1 Lost Paradise - Armin Kerber

Lost Paradise – “Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima”
in Munich on the occasion of Klee’s first exhibition at Galerie Goltz on
Odeonsplatz. As Paul Klee had already left Munich by then, and the sale
of Angelus novus was handled by Goltz, historians agree that buyer and
artist did not meet.
Complicity or indictment? — From where we stand in the early 21st century,
it is difficult to imagine Paul Klee as a German soldier in uniform and
as a politically active artist in the tumultous times of the Munich Soviet
Republic: the vision is far too closely related with the career – albeit at the
political polar opposite – of Gefreiter or lance-corporal and Beer Hall
putschist Adolf Hitler. Nevertheless, the combination of political soldier
and artist is very much what defined the avant-garde in the early 20th
century. The “Soldiers” series (1991–1994) by Swiss artist Pietro Mattioli
consists of nine photographs of illustrious and significant
20th-cent ury avant-garde artists in uniform. Mattioli
thinks that Klee could easily have been among
them, as various photographs exist of Klee with his unit, the reserve battalion
of the Landsturm company in Landshut. Mattioli’s work asks the
fundamental question concerning the avant-garde artists’ roles or even
complicity in their struggle for outsider status, autonomy and alternative
moral values when it comes to the horrors of the 20th century.
In his book, The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde, Paul Mann emphatically
addresses the avant-garde paradox: their opposition provided support
to the bourgeoisie precisely because they were the opposition: “Was
Futurism revolutionary or fascist? Was Dada affirmative or negative? Was
Surrealism aesthetic or revolutionary?” Did the avant-garde seek autonomy
on Munich’s Musenberg or commitment on the barricades? 20th
century art-historians find themselves incapable of distinguishing between
pro and contra without doing injustice to individual artists. But it is this
violent injustice that is a fundamental part of the radically dialectical nature
of avant-gardes. In the 20th century any explicit form of cultural
opposition enters into an implicit alliance with those in power; each of
these alliances also describes a confrontation, a rupture. Beyond the simple
list of aesthetic and ideological oppositions, there exists a very much
more complex and conflictive dialectic that may well be the most characteristic
object of avant-garde history.
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