Click Here To See Hans Richter Rythmus 21 at www.jonasmekas.com

HANS RICHTER

The death knell for Dada sounded in 1924, according to art historians,
and many artists moved into Surrealism. Others, like Richter ( 1888 - 1976),
a founder of Zurich Dada, never vacated the premises. In fact, he wrote
one of the early comprehensive texts on the subject,
"Dada: Art and Anti-Art" (1965). Richter's enduring allegiance to
the anti-movement is evident in this sweeping gallery survey,
where abstract geometric paintings, Arp-like wood reliefs,
and charcoal drawings crafted throughout his career could
all easily be dated in the teens. His most exciting contribution,
however, was his films, several of which flicker on flat-screen monitors.
"Rhythm 21 " (1921), in particular, was among the first avant-garde
films to feature abstraction, and pointed the way for later practitioners
like Stan Brakhage.
Through Sept. 15. (Stendhal, 545 W. 20th St. 212-366-1549.)

Hans Richter
by David Markus

Hans Richter (left) “Cohesion II” (1967). Painted aluminum relief on painted wood: 32.75” * 20.75” Courtesy of Maya Stendhal Gallery.

Art and Anti-Art
Maya Stendhal Gallery June 15-September 16, 2006

Hans Richter is best known to art history for his contributions to avant-garde cinema. “Rhythmus 21” (1921)— one of the earliest examples of abstract film—set a precedent for the application of painterly formalism to the expanding realm of cinematography. And works like “Ghosts Before Breakfast” (1927) and “Everything Turns” (1929) brought Dada’s self-conscious modernity and societal critique to a new, revolutionary medium. But Richter’s commitment to the principles of early twentieth century modernism extended beyond the celluloid reel. As the current exhibit at Maya Stendhal affirms, the filmic work of Hans Richter can only be properly appreciated as a consolidation of ideas developed in Richter’s equally remarkable career as a painter.

For a somewhat underappreciated art-historical figure, Richter held an important place in the development of numerous key movements of the twentieth century, from Der Blau Reiter expressionism and Dada to his breakthrough films and the adaptation of Constructivist principles in his later painted works. Intended to coincide with the arrival of Dada at the Museum of Modern Art, this mini-retrospective provides a welcome overview of the artist in lieu of his
ancillary role in that museum's current blockbuster exhibit.

Divided by period into Stendhal's several galleries, Richter’s work is presented as that of an artist whose continual creative reincarnations over a sixty-year span are unified by a vision of focused singularity. What Richter seems to struggle with most ardently is the paradox of preserving expressive freedom (likened, via the thinking of artist friend Hans Arp, to the principle of “chance”) while adhering to the most scrupulous of formal codes. Despite his philosophical devotion to Dada, the whimsical irreverence typically associated with that movement—which Richter himself refers to as the “skin” rather than the “bone and flesh” of Dada’s approach—emerges in his work only occasionally, as in the heteroclite “Justicia Minor” from 1917. Richter’s surrealistic film experiments were often heavily influenced by friends such as Duchamp, Ernst, Huelsenbeck, and Schwitters, but his most personalized works appear more at home among the aesthetic ambitions of Constructivism than the socio-cultural nihilism of his Zurich and New York peers.

Foremost, it is the assiduity with which Richter applied himself to formal dilemmas—namely, the attempt to find a visual code for musicality through color association and the repetition of form—that defines him as an artist. And in light of this ambition toward a concrete representation of the rhythmic, cinema, (with its synthesis of time and space), seems a natural destination. Still, never does one expressive mode appear to take precedence over the other. As if in conscious accord with the Hegelian principle of Aufhebung, in which a previous conception is both superceded and preserved by its usurper, Richter’s oeuvre functions dialectically; the work ambulates across media, while the nomadic spirit driving it remains essentially unaltered. Thus, his portrait of Arp from 1958 appears as a constructivist collage of the original pencil drawing from 1918, and a group of serigraphs completed near the end of his life bear titles referencing both the date of their creation and the date, some fifty years prior, of their mental inception.

Richter's debt to Arp's creative output and philosophy is plainly apparent. Certain abstract composite works from the Stendhal exhibit, when compared with those by Arp currently on view at the Modern, are as indistinguishable from one another as the analytic cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque. As a stroll through the upstairs galleries at MoMA will affirm, the creative movements in which Richter played a part were defiantly international and, to some degree, collective in terms of their constituents’ proprietary relationship to creative/intellectual material. Because of his consistent tendency toward a derivative approach, it is easy to understand how Richter’s legacy has been eclipsed by the more monumental figures of his time. But the Stendhal exhibit is helpful in elucidating the unique character of Richter’s vision, particularly in its inclusion of several mid-period works whose authorial originality are outshone only by the abstract films Richter completed in the 1920s. “Simple Gestures Variation,” from 1959, and several related canvasses from that period achieve the universal language Richter sought throughout his career to convey through art. Carefully balanced but shot through with motion, they accord with Richter’s proposition that rhythm is “not definite, regular succession in time or space, but the unity binding all parts into a whole.” What this timely, well-conceived exhibit ultimately reveals is a most trenchant creative spirit following what he termed the “sensuous appeal of chance” to its fullest conclusion.

New PersDectives on Dada & Cubism

By JOHN GOODRICH

As art movements go, Dada burned brightly and briefly, its spirit too nihilistic to be sustained by mere paint and poems. Jean Arp and Marcel Duchamp moved on to influential careers, but the Berlin-born Hans Richter (1888-1976), a founder of Dada's Zurich chapter and author of the history "Dada: Art and Anti-Art," is less remembered. Maya Stendhal's handsome survey of more than I00 of his drawings, prints, paintings, assemblages, and reliefs could use a few more explanatory labels and elaboration of his work in film, but it amply demonstrates the artist's protean gifts.

HANS RICHTER: DADA - ART AND ANTI-ART
Maya Stendhal Gallery

TOWARD A NEW AMERICAN CUBISM
Berry-Hill Galleries

EVA LUNDSAGER: WHEREVER
Greenberg Van Doren Gallery

Richter's earliest Dadaist works on view include a series of raw, expressionist portraits executed between 1916 and 1918 in ink, colored pencil, and linocut. He soon turned to geometric abstraction, and from then on his radicalism found its voice - remarkably enough - in lyrical, playful composition, In 1919, he produced the first of his "scroll paintings," long, thin compositions paced by rhythmically evolving shapes. (Unsurprisingly, these sequential images coincide with his first abstract experiments in film.) He revisited this format over the years with such works as the 7-foot-tall oil painting "Fugue 8" (1958) arid the 11-foot-wide serigraph "Fugue 23" (1976). All are notable for their linear sense of time; unlike most traditional paintings even abstractions - there's little doubt about the progressions of movements.

His more compact designs employed a bewildering variety of materials. The de Stijl-like canvas "Towards a Perfect Painting (1946) opposes jazzy thrusts of red, blue, and black on a white background. With delightful irreverence bits of corrugated cardboard animate two collages from 1970. Several reliefs incorporate polished metal cutouts, and even, in the case of "Three Little Themes" (1964), copper strips applied artfully to termite-eaten planks.

Despite these works' revolutionary mots, a poetic orderliness prevails. Two wood reliefs fmm 1974, both titled "Dada Head (After Drawing 1918)," reflect the persistent balance of logic and lyricism. Their playfully abstracted features are engaging but not startling, as if guided by wit and application rather than by, say, Arp's drive for pure, plastic discovery and climactic tensions.

Richter aficionados will be pleased to see films playing on two screens. His later films, produced after he settled in the United States, include "8x8" (1957), in which Duchamp, megaphone in hand, dourly supervises a giant chess game with live playing pieces. The earlier black-and-white short films are less dryly cerebral. In "Rhythm 21" (1921), rectangles expand and shift across the screen in pregnant intervals. Though conceptually simple, its effect is hypnotic. "Ghosts Before Breakfast" (1927) constructs a provocative pseudo-narrative out of self-propelled bowler hats, self-filling coffee cups, and vanishing beards - their juxtapositions made even stranger by dramatic lighting and camera angles. In it, one senses an acute intelligence at work, freewheeling in its outlook but insisting on its own, discreet rhythms ...

Hans Richter (1888-1976)
Dada: Art and Anti-Art

Maya Stendhal Gallery
545 West 20th Street, Chelsea Through Sept. 16

Hans Richter might have been a great avant-garde filmmaker, but the late abstract paintings and reliefs that dominate this partial yet dauntingly large survey of his work feel like well-made acts of desperation. Dating mostly from the last three decades of his long life, they suggest that Richter the object-maker didn't have much to say but couldn't stop saying it. His commitment to painting began when he saw Manet's work in Berlin in 1904. Within a few years he was working in a German Expressionist style. By 19 16 he had landed in Switzerland and hooked up with the Zurich Dadaists, and was soon making portraits in a dark studio to disorient his sense of shape and color. The trick worked. Two bright, nearly abstract off-kilter works in the sprawling Dada exhibition currently at the Museum of Modern Art have a jangling, period-piece beauty.

But Richter found himself as an artist when he began experimenting with film. In Berlin in the 1920's he made several short, gorgeous contributions to the canon of avant-garde cinema. His "Rhythm 21 " (1921), an elegant, geometric animated short that was among the earliest abstract films - as well as Op Art before the fact - is in the Stendhal show. Even better is the delirious "Ghosts Before Breakfast" (1927), an inventive, briskly syncopated exemplar of Surrealist elegance, insinuation and layering, dominated by a skittering trio of bowler hats. (It can also be seen at MoMA, drafted into Dada.)

Dada aside, Richter was very much a formalist, or a structuralist, aided by a sophisticated sense of visual humor first glimpsed, at Stendhal, in a series of small, quickly drawn caricatures of friends from his Zurich years. He played every cinematic option, including jumpcutting, slow motion, still images, blurred focus, zooms, negative and reversed sequences, lighting effects. (After immigrating to the United States in 1941, he worked for 14 years as director of the aptly named Institute of Film Techniques at City College.) At Stendhal, a few appealing abstract paintings from the late 1950's navigate an intriguing route between Mondrian and Abstract Expressionism with calligraphic lines and a palette of black, white, red and green. But just about everything else is some kind of pastiche. Sublimated into objects, without film's fluid, mercurial possibilities, Richter's formalist intelligence pushed forward on automatic pilot.

ROBERTA SMITH