In December 1918, a new artists' association was formed, stating in a manifesto that “(in) the conviction that political upheaval must be used to liberate art from decades of paternalism, a circle of uniformly minded artists and art lovers has come together in Berlin.”¹ The group included well-known architects, sculptors and painters, including Walter Gropius, Bruno Taut and Lyonel Feininger, and had given their association the programmatic name Arbeitsrat für Kunst (Workers council for art) or AfK—consciously making a connection to the workers’ and soldiers’ councils that had emerged during the November Revolution. Politically the AfK stood for a break with the old Wilhelminian traditions and institutions, demanding the dissolution of the royal academies and the removal of all war memorials. At the same time, the group wanted to create new art and architecture for the people. They regarded the “joint elaboration of a comprehensive utopian building project” as the “most important task of the near future.“²

The Arbeitsrat für Kunst is just one example of the many artists’ associations and intellectual groups that emerged across Europe towards the end of the First World War.³ At that time many countries of the old continent were shaken by mass strikes and even revolutionary movements.⁴ These developments were frequently accompanied by what might be termed a social and cultural awakening, one in which artists’ associations also participated. They stood up for the ideals of the new democratic societies being formed in the wake of World War One’s conclusion and supported the corresponding political movements. In Germany, both the “November Group” and the Political Council of Spiritual Workers (Politischer Rat geistiger Arbeiter)⁵ were founded at nearly the same time as the AfK, as was De Stijl in the Netherlands. After the October Revolution of 1917, numerous artists’ associations also emerged in Russia. Here, artists of the avant-garde elected to put their artistic efforts in the service of a new Soviet society. Meanwhile, architects in Vienna supported the emerging settler movement, which, due to the severe shortage of housing, occupied vacant parcels of land, building simple dwellings.⁶ How can the Arbeitsrat für Kunst be located in these developments? The group only existed from 1918 to 1921. What role did it play in the early years of the young Weimar Republic and how did the group distinguish itself from art created during the Empire? Which political forces did it orient itself around? How was it influenced by artistic reform movements from abroad?

These questions will be answered in what follows, in which the group’s references to the Russian avant-garde will also be highlighted. In this way, a sketch-like representation will emerge of the Arbeitsrat für Kunst, a group which has received far too little attention from art historians.

Founded Shortly after the Revolution

The View to Russia

As with many other artists of that time, the artistic developments in post-revolutionary Russia represented an important point of reference for the AfK membership. Both 1917 revolutions had been accompanied by a social departure that affected art and culture. The new Soviet government fought illiteracy, expanded the library system and between 1917 and 1921opened nearly 150 new museums. Furthermore, the government supported the still young medium of film.¹⁵ Avant-garde directors like Sergei Eisenstein created works for a mass audience. According to Stephen White, the early years of the Soviet Union were “a time of extraordinary ferment in the arts: – in literature and theatre, in the cinema, in dance and music, in porcelain and dress design."¹⁶ Many well-known artists such as Vladimir Mayakovsky, El Lissitsky, Kasimir Malevich and Alexander Rodchenko placed their works in the service of this new socialist society.¹⁷

Their efforts were supported by a new government faced with the challenge of convincing the predominantly rural population of the necessity of the impending social changes. Given the great number of illiterate peasants and workers, there was a pressing need to find new forms of social and political education.¹⁸ In this task the government relied on artists, who accepted the challenge gladly: “The streets shall be our brushes, Our pallets shall be our squares” is a frequently quoted verse line from Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poem “Decree to the Army of Art” from 1918. Thus, agitprop posters became an important field of endeavor for avant-garde artists. Posters printed in editions that stretched into the millions enlightened the population politically and served as propaganda in the civil war that followed the October Revolution.¹⁹ Colorfully painted “Agit trains” fulfilled a similar function. The first, equipped with a cinema wagon, set off in November 1919 on a tour of the provinces on a mission to win over the local population to the revolution.²⁰ Photography, which experienced its first upswing in the early 1920s, was also used for education and information. Artists were now concerned with documenting the everyday life of the “new Russia,” communicating the ideals of the new society and thus “driving forward the radical transformation of the country.”²¹

Until the mid-1920s, the demand for functionality was widespread in Soviet art. It was above all the Constructivists who represented this tendency. The themes of their projects were therefore not chosen by chance, writes Rodchenko’s grandson, the design historian Alexander Lavrentiev: “They designed a workers' club and not an opera theatre; a book kiosk and not a summerhouse for recreation; a work suit and not evening wear.”²² The newly founded state higher artistic-technical workshops (Vkhutemas—Vysšie Chudožestvenno-Techničeskie Masterskie) in Moscow also stood for functionality in art.²³ The avant-gardists who taught there were charged with training artists for the benefit of society as a whole, combining craftsmanship traditions with modern technology, thus preparing the way for the integration of art with industrial production.

These developments were followed very closely by the AfK. In March of 1919 the group published a “Call to the Revolutionary Artists of Russia.” “Thank you, brothers,” they said, “that you are now offering us your hands out of the same spirit. We are going in joyfully.”²⁴ The German artists offered to hold joint consultations and exhibitions and to exchange works with fellow Soviet artists. Conceptually, too, the AfK was adopting ideas from Soviet Russia. AfK’s artists also set out to a synthesize the different arts, working in various fields in order to create Gesamtkunstwerken capable of expressing the dynamics of the revolution. Anatolij Strigalov summarizes thus: “Painters and graphic artists tried their hand in the fields of theater and applied arts, book art and architecture. Poets, musicians, architects, scientists and theater people were engaged in painting. Visual artists wrote poems, acted as theatre directors, critics or theoreticians. Universality became the fundamental trait of the age and the artist.”²⁵

AfK founder Bruno Taut was also of the opinion that the arts should be brought together—albeit under the direction of architecture. In a programmatic pamphlet on architecture dating from December 1918 he demanded: “Art! —that's one thing! if it's there. Today this art does not exist. The torn directions can only come together to form a unity under the wings of a new architectural art, so that each individual discipline will be involved in building. Then there are no boundaries between arts and crafts and sculpture or painting, everything is one: building.”²⁶ This understanding was also reflected in the structure of the AfK. The Arbeitsrat was chaired by an architecture committee headed by Taut, responsible for several sections, each of which was assigned to a branch of the arts.²⁷

Exemption from State Paternalism

In addition, the artists of the AfK turned directly to the “people—to the new democratic force seeking out opportunities to cooperate”, Taut biographer Kurt Junghanns writes. “Art should no longer be (about) ‘the enjoyment of the few, but the happiness and life of the masses’ … (and) not the state but lay councils or even workers’ commissions should award state commissions to artists.”²⁸ The desire for liberation from state paternalism was also reflected in the demands directed against the former Wilhelminian art institutions. The AfK demanded the abolition of the state supervision of exhibitions and the dissolution of the royal academies, the Prussian State Art Commission and state museums. It also called for the removal of “worthless” monuments in general and war monuments in particular.

Bruno Taut was programmatically close to USPD (Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) politician Georg Ledebour, but he was also influenced by anarchist theorists like Pjotr Kropotkin and Gustav Landauer²⁹—favoring, for example, their concept of agrarian socialism in rural areas. In the architecture manifesto mentioned above, Taut called for the construction of “large people's houses, not in the cities, but in the countryside.”³⁰ In this respect, differences existed between Taut’s ideas and those promulgated in Soviet Russia, for although the Soviets developed plans for communal housing estates and workers’ clubs, these were to be located in the cities. Taut elaborated his views in greater detail in the book The Dissolution of Cities.³¹ Here he also drew on ideas developed by pre-war liberal reformers, who advocated the founding of garden cities as an alternative to the miserable workers’ housing found in large cities. One representatives of this idea, Heinrich Tessenow, was also a founding member of the AfK—as was Paul Schmitthenner, designer of the garden city Staaken near Berlin. (Schmitthenner later broke ranks with his AfK colleagues, joining the NSDAP in 1933 before becoming disenchanted with Nazism during the war. After the war he paid for this period of collaboration by being denied teaching posts).³²

In view of his closeness to the USPD leadership, Taut had high hopes for the new Soviet government, and wanted to influence their art politics through the AfK. However, after the workers and soldiers councils gave way to a parliamentary form of government in December 1918, and the new government ignored the political ambitions of the AfK, in February 1919 he resigned as chairman of the architecture committee.³³

New Positioning under Gropius

At a plenary meeting on 1 March 1919, the AfK was reconstituted on the basis of a three-tier system. The uppermost layer, the “business committee,” was chaired by three persons: Walter Gropius, the painter César Klein and architect Adolf Behne. The second layer, the “artistic working group,” consisted of members working in Berlin. The third layer consisted of “local and foreign friends of the Arbeitsrat für Kunst who agreed [with] its goals.”³⁴ The change in structure and leadership was accompanied by a change in the political line. The new leadership distanced itself from Taut’s plan to turn the Arbeitsrat into a cultural-political force. Gropius also turned to traditional art patrons, the bourgeoisie and industrialists, for financial support.³⁵ Taut had always tried to prevent this dependence on traditional patronage; Gropius’s move was prompted by the organization’s miserable financial condition.³⁶

Despite these contrasting political orientations, continuity existed in the artistic program of the Arbeitsrat für Kunst. Gropius, too, had long called for an amalgamation of the arts under the leadership of architecture. He exuberantly praised his predecessor on this question. Taut, he wrote in February 1919, was “the first architect who really understood internally the idea that I had been pursuing for many years: the unification of all the arts under building, and we are now pulling together in one direction.”³⁷ Founding the Bauhaus and writing the Bauhaus Manifesto of April 1919 fell within this period and ideological sphere of influence. Gropius’s reads in part: “The ultimate goal of all artistic activity is building! ... Architects, painters and sculptors must come to know and comprehend the complex form of building in its entirety and in its parts. ... Let us want, conceive, create together the new building of the future, which will be everything in one form: Architecture and sculpture and painting.”³⁸

A further goal for Gropius was creating a new art and architecture for the populace by involving laymen in commissions and exhibitions. A “new community” was to be created through such an association of artists with society. Similar developments can also be observed in the art of post-revolutionary Russia. There, working people themselves began to become artistically active. In the years after 1917, historian Richard Lorenz writes, “organizations for proletarian culture sprang up like mushrooms.” Theater and choir circles as well as studios for painting, sculpture and graphics had been created in almost every factory, as well as in state organs and workers’ clubs: “Even in the most remote provincial towns ... scientific and artistic circles were formed.”³⁹

This idea was also behind the AfK’s first work exhibition, which took place in April 1919 under the title Exhibition for Unknown Architects.⁴⁰ In the run-up to the exhibition, laypeople were invited to submit sketches or photographs. “Exhibition of Works by Unknown Architects” was the headline used in newspaper advertisements: “The Arbeitsrat für Kunst in Berlin invites all architects unknown to the public with a marked artistic talent—even dilettantes, regardless of age and education—to send in characteristic samples of their skills in the form of small sketches and photographs according to their designs of any kind (ideal projects) by the thirty-first of the month.”⁴¹ Many submissions followed the call. Among others, the previously unknown Hermann Finsterlin came into contact with the AfK in this way. The exhibition was subsequently shown in Berlin, Weimar and Magdeburg.

In addition to newsletters, leaflets and manifestos, the Arbeitsrat published two brochures during the short period in which it existed: the text collection Ruf zum Bauen (1920),⁴² dedicated to architecture, and the volume Ja! Stimmen des Arbeitsrats für Kunst in Berlin (1919). The latter was based on a questionnaire the AfK had distributed to its members so as to “clarify the position of artists in the movements of the time.”⁴³ The questions posed concerned, among other things, the relationship between artists and the public, the reform of art education, state support for artists, and the possibilities of artistic influence on urban design, architecture and publicly financed housing. The members responded in 28 texts and 41 pictures. The majority of those questioned criticized traditional teaching methods employed within academia. They considered it inadequate and demanded conditions that could lead to greater spontaneity. One demand supported by almost everyone was that the arts should unite under the guidance of architecture.

In contrast to earlier expressionist artist associations, which were of limited membership, the Arbeitsrat für Kunst was open to all artists. This can be explained, above all, by the historical context in which it was created. While the groups of the pre-war period mainly opposed the understanding of art in imperial Germany, the AfK took place within a new social movement. It addressed the question raised by the revolution as to what structural measures a democratic country needed. It is in this context that the utopian architecture of its members, who designed monumental people’s houses and the like, can be seen. But the demand for the unification of the arts with society also reflects this question.

A Story of Failure?

The dawn of political art lasted only a few years. Within the Arbeitsrat für Kunst, the revolutionary enthusiasm quickly evaporated. On 30 May 1921, the group disbanded again. A press release stated that the group had overestimated the “general will for renewal.” The cooperation of the arts could “not be brought about with will and according to desire … because the human community is its prerequisite—and this prerequisite is missing.”⁴⁴

The Russian avant-garde also soon fell on the defensive: once the Stalinist dictatorship emerged at the end of the 1920s, many achievements of the revolutionary era were pushed back. In this context, the arts were also targeted. The photographers around Rodchenko were accused of “formalism”—a term used to discredit artists who were not acceptable to the regime. They were accused of spreading the “propaganda of a taste … that is far removed from the proletariat.”⁴⁵ Several photographers then gave in to the pressure of the regime, often for existential reasons. From then on, they provided propaganda images that idealized the supposed “construction of socialism.”

The situation was similar for artists from other disciplines. The various groups that had emerged in post-revolutionary Russia were “brought into line” by a decree from 1932. Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, Orphism and Dadaism had to give way to Socialist Realism. According to art historian Eckhardt Gillen, “everyday terror” was hidden “behind classical architectural facades and images of dignity and timeless beauty ...”⁴⁶ Even architecture was now Stalinized.⁴⁷ Quite a few artists were murdered or ended up in labor camps. Frustrated by these developments, foreign artists, architects like Ernst May left the country. Those who stayed fared no better than their Soviet colleagues: Bauhaus students Béla Scheffler and Antonin Urban paid for the decision not to leave with their lives.⁴⁸ Their comrade Philipp Tolziner was sentenced to ten years in a labor camp.

In Germany, progressive artists also soon began to suffer from state repression. After the National Socialists came to power, former members of the Arbeitsrat were banned from pursuing their activities publicly and their works were defamed in the exhibition Degenerate Art. The most famous among them were compelled to go into exile: Gropius and Feininger emigrated to the United States; Taut moved to Japan and then to Turkey. Otto Freundlich, who was one of the signatories of the first AfK manifesto, was murdered in 1943 in the Lublin-Majdanek concentration camp.⁴⁹ The extent to which the National Socialists hated artistic modernism is illustrated by the fact that, even in the last years of the war, they placed saddle roofs on communal apartment blocks built during the Weimar Republic because the flat roof form “did not correspond to the understanding of Aryan architecture.”⁵⁰

Even though the progressive artists of the interwar period ultimately failed in their plan to realize the new, egalitarian society they had envisioned, their influence was lasting. Thus the international avant-garde produced some of the most important artists of the twentieth century. Meanwhile, some members of the Arbeitsrat für Kunst occupied important positions at the Bauhaus—above all, its founding director Walter Gropius. In addition, German artists and architects became influential in the various countries they emigrated to while in exile. Their revolution had failed, their belief in progress had been broken, but their art remains.