Rhythm

The rhythm of a work is equal to the idea of the whole. Rhythm is the thing that informs ideas, that which runs through the whole: sense = principle, from which each individual work first gets its meaning. Rhythm is not definite, regular succession in time or space, but the unity binding all parts into a whole.
The emotional world, as well as the intellectual, has laws governing its expression. It is much more the inner, nature-force which directly forms and animates ideas, through which we are bound up with the elemental nature-forces.
Just as the path of the intellectual formulating-power leads to thought, as a justifying moment of intellectual activity, so the emotional formulating-power leads to rhythm as the essence of emotional expression. Just as thought gives value to an abstract work so rhythm gives meaning to forms. Abstract activity for its own sake is the same as formal games for their own sake, they can be ingenious or subtle, but in any case they are futile, so long as they do not follow, to a letter, the whole determining impulse.
Rhythm expresses something different from thought. The meaning of both is incommensurable. Rhythm cannot be explained completely by thought nor can thought be put in terms of rhythm, or converted or reproduced. They both find their connection and identity in common and universal human life, the life principle, from which they spring and upon which they build further. The analysis of a rhythm can thus only be undertaken quite generally and comparatively, so long as it does not deal with material construction, with the discipline of building.

Hans Richter by Hans Richter, edited by Cleve Gray in 1971: Page 136

On Busoni and Musical/Rhythmical studies

During this time, still oscillating between chance and planning, improvisation and search for a reliable order, I met the Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni. During the First World War, Busoni held court, so to say, sitting on the round of the Kaspar Escher Fountain in front of the main railroad station in Zurich. Of course it was a little wet sometimes when the wind came from the wrong side, but he liked it there, and we often just stood around there talking to him. His court was in the evening. After that he would go into the first class restaurant of the station where he wrote the scripts for his operas. He loved the anonymity of the place and said he couldn’t work anywhere else. I came to him with my problem; I explained how I was trying to achieve a balance and counter-balance of the white paper with the black spots of ink I made my drawings with, a balance so that white and black were both part of the same work. I thought of it as kind of a musical problem. He said, “You are right. Why don’t you study counterpoint in music, because musical counterpoint has been used over a long period and there is quite an amount to learn from. Do you do a little playing on the piano?” I said, “Yes, do. I learned the hard way.” So he said, “Why don’t you study a little the preludes and fugues of Bach which he wrote for his wife, Anna Magdalena?” And I did; studied in them the up and down, the movements and countermovements all leading to a definite unity. These studies helped me enormously and gave me the idea that it could be done on a piece of paper. There is also the up and down, there is also strong and weak, a movement and countermovement. So then I used the paper like a musical instrument. This helped prepare me for my later meeting with the Swedish painter, Viking E. Eggeling, who had gone the same way but who was much more advanced, less as a painter but more as a draftsman. Eggeling used only pencil; he had very few paintings, and they were more didactic exercises than paintings. Anyhow, this experience with Busoni-Bach, you know, was really the basis of my further development. This further development took place in the years from 1918 to 1921 when I made my first film.

Hans Richter by Hans Richter, edited by Cleve Gray in 1971: page 37

“Language of Signs”

Each line is a sign.
Each sign is a gesture
Signs are the roots of communication.
Not only words communicate.
There are desires,
passions,
a whole realm of emotions and thoughts
demanding their own expression
different from words.
Nobody can speak signs,
signs speak themselves...
as music does,
or anguish, or joy.
Where the unspeakable
wants to speak,
words do not communicate,
signs do gestures do.
Gestures and signs melt into each other.
To speak the language of the unspeakable
artists have renewed the world,
opened up the abyss and the sky,
with signs.
Growing and disappearing
speak
confirm our existence.
Swinging
with such a transformation
transforms us.
Suddenly meaning evolves.
We understand...
without giving it
any name, just letting it
BE

The transformation of simple forms in a variety of new combinations lead to language.
From abstract gestures to “Vormittagsspuk”, 1927/1928

My first abstract film, 1921: Rhythm 21
Working with the problem of the articulation of time instead of the articulation of form as in painting.

To people in movement. Vormittagsspuk (Ghosts Before Breakfast), 1927.

Hans Richter, Opera Grafica dal 1902 al 1969, La Nuova Foglio Editrice 1976; Pages 311 to 341 ,

“A Painter Speaks to Painters”

What are we doing to oppose the battles that are raging all over Europe?
Everywhere and continuously—battles, killers, the death of human beings! Is that not our concern? Can anyone say that still-lives, nudes or any paintings, titled in some way or untitled, do anything in opposition?

Art is well established everywhere, and poor suffering men have the right to expect some artist to be the mouth of their soul (the soul of those who are less privileged in their ability to use image and word)—their mouth passionately cries out their pain.

Artists flee from the banality of this simple request. But look at the earth now! THAT is the reality. And testify whether the most banal of our demands is fulfilled and whether the very least IS done according to our sincere convictions.

We torture ourselves for special observations in our own field of work, yet in the end we haven’t even found a safe refuge on earth for our ideas and ideals.

If today we are forced to discard, to overcome, to sublimate, it is not done lightheartedly, for it is not in our character to jump on the bandwagon of heroic sacrifice. No. But if we continue to paint and work in the future without regard (as persons and as artists) to these events, we shall be painting and working for an earth void of spiritual heritage, for an earth of corpses.

Is it possible to be aware of this every day, every night, even though one might not be physically involved in it, and then forget it entirely?

If we ever expect to receive the gratitude of present and future generations, we will have to find a way to express human passion. The gratitude of deeply mutilated mankind is something far different from the gratitude of even the most sincere art-lover.

If something exists now in all men, it is the burning pain, disgust and shame of living and participating, at least morally, in such a devastating time even though our “good-will” or “better judgment” might oppose it.

How can we quietly accept the responsibility that everything is so cruel, brutal, devoid of the spiritual values we have cherished all our lives? How can we stand this without exploding in a roar of pain?

Hans Richter in Zeitecho, 1917

Works saved from the war

A year or so after my third wife and I divorced, I met Margarete Melzer. She had been the girlfriend of a well-known Communist writer, Friedrich Wolff, who was later a Communist Ambassador in Warsaw. He left her when he went to Russia. She told me when I met her, “You will be my next boyfriend.” “How do you know? I don’t know it myself,” I answered. But that was it. We were together ten years. She said to me, “I will never marry you, because as soon as one marries you one loses you.” She was wrong because I met my fourth wife Friedl in 1941, and I am still married to her.
But then Melzer and I were taken apart by Hitler. Though she was “100% Aryan” that didn’t help her because everybody thought she was the wife of Pudovkin, she was photographed with him so often when Pudovkin lived in my apartment in Berlin. And I took photos of them in Moscow and these were in the Berlin papers: “Margarete Melzer and the famous Russian director visiting Moscow.” Then it came out that she was my girlfriend, and I had made an anti-Nazi film, Metal! She was saved only because of Gruendgens, the famous Hamburg Theatre director who worked with the Nazis; he helped her get a job as star of the new theatre in the conquered city of Warsaw. The theatre never opened; she was paid a salary throughout the war and never played once. That’s when she started painting and became a well-known painter.
She died in 1959. She was the most generous person I ever met in my life. She gave herself all ways, as an actress, as a painter, as a human being. It was she who created the role of Mädchen in Uniform; she was considered for a time the greatest German actress. Thanks only to her I still possess a few drawings and paintings of those times. I had left with my sister a big folder of my work; Melzer kept it throughout the war. She sent it to me in the early ’50’s. It was my past she had saved.

Hans Richter by Hans Richter, edited by Cleve Gray in 1971: page 47

“On 8 x 8”

What attracted me to make 8 x 8 was, in a way, the intricate pattern which evolves in this fantastic game, chess, which one hundred years ago stimulated Lewis Carroll to write his deep and fantastic story, Through the Looking Glass. Though I did not remember Carroll till late in the game, I was fascinated by its aesthetic, its challenging quality, its unending human implications. It gave me freedom to invent. But no matter what I could invent, it kept both its symbolic relationships to life as it did to chess. A play of opposites: black against white, man against woman, good against evil. I took up the challenge and asked my artists and colleagues to play the game with me. They did.

About 8 x 8: I am not at all a passionate chess player; to the contrary, I am a poor chess player and get much more out of talking to Duchamp or Gabo about chess and what they feel about it than by using my efforts and matching my wits with a good player...the film itself, if you don’t tell anyone, has nothing to do with the chess game per Se. It relates to chess only inasmuch as human motivations can be paralleled to moves on the chessboard. A Queen can be seduced, a Knight can get into an unsolvable position, a King sets a trap, and so forth.

I have made 8 x 8 as an independent artist, and that gives me the freedom to experiment with sound as well as with the image. I think I have opened there a number of new ways in the use of sound. In spite of what I have said so far, I start the film with a burst of music, romantic clavichord music. After the audience settles down and relaxes, the changes start—whole sequences with sound effects only, interrupted stuttering speech, etc. In fact, these are the problems presented to the musician or composer of today.

On Dada

Art historians and critics, not too long ago, discovered Dada. They decided the movement was something like a glorified practical joke that had some useful destructive function at the time.

This definition has now been sanctioned by repetition and has become an “historical fact.” But we who were all together there when it happened look at it from another angle, not from the big noise we made together at the time to “épater le bourgeois” but from the ideas and problems with which we, the artists, were then concerned and which were the bone and flesh, though not necessarily the skin, of this movement. For example, under the name of “New Life” a group of creative Dadaists worked, exhibited and developed until 1922. What we still need is a treatise on the “Dada spirit” that had afforded us a special mental climate: a belief in the purity of man, a source of art welling up from the depths of the subconscious. While it was flabbergasting and mystifying, Dada also succeeded in creating pure poetry. While it was tearing down, Dada also experimented and created the foundations for a new social aesthetic to serve the artist—at least in its last, positive phase. It is a problem which is still awaiting its solution.

Dada will last. Not so much because of the experiments and the literary excesses that gave birth to Surrealism, but rather because of the creation of the prophetic spirit found in the works of Arp, in the poetry and art of Klee, in my scrolls, in the abstract films of Eggeling and me, in the attempts in mural paintings, abstract plastics, mosaics, and in the beautiful tapestries of Sophie Taeuber.

Dada was anything but a hoax; it was a turning on the road opening up wide horizons to the modern mind. It lasts and will last as long as the spirit of negation contains the ferment of the future.

Hans Richter by Hans Richter, edited by Cleve Gray in 1971: Page 101

On Dada’s debut

In August, the war started. In September, I was called up and immediately afterwards was inducted. My friends gave me a going-away party which had a bearing on my finally being in the Dada group two years later.
The German poet Ferdinand Hardekopf and the Austrian poet Albert Ehrenstein were at the party . . . friends of mine. To give me some hope and console me, they suggested that if we were still alive after two years, we should meet at 3:00 in the afternoon at the Café de La Terrasse in Zurich. It was on the 5th of September, 1914 that the party was given.

I was wounded some months later, in 1915. Some of us went into this trench, because we thought it was marvelous to have cover. The Russians had left it, so we went in. But the German artillery that had chased the Russians out of the trench didn’t know we were there. Suddenly they saw movement again, so they started shooting. One too long, one too short, and then we knew we were going to get it. The next shot was right in. A beam came down on me, on the seventh vertebra. 1 woke up two days later in Tilsit (Sovetsk), which is on the Lithuanian border, in the hospital. I was partially paralyzed for many months. When I went to sleep, I had to close my eye with my opposite hand, and I could speak with only one side of the mouth. Yet, I recovered and was released from the army, several hospitals and eleven months later, I think. At this time I married my nurse and went to Switzerland, remembering the rendezvous with my two friends. At 3:00 on September 15, at the café, there were Hardekopf and Ehrenstein. I also met Tzara for the first time, then.
Like that, I was part of the Dada group.

The World Between the Ox and the Swine, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 1971, pages 10 & 11.

Cardboard/Metal

love cardboard.
The cheap corrugated paper, the grey carton lid, the black adhesive tape. Something out of nothing!
That is how creation begins. What is
valueless has value. What is valuable is suspect. Possessions!
Customs admit the cardboard relief. It is valueless, is no possession.
But copper is beautiful, or brass, aluminium, iron. Metal is more intense than cardboard, harder, more glistening, or else more dull. More aggressive. Less yielding.
I love metal.
It resists. It dictates its own rhythm. It shines. It is proud… So very different from the friendlier cardboard which adapts itself willingly to chance, and remains undiscovered.

About Drawings

On Hila von Rebay And Guggenheim

Baroness Hula von Rebay

From 1914 to 1915 the blonde Hilla von Rebay with her new as well as erotic way of talking was my neighbour at my studio Kurfürstendamm 139, Berlin. She was the daughter of the commanding Prussian General in the then still-German Alsace. We dated until I was called “to arms”, in 1914, very much against my liking. Nothing till this moment hinted at the special role destiny had reserved for her. This destiny entered in the form of an abstract painter, Rudolf Bauer. He (and love) challenged her still sleeping dynamic personality and imagination. In the midst of the war she managed to arrive in the United States, where she met the Copper King Solomon Guggenheim. She convinced him that modern abstract art (and its greatest master Rudolf Bauer) was worth living for. Buying his work was an investment for the future. Guggenheim bought all the existing Bauers and the option for all future ones. A temporary museum for Bauer was installed in New York till the great Architect Frank Lloyd Wright was invited to build a monumental one to house other masters as well as Bauer.
Bauer himself was installed in the princely summer house of the Guggenheims in Deal, New Jersey, with a substantial apanage, for life.
The Guggenheim Museum became a sensation in New York, a “must” for visitors and for the greater glory of the billionaire Guggenheim and the forceful Baroness and, at least for a short time, also for Bauer.

On Tristan

TzaraTristan Tzara…is not only an inspired poet, but was also the most realistic and practical man of us all. Originating from the “little Paris of the Balkans”, Bukarest, he was the power behind Dada “movement” and represented the un-naïve and Latin part of it.
As a poet Tristan Tzara carried the art of “coincidence” to its logical extreme. His ‘‘Monsieur Antipirine” is still today an analgesic against un-imaginative poetry and banality. I took him up in my film “Dadascope” in which Tzara is declaiming it just as aggressively and ardently as ever.

On Hardekopf and Poetry

In 1971, I worked on a series of drawings dedicated to poet Hardekopf. In these drawings, I tried to contribute my view of love – music and night world of this poet.
Before the First World War, the café-concert or just “Le Café” was the meeting place of the avant-garde…
Poets and painters inspired each other…
For Number 4 of our review Dada, Arp, Janco and I each made a full page lino-cut, on separate themes…I chose poems by Ferdinand Hardekopf.

Hans Richter, Opera Grafica dal 1902 al 1969, La Nuova Foglio Editrice 1976; Pages 174 to 183.