Hidden Stories – the Life Reform Movements and Art

As the title “Hidden Stories” also suggests, the exhibition reveals the hitherto little-known “hidden” relationships of the artists of the time to the individual reform movements: It presents the active role of the artists (both from Hungary and elsewhere) in the various spiritual, lifestyle-related, religious, social, and artistic reform movements, demonstrating the influence of these movements on their works and worldview.

The exhibition does not explain the “hidden story” of life reform and art by means of works of art alone, but documents them through contemporary photographs and exhibits of other art genres of that epoch. The Kunsthalle can pride itself on being the first museum in Hungary to have devoted itself to this subject; and in doing so, it joins the great European exhibition projects in Germany, Austria, and the Czech Republic which have offered excellent overviews of the social and art history of the life reform movements.

With this exhibition, the Kunsthalle set for itself duel goals: stimulating scientific research on the one hand, and on the other hand familiarizing art lovers open to modern art and contemporary artists with the messages of the life reform movements. Several of the Kunsthalle’s programmes, such as the relevant chamber exhibitions, studio talks, and exclusive guided tours, have already served this purpose.

The two-day conference was organized by the Research Group for Historical, Theoretical, and Comparative Pedagogy at the Faculty of Education and Psychology at Eötvös Loránd University and by participants in relevant doctoral programs. The sponsors were the University, the Art Hall, and the Hungarian Academy of Arts. Within the framework of the event, the broad and complex socio-historical connections between life reform and art will be discussed by renowned domestic and foreign experts providing interdisciplinary perspectives. The conference is not only intended to serve the discourse of various branches of science, but also to deepen the dialogue between generations and professional groups. The panel of young researchers will contribute to this mission, as well as a workshop following the conference in which school and museum educators will be introduced to the cultural and historical significance of the life reform movements and their pedagogical references, which are still relevant today.

On behalf of the Hungarian Academy of the Arts, I wish all the conference participants successful and fruitful discussion.

Introduction: The Multivalence of Life Reform; On the Hybrid Shape of a Cultural Appearance

In the first comprehensive attempt to boil life reform down to a concept, it already became clear that it was a multivalent, hybrid phenomenon; I choose the word “phenomenon” to indicate the openness of the movement. Krabbe had indeed chosen the focus of social reform in his work Gesellschaftsreform durch Lebensreform (1974), understandably at a time when much of the young population was concerned with societal changes in the sense of democratization and participation, and in creating a new world without exploitation. In the title of his work, he also spoke of “a social reform movement” as opposed to “movements”. At the same time, he succeeds in working out the multi-layered and almost nonchalant eclecticism that characterized this “phenomenon” in the first third of the 20th century.

Thus, he relativizes the central aspect, which he emphasizes in the title itself. Life reform can indeed be understood as a movement, but only if we weaken or “fluidize”, as it were, the originally political core of the concept: a goal-oriented and organized political mass movement that identifies a relatively unambiguous goal and a relatively unambiguous enemy. Life reform articulates itself in many different “movements”, each with their own respective leaders and each with its own forms of propagation and self-assurance through multifaceted milieus, personal networks, and so on, but it cannot be clearly defined.

For this reason, Harald Szeemann chose the fertility goddess Artemis of Ephesus as a symbol for his internationally respected travelling exhibition at Monte Verità at the end of the 1970s. Szeemann’s exhibition outlined a broad thematic circle, which was to be further explored in terms of content; to fathom its dimensions as a whole is a decades-long task, a research task that will likely never come to a conclusion.

Around 1900 and the following decades, life reform was somehow “in the air”, and was virtually everywhere as well as – albeit with different importance and accentuation – partially embedded in all groups of society. Its ideological spectrum is extraordinarily extensive, in that in some of its forms it also takes up and remixes aspects of the traditional “great narratives” of religion, esotericism, politics, and social reform motives of various provenance.

Life reform “lives” in an environment weakly controlled by politics and religion. Thus, individuals can, for example, turn to vegetarianism, propagating and celebrating it with quasi-religious fervour, or buy reform clothes while maintaining his enjoyment of meat. Or they can use the intestinal cures recommended by the new religious movement of Mazdaznan to remove their constipation, and at the same time not care about spirituality at all.

But followers of the life reform movements can also decide to expand all this in a great synthesis into their own meaningful, comprehensive view of the world. Some outstanding examples among the modern “teachers of humanity” founded movements that offer recipes for life reform and the salvation of the world up to the present day. The best known are Blavatzky’s Theosophy – worked out before the actual widespread upswing of life reform but becoming closely connected to it – as well as Steiner’s Anthroposophy and the Mazdaznan movement.

Despite the large number of individual studies available, we are still a long way from being able to define a clear core of life reform. The important exhibitions of the last 20 years, including the Budapest exhibition on the subject in 2018–2019, show the extraordinary diversity of the appearance of life reform.

I would like to demonstrate a perspective that considers a single aspect to be at the core of life reform, published in 2006 which, incidentally, is very meritorious. In it, Florentine Fritzen unfolds the core statement that the “life reform movement in the 20th century” is essentially about “living healthier”. No one will seriously deny the importance of this aspect, but when raised to the essential point, shortened or even distorted valuations will result. Thus, Florentine Fritzen minimizes the importance of other roundabout aspects as a “colourful decoration”,

leaving the true core of life reform left open. As a nutrition-related religion of self-redemption, it certainly does not promise eternal life, only an extended one; but with it, the religious aspects of life reform as a whole are by far not adequately described. As such the new nutritionist, dietician, or hygienist were not held responsible for the eternal and final meaning of life.

The dimension of meaning in the archaic version, in accordance with the ultimate meaning of life, must therefore not be minimized or excluded with regard to life reform. It is certainly no mere “decoration”.

Because this view seems appropriate to me, I want to develop this further in a few steps, using the following references:

The Gospel of the Third Way, Social Movements, and Sociotopes