Will Grohmann

This dissertation treats of the conception of “blindness” in the late work of Karl Hofer (1878–1955). Responses to Hofer’s work are sought in the immediate postwar period 1945–1955 within the framework of national discourses regarding the re-establishment of culture in the Federal Republic of Germany. In particular, the notion of the Menschenbild is examined with reference to the critique of Modern Art and abstraction mounted by Hans Sedlmayr (1896–1984) in the same period. A nexus is found between the two men in the form of the work The Parable of the Blind (1568) by Pieter Bruegel (the Elder).

An additional framework for the examination of Hofer’s works which pertain to blindness is the catalogue essay Memoirs of the Blind by Jacques Derrida. Through this prism, the visual experience of the visual representation of non-visual experience is examined. Whether viewed as a threat to the explicitly visual world of art, or as conceptually implicit to the world of the visual arts, the theme of blindness is inextricable from discourse on the Menschenbild and was central to developing national and international artists’ engagement with sight in the postwar period. This dissertation draws on Derrida’s text in order to highlight the tensions that inhabit the relationship between the visual arts and blindness – tensions which stem from the ineluctable fact that, as caught up as an artist might be with the fear of the spectre of blindness, drawing owes a “debt” to blindness, too.

No previous study has dealt in such depth with the shadowgraphs later called “Rayographs” that Man Ray began making in Paris around 1921/22. This account of Man Ray is very different to that usually given in the literature. It deconstructs a couple of myths as the discovery of the Rayographs by a dark chamber accident and studies the early reception in the 1920's contextualizing it for instance in Germany also beyond Dada and Surrealism. This preliminary English translation of the first 10 pages gives an outlook on the much more abundant chapter discussing among others Ray's early artistic development in the United States revealing a highly distinctive, projective approach to images as a “new art in two dimensions". This 60-pages chapter is part of the German monograph "Bild. Körper. Projektion - eine Kulturgeschichte der Schattenbilder".