Collaborative Form: Studies in the Relations of the Arts PDF
Preview Collaborative Form: Studies in the Relations of the Arts
Page iii Collaborative Form Studies in the Relations of the Arts Thomas Jensen Hines Page iv © 1991 by The Kent State University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 9046804 ISBN 0873384172 Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data Hines, Thomas Jensen, 1940– Collaborative form : studies in the relations of the arts / Thomas Jensen Hines. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0873384172 (alk. paper) 1. Arts. 2. Ut pictura poesis (Aesthetics) 3. Group work in art. I. Title. NX170.H56 1991 700—dc20 9046804 British Library CataloginginPublication are available. Page v To Susan, Joshua, and Susanna Page vii Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Collaborative Form 1 1 14 The Work Admired in Every Age: Lettera amorosa 2 31 The Warmth of the Face of the Newborn: A la santé du serpent 3 57 On the Spiritual in Art: Der Blaue Reiter 4 81 The Relation of the Text: Herzgewächse 5 99 The Stage Composition: Der gelbe Klang 6 125 Der Sturm: Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen 7 145 The Sacred and the Profane: Triad Conclusion: The Theory of Collaborative Form 164 Notes 175 Bibliography 195 Index 201 Page ix Acknowledgments I am grateful to the libraries of Kent State University, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the University of Washington and the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, for help in retrieving the works of René Char, Oskar Kokoschka, Wassily Kandinsky, and Arnold Schoenberg that would otherwise have been difficult to find. I am especially indebted to M. François Chapon, curator of the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet for access to the collaborations of René Char with numerous painters of the twentieth century and to the curators of the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, for the early editions of Kandinsky's writings. I would also like to thank M. Chapon for permission to reprint revised versions of essays originally published in the Bulletin du Bibliophile: "L'Ouvrage de tous les temps admiré: Lettera amorosa de René Char et Georges Braque" (73–1) and "A la santé du serpent: René Char et Joan Miró" (81–1). I would like to thank Rudolf Kuenzli for allowing me to reprint a revised version of my article "Collaboration of Forms in a OneMan Show: The Performance of Mörder Hoffnung der Frauen" which first appeared in Dada/Surrealism 4 (1974). For permission to reproduce the lithographs of Georges Braque, I would like to thank M. Claude Laurens, executor of the Braque estate and the Artists Rights Society of New York, exclusive agent of ADAGP for the United States. For the right to reproduce pages of Joan Miró's graphic work from A la santé du serpent, I wish to thank the publisher, Guy LéviManos of GLM and Rosa Maria Malet, director of the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, as well as the Artists Rights Society of New York, exclusive agent for ADAGP for the United States. Page x Permissions to reproduce portions of Arnold Schoenberg's score for Herzgewächse, Op. 20 (copyright 1920 by Universal Editions, Vienna; copyright renewed), have been granted by Belmont Music Publishers for the United States and Canada and by European American Music Distributors for the territory of the world excluding the United States and Canada. I would like to thank the estate of Oskar Kokoschka and its representatives, the Artists Rights Society of New York, exclusive agent for the ADAGP for the United States, for permission to reprint the graphic works of Oskar Kokoschka related to the performance and subsequent publication in Der Sturm (1910) of Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen. I am grateful to Alwin Nikolais of the Nikolais and Louis Dance Company for permitting me to work in the Chimera Foundation Archives and to observe the creation and recreation of several of his choreographies with his dancers. Mr. Nikolais gave me permission to republish photographs from several of his dances and I want to thank him for that as well as for sitting through several interviews. Finally I want to thank those who have given me the time to complete the research and writing of this book. First, I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for giving me an opportunity to go to France and Germany to study painting, graphic works, and sculpture. Next, I want to thank the Research Council of Kent State University for awards of quarters and semesters free to pursue specific parts of the research for this book. Then, I would like to thank the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright Program, and the Deans of Research and Sponsored Programs at Kent State University for travel funds without which I could not have completed this book. In conclusion, I want to add a note of gratitude to those students, colleagues, friends, and family members who patiently attended to the raveling and unraveling of collaborative form in those years when they might have had something better to do and something less elusive to imagine. Page 1 Introduction: Collaborative Form Collaborative forms are the direct result of combining two or more different arts to make composite art works. The following study is an attempt to define and explicate this kind of art. While I refer to the combinations and syntheses of the arts that I have chosen to examine as collaborative forms, they have been given other names as well. In the history of composite art works, beginning with Greek tragedy, no single term has quite sufficed to characterize the variety of intentions and results associated with the synthesis of the arts. Jack M. Stein rightly points out that "since the renaissance, the idea of synthesis has been associated most persistently with the stage, principally opera, which indeed originated in an attempt to revive the form of Greek tragedy." 1 However, with the advent of Romanticism in Germany and England, the ambition of the artists grew and the goal of synthesis of the arts came to include all the arts. William Blake's integration of poetry, painting, and music is as central to the ideal of synthesis in the Romantic sense of the term as the songs and settings of Schumann, Schubert, and Wolf. In Germany, two generations of Romantic writers and artists including Goethe, Schiller, Tieck, Wackenroder, Novalis, Brentano, Hoffmann, and Runge constructed theories and, occasionally, works of collaborative form. The terms they used to describe the synthetic work varied from artist to artist and from text to text. The major philosophical spokesman for the Romantic vision, Friedrich W. J. Schelling, lifted composite art to its highest position in theory when he called for the combination of all the arts into a single new form. Schelling envisioned this ideal synthesis as the most powerful purveyor of the "vision and expression of the indwelling spirit of nature."2 Page 2 Das Gesamtkunstwerk, that infamous term associated with Richard Wagner, suggests the same Romantic ideal of allencompassing synthesis. In Wagner's early prose, he theorized that the synthesis of the arts would take place when music and poetry were combined in his music dramas. 3 In spite of his occasional statements to the effect that the music drama was the universal art form, Wagner's clearest remarks on synthesis concern only two arts, poetry and music. His use of the different arts changed significantly between his theoretical explanations in Oper und Drama (1851) and his actual practice in Der Ring, beginning with Das Rheingold (1854) and Die Walküre (1856).4 In his earlier writings, music, poetry, and drama were all placed on an equal plane and the syntheses of the three arts in opera were understood to come from an interdependence of equals. Later, Wagner believed that the music of the operas of Der Ring so surpassed the other arts that the balance he had predicted was inaccurate. Consequently, he revised his theory of synthesis in favor of music. By Wagner's own confession, music became primary and the Gesamtkunstwerk began to have a peculiar connotation.5 In spite of the fact that Wagnerian collaborations illustrated only one kind of combination, subsequent admirers of the composer tended to speak of his operas as the ideal forms of syntheses in the arts. This misunderstanding led to several mistaken conclusions concerning the history of syntheses of the arts. First, many subsequent discussions of composite form began and ended with Wagner, thus precluding examination of syntheses created by Schubert, Schumann, Hugo Wolf, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, and many others. Second, discussions that were based on Wagner almost inevitably concluded that music is the primary art form and that the highest form of synthesis must follow the Wagnerian model. These have created formidable limitations on discussions of collaborative form. And while some of Wagner's operas are interesting examples of the Gesamtkunstwerk, they nonetheless form a limited set of works which all combine the same arts. They are products of the same mind and the same method of combination. Subsequent devotees to the "total work of art" sought to add further dimensions to Wagner's model. They collaborated to produce a less homogeneous texture (as in the case of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hoffmansthal's Elektra [1909]). They also incorporated other arts to fill out the nascent form. "New arts" like decorative sets and props in avantgarde styles as in Parade (1917), photographs and filmstrips projected on the stage as in Piscator's epic theater of the Page 3 1920s, and even the choreography of modern dance movements on the stage of an operatic production as in Kandinsky's Der gelbe Klang (1909), were brought together in experimental creation. Each addition marked another kind of Gesamtkunstwerk even though the Wagnerian idea had nothing to do with increasing the total number of arts that were brought together. Wagner's original assumption was simply that two arts were better than one. 6 To achieve the effects of interaction that he desired, Wagner composed his "poem" (the libretto) and his music (the vocal and orchestral score) so that ideas, emotions, and rhythms would be built upon the synthesis of the parts. In the history of collaborative form Wagner is certainly the most prolific creator of his century. He popularized an idea that has only rarely been studied outside his principal realm: opera. Because of his public success Wagner received credit for originating the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk even though the idea had been the public dream of the earlier generations of Romantic poets and composers. Furthermore, it was only after Wagner that the dominant artists of the avant garde in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries began to speak and write as if the synthesis of the arts were the absolute goal of the arts. And such was the power of the Wagnerian model that the ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk seemed viable even though few subsequent artists actually attempted to combine any arts in collaborative works. In the twentieth century, other terms have been invented to name collaborative art and, though none of these names would replace the Gesamtkunstwerk, all were invented so that their referents might be distinguished from Wagner's model. Wassily Kandinsky, for example, calls such composite forms Monumentalkunst, a word he transliterates to German from Russian and French. Although he is openly critical of Wagner, Kandinsky envisions combinative effects that are very similar to those announced by Wagner for the Gesamtkunstwerk.7 Similar terms like total art, total theater, multimedia, and mixedmedia have since emerged to describe various combinations of arts. However, since each of these terms has been used to name a certain historical manifestation of the idea of collaboration, all have limited application across the range of possible combinations of the arts. Recently, the term performance art has come to describe a rather wide range of activities performed by artists who often combine several arts in their work. Yet, even the concept of performance art is limited to a set of quasitheatrical assumptions and would not include collaborative works like opera, lieder, or illuminated books.
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