Friedl Dicker-Brandeis

Friedl Dicker-Brandeis

Works from the Collection of the University of Applied Arts Vienna

Stefanie Kitzberger, Cosima Rainer, and Linda Schädler (Eds.)

Foreword

With over two hundred drawings, sketches, and watercolors, as well as designs for furniture, toys, textiles, and interior decor, the institute Collection and Archive of the University of Applied Arts Vienna possesses in the work of the extraordinary artist and designer Friedl Dicker-Brandeis not only a treasure trove but also a testament to one of the most important periods of the twentieth century: one in which no less was at stake than the utopian dream of a new society. The profound changes that took effect in the wake of the First World War gave rise to a rethinking of the role of the family, of sex and gender, the question of housing and of work—in short, how to shape and organize life. Friedl Dicker-Brandeis commanded an imagination powerful enough to contribute to this transformation of society in the realm of politics as well as in the realm of aesthetics. She opposed the blatant injustice of social life with just as much commitment as she did the monstrous machinations of the rising fascism of the bourgeoisie. With a merciless gaze, Dicker-Brandeis deconstructed the self-serving interests of the National Socialists and countered their propagandistic aesthetics with her insistence on a human and a social emancipation that saw the individual as always involved in a social group.

Through an international array of exhibitions in Warsaw, Linz, Zurich and Vienna, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis is finally being introduced to a larger audience.

With this book and the exhibition Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. Werkstätten bildender Kunst [Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. Workshops for Visual Art], which was on view in fall 2022 at the University Gallery of the University of Applied Arts Vienna in the Heiligenkreuzerhof and in spring 2023 at the Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich, our aim of lending contemporary relevance to the important work of this outstanding artist is coming to fruition. In the increasingly posthuman and postsocial environment, marked more by conflicts over individual lives than by those over the social landscape, it seems particularly urgent to give space to the imagination of the social.

More than ever, it is important to communicate to students of the University of Applied Arts Vienna as well as to an international audience not only the trust in the power of art, for which Friedl Dicker-Brandeis stood; but also and alongside it, the responsibility of art toward society.

Gerald Bast Rector, University of Applied Arts Vienna

Eva Maria Stadler Vice-Rector and Professor of Art and Knowledge Transfer, University of Applied Arts Vienna

For Switzerland, this is a discovery: here, the work of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis (1898–1944) has never before been honored with a solo exhibition. It is true that there was a Viennese collaboration with the Swiss Architecture Museum Basel in 1989/90— but at the time Dicker-Brandeis was presented alongside her temporary atelier partner Franz Singer, and the focus was then on the Bauhaus period. The present collaboration with the institute Collection and Archive of the University of Applied Arts Vienna is thus the perfect moment to introduce this important Austrian artist to Switzerland thoroughly for the first time. Without entirely disregarding the tragic circumstances of her life, our aim in the exhibition is to center on the quality of her work and the variety of fields in which her activities took place.

The Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich itself does not possess any works by this multiply-gifted artist. It is therefore a fortunate coincidence that Cosima Rainer, Director of the institute Collection and Archive of the University of Applied Arts Vienna, contacted us about a cooperation. Her institution boasts an unparalleled portfolio. It is thanks to this excellent collaboration that a selection of the works will travel to Zurich following the Dicker-Brandeis exhibition at the University Gallery Heiligenkreuzerhof in fall 2022. One important reason that the partnership makes so much sense is that both of our institutions have a university collection with a close connection to teaching and research. We have thus planned additional exchange in a seminar context, as well as an exchange of exhibitions. While Dicker-Brandeis’s work is on its way to Zurich, Swiss artist Lill Tschudi’s (1911–2004) will likewise be going to Vienna. Having had a solo exhibition in the Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich in winter 2021/ 22, her multifaceted work will be shown at the University Gallery Heiligenkreuzerhof in Vienna. Tschudi has often stood in the shadow of art history, even though she attained great fame with her linocuts in the Anglo-Saxon world during the first half of the twentieth century.

The success of this cooperation demonstrates how valuable and fruitful institutional exchange can be. We would like to thank Cosima Rainer, the main project manager, for her openness and constructive collaboration; Stefanie Kitzberger for the scholarly supervision, especially of the publication; Robert Müller for the co-conception of the exhibition; and Eva Maria Stadler for jumping at the chance to visit the Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich with her students in the context of a seminar trip—the conversation is thus already making promising moves beyond the boundaries of the exhibition opening.

Thanks are also, as always, due to the sponsors of such an ambitious project. Without their financial support, we would not have been able to realize our plan. We would like to thank the Dr. Georg and Josi Guggenheim Foundation and Omanut— Forum for Jewish Art and Culture, as well as those who wish to remain unnamed.

Linda Schädler Head, Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich

Whatever You See Could Just as Well Have Been Otherwise

An Introduction to This Volume

Stefanie Kitzberger and Cosima Rainer

Defying Easy Categorization Has Meant Falling into Oblivion

Friedl Dicker-Brandeis’s artistic work is complex and multimedial. It extends from graphics, paintings, and set and costume designs through building and interior designs, modular and convertible furnishings, textiles, toys and activist political collages to her work in art dissemination and pedagogy, which she carried out even after her deportation to the Terezín Ghetto. During her short career, Dicker also worked in a variety of collaborations and other working relationships. The complexity of the work that arose in these contexts distinguishes her unique contribution. Nevertheless, like many women artists of her generation, she is hardly visible in the art historiography of European modernism. There are various reasons for Dicker-Brandeis’s neglect, including gender-, class-, and ethnicity-based forms of marginalization. Dicker was long understood primarily as the partner of architect Franz Singer. Her persecution as a socialist beginning in the 1930s, and her murder as a Jew at the hands of the National Socialist regime additionally resulted in the dispersal and destruction or loss of central pieces of her rich and extensive work.

The tendency of art historiography to divide the canon of the twentieth century by medium and according to an alleged dichotomy between fine and applied arts has further complicated attempts to classify and interpret Dicker-Brandeis’s interdisciplinary oeuvre. Already her early work, however, reflects an interest in the transgression of established categories both explicitly and in its conceptualization. It is in this sense that, in naming their first company Werkstätten Bildender Kunst GmbH [Workshops for Visual Art Ltd.], Dicker and Singer articulated an avant-garde understanding of visual art as material labor on the social whole. Dicker-Brandeis, who responded to her

frequently changing, sometimes precarious living situations through the medium of art, was a highly principled, aesthetically and socially powerful artist. Her strong personality, her specifically artistic language, and her unusual design ideas and formal combinations, put to use in a wide variety of areas, were not only informed by her multifaceted education with teachers such as Rosalia Rothansl, Arnold Schönberg, Johannes Itten, Lothar Schreyer, or Paul Klee, as well as at institutions such as the Wiener Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt [Vienna Graphical Teaching and Research Institute], the Wiener Kunstgewerbeschule [Vienna Arts and Crafts School], and the Weimar Bauhaus, but also by her networks, which extended far beyond the art field, and by her specific living and working conditions as a Jewish communist from a petit bourgeois background.

This monograph, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. Works from the Collection of the University of Applied Arts Vienna, represents the final part of a two-year research project devoting intensive examination to the corpus of the Collection and Archive of the University of Applied Arts Vienna, which encompasses over 200 works and documents pertaining to the artist—the largest publicly accessible collection in Austria.1 The results of the project were first presented in fall 2022 at the Vienna exhibition Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. Werkstätten bildender Kunst [Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. Workshops for Visual Arts. In a collaboration with the Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich, this exhibition will be shown in revised form in Zurich in spring 2023.

The show, arranged by artist Robert Müller, had the aim of presenting an expanded and nuanced perspective on the oeuvre of the artist. The exhibition thus centered on the material, formal, and thematic complexity of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis’s genreand media-spanning production and turned attention not only to the artist’s various modes of practice and their political and historical contexts, but also to the intellectual and artistic milieus with which she was connected. Approaching its topics in a likewise critical manner, the exhibition and the present publication offer new contributions to the scholarship on Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, as well as to the history of modernism and its de-canonization. It is in this contemporary sense that both wish to interpret and carry forward the program of the founder of the Collection and Archive of the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Oswald Oberhuber.

Oswald Oberhuber and the Formation of the Friedl Dicker-Brandeis Inventory at the University of Applied Arts Vienna

A great deal of credit for the existence of this artist’s collection, unmatched in Austria, is due to the activities of Oswald Oberhuber, who championed a campaign to reestablish an ‹Austrian avant-garde› as an artist, exhibition organizer, and later rector of the University of Applied Arts Vienna.2 Dicker-Brandeis’s work, which had been largely neglected in the years after her murder, was gradually re-discovered beginning in the 1970s.3 With the exhibition Österreichische Avantgarde 1900–1938. Ein unbekannter Aspekt (1976) [Austrian Avant-garde 1900–1938. An unfamiliar view] and the catalogue Die Vertreibung des Geistigen aus Österreich. Zur Kulturpolitik des Nationalsozialismus (1985) [The Expulsion of the Intellectual from Austria. On the Cultural

Stefanie Kitzberger and Cosima Rainer

Politics of National Socialism], Oberhuber re-entered her name into the annals of art history. Oberhuber’s programmatic work was presented comprehensively in the exhibition Schule Oberhuber. Eine Sammlung als Programm [Schule Oberhuber. A Collection as Program] by the institute Collection and Archive in spring 2022.4 There, his attention lay on avant-garde artists and protagonists of the Austrian cultural landscape who had been murdered, exiled, or otherwise marginalized by fascism. With his donation of a print of Dicker’s � 245 and three photographic reproductions of a series of photo collages that have since been lost or destroyed � 206, 210, 211, in 1981 he lay the foundation5 for the development of a Friedl Dicker-Brandeis collection at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.6

Erika Patka, director of the collection from 1980 to 2004, continued this focus. As correspondence of Patka’s and of her successor Patrick Werkner with friends and former collaborators of the artist show, it is due to their committed efforts between 1990 and 2012 that several bundles of graphics, paintings, and letters from the private collections of Georg Schrom, Judith Adler, and Hildegard Angelini-Kothny came into the possession of the Collection of the University of Applied Arts Vienna. These three people were all biographically linked with Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. Leopoldine Schrom, the aunt of the Viennese architect Georg Schrom, was a colleague of Franz Singer and Friedl Dicker at their joint atelier and had preserved most of the works created in the atelier up until her death. From this bundle, which is currently held by Schrom, in 1990 and 1991 design drawings for the apartment of Viktor Kraus,7 an axonometry for the apartment of Hans Heller,8 two bags, and a series of fabric patterns and textile designs by the artist were given over to the University Archive of the University of Applied Arts, as it was then called. Beginning in 1999 with the purchase of over fifty works from the collection of Judith Adler, the daughter of Dicker-Brandeis’s fellow student and friend Anny Wottitz-Moller, by 2002 the main part of a bundle of artistic works and archival documents found their way to the Collection and Archive via the Adler family. Alongside the eight historical glass negatives that document the abovementioned photo collages from the 1930s9—today the most commented individual artistic works of Dicker’s, several architectural designs from the joint atelier with Franz Singer, and paintings from Dicker-Brandeis’s late work as well as letters from the 1920s up until the 1940s, this part contains numerous graphics that the artist produced in the context of her education at the Weimar Bauhaus (1919–23) and her work as a set designer in Dresden and Berlin. Through the estate of Hildegard Angelini-Kothny, further correspondence and paintings arrived at the Collection of the University of Applied Arts Vienna in 2002. Kothny had met Dicker-Brandeis in Prague in 1936 and was in close contact with her particularly during the exile in Prague and Hronov, but also even after her deportation to the Terezín concentration camp.10

Experimental Forms of Dialogue and Education

In its work with its holdings, the institute Collection and Archive has again and again developed experimental forms of dialogue and education and involved contemporary artists, students, and scholars at the University.

Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, Path in Hronov, ca. 1940, oil on cardboard, 54 × 57.5 cm Belvedere Vienna, Inv.no. 9654

(© Belvedere Vienna)

Space Loops

Political Dimensions of Layering, Interweaving, and Intertwining in Friedl Dicker-Brandeis’s Work in the Context of the European Avant-Gardes

Daniela Stöppel

The diversity of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis’s work is not easy to grasp, and it is difficult to describe it adequately in its heterogeneity and disciplinary variety using commonplace art-historical explanatory models.

In 1941, for example, an abstract, diagrammatic assemblage � 156 stands more or less unmediated alongside naturalistic landscape paintings produced at the same time. In the 1920s and 1930s, objectivist, rectilinear construction drawings for functionalist interior designs � 43 are accompanied by figurative works � 50 whose curvilinear composition and sculptural elaboration are nearly impossible to reconcile with the strict modernist vocabulary of the other works. Similarly, the technically ambitious textile designs in the «Bauhaus style» � 98 do not directly anticipate the political photo collages of the 1930s � 200 in which social themes are presented densely packed and rhetorically exaggerated. In addition to this stylistic and disciplinary heterogeneity, there is, as an additional facet, Dicker-Brandeis’s extremely diverse pedagogical and scenographic activity. And last but not least, her collaboration with other artists as well as the economic calculus required of an independent artist make it difficult to grasp and evaluate her creative oeuvre in its entirety.

Consequently, engaging with Dicker-Brandeis’s oeuvre represents no small methodical challenge, since it constantly demands new perspectives and changing questions.

The range of Dicker-Brandeis’s work has been variously explained and evaluated in the past: as having arisen under certain «influences,» such as that of Johannes Itten, as whose «follower» Dicker-Brandeis is generally regarded and with whom she went from Vienna to the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919;1 as the result of collaborative practices, especially with Franz Singer and Anny Wottitz, which caused her to assimilate or even subordinate her impulses to theirs;2 or else as a design vocabulary adapted to

specific functional requirements on a case by case basis and one that consciously distinguished, stylistically, between applied and creative art. A comparison of DickerBrandeis’s work with the major evolving artistic movements is hardly more satisfactory. For as the aforementioned simultaneity within her work, of styles belonging to different art-historical moments shows, we are not dealing with «phases»—an Expressionist one, for example, and a Constructivist or New Objectivist one. Also outdated today are biographical approaches that would attempt to identify some fundamental character of Dicker-Brandeis’s personality or formative life events as the determining factors in her artistic production.3

How, then, are we to approach her work without splitting it up into individual areas, without overemphasizing the «influence» of external or biographical events, and without at the same time lapsing into a homogenizing or essentializing perspective that seeks to identify the artist alone as the impetus for a particular creative decision? And how are we to situate the artist within a European avant-garde, especially since the latter never existed as a singular phenomenon and is thus only suited as a normative standard to a limited extent?

Recent research has fruitfully investigated Friedl Dicker-Brandeis’s oeuvre from the perspective of transitional space (Otto), described her stylistic heterogeneity as an «ars combinatoria» (Johnson), and pursued a source-based appraisal of the (collaborative) production contexts of her works (Hövelmann, Romauch).4 I will draw on these multicausal approaches here, also, in a certain sense, as a means of resisting the temptation to assign Dicker-Brandeis retroactively a place within the canon of European avant-garde art that can only be secured at the cost of homogenizing her work. Instead, I will seek to explore the effective space of action and reflection within which she could and did actually operate as a Jewish woman artist born around 1900 and socialized in Vienna. Ideally, this approach will also help to challenge a monolithic concept of modernism or the avant-garde.

Thus, in what follows I will seek to reconstruct, first, the artistic positions with which Dicker-Brandeis was familiar, and second, the general horizon of experience and expectation for and within which she produced her works. In the process, I will also incorporate the practical skills she acquired in multiple training programs as forms of a practiced or applied «theory of art,» especially as a means of correcting a passively conceived art history of influences and replacing it with a conscious, proactive practice of appropriation and reciprocal engagement. I will also ask whether specific aesthetic criteria can be identified in Dicker-Brandeis’s works through formal analysis which may reflect those of a more general avant-garde aesthetic, or whether her work must ultimately be situated beyond these categories.

In 1940, in a letter to Hilde Kothny, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis wrote of her artistic concerns that she wished to «express the unfolding of a movement in the material. From the plane to the line.»5 Although this statement is brief and does not seem particularly well developed from an art-theoretical perspective, it carries special weight as one of the few instances in which Dicker-Brandeis gives explicit expression to her conception of art.6 Moreover, it articulates two fundamental viewpoints. First, there is a desire to communicate dynamic processes through a certain treatment of the material. And second, interestingly, Dicker-Brandeis describes this principle as proceeding from plane to line. With the former principle of dynamicization, she evokes aesthetic

discussions already underway in Vienna, later at the Bauhaus, and generally in the international, particularly Soviet Russian context, which ascribed an artistic as well as political dimension to the principle of movement.7 Dicker-Brandeis clearly saw the latter as material-based—this too a mode of thought she shared with many designers of her time. Movement was often assigned a transcending function in these contemporary discourses in order to transform the material weight and ontological inertia of the materials into a higher principle, often understood as an «abstract, spiritual» one. Thus, for Dicker-Brandeis too the dynamicizing of materials is clearly harnessed to a higher aim described in the broadest sense as «spiritual.» She had already become familiar with such views of dynamicized matter as a young artist thanks to the Itten school, which was present in Vienna from 1916 and whose theory expressly included physical movement. The second aspect, of thinking from plane to line rather than vice versa, also reflects her own artistic «bildungsroman,» which had carried her from the study of photography and graphic reproduction at the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt [Graphical Teaching and Research Institute] in Vienna from 1912 to 1915, through a subsequent eight-month training program lasting till summer 1916 at the Kunstgewerbeschule [Vienna Arts and Crafts School] in the class of the «textile, carpet, and tapestry specialist» Rosalia Rothansl8 (where she also came in contact with Franz Čižek), to fine art with Itten. Thus, at least in biographical terms, where her education is concerned, the two-dimensional media of photography and textiles were the starting point for Dicker-Brandeis’s own creative thinking and not the line as a drawingoriented design process.

In the significance Dicker-Brandeis attributes to the surface, however, a certain deviation can be seen from the prevailing models and theories discussed and developed above all at the Bauhaus, which she attended from 1919 to 1923. Kandinsky and Klee in particular both emphasized the primacy of line. To what extent Dicker-Brandeis’s reversal, seen from a feminist perspective, constitutes a breaking down of stereotypical gendered notions of creativity or, on the contrary, represents their affirmation is difficult to answer here. However, her activity in her shared studio with Franz Singer has generally been described on the assumption of a binary, gender-based division of their joint practice into design on the one hand and its material, tactile filling in on the other. Thus, the design process, with its male connotations and association with line, was retrospectively attributed to Singer, whereas Dicker was seen as responsible for materially outfitting the design with fabrics and colors, hence for «filling in the plane.»9 On this account, Dicker’s contribution lay among other things in providing the customers with visually striking fabric samples.

Disregarding for the moment the fact that the precise division of labor within the shared studio has not yet been definitively reconstructed, it is interesting that the aspect Dicker-Brandeis mentions first in her letter is the lower-status, female connoted domain of the plane. This could be read as valorizing it, but it could also be seen as indicating a compliant acceptance of the gender-specific division of responsibilities.

A look at her works of this period confirms that her theory coincides with an independent aesthetic practice. Even the sheets produced in direct collaboration with Itten for the volume Utopia , published by Bruno Adler in 1921 � 22, display a conception of text that views writing less as a purely linear sequence of letters than as a woven fabric unfolding in the surface, in which different ribbon-like strands literally inter-

twine. The difference emerges particularly clearly from a comparison with Itten’s diagrammatic Schriftbilder, images containing text or letters, Dicker increasingly juxtaposed text blocks of different density and structure and wove them into a kind of texture by varying and alternating their levels of indentation, whereas Itten tended to build «ladders» of textual elements set off abruptly from one other.10 In DickerBrandeis’s work, an impetus really does seem to pass from the plane to the line and not vice versa. To what extent this is due to her technical skills as a craftsperson trained in designing surfaces—a certain similarity to her textile designs, in which she not infrequently changed the direction of weaving � 23, is unmistakable—or has a reflexive, subversive character is something that can no longer be reconstructed today.11

The fine artworks of this period, most of which Dicker executed in the medium of charcoal drawing, primarily feature figurative motifs, mainly human bodies and landscapes � 64, Inv.no. 12.207, 56, Inv.no. 12.210, 167. 12 Dicker had a predilection for the soft material of charcoal, which she applied to the paper in broad strokes and smudged. Here as in her pastels and oil paintings, she used color chiefly as a plastic medium, without sharp contours. As a «painterly» technique, charcoal drawing still had a relatively low status among drawing media in the nineteenth century and similarly often had female connotations.13 It may be that Dicker was drawing on latent attributed meanings like these, or it may be that they were assigned to her—by Itten, who subscribed to a duality of the genders—as a design medium in keeping with her nature.14 Whatever the case, it is striking that Dicker did not use lines to create contours and hence as an ideal or idealistic element but rather developed her contours from the diffuse materiality of the medium. A dynamicizing impulse is evident not only in how forms are constantly emerging from the priming layer but also in the line itself, whose momentum often weakens so that it dwindles, as it were, to nothing, its tapering also suggesting a temporal expiration.

In 1933, when Franz Singer testified at the so-called passport forgery trial, in which Dicker was accused of falsifying documents, that «Friedl can’t draw a straight line,»15 it was not just a pointed formulation with which he sought to come to her

Friedl Dicker, Johannes Itten, Analyses of old masters, Utopia. Dokumente der Wirklichkeit

[Utopia. Documents of Reality]

Weimar: Utopia-Verlag, 1921, sheet 10, proof, 33 × 24 cm Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, Inv.no. 7293/8

(© Bildrecht, Wien 2022)

aid as an exculpatory witness. He was also identifying a distinguishing feature of her style, the way she used dynamically curving lines to make a temporal process visible that was not achieved through construction but through physical evocation. Here too it is impossible to determine if this almost bodily materialization of movement represents an appropriative recuperation of stereotypical gendered notions of creativity or an affirmation of what the Bauhaus teachers expected of their female students. Whatever the case, the fact remains that dynamicized spatiality was clearly a central category for Dicker; hence it seems legitimate at this point to delve somewhat more deeply into the general discourse surrounding it.

Even Dicker’s formative experiences in the Jewish Youth Movement in Vienna may be seen in terms of a dynamic transformation of society toward socialism and equal rights for men and women, as a form of the physical materialization of spiritual and intellectual processes.16 Particularly noteworthy in this regard is her friendship with Otto Fenichel, who promoted the psychoanalytic method within the Youth Movement as a means of furthering these emancipatory aims.17 In this sense, psychological (movement) processes could be understood as serving not just the goal of ego formation but that of social transformation as well.18 The term Jugendbewegung or youth movement and even more strongly the adjective jugendbewegt, which was widely used at the time, may thus be seen as literal references to forms of dynamic activity.

The technique of photography, which for Dicker-Brandeis represented the first step on her career, is also characterized as a medium by the inextricable connection between time, space, and surface. The effort not to kill off the former two qualities in the photographic process of capturing the image on the surface may be regarded as one of the fundamental challenges specific to the medium. We may assume that Dicker dealt with this topic during her training.19

Of central importance for Friedl Dicker-Brandeis’s concept of art was demonstrably so-called Viennese Kineticism, which she encountered at the latest during her time at the Vienna Arts and Crafts School.20 As has since been established, it may for various reasons be regarded as an atypical manifestation of international modernism, since it represents a syncretic mixture of various avant-garde styles and one that began belatedly.21 Moreover, it is distinguished by a stronger connection to tradition than

Friedl Dicker, embroidery pattern on a mesh, 1920–30 Private collection of Georg Schrom (© Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, Reinhard Haider)

Figure, 1919–20 Inv.no. 16.415/6

Reclining Figure with Outstretched Arm, 1919–20 Inv.no. 12.196

Friedl Dicker and Franz Singer, Theater set design for Berthold Viertel’s production of August Stramm’s Erwachen, ca. 1921

(© Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Inv.no. THM-492-1)

Mark Wigley

The Unbinding Interior of Friedl Dicker

The artist-designer-teacher Friedl Dicker was murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau on October 9, 1944 at the age of 46.1 This should never be forgotten. But how to see and learn from the work of someone who was murdered without treating their life as if always lived in the looming shadow of the brutality to come? To imagine such a shadow increases the cruelty, rendering the victim a victim long before the crime. In a sense, it repeats the confinement and violence, conjuring up a threatening companion that becomes an active participant in every thought and action. Yet to imagine an unhaunted life is equally disrespectful, as if the horror arrived unannounced. Surely art and architecture are constructed in the shadows as much as the light. They are often thought as a form of light and sometimes preciously gifted to others in the face of despair. This is especially true of Friedl Dicker, whose gift was a particular kind of minimal yet psychologically expansive interior. This protective space was a suspended cocoon disconnected from a relentlessly brutal exterior world. Yet it was not binding, confining, imprisoning, suffocating, or dehumanizing. On the contrary, it was a way to unbind its occupants. Dicker’s gift was an unbinding interior, an agile but ultimately fragile space that was systematically erased along with so many of those sheltered within it—yet the space survives in lingering archival traces that are themselves defiant witnesses.

The Longest Shadows

In the half-light between outer threat and inner resistance, a unique kind of architecture was assembled that was never so easy to see, even from its inside, and was anyway ever-shifting, like a kind of enveloping mirage. This was never an anesthetic architec -

ture. It is not soft or even that comfortable. It is designed to keep a community awake—living, thinking, talking, and acting. It is for life when that could be so easily taken—which is always.

After all, Dicker’s death was not accidental or unexpected. On the contrary, the killing was long theorized, planned, calculated, engineered, industrialized, and documented. It was designed and executed as an act of government administration with its own chilling bureaucracy. This deadly genocidal design was an open secret for four years built upon the long history of normalized everyday violence through racial stereotyping, exclusions, and subordinations. Dicker had been arrested and interrogated in Vienna in late 1931 for suspected forging of passports along with a group of fellow communists in her studio space, an accusation immediately published in detail by more than a dozen newspapers, including some that had recently celebrated her design philosophy.2 She was tried, sentenced to three months in prison in March of 1932, and served part of that time before being released, but remained under a permanent triple threat for being a communist, a Jew, and a woman. Vienna was being called the capital of anti-Semitism at the time, with race-based rioting already happening in 1931. The threat of the systemic institutional and social cruelty becoming official policy was unavoidable and only momentarily delayed by the failed Nazi putsch of 1934. Dicker’s work was already being produced under the ever more explicit threat to life that ultimately forced her to become a refugee in Czechoslovakia and active member of a communist cell until confined to the ghetto of Theresienstadt in the fortress town of Terezín for two years before being transported to the death camp.3 Ten years in which art was more than a way of surviving and a painting of flowers catching the fading sun in front of a window overlooking an idyllic countryside was as intensely charged as an agonizing painting of interrogation � 155, a self-portrait of militant mobility, or a prison courtyard. Yet this production of work and ideas in the face of deadly menace was also the flourishing of the defining quality of Dicker’s work from the beginning. The life so abruptly extinguished in 1944 had been shaped since childhood by the countless micro-aggressions of racialized and gender-based cruelty and already lived as a form of internal escape or resistance.

Studio exhibition or shop-offer for sale by the Werkstätten

Bildender Kunst GmbH [Workshops for Visual Art Ltd.], Berlin with works by Friedl Dicker, Franz Singer and Anny Wottitz, from file Werkstätten Bildender

Kunst Berlin-Friedenau, 1923–24, silver gelatin on baryta paper, 11.8 × 15 cm Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, Inv.no. 9030

Mark Wigley

This produced a sharp, opinionated, but resilient fighter constantly inventing arts of resistance—against prejudice, elitism, capitalism, fascism, boredom, routine, passivity, inaction, stasis, and silence. Yet the point here is not to simply read Dicker’s work for what it resists and remain such active threats today but to explore the space that the resistance constructed, to occupy that space and thereby hopefully become another of her students.

Floating the Interior

Dicker could never be pinned down with orthodox labels. Her work ranged across so many media—including drawing, painting, photo-collage, sculpture, textiles, embroidery, theater, costume, accessories, puppets, toys, and furniture—without any one being privileged over the others.4 Yet most of these diverse media were somehow woven together in the architectural work and the teaching, which were both ultimately treated as a single art of interior environment.

In this, Dicker was more Bauhaus than the Bauhaus, even before arriving there as one of the first and strongest students in 1919 and almost immediately being assigned as a teacher to her colleagues, as Walter Gropius later recalled. She actively resisted the dominance of any one media, having already studied textiles, ornamental design, drawing, lithography, theater, and musical composition in Vienna between 1912 and 1918. Joining the private art school of the painter Johannes Itten in 1916, she went to Weimar when he did, being one of his closest associates—as shown by the fact that she was the one who did the remarkable elaborate experimental typographic and conceptual presentation of his artistic and pedagogical philosophy � 22 for the Bauhaus almanac

Utopia: Dokumente der Wirklichkeit [Utopia: Documents of Reality] in 1921. But she engaged equally with most of the workshops and other teachers, particularly Paul Klee at the beginning and Oskar Schlemmer towards the end, before leaving when Itten’s rivalry with Gropius culminated in his departure in 1923. Architecture seems to have emerged in Dicker’s work just before going to the Bauhaus with a theater set design and a furnished apartment in 1918 and continued with Bauhaus-inspired work for theatrical productions done outside the school and drawings of buildings done within the school.5 Yet it only became a consistent practice after leaving Weimar, even if always in the context of other kinds of production, particularly textiles. Architecture was, as it were, suspended within multiple other media and, in reverse, multiple media were suspended within architecture.

This double suspension resonated with the foundational idea of the Bauhaus as famously presented in the opening paragraph of its manifesto by Gropius in 1919, which called on art to restore itself by reinvesting itself with the spirit of architecture: «The ultimate goal of all art is the building! The ornamentation of the building was once the main purpose of the visual arts, and they were considered indispensable parts of the great building. Today, they exist in complacent isolation, from which they can only be salvaged by the purposeful and cooperative endeavors of all artisans. Architects, painters and sculptors must learn a new way of seeing and understanding

Designs for the Theater

Three works from the collection are designs for theatrical productions Dicker was involved in during the 1920s. It is not entirely clear for which pieces the designs were produced; for this reason, in the following the question of their origin will be approached in the framework of a historical contextualization.

The high-contrast charcoal drawing � 111 depicts two standing figures whose heads are turned toward one another.1 On the back of the drawing, Dicker annotated in her own handwriting «Thea» (crossed out) and «figurines,» which suggests that these are costume designs. While one figure with shoulder-length curls, who is represented in profile and draped with a wide coat, stands in the center of the image and is passing over to the right side, the thinner figure on the left, clothed in an hour-glass-shaped garment, is turned toward the viewer, set slightly back, and, because of the blank area under the curved line of the hem of her skirt, appears to float. The vaguely indicated facial features, formed by empty spaces in the drawing, reinforce the puppet-like nature of the figures. Their costumes, composed in deep black lines, bear features of the so-called Elizabethan era: the headdress of the left figure with its curved line framing the forehead reminds of the heartshaped wire frame of the Attifet2 and the Tudor bonnet3 that tapers into a point at the back; her head is supported by a white ruff collar.4 Elena Makarova ascribes the drawing to the staging of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice with Berthold Viertel’s Die Truppe [The Troupe], which premiered at the Berlin Lustspielhaus in September 1923.5 Based on the historical references described above and the fact that according to the current state of knowledge Friedl Dicker worked on no other pieces from the sixteenth century, this ascription appears sound.6

The intermedial and social art form of the theater permeates Friedl Dicker’s varied artistic activity from its beginnings all the way to her work with children at the Terezín concentration camp. In order to finance her studies as the Kunstgewerbeschule [Vienna Arts and Crafts School] starting in 1914, she worked as a prop master and puppeteer.7 At the Bauhaus, she studied, among other places, in the stage workshop established by Lothar Schreyer in 1921 and collaborated on his Mondspiel. 8 Based on the frequency of their artistic collaborations at this time, it is likely

1 On the use of light-dark contrast in Dicker-Brandeis’s graphic works, see the texts on genre scenes and compositions.

2 This bonnet was made fashionable by Maria Stuart in the second half of the sixteenth century; see Ingrid Loschek, Reclams Mode- und Kostümlexikon (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam junior, 2005), 105.

3 Jane Seymour wears one, for instance, in a portrait by Hans Holbein—a painting that Friedl Dicker could have seen in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

4 The tight, here ornamentfilled stockings and the slitted seam of the garment, as well as the beret of the figure on the right, are characteristic of the fashion of the male European upper class in the sixteenth century. On this, see Loschek, Mode- und Kostümlexikon, 34.

5 See Elena Makarova, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. Ein Leben für Kunst und Lehre. Wien—Weimar—Prag— Hronov—Theresienstadt— Auschwitz (Vienna/Munich: Christian Brandstätter, 2000), 72.

6 That The Troupe played Shakespeare in particular, alongside playwrites of modernism, is astonishing, although it can perhaps be ascribed to his influence on the increasing secularization of the theater of his time or his significance for Marx’s writings. On the reception of Shakespeare, see Bettina Boecker, Shakespeares elisabethanisches Publikum: Formen und Funktionen einer Fiktion der Shakespearekritik und -forschung (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2012). Also, Hugh Grady and Christian Smith, «Introduction: Marx and Shakespeare: A Continuing Process,» Shakespeare 14, no. 2 (2018): 99–105.

7 Dicker wrote her own version of Bluebeard, built

Friedl Dicker, Self-portrait on a cover for drawings (gift to Ella and Josef Deutsch), 1931, photo collage, tempera, 70 × 50 cm

Private collection

(scan: Visual Resource Center, UTSA)

Between Media— Registering Practices of Knowing

Julie M. Johnson

History is a story told in words: if women aren’t in books, they may as well never have existed.

Jennifer Higgie, 20211

A society becomes visible in its cultural tradition to itself and to others. The past it allows to become visible within, and which is allowed to emerge in the value perspective of its identificatory appropriation says something about what it represents and about where it wants to go.

Jan Assmann, 19882

Friedl Dicker-Brandeis (1898–1944) spent the first decade of her professional life working in collaborative settings in Berlin and Vienna, where she eventually settled in 1925.3 On November 4, 1931 she experienced a significant rupture in her life: she was arrested, interrogated, put on trial, and sentenced to three months in prison. The charge: falsifying passports. She was convicted of attempted fraud and eventually served the much shorter sentence of September 11–27 in 1932.4 She was registered in Vienna until June 24, 1933, after which she moved to Prague. During this transitional phase of her life (from 1931) Dicker made a series of self-portraits � 152, unusual for the otherwise outwardly-oriented, politically active artist.5 In these rare self-portraits she registers her contingent, particular historical circumstances with an inventive, hybrid approach to media. She breaks with the conventions of the genre, depicting herself in profile or from behind, sitting in an interrogation room or riding in a car. There is something else unusual about these images: we see her ears more clearly than her eyes.6 They signal her interest in sonority and interdisciplinarity.

Scene 1

Vienna, 1931. The gift.

Friedl is cutting out a photograph of herself � 132. She has an idea for a gift that she will present to Ella and Josef Deutsch, a young couple who she has befriended.7 She glues the photograph onto a cover for drawings. It will be a picture of herself in the act of making the image, a meta picture that updates the genre of the self-portrait in the studio. She is in profile, smiling as she looks down at her work. She paints a line in red tempera, has already sketched a table and papers in white lines. They seem to float, though they are anchored to the edge of the page. Instead of her studio surroundings, there is just a pink tinted background, left blank as a space of possibility and imagination. The profile is an unusual format for a self-portrait. The gaze of the viewer and artist more often meet on the fictional plane of the image/mirror. The self-portrait has a sense of humor, evident in Dicker’s play with representation and indexicality. When does a line become an object? When does a picture emerge? This is an intermedial work of art that shows the artist, represented by photomontage, in the act of drawing the very image that we see before us. It is a marvelous image for a cover of her drawings. She invites us to enter her world. Turn the page and inside will be her art. There is something else of note: Dicker is not really alone. Someone else has taken the photograph as she cheerfully beams. Here is the social Dicker, the collaborator, the teacher and giver of gifts.

Dicker belongs in the company of artists who invent new media techniques, or combine old media in new ways. Man Ray and John Heartfield, fellow travelers in media experimentation, also show themselves in profile in unconventional selfportraits.8 In 1932, Man Ray depicts himself adjusting the camera lens in a solarized gelatin silver print (Self Portrait with Camera, Smithsonian). He has turned on the lights in the darkroom to create the unusual solarizing effect, a rediscovery that he made with Lee Miller. In Space Writing (Self-Portrait), an experimental photograph from 1935, his image is blurred, obscured behind white squiggling lines. Time exposure has registered the otherwise invisible, momentary movement of writing in space. His medium is light, the fundamental basis of photography; he merely reinvents its

Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, Dream, 1934–38, spray ink, gouache, pastel, 57.5 × 78.5 cm Jewish Museum Prague, Inv.no. 176.188

(© Jewish Museum Prague)

Julie M. Johnson

processes. Dicker experiments too, not tinkering with the chemicals or processes of the darkroom, but with the alchemy of art itself. She begins her formal studies with a degree in photography9 and goes on to study fiber arts, design, and several media, including musical composition with Arnold Schönberg.10 She is endlessly creative in recombining unexpected materials and subjects, disrupting conventions and building unlikely bridges between disciplines. While both Man Ray and Dicker experiment and break barriers in novel ways, the spotlight has rarely been shone on her.

Dicker specializes in transferring the forms and expectations of one medium to another. Around the same time that Man Ray makes his self-portrait in light, she paints a dream image in spray ink, gouache and pastel � 134. It is a mixed media image that reverses the process of remediation, in which an old medium’s forms are transposed into a new one.11 Here she translates the effects of photography, the new media of experimentation, into the old media of gouache, spray ink, and pastel. The white silhouette of a man reaches out with tiny black hands. The sprayed ink effect looks forward to the solarizing edges of photography and backward to the oldest technologies of silhouette and stencil, known since prehistoric cave painting. Gray shapes of men and their long shadows are equally flat. Figures and shadows emerge from the dream space, as in a photogram. White scribbles, like the light writing of Man Ray, dance over a black cloud. The gouache flows freely, refined and light, which she then traces around the edges in an elegant flowing red line. Poles intersect the picture plane, one is black, the other wrapped in red and white barrier tape. She seamlessly integrates the languages of old and new media into her pictorial space. Narrative and legibility are submerged, as if in a dream, no longer entirely accessible.

Indra’s Net and and the Latent «Interobjectivity» of Art

Heroes of twentieth-century art like Picasso and Duchamp attain their status because the contributions they made have lasting effects on what follows—for example, that art can be like a language, or that a quotidian object can be the medium of a work, surely one of the most enduring strategies of contemporary art. But what if we were to put Dicker-Brandeis at the center of the map? Such a thought experiment may not be as radical or as impossible as it sounds. She was «networked» and connected to the most diverse media, idioms and strategies of modern art of the first half of the twentieth century. The contemporary turn to interdisciplinarity, collaboration and relational art makes us more sensitive to histories of prior artists who specialized in similar practices.12 Dicker-Brandeis’s work exemplifies such a collaborative, cross-pollinating approach; we can find in her a precursor whose inventiveness has been obscured for far too long.

In an earlier essay I proposed that «Indra’s net» could provide a structural device for understanding how to make Dicker-Brandeis’s work more visible in art historical narratives.13 Instead of the linear or developmental schemes of art history, the network metaphor helps visualize a structure that prioritizes interconnectivity. Indra’s net, in the Buddhist tale, is a poetic image in which the universe appears as a web hung with glistening jewels or pearls. It is multidimensional and multidirectional. It is about

The Interrogation, 1933–34

This work, most often titled Verhör III [Interrogation III], is one of three extant images in which Friedl Dicker dealt with her detention in Vienna.1 It is the only one of these paintings that is not executed in oil on a solid painting surface.2 Instead, Dicker applies the familiar collage technique on cardboard here. From scraps of paper and newspaper painted with gouache, she glues together a face, which despite its fragmentary composition appears as a vivid whole. Dicker had practiced the collage technique with colored pieces of paper first under Johannes Itten3 and later also taught it herself to her students in Prague and Terezín. Edith Kramer, who was a student of Dicker’s during her time in Prague—and thus at the time this painting was created—remembers that, she had «made so many compositions with colored paper with her.»4

As so often, also here Dicker does not limit herself to a single imaging instrument, but rather mixes various techniques with one another, such as the moist-liquid gouache with dry-hard chalk. Her lines and brushwork take shape in just as heterogeneous ways. A thickly painted area yields to a glaze; an angular brushstroke to a circular; a sharply drawn chalk line to a broad strip of chalk; and, not least, a curved scissor cut to a straight one. Nevertheless, the overall composition creates an impression of coherence. The face emerges expressionistically out of a cloud of color. Its brightest points are composed of three newspaper clippings glued to one another orthogonally and partly painted over. Entirely in keeping with the tradition of avant-garde collage, Dicker transforms the printed word of the newspaper into representational shading—text becomes texture. The newspaper text is thus not so much something to be read as, rather, a medium of the image to be perceived. Nevertheless, the newspaper functions here as an index that emerges onto the scene as a historical witness, a fragment of extra-pictorial reality. Thus, the Czech-language newspaper ushers us into the Czechoslovakia of the time—a place that marks the flight and exile of Friedl Dicker. Beforehand, there had been numerous raids and mass arrests in Austria in the wake of the banning of the communist party on May 26, 1933 by the Christian Social government under Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß.5 Dicker herself is supposed to have joined the KPÖ [Austrian communist party] around 1931.6 One

1 In 1932, Dicker was accused of producing fraudulent passports, as some were found in her atelier. See Katharina Hövelmann, Bauhaus in Wien? Möbeldesign, Innenraumgestaltung und Architektur der Wiener Ateliergemeinschaft von Friedl Dicker und Franz Singer (Vienna/Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2021), 429.

2 The other two images related by topic and titled Verhör I and Verhör II are both executed in oil on wood or canvas. Both are to be found in the collection of the Jewish Museum in Prague and are estimated by the museum to have originated in 1934–35.

3 Julie M. Johnson, «The Other Legacy of Vienna 1900: The Ars Combinatoria of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis,» Austrian History Yearbook 51 (2020): 262; on this technique in Itten’s teaching, see Rainer K. Wick, Bauhaus-Pädagogik (Cologne: DuMont, 1982), 79.

4 Edith Kramer, «Erinnerungen an Friedl Dicker-Brandeis [Vom September 1988, am Grundlsee],» in Franz Singer— Friedl Dicker. 2 x Bauhaus in Wien (Vienna: Hochschule für angewandte Kunst in Wien, 1989), 17.

5 Walter Baier, Das kurze Jahrhundert. Kommunismus in Österreich. KPÖ 1918 bis 2008 (Vienna: Edition Steinbauer, 2009), 37–38.

6 This is held to be probable, although there are no concrete documents as to her joining of the KPÖ, see Hövelmann, Bauhaus in Wien, 133.

7 See Hövelmann, Bauhaus in Wien, 134. Allegedly, Dicker had only been storing the passports for friends and had not manufactured them herself, in Kramer, «Erinnerungen an Friedl Dicker-Brandeis,» 16. See also the statement by Franz Singer, in which he claimed that Dicker could «not draw a straight line,» securing her release, in Elena Makarova, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. Ein Leben für Kunst und Lehre.

year later, Dicker’s atelier was searched and forged passports were found. The artist was thereupon charged with the falsification of documents.7 After her interrogation in 19328 and subsequent incarceration for a total of three months, the artist fled from Vienna to Františkovy Lázně in 1933.9 In view of these circumstances, the choice of painting carrier—cardboard frayed at its edges—may appear as an improvised, makeshift solution. The ad section of one of the newspaper clippings, which would not have been chosen by accident, creates a further reference to the reality of her life and that of many workers in the crisis-ridden interwar period: the job listings allude to her own unemployment upon her arrival in a new country, as well as to the generally high unemployment in the period of crisis before the Second World War. While the German title Verhör situates the action of the painting in Vienna, the newspaper points to the looming caesura in the life of the artist. The face probably represents Dicker’s self-portrait.10 The artist’s coming flight from Vienna thus appears to literally be written into the face. Its countenance flaunts an enigmatic smile in the face of the threatening situation of a police interrogation. The inky black eyes also bear profound expressive power. Although no pupils can be made out, the subject hauntingly stares back at us out of the depths of her eye sockets. The expressionistic-seeming interrogation paintings not only mark a personal disruption in the life of Friedl Dicker, but also herald a re-orientation of Dicker as an artist in terms of both content and material. Her focus on socio-political topics in the early 1930s, which she played out in the technique of photomontage � 200, now shifts toward landscapes, still lifes � 164, and expressionistic portraits � 258, for which Dicker will privilege the techniques of oil and pastel painting.

Hamida Sivac

Wien—Weimar—Prag— Hronov—Theresienstadt— Auschwitz (Vienna/Munich: Christian Brandstätter, 2000), 23.

8 Contra the notion that Dicker was arrested during the February uprising of 1934 (see for instance Makarova, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, 238), registration and release forms from the Georg Schrom archive show that the artist was released from custody twice—once on December 21, 1931 and the second time on September 11, 1932. See on this also Hövelmann, Bauhaus in Wien, 134.

9 A certificate of registration from the archive of Georg Schrom documents that Dicker announced her departure from Vienna on June 24, 1933, specifying the Czechoslovakian Františkovy Lázně as her new place of residence. In Františkovy Lázně, a large Jewish community existed until the Second World War.

10 In reference to the Interrogation paintings (I, II, III), Julie M. Johnson raises the question of whether the face represented is that of the interrogator or that of the accused, and therefore the artist herself. See Johnson, «The Other Legacy of Vienna 1900,» 263. The short hairstyle, then called the ‹Bubikopf,› which is documented in photographs of Dicker from her time in Prague and appears here as well, could be clue, however, that the painting is a self-portrait. On the other hand, Dicker could also have intentionally retained a sense of ambivalence as to the attribution of the face.

Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, Don Quijote & Lenin, 1940, oil on canvas, 77 × 100 cm Private collection

Art in the Face of Fascism

On the Political in the Work of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis around 1930 to 1942

Stefanie Kitzberger

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‹the way it really was› (Ranke).

It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.

Benjamin,

I.

Two white chairs stand in a room in a pre-war apartment. The building: presumably in Vienna. The room: perhaps a space in which Friedl Dicker lived before 1933, when she emigrated to the former Czechoslovakia in the wake of her imprisonment for alleged passport fraud.3 In this interior space, someone—possibly Dicker herself— documented, one after the other, a total of nine panels made of wood fiber and plywood, around 1.2 � 1/0.9 meters in size,4 which were painted in various techniques, labeled, and on which cutouts of black-and-white photographs and snippets of text were pasted. These panels are six large-format photo collages by the artist Friedl Dicker � 200, which have been categorized as leftist visual political agitation. The surviving glass negatives,5 created using a view camera, thus preserve artistic works of Dicker’s that were obviously meant to address a larger audience, yet were here staged not in their ‹natural› environment—a political exhibition or a workers’ club—but instead in these private rooms.6

Except for one that shows a pair, each of the shots captures a single panel, rotated onto its side and resting on two chairs, the lower edges of the panel touching the seat, the relief of a wooden door visible behind its upper edges. To the left of some of the photo collages, a tiled fireplace can be seen, with a mantle stepped to the top. In the photograph of the double panel, a bed with a checkered bedspread can be made out all the way to the right.7 Above it are three plugs, from which an electrical cable hangs down. The panel to the left lies on two thin books, one of which is an edition of Friedrich Engels’s The Peasant War in Germany (1850). � 203 Though the photo collages disappear shortly after they were documented, and with them any information on the

Walter

«Theses on the Philosophy of History»2

concrete circumstances in which they were created (assignment, function, place of exhibition), Friedl Dicker’s friend Anny Wottitz-Moller will preserve the glass negatives throughout the National Socialist era. Beginning in the 1990s, along with other works of the artist that have survived, her inheritors will make these negatives accessible to a broad public, in so doing also allowing them to be subject to detailed art historical study for the first time.8

The constellation sketched here in which Dicker’s photo collages appear and disappear speaks to the manifold precarity of her entire work: here, we encounter an artwork whose material substance has been lost, which survives only as a reproduction, and for which hardly any primary sources that could speak to the contexts in which it was produced and received remain. This is also true of all the built architecture (with the exception of a few pieces of furniture) that the artist designed in her long-time collaboration with Franz Singer; it has been destroyed and is today recorded only in fragments, via photographs or design drawings. Most of the contextual information in the literature comes not from written documents but from oral testimonies by contemporary witnesses delivered to the art therapist and Dicker-Brandeis biographer Elena Makarova. However, the latter published this information in the form of a narrative of Dicker-Brandeis’s life lacking precise commentary on or critical evaluation of her sources.9

Nevertheless, the reproductions of the photo collages themselves reveal a great deal about the conditions of their own production and thus offer a framework important for their social- and art-historical interpretation. For the domestic space in which these works were staged, which has till now gone without much notice, turns out to be more than just another piece of evidence that the biographer can invoke in weaving a story. A place of social reproduction and of unpaid, ‹feminine› labor, outside of the public sphere10—in which it is still marginalized in today’s political economy—this setting reflects the specific living and working conditions in which the collages were produced by their creator in 1930: as a Jewish woman from a petit bourgeois background who long remained unmarried, from childhood she would have had to navigate classist, racist-antisemitic, and misogynist discrimination. Although she knew important intellectuals and figures within and outside of the art scene, she never managed to anchor herself within an institution, affiliating herself—apart from cooperating with the dramaturg Berthold Viertel and the architect Franz Singer—with none of the wellknown artistic groupings of the European avant-garde and thus profiting from none of their transnational dissemination strategies.11 Furthermore, having no inheritance or savings to draw on, she had to make a living through her own work—a necessity that was massively complicated by the National Socialist coup in Germany in 1933 and the so-called ‹annexation› in 1938, and was rendered entirely impossible by her deportation to Terezín.12

These private and political ‹circumstances› in which Friedl Dicker-Brandeis lived (barely) in the 1930s up to her deportation to the Terezín Ghetto have written themselves into the form of her artistic works, seemingly by accident, as at the borders of the photographs described above: the ‹private setting› emerging from the background of the photographs gives us occasion to reconsider our understanding of the ‹private› as something external to the work and opposed to the political. In the following investigation of the relation between art and politics in Dicker-Brandeis’s later work, I would

Stefanie Kitzberger

like to turn to this aspect. Through close attention to the content and form of her works, I offer an example of a kind of interpretation that spells out the aesthetic mode of the political in the works of Dicker-Brandeis and brings it into concrete relation with the ‹private› biography of the artist, in order to challenge the apparent distinction between politics, art, and private life, a distinction particularly specious in the case of marginalized persons such as Dicker-Brandeis. In the course of this argument, I would also like to try to sharpen the artist’s vague categorization as ‹communist› or ‹leftist› within contemporary developments in social and party politics by attending closely to details of the form and content of her artistic work. This investigation raises the question of how Dicker-Brandeis dealt with the rapidly deteriorating conditions of production, distribution, and dissemination particularly for Jewish socialists in the 1930s and 1940s, and the ways these efforts concretely articulated themselves in her artistic strategies and forms of expression.

II.

While Dicker’s early work is most often considered with a view to formal-aesthetic aspects and the reception of visual strategies from the international avant-gardes at the Bauhaus, it is in descriptions of her later work that the designation of ‹political› most often appears, first and foremost in reference to the abovementioned photo collages as well as the Interrogation series � 152 created directly after Dicker’s emigration to Czechoslovakia in 1933. While it is true that the artist only began to bring her political orientation into her artistic production explicitly in the 1930s, she came into contact with leftist perspectives much earlier. Already in the 1910s, she was beginning longterm friendships with figures connected to the Viennese Zionist-Socialist Jugendbewegung [Youth Movement] around Siegfried Bernfeld.13 In those years, Dicker appears at first to have harbored sympathies for leftist movements within social democracy.14 However, contemporary witnesses primarily speak of Dicker’s activities in communist circles, which she continued and possibly even intensified after her emigration. In Czechoslovakia, she became involved in a circle of leftist emigrants that met regularly in the city center at the bookstore Schwarze Rose [Black Rose] owned by the communist Lizi Deutsch.15 A glance at Dicker’s professional network—the mostly communist

Warenüberfluss [Commodity Overflow] (detail), 1932–33

Inv.no. 15.590/3/FW

Photo Collages

1932–33

Today, the original versions of Dicker’s photo collages are thought to be lost or destroyed. Only eight negatives preserved on glass plates reproduce these presumably colored collages now in grayscale.1 The plates show six photo collages that were all photographed in the same domestic interior—in the backgrounds, the same bed can be recognized. In light of her impending emigration to the Czechoslovakian Františkovy Lázně at the end of June 1933, it can be presumed that, with these hurried photographs, Dicker intended to document works that she could not or was not permitted to take with her. Possibly the artist herself destroyed the originals due to their decidedly leftist political contents.2 The Communist Party had been banned on May 26, 1933 under Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß, barely a month before Dicker’s flight.3

It seems reasonable that the creation of the photo collages is related to the agitprop division of the KPÖ [Austrian communist party], which carried out strategic agitation against fascism and propaganda for communist agendas.4 That the works originated in Vienna is suggested not only by the German-language text cutouts employed in them, but also by a newspaper clipping to be found in the collage Gegenwart und Zukunft des Kindes [Present and Future of the Child], whose dating to 1932–33 lends a terminus post quem. The size, estimated to be around 50 � 40 cm, implies large-format posters, possibly for the purpose of agitation or exhibitions.5 In their figurative dimension, the images feature a high density of collected news material, while in their textual dimension, they contain both montaged lines from newspapers as well as fonts designed by Dicker herself. Although each image features a clear and arranged composition, Dicker’s photo collages do not allow for an instantaneous apprehension of the contents of the image.6 Formally, their fragmented structure reminds of such Dadaist photo collages as those of Hannah Höch (1889–1978) or Paul Citroen (1896–1983) from the early 1920s. Similarly, Dicker’s works represent photo collages based on a mixed technique—since liquid dyes and resizing and retouching techniques nevertheless appear to have been used. Thus, the scissor cut so typical of collage or pasted paper [Klebebild] often cannot be perceived because it has been painted over or because the figure has been taken in its entirety. Dicker had completed

1 The historical storage medium of the glass negative was already an outdated medium around the turn of the century and was mainly used by trained photographers. Because the heavy glass plate was less convenient for everyday use than the flexible rollfilm, it was gradually replaced entirely by the negative film; see on this Willfried Baatz, Geschichte der Fotografie (Cologne: DuMont, 1997), 65.

2 A hint of Dicker’s communist orientation is also supplied by a copy of Der Deutsche Bauernkrieg by Friedrich Engels, which was used for a photograph to straighten the photo montage Gegenwart und Zukunft des Kindes [The Present and Future of the Child].

3 Walter Baier, Das kurze Jahrhundert. Kommunismus in Österreich. KPÖ 1918 bis 2008 (Vienna: Edition Steinbauer, 2009), 37.

4 Dicker joined the Austrian communist party around 1931. There are no concrete sources on her joining the party, only the recollections of contemporaries recorded by Elena Makarova; see on this Katharina Hövelmann, Bauhaus in Wien? Möbeldesign, Innenraumgestaltung und Architektur der Wiener Ateliergemeinschaft von Friedl Dicker und Franz Singer (Vienna/Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2021), 133.

5 Angelika Romauch, «Friedl Dicker. Marxistische Fotomontagen 1932/33. Das Verfahren der Montage als sozialkritische Methode,» (unpubl. thesis, University of Applied Arts Vienna, 2003), 100.

6 See on this aspect a comparison with contemporaneous photo montages of John Heartfield (1891–1968) in Elena Makarova, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. Ein Leben für Kunst und Lehre. Wien— Weimar—Prag—Hronov— Theresienstadt—Auschwitz (Vienna/Munich: Christian Brandstätter, 2000), 22, as

Fürchtet den Tod nicht [Do Not Fear Death], 1932–33 Inv.no. 15.590/7/FW

Invitations to the 1st and the 8th Bauhaus Evening

«For the artist of the written hand, the contents of his writing are only a pretense, just as the motif of an image is for its painter.»1 With this statement, the GermanJewish writer Else Lasker-Schüler (born in Elberfeld, today Wuppertal, in 1869; deceased in Jerusalem in 1945) introduces her essay Handschrift [Handwriting], in which she addresses the «art of the letter.»2 In the design of two invitations to Bauhaus Evenings3 with Lasker-Schüler and Helge Lindberg, Friedl Dicker, too, takes as her primary concern the figurative or calligraphic qualities of writing. It is in this spirit that Dicker utilizes a variety of invented fonts in the design of these invitations, both of which are composed with lithographic flat printing techniques.4 In both designs, although the written word retains its linguistic value, its figurative function is nevertheless forcefully accentuated in some places, in which the writing takes on such purposes as those of ornamentation or of shading. One could say that writing undergoes a process of spatialization. In addition, Dicker’s graphic characters rarely develop linearly, following no culturally predetermined directions of writing such as from left to right, but rather spreading across the paper in free trails. This playful and free form corresponds entirely with the stylistic features of her lithographic designs of the time. The polymorphism of lines and shading represent one of the primary design principles of all of Dicker’s lithographs, a principle that is augmented by the multiplicity of fonts as a result of the textual dimension of the invitations. The lettering of both of these invitations discloses nothing other than the first and last names of the protagonists of the respective evening.

For the recto of the invitation to the reading by Else Lasker-Schüler on April 14, 1920, Dicker produced her design using lithographic ink or pen.5 At that time, the writer had already achieved a measure of renown through publications in Der Sturm and Die Fackel as well as a series of her own volumes of poetry.6 Dicker incorporates Hebraic motifs, which Lasker-Schüler in her poetry often allows to «uniquely blend» with the Indian, «Egyptian, Arabic, quite generally ‹Oriental.›»7 Thus, for instance, the five-pointed star of David can be seen twice,8 once in a frayed style over the palms9—«the heavens are one single

1 Else Lasker-Schüler, «Handschrift,» Der Sturm, 39 (1910): 309.

2 Lasker-Schüler, «Handschrift,» 310.

3 Walter Gropius, «1919: Manifest und Programm des Staatlichen Bauhauses Weimar,» in Programme und Manifeste der Architektur des 20. Jahrhunderts. Bauwelt Fundamente 1, ed. Ulrich Conrads (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2013), 49. Initiated in 1920 and taking place every Wednesday, the Bauhaus Evenings were a series of events involving lectures, readings, and concerts. Already in 1919 Gropius had incorporated participation in public life as a part of education in the program of the Bauhaus. On this see also Peter Bernhard, «Die Bauhaus-Vorträge als Medium interner und externer Kommunikation,» in Bauhaus Kommunikation. Innovative Strategien im Umgang mit Medien, interner und externer Öffentlichkeit, ed. Patrick Rössler (Berlin: Mann, 2009), 171–185.

4 At the end of the same year, Dicker takes on numerous typography design tasks for Johannes Itten’s almanac Utopia, including the illustration of the chapter «Analysen Alter Meister» [Analyses of Old Masters]. According to Elena Makarova, she was given the task of «devising a font that would make reading itself into a meditation,» in Elena Makarova, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. Ein Leben für Kunst und Lehre (Vienna: Christian Brandstätter Verlag, 2000), 16. See on this also a letter from the Bauhaus to Anny Wottitz from the end of 1920, in which the artist herself reports on her hours-long work on the typesetting and on the typography, Inv.no. 12.882/4/Aut.

Invitation to the 1st Bauhaus Evening: Reading with Else Lasker-Schüler on April 14, 1920 Inv.no. 2353

9 Viktor Kraus (1887–?) worked in Reichenberg for the textile factory Carl Kraus Sohn Viktor. His fate is unknown.

10 Kindergarten teacher Hedwig Schwarz, née Fleischl (1892–1968), worked at the Montessori kindergarten in the Goethehof in Vienna, which the studio of Dicker and Singer designed between 1930 and 1932. When the teachers were dismissed under the Dollfuß regime, she initially founded a private kindergarten in Vienna and eventually fled to London.

11 This was the case, for example, with the TéryBuschmann (1929/30) and Reymers-Münz (1930) apartments.

12 These included an interior design for the home of Hans Heller’s cousin Karl Heller (1899–1980).

13 Hans Heller, Zwischen zwei Welten. Erinnerungen, Dokumente, Prosa, Bilder (Wels: Ovilava-Libri, 1985), 43.

14 Gisela Urban, «A Viennese Entertains,» Independent Woman 11 (1932): 400–401.

15 Amelia S. Levetus, «A Most Valuable One-Room Flat,» The Evening Standard, July 26, 1934, 18.

16 See the handwritten note on the back of the photograph; BHA, Photograph Collection, Franz Singer (Inv.no. 7751/8).

17 For more on Dicker’s textile works and her role at the studio, see Katharina Hövelmann, «Die Textilien der Bauhaus-Künstlerin Friedl Dicker: Raumgestaltung und Möbeldesign,» in Textile Moderne / Textile Modernism, ed. Burcu Dogramaci (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2019), 205–215;

and Katharina Hövelmann, «Friedl Dickers Beitrag in der Ateliergemeinschaft mit Franz Singer. Eine kreative Zusammenarbeit,» in Friedl DickerBrandeis (1898–1944), eds.

Brigitte Reutner-Doneus and Hemma Schmutz, Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz (Munich: Hirmer, 2022), exh. cat.

18 Hajo Düchting, Farbe am Bauhaus. Synthese und Synästhesie (Berlin: Mann, 1996), 13.

19 Clark V. Poling, KandinskyUnterricht am Bauhaus. Farbenseminar und analytisches Zeichnen dargestellt am Beispiel der Sammlung des Bauhaus-Archivs (Berlin: Kunstverlag Weingarten, 1982), 43.

20 Theo van Doesburg, «Der Wille zum Stil. Neugestaltung von Leben, Kunst und Technik (Schluß),» De Stijl 3 (1922): 33–41.

21 After applying unsuccessfully for a teaching position at the Bauhaus, van Doesburg organized a de Stijl course in the studio of Bauhaus student

Karl Peter Röhl in Weimar in 1922 to teach the principles of the de Stijl movement to Bauhaus students.

22 See the handwritten note on the back of the photograph; BHA, Photograph Collection, Franz Singer (Inv.no. 7751/68).

23 Patent, Franz Singer, «Diwanbett,» Austrian Patent Office, 125629, filed: September 24, 1929; start: July 15, 1931; granted: November 25, 1931.

24 Walter Gropius, Bauhausbauten Dessau, Bauhausbücher

12 (Munich: Langen, 1930), 110.

25 Franz Schuster, Eine eingerichtete Kleinstwohnung (Frankfurt a. M.: Englert & Schlosser, 1927).

26 «Das richtige Wohnen,» Kölner Tageblatt, August 29/30, 1931.

27 Wilhelm Lotz, «Möbel und Wohnraum,» Die Form. Zeitschrift für gestaltende Arbeit 2 (1931): 42.

28 Hans Heller to Franz Singer, 1934, private collection of Georg Schrom.

29 Heller, Zwischen zwei Welten, 49.

30 Ibid.

31 Peter Heller to Matthias Boeckl, February 10, 1993, private collection of Georg Schrom.

32 Selim O. Chan-Magomedow, «Design, Architektur, Agitations- und Gebrauchsgraphik im Schaffen Alexander Michailowitsch Rodtschenkos,» in Rodtschenko. Aufsätze, Autobiographische Notizen, Briefe, Erinnerungen (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1993), 44.

33 Daniela Stöppel, «Falten, Klappen, Knicken als ästhetische Konzepte der Zwischenkriegszeit in Möbelgestaltung, Architektur und Grafikdesign,» in Modern Wohnen. Möbeldesign und Wohnkultur der Moderne, eds. Rudolf Fischer and Wolf Tegethoff (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2016), 135, 143–144.

34 Peter Heller to Matthias Boeckl, February 10, 1993, private collection of Georg Schrom.

Katharina Hövelmann

With Franz Singer, Design for the apartment of Hans Heller, Karolinengasse, 4th district, Vienna: combined bed-, living and dining room for a bachelor, 1927–28 Inv.no. 9394/1

With Franz Singer, Design for the apartment of Hans Heller: color study for the floor, ca. 1927 Inv.no. 9394/4

With Franz Singer, Design for the apartment of Hans Heller: color study for the floor in the foyer, ca. 1927 Inv.no. 9394/5

With Franz Singer Design for the apartment of Hans Heller: room view, ca. 1927 Inv.no. 9394/2

With Franz Singer, Design for the apartment of Hans Heller: room view, ca. 1927 Inv.no. 9394/3

Imprint

Stefanie Kitzberger, Cosima Rainer, Linda Schädler (Eds.)

University of Applied Arts Vienna, Collection and Archive

Director: Cosima Rainer

This publication was accompanied by the exhibition Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. Workshops for Visual Arts (Exhibition Design: Robert Müller), University Gallery of the University of Applied Arts Vienna at Heiligenkreuzerhof in Vienna (September 23–November 26, 2022)

Further exhibition venue: Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. A Modern Artist, Graphische Sammlung

ETH Zürich (March 29–June 18, 2023)

University of Applied Arts Vienna, Collection and Archive

Postgasse 6, A-1010 Wien

https://dieangewandte.at/en https://kunstsammlungundarchiv.at/en/

ETH Zürich

Graphische Sammlung

Rämistrasse 101, CH-8092 Zürich https://gs.ethz.ch/

Biography Friedl Dicker-Brandeis

Laura Egger-Karlegger, Eva Marie Klimpel

List of exhibitions, theater productions, song evenings, and lectures

Laura Egger-Karlegger, Eva Marie Klimpel

Production

Laura Egger-Karlegger, Sofie Mathoi

Image and reproduction rights

Lian Hannah Walter, Laura Egger-Karlegger

Reproductions of the holdings of the institute

Collection and Archive

Manuel Carreon Lopez, kunst-dokumentation.com

Book design

Martha Stutteregger

Proofreading

Jeanette Pacher

Translations into English

Caroline Durlacher, James Gussen, Stephen Lindberg

Image editing

Pixelstorm Litho & Digital Imaging

Printing

Holzhausen, die Buchmarke der Gerin Druck GmbH

Paper

Munken Polar 130 g/m²

Authors

Laura Egger-Karlegger, Julie M. Johnson, Stefanie Kitzberger, Eva Marie Klimpel, Cosima Rainer, Robin Rehm, Bernadette Reinhold, Linda Schädler, Christian Scherrer, Noemi Scherrer, Hamida Sivac, Daniela Stöppel, Mark Wigley

The Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich is part of ETH Library.

Concept

Stefanie Kitzberger, Cosima Rainer

Project Management «Edition Angewandte» on behalf of the University of Applied Arts Vienna Anja Seipenbusch-Hufschmied, A-Vienna

Content and Production Editor on behalf of the Publisher

Katharina Holas, A-Vienna

Editorial Management

Laura Egger-Karlegger, Stefanie Kitzberger, Eva Marie Klimpel

List of works

Laura Egger-Karlegger, Eva Marie Klimpel

Bibliography

Laura Egger-Karlegger, Eva Marie Klimpel

Thanks to Ann Adler, Tanja Aichberger, Dominik Buda, Judith Burger, Luisa Chmiel, Anita Dumfahrt, Nathalie Feitsch, Anette Freudenberger, Natalia Ganahl, Silvia Herkt, Katharina Hövelmann, Teresa Indjein, Rita Kersting, Konrad Krcal, Elena Makarova, Birgit Megerle, Evelina Merhaut, Robert Müller, Florian Pumhösl, Herbert and Katja Rainer, Kathrin Rhomberg, Angelika Romauch, Emanuel Scheib, Christian Scherrer, Georg Schrom, Anja Seipenbusch-Hufschmied, Daniela Singer, Jenni Tischer, Ines Turian, Heide Wihrheim, Georg Wolf, Gerd Zillner, Heidy Zimmermann, Heimo Zobernig

Cover: Friedl Dicker, Franz Singer, Design for the Apartment of Hans Heller: Color Study for the Floor in the Foyer, around 1927 (detail), Inv.no. 9394/5, © Collection and Archive, University of Applied Arts Vienna, photo: kunst-dokumentation.com

All works by Friedl Dicker-Brandeis from the Collection of the University of Applied Arts Vienna: © Collection and Archive, University of Applied Arts Vienna

Notes

Bibliographic information published by the German National Library

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ISSN 1866-248X

ISBN 978-3-11-078906-5

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Titles of works by Friedl Dicker-Brandeis are italicized only if they are historically documented titles or if the titling is comprehensible in a comparable way.

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