Kataklump

“Even beautiful Seeshaupt loses a hell of a lot of its appeal when one’s in my situation.” 11 May 1920, Fritz Stuckenberg

In May 1919, Fritz Stuckenberg moved with his pregnant partner, the artist Erika Deetjen, to Seeshaupt, where they lived until August 1921. The idea of moving to this village on Lake Starnberg in Upper Bavaria came at a time of sociopolitical and artistic upheaval following World War I, marked by the November Revolution and the demise of Imperial Germany. In artistic circles, this unrest manifested itself among others in the founding of the Workers’ Soviet and the November Group, associations of artists who wanted to create a new relationship between art and society. At the same time, the younger generation of artists in particular had begun searching for new forms of ex­pression between abstract and figurative visual idioms, sparking the emergence and evolution of a wide variety of avant-garde movements.

In 1916, having moved to Berlin in 1912 after an extended period in France, Fritz Stuckenberg connected with the milieu around STURM and the gallerist Herwarth Walden. This allowed him to become networked with the city’s art scene and take part in several exhibitions, but it did not bring the break­through and financial independence he longed for.

It was in this context that he decided to move to Seeshaupt, for a multitude of reasons: the war and its aftermath had created shortages in the city, and by moving to a rural setting he sought to escape these precarious living condi-tions, not least with a view to starting a family. Moreover, Fritz Stuckenberg had cut his ties to Herwarth Walden, among others due to irregularities con-cerning the sale of pictures.

At the time, Seeshaupt was a fitting choice as it seemed likely to become an artists’ colony. The artists Heinrich Campendonk, the youngest member of the ‘Blaue Reiter’ group with good connections in Munich and the Rhineland, and Jean-Bloé Niestlé had both been living there since 1916. Fritz Stuckenberg and Heinrich Campendonk knew each other from the STURM milieu in Berlin. The final deciding factor was probably a letter from Paul van Ostaijen with news of his visit to Heinrich Campendonk in Seeshaupt in July 1919.

Fritz Stuckenberg hoped the move would bring a new start, but his expecta­tions of improved living conditions and an artistic breakthrough were not to be fulfilled. Instead, his time in Seeshaupt was marked by contradictions. In spite of recurring creative crises, he looked back on it as a very productive period during which he was able to maintain his contacts to the contempo-rary art scene. As a result, he had several exhibitions – at the Jena Art Society, at the Goyert art dealership in Cologne, and at Alfred Flechtheim’s gallery in Düsseldorf – but he sold little and success continued to elude him.

The work Fritz Stuckenberg made in Seeshaupt is diverse and heteroge-neous. Like many artists of his generation, he moved between figuration and abstraction. Unlike many of his contemporaries, however, there was no steady evolution towards a purely abstract formal idiom; instead, he experi-mented with various approaches between figurative and non-figurative painting.

Due to his precarious financial situation in Bavaria – living at close quarters with his partner and their child, with no money to heat his studio in winter – he made extensive use of the medium of watercolour painting. He would repeatedly paint and repaint the front and back of his pictures, as canvases and frames were simply too expensive. These works are spontaneous, emo-tional outbursts of colour and form in which colour dominates, as seen in ‘Explosion’ (1919) or in ‘Rot jubelt’ (1920).

He was also fascinated by the Cubist play with geometrical forms. In his wa-tercolour ‘Leichte Formen’ (1920), for example, he concentrated on the basic elements of the circle and rectangle that overlap and connect as they float in space. ‘Mechanik’ (1919), by contrast, is dominated by a purely con-structive composition, shaped by geometrical planes of colour that interlock almost like masonry.

‘An Mynona’ (1919), a drawing dedicated to poet and philosopher Salomo Friedländer (who signed his writings Mynona, an anagram of anonym, German for anonymous), has a symbolic charge, addressing ideas that cir­culated in avant-garde circles at the time concerning a cosmic-spiritual worldview, the search for individual spirituality in harmony with humankind and the universe.

Before the birth of his son, Fritz Stuckenberg had also engaged in depth with the theme of femininity, as reflected in the lithograph ‘Weib’ (c. 1919). His focus on this theme was also due in part to his contact with Heinrich Campendonk who made many woodcuts of female nudes in nature during this period. Finally, Fritz Stuckenberg’s mode of expression will also have been influenced by the birth of his son in Seeshaupt and his partner’s tran-sition to motherhood. This is reflected in the lithograph ‘Die Kreisende’ (1921) centring on a geometrically abstracted pregnant female body.

By contrast, the close friendship with Paul van Ostaijen and his partner Emma Clément seems to have inspired Fritz Stuckenberg to make erotic works, especially following their visit to Seeshaupt in the summer of 1920. He was fascinated by and attracted to Emma Clément, who is often mentioned in Fritz Stuckenberg’s correspondence with Paul van Ostaijen, in which the two men also discussed their respective sex lives. What happened when the two couples met in the summer of 1920 and whether their relationship became sexual remains unclear, but the surviving letters suggest that something took place, as both men refer to homosexuality.

At this time, Fritz Stuckenberg made sexually charged works, including one of his few paintings from this period, ‘Erotisches Stillleben’ (1920), an untitled lithograph, and the drawing ‘‚Umarmung’ (1919). In these works, organic forms play around one another, seeking a close connection, merging into something new, like lovers. The artistic and thematic variety of the Seeshaupt years exemplifies Fritz Stuckenberg’s oeuvre as a whole, which is marked by heterogeneous complexity.

Contrary to expectations, the move did not bring contentment and commer­cial success. Although very productive in artistic terms, this period did not result in financial independence. Fritz Stuckenberg, who had been part of an active art scene during his Berlin years, suffered from being isolated in Seeshaupt. During one profound creative crisis, he even destroyed finished works. Against this backdrop he finally decided, in the spring of 1921, to move with his family back to Delmenhorst where his parents lived.

In the autumn of 1918, Paul van Ostaijen (1896–1928) travelled with his partner Emma Clement to Berlin, on the run from history and in search of a fresh start. There, in the revolutionary capital, he soon met a group of like-minded artists including Lyonel Feininger, Erich Heckel and Fritz Stuckenberg. Like him, they were enthusiastically seeking new forms for an as-yet-unknown world.

A striking figure, Paul van Ostaijen had an insatiable hunger for new artistic ideas and an unshakeable conviction that art had a major role to play in rebuilding Europe after the war. For Fritz Stuckenberg in particular, the Flemish poet’s verve was a breath of fresh air. Conversely, Paul van Ostaijen found in Fritz Stuckenberg an artist who took artistic experimentation as seriously as he did himself. Early in 1919, they threw themselves into the ex-ploration of new forms and ideas. Traces of this can be found in the unpub­lished poem ‘Frits Stuckenberg’ written in February 1919:

“Waves worlds the world. Rollers.
They turn on their own axis. 
They roll and grow.
Spinning. Being. Spinning existence.
Globe!!! Sphere.
One two three. Build from three points.
Ever higher the pyramid climbs upon the sphere.”

The poem begins as a searching evocation of Fritz Stuckenberg’s similarly searching paintings of this period, as seen, for example, in ‘Astral Construction’: things writhe around each other – circles, spheres  – as if we are witnessing the birth of the universe. But the Belgian soon moves on from portraying the world in purely abstract terms. To one spherical object he immediately adds three exclamation marks, possibly suggesting that this is a bullet. Elsewhere, the wandering heavenly bodies look suspiciously like humans expectantly moving past each other and sometimes, in an ecstatic moment, into and out of each other again. The search for oneness proves to be in vain, as Paul van Ostaijen writes in a line whose total lack of emotion only adds to its impact:

“Solitude is a geometrical principle.”

This one line says it all. Humanity is an accumulation of lonely circles whose path through life is sometimes peaceful, sometimes frenzied, damned for­ever to rotating movement.

‘Frits Stuckenberg’ was a big step forward for Paul van Ostaijen’s poetry. Although some Expressionist pathos remained, he removed all traces of romanticism. And, perhaps even more importantly, Paul van Ostaijen’s dia­logue with painters like Fritz Stuckenberg led him to conclude that poems can only be truly modern if they enter into a relationship with reality as complex as that seen in painting. Although van Ostaijen didn’t include ‘Frits Stuckenberg’ in ‘Feasts of Fear and Agony’, the poem featured another element that plays a key role in the collection, as the dance of existence became the book’s main theme.

In late summer 1919, when Fritz Stuckenberg was leaving Berlin for Seeshaupt in Bavaria, Paul van Ostaijen learned that dancing was more than a fashion. Before Fritz Stuckenberg’s departure, the painter and the poet immersed themselves in Berlin’s nightlife for a few days. Since the spring of 1919, when the municipal authorities had tried to ban dancing, the city’s nightlife had gone largely underground. Paul van Ostaijen suddenly realized why. Rather than the thrill of moving to the music, what people were looking for on the dancefloor was an encounter with their own physicality and mortality. So soon after the war, this was much more than a pleasant way of passing the time: it was a place of fundamental self-reflection.

In ‘Meta­physical Jazz’, dedicated to Fritz Stuckenberg, the most modern dance of all takes on formidable proportions. At the start of the poem, the line “we incognito steppers” sounds as if Paul van Ostaijen and Fritz Stuckenberg are looking on as anonymous observers. But they are soon overwhelmed by the significance of this modern music. The influence of Afro-American spirituals echoes in the repeated ‘The Lord is my Life’ and in the new instrumentation, as broken violins are replaced by banjos and wooden laths, the whole of contemporary life rushing through the dancehall. Grad­ually, the jazz music grows into the promise that the gates of Zion will fall so that the prophesied city can be founded.

Fritz Stuckenberg’s departure came as a heavy blow to Paul van Ostaijen, removing a good friend and loyal ally from his everyday life. But in his end­less search for new forms, the move to Seeshaupt also offered opportunities.

Before his friend packed his bags, Paul van Ostaijen had already travelled to Seeshaupt with his partner Emma Clement in the summer of 1919 to visit the painter Heinrich Campendonk, who had been living there since 1916. This led to a special relationship between the poet and the youngest of the legendary group ‘Der Blaue Reiter’. As a painter not especially interested in abstraction, construction or the whirlwind of modern life, Heinrich Campendonk forced Paul van Ostaijen to expand his thinking about modern art, as his paintings evoked tension in entirely different ways, as explored by the poet in his ‘Two rural poems for Heinrich Campendonk’.

Rather than describing actual paintings, the poems ‘Countryside, Evening’ and ‘Countryside, Quiet’ are poetic explorations of the way Heinrich Campendonk elaborated his visual world. As Paul van Ostaijen shows, nothing is as it seems. A garden gate slamming at the start of ‘Countryside, Evening’ triggers a series of associations with a world beyond the Bavarian countryside. And the people, animals and objects involved also don’t match their outer appearance:

“Garden gate slams shut
                      and 
         barking dog 
        clink chain jangle 
            jumping dog 
                dancing dog 
                    jump dancing dog 
    dance of dog before moon 
moon-possessed dog 
in moon higher dog-dance 
                        DOG-DANCE”

A dog barks, alarmed by the noise, pulls on its chain and leaps at the visitor. In the next line, the dog’s jumping has already become a dance. The dance becomes a moon dance, taking on added magical significance. The dance becomes a “higher dog-dance” that becomes more and more powerful as the poem progresses. A tree standing in the moonlight is also lost to the dance, becoming “a tree lost in moon” that stands on an “earth decaying into moon”. 

At the end of the poem, nothing is the way it seemed at the beginning. According to van Ostaijen, precisely this was Heinrich Campendonk’s strength. In his view, the painter constantly asked himself the Kantian question of whether reality can be truly perceived. In his embrace of the seemingly unreal, Heinrich Campendonk opened up a path towards the unexpected. For Paul van Ostaijen, this artistic experience was the missing piece of the puzzle for his collection ‘Feasts of Fear and Agony’, the element he needed to describe the fearful dance through an unreal postwar Europe.

„Campendonk est un chic type“ Stuckenberg, 21.8.1919

In October 1911, aged 21, Heinrich Campendonk travelled to Upper Bavaria at the invitation of Franz Marc, Wassily Kandinsky and August Macke. He had attended the School of Applied Arts in Krefeld where he received a comprehensive training from his teacher, the Belgian Jan Thorn Prikker, mainly focussing on composition, as well as a theoretical and practical understanding of colour in the spirit of neo-Impressionism. Heinrich Campendonk had had to fight to pursue this path, as his petit-bourgeois parents saw fine art as a penniless occupation. But his desire for the recognition denied by his father only strengthened his attitude of “keep working, never despair”.

In Bavaria, too, where he joined the emerging circle of artists associated with the almanac ‘Der Blaue Reiter’, Heinrich Campendonk was able to assert himself. Like Franz Marc, he lived in the village of Sindelsdorf, not far from Murnau, where Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter lived. From here, he also had easy access to Munich, where other avant-garde artist friends lived. In this new setting, with the experience of nature in the alpine uplands, his work flourished and he made giant steps. His older artist friends, with their groundbreaking works, experience and conversation, gave the young man orientation and access to important art world contacts. Thanks to their joint exhibitions, he was taken on by Herwarth Walden’s avant-garde gallery DER STURM in 1912 and the patron of ‘Der Blaue Reiter’, the Berlin industrialist Bernhard Koehler, became a loyal collector and supporter..

At the outbreak of World War I, the group broke up. This and the death of his friend Franz Marc in May 1916 left Heinrich Campendonk on his own. The moment had come to define his own distinctive artistic position. The same year, he moved with his wife Adda and their son Herbert to Seeshaupt. They were able to rent half of a large house and a separate studio space. For Heinrich Campendonk this was the beginning of an intensive period of concentrated work. Returning to the woodcut technique, he explored its rigorous interplay of line and field, outline and shape, printed and blank areas. This resulted in a stricter stylization and a sharpening of his sense of the technical possibilities of watercolour painting. In the following years, this influenced his works on paper more generally, as he structured his compo­sitions in new, more complex ways. This was the period when he made his best work and when his profile and reputation grew.

Seeshaupt, a village at the southern tip of Lake Starnberg, is roughly 50 kilometres from Munich. Since the mid-nineteenth century, it had been easily accessible by steamboat and later by train, with people coming for daytrips or summer vacations. For many artists, too, the village was (and still is) an attractive domicile, with its picturesque lakeside setting against the impres­sive backdrop of the Zugspitze and Karwendel mountains – not least because of the easy access to Munich with its cultural life, galleries and museums. The Campendonks had many visitors: artist friends, collectors, gallerists.n.

Heinrich Campendonk already knew Fritz Stuckenberg as a STURM artist; their works had been shown side-by-side in several exhibitions. But they didn’t get along well. Heinrich Campendonk was irritated above all by Fritz Stuckenberg’s arrogance in his dealings with Herwarth Walden in the chaotic phase after the ceasefire. Before Fritz Stuckenberg’s arrival, Paul van Ostaijen had already visited Seeshaupt in July 1919 with his attractive partner Emma Clément. The relaxed, friendly tone of Heinrich Campendonk’s subse­quent letters to Paul van Ostaijen shows how special this encounter was for him.

In August, they were followed by a Fritz Stuckenberg and his new partner, the painter Erika Deetjen, for a two-week vacation. He wrote to Paul van Ostaijen:

“Campendonk is a cool guy.”

Having moved to Seeshaupt in October, however, his longer-term impression was different. As a painter, he was a rival and had to observe Heinrich Campendonk’s commercial and artistic success at close quarters:

“How Campendonk is to be envied.”

He was able to choose between multiple offers from galleries, often forego­ing their assistance to sell directly to private collectors. By contrast, money was a problem for Fritz Stuckenberg since his separation from STURM. Above all, the two men had entirely different artistic approaches. While in 1919, Heinrich Campendonk praised Fritz Stuckenberg’s painting ‘Umarmung’ (Embrace), by the beginning of 1920 he characterized abstract works he had seen by Fritz Stuckenberg and his friends as “lightweight, superficial” in contrast to his own “serious” work. The more the form of their abstract works dissolved, the more reserved Heinrich Campendonk became, repeatedly turning down Fritz Stuckenberg’s requests and proposals to swap works. On this subject, Paul van Ostaijen wrote that he suspected

“delusions of technical superiority” 2.2.1920, PvO an FS

At this time of growing hardship – landlords who refused to accept his part­ner and their child out of wedlock; money problems; obstruction of his artistic work by external circumstance; and above all the erotic challenge of his sexual attraction to Paul van Ostaijen – Fritz Stuckenberg viewed Heinrich Campendonk and his art as nothing but bourgeois, and he felt that collectors and the American gallerist Katherine Dreyer were being deliberately kept away from him, resulting in exclusion. But Paul van Ostaijen wrote

“To me, Camp. remains a cherished friend. Rational, conscious artist and in no way bourgeois. Colossal opposition to any attempt to force him into bourgeois ways. He and his wife do not like ‘extravagant politeness’– fine, then I’ll drop it. Not so easy.” 4.10.1920, PvO an FS

It certainly will have made a big difference that van Ostaijen expressed his enthusiasm for Heinrich Campendonk’s work in a commissioned essay. Paul van Ostaijen dedicated two poems to Heinrich Campendonk, ‘Gnomedans’ and ‘Melopee’, and Heinrich Campendonk made three works based on the latter. By contrast, the exchange of watercolours initiated by Fritz Stuckenberg in July 1919 was never reciprocated.

On 19 January 1920, Fritz Stuckenberg wrote to Paul van Ostaijen:

“For now I’m just happy that I have you wholly. That I have no secrets from you. Meaning your shivers are my shivers, your hate is my hate, your ecstasy is my madness! How incredibly great is that!”

The two men appreciated each other’s work, had a passionate and intimate relationship, and fought together again and again to establish themselves in the machinery of the art world – where they both foundered. In May 1921, Fritz Stuckenberg returned to live with his parents; at the same time, Paul van Ostaijen left Berlin for Brussels. Early in 1923, Heinrich Campendonk and his family moved into a house in Krefeld that had been built for them by one of Heinrich Campendonk’s patrons. Paul van Ostaijen was a frequent guest, visiting from Belgium.

“Now, about your project: Splendid!” 3 Mar. 1920, Fritz Stuckenberg

With their project to found a new artists’ group, Fritz Stuckenberg and Paul van Ostaijen were pursuing two shared objectives. Seeking avant-garde potential in art, they made this the condition for participating in ‘Kataklump’. At the same time, they were creating a model through which to secure their livelihoods: the group’s exclusivity was to be based on a commitment to abandon all other ties and to exhibit only with this new group of friends. When making these plans, they had two groups in mind that had been suc­cessful before World War I: ‘Die Brücke’ and ‘Der Blaue Reiter’. Both were open to all forms of art that departed from the academic style. The program­me of ‘Die Brücke’ was summed up by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in a woodcut as follows: “With a belief in continuing evolution, in a new generation of creators as well as appreciators, we call together all youth. And as youth carrying the future, we intend to obtain freedom of movement and of life for ourselves in opposition to older, well-established powers. Whoever renders directly and authentically that which impels him to create is one of us.” (1906) World War I brought the end of both groups. Some artists had to leave Germany, others were drafted into the military, and all attempts to reactivate the groups after the war failed.

In 1918, when the November Revolution led to a ceasefire and the abdication of the Kaiser, the fall of the monarchy created a political vacuum in which matters quickly escalated. The war economy, inflation and rising prices had already led to food riots in 1915. By the end of the war, the overall supply situation in Germany was catastrophic. Paul van Ostaijen was a political person. He had been in Antwerp when the city was occupied by German troops and he was involved in the movement for an autonomous Flanders. In 1917 he had been arrested at a demonstration against the francophone Cardinal Mercier and found guilty of activism. To avoid going to prison, he fled in October 1918 to Berlin, where he experienced the end of the war. He was shocked by the political upheavals he observed in the city, and espe­cially by the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht on 15 January 1919. Whereas in Antwerp he had viewed art and poetry as a revolutionary movement that would lead the people in shaping an ideal society, in Berlin he realized the boundless naivety of this position. Abandoning all political activity, he devoted himself to ‘pure poetry’, taking inspiration from the artists of Expressionism and painterly abstraction.

For Paul van Ostaijen, too, DER STURM was a milieu where he could meet like-minded people. But the political changes were opening up new options for artists.

The Artists’ Soviet was formed in Berlin, emphasizing the social significance of architecture and its role in shaping a new society. The November Group, an artists’ association founded on 3 December 1918, also dedicated itself to political work and to the democratization of the art world. Having fallen out with Herwarth Walden, Fritz Stuckenberg was a member of these two groups, but he lacked effective representation on the art market. A clear rival of STURM, I.B. Neumann’s Graphisches Kabinett hosted Germany’s first Dada exhibition that included work by both Fritz Stuckenberg and Erika Deetjen, after Paul van Ostaijen and Fritz Stuckenberg met the gallerist, apparently by accident, at Berlin’s KaDeWe department store when they were celebrating New Year’s Eve in 1919. On his return to Seeshaupt, Fritz Stuckenberg immediately wrote to I.B. Neumann:

I was glad to note that we share the view that something needs to happen in Berlin to create a representation for abstract art to the left of your programme that is worthier that what Walden offers.” 14 Jan. 1920, FS to IBN

In the same letter, he suggested entrusting this task to Paul van Ostaijen:

“At all events, he is the best, in my view the only person in Germany today who knows what Expressionism is.”

In February, concrete plans were made, with I.B. Neumann pledging to invest 25,000 marks and Paul van Ostaijen planning to borrow the same amount from his brother to fund an exhibition. Fritz Stuckenberg and Arnold Topp were to contribute their share in the form of artworks. However, it soon became clear that 50,000 marks was not enough to hire a suitable space in Berlin. I.B. Neumann was unwilling to invest more, and the painters who had been asked to participate were hesitant about cutting their ties to Herwarth Walden. Georg Muche cautiously inquired

“whether you have reason to assume this will be of financial benefit for us. About the favourable situation concerning harmony of ideas I have no doubts …” 19 Feb. 1920, FS to PvO

In April, after many letters and conversations, Paul van Ostaijen took stock:

“Result: Campendonk and Klee say no, Muche and Molzahn say no, which leaves you, Arno, Boddien. Not enough to found a group.”

His conclusion was a clear rejection:

“In a word: This has come to nothing! Why? Because the painters don’t care.” 12 Apr. 1920, PvO to FS

Finally, this disappointment and the separation from his partner Emma Clément prompted Paul van Ostaijen to leave Berlin. In May 1920, he wrote to his publisher de Bock:

“I’m fed up with Germany. I’ve applied for a passport to return to Belgium. I’m prepared to accept Mercier and soldiering.”

The same month, Fritz Stuckenberg moved back to Delmenhorst where his situation was stabilized thanks to financial support from his parents.

„Ostaijen, Topp, Muche, Stuckenberg, die 4 Namen tönen gut.“ Fritz Stuckenberg, Januar 1920

Georg Muche, geboren 1895 in Querfurt, hatte in München an einer privaten Kunst­schule Malerei studiert und sich hier intensiv mit den Werken von Wassily Kandinsky und Paul Klee aus­einander­gesetzt. Im Jahr 1914 zog er nach Berlin, wo er abstrakt zu arbeiten begann und sich dem STURM-Galeristen Herwarth Walden vor­stellte. Dieser, beeindruckt von Georg Muches architek­tonisch an­gelegten und voller lebendiger Farbig­keit sprießender Malerei, berief ihn 1916 an seine neu­gegründeten STURM-Kunst­schule als Leiter der Abteilung Malerei.

Arnold Topp, 1887 in Soest geboren, hatte an der Kunst­gewerbe­schule in Düsseldorf studiert und begann 1913 in Branden­burg an der Havel als Zeichen- und Sport­lehrer zu arbeiten. Er war vermutlich seit seinem Studium mit Herwarth Walden bekannt. Nach seinem Umzug an die Havel festigte er diesen Kontakt mit regel­mäßigen Besuchen in Berlin.

Beide Künstler gehörten zum engen Kreis um Herwarth Walden und blieben mit ihm, wie viele andere auch, während ihrer Wehr­dienst­zeit im Ersten Welt­krieg in engem Austausch.

Fritz Stuckenberg hatte Georg Muche im Februar 1916 in Berlin kennen­gelernt und durch ihn die Bekannt­schaft mit Herwarth Walden geschlossen. Auch Arnold Topp begegnete er in diesem Umfeld.

Paul van Ostaijen kam mit beiden Künstlern in seinen ersten Berliner Jahren um 1918 in Kontakt. Er stand Georg Muche und seiner rein abstrakten Malerei, entgegen Fritz Stuckenberg, zunächst kritisch gegenüber. Erst Ende 1919, nach­dem sich Georg Muche verstärkt einer gegen­ständlichen Formen­sprache zugewandt hatte, und kurz bevor er dem Ruf von Walter Gropius ans Bauhaus folgte, begann Paul van Ostaijen sich für ihn zu begeistern:

„Glaube nun nicht dass ich Muches Arbeit besser finde, um persönliche Motiven. Andersrum wäre richtig. Als ich gesehen habe dass seine Arbeiten bedeutend besser waren als die aus der Mozart­periode (…). Was er gar nicht hatte sucht er jetzt (…)“ Dezember 1919, PvO an FS

„Ostaijen, Topp, Muche, Stuckenberg, die 4 Namen tönen gut“,

Doch zu der geplanten Zusammen­arbeit kam es nicht, da Georg Muche im Gegen­satz zu Fritz Stuckenberg und Arnold Topp dem STURM-Kreis eng verbunden blieb und sich weiterhin von Herwarth Walden vertreten ließ.

“Paul, I send you kisses … Yours, with my deepest love, René” Stuckenberg, 31 March 1920

Since their first encounter in 1918 in the milieu around STURM gallerist Herwarth Walden, Fritz Stuckenberg and Paul van Ostaijen, fifteen years his junior, had a close intellectual and artistic connection. During Fritz Stuckenberg’s stay in Seeshaupt between 1919 and 1921, the friendship changed and moved beyond a purely platonic relationship, at the latest following Fritz Stuckenberg’s trip to visit Paul van Ostaijen in Berlin in the autumn of 1919. From this point on, the friendly forms of address in their early correspondence were replaced by more intimate expressions like “I long for you” or “I send you kisses”. In an unpublished poem dedicated to Fritz Stuckenberg, Paul van Ostaijen wrote:

“Grown together. Bodies into one another, out of one another. Not a hermaphrodite, but two bodies one. Two one.”

This theme of bodies growing together, organic forms fitting into one anoth­er, was addressed by Fritz Stuckenberg via the motif of the embrace in many works of the years 1919–1921: erotically charged depictions of the female and male body as in the lithographs ‘Mann’ and ‘Weib’, but also bodies melting into each other’s embrace in ‘Betende’ and ‘Wildnis’. In the drawing ‘Umarmung’ and finally in ‘Erotisches Stillleben’, one of the few pictures from the years in Seeshaupt, this merging comes to a head as organic forms combine in flowing movements, becoming inseparably interconnected.

But not only the men felt a certain attraction for one another – their partners, too, were part of this affinity. Fritz Stuckenberg in particular was fascinated by Paul van Ostaijen’s girlfriend Emma Clément:

“That Emmecke is a women with whom you can be uninhibited, stoking the most tremendous sexual fires, seems highly likely to me. (…). That is denied to me. (…). Deetjen loves romantically, and the sexual doesn’t come naturally to her.” Letter from Fritz Stuckenberg to Paul van Ostaijen, 19 January 1920

In the summer of 1920, while Paul van Ostaijen and Emma Clément were visiting the Stuckenbergs in Seeshaupt, the relationship peaked. Afterwards, Paul van Ostaijen emphasized:

“I’m just not homosexual. We’ll have to deal with that.” letter from Paul van Ostaijen to Fritz Stuckenberg dated 18 August 1920

To which Fritz Stuckenberg replied:

“I’m no less and no more homosexual than you are.” 22 August 1920

How intimate the couples were with each other in the summer of 1920 can only be guessed at, but in the course of the late summer their relationship clearly returned to one of friendly exchange. Following Fritz Stuckenberg’s move to Delmenhorst and Paul van Ostaijen’s departure from Berlin in 1921, their previous flow of almost daily communication dwindled to just a few letters per year until the Belgian’s death in 1928.

“It’s the beginning of the end.” 1920, Paul van Ostaijen

When Fritz Stuckenberg broke his ties with Herwarth Walden in December 1918, DER STURM was more than just a gallery and a publishing house. Whereas World War I had a negative impact on most galleries showing international art, and French art in particular, Walden was able to expand his business: in 1916 he opened an art school, in 1917 a bookstore, and in 1918 a theatre and a venue for concerts and readings. He also organized numer­ous STURM exhibitions across Europe. The reason for this positive develop­ment was that Herwarth Walden used his travels, exhibitions and contacts in the Netherlands and Sweden to spy for the German Foreign Ministry. This lucrative sideline, for which documentary evidence exists, has been discussed in the literature as the “STURM Intelligence Bureau”. When Herwarth Walden was travelling, he sent back regular reports about the political mood abroad to the German Empire, while the avant-garde art he presented allowed Germany to portray itself as a modern, cosmopolitan state. At the same time, it was easier for him to organize exhibitions because the state helped with paperwork, customs and travel permits, as well as paying the gallery for its services. During the war years, Walden held work by artists who had drafted into military service or who had been forced to leave Germany as citizens of enemy states. After the war, these works were sold without it being clear whether their creators had been adequately remunerated, leading to legal proceedings against Herwarth Walden by artists including Marc Chagall and Wassily Kandinsky. For Fritz Stuckenberg, in addition to these financial issues, another reason to criticize STURM was the question of quality. On 14 January 1920, he wrote to the art dealer I.B. Neumann:

“It’s an untenable state of affairs that Sturm shows the best works of the Expressionists alongside those of sweet Nell [Walden] etc..”

Paul van Ostaijen, too, complained about the museumization of Expressionism:

“It’s a fact: if this commerce continues, Expressionism is doomed. Secure livelihoods for painters and their children: It’s the beginning of the end. And their output: good God! From Breslau to Berlin. A museum für Expressionism-Cubism and Futurism!!” PvO, 18 Feb. 20

Paul van Ostaijen’s own attempts at selling the work of selected artists who had turned away from Herwarth Walden were largely unsuccessful. Lyonel Feiniger planned to found an Association of German Expressionists and wanted to recruit Paul van Ostaijen. There was also talk of him being offered a post in the new department of the Nationalgalerie, at Paul Westheim’s ‘Kunstblatt’, or as the Flemish representative in the Artists’ Soviet, none of which materialized. Paul van Ostaijen lived mainly from the earnings of his partner Emma Clément, who was employed by a fashion house.

In a letter to his friend Paul van Ostaijen in Berlin on 11 January 1920, Fritz Stuckenberg wrote:

“All these miserable money troubles spoil the best moments of life.”

His existential precarity was at odds with the visibility of his works in exhibi­tions. Even after parting ways with Herwarth Walden, he was included in important STURM shows – in 1919 in Berlin, Dessau and Stuttgart. In 1920, Walter Dexel showed 24 works by Fritz Stuckenberg at Kunstverein Jena, together with Paul Klee and Johannes Molzahn. With the November Group, Fritz Stuckenberg had exhibitions in 1920 in Karlsruhe, Berlin, Darmstadt and Halle. He met Katherine Dreier, an important American collector who not only bought European art, but also organized exhibition tours in the United States, presenting Fritz Stuckenberg’s work in New York and Chicago.

In 1920, Fritz Stuckenberg’s work was exhibited in 1920 in Berlin, Dresden, Düsseldorf, Gumbinnen, Hamburg, Hagen, Insterburg, Stuttgart and Munich. He had important solo shows at Wilhelm Goyert’s art dealership in Cologne (1920) and at Galerie Nierendorf in Bonn (1921). At the same time, there were also contacts with the Bauhaus. Although his hopes of a post there were not fulfilled, he did contribute an original print to the third Bauhaus portfolio, a reference that was important in the long-term.