1913- The Year Before the Storm

by Florian Illies

  DECEMBER

  Everything is open: the future, and the lips of beautiful women. Kasimir Malevich paints a black square. Robert Musil finds Germany to be very dark. The Mona Lisa is found in Florence and becomes the most important painting in the world. Rainer Maria Rilke would like to be a hedgehog. Thomas Mann makes one thing clear: ‘I’m not writing The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, but The Magic Mountain!’ Emil Nolde finds only disturbed people in his South Pacific paradise, while Karl Kraus finds happiness in Janowitz. Ernst Jünger is found in Africa and celebrates Christmas in Bad Rehburg. And what do the stars tell us?

  (illustration credits 12.1)

  In December 1913 the first ‘ready-made’, the bicycle wheel on the wooden stool, is turning at the hand of Marcel Duchamp in Paris, while the first ‘Black Square’ comes into being in Moscow – the twin starting-points of modern art.

  At the 1913 Futurist Congress in Uusikirkko, in Finland, Malevich introduces the term ‘Suprematism’, which for him represents ‘the beginning of a new civilisation’. He throws aside the burden of representational art, which still held even Cubism under its spell. He wants to move forward, and to a place where nothing is needed: no reality and no colours. In December 1913 he presents thirty-five of his latest works at the ‘0,10’ exhibition in St Petersburg, including his Suprematist Manifesto and even his unprecedented painting Black Square on a White Background. The picture is an all-out provocation, and a revelation. For Malevich the square embodies the ‘zero state’, the experience of pure abstraction. And the elementary contrast between white and black creates a universal energy for him. It is an end-point for art – and yet, at the same time, the beginning of something completely new. It is the rejection of all demands made on artists and art – and, in the process, one of the greatest self-assertions of artistic autonomy. We should always think of the Black Square when we think of 1913.

  The second masterpiece that defines 1913 is 400 years old and painted on a 77cm by 53cm wood panel made from Lombard white poplar. The Mona Lisa, by Leonardo da Vinci. There has been no trace of her since she was stolen from the Louvre two years ago.

  But at the beginning of December the Florentine art dealer Alfredo Geri receives a letter. This portly, broad-shouldered and gregarious gentleman caters to Florence’s upper classes from his antiques shop in Via Borgo Ognissanti. His clients include Eleonora Duse, known as ‘La Duse’ for short, and her lover, Gabriele d’Annunzio. The letter he is holding in his hands disturbs him. Is it the truth, or simply a letter from a lunatic? He reads it again: ‘The stolen painting by Leonardo da Vinci is in my possession. It is quite clear that it belongs to Italy, because the painter was Italian. It is my desire to give this masterpiece back to the country it came from and by which it was inspired. Leonardo.’

  Geri manages to arrange a meeting with the ominous sender for 22 December in Milan. But on 10 December, when Geri is about to close up his shop at half-past eight in the evening, a man comes up to him from among the last customers: ‘My name is Leonardo.’ Geri looks at the man, aghast: he has a dark complexion, pomade-black hair and, all in all, makes quite a greasy impression with his twirly little walrus moustache. He had, the man told Geri, come a little earlier after all, and was staying at the Albergo Tripoli-Italia in Via Panzani under the name of Leonardo Vincenzo. In other words, just one block away from Borgo San Lorenzo, where, 400 years previously, Lisa del Giocondo had sat and modelled for Leonardo.

  Leonardo went on to say that Signore Geri could come to see the Mona Lisa in the guest house at three in the afternoon the following day. Geri subsequently alerts the director of the Uffizi Gallery, Giovanni Poggi, and the three of them go from the antiques shop to the run-down guest house. As they walk through the streets, Geri and Leonardo agree that he will receive 500,000 Lire if the painting is genuine. That would be nice, Leonardo says, but it really isn’t about the money; he just wants to bring Italy’s stolen art treasure back home. Poggi and Geri look at each other, confused.

  The gentlemen climb up the steep steps to the Albergo Tripoli-Italia, where Leonardo’s shabby single room is situated on the second floor. He fetches a trunk out from under the bed, throwing its entire contents – underwear, work tools and his shaving things – onto the mattress. Then he opens a false bottom inside the trunk and takes out a board wrapped in red silk: ‘Before our eyes, the divine Gioconda appeared, unharmed and in magnificent condition. We carried her over to the window for comparison with a photograph we had brought along with us. Poggi inspected her’, as Geri later explained. There is no doubt; the inventory number from the Louvre is even on the back. But despite their excitement, Geri and Poggi keep their nerve – they tell Leonardo that the painting may be the one everybody’s looking for, but that they have to make further enquiries. Leonardo, exhausted from the long journey and with the 500,000 Lire in his sights, hangs the picture on his bedroom wall and lies down for an afternoon nap.

  Poggi immediately informs the police – when the Carabinieri open the door, Leonardo is still asleep, and the entire contents of his trunk are on the floor next to the bed. He does not resist arrest. The Mona Lisa is taken to the Uffizi under police protection. Then, aware of the significance of his find, Poggi doesn’t just call the Culture Minister, Corrado Ricci, in Rome, and the French Ambassador, Camille Barrère, but even has his calls put through to King Vittorio Emmanuele and Pope Pius X.

  In the Italian parliament two representatives are exchanging blows when someone runs into the plenary hall and cries out: ‘La Gioconda è trovata.’ The Gioconda is back! The message is immediately understood. The two adversaries embrace and kiss each other through sheer excitement.

  From this moment on the whole of Italy is overcome by Mona Lisa Fever. And Leonardo? Leonardo’s real name was Vincenzo Peruggia, he was thirty-two years old and had been working as a temporary glazier in the Louvre at the time of the theft. It was he who had put the Mona Lisa in the controversial glass frame. And because he had put her there, he also knew how to get her out. He hid himself one evening so that he would be locked in, took the painting out, wrapped it in linen and then walked out of the Louvre the next morning in broad daylight. The guards, who knew him well, nodded to him in greeting.

  The whole story was absurd. The police had taken fingerprints from everyone, every cleaning woman, every art historian, every archivist in the Louvre in order to catch the thief, because he had left prints on the picture’s frame. But they forgot the temporary glazier Vincenzo Peruggia. During their search for the Mona Lisa the police had even visited him at home in his shabby little room at 5 Rue de l’Hôpital Saint-Louis, just like they had every other Louvre staff member. But the policemen didn’t look under the bed.

  There, just a kilometre away from the Louvre as the crow flies, the most-hunted art work in the world lay for two whole years. The story was a shock: for the Louvre and for the Parisian police. But at the same time it is also a wonderful Christmas message filled with joy. Locked up in his cell, Peruggia receives innumerable thank-you letters, sweets and presents from grateful Italians.

  Gabriele d’Annunzio wrote the following: ‘He who dreamed of fame and honour, he, the avenger of the thefts of Napoleon, brought her over the border back to Florence. Only a poet, a great poet, can dream such a dream.’

  By 13 October the French government officials and art historians had arrived in Florence to check the authenticity of the Mona Lisa. The Italian Culture Minister, Ricci, said these wonderful words: ‘I just wish the French had declared the picture to be a copy, for then Mona Lisa would have stayed in Italy.’ But even the French declared the painting to be the original.

  Alfredo Geri was given a reward by the Louvre and the rosette of the Légion d’Honneur by the French state. Leonardo, otherwise known as Vincenzo Peruggia, was sentenced to seven months’ imprisonment.

  On 14 December, watched over by a unique international honour guard consisting of Gendarmes and Carabinieri in parade uniform, the Mona Lisa was hung in the Uffizi, carr
ied through the walkways in an elaborate gilded walnut frame as if part of a procession. Thirty thousand people saw her; Italian children even got a day off school to go to Florence and admire the national shrine. Then, on 20 December, the painting was taken to King Vittorio Emmanuele in Rome, in a saloon carriage filled with guests of honour. The next day he handed it over in the French Embassy, the Palazzo Farnese, as part of a symbolic act. Over Christmas 1913 the painting was on display in the Villa Borghese once more – the Culture Minister himself sat next to it during the opening hours; he had promised not to let it out of his sight for a second. At night a dozen police officers stood guard. Next, the Mona Lisa was taken to Milan in a saloon carriage – under strict security precautions, the painting was then on display in the Brera Museum for two days. Mona Lisa’s journey through Italy was an unparalleled victory parade. Whenever the carriage passed a train station, people would cheer and wave. From Milan onwards the Mona Lisa was given a private carriage in the express train from Milan to Paris. She was treated like a queen. Late in the evening of 31 December the Mona Lisa crossed the French border. She had left the Louvre as a painting but was returning as an enigma.

  The December edition of the Neue Rundschau prints a short notice from Oscar Bie, who had recently visited Thomas Mann at his home: he reports that Mann is working on a new novel entitled ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’. Bie’s handwriting was so indecipherable that even he sometimes had problems decoding it. So Thomas Mann ends up spending December putting straight all the friends and acquaintances who write to him about it: ‘You won’t believe it, but (the novel) is finished. And by the way, it’s called The Magic Mountain (Bie misread his own handwriting).’

  On 15 December, Ezra Pound, the great poet and one of London’s most important and proactive cultural mediators, sends a letter to James Joyce in Trieste. He asks the poverty-stricken English teacher for some of his newest poems for the magazine The Egoist. ‘Dear Sir!’ this friendly letter begins, and it ends: ‘From what Yeats says I imagine we have a hate or two in common.’ This letter has the effect of making Joyce feel as if he has been raised from the dead. Soon Pound sends a second letter from his Kensington home, saying that Yeats has sent him the poem ‘I Hear an Army’, and that he liked it very much. So emboldened is James Joyce that he sits down that very day and corrects his two manuscripts. After two weeks the first chapter of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and his short stories Dubliners are ready, and he sends them by express train to Ezra Pound in London. A star is born.

  Dr. Med. Alfred Döblin, the writer and neurologist, and collaborator on Herwath Walden’s magazine Der Sturm, spends nights on end in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s new studio in Körnerstrasse. Döblin wrote again and again about men and women and their relationships, about the battle of the sexes. He wrote this, for example, after one of his lovers gave birth to his son: ‘Marriage isn’t a shop specialising in sexuality. Equally foolish is the insistence on fulfilling all sexual relations within the framework of the marriage, as if one could predict that you would only be hungry at mealtimes and in certain places.’ Kirchner liked that a lot. Back in the summer he had done the etchings for Döblin’s novella The Canoness and Death, which was published in November by A. R. Meyer’s small Wilmersdorf publishing house. The very same publishing house which issued Gottfried Benn’s Morgue in 1912 and his new volume of poetry, Sons, in 1913.

  In December, Kirchner starts work on illustrations for Döblin’s one-act play Countess Mizi, a play about the coquettes Kirchner devoured so hungrily with his painter’s eye on their forays along Friedrichstrasse and around the outskirts of Potsdamer Platz. Döblin said this of the ladies of the night: ‘Their sexual organs are machine parts.’ That is the theory behind the practice painted by Kirchner. This December he tries time and again to transfer the fascination and coldness of Potsdamer Platz into art. The coquettes’ fur collars, their pink faces against the pale, icy delirium of the collars, the glaring green feather boas – and alongside them the faceless, hunted men. Kirchner sketches and sketches, and once even writes these words in his sketchbook: ‘Coquette = the momentary mistress.’

  Christmas Eve in Berlin’s Klopstockstrasse, at Lovis Corinth’s place.

  His life’s work has become another year richer. It was mainly in the Tyrol that Corinth expanded his palette, finding the tone for the mountains that he would then fully master in his portraits of Lake Walchen. But he isn’t on top form yet. Once the Christmas dinner is finally over and the handing out of presents is due to begin, Papa Corinth asks the children for just a moment’s patience. He fetches his easel, a stretcher frame and his paints. Charlotte also slips out of the room, telling the children she’s keeping an eye out for Father Christmas. But it’s really so she can dress up as Father Christmas herself. The children, Thomas and Wilhelmine, wait with eager anticipation. Then Father Christmas – in actual fact Mother Christmas – arrives, and the giving of presents can begin. But Lovis Corinth leaves his untouched; he only has eyes for his canvas – and with just a few energetic brushstrokes he depicts the Christmas tree with its glowing red candles. Next to it in the painting is Thomas, completely immersed in looking at his new red-curtained puppet theatre. Little Wilhelmine, in a white dress, has just unwrapped a puppet and is already moving on to the next present. Charlotte, on the left, still has her Father Christmas costume on. In the foreground of the picture, to the left-hand side, is the still uncut marzipan cake. But once Corinth has painted it in the most beautiful shades of brown, he wipes his fingers on a cloth and cuts himself a piece.

  Meanwhile, Josef Stalin is freezing in his Siberian exile.

  Ernst Jünger has finally arrived in Africa. A newly recruited legionnaire in the Foreign Legion, he is in a dusty tent with his comrades in North Africa, near Sidi bel Abbès. Instead of endless freedom, all he finds are endless drills. In the blazing heat they are forced to carry out military training exercises, manoeuvres and endurance runs. What on earth made him commit himself to five years straight? So Jünger tries to run away again, this time from the Foreign Legion. He hides out in Morocco. But he is caught and sentenced to a week’s imprisonment in the garrison prison. Somehow he had imagined Africa would be completely different. On 13 December a messenger brings the following telegram: ‘SENT FROM REHBURG CITY, 12:06. THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT HAS GRANTED YOUR RELEASE HAVE PICTURE TAKEN JÜNGER.’ After diplomatic intervention Jünger’s father has managed to secure his release and transport home. On 20 December he leaves the Foreign Legion’s North African barracks with the following grounds for his discharge written on the release form: ‘Father’s appeal due to soldier being under-age.’ Deeply tanned, deeply ashamed and deeply confused, Jünger sets off by train on the long journey from Marseille to Bad Rehburg. He arrives at his parents’ home just in time for Christmas. On Christmas Eve, therefore, he is sitting not under a starry African sky but under a Christmas tree that was chopped down a few days earlier in the Rehburg Forest. There is carp for dinner. Jünger promises his father he will now study hard for his Abitur. Then he excuses himself and goes to bed. This time, however, he doesn’t read Secrets of the Dark Continent before going to sleep.

  Emil Nolde has reached the destination of his dreams. On 3 December, two months after their departure, he sails past the Palau islands with Ada and the expedition group on the North German Lloyd steamboat Prinz Waldemar. On the small island of Jap, in the Western Caroline Islands, they make their first contact with the native inhabitants, who berth their boats next to theirs and come on board. Then they journey on, towards the equator, sailing past the island of German New Guinea, where August Engelhardt founded his empire. The German reformist, incredibly gaunt by now, lives here in his book-filled hut on the beach, gathering the followers of his coconut religion around him. He believes the coconut to be a heavenly fruit (because it grows at such heights) and preaches that people can only be healthy if they nourish themselves exclusively on its milk and flesh. He loves the wonderful, heavenly sound it makes when open
ed, that moment when the coconut splits.

  Even Nolde is eating many coconuts these days, but it isn’t enough for him; he needs the regular supplement of a freshly killed chicken. On 13 December the expedition group reaches Rabaul, the capital city of the Neu-Pommern nature reserve. There they are each appointed with a native ‘boy’. Tulie and Matam are the names of the two boys who will tend to Emil and Ada Nolde from now on. So they can all acclimatise, the group now spends four weeks on a small mountain above Rabaul, named Narmanula, where they are able to stay in a newly built but as yet unused colonial hospital. After weeks of waiting, Nolde is overcome by an intense urge to create. He takes his watercolour paper, pours a little stream water into a holder and paints from early in the morning until late at night: Matam and Tulie at first, then the natives’ huts too, the women, the children, the tranquillity, the palm trees. He also cuts a block of wood and makes a woodcut of the two boys. Their ears and eyes are delicately carved onto the dark heads, and you can even see Tulie’s curious nose and Matam’s protruding upper lip, with the lush South Pacific vegetation visible in the background.