Kinetism comeback | Self-determination and exertion with Klien in Vienna

Tempo, beat, rhythm for the pinball machines: »Lokomotive«, 1925 Photo: Belevedere The Austrian artist Erika Giovanna Klien (1900–1957) was only rediscovered in the last two and a half decades - as a central protagonist of the Viennese avant-garde of the 1920s. Today she is considered - together with her colleagues Elisabeth Karlinsky and My Ullmann - an important representative of Kinetism: a local and contemporary style that has been sidelined in art history and can be seen as an independent Viennese contribution to modern art. It was also received outside of Austria at the time and goes back to Franz Čižek, who was Klien's teacher at the arts and crafts school.

With its focus on movement, rhythm and structure, Kinetism was open to the representational-critical formalist methods of abstraction, futurism and constructivism. It could be described as a dynamic update of the “new art” of Art Nouveau. At the same time, he presents himself as a formalistically contained but open-minded alternative to abstraction to the expressionist “soul art” of Richard Gerstl, Oskar Kokoschka or Egon Schiele. But unlike Kinetism, Austro-Expressionism is still a hit with audiences today. Impasto and figurative macho painting will probably never go completely out of fashion.

For Goethe, art is “a mediator of the inexpressible.” What is moving about it, what is political? We will explain this using a current or historical example: The work of art of the month.

All the better that the Vienna Belvedere recently included Erika Giovanna Klien on the program with the official retrospective “Everything is Movement”. The show takes a look at the main paths, which are primarily worked on in the form of paintings, as well as the graphic and design side strands of her work, which is quite remarkable in terms of its scope and consistency. She also sheds light on Klien's role as an art educator: After completing her studies in 1925, the aspiring artist - whose works were shown internationally and purchased, for example by the influential New York patron Katherine S. Dreier - was dependent on day jobs, especially in teaching, for her entire life.

This is also why her picture cycle “Klessheimer Sendbote”, created in 1926 and 1927 and intended for semi-public use, with the “scandalous news” advertised in it, is particularly attractive. The heroine of the series, which is probably circulating among Klien's circle of friends and can be read like a serial comic strip, is a young woman in her twenties. With her fashionable, sometimes tousled, sometimes strictly parted "bobbed head", flamboyant scarf, skirt that reaches just above the knee and comfortable ballerina shoes, she looks like a typical flapper: obviously a self-portrait of the artist.

Jazz set the beat, tempo and tone for the music-loving flappers and promoted the combination of empowerment and hedonism, which fits perfectly with the zeitgeist of the Roaring Twenties.

In the years after the First World War, the so-called young women added a bohemian contrasting color to the ideal image of the career-conscious and morally strict "new woman" propagated by the women's rights movement at the turn of the century, especially in the USA and Great Britain. Jazz set the beat, tempo and tone for the music and dance-loving flappers and promoted the combination of empowerment and hedonism, self-determination and exertion, which fits perfectly with the zeitgeist of the proverbial Roaring Twenties. Before the stock market crash on October 24, 1929 pulled the plug on the partying.

It is a life-affirming, rebellious, but also melancholic spirit that permeates Klien's pictures, not only because liqueur, sherry brandy and rum, as well as the inevitable cigarettes - whose smoke rises in finely drawn spiral lines - are part of the permanent inventory of her, in his own words, "sloppy existence". The sheets also groove in a formal and conceptual sense.

Image and text are in a finely balanced relationship. Klien presents herself as an excellent, self-ironic report illustrator who puts her experiences to paper with a sharp pen. It's not just a mix of different styles, modern, naive and folk image formulas as well as different types of text, including German and English parts of the text. The elegant Ligne claire of Art Nouveau, which has long since defined popular fashion and commercial graphics, also becomes open to design elements that are more closely associated with the radical artistic innovations of the early avant-garde, Futurism or Cubism, when figures in motion and silhouettes appear spectrally fanned out and fragmented.

It is fitting that the motifs do not follow a clear chronology, but - à la Chagall - are in an associative, simultaneous relationship. This is how the narrative levels mix, image and dream image, document and fiction become confused.

It feels like a schematic, grotesquely technical-looking radio with headphones is on constant broadcast. It seems to be a particularly important prop for the protagonist: a gateway out into the world and at the same time a private protective zone from an environment that, despite its artistic, bohemian foundation, also has something narrow and provincial about it.

No wonder: Klien was working as an art teacher in the outskirts of Salzburg, at the Elizabeth Duncan Dance School at Kleßheim Castle. It was run as a boarding school by the sister of the celebrated pioneer of modern dance, Isadora Duncan. Famous for its progressive, holistic curriculum in the spirit of the life reform movement, the school attracted international celebrities: in the summer of 1928, for example, Lucia, daughter of the Irish writer James Joyce, was a guest for a course.

However, Erika Giovanna Klien was already on the move: after the birth of her son Walter in November 1928, she emigrated to the USA the following year, overshadowed by the global economic crisis. From then on she wrote letters to the child who was left behind in Austria.

Her "scandal news" from the "Klessheimer Sendbote" drawn in the previous two years also clearly shows how alone and on her own the artist may have felt, far away from her Viennese friends, the art life of the Danube metropolis - and without any real perspective as to how she would ever make it as a "free artist".

Already in an early episode of "Sendboten" from January 11, 1927, the heroine indulges in wild suicidal fantasies after her "arrival in Klessheim": she repeatedly rams a dagger into her heart with crazy force, depicted in a trivial-futuristic manner, so to speak in fast motion, melodramatically holds a pistol to her temple and at the same time deals with her frustration with the help of an oversized blue one Color tube in kinetic-abstract etudes that appear as miniaturized images in the picture. In a parallel scene, she calls her friend Ludwig Steinmetz - art critic, author and co-operator of the action stage "Der Bücherkasten" - in distant Vienna for help and rescue.

Other episodes tell more or less explicitly about dance evenings, "radio dreams" and dalliances - but also about everyday school life in Klessheim: when there is an absurd argument about supposedly wasted glue or when the teachers get together for the evening "table round" with shallow, at least English conversation.

Particularly interesting are the many studio scenes, which provide more than just anecdotal insights into Klien's way of working, especially in her engagement with the various idioms of modern art, which she incorporates here in miniature, so to speak, as a test - in order to cast them in the "official" format of painting in her own style, which is idiosyncratic in the virtuoso combination of form and dance dynamics.

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