Walden, Herwarth

   born Georg Levin (1878-1941), writer, publisher, and art dealer; chief promoter of Expressionism.* Born to a Berlin* doctor, he studied music* in Florence and at Berlin s Stern Conservatory and won a Liszt stipendium as a pianist. Initially pursuing a career in music composition, he founded the Verein fur Kunst (Society for Art) in 1904, in which young au-thors—for example, Heinrich Mann,* Rainer Maria Rilke, Frank Wedekind, and Else Lasker-Schuler* (Walden's wife during 1901-1911, who convinced him to change his name around 1900)—read their manuscripts. He was employed dur-ing 1908-1910 by the theater* magazine Der neue Weg, which released him as too radical. Committed to the idea that culture is a moral force, he founded Der Sturm in March 1910 as a weekly for art and criticism; it was published until 1932. Sturm's first article, written by the Viennese critic Karl Kraus, contained a statement evocative of German art for two decades: "The world becomes more rational every day, which naturally renders its utter stupidity more and more conspicuous.

   With his background in music and theater, Walden was originally little inter-ested in visual art, but he was soon Berlin s most progressive art connoisseur. Sturm began featuring drawings and paintings in its pages, initially focusing on the work of Oskar Kokoschka* but by 1912 providing reproductions from the Brucke and Blaue Reiter groups. Walden opened the Galerie der Sturm in March 1912 with a Blaue Reiter exhibition and soon was circulating shows to towns and cities throughout Western Europe. Between them, the journal and the gallery formed the hub of many Expressionist, Cubist, and Futurist innovations before, during, and after World War I. While Walden had his rivals—Die Aktion,* edited by Franz Pfemfert; Die weissen Blatter, edited by Rene Schickele*; and Paul Cassirer s Pan - Sturm held its own until 1919 as the center of modern art in Berlin.

   Although Sturm evolved during World War I into a school, a publishing house, a lecture series, and a theater, Walden's influence was short-lived after 1918. He was stretched financially: his journal, a monthly in 1918, became a quarterly in 1924, and the theater, lectures, and school were discontinued. Crit-ical of endeavors such as the Arbeitsrat fur Kunst,* he became increasingly enamored of communism. A member of the Society of Friends of Soviet Russia, he emigrated to Moscow in 1932, where he worked as a language teacher and editor of the emigre periodical Das Wort. He was arrested in March 1941 and died shortly thereafter in prison.

   REFERENCES:Brühl, Herwarth Walden; Long, German Expressionism; Selz, German Expressionist Painting; Weinstein, End of Expressionism.