Edgar Wind and Modern Art: In Defence of Marginal Anarchy 9781501341755, 9781501355998, 9781501341748

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Edgar Wind and Modern Art

Edgar Wind and Modern Art In Defence of Marginal Anarchy Ben Thomas

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Ben Thomas, 2020 Ben Thomas has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All quotations from the papers and published works of Edgar Wind are by kind permission of the Literary Executors of the Estate of Edgar Wind. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyright material, and the publisher will be pleased to be informed of any errors and omissions for correction in future editions. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Klee, Paul, Child with a Toy, 1908 © Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Thomas, Ben (Benjamin David Harwood), author. Title: Edgar Wind and modern art: in defence of marginal anarchy / Ben Thomas. Description: London; New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020036656 (print) | LCCN 2020036657 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501341755 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501341748 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501341731 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Art, Modern–20th century. | Wind, Edgar, 1900-1971–Aesthetics. Classification: LCC N6490 .T515 2020 (print) | LCC N6490 (ebook) | DDC 709.04–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036656 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036657 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-4175-5 ePDF: 978-1-5013-4174-8 eBook: 978-1-5013-4173-1 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters

Intellect excludes contradictions; love embraces them.*

Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 56.

*

vi

Contents List of Illustrations Preface and Acknowledgements

ix x

1

In Defence of Marginal Anarchy 1 Edgar Wind (1900–71) 4

2

Art and Anarchy 19 The Polarity of the Symbol 30 Holy Fear 33 Experiment and Metaphysics 37

3

The Tradition of Symbols in Modern Art 41 The Heritage of Baudelaire 42 History of the Monster 52 Picasso and the Atavism of the Mask 58 Religious and Scientific Fallacies – ‘Our Present Discontents’ 67

4

‘Cher Magus’ – Pavel Tchelitchew 77 Cathedrals of Art 83 ‘You Really Are a Magician’ 88 The Feast of the Gods 91 Monstrous Phenomena 97 Method and Microcosm in Leonardo da Vinci 102 Tchelitchew and Leonardo 107

5

‘The Muses’ sterner laws’ – W. H. Auden and Ben Shahn 117 The Irresponsibles 120 The Critical Nature of a Work of Art 122 Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century 126 Klee and Candide 130 Seven Moral Paintings 135 Art and Morals 139 ‘The Truest Poetry Is the Most Feigning’ 147 The Shape of Content 150

Contents

viii

6

‘Certain Forms of Association Neglected Before’ – R. B. Kitaj 157 The Fallacy of Pure Art 162 The Book as Symbol 172 Rosa Luxemburg as Pathosformel 180 Warburg as Maenad – the Reconciliation of Opposites 190 If Not, Not 196

Conclusion

199

Notes Select Bibliography Index

203 235 246

Illustrations 3.1 3.2 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5

5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8

Pavel Tchelitchew (1898–1957), Hide-and-Seek, June 1940–June 1942 Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Sueño y mentira de Franco (Plate 2), 1937 Pavel Tchelitchew (1898–1957), La Fenêtre au bout du monde, 1941 Pavel Tchelitchew (1898–1957), Phenomena, 1936–8 Florine Stettheimer (1871–1944), The Cathedrals of Art, 1942 Giovanni Bellini (c. 1435–1516) and Titian (c.1490–1576), The Feast of the Gods, 1514/29 Jacopo de’ Barbari (c. 1440–1515), Portrait of the Mathematician Lucas Pacioli and Unknown Young Man (maybe Guidobaldo da Montefeltro), 1495 Paul Klee (1879–1940), Child with Toy, 1908 Ben Shahn (1898–1969), Sound in the Mulberry Tree, 1948 Ben Shahn (1898–1969), Allegory, 1948 Ben Shahn (1898–1969), Second Allegory, 1953 Piero di Cosimo (1462–1521), Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci, c. 1490 R. B. Kitaj (1932–2007), Warburg as Maenad, 1961–2 R. B. Kitaj (1932–2007), Specimen Musings of a Democrat, 1961 R. B. Kitaj (1932–2007), The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg, 1960 R. B. Kitaj (1932–2007), Pictures with Commentary. Pictures without Commentary Franz Roh (1890–1965) and Jan Tschichold (1902–74), foto-auge, 1929 R. B. Kitaj (1932–2007) and Eduardo Paolozzi, Work in Progress, 1962 R. B. Kitaj (1932–2007), If Not, Not, 1975–6

56 60 78 79 87 90

104 118 136 145 154 165 168 177 181 185 186 189 197

Preface and Acknowledgements From 1996 to 1999 I worked for Margaret Wind as a research assistant, helping her to prepare the papers of Edgar Wind for deposit in the Bodleian Library. I learnt much more about scholarship and its true value from this experience than from the more formal aspects of my education. This book is an inadequate attempt to acknowledge my debt to Margaret Wind, to whom it is dedicated. It is also dedicated to the memory of another great scholar, my father Wyndham Thomas. I first met Elizabeth Sears at Margaret Wind’s flat when she was editing The Religious Symbolism of Michelangelo. I am most grateful for her continued expert support and her generosity in sharing her unparalleled knowledge of Wind and also her archive discoveries with me. The work of Horst Bredekamp, Bernhard Buschendorf, and Pablo Schneider has been formative for those studying Wind. I have also benefitted from the intelligent conversation and wide-ranging knowledge of Robert Pawlik. During the writing of this book it has been a pleasure to meet, correspond with and learn from the publications of a new generation of Wind scholars including Bernardino Branca, Franz Engel, Sascha Freyberg, Oliver O’Donnell, Ianick Takaes and Giovanna Targia. It has been a privilege to carry out research for this book in the Bodleian Library, the Ashmolean Museum, the British Library and the Warburg Institute Library – my thanks to the archivists, librarians and curators who have assisted my work. Svenja Kunze at the Bodleian Library, who was responsible for the cataloguing of the Wind papers, has been particularly helpful. Nanci A. Young, the Smith College archivist, kindly provided copies of documents from Wind’s biographical file and the complete transcript of the 1953 ‘Art and Morals’ Symposium. My thanks also go to Margaret Michniewicz and James Thompson, my editors at Bloomsbury. Aspects of this research have been presented in papers at the Paul Mellon Centre in London, at the EAM conference at the University of Munster, at the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw and at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford Brookes University and University of Oxford History of Art Research Seminar. I am grateful to my generous hosts on these occasions and for the feedback I received from the audiences. Equally, my colleagues and students at the University of Kent have been kindly supportive of my research.

Preface and Acknowledgements

xi

For their helpful suggestions, clarifications and assistance of various kinds I am very grateful to David Ayers, Vardan Azatyan, Stephen Bann, Tracy Bartley, Alixe Bovey, Howard Bowman, Edward Chaney, Caroline Elam, Stephen Farthing, Carlo Ginzburg, Hanneke Grootenboer, Mark Hallet, Martin Hammer, Colin Harrison, Geraldine Johnson, Jon Kear, Sabine Kriebel, Martin Kemp, Ed Krcma, Christina Lodder, Jules Lubbock, Eckhart Marchand, Theresa Mikuriya, Humphrey Ocean, Gavin Parkinson, Grant Pooke, Peter Read, Ann Reynolds, Adrian Rifkin, Gervase Rosser, Patricia Rubin, Richard Rutherford, Deborah Schultz, Stéphane Toussaint, Sarah Victoria Turner, Tiziana Villani, Claudia Wedepohl, Catherine Whistler, Jon Whiteley, Linda Whiteley and Timothy Wilson. My greatest debt is to Katia Pizzi who has read the whole manuscript and discussed many aspects of modernism with me with sensitive insight: a true labour of love! This book on a less well-known aspect of Edgar Wind’s fascinating career – his passionate interest in modern art – grew out of a more wide-ranging project to examine the interaction of art history and Cold War politics. In 2011, when I was co-organizing a panel at the Association of Art Historians’ conference at the University of Warwick on this topic, the issues facing art historians at the midpoint of the twentieth century seemed relevant and their responses to these challenges significant and, at times, brave and wise. At the end of 2019 – when environmental scientists have given humanity a decade to mitigate the disastrous impact of climate change, when the threat of nuclear war has re-emerged, when fascism and anti-Semitism have revived, when distorting myth deludes nations in its latest guise as ‘fake news’, and when the totalitarian implications of ‘big data’ are becoming ever more apparent – the questions and concerns with which Wind and his contemporaries struggled leap out of the documents with forceful immediacy. The circumstances may have changed, but the question remains the same: How can we best defend civilization from the illiberal forces attacking it?

xii

1

In Defence of Marginal Anarchy

In a satirical survey of the early 1960s New York art scene, the director of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, John Bernard Myers, imagined a new collector of modern art gaining access to fashionable museum circles where at pre-opening dinner parties he could ‘shake hands with a Rockefeller or pass the buns to Mrs. E. Bliss Parkinson or have a short chat with Dr Edgar Wind or listen to Barney Newman tell how it really happened in the pioneer years’.1 The philosopher and art historian Edgar Wind, author of Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (1958) and first professor of history of art at the University of Oxford, appears here in an unfamiliar context for a leading scholarly exponent of the iconographical method in art history: as a fixture on the fashionable contemporary art circuit. The fact that in 1964, when Myers’ piece was published, Wind had been living in Britain for nine years (he was appointed to the post in Oxford in 1955) is a testimony to the enduring memory of his charismatic presence as an habitué of private views and salons, an acquaintance of wealthy trustees and an interlocutor with leading artists. Wind was one of the scholars hailing from the circle around Aby Warburg in Hamburg during the Weimar Republic who engaged most enthusiastically and seriously with modern art and, during the 1940s and 1950s in particular, he was considered a respected pundit on the current state of the arts on a par with figures like Herbert Read, Kenneth Clark or Meyer Schapiro. As his widow, Margaret Wind (née Kellner), put it in 1981 when asked what her husband thought about modern art: ‘He was passionately interested in it.’2 This book aims to examine in detail this less well-known aspect of Wind’s life and thought, particularly by attending closely to the relationships he forged with three significant artists: Pavel Tchelitchew, Ben Shahn and R. B. Kitaj. The fact that none of these artists is mentioned in Wind’s published writings indicates the extent to which his engagement with modern art was predominantly through the medium of public speech, in dialogue at conferences or more formally in lectures. Wind, who was reputed to be one of the most dazzling

2

Edgar Wind and Modern Art

lecturers of his generation, always spoke from memory, showing one black-andwhite slide at a time (not for him the double projection method of Heinrich Wölfflin, which he felt resulted in unfortunate and distracting juxtapositions). While the content of his lectures, and his contributions to public debates, was never improvised, it was rarely recorded. As a result, the researcher is often, as is the case with the important series of lectures on the ‘Tradition of Symbols in Modern Art’ given at the Museum of Modern Art in April 1942, forced to rely on slide-lists and correspondence to reconstruct the argument. Inevitably this means that a certain amount of informed speculation is involved in the process of reconstructive interpretation – can a particular sequence of images really amount to a theoretical position? and how reliable is a hostile review as a source? – but it helps that Wind reached many of his conclusions relatively early in life, that he tended to refine his ideas through repetition, accumulating evidence along the way, and that there are consequently no major reversals of viewpoint. Attending carefully to the evidence with this characteristic trait in mind, it is often possible to illuminate an earlier fragmentary note by referring to a later more complete statement of the same position. The most obvious example of this is Art and Anarchy, Wind’s series of Reith lectures broadcast by the BBC in 1960 and printed in The Listener, then published in book form in 1963 and subsequently revised in 1969. Here the original recordings, extensive drafts and the published versions exist of Wind’s magisterial summary of his views on art, morals and society. This book begins with an account of these lectures, and identifies the occasions on which certain themes were first developed and the contexts that gave them meaning. While the first step taken here is to reconstruct Wind’s views on modern art, and to assess their influence, two broader aims are pursued: to relate Wind’s analysis of modern art to his better known iconographical interpretations of Renaissance art and to his early philosophical writings; and to indicate the significance for the history of twentieth-century art of what Wind described as the ‘tradition of symbols’. Wind had a close intellectual bond with his mentor Aby Warburg, and thought that Warburg’s approach to the analysis of cultural memory was applicable to modern art. However, this ‘application’ of the iconographical approach to the art of Klee, Picasso or Dali was not merely a playful exercise in methodological eclecticism or an intriguing sideline to the more significant study of Renaissance masterpieces. Wind’s analysis of modern art was of a piece with his overall intellectual project, just as his unprecedented studies on eighteenth-century British art had been.3 Arguably, modern art represented an ‘experimentum crucis’, as Wind had defined this term in Das

In Defence of Marginal Anarchy

3

Experiment and die Metaphysik (1934), his Habilitationschrift: in other words, an experiment devised to test the viability of a hypothesis, but which also involved the researcher in circular argument and the use of instruments that embody metaphysical speculations. In this respect, Wind’s approach to modern art reveals significant aspects of his particular understanding of a method of historical analysis of symbols deriving from Warburg, although inflected in his case by a philosophical position where German idealism has been revised in the light of American pragmatism. In addition, this book will argue that Wind had the scope to apply the iconographical method to modern art because of the enduring importance of ‘the eloquence of symbols’. The historian of American art, Sam Hunter, described how many mid-century artists associated with Jackson Pollock were prepared to leave the ‘high road of twentieth-century painting tradition’ for the ‘byways of myth and symbolism’.4 These designations – ‘high road’ and ‘byway’ – reflect the critical assumptions of the prevailing explanatory narrative for the development of modern art: namely, the critical tenets on which the formalism of Roger Fry, Alfred Barr and Clement Greenberg was based, where modern art was conceived of as a process of progressive refinement towards abstraction in each art form driven by a self-critical exploration of each medium’s means of representation. Wind’s critique of this approach linked formalism with a tendency to departmentalize the arts and also with ‘art for art’s sake’ attitudes; he, in contrast, saw art as meaningful when it had a relationship to life, when it embodied knowledge or gave form to the vital forces of the imagination. In this respect, he was closer to surrealism, or even pop art, than to the various forms of abstraction that Greenberg championed. Wind’s identification of a ‘tradition of symbols in modern art’ was an approach that saw the problem of subject matter as intrinsic to, rather than irrelevant to, modern art’s development – even when it came to abstract expressionism. Interestingly, some of the subject matter of the modern art that Wind attended to, for example in the work of artists like Tchelitchew or Ernst, drew on the same hermetic sources that he studied to elucidate the art of Botticelli and Michelangelo. To a certain extent, Wind’s interest in these artists was a pursuit of ‘pagan mysteries in modern art’ (to coin a phrase), and he can even be discovered acting as an ‘iconographical advisor’ to contemporary artists, recommending that Tchelitchew read Paracelsus, and Kitaj read Warburg. In order to recover some of these fascinating connections between iconography and modernism in the visual arts, the elusive topic of Wind’s involvement in contemporary art has been approached through the archive: a ‘detour’, as Wind was fond of describing

4

Edgar Wind and Modern Art

the iconographical method, taken to describe a cultural milieu that provides the context for his theories and opinions.

Edgar Wind (1900–71) Before moving on to a summary of Art and Anarchy, it will be helpful to give a brief resumé of Wind’s biography, emphasizing here those aspects of his life that have a direct bearing on the themes of this book.5 Edgar Wind was born on 14 May 1900 in Berlin into a secular Jewish family. His mother, Laura Szilard, was of Romanian origin, and his father Maurice Delmar Wind, who acted as a financial agent in the export of optical goods to South America, had Argentinian nationality, although he was of Russian origin. This meant that Edgar Wind was ‘Argentinian by German law but German by Argentinian law’ (as Lloyd-Jones put it). Although this confusion was only resolved when Wind obtained German nationality in 1930, this did disqualify him from military service towards the end of the First World War. An older sister, Felice, shared his cosmopolitan and multilingual upbringing but not his studious character. Wind attended the Kaiser-Friedrich-Schule in Charlottenburg from 1906 until 1918, the same school that his older contemporary Walter Benjamin attended, and which was described as ‘a decidedly progressive institution’ by Gershom Scholem in the recollections of his friendship with Benjamin. While Wind was too young to be part of this circle, Scholem’s memoir gives some insight into the cultural milieu in which young middle-class Jews in Berlin moved in the early twentieth century, formed of an intense mixture of advanced literature, philosophy, left-wing politics and Zionism. According to Scholem, his friends were defined by ‘a resoluteness in pursuing our intellectual goals, rejection of our environment – which was basically the German-Jewish assimilated middle class – and a positive attitude towards metaphysics’.6 At this stage, Wind’s interest in the visual arts was orientated towards the modern, and he admired the French impressionist paintings assembled at the Nationalgalerie by its director Hugo von Tschudi, particularly those by Manet and Cézanne, and the contemporary art displayed at the Berlin Secession (also collected for the Nationalgalerie by Tschudi’s successor, Ludwig Justi, from 1918).7 Although Wind’s father encouraged his love of learning, after his father’s death in 1914 tensions began to manifest themselves in his relationship with his mother and sister, who both disapproved of his unwillingness to embark on a business career and whose primary concern appears to have been to maintain a

In Defence of Marginal Anarchy

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bourgeois lifestyle in the face of rampant hyperinflation. Eventually this would result in Wind becoming estranged from, and effectively disinherited by, his immediate family – a situation that continued until 1944 when Wind heard of his mother and sister’s escape from war-torn Budapest to Sweden, then via Lisbon to New York. Contact was restored, and Wind helped financially, but they were never close.8 In 1918 Wind began academic studies at Berlin, where he spent three terms attending lectures on classical art and archaeology, history, philosophy (with Ernst Cassirer who was then a Privatdozent) and history of art (with Adolph Goldschmidt). This was a volatile time politically when Germany oscillated between extremes in the aftermath of defeat in the First World War: the November Revolution, the establishment of the Weimar Republic, the Kapp Putsch, the General Strike and the disastrous economic decline following the punitive terms of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. The arts were in a similarly turbulent state in Berlin, with expressionism and Dada dominating contemporary art (Karl Schmidt-Rottluf became president of the Berlin Secession in 1919), and with proletarian theatre, avant-garde film and experimental cabarets flourishing. Following brief visits to Munich (to hear Wölfflin lecture on Rembrandt) and Marburg (which Wind left after three days due to its ‘intolerable atmosphere’), Wind travelled in 1919 to Freiburg where he studied philosophy with the pioneer of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, whom he found mystifying, and Martin Heidegger, whom he found bullying. Wind then moved to Vienna for the Summer term of 1920 where he studied art history with Max Dvorak, Josef Strzygowski and Julius von Schlosser. Unimpressed, however, with the ‘reigning sovereigns’, Wind moved to Hamburg in 1920, where he became Erwin Panofsky’s first pupil and engaged further with the neo-Kantianism of Ernst Cassirer.9 At this time Aby Warburg was absent from Hamburg, as he was being treated by Ludwig Binswanger in the Kreuzlingen Sanatorium in Switzerland (1918–24) for a mental breakdown, and Wind did not meet him until 1927.10 However, Wind did study in the Warburg Library and found that Warburg’s ‘ghostly presence was very evident’. Wind obtained his doctorate in 1922, which was examined by Cassirer and Panofsky. His concern in this dissertation was to explore the methodological paradox that the art historian’s attempts at rational scientific analysis were grounded on aesthetic judgements that were intrinsically irrational: an insoluble contradiction.11 Returning to Berlin in 1922, Wind lived in the family apartment at 102 Bismarckstrasse while he prepared for his Habilitation, and worked in a clerical role for Polyphonwerke, answering customer letters. Wind’s mother had

6

Edgar Wind and Modern Art

made use of family connections to find him this job, but his musical ability also suited him for it: he was an accomplished pianist who had taken private lessons with Martin Krause of the Stern Conservatory who trained Claudio Arrau and Edwin Fischer.12 In his spare time, Wind frequented the Paul Cassirer Salon in the Victoria Strasse, visiting exhibitions and attending the meetings of an art historical society that met there every three months (the Kunsthistorisches Gesellschaft). Paul Cassirer, a cousin of Ernst Cassirer, was one of the principal promoters of modern art in Berlin, through his gallery and through the publishing house that he ran with his brother Bruno. His wife at this time was the famous actress Tilla Durieux, a star of avant-garde theatre who had posed for Auguste Renoir and Franz von Stuck among others. In fact, Cassirer committed suicide when Durieux divorced him in 1926. According to Margaret Wind, Wind ‘often lunched at Paul Cassirer’s’. Paul Cassirer had left-wing connections, particularly in the immediate post-war period when he was a member of the Independent Socialist Party and published political texts, including work by Rosa Luxemburg.13 A sense of the tense atmosphere of artistic and political debate in Cassirer’s circle can be obtained from Max Beckmann’s prints The Ideologues and The Disillusioned II from the Trip to Berlin (Berliner Reise) portfolio of lithographs from 1922, and also from the Hell (Die Hölle) set of prints from 1919 that commemorates the murder of Rosa Luxemburg in The Martyrdom (Das Martyrium). The Disillusioned II depicts Paul Cassirer, Tilla Durieux, the musician Leo Kestenberg and the artist Max Slevogt as cultivated people on the political left disappointed by the turn of events in post-war Germany; while in The Ideologues, Beckmann portrayed himself with the intellectuals gathered around the figure of Heinrich Mann declaiming from a lectern, among whom is the art historian Carl Einstein.14 Wind would later refer to Beckmann as a ‘remarkable talent’ but one ‘caught in that most cantankerous of genres, the serious cartoon’.15 Through his contacts in the Cassirer circle, Wind was able to visit the artist Käthe Kollwitz, although she was never present at the gallery (‘He simply wrote and asked whether he might come and call’). He also received encouragement to continue his academic career from ‘Mrs Kurt Glazer’ and a certain ‘Schultz’, both of whom intervened with Wind’s mother to point out his natural aptitude as a scholar.16 ‘Mrs Kurt Glazer’ is Elsa Glaser (née Kolker), the wife of the art historian Curt Glaser who worked at the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin and who published regularly in the art journal Kunstgeschichtliche Gesellschaft zu Berlin. Together the Glasers collected modern art, including works by Max Beckmann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Ernst Oppler, Henri Matisse and Edvard Munch. At this

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time, Wind was also good friends with Anna Kallin (known as ‘Niouta’), who was the lover of the painter Oskar Kokoschka and a fixture of artistic circles. Kokoschka had an exhibition in the Paul Cassirer gallery in 1923, and Wind would later recall the ‘perpetual fortissimo’ of his art.17 Wind also remembered in Art and Anarchy the first time he saw an exhibition of expressionist painting: ‘the walls were filled with apocalyptic pictures painted in violent colours and incongruous shapes. I found this aggressive art singularly exciting and consumed it with the fresh appetite and strong stomach of youth.’ However, he later reflected that ‘if all these intense pictures . . . had been experienced by me with the intensity they demanded, I ought to be out of my mind, but I clearly was not.’ An initial encounter with the art of the second wave of expressionist painters, therefore, prompted Wind to begin thinking through the problem of ‘aesthetic participation’.18 He would also later refer to the Neopathetisches Cabaret founded by Kurt Hiller in Berlin, as typical of the expressionist movement’s urge to ‘extract monumental gestures from burlesque apostrophes’.19 While it is not possible to be precise about the extent of Wind’s engagement with modernist trends in early 1920s Berlin (because of the loss of his personal papers left in London during the Second World War), it seems reasonable to assume that the familiarity shown in the extensive notes to Art and Anarchy with expressionism, Dada, the serial compositional techniques of Arnold Schoenberg, and the alienation effects of Bertolt Brecht’s drama has its roots in his cultural formation in Weimar Germany. Also, Wind’s youthful experience of radical artistic experimentation coinciding with dramatic political turbulence goes some way to explaining the seriousness with which he treated the insight in book 4 of Plato’s Republic that ‘when the modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State change with them’. Wind was concerned by the escalating political violence in Berlin, and the assassination in 1922 of the foreign minister, the Jewish businessman Walther Rathenau, by the right-wing terrorist group Organisation Consul was one of the factors in his decision to move to the United States (Margaret Wind noted that ‘Rathenau’s murder in June 1922 worried Edgar profoundly’). Wind left for America in March 1924, staying in New York at the invitation of his cousin, the lawyer Henry Moskowitz, whom he later recommended to Erwin Panofsky as a contact because he and his wife Belle played a very influential role in New York’s political life.20 Moskowitz was a civil rights activist and one of the co-founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, while Belle (née Lindner) was a close adviser of the Democrat governor of New York, Al Smith (eventually running his presidential campaign in 1928). At this time,

8

Edgar Wind and Modern Art

Wind worked as a substitute teacher of French and Mathematics in New York high schools (‘the best way to overcome stage-fright’).21 Tiring of school-teaching, Wind applied successfully in 1925 for one of two postdoctoral Graham Kenan Fellowships at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, becoming the following year an instructor in the Department of Philosophy. Wind’s colleagues in the philosophy department at Chapel Hill included Paul Green, a writer whose play In Abraham’s Bosom tackled the problem of racial segregation in the American South and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1927, and who was subsequently influenced by the theatrical approach of Brecht and Erwin Piscator, later collaborating with Kurt Weill. Katherine Gilbert, the author of Studies in Recent Aesthetic (1927), which discussed the philosophies of art of Santanaya, Bergson, Bosanquet and Croce, was another colleague. Wind and Green are credited by her as readers of the manuscript of this book.22 During this American period, Wind was principally engaged with pragmatism, becoming a lifelong admirer of the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, taking an active part in the American Philosophical Association, and providing a perceptive survey of contemporary trends in German philosophy for the Journal of Philosophy in 1925.23 In 1926, he also participated in educational experiments at the Cooper Union in New York through which he became acquainted with scholars like Mortimer Adler, Scott Buchanan and Richard McKeon, who were pioneers of the ‘Great Books’ approach to teaching. Two other philosophers that Wind met at this time in New York were Sidney Hook and George Boas. This was also the year in which the Société Anonyme organized a major survey exhibition of modern art at the Brooklyn Museum (19 November 1926–1 January 1927) in order, as its President Katherine Dreier put it, to promote ‘the study of the experimental in art’. Also in 1926, Wind married his first wife, the American Ruth Hatch (they separated in 1934).24 When Wind’s contract at Chapel Hill was renewed in autumn 1927 he found that his pay had been reduced so he left, living ‘by his wits’ in New York for three months, doing odd-jobs, like hand-colouring black-and-white films, giving piano lessons and even being ‘used as a bootlegger’s decoy’. Returning to Hamburg in 1927, Wind met and struck up an immediate rapport with Aby Warburg, and he began working that year at the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (or KBW) as a research assistant. Although Warburg travelled in Italy for long periods of the two years that Wind knew him, Wind felt a particular closeness and indebtedness to his mentor, as he explained later in a letter written to Jean Seznec in 1954, in which he revealed that the dying Warburg had confided to him that his presence at the KBW was a comfort because ‘je sais que tout ira bien quand je serai parti’ (‘I know that everything

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will turn out alright when I’m gone’).25 Warburg remarked of Wind, ‘I always forget you are a trained art historian, you know how to think so nicely’ and wrote in the diary of the library ‘Herr Wind ist eine Denktype bester Sorte’ (‘Wind is an example of the best type of thinker’).26 According to Margaret Wind, it was Wind who introduced Warburg to Peirce’s thought, and these remarks may reflect their discussions of pragmatism and the author of ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’. Although their association was short, it was intense – particularly during the autumn of 1928 when Warburg gave Wind his ‘Fragments’ on expression to work with. For Wind, especially, it was a formative intellectual exchange, encouraging him to apply his theoretical concerns to the analysis of the culturally significant historical detail.27 At this time, he was involved with two of Warburg’s projects that would continue to shape his thinking: the Mnemosyne Atlas, where, with Gertrud Bing acting as principal helper, he assisted Warburg’s efforts to trace, through the arrangement of images on panels, the descent of ‘Pathosformeln’ or pathos formulas through time; and Warburg’s thwarted efforts to return to New Mexico to revisit the Pueblo Indians whose ritual dances he had studied in 1896.28 Interestingly, Fritz Saxl was approached in 1929 by Carl Einstein, the editor of the journal Documents, proposing a link with the Warburg Institute due to ‘my strongest sense of partisanship’ based on a perceived affinity of methodological approach.29 Warburg died on 26 October 1929; ten years later Erwin Panofsky was to describe Wind as ‘the one man who has developed the ideas of the late Professor Warburg in an entirely independent spirit’.30 In 1930 Wind’s Habilitationschrift – Das Experiment und die Metaphysik (‘Experiment and Metaphysics’) – was examined, and he began to teach at Hamburg University as a Privatdozent, where he lectured on eighteenth-century English philosophy, the history of scepticism and the history of science. It was at this time that Wind produced his first major art historical publication Humanitätsidee und heroisertes Porträt in der englischen Kultur des 18. Jahrhunderts, where he associated the different portrait styles of Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough with the opposed philosophical approaches to the question of ‘the nature and dignity of man’ of James Beattie, Edmund Burke and Samuel Johnson on the one hand, and with David Hume on the other.31 This was a pioneering study in treating British eighteenth-century portraiture as a topic worthy of critical analysis, as opposed to the appreciation of connoisseurs, and also because it studied artistic and philosophical documents ‘in their interaction’. Hume became one of Wind’s intellectual heroes, along with Peirce and Warburg, confirming the empiricist, even sceptical, cast of mind that was his distinctive contribution to the iconographical tradition.

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Edgar Wind and Modern Art

As a Jew, Wind was dismissed from his post at Hamburg when Hitler came to power in 1933. At a conference about ‘Science and Freedom’ held in Hamburg by the Congress for Cultural Freedom in 1953, Wind recalled the principled stance that his friend, the classicist Bruno Snell, had taken on behalf of Jewish colleagues against the rector imposed on the University by the Nazis. Sadly, the older academics refused to support Snell in what they saw as an ‘empty gesture’.32 Nazi anti-Semitism also imperilled the KBW, and Wind together with the KBW’s director, Fritz Saxl, sought an alternative home for the private research institute and library (overtures had even been made by Wind to Italy when he wrote to Giovanni Gentile). Ultimately, Wind’s effective lobbying of a group of powerful well-wishers in London, including the director of the Courtauld Institute, William George Constable, led to funding and space being found for the transfer of the KBW to Britain. Shortly after moving to London, Wind met the dancer and choreographer Agnes de Mille at the home of Henrietta (née Montagu), the Hon. Mrs Ernest Franklin. Wind’s distant cousin Miriam, the daughter of Belle Moskowitz by a previous marriage, was married to Mrs Franklin’s son, Cyril. As Margaret Wind summarized: ‘this distant connection with Cyril Franklin was of immense importance in the negotiations that led to the transfer of the Warburg Library from Hamburg to London’ as Mrs Franklin was able to introduce Wind to several powerful English supporters of scholarship and the arts.33 De Mille found herself at ‘one of those extraordinary London lunches’ at the Franklin’s ‘colossal and ugly’ house in Porchester Terrace, Bayswater (which nevertheless housed an art collection including works by Jacob Epstein), at the invitation of Miriam Franklin, because Belle Moskowitz had been a school friend of her mother, Anna George de Mille (who was herself the daughter of the famous economist and progressive reformer Henry George, proponent of the single tax movement or land tax).34 Miriam Franklin would later marry the constructivist artist Naum Gabo. At the Franklin’s lunch, De Mille met a dozen refugees from Hitler, among them ‘an impressive, large, black-haired person, Dr Edgar Wind. “I think we’ll all be here quite some time”, he said.’ A year later, having showered De Mille with red roses and ‘ardent and disturbing’ cards after two of her London performances, Wind engineered a meeting through Miriam Franklin.35 A brief if intense love affair ensued, complicated by De Mille’s professional commitments in New York and Wind’s difficulties with his first wife (hinted at in De Mille’s narrative). De Mille’s racy memoir provides an unusual if valuable sketch of Wind’s character and interests during the 1930s. He certainly seems to have closely

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followed her career in experimental dance, which at this time involved working with Marie Rambert and Antony Tudor, later of Ballet Rambert and the London Ballet. Her record of their conversations reveals his anxiety about European politics, his committed anti-fascism and the fact that he had read Mein Kampf with alarm. She was also impressed by the range of his cultural interests: ‘Dr Wind seemed to know, with lively understanding and zest, and encyclopaedic memory, everybody dead or alive, and everything they did or had done.’ Among his ‘living friends’ De Mille named Kenneth Clark, Jacques Maritain and Erwin Panofsky. ‘He spoke four living languages interchangeably, and two dead ones, and he played the piano with [Artur] Schnabel’s pupils. . . . And he was fun.’ When De Mille asked Wind ‘What exactly are you?’ he replied, ‘A philosopher.’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘Nobody really knows.’ Wind provided supportive advice about De Mille’s choreography and how to deal with critics: ‘don’t rely on nationalism or nostalgia. You just do the work clean.’36 He also gave her books by Charles Darwin, John Addington Symonds and C. K. Ogden, and took an interest in her disabled friend Ramon, providing him with transcripts of lectures given by Carl Jung at the Warburg Institute (apparently, Wind remarked waspishly of Jung that he had ‘the mind of a god; the nose of a dog’).37 Although it occurred in the context of a love affair, Wind’s concern to help De Mille as an artist is indicative of the private efforts he made to support contemporary artists. If, as De Mille’s memoir reveals, Wind took a close interest in avant-garde developments in dance and music, then it is probably fair to assume that he was equally interested in exhibitions of contemporary art in London at this time (although when she does discuss his interest in the visual arts it is to mention Hogarth and Michelangelo). Wind’s friend, the British Museum curator Roger Hinks, noted in his diary the effect that an exhibition of Max Ernst’s art at the Mayor Gallery had on him: 18 June 1937, London: There is an exhibition of recent pictures by Max Ernst at the Mayor Gallery; it might serve as the text to a sermon on the relations between visual and verbal fantasy. The titles of the pictures, when read out of the catalogue, led the mind away into remote and enchanted regions; but a glance at the paintings themselves was enough to bring it back with a snap to a scene of sordid and disagreeable imaginative disorder.38

Hinks’s comments on Ernst are symptomatic of the classicist approach to contemporary art he took in art-critical contributions to The Criterion (edited by T. S. Eliot), seeing in abstract painting, for example, the ‘reductio ad absurdam of the whole European tradition’.39 The Mayor Gallery on Cork Street launched

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Edgar Wind and Modern Art

Herbert Read’s book Art Now with a survey exhibition of contemporary art in 1933. Subsequent exhibitions during the 1930s provided opportunities to see the art of the Unit One artists, of Klee, Picasso, Rouault, Bérard, Calder, Miró, Masson, Moore and Penrose among others. Klee and Rouault, both particular favourites of Wind’s, featured heavily in the gallery’s schedule. In 1936, London hosted the First International Surrealist Exhibition, which had a significant impact and saw Herbert Read to the fore once more, working as organizer alongside Roland Penrose and E. L. T. Messens. In addition to providing London-based art lovers with the most comprehensive survey of Surrealist art yet displayed, it brought André Breton, Paul Eluard and Salvador Dali to the British capital. While there is little surviving evidence to confirm this hypothesis, it seems likely that Wind took advantage of these and other opportunities to engage with modern art and that his tastes were to some extent shaped by the works available to him in London. What is less certain is the extent to which Wind was directly acquainted with artistic developments in Paris during the 1930s: his later observations on Picasso’s Guernica suggest that he may have seen it in the Spanish pavilion at the Paris International Exhibition in 1937, and some remarks on the French translation of Heidegger in his 1946 essay ‘Jean-Paul Sartre: A French Heidegger’ indicate that he did visit Paris for research purposes before the Second World War.40 These last comments relate to Wind’s meeting with Henry Corbin in 1930, who was then a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale, translating in his spare time Heidegger’s Was ist Metaphysik? (a translation published in 1938), and who would later become a scholar of Sufi mysticism at the Sorbonne and a leading figure in the Eranos Circle around Jung.41 Wind was particularly fond of Paris, and he visited it regularly when he was based at Oxford. It is probably fair to assume that the trip in 1930, when he remembered meeting Corbin, was not the only visit to the Bibliothèque Nationale to have occurred during the 1930s – whether or not he encountered there the two scholars whose parallel interests suggest certain ‘correspondences’ with his own work, Walter Benjamin and Georges Bataille, is sadly not documented. As deputy director, Wind was instrumental in ensuring that leading cultural figures visited the Warburg Institute. Notable speakers included in 1935 the philosopher Jacques Maritain (whose talk was chaired by T. S. Eliot who had been persuaded to do this by Hinks), and in 1936, the physicist Niels Bohr, who gave a talk on ‘Some Humanistic Aspects of Natural Science’ at Wind’s invitation. In the same year, Ernst Cassirer spoke on ‘Critical Idealism’. Among the distinguished cultural historians invited by Wind to speak at the institute

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were Johan Huizinga and Henri Focillon, who participated in a series of lectures in 1937 on the ‘Cultural Function of Play’.42 From 1937, Wind was co-editor with Rudolf Wittkower of the Journal of the Warburg Institute, and the early issues of the journal are stamped with his mercurial intelligence and determination to develop Warburg’s approach faithfully, understanding ‘faithfully’ to also mean ‘playfully’ (the previous year’s series of lectures on play demonstrate Wind’s interest in the continuing relevance of the Renaissance notion of ‘serio ludere’). Wind contributed a remarkable series of articles to the journal on a very wide variety of subjects, but characterized by a persistent interest in the paradoxical and incongruous: writing ‘in defence of the composite portrait’, on the ‘criminal god’, the ‘saint as monster’, about a ‘medieval formula in Kant’, the ‘Christian Democritus’ and the presence of a ‘Maenad beneath the Cross’. The layout of the pages of illustrations orchestrated striking conjunctions – such as the juxtaposition of details from Michelangelo’s Last Judgement and Sistine ceiling with grotesque punishment masks in the museum at Munich which ‘could be mistaken for instruments of a primitive dance ritual’.43 Such combinations of images recall the Mnemosyne Atlas, but also bring to mind the similar mixture of the artistic and the anthropological in the journal Documents edited by Georges Bataille with Carl Einstein (1929–30), or in Albert Skira’s contemporary Minotaure (1933–9). Wind’s editing of the Warburg journal gave it a lively and purposive quality more akin to an avantgarde art magazine than an academic journal – and the editors of View in New York did study the early volumes of the Journal of the Warburg Institute as a precedent (a letter to Wind from Pavel Tchelitchew reveals that it was compared favourably with the Surrealist publication VVV).44 Wind’s editing gave a programmatic coherence to the diverse contributions, and the opening article, Jacques Maritain’s ‘Sign and Symbol’, acted as a type of learned manifesto staking out the terrain of the journal: its dedication to the study of symbols as vehicles of cultural memory.45 This quality of the journal became diluted once distance prevented Wind from playing as active a role in its editing, and it subsequently became a more typical, if specialized, scholarly journal. In August 1939 Wind departed for America for a five-month period of sabbatical leave to take up an invitation from Scott Buchanan and Stringfellow Barr to join them in St. John’s College, Annapolis, where they were introducing the interdisciplinary ‘Great Books’ curriculum on the model of earlier experiments at the Cooper Union in New York. Wind’s friend, the composer Nicolas Nabokov, who joined the staff at St. John’s in 1941 on Maritain’s recommendation, later expressed his reservations about an educational experiment which he described

14

Edgar Wind and Modern Art

as a ‘jet odyssey through 2,500 years of Western intellectual history’.46 No doubt Wind shared some of Nabokov’s concerns (What were the selection criteria for a ‘great book’? Why War and Peace but not Anna Karenina?), but he was sufficiently impressed by the transformative goals of the experiment to support a similar endeavour at the University of Chicago led by Robert Hutchins in 1942, who saw the purpose of a University as ‘nothing less than to procure a moral, intellectual and spiritual revolution throughout the world’.47 Then in the early 1950s, Wind devised his own sophomore course on this model at Smith College that proceeded through the close reading of a sequence of key texts and which he described as ‘not an orientation course but a disorientation course, whose purpose is to break up prejudices’. Like Art and Anarchy, the course began with Plato and ended with William James: its purpose is to give a sense of how often enlightenment and superstition stem from a common root. The Greeks were wise in using two separate terms – logos and mythos – for the one thing which we call ‘word’! For it is through the use of words that our thoughts are both clarified and befuddled. The question, therefore, is not whether for the beginner the universal should precede the particular, or the particular the universal. The real problem, and the challenge, is how to make the beginner grasp the universal through the particular; and this is a vivid study which sometimes lies at the very frontiers of knowledge!48

It is characteristic of Wind that one of the clearest and most succinct statements of his method, which helps to explain the trajectory of Art and Anarchy as a radiobased ‘disorientation course’, should occur in an account of his teaching in an alumnae magazine. The ‘slightly explosive process’ of the classes in Humanities 292a constituted an experiment, in other words ‘a controlled adventure’. For, as Wind argued, the issues at stake were not simply educational or aesthetic, they were essential to the experience of living in the modern world: The imaginative and intellectual powers of man are almost perpetually at odds; he is involved in a continuous struggle between his enthusiasms and his critical acumen, between superstition and enlightenment. Clearly, this problem is still very much with us. When we think of ourselves as really enlightened, we are likely to be very superstitious. We do not, for example, recognize myth in the guise of science, and succumb to this fetish in a half-primitive idolatry. On the other hand, so-called primitive men are often quite enlightened although they express their insights obliquely through poetry and metaphor.49

Unexpectedly, Wind found himself in the United States at the outbreak of the Second World War, and he was sent a telegram on 21 May 1940 by his Warburg

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colleagues stating ‘in the common interest advise you to stay in the States awaiting further developments’.50 This began a period of intensive networking on behalf of the Warburg Institute, and of lecturing throughout the United States to demonstrate the Warburg approach to the analysis of works of art. By establishing connections with and through influential cultural patrons like Mildred Barnes Bliss (founder, with her husband, the diplomat Robert Woods Bliss, of the Dumbarton Oaks Institute), or the poet Archibald MacLeish, who was Librarian of Congress, Wind secured an offer to provide the Warburg Institute with a home in America during the war. As the Warburg Institute’s annual report put it: ‘Dr Wind has done eminent service to the Institute in America, which resulted in an invitation . . . by the National Gallery of Art in Washington (the former Mellon Collection), the Library of Congress, and other distinguished Americans, to send the Warburg Library to Washington for the duration of the war.’51 For various reasons, not least the intensity of the naval battle going on in the Atlantic, this invitation was declined. Wind then embarked on a peripatetic course of lectures, mostly on Renaissance and eighteenth-century topics, that had an extraordinary success establishing him as one of the leading figures in the cultural life of the United States. As he detailed in a report written for Saxl in 1945: I lectured at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, New York University, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Dumbarton Oaks, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Carnegie Corporation in New York, The Frick Collection, The Morgan Library, and the Medieval Academy. I also spoke at the universities in the South: the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina, and Duke University; in the Midwestern States, at the University of Chicago, the University of Iowa, and the Cleveland Museum of Art; and in the Far West at the University of California at Berkeley, Mills College, the San Francisco Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Huntington Library. I made a particular point of visiting the more provincial institutions, the Museums in Worcester, Hartford, Providence and Buffalo; the colleges of the Connecticut Valley, and of recent years I have been occasionally a guest at Groton School.52

It was during this extraordinary period that Wind met Margaret Kellner, the daughter of the physicist G. A. Hermann Kellner, who became his research assistant and then wife in 1942. Although he gave courses as a visiting lecturer at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, Wind was concerned to maintain his independence, continuing to see his academic affiliation as very much with the Warburg Institute (in spite of the physical separation and lack of pay caused by the war). However, after three years of intense activity, and with

16

Edgar Wind and Modern Art

no prospect of the war ending, Wind ‘felt that my strength would not permit me to continue the same course indefinitely’ (in fact he was hospitalized with pneumonia in 1943). He, therefore, accepted a permanent post at the University of Chicago in the Art Department in 1942, a move which his Warburg colleagues initially reacted to despairingly. Saxl, for example, wrote to Wind in 1943: ‘there is nobody except you (and perhaps Gombrich) who has ever been touched by Warburg’s personality and understood what he meant by founding the Institute . . . [which] as a centre of Kulturwissenschaft in Warburg’s sense will collapse without you.’53 At the time when Chicago persuaded Wind to join its staff, both Columbia and Harvard Universities were also seeking to appoint him, with the latter’s professor of fine art, Paul Sachs, arguing for Wind to be installed as a researcher at Dumbarton Oaks. Sachs was a pivotal figure in the study of modern art in America, having trained a generation of curators and scholars on his museum course, including Kirk Askew, Chick Austin, Alfred H. Barr Jr, Lincoln Kirstein, Julien Levy and Agnes Rindge.54 It was probably through Sachs that Wind became acquainted with this modernist circle, and he maintained long-standing friendships with Askew and Kirstein. Other members of Harvard’s Society for Contemporary Art who knew Wind were the architect Philip Johnson, who participated in the ‘Art and Morals’ conference at Smith College in 1953; John Walker, the director of the National Gallery in Washington DC with whom Wind planned to write a book on Bellini; and Edward Warburg, son of Felix Warburg, and co-founder, with Kirstein, of the American Ballet. Wind’s time at Chicago proved unhappy and conflictual as he fell out with the dean of humanities, Richard McKeon, and was attacked as a ‘menace’ and ‘obscurantist’ for supporting the reforms of Robert Hutchins in the bitter in-fighting that divided Chicago’s faculty. Wind took up the offer of the William Allen Neilson Research Professorship at Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts, in the autumn of 1944, which by contrast with Chicago ‘proved refreshingly undramatic’. At the end of the war, Wind fully expected to return to the Warburg Institute. However, a visit by Saxl to the United States in June 1945 revealed how his plans and aspirations for the Warburg Institute now diverged from those of Wind. Following the Institute’s incorporation into the University of London in 1944, Wind’s post of deputy director had been abolished, with Gertrud Bing now installed as assistant director. An academic hierarchy had been imposed with Saxl and Bing as professors, and Wind beneath them as reader. His salary was projected to be £950 a year, in contrast to the $8,000 he received as Neilson Professor at Smith. More seriously Wind felt that Saxl’s refusal to strengthen the

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permanent staff, his decision to divert resources into an encyclopaedia project, and his tendency to view the institute as a charitable organization providing temporary relief to itinerant scholars were all signs of conventional thinking and of avoiding, as he put it in a letter to Bing, ‘the discomfort of being an intellectual outcast (which, I hope you will agree with me, is today the only honorable position)’. Wind decided to remain at Smith College, becoming an American citizen in 1948, and accepting with regret that ‘the Warburg Institute is no longer the most suitable place for developing Warburg’s methods and ideas’.55 Wind remained in the United States until his appointment as professor of the history of art at Oxford in 1955, participating in cultural events organized by the Congress for Cultural Freedom as an expert on modern art, and organizing a major conference on ‘Art and Morals’ at Smith College in 1953. These events and his lectures on modern art at the University of Oxford in 1957 will be discussed in greater detail in subsequent chapters. Wind retired from his Oxford Chair in 1967 and died in London on 12 September 1971 from the leukaemia he had been suffering from since 1965.

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2

Art and Anarchy

Wind’s invitation to give the prestigious Reith lectures on the Third Programme of BBC radio in 1960 was largely the result of Anna Kallin’s advocacy.1 Wind’s old friend from his Berlin days had become a dynamic producer at the BBC, who drew on her contacts with artists and intellectuals to maintain a lively variety and high quality of broadcasting. Wind had participated in radio broadcasts at her request, for example recording a series of lectures on Leonardo da Vinci in 1952 and debating Kant with the philosopher Stuart Hampshire in 1957. The decision to devote the Reith lectures to the arts was unusual at this time, as they had previously been dominated by world affairs, politics and science, with speakers of international standing like Bertrand Russell, Arnold Toynbee, Robert Oppenheimer and George Kennan. There had been a precedent, however, when the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner gave a series of talks on The Englishness of English Art in 1955 (incidentally, citing Wind’s article ‘The Revolution in History Painting’ in his lecture ‘Hogarth and Observed Life’). Wind’s lectures, which were broadcast in November and December 1960, took a very different approach to Pevsner’s account of art as expressing the fundamental traits of national character. The summary given here is based on the final edition of the book version of Art and Anarchy. ‘Art and Anarchy: Our Present Discontents’, Wind’s first lecture, began with the unexpected assertion that art is ‘an uncomfortable business’, especially for the artist, and that those who wish to live undisturbed would be well advised to remove art from their homes! The cause of the ‘dissatisfaction and discontent’ that frequently accompanied art was, according to Wind, the ‘disruptive and capricious power’ of the imagination which the artist must aim to manage – learning, as Plato argued, how to ‘rage correctly’, so as to regulate the forces of the imagination to produce, as Baudelaire put it, a ‘workaday frenzy’ (‘trouver la frénésie journalière’). As a result, the artist’s creative struggle risked either atrophy or excess – the latter proving more dangerous to a great poet like Goethe who

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Edgar Wind and Modern Art

saw imagination as an enemy who ‘breaks out against all civilizing restraints like a savage who takes delight in grimacing idols’.2 For the rest of this lecture Wind discussed the contrasting views on art of two philosophers: Plato and Hegel. Where Plato saw art as a dangerous force that needed to be regulated for the good of the state and which required an attitude of ‘sacred fear’, Hegel thought art had been displaced from its central position in society by science and that its marginality meant that it was a ‘splendid superfluity’ that could be safely appreciated on its own terms (Wind saw the rise of ‘art for art’s sake’ attitudes as being linked with German Idealist philosophy). While Wind rejected Plato’s cure – state censorship – he argued that the ancient Greek philosopher’s diagnosis was correct: art can intensify as well as purge our emotions, so that what begins in fiction can ‘take root in reality’. Great art does this more effectively than mediocre art, which was why Plato said that a true poet should be honoured before being required to leave the republic as a potential threat to its harmony. Plato had lived at a time when art flourished as the state declined, but were the two phenomena necessarily related? The similar conditions that occurred at the Renaissance suggested they were. With romanticism, however, the work of art came to be seen as an object of interest, and a painting like Manet’s Dead Christ with Angels (1864, New York, Metropolitan Museum), unlike Mantegna’s fifteenth-century treatment of the same subject (1495–1500, Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst), was meant to provoke an aesthetically ‘interesting’ experience rather than impel the worshipper to their knees. (‘An “interesting” experience is one that has no lasting effect.’)3 With the technological mass-diffusion of art in the modern world a general apathy about the abundance of well-received art works had set in, with a corresponding tendency on the part of modern artists to attempt to shock their audience through ‘gratuitous acts’ and alienation techniques. If Plato could not have foreseen the immunity to art that developed because of its dilution through widespread dispersal, then Hegel may have been wrong to assume that art could never recover its power to move us because of its marginal position. As Wind argued, ‘the past is not destroyed by the present but survives in it as a latent force’; and so, with this qualification of Hegel, the first lecture ended on a Warburgian note, alluding to art’s role as a vehicle of cultural memory (almost as a regressive gene).4 In the second lecture, ‘Aesthetic Participation’, Wind argued that art was not merely the victim of the developments described in ‘Art and Anarchy’ but had been a willing participant in them: ‘art has been displaced from the centre of our life not just by applied science, but above all by its own centrifugal impulse.’5

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In a similar way, the Renaissance poet Ariosto had complained that gunpowder had killed off chivalry, but his own parodic treatment of the theme of the knight errant had been just as effective, paving the way for Don Quixote. Modern art, in particular, had advanced through a series of ‘triumphs of disruption’: the dissociation of sensibility in literature, the emancipation of dissonance in music and even the ‘derangement of all the senses’ described in Rimbaud’s ‘lettre du voyant’. In the visual arts Picasso exemplified a ‘destructive tendency to break up each new style’. Artistic inventiveness had become an end in itself, and modern art can therefore be described as ‘experimental’ (although the artists and writers emulating scientific methods were not always too well-informed about them).6 Wind then related the formalist art-critical approaches advanced by Heinrich Wölfflin, Bernard Berenson and Roger Fry to the same conception of modern art: one that prioritized the ‘lucid application of a fastidious technique’ over an engagement with art’s deeper imaginative forces.7 The third lecture, ‘Critique of Connoisseurship’, looked in some depth at Giovanni Morelli’s nineteenth-century development of an empirical technique for identifying an artist’s hand by attending carefully to overlooked details in paintings – the way an artist draws an ear or fingernail – rather than broader stylistic traits. The application of Morelli’s technique had brought about revolutionary changes in the attribution of pictures in collections across Europe. Wind argued, however, that Morelli’s method, for all its scientific allure, was also related to romantic concerns such as the spontaneous and authentic touch of the artist and the ‘cult of the fragment’, and therefore led to an emphasis on aspects of the art work that are most characteristic of the artist’s individual creativity (e.g. on the initial sketch rather than the finished painting). In this way, Wind attempted to link the formalist practice of art history by Morelli’s followers, like Berenson, to a romantic ‘cult of the spasm’ which had ultimately been responsible for driving the arts into crisis.8 The fourth lecture, ‘The Fear of Knowledge’, was described by Wind in correspondence with Philadelphia’s Saturday Evening Post (which published a version of it in 1962), as ‘from my own point of view, perhaps the most important in the series’.9 In it he argued that if modern society had lost the ‘sacred fear’ of art advocated by Plato, it harboured a different fear: ‘the fear that knowledge might harm the imagination, that the exercise of artistic faculties, both in the artist and in the spectator, might be weakened by the use of reason’. This was a modern phenomenon unknown before the romantic period, Wind argued, reminding his listeners once again that modern attitudes to art had their roots in romanticism.10 The prejudice against didactic art was a typical

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Edgar Wind and Modern Art

symptom of this prevailing attitude: didactic poetry, for example, represented a monstrous compromise, ‘a hybrid of intellect and imagination in which art is sacrificed to the interests of reason and reason betrayed by the use of art’.11 Yet Baudelaire, who had begun an essay critical of ‘Philosophical Art’ inspired by the amusing incongruity between thought and image evident in the paintings of his contemporary Paul Chenavard, changed his mind and concluded that great painting does rely on great ideas. If Baudelaire could question whether the intellect necessarily damaged the imagination, then perhaps didactic art should be reappraised, taking into account artistically successful didactic poems from antiquity by Lucretius, Virgil and Horace, or Renaissance masterpieces like the Sistine Chapel frescoes based on complex theological schemes or allegories. Interestingly, in answer to the question of how artists could possibly master complex subject matter quickly, Wind drew on his own personal acquaintance with contemporary artists: ‘I have never met a significant painter or sculptor who did not speak and think exceedingly well.’12 Yet modern artists, inhabiting a position of splendid isolation at the margins of society, had the disadvantage of having to think for themselves, unassisted by the philosophers and theologians – the ‘iconographical advisors’ evoked in Warburgian readings of medieval and Renaissance art – who now treat artists as ‘untouchables’ whose genius must not be ‘disturbed or distracted’. This situation demonstrated how effectively the ‘Romantic revolt against reason’ had driven apart imagination and learning. According to Wind, the resulting art was eccentric and capricious even when admirable, and it could be simply misinformed – ‘witness the flimsy ghost of quantum mechanics in the talk of some “action painters” and serial composers’.13 Paul Klee was a self-consciously marginal artist, and the humour at play in his works represented ‘a precious bloom of Romantic irony’; yet Wind felt that an opportunity to engage a genuine scientific curiosity, evident in drawings inspired by plant sections, had been wasted. Why had Picasso chosen to illustrate Buffon rather than the work of a contemporary scientist? Similarly, Wind felt that it would be good for Henry Moore to work closely with professional geologists. Without this sustained engagement with informed patrons and expert advisers, the work of leading modern artists would fall short of Raphael’s achievement in giving lucid form to encyclopaedic learning in the School of Athens.14 The fifth lecture, ‘The Mechanization of Art’, advocated a ‘prudent scepticism about mechanization’ while also acknowledging ‘the positive part that machinery and substitution have played in artistic growth’. A suspicion that mechanical reproduction of art might compromise its uniqueness was an old belief, Wind

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argued, going back at least five hundred years to the invention of printing which Federigo da Montefeltro, the Duke of Urbino, had reacted to with dismay, banning printed books from entering his famous library. John Ruskin had also contrasted honest craftsmanship with ‘vile manufacture’, yet new technologies like film had discovered their own ‘powerful idiom’ having passed through a phase of imitating older art forms (like theatre).15 Wind was not against mechanization as such, only the unimaginative use of it, which resulted in uncomfortable ‘streamlined taxis’ or mass-produced copies of Mies van der Rohe chairs and, more seriously, aggressive forms of architectural conservation and picture restoration that aimed to return buildings and art works to their original pristine state. Interestingly, Wind assessed how the mechanical reproduction of works of art, whether through photographs of pictures or recordings of musical compositions, changed our aesthetic perception of them. As a result of increasing familiarity with mechanized reproductions an aesthetic reversal occurs: ‘the medium of diffusion tends to take precedence over the direct experience of the object, and more often than not the object itself is conceived with this purpose in view.’16 Wind had experienced this phenomenon when listening to a speech made into a radio microphone in 1941 by President Roosevelt at the opening of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, where he had felt like an eavesdropper to a broadcast, rather than a member of an audience in the room. In a similar way, Wind argued, Picasso had ‘consciously adjusted his palette to the crude requirements of the colour process’, while concert performances now catered for the expectations of audiences who had become attuned to the faultless regularity of recordings listened to repeatedly at home.17 While Wind’s argument comes close here to Marshall McLuhan’s near-contemporary thesis that ‘the medium is the message’, and covers terrain explored by Walter Benjamin in his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, he was himself developing insights from nineteenth-century texts by Samuel Butler and Thomas Carlyle that were read in Warburg’s circle. Therefore, a philosophical enquiry into the issue of the mechanization of art would have to start from the question: ‘Is not all art a form of self-extension, as in Carlyle’s definition of man as “a Tool-using Animal”?’18 The final lecture, ‘Art and the Will’, restated several of the themes developed in the foregoing lectures but seen through the lens of the pragmatist philosopher William James’s defence of risk in ‘The Will to Believe’.19 Having begun the series of lectures with an examination of the disruptive power of the imagination, here Wind tried to map out the interactions of will and belief. The power of the will is necessarily limited and cannot, for example,

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Edgar Wind and Modern Art

change a person’s belief in elementary truths (two plus two is four). However, in areas like religious belief or ‘economic beliefs today’, dissenting or heretical views have been persecuted and the refusal to conform has been seen as wilful (‘dissent is wilful’). In the fifteenth century, Pico della Mirandola, who himself had been indicted for heresy, explained that belief could not be formed by an act of the will and that to attempt to force belief in this way was tyranny – ‘he gave to that confusion a good Latin name: he called it actus tyrannicus voluntatis, a tyrannical act of the will.’20 Wind argued that ‘tyrannical acts of the will’ are not just external, as in the church demanding that a heretic recant, but can be internal as well, as in a scientist or historian refusing to give up a cherished theory when facts that disprove it are discovered: ‘the will can thus obstruct a necessary revision of belief. Thinking becomes warped because it is wilful.’21 William James, however, had pointed to one aspect of thought where the will should remain active, namely when approaching ‘new and uncharted regions of experience for which rational guides are not yet available’. Normal scientific prudence results in a noncommittal attitude, which in suspending judgement before proof is available is itself an act of the will. By contrast, the discovery of new truths has been attended by the risk of adopting beliefs before the evidence for them is available: the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, for example, remarked that he knew his results in advance and that the ‘real bother was how to reach them’.22 By analogy, Wind argued that the experiment of modern art required a corresponding ‘will to believe’ on the part of both artist and society in order that new artistic knowledge could be discovered. This situation is complicated by the fact that authentic artistic inspiration and appreciation does not involve the will at all: ‘the work of art, no less than a truth, demands a genuine and complete oblivion of the self: an attitude repugnant to many people, while others perform it with natural ease.’23 Nevertheless, the will is involved in many of the decisions made prior to an aesthetic experience (such as the choice to go to the theatre), or in the artist’s creative work the choices about medium and scale or the practice of techniques that regulate the imagination to produce Baudelaire’s ‘workaday frenzy’. Wind distinguished here between the forecourt and the temple, and while the will cannot enter the temple, it can and should be an actively engaged presence in the forecourt: ‘When we treat art as sacrosanct we clearly refer to the temple and to nothing else: there the artist is necessarily alone with his genius. But in the forecourt he should not be left alone. And yet we leave him alone there as well, because we mistakenly extend to the porch the same veneration as belongs to the sanctuary.’24

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Wind once again contrasted Renaissance attitudes to art with post-romantic ones: while Pope Clement VII and Michelangelo indulged in heroic struggles over the commission for the Medici tombs, the modern art collector acquired ‘ready-made’ works of art produced for exhibitions, which are cherished ‘as a “find”, a sort of object trouvé’.25 The nearest thing to a Renaissance patron that Wind could suggest for modern art, was a dealer like Ambroise Vollard, who had ‘a singular gift for annoying, bullying, teasing, and flattering an artist’ until the desired work was produced. Renoir had dedicated a self-portrait to his dealer with the inscription ‘à Vollard, mon raseur sympathique’, a colloquialism meaning something like ‘to my dear bore’, which shows ‘the artist’s gratitude to his gadfly’.26 By contrast, when Jean Arp was commissioned to make sculptures for the UNESCO building in Paris, he found that no one involved with the project had the time to discuss his contribution or how it was intended to coordinate with works by Miró, Moore, Picasso and Tamayo. The result was that ‘in this building devoted to the cultural work of the United Nations the arts loiter about the place without function, distracted and disunited’.27 Wind’s conclusion was that artists preferred creative friction to being ignored and that one effect of the risk avoidance practised by contemporary patrons (like UNESCO) was that artists created their own obstacles to overcome in the creative process, such as the enlarged scale of abstract expressionist paintings, the serial techniques of composers or the ‘interior monologues’ of novelists. Ironically many of these developments lent themselves ideally to mechanization and so further aggravated the dissociation and dilution that modern art suffers from: ‘for wherever a vacuum is left by the will today, it is bound to be filled by mechanical forces.’28 James had argued against a misplaced trust in science, and an unwarranted extension of the law of parsimony beyond formal logic by what he called ‘the knights of the razor’ (after the philosophical term ‘Occam’s razor’). The ‘knights of the razor’ are by no means ‘raseurs sympathiques’, Wind punned, and they avoid participation in the process of creating art because to wrestle with that angel ‘takes too long; it is uneconomical; and one is likely to get one’s thigh out of joint’.29 Rather they aim to absorb ‘the anarchic energies of creation’ through a policy of ‘benevolent neutrality’ and ‘destructive tolerance’ which Baudelaire had perceptively warned might one day be hailed as progress. Yet, as Wind restated with James in his peroration, it was humanity’s ‘exuberant excess’ and ‘quest for the superfluous’ that was its essential characteristic: ‘prune down [man’s] extravagance, sober him, and you undo him.’30 The broadcast of Wind’s lectures on Art and Anarchy provoked an extraordinary response. Reviews were mixed, if unanimous in perceiving them

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Edgar Wind and Modern Art

as extremely challenging.31 The transcript of each broadcast was published in The Listener, which in turn prompted responses that dominated the magazine’s letters page for several months. Perhaps the most significant of these letters came from the Bloomsbury Group art critic, Clive Bell, who conceded the merit of Wind’s argument against formalist art criticism.32 Wind’s views were adopted by certain defenders of modern art – for example, the architect Reyner Banham – while others, like the poet Geoffrey Grigson, felt Wind’s lectures were unhelpful and untimely.33 Acknowledging the extent of the debate provoked by Art and Anarchy, the BBC’s Third Programme aired three commissioned responses to Wind’s lectures early in 1961 from the print historian Owen Holloway, the composer Michael Tippett and the Catalan composer Roberto Gerhard.34 Gerhard, in what is perhaps the most thoughtful of the three rather critical responses, compared Wind’s analysis with Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (Untergang des Abendlandes, 1918), stating that where Spengler advocated abandoning art for engineering, Wind wanted to revive art’s vitality: ‘the general diagnosis is confirmed, the malady persists, but the patient is not given up.’ Wind’s lectures were published in book form in 1963, revised and supplemented with an array of notes. In one of the first responses to the publication of Art and Anarchy as a book, Herbert Read commented that these changes would ‘do much to dispel certain dissatisfactions that were left at the time of their delivery’.35 In a rather guarded review, Read praised Wind, on the one hand, for providing ‘one of the best definitions [of art] I have ever read . . . an exercise of the imagination, engaging and detaching us at the same time’ while, on the other hand, criticizing the book for lacking overall coherence. Read concluded his review with a series of telling observations and questions: It is his attitude to the art itself that I find ambiguous. Does he imply that the art of Klee and Moore, of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, of Valéry and Eliot, is in some sense limited, in some sense inferior to the art of the past? Or does he want to get rid of our ‘benevolent societies’ and establish a social order in which art will once more be concentrated, intense, tragic, and sublime? Or, dreadful thought, does he retreat into scholarly neutrality, a form of spiritual pride?

Read was a regular sparring partner of Wind’s and was probably his ideal interlocutor on the subject of modern art.36 While they were not close there was a mutual respect, but they could be very critical of each other’s views, presumably because they were both equally committed to the vital role that art could play in society. While Wind admired Read’s passionate advocacy of modern art (see Chapter 5), he saw him as exemplifying wrong-headed, late romantic attitudes.

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As he put it in an anonymous review of Read’s Icon and Idea in The Times Literary Supplement in 1956, Read was ‘like a belated Rousseau’ who has ‘deplored the advances of the intellect because they have encroached on sensibility; and in order to redress the balance he has asked that we become as little children’.37 Whether or not this is entirely fair to Read, for Wind he represented the ‘fear of knowledge’ that he warned against. Art and Anarchy, the book, was widely if critically reviewed, including by the distinguished philosophers Richard Wollheim and Michael Podro.38 Two reviews – an anonymous review in The Times Literary Supplement that provoked a rebuttal from Wind and a review in the Cambridge magazine Delta by Michael Baxandall which suggests an art historical reaction against iconography – are worth looking at in some detail. The reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement argued that Wind had delayed the publication of his lectures not to revise their argument but because ‘he wanted to provide a critical apparatus to support it’. Perceptively, the reviewer stated of the additional notes that ‘their conjunction is, however, sometimes more arbitrary than inevitable, and one wonders whether the author is aware that they must strike an outsider as being in essence autobiographical’.39 This is an acute observation, and for Wind it was an unavoidable position for the researcher to find himself in: attempting to practice a form of ‘internal delimitation’ from inside an experiment (see later in this chapter for a discussion of Wind’s Experiment and Metaphysics). Leaving aside the notes, the ‘argument proper’ proved difficult to follow and left the reviewer ‘in a mutinously disputatious state of mind’. The two central propositions of the book are identified as Plato’s concept of ‘sacred fear’ and Hegel’s view that art had become marginal to society and was now a ‘splendid superfluity’. In the case of the latter point, the reviewer felt that Wind had simply asserted and not proven his case. When it was illustrated by reference to art works, the examples chosen tended to disprove rather than support the argument: Manet’s Dead Christ, in particular, was not an essay in ‘sheer painting’ but an attempt to convey an image of ‘suffering humanity’ inspired by Ernest Renan’s conception of Christ ‘as the perfect man’. Continuing to argue against Wind, the reviewer cited Arp, Brancusi, Hepworth and Moore as all displaying an interest in morphology that was informed by science, and discerned a ‘hint of anti-democratic bias’ in Wind’s concerns about the diffusion of art through mechanization. The review concluded that, owing to his ‘violent personal reaction’ against romanticism and expressionism, ‘Professor Wind should keep his eyes on those Renaissance paintings to which he is temperamentally attuned, and leave the productions of the twentieth century to those who like them’. This conclusion somewhat contradicted the reviewer’s earlier observation

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Edgar Wind and Modern Art

that ‘Professor Wind’s championship is having results, for the paintings of the London-domiciled American, R. B. Kitaj, do indeed follow certain of his precepts, and few young painters have had a greater influence today’. A similar point regarding Kitaj’s relationship to Wind had also been made in the editorial of Apollo magazine.40 Wind’s correspondence with Arthur Crook, editor of The Times Literary Supplement, reveals his exasperation about the wrong impression of the book that this review conveyed – that the notes ‘take up more space than the completed text of the lectures’ – and also that he took very seriously the imputation that he was ‘anti-democratic’. His own public response to the author of the review consisted of a refutation of the statement that Manet was influenced by Renan. In what amounted to a short scholarly article, Wind argued that Manet was unlikely to have supported a ‘heterodox view of religion’ as he was a practising Catholic who counted Abbé Hurel among his supporters. The association of Manet’s Dead Christ with Renan came from one negative contemporary review of the picture and was not supported by any reference to Renan in Manet’s own correspondence or conversations. It is a subtle irony of this exchange that Wind pointed to Manet’s religious connections to dispute a religious interpretation of his work.41 The supposed ‘anti-democratic’ implications of Wind’s book were not addressed in this exchange, however, leaving open the question of the political implications of Wind’s views on modern art. Thus, in reviews of the American version of the book, The New Leader concluded that ‘Wind is obviously a conservative’, and the journal Progressive argued ‘the conservative humanist may find in this expert his champion; the avant-garde liberal will meet a worthy antagonist’. Wind received a letter from Japan in 1963 from the American poet Cid Corman, which he read ‘with delight’, that stated ‘chances are you won’t find too many “supporters”, except from the conservative camps that will misread you’.42 While Wind was reluctant, unless forced by circumstances, to openly take a political position (perhaps understandably as a refugee from Nazi Germany), most of his significant friendships – with people like Paul Cassirer, Stringfellow Barr, Henry and Belle Moskowitz, Archibald MacLeish or Robert Hutchins – tend to place him among progressives and liberals. When confiding in trusted friends, Wind could even strike a radical note: for example, writing in 1946 to his Warburg Institute colleague, Hugo Buchtal, he said of America that ‘the country is seriously ill, and the only cure is a revolution. The rich are getting more stupid and indecent every day, and my only fear is that the poor may become infected.’43 When he became an American citizen, Wind registered as a Democrat voter.44

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In addition, the three artists discussed in this book, who were supported by Wind, were all in their own ways on the political left. Wind was less overt, but possibly more consistent in his politics, which could be described as ‘left liberal’, than contemporaries like his friend Sidney Hook, or the art critic Clement Greenberg, who both moved from being Marxists in the 1930s to become determined ‘Cold Warriors’ in the 1950s.45 Michael Baxandall, who was then assistant keeper in sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum, also published a highly critical account of Art and Anarchy in the Cambridge magazine Delta.46 The review characterized Wind’s book as a survey of some of the familiar ‘commonplaces of pessimistic Kulturkritik’ – anti-intellectualism, catholicity of taste, and so on – which thankfully stopped short of the sillier excesses of this type of analysis such as the Gesamtkunstwerk. Here the anti-Hegelian bias of Baxandall’s mentor, E. H. Gombrich, is evident. Baxandall identified the central argument of the book as the diminished response to art since the time of Plato, but questioned how it is possible to establish this: ‘I may sometimes say with conviction that a given artistic experience moved or disturbed me more a year ago than it did today, but it would be unusual to feel sure that it moved me more or less than it did my great-grandfather, whom I never knew.’ Without reliable evidence the book’s thesis was simply an assertion, and Wind’s views on art were therefore ‘stated, not debated’, and although much informative material is brought to bear on these views it tends to ‘decorate the assertions rather than clarify them’. More seriously, Baxandall admitted to ‘a growing anxiety about Professor Wind’s sense of evidence’: for example, the only evidence that Federigo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, refused to allow printed books in his library comes from Vespasiano da Bisticci, ‘a leading Florentine manuscript book-seller’, a fact that Wind must have known, as he must also have known that the duke died in 1482 ‘before printed books in Italy had become fully competitive with manuscripts on any basis’ (a tendency to factual inaccuracy was a frequently recurring accusation levelled at Wind’s work).47 Finally, Baxandall argued that it was pointless to expect painting to continue to fulfil a function ‘it has yielded to new media’. This was where the ‘central imagery of our time’ still exerted ‘accomplishment and power’ rather than the traditional visual arts which could effectively only refine a visual grammar. ‘It is possible to regret this’, Baxandall concluded, ‘but it is so, and to go on as if it is not is unhelpful.’ One private response to Art and Anarchy came from Wind’s Oxford colleague, the historian K. Bruce McFarlane (whose posthumous book on Memling was edited by Wind), who argued that fears of ‘a frenzied addiction to art’ were exaggerated: ‘You and Plato seem too easily alarmed. And weren’t Plato’s main

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Edgar Wind and Modern Art

concerns political? And weren’t they the same as Kruschev’s’? Wind’s reply to McFarlane conveyed his feelings about the general response to Art and Anarchy: ‘I expected the book to be dismissed as vieux jeu [“old hat”]. I am amazed, but not elated, that it should seem paradoxical and perverse.’ He reasserted his point that ‘the frenzied addiction to art’ was a risk to the artist, and that when we share the artist’s experience we are ‘exposed to the same threat to a lesser degree’. Finally, responding to an argument that McFarlane made about surplus wealth stimulating artistic production and effectively replacing patronage, Wind argued that it was the quantity of art that was affected by economic forces, but that the quality depended on ‘a far more precarious element, the presence of heightened imagination’.48

The Polarity of the Symbol The presence of heightened imagination, the willingness to take the risk of belief in art, to engage in the experiment of its embodiment, the awe felt at art’s power: all this amounted to a ‘defence of marginal anarchy’ (as Wind put it in a note intended for Nicolas Nabokov listing possible topics on which he could talk at the ‘Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century’ conference held in Paris in 1952 by the Congress for Cultural Freedom). The positive aspect of Wind’s case for the ‘magical’ power of art was neglected by critics who largely fixated on the negative assessments of Plato and Hegel discussed by Wind in the first lecture. Wind’s concluding emphasis on William James, and on a more playful, exuberant, even Dionysian conception of art as essential to humanity did not make as much of an impact. The failure among Wind’s critics to discern an overall argument in Art and Anarchy derived, partly at least, from their unfamiliarity with the critical concepts underpinning his approach. Probably the clearest theme to emerge from both broadcasts and book was that as the ‘holy fear’ of the power of the imagination diminished, so the fear of knowledge and its imagined negative consequences for art increased. This argument had been first formulated by Wind in an article on Plato’s philosophy of art that he published in 1932. The two other key concepts that shaped Wind’s overall approach to modern art also date from c. 1930: the ‘polarity of the symbol’ derived from Warburg, and the idea of Verkörperung or embodiment, and the related notion of ‘internal delimitation’, that Wind developed to solve a methodological paradox in physical science. Wind had provided an influential summary of Warburg’s ideas, and the implications for the history of art of his concept of Kulturwissenschaft (or cultural

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history), in a lecture given at the fourth Congress on Aesthetics in Hamburg in 1930. Here Wind focused on three distinctive aspects of Warburg’s thought: his concept of imagery, the theory of the polarity of the symbol and the psychological problem of expression. Wind began with a discussion of the art historical writings of Alois Riegl and Heinrich Wölfflin who both showed a ‘polemical concern for the autonomy of art history’ and a desire to separate it from the history of civilization – a contrasting approach exemplified by Jacob Burckhardt’s Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860). This separation of art history from cultural history was consistent with the ‘artistic sensibility’ of an age that prioritized ‘pure vision’ over subject matter in assessing an artwork. By contrast Wind asserted: ‘It was one of Warburg’s basic convictions that any attempt to detach the image from its relation to religion and poetry, to cult and drama, is like cutting off its lifeblood.’49 Emphasizing the importance for Warburg of Friedrich Theodor Vischer’s essay on the symbol, Wind explained that there are three types of link between the image and meaning. At one extreme, there is a magical link where signifier and signified are perceived as identical. At the other, a purely conventional and arbitrary link, constituting part of a shared code (so that, for instance, red means stop and green means go on a traffic light). In the middle of the spectrum the symbol manifests a ‘connection with reservation’, comparable to poetic metaphor, where the beholder of the image does not believe it magically to be the thing it represents, but is nevertheless aware of a psychological link that endows it with greater power to move than a mere sign. As Wind put it, at this central point, ‘the symbol is understood as a sign and yet remains a living image, where the psychological excitation suspended between the two poles, is neither so concentrated by the compelling power of metaphor that it turns into action, nor so detached by the force of analytical thought that it fades into conceptual thinking’.50 The critical point, therefore, in Warburg’s analysis of the symbol is the vital centre between the two extremes, where the symbol achieves a powerful harmony through being neither completely magical nor entirely conceptual: ‘It is by this theory of polarity that the role of an image within a culture as a whole is to be determined.’51 Warburg had applied Vischer’s concept of the symbol to historical analysis by tracing the survival and recurrence of Pathosformeln and their role in the process of cultural memory, employing them almost as instruments for testing the cultural temperature of a given historical situation. Here Wind’s own interest in pragmatism and the theory of embodiment influenced his summary of Warburg’s thought, even extending to a critique of the mathematical logic of propositional function. Arguably, Wind’s lecture provided a synthetic summary whose lucidity reflects his own preoccupations as much as Warburg’s.

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Edgar Wind and Modern Art

It is not possible to do justice here to Wind’s lecture on Kulturwissenschaft, let alone to the complexity of Warburg’s thought or the nature of his legacy (Wind notoriously reviewed Gombrich’s intellectual biography in 1970, complaining that it portrayed Warburg as a ‘tormented mollusc’, and asserting in contrast his ‘epigrammatic wit’ and the clarity of his published works).52 Instead, a few suggestions will be advanced that point to the formative influence of Warburg’s conception of the artistic type for Wind’s understanding of modern art. Warburg’s lecture on ‘Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America’, given on 21 April 1923 in the Kreuzlingen Sanatorium, related memories of his visit to New Mexico to study Hopi Indian culture in 1895–6, to the residual traces of pagan serpent worship in Greek and Jewish religion, and it was also a test of his recovery from a prolonged period of psychotic illness. Warburg had witnessed two Hopi dances during his trip: the Antelope dance at San Ildefonso, the vestigial trace of a hunting ritual originally meant to give the Hopi magical power over what was at the time of his visit already an extinct species and the Humiskachina dance at Oraibi ‘of the growing corn’, where a chorus of rotating masked dancers represented corn demons in order to bring about rain for crops.53 The focal point of the latter dance was a tree adorned with feathers: the ‘nature-given mediator, opening the way to the subterranean element’. Towards sunset a group of six clowns (Koshari) performed a ‘vulgar parody’ of the Humiskachina dance, a ‘peripheral contribution’ to the ritual – perhaps a form of marginal anarchy? – which Warburg saw as analogous to the satyr play in relation to the tragic chorus in Greek drama. Warburg also analysed the Hopi serpent ritual where ‘the dancers and the live animal form a magical unity’ as dangerous rattle-snakes are physically assimilated into the dance in an attempt to force nature into providing rain through a manipulation of the sympathetic correspondences between the zig-zagging movement of the snake and the lightning flash presaging the longed-for storm.54 Warburg saw the symbols and rituals of the Hopi as mediating magically between humanity and nature. In this context, it is revealing to compare his description of the cultic tree at the heart of the Humiskachina dance as a ‘connecting agent’, with a speech about modern art made by Paul Klee at the museum in Jena in 1924, where he asked: ‘May I use a simile, the simile of the tree?’ In Klee’s image, the artist is the trunk of a tree, whose roots are in nature, and whose crown diverges from its subterranean form, as it is shaped by a vital impulse working itself out in a different element. ‘Nobody would affirm that the tree grows its crown in the image of its root’, Klee argued, adding that the artist ‘does nothing other than gather and pass on what comes to him from the depths.

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He neither serves nor rules – he transmits’.55 Klee’s view of the artist as a medium of sorts was shared by Warburg who in his ‘Introduction’ to the Mnemosyne Atlas project described the ‘artistic type’ who ‘wavers between a religious and a mathematical conception of the world’ and who is ‘assisted in peculiar fashion both by the memories of the collective and of the individual’.56 The role of the artist as a ‘sensitive seismograph’ is comparable to the surrealist conception of the artist as seer, a connection that was reiterated by Wind in his inaugural lecture in 1957 at Oxford (see Chapter 6). Warburg, when reflecting in an autobiographical vein, saw his own role as ‘psycho-historian’ as also to function as ‘a seismograph of the soul, to be placed along the dividing lines between different cultural atmospheres and systems’.57 During the period in the late 1920s when Wind was acquainted with Warburg, it was through the rearrangement of photographs on panels that Warburg pursued the elusive connections between symbolic images, the recurrence of the frantic energy of the Maenad in a Ghirlandaio fresco, or the antique melancholy of the river god in Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863, Paris, Musée d’Orsay). Gombrich has pointed out that it was the philosophy of ‘bipolarity’ that Warburg ‘was testing and developing in these kaleidoscopic permutations’, and he aptly described the eighty-two panels of the Mnemosyne Atlas as ‘having the intensity of a dream’, adding that ‘its affinities are less with works of history than with certain types of poetry, not unknown to the twentieth century, where hosts of historical or literary allusions hide and reveal layers upon layers of private meanings’.58 The associative and combinative process of collage could equally be evoked in relation to the picture atlas, which includes in its later panels allusions to the disjointed assembly of images in the modern newspaper layout (e.g. in panels 77–79, and notably in panel 78 where Warburg discerned the ‘catharsis of the female head-hunter in the shape of the golf player’).59 Combining the primitive and modern, the Mnemosyne Atlas represented an experiment in historical enquiry that drew on the resources of the imagination, aligning the ‘psycho-historian’ with the modern artist.

Holy Fear Wind’s article on Plato’s philosophy of art – on the concept of ‘holy fear’ – was originally the subject of his inaugural lecture as Privatdozent in Hamburg in 1930, and it was then published in an art historical journal in 1932. In a letter written to Werner Oechslin in 1933, Wind regretted not having made the political thrust of this article more explicit.60 The immediate context of publication was

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Edgar Wind and Modern Art

the ominous political implosion of the Weimar Republic; however, the article’s central theme of the relationship of art and the state, of aesthetics and politics, was a concern of the German philosophical tradition going back at least to Friedrich Schiller’s letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795). Wind was aware that Schiller’s influential text was one of the first significant philosophical texts that Peirce had read as a boy (Wind noted that Peirce had admitted this in a letter to Lady Welby in 1908), and so it undoubtedly held a particular significance for him too. Wind began by examining the question of why Plato renounced the arts, in spite of his own artistic gifts and his admiration for poets like Homer and Hesiod. Plato was not the Anthony Comstock of antiquity (‘a notorious Puritanical censor’) that one American critic had accused him of being. However, the seriousness of his demand that the artist’s creativity be subordinated to the claims of society could not merely be explained away by invoking ‘our “sense of history”’. To answer this dilemma, Wind turned to Plato’s late work the Laws, for a psychological explanation that avoided the issue of the theory of the Idea, and the mimetic argument against art (as a copy of a copy) familiar from the Republic. He contrasted Plato’s early and late conceptions of the soul, represented by the image of a chariot in the Phaedrus, where the charioteer representing reason governs the black horse of desire and the white horse of pride who pull in different directions, with the image of the soul as a puppet in the Laws, pulled in different directions by strings so that falling over is likely, but with ‘one simple wire of gold, flexible yet immutable, to which the soul must respond if it wishes to attain its equilibrium’. In both images the task is to unify the conflicting forces of the soul to achieve harmony: ‘whenever this unity is in danger, Plato invokes the nature of artistic activity as the means, when properly employed, of promoting it; but it is also the means, when abused, of endangering that unity.’61 In the Laws Plato advocated employing both pleasure and pain in the education of citizens, and just as the soldier becomes brave through familiarity with fear, so citizens remain virtuous through familiarity with pleasure, so as to avoid the perils of ‘limping virtue’. This meant that, to the horror of abstemious Spartans and Cretans, regulated drunkenness formed an aspect of Athenian education controlled by a choirmaster who saw that drinking was accompanied by appropriate songs and dances – in other words, a form of musical education in practical morality. In this way pleasure is constrained by a ‘holy fear’ of disgrace; however, elderly men who develop a natural reluctance to take part in these exercises should drink and summon Dionysus to their aid.

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Art’s power, therefore, is transformative; it is ‘a kind of magic’, and that is why Plato felt the state must control it. When art disengages from the moral code of the state, and posits its own criteria of pleasure and pain as the final arbiters of value, then not only is the spiritual harmony aimed at by Plato disrupted but also the arts cease to inform each other, and they develop their own separate, autonomous trajectories. Art and the state then come into conflict because ‘those tensions between the powers of the soul which the legislator attempts to overcome and resolve are those which the artist maintains and intensifies’.62 Political corruption, which Wind argued that Plato saw as the counterpart of artistic mobility, occurs in a figure like Alcibiades in the Symposium, who appears to be possessed by ‘divine madness’ while lacking any sense of ‘divine fear’. The greater the talents of the politician, or artist, the greater the threat they pose: which is why, as Plato argued in the Republic, ‘if a man with the skill to assume all shapes and all things were to come to our city wishing to show off himself and his poetry . . . we should anoint his head with myrrh and crown him with a garland of wool and send him to another city’.63 Wind concluded the first two sections of his essay by arguing that it was Plato’s view that ‘the more art develops our aesthetic capacities for their own sake, the more it must destroy our capacity for morality and logic’.64 While this striking interpretation has its own cogency, it does largely avoid the problem of mimesis which is conventionally seen as being the key issue for Plato in his approach to the arts. In fact, the discussion in the Sophist of appearance and reality, of being and non-being, which had proved so fruitful for Renaissance literary commentators in excusing poetry from platonic censure (and here the distinction between ‘icastic’ and ‘fantastic’ imitation was critical), is ignored by Wind. The three sections comprising the second half of the essay cover, in a very condensed form, the aesthetic theories of Lessing, Kant and Schiller; Goethe’s view that it is ‘the business of art to carry out a symbolic transposition’ of psychological tensions; and various forms of romantic irony, epitomized by the contrast between Schlegel and Hegel, and literary decadence exemplified by Baudelaire, Wilde, Verlaine and Proust. From this summary of ‘examples chosen at random from the last two centuries and the immediate present’ it seems clear that Wind’s reading of Plato was guided by the central problem of modern art as he understood it: the divorce of reason and imagination resulting from the romantic rebellion in favour of ‘art for art’s sake’.65 Like the neo-Platonic and Renaissance commentators on Plato that he studied, Wind’s interpretation of Plato was both profoundly scholarly and yet shaped by contemporary concerns; it also displayed a similar ingenuity in finding an underlying consistency in texts

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that may simply be divergent in meaning. Basing his argument on Plato gave it the authority of antiquity, but the forceful concerns expressed by Wind were distinctly modern. In this way, Wind saw Lessing’s ‘struggle for the autonomy of art’ as leading to a perpetual state of psychic restlessness as he alternated between being a discursive thinker and a poet. Even Kant’s system kept apart cognition, moral action and aesthetic judgement, although he attempted to mitigate the tensions created by this compartmentalization by ‘assigning to aesthetic contemplation a mediating role between the conflicting standards of action and cognition’. Schiller, who developed Kant’s conception of the aesthetic to posit a theory of ‘play’, is treated respectfully if critically by Wind, and it is to the fundamental problem that Schiller identified that Wind is really responding in this essay: How, in the light of the French Revolution’s descent into terror and tyranny, can freedom truly be achieved? Although Schiller argued that ‘the beautiful provides man with a pathway from feeling to thinking’, and therefore that the aesthetic plays a crucial role in education – to such an extent that Wind stated that for Schiller it represented ‘the most important organ of education, and the only organ of liberation’ – he was still left with a conception of human subjectivity based on ‘internal tension’ and a ‘splitting-off of a part of the self and the consequent activity of the mind’.66 Wind’s treatment of the theme of romantic irony in this essay also foreshadowed aspects of Art and Anarchy, as he saw Schlegel’s ‘mischievous aesthetic’ of irony as being related to Hegel’s renunciation of art, and Baudelaire’s later renunciation of morality. Hegel, the logician, saw the self-realization of reason in the form of science, of ‘Geist’, as the indicator of modernity, and consequently works of art had become peripheral. No matter how beautiful images of the gods may be, it was no use – ‘we no longer bend our knees before them’. Wind saw Hegel’s demotion of art to a subordinate plane of the spirit as a similar impulse to Baudelaire’s rejection of morality for artistic reasons. They are opposite poles of the same impulse resulting from the fact that the unity of the soul envisaged by Plato can no longer be achieved through art. Having succinctly and forcefully outlined the predicament of modern art resulting from the psychological tensions caused by a separation of reason and imagination, and the divorce of art and life, Wind concluded with cautious optimism by referring to a recent rapprochement of science and art. Science no longer felt compelled to reject areas of experience previously confined to art, while ‘art, in its turn, has begun to abjure the hatred of culture that had temporarily plunged it into self-conscious primitivism’. The conditions were ripe for a new and constructive interpenetration, but also for a new sophistry. Hence the continuing relevance of Plato’s theory of ‘holy fear’.

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Experiment and Metaphysics As early as 1926 Wind argued that ‘there is a paradox inherent in physical enquiry’.67 This consists in the fact that measurements as physical processes are themselves subject to the same physical laws that they are meant to elucidate. The investigator is therefore involved in a circular argument as an experiment presupposes knowledge of the very laws it is designed to test. In this way instruments of measurement embody metaphysical assumptions. It was in response to this contradiction – as Arthur Eddington put it, ‘that the world of physics is a world contemplated from within, surveyed by appliances which are part of it and subject to its laws’ – that Wind developed his theory of the experiment and his concept of ‘internal delimitation’.68 Later, in an essay written for a Festschrift dedicated to Ernst Cassirer in 1936, Wind would come to the same conclusion for the art historian: an art historian who from a given work draws an inference concerning the development of its author turns into an art-connoisseur who examines the reasons for attributing this work to this particular master: and for this purpose he must presuppose the knowledge of that master’s development which was just what he wanted to infer.69

These developments in Wind’s thinking about the problem of the circular argument resulted in his philosophical masterpiece, Das Experiment und die Metaphysik, completed in 1929, presented as his Habilitationschrift in 1930, but not published until 1934. In this book, Wind sought to apply the experimental method to resolve the ‘conflict between Einstein’s cosmology and transcendental dialectic’. This produced an observation that ‘in Kant’s structuring of experience there is absolutely no logical space for the experiment’.70 Wind’s distinctive argument was, therefore, the product of the encounter of American pragmatism with German idealism. In the preface, he quoted Peirce approvingly to the effect that it would be unphilosophical to assume that rational investigation could not eventually produce a solution to any question given sufficient time. Peirce’s maxim from one of Wind’s favourite texts, ‘How to Make our Ideas Clear’, represented a methodological approach that countered the ‘declamatory broodings’ of Jaspers and Heidegger with ‘unambiguous hypotheses’ and ‘stringent proofs’.71 These remarks, together with an attack on idealist philosophers, gave the preface a political force in the context of the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933. In subsequent chapters Wind went on to tackle the problem of circular argument in both the sciences and humanities, to advance a theory of the

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experiment based on ‘internal delimitation’ as an empirical method for testing hypotheses and to propose ways in which the four cosmological antinomies described in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) could be resolved through a critique of their underlying Newtonian assumptions regarding space and time in the light of scientific advances such as the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. Essentially, Wind argued that fundamental metaphysical questions could be settled experimentally: as Ernest Nagel observed in his favourable review ‘for anyone reared in Kantian traditions this is revolutionary’. Wind remembered later that one of the few readers of his book, Ernst Cassirer, saw this as a lapse into empiricism, and ‘I am sorry to say it made that amiable man extremely angry’.72 How does a book proposing radical philosophical solutions resulting from scientific advances to the problem of the Kantian antinomies relate to modern art? At a general level, given Wind’s opinion that science had displaced art from its central cultural position, and that modern art aspired to be experimental, it is useful to recognize both his extraordinary expertise – for an art historian – in the field of physical science, and how philosophically rigorous his theory of the experiment was. More specifically, Wind deployed the key insight of Experiment and Metaphysics in his analysis of artworks. Fundamental to Wind’s argument was the notion of Verkörperung or embodiment, which can be understood as the conceptual link between a pragmatist revision of Kant and a Warburgian understanding of the symbol. Physical hypotheses are embodied in the instruments devised to verify them just as the symbol embodies the cultural tension between sign and living image – and a person’s behaviour embodies their beliefs.73 A critique of the scientist Henri Poincaré’s concept of ‘arbitrary convention’ was an important aspect of Wind’s development of his theory of embodiment and of the critical role of experiment or what he called the ‘experimentum crucis’. A succinct statement of Wind’s position can be found in a passage critiquing Poincaré: Treated purely mathematically, the thinking out of transformations thus remains a pretty game, but one which can only prove fruitful if man believes his destiny does not lie in his mirroring himself like a god in his own thoughts. Only in combination with an act of embodiment does transformation become an instrument of cognition, and the instrument becomes all the more powerful (and thus all the more dangerous) in proportion to the comprehensiveness with which the embodiment is attempted.74

Transposed to the arts, this is essentially the argument of Art and Anarchy. Wind drew this conclusion himself in the solitary reference to art in Experiment and

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Metaphysics: ‘Even an artistic conception only becomes a work of art by dint of being embodied and demonstrating its aesthetic validity through this act of embodiment. Otherwise it remains a mere figment of the imagination, which does not expose itself to the danger of error and thus forfeits the opportunity to be given objective form.’75 Wind expanded on this insight in his article ‘In Defence of Composite Portraits’ published in the Journal of the Warburg Institute in 1937, one of a number of short essays written by Wind for the early volumes of this journal which have the merit of summarizing complicated theoretical positions in compact phrases of epigrammatic clarity and density. Here, defending Mignard’s portrayal of Molière as Julius Caesar in spite of its ahistorical hybridity, Wind argued that the picture’s vitality placed it on the midpoint of a scale between the polarities of mythic hero-worship and archaeological accuracy: It may be a depressing thought to many that vivacity of approach should thus produce distortion and that truth, though clarifying if sought in due measure, should prove deadening if surrendered to without restraint. Regret, however, cannot amend the matter. We must learn to look upon distortions as instruments rather than as mere obstructions of a living mind, and we may yet find that we are none the worse for being in a world in which the limitations of our powers determine their use.

Wind then added a further allusion to the argument of Experiment and Metaphysics in a footnote: ‘not beyond but within our temporary limitations do we find the tools for distinguishing between truth and error and achieving our measure of each of them’.76 Within the field of art, therefore, the symbol and the pathos formula provide the instruments with which the art historian can test hypotheses or gauge the art work’s position between polarities. One further example, from ‘Traditional Religion and Contemporary Art’, a talk given at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953, illustrates this point. Discussing Paul Gauguin’s Christ Jaune (1889, Buffalo, New York, Albright-Knox Art Gallery), Wind remarked on how the artist had found a ‘a formula of picturesque evasion by which he could both enter a religious experience and stay out of it’. This was to use the Breton peasant women at the base of the crucifix as ‘emotional repoussoirs’ whose function is to distance ‘the pious action from the spectator’. This distancing effect acts as an instrument by which the emotional intensity of the picture’s religious content can be gauged.77

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The Tradition of Symbols in Modern Art

Wind’s first sustained scholarly engagement with modern art came when he was invited in June 1941 to give a series of talks on ‘the Literary Background of Modern Art’ at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.1 Wind was then at the height of his American fame as a lecturer, a fact that was reflected in the fee of $200 per lecture (Wind’s pay for the series amounted to approximately the average annual wage in the United States at this time). Writing on behalf of the museum, Monroe Wheeler assured him that ‘we all feel greatly honored by your consenting to give this series of lectures, for we have the very highest opinion of your extraordinary knowledge and brilliant delivery’. The sense of occasion felt by MoMA in securing Wind’s services was also reflected in the publicity flyer promoting the lecture series: ‘Dr. Wind’s lectures may well be the most significant and brilliant ever held under the Museum’s auspices.’ In the end, Wind gave five lectures in April 1942 under the overall title The Tradition of Symbols in Modern Art: ‘The Heritage of Baudelaire’ (1 April), ‘History of the Monster’ (8 April), ‘Picasso and the Atavism of the Mask’ (15 April), ‘The Survival of Wit’ (22 April) and ‘Scientific and Religious Fallacies – “Our Present Discontents”’ (29 April). Typed slide-lists survive for four of these lectures, but not for ‘The Survival of Wit’. The slide-lists show that the contemporary artists that Wind discussed were, in alphabetical order, Leonora Carrington, Salvador Dali, Giorgio De Chirico, André Derain, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Paul Klee, José Clemente Orozco, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Georges Rouault, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Gino Severini and Pavel Tchelitchew. The emphasis, therefore, was predominantly on European surrealists: those artists who had featured in MoMA’s Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibition in 1936, rather than those in the companion exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art (although there were, of course, artists like Klee, Duchamp and Picasso who had featured in both). This was noted by Alfred M. Frankfurter of Art News who hopefully assumed that, in future lectures, ‘this eminent scholar . . . will branch out from Surrealism

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into all forms of modern pictorial expression’.2 Wind’s notes on his slide-lists provide evidence of him consulting dealers like Kirk Askew, Balzac Galleries and Karl Nierendorf in New York, Léonce Rosenberg and Galerie Simon in Paris, and referring to works in the private collections of Walter Arensberg, Walter Chrysler, Paul Guillaume, Sidney Janis, Edward James and Roland Penrose. Apart from drawing on the resources of the Museum of Modern Art and the Wadsworth Athenaeum, he also had slides made from images in art journals like Minotaure and Cahiers d’Art. Although Wind’s MoMA lectures provoked admiration and debate – Art News commented that they ‘produced a degree of stimulation that would be remarkable at any time, let alone at a moment when a concentrated audience for art has never been harder to get’ – not everyone in New York agreed with Wind’s conclusions about modern art, or with his version of the iconographical method. For example, the art historian Creighton Gilbert (the son of Wind’s former colleague Katherine Gilbert) remembered in 1984 that When Wind lectured at the Morgan Library soon after [his Museum of Modern Art lectures], on Michelangelo, the Surrealist painter Tchelitchew came, brought by Agnes Rindge Claflin, the Vassar professor of modern art history. Clearly, Wind was in fashion. But some people had their doubts. After one of these talks, Meyer Schapiro gave a spontaneous counter-lecture, complete with bibliography, in a nearby coffee shop. Others asked whether what Wind said could be relied on.3

The novelist Glenway Wescott provided an illuminating image of Wind as a deep-sea explorer to convey some of the negative criticism his MoMA lectures provoked: To return to my image of you as an oceanographer of the ocean of art: – During No 1 [‘The Heritage of Baudelaire’], people like Kirstein stood on the sand (and what landlubbers they are anyway) and watched you there off-shore in your rowboat with your dip-net, and cried, ‘What in the world is that man doing? He’s not fishing for anything, that’s not the way to fish, he must be mad?’4

The Heritage of Baudelaire Wind thought that modern art was a product of romanticism and that artists like Klee, Rouault and the surrealists were working within ‘the heritage of Baudelaire’ (‘to say the word Romanticism is to say modern art’, Baudelaire had

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written in his 1846 Salon review).5 This is why the lectures on ‘The Tradition of Symbols in Modern Art’ began with a lecture on the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire, the artists associated with him like Courbet, Delacroix and Manet, and with his poetic heirs Verlaine and Rimbaud. The romantic revolt, symbolized by the victory of the Bohemian supporters of Victor Hugo over the classicists at the so-called ‘Battle of Hernani’ at the 1830 opening of Hugo’s play at the Comédie-Française, was for Wind a watershed moment when the arts attempted to disengage from societal constraints and ‘to set up pleasure and pain as the final arbiters’.6 Although Hugo claimed a triumph for literary freedom, and declared romanticism to be liberalism in literary form, Wind saw the Hernani episode as a Pyrrhic victory, achieving for art an autonomous development, but one that increasingly detached it from life. As Wind put it in his inaugural lecture in Oxford in 1957: ‘It is difficult for us, who treat matters of art in a spirit of laissez faire, to picture the frenzy with which the Romantics demanded that the powers of the imagination should be released from any restraints imposed by intellect, morals, or religion, let alone by utilitarian considerations.’7 In the 1932 article on Plato’s concept of ‘holy fear’, Wind had discussed Baudelaire in the context of developments that had displaced art to the periphery of society, and which even placed the poet in defiant opposition to mainstream morality. Above all, Baudelaire represented for Wind a poet who exulted in his expulsion from Plato’s Republic, and who with ‘the arrogance of the “libertine”’ celebrated the rejection of bourgeois morality as the source of his artistry. In the poem ‘Horreur sympathique’ (‘Congenial horror’), Baudelaire had boasted: ‘Je ne geindrai pas comme Ovide / Chassé du paradis latin’ (‘I will not moan like Ovid, driven out of the Latin paradise’).8 In his introductory poem to Les Fleurs du Mal, Baudelaire indicated the diabolical source of his inspiration – ‘Satan Trismégiste’ – and that the poetics of ‘Ennui’ represented a foul yet ‘delicate monster’ (‘ce monstre délicat’) that also implicated the hypocritical reader. According to Wind, Baudelaire felt that to create beautiful poetry out of corrupt or even evil subject matter was a greater artistic feat than writing morally commendable verse, where the relationship between form and content was practically tautological. One of the consequences of ‘romantic irony’ was a tendency to see both sides of the argument, to endow the cause of both Greeks and Trojans with a moral equivalence, and even to find a sublime grandeur in the fate of the ultimate rebel, the devil himself. Wind had discovered the first stirrings of this attitude in his studies on British eighteenth-century art, in the heroic treatment that artists like Romney, Blake and Fuseli gave to Milton’s character of Satan. Baudelaire’s

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Edgar Wind and Modern Art

‘Litany to Satan’ was a later symptom of the same romantic revolt in favour of the autonomy of art. Wind insisted, therefore, that in spite of the claim in the draft prefaces to Les Fleurs du Mal that the poems were ‘an innocent exercise, designed to demonstrate how an exquisite artistry can transfigure an offensive theme’, Baudelaire was drawn to immoral subject matter, because it formed part of the artist’s genius, ‘and for me, a barbarian in spite of everything, a part of the pleasure’ (‘Le sujet fait pour l’artiste une partie du genie, et pour moi, barbare malgré tout, une partie du Plaisir’). Speaking on ‘The Critical Nature of a Work of Art’ at a symposium organized by the music department at Harvard University in 1948, Wind concluded his attack on Baudelaire by emphatically stating: ‘The most sophisticated of poets, “barbare malgré tout”, thus conceded his affinity to a savage. Like a primitive chieftain, he sensed that he could mould the conduct of a tribe by the sheer force of the incantation.’9 The interpretive violence done to Baudelaire’s writings to reach this conclusion is revealed by the fact that the poet’s admission of barbarism is not to be found in the posthumously published prefaces to Les Fleurs du Mal, but rather in the section on landscape painting in his 1859 Salon where the comment is made in the context of a plea for a greater role for imagination in the landscape genre, and is simply a self-deprecating admission for an old-fashioned taste for picturesque ruins.10 Nevertheless, Wind would continue to refer to Baudelaire as exemplifying a tendency in modern art to dangerously prioritize aesthetic effect over morality. For example, speaking at the ‘Art and Morals’ conference at Smith College in 1953, Wind repeated that ‘Baudelaire declared in the Fleurs du Mal that the task of the poet, as he saw it at that moment, was to glorify the most pernicious states of the mind, because the very perniciousness of these states gave him the possibility as an artist to show his art in transfiguring them’. Similarly, while in conversation with the philosopher Stuart Hampshire in a BBC radio broadcast on Kant in 1957, Wind insisted that Baudelaire ‘deliberately intends to convey evil through aesthetic terms’. Here an earlier point, first made in the lecture on Plato’s concept of ‘holy fear’ is maintained: that ‘the intellectual edge of this feeling is apparent in every line of Baudelaire’s work, in each antithesis and juxtaposition . . . and in the consciousness of the evil of his passion he finds the true accents of his art’.11 Wind was drawn to paradox as a thinker, and this was doubtless part of Baudelaire’s appeal; for, if as an artist, Baudelaire exemplified the damned poet or ‘poète maudit’, as a critic he anticipated Wind in many of his conclusions. It was Baudelaire, for example, who complained of contemporary painters that ‘it

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would seem legitimate to demand from them a little more interest in religion, poetry and science than in fact they show’.12 As we have seen, Wind referred to Baudelaire in Art and Anarchy concerning the need to regulate the imagination’s disruptive powers, and on his ambivalent attitude to didactic art. Baudelaire also criticized the deficiency of contemporary religious art, while pointing out that a non-believer could, nevertheless, succeed in this sphere through the power of imagination (a problem that Wind also explored in a lecture contrasting the religious works of Matisse and Rouault given at MoMA in 1953).13 In addition, Wind owed to Baudelaire the concept of the ‘double nature’ of the artist, who must both engage with and remain detached from the imaginative forces that shape his work; just as the beholder of the beautiful must keep in mind both its eternal and contingent aspects, the latter of which acts as the icing on the cake that makes universal beauty more digestible.14 Reading Baudelaire’s criticism through a Warburgian lens also yields further affinities with Wind’s take on modern art: for example, the poet’s intuition that ‘primitive’ art illuminates the art of antiquity (e.g. Baudelaire praised George Catlin’s paintings of native Americans: ‘these savages make antique sculpture comprehensible’); or Baudelaire’s view that memory is the principal criterion for judging art, that ‘art is a kind of mnemotechny of the beautiful’. As will be discussed in the paragraphs that follow, Wind related the recurrent interest in monsters in modern art with the ‘Art of Memory’ (Ars Memorativa), which for its effectiveness – as Baudelaire also pointed out – relied on the powers of the imagination. Again, when considering the great if dangerous artists that Plato felt must be honoured and then requested to depart from the Republic, it is useful to bear in mind Baudelaire’s characterization of the composer Richard Wagner: the force of his symbolic art, his attraction to myth and the relationship of his music to politics. Although Wind’s friend McFarlane felt that he was ‘too easily alarmed’ by the disruptive power of great art, Wind – perhaps mindful of Nietzsche’s rejection and the Nazis’ adoption of Wagner – stated in Art and Anarchy that he was one of those who responded to Wagner by ‘acknowledging the power of a supreme genius but recognizing it as the kind of power to which one should not surrender’.15 Baudelaire, however, did surrender to Wagner’s music ‘with my eyes closed, feeling, as it were, lifted from the earth’: the imagination is stimulated by the music of Tannhäuser to pursue analogies, to create metaphors and, in the words of one of the key poems in Les Fleurs du Mal, to discover ‘correspondences’: La nature est un temple où de vivants piliers Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;

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Edgar Wind and Modern Art L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symbols Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers.16

Wind feared that the combinatory power of the imagination could produce monsters as well as discover correspondences, especially when it is not held in check by reason. Baudelaire’s ‘forests of symbols’ might observe us knowingly, but Rimbaud’s ‘alchemy of the verb’ can induce disquieting hallucinations which replace factories with mosques, displace drawing rooms to the bottom of a lake, and produce ‘monsters’ and ‘mysteries’. Wind referred especially to the essay ‘On the Essence of Laughter’ to relate Baudelaire’s support for ‘art for art’s sake’ to the disinterested pleasure that Kant saw as characterizing an aesthetic response to an artwork. Here Baudelaire characterized laughter as diabolical – ‘laughter is satanic: it is thus profoundly human. It is the consequence in man of the idea of his own superiority’, yet it also betrays a contradictory awareness of humanity’s fallen state of misery. However, the ‘absolute comic’, which Baudelaire distinguished from the ‘the significative comic’, is not judgemental but simply revels in the grotesque, and ‘has about it something profound, primitive and axiomatic’, larger and more elemental than laughter at human behaviour. Baudelaire concluded that ‘there is the same difference between these two sorts of laughter as there is between the implicated school of writing and the school of art for art’s sake’ (‘. . . l’école littéraire intéressée et l’école de l’art pour l’art’).17 The key word here is ‘intéressée’ which, in a footnote to Art and Anarchy, Wind related to Kant’s terms ‘interessiert’ or ‘Interesse’ which pervade the Critique of Judgement. Baudelaire posed for Wind, as the radio broadcast on Kant with Stuart Hampshire makes clear, the problem of whether disinterested aesthetic judgements were possible: for example, in reading Baudelaire on the pleasures of evil was it possible to detach yourself sufficiently so that ‘nevertheless without committing yourself to them, you can appreciate the grandeur of his poetry by taking what he [Kant] would call a disinterested pleasure’? The same problem was restated in Wind’s inaugural lecture at Oxford on the ‘Fallacy of Pure Art’ in 1957, where Baudelaire is said to have defined pure laughter [as] being the counterpart to pure art. ‘L’école littéraire intéressée’, he observes, was properly entertained by the comedies of Molière because he excels in the ‘comique significatif’, that is, moral satire; but inasmuch as that aim is the aim of reason, Molière’s pointed wit has less imaginative freedom than the incalculable extravaganzas and drolleries of Callot (‘comique absolu’) in which Baudelaire greets ‘l’école de l’art pour art’.18

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Absolute laughter, which characterizes the laughter of pure art, has something primitive about it, therefore, driving apart reason and imagination. Turning to Wind’s treatment of the theme of ‘the heritage of Baudelaire’ in the first of his series of lectures given at the Museum of Modern Art in April 1942, the surviving slide-list shows that the sequence of slides relating to Baudelaire was suggestively introduced by two images of Lewis Carroll, the mathematician and author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865): a self-caricature with agitated hair where his right hand covers his face entitled ‘What I look like when I am lecturing’, and a posed photographic self-portrait in reflective mood from 1857.19 This juxtaposition appears to set up a series of contrasts between caricature and photographic portraits, between the real and the ideal, between reason and fantasy, beginning with the eccentric Oxford don whose writings were admired by the surrealists. A sequence of portraits of Baudelaire then followed: Emile De Roy’s portrait of the young, bearded poet (1844, Palais de Versailles), negligently leaning his head against an elegantly poised hand – a pose conveying melancholy which Wind thought was reprised in a 1909 self-portrait by Klee – while looking intensely if ironically at the viewer; then Etienne Carjat’s 1863 photograph that conveys the grim realities of ageing and disappointment (an image copied by Rouault in a lithograph); and finally, two self-portrait caricatures sketched alongside profiles of his friend, the writer Champfleury.20 Perhaps what is intended here is an analysis of the image of the modern artist, even a physiognomy: Baudelaire, too, had analysed the smile of Daumier, which reads as a sign of his good character (‘comme un signe de sa bonté’) unlike the grimaces of a Melmoth or Mephistopheles.21 Certainly the striking contrast between De Roy and Carjat’s portraits of Baudelaire suggests a juxtaposition of the ideal and real (or in Baudelaire’s terms ‘Spleen and the Ideal’) – even an echo of one of Wind’s favourite refrains: the contrasting philosophies of life conveyed in the physiognomies of Democritus and Heraclitus.22 Baudelaire’s own caricatures link him to Champfleury and the circle around Courbet. Indeed, Baudelaire appears on the right-hand side of the ‘real allegory’ L’Atelier du peintre. Allégorie réelle determinant une phase de sept années de ma vie artistique et morale (1854–5, Paris, Musée d’Orsay). Here the poet appears lost in reverie, absorbed in his book, while the painter looks towards his canvas, and beyond this to the cast of ordinary characters discovered in everyday life that inspired his art. The still-life of the Spanish hat and guitar to the left of the easel represented, according to Wind, the concept of the ‘defrocked romantic’ (‘romantique défroqué’) propounded by Théophile Gautier, and with it Courbet’s

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rejection of romanticism. The painting sets up the contrast between realist and imaginative trends in modern art that Baudelaire himself discussed in his art criticism. That Courbet saw Baudelaire as a contemplative absorbed with books is confirmed by a separate portrait in the Musée Fabre. Interestingly, Julien Levy also characterized Baudelaire as a dreamer in the 1936 text that introduced the surrealists to America.23 Following the discussion of Courbet, Wind turned to Constantin Guys who Baudelaire had praised as more a ‘man of the world’ than an artist. No doubt this sequence of slides of vivid sketches of the streets of Paris and its demimonde, involved a discussion of Baudelaire’s famous essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’. The sequence was introduced by another portrait of Baudelaire, this time a photograph by Carjat showing him posing in front of popular prints, and closed with Manet’s 1862 etching of the poet – now the subject of a print – jauntily sporting his top hat and viewed in profile, epitomizing the dandy and flaneur praised in his essay. For Baudelaire, a significant aspect of Guys’ art was that his rapid sketches, while capturing the fleeting and contingent details that characterized modern beauty, were executed from memory. This ‘mnemonic art’ has a primitive quality, the result of ‘an inevitable, synthetic, childlike barbarousness, which is often still to be discerned in a perfected art, such as that of Mexico, Egypt or Nineveh, and which comes from a need to see things broadly and to consider them above all in their total effect’.24 Slides of Baudelaire’s own drawings of his mixed-race lover Jeanne Duvall and Manet’s portrait of the same subject (1862, Budapest, Museum of Fine Art) then followed. Perhaps here Wind intended to draw attention to Baudelaire’s characterization of the courtesan as ‘a perfect image of the savagery that lurks in the midst of civilization’, and to the poet’s own tender description of Jeanne Duvall as ‘a perfect monster’.25 Manet, Baudelaire and Champfleury appear close together in Fantin-Latour’s Homage à Delacroix (1864, Paris, Musée d’Orsay), a group portrait of artistic and literary admirers of the great romantic artist gathered around his portrait. This work introduced a sequence of slides where Wind seems to have charted the declining status of the artist from romantic rebel to societal outcast. Where Delacroix envisaged his friend Chopin as Dante, and established his fame with the success of his La Barque de Dante (1822, Paris, Louvre), the ‘season in hell’ of the ‘poètes maudits’ descended into a sordid, drink and drug-fuelled pursuit of a ‘derangement of all the senses’, resulting in the two poets dodging policemen in London, and Verlaine shooting Rimbaud in Brussels. Rouault’s portrait of Verlaine, and the self-portrait by Klee in a similar pose to that adopted by

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Baudelaire for De Roy, charted the recurrence of the pathos formula of romantic physiognomy in the work of modern artists. If Wind’s emphasis on Baudelaire as the precursor of modern art was unusual at this time, outside of surrealist circles at least, the fact that he actually began his lecture with a discussion of Samuel Butler, author of the utopian satire Erewhon (1872), was frankly eccentric.26 Here Wind introduced the themes of his lecture with a sequence of images taken from Butler’s 1881 travel book Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino, together with photographs and paintings of Butler’s rooms at 15 Clifford’s Inn in London. In addition to publishing fiction, Butler attempted to pursue a career as a painter, was a keen photographer, and engaged in lively debates about the theory of evolution supporting Lamarckian views about inherited characteristics against those of Darwin. The illustrations taken from Butler’s travel book relate to passages in the text where the author observed acutely the phenomena of ‘primitivism’ and stylistic anachronism during his travels through the Alps: for example, a mural on a church facade in Mesocco that seemed to have been painted by an ‘old master born out of due time’ although dated 1720, or a naïve landscape drawing by an amateur artist encountered by Butler that appeared to be ‘by some fourteenth century painter who had risen from the dead’, or the crude votive picture of a sick girl in bed protected by the Madonna that Butler copied at Casina di Banda. Photographs taken by Butler show a church interior at Locarno packed with ex votos, and also the tightly hung walls of his rooms at 15 Clifford’s Inn where reproductions of the Old Masters are placed alongside folk art from the alpine regions and Butler’s own paintings. Although he had lost his faith as a result of reading Darwin’s Origin of Species, Butler was sympathetic to, and also intrigued by, the manifestations of sincere belief that he witnessed in a mountainous enclave of Europe still remote from modernity. Butler could be described as acting like an anthropological observer, investigating the persisting relationship of primitive style to ritual practice in a secluded community where traditional beliefs had been preserved. In this sense, Butler is comparable to Warburg visiting the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, who also recorded his travels to the cultural past – to a version of Erewhon – through the mechanical lens of the camera (also, of course, an instrument embodying metaphysical assumptions). A letter from Gertrud Bing to Wind from 1940 shows that comparisons of Butler and Warburg were discussed in the Warburg circle: I have been reading Samuel Butler lately, and been very thrilled. I almost feel he is talking of historical and not of biological matters, and the affinity with

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Edgar Wind and Modern Art Warburg’s ideas is sometimes staggering, for instance, when he says that ‘customs and machines are instincts and organs in process of development’ or that ‘rudimentary organs are sign of a discontinued faith’.27

Knowing that in their correspondence Wind and Bing were relating Warburg’s ideas to Butler’s writings, perhaps it is legitimate to suggest that the sequence of slides in Wind’s MoMA lecture showing photographs of votive pictures jostling against each other on a church wall, and Butler’s own arrangement of images across the walls of his room where high art and folk art are juxtaposed, is meant as an allusion to Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas? Warburg’s method of combining photographic images on panels to pursue connections across time, and trace the recurrence of ‘pathosformeln’ was one devised to tackle the problems of cultural memory. As Bing’s letter demonstrates, Warburg and his helpers struggled with the question of how evolutionary theory could be applied to cultural history, in other words how, as Bing put it, ‘can heredity by memory pass through other channels than those of biological descent in direct line?’ Perhaps the ‘mnemic’ theory of engrams proposed by Richard Semon was of some help? – but Bing looked to Wind to be her guide here: ‘can you act as “Katalysator” to my muddled ideas in this, as you have so often done before?’ Wind’s references to ‘unconscious memory’ in the MoMA lecture series, therefore, refer more to Butler than to Freud. However, Butler was intriguing not only for his ‘staggering’ affinity with Warburg, but also because his writings resonate in equally strange ways with Baudelaire and surrealism. For example, a passage in the introduction to the travel book evokes Butler as a flaneur musing on the intoxicating quality of the imagination while, like Louis Aragon in Le paysan de Paris (1926), scrutinizing shopfronts for surreal meaning: No one can hate drunkenness more than I do, but I am confident that the human intellect owes its superiority over that of the lower animals in great measure to the stimulus which alcohol has given to imagination – imagination being little else than another name for illusion. As for wayside chapels, mine, when I am in London, are the shop windows with pretty things in them.28

Butler’s theory of unconscious memory stated that the more perfectly we know how to do something, such as play the piano, the less consciously aware we are of that knowledge, so that ‘perfect ignorance and perfect knowledge are alike unselfconscious’.29 Butler described, for example, a paid copyist who ‘writes on in a quasi-unconscious manner; but if he comes to a word or to characters with which he is but little acquainted, he becomes immediately awakened to the consciousness of either remembering or trying

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to remember’. The speculation about the relationship of unconsciousness to consciousness in the act of writing, and the mediating role of memory between these two ‘communicating vessels’ (to paraphrase Breton), strikingly prefigures the surrealist interest in automatic writing. Also, like the surrealists, Butler cited Leonardo da Vinci’s observation that spots on a wall might yield landscapes or battles to the observing artist: ‘a variety of compositions may be seen in such spots according to the disposition of mind with which they are considered.’30 Two responses to the first MoMA lecture, ‘The Heritage of Baudelaire’, exist in the form of a letter to Wind from the Metropolitan Museum of Art curator and print scholar William Ivins Jr., and a letter to Alfred H. Barr Jr by the artist Louise Bourgeois. Writing to Barr, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, on 6 April 1942, Bourgeois stated that Wind’s lecture had raised ‘many problems’ and that she was listing three to put to him. Her questions are characteristically penetrating, identifying weaknesses in the argument. Firstly, Bourgeois points out that Baudelaire’s ‘Litany to Satan’ occurs in the section of Les Fleurs du Mal entitled ‘Revolt’ (Baudelaire had claimed that he was playing the role of a spiritual rebel here), and that the poet who was ‘so obsessed with transgression’, ‘who uses vice as the road to virtue, who stresses the immoral as proof of the moral and harps on their final union’ was actually profoundly concerned with faith. Secondly, she argued that Baudelaire’s idea of the savage was ‘quite naturally that of his romantic period (luxe, calme, et volupté)’ and that consequently the twentieth-century taste for primitive art was really ‘closer to that of Champfleury and the Realists than to that of Baudelaire’.31 Finally, summarizing Wind’s peroration that ‘scientists and artists together would solve the problems of the immediate future, as in the Renaissance’, Bourgeois caustically asked whether ‘the investigations of the Surrealists to whom Dr Wind referred’ can really be ‘put on the same level of those of psychiatrists, biologists, and bio-chemists’? Her final comment to Barr – ‘I hope that the above three are clear and not too long for your use’ – suggests that she was contributing to a defensive response to Wind’s provocative lectures within New York’s modern art clique (Kirstein had also been very critical as is revealed by Wescott’s letter cited earlier).32 The letter from Ivins to Wind was far more supportive: ‘Such a good talk as you gave us last night! . . . I envy you your brilliance and skill.’ Ivins referred Wind to an anecdote about Baudelaire and a sea-captain related by Anatole France which supported the lecture’s argument that Baudelaire’s poetic persona and concept of modernity were linked to primitivism:

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Edgar Wind and Modern Art The captain, recently returned from a long voyage in Oceania, was showing B some of the things he had brought back with him. B became lost in thought as he held and looked at a little bone or ivory carving. The captain, wanting B to look at something else, spoke of the carving as merely a negro totem of no value, at which B held up his hand in warning and said – Preny garde, mon ami, si ça serait le vrai Dieu!33

In addition to this rather loose account of France’s story, Ivins commented that ‘you brought out Butler’s interest in photography – I hope you will bring out the important role played by photography in the development of modern art’. Alluding to what would become a central theme of his classic Prints and Visual Communication (1953), Ivins argued that the mechanical perspective of photography, together with photographic processes for producing reproductive prints, had deprived painters of the role of representing objective reality, freeing them to pursue other goals. However, this had encouraged a lot of weeds to flourish in the garden of art among the flowers, weeds that had previously been kept out by the high technical standards required for representative art. Ivins concluded that advocates of modern art could be oddly intolerant by comparison with academicians, reducing artistic intuitions to ‘hard rules of conduct’: ‘No tribe of artists has ever made a school of theology and dogma as fast or so rigid as the horde who are aut modern aut nullus’.

History of the Monster Wind’s second lecture, ‘History of the Monster’, began with a slide that showed the reverse of a Renaissance medal of Francesco di Giulio della Torre depicting the ‘auriga Platonis’ or the Platonic symbol of the chariot of the soul from the Phaedrus. As we have seen, Wind commented on this symbol in his 1932 essay on Plato’s concept of ‘holy fear’: the soul is compared to a chariot which has nous, the intelligent element in us, as its driver, controlling an evil black horse (desire) and a noble white horse (pride or spirit). If he masters the white horse he can, by guiding this horse, curb the black one; but if the black horse masters the white one, the charioteer loses control, and the chariot is thrown off its course. However strongly the image emphasizes the limitations of our power of reason, it still depicts it as strong enough to control the horses by itself.34

The image of the Phaedran charioteer began the lecture with an ancient philosophical symbol that is itself a kind of monster: the yoking together of the

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black and the white horses representing the conflicting psychic forces that can only be kept in check by reason, but which risk disintegration if that precarious harmony is lost. According to Wind’s reading of Plato, art can intensify the passions represented by the horses and transform us, acting like ‘a kind of magic’, which is why its ‘divine madness’ should be moderated by ‘holy fear’. The modern artist, however, is working within the ‘heritage of Baudelaire’, the libertine poet whose art was ‘a cry of scornful triumph at his expulsion from Plato’s Republic’ and which revelled in ‘congenial horror’. The horses, in other words, had been given free rein. So, in contrast to the Renaissance revival of Platonism represented by Giulio della Torre’s medal, Wind discussed Rouault’s etching of an Ubu-esque monster (1928) made for a set of prints accompanying the text Les Réincarnations de Père Ubu by Ambroise Vollard published in 1932. This image epitomized the modern cult of the monstrous anti-hero of Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi (first performed in 1896), a scabrous critique of bourgeois society originating in schoolboy mockery of a pompous and incompetent teacher (one Félix-Frédéric Hébert). Wind returned to the theme of the ‘monstrous puppetry’ of Ubu Roi in his final lecture on religious and scientific fallacies, showing slides of Jarry’s own designs of his grotesque character, and Duchamp’s ingenious book cover for Ubu Roi. Jarry had written an essay on the theme of the monster, Les Monstres (1895), in which he argued that while ‘usually the word “monster” signifies some sort of unaccustomed harmonizing of dissonant elements . . . I call “monster” every original inexhaustible beauty’.35 Between the fragile reconciliation of psychic opposites suggested by Plato’s symbol of the Phaedran charioteer, and the celebration of poetic excess represented by Jarry’s monstrous beauty, Wind appears from the slide-list to have charted the obsessive interest of contemporary artists with ancient monsters, notably Picasso’s concern with the Minotaur and Ernst’s with the Sphinx. The monster is used here as an instrument to gauge positions on a scale of psychological intensity ranging from the ritual role of monsters in antiquity, through their symbolic revival in the Renaissance, to their presence in modern art as signifiers of artistic autonomy and the play of the imagination. The Minotaur and the Sphinx were the same monsters that Wind had discussed in an article in defence of composite portraits published in the Journal of the Warburg Institute in 1937 – where he argued that it was the union of the unlikely component parts that conjured up the hybrid portrait’s spell because ‘the joining of incompatibles has ever been the secret of witchcraft’. Here Wind analysed the allegorical portraiture from the time of Louis XIV in portraits by

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artists like Nicolas Mignard and Nicolas de Largillière, where courtiers and actors appear as gods or heroes and court ladies take on the guise of a naiade or nymph. Wind argued that the apparent absurdity of these portraits to modern eyes belies their cultural vitality when considered in context: ‘Distorted Gods’, – ‘Composite Beings’, – all very true. But why not carry this idea to its ultimate conclusion? These beings are, to put it quite plainly, an artificial type of monster. Dissolve them into their component parts – and you will retain on the one side the idea of a god, and on the other a specimen of human flesh; neither of them very surprising. As with the Sphinx and the Minotaur, it is the union which works the spell.36

Following the Phaedran charioteer, Wind showed a series of images of monsters from antiquity: from animal-headed Egyptian gods like Horus and Anubis, to the Sphinx of Naxos and the combat of Lapiths and Centaurs on the friezes of temples. The Sphinx, as Pico della Mirandola argued, was placed in temples by the Egyptians as a sign for the secret mysteries and a warning that ‘divine knowledge, if committed to writing at all, must be covered with enigmatic veils and poetic dissimulation’.37 Other monsters followed, perhaps ‘manifestations of God’s mysterious ways’, taken from the studies of the sixteenth-century naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi, some of them legendary, others naturally occurring teratological phenomena like the monstrous pig of Landseer immortalized in Albrecht Dürer’s engraving of 1496. Picasso’s identification with the Minotaur was introduced at this point with slides of the Minotauromachy etching of 1935, which also deploys personal symbols deriving from the bullfight, of a ‘collagelike’ painting of a running Minotaur from 1928, and the 1937 drawing owned by Roland Penrose of a dying Minotaur looking into a mirror held for him by a muse-like woman. The section on Picasso is then followed by a series of images taken from the literature on the art of memory (perhaps recalling Baudelaire’s definition of art as ‘a kind of mnemotechny of the beautiful’). Here bizarre composite creatures synthesize texts or whole fields of knowledge in their monstrous forms: for example, the woodcuts in Nicolaus Simon’s Ars Memorativa of 1510, or the Rationarium evangeli also of 1510 – with its peculiar beasts who are demonstrative amalgams of motifs from the gospels – and an engraved title-plate from Daniel Meissner’s Thesaurus Philopoliticus of 1630, where four monsters representing each of the four seasons display the physical attributes of the signs of the Zodiac in their hideous hybridity. The lesson of these assorted prints is that the more monstrous the image, the more effectively it stays in the

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memory.38 As Wind was to put it later in Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance: ‘we remember the absurd more easily than the normal, and the monster often precedes the god.’39 One of the links between Renaissance treatises on memory and the modernist avant-garde is Alfred Jarry’s revival of folk woodcuts, such as Le Miroir du Pécheur, in his editing (with Remy du Gourmont) of the Symbolist journal L’Ymagier (1894–5).40 Wind certainly referred to this fact in the lectures he gave on modern art in Oxford in 1957. For the rest of the lecture, Wind investigated various manifestations of the monstrous in the art of Klee, Tchelitchew and Ernst. In particular, Wind pursued the fusion of man and plant in a sustained comparison of Tchelitchew’s art, particularly his preparatory drawings and sketches for Hide and Seek (1940–2, New York, MoMA – Figure 3.1), a painting where the four seasons are embodied in an anthropomorphic tree, with similar motifs in Ernst’s recent works such as Swampangel (1940, Riehen, Fondation Beyeler), Napoleon in the Wilderness (1941, New York, MoMA) and Antipope (1941–2, New York, Guggenheim Museum). The latter two works expressed in symbolic form aspects of Ernst’s fraught emotional state in exile and between loves. Wind also displayed a collage of a Sphinx that had adorned the cover of the volume of Cahiers d’Art dedicated to Ernst in 1937, and another slide that showed several modernist verbal formulations devised by Apollinaire and Joyce, including Ernst’s punning term ‘phallustrade’.41 This latter – a sort of surrealist version of the riddle of the Sphinx – was described by Ernst as a ‘verbal collage’, the alchemical product of ‘autostrade’, ‘balustrade’ and a certain quantity of ‘phallus’. Wind would have found this concept in Ernst’s Beyond Painting (Au delà de la peinture), which is reprinted in the Cahiers d’Art volume, along with key texts on the artist by Breton, Eluard, Crevel and Read. Also significant here is Ernst’s 1932 text Inspiration to Order, where he discussed the systematic study of unconscious inspiration carried out by the surrealists, taking up Rimbaud’s challenge to achieve a seer-like state through a systematic derangement of the senses, so that in a collage a ‘complete transmutation followed by a pure act such as the act of love must necessarily occur every time the given facts make conditions favorable: the pairing of two realities which apparently cannot be paired on a plane apparently not suited to them’ (italics in the original).42 Ernst articulated here not only a version of Lautréamont’s definition of unexpected beauty (the chance meeting of an umbrella and a sewing-machine on an operating table) but also the neo-Platonic theme of the reconciliation of opposites so familiar to Wind from his study of Renaissance symbolism. Surrealism was comparable to Renaissance art in this

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Edgar Wind and Modern Art

Figure 3.1  Pavel Tchelitchew (1898–1957): Hide-and-Seek. Derby, Vermont and New York, June 1940–June 1942. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Oil on canvas, 6' 6½' × 7' ¾' (199.3 × 215.3 cm). Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund. Acc. no.: 344.1942. ©2019. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

respect: the use of striking, even absurd, images which condensed complex, even obscure, ideas to memorable forms. In this way, as Wind noted, ‘Chrysippus . . . as recorded by Seneca, tried to make his precepts on liberality “memorable by attaching them to the Graces”’.43 The modern exploration of similar mysteries, employing similar mechanisms – the analogical processes of the imagination – produced remarkable coincidences: as Ernst himself noted when he arrived in America and encountered a painting by Piero di Cosimo that prefigured his own work exactly.44 It is possible to indicate something further of the content of Wind’s lecture on the monster from letters that he received from two members of the audience: Eleonor Wolff on 9 April 1942, and the poet Leo Liberthson (author of the 1946 collection of poems If there are pits as deep) on 10 April 1942.45 Wolff

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picked up on ‘the whole looking-in-the-mirror-kills idea’ advanced by Wind, presumably in his discussion of the Picasso drawing owned by Penrose called ‘La Fin d’un monstre’ after the poem that it inspired Eluard to write (1937, Edinburgh, National Galleries of Scotland). Here the dying Minotaur, pierced through by an arrow, contemplates his features in a mirror held up to him by a garlanded, spear-wielding nude woman. Wolff suggested a number of other monsters associated with mirrors, notably the basilisk, and also made the significant comment: ‘Psychoanalysis another mirror that kills the monster.’ The ‘obsessional monsters’ that Wind had shown, all ‘emphasized the eye’ (italics in the original), suggesting that the ambivalent power of sight – of looking – was part of their fascination, but also how their terror could be mastered (one of Wind’s maxims was that ‘the eye focusses differently when it is intellectually guided’). Wolff also noted that the Minotaur was the only monster discussed by Wind that combined pity and terror, and that once a monster ceased to be terrifying it lost its ‘connection with Satanism’ and therefore its power over the imagination and lapsed into satire becoming ‘the intellectual monster, as you called it’. In a further comment, valuable for what it reveals about the thematic connections with the preceding lecture on Baudelaire, she added that the relationship between terror and pity suggested a ‘possible tie-up with infantilism, dandyism, because the child, though it may delight in terror, is in general pitiless (in the stories it enjoys and invents) and pity seems to have been an emotion very repugnant to Baudelaire?’ The Minotaur was ‘part man’, like the centaur or the satyr, and therefore not a pure expression of evil but, on the other hand, ‘were not the Chimaera, the Hydra, the various dragons, etc. all images of harm or evil, like Rouault’s and the religious lady’s, and as such, don’t they make a better, indeed, a perfect, connection with the first lecture?’ The reference here to the ‘religious lady’s’ monster probably refers to the hyena-like creature in Leonora Carrington’s painting Self-Portrait: Inn of the Dawn Horse (1937–8, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art) which Wind associated with Fuseli’s Nightmare of 1781 (Detroit Institute of Arts). In this painting, Carrington gestures towards the monster making the sign of the ‘evil eye’. A final perceptive point made by Wolff points to the underlying Warburgian trajectory of Wind’s psychological analysis of the theme of the monster: ‘Pegasus, a horse, a good monster sprung from the blood of an evil one, poetry and passion, might be said to embody per monstra ad astra?’ In his letter, Liberthson thanked Wind for his ‘immensely diverting exposition on the significance of the monster in modern art’ and acknowledged Wind’s

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discretion in not making too explicit, for the sake of his audience’s sensibilities, the full zoophilic and erotic undercurrents of the subject of the monster, and its origin in the ‘heterogeneous sexual mores which prevailed within the temples of antiquity and against which the early Hebrews so violently expostulated’. He speculated ‘whether the twinkle in the lecturer’s eye was not equally significant of something else; to wit, his awareness of the inability of the modern audience to face or accept all the implications inherent in the subject’.46 The audience’s incomprehension here was evidenced by the ‘audibly mute’ reaction to the ‘verbal condensations which you flashed on the screen’, which included Ernst’s ‘Phallustrade’ (and the similarly risqué ‘Merdecin’ – from Apollinaire’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias – along with ‘Aix-les-Pains’ from Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake). Liberthson was also amazed by the examples of plant-like monsters that Wind had discussed from the art of Tchelitchew and Ernst because ‘the monster embodying the fusion between man and plant finds its counterpart almost literally in certain cases of tropical mycotic infections which produce exfoliative and proliferative distortions and extension of body and limb that are horribly fascinating to behold and precisely evocative of the analogy of man turning into tree’, and which Wind could discover in the medical archives of the BurroughsWellcome Institute. Liberthson also complained that Wind had introduced the concept of ‘unconscious memory’ but had left it ‘suspended in mid-air’. Both correspondents hinted that Wind had not fully explored the Freudian aspects of his subject – although Wind’s own records reveal that in showing a slide of Fuseli’s ominous Nightmare to elucidate the similar dream-like equine imagery in works by Ernst and Carrington, he knew that a print of this work had hung in Freud’s Vienna consulting room, as he had annotated an article by Max Eastman in the New Republic containing this information.47 While aware of Freud, Wind’s discussion of ‘unconscious memory’ was firstly a continuation of his discussion of Butler in the first lecture, and then more fundamentally an application of Warburg’s ideas to contemporary art, in particular, the monster as an example of the ‘pathos formula’.

Picasso and the Atavism of the Mask Unlike the first two lectures that Wind gave at MoMA, there is no surviving correspondence to assist in reconstructing his third lecture, ‘Picasso and the Atavism of the Mask’. Here, in addition to the slide-list, it is possible to piece

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together Wind’s overall view of Picasso from scattered references in later texts, notably the transcript of a speech given at the ‘Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century’ conference in Paris in 1952, and the remarkable short text Wind wrote as public orator at Oxford when it was intended to confer an honorary doctorate on the artist (which Picasso declined). Some further speculative suggestions can also be advanced based on references to masks in two articles published in the Journal of the Warburg Institute in 1938, and also on differences in the textual commentary between the two versions of Barr’s catalogue for the retrospective exhibition dedicated to Picasso at MoMA – Picasso: Forty Years of His Art and Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art – which can perhaps be attributed to the intervening influence of Wind’s lecture. The presence of Picasso’s powerful Guernica (1937) in the Museum of Modern Art provided compelling evidence for Wind’s argument that the modern artist continued to work within a ‘tradition of symbols’, and most of the works he chose to discuss in his lecture date from the late 1920s and the 1930s, and can be related to Picasso’s development of a complex of symbols that culminated in Guernica. Somewhat surprisingly, given the lecture’s title referring to ‘the atavism of the mask’, Wind did not mention another masterpiece by Picasso in the museum: Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon (1907) – a work that combines the varied influences of Iberian sculpture and African masks with a thoroughly Baudelairean subject. His concern was evidently not to explain the formal development of cubism, or to explore the influence of African art. Wind’s lecture occurred at a moment when the question of how art should respond to the shocking realities of war was urgently debated, and when Picasso’s response to that problem was criticized from both left and right sides of the political spectrum. Wind would no doubt have been interested in the artist’s own statement: ‘No the bull is not fascism . . . the Guernica mural is symbolic . . . allegoric. That’s the reason I used the horse, the bull, and so on. The mural is for the definite expression and solution of a problem and that is why I used symbolism.’48 Wind’s opinion of Picasso was ambivalent. He discussed the Spanish artist in his contribution to the debate on modern painting at the 1952 Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century conference, where he ironically advanced three ‘doubtful theses’ against the pedantic mistake of taking modern art too seriously: that modern art was essentially capricious, that this caprice often disguised itself as a form of ‘research’, and that art had become marginal. Wind did not use the term ‘caprice’ in a derogatory sense. As Goya’s Los Caprichos and Picasso’s Songe et Mensonge de Franco (Figure 3.2) showed, the most serious and tragic things could be expressed in a capricious manner. Wind added that Picasso’s art was

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Figure 3.2  Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Sueño y mentira de Franco (Plate 2), 1937, 31.8 × 42.2 cm, etching and aquatint, London, British Museum. ©Succession Picasso/ DACS, London 2019.

perhaps at its strongest when he made ‘half-sentimental, half-ironic’ works on a small scale, but when he aspired to be monumental, to take himself too seriously, he made a pedant of himself.49 A note comparing Picasso with Braque (‘the more sensitive artist’), dating from 1957 when Wind was lecturing on modern art in Oxford, calls him a ‘master of distraction’, who gains by mass exhibition, because the individual works then ‘go under in the oeuvre’. In Picasso, Wind discerned ‘the growth of an artistic sensibility attuned to distraction’, concluding that ‘he is centrifugal’. The Oxford student magazine The Isis reported that in Wind’s lecture ‘Picasso was delicately and swiftly laid open to our laughter and his conscious joking began to make one wonder if there was anything left’.50 In one of the notes added to the book version of Art and Anarchy, Wind reiterated the view that Picasso’s versatility in the ‘facile routine’ of ‘breaking up of perceptual habits’ had distracted contemporaries from his relative superficiality as an artist: ‘Those modern artists who found their idiom and stayed with it – Matisse, Braque, Klee, Bonnard, Moore – may have been narrower in range than he was, but it is

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possible that they struck deeper.’ Wind even went so far as to compare Picasso with Canova: ‘an artist more like Picasso than it might seem’!51 A more positive aspect of this view of the artist emerges from a remarkably bold and poetic short text composed as an oration for Picasso’s proposed Oxford degree ceremony.52 Here, Wind argued that Picasso was ‘comparable to a powerful pantomimic artist who can transform his face and expression with such virtuosity that he might well frighten Plato into expelling him from the Republic. In fact, his virtue is that he is not safe.’ Strikingly, Wind praised Picasso for his vitality ‘as improvvisatore, a prestidigitator baffling the stolid and seriousminded by the incessant change of his manner’, a quality which was most evident in his less celebrated works – illustrations to Buffon, Aristophanes and Balzac, for example – rather than more monumental pieces like Guernica. It was here that discerning critics discovered ‘a fertility and caprice of invention which they incline to regard as the root of his genius’. Picasso’s self-mocking bravado, his incessant changing of masks, was a form of Socratic self-knowledge where persistent juvenility and even sentimentality belie a more tragic core. Wind noted that Picasso ‘has said himself that creation is an act of destruction’, concluding that ‘he sets about it like a self-appointed phoenix, deliberately producing the holocaust which is the source of his rejuvenation’. Wind’s distinctive take on Picasso was one that sought to defend an essentially anarchic art from the pedantic praise of supporters as much as from the ignorant criticism of detractors. Perhaps Wind was responding to one of Picasso’s own statements: ‘But today we haven’t the heart to expel the painters and poets from society because we refuse to admit to ourselves that there is any danger in keeping them in our midst.’53 Wind’s ambivalence about Picasso, therefore, reflects his broader views on the quandary of modern art. On the one hand, the artist’s Protean nature, expressed through the anarchic and revitalizing quality of his metamorphic art, make him worthy of the ‘holy fear’ that Plato argued should accompany our response to art’s magic – Picasso’s ‘virtue is that he is not safe’. On the other hand, the irony motivating Picasso’s mutability, his playfulness, is most effective in a capricious mode. Operating, as modern artists are constrained to do, from the cultural margins, Picasso’s art miscued when he attempted to tackle grander subjects like religion and war, because then his array of personal symbols and habit of stylistic disruption became pedantic and tautological. As Wind declared of Guernica in one of the notes to Art and Anarchy: ‘Just because Picasso, as he himself explained, builds up his compositions by progressive destruction, catastrophe is an unsuitable subject for him. . . . Tautology is an aesthetic weakness.’54 Wind believed that Guernica fell short of the unifying synthesis achieved by Raphael

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in the School of Athens: it was ‘a splendid example of pamphleteering rather than a didactic painting’.55 The general picture of Picasso that emerges from this synthetic summary of Wind’s later pronouncements on the artist is no doubt helpful in making sense of the slide-list for ‘Picasso and the Atavism of the Mask’, and it is certainly consistent with the argument of Art and Anarchy. However, in 1942 Wind’s treatment of Picasso occurred at the midpoint of his series of lectures, when the artist would – following the lectures on Baudelaire and the Monster – seem to epitomize the painting of modern life, as a primitive effort of memory to catch the universal in the contingent, and its monstrosity. Wind showed only two works by artists other than Picasso during the lecture: Ingres’s Madame Moitessier (1856, London, National Gallery) and Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (1512–16, Colmar, Unterlinden Museum). These represent the extremes of a polarity, both stylistic and emotional, between which Picasso operated in the post-cubist period investigated by Wind. In both cases, Wind showed how Picasso’s ‘research’ into the pictorial mechanisms contrived by his artistic predecessors took the form of destructive distortion – the classically poised Madame Moitessier morphing by degrees into the frenzied if boneless Woman in an Armchair of 1929 (Houston, Menil Collection) or the skeletonlike armature of Woman in a Red Armchair of 1932 (Paris, Musée Picasso). In the case of Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, Picasso had ‘in a series of drawings reduced this superhuman crucifix to a relic of bones, a mammoth-like prehistoric idol commemorating a barbaric enormity’ (as Wind put it in a lecture given at MoMA in 1953). Picasso’s drawings after Grünewald, known to Wind through their reproduction in the first volume of Minotaure, are brought into play in the lecture with the monstrous bathers from the beach scenes of the late 1920s, the imagery of the two versions of his anti-fascist print Songe et Mensonge de Franco, and the preparatory drawings for Guernica. In none of the images shown by Wind (at least in those that are identifiable) is there a literal representation of a mask, although there are plenty of faces that have taken on, through distortion, a mask-like appearance: the reference in the title is, therefore, to the dramatic stylistic versatility of a ‘powerful pantomimic artist who can transform his face and expression’. But what then of the ‘atavism of the mask’? To address the issue of reversion raised by Wind’s use of a loaded term signifying both the expression of dormant genes in biology, and the revival of primitive cultural traits (or ‘throw-backs’), it is necessary to turn to two closely related articles that he published in the Journal of the Warburg Institute in 1938: ‘The Criminal God’ and ‘The Crucifixion of

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Haman’.56 In the first of these articles, Wind investigated James Frazer’s concept of the scapegoat from The Golden Bough (1906–15), where the ancient religious duty of the king to ‘have himself killed for the benefit of his people’ had degenerated into the symbolic sacrifice of a criminal substituted for the monarch. For the substitution to be both acceptable and effective the criminal had to be envisaged, like the king, as a taboo individual possessed of powers that put him beyond good and evil. The original ritual performance of ‘imitational magic’ had degenerated over time, but traces of it were preserved in the forms taken by medieval executions and the aspect of feasting that accompanied them. Breaking on the wheel or crucifixion were such disproportionally cruel punishments that they had to be remnants of rites where the victim was ‘sacrificed for a cosmic purpose’ and where the form that sacrifice took (the cross, the circle) underlined the role of ‘cosmic analogy’. Even the ingenious mockery of minor offenders, such as slanderers, through the punishment of having to wear fanciful, metal masks like those preserved in the National Museum in Munich, derived from the function of taboo: ‘The mask, once the seat of magical power, has become an instrument of derision; but the mockery by which the criminal is insulted and punished retains as an ingredient the old pagan terror which the wearer of the mask inspires.’57 The latent force of the symbol had been reactivated in the Passion of Christ, who ‘in perishing on the cross as a criminal, re-enacted the sacrifice of the god’. While the Romans had forgotten the original meaning of a form of execution they merely considered humiliating, the Christian church raised the cross into a ‘powerful sacred symbol’, thereby becoming ‘the heir of the pagan tradition which it transfigured and preserved in the very act of overcoming it’.58 Wind concluded, however, that today the possibility that a criminal could be transfigured as a redeemer was minimal. As the examples of the gangster Al Capone and New York’s corrupt mayor, Jimmy Walker, showed, ‘we have reversed the procedure of our ancestors. They used to mock the criminal and then kill him. We worship him seriously – and let him live.’59 Wind’s short article on the ‘Crucifixion of Haman’ investigated the iconographical anomaly of Haman – the persecutor of the Jews whose intended genocide was thwarted by Esther, the Jewish queen of King Ahasuerus of Persia – being depicted as crucified, rather than hanged, in a spandrel of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. Michelangelo’s source was probably a verse in Dante’s Purgatorio: ‘un crucifisso dispettoso e fiero’. But, as Wind pointed out, this does not explain how Dante came to envisage Haman as crucified, an association which occurred because of a tragic coincidence – or even, Wind suggested,

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‘concordance’ – of dates, between the feast of Haman and the date of Christ’s crucifixion, which both fall on the second day of Passover (and not during Purim as Frazer had assumed).60 As early as the Theodosian Codex (AD 408), Christians had misinterpreted the ritual mockery by Jews of the villainous Haman, accompanied by the burning of his effigy, as a blasphemous attack on a mock-Christ. This misunderstanding made the annual celebration of liberation from persecution the cause for further oppression of the Jews. Dante inherited the association of Haman with the crucifixion from this tradition, and Michelangelo paired it on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with the Raising of the Brazen Serpent by Moses, a type of the Passion of Christ. Michelangelo could not have known what the comparative study of religion had subsequently revealed, that the story of Haman was related to an ancient Spring festival, known as the Sacaea feast in Babylon, whose characters Ischtar and Marduc may have become Esther and Mordecai when the Jews brought the festival with them from their Babylonian exile. In Frazer’s reading, Haman was the dying god of the old year and Mordecai the resurrected god of the new year and, furthermore, in submitting to death on the cross, ‘Christ thus perished in the character of Haman’. The practice of this ancient fertility cult in the eastern Mediterranean may have enabled the rapid spread of Christianity, whose founder was seen as fulfilling this tradition. Jews, however, continued to celebrate the feast of Haman: ‘in the “jocose”, “fictitious” form of the puppet play they preserved the memory of that ancient custom which had been overcome and transfigured by Christ.’61 Wind’s explanation of how Michelangelo could restore the original meaning of an ancient ritual he could not possibly have known about also provides his clearest account of the role of the individual in the process of collective memory. This explanation, incidentally, provides the answer to the question that Bing had asked in her 1940 letter to Wind about Butler’s theory of unconscious memory. The process of ‘remembrance’ is carried out by ‘that anonymous being, the social community’ which employs the individual’s consciousness as an ‘instrument to register and express its ancient memories’. Therefore, what the collective knows as remembrance, the individual experiences as ‘discovery’. These discoveries do not occur with ‘primitive spontaneity’ but require the persistence of an external tradition ‘which in the form of an intellectual dogma or pictorial image, challenges the individual to explore and discover what the community tends to forget’. Thus, Christ discovered and recovered the redemptive meaning of the feast of Haman, and Michelangelo reinvested a poetic image with its latent force.62 Equally, the original fear inspired by the Satanic power of a monster like Haman could degenerate over time into the satire and puppet play of Purim

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where Haman had become an ‘intellectual monster’ (to use the term that Wolff recorded Wind as using in the previous lecture). These two remarkable essays represent Wind at his most Warburgian, demonstrating the operation of the pathos formula in the dialectic between collective ‘remembrance’ and individual ‘discovery’ and, through the analysis of historical detail, revealing the broader interaction of Jewish, Christian and Pagan traditions. With their references to Frazer’s Golden Bough, to Nietzsche (no other publications by Wind display such a wide range of reference to Nietzsche’s works), and to Jung – and with their thematic focus on sacrifice and the sacred (even referring to the sacrifice of the Mexican god Xipe), on feasting and ritual cruelty, on totem and taboo – they place Wind closer to the work of Georges Bataille and the College of Sociology than at any other time. Perhaps this ‘concordance’ is an effect of the times, an awareness of the nature of fascism, the plight of the Jews and the impending war. At such moments thoughts turn to how catastrophe might be averted. Certainly, Wind in 1938 was at his most political and his most explicitly Jewish in publishing the related studies on the criminal god and Haman. It can be argued that these two articles were equally significant for Wind’s conception of modern art. How then can they be related to Picasso? An ironic footnote to ‘The Criminal God’ on the function of the scapegoat (‘Far be it from us to advocate the transformation of prisons into slaughterhouses’) expressed Wind’s regret about the ‘disappearance of mockery as a form of punishment’, and advocated the ‘moderate antidote’ of ‘the revival of the pillory’.63 Picasso certainly ‘pilloried’ Franco in the two versions of Songe et Mensonge de Franco discussed in detail by Wind in his lecture. Here Picasso’s mockery took the form of a monstrous puppet play (and Wind was aware that Picasso knew of Jarry through his friend Apollinaire), where Franco is envisaged as an obscenely misshapen creature engaged on an obscure and quixotic quest that ultimately results in the carnage of the bullfight. A detail examined by Wind juxtaposes Franco – depicted as a cross between Ubu Roi and a deformed and hairy root vegetable – with the noble features of a bull’s head (Figure 3.2). Franco wears a crown like a king. This tragedy played out in a capricious mode – reminiscent of the mocking of Haman in the Jewish festival of Purim – had been preceded in Picasso’s work by a sustained exploration of the traditional imagery of the crucifixion. The jarring colours, wilful alterations of scale and confusing perspectives of Picasso’s 1930 Crucifixion (Paris, Musée Picasso) could appear like parody – for example, the minute and quixotic knight on horseback piercing Christ’s side with a lance as if tilting at windmills – if it were not for the wild

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grief expressed by a Maenad-like figure whose menacing jaws are superimposed over the rather anodyne body of Christ, and the fact that the artist’s source, Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, also employed irregular proportions for expressive effect. Picasso made dramatic use of a long ladder on which an executioner hammering nails into Christ’s hand is perched, a motif which also occurs in the Minotauromachy etching and in the preparatory drawings for Guernica (see, for example, the drawing of a grieving woman holding a dead child and climbing a ladder dated 9 May 1937). The cross-pollination of motifs like the ladder in Picasso’s work demonstrates him exploring and recombining elements of different symbolic traditions – the imagery of the crucifixion and the bullfight, both of which have their origins in pagan antiquity – as the unconscious instrument of collective memory.64 In its capricious mode, this process takes the form of a Purim-like puppet play; while in tragic mode, as in Guernica, Picasso attempted, like a criminal god, to transfigure his sources ‘like a self-appointed phoenix, deliberately producing the holocaust which is the source of his rejuvenation’. Early in his lecture, Wind showed a sequence of slides of Picasso’s Swimming Woman from 1929, right way up, upside down and with the left and right sides at the bottom. Rotating the image in this way revealed a sequence of equally valid figural inventions, and consequently the artist’s Protean capacity to produce metamorphosis. As Barr put it: ‘Picasso has composed this Swimming Woman so that it may be hung with any edge up. The head is also a visual pun for a pointing hand.’ This note occurs in the MoMA catalogue Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art but not in the earlier publication Picasso: Forty Years of His Art, and it therefore reveals one specific case of the influence of Wind’s lecture. The Picasso retrospective at MoMA ran from 15 November 1939 to 7 January 1940, so it is likely that Wind saw it, especially as the majority of the works he discussed in ‘Picasso and the Atavism of the Mask’ were on display in this show. Therefore, other revisions in the text of the retrospective catalogue may also be due to Wind’s influence and are certainly suggestive even if this hypothesis remains unproven: for example, the analysis of the ‘private allegory’ of the Minotauromachy print, where a connection is drawn to the symbolism of other works, such as the Fin du Monstre drawing (discussed by Wind in ‘History of the Monster’), notably with the detail of the girl holding flowers and a candle, who challenges the monster with light (the enlightening effect of reason?). The motif recurs in Guernica, its meaning now tragically reversed, in the form of an anguished woman emerging from a window holding a candle in her outstretched hand. Also, The Three Dancers (London, Tate), again discussed by Wind in ‘Picasso and the Atavism of

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the Mask’, is described in the revised catalogue as ‘convulsive’ and ‘disquieting’ with a reference to Breton’s First Manifesto of Surrealism.

Religious and Scientific Fallacies – ‘Our Present Discontents’ ‘Painters have always liked the circus,’ Gertrude Stein wrote in her study of Picasso, ‘even now when the circus is replaced by the cinema and night clubs, they like to remember the clowns and acrobats of the circus.’65 Wind’s lecture on Picasso began with a portrait of the artist’s son Paul dressed as Harlequin (1924, Paris, Musée Picasso), and ended with an early painting Seated Harlequin (1901, New York, Metropolitan Museum), which Wind compared with a self-portrait (reproduced on the cover of Stein’s book) which shares the similar melancholic gesture of chin resting in hand also noted in images of Baudelaire and Klee. Wind’s final lecture, ‘Religious and Scientific Fallacies – “Our Present Discontents”’, opened with a sequence of slides continuing the theme of circus clowns and the stock characters of the commedia dell’arte. Manet’s 1874 lithograph of Pulcinella (or Mr. Punch), was followed by Cézanne’s painting of Pierrot and Harlequin (1888, Moscow, Pushkin Museum), Severini’s Giocatori di carte (1924, private collection), which also features Pierrot and Harlequin as two of the card players, and Derain’s Harlequin and Pierrot (c. 1924, Paris, Musée de l’Orangerie), where Derain portrayed himself and the collector Paul Guillaume as two clowns. Picasso’s Three Musicians (1921, New York, Museum of Modern Art), where Picasso may have represented his friendship with Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob as a concert of clowns, and Klee’s Figurine: The Fool (1927, Bern, Zentrum Paul Klee), depicting a juggling fool wearing the motley of Harlequin, bring this sequence to an end. The effect of this series of works is to indicate the persistence of a literally ‘zany’ tradition of marginal anarchy ‘remembered’, as Stein put it, by leading modern artists who identified with the mischievous Harlequin or the melancholy Pierrot (another pairing reminiscent of Democritus and Heraclitus?). In eighteenth-century France, the Italian commedia dell’arte had operated outside the official theatrical culture of the Comedie française, consisting of vagabond players operating on temporary stages in fairgrounds, and as such achieved an alternative appeal, and romantic allure, evident in the paintings of Watteau. The survival of these (often masked) characters in the works of Picasso, Klee and Derain, takes the form of the vestigial traces of a ‘discontinued faith’, as Butler put it. What is evoked here, again, is Baudelaire’s concept of the ‘absolute comic’: the primitive, amoral laughter that the poet associated with the prancing pantaloons

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of Callot’s etchings of the Balli di Sfessania (c. 1622) and the concept of ‘art for art’s sake’. Wind’s fourth lecture, ‘The Survival of Wit’, may have explored an antithetical and more sceptical tradition within modern art. Wit is a key term for Wind, often paired with ‘enthusiasm’, as in his Oxford lectures on eighteenthcentury British art entitled ‘Enthusiasm and Wit’. Here, taking his cue from Hume’s moral writings, such as the essay ‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’, Wind argued for the moderating role of a humane scepticism to check the excesses of the imagination: ‘Fear, which is the root cause of superstition, and self-confident pride, which is the basis of enthusiasm, are both born of imagination. Whether man is by nature admirable or contemptible, nearer to the deity or the worm, is a question of comparison. The answer will depend on one’s vantage point.’66 This argument reiterated in a sceptical key Wind’s concept of ‘internal delimitation’, which he originally developed to explain the role played by experiment in addressing the problem of the circular argument in science. Perhaps ‘The Survival of Wit’ dealt with works like Klee’s illustrations for Voltaire’s Candide, a subject which Wind later offered to lecture on at the Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century conference in 1952? Perhaps it regretfully pointed to modern art’s neglect of Hogarth, the inventor of the ‘modern moral subject’, and consequently the abandonment of didactic painting and the ‘significative comic’? In the absence of any documentation, or even a slide-list, these suggestions can only remain speculative. However, it does seem that in Wind’s final lecture ‘internal delimitation’ played a role in the analysis of ‘religious and scientific fallacies’ as evident in works of modern art. After the sequence of slides documenting the persistence of circus imagery and of characters like Pierrot and Harlequin in modern art, Wind considered Jarry’s anarchic play Ubu Roi (as discussed previously). Jarry’s own designs for the character of Ubu demonstrate his interest in popular prints, and also the nature of the play as a type of ‘guignol’ or puppet show. In fact, the play’s origin was in puppet shows staged by Jarry with his school friends. In it Ubu kills the king of Poland becoming Ubu Roi, and is in turn overthrown by Bougrelas the king’s son, a plot that parodies aspects of Shakespearian tragedy but which also recalls Wind’s interest in the subject of sacrifice and the scapegoat in the two articles of 1938 on ‘The Criminal God’ and the ‘Crucifixion of Haman’ (the poet W. B. Yeats had remarked of Ubu Roi that the refinements of Symbolist art could only be followed by ‘the Savage God’).67 It has been suggested earlier that Wind discerned Jarry’s influence in Picasso’s concern with the monster, and his deployment of monstrous satire against Franco. In his final lecture, Wind touched on the transformation of

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Ubu in the work of Rouault: an artist who combined a fascination with the ‘marginal anarchy’ of the circus and the brothel, with a sincere exploration of religious motifs from a Catholic perspective. The lithograph of a monstrous flying fish from the series ‘Les Réincarnations du Père Ubu’ made by Rouault for Vollard in 1918, reappeared here in the context of Jarry’s own designs for Ubu, having previously been introduced in the second lecture on the monster. Rouault’s print portraits of Baudelaire and Verlaine, discussed in the first lecture, also placed him in the tradition of French symbolism and the ‘heritage of Baudelaire’. Wind’s views on Rouault are recorded in an interview he gave to The New York Times in 1953 on the occasion of MoMA’s retrospective of the artist curated by Monroe Wheeler. Here Wind expressed surprise that such a significant painter could emerge from the ‘muddy, mawkish atmosphere of Moreau and Huysmans’, two cultural figures who ‘narrowed down the scale of art . . . [having] a hatred of plein air, both actually and intellectually as well as a sort of sophisticated bad taste’. Rouault, himself, was an artist who had a ‘very limited range’, with almost all of his art falling into two categories: ‘the Satanic type of judges, tyrants, evil-doers, prostitutes and the Saintly suffering type of Christ, clowns and innocent men’. Discussing the topic of high profile conversions to Christianity (e.g. T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden), Wind revealed that it was mythical thinking that connected religious and scientific fallacies: The convert receives a unique revelation but most modern men are more interested in multiple revelation: they are more drawn to mythology – to a comparative study of those myths which are ‘lies figuring the truth’ – than to dogma. Moreover, modern man seems now to accept science in the way he once accepted religion: he believes in it without understanding it.68

Wind also gave a lecture at MoMA at this time on ‘Traditional Religion and Modern Art’, which was published in Art News, and which further elucidated Wind’s views on Rouault, ‘the devout Catholic’, whose treatment of religious art was compared with that of Matisse, ‘the tolerant pagan’. Wind discerned in the art of both modern artists, in spite of their differences, a parallel uneasiness with the sacramental details of blood sacrifice that the Catholic Church continued to insist upon in its doctrinal statements (notably in the encyclical Mediator Dei issued by Pius XII in 1947). When painting the crucifixion, Rouault did not ‘dwell in the wounds of Christ’, picturing him as a sacrificial victim, as believers were enjoined to do by the pope. Rather he emphasized Christ’s humanity, generalizing his suffering so that ‘the devotion which these images arouse

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is closer to moral meditation on human cruelty and divine meekness than to participation in a sacrament’.69 While Wind did not discuss Matisse in his 1942 lecture (the ‘gracious gesture’ of the artist’s work at the Chapelle du Rosaire at Vence on behalf of the Dominican Nuns began in 1949), he did provide a sequence of comparisons with Rouault’s religious art that were also deployed in the later talk: with Mantegna’s Lamentation (c. 1483, Milan, Brera), Gauguin’s Le Christ Jaune (1889, Buffalo, New York, Albright-Knox Art Gallery), Schmidt-Rottluf ’s 1918 woodcut Kristus, and Orozco’s Christ with the Axe from the mural series Modern Migration of the Spirit (1932–4, Dartmouth College). While Mantegna had employed ‘an aggressive foreshortening’ to forcefully impress the sacramental meaning of Christ’s wounds on the beholder, Gauguin had deployed the device of the Breton peasant women as ‘repoussoirs’ to keep the ritual aspect of the Crucifixion at a safe distance, and both Schmidt-Rottluf and Orozco had drained the subject of prayer presenting it ‘in the style of a ferocious poster’. In 1942, Wind also used contrasting images of the Dead Christ by Holbein (1520–2, Basle, Öffentliche Kunstsammlung), by Orazio Borgianini (1615, Rome, Palazzo Spada) and Lovis Corinth (destroyed 1946, exhibited in the 1889 Paris Salon). The shared iconography of these works of art acted as an instrument to gauge their declining emotional impact as a greater distance is placed between the beholder and the physical impact of the blood sacrifice. Wind did not necessarily see this as a bad development, as he admired Rouault’s ‘unsacramental’ and undogmatic emphasis on the humane aspect of Christ’s suffering. However, it did point to the separation of private devotion and public worship, to the modern phenomenon of individual conversion as distinct from religious revival. In a photograph shown by Wind, taken by Man Ray in 1922, Gertrude Stein sits at her desk, with Alice B. Toklas ‘at the door’, in a room that is decorated with both modern art and religious artefacts, as if the writer and collector was indifferent to their respective functions. In this avant-garde space, paintings by Matisse and antique crucifixes are both equally objects of a disinterested ‘interest’. Gertrude Stein also featured in Tchelitchew’s Phenomena (1936–8, Moscow, State Tretyakov Gallery – Figure 4.2), perched possessively on a stack of paintings, analysed by Wind at this midpoint in the lecture, probably as a work combining religious, scientific and social ‘discontents’ (it is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4). If, at its best, modern art treats religion as a matter of private and humane meditation, while overall removing it from the collective context of sacrament, ritual and prayer, then science fares little better. The slides shown in the second half of the lecture suggest that, whether it was ‘pataphysical’, ‘metaphysical’ or

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‘paranoid-critical’, Wind found the treatment of science in the art of Duchamp, De Chirico and Dali to be equally eccentric. Carl Einstein argued in 1934, in relation to cubism, that ‘quantum theory had shattered the unitary continuity of the universe’.70 Wind certainly seems to have pursued the theme of the fragmentation of perceptions, represented by multiple and simultaneous views of the same subject, in paintings by Dali and Duchamp. As in earlier lectures, he compared these contemporary works with Renaissance and eighteenthcentury art, so that Dali’s Portrait of Gala (1935, New York, MoMA) and Portrait of Vicomtesse de Noailles (c. 1932, private collection) – which both show two views of the sitter – are compared with Titian’s La Schiavona (1510–12, London, National Gallery) and Reynolds’ A Child’s Portrait in Different Views: Angels Heads (1786–7, London, Tate). Perhaps this comparison, like the use of foreshortened views of Christ deployed earlier in the lecture, was intended to gauge the differences between modern and early modern art works, indicating the integration of personality in the earlier pictures, and its disintegration in Dali’s ‘paranoid-critical’ use of the double image. This section is then followed by a sequence of works by Duchamp, moving from Portrait (Dulicinea) (1911, Philadelphia Museum of Art), which Wind termed ‘portraits of a lady from six angles’, to the notorious Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912, Philadelphia Museum of Art) and the fleshly mechanisms of The Bride (1912, Philadelphia Museum of Art). Although it is possible to infer, based on some of Duchamp’s cryptic comments, an interest in the ‘fourth dimension’ in these works, which could be interpreted as diagrams of ‘configured temporality’ (to use a phrase from Experiment and Metaphysics), they most likely display an ironic take on science comparable to Jarry’s playful ‘science of imaginary solutions’, which he termed ‘pataphysics’. Duchamp was a reader of Henri Poincaré, interested in non-Euclidean geometries, and consequently aware of the arbitrariness of conventions, and also the undecidability of relations revealed by quantum mechanics. In this respect, some striking similarities can be found with Wind’s parallel interests in contemporary mathematics and science. For example, Wind described the basic experiment of measuring the circumference of a circle with a piece of string whose length corresponds to its radius. The utility of the string as an instrument is compromised, however, by the fact that it ‘changes its position in space and time, that it passes through certain physical stages of motion’. ‘Would it not, then, be entirely conceivable’, Wind asked, ‘that the laws of motion to which it is thus subject should affect the invariance of its length, and thus the identity of the unit of measurement embodied in it?’71 In a similar way, Duchamp had carried

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out the experiment of dropping three pieces of thread, each one metre long, onto a canvas from the height of one metre. From the chance configuration of these threads three wooden ‘rulers’ were constructed, each a random variation from the standard unit of measurement: 3 Standard Stoppages (1913–14, New York, Museum of Modern Art. Wind does not mention this work, which at the time of his lecture was in the private collection of Katherine Dreier). However, the difference between Duchamp and Wind’s interest in the problem of measurement is that, where Duchamp saw his ‘joke about the metre’ as demonstrating measurement to be arbitrary, Wind saw it as both arbitrary and purposive.72 Poincaré’s theory of ‘arbitrary convention’ meant that mathematics remained a game until, by an act of embodiment, it is put to the test of reality through experiment. Discussing the difference between a god, an ‘infinite intellect’, and the scientist confined to investigating reality with a ‘finite intellect’ using parts of the world as ‘tools of cognition’, Wind argued that Such a god can only ever be imagined as playing a game, but not even, like an artist, playing the game seriously. Even beauty would never take on reality for him, as he would always be able to ascertain the perfection of a figure, such as an artist projects onto a piece of marble, without first having to hew it out of the marble as the artist does.73

A modern artist, like Duchamp, was therefore playing a serious game with scientific concepts – and here the concept of ‘serio ludere’ familiar from Wind’s writings on Renaissance art comes to mind – but, nevertheless, it remained a game, and without consequence in terms of the experimental work that an embodied ‘symbolic representation’ can potentially do. Perhaps these remarks also apply to Dali’s Agnostic Symbol (1932, Philadelphia Museum of Art) and Geodesical Portrait of Gala (1936, Yokohama Museum of Art), both works that allude to representation or measurement in their titles only to frustrate those concepts in their imagery. Wind’s comparison here of the enigmatic paintings of De Chirico – such as The Anguish of Departure (1913–14, Buffalo, New York, Albright-Knox Gallery) or Nostalgia of the Infinite (1911, New York, Museum of Modern Art) – with stage designs for productions of Shakespeare by Edward Gordon Craig, may also allude to a lack of embodiment, as well as to obvious visual similarities.74 Whereas De Chirico’s work hauntingly evokes an absent drama in scenes full of poetic foreboding – to the extent that the surrealists projected their own fantasies onto them – Gordon Craig’s designs for stage sets with arcades and isolated towers were intended to frame plays whose dramatic impact is directly moral.

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The final sequence of six slides in this last lecture can be interpreted as summing up the whole series – as well as, somewhat unexpectedly, giving some advance publicity for Dali’s The Secret Life of Salvador Dali ‘as to be published in fall of 1942’ (as Wind’s lecture notes put it – perhaps James Thrall Soby or Julien Levy, or Dali himself, had given him access to the manuscript?). Dali’s Sleep (1937), then in the collection of Edward James, reprised the theme of the monster: Dali himself described Sleep as a precise outcome of the ‘glorious paranoiac-critical method’, a ‘veritable “chrysalis-like” monster’ propped up by crutches.75 Dali’s paradoxical image of Sleep as weightless yet requiring support, a floating rocky outcrop with a man’s profile, is situated within an empty landscape from which a town emerges in the background as if from ‘the boring dream of Piero della Francesca’. It is a perfect symbol for Wind’s argument that, to cite the title of Goya’s famous etching of 1799, the sleep of reason produces monsters, but also – to quote the title of another work by Dali out of context – of the persistence of memory. Although dormant and curiously inconsequential, a latent potential for transformation still exists in this creature of the imagination: an imago may yet emerge from this pupa. The slide of Dali’s Sleep was then followed by a ‘fragment of manuscript’ of The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, and a detail of the same image, unfortunately not now identifiable (possibly one of Dali’s illustrations picking up on the imagery of crutches?). Two works by Duchamp followed this section on Dali: the elaborate book binding from 1935 made of morocco leather designed for Jarry’s Ubu Roi, spelling out the name Ubu (made by Mary Reynolds, Philadelphia Museum of Art), and the glass ampoule from a pharmacist containing ‘air from Paris’ given to Walter Arensberg as a souvenir in 1919, 50 cc of Paris Air (Philadelphia Museum of Art). The first item can be interpreted, in this context, as representing the importance of Alfred Jarry for Wind’s understanding of modern art: his concept of the monster as ‘original inexhaustible beauty’, his interest in traditional folk art, his satirical deployment of puppetry, his pataphysical mockery of scientific research, and his influence on Picasso. It could also conceivably stand for the relationship of text to image in the iconographical approach, and therefore as a piece of evidence against formalist arguments for pure art. In Art and Anarchy Wind noted that Duchamp’s ‘ingenious bookbinding’ was curiously refined for so coarse a subject, but ‘it is just that combination of coarseness and polish which produces the hautgoût of barbaric regression’.76 The second work by Duchamp possibly signified, following Baudelaire, the painter of modern life’s recognition of the universal in the contingent, or as Wind put it in the description of his Smith College

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course, the challenge of grasping ‘the universal through the particular’. It could also allude to Wind’s concept of ‘internal delimitation’, the attempt of a ‘finite intellect’ to take the measure of the universe from within, using this 50 cc of Parisian air as an instrument. Finally, Wind ended his lecture by showing again Manet’s 1862 etching of Baudelaire in profile, wearing a top hat: the poète maudit as flaneur, the advocate of the primitive laughter of the ‘absolute comic’ and of the artist as a ‘mnemo-technician’ of the beautiful. The reconstructive summary given here of Wind’s series of lectures on modern art at MoMA in 1942 demonstrates how aspects of the argument of the 1960 Reith lectures on Art and Anarchy were prefigured in them: notably the significance of Baudelaire, the relevance of Plato’s views on psychic balance, and the marginality of modern art as evident in its treatment of religious and scientific themes. However, it also points to notable differences in approach and tone. Partly this is simply the result of different formats: slide lectures where the argument could be developed visually through a sequence of images, and radio talks where reference to works of art was necessarily less detailed and confined to better known and more literary examples. The Art and Anarchy lectures also indicate Wind’s shifting tastes so that, while Klee and Picasso remained central to his analysis of modern art, the surrealists lost their importance, meaning that Ernst, Dali and Tchelitchew were no longer referred to, while Matisse, Braque and Moore became more prominent. A more fundamental difference is that the MoMA lectures showed Wind at his most Warburgian, drawing in particular on the remarkable series of essays he published in the Journal of the Warburg Institute in the late 1930s for the conceptual instruments then employed in the analysis of modern art. The articles on composite portraits, on the criminal god and the crucifixion of Haman, have a particular relevance for the way that they elucidate the ‘tradition of symbols in modern art’ and how Wind envisaged it functioning. In particular, the persistence of external traditions – whether of the commedia dell’arte clowns or of religious symbols – allowed for the rediscovery by the individual of meaning that had been forgotten by the collective. It is here that the significance of isolated communities such as the inhabitants of the Canton Ticino or the Hopi reservations in New Mexico becomes clear. The cryptic traces of ‘discontinued faiths’ can be reinterpreted through contact with marginal traditions, and old forms of belief can be transcended through the renewal of symbols that transmit memory like latent genes – symbols that can also serve as instruments for gauging our relative situation from within an empirical reality against which

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hypotheses can be tested. While it may not have impressed Louise Bourgeois that Wind argued that ‘scientists and artists together would solve the problems of the immediate future, as in the Renaissance’, she did helpfully record that in 1942, at least, Wind saw the potential for the reintegration of the psychic forces of reason and imagination, for a reconciliation of science and art, and therefore for a form of Renaissance.

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‘Cher Magus’ – Pavel Tchelitchew

A set of photographs taken in the late 1940s of the Winds’ home at 35 Woodlawn Avenue in Northampton, Massachusetts, reveals that Pavel Tchelitchew’s drawing La Fenêtre au bout du monde (Window at the End of the World, 1941, Oxford, Ashmolean Museum – Figure 4.1) was situated to the right of the fireplace in the sitting room, hanging alongside an engraving of the muses Clio and Urania by Marcantonio, and a sheet of skull studies also by Tchelitchew.1 Window at the End of the World appears at first glance to consist of nebulous blots of ink but on closer inspection it reveals a precisely rendered world of fantastic forms. Initially, the brush has moved over the paper in an automatic way leaving random marks of varying tones (as can be seen most clearly at the top of the sheet). Then once these fluid brushstrokes dried, the artist picked out in very fine pen lines mothers holding children, overlapping profiles, gnarled roots and branches, stony walls, dogs and so on, as suggested by the indefinite patches of wash. Prompted by chance forms, the artist’s imagination responded by pursuing an unfolding metamorphosis where children’s heads merge with branches and foliage. The window of the title appears to be the small square gap in the wash at the centre-left of the sheet in which a tiny figure is framed (taking the measure of this dream world in a form of ‘internal delimitation’?). The artist signed and dated his work along the branch-like form that occurs towards the bottom and centre of the sheet. The text of a memorandum on ‘aesthetic universals’ written by Wind for John Nef ’s Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago in 1944 might stand as a commentary on Tchelitchew’s drawing.2 In this paper, Wind argued that there are two fallacious assumptions that prevent effective aesthetic analysis: that aesthetic judgements are necessarily rational, and that if, on the other hand, reason plays no role in aesthetic judgements then they are merely accidental and have no claim to universal validity. By contrast, Wind argued that aesthetic judgements are intuitive and based on ‘universals of sensibility’, and that the imagination

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Figure 4.1 Pavel Tchelitchew (1898–1957), La Fenêtre au bout du monde, 1941, 24.5 × 27.4 cm, pen and black ink with grey wash on stiff white, discoloured laid paper. Bequeathed by Mrs Margaret Wind in memory of Professor Edgar Wind, 2005. © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

plays a mediating role between sense data and reason, drawing on the reserves of memory (‘as the Muses are the daughters of Mnemosyne’), in the process of ‘aesthetic play’ or ‘aesthetic make-believe’. The product of the transformative play of the imagination over the ‘universals of sensibility’ is the symbol. Sense data endowed with imaginative significance are generally called symbols or metaphors; and in so far as they arouse the imagination by their expressive physiognomies, they are the chosen stuff of the artist, who explores, organizes, and intensifies their powers. At the same time, they are a source of dismay and discomfort to the logician as well as to the practical man; for the multiplicity of connotations which, to the artist, are a rich source of possible harmonies, are to the logician and the practically-minded man a source of ambiguities.

The iconographical method described the ‘extra-aesthetic’ process by which the obstacles to understanding a symbol are removed, its ambiguities clarified, and its

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claim to universal validity based on an intuitive response to aesthetic universals established. Iconography was also the means by which the polarity between Tchelitchew the imaginative artist and Wind the logician was bridged, and it contributed to the ‘concordance of opposites’ that was their unlikely friendship. As Wind’s lectures at MoMA in 1942 show, he saw Tchelitchew as part of the ‘tradition of symbols in modern art’. Further analysis of his ‘metamorphic’ art reveals deeper analogies with Wind’s approach, and affords the possibility for comparing it with the psychoanalytical method, as well as for gauging certain similarities with surrealism. Wind pursued these affinities in his MoMA lectures at a time of crisis for the surrealists who, if they had not given up on the goal of reviving myth to bring about a revolution of the mind, had begun to doubt the effectiveness of ‘pure psychic automatism’. André Masson, for example, writing in 1941, described the ‘danger of automatism’ as ‘the association of inessential connections’, which only provide the material for an imaginative work that requires an ‘intensity of preliminary thought’.3 In particular, a sustained enquiry will be attempted here into the correspondences between two of Tchelitchew’s principal works, Phenomena (1936–8, Moscow, State Tretyakov Gallery – Figure 4.2) and Cache-Cache or Hide and Seek (1941–2, New York, Museum of

Figure 4.2  Pavel Tchelitchew (1898–1957), Phenomena, 1936–8, 200 × 271 cm, oil on canvas. Courtesy of State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

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Modern Art – Figure 3.1), and two of Wind’s books on Renaissance art, Bellini’s Feast of the Gods (1948) and an unwritten but planned book on Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1952). In order to carry out this comparative analysis, it will be necessary to look in some detail at their shared cultural milieu as revealed by the correspondence between Wind and Tchelitchew. Wind probably met Tchelitchew (or ‘Pavlik’) in New York shortly after his arrival in America in 1939. Wind’s success at this time was as much social as academic. A confident presence and brilliant conversationalist, Wind moved at ease in New York’s social circles. For example, he was invited to participate in the salon of Josephine Boardman Crane (Mrs W. Murray Crane), a founding trustee of the Museum of Modern Art and the doyenne of ‘social-literary-musicalintellectual life in New York’. Wind was among the prominent cultural figures who lectured or performed to a ‘select audience in the Big Room at 820 Fifth Avenue’ which housed a collection of paintings including Dali’s The Feeling of Becoming (1930, private collection).4 During February 1942, Wind gave a series of four Sunday evening talks on ‘The Philosophy of Love in Renaissance Art’ at Mrs Crane’s salon (accompanied by Renaissance music organized by Virgil Thomson), and he subsequently lectured on ‘Renaissance Man’ in 1944, and on Plato and Nietzsche in 1947.5 Memoirs of this period, by Cecil Roberts and Frederic Prokosch, describe the Crane salon as a refined cultural circle frequented by prominent artistic figures like Dali, or the poet Marianne Moore. Josephine Boardman Crane continued to support Wind as a patron, funding research trips, and along with her daughter Louise Crane remained a friend of the Winds for many years.6 A less formal New York salon was presided over by Kirk Askew, a leading art dealer, and his wife Constance, whose striking features are preserved in one of Tchelitchew’s mysterious portraits and in several beautiful drawings.7 The composer Virgil Thomson vividly evoked the social scene here: ‘the people one saw at the Askews’ high brownstone on East Sixty-first Street were a wider world than just the modern-art-distributing in-group’, and consisted of writers, musicians, stage directors, actors, literary critics, ‘all the poets (e. e. cummings to Lincoln Kirstein)’, curators and of course painters, including Florine Stettheimer, Massimo Campigli, Pavel Tchelitchew, Eugene Berman, Kristians Tonny and Maurice Grosser.8 Letters among Wind’s papers show that he knew the painter Eugene Berman at this time, who, like Tchelitchew, was part of the neo-romantic group of artists who had first exhibited together at the Galerie Druet in Paris in 1926.9 Eugene Berman’s brother, Leonid, also a neo-romantic painter, married the musician Sylvia Marlowe in 1948. A pupil of Nadia Boulanger and pioneer

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of the harpsichord, Marlowe was also a good friend of Margaret Wind and the hostess of another influential New York salon at her Manhattan apartment (near Bloomingdale’s): ‘among the people who gathered there regularly were W. H. Auden, Virgil Thomson, Pavel Tchelitchew, Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Lionel Trilling, Aaron Copland, Alfred Kazin, Max Ernst, Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson and Marcel Duchamp.’10 Although the connections between New York and Paris in these social circles were well-established, with artists and musicians like Duchamp and Thomson regularly crossing the Atlantic, the Second World War brought an influx of European refugees that gave New York’s cultural life an additional stimulus.11 While Wind was clearly part of New York’s academic world, and was acquainted with scholars like the Columbia professor Meyer Schapiro and Metropolitan Museum curator William Ivins, it was this wider cultural milieu that gave rise to his friendship with Tchelitchew, an artist described by Edwin Denby as the ‘uptown master’.12 Tchelitchew had travelled to the United States for the first time in October 1934, with his lover, the poet Charles Henri Ford. Shortly afterwards, he had exhibitions at the Arts Club in Chicago, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, and at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York, and their reception was sufficiently good to convince him to make his home in America (although he continued to exhibit and work as a stage designer in London and Paris until the outbreak of the Second World War). Tchelitchew was born into an aristocratic Russian family in 1898, and his father managed the vast forests on the family estate at Dubrovka. Drawn initially to ballet, Tchelitchew was encouraged to work on stage designs in Moscow in 1917 by the impressionist painter Konstantin Korovin. In 1918 the Tchelitchew family were evicted by the Bolshevik revolutionary forces from their land and moved to Kiev in the Ukraine, where Tchelitchew’s art and stage designs moved in a more ‘cubofuturist’ direction under the influence of Alexandra Exter and Alexander Bogomazov, and where he was befriended by Pierre Souvtchinsky. After a brief period in the White Army as a cartographer, and a serious illness that almost killed him, Tchelitchew left for Constantinople in 1919, from where he travelled to Sofia in 1920 at Souvtchinsky’s request, then onwards to Berlin in 1921. In Berlin, Tchelitchew joined the Russian exile community (meeting Igor Stravinsky), and worked as a stage designer, initially at the Russian Romantic Theatre and moving up as his career flourished to the Staatsoper. He also began a relationship with the American pianist Allen Tanner, with whom he decided to move permanently to Paris in 1924, where the impact of Picasso’s ‘blue’ and ‘pink’ period works influenced the development of his art in a more figurative

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and symbolist direction. He exhibited with the neo-romantic group of painters, including Kristians Tonny, Christian Bérard, and Eugene and Leonid Berman, and was taken up by Gertrude Stein who purchased his Basket of Strawberries (1925, Moscow, N. Kournikova and A. Filkov Collection) from the Salon d’Automne. Through Stein, Tchelitchew met the leading figures of the French artistic avant-garde, prominent visiting Americans, and significant modernist writers (his portrait of James Joyce in the National Gallery of Ireland dates from c. 1928). In addition, Tchelitchew was familiar with the surrealists through one of his lovers, the poet René Crevel. He also continued his career as a stage designer, notably with the highly original Ode in 1928 for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, with choreography by Leonid Massine and music by Nicolas Nabokov. Here Tchelitchew used film projection in a pioneering move to create vivid symbolic tableaux that several of his supporters saw as the high point of his creative career. In 1927 Tchelitchew was introduced by Stein to the English poet Edith Sitwell (his ‘two sibyls’, as Parker Tyler characterized the artist’s patrons). At their first meeting at the Paris debut of her brother Sacheverell’s Triumph of Neptune, Sitwell stated that Tchelitchew was ‘staring at me as if he had seen a ghost’ – he was fascinated by her physical resemblance to ‘the original of Father Zossima, the saint in The Brothers Karamazov’ who was his father’s confessor.13 For her part Sitwell seems to have fallen deeply in love with Tchelitchew, and took it upon herself to promote his art in England, beginning with an exhibition in July 1928 at the Claridge Gallery in London. The English supporters of Tchelitchew included the poet and collector Edward James of West Dean Park, Peter Watson, Lord Berners, Kenneth Clark and Cecil Beaton.14 In 1933, Tchelitchew met the young poet Charles Henri Ford, who would gradually supplant Allen Tanner as his life partner, and in the same year the art dealer Julien Levy, both of whom would orient him towards the United States, as he also fell out with Gertrude Stein. It is hard to credit now, when his name hardly occurs in standard art historical accounts of twentieth-century art, that Tchelitchew enjoyed a fame and standing second only to Picasso and Dali at the time when he met Wind. Although he was seen as the leading neo-romantic artist, and had influential supporters like Edward James, Julien Levy and James Thrall Soby, a process of exclusion from art history started relatively early on, which the artist was acutely sensitive about. For example, Tchelitchew was not included in MoMA’s 1936 Fantastic Art exhibition, nor is he mentioned in Sidney Janis’s influential Abstract and Surrealist Art in America (1944), and Clement Greenberg is disparaging about

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him in his early critical writings when he mentions him.15 Partly this may be because neo-romanticism, with its links to the worlds of theatre and fashion, was seen as a less serious prospect than surrealism, but it was also due to the difficulty of Tchelitchew’s character and the occult motives of his art. Wind appears to have been among those who were convinced of Tchelitchew’s genius, but acknowledging the significance of the artist did not blind his closest supporters to the faults of the man. Ford wrote in his diary, ‘I sometimes think of Pavlik as a monster of egotism, enveloping, smothering, crushing my own ego. But that is not the whole truth.’16 In a similar vein, Glenway Wescott – whose sceptical A Calendar of Saints for Unbelievers (1932) is illustrated believingly by Tchelitchew with drawings of the Signs of the Zodiac – recorded in his diary in 1945 how Monroe Wheeler had remonstrated with him that ‘one must not hate the man whose genius one loves’.17 Then, in a 1950 journal entry, Wescott stated of Tchelitchew’s later works that ‘his art had gone wrong, with the anatomies, heads, sinuses’ but that this ‘was not a question of his craziness – he has always been in a certain way insane, non-sane, psychopathological; but his art, even in pornography, even in the rendering of morbidity, has been sane’.18 Tchelitchew was the model for the character of Jonathan Swift in Sitwell’s novel I Live Under a Black Sun (1937), which, as Richard Greene has argued, is an ‘extremely hardminded’ book where ‘the only artist able to represent the insanity of the age is at the same time the embodiment of the private madness’. Sitwell’s explanation for her complicated decision not to dedicate the novel to Tchelitchew hints at his superstition and hysterical neediness, her concern for him, and perhaps also fear of him: ‘I have a very great friend,’ she wrote to Tchelitchew addressing him in the third person, ‘I did not dedicate my book I Live Under a Black Sun to him, because the book is about a man of genius who lived in darkness, – and he is a man of genius. I felt that if I had, it would have drawn down darkness of one kind or another upon our world.’19

Cathedrals of Art Tchelitchew’s surviving letters to Wind vividly evoke the artistic life of the 1940s and 1950s, and in particular of the social circles in New York associated with View magazine and the Museum of Modern Art. Written in the artist’s idiosyncratic French and English, the letters abound in references to avant-garde figures with whom Wind was acquainted through the exiled Russian painter. For example, a lively letter of 1942 complains of the ‘bouillabaisse’ of confused ideas surrounding

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the short-lived surrealist journal VVV, citing Masson on the unreflective belief of the surrealists in Breton. According to Tchelitchew, the active surrealists were like a group of nuns panic-stricken on seeing their mother superior, Breton, completely naked in the middle of a storm – a nice idea for a genre picture!20 In 1943, Tchelitchew was ‘very anxious to know what you both [i.e. Edgar and Margaret Wind] think of my cover for View called “flowers of sight”’ – a design reminiscent of Leonardo’s anatomical studies – and also passed on the news that Soby was writing a book about Marcel Duchamp: ‘Pauvre Marcel’!21 In 1944, Tchelitchew wrote a detailed and moving letter to Wind to inform him of the death of Florine Stettheimer (‘notre chere [sic] Florine’).22 In a memoir of Stettheimer published in View, the art critic Henry McBride linked Tchelitchew’s name with that of Duchamp as two of the artist’s greatest admirers.23 Parker Tyler, who edited View with Ford, and who later became Tchelitchew’s biographer, also wrote Stettheimer’s life. Tyler noted in his biography of Stettheimer that ‘Edgar Wind was one of those whom Tchelitchew introduced to Florine. Inevitably, the eminent art scholar was a candidate for the lists espousing the hostess’ cause; since he proved well disposed toward her work, it is to be regretted that nothing came of that fact.’24 Wind did, in fact, remain interested in Stettheimer’s work as a letter from Kirk Askew in 1952 mentioning the art historian’s approval of a posthumous retrospective exhibition of her art demonstrates.25 Tyler also informs us that, somewhat typically, Tchelitchew first encountered Stettheimer in a prophetic dream where she appeared to him saying, ‘I am Florine Stettheimer. I love your work. I will be your friend to my last days.’26 Together with her sisters Carrie and Ettie, Florine Stettheimer had presided over a modernist salon at their Alwyn Court apartment in Manhattan, which was one of the key meeting places for those involved in New York’s cultural life during the 1920s and 1930s. Wind, however, was introduced to Florine Stettheimer at her studio apartment in the Beaux Arts building on Sixth Avenue to which the artist moved after her mother’s death in 1935. Here the entertainments were for a more select group: for example, Tyler recalled first meeting Stettheimer in 1936 after the premiere of Gluck’s Orfeo at the Metropolitan, for which George Balanchine did the choreography and Tchelitchew designed the set and costumes, at a party where the company consisted of Tchelitchew, Ford and his sister the actress Ruth Ford, Kirk and Constance Askew, and the artist Joseph Cornell.27 In 1947 Tchelitchew wrote to Wind from Arizona, where he was visiting Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning at their house in Sedona. The letter records the artist’s enthusiastic response to a landscape so different to the Connecticut and

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Vermont landscapes that his American paintings are associated with: ‘the painted desert and the petrified forest (the last of Yves Tanguy!) are stupendous – here around as at Sedona (which I call Sidonia) where Max and dear Dorothea live the landscape is amazing.’28 Finally, to conclude this review of artists mentioned in their correspondence, Wind wrote to Tchelitchew in 1952 from Paris to console him for being excluded from the Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century exhibition, remarking that ‘J’ai vu notre amie Leonor Fini’ (‘I have seen our friend Leonor Fini’).29 André Masson, André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Florine Stettheimer, Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, Yves Tanguy and Leonor Fini: Wind’s correspondence with Tcheltichew places the art historian squarely in the cultural milieu of the New York modernists and the surrealist diaspora during the Second World War. In fact, this list of names is reminiscent of the line-up of famous artists in the well-known photograph taken by George Platt Lynes for the Artists in Exile exhibition held at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in March 1942, where Tchelitchew is standing somewhat forlornly at the back next to the pipesmoking Kurt Seligmann. Jimmy Ernst recalled the jostling for position that occurred at this lengthy photoshoot, commenting on how he felt embarrassed at artists ‘behaving like Hollywood starlets for the sake of a camera’.30 The correspondence also reveals that Tchelitchew had the active backing of a group of influential figures in New York’s cultural life. As Ford remembered in an interview in 1993: ‘he had a powerful faction behind him. At that time, everything was – you might say it was a closed circle. It was the elite in charge, regardless of sexual preference.’31 This elite included Ford and Tyler at the surrealist-influenced arts magazine View. At the Museum of Modern Art, Tchelitchew had the support of the director of publications and exhibitions, Monroe Wheeler, whose partner Wescott was also a friend (if overall rather more admiring of Tchelitchew’s art than his personality). Another supportive figure at the Museum of Modern Art was the writer and curator James Thrall Soby, who produced the exhibition catalogue for Tchelitchew’s major retrospective exhibition in 1942, and whose sober and scholarly approach Tchelitchew often complained about. Before working at the Museum of Modern Art, Soby had been associated with the pioneering museum director A. Everett ‘Chick’ Austin at the Wadsworth Athenaeum, who was another Tchelitchew supporter within the art world and who gave the artist’s major painting Phenomena a temporary home in his museum. Finally, the wealthy cultural impresario and co-founder of the New York City ballet, Lincoln Kirstein, was a friend and committed backer of the artist, eventually publishing a book on Tchelitchew in 1994. Kirstein had established the American Ballet in 1933, a vehicle for the choreographer

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George Balanchine, together with his friend from Harvard, Edward Warburg, the nephew of Aby Warburg (he was the son of Aby Warburg’s younger brother Felix). With this last connection, the way in which the social spheres of modern art and the Warburg family overlapped is revealed (however, Wind’s relations with the American branch of the Warburg family were occasionally strained).32 Another point of contact between the Warburg and modern art circles was Erwin Panofsky’s friendship with Alfred and Margaret Scolari Barr. Wind, an accomplished networker whose role in America during the early years of the Second World War was to promote the possibility of the Warburg Institute moving across the Atlantic, was fully at home in these social circles. As we have seen, he reported back to his colleagues in London that he took advantage of every opportunity to promote the Warburg Institute, its work and its approach to cultural history. It was Monroe Wheeler, for example, who invited Wind to lecture on ‘the literary background of modern art’ at the Museum of Modern Art in 1941. A more informal letter written by Glenway Wescott after the second of Wind’s Museum of Modern Art lectures in 1942 gives a glimpse of Wind’s role in the Tchelitchew faction lobbying Barr, the museum’s director, on the artist’s behalf: ‘Did you observe: we (that is, chiefly you and Pavlik) charmed that poor apathetic Alfred out of himself. Fun . . . And in a way very important, for the glory of God.’33 Writing to Wind in 1942 about the successful opening of his retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (28 October–29 November 1942), Tchelitchew admitted to having missed Wind, who had moved during September 1942 to a post at the University of Chicago, and also to being touched by the support and camaraderie shown by Askew, Soby, Wheeler and Wescott.34 The workings of the ‘powerful faction’ backing Tchelitchew within the wider New York art scene, was given pictorial form by Florine Stettheimer in her last painting, The Cathedrals of Art (1942, Metropolitan Museum, New York – Figure 4.3), which the artist was working on at the time when she became acquainted with Wind. The cathedrals of art in question are the New York institutions the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, and the painting forms part of a series of four works celebrating different aspects of the city’s life. In the picture, grouped around the grand staircase of the Metropolitan Museum, Stettheimer has placed artists, critics, curators, dealers and photographers from her social circle. Among these Austin leans against a pillar inscribed ‘Art in America’, near which Wheeler can also be found, while immediately behind them Tchelitchew gestures towards the Museum of Modern Art depicted at the rear left, where Barr sits on a modernist

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Figure 4.3 Florine Stettheimer (1871–1944): The Cathedrals of Art, 1942. Oil on canvas. H. 60-¼, W. 50-¼ inches (153 × 127.6 cm.). Gift of Ettie Stettheimer, 1953 (53.24.1). New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. ©2019. Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence.

chair reading unconcernedly as a child plays hopscotch on a Mondrian painting. In front of the opposite pillar framing the staircase, and inscribed ‘American Art’, stands the critic Henry McBride holding ‘Stop’ and ‘Go’ flags, while behind him a group of dealers, holding balloons emblazoned with the names of the artists they represent, includes Askew as well as Julien Levy and Pierre Matisse. Alfred Steiglitz kneels in profile in a black cloak on the staircase like a donor portrait from a Renaissance altarpiece.

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Stettheimer herself appears at bottom right, beneath one of her characteristic canopies, and in the role of master of ceremonies or ‘commère’, paired spatially with the ‘compère’ Robert Locher, an interior designer, whose first artistic exhibition had occurred alongside Stettheimer at the Knoedler Gallery in 1916, and which like her debut also proved a commercial failure. The roles of ‘commère’ and ‘compère’ refer to the opera Four Saints in Three Acts by Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein, for which Stettheimer had designed the set and costumes. Gently facetious and full of esoteric references to a particular cultural milieu – ‘lacking sufficient iconographical sources, one might easily miss some of the meaning’, commented Tyler – the painting is nevertheless a meditation on the place of American art in relation to European modern art and the Old Masters. In addition, it archly comments on the prospects of the infant figure of art, sprawling inelegantly at the base of the staircase, caught in the glare of publicity and competing with the commercial lures of celebrity and fashion – for example, the spotlights illuminating a cocktail dress at the apex of the staircase obscure the view of a painting by Frans Hals. This concern about the role of art in contemporary American society would no doubt have interested Wind, as would the similarities of the composition with Raphael’s School of Athens: it is part of the work’s subtle irony that, by analogy with Raphael’s mural, Stettheimer takes on the role of the presiding deity Athena.

‘You Really Are a Magician’ While firmly situating the émigré art historian in a particular cultural milieu, Tchelitchew’s letters to Wind reveal, above all, the closeness of their rather unlikely friendship and the extent to which the artist relied on him for intellectual guidance and emotional support. Tchelitchew wrote to Edith Sitwell that Wind was ‘a wonderful friend, my soul’s doctor’.35 Wind’s constructive influence on the highly charged painter, and on the development of his art, was noted by others. Tyler, for example, wrote that ‘from the moment in 1942, when the art scholar, Edgar Wind, pronounced Hide and Seek “a magic picture” and dwelled on its importance, the artist recovered from a reactionary spell of self-doubt and valiantly proceeded with the mystic motif of his style’.36 Similarly, Kirstein wrote that ‘Tchelitchew was fascinated by the conversations of Dr. Edgar Wind, the art historian, in discussing survivals of hermetic information from antiquity into the Renaissance’.37 Cecil Beaton commented on the mercurial character of his friend in the obituary that he wrote in 1957 for The Times, noting that

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Tchelitchew was ‘a martyr to his enthusiasm and his emotions, he was either ecstatically sublime or in the darkest misery. Tchelitchew lived in a continual turmoil.’38 The reveal that Wind was one of the confidants to whom Tchelitchew turned when he was experiencing this turmoil and that he attributed a magical healing power to the art historian. A scrap of a letter, probably dating to 1947, gives a typical flavour of the correspondence: ‘I have a terrible need to speak with you, I am in a dreadful state, I doubt everything, especially my poor reason – a dinner with you, a conversation, could help me enormously. Don’t tell anyone about it.’ In 1948, the artist complained of the critical incomprehension produced by his art: ‘it is not a very comfortable feeling being either ignored or spat on for the last 30 years.’ Then later in the same year, sensing a declining interest in his work, he complained, ‘naturally my kind of painting is not for the USA of ones [sic] day – they are afraid of it all in all – but it is too late to go back and I am getting deeper and deeper. . . . I am in an immense desert all alone! I am very very nervous.’ An entry in Ford’s diary in November 1948 reveals Wind’s solicitude towards his friend: ‘There was also a wonderfully poetic letter, which he read to me, written to Edgar Wind, in answer to a telegram saying his (P.’s) telephone had not answered for ten days – Edgar must have phoned in the morning, when we do not answer the phone.’39 Writing from Rome in 1949, following a move to Europe that ill health made permanent, Tchelitchew confessed, ‘I miss you terribly – there is no one I can listen too as I love to listen to you, Edgar, nor can I talk to one [sic] and be sure to be understood and encouraged by your marvelous vision, understanding and knowledge.’ Wind’s calming influence on Tchelitchew was also noted by Edith Sitwell. Writing to Wind in 1958 to thank him for a presentation copy of Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (‘a book for which all poets must have prayed’), she recalled an occasion at the St. Regis Hotel in New York when ‘our dear Pavlik was very cross, and had to be soothed by you’.40 During the late 1940s and early 1950s Tchelitchew’s art developed away from earlier commercially successful formulas – to quote Cecil Beaton again: ‘neo-romantic canvases of clowns, acrobats, zouaves, and unhappy girls under lilac trees’ – and also from the metamorphic naturalism of the late 1930s and early 1940s that saw him working in close proximity to surrealism. Instead he worked through a series of elaborately anatomical ‘inner landscapes’ to a final experimental late style based on esoteric themes and complex geometry approaching abstraction. This late style, combined with the artist’s loss of interest in carrying out society portraits and magazine covers, caused his friends much concern as his income declined. In 1952, Tchelitchew wrote to Wind that he felt

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like Job surrounded by the lamentations of his friends, and asked him frankly: ‘Do you think – Dear Magus – that I am committing a “terrible error” – that I have become entirely entombed in my madness and illusions – and that it is time to call a halt???’41 ‘Cher Magus’! Wind had acquired this honorific title from Tchelitchew in the course of their correspondence as he teasingly yet sincerely attributed ever greater powers to his friend. Tchelitchew’s initial term of address for Wind – ‘cher docteur’ – both implied respect for academic status and an acknowledgement of healing skills, with the latter’s apparently supernatural source becoming more explicit as Wind was increasingly hailed as ‘Edgardo divino’ the magician. For example, when Tchelitchew heard that Hide and Seek was going to be purchased by the Museum of Modern Art, he wrote to Wind thanking him for having exercised his powerful magic for the artist’s protection (‘votre grande magie’).42 On receiving an encouraging telegram from Wind, Tchelitchew had felt ‘a very

Figure 4.4  Giovanni Bellini (c. 1435–1516) and Titian (c. 1490–1576), The Feast of the Gods, 1514/1529, 170.2 × 188 cm, oil on canvas. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.

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warm, kind and good – wise – feeling coming to me like a clear ray in darkness – thank you dear dear Edgar’. Perhaps the clearest and most interesting expression of this idea of Wind as a sort of spiritual healer for Tchelitchew can be found in a letter of 1948 acknowledging receipt of a copy of Wind’s book on Giovanni Bellini’s Feast of the Gods (Figure 4.4). Here Tchelitchew stated, ‘you really are a Magician, a healer of Man’s illness: madness and fears – anyway you are so for me.’43

The Feast of the Gods In this letter Tchelitchew equated Wind’s iconographical method of interpreting Bellini’s painting not only with the process of historical recovery – comparable to a resurrection of the dead (‘your magic discoverys [sic] and enchanting revelations!’) – but also with a restoration of calm and order, the healing of madness and the bringing of the gods down to earth. An earlier echo of this perception of the iconographical method as a harmonizing force can be found in a letter from 1942, in which Tchelitchew thanks Wind for sending Ford a copy of the Journal of the Warburg Institute, commenting, ‘quelle tranquillité comparée à la confusion de VVV’ (‘what tranquility compared to the confusion of VVV’).44 It is interesting in this context to compare Tchelitchew’s conception of Wind’s iconographical procedure with Marcel Mauss’s description of ‘original rites’ in his classic General Theory of Magic: These describe the genesis and enumerate the names and characteristics of the being, thing or demon concerned in the rite. It is a kind of investigatory process by which the demon involved in the spell is slowly uncovered. The magician institutes magical proceedings, establishes the identity of the powers involved, catches hold of them and brings them under control by the use of his own power.45

Other contemporaries compared Wind’s method of developing iconographical readings of mysterious art works to magic, although in less sincere and complimentary ways. Isaiah Berlin, for example, compared Wind’s 1957 Oxford lectures with the contemporaneous Slade lectures of Douglas Cooper which, although ‘interesting enough’, were ‘nothing like as fascinating as the Cagliostrolike performances of the great magician Wind’.46 Kenneth Clark, when reviewing Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance on the radio, described Wind as like ‘a conjuror pulling paper flowers out of a hat’, writing later to Bernard Berenson to

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describe with some relish Wind’s annoyance at this comparison (‘I see the word “paper” was rather offensive’).47 Bellini’s Feast of the Gods: A Study in Venetian Humanism (1948) was Wind’s first book to be published in America, and resulted from lectures on Venetian Renaissance art given at the Houghton Library at Harvard and at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC in 1945 and 1947. Initially, the plan had been to co-write a book on Bellini’s Feast of the Gods with John Walker, the director of the National Gallery, and formerly part of the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art. Walker, assisted by Hans and Erica Tietze, intended to write about the stylistic discoveries revealed by recent X-rays, while Wind focused on the painting’s iconography. The two co-authors fell out, however, over Walker’s attempts to discredit Wind’s iconographical interpretation due to the fact that the literary source for the picture had previously been mentioned by Louis Hourticq in 1919. Initially, Wind had responded with equanimity to Walker’s criticisms, stating that ‘this is a sequence of events quite normal in iconographic studies. Our best researches are rediscoveries, restatements of things forgotten.’ However, Walker’s persistence in undermining the originality of his interpretation eventually provoked Wind into angrily writing that ‘I confess that I find it a little ungracious that you should be so very anxious to deprive me of a claim to which I am clearly entitled – “a small thing, but my own”.’ Walker apologized and wrote an admiring letter about Wind’s prepublication manuscript: ‘How rare it is to find urbane scholarship like yours in the history of art today.’48 These disputes were a foretaste of the controversy that the book would provoke on publication. To summarize the argument of Bellini’s Feast of the Gods: Wind argued that the painting which Isabella d’Este’s letters from 1501 onwards show her attempting to commission from Giovanni Bellini for her famous Grotta in the palace of Mantua was in fact the very same picture that the artist later delivered to Isabella’s brother Alfonso d’Este for his equally celebrated Camerino d’Alabastro in Ferrara in 1514 (and which is now in the National Gallery in Washington – Figure 4.4). Working from Isabella d’Este’s letters, Wind emphasized the role of the intermediary between the demanding patron and the elusive artist, the poet Pietro Bembo, and identified him also as the inventor of the painting’s mythological programme. Wind recognized that the poetic source for the principal episode in the painting – the frustrated attempt of Priapus to rape the sleeping nymph Lotis, interrupted by the braying of Silenus’s ass – was a passage in Ovid’s Fasti, and elucidated the wider interest in this odd episode in Venetian humanism, for example in the wonderful illustrated book the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), and also specifically in Bembo’s own writings where there is a

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recurrent interest in the Priapea or ancient epigrams written in praise of the tumescent god. Wind also explained the unusually humble, even comic, characterization of the gods in Bellini’s painting as typical of a broader culture of pedantic irony and facetious mockery that distinguished the interest in mythological themes at the north Italian courts, and which could also help explain numerous peculiar details in the courtly paintings of Andrea Mantegna, Lorenzo Costa and Titian. Underlying this superficially playful treatment of mythology was a deeper allegorical meaning (as Wind brought out clearly when discussing Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne): ‘as the birth of love is in discord, so the growth of love is in concord; and the consummation of love is a discordia concors, a union of both, which is achieved when the mortal is loved by the god himself, but the love of the god means death.’49 Ultimately the profounder moral purpose of Bellini and Mantegna’s paintings legitimated a certain degree of licentious revelry in artistic treatments that celebrate the victory of virtue over vice. The meaning of specific details of the painting revealed by Wind’s iconographical interpretation hinged on the symbolic function of significant objects that acquired the status of attributes, and also on the validity of his reading of physiognomies and gestures. For example, the piece of fruit held by the seated female figure in the group of gods in Bellini’s painting, identified by Wind as the earth goddess Gaea, is apparently a quince, and ‘the quince is a symbol of marriage and occurs as a common attribute in Venetian marriage paintings’ (e.g. in paintings by Paris Bordone).50 The isolation of this fruit from the others in the bowl placed on the ground, endowed the painting with an epithalamic quality: consequently Wind argued that Bellini had commemorated with his painting the wedding of Alfonso d’Este to Lucrezia Borgia in 1502, and had also included ‘mythological portraits’ of the key players in that significant dynastic event in the picture. Gaea, therefore, was Lucrezia Borgia, and the male god beside her, reaching indiscreetly between her legs, was her husband Alfonso d’Este disguised as Neptune. (‘Alfonso himself favored the role of Neptune, for the Ferrarese, with their splendid fleet in the Po, regarded themselves as a major sea power.’)51 The god Mercury, identifiable by his caduceus, was deduced by Wind to be Ippolito d’Este who had done so much to negotiate the marriage, and the infant Bacchus was Ercole d’Este, the offspring resulting from this union. Bembo and Bellini, who were responsible for the invention and execution of the artwork, are included with self-deprecating humour as the rustic gods Silenus and Silvanus – a reading that at least has the merit of explaining the problematic representation of Silenus as thin and with a prominent aquiline nose. Wind

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attempted to secure these identifications by comparing Bellini’s physiognomies with other known likenesses in medals and portrait paintings of the individuals involved. It was this revelation of historical individuals in the guise of gods that impressed Tchelitchew as magical, and which might be described as an investigatory rite of identification following Mauss. As Tchelitchew wrote, somewhat incoherently in his excitement, Wind had shown him the ‘dead come to life come back to us alive even to the most personal life of the actors, being a part of history and revealing a family too – historical yet human – gods yet down to earth – I can hear your voice, when I read it and a wonderful calm quietness overcomes me – I hear and feel, that time is not only clock time, time is a wonderfully shaped thing, where nothing what is to be not forgotten [sic] is revealed again – rediscovered’. Edith Sitwell also wrote to Wind praising his interpretation: ‘never have I gained so much from so short a book, which contains a life-time of learning in sixty odd pages.’ ‘I am deeply proud to have Bellini’s Feast of the Gods, given me by you, and inscribed by your hand,’ she stated, adding that ‘it was one of my greatest privileges, to have had the pleasure and honor of meeting you while I was in New York. And I shall never forget the experience of hearing you lecture.’52 Writing to Tchelitchew during the same period – which was a very strained time in their relationship – Sitwell emphasized that she had ‘a profound admiration, indeed, reverence, and a great personal liking’ for Wind.53 Not everyone was so impressed with Wind’s book, however, as it received a number of very critical reviews from scholars. Erica Tietze-Conrat, in a review in Art Bulletin that confined itself to Wind’s treatment of Mantegna’s mythological paintings, responded to the force of the book’s explanatory power while disputing point after point of Wind’s argument on historical grounds. In doing so she conflated magic with the effect of a good thriller in describing Wind’s persuasive powers: ‘Wind conjures up the past with a magic wand. He succeeds in convincing the reader of the correctness of his thesis and, what is most captivating, the book reads like a thrilling novel.’54 While Wind expressed his interpretations of Renaissance works of art in a clear style that avoided obscurity and sparkled with wit, the iconographical method he was conscious of developing in the wake of Warburg’s founding example, the recovery of cultural memory, was for him a highly serious and moral pursuit. To compare it to an entertaining stage illusion or a thriller was to misunderstand what was at stake completely. For example, he had been ‘thoroughly shocked’ in 1942 by the comparison of his iconographical method to crime fiction in the Museum of Modern Art’s publicity announcements, where the museum had stated

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that ‘he has been extraordinarily successful in making the most abstruse and complicated problems of subject-matter in art as fascinating to the layman as a detective story’.55 The publication of Tietze-Conrat’s review was preceded by a polite correspondence with Wind, in which she congratulated him on the book and informed him that she would depart from his interpretation, and then by proofs of the review sent by the Art Bulletin’s editor Charles Kuhn. Wind was outraged to find that Tietze-Conrat attributed to him the discovery of a number of ‘sex symbols’ in Mantegna’s Parnassus, and wrote to Kuhn complaining of her ‘silly and mistaken imputations of obscenity’ and protesting that the review ‘verges on slander’. The situation then escalated, with Wind receiving support from several colleagues for his view that the imputation of ‘pornographic intentions’ to his analysis was professionally damaging. He demanded a right to reply, asserting that his book had ‘nothing to do with psychoanalysis, sexual symbolism or anything else of the kind’. Wind even consulted a New York lawyer, Morris Ernst, on whether Tietze-Conrat’s review was libellous. Ernst advised against taking legal action but did bring to Wind’s attention Judge Jerome Frank’s opinion in the Roth Case that ‘the greater the art, the greater the harmful impact on its average reader’. Wind replied that he would refer to this case in future – and it formed a significant part of his argument for Art and Anarchy.56 In addition to Tietze-Conrat’s review, Bellini’s Feast of the Gods received respectful if critical reviews from Giles Robertson in The Burlington Magazine, and W. G. Constable in The American Journal of Archaeology, and a more hostile review from Carlo Dionisotti in The Art Bulletin.57 In fact, Dionisotti was dismissive, stating, ‘it seems a pity that no further identifications are proposed, not even of such an important character as Jupiter. . . . Such identifications are not supported by any contemporary evidence; they are not confirmed by any reliable comparison of portraits.’ For example, the portrait medal of Bembo by Valerio Belli cited by Wind to support his identification of Silenus as a ‘mythological portrait’ of the poet dates from twenty years later than the painting, and therefore has limited evidential value. Similarly, Dionisotti found the idea that Alfonso d’Este was proud of being a naval leader ‘a somewhat startling assertion’, and one that in no way proves that this god can be identified with Neptune. In private correspondence with Kenneth Clark, who admired the book but doubted whether Silenus and Silvanus were Bembo and Bellini, Wind admitted that ‘the part on the portraits is the most debatable’.58 Wind responded to his critics with almost Olympian disdain in a series of epistolary exchanges in the pages of The Burlington Magazine and The

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Art Bulletin that resemble gladiatorial displays of erudition. Tietze-Conrat’s objections are ruthlessly dispatched by Wind, who pointed out her factual errors and generalizations one after another: ‘in deference to a learned journal, I have sustained the fiction that these malapropisms deserve to be seriously refuted.’59 While Wind’s demonstrations hit home – for example, Homer had been well-known since the first printed Greek edition of 1488 despite what TietzeConrat claimed, and Homer’s mock-heroic approach would certainly have been understood by Isabella d’Este’s adviser Paride da Ceresara, the author of iconographical programmes for the paintings in her Grotta – there is a sense in which the overall argument of Wind’s book gets lost in the point-scoring of these scholarly jousts. When learnedly discussing the obscene hand gesture performed by ‘Polyhymnia, the Muse of pantomime, together with Erato, the Muse of love’ while they dance to Apollo’s music before Mars and Venus in Mantegna’s Parnassus, the analysis of both scholars even approaches pataphysical realms of learned absurdity. Robertson and Dionisotti proved sterner adversaries, and Dionisotti in particular was relentless in driving home his criticisms, notably that Wind’s suggestion that Ferrara was regarded as a major sea power was the ‘most startling point in Professor Wind’s historical criticism’.60 The most valuable results of these exchanges were the brief clarifications of the iconographical method that Wind gave to his critics. Writing to defend his interpretation of Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne (1520–3, London, National Gallery) as a representation of the last meeting of these mythic lovers (as described in Ovid, Fasti, III), which resulted in Ariadne’s apotheosis, rather than as is usually maintained their first meeting (as described in Catullus, Carmina LXIV), Wind commented in response to Robertson’s review: ‘the rules for deciding whether a text applies to a painting have been little explored; but if one is in doubt between two texts, it is well to ask which of the two illumines the picture.’61 Responding to Tietze-Conrat’s professed reluctance to advance hypotheses, Wind asserted their value, citing Poincaré, as ‘the most important part in the logic of exploration . . . no scientific discovery can be made without them’. He also pointed out the danger of linear arguments, which in the case of Tietze-Conrat’s discussion of Mantegna’s Parnassus had produced a series of Polyhymnias in which ‘one Polyhymnia “explains” a second Polyhymnia, and she a third’. Quoting Peirce, Wind argued that our ‘reasoning should not form a chain that is no stronger than its weakest link, but a cable whose fibers may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected’.62 It was Tietze-Conrat who had the last word, however, writing to the editor of the Art Bulletin that the all-important quince in Bellini’s Feast of the

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Gods might, after all, be simply ‘an antidote for inebriation’ rather than a symbol of marriage.63

Monstrous Phenomena Many of the scholarly objections to Wind’s interpretation of Bellini’s Feast of the Gods have been sustained by subsequent research, and few experts would now maintain that it celebrates a wedding that had occurred twelve years before the completion of the painting, or that it contains ‘mythological portraits’ of outstanding personalities from the cultural milieu that produced the work. If the critics can be granted a limited victory on the details of the iconographical reading proposed by Wind, the reactions of the artists Tchelitchew and Sitwell arguably represent a truer response to what Wind was trying to achieve. If it was indeed flawed, Wind’s reading of Bellini’s painting at least recognized the power of art to intensify the ideas and the lives of the people who had commissioned it. Approaching the painting as an object of interest, a puzzle to be cracked, or as the occasion for ingenious source hunting, was symptomatic – to quote Wind’s essay on Plato’s concept of ‘holy fear’ – of ‘an age in which the power of art is unrecognized, an age when the connection between moral and artistic forces has been lost’. Wind’s iconographical reading had reconnected art and life by vividly revealing the psychological drama within Bellini’s painting, and the role that myth and symbol played in negotiating and containing conflicting forces both elemental and political. It made Renaissance art seem dangerous, urgent and contemporary. As Francis Henry Taylor, director of the Metropolitan Museum, put it in an enthusiastic review in The New York Times Book Review: ‘We need more of this kind of humanism in America and less of that corrosive contemplation of self which is so inexorably destroying our art.’64 This was precisely the sort of criticism that Tchelitchew longed to receive for his art. At much the same time that he was responding enthusiastically to Wind’s book on Bellini, Tchelitchew wrote to Kirstein urging him to write a book on his large and complex painting Phenomena, and advising him to follow Wind’s method in interpreting it: ‘that is what Edgar Wind does, looking to a pitcher of water, a piece of bread, etc. and from them discovering a hidden language of symbols.’65 There is an echo here of the significant role played by the quince in Wind’s reading of Bellini’s Feast of the Gods. In the same letter – an extraordinary outpouring of confused ideas, ‘a sort of cabbalistic scripture’, meant to assist Kirstein – Tchelitchew also advised him to consult Wind on which passages

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of Paracelsus to read in order to decipher the symbolism of the ‘cycle of the elements’ within the painting: ‘read Paracelsus; you’ll be entranced, ask Edgar Wind what to read.’66 While Kirstein was critical of Wind’s MoMA lectures in 1942, he wrote to the art historian in 1948 that ‘I loved your FEAST OF THE GODS, and it is indeed a feast.’67 Soby appears to have been convinced earlier by Wind’s approach. Writing in the catalogue of Tchelitchew’s retrospective exhibition at the museum, itself a reconciliatory gesture for the artist’s exclusion from the Fantastic Art exhibition held in 1936, he noted with regard to Phenomena that The extraordinary invention of incident within the picture, which may constitute its chief importance whether ‘literary’ in inspiration or not, was dismissed as decadent and extra-pictorial. But it may be that today, when an interest in iconology is being revived at the hands of Renaissance scholars and spreading to the contemporary field, Phenomena will be given the more detailed study it has always deserved.68

The subtitle of Wind’s final MoMA lecture, ‘Our Present Discontents’ (a phrase that alludes to both Edmund Burke and Sigmund Freud) would also make a good subtitle for Tchelitchew’s Phenomena. This extraordinary work was hailed by his supporters as a contemporary version of Dante’s Inferno, the first great statement in the artist’s pictorial Divine Comedy, and by his detractors as ‘Jerome Bosch at the Ritz’.69 Writing to Kirstein in 1937, Tchelitchew said of the painting that ‘in spite of Phenomena being a thunderbolt in a frame (and you have just recently witnessed it), it is the mildest lamb, compared to the époque which we have to witness – am I right or not? We are living in the midst of most appalling and impossible not to be seen horrors and madness – and everyone covers them with pretty rugs and wallpaper and chintz!’70 In juxtaposing social injustice with the follies of high society, and giving that contrast an apocalyptic dimension, Tchelitchew’s work shared some of the concerns and quality of Sitwell’s poetry (e.g. Gold Coast Customs of 1928). In spite of his best efforts, however, Ford could not persuade Breton of the merits of Phenomena: ‘I took Breton in Paris to see Phenomena. But it didn’t turn him on. “This is not Surrealism”. But Breton was difficult.’71 In his lecture, Wind focused on two details of this crowded and complex composition consisting of a hellish beach, enclosed by distant mountains and defiantly modernist architecture, and populated by a multitude of characters deformed by a logic of ‘too much or too little’. First, he showed a slide of the foreshortened twin girls in red bathing suits at the right foreground of the picture,

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who peer crossly at a butterfly. This slide followed Borgianni’s Lamentation (c. 1615, Galleria Spada, Rome), where the foreshortened view of the dead body of Jesus is reminiscent of Mantegna’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ (c. 1480, Brera, Milan). These religious paintings are comparable formally with the detail of the twins from Phenomena because they all employ a distinctive point of view, but where Mantegna and Borgianni used a steep perspective to confront the beholder with the physical reality of Christ’s death in a challenging test of faith, Tchelitchew’s twins with their grossly distorted feet epitomize the exaggerated logic of superfluity that pervades the right side of the composition of Phenomena. They also seem distinctly annoyed at the prospect of resurrection suggested by the symbolism of the butterfly. The contrasting attitudes towards religion of the past and present are evident here, but also the marginality of art in contemporary life. The second detail that Wind focused on is towards the rear left of the painting, where Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas sit gloomily on piles of canvases, before the giant, operatic ‘spirit of Isolde’ (a draped portrait of Alma Clayburgh), performing the roles of ‘Sitting Bull’ and ‘The Knitting Maniac’ within the freakish economy of Tchelitchew’s panorama. This was an aspect of the picture that Wind had a personal interest in, as he owned a preparatory drawing of this Wagnerian scene with Stein and Toklas, which was presumably a gift from the artist.72 Kirstein refers to Tchelitchew’s former patrons as ‘Guardians of the Threshold’, an ironic reference to the guru Rudolf Steiner that Wind may also have known from Tchelitchew, as he followed this slide with a Man Ray photograph of Stein and Toklas at home that he described as ‘Alice B. Toklas at the door’. Certainly, Tchelitchew wanted to satirize Stein’s involvement with opera, as a librettist for Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts, by associating her with the ghostly figure of Isolde; similarly, the piles of paintings were meant as a jibe at Stein’s farsighted if erratic role as collector and patron of modern art. This detail also demonstrates how Tchelitchew populated his hellish scene with distorted portraits of friends, rivals and associates from the cultural circles in which he moved – beginning with his own self-portrait with bulbous feet, at the far left of the picture, painting the angel of the Annunciation. Above his shoulders a wraith-like female figure holding a quill is Edith Sitwell, ‘The Sequestered One’. Also present are Parker Tyler, ‘Armless Wonder’, typing with his feet; the poet and collector Edward James as one of the heads of ‘The TwoHeaded Man’ (a monster who resembles the alchemical androgyne); composer Virgil Thomson as ‘Sealo’ with flippers; Tchelitchew’s artistic rival Christian ‘Bébé’ Bérard as ‘The Bearded Lady’; in the same striped fairground tent, the

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dancer Nicholas Magallanes as ‘Leopard Boy’; Igor Stravinsky sits forlornly near a pool in which Charles Henri Ford, ‘Spider Boy’, is swimming; and Leonor Fini reclines nearby as ‘Elephant-Skin Woman’. Writing to his dealer Julien Levy, Tchelitchew explained why Levy’s wife Joella was depicted like a contemporary Diana of Ephesus as a multi-breasted nude holding Siamese twins in her lap: ‘your Joella grows to have many children and to be heavy with maternity, breasts and breasts and breasts – just a few more babies and she will need breasts along her legs, like five cows! Nobody will understand, but these freaks are sad and glorious.’73 Interestingly, one person who did understand was Frida Kahlo, whose exhibition at the Levy gallery followed Tchelitchew’s, who said of him: ‘I like this guy, I like his work because it has freaks in it.’74 Many of the characters depicted by Tchelitchew in Phenomena had been explored in earlier works as part of an expanding personal pantheon of ‘freaks’ and ‘pinheads’ – for example, Pip and Flip (1935, Wadsworth Atheneum), Sleeping Pinheads (1935), The Madhouse (1935, Museum of Modern Art, New York), Lion Boy (1937) and The Fish Bowl (1938). No wonder that when he wrote to Kirstein to explain Phenomena, the artist referred to himself as ‘the father of monsters, or “their court-painter”’.75 The freakish portraits in Phenomena represented the culmination of Tchelitchew’s particular obsessions, but these monsters are also, in a sense, distant relatives of the ‘mythological portraits’ that Wind discovered in Bellini’s Feast of the Gods, where Lucrezia Borgia, Pietro Bembo, Giovanni Bellini and members of the d’Este family took on the garb of ancient gods, thereby endowing their historical existence with a mythic dimension. Both gods and freaks are, when combined with portraits of identifiable individuals, monsters of the type that Wind had analysed in his 1937 article on composite portraiture. Like the allegorical portraits from the court of Louis XIV, Tchelitchew’s artificial monsters derive their force from the combination of deformity with recognizable likenesses of living members of high society and the art world; however, the initial reaction to Phenomena from critics seems to have been that its satire was too close to the artist’s well-known party trick of cruelly mimicking people he envied or despised. The work was ‘marred occasionally by malice in satire’s place’, as Soby diplomatically put it.76 Regardless of Tchelitchew’s occasional settling of personal scores, each freakish creature populating Phenomena’s nightmarish beach has been moulded by the same dialectical forces distorting society – forces that culminate ultimately in the monstrosity of fascism with both Mussolini and Hitler represented in the painting (‘the worst monstrosity is Tyranny’) – and each monster is a microcosm of the larger cosmic forces warping nature and distorting time that the picture

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also aims to represent. Take, for example, the Milking Machine or the Fish Bowl (‘a horror of a major kind’) where, to quote Kirstein, ‘under sealed glass, an ancient, anxious dowager, turbaned and swathed in pearls, gnaws her nails’. The dowager, a representative of the parasitic rentier class, is fed by a series of tubes that suck up milk and other resources, redirecting them towards her and leaving behind a scorched terrain populated by beggars. Placed centrally, the Fish Bowl symbolizes the imbalanced economic exchanges that result in scarcity on the left of the composition and superfluity on the right. Political critique is certainly intended, and Tchelitchew, in spite of being an exiled, aristocratic White Russian, was broadly speaking on the left (‘we cannot make fun of the Communists: they are quand même, the only hope,’ he told Kirstein in 1935).77 This monstrous imagery occurs within a diamond-shaped composition whose apparently arbitrary bands of colour represent ‘double reversed rainbows’. Objects and figures are viewed from three different perspectives – from below, side-on and from above – and this deliberate departure from classic linear perspective results from an awareness of Einstein’s theory of relativity and a desire to evoke a modern perception of the interaction of time and space. Yet, at the same time, the metamorphic flux of the elements of earth, air, fire and water suggested by the picture’s rainbow colours, alludes to magical concepts associated with the practices of alchemy. In this way, post-Newtonian physics and the recurrent cycle of myth are fused. Therefore, Tchelitchew’s deployment of symbolic freaks cannot be reduced to the prosaic illustration of ideology (which was an aspect of Wind’s criticism of the Mexican muralist Orozco’s political art); rather, his personal symbols resonate within a claustrophobic universe – Tchelitchew described it as ‘a sort of en attendant le jugement dernier’ (‘waiting for the Last Judgement’) – generating diagrams of society in which man is the mis-measure of man. Phenomena could even be likened to a pictorial rendition of the concept of ‘internal delimitation’ where every act of measurement becomes a greater or lesser distortion of phenomena. Notably, Tchelitchew depicts himself on the beach taking his place among the freaks (their ‘court painter’, like Velazquez in Las Meninas). As Wind would write in a footnote to his essay on composite portraits: ‘not beyond but within our temporary limitations do we find the tools for distinguishing between truth and error and achieving our measure of each of them’.78 At the fulcrum of Phenomena’s composition directly beneath the Fish Bowl, seen from above in distorting perspective and veiling his ominous features with a semi-transparent towel, we find the Lion Boy. Invented originally for a separate work of art, owned by Wescott, this fantastic motif was at first overtly erotic,

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but within Phenomena the hybrid and hirsute figure takes on a darker meaning (Tyler thought he was Satanic, somewhat like a reversed image of the alchemical figure of the fixed volatile). As Tchelitchew explained to Kirstein: ‘the lion boy is the image of the relation of Plus to Minus, the place where they are blended and where they produce monstrosity – a man plus a King of Beasts is a lessMan and less-beast – it is a “Monster”.’79 As his lecture ‘History of the Monster’ demonstrates, the monster was one of the principal instruments by which Wind tried to take the measure of modern art’s significance.

Method and Microcosm in Leonardo da Vinci Wind had a long-standing interest in Leonardo da Vinci but never wrote the book he intended to devote to the artist, for which there is a brief proposal for Oxford University Press from 1952. This document provides the book’s title – Leonardo da Vinci: New Observations on his Method – and the titles for the nine chapters that would form a text of about 80,000 words.80 In addition, Wind gave three radio talks on Leonardo, which were broadcast in April 1952 by the BBC’s Third Programme. To Wind’s annoyance, transcripts of these broadcasts were published in The Listener without his knowledge or approval.81 Although littered with mistakes, these transcripts provide precious evidence of Wind’s thesis concerning Leonardo’s method. A letter from Margaret Wind reveals that Tchelitchew read The Listener articles and was inspired by them to ask Wind to write a book about his art: ‘There is a mad letter here from Pavlik which I can scarcely make out, except near the end where he says . . . that he would like you to write a book about him.’82 The earliest surviving slide-lists for lectures on Leonardo date to the early 1940s when Wind was based at the Institute of Fine Art in New York, and he also lectured on the artist while at Smith College. Comparison of the slide-lists for Wind’s Leonardo lectures, including those given at Oxford, reveals the recurrence of key images, and similar sequences of works, suggesting that – as was typical for him – the basic argument did not fundamentally change but rather continued to be refined through the 1940s and 1950s. Tchelitchew, therefore, would certainly have been familiar with Wind’s ideas about Leonardo through conversations with him during this period. Wind’s interpretation of Leonardo was both original and controversial at the time that he advanced it. Put briefly, it was that Leonardo, in spite of his mechanical inventions and anatomical studies, was ‘not a precursor of modern science’ – he was a magus.83 In other words, Leonardo’s observation of natural phenomena

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was not analytical or ‘logically-dissociative’, rather it was ‘magical-associative’, proceeding by analogy and committed to a particularly thoroughgoing version of the concept of microcosm. As Leonardo had himself written in his notebooks: ‘Man has been called by the ancients a lesser world, and indeed the term is well applied. Seeing that if a man is composed of earth, water, air and fire, this body of earth is similar.’84 While the idea of microcosm was a Renaissance commonplace, famously expounded in Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man, Leonardo ‘carried it to bizarre extremes’ equating the dislocation of facial features in his studies of grotesques with the volcanic explosion of mountains, so that, according to Wind, it is possible to talk about the geology of a face and of the physiognomy of a mountain. In describing Leonardo’s drawings of grotesque physiognomies, Wind’s language became quite ‘Tchelitchewian’: they were ‘freaks, marvels of nature’ looking as if ‘some explosion had been taking place inside such faces’. Features were distorted by explosive emotion – ‘raucous laughter’, ‘cursing’ – producing strange transmutations (‘Horse – Lion – Man’) and resulting in antithetical caricatures (‘Bull vs. Bird’). By analogy, the same violent forces thrust rock formations up into the air and regulated the ‘breathing’ of the ocean’s tides. The result of relentlessly pursuing such analogies was that Leonardo’s drawings displayed a ‘vivacity’ that demonstrated a knowledge of the whole in the study of the parts (e.g. the formal correspondence of flowing water and ringlets of hair that he observed), and his thought displayed an ‘intrepidity’ that, in contrast with the methodological caution of the modern scientist, assumed that what could be observed in the part was equally true for the whole because ‘all is in all’.85 In spite of some derogatory comments about Plato in Leonardo’s notebooks, Wind argued that Leonardo’s concept of a constantly mutating universe whose apparent chaos was based on fundamental mathematical regularity derived from the Timaeus, a dialogue known to Leonardo through friends at the Milanese court of Ludovico Sforza, like the mathematician Luca Pacioli. Plato’s cosmology described a universe in flux but founded on geometrical rules epitomized by perfect forms. These were the so-called ‘Platonic’ solids representing the elements of fire (the tetrahedron), earth (the hexahedron), air (the octahedron) and water (the icosahedron). These perfect elemental forms constantly recombine to produce the semi-regular solids that temporarily hold together violently opposing natural forces. Leonardo had illustrated the regular and semi-regular solids for Pacioli’s mathematical treatise De Divina Proportione (c. 1498, first printed in Venice in 1509): in particular, Wind praised his illustration (on p. 15v) of the

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icosahexahedron – ‘a solid of twenty-six surfaces, eighteen of which are squares while the remaining eight are equilateral triangles’ – which demonstrated how ‘by virtue of his mathematical precision, Leonardo heightened the sensibility with which he drew’.86 A crystalline and transparent model of the icosahexahedron, complete with reflected street views from beyond the picture space, occurs in the Venetian painter Jacopo de’ Barbari’s portrait of Luca Pacioli with a Young Man (c. 1500, Naples, Capodimonte – Figure 4.5). Here Pacioli is depicted demonstrating Euclid’s theorems; a book on the table supports a model of the dodecahedron, the fifth regular solid, composed of twelve pentagons, that represents the cosmos, and which therefore contains within it the four elements. Pacioli’s treatise suggests how Wind may have intended to relate Leonardo’s geometrical studies to a ‘Theory of Natural Magic’ and ‘Leonardo’s Religion’ (as the second and third chapter headings of the Leonardo book proposal put it). The ‘divine proportion’ of Pacioli’s title is the so-called ‘golden section’: ‘a uniquely

Figure 4.5  Jacopo de’ Barbari (c. 1440–1515): Portrait of the Mathematician Lucas Pacioli and Unknown Young Man (maybe Guidobaldo da Montefeltro), 1495. Naples, Museo di Capodimonte. Painting on wood panel, also attributed to Jacometto Veneziano; 99 × 120 cm. Inv.: Q58. ©2019. Photo Scala, Florence.

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reciprocal relationship between two unequal parts of a whole, in which the small part stands in the same relation to the large part as the large part stands to the whole.’87 In addition to demonstrating its mathematical effects, Pacioli attributed a mystical significance to the ‘divine proportion’ – for example, equating the fact that it could only be expressed numerically by an irrational number with the limitlessness of God, or the fact that it always involved three components with the Trinity. The ‘divine proportion’ was also necessary to construct the pentagon, the plane component of the cosmic dodecahedron. It was for this reason that the pentagon, and the related pentagonal star, or pentagram, had a symbolic importance for the Pythagoreans denoting health. Wind’s notes contain a reference to a passage in Piero Valeriano’s Hieorglyphicorum (Basle, 1575, 351v) demonstrating how the five wounds of Christ can be mapped onto the human body through superimposing the pentagram – suggesting an intriguing parallel with Tchelitchew’s concern to relate the body’s mysteries to cosmic geometry. Although pervaded by numerical harmonies, the cosmos envisaged by Leonardo and Pacioli was one in which mutable matter was violently altered by disequilibrium caused by an elemental desire to revert to the regularity of perfect form. Leonardo wrote that ‘force is born in violence and dies in liberty’ and also that ‘everything comes from everything, and everything is made from everything, and everything can be turned into everything else’.88 Wind connected Leonardo’s analysis of mutability and force with the ancient philosopher Heraclitus, whom he saw as a precursor to Plato with regard to the concept of a fluctuating universe: ‘Leonardo’s definition of force that “it lives its own death” is so literally reminiscent of Heraclitus that the association can hardly be an accident.’ It is certainly the case that Leonardo’s notes on force are strongly reminiscent of Heraclitus’s belief that ‘all things come into being by conflict of opposites, and the sum of things flows like a stream’.89 To further reinforce the link between Leonardo and Heraclitus, Wind pointed to a sixteenth-century painting of Democritus and Heraclitus by an anonymous Milanese painter (Milan, Raccolta Benvenuti-Martinez), where the features of Heraclitus appear to be based on the so-called self-portrait drawing by Leonardo in Turin.90 This proved, Wind argued, that Leonardo was remembered in Milan as a Heraclitan character and that his facial features reflected the melancholic view of life found in the ‘dark’ philosophy of the Fragments (interestingly, Heraclitus was a figure who also fascinated the surrealists). Yet, Leonardo appears in the role of Heraclitus in order to instruct a younger man, Democritus, who laughs at the folly of the world – much as Pacioli instructs a younger man, possibly the artist himself, in the mathematical mysteries in Jacopo de’ Barbari’s painting:

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‘so that the range which Leonardo covered in his physiognomic studies – from fantastic freaks, the astonishing physiognomies, which expressed violence, disequilibrium, and passion, to the angelic faces of his Mona Lisa or his angels – is really the one which leads from the gloom of Heraclitus to the serenity of Democritus’.91 As with his reading of Bellini’s Feast of the Gods, Wind’s interpretation of Leonardo can now be criticized on a number of points of detail. For example, the drawing in Turin known as Leonardo’s ‘self-portrait’ is now dated on stylistic grounds to the late 1480s, and therefore cannot be an image of the artist, thus removing the visual identification with Heraclitus.92 Here it is sufficient to emphasize the elective affinities that existed between Wind’s interpretation of Leonardo and Tchelitchew’s own self-image and practice as an artist. Suggestively, an entry from Ford’s diary for August 1953 reads: ‘“Knitting threads of light . . .” Pavlik speaking of his work. “One ends, one does not begin, with simplicity . . . What I shouldn’t forget is that Everything is Everything”.’93 Wind’s summing up of Leonardo in Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance – in a passage discussing ‘natural magic’ as understood by Pico della Mirandola – could equally well apply to Tchelitchew: ‘the episodic method of his experimentation, so baffling to modern scientists because of its unconsecutive, conjectural style, is a pursuit of elective affinities that are of magical power. . . . His spirit of enquiry was spectacular like a magician’s.’94 The subtitle of the book that Wind intended to write on Leonardo was ‘New Observations on his Method’ – an allusion to Paul Valéry’s Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci (1895), which Wind considered to be ‘still the best study of the subject’.95 Valéry argued that Leonardo’s status as a universal man derived from his power to make connections ‘between those things whose law of continuity escapes us’, and that his method – as Wind argued too – was based on analogy: ‘for in reality, analogy is only the faculty of varying the images, of combining them, of making part of one coexist with part of another and perceiving, voluntarily or otherwise, the similarities of their construction.’96 Wind’s reliance on Valéry connects Leonardo to symbolist poetics, the heritage of Baudelaire and the combinatory mechanism for producing monsters. Kirstein relates how Tchelitchew was ‘led by Wind to observe the portrait of Fra Luca Pacioli in Naples’ which he ‘mused long over’.97 The regular and semiregular solids represented in Jacopo de’ Barbari’s painting acted for Tchelitchew as ‘suggestive objects’ that spurred him on in the development of his distinctive late style: ‘his final designs avoid any reference to terrestrial nature; he was now prepared for an imagery that married microcosm and macrocosm towards

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some encompassing synthesis.’98 Therefore, Wind’s understanding of Leonardo’s magical view of a metamorphic yet mathematical universe accompanied the development of Tchelitchew’s art from anatomical studies to geometrical forms – a process of abstraction unrelated to the inner logic of picture-making (as propounded by Barr and Greenberg). In conclusion, the extent to which Tchelitchew had absorbed Wind’s conception of Leonardo’s method, and related Renaissance themes, and the profound inspiration he took from them, is vividly conveyed in a letter written from Italy in 1949: We just saw the Sistine Chapel and the Stanze of Raphael. What a marvel it is and what a floating feeling one has from the wall of the Last Judgment. School of Athens is a great classic, a wonderful realisation in every sense. When one sees such wonders, one is encouraged to go further on the ‘thorny road’ of my own, in my own small way. I am looking now for reversibilité a quality which enables the pictures to change – to breathe as a human being does – it comes and goes all in oneself – I am relooking Fra Lucca Pacioli [sic] – ideas and reading Pythagoras ideas too.99

Tchelitchew and Leonardo Tyler noted that ‘all Tchelitchew’s close friends knew that he imagined himself in the occult tradition of the magus, the ancient wise man of magic faculties’.100 The artist was ‘a solid exponent of the old poetic magic’ and his work was ‘a subdividing alembic in an alchemical search for the Philosopher’s Stone’. This, Tyler concluded, ‘is to be regarded as his modernism’.101 Others were less sympathetic to Tchelitchew’s hermetic tendencies. Stravinsky, for example, remarked that he had ‘a queer and difficult character, for though lively and very attractive as a person, he was also morbidly superstitious, and he would wear a mysterious red thread around his wrist or talk hieratically about the Golden Section and the true meaning of Horapollo’.102 Nor was Tchelitchew unique in practising a modernism infused with hermetic and occult ideas; to give just one example from his circle in New York in the 1940s, the artist and ‘independent surrealist’ Kurt Seligmann had extensive knowledge of magic, alchemy and astrology and was well-disposed towards Tchelitchew’s art. Tyler described his ‘warm and lasting relationship with Tchelitchew’ and stated that Seligmann knew ‘enough about the background of magic to interpret Tchelitchew’s big masterpiece, the Hell [Phenomena]’ but, like Kirstein at that time, he did not become the work’s exponent. He did provide, however, in the history of magic that he published in 1948, a relevant definition of the magus:

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We think of the magus as the possessor of occult secrets, a master of esoteric wisdom, who makes use of this knowledge for his own good as well as for that of his fellow men. He is a ‘white’ magician, less fond of prodigies than of the contemplation of nature, in which he discovers marvelous active forces where others only see familiar things. For him the power of God is not concentrated in the One, but permeates every being of the universe.103

Equally suggestive in relation to Tchelitchew is the following passage where Seligmann links together psychoanalysis and alchemy: Psychoanalysts have pointed out the neurotic character of alchemical allegories and practices: the fondness of the adepts for putrefaction, their experimentations with offensive substances, their Peeping-Tom curiosity in erotic matters, their glorification of the hermaphrodite, and so forth. If this is true, the alchemist could be compared to the artist, according to Freud’s analysis of the latter. In both cases the abnormal produces what is valuable, the good. Speaking in alchemical terms, we could say that putrefaction was followed by sublimation.104

If Tchelitchew was a magus, especially the type of magus that Wind envisaged Leonardo to be, the trajectory of his art from the 1940s onwards could be described as, to paraphrase Seligmann, an alchemical metamorphosis from putrefaction to sublimation; or, to paraphrase Wind, as a transition from the gloom of Heraclitus to the serenity of Democritus. Tchelitchew’s longstanding fascination with Leonardo is indicative of his commitment to the concept of microcosm, and also his identification with the Leonardo of Freud’s psychoanalytical study of the artist published in 1910 (and revised in 1919). Tchelitchew once wrote to Wind ‘Leonardo was always divino – so are you . . .’ Although intensified by it, Tchelitchew’s identification with Leonardo certainly predated his friendship with Wind, as can be seen from his design for the programme for the ballet Ode which adapts Leonardo’s well-known drawing of the Vitruvian Man (c. 1490, Venice, Accademia). According to Tyler, who heard this from the artist himself, Tchelitchew’s fascination with Leonardo began at the age of ten when he ‘borrowed’ Freud’s study on Leonardo from his elder sister Natasha, encountering there for the first time the mysterious word ‘homosexuality’.105 Tchelitchew’s ‘memory of his childhood’, to paraphrase Freud’s title, cannot be accurate as he was ten years old in 1908, two years before the analysis of Leonardo was published (in German). Nevertheless, the importance of Freud’s Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood in providing an illustrious precedent for Tchelitchew as a homosexual artist with a ‘quest after knowledge’ is clear from this self-mythologizing anecdote.

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The symbolic importance of the significant detail is critical to the iconographical method of interpreting images (as we have seen with Bellini’s epithalamic quince), and in this respect there is a fundamental similarity with the psychoanalytical interpretation of dreams. For example, Freud’s explanation of the phenomenon of Leonardo’s extraordinary universality hinges on a brief note, occurring in a manuscript devoted to the study of flight, that provides a rare document of the artist’s childhood: ‘It seems that I was always destined to be so deeply concerned with vultures; for I recall as one of my very earliest memories that while I was in my cradle, a vulture came down to me, and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me many times with its tail against my lips.’106 Freud famously interpreted this childhood memory as a wish-fulfilment fantasy where the phallic symbolism of the bird’s tail revealed Leonardo’s repressed desire to perform fellatio. Leonardo’s homosexual orientation, discerned by Freud in this fantasy, was caused by an early erotic fixation with his mother, the peasant girl Caterina, whose affection towards her child compensated her for the loss of Leonardo’s father Ser Piero da Vinci, with whom she had an extramarital affair. This maternal behaviour in turn stimulated in the infant Leonardo a curiosity towards his mother’s ‘phallus’ – ‘his mother’s tenderness was fateful for him; it determined his destiny and the privations that were in store for him.’107 Then the enigmatic smile of Mona Lisa, which reminded Leonardo of his mother, prompted a middle-aged resurgence of the artist’s repressed erotic feelings towards her, which in a more diffused form accounts for the psychological obsession with similarly smiling figures in the late works – most notably in the painting of Madonna and Child with St. Anne (c. 1501, Paris, Louvre), in whose unusual composition Freud discerned the playing out of the family drama of the artist’s two mothers: his natural mother Caterina, and his stepmother Donna Albiera. In a lengthy footnote added in 1919, Freud also appeared to endorse Oscar Pfister’s discovery in the Virgin’s drapery folds of the shape of a vulture whose tail, in an unconscious echo of Leonardo’s childhood memory, appears to end near the Christ Child’s mouth: ‘a remarkable discovery has been made in the Louvre picture by Oskar Pfister, which is of undeniable interest, even if one may not feel inclined to accept it without reserve. In Mary’s curiously arranged and rather confusing drapery he has discovered the outline of a vulture and he interprets it as an unconscious picture-puzzle.’108 In order to strengthen the association of the artist’s mother with the vulture of his childhood fantasy, Freud drew on the hermetic literature that proved so important for Wind’s iconographical elucidations of pagan mysteries in Renaissance art: ‘in the hieroglyphics of the ancient Egyptians the mother is

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represented by a picture of a vulture,’ Freud wrote, citing Hermes Trismegistus and also Horapollo for the ancient belief that all vultures were female and were impregnated by the wind – an idea seized on by the church fathers to support the concept of the Virgin Birth.109 In Egyptian mythology the vulture-headed mother goddess, Mut, was even represented as an androgynous figure complete with phallus. The psychoanalytical explanation for such sexually ambiguous mythological figures lies in the male child’s curiosity concerning his mother’s genitals and the assumption caused by ignorance of sexual difference that ‘all human beings, women as well as men, possess a penis like his own’.110 We have seen that Wind cited Piero Valeriano, the major Renaissance commentator on Horapollo’s Hieroglyphica, in relation to Leonardo’s ideas about the microcosm, and he also related the dream romance and hieroglyphic mysteries of Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili to Bellini’s priapic painting of the Feast of the Gods (Tchelitchew’s own obsession with Horapollo was recalled by Stravinsky). This is, therefore, one significant area of overlap between Freud’s practice of psychoanalysis as a method of interpreting images arising from the unconscious, and the iconographical approach to interpreting symbols in art. Unfortunately, as Eric Maclagan first pointed out, Freud’s theories are based on a translation error in the German version of Leonardo’s notebooks – the Italian word ‘nibbio’ used by Leonardo does not mean ‘vulture’ but ‘kite’, yet ‘nibbio’ had been wrongly translated into German as ‘Geier’ meaning vulture in the translations used by Freud.111 Although it was problematic as psychology and unconvincing as art history, Freud’s psychoanalytical essay on Leonardo endowed the Renaissance artist with an allure that proved fascinating to surrealist artists. In particular, the ‘unconscious picture puzzle’ of the vulture’s outline discovered in the Virgin’s drapery seemed variously an unconscious result of psychic automatism, or by contrast a hysterical ‘double image’ resulting from the ‘paranoiac-critical’ approach. For example, in a fantastic article on Ernst published in View in April 1942, Breton responded poetically to the surrealist artist’s imagery, stating, ‘along the surface of the ancient demolished walls, lavish scenes evolve in the saltpetre’s sudden flare. The vulture, whose unexpected appearance in Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks had already been pointed out, has just taken flight (in the fifteenth century it was already Loplop).’112 It seems pedantic to point out that the vulture is supposedly to be found in the Virgin and Child with St. Anne and not the Virgin of the Rocks. Ernst, whose avian alias was Loplop, had long been fascinated with the hidden vulture, which is reprised as a blue shape within the drapery in his painting The Kiss (1927, Venice, Guggenheim Collection), a work that

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was on display in New York from October 1942 in the newly opened Art of this Century gallery run by Peggy Guggenheim. Perhaps Freud’s essay on Leonardo is also implicated in Ernst’s blasphemous inversion of a Renaissance Madonna and Child, The Blessed Virgin Chastising the Infant Jesus Before Three Witnesses: A.B., P.E. and the Painter (1926, Cologne, Museum Ludwig): here the ‘fateful’ tenderness lavished on Leonardo by his mother Caterina is distinctly lacking. Dali was also fascinated by Leonardo as a precursor to his own ideas and art, writing in 1939 that ‘Leonardo proved an authentic innovator of paranoiac painting by recommending to his pupils that, for inspiration, in a certain frame of mind they regard the indefinite shapes of the spots of dampness and the cracks on the wall, that they might see immediately rise into view, out of the confused and the amorphous, the precise contours of the visceral tumult of an imaginary equestrian battle.’113 That this fascination was channelled through his devotion to Freud, whom he met in London in 1938, is evident from the passages paraphrasing Freud’s essay on Leonardo in The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (e.g. on the sexual connotations of dreams of flight).114 Interestingly Wind was able to show two slides of the manuscript of Dali’s Secret Life prior to its publication in his final Museum of Modern Art lecture. As discussed above, Dali referred to a well-known passage in Leonardo’s notes concerning the stains on a wall as a precedent for his own paranoiac-critical method. Leonardo had written: I shall not refrain from including among these precepts a new aid to contemplation, which, although seemingly trivial and almost ridiculous, is none the less of great utility in arousing the mind to various inventions. And this is, if you look at any wall soiled with a variety of stains, or stones with variegated patterns when you have to invent some location, you will therein be able to see a resemblance to various landscapes graced with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, great valleys and hills in many combinations. Or again you will be able to see various battles and figures darting about, strange-looking faces and costumes, and an endless number of things which you can distill into finely-rendered forms.115

In The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, Dali repeatedly referred to this Renaissance precedent for his method of harnessing the hallucinatory suggestions of forms arising from the contemplation of the characteristic rock forms at Cadaques, or the amorphous stains on the ceiling of his childhood schoolroom: The great vaulted ceiling which sheltered the four sordid walls of the class was discolored by large brown moisture stains, whose irregular contours for some time constituted my whole consolation. In the course of my interminable and

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exhausting reveries, my eyes would untiringly follow the vague irregularities of these moldy silhouettes and I saw rising from this chaos which was as formless as clouds progressively concrete images which by degree became endowed with an increasingly precise, detailed and realistic personality.

Dali described this phenomenon as ‘the keystone of my future aesthetic’.116 Breton had previously referred to the fact that ‘Leonardo da Vinci advised his pupils, searching for a suitable original subject, to stare fixedly at an old, decrepit wall’ in an important essay ‘The Automatic Message’ published in Minotaure in 1933.117 Similarly, Ernst recorded in Beyond Painting how ‘on the tenth of August, 1925, an insupportable visual obsession caused me to discover the technical means which have brought a clear realization of this lesson of Leonardo’. This involved taking rubbings from the worn floorboards of a seaside inn, inspired by the childhood memory of visions provoked by a false mahogany panel visible from his bed. The resulting frottage technique, Ernst argued, produced the visual equivalent of automatic writing and, going beyond the rediscovery of inspiration, even implicitly resolved the ‘passage from subjectivity to objectivity’.118 As we have seen, Wind was certainly familiar with Ernst’s text, which he quoted in his lecture on the ‘History of the Monster’. More significantly, Wind lived with an example of Tchelitchew’s distillation of distinctive forms from amorphous blotches: Window at the End of the World. Unsurprisingly, Tchelitchew’s art, like Ernst’s and Dali’s, was also linked by critics with the phenomenon of discovering images in stains on the wall noted by Leonardo. In the May 1942 issue of View dedicated to Tchelitchew and Tanguy, Kirstein wrote: ‘Tchelitchew’s metamorphosis is linked to . . . the monsters Leonardo saw in a saturated wall, whose coruscations formed a fluid universe, as his eyes saw shifting outlines and the looming forms they enclosed.’119 Similarly, Tyler thought that the hidden vulture in Leonardo’s Madonna and Child with St. Anne could be seen as a Renaissance precedent for the artist’s concern with the ‘double image’.120 However, Tchelitchew himself denied that the vulture was present in Leonardo’s picture at all: I asked him if he had detected the hidden vulture in Leonardo’s painting and he denied it was there . . . perhaps with the extraordinary naiveté Tchelitchew would evince about the issue of originality, he wished to minimize the precursors in a specialized artistic department . . . as Hide and Seek shows, however, no artist had been so daring in the multiple image as Tchelitchew!

The double or multiple image was particularly associated with Dali, as can be seen in such paintings as The Invisible Man (1929, Museo Nacional Reina Sofia,

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Madrid) or Swans reflecting Elephants (1937, Cavalieri Holding Co, Geneva), the latter owned by Edward James, who was a patron of both Dali and Tchelitchew. For Dali the paranoiac has a hypersensitive capacity to recognize double images, and he claimed that the second image arising from the first – for example, the seated man in The Invisible Man who is ‘not really there’ but emerges as an illusion from a contrived composition spatially organized through perspective – has a ‘super-real’ existence as a result of being brought to the attention of consciousness through the intervention of desire in the interrogation of visual phenomena.121 Particularly relevant to the connection between Leonardo and the surrealist double image is another painting owned by Edward James – Spain (1938) – in which, to quote Soby who celebrated it as a masterpiece, ‘the face of the central figure of Spain is defined by episodes from a cavalry combat after Leonardo’ thereby acting as ‘a symbolic reference to an ideology which the artist finds related and sympathetic to his own’.122 Sharing a dealer, Julien Levy, and a patron, Edward James, Tchelitchew and Dali had much in common in addition to their use of the double image. Dali recalled in his Secret Life that Tchelitchew was the only ‘personality’ in the group of artists he met in Paris in the 1930s under contract to the dealer Pierre Loeb. He also tells an interesting anecdote of how the Russian artist helped him to overcome his initial terror of the Paris Métro, concluding with the suggestive statement that ‘Tchelitchev had just shown me the underground way, and the exact formula for my success. For the rest of my life I was always to make use of the occult and esoteric subways of the spirit.’123 For his part Tchelitchew was cool at best towards Dali, whom he saw as an arch-rival (Cecil Beaton photographed Dali and Tchelitchew fencing!), and whose claim to precedence in introducing the sustained exploration of the double image in modern art he disputed (dating from 1929 his Blue Clown is contemporaneous with Dali’s Invisible Man). Beyond simple rivalry, however, Tchelitchew was keen to distinguish his artistic aims from those of Dali in order that superficial similarities should not confuse the beholder. Writing in 1941 while working on Hide and Seek at Derby Hill in Vermont, he recorded that I have discovered now a very interesting and important thing – in the picture it is not only necessary to organize the figures and let’s call it the solid parts of the composition. It is also necessary to organize the places between them. Not only the space like does S. Dali but the enumerous [sic] quantity of all sorts of spaces should be organized as the solid forms are too.124

Taking their cue from the artist, Tchelitchew’s supporters also reiterated the distinction between Dali’s evocation of a heightened, hysterical surreality,

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and Tchelitchew’s emulation of the principle of transmutation at the heart of nature itself – which Leonardo described as force. Soby, for example, contrasted Tchelitchew’s works with Dali’s, arguing that in Tchelitchew’s art the second and subsequent images that arise within the picture do not supplant but supplement the initial dominant form: Tchelitchew has ‘always considered that metamorphosis must contribute to fixed structure, that it must be used as a kind of interior magic, creating its own mystery and awe but never becoming a dominant illusion’.125 Kirstein succinctly argued that ‘with Tchelitchew the double image is by no means merely double, it is multiple; it is no trick to be pulled, but rather the employment of the principle of metamorphosis’; and Tyler similarly emphasized the natural principle of metamorphosis as being ‘the energy-unit of growth [and] what stamps and differentiates Tchelitchew’s punned figures’.126 The process of metamorphosis was, therefore, intrinsically natural, and it exercised a powerful influence on the artist’s imagination – for example, his absorbed reaction to the effect of the foliage turning from green to red one Vermont autumn. This seasonal transformation inspired a series of drawings exploring the idea of ‘leaf children’ playing and fighting as the embodiment of metamorphosis, which also recalled the artist’s childhood battles with his siblings. One related painting, The Green Lion (1942, Moscow, Igor & Natalia Denisov Collection), depicts two boys fighting among spears of wheat and thistles, while watched by a foreshortened girl seen from above, – a scene from which a lion’s head emerges as a second ghostly image, the two boys transforming into eyes, the girl’s head and arms standing for the lion’s nose and mouth. Later, while reading Paracelsus, Tchelitchew found ‘something miraculous’ – that the name Green Lion describes ‘the true and genuine Balsam . . . suffering no bodies to decay’, it is ‘the Tincture, transparent Gold’.127 The painting had been made two years before Wind introduced Tchelitchew to Paracelsus, but this unconscious correspondence – an instance perhaps of ‘objective chance’ – confirmed the artist in his view of nature as magical, and of art as a related alchemical technique for refining nature. As Tyler put it, ‘the nature of the picture is as interesting as the alchemic allegory of the faculty in nature of turning green leaves red in autumn.’128 Hide and Seek (Figure 3.1) is Tchelitchew’s most elaborate statement of the alchemical processes of metamorphosis and of the microcosmic correspondences between nature and man that they reveal. It stands in his oeuvre – as a synthesis of psychological, alchemical and scientific concerns – in an analogous position to the one occupied by the Last Supper in Wind’s reading of Leonardo. Beginning with studies of a tree seen at Edward James’s West Dean estate, Tchelitchew

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associated the central tree in the painting with memories of his childhood in the Russian forests managed by his father before the Revolution, combined with references to Leonardo’s drawing of the Vitruvian Man and ideas of the microcosm, to create a fantastically complex image of the four seasons and the magic interconnections between nature and the individual. In the preparatory drawings for this work, children metamorphose into ‘leafboys and boyleaves’ as they play the game of Hide and Seek enacting an alchemical ‘turning into gold’.129 Fighting with blades of corn, they appear like corn demons or kachinas, struggling to renew nature’s magic, while dancing around the mediating symbol of the tree of life. In the final painting, ghostly children representing the four seasons emerge in a striking display of ‘multiple images’ from the space between the tree’s branches, organized by a colour symbolism linked to a theory of the four elements that the artist explained in some detail to the philosopher Gaston Bachelard, and seen simultaneously from three different perspectives so that their varying positions suggest different moments in time, and hence an anachronistic amalgam of the theory of relativity with perpetual motion.130 Perhaps the last word on this complex – and Leonardesque – play of magical associations should be left to Tchelitchew: Working on Hide and Seek and observing how, in the autumn, the leaves change, and how they become more and more transparent, I conceived of the idea of the Four Seasons, which show the life-cycle of a tree, of a life like day and night, – like the Four Ages of our own lives. I came to the conclusion that winter must be the least dense of all the seasons, and there and then I found myself, from the metamorphic point of view, not only inside a leaf, but also inside a human body, conceived as a crystal vase.131

5

‘The Muses’ sterner laws’ – W. H. Auden and Ben Shahn

The crux of Wind’s argument about the relationship of art and morality, explored in this chapter, is expressed in Schiller’s letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795). Reflecting on the most urgent political problem of his age – namely why the French Revolution which was inspired by philosophical ideas of freedom could lead to terror and tyranny – Schiller argued that the state of aesthetic freedom plays a critical role in mediating between ‘the passive state of sensation to active thinking and willing’. Therefore, the only way of transforming the sensual being into a rational one is through the experience of beauty: ‘for it is only from the aesthetic condition and not from the physical, that the moral condition can develop’.1 Humanity transcended the ‘slavery of an animal existence’ through ‘an inclination to ornamentation and play’.2 Schiller stressed this theory of ‘play’ – that man is ‘only fully human when he plays’ – so that, in his view, the aesthetic performs a crucial role in education, with the imagination leading to reason. Wind stated (see Chapter 2) that for Schiller the aesthetic represented ‘the most important organ of education, and the only organ of liberation’. Yet Schiller’s philosophical letters were also a symptom of the disintegration and compartmentalization of the human psyche, the divorce of reason and imagination that Wind attributed to romanticism, and the ‘centrifugal impulse’ of art’s autonomous development. Perhaps it was with Schiller’s ideas in mind that Wind decided to buy a Paul Klee drawing of a young girl playing with a toy animal (probably a lamb)? Child with Toy (1908, Oxford, Ashmolean Museum – Figure 5.1) was certainly acquired before 1944, as it can be seen in a photograph of his apartment at 5138 Kenwood Avenue in Chicago, hanging alongside a Tchelitchew drawing of leaf-children. Wind also lent the work to a MoMA touring exhibition in 1945. Its purchase probably coincided with Wind’s marriage to Margaret Kellner and possibly represented their hopes to start a family. Klee appears to have begun the

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Figure 5.1  Paul Klee (1879–1940), Child with Toy, 1908, 14.3 × 10 cm, pen and ink on paper on cardboard. Bequeathed by Mrs Margaret Wind in memory of Professor Edgar Wind, 2005. ©Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

drawing with the lamb, as there is a horizontal line indicating the ground below its feet. Then the child emerged from the line’s journey around the toy. While the child’s right hand has been integrated with the animal’s form, the left hand overlaps the line defining its back. Indeed, the left arm appears to have been drawn last, as it also crosses over the outline of the shoulder above. The upturned

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foreshortened feet create the effect of the child sitting – perhaps a result of the artist running out of paper at the bottom of the sheet. This is indicative of the seeking quality of Klee’s drawing, discovering form through the hand’s impetus. As he put it in a diary entry for 1908: ‘A work of art goes beyond naturalism the instant the line enters in as an independent pictorial element. . . . In fact I am beginning to see a way to provide a place for my line. I am at last finding my way out of the dead-end of ornamentation.’3 Klee’s signature slightly overlaps the edge of the drawing at bottom right, while the title and date are inscribed on the support on which the paper is mounted at bottom left. The child’s connection with the toy is through touch, and her attention, her poignantly joyful look, is to the viewer’s right – the same direction in which the lamb faces. The child’s searching gaze is therefore directed beyond, towards the other. Her eyes are like wheels or stars. Emotionally, her play is not a closed circuit. The toy, like the puppets devised by Klee, is the embodiment of a game that animates the child’s enquiry. It mediates, in Schiller’s sense, between the sensual – the tactile – and the rational (represented by her wide-eyed apprehending stare). The toy might even be considered an instrument deployed in the ‘controlled adventure’ of an experiment. Yet the child’s grip is a little cruel with just a suggestion of the fanged about it. Perhaps there is also in the child’s expression something of Baudelaire’s ‘absolute comic’ – something primitive and wild about the open mouth and starry eyes, and the girl’s laughter. If the play of the imagination leads to discovery, to apprehension, it also involves risk. In a letter written to William S. Hecksher in 1968 concerning his memories of Erwin Panofsky, Wind recalled a charming example of the playfulness of children: I also remember my first visit to his flat, when he [Erwin Panofsky] had asked me to come to Hamburg for an interview. The door was opened by a very small boy (Wolfgang), attended by his mother [Dora Panofsky], who was horrified when he greeted me with the question: ‘Hast Du mir Murmeln mitgebracht?’ [‘Did you bring me marbles?’]. She assured me that she had never before heard him ask a stranger to bring him presents, and she found his behaviour inexplicable; but it soon transpired that he had acted logically. He had heard that the name of the newcomer was Wind and he remembered a little verse: ‘Es säuseln di Wellen, es murmelt der Wind’ [‘The waves murmur, the wind murmurs’]. The next time I did bring him marbles.4

The young Wolfgang Panofsky, who later became an eminent physicist, had deduced from the verse he had heard that Wind, or ‘the wind’, should bring him marbles because of the double meaning of the verb ‘murmeln’, which means

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both ‘to murmur’ and ‘to play marbles’. Testing this hypothesis, little Wolfgang behaved in an unprecedented way. In a sense, the aesthetic – the poetic influence of memorable verse on a child’s mind – had acted as the ‘organ of education’. Wind’s anecdote also illustrates the combinatory power of the imagination and the associative logic that informs myth and structures dreams – the tendency, as Cassirer put it, to mistake contiguity for causality.5 As is discussed later in this chapter, Wind argued that Klee played an ironic game at the limits of reason ‘en se faisant enfant subtil’ [‘by becoming a subtle child’], reducing the viewer of his art to a state of artificial innocence.6 Consequently, Klee provided an antidote to the pedantry of the age, which was its real malaise. In this respect, whether Klee intended this or not, Wind’s ownership of the Child with Toy drawing transformed it into a symbol, embodying an argument about the essence of laughter, and the role of the aesthetic in education. It is tempting to speculate about the extent to which the possession of this particular work by Klee influenced Wind’s views on the artist, and by extension of the nature of modern art in general. Wind might even be compared here with Walter Benjamin, whose remarkable ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940) contains an analysis of Klee’s Angelus Novus of 1920, a work that Benjamin owned (now in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem). Here, according to Benjamin, the ‘angel of history’ is propelled backwards into the future by a violent storm blowing from Paradise, his face turned towards the past contemplating with shock what we think of as progress: ‘where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet’.7 While Wind was also interested in the historical, even cosmic, dimension of Klee’s art – as his fascination with Klee’s illustrations to Voltaire’s Candide shows – it is probably fair to say that his view of the artist was closer to that of his friend Ben Shahn. Shahn, whose own pursuit of ‘personal realism’ is discussed in this chapter in relation to Wind’s advocacy of moral art, argued that ‘More than anyone else Klee reaffirms an old heresy of mine – that form is merely the shape taken by content. Where content is highly subjective and personal new forms will emerge. That (and not a trick of weaving ribbons of color) is what Klee ought to mean to other artists.’8

The Irresponsibles During 1940, while he was at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, Wind became acquainted with the poet Archibald MacLeish, who had been appointed Librarian of Congress by President Roosevelt, and who helped to procure the

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offer of an American home for the Warburg Institute during the war. At this time, as a result of the Spanish Civil War, and then Hitler’s invasion of Austria and Czechoslovakia, MacLeish had moved from a pacifist to an interventionist stance on the question of America’s position on the war in Europe. On 19 April 1940 in a speech entitled ‘The Irresponsibles’ addressed to the American Philosophical Society, he criticized writers and intellectuals for being unprepared to defend their common culture from the attacks of fascists. This was followed by his ‘Post-War Writers and Pre-War Readers’, published in the 10 June 1940 issue of New Republic, which attacked writers like John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway, who not only correctly depicted the cruelty and falsehood of the First World War in their novels but also promoted the cynical view that ‘all issues, all moral issues, were false – were fraudulent – were intended to deceive’. MacLeish received widespread criticism for these public statements from, as he put it, ‘isolationists, pro-fascists, communist-fascists, and the whole literary gang’.9 The political situation changed as a result of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and America’s entry into the war on 8 December 1941, but in 1940 MacLeish’s views were controversial, especially in identifying art as a cause of inaction. Wind not only agreed with MacLeish on the necessity of fighting fascism but also was convinced of the connection between the moral irresponsibility of artists and intellectuals – caused by a separation of powers between reason and imagination – and the threat to liberal society and culture. In MacLeish he perceived an ally for his stance that art had consequences, and was therefore a moral matter. In The Irresponsibles MacLeish argued forcefully that the crisis posed by the war in Europe was not simply an economic and political struggle, but a cultural one that the intellectual could not remain indifferent to because it was a direct attack on the human individuality on which the scholarship and poetry of the West was founded. The propagation of falsehood which was at the heart of the fascist assault on liberal democracy posed an existential threat to culture: ‘to lie, not in the name of truth, but in the name of lies, is to destroy the common basis of communication without which a common culture cannot exist and a work of learning or of art becomes unintelligible’. For MacLeish, anti-Semitism – ‘the long series of outrages against the Jews’ – was a parallel development to the persecution of artists and writers.10 The optimistic hopes for ‘the revolution of the age’ had been shattered by the reality of ‘a revolution against’ which aimed to destroy the system of ideas that places ‘law above force, beauty above cruelty, singleness above numbers’. American intellectuals had attempted to ignore this. But, MacLeish urged, ‘how could we sit back as spectators in a war against ourselves?’11

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In answer to this question, MacLeish argued that the cause of the failure to fight an existential threat with the appropriate weapons of writing and scholarship was not lack of courage or wisdom, but the division of ‘men of letters’ into two castes: the scholars and the writers. Neither had taken responsibility ‘for the common culture or for its defence’. By contrast, the nineteenth-century conception of the man of letters represented an integrated and purposeful version of the intellectual life where ‘learning was not employed for its own sake in a kind of academic narcissism but for the sake of decent living’. This type of intellectual, mediating between past and present, between creativity and criticism, ‘admitted a responsibility for the survival and vitality of the common and accumulated experience of the mind’.12 The contemporary division between scholars and writers, by contrast, resulted merely in experts asserting ‘each in his particular way, an irresponsibility as complete as it is singular’. MacLeish speculated that this development was due to the methods of scientific inquiry being carried over into the humanities, so that the humanist had taken on the indifference of the scientist: ‘his pride is to be scientific, neuter, sceptical, detached – superior to final judgment or absolute belief.’13 The result was that both writers and scholars ‘emerged free, pure and single into the antiseptic air of objectivity. And by that sublimation of the mind they prepared the mind’s disaster.’14 Wind explicitly and publicly associated himself with this argument when, at the height of McCarthyism in 1953, he invited MacLeish to give the opening address at the ‘Art and Morals’ symposium that he organized at Smith College. At this event Wind stated, from the stage, that ‘it is in this common battle against the Philistines . . . that I am personally with Mr. MacLeish, and I don’t think there are any neutrals in this battle’.

The Critical Nature of a Work of Art The fact that, for Wind, art was necessarily moral and could therefore have political consequences did not mean, however, that he believed that art should be politically engaged in a narrowly propagandistic sense. This becomes clear from his scattered references to Mexican art, notably the work of Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. Both artists are discussed by Wind in ‘The Critical Nature of a Work of Art’, a speech that he gave at a symposium on ‘Music and Criticism’ held at Harvard University from 1 to 3 May 1947. At the conclusion of this talk, Wind remarked that the commission of Rivera’s mural Man at the Crossroads in the Rockefeller Centre in New York was an example of the type of ‘limping virtue’

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that Plato had warned against. Rivera’s patrons must have known that the Marxist artist ‘held opinions which if acted upon, would slightly alter the function of the Rockefeller Centre’. However, as they were dealing with art ‘they were animated by superior sentiments and willing to accept a decorative edification regardless of its import’. That is, until it became clear from a newspaper report that Lenin’s portrait was prominently included, and the mural was then destroyed – an act of iconoclasm that belatedly acknowledged that Rivera’s art ‘might convey his convictions’. ‘Without wishing to seem facetious’, Wind remarked, ‘I would suggest that in having these frescoes removed, the liberal-minded patrons paid the artist a greater tribute than by commissioning them.’15 Interestingly, from Rivera’s own account of this episode, it seems that he too assumed that ‘a presumably cultured man’ like Nelson Rockefeller would not take him literally when he declared that ‘rather than mutilate the conception, I should prefer the physical destruction of the conception in its entirety’.16 For his part, Ben Shahn, who was one of the assistants working on Rivera’s ‘ill-fated Radio City job’, expressed surprise that the workmen ‘who had been so fascinated watching the mural emerge . . . could later so callously destroy it. They explained that they would do anything for time and a half.’17 Shahn also felt that Rivera had acted with equal irresponsibility to Rockefeller by introducing the portrait of Lenin, which had not been present in the approved drawings for the mural, as ‘a dramatic test between his own power as a “radical” artist and that of his “reactionary” patrons’.18 If the episode of Rivera’s Rockefeller Centre mural represented iconoclasm then, at the other extreme, Orozco’s mural cycle The Epic of American Civilization, in the Baker Library at Dartmouth College, was indicative of ‘dereliction’ on the part of its commissioners. In spite of the ‘relentless violence of his message and the ferocity of his designs’, Orozco’s work inspired no fear in his academic patrons, who expected students to ‘sit quietly and read unperturbed (I presume) by the revolutionary phantoms attacking them from all sides’. Wind concluded that ‘a more solid faith in the ineffectuality of art is difficult to imagine’.19 Orozco’s Dartmouth frescoes were discussed by Wind in his 1942 lecture at MoMA, ‘Religious and Scientific Fallacies’, and he continued to refer to the artist, describing him as a ‘cartoonist’ influenced by the ‘macabre caricatures of Posada’ in Art and Anarchy.20 An invitation to the opening of MoMA’s Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art exhibition on 14 May 1940 can be found among Wind’s papers.21 Included in the modern section of this blockbuster show were works by Orozco, who was personally present during the exhibition executing his mural The Dive Bomber, Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, David Alfaro-Siqueiros and Frida Kahlo (whose remarkable The Two Fridas of 1939 was on display). In a rather combative artistic

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statement published by MoMA at this time, Orozco complained that ‘the public refuses TO SEE painting. They want TO HEAR painting. They don’t care for the show itself, they prefer TO LISTEN to the barker outside’.22 It is likely that Wind saw the artist at work on this occasion. Wind had been invited to participate in the Harvard symposium on ‘Music and Criticism’ by the professor of music, Arthur Tillman Merrit, who rejected Wind’s proposed topics – ‘The Logic of Critical Argument’ or ‘Is Art a Universal Language?’ – suggesting instead ‘The Critical Nature of a Work of Art’. Wind spoke in the session held on 2 May along with the pianist Olga Samaroff and the composer Virgil Thomson and, in his speech, he responded forcefully to the contribution that the novelist E. M. Forster had made the previous day. Forster had argued that ‘there is a basic difference between the critical and creative states of mind’ with the creative state comparable to a dream. The artist ‘lets down a bucket into his subconscious and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences, and out of the mixture he makes a work of art.’23 As his agreement with the argument of MacLeish’s The Irresponsibles demonstrates, Wind rejected the disjunction between criticism and creativity, and the separation of reason and imagination, that Forster maintained here. Wind began his speech by ‘assailing Mr. Forster’s conclusions’, criticizing him for opening up ‘a forbidding gulf separating the creative artist from the critic’ characterized by ‘the absolute disparity of their methods’. According to Forster, the artist operated ‘in a quasi-somnambulistic state of grace’, while the critic ‘strayed along those pedestrian paths which lead all around the Arcanum but never into it’. Wind, however, argued that critical acumen was an integral part of the artistic process, and that there were sublime examples of the intellect and the imagination interacting in harmony, ‘as in the learned works of Raphael or Mozart, where grace and intelligence are one’. Equally, there were instances when the two functions of the mind separated, but it was not inevitable that the result of the artist surrendering to ‘to a kind of self-propelling instinct’ would be superior work, as the ‘doodles’ of Leonardo and the automatic transcriptions of visions made by Blake show. The work of both artists improved as a result of conscious revision. Critical discipline was essential to the artist’s craft, therefore, and consequently ‘we may well wonder whether these two irreconcilable foes – the artist creating Where Angels Fear to Tread and the critic anatomizing Aspects of the Novel – might not possibly be the same person’.24 In fact, an awareness of the criteria of judgement forming canons of beauty that were incorporated in works of art had become part of the creative impetus for

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critically aware artists, manifested in movements and debates, and the rejection of established values (as in Hogarth’s 1745 print The Battle of the Pictures). The artist had not only an ‘inner critic’, therefore, but also an ‘inner grammarian’, and it was natural that artistic rules and devices should be contested ‘with dialectical zest by a liberally emancipated profession’. Wind appeared here to be setting certain technical aspects of modernist art and formalist tendencies in criticism into a broader historical setting. However, works of art were not simply created for other artists, or even for critics and art historians who treat them as specimens to be examined, ‘but for a public on which they have an immediate, occasionally a profound, and at times a radically disturbing effect’. From this perspective, art appeared as ‘a vital form of interference, a “nuisance” which, if carried far enough, may extend even to the sacred regions generally entrusted to men of affairs’. Wind then interpreted the title that had been assigned to him – ‘The Critical Nature of a Work of Art’ – as referring to this ‘mischievous’ or even ‘daemonic’ quality of art, and used the rest of his speech to reprise the argument of his 1932 essay on Plato’s concept of ‘holy fear’, going on to criticize the ‘barbaric’ quality of Baudelaire’s poetry and the dangerous impact of Wagner’s music (see Chapter 3). This resulted in one of Wind’s most succinct summaries of his views concerning art: No one would wish to deny the strictly aesthetic qualities of a work of art, or to detract from its cathartic power. But while it is true that the artist transfigures our sensations, it is equally certain that they are also intensified by him. Consequently, the work of art has the power not merely to purge but also to incite emotions, to arouse a higher sense of awareness which may far outlast the artistic experience and become a force in shaping our conduct.25

Truth can be perverted by the artist’s power to shape perceptions, to dispense justice like Dante through ‘singing flames’, as the posthumous reputation of Lucrezia Borgia demonstrated. Remembered now as an ‘incestuous monster’, she had been in fact a ‘modest, well-behaved’ woman and a competent regent of Ferrara. Yet following Jacopo Sannazaro’s polemic lead (the Renaissance poet had spread slanderous epigrams as his contribution to the conflict between Naples and the Borgia papacy), Victor Hugo, Gaetano Donizetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti had all in their different arts embellished the legend of Lucrezia Borgia’s vices. This could be dismissed as simply the exercise of ‘poetic license’, a harmless form of ‘make-believe’, that does not really affect the historical truth and which is justified by the merit of the artistic achievement. Wind’s two arguments against this position were that it resulted in a ‘distracted mind’ where ‘the intellect ignores what the imagination pictures, and the imagination disregards what the

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intellect knows’, and that an ‘absolute grant of poetic license’ actually narrows the scope of art reducing it to ‘an irrelevant pastime, a pleasant caprice unrelated to any basic impulse’.26 Wind reiterated here the theory he derived from Plato that artists should not be left alone by society because the ‘daemonic’ power of art meant that it should be attended by a ‘holy fear’ but also by an abhorrence of ‘limping virtue’. Rejecting Plato’s ‘utopian remedy’ of state censorship exercised by magistrates, Wind argued that it was the role of the critic in modern society to ‘instil into us a sacred fear or castigate our limping virtue’, and that for this criticism to be effective it had to go beyond asking ‘has the artist achieved the effect at which he aimed?’ to ask the ‘forbidden question’: ‘Should this kind of effect be aimed at, and what should be its place in our experience?’27 A letter from Forster to Wind dated 3 May 1947 documents the novelist’s response to Wind’s talk, together with a small note containing questions that had evidently been passed to Wind during the conference. Forster asked Wind whether it was not the case that ‘the critic’s main job is aesthetic, and his examination of the artist’s responsibility incidental?’ In the letter, Forster continued to maintain that, while the aesthetic and moral aspects of a work of art are closely connected, ‘criticism’s main job is aesthetic’, adding that ‘I was trying to find out whether you desire supervision for the artist in a world where so much is in far more urgent need of supervision. My own belief is that the artist ought not to be supervised.’ Wind was in complete accord with Forster on this point – as he repeatedly maintained, he agreed with Plato’s diagnosis, not with his cure – but this did not prevent frequent misunderstandings of the type Forster tried to clarify here. In other words, that Wind was an advocate of state censorship of the arts. Nothing could be further from the truth, as Wind’s active opposition to McCarthyism showed (see later in this chapter). For his part, Wind took on board one aspect of Forster’s lecture: his criticism of the ‘mystifying element’ in art. Certain symbols turn out to represent, as Forster put it, ‘not an immortal Muse but a Sphinx who dies as soon as her riddles are answered’. This felicitous phrase was quoted by Wind in Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance in association with symbols that ‘disturb us as long as we do not understand them, and bore us as soon as we do’.28

Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century Wind’s involvement with the Congress for Cultural Freedom (hereafter CCF) resulted from the invitation of the exiled Russian composer Nicolas Nabokov

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to participate in the spectacular arts festival he organized under the aegis of the CCF in Paris in May 1952. Nabokov was a close friend of the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who described him as ‘a very gifted and delightful man’ although ‘not a very good composer’, and also ‘the most obsolete of all types – a Russian bourgeois Liberal of 1910’.29 He was also a friend of Tchelitchew’s, with whom he had collaborated on the production of his ballet Ode in 1928. It was doubtless the case that Wind was already acquainted with Nabokov through these mutual connections, but it was while they were both Fellows at the American Academy in Rome during August 1951, where Wind was carrying out research on Raphael and Michelangelo, that their friendship was consolidated and the possibility of Wind’s participation in the Paris festival was discussed. Nabokov wrote to Wind on 9 February 1952 stating that ‘of course we want a lecture from you in the course of our Exposition, and yes of course we want that lecture to be in the general lines of what we have discussed in Rome’.30 The statement of aims for the festival that Nabokov included in his letter describes how ‘the purpose of the exposition is to bring into focus the richness of our half-century’s contribution to Western culture, a contribution which we believe would not have been possible except in the climate of freedom in which the great artists, composers and writers of our time have worked’.31 Put briefly the premise of Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century was that the vitality and modernity of art produced in the non-communist world was an index of political freedom. In his memoirs, Nabokov claimed that the question of how Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century would be paid for never crossed his mind, stating that ‘perhaps because of my innate optimistic insouciance, I assumed that money for my festival would somehow come my way . . . not in my wildest dreams could I have expected that my “dream festival” would be supported by America’s spying establishment’. The later discovery that the CCF was funded through a system of sham trust funds, like the Farfield Foundation, and labour union grants, which ultimately led back to the Central Intelligence Agency, caused Nabokov great hurt, he claimed, and brought into unnecessary disrepute an organization composed of ‘profoundly incorruptible free-thinking men and women’ which acted as ‘a kind of Cold War United Nations of liberal, civilized intelligentsia’.32 The idea that regular participants in the activities of the CCF were completely unaware of covert funding by the CIA, cultivated in the aftermath of the backlash against the organization after the details of its finances came to light in 1965, is unsustainable in the light of recent research.33 A more realistic assessment, stressing the political context of the 1950s ‘when war between the Communist world and the West seemed in the offing’, is given by the philosopher Sidney Hook in his autobiography:

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In my own mind I had no doubt that the CIA was making some contribution to the financing of the congress, but I was never privy to the amount or to the mechanism of its operation. Everyone involved in the activities of the Congress had heard the rumors of covert CIA support. If anyone had deep moral scruples about it, he should have dropped out. If he did not, he did not want to know.34

To what extent was Wind himself aware of the CIA’s role in funding the CCF? There is no evidence on this question among his papers, but given his friendships with figures like Hook and Berlin who had close links with diplomatic and intelligence circles it seems unlikely that his involvement was a naïve one. Certainly, on his way across the Atlantic to Paris on the Mauretania, Wind read up on the topic of the Cold War, taking with him a copy of George Kennan’s American Diplomacy (1951). Kennan was the architect of the Truman Doctrine and played a significant role in the Marshall Plan, and at this time was the American ambassador to the Soviet Union.35 Wind arrived in France at a tense time politically, with communist demonstrations on the streets, and intellectual Paris caught up in divisive arguments following the publication of Albert Camus’ L’Homme révolté (The Rebel) late in 1951, which were echoed in the debates he participated in. The controversy around Camus’ book became, for example, an important test case in Raymond Aron’s analysis of the influence of Marxism in the West, The Opium of the Intellectuals (1955); Aron participated in the Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century debates, chairing the session on ‘Revolt and Communion’ on 23 May 1952, and was intriguingly described by Wind as ‘the Walter Lippmann of the Figaro’.36 In his essay in political philosophy, The Rebel, Camus rejected revolutionary justifications of violence and terrorism to bring about future freedom, asserting instead the humanist values created through revolt (‘I revolt therefore we are’). A withering review by Francis Jeanson, commissioned by Jean-Paul Sartre, was published in the May edition of Les Temps Modernes that effectively accused Camus of being a reactionary because he had taken an explicitly anti-communist position. Camus’ reply published in August criticized armchair revolutionaries, a remark that Sartre took personally and which led to their definitive split.37 Camus, therefore, found himself as a left-wing anti-communist in a political position similar to that of the CCF, and he does seem to have attended some of the events of Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century – dining with Stravinsky, for example, after the opening performance of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées on 2 May 1952.38 Moving in the same social circles, Wind met Camus – along with ‘la France intellectuale’ – and was able to report to Margaret Wind that ‘Nicky could not be nicer [Nabokov]; and “she” thinks I

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must be a great man because Camus has taken an enormous liking for me. Think of it!’ The ‘she’ referred to here is the journalist Patricia Blake, Nabokov’s third wife, a Smith College alumna and one of Camus’ lovers.39 Margaret Wind replied, ‘I do wonder what M. Guilloton would say about the “reconciliation” between you and Camus. This is all becoming very involved and very French.’ Vincent Guilloton was the professor of French at Smith College, with whom Wind had debated Sartre’s existentialism in 1946 in the pages of The Smith College Associated News, following Wind’s polemical article attacking Sartre’s existentialist philosophy ‘Jean Paul Sartre: A French Heidegger’.40 In reply, Wind summarized the political context of the festival by stating ‘all the existentialists have abstained. Except for Malraux, all the speakers are oldfashioned liberals, and – whether inadvertently or not – the predominant tone is “left of centre”’.41 Wind seems to have been appalled, if fascinated, by the increasingly right-wing André Malraux whose speech ended the festival: Malraux’s speech was a kind of self-induced intellectual hysteria, brilliantly theatrical and at times trance-like, with screaming, whispers and dreadful coughs. A demagogue of the highest order and (for the moment) not entirely on the wrong side. . . . But out of this nervous chaos he produced sentences that are undeniably sublime, and which he twisted with a merciless wit into unexpected conclusions.42

Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century was above all dominated by musical performances, and this was the one aspect of the festival that genuinely impressed Wind (‘never have I heard better orchestras!’).43 Musicians from Germany, Italy, Britain and Austria were involved and the Boston Symphony Orchestra and New York City Ballet were flown over to Paris. Highlights of the extensive musical programme included performances of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex with Jean Cocteau as narrator, which Wind considered to be a masterpiece, and Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd, performed by the Royal Opera, which Wind was scathing about.44 In Paris, Wind was also able to gauge something of the success of his recent broadcasts on Leonardo da Vinci on the BBC’s Third Programme from the congratulations of British participants in the festival. For example, Wind commented on 20 May that Herbert Read has mellowed considerably. I ran into him this afternoon, and was showered with praises for the Leonardo talks. In fact, he was so exceedingly enthusiastic about the mathematical one, that I began to wonder where the ‘grass roots’ had gone to. The note from K. C. [Kenneth Clark] arrived, and shook my diaphragm. I quickly wrote him a few lines of proper condolences. ‘Nos amis, les Anglais’.45

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Klee and Candide Wind had been informed shortly before departing for Paris that plans for the ‘literary program’ for Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century had changed, and that he would no longer be giving a lecture but would instead participate in one of a series of cultural debates on the themes of ‘Isolation and Communication’, ‘Revolt and Communion’, ‘The Spirit of Painting in the Twentieth Century’ and ‘Diversity and Universality’. On 19 March 1952 Nabokov explained that ‘this would of course entail the choice of another subject than the one you had in mind (Klee and Candide)’.46 In response, Wind drew up a list of four topics on which he was prepared to speak at short notice: ‘Symbolism and Significant Form’; ‘In Defence of Marginal Anarchy’; ‘Poetic Memory’; and ‘The Fallacies of Detachment’. Hearing that he would be participating in a debate on modern art with the MoMA curator James Johnson Sweeney among others, Wind remarked to Nabokov: ‘Candide and Klee after all!’47 In a brief essay in the catalogue that accompanied the touring Klee exhibition to which Wind had lent ‘Child with Toy’, Sweeney, interpreted Klee’s art in relation to its political context, and specifically his persecution by the Nazis: the artist had been ‘forced to withdraw into himself to protect the sensibility his art cultivated’ by ‘a blind, self-satisfied world’ but this introspective process had produced ‘a delicate distillation of those qualities most needed to give life to a renewed world’. For Sweeney, Klee was an artist who spoke directly to the challenges of post-war reconstruction: Today we are faced by another vast social crisis. We see a world torn between the two great forces, democracy and totalitarianism. . . . In life the inelastic, inorganic, anti-vital, machine-attitude must give way to a system which will allow for the free development of sensibility and intelligence.48

The idea that Klee’s art represented the ‘sensibility and intelligence’ vital to democracy and threatened by totalitarianism was an interpretation typical of the Cold War period. Wind’s own views on Klee did not simply reduce his art to a symptom of the political context in which it was made. Moreover, he seems to have had a low opinion of Sweeney, remarking to Margaret Wind in a letter from Paris, ‘Sweeney has fled in fear (back to America): at least one improvement’.49 Sweeney had curated, with Jean Cassou, an exhibition of representative works of modern art in the Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne for the Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century festival which Wind witheringly described as ‘below criticism’ to Margaret Wind, and as ‘the worst exhibition I have ever seen’ to Tchelitchew.50

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The contrast between an optimistic view of progress and the catastrophe of history is at the heart of Voltaire’s picaresque and satirical novel Candide, ou l’optimisme (1759), a work that had a profound influence on Paul Klee and which he began illustrating in May 1911 in a free and energetic linear style.51 It seems from his remarks in his correspondence with Nabokov, that Wind’s initial intention was to deliver a lecture on Klee’s illustrations to Voltaire, which would no doubt have respected the dangerous energy of Klee’s art along with the satirical force of Voltaire’s philosophy. Klee represented for Wind the capricious side of modern art, a vital and anarchic impulse that was missing from the ultimately rather timid if serious accounts of modern art’s profound importance promoted by the CCF. According to the transcript of Wind’s speech published in a special supplement to the CCF journal Preuves in July 1953, he argued that Klee appears to us in the role of a ‘defrocked intellectual’, playing the fool without renouncing his intelligence, ironically suggesting the limits of our rational understanding while reducing us to a state of artificial innocence. To combat the pedantic insistence on the significance of modern art as a weapon in the fight against socialist realism, Wind advanced three theses: at its best modern art is essentially capricious and is involved in a serious game; that this play often takes the form of an imitation of scientific research –almost as a disguise – although this is often an anachronistic type of science; and that consequently modern art is marginal.52 Wind made these observations during the debate on ‘The Spirit of Painting in the Twentieth Century’ which took place on the evening of 26 May 1952 at the Centre de Relations Internationales. The session was chaired by Cassou and originally had been advertised as involving Sweeney, Read, the French art historian Bernard Dorival, the Argentinean painter and critic Julio Payro, the Austrian surrealist artist Rudolph Carl von Ripper, and the Italian art historian and critic Lionello Venturi. In the end the session was introduced by Cassou and summarized by Dorival, and involved four substantial contributions by Ripper, Venturi, Wind and Read in that order. In his introduction, Cassou framed the discussion by raising the question of the role of modern art in contemporary society, after which Ripper gave an account of the avant-garde artist as prophetically ahead of society which culminated in harsh criticism of Picasso’s support for communism. This was then followed by an attack from Venturi on socialist realism (exemplified by the paintings of Guerassimov), accompanied by the complaint that artists in the West lacked confidence in the art and culture they should be defending.53 By contrast, Wind and Read’s statements stood out for the way in which they departed from the script of forceful criticism

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of communist policy on the arts. According to Wind’s account of the session communicated to Margaret Wind in a letter of 27 May, Read gave ‘an absolutely magnificent speech’: [Read] spoke in a white fury because of a cautiously reactionary talk delivered two days before by [W. H.] Auden. Like a kindly but very old aunt, Auden had asked his audience to abolish the word ‘revolt’ and substitute for it either the word ‘reform’ or the word ‘rebellion’. We all want reform, he said, but we don’t want a rebellion; so let us distinguish carefully between the two, and not use the word ‘revolt’ which combines them. It all had an embarrassing tone of plausibility, and ended with a peaceful theology of ‘grace’. Herbert Read explained that the forces of reaction today were so menacing and so universal, that ‘revolt’ was the only proper attitude towards them, and he did not intend to be deprived of this word by scholastic distinctions which professed to ‘reform’ the behaviour of classes who were demonstrably incorrigible. As for ‘grace’, he did not care to join ‘this dance around an altar with an extinguished flame’ – I begin to like that man.54

Wind’s memory of the poet W. H. Auden’s speech (given on 23 May 1952) was slightly muddled as Auden had actually used the word ‘revolution’ rather than ‘revolt’ – perhaps this mistake indicates the pervasive influence of debates in Paris about Camus’s concept of revolt? A typescript Compte rendu of the debates during Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century exists in the Wind archive and here we find that Auden had argued that Every revolution requires a counter-revolution which must be distinguished from reaction. The reactionary thinks that the revolution is not a revolution but a rebellion which can be crushed and the status quo will be reinstated. The counter revolutionary realizes the essential point of this revolution and defends the revolution against its own excesses. Every revolution, in the eyes of those who begin it, ends by being betrayed. Every revolution, if it was not betrayed, would wreck the world.55

Read’s response to Auden’s distinctions between revolution, counter-revolution and reaction was: I do not propose to discuss the spirit of twentieth-century painting as if it were some Pentecostal flame that had already been extinguished. I do not think we should insult the spirit of twentieth-century painting by substituting the word ‘reform’ for the word ‘revolution’. The spirit that animated the Fauves, the spirit that animated the Cubists, the spirit that animated the Surrealists and the Constructivists, was the spirit of revolt, and if we lose that spirit we die!

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Tellingly, Read pointed out that the CCF, while criticizing totalitarian regimes for trying to subordinate art to political needs, was guilty of the same mistake by insisting that art conform to ‘some supposed tradition of Western Culture’. Read, whose own political position was essentially anarchist, concluded that ‘any determinist attitude towards art is absurd and futile’. He also contrasted the backward-looking nature of the art exhibition organized for Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century (‘a complacent look at the past’) with a major exhibition of Mexican art also on display at the Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne, which revealed the existence of a flourishing folk art tradition alongside the practice of modern Mexican artists like Rivera and Tamayo (Art méxicain du précolombien a nos jours). What was lacking in America and Europe was a genuinely popular art like this, and it would take a revolution to produce it.56 It is significant to find Wind and Read in agreement at this juncture as they did not otherwise have much in common in their thinking on the visual arts. Both argued that ‘the spirit of painting’ under discussion in the debate was not the passive reflection of external political forces but potentially an active force that could effect change within the society of which it was a part. This was the point of Wind’s digression concerning Ariosto’s complaint in Orlando Furioso that the technology of modern warfare had destroyed chivalry: it had not been canons alone, Wind observed, but also Ariosto’s satire that had weakened chivalric values, so that it could be asked whether art itself is sometimes implicated in creating the situation where it seems to be the victim (‘Je me demande donc si l’artiste, qui se croit victime d’une situation externe, n’est pas souvent lui-même un de ceux qui contribuent à créer cette situation’).57 In the context of Cassou’s remarks about the monumental importance of modern art, Venturi’s views on its need for greater self-belief to uphold democratic values, and Ripper’s attack on Picasso’s adherence to communism, Wind’s preference for the capricious, ironic and sentimental Picasso – praising his Songe et Mensonge de Franco and illustrations to Buffon – punctured the attempts to appropriate a ‘serious’ Picasso from both left and right. It also indicated, paradoxically, Wind’s deeper respect for the significance of art and its dangerous potential for harm that had led Plato to recommend it be excluded from his Republic: he noted, for example, that the use of art practice as a therapy in mental health clinics had revealed that art could either relieve suffering through catharsis or amplify dangerous fears and obsessions through repetition and formal clarification – in a similar way art has the power to either liberate or imprison a society (‘J’en conclus que l’art peut nous libérer, mais qu’il peut aussi nous enfermer’).58

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The extent to which Wind’s views on modern art diverged from the general tenor of this anti-communist festival is revealed in some corrections Wind made to remarks made by Ripper in the discussion that followed the formal speeches. These are recorded in a separate typescript document providing a transcript of Wind’s speech in the Wind archive, but they do not appear in the Compte rendu of proceedings or in the published account of the conference in Preuves. Ripper had argued that ‘there are only two instances in the history of art when the patron insisted on determining not only what an artist paints . . . but also how he paints it. This absolute control was only imposed by the Nazis and is imposed today by the Communists.’59 Wind pointed out that this was a historical error and that, to give one example, the Counter-Reformation Church had prescribed not only the subject of art but also how it was handled, so that Paolo Veronese, ‘since we are in Paris’, had found himself in front of the Inquisition because of his Marriage at Cana (1563) in the Louvre. Wind then went on to make an argument that was of fundamental importance to his conception of art in terms that were striking in this Cold War context: the fact that patrons have imposed upon artists has always existed, and this is not the most serious of the threats to art because it actually demonstrates an appropriate fear of art – the Russians are scared of art and music and they are correct to be, Wind quipped, ‘play too many Viennese waltzes in Russia and the bourgeois spirit could be reborn!’60 The irony of Wind’s sarcastic praise for Soviet art policy as indicating a true respect for art’s dangerous potency in contrast to its marginalized and neglected position in the West is an irony further compounded by the fact that his point was made in the context of significant and engaged patronage of the arts by the American state through the CCF. This was, however, a directive patronage hidden from the public to preserve the illusion of the spontaneous and free flourishing of those arts. Wind’s contribution to the Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century debates was widely considered to have been one of the most outstanding, and it brought him a great deal of recognition. For example, Le Monde on 3 June 1952 described Wind’s ‘admirable intervention’ as one of the few during the festival that had not been weighed down by an oppressive concern with Marxism.61 Wind’s involvement in the Paris conference was also significant because he met the poet W. H. Auden. Although he was not overwhelmed at first impression – ‘Auden, however pleasant, is a little too corroded for my taste’ – and he disapproved of his ‘cautiously reactionary speech’ (Margaret Wind agreed: ‘Auden sounded very distressing. This is not talk for a poet’), Wind would develop a long-standing friendship with Auden who became a colleague at both Smith College and

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then at Oxford.62 As a result of their meeting in Paris, Wind invited the poet to participate in the ‘Art and Morals’ conference he organized at Smith College in 1953.

Seven Moral Paintings Notes and a memorandum written for Robert Gorham Davis, the professor of English who was chairing the organizing committee at Smith College, record Wind’s intention of curating an exhibition to accompany the ‘Art and Morals’ symposium.63 This is a rare example of Wind organizing a display of art, and he planned to make its focus the Ben Shahn painting in the Smith College collection: Sound in the Mulberry Tree (1948) – Figure 5.2), a work composed of complementary blocks of warm reds and cool blues, in which two children are situated in an urban scene, a boy sitting on a staircase and a girl, seen from behind, looking through a shop window. The exhibition’s title is recorded in a brief note which lists the works to be included: ‘Ben – Seven Moral Paintings’. Rather than highlight Shahn’s role in contemporary artistic controversies, or contrast his work with the prevailing trend for abstract painting in American art, Wind sought to situate Sound in the Mulberry Tree in a tradition of moral painting going back to the seventeenth century. This curatorial approach differed starkly from that taken subsequently by the staff of the Museum of Modern Art who paired Ben Shahn with Willem de Kooning at the American Pavilion for the 1954 Venice Biennale. As Andrew Ritchie, MoMA’s director of painting and sculpture, put it in the museum’s publicity statement: ‘the committee felt that the contrast of two such different styles of painting as these men represent [abstract expressionism and social realism] would provide a strong impact.’64 By contrast, Wind intended to arrange a small loan exhibition of seven paintings in the front hall of the Smith College Museum of Art around Shahn’s painting, including works by Caravaggio, Rubens, Vermeer, Chardin, Hogarth, Gericault and Manet.65 These works were in East Coast collections, and Wind had secured agreement in principle for the loan of three of these from the Metropolitan Museum: Chardin’s Soap Bubbles (1733–4), Vermeer’s Allegory of the Catholic Faith (c. 1670–2) and Manet’s Funeral Landscape (c. 1867). The idea was to present ‘a diversified and provocative view of “morals in art”, – the Hogarth being a moral portrait, the Caravaggio a moral still-life, the Manet a moral landscape, the Chardin a moral genre picture, etc., and all of them distinguished by their artistic quality’. The programmatic intention of proving that painting can

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Figure 5.2  Ben Shahn (1898–1969), Sound in the Mulberry Tree, 1948, 121.9 × 91.4 cm, tempera on paper on canvas mounted on panel, SC 1948.5.1. Purchased with the Drayton Hillyer Fund, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts. ©Estate of Ben Shahn/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2019. SC 1 948.5.1.

convey a moral message across all genres is clear. However, the choice of works has some interesting connotations for both Wind and Shahn. For example, the Manet painting of a funeral cortege, with the Pantheon prominent in the Paris skyline in the background, is thought to represent Baudelaire’s burial which the painter attended on 2 September 1867. Similarly, the inclusion of the Vermeer Allegory or Rubens’ Quos Ego (based on a well-known passage of Virgil’s Aeneid) would have created interesting resonances and provoked comparisons with Shahn’s work, given the inclusion of a reference to a biblical text in his painting

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(the Hebrew inscription refers to 2 Sam. 5. 24: a verse announcing David’s defeat of the Philistines) and the developing use of allegory in his art. Wind also intended to provide two further small displays of material in the side rooms of the museum: Hogarth prints from the Smith College collection, together with stage designs by Theodore Stravinsky for the opera The Rake’s Progress (1951) by Igor Stravinsky (with a libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman); and a group of moral emblems that Wind hoped would be lent by his friend Philip Hofer at the Houghton Library at Harvard. The prominence of Hogarth in this selection of works suggests that Wind saw Shahn as an heir to the eighteenthcentury artist’s concept of the ‘modern moral subject’. Unfortunately, Wind’s planned exhibition did not take place because of the opposition of the curator of the Smith College Museum of Art, Henry-Russell Hitchcock. Hitchcock was a product of Paul Sachs’ museum course at Harvard, a friend of Alfred Barr’s, and a leading expert on modernist architecture. He had contributed an article on Frank Lloyd Wright to the ‘American’ issue of the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute edited by Wind during the war, and he had corresponded with him in 1942 about the romantic landscape painter Washington Allston, remarking ‘I wish I might get down to the series of lectures you are offering at the Museum of Modern Art. They should be very exciting. But I have had pretty much my fill of New York.’66 On the occasion of the ‘Art and Morals’ symposium, however, their relations were less cordial with Wind reporting that ‘Mr Hitchcock has now suddenly taken a violent aversion to the exhibition’ and that he refused ‘to guarantee the quality of the exhibition because he has been treated as “a mere agent”’. In the light of Hitchcock’s uncooperative attitude, Wind recommended dropping the exhibition from the program rather than have ‘a shabby one’. Wind did, however, refer to Shahn’s painting during the symposium as an emblem for the debate on ‘Art and Morals’. This was also the occasion for his open support of MacLeish’s The Irresponsibles, equating the poet and artist whose work had appeared together in the 1938 volume Land of the Free which documented the poverty in rural communities during the depression: Perhaps the painting by Ben Shahn which is in the Museum of Smith College, and which is called Sound in the Mulberry Tree, should be a motto for our debate. In this picture, two children are in front of a shop window in which tombstones are for sale. And on these tombstones is written in Hebrew a verse from Samuel, in which David is warned not to go into battle on his own strength but to wait for the Lord to call him: ‘And let it be, when thou hearest the sound a going in the tops of the mulberry trees, that then thou shalt bestir thyself: for

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then shall the Lord go out before thee, to smite the host of the Philistines.’ It is in this common battle against the Philistines, against the knights of the razor, that I am personally with Mr. MacLeish, and I don’t think there are any neutrals in this battle.67

A more pointedly political reading of this painting had previously been advanced in The Saturday Review by Soby who interpreted it as a coded call to arms against the Republican representative George Dondero’s ‘philistine’ tirades against modern art as communist propaganda (the work has also been interpreted as referring to the founding of the state of Israel).68 Dondero had attacked Shahn by name in a speech of 25 March 1949 as a communist because of his association with Rivera’s Rockefeller Building mural. In 1953 Shahn responded to such attacks with a statement in defence of American liberalism published in Rights and Art News.69 Here, Wind equated the philistines with ‘the knights of the razor’, those thinkers who William James had criticized for overextending Occam’s law of parsimony, for not being prepared to take the risk of belief, for remaining – as MacLeish would put it – ‘irresponsible’. Wind’s reference to James on this occasion is a significant precursor of the final chapter of Art and Anarchy, which in the context of the ‘Art and Morals’ symposium in 1953 does implicitly refer to McCarthyism, but only as the latest instance in an ongoing struggle to preserve common culture against its determined enemies by re-engaging art with life. According to the account he gave his biographer Selden Rodman, Shahn’s painting was a recollection of childhood, of ‘a biting-cold clear early morning of 1910 that had engaged his three senses’. Roller skating home on an errand for his father, the twelve-year-old Shahn arrived at the dead-white frost-covered window of a fish store. There was the salty smell of fish. And finally, from behind the closed door on a cracked phonograph record, the wonderful strains of Caruso singing ‘O Sole Mio!’. Across the street in an empty lot some bums were huddled over a garbage can under which they had kindled a small fire.70

Shahn’s remembrance reveals that the blocks in the window are made of ice and are therefore not tombstones. However, this may be an instance of the transformative power of ‘poetic memory’ (as Wind had put it in his notes for Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century), because the presence of the ‘Hebrew scroll’, as Pohl describes it, inscribed on the block of ice, makes it monumental, and urgently associates the heightened recollection of a sensually vivid moment from childhood with contemporary dangers. As Rodman put it: ‘1948 with its

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complacencies and its betrayal of promises had indeed seemed a time to remind the Philistines of Armageddon.’71 However, if the title, with its biblical reference, had sprung ‘from the top of the mind’, it was the deeper resources of memory that gave the picture its power to sing enduringly. This layered nature of the work is also suggested by Shahn’s handling of overlapping forms and floating patterns of colour that emphasize the picture’s surface in tension with the more photographic quality of its line. Rodman discussed Sound in the Mulberry Tree alongside another of Shahn’s works that drew on childhood memories: New York (1947, New York, The Jewish Museum). Taking as his starting point a photograph from 1936 of a Jewish fish stall on the Lower East Side, Shahn’s later painting frees the elements of the scene from the camera’s realistic regime, allowing them to flow freely in memory, so that the scales, fish and bearded merchant of the photograph become associated with the vulnerable figure of Shahn’s brother Hymie who died in a swimming accident in 1926. Rodman explained that in Shahn’s artistic maturity the ‘buried ore’ of experience was ‘transferred by the passage of time to the storehouse of his unconscious mind, ready through suffering to be made conscious without disaster, and available through experience and discipline for use’.72 The artist had moved from social realism to a more personal realism, perhaps even a ‘magic realism’, drawing on memory, while bringing a conscious discipline to the creation of a symbolic art. Although no longer ‘engaged’ in a directly political way, Shahn’s art achieved a more profound moral meaning through the poetic resource of symbolism. This placed him in opposition to the more doctrinaire advocates of abstraction. As Shahn put it himself: ‘Non-objectivism is about the most non-committal statement that can be made in art. It rests its faith in the machinery with which a painting is put together. . . . Abstract and non-objective art deny the validity of any moral intention in art.’73

Art and Morals The ‘Art and Morals’ symposium organized by Wind took place in Smith College’s John M. Greene Auditorium from 23 to 24 April 1953 in Northampton, Massachusetts. Attendance at the opening address by Archibald MacLeish was 1,600, and it did not drop below 1,100 for the remaining sessions. The first debate on the evening of 23 April involved the poets W. H. Auden and Allen Tate and the critic Lionel Trilling. The following day the participants in the afternoon discussion were the artist Ben Shahn, the architect Philip Johnson and Wind

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himself. The final evening session brought together the cultural historian Jacques Barzun, the philosopher George Boas, and the art historian W. G. Constable. Wind’s notes and correspondence reveal that other potential speakers he had considered or approached included Samuel Barber, Joseph Campbell, René d’Harnoncourt, Jerome Frank, Walter Gropius, Aline Louchheim, Jacques Maritain, Lewis Mumford, H. Richard Niebuhr, Herbert Read, Meyer Schapiro, Roger Sessions, Igor Stravinsky and Paul Tillich – an impressive cross-section of intellectual and creative life in America at the time, and one that suggests that Wind had also envisaged sessions on theology and music. Writing for the New York Herald Tribune, the critic Emily Genauer noted that at a time of ‘intense soul-searching among artists’ resulting in frequent forums and conferences, the Smith College symposium had been ‘perhaps the best I have ever attended . . . so high was the calibre of the participants, so deeply serious their approach, so provocative and often eloquent their statements’. Genauer had been particularly impressed by Wind who had supported MacLeish’s argument that art is ‘not just an innocent exercise’ by ‘brilliantly, wittily, spontaneously summoning up out of his incredible store of learning, philosophic references and poetic texts in his refutation of speakers he had just heard’. In a letter of congratulation on the success of the symposium, W. G. Constable also attributed this to Wind’s ‘personal inspiration and imagination; and it was a great triumph for you, to see how the minds of people were set working, feelings aroused, excitement created’.74 Judging by the transcript of the speeches and discussions that took place over an intensive two days, Genauer’s judgement was correct. Wind’s efforts had produced the ‘fireworks’ that Barzun had informed him that both Auden and Trilling were anticipating from the symposium.75 Sadly, it is not possible to do justice to the full range of fascinating insights generated by the debates – Allen Tate’s remarks on the poetry of Hart Crane, to give just one example – and in order to pursue further the theme of this chapter the contributions of MacLeish, Auden, Shahn and Wind will be the focus here. In his opening address, MacLeish repeated the message of The Irresponsibles which remained relevant because of the continuing threats to freedom from outside America, but also from within (and here the allusion was clearly, if not explicitly, to Senator McCarthy and the procedures of the House Un-American Activities Committee). He reflected on the criticisms his tract had received in 1940: that ‘the function of the artist was not to defend causes, even the cause of freedom, even the freedom essential to his existence as an artist, but to produce art’.76 The question to be examined, according to MacLeish, was not so much art versus morality, as what obligations

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does the practice of poetry impose from within? ‘Are those critics right’, asked MacLeish, ‘who, pursuing their reasons back through the mirror of Mallarmé to Baudelaire, and back through Proust to Freud, discover loyalty to the art of poetry is loyalty to the inward self alone?’77 To answer this question he then carried out an analysis of W. B. Yeats’s poem ‘The Grey Rock’ from the 1914 collection Responsibilities (in which Yeats’s verse took on a new political dimension). The poem conjures up an imaginary scene from Celtic mythology where a muse-like figure called Aoife denounces a young poet to the assembly of feasting gods for renouncing her protection in order to participate in a battle in which he subsequently died: ‘I’d saved his life, yet for the sake of a new friend he has turned a ghost’, she laments. Yeats addressed this tale to his former ‘companions of the Cheshire Cheese’, namely the poets participating in the Rhymers’ Club in London in the 1890s which met at the Cheshire Cheese pub, and who were committed to an aesthetic viewpoint. These poets stayed faithful to their art, eschewing popularity and ignoring financial incentives and political causes: ‘You kept the Muses’ sterner laws’, as Yeats put it. In other words, poetic vision had taken precedence over political commitment. However, MacLeish argued that ‘the Muses’ sterner laws’ could also compel an artist to confront the world, not because of the demands of an external morality, but through the inner necessity of the artistic process itself. Therefore, as the gods reject Aiofe’s appeal (the name Aiofe means beauty), the deeper meaning of the poem was that ‘a man can be faithful to the art of poetry without denying his country’s need, the world’s need or his life as a man’. MacLeish concluded that the aestheticism of the 1890s, which Yeats was extricating himself from in ‘The Grey Rock’, had largely been replaced by ‘our concern with the symbol-making function of the arts and their power through symbols of bringing to understanding and so to possession depths of experience which cannot otherwise be known’.78 Again, the closeness of MacLeish’s analysis to Wind’s way of thinking is striking. By contrast with the serious tone and political tenor of MacLeish’s opening address, Auden’s speech sparkled with irreverent wit (Wind described him as operating ‘in a state of capricious freedom’). A preoccupation with moral issues could lead to a poet ‘talking nonsense’, he claimed; yet the critic who avoids them becomes ‘unreadable’. The role of the artistic imagination is to exclude ‘the banal, the repetitive, the official, the nameless’, and this can lead to ‘Mrs Imagination’ behaving in a way that is ‘a little flighty’. For example, if a couple were to ask her whether their illicit love affair was permissible, on discovering that their names were Tristan and Isolde, she would advise ‘you must commit adultery’ and then

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give them a love potion as an encouragement. A more dogmatic moral approach could lead to the artistic paradox of Miss Prism’s novel, Auden argued, alluding to Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), where ‘the good ended happily, the bad unhappily, that is what fiction means’. However, beneath the playful delivery, a serious argument not unlike MacLeish’s developed. Auden was concerned to examine the ‘bias’ arising from the practice of poetry, citing Shakespeare’s 111th sonnet to the effect that the poet’s ‘nature is subdu’d to what it works in, like the dyer’s hand’. The Dyer’s Hand was the title that Auden later chose for an anthology of his critical prose, including his lectures given as professor of poetry at Oxford, which he published in 1962. A number of the arguments developed in that collection were first raised at the ‘Art and Morals’ symposium, just as Wind rehearsed certain lines of reasoning that would later form part of Art and Anarchy. Insisting on the distinction between artistic imagination and moral conscience, and on the artist’s bias towards the ‘singular, the personal, that which has a face’, Auden nevertheless argued that these two faculties were related and not arbitrarily but through the process of writing which is ‘a fight with the Muse analogous to the fight between Jacob and the Angel’. As a result, ‘it is very often the case that it is only by our imagination first being caught that our conscious is aroused’.79 Auden concluded that ‘a real work of art in itself is an assertion of the value of the personal free willing faith’, and that in an age dominated by forces aiming to suppress personal freedom ‘maybe that in itself has political importance’. In the subsequent discussion chaired by Barzun, Auden stated that ‘what I do think about the artistic imagination is that it is extremely frivolous. It is extremely interested in morals, but in a very frivolous way. And there I entirely agree . . . that art can be dangerous.’80 Although Wind objected to Auden’s insistence on frivolity, this is actually a very similar position on the daemonic power of the artistic imagination to that outlined in his essay on Plato’s concept of ‘holy fear’. Shahn began his contribution to the symposium by rejecting the terms ‘morals’ and ‘ethics’, because of their unhelpful connotations, and instead asserted ‘this is about values’. Despite their reputation for bohemian indifference to morality – and here Shahn referred to the notorious incident when Dali jumped through the window of Bonwit Teller – artists were really deeply concerned with creating value. In this respect, they differed from aestheticians whose principal concern was ‘the psychological factors that shape an artist’s work . . . symbol transference, communication, kinds of behavior, and a number of other highly technical matters’. Shahn recounted here his experience of participating in the Fourth Annual Woodstock Festival (1952), ‘a very fruitful sort of Jam-session

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between artists and aestheticians’, where the artists had wanted to discuss values, taking for granted the psychological and behavioural concerns that defined the quantitative, as opposed to qualitative, approach taken by the critics (‘it was at the problem of value that the aestheticians stopped’).81 The artists participating in the Woodstock Festival included David Smith, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Robert Motherwell (with whom Shahn had a rather adversarial relationship).82 These artists represented for Shahn an ‘aesthetic of pure forms’ that had become ‘increasingly rigid and intolerant’, and a cult of self-expression that had ‘become a “tight little absolute” tolerating no heresies about meaning or content’. The adherents of pure form failed to understand that, throughout art’s history, ‘form is the outward shape of content’, and as a result ‘the abstract artist has painted himself into a corner’. Art had entered an extended period of selfexamination, ‘not by any particular necessity, but by its own predilection’.83 As with MacLeish, the parallels with Wind’s understanding of the state of modern art are striking. Having criticized both aestheticians and abstract expressionists, Shahn explained his own conception of art as producing value symbols. To begin with ‘values exist as images’, not just visual images, but even the ‘readily recalled images of every sense’. More significantly, there are the images produced by ‘emotional crises’ and those that accompany ‘sudden intellectual comprehension’. These varied images ‘constitute a value’ to the extent that ‘an emotional coloration’ is retained. Shahn argued that the creation of valid artworks proceeds from these ‘original value concepts’ in the mind, and attains private and public value through their realization in an artwork. The private value consists in the artist being satisfied that the artwork fully expresses the ‘value image’ as the ‘major reason for painting any picture is to create his value image in living form’. The public value of the artwork derives from its ability to communicate with a wider audience, which does not mean that the idea communicated needs to be obvious. To make this point, Shahn referred to the work of Morris Graves: And I think of Morris Graves’ Little-Known Bird of the Inner Eye [1941, New York, MoMA], an almost fragmentary piece of work and yet one that has aroused in so many people a sense of lonely contemplation, of stillness and tranquility, an image that has achieved and created what might be called a public value.84

The stature of the public value of an artwork depends on the extent to which it engages with the ‘vaster plane’ of emotional existence that humanity, rather than an individual, exists on. Some artists have ‘have met life upon that level, and created their images with corresponding emotional power’ while others have

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confined themselves to ‘intimate and personal values’. Artists achieving work of wider public value may have engaged with the ‘central ideas of various epochs’ and borrowed their value images from the common store of religion and myth. However, art also constituted, as well as reflected, shared traditions: the Koran, the Talmud and the Bible were all products of ‘the dreams, and the intellect, and the values of certain men’ and ‘on the imagery of each one of these, a civilization has been founded’. Therefore, if artists feel marginalized in contemporary society, then they need to ask whether their work is producing public value: So, if artists today are inclined to think of themselves as a small island of sensitivity and intelligence in the midst of an ocean of unresponsive public opinion, we might ask, what stirring images have we created? What are the symbols, and what are the values that we have developed? And I think that we might have to acknowledge that if we live in a spiritual vacuum, it’s probably because we have made it so.85

Shahn developed in this speech a number of themes that anticipate the argument of his book The Shape of Content (1957), particularly the remarkable chapter ‘The Biography of a Painting’ (discussed later in this chapter) in which the artist examined the emotional and creative process leading to his work Allegory (1948, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth – Figure 5.3). The affinities revealed by Shahn’s speech between his view of the artistic process and a Warburgian approach to cultural history are also notable. Effective symbols arise from the memory of emotionally charged events and communicate that feeling in a way that shapes the broader culture. Shahn’s concept of the ‘value symbol’ is, therefore, akin to the ‘pathos formula’, while also being compatible with Wind’s theory of embodiment. Wind began his contribution by responding to the critique of the concepts of utilitarianism, progress and economy as they related to architecture which had been articulated by Johnson in a previous speech. He pointed out that the architect’s insistence on ‘exciting space’ as opposed to functionalism (defending Frank Lloyd Wright from his critics) was a reiteration of William James’s theory of superfluity. According to James, humanity’s ‘quest for the superfluous’ was what distinguished it from the beasts. However, the ‘knights of the razor’ (as James had termed them) – in architectural terms, the advocates of a low-cost, functionalist aesthetic – had so increased in number that the pressing question had become to what extent they would impose themselves upon art. Wind then responded to a parable from an essay by Max Eastman that Trilling had dwelt on in his talk of two men crossing a river in a boat – one was a poet on the deck

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Figure 5.3  Ben Shahn (1898–1969), Allegory, 1948, 91.76 × 122.24 cm, tempera on panel. Collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Gift of William P. Bomar, Jr. In Memory of Mrs. Jewel Nail Bomar and Mr. Andrew Chilton Phillips. ©Estate of Ben Shahn/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2019.

enjoying the journey ‘looking at the moon and the stars and the waves’, and the other a businessmen below decks eager to get across to carry out his work. Trilling’s sympathies had been with the second man, fearing that if ‘the dreamer on the deck’ had his way the ship might not make the crossing. Trilling had resolved this antinomy too easily for Wind’s liking, however, by stating that art was itself ‘energy transmuted into grace’ and then rhapsodizing about the formal qualities of an antique Chinese teacup he had been privileged to hold, forgetting that ‘such cups are made in order to drink tea’. Reframing the scenario, Wind asked what if the man in the cabin takes over the deck with ‘assistants and secretaries and typewriters’ and says to the declaiming poet ‘shut up, you disturb us!’ If he decides that ‘the quickest route is also the best’ then it is likely that the poet will be eliminated – and, Wind argued, ‘it is exactly that point which Mr. MacLeish made’ in warning against the threat to freedom of a police state.86 On the other hand, if the artist – for example, an irresponsible orator like Alcibiades – encroaches on the ‘practical energies of life’ then the boat might founder, go off course, and never reach the other shore. At this point, Wind repeated his (by now familiar) critique of Baudelaire’s

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Fleurs du Mal for twisting ‘pernicious feeling’ into great art – an example which Auden would presumably regard as ‘an innocent game of frivolity’ – and Plato’s recommendation that the daemonic power of art required a ‘sacred fear’ accompanied by a distrust of ‘limping virtue’. Wind confirmed here that it was the ‘knights of the razor’ who were susceptible to fall victim to ‘limping virtue’. Art’s potential power, on the other hand, was such that ‘it takes hold of the imagination, shapes the memory, and thereby influences the action’, and it was therefore the great artists who were most dangerous. On this occasion, Wind used Shahn’s art as an example of the poet’s ‘singing flames’: anyone who has been put at a ‘bad moment of his history into a picture by Ben Shahn – think of Judge Thayer or President Lowell – cannot escape from it’. Wind was alluding here to Shahn’s well-known series of paintings The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (1931–2, New York, Whitney Museum of Art) commemorating the notorious trial and execution in 1927 of two Italian anarchists in Massachusetts. Shahn’s painting Sound in the Mulberry Tree (see above) was then evoked by Wind, who concluded by attacking Auden ‘the didactic humorist’, as opposed to Auden the poet or critic. When he proceeded in this fashion, Auden gave the impression ‘that he is beating about the burning bush’. However, his own poetry told another story, Wind argued, citing some lines from Auden’s poem ‘Leap Before You Look’ that ended by advocating taking the risk of belief: ‘Laugh if you can, but you will have to leap’.87 The general discussion following the final session of the symposium involved Wind in further exchanges with Auden (see later in this chapter), saw him clarify Jung’s theory of archetypes arising from the collective unconscious in dialogue with Shahn (while also disapproving of it), and allowed him a further opportunity to argue that the artist possessed a ‘peculiar power of incantation’. He also responded to a question from the floor – ‘Why do you not consider abstract art to be art? Do you relate this to the idea of content and perhaps of morals?’ – giving a rare account of his views on abstract art: I am not aware of having said that abstract art is not art. All I did say is that abstract art, as it is called, is not abstract. I think that by abstraction, if we use the word properly, we mean generalization, of a kind which takes us away from perceptions. Now I believe that everyone would agree that colours are perceptions, and if colours, independently of subject matter or content, are juxtaposed in space, they produce certain emotions and certain rhythms, and insofar as rhythms form us, I think such art not only is art but has moral implications. It is possible, though, that Mr Shahn feels differently about it. Does he? (Mr Shahn shakes his head.) He does not.88

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‘The Truest Poetry Is the Most Feigning’ Auden commented in the panel discussion at the end of the ‘Art and Morals’ symposium that Wind’s response to his speech was comparable to ‘the avalanche of the wrath of Jehovah which descended on my head’. Nevertheless, he also felt, on reflection, that there was ‘practically no difference between Professor Wind’s view and my own as to the nature of art’. If he had used the word ‘frivolity’, it was because he had to take lightly his passionate devotion to his art. Impressed by Wind’s ability to quote his own poetry against him, Auden conceded that ‘in this year of grace, 1953, “beating about the burning bush” will remain one of those few smart wisecracks which will be memorable’. In effect this barbed witticism – reminiscent of an image conjured by Read in his emotive response to Auden in Paris, as remembered by Wind, of a ‘dance around an altar with an extinguished flame’ – was the seed from which the poem Auden dedicated to Wind grew: ‘The Truest Poetry is the Most Feigning’. In fact, the line ‘Good poets have a weakness for bad puns’ is a private joke with Wind.89 For his part, Wind clarified that the possible worlds conjured up by poetry entail commitment, and potentially have an impact on the real world, admitting that ‘Mr. Auden’s poetry in very many respects has moulded me, and I know therefore that what he calls frivolity is possibly a thing which is very serious and does entail risks because it induces certain attitudes’. To this statement, Auden replied: ‘Yes.’ The period after ‘Art and Morals’ was one of growing friendship between Wind and Auden, marked by the gift of a copy of Joseph Farington’s Lakes of Lancashire, Westmoreland and Cumberland (1816) inscribed to ‘Edgar and Margaret with love from Wystan. May 1953’. During the Summer of the same year, Auden and Wind were both participants in the Alpbach Seminar organized by the CCF, where Wind spoke once more about Klee’s art (among other topics).90 Shortly after this Auden wrote from Forio d’Ischia on 17 September enclosing a draft of the poem – ‘Re: “Beating about the Burning Bush”’ – that he proposed to dedicate to Wind. A further letter from Forio on 30 October 1953 responds to a now missing letter from Wind about the poem by explaining Auden’s thoughts on the relationship of art and politics.91 Whereas he had previously addressed Wind as ‘Dear Brother Magus’ while quoting Prospero from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Auden now called him ‘Geistreichste Kolleger’ (wittiest colleague). The first point Auden made was that while there had been historical periods where ‘art had a direct effect upon the polis’, the modern world was radically different as a result of technological change. Paraphrasing Plato, Auden stated that ‘in such a polis it is only possible to say “When the comic strips and the cosmetic ads change, the

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walls are shaken”’, adding that, ‘if I were its philosopher-king . . . it is not poets whom I should banish, but all photographers’. Secondly, Auden argued that in the contemporary political situation art continued to have a moral value, if an indirect one, because it witnessed to the ‘personal face-to-face life’ in opposition to the ‘impersonal numerical no-life which surrounds it’. Art was more effective morally for waiting to be noticed ‘instead of screaming like an affiche [poster] “Look at me. BE PERSONAL”’ – and here Auden made a handwritten annotation to his typed letter alluding to Shahn: ‘This means YOU, Big Ben.’ Thirdly, Auden responded to Wind’s remark on the draft of the poem that ‘changing an epithet does not stop the shooting’. This refers to the mock advice addressed to a poet by Auden that ‘if half-way through such praises of your dear, / Riot and shooting fill the streets with fear’ and a new political regime inimical to love poetry is established, then the poem being written can be adapted from a tribute of love to one of praise for the ‘new pot-bellied Generalissimo’. Pronouns can be re-sexed, and epithets can be changed – for example, from ‘lily-breasted’ to ‘lion-chested’ – and a state pension or literary prize will be the result. Auden agreed with Wind that his advice to the poet was paradoxical, and that a true poet would not be able to persuade himself ‘that the Generalissimo is a ruddy marvel’ but would be ‘shooting with a gun in the streets himself – on the right side’. Fourthly, and finally, Auden concluded on a personal note that ‘what my experiences in the 30s have taught me is that, if artists in our period think they can directly influence the polis by their art, they neither produce good art nor do their political duty as citizens’. Appropriately, Auden’s poem ‘The Truest Poetry is the Most Feigning’ deploys the same capricious freedom and frivolous tone that had brought down the ‘wrath of Jehovah’ on him. It is an exercise in marginal anarchy addressed to the defender of marginal anarchy. Knowing Auden’s poetic ‘bias’ for the personal and the face-to-face, the dedication to Wind is critical in situating the poem’s meaning: as Auden remarked during the symposium, he was not inspired to write by the current political situation of McCarthyism because it ‘takes place on a scale of impersonality of which the imagination can do nothing’, whereas ‘if we had a political row in Northampton I could write a poem about it’. ‘The Truest Poetry is the Most Feigning’ is that poem resulting from a row in Northampton, and in that context, it can be interpreted as a subversive rewriting of Yeats’ ‘The Grey Rock’ (and MacLeish’s reading of it) as the opportunistic poet addressed by Auden certainly does not keep ‘the Muse’s sterner laws’. It also teasingly takes Wind to task for questioning Auden’s frivolity while simultaneously supporting James’s view of humanity as defined by the ‘quest for the superfluous’.

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The poem begins in mock-Horatian mode as a slangy Ars Poetica: ‘By all means sing of love but, if you do, / Please make a rare old proper hullabaloo.’ Because poets are not ‘celibate divines’ they are advised to practice hyperbole: ‘be subtle, various, ornamental, clever’. For the reader, the mundane characteristics of the poet’s beloved are uninteresting – ‘Yours may be old enough to be your mother, / Or have one leg that’s shorter than the other’ – and only take on universal meaning through a process of poetic apotheosis that transforms ‘the living girl’ into a ‘paragon’. ‘From such ingenious fibs are poems born,’ Auden concluded – and, by implication, so too is the ‘exciting space’ of the nonfunctionalist architecture defended by Johnson, with its deceitful pilasters and unnecessarily high ceilings, and with it the whole of human culture deriving from the superfluous and ornamental. The critics evoked by Auden whose ‘crude provincial gullets crave in books / Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks’ are surely James’s (and Wind’s) ‘knights of the razor’. At this point in the poem things take a political turn with the revolution that brings to power the ‘pot-bellied Generalissimo’. Here the ironic advice to the poet is ‘Stick at your desk and hold your panic in, / What you are writing may still save your skin.’ Changing the title of the poem from ‘Goddess of wry-necks and wrens’ to ‘Great Reticulator of the fens’ will result in the poet dying in his bed (unlike the dictator), and while some might criticize him for hypocrisy, ‘true hearts’ and ‘clear heads’ will ‘put inverted commas around the story’ and understand the deeper meaning of the work. With the final ten lines of the poem, Auden abruptly changed his tone, addressing Wind on the ground of his own scholarly specialism, Renaissance poetic mystery, even alluding to Pico della Mirandola by describing Man as ‘the self-made creature who himself unmakes’. Incongruously, it was Man’s nature to be unnatural, and to tell the truth through lies (as Wind frequently pointed out myth is a lie that tells the truth). Only ‘tall tales’ or the ‘luck of verbal playing’ – an echo of Schiller on play? – can trick Man into saying ‘that love, or truth in any serious sense, / Like orthodoxy, is a reticence’. This paradoxical conclusion may allude to the earlier statement that ‘no metaphor . . . can express / A real historical unhappiness’, and similar sentiments about the inexpressible quality of harsh reality can be found in other poems from this period.92 Auden is also stating a mystery, the coincidence of opposites of truth in falsehood, in a dialectical metamorphosis tending to transcendence. Or so the occurrence of a reference to Auden’s New Year Letter (1941) in the ‘Pan and Proteus’ chapter of Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, which opens with a discussion of humanity’s characteristic mutability in Pico’s Oration on the Dignity of Man, would suggest: ‘For through the Janus of a Joke

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/ The candid Psychopompus spoke.’93 Here, in this hermetic context, it would appear that Wind returned the favour of Auden’s dedication of a poem to him by quoting him as a mercurial seer.

The Shape of Content Writing in the Penguin Modern Painters book on Ben Shahn, published to accompany his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1947, Soby introduced the artist as representing a challenge to formalist approaches to art criticism: ‘All Art’, wrote Roger Fry in Vision and Design, ‘gives us an experience freed from the disturbing conditions of actual life’. If we accept this definition, then we must reject much of Ben Shahn’s painting, as Fry rejected Bruegel’s, for it does more than remind us of the living world; it takes strong issue with contemporary reality, and urges us to sympathetic choice. Shahn himself is the opposite of the ‘pure’ painter nourished in his studio by aesthetic faith.94

Shahn was both ‘propagandist and poet’ as the Museum’s press release for this exhibition put it. Or as Kirstein argued in the 1943 catalogue for the earlier American Realists and Magic Realists: ‘Ben Shahn achieves, not so much by manual dexterity as by photographic arrangement and a delicate faux-naïve atmosphere, an almost super-journalistic reality.’95 Shahn portrayed himself as the street photographer in Myself Among the Churchgoers (1939, Minneapolis, Curtis Galleries), using the instrument of the right-angle camera to take the measure of contemporary society, and representing himself practising what Wind would term a form of ‘internal delimitation’. Reviewing Shahn’s retrospective for The Nation, Clement Greenberg acknowledged his indisputable gift, but complained that what little originality was demonstrated in his art derived from the influence of photography. However, judged as painting, Shahn’s work was basically irrelevant, as far as Greenberg was concerned: ‘This art is not important, is essentially beside the point as far as ambitious present-day painting is concerned, and is much more derivative than it seems at first glance.’96 Shahn understandably resented what Rodman described as Greenberg’s ‘patronizingly contemptuous review’. Moreover, he saw Greenberg as being inconsistent in his formalism, ‘giving himself away’ when he criticized the award of the inaugural Bollingen Prize to Ezra Pound in 1949 because the Pisan Cantos ‘were an incitement to Jew-baiting’.97 Referring to the one juror on the Bollingen Prize

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committee who had voted against Pound, the poet Karl Shapiro (and his article ‘The Anti-Critic’), Shahn argued that the issue of anti-Semitism revealed the limits of a theory of pure art: If you discover that a painting of transcendent formal beauty was the work of a Nazi and that it happened to have been painted on human skin, how does that conceivably affect the value of the painting? In Greenberg’s case, the fact that he himself happens to be a Jew simply outweighed in this instance his critical dogma of aesthetics in a vacuum.98

In 1948 Greenberg reviewed the Whitney Annual exhibition, calling attention to Shahn’s Allegory as one of the few works ‘of any merit’, but remarking critically on its symbolic nature which was ‘symptomatic of another recent tendency . . . the easel painting offered as an emblem rather than as, strictly speaking, a picture’.99 If the emblematic aspect of Shahn’s work was seen by Greenberg as irrelevant to the purely formal concerns of picture-making, then another critic, Henry McBride, misinterpreted the ‘almost heraldic lion glaring from a fiery landscape’, as Rodman described it, as a ‘subtle tribute to our quondam friend but present enemy, the Soviet Republic’. This ‘curiously McCarthyian analysis’, as Rodman put it, was remarked on by Shahn in a 1968 interview with Forrest Selvig, where he joked about McBride calling for him to be deported, but stated that ‘he mistook it for something – Communism. I don’t know why. Because it was red.’ In fact, Allegory was an example of Shahn’s ‘personal realism’ deriving from his memories of childhood trauma: ‘it was something very close to my life. I have been through two terrible fires. . . . And it became a symbol, a beast to me, this fire.’100 Critical misunderstanding of his work prompted Shahn to explore the process behind its creation in one of the Charles Eliot Norton lectures he gave at Harvard that became The Shape of Content. He told Selvig that tracing the emotional development of his painting was ‘a dangerous thing to do, I felt all roiled inside having done it’.101 In ‘The Biography of a Painting’, Shahn explained how the origin of Allegory was a commercial illustration job for a journalistic account of the ‘Hickman Story’ of 1947: the case of an African American man, James Hickman, put on trial for the murder of his landlord after losing his four children in a fire in Chicago.102 The pathos of the case derived from its universal qualities – racial injustice, poverty and, above all, the destructive power of fire. These in turn suggested a symbolic approach to Shahn, which he later abandoned except for the ‘highly formalized wreath of flames’ which crowned the illustration of the burning house. The case also set off a series of personal memories about

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two fires that Shahn had experienced in childhood – one in ‘the little Russian village in which my grandfather lived’ and the other in his family’s Lorimer Street apartment in New York, where Shahn’s father risked his life to save his children trapped inside.103 Shahn continued to work with the ‘discarded symbols pertaining to the Hickman story’: a monstrous menagerie of ‘heads and bodies of beasts, besides several Harpies, Furies, and other symbolic, semi-classic shapes and figures’.104 One of these, a ‘lion-like beast’, was reworked through drawings ‘approaching more nearly some inner figure of primitive terror’ in order to bring it ‘under control’. In the process the beast became associated with the symbolic wreath of flames devised for the Hickman story, with ‘the stare of an abnormal cat’ once owned by the Shahn family which had eaten its own kittens, with folk tales and family memories about wolves in Russia and with the ‘disconcerting’ antique sculpture of Romulus and Remus suckled by the She-Wolf. The children which Shahn placed below the monstrous beast in Allegory, ‘in their play-clothes of 1908’, resembled more his own brothers and sisters, than Hickman’s children or the legendary founders of Rome. The resulting painting was not of ‘a disaster’, but instead sought to create ‘the emotional tone that surrounds disaster; you might call it the inner disaster’.105 These elements of the work, constituting the ‘visionary stage’, were then refined to an effective image by the ‘inner critic’, an even more formidable figure than Henry McBride. As Shahn concluded, ‘an artist at work upon a painting must be two people, not one’: the imaginer and the critic.106 As we have seen, this was the same argument that Wind made at the ‘Music and Criticism’ conference in response to Forster. A visual source that Shahn did not specifically mention in his lecture, but which informs the representation of the children in Allegory – as a pile of prone and diminutive bodies over which the monstrous form looms – is a photograph of child victims of the Holocaust from the United States Office of War Information (OWI), where the artist worked during the war.107 Discovering this source does not answer the riddle of the Sphinx, as Forster put it when discussing the mystifying aspect of art, revealing that Allegory is actually the artist’s response to the Holocaust. Rather it deepens the eloquence of a symbol that continued to haunt Shahn’s imagination. The head of the wolf-lion with its mane of flames reappears in a 1950 serigraph print with Hebrew script entitled Where There Is a Book There Is No Sword and ambiguously in the serigraph print Credo from 1966, where Shahn’s symbol of ‘inner disaster’ can be seen in the open pages of a book held up by a sombre man, alongside a version of Martin Luther’s speech at the Imperial Diet of Worms in 1521 asserting individual conviction over papal authority.108 Where Luther felt bound by the authority of Biblical text, Shahn’s

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figure witnessing to the risk of belief holds up a symbolic image, overlapping the elegant calligraphy embodying the defiant words. The elevation of individual conscience is certainly complicated here by its association with the notoriously anti-Semitic Luther. Another telling instance is Shahn’s use of a drawing of the fire beast for the cover image on the dust jacket of The Shape of Content. Here the symbol could be seen as representing form, which ‘is the shaping of content into new kinds of order, thus bringing to content added meanings and greater expressiveness’, and therefore as a rebuttal of Greenberg’s view that such symbolism is not intrinsic to the art of painting.109 With regard to its content, Shahn’s Allegory could be interpreted as the opposite of Klee’s Child with Toy: here the animal has asserted its mastery over the vulnerable forms of children dressed in ‘play-clothes’ (incidentally Shahn dates these clothes to 1908 the same year in which Klee made his drawing). But if the work represents the disaster of terror overcoming reason and suppressing play, then the process of creating it went some way towards controlling that ‘primitive fear’ by giving it form. Therefore, the image of an elemental destructive power becomes the symbol of the artist’s personal credo, that form is the shape of content, and also a gesture towards the sacred. The artist’s previous style of social realism or practice of photography was inadequate for this purpose. In a sense, Shahn found himself in the same position as the Hopi Indian described by Warburg, who stands ‘midway between logic and magic, and his instrument of orientation is the symbol’.110 As Wind argued in 1950, certain phenomena – ‘the sacred, the ominous, the sublime, the graceful, the comical, the pitiful’ – require the allusive and indirect approach of symbolism because they ‘tend to vanish if we approach them without ceremony’.111 Interestingly, the Kachina dolls collected by Ernst and Breton during the war, were created by the Hopi to enable children through play to identify the spirits invoked during magic rites. According to Malraux, when Breton learnt that the Hopi had been driven out of Los Alamos in New Mexico so that the first atomic bomb could be tested there, he remarked: ‘That doesn’t surprise me. . . . I don’t believe in coincidences: magic takes over from magic.’112 The wreath of flames was reused by Shahn in his Second Allegory (1953, University of Illinois, Krannert Art Museum – Figure 5.4) where it surrounds a monumental pointing hand appearing from the heavens indicating a cowering man, covering his mouth, stretched out on the ground. To the side of the fiery hand are several crystalline forms rendered with geometrical precision. Created in the same year as the ‘Art and Morals’ symposium, it is certainly tempting to associate this work with Wind’s comment about ‘beating around the burning

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Figure 5.4  Ben Shahn (1898–1969), Second Allegory, 1953, 135.6 × 79.7 cm, tempera on Masonite. Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois on behalf of its Krannert Art Museum. University of Illinois Purchase through the Festival of Arts Purchase Fund. 1953-7-1. ©Estate of Ben Shahn/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2019.

bush’ and Auden’s response invoking ‘the avalanche of the wrath of Jehovah which descended on my head’. Perhaps Wind also brought to Shahn’s attention, as he had done with Tchelitchew, the Platonic and semi-regular solids represented in Jacopo de’ Barbari’s Portrait of Luca Pacioli (c. 1500, Naples, Capodimonte)? A watercolour version of Second Allegory in a private collection reveals that the source for the crystalline forms was a chemistry textbook. Therefore, the inexpressible horror of the threatening hand can be associated with the discoveries of modern science, and the picture has consequently been interpreted as giving

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form to Shahn’s fears about nuclear war – although the painting is not simply about the atom bomb any more than Allegory is straightforwardly about the Holocaust (it could equally refer to McCarthyism). Just as with Allegory, Shahn reused elements of the picture’s iconography in other contexts – for example, the figure of the sprawling, mute man is used as an illustration to The Shape of Content on a page where Shahn bemoans the ‘sorry divorce’ of form and content, and condemns formalist art criticism.113 In this context, the mute figure might suggest MacLeish’s point in The Irresponsibles about the misleading objectivity of ‘scientific’ approaches to criticism which prepared ‘the mind’s disaster’. In concluding this discussion of Wind’s post-war analysis of the relationship of art to morality, it is worth reiterating his belief that ‘the mind’s disaster’ can be amplified by art and has harmful consequences in the real world. The debates in which Wind engaged with Forster, Read, Shahn and Auden were not purely theoretical and inconsequential. Shahn, for example, was investigated by the FBI at the end of February 1953, immediately prior to the ‘Art and Morals’ symposium – a situation he handled by behaving courteously to the officers, inviting them to lunch, talking freely about himself but refusing to name or discuss others.114 At Smith College, the ex-communist Robert Gorham Davis was supported by President Benjamin Wright for testifying to the House Un-American Activities Committee and naming colleagues that he knew were, or suspected of being, communists. Wind was painfully aware of the similarities with Germany in 1933, and led the opposition to McCarthyism at Smith, taking the risk of arguing publicly in Faculty committees and meetings during March 1953 that ‘one of the most important forms of cooperation in government is a firm expression of dissent when legitimate power is being abused’ and also that ‘the moral law and the law of the state do not always coincide’. Wind also spoke at Josephine Crane’s salon on 9 April 1953, where he made, according to Michael Jaffé who was present, ‘a brave and spirited defence of freedom of conscience’, which resulted in one ‘ardent McCarthyite’ starting a petition to denounce him as a subversive.115

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‘Certain Forms of Association Neglected Before’ – R. B. Kitaj

In November 1993, the American painter Ronald Brooks Kitaj wrote to Margaret Wind requesting a photograph of her late husband for the illustrated chronology that would accompany the catalogue of a major retrospective of the artist’s work, planned for the Tate Gallery in London and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Kitaj wrote: ‘30 years ago, when I was a young art student in Oxford, Edgar Wind was very kind to me and he had a very great influence on me.’ In reply, a ‘delighted’ Margaret Wind explained that as a result of Wind’s dislike of being photographed she had a limited number of snapshots in her ‘treasure box’ but that Kitaj could make use of one taken in 1960 in the gardens of the Palais Royal in Paris with the stipulation that ‘I must ask you please to include the surroundings in your catalogue reproduction because this sets the “portrait” into its context.’1 Wind had stayed in the Hotel Beaujolais in the Palais Royal during May 1952 when he attended the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s ‘Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century’ conference. A picture postcard sent to Margaret Wind at this time reads: ‘View out of my window: with a piece of the Louvre rising above the Palais Royal; and behind my back is the Bibliothèque Nationale. . . . The month of May seems to agree with the Mona Lisa, who looks very well.’ The Palais Royal provided the ideal context for an iconographer: looking towards art supported by the resources of a great library. Margaret Wind replied pointing out that Jean Cocteau lived nearby, and that the author Colette was Wind’s neighbour in the Rue de Beaujolais, from which vantage point she had written a book De ma fenêtre (1942). Kitaj complied with Margaret Wind’s request not to crop the photograph as, after all, setting pictures into context, and connecting art with life, was something he had in common with Wind: ‘I’m for an art into which the painter imports things from the world that he cares about,’ Kitaj claimed in his First

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Diasporist Manifesto (1989), ‘passed [sic] rigorous art-customs officials unused to free entry of dissident baggage’.2 The ‘dissident baggage’ that Kitaj smuggled into his pictures included notes and commentaries inspired by the example of the modernist poetry of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and also by a surrealistinflected take on the iconographical method and the Warburg tradition that Wind had introduced him to in Oxford. When he wrote to Margaret Wind, Kitaj had come to see his long-standing interest in the relationship between words and images, as consistent with the exegetical tradition of Midrash, or commentary on the Torah, and therefore as part of an ongoing process of selfdiscovery as a ‘diasporist’ Jew. The negative critical reaction to the London version of Kitaj’s 1994 retrospective, and the subsequent ‘Tate War’ that he waged against his critics, was to a large extent caused by the presence of interpretative ‘prefaces’ or short critical texts written about the pictures by the artist himself. In Wind’s terms these could be categorized as a form of ‘marginal anarchy’, and consistent with the art historian’s critique of formalist approaches to art criticism. In addition to exploring the ‘very great influence’ that Kitaj acknowledged Wind had on him, this chapter will also offer readings of several of Kitaj’s works in the light of the artist’s knowledge of Wind’s writings, particularly those in the Journal of the Warburg Institute whose pages were continuously mined as a source of ideas and imagery. These readings will develop existing interpretations of ‘iconology as a theme’ in Kitaj’s art in ways that identify Wind’s influence more precisely in specific cases: for example, by suggesting to the artist such devices as the ‘composite portrait’, ‘composite allegory’, ‘borrowed attitudes’ and ‘the revolution in history painting’.3 While Kitaj evidently read Wind’s writings carefully and found them a productive stimulus, the more important goal here will be to analyse how the practice of interpretative commentary on pictures is related to a concern with origins: the origins of paganism in the case of Aby Warburg’s journey to New Mexico to observe the ritual dances of the Pueblo Indians, which exercised such a hold on Kitaj’s imagination, and the origins of modernism in his own pursuit of elective affinities with such creative predecessors as Kafka and Eliot, or Degas and Cézanne. Both cases involve an awareness of historical and critical distance, together with cultural difference and hybrid identity. A more elusive question is whether Wind’s own experience of exile resulting from his Jewish identity, and the understanding of freedom that it shaped for him, contributed to the development of Kitaj’s concept of ‘diasporism’, as well as qualifying Wind – along with Freud, Warburg and Benjamin – as one of the artist’s list of exemplary diasporists.

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Kitaj was born in Chagrin Falls near Cleveland, Ohio, in 1932 into a Russian Jewish family with secular views, and took his surname from his stepfather, Walter Kitaj, a Jewish refugee from Vienna. Kitaj’s artistic training began in earnest in 1950 at the Cooper Union Institute in New York under Sydney Delevante (Wind had taught at this institution in 1926), and he then moved to the Academy of Fine Art in Vienna in 1951 where he studied with Albert Paris Gütersloh, a student of Gustav Klimt and an associate of Egon Schiele. After travelling in Spain and North Africa, Kitaj returned to New York in 1952 where he attended classes given by the art critic Harold Rosenberg, and knew several abstract expressionist painters, including Robert Motherwell who called him a surrealist. Kitaj was not convinced by the prevailing artistic commitment to abstraction. He returned to Europe in 1954, visiting Vienna and Catalonia again, before enlisting in the US Army in 1955 which posted him to Germany and France. Qualifying for a G. I. Bill grant, Kitaj then applied to the Ruskin School of Drawing based in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in 1957, and it was there that he encountered Edgar Wind and attended his lectures and seminars. In 1959 Kitaj moved to the Royal College of Art in London, living in Dulwich village at 131 Burbage Road where Gertrud Bing, the recently retired director of the Warburg Institute, was among his neighbours.4 At the Royal College Kitaj exercised a formative influence over his contemporaries, including his friend David Hockney, and younger artists like Derek Boshier, Patrick Caulfield, Allen Jones and Peter Phillips, and as a result he was wrongly categorized as a pop artist. The exhibition Pictures with Commentary / Pictures without Commentary at Marlborough Fine Art in Old Bond Street in February 1963 established Kitaj as a successful and critically acclaimed artist. It is likely that Wind visited this exhibition as there is a copy of the exhibition catalogue among the Wind papers in the Bodleian Library. Apart from periods of teaching in the United States, Kitaj was largely resident in London, acquiring a house in Chelsea: 62 Elm Park Road. In 1976 he curated the exhibition The Human Clay for the Arts Council, in the catalogue for which he argued for the fundamental importance of life drawing, and asserted the importance of the group of artists forming a School of London, including Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff.5 A significant influence in redirecting Kitaj to life drawing was his second wife, the artist Sandra Fisher, whose sudden demise in 1994 prompted his departure from Britain for Los Angeles where he lived until his death in 2007. Kitaj’s rich and varied experience of different artistic traditions prior to arriving at the Ruskin School in Oxford, in particular the close links he established through travel with Vienna, Catalonia and New York, had moulded him to be particularly

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receptive to Wind’s influence. The young artist was aware of his artistic descent from both surrealism and symbolism through his teachers Delevante and Gütersloh, and at Oxford the master of drawing, Percy Horton, instilled a lasting enthusiasm for Cézanne and an appreciation of a practice of drawing that could be traced back from Walter Sickert, via Degas, to Ingres. Two other confirmed characteristics at this stage were a passion for film, and a bibliophilia that manifested itself in serious book collecting. The artist recalled in his memoirs the major event of his purchase of the entire run of issues of the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute in the antiquarian department of Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford; for Kitaj the journal represented an ‘an Amidah (standing up to) Hitlerism’ while its plates ‘sparked the always latent Surrealist-Symbolist-Dadaist in me’. It was here that he encountered Warburg’s ‘A Lecture on Serpent Ritual’.6 Throughout his career, Kitaj regularly acknowledged his debt to Wind in interviews as well as in his own writings. For example, John Russell noted in the iconic survey of the British art scene, Private View (1965), that ‘in Oxford [Kitaj] had had the advantage of knowing Professor Edgar Wind. Wind’s panoramic knowledge of the interaction of art and mythology was invaluable to Kitaj’ and also that ‘a certain love of art historical mischief should also be attributed to the influence of Edgar Wind’.7 Kitaj told Marco Livingstone in 1976 that ‘Wind certainly was a tremendous encounter in my life. But it was coincidental,’ a remark that endows their meeting with an element of ‘objective chance’.8 Then Kitaj informed Julián Ríos that ‘I was befriended by the great and controversial Professor Edgar Wind, who was appointed to the first Professorship in Fine Art in Oxford’s 1000 year history. His lectures were fabulous and have gone into legend.’9 The chronology for the 1994 Tate retrospective notes that between 1957 and 1959 Kitaj attended lectures in Oxford by K. T. Parker, Douglas Cooper, ‘but above all by the spellbinding Edgar Wind, who also invited him to teas and to his seminars with Stuart Hampshire at All Souls’.10 Then in his autobiographical Confessions of an Old Jewish Painter, Kitaj recalled that ‘the great Edgar Wind also befriended me to my amazement and even had me to tea in his North Oxford flat. I attended his seminars with Stuart Hampshire at All Souls on Kant’s Aesthetik, but it was over my head.’11 In her reply to Kitaj’s letter concerning the catalogue of his 1994 retrospective exhibition, Margaret Wind remarked: ‘still vivid in my memory is your visit to Belsyre Court one afternoon many years ago.’ Emerging from the lift at the top floor of the Belsyre Court apartment block at the junction of Woodstock Road and Observatory Street, the young Kitaj would have entered Wind’s flat, number 27, passing through the small hall hung with Piranesi prints, to find a light-filled living room with a piano with orchids placed on it, elegant antique furniture and

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a neatly arranged desk. The walls were lined with bookshelves harbouring rare editions in ancient bindings, alongside which could be found drawings by Klee and Tchelitchew, and engravings by Marcantonio. A short and undated note written by Kitaj survives among Wind’s papers: ‘A few weeks ago you suggested that you would have time to examine some drawings of mine after the end of term. Wise counsel would be most welcome should you find time.’ The drawings mentioned by Kitaj may have been life studies made at the Ashmolean like those illustrated in the catalogue for his first exhibition Pictures with Commentary / Pictures without Commentary (but not listed as catalogued works). The comment that ‘wise counsel would be most welcome’ suggests that Kitaj envisaged Wind playing a role similar to that of the humanist advisers to artists like Botticelli and Michelangelo who featured in Wind’s lectures on Renaissance art, figures like the poet Angelo Poliziano and the theological scholar Egidio da Viterbo. In ‘The Language of Mysteries’, the introductory chapter of Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, Wind described ‘learned dialogue’ as the ‘royal road to knowledge’ for Renaissance artists, adding that ‘the process of recapturing the substance of past conversations is necessarily more complicated than the conversations themselves’.12 The same could be said for the task of recovering the lost dialogue between Wind and Kitaj that took place in Oxford between 1957 and 1959, although it is probably fair to say it consisted of open and inspiring exchanges rather than being a didactic process. In an article that Kitaj may have read in the Journal of the Warburg Institute, ‘Julian the Apostate at Hampton Court’, Wind had commented on the collaborative role of artist and iconographical adviser. Here the aesthetic failure of Verrio’s murals is attributed to Shaftesbury’s view that ‘the plastic artist is merely a mechanical executant of ideas dictated to him by a philosopher’; by contrast, Wind pointed out that the collaboration between Peiresc and Rubens was such that ‘the scholar inspired the artist who in his turn enlightened the scholar’.13 Three typed notes by Margaret Wind ‘on Kitaj and Wind’ exist in the archive, each trying to establish more precisely the nature and extent of the contact between the art historian and the artist. The annotations and corrections indicate her uncertainty about the dates of Kitaj’s Oxford period: initially given as 1958 to 1961, then September 1956 to June 1959, and finally and more definitively in a handwritten correction ‘Dates of Kitaj’s time at Ruskin School? Acc[ording] to Ruskin records he was there from Hilary 1957 until Trinity 1959 but the sec[retary] is not certain this is correct?’ The seminars on ‘Kant’s Critique of Judgement: Problems in Aesthetics’ that Kitaj recalled being ‘over my head’, were taught by Wind with the philosopher Stuart Hampshire during Hilary Term

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1957 at All Souls College. That term Wind also lectured on modern art at the Playhouse Theatre from 3 to 20 February – the first ever lectures to be given at Oxford on modern art, which attracted large crowds and press coverage, and which had to be repeated.14 The three lectures were entitled ‘Matisse and Rouault as Religious Painters’, ‘Picasso and the Atavism of the Mask’ and ‘Paul Klee’. During Michaelmas Term 1957 Wind gave a series of six lectures on the ‘Classical Sources of Botticelli’ and gave his inaugural lecture on ‘The Fallacy of Pure Art’. During 1958, Kitaj could have attended Wind’s lectures on ‘Some Renaissance Poems and their Visual Counterparts’ (a series of seven lectures given with John Sparrow) and six lectures on ‘Raphael in Rome’ during Hilary Term; and during Michaelmas Term lectures on the ‘Theological Sources of Michelangelo’ (six lectures) and ‘Problems in Aesthetics: Hegel and post-Hegelian Theories’ (eight lectures with Stuart Hampshire). Finally, during Hilary Term 1959, Wind discoursed on ‘Enthusiasm and Wit in Eighteenth-Century England: from Hogarth to Fuseli’, a series of six lectures covering a range of topics like ‘character and caricature’, the ‘use of metaphor’, or ‘romantic irony’, which resonate with Kitaj’s later art. It seems reasonable to conclude with Margaret Wind that ‘Kitaj heard Wind lecture on Botticelli, Raphael, Michelangelo and the English eighteenth century as well as on Modern Art’, and that, in addition, he absorbed something of Wind’s views on Kant and Hegel, and probably heard his inaugural lecture, which was a major statement of the iconographical method in opposition to formalist art criticism. As Kitaj’s friend Michael Podro commented of his time at Oxford: He had listened to the way Edgar Wind wove his literary exegeses of the paintings of the Renaissance. Wind had indeed entranced unprecedentedly large Oxford audiences with his displays of learning: he embedded the paintings of Mantegna, Botticelli and Michelangelo into elaborate contexts of mythologic interpretation. And one feature of these displays was, inevitably, the use of mere woodcut illustrations to throw light on the master works. It seems impossible not to see Kitaj’s enterprise at that time as trying – among its other objectives – to give his own work that embeddedness in the verbal culture, that allusiveness which, following Wind, he saw in Renaissance paintings. Here too was a source for his devising commentaries.15

The Fallacy of Pure Art Wind gave his inaugural lecture as the first professor of history of art at the University of Oxford on Tuesday 29 October 1957 in the Examination Schools

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at 5.00 p.m.16 Of all the lectures by Wind that Kitaj attended, ‘The Fallacy of Pure Art’ is the one that survives in the most complete state: a heavily annotated typescript prepared towards publication, copious handwritten notes and even a nineteen-page transcript of an incomplete BBC recording of the lecture can be found among the Wind papers (a central section of the lecture is missing in the transcript due to technical problems with the recording equipment). These documents make it clear that parts of the lecture informed Art and Anarchy, notably the chapters on ‘Aesthetic Participation’ and the ‘Critique of Connoisseurship’, and that Wind’s work on revising the inaugural lecture blended into his drafting of the later book. Wind began his lecture by summarizing the argument for ‘poetry for poetry’s sake’ developed in an earlier inaugural lecture at Oxford given in 1901 by the professor of poetry, the renowned Shakespeare scholar Andrew Cecil Bradley. Bradley had argued, according to Wind’s summary, that ‘only if the experience of art is kept pure of extraneous and hence irrelevant knowledge, can art make its full contribution to the life of the spirit’. He envisaged poetry and life as ‘parallel developments’ or ‘analogues’, and that if there is a connection between them it is an ‘underground’ one.17 Wind admitted that Bradley’s treatment of this theme had been so ‘masterly’ that his own critique of it might be thought ‘injudicious’ (and it could indeed be argued that Wind flattened the subtlety of Bradley’s thesis, which rejected the more doctrinaire manifestations of formalism, for rhetorical effect). In fact, Wind dwelt at surprising length on the merits of the theory of pure art, tracing its roots back to the liberating demands made by the romantics for the autonomy of the imagination, freed from moral or societal constraints, and encapsulated in the motto ‘l’art pour l’art’. Bradley was aware that he was speaking for ‘a tradition which reaches back to the great Romantics’; and the critical supporters of pure art, whose theories Wind contested, could be described as ‘defrocked romantics’ (a phrase coined by Théophile Gautier, himself a great advocate of ‘l’art pour l’art’). Among these Wind named: Giovanni Morelli and his followers, including Max Friedländer and Bernard Berenson; Heinrich Wölfflin, Alois Riegl and members of the Vienna School of art criticism; and the English critics associated with the Bloomsbury Group, Roger Fry and Clive Bell. Wind was also concerned to counteract the influence of Benedetto Croce’s Aesthetics (1912) ‘in which almost anything that was ever said about art is dismissed as “illicit transference”’, and where Croce made the bracing if erroneous assertion that there was no ‘double bottom’ to the suitcase of art. Perhaps a distant echo of Croce’s image, repeated by Wind in Art and Anarchy, can be found in Kitaj’s later advocacy of ‘dissident baggage’?

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Against this formidable array of critics, Wind argued that ‘a belief in art as pure vision rests on a mistaken theory of how vision operates’. Far from distracting from the aesthetic experience of form, a knowledge of things extrinsic to the artwork can enhance our vision: ‘attention to relevant outward features is therefore more than a proper preliminary exercise, on which the aesthetic vision may follow. It is the most effective discipline for that purpose.’ Indeed, the test for an effective iconographical approach, and therefore for the relevance of the materials it marshals and deploys, is whether our aesthetic appreciation is enhanced by it (a process that Wind compared to a learner finally comprehending a new language from the inside, or even to religious conversion). Wind was effectively proposing an ‘experimentum crucis’ for iconography, postulating as a gauge of success for the experiment of historical criticism the heightened appreciation of the artwork ‘as art’ that the advocates of pure art claimed for their approach. This means that, far from trying to extract the formal meaning from an artwork by a process of distillation (and here Wind uses the alchemical term ‘caput mortuum’ for this type of abstraction), the focus for effective analysis should be the meeting point of art and life: ‘this is the crucial point for the historian of art because at that point he can show how circumstances which lie outside of art point to something which enlightens the artistic perception itself.’18 Wind acknowledged that propositions about art are necessarily indirect, and that in order not to fall into the terminological vagaries of the pure art approach (‘ideated sensations’, ‘tactile values’ and so on) the art historian should try to avoid metaphors and analogues. However, he concluded by arguing that we can ‘indeed point to a class of propositions for which the theory of pure art makes no allowance: observations that are aesthetically relevant without being aesthetic observations’. All of this must have interested Kitaj, who was already suspicious of an ‘art for art’s sake’ position, and it would have done much to disabuse him of his previous admiration for Berenson’s writings.19 But it is Wind’s demonstration of his methodological approach through the analysis of Piero di Cosimo’s Simonetta Vespucci (c. 1490, Chantilly, Musée Condé – Figure 6.1) and Raphael’s Transfiguration (1520, Rome, Vatican Museums) that reveals closer parallels with Kitaj’s artistic practice. Wind admitted that his first choice of example was somewhat maliciously motivated because ‘portraiture is an embarrassing genre for the theory of pure art. It violates Bradley’s elementary rule that the inner meaning of a painting must be dissociated from any reference to the world outside.’ Gautier had jokingly rejected the whole genre of portraiture as a form of ‘lèse-peinture’ (or offence against the dignity of painting) because of its insistent referencing of particular individuals existing beyond the painting. What is more,

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Figure 6.1 Piero di Cosimo (1462–1521), Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci, c. 1490, 57 × 42 cm, tempera on poplar panel, Chantilly, Musée Condé. ©2019. Photo Scala, Florence.

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the portrait of Simonetta Vespucci has an inscription identifying the sitter as part of the work – another type of ‘lèse-peinture’ in its mingling of word and image – and, as Wind put it, ‘inscriptions in paintings are like titles of poems. For the theory of Pure Art they are neither here nor there.’20 Bradley, for example, had argued that the subject of Shelley’s poem ‘To A Skylark’, as indicated by its title, was ‘not as such inside the poem, but outside it’.21 Wind responded that the first line of Shelley’s poem – ‘Hail to thee blithe spirit! Bird thou never wert’ – would be meaningless without the knowledge that the title supplied. Therefore, ‘if a poem thus reaches beyond itself to get started, and a “given” meaning intrudes into the poetic sense, the same may be said of an inscribed portrait’. Admittedly, Piero di Cosimo’s picture of a bare-breasted woman seen in profile against a landscape view, with an elaborately arranged and bejewelled coiffure, and wearing a curious necklace with a snake coiling around it, is not a conventional portrait of a fifteenth-century Florentine lady.22 Without the inscription, it would be tempting to identify her as a legendary figure from ancient history or myth, such as Cleopatra – a mistaken identification that Wind discussed. However, the inscription, the ‘title’ as it were, reaches beyond the image to associate it with an individual woman, much loved by Florentine poets, and whose early death prompted literary expressions of mourning. According to Lorenzo de’ Medici’s neo-Platonic tribute to Simonetta: ‘Death . . . is the consummation of Beauty because it raises Beauty from the temporal plane to the eternal. Perishable on earth, Beauty reaches perfection as it transcends into the Beyond. The end is the beginning. Time closes itself to a perfect circle.’ Lorenzo de Medici’s written tribute to Simonetta Vespucci, summarized here by Wind, focuses the viewer’s attention on the detail of the serpentine necklace, where Piero di Cosimo has depicted the snake ‘in the very act of catching its tail’. The ancient symbol of a serpent biting its own tail (the ouroboros) represents eternity, but Wind argued that, because the artist has represented an active rather than static version of this symbol, ‘it represents therefore the very moment at which the circle is rounded by death. It follows that the portrait is an apotheosis, and that fact accounts for certain extravagant features which might otherwise be mistaken for romantic.’ These aspects of the work include such details as the darkened cloud emphasizing the woman’s profile, and her classicizing seminudity, which now seem consistent with the idea of a posthumous and eulogistic portrait. To summarize, therefore, the inscription leads us beyond the picture to texts written to commemorate a particular woman, and these associate her with the idea of transcendent beauty eternalized through death in the ‘perfect circle’ of time. These neo-Platonic ideas then allow the art historian to identify

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the snake necklace as being a symbolic element of the work (as distinct from, say, the neutral ornament of the elaborate hairstyle), and the recognition of this symbolism transforms our aesthetic appreciation of the work as our understanding of the meaning of its details is illuminated by it. A number of suggestive connections can be proposed between Wind’s analysis of Piero di Cosimo’s Simonetta Vespucci and Kitaj’s early works carried out in Oxford and London (and these will be discussed in greater detail later in the analysis of the artist’s first exhibition, Pictures with Commentary / Pictures without Commentary). In general, Kitaj found the idea of incorporating texts into a picture, or endowing it with a suggestive title, to be a very productive one to explore because, as Wind argued, texts and titles ‘reach beyond’ the image to begin the process of generating meaning through creating associations with ‘aesthetically relevant’ material extrinsic to the work. Wind’s notes show that he extended this analysis of the role of titles to modernist and even abstract art, citing such works as Kandinsky’s The Angular Line and Klee’s Abstract Trio, where titles function as ‘cognitive signals’ and ‘infra-aesthetic devices’ directing our attention towards the aesthetic vision. The idea of a symbolic portrait was also emulated by Kitaj, if somewhat travestied, with his Warburg as Maenad (1961–62, Düsseldorf, Stiftung Museum Kunstpalast – Figure 6.2). Furthermore, Wind’s analysis of Raphael’s Transfiguration concerned itself with the creative juxtaposition of apparently incongruous elements whose relationship can also be elucidated by reference to a text outside the picture. Roger Fry, according to Wind, had run into problems in his analysis of Raphael’s last altarpiece because the stories of the Transfiguration and the unsuccessful attempt by the disciples to heal a boy possessed with demons had been set alongside each other, and this meant for Fry that ‘we are liable to have our aesthetic reaction interfered with by our reaction to dramatic overtones and implications’. Therefore, the literary qualities of Raphael’s design distracted from the ‘pure contemplation of the spatial relations of plastic volumes’.23 Wind resolved the difficulties Fry encountered in Raphael’s altarpiece by referring to a text beyond the painting: a Latin poem accompanying an engraving after the upper part of Raphael’s Transfiguration by Giulio Bonasone in Achille Bocchi’s emblem book of 1555.24 Wind argued that this text makes clear that Raphael’s juxtaposition of these two stories was motivated by Plato’s concept of divine madness and that ‘secret things of the divine are connected with madness’: And since the oppression which comes from illness and madness is turned into purge by the power of the divine madness from above, it is perfectly clear that

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Figure 6.2  R. B. Kitaj (1932–2007), Warburg as Maenad, 1961–2, 193 × 92 cm, oil and collage on canvas, Düsseldorf, Stiftung Museum Kunstpalast. ©R. B. Kitaj Estate.

Raphael juxtaposed the lunatic boy in his epileptic fit to the figure of Christ in the Transfiguration so that our eye would join the two and move from the complete serenity above to the terror which you see below, and the eye in a pure formal visual way, moves differently in this picture if you know this argument.25

Wind’s reading of Raphael’s Transfiguration makes it seem almost like a surrealist collage, where the juxtaposition of incongruent elements sparks an unexpected insight: the relationship between divine revelation and madness suggested by the visual contrast between serenity and terror. In the final section of his lecture, Wind developed this theme to include Plato’s argument that ‘when the modes of music change the fundamental laws of the State always change with them’, and that seen from this point of view artists act as sensitive seismographs anticipating

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political upheavals ‘almost as in dreams’. Wind concluded by advocating the study of the history of art at Oxford, alongside traditional historical approaches, because ‘if we study man not only in his verbal documents but also in his visual documents, we shall study him also not only in his clear, daily, waking decisions, but also in those modes of expression which come near to the dream and which are recorded in art’.26 Perhaps it is not surprising that Kitaj detected a fundamental affinity between the Warburg approach to the history of art and surrealism, given Wind’s emphasis here on visual documents being like dreams and artists resembling seers. As he later recalled, ‘I had just read Julien Levy’s seminal book on surrealism, and Warburg’s stunning words that “Magic and Logic grow on the same stem” coupled in my mind and art with Breton.’27 Kitaj’s appreciation of the similarity between the iconographical method and surrealism persisted, and it is restated in the First Diasporist Manifesto (1989): ‘almost thirty years ago, under the spell of Diasporists like Aby Warburg, Fritz Saxl, Edgar Wind and the Surrealists, I made a little painting called His Cult of the Fragment.’28 Two other general influences on Kitaj’s subsequent art can be suggested from Wind’s notes for his inaugural lecture. The first is that Wind saw short-lived styles, like cubism, pointillism or ‘the style of violent foreshortening which preoccupied the Quattrocento for a short while’ as being parallel developments to violent political events: ‘on the combination of doctrinairism [sic] with violence, and the comparative shortness of their reign, the history of art is as instructive as the history of social institutions.’29 Here we see the germ of the idea for treating political violence as a theme linked to the phenomenon of stylistic disjunction in art that Kitaj would develop to a highly sophisticated level in Pictures with Commentary / Pictures without Commentary. Related to this concept is Wind’s concept of the ‘doubleness’ of the artistic temperament, which protects the artist from the insanity that would result from genuinely feeling the emotions of terror expressed in art. Here the examples adduced are the terrible gods represented in Mexican sculpture, and the ritual dances of the Pueblo Indians that had been studied by Warburg: In superstitious tribes the ritual performers, among whom the religious sculptors must be counted, enjoy the benefit of particular spells which render them immune to the terrors they administer. Snake dancers do not fear the poisonous snakes they handle. It may be surmised that the Mexican sculptors, at least while they were engaged in the act of carving, felt the terror of their gods only vicariously.30

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The same insight could be applied to the carvers of the Laocoön group in the Vatican, Agesander, Athenodorus and Polydorus of Rhodes, who represented the death of the Trojan priest as he and his two sons are crushed to death by serpents sent by the gods. Warburg had described this ‘renowned sculpture’ as the ‘manifest incarnation of extreme human suffering’ at the hands of vengeful demons, and a symbol for the ‘hopeless, tragic pessimism of antiquity’. By contrast, the ancient statues of Asclepius, the god of healing, conveyed the ‘humane, transfigured beauty of the classical age’, and here the snake that winds itself around the god’s staff, emerging from the earth where the dead rest, represents ‘the most natural symbol of immortality and of rebirth from sickness and mortal anguish’.31 Wind saw Warburg’s interest in these contradictory aspects of the snake as a symbol of both suffering and healing as indicating his essentially Nietzschean understanding of the art of antiquity: ‘a Janus-face of Olympian calm and daemonic terror’. In Wind’s lecture on Warburg’s concept of ‘Kulturwissenschaft’ (1930), he highlighted Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s essay Laocoön (1767) for its ‘refutation of the reasons Winckelmann gave for Laocoön’s suffering in silence’ and because he saw it as containing ‘in embryo the whole problem that Warburg was investigating’. This was because Lessing’s notion of the ‘pregnant moment’ – in other words, ‘the most fruitful moment’ for the sculptor ‘which allows free play to the imagination’ – suggested the ‘transitory’ nature of the art work, and its precarious state as a harmonization and embodiment of the tensions that threaten to erupt and ‘destroy the actual artistic achievement’.32 Another very different take on Lessing can be found in Clement Greenberg’s 1940 essay ‘Towards a Newer Laocoön’, which is a powerful statement for the historical necessity for an avant-garde theory of pure art. Where Wind had focused on Lessing’s concept of the ‘pregnant moment’ as compatible with Warburg’s theory of the polarity of the symbol, Greenberg instead took up Lessing’s argument against the notion of ‘ut pictura poesis’, and the confusion that he felt resulted from the prevailing influence of literature on other art forms. Greenberg argued that the dogmatic claims of proponents of pure art were not simply due to a ‘cultist attitude’ but should be taken seriously as an index of why the best contemporary art was abstract: ‘purism is the terminus of a salutary reaction against the mistakes of painting and sculpture in the past several centuries’ when the visual arts had been deflected from their mediumspecific goals due to ‘the dominance of literature, which was subject matter at its most oppressive’.33 Painting had progressively detached itself from its reliance on literature through the influence of music, which ‘had come to replace poetry

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as the paragon art’. This influence was salutary because music was intrinsically an autonomous art of pure form. As a result, ‘the arts lie safe now, each within its “legitimate” boundaries, and free trade has been replaced by autarchy. Purity in art consists in the acceptance, willing acceptance, of the limitations of the medium of the specific art.’34 Modernism in painting could be understood, therefore, as a process of purification, of a self-critical discarding of expendable conventions that are not essential to the art form – and this was also Greenberg’s position in the later essay ‘American-Type Painting’ published in his volume of critical essays Art and Culture in 1961. Wind had linked this type of purism with a rejection of the symbol, and had identified it as a legacy of Lessing’s Laocoön, in a memorandum written for the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago in 1944: The fear of symbolism in art is also a heritage of the Enlightenment (c.f. Lessing’s Laokoon) and was revived in the late Nineteenth Century in the theories of the Impressionists and more recently in the doctrines of ‘pure’ and ‘abstract’ Art. These critiques of symbolism are always symptomatic of a tendency towards departmentalism and are often contradicted by the very art which they defend.35

While Wind does not refer to Greenberg, Kitaj was certainly keenly aware of him as the principal American advocate of ‘art for art’s sake’ criticism, the ‘parallel river’ to the Warburgian approach he encountered in Oxford, which ‘ran at floodtide through the School of New York and to a lesser degree through the School of Paris’.36 Kitaj would later befriend Greenberg, who came to dinner at his Dulwich home with the painter Kenneth Noland, and ‘their visit meant a lot to me because Greenberg meant a lot to me. He was the most compelling art critic at work during my lifetime.’37 On the whole, Kitaj admired Greenberg’s writings on Jewish identity more than his take on modern art as a process of self-critical refinement, stating, ‘I don’t particularly want to be pure of heart or art, because being impure has been so much fun, so liberating.’38 However, Kitaj’s art can be said to resemble Greenberg’s criticism when the latter is writing about modern poetry. For example, Greenberg argued that, following Mallarmé, The medium of poetry is no longer in the relations between words as meanings, but in the relations between words as personalities composed of sound, history and possibilities of meaning. . . . The poem still offers possibilities of meaning – but only possibilities. Should any of them be too precisely realized, the poem would lose the greatest part of its efficacy, which is to agitate the consciousness with infinite possibilities by approaching the brink of meaning and yet never falling over it.39

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This was the aesthetic that, as a dedicated reader of modernist literature, Kitaj aspired to achieve in his painting. If, however, as Greenberg argued, abstract art was unavoidable due to historical necessity, then it could only be disposed of ‘by assimilating it, by fighting our way through it’.40 This sense of Kitaj fighting his way through abstraction towards poetry can be discerned in two paintings executed in Oxford in 1958: Erasmus Variations (London, Tate) and Tarot Variations (Atlanta, High Museum of Art). In his 1994 ‘preface’ to Erasmus Variations, Kitaj described it as ‘the first modern art I committed’, as if it was a sin, or perhaps an act of ‘lèse-peinture’. With the title, the work ‘reaches beyond itself ’, to use Wind’s phrase, to allude to the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus. Wind had commented in his articles of the 1930s on Erasmus’s interest in the relationship between word and image, pointing out, for example, that the inscription on a book – ‘Herculean labours’ – in his portrait by Holbein (1523, London, National Gallery) expressed ‘a humanist’s faith in the power of words to vanquish the monsters of the imagination and establish the peace of reason’.41 Kitaj has, instead, based his work on caricatures and doodles made by Erasmus in the margin of a manuscript of the letters of St. Jerome which ‘looked like the surrealist automatic art I had been digesting unquietly for years’. These were discovered in the Phaidon edition of Johan Huizinga’s monograph on Erasmus, where the impression of a serial sequence of variations has been imposed on these marginal drawings by their arrangement into a grid pattern on plate V by the book’s designer.42 The ‘modernity’ of Erasmus’s sketches has been enhanced, therefore, by the design aesthetic of Bela Horowitz’s press (so admired by Kitaj the bibliophile). The grid pattern of the Phaidon plate provided the structure for an eristic encounter with Willem de Kooning’s series of Woman paintings and, as the artist later confessed, for a coded admission to a number of adulteries with real women. Tarot Variations was prompted by the Madame Sosostris passage of ‘The Burial of the Dead’ section of Eliot’s Waste Land – a work that more generally inspired Kitaj ‘to place images abreast (and later annotated), as if they were poetic lines on a page’ and – in a sort of reversecalligram – to produce a picture that looked like a poem.43

The Book as Symbol If Kitaj’s art could be said to aspire to the condition of poetry, then his first solo exhibition Pictures with Commentary / Pictures without Commentary was his Waste Land, and its catalogue with its battery of quotations and bibliographic

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references provided the equivalent of T. S. Eliot’s Notes to his poem.44 Where Eliot acknowledged a debt to Jessie L. Weston’s book about the Grail legend, From Ritual to Romance (1920), for the title, plan ‘and a good deal of the incidental symbolism’ of his poem, Kitaj’s exhibition had at its heart Aby Warburg’s ‘Lecture on Serpent Ritual’ of the Pueblo Indians of Arizona and New Mexico, while its title was derived from an article by Fritz Saxl.45 Kitaj quoted line 372 from Section V of The Waste Land – ‘Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air’ – as the title of one of the more collagist works in the exhibition, and also included a line from Ezra Pound, the editor and ‘miglior fabbro’ of Eliot’s poem, in the title of Junta (‘What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross,’ Canto LXXXI), a polyptych which acts as a type of visual hagiography by presenting ‘portraits’ of five imaginary leaders of an ideal revolutionary government. The line cited by Kitaj from the concluding ‘What The Thunder Said’ section of The Waste Land, comes from a passage evoking the falling towers of the ‘unreal city’ summoned up by the poem. This includes a list of cities – ‘Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London’ – that would no doubt have resonated with Kitaj, in particular the last two where he had lived. Athens is juxtaposed with Oraibi, the Hopi village in Arizona visited by Warburg in 1896, in the cryptic aphorism which acted as the epigraph to his lecture on the serpent ritual: ‘Es ist ein altes Buch zu blättern, / Athens-Oraibi, alles Vettern’ (‘It is a lesson from an old book: / the kinship of Athens and Oraibi’).46 This is itself an adaptation of verses from the second part of Goethe’s Faust linking German and ancient Greek culture (which Warburg also cited in his article on Martin Luther and prophecy discussed later in this chapter) – and Goethe looms large as an exemplar of European civilization in Kitaj’s exhibition, present in the title of a picture about the Spanish Civil War, Kennst du das Land?, and also quoted at length in the catalogue section for Cracks and Reforms and Bursts in the Violet Air on the subject of the use of tropes in Arab literature in a passage taken from Ernst Robert Curtius’s monumental study European Literature and The Latin Middle Ages published in 1948, a book that was itself dedicated to Aby Warburg’s memory.47 The references provided by Kitaj in the ‘More General Bibliography’ in his catalogue reinforce the impression that the cultural and symbolic role of the ‘unreal city’ is one of the principal themes of his exhibition: books like Metropolis: An American City in Photographs of 1934, which charts a day in the life of New York through the interplay of photographs and textual commentary, Kafka and Prague of 1960, which relates Kafka’s writings to photographs of the city of Prague, or Joshua Podro’s Nuremberg: The Unholy City of 1937. The latter text, written by Michael Podro’s father, is a review of the anti-Semitism

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that permeates Nuremberg’s history from the butcher Rindfleish, the instigator of medieval pogroms, to the Nazi ‘king of Nuremberg’ Julius Streicher. Podro wrote: Some historic cities are symbols of human achievement; others of inhuman shame and infamy. While Jerusalem and Athens commemorate the wars which man has waged for the development of the spirit, there are other cities which are monuments to cruelty and retrogression, cities which have exploited human ability for inhuman ends.48

The density of allusion apparent in Kitaj’s citation of Eliot provides confirmation for Michael Podro’s observation that the artist was aiming ‘to give his own work that embeddedness in the verbal culture’ that Wind had argued was a fundamental quality of Botticelli, Raphael and Michelangelo’s works, and which he had revealed through the exegetical play between Renaissance texts and their ‘visual counterparts’. Ironically, Eliot’s notes to The Waste Land were only written as a space-filler to enable the publication of the poem in book form in 1922, and he later regretted stimulating ‘the wrong kind of interest among the seekers of sources’ and ‘having sent so many enquirers off on a wild goose chase after Tarot cards and the Holy Grail’.49 Yet for Kitaj, Eliot’s notes would have situated the interpretation of the definitive modernist poem in the same cultural terrain of learned comparative literary analysis, and anthropological speculation about myth inspired by Frazer’s Golden Bough, that he had encountered in Wind’s Oxford lectures and in the articles published in the Journal of the Warburg Institute. Kitaj’s own commentary on the works in his exhibition emulated the wide range of reference and the thematic complexity of the notes to The Waste Land, and provided a suitably challenging iconographical context for the formal experimentation of the art.50 Pictures with Commentary / Pictures without Commentary was like The Waste Land, therefore, in deploying its own cast of characters to articulate multiple and contrasting voices, in combining erudite quotation and found material from everyday life, and juxtaposing different stylistic registers incongruously. The twenty-one works on display combined figuration with abstraction, and deployed distorted perspectives derived from photographs alongside grid structures emphasizing the picture plane that recall Mondrian. Kitaj’s sustained study of modernist photography is evident from the classic photographic volumes he listed such as foto-auge from 1929 or Karl Blossfeldt’s Urformen der Kunst of 1928. Gestural marks and brushstrokes reminiscent of abstract

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expressionism coexist with ‘torn out’ shapes apparently produced by chance, which suggest Duchamp or Arp; and carefully constructed geometrical forms abut clumsily sketched pictographs derived from anthropological studies of native Americans. Formally, at least, the works exhibited by Kitaj appeared as a self-conscious, if eclectic, summation of the current state of the art. He appeared to have accepted Eliot’s claim that ‘poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult’.51 The critic Marina Vaizey noted in her review in The Sunday Times that Kitaj was that difficult thing, ‘a literary artist’, but added that ‘a Kitaj painting first works, and works best when all is said and done, because of its appearance. The visual arts are, after all, primarily made to be looked at.’ A similar response to the exhibition came from Neville Wallis in The Spectator who remarked ‘forget the glossary, confound what happened to Aby Warburg in New Mexico, or to Nietzsche’s moustache: there is no need of a cult. Relish simply Kitaj’s command of his fragmented design, the disposition of his coloured, wavering, stencil-like figments of historic fancy, the deadpan wit.’ This critical tendency to isolate the visual qualities of Kitaj’s works from their emphatically stressed content was an attempt to defuse his art’s radical intent. However, as Eliot pointed out, formal experimentation was not an end in itself but an appropriate because urgent means of expression: ‘the poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.’52 By contrast with the prevailing critical reaction, a very interesting report ‘from a correspondent’ on ‘Literary Reference in the New Figurative Painting’ in The Times noted that Kitaj’s paintings ‘are indeed accompanied by a sizeable bibliography, together with a number of explanatory quotations which that aesthetic purist Roger Fry would no doubt have looked on with disfavour’, adding that ‘to think of Fry in this relation is to think of the long period during which “literary” has been a term of disparagement’. Kitaj himself, the ‘un-pop artist’, actively contributed to these debates, and was reported in The Observer Weekend Review as stating, ‘the more you know about the paintings, the better – I’m absolutely against the Berenson way of thinking.’ That these quotations all come from newspaper cuttings in the Wind archive also shows how closely the art historian was following the debates surrounding his protégé’s exhibition.53 One way of reacting to Kitaj’s commentaries to his pictures, and the somewhat heterogeneous bibliography provided in the catalogue, was to understand his exhibition as a rejection of formalism and ‘art for art’s sake’, and an attempt to revive subject matter in art: ‘Subject-matter, indeed, has come back into art’, noted the editorial of Apollo magazine in September 1963, ‘it is one sign

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of the times that Kitaj’s recent pictures are indebted to the researches of the Warburg Institute.’ Perhaps a more precise formulation of Kitaj’s endeavour was that he was attempting a revival of the Horatian notion of ‘ut pictura poesis’ (‘as in painting, so it is in poetry’) – a tradition, Kitaj acknowledged in his catalogue, that was brought to his attention by the critic Lawrence Alloway. The fundamental similarity of poetry and painting was articulated by Horace together with a warning that the poet’s creative licence should be tempered by decorum, otherwise the combinatory power of the imagination might produce monsters ‘like a sick man’s dreams’. ‘Teratology’, or the study of monsters (or congenital deformities in medicine), is cited by Kitaj in the subtitle of Junta, alongside the phrase ‘His Flower-Bedecked Bomb’; and Rudolf Wittkower’s article ‘Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters’ is given as the source for the bright pink, one-legged homunculus (a ‘Sciapod’) derived from a medieval manuscript in the painting Welcome Every Dread Delight.54 Like Tchelitchew, Kitaj had an interest in ‘freaks’, but in the context of this exhibition the referencing of monsters complements the thematic interest in ‘the coining and transmission of symbols’ described in the account given by Saxl of Warburg’s visit to the Pueblo Indians quoted at length in the catalogue; and, as with Tchelitchew, the source for the association of symbols and monsters is likely to have been Wind. The phrase ‘His Flower-Bedecked Bomb’ contains an unexpected and monstrous coincidence of opposites reminiscent of surrealist notions of beauty (e.g. Breton’s description of Frida Kahlo’s art as like ‘a ribbon around a bomb’). Its source is one of the books listed by Kitaj in his comments on the painting Specimen Musings of a Democrat (1961, Chichester, Pallant House Gallery – Figure 6.3): W. C. Hart’s Confessions of an Anarchist from 1906. This dramatic exposé and critique of anarchism written by a printer and former anarchist is richly illustrated throughout, including a plate of ‘Mateo Morale and his flower-bedecked bomb’. Mateo Morral was the Catalan anarchist who attempted to assassinate King Alfonso XIII of Spain by throwing a bomb hidden in a bunch of flowers at the royal carriage as it processed through Madrid on the king’s wedding day in 1906. A diagram of ‘King Alfonso’s bomb’ in Hart’s book was also used by Kitaj as the source for the image in the lower section of the fourth panel of Junta. In addition, Confessions of an Anarchist was where the artist encountered Louise Michel, ‘the Red Virgin of the Commune’, and the quixotic figure of the late nineteenth-century anarchist Dan Chatterton, who produced in London’s Drury Lane the amateurish pamphlet the Atheistic Communistic Scorcher. Both appear as ‘characters’, in Eliot’s sense, in the works

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Figure 6.3  R. B. Kitaj (1932–2007), Specimen Musings of a Democrat, 1961, 102 × 127.5 cm, oil and collage on canvas, Chichester, Pallant House Gallery. Gift from Colin St John Wilson through the National Art Collections Fund 2004. ©R. B. Kitaj Estate.

exhibited in Pictures with Commentary / Pictures without Commentary, notably in Specimen Musings of a Democrat. This recurrent interest in historical anarchists brings out an aspect of the works in the 1963 exhibition that Kitaj was to play down in later life: their preoccupation with political violence and radicalism, and in particular with anarchism. This is most evident in the painting Reflections on Violence, whose title derives from the book published by the French syndicalist Georges Sorel in 1908 defending political violence, and which combines ideographic images inspired by American Indian pictographs with textual allusions to Sorel’s political ideas. With the permission of Herbert Read, Kitaj also included in his catalogue an essay by Alfred Richard Orage, the editor of the modernist journal The New Age, defending Sorel’s concept of the General Strike as a necessary myth that was ‘rather poetry than political idea’ and ‘of the same order of thought as the Republicanism of Plato’. Kitaj, therefore, wove together a network of associations linking anarchism and violence with the condition of modern art; so that, for example, Orage leads

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to Sorel, who was read in a translation by T. E. Hulme, whose Speculations on the philosophy of modern art were linked to the conviction that ‘the regeneration of society will never be brought by the pacifist progressives’, and whose writings lead to Wyndham Lewis, who is also influenced by Sorel and whose defence of modernism from the political right brings us back to Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.55 This particular circuit of associations takes its place within the broader thematic exploration of political violence that connects the murder of Rosa Luxemburg with the pogroms carried out by Cossack riders described in the writings of the Jewish victim of Stalinism, Isaac Babel. In turn, this system of references runs parallel to one where Saxl, Warburg, Yates, Wittkower and Curtius are cited to evoke the cultural historical concerns of the Warburg tradition of scholarship. The two iconic photographs deployed by Kitaj to represent these antithetical traditions are of the anarchist hero of the Spanish Civil War, Buenaventura Durruti, and of Aby Warburg standing alongside a Hopi Indian dancer from Oraibi, and together they ‘bracket’ the list of Kitaj’s works in the catalogue. To state the argument simply: the two photographs of Warburg and Durruti stand for the two poles of Art and Anarchy. This, not coincidentally, was the title of Edgar Wind’s series of Reith lectures broadcast in 1960 while Kitaj was beginning work on the pictures included in his 1963 exhibition. Wind’s title Art and Anarchy was, of course, an allusion to the 1869 book by Matthew Arnold Culture and Anarchy, and he was not concerned with the political anarchism repeatedly referenced in Kitaj’s historical allusions. Arnold had advocated culture as ‘the great help out of our present difficulties’ and the means by which humanity could live ‘in an atmosphere of sweetness and light’. Unlike Arnold, Wind did not conceive of art as straightforwardly benign but as ‘a kind of magic’ that should be accompanied by ‘holy fear’. The ambivalent nature of art is caused by its origin in the response to primal human emotions. As Saxl put it, in the text on Warburg quoted by Kitaj, ‘symbolic forms are coined in the depths of human experiences . . . [and] have the power to limit and condense fear and awe’, thereby articulating profound emotional experience and perpetuating it in the ‘social memory’. Proof positive that Kitaj knew Wind’s Art and Anarchy and applied its insights to his analysis of contemporary art comes ten years later in a fascinating essay he wrote in 1973 about the art of Jim Dine, but it is more than likely that the artist followed the broadcasts of his Oxford professor’s lectures and was aware that their publication as a book coincided with his exhibition at Marlborough Fine Art.56 Kitaj’s works in Pictures with Commentary / Pictures without Commentary held in tension, therefore, the insights that art – as symbolic form – originated in

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the attempt to contain and shape emotions of fear and awe, with those irrational forces constantly threatening to break through the surface of civilization; and the notion that the modern artist, operating in the margins of a fragmented society, might need to resort to symbolic violence ‘to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning’ – a predicament that led several of the artists cited by Kitaj, notably Pound, into an accommodation with the political violence of fascism. As we have seen throughout this book, these are the deep concerns of Wind’s argument in Art and Anarchy. To summarize the argument so far: Kitaj’s exhibition Pictures with Commentary / Pictures without Commentary revived the notion of ‘ut pictura poesis’ in order to assert an ‘impure’ and symbolic art, which is difficult, fragmented and allusive like modernist poetry. This involved taking a position, with Wind, against formalism; but more significantly the works exhibited by Kitaj explored the relation of symbolic form to political violence, and therefore of art to society. To do this an array of historical ‘characters’ were deployed, some well-known like Rosa Luxemburg, others more quixotic like Dan Chatterton. The notes provided in the catalogue provide ‘scholarly’ references, indicating the sources for some (not all) of the iconographical motifs employed by the artist, but these references rather extend the associative work of the pictures than provide an interpretive key. Lengthy quotations from texts by Saxl on Warburg, Orage on Sorel, and Curtius on Goethe suggest broader themes: ‘the coining and transmission of symbols’, ‘the necessity of myth’ and ‘the Book as Symbol’. The motive force driving the exploration of these themes is poetic analogy, the search for correspondences, and the combinatory power of the imagination which can either produce monsters or result in the reconciliation of opposites. The wideranging eclecticism and disjunctive force of Kitaj’s imagery recalls surrealist art (and there are also similarities with surrealism in its esotericism), and could even be said to illustrate Eliot’s line from The Waste Land, ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins.’ However, in spite of this ‘cult of the fragment’ practised by Kitaj, perhaps often for covert and personal reasons, the exhibition does make an argument about the nature of modern art, its marginality, its hybridity and its symbolic nature, that is essentially along the lines argued by Wind in Art and Anarchy and in his Oxford lectures. Having argued this, it must be noted that the one name that does not appear in the many references supplied in Kitaj’s catalogue is that of Edgar Wind! Wind’s influence can possibly be discerned in Kitaj’s statement that ‘with the exception of one paper, Warburg’s work has never been translated into English for reasons best known to those who control these sacrosanct matters’. Certainly, Wind

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would remark in 1970, in his review of Gombrich’s intellectual biography of Warburg, on the ‘strange irony’ that Warburg’s lecture on the serpent ritual was the only one of his works to have appeared in English when ‘he, of course, never published it himself ’.57 The lecture on serpent ritual was, in effect, published by Wind (as co-editor of the Journal of the Warburg Institute), although he had reservations about the shortened and inaccurate translation of the text by W. F. Mainland commissioned by Saxl and Bing. Wind’s personal interest in producing an edition of Warburg’s lecture on the dances of the Pueblo Indians is recorded in the Annual Report of the Warburg Institute of 1934–35, and is also evident in the fact that he visited the mission churches at Carmel and Santa Barbara, together with the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles, on a visit to California in 1940 when he was collecting photographic material related to Warburg’s lecture. Margaret Wind also recorded a conversation with her husband where he stated that Warburg had wanted to revisit New Mexico in the late 1920s: ‘Edgar tried to persuade Felix [Warburg] to let Aby revisit the Pueblo Indians. Warburg had asked him to do this. But Felix “the Pasha” said this was impossible’.58 It was certainly Wind who had brought this lecture to Kitaj’s attention and his omission of Wind’s name in the exhibition catalogue may be indicative – paradoxically – of the profound influence that the art historian had on the conception of the works exhibited.

Rosa Luxemburg as Pathosformel Pictures with Commentary / Pictures without Commentary opened with the powerful work The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg of 1960 (London, Tate – Figure 6.4).59 With this painting Kitaj immediately introduced the theme of political violence in its full ambiguity with his fractured treatment of what he called the ‘prophetic murder’ in 1919 of the communist intellectual and Polish-born Jew, Rosa Luxemburg. While she was, with Karl Liebknecht, the victim of a brutal murder motivated by right-wing militias and carried out by Freikorps soldiers under Captain Pabst during the abortive Sparticist revolution, Luxemburg had herself advocated political violence in her theoretical critique of the revisionist accommodation with ‘bourgeois legality’ propounded by Eduard Bernstein, the leader of the German SDP. For example, Luxemburg argued that ‘the use of violence will always remain the ultima ratio for the working class, the supreme law of the class struggle, always present, sometimes in a latent, sometimes in an active form’.60 Luxemburg’s intellectual conviction that

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Figure 6.4  R. B. Kitaj (1932–2007), The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg, 1960, 153 × 152.4 cm, oil paint, ink, graphite and paper on canvas, London, Tate. ©R. B. Kitaj Estate. Photo ©Tate.

revolutionary violence was necessary because capitalist society was itself a form of institutionalized violence against the working class was combined, however, with an emotional sensibility that abhorred violence in all its forms, even when observed in nature (in one letter, written from prison to Sophie Liebknecht, she gives an account of the horror she felt when watching ants attacking a beetle). As the publishers of her Letters from Prison put it: ‘It is good that [readers] should see how this woman, undaunted by her own sufferings, brought a deep sympathy and a poet’s vision to her understanding of all things in nature. . . . We merely point to the monument that the departed herself erected.’61 The question of an appropriate monument for Luxemburg is one that Kitaj explored in his picture by including three representations of monuments – one pyramidal, another in the form of an obelisk, and the third consisting of

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an allegorical figure – which he positioned around the distorted body of the murdered Luxemburg. These derive from the figure of Germania from the Niederwald Monument to the German Empire by Johannes Schilling (1871– 83) – as Kitaj himself noted in the handwritten text added to the top right of the picture: ‘a figure similar to the image at the left of this sheet surmounts the German national monument, Niederwald, commemorating the foundation of the new German Empire in 1871’ – and two unexecuted monuments to Kant and to Frederick the Great which Kitaj sourced from an article in the Journal of the Warburg Institute by Alfred Neumeyer on monuments to German ‘genius’.62 The pyramidal structure with a temple façade is a design for a monument to Kant, known from a watercolour of 1808 by Janus Genelli, which Kitaj has adapted by making it the most brightly coloured element of the generally monochrome composition; and the obelisk crowned with an eagle commemorated Frederick the Great and his generals (again, as Kitaj himself noted in the text added to the picture, ‘the monument at the bottom left looks like a monument to Frederick the Great and his Generals seen in an aquatint used in illustration to Neumeyer’s paper’). It may well be that Kitaj agreed with the publishers of Luxemburg’s Letters from Prison that these epistolary insights into her ‘poet’s vision’ constituted a truer memorial, since he recorded them, together with Neumeyer’s article, Paul Frölich’s biography, and a political pamphlet by the Trotskyite activist Tony Cliff as sources for this painting in his notes on page 5 of the catalogue. It could be argued that the romantic monuments cited by Kitaj were stylistically more aligned with the reactionary militarism and nationalism that defeated Luxemburg than with her own revolutionary struggle – and Kitaj himself pointed out that near the figure of Germania ‘the profile in the car window bears some resemblance to Field-Marshal Count von Moltke’ who was the architect of Germany’s military victory in the Franco-Prussian war. A modernist monument to Rosa Luxemburg, the Revolutionsdenkmal in Berlin, consisting of a brick wall articulated in a grid pattern, had been commissioned by the German Communist Party in 1926 from the Bauhaus architect Mies van der Rohe. This unusually political example of Bauhaus design was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933. By citing incongruous monument designs Kitaj raised the question of appropriate style: as Hegel put it, ‘every definite content determines a form suitable to it.’63 The sheet of paper pasted onto the picture at the top right has a transcription in Kitaj’s clear hand-writing of the factual description of Luxemburg’s murder given by Frölich, together with the references to Neumeyer’s article, Count von Moltke and the Niederwald monument. Frölich insisted on the accuracy of his

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account and that ‘almost every detail of the crime is known exactly’ thanks to Leo Jogiches, a Lithuanian Jew and former lover of Luxemburg who was himself murdered by right-wing militias in 1919. Kitaj copied out the section of this account where Luxemburg was led out of the Hotel Eden in Berlin by a certain Lieutenant Vogel when, acting on orders from Vogel, a trooper named Runge ‘smashed her skull with two blows’ with the butt of his gun. Luxemburg was then taken, half-dead, into a waiting car where ‘Lieutenant Vogel killed her with a shot in the head at point-blank range’, and her body was then thrown into the Landwehr Canal from the Liechtenstein Bridge.64 Kitaj’s transcription of this account appears to be pasted over and, therefore, to obscure the figure of the assassin Vogel, but a hand outlined in blue holding a somewhat phallic gun emitting a broken red line aimed at Luxemburg’s head emerges from beneath the left corner of the paper. The question of how to reconcile a ‘monumental style’ with scrupulous historical accuracy in the detailed representation of contemporary events was a topic analysed by Wind in an article published in the same 1938 issue of the Journal of the Warburg Institute which contains the Neumeyer article on German monuments cited by Kitaj. ‘The Revolution of History Painting’ reviewed the challenges facing eighteenth-century artists in commemorating heroic figures from recent history while preserving the gravity of the ‘grand style’ as defined by the academies of art. Wind showed that while English artists like James Thornhill and Joshua Reynolds held back from transgressing the rules of decorum governing academic ‘history painting’, the decisive step towards the accurate rather than allegorical representation of recent events was taken by the American artists Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley. Wind remarked that the position of West and Copley, both in London at the height of the American struggle for independence, was not in fact ‘precarious’ as might be assumed, but rather ‘very advantageous if not positively glamorous’, and that the ‘revolution of history painting’ had been carried out by Americans with strong democratic convictions. This is a point that could hardly have failed to appeal to Kitaj, who was himself an American in London reflecting from a distance on the ongoing civil rights struggle in his own nation (the revival of the iconography of ‘Nobody’ in the painting Yamhill seems to refer to this situation, as discussed in the following paragraphs).65 Two further aspects of Wind’s article are relevant to Kitaj’s The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg. Firstly, that a drawing discussed by Wind by James Thornhill in the British Museum for the commission of a painting of the ‘Landing of George I’ in England (c. 1720) shows the artist listing in the margin a number of objections to

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representing the event ‘as it was in fact and in the modern way and dress’, thereby combining a handwritten, factual account of a historical event with a picture that diverges from it. Wind commented: ‘thus Thornhill, the adept of the grand style, argues with Thornhill the chronicler of contemporary events.’ The second is that in West’s famous 1772 painting The Death of General Wolfe (Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada), the shock for the eighteenth-century viewer of seeing the hero in modern dress is mitigated by the presence of a native American to the left of the central group. As Wind comments, this figure ‘fulfils the function of a “repoussoir” . . . leading the imagination into a distant land’, thereby preserving the sense of the ‘marvelous’ necessary for the grand style.66 Historical distance is replaced, therefore, by the vantage point of an ‘exotic’ culture; and it was in order to review the culture and values of European civilization, to elucidate their pagan origins, that Warburg had travelled to New Mexico to observe the ritual dances of the Hopi. Both West’s painting and the photograph of Warburg with a Hopi dancer juxtapose the clothing and customs of Europeans and Native Americans. With this in mind it is interesting to note the similarity between West’s figure of General Wolfe, whose recumbent figure is supported by an attendant seen in profile, and Kitaj’s own arrangement of Luxemburg’s fallen body held by a pig-tailed figure in profile who appears to be kneeling. This may be a case of ‘borrowed attitudes’, as Wind puts it in another article on Reynolds and Hogarth published in the same 1938 volume of the Journal of the Warburg Institute; but where Wolfe’s expression and pose suggest the restrained and noble suffering that Lessing discerned in the Laocoön, Luxemburg’s twisted body is surmounted by a fractured mask of pain rendered in an expressionist style.67 Wind’s article argued that Hogarth’s use of quotations from the Old Masters is a form of ‘pictorial burlesque’, and this concept does convey something of the tone of Kitaj’s own version of a history painting of a failed revolution. Kitaj reproduced a photograph of a bloodied pavement below the essay by Orage on Sorel in his catalogue, at the bottom of page 11 (Figure 6.5) where a detail of Luxemburg’s face is printed at the top right (this detail is orientated vertically like the drawn version of Rosa Luxemburg included in Work in Progress, discussed later in this chapter). The photograph is not identified in the ‘List of Minor Illustrations’ provided on page 13 of the catalogue, although the original caption of the photograph in German, French and English is included in what appears to be a cropped image: ‘central police office at Stuttgart: murder in times of peace (photograph as document)’. The source for this image is Franz Roh and Jan Tschichold’s foto-auge of 1929, where it is illustration 73 (Figure 6.6).68 This early and important study of photography is included in

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Figure 6.5 R. B. Kitaj (1932–2007), Pictures with Commentary. Pictures without Commentary, London: Marlborough Fine Art Limited, February 1963, p. 11 (author’s collection). ©R. B. Kitaj Estate.

Kitaj’s ‘A More General Bibliography’ on page 14 but without any indication that this is the source for this particular photographic detail – which is typical of the artist’s teasingly elusive citation of his sources. What has been omitted by the cropping of the photograph is the abject and awful image of a murdered woman’s corpse on the pavement surrounded by pools of blood. The woman’s blood has sprayed extensively across the paving stones and lined her face so that it seems a mask. Traces of footprints can be discerned in the copious blood which has drained in four rivulets into the gutter below. This is surely the immediate – and therefore suppressed – visual source for Luxemburg’s body in The Murder of

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Figure 6.6  Franz Roh (1890–1965) and Jan Tschichold (1902–74), foto-auge, Stuttgart: F. Wedekind, 1929, plate 73. © The British Library Board (c.186 c.11).

Rosa Luxemburg.69 It may also be the source for the expressionist, slashing lines to the lower right of the painting below the body, which are possibly intended as a grim joke about abstract expressionism (‘Jack the Dripper’?). Equally there may be a covert reference to two key artistic influences: Willem de Kooning, particularly the series of Woman paintings of the 1950s, and Francis Bacon, who also made extensive use of photographic sources. Certainly, Kitaj was concerned to bring into play the documentary claims of photography and historical writing in his creative adaptation and appropriation of these different sources.70 Roh in foto-auge emphasized the documentary veracity of photography but alongside this he advocated the marvellous effects of photomontage, which even in its use in advertising has a ‘demonic-fantastic effect’, giving several of Ernst’s collage works as examples, and stating that ‘to maintain that here is a mingling of heterogeneous elements that can never combine is but an empty doctrine’.71 In an essay written about Ernst in 1920, Breton argued that ‘the invention of photography has dealt a mortal blow to the old modes of expression’ in both painting and poetry; and that automatic writing, which unleashes the associative power of the imagination from conscious control, ‘is a true photography of thought’.72 Ernst’s fusing of these two types of ‘photography’ in his practice of collage both generated new conceptions through unexpected juxtapositions ‘drawing a spark from their contact’, but also disorientated our sense of time and space by removing the source material from its context. Or as Ernst was to put it himself in Beyond Painting (1936), a text that Kitaj knew in Robert Motherwell’s

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edition, collage is ‘an alchemical composition of two or several heterogeneous elements resulting in their unexpected union, due to a will tending – by love of clairvoyance – toward the systematic confusion and derangement of all the senses (Rimbaud), either by chance, or a will favoring chance’.73 The recombination of heterogeneous elements removed from their original contexts by a seer-like artist (note Kitaj’s reference to Luxemburg’s death as ‘prophetic’), and the resulting impression of ‘systematic confusion’, seems to have struck Kitaj as an appropriately modernist, and also Warburgian, method for treating the historical event of Rosa Luxemburg’s death. Therefore, a series of ‘found’ images and ‘borrowed attitudes’ are juxtaposed across the canvas, few of which have any direct illustrative bearing on the factual account of Luxemburg’s death transcribed and pasted onto the picture by the artist. It is worth returning at this point to the highly perceptive review of Kitaj’s exhibition ‘from a correspondent’ published in The Times. Here the anonymous author contrasted The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg with David’s Death of Marat (1793, Brussels, Musée royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique) to demonstrate that, by comparison with David’s representation of ‘the tragic moment as it might have been in reality’, Kitaj’s response to a similar tragedy was less illustrative than discursive: ‘The painting tends to show a psychological process, impressions that have been left on the mind by a miscellany of reading and information, sometimes collected on one canvas and rambling discursively across it.’ In this respect Kitaj can also be contrasted with the social realism of modern artists like Ben Shahn and Sidney Nolan. For in Kitaj’s works, unlike Shahn’s series of paintings on the case of Sacco and Vanzetti, ‘we follow thoughts as they came into the artist’s mind we do not look, as through a window, at a scene’. David’s Death of Marat was the final work discussed in Wind’s ‘Revolution of History Painting’, and whoever wrote this review certainly shared a number of his concerns and points of reference.74 Kitaj evoked the surrealist sanction for this ‘flow of consciousness’ procedure in the title of the second work in his exhibition, which followed immediately after The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg in the catalogue: Certain Forms of Association Neglected Before (1961, private collection).75 This title derives from Breton’s ‘encyclopaedia’ definition of surrealism in the first Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) as ‘the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought’.76 As with Shelley’s poem ‘To A Skylark’, as analysed by Wind, the title of this work, while extrinsic to it, reaches beyond it to begin the associative process of interpretation. However, as Wind pointed out in his reading of Raphael’s Transfiguration, the test of aesthetic relevance can be brought to bear on the texts

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associated with a picture to limit the scope of indefinite association. The Latin poem accompanying Bonasone’s engraving revealed the connection between the two halves of the altarpiece, showing how ‘Raphael juxtaposed the lunatic boy in his epileptic fit to the figure of Christ in the Transfiguration so that our eye would join the two and move from the complete serenity above to the terror which you see below’. Looking at Kitaj’s The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg with Wind’s reading of Raphael’s Transfiguration in mind, it is possible to connect the ‘serene’ figure of idealized femininity representing Germany in the upper register with the ‘systematically deranged’ figure of Luxemburg below. But whereas divine truth reconciled inspiration with madness in Raphael according to Wind, it is violence that connects the power of the nation and the suffering individual in Kitaj’s work. What sort of work, therefore, is Kitaj’s The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg? A history painting of revolution that takes into account ‘the revolution of history painting’? A ‘supra-historical’ essay, in Nietzsche’s sense, and therefore a symbolic painting? A ‘mouse-trap’ painting of the sort described by Dahlberg, one of Kitaj’s sources, that like Goya’s Saturn Devouring his Children (1819–23, Madrid, Prado) ‘baits the conscience of men’ with the unpalatable truth that ‘terror is the lodestar, and its mark is in the first blood-besmeared pictures in the Paleolithic Caves’?77 An act of ‘lèse-peinture’ against Greenberg’s ‘Newer Laocoön’, which is itself a ‘new’ version of the Laocoön that impurely merges the expressive accuracy of photography and the ‘demonic-fantastic’ power of montage? With its deployment of ‘borrowed attitudes’ and textual allusions is it, like Hogarth’s pictures, a ‘modern moral subject’? Or is it a modern take on the Transfiguration that juxtaposes the monumental serenity of the Niederwald Germania with the ‘derangement of all the senses’ of a Rosa Luxemburg maddened by violent apotheosis? One thing is certain, Luxemburg is not represented here as a martyr, but as a maenad. The proof of this is that Kitaj collaged in to his ‘altarpiece’ Work in Progress (1962, Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art – Figure 6.7), made in collaboration with Eduardo Paolozzi, a drawn version of the figure of Luxemburg placed vertically, alongside images of the crucified Christ. In this context she is, literally, ‘The Maenad under the Cross’.78 Wind published a short article with this title in the first issue of the Journal of the Warburg Institute on Joshua Reynolds’ observation that the maenad, a woman engaged in the orgiastic worship of the god Dionysus and therefore a figure expressing ‘frantic joy’ in ancient art, was reused by the Florentine sculptor Baccio Bandinelli in a drawing as one of the Maries in a crucifixion scene ‘to express frantic agony of grief ’. Wind observed that Reynolds had hit

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Figure 6.7  R. B. Kitaj (1932–2007) and Eduardo Paolozzi, Work in Progress, 1962, 85.3 × 100 cm, paper and tin collage in painted wooden frame, GMA 4069: National Galleries of Scotland. ©Trustees of the Paolozzi Foundation, Licensed by DACS 2019 and The Estate of R. B. Kitaj.

upon the same phenomenon studied by Warburg who ‘collected material which tended to show that similar gestures can assume opposite meanings. The pagan figure of the dancing maenad was the central theme of these studies.’ Wind was referring here to the Mnemosyne Atlas, Warburg’s project to chart the recurrence of expressively charged figures and gestures which he termed ‘Pathosformeln’, which involved the arrangement of photographs, for example of the pathos formula of the dancing maenad, on large boards to facilitate their comparison – a visual mode of juxtaposition that superficially resembles surrealist collage, and also the composition of Kitaj’s early works like Work in Progress. Here the figure of Luxemburg erupts into a grid-like arrangement of reiterated photographic details of Christ’s face from a crucifix as a ‘Pathosformel’, expressing grief as ‘one of the Maries’ but carrying with her a trace of the brutal violence enacted on her body for political motives in the original context in which this motif occurs. She appears alongside collaged scraps of torn paper

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and transcribed fragments of text from Isaac Babel’s short stories concerning Cossack anti-Semitic violence during the Russian Civil War. The effect is to suggest a correspondence between the violence inflicted on Christ’s body, and the anti-Semitic violence inflicted on Jews by Christians carrying out pogroms, and on Luxemburg’s body by the forces of reaction. Around this central section Paolozzi arranged in compartments a variety of found materials, including oldfashioned packaging for award-winning products. To the upper right are three photographs of a Catholic priest, Father Leopold Unger, a former Jew, who had befriended Kitaj in Vienna, and who almost converted him to Christianity. Therefore, Work in Progress exemplifies another theme of Wind’s lectures on modern art: that the treatment of religious subjects by modern artists – whether Manet, Matisse or Rouault – only demonstrates the marginality of art in contemporary society. An object of aesthetic ‘interest’, nobody will fall to their knees in prayer before this ‘altarpiece’ which succeeds in intriguing but fails to convert. Although prominent and reiterated, the images of Christ have an associative equivalence with the packaging of commodities, and while the work’s form refers to the traditional polyptych it possibly also owes something to the more eccentric example of Alexander Wallace Rimmington’s colour-organ (this artist’s Colour Music of 1911 is cited in Kitaj’s bibliography and the band of coloured blocks at the top of the work may refer to his notion of the colour scale). Its symbolism is private and associative, therefore, rather than social and unified, and relates more to the artist’s personal memories (Father Unger) than to the ‘social memory’ imprinted in the pathos formula by the original religious act of ‘coining symbols’ through ritual. Work in Progress appears finished, but its title may refer to the open-ended and intertextual play of associations it sets in train, or even to the ongoing process of exploring the implications of working creatively as a late modernist artist from a position of marginal anarchy.

Warburg as Maenad – the Reconciliation of Opposites As Wind pointed out, the same gesture of the dancing maenad could express ‘frantic joy’ or ‘frantic agony’ depending on its context, and he argued that the power of an effective symbol consisted in its ability to reconcile these emotional extremes. Kitaj seems to have used one of the illustrations for Wind’s article on ‘The Maenad under the Cross’ as his principal source for the painting Warburg as Maenad (1961–62, Düsseldorf, Stiftung Museum Kunstpalast – Figure 6.2): the detail of a Neo-Attic relief in the Uffizi in Florence, showing one of three

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frenzied maenads.79 Here the trace of the ‘borrowed attitude’ can be seen most clearly in the graceful left arm, as well as in the pentimenti (revisions) that suggest an earlier attempt to transcribe the elaborate drapery from the relief carving. Other antique sources may have played their part in the progressive metamorphosis of the figure, such as the Maenad of Skopas in Dresden and a similar figure in a Neo-Attic relief in the Louvre which is illustration 47a in Warburg’s ‘Serpent Ritual’ article (for the abandoned position of the thrownback head), or even the variants of Bacchic poses remembered and reworked in Botticelli’s art. Of course, the other major pictorial source, incongruously, even absurdly, is the photograph of Aby Warburg in Oraibi. Kitaj’s depiction of Warburg as a maenad, imposing a recognizable version of his moustachioed head (complete with purple cowboy hat) onto a contorted, pink – the particular pink employed here evokes De Kooning once more – nude and emphatically female body, is literally a travesty, and one that at first sight appears comic. Warburg himself commented that when he first saw the antelope dance at the village of San Ildefonso ‘it struck me as very harmless and almost comical’. However, he warned against laughing at the dancers, noting that ‘a man who laughs at comic features in folklore is wrong, for he at once obstructs insight into the tragic element’ of what is ‘a highly religious ritual act of self-surrender to some external being’.80 Wind reiterated this warning, quoting Warburg on the antelope dance, in his 1937 article on composite portraits: ‘laughter at seeing the unexpected is a danger-signal to the weak spectator’ because ‘primitive men, being genuinely humble believe that animals are superior to themselves’.81 By imitating the animal’s movements and transforming themselves into the quarry through putting on a mask, the hunters hoped to achieve a magical control over the antelopes. Subsequently the transition from animal worship to hero worship occurred so that, for example, Emperor Commodus was portrayed as Hercules. In later periods, Wind argued, such rituals ‘survive with the force of an atavism’, so that the sitters in composite portraits by Largillière or Mignard do not become gods and goddesses, but do associate themselves symbolically with their qualities. As we have seen in the previous discussion of Tchelitchew’s art, Wind saw composite portraits as ‘an artificial type of monster’ where it is the union of incongruent parts that works the spell: ‘the joining of incompatibles has ever been the secret of witchcraft.’ Kitaj’s composite portrait of Warburg as a maenad is an attempt to forge just such a monstrous conjunction of incompatible elements. In its posthumous nature, Kitaj’s portrait of Warburg might also be compared with the similarly symbolic portrait of Simonetta Vespucci by Piero

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di Cosimo, but its tone, by contrast with that of the idealization of Simonetta, is more one of frantic melancholy. Kitaj attached a sheet of transcribed text to this painting, just as he did with The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg, copying a passage from Bing’s memoir of Saxl describing Warburg’s mental breakdown as a result of Germany’s defeat in the First World War: Warburg had foreseen the outcome of the war from the beginning, and throughout its course watched with growing anxiety every bad omen of political, moral and intellectual decline. In the autumn of 1918, when the world around him fell to pieces, he broke down. Just before and during the war he had been concerned with a historical period also filled with forebodings of catastrophe: he had made a study of Luther’s and Melanchthon’s attitude towards astrology and portents through the imagery found in prognostications, calendars and the reformers’ letters and lampoons.82

Bing’s text makes a connection between Warburg’s life and work, equating his studies on astrology in Reformation Germany with his mental collapse following the fulfilment of his own dire predictions concerning the fate of the nation. Warburg’s article ‘Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther’ (1920) is also summarized in Saxl’s lecture on ‘Warburg’s Visit to New Mexico’, and Kitaj quotes a section of this text in his catalogue where Saxl connected the controversy about the two dates circulating in the sixteenth century for Luther’s birth with Warburg’s studies of the dances of the Pueblo Indians (The Twin Birthdates of Martin Luther was also the title of a painting of 1960 by Kitaj, a detail of which was reproduced on page 13 of the exhibition catalogue).83 Warburg had been fascinated by the fact that both the opponents and supporters of Luther had believed that he was the prophet predicted by a particularly auspicious conjunction of the stars in 1484, even though Luther (and his mother) were able to provide accurate information about his actual birthdate in 1483 which contradicted this belief. Astrology was a discipline that represented a ‘polarity’, as Warburg termed it: on the one hand, the reading of a horoscope required the calculation of the position of the stars and, therefore, an abstract logic of measurement; while, conversely the belief in the influence of the stars required a magical association of microcosm and macrocosm. Logic sets apart mind and object through the use of the concept, while magic collapses that analytic space to insist on their identity. Warburg argued that ‘in the divinatory workings of the astrologer’s mind, these two processes act as a single, primitive tool that he can use both

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to make measurements and to work magic’, and in the phrase that reminded Kitaj of Breton and the surrealists, he added ‘that age when logic and magic blossomed, like trope and metaphor, in Jean Paul’s words, “grafted to a single stem”, is inherently timeless’.84 Also, as Saxl pointed out, Warburg’s study of the Hopi Indians showed that ‘where they clash magical truth can suppress factual truth’. Luther was consistently unimpressed by astrology and did not encourage his friend Melanchthon in his speculations concerning his mythical birthdate in 1484, yet he did retain a superstitious belief in natural signs and portents. For example, monstrous phenomena – such as the birth of conjoined pigs in Landseer in 1496, an event memorialized in an engraving of an impressive monster by Dürer – were seen as ‘teratological’ images of impending disaster by Luther.85 Kitaj’s representation of Warburg as a maenad is a type of monstrous portent in itself (even in such details as the two left arms and the residual fragment of the right arm), while also collapsing the space between the observer of the magical dance and the participant in it. The distorting force of myth, it seems, has overcome the rational distance maintained by the anthropologist from the object of analysis, and Warburg is transformed into a symbol of his own tragic madness. Yet the lecture on the serpent ritual, given in the Kreuzlingen Sanatorium, was itself a sign of Warburg’s recovery and a means of mastering the anarchic forces unleashed by the maenad (an interesting parallel is suggested here with Shahn’s account of his Allegory, as discussed in Chapter 5). Here we have a ‘pregnant moment’ of the type identified by Lessing in his analysis of the Laocoön where Warburg embodies the polarity of reason and magic. Kitaj’s painting not only makes Warburg monstrous but also imposes a change of sex on him, and in this respect Warburg as Maenad is comparable to the figure of Tiresias in The Waste Land. As Eliot noted: Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a ‘character’, is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem. The whole passage from Ovid is of great anthropological interest.86

Eliot then quoted the Latin text of Ovid, Metamorphoses, III, where Tiresias is consulted by Jupiter and Juno to resolve an argument about whether men or women experience more pleasure from lovemaking. Tiresias was qualified to

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adjudicate this question, having experienced love from the perspective of both sexes, because he had miraculously changed from a man to a woman ‘when two huge serpents were intertwining themselves in the depths of the green wood, [and] he had struck them with his staff ’. Seven years later, observing the same phenomenon and repeating his action, he returned to his original male state. Agreeing with Jupiter that women experienced greater sexual pleasure, Tiresias was blinded by Juno as a punishment, but ‘the omnipotent father granted Tiresias the power to know the future’ in compensation.87 Warburg is not only depicted as changing sex; he is also shown as ‘one-eyed’, as if caught halfway between the prophetic insight that came to Tiresias through blindness, and the clear-sighted observation of the scientist (incidentally, both Warburg and Tiresias derived their insights from studying serpents).88 This detail might be seen, recalling Wind’s analysis of the ouroboros symbol in the portrait of Simonetta Vespucci, as an active rather than a resolved symbol. Another detail of the painting that takes on a more precise significance in the light of the iconographical detour initiated by the text quoting Bing inserted into the picture by Kitaj, is the watch worn by Warburg on the wrist of his upraised left arm, which contrasts with the bracelet encircling the wrist of the ‘Neo-Attic’ left arm. Here the chronological time of conventional history is contrasted with the ‘inherently timeless’ nature of ‘that age when logic and magic blossomed . . . “grafted to a single stem”’. While Warburg as Maenad was unavailable, and only a detail of it was reproduced in the catalogue, the idea of Warburg as maenad as ‘the most important personage . . . uniting all the rest’ was present in the exhibition in the collage-painting Specimen Musings of a Democrat (Figure 6.3). This work deploys squares of paper containing drawings and text (both handwritten and printed ‘found’ texts from old books), together with patches of colour, in a grid pattern across the picture surface. While ostensibly emulating Mondrianstyle abstraction, the grid pattern was actually derived from an illustration to a scholarly article by Frances Yates on the Catalan mystic Ramon Lull (1232–c. 1315) – in particular, its source is illustration 8a from Yates’s 1954 article taken from Lull’s Alphabet of the Art.89 Kitaj’s Specimen Musings of a Democrat is structured, therefore, like a Lullian ‘table of combinations’: a grid which allows for the working out of correspondences. Lull’s art, his ‘Ars Magna’, was a method of arriving at truth through combining categories and influences, a problemsolving device deploying the letters of the alphabet, and like astrology it was a type of ‘polarity’ in combining logic and magic, but one whose mechanism ultimately owed more to analogy than to syllogism.90 Like Lull’s combination

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table, Kitaj’s grid deployed ten ‘image types’ corresponding to the letters A to K along the top of the diagram – one of these ‘image types’ is the Maenad – to be modified by six influences along the side. As Kitaj’s catalogue commentary explains, ‘other types have joined the complex’, including the cast of characters discovered in Hart’s Confessions of an Anarchist – Dan Chatterton, the Red Virgin of the Commune (Louise Michel), King Alfonso’s Bomb – and another manifestation of the maenad, the late nineteenth-century outlaw, Rose of the Cimarron, who was associated with the Doolin-Dalton Gang. In the fourth row from the bottom of the table, moving left-to-right, we find three square sheets of Kitaj’s notes. The first reads ‘Warburg as Maenad or Dan Chatterton, Atheist & Communist’. This is followed by a list of ‘image types’ (‘fountain, still-life of books, deck chair, Head = A, Sunset, Half-Soldier, Priest, Maenad, Porch’). The third note then runs through a number of combinations under the heading ‘bibliography’: ‘Warburg as Maenad, Warburg as Dan Chatterton, Warburg in the hearts of his countrymen . . . Warburg at Kreuzlingen, Warburg in New Mexico . . .’ and so on. Around these text-based panels images such as profile portraits of Dan Chatterton and the Red Virgin recur, as well as still-life sketches of windows, diagrams of bombs and two maenad figures with left arms raised in frenzy. Of course, Kitaj has only loosely adopted Lull’s demonstrative art, and the categories employed derive from his own private, poetic associations rather than from the elements or astrological schema used by Lull. However, what appears to have motivated the creation of this curious and influential work is the idea of an imaginative mechanism or process for the reconciliation of opposites: a means of arriving at ‘Warburg as Dan Chatterton’, of harmonizing art and anarchy. As we have seen, the same combinatory power of the imagination involved in the ‘coining of symbols’ and the harmonization of incompatible elements, can also produce monsters. Art can release as well as contain anarchic forces. And when this occurs who is to blame? Nobody. The ‘German legend’ of Nobody, or ‘Niemand’, referred to by Kitaj in his catalogue notes for the painting Yamhill (1961, Atlanta, Georgia, James H. Grady), was analysed by Gerta Calmann in an article published in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes in 1960 and which was referred to by the artist.91 Calmann described how the figure of Nobody developed from the innocent scapegoat for household accidents in a broadsheet published by Joerg Schan c. 1507, to a symbol for silent patience in the face of false accusations: the iconographical attribute of the padlocked mouth, ‘taken up’ by Kitaj in the reclining figure to the bottom right of Yamhill, indicated that ‘Nobody must be silent otherwise he would be Somebody’. However, in the

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circumstance of an innocent taking the blame, this silence might be seen as folly. Following the humanist Ulrich von Hutten’s reworking of the theme, the figure of Nobody could even take on a heroic and reforming role: Who is speaking out against corruption in the church? Nobody. Therefore, the imagery of Nobody combines passivity and activism – a Warburgian polarity that appealed to Kitaj in a meditation on injustice that took the form of ‘another association neglected before’. Yamhill is composed of two halves based on the juxtaposition of writing and image: on the left an American County Courthouse derived from a lineengraving in a nineteenth-century journal Portfolio, and on the right a ruled-up but empty page ‘based on a reproduction of a portion of an 11th century English manuscript which occurs among the plates to Fritz Saxl’s Lectures’.92 The manuscript in the British Museum adapted by Kitaj functioned as an oracle, complete with figures of Life and Death (Vita and Mors), that could predict the outcome of an illness. A trace of this hazardous yet static condition remains in Kitaj’s placing of the prone figure of Nobody between two columns of ticks and crosses, as if suspended in an indeterminate state awaiting – like Kafka’s K in The Trial – the judgement that will decide his fate. Dark-skinned and forcibly constrained from speaking by the padlock, Nobody here probably represents the civil rights struggle of African Americans, and the suffering inflicted on them by the state. What is not clear from Kitaj’s references in the exhibition catalogue is that the pioneer in the study of the iconography of Nobody was Margaret Wind at the time when she first met Edgar Wind: as Gertrud Bing put it in a letter of 1944, ‘you were introduced to us a long time ago, when Edgar led us to expect a paper “from a remarkable young lady” on Nobody. . . . What has become of this article of yours on Nobody?’93

If Not, Not Kitaj’s extraordinary first exhibition had a wide and diverse influence on his contemporaries. For example, the artist and filmmaker Peter Greenaway recalled that ‘I suddenly saw this body of work that legitimized all I had hopes of one day doing. Kitaj legitimized text; he legitimized arcane and elitist information; he drew and painted as many as ten different ways on the same canvas; he threw ideas around like confetti.’94 Similarly, a fascination with combination tables that relate arcane to political imagery (Joe Tilson), with hermaphroditic characters (Allen Jones), or with stylistic disjunction and the harmonization of opposites

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(David Hockney, particularly in his Marriage of Styles paintings) was shared among Kitaj’s artistic contemporaries. Through Kitaj’s pictorial advocacy, Wind’s ideas about modern art were having a pervasive if somewhat unacknowledged influence. Pictures with Commentary / Pictures without Commentary represented the height of Wind’s influence on Kitaj, although Warburgian themes would continue to resurface in his art. For example, the maenad reappeared as a Nanny pushing a pram in The Ohio Gang (1964, New York, Museum of Modern Art), a work purchased by Alfred Barr for MoMA, where she is ‘a memory of those preChristian wraiths the Warburgers detected at the base of Crucifixions in art’. One further specific reference to Wind can be detected in the complex work If Not, Not (1975–76, Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art – Figure 6.8) which associates Eliot’s Waste Land and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with the Auschwitz gatehouse and – a tellingly discordant juxtaposition – the evocation

Figure 6.8  R. B. Kitaj (1932–2007), If Not, Not, 1975–6, 152.4 × 152.4 cm, oil and black chalk on canvas, GMA 1585: National Galleries of Scotland. ©R. B. Kitaj Estate.

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of Baudelaire’s ‘luxe, calme et volupté’ in modernist painting, notably in works by Matisse like Le bonheur de vivre (1905–06, Merion, Pennsylvania, Barnes Foundation). Kitaj also acknowledged the influence of Giorgione’s Tempesta (c. 1507–8, Venice, Accademia) in his ‘preface’ written for the 1993 Tate retrospective, but it was in the commentary to another work, Tempesta (River Thames) that he referred to Wind’s last book on Giorgione’s poetic allegories. Here Kitaj noted of Giorgione’s mysterious painting that Wind ‘suggests it’s a pastoral allegory’ while Kenneth Clark ‘calls it a free fantasy’.95 Kitaj did more than state an antinomy between allegory and free association here, he also alluded to a significant source for his painting by citing Wind: the disembodied head with a strange protrusion emerging from it, below the Giorgionesque pool at the centre of the work, is a transcription of a detail of the head of Holofernes from Giorgione’s Judith (c. 1504, St Petersburg, Hermitage), including the foot resting on her victim’s head, as is appropriate for one of Warburg’s ‘head-hunters’. Wind related this work to a now lost fresco by Giorgione on the façade of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice, which represented the triumph of Justice with an image of the Jewish heroine Judith, but which Vasari failed to read correctly, suggesting it may be Germania.96 Within the associative and dream-like space of If Not, Not this fragment functions as an index of the absent figure of Justice, misidentified as Germany, in the unfolding horror of the Holocaust.

Conclusion

Describing his sophomore course at Smith College in 1953, Wind argued that humanity’s intellectual and imaginative powers are constantly at odds, and that enlightenment and superstition have a common root, for which the Greeks had two different words: ‘logos’ and ‘mythos’. It was Warburg who argued that ‘magic and logic flower on one stem’, but it was Baudelaire who had expressed that concept through the image of the thyrsus, the instrument of the nymph ecstatically worshipping Bacchus. Addressing himself to the composer Franz Liszt, Baudelaire stated that ‘the thyrsus represents your astonishing duality, oh powerful and revered master, dear Bacchant of mysterious and passionate Beauty’. Wind, like Baudelaire, believed in the duality of the artistic personality: the artist was imaginatively involved in the mystery, while intellectually detached from it; in awe of the gods, yet able to represent them. The thyrsus was itself a symbol for this concordance of opposites: ‘the stick is your will-power, straight, firm and unmovable’, Baudelaire wrote to Liszt, ‘the flowers represent your fantasy wandering around your will.’ Matisse reprised this theme in the text accompanying his set of prints Jazz from 1947: ‘My curves are not mad. In determining the vertical direction, the plumb line along with its opposite, the horizontal, forms the compass of the draftsman. . . . Around this fictive line “the arabesque” evolves. . . . I never indicate a curve . . . without being aware of its relationship to the vertical.’1 Practising a form of ‘internal delimitation’, gauging the curve’s deviation from the vertical, the artist acts as a ‘sensitive seismograph’. The curved line and the plumb line, imagination and intellect, myth and allegory, the black horse and the white pulling together in harmony on the chariot of the soul: this was the desired union that produced great art ‘as in the learned works of Raphael or Mozart’, as Wind put it in 1947, ‘where grace and intelligence are one’. To quote Baudelaire again: ‘Straight line and arabesque, intention and expression, firmness of the will, sinuosity of the word, unity of the aim, variety of the means, an all-powerful and indivisible amalgam of genius, what analyst would have the odious courage to divide and separate you?’2 Yet, according to Wind, it was the tragedy of modern art that intellect and imagination had

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been driven apart by the romantic revolt of artists like Baudelaire and Liszt, and consequently ‘l’art pour l’art’ had become a ‘splendid superfluity’. The opening chapter of Roger Hinks’s Myth and Allegory in Ancient Art (1939), a text where Wind is credited for ‘his constant help, advice, and encouragement’, reads like an intelligent summary of Wind’s theories on myth. Here the apparent anomaly of Plato’s use of myth – for example, the chariot of the soul in the Phaedrus – is explained as comprehensible once it is recognized that ‘Plato regards the mythical and the logical forms of presentation as in some way alternative and equivalent’.3 Mythical and rational representations are both symbols, through which our knowledge of reality is mediated. The difference between myth and logic ‘lies in the ratio between the imagination and the intellect as the dominant modes of interpretation’. Absolute myth and absolute logic are merely abstractions, because in order for thought to take a concrete form that has an impact on life, in other words for it to be embodied, ‘requires the collaboration of both myth and logic’.4 Different and incommensurable, the two poles are nevertheless not mutually exclusive: Myth, the language of religion, lays the emphasis upon what man has in common with his world; logic, the language of philosophy, upon what divides them. Religion, generally speaking, is concerned with collective experience, philosophy with individual experience; and the progress from religion to philosophy is essentially the history of man’s self-discovery and self-detachment from his world.5

Although distinctive, the realms of myth and logic are not parallel (as Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic form might suggest) but interactive, and form a dialectic that has historical consequences. As Wind warned, myth may not be recognizable ‘in the guise of science’, and so it is possible to ‘succumb to this fetish in a halfprimitive idolatry’. Adorno and Horkheimer gave the same warning in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), where they showed how ‘enlightenment reverts to mythology’ and ‘false clarity is only another name for myth’, because ‘myth has always been obscure and enlightening at the one and the same time’ (they also provided a remarkable reinterpretation of the myth of the Sirens).6 At much the same time that Wind was lecturing on ‘the tradition of symbols in modern art’ at MoMA, two other notable exiles in New York were also concerning themselves with myth. Cassirer warned against the dangerous ‘preponderance of mythical thought over rational thought in some of our modern political systems’, while Breton asked the question that haunted the age’s ‘most lucid and daring’ minds: ‘in what measure can we choose or adopt, and impose, a myth fostering the

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society that we judge to be desirable?’7 Both warnings were apposite, both needs real. As Wind would put it: a ‘holy fear’ of art’s magical power must also be accompanied by a distrust of reason’s ‘limping virtue’. To this end, the ‘extraaesthetic’ clarifications of the iconographical method, employing sources extrinsic to the artwork to heighten our visual appreciation of it, were a cathartic experiment deepening the experience of an authentic symbol while banishing the riddles thrown up by the monsters of the imagination. In 1942 Wind felt that a modern art fusing intellect and imagination was possible. It is debatable whether he still believed that in 1960 when Art and Anarchy was broadcast (although Kitaj’s works must have given him pause for thought). Today – when the complex play of sign and symbol characterizes the work of Jasper Johns, or richly allusive mythical scenarios constitute the oeuvre of Anselm Keifer (to give just two prominent examples) – Wind’s experimental foray into the field of contemporary art seems more compelling than ever.

202

Notes Chapter 1 1 John Bernard Myers, ‘Junkdump Fair Surveyed’, first published in Art and Literature, 3 (1964), in Jed Perl, ed., Art in America 1945-70 (New York: Library of America, 2014), 669. Another semi-fictional appearance of Edgar Wind as a character in a parodic text occurs in Frederic Prokosch’s Voices, where a conversation with the poet Marianne Moore about a Dali painting takes place at a lecture by Wind given at Josephine Crane’s salon: Frederic Prokosch, Voices: A Memoir (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1983), 177. 2 Bodleian Library, Special Collections, MS Wind 14, folder 2/3: Margaret Wind to B. Rundle, 24 September 1981: ‘Wherever he was, he went to exhibitions of modern art, and bought long ago two early drawings by Klee, three marvellous prints by Braque, and a Soulages which are here in the house. He would have bought much more if he could have.’ 3 Edgar Wind, Hume and the Heroic Portrait: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Imagery, edited by Jaynie Anderson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). 4 Sam Hunter, American Art of the 20th Century (London: Thames & Hudson, 1973), 168. 5 The most complete biography is now: Bernardino Branca, Edgar Wind, Filosofo dell’immagine (Milan: Mimesis Edizioni, 2019). See also: Ben Thomas, ‘Edgar Wind: A Short Biography’, Stan Rzeczy, 1, 8 (2015), 117–37; Hugh Lloyd-Jones, ‘A Biographical Memoir’, in Edgar Wind, The Eloquence of Symbols, edited by Jaynie Anderson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), xiii–xxxvi. 6 Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship (New York: New York Review Books, 1981), 8 and 28. See also: Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), 21. 7 Wind, Eloquence of Symbols, xiii. 8 See MS Wind 1, folder 4/7 and folder 3/7, for Wind’s complex relations with his sister and the dispute over inheritance in 1966. 9 MS Wind 1, folder 5/7: Edgar Wind to William S. Heckscher, 3 November 1968: ‘I was Panofsky’s first pupil and wrote my dissertation under him’. 10 Wind, Eloquence of Symbols, xiv.

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11 See: Edgar Wind, Ästhetischer und kunstwissenschaftlicher Gegenstand. Ein Beitrag zur Methodologie der Kunstgeschichte, edited by Pablo Schneider (Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts, 2011); Silvia Ferretti, ‘Edgar Wind: dalla filosofia alla storia dell’arte’, La Cultura (1991), 346–57; and Silvia Ferretti, Cassirer, Panofsky, and Warburg: Symbol, Art, and History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989). 12 MS Wind 1, folder 6/7. 13 Rahel E. Feilchenfeldt and Markus Brandis, Paul Cassirer Verlag Berlin 1898-1933: Eine kommentierte Bibliographie (Münich: K. G. Saur, 2002); Rahel E. Feilchenfeldt and Thomas Raff, eds, Ein Fest der Künste: Paul Cassirer Der Kunsthändler als Verleger (Munich: C. H. Beck Verlag, 2006). 14 Barbara C. Buenger, ‘Max Beckmann’s Ideologues: Some Forgotten Faces’, Art Bulletin, 71, 3 (1989), 454–79. 15 Edgar Wind, Art and Anarchy, third edition (London: Duckworth, 1985), 114, note 55. 16 MS Wind 1, folder 6/7: notes by Margaret Wind on ‘Berlin 1922-24’. Branca, Edgar Wind, 16–17. 17 Isaiah Berlin, Personal Impressions (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014), 316. Wind, Art and Anarchy, 27. 18 Wind, Art and Anarchy, 26: Wind remarked that ‘that early exhibition included some rather mediocre pictures – paintings by Heckendorf, Jäckel or Melzer, whose names are almost forgotten today’. Peter Selz, German Expressionist Painting (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957). 19 Wind, Art and Anarchy, 114, note 55. 20 Dieter Wuttke, ed., Erwin Panofsky. Korrespondenz 1910 bis 1936 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2001), 408–11, no. 279: Edgar Wind to Erwin Panofsky, 24 October 1931. 21 William Hecksher, ‘Ist das Alles?’, Art Bulletin of Victoria, 28 (1988). Wind, Eloquence of Symbols, xvi. 22 Katherine Gilbert, Studies in Recent Aesthetic (Chapel Hill: The University of Carolina Press, 1927), ix. See also: Creighton Gilbert, ‘Edgar Wind as Man and Thinker’, The New Criterion, 3 (October 1984), 36–41. 23 Edgar Wind, ‘Contemporary German Philosophy’, The Journal of Philosophy, XXII (1925), 477–93, 516–30. 24 MS Wind 1, folder 5/7: Notes by Margaret Wind on a conversation with Hans Calmann in 1972 about Hamburg: ‘Ruth Wind was a feminist avant la lettre, interested in herself, her own rights. Calmann said she would not sew on a button! Warburg liked her very much. E never spoke of her. She translated Warburg’s essay on Luther.’ 25 MS Wind 7, folder 5/5. 26 Bernhard Buschendorf, ‘Auf dem Weg nach England – Edgar Wind und die Emigration der Bibliothek Warburg’, in Michael Diers, ed., Porträt aus Büchern

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(Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz Verlag, 1993), 85: ‘Ich vergesse immer dass Sie ein geschulter Kunshistorische sind. Sie haben es ja so nett mit dem Denken’; and Pablo Schneider, ‘From Hamburg to London. Edgar Wind: Images and Ideas’, in Uwe Fleckner and Peter Mack, eds, The Afterlife of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg. The Emigration and the Early Years of the Warburg Institute in London (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 117–30, 118. 27 Schneider, ‘From Hamburg to London’, 119. 28 Ulrich Raulff, ‘Zur Korrespondenz Ludwig Binswanger-Aby Warburg im Universitätsarchiv Tübingen’, in Horst Bredekamp, Michael Diers and Charlotte Schoell-Gass, eds, Aby Warburg: Akten des internationalen Symposiums Hamburg 1990 (Weinheim: VCH, Acta humaniora, 1991), 66–7; Kurt W. Forster, ‘Introduction’, in Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and Humanities, 1999), 40. 29 Spyros Papapetros, ‘Between the Academy and the Avant-Garde: Carl Einstein and Fritz Saxl Correspond’, October, 139 (2012), 77–96. 30 Dieter Wuttke, ed., Erwin Panofsky. Korrespondenz 1937 bis 1949, Band II (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2003), II, 219, no. 771: Erwin Panofsky to George Boas, 5 October 1939. Cited in Schneider, ‘From Hamburg to London’, 125. 31 Wind, Hume and the Heroic Portrait, 1–52. 32 For the Enge Zeit exhibition of 1991 that reviewed this moment in Hamburg University’s history, see: MS Wind 5. 33 MS Wind 1, folder 7/7: ‘It was in Mrs Franklin’s house in Porchester Terrace that EW stayed when he went on his own initiative privately to London in the Spring of 1933, and it was Mrs Franklin who introduced him to the men of influence who took up the Library’s cause.’ 34 Agnes de Mille, Speak To Me, Dance With Me (New York: Popular Library, 1973), 65–6. 35 Ibid., 312–15. 36 Ibid., 319. 37 Ibid., 348. 38 Roger Hinks, The Gymnasium of the Mind: The Journals of Roger Hinks 1933-1963, edited by John Goldsmith (Wilton: Michael Russell, 1984), 38. 39 Elizabeth Sears, ‘A Diarist’s View: Roger Hinks on the Warburg Institute “twentyfive years after its settling in London”’, in Fleckner and Mack, eds, The Afterlife of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, 71–96, and 77 for Hinks’s article ‘Abstract Painting’, The Criterion, 15 (1936), 669–73. 40 Wind, Art and Anarchy, 114, note 55: ‘Picasso’s Guernica was not only designed as a monumental cartoon, but was never seen to better advantage than as a huge poster decorating the Spanish pavilion at the Paris World Exhibition in 1937.’ 41 Edgar Wind, ‘Jean-Paul Sartre: A French Heidegger’, Smith College Associated News (SCAN), XL (5 March 1946), 1–4. See also: Horst Bredekamp, ‘Falsche

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42 43 44 45 46 47 48

49 50 51 52 53 54 55

Notes Skischwünge: Winds Kritik an Heidegger und Sartre’, in Horst Bredekamp, Bernhard Buschendorf, Freia Hartung and John Michael Krois, eds, Edgar Wind: Kunsthistoriker und Philosoph (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1998), 220–1. Schneider, ‘From Hamburg to London’, 128. Edgar Wind, ‘The Criminal God’, Journal of the Warburg Institute, 1, 3 (1938), 243–5. MS Wind 53, folder 1/4: Pavel Tchelitchew to Edgar Wind, 11 July 1942. Jacques Maritain, ‘Sign and Symbol’, Journal of the Warburg Institute, 1, 1 (1937), 1–11. Nicolas Nabokov, Bagázh: Memoirs of a Russian Cosmopolitan (London: Secker & Warburg, 1975), 203–5. MS Wind 7, folder 2/3. Smith Alumnae Quarterly (May 1953), 136. Wind described his ‘experimental’ course, Humanities 292a, in parallel with Sidney Packard’s account of his ‘traditional’ course, History 11. Ibid., 136. MS Wind 7, folder 1/5. Warburg Institute Report (June 1940–August 1941), 3. MS Wind 7, folder 2/3. MS Wind 7, Folder 2/3: Fritz Saxl to Edgar Wind, 19 March 1943. Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2002), 36–85. MS Wind 7, folder 2/5: Edgar Wind to Gertrud Bing, 13 June 1945. Ianick Takaes, ‘“L’esprit de Warburg lui-même sera en paix”: A Survey of Edgar Wind’s Quarrel with the Warburg Institute’, engramma, 153 (2018).

Chapter 2 1 Ianick Takaes, ‘“A tract for the times”: As Reith lectures de 1960 por Edgar Wind’, Figura: Studies on the Classical Tradition, 5, 1 (2017), 269–87. See also the forthcoming book on Art and Anarchy by Takaes. 2 Wind, Art and Anarchy, 1–2. 3 Ibid., 10. 4 Ibid., 16. 5 Ibid., 18. 6 Ibid., 20–1. 7 Ibid., 24. 8 Wind also made this point in an unpublished note on ‘Typology in Kugler’s Handbook’ (c. 1950) in which he attributed the suppression of Charles Lock Eastlake’s typological insights concerning the Sistine Chapel ceiling from Kugler’s A Hand-Book

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of the History of Painting, when it was revised in 1887 by A. H. Layard, to Morelli’s influence: ‘Their disappearance from the Handbook, and thence from art-historical memory, was one of the more regrettable but presumably inevitable, effects of the great Morellian revolution, itself only a phase of that general revolution of sensibility which dismissed the intellectual connotations of a work of art as irrelevant and distracting.’ See: Edgar Wind, The Religious Symbolism of Michelangelo, edited by Elizabeth Sears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 189. 9 MS Wind 96, folder 2/2. ‘Art and the Fear of Knowledge’, The Saturday Evening Post (10 February 1962), 52–8. 10 Wind, Art and Anarchy, 47. 11 Ibid., 48. 12 Ibid., 52. 13 Ibid., 53. 14 Ibid., 53–4. 15 Ibid., 63–6. 16 Ibid., 71. 17 Ibid., 69. 18 Ibid., 73. 19 William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Dover, 1956). 20 Ibid., 76. Pico’s phrase ‘a tyrannical act of the will’ from the Apologia (1487) was discussed by Wind in his 1954 article ‘The Revival of Origen’: Wind, Eloquence of Symbols, 46. 21 Ibid., 76. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 77. 24 Ibid., 78. 25 Ibid., 78–9. 26 Ibid., 83. 27 Ibid., 84. 28 Ibid., 87. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 89. 31 MS Wind 97, folder 1/4. Reviews cited subsequently can be found as cuttings in MS Wind 97. 32 Clive Bell to the editor, The Listener (5 January 1961). 33 Reyner Banham, ‘History of the Immediate Future’, The Listener (23 February 1961), 347. 34 Owen Holloway, ‘Thoughts on Art and Anarchy’, The Listener (9 February 1961), 255–7; Michael Tippett, ‘Thoughts on Art and Anarchy’, The Listener (2 March 1961), 383–4.

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35 MS Wind 98, folder 1/3: Herbert Read, ‘Art and Anarchy’, The Listener (18 July 1963). 36 On Herbert Read, see Michael Paraskos, Herbert Read: Art and Idealism (Mitcham: The Orage Press, 2014). 37 MS Wind 78, folder 3/3: [Edgar Wind], ‘Ideas and Images’, The Times Literary Supplement (11 May 1956). Hebert Read, Icon and Idea: The Function of Art in the Development of Human Consciousness (London: Faber & Faber, 1955). Wind may also be the author of a review of Read’s A Concise History of Modern Painting: ‘Private View’, The Times Literary Supplement (23 October 1959), 601–2. Both reviews are critical of Jackson Pollock, and of Read’s reliance on Jung’s theory of archetypes. 38 Richard Wollheim, ‘What Is Art?’, The New York Review of Books (30 April 1964); Michael Podro, ‘The Creative Element’, The Spectator (9 August 1963), 178; Raymond Mortimer, ‘What Has Happened to Art?’, The Sunday Times (21 July 1963); Anthony Bertram, ‘Nothing if not Controversial’, The Tablet (3 August 1963), 841; Conrad Wilson, ‘Pas assez de zele?’, The Scotsman (10 August 1963); Nick Humphrey, ‘Following Wind’, Granta (9 November 1963); Derek Hill, ‘The Danger Men’, The Irish Times (30 November 1963); Philip Callow, ‘A Splendid Superfluity’, The Tribune (6 December 1963); Rollo Charles, ‘Art and Anarchy’, British Journal of Aesthetics, IV (1964), 183–4; R. A. Sayce, ‘Art and Anarchy’, The Oxford Magazine (30 January 1964), 161. 39 ‘Art in the Margin?’, The Times Literary Supplement (12 March 1964). 40 [Denys Sutton], ‘Editorial – Knights of the Razor’, Apollo, 78, 19 (1963), 170–1. 41 ‘Art and Anarchy’, Edgar Wind to the Editor, and response from the reviewer, The Times Literary Supplement (2 April 1964); Edgar Wind to the editor, The Times Literary Supplement (9 April 1964). MS Wind 97, folder 2/4: In a letter of 5 April 1964 to Arthur Crook, Wind refers to an Albanian proverb about a child throwing rocks into a garden to justify the length of his response, adding, ‘I was told that your child was 71 years old.’ While this is not conclusive proof of the identity of Wind’s reviewer, the art critic Eric Newton was that age in 1964, and was also the author of books on modern art and on Christianity and art. 42 MS Wind 97, folder 2/4; MS Wind 98, folder 1/3: C. D. Corman to Edgar Wind, 4 October 1963. 43 MS Wind 7, folder 2/3: Edgar Wind to Hugo Buchtal, 18 January 1946. 44 This information was volunteered to the author of this book in 1997 by Margaret Wind, when she saw from a rosette he was wearing that he had been campaigning for the Labour Party in the general election campaign that brought Tony Blair’s government to power. Margaret Wind said that ‘Edgar would have approved’, and that as a liberal he would have liked the politics of New Labour. 45 A clue to Wind’s ‘left liberal’ political position (as well as to his atheism accompanied by an ‘imaginative view of religion’) can be found in his short article ‘Heine on Louis Philippe’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 3, 1/2 (1940), 160–1, where he writes of the poet Heinrich Heine, a revolutionary of

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1830: ‘He knew that if it ever came to a clash between these two extreme factions, his sympathies would be with the revolutionary party because it was, in however misguided a form, the party of freedom. But he declared openly that the methods and aims of the “republican demagogues” were not his own, and he viewed with frank disfavour the events of 1848.’ 46 Michael Baxandall, ‘Art and Anarchy’, Delta, 32 (Spring 1964), 36–9. 47 See, for example, MS Wind 23, folder 3/3: Isaiah Berlin to Colin Hardie, 5 April 1973, where Berlin qualifies his praise for the ‘marvellous constructions of his lectures’ with the criticism that they were ‘not always supported by conclusive factual evidence’. 48 MS Wind 48, folder 2/6: K. Bruce McFarlane to Edgar Wind, 8 October 1963. Wind’s draft response is dated 1 November 1963. 49 Wind, Eloquence of Symbols, 25. 50 Ibid., 28–9. 51 Ibid., 26. 52 Ibid., 106. Notable publications in the growing literature on Warburg include Georges Didi-Huberman, L’image survivante: histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2002); Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion (New York: Zone Books, 2004); Emily J. Levine, Dreamland of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky and the Hamburg School (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 53 Aby Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians, translated with an interpretive essay by Michael P. Steinberg (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), 20. E. H. Gombrich, Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London: The Warburg Institute, 1970), 216–27. 54 Ibid., 33–5. The Hopi Snake Dance was witnessed by Jimmy Ernst in 1938, who also noted ‘four or five clown-like dancers who, by gesture and body posture, performed antics that left no doubt about their scatological nature’. Jimmy Ernst, A Not-So-Still Life (New York: Pushcart Press, 1992), 127–9. 55 Paul Klee, On Modern Art (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 13–15. 56 Gombrich, Warburg, 289 (and 283–306 for the Mnemosyne Atlas). 57 Aby Warburg, ‘On Planned American Visit’ (1927) in Michaud, Aby Warburg, 332. For a similar self-description, see: Warburg, Images of the Pueblo Indians, 74. 58 Gombrich, Warburg, 285 and 302. 59 Ibid., 302. Aby Warburg, Atlas Mnemosyne, edited by Martin Warnke (Madrid: AKAL, Arte y Estética, 2010). 60 Edgar Wind, ‘[holy fear]. Untersuchungen über die Platonische Kunstphilosophie’, Zeitschrift für Ästhetick und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, 26 (1932), 349–73; Wind, Eloquence of Symbols, 1–19; Warburg Institute Archive, Edgar Wind Files, 193233: Edgar Wind to Werner Oechslin, 1933; cited by Branca, Edgar Wind, 88, who interprets Wind’s article as a veiled critique of Nazi propaganda.

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61 Wind, Eloquence of Symbols, 4. 62 Ibid., 8. 63 Ibid., 7. 64 Ibid., 8–9. 65 Ibid., 9. 66 Ibid., 10–11. 67 Edgar Wind, ‘Experiment and Metaphysics’, in E. S. Brightman, ed., Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Philosophy (New York: Longmans, 1927), 217–24. 68 Edgar Wind, Experiment and Metaphysics: Towards a Resolution of the Cosmological Antinomies (Oxford: Legenda, 2001), 9–10. Wind was indebted to Sidney Hook’s pragmatist discussion of instruments in The Metaphysics of Pragmatism (Chicago and London: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1927). 69 Edgar Wind, ‘Some Points of Contact between History and Natural Science’, in Raymond Klibansky and H. J. Paton, eds, Philosophy and History: Essays presented to Ernst Cassirer (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1936), 256. 70 Wind, Experiment and Metaphysics, 4. 71 Ibid., 2. 72 Ernest Nagel, ‘Review of Das Experiment und die Metaphysik,’ Journal of Philosophy, 31, 6 (1934), 164–5; Edgar Wind, ‘Microcosm and Memory’, The Times Literary Supplement (30 May 1958), 297. See also Franz Engel, ‘“In einem sehr geläuterten Sinne sind sie doch eigentlich ein Empirist”: Ernst Cassirer und Edgar Wind im Streit um di Verkörperung von Symbolen’, in Ulrike Feist and Markus Rath, eds, Et in imagine ego: Facetten von Bildakt und Verkörperung (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 369–92. 73 On ‘Verkörperung’ or embodiment, see especially: John Michael Krois, ‘Kunst und Wissenschaft in Edgar Winds Philosophie der Verkörperung’, in Bredekamp et al., Edgar Wind: Kunsthistoriker und Philosoph, 181–205. See also the section on Wind in: Tullio Viola, ‘Peirce and Iconology’, European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, IV–1 (2012), 2–29. 74 Wind, Experiment and Metaphysics, 32. 75 Ibid., 40. 76 Edgar Wind, ‘Studies in Allegorical Portraiture I: In Defence of Composite Portraits’, Journal of the Warburg Institute, 1, 2 (1937), 141–2, note 1. 77 Wind, Eloquence of Symbols, 96–7.

Chapter 3 1 MS Wind 162, folder 1/3: Monroe Wheeler to Edgar Wind, 4 June 1941. 2 MS Wind 162, folder 1/3: A. M. F. [Alfred M. Frankfurter], ‘Vernissage’, Art News, XLI, 7 (1942), 7.

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3 Gilbert, ‘Edgar Wind’, 36. In 1942 Gilbert was studying at New York University. 4 MS Wind 162, folder 1/3: Glenway Wescott to Edgar Wind, 9 April 1942. 5 Charles Baudelaire, Art in Paris 1845–1862: Salons and Other Exhibitions (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 1981), 46. 6 Wind, Eloquence of Symbols, 6. 7 MS Wind 152, folder 1/3: transcript of inaugural lecture, 1–2. 8 Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal, translated by James McGowan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 154, no. 82; Wind, Eloquence of Symbols, 17. 9 Edgar Wind, ‘The Critical Nature of a Work of Art’, in Richard F. French, ed., Music and Criticism: A Symposium (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 59. 10 Baudelaire, Art in Paris, 202: ‘You see, my friend, that I can never regard choice of subject as a matter of indifference, and that, in spite of the necessary love which needs must fertilize the humblest fragment, I hold that subject-matter plays a part in the artist’s genius, just as it plays a part in my own pleasure – barbarian as I am!’ 11 MS Wind 271, Folder 1/3. MS. Wind 154, Folder 1/3. Wind, Eloquence of Symbols, 17. 12 Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Life and Work of Eugène Delacroix’, in Jonathan Mayne, ed., The Painter of Modern Life (London: Phaidon, 1964), 44. 13 A sound recording of this lecture exists: New York, Museum of Modern Art Archive, ‘Traditional Religion and Contemporary Art’, 8 April 1953, 53.5, 53.5D and 53.6, 53.6D. Wind published an article based on this talk in Art News, 52, 3 (May 1953), 18–22, and 60–3, and also Wind, Eloquence of Symbols, 95–102. 14 Wind, Art and Anarchy, 25, quoting the conclusion of Baudelaire’s ‘L’essence du rire’ but also referring to ‘Le peintre de la vie moderne’ in note 53, 112–13. 15 Ibid., 27. 16 Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 116; Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, 19, no. 4, ‘Correspondences’: ‘Nature is a temple, where the living / Columns sometimes breathe confusing speech; / Man walks within these groves of symbols, each / Of which regards him as a kindred thing’. 17 Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 155–7. 18 MS Wind 152, folder 1/3: inaugural lecture. 19 R. G. Collingwood, The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (London, 1893). 20 Georges Rouault, Souvenirs Intimes (Paris: Galerie des peintres graveurs, 1927). 21 Baudelaire, Les Épaves (1866), xiv, ‘Vers pour le portrait de M. Honoré Daumier’. The portrait by Michel Pascal was reproduced in Champfleury’s book on modern caricature along with Baudelaire’s verses: Champfleury, Histoire de la Caricature Moderne, 2nd edition (Paris: E. Dentu, 1871), 64–5. Possibly Wind also had in mind an article by Paul Eluard, ‘Le Miroir de Baudelaire’, Minotaure, 1 (1933), 62–4. 22 The laughter of Democritus is cited in Champfleury, Histoire de la caricature antique, 7–8.

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23 Julien Levy, Surrealism (New York: Da Capo, 1995), 13: ‘Baudelaire passed his day in an incomparable subjective dream’. 24 Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 15. 25 Ibid., 36. 26 See, for example: André Breton, ‘Le merveilleux contre le mystère. A propos du Symbolisme’, Minotaure, 9 (1936), 25–31. 27 MS Wind 7, folder 1/5, Gertrud Bing to Edgar Wind, 9 April 1940. This shared interest in Butler may have extended to Wind’s American associates – see, for example: Hook, The Metaphysics of Pragmatism, 28: ‘It may not be too fantastic to regard man as a machinate mammal, as one writer did in Erewhon, and the physical machine as a supplementary limb.’ 28 Samuel Butler, Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino (London: A. C. Fifield, 1913), 46. 29 Samuel Butler, Life and Habit (London: Jonathan Cape, 1924), 8. 30 Butler, Alps and Sanctuaries, 45. 31 Bourgeois was married to the art historian Robert Goldwater who had published an important study of primitivism in 1938: Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986). 32 Louise Bourgeois, Destruction of the Father / Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews 1923 – 1997 (London: Violette Editions, 1998), 43. 33 Anatole France, La vie littéraire, 3ième série (Paris: Calmann Lévy Éditeur, 1891), 23: ‘Prenez garde! dit Baudelaire inquiet. Si c'était le vrai dieu!’ 34 Wind, Eloquence of Symbols, 3. 35 Alfred Jarry, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Editions du Livre, 1948), I, 972. See also: Alastair Brotchie, Alfred Jarry: A Pataphysical Life (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2011), ix. 36 Wind, ‘In Defence of Composite Portraits’, 139. For a comment on the different conceptions of the Minotaur of Picasso and the surrealists, see: Brassaï, Conversations avec Picasso (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 18–19. 37 Wind, Pagan Mysteries, 17. 38 [Petrus Rosenheim], Rationarium evangeli, 1510, Georgius Simler to the reader: ‘Igitur per imagines variis insignitas rebus, & quidem placitura simulacra (quemadmodum speramus) tibi convessimus, quo memoriam huiuscemodi formis evibrares, quas cernis venuste prorsus effigiatas uti meliores posse fieri celere nequeas.’ 39 Wind, Pagan Mysteries, 27. The field of mnemonic systems, particularly those of Giordano Bruno, was analysed in Frances Yates’s The Art of Memory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966). Yates had been introduced to the Warburg Institute by Wind. 40 Brotchie, Alfred Jarry, 89–106.

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41 Max Ernst, Max Ernst: Oeuvres de 1919 à 1936 (Paris: Éditions Cahiers d’Art, 1937), 38: ‘Qu’est ce qu’une Phallustrade? C’est un produit alchimique, compose des éléments suivants: l’autostrade, la balustrade et une certaine quantité de phallus. Une phallustrade est un collage verbal’. See also: Wind, Pagan Mysteries, 200, where Wind refers to the ‘ugly neologisms’ (like Cusanus’s possest) inspired by the Renaissance ‘spirit of sacred drôlerie’, which also gave rise to ‘that most symmetrical of monsters, the double-headed Janus’. 42 Ernst, Max Ernst: Oeuvres de 1919 à 1936, 72. 43 Wind, Pagan Mysteries, 28. 44 James Johnson Sweeney, Eleven Europeans in America (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1946), 16–17. 45 MS Wind 162, folder 1/3. 46 Kurt Seligmann explored similar phenomena in the Tshimshian culture of the Pacific North-West, see: Kurt Seligmann, ‘Entretien avec un Tsimshian’, Minotaure, 12–13 (1939), 66–7. 47 Max Eastman, ‘A Significant Memory of Freud’, The New Republic (19 May 1941), 693–5. Wind circled the reference to Fuseli in his copy of this article in blue pencil. 48 Alfred Barr, Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1946), 202. 49 Edgar Wind, ‘Un art de caprice, de recherches, un art marginal’, Supplément de la revue “Preuves”: Problèmes de l’art contemporain, 29 (1953), 16–17. 50 MS Wind 162, folder 1/3: The Isis (27 February 1957). 51 Wind, Art and Anarchy, 106, note 34. 52 MS Wind 162, folder 1/3. 53 Barr, Picasso: Forty Years of His Art, 13. 54 Wind, Art and Anarchy, 123, note 79. 55 MS Wind 96, 1/2: Wind’s opinion of Guernica was expressed in a letter to Richard Thruelsen, Senior Editor of The Saturday Evening Post, 28 August 1961. 56 Edgar Wind, ‘The Criminal God’ and ‘The Crucifixion of Haman’, Journal of the Warburg Institute, 1, 3 (1938), 243–5 and 245–8. These articles form a thematic trio with Anthony Blunt, ‘The Criminal King in a Nineteenth-Century Novel’, Journal of the Warburg Institute, 1, 3 (1938), 248–9, in which Blunt discussed Balzac’s character, the criminal Vautrin, ‘whose power places him above good and evil’. Picasso’s interest in Balzac was noted by Wind, who showed the etching Painter with Model Knitting of 1931 which relates to the story ‘Le chef d’oeuvre inconnu’. See also Andrea Damascelli, ed., James George Frazer La crocifissione di Christo sequito da La crocifissione di Aman di Edgar Wind (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2007). 57 Wind, ‘The Criminal God’, 243. 58 Ibid., 244. 59 Ibid., 245.

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60 Wind, ‘The Crucifixion of Haman’, 246, note 3. 61 Ibid., 247. Wind’s continuing interest in the story of Esther can be seen in his identification in 1940 of the subject of Botticelli’s small panel known as ‘La Derelitta’ (Rome, Pallavicini collection) as ‘Mordecai weeping at the King’s Gate’: Wind, Eloquence of Symbols, 39–41. 62 Ibid., 248. 63 Wind, ‘The Criminal God’, 245, note 2. 64 Interestingly, Wind noted in his article ‘Traditional Religion and Modern Art’ in 1953 that Manet’s Dead Christ with Angels had been exhibited at the Salon of 1864 ‘together with another Spanish picture by Manet, a bullfight with a dead toreador in the foreground’ (now in the National Gallery in Washington DC): Wind, Eloquence of Symbols, 96. 65 Gertrude Stein, Picasso (London: B. T. Batsford Ltd, 1938), 7. 66 Wind, Hume and the Heroic Portrait, 4. 67 Wind, Art and Anarchy, 100, note 16: Wind quoted Yeats, who attended the first performance of Ubu Roi in 1896, from his Autobiographies (1956), 348. 68 MS Wind 162, folder 1/3: The New York Times (5 April 1953), ‘Religion and Art in Our Time. Noted Scholar Discusses Relation of the Two in Life Today’. 69 Wind, Eloquence of Symbols, 100. 70 Gavin Parkinson, The Duchamp Book (London: Tate Publishing, 2008), 78. Wind, Experiment and Metaphysics, 34–7: for Einstein’s theory of relativity. 71 Wind, Experiment and Metaphysics, 12. 72 Ibid., 11. 73 Ibid., 42. 74 Edward Gordon Craig, Toward a New Theatre (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1913). Wind showed slides of stage designs from 1905 for Julius Caesar and 1909 for Macbeth. 75 Minotaure, 10 (1937), 26: ‘Le sommeil est un veritable monstre “chrysalitique” dont la morphologie et la nostalgie sone appuyées sur 11 béquilles principals, également “chrysalitiques”, à étudier séparément’. 76 Wind, Art and Anarchy, 100, note 16.

Chapter 4 1 Ashmolean Museum, WA 2006.168. The sheet of skull studies, WA 2006.170, dates from 1944. Marcantonio’s print dates from 1517–20 (Bartsch XIV.299.397). 2 MS Wind 136, folder 2/5. On Tchelitchew see: Lincoln Kirstein, Pavel Tchelitchev (Santa Fe: Twelvetrees Press, 1994); Alexander Kuznetsov, Pavel Tchelitchew: Metamorphoses (Stuttgart: Arnoldsche Art Publishers, 2012); Forrest Selvig, ed.,

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Pavel Tchelitchew: An Exhibition in the Gallery of Modern Art 20 March through 19 April 1964 (New York: The Gallery of Modern Art, 1964); James Thrall Soby, Tchelitchew: Paintings, Drawings (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1942); Parker Tyler, The Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelitchew (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969). Tchelitchew’s papers are in the Beinecke Library at Yale University (YCAL MSS 318), and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin (MS 4175 – two telegrams from Wind, container 5.7). 3 André Masson, ‘Painting Is a Wager’ (1941) in Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1996), 436–7. 4 Chester Page, Memoirs of a Charmed Life in New York (New York, Lincoln and Shanghai: iUniverse, Inc., 2007), 69 and 167–8: The musician Chester Page was employed by Louise Crane, and was a friend of the writers Marianne Moore and Djuna Barnes. 5 MS Wind 42, folder 1/4. 6 MS Wind 42 and 43 for the correspondence with Josephine and Louise Crane, and members of their circle like Chester Page and Elisabeth Bishop. Cecil Roberts, The Pleasant Years (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1974), 18: Mrs Crane was ‘a deft and enterprising collector of people’. 7 Soby, Tchelitchew, 72, no. 49; Kuznetsov, Tchelitchew, 208–9, nos. 177–8. For a letter from Kirk Askew see: MS Wind 53, folder 2/4: Kirk Askew to Edgar Wind, New York, 23 November 1949: ‘I am glad you liked the catalogue of Pavlik’s show in Buenos Aires, and also that you liked the Ondine production. I shall write Pavlik what you said about it, I know he will be pleased.’ See also MS Wind 37, folder 1/3: for Margaret Wind’s letter to Louise Crane, 26 April 1974, commenting on Askew’s death: ‘I was very sad. He was a friend, and in the end there are not many who remain that for a long time’. 8 Virgil Thomson, An Autobiography of Virgil Thomson (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1966), 215–16. 9 Ms Wind 37, Folder 3/3, Eugene Berman to Edgar Wind, 10 November 1959: Berman thanked Wind for a gift of Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance stating that he was ‘grateful and touched for your remembrance and dedication’. A letter of 26 January 1960, following a visit to Oxford, states the importance to Berman of ‘our renewed and consolidated friendship’. 10 MS Wind 47, folder 4/4: article on Sylvia Marlowe, The New Yorker (11 January 1982), and obituary of Sylvia Marlowe, The New York Times (11 December 1981). 11 The poet Philip Lamantia described a similar milieu consisting of emigré and American artists at the journal View where he was an editorial assistant in 1944: David Meltzer, ed., San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets (San Francisco: City Light Books, 2001), 135–6; Garrett Caples, Andrew Joron and Nancy Joyce Peters,

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eds, The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2013), xxix. 12 MS Wind 52, folder 1/5: Edgar Wind to Meyer Schapiro, 3 January 1941 (draft), concerning an invitation to speak at the Jewish Seminary. Perl, Art in America, 82. 13 Tyler, Divine Comedy, 320. 14 Sofka Zinovieff, The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me (London: Jonathan Cape, 2014), 113: ‘There is also the exotic Madame Yoshiwara [in Lord Berners’ comic novel The Girls of Radcliff Hall by ‘Adela Quebec’] who is a feminized version of the Russian surrealist painter and theatre designer Pavel Tchelitchew’. 15 Sidney Janis, Abstract and Surrealist Art in America (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1944): Janis does not mention Tchelitchew, or View magazine, although he does discuss the debt of American painters like Rothko, Gorky and Motherwell to surrealism, and mentions Kurt Seligmann and André Masson in this context. The ‘double image’ is credited to Dali alone, 126. 16 Charles Henri Ford, Water from a Bucket: A Diary 1948-1957 (New York: Turtle Point Press, 2001), 147. 17 Glenway Wescott, Continual Lessons: The Journals of Glenway Wescott 1937–55, edited by Robert Phelps with Jerry Rosco (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1990), 19 September 1945, 149 and 188. 18 Ibid., 278. 19 Richard Greene, Edith Sitwell: Avant-Garde Poet, English Genius (London: Virago, 2011), 258–9. See also: Harold Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), 176: ‘Strindberg was said to have been possessed by a dark demon, but Tchelitcheff must have been possessed by several.’ MS Wind 136, folder 2/5: Wind remarks of genius that the ‘religious roots are very clear in the Greek demon, of which the Latin genius is the translation’. 20 MS Wind 53, folder 1/4: Pavel Tchelitchew to Edgar Wind, New York, 11 July 1942. 21 MS Wind 53, folder 1/4: Pavel Tchelitchew to Edgar Wind, New York, 20 December 1943. 22 MS Wind 53, folder 1/4: Pavel Tchelitchew to Edgar Wind, New York, 25 May 1944. 23 Henry McBride, ‘Florine Stettheimer: A Reminiscence’, in Charles Henri Ford, ed., View: Parade of the Avant-Garde (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991), 157. 24 Parker Tyler, Florine Stettheimer: A Life in Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1963), 95. 25 Ms Wind 37, Folder 1/3: Kirk Askew to Edgar Wind, 6 March 1952: ‘I am so happy to hear Florine’s show looks well’. 26 Tyler, Florine Stettheimer, 100. 27 Ibid. Joseph Cornell’s art was associated with that of Florine Stettheimer in the ‘America Fantastica’ issue of View (January 1943). The ultimate tribute

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from Cornell to Tchelitchew was the short film Angel, made in 1957 with Rudy Burckhardt, intended as a memorial for the recently deceased artist: Sarah Lea and Jasper Sharp, Joseph Cornell: Wanderlust (London: Royal Academy, 2015), 222, no. 70. 28 MS Wind 53, folder 1/4: Pavel Tchelitchew to Edgar Wind, Flagstaff, Arizona, 15 July 1947. 29 MS Wind 53, folder 1/4: Edgar Wind to Pavel Tchelitchew, Paris, 1952 (draft). The same file contains a postcard sent to Edgar and Margaret Wind from near Rome, 19 September 1952, signed by Leonor Fini and written by her lover the Polish writer Konstanty Jelenski. 30 Ernst, A Not-So-Still Life, 222–3. 31 MS Wind 53, folder 2/4: Charles Henri Ford, interview with Paul Cummings, in Pavel Tchelitchew: Nature Transformed (New York: Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, 1993), 6. 32 MS Wind 7, folder 1/5: Edgar Wind to Edward Warburg, 13 June 1942 (concerning the financial affairs of the Warburg Institute). 33 MS Wind 162, folder 1/3: Glenway Wescott to Edgar Wind, 9 April 1942. 34 MS Wind 53, folder 1/4: Pavel Tchelitchew to Edgar Wind, New York, 3 November 1942. 35 Tyler, Divine Comedy, 441. 36 Ibid., 118–19. 37 Pavel Tchelitchew, An Exhibition, 44. See also: Kirstein, Tchelitchev, 95: ‘Tchelitchev was also strongly moved by contact with Dr. Edgar Wind.’ 38 MS Wind 53, folder 2/4: Cecil Beaton, ‘Obituary of Pavel Tchelitchew’, The Times (3 August 1957). 39 Ford, Water from a Bucket, 19. 40 MS Wind 52, folder 1/5: Edith Sitwell to Edgar Wind, 21 August 1958. 41 MS Wind 53, folder 1/4: Pavel Tchelitchew to Edgar Wind, 11 March 1952: ‘Pensez Vous – Cher Magus – que je suis dans une “terrible erreur” – que je me suis entombé entièrement dans ma folie et mes illusions – et qu’il est temps de m’arreter???’ 42 MS Wind 53, folder 1/4: Pavel Tchelitchew to Edgar Wind, New York, 11 July 1942: ‘Mon cher docteur je vous félicite de votre grande magie et je vous remercie que vous l’avez exerci pour ma protection!’ 43 MS Wind 53, folder 1/4: Pavel Tchelitchew to Edgar Wind, 22 April 1948. Edgar Wind, Bellini’s Feast of the Gods: A Study in Venetian Humanism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948). 44 MS Wind 53, folder 1/4: Pavel Tchelitchew to Edgar Wind, 11 July 1942. 45 Marcel Mauss, A General Theory of Magic (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 69–70. Interestingly, William James also makes a similar point in ‘What Pragmatism Means’: ‘If you have his name, or the formula of incantation that binds him, you can control the spirit, genie, afrite, or whatever the power may be.’

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William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (London, New York and Toronto: Longmans, Green & Co, 1940), 52. 46 Isaiah Berlin, Enlightening, Letters 1946-1960, edited by Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes (London: Pimlico, 2011), 600: Isaiah Berlin to Rowland Burdon-Muller, 13 December 1957. 47 Robert Cumming, ed., My Dear BB: The Letters of Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark, 1925-59 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015), 464: Kenneth Clark to Bernard Berenson, 22 November 1958. Clark’s discussion of Wind’s book was broadcast on the Third Programme as ‘The Concealed God’ on 14 November 1958, and was published in The Listener (27 November 1958), 875–77: ‘like all conjurers, he is sometimes carried away by his skill and produces from his hat not only the promised rabbit but the flags of all the nations and several bunches of paper flowers as well’. 48 MS Wind 72, folder 1/4: Edgar Wind to John Walker, 21 February and 27 February 1947; a letter of 16 August 1947 from Wind to Erwin Panofsky summarizes the dispute; John Walker to Edgar Wind, 12 November 1947. Louis Hourticq, La jeunesse de Titien (Paris: Librarie Hachette, 1919), 148. Walker’s book, Bellini and Titian at Ferrara (London: Phaidon Press, 1956), 5, continued to attribute the discovery of the picture’s literary source to Hourticq rather than Wind. 49 Wind, Bellini’s Feast of the Gods, 61. 50 Ibid., 37. 51 Ibid., 38. 52 MS Wind 52, folder 1/5: Edith Sitwell to Edgar Wind, Renishaw Hall, 28 April 1949. 53 Richard Greene, ed., Selected Letters of Edith Sitwell (London: Virago Press, 1997), 306: Edith Sitwell to Pavel Tchelitchew, 2 April 1949. 54 Erica Tietze-Conrat, ‘Mantegna’s Parnassus: A Discussion of a Recent Interpretation’, Art Bulletin, 31, 2 (1949), 126–30. 55 MS Wind 162, folder 1/3: Edgar Wind to Frances Hawkins, 16 March 1942. 56 MS Wind 72, folder 4/4: for the documents regarding Erica Tietze-Conrat, and Edgar Wind to Morris Ernst, 25 February 1949. Samuel Roth was a publisher prosecuted under obscenity laws in 1936 for publishing pornographic material (including extracts of Joyce’s Ulysses). He was also involved in the 1957 landmark Supreme Court case concerning First Amendment protection for obscene material. 57 MS Wind 72, folder 3/4: W. G. Constable, American Journal of Archaeology, 53, 2 (1949), 234–5; Giles Robertson, The Burlington Magazine, 91, 559 (1949), 295–6; Carlo Dionisotti, Art Bulletin, 32, 3 (1950), 237–9. MS Wind 72, 2/4: for further reviews in The United States Quarterly Book List, Times Literary Supplement, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, New York Times Book Review, Humanisme et Renaissance. 58 MS Wind 72, folder 2/4: Edgar Wind to Kenneth Clark, 28 August 1948. This file contains correspondence about Bellini’s Feast of the Gods with Katherine Gilbert,

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Roger Hinks, Philip Hofer, W. M. Ivins, Lincoln Kirstein, Harry Levin and Philip Pouncey. 59 Edgar Wind, ‘Mantegna’s Parnassus: A Reply to Some Recent Reflections’, Art Bulletin, 31, 3 (1949), 224–32. 60 Edgar Wind, Carlo Dionisotti and Erica Tietze-Conrat, ‘Letters to the Editor’, Art Bulletin, 33, 1 (1951), 70–2. 61 Edgar Wind, ‘A Note on Bacchus and Ariadne’, The Burlington Magazine, 92, 564 (1950), 82–5. 62 Wind, ‘Mantegna’s Parnassus’, 231. 63 Wind, Dionisotti and Tietze-Conrat, ‘Letters to the Editor’, 71: Bellini could have known of this traditional use of quinces, according to Tietze-Conrat, from Atheneaus’s Deipnosophistae, an edition of which was published in Venice in 1514. 64 MS Wind 72, folder 2/4: Francis Henry Taylor, The New York Times Book Review (9 May 1948). 65 Kirstein, Tchelitchev, 111. Kirstein dates this letter ‘in early 1938’ when ‘he was attempting to find a publisher for a monograph on the recently completed Phenomena. However, it is more likely that the letter dates to 1948, the year of Wind’s book on Bellini, as there is no evidence in the Wind archive that he knew Tchelitchew personally prior to c. 1940. Kirstein had recently published a study of Tchelitchew’s drawings, and the artist revived the idea for a book on Phenomena at this time: Lincoln Kirstein, Pavel Tchelitchew Drawings (New York: Bittner, 1947). 66 Kirstein, Tchelitchev, 111. 67 MS Wind 72, folder 2/4: Lincoln Kirstein to Edgar Wind, 4 April 1948. 68 Soby, Tchelitchew, 29. 69 Kirstein, Tchelitchev, 72. The comment was made by Phillipe Julien ‘a facile social historian of painting’. 70 Ibid., 72: Pavel Tchelitchew to Lincoln Kirstein, 10 April 1937. 71 Pavel Tchelitchew: Nature Transformed, 6. See also: Dickran Tashjian, A Boatload of Madmen: Surrealism and the American Avant-Garde 1920-50 (London: Thames and Hudson, 2001), 172. 72 Ashmolean Museum, WA 2006.166: Study for Wagner’s Isolde with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas at her feet, 1936. 73 Kirstein, Tchelitchev, 75. Julien Levy, Memoir of an Art Gallery (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977), 232–7. 74 Hayden Herrera, Frida: The Biography of Frida Kahlo (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), 234. 75 Kirstein, Tchelitchev, 110. 76 Soby, Tchelitchew, 29. 77 Martin Duberman, The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 291.

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78 Wind, ‘In Defence of Composite Portraits’, 142, note 1. 79 Kirstein, Tchelitchev, 110. 80 MS Wind 155, folder 1/2. 81 MS Wind 76, folder 6/6: Edgar Wind, ‘Mathematics and Sensibility’, The Listener (1 May 1952), 705–6; ‘The Last Supper’, The Listener (8 May 1952), 748; ‘Leonardo as a Physiognomist’, The Listener (15 May 1952), 788. 82 MS Wind 11, folder 4/4: Margaret Wind to Edgar Wind, 1952. 83 MS Wind 155, folder 1/2: notes for the 1960 Royal Institution lecture. 84 Irma Richter, ed., The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 45. 85 Richter, Notebooks of Leonardo, 14: ‘Everything comes from everything’. Wind, Pagan Mysteries, 41, note 21: ‘An interesting expansion of ‘all is in all’ is in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, headed ‘Anasagora’, Codice Atlantico, fol. 385v’. 86 Wind, ‘Mathematics and Sensibility’, 705. 87 G. Doczi, The Power of Limits: Proportional Harmonies in Nature, Art and Architecture (Boulder and London: Shambhala, 1981), 2. 88 Richter, Notebooks of Leonardo, 61–2. 89 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers (London: Loeb Classics, 1950), II, 415. 90 Wind, Pagan Mysteries, 49, note 51; F. Malaguzzi Valeri, La corte di Lodovico il Moro (Milan, 1915), 636, figure 689. 91 Wind, ‘Leonardo as a Physiognomist’, 788. 92 An appraisal of the strengths and weaknesses of Wind’s approach to Leonardo can be found in: Leo Steinberg, Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 45. 93 Ford, Water from a Bucket, 165. 94 Wind, Pagan Mysteries, 111. 95 MS Wind 155, folder 1/2: Book proposal, 1952. 96 Paul Valéry, Selected Writings (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1950), 98. 97 Pavel Tchelitchew, An Exhibition, 44. 98 Kirstein, Tchelitchev, 95. 99 MS Wind 53, folder 1/4: Tchelitchew to Edgar Wind, Rome, 30 December 1949. 100 Tyler, Divine Comedy, 17. 101 Ibid., 12. 102 Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Dialogues and A Diary (London: Faber & Faber, 1968), 48. 103 Kurt Seligmann, The History of Magic (New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1997), 307. 104 Ibid., 184. Philip Lamantia reported of Seligmann that ‘though his oft reprinted book The Mirror of Magic had an objective, detached, psychoanalytic critical

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surface, it was otherwise when talking with him’. Lamantia also remembered lending Tchelitchew his copy of A. E. Waite’s translation of Paracelsus, which the painter never returned: Meltzer, San Francisco Beat, 137. Wind thought that alchemy was a degraded form of the ancient mysteries: Wind, Pagan Mysteries, 215. 105 Tyler, Divine Comedy, 142. 106 Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, introduction by Brian Farrell (London: Penguin, 1963), 117. 107 Ibid., 161. 108 Ibid., 159. 109 George Boas, ed., The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 49–51: ‘To denote a mother . . . they delineate a vulture’. 110 Freud, Leonardo, 132–3. 111 MS Wind 169, folder 4/4: Brian Farrell, the Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy at the University of Oxford, consulted Wind about Freud’s essay on Leonardo because he was writing an introduction for the 1963 Penguin edition. He also enquired about Eric Maclagan, ‘Leonardo in the Consulting Room’, The Burlington Magazine, XLII (1923), 54–7. Meyer Schapiro, ‘Leonardo and Freud: An ArtHistorical Study’, Journal of the History of Ideas, XVII, 2 (1956), 152–3. 112 André Breton, ‘The Legendary Life of Max Ernst Preceded by a Brief Discussion of the Need for a New Myth’, in Surrealism and Painting (Boston, MA: MFA Publications, 2002), 164. 113 James Thrall Soby, Salvador Dali (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1946), 21. Dali’s text was published in the catalogue for his New York exhibition of March and April 1939. 114 Salvador Dali, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (New York: Dover, 1993), 30. 115 Richter, Notebooks of Leonardo, 181–2. 116 Dali, The Secret Life, 46. 117 André Breton, What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings, edited by Franklin Rosemont (New York, London, Montreal and Sydney: Pathfinder Press, 1978), 151. 118 Max Ernst, Beyond Painting and Other Writings by the Artist and His Friends (New York: Wittenborn, Schulz, Inc, 1948), 7–11. 119 Ford, View: Parade of the Avant-Garde, 51–2. 120 Tyler, Divine Comedy, 128. 121 Soby, Dali, 18. 122 Ibid., 21. 123 Dali, Secret Life, 210. 124 Tyler, Divine Comedy, 246. 125 Soby, Tchelitchew, 19. 126 Tyler, Divine Comedy, 165.

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127 Paracelsus, ‘The Treasure of Treasures’, in Arthur Edward Waite, ed., The Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of Paracelsus (London: James Eliot & Co, 1894), I, 38. 128 Tyler, Divine Comedy, 449–50. 129 Pavel Tchelitchew and Parker Tyler, Yesterday’s Children (New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1944). 130 MS Wind 53, folder 1/4: Tchelitchew to Wind, 26 June 1953, discussing his friendship with Bachelard; Tchelitchew: Oeuvres Récentes, Galerie Rive Gauche (Paris, 18 June–12 July 1954), catalogue essay by Gaston Bachelard: ‘Déjà l’artiste a compris la vie interne des rapports. D’un point à l’autre courent des forces . . . Tchelitchew en a fait un object de total vertige.’ 131 MS Wind 53, folder 3/4: Recent Drawings and Gouaches: Pavel Tchelitchew, Worth Avenue Gallery (Palm Beach, Florida, 3–15 March 1952), artist’s statement.

Chapter 5 1 Friedrick Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man (London: Penguin Classics, 2016), 84–6. 2 Ibid., 100. 3 Paul Klee, The Diaries of Paul Klee 1898–1918 (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1992), 232. 4 MS Wind 1, folder 5/7: Edgar Wind to William S. Heckscher, 3 November 1968. 5 Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Volume 2: Mythical Thought (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1955), 44–5: for the ‘astonishing conclusion’ that Hume revealed a source of mythological exlanations of the world by showing that ‘mere local or temporal contiguity is transformed into causality by a simple mechanism of “association”.’ 6 In 1968 Alfred Barr recalled ‘the gentle charm of Klee, and his interest in music . . . his little collection of odds and ends of shells and minor curiosities, his interest in children’s drawings’. Cited in Kantor, Barr, 159. 7 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Hannah Arendt, ed., Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1973), 249. 8 Selden Rodman, Portrait of the Artist as an American. Ben Shahn: A Biography with Pictures (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951), 81. Ben Shahn’s papers are in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institute. 9 Scott Donaldson, Archibald MacLeish: An American Life (Boston and London: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1992), 333–7. 10 Archibald MacLeish, The Irresponsibles: A Declaration (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1940), 13–14. 11 Ibid., 19.

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12 Ibid., 21–2. 13 Ibid., 27–8. 14 Ibid., 34. 15 Wind, ‘The Critical Nature of a Work of Art’, 70. Wind kept a cutting from The New York Times (24 March 1952) reporting that the Detroit City’s art committee had cleared Rivera’s Detroit murals of any taint of communist propaganda in response for calls to destroy them. 16 Diego Rivera, My Art, My Life: An Autobiography (New York: Dover, 1991), 126–7; Bertram D. Wolfe, Diego Rivera: His Life and Times (London: Robert Hale, 1939), 360–74. 17 Dorothy C. Miller and Alfred H. Barr, eds, American Realists and Magic Realists (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1943), 52–3. 18 Rodman, Shahn, 101. 19 Wind, ‘The Critical Nature of a Work of Art’, 71. 20 Wind, Art and Anarchy, 114, note 55. 21 MS Wind 3, folder 6/6. 22 José Clemente Orozco, Orozco ‘Explains’ (New York: MoMA, 1940), 6. 23 French, Music and Criticism, 20–2. 24 Ibid., 55–7. 25 Ibid., 59. 26 Ibid., 64. 27 Ibid., 69–70. 28 Wind, Pagan Mysteries, 235. 29 Isaiah Berlin to Philip Graham, 14 November 1946, in Berlin, Enlightening, 20. On Nabokov see: Ian Wellens, Music on the Frontline: Nicolas Nabokov’s Struggle against Communism and Middlebrow Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). 30 MS Wind 10, folder 2/4: Nicolas Nabokov to Edgar Wind, 9 February 1952. 31 MS Wind 10, folder 2/4: ‘Statement of Aims for Masterpieces of the XXth Century’. 32 Nabokov, Bagázh, 243–6. 33 Christopher Lasch, The Agony of the American Left (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968). On the CCF see: Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (London and New York: Macmillan, 1989); Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999); Giles Scott Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA, and Post-War American Hegemony (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). 34 Sidney Hook, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 451, and see also 450–6. Hook questioned the reliability of Nabokov’s memoirs.

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35 MS Wind 11, folder 4/4: Edgar Wind to Margaret Wind, 14 May 1952, R.M.S. Mauretania, Cunard Line: ‘This is a mind of the first order . . . he has a positive policy about Russia.’ 36 MS Wind 11, folder 4/4: Edgar Wind to Margaret Wind, 5 June 1952. Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2001), 51–8. The American journalist Walter Lippmann was the founding editor of New Republic and one of the first writers to use the term ‘Cold War’. 37 Francis Jeanson, ‘Albert Camus ou l’âme révolté’, Les Temps Modernes, 79 (May 1952), 207–90. See also Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: A Life (London: Vintage, 1998), 299–310. 38 Stravinsky and Craft, Dialogues, 179. 39 MS Wind 11, folder 4/4: Edgar Wind to Margaret Wind, 25 May 1952. For Patricia Blake see: Todd, Camus, 222, and Hook, Out of Time, 525. Blake had a distinguished journalistic career with Time-Life. 40 MS Wind 11, folder 4/4: Margaret Wind to Edgar Wind, 21 May 1952 (‘Wednesday later’). 41 MS Wind 11, folder 4/4: Edgar Wind to Margaret Wind, 28 May 1952. 42 MS Wind 11, folder 4/4: Edgar Wind to Margaret Wind, 5 June 1952 (‘last day in Paris’). 43 MS Wind 11, folder 4/4: Edgar Wind to Margaret Wind, 25 May 1952. 44 MS Wind 10, folder 3/4. 45 MS Wind 11, folder 4/4: Edgar Wind to Margaret Wind, 20 May 1952. Wind’s reference to the ‘grass roots’ is to a series of lectures given by Herbert Read at Yale University in 1946, and published as The Grass Roots of Art (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz Inc., 1949). 46 MS Wind 10, folder 2/4: Nicolas Nabokov to Edgar Wind, 19 March 1952. 47 MS Wind 10, folder 2/4: Edgar Wind to Nicolas Nabokov (draft), 15 April 1952. 48 Margaret Miller, ed., Paul Klee, second revised edition (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1945), 19. 49 MS Wind 11, folder 4/4: Edgar Wind to Margaret Wind, 25 May 1952. 50 MS Wind 11, folder 4/4: Edgar Wind to Margaret Wind, postcard of Rue de Rivoli, postmarked 22 May 1952. MS Wind 53, folder 1/4: Edgar Wind to Pavel Tchelitchew (draft), undated, ‘sans exaggeration c’est la pire exposition que je n’ai jamais vue’. In the same letter, Wind informed Tchelitchew that he had seen Leonor Fini in Paris. A letter of 21 May 1952 from Tchelitchew to Wind complains of his exclusion by Sweeney from the Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century exhibition and of the ‘ennui à mourire’ this has caused. For Wind’s copy of the exhibition catalogue, see: MS Wind 10, folder 3/4: Jean Cassou and James Johnson Sweeney, Musée National d’Art Moderne, LOeuvre du XXe Siècle, Mai-Juin 1952. The selection of works is heavily weighted towards European art of the first two

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decades of the Twentieth Century, and while Wind’s friends Pavel Tchelitchew and Ben Shahn are excluded, so are contemporary American artists like Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock. 51 Klee, Diaries, 240: ‘Voltaire’s Candide with its condensed riches provides innumerable stimuli for illustrations. . . . In Candide there is something higher that attracts me, the exquisitely spare and exact expression of the Frenchman’s style.’ 52 Wind, ‘Un art de caprice’, 16–17: ‘Paul Klee, par exemple, nous révèle le caractère d’un intellectuel défroqué – un intellectuel qui, avec une suprême ironie, joue le naïf, mais sans renoncer à son intelligence. En se faisant enfant subtil, il suggère des limites à notre intendement raisonnable et nous réduit à un état d’innocence artificielle’. 53 MS Wind 10, folder 3/4. The speeches in ‘The Spirit of Painting in the Twentieth Century’ debate were printed in the supplement to Preuves in July 1953. 54 MS Wind 11, folder 4/4: Edgar Wind to Margaret Wind, 27 May 1952. 55 MS Wind 10, folder 3/4: L’oeuvre du xxe siecle, compte rendu in-extenso, ‘Revolte et communion’, 20 (hereafter referred to as Compte rendu). 56 Compte rendu, 14–16. 57 Wind, ‘Un art de caprice’, 17. 58 Ibid. 59 Compte rendu, 6. 60 MS Wind 10, folder 3/4: additional typescript of Wind’s speech, 81. 61 MS Wind 10, folder 3/4: Pierre de Boisdeffre, ‘l’oeuvre du XXe siecle: Réflexions en marge d’un congrès’, Le Monde (3 June, 1952). 62 MS Wind 11, folder 4/4: Edgar Wind to Margaret Wind, 28 May 1952; Margaret Wind to Edgar Wind, 31 May 1952. 63 MS Wind 271, folder 1/3. 64 MoMA archive, ‘Paintings by De Kooning and Shahn to be shown at 27th Venice Biennale’, press release, 4 April 1954. 65 Wind’s list of desirable loans was: Chardin’s Soap Bubbles, Vermeer’s Allegory of Faith and Manet’s Funeral Landscape from the Metropolitan Museum in New York; a Caravaggio Still Life from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (not now believed to be by Caravaggio); Ruben’s Quos Ego from the Fogg Museum at Harvard; Gericault’s The Kidnapper from the Springfield Museum; and Hogarth’s Mrs Butler from the Philadelphia Museum. Possible substitute pictures listed in Wind’s notes include John Trumball’s Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker Hill 1775 (1832, Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum) and Benjamin West’s Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky (c. 1816, Philadelphia Museum of Art). 66 Henry-Russell Hitchcock, ‘Frank Lloyd Wright and the Academic Tradition of the Early 1890s’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 7 (1944), 46–64. MS Wind 6, folder 4/6: Henry-Russell Hitchcock to Edgar Wind, 6 February 1942.

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67 MS. Wind 271, Folder 1/3: Transcript of the ‘Art and Morals’ symposium, 7 (a transcript and sound recording are also in the Smith College archive). Pagination in this typescript is irregular, and begins again with each new speaker. Archibald MacLeish, Land of the Free (London: Boriswood, 1938), with photographs by Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein and Ben Shahn. 68 James Thrall Soby, ‘A Going in the Mulberry Trees’, Saturday Review (2 July 1949), 30–1. See also Frances K. Pohl, ‘Allegory in the Work of Ben Shahn’, in Susan Chevlowe, Common Man, Mythic Vision: The Paintings of Ben Shahn (New York: The Jewish Museum, 1999), 110–41, particularly 132–4 for Sound in the Mulberry Tree. 69 Georges Dondero, from The Congressional Record, 25 March 1949 in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds, Art in Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 655. Ben Shahn, ‘The Artist and the Politician’ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 665–9. 70 Rodman, Shahn, 164–5. 71 Ibid., 165. 72 Ibid., 155. 73 Ben Shahn, Paragraphs on Art (New York: The Spiral Press, 1952), 4. 74 MS Wind 271, Folder 1/3: Emily Genauer, ‘Art and Artists: Smith Forum’, New York Herald Tribune (10 May 1953), also a letter from Genauer to Wind, 10 May 1953, stating that ‘I quoted – too briefly, I regret – from your enormously stimulating remarks’. W. G. Constable to Edgar Wind, 26 April 1953. 75 MS Wind 271, folder 1/3: Jacques Barzun to Edgar Wind, 24 January 1953 (postcard). 76 Transcript, 2. 77 Transcript, 4. 78 Transcript, 13. 79 Transcript, 5. 80 MS. Wind 271, Folder 1/3. 81 Fourth Annual Woodstock Art Conference, 22–3 August 1952, ‘Aesthetics and the Artist’: in addition to Shahn, the other participants included John Ashford, George Boas, James Fitzgibbons, Harry Holtzman, Susanne K. Langer, George L. K. Morris, David Smith, Robert Wolff, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell and Barnett Newman. 82 Shahn and Motherwell had a ‘public duel’ on the occasion of the Seventh Annual Conference of the Committee on Art Education at MoMA, ‘The Artist’s Point of View’, 19 March 1949. Robert Motherwell, ‘The New York School’ (1950) in The Writings of Robert Motherwell (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 96: ‘He [Shahn], of course, insisted that my art had no content, that it was decorative and good to taste, like a wedding cake. I remarked, of course, that every art had content, only the content of some art is more subtle. But the hostility on my

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part against him was not that he was a Communist, but that his art contains none of the quality that would seem to me to make one legitimately in rebellion against our society.’ 83 Transcript, 6–7. 84 Transcript, 8. 85 Transcript, 9. 86 Transcript, 3. 87 Transcript, 8. 88 Transcript, 25. 89 W. H. Auden, Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957 (London: Faber & Faber, 1969), 315–17, and 316 for the line cited here. For a reading of this poem, see: Rebecca Zorach, ‘Love, Truth, Orthodoxy, Reticence: Or, What Edgar Wind Didn’t See in Botticelli’s Primavera’, Critical Inquiry, 34, 1 (2007), 190–224. 90 The Alpbach Seminar (‘Was ist der Mensch?’) took place at the Osterreichischen College, 15 August–4 September 1953. Wind took part in the seminars ‘Die Idee des Menschen in Wandel der Geschicte’, ‘Vom Impressionismus zur Gegenwart’, ‘Die Einheit der Moderne in bildender Kunst, Literature und Musik’ (where the focus was Klee), and also ‘Die moderne Musik kampft um ihr Publikum’. For Wind’s programme of events see: MS Wind 11, folder 3/4. 91 MS Wind 271, folder 2/3 for Wind’s correspondence with Auden. 92 For example, the reference to the silence of Clio in ‘Homage to Clio’: Auden, Collected Shorter Poems, 307–10. 93 Wind, Pagan Mysteries, 200. 94 James Thrall Soby, Ben Shahn (West Drayton: Penguin, 1947), 3. 95 Lincoln Kirstein in American Realists and Magic Realists, 8. 96 Clement Greenberg, ‘Review of an exhibition of Ben Shahn and of the Pepsi-Cola Annual’, in The Collected Essays and Criticism, edited by John O’Brian (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986–93), 2, 173–4. 97 Interestingly, Wind was appointed to the board of directors of the Bollingen Foundation by Mary Mellon: Deirdre Bair, Jung: A Biography (London: Little, Brown, 2004), 477. 98 Rodman, Shahn, 29–30. 99 Greenberg, Collected Essays, 2, 267. 100 Forrest Selvig and Ben Shahn, ‘Interview: Ben Shahn talks with Forrest Selvig’, Archives of American Art Journal, 17, 3 (1977), 20. 101 Ibid., 19. 102 Joe Allen, People Wasn’t Made to Burn: A True Story of Race, Murder and Justice in Chicago (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011). 103 Ben Shahn, The Shape of Content (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 25–33; Rodman, Shahn, 162–3.

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104 Shahn, The Shape of Content, 31. 105 Ibid., 32. 106 Ibid., 34. 107 Ziva Amishai-Maisels, ‘Ben Shahn and the Problem of Jewish Identity’, Jewish Art, 12–13 (1986–7), 304–19. Cited by Pohl in Chevlowe, Common Man, Mythic Vision, 118. 108 Kenneth W. Prescott, Prints and Posters of Ben Shahn (New York: Dover Publications, 1982), 7 and 45. 109 Shahn, Paragraphs on Art, 2. 110 Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians, 17. 111 Edgar Wind, ‘The Eloquence of Symbols’, The Burlington Magazine, 92, 573 (1950), 349. 112 André Malraux, Picasso’s Mask (London: Macdonald and Jane’s, 1976), 163–4. See also: Michaud, Aby Warburg, 316 for Warburg’s notes on the custom of giving girls kachina dolls: ‘Every child sees the kachinas as frightful, supernatural beings.’ 113 Shahn, The Shape of Content, 56. 114 Howard Greenfeld, Ben Shahn: An Artist’s Life (New York: Random House, 1998), 276–82. 115 MS Wind 271, Folder 3/3: Michael Jaffé to Hugh Lloyd-Jones, 16 February 1984. The documents in this file reveal the extent of Wind’s opposition to McCarthyism, including supporting the Civil Liberties Appeal and Americans for Democratic Action.

Chapter 6 1 MS Wind 46, Folder 5/8: R. B. Kitaj to Margaret Wind, November 1993, together with a typescript copy of Margaret Wind’s reply. 2 R. B. Kitaj, First Diasporist Manifesto (London: Thames & Hudson, 1989), 69. 3 Marco Livingstone, ‘Iconology as a Theme in the Early Work of R. B. Kitaj’, The Burlington Magazine, 122, 928 (1980), 488–97; Edward Chaney, ‘R. B. Kitaj: Warburgian Artist’, emaj, 7, 1 (2013). On Kitaj, see most recently: Cilly Kugelmann, Eckhart Gillen and Hubertus Gassner, eds, Obsessions. R. B. Kitaj 1932-2007 (Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2012). Kitaj’s papers are in the Charles E. Young Research Library at UCLA (1741). 4 Kitaj would later recall of Bing that ‘when I would visit her, she would exclaim: “But you know so much about us!” as if she belonged to a secret society, which the Warburgers were as far as Modern Art was concerned’: R. B. Kitaj, Confessions of an Old Jewish Painter (Munich: Schirmer Mosel, 2017), 63. 5 R. B. Kitaj, The Human Clay (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1976).

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6 Kitaj, Confessions, 56. Aby Warburg, ‘A Lecture on Serpent Ritual’, translated by W. F. Mainland, Journal of the Warburg Institute, 2, 4 (1939), 277–92. See also MS. Wind 6, folder 4/6. 7 Bryan Robertson, John Russell and Lord Snowdon, Private View. The Lively World of British Art (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1965), 193. 8 Livingstone, ‘Iconology as a Theme’, 488, note 2. 9 Julián Ríos, Kitaj: Pictures and Conversations (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994), 6. 10 Joanne Northey, ‘Chronology’, in Richard Morphet, ed., R. B. Kitaj: A Retrospective (London: Tate Gallery, 1994), 59. 11 Kitaj, Confessions, 58. 12 Wind, Pagan Mysteries, 14–15. 13 Wind, Hume and the Heroic Portrait, 61. 14 MS Wind 14, folder 1/3: Margaret Wind to Josephine Crane, 22 August 1957: ‘Edgar himself caused another explosion with some lectures on “Modern Art” – the “Old Masters” as someone put it: Picasso, Matisse, Rouault, Klee. We can’t quite explain it’; Oxford Mail (14 February 1957): ‘500 Crowd Lecture on Picasso’, and Oxford Mail (1 February 1957): reports that Wind will repeat his lectures on modern art – ‘Prof Wind is one of the finest lecturers on the subject. It’s worth missing lunch in college to hear him.’ 15 Michael Podro, ‘Some Notes on Ron Kitaj’, Art International, XXII, 10 (March 1979), 18–29. 16 MS. Wind 152, Folder 2/3. 17 A. C. Bradley, Poetry for Poetry’s Sake (Oxford, London, Edinburgh and New York: H. Frowde, 1901), 9. 18 MS. Wind 152, Folder 3/3: Typescript of recording, 7. 19 Kitaj, Confessions, 53. 20 MS. Wind 152, Folder 2/3. 21 Bradley, Poetry, 13. 22 For a more recent discussion of the ‘fantasy portrait’ of Simonetta, see: Dennis Geronimus, Piero di Cosimo. Visions Beautiful and Strange (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 48–75, where the work is related to Piero di Cosimo’s Allegory of Chastity Triumphing over Lust (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art) – a work that Max Ernst admired – and dated to the early 1480s. 23 Roger Fry, ‘Retrospect’, in Vision and Design (London: Chatto & Windus, 1920), 197–8. 24 Achille Bocchi, Symbolicarum quaestionum de universo genere quas serio ludebat (Bologna, 1555), plate 98. On Wind’s unfinished book on Raphael, see: Giovanna Targia, ‘Détails et hypothèses: Edgar Wind, Aby Warburg et L’École d’Athènes de Raphaël’, in Carole Maigné, Audrey Rieber and Céline Trautmann-Waller, eds, La Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg comme laboratoire (Paris: CNRS éditions, 2018), 87–105.

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25 MS. Wind 152, Folder 2/3: Transcript, 11. 26 Ibid., 18. 27 Kitaj, Confessions, 68. Kitaj’s source for Warburg’s aphorism that ‘magic and logic flower on one stem’ was: Gertrud Bing, ‘Fritz Saxl (1890 – 1948): A Memoir’, in D. J. Gordon, ed., Fritz Saxl 1890 – 1948. A Volume of Memorial Essays from His friends in England (London, Edinburgh, Paris, Melbourne, Toronto and New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, 1957), 11. 28 Kitaj, First Diasporist Manifesto, 59. 29 MS Wind 153, Folder 1/3, 14–15. 30 MS Wind 153, Folder 1/3, 2c. 31 Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians, 39–42. 32 Wind, Eloquence of Symbols, 29. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1887), 16–17 and 92: ‘Painting, in its coexistent compositions, can use but a single moment of an action, and must therefore choose the most pregnant one, the one most suggestive of what has gone before and what is to follow.’ 33 Greenberg, Collected Essays, I, 23. 34 Ibid., 32. Greenberg approvingly cites Walter Pater’s statement from ‘The School of Giorgione’ (1877) that ‘all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’. As editor of the Journal of the Warburg Institute, Wind published musicological articles that tended to question the intrinsic purity of music as an art form. For example: Manfred Bukofzer, ‘Allegory in Baroque Music’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 3, 1/2 (1939–40), 1–21. 35 Ms Wind 136, Folder 2/5. 36 Kitaj, Confessions, 53. 37 Ibid., 93. 38 Ibid., 26. 39 Greenberg, Collected Essays, I, 33. 40 Ibid., 37. 41 Edgar Wind, ‘Hercules and Orpheus: Two Mock-Heroic Designs by Dürer’, Journal of the Warburg Institute, 2, 3 (1939), 209. 42 Johan Huizinga, Erasmus of Rotterdam (London: Phaidon Press, 1952), plate V. Erasmus’s doodles dating from 1514 are in MS A.IX.56 in the University Library in Basle, a manuscript copy of the Scholia to the Letters of St. Jerome. 43 R. B. Kitaj: A Retrospective, 68–71. 44 Kitaj, Confessions, 84: ‘I have to admit that Eliot’s extensive notes at the end of The Waste Land was an exemplar’. 45 Fritz Saxl, ‘A Spiritual Encyclopaedia of the Late Middle Ages’, Journal of the Warburg Institute, 5 (1942), 82–142. Kitaj has reused Saxl’s subtitles from 99: ‘Allegorical Figures with Commentary’, and 103: ‘Pictures without Commentary’.

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46 Warburg, ‘A Lecture on Serpent Ritual’, 277. 47 Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and The Latin Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953). This text is dedicated to the memory of Aby Warburg. Kitaj cited the passage opening chapter 16, ‘The Book as Symbol’, 302–4. For an analysis of Kennst du das Land?, see: Simon Faulkner, ‘The History Behind the Surface: R. B. Kitaj and the Spanish Civil War’, in James Aulich and John Lynch, eds, Critical Kitaj: Essays on the Work of R. B. Kitaj (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 111–38. 48 Joshua Podro, Nuremberg: The Unholy City (London: Anscombe, 1937), 7. Agnes Rogers, Frederick Lewis Allen and Edward M. Weyer, Metropolis: An American City in Photographs (New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1934); Emaunel Frynta and Jan Lukas, Kafka and Prague (London: Batchworth Press, 1960). 49 T. S. Eliot, ‘The Frontiers of Criticism’, in On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber, 1957), 109–10. Cited in Lawrence Rainey, ed., The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 38. 50 For an analysis of the formal experiments in Kitaj’s 1963 exhibition see the chapter on ‘Integration and Disintegration in the Works of R. B. Kitaj’ in Allen Fisher, Imperfect Fit: Aesthetic Function, Facture, and Perception in Art and Writing Since 1950 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2016), 77–95. 51 Eliot, The Annotated Waste Land, 199. 52 Ibid., 199. 53 MS Wind 46, folder 5/8. 54 Rudolf Wittkower, ‘Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 5 (1942), 159–97. A source for Kitaj’s use of the term ‘teratology’ is Cesare Lombroso’s The Man of Genius (London: Walter Scott, 1891). 55 Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled (London: Chatto & Windus, 1926), 26: ‘I am not a communist; if anything, I favour some form of fascism rather than communism.’ This text is in Kitaj’s bibliography. 56 R. B. Kitaj, ‘By Mir Bist Du Schon’, in Richard J. Boyle, Jim Dine and R. B. Kitaj, Dine/Kitaj: A Two Man Exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Museum April 12 through May 13, 1973 (Eden Park and Cincinatti: Cincinnati Art Museum, 1973), 5–6. Art and Anarchy was published by Faber & Faber in February 1963; Wind dated the preface 24 January 1963. 57 Wind, Eloquence of Symbols, 111. 58 The Warburg Institute, Annual Report 1934–35, 8: ‘Dr. Wind is working on an edition of Warburg’s studies of “Snake Dance and Ritual”.’ For Wind’s trip to California, see: MS. Wind 3, folders 5 and 6.

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59 Livingstone, Kitaj, no. 16. On this painting see in particular: John Lynch, ‘The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg: monuments, documents, meanings’, in Critical Kitaj, 58–68; and Francis Marshall, R. B. Kitaj and the Idea of Europe, Phd thesis, University of Sussex, 2016, ‘Luxemburg – Warburg’, 72–117. 60 Rosa Luxemburg, Gesammelte Werke, III, 366 cited in Tony Cliff, Rosa Luxemburg (London, 1959). 61 Rosa Luxemburg, Letters from Prison with a Portrait and a Facsimile (Berlin: Publishing House of the Young International, 1923). 62 Alfred Neumeyer, ‘Monuments to “Genius” in German Classicism’, Journal of the Warburg Institute, 2, 2 (1938), 159–63. 63 Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics (London: Penguin, 1993), 16. 64 Paul Frölich, Rosa Luxemburg: Her Life and Work (London: Victor Gollanz Ltd, 1940), 332–3. 65 On Kitaj’s ‘complicated political stance’ at this time, see: David Mellor, The Sixties Art Scene in London (London: Phaidon, 1993), 34–8. 66 Wind, Hume and the Heroic Portrait, 89. 67 Edgar Wind, ‘“Borrowed Attitudes” in Reynolds and Hogarth’, Journal of the Warburg Institute, 2, 2 (1938), 182–5. Lessing, Laocoön, 11–12: ‘There are passions and degrees of passion whose expression produces the most hideous contortions of the face, and throws the whole body into such unnatural positions as to destroy all the beautiful lines that mark it when in a state of greater repose.’ 68 Franz Roh and Jan Tschichold, foto-auge / oeil et photo / photo-eye (Stuttgart: Akademischer Verlag Dr Fritz Wedekind & Co, 1929). 69 R. B. Kitaj, ‘Statement, Paris, 1982’ (Tate archive), and published in The Tate Gallery 1980–82: Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions (London, 1984): ‘The body in the picture looks very melodramatic but I grew up on tales and photographs of such battered corpses and so the murder (which is retold in the notes attached to the picture) is personified in a form I had seen the like of.’ The same text describes the painting as a meditation on Kitaj’s two grandmothers, and states that the work is ‘really about murdering Jews’. 70 Roh, foto-auge, 15. 71 Ibid., 17. Roh had earlier coined the term ‘magic realism’ in: Franz Roh, NachExpressionismus – Magischer Realismus. Probleme der neuesten europäischen Malerei (Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1925). 72 André Breton, ‘Max Ernst’, preface to Ernst’s 1920 Paris exhibition catalogue, in Breton, What Is Surrealism?, 16–17. 73 Ernst, Beyond Painting and Other Writings by the Artist and His Friends, 1948. 74 Things Seen: ‘Literary Reference in the New Figurative Painting’ from a Correspondent, The Times (12 February 1963): The article refers to Roger Fry, Jacob Burckhardt, David and Ben Shahn – all topics of interest to Wind. Could the

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‘correspondent’ be Wind himself? He was occasionally an anonymous reviewer of books for The Times Literary Supplement. The only false note here is the reference to Sidney Nolan, who was not, to my knowledge, an artist who interested Wind. 75 Livingstone, Kitaj, no. 24. 76 André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 26. 77 Edward Dahlberg, Sing O Barren (London: Routledge, 1947), 3–4. 78 Edgar Wind, ‘The Maenad under the Cross: Comments on an Observation by Reynolds’, Journal of the Warburg Institute, 1, 1 (1937), 70–1. 79 Wind, ‘The Maenad under the Cross’, 71, 9c. 80 Warburg, ‘Serpent Ritual’, 282. 81 Wind, ‘In Defence of Composite Portraits’, 138. 82 Bing, ‘Saxl’, 9. 83 Livingstone, Kitaj, no. 19. 84 Aby Warburg, ‘Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther’ (1920), in Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 599. 85 Ibid., 622. 86 Eliot, The Annotated Waste Land, 72. 87 Ovid, Metamorphoses (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1955), 82–3. 88 Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled, 291, refers to the phenomenon of sex change among Chukchee shamans. 89 Frances A. Yates, ‘The Art of Ramon Lull: An Approach to It through Lull’s Theory of the Elements’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 17, 1/2 (1954), 115–73, 8a. 90 Ibid., 5. 91 Livingstone, Kitaj, no. 25; Gerta Calmann, ‘The Picture of Nobody: An Iconographical Study’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 23, 1/2 (1960), 60–104. 92 Pictures with Commentary, 5, no. 3; Fritz Saxl, ‘Macrocosm and Microcosm’, in Lectures (London: The Warburg Institute, 1957), plate 34b. 93 MS Wind 7, Folder 2/3: Gertrud Bing to Margaret Wind, 21 January 1944. Correspondence with Hans and Gerta Calmann can be found in MS Wind 41, folder 2. 94 Paul Melia and Alan Woods, Peter Greenaway: Artworks 63–98 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 7–9. 95 R. B. Kitaj: A Retropsective, 120 and 186. 96 Edgar Wind, Giorgione’s Tempesta with Comments on Giorgione’s Poetic Allegories (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 14: ‘Vasari’s baffled reaction to the whole affair is an eloquent tribute to its oddity . . . he opined that the Judith may be a Germania.’

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Notes

Conclusion 1 Henri Matisse, Jazz (New York: George Braziller, 2016), xxiv. 2 Charles Baudelaire, The Prose Poems and La Fanfarlo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 84–5. 3 Roger Hinks, Myth and Allegory in Ancient Art (London: The Warburg Institute, 1939), 2. 4 Ibid., 8. 5 Ibid., 6–7. 6 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London and New York: Verso, 1997), xiv. 7 Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1974), 293: Heidegger’s philosophy ‘did enfeeble and slowly undermine the forces that could have resisted the modern political myths’. ‘Prolegomena to a Third Surrealist Manifesto or Not’ in Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, 287.

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Wind, Edgar. ‘A Note on Bacchus and Ariadne’. The Burlington Magazine, 92, 564 (1950), 82–5. Wind, Edgar. ‘Humanities 292a: An Experimental Course’. Smith Alumnae Quarterly (May 1953), 136. Wind, Edgar. ‘Un art de caprice, de recherches, un art marginal’. Problèmes de l’art contemporain: Supplément de la Revue Preuves, 29 (1953), 16–17. Wind, Edgar. ‘Microcosm and Memory’. The Times Literary Supplement (30 May 1958), 297. Wind, Edgar. Giorgione’s Tempesta with Comments on Giorgione’s Poetic Allegories. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. Wind, Edgar. Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance. Revised edition. Oxford, New York, Toronto and Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1980. Wind, Edgar. The Eloquence of Symbols: Studies in Humanist Art. Edited by Jaynie Anderson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. Wind, Edgar. Art and Anarchy. Third edition. London: Duckworth, 1985. Wind, Edgar. Hume and the Heroic Portrait: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Imagery. Edited by Jaynie Anderson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. Wind, Edgar. The Religious Symbolism of Michelangelo. Edited by Elizabeth Sears, with essays by John W. O’Malley and Elizabeth Sears. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Wind, Edgar. Experiment and Metaphysics: Towards a Resolution of the Cosmological Antinomies. Translated by Cyril Edwards, with an introduction by Matthew Rampley. Oxford: Legenda, 2001. Wind, Edgar. Ästhetischer und kunstwissenschaftlicher Gegenstand. Ein Beitrag zur Methodolgie der Kunstgeschichte. Edited and with an essay by Pablo Schnieder. Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts, 2011. Wittkower, Rudolf. ‘Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters’. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 5 (1942), 159–97. Wolfe, Bertram D. Diego Rivera: His Life and Times. London: Robert Hale, 1939. Wuttke, Dieter, ed. Erwin Panofsky. Korrespondenz 1910 bis 1936. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2001. Yates, Frances A. ‘The Art of Ramon Lull: An Approach to It through Lull’s Theory of the Elements’. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 17, 1/2 (1954), 115–73. Yates, Frances A. The Art of Memory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966. Zinovieff, Sofka. The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me. London: Jonathan Cape, 2014. Zorach, Rebecca. ‘Love, Truth, Orthodoxy, Reticence: Or, What Edgar Wind Didn’t See in Botticelli’s Primavera’. Critical Inquiry, 34, 1 (2007), 190–224.

Index Adler, Mortimer  8 Adorno, Theodor W.  200 Aldrovandi, Ulisse  54 Alfaro-Siquerios, David  123 Alloway, Lawrence  176 Allston, Washington  137 American Journal of Archaeology, The  95 Apollinaire, Guillaume  55, 58, 65, 67 Apollo  28, 175 Aragon, Louis  50 Arensberg, Walter  42, 73 Ariosto, Lodovico  21, 133 Aristophanes  61 Arnold, Matthew  178 Aron, Raymond  128 Arp, Jean  25, 27, 175 Arrau, Claudio  6 Art Bulletin  94, 95–6 Art News  41, 42, 69 Askew, Constance  84 Askew, Kirk  16, 42, 80, 84, 86, 87 Auden, W.H.  69, 81, 117–55 Auerbach, Frank  159 Austin, A. Everitt “Chick”  16, 85, 86 Babel, Isaac  178, 190 Bachelard, Gaston  115 Bacon, Francis  159, 186 Balanchine, George  84, 86 Balzac, Honoré de  61 Bandinelli, Baccio  188 Banham, Reyner  26 Barbari, Jacopo de’  104–6, 154 Barber, Samuel  140 Barr, Alfred J.  3, 16, 51, 59, 66, 86, 107, 137, 197 Barr, Margaret Scolari  86 Barr, Stringfellow  13, 28 Barzun, Jacques  140, 141 Bataille, Georges  12, 13, 65 Baudelaire, Charles  19, 22, 24, 25, 35, 36, 41, 42–52, 57, 59, 62, 67, 69, 73, 74,

106, 119, 125, 136, 141, 145, 198, 199, 200 Baxandall, Michael  27, 29 Beaton, Cecil  82, 88, 89, 113 Beattie, James  9 Beckmann, Max  6 Bell, Clive  26, 163 Belli, Valerio  95 Bellini, Giovanni  16, 80, 90, 91–7, 100, 106, 109, 110 Bembo, Pietro  92, 93, 95, 100 Benjamin, Walter  4, 12, 23, 120, 158 Bérard, Christian  12, 82, 99 Berenson, Bernard  16, 21, 175 Berg, Alban  128 Bergson, Henri  8 Berlin, Isaiah  91, 127, 128 Berman, Eugene  80, 82 Berman, Leonid  80, 82 Berners, Lord, Gerald Hugh TyrwhittWilson  82 Bing, Gertrud  16, 17, 49, 50, 64, 159, 180, 192, 194, 196 Binswanger, Ludwig  5 Blake, Patricia  129 Blake, William  43, 124 Bliss, Mildred Barnes  15 Bliss, Robert Woods  15 Blossfeldt, Karl  174 Boas, George  8, 140 Bocchi, Achille  167 Bogomazov, Alexander  81 Bohr, Niels  12 Bonasone, Giulio  167, 188 Bonnard, Pierre  60 Bordone, Paris  93 Borgia, Lucrezia  93, 100, 125 Borgianini, Orazio  70, 99 Bosanquet, Bernard  8 Boshier, Derek  159 Botticelli, Sandro  3, 161, 162, 174, 191 Boulanger, Nadia  80

Index Bourgeois, Louise  51, 75 Bradley, Andrew Cecil  163, 164, 166 Brancusi, Constantin  27 Braque, Georges  60, 74 Brecht, Bertolt  7, 8 Breton, André  12, 51, 55, 67, 84, 85, 98, 110, 112, 153, 169, 176, 186, 187, 193, 200 Breugel, Pieter  150 Britten, Benjamin  129 Buchanan, Scott  8, 13 Buchtal, Hugo  28 Buffon, Comte de, Georges-Louis Leclerc  22, 61, 133 Burckhardt, Jacob  31 Burke, Edmund  9, 98 Burlington Magazine, The  95 Butler, Samuel  23, 49–52, 58, 64, 67 Cahiers d’Art  42 Calder, Alexander  12 Callot, Jacques  46, 68 Calman, Gerta  195 Campbell, Joseph  140 Campigli, Massimo  80 Camus, Albert  128, 129, 132 Canova, Antonio  61 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da  135 Carjat, Etienne  47, 48 Carlyle, Thomas  23 Carrington, Leonora  41, 57, 58 Carroll, Lewis  47 Caruso, Enrico  138 Cassirer, Bruno  6 Cassirer, Ernst  5, 6, 12, 37, 38, 120, 200 Cassirer, Paul  6, 7, 28 Cassou, Jean  130, 131, 133 Catlin, George  45 Catullus  96 Caulfield, Patrick  159 Cézanne, Paul  4, 67, 158, 160 Champfleury (Jules François FleuryHusson)  47, 48, 51 Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon  135 Chenavard, Paul  22 Chopin, Frédéric  48 Chrysler, Walter  42 Claflin, Agnes Rindge  16, 42 Clark, Kenneth  1, 11, 82, 91, 95, 129, 198 Clayburgh, Alma  99

247

Cocteau, Jean  129, 157 Colette  157 Colonna, Francesco  110 Conrad, Joseph  197 Constable, William George  10, 95, 140 Cooper, Douglas  91, 160 Copland, Aaron  81 Copley, John Singleton  183 Corbin, Henry  12 Corinth, Lovis  70 Corman, Cid  28 Cornell, Joseph  84 Costa, Lorenzo  93 Courbet, Gustave  43, 47–8 Craig, Edward Gordon  72 Crane, Hart  140 Crane, Josephine Boardman (Mrs W. Murray Crane)  80, 155 Crevel, René  55, 82 Criterion, The  11 Croce, Benedetto  8, 163 Crook, Arthur  28 cummings, e.e.  80 Curtius, Ernst Robert  173, 178, 179 d’Este, Alfonso  92, 93, 95 d’Este, Ercole  93 d’Este, family  100 d’Este, Ippolito  93 d’Este, Isabella  92, 96 d’Harnoncourt, René  140 da Bisticci, Vespasiano  29 da Ceresara, Paride  96 da Montefeltro, Federigo (Duke of Urbino)  23, 29 da Vinci, Leonardo  19, 51, 80, 84, 102–15, 124, 129 da Vinci, Ser Piero  109 Da Viterbo, Egidio  161 Dahlberg, Edward  188 Dali, Salvador  2, 12, 41, 71–4, 80, 82, 111–14, 142 Dante (Alighieri)  48, 63, 64, 98, 125 Darwin, Charles  11, 49 Daumier, Honoré  47 David, Jacques-Louis  187 Davis, Robert Graham  135 De Chirico, Giorgio  41, 71, 72 de Kooning, Willem  135, 172, 186, 191 de Largillière, Nicolas  54, 191

248

Index

De Mille, Agnes  10, 11 De Mille, Anna George  10 De Roy, Emile  47, 49 Degas, Edgar  158, 160 Delacroix, Eugène  43 Delevante, Sydney  159, 160 della Francesca, Piero  73 della Mirandola, Pico  24, 54, 103, 106, 149 della Torre, Francesco di Giulio  52, 53 Delta  27, 29 Democritus  47, 67, 105, 106, 108 Denby, Edwin  81 Derain, André  41, 67 di Cosimo, Piero  56, 164–7, 191–2 Diaghilev, Sergei  82 Dine, Jim  178 Dionisotti, Carlo  95, 96 Documents  13 Dondero, George  138 Donizetti, Gaetano  125 Dorival, Bernard  131 Dos Pasos, John  121 Dreier, Katherine  8, 72 Duchamp, Marcel  41, 53, 70, 72, 73, 81, 84, 85, 175 Dürer, Albrecht  54, 193 Durieux, Tilla  6 Durruti, Buenaventura  178 Duval, Jeanne  48 Dvorak, Max  5 Eastman, Max  58, 144 Eddington, Arthur  37 Einstein, Albert  37, 101 Einstein, Carl  6, 9, 13, 71 Eliot, T.S.  11, 12, 26, 69, 158, 172–6, 178, 179, 193, 197 Eluard, Paul  12, 55, 57 Epstein, Jacob  10 Erasmus, Desiderius  172 Ernst, Jimmy  85 Ernst, Max  3, 11, 41, 53, 55, 58, 74, 81, 84, 85, 110–12, 153, 186 Euclid  104 Exter, Alexander  81 Fantin-Latour, Henri  48 Fini, Leonor  85, 100 Fischer, Edwin  6

Fisher, Sandra  159 Focillon, Henri  13 Ford, Charles Henri  81–5, 89, 91, 98, 100, 106 Ford, Ruth  84 Forster, E. M.  124, 126, 152, 155 France, Anatole  51–2 Frank, Jerome  140 Frankfurter, Alfred M.  41 Franklin, Cyril  10 Franklin, Henrietta (née Montagu), the Hon. Mrs Ernst  10 Franklin, Miriam  10 Frazer, James  63–5, 174 Freud, Lucian  159 Freud, Sigmund  50, 58, 98, 108–11, 141, 158 Friedlander, Max  163 Frölich, Paul  182 Fry, Roger  3, 21, 150, 163, 167, 175 Fuseli, Henry  43, 57, 58, 162 Gabo, Naum  10 Gainsborough, Thomas  9 Gauguin, Paul  39, 70 Gauss, Carl Friedrich  24 Gautier, Théophile  47, 163, 164 Genauer, Emily  140 Genelli, Janus  182 Gentile, Giovanni  10 George, Henry  10 Gerhard, Roberto  26 Géricault, Théodor  135 Ghirlandiao, Domenico  33 Gilbert, Creighton  42 Gilbert, Katherine  8, 42 Giorgione  198 Glaser, Curt  6 Glaser, Elsa (née Kolker)  6 Gluck, Christoph Willibald  84 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang  19, 35, 173, 179 Goldschmidt, Adolph  5 Gombrich, E. H.  16, 29, 32, 180 Goya, Francisco  59, 73, 188 Graves, Maurice  143 Green, Paul  8 Greenaway, Peter  196 Greenberg, Clement  3, 23, 29, 81, 82, 107, 150, 151, 170–2, 188

Index Grigson, Geoffrey  26 Gropius, Walter  140 Grosser, Maurice  80 Grünewald, Matthias  62, 66 Guerassimov, Aleksandr  131 Guggenheim, Peggy  111 Guillaume, Paul  42 Guilloton, Vincent  129 Gutersloh, Albert Paris  159, 160 Guys, Constantin  48 Hals, Franz  88 Hampshire, Stuart  19, 44, 46, 160–2 Hatch, Ruth  8 Hecksher, William S.  119 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich  20, 27, 29, 30, 35, 36, 162, 182 Heidegger, Martin  5, 12, 37 Hemingway, Ernest  121 Hepworth, Barbara  27 Heraclitus  47, 67, 105, 106, 108 Hesiod  34 Hickman, James  151–2 Hiller, Kurt  7 Hinks, Roger  11, 12, 200 Hitchcock, Henry-Russell  137 Hockney, David  159, 197 Hofer, Philip  137 Hogarth, William  11, 19, 68, 125, 135, 137, 162, 184, 188 Holbein, Hans  170, 172 Holloway, Owen  26 Homer  34, 96 Hook, Sidney  8, 29, 127, 128 Horace  22, 176 Horapollo  107, 110 Horkheimer, Max  200 Horowitz, Bela  172 Horton, Percy  160 Hourticq, Louis  92 Hugo, Victor  43, 125 Huizinga, Johan  13, 172 Hulme, T. E.  178 Hume, David  9, 68 Hunter, Sam  3 Husserl, Edmund  5 Hutchins, Robert  14, 16, 28 Hutten, Ulrich von  196 Huysmans, Joris-Karl  69

249

Ingres  62, 160 Isis, The  60 Ivins Jr., William  51–2, 81 Jacob, Max  67 Jaffé, Michael  155 James, Edward  42, 73, 82, 99, 113, 114 James, William  14, 23–5, 30, 138, 144, 148, 149 Janis, Sidney  42, 82 Jarry, Alfred  53, 55, 65, 68, 71, 73 Jaspers, Karl  37 Jeanson, Francis  128 Johns, Jasper  201 Johnson, Philip  16, 139, 144, 149 Johnson, Samuel  9 Jones, Allen  159, 196 Journal of Philosophy  8 Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute  137, 160, 195 Journal of the Warburg Institute  13, 39, 53, 59, 62, 74, 91, 158, 161, 174, 180, 182–4, 188 Joyce, James  55, 58, 82 Jung, Carl  11, 12, 65, 146 Justi, Ludwig  4 Kafka, Franz  158, 173, 196 Kahlo, Frida  100, 123, 176 Kallin, Anna (‘Niouta’)  7, 19 Kallman, Chester  137 Kandisky, Wassily  167 Kant, Immanuel  19, 35–8, 44, 46, 160, 162, 182 Kazin, Alfred  81 Keifer, Anselm  201 Kellner, G. A. Hermann  15 Kellner, Margaret. See Margaret Wind Kennan, George  19, 128 Kestenberg, Leo  6 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig  6 Kirstein, Lincoln  16, 42, 51, 80, 85, 88, 97, 99–102, 106, 107, 112, 114, 150 Kitaj, R. B.  1, 3, 27, 157–98 Klee, Paul  2, 12, 22, 26, 32–3, 41, 42, 47, 48, 55, 60, 67, 68, 74, 117–20, 131, 147, 153, 161, 167 Klimt, Gustav  159 Kokoschka, Oskar  7 Kollwitz, Käthe  6

250 Korovin, Konstantin  81 Kossof, Leon  159 Krause, Martin  6 Kuhn, Charles  95 Kunstgeschichtliche Gesellschaft zu Berlin  6 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste  49 Lautréamont, Comte de (Isadore Lucien Ducasse)  55 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim  35, 36, 170, 171, 184, 193 Levy, Joella  100 Levy, Julien  16, 48, 73, 81, 82, 87, 100, 113, 169 Lewis, Wyndham  178 Liberthson, Leo  56, 57–8 Listener, The  2, 102 Liszt, Franz  199, 200 Livingstone, Marco  160 Lloyd-Jones, Hugh  4 Locher, Robert  88 Loeb, Pierre  113 Louchheim, Aline  140 Lucretius  22 Luther, Martin  152–3, 173, 192, 193 Luxembourg, Rosa  6, 178, 179, 180–90 L’Ymagier  55 Lynes, George Platt  85 McBride, Henry  84, 87, 151, 152 McCarthy, Mary  80 McFarlane, K. Bruce  29–30, 45 McKeon, Richard  8, 16 MacLagan, Eric  110 MacLeish, Archibald  15, 28, 120–1, 122, 124, 137–44, 148, 155 McLuhan, Marshall  23 Magallanes, Nicholas  100 Mallarmé, Stéphane  141, 171 Malraux, André  129, 153 Manet, Édouard  4, 20, 27, 28, 33, 43, 48, 67, 74, 135, 136, 190 Mantegna, Andrea  20, 70, 93–6, 99, 162 Marcantonio (Raimondi)  77, 161 Maritain, Jacques  11–13, 140 Marlowe, Sylvia  80–1 Massine, Leonid  82

Index Masson, André  12, 79, 84, 85 Matisse, Henri  6, 45, 60, 69, 70, 74, 87, 162, 190, 198, 199 Mauss, Marcel  91, 94 Medici family  25 Medici, Lorenzo de’  166 Meissner, Daniel  54 Melanchthon  192, 193 Memling, Hans  29 Merrit, Arthur Tillman  124 Messens, E. L. T.  12 Michelangelo (Buonarroti)  3, 11, 13, 22, 25, 42, 63, 64, 107, 127, 161, 162, 174 Mignard, Nicolas  39, 54, 191 Milton, John  43 Minotaure  42 Miró, Joan  12, 25 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin)  39, 46 Monde, Le  134 Mondrian, Piet  87, 174, 194 Moore, Henry  12, 22, 25, 26, 27, 60, 74 Moore, Marianne  80 Moreau, Gustave  69 Morelli, Giovanni  21, 163 Moskowitz, Belle  10, 28 Moskowitz, Henry  28 Motherwell, Robert  143, 159, 186 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus  124, 199 Mumford, Lewis  140 Munch, Edvard  6 Myers, John Bernard  1 Nabokov, Nicolas  13–14, 30, 82, 126–7, 130, 131 Nagel, Ernest  38 Nef, John  77 Neumeyer, Alfred  182 New Age, The  177 New Leader, The  28 New Republic  121 New York Times, The  69 New York Times Book Review, The  97 Newman, Barnett  1, 143 Niebuhr, Richard  140 Nierendorf, Karl  42 Nietzsche, Friedrich  45, 65, 80, 175, 188 Niouta. See Anna Kallin Nolan, Sidney  187 Noland, Kenneth  171

Index Observer, The  175 Oechslin, Werner  33 Ogden, C.K.  11 Oppenheimer, Robert  19 Oppler, Ernst  6 Orage, Alfred Richard  177, 179, 184 Orozco, José Clemente  41, 70, 101, 122, 123 Ovid  43, 92, 96, 193 Pacioli, Luca  102, 103–7, 154 Panofsky, Dora  119 Panofsky, Erwin  5, 7, 9, 11, 86, 119 Panofsky, Wolfgang  119–20 Paolozzi, Eduardo  188, 190 Paracelsus  3, 114 Parker, K. T.  160 Parkinson, E. Bliss  1 Paul, Jean  193 Payro, Julio  131 Peirce, Charles Sanders  8, 9, 34, 37, 96 Peiresc, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de  161 Penrose, Roland  12, 42, 54, 57 Pevsner, Nikolaus  19 Pfister, Oscar  109 Phillips, Peter  159 Picasso, Pablo  2, 11, 12, 21–3, 25, 41, 53, 54, 57, 58–67, 73, 74, 81, 82, 131, 133, 162 Picasso, Paul  67 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista  160 Piscator, Erwin  8 Plato  7, 14, 19, 20, 21, 27, 29, 30, 33–6, 43, 44, 45, 52, 53, 74, 97, 103, 105, 123, 125, 126, 133, 142, 146, 147, 167, 168, 177, 200 Podro, Joshua  173 Podro, Michael  27, 162, 174 Pohl, Frances K.  138 Poincaré, Henri  38, 71, 72, 96 Poliziano, Angelo  161 Pollock, Jackson  3 Portfolio  196 Pound, Ezra  150, 151, 158, 173, 178, 179 Preuves  131 Progressive  28 Prokosch, Frederic  80 Proust, Marcel  35, 141 Pythagoras  107

251

Rambert, Marie  11 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio)  22, 61, 107, 124, 127, 162, 164, 167, 168, 174, 187, 188, 199 Ray, Man  41, 70, 99 Read, Herbert  1, 12, 26, 27, 55, 129, 131–3, 140, 147, 155, 177 Rembrandt (van Rijn)  5 Renan, Ernest  27, 28 Renoir, Auguste  6, 25 Reynolds, Joshua  9, 71, 183, 184, 188 Reynolds, Mary  73 Riegl, Alois  31, 163 Rimbaud, Arthur  21, 43, 46, 48, 55, 187 Rimmington, Alexander Wallace  190 Ríos, Julian  160 Ripper, Rudolph Carl von  131, 133, 134 Ritchie, Andrew  135 Rivera, Diego  122–3, 133, 138 Roberts, Cecil  80 Robertson, Giles  95, 96 Rockefeller, Nelson  1, 123 Rodman, Selden  138, 139, 150–1 Roh, Franz  184, 186 Romney, George  43 Rosenberg, Harold  80, 159 Rosenberg, Léonce  42 Rosetti, Dante Gabriel  125 Rothko, Mark  143 Rouault, Georges  12, 41, 42, 45, 47, 48, 53, 57, 69, 70, 190 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  27 Rubens, Peter Paul  135, 136, 161 Ruskin, John  23 Russell, Bertrand  19 Russell, John  160 Sacco, Nicola  187 Sachs, Paul  16, 137 Samaroff, Olga  124 Sannazarro, Jacopo  125 Santayana, George  8 Sartre, Jean-Paul  12, 128, 129 Saxl, Fritz  9, 10, 15, 16, 169, 173, 176, 178–80, 192, 193, 196 Schan, Joerg  195 Schapiro, Meyer  1, 42, 81, 140 Schiele, Egon  159 Schiller, Friedrich  34–6, 117, 119, 149

252 Schilling, Johannes  182 Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich  35, 36 Schmidt-Rottluf, Karl  5, 41, 70 Schnabel, Artur  11 Schoenberg, Arnold  7, 26 Scholem, Gershom  4 “Schultz”  6 Seligmann, Kurt  85, 107, 108 Selvig, Forrest  151 Semon, Richard  50 Seneca  56 Sessions, Roger  140 Severini, Gino  41, 67 Seznec, Jean  8 Sforza, Ludovico  103 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley-Cooper 3rd Earl of  161 Shahn, Ben  1, 117–55, 187, 193 Shakespeare, William  68, 72, 142, 147, 163 Shapiro, Karl  151 Shelley, Percy Bysshe  166, 187 Simon, Nicolaus  54 Sitwell, Edith  82, 83, 88, 89, 94, 97, 98, 99 Sitwell, Sacheverell  82 Skira, Albert  13 Slevogt, Max  6 Smith, David  143 Snell, Bruno  10 Soby, James Thrall  73, 82, 84–6, 98, 100, 114, 138, 150 Sorel, Georges  177–8, 179, 184 Souvtchinsky, Pierre  81 Sparrow, John  162 Spectator, The  175 Spengler, Oswald  26 Steiglitz, Alfred  87 Stein, Gertrude  67, 70, 81, 88, 99 Steiner, Rudolf  99 Stettheimer, Carrie  84 Stettheimer, Ettie  84 Stettheimer, Florine  80, 84–8 Stravinsky, Igor  26, 81, 100, 107, 110, 128, 129, 137, 140 Stravinsky, Theodore  137 Strzygowski, Josef  5 Sweeney, James Johnson  130, 131 Swift, Jonathan  83

Index Symonds, John Addington  11 Szilard, Laura  4 Tamayo, Rufino  25, 123, 133 Tanguy, Yves  85, 112 Tanner, Allen  81 Tanning, Dorothea  84, 85 Tate, Allen  139, 140 Taylor, Francis Henry  97 Tchelitchew, Pavel  1, 3, 13, 41, 42, 55, 58, 70, 74, 77–115, 127, 130, 154, 161, 176, 191 Teller, Bonwit  142 Thomson, Virgil  80, 81, 88, 99, 124 Thornhill, James  183–4 Tietze, Hans  92 Tietze-Conrat, Erica  92, 94, 95, 96 Tillich, Paul  140 Tilson, Joe  196 Times, The  88, 175 Times, The Sunday  175 Times Literary Supplement, The  27 Tippett, Michael  26 Titian (Tiziano Vecellio)  71, 90, 93, 96 Toklas, Alice B.  70, 99 Tonny, Kristians  80, 81 Toynbee, Arnold  19 Trilling, Lionel  81, 139, 140, 144, 145 Trismegistus, Hermes  110 Tschichold, Jan  184, 186 Tudor, Antony  11 Tyler, Parker  82, 84, 85, 88, 99, 102, 107, 108, 112, 114 Vaisey, Marina  175 Valeriano, Piero  105, 110 Valéry, Paul  26, 106 Van der Rohe, Mies  23, 182 Vasari, Giorgio  198 Velasquez, Diego  101 Venturi, Lionello  131, 133 Verlaine, Paul  35, 43, 48, 69 Vermeer, Johannes  35, 136 Veronese, Paolo  134 Verrio, Antonio  161 Vespucci, Simonetta  164, 166, 167, 191, 194 View  13, 83, 84, 85, 110, 112 Virgil  22

Index Vischer, Friedrich Theodor  31 Vollard, Ambroise  25, 53, 69 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)  68, 120, 131 Von Schlosser, Julius  5 Von Stuck, Franz  6 Von Tschudi, Hugo  4 VVV  13, 84 Wagner, Richard  45, 125 Walker, John  16 Walker, John  92 Wallace, Neville  175 Warburg, Aby  1, 2, 3, 5, 8–9, 13, 22, 23, 30, 31–2, 33, 38, 49, 50, 58, 65, 86, 94, 153, 158, 160, 167–70, 173, 175, 176, 178, 179, 184, 189, 190–6, 199 Warburg, Edward  16, 86 Warburg, Felix  16, 86, 180 Watson, Peter  82 Watteau, Jean-Antoine  67 Weill, Kurt  8

253

Welby, Victoria  24 Wescott, Glenway  42, 51, 83, 85, 86, 101 West, Benjamin  183, 184 Weston, Jessie L.  173 Wheeler, Monroe  41, 69, 83, 85, 86 Wilde, Oscar  35, 141 Wilson, Edmund  81 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim  170 Wind, Margaret (née Kellner)  1, 6, 7, 10, 15, 78, 81, 84, 102, 117, 118, 128–9, 130, 132, 134, 147, 157, 158, 160, 161, 180, 196 Wind, Maurice Delmar  4 Wittkower, Rudolf  13, 176, 178 Wolff, Eleonor  56–7, 65 Wölfflin, Heinrich  2, 5, 21, 31, 163 Wollheim, Richard  27 Wright, Frank Lloyd  144 Yates, Frances  178, 194 Yeats, W. B.  68, 141, 148

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