Doris Berger

The Moving Canvas:

Hans Richter’s
Artistic Practice
in the 1940s
The artists of the coming generation will seriously consider the camera as well as
the brush their medium of expression.1

F
ilm and painting hardly ever coexist as closely as they do in Hans Richter’s artistic

fig. 133 Hans Richter, Stalingrad (Victory in the East) (detail), 1943–44, oil and collage on shade cloth,
practice, from his first film in 1921 through the end of his life in 1976.2 While many
avant-garde artists such as Fernand Léger or Man Ray made films in the 1920s

35 3⁄4 x 188 7⁄8 in. (90.7 x 479.6 cm). Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian
before eventually leaving the medium behind, Richter stayed with it—and moreover, he
became a lifelong spokesperson for film’s acceptance as an artistic medium, promoting
it as “an original art form” in his writing.3 His interdisciplinary practice in the 1940s is of
great interest, since it was during that time that he resumed painting and developed his
filmic language in a new direction. Cecile Starr has written about Richter’s achievements
as a filmmaker in the United States, while Estera Milman has analyzed his work within
the sociopolitical context of America in the 1950s onward.4 How Richter’s personal

Institution, Washington, DC. Gift of Mrs. Hans Richter, 1976

circumstances as an émigré might have instigated artistic changes in his painting and
filmmaking will be the focus of this text. I will examine how his dialectic thinking about
each medium reflected upon the use and destabilization of different types of narratives
and how this approach is tied to his life in America.
Richter arrived in the United States in 1941 with the support of the Hebrew Immi-
grant Aid Society and at the invitation of Hilla Rebay to lecture about the development
of abstract film at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in New York. Rebay was trying
to establish the Guggenheim Film Center and Light Institute, where Richter, Oskar
Fischinger, and Norman McLaren were to have been advisors, but the project was never
realized.5 By the end of that same year, Richter began teaching at the Institute of
Film Techniques at the City College of New York; he became its director in 1948, until
his retirement in 1956. In retrospect, his emigration seems easier than it really was.

139
 In fact, Richter had used several different ways to try to flee Europe, where he had moved both elements work in dialogue with each other to show the developments on the Russian

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between France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland throughout the 1930s. He applied front unfolding chronologically from left to right. Guiding the historical narration—from
for a visa in 1939 with the aim of going either to Chile (to stay with his sister Dora and headlines such as “Germans Smash Harder at Stalingrad Lines” and “Russians Hit Back”
brother-in-law Udo Rukser) or to the United States. Even though he initially received (August 26, 1942) to “Nazis’ Stalingrad Chief Captured” (February 1, 1943)—the texts are
a tourist visa for Chile, he made the dangerous decision to wait for a U.S. visa.6 It is worth not only informative, but also essential to the painting’s overall formal principle. Beyond
considering Richter’s situation as an immigrant: how does an acknowledged artist and the chronological developments, the dramaturgy of forms suggests the artist’s interpretation
filmmaker in one setting situate himself in a new world and culture in such politically of events. Richter stated that he used geometric forms in black, white, gray, and red to
difficult times? I would like to address these questions by looking at his artistic practice and represent the Nazi regime and organic shapes and multiple colors to depict the people
discussing two works—the painting Stalingrad (Victory in the East) and the film Dreams defending Stalingrad: “Finally, the multi-colors . . . dissolve the gray, black, and white war
That Money Can Buy—that at first sight do not appear to have much in common other than machine and the symphony of free forms swallows up, totally, the geometrical ones.”17
their shared time period and place of origin. Created between 1943 and 1947, they were Combining newsprint and painting is reminiscent of Cubism’s early use of collage,
among Richter’s first works in their respective mediums that he made in the United States. but it also relates to Dadaism’s use of collage as a political tool to convey antiwar sentiment
(as, for example, in the work of John Heartfield). For Richter, this was a new element in
his oeuvre that allowed him to visualize a historic process with its multifaceted forces.18
“After my escape from the underworld that threatened to engulf all of Europe, I had returned In comparison to his early scrolls, such as Preludium (1919) or Orchestration of Colors (1923),
into the world of men in New York and started immediately to work and ‘orchestrate’ freely which were concerned with rhythm and counterpoint of forms, these scrolls included
with form and color,” Richter remembered.7 Dragonfly (1943) was probably not only his first historical and narrative elements. Although history painting was considered an outdated
painting in the U.S., but also his first painting since the 1920s. fig. 125 As Gisela Hoßmann genre in the art historical discourse of the twentieth century,19 there were still numerous
suggests, it can be considered a work between the past and the future.8 Shortly after making artists who were motivated by political events or historic circumstances in their work; the
it, he again took up the scroll format he had explored in the 1920s, but this time with different most famous ones predating Richter’s “history paintings” that resonated in the United
objectives. In Stalingrad (Victory in the East) (1943–44), Richter reflected on the develop- States were Max Beckmann’s Departure (1932–35), about Hitler’s rise to power, and Pablo
ments of Germany under Hitler.9 fig. 136 He closely followed the atrocities in his native country Picasso’s Guernica (1937), about the Spanish Civil War. For Richter, abstract art and history
and collected newspaper articles, later remembering that “I had originally planned to use painting were not contradictions—he not only thrived on the counterpoint of forms but
these clippings only as reference material, but my first sketches made on newspaper (for also the counterpoint of narratives and genres, an aspect that would also be seen in Dreams
economical reasons), gave me the idea to incorporate the original reports into my scrolls, the That Money Can Buy (1944–47).
speeches and accusations and all these proclamations of inhumanity.”10 Cynthia Jaffee It was Peggy Guggenheim who brought Richter’s films and scrolls together for the
McCabe also interprets this work biographically in the sense of an “affirmation of survival.”11 first time. Richter’s solo show at her Art of This Century Gallery in October 1946 included his
Richter had been politically engaged since making antiwar drawings after his experiences World War II–influenced scrolls along with Rhythmus 21, one of the Preludium drawings
as a soldier in World War I.12 Now, having witnessed the beginning of World War II, the defeat of 1919, and stills from his as-yet unfinished film, Dreams That Money Can Buy. Guggenheim
of National Socialism was clearly on his mind. also helped finance the film and lent her name to the production company, Art of This
fig. 134 Hans Richter, Liberation of Paris, 1945

Following this, he made more scrolls with the end of the war as their subject matter,

Invasion (later titled Invasion), Art of This Century Gallery, New York, 1946
including a second version of Stalingrad (1943/46).13 fig. 128 Liberation of Paris (1945) is a

fig. 135 Peggy Guggenheim seated next to Hans Richter’s Momentum of

vertical scroll collage that Richter described as a “moment in history, not an epic (like
Stalingrad),” “a vertical gesture of arms being lifted up to heaven in joy.”14 fig.134 Invasion
(1944–45) is a horizontal scroll that at first used only painted abstract elements, creating a
dynamic development of forms, but was later reworked to include newspaper clippings. fig.129
When it was shown at the Art of This Century Gallery in 1946, it was titled Momentum of
Invasion and dated 1945–46. fig.135 Richter evidently reworked it at a later, undetermined
date by adding newspaper clippings; photographs from catalogues and articles in the 1960s
show it still in its pre-collage state. The work as it is now known is dated 1945, and came to
its current location at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 1982. Richter may have backdated
it in order to match the work’s completion with the end of the war; indeed, the final piece
of collage on the right corner is a newspaper reprint of the signatures on the document of
Germany’s surrender on May 7, 1945.15
By contrast, Stalingrad (Victory in the East),16 a horizontal scroll of oil and collage on
shade cloth, included newspaper clippings from its inception. The articles are cut into shapes
(while still retaining their legibility) that correspond with painted forms of various colors;

140 141
 Century Films, of which Richter was a main shareholder and president.20 To combine these
quite different works in an exhibition not only shows Guggenheim’s interest in both abstract
and Surrealist art but also reflects Richter’s point of view as an artist in which he does not
distinguish between filmmaking and painting: “painting and film are nevertheless the same
thing for me; they are made by composing poetic images. . . . Film is painting in movement.
And there, I believe it approaches more closely to modern painting—which is beginning to
direct itself seriously to the problem of movement—than to film in its accepted form.”21
This explains how Richter could go from making his early scrolls in the 1910s to
making abstract films such as Rhythmus in the 1920s, and then return to the scroll form in
the 1940s, this time with political themes he could not have filmed as easily during the
war. In addition, he seems to have wanted to avoid repeating himself by creating more
abstract films, even though they were quite popular in New York and were already included
in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art by the time he arrived in the U.S.22 As he
stated: “Purely abstract films? Forever? No! I felt I had to conquer more of the field of films as
such—That includes stories—epic—and that pure music that lies everywhere. Also, for
instance, in the forms of objects and in the implication of the transformed object—Trans-
formed by its new use (Surrealism).”23 This can already be seen in his earlier film Ghosts
Before Breakfast (1928), in which he questioned traditional film narratives by creating
a “film poem.”
fig. 136 Hans Richter, Stalingrad (Victory in the East), 1943–44, oil and collage on shade cloth, 35 3⁄₄ x 188 7⁄₈ in. (90.7 x 479.6 cm).
In Dreams That Money Can Buy Richter extended the scope of his work by collaborating with
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Gift of Mrs. Hans Richter, 1976
Fernand Léger, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Alexander Calder. Next to this
impressive roster of “avant-gardists,” Richter also emphasized the importance of music for
filmmaking by inviting composers Louis Applebaum, Paul Bowles, John Cage, John Latouche,
David Diamond, and Darius Milhaud to contribute a different score for each episode of the
film. At eighty-five minutes, it was the first experimental feature-length film in color, receiving
an award for Best Original Contribution to the Progress of Cinematography at the Venice Film
figs. 137–144 (pp. 144–45) Hans Richter, Dreams That Money Can Buy, 1944–47
142
Festival in 1947. The war—or the effect of the war—was present in the film, less in the factual
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sense (as in the scrolls’ newspaper clippings) than through the cooperation of artists who
had been forced by the war to find refuge in the United States. As Richter reflected: “My old
friends from our beloved but bereaved Europe: Calder, Duchamp, Max Ernst, Man Ray
contributed ideas and I made the film. And so a very un-warlike document grew in the midst
of war through the cooperation of 2 Americans, 2 Frenchmen and 2 Germans,—in the then
cultural center of the free world.”24
Dreams That Money Can Buy comprises seven dream sequences structured by a
noir-influenced frame story. The protagonist, Joe (played by Jack Bittner), realizes that he
has the gift of literal introspection—when looking in the mirror his thoughts appear as
actual images in his eyes. As he looks into other people’s eyes, he sees into their subconscious,
enabling him to sell dreams. Hence, he turns his gift into a business by selling each client
a different dream. Six of the dream sequences were made in collaboration with another artist,
while the seventh was made by Richter alone. While the film acknowledges Surrealism
through its subject matter of exploring the subconscious through dreams, it is simultaneously
a film both with and about art.
The dreams are separated from each other as well as held together by Joe’s frame story.
The first dream, “Desire,” was based on Max Ernst’s collage novel Une semaine de bonté
(A Week of Kindness, 1934). fig. 138 Richter not only recreated the Victorian setting after one
of Ernst’s prints,25 he also showed them serving as inspiration for the client in the episode—
and then cast Ernst, who cowrote the script, as one of the actors in the dream. Fernand
Léger’s unrealized film project, Folkore à l’américaine (American Folklore), was the basis
for the second dream, “The Girl with the Prefabricated Heart,” an unfulfilled love story
between two shop-window mannequins. fig. 139 The episode highlights American life as full
of commodities, linking it to the mechanized aspect of modern life that had long fascinated
Léger. This can be seen in his paintings as well as in his seminal film, Ballet mécanique
(Mechanical Ballet, 1924), which Richter greatly admired. Léger’s Julie, la belle cycliste
(Julie, the Lovely Cyclist, 1945), is first seen hanging in a frame as part of Joe’s office decor;
143
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144 145
 it then appears in the mannequins’ story as a prop, when the male doll holds it up (now

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unframed) to present it to his bride. figs. 145, 146 A close-up on the painting stops at the bicycle
wheel (a symbol of progress that appears in many of Léger’s paintings); the wheel turns
and the colors are inversed. The episode also features a song by John Latouche that functions
diegetically, becoming almost mantra-like in this carousel of unfulfilled love.
Man Ray supplied the story “Ruth, Roses, and Revolvers” for the third dream, and
Darius Milhaud composed the score. fig. 140 The story was first published in View magazine
in 1944, together with a photograph bearing the same title.26 Both the script and the photo-
graph—altered somewhat from how they originally appeared—also become props in the
dream sequence (his Self-Portrait with Beret [1946], for instance, is used as the back cover of
the script in the film).27 Additionally, Man Ray’s self-portrait of his own eyes hangs behind
Joe’s desk, where it overlooks the unfolding scenario outside of the dreams. The photograph
of the eyes signifies different notions of seeing: it serves as a reminder of Joe’s gift, show-
cases the “tyranny of the eye” that was attacked by many avant-garde filmmakers,28 and

fig. 147 Production still of Dreams That Money Can Buy, 1944–47, with Man Ray’s self-portrait
figs. 145, 146 Hans Richter, Dreams That Money Can Buy, 1944–47, Léger segment

146 147
 makes visual the act of seeing, in terms of both watching and introspection. In the film,

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Self-Portrait with Beret is given the incorrect date of 1950—four years after it was actually
made and three years after the film was finished. The voice-over instructs the viewer to look
“carefully on the other side. You will see the real significance, including the exact date of
the writing.”29 This obviously false statement destabilizes the meaning of the script—even
meaning in general as is created through film. It may also have been a wink to the difficult
production process of this episode, since Man Ray and Richter disagreed about how best
to translate its script into a filmic sequence.30 The episode as a whole is a satirical reflection
on cinema, particularly projection and spectatorship, poking fun at the influence film has
on viewers (as in one scene where a movie-going audience is asked to mimic the actions they
see onscreen). fig. 147 At the same time, it destabilizes reality—facts become fiction and
fiction refers to reality.
The fourth episode fig. 141 is a selection of Marcel Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs, interspersed
with a nude woman—strategically covered in black circles to avoid trouble with American
censors—descending a staircase, an image that eventually multiplies. John Cage’s Japanese-
sounding score is produced with muted strings of a piano creating a Zen-like atmosphere.
It is “prismatic in character,” as Cage describes: “each 11 measures of 5/4 (and the whole
which is 11 x 11 measures) is phrased (and the whole divided into parts) according to
the following relationship: 3, 1, 3, 1, 2, 1. These numbers were derived from the time lengths
given by the film itself as related to a pulse of 120 to the minute. By ‘derived,’ I mean:
arrived at from a desire to be with the film phrases at certain points and against or in
‘contrapuntal’ relationship with it at other points.”31
The sequence also showcases optical illusions created by movement through refer-

fig. 148 Hans Richter, Dreams That Money Can Buy, 1944–47, Duchamp segment
ences to three different works by Duchamp: his Rotoreliefs (1935), fig. 148 his painting
Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (1912), and his film Anémic cinéma (1926), which
featured a different selection of turning discs in black and white inscribed with puns.
Dreams five and six consist of works by Alexander Calder. figs. 142, 143 They are the most
lyrical sequences, exemplifying the productive interplay between sculpture and film.
Calder’s mobiles are made for movement, and the film captures that element better than
any other medium.
The seventh and final dream is Richter’s, featuring a man whose face turns blue after
looking into the mirror—an ultimate parable of the artist as outsider in society. fig. 144 It also
references an early painting of Richter’s—Blauer Mann (Blue Man) fig. 65 —as well as the
Narcissus myth. Here, a man looks not “only at his own image but into it and into the world
which is mirrored in himself.”32 The Blue Man eventually escapes by way of a rope out
the window, taking with him a bust of Zeus, which eventually shatters. He descends through
New York City into another world, full of abstract color formations33 and broken myths.
Richter had recently made his own escape from the threatening “underworld” of Europe to
New York; 34 here, the Blue Man’s journey is in the opposite direction. In addition, the
reinterpretation of the mythic put Richter in tune with similar investigations by the Surreal-
ists, as seen in the exhibition Le Surréalisme 1947, organized by André Breton and Duchamp
in Paris. But though most of his collaborators on Dreams That Money Can Buy took part in
the exhibition (with the exception of Léger), Richter’s film was not included. One explanation
might be that Breton did not consider the film Surrealist because of the presence of a
narrative storyline.35 Indeed, the film may be interpreted more as a Surrealist gesture than
a Surrealist film, even though the term “Surrealism” was used in the film’s advertisements
and press coverage.36

148 149
 Dreams That Money Can Buy acts as a bridge between fields—between experimental

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and feature film, between an artwork in itself and a film about art. Its frame story utilizes
Surrealistic techniques, such as the dreamlike (onirique) narrative and the investigation of
the subconscious, within which Richter featured a heterogeneous display of art in motion—
art of all media, from sculpture, painting, and printmaking to photography and film. The
film employs works of art as staffage, both as carriers of symbolic meaning and as works for
their own sake. Since movement and rhythm were important elements throughout the avant-
gardes of the early twentieth century, these works are especially suited for being shown
as turning, pending, descending. Dreams That Money Can Buy illustrates a possibility of how
to integrate visual art in the film medium, as well as how an artist can make a film about
art history. Siegfried Kracauer recognized that Richter “transfers the essential content of
modern art to the screen. Modern art, as it appears in this film, intertwines the region of pure
forms with the virgin forest of the human soul.”37

Richter’s interdisciplinary practice during the 1940s was situated in an émigré milieu, which
shaped the cultural and social conditions of his artistic production as well as its reception.
Both Stalingrad and Dreams That Money Can Buy use figurative and abstract elements,
as well as narrative conventions combined with a more freely shaped form-vocabulary. Both
works have a retrospective tendency: Stalingrad looks back at the continent Richter was
forced to leave by observing its current events, while Dreams places avant-garde art from the
past within a new cultural context. Stalingrad’s content is overtly political—a history
painting infused with a Dada spirit, if we understand it as a “compelling imbrication of the

fig. 149 Production still of Dreams That Money Can Buy, 1944–47, with Jack Bittner (left) and Hans Richter (middle)
indexical real with the illegibly abstract.”38 As Dada was formed in part as a reaction to World
War I, creating Dada-influenced pieces in reaction to World War II fit with Richter’s profes-
sional and personal trajectory. Frida Richter recalled: “He was a Don Quixote. I don’t think
he would have said he did the artworks because he wanted a political fight, but more like
any other human being as an expression of his natural involvement in the state of affairs . . .
he would take a stand.”39
Dreams That Money Can Buy, however, was less overtly political, linked more to his
immediate circumstances. Richter was well integrated in the émigré circles of New York,
partly because he already knew many of the artists from Europe. Additionally, Peggy
Guggenheim’s gallery became an important exhibition venue for European and emerging
American artists between 1942 and 1947, and Richter had exhibited there since its first
year.40 As the center of the modern art world shifted from Paris to New York in the 1940s,41
European émigrés were significant in the emerging art scene but eventually did not fit in
with the project of solidifying New York’s cultural hegemony. Abstract Expressionism, for
example, referred to European avant-garde movements on many levels but sought to
distinguish itself by enriching its own history with what were seen as American values and
heroes—epitomized most strongly by Jackson Pollock.42 In contrast, Richter had always
been on the move: between isms, between media, and between countries. His work did not
lend itself to the formalist approach of art criticism developing at midcentury in New
York and that was reinforced in both high and popular culture, from the Museum of Modern
Art to Life magazine. Richter’s Stalingrad has more to do with a cinematic and historic
approach than it does with the “all-over” discourse formulated by Clement Greenberg.43 His
scrolls of that period are narrative, whereas Greenberg sought the “essence of painting”
that could not be confused or influenced by other media or any subject matter. Richter did

150 151
not fit this model; his exhibition at Art of This Century was not very well received, and his
works did not sell.44
Richter’s legacy in the United States is found less in modernist painting than it is in
independent film and as a historiographer. His work at the Institute of Film Techniques and
his visual arts background were particularly influential on emerging filmmakers such as
Maya Deren and Jonas Mekas, though he did not have the direct influence on the visual arts
in America as did fellow German émigrés Hans Hofmann (on Abstract Expressionism)
or Josef Albers (at Black Mountain College). Rather, having been involved in the heyday of
avant-garde movements in Europe before the war, Richter’s professional orientation as
an artist in exile developed toward historicizing the avant-garde, starting with Dreams That
Money Can Buy and continuing in such films as Dadascope (Parts I and II, 1956–68). He
became even more widely known for his writing, following the resurgence of interest in Dada
sparked by the 1951 anthology, The Dada Painters and Poets, by Robert Motherwell (an
Abstract Expressionist, after all).45 Subsequently, Richter developed a second career in the
1960s as a historiographer of the avant-garde, asserting Dada’s influence on Neo-Dada in
the United States and Fluxus in Europe and combining a historical and personal approach in
his books.46
Richter’s work of the 1940s showcases the difficult position of his interdisciplinary
artistic practice as an émigré during the rise of the New York School of modern art.
Nevertheless, it could be argued that his work actually fits within a larger cultural climate,
in particular when looking at Hollywood. Two of its most popular genres at the time were
war films and film noir.47 Even though Richter was not keen on popular cinema, it is
interesting to compare those two genres schematically to his work. War films focused on real
events, including war-related documentaries and semi-documentaries that blurred fact
and fiction, which can clearly be related to Richter’s war scrolls. Film noir—itself a genre that
was considerably shaped by Jewish émigré directors 48 —was clearly a model for Dreams That
Money Can Buy. Its title also suggests a satirical and multilayered reference to the Hollywood
“dream machine,” especially considering that psychoanalysis and dreams were en vogue
in the film industry around the same time.49 Without drawing too many conclusions from
these observations, it is worth noting that film can be said to form both the subconscious and
the conscious cultural fabric of a particular moment. Even though Stalingrad and Dreams
That Money Can Buy contain quite different content and aesthetic concerns, they reflect
Richter’s interests, cultural habitat, and “handwriting.” Richter had moved from history
painting to history writing. These works “embody the condition of exile,” depicting and
dramatizing contemporary (art) history.50 For Richter in the 1940s, it was no longer
important to translate one medium to another as he did in the 1920s. Rather, he infused
both with references to the respective other medium, thereby narrating (art) history in
a way that combined fact, fiction, documentation, and poetry. The canvas did not have to
move anymore because of formal concerns. It told a story and moved an audience.
152
1 Hans Richter, “Easel–Scroll–Film,” Magazine of Art
(February, 1952): 86.
2 I am grateful to the Getty Research Institute and its
scholar community for the extraordinary research
opportunity and fruitful discussions during my Getty
Fellowship in 2011–12.
3 “The Film as an Original Art Form,” College Art
Journal 10, no. 2 (Winter 1951): 157–61.
4 Cecile Starr, “Notes on Hans Richter in the U.S.A.,”
Film Culture 79 (Winter 1996): 17–26; Estera Milman,
“Hans Richter in America: Traditional Avant-Garde
Values/Shifting Sociopolitical Realities,” in Hans Richter:
Activism, Modernism, and the Avant-Garde, ed. Stephen
C. Foster (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 160–83.
5 Joan M. Luckach, Hilla Rebay: In Search of the Spirit
in Art (New York: George Braziller, 1983), 211–25.
6 See correspondence between Richter and Rukser at
the Hans Richter Estate, West Palm Beach, FL. I thank
the estate for generously accommodating my research
on so many levels.
7 Hans Richter, Hans Richter (Neuchâtel: Éditions du
Griffon, 1965), 60.
8 Gisela Hoßmann, Hans Richter 1888–1976. Das
bildnerische Werk (Ph.D. diss., Cologne, 1985), 47.
9 Richter added the subtitle (Victory in the East) much
later in 1975, riffing off the Nazi propaganda film Victory
in the West (1941). See Cynthia Jaffee McCabe, Hans
Richter’s Stalingrad (Victory in the East) (Washington,
DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1980), n.p. Richter had
already mentioned that film previously; see Hans Richter,
“Der politische Film,” Deutsche Blätter (Santiago de
Chile) 2, no. 2 (1944):17–20.
10 Richter, Hans Richter, 62.
11 Jaffee McCabe, Hans Richter’s Stalingrad, n.p.
12 See Joan Weinstein, The End of Expressionism: Art
and the November Revolution in Germany 1918–19
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 194–95,
and Daniel Robbins, The World between the Ox and the
Swine: Dada Drawings by Hans Richter (Providence:
Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 1971).
13 Richter also mentioned an unfinished scroll based on
the Battle of Guadalcanal. Richter, Hans Richter, 62.
14 Ibid. In Guggenheim’s exhibition, this work was dated
1944. The sketches for this scroll in the Richter Estate
provide insights into the process of developing his
composition.
15 I thank Dr. Dieter Scholz, curator at the Neue
Nationalgalerie in Berlin, for his expertise and thoughts.
16 Frida Richter donated this piece in 1976 to the
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden of the
Smithsonian in Washington, DC, following the exhibition
The Golden Door: Artist Immigrants in America
1876–1976. See McCabe, Hans Richter’s Stalingrad, n.p.
17 Hans Richter by Hans Richter, ed. Cleve Gray
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1971), 119.
18 Sven Beckstette, Das Historienbild im 20. Jahrhun-
dert: Künstlerische Strategien zur Darstellung von
Geschichte in der Malerei nach dem Ende der
klassischen Bildgattungen (Dissertation, Berlin, 2010),
40–50. http://www.diss.fu-berlin.de/diss/receive/
FUDISS_thesis_000000018889?lang=en (accessed: July
27, 2012).
19 Beckstette, Das Historienbild im 20. Jahrhundert,
3–4.
20 Hans Richter in Peggy Guggenheim and her Friends,
ed. Virginia M. Dortch, (Milan: Berenice, 1994), 89–90.
21 Richter by Richter, 152.
22 Anne Umland and Adrian Sudhalter, eds., Dada in
the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art (New York:
The Museum of Modern Art, 2008).
23 Richter by Richter, 153. This might explain why the
film project with Malevich in 1927 remained uncom-
pleted, despite the efforts of Arnold Eagle to finish it with
Richter in the early 1970s. Arnold Eagle Papers and Film,
Special Collections, Getty Research Institute, Los
Angeles.
24 Richter, Hans Richter, 114.
25 Werner Spies, ed., Max Ernst: Une semaine de bonté.
Die Originalcollagen (Cologne: Dumont, 2008), 121.
26 Man Ray, “Ruth, Roses, and Revolvers,” View IV, no.
4 (December 1944): 120–23.
27 Self-Portrait with Beret (1946) and Ruth, Roses, and
Revolvers (1944) are owned by The Getty Museum.
Thanks to Amanda Maddox for her assistance.
28 See Thomas Elsaesser, “Dada/Cinema?” in Dada
and Surrealist Film, ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1996), 16.
29 See Timothy Benson’s essay in this volume for a
discussion of the significance of false dating in other
works of Richter’s.
30 See Richter’s letters to Man Ray between 1945 and
1946; Man Ray Letters and Album, Special Collections,
Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. After resolving
their differences, Man Ray helped Richter organize the
film’s premiere in Hollywood in 1948.
31 Program pamphlet, Dreams That Money Can Buy
(New York: Films International of America, 1947), Special
Collections, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.
32 Richter by Richter, 53.
33 The imagery here is reminiscent of Die Geburt der
Farbe (The Birth of Color, 1939). See Yvonne Zimmer-
mann’s essay in this volume.
34 Richter, Hans Richter, 60.
35 Philippe Sers, Sur Dada: Essai sur l’expérience
dadaïste de l’image; Entretiens avec Hans Richter
(Nîmes: Éditions Jacqueline Chambon, 1997), 6.
Berger
36 “The New Avant-Garde Movie: Avant-Garde Artists
Make a Surrealist-Abstract Movie,” Vogue (April 15,
1946); “Surrealist Movie: Six Ultramodern Artists Supply
Dreams for New Film,” Life (December 2, 1946).
37 Siegfried Kracauer, “Filming the Subconscious,”
Theater Arts (February 1948): 40.
38 Umland and Sudhalter, Dada in the Collection of
MoMA, 21.
39 Frida Richter quoted in Anthony Heilbut, Exiled in
Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in
America, from the 1930s to the Present (New York:
Viking Press, 1983), 141–42.
40 See photograph in Susan Davidson and Philip
Rylands, eds., Peggy Guggenheim & Frederick Kiesler:
The Story of Art of This Century (New York: Guggen-
heim Museum Publications, 2004), 194.
41 Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of
Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the
Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
42 See Doris Berger, Projizierte Kunstgeschichte:
Mythen und Images in den Filmbiografien über Jackson
Pollock und Jean-Michel Basquiat (Bielefeld: Transcript,
2009), 33–56.
43 Clement Greenberg, “The Crisis of the Easel
Picture,” Partisan Review 15, no. 4 (April 1948): 481–84.
44 Davidson and Rylands, Peggy Guggenheim &
Frederick Kiesler, 338–39.
45 Robert Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets
(New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1951); includes Richter’s
1948 essay, “Dada XYZ.”
46 See Michael White’s essay in this volume.
47 Thomas Schatz, Boom and Boost: American Cinema
in the 1940s (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1997), 2–3.
48 Vincent Brook, Driven to Darkness: Jewish Émigré
Directors and the Rise of Film Noir (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 2009).
49 See, for example, Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound
(1945) and Anatole Litvak’s The Snake Pit (1948).
50 See Peter Chametzky’s discussion of Max
Beckmann’s exile, “Titanic Sinks, Departure Arrives,”
in Objects as History in Twentieth-Century German Art:
Beckmann to Beuys (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2010), 9–10.
153