1914 Die Avantgarden im Kampf

A major retrospective in the anniversary year

On account of a deployment of technology and matériel that burst all human measure, the First World War is regarded as the “primal catastrophe of the twentieth century” – a century whose moral nadir was then to be reached in the National Socialist policy of war and extermination. Yet those worlds that collapsed in 1914, when 70 million soldiers in Europe, Africa and Asia went off to a war that was subsequently to cost 17 million people their lives – those worlds had already grown brittle in the preceding years, and not a few writers, musicians and artists had long since wearied of them and therefore greeted the outbreak of war, like many of their fellow citizens, with jubilation. Franz Marc – in accord with countless statements by his contemporaries – summed up this spirit of the age as follows: “In our epoch of the great struggle for a new art we fight as ‘savages’, the unorganised against an old, organised power. The struggle appears unequal; but in matters of the mind it is never numbers that triumph, only the strength of ideas.” The exhibition at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn and the catalogue carefully edited by the curator Uwe M. Schneede, however, by no means merely assemble the familiar sources and protagonists; they take the decisive step further by tracing the processes of transmission within the international art movements of the period. How did these movements enter into the war, pass through it and emerge from it? What remained, how were the avant-gardes transformed or deformed and made the point of departure for an entirely new understanding of art? Which intermediate steps can be reconstructed, under what historical conditions, and in what relation do Expressionism, Cubism, Dadaism or other conceptions of art competing with one another into the 1930s stand? This immense cultural step – one is almost tempted to call it a step in the history of humankind – which led the twentieth century through all its heights and depths, is set out in manifold ways by means of works, photographs and personal testimonies. A minor sensation in passing is the fact that almost every one of the protagonists had himself photographed in uniform in his studio – and some of the paintings to be seen on the walls in the background of these photographs are also shown in the book and in the exhibition.

Works in the exhibition by: Jean Arp, Roberto Marcello Iras Baldessari, Ernst Barlach, Max Beckmann, Carlo Carrà, Lovis Corinth, Robert Delaunay, Otto Dix, Marcel Duchamp, Raoul Dufy, Heinrich Ehmsen, Conrad Felixmüller, André Fraye, August Gaul, Albert Gleizes, Natalia Gontscharowa, Walter Gramatté, George Grosz, Otto Gutfreund, Raoul Hausmann, Erich Heckel, Richard Huelsenbeck, Willy Jaeckel, Marcel Janco, Alexej von Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, Käthe Kollwitz, Alfred Kubin, František Kupka, Fernand Léger, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Aristarkh Lentulov, Max Liebermann, August Macke, Vladimir Majakovsky, Kasimir Malewitsch, Franz Marc, André Mare, Frans Masereel, Ludwig Meidner, Jean Metzinger, Gabriele Münter, Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson, Emil Nolde, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, Hans Richter, Luigi Russolo, Egon Schiele, Gino Severini, Max Slevogt, Jacob Steinhardt, Franz von Stuck, Vladimir Tatlin, Leon Underwood, Henry Valensi, Theo van Doesburg, Édouard Vuillard, Albert Weisgerber, Ossip Zadkine

Exhibition:
Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, 8/11/2013 – 23/2/2014