My Mother was not a name dropper. She just took it for granted that when speaking about someone, you would know the person in question. I know this infuriated a lot of her friends around the world when she wrote to them or even talking to them in person. I tried to keep up when I came to live in France. It wasn’t always easy. Even more so as my Australian upbringing had not taking into account film makers, painters, photographers, philosophers, psychiatrists - I could really call this Mother’s 4 P’s. For me Hans Richter was a painter. Not one that overwhelmed me and yet the name seemed to ring a bell. I went off to the Beaubourg in Metz to discover why.
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| Beaubourg Metz |
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| Looking down from the 3rd gallery |
This exhibition traces more than a half century of Hans Richter’s life using film as a catalyst. I had read about this before going to Metz but it wasn’t until I began visiting the exhibition that the puzzle fell into place.
The man worked in multiple domains. In fact you could say that his life was caught up in the tangled thread of the 20th century history. Born in Germany in 1888, he was in Munich during the Spartacist uprising in 1919, then in the USSR in the early 1930s. He was forced to flee Germany (one of those « degenerate artists ») because of the Nazi regime and then found refuge in Holland, France, Switzerland and ultimately in the USA. Looking at his work as I did in a virtually empty museum, there is a permeability between the forms of expression he uses. Then film came into the picture which had an influence on his art form and perhaps even the history of art in the early 20th century. He certainly crossed many artistic borders.
Perhaps not at the origin of Dada but some 50 years later he introduces the Dada movement again in another exhibition. A historian of this movement? He staged a vast retrospective of the DaDa period after emigrating to the States in 1966. Composed entirely of black and white photo panels. The exhibition was shown all over the world.
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| Musique DADA 1918 |
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| Photomontage pour Livre de HR 1971 |
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| Photomontage pour Livre de HR 1971 |
He also met up with artists who had moved to the States to escape the war. Americans too of course. Brancussi, Rodtchenko, Marcel Duchamp, Calder, Max Ernst, Fernand Légèr just to name a few.
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| Brancussi - L'Oiseau dans l'espace 1925 |
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| Alexandre Rodtchenko Paper figure and shadow 1926-27 |
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| M.D., Calder, Légèr, Ernst |
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| Max Ernst - Les trois1951 Cypres |
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| Fernand Leger - Les Grands Plongeurs noirs 1944 |
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| Marcel Janco Mask 1919 |
Moving from room to room, I felt he was zigzagging between painting, writing and film. A couple of groups of « oldies » arrived so I sat myself in front of a documentary on his life and watched that for an hour. The Beaubourg by then was empty again.
Now I saw that the puzzle was falling into place. Of course Mother would have talked about him. Richter contributed to a new photographic and filmic production and worked at times with Joris Ivens and Paul Strand. Friends of hers. It was strange seeing photos of these people, films that Strand had made and references to Joris’s work. So Mother would have said if I had asked her who Ritcher was. « An abstract film maker. Why, didn’t you know? » No I didn’t.
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| Joris Ivens - The Rain 1929 |
I liked his Visionary Portraits and Dada heads. That’s for sure.
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| Autoportrait 1917 |
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| Portrait visionnaire 1917 |
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| Portrait visionnaire 1917 |
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| Blue Man 1917 |
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| Autoportrait in red and | blue 1916 |
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| Autoportrait |
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| Portrait of Hans Arp 1918 |
I also began to understand what the scrolls were all about. They were themes for his abstract films, like Rhythm 21 which I learnt is a milestone in history of experimental film, and possibly Hans Richter’s masterwork. White squares and triangles on a black back-ground appear and disappear, attract and repel. Was he influenced by Malevich ? « Definitely not » he says. But the cross moves around in the film and is a little less monotonous than the black cross of Malevich. They were close friends too.
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| Rythm 23 - 1923 |
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| Orchestration of colours 1923-70 |
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| From Major to Minor 1960's | | |
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| Film strip collages - ghosts before brakfast 1950 |
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| For rythm 23 |
Even so, there were some paintings - when he came back to painting in the States, which reminded me very much of Malevich.
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| Malevich - Peinture suprémiste 1916/17 |
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| Toward a perfect painting 1946 - His first painting after years of film |
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| Dragon Fly 1943 |
The Liberation of Paris and the scroll on Stalingrad were not without interest.
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| Liberation of Paris |
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| Close up of Liberation |
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| Stalingrad 1943-46 |
Some of his early work was fun but my goodness, did he change his style.
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| The cubist period.... |
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| Dada |
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| Dada |
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| Workers 1911 |
It seems that there were more films than paintings to see. I watched them but not always from start to finish. Here is a short film I found on You Tube which he made in 1926. It gives a very good idea of the abstraction used in his experimental films.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRYepu7IqngHe died in 1976 in Switzerland. From a film I saw, he was still able to pick up a young woman in dance with her in his arms. He must have had energy until the end.
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