Internationale Revue i 10 1927-1929

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Introduction

I got to know Piet Mondrian in Paris in the spring of 1925. For many years he had been living at 26, rue du Départ, in the somewhat dilapidated house with its now legendary studio behind the Gare Montparnasse. The whole complex was knocked down in 1936. My admiration for Mondrian's work was great, and has never diminished; nor has my appreciation of him as an exceptional person. ‘He was a great man and a noble human being’, as Oud tersely and correctly put it. The last time we met was in London. To the surprise of all his friends, who could not imagine him anywhere else but in Paris, he had moved to England in 1938 in anticipation of the coming war. In September 1940 he left for New York, where he received recognition as ‘the greatest Dutch painter since Van Gogh’. He died there on 1st February 1944. His fame developed posthumously from then on.

Since the time I had been in Berlin - from 1922 to 1924 - I had made plans, when back in Holland to publish a periodical devoted to art, literature and politics. I discussed the project with Mondrian, who agreed to collaborate. It was he who gave me an introduction to his friend, the architect Oud. Oud was very interested, all the more so since, at the time, there was no periodical with that sort of programme, designed to serve the interests of abstract art and functional architecture, and it was in those days that the term ‘New Objectivity’ became current. Oud was to incorporate these thoughts into his statement of beliefs in the editorial of the first number. Apart from Oud and Mondrian a number of other artists, in particular Van Eesteren, Rietveld, Van der Leck, Huszar, Domela, Vordemberge-Gildewart and Peter Alma, were prepared to co-operate in the venture. They were all adherents to the ideas expressed in De Stijl; though Theo van Doesburg, who had launched De Stijl, and had been the tireless protagonist of the principles associated with it, was not among the contributors to i 10. This was partly due to certain differences with his former colleagues and partly on account of the character of a journal like i 10. Dutch architects involved also included Van Ravesteyn and, in particular, Mart Stam.

Oud's editorial responsibility was to include architecture as well as pictorial art. His stern and perhaps somewhat rigid editorial policy - a reproduction of Picasso's representational picture Fenêtre ouverte was, I suspect, a great concession - set the tone of the journal, particularly in the first year.

The active collaboration of Moholy-Nagy was essential to the character of the journal. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy had, since 1923, been working in Weimar and then in Dessau at the Bauhaus founded by the architect Walter Gropius, where he was in charge of the metal workshop (Metallwerkstatt) and some preliminary courses. Moholy-Nagy was Hungarian and had been a member of the group known as MA (Today) founded in Budapest in 1917. He had been in Berlin since 1920 and was in contact with the Russian Constructivist painter El Lissitzky and through him with Casimir Malevich. As early as 1913 Malevich had evolved non-objective ‘abstract’ art and, like Mondrian's ‘Neo-Plasticism’ work, geometrical painting the principle of which he called ‘Suprematism’. His architectonic sculptural constructions he described as ‘Suprematist Architecture’. The Belgian artist Vantongerloo was to construct his Cubist blocks in the same spirit. In 1922 Malevich laid down his theoretical and philosophical concepts in his essay Die gegenstandslose Welt. The text was published in a full German edition for the first time in 1962. A summary under the same title had appeared in 1927 in the Bauhausbücher series, edited by Walter Gropius and Moholy-Nagy. Malevich died in poverty in Leningrad in 1935.

The collages of the Hanoverian Dadaist Kurt Schwitters inspired Moholy to take an interest in typography. For his abstract compositions put together out of worthless bits and pieces, Schwitters also used individual letters as art material, as had the Cubists. Lissitzky, too, experimented in this field. Moholy-Nagy was concerned with photograms (photography without a

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lens) - so was Man Ray who talked about ‘Rayograms’ and photoplastics (Moholy's term for photomontages). Moholy-Nagy used all sorts of new material for his paintings or rather his constructions in space. In 1925 there appeared in the Bauhausbücher series his Malerei, Photographie, Film. He assembled his ideas later in The New Vision (1930) and Vision in Motion (1947). Like Gropius and other members of the Bauhaus, Moholy emigrated to America. He founded a New Bauhaus in Chicago and died there in 1946.

Moholy was chiefly concerned with the relationships between light, space and movement; hence also his interest in the possibilities of photography and film as potential art forms. The Russian Constructivists had made strides in similar directions. Not only did they use materials which had hitherto never been used in art, but they recognised space itself as capable of being treated plastically. In the Realistic Manifesto (Moscow 1920), which bears that axiomatic and one-sided character typical of such manifestos and by which they make history, Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo explained: ‘Volume is not the only means of expressing space’. This was the breakthrough. Later Gabo was to employ light as well as transparent materials and so became the pioneer of Kinetic Plasticism. The first essay about his work appeared in i 10.

Kurt Schwitters published articles on typography and other subjects in i 10. His Sonate in Urlauten, which he often performed and which has been recorded, was also published in i 10, thereby losing the journal some of its none too numerous subscribers. Schwitters emigrated to Norway in 1937 and to England in 1940. He died there in 1948. i 10 published poems by Hans Arp, a friend of Schwitters and also a Dadaist who, together with Brancusi, is one of the great representatives of abstract sculpture. Of these poems Arp wrote to me: ‘It is the first time that poems of mine have appeared unmutilated in a periodical’.

In October 1926 I went for preparatory talks to Dessau, where the Bauhaus had been installed since 1925. On the way I visited Gret Palucca, the director of Mary Wigman's ballet group. In her huge, light room in her father-in-law's house a single painting held my attention: one of Mondrian's diamond-shaped canvases, a white expanse with two black lines. At the Bauhaus I met Moholy, working there beside Kandinsky, Klee and Schlemmer, designer of the abstract ballet. Kandinsky was very keen on the plan for the new journal. He had already given special attention to the problem of the synthesis of the arts and had laid the foundations in the Blaue Reiter in collaboration with Franz Marc. For i 10's first number he wrote UND, an article setting out his programme.

Moholy designed the layout for the first number and gave me a crash course in typography to enable me to look after the paper on the lines he indicated. The printer, G.J. van Amerongen in Amersfoort, though at first upset by our rejection of all the classical rules for book printing was, in the long run, not dissatisfied with the result. César Domela designed the cover. Putting together each number was something of a jigsaw puzzle; so many different wishes had to be taken into account. Each issue was an adventure.

The first number was already being prepared and no name had been found for the journal. In keeping with its international character, we were looking for a title which did not need to be translated. It became clear during one of our talks that even those who had agreed to collaborate would not necessarily agree with one another about everything else. With such a situation ahead of us we would, someone said, be approaching the Tenth International: hence i 10. If my memory is correct, it was Lucia Moholy who suggested it.

This title raised quite a storm. An English weekly, mistaking the title for the price, commented on the ‘reversed position’ as a special feature of this Dutch avant-garde journal. The title was not, however, as original as it might appear. Hans Richter, the abstract painter and member of the Dadaist group who, in 1921, had produced the first abstract film Rhytmus 21 under the influence of Malevich's Suprematism, helped to edit a paper called G, founded in 1923. Not long ago, at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, I noticed a poster of an exhibition which had taken place in 1915/16 in Petrograd of a group of Russian Futurist painters called O.10. Here there was no

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question of plagiarism, any more than when new art forms appear in different places at the same time. These things are in the air.

1927 was a revolutionary year for films: the sound film, called the ‘talkie’ appeared. The Dutch authorities banned the sensational avant-garde films of the Russian producers Eisenstein and Pudovkin. This led to the setting up of the Filmliga whose intelligent spokesman was Menno ter Braak. He reviewed films regularly for i 10. Willem Pijper edited the section on music, even though he was not particularly active; he had had his own music periodical since 1926, but contributed a few articles nonetheless.

The homogeneity which found expression in architecture and art - contributors to i 10 showed their work under the title of the i 10 Group in Rotterdam - could not, by its very nature, be applied to other types of activity. Personal friendship and chance encounters have always had their role to play in such ventures.

Bart de Ligt, the socialist, anti-militarist and cultural philosopher with whom I had been friendly since 1920, had been an enthusiastic and active supporter of i 10 ever since the beginning. At that time he lived in Geneva where he maintained numerous international contacts.

In March 1926 at Sanary I met Ernst Bloch, author of Der Geist der Utopie (1923) and of Das Prinzip Hoffnung (1962). Through him I got to know Walter Benjamin, poet, essayist and one of the most shrewd of German critics. He translated Baudelaire and wrote sociological studies on literature for the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung and on Karl Kraus for i 10. He was one of the many members of the German-Jewish intelligentsia who fell victim to Nazi madness and committed suicide on the Spanish frontier in September 1940. His collected works appeared in 1946. From among my Russian political friends who had played an active part in the Revolution of 1917 - and from whom I had learned more in Berlin since 1922 about the phenomenon of revolution than from any lectures in political science - were Alexander Berkman and Alexander Schapiro wrote about the Russian Revolution.

All things considered the contributors could have turned out to be even more of a mixed bag than they actually were.

i 10 was not essentially a political journal: it had no special political slant. Oud would have preferred to have left politics out altogether. I think he was afraid of getting mixed up with political views which he did not share; he felt that as an architect he had quite enough opposition to overcome without bringing in politics. I felt however, that to ignore politics altogether would have produced an i 10-Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark and I was not keen on the idea. It would also have undermined the concept which for me was fundamental to i 10: that the so-called integration of art in daily life - a premise accepted by the Bauhaus and by De Stijl - would have to be accompanied by changes in other sectors of cultural life and in society as a whole. Among the architects who contributed it was Van Eesteren, the town planner, who was particularly anxious for this concept to materialise.

While it would not always be possible to establish direct links, the periodical was to pay attention to specific aspects of art, politics and society in terms of principles or actuality. This was not to be attempted through general articles, but by inviting specialists to write about their particular subjects, so that as a result general cultural links might emerge. It was essential therefore to get these contributors together, and for their articles to appear in the same publication.

Although the Stijl group had in theory rejected individualism and isolation in art - ‘Art will disappear in proportion as life gains in equilibrium’, as Mondrian formulated the idea - and though architects and town planners were confronted with social problems by the nature of their work, I felt that in general the Bauhaus was more sensitive to the implications and the complications of social and political problems. Indeed the Bauhaus in Dessau was shut down in 1932 under pressure of the National Socialists majority in the municipality. The transfer to Berlin under the direction of the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, did not save the Bauhaus: within a year it

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was occupied by the SA and liquidated as degenerate art. However, the theories and practices propounded and put into effect by the Bauhaus lived on and exercised a continuous influence the world over. In the inter-war years it was one of the great institutions of European culture.

The integration of art in life is still on the cultural agenda. What Mondrian achieved with his surfaces, lines and pure colours, what Gabo achieved with spirals, curves and space as plastic elements, what so many others achieved with their various media - the creation of a concrete balance of pure relationships - surely all this is nothing more nor less than the creation by these artists of a world of free order? To combine image-making, social activity, human values, technical operations - this was the idea expressed in the declaration of the Conference held at La Sarraz in 1928 - the first congress of the CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne). This declaration was published in i 10.

These ideas are, it is true, common property today, but they are often applied in a formal and superficial way, the real concept being distorted and rendered hollow. Once abstract art is generally accepted it may well be that those critical standards, which enable us to distinguish authentic, primary, living work from a routine which conforms to an outmoded tradition, will be lost. We must question whether the younger generation can still be inspired by the wholehearted commitment, the creative intentions and inventions of the pioneers of abstract art now that these artists have been canonised by the art historians.

My original concept of i 10 was more in the spirit of Die Aktion, a revolutionary weekly published by Franz Pfemfert from 1910 to 1932, which was devoted to modern (chiefly Expressionist) poetry and graphic art. Pfemfert emigrated in 1932 and died in Mexico in 1959. Owing to the dominant role of architecture and art the character of i 10 became quite different.

Its financial basis was shaky from the very beginning. The first number appeared in January 1927 with a hundred subscribers. At the time of the last number (July 1929) there were, I think, 300 (the archives of i 10 are still missing). The second volume was published by the editor, a state of affairs which for a periodical generally means the beginning of the end. Attempts to find a publisher in Germany or Switzerland, where there was more interest than in Holland, failed. By 1930, moreover, the revolution in art which had been so marked in the ten years after the First World War, had lost its impact. (In Russia this had already happened in 1922; cultural reaction reflected the political counter-revolutionary development towards the terrorist dictatorship of state and party.) The world crisis of capitalism, the growth of reactionary forces and Fascism were under way.

A paper cannot live without readers, for whom it in fact exists. It needs readers who, together with the contributors, can create an atmosphere favourable to the ideas the paper represents. It is obvious that this could not happen, given the very short time i 10 existed. But the response it brought about, internationally as well as within Holland, is remarkable enough. The influence exerted by the contributors upon each other in respect of ideas of which they would otherwise have been ignorant, is among the enduring results of this undertaking.

The beginning of the great renaissance of European pictorial art about 1914, coincided with the unmasking of European bourgeois civilisation. This renaissance was the expression of revolt and the revolt itself at the same time. The numerous isms, groups, periodicals and movements of this revolution had three features in common: they were international, inter-dependent, and no longer isolated from events in society. Dada, founded in 1916, was not just a gag of unbalanced artists, but among other things a reaction to a world gone mad. Nothing has changed since. Now as then a great deal of art is an expression of the neurosis belonging to a particular period. After the Second World War, things being back to ‘normal’, we would gladly have forgotten Nazi-Fascist barbarity though it lasted twelve years; and we would rather have avoided listening to the Epilogue of Brecht's Arturo UI ‘The womb which gave it birth is still teeming’.

Now as then the same churches, politicians, technocrats produce the same quasi-logical formulas; but nevertheless the explosions occur. The Jules Verne-like development of technical

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expertise - the jet aircraft, pre-fabricated houses, machines for living, technical apparatus in the kitchen, or man venturing even further into space, none of these things, despite the whole complicated process of planning, have altered either the lives or the thoughts of men, nor have they altered society, still based, as it is, on the same archaic economic, political and spiritual concepts. While the city destroys nature, human beings are confronted with an apparently ineluctable process of contamination of their natural environment: air, water, food. ‘Mankind can no longer look ahead and will end up by destroying the earth’, wrote Albert Schweitzer.

Failing a total revolutionary change, the free order which modern artists created in this century by their works will not be realised in human society. This also means that there will be no possibility of developing our present technical civilisation towards a culture and a community in which man can live in freedom.

Amsterdam 1978

Arthur Lehning