the futility of the collaborative modernist ...painter fernand léger and art historian sigfried...

95Architectural Aesthetics. An Old Matter Revisited

The Futility of the Collaborative Modernist Gesamtkunstwerk: A Goodmanian Explanation

Kasper LægringExternal Lecturer, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

[email protected]

KEYWORDS: Gesamtkunstwerk; Modern Movement; modern art; modern architecture; Nelson Goodman

The theme of this article is the status of the Gesamtkunstwerk in modern architecture of the 20th century, or, more precisely, what I would call the decline, the crisis and ultimately the demise of the traditional, collaborative Gesamtkunstwerk that came about when the Modern Movement appeared on the scene of history.In what follows, I will argue, first, that the Modern Movement was incapable of producing Gesamtkunstwerk architecture in the original – collaborative and integral – sense. A comparison between the program for a “new monumentality” of the 1940s, on the one hand, and what was actually built at the same time, on the other hand, will serve to shed light on the matter. This will take me to my second claim, namely that Nelson Goodman’s notion of exemplification is a promising explanation as to why the traditional Gesamtkunstwerk was no longer within reach of the modern architect. The aesthetic modes of symbolization available to architects had changed significantly from the pre-modernist situation to the modernist one.

The Monumentality Debate

The 1943 manifesto Nine Points on Monumentality, formulated by architect Josep Lluís Sert, painter Fernand Léger and art historian Sigfried Giedion, was an attempt to rethink the cultural, symbolic and psychological dimensions of modern architecture in the wake of World War II. The reintegration of the visual arts into architecture was a major concern, as was the search for an appropriate monumental expression within Modernism itself. The three authors condemned the classicizing monumentalism popular at the time and called for modern alternatives to the bombastic architectures of Hitler and Stalin. To the writers, and to Giedion in particular, the failure in 1927 to commission Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret to design the League of Nations headquarters in Geneva had been a colossal blunder, for this project embodied the potential for the Modern Movement to achieve monumental form; its symbolic value arising from the overall compositional grouping of building volumes, not from applied decoration.When Sert, Léger and Giedion collectively authored this manifesto, they not only sought to resurrect a proper monumental expression worthy of its time, they also wanted to revive the collaborative spirit of the Gesamtkunstwerk on explicitly modernist terms. As they stressed,

“A monument being the integration of the work of the planner, architect, painter, sculptor, and landscapist demands close collaboration between all of them. This collaboration has failed in the last hundred years. Most modern architects have not been trained for this kind of integrated work.”1

The 1943 manifesto itself went unpublished until 1958, but many of its ideas were expressed when Giedion in 1944 contributed a text, The Need for a New Monumentality, to Paul Zucker’s

1 José Luis Sért, Fernand Léger, and Sigfried Giedion, “Nine Points on Monumentality” [1943], in Architecture, You, and Me: The Diary of a Development,bySigfriedGiedion(Cambridge,MA:HarvardUniversity Press, 1958), 49.

96 studies in History & Theory of Architecture

book of that same year, New Architecture and City Planning. A few post-war events in the 1940s focused on the monumentality question, but then the debate more or less died out.

The Gesamtkunstwerk as an Aesthetic Concept

The core of the Nine Points manifesto is the call for collaboration between the architect, the planner, the landscapist, the painter and the sculptor. This idea of intentionally achieving an aesthetic synthesis, in which the sum is more than its parts, and where the artistic contribution involves many media, was first aired by the German philosopher Karl Friedrich Eusebius Trahndorff in 1827. In his two-volume treatise on aesthetics, Aesthetik, oder Lehre von der Weltanschauung und Kunst [Aesthetics, or Theory of Worldview and Art], he introduced the concept of the “total work of art” or “unified work of art” as an innate force in all artistic production:

“Throughout the entire field of the arts, a special striving develops from the temporal (teleological) into the spatial (plastic) through excitation, and vice versa from the spatial into the temporal through the binding to unite all the arts to represent a single work of art.”2

In particular, Trahndorff thought of the performing arts as possessing this possibility, as he called it, to attain the status of a total work of art: “… so that the four arts, the so-called art of the spoken word, music, facial expressions and dance have the possibility to flow together into one representation.”3

However, this “possibility” is not exclusively available to music, dance and other ephemeral arts:“This possibility is based on a striving for a total work of art from all sides in the entire art field, a striving that is original in the whole art field as soon as we recognize the unity of its inner life; this possibility, however, will not only include all of the arts mentioned, but all of them.” 4

While the notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk predates Romanticism, if we consider it an aesthetic strategy practiced by artists and architects, it is nonetheless intimately related to this particular period when considered in terms of programmatic intent. As the term Einheit [Unity] indicates, Trahndorff was looking for a definition, or rather a potential, that would enable the arts to form an organic synthesis. So, while the actual use of Gesamtkunstwerk techniques had been around for centuries when Trahndorff wrote his treatise, as evidenced from works such as Monreale Cathedral, Chartres Cathedral, the Pazzi Chapel or the Palace of Versailles, its implications for aesthetic signification were suddenly given theoretical consideration with his work.It was not until 1849, however, that the total work of art became the cornerstone of an aesthetic thesis. This happened when the German composer Richard Wagner, in two famous essays, established the Gesamtkunstwerk as a programmatic aesthetic endeavor, in which all the arts would work together to attain an ennobling unification. Trahndorff had highlighted “the opera” and “the panorama” as being particularly susceptible to a project of mediatic unification, and with Wagner’s agency, both in theory and in practice, the performing arts were given special attention once more.

2 Orig. “DurchdasganzeGebietderKünsteentwickeltsicheinbesonderesStrebenausdemZeitlichen(Teleologischen)herüberindasRäumliche(Plastische)durchdasErregen,undumgekehrtausdemRäumlichenindasZeitlichehinüberdurchdasBinden,alleKünstezurDarstellungeineseinzigenKunstwerks zu vereinen.”

3 Orig. “...daßdievierKünste,dieebengenannteKunstdesWortklanges,dieMusik,MimikundTanzkunstdieMöglichkeitinsichtrügenzueinerDarstellungzusammenzufließen.”

4 K. F. E. Trahndorff, Aesthetik, oder Lehre von der Weltanschauung und Kunst (Berlin: Maurersche Buchhandlung,1827),§72,312.http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.hnup26;view=2up;seq=4;orig.“DieseMöglichkeitgründetsichaufeinindemgesamtenKunstgebieteliegendesStrebenzueinemGesamt-KunstwerkevonSeitenallerKünste,einStrebendasindemganzenKunstgebieteursprünglichist, sobald wir die Einheit seines inneren Lebens erkennen; diese Möglichkeit wird eben deshalb aber auch nichtbloßdiegenanntenKünste,sondernalleumfassen.”


Unlike Trahndorff’s purely academic treatment of the concept, Wagner saw the goal of the Gesamtkunstwerk as an antidote to what he perceived to be a pervasive cultural fragmentation and lack of direction in contemporary society. In Die Kunst und die Revolution [Art and Revolution, 1849], Wagner characterized Ancient Greece as a culture that had brought the total work of art to perfection.5 In this, he clearly echoed Hegel’s judgment, yet unlike Hegel, who welcomed the ossification of art, Wagner was not content with this diminished role for contemporary art in society.In Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft [The Art-Work of the Future, 1849], Wagner found that his time was one of crisis. Unlike past epochs, which had seen a correspondence between spirit and matter, between nature and culture and between various art forms, he considered his own time as lacking coherence [Zusammenhang]:

“In like matter will Art not be the thing she can and should be, until she is or can be true, conscious image and exponent of the real man, and of man’s genuine, nature-bidden life; until she therefore need no longer borrow the conditions of her being from the errors, perversities, and unnatural distortions of our modern life.”6

To Wagner, the integrative project of the Gesamtkunstwerk, which he would later turn into a guiding principle for his operas, was not merely an aesthetic category subject to personal whim; it was a necessity for reversing cultural decline and for restoring aesthetic meaningfulness to artistic expression. By turning the Gesamtkunstwerk into cultural activism and awakening, Wagner fused two powerful ideas prevalent in German idealism and romanticism: that of the artist genius providing directions for art and culture and that of the necessity of the artwork being an organic whole that mirrors cultural conditions.

The Problem of the Zeitgeist

This idea – that the artist genius can single-handedly spearhead a cultural reawakening that would restore harmony and coherence between the material and the spiritual dimensions of culture – is indebted to the notion of the Zeitgeist. And, as Mari Hvattum puts it, “the Zeitgeist, in its turn, is based on the distinctly modern belief that there is – and must be – a strict correlation between historical conditions and historical expression.”7

In Wagner’s time, this belief became inseparable from discussions of the nature and status of style, Gottfried Semper’s work being a prime example.While the notion of style was of little interest to the avant-gardes – Giedion even warned against any such discussion8 – the notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk survived well into the 20th century and became an aesthetic ambition central to many an avant-garde movement. However, this transition necessitated a break with its Wagnerian roots – otherwise the concept would entail a historical rather than a transformative project. Therefore, in the first decades of the 20th century, the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk now appeared on the stage of history as a wholly new artistic strategy, divorced from the cultural context of its genesis and from its connected debates on style, nationhood and geniality. From today’s perspective, the deliberately ahistorical

5 “Hand-in-hand with the dissolution of the Athenian state, marched the downfall of Tragedy. As the spirit of Communitysplititselfalongathousandlinesofegoisticcleavage,sowasthegreatunifiedworkofTragedydisintegrated into its individual factors.” Richard Wagner, “Art and Revolution” [1849], in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, Vol. 1, edited and translated by William Ashton Ellis (London: Reeves, 1895), 35.

6 Richard Wagner, “The Art-Work of the Future” [1849], in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, Vol. 1, edited and translated by William Ashton Ellis (London: Reeves, 1895), 71.

7 MariHvattum,“CrisisandCorrespondence:StyleintheNineteenthCentury,”Architectural Histories 1(1):21 (2013): 1.

8 Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, Fifth Edition, Revised and Enlarged(Cambridge,MA:HarvardUniversityPress,1967),xxxiii.


way in which the avant-gardes appropriated the concept in order to reboot culture has obscured the chain of inspiration from Wagner to the avant-gardes, for the

“idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk as an agent of change — a harbinger of redemption in modern society — makes it, as much recent scholarship has pointed out, a profoundly modern phenomenon, central to the modernist agenda in the twentieth century.”9

Likewise, recent architectural historiography has sought to uncover the Modern Movement’s roots in Romanticism, Gesamtkunstwerk thinking included. In the words of Alan Colquhoun,

“The question was never asked how a cultural totality, which by definition had depended on an involuntary collective will, could now be achieved voluntarily by a number of individuals. Nor did it ever seem to have occurred to those who held this view that what separated the past from the present might be precisely the absence of this inferred organic unity. According to the model of the organic unity of culture, the task of the architect was first to uncover and then create the unique forms of the age. But the possibility of such an architecture depended on a definition of modernity that filtered out the very factors that differentiated it most strongly from earlier traditions: capitalism and industrialization.”10

Several Kinds of Gesamtkunstwerk

What concerns us here, however, is not so much the internal contradictions of the justification for the avant-garde Gesamtkunstwerk, but rather a difference in kind between the organic and the programmatic Gesamtkunstwerk and between the individual and the collective Gesamtkunstwerk.While there are certainly numerous examples in existence of pre-modern Gesamtkunstwerke where architecture and the arts form a synthesis, most of these result from architect-artist collaborations rather than from individual genius. There are certainly cases of works by artist–architects such as Michelangelo, Bernini and Piranesi, for example, where the genial orchestration of many media has been commanded and carried out by a single individual, but they are rare, and most examples, both from the Middle Ages and from the Early Modern period, confirm collaboration between several individual architects and artists to be the norm. Whether in the case of grand ceremonial building projects commissioned by a sovereign, such as the Palace of Versailles, or in the case of small, privately commissioned vernacular pieces of architecture, such as the Asamkirche in Munich, the pre-modern, or Early Modern, period cultivated a practical Gesamtkunstwerk culture dependent on a fine-tuned collaboration and coordination between several clients, architects, artists and artisans. Moreover, this type of Gesamtkunstwerk was not predicated upon formal academic training in architecture and the arts.In contrast, the Gesamtkunstwerk that was endorsed by Wagner, in theory and in practice, was indebted to the cult of the genius of the romantic period and was thus another step in the process of aesthetic emancipation that had been made possible by the characterizations of the nature of aesthetic experience made by Baumgarten, Kant and Schiller. It was no longer possible to define rules for artistic creativity, and at the same time, the artwork, whether architectural, painterly or sculptural, came to rely less and less on a textual source that could direct representation.11

Wagner’s contemporaries in the architectural profession, such as Semper, created historicizing buildings, which owed their Gesamtkunstwerk status to the same collaborative process of workmanship that had defined the monumental edifice in the preceding centuries. Due to their

9 Hvattum,“CrisisandCorrespondence,”6.10AlanColquhoun,Modern Architecture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 11.11 Norman Bryson, Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Régime(Cambridge:Cambridge

University Press, 1981), 1-28.


status as stylistic pastiches, the Semperoper in Dresden or the Palais Garnier in Paris were no different from past works, aesthetically speaking, since it had taken a host of artists and artisans to arrive at a synthesis. The contribution of the sculptor, for instance, was crucial to the desired effect of what came to be known as the Beaux-Arts style, and the sculptural effect of walls, vaults and statues was usually anticipated in the architect’s drawing for a project where it would play a major compositional role.12 In this kind of collaborative Gesamtkunstwerk – be it Versailles or Palais Garnier – the contributing role of the artist – say Charles Le Brun or Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux – was singular and essential to the aesthetic experience of the work in its totality.Yet most attempts at inorganically achieving the experience of a total work of art on the basis of architecture in the second half of the 19th century were steeped in the cult of the genius in one way or another, and even when such attempts were initiated by craftsmen rather than architects, the focus on the individual creator remained the same. The latter is the case when we consider figures such as William Morris of the Arts and Crafts movement, while the former condition applies to Louis Sullivan of the Chicago School and Frank Lloyd Wright of the Prairie School. Even when a painter like Henry van de Velde, a co-founder of the Deutscher Werkbund, turned to architecture, the results served to bolster rather than to dissolve the cult of the genius.In fact, the joined impact of van de Velde’s personal Art Nouveau style and his campaigning for the total work of art – rooted in interior decoration – was so pervasive in fin-de-siècle culture that it made him a favorite target for Adolf Loos, the notorious enemy of ornament. The Art Nouveau movement

“pledged to a Gesamtkunstwerk or ‘total work’ of arts and crafts, in which everything from architecture to ashtrays was subject to a florid kind of decoration, in which the designer struggled to impress his subjectivity on all sorts of objects through an idiom of vitalist line – as if to inhabit the thing in this crafted way was to resist the advance of industrial reification somehow.”13

As Hal Foster concludes, on the basis of the Loosian critique, the Art Nouveau Gesamtkunstwerk “does more than combine architecture, art, and craft; it commingles subject and object: ‘the individuality of the owner was expressed in every ornament, every form, every nail’.”14

To Loos, turning everyday objects into art (in order to ennoble an interior for the sake of the “total work of art”) was a cultural wrongdoing since it violated both the nature of materials and the nature of craftsmanship. Furthermore, as Loos famously argued in his Ornament und Verbrechen (1908) essay, ornament had become both culturally irrelevant and a waste of time and money.Writing from a contemporary position, philosopher and architectural theorist Karsten Harries concurs with Loos’s analysis, yet for quite different reasons. According to Harries, ornament began to lose its cultural and symbolic significance during the Enlightenment, where it was secularized and stripped of metaphysical power. What emerged instead, in the course of the 19th century, was a culture of aestheticism, which had been made possible by the emergence of philosophical aesthetics as a separate, autonomous domain. Consequently, aesthetic phenomena now merited attention in their own right, but this advancement came with the price that any explanation of “the beautiful” was now disconnected from the age-old philosophical questions of “the true” and “the good.”15

Interestingly, Norman Bryson’s semiological account of the historical development of art has points of convergence with Harries’s phenomenological narrative. Artistic movements such as Impressionism worked towards an art form of pure opticality with no iconological content, thus

12 David van Zanten, “The Architecture of the Beaux-Arts,” Journal of Architectural Education 29:2 (November 1975): 17.

13 Hal Foster, Design and Crime: And Other Diatribes (Verso: London, 2002), 13.14 Ibid., 15.15 Karsten Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture (Cambridge,MA:MITPress,1996),48.


leading to the primacy of perception in art, and it is telling that Bryson opens his narrative with Canterbury Cathedral – a pre-modern Gesamtkunstwerk where we encounter “the primacy of the discursive over the figural”16 – for architecture would later cease to play any supporting role when art had become emancipated from textual dictates.Regardless of whether one accepts Harries’s cultural interpretation of ornament or not, his analysis indirectly confirms that the programmatic Gesamtkunstwerk in architecture, such as the one promoted by Art Nouveau, was quite different in aesthetic character and collaborative scope, broadly speaking, than the organic Gesamtkunstwerk of pre-modern times.

The Modernist Gesamtkunstwerk

Nonetheless, the time around 1900 did see some convincing examples of the programmatic, yet collaborative Gesamtkunstwerk emerge. The Vienna Secession Building (1897–1898) by architect Joseph Maria Olbrecht, who collaborated with artists Othmar Schimkowitz, Koloman Moser, Georg Klimt and Robert Oerley on the décor, is the best example. Likewise, when creating the sumptuous Palais Stoclet in Brussels (1905–1911), architect Josef Hoffmann, painter Gustav Klimt and sculptor Franz Metzner worked together to create a synthesis where the various media were put on equal terms.Several avant-garde groups active in the first decades of the 20th century revived the project of the “total work of art” outside of its Wagnerian legacy, and the most radical attempt at this was found in the teachings of the Bauhaus School founded in 1919. Actually, the founder of the school, Walter Gropius, was indebted to van de Velde, whose organicist approach to “total design” was a source of inspiration, and who had appointed Gropius to be his successor,17 yet “the Bauhaus intended to start again, with a clean slate,” and that meant erasing any evidence of historical continuity.18 In his later writings on the accomplishments of the Bauhaus, Gropius would also downplay the Expressionist roots of the school, in whose founding manifesto he himself had proclaimed that the aim of the Bauhaus was to “desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity.”19

Likewise, Oskar Schlemmer confirmed his dedication to the “total work of art”, or Einheitswerk [work of unity], as Gropius called it:

“The concept of building will restore the unity that perished in debased academicism and in finicky handicraft. It must reinstate the broad relationship with the ‘whole’ and, in the deepest sense, make possible the total work of art.”20

Not only Schlemmer, who was in charge of the Bauhaus stage, but also Gropius found theatre and architecture to be particularly promising arenas for the creation of the Einheitswerk.21

If we look at the architectural accomplishments of the Bauhaus, however, they seldom fulfil the stated ambition of achieving a “total work of art”. Mostly, whether in the case of experimental

16 Bryson, Word and Image, 4-5.17 Melissa Trimingham, “Gesamtkunstwerk, Gestaltung, and the Bauhaus Stage,” in The Total Work of Art:

Foundations, Articulations, Inspirations, ed. David Imhoof, Margaret Eleanor Menninger, and Anthony J. Steinhoff (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016), 97.

18 Ibid., 100.19 Walter Gropius, “Programme of the Staatsliches Bauhaus in Weimar” [1919], in Programs and Manifestos

on 20th-Century Architecture,ed.UlrichConrads,trans.MichaelBullock(Cambridge,MA:MITPress,1970), 49.

20OskarSchlemmer,“ManifestoforthefirstBauhausexhibition”[1923],inPrograms and Manifestos on 20th-Century Architecture,ed.UlrichConrads,trans.MichaelBullock(Cambridge,MA:MITPress,1970),69.

21 David Roberts, The Total Work of Art in European Modernism(Ithaca:CornellUniversityPress,2011),159-160


houses, such as Georg Muche’s design in Weimar (1923), or in the case of the school building itself, Gropius’s magnum opus in Dessau (1925–1926), architecture had been conceived as a neutral, orthogonally determined container that could act as receptacle and “exhibition space” for the various individual products of the Bauhaus workshops. Any integrated use of painting, sculpture and ornament was avoided so as to not detract attention from the “pure” architectural experience.We already find acknowledgement of this aesthetic sea change in the strict formalist program presented by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson as a curatorial framework for their influential Modern Architecture exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932. In the accompanying book, The International Style: Architecture Since 1922, where Frank Lloyd Wright was left out, and where architectural developments in Germany and France were taken to be exemplary, Hitchcock and Johnson argued against the Gesamtkunstwerk:

“Sculpture also ought not to be combined or merged with architecture. It should retain its own character quite separate from that of its background. This was true of the best Greek sculpture and often that of other periods. It is particularly important today that sculpture should be isolated; for if it is actually applied, its suggestion of solid mass is carried over to the wall surface it decorates.”22

Being an ideological program for modern architecture, Hitchcock and Johnson’s verdict should not be taken at face value, since later research has uncovered many other, competing Modernisms that were overlooked or dismissed in their work, yet their analysis of mainstream Modernism still holds a certain truth as regards the absence of the collaborative Gesamtkunstwerk in modern architecture. For in spite of its dedication to collaboration, the Bauhaus did not combat the compartmentalization of aesthetic experience, and Gropius’s desire to create marketable products further worked against the impractical idea of the “total work of art.”Instead, as in the Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau periods, it was the synthesizing genius of the architect, rather than the artist collective, who came to epitomize the creativity of this new age. In spite of major differences in layout, materiality and execution, key modernist houses such as Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat, Adolf Loos’s Villa Müller and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater certainly expressed a “total work of art” where architecture, interior decoration and furnishings were seen as interconnected and interdependent entities – “total design,” in other words. But this “total design,” which was given ample theoretical consideration in writing by Le Corbusier and Wright in particular, was exclusively a vision of the heroic architect, not of the artist or craftsman, who was relegated to a supporting role without any claim to creativity.So while such projects were indeed Gesamtkunstwerke of the “programmatic” and individual kind, being heirs to the Romanticist notion of the organic aesthetic experience, they also confirm that the modernist “total work of art” had become questionable as a true Gesamtkunstwerk, as the “totality” had become more or less the monopoly of the architect. In Le Corbusier’s Notre-Dame-du-Haut in Ronchamp, for instance, we find all three — architecture, painting and sculpture — yet everything has been designed, dictated and done by the master himself. Furthermore, the full appreciation of works by Wright, Le Corbusier and many more was dependent on prior theoretical conditioning, for

“what these movements and ‘isms’ have in common, across the visual arts, is a propensity to rest upon theoretical foundations. Art and architecture of the modern period have become intrinsically theoretical.”23

22 Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style: Architecture Since 1922 (New York: W.W.Norton&Co.,1995[1932]),85.

23 Edward Winters, Aesthetics & Architecture(London:Continuum,2007),52.


Monumental Modern Architecture in the Wake of the Nine Points Manifesto

But let us return to the Nine Points manifesto of 1943, which came into being at a time when the aestheticizing, formalist definition of Hitchcock and Johnson’s 1932 Modern Architecture exhibition was gradually giving way to more inclusive, and less formalist, definitions of the Modern Movement. Giedion was instrumental in this broadening of criteria for admission into the Modern Movement, but even more important was the campaigning of Hitchcock.Concurrently with the birth of the Nine Points manifesto, Hitchcock was championing Wright’s architecture as a way forward towards a renewal of Modernism’s range of expression, and in 1947 he argued that modern architecture had forked into what he called an “architecture of genius” and an “architecture of bureaucracy.” To Hitchcock, Wright was emblematic of the former, while the architectural office of Albert Kahn, Inc. was characteristic of the latter.24

But such a definition (later to be repeated by Kenneth Frampton in his call for a Critical Regionalism) would turn the art of building into a marginal and exclusive phenomenon, and that was apparently not the ambition of Sert, Giedion and Léger. So, what was built in the post-war era, we may ask, that lived up their expectations of monumental modern architecture? Very little, it seems, if we focus on the collaborative Gesamtkunstwerk aspect of the Nine Points manifesto, whose authors hoped that “big animated surfaces with the use of color and movement in a new spirit would offer unexplored fields to mural painters and sculptors.”25

For inspiration from the arts was not only found in the world of permanent objects but also in the ephemeral and performative arts. Giedion specifically mentions the world’s fairs (Paris Exhibition of 1937) and other spectacles as a way of connecting “the emotional apparatus of the average man.”26

Some post-war projects were modified to better serve the demands that called for more collaboration and a new kind of monumentality. The United Nations Headquarters in New York, built from 1948 through 1952 to a design by a team of architects headed by Harrison & Abramovitz, was meant to be a lesson in how to achieve monumental, modern form, and

24 Henry-Russell Hitchcock, “The Architecture of Bureaucracy and the Architecture of Genius,” Architectural Record 101 (January 1947).

25 Sért, Léger, and Giedion, “Nine Points on Monumentality,” 51.26 Giedion, “Need for a New Monumentality,” 60.

Fig.1a&1b:UnitedNationsHeadquarters,NewYork


while the complex was successful in this respect, its tortured genesis, involving many ongoing design changes and compromises, made it a failure as a collaborative Gesamtkunstwerk. After the completion of the building complex, the decoration of its assembly halls was assigned to a variety of designers, who were given free hands. So, while collaborations in the spirit of the Nine Points manifesto did materialize, as in the case of the United Nations project, the design process was piecemeal rather than synthetic. [Fig. 1]Even when the process of collaboration between architect and artists went smoothly and followed a designated program, the results were often alien to the spirit of the Gesamtkunstwerk. For instance, the Central University of Venezuela, built from 1944 through 1970 to a design by Carlos Raúl Villanueva, is an example of a large-scale architect-artist collaboration in the modernist idiom, yet the compartmental method of integration of visual arts into architecture is markedly different from pre- modernist approaches. Here we find murals, stained-glass windows, sculptures and mobiles by artists such as Alejandro Otero, Carlos González Bogen, Alexander Calder and Jean Arp. Fernand Léger, one of the authors of the Nine Points manifesto, also contributed.When architect Erling Viksjø designed Regjeringskvartalet [the Government District] in Oslo from 1946 onwards, he also opted for a sustained collaboration with artists, and sculptor Carl Nesjar became a recurring and pivotal figure, whose contact with Pablo Picasso made it possible to include sand-blasted concrete reliefs designed by the latter in the interiors and exteriors of the two main buildings (the H Block and the Y Block, built 1955–1958 and 1969–1970, respectively, the latter demolished in 2020). Picasso provided the drawings, while Nesjar was in charge of the execution on the site. [Fig. 2, 3]But apart from the treatment of the concrete itself, where exposed pebble was innovatively used to create a “natural,” stony surface, both the overall plan – which was very much inspired by ensembles such as the UN Headquarters – and the façades of the buildings relied on standardization and modularization. Art was not an afterthought in Viksjø’s project, but the arbitrary way in which it was incorporated into the already finished architecture, occupying conveniently vacant surfaces, again confirms that the meeting of art and architecture at the middle of the 20th century was a coexistence in time and space of different media but not necessarily a process of integration and synthesis. [Fig. 4]

Fig.2:Stained-glasswindowbyFernandLéger,1954,CentralLibrary,CentralUniversityofVenezuela,Caracas

Fig.3:MuralbyMateoManaure,1954,ConcertHall,CentralUniversityofVenezuela,Caracas


The Fragmented Gesamtkunstwerk of Modern Architecture

As we have seen, in all of the cased discussed here, the road taken towards the Gesamtkunstwerk in modern architecture was neither truly collaborative, nor truly synthetic. The “total work of art” of the Modern Movement was either anchored in the Romanticist notion of the independent artistic genius or based on an accept of the division of labor, which was so integral to the industrial society that Semper and Ruskin had rebelled against. In many of these projects, however ambitious, art mostly became an afterthought to be housed within already finished environments.In fact, in many of the “monumental” modernist projects, art might be said to occupy a decorative role rather than an integral role. While the loss of the cycle of mythological murals in the stoa and main stairwell of the Altes Museum in Berlin (1822–1830) has amputated the aesthetic totality of Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s work, as the cycle – designed by Schinkel and painted by Peter Cornelius and others – was part and parcel of Schinkel’s aesthetic vision, some of the artworks adorning the above-mentioned modernist buildings seem to be interchangeable with similar artworks by other artists, and even stylistic coherence seems to matter less in the modern environments.Ironically, the culture of décor in many of these modernist projects marks a return to the ornamental fin-de-siècle aesthetic that Loos was skeptical of, although the fragmented character of the meeting of art and architecture in these modernist ensembles is alien to the pre-modernist aesthetic culture.Later, during the postmodernist backlash against Modernism, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown would claim that several types of modern architecture, most notably Brutalism, had become expressive outdoor sculptures rather than architecture.27 If this is the case, it would only complicate further the relationship between art and architecture.

27 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The ForgottenSymbolism of Architectural Form,RevisedEdition(Cambridge,MA:MITPress,1977),87,160.

Fig.4:MuralbyPabloPicassoandCarlNesjar,1970,YBlock(demolished2020),Regjeringskvartalet(Government District), Oslo


To conclude so far, the post-war developments, where Modernism truly became an “International Style,” as the 1932 book had prophesied, led not to the rebirth of Gesamtkunstwerk but to the birth of “total design.” For the most successful architects of the 1950s and 1960s were those who managed to make the Romanticist role of the genius compatible with the workflow of industrial society. Hence, as Anders V. Munch has argued, an architect such as Arne Jacobsen demonstrated how the modern architect could, paradoxically, reinforce his role as artistic genius by tapping into the new conditions of industrialized architecture.28

It is beyond doubt that architects of this period did fulfil one aspect of the Nine Points manifesto, namely to include large-scale planning and landscaping in the process. This would eventually lead to the birth of the megastructure, to the creation of very large matted buildings such as the Freie Universität Berlin and to new collectives of architects, yet inclusion of artists into these collaborations was never given similar consideration.

Exemplification as Explanation

Why was the Modern Movement incapable of producing Gesamtkunstwerk architecture in the old – i.e., collaborative and synthetic – sense? A possible answer, I will suggest, is to be found in Nelson Goodman’s notion of exemplification.In Goodman’s aesthetic theory, denotation and exemplification are the two major modes of reference. Denotation is what we ordinarily understand as representation, and in painting, for example, denotation occurs when a picture depicts something that can be assigned a label. Goodman mentions a portrait painting of the Duke of Wellington as a case in point.29 In architecture, denotation is rare but was nonetheless ever present as ornament and decoration until the advent of Modernism, when applied decoration was programmatically banished from architecture. The Classical orders are ripe with denotation – the Corinthian capital depicts acanthus leaves; the triglyph is believed to represent wooden beam ends etc. – and they have formed the basis for Western architecture for most of its existence. The Gothic period deviates from the Classical idiom, yet the presence of denotation is no less rich in this period. A few buildings even display near-total denotation, such as the Dunmore Pineapple (c.1761), a folly in Scotland with a dome shaped like a pineapple.Exemplification is a quite different type of reference. It occurs when something symbolizes aesthetically by functioning selectively as a sample of some, but not all, of its possessed properties. Goodman often explains exemplification with an example from the textile business:

“A commonplace case is a swatch of yellow plaid woolen serving as a sample. The swatch refers not to anything it pictures or describes or otherwise denotes but to its properties of being yellow, plaid, and woolen, or to the words ‘yellow,’ ‘plaid,’ and ‘woolen’ that denote it. But it does not so exemplify all its properties nor all labels applying to it–not, for instance, its size or shape. The lady who ordered dress material ‘exactly like the sample’ did not want it in two-inch-square pieces with zigzag edges.”30

Exemplification occurs, according to Goodman, when something is “referred to, exhibited, typified, shown forth. A square swatch does not usually exemplify squareness […]. Normally, a swatch exemplifies only sartorial properties.”31

28 Anders V. Munch, Design as Gesamtkunstwerk: The Art of Transgression (Humlebæk: Rhodos, 2012), 104-111.

29 Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, Second Edition (Indianapolis: HackettPublishingCo.,1976),4.

30 Nelson Goodman, “How Buildings Mean,” Critical Inquiry 11:4. (June 1985), 645.31 Goodman, Languages of Art, 86.


In addition to denotation and exemplification, Goodman mentions expression, which covers cases where the possession of properties is merely metaphorical, and mediated reference, which covers instances of allusion and more complex chains of reference.As Goodman points out, denotation has always been a marginal phenomenon in the aesthetic experience of architecture, while “exemplification is one of the major ways that architectural works mean.”32 Therefore, he claims, the impact of Modernism was less consequential in architecture than in the visual arts:

“Yet since few architectural works depict either as wholes or in part, directly or indirectly, architecture never had to undergo the trauma brought on by the advent of modern abstractionism in painting. In painting, where representation was customary, the absence of representation sometimes left a sense of deprivation and gave rise to both acrid accusations and defiant defences of meaninglessness; but where representation is not expected, we readily focus upon other kinds of reference.”33

In other words, Goodman views architecture through the lens of exceptionalism. This is surprising, for “in formalist architecture” exemplification “may take precedence over all other ways” of meaning, Goodman asserts.34 As a case in point, he mentions Gerrit Rietveld’s use of lines and planes in the 1924 Schröder House in Utrecht, where certain aspects of construction have been highlighted at the expense of others. Likewise, certain colors have been exemplified on the exterior.As it turns out, the strategies of abstractionism, formalism and minimalism all rely on exemplification for their effects, and they are defining features of mainstream Modernism, architecture included. Instead of being a logical step in a continuous evolution of architecture, as many historiographers, such as Giedion, would have us believe, the abolition of denotation in architecture was a turning point in the history of architecture, as I have previously argued elsewhere.35

Of course, the analytical notion of exemplification was not available to the minds of 1920s architectural culture, yet, in retrospect, we can nonetheless establish as a fact that the formalist aesthetic program presented by Hitchcock and Johnson in their 1932 International Style book was a latent endorsement of exemplification. Here, architecture were to be reduced to its basic appearance as plane and volume in space, no ornament detracting from the experience of pure, isolated, distinct and distinguishable forms:

“The clarity of the impression of volume is diminished by any sort of complication. Volume is felt as immaterial and weightless, a geometrically bounded space. Subsidiary projecting parts of a building are likely to appear solid.”36

Any other interfering elements, even color, were disfavored:“At present applied color is used less. The color of natural surfacing materials and the natural metal color of detail is definitely preferred. […] In surfaces of stucco, white or off-white, even where it is obtained with paint, is felt to constitute the natural color.”37

Similarly, Emil Kaufmann, in his 1933 study of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s architecture of the 1780s, Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier: Ursprung und Entwicklung der Autonomen Architektur [From Ledoux to Le Corbusier. Origin and Development of Autonomous Architecture], pointed out the fact that the principles of aesthetic reduction whereby the art of building was

32 Goodman, “How Buildings Mean,” 645.33 Ibid., 644-645.34 Ibid., 645.35KasperLægring,“ExemplificationasExplanation:TheNegativeReceptionofModernArchitecture

Revisited,” Serbian Architectural Journal 10:1 (2018).36 Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style: Architecture Since 1922(NewYork:W.W.Norton&Co.,1995[1932]),59.37 Ibid., 87.


to emerge reborn, as groupings of pure, autonomous volumes freed from classical convention, were akin to the principles of modern architecture formulated by Le Corbusier, and he thus indirectly identified a kinship of aesthetic means between the 1780s and the 1920s. The main point here is that the unifying principle between these two epochs, aesthetically speaking, is the desire to attain pure, autonomous, undecorated and un-representational form at the expense of expansive communicative programs that are reliant on denotation.As Mark Linder has argued, the International Style not only predates, but was also a source of inspiration to the Minimalist artists of the 1960s, and the common ground between the two movements was a dedication to formalism.38

A Change of Aesthetic Significance

Just before, I quoted Goodman saying, in the context of modern architecture, that “where representation is not expected, we readily focus upon other kinds of reference” but in fact, the possibility for complex chains of meaning to emerge often rests upon the coexistence of denotation and exemplification, which was almost universally present in architecture based on the classical vocabulary from antiquity. This is the case when we look at buildings from pre-modernist times, regardless of style. Goodman is thus not wrong in remarking detachedly that one kind of reference, exemplification, replaces another, denotation; however, this change is significant in qualitative terms that his theory does not account for. [Fig. 5]

38 Mark Linder, Nothing Less than Literal: Architecture after Minimalism (Cambridge,MA:TheMIT Press, 2005), 74.

Fig. 5: Zwiefalten Abbey, Swabia, view of central nave


For it is a change of the utmost aesthetic significance when we discuss the possibility of the Gesamtkunstwerk in the modernist idiom. This becomes evident when we consult writings by Dalibor Vesely and Karsten Harries, who have provided us with perceptive phenomenological studies of the nature of Baroque and Rococo architecture. These architectural styles predate Trahndorff and Wagner’s conceptualizations of the Gesamtkunstwerk, yet these periods later came to be regarded as exemplary of the aesthetic coordination of effects so typical of the programmatic Gesamtkunstwerk, and this, I reason, make them relevant to the discussion here.The rocaille, the basic unit of the decorative art of the Rococo, is particularly significant, as it in itself oscillates between appearing as a fragment of identifiable nature, a rock, a seashell, a wave, and appearing as pure abstract curvature, an s- or c-shaped curve, a serpentine. To Vesely, the rocaille holds a unique potential for being a catalytic element, and this he demonstrates in his analysis of Zwiefalten Abbey (1739–1765 by Johann Michael Fischer) in Southern Germany. He first notes that

“As ornament, rocaille is inevitably pictorial, but it is not a picture—it is only like a picture. The same is true of its sculptural and architectural characteristics. It resists becoming a definite art form in order to preserve its metaphorical and creative nature.”39

Vesely then proceeds to analyze the composition, where architecture, sculpture and painting all partake in creating an illusionistic, all-encompassing space as celebration of the sanctity of Virgin Mary. Painted architecture appears in the ceiling fresco, real architecture offers support for the whole scenery, and stucco acts as the intermediary between them, blurring the boundaries between media and allowing for real architecture to cast shadows into the imaginary world of the painting where painted shadows further enhance this role play between the real

39 Dalibor Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production(Cambridge,MA:MITPress,2004),224.

Fig. 6, 7: Zwiefalten Abbey, Swabia, detail of rocaille cartouche by Johann Michael Feuchtmayer II, 1741–47,andfrescobyFranzJosephSpiegler,1747–53


and the virtual. Furthermore, the curvilinearity of the rocaille finds thematic backing in the overall architectural framework, the vaults of the pilgrimage church. Vesely finds this to be a high point in the achievement of “communicative space,” for

“Decor and the decorative meaning of art are thus relational—very much like the communicative nature of situation. In both cases the individual creative contributions are situated in a sequence of representations in which the criterion of meaning, relevance, or beauty is not the individual value but that of the whole.”40 [Fig. 6, 7]

Harries’s assessment of Rococo spatial unification is congenial with Vesely’s, and he celebrates the same Swabian and Bavarian churches for their Gesamtkunstwerk qualities,41 but he is less enthusiastic about the Rococo, since he opposes the emancipation of ornament that would lead to a l’art pour l’art culture: “When ornament speaks too loudly with its own voice, as it does when it presents itself to us as a self-sufficient sculptural presence, its voice drowns out that of architecture.”42

Whether one agrees with Harries’s cultural diagnosis or not, his observation on the altered status of ornament is to the point, for this aesthetic rupture was the first step towards making medium specificity, championed by art critic Clement Greenberg, the goal of all modern art.43 This was a further development towards autonomy that made a Gesamtkunstwerk effect increasingly difficult to achieve. While Giedion, Sert and Léger were making their case for the total work of art, new generations of avant-gardes were distancing themselves even further from such notions. For the protagonists of art forms such as abstract, concrete and minimalist art sought to cultivate medium specificity at the expense of the total work of art. In the case of Max Bill, for instance,

“one of the basic premises of his ‘concrete art’ was the self-sufficiency of the means employed in artistic production. These means do not serve to depict anything; they constitute the work itself, even a work of architecture.”44

Even if one accepts the assumption that “medium specificity” is only a figment of the imagination, as W. J. T. Michell does,45 this does not challenge the validity of the notion of exemplification, since Goodman’s aesthetic theory does not hinge on a definition of what constitutes an artistic medium. In fact, his idea of expression presupposes the rich possibility of cross-modality and “frozen metaphors” in our habitual ways of describing aesthetic experiences.46

Conclusion

The lesson to be learned from the analyses by Vesely and Harries is that the catalytic role of ornament sets the Rococo Gesamtkunstwerk apart from its modernist emulations, whereas the Historicist reinterpretations of the Rococo remain faithful to the style’s synthesizing capacity, despite the potential loss of authenticity and originality involved in such paraphrasing of styles.Additionally, if we return to the findings of Emil Kaufmann, we will also find documentation for this major change in the way buildings were composed, for he concludes that the heteronomy of the so-called “barocke Verband,” with its equal treatment of all building parts, gave way to Boullée and Ledoux’s autonomous architecture of effect and exaggeration.47

40 Ibid., 95-96.41 Harries, Ethical Function of Architecture, 61.42 Ibid., 128.43ClementGreenberg,“ModernistPainting,”Arts Yearbook 4 (1961).44 David Leatherbarrow and Mohsen Mostafavi, Surface Architecture (Cambridge,MA:MITPress,2002),24.45 W. J. T. Mitchell, “There Are No Visual Media,” in Media Art Histories,ed.OliverGrau(Cambridge,MA:

MIT Press, 2007), 395-406.46 Goodman, Languages of Art, 68ff.47 Emil Kaufmann, Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier: Ursprung und Entwicklung der autonomen Architektur

(Vienna: Verlag Dr. R. Passer, 1933), 13-15.


When Nicolas-Henri Jardin, one of the earliest proponents of Neoclassicism in France, in 1756 was tasked with embedding some recently arrived portrait and overdoor paintings by Louis Tocqué and François Boucher into the already finished Rococo panelling of the Grand Hall of Count Moltke’s townhouse, or rather hôtel particulier, in the new Frederiksstaden district in Copenhagen, he opted for the new idiom, using festoons, cartouches and trophies as framing devices, yet, out of respect for the setting finished just two years prior, he cleverly chose only those antiquing symbols that would not disturb the Rococo atmosphere of the room. The primacy of the existing Gesamtkunstwerk was thus confirmed rather than challenged. In the Romanticist period that followed, such a strategy of adaptation would be anathema to the emancipation of ornament itself and to the celebration of the fragment, and even the most advanced of the “monumental” modernist projects do not allow for such adaptation across styles and expressions.Both Harries and Vesely locate the reason for the impossibility of the mutual integration of the arts in the experience of modernity, which has replaced an overarching cosmology with processes of ever-increasing secularization and rationalization. A similar concern was already aired, in rather more extreme form, by Hans Sedlmayr in his Verlust der Mitte: Die bildende Kunst des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts als Symptom und Symbol der Zeit [Art in Crisis: The Lost Centre, 1948], a scathing critique of post-Enlightenment aesthetic culture.However, if we follow Goodman’s aesthetic theory, we can arrive at the same conclusion, namely the loss of the possibility of the collaborative Gesamtkunstwerk, by aesthetic arguments alone. By abandoning denotation, and by tacitly promoting the aesthetic monopoly of exemplification, the avant-gardes set the course for an architecture with little capacity for creating Gesamtkunstwerke (for the aesthetic composition of pre-modernist architecture – such as Schinkel’s Altes Museum – relied equally on denotation and exemplification). This means that the mission that Giedion, Sert and Léger embarked on in 1943 was futile from the very beginning, since their project contained an inherent dissonance between the holistic legacy of Romanticism and the particularistic program of contemporary formalist aesthetics.Whenever a convincing modernist Gesamtkunstwerk did appear, it owed is existence not to the formal aesthetic doctrines of Modernism but to the deviation from such orthodoxy. In other instances, the modernist Gesamtkunstwerk turned out to be the work of a single architect and thus did not fulfil the collaborative criterion of the Nine Points manifesto. I have only mentioned a few, but examples of the latter type are numerous and are not confined to any particular stylistic offshoot of Modernism, and while such works may be compatible with Wagner’s way of carrying out the Gesamtkunstwerk, they do not conform to the expectations of Giedion, Sert and Léger.While the resurrection of the Gesamtkunstwerk on modernist terms was a logical step to take, since several luminaries of the avant-gardes were directly influenced by the Wagnerian idea of the total work of art, and since the belief in the culturally transformative potential of art was just as ingrained in the workings of the avant-gardes as it had been in Wagner’s operatic projects, the idea turned out to be a self-defeating proposition in practice, as the hegemony of exemplification, both in architecture and in the arts, stood in the way of such an endeavor.By looking at the history of modern architecture afresh, with the aid of Goodman’s conceptual apparatus, it is thus possible to bracket well-known (but relevant) discussions about originality, genius, evolution, avant-garde, industry, social class, technology, revolution and so on, in order to focus on the aesthetic experience afforded to us by modern architecture. Goodman rejected the culture of exceptionalism promoted by the formalists, insisting instead that Modernism was no different, in terms of aesthetic signification, than any other period or style:

“Moreover, some formalist writers preach that pure art must be free of all symbolism, must exist and be looked upon solely in and for itself, and that any reference beyond it amounts


virtually to pollution. But this contention, as we shall see, rests upon a cramped conception of reference.”48

This approach clashes with the popular narrative – launched by the avant-gardes themselves – that Modernism constituted an aesthetic culture with no links to the past. This notion lingers on, even in contemporary attempts to re-write the history of modern architecture such as the account by Hans Rudolf Morgenthaler, where the author claims that Modernism can only be grasped with theories from the same time period.49 According to Morgenthaler, Modernism has eliminated representation as an aesthetic strategy:

“Especially in modernist architecture, we can proceed now on the assumption that ornament and representation in buildings are the same. Representation simply becomes the associations engendered by visual stimuli. Modernist architecture does not so much represent, as rather offer ‘form and color, in the plane or in space’.”50

If this only means “representation” in the denotational sense of the word, his claim is obviously correct. But if it instead means “reference,” then Morgenthaler’s interpretation of modern architecture would be at odds with Goodman’s. For to Goodman, the fact that exemplification is more common in Modern art and architecture than in past periods does not mean that Modernism is devoid of signification, symbolization or referentiality. It just means by other means than denotation. And for that reason, Goodman refuses to pass judgment on Modernism solely on the grounds of an abundance of exemplification.51

However, Goodman – who did not comment on the emancipation of artistic media – might well be mistaken in writing off the question of exceptionalism, for as it turns out, and as I hope to have demonstrated with this contribution, modern architecture did operate aesthetically in a very different manner than past periods, by relying exclusively on denotation. This dramatic change sets Modernism apart from past styles, but it also serves to explain the futility – or the radical difference in kind – of the modernist Gesamtkunstwerk. And, by implication, this conclusion will of course also be of interest to current discussions of contemporary architect–artist collaborations where formalist and minimalist strategies remain active.

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ILLUSTRATION CREDITSFig.1a:Courtesy:ZucchiEnzo,EuropeanCouncil,Flickr.Fig.1b:UnitedNationsHeadquarters,NewYork.Courtesy:RickBajornas,UnitedNations,Flickr.Fig.2:Courtesy:RobertMarín,WikimediaCommons.Fig.3:Courtesy:RobertMarín,WikimediaCommons.Fig.4:Courtesy:HelgeHøifødt,WikimediaCommons.Fig.5:Courtesy:DorisMetaFranz,Flickr.Fig.6:Courtesy:GFreihalter,WikimediaCommons.Fig.7:Courtesy:Vassil,WikimediaCommons.

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