Timothy O. Benson - Expressionist Utopias: Paradise, Metropolis, Architectural Fantasy

Benson, Timothy O., 1950

Frisby, David

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

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1 he notion of Utopia exists in every culture, capturing shared dreams and common goals. Meaning paradoxically both "no place" and "a good place," utopia also challenges humanity to bring this dream into existence. If all the arts offer a realm of fantasy where Utopian ideals can be embodied and shared, then architecture is especially captivating, in part because it provides the communal spaces of cultural identitymeeting rooms, religious structures, and government buildingsand presents the opportunity to conceive and build a new environment for humanity.

This volume was prepared in conjunction with the exhibition Expressionist Utopias: Paradise, Metropolis, Architectural Fantasy, organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The exhibition explores how the optimistic and forward-looking themes of utopia and fantasy sustained faith among artists and architects in the power of art to shape a better world during the tumultuous era surrounding World War I in Germany. When the construction of buildings there became nearly impossible, paper became the medium of the unbridled imagination. At the center of this activity were the "utopian architects" of the Working Council for Art and the Crystal Chain, whose architectural inventions ranged from ideal agrarian communities to futuristic worlds dependent on miraculous advances in technology for their creation or discovery. The exhibition's curator, Timothy O. Benson, presents the diverse manifestations of the utopia metaphor in its progression throughout Expressionism from arcadian to manmade Utopias using selections from the realms of paradise, metropolis, architectural fantasy, anti-utopia, and film and stage.

In his introductory essay in this volume Benson argues that the imagery of Utopia in early modernism was transformed from a nostalgic paradise "discovered" in nature to a condition that could be "constructed" in culture. Reinhold Heller examines the Dresden Brucke artists' integration of art and life in both nature and the studio using paradisiacal imagery of the nude. David Frisby shows how Expressionist art became a responsive embodiment of the disunified experience of the metropolis, leading to a utopian vision of the future imbedded in the fragmentary present. Iain Boyd Whyte sees the Romantic heritage of the sublime expanding from its association with nature to become identified with the processes and products of

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expressionist Utopias

PARADISE + METROPOLIS * ARCHITECTURAL FANTASY

Timothy O. Benson

With contributions by David Frisby

Reinhold Heller Anton Kaes

Iain Boyd Whyte

LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART

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6 Foreword 8 Introduction

12 Fantasy and Functionality: The Fate of Utopia Timothy O. Benson

56 Plates: Paradise

62 Bridge to Utopia: The Briicke as Utopian Experiment Reinhold Heller

84 Plates: Metropolis

88 Social Theory, the Metropolis, and Expressionism David Frisby

112 Plates: Architectural Fantasy

118 The Expressionist Sublime Jain Boyd Whyte

138 Plates: Film and Stage

146 Metropolis: City, Cinema, Modernity Anton Kaes

166 Plates: Anti-Utopia

171 Catalogue of the Exhibition

261 Appendix: Essays, Articles, Manifestos, Letters, and Other Writings

307 Selected Bibliography

315 Acknowledgments

318 Lenders to the Exhibition

319 Photo Credits

320 Index

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expressionist Utopias: Paradise, Metropolis, Architectural Fantasy presents an often overlooked aspect of German Expressionist art. In the first decades of this century Expressionist artists and architects produced images of a newarchitecture and of planned cities where harmonious and just social conditions prevailed. They created these visionary prints, drawings, and watercolors in the recognition that their efforts for the betterment of the world must begin with changes within themselves, their art, and existing social institutions. However unrealizable these projects may have been, they suggested a more humane vision of what might be accomplished, from which we can still draw inspiration as we approach the next millennium.

This exhibition continues the important commitment to the German cultural heritage made by the museum over the past decade. In 1987 the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies was opened, and the two-volume scholarly catalogue German Expressionist Prints and Drawings: The Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies was published. The museum has examined various aspects of Expressionism in the exhibitions German Expressionist Sculpture, German Expressionism 1Q15-1Q25: The Second Generation, The Apocalyptic Landscapes ofLudwig Meidner, and "Degenerate Art": The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany.