Der Sturm der Bilder: Zerstörte und zerstörende Kunst von der Antike bis in die Gegenwart 9783050089591, 9783050049038

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DER STURM DER BILDER Zerstörte und zerstörende Kunst von der Antike bis in die Gegenwart

M N E M O S Y N E . S C H R I F T E N DES I N T E R N A T I O N A L E N

WARBURG-KOLLEGS

DER S T U R M DER BILDER Zerstörte und zerstörende Kunst von der Antike bis in die Gegenwart H E R A U S G E G E B E N VON UWE FLECKNER MAIKE S T E I N K A M P UND HENDRIK ZIEGLER

Akademie Verlag

INHALT

Vorwort

1

Produktive Zerstörung Konstruktion und Dekonstruktion eines Forschungsgebiets Uwe Fleclcner / Maike Steinkamp / Hendrik Ziegler

ZERSTÖRUNG ALS POLITISCHER UND SCHÖPFERISCHER AKT 15

Aus dem Gedächtnis verbannt Funktion und Ästhetik zerstörter Bildnisse Uwe Fleckner

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Das Kunstwerk als Beute Raub, Re-Inszenierung und Restitution in der römischen Antike Susann Holz

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Der »Vandaliste« und sein Werk Bildakte der Zerstörung und Befreiung in der Französischen Revolution Godehard Janzing

IKONOKLASMUS KULTURELLER KONTEXTE 77

Continuity and Destruction Quatremère de Quincy and History Jesper Rasmussen

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Re-contextualizing Holy Images Pavel Florensky's Reaction to Lenin's »Plan for Monumental Propaganda« Clemena Antonova

ARCHITEKTUR ALS OBJEKT VON ZERSTÖRUNG UND UMGESTALTUNG

119 Targeting Architecture Iconoclasm and the Asymmetry of Conflicts Dario Gamboni

137

Des Kolosseums neue Kleider Nachantike Nutzungen des flavischen Amphitheaters Erik Wegerhoff

155 Das Paradoxon der doppelten Zerstörung Zur Neukonzeption des Magdeburger Domchores um 1220 Andreas

177

Waschbüsch

»Ausmerzung durch Umgestaltung« Das Haus Arnold Zweig und seine Entmodernisierung im »Dritten Reich« Anke Blümm

KÜNSTLER ZERSTÖREN KUNST UND WELT

197

Barbaren des 20. Jahrhunderts Avantgardistische Kunstmilitanz und die Gewalt des Ersten Weltkriegs Hanno Ehrlicher

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Indifferent Destruction The Tension between Subject and Object in German Dadaism Maria Stavrinaki

237 Zerbrochene Transparenz Das Zerschlagen von Glas als künstlerischer Akt bei Adolf Luther, Jesse Magee und Pipilotti Rist Anja Kregeloh

253

Register

VORWORT

Mit dem vorliegenden Band hält der Leser die erste Veröffentlichung einer neuen Institution wissenschaftlicher Nachwuchsförderung in Händen, die 2006 unter dem Namen Internationales Warburg-Kolleg eingerichtet wurde. Veranstaltet vom Kunstgeschichtlichen Seminar der Universität Hamburg und angesiedelt am dortigen Warburg-Haus bietet es jüngeren Kolleginnen und Kollegen die Möglichkeit, über einen längeren Zeitraum hinweg an einem gemeinsamen Thema zu arbeiten; an einem Thema, das erst durch den konkreten intellektuellen Austausch innerhalb zweier Kollegwochen, die Anfang und Abschluss des jeweiligen Themenjahres markieren, sein endgültiges und - hoffentlich - scharfes Profil gewinnt. Das Echo auf diese pointierte und daher intensive Form wissenschaftlicher Zusammenarbeit hat seit der ersten Ausschreibung des Warburg-Kollegs alle auch noch so hohen Erwartungen übertroffen: Bewerbungen aus der ganzen Welt demonstrieren seither das wachsende Bedürfnis nach Formen globalen Wissenstransfers, und die Kollegiatinnen und Kollegiaten haben durch oft genug unerwartete thematische wie methodische Ansätze aus unterschiedlichen nationalen und wissenschaftsgeschichtlichen Perspektiven dazu beigetragen, den tatsächlichen intellektuellen Umfang der in den Blick genommenen Themen als Gegenstandsbereiche der Kunstgeschichte zu bestimmen. Das Interesse an künstlerischen Phänomenen des Bildersturms hat sich in den letzten Jahren maßgeblich verschoben. Zunehmend setzt sich die Erkenntnis durch, dass es sich bei

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ikonoklastíschen Handlungen von der Antike bis in die Gegenwart - dem Kollegthema des Jahres 2007 - nicht allein um destruktive, bildauslöschende Praktiken handeln kann. Vielmehr wird nun der oft genug »schöpferische« Charakter dieser besonderen Rezeptionsform von Werken der Bildenden Kunst erkannt und immer genauer erfasst: von der damnatio memoriae, also der willentlichen, allerdings selten vollständigen Auslöschung des bildlichen Andenkens an einen Menschen, über den Kunstraub nicht nur als gezielte Demütigung eines Kriegsgegners, sondern auch als bewusste Demonstration politischer oder kultureller Überlegenheit, bis hin zu Transformationsprozessen und Funktionsveränderungen, wie sie sich etwa aus einer planmäßigen Musealisierung oder aus der Überformung ästhetisch, politisch oder religiös umkämpfter Bauwerke ergeben können. Auch die moderne und zeitgenössische Kunst, in der metaphorische und tatsächliche »Zerstörung« zum Bestandteil ihrer Arbeitstechniken und Vorgehensweisen erhoben werden kann, trägt in entscheidendem Maß dazu bei, Beschädigung, Vernichtung oder Deformierung immer auch als produktiven, kreativen und performativen Akt eigener ästhetischer, politisch-gesellschaftlicher oder weltanschaulicher Dimension ernst- und wahrzunehmen. Die Herausgeber haben ihre Schriftenreihe programmatisch unter den Titel »Mnemosyne« gestellt. Neben der Reverenz an den Gründer der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg - deren ovaler, die konzentrierte Arbeit überaus fördernder Lesesaal den geeigneten Ort für wissenschaftliche Begegnungen dieser Art bildet - soll damit auf das kulturelle Gedächtnis aufmerksam gemacht werden, das als unentbehrliche Grundlage aller historischen Wissenschaften dient: Mit dem »Sturm der Bilder«, aber auch mit den noch folgenden Bänden des Internationalen Warburg-Kollegs ist in diesem Sinne durchaus eine Archäologie kunsthistorischer Gegenstände beabsichtigt, ein nach und nach aufdeckendes Betrachten vielschichtiger, oft palimpsesthafter Phänomene, was auch durch die zwar gegenstandslose, gleichwohl assoziationsreiche Umschlaggestaltung der Schriftenreihe zum Ausdruck gebracht werden soll, die wir der Hamburger Grafikerin Gitti Krogel verdanken. Unser Dank gilt in erster Linie den Kollegiatinnen und Kollegiaten, die durch ihre Aufsätze, insbesondere aber durch ihre engagierte Arbeit im Warburg-Haus den Erfolg des Kollegs überhaupt erst möglich gemacht haben. Martin Warnke, einer der Pioniere der kunsthistorischen Arbeit an Themen des Bildersturms, hat gemeinsam mit ihnen eine überaus anregende Diskussionsrunde zur Geschichte des Ikonoklasmus und seiner Erforschung bestritten. Zudem konnten mit Diane H. Bodard und Dario Gamboni zwei Gastredner gewonnen werden, die sich intensiv mit Zerstörung von Kunst und Zerstörung als künstlerischem Verfahren beschäftigt haben. Hanno Ehrlicher war dankenswerter Weise dazu bereit, mit seinem Beitrag eine empfindliche Lücke innerhalb der kollegialen Themenreihe zu schließen. Größte Anerkennung gebührt auch Maike Steinkamp und Hendrik Ziegler sowie Matthias Krüger und Isabella Woldt, die das Wagnis dieser neuen Form von Nachwuchsförderung mit getragen haben. Marianne Pieper und Hartmut Halfmeier haben die administrative und finanzielle Planung des Warburg-Kollegs mit sicherer Hand bestritten, der Verein der Freunde und Förderer des Kunstgeschichtlichen Seminars hat zur Finan-

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zierung der vorliegenden Publikation beigetragen. Daß diese neue Form der Nachwuchsförderung mit den dazu notwendigen Personalmitteln ausgestattet wurde, verdanken wir der langjährigen und großzügigen Unterstützung durch die Claussen-Simon-Stiftung, Essen. Für ihr umsichtiges Korrektorat der englischsprachigen Beiträge geht unser Dank an David Kim und Sarah McGavran. Auch das Institut Français in Hamburg hat das Kolleg seit seiner Gründung durch Reisestipendien unterstützt, namentlich seinem Direktor JeanPierre Tutin sowie Brigitte Zinke und Valérie Le Vot ist dafür zu danken. Und nicht zuletzt gilt unser herzlicher Dank der Aby-Warburg-Stiftung, ihrem Beirat und ihrem Vorstand. Gerade in einer Zeit, in der die Aktualität von Joseph Alois Schumpeters These einer »schöpferischen Zerstörung« wirtschaftlicher Zusammenhänge wieder einmal vehement unter Beweis gestellt wird, hat sich die Stiftung ohne zu zögern dazu entschlossen, einen nicht unerheblichen Teil ihrer finanziellen Mittel in den Dienst der gemeinsamen Sache zu stellen. Max Warburg hat darüber hinaus mit einer großzügigen Zuwendung sein Vertrauen in den Erfolg des Vorhabens zum Ausdruck gebracht; ein Vertrauen, dem sich der vorliegende Band hoffentlich würdig erweisen wird. Hamburg, 6. Juni 20io

VORWORT

Uwe Fleckner

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PRODUKTIVE Z E R S T Ö R U N G Konstruktion und Dekonstruktion eines Forschungsgebiets UWE F L E C K N E R / MAIKE STEINKAMP / HENDRIK Z I E G L E R

Destruction leads to a very rough road But it also breeds creation Red Hot Chili Peppers: Californication, 1999

Überformung als künstlerische Strategie »Mann mit Spitzbart von Göbbels prämiert von Hitler angekauft«. Mit diesen Worten kommentierte Willi Baumeister eine von ihm um 1941 überarbeitete Postkarte, auf der ursprünglich eine Reproduktion von Adolf Zieglers Gemälde Göttin der Kunst von 1938 zu sehen war |Abb. i|. Auf den nackten Körper der in antikisch gemeinter Pose und mit ebensolchen Attributen dargestellten Frau hatte der zu dieser Zeit von den Nationalsozialisten als »entartet« diffamierte Maler skizzenhaft mit schwarzem Filzstift ein männliches Gesicht gezeichnet und dabei die motivische Vorgabe des »Reichsschamhaarmalers« Ziegler höhnisch zweckentfremdet. Nicht ohne Grund traf es dabei die Göttin der Kunst, mit deren Entstellung Baumeister einen ironischen Kommentar auf das im »Dritten Reich« propagierte Kunst- und Frauenideal sowie auf die nationalsozialistische Kunstpolitik insgesamt formulierte. Ganz bewusst zerstörte Baumeister mit seinem künstlerischen Eingriff das Werk des verhassten Kollegen - beziehungsweise den medialen Stellvertreter dieses Werks - und schuf gerade dadurch eine neue Bildaussage; nicht jedoch ohne ausdrücklich Bezug auf den ursprünglichen Kontext des Gemäldes zu nehmen, diesen kritisch in Frage zu stellen und zu persiflieren. Die Überarbeitung durch Baumeister ist demnach nicht nur als Angriff auf die konservativ-akademische Maltradition der Nationalsozialisten zu charakterisieren, sondern kann gleichsam als ein Aufbegehren gegen den von ihnen systematisch betriebenen Bilder-

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Xconcours publia in Revolutionary France, 1791-1795, in: The Oxford Art Journal, X, 1/1987, pp. 15-43. 2 His reform plans have been published in Quatremère de Quincy: Considérations sur les arts du dessin en France. Suivies d'un plan d'Académie, ou d'Ecole publique, et d'un système d'encouragement, Paris 1791. 3 Martha Woodmansee has applied this perspective on the aesthetics of Friedrich von Schiller (17591805). See Martha Woodmansee: The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics, New York 1994. Another rewarding methodology to which this article adheres to some extent is Michel Foucault's discourse analysis. See Michel Foucault: Les mots et les Choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines, Paris 1966 and id.: L'Archéologie du savoir, Paris 1969. 4 Andrew McClellan: Inventing the Louvre - Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1999, p. 114 and pp. 116-117. 5 Quoted from ibid., p. 116 (French original in: Moniteur universelle, 3 Vendemaire III (24 September 1794))· 6 According to André Gob there is reason to believe that not all of the objects were taken by simple application of force. Numerous art works were handed over as a result of negotiations, and their former owners were not always eager to get them back after the fortune of war had changed. See André Gob: Des musées au-dessus de tout soupçon, Paris 2007, p. 113. 7 The Louvre opened as the Muséum Français, and was rebaptized the Musée central des arts in January 1797; see McClellan 1999, p. 95 and p. 125. It housed works belonging to the church, the royal family and individuals that had been confiscated from the beginning of the revolution. Quatremère played an important role in restoring some of the works to the church after the revolution. For the narration of the events leading to the integration of the Italian art works into the collections of the Musée central des arts, I rely on: McClellan 1999. McClellan's study also has the great merit of relating the long prehistory of the idea of establishing a national museum in France. 8 Quatremère de Quincy: Lettres sur le prejudice qu'occasionneroient aux Arts et àia Science, le déplacement des monumens de l'art de l'Italie, le démembrement de ses Ecoles, et la spoliation de ses Collections, Galeries, Musées,ftc.,Paris 1796. All references to this text are made to its 1836 edition, which has been reprinted in Jean-Louis Déotte (ed.): Considérations morales sur la destination des ouvrages de l'art, Paris 1989, pp. 187-250. Edouard Pommier has retraced the publication history of the Lettres sur le prejudice... in his foreword to one of the two 1989 editions of this text. See Édouard Pommier: La Révolution le destin des œuvres d'art, in: id. (ed.) : Lettres à Miranda sur le déplacement des monuments de l'art de l'Italie, Paris 1989, pp. 5-83. According to Pommier, Quatremère would have written his letters in hiding. Not only did Quatremère's letters provoke commentary from parts of the established press, they were also followed up by a petition signed by fifty artists which was submitted to the Directoire 29 Thermidor IV (16 August 1796). Approximately three months later, 9 Brumaire V (30 October 1796), a counter petition signed by thirty seven artists made its way to the same institution. Both are printed in Pommier 1989.

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9 While Quatremère wrote on art in his letters, Miranda would have reflected on constitutional issues. Thus, Quatremère sums up one of Miranda's letters as a demonstration of the fact that »l'esprit de conquête dans une république est entièrement subversif de l'esprit de liberté« [»in a republic the spirit of conquest is entirely opposed to the spirit of freedom«]. See Quatremère 1796, p. 190, Quatremère's italics. Translations are the author's, unless otherwise specified. 10 Quatremère frequently describes art as a plant. 11 »It is our conviction that it is the state rather than the soil which defines man.« Quoted from Pommier 1989, p. 51. 12 Quatremère believed that art was invented in a process of productive degeneration of the Egyptian hieroglyph, when the Greeks started taking the sign for what it represented thus transforming a system of abstract signs into representative figures. This implies that for Quatremère art is a very basic form of sign making and not the surplus of bourgeois society. See Quatremère 1791, pp. 29-30 and id.: Sur l'Idéal dans les Arts du Dessin, in Archives littéraires de l'Europe ou mélanges de littérature, d'histoire et de philosophie, VI/1805, pp. 385-405, VII/1805, pp. 3-37, VII/1805, pp. 289-337. 13 Quatremère had already presented his theory of necessity in a somewhat more detailed and markedly more Rousseauist version. See Quatremère 1791. According to Quatremère, a too high degree of civilization had rendered art unnatural to France. The damage having been done, though, art could and should be cultivated through a system of institutions that were entirely unnecessary in the ideal Greek society. 14 Quatremère explicitly adheres to the ideal of the Republic of the Arts. See Quatremère 1796, p. 191. 15 Quatremère 1796, p. 207 [»The true museum of Rome of which I speak is composed of statues, colossi, temples, obelisks, triumphal columns, thermal baths, circuses, amphitheatres, triumphal arcs, tombs, stucco, frescos, low reliefs, inscriptions, fragments of ornaments, construction materials, furniture, tools, etc., etc.; but it is equally composed of places, sites, mountains, quarries, antique roads, the location of ruined towns, geographical relations, the connections between all things, memories, local traditions, surviving customs. Parallels and comparisons that can only occur within the country itself.«] 16 For another expression of Quatremère's scientific project being bound up to a general history and not just the history of art see Quatremère 1796, p. 201. 17 Quatremère makes use of the metaphors of life and death when discussing art's role in society. See, for example, Quatremère: Considérations morales sur la destination des ouvrages de l'art, ou de l'influence de leur emploi sur le genie et le gout de ceux qui les produisent ou qui les jugent, et sur le sentiment de ceux qui en jouissent et en reçoivent les impressions, Paris 1815, reprinted in Déotte 1989, p. 50. 18 Stanley J. Idzerda: Iconoclasm during the French Revolution, in: American Historical Review, 60/1954. pp· 13-14. 19 Ibid., p. 13. 2 0 Ibid., p. 26. 21 Quatremère 1815, p. 39 [»From this stems the pernicious habit of appreciating nothing but that which corresponds to some perfect abstraction, accepting no flaws, not taking into account their reasons that pardon and sometimes even justify what is thought of as a mistake, but would have been admired had the places and the circumstances been taken into consideration.«] Quatremère also criticizes the specialization of the art amateur and scolds art criticism on the same premises. See Quatremère 1815, p. 42.

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2 2 Ibid., p. 48. 2 3 Quatremère 1796, p. 224. 2 4 Ibid., pp. 243sq. 2 5 Ibid., p. 200 [»That will be the death of the goose that lays the golden eggs.«] 2 6 An example of the Marxist reading can be found in Daniel J. Sherman: Quatremère/Benjamin/Marx: Art Museums, Aura, and Commodity Fetishism, in: id. and Irit Rogoff (ed.): Museum Culture. Histories, Discourses, Spectacles, Minneapolis 2000, pp. 123-143. 2 7 In his Considérations sur les arts du dessein en France... Quatremère explicitly claimed that the fine arts (painting, sculpture and architecture) were beneficial to the national economy on two accounts: They stimulate the businesses of a number of suppliers working in the mechanical arts; all of the nation's industries benefit from the reputation of superior fine arts. See Quatremère 1791, p. 64. 2 8 See Quatremère 1815, p. 45. Schneider has pointed out that the Considérations morales... should be read in the context of Quatremère's campaign to restore art works stolen from the churches during the revolution. Specifically, Alexandre Lenoir's (1761-1839) Musée des Monuments français was threatened by this initiative and was closed in 1816. See René Schneider: L'Esthétique classique chez Quatremère de Quincy (1805-1825), Paris 1910, p. 104. 2 9 The overall scheme of this abuse of history is well known. In this case the presupposition of vulgar Marxism of a harmonious past being wrecked by the changes introduced by an economy based on the free market resonates neatly with Quatremère's own history of art. This contributes to making Marxism and Quatremère a convincing - and therefore suspicious - fit. 3 0 Cited after George-Marie Raymond: De la peinture considérée dans ses effets sur les hommes en général et de son influence sur les mœurs et le gouvernement des peuples, Paris 1799, p. 1. 31 The first of two volumes of Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste was published in 1771 and was succeeded by the second in 1774. A four volume edition was published from 1786 to 1788 and saw several reruns. Extracts of Sulzer's work were reprinted, without Sulzer's permission, in a supplement to Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert (ed.): Supplément à l'Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers [Paris 1776], Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 1967, vol. 1, »Beaux-Arts« under »Art«, pp. 587-596. Quatremère refers to Sulzer. See Quatremère: Essai sur la nature, les buts et les moyens de l'imitation dans les beaux-arts, Paris 1823, p. vi. 3 2 Johann Georg Sulzer: »Künste; Schöne Künste«, in: id: Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste, 4. vol., Leipzig 1793, vol. 3, pp. 72-95. 3 3 Ibid., p. 86. 3 4 Raymond 1799, p. 241 [»The culture and the perfection of the arts presuppose that its people was constituted a long time ago. That it has its own customs, habits, and a national character. As everything else the productions of art derive their character from that of the nation; having become mirrors reflecting every detail of and therefore strengthening its taste, habits, and opinions, the art productions consolidate the national character to which they owe their existence: it functions as an effect working back on its cause thus corroborating what it has received by giving it back.«] 3 5 1 rely on Elisabeth Décultot: Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Enquête sur la genèse de l'historié de l'art, Paris 2000. She refers to Johann Joachim Winckelmann: Erläuterung der Gedanken von der Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerey und Bildhauerkunst; und Beantwortung des

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Sendschreibens über diese Gedanken, in: Helmut Pfotenhauer et al. (ed.): Frühklassizismus. Position und Opposition: Winckelmann, Mengs, Heinse, Frankfurt am Main 1995, p. 98, as well as id.: Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, Mainz 1993, p. 35. 3 6 Décultot2ooo, p. 167. 3 7 In Museums in the German Art World From the End of the Old Regime to the Rise ofModernism James J. Sheehan writes: »Significantly, he [Winckelmann] imagined the best foundation for such a project as an ideal museum containing all the works of Greek art; after each object had been examined (by the eye and understandings it would be possible to establish the nature of beauty once and for all.« James J. Sheehan: Museums in the German Art World From the End of the Old Regime to the Rise ofModernism, Oxford 2000, p. 13. Sheehan refers to Carl Justi: Winckelmann und seine Zeitgenossen, Cologne 1956, vol. 3, p. 199. 3 8 On this aspect of Winckelmann's destination, see Décultot 2000, pp. 148-149 and Alex Potts: Flesh and the Ideal. Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History, London 2000, pp. 47-66. 3 9 Quatremère de Quincy: Le Jupiter Olympien ou L'art de la sculpture antique considéré sous un nouveau point de vue [Paris 1814], Paris 1815, pp. iii-iv. [»But this vast gap that time and destruction have left between the ancients and ourselves will soon give us back the hope of making ever new discoveries, and return to us the illusion of infinity that our soul needs. From this stems this everaroused and unfulfilled ambition; from this stems this lust, this desire that we have for the knowledge and the pleasures of the peoples that preceded us.«] 4 0 According to Potts, the increasing knowledge of historical science led to a simultaneous radicalisation of and split in the ideal of Antiquity. On the one hand, like Raymond, certain Jacobins thought that the ideal could be realized as a moral destination. On the other hand, more conservative minded voices were of the opinion that the ideal could at best constitute an interiorised ethical ideal for the individual. See Alex Potts: Political Attitudes and the rise ofHistoricism in Art Theory, in: Art History, vol. 1,2/1978, pp. 191-213. This split is constitutive of the whole of modernist aesthetics as it is expressed in Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Friedrich Schiller's (1759-1805) works. 4 1 Quatremère also qualifies the displacement of the Venus of Milo as a »heureuse exportation« [»fortunate exportation«]. Quatremère de Quincy: Sur la statue antique de Venus découverte dans l'ile de Milo en 1820 ; transportée à Paris, par M. le Marquis de Rivière, ambassadeur de France à la cour ottomane, Paris 1821, p. 5. However, Quatremère is much less explicit on the issue of exportation of works of art in this text than in his letters on the Elgin Marbles, making the latter a better object of analysis in the context of this article. 4 2 See Victor Cousin: Du Vrai, du beau, et du bien, Paris 1853, lecture VIII, p. 190 and Edouard Pommier: Winckelmann, inventeur de l'histoire de l'art, Paris 2003, p. 17. Quatremère refers directly to Winckelmann. See Quatremère 1796, p. 208 and id. 1815 [1814], p. i. 4 3 Quatremère de Quincy: Lettres écrites de Londres à Rome et adressées à M. Canova sur les marbres d'Elgin, ou les sculptures du temple de Minerve à Athènes, Rome 1818, reprinted in Déotte 1989, pp. 95-186. Quatremère adresses the question of Winckelmann's periodisation explicitly in his first letter to Canova. He acknowledges having gone to London only reluctantly. For him, as for the rest of Western and Northern Europe, the exhibition of the Elgin marbles constituted a moment of truth. It would finally be visible to everyone how the Parthenon compared to the Laocoon, and thus also whether or not Winckelmann's history could be maintained. 4 4 Quatremère 1818, pp. 109-110 [»While more or less all the remains of Antiquity produce these effects, how much more power will they not exercise over the feeling of the spectator who, in the presence of these ruins of an origin as recommendable as it is certain, must be surrounded by the most seductive prejudices: for here nothing is questionable.«]

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4 5 A modern version of this idea survives in Andreas Huyssen: Escape from Amnesia: the Museum as Mass Medium, in: Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia, New York 1994, pp· 13-36. 4 6 Quatremère 1818, p. 141 [»However, I cannot hide the fact that I like to represent to myself these magnificent works in their primitive state. Unwillingly, my imagination puts them back in place so that they form a whole, complete with their details and all of their accessories. And I believe that any attempt to produce something like this effect would be useful to the arts.«] 4 7 Quatremère had explicitly mentioned the Parthenon in his Lettres sur le prejudice... and criticized an attempt to remove parts of it during the war against the Turks. See Quatremère 1796, pp. 218 f. Schneider defines Quatremère's letters on the Elgin marbles as a turning point in his œuvre. See Schneider 1910, p. 2. 4 8 Déotte 1989, p. 91. Similar arguments had actually been put forward already in the Lettres sur le prejudice.... Quatremère 1796, p. 229. 4 9 Quatremère is very explicit on the differences between the artist and the uninformed. See, for example, Quatremère 1815, p. 34. 5 0 Ibid., pp. 32-33 [»Science is without a doubt one of the means by which the work of Art pleases; without it, Art is incapable of arresting us: But sentiment is another kind of science to be reckoned with without which the work does not only stop pleasing, but science itself displeases.«] 51 Without explicating it, Marie-Noëlle Polino hints at this explanation. See Marie-Noëlle Polino: Nécessité de la morale, moralité de l'émotion : l'œuvre d'art selon Quatremère de Quincy, in: Corpus, Paris 14-15/1990, pp. 177-196. McClellan 1999, p. 201, characterizes Quatremère as a thinker who disregards »the pleasure and intellectual stimulation afforded by close visual engagement with a work of art in a well-tempered environment such as the Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery, London, or the British Art Centre at Yale University. Seemingly, [McClellan continues] there was no room in Quatremère's view of art for the pleasure principle advocated by pre-Enlightenment theorists.« This view is widespread, but does not account for a large part of Quatremère's work. At the conference De la quête des règles au discours sur les fins. Les mutations des discours sur l'art en France dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle (University of Lausanne, 14-16 February 2008), Pascal Griener suggested that the experience of the art theorist/historian deriving pleasure from the isolated art object resembles that of mourning. His pleasure both compensates for and reminds him of the decline of art in post-Greece. 5 2 Anthony Vidier has pointed out that Quatremère enthusiastically describes the museum of architecture set up by the Prince of Biscari and has suggested an inconsistency in Quatremère's œuvre. See Anthony Vidier: The Writing ofthe Walls, Princeton (N.J.) 1987, p. 163. The passage in question is the entry on »Catania«, in Quatremère: Encyclopédie méthodique, Paris 1788, vol. 1, pp. 555-557. However, one should keep in mind the context in which this museum is suggested as well as its nature. In this case, Quatremère is describing a museum of types of architecture containing a collection of fragments in the interest of technical studies. 5 3 Gob 2007, p. 118, has read Quatremère's positions on repatriation and the status of Rome as proof of theoretical inconsistency. Gob's conclusions are somewhat hasty and make little way in terms of providing a hermeneutic insight into Quatremère's writings. But he nonetheless succeeds in pointing out the two central problems in Quatremère's theory. 5 4 Quatremère 1796, p. 222 [»Rome has become to us what Greece was once to Rome.«] Interestingly, the revolutionary »repatriation policy« was at one point justified in similar terms: »Les Romains, en dépouillant la Grèce, nous ont conservé de superbes monuments, imitons-les.« [»By plundering Greece the Romans have preserved superb monuments; we should imitate them.«] A. F. Sergent, citation from

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Pommier 1989, p. 24. Quatremère is even more explicit on the relation between Greece and Rome when he narrates his travels aided by his imagination in Le Jupiter olympien ..., see Quatremère 1815 [1814], p. vij: »Je restituais à Athènes, à Corinthe, à Olympie, à Delphes, ce que d'ignorants Mummius s'étaient approprié; et, vengeant à ma manière le génie des outrages de la force, j'employais Rome à rétablir la Grèce.« [»I gave back to Athens, to Corinth, to Mount Olympus, and to Delphi what ignorant Mummiuses had taken. And I applied Rome to the task of reestablishing Greece, thus avenging genius against the insults of brute force.«] Lucius Mummius (2nd century BC) brutally slaughtered the inhabitants of Corinth in 146 BC, possibly on orders from the senate which he was too weak to resist. He is known for having said to the contractors responsible for the displacement of art works from Corinth to Rome that if they lost or damaged them, they would need to replace them, thus displaying his ignorance of the nature of artistic value (in modernity). 5 5 Quatremère 1815, p. 54 [»The beauty of which I speak grew with all the sympathetic affections related to these images within the imagination. It had its principle in the heart of the artist and its empire in the faith of the spectator; and they reinforced each other mutually with all the illusions of religious belief. Illusions? You ask of me. And what does it matter, I reply, if the artist owes them the capacity to better express beauty and if the spectator owes them the capacity to experience impressions stronger. [...] What reality would be superior to illusions of such efficiency? [...] Half of the force of beauty resides in the faculties of the person who perceives its impressions.«] 5 6 In Le Jupiter Olympien... Quatremère identifies three sources of this reconstruction of the destination; see Quatremère 1815, p. iii: »[...] le pouvoir d'abstraction dont notre esprit est doué« [»[...] the mind's talent for abstraction«]; »ces masses d'édifices qui portent encore jusqu'au ciel la gloire de leur génie« [»the numerous edifices which still carry the glory of their genius high into the sky«]; »mille souvenirs, mille impressions locales« [»a thousand memories, a thousand local impressions«]. These three sources correspond with the art historian, the works themselves, and popular belief and usage of the works, respectively. In Quatremère de Quincy as a Polular Archeologist Michael Greenhalgh demonstrates how Quatremère applies his speculative method with some success in terms of actually predicting details of later archeological findings. Greenhalgh also points out that Quatremère seemed more interested in attempting to reconstruct incomplete monuments than in analyzing those discovered in a more complete state. It is of course tempting to explain this inclination by referring to Quatremère's strong ties to archeology as it was practiced by his predecessors, who were often obliged to speculate on the basis of very little material. See Michael Greenhalgh: Quatremère de Quincy as a Polular Archeologist, in: Gazette des Beaux-Arts, April 1968, pp. 249-256. See also Winckelmann 1993, p. 18. On Quatremère and Caylus, see Décultot 2000, pp. 227-234. 5 7 Quatremère 1815, pp. 208-211, comments directly on his historical method when taking up the Smithean division of labor in connection with knowledge production and privileges Winckelmann's historical method, while acknowledging the merits of Caylus' work. He insists that the results of specialized research needs »une intélligence supérieure et générale« [»a superior and general intelligence«]. Such intelligence should not precede empirical observation, but is necessary to the obtainment of »l'ensemble, qui est la vérité universelle« [»the whole, which is the universal truth«]. And this superior mind does not need to see in order to understand: »C'est pour lui que butine, peut-être sans le savoir, cet essaim de travailleurs, de critiques, de commentateurs« [»Even without their knowledge, it is for him that this swarm of workers, of critics and commentators, gather the pollen«]. 5 8 See Sylvia Lavin: Quatremère de Quincy and the Invention of a Modern Language of Architecture, Cambridge 1992. 5 9 Unfortunately, the interest of Lavin's study is somewhat reduced by her lacking a definition of language and language theory. Thus, these terms become metaphors which signify: A method (for

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Quatremère's theory), an ontological perspective (art is as a language is), and a more general stand-in for linguistic phenomena (a book, for example). It should be underlined, as Hendrik Ziegler has pointed out at the Warburg Kolleg 2007, that Quatremère's conception of history is entirely in line with his neoplatonicism and his ties to freemasonry. I have commented on aspects of Quatremère's neo-platonicism in Jesper Rasmussen: Entre règles et régénération .pour une nouvelle lecture de Quatremère de Quincy, in: Proceedings of the conference De la quête des règles au discours sur les fins. Les mutations des discours sur l'art en France dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle, Lausanne, Paris and Rome, 2008, publication in process. The freemasonic context, however, remains largely unexplored. 6 0 Quatremère 1796, p. 200 [»[...] keep this is to kill art in order to write its history; it is not to write its history, but its epitaph.«] This passage is the final part of the sentence cited in note 25.

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R E - C O N T E X T U A L I Z I N G HOLY I M A G E S Pavel Florensky's Reaction to Lenin's »Plan for Monumental Propaganda«1 CLEMENA ANTONOVA

Iconoclasm as destruction of meaning The re-location of religious art from its original place in monasteries and churches to newly founded public museums and galleries represents a significant aspect of Soviet cultural policy. This paper considers two texts from the early Soviet period, which reveal important moments of the debate on religious art. A case is made that Pavel Florensky's essay The Church Ritual as a Synthesis of the Arts (October 1918) was written in response to Lenin's Plan for Monumental Propaganda (April 1918). The latter was influential in formulating the Soviet position on religious art, which was fundamentally iconoclastic, while Florensky was one of the thinkers in the long line of Eastern Orthodox iconophiles. This interpretation depends on a certain definition of the concept of iconoclasm. Iconoclasm is understood as a philosophically motivated position on the nature of the image rather than a physical destruction of a group or groups of images. According to this understanding, iconoclasm is by no means averse to images as such but to the possibility that the image can represent God. As Alain Besançon has shown, for iconoclasts ranging from those in Byzantium and the Islamic world to Calvin the issue invariably centred on this problem.2 In modern times, this understanding of the image has been revived by Hegel.3 In this school of thought, iconoclasm represents the refusal to accept that a visual representation can »contain« the presence of what is represented, while iconophilia is informed by the belief that, in some sense, the

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image retains an ontological connection with its prototype. The divine image has invariably provided the paradigm for this debate. Like most iconoclastic movements, the Bolsheviks' rise to power was accompanied by acts of physical destruction of monuments associated with the previous regime. However, in their consistent policy of re-contextualization of art the Soviets are most closely reminiscent of developments in France after the Revolution. While this aspect of Soviet policy has not been as systematically studied as the French case, it will be noticed that, in important ways, Bolshevik Russia was recapitulating some of the attitudes of revolutionary France.4 Re-contextualization in both cases represents the attempts at the destruction of meaning rather than the physical obliteration of the objects. In fact, the process of re-contextualization went along with the professed desire for the protection and safe-keeping of works of art deemed of artistic and historical significance. Especially in the Russian case this aim was pursued with a remarkable degree of success, as witnessed by the Soviet achievements in conservation techniques, which were acknowledged in the West as well.5 One of the questions raised by this paper regards the ultimate success or failure of official policies of re-contextualization. There is no doubt that context plays a role in the overall meaning of a work. A radical transformation happened once the holy images, originally belonging to churches and other sacred spaces, found their place in museums. An icon behind a glass, placed among other aesthetic objects in a gallery, does not allow for a number of ritualistic practices one identifies with Eastern Orthodox religious behaviour; it cannot be kissed, it would be highly unusual if a visitor kneels before it and impossible to light candles before it.6 The overt intention is to transform the cult object into an aesthetical one, whereby the image loses exactly its dimension of holy presence and becomes an object of disinterested visual experience. The spectator in the modern gallery is supposed to be »indifferent [...] to the real existence of the object« of representation and is expected to do no more than »play the part of judge in matters of taste«.7 This paper associates itself with a line of post-Kantian, post-Enlightenment criticism which challenges the possibility of a »pure« aesthetical experience, based on notions of disinterestedness and indifference. The fact that people, especially since perestroïka, pray in front of Andrey Rublev's Holy Trinity icon, relocated from its original place in the Lavra of the Trinity in St. Sergiev Posad, Russia's great medieval monastery, to the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, where it can still be seen, reveals an attitude that symbolically transforms the gallery into a religious space |fig.11.8 More importantly, it makes one consider once again the topic of the »power of images«, much discussed recently, as it appears that there is a dimension of the image - no matter whether we term it »presence« or otherwise - that it retains even outside its original context.9 This larger question, regarding the nature of the visual, is only implicit with Lenin and Florensky, as both authors seemed to place an enormous importance on the meaning-formulating capacity of the reception context of an object. Their approaches to the problem of religious art can only be understood in the historical context at the time.

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i Andrey Rublev: Holy Trinity, c. 1410, tempera and gold on wood, 142 χ 114 cm, Moscow, Tretyakov Gallery

Historical background: the Bolsheviks, the Church and the arts This paper is concerned with one specific aspect of early Soviet cultural policy: the decision to remove religious objects considered to be of artistic value from churches and monasteries to museums and galleries. Two interconnected factors are at play in this - the role that the Bolsheviks assigned to art and their attitude to religion. There seems to have been more or less a consensus among the major Bolshevik leaders as to the general aim: religion had to be eradicated and the new Socialist art should take its place. Differences of opinion arose when it came to the implementation of actual cultural policies to attain this end.10 In this sense, while the focus falls on Lenin's position in his Plan for Monumental Propaganda it should be kept in mind that there were other views within the Party. As it would become clear, Lenin's thinking on art was comparatively conservative, while his ideas about the manner in which to deal with religion changed according to historical circumstances.

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The position of Marxist-Leninism on religion and the Church can be summarized in the popular expression, which both Marx and Lenin used: »Religion is the opium of the people.«11 Already in 1905, Lenin had explained that »religion teaches those who toil in poverty all their lives to be resigned and patient in this world, and consoles them with the hope of reward in heaven.« Thus he concludes: »As for those who live upon labour of others, religion teaches them to be charitable in earthly life, thus providing a cheap justification for their whole exploiting existence and selling them at a reasonable price tickets to heavenly bliss. Religion is the opium of the people. Religion is a kind of spiritual intoxicant, in which the slaves of capital drown their humanity and their desires for some sort of decent human existence«.12 In this view, religion, a remnant of feudalism, becomes the ideological weapon of capitalism, just as the Church is the bastion institution of the old order.13 Therefore, religion can have no place in a Socialist society and Lenin, by no means, intended to allow it one. However, what was to be done about religion? Marxist-Leninist theory holds that with the development of economic forces religion will naturally disappear. As Lenin says, religion will be »steadily relegated to the rubbish heap by the normal course of economic development«.14 Religion should be eradicated not by »punishment and repression, but with good schools, Communist propaganda, and Socialist economics«.15 Lenin was aware of the huge importance of religion among a people who commonly referred to their country as »Holy Russia«. Therefore, he fully realized the necessity of providing a substitute to fill in the place of religion and this is why art plays such a crucial role in his project for a new society. Up to 1922, the policy of the Soviet government followed a more or less soft line in regard to the Church. On 26 January 1918 a decree of the separation of the church from the state and the school from the church was issued. Just as in the aftermath of the French Revolution, the property of the Church was nationalized but, for the most part, this only legalized seizures of land that the peasants had already conducted on their own.16 In the meantime, the Russian Patriarch Tikhon anathemized the Bolshevik government and called on the faithful »not to commune with such outcasts of the human race«.17 He led protest demonstrations through the streets of Moscow and openly condemned the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk with which the new Soviet state had withdrawn from the First World War on extremely harsh terms. The Patriarch was placed under house arrest but not much further action was taken. As Harvey Fireside has pointed out in his study, »the government's devastating response was to ignore his challenge«.18 The Bolsheviks had another, much more urgent problem on their hands which threatened their very existence. Up to 1920, they were heavily engaged in the Civil War (1918-1921) against the White forces. It was well-known that many of the clergy were sympathetic to the White cause and some were even fighting in their ranks. The Bolsheviks won and in the meantime the ground was laid for a charge that became common two years later: the priests and their sympathizers were associated with counter-revolutionary activity.19

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Soviet ideologues were quick to take advantage of another historical circumstance. The country, already devastated by both internal and external wars, was hit by a famine with almost unprecedented force.20 On 26 June 1921 the government came out with a warning that 25 million people in the Volga region faced starvation. Help was asked of foreign organizations and a number of measures were launched. It is in this context that the confiscation of church valuables was undertaken. According to Jonathan Daly, »the famine of 1921-1922 served to justify an assault«, and »without the famine, the Bolshevik government surely would not have called for the confiscation of the church treasures in 1922«.21 This is probably true in the sense that the confiscation could have been put off for some time, but it was inevitable. Lenin's Plan for Monumental Propaganda had clearly implied it already in 1918 with respect to religious art. The genuine crisis before the Soviet government also represented an opportunity for discrediting the Church which was too good to be missed. The authorities set out to expropriate all movable property of value to use it in the struggle against famine. In December 1921 Trotsky joined Litvinov to coordinate the sale of this property abroad in order to get funds and food for the hunger-stricken provinces. The press, in the meantime, was busy reporting on the scale of the crisis, which had led to incidents of cannibalism. In this atmosphere, any unwillingness on part of the Church to surrender valuables could be easily interpreted as counter-revolutionary activity, sabotaging the new regime. That there was such unwillingness is undeniable, though not because the Church refused to help in the famine relief on principle. On 6 January 1922, the Patriarch encouraged believers to donate valuables, although not consecrated items. The following month he endorsed this statement by declaring as sacrilegious the surrender of consecrated vessels and threatened those guilty of the offence with excommunication. Throughout March, there were cases of popular resistance to the removal of church property all over Russia.22 The government took the view that these incidents had been organized by the high clergy and »was able to mobilize vast public resentment against the Church, which found itself in the uncomfortable position of apparently condemning millions of innocents to a cruel death by starvation merely for the sake of a few ancient rules«.23 At this point, there was a shift in Soviet policy on the Church, which up to then had refrained from open repression. In the period between the spring of 1922 and the spring of 1923,44 religious leaders were executed and 346 received prison sentences of one to five years on charges of resisting the requisition of church valuables. This policy was openly sanctioned by Lenin in his letter to the Politburo of 19 March 1922, which says that »the larger number of reactionary clergy and bourgeois we are able to execute on these grounds, the better«.24 Clearly, the Bolsheviks had given up relying only on »good schools, Communist propaganda, and Socialists economics«. As has been noticed, »a large portion of the valuable objects seized from churches found their way not to the hungry but into museums«.25 While this proves that the hunger crisis was not the only reason for the confiscation, it is also very much in the spirit of Lenin's general position on art and religion and his notion that in a Socialist society art will take the place of religion.

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Lenin's »Plan for M o n u m e n t a l P r o p a g a n d a « as an instance of i c o n o c l a s t i c p o l i c y

Years later, Anatolii Lunacharsky, who had been head of the Commisariat for the Enlightenment, the institution responsible for implementing cultural and educational policy, remembered a conversation he had had with Lenin in the winter of 1918-1919. Lenin had commented on the role of art »to help fhe education and the bringing up of the new generations« and had cited in this context Ton^naso Campanula's The City of the Sun. The walls of Campanella's Utopian city were covefed with frescoes, which served an educational purpose.26 The ideas that Lenin had discussed with Lunacharsky came out in a concrete form in his Plan for Monumental Propaganda, the main focus of which fell on new works of art which contemporary artists would create in the context of a victorious Socialist revolution. In this sense, it is not surprising that most critical literature on the subject deals with this aspect of Lenin's program.27 What is rarely noticed is the position on the religious art of the past. As Lenin told Lunacharsky, a list needed to be worked out »of those ancestors of Socialism or its theoreticians and fighters, but also outstanding names in philosophy, science, art, etc., who even without having a direct relationship to Socialism, were genuine heroes of culture«.28 Not only are the works of those artists on the list to be preserved, but also - and this is not always noticed - the moment of preservation of some of the art of the past was an important part of the plan. This paper is mainly concerned with works which would fall under the category of »religious art«. Iconoclasm in the narrow sense of the word - the physical destruction of images - was a part of early Soviet policy on art, which went alongside the urge for the creation of new monuments. The decree issued on 12 April 1918 concerns the »demolition of monuments, erected in honour of the tsars and their servants and the creation of projects for monuments of the Russian Socialist Revolution«. Some of the avant-garde, too, enthusiastically welcomed this process which they saw as a creation-destruction dualism and an unprecedented opening for originality and the breaking of artistic canons. A poem by Vladimir Kirillov says in obviously exaggerated terms that: »In the name of tomorrow we will burn Raphael, destroy the museum, and trample over Art«.29 It seems fortunate that this Nietzschean sentiment did not win the day and Lenin in particular was far from sharing it. The demolition of tsarist monuments had always been carried out with the qualification that all those of artistic value should be preserved. As Lenin said to Klara Zetkin, a German Communist, »we must preserve the beautiful, take it as a model, and use it as a starting point, even if it is >oldold