Foujita

Photographer unknown - Leonard Foujita - 1920s

Dada

Photographer unknown - Marcel & Suzanne Duchamp, Michel Corlin, Germaine Everling, Lorenzo, Francis Picabia, Jean Crotti - 1920s

Weave

Sybil Moholy-Nagy - László Moholy-Nagy - Germany - 1930s

Laughter

Josef Albers - Walter Gropius and Schifra Canavesi - Ascona - August 1930
via Art Blart

Self

Umbo (Otto Umbehr) - Umbo am Strand - ca. 1930

Naked of worship

Photographer unknown - D.H.Lawrence and his sister Ada Clarke - Mablethorpe beach, Lincolnshire - 1926

Laelius

Lily Klee - Wassily Kandinsky & Paul Klee - 1929

Glacier

Ernst Schwitters - Photograph of Kurt Schwitters in a boat at the foot of a glacier - 1935

Beach Buggy

Gerrit Rietveld - Beach Buggy - 1922-23

Hans Arp at the beach

 Sophie Taeuber-Arp (maybe) - Hans Arp’s navel - Brittany - 1930s

What they have always done

“But aren’t the good person, the moral, the normal, the useful person, are not the ideal patriot, the disciplined ideal party member, the perfect citizen already standardized people? Visions of the future are herewith opened up for all standardizing institutions. What they already have always done, they will now do with the aid and the unquestioned authority of science and technology. The current of the times is taking a direction that serves their purposes, the remains of the individual are polished away.”

Robert Musil, Philosophy of a Shoe Factory, 1924-26

translated by Genese Grill

Lotte Bloch Zavrel - Peter Altenberg, Hermann Bahr and Koloman Moser - 1913

via Vienna U

Nothing

"The artist should never comtemplate making a work of art that is about something; a successful work of art can only ever be about nothing. The artist's complete negation of intent thus creating a reflective surface into which the critic, curator or collector can gaze and see only himself."
Sol Lewitt, Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, 1967
via Scott King

Katarzyna Kobro and Władysław Strzemiński - Chałupy - August 1928

via Monoskop

“At the beginning of the world can be found an irrational freedom rooted in the depths of oblivion, a chasm from which spring the dark torents of life…
The light of Logos triumphs from darkness, the cosmic harmony triumph of chaos, but without the abyss of darkness and chaos, there would  be, in the ongoing evolution, neither life, nor freedom. Freedom lies in the dark abyss, in the oblivion, but without it all is meaningless… Freedom is uncreated, because it is not nature, it precedes the world, it is rooted in the initial oblivion.”
Nicolas Berdyaev, Freedom and the Spirit, 1927

Literary syphilis

"A manifesto is a communication made to the whole world, whose only pretension is to the discovery of an instant cure for political, astronomical, artistic, parliamentary, agronomical and literary syphilis. It may be pleasant, and good-natured, it's always right, it's strong, vigorous and logical. "

Tristan Tzara, Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love, 1920

Sara Murphy and Pablo Picasso - Plage de la Garoupe - 1926

Stretching his Hand to the Master of Things

“In place of a romantic, an idealist, an aristocratic dreamer about pure symbol, about abstract aesthetics of the word, in place of symbolism, futurism and imaginism, arrived a living poetry of the word-object, and its creator is not an idealist-dreamer Mozart, but a rigorous and severe artist-master Salieri, stretching his hand to the master of things and materialistic values, to the builder and producer of the material (reified) world.“ 
Ossip Mandelstam, O prirode slovaб 1922, 
quoted and translated in Edward Możejko, “Tracing the Modernist Paradigm” 
in Modernism, ed. Astradur Eysteinsson, 2007 vol.1

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy - Unnown Photographer - 1937

via moholy-nagy.org

Contemplating Itself

”But even as you enjoy the contemplation of such romantic mirages as beauty and pleasure; so would I enjoy the contemplation of that which interests me above all things: namely, Life: the force that ever strives to attain greater power of contemplating itself.” 

George Bernard Shaw, Don Juan in Hell, in Man and Superman, 1903

Sonia Delaunay and Sophie Taeuber-Arp - Carnac - 1929

via Archive Dada

Essential Quality of being present

"The pleasure which we derive from the representation of the present is due not only to the beauty with which it can be invested, but also to its essential quality of being present."

Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 1863

Charles Demuth and Eugen O'Neill - ProvinceTown - ca. 1915?

Via Province Town Playhouse

The End of a World and the Birth of Another

"We are living an epoch both dangerous 

and magnificent which embraces

desperately the end of a world and

the birth of another - a seeming confusion 

is its most immediate appearance."

Fernand Léger, 1947, in Maurice Fréchuret, 

Catalogue du Musée National Fernand Léger, 2006

Cornelis Van Eesteren & Frieda Fluck - Ascona - 1927

via Charnel House (again!)

Monuments of a Historical Consciousness

“The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action. The great revolution introduced a new calendar. The initial day of a calendar serves as a historical time-lapse camera. And, basically, it is the same day that keeps recurring in the guise of holidays, which are days of remembrance. Thus the calendars do not measure time as clocks do; they are monuments of a historical consciousness of which not the slightest trace has been apparent in Europe in the past hundred years.” 

Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, 1940
quoted in Roger Griffin, A Fascist Century, 2008

F.T. Marinetti and Thayaht

Our Things in our Hands

“The light from the East is not only the liberation of worker, the light from the East is in the new relation to the person, to woman, to things. Our things in our hands must be equals, comrades.”
Alexander Rodchenko, 'Rodchenko v Parizhe. Iz pisem domoi', Novyi lef, 1927
via Christina Kiaer

Unknown Photographer - Walter Gropius - 1968

via Exit Architects

"Since the universal power of the whole of nature is nothing but the power of all individual things together, it follows each individual thing has the sovereign right to do everything that it can do, or the right of each thing extends so far as its determined power extends"
Baruch Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, 1670

Perpetual Indecision

"The unity of life and art that aesthetic culture aimed at, instead of lifting life to the sublime, transcendent realm of art by giving form to its contingencies and necessity to its trivialities, actually imbued art with its own dilettante hedonism. In sum, aesthetic culture pulled art down to its own level, the petty, ramshackle realm of perpetual indecision."

Georg Lukács, Aesthetic Culture, 1910

Unknown Photographer
From left to right: Emil Hesse Burri, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Wilhelm Speyer and Marie Speyer - Le Lavandou - 1931