The Quiet Art of Quiet Circumstances – Weekend – Kommersant
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The Lentos Art Museum in Linz hosts an exhibition by Karl Hauck (1898–1974). Nothing connected the moderate Austrian modernist to the Soviet Union, but for someone familiar with the work of Soviet modernist artists of his generation, forgotten and rediscovered in recent decades, it is hard not to look at Hauck’s art through the prism of their experience.
Night, street, lantern, drugstore – this is a brief retelling of the scenario of “Night Walk” (1926), the most famous painting by Karl Hauck, part of the collection of the National Bank of Austria and adorning the cover of one of the last monographs on the Hagenbund. Indeed, Night Walk perfectly explains what the artistic association Hagenbund was in its best years in the average aesthetic terms. A small town with a Gothic church tower, lost in the Austrian Alps, vividly reminds of the Fauvists and the early Cubist Picasso; above him stretched a blue-black and many-starry sky, like Van Gogh’s; the stars shine dimly with a cold white light, so a yellow lantern is taken to illuminate the crooked, deserted and homeless, like the streets of Dresden and Berlin expressionists; the reflection on the face of a lone flaneur – the artist’s alter ego appears in the foreground – forms a spectacular contrast of yellow and green, but the Fauvist color scheme does not prevent one from noticing that the figure of a night pedestrian is one step away from the “new materiality”; There is no Apotheke sign anywhere, but it’s not hard to imagine that one of these post-Cubist houses could be a pharmacy – Hauk’s father was a very wealthy apothecary. The French, the Germans and the soil – this is in general terms the formula of eclectic Hagenbund modernism.
There is little ground in The Night Walk, but in other works of Hauk, the influences of the main Austrian idols of the Hagenbund show through. According to the sketches of frescoes for the Upper Austrian Workers’ Chamber in Linz (1928), it is clear what impression the art of Albin Egger-Lienz and everything that stood behind him made on Hauk, starting with the plastic genius of Hodler and ending with the glorification of labor, only in Egger-Lienz the peasant, and Hauck’s is proletarian. Egger-Lienz died in 1926, and neither the deceased himself, nor Hauck, nor anyone else from the Hagenbund could imagine that the artist with his symbolist-expressionist heroism would be canonized in the Third Reich as the pinnacle of the Aryan spirit in painting, will become Rosenberg’s and Hitler’s darling and be tarnished for all eternity by this posthumous Nazi reappraisal. And according to many other works of Hauck, it is clear that he is forever in love with Oskar Kokoschka: “The Lovers” (1923) seems to be a paraphrase of “The Bride of the Wind”, and the radiant, jubilant “Nibelungen Bridge in Linz” (1950) I want to call the bridge named after Kokoschka and all his “Charles Bridges”. In the 1920s, the Hagenbunds honored Kokoschka, in the near future the most prominent representative of Austria at the Nazi exhibition “Degenerate Art” and “enemy of art No. 1” in the Nazi classification, along with Egger-Lienz.
Fifteen years ago, the name of Karl Hauck did not say anything even to specialists, but then the Kunsthandel Widder gallery in Vienna, specializing in Austrian art of the interwar period, took over the legacy of a completely forgotten artist, an ordinary member of the Hagenbund. It was taken wisely: catalogs and monographs were published, Hauck’s works appeared at exhibitions dedicated to the Hagenbund, he became almost the face of the association, and now a small retrospective has arrived at Lentos. This is the most noticeable in recent years, but, presumably, not the last discovery of the forgotten masters of the Hagenbund, which is built into the international research program to rethink modernism between the two world wars. Actually, the “Hagenbund” itself began to return to the history of Austrian art relatively recently: although the first studies date back to the 1970s, but only after the exhibition “Lost Modernism. Union of Artists Hagen, 1900–1938”, held in 1993 in the Belvedere, it became clear that this was the most significant event in the artistic life of Austria in the 1920–1930s. The secession finally ended, Klimt and Schiele died, and Kokoschka almost never appeared in Austria, and continued until 1945, when a gradual revival of abstraction began.
Here it is impossible not to think that the history of these Austrian discoveries and rethinking is surprisingly reminiscent of one domestic story: the return of the artists of the 1920s-1930s, a collective expressionist portrait of which was drawn in the famous book by Olga Roitenberg “Did someone remember that we were … ”, written in the 1980-1990s and first published after the death of the author, in 2004. Vkhutemasovtsy-Vkhuteinovtsy, “Shevchenyats”, Falkovtsy or Petrov-Vodkintsy, members of the OST, the “Workshop of Painters”, the group “13”, the “Circle of Artists” or single individual farmers – no common denominator can be found for them, except perhaps all of them, ” peers of the century, whose childhood and adolescence fell on the era of the first avant-garde, profess new art, Western and domestic, gravitating towards figurativeness and not believing in abstraction. It is characteristic that galleries and private collectors are also enthusiasts for the return of our forgotten modernism: large state institutions are either busy with the “first names” of the Soviet avant-garde, or they mix the forgotten ones into the vinaigrette of “romantic Stalinism” according to plot and thematic recipes.
There is no any successful generally accepted definition for “art of the third way” (between radical avant-garde and terry socialist realism), aesthetic discussions rest on political differences: “quiet art”, “modernism without a manifesto”, “art of the first five-year plan”, “art of cultural revolution”, “the art of the Trotskyist opposition and the Comintern” – the cloud of terms describes both a variety of artistic strategies, from the conscious choice of propaganda and agitation service to the cause of the proletarian revolution to the forced execution of state orders and internal emigration, as well as a variety of research positions, from neo-Marxist to neo-liberal. But at the same time, the political history against which such an aesthetic project develops gives it absolute exclusivity in our eyes. On the one hand, a great experiment that gave the Soviet artist advances that no one else had – neither the Bauhaus and the fiery graphic artists of the Weimar Republic, nor the muralists of revolutionary Mexico. On the other hand, terror, repressions, destruction of creative heritage and prohibitions, which no other totalitarian state of Europe has known in terms of cruelty and duration. In a word, any comparison of the “Hagenbund” with the conditional “Circle of Artists” seems blasphemous, but at the exhibition of the Hagenbundist Karl Hauk this blasphemous comparativeism creeps into the head.
A series of “naked”, written in 1930, with frivolous and non-binary – quite in the spirit of the time – eroticism resembles Tatiana Mavrina’s “nudies”. The scenes in the parks bring to mind the paintings on the theme of the cultural recreation of the Soviet workers, which the landscape painters of the Leningrad school, indifferent to the theme of production, escaped. The “Croatian cycle” of the turn of the 1920s and 1930s about the life of old Italian towns on the Adriatic coast, seen by the exotic eye of the Pont-Avens and Gauguin, seems close to the sketches that Muscovites brought back from their Crimean or Turkestan business trips in those same years. Sketches for frescoes for the Workers’ Chamber in Linz will evoke Pavel Ab’s “Textile” or any other production plot that came out of the workshop of Petrov-Vodkin, and the group of paintings associated with this main monumental work by Hauck, depicting workers and the unemployed, resembles Ostovsky criticism of the capitalist peace.
Here, of course, it should be noted that couples in the parks of Hauk strive for petty-bourgeois solitude, while in the parks of culture of his Soviet peers, recreation is of a progressive, collective-mass character. In addition, the production theme is treated by the Austrian, who shows clear sympathy for the advanced art of the Bauhaus in his other works, with a backward pictorial method, while Alexander Deineka or Yuri Pimenov would have applied a photomontage approach proletarian in spirit in a similar case. And that the dance-cabaret plots of Hauk of the 1920s amusingly rhyme with Elena Aladzhalova’s “May 1st Holiday”, a graduation work defended in the workshop of Petrov-Vodkin in 1927, is just an accidental formal, and not at all meaningful similarity.
Jokes are jokes, but looking at “Saint Sebastian” (1922) by Karl Hauck, you involuntarily recall Boris Golopolosov’s painting “A Man Knocks on a Wall (Psychological Story)” (1938). In 1937, Golopolosov was expelled from the Moscow Union of Artists for formalism – he went crazy, drank, fled Moscow in the hope of escaping arrest, wandered, and worked odd jobs. Today, this Holopolosovsky “Man” in the dungeons is perceived as a symbol of the Great Terror, although sketches with similar motifs appear in the artist’s graphics just in the early 1920s. In 1916, Hauk turned 18 and was drafted into the active army – two years, until the end of the Great War, he would serve on the Southern, Italian front. It was his first trip abroad – he returned from Italy with the intention of becoming an artist, a love for the Adriatic and, judging by the religious graphics of the early 1920s and Sebastian, a deep hatred of war.
In 1938, Hauck, like all Hagenbund members, also did not feel the best way: after the Anschluss, the Hagenbund was disbanded due to political, racial and aesthetic unreliability. Some former colleagues took high positions in the Nazi hierarchy. Others – Jews, members of the Social Democratic Party and the Austrofascist Fatherland Front – fled the country. Still others were subjected to repression: members of banned political associations were not allowed to exhibit, Jews who did not have time to emigrate were sent to concentration camps, where they died. Hauck was not a Jew, he was not a member of any parties, but he was not going to join the NSDAP and spoke negatively about the Anschluss and the Nazis in private correspondence. However, nothing “degenerate” was found in his art (apparently because of these Egger-Lients overtones in the frescoes for the Workers’ Chamber), he continued to work calmly, including on monumental orders. True, in 1943, Hauck resigned his professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Breslau and was immediately mobilized, so that he was a participant in both world wars.
In the churches and public buildings of Linz and Vienna, many stained-glass windows, mosaics and decorative panels made according to Hauck’s sketches have been preserved (the Austrian “monumental propaganda plan” was by no means limited to the “Red Vienna” and worked perfectly throughout the country under various socio-political slogans). However, two of his most important works – frescoes at the Linz Main Station and in the nearby Workers’ Chamber – perished during the war, this area of the city was completely bombed. The loss of the best frescoes was the biggest tragedy in his creative biography. In 1947, Hauk, who was not seen collaborating with the Nazis, was appointed the first director of the Linz Art School (today’s Kunstuniversitat Linz), which was being created: he tried to build education on Bauhaus principles, but his pedagogical ideas were accepted without enthusiasm – after a few years he had to leave. Here is another tragedy. The measure of suffering is not the best criterion for determining which creativity is more and which is less valuable. But, probably, we will never be able to look at the art of artists like Karl Hauk with the same eyes that we look at the art of his peers and aesthetic associates from Soviet Russia.
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