Forget Rudolf Belling: Getting the Carl Einstein We Deserve

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Paul Monty Paret
Forget Rudolf Belling
Getting the Carl Einstein We Deserve
Paul Monty Paret
Both camps make the Warhol they need, or get
the Warhol they deserve; no doubt we all do.
Hal Foster, The Return of the Real 1
“It is extremely regrettable,” remarks Sebastian Zeidler in a wishful footnote
to his astute study of Carl Einstein’s 1915 Negerplastik, “that Einstein never
wrote at length about the work of Constantin Brancusi.”2 Zeidler’s comment
about the French-Romanian sculptor, a now canonical and indispensable figure for any history of modern sculpture, expresses the desire to link Einstein’s
theory of totality in Negerplastik, one of the twentieth century’s most important and confounding texts on sculpture, to Einstein’s later art criticism and
the avant-garde practices of the 1920s. Zeidler reminds us that mining the
archival and historiographic record of modernist art and criticism can be a
frustrating and sometimes ugly affair. Writers, to say nothing of artists, only
seldom produce what we may wish for to fuel our histories; to the contrary,
they often leave us with an archival record we neither need, want, nor know
how to use. It should be no surprise that the judgments and analyses of even
the most insightful and highly regarded critics do not match up cleanly with
the later formed consensus or always manage to rise above parochial concerns. Such fissures should have much to offer the historian. Too often, however, they are swept under the rug, quickly dismissed as not significant, or
quietly ignored by what at times can be a juggernaut of contemporary scholarly agendas.
This paper re-examines one such instance of disconcerting judgment:
Carl Einstein’s sustained and forceful support for the once prominent sculptor Rudolf Belling (1886–1972), an artist today regarded as a secondary or
tertiary figure of modernism. Unlike Brancusi, Belling might be regarded as
1
2
Hal Foster: The Return of the Real. The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, Cambridge/Mass.
and London: The MIT Press 1996, p. 130.
Sebastian Zeidler: “Totality Against a Subject. Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik”, in: October 107: Carl
Einstein. A Special Issue (Winter 2004), p. 46.
Forget Rudolf Belling
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dispensable; it is highly doubtful, for instance, that any scholar ever expressed regret that a major critic failed to address him. Yet beginning in
1924 and up through the revised 1931 edition of his Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, Einstein consistently championed Belling and placed him at or near
the pinnacle of his teleology of modernist sculpture. In this instance, Einstein, so highly regarded as a prescient early champion of sub-Saharan African sculpture, the cubism of Picasso and Braque, and the emerging surrealism of Paul Klee, threw his support behind an artist very much on the other
side of history.3 Moreover, by the time Einstein first began to champion
Belling’s work in 1924, Belling’s once substantial reputation had peaked and
was already beginning to fall.
In what follows I shall look at Einstein’s conception of sculpture, his
sustained support for Belling’s work and the peculiar logical gaps and acrobatic image selections to which that support sometimes led him. The later
part of the paper speculates on the near total absence of Belling from the
growing literature on Einstein, and the disjunction between the archival record of modernism and the needs and wants of contemporary scholarship.
It is not a matter of merely ignoring Einstein’s longstanding critical commitment to Belling, a now little-respected artist. Particularly notable is the apparent impulse, marked with unusual honesty by Zeidler, to replace Einstein’s
real commitments with exaggerated, even imaginary, allegiances to artists we
might wish Einstein had favored but in fact never did. My concern is not to
somehow rehabilitate Belling’s reputation and status within modernist histories, nor is it to debunk Einstein or his view of Belling. Rather, I am interested in the historical discourse of sculpture and the disconnect in contemporary scholarship when a critic with an ascending scholarly reputation like
Einstein is found to champion an artist who has long ago been tossed aside.
Re-examining such episodes can offer new insights into well-worn areas of
modernism where, contrary to any notion of the heroic avant-garde, failure
is often the watchword for both artistic practice and criticism.
1.
It may be surprising that in the early 1920s Rudolf Belling was frequently
identified in Germany as a leading contemporary sculptor, and sometimes
even as the greatest sculptor of the age. Belling is the last artist discussed in
Alfred Kuhn’s 1921 history of modern sculpture, Die neuere Plastik von 1800
bis zur Gegenwart, a text whose formalist trajectory concludes with a discussion
3
Another example is Einstein’s puzzling enthusiasm for the painter Moïse Kisling. See Liliane
Meffre: Carl Einstein 1885–1940. Itinéraires d’une pensée moderne, Paris: Presses de l’Université de
Paris-Sorbonne 2002, pp.172–176 and passim; and Uwe Fleckner: Carl Einstein und sein Jahrhundert. Fragmente einer intellektuellen Biographie, Berlin: Akademie Verlag 2006, pp. 99–121.
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of Belling’s work as emblematic of “the new spatial feeling.”4 Belling also figures prominently at the end of A. E. Brinkmann’s 1922 Plastik und Raum, as
well as in Paul Westheim’s 1923 Architektonik des Plastischen, both, like Kuhn’s,
among the major texts on modern sculpture in postwar Germany.5
Einstein first wrote about Belling in 1924 for the catalog of his exhibition at Berlin’s Kronprinzenpalais, which during the Weimar Republic
served as the contemporary wing of the National Gallery. This exhibition
was the high point of Belling’s public reputation. Organized by Ludwig Justi,
the exhibition included twenty-nine works, had a catalog with essays by both
Einstein and Westheim, and resulted in Justi purchasing a new carved wood
version of Belling’s 1919 plaster Dreiklang (Fig. 1) for the National Gallery.
Fig. 1: Rudolf Belling, Dreiklang, 1924 birch wood, 1924 (after the plaster version of 1919)
Berlin. Neue Nationalgalerie. © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG BildKunst, Bonn.
4
5
“Das neue Raumgefühl” is the title of the final chapter. Alfred Kuhn: Die neuere Plastik von
Achtzehnhundert bis zur Gegenwart, Munich: Delphin-Verlag 1921, pp. 125–8.
A.E. Brinckmann: Plastik und Raum als Grundformen künstlerischer Gestaltung, Munich: Piper 1922,
p. 78, ill. 40; Paul Westheim: Die Architektonik des Plastischen, Berlin: Wasmuth 1923, p. 20.
Forget Rudolf Belling
107
Einstein opens his essay with the boldly declarative statement that “Rudolf Belling is the first among German sculptors to break from the prescriptive lessons handed down by the classicists.”6 Two years later, repeating significant portions of the 1924 text, Einstein gave Belling preeminent position
as the final artist discussed in the sculpture section of his Die Kunst des
20. Jahrhunderts, part of the Propyläen Kunstgeschichte series. It is hard to
overestimate the significance of Einstein’s placement of Belling at the concluding point of his discussion of modern sculpture. Far from an afterthought to Einstein’s text, Belling’s “powerful tectonic form” and “effective
spatial bodies” mark the triumph of modernist sculpture in overcoming
what Einstein considered the stifling adherence of European sculpture to
the closed mass and a pictorial conception of sculptural form.7
Belling came to prominence in Berlin following the end of the First
World War. Having first studied applied arts and worked in theater and
stage decoration, he began studying sculpture in 1912 at the Kunstakademie
Berlin-Charlottenburg and worked through a range of cubo-expressionist
idioms during the 1910s.8 In the immediate aftermath of the war – in which
he had served in an aviation unit near Berlin, a posting that allowed him to
continue some artistic pursuits – Belling participated in the briefly radical
efforts to reshape Germany’s artistic culture as a member of the Working
Council for Art (Arbeitsrat für Kunst) and as a founding member of the
November Group (Novembergruppe). Belling’s 1919 sculpture Dreiklang
became his first real success. Exhibited in the November Group section of
the 1920 Berlin Art Exhibition, Dreiklang consists of three angular prongs
that burst upward from a common base. The two taller prongs reconnect
together in a sweeping attenuated arch at the top of the sculpture, which
lacks a solid center and presents no frontal or primary view. Dreiklang became for some an emblem of Expressionist fervor and, in the merging of
its three prongs, even a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk, a metaphor for unifying
the disparate arts of painting, sculpture and architecture, as had been demanded by both the Working Council for Art and the November Group.
Pushing the idea of Dreiklang as a Gesamtkunstwerk, the catalog of the November Group section of the exhibition falsely implies that the exhibited
plaster, just about three feet tall, was a scaled down model of an eighteen
6
7
8
“Rudolf Belling trennte sich als erster unter deutschen Bildhauern von Übungen der Klassizisten, überkommenen Rezepten.” Carl Einstein: Rudolf Belling, Skulpturen, in: Rudolf Belling –
Skulpturen. Mit Vorreden von Carl Einstein und Paul Westheim, Potsdam: Kiepenheuer 1924;
reprinted in BA 2, 350–1, p. 350. Translations are by the author unless otherwise noted.
“Kräftig tektonische Form”, “wirksame Raumkörper”, in: K 1, 173 and 174.
The most detailed account of Belling’s career is Winfried Nerdinger: Rudolf Belling und die Kunstströmungen in Berlin 1918–1923, Berlin: Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft 1980.
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foot tall monumental version of Dreiklang made of bricks and painted stucco, although no such version ever existed.9
The following year, Belling made the equally pathos-laden Geste Freiheit
and worked on several collaborative architectural commissions, including
the central fountain and stylized crystalline ceiling for the Scala Casino in
Berlin, designed by the architect Walter Würzbach. Aside from Dreiklang,
Belling’s best-known work is the futuristic robotic head, Skulptur 23, 1923
(Fig. 2), made first of plaster and wire, then cast in brass, using simplified,
geometric parts formed around an open central structure. Throughout the
early 1920s Belling moved rapidly between abstract and figurative work and
between stylistic idioms of cubo-expressionism (Erotik, 1920) futurism (Organische Formen, Schreitender, 1921), constructivism (Brunnen vor dem Hause
Goldstein,1923), and a kind of stylized art deco by 1925 with Kopf in Messing,
a portrait of Belling’s wife, the dancer Toni Freeden. During the second half
of the 1920s and into the 1930s Belling worked increasingly in modes of
naturalism (Porträt Friedrich Ebert, 1927, or Max Schmeling, 1929), and social
realism (Bergarbeiter, 1930), and received numerous sculptural commissions
from trade unions in Germany and Holland, such as the 1932 series of six
bronze panels (destroyed) depicting labor and industry for the Gewerkschaft Gesamtverband in Berlin.
2.
It seems likely that Einstein and Belling met through Westheim, the art historian and editor of Das Kunstblatt, who had known and supported Belling since
at least 1920. Einstein and Westheim wrote the two essays for Belling’s 1924
exhibition catalog at Berlin’s Kronprinzenpalais, and the following year included an illustration of Belling’s Skulptur 23 in their co-edited Europa Almanach (EA, 137). In the spring of 1925 Belling, Einstein and Westheim were all
in Paris where, together with Max Sauerlandt, they visited the studio of Aristide Maillol, whom all three greatly admired and with whom Einstein begins
his discussion of sculpture in Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts.10
Einstein privately confirmed his admiration for Belling in an undated
letter from the second half of the 1920s to, of all people, his friend George
Grosz. “Aside from you,” Einstein writes, “the only Berliner who matters to
9
See Erich Ranfft: Reproduced Sculpture of German Expressionism. Living Objects, Theatrics
of Display and Practical Options, in: Sculpture and its Reproduction. Ed. by Anthony Hughes and
Erich Ranfft, London: Reaktion 1997, pp. 123–5; and Anita Beloubek-Hammer: Wider die
‘Stand- und Spielbein’-Skulptur, in: Novembergruppe, Berlin: Galerie Bodo Niemann 1993, p. 35.
10 Lutz Windhöfel: Paul Westheim und Das Kunstblatt, Cologne: Böhlau 1995, p. 17. On Einstein
and Maillol see especially Fleckner (pp. 37–46), who references the visit to Maillol’s studio but
without mention of Belling.
Forget Rudolf Belling
109
me is Belling, who is a true sculptor.”11 This striking, almost melancholic
statement, offers intriguing insights into Einstein and his understanding of
Belling’s sculpture. Einstein’s unlikely pairing of Grosz with Belling as the
only two Berlin artists who matter to him reminds us of Einstein’s complicated, unhappy relationship with Berlin and its artistic culture. By almost
any standards these two would seem an odd pair and it provides yet another
example of Einstein’s unconventional analysis and sometimes peculiar critical judgment. There was, in fact, no love lost between Grosz and Belling,
who knew and very much disliked each other from the early days of the
November Group, when Belling sided with those moving the organization
toward becoming primarily an exhibition society, a development that resulted in the resignations of Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, Rudolf Schlichter, Otto Dix and others.12 Years later in his autobiography
Grosz makes his opinion clear when he refers to “the sculptor Rudolf Belling, known for his money-grubbing greed.”13
Most notable in Einstein’s comments to Grosz is the identification of
Belling as a “true sculptor,” a man who “wirklich ein Plastiker ist,” a phrase
which itself expresses Einstein’s certainty about the ontology of sculpture
and the existence of such a thing as true sculpture and true sculptors. By
calling Belling a “true sculptor,” Einstein was referring to the ideas he had
first forcefully expressed in his 1915 Negerplastik that, put simply, “[s]culpture’s task is to render three-dimensionality.”14 Einstein regarded most
European sculpture since the Romanesque as being trapped by pictorial
concepts of form in which “[t]hree-dimensionality was eroded by optical
sensations.”15
The theory of sculpture Einstein proposed in Negerplastik is an attack
on both Adolf von Hildebrand’s relief theory and equally so on the experiential, temporal model of the “impressionist” sculpture he identified with
Rodin.16 Hildebrand had proposed that sculpture should allow the viewer
11 “Ausser Dir liegt mir von den Berlinern nur an Belling, der wirklich ein Plastiker ist.” Einstein
to George Grosz, undated letter [1927?] Stiftung Archiv, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, George Grosz Archiv.
12 See Joan Weinstein: The End of Expressionism. Art and the November Revolution in Germany, 1918–
1919, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1990, p. 96; and Armin Schulz: “Hinein in die
Menschheitswogen” in: Novembergruppe, Berlin: Galerie Bodo Niemann 1993, pp. 20–21.
13 George Grosz: George Grosz: An Autobiography, New York: Macmillan 1983, p. 199.
14 Carl Einstein: Negro Sculpture, trans. Charles W. Haxthausen and Sebastian Zeidler, in: October
107 (Winter 2004), pp. 122–38, p. 131. Orig. Negerplastik, Leipzig: Verlag der Weißen Bücher
1915; Munich: Kurt Wolff 1920.
15 Einstein: Negro Sculpture, p. 127.
16 See especially Zeidler; Winkler, pp. 29–36; and Dirk Heißerer: Das ‘Problem der Form’, der
‘Blaue Reiter’ und die ‘Negerplastik’. Zu den Voraussetzungen der Kunstkritik Carl Einsteins,
in: Die visuelle Wende der Moderne: Carl Einsteins Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. by Klaus H.
Kiefer, Munich: Wilhelm Fink 2003, pp. 21–38. Einstein’s response to Hildebrand is placed
within a larger framework of the history of sculpture in Alex Potts: The Sculptural Imagination.
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to reconstruct three-dimensional space pictorially either through a single coherent frontal image, which Einstein countered “essentially cheats the viewer out of the experience of the cubic,” or through the synthesis of sequential
images generated over time as the viewer moves around the object.17 Einstein; on the other hand, valued sub-Saharan African sculpture precisely for
what he identified as the immediacy of its three-dimensional totality. “Cubic
form,” Einstein insisted, “must be apprehended all at once. […] Three-dimensionally situated as they may be, all parts of the composition must
nonetheless be represented simultaneously, i.e., the dispersed space must be
integrated into a single field of vision.”18
In the “On Sculpture” chapter at the end of Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts
Einstein loosely charts the degree to which select twentieth-century sculptors have or have not approached such a cubic totality. His analysis begins
with Maillol, whose “historical importance lies in his purging sculpture of
painterly impressionism,” which Einstein associates with Rodin.19 He then
proceeds through discussions of his principal figures: Wilhelm Lehmbruck,
who favored “a graphic rather than cubic solution,” Ernst Barlach,
Alexander Archipenko, who “remains unthinkable without the cubist
painters,” concluding finally with Belling.20 (Other sculptors mentioned
briefly, and generally negatively, along the way include Hermann Haller, Ernesto de Fiori, Brancusi, Jacques Lipschitz and Henri Laurens, but none receives more than a short paragraph.)
“Rudolf Belling,” Einstein begins, “attempted powerful tectonic form.
He separated himself from the frontal schema and relief-like modeled layer
that weakens the three-dimensional.”21 Alluding to his own critique of Hildebrand, Einstein stresses Belling’s embrace of three-dimensional space.
“Belling,” Einstein continues, “avoids the flat contour and prefers to work
with open vibrating constructions. Modeled masses of air and light penetrate the hollowed-out material form, which is ruptured or opened so that
the contrast of forms is intensified, differences awakened, and three-dimensional excitement counterpointed.”22 Recalling something of the simultane-
17
18
19
20
21
22
Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist, New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2000, pp. 129–
31; and Yves-Alain Bois: Kahnweiler’s Lesson, in his: Painting as a Model, Cambridge/Mass. and
London: The MIT Press 1990, pp. 75–77.
Einstein, Negro Sculpture, p. 132.
Ibid.
“Die geschichtliche Bedeutung Maillols […] ruht in der Reinigung des Plastischen vom malerischen Impressionismus.” (K1, 163)
“eher zeichnerische, denn kubische Lösung” and “bleiben ohne die kubistischen Maler undenkbar.” K1, 167 and 171.
“Kräftig tektonische Form versuchte Rudolf Belling. Er trennte sich von frontalem Schema
und reliefmäßig modellierter Schicht, worin das Dreiräumliche abgeschwächt wird.” (K 1, 173)
“Belling meidet das flächig Umrissene und arbeitet gern in offen schwingenden Gebilden.
Geformte Luft und Lichtmasse durchdringt die gehöhlte Materialform, die abgebrochen oder
Forget Rudolf Belling
111
ity of the cubic he had described in Negerplastik, Einstein suggests that in
Belling’s sculptures, “[t]he fleeting force of air is captured in formal groupings or encircled bodies that are fused to the sculptural object and, rather
than merely passing over it, work together and shimmer as form.”23
In support of such statements, the 1926 edition of Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts included seven illustrations of Belling’s work: Der Mensch, an expressionist work from 1918; Dreiklang (Einstein’s caption lists the work as wood,
but the image shows the plaster; in the 1931 edition the wood version is
pictured); Erotik, 1920, a work in wood with gold tinting, which was not
included in the revised 1931 edition; Kopf, 1921; a close-up partial view of
the 1918 Gruppe Natur (fig. 3) (called Göttin in Einstein’s caption); Skulptur
23, 1923; and Kopf, 1923, a drawing of Skulptur 23, to which Belling would
later add a dedication to Einstein.24
If the eclectic range of styles in these works from the 1926 edition of
Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (it is unfortunately not possible to illustrate
them all) was not extreme enough, for the revised 1931 edition Einstein left
the text on Belling virtually unchanged, but had added three additional illustrations of more recent works: Bildnis Richard Haertel, 1926 (Fig. 4); Kopf in
Messing, 1925; and Versilberter Bronzeschild, 1929–30 (Fig. 5), a commission
for a retail cooperative, “De Volharding” in the Hague.
The extreme diversity of styles and forms evident in these works does
not seem to have troubled Einstein, whose primary concern was never style,
but rather conceptions of spatial experience and perception. In a somewhat
unusual example of Einstein discussing specific works of art, he carefully
articulates how Dreiklang and Skulptur 23, two stylistically very distinct
sculptures, each produces cubic experience by different means.
Referring to Skulptur 23, Einstein offers that “[t]he sphere of the head
is structured as both air and material form, and from such a contrast one
gains a cubic concentration of two spatial modes.” This effect is secured, he
goes on, by the “thin wire contour,” a reference to the wire coming out over
the figure’s forehead and nose, as well as to the wire rising up from the
sculpture’s base to support the spherical eye. The result, Einstein writes, is
that “cubic lines in space delimit the three-dimensional breathing body.”25 If
geöffnet wird, damit Kontrastform eindringe und verstärke, Gegensätze wecke und dreidimensionale Erregung kontrapunktisch steigere.” (K 1, 174)
23 “Die feinflüchtige Gewalt der Luft wird in Formgruppen oder umzirkte Körper eingefangen,
so daß, statt überfliegend einzuhüllen, sie als Form mitwirkt und, dem plastischen Gebilde
eingezwungen, schimmert”, ibid.
24 The dedication, “meinem lieben Carl Einstein herzl. zugeeignet,” was added some time after
Einstein received the photograph used in all three editions of Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts.
25 “Die Kugel des Kopfes wird in Luft und Materialform gegliedert, und man gewinnt aus solchem Kontrast kubische Ballung zweier Raummittel. Belling verischert sich dieser Luftform in
Skulptur 1923 mit dünnem Drahtkontur; die kubische Raumlinie begrenzt dreidimensional
atmende Körper.” (K 1, 174)
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Fig. 2: Rudolf Belling, Skulptur 23, brass, 1923. The Museum of Modern Art New York.
© 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
in Skulptur 23 the cubic space of the head is ultimately secured by the wire
contour, in Dreiklang by contrast “the cubic is spun like a ball of forms and
held in equilibrium.”26
At times Einstein relies on very carefully selected images of Belling’s
work to secure his point. Gruppe Natur (Fig. 3), for instance, a niche sculpture commissioned for the villa of the publisher Wolfgang Gurlitt, is reproduced in Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts in a cropped, close up image. Originally gold-tinted and painted in “bold colors” according to a design by the
painter César Klein, the group’s central allegorical figure of Nature is
flanked by figures of Adam, cropped out of the image in Die Kunst des
20. Jahrhunderts, and Eve, partially visible in the lower right, who is connected to the figure of Nature by a grotesque chain of linked putti extending
out from her hands. To say nothing of the extreme sentimentality of the
subject and its treatment, the idea of a niche sculpture itself necessarily emphasizes a single, frontal, pictorial image and does not fit easily with Einstein’s ideas on sculptural form and three-dimensionality.
Belling, who always claimed spatial complexity for his work, was sensitive to this problem. He argued defensively that by having the leg of the
central figure in Gruppe Natur protruding out from the flanking figures and
26 “Im Dreiklang [...] wird das Kubische wie ein Ball von Formen gewirbelt und im Gleichgewicht
gehalten.” (Ibid.)
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Fig. 3. Rudolf Belling, Gruppe Natur (detail), gilded and painted cast metal, 1918. From:
Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, 1931, p. 611. © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
arranging the pedestal at a ninety-degree angle to the back wall of the niche,
he was able to emphasize the work’s spiraling form and three-dimensionality.27 With his image selection Einstein seems to have tried to support Belling’s claim. The closely cropped photograph reproduced in Die Kunst des
20. Jahrhunderts emphasizes the space-embracing reach of the main figure’s
arms, which hold a flower out to complete the arc above her head, as well
as the rotation of her body. Together with cropping and isolating the sculpture from its decidedly pictorial context, the upward-tilting camera angle
works to distort further the figures and prevents any notion of frontally
conceived pictorial form. Something similar occurs in the image Einstein
27 Belling letter to A.E. Brinckmann, undated [c.1920], cited in Nerdinger, pp. 39–42.
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Fig. 4. Rudolf Belling, Bildnis Richard Haertel (detail), bronze, 1926. From Die Kunst des
20. Jahrhunderts, 1931, p. 615. © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
uses to illustrate Belling’s 1926 Bildnis Richard Haertel (Fig. 4), a close up taken from a side angle that emphasizes the protrusion of this hyper-realist
head from it’s flat ground and downplays the relief ’s banal symmetry and
kitschy naturalism.28 These photographs help to bridge or at least minimize
the gap that sometimes exists between Belling’s sculptures and Einstein’s
language and ideas.
It is also true that if not all of Belling’s sculptures included in Die Kunst
des 20. Jahrhunderts – to say nothing of those not included – live up to Einstein’s analyses, neither do they follow the dictates of Adolf von Hildebrand,
whose relief theory of sculpture had called for all sculptural form to remain
behind a clearly articulated frontal plane, a kind of imaginary window pane
beyond which nothing should protrude.29 That is certainly not the case even
28 Along with a drinking fountain (see Fig. 6) and coat of arms by Belling, the portrait of Haertel,
a founder of the Gewerkschaft Druck und Papier, was commissioned for Max Taut’s Verbandshaus der Deutschen Buchdrucker in Berlin. See Nerdinger, pp. 203, 241–2.
29 Adolf Hildebrand: The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts, in: Empathy, Form and Space. Problems
in German Aesthetics 1873–1893. Ed. by Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou,
Forget Rudolf Belling
115
with Belling’s reliefs, such as the Bildnis Richard Haertel, where figures tend to
pop out, almost fully separating from their ground. Belling’s disregard of
Hildebrand’s sculptural principles – in his writings, too, he often used Hildebrand as a foil30 – may alone have been enough to make his work attractive
for Einstein and justified his sustained support, despite any reservations. Indeed, Einstein was particularly excited about the Bildnis Richard Haertel,
which he wrote about in Der Querschnitt in 1927 as a “surprising example”
of Belling’s “fondness for carefully concretizing his fantasies of form. […]
In this portrait free form and the highest objectivity are congruent. […] Let
us say it clearly: with this achievement Belling has proven himself as the predestined [berufene] German monumental sculptor.”31
3.
Einstein’s praise for Belling did have its limits. He notes in 1926, for instance,
that Belling’s early cubist style at times remains just a “decorative vulgarization of a sketch” and allows that his work sometimes risks slipping into “stylized compromise.”32 On the whole, however, Einstein was remarkably tolerant of Belling’s rapid style change and eclecticism. If his praise of Belling has
some qualifications, these were minor compared to his harsh treatment of
other leading sculptors. There is the well-known story of Ernesto de Fiori,
who, enraged at being referred to in Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts as Maillol’s
“talented follower,” attacked Einstein shortly after its publication, hitting him
on the head with copy a of the massive book.33
There is also the example of Alexander Archipenko, to whom Belling is
often compared for their shared interest in breaking open the solid mass of
sculpture. Like Belling, Archipenko was enormously successful in Germany
in the late 1910s early 1920s, before reverting to a kind of stylized naturalism as his career and reputation began a steady decline. In Die Kunst des
30
31
32
33
Santa Monica: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities 1994, esp. chapter
IV, “The Concept of Relief,” pp. 251–60.
Belling, untitled contribution, in: H.M. Pechstein und Rudolf Belling. Buch der Galerie Goyert 3
(Cologne: Galerie Goyert 1921); Belling, letter to the Karl-Ernst-Osthaus Museum, Hagen, 16
September 1956, published in: Drei deutsche Künstler im Ausland. Belling – Battke – Wieghardt
(Hagen: Karl-Ernst-Osthaus Museum, 1956); and Belling: Zum Raumproblem in der Skulptur, in: Rudolf Belling. Ed. by Herta Elisabeth Killy, Berlin: Akademie der Künste 1962; see
Nerdinger, pp. 216ff.
“Belling liebt es heute, seine Formphantasie sorgsam zu konkretisieren. Ein überraschendes
Beispiel gibt das Bildnis Haertel [...] Freie Form und höchste Gegenständlichkeit sind in diesem Porträt kongruent. […] Sagen wir es deutlich: mit dieser Leistung hat sich Belling als der
berufene deutsche Monumentalplastiker erwiesen.” Carl Einstein: Rudolf Belling, in: Der Querschnitt 7:5 (1927), pp. 381–2, repr. in BA 2, 501–3, quotation p. 502.
“dekorativer Vergröberung einer Skizze”; “stillisierendes Kompromiß.” (K1, 173, 174)
“begabten Nachkommen,” K 1, 166. Cf. Uwe Fleckner and Thomas Gaehtgens: “Schauend
ändert man Menschen und Welt.“ Carl Einstein und die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, in: BA 5,
7–8.
116
Paul Monty Paret
Fig. 5. Rudolf Belling, Versilberter Bronzschild (Symbolschild), 1928, silver-plated bronze and
brass. From: Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, 1931, p. 617. © 2012 Artists Right Society (ARS),
New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
20. Jahrhunderts Einstein concludes that “[d]espite all his cubism, [Archipenko] emphasizes the usual frontality” and “almost nervously preserves a cloying closed contour.”34 When we compare works by Archipenko and Belling,
especially from the late 1920s, which Einstein included as illustrations, it is
not entirely clear why it is only Archipenko who receives this verdict.
An additional puzzling aspect of Einstein’s support for Belling is his
willingness to ignore Belling’s many attempts to commercialize his sculpture
practice. The most successful of his commercial ventures was the ModenPlastiken or “fashion sculptures,” a neologism Belling coined for the stylized
elongated mannequins he developed in 1921, and patented and licensed to
34 “Trotz allem Kubismus betont man übliche Frontalität” and “Archipenko zerlegt wohl den
Körper, doch fast ängstlich bewahrt er einen süßlich geschlossenen Gesamtkontour.” (K 1,
173) For the 1931 edition where these comments are repeated, Einstein cut his text on Archipenko in half and reduced the illustrated works from eight to four. On Archipenko’s reputation see Paul Paret: Archipenko’s Failure: Sculpture and Criticism in Post-World War I Germany, in Paret and Michael White: Russian Berlin in the 1920s (Essays on Sculpture, No. 54),
Leeds: Henry Moore Institute 2006, pp. 7–15.
Forget Rudolf Belling
117
be manufactured in the following years.35 Belling’s Moden-Plastiken were
heavily promoted and for a time commercially quite successful and widely
used in department store display windows. In later years Belling distanced
himself from this work, but in the 1920s he did not hold these commercial
efforts separate from his other sculpture. The Moden-Plastiken received considerable favorable attention in the art press at the time and were included
in Belling’s 1924 exhibition at the Kronprinzenpalais. Not surprisingly, Einstein does not mention them in his catalog essay or, for that matter, in his
other writings on Belling. There is some irony in the fact that Einstein, who
railed against art critics and historians who served only the interests of commerce and sales, consistently threw his support behind one of the most opportunistic, commercially minded artists of the Weimar Republic.
The task of supporting Belling likely became harder for Einstein over
the course of the 1920s as Belling’s work moved increasingly toward stylized
idioms of naturalism (Porträt Friedrich Ebert, 1927, or Max Schmeling, 1929)
and social realism (Bergarbeiter, 1930), and was driven largely by commissions. Einstein, nonetheless, continued to support Belling throughout the
late 1920s. We have already seen his admiration for the Bildnis Richard Haertel
in 1927 Der Querschnitt, where Einstein also reiterates his fundamental praise
that Belling “freely invents three-dimensional forms and does not believe
something is sculptural if mass just sits behind a contour.”36 In 1928 Einstein published another positive article, “Les Fontaines de Rudolf Belling,”
in Cahiers d’Art. Focusing on an elaborate art deco drinking fountain (Fig. 6)
Belling made for the Max Taut’s Buchdruckerhaus, Berlin (where his Bildnis
Richard Haertel was also installed), Einstein again makes the claim that
“[a]mong German sculptors, Belling has reacted the most strongly against a
too complacent tradition.” About this fountain in particular, Einstein writes,
Belling “has succeeded in using light and air as architectonic forms and creates a polyphonic fugue of dense volumes and negative volumes, of resolute
emptiness. He has in this way demonstrated that sculptural form is not only
a mass locked in by line.”37
35 Belling’s Moden-Plastiken were manufactured by the Erdmannsdorfer Büstenfabrik, which produced an elaborate sales catalog with photographs, excerpts from the art press and advertising
trade journals, claiming that Belling’s figures were use in 101 German cities and twenty foreign
countries; Gerta Elisabeth Thiele: Die Moden-Plastik. Entwurf des Bildhauers Rudolf Belling. Ein
Handbuch für ihre Anwendung in der Schaufenster-Dekoration, Berlin: Erdmannsdorfer Büstenfabrik
A.-G. 1924. See especially Harold Hammer-Schenk: Das patentierte Kunstwerk: Rudolf Bellings Moden-Plastiken, in: Bazon Brock et al., Ikonographia: Anleitung zum Lesen von Bildern, Munich: Klinkhardt und Biermann 1990, pp. 297–306.
36 “Er erfindet freie dreidimensionale Formen und glaubt nicht, daß ein Ding plastisch sei, wenn
hinter einem Kontur Masse sitze.” (BA 2, 502)
37 “Parmi les sculpteurs allemands, Belling a réagi le plus fort contre un heritage trop facile. …Il
réussit à utiliser la lumière et l’air commes formes architectoniques et réalisa une fugue polyphone de volumes denses et de volumes négatifs – de vides determines. Il a ainsi démontré,
118
Paul Monty Paret
Fig. 6. Rudolf Belling, Wand-Trinkbrunnen, 1926, colored ceramic and brass. From Carl
Einstein, “Les Fontaines de Rudolf Belling,” in: Cahiers d’Art 1928, no. 3, p. 133.
© 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
For the revised, third edition of Die Kunst des 20 Jahrhunderts (1931) Einstein made many changes but left his text on Belling essentially intact – he
eliminates only the concluding sentence, which had expressed hope for an
architecture befitting Belling’s sculpture. At the beginning of the revised
chapter, Einstein adds a new paragraph offering a partial overview and
summary of developments. Belling, he clarifies, belongs to the stream of
sculptors, including Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Henri Laurens and Jacques
Lipschitz, who made the “turn toward cubism.” Referring to these figures
Einstein writes: “Now one dares to break with classical tradition; the unified
figure and the concentrated formal masses are dissolved and shattered.”38
que la forme plastique n’est pas seulement une masse, enfermée par des lignes.” Carl Einstein:
Les Fontaines de Rudolf Belling, in: Cahiers d’Art 3 (1928), p. 133, repr. BA 2, 526.
38 “[…] die Wendung zum Kubismus. […] Nun wagt man den Bruch mit der klassischen Über-
Forget Rudolf Belling
119
Most importantly, for the 1931 edition Einstein extends his discussion of
sculpture with brief paragraphs on Hans Arp and Alberto Giacometti, signaling his increasing interest in surrealism. Still prominent, Belling no longer
occupies the highest point of sculptural developments, as it is now Giacometti who, Einstein tentatively concludes, “breaks away perhaps the furthest
from inhibitions imposed by inherited concepts of mass.”39
4.
If Einstein was not bothered by Belling’s stylistic eclecticism, sentimentality,
commercialism, and increasingly reactionary social-realist figurative aesthetic,
the same cannot be said for later historians of modern sculpture. Indeed, Belling’s 1924 exhibition at Berlin’s Kronprinzenpalais, the occasion of Einstein’s
first writing on the artist, in many ways marked the height of Belling’s reputation, which soon began a quick and precipitous decline. Although in 1931
Belling was elected to the Prussian Academy of Art (from which he was
forced to resign in 1937), after the exhibition in the Kronprinzenpalais his
next solo exhibition would not be until 1935 at the Weyhe gallery in New
York, and in Germany not again until the 1950s. In 1937 Belling’s Dreiklang
and Kopf in Messing, both confiscated from the Kronzprinzenpalais, were displayed in the Degenerate Art exhibition. Astonishingly, at exactly the same
time in Munich, Belling’s realist three-quarter length portrait of the boxer
Max Schmeling was included in Great German Art Exhibition of officially recognized and approved German art.40 By January 1937 Belling had left Germany to accept a position in Turkey at the Istanbul Art Academy (he would
not return to Germany until 1966), where he completed numerous neo-classicizing portrait commissions including a life-sized bronze statue and an
over-life-sized equestrian monument for the Turkish president, Ismet Inönü.41 Not only did Belling never regain the status he briefly held in Germany
in the early 1920s, but even his work from these years is rarely granted anything more than minor historical significance.
lieferung, die einheitliche Gestalt und die gesammelten Formmassen werden aufgelöst und
zerbrochen.” (K 3, 218)
39 “Giacometti […] löste sich vielleicht am weitesten von aller Befangenheit ererbter Vorstellungsmassen.” (K 3, 229)
40 On the complexity of Belling’s reception and activities under National Socialism, see Burcu
Dogramaci: Die zweispältige Rezeption eines Bildhauers. Rudolf Belling und seine Plastik
‘Dreiklang’, in: Das verfemte Meisterwerk. Schicksalswege moderner Kunst im ‘Dritten Reich’. Ed. by
Uwe Fleckner, Berlin: Akademie Verlag 2009, pp. 307–33.
41 On Belling’s works during his time in Turkey, see the catalog in Nerdinger, pp. 252–268. After
the war Belling had hopes of returning to West Berlin and obtaining a teaching position. See
Dogramaci, p. 329, and the selections of Belling’s post-war correspondence in: “und die Vergangenheit sitzt immer mit am Tisch.” Dokumente zur Geschichte der Akademie der Künste (West) 1945/
1954–1993. Ed. by Christine Fischer-Defoy, Berlin: Stiftung Archiv Akademie der Künste and
Henschel 1997, pp. 198–203.
120
Paul Monty Paret
Given Belling’s relatively low standing within the history of modernism,
it is not particularly surprising that Einstein’s commitment to Belling remains far below the radar, even among the growing number of scholars reexamining Einstein’s complex work and legacy. Belling, in fact, has been almost completely absent, occasionally glaringly so from the expanding
literature on Einstein’s writings on art and aesthetics. To take just one example, Belling is notably missing from Uwe Fleckner’s 2006 Carl Einstein und
sein Jahrhundert and the related 2008 exhibition catalog, The Invention of the
20th Century: Carl Einstein and the Avant-Gardes. Although the subtitle of
Fleckner’s ambitious book offers the defense of being only “fragments of
an intellectual biography,” it seems that Belling simply does not belong to
the 20th century that we imagine Carl Einstein “invented.” A partial exception is Klaus Kiefer’s use of Belling’s drawing Kopf, with its handwritten
dedication to Einstein, on the cover of his edited volume Die visuelle Wende
der Moderne: Carl Einsteins Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, although as Kiefer notes
Belling is nowhere discussed within the volume.42
The Einstein who wrote about and championed Belling is apparently
not the Einstein we want. But if not Belling, who? This is the question that
Zeidler answers candidly, if also unintentionally, with his almost off-hand
lament that Einstein never wrote at length about Constantin Brancusi. The
little Einstein did write about Brancusi turns out to be extremely negative,
describing him in the first edition of Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts as an artist
“who appears to seek something like archetypes; an attempt at the monumental with totally insufficient means. Effect: a bluff, or a chimera of a private Egypt.” Far from warming to Brancusi for the 1931 edition, as he did
with Arp and Giacometti, not to mention Klee, Einstein adds that with
Brancusi, “the simplified forms are all too lacking in contrast.”43
It is fascinating to imagine an Einstein who recognized Brancusi’s
formal achievements and valued his surrealist and ethnographic impulses.
Einstein after all included six well-chosen Brancusi objects and photographs
for the 1931 edition.44 To many of us these Brancusi images may suggest
something very different than “simplified forms lacking in contrast.” Informed by decades of visually attentive and theoretically rich scholarship on
Brancusi we are more likely to see in these images evidence of Brancusi’s
subtly destructive sculpture full of nuanced inversions, reabsorbed pedestals, exploded contours and multiplying forms. Yet that was not Einstein’s
judgment; he saw none of those things. Instead of Einstein on Brancusi, we
get Einstein on Belling.
42 Klaus Kiefer: Zur Einführung, in: Die visuelle Wende der Moderne, p. 15.
43 “der etwas wie Urformen zu suchen scheint; ein Versuch zum Monumentalen mit gänzlich
unzureichenden Mitteln. Wirkung: ein Bluff oder eine Chimäre privaten Ägyptens”, K 1, 168;
“die Gestalt zu allzu kontrastloser Einheitlichkeit vereinfachte”, K 3, 218.
44 K 3, 618–23. Only three Brancusis had been reproduced in the 1926 edition.
Forget Rudolf Belling
121
I suspect, finally, that it is not only the comparatively low regard for Belling that has made him such a dead zone in Einstein scholarship. There may
also be the unconscious wish, even need, to imagine an Einstein who had
actually championed Brancusi instead of Belling. Exceptionally expressed by
Zeidler, this wish may perversely drive a continuing blind spot about Einstein’s commitment to Belling. In other words, to acknowledge Belling fully
might be to foreclose on the fantasy of Brancusi or another figure who
could carry Einstein’s theory of sculptural totality beyond the tribal objects
of Negerplastik and into the European avant-garde. We may well deserve
such an Einstein, one who recognized the formal rigor of Brancusi rather
than the cloying sentimentality of Belling. But we do not get the Einstein we
want and must deal instead with the Einstein we have.
spectrum Literaturwissenschaft /
spectrum Literature
Komparatistische Studien /
Comparative Studies
Herausgegeben von / Edited by
Moritz Baßler · Werner Frick · Monika Schmitz-Emans
Wissenschaftlicher Beirat / Editorial Board
Sam-Huan Ahn · Peter-André Alt · Aleida Assmann · Francis Claudon
Marcus Deufert · Wolfgang Matzat · Fritz Paul · Terence James Reed
Herta Schmid · Simone Winko · Bernhard Zimmermann
Theodore Ziolkowski
30
De Gruyter
Carl Einstein und
die europäische Avantgarde /
Carl Einstein and
the European Avant-Garde
Herausgegeben von / Edited by
Nicola Creighton
Andreas Kramer
De Gruyter
Gedruckt mit freundlicher Unterstützung der Geschwister Boehringer Ingelheim
Stiftung für Geisteswissenschaften in Ingelheim am Rhein
ISBN 978-3-11-029115-5
e-ISBN 978-3-11-029129-2
ISSN 1860-210X
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
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Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen
Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet
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