Vision Loss: The Forgotten German Prophets Secretly Behind Modern Art

 The forgotten aspects of art history will always be the most intriguing. Digging up the dead storylines of art history, whether in the distant or the recent past, will never end, mostly thanks to forces that buried the facts, if not the bodies, for whatever agenda. Artists and Prophets: A Secret History of Modern Art 1872-1972 at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt resurrects German visionaries and Jesus wannabes from the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries to look at how their exploits and artistic creations helped shape the course of German and European modern art. It also shines light on how the impact of those figures fell into obscurity as another casualty of the ideological war waged by that most unfortunately unforgettable of German messianic aspirants — Adolf Hitler. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Vision Loss: The Forgotten German Prophets Secretly Behind Modern Art."

Designing Woman

“He who knows how to appreciate color relationships, the influence of one color on another, their contrasts and dissonances, is promised an infinitely diverse imagery,” Sonia Terk Delaunay once said. Born November 14, 1885, Sonia Delaunay and her husband Robert created some of the most powerful images of the Orphic school, such as her Electric Prisms (above, from 1914). Electric Prisms takes full advantage of Sonia’s incredible grasp of color relationships, playing the different tones off of one another, with all the subtle concordances and dissonances, as if she were playing on a musical instrument one of the compositions of her musical contemporaries Les Six.

Sonia and Robert followed the mystic lead of the Czech painter Frantisek Kupka, whose spirituality energized the earliest Orphic works. In many ways, Orphism stands at the intersection where turn of the century spiritualism, new color theories, and new musical innovations such as jazz all collide. Sonia’s Rhythm (above, from 1938) explicitly calls to mind this musical side of Orphism, where colors are meant to wash over the viewer like a symphony, appealing to the soul and the senses more than the rational mind. During their lifetime together, from their marriage in 1910 to Robert’s death in 1941, Sonia assumed a secondary role, allowing Robert’s art to take center stage. After his death, however, Sonia assumed her rightful place.

In 1964, the Louvre staged a retrospective exhibition of Sonia’s work, making her the first living woman artist so honored. In 1975, she became an officer of the French Legion of Honor. These accolades come not only in response to Sonia’s painting, but also for her work in theater design and fashion. Sonia’s startlingly designed (and startlingly uncomfortable) knitted wool swimsuit (above, from 1928) helped usher in a new age of fashion in the twentieth century linked to the latest art movements. With such designs, Sonia helped blur the line between fine art and fashion for future designers. By raising the previously disregarded area of textiles to the level of fine arts, Sonia paved the way for future artists such as Judy Chicago to create The Dinner Party, which incorporates all the supposedly lower, feminine arts in an epic work of grand art and feminism. Fittingly, Judy Chicago left a place at the table (albeit as one of the floor tiles) for Sonia Delaunay, one of the grand dames of modernism.

Body Color

With his shaved head and long, monkish robe, Johannes Itten cut an interesting figure in the halls of the Bahaus, where he taught the famed “preliminary course” from 1919 to 1922 that prepared his students for the diversified curriculum of that famed art school. Born November 11, 1888, Itten created a whole new way of looking at color, combining his own unique spiritual life and love of music to develop a nuanced, multifaceted approach to color, as can be seen in teaching tools such as his Farbkreis (above, from 1961). “He who wants to become a master of color must see, feel, and experience each individual color in its many endless combinations with all other colors,” Itten once wrote. “Colors must have a mystical capacity for spiritual expression, without being tied to objects."

Itten practiced the Mazdaznan faith, a religious health movement based on a combination of Christianity and Zoroastrianism that emphasized vegetarianism, breathing exercises, and the cultivation of the body. Before starting each class, Itten would make his students perform gymnastic exercises to loosen them up and free their bodies as much as their minds for his teachings. Itten wanted his students to feel color in their bodies as much as see it through their eyes and experience it in their minds. His book, The Art of Color, contains many of his almost mystical ideas on color and still inspires students today. In works such as Die Begegnung (above, from 1916), Itten put his theories into practice, creating images remarkably similar to those of the Orphic artists Frantisek Kupka and Sonia and Robert Delaunay.



Today, Itten is a forgotten figure, known only as a color theorist to intrigued specialists or as one of the many colorful characters who passed through the doors of the Bauhaus during its heyday. Space Composition I (above, from 1944) shows both Itten’s strengths and his weaknesses. In Space Composition I we see Itten composing an intricate web of color contrasts and dissonances, choosing each color with the surrounding colors in mind, maximizing each piece for maximum effect. Itten plays games with color like a chessmaster, thinking many moves ahead and seeing the whole board in a way that others simply can’t. I’ve tried to untangle for myself Itten’s color theories, but he is light years beyond me, which may be his weakness. Tied to such powerful ideas about the use of color, many of Itten’s works look like school exercises—elaborate color wheels rather than organic works of art. I just can’t feel the color in his works the way he hoped one would, which is probably more my weakness than his.

Bohemian Mystic

As a young man, Frantisek Kupka worked as a medium at séances, bridging the gap between this world and the next. Kupka, born September 23, 1871, used this true belief in the mystical and transcendent and created a form of abstract art that bridged the worlds of Fauvism and Cubism in works such as Planes by Colors, Large Nude (above) from 1909. This portrait of his wife Eugenie throbs with bright Fauvist color, taking the experiments of Henri Matisse even further, yet also incorporating Pablo Picasso’s Cubist explosion of the figure by seemingly looking into the insides of the body in an eerie prophesy of an MRI machine.

In works such as 1919’s The Colored One (above), Kupka uses explosively expressive color and evocative shapes to create an image totally divorced from this plane of reality to suggest higher planes. Born in Dobvuska, Bohemia, Kupka was truly a wild Bohemian, intensely spiritual in all aspects of his life. Although Kupka studied under Sequens and Eisenmenger, two minor members of the devoutly Christian German art school known as the Nazarenes, his spirituality never takes any orthodox form. He actually painted quite naturalistically until 1906, when he felt the constrictions of realism too greatly. After the transitional stage in which works such as The Large Nude were painted, Kupka allowed himself total freedom from recognizable subjects. “The work of art, being itself abstract reality,” Kupka once said, “needs to be made up of invented elements.”

Kupka composed with colors and geometric shapes the way musicians compose with notes and rhythms. He recognized this parallel and titled many of his works with musical terms, such as Amphora: Fugure in Two Colors (above) from 1912. Robert and Sonia Delaunay were greatly influenced by Kupka’s paintings and modeled their own Orphism style after his abstractions. This “fugue” seems fresh and striking even today in the evocative gestures and movement within the image. Kupka tries to pull the viewer into his realm of possibility, the spiritual plane of pure art freed from the bonds of the physical. With his contributions to the new ways of seeing in modern art, Kupka opened the doors for later abstract artists to explore and represent their own personal spiritual lives.