Hans Richter in Exile: Translating the Avant-Garde

Abstract

A large number of European abstract films premiered in the United States in a 1940 festival at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The program featured, along with the work of Man Ray, Fernand Léger, and Marcel Duchamp, one of the earliest abstract films, Hans Richter’s 1921 study, Rhythmus 21. At the time, Richter was head of film production at the Frobenius Film Studios in Basel, Switzerland. But Swiss officials had just announced their intention to deport him back to Germany. Richter, one step ahead of the Swiss, had filed with the U.S. consulate for immigration papers, and was awaiting his official documents. MoMA’s screening therefore provided a timely introduction of the artist’s work into the New York art scene. Less than a year later, in 1941, Richter immigrated to the United States and took up residence in Manhattan where he would continue to reside on a part-time basis until his death in 1976. Although identified as a German artist, for the past quarter of a century before he arrived in the United States, Richter had a peripatetic lifestyle and he counted Zurich, Munich, Berlin, Moscow, Eindhoven, Basel, and Paris, amongst other cities, as his residences. Thus, to varying degrees, one might be tempted to conclude that most of Richter’s life was spent in exile. However, the term exile, as Hamid Naficy reminds us, is traditionally taken to mean “banishment for a particular offense, with a prohibition to return,”¹ and many of Richter’s earlier departures were voluntary and he always returned to Germany.

Driven out of my country, now I must see how to find a new store, a bar, where I can sell what I think.

—Bertolt Brecht, “Sonnett in der Emigration”