A Bauhausler in Canada: Andor Weininger in the 50’s

When the Nazis came to power in Germany in the 1930s, their witch hunt against “degenerate” art and their anti-Semitic policies caused an exodus of artists and intellectuals to other parts of Europe and to North America. Among those fleeing were the Hungarian Andor Weininger and his Jewish wife Eva.

While many of the exiles made for the USA, the Weiningers chose Canada, and in 1951 they came to live and work in Toronto. Yet today few in Canada know their names or have seen the art Andor produced during his seven years here—that is, until Oliver Botar curated his exhibitions of Weininger’s work in 2004 at the University of Manitoba’s Gallery One One One and in 2009 at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, and produced this fascinating book, A Bauhausler in Canada: Andor Weininger in the ‘50s.

With the aid of lavish plates and a wealth of archival photographs, Botar has provided us with a survey and analysis of Weininger’s work and its Canadian context, and tackled the question of why acceptance and success eluded Weininger in Toronto. The Weiningers met as students at the famous multidisciplinary, experimental art school known as the Bauhaus. Andor’s chosen teachers there were Johannes Itten, Oscar Schlemmer and Wassily Kandinsky, and he attended an external seminar on De Stijl by Theo van Doesburg. This training led him beyond subjective expressionism to a “constructive” multimedia practice. He materialized his ideas through paintings and reliefs, furniture and interior design. As a musician and performer, he was a key member of Oscar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus Theatre Workshop, where he created his renowned “Spherical Theatre and Mechanical-Stage Review.” With fellow students, he had founded the Bauhaus band, which toured Germany with its blend of jazz and various folk traditions. After his graduation, when the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, Gropius hired him to assist the college with public relations and musical entertainment. By 1931 he and Eva had married and established a design company in Berlin. But the 1935 Nuremberg laws barred them from work in Germany and they took refuge in Holland.

Weininger had great expectations of Toronto: “I believed that in Canada, a new country, I would have success. I tried to teach, but I was rejected. I tried to do furniture design, but there was no interest in modern furniture in Canada. So I painted, but I couldn’t exhibit my works. I was rejected each time. This didn’t only happen to me; they made it very difficult for foreigners in Canada.” Botar’s research unpacks a much more nuanced and complex picture. The period of Weininger’s sojourn actually saw the belated Canadian acceptance of abstraction as the reigning paradigm in art and the advent of Modernism in the fields of architecture and furniture design. One of the fascinations of this book is that it paints a portrait of the Canadian arts community in the 1950s from a new viewpoint.

On Weininger’s arrival in Toronto he was warmly welcomed by Jock Macdonald, who had international contacts and became a good friend, as did Macdonald’s former pupil, William Ronald. Weininger and Ronald together taught an art class for the Niagara District Art Association, and Alexandra Luke included his work in the landmark 1952 show “Exhibition of Abstract Painting by Canadian Artists.” But the established exhibiting societies (the Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolour, the Ontario Society of Artists) consistently rejected his submissions, and when Ronald and his associates founded Painters Eleven in 1953, they did not invite Weininger to be a member, an exclusion he found very painful. Why this omission? Botar quotes Helen Ronald’s later remark that her husband was “surprised that Weininger was upset about not being invited to join. He did not think that he would have wanted to join.” The Painters Eleven evidently placed Weininger in a category separate from themselves—as an established figure from the heroic days of European Modernism, not a local painter struggling to emerge in a hostile provincial environment. Above all, members of Painters Eleven were measuring themselves against the epic gestural brushwork and scale of New York Abstract Expressionist painting. From their point of view, Weininger, with his small-scale and often geometrically based works, belonged to a venerable but now superceded artistic paradigm. But since Weininger’s contact with his circle of Bauhaus colleagues was now reduced to letters and occasional visits, he acutely felt the lack of an artistic community for stimulus and support. More puzzling is the fact that the Weiningers did not partake in the new developments in Canada in furniture and interior design. Botar explains this was the result of Weiniger’s unwillingness to leave Toronto and make the necessary connections in Waterloo, Montreal or Vancouver. Since he and Eva could live comfortably on an allowance from her wealthy family, they did not absolutely need to seek commercial work.

Another factor in these setbacks, Botar suggests, was Andor Weininger’s personality. He was a modest, shy man who had difficulty promoting himself. Within his own Bauhaus circle he was amply acknowledged, but that circle was now scattered. Significantly, it was only much later, in the context of the art-historical revival of interest in the Bauhaus in the late 1960s, that his reputation was re-established through retrospective exhibitions and publications in the US.

What, then, is the significance of Weininger’s production during his Canadian years? The illustrations in Botar’s book lead us into Weininger’s creative world and distinct aesthetic. Each work was to be the rendering of what Weininger called a “picture idea,” and his approach to style and medium was eclectic. In Toronto he added to his repertory the “informel,” the gestural painting mode then favoured internationally as well as by Painters Eleven. At the same time he was working in the medium of painted wood relief. A consistent thread, in accord with his beginnings in theatre, was the presence in his compositions of the human figure, either through stylized representation or through abstract rhythms that evoke the body’s motion or emotional state. A recurring trope is the artist’s self-image as an ironic, rueful clown. Weininger’s forms superceded the prosaic naturalism of traditional art with new structures revealed by microscope and telescope and by multidimensional geometry. He dislocated the viewer by playfully dispersing his pictures throughout a given exhibition space rather than hanging them in a linear sequence. Botar has effectively recreated this method of display in his 2004 and 2009 Weininger exhibitions.

The artist we discover in this book created a mental universe very different, then, from the monumental, tragic vision to which North American Abstract Expressionism aspired. The leaders of that school had lived through the Depression and were spectators of the distant cataclysms unleashed by World War II. Weininger himself lived at ground zero of two world wars and had experienced the destruction of his homes and the dispersal of his social world. His art practice of defiant play with the fragments of an atomized world turns out to have more affinity with the pluralist improvisations of postmodernity than it did with the brave new world of Toronto in the 1950s. ❚

A Bauhausler in Canada: Andor Weininger in the ‘50s by Oliver A I Botar. Winnipeg: Gallery One One One; Oshawa: The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 2009. Hardcover, 480 pp, $55.00.

Gerta Moray is Professor Emerita at the University of Guelph and a lecturer at the Onatrio Collage of Art and Design