Virtual Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon

The Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon (First German Autumn Salon) was held on the fourth floor of Potsdamer Straße 75, today Potsdamer Straße 180, Berlin, in the fall of 1913 (September 20-December 1).

As we know from Robert Delaunay’s correspondence, this groundbreaking international exhibition was a collaborative project. Gallery director Herwarth Walden rented the space with funding from art collector Bernhard Koehler, the artist August Macke’s uncle. Walden, Macke, Wassily Kandinsky, and Franz Marc invited artists and curated the show, with the following general limitation: each artist was to have 3-4 works, and these were to be hung together. That guideline was not followed strictly, however, as some artists had more or fewer works, and Walden wrote to Robert Delaunay, for example, that he could have as many as he wanted—as long as they had never been exhibited in Berlin before.

Jenny Anger (Art and Art History, Grinnell College) has worked with a contemporary team of collaborators to help students explore the exhibition through historical and imaginative modeling of its spaces in three dimensions. In the team’s 3D model of the exhibition space, each of the historical exhibition’s 19 “rooms” is built and numbered, and students in Anger’s classes can use the limited historical documentation that has come down to the present to consider and argue for different ways to fill in the gaps of our historical knowledge in re-creating the exhibition in compelling and historically appropriate ways.

Jenny Anger was a participant in the 2015 Digital Bridges Summer Institute and a Digital Bridges faculty-student summer collaborative grant at Grinnell. On this project, she has collaborated with David Neville of the Grinnell Digital Liberal Arts Collaborative; Reuben Vyn of the Digital Bridges grant; Grinnell students Eliza Harrison, James Marlow, Rebekah Rennick, Sonja Spain, and Lauren Toppeta; and Grinnell Image Curator Karen Hueftle-Worley. Anger is further developing this project in partnership with Joyce Tsai of the University of Iowa as part of a Digital Bridges Pedagogy Grant.