ART CITIES:Berlin-Neolithic Childhood

The stock market crash and mass unemployment, political polarization, the industrialization of perception, the violence of colonialism: “c. 1930” was a time of crisis in modernity. For the artistic Avant-Gardes in Europe, the contemporary condition also became problematic; the impositions of the present led artists to break out into an imaginary realm of the archaic and the exotic, seeking out alternative origins and points of departure for humanity.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Haus der Kulturen der Welt Archive

How did the artistic Avant-Garde react to the multiple crises of European modernity around 1930? The exhibition and research project “Neolithic Childhood. Art in a False Present, c. 1930” does not set out to trace anew the failure of art in the face of reality. Instead, it examines the breathtaking, often contradictory fusion of aesthetic, scientific, and political strategies which protagonists in Paris, Berlin and Prague, employed during the decade between the world wars in response to a present experienced as “fundamentally false”. The exhibition’s title is derived from Carl Einstein. In an essay on Jean (Hans) Arp’s art, the art historian interpreted the pictorial elements in his work as the repetition of children’s ritual “prehistoric”-like play. Based on Einstein’s writings the exhibition addresses the productive despair over the present in Europe around 1930. The loss of social cohesion, the isolation of the individual, and the atomization of society was diagnosed everywhere. It appeared necessary to re-establish the social order, or to leave it behind completely. Thus the interest in “archaic layers” also rose. From the 1920s to the 1940s, the artistic Avant-Garde in the context of Surrealism became intertwined with the human sciences. The exhibition documents this intensive interaction between the visual arts, politics, philosophy, ethnology, psychology, and the natural sciences in an epoch of historic upheavals. From Max Ernst’s series of works on non-human natural history and Brassaï’s photographs of prehistoric-looking graffiti to the sexual iconographies of Toyen and Catherine Yarrow’s mask-like watercolors: the aesthetic politics of Surrealism play a central role in the exhibition, 180 artworks and 600 archival sources propose an insight into the interaction between the visual arts, politics, philosophy, ethnology, psychology, and the natural sciences in the period between the world wars. In the exhibition are on presentation works by: Hans Arp, Willi Baumeister, Georges Braque, Claude Cahun, Germaine Dulac, Sergei Eisenstein, Max Ernst, T. Lux Feininger, Florence Henri, Hannah Hoch, Heinrich Hoerle, Valentine Hugo, Paul Klee, Germaine Krull, Len Lye, André Masson, Richard Oelze, Wolfgang Paalen, Jean Painlevé, Alexandra Povòrina, Gaston-Louis Roux, Kurt Seligmann, Kalifala Sidibé, Jindřich Štyrský, Toyen, Frits Van den Berghe, Paule Vézelay, Catherine Yarrow.

Info: Curators: Anselm Franke and Tom Holert, Scientific Advice: Irene Albers, Susanne Leeb, Jenny Nachtigall and Kerstin Stakemeier, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10, Berlin, Duration: 13/4-9/7/17, Days & Hours: Wed-Mon 11:00-19:00, www.hkw.de