Gaining Recognition for Critical Theory 407with Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the patron and connoisseur of the arts.
Kahnweiler later presented him with a folder of graphics by Picasso.
Other acquaintances included Frederick Goldbeck, the conductor,
music critic and author, whom he had known since the 1920s, René
Leibowitz, the conductor and music writer,^214 as well as Lucien
Goldmann, the Marxist literary sociologist. As early as November 1956,
he gave three lectures at the Sorbonne and the Faculté des lettres
et sciences humaines, one on the experiential contents of Hegelian
philosophy, the second on the sociology of music and the third on
the relations between sociological theory and social research. Three
years later, on the initiative of the French Germanist Robert Minder,
he was invited to speak at the Collège de France. He gave three late
afternoon lectures, using material from the course he had been giving
on ‘Ontology and Dialectics’ in Frankfurt during the winter semester
of 1960–1.^215 Adorno’s lectures, which he gave in French, were evid-
ently well attended. Among others, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean
Wahl were present, as was Robert Minder, of course, as well as other
acquaintances from the French metropolis,^216 including Roger Caillois,
George Friedemann and Frederick Goldbeck.
Adorno’s friendships with writers and artists were strikingly numer-
ous. One instance in 1957 was his friendship with Hans Günter Helms,
the composer and musicologist born in 1932 who worked with Heinz-
Klaus Metzger, Dieter Schnebel and Gottfried Michael König, and later
with John Cage. Adorno was more interested in his experiments in the
realm of ‘language music’ than in his sociological attempts at a critique
of the ideology of West German society.^217 Adorno was receptive to
Helms’s musical and literary work because he perceived it as a set of
aesthetic experiments with the similarities of music to language. Above
all, he regarded it as proof of something that ever since his pioneering
lecture at the Berlin Academy of Arts in July 1966 he had described as
the ‘erosion, fraying [Verfransung] of the arts’.^218 In 1960, when Helms
gave a public reading of his literary production ‘FA: M’AHNIESGWOW’
in Cologne,^219 Adorno was one of the few who were in a position to
provide an introduction to the artist’s work. The expectation that one
should be able to understand avant-garde art like a foreign language
turns out, according to Adorno, to be an illusion.^220 What is decisive is
‘the co-execution [Mitvollzug, i.e., by the reader/listener as well as the
author] of the tensions sedimented in the work of art’.^221 This is con-
nected with the contingent, improvised elements of the modern work of
art that exploits such features to create free space for itself.^222 Our task
as consumers of art is to use our ears to compose a piece of music again,
to use our eyes to paint a picture for the second time, to use our linguis-
tic sense to re-create a poem. At the same time, he again put forward
the argument that the modern work of art tells the truth about society
‘all the more accurately, the less it takes society as its subject’. In the
modern work of art, the tension between expression and meaning is not