“In her lyrical examination of Richard Riemerschmid's beautiful, lively, and prescient objects, Freyja Hartzell restores to history a titan of modern design.”
Elizabeth Otto, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History, The University at Buffalo, State University of New York; author of Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics
“Freyja Hartzell's book is a brilliant re-reading of the early years of German modernism, using Richard Riemerschmid's prewar designs to explore how changing ideas about objects themselves contributed to new ways of making and thinking. Hartzell offers us a novel, historically grounded history of modernism, at the same time challenging long-established beliefs about what it meant to be modern in late Wilhelmine Germany.”
Christopher A. Long, School of Architecture, University of Texas at Austin; author of The New Space: Movement and Experience in Viennese Modern Architecture
“Freyja Hartzell's pioneering study examines Richard Riemerschmid's uncanny, seemingly animated, designed objects in relation to empathy theory, emergent psychoanalytic concepts, and to biological and art historical discourses. By making visible the paradoxes of Riemerschmid–iconoclast and historicist; avant-gardist and commercial designer; progressive and nationalist–Hartzell offers a significant rethinking of modernism itself.”
Tim Barringer, Yale University Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art, Yale University; co-editor of On the Viewing Platform: The Panorama from Canvas to Screen, with Katie Trumpener
“By dissecting the design production of a single artist across scales—from beer mugs to chairs, dresses to furnished rooms—this erudite book retraces artifacts through theories of empathy, vitalism, and animation, while simultaneously proposing a radical understanding of Sachlichkeit as lively thingliness.”
Spyros Papapetros, Associate Professor, Princeton University; author of On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life
