Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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REVOLUTION, REMEMBRANCE,
REPRESENTATION
An exhibition devised by John A. Walker (text copyright 2009) held at the
1986.
Director of the Gallery was Geoff Evans. The catalogue was designed by Ismail
Michaels. Funding was supplied by Greater London Arts and the London Borough
of Camden
Cover with woodcut images by Anton Raderscheidt - Rosa - and Franz Seiwart -
Karl.
Installation shot with paintings by Spadari.
FOREWORD
London. Included in that show was R. B. Kitaj's The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg.
The painting intrigued me because its narrative content and 'quotational' style was
so very different from my own abstract work. Since I had never heard of
that one day I would study the painting and its subject matter in more detail. A little
later - twenty five years later to be precise - I kept the promise I had made myself -
represented by Kitaj's canvas was to become a central issue for me and many others
in subsequent years. This exhibition is intended as a modest contribution to that
issue.
referents (that is, refer to a reality outside of themselves). All the works featured in
this exhibition represent, or refer to, real people and real historical events. This fact
does not preclude intertextuality (that is, the images also refer to other images), nor
materialist would say: there is only one reality, one truth, but there are many
different ways of depicting it; the images vary because the determinate means of
representation and the aims of the artists were different in each case, not because
This exhibition is a historical exhibition - it includes works over sixty years old,
works concerning events which took place in 1919 - but it is not purely historical
because works by living artists, paintings produced in the 1980s, are also
from the concerns of today. What this exhibition demonstrates is that the past
informs the present, that it survives in the minds and hearts of the living. It shows
there is a continuity between then and now which purely historical art exhibitions
can obscure.
When works of art are exhibited in public and private galleries certain aspects
are stressed at the expense of others: the way in which a work is presented, the
company in which it is shown, inflects the viewer's response. In particular, the full
exhibition context invites art-historical, formal or aesthetic readings (that is, the
work is seen as 'an early Kitaj', 'a German print', 'a masterpiece of lithography',
etc). Part of the motivation behind this exhibition has been to restore the meaning
art; its depiction of grief may also evoke a sympathetic response regardless of the
viewer's political persuasion, but the fact that the person being mourned was a real
historical figure, a communist revolutionary who was murdered for his political
convictions is surely of some importance. How do those on the right, one wonders,
reconcile their aesthetic response to such an image with their distaste for memorials
to Marxist revolutionaries? Can they fully share the grief represented if they do not
THE MURDERS
Berlin, January 1919. The city is under the control of counter-revolutionary troops
On the evening of the 15th the hiding place of two Spartacus leaders Karl
arrested and taken separately to the Eden Hotel in the centre of Berlin then serving
as the headquarters of the Garde-Kavalierie-Schützen-Division. Following an
interrogation Liebknecht is taken out of the hotel by a side door. As he emerges one
of the guards - Private O. Runge - smashes his head with a rifle butt. The stunned
prisoner is then dragged into a car and driven to the Tiergarten (Berlin's Hyde
When Luxemburg arrives at the hotel soldiers waiting in the lobby taunt her and
beat her up. She is then taken to the first floor to be interrogated by Captain
Waldemar Pabst. Despite her perilous situation Luxemburg gives stinging replies to
Pabst's questions. During the night Luxemburg is removed from the hotel by
soldiers under the command of Lieutenant Kurt Vogel. For the second time Runge
uses his rifle butt on a defenceless prisoner. Luxemburg's sufferings are short lived:
she is shot in the head by Vogel while in the car. Her body is then dumped into the
dirty waters of the Landweher canal where it remains undiscovered until 31 May;
Karl Liebknecht.
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THE VICTIMS
Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) was a small, dark haired, dynamic woman who
devoted her whole life and energies to the struggle for socialism. She came from a
Jewish family in Poland but married a German in order to become a member of the
Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), then the largest and most prestigious
socialist party in Europe. Most of her active political career was spent in the service
of the SPD though as time passed she grew increasingly disillusioned with the SPD's
reformism and lack of militancy. 'Red Rosa', as she became known, was a convinced
stressed democracy and mass action to achieve socialism. She was a comrade but
also a critic of Lenin; she opposed the use of terror by socialist governments.
on the topic of Imperialism. During the first world war Luxemburg was imprisoned
for long periods because of her anti-war polemics. With Liebknecht and others she
Karl Liebknecht (1871-1919) also devoted his life to the cause of socialism. In his
case it was a family tradition: he was the son of Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826-1900)
one of the founding fathers of the SPD. Karl trained to be a lawyer and eventually
he became a deputy of the Prussian Diet and the Reichstag. In 1907 he was
sentenced for high treason for his book Militarism and Antimilitarism. Before the
first world war it was thought that the international solidarity of socialists would
prevent war from taking place but when the war came the SPD members of the
Reichstag acted like national patriots and voted for war credits. Liebknecht
achieved notoriety as the only SPD member to vote against war credits. Like Rosa,
As the war dragged on opposition to it grew and in 1917 the SPD split. The
internationalist minority of the SPD founded a new party - the Independent Social
1918, following the military defeat of Germany, a 'revolution' took place as a result
of which a provisional government was formed by the SPD under the leadership of
that all power should be placed in the hands of Workers and Soldiers Councils.
Since the USPD proposed to collaborate with Ebert, the Spartacus League decided
to found a new revolutionary party - the German Communist Party (KPD). Its
founding conference took place on 30/31 December 1918 and 1 January 1919.
occupations of public buildings and newspaper offices, and street fighting took place
as various factions tried to gain control of the state. Despite Luxemburg's doubts
that conditions favoured armed uprising, the younger radical Spartacists resorted to
organized. (2) To restore 'law and order' Ebert had encouraged the formation of
Thus it was that the murders of Liebknecht and Luxemburg took place under a
'socialist' government.
THE ARTISTIC RESPONSE
and their sympathizers throughout the world. The loss of Luxemburg and
were deprived at a crucial time of two leaders who believed in democracy and mass
creating works of art in a variety of media to honour the memory and courage of
the two martyrs. These artists included George Grosz, Käthe Kollwitz, Lovis
Corinth, Max Beckmann, Karl Jakob Hirsch, Karl Holz, Conrad Felixmüller,
Johannes Molzahn, Mies van der Rohe, Alfred Doblin, Bertold Brecht and Erwin
Piscator. In the more immediate past the American artists R. B. Kitaj and May
Stevens, the Italian artist Giangiacomo Spadari, and the English artists Sue Coe and
Margaret Harrison have also produced works in memory of Rosa and Karl. In 1986
the feature film Rosa Luxemburg, directed by the West German Margarethe von
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Montage of images relating to Piscator’s Despite All! 1925.
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history of Germany from 1914 to the murders of the Spartacist leaders. The form
by a mass, left-wing audience. In charge of the design of Despite All! was John
Heartfield.
Book cover.
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Alfred Döblin (1878-1957) was a doctor, a psychiatrist, and one of the major
German writers of the twentieth century. Today he is best known for his 1929 novel
Revolution. The concluding volume of this epic series - Karl and Rosa - is a
fictionalized account of the final months of the Spartacists' struggle. This text, a
1983.
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Epitaph 1919.
Red Rosa now has vanished too, Where she lies is hid from
view. She told the poor what life is about, And so the rich have
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KOLLWITZ
and the poor were notable for their realism and human sympathy. Although
Kollwitz aligned herself against their exploiters, she never joined any left-wing
political party. She was, however, prepared from time to time to use her skill as an
campaigns. And she naturally shared some of the ideas of the Spartacists. For
example, like them Kollwitz was strongly opposed to war in all its forms (her
younger son Peter had been killed during the first world war).
Kollwitz's diaries and letters reveal the moderate character of her political beliefs
and her rejection of revolutionary violence. In June 1921, she wrote: 'I am not a
much more of a democrat' (3) It is clear that Kollwitz was not a supporter of
profoundly shocked by their deaths: her diary described the murders as 'despicable
and outrageous' .
Since Kollwitz was known to the Liebknecht family, she was commissioned by
them to make a portrait of Karl from his corpse. The catalogue of her drawings
contains six studies of Liebknecht's head (four in profile, two in three-quarter view).
To gain a better understanding of her subject Kollwitz read Liebknecht's letters. She
also witnessed his funeral and was deeply impressed by the silence of the thousands
who attended it. (Liebknecht was buried on the 25th of January 1919 along with
for Luxemburg was included because her body had not yet been discovered.)
satisfactory composition. She made an etching and then a lithograph but these
were rejected. Only in the traditional German medium of woodcut - which Kollwitz
June 1920 - was she able to achieve the simplicity and boldness of design
language and gesture (the figures of the mourners), and by means of emphatic
sense of grief and loss. Death, mourning, grief - these were subjects which had a
special appeal for Kollwitz and they recur throughout her oeuvre. Her images
represent emotions such as grief and sorrow; they also serve as cathartic releases
Kollwitz's woodcut has been described as a 'socialist pieta' because of its affinity
with traditional Christian representations of the dead Jesus mourned by his family
and disciples. Jacques-Louis David's paintings of the murdered body of the French
image.
Along the bottom edge of the woodcut is an inscription 'Die Lebenden dem Toten'
('Those who live to him who died') a phrase which is a reversal of Freiligrath's line
'Die Toten an die Lebenden' ('Those who died to those who lived') from a poem
written for victims of an earlier revolution, that of 1848. Once the woodcut was
finished Kollwitz offered prints of it for sale in order to benefit a workers' art
exhibition.
Kollwitz realised that her graphic memorial to Liebknecht would lead many
people to the erroneous conclusion that she agreed with his politics. This explains
her defensive self-justification: 'As an artist, I have the right to distil the emotional
content out of everything and anything, to let that content take effect on me, and
then to give outward expression to it. I also have the right to depict the workers'
leave taking from Liebknecht, indeed, the right to dedicate this work to the
not?’ (4)
These remarks confirm that the grief signified by the woodcut is as much that
Kollwitz's sorrow .
GROSZ
Like his fellow Dadaist John Heartfield, George Grosz (1893-1959) was more
politically committed than Kollwitz. Both men joined the KPD on the 31st
December 1918 receiving their membership cards from Rosa Luxemburg herself.
These two artists had been radicalized as a result of their experiences during the
first world war. For them art's most important task was the relentless criticism of
the bourgeois society and German militarism. Grosz contributed many savage
caricatures and cartoons of SPD leaders and policies to Spartacist pamphlets in the
post-war period. Large sales, acts of censorship and prosecutions by the authorities
depicts the ominous figure of a hangman judge hovering above the coffins of
Liebknecht and Luxemburg; the eyes of the judge appear to have been put out and
the figure terminates in pools of blood. The meaning of this image is ambiguous: it
law (blind and bloodstained). It should be explained that the soldiers responsible for
the murders of Liebknecht and Luxemburg were never properly tried and
convicted. Some men were tried and received light sentences, while others avoided
punishment altogether.
When Grosz created the drawing is uncertain, though most scholars favour 1919.
Erich Cohn dated November 1935; the dedication is in remembrance of the time of
Remember 1919 is rather tame in comparison with other works Grosz produced in
1919 and 1920. For example, the pen and ink drawings Cheers Noske! The
Proletariat has been disarmed (1919), The Communists are Dying and the Foreign
Exchange Rate Goes Up (1920), and Knocking Off Time (1920) are much more
caustic.
Liebknecht and Luxemburg are not directly featured, instead their fate is
Liebknecht can be found in at least one of Grosz's drawings from 1919, namely
This is How the State Court Should Appear! an image which appeared on the cover
of the satirical weekly Der Blutige Ernst, number 3, 1919. Grosz pretends that a
court is trying the German military caste. Grosz uses the picture-within-the-
the judges. Liebknecht's spirit presides over the court's deliberations and demands
retribution.
FELIXMULLER
youth, was living in Dresden at the time of the events of 1919. He came from a
working class background and although alienated from his origins by his artistic
training at the Dresden Academy, he became politicized and joined the German
Communist Party. Felixmüller was one of the few artists to take an active part in
soldiers clutching red flags were shot to death around him. His lithograph Dead
Comrade
one showing the two figures clasped together like lovers ascending towards a huge
red star above a city roofscape; thus, Christian iconography was adapted to meet
Expressionist-Socialist ends.
BECKMANN
Max Beckmann (1894-1950) was resident in Frankfurt at the time of the abortive
Beckmann's modern, figurative work is, like his politics, difficult to categorize. He
came from a middle-class background - his father was a wholesale flour merchant
- and achieved early acclaim and success as an artist, but then suffered a nervous
world war. Towards the end of the war, Beckmann's art evolved in new directions
as he struggled to give form to his pessimistic vision of the human condition. His
well-known canvas The Night (1918-19) depicts a man and a woman being
disturbing subject with a degree of detachment and objectivity: both victims and
torturers appear to be at the mercy of evil forces they cannot control. The coldness
and fatalism of Beckmann's pictures offer the viewer little comfort, nor do they
politics: 'I have never been politically active in any way. 1 have only tried to realize
political neutrality cut no ice with the Nazis who branded him a 'cultural
Bolshevik' and condemned his art as ‘degenerate’. In 1919 Beckmann may not
wartime diaries prior to 1919 reveal a sympathy for the masses: 'We must share in
the great misery which is bound to come. We must surrender our hearts and
nerves to the horrible cries of deception of these poor deceived people. Now more
than ever we must stand as close as possible to the people. That is the only thing
give to the people a picture of their destiny'. (7) They also reveal a tentative
with profitability, if - and I scarcely dare to express the hope - we could live by a
lithograph is one of a set of ten with the overall title Die Holle (Hell). (A transfer
drawing for the lithograph also exists.) Like most of Beckmann's works,
So confined is the
space that the roof of a car bursts out beyond the framing edge in the top left-hand
corner. The composition is agitated and confused: lines run in all directions;
shapes overlap and interrupt one another; fragmented, ambiguous forms recall the
multi-faceted structures of Cubism and a scatter of light and dark patches makes
the content hard to decipher. Eventually, the iconography becomes clearer: moon
and stars in the background indicate a night time event. Their feeble light discloses
by vicious soldiers who assault her with rifle butts and barrels. The presence of the
soldiers and the cross-like position of the woman's arms makes a clear reference to
represent Noske?) holding the woman's left leg under his arm and threatening her
crutch with his hand. The lithograph implies that whenever a woman is assaulted
figures and events to point more general lessons and morals. Martyrdom is no
because of her beliefs and actions by her political opponents, instead she stands for
all women who are victims of torture and murder. What is gained in terms of
would not have shared Beckmann's pessimistic world view - 'Hell is on earth, it is
what humans have created' - because she had faith in ultimate victory no matter
Violent and sadistic subjects pose a general problem for artistic representation:
is the viewer to derive aesthetic pleasure from the image of someone being beaten
when an artist strives to communicate the suffering of victims to the viewer, the
principle of form and stylization inherent in all art - as T. W. Adorno has pointed
out - transfigures the event, endows it with meaning and significance and thereby
lessens the horror. (9) Some artists have responded to this dilemma by avoiding
then crucial areas of human experience and history would be excluded from the
scope of art.
In the case of the Beckmann, an unsettling tension exists between the aesthetic
qualities of the lithograph and its violent content. Indeed, the character of the
content infects the form - the pleasure is that of dissonance rather than harmony.
As in all artistic representations, the viewer is distanced from the event depicted -
memorialized and for as long as people see the lithograph they will be reminded of
the dark side of humanity. As Adorno once observed: 'it would be better for art to
vanish altogether than to forget suffering ..... Suffering .... .is the humane content of
art'. (10)
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) a German-American architect was a radical
in artistic matters (he was a modernist, one of the founders of the International
Style) but not in politics (his stance was apolitical). It is somewhat surprising
therefore that he was commissioned by the KPD to design a monument to the two
recalled later, the commission came about almost by accident: Mies was asked by
Eduard Fuchs (treasurer of the KPD) for his opinion of a design for a stone
monument that was academic and classical in its conception. His response was
laughter and the comment 'it would be a fine monument for a banker'. (11) When
wall on the grounds that victims were generally shot against such walls.
In the event Mies did not design a plain brick wall but a massive, free-standing
brick structure with horizontal, box-like projections. The heavy, rectangular masses
reminded Arthur Drexler of stacked coffins. (12) The sheer bulk of the memorial, its
plainness, severity and emphatic horizontality endowed it with an awesome
presence and solemnity. Twisted purple clinker bricks were used to give the
monument a richly textured surface. During the 1920s, Mies was fond of using
bricks as a building material. Philip Johnson remarks that Mies 'liked the regular
of the modular structures which were to typify the modern architecture of the
meaning has been perceived in the choice of brick for the monument: according to
Phillip Goodwin, brick symbolises the bond between Liebknecht and Luxemburg
and the masses - 'a common material for leaders of common people'. (14) One can
also detect an analogy between the 'truth and honesty to materials' aesthetic of Mies
images appear on the monument apart from a star, hammer and sickle, and a
flagpole.
The memorial was unveiled by Wilhelm Pieck leader of the KPD in June 1926
It seems that when Mies became a leading American architect his earlier
revolutionaries even though he did not share their politics - was regarded with
suspicion by the US government officials. Most of the books on Mies focus on his
work in America. They either ignore the monument to Liebknecht and Luxemburg
In recent years Mies has come under attack from architectural critics for his
formalism. (15) Is this criticism applicable to his 1926 monument? Certainly the
Also, the static quality of its horizontals precluded any sense of the dynamic
struggle in which the two Spartacists had been engaged. (In this respect Mies'
monument contrasts sharply with Johannes Molzahn's painting The Idea -
KITAJ
art world recognition during the early 1960s. His painting The Murder of Rosa
Luxemburg (1960) is somewhat different from other examples which have been
considered because first, it was executed by an American and not a German, and
second, it was produced very much later in time. As a result the painting is more
anecdotal (in the sense of telling the story of what happened), and more detached/
reflective than the works produced immediately after the murders. In terms of
shall see shortly, the history to which it refers encompasses that of Kitaj's forebears
Kitaj is a highly cultured and widely read artist. His pictorial method is quasi-
literary in the sense that his paintings sometimes include written matter and
'quotes' from other images; also, his catalogue notes frequently include
bibliographies and citations to texts which have informed the creation of the works
in question. Kitaj is a very self-conscious artist who is well versed in the theories of
collage and montage debated by the Surrealists, and by Soviet and German artists
and writers in the 1920s and 1930s. He is also knowledgeable about the
iconology practised by such scholars as Aby Warburg, Fritz Saxl, Edgar Wind and
R. B. Kitaj, The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg, (1960). Tate Gallery Collection. Photo
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The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg is a loose assembly of images and words which
interlock and overlap in various ways. Its manner of execution is somewhat crude:
the semi-graphic drawing style and brushwork are reminiscent of graffiti and, to a
certain extent, Abstract Expressionism. Although some degree of recession is
implied by the work's overlapping elements, there is a lack of aerial depth and
and therefore its time, are not singular and coherent. Dark hues predominate -
black, brown, blue, ochre - in keeping with the sombre theme. In the top left-hand
corner of the painting is the ragged shape enclosing the outline of a woman's head
and upper body. According to Kitaj, this is not a portrait of Luxemburg but a
depiction of his grandmother Rose, a Jewess who fled from Russia at the turn of the
century to avoid persecution. (18) Helen, his other grandmother, appears in profile
(centre left) grasping the distorted, horizontal body of Luxemburg whom Helen
resembled physically.
Above the floating corpse of Luxemburg is the side view of a car or van with the
profile face of a driver. To the right is an outline shape resembling that of a German
soldier with a helmet which itself encloses the image of a nineteenth century style
statue. Luxemburg's killer appears in the top right-hand corner but his features
and identity are obscured by a box of writing. The murder weapon - a pistol - is
rendered in such a way as to imply that it is also a phallus. Vertical striations of red
and green pigment suggestive of blood and pain occupy the lower right-hand area
of the canvas. A good deal of the lower part of the painting is left bare. Kitaj's
signature and the work's title appear in the bottom left-hand corner plus a
another monument, this time a pyramid and classical temple, painted with streaks
painting hard to decipher. However, this task is assisted by the box of writing in the
top right-hand corner. This box serves as a key to the rest of the image. Its literary
matter consists of four items: first, an account of Luxemburg's death quoted from
P. Frolich's biography (1940); second, the information that the face of the man in
the car resembles that of Field Marshall Count von Moltke (chief of the German
General Staff at the outbreak of the first world war; he died in 1916); third, the
information that the statue immediately to the left of the box is based on the
Warburg Institute journal on German monuments, plus the information that the
obelisk monument is based upon a design for a memorial to Frederick the Great
Several purposes are served by the meta-linguistic text located within the fabric of
the painting: it supplies a key to the iconography; it reveals the sources of some of
the imagery and underlying ideas (the sources are twofold: the history of politics
and the history of art. This reminds us that art is as much the result of the tradition
In 1963 Kitaj had a one-man show at the Marlborough Gallery in London which
included The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg. He supplied the catalogue information
for this exhibition and his note for the painting included a short bibliography on
Luxemburg plus the full details of the Neumeyer article. (20) (Incidentally, the
article discusses the artistic character and social function of monuments to genius
Dannecker's design for a monument to Frederick the Great and his generals (an
obelisk), and Janus Genelli's design for a monument to Kant (a pyramid and
Greek temple) - were the source of two images in the Kitaj. Neumeyer points out
that one problem facing the designers of monuments is whether or not to celebrate
the achievements of particular individuals or the more universal powers that act
through them. In practical terms: should a monument take the form of a portrait
figure or symbolic architecture? (As we have already seen, Kollwitz chose the first
problem of constructing such memorials. At least this is one conclusion that can be
drawn from the inclusion of images of monuments of different types within the
picture and the citing of the Neumeyer article. Can a memorial to a socialist martyr,
the picture seems to be asking, take the same form as officially approved
monuments to great leaders? The work articulates the conflict which exists between
particular circumstances of her death. In fact, the problems posed by this canvas
are part of a wider issue, namely, the difficulty of producing a convincing socialist
mythology, one which will avoid the simplistic hagiography and retrogressive visual
Luxemburg and Kitaj. (21) She was a Pole 'exiled' in Germany, he an American
'exiled' in Britain. Both were fascinated by German society and culture; both were
born into Jewish families. Kitaj has explained that when he conceived the painting it
was not Luxemburg's revolutionary politics which prompted him but the fact that
her death was the murder of a Jew. (22) It was precisely to avoid a similar fate that
his grandmothers had emigrated from Austria and Russia to the United States.
Rosa's life and death was, for Kitaj, 'an ikon for the dark times I associated with my
too oblique for the viewer to understand without the aid of Kitaj's gloss.
Kitaj chose to represent the theme of the murder of Jews in terms of the banality
what was to happen to Jews and communists in Germany under the Nazis. A
fascism. It is this link, Kitaj says, he had in mind when he introduced the Romantic
reasonable to infer that he is, politically speaking, a socialist. (23) Yet there
remains the problem of how works with socialist subjects - especially historical
ones - are to be effective within the practical struggles of the present. For socialist
artists the 'language' to be used in art is of crucial importance because the kind of
'language' and level employed determines, to some extent, the audience. Kitaj's
Podro also has pointed to the tension between Kitaj's 'concern to make an
emotionally charged private art for a small group of initiates, and a publically
resonant art'. At the same time the educational value of the painting should not
SPADARI
Giangiacomo Spadari (b. 1938) is an Italian artist, little known in Britain, whose
interest in socialist martyrs extends over many years. At the Galleria Schwarz,
Milan, in 1972 he held an exhibition entitled The Rose and the Lion of twenty works
reflecting upon the killings of Luxemburg and Trotsky. Two years later in Berlin, at
the Pool Gallery, he mounted a show called Rosa Luxemburg: A Life for Socialism.
G. Spadari, Brotherly Greetings from the SPD, (1972).
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Spadari's work as a painter matured in the late 1960s. He was strongly influenced
by the revolutionary events of 1968 and regarded his painting as an artistic avant-
the failure of the left to fulfil its potential, Spadari felt the need to re-examine
history, in particular to analyse the fate of those leading figures of the worker's
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Spadari's pictorial method - the use of image fragments 'quoted' from various
ambiguous space - somewhat resembled that of American Pop artists like James
Rosenquist. However, Spadari's touchstone was not Pop art but Cuban posters and
earlier forms of left-wing montage aiming for a new kind of realism. His readymade
imagery included news photos, stills from Eisenstein's films, Dada collages,
newspapers and Russian Constructivist graphics. The task he set himself was to re-
work and re-edit this material. What Spadari sought was an anonymous, public
photographs.
concern was as much with the 'linguistic' aspects of painting as with the political
content. Rather than seeking to invent a new artistic idiom, he preferred to employ
existing 'linguistic tools' which had already been mediated. Thus the series The
Rose and the Lion was not only an essay on two historical figures but also a
meditation on the different kinds of pictorial evidence which remains from the
past. Our knowledge of the past depends upon such fragments, therefore Spadari's
interpretation.
STEVENS
May Stevens is an American, socialist-feminist artist, writer and teacher who was
born into a working class family in Boston in 1924. (24) During the late 1970s
images dealing with the contrasting lives of her mother Alice and Rosa Luxemburg.
woman who achieved international fame, Alice Stevens was an ordinary worker,
mother and housewife who in middle age became mentally ill and retreated into
silence.
As the basis for her collages Stevens selected family album type photographs of
her mother and Rosa, plus documentary images including a horrific police
photograph of the latter's decomposing head. Stevens then photo-copied and re-
photographed the
images together with written quotations in such a way as to abstract them and to
reduce them to a sharp black/white contrast. By this means disparate raw material
was given a measure of formal unity. However, a simple and coherent message is not
Two feminist ideas informed the collages, namely, 'hidden from history' and 'the
anonymous life from the oblivion that is the fate of the vast majority of human
mother revealed the effects of class position and sexism: private life was inextricably
linked with larger political issues. Luxemburg was, for Stevens, the exemplar of that
wider public realm in which she as an artist and activist was attempting to
intervene. Alice and Rosa thus represented for Stevens two role models, two
mothers, one natural and one ideal. Stevens' quest for self-identity and fulfilment
necessarily involved them both.
silence/speech. However, the actual situation is more complex than this because
some of the antitheses apply to both women. For instance, Rosa herself found
difficulty in reconciling her private life - in particular her lengthy love affair with
the Polish revolutionary Leo Jogiches - with her public, political career.
Furthermore, a merger of the causes of feminism and socialism was then (and now)
did not contribute to the women's movement in the same way that her friend Clara
Zetkin did. Rosa's conviction was that only the advent of socialism would enable
women to make real progress, hence she devoted herself to that cause rather than
to feminism as such.
In addition, both Alice and Rosa were martyrs in their different ways. And, as the
up and ageing. In short, the collage juxtapositions reveal common factors as well as
differences.
May Stevens, Demonstration, (1981). Acrylic on canvas, 6’6” x 10’. Collection
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May Stevens, Voices, (1983), acrylic on canvas, 6’6” x 10’. Photo courtesy of the
artist.
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May Stevens, The murderers of Rosa Luxemburg, (1986). Acrylic on canvas, 6’6” x
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During the 1980s Stevens' attention has shifted from collage to painting.
of Liebknecht and Luxemburg are being carried aloft. Voices and Procession, two
canvases dating from 1983, are also large (78" x 120"). Freely executed in acrylic,
they represent the funeral procession of Liebknecht and Luxemburg. These works
are interpretations rather than copies of documentary photographs of the event. For
top half of the image with the words of Luxemburg: 'Ich war, Ich bin, Ich werde
sein!' ('I was, I am, I will be!'). This expression - which could apply to Rosa herself -
was in fact used by her to refer to the revolution whose failure cost her life. A few
days before her death she wrote defiantly: 'Tomorrow the revolution will rear its
head once more and will proclaim, with trumpets blazing: I was, I am, I will be!'.
Rosa's words ascend into the sky above the coffins and the heads of the mourners;
the revolutionary is dead but as long as her words survive in the minds of the living
HARRISON
been a hallmark of Margaret Harrison's work. Not content with the 'instant
Pankhursts must be seen a broad sisterhood which can draw strength from
understanding the many individuals who contribute to it. Thus the painting From
Rosa Luxemburg to Janis Joplin was conceived and executed for the International
Women's Week in Berlin, 1977, and was installed for that particular context close to
the Zoological Gardens where Red Rosa's corpse was discovered; its combined
intention was to show how the roll-call of women represented in the painting had
suffered and been destroyed by the variety of male-dominated societies into which
they were born, and that despite their achievements, the representation of women in
the parliament houses of the 'democracies' is still pitifully below par.
Margaret Harrison, From Rosa Luxemburg to Janis Joplin, (1977), collage, oil
and acrylic on canvas, photo courtesy of the artist and the Ronald Feldman
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The work was daubed with the word ‘Juden’ beneath the image of Rosa
Luxemburg at its first showing in Berlin, and the artist has chosen to leave the
AFTERWORD
As we have seen, each of the artists considered here responded to the same
historical events in different media and different ways. A general question arises
from all these works: what is their value to the world of today? Arguably, the images
are relevant to the present in a number of ways: every generation has to consider its
relationship to history. Who and what is to be remembered and commemorated?
What lessons are to be learned? Every generation has to seek new solutions to the
unresolved problems and contradictions it inherits from the past. Every generation
has also to come to terms with defeat, loss and grief. Such feelings can be aroused by
the tragic fate of historical persons, by the assassination of public figures, as well as
by the deaths of relatives and friends. They can be prompted by social as well as
individual catastrophies because the personal and the political are but different ends
of the same spectrum. In the case of Rosa and Karl, what was lost was not only two
worthy human beings but also a struggle to achieve a better world. If the Spartacist
revolution had succeeded the whole subsequent history of Europe could have been
very different. The rise of Nazism might have been prevented. That failure of
idealism and hope was compounded in their manner of death by yet another
revelation of the inhumanity of which some humans are capable. The value of works
of art, in particular those that indict the crimes of humanity, is that they supply a
partial redemption.
have for the living socialists and the struggle for socialism? Such memorials help to
keep alive the past existence and sacrifices of socialist heroes and heroines. In so
far as they prompt people to read about the lives of famous revolutionaries, to read
their writings, and to learn from their political ideas, experiences and mistakes,
these works perform valuable educational and inspirational functions beyond the
purely aesthetic. As Pope Gregory the Great expressed it in his Pastoral on the
question of Christian devotional imagery: 'To adore images is one thing; to teach
with their help what should be adored is another' (25)
In the light of the cult of personality which developed in the Soviet Union after
Lenin's death - and it is worth remembering that Lenin disliked such cults (26) -
scepticism towards heroic monuments is a rational response. However, all the works
described here avoid the craven flattery and bombastic rhetoric of monuments to
Stalin. Indeed, in the case of Kitaj's painting, the very role and value of monuments
is placed in question.
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(1) This account is based upon J. P. Nettl's book Rosa Luxemburg, (2 Vols) (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1966) and a report in the Times, 22 May 1919, p.11. See
also E. Hannover-Druck and H. Hannover (eds): Der Mord an Rosa Luxemburg und
Suhrkampf, 1967).
(2) There are a number of books on the November Revolution and the revolt of the
Several other studies of Luxemburg exist besides Nettl's works: P. Frõlich, Rosa
of Rosa Luxemburg, (London: New Left Book, 1976); F. Hetmann, Rosa L. Die
Geschichte Der Rosa Luxemburg uno Ihrer Zeit, (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch
DC: Public Affairs Press, 1957); H. Trotnow, Karl Liebknecht: Eine Politische
(3) K. Kollwitz, The Diaries and Letters of Käthe Kollwitz, (Chicago: Henry Regnery,
1955).
(5) On Grosz, see B. I. Lewis, George Grosz: Art and Politics in the Weimar Republic,
Life and Work, (London: Gordon Fraser, 1979); George Grosz, A Small Yes and a Big
6: 'On My Painting' (1938) -in- Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists
and Critics, ed. H. Chipp (Berkeley, Los Angles & London: Univ. of California
(8) 0p cit.
(9) T. W. Adorno, Aesthetics and Politics, E. Bloch and others, (London: New Left
(11) Mies, quoted in, Social Radicalism and the Arts: Western Europe, by D. D.
Eduard Fuchs was a scholar, historian and art collector. He was particularly
interested in caricature (he had a large collection of Daumier's work) and erotic
images. Besides Mies, Fuchs knew George Grosz and Walter Benjamin (the
(13) P. C. Johnson, Mies van der Rohe, (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978), p. 35.
(14) P. L. Goodwin, 'Monuments' -in- New Architecture and City Planning, ed. P.
(15) See, for example, Charles Jencks 'The problem of Mies' -in- Modern Movements
Muche and the Weimar Bauhaus', Art Journal, 27 Spring 1969, pp. 269-77.
(21) M. Podro, 'Some notes on Kitaj', Art International, 22 (10) March 1979, pp
18-25.
(23) In an interview with Tim Hyman, Kitaj remarked, "I feel like a socialist";
Kitaj: Paintings, Drawings, Pastels, by John Ashbery and others, (London: Thames
& Hudson, 1983), p. 45. In this interview, and in a letter to the author, Kitaj
expresses his suspicion of all socialist ideologies, programmes and parties. He puts
his faith in individuals as against collectivities and identifies with the compassionate
ideals of socialism.
(24) On the work of May Stevens see: M. Roth, 'Visions and Re-visions:
Rosa Luxemburg and the Artist's Mother', Artforum, 14 (3) November 1980, pp. 36-
9; L. Tickner, 'May Stevens', Block, (5) 1981, pp. 28-33; May Stevens:
Gallery, 1984).
(25) Pope Gregory I (590-604), see Early Medieval Art 300-1150: Sources and
Documents, ed. C. Davis - Weyer, (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1971), p. 48.
(26) See N. Tumarkin, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia,
NB. An exhibition covering some of the same ground as this show was: Ikon and
Revolution: Political and Social Themes in German Art 1918-33, (Norwich, Univ. of
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