much easier it is to get hold of a painting, more particularly a
sculpture, and especially architecture, in a photograph than it is in reality,” he observes.
75
It is the fact of reproduction rather than just its over use that is most significant for
Benjamin: “…the impact of the photographic reproduction of artworks is much more
important to the function of art than the greater or lesser artistry of photography that
regards all experience as fair game for the camera.”
76
The reproduction offers access and
the perception of proximity and in the process destroys aura and results in a general
leveling, a “perception whose sense for the sameness of things has grown to the point
where even the singular, the unique is divested of its uniqueness—by means of its
reproduction.”
77
Thus, the effect of the reproduction on the “function of art” is for
Benjamin, as it is for Kracauer, to impose sameness, to remove significance and
singularity.
Still, the photographic reproduction would never inspire the same sense of threat
to the integrity of the original unless there were an implied horde of identical images
Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y Levin, trans. E. F. N Jephcott (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press
of Harvard University Press, 2008), 519.
74
Ibid.
75
Ibid., 523.
76
Ibid., 520.
77
Ibid.
278
behind it. But for Benjamin, the mass of reproductions alone is not the thing that
threatens the singular status of the art object. Reproductions devalue originals by
expanding the number of ‘great works’ available for reproduction: “…the understanding
of great works,” he reports, “was transformed at about the same time the techniques of
reproduction were being developed.”
78
As individuals were able to ‘own’ a work of art in
reproduction, not only did the number of images increase, what constituted the canon also
expanded to accommodate the demand for reproductions. In the process, the canon
became “a corpus so vast it can be assimilated only through miniaturization.”
79
This
revised body of great works, however, threatened the very basis of the canon itself. For
Benjamin, then, reproduction devalues the work of art by making it one among many
rather than something that stands at a distance, beyond our grasp.
The Marées Gesellschaft
Was it possible, then, to offer a ‘high-quality’ photomechanical reproduction that
respected, even increased, the status of the original art object? How might one balance
the demand for access with the imperatives of fine art? The Marées Gesellschaft, a
member-based association of collectors and art enthusiasts started by the publisher
Reinhard Piper and the art historian Julius Meier-Graefe, tried to thread this needle,
offering its members both original graphics and high-quality facsimile prints produced
with an unusual attention to the quality of their manufacture.
78
Ibid., 523.
79
Ibid.
279
As discussed in chapter two, Piper relished his role as a publisher cum cultural
promoter. He viewed it as the responsibility of progressive publishers to facilitate the
production of new and culturally important works, becoming, indirectly at least, a kind of
cultural co-producer. Piper defended the role of his facsimile prints by insisting that
dissemination and artistic value were not mutually exclusive concepts. For Piper, the
primary function of reproductions was to propagate works, thereby ensuring greater
access, and therefore, recognition, for their individual producers. But he also imagined
that by expanding access he was performing a cultural duty. As he stated in his
autobiography, Mein Leben als Verleger, “I have devoted a good part of my life’s work
to the reproduction of works of art, which means I have helped them achieve an increased
effect, and may I also say, I have also enriched the lives of many individuals through
art.”
80
Piper’s reproductions were, the publisher claimed, “so faithful, that they could
almost have been mistaken for the originals.”
81
As if to prove his point about “museum
quality,” a selection of his "Meister Facsimiles" were hung on the walls of the Staatliche
Graphische Sammlung in Munich in 1920 (figure 4.15). In reference to this exhibition,
Piper stated: "A selection was chosen from the more than six hundred portfolio prints [of
the Marées-Gesellschaft] and hung in temporary frames [Wechselrahmen] on the walls of
80
"Ich habe ein gut Teil meiner Lebensarbeit der Reproduktion von Kunstwerken gewidmet, das heißt, ich
habe ihnen dadurch zu erhöhter Wirkung verholfen, und so darf ich wohl auch sagen: Ich habe das Leben
vieler Menschen durch Kunst bereichert." Piper, Mein Leben als Verleger, 380.
81
“…so getreu, daßsie mit den Originalen fast verwechselt werden konnten.” He states this in reference to a
portfolio of facsimiles after drawings by Hans von Marées. Ibid., 256.
280
the bright exhibition rooms, awakening in the visitor the impression of an until-then
unknown museum.”
82
According to Piper, quality reproductions also insured art against disappearance
and decay. One of the Marées Gesellschaft’s facsimile portfolios even became a kind of
provisional original: Albrecht Dürer’s Die Landschaften der Tugend (Landscapes of
Virtue), which was included in a portfolio of facsimile drawings by the artist, gained what
Klaus Piper called a "special documentary importance" when the original in the Bremer
Kunsthalle disappeared during the Second World War. Emil Waldmann, the director of
the Kunsthalle, had previously declared Piper’s reproductions “congruent with the
originals.”
83
In the absence of original works—or in their lack of availability due to a
work’s singularity (the case with drawings and paintings), these objects were promoted
from reproductions to surrogates for the real thing.
It was the French, according to Meier-Graefe, who first recognized the benefits of
facsimile printing: “France alone…first began to realize, that a facsimile is more pleasant
to the eye than a mass print.”
84
The term facsimile then, had slightly more cultured
connotations, and was an attempt to differentiate the intermediate character of the ‘fine
82
“Eine Auswahl aus den mehr als sechshundert Blättern der Mappen, in Wechselrahmen an die Wände
lichter Sammlungsräume gehängt, erweckten im Besucher den Eindruck eines bis dahin unbekannten
Museums.” Ibid., 375. This exhibition was apparently more than an isolated event. Piper’s facsimiles were
displayed in Berlin and in other locations inside and outside of Germany: “Diese Wirkung wurde in
München in der Staatlichen Graphischen Sammlung und später in der Neuen Sammlung für angewandte
Kunst, in Berlin im Gebäude der Sezession und anderswo, auch im Ausland, wiederholt erprobt.” Ibid.
83
"…übereinstimmend mit den Originalen." Quoted in Klaus Piper, ed., 75 Jahre Piper: Bibliographie
und Verlagsgeschichte 1904-1979 (Mu#nchen; Zu#rich: Piper, 1979), 38.
84
“Selbst Frankreich, obwohl anerkennenswerter Weise uns der Chauvinismus nicht behelligt, beginnt erst
einzusehen, dass ein Faksimile dem Auge angenehmer ist als ein Massendruck.”
281
art’ reproduction from the mass print.
85
It is not clear whether the word, which was first
used in nineteenth-century France to describe anything “which aspired to reproduce
exactly a manuscript, drawing, or engraving,” did qualify photomechanical prints in
qualitative terms.
86
But Piper and Meier-Graefe’s adherence to it implied that the
facsimile was necessarily of higher quality than the mass print. Facsimiles were often
discussed as potential surrogates for the original while the mass print offered little more
than a rough approximation. This distinction was insisted upon by Piper and especially
Meier-Graefe, who was loathe to see any similarities between the project of the
Gesellschaft and the kitschy popularity of a product like Westheim’s oleograph.
The partners attempted to live up to their promises regarding the quality of their
facsimiles—which, they assured subscribers, would ensure their prints’ value—by single-
mindedly prioritizing the printing process. Piper relates how the two searched among the
established art printers in Berlin and Munich for the right press to put out the Gesellschaft
reproductions. In the end, they purchased their own collotype press [Lichtdruckerei] in
Berlin, which they named Ganymede after the mascot of the Gesellschaft.
87
This gave
85
Alexander Dückers, the editor of Grosz’s catalogue raisonne, also characterized Grosz’s graphic oeuvre
as facsimile prints, employing the term as a more equivocal and transitional title that downgraded Grosz’s
prints from ‘original’graphics without ceding the ground entirely.
86
Emmanuel Pernoud traces the first uses of the term “facsimile” in nineteenth-century France to describe
anything “which aspired to reproduce exactly a manuscript, drawing or engraving.” The neologism
“facsimile” (from the Latin meaning “make [it] similar”) was accepted by the Académie Française in 1835
to mean “copy, exact reproduction.” The word was used on albums to replace the term engraving, and, she
suggests, connotes a change in attitude: “reproductions were no longer designated by the craft that went
into them but by their ability to stand for something else, to simulate.” Emmanuel Pernoud,“The Art of
Facsimile: Alfred Jarry and Reproduction,” Word & Image 16, no. 4 (2000): 352.
87
Considered the first photolithographic process, the collotype (Lichtdruck in German) became very
popular for high quality reproductions, eventually displacing the Woodburytype. In his Encyclopedia of
Printing, Photographic, and Photomechanical Processes, Luis Nadeau vouched for its quality, stating:
“Although this is somewhat subjective, the writer believes that no other photomechanical process can
282
them more control over their finished facsimiles, but it was also necessitated by the fact
that the products of the established printers did not meet their exacting standards. Meier-
Graefe acknowledged, in rather pejorative terms, that,
Given today’s meat prices, joy in one’s handiwork alone attracts no
printers or retouchers [Retuscheur]…As soon as the possibility exists to
achieve the same income with less work, nine-tenths of the population
reaches for kitsch. One cannot create picture-postcards [Ansichts-
Postkarten] one day and then, with the same strength, make facsimiles the
next. It is only possible to create quality when the entire establishment has
no other commission.
88
In other words, it was vital for the press itself to keep its focus on producing prints of
only the highest quality—none of the picture postcards or other cheap kitsch that was so
readily turned out—if it was to offer a consistent quality product.
Piper’s faith in the printing press was more absolute than was Meier-Graefe’s.
Meier-Graefe himself believed in certain limitations, namely, that facsimile reproductions
should only be made on the same support as the original (that is, works on paper such as
drawings, prints, and watercolors were only suited to reproduction on paper). This
position led to a disagreement between the two men, and ultimately Piper started a
match a top quality collotype, and this includes Woodburytype and photogravure.” What set the collotype
apart, according to Nadeau, was that it remained the only process (with the limited exception of the
screenless lithograph and aquatint photogravure) that used a screenless matrix. Most photomechanical
processes—most notably the halftone—employed some sort of screen matrix to create tonal values in the
image. Further, “High quality monochrome collotypes are practically indistinguishable from original
photographs…The lack of a screen allows multiple impressions without the risk of moiré patterns.
Collotype printing requires high skill and the nature of the matrix (reticulated dichromated gelatin) makes it
good for only a limited number of impressions, e.g. 100 to 5000.” Nadeau, Encyclopedia of Printing,
Photographic, and Photomechanical Processes, 73-75.
88
“Die Freude am Handwerk lockt bei den heutigen Fleischpreisen keinen Retuscheur oder
Drucker…Sobald die Möglichkeit in der Nähe existiert, mit einer geringeren Arbeit dieselbe Einnahme zu
erzielen, greifen Neunzehntel der Leute nach dem kitsch. Mann kann nicht heute Ansichts-Postkarten,
morgen mit denselben Kräften Faksimiles herstellen. Nurwenn es in der ganzen Anstalt keinen anderen
Auftrag gibt, wird Qualität geschafft.” Julius Meier-Graefe, “Die Drucke der Marées-Gesellschaft,” Der
Querschnitt 1, no. 4/5 (September 1921): 114.
283
separate imprint, the Piper Drucke (Piper Prints), for the production of facsimiles after
paintings.
89
Piper stressed the importance of ensuring access to works of art, and to works
about art in his autobiography, and insisted that this was central to his work as a
publisher. He had the idea, for instance, of printing “cheap single volumes” on van Gogh
and Cézanne for those “university students and others who don’t have much money.”
90
Echoing Walter Benjamin’s observations about the way photomechanical reproductions
both bring the work of art closer and enlarge the canon—but nevertheless viewing that
outcome in unequivocally positive terms—Piper noted, “…the reproduction makes
artworks accessible. They are removed from their local constraints [Gebundenheit] and
isolation, one can even say: rescued…Now [previously inaccessible works of art] have
become the shared cultural property of all Europeans through the Piper Prints.”
91
The Piper Drucke appeared for the first time in November 1923, the high point (or
nadir, depending on one’s perspective) of hyperinflation. As if to confirm the worthwhile
nature of his project, Piper shares a story about visiting the famous writer Thomas Mann
with a selection of proofs from the Piper Drucke around that time in order to receive a
favorable “Urteil” from a “Prominente” that he could then use to advertise the
undertaking. While Mann was looking over the proofs, the author’s wife, Katia, entered
89
Piper reports that Meier-Graefe was eventually converted and participated in selecting works for the
Piper Drucke, however.
90
“…Akademieschüler und andere Leute, die nicht viel Geld hatten, billige Einzelbände über van Gogh und
Cézanne herauszubringen…” Piper, Mein Leben als Verleger, 257.
91
“…die Bildreproduktion, machte die Kunstwerke zugänglich. Sie wurden aus ihrer lokalen Gebundenheit
und ihrer Isoliertheit gelöst, ja man kann sagen: erlöst…Jetzt sind sie durch die Piper-Drucke europäischer
Allgemeinbesitz geworden.” Ibid., 380.
284
the room and fretted that the price of a Pfund (roughly a pound) of apples had reached
83000 Marks that morning. A few days later, Piper tells us, the writer sent the publisher
a note praising the prints and calling them “astounding technical achievements.” He
continued:
The prints become more than a reminder of the originals—they will offer
a remarkable [täuschenden] replacement for them. If one estimates the
enormous investments which are today necessary in order to produce
such things, it is astonishing the commercial daring which goes on
determinedly through the most despairing circumstances for enterprises
such as these. It manifests itself in a belief in German idealism, in a
German need for culture, which is truly comforting.
92
The contrast established here between the fleeting and unreliable value of paper money
versus the durable cultural value of Piper’s reproductions is hard to miss. Speculation, or
“commercial daring,” here is praised as a cultural pursuit, one that reminds Mann that
“German idealism” and the “German need for culture” is still present even in a period of
unprecedented economic and social turmoil.
Were the products of the Marées Gesellschaft and the Piper Drucke Westheim’s
answer to the oleograph, meeting the masses where they lived? Or were their facsimiles
yet another mass medium, a stream added to a flood, further devaluing the works of
Germany’s patrimony and European high culture through reproduction? Perhaps they
were something in between. Both Piper and Meier-Graefe sought to expand the canon
through the facsimile prints and publications of the Piper Drucke and the Marées
92
“Die Drucke werden mehr als eine Erinnerung an die Originale—sie werden einen täuschenden Ersatz
dafür bieten. Überschlagt man die gewaltigen Investierungen, die heute nötig sind, um solche Dinge
hervorzubringen, so nimmt der geschäftliche Wagemut einen wunder, der unbeirrt durch die
verzweifeltsten Umstände an Unternehmungen wie diese geht. Es bekundet sich darin ein Glaube an den
deutschen Idealismus, an ein deutsche Kulturbedürfnis, der wahrhaft tröstlich ist.” Piper, Mein Leben als
Verleger, 379.
285
Gesellschaft. The very origins of the Gesellschaft were, in fact, rooted in bringing the art
of an unfamiliar German artist, Hans von Marées, to light. And yet, the culture of
reproduction that Benjamin and Kracauer wrote about is certainly not the one embodied
by the facsimile print. The facsimile print, “pleasant to the eye” as Meier-Graefe noted,
was miles from the expediency of the single color halftone. The former pointed to a
recent past in which the spaces of the original and the reproduction were less
incompatible, more symbiotic than competitive.
93
The latter, however, was the future of
the popular printed image, one that would become ever more prevalent in the following
years, waxing as the popularity of the fine art print waned.
Conclusion
While the stabilized economy ultimately ushered in a new era often referred to as
the “golden Twenties” for its relative security in comparison with the tumult of the
previous decade, in the brief period of transition between inflation and stability, the print
boom subsided. Print production dropped off considerably as those artists who had
explored print as an alternative to painting returned to the canvas. And although
important print portfolios continued to be produced into 1924, dealers were unable to
move the backlog of graphic stock they had on hand from previous years. Otto Dix’s Der
Krieg, for instance, was released for the tenth anniversary of the start of the First World
War. Dix’s dealer Karl Nierendorf boasted, “Never has a bigger propaganda campaign
93
The symbiotic relationship between original and reproduction in nineteenth century France, for example,
is richly described by Stephen Bann in Parallel Lines.
286
been staged for a print series,”
94
yet he struggled to find buyers. He admitted to Dix that,
“As yet, only a single subscription has been placed, and many write to tell me that the
series is magnificent, but too expensive…Because 100 Marks is again a fortune, there is
no one who can spend 1000 Marks right now.”
95
Due to a general shortage of currency,
he concluded, “Money is still the rarest thing in the world and no one pays.”
96
The flow
of money, once a flood, had slowed to a trickle as money was again backed by stable
values—now land and industrial goods rather than gold. But Nierendorf’s difficulties
finding buyers may also have had something to do with the very publicity campaign he
waged in Dix’s name, a campaign that consisted primarily of a photomechancially
reproduced booklet edition of Krieg that contained reproductions of 26 images from the
original series of 50. Nierendorf sent these out to newspapers, critics, anti-war groups,
booksellers, and others—often free of charge—to drum up support for the series among
“Prominenten.” The dealer wrote to Dix that he had printed up more than 3000 of these
booklets, far exceeding Krieg’s edition of 70. But Nierendorf does not realize that this
blitz of printed publicity material, while increasing the notoriety of the series, might
ultimately decrease the immediate value of the series. Had Nierendorf cannibalized
potential customers by providing the photomechanical booklet to those individuals and
institutions who would have been most supportive of it in the first place? Or had the
market for such works already been so eroded by the overproduction of prints during the
94
“Eine grössere Propaganda ist für ein Mappenwerk noch nicht gemacht worden.” Karl Nierendorf to
Otto Dix, no date (1924), Dix Nachlass, I.C.524f, Germanisches Nationalmuseum (GNM).
95
“Bisher liegt eine einzige Subskription vor und man schreibt mir von vielen Seiten, dass die Mappe
grossartig, aber zu teuer sei…Aber da 100 M wieder ein Vermögen sind, gibt es keine Leute, die jetzt
1000.-M ausgeben können...” Ibid.
96
“Geld ist noch immer das rarste Ding in der Welt und niemand zahlt.” Ibid.
287
inflation that the very idea of a fine art luxury portfolio with popular potential was itself
an anachronism? Certainly, Krieg represents the last graphic work of such scale and
ambition in Dix’s own oeuvre. Dix, like many others, would refocus his creative
attention on painting in the years to come.
The Bauhaus’s Print Workshop also closed its doors when the school relocated to
Dessau in 1925. The portfolios in the Neue Europäische Graphik series had not only
failed to sell, they lost the school a significant amount of money at a time when it was
strained almost to the breaking point financially. As the Bauhaus sought commissions
from industry, it was difficult to justify fine art printmaking at an institution dedicated to
the latest trends in architecture and modern design. In Dessau, the Print Workshop was
replaced by a Printing and Advertising Workshop, and Herbert Bayer took over for
Lyonel Feininger as the Workshop’s Formmeister. The revamped Workshop focused on
recent trends in typography, graphic design, and modern advertising. The shift from
Feininger to Bayer can be viewed as indicative of a larger changing of the guard that
separates postwar from prewar aesthetic culture, and the fine art expressionist woodcuts
embodied by Feininger’s Cathedral, the visual emblem that graced the school’s Bauhaus
manifesto, from the mass-produced Neue Typographie design that characterized Bayer’s
tenure in Dessau. But that transformation was already underway; it was, after all,
Bayer’s commission to design Notgeld for the State of Thuringia that had represented the
school’s first contract for a mass-produced product.
In other words, the mass-produced
print, the product of inflation and of necessity as much as a progressive politics and
technology, was part of the school from the beginning. In this way, it is Bayer’s Notgeld
288
notes as much as Feininger’s Cathedral that embody the character of the postwar print
boom.
289
Illustrations
Figure 1.1: George Grosz, Seid fruchtbar und mehret Euch (Be Fruitful and
Multiply), 1922, reed pen and pen and ink, 64.8 x 52.1 cm, Private Collection.
290
Figure 1.2: Karl Arnold, Soll und Haben (Debit and Credit), cover of
Simplicissimus 28, no. 34, (November 19, 1923) (Munich: Albert Langen
Verlag).
291
Figure 1.3: Three Mark Notgeld voucher, stamp and handwriting on quartered
playing card, Estate of Lopischewo bei Ritschenwalde, 1914, Collection
Kurpfälzische Münzhandlung, Mannheim.
292
Figure 1.4: Olaf Gulbransson, Die Sintflut (The Deluge), in Simplicissimus 28, no. 20 (Aug.
13, 1923), 255.
293
Figure 1.5: Erich Schmidt, Gutenberg und die Milliardenpresse
Figure 1.5: Erich Schmidt, Gutenberg und die Milliardenpresse (Gutenberg and the Billion-
Mark Press), in Simplicissimus 27, no. 33 (Nov. 15, 1922), 469.
294
Figure 1.6: Gera Notgeld (Serienschein), 4 notes, 75, 50, and 25 Pfennige, issued May 1, 1921,
Collection of the author.
295
Figure 1.7: Pößnecker Ledergeld (Leather Note issued by the Town of
Pößneck), 5 Billion-Mark note, issued Aug.11, 1923, leather with gold leaf,
13.9 x 9 cm.
296
Figure 1.8: Pößnecker Ledergeld (Leather note issued by
the town of Pößneck), 1.50 Gold Mark Tauschwert-Schein,
issued Sept. 27, 1923 (contemporary impression, printed in
silver).
297
Figure 1.9: “Moderner Tauschhandel” (“Modern Barter”), published in Hans Ostwald,
Sittengeschichte der Inflation (Berlin: Neufeld & Henius, 1931), 114.
298
Figure 1.10: Eduard Thöny, “Das ausgehungerte Deutschland” (Famished Germany), in
Simplicissimus 24, no. 33 (Nov. 12, 1919), 456.
299
Figure 1.11: “Der verstümmelte Muse” (“The Mutilated Muse”) in Lustige
Blätter, no. 5 (1921), 7.
300
Figure 1.12: Advertisement promoting Bielefeld Notgeld, issued by the Stadt-Sparkasse Bielefeld, n.d.
301
Figure 1.13: Bielefeld “Stoffgeld,” Twenty-five Mark note, white silk note in red and purple with
“Jungbrunnen” motif, printed by city of Bielefeld, issued July 15, 1921, 11.4 x 8.5 cm.
Figure 1.14: Bielefeld “Stoffgeld,” Twenty-five Mark note, white silk note in green, orange, and purple
with “Jungbrunnen” motif, printed by city of Bielefeld, issued April 2, 1922, 18.1 x 13.1 cm.
302
Figure 1.15: Bielefeld “Stoffgeld,” 100 Mark Note, pink Seidenschein (silk note) issued
by the city of Bielefeld with decorative braided border, issued July 15, 1921
303
Figure 1.16: Olaf Gulbransson, “Sylvesterserie,” Notgeld for city of Kahla,
Figure 1.16: Olaf Gulbransson, “Sylvesterserie,” Notgeld for city of Kahla,
recto, issued Dec. 1, 1921, 12.8 x 8.6 cm, Collection of the author.
Figure 1.17: Olaf Gulbransson, “Der deutsche Merkur” from the
“Sylvesterserie,” Notgeld for city of Kahla, verso, issued Dec. 1, 1921, 12.8
x 8.6 cm, Collection of the author.
304
Figures 1.18a and 1.18b: Olaf Gulbransson, “Starkbier macht Einigkeit” and
“Einigkeit macht stark” from the “Sylvesterserie” Notgeld for city of Kahla,
verso, issued Dec. 1, 1921, 12.8 x 8.6 cm, Collection of the author.
305
Figure 1.19: Karl Arnold, “Wie Steht der Dollar?” (“Where Does the
Dollar Stand?”) in Simplicissimus 28, no. 20 (13 August 1923), 247.
306
Figure 1.20: George Grosz, “Von Geldsacks Gnaden” (“By the Grace
of Moneybags”), cover of Die Pleite, no. 1 (1919) (Berlin: Malik
Verlag).
307
Figure 1.21: George Grosz, “Aus dem Leben eines Sozialisten” (From the
Life of a Socialist), photolithograph, Das Gesicht der herrschenden
Klasse, (Berlin: Malik Verlag, 1921), 4.
308
Figure 1.22: Herbert Bayer, One Million Mark Notgeld notes in
red and yellow, issued by the State of Thuringia in August,
1923, 13.8 x 7 cm
309
Figure 2.1: Max Liebermann, “Ich kenne keine Parteien mehr...”
cover of Kriegszeit: Künstlerflugblätter, no. 1 (August 31, 1914)
(Berlin: Cassirer Verlag).
310
Figure 2.2: Max Beckmann Andenken an einen gefallenen Freund
(Portrait of the artist’s brother-in-law, Martin Tube), lithograph,
published in Kriegszeit, no. 11, (November 4, 1914).
Figure 2.3: Max Slevogt, Masthead for Der Bildermann, no. 1, (April 5,
1916) (Berlin: Paul Cassirer Verlag).
311
Figure 2.4: Max Beckmann, The Disillusioned II (Die Enttäuschten
II), from the portfolio, Berliner Reise (Berlin Journey), lithograph,
1922, composition (irreg.): 47.6 x 38.6 cm; sheet (irreg.): 68.4 x
53.7 cm, published by J.B. Neumann, Berlin.
312
Figure 2.5: Photograph of the German heavyweight champion Hans Breitensträter (right); and the artist
Renoir in his studio (facing page). Published in Der Querschnitt, no 2/3 (1921), 138-39.
313
Figure 2.6: George Grosz, Cover of pamphlet
Schutzhaft (Protective Custody), March 1919
(Berlin: Malik Verlag).
Figure 2.7: George Grosz and Helmut
Herzfeld, Cover of Jedermann sein eigner
Fußball (Everyone His Own Soccer Ball),
no. 1 (February 1919) (Berlin: Malik
Verlag).
314
Figure 2.8: Caricature of Munich publishers, including Reinhard Piper
(second from right), Georg Müller (first from left) and Rudolf Oldenbourg
(fourth from left). Originally published in Zeit im Bild, vol. 11, 1913;
republished in Edda Ziegler, 100 Jahre Piper: Die Geschichte eines
Verlags (Munich: Piper Verlag, 2004), 21.
Figure 2.9: Portrait of Reinhard Piper with his dog, Treff, undated.
Published in Reinhard Piper, Mein Leben als Verleger: Vormittag,
Nachmittag. (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1964).
315
Figure 2.10: Max Beckmann, Im Hotel (Der Dollar) (At the
Hotel [The Dollar]), 1923, drypoint, plate: 29.7 x 19.8 cm;
sheet: 37.5 x 27.1 cm, published by J.B. Neumann, Berlin.
316
Figure 2.11: Max Beckmann, Double-Portrait of J.B. Neumann and Martha Stern, 1922,
lithograph, composition (irreg.): 43.2 x 48.9 cm; sheet: 49.4 x 61.1 cm, published by J.B.
Neumann, Berlin.
317
Figure 2.12: Otto Dix, Portrait of the Art
Dealer Alfred Flechtheim, 1926, mixed
media on wood, Staatliche Museen zu
Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Neue
Nationalgalerie, Berlin.
Figure 2.13: Otto Dix, Portrait of Karl
Nierendorf (also titled The Collector), 1923,
oil on canvas, location unknown.
318
Figure 2.14: Otto Dix, Portrait of J.B.
Neumann, 1922, drypoint and etching, plate:
29.5 x 24.2 cm; sheet: 45.1 x 37.8 cm,
published by Karl Nierendorf, Berlin.
Figure 2.15: Max Beckmann, Portrait of Reinhard
Piper, 1920, drypoint, published by Piper Verlag,
1920, published c. 1921., plate: 30 x 14.8 cm; sheet
46.3 x 29 cm, published by R. Piper & Co., Munich.
319
Figure 2.16: Max Beckmann, Portrait of
Reinhard Piper, 1921, lithograph,
composition (irreg.): 59.1 x 41 cm; sheet:
65 x 47.4 cm, published by R. Piper & Co.,
Munich.
, 88.
Figure 2.17: Undated photograph of
Reinhard Piper standing next to the 1921
lithographic portrait by Beckmann.
Published in Ziegler, 100 Jahre Piper, 88.
320
R
Figure 3.1: A Siege Attack, photograph with labels of the a) Russian trench, b) the German siege
trench, c) the German trench, and d) a dead Russian, from Die große Zeit: illustrierte
Kriegsgeschichte, no. 24 (1915) (Berlin: Ullstein & Co.), 25.
321
Figure 3.2: Cover of Die große Zeit: illustrierte Kriegsgeschichte, no. 23
(1915) (Berlin: Ullstein & Co.).
322
Figure 3.3: Max Liebermann, “Ich kenne keine Parteien mehr...”
cover of Kriegszeit: Künstlerflugblätter, no. 1 (August 31, 1914)
(Berlin: Cassirer Verlag).
323
Figure 3.4: Julius Wolfgang Schülein, Die Mutter der Helden (The Mothers of Heroes),
1914, lithograph, in Kriegsbilderbogen Münchner Künstler, first portfolio, published by
Goltz Verlag, Munich.
324
Figure 3.5: Otto Theodor Wolfgang Stein, Lüttich (Liège), 1914, lithograph,
in Kriegsbilderbogen Münchner Künstler, first portfolio, published by Goltz
Verlag, Munich.
325
Figure 3.6: Max Beckmann, Théâtre du Monde - Grand
Spectacle de la Vie, also titled Mann mit Krücke im Rollstuhl
(Man with Crutch in Wheelchair) 1914, pen and ink drawing,
15.7 x 12.8 cm, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Graphisches Kabinett.
326
Figure 3.7: Max Beckmann, Untitled, drawing for “Die erste Kriegswoche in
Berlin,” in Kunst und Künstler, XIII, 1914/15 (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer Verlag),
55.
327
Figure 3.8: Max Beckmann, Scene from the Destruction of Messina, 1909, oil on canvas,
100 1/4 x 105 3/8 in. (254.6 x 267.7 cm), St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, Bequest of
Morton D. May
328
Figure 3.9: Max Beckmann, Die Granate
(Grenade) state III, 1915, published 1918,
drypoint, plate: 38.9 x 28.9 cm; sheet (irreg.):
54 x 45 cm, published by Paul Cassirer, Berlin.
Figure 3.10: Die Granate (Grenade),
state II.
329
Figure 3.11: Otto Dix, Field of Craters near Dontrien Lit by Rocket Flares (Trichterfeld
bei Dontrien von Leuchtkugeln erhellt), First Portfolio, No. 4, from Der Krieg, 1924,
etching and aquatint on cream wove paper, plate: 25.1 x 19.3 cm; sheet: 34.9 x 47.3 cm,
published by Karl Nierendorf, Berlin
330
Figure 3.12: Otto Dix, Wounded Soldier (Autumn 1916, Baupaume) (Verwundeter
[Herbst 1916, Baupaume]), First Portfolio, No. 6, from Der Krieg (War), 1924, etching,
aquatint and drypoint on cream wove paper, plate: 29 x 19.7 cm; sheet: 35 x 47.4 cm,
published by Karl Nierendorf, Berlin
331
Figure 3.13: Otto Dix, Dying Soldier (Sterbender Soldat), Third
Portfolio, No. 6, from Der Krieg (War), 1924, etching, aquatint
and drypoint on cream wove paper, plate: 14.3 x 19.3 cm; sheet:
47.2 x 34.5 cm, published by Karl Nierendorf, Berlin
332
Figure 3.14: Max Beckmann, Self-Portrait in Hotel (Selbst im
Hotel), sheet 1 from Berlin Journey (Berliner Reise), 1922,
lithograph on cream wove paper, composition (irreg.): 45.4 x 32.6
cm; sheet: 68.2 x 53.7 cm, published by J.B. Neumann, Berlin
333
Figure 3.15: Max Beckmann, The Chimney-Sweep (Der
Schornsteinfeger), sheet 10 of portfolio Trip to Berlin (Berliner
Reise), 1922, lithograph on cream wove paper, composition (irreg.):
45.1 x 33.4 cm; sheet (irreg.): 68.2 x 54 cm, published by J.B.
Neumann, Berlin
334
Figure 3.16: Max Beckmann, Untitled, drawing for “Die erste
Kriegswoche in Berlin,” in Kunst und Künstler, vol. XIII,
1914/15 (Bruno Cassirer Verlag, Berlin) 53.
335
Figure 3.17: Max Beckmann, Die Kriegserklärung (Declaration of War), 1914,
drypoint, state II, plate: 20 x 24.7 cm; sheet: 32.7 x 46.8 cm, published 1918 by J.B.
Neumann, Berlin.
336
Figure 3.18: “The Battle in the Newspaper Quarter,” (Kampf im
Zeitungsviertel) Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung: Berliner Sturmtage,
Sonder-Nummer (1919) (Berlin: Ullstein Verlag), 8.
337
Figure 3.19: (top) Fritz Koch-Gotha, “Streetscenes near the Ullstein
House during the fighting. Shots from out of the dark”; (bottom)
Edmund Fürst, “A dangerous corner.” Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung:
Berliner Sturmtage, Sonder-Nummer (1919) (Berlin: Ullstein Verlag),
7.
338
Figure 3.20: Max Beckmann, The Last Ones
(Die Letzten), sheet 10 from Berlin Journey
(Berliner Reise), 1919, lithograph on cream
wove “japan” paper, composition (irreg.): 67 x
47.6 cm; sheet: 86.8 x 61.2 cm, published by
J.B. Neumann, Berlin
Figure 3.21: “The devastation of a private
apartment in the Vorwärts house caused by
the bombardment.” Berliner Illustrirte
Zeitung: Berliner Sturmtage, Sonder-Nummer
(1919) (Berlin: Ullstein Verlag), 10.
339
Figure 3.22: Max Beckmann, Self-Portrait (front
cover) (Selbstbildnis [Umschlag]) of Hell (Die Hölle),
1919, lithograph on cream wove paper mounted on
cardboard, composition: 41.7 x 63.4 cm, published by
J.B. Neumann, Berlin
340
Figure 3.23: Max Beckmann, Martyrdom, (Das Martyrium) and detail, plate 3 from
Hell (Die Hölle), 1919, lithograph on cream wove “japan” paper, composition
(irreg.): 54.7 x 75.2 cm; sheet: 61.7 x 87.2 cm, published by J.B. Neumann, Berlin
341
Figure 3.24: Käthe Kollwitz, Memorial for Karl Liebknecht (Gedenkblatt für Karl Liebknecht),
1920, woodcut (photomechanical edition, state VI), 53.66 x 40.32 cm, published by Emil
Richter, Dresden.
342
Figure 4.1 (left): Cover of William M. Ivins, Prints and Visual Communication
(New York: Da Capo Press, 1969); Figure 4.2 (top right): The head of Laocoön, as
it appeared in Sandrart’s Sculpturae veteris admiranda, sive delineatio vera,
Nuremberg, 1960 (fig. 74B); Figure 4.3 (bottom right): The head of Laocoön, as it
appeared in Murray’s History of Greek Sculpture, London, 1890 (fig. 77B)
343
Figure 4.4: George Grosz, “Die Religion muß dem Volke erhalten
bleiben!”(Religion must be preserved from the people!) from
Abrechnung folgt!, 1923, offset photolithograph, Collection of the
Getty Research Institute.
344
Figure 4.5: George Grosz, “Völker Europas, wahrt eure heiligsten Güter,”
(Peoples of Europe, Protect Your Most Precious Possessions!) from
Abrechnung folgt!, 1923, offset photolithograph, Collection of the Getty
Research Institute.
345
Figure 4.6: Edition page from Ecce homo, offset photolithograph, Edition “C”,
1921, Collection of the Getty Research Institute.
346
Figure 4.7: George Grosz and John
Heartfield, Neujahrsgrüss (New
Year’s Greeting) (detail), 1920-21,
Zeitungdruck, 18.5 x 7 cm,
Berlinische Galerie, Berlin.
Figure 4.8: George Grosz, Daum Marries Her
Pedantic Automaton “George” in May 1920.
John Heartfield is Very Glad of It (Meta-Mech.
Constr. After Prof. R. Hausmann), 1920,
watercolor, pen, and collage on card stock,
Berlinische Galerie, Berlin
347
Figures 4.9 – 4.11: George Grosz, full page and details, Mit Pinsel und Schere,
7 Materialisationen, 1922, offset photolithographs, Collection of the Getty
Research Institute.
348
Figure 4.12: George Grosz, Whisky, plate II from Ecce homo, 1923, color
offset print, 15.7 x 27.7 cm, Collection of the Getty Research Institute.
349
Figures 4.13-4.14: Details from Whisky, plate II
from Ecce homo, 1923, color offset print,
Collection of the Getty Research Institute.
350
Figure 4.15: Installation view of “Meister-Facsimiles” exhibition from the Drucken der
Marées-Gesellschaft in the Staatlichen Graphsichen Sammlung, Munich, 1920. Published
in 75 Jahre Piper (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1979).
351
Bibliography
Archives
Akademie der Künste, George Grosz Nachlass and Wieland Herzfelde Nachlass
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, J.B. Neumann Papers and Lily
Harmon Papers
Museum of Modern Art, New York, J.B. Neumann Papers and Alfred H. Barr Jr. Papers
Berlinische Galerie
Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Otto Dix Nachlass
Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles
Max Beckmann Archiv, Munich
Nierendorf Galerie, Berlin
Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies, LACMA
Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich
Primary Journals and Newspapers
Der Ararat
Der Anbruch
Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung
Der Bildermann
Der blutige Ernst
Die große Zeit
Das Kunstblatt
J.B. Neumann’s Bilderhefte
Jedermann sein eigener Fußball
Kriegszeit Künstlerflugblätter
Kunst und Künstler
Kunstchronik und Kunstmarkt
Neue Jugend
Pan
Die Pleite
Der Querschnitt
Simplicissimus
Der Strom
Primary Sources
Beckmann, Max. Briefe im Kriege. Collected by Minna Tube. München: Piper Verlag,
1984.
———. Max Beckmann, Briefe: 1899 - 1925, vol. 1. Edited by Uwe M. Schneede.
352
Munich: Piper Verlag, 1993.
———. “Max Beckmann: Briefe an I.B. Neumann. Einschliesslich 38 bisher
unveröffentlichter Briefe und 3 Briefen von I.B. Neumann.” Unpublished
manuscript, Berlin, 1997.
———. Self-Portrait in Words: Collected Writings and Statements, 1903-1950. Edited
by Barbara Copeland Buenger. Translated by Barbara Copeland Buenger,
Reinhold Heller, and David Britt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Benjamin, Walter. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. 4 vols. Edited by Michael W.
Jennings, Gary Smith, and Howard Eiland. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2005.
———. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other
Writings on Media, edited by Michael William Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and
Thomas Y Levin, translated by E. F. N Jephcott. Cambridge: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2008.
Bierbaum, Otto. “Moderne Holzschnitte.” Ver Sacrum 1, no. 10 (October 1898): 5–11.
Cassirer, Paul. “Kunst und Kunsthandel: Teil I.” Pan 1, no. 14 (May 16, 1911): 457–69.
———. “Kunst und Kunsthandel: Teil II.” Pan 1, no. 17 (July 1, 1911): 558–73.
Coellen, Ludwig. “Die erste George Grosz-Mappe.” Das Kunstblatt 1, no. 11 (November
1917): 348–49.
Donath, Adolf. “Der Berliner Kaufmann als Kunstfreund.” In Berlins Aufstieg zur
Weltstadt, edited by Max Osborn. Berlin: Hobbing, 1929.
Flechtheim, Alfred. Ostern 1919: Herausgegeben anlässlich der Wiederöffnung der
Galerie Alfred Flechtheim in Düsseldorf. Potsdam: G. Kiepenheuer, 1919.
Fraenger, William. “Max Beckmann, ‘Der Traum’: ein Beitrag zur Physiognomik des
Grotesken.” In Blick auf Beckmann: Dokumente und Vorträge, 36–49. Schriften
der Max Beckmann Gesellschaft 2. Munich: Piper Verlag, [1924] (1962).
Friedländer, Max J. “Ueber das Kunstsammeln.” Der Querschnitt, May 1921.
Galerie Neue Kunst. Die zweite Ausstellung der Redaktion der Blaue Reiter, Schwarz-
Weiss. Munich: F. Bruckmann A.G., 1912.
Galerie Nierendorf. 1920-1970, fünfzig Jahre Galerie Nierendorf. Rückblick,
353
Dokumentation, Jubiläumsausstellung. Berlin: Galerie Nierendorf, 1970.
———. Jubiläum, Rückblick, Dokumentation: 1920-1980, sechzig Jahre Galerie
Nierendorf; 1955-1980, fünfundzwanzig Jahre seit dem Neubeginn. Berlin:
Galerie Nierendorf, 1980.
Glaser, Curt. Die Graphik der Neuzeit: vom Anfang des XIX. Jahrhunderts bis zur
Gegenwart. Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1922.
———. “Vom Graphik-Sammeln.” In Deutsche Graphik des Westens, edited by Hans
von Wedderkop, 13–19. Weimar: Feuerverlag, 1922.
———. “Vom Graphiksammeln, Künstler-Signatur, und Verlags-Nummer.”
Kunstchronik und Kunstmarkt: Wochenschrift für Kenner und Sammler 58, no. 17
(January 26, 1923): 332–34.
———. , et al. Max Beckmann. Munich: Piper Verlag, 1924.
Goltz, Hans. “Die Abwürgung der jungen Kunst in Deutschland.” Der Ararat 1, no. 9/10
(October 1920): 123–27.
Grosz, George. “Zu meinen neuen Bildern.” Das Kunstblatt 5 (January 1921): 11–14.
———. Der Spiesser-Spiegel: Image of the German Babbit. Arno Press, [1925] 1968.
———. A Little Yes and a Big No: the Autobiography of George Grosz.
Translated by Lola Sachs Dorin. New York: The Dial Press, 1946.
———. Briefe 1913-1959. Edited by Herbert Knust. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt,
1979.
Harter, Ursula and Stephan von Wiese, eds. Max Beckmann und J.B. Neumann. Der
Künstler und sein Händler in Briefen und Dokumenten 1917-1950. Cologne:
König, Walther, 2011.
Hartlaub, Gustav. Die neue deutsche Graphik. Berlin: E. Reiss, 1920.
———. Ausstellung “Neue Sachlichkeit”: deutsche Malerei seit dem Expressionismus.
Mannheim: das Kunsthalle, 1925.
Herzfelde, Wieland. “Schutzhaft. Erlebnisse vom 7. bis 20. März 1919 bei den Berliner
Ordnungstruppen.” Malik-Verlag, March 1919.
———. “Introduction to the First International Dada Fair.” Translated by Brigid
354
Doherty. October 105 (Summer 2003 [1919]): 93–104.
———. “The Curious Merchant from Holland.” Harper’s Weekly 187, no. 1122
(November 1943): 569–76.
———. “John Heartfield und George Grosz: zum 75. Geburtstag meines Bruders.”
Mitteilungen der deutschen Akademie der Künste zu Berlin 4, no. 4 (1966): 2–4.
———, ed. Der Malik-Verlag: 1916 - 1947. Berlin, Ost: Deutsche Akademie der Künste,
1966.
———. “George Grosz, John Heartfield, Erwin Piscator, Dada und die Folgen - oder
die Macht der Freundschaft.” Sinn und Form 23, no. 6 (November 1971): 1224–
51.
———. “Kürzlich vor 60 Jahren.” Sinn und Form 27, no. 2 (March 1975): 371–84.
———. Pass Auf!Hier kommt Grosz: Bilder, Rhythmen u. Gesänge, 1915-1918.
Leipzig:
Reclam, 1981.
———. Immergrün: Merkwürdige Erlebnisse und Erfahrungen eines fröhlichen
Waisenknaben. Berlin: Aufbau Taschenbuch Verlag, 1996.
Kaes, Anton, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, eds. The Weimar Republic
Sourcebook. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Kaiser, Hans. Max Beckmann. Künstler unserer Zeit 1. Berlin: Cassirer, 1913.
Kandinsky, Wassily, Franz Marc, and Klaus Lankheit, eds. The Blaue Reiter Almanac.
New York: Viking Press, 1974.
Kinkel, Hans. 14 Berichte. Begegnungen mit Malern und Bildhauern. Stuttgart: Goverts,
1967.
Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig. Der gesamte Briefwechsel. Edited by Hans Delfs. Zürich:
Scheidegger und Spiess, 2010.
Klipstein & Kornfeld. Archiv und Teile der Sammlung J. B. Neumann. Bern: Klipstein &
Kornfeld, 1962.
Kracauer, Siegfried. The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Translated by Thomas Y.
Levin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.
355
Kuhn, Alfred. “Über das Sammeln von Graphik. Überlegungen anläßlich der Auktion bei
Graupe.” Kunstchronik und Kunstmarkt: Wochenschrift für Kenner und Sammler
58, no. 30 (April 27, 1923): 594–97.
———. “Versteigerungs-Ergebnisse: Graphikauktion bei M. Perl, Berlin.” Kunstchronik
und Kunstmarkt: Wochenschrift für Kenner und Sammler 58, no. 23 (March 9,
1923): 461–62.
“Kunststeuern.” Kunstchronik und Kunstmarkt: Wochenschrift für Kenner und Sammler,
no. 17 (January 20, 1922): 277–79.
Kurtz, Freidrich. “Aus Sammlerkreisen: Künstlersignaturen und Verlagsnummer.”
Kunstchronik und Kunstmarkt: Wochenschrift für Kenner und Sammler 58, no. 29
(April 20, 1923): 571–73.
Long, Rose-Carol Washton, ed. German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the
Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism. New York: G.K. Hall,
1993.
Meier-Graefe, Julius. “Handel und Händler.” Kunst und Künstler 11, no. 1 (1912): 27 –
34.
———. “Gesichter: Vorrede zu einer Mappe mit 19 Radierungen von Max Beckmann.”
In Blick auf Beckmann: Dokumente und Vorträge: 50–56. Schriften der Max
Beckmann Gesellschaft 2. Munich: Piper Verlag, [1919] 1962.
———. “Die Drucke der Marées-Gesellschaft.” Der Querschnitt 1, no. 4/5 (September
1921): 114–16.
Neugass, Fritz. “J. B. Neumann - 50 Jahre im Kunsthandel.” Weltkunst, June 15, 1960.
Neumann, J.B (Jsrael Ber). Moderne Graphik. Berlin: Graphisches Kabinett J.B.
Neumann, 1912.
———. “Im neuen Bunde.” Berlin, March 6, 1919.
———. “Das graphische Kabinett, 1910-1917, eine Werbeschrift.” Berlin: Graphisches
Kabinett J.B. Neumann, 1917.
———. “Confessions of an Art Dealer,” 1956.
———. “Wer hat Das Kunstblatt wirklich gegründet - Paul Westheim oder J. B.
Neumann?” Weltkunst, September 15, 1960.
356
———. Max Beckmann. The Art Lover Library, 5. New York: J.B. Neumann, 1931.
Ostwald, Hans. Sittengeschichte der Inflation, ein Kulturdokument aus den Jahren des
Marktsturzes. Berlin: Neufeld & Henius, 1931.
Piper, Klaus, ed. 75 Jahre Piper: Bibliographie und Verlagsgeschichte 1904-1979.
Munich: Piper Verlag, 1979.
Piper, Reinhard. Mein Leben als Verleger: Vormittag, Nachmittag. Munich: Piper Verlag,
1964.
———. Briefwechsel mit Autoren und Künstlern: 1903-1953. Edited by Ulrike Buergel-
Goodwin. Munich: Piper Verlag, 1979.
Redslob, Edwin. “Der Weg zur Graphik.” In Das graphische Jahr, 1: 9–20. Berlin: Fritz
Gurlitt Verlag, 1921.
Reifenberg, Benno. “Max Beckmann.” Blick auf Beckmann: Dokumente und Vorträge.
Schriften der Max Beckmann Gesellschaft 2. Munich: Piper Verlag, [1921] 1962.
Roh, Franz. “Magical Realism: Post-Expressionism.” In Magical Realism: Theory,
History, Community, 15–32. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.
Scheffler, Karl. Die fetten und die mageren Jahre: ein Arbeits- und Lebensbericht.
Munich: P. List, 1946.
Schultze-Naumberg, Paul. “Die Bedeutung der illustrierten Zeitschrift für die Kunst.”
Kunst für alle, 8, no. 3 (1893): 97 – 101.
Shapire, Rosa. “Kreis graphischer Künstler und Sammler. Zweite Mappe. 1921.”
Kunstchronik und Kunstmarkt: Wochenschrift für Kenner und Sammler, no. 46
(August 18, 1922): 762.
Städtische Kunsthalle, Mannheim. Max Beckmann, das gesammelte Werk: Gemälde,
Graphik, Handzeichnungen aus den Jahren 1905 bis 1927. Mannheim: Städtische
Kunsthalle, 1928.
Struck, Hermann. Die Kunst des Radierens. Ein Handbuch von Hermann Struck. 5th ed.
Berlin: Verlag Paul Cassirer, 1923.
Szkolny, Felix. “Die Luxussteuer auf Kunstwerke.” Kunstchronik und Kunstmarkt:
Wochenschrift für Kenner und Sammler 58, no. 21 (February 23, 1923): 397–404.
Valentiner, Wilhelm. “Max Beckmann.” In Blick auf Beckmann: Dokumente und
357
Vorträge. Schriften Der Max Beckmann Gesellschaft 2. Munich: Piper Verlag,
1962.
“Versteigerung moderner und alter Graphik.” Kunstchronik und Kunstmarkt:
Wochenschrift für Kenner und Sammler 58, no. 8 (November 24, 1922): 156–60.
Westheim, Paul. Das Holzschnittbuch. Potsdam: G. Kiepenheuer 1921.
———, ed. “Ein neuer Naturalismus?? Eine Rundfrage des Kunstblatts.” Das
Kunstblatt, no. 6 (October 1922): 369.
———. “Rundfrage an einige führende Kunsthandlungen Deutschlands zur
Wirtschaftslage und den Aussicht auf dem Kunstmarkt.” Das Kunstblatt 7, no. 10
(1923): 294–301.
———. “Der arrivierte Öldruck.” In Für und Wider: kritische Anmerkungen zur Kunst
der Gegenwart, 173–78. Potsdam: G. Kiepenheuer, 1923
———. Für und Wider: kritische Anmerkungen zur Kunst der Gegenwart. Potsdam: G.
Kiepenheuer, 1923.
———. “Paul Westheim - Der Begründer des Kunstblatts.” Weltkunst, August 1, 1960.
———. “Paul Westheim - How Das Kunstblatt Was Born.” In The Era of German
Expressionism, edited by Paul Raabe, translated by J.M. Ritchie, 201–5.
Woodstock: Overlook Press, 1974.
“Wie hat sich der Geschmack der Bucherkäufer seit dem Krieg verändert?” Börsenblatt
für den deustchen Buchhandel 30 (1925): 264.
Secondary Sources
Ackermann, Marion, ed. Getroffen: Otto Dix und die Kunst des Porträts / Match: Otto
Dix and The Art of Portraiture. Cologne: DuMont in association with
Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, 2007.
Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Greta Adorno and Rolf Tiedeman.
Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2006.
Agalidi, Sanda. “The Mannheim Exhibition of 1925 and the Idea of the New
Objectivity.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1995.
Armstrong, Carol M. Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843-
358
1875. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998.
Assouline, Pierre. An Artful Life: A Biography of D.H. Kahnweiler, 1884-1979.
Translated by Charles Ruas. New York: G. Weidenfeld, 1990.
Bann, Stephen. Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters and Photographers in Nineteenth-
Century France. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.
———. Distinguished Images: Prints in the Visual Economy of 19th Century France.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.
Barnouw, Dagmar. Weimar Intellectuals and the Threat of Modernity. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1988.
Barron, Stephanie and Peter W Guenther, eds. Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-
Garde in Nazi Germany. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art in
association with H.N. Abrams, 1991.
———. , ed. German Expressionism 1915-1925: The Second Generation. Los Angeles:
Los Angeles County Museum of Art in association with Prestel, 1988.
Barth, Peter. “Wegbereiter Der Neuen Kunst: Kunsthändler im Rheinland; Alfred
Flechtheim, Hans Koch, Johanna Ey, Karl Nierendorf.” In Krieg und Utopie:
Kunst, Literatur und Politik im Rheinland nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg, edited by
Gertrude Cepl-Kaufmann and Gerd Krumeich, 373–83. Essen: Klartext-Verlag,
2006.
Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Translated by
Jonathan Mayne. 2nd ed. London: Phaidon Press, 1995.
Bauhaus-Archiv. Punkt, Linie, Fläche: Druckgraphik am Bauhaus. Berlin: G H Verlag,
1999.
Bealle, Penny. “J.B.Neumann and the Introduction of Modern German Art to New York,
1923 - 1933.” Archives of American Art Journal 29, no. 1/2 (1989): 2–15.
———. “Obstacles and Advocates: Factors Influencing the Introduction of Modern Art
from Germany to New York City, 1912-1933: Major Promoters and Exhibitions.”
PhD diss., Cornell University, 1990.
Becker, Howard. Art Worlds. 25th anniversary ed. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2008.
Behr, Shulamith. Conrad Felixmüller, 1897-1977: Works on Paper. London: Courtauld
359
Institute Galleries, 1994.
Belting, Hans. Max Beckmann: Tradition as a Problem in Modern Art. Translated by
Peter Wortsman. New York: Timken Publishers, 1989.
Benson, Richard. The Printed Picture. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2008.
Benson, Timothy O. Raoul Hausmann and Berlin Dada. Ann Arbor: UMI Research
Press, 1987.
Bergdoll, Barry and Leah Dickerman, eds. Bauhaus 1919 - 1933: Workshops for
Modernity. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009.
Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New
York: Penguin Books, 1988.
Bertz, Inka. “‘Und das Buch, das du geschrieben, ist ein wirkliches verdienst’: Hermann
Strucks Erfolgsbuch ‘Die Kunst des Radierens’ und sein Einfluß auf die Künstler
im Paul-Cassirer-Verlag.” In Ein Fest der Künste: Paul Cassirer, der
Kunsthändler als Verleger, edited by Rahel E. Feilchenfeldt, 122–38. Munich:
C.H. Beck, 2006.
Billeter, Felix. Max Beckmann und Günther Franke. Hefte des Max Beckmann Archivs
4. Munich: Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen in association with the Max
Beckmann Archiv, 2000.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Edited
by Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
———. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard
Nice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.
Brooker, Peter, Sascha Bru, Andrew Thacker, and Christian Weikop eds. The Oxford
Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Vol. 3, Europe 1880 –
1940. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2013.
Brühl, Georg. Die Cassirers: Streiter für den Impressionismus. Leipzig: Edition Leipzig,
1991.
———. Herwarth Walden und “Der Sturm”. Cologne: DuMont, 1983.
Buenger, Barbara C. “Max Beckmann’s Ideologues: Some Forgotten Faces.” The Art
Bulletin 71, no. 3 (September 1989): 453–79.
360
Büttner Nils and Daniel Spanke, eds. Das Auge der Welt: Otto Dix und die Neue
Sachlichkeit. Stuttgart: Kunstmuseum Stuttgart in association with Hatje Cantz,
2012.
Canetti, Elias. The Torch in My Ear. Translated by Joachim Neugroschel. New York:
Farrar Straus Giroux, 1983.
Carey, Frances, and Antony Griffiths. The Print in Germany 1880-1933: The Age of
Expressionism. Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. New York: Harper &
Row, 1984.
Caspers, Eva. Paul Cassirer und die Pan-Presse: ein Beitrag zur deutschen
Buchillustration und Graphik im 20. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt am Main:
Buchhändler-Vereinigung, 1989.
Chametzky, Peter. Objects as History in Twentieth-Century German Art: Beckmann to
Beuys. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.
Coffing, Courtney. Guide & Checklist of World Notgeld, 1914-1947 and Other Local
Issue Emergency Money. Iola, WI: Krause Publications, 2000.
Crockett, Dennis. German Post-Expressionism: The Art of the Great Disorder, 1918 –
1924. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999.
Cuevas-Wolf, Cristina. “Montage as Weapon: The Tactical Alliance between Willi
Munzenberg and John Heartfield.” New German Critique 36, no. 2 107 (July
2009): 185–205.
Danzker, Jo-Anne Birnie and Amélie Ziersch, eds. Max Beckmann, Welt-Theater: das
graphische Werk 1901 bis 1946. Munich: Villa Stuck in association with Hatje,
1993.
D’Alessandro, Stephanie. German Expressionist Prints: The Marcia and Granvil Specks
Collection. Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum in association with Hudson Hills
Press, 2003.
Dickerman, Leah, ed. Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris.
Washington D.C.: National Gallery of Art in association with Distributed Art
Publishers, 2005.
Doherty, Brigid. “Berlin Dada: Montage and the Embodiment of Modernity, 1916-1920.”
PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1996.
———. “Figures of the Pseudorevolution.” October 84 (Spring 1998): 65–89.
361
———. “‘See: ‘We Are All Neurasthenics’!’ Or, the Trauma of Dada Montage.” Critical
Inquiry 24, no. 1 (Autumn 1997): 82–132.
———. “The Work of Art and the Problem of Politics in Berlin Dada.” October 105
(Summer 2003): 73–92.
Drucker, Johanna. The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909-
1923. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Dückers, Alexander. George Grosz: Das druckgraphische Werk / The Graphic Work. 1st
English edition. San Francisco: A. Wofsy Fine Arts, 1996.
———. , ed. Max Beckmann: Die Hölle, 1919. Berlin: Kupferstichkabinett Berlin,
Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, 1983.
Dumas, Ann. “Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde.” In Cézanne to Picasso:
Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde, edited by Rebecca A. Rabinow, 2–
27. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2006.
Easton, Laird McLeod. The Red Count: The Life and Times of Harry Kessler. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002.
Eberle, Matthias. World War I and the Weimar Artists: Dix, Grosz, Beckmann,
Schlemmer. Translated by John Gabriel. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1985.
Eglau, Hans Otto. Mehr Schein als Sein. Als die Mark Kapriolen schlug: deutsches
Notgeld, 1914 - 1923. Düsseldorf: Dodos-Verlag, 1997.
Ehrenburg, Ilya. Memoirs, 1921-1941. Translated by Tatania Shebunina in collaboration
with Yvonne Kapp. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1966.
Erffa, Hans Martin Freiherr von, and Erhard Göpel, eds. Blick auf Beckmann: Dokumente
und Vorträge. Schriften der Max Beckmann Gesellschaft 2. Munich: Piper
Verlag, 1962.
Esau, Erika. “‘The Magazine of Enduring Value’: ‘Der Querschnitt’ (1921-36) and the
World of Illustrated Magazines.” In The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of
Modernist Magazines, edited by Peter Brooker. Vol. 3, Europe 1880 - 1940.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Fallada, Hans. Wolf Among Wolves. Translated by Philip Owens. Brooklyn, NY: Melville
House, 2010.
362
Faure, Ulrich. Im Knotenpunkt des Weltverkehrs: Herzfelde, Heartfield, Grosz und der
Malik-Verlag, 1916-1947. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1992.
Fawcett, Trevor. “Graphic Versus Photographic in the Nineteenth-Century
Reproduction.” Art History 9, no. 2 (1986): 185–212.
Feilchenfeldt, Rahel E. Paul Cassirer Verlag, Berlin 1898-1933: eine kommentierte
Bibliographie. Munich: Saur, 2002.
———. , ed. Ein Fest der Künste: Paul Cassirer, der Kunsthändler als Verleger.
Munich: Beck, 2006.
Feldman, Gerald D. The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics, and Society in the German
Inflation, 1914-1924. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Figura, Starr, ed. German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse. The Museum of Modern
Art, New York, 2011.
Fineman, Mia. “Ecce Homo Prostheticus: Technology and the New Photography in
Weimar Germany.” PhD diss., Yale University, 2001.
Fitzgerald, Michael C. Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for
Twentieth-Century Art. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995.
Fitzke, Kirsten. “Im ‘Menschenschlachthaus’ hat der personifizierte Tod Konjunktur#:
der
industrialisierte Krieg in Totentanzzyklen aus dem Rheinland und Thüringen.” In
Krieg und Utopie: Kunst, Literatur und Politik im Rheinland nach dem Ersten
Weltkrieg#, edited by Gertrude Cepl-Kaufmann and Gerd Krumeich, 231-47.
Essen: Klartext-Verlag, 2006.
Flavell, Mary Kay. George Grosz, a Biography. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1988.
Fischer, Ernst and Stephan Füssel. Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels im 19. und 20.
Jahrhundert. Vol. 2, Die Weimarer Republik, 1918-1933. Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter, 2007.
Fontanella, Megan M. “‘Unity in Diversity’ Karl Nierendorf and America, 1937–47.”
American Art 24, no. 3 (October 1, 2010): 114–25.
Fore, Devin. Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012.
363
Fraser, James H. “German Exile Publishing: The Malik-Aurora Verlag of Wieland
Herzfelde.” German Life and Letters 27, no. 2 (1974): 115–24.
Frisby, David. Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel,
Kracauer, and Benjamin. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986.
Fritzsche, Peter. Reading Berlin 1900. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. 1st Illustrated Edition. New York:
Sterling, [1975] 2009.
Galenson, David W, and Robert Jensen. “Careers and Canvases: The Rise of the Market
for Modern Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris.” Van Gogh Studies 1 (2007): 136–
66.
Gallwitz, Klaus, ed. Max Beckmann, Frankfurt 1915-1933: eine Ausstellung zum 100.
Geburtstag. Frankfurt am Main: Städtische Galerie im Städelschen Kunstinstitut
in association with Die Galerie, 1983.
Gay, Peter. Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider. New York: W.W. Norton, [1968]
2001.
Gemünden, Gerd, and Johannes von Moltke. Culture in the Anteroom: The Legacies of
Siegfried Kracauer. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012.
Geyer, Martin H. Verkehrte Welt: Revolution, Inflation und Moderne, München 1914 –
1924. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998.
Goergen, Jeanpaul. “Marke Herzfeld-Filme: Dokumente zu John Heartfields Filmarbeit,
1917-1920.” In John Heartfield: Dokumentation. Reaktionen auf eine
ungewöhnliche Ausstellung, edited by Klaus Honnef and Hans-Jürgen
Osterhausen, 23–67. Berlin: Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Künste, 1994.
———. “Soldaten-Lieder und zeichnende Hand: Propagandafilme von John Heartfield
und George Grosz im Auftrag des Auswärtigen Amtes, 1917/1918.” KINtop, no. 3
(1994): 129–42.
Göpel, Erhard, and Barbara Göpel, eds. Max Beckmann: Katalog Der Gemälde, vol. 1,
Katalog und Dokumentation. Bern: Kornfeld Cie., 1976.
Grabowski, Hans-Ludwig. Notgeld der besonderen Art: Geldscheine aus Stoff, Leder und
sonstigen ungewöhnlichen Materialien. Deutsches Notgeld 9. Regenstauf: Gietl,
2005.
364
———, and Manfred Mehl, eds. Deutsche Serienscheine von 1918-1922, A - K.
Deutsches Notgeld 1. Regenstauf: Gietl, 2003.
———, and Manfred Mehl, eds. Deutsche Serienscheine von 1918-1922, L - Z.
Deutsches Notgeld 2. Regenstauf: Gietl, 2003.
Green, Nicholas. “Circuits of Production, Circuits of Consumption: The Case of Mid-
Nineteenth-Century French Art Dealing.” Art Journal 48, no. 1 (April 1, 1989):
29–34.
———. “Dealing in Temperaments: Economic Transformation of the Artistic Field in
France during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century.” In Critical Readings
in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism: An Anthology, edited by Mary
Tompkins Lewis, 30–47. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
Gretton, Tom. “Difference and Competition: The Imitation and Reproduction of Fine Art
in a Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Weekly News Magazine.” Oxford Art Journal
23, no. 2 (January 1, 2000): 145–62.
———. “Signs for Labour-Value in Printed Pictures After the Photomechanical
Revolution: Mainstream Changes and Extreme Cases around 1900.” Oxford Art
Journal 28, no. 3 (October 2005): 371 –390.
Gross, Jennifer R. The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2006.
Haber, L. F. The Poisonous Cloud: Chemical Warfare in the First World War. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Hansen, Miriam. “‘With Skin and Hair’: Kracauer’s Theory of Film, Marseille 1940.”
Critical Inquiry 19, no. 3 (April 1, 1993): 437–69.
Harmon, Lily. “The Art Dealer & the Playwright: J. B. Neumann and Clifford Odets.”
Archives of American Art Journal 29, no. 1/2 (1989): 16–26.
Hauberg, Jo. Der Malik-Verlag 1916 - 1947: Chronik eines Verlages. Kiel: Neuer Malik-
Verlag, 1986.
Heise, Nele. “Das Bauhaus in allen Taschen: Notgeldscheine als Vorboten der Neuen
Typografie.” In Bauhauskommunikation: innovative Strategien im Umgang mit
Medien, interner und externer Öffentlichkeit, edited by Patrick Rössler, 265–80.
Neue Bauhausbücher 1. Berlin: Mann, 2009.
365
Heller, Reinhold, and Stephanie D Alessandro. Stark Impressions: Graphic Production in
Germany, 1918-1933. Evanston, IL: Mary and Leigh Block Gallery,
Northwestern University, 1993.
Henne, Claudia. “Ich bin Kunsthändler und kein Galerist: ein Gespräch mit dem Berliner
Kunsthändler, -Sachverständigen und -Sammler Florian Karsch.” In 100 Jahre
Kunst im Aufbruch: Berlinische Galerie, edited by Petra Kruse. Cologne:
Wienand, 1998.
Hermann, Frank. Malik: zur Geschichte eines Verlages, 1916 - 1947. Düsseldorf: Droste,
1989.
Hofmaier, James. Max Beckmann: Catalogue Raisonné of His Prints. 2 vols. Bern:
Gallery Kornfeld, 1990.
Holdengräber, Paul. Portrait of the Artist as Collector: Walter Benjamin and the
Collector’s Struggle against Dispersion, 1995.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical
Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Translated by Edmund Jephcott.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.
Hughes, Michael L. Paying for the German Inflation. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1988.
Ivins, William Mills. Prints and Visual Communication. New York: Da Capo Press,
1969.
Jacobs, Stephanie. “Wider den ‘Unrat der Gründerjahre’: Paul Cassirer und die ‘Pan-
Presse.’” In Paul Cassirer, der Kunsthändler als Verleger, edited by Rahel E.
Feilchenfeldt, 102–21. Munich: Beck, 2006.
Jarausch, Konrad Hugo, and Michael Geyer. Shattered Past: Reconstructing German
Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.
Jensen, Robert. Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1994.
Jentsch, Ralph. Alfred Flechtheim, George Grosz: zwei deutsche Schicksale. Bonn:
Weidle, 2008.
———. George Grosz: Berlin - New York. Milan: Skira, 2008.
Johnson, Una E. Ambroise Vollard, Éditeur: Prints, Books, Bronzes. New York: Museum
366
of Modern Art in association with the New York Graphic Society, 1977.
Jussim, Estelle. Visual Communication and the Graphic Arts: Photographic
Technologies in the Nineteenth Century. New York: R.R. Bowker Co., 1974.
Kahnweiler, Daniel Henry. My Galleries and Painters. Translated by Helen Weaver.
London: Thames and Hudson, 1971.
Karsch, Florian. Otto Dix: das graphische Werk. Hannover: Fackelträger Verlag, 1970.
Kennert, Christian. Paul Cassirer und sein Kreis: ein Berliner Wegbereiter der Moderne.
Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1996.
Kolb, Eberhard, Eberhard Roters, and Wieland Schmied. Kritische Grafik in der
Weimarer Zeit. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1985.
Krahmer, Catherine. “Julius Meier-Graefe und Paul Cassirer: die ‘Pan’-Connection.” In
Paul Cassirer, der Kunsthändler als Verleger, edited by Rahel E. Feilchenfeldt,
87–101. Munich: Beck, 2006.
Krauss, Rosalind E. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986.
Kriebel, Sabine. “Revolutionary Beauty: John Heartfield, Political Photomontage, and
the Crisis of the European Left, 1929 – 1938.” PhD diss., University of California,
Berkeley, 2003.
———. “Manufacturing Discontent: John Heartfield’s Mass Medium.” New German
Critique 36, no. 2 107 (July 2009): 53–88.
Labarre, E. J. Dictionary and Encyclopaedia of Paper and Paper-Making. Rev. ed.
Amsterdam:Swets & Zeitlinger, 1952.
Lambrecht, Lars. “‘1919 interessierte er sich für Politik’: die sozialistischen Schriften im
Paul-Cassirer-Verlag.” In Paul Cassirer, der Kunsthändler als Verleger, 253–66.
Munich: Beck, 2006.
Lenman, Robin. “Der deutsche Kunstmarkt 1840 - 1923: Integration, Veränderung,
Wachstum.” In Sammler, Stifter und Museen: Kunstförderung in Deutschland im
19. und 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Ekkehard Mai, 135–52. Cologne: Böhlau,
1993.
———. “The Internationalisation of the Berlin Art Market 1910 - 1920 and the Role of
Herwarth Walden.” In Künstlerischer Austausch/Artistic Exchange. Vol. 3, Akten
367
des XXVIII. Internationalen Kongresses für Kunstgeschichte Berlin, vol. 3, edited
by Thomas Gaehtgens, 535–42. Berlin: Akademie, 1993.
Lenz, Christian. “Max Beckmann: ‘Das Martyrium.’” Jahrbuch Der Berliner Museen 16
(1974): 185–210.
———, ed. Max Beckmann. Aufsätze. Hefte des Max Beckmann Archivs 6. Munich:
Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen in association with the Max Beckmann
Archiv, 2002.
Lethen, Helmut. Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002.
Lewis, Beth Irwin. George Grosz: Art and Politics in the Weimar Republic. Rev ed.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
———. Art for All?: The Collision of Modern Art and the Public in Late-Nineteenth-
Century Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.
Lochmaier, Katrin. “Die Galerie ‘Neue Kunst - Hans Goltz’ in München.” In Avantgarde
und Publikum: zur Rezeption avantgardistischer Kunst in Deutschland, 1905 -
1933, edited by Henriche Junge, 103–10. Cologne: Böhlau, 1992.
Long, Rose-Carol Washton and Maria Makela, eds. Of “Truths Impossible to Put in
Words”: Max Beckmann Contextualized. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009.
Lorenz, Ulrike, ed. Grüsse aus dem Krieg: die Feldpostkarten der Otto-Dix-Sammlung in
der Kunstgalerie Gera. Gera: Die Galerie, 1991.
———, ed. Otto Dix: Gemälde, Zeichnungen, Druckgrafik. Gera: Kunstsammlung Gera
in association with Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1997.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art. German Expressionist Prints and Drawings: The
Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies. 2 vols. Los
Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art in association with Prestel, 1989.
Maanen, Hans van. How to Study Art Worlds: On the Societal Functioning of Aesthetic
Values. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009.
Mainardi, Patricia. The End of the Salon: Art and State in the Early Third Republic.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Marckwardt, Wilhelm. Die Illustrierten der Weimarer Zeit: Publizistische Funktion,
ökonomische Entwicklung und inhaltliche Tendenzen, Minerva-Fachserie
368
Geisteswissenschaften. Munich: Minerva Publikation, 1982.
März, Roland, ed. Der Schnitt entlang der Zeit: Selbstzeugnisse, Erinnerungen,
Interpretationen: eine Dokumentation. Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1981.
Max Beckmann Gesellschaft. Max Beckmann: Die Skizzenbücher / The Sketchbooks.
Ostfildern: Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen and National Gallery of Art in
association with Hatje Cantz, 2010.
McCloskey, Barbara. George Grosz and the Communist Party: Art and Radicalism in
Crisis, 1918 to 1936. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
McMeekin, Sean. The Red Millionaire: A Political Biography of Willi Münzenberg,
Moscow’s Secret Propaganda Tsar in the West. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2003.
Meidner, Ludwig. “An alle Künstler!” Der Anbruch 2, no. 1 (January 1919): 48.
Meier, Andreas. “Das Umfeld des Verlegers: Reinhard Piper und der ‘Blaue Reiter.’” In
Der Blaue Reiter, edited by Hans Christoph von Tavel, 227–37. Bern:
Kunstmuseum Bern, 1986.
Meißner, Karl-Heinz. “Israel Ber Neumann, Kunsthändler, Verleger.” In Avantgarde und
Publikum: zur Rezeption avantgardistischer Kunst in Deutschland, 1905 - 1933,
edited by Henriche Junge, 215–24. Cologne: Böhlau, 1992.
Merz, Jörg Martin. “Otto Dix’ Kriegsbilder. Motivationen - Intentionen - Rezeptionen.”
Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 26 (January 1, 1999): 189–226.
Miesel, Victor H. “Paul Cassirer’s ‘Kriegszeit’ and ‘Bildermann’ and Some German
Expressionist Reactions to World War I.” Michigan Germanic Studies 2, no. 2
(1976): 148–68.
Moffett, Kenworth. Meier-Graefe as Art Critic. Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1973.
Moulin, Raymonde. The French Art Market: A Sociological View. Translated by Arthur
Goldhammer. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987.
Mülhaupt, Freya, ed. Herwarth Walden: 1878-1941, Wegbereiter der Moderne. Berlin:
Museumspädagogischer Dienst in association with the Berlinische Galerie and the
Museum für Moderne Kunst, Photographie und Architektur im Martin-Gropius-
Bau, 1991.
Neuerburg, Waltraut. “Der graphische Zyklus im deutschen Expressionismus und seine
369
Typen, 1905-1925.” PhD diss., Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu
Bonn, 1976.
Nobis, Beatrix. “‘Expressionismus ist ein Kampfwort …’#: ein idealistischer
Revolutionär: Herwarth Walden und der ‘Sturm’.” In Avantgarde und Publikum:
zur Rezeption avantgardistischer Kunst in Deutschland, 1905 - 1933, edited by
Henrike Junge, 321–28. Cologne: Böhlau, 1992.
Palmér, Torsten. The Weimar Republic Through the Lens of the Press. Edited by Hendrik
Neubauer. Cologne: Könemann, 2000.
Paret, Peter. The Berlin Secession: Modernism and Its Enemies in Imperial Germany.
Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980.
———. German Encounters with Modernism: 1840-1945. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2001.
Peisker, Albert. Das Berliner Notgeld 1914-1924. Schriftenreihe die Münze, vol. 16.
Berlin [West]: Pröh, 1972.
Pernoud, Emmanuel. “The Art of Facsimile: Alfred Jarry and Reproduction.” Word &
Image 16, no. 4 (2000): 352–62.
Peters, Dorothea. “Die Welt im Raster: Georg Meisenbach und der lange Weg zur
gedruckten Photographie.” In Konstruieren, Kommunizieren, Präsentieren: Bilder
von Wissenschaft und Technik, edited by Alexander Gall, 179–244. Göttingen:
Wallstein Verlag, 2007.
Peters, Hans Albert, and Stephan von Weise, eds. Alfred Flechtheim: Sammler,
Kunsthändler, Verleger. Düsseldorf: Das Kunstmuseum, 1987.
Peters, Heinz, ed. Die Bauhaus-Mappen: Neue Europäische Graphik, 1921-23. Cologne:
C. Czwiklitzer, 1957.
Peters, Olaf, ed. Otto Dix. New York: Prestel, 2010.
Peukert, Detlev. The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity. Translated by
Richard Deveson. New York: Hill and Wang, 1992.
Pinson, Stephen C. Speculating Daguerre: Art and Enterprise in the Work of L. J. M.
Daguerre. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Pointon, Marcia. “Kahnweiler’s Picasso; Picasso’s Kahnweiler.” In Portraiture: Facing
370
the Subject, edited by Joanna Woodall, 189–202. Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1997.
Pratt, Jonathan Pascoe, and Douglas Druick. “Vollard’s Print Albums.” In Cézanne to
Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde, edited by Rebecca A.
Rabinow, 189–96. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2006.
Rabinow, Rebecca A., ed. Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-
Garde. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2006.
———. “Vollard’s Livres d’artiste.” In Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of
the Avant-Garde, edited by Rebecca A. Rabinow, 197–212. New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2006.
Rainbird, Sean, ed. Max Beckmann. New York: Distributed Art Publishers in association
with the Museum of Modern Art, 2003.
———. “Images of the Times in Beckmann’s Early Work.” In Max Beckmann, 16–22.
New York: Distributed Art Publishers in association with the Museum of Modern
Art, 2003.
Reisenfeld, Robin. “Cultural Identity and Artistic Practice: The Revival of the German
Woodcut.” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1993.
———, ed. The German Print Portfolio, 1890-1930: Serials for a Private Sphere.
London: David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art in association with the
University of Chicago, 1992.
———. “Cultural Nationalism, Brücke and the German Woodcut: The Formation of a
Collective Identity.” Art History 20, no. 2 (June 1997): 289–312.
Reuveni, Gideon. Reading Germany: Literature and Consumer Culture in Germany
Before 1933. New York: Berghahn Books, 2006.
Richards, Sarah. “Late Eighteenth-Century Prints in Leipzig’s Periodical Press: Cultural
Transfer of the English Style.” In Interkulturelle Kommunikation in der
europäischen Druckgraphik im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert, edited by Philippe
Kaenel and Rolf Reichardt, 223–43. Hildesheim: Olms, 2007.
Rigby, Ida Katherine. An Alle Künstler! War--Revolution--Weimar: German
Expressionist Prints, Drawings, Posters, and Periodicals from the Robert Gore
Rifkind Foundation. San Diego: San Diego State University Press, 1983.
Rössler, Patrick. “Das Weimarer Bauhaus und seine Öffentlichkeiten im Dialog#:
371
Strategien und Maßnahmen als Ausdruck einer Corporate Identity.” In
Bauhauskommunikation: Innovative Strategien im Umgang mit Medien, interner
und externer Öffentlichkeit, edited by Patrick Rössler, 13–47. Neue
Bauhausbücher 1. Berlin: Mann, 2009.
Roth, Joseph. What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933. Translated by Michael
Hofmann. W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.
Roth, Lynette. “The Cologne Progressives: Political Painting in Weimar Germany.” PhD
diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2009.
Roth, Nancy Ann. “The Politics of Collaboration: Brothers, Friends, the Party and the
Performance of John Heartfield, 1915-1938.” PhD diss., City University of New
York, 1996.
Salzmann, Karl H. “PAN: Geschichte einer Zeitschrift.” In Jugendstil, edited by Jost
Hermand, 178–208. Wege der Forschung, vol. 110. Darstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 1971.
Samii, Tina Vivica. “J.B. Neumann: The Dealer and His Relationship with Max
Beckmann.” Master’s thesis, Christie’s Education, Inc., 2001.
Schmidt, Hans M. “Kriegs- und Krupp-Krüppel: zu Werken von Heinrich Hoerle und
anderer Kölner ‘Progressiver.’” In Krieg und Utopie: Kunst, Literatur und
Politik
im Rheinland nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg, edited by Gertrude Cepl-Kaufmann,
283–92. Essen: Klartext-Verlag, 2006.
Schubert, Dietrich. Max Beckmann: Auferstehung und Erscheinung der Toten. Worms:
Wernerische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1985.
———. “Krüppeldarstellungen im Werk von Otto Dix nach 1920: Zynismus oder
Sarkasmus?” In Krieg und Utopie: Kunst, Literatur und Politik im Rheinland
nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg, edited by Gertrude Cepl-Kaufmann, 293–308. Essen:
Klartext-Verlag, 2006.
Schulenburg, Rosa von der. “John Heartfield und George Grosz: Realität und Mythos
einer Freundschaft.” In John Heartfield: Zeitausschnitte, Fotomontagen 1918-
1938, edited by Freya Mülhaupt, 36–45. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009.
Selz, Peter. German Expressionist Painting. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1957.
———. Max Beckmann. New York: Museum of Modern Art in association with
372
Doubleday, 1964.
Silver, Kenneth E. Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First
World War, 1914-1925. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.
Simmel, Georg. The Philosophy of Money. Translated by David Frisby. Reprint ed.
London: Routledge, 2011.
Simmons, Sherwin. “Advertising Seizes Control of Life: Berlin Dada and the Power of
Advertising.” Oxford Art Journal 22, no. 1 (1999): 121–46.
———. “War, Revolution, and the Transformation of the German Humor Magazine,
1914-27.” Art Journal 52, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 46–54.
Sprenger, Bernd. Das Geld der Deutschen: Geldgeschichte Deutschlands von den
Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart. Paderborn: F. Schöningh, 1991.
Springer, Peter. “Alfred Flechtheim: ein Kunsthändler neuen Typs.” In Avantgarde und
Publikum: zur Rezeption avantgardistischer Kunst in Deutschland, 1905 - 1933,
79–91. Cologne: Böhlau, 1992.
Sterne, Margaret Heiden. The Passionate Eye: The Life of William R. Valentiner. Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 1980.
Stetler, Pepper. “Bound Vision: Reading the Photographic Book in the Weimar
Republic.” PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2009.
Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the
Collection. Duke University Press Books, 1993.
Strauss, Victor. The Printing Industry: An Introduction to Its Many Branches, Processes,
and Products. Washington D.C.: Printing Industries of America in association
with R.R. Bowker Company, 1967.
Strobl, Andreas. “Otto Dix und Hugo Erfurth: der Maler im Zeitalter der Photographie.”
Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst 3, no. 44 (1993): 181–99.
Tatar, Maria M. Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1995.
Thurn, Hans Peter. Der Kunsthändler: Wandlungen eines Berufes. Munich: Hirmer,
1994.
Van Dyke, James. “Otto Dix’s ‘Streetbattle’ and the Limits of Satire in Düsseldorf,
373
1928.” Oxford Art Journal 32, no. 1 (March 2009): 37–65.
Vollard, Ambroise. Recollections of a Picture Dealer. Translated by Violet M.
Macdonald. New York: Dover Publications, 1978.
Wagner, Monika. “Wood - ‘Primitive’ Material for the Creation of ‘German Sculpture.’”
In New Perspectives on Brücke Expressionism: Bridging History, edited by
Christian Weikop, 71–88. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011.
Walter-Ris, Anja. “Die Geschichte der Galerie Nierendorf: Kunstleidenschaft im Dienst
der Moderne; Berlin, New York 1920-1995.: PhD diss., Freie Universität, 2003.
Weber, Klaus. “‘Zu Ehren unserer Sache’: Das Mappenwerk Neue Europäische
Graphik.” In Punkt, Linie, Flache: Druckgraphik am Bauhaus, edited by
Bauhaus-Archiv, 22–31. Berlin: G + H Verlag, 1999.
Weikop, Christian. “Arboreal Expressionism: Myth, Medium, Material and Memory: The
Aesthetics of Cohesion and Subversion in Brücke’s Woodcut Culture.” PhD diss.,
University of Birmingham, 2005.
———. “The Arts and Crafts Education of the Brücke: Expressions of Craft and
Creativity.” The Journal of Modern Craft 1, no. 1 (March 2008): 77 – 100.
Weinstein, Joan. The End of Expressionism: Art and the November Revolution in
Germany, 1918-19. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
Werckmeister, O. K. The Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 1914-1920. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1989.
White, Harrison C, and Cynthia A White. Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in
the French Painting World. New York: Wiley, 1965.
White, Michael. “Johannes Baader’s Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama: The Mysticism of the
Mass Media.” Modernism/modernity 8, no. 4 (2001): 583–602.
Widdig, Bernd. Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2001.
Wiese, Stephan von. Max Beckmanns zeichnerisches Werk: 1903 - 1925. Düsseldorf:
Droste Verlag, 1978.
Wiesel, Miriam. “I. B. Neumann und Max Beckmann, 1912 - 1937: Kunst und
Kunsthandel zwischen Berlin und New York.” Master’s thesis, Johann Wolfgang
Goethe-Universität, Kunstgeschichtliches Institut, 1984.
374
Windhöfel, Lutz. “Paul Westheim und seine Zeitschrift ‘Das Kunstblatt’ (1917 - 1933).”
In Avantgarde und Publikum: zur Rezeption avantgardistischer Kunst in
Deutschland, 1905 - 1933 edited by Henrike Junge, 329–39. Cologne: Böhlau,
1992.
———. Paul Westheim und das Kunstblatt: eine Zeitschrift und ihr Herausgeber in der
Weimarer Republik. Dissertationen zur Kunstgeschichte, 35. Cologne: Böhlau,
1995.
Wingler, Hans Maria. Die Mappenwerke “Neue Europäische Graphik.” Mainz:
Kupferberg, 1965.
———. , ed. Graphic Work from the Bauhaus. Translated by Gerald Onn. London: Lund
Humphries, 1969.
Zeiller, Christiane. “Der junge Max Beckmann und die ‘Firma C.’: der
Illustrationsauftrag zu ‘Eurydikes Wiederkehr.’” In Ein Fest der Künste: Paul
Cassirer, der Kunsthändler als Verleger, 139–50. Munich: Beck, 2006.
Zervigón, Andrés. “A ‘Political Struwwelpeter’? John Heartfield’s Early Film Animation
and the Crisis of Photographic Representation.” New German Critique 36, no. 2
107 (July 2009): 5–51.
———. John Heartfield and the Agitated Image: Photography, Persuasion, and the Rise
of Avant-Garde Photomontage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Ziegler, Edda. 100 Jahre Piper, Die Geschichte eines Verlags. Munich: Piper Verlag,
2004.
Abstract (if available)
Linked assets
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
Conceptually similar
PDF
Graphic art in Weimar Berlin: the case of Jeanne Mammen
PDF
Typophoto and the reinvention of photography in Weimar Germany
PDF
The problem of the missing museum: the construction of photographic culture in the GDR
PDF
Art and epic theater in Cold War Germany
PDF
Reading expressionist architecture: German modernism and 'paper architecture,' 1914-1920
PDF
An aesthetic of comprehension: the distribution of American land art and conceptual art in Germany, 1968-1975
PDF
Expressionism multiplied: early twentieth-century German posters between art, commerce, and politics
PDF
The multivalent platforms of alternative art publications as agents of authentic cultural change
PDF
The cycles of dread: reggae roots and culture amid processes of globalization
PDF
The bespoke book: experimental printing in early modern Italy
PDF
All on different trips: San Francisco's Mission School and the dot-com years
PDF
The watching night: print, power and Jewish vision in early modern Italy
PDF
Total integration: design, business, and society in the United States, 1935–1985
PDF
Up to code: geopolitics and its influence on cultural production on the Internet
PDF
Art on television: 1967-1976
PDF
Tapestry and tableau: revival, reproduction, and the marketing of modernism