Fascination with Rhythm

In the 1960s, several young artists --most notably Andy Warhol and California's Bruce Conner -- have abandoned the paint tube for the film can, leading their fans to hail the underground cinema as the birth of "a new art form." Rebirth would be more like it. The first artists to experiment with film were the Dadaists and surrealists in the 1920s, including Duchamp and Man Ray. The most inventive of the lot was a film maker who, as an artist, is all but unknown in the U.S.

He is Germany's Hans Richter, 79, and his mastery of the motion-picture medium has long been acknowledged by directors from Fellini to Jean-Luc Godard. In recent years, Richter's unmoving pictures have also been gaining new attention, and they are featured in an exhibit of more than 80 Richter drawings, paintings, collages and films at Manhattan's Finch College Museum. Coupled with a smaller display at the Byron Gallery, the show provides a unique opportunity to see how, as the artist puts it, "film and painting overlap with modern art. Modern art gets its ultimate meaning in movement."

Richter considers not visual art but music "my principal inspiration." As a child in Berlin, he became fascinated with the impeccable synthesis of logic and rhythm found in the fugues of J. S. Bach. His rhythmically fragmented paintings of musicians made under the cubist-futurist influence around 1914, show him striving for a visual emulation of Bach's counterpoint.

Invalided out of the Kaiser's army in 1916, Richter joined up with the anarchistic Dadaists in Zurich. Nonetheless, his basic predilection for order made him equally sympathetic to the constructivists. In his "scroll paintings," he experimented with a constructivist image, repeated with variations, along a long panel. From there, it was only a step, in 1921, to Rhythm 21, one of the first art films made.

Rhythm 21 consisted of squares, hypnotically regrouping themselves into evolving sets of Mondrians. Later films employed surrealistic glass eyes and bowler hats skittering through the air. An outspoken opponent of Nazism, Richter was forced to flee Germany and emigrated to the U.S., where he produced Dreams That Money Can Buy, a surrealist fantasy starring his fellow emigres Duchamp and Leger.

A resident of Connecticut since 1941, Richter winters in Switzerland, where he is currently hospitalized with pneumonia. But he still insists that he is unhappy only when he cannot work. His current style: rhythmic, wavelike white-on-white bas-reliefs, ambiguously titled Pro and Contra.

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