ABSTRACT
Already from its foundation in 1912, Herwarth Walden's Sturm gallery in Berlin marketed picture-postcards, Künstlerpostkarten, reproducing artworks by avant-garde artists that had exhibited in the Sturm gallery. Given Herwarth Walden's talent for “propaganda,” the production and dissemination of postcards were part of a promotion strategy. The turn of the twentieth century had seen a new vogue for photographic postcards which were produced in large numbers and collected and distributed. Postcards were used as an advertising medium on a large scale by all types of businesses. The postcards translated the original artworks into commonplace objects of everyday life, a process that turned the singular fetish into multiple commodities on paper. In this paper, it is argued that this translation of material was of importance for the dissemination and reception of avant-garde art. Due to the postcards' essential function to be openly circulated, the images they offered were fundamentally intended for widespread dissemination and both public and private display. Reproductions on postcards enabled the public to form their own avant-garde collections. Moreover, the size and materiality of the postcard opened up for a more intimate, but also more mundane, experience of the art object through its reproduction.
