Carl Heidenreich, Durutti’s Funeral 2, 1939. Oil. Collection of Fedor Pless. — Carl Heidenreich, *Durutti’s Funeral 2*, 1939. Oil. Collection of Fedor Pless.

By Christopher Squier

Walter Benjamin is known as a writer, a philosopher, and a cultural critic, so it’s not surprising that he thinks deeply and at length about the function of language and the written word.

In “One-Way Street,” at one of the literary intersections we as readers are brought to, he proposes a series of steps. “Caution,” he advises. “Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.” And from here, he launches into a series of entries on a writer’s techniques, pitfalls, and obligations.

The following is a brief guided tour through his ideas on writing.

Stop one. At the Attested Auditor of Books, Benjamin broods over the transformation of the written word from the Renaissance to his contemporary moment. For him, modernity is rife with political invective, fascist propaganda, and most saliently and detrimentally commercialism, often taking the form of advertisement.

Moving on. Within a section titled Teaching Aid, he lampoons “the weighty tome” with sardonic instructions for composing profuse and gratuitous books.

Then, with Post No Bills, he provides thirteen theses for writing, culminating dolefully in number 12: “The idea kills inspiration, style fetters the idea, writing pays off style”; and number 13: “The work is the death mask of its conception.”

Throughout his interrogations of language, its limitations, and its force, Benjamin looks back on earlier moments in the history of the written word, from the card index and newspaper to movable script, runes, and even knot notation. He situates the book as we know it in the tradition of Martin Luther’s translation in the Luther Bible and the advent of the Gutenberg Press. As a result, he finds along this thoroughfare that the contemporary word is approaching the end of the line. In its traditional form, the book too has become a death mask of sorts.

In this abutment of traditional writing and contemporary text, Benjamin proposes a contradiction straining the dialectic between one concept of writing—the linear flow of the traditional written word logically conveying thoughts and ideas, inviting democratic understanding, and insisting on communication as a basis for the reader’s experience—in opposition to what he calls its “graphic tensions.”

These tensions, set up by the advertisement on the printed page as in a newspaper or encountered in the street as posted signs, bulletins, and announcements alter the autonomy and logic of the word. To Benjamin, the graphic dimension of language hampers its ability to create collective understanding, instead conjuring a visually-juxtaposed cacophony. The meaning of a word becomes subsumed by the political and economic ferocity (a “blizzard” in Benjamin’s words) of a multiplying, visually-charged, and omnipresent collage of public language; the clamorous appearance of this language instructs, commands, and often contradicts its own meaning.

“Printing,” Benjamin writes, “having found in the book a refuge in which to lead an autonomous existence, is pitilessly dragged out onto the street by advertisements and subjected to the brutal heteronomies of economic chaos.”

In order to explain this devolution of language, Benjamin rethinks text in relation to the optical plane. How does language exist in relation to the ground and our bodies, and how does the physical angle at which reading and writing take place affect its reception?

Benjamin observes the gradual transformation of written language’s position. At one point, writing inhabited the horizontal format as with a “manuscript resting on sloping desks” or a printed book “taking to bed.” Over time, however, new media and forms of printing (newspapers, advertisements, and films, for example) have erected language in increasingly vertical formats, taking on a vociferous role in public, blanketing and obstructing urban space.

This reorienting of language produces “locust swarms of print,” rising out of the horizontal plane of the book and enveloping the three-dimensional space of the city. Ultimately, the printed word is employed in strident articulations and incongruous arrangements which are contradictory and obscure meaning. It rises into what Benjamin terms the “dictatorial perpendicular.”

I’d like to focus this essay on Carl Heidenreich’s use of text. Although it occurs sparingly throughout his body of work, text is often used to signal political urgency, a rupture in everyday life, or violent and disorienting experiences.

In a few instances, Heidenreich experimented with collaged newspaper, borrowing from Cubism. This is the case in Untitled (Frauenkopf Nach Rechts), a small multimedia collage of Japanese papers and newspaper forming a portrait of a woman. The sitter’s atypically expressive—capricious, petulant?—face sits at the center of a maelstrom of churning scraps of cut paper. The delicate sawtooth edges of rectangular forms envelop her in a sash, jutting out above the shoulder. Her crossed arms compose a defensive posture. A blotch of paint, bruise like, forms her mouth.

Another figure in the upper right, really just a face observing the woman from beneath the brim of an elaborate, pointed hat, is more impartial. Perhaps the second figure watches impassively through the window, or rushes past, carrying the scrap of newspaper. His role is that of a messenger, bearing news. The newspaper he holds features two articles, one of a birth and the other a benediction.

On closer inspection, the birth is the first official birth in New York of the new year, while with the benediction, it is the first time a certain New York cathedral held a funeral on New Year’s Eve. Thus, for the subject of the artwork, life and death arrive in tandem, sutured together through the almost arbitrary printed layout of a scrap of newspaper.

It’s an unusual portrait for Heidenreich to have made, offering more narrative than many of his portraits and composed as a collage rather than, say, a mixed-media work on paper or an oil painting.

Carl Heidenreich, Untitled (Frauenkopf Nach Rechts), n.d. Various materials, including paper and Japanese papers, collaged and painted over with gouache. Collection of Emanuel L. Wolf and Patricia Recendez. — Carl Heidenreich, *Untitled (Frauenkopf Nach Rechts),* n.d. Various materials, including paper and Japanese papers, collaged and painted over with gouache. Collection of Emanuel L. Wolf and Patricia Recendez.

Carl Heidenreich, Portrait of Martha Engel, 1932. Oil. Private collection. — Carl Heidenreich, *Portrait of Martha Engel*, 1932. Oil. Private collection.

Compare for example Portrait of Martha Engel, an oil from 1932 of Heidenreich’s close friend and frequent penpal. Here, Heidenreich’s expressionistic training and Fauvist influence highlights the subject’s internal mood. There is a “dark, melancholy” sense of unease heightened through the bold use of orange across the mouth, eyes, and jaw of the face. A dark, austere background in conjunction with intense lighting isolates Martha Engel from any identifiable place or context.

In contrast, Frauenkopf sets out an allegorical dichotomy—birth, death—in graphic tension. The material doubles as the subject: the narrative is delivered through the arrival of a newspaper, which standing in for itself is already an actual piece of newspaper. The scrap of text enters from the outside world, shown as a square of blue sky beyond the dusty orange walls and pink roof of the woman’s home.

The composition dissolves, much as in Benjamin’s description, in a “blizzard,” but the meaning of the text itself, although existential in nature, is not an assault as Benjamin warned. Instead, it offers a sense of inner and outer reality, suggesting the infringement of daily life on the comforts of the home. Years change. Birth and death remain constant.

More commonly in Heidenreich’s works using newspaper, the text recedes into the background serving as a support for willful and gestural strokes in gouache and watercolor. Often it’s unclear if the decision to use newspaper was out of the artist’s own economy or the lack of availability of other materials, or if he intended to create the conflicting effect of painting over newsprint. However, the subject matter of certain pieces makes his artistic intent clear.

In an unusual work from the late 1950s (signed, but Untitled and stored as a verso to another painting), he repurposes a page from the December 10, 1958 edition of The New York Times. In this painting, the true cacophony of article, advertisement, and simultaneous demanding blocks of text assume Benjamin’s “locust swarms of print.”

Carl Heidenreich, Untitled, c. 1958. Gouache on newspaper. Collection of Emanuel L. Wolf and Patricia Recendez. — Carl Heidenreich, *Untitled*, c. 1958. Gouache on newspaper. Collection of Emanuel L. Wolf and Patricia Recendez.

In the lower left, travel advertisements from the paper’s resorts section beckon to Florida, Miami Beach, West Palm Beach, and Haiti, a pleasure-seeking inversion of Heidenreich’s forced peregrinations through France, Morocco, and Martinique. Reminders of Europe’s fate also abound: “See more – spend less in EUROPE. High value escorted tours” and “ISRAEL: LOW COST AIR TOURS” resonate across the fold with an article on the Czech Iron Curtain. They buttress another article on the state of the global airplane market and a cruiseliner’s ad to go “AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS.” In the upper left and center, architectural floor plans and the bucolic images of Country Village homes offer a reminder of the promise of the American dream of home ownership and suburban security. “Still NO DOWN PAYMENT FOR VETS!”

Here, the hurried brushstrokes and blood-red hues of Heidenreich’s painting seem to reverberate with Benjamin’s angst: wartime aggression and postwar commercialism combine in an assaulting, chaotic, and frenzied collage of printed language. Patches of lavender are laid mistily across much of the painting’s background, while the advertisement for travel to Israel is soaked in a livid red. The circling, spiraling motion of red and blue-green paint connects the two newspaper spreads in an ambivalent and fluctuating collision of home ownership and travel, stand-ins perhaps for nationalism and exile.

Though experimental and sparsely painted, the work is undoubtedly finished, with Heidenreich’s signature prominent in the lower right. It masterfully conjures Benjamin’s graphic tensions by inserting two double-truck pages from the Sunday Times into contradiction with one another, an image of two worlds which would have been apparent to an exile or immigrant in the United States on a daily basis.

Beyond his use of newspaper, painted text surfaces occasionally in Heidenriech’s work to signal political urgency, whether as a sign of distress as with the piece he painted following John F. Kennedy’s assassination, or in solidarity with political movements, as with his paintings of crowds with the banners of the FAI (Federación Anarquista Ibérica), the CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo), and POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) at Buenaventura Durruti’s funeral.

Carl Heidenreich, Durutti’s Funeral 1, c. 1939. Oil. Private Collection. — Carl Heidenreich, *Durutti’s Funeral 1,* c. 1939. Oil. Private Collection.

Durruti’s Funeral 2, an oil from 1939, fills a street scene with hundreds of figures attending the funeral of the Spanish anarchist militant. Many of the banners fold and crease, rendering their messages unintelligible, with occasional glimpses of acronyms for the various anarchist and anti-fascist groups. In the middle, laid out flat against the picture plane of the painting, the central banner reads, “Adios Durruti / CNT FAI,” a parting salute from the two leading far-left groups.

“One-Way Street” again captures the sentiment emerging from Europe’s wartime struggle: “Separation penetrates the disappearing person like a pigment and steeps him in gentle radiance.”

Over two decades after the Durruti paintings were completed, Heidenreich returned to the use of text in a painting inspired by a mixture of shock, urgency, and intense emotion, once again in response to political violence and a funeral.

Carl Heidenreich, Kennedy’s Death, 1963. Oil. Collection of Emanuel L. Wolf and Patricia Recendez. — Carl Heidenreich, *Kennedy’s Death,* 1963. Oil. Collection of Emanuel L. Wolf and Patricia Recendez.

Kennedy’s Death, completed three days following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, is awash in antagonistic color combinations, graphic black lines trailing across the surface of the canvas, extending outward from a black rectangular form swathed in crimson red.

This rectangle exists as a void in the composition, simultaneously standing in for a bullet wound, a casket, and the black cars of the presidential motorcade in which the assassination took place.

As with his many of his later abstract works from the 1960s, the relationship between form and scale can be understood as both the view from above (see, for example, Gabriele Saure’s observations on Heidenreich’s Alaska Series) and as a surface cloaked and covered by textures, dripping paint, and brushstrokes. We hurdle between a horizontal logic and a chaotic perpendicular.

This shift destabilizes our perspective and sense of grounding. Reporters’ flash bulbs go off, documenting and disorienting all at once. We can see the black rectangle as a motorcade, the white sparks as cameras, and the green, blue, and brown stains as the grassy knoll and lawns of Dealey Plaza. But the red, black, and brown drips and stains across the canvas also read as a violent desecration of the painting itself. A black line along the left hand side frames the composition. The president’s name aligns with the upper edge of the canvas.

The typography, similarly, exists in both the horizontal of the printed page and the vertical of the painted plane. “Assassination,” bifurcated by the canvas edge, topples diagonally. The authoritative seriffed weight of the font loses its sense of place. A number 22, abstracted from its place in the calendar, floats loosely, uncertainly, in a wash of rust-brown and red.

Heidenreich wrote to Hannah Arendt about the painting: “On the day of the funeral I painted a strongly emotional picture without thinking, a landscape in paradise broken, a shattered priceless thing, a terrible wound in the peaceful landscape mood, with cold typescript the words, ‘Kennedy assassinated’ … It is a statement, an enormous protest.”

In “One-Way Street,” Benjamin predicted the end of the written word as linear, rational, and horizontal text. In Kennedy’s Death, Heidenreich responds to the political upheaval of the 1960s by exaggerating the graphic tensions of language found in newspapers and the media. He repurposes the confusion of text laid across the painted picture plane to make a clear, urgent, and painfully emotional statement.

In doing so, he relates the “dictatorial perpendicular” of Benjamin’s writing to the unsettling and irrational blizzard of political events, social dissent, and a string of headline assassinations that would continue throughout the decade.

We enter, fleeing is a series of essays and blog entries by Carl Heidenreich Foundation director Christopher Squier drawing inspiration from the work of the literary critic Walter Benjamin alongside discourses in visual culture and contemporary art. The series considers postwar painting and abstraction in the context of diaspora, exile, and migration.

Citations:

Benjamin, Walter. “One-Way Street.” In Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Edited by Peter Demetz. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. New York: Schocken Books, 1978.

Saure, Gabriele. Carl Heidenreich. Translated by John Leslie. New York: Goethe Institut, 2004.