Detail

After expressionist and cubist experiments, German artist Hans Richter went to Zurich in 1916 where he got to know Swedish painter Viking Eggeling who was part of the Dada group circle. Starting from an analogy with music, they worked together on a universal artistic language. Their aim was to find a system of order for visual art that was, like music, harmonic and controlled by the human mind. In the work shown here, Hans Richter refers to the musical principle of the fugue. The fugue is similar to a canon, a theme is repeated but varied. Fugue in Red and Green shows a sequence of recurring elements. They are given optical form using musical principles of creating order: repetition, variation, interval and transposition into rhythm. In order to depict the development of the formal motif and to structure the viewer’s perception over time, Richter chose the scroll painting format that we know from medieval or East Asian cultures. The motif develops step by step as in a film strip. So it is not surprising that in the 1920 Richter turned to animated images and experimented with film.