Page 23 - Studio International - March 1972

Viking Eggeling

Hans Richter

Viking Eggeling
Landscape 1915-16
2 'Cubist school' drawing 1915

The Swedish painter Viking Eggeling is known
to a larger public mainly by his abstract film
Diagonal Symphonie, one of the first of its kind,
produced under the greatest difficulties and
hardship between 1920-23. It was first shown
publicly in November/December 1923 at the
V.D.I. (Verein Deutscher Ingenieure) in Berlin.
Important as this step from painting to
film might be in the history of modern art, it is
by no means the only and perhaps not even the
most important contribution of this artist.
When I first met him, early in 1918, I stayed
at a little Hotel Limmatquai in Zürich, where
Tristan Tzara lived. He had told me a couple of
times of 'a crazy guy in Ascona' who searched
for a master key to abstract art. One day, Tzara
knocked at the thin wall separating our rooms
and asked me to come over to meet 'the guy
from Ascona'. Ten minutes later he was in my
room and showed me a drawing of his. I was
immensely impressed by this rather short but
fanatically determined man. He introduced me
into the secrecies of his art, into small drawings
which he called Elementar-Tafeln (elementary
tablets). They were, as he explained, the basis
and key to his work, its essence. (Whatever
grew out of them later—scroll, film—was already
contained in them). These ten tablets were his
to commandments from which he deduced his
Orchestration of the Line and its superstructure
for art in general Den Generalbase der Malerei
(freely translated 'The Elementary Syntax of
Painting').
I grasped already at our first meeting the
fundamental importance of his research, as I
had been involved myself in finding an organizing
principle with which to control the abundance of
free forms independent of natural objects, which
had led me from my Dada-heads to abstraction.
This identity of aesthetic purpose made us
friends immediately, and so we remained—with
a short interruption in 1922/23—until his death
in 1925.
What I did not see until much later was the
answer to the questions : What had led Eggeling
to his conclusions, to his style ? Why did he so
exclusively concentrate upon the line, which
for me, as a painter, played only a secondary
role ?
Eggeling was born in 1880 in Lund, Sweden.
For twenty years, around 190o, a special art
style flourished in Europe, even beyond Europe:
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