Arthur Müller-Lehning

Arthur Müller-Lehning was an anarchist, writer, and historian who founded the important Dutch-based, international avant-garde art journal i10 Internationale Revue (1927–29). This short-lived but ambitious undertaking, which aimed to reach a transnational network, brought together a variety of artists’ voices, addressing issues in aesthetics, politics, and the avant-garde in a multi-lingual forum.

Lehning was dedicated to antimilitarism, a commitment initiated as a student during the First World War. From 1922 to 1924 Lehning lived in Berlin, where he studied history at Friedrich Wilhelm University. It was during this formative period in Berlin that Lehning conceived the plan to publish a journal.

In Berlin, while frequenting the Romanisches Café, he came into contact with Russian anarchists and syndicalists who had been active in the Bolshevik Revolution, as well as other artists and intellectuals—including Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, and Rudolf Rocker—who had come to Germany directly from the Soviet Union. Through this new social circle Lehning became inspired by the work of Max Nettlau, considered to be the first and most renowned historian of anarchism, and the revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.

In 1925 Lehning moved to Paris, where he met the artist Piet Mondrian through their mutual friend, the Dutch writer Bart de Ligt. Lehning encouraged Mondrian to collaborate on his concept for a new journal. The artist agreed and introduced Lehning to the De Stijl architect J. J. P. Oud, who also became interested in the project. Oud later provided an enthusiastic introductory statement for the first issue, and a number of De Stijl artists, such as Peter Alma, César Domela-Nieuwenhuis, Vilmos Huszar, Mondrian, Gerrit Rietveld, Bart van der Leck, Cornelis van Eesteren, and Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, signed on as contributors.

The following year Lehning visited the Bauhaus in Dessau, where he met with former members of De Stijl, the architects Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, and artists Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Laszló Moholy-Nagy. By that time the artists of De Stijl and the Bauhaus had begun to network; their fusion of styles influenced the aesthetic orientation of the journal as well as its diverse left-wing ideas. In the same year Lehning returned to his native Amsterdam and went to work on founding i10 International Revue. He employed Moholy-Nagy as both the designer for the magazine’s typography and editor of the film and photography section.

Published by De Tijdstroom in Amsterdam, i10 ran for only twenty-two issues, from January 1927 to the summer of 1929. Its international roster of contributors included Walter Benjamin, El Lissitzky, Lionel Feininger, Naum Gabo, Kandinsky, Kasimir Malevich, Mondrian, Oud, Rietveld, and Kurt Schwitters, among many others. Titled for ease of translation into multiple languages, i10 published essays in the chosen language of the author, each issue containing articles in Dutch, English, German, and French, followed by summaries translated into the other three. The goal of the journal, which drew inspiration from the German expressionist magazine Die Aktion (1911–32), was to create links between art, politics, and society, and to promote global revolutionary change. To that end i10 published transnational dialogues across disciplines, including painting, photography, film, sculpture, architecture, literature, music, typography, and advertising, alongside articles on Marxist and anarchist analyses of current political issues.

Distributed in Amsterdam, Zurich, London, New York, Moscow, Berlin, Dresden, Dessau, Paris, Brussels, Toronto, Basel, Vienna, and Warsaw, i10 was an important forum for conversations about cultural renewal, the elimination of literal and metaphorical borders between nations and the arts, and the integration of art into society. The magazine hosted crucial international dialogues on expressions of modernity and modern thought, with lively discussions on creative output in Europe versus the United States and important cultural and political developments in Soviet Russia, and articles on faktura, a Soviet-Constructivist idea referring to inherent material qualities embodied in the work of art. i10 alsoinitiated many historically important conversations on modernist aesthetics that subsequently gained renown in other venues. In an article titled “America-Europe,” published in the second volume of i10 (October 1928), architectural historian Henry Russell-Hitchcock first articulated his ideas for the International Style, a term that he and Philip Johnson officially coined in 1932 to describe similar trends in architectural aesthetics emerging in the United States and Europe. Cultural critic Walter Benjamin also found an outlet for his ideas in the pages of i10, some of which would find their way into widely read essays such as “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936). It has been suggested by Meindert Peters that the theoretical writing on new media featured in i10 had an impact on Benjamin’s interests in film, the work of Moholy-Nagy, and the Dutch poet Menno ter Braak, cofounder of the cinema club Dutch Filmliga. Accompanying the articles were works by artist contributors, including Kandinsky’s Transverse Line (1923) and Moholy-Nagy’s photoplastic Once A Chicken, Always a Chicken (1925).

Despite its international distribution, i10 was unable to cover operating costs due to a lack of readership. An attempt to merge the magazine with the journal De Stijl did not come to pass, and i10 folded in 1929.

In the last phase of his career, Lehning became better known as a political writer and literary figure. His Archives Bakounine, a full translation into French of the written work of Bakunin, was published in 1961. He took up teaching appointments at Oxford in 1972 and at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University the following year. In 1999, he was awarded a P. C. Hooft Award for contemplative prose, the top prize for literature in The Netherlands. His writings on Bakunin have since been translated into German, Spanish, English, and Italian.