1913 (8 page)

On 13 February there is still no sign of Leonardo’s
Mona Lisa
. The Louvre’s new catalogue is published, no longer listing the painting. In Berlin, on 13 February, Rudolf Steiner holds one of his great lectures – ‘Leonardo’s Spiritual and Intellectual Greatness at the Turning Point of the New Age’. Steiner speaks for a long time, almost two hours. The audience hang on his every word. He, just like Oswald Spengler, talks a lot about things falling into ruin, about the decline of an era. But he regards this as necessary to make room for the new:

On 17 February the Armory Show, one of the most important art exhibitions of the century, opens in a former arsenal in New York. Which century, I hear you ask? Well, you could say that the art of the nineteenth century only came to an end when the first Armory Show began. And it led to the supremacy of modern art not only in Europe but globally too.

Towards the end of 1912 three Americans with highly inquisitive natures and the necessary expertise – the painters Walter Pach, Arthur Davies and Walt Kuhn – travelled to Europe to identify the
most interesting artists and bring their key works back to New York. Great painters and photographers such as Claude Monet, Odilon Redon and Alfred Stieglitz sat on the selection committee – and the American public quickly realised that it was about pitting the Cubists and Futurists and Impressionists of Old Europe against the affluent American
fin-de-siècle
art scene. This was war. And for the first time the war was being waged on American soil – now that Europe’s battles had been fought. In total there were 1,300 paintings on display, only a third of them from Europe. But it was this third that made the American pictures look ancient – particularly the eight Picassos and twelve Matisses. The Brancusi sculptures and paintings by Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp provoked particularly outraged debate.
Camera Work
, Stieglitz’s legendary magazine, reported: ‘The exhibition of new work from Europe dropped on us like a bomb.’ And the force of the detonation was just as intense – rage, incomprehension and laughter were among the reactions, but people flocked to the exhibition in order to see it for themselves. The newspapers printed caricatures almost every day, and during the exhibition’s second residency, in Chicago, there was even a protest staged by students of The Art Institute of Chicago – who reportedly burned copies of three Matisse paintings. In the eyes of the American public Matisse was the most ‘primitive’ of all the artists. That has always been the supreme guarantee of quality.

The greatest sensation was caused by the three brothers Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Jacques Villon and Marcel Duchamp. Seventeen of their works were exhibited, and all but one were sold. Marcel Duchamp’s
Nude Descending a Staircase
became the focal point of the Armory Show, the most discussed and most caricatured art work on show. One critic called it
Explosion in a Shingle Factory
, a comment that, although intended to ridicule the work, instead demonstrated how strong the shock waves caused by the piece really were. A woman striding through space and time – a genial combination of Cubism, Futurism and relativity theory. The room housing the picture was flooded with visitors every single day; people queued for over forty minutes just to catch a glimpse of the scandalous painting. Evidently, for the traditionally minded Americans, this work was the
embodiment of a strange, irrational Europe. An antique dealer from San Francisco bought it – somewhere along his endless train journey back from New York, at a provincial station in New Mexico, he got off and sent a telegram to New York: ‘I will buy Duchamp nude woman descending stairway please reserve.’

The Duchamps went on working away in their studio in Neuilly, oblivious to their new-found American fame – until the cheques suddenly started coming in the post. Marcel Duchamp received $972 for his four sales – not a high price, even in 1913. Cézanne’s
La Colline des Pauvres
, for example, was sold from the exhibition to the Metropolitan Museum for $6,700. Duchamp was pleased nonetheless.

At the moment when America and Paris too had started to pay attention to his work, Marcel Duchamp had turned his back on Cubism and the theme of motion – or, as he so eloquently put it, ‘motion mixed with oil paint’. At the very moment when he should have become one of the greatest artists of his generation Duchamp declared that he was bored with painting. He was looking for something different, something new.

In Prague, Franz Kafka is suffering. He’s suffering because Felice, for whom he has been pining from afar in letters, hasn’t said a word about the book
Contemplations
, which he sent her in December. And because his sister Valli is getting married, and because it’s always too noisy in the apartment (the doors are always banging, and his parents and sister have the impertinence to talk to one another), and because he’s working for an insurance company by day and writing by night. He also has to contend with work trips, interruptions and colds. But above all he’s suffering from the fear that his creativity has withered away. And as dreadful as the idea of living as a bachelor is – perhaps it was the only way of being a writer. In moments of panic he is overwhelmed by the question ‘What will become of me if I get married?’ How would he deal with what he called ‘A Wife’s Rights’? For him there were two equally horrific scenarios: the physical demands of
the wife and, above all, the demands on his time. He implored Felice never again to write that she wanted to sit by him while he was working on his books – for if she or anyone else were to sit behind him, the secret of writing would be destroyed. And then he also wrote: ‘I would never expose myself to the risk of becoming a father.’ Is it possible to warn someone off more than Kafka did in these letters? But Felice responds, although torn between office and home, letter-writing and worries about her family, as if it were her true calling to be his addressee, a reader both for Kafka and for world literature. She assumes the role calmly and in complete earnest.

In 1913 art everywhere is driving towards abstraction. Kandinsky in Munich, Robert Delaunay and František Kupka in Paris, Kasimir Malevich in Russia and Piet Mondrian in the Netherlands – each in their own way they are trying to free themselves from all reference to reality. And then there’s that young, well-brought-up, reserved young man in Paris: Marcel Duchamp, a painter who has suddenly decided he doesn’t want to paint any more.

In Munich a benefit auction held for Else Lasker-Schüler turns into a complete disaster. In a touching gesture Franz Marc asked artist friends to donate paintings to raise more money for the relief effort initiated by Karl Kraus in
Die Fackel
. His call doesn’t go unanswered, with oil paintings arriving from Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Oskar Kokoschka, Paul Klee, August Macke, Alexej von Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc himself for the auction on 17 February. Only Ludwig Meidner from Berlin declines (saying he himself has no money and is starving). An auction is held in the Neuer Kunstsalon, but no one shows any interest. So, to avoid total embarrassment, the artists all bid for each others’ work, and raise 1,600 Marks.

The total value of the works unauctioned on 17 February 1913 would amount to around 100 million Euros today. Oh, what the heck – probably closer to 200 million.

Sigmund Freud continues to work on his theory of parricide. At the same time, in the newly founded film studios in Potsdam-Babelsberg, filming begins on
The Sins of the Fathers
, starring Asta Nielsen. In keeping with the title, Nielsen later feels partly to blame for the ‘kitsch in that early dawn of film’. The film poster shows her wearing a tight skirt and a plunging blouse. She was slim, unusual at the time, and a source of great joy for cartoonists, who immediately saw a stick figure in the making. Most men too were quite happy with how she looked. In 1913 Asta Nielsen was the ultimate sex symbol, and a big contract led to her making eight films between 1912 and 1914, which were filmed and released back to back. The new magazine
Bild und Film
put it like this: ‘People are queuing up to see the film as if they’re at a bakery during a famine, almost breaking their necks to get a ticket. Many people watch the film two or three times in quick succession and are enchanted by it again and again.’ Samuel Fischer, the most renowned publisher of his time, watched with increasing amazement as Nielsen captivated the masses. Believing film to be the medium of the future, he tried to convince his most famous authors to write screenplays as well.