I swear, until this morning I was just going to like and reblog this photo of Warhol and move on. And then the Angel of History started piling rubble on top of rubble on the White House lawn.
Albert Speer was Hitler’s favorite architect, and Andy Warhol loved him. In the early 80s he made multiple paintings of Speer’s Lichtdom, and they seem to exist only in the backgrounds of snapshots of Warhol himself. Though they appeared in a major international exhibition in 1982, they seem to have been ignored by dealers and curators and historians then and since.
At first, the only mentions of Speer and Warhol I can find are of the architect taking hollow comfort in Warhol’s admiration, as in this quote from Marcel Ophül’s 1976 documentary on wartime atrocities, The Memory of Justice:
“Marcel Ophüls: Were you a good architect?
Albert Speer: That’s not so easy to answer. Andy Warhol, for instance, said that he valued my work highly.”
Which was already several years after Inside The Third Reich (1970), Speer’s near 1,000-page, self-rehabilitating memoir came out, and liking his nazi architecture was considered merely edgy and intellectually daring, not fascist, or at least not too fascist.
Actually, there is a primary source: Berlin dealer Volker Diehl helped Warhol get images of Speer’s Lichtdom [which is properly translated as Cathedral of Light, but which is repeatedly translated as Light Dome, which it is not.] From 1981 until 1983 Diehl worked as an assistant to curators Christos Joachimedes and Norman Rosenthal, on a massive, international group show called Zeitgeist, which opened at the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin in October 1982. The premise of Zeitgeist was Joseph Beuys, also painting is not dead, but alive and well in the gigantic works of 45 men and Susan Rothenberg:
[Warhol] came to Berlin in March of 1982. At a meeting, he asked me if I could get him photos of Albert Speer’s architecture from the 1930s. I found a lot of photos in the archives, which we then sent to him.
He used one of the photos which I had found in the Landesarchiv [the State archive] – it was a photo of the Light Dome [Cathedral of Light – red.], which Albert Speer designed in 1934, in Nuremberg.
Speer had used anti-aircraft searchlights, aimed skyward, to create the columns of light. Inspired by this photo, Warhol did a whole series of paintings; he sent me a photo where he is standing in front of one of his first paintings of Speer’s Light Dome [sic]
Diehl told the same story again, slightly differently, and the dates of Warhol’s visit and request—March/April 1982—make me think about either the date of Hoepker’s photo, or the sources of Warhol’s images:
The story with Andy was also very interesting because we were visiting the Gropius Bau in April ’82; the opening was planned for October ’82, and Andy was walking around and then he took me on the side and he said – because he wanted to do special works for the exhibition, like most of the artists, also Beuys did – he said he always admired the architecture of Albert Speer. And if I could get him photographs. At that time there were not many books existing on Albert Speer’s architectural oeuvres. So I went to the Landesbildstelle here and Ullstein archive and I found photographs from the Light Dome and from many other things, which we copied and sent to New York. He used several of the images. One image was the Light Dome [sic] Albert Speer created for the Reichsparteitagsgeländein Nurnberg I think it was ’34, and he used that for a series of works. And when the first one was finished, it wasn’t even put on a stretcher, he sent me an Ektachrome transparency, as a kind of thank you. And I still have it, and it’s hanging in my gallery always in the backroom, reminding me of good old days.
Mhmm. Speer’s Lichtdom was used at Nuremberg from 1934 until 1938, and I think that’s the image in Diehl’s photo above. But the photo up top is Speer deploying the same searchlight concept at the closing ceremony of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. It appeared at the end of Festival of Beauty, Part Two of Leni Riefenstahl’s film Olympia. So it was available.
Of which Warhol was also a fan. Here is Bob Colacello in Holy Terror, on how they celebrated moving to the new Factory at 860 Broadway:
One of our first get-togethers in the new place was a secret lunch in October 1974 for Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s favorite filmmaker, and the Tanzanian foreign minister, organized by Bianca Jagger and Peter Beard. Triumph of the Will and Olympia, Riefenstahl’s documentaries of the 1934 Nuremberg Nazi party conference and the 1936 Berlin Olympics, were recognized classics taught in every film school, but she was still an ostracized and controversial figure, despite the fact that she’d been acquitted of collaboration after the war. Bianca had met her when the London Sunday Times magazine asked the Jaggers to pose for a cover, and Mick flippantly told them he’d only pose for Leni Riefenstahl, thinking they’d never go for it. They did, and Bianca and Leni became fast friends.
…
“She’s great,” he said after she left. “She doesn’t care about politics. She just cares about beauties.” He could have been talking about himself.
You don’t say! Colacello’s book is an incredible and invaluable account of Warhol’s relentless pursuit through the 70s and early 80s of portrait commissions and Interview ads, occasionally interrupted by flashes of desperation for artistic significance. Warhol’s critical appreciation was coming largely from Europe, where aristocrats and industrialists snapped up Mao portraits and hammer & sickle pictures—AND portraits.
When I first tried puzzling out Warhol’s Lichtdom works, I thought they might have been connected to his Shadow paintings, another avenue for expanding his painting practice into abstraction. They may be that, too. But the Lichtdom was just one nazi architectural subject that occupied Warhol in 1981-82: there two more Speer-related projects, which he showed at Zeitgeist, and eight paintings of Trump Tower, which he did not.
Compared to the rest of Warhol’s Zeitgeist series, the Lichtdom pieces are kind of quiet. Above are two large diptychs of the colonnade from Speer’s Berlin Olympic Stadium. Below are three more large-scale works that use two frankly confounding neo-classical images of Friedrich Gilly’s audacious 1797 proposal for a Monument to Friedrich the Great.
And In one of the only reviews I could find that mentioned Warhol’s work, Roberto Calvocoressi called the “bright, synthetic” colors “cool” and “ironic.” I’d say that irony is a hopeful interpretation; Warhol’s flattening screenprint technique and repetition leaves these images hollowed out, transformed, if not reduced, into reproduced information.
The Trump orange triptych on the right is at the Hamburger Bahnhof, where, in 2011, flickr user Wolf wondered why Warhol used this monument proposal. The answer, I think, came from the Getty, which published an English translation of Gilly’s writing; it turns out this audacious, bombastic proposal was a specific favorite of Speer, who made a scale model of it, and used it as the basis of his own vast Hitler-centric reconfiguration of Berlin.
I think the two diptychs with views of the Friedrich memorial through a coffered arch are Speer’s, not Gilly’s, and that it relates to Speer’s image, above, of the Volkshalle, which was to be the center of the Third Reich’s capital, Germania.
The entrance to Gilly’s Friedrich Monument is a giant triumphal—or technically, memorial—arch. You see where this is going. Hitler had sketched out a triumphal arch for himself in 1925, and fourteen years later, Speer unveiled a model of it on his fiftieth birthday.
So while reports dropped of plans to work 20 hours/day with 320-ft cranes in the flight path of National Airport to rush build Trump’s bullshit arch to himself, last night the White House tested the lightshow on its corporate gladiator stage.
Temu Hitler’s Lichtstall, via @separkinson.bskly.social
So I thought this was going to be about Warhol not even being the only artist in Zeitgeist to address Speer’s architecture and Germany’s nazi past—Anselm Kiefer was in the show, too, and Volker Tannert even showed a giant painting of the Lichtdom. Then it felt like it would be a callout of Warhol’s complicity, or his hypocrisy, as he tried, Leni-style, to shun politics for beauty, and ends up recharging nazi architectural spectacle while kissing the rings of the Reagans and Roy Cohn at home and dictators like the Marcoses and the Shah of Iran abroad.
But then, like everything else, it all collapsed into the now, where Warhol’s cravenness, or his irony, reverberates like a cursed oracle. I can’t figure out how to end this, but I guess the point is, it doesn’t?
Related, amazingly, from 2007: Bombardment Periphery Rotterdam, Lichtdom, and Los Angeles Searchlight Wigwam
This also brings back the WTC Towers of Light, which at least one of the creators of was a deep, dyed-in-the-wool, Speer-head, but I have not gotten into that here.