Beginnings of German Abstraction

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Since the early days of 1917, when I first came in contact with the problems of abstract art, I felt a mysterious and special message in the fact that form and color had been liberated from guitars. madonnas, trees, harlequins, skirts, and apples. In Switzerland in those times -- which historically are called Dada -- we were involved in a manifold struggle to understand this message. It seems now in retrospect as if the 'ready-made', the hat-rack, the pissoir, or the flat iron-with-the-nails underneath were the real and true expression of that period; was it a period which wished to 'destroy' or at least to 'deny' art? It's not true; we -- Arp, Eggeling, Janco, and I -- were nevertheless very intensely preoccupied with just art, or to be concrete: abstract art.

There was of course the axiom of the 'law of chance', which let things fall where they wanted, and revealed new possibilities (proclaimed first, I think, by Arp -- though Schwitters became its main addict). But the free-wheeling 'law of chance' was only one side of the picture. The 'scientific' method of analysing laws and principles of plastic expression, the desire to penetrate into the 'Generalbass der Malerei' ( Eggeling) to find the clue for a 'universal language', to search into the 'equivalent of opposites', into an understanding of' the 'principle of contrast and analogy', into a 'new order' -- to establish a balance between 'heaven and hell' ( Arp) -- was deep behind our cynical acrobatics. It did not seem contradictory for us to allow chance its part, to let the hand waver, the paint drop, the paper tear, the accidental reveal the personal and individual, or to go wild . . . and at the same time strive for the clearest understanding of principles in order to limit chance, the accidental and emotional, the personal 'whim'.

My Dada experience as well as my earlier expressionistic period made me very conscious of the possibilities of completely uninhibited expression. But from my background and philosophy I nevertheless revolted against a more than temporary allowance in this direction. I was -- and I am -- unwilling to give up altogether the freedom of will ('inasmuch as we have little consciousness, we have little free will') to the dictates of the creative forces inside myself. I believed in the necessity of confronting the original creative impulses with consciousness to articulate, control, and shape these visions as soon as they came out from the dark into the light of day: on the canvas. In this general attitude I was greatly encouraged by my late friend,

Viking Eggeling, who had taken up the search with unsurpassed passion: 'we do not wish to diminish spontaneity but instead to submit it to an a posteriori judgment of our reason. By this technique of 'inhibition' we hoped to gain greater vitality, greater depth, greater concentration, for both our capacities: intuition and reason. 'We are bored by these super-individualistic tendencies that wish to throw overboard every discipline, every system, every order -- as if by order or discipline our faculty of emotion or sensitivity or intuition might be impaired . . . as if sensitivity, intuition, and so forth were not in any case the conditio-sine-qua-non of every artistic expression.'

Maybe the upheaval of World War I had something to do with this general search for 'order'. In any case it appeared to us a physical necessity to articulate the multicolored darkness with a definite simplicity, to establish an Archimedean point and to oppose the chaos that threatened from every direction. In this state of social, political, philosophical disintegration, abstract art seemed to show us a way -- to be a promise.

And so we felt very definitely prepared to sacrifice whatever had to be sacrificed of individual spontaneous expression, in order to clarify and purify form and color until the very principle itself became expressive. We saw in completely liberated form -- liberated also from subjective interpretation -- a universal language 'to carry on in the same way as nature organizes matter -- but to use only its principles, not its forms'. In that way it could become a means of emotional and intellectual experience for all, one which would restore to the arts their social function. Abstract art seemed to have a very definite mission. We fought for extreme -- and more extreme -economy in the use of forms, lines and colors, until only the necessary, the clearest, the defined, remained; till the small against the tall, the dark against the light, the one against the many, and so forth, became full of complex meaning and filled with a new beauty . . . We did not have a theory, theory caught up with us. It was a philosophy that became reality; the nearer we approached to simplicity, the less we cared about the expression of our own ego, its emotions and impressions.

And, as if the sacrifice of the ego-expression had been rewarded, we observed that the naked, simple analytical drawings (thousands of them), and the transformation of one element through different stages, fell suddenly into a 'logical' sequence, into some kind of continuity which made kinetic 'sense'. That is what we established finally on scrolls in 1919. These scrolls invited the eye to meditate. Without intending to, we had arrived at a kind of dynamic expression which produced a sensation rather different from that possible in easel painting. (One may assume that the Egyptians and the Chinese felt the appeal and that they enjoyed arresting time in this way. Otherwise such a form would not have evolved nor been preserved as it still is in China today.) 'Becoming and duration are not in any way diminution of unchanging eternity; they are its expression. Every form occupies not only space but time. Being and becoming are one . . . What should be grasped and given form are things in flux.'

So strong was this historical impulse to establish a 'new order that might restore the balance between heaven and hell' that it expressed itself simultaneously in various places on the globe. And when I published in 1921 the first modern art magazine in Germany, G, together with my friends, Mies van der Rohe and Werner Graeff, we found ourselves instantly in the midst of a movement that very definitely stood for the structural reality and economy we had been working for. There was a parallel in architecture ( Mies, Hilbersheimer, van Esteren). sculpture ( Gabo, Pevsner), painting ( Mondrian, van Doesburg, Malevitch, Lissitzky, Delaunay), theatre ( Kiesler), and in the forms of scrolls on film ( Eggeling, Diagonal Symphony and my Rhythm 21).

Today it might seem as if Mondrian had ended the struggle for 'fundamental principles'; as if his puritanical 'horizontal-vertical equivalent of opposites' had halted the search for the 'perfect painting', and satisfied a new generation that there were no gains from going further into this austere and utterly defined field . . . as if the pendulum had swung over again all the way to the age of Kandinsky's freest improvisations.

Léger, with his sense of reality, insisted: 'when one line of art is followed to perfection, the new will start exactly in the opposite corner' . . . and it did start in the opposite corner, enthusiastically, freed of all inhibitions (except the one: not to have any). The paradox in every artistic process -- to impose, on the one hand, formal discipline towards a unified 'style' and yet at the same time to follow the slightest hint of intuition -- has been decided by the young generation in favor of the latter. So? ? ?

Indeed they have created their own rich language with new perspectives, new formulas, new 'symbols', new people and a new following which are neither better nor worse than followers have been at any time (only there were never as many painters as there are today). But nobody will convince me that the historic task which had gone without interruption through three generations since Cézanne has suddenly become meaningless. On the contrary, I am convinced that the free-flying generation of today will contribute to the much-needed freedom of expression, as well as toward breaking up the academism that certainly has grown from, in, and around the revolutionary ideas of yesterday . . . that is -- of tomorrow.