Modern Art and the Remaking of Human Disposition 9780226745183

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Modern Art & the Remaking of Human Disposition

Emmelyn Butterfield-­Rosen

Modern Art & the Remaking of Human Disposition

T h e U n i v e r s i t y of C h ic ag o Pr e s s

Chicago & London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2021 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2021 Printed in China 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21  1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­74504-­6 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­76418-­3 (e-­book) DOI: https://​doi​.org​/10​.7208​/chicago​/9780226745046​.0001 This publication is made possible in part from the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Butterfield-Rosen, Emmelyn, author. Title: Modern art and the remaking of human disposition / Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen. Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021007592 | ISBN 9780226745046 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226745183 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Human figure in art. | Seurat, Georges, 1859–1891. Sunday afternoon on the island of la Grande Jatte. | Klimt, Gustav, 1862–1918. Beethoven frieze. | Afternoon of a faun (Choreographic work : Nijinsky) | Art, Modern. Classification: LCC N7570 .B88 2021 | DDC 704.9/42—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021007592 ∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

F or m y m oth e r a nd fat h e r Suzanne Butterfield & Stuart Rosen

. . . Je suis ça je suis un singe Je suis singe mes pas un singe Je suis singe sent ettree singe Singe et singe ne pas un singe Singe et sage ne pas un singe Sage sage et sage et sage Je suis sage je suis un singe . . . . . . I am that I am a monkey I am monkey but not a monkey I am monkey without being monkey Monkey and monkey is not a monkey Monkey and wise is not a monkey Wise wise and wise and wise I am wise I am a monkey . . . From Vaslav Nijinsky , “Au hommes” [sic] (“To Humankind”)

Contents Int ro duct io n  1 1 F igur es o f Tho u ght  31 Poseuses and the Controversy of the Grande Jatte

2 Beet hov en ’ s Far ewe ll  101 The Creative Genius “in the Claws of the Secession”

3

The M is e-­en -­s cèn e o f D r eam s   165 L’Après-­midi d’un faune Acknowledgments 243 Notes 247 Index 323

Introduction

In Paris in the spring of 1886, at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition, the twenty-­seven-­year-­old painter Georges Seurat debuted a peculiar composition (fig. 1). On a large, seven-­by-­ten-­foot canvas, he presented a throng of his fellow Parisians partaking of a Sunday stroll on the banks of the Seine, outfitted in their finest attire, equipped with all the accoutrements of outdoor leisure—­walking sticks, fishing rods, parasols, pets. This scene of recreation taking place in a major European metropolis might have seemed of a type with other scenes of modern life exhibited regularly in the 1880s by Impressionist and other painters—­ but for the striking manner in which the artist posed the bodies of his promenaders. As the critic Félix Fénéon observed in a review of the exhibition, the men, women, and children in Seurat’s painting were “rigorously treated,” presented “at right angles,” “either from the back or full face or in profile” (ou de dos ou de face ou de profil ).1 Whether standing or seated, most figures were bolt upright, exhibiting what Fénéon elsewhere described as “the verticality of a sundial.”2 Almost none of these figures appeared to shift their weight onto one leg or to pace forward, extend or intertwine their forelimbs, twist their torsos, or turn or tilt their heads. Their “attitudes,” as another critic put it, seemed somehow constricted, reined in, “condensed with an astonishing concision.”3 This book was sparked by a simple formal observation: in European art in the decades before 1900, the body language in depictions of the human figure changed. Un Dimanche à la Grande Jatte–­1884 (1884–­ 1886), Seurat’s now-­iconic canvas, is merely one early example of a set of techniques for posing human bodies that would become commonplace. Around the turn of the twentieth century, several related strategies emerged across a heterogeneous range of works: artists posed multiple figures in identical positions, restrained the maneuvering and extension of limbs, distributed weight evenly throughout the body, and ­abolished oblique torsions around the body’s central vertical axis, aligning figures

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Fi g ure 1. Georges Seurat, Un Dimanche à la Grande ­Jatte–­1884, 1884–­1886. Oil on canvas, 207.5 × 308.1 cm. Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Art Institute of Chicago/ Art Resource, NY.

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“frontally”—­either parallel or perpendicular to a support and the imagined standpoint of a viewer. These figural strategies, which have never received sustained analysis in art history, evince a historical mutation in European art’s normative modes of imagining the human person.4 To pose bodies in this new manner was a primary visual device through which turn-­of-­the-­century artists manifested a philosophical rupture with some of the most basic assumptions about what it meant to successfully represent a human figure, assumptions that had undergirded the production of figural art in Europe for centuries prior.5 If “European art” could be considered a coherent aesthetic category—­as many art historians were beginning to conceive it by the second half of the nineteenth century, as the intensification of imperial networks populated European museums and reproductive imagery with a vastly expanded panoply of objects from around the world—­the coherence of this category was recognized to consist, to a large degree, in a set of norms for representing the human body’s postures and gestures.6 Rather than reinscribing European art as a monolithic and hermetic entity, this book aims to estrange this category by showing how, in art as well as political philosophy, “Europe . . . is an imaginary figure that remains deeply embedded in clichéd and shorthand forms,” as Dipesh Chakrabarty has stated.7 Highlighting the concrete postural shorthand around which a taxonomy such as “European art” could consolidate is necessary groundwork for its provincialization and deconstruction. To reiterate some timeworn art-­historical truisms: certain techniques of pose first formulated in classical Greek statuary were taken up systematically by artists early in the European renaissance; these techniques then held fairly constant for several centuries, right up through the moment of Impressionism. An interconnected set of formal strategies became both habitual and obligatory. To vary postures and gestures between discrete figures, to turn bodies obliquely, to acknowledge their subjection to gravity through an uneven distribution of weight to the lower extremities—­all were regarded as indispensable strategies for conveying not only the human body’s corporeal mass and volume but also, more fundamentally, its indwelling capacity for autonomous thought and movement. This ensemble of techniques stands as a primary example of a “deeply implicative convention” that, as David Summers has argued, “remains invisible in stylistically periodized histories of Western art precisely because it is a constant.”8 The constancy of these conventions over the longue durée underscores the import of their disruption at the end of the nineteenth century, when artists exposed this “invisible” line of continuity by severing it conspicuously. This book examines the motivating circumstances and expressive consequences of the repudiation of these inherited conventions of pose. Its broadest and most basic ambition is to show how new concepts of subjectivity were materialized in works of art by means of new dispositions of the body. My aim is to restore to view a highly tangible dimension of

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an epistemological transformation: how a new vocabulary of poses and postures in art participated in reconceptualizing what it meant, for the hegemonic cultures of Western Europe around 1900, to be human. More broadly, examining this episode of formal change in figuration uncovers the structural role played by the body and its poses and postures in a longer prehistory of human self-­understanding and self-­ representation in Western culture. Artworks at the turn of the century deconstruct the concrete postural mechanics through which European artists and writers had both visualized and conceptualized certain ostensibly abstract, immaterial properties of selfhood—­such as “thought,” reason, or consciousness—­that European culture had long taken to be the most defining feature of the species to which Carl Linnaeus, in 1758, gave the name Homo sapiens.9 In this process of deconstruction, a novel corporeal language was forged and incorporated into projects of personal and cultural self-­representation in mainstream venues of high culture. This new corporeal language might now be taken to be a visual touchstone in the prehistory of a more recent brand of ­species self-­identification: the one that at the turn of the next century, in a “Euro­­centric critique of European humanism,” embraced the name “post­human.”10

Disposition I consider artistic approaches to posing human figures under the rubric of “disposition” because this term encapsulates my methodological prem­ise: that pose or posture is a privileged locus for apprehending correspondences of concrete form and abstract content. The word disposition derives from the Latin dispositio, a term in classical rhetoric denoting the arrangement or ordering of parts into coherent verbal arguments. Current definitions include both the “relative position of the parts or elements of a whole” and “mental constitution or temperament; turn of mind.”11 Dispositio was conceptually keyed to a norm of order embodied by a normative human in classical rhetoric. Quintilian, in his textbook Institutio Oratoria (95 ce ), analogized successful dispositio to assembling casts of human limbs into an anatomically correct statue of a person.12 It is also significant for my thinking that dispositio provides the linguistic root for Michel Foucault’s term dispositif, or “apparatus,” which he defines as a set of “strategies of relations of forces supporting, supported by, types of knowledge.”13 The disposition of bodily poses, this book contends, serves in the history of figural art as a dispositif in quite a literal sense: poses were a primary formal mechanism through which artists visualized for their audiences different “types of knowledge” about the inner constitution of the subject. In renaissance aesthetic theory, which adopted many of its terms from classical rhetoric, the terms “disposition” and “composition” were virtually synonymous, though disposition often referred more specifically to the arrangement of figures.14 The paramount importance painters ascribed to the disposition of postures and gestures stemmed from

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the understanding that they served a dual aesthetic function, establishing certain abstract norms of visual order within a figural composition, while simultaneously providing viewers with imaginative access to a depicted figure’s invisible psychological interior. As Leonardo da Vinci stated, “The good painter has two principal things to paint: that is, man and the intention of his mind. The first is easy, the second difficult, because it has to be represented by gestures and movements of the parts of the body.” And thus, “attitude is the first and most important part of the portrayal of a figure.”15 When, for instance, Leon Battista Alberti proposed in On Painting (1435) that painters should always endeavor to compose a picture with “bodies in many dissimilar poses,” he did so not only because he believed that the human eye was always pleased by “variety,” but also because he took for granted that a variety of poses was necessary if a painter was to convey that each human being was imbued with a unique and autonomous soul. “The movements of the soul are made known by movements of the body,” he asserted, and in a picture, “each man . . . [must] clearly [show] the movement of his own soul.”16 Similarly, Leonardo instructed that “there should always be variation in the limbs of posed figures,” so that “if one arm goes forward, the other should be still or go backward, and if the figure poses on one leg, the shoulder that is above that leg should be lower than the other.” Moreover, the painter should “never make heads straight on the shoulders, but turn them to the right side or the left.” Such turns of the body were necessary, he explained, because figures should “not seem to be pieces of wood,” and “because it is necessary for them to look lively and awake and not asleep.”17 I draw on these familiar passages not only to point toward norms that artists working around the turn of the twentieth century would violate ostentatiously, but also to emphasize how formal conventions for posing figures were inflected by—­and constitutive of—­historically specific comprehensions of the human disposition. For Leonardo and Alberti, the compositional desiderata of postural variety among figures and asymmetry in the tilt of a figure’s head and the set of its legs were tied to a concept of the “mind” as synonymous with lively wakefulness and of the “soul” as a motor of passions externalized legibly in gestural body actions.18 By 1900, in the wake of the rise of scientific psychologies—­or what one psychologist termed, in 1885, “psychology without soul”—­such conceptualizations of human interiority had been disputed vociferously.19 The transformation in strategies of pose in modern art of the late nineteenth century manifests this fundamental revision in European culture’s modes of comprehending the human “mind” or “soul.” That, in brief, is the core premise of my argument, which draws on—­ and puts into conversation—­four primary bodies of evidence. First, a series of artworks that adopt a changed approach to figural pose. Second, responses to those works of art (both visual and verbal) recorded by period critics. Third, a corpus of art-­historical literature that emerged

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in the late nineteenth century that sought to describe and explain the distinctive modes of bodily presentation found in forms of art that turn-­of-­the-­century Europeans often characterized as “primitive.” And fourth, scientific, psychological, and philosophical literature—­much of it already familiar within canonical cultural histories of turn-­of-­the-­ century Europe—­in which new concepts of mind and embodiment were articulated. Shuttling between these four registers of discourse, this book aims to pinpoint with new precision connections between the history of concepts of the psyche and the formal logic of artworks.

Seurat, Klimt, Nijinsky The elimination of oblique turns of the body, the emphasis on “stiffness” and uniformity of gesture, the de-­articulation of hands and feet, and the positioning of bodies with ambiguous spatial relationships to the ground are strategies prevalent across modern art produced in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They feature in works by artists from different styles and schools—­from Ferdinand Hodler to Pablo Picasso, Paul Gauguin to Oskar Schlemmer, to name only a few. This book does not attempt to trace the scope of these formal tendencies. Rather, through sustained engagement with the intricate workings of a few individual artworks, I aim to defamiliarize and enrich our understanding of figural devices relevant beyond the handful of works discussed here. The examples at the center of this book are more exceptional than representative. Each is an artwork with long tentacles, structured by dense networks of references to other cultural artifacts: paintings, poems, musical compositions, and, especially, sculptures.20 The self-­reflexive engagement with the aesthetic past in each of these works indicates how the emergence of new postural conventions was bound up in preoccupations with continuity and rupture. And the deliberateness with which these works grapple with ontological questions about the human being’s inner disposition, and the psychological valences built into European art’s existing conventions of posture, earn them a somewhat special status as “theoretical objects.”21 The three works that anchor the three chapters are major, manifesto-­ like projects by well-­known artists: the canvas Poseuses (1886–­1888) by Seurat (1859–­1891), the French Neo-­Impressionist; the Beethovenfries (1902), a mural by the Austrian Secessionist Gustav Klimt (1862–­1918); and the ballet L’Après-­midi d’un faune (1912) by the Russian dancer and Ballets Russes choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky (1889–­1950). The work of sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840–­1917) also features, with varying prominence, across all three chapters. As an artist who worked from within—­ albeit at the very limit of—­a formal paradigm of corporeal expression abandoned by the book’s main protagonists, Rodin is a clarifying counterexample who offers singular insight into the stakes of modern art’s new approach to body language.

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The heterogeneity of my three core examples is strategic. The analogies that reverberate across these works, produced by artists from different national backgrounds, working in different mediums and in very different styles and cultural contexts, reveal not only how common formal strategies were being applied to the human figure across different materialities—­from oil on canvas, to site-­specific “fresco mosaic,” to live performance—­but also how these formal strategies responded to a set of preoccupations that had become urgent throughout turn-­of-­the-­century Europe. The motif of the nonhuman animal, for instance, is pivotal for all three artists—­from the leashed pet monkey in Seurat’s Grande Jatte, to the winged gorilla looming overhead in Klimt’s mural, to the piebald faun who stars in Nijinsky’s dance.22 This animal presence signals the embeddedness of these three works in the new cultural environment inaugurated by the event that Sigmund Freud referred to in 1917, as the “biological blow” to “human narcissism.” These works participate in the broader reckoning with the imaginative consequences of admitting humankind’s animal ancestry that came in the wake of Charles Darwin’s publication, in 1859, of his sensationally popular book On the Origin of Species. Equally and inseparably, these works participate in the re­ envisioning of the human psyche that accompanied the popularization of evolutionary ideas. They were produced in the throes of what Freud extolled by extension as the “psychological blow” to human narcissism—­ the recognition, in the distinctly modern disciplines of scientific psychology, of the unconscious dimensions of human mental life.23 The figural art produced in this moment, coincident with “the birth-­period of self-­conscious and assertive sciences of man (psychology, anthropology, sociology),” evinces, if not quite a “blow” to human narcissism, its regrounding on a new basis.24 The belief that a momentous shift had taken place in the status of humanity as a conceptual category was vital to European self-­understand­ ing in the decades around 1900. This attitude—­marking a new phase in European culture’s self-­ascribed role of “managing and controlling the idea of [the] human and humanity”—­is encapsulated in Freud’s portentous rhetoric of rupture, his positioning of himself and Darwin as the two historical figures consummating a Copernican revolution that deposed the human species from its previously privileged position in the cosmos and among all creatures on earth.25 My concern is not to substantiate that interpretation of history but rather to show how works of art participated in fundamental ways in its “epochal consciousness.”26 Visual materials—­and complex works of art especially—­possess a capacity to communicate ideas with a potency that exceeds language. Seurat’s canvas, Klimt’s mural, and Nijinsky’s dance demonstrate with particular vividness how the perception of epistemological rupture could be actualized or even acted out in artworks.27 My inclusion of choreography is meant to underscore that impulse toward materialization; Nijinsky’s dance—­which he choreographed to perform with his own person—­is

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only the most literal and self-­reflexive example of a more general artistic impulse to stage and give body to new conceptions of the human psyche, and hold them up before large audiences for collective scrutiny. The main argument of this book unfolds episodically. The three chapters examine works made at intervals of roughly a decade (1888, 1902, 1912). They can be read as autonomous histories; each is a discrete web of texts and images, organized around nodal points in the artworks where philological and iconographic analysis can intersect very directly. The through-­lines linking the three episodes will be apparent as the chapters unfold, and I have largely left them to be synthesized by the reader. The first chapter, “Figures of Thought: Poseuses and the Controversy of the Grande Jatte,” focuses on two related pictures by Seurat to introduce bodily pose as both a central topos of the history of art and an aesthetic device that came into crisis under the pressure of new conceptions of the psyche in Europe at the close of the nineteenth century. The subsequent chapters examine more specific ramifications of the relationship staged by Seurat in Poseuses—­between new paradigms of pose and a new epistemology of the subject, which no longer presumed a fundamental distinction between animal and human nature or, relatedly, that the human being’s defining endowment was the activity of an alert, autonomous, and rational consciousness. Read in chronological sequence, the chapters suggest the increasing complexity of ideas of animal descent and unconscious mentation over the course of a quarter century, in terms of both artistic strategies and psychological theories. If, in the case of Seurat, we begin with the basic figural problem of whether and how to represent an unconscious human being in some semblance of real (public or private) space, by the time we reach Nijinsky, it is more a matter of representing internal mental imagery and the mind itself as a structure—­or rather, as a mechanism envisioned as a “psychic apparatus built into homo natura.”28 And if we begin with artists thinking about sexuality through a Darwinian lens, which is to say, in terms of the heterosexual and the procreative, we end with an envisioning of sexuality closer to the one proposed by psychoanalysis in the early decades of the twentieth century. In tandem with an eruption of unambiguously inorganic, mechanical imagery for the metaphorizing of unconscious thought processes, we arrive at a vision of sexuality as something fundamentally nonprocreative and inextricable from infantile drives and activities.29 The three chapters center on three different “primary postures.”30 My discussion of Seurat crystallizes around the figure of the standing studio model. With Klimt, I take up the motif of the seated human thinker. With Nijinsky, the recumbent dreamer. The impulse across these works to shed culturally specific corporeal signifiers for communicating human uniqueness—­and more specifically, human consciousness—is encapsulated in this episodic progression from standing, to sitting, to lying prone on the ground, in a posture that relinquishes the erect attitude Darwin identified as the “most conspicuous difference” (perhaps

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the only difference of real significance) separating humans from other animal species, and an attitude that had long served, in European art and philosophy, as the postural synonym for a uniquely human form of awakeness.31

Mind and Pose

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“The meanings of words must be made out: Reason, Will, Consciousness,” Darwin wrote in 1838, in a private journal exploring the “metaphysical” implications of his nascent theory of the genealogical relation of all living organisms.32 This note-­to-­self is emblematic of a pervasive tendency in nineteenth-­century thinking, shared across many disciplines, to redefine and put into question mental endowments that Western culture previously conceived as the grounding of a uniquely human form of subjectivity. Jonathan Crary has described this intellectual development, which became pronounced in late nineteenth-­century figuration, as a “turbulent transition from a philosophy of consciousness . . . to a philosophy of life.” This is a useful rubric for contextualizing the formal transition enacted in L’Après-­midi d’un faune, the Beethoven­fries, and Poseuses. Broadly, these works articulate the turbulent mutation of European art’s working visual concept of the human person; a mutation occurring at a historical juncture when the previously “inevitable congruence between subjectivity and a thinking ‘I’ ” no longer exists.33 In each of these three works, the dimension of the subject that presents itself to be showcased visually is no longer consciousness or “thinking” (in the nineteenth century these words were often used interchangeably). Rather, it is, roughly speaking, biology in all its capaciousness, encompassing the mind as a function of the body with its “lower” organs, automatic processes, reproductive capacity, and attendant instincts of sexuality. “Is man, as a whole, to be spoken of by preference from the point of view of his animality, or from the point of view of his rationality?”34 This question, voiced in a review of The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), was perhaps the most polemical one raised by Darwin’s publications—­a question that was in essence psychological. For Darwin, it was self-­evident that human beings had inherited not just the structure of their bodies but also their mental equipment from the so-­called lower animals. “Having proved mens & brutes bodies on one type,” he wrote already in 1839, “almost superfluous to consider minds.”35 What would it mean to accept and represent this dimension of the evolutionary idea? And what would it look like? That basic question is explored—­with varying degrees of ambivalence—­by Seurat, Klimt, and Nijinsky.36 We can be sure that each of these artists confronted formulations of Darwin’s ideas. His evolutionary theories circulated widely in popular culture through highly transmissible verbal catchphrases and visual caricatures that, it has been argued, were perhaps the first true memes of modernity.37 In certain cases

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I specify how the idea of evolution directly intervened in an artist’s life—­ such as Seurat’s encounter with Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) in his compulsory anatomy course at the École des Beaux-­Arts. But on the whole, what is at stake is not tracing lines of causality but elucidating structures of analogy between relatively synchronic visual and verbal hypotheses about human mental disposition and functioning—­in some cases entirely outside the possibility of direct “influence.” The point is not that such analogies exist—­that they do is hardly surprising—­but rather to show the concrete, corporeal logic through which they could materialize. The works of art at the center of this book broadcast their preoccupations with evolutionary descent in a relatively simple way, by foregrounding animal motifs. There is greater complexity in the ways they call up ideas emerging from what was then the nascent discipline called psychology. In the decades after becoming institutionalized in the 1870s, psychology accrued profound cultural prestige, becoming, as Friedrich Nietzsche claimed in 1886, “Mistress of the Sciences” and usurper of the throne of philosophy as a “new master discipline . . . in articulating what it means to be human.”38 Rather than through iconography, it is through the specific device of posture that these works can be said to parallel psychology’s upending of that category of the human mind known as the “person”—­if “what person stands for” had been, in John Locke’s influential definition, “a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking.”39 Structured into the basic form of turn-­of-­the-­century figuration is the obsolescence of European culture’s “old metaphysical prejudice that man ‘always thinks,’ ” and the replacement of that old prejudice with a newly conventional view that “man really thinks very little and very seldom,” as Wilhelm Wundt, founder in 1879 of the world’s first laboratory of experimental psychology, stated in his Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology.40 Seurat, Klimt, and Nijinsky posed human bodies in ways that departed decisively from inherited paradigms of naturalistic figuration. Yet their postural antinaturalism can be seen as instituting naturalism of another kind; it was a visual sign for acknowledging the “naturalization of mind” that, by the end of the nineteenth century, had transformed understandings of the psyche.41 In different ways and with different kinds of emphases, these artists each gave form to the expanded concept of “mind” that emerged from this naturalization, which went hand in hand with an expansion of the prototypical subject of psychological theorizing. New scientific psychologies programmatically rejected the habitual solipsistic tendency in prior European philosophy of mind to “simply take for its object the adult male, white and civilized,” as Théodule Ribot observed derisively in 1870.42 The practitioners of the new psychology were still adult white men, almost exclusively. But they began to premise their generalizing psychological theories on everyone left out of their own

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hegemonic subcategory of the species—­in particular women, children, racialized colonial subjects deemed “primitive” or “noncivilized,” not to mention animals and certain adults (so-­called hysterics, neurotics, and perverts, among others) who were deemed to exhibit “pathological” tendencies.43 In tandem with this colonizing gesture to incorporate new populations of minds into psychological theory, Euro-­American psychologists embraced a vastly expanded concept of mind that no longer presumed, as Freud put it, that “ ‘conscious’ and ‘mental’ were identical.”44 The new psychology placed particular emphasis on the many precognitive aspects of human behavior that functioned involuntarily or automatically, beyond or beneath the thresholds of will and awareness. Most famously, this new psychology privileged “sleep and analogous states”: activities of the mind outside of waking consciousness such as dreaming, hallucination, hypnotic trance, and somnambulism.45 Seurat’s Poseuses, Klimt’s Beethovenfries, and Nijinsky’s L’Après-­midi d’un faune each put on display not only animal motifs but also human figures who appear to be—­to quote a stage direction of Nijinsky—­“asleep with eyes open.” As an ensemble, these works make evident a thorough cross-­contamination in the turn-­of-­the-­century visual imagination between evolutionary theory’s blurring of the categories animal and human and the new psychology’s blurring of a categorical distinction between states of sleep and wakefulness.46 More importantly, considering these works together reveals a fundamental and heretofore unrecognized formal logic intrinsic to modern art’s engagement with “psychological modernism” (as the new psychology is sometimes termed).47 That is to say: the visualization of the unconscious mind, like its linguistic articulation, could not be communicated positively. Its figuration invited postures of the body that functioned much like the privative prefix un-­, postures that signified by means of an implicit negation of a preceding set of corporeal norms in European art history, which had communicated consciousness as a positively representable psychic entity.48

The Exhaustion of Gestural Formulas

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The transformation of pose in modern art occurred at a moment when corporeal language in the figural arts was emerging as a topic of interest across a range of scholarly disciplines. Art historians, doctors, psychologists, anthropologists, scientists and others began, in the decades around 1900, to direct greater attention toward the poses and gestures of figures in representational arts—­in historical artifacts of European art and in the arts of other cultures of the world, as well as in renderings not widely regarded as art, such as the drawings of children. Figural postures were analyzed to interpret the meaning of specific artworks, trace the historical evolution of artistic styles, chart patterns of cultural transmission, and comprehend human developmental and perceptual psychology. These proliferating discourses have rarely been considered alongside the change in modern art’s prevailing rhetoric of body lan-

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guage. But these formal and discursive developments cannot be comprehended in isolation. The heightened attention to artistic body language circa 1900 is exemplified in the work of the German scholar Aby Warburg. In 1905, he coined the term Pathosformel to describe postures and gestures that were “prefigured” in the art and sculpture of Greco-­Roman antiquity and subsequently redeployed by renaissance artists to express the hu­man figure’s inner psychic states, specifically states of heightened emotion or pathos.49 Tracing the legacy of these so-­called formulas of pathos in postmedieval art and civilization was the core preoccupation of Warburg’s research, which treated gesture as the primary vehicle of continuity within a European aesthetic tradition he understood to be the “afterlife” (Nachleben) of classical antiquity.50 Warburg’s scholarship modeled a form of close attention to expressive gestures in art and framed them as a topic of foundational interest for a new “science of culture” that would treat visual artifacts as components of cultural phenomena “in all their interconnectedness.”51 This book is indebted to those innovations. But Warburg’s ideas serve primarily as a foil or counterpoint to the argument that follows, which highlights a historical and formal development in modern art that allows us to recognize Warburg’s research as a far less singular phenomenon. His conceptualization of the Pathosformel was simply one symptom of a much broader crisis in European modernity of the late nineteenth century—­a crisis surrounding the origin, meaning, and expressive efficacy of bodily gestures. “By the end of the nineteenth century, the Western bourgeoisie had definitely lost its gestures.” This intriguing, telegraphic statement launches Giorgio Agamben’s short essay “Notes on Gesture.” Agamben does not qualify his claim or provide a concrete explanation of what exactly is meant by a “loss of gestures.” Nor does he stipulate an explicit reason why the loss occurred at this precise juncture in history, though he implies that scientific studies of movement, by practitioners of both medical psychiatry and protocinematic photography, contributed to conditions in which “gestures lose their ease under the action of invisible powers.” Nevertheless, the art-­historical record supports Agamben’s hypothesis that something like a loss of gestures occurred before 1900—­at least within the imaginative domain of artworks. This loss can be seen as the context informing Warburg’s expansion of the discipline of art history around the visual-­conceptual category of gesture. For “an age that has lost its gestures,” as Agamben stated, “is, for this reason, obsessed by them.”52 Warburg emphasized Greco-­Roman antiquity’s enduring bequest to European art of “a primal vocabulary of passionate gesticulation” during a moment when many modern artists were systematically eradicating that gestural language.53 Historians have repeatedly noted that gesture in European art of the late nineteenth century appears to take on an overtly problematic status. This recognition surfaces, for instance, in

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F igu re 2. (facing) Aby Warburg, panel 55 of the Mnemosyne Picture ­Atlas, October 1929. © The Warburg Institute.

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Martha Ward’s observation that in French art of the 1880s the “depiction of gestures was becoming problematized across an array of artists and subjects,” or Kenneth Clark’s comment: “With Rodin an epoch and an episode has come to an end. The idea of pathos expressed through the body has reached its final stage and is in decay.”54 Warburg—­who began his formal study of art history at the University of Bonn in 1886, the same year the Grande Jatte debuted at the final Impressionist exhibition—­ recognized the persistence of Pathosformeln in the aftermath of the exhaustion and obsolescence of such formulas in much contemporary practice. Indeed, for the three works at the center of this book, the relevance of Warburg’s argument concerning the afterlife of a “classical language of gesture” lies in the fact that it no longer seems to apply to them.55 When “pre-­coined” classical gestures come into play in Seurat’s, Klimt’s, and Nijinsky’s works, they do so to be transformed, travestied, or supplanted by opposing postural modes. Modern art, in other words, presents a theoretical and iconographic problem for Warburg’s project. Consider Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, a painting included in the art historian’s famous Mnemosyne Picture Atlas. This assemblage of nearly a thousand images was conceived as an “inventory of pre-­coined classical forms” that had shaped the representation of bodily gesture and movement from the European renaissance forward. Known for its sweeping historical scope, the Atlas incorporated imagery from contemporary newspapers and magazines—­ but no images postdating Manet’s 1863 canvas that could be classified as art, in the old “fine art” sense.56 The Déjeuner thus occupied a charged, ambiguous position within a constellation of reproductions assembled to demonstrate the “survival” of Pathosformeln, or the “ineradicable force” of “the pictorial language of gesture.”57 It inhabited the Atlas as a point of continuity but also of terminus. In one sense, Manet’s painting could serve as linchpin evidence of Warburg’s core historical conviction: that in art, as he put it, “expressive values draw their penetrating strength not from the rejection of older forms, but from the nuances in the transformations to which they are subjected.”58 As Warburg demonstrated on panel 55 of the Atlas (fig. 2) and discussed in a short essay on the Déjeuner, Manet had patterned the poses of the canvas’s three central figures on an ancient formula. Tracing their postures all the way back to a Hellenistic sarcophagus, Warburg showed how this pattern of postures was repeated in a composition by Raphael (preserved in a print by Marcantonio Raimondi, ca. 1510–­1520; fig. 3), a seventeenth-­century Dutch picture, and eventually, Manet’s Déjeuner (fig. 4). Yet Warburg’s determination to situate the Déjeuner as a last link in a chain extending back to Hellenistic Greece stemmed, perhaps, from his unstated recognition that the picture represented something more than a mere confirmation of the “ineradicable force” of the gestural formulas Greco-­Roman art had long ago established. “No modern painting,” he acknowledged in his essay on the Déjeuner, “poses

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Fig u re 3. Marcantonio Raimondi (after Raphael), The Judgment of Paris (detail), ca. 1510–­1520. Engraving, 29.1 × 43.7 cm. Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art. Fig u re 4 . Édouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1862–­1863. Oil on canvas, 208 × 265.5 cm. Collection of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photo: Benoît Touchard/ Mathieu Rabeau, © RMN­Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

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more difficulties for an art critic who wants to demonstrate the crucial, essential role of formal and thematic links with tradition.”59 In treating Manet’s Déjeuner as evidence of the survival of classical forms, Warburg’s account of the painting’s historical significance is at odds with those of later scholars, who have tended to regard Manet as the initiator of a “deep rupture” in modern aesthetic culture, and Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, in particular, as a “caesura in the history of painting.”60 The most lucid account of the art-­historical dynamics of that caesura comes from Michael Fried, who has described Manet as the last modern painter who felt “the need to secure the connectedness of his

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art to that of the distant past, to the enterprise of the Old Masters.”61 Fried acknowledges but does not develop the basic point at issue for us here: bodily gestures stand at the crux of Manet’s stance in relation to the history of European art. For Manet, figural poses were the primary unit of quotation, the primary vehicle through which connectedness to that history could be made manifest.62 And if paintings such as the Déjeuner adopt a newly panoramic perspective on the history of European art—­presupposing “the availability of all previous painting in an imaginary museum space” and drawing from new “universal” histories of European art like Charles Blanc’s fourteen-­volume History of Painters of All Schools (1849–­1869)—­they reflect an insight quite similar to the one Warburg, a half century later, placed at the heart of his research and the imaginary museum of the Atlas.63 Manet calls attention to “the repetition-­structure of European painting from the early Renaissance on,” and emphasizes how this repetition-­structure implicates above all human figures, operating through their postures and gestures.64 What separates Manet’s perspective from Warburg’s, however, is the complex endgame overtly at stake in the painter’s recycling of “pre-­ coined” poses—­a practice he largely abandoned after the 1860s. Manet’s assertion of historical continuity in his works of the 1860s, through pervasive, undisguised citations of poses borrowed from various genres, national schools, and periods of European art history, ultimately had the effect of making obvious, as Fried suggested, that the art of the past “was no longer alive, no longer capable . . . of giving life to the present.”65 In Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, suffice it to say, the “pre-­coined” gestural formula patterned on Raimondi’s mythological print (patterned, in turn, on the Hellenistic sarcophagus) is rendered conspicuously strange. Manet frankly acknowledged that the figures were posed models. He chose to clothe two of the three figures, all of whom were originally naked, and—­a crucial detail almost never mentioned—­to delete the oar lodged in the riverbank that supports the outstretched arm of the river deity reclining at the right in Raimondi’s print.66 By removing this oar, Manet transformed a resting limb into an unsupported arm extended in space; it reads—­necessarily, if not convincingly—­as a gesture of pointing, exclamation, or declamation. These modifications produce not only the sense of physical “frozenness” Fried has stressed but also, more profoundly, a sense of psychological foreclosure, a barring of access to interiority or authentic affect.67 Indeed, once one perceives how Manet created the arm’s gesture, it becomes impossible to unsee this feature. One’s sense of the deliberate estrangement of body language in the picture becomes even sharper.68 The relaxation of the prior gesture, with its acknowledgment of the body’s need to support its physical weight, is both evoked and canceled. The arm appears to rigidify in place. And the elusive expressive quality of this trio—­who already project a sense that some formula has been imposed upon their bodies, an arbitrary formula that bears no motivated relation to their mental states—­becomes far more flagrant.

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To quote the succinct summation of Carlo Ginzburg in reference to Manet: “If there is a Pathosformel, there is no pathos.”69 Indeed, contrary to Warburg’s conviction in the “ineradicable force” of “the pictorial language of gesture,” Manet’s painting almost seems to register an art-­historical second law of thermodynamics, demonstrating that over time the energy stored in a gestural formula is inevitably subject to entropic decay. An integral dimension of the meaning of Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, as a statement about modern life and as a statement about the possibility—­or impossibility—­of carrying on in modernity that self-­ important “enterprise of the Old Masters,” is the suggestion that European art’s classical formulas of corporeal expression could no longer go on repeating themselves as they long had. Why was the repetition-­structure of figural gestures disrupted in Manet’s art in this way? This question remains relatively unexamined, though almost all scholarship acknowledges the artist’s profound estrangement of inherited conventions of expressive body language. Does Manet’s draining of pathos from Pathosformeln emerge from a newly synthetic understanding of the history of European art? Does it betray his hyperconsciousness of working in a historically “late” phase in the evolution of a particular tradition of figuration, by which point the sheer density of repetitions of gestural formulas over the course of centuries had progressively exposed their purely formulaic character?70 Or should the decay of affective “charge” in these gestures be understood as referring outward, to the people in the social world that surrounded Manet’s pictures? By 1900, many writers were testifying to the realization that the human being’s modes of comporting and inhabiting the body are historically variable, that the body internalizes its social milieu at the biological level through the kinds of corporeal automatisms twentieth-­century sociologists later defined as habitus or hexis.71 “The gestures of humanity . . . had changed,” Rainer Maria Rilke claimed in 1902; this changed gesticulation revealed “greater experience and, at the same time, greater ignorance; much less courage and a constant attacking of obstacles; much more mourning for what has been lost; much more calculation, judgement, reflection, and less spontaneity.”72 That Manet’s paintings presage some of these later insights about a historical transformation in bodily expression is a presumption that permeates many analyses of his pictures. The blank, vacant, or impassive quality of expression seen as so distinctive of his figures (perhaps especially his female figures) has often been compared to the “blasé affect” Georg Simmel identified, in 1903, as a new and characteristic quality of modern metropolitan demeanor.73 Simmel coined the term Blasiertheit two years before Warburg coined the term Pathosformel. It could be said that Manet’s citational paintings of the 1860s prefigure the simultaneity of those two terms, anticipating and putting into conversation Warburg’s art-­historical insights about

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the repetition-­structure of gestural language in European art with Simmel’s sociological insights about the changed demeanor of contemporary city-­dwellers. Manet points toward a broader cultural context in which the human body’s externalization of affect, recognized by Warburg as the very leitmotif of European art history, was being relegated to the past, repressed, or conceptually complicated. Manet occupied a world in which the human “exterior” was recognized to be splitting off from the psychological interior in a dual sense. Concretely, manners of public comportment were perceived to have transformed into something more impassive, less legibly expressive. More abstractly, modern culture was increasingly coming to recognize “a new kind of polarity,” as T. J. Clark put it, “of conscious and unconscious mind—­which theorized (among other things) . . . that the ‘inside’ cannot be read from the ‘outside.’ ”74 Ultimately, this book is less about specifying actual historical changes in habitus, as embodied by real historical persons and refracted into artworks, than it is about specifying the conceptual manipulation of the figure of the body at a certain moment in history. As the anthropologist Michael Lambek proposes, “We have to attend to body and mind in body (embodiment), and also to body and mind in mind (imagination),” and these two entities, although intimately related, cannot simply be conflated or “captured . . . within the same structure.”75 I address how real people posed, or were posed, as props for the production of figural representations, as well as how some contemporary writers imagined how specific types of individuals—­such as professional artists’ models, shop-­ girls, hypnotized “hysterics,” “men of genius,” exhibitionistic children, and “perverts”—­might pose and gesture and comport their bodies in their social worlds. But I am not writing a history of such bodies at any literal level. The lived history of gestures and the personal experiences they encode will always remain, in certain fundamental ways, irretrievable. Through the study of art, however, we can capture the body’s postures as a core imaginative and metaphorical structure—­one that was always tasked with communicating basic ideas about the nature of human mindedness. I interpret the loss of gesture identified by Agamben as a loss that was primarily imaginative. What was lost, perhaps, was an established conceptual framework for making sense of human gesture. Significantly, the very word Warburg deployed in his analysis of art’s formulas of gesture, Pathos, was a terminological archaism in a culture already accustomed to speaking not of “passions” but of “emotions”—­a more secular, scientific word that registered a shift of emphasis away from interior states of feeling arising in a mind or soul toward the physiological body’s movements.76 New conceptions of emotions in the nineteenth century were tied to a broader rethinking of dualistic models of the mind-­body relation. The notion of a human person as, in common parlance, an “intelligence served by organs” was coming to be replaced by theories based on the general premise that, as Darwin postulated, “mind is [a] function

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of body.”77 This reprioritization from mind to body was conceptualized with particular clarity in theories of emotion that effectively inverted the causal order taken for granted in the philosophy of figuration outlined by Leonardo or Alberti. In this paradigm of figural representation, gesture indexed the existence of a mind that was the motive force of the organs—­a microcosmic mirroring, perhaps, of how intelligent organisms in the world were presumed to index the existence of the divine “intelligence” who had created them. Darwin’s widely read treatise on bodily gestures, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), removed emotional expression from any framework of rationality, denying earlier notions that comprehended expression as a communicative capacity uniquely given to humans in a designed universe.78 In effect, Darwin animalized and infantilized expressive movements. He recast them as symptoms rather than messages, noncommunicative bodily reflexes retained as defunctioned relics of previously functional behaviors performed in the phylo­ genetic and ontogenetic past of the organism. (The sneer of disdain, for example, he described as a relic of animal ancestors baring canine teeth to predators, while the furrowing of the brow in cogitation was explained as a reflex retained from the human baby’s contracted eyelids during crying fits.)79 Darwin’s conviction that emotional expressions were involuntary, inherited automatic behaviors was quickly taken up by other writers, who made more explicit the degree to which consciousness was now seen as extraneous to the experience of emotion. In the early 1880s, the American psychologist William James and the Danish psychiatrist Carl Lange simultaneously and independently conceived what became known as the James-­Lange theory of emotion. Both argued for an avowedly “paradoxical” hypothesis: “that which common sense treats as the effect of emotion is its cause.”80 As James stated, we are amused because we laugh, we feel sad “because we cry,” and outside of these bodily manifestations, an emotion “has no mental status.”81 More than simply asking, as James did in the title of his famous article, “What is an emotion?,” these new theories of emotion raised even more elementary questions concerning the underlying psychic makeup of the subject. “Does ‘consciousness’ exist?” James asked in the title of a later article.82 The “loss of gesture” in modern art, I suggest, stemmed from an impulse to reckon with such a question.

From Gesture to Posture

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If Manet’s Déjeuner shows an artistic loss of gestures in process, Seu­ rat’s Grande Jatte shows the aftermath. One way to describe the formal breach separating these two pictures would be to say that a tradition of figuration built around a paradigm of expressive gestures has been displaced by a paradigm of postures. This shift, from gesture to posture, reflects a change in the facet of human interiority that most pre­occupied

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artists. Now that a question mark had been attached to the concept of consciousness as such, representing the human subject’s transitory emotional states was no longer sufficient to communicate knowledge about the human interior. The shift from gesture to posture reflects an imperative to address more permanent, underlying psychic structures and, in particular, to communicate the baseline condition of consciousness (or its absence). Although posture and gesture are interrelated phenomena that I will often discuss in tandem, certain distinctions can be drawn between them. These distinctions are consequential for the aesthetic transformation this book examines. Gesture is typically conceptualized as “a movement of part of the body, especially a hand or the head.”83 The particularly close association between gesture and the human forelimbs—­ unique among tetra­pod animals as non-­weight-­bearing members specialized for pre­hension (grasping)—­is indicated in the word’s derivation from the Latin gerere, to carry.84 Posture, by contrast, is less localized to the upper extremities and, thus, less human-­specific. Defined as “the position in which someone holds their body when standing or sitting,” posture can be conceptualized within the framework of positional behavior, a phrase used in the field of primatology to describe the circumscribed repertoire of stance and locomotor possibilities unique to a given species.85 Posture describes the disposition of the entire body, including—­and this distinction is crucial—­its lower portions: the genitals and weight-­bearing legs and feet, as well as the head and the hands. Compared to gesture, posture is a lower-­order, more primary phenomenon, less beholden to the hierarchy of organs implicit in gesture, which privileges the human head, arms, and hands. Posture, moreover, can internalize stasis, a point underscored by its root—­shared with the word “pose”—­in the Latin verb ponere, to put or position. Thus, as the archaeologist Salomon Reinach usefully observed in a 1924 article titled “The History of Gestures,” “one speaks of the posture of sleep, not the gesture of sleep.”86 Posture, much more so than gesture, describes a relational “position,” the “place in which a person . . . is located or has been put.”87 It involves more fully a figure’s up-­down, front-­back, left-­right orientation, as well as figure-­ground relationships, including the body’s relation to the seat or ground that supports its weight and the surrounding environment that participates in organizing its disposition. The category of corporeal language toward which Warburg’s art history was oriented was, undoubtedly, gesture. Recent algorithmic analysis of the Mnemosyne Picture Atlas confirms a point that should already have been obvious—­Warburg’s Pathosformeln were characterized above all by movements of the arms.88 From Warburg into the present, art history has focused on gesture far more than on posture.89 This book re­ orients attention toward the latter, which is the more useful category for describing the new strategies of pose that emerged in figural art at the end of the nineteenth century.

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Frontality and the Posture of “Primitivity”

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Matters of posture preoccupied many art historians in Europe around the turn of the century. In contrast to Warburg, these scholars studied forms of figuration that they regarded as anterior to the attainment by artists of the technical or cognitive capacity to represent gesture. As Reinach argued in “The History of Gestures” (deploying a term that will become salient for us shortly), gesture could appear in art only after “the passage from what one calls frontality.”90 How to interpret figuration that did not incorporate Western art’s familiar gestural repertoire was a problem that preoccupied a number of influential scholars. Their work coalesced around a basic question voiced by the classical archaeologist Emanuel Löwy in 1900: “Why does art, till the middle of the sixth century [bce ], scarcely ever venture upon a foreshortening, the expression of an emotion in the face, or a more active play of the fingers, than that of a merely extended palm or doubled fist?”91 In 1913, in an article devoted to the topic of modern art and “archaism,” the writer Alfred Pichon asserted that for the past quarter century, the most conspicuous feature of modern art in Europe had been “the absence of what the Renaissance conquered step by step.” A “disdain for a frozen art made by formulas,” he suggested, “had led [modern art] back to archaism as the best method for violating dead formulas” (formules mortes).92 If Warburg understood the defining “creative event” of the European renaissance to have been the incorporation of Greco-­Roman gestural formulas for “the depiction of human life in motion,” a defining trend of the art produced in his lifetime might be described in terms of the expulsion of those formulas.93 And if what Pichon called “primitive art” presented modern artists with the most expedient means for violating these formules mortes, this book proposes that it did so in large measure by modeling a new approach to body language. The phenomenon that has been called “primitivism,” so basic to textbook histories of modern art after Impressionism, relied upon a formal logic that was fundamentally postural. A central appeal of works perceived to be “primitive” was that they appeared to lack the familiar repertoire of dynamic gestural formulas identified by Warburg as Greco-­ Roman art’s enduring bequest to European figuration. And here it must be emphasized, as Ernst Gombrich also stressed, that the kinds of expressive gestures upon which Warburg’s art history fixated “were only represented in a particular phase of ancient art” that was “relatively late.”94 By absorbing corporeal models understood to predate this “relatively late” phase of the antique, European artists around the turn of the century can be seen to have departed categorically from the “classical” (or, we could say, from the self-­consciously “Occidental”) tradition of figuration toward which Warburg’s scholarship was oriented.95 The word “primitive,” employed by a number of art historians and critics addressed in this book, is used here in a sense informed by arguments acknowledging that it lacks inherent meaning and functions

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merely as a “relational operator”; more particularly, I am informed by Frances Connelly’s argument that the primitive was an aesthetic category that could come into coherence in modern art and theory only as a term of opposition, as the inverse of “institutionalized classicism taught in academies of art.”96 Postural primitivism, as I will call it, was a strategy that presupposed familiarity with norms of figural disposition institutionalized in the art academies of the European Beaux-­Arts system. One of the primary pedagogical functions of such academies, as the chapter on Seurat will detail, was to inculcate a set of norms for posing bodies—­norms crystallized in a specific repertoire of canonical antique statues that art academies often displayed prominently through casts and incarnated ritually through live models who posed or were posed in dialogue with the postures of such sculptures. The expressive valences that could attach themselves to postural primitivisms are inconceivable except against this backdrop of the “persistence of the image, or mirage, of the classical body” in a culture where “successive postclassical generations” came to “know, experience, and possess their bodies through sustained contact with” what James Porter has called the “received body of antiquity.”97 In the late nineteenth century, the primitive was a capacious and incoherent art-­critical category that could, but did not necessarily, designate an opposition to European culture. This book deliberately brackets for future consideration what art history has typically understood as “primitivism” in its purest and most starkly racialized form—­that is, Euro-­American artists’ widespread and self-­conscious expropriation of motifs and formal structures from Oceanic and African sculpture in the years before and after the First World War.98 I indicate some of the underlying formal logic that would have played into those appropriations by excavating one unifying factor of what the heterogeneous term “primitive” initially stood for: as Martha Ward observed, in France in the 1880s the word was synonymous with “oddly disposed bodies.”99 That is to say, any form of art that deviated from the postural norms associated with “institutionalized classicism” might potentially be classified as primitive. For many of the authors addressed in this study, the primitive encompassed figures or styles from within European culture, albeit ones recognized to be “artifacts of the West’s own childhood.”100 One of the first applications of the term was to European late-­medieval and early-­ renaissance painters, as well as archaic Greek sculptors.101 The meaning of “primitive” was in essence equivalent to the prefix pre-­(as in, especially, preclassical). In this temporal sense—­on the basis of the “denial of coevalness” that structured European discourses on non-­Western cultures at the turn of the century—­it was likewise applied to objects made outside Europe, including in regions that at that time were being colonized by European nations.102 In tandem with the historical apogee of Europe’s imperial incursions across the world, European scholars began to reach concertedly outside the “European nest” to position their artifacts within far more expansive spatiotemporal

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histories, as evidenced in new publications with sweeping titles like The History of Art of All Times and Peoples, published between 1900 and 1911 by Karl Woermann.103 The complexity of the global network of intercultural contacts that undergirded the burgeoning interest in art deemed “primitive” around 1900 defies succinct summary here. It is important to stress, however, that I am working under the assumption that the accelerated collection of—­and traffic in—­art made outside the Western peninsula of the Eurasian continent was the key factor that, in the nineteenth century, precipitated the consolidation of “European art” as a coherent category.104 Crucially, this was a category constructed retroactively. The perception that certain norms of corporeal disposition constituted the red thread of an art that might be labeled “European” happened just as artists trained within European nations began to deliberately abandon those norms, launching a process that might be described as a self-­conscious and performative de-­Europeanization of norms of figural composition.105 To begin to establish the broader philosophical stakes of modern art’s postural primitivism, I want to briefly introduce the argument formulated in 1892 by the Danish art historian Julius Lange in his influential book The Representation of the Human Figure in Its Earliest Period until the Apogee of Greek Art.106 This study addressed a formal problem whose significance within Western historiographies of art is difficult to overstate. As Whitney Davis has recently analyzed at length, one of the most basic assumptions in Western discourse on art since Hegel, and in fact, long before him, has been the notion that there exists a contrast of momentous import, a “world-­historical Ur-­contrast,” between two basic modes of figuration: on the one hand, a figuration of “primitive frontality, sometimes identified as the default condition of all images and pictures,” and on the other, a figuration that introduces figural obliquity, a formal innovation typically credited to classical Greek sculptors and characterized “as a revolutionary achievement of picture-­making.”107 Art history does not typically acknowledge the fact that, by coining the word frontality, Lange set the terms for almost all subsequent discussions of this Ur-­contrast, which came to assume an unprecedented intellectual and formal urgency for artists and writers around the turn of the century. Lange’s book, later cited by famous scholars such as art historian Alois Riegl and psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, achieved what the classical archaeologist Adolf Furtwängler lauded in 1899 as an “art historical result of the first order, comparable to the discovery of a natural law.”108 After twenty years of scrutinizing “European art collections with their thousands upon thousands of depictions of human beings,” Lange claimed to have detected a universal restriction governing the posture of figures in the arts of all “primitive” cultures.109 He based his generalizations on objects from the ancient Near East, archaic Greece, Oceania, and the Americas, all of which he studied in photographic reproductions

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or public collections such as the Glyptothek in Munich, the British Museum, and the recently opened Königliches Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin (now the Ethnologisches Museum).110 To illustrate his guiding thesis, Lange’s opening chapter provided line-­drawn illustrations of certain representative objects that he reproduced as generic schema, leaving them undated and identifying them only by location of origin. These representative objects include, among others, the Louvre’s Seated Scribe; the Kouros of Tenea; the statue of Ashurnasirpal II, brought from Nimrud to Britain in 1851 by Austen Henry Layard; a carved statuette (of the type the Rapa Nui call moai kavakava) taken from Easter Island by a sailor and donated in 1885 to the British Museum; and two wooden figures acquired from the Nuu-­Chah-­Nulth on Vancouver Island in 1778 by Captain Cook.111 Synthesizing what he took to be a common principle uniting all of these and other sculptural specimens, Lange concluded that all “primitive artists” rigorously avoided any “torsion” or “flexion” along the body’s central vertical axis, always presenting the figure in attitudes in which a bisecting line could be drawn straight down from the tip of the head through the trunk to the sexual organs (fig. 5). He christened this universal law of posture the “Law of F ­ rontality” (Frontalitetens Lov). Lange proposed that the invention of a new type of pose in Greek sculpture in the fifth century bce was the key development that had, as he stated, “strictly speaking, created European art, which later conquered a large part of the globe.”112 His argument fits within the broader tendency in the nineteenth century to reconceptualize Greece (not the country, but a fictionalized ancient culture reimagined as an i­ntegral

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Figur e 5. Layout in Julius Lange, Billedkunstens Fremstilling af Menneskeskikkelsen i dens ældste Periode indtil Højdepunktet af den græske Kunst (Copenhagen: F. Dreyer, 1892). Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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Figur e 6. Nineteenth-­ century postcard of the Doryphoros in the Chiaramonti Museum, Vatican City. Roman copy after the original by Polykleitos, ca. 450–­440 bce . Courtesy Watkinson Library, Trinity College, Hartford, CT.

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Hellenic entity) as the “epitome of Europe.”113 It spelled out with new precision a conceptual linkage between a specific device of figural depiction and larger, clichéd Western notions about the “discovery of the mind” in classical Greek culture.114 The moment when the sculptor Polykleitos gave definitive form to the posture Pliny defined as uno crure insistere (standing on one leg)—­that is, the moment he created the famous contrapposto stance that introduced an asymmetrical tilt in the figure’s trunk and neck to convey ponderation or the shifting of weight (fig. 6)—­was the moment that Lange said marked the moment Greek art departed from a “completely exterior construction of the human form” to espouse a “representation of man where everything is directed and determined by an interior center.”115 In the French synopsis Lange included at the back of his Danish text, he named this new interior center “le moi” (the me).116 The moi, by 1892, was hardly a neutral term; in France in the nineteenth century it had served as a synonym both for “the soul” (âme) and, as attested by an 1849 philosophical dictionary, for Descartes’s concept of res cogitans, a mental entity that “has consciousness of itself and is familiar with its own operations, or is simultaneously the subject and object of its thought.”117 The moi was the centerpiece of the psychological theory taught in French philosophy curricula in the first half of the

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nineteenth century. As Jan Goldstein has demonstrated, in the post-­ Revolutionary context, the moi served as a conceptual bulwark against the fragmentation and decentering of the psyche already incipient in eighteenth-­century sensationalist psychologies, which had begun to embrace materialist understandings of mind that destabilized the notion of a regulating core of consciousness, from which reason and voluntary action emanate.118 Thus, by yoking the moi to ponderation and contrapposto, Lange situated the formal phenomenon of frontality and its dissolution within an already fraught debate around ideas associated with the new psychology. (And here it is not incidental that Carl Lange, the prominent psychophysiologist who coformulated the above-­mentioned James-­Lange theory of emotion, was Julius Lange’s older brother.) An impulse to revert to techniques of pose that were understood to precede the revolutionary postural innovation described by Lange—­ which ostensibly “created European art” by inventing a visual form for the moi—­was instrumental in what this book characterizes as the modernization of figural art in the decades around 1900. This modernization should be understood in two not strictly separable senses—­the first formal, the second having to do with the historical models of mind in which formal languages are implicated. The embrace of “frontal” dispositions of the body introduced certain visual qualities now recognized as quintessentially modernist. As a mode of figuration governed by the rigorous avoidance of foreshortened views of the body, and by the absence of indications of the body’s physical weight upon a ground plane, the frontal presentation of the body was closely bound up with the abandonment of perspectival depth, which came to be recognized as a hallmark of modernist abstraction. Thus, in 1948, Clement Greenberg could speak in the same breath of “flatness and frontality” as formal qualities central to a modern “crisis of the easel picture.”119 Later, in the essay “On Frontality” (1968; fig. 7), Rosalind Krauss identified frontality as a formal concept pivotal to the practices of both “non-­objective painters” of the early twentieth century such as Wassily Kandinsky and Kasimir Malevich and postwar abstract painters such as Frank Stella and Kenneth Noland.120 Neither Greenberg nor Krauss acknowledged the figural derivation of the word “frontality.” But it is significant that a term eventually adopted as an abstract formalist category first entered the art-­historical lexicon through Lange’s 1892 study, where it designated a quality specific to the posture of a human figure. The semantic migration of the term “frontality” from figure to pure abstraction suggests how certain formal qualities that later came to be associated with modernist abstraction have their roots in theories and practices of figural representation. One of this book’s historiographic hypotheses is that bodily posture is a site where we might identify most clearly a shift from mimetic to symbolic or non-­naturalistic representation in European art after Impressionism (which is also to say that the emergence of these abstraction-­associated formal tendencies emerged first and with particular force in the genre of figural art).121 But this book

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F igu re 7. Rosalind Krauss, cover page for “On Frontality” (with Jules Olitski, Magic Number, and Kenneth Noland, Stria; both 1967), Artforum, May 1968. © 2020 Estate of Jules Olitski/licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. © 2020 The Kenneth Noland Foundation/licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

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is not a prehistory of abstraction. I am less interested in the appearance of “frontality” in modern figural representation as a sign of nascent formalism than as a formal strategy responsive to a widely felt aesthetic imperative to modernize the presentation of psychic interiority. What matters here are the ways in which the valences of the simple—­even simplistic—­formal antithesis spelled out in Lange’s art history were also implicitly operative for many artists. (They were also paralleled in emergent practices of scientific photography, as I touch upon in chapter 3.122) This formal equation could be graphed, roughly, as: Obliquity = conscious; Frontality = not conscious. Frontality—­as a visual strategy enlisted to convey dimensions of the human moi or “interior center” newly recognized and newly urgent in modern culture, including instinctual impulses and psychological automatisms, or forms of thinking that might be defined as “un­ conscious”—­entailed an inversion of the prevailing rhetoric of composition in European art. It upended the compositional norm, stretching back to the teachings of classical rhetoric, that in 1890 Maurice Denis summarized with the sardonic maxim “L’Art, c’est quand ça tourne” (Art is when it turns).123 Significantly, Denis’s equation of turning and artfulness echoes the opposition in classical rhetoric between the frontal and the “turned” or oblique poses of pre-­and postclassical statuary as a

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device for explaining the nature of successful verbal persuasion. Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, which traces the progression of Greek statuary from early “stiff” statues to later “more fluid” works by Myron and Polykleitos, includes a famous passage opposing the posture of the Discobolus (ca. 450 bce ; fig. 8) to the characteristic frontal pose of the archaic kouros (fig. 9): It is often expedient, and sometimes becoming, to make changes in the set traditional order, just as we see dress, expression, and stance varied in statues and pictures. The upright body has very little grace: the face looks straight at you, the arms hang down, the feet are joined together, and the work is entirely stiff (rigens) from top to bottom. That flexibility (flexus)—­I might almost say “movement”—­produces a sort of action and emotion. . . . What is so contorted and elaborately wrought as Myron’s famous Discobolus? But would not any critic who disapproved of it because it was not upright show how far he was from understanding its art, in which the very novelty and difficulty of the pose are what most deserve praise?124

This comparison, cited frequently in renaissance aesthetic treatises, served as the prologue to Quintilian’s discussion of the role of the “fi­ gura” in persuasive rhetoric.125 Literally meaning physical shape or plastic form, figura also had an established nonliteral sense in Latin rhetoric, designating “any shape in which a thought is expressed—­just as our bodies, in whatever pose they are placed, are inevitably in some sort of

Figur e 8. Roman copy after Myron, Discobolus, bronze original ca. 450 bce . Illustrated in Maxime Collignon, Histoire de la sculpture grecque (Paris: Firmin-­Didot, 1892). Digital image courtesy Robarts Library, University of Toronto. Figur e 9. Kouros of Tenea, ca. 560–­550 bce . From Emanuel Löwy, Lysipp und seine Stellung in der griechischen Plastik (Hamburg: J. F. Richter, 1891). Digital image courtesy Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University.

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attitude,” or, more broadly, any “purposeful deviation in sense or language from the ordinary simple form; the analogy is now with sitting, bending forwards, or looking back.”126 Figurae were, for Quintilian, the “gestures or attitudes of language,” the necessary devices through which “a speech becomes an animate person.”127 The strategies of pose examined in this book entailed an emphatic shift away from this paradigm of, so to speak, figural composition, built around an explicitly stated preference for a visibly “animate,” gesturally dynamic person. But paradoxically, by restoring the kinds of poses Quintilian had equated with “stiff,” nonfigurative language, modern artists transformed their human figures into figurae in one of the primary senses defined by the rhetorician: expressions that “represent a deviation from the norm.”128 For centuries, European art had made the paradigm of postural variety and flexibility its norm—­even if this norm, exemplified by the body of the Discobolus in torsion, defined itself in opposition to the monotony of “common and vulgar” or “ordinary simple” composition that Quintilian saw epitomized in the stiff, frontal posture of the archaic kouros. To reinstate such “simple” postures at the end of the nineteenth century surely conferred upon works of art a powerful quality of formal surprise or novelty.129 More importantly, though, this “deviation from the norm” enabled the materialization of novel ideas about the human psyche by refusing or unmasking a set of bodily metaphors that in preceding centuries of European art had operated implicitly.130 By posing figures in ways that flagrantly neglected to convey the human body’s subjection to gravity or its capacity for self-­propelled movement, artists both exposed and negated a metaphorical system that had come to be taken for granted by both producers and viewers of art acculturated in this visual tradition. This metaphorical system extrapolated concepts of mind and consciousness from the concrete functions of the human body’s specialized anatomical equipment: anterior and posterior limbs separated into prehensile arms with hands that can grip and manipulate, and locomotive legs with plantigrade feet that support and balance weight.131

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Figures of Thought Poseuses and the Controversy of the Grande Jatte

“I have committed myself to four great canvases of combat [grandes toiles de lutte], if you permit me to speak of them that way, and I prefer them to all my landscape studies [études de paysage].”1 With this preamble, Georges Seurat began the only summary he ever gave of his aesthetic theory, which he composed in 1890, six months before he died suddenly of diphtheria at the age of thirty-­one. Although Seurat eventually crossed out the second half of the sentence, and never delivered his statement to the journalist who had solicited it, this assertion vividly communicates his deep investment in figure painting, communicated here with a phrase that invokes both violent conquest and personal crusade: “grandes toiles de lutte.”2 Central to Seurat’s radical aesthetic agenda, which launched the vanguard movement that came to be named Neo-­Impressionism, was an emphatic reinstatement of the academic hierarchy of genres that had been dismantled by the preceding Impressionist generation. Seurat’s Un Dimanche à la Grande Jatte–­1884 (see fig. 1) emerged as the “manifesto painting” of Neo-­Impressionism.3 It “aimed, as did few other paintings in the late nineteenth century, to be the great tableau . . . to lay claim to the significance of a museum space,” as Martha Ward has stated.4 Similarly, André Chastel singled out Seurat as the first in his generation to be “haunted” by the notion of “la ‘grande composition.’ ”5 To comprehend the complex implications of Seurat’s investment in this notion, it is crucial to foreground a point that has often been glossed over: for Seurat, as for prior generations of academic painters, the human figure—­above animals, plants, or inanimate objects—­was an obligatory component of any composition that was to be regarded as “grand,” whether in terms of physical size or aesthetic significance.6 During his youth, Seurat assiduously read the works of Charles Blanc, one of the most prominent writers on art history and aesthetics in late nineteenth-­century France, who served as director of the École des

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Beaux-­Arts between 1848 and 1851 and again from 1870 to 1873.7 Numerous scholars have emphasized that Seurat first learned of Michel-­ Eugène Chevreul’s laws of simultaneous contrast of color while reading Blanc’s major theoretical text, the Grammaire des arts du dessin (1867). The overarching anthropocentrism of Blanc’s aesthetic system is less often acknowledged, though it was equally formative for Seurat’s Neo-­ Impressionist aesthetic.8 In the Grammaire and elsewhere, Blanc insisted upon the primacy of human beings over all other artistic subject matter. In 1866, for instance, he passionately defended the academic hierarchy of genres, recapitulating a doctrine first officially formulated by André Félibien in 1667. His defense succinctly summarizes the core assumption underlying the French academy’s long-standing practice of ranking painters of the human figure as “much more excellent than all others.”9 At the risk of coming to blows with the critics in love with equality in art, we gently remind them that there is a gradation in the kingdom of nature, and if the purpose of art is to express life . . . the human figure is the most exalted image an artist can propose for a model, because it is a summation of all anterior creations and, filling the immense space that separates intelligence from vegetation, it manifests the highest degree of life, which is to say thought [le plus haut degré de la vie, qui est la pensée]. To see it only from a plastic perspective, there is in the human figure such a prodigious variety of forms, of contours, of depressions, of projections, of attitudes, of movements, of nuances, that the Greeks needed ten or twelve generations, adding study upon study, genius after genius, to begin to possess a perfect comprehension of a perfect man. Similarly, in the Renaissance, more than a century was needed before one was able to place a human figure on the weight of his feet. . . . Therefore, if the greatness [grandeur] of painting is measured by the difficulty of its enterprise, it is impossible to equate, to give equal merit, to landscape and the human figure.10

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Twenty years after Blanc published this statement, the Grande Jatte debuted. With this canvas, Seurat inaugurated a movement that forcefully reasserted the traditional primacy figure painting had held within academic aesthetics. And yet, part of the polemical, programmatic aspect of Seurat’s manifesto painting was that it seemed to prioritize the human figure on a basis entirely different from the one Blanc had advocated, one no longer wedded to a notion of thought as the fundament of human existence. Seurat had an “appetite for contradiction,” according to his friend Paul Signac.11 That appetite is nowhere more evident than in the contradiction at the heart of his figure painting practice. This basic paradox structures his oeuvre: Seurat returned to the anthropocentrism of the academic tradition in which he was schooled, while simultaneously devising visual strategies that seemed to deny or degrade precisely that

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“highest degree of life” that previously, as Blanc asserted, guaranteed the human figure’s “exalted” status as the preeminent class of pictorial content. Previous centuries of Western figural art, up through and including the moment of Impressionism, could be understood to share a guiding principle, expressed succinctly in Ludovic Vitet’s 1861 history of the French Académie: an artist who represents the human figure must “always remember [he] draws a man, that is to say an intelligent and impassioned creature, not a banal and mechanical being.”12 Seurat’s approach to human form challenged this conception of personhood. If—­as Hippolyte Taine proposed in the opening lines of On Intelligence, his 1870 survey of new psychological research—­someone were to stand atop the Arc de Triomphe and look down at the minuscule dots of people walking on the street below, they would imagine each dot as “a living body, with active members, a refined economy of organs, a thinking head, driven by some interior desire or plan, in short, a human person.”13 This definition underwent a formal cancellation in the Grande Jatte. Seurat began his career as a “regular and submissive” pupil at the École des Beaux-­Arts (fig. 10), where for nearly four years he drew and painted on a daily basis from nude models and antique casts.14 But his manifesto painting conspicuously abandoned the proficiency of figural mimesis that, as Blanc recounted, Western art had achieved progressively over generations and centuries. Relinquishing the hard-­won

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Figur e 10. Seurat (standing, sixth from left) in a group of Henri Lehmann’s students in front of the École des Beaux-­Arts, ca. 1878. Photographer unknown. Image courtesy Clark Art Institute.

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­ astery of the human body’s “prodigious variety of forms, of contours, m of depressions, of projections, of attitudes, of movements,” the Grande Jatte instead adopted a rigid, repetitive, formally abbreviated mode of figural presentation that startled nineteenth-­century viewers with its seeming technical and expressive crudeness. Despite a general consensus that Seurat represents a dramatic departure from prior regimes of figural representation, art history has never specified the precise formal mechanisms that constitute his innovative approach to the human form, beyond suggesting that the Grande Jatte’s novel technique of figuration marks the canvas as “the first major statement of a new variant of ‘primitivism.’ ”15 Nor has art history acknowledged that, when the Grande Jatte debuted, its technique of figuration instigated a major critical dispute about the aims and aesthetic effects requisite to figure painting. This dispute grew increasingly urgent with the painting’s subsequent exhibitions at the Salon des Indépendants of August 1886 in Paris and the Salon des XX in Brussels in 1887. The debates around the Grande Jatte’s technique of figuration are vitally important not only for grasping the fraught status of the human figure within Seurat’s oeuvre but for understanding more broadly how at the turn of the century some of the most basic objectives of figural representation were reconceptualized by modern artists. At its core, the dispute around the Grande Jatte concerned the presumed obligation that an artist should endeavor to portray the indwelling physical and intellectual liveliness of the human being. While this debate was, in one sense, a debate about formal conventions, it was also inextricably bound to larger questions about how to define and represent human interiority.

A “Reprinted, Corrected, Singularly Augmented Edition of the Grande Jatte”

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Among the seven figure paintings Seurat completed before his death, one holds singular importance for comprehending the problematic status the human figure came to assume within his oeuvre. Exhibited in 1888 under the idiosyncratic title Poseuses—­“Posers,” not “Models,” as the title is often improperly translated—­Seurat’s composition of three nude models assembled in his studio in front of a section of the Grande Jatte occupied him longer than any other of his notoriously labor-­intensive canvases of combat.16 Produced over two years in “cloistered” secrecy, Poseuses (fig. 11) was a uniquely introspective as well as retrospective project—­a “grande toile de lutte” that self-­consciously answered, and thematized, the dispute about figure painting that had emerged from the Grande Jatte’s contentious reception.17 A terse, two-­line review published in 1889 aptly summarizes the discursive structure of Poseuses; it identifies the canvas as “a reprinted, corrected, singularly augmented edition of the Grande Jatte.”18 Pointedly deploying the terminology of print, the turn of phrase seems to allude to the influence of Seurat’s critics, underlining their mediating function in the formal and conceptual realization of Poseuses—­a painting Seurat C h a pt e r O n e

began immediately after the Grande Jatte’s debut, and executed while scrutinizing the reviews generated from its year­long tour of exhibitions. Seurat, whose career coincided with a new art-­world infrastructure, the “dealer-­critic system,” was intensely preoccupied with his critical reception, vigilantly monitoring and archiving his reviews.19 In the case of the Grande Jatte, that preoccupation was especially acute. The canvas made Seurat’s name and was, according to Félix Fénéon, the critic who became Seurat’s most important advocate, “by far the work of his career that most excited the press.”20 By the time “this famous tableau of Seurat” reached Brussels in February 1887, period press clippings declare, the “sensation” it would create was being “advertised in advance” of its exhibition, and the canvas was quickly surrounded by “a crowd in delirium.”21 Like many artists in the 1880s, Seurat had hired one of the new clipping agencies to monitor his name in the domestic and international press. He thus was able to gather a nearly comprehensive dossier of reviews from the three exhibitions of the Grande Jatte in 1886–­1887.22 ­After his death, more than sixty clippings discussing the canvas, as well as several dozen loose pages with thirty-­three reviews copied out in longhand, were found in Seurat’s studio.23 The very title the artist selected for his next figural composition—­Poseuses—­appears in a key phrase from one of Figures of Thought

Figur e 11. Georges Seurat, Poseuses, 1886–­ 1888. Oil on canvas, 200 × 249.9 cm. Collection of the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia. Bridgeman Images.

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Fig u re 12. Georges Seurat, Parade de cirque, 1887–­1888. Oil on canvas, 99.7 × 149.9 cm. Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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these hand-­copied reviews: “la récréation même est poseuse” (even leisure is posturing).24 To describe Poseuses as a “reprinted, corrected, singularly augmented edition” of the prior canvas is therefore appropriate, particularly since those terms capture the painting’s ambivalent stance towards its precedent: simultaneously a reiteration and redaction of the Grande Jatte. Poseuses has been described as Seurat’s “most academic” or “most naturalistic” composition.25 In the collection of the Barnes Foundation, where it has hung since 1926 at a height that presents significant challenges for close examination, the picture remains the least studied of Seurat’s seven figure paintings. Literature on Neo-­Impressionism has been justifiably preoccupied with Seurat’s technical innovations, with respect to both his new system of divisionist color application and his novel approach to composition, which many twentieth-­century artists and theorists saw as a precursor to abstraction.26 In stylistic terms, this novelty is tempered, or less blatant, in Poseuses. Perhaps for this reason, the picture has proven less intriguing to scholars than, for instance, Parade de cirque (1887–­1888; fig. 12), a much smaller composition of a circus sideshow Seurat painted and exhibited alongside Poseuses in March 1888. Described, by contrast, as Seurat’s “most radical” or “most abstract” painting, Parade has occasioned multiple important studies, from an essay in 1929 by Roger Fry to the central chapter of Jonathan Crary’s book Suspensions of Perception in 1999.27 Seriously reckoning with Poseuses, however, is indispensable for comprehending the larger questions—­formulated most provocatively

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in Crary’s wide-­ranging consideration of Parade de cirque—­about the “nature of the human subject presupposed by Seurat’s practice.”28 Crary contends that Seurat’s art intuited the loss or depreciation of “what might have been contemplation” in modern culture and “challenged the privileged status of a conscious observer,” basing his argument primarily on an analysis of the ways in which Seurat’s pictures presupposed and solicited a “subrational response” from their hypothetical viewers.29 Poseuses offers singular insight into the self-­consciously fraught status of consciousness and contemplation in Seurat’s Neo-­Impressionism; it is a picture that seems designed to engage the viewer in questioning “the nature of the human subject” being posited in his oeuvre. But to access this dimension of Poseuses demands an analysis that gives more emphasis to the testimony of period viewers and to the pedagogical environment from which the artist emerged. As Alexandre Arsène noted in his obituary for Seurat, “It was at the École des Beaux-­Arts . . . that he learned his alphabet and grammar. An alphabet whose characters he would manipulate with a singular liberty, a grammar whose syntax he would scramble with tranquil indifference.”30 If the human figure was the fundamental symbolic unit of the language Seurat acquired at school, it makes sense to speak of the Grande Jatte and the artist’s Neo-­Impressionist figure painting in general as a subversion of an inherited language. The logic of this subversion was immanent in the particular historical moment when Seurat received his academic education. By the time Seurat entered the École as an aspirant in 1876, a breach had opened between the practical and the theoretical components of the curriculum. Despite the modernizing reforms of 1863, which had instituted painting ateliers in addition to drawing instruction and ended the academy’s centuries-­long ban on female models, hands-­on instruction remained essentially unchanged since the academy’s founding in 1648, especially in its emphasis on the mastery of figuration through repetitive depiction of classical statuary and live models (fig. 13).31 The compulsory anatomy curriculum, however, had been transformed significantly to incorporate the most recent research on human physiology, psychology, and evolutionary history. Thus, while Seurat studied in the atelier of Henri Lehmann, a devoted former pupil of Ingres, who was described by one of Seurat’s friends as “a master as academic as one could possibly fathom,” he also attended compulsory anatomy lectures by the physiologist Mathias Duval.32 An editorial penned by Fénéon in the inaugural 1884 issue of the Symbolist journal Revue indépendante included Duval in a list of indi­ vid­­uals—­among them Darwin, Hermann von Helmholtz, and the neurologist Jean-­Martin Charcot—­whose names were synonymous with scientific “materialism.” Fénéon explained that materialism was a “perturbing vocable” that stood for a new Darwinian worldview that “assumed a mechanical conception of the universe instead of a teleological one based on a ridiculous anthropomorphism.”33 Duval, a scholar whose

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Fig u re 13. Charles-­ Joseph Natoire, L’École de dessin à l’Académie royale, 1746. Ink, chalk, and watercolor on paper. Collection of the Courtauld Gallery, London. Bridgeman Images.

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wide-­ranging research anticipated key developments in French physiology and psychology in the last decades of the century, was in close contact with many scientists who today are far more widely known—­Charcot, for instance, or the anthropologist Paul Broca and the physiologist Étienne-­ Jules Marey.34 Something of his omnivorous “materialist” sensibility is captured in a celebratory portrait in Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui, in which the professor brandishes a basket of hatching eggs, surrounded by jars of embryos and textbooks on anthropology and physiology (fig. 14). After arriving at the École in 1873, Duval instituted “a complete reform of the teaching of anatomy.”35 His enormously popular lectures—­ for which students apparently arrived a half hour early to secure choice seats—­were no longer focused on dissecting the body as a static system of muscles and organs but oriented toward studying the human being

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Figu r e 14 . Étienne Roc, “Le Professeur Mathias Duval.” Cover of Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui 6, no. 273 (1886). Wellcome Collection.

more broadly, encompassing physiology, evolutionary history, and rapport with the animal world.36 Duval, who in 1886 would publish one of the first comprehensive French surveys of Darwin’s theories, concluded his anatomy course with a series of units on Duchenne de Boulogne’s Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine (1862) and Charles Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), emphasizing the automatic and instinctive bases of human gesture and facial expression.37 As Crary and others have stressed, Seurat’s Neo-­Impressionism was predicated on his familiarity with some of the most advanced research in physiological optics and experimental psychology of the late nineteenth century.38 It is crucial to add that it was likely in his anatomy class at the École that the artist was introduced to the burgeoning field of physiological psychology, promoted in France by Théodule Ribot as a new discipline of “psychology without soul.”39 Poseuses, more than any other of Seurat’s pictures, refers back to this academic context as foundational to the conflict that animated his mature figure painting practice. For the campaign of figure painting that Seurat inaugurated with the Grande Jatte and revisited in Poseuses can be seen as an attempt to reconcile—­or demonstrate the impossibility of reconciling—­the academy’s “grand” tradition of figural representation and the modernized conception of the subject already being taught under its auspices.

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Genre Questions: Intelligence or Vegetation

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The public reception of the Grande Jatte, which is foundational to comprehending Poseuses, was highly sensitive to this conflict at the heart of Seurat’s commitment to the figure. Indeed, the fact that the artist felt compelled in 1890 to affirm his personal and aesthetic commitment to the “grande toile de lutte” admits the degree to which his work in the genre of figure painting became profoundly embattled after the Grande Jatte’s debut.40 Seurat’s trademark invention of a quasi-­scientific system of divisionist (or pointillist) color application, which the art-­historical literature tends to assume was received as a radical gesture, did not initially ruffle many feathers. When the technique was introduced at the final Impressionist exhibition, in the Grande Jatte and several accompanying landscape pictures, it was less controversial than Seurat’s approach to the figure. When figures were absent, critics widely endorsed his divisionist pictures. A dichotomy of response was established that would haunt Seurat for the rest of his short career: it became a commonplace in criticism to say that Seurat’s landscapes were a “triumph,” “the best side of his talent,” while “the presentation of the human figure” was his “stumbling block.”41 The critical preference for landscape inverted the hierarchy Seurat himself asserted in this first display of divisionist works. At the final Impressionist exhibition, the Grande Jatte was the centerpiece of a separate Neo-­Impressionist gallery, hung alongside divisionist works by the veteran Impressionist Camille Pissarro and fellow newcomer Paul Signac, along with eight more of Seurat’s works—­three small conté crayon drawings, two small landscapes of the Grande Jatte environs, with staffage, and three equally sized figureless seascapes, executed in a highly refined divisionist technique.42 The Grande Jatte dominated the room. It was hung facing the threshold and was bookended symmetrically by Le Bec du Hoc and Le Rade de Grandcamp, two of Seurat’s figureless seascapes.43 Given this hanging, it is unsurprising that one critic hailed the canvas as “the signboard of the new school.”44 Framed in the doorway, flanked on either side by two small pendants, the Grande Jatte would have confronted the viewer almost like the central panel in a triptych altarpiece. Looking back in 1926 at the decidedly hostile reaction to the canvas at the center of this triptych, Fénéon recalled with bemusement, “There was apparently something very aggressively insolent in that canvas, because from the first minute it irritated the visitor to paroxysms.” He described how the public’s “rage” was “at first scattered among the forty characters,” and then “localized, for inexplicable reasons, on the monkey held on a leash by the woman on the frontal plane, and especially on its spiral tail.” According to Fénéon, the public responded to these particular figures as if they had been “placed there especially to insult the person who crossed the threshold.”45 Numerous accounts describe the figures in the Grande Jatte as a provocation that diverted attention from other aspects of the painting they

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appeared in and from the other pictures Seurat exhibited. As Madeleine Maus recalled, the Exposition des XX in Brussels in 1887 “presented itself exclusively under the sign of the Grande Jatte; I do not say ‘of Seurat,’ but of this work alone, because of the riots it provoked, the battles that took place around it.”46 These battles, it must be stressed, were primarily battles around the painting’s figures, whose “hieratic aspect,” the writer Paul Adam noted, “at once excited the dumbstruck hilarity of the public, and the approval of a rare few who understood.”47 Had Seurat shown divisionist landscapes alone, it is doubtful his Impressionist exhibition debut would have caused any consternation or even generated much publicity. As Joris-­Karl Huysmans wrote in 1887, from “one point of view, as a landscapist and site painter,” Seurat was “a newcomer to the so-­called Impressionist school,” the one who contributed “the newest and most original note” with a technique that could “marvelously render the pulverization of air, the iridescent quivering of water, the blond undulations of sand.”48 Indeed, the wide praise for Seurat’s Grandcamp seascapes—­the first pictures executed in the technique that came to be named, variously, chromo-­luminarism, divisionism, or pointillism—­registers immediate appreciation for its potential to capture atmospheric phenomena of the natural world. As if intuiting divisionism’s genesis on the Norman coast, where Seurat traveled in summer of 1885 to make a first attempt at marine painting, critics seem to have perceived a perfect reciprocity between divisionist technique and the characteristic motifs of land-­or seascape, comprehending Seurat’s method of paint application as a specific contribution to the demands of painting a particular type of (depopulated) terrain—­coast and ocean, water and air.49 Appreciation for Seurat as landscapist and site-­painter could also extend to an appreciation of his manifesto painting—­if taken as a landscape picture. More than one critic spoke of devising methods of expunging the promenaders from the Grande Jatte to facilitate their delectation in its masterfully luminous rendering of the island’s greenery, sky, and water. Jean le Fustec, for instance, noting that he “share[d] the public’s hilarity in front of the wooden bonshommes who perform the gingerbread fair in this canvas,” offered a simple solution for how Seurat might remedy what marred the picture: “Remove [the figures], and you are left with the pure and simple landscape, and then you would be in the presence of a serious, powerful, moving work.”50 When the Grande Jatte was shown in Brussels, this proposal was concretized in a satirical review that contrived a viewing scenario to mask from view the painting’s largest, most offensive figures. Attempting to demonstrate the canvas’s aesthetic merit to a fellow exhibition-­goer—­a conservative notary who had been forewarned of Seurat’s “scandalous” painting in his morning newspaper—­the author described how he positioned the notary in the exhibition hall so that “the right part of the canvas, with its mannequins sauced in violet, was hidden from his eyes behind . . . sculptures in the middle of the room.” With the standing, life-­size figures thus

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c­ amouflaged in his field of vision, the notary was instructed to look again at the landscape of the Grande Jatte while trying to “ignore certain figures so naive that they are silly, and . . . only preoccupy [himself] with the effect of light the painter has tried to render.”51 It was this discrepancy—­approbation for Seurat’s seductive rendering of nature and “effects of light,” even as his promenaders were deemed so affronting as to warrant measures to physically shield the viewer—­that determined positions within the larger debate on whether Seurat, in carrying his new divisionist system forward, could or should continue to work as a painter of figures. Most critics urged the artist to abandon figure painting altogether. Seurat, one of them suggested, “would succeed less badly if he daubed some more landscapes instead of planting wooden bonshommes as in l’Île de la Grande jatte, un dimanche [sic].”52 The most considered articulation of this position came from Huysmans, who published an extended meditation on the uneven merits of Seurat’s different genres of work. “Strange thing!” he observed, “this landscapist whose seascapes serve as an aid to monotonous dreams becomes all façade, and remains unsuggestive, as soon as he places painted persons on the scene.”53 A small coterie of critics, most of them writing in new Symbolist journals, argued the opposite: “one would like . . . a greater place for the figure, for groups of figures.”54 Chief among these was Fénéon, who became the principal spokesman for Neo-­Impressionism. (It was he who coined this appellation in 1887.55) At first glance, Fénéon’s dense, influential review is striking for its apparent distance from the controversy around the Grande Jatte’s figuration, which was downplayed in favor of more technical concerns. The depersonalized tone of the review, now recognized as a milestone in the history of art criticism for its coolly clinical, pseudoscientific rhetoric, was created in part by intensively engaging Seurat’s painting at the level of chromatic microstructure.56 Fénéon devoted entire paragraphs to analyzing “square decimeters” of the canvas’s “immense” surface area, offering mathematical equations for the relative luminosity of pigments and light waves before tacking on a brief identification of its figurative subject matter: “the subject: . . .  the island . . . moving with a random Sunday population in the joy of the fresh air, among the trees, and its some forty characters are invested in a hieratic and summary drawing, rigorously treated from the back or full face or in profile, seated at right angles.” And yet this almost perfunctory verbal acknowledgment of the figural content of Seurat’s canvas belies the degree to which Fénéon recognized the human figure to be fundamental to “the complete and systematic paradigm of the new painting” Seurat had offered.57 Between the lines of his minute, almost hallucinatory evocation of the colorful surface of Seurat’s canvas, Fénéon took a clear and forceful position in favor of the human figure as pictorial subject matter. Inverting the common critical preference for Seurat’s seascapes, Fénéon never even mentioned the Grandcamp works, focusing exclusively on

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the Grande Jatte. And his analysis of that canvas concluded with a strategically polemical prescription for how Seurat should carry his project forward. The naked human body, Fénéon proposed, should be Seurat’s ultimate object: “Pointillist painting [la peinture au point] imposes itself for the execution of smooth surfaces, and above all, the nude, to which it has not yet been applied.”58 Fénéon’s declaration that Seurat should build on the achievement of the Grande Jatte by applying his technique to the nude—­the most elevated and tradition-­bound subject of academic classicism—­is characteristic of how the writers who celebrated Seurat’s manifesto painting wanted to see him work from within an inherited system of aesthetic standards built around the human figure. The suggestion that Seurat paint a nude seems to adopt a logic of assessment inherited from the academy, where executing a so-­called académie—­a nude figure study—­ served as an official test of professional competence. Evoking a long tradition in post-­renaissance painting, in which nude figures functioned “like certificates of professional capacity,” as Kenneth Clark put it, Fénéon’s proposal implies that producing a nude could silence the chorus of critics who challenged Seurat’s legitimacy as a figure painter.59 Yet the suggestion was also clearly a provocation. In referring to the nude simply as an ideal “smooth surface” for Seurat’s pointillist facture, F ­ énéon implicitly endorsed the artist’s perceived neglect of the specifically human dimensions of the human figure. Fénéon expressed a pointed lack of interest in those mental qualities that made the human figure, in Blanc’s words, “the most exalted image an artist can propose for a model.” Indeed, the fundamental problem most critics had with the Grande Jatte—­articulated most forcefully in Huysmans’s damning indictment—­ was that it contained “not enough life!” (pas assez de vie!). Strikingly, this complaint was made of a painting that had prompted other critics to remark upon the sheer quantity of living beings it depicted—­nearly fifty figures, including “dogs, babies, not to mention a marmoset.”60 More specifically, then, Huysmans characterized the insufficiency of life in the Grande Jatte as an absence of inner life: “Pick away the colored fleas that cover [Seurat’s] characters, and beneath them is void; no soul, no thought, nothing. Nothingness in a body for which only the contours ­exist.”61 One could say, to return again to Blanc’s justification for the hierarchy of genres, that the Grande Jatte was a figure painting that leveled “the immense space that separates intelligence from vegetation.” Seurat asserted the traditional hierarchy of genres while simultaneously undermining its legitimating hierarchy of life forms. For Huysmans, human consciousness had been nullified, in formal or symbolic terms, by a painter so enamored with the surface effects of light and color that he “forgets to penetrate further and deeper.” The vibrant surface monopolizes any claim to life in the Grande Jatte, which Huysmans described as literally teeming with life, but life of the lowest sort. Little dabs of oil on the canvas epidermis—­the swarm of “colored fleas”—­appear more alive,

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responsive, and alert than the human forms they cover. For Huysmans, signs of what Blanc termed “the highest degree of life, which is to say thought,” were nowhere to be found in this picture, which made “the human armature become rigid and hard.”62 What was it exactly about Seurat’s figuration that made his contemporaries perceive that “soul” or “thought” had been absented from the picture? Despite the intense and polarized reactions to the Grande Jatte’s figures in period literature, art history has never analyzed the painter’s figural technique as closely as his system of divisionist facture. Before unpacking in greater detail how Seurat’s contemporaries interpreted his figures, I want to describe what I take to be the defining features of the Grande Jatte’s distinctive approach to human form. The first is anatomical. Sketchbooks from Seurat’s student days provide ample evidence of the efforts he initially expended to master naturalistic depiction of the human body’s extremities: the tête d’expression, the delicate motions of fingers, the foot making contact with the ground (fig. 15). But by the time he painted the Grande Jatte, he had clearly abandoned the central tenet of academic practice, which held that the extremités should always be “worked with greater exactitude and precision than the rest” of a figure.63 The facial features of the promenaders, even those close to the foreground, appear imperceptible or oddly blurred. All the faces visible in the foreground are expressionless. Seurat also ­effectively de-­articulated his figures by dramatically containing limbs or eliminating them altogether. A majority of the promenaders hold their upper limbs so tightly against their torsos that the presence of arms, even if they have been indicated, can be difficult to decipher. The two figures in the middle ground who do extend their upper limbs—­the trombonist and the little girl who runs with both arms out, balanced on one leg—­are exceptions that prove the general rule of virtual armlessness. Hands, even more, appear absented. The arms of the trombonist and running girl are truncated at the wrist. With only two exceptions—­the silhouetted fingers of two men in the foreground holding a cigar and a pipe—­the hands of most figures, even those presented in the act of holding or manipulating objects like flowers, fishing rods, or walking sticks, appear as mere fists.64 The two hands closest to the foreground—­the gloved hand holding the monkey’s leash and the closed fist of the reclining pipe-­smoker—­look fingerless. This reining in of the upper extremities continues down into the lower bodies of the figures. Among those standing, the majority of men, as well as the little girl in the white pinafore at the canvas’s center, stand with their legs tight together, so that the bipedal stance is compacted into a single column.65 The bolt-­upright quality of these figures, who exhibit what Fénéon described as “the verticality of a sundial,” stems in part from Seurat’s tendency to neglect the terminal portion of the limb, the plantigrade foot that makes contact with the horizontal ground, supports locomotion, and enables the body to shift and relax its weight.66 In the Grande Jatte, for the most part, feet are eliminated or concealed

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Figur e 15. Georges Seurat, Page 14 of 50 from sketchbook, ca. 1877–­1878. Graphite and mixed media, 20 × 11.8 × 1.8 cm. Collection of the Yale University Art Gallery. Courtesy Yale University Art Gallery.

under floor-­length skirts—­there is no sense of freestanding corporeal poise, or “placing a human figure on the weight of his feet,” as Blanc put it. Seurat’s de-­emphasis on anatomical extremities in the Grande Jatte is coupled to a radical de-­emphasis on oblique torsions of the body. There is no lateral twisting around the vertical axis of the spinal column—­the heads, trunks, and lower bodies of these figures never turn in opposing directions but align in one piece. Seurat also oriented the bodies of the promenaders in a manifestly regimented order from which very few deviate. Nearly every figure in the Grande Jatte faces parallel or perpendicular to the picture plane. The noticeable exceptions are the trombonist, the running girl, and a little pug scampering in the foreground (a late addition that did not appear in the final study for the composition).67 Again, these exceptions prove the rule: the majority of figures are pictured in pure profile, staring straight ahead toward the water at the left edge of the picture. Seurat also marked the symmetry of the rectangular tableau by placing two figures facing directly forward at the vertical midline of the picture, to the right of a seated woman in a white nurse’s cap who faces away, her back flush with the canvas. As Fénéon stressed, the disposition of bodies is limited to these three basic orientations: ou de dos ou de face ou de profil.68

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A single word was used again and again by Seurat’s first critics to characterize the overall impression made by the Grande Jatte’s figures: “stiffness,” or raideur. While the critics, both detractors and enthusiasts, agreed unanimously that Seurat’s figures were stiff, they had polarized reactions to this raideur, using very different analogies and metaphors to condemn or endorse it. I will begin by outlining the reaction of writers who, after viewing the Grande Jatte, encouraged Seurat to continue privileging figure painting over landscape. This included Fénéon and a few others affiliated with the burgeoning Symbolist movement. For these writers, who celebrated Seurat as a “primitive of today” and praised his figuration for “conferring hieratic austerity to human beings,” stiffness was a highly positive feature.69 Positive not despite but because it produced the absence Huysmans articulated—­a lack of apparent soul (âme) or thought (pensée) within the figure. (The two words articulate something similar: the French âme condensed the various senses of “soul, mind, spirit, mental life and consciousness.”70) The Grande Jatte, in the words of Paul Adam, made a “return to primitive forms.” It announced a new artistic tendency to “flee the poverty and insignificance of the classical tradition” and “consult . . . origins instead.”71 “Primitive,” once again, was a highly labile category in this criticism. Like the rest of Seurat’s supporters, Adam made various and disparate suggestions about what kind of primitive origin he saw the Grande Jatte as having reinstated—­he referred at various points to “old frescoes,” to paintings by Hans Memling, and to “Egyptians lining up

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piously . . . across steles and sarcophagi.”72 No matter which precedents were referenced, however, ancient Egypt was always implicitly central to such characterizations of Seurat’s figuration. In almost every case, critics praised the Grande Jatte’s figuration with the word “hieratic” (hiératique), which became, as Coquiot noted, “one of those words that swiftly infiltrates critical dialect” after the Grande Jatte’s debut.73 Meaning, literally, “sacred” or “pertaining to the priesthood,” the word hieratic originally denoted an abbreviated hieroglyphic script used by the priestly class in ancient Egypt. By the middle of the nineteenth century, its aesthetic valence had expanded to include a type of “style in which religion imposes on the artist traditional forms,” or “a style of art . . . in which earlier types or methods, fixed by religious tradition, are conventionally adhered to.”74 While many critics viewed Seurat as a “reactionary maniac” because he had adopted a style that appeared “more conventional than the most academic painting,” his supporters celebrated the exaggerated conventionality of his aesthetic, which they lauded for being “stark like a prophecy, like a marching order, like an inflexible law.”75 The term hieratic named this inflexibility as a specific property—­or posture—­of the figure. It at once conveyed Seurat’s compositional technique of posing and positioning figures in conformity to a set of restrictive rules and the physical inflexibility manifest in the bodies of the resulting figures. Indeed, it seems that Symbolist critics used the word hiératique more or less interchangeably with stiffness.76 As Robert Rey observed in 1930, the Grande Jatte appears to have identified and implemented, avant la lettre, the fundamental formal law postulated in Lange’s The Representation of the Human Figure in Its Earliest Period until the Apogee of Greek Art.77 While neither Seurat nor his critics could have been familiar with the concept of a “law of frontality”—­the Grande Jatte predated Lange’s text by six years—­the book helps specify what was at stake in the praise for Seurat’s “hieratic” figuration and in the claim that he had “fled” the classical tradition and returned to “primitive forms.” “Primitive art,” as Lange defined it, “corresponds to what archaeology calls an age (stone age, iron age, etc.), which is to say, a provisional state characterized by the absence of something that will, in the future, have great importance.” This definition reveals the degree to which Lange viewed “primitive art” through the prism of a teleological and profoundly Eurocentric view of history. He classified all figuration that was “primitive” under the general heading of Inledningskunst or “preliminary art.” The defining quality of primitive figuration for Lange—­ which for him encompassed, once again, ancient Egyptian and Assyrian art, art of the Americas prior to European invasion, the art of so-­called Naturvölker (“natural peoples”), and Greek art prior to the Persian wars (492–­480 bce )—­was its lack of certain techniques and expressive valences that classical figuration was understood to have inaugurated. A similar conception of primitive art was in play for Seurat’s supporters when they valorized his return to “primitive forms.” For these critics,

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the attraction of the Grande Jatte’s primitivism was inextricably bound to a condition of lack or negation. “Hieratic stiffness” signified the absence of the kind of illusion of inner life that the “classical tradition” conventionally simulated through the figure’s corporeal suppleness. In his French synopsis, Lange asserted that the specialist term “frontality” could serve to explain certain qualities that prior writers had articulated with “vague words like raideur.”78 He explained that conformity to the law of frontality (fig. 16), which essentially consigned any primitive artist to “the uniform reproduction of one and the same pose,” gave “the figures of primitive art a special character.”79 The “frontal attitude,” he asserted, prevented “the expression of what could properly be called a rapport between figures.” Relations between frontal figures were reduced to “the simplest geometric relations.” Just as the imperative to conform each individual figure to a frontal attitude forbade the introduction of any lateral twisting in the body, the law of frontality also disallowed the possibility of orienting figures at oblique angles to one another. In the grouping of figures, Lange argued, the primitive artist had to position figures either “perpendicular to one another” or “parallel,” so that the figures are “standing or seated alongside one another, facing in the same direction, like soldiers in a line.”80 Similarly, the law of frontality precluded the expression of anything that might be described as a “truly natural movement.” Any s­ uggestion of motion, which Lange saw as confined for the most part to the crude indication of a walking posture, would be necessarily “of a simple and uniform nature; if the figure walks, it will walk straight ahead.”81 Elaborating on Lange’s idea a few years later, Alois Riegl commented that because adherence to the law of frontality prohibited all “lateral inclination of the head or torso,” any movement beyond simple walking would appear “cut off at the root . . . in the places where one most readily seeks the residence of the spiritual or the soul: in the head and torso.” For this reason, Riegl proposed, any movement approximated by the frontal figure will necessarily “appear mechanical, automatic.”82 The classical archaeologist Emanuel Löwy made similar observations in a short study published in 1891 tracing the evolution of poses in Greek statuary from the “stiff schema” of the archaic kore through the naturalistic poses developed in the fourth century bce by Lysippos, which fully overcame the “soldierly stiff impression made by the attitude of these older works of art.”83 (I will return to Löwy in chapter 3.) Löwy associated this soldierly stiffness not only with a lack of coordination between the different parts of the body but also with the absence of a stable center of gravity: he emphasized that because the legs of the kore always remained closed even if one foot advanced before the other, and because each leg supported equal amounts of weight, they appear as if they might “topple over if you gave them a push.”84 While Lange understood the law of frontality to be a formal rule eventually standardized by convention, he saw it also as a formal expression

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Figur e 16. Doryphoros. From Emanuel Löwy, Lysipp und seine Stellung in der griechischen Plastik (Hamburg: J. F. Richter, 1891). Digital image courtesy Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University.

of “the ethics of primitive human life, which is to say its ensemble of habits and rules.” In his estimation, figures that obey the law of frontality “give us the impression of the empire of habit, in human life in general as in art, which sees itself reduced to the continual repetition of the same motifs.” This “empire of habit” was for Lange characteristic of all “inferior civilizations,” which he argued were essentially “stationary” in their passive resistance to change and their restriction of individual freedom of thought and movement. Indeed, he went so far as to propose that “uncivilized” peoples still betrayed a certain “lack of suppleness” in

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their bearing which “gives them a comportment that recalls primitive statues.”85 For Lange, the special character of the frontal figure—­its seeming isolation and incapacity to relate to other figures, its unnatural, mechanical quality of movement, its lack of a stable center of gravity—­were features that indexed the absence of something crucial within the figure. As outlined in the introduction, Lange regarded Greek art of the fifth century bce as an “apogee” of world-­historical import—­the moment that “strictly speaking, created European art”—­because artists in this period first began to “break with these primitive rules to create a new art that was richer and more varied.” By breaking the law of frontality to allow lateral torsions and an asymmetrical tilt in the figure’s trunk and neck to convey the shifting of weight, Greek artists brought about “a remarkable change . . . in the expression of the figure.”86 These artists replaced, as Lange put it, a “completely exterior construction of the human form” with a “representation of man where everything is directed and determined by an interior center,” an “interior center” he named le moi.87 As Riegl summarized a few years later, Lange described an epochal shift from a mode of presenting the human being as a “merely physical individuation, which seems to arise from mechanical movement,” with a body whose “parts take no heed of one another,” toward a mode of presenting the figure as “an ego [ein Ich] to which all the parts are sub­ordinate.”88 “To push the analysis of the me to the extreme” (pousser l’analyse du moi à l’extrême) was, as the poet Gustave Kahn wrote in 1886, the central aim of the new Symbolist movement.89 This determination to explore the farthest limits of the moi clarifies the great enthusiasm Kahn and other Symbolist writers expressed for Seurat’s “hieratic” figures. When they celebrated the Grande Jatte for fleeing the classical tradition and “reject[ing] the methods it produced,” they were expressing their disinterest in the kind of moi materialized through the classical attitude.90 A large body of scholarship has established how closely these Symbolist writers followed contemporaneous research in the ­sciences, experimental psychology in particular; Fénéon’s 1884 editorial “Material­ism”—­ essentially a roll call of the most prominent biologists, physiologists, and psychologists of the era—­makes this investment abundantly clear.91 In his summation of the aims of the Symbolist movement, Kahn asserted that the principal arena of interest for these artists was not the hustle and bustle of an urban street but, rather, the interior of “a brain.” This preoccupation with the mind and the psychological was new in the sense that it was focused primarily on the dimensions of mental life outside the traditional purview of the moi—­or the moi as defined in nineteenth-­ century French philosophy curricula, as a species of âme or res cogitans, a mental entity that “has consciousness of itself.”92 To explore and acknowledge the existence of forms of nonconsciousness was clearly fundamental to the Symbolist ambition to “push the analysis of the me to

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the extreme.” Indeed, Kahn seems to have taken unconsciousness as a starting principle. As he stated in the same article, “dreaming and life are indistinguishable.”93 Kahn was clearly getting at something akin to the law of frontality when he explained, in 1887, that “in scenes with figures” a Neo-Impressionist artist would actively work to “suppress” “any contortion, any movement of joy or suffering” and instead attempt to give to “the modern passerby the hieraticity of an ancient statue,” “re-creating the body as a totality and in a normal aspect.”94 This endorsement of “normal aspects” in which contortions were banished must be understood in the context of an interest in figural forms with the capacity to represent states of unconsciousness. Among Seurat’s enthusiasts, a preference for an absence of apparent thought or consciousness was programmatic. In 1887, in the article that named and summarized the aims of the Neo-­ Impressionist movement, Fénéon issued what was likely a mocking riposte to Huysmans’s just-­published condemnation of the Grande Jatte. Here, Fénéon suggests that maintaining a figural paradigm of simulated consciousness—­a paradigm in which figures seem to insist that the viewer acknowledge their indwelling âme and pensée—­was both fraudulent and outdated. As he stated, “Critics in love with anecdotes whine: you are showing us mannequins, not humans. These critics are not yet bored of portraits . . . that seem to question: Guess what I am thinking!”95

Mannequins and Toy Soldiers Different attitudes toward the stiffness of Seurat’s figures registered differing attitudes toward the psychological insinuations of his picture. Fénéon’s position was not one that the majority was prepared to accept. Most critics and viewers remained committed to the basic principle that the success of a figure painting depended upon an artist’s convincingly simulating a living—­and therefore moving, feeling, thinking—­human being, imbued with âme or pensée. For these writers, the raideur of the Grande Jatte’s figures was not a positive but rather an offensive, or laughable, feature. Critics who reacted negatively to the figures pointed toward many of the same expressive features that Lange associated with primitive, “frontal” figures—­an absence of evident rapport between figures, who, lacking in freestanding poise, appear lined up “like soldiers,” seemingly in the grip of habitual, repetitive behaviors, their movement having an automatic or mechanical quality. But they saw the figures within a more prosaic and more contemporary frame of reference. They compared them not to hieratic statues, as the Symbolists did, but rather to two common types of mass-­produced effigies: toy soldiers, specifically the flat tin soldiers (Zinnfiguren) produced for mass export in Nuremberg, and fashion mannequins, newly ubiquitous in the window displays of Parisian department stores. Rhetorical selection between this

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pair—­a p ­ erfect hyperbole of a nineteenth-­century gender binary—­ depended to a large extent on whether critics looked to the male or the female promenaders to describe the canvas’s overarching figural manner. To compare painted figures to children’s toys or mannequins was a strategy of censure with a long history in French art criticism: these words were conventionally applied to figures deemed “stiff [raide] and unnatural,” lacking the vivacity that was supposed to derive from study of the live model.96 The particular ways Seurat’s critics pressed their allusions to mannequins and toy soldiers, however, betrays their recognition that something different was happening in the Grande Jatte. Seu­ rat’s distinctive approach to posture and his idiosyncratic treatment of legs and arms made allusions to such forms seem almost deliberate. Thus the picture’s failure, or refusal, to achieve a mimetic simulation of liveliness, or produce an illusion of “thought” within the figure, could not easily be dismissed as technical incompetence; rather, as the critics recognized, it was part of the artist’s assertion of a particular understanding of human nature. The widespread perception that Seurat’s canvas resembled “a display of toys from Nuremberg” was keyed to two of the picture’s most distinctive formal features.97 Seurat’s general emphasis on the profile view created a strong resemblance to the most common type of toy exported from Germany, small, flat, two-­sided, poured-­metal soldier figurines that balanced upright on grass-­green painted bases, most often in profile marching forward (fig. 17). The striking treatment of the shadows cast by the promenaders in the Grande Jatte would have further heightened the likeness to these Zinnfiguren: oddly solid, dark green ovules spread beneath the often-­absent feet of the figures in the middle­and background of the picture. These oblong green forms resemble “pedestal-­shadows,” as Robert Herbert aptly put it.98 Contemporary viewers evidently saw them as such, recognizing an analogy between Seurat’s figures and “lead soldiers who move on articulated lozenges.”99 The ­cadets Seurat placed by the water’s edge suggest he may have courted this visual analogy.100 He assigned these two soldiers a position that makes them appear minuscule and toylike in relation to the life-­size figures in the foreground of the Grande Jatte. And he planted these Lilliputian soldiers, who appear doubled as if by a process of mechanical reproduction, on a single and visually prominent “pedestalshadow,” generating an almost unavoidable allusion to Zinnfiguren that necessarily inflects the surrounding figures. The diminutive cadets by the water, standing as if at attention, shoulder to shoulder and facing forward, on a simulated base that appears to help keep them upright, form an obvious counterpoint to another, much larger couple standing in profile in the right foreground of the picture: that “hieratic and scandalous couple, a young man giving his arm to his dandy companion who is holding a yellow, purple, and ultramarine monkey on a leash,” as one critic put it.101 The female half of this couple, whose silhouette almost completely obscures that of the escorting gentle­man,

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Figur e 17. Toy metal soldiers. From Henry René d’Allemagne, Histoire des Jouets (Paris: Henry René d’Allemagne, 1902). Digital image courtesy Getty Open Content Program.

seems to preside (along with her pet) over Seurat’s composition, in a manner that allows or even invites the perception that, ultimately, she is the Grande Jatte’s protagonist.102 This woman is also the figure that, more than any other in the Grande Jatte, provided specific fodder for the generic complaint that Fénéon sardonically parroted: “You are showing us mannequins, not humans.” More than a century’s worth of scholarship has continued to apply the term “mannequin” to Seurat’s figures, without acknowledging its historically contingent status.103 A crucial semantic shift was occurring when critics applied the term to Seurat’s figures in 1886. In Seurat’s reception,

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the original, specifically artistic reference made by Diderot and subsequent critics to the articulated dummy, or mannequin d’atelier used since the renaissance as a studio tool by figural artists, was displaced by the secondary definition of “mannequin.” This was given in Larousse in 1873 as “a human form . . . decked out in clothing and serving as a showpiece at tailors and clothing shops.”104 This secondary type of mannequin, the mannequin d’étalage or mannequin de mode, proliferated in tandem with the rise of the department store and the market for ready-­ to-­wear clothing (confection).105 Léon Riotor, in a sumptuous publication of 1900 celebrating “these department store busts, these summary portmanteaux icons,” recounted that annual sales for one Parisian mannequin manufacturer grew from fifty to thirty thousand between 1860 and 1900.106 The rise of the fashion mannequin was tied to the death of the artistic one. Riotor’s book opened with an illustration of an articulated mannequin d’atelier painting the portrait of a female dressmaker’s doll, above the caption “The Docile Women.”107 As announced in that image, the artist’s dummy, an often genderless creature, prized for its “absolute immobility and exemplary docility,” was giving way in this period to the fashion industry’s femme docile, a more emphatically gendered effigy, possessing even less anatomical articulation or potential for expressive movement.108 Seurat made more preparatory studies for female busts than for any other form in the Grande Jatte.109 Distilling the body into a compactly voluptuous truncation, ignoring or dramatically de­emphasizing arms, abruptly easing pressure of the conté rubbing at the neck, so that heads appear as pale, disembodied ovals floating over torsos, Seurat echoed in these drawings the period’s most common variety of fashion mannequin, the buste-­mannequin (fig. 18).110 The most astonishing specimen from Seurat’s series deploys its mise-­en-­page to sever one of several identical busts just below the waist and above the neck (fig. 19). This formal isolation of the bust carries over strongly in the final painted composition. The silhouetted profile of the female torso, delineated most starkly in perfect profile and at one-­to-­one human scale in the graphic black bodice of the life-­size woman in the foreground, repeats rhythmically, with variations of color, across and into the background of the canvas, beginning with the two pairs of seated, virtually legless women on either side of that figure, and then reverberating outward, for instance, to the figure of the woman fishing at the water’s edge, replicated in minuscule form near the vanishing point of the composition. Seurat’s contemporaries were struck by the resemblance. Le Fustec described the promenaders as a “band of petrified beings, immobile mannequins who have the audacity to captivate the public’s attention and provoke them to laughter,” while Émile Hennequin criticized them for being “drawn up to date, like poorly manufactured mannequins.”111 The aforementioned satirical vignette about the critic who used sculptures to conceal the foreground figures, instructing his companion to “ignore certain figures so naïve that they are silly,” concludes with the

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Figur e 18. Buste-­ mannequin produced in 1885. From Léon Riotor, Le Mannequin (Paris: Bibliothéque Artistique et Littéraire, 1900). Figur e 19. Georges Seurat, study for Grande Jatte, ca. 1884. Conté crayon on laid paper, 23.5 × 30.5 cm. Collection of the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA. Courtesy Smith College Museum of Art.

companion’s retort: “But those figures, my dear, those two large devils of figures resembling dolls from some display of a confectionneur?”112 As this punch line makes clear, the resemblance of the Grande Jatte figures to inanimate effigies—­whether miniature figurines or life-­size dummies—­was the principal force driving the public’s tendency to laugh at the picture. In that sense, the dynamics of the Grande Jatte’s reception anticipate the definition of the comical formulated by the philosopher Henri Bergson some ten years later, in which the comical designates the experience of being confronted with “a certain mechanical inelasticity”

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(raideur de mécanique) located “just where one would want to find the supple attention and living flexibility of a human being.”113 At the core of Bergson’s conception of the comic is an opposition between suppleness (souplesse) and raideur, tied in his argument to a larger antagonism between the opposing principles of intelligent wakefulness and stupid slumber. “In every human form,” he proposed, the human imagination intuitively expects to “see the effort of a soul” (âme) engaged in “shaping matter, a soul which is infinitely supple and perpetually in motion.”114 The soul, which “imparts a portion of its winged lightness to the body it animates,” represented for Bergson “the ever-­alert activity of [a] higher principle,” an activity transcending the forces of “mere automatism.”115 Laughter, in his estimation, arises in those moments when mere automatism overtakes that superior principle, “fix[ing] the intelligently varied movements of the body into stupidly contracted grooves” and presenting the spectacle of “the living body stiffening into a machine.”116 By defining human interiority in terms of the soul and defining that soul as the “ever-­alert activity of [a] higher principle,” Bergson’s essay on laughter affirmed what Crary has described as the philosopher’s “normative model of consciousness,” formed in resistance to prevalent tendencies in late nineteenth-­century science and experimental psychology to reduce mental and social existence to the mechanical operations of “automatic” processes.117 Laughter, as Bergson understood it, was both an expression of the human subject’s intuitive resistance to any apparent “deflection of life towards the mechanical” and a social corrective, the social body’s method of enforcing its ideal of “constantly awake attention.”118 Laughter was thus for Bergson an expression of social disapproval, or even anxiety: “All stiffness of character, of mind and even of the body will be suspicious to society, because it is the sign of a possibly slumbering activity.”119 The laughter directed at Seurat’s “mannequins” or his “characters [with] the automatic gestures of lead soldiers,” I will suggest, expressed a suspicion that can be understood in Bergson’s sense.120 It was a response that reflexively enforced a normative model of consciousness in the face of a painting whose forms very obviously challenged this norm, with a tableau of figures that powerfully approximated a “slumbering activity” inherent in the metropolitan populace. The particularly hostile tenor of the laughter directed at the Grande Jatte’s figures points toward the volatile status of ideas surrounding “automatism” in 1880s France. In the years between 1878, when Charcot began hypnotizing hysterical asylum patients in public lectures at the Salpêtrière hospital, and 1889, when Paris hosted the First International Congress for Experimental and Therapeutic Hypnotism, hypnosis became a leading topic of medicoscientific inquiry among French researchers.121 The practice of inducing trance, first popularized by Franz Mesmer in the eighteenth century under the term “animal magnetism,” was rehabilitated from its prior associations with fairground

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entertainment and quack medicine and embraced under a new name as one of modern science’s most valuable “instrument[s] of psychological vivisection,” as one period doctor put it.122 Phenomena of induced trance and provoked somnambulism were at the center of French efforts to become “acquainted with the unconscious” and to understand the mechanisms of what Pierre Janet referred to in 1889 as “the inferior forms of human activity,” or “psychological automatism.”123 This intellectual context, which Bergson reacted against, clearly informed the reception of Grande Jatte, not to mention the form of the picture itself. Ideas surrounding “inferior forms of human activity” are central to Seurat’s presentation of the dynamics of modern social life. To suggest how, I will outline some very specific analogies that can be traced between the Grande Jatte’s form and iconography and certain aspects of the social psychology of Gabriel Tarde, Bergson’s predecessor as chair of philosophy at the Collège de France. Tarde was one of many writers in the 1880s who drew on the proliferating literature on hypnotism to theorize universal dynamics of human behavior and mental processes. His sociology was in step with the school of thinking that developed around the neurologist Hippolyte Bernheim, who argued that the capacity to be hypnotized was not a symptom of pathology but a fully normal ­feature of the human psyche; all persons were capable of being hypnotized, not just hysterics, as maintained by Charcot.124 For Tarde, this insight grounded a new theory of social existence premised on the insight that “the social like the hypnotic state is only a form of dream.”125 In 1884—­ the year memorialized in the Grande Jatte’s title—­Tarde published his paper “What Is a Society?” It launched the thesis that became the crux of his 1890 book The Laws of Imitation: “Society is imitation, and imitation is a form of somnambulism.”126 Quite contrary to Bergson’s subsequent proposition that “truly living life does not repeat itself,” Tarde based his sociology on the principle of “universal repetition.”127 Just as inorganic life is propagated through the vibration of matter, and biological life through heredity and sexual reproduction, social life, he argued, exists through imitation.128 Tarde’s theories interwove research on animal societies and behavior with psychophysiological research.129 He presupposed an “innate tendency to mimicry in the nervous system” and understood the human brain as an organe répétiteur functioning predominantly through “a kind of habit, unconscious imitation of self by self.”130 This imitative function of individual cerebration was reiterated in the tendency for human beings to unconsciously and involuntarily imitate other persons. He argued that the individual’s dependence on habitual repetition for the most basic activities, such as “looking, listening, walking, standing upright, writing, playing the flute,” was replicated in the social body’s dependence upon a “treasury of routine, of unfathomable mimicry [singerie] and obedience [moutonnerie], incessantly accrued by successive generations.”131 To describe the psychological mechanism of this mimicry, Tarde cited

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recent research on hypnosis, giving absolute centrality to the human susceptibility to suggestion. He viewed the hypnotized subject’s tendency to imitate the hypnotist as the purest form of the “imitativity” that structured all social relationships. The Grande Jatte, it would seem, effected a rude awakening from the social “dream,” as Tarde understood it—­for the painting’s form brought modern imitation forcefully to consciousness for contemporary viewers. The painting formalized in a particularly graphic way a proposition akin to the statement that “society is imitation, and imitation is a form of somnambulism”; like Tarde’s sociology, the painting militated against the tendency for “civilised peoples [to] flatter themselves with thinking that they have escaped this dogmatic slumber,” as Tarde put it, in a formulation that gave new literalism to the famous phrase of Kant.132 Certainly, the Grande Jatte’s subject—­the Sunday promenade, a public ritual of perambulation—­held particular resonance with the concept of somnambulism. (As Tarde recollected in 1890, in the early 1880s “the word hypnotism had not as yet been altogether substituted for somnambulism.”133) Alfred Paulet seems to have implied this analogy to sleep-­ walking when he asserted that Seurat gave his figures “the automatic gestures of lead soldiers” because he sought “to demonstrate the routinization [train-­train] of the banal parade of endimanchés who walk without sensation in the places where it is conventional one must walk on Sunday.”134 Tarde defined society in general as a group of individuals who imitate one another. Crucially, however, he asserted that societies grew increasingly imitative “as they become civilised.” While modern democratic civilizations tended to believe they had “become less credulous and docile, less imitative, in short, than our ancestors,” Tarde argued that the reverse was true. In European culture in the nineteenth century, mechanisms of suggestion had only become more diffuse and accelerated. The greater proximity and concentration of populations, the emergence of new media for nearly instantaneous and mass communication, a scientific and industrial culture of inventions, and, not least, the new importance of fashion, all conspired to make imitation an increasingly dominant force in modern civilizations.135 Seurat’s handling of the figures en masse—­his monotonous repetition of sartorial silhouettes and postures—­evoked this heightened imitativity of the modern public sphere for contemporary viewers. As Paul Adam described it, “the stiffness of the people” in the canvas captured the “feeling of the modern,” recalling the new uniformity of ready-­to-­wear clothing and new homogeneity of the metropolitan expressive affect, “the reserve of our gestures, the British cant everyone imitates” (par tous imité).136 It was also in connection with this idea of imitation that the word poseuse—­connoting aspirational self-­presentation through mimicry of models of prestige—­ was applied to Seurat’s picture. As Henry Fèvre observed, the Grande Jatte had captured “the stiffness of Parisian promenading, somber and listless, where even recreation is posturing” (poseuse).137

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Figur e 20. “Imitation.” From Cesare Ripa, Iconologia; or, Moral Emblems (London: B. Motte, 1709). Digital image courtesy University of Illinois Urbana-­Champaign.

Laws of Imitation: Mannequin and Monkey If the crowd as a whole seems to have evoked that docile somnolence of imitation that modern civilizations preferred to associate, as Tarde asserted, with “primitive” cultures, one figure more than any other—­ perhaps predictably, a female figure—­stood in for this collective deviation from what Bergson would call the “ever-­alert activity of a higher principle.” As I have stressed, the woman in the painting’s right foreground, outfitted in a modish toilette de promenade and accompanied by her leashed pet monkey, monopolized attention, “exciting most especially the verve of the boulevardiers,” as Paul Signac remembered.138 Although Fénéon dismissed the public’s particular antagonism toward this figure as an “inexplicable phenomenon,” an explanation is implicit in his coy description of the monkey as a piece of “nostalgie bestiole” (little animal nostalgia).139 With their overdetermined symbolism and highly calculated formal parallelism, the woman-­monkey pair crystallizes the canvas’s broader allusion to the human subject’s unconscious imitative impulses, representing its most ostentatious or even obscene materialization of them. The monkey stands as a traditional emblem of imitation (fig. 20); in French, as in many European languages, the word itself (singe) came to connote various forms of mimicry. The verb singer meant “to imitate, to counterfeit,” while the noun singerie designated mimicry—­whether as deliberate parody or clumsy affectation—­of actions, styles, gestures, or manners.140 Tarde deployed this simian vocabulary strategically,

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­ otably to convey the human proclivity to imitate models of prestige, a n tendency he saw as “the foundation and origin of society.”141 “The movement of imitation [is] from above to below,” he believed; “all passions and needs for luxury are more contagious than simple appetites and primitive needs.”142 Thus, in 1883, he described the tendency for small-­ town inhabitants to ape (singer) metropolitans and the lower classes to ape the upper classes as the “ensemble of simian avidities [convoitises simiennes] that constitutes the potential energy of a society.”143 Depicting what certain period critics recognized as “a Sunday festival of store clerks, apprentice butchers, and women in search of adventures,” the Grande Jatte might be seen as acknowledging how, in the context of a purported “democratization of luxury” in the French Third Republic’s mass-­consumer economy, this type of simian avidity had become a social force of special potency.144 As scholars have argued, the painting seems to capture a specifically petit bourgeois population, or else a “working class who aspires to become petit bourgeois,” the nouvelles couches sociales taking possession of the bourgeois privilege of leisure.145 But this collective energy is condensed and crystallized in a single figure: the monkey’s mistress, who through her visible identification with the fashion mannequin and her physical proximity to her simian companion, appears as the unambiguous emblem for these convoitises simiennes. The mistress of the monkey was certainly the Grande Jatte’s most scandalizing human presence. Not only was she the figure who most insistently evoked the fashion mannequin, she could also be read as an allusion to prostitution—­having been identified by a number of viewers as a “superb cocotte.”146 But more, perhaps, than any overtly sexual signifiers attached to her, it is her rigid and static demeanor, the rigor with which she remains inert, expressionless, displaying fashion rather than flesh while holding a mannequin’s posture, that marks the monkey’s mistress as a figure of commerce. If not a prostitute, she might allude to another kind of commercial character—­a department store shop-­girl. These working-­class women became objects of fascination during the late Second Empire and early Third Republic. Émile Zola, whose books Seurat read avidly, noted while researching The Ladies’ Paradise, his 1883 novel set in a department store, that demoiselles de magasin could be instantly identified on their (Sunday) expeditions outside the store. They announced themselves by their perfect attire and by “always carrying a bit of the grace of the mannequin.”147 (“Grace” is surely an ironic descriptor; Zola elsewhere described the fashion mannequin as a “ferociously obscene” object.148) Zola’s suggestion that contemporary shop-­girls, in bearing and carriage, modeled themselves on the mannequin provides one important framework for understanding the offensive raideur of the monkey’s owner. “The displays of shop windows,” Tarde asserted, were a key component of a modern urban environment in which commercial attractions acted hypnotically upon subjects, exerting profound suggestive impact.149 The monkey’s mistress might be read as a subject who has suc-

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cumbed to the magnetism of the shop window, or more precisely, to the magnetism of the mannequin, surely one of the new department stores’ most powerful instruments of suggestion, as an object that modeled ensembles the potential customer could replicate on her own person. Her attire clearly marks her as an enthusiastic participant in the widespread aping of the leisure class in late nineteenth-­century France. She has acquired the full inventory of articles required for promenading in Paris in 1884, including an umbrella, the most ubiquitous new pseudoluxury rendered widely affordable by the “democratization of luxury” and considered an “indispensable complement to any toilette de promenade.”150 But her imitativity appears to exceed mere consumption habits. Her palpable stiffness—­she seems to do nothing but hold still and face forward, as if to flaunt her bustled silhouette at an ideal angle for the viewer of the canvas—­suggests the aping of an inanimate display object. Indeed, the preposterous presence of this “mannequin sauced in violet” lies in the suggestion that she has somatically internalized the mannequin as a “model for imitation,” treating it as a model not only for assembling an external toilette but also for inhabiting and exhibiting the body in public.151 Seurat’s decision to accessorize this mannequinlike female with a leashed pet monkey (a capuchin, most likely, or a macaque)—­a highly eccentric complement to an otherwise quite conventional toilette—­ underlines her status as a personification of imitation.152 Far more than a mere whimsy or symbol of licentiousness, as the monkey has often been interpreted, the capuchin actualizes the linguistic metaphor of singerie, while simultaneously forging a visual link between the modern tendency Tarde defined as mode-­imitation and what he described as “fashionable theories on evolution.”153 The monkey’s facility for mimicry has long been associated with art and its mimetic function—­epitomized in the classical aphorism ars simia naturae, “art is the ape of nature.” For centuries, the monkey had been the standard animal alter ego of the artist.154 The Grande Jatte perhaps retains some trace of this ancient association: the monkey appears in the canvas’s lower right corner, near the artist’s signature. But if the monkey can be read as Seurat’s stand-­in—­an invocation of the artist in his habitual role as ape of nature—­the Grande Jatte also alludes to the breakdown of that traditional definition, and to an artist whose “aping of nature” was radically unmoored from classical mimesis and grounded instead in the modern natural sciences. The popular dissemination of evolutionary theory in the late nineteenth century irrevocably altered the monkey’s iconographic connotations. By the 1880s, the monkey’s specifically artistic symbolism had been overwritten by the animal’s new function as a visual synonym and alter ego for Charles Darwin. This identification grew so entrenched that, to borrow a striking formulation from one vocal anti-­evolutionist of the era, it became impossible to pronounce the name Darwin “without immediately seeing it sparkle forth like the silhouette of a monkey.”155

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F igu re 21. Attributed to J. Gordon Thomson, “That Troubles Our Monkey Again.” From Fun, November 16, 1872. Album/Alamy Stock Photo. F ig u re 22. André Gill, “L’Arbre de la science.” Cover of La Petite lune, no. 10 (August 1878). Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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After Darwin’s election to the Académie des Sciences in 1878, French caricaturists began to follow the English in delineating him as an homme-­ singe with a lavish prehensile tail (figs. 21–­22), not dissimilar to the spiraling appendage in the foreground of the Grande Jatte, “the length of [which],” as George Moore noted, “raised a clamor in the petite presse.”156 While critics never acknowledged this association in print, evolutionary theory likely inflected the vehement reactions to the simian presence in the Grande Jatte. And it is inconceivable that Seurat, who had studied Darwin in Duval’s anatomy class, could have been oblivious to current debates concerning the proposition that “man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped” when he introduced a monkey’s silhouette into the foreground of the Grande Jatte.157 Seurat likely would not have seen the 1871 caricature in Fun, in which Darwin-­as-­monkey, his tail spiraling up suggestively between his legs in a lavish S-­curve, takes the pulse of an elaborately bustled “female descendent of Marine Ascidian,” who scolds the scientist flirtatiously, “Really, Mr. Darwin, say what you like about man . . .” But the Grande Jatte contains a striking formal echo of the British caricature. Seurat’s picture reiterates its cluster of associations between Darwin, sexuality, animality, and female fashion, and adds to it new psychological dimensions, putting the consciousness of the female figure more overtly in

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question.158 The specter of animal descent is made integral to Seurat’s evocation of the modern subject’s imitative impulses, which the Grande Jatte presented as not simply somnambulistic but also animalistic and hypersexual. Though the monkey was part of Seurat’s earliest conception of the Grande Jatte, he painted in the animal last, as a final flourish.159 Extant studies show that in progressing from conté drawings of serial monkey silhouettes to eventually leashing an individual monkey to the standing woman in the final canvas (fig. 23), Seurat gradually adapted anatomy, posture, and fashionable attire to create a formal parallelism that made these figures appear as if they were reciprocally mimicking one another.160 Most significantly, it was not until Seurat finally coupled the monkey’s silhouette to that of its mistress that the lavish “ring-­tail . . . said to be three ­yards long” was added (fig. 24).161 As John Carl Flügel remarked in the Psychology of Clothes, for a brief moment in France of the

Figur e 23. Georges Seurat, Sept Singes, 1884. Conté crayon on white paper, 30.1 × 23.5 cm. Collection of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photo: Tony ­Querrec, © RMN-­Grand Palais/ Art Resource, NY.

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Fig u re 24 . Georges Seurat, Woman with a Monkey (study for the Grande Jatte), ca. 1884. Oil on panel, 24.8 × 15.9 cm. Collection of the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA. PicturesNow/UIG/ Bridgeman Images. Fig u re 25 . Albert Robida, “Le Phare de la mode.” From La Caricature, no. 302 (October 10, 1885). Courtesy Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections and University Archives, Northwestern University Libraries.

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1880s the “accentuation . . . of the posterior parts” was so ­exaggerated that “women were wearing a creditable imitation of a tail.”162 Like the caricaturist who in 1885 drew a series of women fanning or shading themselves with accoutrements grasped by their prehensile bustles (fig. 25), accompanied by the caption “the tournure appears as the attachment of an atrophied caudal appendage, proving right the Darwinists,” Seurat plainly perceived the tournure’s tail-like aspect and used the monkey to bring it into focus.163 Certainly, as Gustave Coquiot insisted, the Grande Jatte conveys Seurat’s “respect” for the so-­called faux cul, or “false-­ass,” treating the exaggerated bustle as a “sacred object,” suggesting even a certain “pleasure in delineating it.”164 Seurat’s rigorous imposition of the profile posture is one vital sign of his respect for the fad, which became known as the cul de Paris, or “Parisian ass,” when it was eventually imitated in less fashion-­forward European capitals.165 Seurat recognized, as Charles Blanc did in his 1872 “Consideration of Ladies’ Fashion,” that the fad for the “accentuated rump” was an instance of women “dressing as if to be viewed in profile.”166 The artist “frankly tackled” this “disgracious profile,” as Gustave Kahn asserted, presenting the figure “from the side, accentuating the arch of the backside the couturier tried to obtain and translating all the bizarre fantasy of this ornamentation.”167 The wom-

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an’s accessories embellish and amplify this graphic profile. She tilts her open umbrella at an angle that precisely rearticulates the silhouette of her backside. And the posture of her pet monkey, likewise posing as if to be seen in profile, emphasizes the contour of its elongated tail, a spiral reiterating the swooping curve of its mistress’s bustle. The precision of the postural parallelism between monkey and mistress is made vivid through the contrast between the pose of the monkey and that of the jumping pug, one of the only figures in the Grande Jatte with an active, oblique posture. The formal mimicry lends the woman-­monkey pairing a comic flavor. It is as if—­as in the popular performances featuring trained capuchins that proliferated in Paris in the 1880s, including at the Cirque Corvi, which Seurat frequented and later painted in Parade de cirque (see fig. 12)—­the Grande Jatte presented its audience with a performing monkey, trained to imitate human behavior. In the drawing now known as the “dancing dandy,” Seurat may even have depicted one such creature—­the top-­hatted dancer’s elongated feet and rounded facial area appear simian in character, and the single “tail” of the billowing tailcoat (in French, queue-­de-­pie) between the dancer’s legs blurs the line between sartorial flourish and anatomical feature (fig. 26).168 But the Grande Jatte presents a far more complex and challenging spectacle of simian mimicry than anything Seurat could have encountered in popular theater. For his painting creates an infinite relay of mutual mimicries that confounds any clear sense of the directionality of imitation—­any sense of who is imitating whom, in other words.

Figur e 26. Georges Seurat, Dancing Dandy, ca. 1887–­1889. Conté crayon on laid paper, 30 × 18 cm. Private collection. Image courtesy Clark Art Institute.

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If Tarde was confident that “the movement of imitation [is] from above to below,” the Grande Jatte makes unclear whether the flow of imitation is from above to below or vice versa. The canvas presents a preening, eminently Parisian, even fashion-­conscious monkey, who appears to have learned to imitate its owner’s imitation of the stiffened “grace of the mannequin” and to coil its copious tail to match the faux cul she displays in perfect profile toward the viewer. At the same time, the presence of the monkey insists that we perceive its mistress in animalistic terms, as a human being sporting a “creditable imitation of a tail,” whose “extraordinary costume,” Osbert Sitwell wrote in 1926, appears as an “eloquent simian shape . . . evolved for [herself] as decoration.”169 Seurat’s presentation of the monkey presses the concept of “imitation,” in Tarde’s sense, toward its lewdest possible horizons. Replicating the outline of the cul de Paris with its tail or queue, common slang for penis, the monkey underscores the analogy between the attractive functions of modern fashion and ornamental display within the animal kingdom—­a comparison also central to Darwin’s controversial theory of “sexual selection” in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871).170 That the monkey’s mistress appears on the arm of a just-­barely-­ visible gentleman implicates her in the dynamics of modern mating rituals, or sexual transactions. Her profile posture, beyond registering obedience to the law of frontality, evokes a sexualized display behavior precisely calibrated in relation to the viewer: as Darwin emphasized, in courtship rituals animals tended to adopt “extraordinary attitudes,” angling their bodies to showcase their ornamental physical attributes for optimum visual effect.171 The presence of the monkey alongside the Grande Jatte’s most prominent figure indexes Seurat’s ambition to take on the question of human nature in the broadest possible sense. Through the monkey, the artist framed the imitative behaviors of Parisian metropolitan life at a particular moment in time—­1884 ce —­within a far more macroscopic historical lens, encompassing the evolution of humanity as a species. The somnambulistic character of the figures is framed within that evolutionary perspective (and the associations that still remained in the 1880s between the word “hypnosis” and the old phrase “animal magnetism” are therefore not irrelevant).172 In the Grande Jatte, humankind’s biological progenitor serves, among other things, as a powerful visual emblem for lower, rather than higher, forms of life and intelligence, or perhaps for forms of life in which instinct, as opposed to “thought,” were understood to be predominant.

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Poseuses Seurat’s career was launched from the publicity the Grande Jatte won him. Yet the artist—­known for his proud and defensive temperament, particularly in dealings with journalists—­was not indifferent to the storm of ridicule and condemnation elicited by his canvas. After its tour

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of exhibitions, Seurat reinstalled the manifesto painting in his cramped studio, where, as Gustave Kahn recalled, he “reexamined it with an ever-­ renewing anxiety, searching for its smallest faults, always trying to satisfy his conscience.”173 This fraught reexamination of the Grande Jatte, in light of its contentious critical reception, is the key to comprehending his next great manifesto: Poseuses (see fig. 11). Isolating the Grande Jatte’s bottom right corner, the corner containing the two figures that had provoked the most vehement reactions from viewers, Seurat stepped back from the controversy over how to represent the inner life of the human subject in order to situate the painting in relation to a much longer tradition of figural representation in the West. Seurat reproduced the Grande Jatte as the backdrop to a fictional scene of its own genesis, or to an archetypal origin scene of figure painting in a larger sense—­an encounter with “life,” via the naked body of a human model, unfolding in an artist’s studio. Turning introspectively back into the atelier interior, Poseuses thematizes questions about the nature of human interiority, or “inner life,” by staging the transaction with life that had been understood to form the necessary basis for figural representation since the foundation of the academies in the sixteenth century.174 Seurat here revisits the figural conventions the Grande Jatte had abandoned, reverting to the practices in which he had been schooled, and turning back to the art-­historical past as a repository of canonical figural images. In doing so, he conceded the degree to which the new propositions the Grande Jatte referenced about the human being’s mental disposition had thrown into crisis an entire tradition of figural representation. If Poseuses responded to the critical dispute Seurat’s manifesto painting had produced, it responded first and most forcefully to the basic question of genre raised by that dispute: Should Seurat continue to produce figure paintings, or should he abandon the genre and restrict himself to landscape? The paintings Seurat exhibited between the Grande Jatte and Poseuses might have implied capitulation to critical consensus on that question. In 1887 he contributed seven seascapes to the Salon des Indépendants, and no figure painting—­apart from a tiny, ten-­by-­six-­ inch panel of a standing female nude, titled Poseuse (fig. 27).175 Then, at the Indépendants of 1888, Seurat unveiled what the miniature picture had intimated: in the two years since the Grande Jatte debuted, he had been methodically preparing a new work that would vindicate his staunch commitment to figure painting. Poseuses became the centerpiece of a group of submissions that, for the first time in Seurat’s career, included no landscapes; it was accompanied by the much smaller Parade de cirque and by eight figural conté drawings, mostly focused on the cabaret and café-­concert.176 Seurat reproduced the tiny figure of Poseuse, enlarged to life-­size (four feet ten inches tall), in the exact center of a large canvas almost exactly equivalent to the Grande Jatte in scale. In this expanded composition, the repeated figure is flanked on either side by, as one critic observed, “two

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Fig u re 2 7. Georges Seurat, Poseuse, 1887. Oil on panel, 25 × 16 cm. Collection of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photo: Adrien Didierjean, © RMN-­Grand Palais/ Art Resource, NY.

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‘pretty and young girls,’ seen from the back and in profile.”177 Seurat situated this trio in the corner of an interior—­seemingly the artist’s atelier, where the Grande Jatte appears as if on private display, occupying the entire left wall of an otherwise spartan room. Poseuses, in one sense, threw down the gauntlet. Defying the many critics who had urged him to stick to landscapes, Seurat instead answered Fénéon’s call to paint the nude—­an obvious attempt, as Kahn put it, to “respond victoriously” to those who had maintained he was “power­ less to evoke a figure.”178 But as a rejoinder to the debate the Grande Jatte had sparked, Poseuses betrays ambivalence as much as defiance. It is structured as a kind of compromise formation. Through a calculated

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F ig ur e 28. Tournure undergarment. From La Mode illustrée 24, no. 44 (1883).

interplay of reproduction and deletion, repetition and difference, Poseuses served simultaneously as an apology for and reassertion of the Grande Jatte’s essential challenge. While Poseuses reproduces the quadrant of the Grande Jatte containing the two figures that most stimulated public outrage—­the monkey and its standing mistress—­Seurat positions the leftmost seated nude so that her back blocks the place where the monkey would have been expected to appear. And he provides a counterpoint to the prior picture’s mannequin­like protagonist by placing at the center of the canvas, just adjacent to her painted image, a professional studio model, naked and directly facing the viewer. More generally, the Grande Jatte’s rigorous imposition of the law of frontality is both echoed and recanted. The three nudes in Poseuses seem to recapitulate the earlier painting’s placement of figures in space according to a law demanding the “simplest geometric relations.” From left to right, they are shown from the back, front, and side, in a schema that seems to allude to Fénéon’s initial description of the Grande Jatte’s figures posed ou de dos ou de face ou de profil. Indeed, Seurat insolently underlines this restrictive orientational schema; on the studio wall, just to the right of the de profil figure, there hangs on a peg the posterior padding worn beneath a woman’s skirt to support the bulge of a bustle (fig. 28). The cycle of ou de dos ou de face ou de profil is therefore resumed in Poseuses in the form of a grass green “false ass” turned de dos to face and “moon” the viewer. This rear-­end pad protruding from the wall—­misidentified as a bag in all previous scholarship—­is only the most obvious example of how

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i­ nsistently Poseuses refers back to features that had been the butt of jokes in the Grande Jatte.179 Certainly, a crude and ancient symbolism is operative in this mooning piece of underwear, which can perhaps be seen as a “kiss-­my-­ass” to the critics of the Grande Jatte.180 At the same time, however, the confrontational tone is tempered. Poseuses both re­asserts and recants the Grande Jatte’s most controversial features. While Seurat arranged the nudes, as in Grande Jatte, according to a restrictive orientational schema, de dos, de face, and de profil, he also relaxed his enforcement of the law of frontality. The three nudes, in their individual postures, step out of the Grande Jatte’s strictly frontal attitudes, assuming three distinct and comparatively supple individual postures. Beyond that, the canvas itself is shown from an oblique angle, as if the confrontational frontality of the Grande Jatte was deliberately set askew. The hedged position Seurat adopted toward the Grande Jatte was reflected in reviews of Poseuses. Critics could not decide whether the painter had reasserted the challenge of the Grande Jatte or retreated from it. Viktor Joze noted the return of “that dressed up Parisian woman,” and argued that Seurat “shows the viewer . . . the ­continuation” of the Grande Jatte.181 Similarly, Octave Maus declared that by “show[ing] once again (by chance or mischievousness?) . . . a large section of the Grande Jatte, which two years ago scandalized the bourgeois,” Seurat had “affirm[ed] with greater force” his idiosyncratic “aesthetic conviction.”182 By contrast, Henry van de Velde insisted that the artist had been “visibly wounded” by the “objections” to his previous canvas; he observed that Poseuses had abandoned the “wooden rigidity” of the Grande Jatte and “its delight in static attitudes more puerile than synthetic.”183 While Poseuses was obviously produced in collusion with the subversive agenda set in Fénéon’s review, the picture could at the same time be interpreted as the remedial exercise of a chastened École des Beaux-­Arts student—­a student whose preceding work had put his mastery of figuration in question, eliciting comments such as “Dare we ask Seurat where he learned to draw?”184 In light of such questions, Poseuses can be read as a self-­imposed endeavor to retake the official test of figural competence. This, at least, was how one critic understood it: “Seurat has a large canvas . . . which in his mind will make the Institute swoon with jealousy . . . he is not afraid to tackle the académie.”185

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The académie—­both as a designation for studies of nude models and as a pedagogical context in which specific figural practices and representations were taught and sanctioned—­was a self-­conscious subtext in Poseuses. The painting reverted to the familiar stylistic terrain of academic classicism and also insistently referenced Seurat’s school. It was in the summer of 1888, we should remember, just a few months after Poseuses debuted, that Camille Pissarro wrote Signac with the cryptic grievance: “Seurat is of the École des Beaux-­Arts. He is impregnated with it.”186

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Figur e 29. Class portrait with model at the École des Beaux-­Arts, ca. 1890. Photographer unknown. © Beaux-­Arts de Paris, Dist. RMN-­Grand Palais/ Art Resource, NY.

Foregrounding the life model was the most fundamental way Poseuses invoked the École des Beaux-­Arts, a school sometimes referred to as the École du Modèle (fig. 29).187 This metonymy between academy and model also obtained for Seurat, who displayed, as Kahn recalled, “an academy (a painted study of a nude man)” on his studio wall as a “souvenir” of his time at school.188 The illegible vertical sheet pinned up just behind and to the right of the central poseuse, its dimensions a formal echo of her upright stance, was perhaps Seurat’s discreet placeholder for this academic totem retained in his studio (fig. 30). And it is tempting to hypothesize that the analogy between the central model and the académie pinned to the wall might initially have been more visible; infrared analysis has revealed significant underpainting beneath the blanked-­ out compositions on the wall.189 Certainly, though, the hundreds of académies Seurat produced while at the École, the countless hours he must have spent participating in the rituals of life class, such as the regular student votes to select the model’s pose for the week, cannot have been incidental to his return to the posing session in Poseuses, as a motif if not as a practice.190 By placing a nude model in the imagined studio space of Poseuses, Seurat insinuated his current or past compliance with the customary academic practice of working “from life,” a practice that had in fact played an extremely minor role in the genesis of the Grande Jatte. Extant studies suggest that only one figure—­that of the monkey’s mistress—­had been created with the aid of modeling sessions.191 The academic overtones of Poseuses are established not simply through the depiction of a posing séance, but also through Seurat’s emphasis on a specific series of poses. If in the 1880s the adjective académique was applied, pejoratively, to figures “given the conventional pose of the atelier and not a real attitude, observed from nature,” then Seu­ rat’s poseuses are paradigmatically academic, for their attitudes recapitulate iconic postures enshrined within a classical artistic canon.192

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F i g u re 30. Georges Seurat, series of Académies. From César-­M. de Hauke, Seurat et son oeuvre (Paris: Gründ, 1961).

Figur e 31. Georges Seurat, study for Poseuses, 1886–­1887. Conté crayon on laid paper, 29.7 × 22.5 cm. Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Henry van de Velde argued that the postures of the nudes in Poseuses were intended to “oppose” the “hieratic postures of La Grande Jatte.”193 The painting’s compositional evolution bears out this view. Sometime in the late spring or early fall of 1886, Seurat executed two preliminary studies for the central figure in Poseuses, a conté crayon drawing (fig. 31) and an oil sketch on board, both likely done in front of a hired model.194 These two première pensées demonstrate that, initially, the artist solicited from his model a pose of strict symmetry along the body’s vertical axis, conforming with the basic postural features Lange defined as characteristic of primitive sculpture.195 Both show a naked girl posing barefoot, standing on the floor with her back almost up against the studio wall. The drawing and painted sketch both present the figure with unarticulated hands and arms held tight to the body in a continuous loop. There is no space between her legs. Her head is held erect, facing straight forward, with blurry, undefined facial features. The strictly upright and symmetrical posture of this preliminary figure has been likened, by more than one art historian, to a soldier’s “at attention” stance.196 But before he exhibited the small Poseuse in 1887 (see fig. 27), Seurat made calculated revisions to the figure. (Whether he did so with the aid of further sessions with a model is unclear.) The figure in the definitive Poseuse miniature, which he recast at life-­size in Poseuses, has far more refined extremities and a decisively modified posture. Seurat significantly enlarged the figure’s head and cocked it off-­center. He added delicate facial features, defining her slightly curled lips in faint cosmetic pink. At the same time, he relaxed her arms, articulated her hands, and interlaced their fingers—­creating the figure’s characteristic gesture, Figures of Thought

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described by critic Jules Christophe as “hands simply clasped slightly below the pudendum.”197 As Daniel Catton Rich observed, in his progression from the Grande Jatte to Poseuses, Seurat “reversed his process.”198 If in the Grande Jatte he proceeded through successive phases of “honing the [figure] down to its signifying minimum,” as Linda Nochlin argues, Seurat’s work on the figures in Poseuses was additive. He built back up what the prior picture had subtracted.199 Even the surface texture of Poseuses, which is by far the most densely worked of all Seurat’s canvases, bears the traces of this reparative process, which was directed in particular toward those “expressive” bodily extremities the Grande Jatte had neglected. In both Poseuse and Poseuses, the colored dots accrete most thickly on the standing model’s face and folded hands.200 In the larger canvas, this hyper­ attentiveness to extremities is underscored and complemented by the cornucopia of accessories for adorning the head, hand, and foot that spill out into the foreground.201 In reversing his process, Seurat was clearly responding to the core criticism that had been directed at the figures in the Grande Jatte: “pas assez de vie,” as Huysmans put it. If critics had bemoaned the absence of “soul” or “thought” in the previous canvas, Poseuses set out to correct that defect by bringing those intangible entities back. Seurat approached this task of revivification with a deliberateness that seems to equivocate between irony and earnestness. He deployed practical, time-­ tested solutions for conferring inner life upon the figure, falling back on certain conventional techniques of pose. In so doing, he also called out their formulaic character. As Seurat developed his composition from the initial drawing and the painted sketch into the definitive version shown in 1887 as Poseuse, he made his nude step out of the Grande Jatte’s frontal attitude. He separated her legs and shifted her weight onto her back foot, introducing the interplay of a Spielbein and a Standbein, or free and supporting leg. This stance, recognized by scholars such as Lange and Löwy as the fundamental innovation of classicism, lends the figure that sense of both the mobility and the internal stability (Standfestigkeit) that the Grande Jatte figures were seen to lack.202 Her final pose conforms to the obliquities of contrapposto, a pose Paul Richer described in 1894 as the stance “preferred” by all artists, “used and abused” ever since its “introduction” by Polykleitos.203 Indeed, the changes undergone by the standing nude at the center of Poseuses essentially restaged the so-­called Greek Revolution in miniature. The evolution of her posture recapitulates the hyperbolically freight­ ed stylistic development that, for Lange, had, “strictly speaking, created European art”—­the invention of a postural schema with “soul-­exhibiting characteristics,” or the capacity to communicate a self-­regulating ego or moi lodged within a human figure.204 If, as Ernst Gombrich stated, art history often recounted this rupture in “terms of the episode from ‘The Sleeping Princess,’ ” in which a “thousand-­year-­old spell” is broken and figures “stir from the rigors of unnatural sleep,” the changes to the posC h a pt e r O n e

ture of the standing nude at the center of Poseuses could be seen to restage that “awakening of art from primitive modes” precisely to effect an arousal of the Grande Jatte’s seemingly slumbering figures.205 A deliberate contrast between different moments within a perceived teleological progression—­between an archaic mode of figuration and a later, more advanced one—­was built into Seurat’s process of composition, as well as the finished full-­size Poseuses, as Van de Velde observed when he pointed to the contrast between the hieratic poses of the Grande Jatte promenaders and those of the nudes in front of them. And the conspicuousness of this opposition would have been underscored in Poseuses’s initial exhibition, when it appeared alongside Parade, a composition Roger Fry described as “more than Egyptian, more than hieratic.”206 The juxtaposition between the hieratic figures in the Grande Jatte and the “more than hieratic” figures in Parade, on the one hand, and the nudes in the foreground of Poseuses, on the other, suggests how Seurat was deliberately contrasting “primitive” and “classical” prototypes of posture to make figures appear to shift in and out of different states or degrees of consciousness. Seurat’s switch out of the “hieratic” mode dramatically altered the expressive presence of the nudes, as the immediate shift in the rhetoric of the critical responses attests. First of all, Poseuses generated far fewer reviews than the Grande Jatte and does not seem to have been a magnet for public mockery. Those reviews that did analyze Poseuses applied a very different set of adjectives to its figures. If the promenaders in the Grande Jatte were described again and again in terms of rai­ deur, the nudes in Poseuses were described as possessing “suppleness” (souplesse). When Seurat exhibited the little Poseuse, Kahn said she possessed “the fluid extremities of a dancer” and characterized her attitude as “contemplative.”207 This emphasis on pliancy and grace was echoed in reviews of the large canvas. Gustave Geffroy described the models as possessing “suppleness and young grace,” while Henry van de Velde described them as “moving, undulating . . . supple.”208 Crucially, in certain key reviews, this corporeal souplesse was linked explicitly to vitality in a larger sense—­that is, to vitality of mind, being, or consciousness. As Paul Adam put it, in a formulation that departed markedly from his description of the Grande Jatte’s “hieratic” figures, “One feels that these supple, alert, smooth women are, even at rest, ready to live, to charge, to laugh, to will.”209 This shift in perceptions of the physical and mental disposition of the nudes dramatically altered the kinds of figural imagery that Poseuses conjured in critics’ minds. Rather than comparing the figures to mannequins, Egyptian sculptures, or toy soldiers, critics spoke of their seamless compatibility with the grand tradition. Jules Christophe invoked Ingres’s La Source (1856), while Fénéon described the central figure as one that would “glorify the haughtiest of museums.”210 But if Seurat’s contemporaries recognized that Poseuses was an evocation of the “grand tradition,” they failed to identify the degree of calculation in this evo­ cation. Figures of Thought

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Fig ur e 32. Jean-­ Auguste-­Dominique Ingres, La Baigneuse, dite Baigneuse Valpinçon, 1808. Oil on canvas, 146 × 97 cm. Collection of the Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Philippe Fuzeau, © RMN-­Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

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Scholars now recognize that each of the figures in Poseuses mimics an iconic pose from the classical or academic canon. The nude at left, shown de dos with a white sheet wrapped around her buttocks, has been linked to Ingres’s Valpinçon Bather (1808; fig. 32), the sensual back view of a seated torso that Ingres himself repurposed throughout his career.211 Seurat’s quotation of this pose from Ingres fits within a broader pattern of allusions, in Poseuses, to the artist’s academic training. Ingres had been Seurat’s dominant pedagogical model while he studied at the École under Henri Lehmann, a former pupil of Ingres. Of two surviving paintings from Seurat’s student years, one is an 1878 copy of the female nude in Ingres’s Roger Freeing Angelica (1819). The same year Seurat painted that copy, the philosopher Eugène Véron referred to Ingres as “the official prototype of artistic perfection for France of the nineteenth century.”212 A self-­conscious appeal to “official prototypes” is also evident in Seurat’s choice of pose for the model at right, shown de profil pulling a stocking up her left foot. This figure quotes the Spinario (fig. 33), a Roman bronze (ca. 100 bce –­100 ce ) of an adolescent boy using both hands to extract a thorn lodged in the sole of his left foot.213 Often called the “Thorn Puller,” the Spinario was one of the most widely copied of all antique statues. It would have been known to Seurat through multiple sources—­a

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bronze version in the Louvre, illustrations in his École des Beaux-­Arts textbooks, and photographic académies that circulated among École students (fig. 34).214 Models posed in the Spinario attitude were also a fixture of Adolphe Yvon’s drawing classes at the École, which Seurat attended.215 More than simply an appeal to the authority of tradition, Seurat’s quotation of the Spinario pose invokes classical art’s lauded capacity to conceive of poses capable of conferring a powerful sense of inner life upon figures. Not incidentally, the Spinario was the “random . . . example” that Henri Lechat selected, in an 1895 exposition of Lange’s law of frontality, to typify the expressive rupture between primitive and classical approaches to pose. “A statue like the Spinario,” he wrote, “a seated adolescent who looks at the sole of his foot where the thorn has penetrated, and thinks of nothing but that thorn which pains him and which he is in the midst of extracting,” would have been inconceivable and even repellent—­“a veritable monstrum”—in ancient Egypt or ­Assyria.216 Lechat’s characterization of the Spinario—­a sculpture that puts particularly strong visual and thematic emphasis on the figure’s hands and feet—­ aligns with that of contemporaneous authors who saw this statue as a vivid embodiment of a psychic state of “perfect absorption,” as one textbook put it in 1885.217 Precisely because the figure turns in upon himself, in an attitude that broadcasts obliviousness to the surrounding world, the Spinario exudes a powerful sense of an autonomous “interior center,”

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Figur e 33. Spinario, Roman bronze, ca. 100 bce –­100 ce . Collection of the Capitoline Museum, Rome. Courtesy Archivio Fotografico dei Musei Capitolini. © Rome, Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali. Figur e 34 . Camille-­ Félix Bellanger, Académie: Jeune homme dans la pose du Tireur d’épine, 1869. Charcoal on paper, 59.5 × 46.2 cm. Collection of the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-­ Arts, Paris. Photo © Beaux-­Arts de Paris, Dist. RMN-­Grand Palais/ Art Resource, NY.

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a free and conscious mind that “thinks” of the thorn while consciously executing, in a feat of proprioception and hand-­eye coordination, a deliberate albeit simple task. Precise sources have been proposed as prototypes for the poses of the two peripheral seated nudes. A definitive source for the pose of the central de face nude, by contrast, has not been attributed. In general, this figure—­perhaps the only one in Seurat’s entire oeuvre to whom the artist has given a finely wrought, highly nuanced facial expression—­possesses an oddness that scholars have found difficult to characterize and interpret. Fry suggested that she projects “something too literal, something of the unassimilated fact.”218 Françoise Cachin perceived in her expression a “willful, perhaps unpleasant cast.”219 Because of the matter-­of-­ factness with which Seurat handled her full frontal nakedness, which is treated with “no prurience, no hint of delicious victimization,” Nochlin has recognized Poseuses as a radical intervention into the history of the female nude as a subject and topos of European art.220 Herbert notes that the central poseuse “recalls the antique statues [Seurat] drew in his youth,” statues that were, as Cachin rightly adds, almost exclusively statues of men.221 At the same time, because her folded hands obscure her crotch, others have described her as a variation on the classical Venus pudica (modest Venus).222 Yet the model’s unembarrassed outward gaze, the resolute quality of her wide stance, as well as her distinctive clasped ­hands, contradict key features of the pudica pose in all its antique precedents. Praxiteles’s original Knidian Aphrodite, ca. 340 bce , as well as the Capitoline Venus and Venus de’Medici, all emphasize the sideward turn of the head, the pressing together of thighs so that knees touch, and a single open hand held out in front of the pubis. This highly gendered body language, which became for Western art the postural hallmark of the feminine, as J. J. Tikkanen observed in 1912, is precisely what we do not find in the central figure of Poseuses.223 Yet it is clear that, if not the Venus pudica, the figure does allude to a sculptural type of some sort. When Seurat reworked the figure into its definitive pose for the 1887 Poseuse, he added beneath the feet a circular white form, presumably a dropped petticoat, that unmistakably evokes the marble base of a statue. This detail—a classicizing reiteration of the “pedestal-shadows” at the feet of the toy soldier–­like figures in the Grande Jatte—insists upon an analogy between the central nude figure and a free-­standing sculpture. Moreover, there is convincing evidence that the pose of one specific classical sculpture served as inspiration for the central model’s posture. This somewhat surprising source goes some distance toward clarifying the extraordinarily enigmatic, multivalent presence of the figure. The crucial elements of the central model’s pose—­weight shifted to the right foot, hands clasped together below the waist, a quality of serious­ ness in countenance—­correspond closely to a Hellenistic statue of the Athenian orator Demosthenes, attributed to the sculptor Poly­euktos (fig. 35).224 Created in commemoration of the orator’s fierce resistance

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Figur e 35. Copy after Polyeuktos, Demosthenes, 280 bce . Marble, 192 cm. Collection of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen. Photo: Ole Haupt, courtesy Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek.

to the Macedonian conquest of Athens, the statue originally stood in the Athenian agora on a base bearing the inscription “If you had bodily strength equal to your intelligence [γνώµη, gnome], O Demosthenes / The Macedonian Ares never would have ruled the Greeks.”225 Two full-­ scale Roman copies survived (one in a private collection, the other in the Vatican’s Braccio Nuovo), and by the end of the nineteenth century, it was claimed that “few statues [were] better known.”226 Certainly, at least, the Demosthenes would have been very familiar to Seurat, who confronted a copy each morning during his years at the École. The Palais des Études, the main building facing the gated entrance to the school, was decorated with ten sculptural copies sent back to Paris by winners of the Prix de Rome. An 1831 copy of the Demosthenes in the Braccio Nuovo adorned its façade, nestled between copies of the Capitoline Venus and a Danaiade (fig. 36).227 A second Demosthenes—an 1837 cast commissioned by none other than Ingres—stood among the antique plasters displayed in the covered courtyard entered through the Palais des Études threshold.228 It is as if Seurat drew back to the literal gateway through which he had entered the academic tradition in Poseuses, counteracting the Grande Jatte’s deviation into “primitive” figuration by superimposing over it a triad of classical figures that echoes those arrayed across the façade of

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Fig u re 36. Pierre Petit, detail of photograph showing the façade of the Palais des Études at the École des Beaux-­Arts decorated with sculptural copies, ca. 1870. Proof on albumen paper, 20.7 × 25.5 cm. Collection of the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-­Arts, Paris. Photo © Beaux-­Arts de Paris, Dist. RMN-­Grand Palais/ Art Resource, NY.

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his school. Indeed, the formal and conceptual principle of the façade’s decoration—­an arbitrary inventory of unrelated specimens from the classical canon arrayed in a horizontal row spaced at regular intervals—­ resonates in important ways with Seurat’s treatment of the nudes in Poseuses, who are presented, in one sense, simply as “three statues in the classical bearing,” as Gustave Coquiot observed in 1920.229 And the metaphorical connotations of a façade, as something that conceals, resonates with the relationship Seurat established between the foreground nudes and the painted figures in the Grande Jatte. In a sense, Seurat had actually implemented the strategy of disguise described in the review in which the Grande Jatte’s most offensive figures were hidden behind “sculptures in the middle of the room.” Poseuses simulated that strategy even as it sabotaged it. For only the monkey—­and not its offending mistress—­was effectively obscured behind the façade of classical nudes. While the façade of the Palais des Études might have provided Seurat with a compositional template, a crucial difference distinguishes the ordering of statues on the façade and the ordering of nudes in Poseuses. No longer a merely arbitrary selection, the sequence of poses in the painting creates a legible, if ambiguous, narrative. They are embedded in an integral space and scenario, and in keeping with the classical motif of the Three Graces, there is a physical similitude among them that invites the perception that they are “sisters,” or even permutations of a single figure. The three nudes have “a shared visage,” as one critic noted, and are identical even in minute details—­most tellingly, the placement of the red barrette that secures the chignon.230 The painting can thus be

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read, from left to right, as a narrative continuum tracking three sequential moments: a single model waiting to begin her session, posing for the painter, and putting her clothes back on after the session has ended.231 Within this narrative framework, Seurat’s quotations of the Baigneuse and Spinario poses make sense. The Baigneuse translates easily into a transitional moment of naked repose, and the Spinario practically begged for adaptation to ladies’ stockings, a stock motif of nineteenth-­ century erotic representations.232 By comparison, the logic driving the Demosthenes quotation is, however, less self-­evident. A monument to the man renowned as the “most forceful of [Attic] orators” is far from an obvious point of reference in the depiction of a working-­class adolescent female who strips down and poses for hire.233 Yet precisely the incongruous­ness of that allusion must be recognized as integral to the larger thematics of Poseuses. The model in the Demosthenes pose, whose clasped hands sit at the canvas’s exact center, occupies the physical and narrative crux of this picture. She enacts the climax of its implied narrative sequence, the moment when the poseuse referenced in the painting’s t­ itle presents herself in a “pose” to be painted. Indeed, Seurat treated the central figure almost as the painting’s mascot. Twice he presented her in isolation to stand in publicly for the large canvas: first in the small panel that presaged Poseuses in 1887, and again in the

Figu r e 37. Georges Seurat, drawing after Poseuses. As reproduced in La Vie moderne, April 15, 1888. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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pen-­and-­ink replica produced for the April 1888 issue of La Vie moderne (fig. 37), published while the painting was still on view.234 Why might Seurat have chosen to make the pose of Demosthenes so central to Poseuses? The significance of this postural quotation can best be grasped in the context of Seurat’s working through of the Grande Jatte’s reception. If the Grande Jatte was perceived to have voided outward signs of the human being’s inner consciousness, the Demosthenes statue might have presented itself as a fitting corrective. The sculpture—­ today the most common example used to illustrate Hellenestic art’s invention of a new genre of “psychological portrait”—­was renowned in the nineteenth century as a particularly “pregnant representation of the inward life,” to quote an 1882 study by the archaeologist Adolf Michaelis.235 Nineteenth-­century descriptions show how this sculpture fascinated viewers with its “seriousness of expression.”236 The “attitude” of the Demosthenes so convincingly conveyed a “forgetfulness of self and everything but the subject on which the mind of the orator is intent” that, one observer noted, the statue was one that “an actor would seek to imitate.”237 While perceptions differed in certain key details—­most crucially, whether the orator was presented “in the act of speaking,” publicly delivering one of his “thunderbolt-­like” orations, or engrossed in a private “moment of meditation”—­all commentators agreed that the statue, through its attitude and aspect, projected the intensity and intentness of the orator’s cogi­­tation.238 In the first major art-­historical study of the statue, published in 1887, Michaelis characterized the Demosthenes as “full of the exertion of thought [Anspannung des Denkens] and the energy of the will.”239 More recently, in a study of images of intellectuals in antiquity, Paul Zanker argued that the Demosthenes inaugurated “a new paradigm for expressing intellectual activity,” announcing a new epoch in classical culture that gave greater reverence to “superior intellectual power” and “the rigors of thinking.” Zanker reads Demosthenes’s “pose and expression” as conveying “a state of extreme mental tension” that “proclaim[s] for the first time the extraordinary intellectual capacity required for political achievement.”240 The statue functions, on his reading, as an embodiment of gnome (γνώµη), a word inscribed on the original sculpture’s base, which designates thought or intelligence, in the sense of mental activity producing convictions and judgments (to quote again the epigraph on the base: “if you had bodily strength equal to your intelligence [gnome], O Demosthenes . . .”).241 More than simply reverting to a generic classicism, then, in Poseuses Seurat isolated a specific posture from the classical repertoire associated with thoughtfulness, with “inward life” in its most elevated manifestation. This was the inward life of the thinking intellect, the “superior intellectual power” that enables the human subject’s political conviction, his resistance to being conquered and vanquished. Seurat’s quotation of the Demosthenes pose in Poseuses was in some ways quite consistent with that sculpture’s already rich history of quota-

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Figur e 38. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Madonna dei Palafrenieri, 1605–­1606. Oil on canvas, 292 × 211 cm. Collection of the Galleria Borghese, Rome. Scala/ Art Resource, NY.

tion. Salvatore Settis, in an article that uses the Demosthenes pose as the basis for a broader argument about the “codification of the gestural language used in the figurative arts,” or, as he more emphatically puts it, the “progressive ‘petrification’ of . . . gestural language,” has shown that there exists a “long iconographic chain” extending from antiquity through early Christian art up through Caravaggio in which figures adopt the Demosthenes posture to indicate “moments of reflection.”242 Polyeuktos’s original statue was displayed on a base that, with its inscription specifying that the figure was meditating on the Macedonian conquest, was designed to give an answer to the kind of question mockingly formulated by Fénéon—­“Guess what I am thinking!” But as Settis shows, the pose of Demosthenes was readily detached from that specific context. Migrating across genders and into new contexts, it became an “image-­sign” or “iconographic scheme” for meditation.243 Settis’s discussion of how Caravaggio might have come to quote the Demosthenes pose, in an altarpiece consecrated to Saint Anne in 1605 (fig. 38), can help us think through a potential objection that might be raised against my suggestion that Seurat is making this quotation. In choosing this pose to visualize Saint Anne in a state of spiritual meditation, Caravaggio was unaware of the statue’s intended expressive significance, since the copy of the Demosthenes in Rome was not recognized to be the statue described in Plutarch and other ancient sources until 1737.244 But Caravaggio seems to have intuitively grasped the original meaning of the pose and, also, the body’s original disposition, which

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Fig u re 39. Domenico Anderson, Demosthenes in the Braccio Nuovo, Vatican, ca. 1890. Albumen silver print. Collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Alinari/Art Resource, NY. Fig u re 40. James Anderson, Demosthenes in the Braccio Nuovo, Vatican, ca. 1845–­1855. Albumen silver print, 35.4 × 19.5 cm. Collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy Getty Open Content Program.

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he “correctly ‘restored’ ” despite the fact that the statue, as he would have known it, was “shorn of its hands and thus of the gesture that most characterizes it” (fig. 39).245 While the Polyeuktos original, as Plutarch insisted, “stood with its fingers interlaced,” the copy that survived and entered the Braccio Nuovo, as well as the second copy owned by the Duke of Dorset, were both eventually restored with hands clasped below the waist around a scroll (fig. 40).246 The Demosthenes on the façade of the Palais des Études, copied from the restored figure in Rome, came down to Seurat in this distorted form. Seurat might well have been aware of the identity and history of the sculpture he was quoting and deliberately “restored” the pose of his central figure to match the original. The corrective of an “absolute joining of hands” had been proposed as early as 1836 by Johann Martin von Wagner, an artist and art advisor on antiquities to Ludwig I of Bavaria.247 But such specialized knowledge would by no means have been necessary for him to perform a historically “correct” restoration of the Demosthenes pose. As the traditional attribute in Western art of philosophers and other celebrated intellectuals, a scroll in the hands of a young adolescent female would certainly have strained credulity, and so we might understand Seurat’s omission of an attribute conventionally associated with the “rigors of thinking” as a necessary concession to

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Figur e 41. Fragment believed to be the folded hands of the Braccio Nuovo Demosthenes. From Paul Hartwig, “Zur Statue des Demosthenes,” Jahrbuch des Deutschen archäologischen Instituts 18 (1903). Digital image courtesy Eisenhower Library, Johns Hopkins University.

adapting D ­ emosthenes’s pose to the modern, everyday studio scenario of Poseuses.248 Yet it is of equal importance that, by removing the scroll and restoring Demosthenes’s gesture of “fingers interlaced,” Seurat recovered the expressive force of the original pose as a scheme for the “exertion of thought,” a scheme for which the “folded hands” were understood to be the “keystone.”249 When Paul Hartwig discovered, in 1903, a pair of folded hands (fig. 41) in the Palazzo Barberini garden that he believed to be a lost fragment from the Braccio Nuovo marble, he argued that the restoration of the hands completed the picture of Demosthenes as “in his thoughts.”250 In some sense, as Zanker hints, Demosthenes’s clasped finger postures might be seen to prefigure the symbolic function of the hands for Stoic philosophers, who made a gripping gesture (the left hand around the right fist) to demonstrate the concept of mental comprehension, or katalepsis.251 That Demosthenes, likely through the renown of his sculpted portrait, might also have become associated with such a symbolic hand gesture is suggested in a passage by Friedrich Nietzsche about the composer Richard Wagner: “Taken as a whole, Wagner the artist has—­to recall a well-­known type—­something of Demosthenes about him: the terrible seriousness toward his object and the force of his grip, so that he always grasps the object; he places his hand around it, in a moment, and it takes firm hold, as if it were made of bronze.”252 Seurat’s quotation of the Demosthenes pose and his restoration of the original hand gesture that formed its “keystone” suggest he was concerned to restore to his presentation of the human being what Blanc had deemed, in his defense of the supremacy of figure painting, “the highest degree of life, which is to say thought.” The choice of pose confirms that Seurat comprehended the controversy around the Grande Jatte as a controversy about the status of thought, sparked by the canvas’s portrayal of figures that appeared to lack consciousness. Therefore to “correct” the Grande Jatte, Seurat had to evoke those “higher degrees” of life associated with thoughtful consciousness; he had to supply the image of a “thinking” subject.

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The central model in Poseuses, who assumes a posture of meditation derived from a famous monument to a charismatic male political agitator, and who was, once again, described by Kahn as “contemplative,” demands to be seen in some sense as a thinking person. More specifically, perhaps, she demands to seen as a thinking woman, with considerable intellect and capacity for self-­determination—­“alert” and “ready to will,” as Adam described her. It is just this suggestion of active, conscious contemplation, structured in and through the Demosthenes posture, that would seem to invite a potentially feminist reading of Poseuses, a picture Seurat composed at a moment when a liberal feminist movement was gaining ground in the Third Republic, and when the femme nouvelle—­a female type perceived as “exquisitely cerebral”—­was becoming increasingly prominent in French culture.253 (Including studio culture: Degas, in his late years, reportedly complained to one woman who regularly posed for him, “What are these times we live in, Pauline, good God! Now there are even models who come around wanting to talk to you about art, painting, literature . . .”254) It is possible to read the Demosthenes posture as a device that dignifies the central model, exalting while also distinctly desexualizing her. Compared to the bustled mistress of the monkey pictured in profile behind her, the central poseuse appears androgynous, with an almost masculine bust. She projects a quality of contemplative “inward life” that seems opposed to the more primitive form of instinctual life evoked by the Grande Jatte’s most controversial figure. And yet, Poseuses makes propositions about the inner life of the female subject that it also leaves profoundly unresolved. A sense of travesty undercuts Seurat’s evocations of the “highest” faculties of consciousness through the person of this naked figure—­a Demosthenes feminized and stripped bare. If Seurat intuited the original meaning of the pose from Polyeuktos, apprehending the Demosthenes in the sense invited by the original epigraph—­as a figuration of gnome, as, in essence, a figuration of a thinker—­we are compelled to ask whether the artist intended to retain that connotation as he transposed the pose across genders.255 As Naomi Schor asserted in relation to Auguste Rodin’s sculpture Le Penseur, which was first exhibited under that title in 1888, “The figure of a woman cannot be substituted for that of the male Thinker without evoking laughter.” Indeed, as Schor notes, caricatures reimagining Rodin’s sculpture as “La Penseuse” attest to the perceived “absurdity of such a figure” (fig. 42).256 While Poseuses sustains a conflicted, ultimately open-­ended reading antithetical to the simple punch-­line logic that governs the “la penseuse” caricature, Seurat’s figuration of his poseuse as a penseuse was also, in some sense, a travesty of the very notion of a thinker. This travesty necessarily hinges on the ambiguous but conspicuous presence in Poseuses of a professional model who mediates the recovery of the classical attitudes that serve to “oppose” the Grande Jatte’s “hieratic postures.” Seurat’s calculated reversion to what Adam had derided as “the poverty and insignificance of the classical tradition” went hand in hand with fore-

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Figur e 42. “Penseuse.” From Le Supplément, March 4, 1905. Photo: Jean de Calan, © Musée Rodin.

grounding the motif that Fénéon had denounced, in one section of his review of the Impressionist exhibition in 1886, as “the irritating image of the ‘model’ who ‘poses’ ” (le pénible image du “modèle” qui “pose”).257

“The ‘Model’ Who ‘Poses’ ” Poseuses employed a highly specific iconography that spoke knowingly to the trade secrets and social milieu of modeling in Paris. The 1880s, the moment in nineteenth-­century art when “interest in the model peaked,” as Marie Lathers has demonstrated, was a moment that saw the rise of a new type of sociological journalism in which modeling emerged as a topic of often prurient interest.258 Seurat consciously sought to situate Poseuses within this new discursive context. He produced the drawing of the central poseuse for circulation in the same magazine that had in 1887 published Paul Dollfus’s article series “Paris qui pose,” which was expanded in 1888 into the first book-­length study of the modeling profession, Modèles d’artistes.259 The high point of interest in the model during the 1880s resulted from the fact that this was, as Lathers has shown, “the critical decade in the evolution or de-­evolution of the modeling profession as it was then known.”260 A significant deprofessionalization of the modeling populace occurred at this moment, as the model’s traditional role within the compositional process was being practically as well as philosophically reformulated by a range of artists. The model’s impending obsolescence as an obligatory instrument of artistic practice was a persistent specter. While Dollfus’s book opened with the declaration that models are “indispensable” to artists, as necessary as “the human document for

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the naturalist novelist,” he returned continually to the idea that modeling as it currently existed might soon vanish.261 He emphasized that a generalized adaptation of le naturalisme, and “the abandonment of classical art, of history painting, of religious painting, of allegory,” had hastened the extinction of what he called the modèle classique or modèle antique, and the rise to a new category he called the modèle technique or modèle moderne.262 Rather than hiring specialized professionals, such as the families of Italian immigrants who had dominated the modeling profession in Paris for much of the recent past, in part because of their presumed genetic link to the Greco-­Roman past, artists were now recruiting nonprofessionals from the general population of working-­class Parisiennes.263 Demand for this new type of model, a category that was, unlike the modèle classique, almost overwhelmingly female, was generating, Dollfus reported, “daily vacancies in the ranks of hat dressers, dressmakers, and department store shop-­girls.”264 Seurat’s model, with her hair worn “à la moderne,” and her fashion­ able department-­store articles strewn about the studio, is clearly a modèle moderne and therefore drawn from the very ranks embodied by the scandalous protagonist of the Grande Jatte.265 Indeed, Poseuses is set up to suggest that the model in Seurat’s studio is the same woman who in the painting behind her is “found again dressed, on the arm of a superb gentleman,” as Adam noted.266 Seurat’s foregrounding of the modèle moderne in Poseuses returned his audience to the offensive female subject who had dominated Grande Jatte. He confronted his audience once again with a figure who seemed to have been drawn from the ranks of those demoiselles de magasin who, as Zola stated, were “always carrying a bit of the grace of the mannequin,” and whom he also described derisively as poseuses.267 The specter of such a woman seems to hover over the central model in Poseuses. A haze of purple shading, at right just over the head and shoulder of the central poseuse, cascades down the wall, bisecting the bottom leftmost picture pinned up behind her. Although ostensibly a shadow cast by the standing model’s body, the shading bears no logical relationship to her corporeal contours. Instead, its downward swoop and upper curve mimic the exact contour of the faux cul worn by the monkey’s mistress in the Grande Jatte, visible to the model’s left. The green rear-­end padding, hung up like a picture on the studio wall, drives home Seurat’s reemphasis on this particular form, as if to suggest that the model standing in the center of Poseuses has only just shed her “imitation tail,” which remains visible in the shadow that her body casts. Is Seurat suggesting that this was the model who had posed as the monkey’s mistress? Perhaps. But if so, what is significant is the apparent disconnect between her body language and that of the key protagonist of the Grande Jatte. While it is clear that the model in Poseuses represents a modèle moderne, part of the ambiguity of the scenario stems from Seurat’s deliberate scrambling of signals regarding the type of model present in his studio. The choreography of poses inscribes this modèle mod-

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erne within the domain of the modèle classique or antique; it suggests she is the kind of experienced professional more likely to be found in an academy than in an avant-­garde private studio, the kind of model who might possess a codified repertoire of practiced, self-­consciously artistic poses. These types of practiced poses were, in part, what modern artists sought to avoid when hiring the modèle moderne, who was expected to have little to no experience in the professionalized craft of the “pose.” For many of Seurat’s contemporaries who worked extensively with models, for example, Degas or Rodin, an essential goal was to reorganize the posing session in ways that would subvert academic art’s perceived dependence upon “the repetition of certain pre-­approved movements,” as Rainer Maria Rilke described it.268 “Pas une pause, ni une pose” (neither a pause, nor a pose) was one of the mottoes of Edmond Duranty’s Impressionist manifesto of 1876, which drew its inspiration above all from Degas.269 For Degas, this subversion of “pose” took shape through two concurrent strategies. On the one hand, he tended to replace the professional model with the professional ballerina, a figure he often represented executing numbered balletic “positions” that frankly proclaimed their status as codified, conventional, repeatable movements. On the other hand, as Fénéon noted, Degas at the same time eradicated “the irritating image of the ‘model’ who ‘poses’ ” by embracing the imaginative process of working from memory, creating his figural works in the absence of the model, with the aid of accumulated sketches.270 Rodin, for his part, attempted to deformalize the posing séance: accounts of his studio practice (no doubt embellished) describe multiple models aimlessly wandering naked, with no demarcated posing areas or platforms, and no clear beginning or end to the posing sessions. The sculptor refused to physically manipulate models into desired positions and only rarely gave vocal directions. He appeared to work in a manner such that, as his interviewer Paul Gsell said, “models seem to give orders to you rather than you giving orders to them.”271 In Poseuses, by contrast, Seurat enlisted the modèle moderne to return precisely to academic art’s perceived dependence upon “certain pre-­ approved movements,” or, to put it in Salvatore Settis’s terms, to openly embrace art’s “progressive ‘petrification’ of gestural language.” Indeed, the painting seems to insinuate the model’s complicity in that petrification process. It is possible to read the scenario presented in Poseuses as a restaging of a type of audition Seurat would have witnessed weekly in his École des Beaux-­Arts life class. As Alexis Lemaistre recalled in 1889, the models who arrived Monday mornings seeking employment for the weekly posing sessions “would give their repertoire of poses, turning themselves de dos, de face, de profil, with dignified or furious gestures, eyes bathed in ecstasy or veiled in sadness.”272 William Chambers Morrow also described these Monday morning solicitations, recounting how many of the Italian models (modèles classiques) still favored at the École created their “repertoire of poses” by “spending idle hours in studying the attitudes of figures in great paintings and in sculptures in the

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Fig u re 43. Édouard Cuyer, the model “Gélon” posing, 1890. From a photographic inventory of models. Albumen silver print, 24.2 × 32.9 cm. Collection of the École des Beaux-­Arts, Paris. Photo © Beaux-­Arts de Paris, Dist. RMN-­Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

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Louvre  . . . and adopting these poses when exhibiting themselves to artists.” But Morrow, writing in 1899, emphasized that these kinds of “stud[ied] . . . attitudes” no longer impressed the younger generation of artists: “the trick is worthless.”273 Poseuses seems to perform one of these worthless “tricks.” It shows a model who appears to move through a “repertoire of poses”—­Baigneuse, Demosthenes, Spinario—­turning de dos, de face, and de profil as she does so. More specifically, the painting alludes to the ways in which such a repertoire might be molded by “pre-­approved” artistic prototypes for the exteriorization of inner consciousness. The central figure in Poseuses can be seen to conjure a posing scenario analogous to one captured in an 1890 photograph of a male model Seurat drew while at school, a certain Gélon (fig. 43), who was apparently the “doyen of models” at the École.274 We know from Lemaistre (fig. 44) that Gélon possessed particular skill and enthusiasm for exhibiting himself in poses meant C h a pt e r O n e

to evoke the cogitations of ancient rulers and literary characters, a skill he appears to be putting into practice in the photograph, where he poses with his fist clenched, his head cocked to one side, and his chin resting on his hand—­a pose that seems carefully calibrated to aid an artist in the production of an image that asks, “Guess what I am thinking!”275 Affecting a gesture (chin resting on his hand) that had functioned across centuries of European art as a conventional sign for contemplation, Gélon demonstrates here the kinds of modeling practices deployed in environments like the École to instantiate the aesthetic illusion of a human being imbued with the “inward life” of thought or consciousness. The photograph makes clear how these practices involved circular, mutually reinforcing feedback between “the attitudes of figures in great paintings and sculptures” and the mise-­en-­attitude of models who internalized and imitated such postures when presenting themselves to artists.276

Figur e 44 . “Gélon” in and out of pose at the École des Beaux-­Arts. From Alexis Lemaistre, L’École des Beaux-­Arts dessinée et racontée par un élève ­(Paris: Firmin-­Didot, 1889). Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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In that sense, Gélon’s pose in the photograph offers an analogy with that of the central figure of Poseuses. By replicating the posture of Polyeuktos’s sculpture, Seurat’s young model can likewise be seen to assume a “studied pose” contrived to exteriorize the activity of a contemplative intellect, a pose that we might say was intended to evoke a form of thought that was “higher” than the kind of automatic or unconscious behavior recognized in the figures of the Grande Jatte. But as in the Gélon photograph, the pretense of contemplation is undercut by the mise-­en-­scène of the posing session. One could say the mood of Seurat’s picture mirrors that of the photograph. Although it palpably captures the sympathetic character of Gélon, who was beloved and respected by generations of art students, the photograph also discloses the preposterousness of his vocation. There is a dissonance between the theatrical context and the grave pose of contemplation Gélon affects, as he stands naked on a stagelike platform before a shabby curtain, executing a routine physical task that demands no actual intellectual involvement. Because of this dissonance, it is impossible to disregard that Gélon’s contemplative aspect is a simulation. That sense of preposterousness is carried over in Poseuses. The studio setup, the model’s gender, the ambiguous quality of her facial expression, the status of her pose as a quotation, a “studied attitude” that mimics an antique monument—­all of these collude to convey the notion that thought, here, is not really thought. Rather, it is an imposture of it, indeed, merely the pretense of a poseuse, “a man, or a woman, who affects postures or a studied language. —Someone who seeks to produce an effect through a studied attitude” (attitude étudiée).277 Certainly, the very title of the canvas, Poseuses, if we understand it to refer not only to the figures in the Grande Jatte but to the nude women in the foreground of the canvas, underlines the notion of performative artifice, or affectation. That sense of performance would have been further under­scored by the ensemble of works with which Poseuses was originally exhibited—­Parade de cirque and a group of conté crayon drawings of the café-­concert. Given the subject matter of those pictures, it seems likely Seurat would also have had in mind the specifically theatrical meaning of the word poseuse, a term for women who sat onstage at the café-­concert flanking the main entertainer (fig. 45).278 Seurat’s arrangement of the nudes in Poseuses, with two seated subsidiaries flanking a principal standing figure, evokes that theatrical setup, almost as if to analogize the central figure to a theatrical performer. If the obliteration of the monkey in the Grande Jatte stands as the most obvious signal that Poseuses was renouncing a presentation of the human subject tied to notions of instinctuality and unconsciousness, it is also true that, in obscuring the monkey, the nude model in Poseuses became its surrogate. Appearing as a kind of aper of art, the posing model in Poseuses reiterates the concept of “imitation” while shifting it into a different, more classically aesthetic register. Seurat sought to “correct” the Grande Jatte by supplying the pictorial illusion of a figure imbued

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Figur e 45. “Poseuses” seated onstage at the café-­concert. Cover of La Caricature, August 16, 1884. Courtesy Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections and University Archives, Northwestern University Libraries.

with inner life—­“with the highest degree of life, which is to say thought.” But he presented that illusion as the product of mere singerie. In that connection, it is not incidental that the posture aped by the model at the center of the canvas is that of the Demosthenes sculpture, for that sculpture, we should recall, was described as embodying such a compelling expression of a man engrossed in thought that “an actor would seek to imitate it.” Demosthenes himself was known for having worked with actors to perfect his physical comportment for oration—­the renowned force (deinotês) of his rhetoric was widely understood to derive from his “power of acting.”279 Demosthenes, a man who “even in the last night of his life dreamed of himself as an actor on the tragic stage,” Nietzsche wrote, had “discovered the last stage of eloquence, hypocrisis.”280

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“The Fatigue and Ecstasy of the Pose”

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Seurat undermined the illusion of thought he provided in Poseuses by stressing the staged, “studied,” imitative status of the model’s pose. But there is a deeper sense in which this painting’s image of thought was radically subverted. Not only because the central model’s contemplative aspect appeared as an imitation, but also because it was possible to read the central model as a woman who is in fact not even conscious. It is a point of some interest that Fénéon praised Poseuses as a masterpiece even though it foregrounded everything he condemned in his criticism. The central nude is a figure that both invites the “Guess what I am thinking!” and embodies the studio contrivance Fénéon saw as coinciding with that tiresome paradigm of inwardness, “the irritating image of the ‘model’ who ‘poses.’ ” Yet Fénéon’s ecstatic review of Poseuses suggests that he perceived in it a radical subversion of those aesthetic conventions. For as Martha Ward has suggested, his description of the central model strongly implies that he recognized her to be posing in a state of hypnotic trance.281 She is, in his description, “standing on a square of linen . . . her arms at rest and her hands united, her eyes . . . contracted from the fatigue and the ecstasy of the pose.”282 After Charcot began his spectacular public demonstrations of hypnosis in 1878, both artists and scientists came to recognize the hypnotic séance and the posing séance as somehow analogous. Student memoirs of the period attest that there was an enthusiasm for hypnotic experiments among École des Beaux-­Arts students. The endeavors of the young men in Jean-­Léon Gérôme’s class to replicate some of Charcot’s experiments on “young women of the model persuasion” were recounted by John Shirley-­Fox, who recalled hiring one such young woman “so used to being hypnotised that a little more or less of it made no difference to her.”283 While enthusiasm for such experiments was widespread in French society by the end of the 1880s, it makes sense that the École des Beaux-­ Arts students were early enthusiasts, given the robust alliances between the art school’s faculty and the physician-­researchers at the Salpêtrière hospital. In 1873, a full five years before Charcot ventured into this territory, Mathias Duval had published a significant paper on hypnosis, advocating experimental psychology’s embrace of “provoked somnambulism.”284 Duval became a regular at Charcot’s Tuesday lectures and appeared in Pierre-­André Brouillet’s 1887 group portrait of Charcot’s clinic.285 When Duval retired in 1903, he appointed Charcot’s assistant Paul Richer to succeed him as professor of anatomy at the École.286 The cross-­pollination of the official spheres of the École des Beaux-­Arts and the Salpêtrière is perhaps unsurprising, since, as Freud recalled of his period of study at the Salpêtrière in 1886, Charcot “had the nature of an artist.”287 He embraced a distinctly aesthetic conception of medicine, based on the assumption that art and medicine shared the human body as their common subject. He proposed, for instance, that doctors “should know the nude as well as or even better than painters.”288 But if

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Charcot regarded the painter’s intimacy with bodies as a model for the clinician, he also recognized in his own hypnotic experiments “a model for the artist,” as Andreas Mayer has shown.289 In 1883, for instance, in an article on “cerebral automatism,” Charcot and Richer asserted that their hysterical female patients, when they entered the initial, cataleptic phase of hypnotism (preceding lethargy and somnambulism), were “transformed into a sort of expressive statue, a motionless model.”290 Because their cataleptic subjects could “preserve a perfect equilibrium” if “placed standing and in a forced attitude,” the doctors proposed that catalepsy was a condition of which “artists, without doubt, might avail themselves to a very great extent.”291 The use value of hypnotism for the figurative artist was reiterated in 1887. As a “perfectly docile automaton, but without stiffness [un automate parfaitement docile, sans raideur], on whom one can imprint with the greatest facility the most varied poses,” the cataleptic test subject presented herself as the ideal modeling subject.292 Richer, writing with Gilles de la Tourette, went so far as to suggest that classical artists had been disadvantaged by their inability to exploit hypnosis. Had they possessed the requisite knowledge, they suggested, “sculptors of antiquity” would certainly have recruited “cataleptic women” to pose for them.293 The apparent facility for expressive posing demonstrated by Charcot’s hysterical test subjects, in graphic and photographic images and in his public “Tuesday Lessons,” left a strong impression on the public. Dollfus went so far as to conclude Modèles d’artistes with the prediction that in the future, “models will only be chosen from among the pensionnaires of the Salpêtrière.”294 But more than simply fostering a recognition of the analogy between the roles performed by the artist’s model and the hypnotized female test subject, the popularization of hypnosis prompted a new recognition of the fundamentally ambiguous mental condition that was and always had been intrinsic to the regular artistic posing session. In Modèles d’artistes, Dollfus characterized modeling as an act that fostered the inhibition of conscious thought, a regression into a state of slumber or trance: “Look closely at a model who has stood for several minutes on a posing table . . . not thinking [ne pensant pas], the eyes fixed in vagueness without seeing . . . some actually find ways of putting themselves to sleep with their eyes open, and resting like that. Others—­and there are more than one . . . reach magnetic slumber, like a catalepsy.”295 The central model in Poseuses also demands to be read in light of Doll­fus’s comments. The model in the Demosthenes pose offers a fundamentally dual, or conflicted, presence, simultaneously embodying the pose of meditation and displaying signs of an opposing mental state, a state of sleeping with her eyes open, the ne pensant pas of a hypnotic trance, or the cataleptic slumber that transformed human beings into what Pierre Janet described as “living statues whose minds are empty of thoughts.”296 (This duality is already inherent in the conflicting medical and philosophical meanings of “catalepsy,” which comes from the Greek

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katalepsis. The term’s modern sense—­as seizure, trance, or “condition induced by mesmerism”—­overlaid the more ancient and exalted philosophical sense of katalepsis as mental apprehension or comprehension, a concept the Stoic philosophers equated with the hand’s grasp.297) That duality is manifest in the enigma of the central model’s facial expression. While these effects are difficult to perceive when examining Poseuses in its current perch at the Barnes Foundation, the longer one studies the countenance of the central poseuse at eye level, the more her expression seems to oscillate between vacuity and knowingness. Her eyes shift between glazed and communicative, her lips at times seem curled in a kind of beatific “archaic smile,” at times stern and pursed as if on the verge of some elocution. The duality of mental states embodied in the central model also bears on the highly ambiguous question of agency in the transaction between painter and model to which Poseuses alludes. As Ward has observed, there is “no painter for whom to perform”—­the model appears to “pose for no one.”298 No palette, paint, easel, or other tools signal the active presence of an artist in the studio depicted in Poseuses. This conspicuous absence of an artist can be seen to assign the model in the pose of Demosthenes a degree of authorial control, almost positioning her as the artist’s female surrogate. Poseuses invites the perception that the model it pictures is the living incarnation of the figure pictured in the composition behind her, the figure who became the scapegoat for the manifesto painting’s larger offenses. Given this identification, it is possible to interpret the model’s pose as a conscious, calculated effort to refute the charges that had been leveled against her painted image. It is as if the monkey’s mistress has descended from the canvas and turned de face toward the public to stand, upon the “improvised pedestal” of her underclothes, in a pose in which she identifies herself with a celebrated classical thinker.299 If read in this manner, it is difficult not to recognize in the central model a semblance of a knowing address to Seurat’s critics, half defiant, and half mournful, perhaps. Indeed, as a conventional scheme for meditation, the Demosthenes pose necessarily derives its specific meaning from context. As Settis has shown, textual or visual clues enable the viewer to “guess” what the figure is thinking about. The epigraph inscribed beneath Polyeuktos’s Demosthenes allows us to infer that the figure meditates upon the Macedonian conquest; the presence of the Christ child bruising the head of the serpent tells us that Caravaggio’s Saint Anne meditates upon the resurrection. In Poseuses, the Grande Jatte plays that contextualizing role. If we perceive the central model as figuring a mode of thought that could be characterized in terms of “thinking about,” then the picture invites the interpretation that the object of the central model’s meditation is the Grande Jatte itself. Her meditation, on this reading, restages Seurat’s own meditation. She can be read as a figure engrossed in a self-­reflexive rumination on the larger questions raised by the contentious reception of the manifesto painting—­asking not “Guess what I am thinking?” but rather “What is thinking?” in the very broadest sense. Or perhaps the C h a pt e r O n e

Figur e 46. Hypnotizer and hypnotized subject. Illustrated in Foveau de Courmelles, L’Hypnotisme (Paris: Hachette, 1890). Digital image courtesy University of Ottawa.

painting asks, what does it mean to visually acknowledge that the human subject’s mental disposition encompasses a duality of consciousness and unconsciousness? By representing its central figure as if she herself might be in the throes of reckoning with the enigma of her own consciousness, Poseuses asks this. At the same time, one can read the model as stripped of any agency or awareness, as simply an automate parfaitement docile, sans raideur, oblivious to the significance of the poses she is adopting in front of the picture displayed behind her. Read in this sense, the model appears not as an author of her image but as a woman who has relinquished her autonomy of consciousness and is now subject to the artist’s external “suggestion” and control. Though invisible, Seurat might be felt to preside over this studio. His dominion over this space, and the objects and persons he curates within it, is implied all the more powerfully by his nonpresence, for we are invited to imagine the artist standing in the position we adopt in front of the picture, that is, to imagine him in a face-­to-­face confrontation with the central poseuse.300 If we read Poseuses as implying an interaction in which the artist dominates a docile, unconscious woman (fig. 46), then the painting becomes a somewhat bitter joke at the model’s expense—­a kind of systematic undoing of its own depiction of the plenitude of contemplative thought by means, once again, of the spectacle of woman as unconscious automaton. Figures of Thought

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Fig u re 47. Georges Seurat, Cirque, 1890–­ 1891. Oil on canvas, 185.5 × 152.5 cm. Collection of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

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Both of these potential readings are left open in Poseuses. Indeed, I suggest they coexist in tension. Seurat’s “reprinted, corrected, singularly augmented edition of the Grande Jatte” both did, and did not, retract the core offense of that prior canvas—­the apparent degradation of the human subject by means of a visual negation of “the highest degree of life, which is to say thought.” It is certain, however, that “re-­examining” the Grande Jatte resolved some of these questions for Seurat. His revisitation of classical figuration in Poseuses served at once as a kind of requiem for and exorcism of the figural conventions the Grande Jatte had abandoned. Poseuses was almost certainly the last “grande toile de lutte” for which Seurat hired a professional model to pose.301 From that point onward, his remaining figure paintings, Chahut (1889–90) and Cirque (1891; fig. 47), were visibly unburdened by the weight of tradition, embracing an unambiguously mechanistic figural language allied closely with both psychophysics and new mass-­produced media such as the advertising posters of Jules Chéret and the animation strips of

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Émile Reynaud.302 That decisive shift in Seurat’s practice, however, was authorized in and through Poseuses, which simultaneously summoned and obliterated the illusion of conscious thought valorized within the tradition of figuration the artist inherited. As Fénéon noted at the end of his review, “This work humiliates in the memory the nudes of galleries and of legends.”303

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Figures of Thought

F i g ure 48. M. B., “Beethoven’s Abschied.” In Wiener Bilder: Illustrirtes Familienblatt 6, no. 23 (June 4, 1902). © ÖNB Vienna.

Beethoven’s Farewell The Creative Genius “in the Claws of the Secession”

I reminisced of a time, when I was happy In the Paradise of Olympus For in the Secession’s Eden I felt terribly crappy.1 Thus in “Beethoven’s Farewell,” a satirical poem published in the magazine Wiener Bilder (fig. 48), the fictional voice of the great composer recounts his experience of being “excommunicated” to a “temple of modern art” in Vienna at the dawn of the twentieth century. For some ten weeks in the spring of 1902, the Union of Austrian Artists (known as the Vienna Secession) suspended its regular programming of inter­ national contemporary art exhibitions and converted its recently constructed Kunsthalle into a decorative shrine for the unveiling of a single monumental sculpture: the Beethoven-­Denkmal by the famous German artist Max Klinger (figs. 49, 50), newly completed after seventeen long years of labor.2 On the occasion of this experimental exhibition, referred to as the Klinger-­Beethoven Ausstellung, the Secessionists took it upon themselves to create a “worthy frame” for “the beautiful and serious homage Klinger offered to the great Beethoven.”3 In this homage, as one critic put it, Klinger had acted as “a king who built for his God an agalma, for the cella of a temple yet to be built.”4 He had spent years, and more than one hundred and fifty thousand marks of his personal fortune, gathering rare colored marbles and semiprecious stones for this sculpture—­a modern reworking of Phidias’s chryselephantine cult statue of Zeus for the Temple at Olympia (ca. 470–­457 bce; fig. 51).5 The stated mission of the exhibition was to provide the place of worship this idol seemed to require. To that end, the Secession headquarters—a hulking, white, windowless edifice, ornamented with stylized owls, snakes, and Gorgons, crowned with a golden dome of foliage—was internally reconfigured into a “modern three-­nave temple in brick and roughcast plaster.”6

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Fig u re 4 9. Max Klinger, Beethoven-­Denkmal, 1902. Various colored stones and bronze, with glass, metal, ivory, and precious stone inlay; height of figure 150 cm, total monument 310 cm. Collection of the Museum der Bildenden Kuenste, Leipzig. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

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Twenty-­six Secessionists collaborated to adorn the interior with ephemeral “painted and sculpted ornaments [Schmuckes]” ranging from small decorative plaques and sculptures to mosaics and murals. Most prominent among them was an enormous allegorical frieze by Gustav Klimt, the Secession’s founding president.7 The Klinger-­Beethoven exhibition was the most popular exhibition in the eight-­year existence of the Secession (1897–­1905; fig. 52). Today it is remembered as the organization’s signature project and, more broadly, as an event that “concentrated and summed up the whole conceptual world of Art Nouveau.”8 The exhibition also staged a relationship similar to the one Seurat diagrammed in the bifurcated composition of Poseuses, with its internal juxtaposition of “hieratic” and classical body language. By suggesting how the decorative style that swept Europe circa 1900 integrated a new approach to figural disposition, this chapter aims to specify the nature of the human subject that Art Nouveau presupposed. C h a pt e r T w o

Figur e 50. Max Klinger’s Beethoven-­Denkmal in front of Alfred Roller’s mural Die sinkende Nacht. Installation view of the central hall of the Klinger-­ Beethoven exhibition, Vienna, 1902. akg-­images/ Imagno. Figur e 51. Hand-­colored frontispiece from Antoine Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy, Le Jupiter olympien; ou, L’Art de la sculpture antique (Paris, 1815). History and Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo.

Fig u re 52. Visitors in the central hall of the Klinger-­ Beethoven exhibition. As illustrated in Wiener Bilder 7, no. 17 (April 23, 1902). © ÖNB Vienna.

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“When classicism says man, it means reason and feeling; when Romanticism says man, it means passion and the senses; when modernity says man, it means nerves,” wrote Hermann Bahr, a principal literary advisor to the Secession.9 Bahr championed an aesthetic program grounded in what he termed the “New Psychology,” whose “entire trick,” as he summarized somewhat simplistically in 1890, lay in abandoning the concept of “consciousness,” that old notion which “the old psychology could never relinquish in its research.”10 The previous chapter argued that the core polemic of Seurat’s Grande Jatte was a visual negation of what Bahr would term “the old psychology.” This negation was expressed by means of an iconography—­and more fundamentally, a technique of figural disposition—­that denied any fundamental distinction between animal and human nature or, relatedly, that the activity of an alert, autonomous, and rational consciousness was the human subject’s defining endowment. In the Klinger-­Beethoven exhibition—­or more precisely, in the contrast between Klinger’s idol and the Secessionists’ decorative framing of it—we see some of the ramifications of this

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opposition between an “old” and a “new” psychology with respect to the human aesthetic faculties. Here the new psychology is brought to bear on the envisioning of the creative artist—­the figure so prominently absented in Seurat’s portrait of his studio. “Beethoven’s Farewell,” the title of the satirical poem in the W ­ iener Bilder, literally referenced the departure of Klinger’s monument from Vienna at the close of the exhibition. The phrase can also be read metaphorically, however. It seems to acknowledge that the Klinger-­Beethoven exhibition marked the demise of an older ideal of the artist, embodied by Beethoven, who himself believed that “only art and science raise man to the level of God.”11 The apotheosis of Beethoven, as staged by the Secession, was also a kind of Götzendämmerung (twilight of the idols)— to borrow a phrase Friedrich Nietzsche coined in mocking reference to Richard Wagner’s opera Götterdammerung (Twilight of the Gods, 1876). Indeed, the “Beethoven” given voice in the poem recounted his experience of the Klinger-­Beethoven exhibition as precisely a fall from divine status, a descent from “the Paradise of Olympus” to the decidedly postlapsarian “Secession’s Eden.” This Eden, as “Beethoven” experienced it, was a demeaning, even sickening environment. The “disfigured walls” (verunzierten ­Mauern) inside the “temple of modern art” petrified the poor musician and, even worse, rendered him silent: “I turned to stone  / trying to resist the ­horror . . . I still don’t dare to make a sound / standing in front of all those impudent art ornaments” (schnoddrigen Kunstzierath).12 Deploying a term, Zierath (Zierrat in modern German), used interchangeably with parergon in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), the fictional Beethoven suggests the degree to which the framing parerga of “painted and sculpted ornaments” visually overwhelmed Klinger’s monument. This eclipse of the central ergon by “impudent art ornaments” can be understood to stand, in a larger sense, for the inversion of a range of entrenched hierarchical binaries at the Klinger-­ Beethoven exhibition—­ergon and parergon, sacred and profane, high and low, god and animal. Most fundamentally, that inversion took form through the conspicuous undermining, in the works produced by the Secession, of the priorities consolidated in Kant’s aesthetic philosophy, which was premised on the priority of reflection over mere sensation, and the essential disinterestedness of all human judgment that might properly be called “aesthetic.”13 The Klinger-­Beethoven exhibition took place at a moment when a range of recently emerged or just-­emerging disciplines, from evolutionary biology to art history to psychoanalysis, were beginning to discredit the received wisdom that “art obviously represented—­or so one thought—­a higher stage of intellectual evolution,” as the Viennese art historian Alois Riegl put it in the introduction to his Problems of Style: Foundations for a History of Ornament in 1893.14 At a moment when the popularization of evolutionary theory had given the lie to the enduring metaphor of God as an artist or Supreme Designer, and when

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Freud would soon advance psychoanalytic theories of artistic creation that would “unmask” what Sarah Kofman has described as “a theological conception of art”—­the notion of the work of art as the artifact of “an autonomous, conscious subject who was the father of his works, as God was of creation”—­the Secessionists countered Klinger’s vision of Beethoven as an artist deity, visibly laden with the weight of his creative consciousness.15 Their ornamental framing of the Beethoven-­Denkmal materialized and reveled in a new, deintellectualized conception of artistic creativity as the expression of the most elementary of human or even animal drives. In doing so, the Secessionists cast into twilight the quasi-­ divine paradigm of the artist that the Beethoven-­Denkmal was seen to have “crystallized,” that of the “genius as type.”16

“Poisoning” Beethoven

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The Klinger-­Beethoven exhibition has often been historicized as a successful visual Gesamtkunstwerk. Scholarship has largely disregarded the extent to which it was riven with internal contradictions.17 The press described the event as a “strange exhibition” that “contains only one work,” for which “all the other creations by artists serve only [as] decorative embellishment.”18 The Secessionists insisted on the “self-­sacrificing” character of their endeavor.19 They encouraged the perception that, as one reviewer put it, they regarded Klinger’s Beethoven-­Denkmal “as so immeasurably superior to any other of the contributed art works that it was . . . both just and expedient to subordinate everything else to this masterpiece.”20 At the same time, their decorative embellishments were widely recognized to have overshadowed the masterpiece they were intended to serve—­one of them even more so than the others.21 Klimt’s mural came to dominate the exhibition, both physically in its design and discursively in its reception. The painter-­president of the Secession had been assigned by the exhibition’s designer, Josef Hoff­ mann—­or had assigned himself, perhaps—­a prime location. He was granted more space than any other participant: three full walls in the first room visitors entered in the course of the exhibition’s choreographed itinerary (fig. 53). Klimt’s mural, described in the catalogue as a suite of “ornamented plaster surfaces,” deployed a new and self-­consciously ornamental painting technique to unfold a narrative composition that took Beethoven’s chef d’oeuvre as its subject.22 The three walls loosely approximated the arc of the Ninth Symphony—­the piece considered, since its premiere in Vienna seventy-­eight years prior, the pinnacle of the composer’s achievement. As Bahr remarked in a letter after seeing the Klinger-­Beethoven exhibition, Klimt’s mural contributed such a powerful “tone” to the whole exhibition that he felt unable to speak simply of “Klinger’s Beethoven”— he felt compelled to speak rather of “the theme of genius, expressed in its own way by Klimt and by Klinger.”23 Bahr, who was Klimt’s most loyal partisan, saw the strength of the painter’s contribution as cause

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for celebration. And he was untroubled by the evident disparity in the two artists’ attitudes toward “the theme of genius.” But other visitors were perturbed by the sense of incongruity at the heart of the exhibition, the “hiatus between the soulful character of [Klinger’s] musician” and the “decorations [in] which the [Secessionists] reveled in gruesome conceits.”24 Karl Kraus, who alongside the architect Adolf Loos was one of the Secession’s most fervent and biting critics, stressed this “hiatus” with particular vehemence. For Kraus, Klinger’s sculpture exuded an “inner life of utmost tension” (aufs höchste gespannten inneren Leben) fundamentally incompatible with the decorative environment “the Secession gentlemen thought appropriate to daub on its behalf.”25 Many critics echoed Kraus’s perception that the Secessionists’ decorative frame for the Beethoven-­Denkmal sullied the great man purportedly honored in the exhibition. Seeing Beethoven “in the claws of the Secession,” one reviewer wrote, was like seeing “something beloved and sublime dragged into the dust.”26 Again and again, Klimt’s Beethovenfries was singled out as the principal offender in this desecration. The mise-­en-­page of “Beethoven’s Farewell,” for instance, set the composer’s lament above a decorative border parodying the horizontally outstretched female figures that were the principal leitmotif of Klimt’s frieze (see fig. 48). In the poem, the appalled composer’s description of the “ultramodern shrews” that “threaten gruesomely . . . from the walls” clearly references allegorical figures from Klimt’s composition.27 Likewise, Kraus singled out Klimt’s frieze for special condemnation. Because the visitor to the exhibition had to pass through a room adorned with Klimt’s “superficial allegories

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Figur e 53. View of Gustav Klimt’s Beethovenfries as mounted during the Klinger-­Beethoven exhibition, Vienna, 1902. akg-­images/interfoto / picturedesk​.com​/ÖNB.

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with their shallow materialistic punch lines,” Kraus argued, they necessarily arrived at the statue with their “soul and aesthetic perception poisoned.”28

Grasp and Gravity: Corporeal Metaphors of Contemplation

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How, in formal terms, might Klimt’s mural have conveyed a “materialistic punch line”? And how might that materialistic punch line have seemed to “poison” the ideal of Beethoven figured in Klinger’s sculpture—­as a monumentalization of a creative subject imbued with, as Kraus put it, an “inner life of utmost tension”? To begin to answer those questions, it is necessary to specify the corporeal language through which Klinger envisioned this inner life—a language that, as we shall see, Klimt’s punch line would emphatically upend. Seurat’s Poseuses, the previous chapter proposed, quoted and travestied the posture of a specific classical statue—­Polyeuktos’s monument to the orator Demosthenes, erected in the Athenian agora circa 280 bce . According to the classicist Paul Zanker, the novel corporeal disposition of this sculpture heralded a new tendency in classical culture to idolize “superior intellectual power.”29 Notably, the Beethoven-­Denkmal, which Klinger’s friend Paul Hartwig analogized explicitly to the Demosthenes in 1903, features in Zanker’s sweeping study of “the image of the intellectual in antiquity” as the key exemplar of the exhaustion in modernity of a long, classically rooted tradition of monumentalizing the “intellectual hero.”30 Identifying the Beethoven-­Denkmal as the prime example of a type of late nineteenth-­century monument that “rendered the apotheosis of the great mind in such exaggerated form that, not just for modern taste, it verges on the ridiculous,” Zanker regarded Klinger’s sculpture as the product of a moment when the “great mind” became a notion “utterly divorced from the present.” At the turn of the century, he argued, the image of the intellectual hero became an artifact of the past, or, more precisely, a subject purely for art, with “no certain function in the real world.” “Unlike the Hellenistic monuments that they may seem to evoke, and despite all their mighty pathos,” statues such as the Beethoven-­Denkmal carried “no weight as cultural artifacts and [did] not express any values with which the society around them could identify.”31 The juxtaposition of Klimt’s mural with Klinger’s sculpture is indeed exemplary of this moment when monumentalizations of the “intellectual hero” began, as Zanker put it, to lose their “weight as cultural artifacts”—a metaphorical formulation I will suggest is precisely apt. First conceived in 1885 during Klinger’s sojourn in Paris, the Beethoven-­Denkmal (fig. 54) worked from within, or perhaps at the limit of, an inherited language of classically derived expressive gestures. It shared this feature with a sculpture many turn-­of-­the-­century viewers took to be its inspiration—­Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker (Le Penseur, created 1880–­1881; fig. 55).32 This sculpture of a nude seated male, a univer-

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salized figuration of the poet Dante, first created to top the tympanum of the Gates of Hell (1880–­1917), resonates deeply with the Beethoven-­ Denkmal. It represents an analogous effort to monumentalize a revered artist-­hero in the throes of creative contemplation, in a form that appears to many today (as it did already for certain viewers around 1900) as a “visual cliché.”33 Klinger and Rodin could hardly be more different in terms of technique. Rodin worked with traditional sculptural materials such as clay and bronze and used them to dramatically intensify and expand European art’s existing repertoire of expressive bodily gestures. The innovative aspect of Klinger’s sculpture resides less in its approach to human form than its material properties; although Klinger retained the traditional white marble for the composer’s body, he adorned the figure with an onyx mantle, placed him on a bronze throne inlaid with agate, ivory, and opals, and accompanied him with an amber-­eyed black marble ­eagle.34 Rodin was barely able to conceal his contempt for Klinger’s forays into the sculptural medium. (Klinger’s considerable fame was primarily due to his prolific work as a graphic artist, notably for the thirteen series of prints he published, beginning in 1881 with the now-­famous cycle A Glove.35) After visiting the Klinger-­Beethoven exhibition in 1902, Rodin issued a singularly withering assessment of the Beethoven-­Denkmal, stating that it was “a wonderful work, one should make a million copies from it. But it’s got nothing to do with sculpture.”36

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Figur e 54 . Max Klinger, study for Beethoven-­Denkmal, 1885–­1886. Painted plaster. Collection of Beethoven-­Haus, Bonn. Courtesy Beethoven-­ Haus. Figur e 55. Victor Pannelier, photograph of Le Penseur in Rodin’s studio, 1881. Collection of the Musée Rodin. © Musée Rodin.

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Still, something about the monument summoned Rodin for turn-­ of-­the-­century viewers. After seeing the Beethoven-­Denkmal installed at the Secession, Franz Servaes asserted that Rodin was the only artist with whom Klinger could be compared, because one found in their works, as he put it, “the same spiritual depth.”37 It is on this basis that we might align Klinger’s Beethoven-­Denkmal and Rodin’s Penseur, as works that epitomized “spiritual depth” for turn-­of-­the-­century viewers—­ embodied, in both cases, in the form of a human figure engrossed in a profound contemplative state. We could further say that the two sculptures, despite obvious formal and conceptual divergences, share the same basic strategy for portraying this state of contemplation. Both exploit certain preexisting corporeal conventions for expressing the inner activities of the intellect: most notably, a clenched hand, a heavy head, and a seated posture. Like Rodin’s Penseur, the Beethoven-­Denkmal elicited from viewers a hyperbolically thought-­focused rhetoric. “A world operates in him, a world of thoughts,” one admiring art historian observed of Klinger’s composer. This interior world was deduced from the pose of the sculpted figure: “Beethoven’s gesture is just about the simplest gesture of thoughtfulness.”38 As already mentioned, Hartwig, an archaeologist and antiquities dealer who became close to Klinger during his years in Rome (1888–­ 1893), compared the Beethoven-­Denkmal to the Demosthenes (see fig. 35), noting that the monument deployed the same formal device of manual grasping (see fig. 41), reiterating “the artistic idea of conveying the inner storm of an agitated soul through hands firmly clasped against any contact with the outside world.”39 “How he sits!” Ludwig Hevesi exclaimed of Klinger’s sculpture. “The whole figure is like that right hand’s clenched fist, an expression of the highest mental concentration.”40 Hevesi’s praise for the way Beethoven’s entire body echoes and signifies its clenched fist—­the exaggerated size of which was mocked in the popular press (fig. 56)—­recalls the description Rodin gave some years later of his Penseur: “what makes my Thinker think is that he thinks not only with his brain, his knitted brow, distended nostrils, and compressed lips, but with every muscle in his arms, back, and legs, with his clenched fist and gripping toes.”41 These comments underscore how Klinger’s sculpture, like Rodin’s Penseur, hyperbolized the convention, stretching back to antiquity, of equating intellectual comprehension with the human hand’s prehensility. As noted in the previous chapter, the fist with its tightly gripping fingers provided the visual and etymological basis for the concept of katalepsis (mental comprehension, from the Greek καταλαµβάνειν, to grasp) as coined by the Stoic philosophers. Both Rodin’s and Klinger’s sculptures derive their expressive force in part through the activation and intensification of this ancient “understanding is grasping ” metaphor, which remains, as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson demonstrate, one of the primary metaphors organizing our conceptualization of thinking itself in Western culture.42

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Figur e 56. Caricature of Beethoven-­Denkmal. From Der Floh, April 27, 1902. © ÖNB Vienna.

In concert with their emphasis on the “clenched fist” disposition of the figure, whether through the gesture of the hand or the extrapolation of that manual prehension to the figure’s body altogether, both the Penseur and the Beethoven-­Denkmal take pains to impart to their sedentary thinkers a sense of physical weight and the downward pull of gravity. Both sculptures manifest thinking by activating what cognitive linguists have called the “grasp schema” in combination with other “primary metaphors” derived from a basic aspect of bodily sensory-­motor experience that generates “words, imagery and inferential structures” through which the conceptualization of thought in Western culture has been decisively structured.43 The sensation of weight experienced by a human body occupying an “erect position relative to the gravitational field” gives rise to a whole set of distinctions—­up/down, above/below, light/heavy—­which provide the inferential template for “the axiomatic metaphors par excellence,” as Gaston Bachelard described them: “metaphors of height, elevation, depth, [and] sinking.”44 Both Rodin’s and Klinger’s figurations of the contemplative artist-­ genius exploit a metaphorical equivalence with very deep roots in the European visual and linguistic imagination: the formal and symbolic conflation of physical and intellectual pondering. Because this aspect of the corporeal metaphorics of contemplation is foundational to the interpretation of the Beethovenfries that follows, I will step back briefly to situate this metaphor more broadly within the conventions of the postclassical European figural tradition. Crucially, within this tradition, the depiction of the body’s subjection to gravity had long been freighted with implicit psychological connotations. Acknowledging this dimension of implied meaning is particularly critical for understanding the

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expressive ambitions of figural art produced around the turn of the century, a moment when the psychological valences of gravity emerged as an increasingly explicit preoccupation of artists and art historians (as well as philosophers, as we shall see). Lange’s The Representation of the Human Figure in Its Earliest Period until the Apogee of Greek Art is exemplary of this preoccupation. His account of the shift from the primitive “frontal” attitude to the classical pose of uno crure insistere places extraordinary emphasis on the symbolic importance of acknowledging the horizontal floor on which weight is supported. Lange posited a direct, almost causal inter­connection between the invention of contrapposto—the destabilization of even weight distribution by shifting weight to a single foot, almost always in tandem with a slight off-­center cocking of the head—and the emergence of a moi within the figure, a psychological center of gravity that could be described as alert and conscious. It is obviously grandiose and reductive to claim, as Lange did, that this single development “strictly speaking, created European art.” But Lange and his readers were not mistaken in their general sense that contrapposto introduced something that would become one of the most basic norms of Western figural representation— the norm of conveying in the treatment of the body the visible manifestations of gravity.45 The aesthetic importance of this technique of “balancing a man on his feet, so that he does not fall down,” which Leonardo referred to as ponderatione (fig. 57), has been emphasized in recent art history, in particular in Étienne Jollet’s foundational studies.46 Although Jollet has focused primarily on French art of the eighteenth century, his research has wide implications for a longer historical trajectory, particularly in its emphasis on how the portrayal of gravity acting (or seemingly failing to act) upon the human body imparts powerful metaphorical meanings to figural imagery. This is a fundamental dimension of the “normative” function Jollet attributes to ponderation, which can be understood as grounding a metaphor of consciousness within postclassical Western figuration.47 More than simply guaranteeing the general verisimilitude of mimetic representation, the imperative (articulated by Leonardo, Vasari, and others after) to convincingly anchor bodies to the ground or support beneath them played a pivotal role in enforcing a normative mental disposition for the human figures enshrined at the center of this anthropocentric regime of representation—­the norm presupposing that, as Leonardo put it, human figures should “look lively and awake and not asleep” (vivacità desta e non addormentata).48 The general visual association between corporeal weight and consciousness that is intrinsic to the technique of ponderatione is essential to comprehending the conventions—perpetuated in Rodin’s and Klinger’s monuments—for figuring a specifically contemplative state of consciousness. These conventions can be seen to amplify and build upon the visual technique of ponderatione, marking a special and privileged state of consciousness simply by adding emphasis to the apparent force

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Figur e 57. Leonardo da Vinci, anatomical studies, 1504–­1506. Pen on red prepared paper, 25.3 × 19.7 cm. Collection of the Biblioteca Reale, Turin. Picture Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo.

of the downward pull of gravity, or adding emphasis to the apparent weight borne by specific parts of the body. The verb ponder, as in “to contemplate,” derives from the verb ponder, as in “to weigh.”49 Perhaps no work better illustrates how this metaphorical equivalence structured the representation of contemplation in European art than Albrecht Dürer’s iconic print Melencolia I (1514; fig. 58). This depiction of “a deep and thoughtful mind,” as Dürer’s friend Joachim Camerarius described it, visualized intellectual activity through a complex web of associations between weighing instruments, corporeal heaviness, and the force of gravity.50 Contemplation appears in Dürer’s picture at once as a capacity for weighing and a visible weight bearing down on the body. As we know from the magisterial study by Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Dürer fused the figure of melancholy with a personification of the liberal art of geometry—­identified in his era with the mnemonic geo ponderat, “geometry weighs.”51 The scales appear in Dürer’s print just adjacent to the head of the seated figure. The sense of heaviness imparted to this winged yet sedentary creature is compounded by the downward drip of sand in the hourglass hanging directly above her downcast head. Dürer’s print can be said to fuse two primary metaphors for mental activity, mutually implicating the propositions “considering is weighing ” and “knowledge [or thought] is the physical contents of the head .”52 The activity of thinking-­as-­weighing engaged

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in by the depicted figure manifests itself concretely in the body—­in the “motif of the drooping head,” as it was memorably termed by Panofsky and company.53 This pivotal corporeal motif, a conventional signifier for thought that endured in Western art over millennia, dating back at least to Greece in the early third century bce (fig. 59), crystallizes the overarching invocation of contemplation in Melencolia I.54 The motif is so familiar to students of Western art history that we rarely stop to consider the highly concrete logic through which it functions. The drooping head communicates thoughtfulness by inviting us to infer that the head of a human figure has become filled with a heavy substance—­that is, with thought—­that weighs on it and pulls it downward. The “motif of the drooping head” found one of its most iconic formulations in Melencolia I, which went on to exert considerable influence on subsequent figurations of thinking as such, and the contemplation of artists more specifically. (The tendency to read the print as Dürer’s self-­ portrait was well e­ stablished by the nineteenth century—­“Tu t’es peint, ô Durer!” Théophile Gautier exclaimed in his poem on the picture.55)

Fig u re 58. Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, 1514. Engraving, 24.5 × 19.2 cm. Collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, https:// www.nga.gov/collection /art-object-page.35101 .html. Courtesy National Gallery of Art.

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Figu r e 59. Terracotta statuette of a contemplative young man, ca. 300 bce . Collection of the Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Munich. Photo: Renate Kühling, © Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek München.

Rodin’s Dante-­as-­Penseur, whose head rests on his fist, propped up in turn by an elbow on the knee, carries on the tradition, denoting intellectual activity by giving visual emphasis to the head’s physical heaviness. Klinger’s Beethoven-­Denkmal does as well, if slightly less overtly. The body of the sculpted composer appears “bowed . . . [with a] massive inclined head,” shoulders hunched, head projecting forward as if the neck had buckled beneath its weight (fig. 60).56 And as if to underline which part of Beethoven’s body bears the great weight of his thought, one of the two ivory putti adorning the ears of the composer’s throne points toward Beethoven’s drooping head (its visage directly modeled from Franz Klein’s 1812 life cast of Beethoven) with a gesture of reverence that evokes the pointing hand of the angel Uriel in Leonardo’s Madonna of the Rocks.57 Whether deployed to signify the “rigors of thinking” revered by ancient Greek culture or the “human, humanistic contemplation” embodied by Dürer’s melancholy artist-­geometer, the motif of the drooping head was never a neutral motif.58 It asserts valor and honorific status because it hinges on the notion of heaviness, a concept that organizes a number of primary metaphors, in particular “metaphors for Significance and Difficulty” (e.g., importance is weight, difficulty is

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Fig u re 60. Side view of Beethoven-­Denkmal. From Barbara John, Max Klinger: Beethoven (Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 2004). Image courtesy Clark Art Institute.

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heaviness ).59 These metaphorical propositions were central to Western art’s advancement of self-­congratulatory claims about the power of human intellect, which posited thought as a literal onus—­a noble and ennobling heaviness, exerting a downward pressure that paradoxically elevated the human being to a privileged or even “divine” status.60 In 1906, when a monumental version of the Penseur was erected outside the Paris Panthéon—­in front of a façade bearing the dedication “Aux grands hommes”—­Gabriel Mourney gave an inaugural speech proclaiming that Rodin’s sculpture would teach future generations “the glory of thinking and the pride of being a man.”61 The degree to which corporeal heaviness was integral to this heroic narrative about “man”

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whose “glory” inhered in his unique capacity for “highest mental concentration” finds succinct formulation in a quatrain Arthur Symons composed as a hypothetical plaque for this enlarged Penseur: Out of eternal bronze and mortal breath And to the glory of man, me Rodin wrought Before the gates of glory and of death I bear the burden of the pride of thought.62

The Beethoven-­Denkmal, working in a long tradition of depictions of Beethoven with his “brow by thought o’erladen,” likewise celebrates this identification of “the glory of man” with “the burden of the pride of thought”—­perhaps in even more hyperbolic terms.63 Indeed, Klinger’s “sunken-­in-­thought [gedankenversunken] Zeus-­Beethoven,” as Julius Vogel aptly described the sculpture, is an image of a mortal human who appears to have ascended to the divine perch of Mount Olympus on the basis of his capacity for “highest mental concentration.”64 “Ponderation,” as one French critic noted, “is one of the essential qualities of the Beethoven of Max Klinger.”65 A sense of heaviness is key to the visual effect of the object as a whole, whose exorbitant weight—­ around four thousand kilograms, at one point erroneously reported to be twelve thousand kilograms—­was a topic of much speculation in the Viennese popular press.66 As the public seems to have intuited, Klinger’s sculpture was deeply invested in the “importance is weight ” metaphor. Klinger communicated his reverence for Beethoven not only through religious symbolism but also through the literal heaviness of the sculpture. In that sense, the Beethoven-­Denkmal manifests the paradox intrinsic to the cultural logic encapsulated in Symons’s poetic formulation of the “burden of the pride of thought.” For this notion presumes a reciprocal correlation between the weight of a “burden” pressing downward and a process of elevation drawing upward, upward in the abstract sense of a vertical classification schema in which value judgments are conceptualized through spatial terms of height and baseness, and “every valorization is a verticalization.”67 Klinger’s presentation of his “sunken-­in-­thought Zeus-­Beethoven” makes this down/up reciprocity particularly blatant. Despite the sculpture’s conspicuous heaviness, which calls attention to the downward force of gravity, pulling it toward the floor, Klinger simultaneously asks the viewer to direct her imagination upward, to perceive this “Genius enthroned above all humanity” as if perched high overhead, “in the lonely ether far above this earth.”68 A line from Goethe’s Faust II—­“Der Einsamkeiten tiefste schauend unter meinem Fuß” (Gazing down on the loneliest depths beneath my feet)—­was initially inscribed on the purple marble pedestal that raises the figure a few dozen inches off the floor, over which a jagged slab of rock is cantilevered (see fig. 60).69 Ultimately, Klinger seems to have recognized the redundancy of this verbal

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prompt, since the distinctive form of his pedestal so obviously simulates the craggy peak of a mountaintop.70 But the discarded line from Faust makes evident the figure’s paradoxical relation with the space that is, so to speak, “unter . . . Fuß,” for this sculpture simultaneously denies and calls attention to its pedestal (the word in German is Fußgestell, “footstall”).71 On the one hand, because of its palpable heaviness and distinctly top-­heavy form, the sculpture invites acute awareness of the weight pressing down on the square Fußgestell that physically links it to the floor; yet, on the other, we are also meant to imagine away that marble base, as well as the floor, to feel the elevation of Beethoven, whose altitude is underscored by the accompanying eagle, a bird known as a “denizen of heights” and the traditional “animal counterpart” of Zeus, king of the gods of Mount Olympus.72 If for us the Beethoven-­Denkmal fails to convincingly reconcile this tension, appearing more as a hulking mass set heavily a few feet above the floor than as a body situated overhead, gazing down from on high, this failure might be tied to the hyperbolic earnestness with which Klinger literalized “the burden of the pride of thought,” pushing the metaphor to a point of absurdity. In that sense, the Beethoven-­Denkmal betrays far less ambivalence than Rodin’s Penseur about the elevated status of the activity engaged in by a human thinker. The general wide acclaim for the Penseur was contested by a number of critics who perceived the sculpture’s “form [as] antithetical to its theme.” “The subject elevates us,” Gabriel Boissy asserted, “so the form should repeat and underline that elevation.” Instead, Boissy saw Rodin’s sculpture as the embodiment of “all that is rudimentary, coarse, and base,” objecting in particular to the extreme “contraction” of the posture, a contraction particularly prominent in the lateral silhouette of the figure.73 Indeed, Rodin figured creative “thought” in the Penseur as a bodily as much as an intellectual activity. His assertion that his Penseur “thinks not only with his brain” but also with his “gripping toes” (a remark that echoes Rainer Maria Rilke’s description of the figure as “the one who sits, thinking with his entire body”) articulates how Rodin exceeded the corporeal conventions for signifying thought at the same time that he perpetuated them.74 The Penseur embodies a mode of “thinking” that reverberates corporeally downward, descending from the “drooping head,” the privileged locus of the mind, and the “clenching” hand—­the organ treated by convention as the mind’s bodily surrogate—­through the figure’s “entire body,” indeed, down to those “gripping toes.” “The fertile thought slowly elaborates itself in his brain. He is no longer a dreamer, he is a creator,” Rodin remarked of Le Penseur.75 While the artist certainly conceived the sculpture as a representation of a heroic creator, his mode of signifying fertile thought with the entire body could appear to be a parody of the dignity of intellectual activity, “a spectacle of hideousness and vulgarity” that might be seen to visualize thought, much in the manner of the infamous materialist slogan of Karl “Urine” Vogt, who claimed in 1846, to great consternation, that the brain secretes thought “like the liver does bile or the kidneys urine.”76 “This C h a pt e r T w o

Figur e 61. Auguste Rodin, plaster model of Monument to Balzac, 1891–­1898. Exhibited at the Salon de la Société nationale des beaux-­ arts, Paris, 1898; photograph by Eugène Druet. © ­Musée Rodin.

oaf who calls himself so pretentiously ‘The Thinker,’ ” as Max Nordau described him, was derided by certain viewers as a “symbol of Thought in [the] attitude of a constipated man exerting himself on a chamber pot.”77 Indeed, the vaguely excremental effect of the sculpture emblematizes how, in the Penseur, Rodin maintained inherited conventions for signifying “the pride of thought” at the same time that he exceeded and potentially undermined them, pursuing a more crudely physical set of corporeal metaphors for the creative process, locating “fertile thought” less in the head and the upper extremities than in “lower” bodily functions that were unconscious and, so to speak, productive.78 As Albert Elsen notes, Le Penseur, created around 1880, was the last major work in which Rodin employed conventional “poses associated with art history.”79 That departure from poses with classical arthistorical pedigree finds particularly vivid expression in the sculpture that might be described as the Penseur’s successor: Rodin’s monument to Honoré de Balzac (1891–­1898; fig. 61), author of an epic Comédie humaine inspired by Dante’s Divina Commedia.80 Beethoven’s Farewell

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F igu re 62. Auguste Rodin, first study of Nude “F” (Study for Balzac), 1895–­1896. Plaster, 93.3 × 42 × 34.5 cm. Collection of the Musée Rodin, Paris. Photo: Christian Baraja, © Musée Rodin.

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In the Balzac, Rodin transformed the corporeal conventions employed to signify thought in Le Penseur in a number of crucial aspects. Conceived from the first as a standing rather than seated figure, the Balzac took its final form from a study of the author standing with his right hand clenched around his erect penis (fig. 62).81 The left hand encircles the right wrist “as if helping to support the [penis’s] weight,” as Anne Wagner observed.82 Rodin built on this study in the final version, which cloaked the towering verticality of Balzac’s body beneath a billowing robe that bulges distinctly in the groin area. The simultaneously atavistic and indecent impression made by the Balzac rests upon this encasement of the figure; perhaps the most widely ridiculed feature of Rodin’s “Balzac dans un sac” (Balzac in a sack), as the satirical press christened the sculpture, was the concealment of the writer’s hands.83 (“If I cannot shake your hand, you can blame Rodin, who put me in a sack,” joked one of many period doggerels devoted

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Figur e 63. Caricature of Balzac. From Le Monde moderne, December 1900. Photo: Jean de Calan, © Musée Rodin.

to the sculpture.84) The invisibility of the hands, so often treated as the ­ symbol of the evolution of man,” prompted some viewers to liken the “ Balzac to a “seal” or “tadpole” or other life form typically ranked “lower” on an evolutionary scale that placed man at its apex, precisely because of the intellectual superiority presumed to be both enabled and encapsulated in the manual capacity to grasp.85 These animalistic associations emphasize the embryonic aspect of the “Balzac dans un sac.” The sculpture’s perceived resemblance to some less intellectually developed life form was tied to Rodin’s insistent activation of procreative metaphors, its overarching sexualization of the theme of creative contemplation.86 For the invitation to read the Balzac as lacking human hands altogether bleeds into another interpretation, which recognizes the hands as present but engaged in an activity too indecent to overtly render. Indeed, that the gesture of the final study, before Rodin enshrouded the figure, was readily inferred by period viewers is clear from the caricatures of laughing crowds gazing up, slack-­jawed, at the crotch of the sculpture (fig. 63).87 As a symbolic expression of Balzac’s “fertile thought,” this gesture of a hand gripping the aroused genitals evokes and transforms the “clenched fist” motif while also displacing the locus of manual contact associated

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with the “drooping head,” propped up on a fist or palm. Balzac’s concealed but still conspicuous gesture can be seen to point, with almost pantomimic vividness, to a physical and conceptual displacement of the locus of creative potency, or “fertile thought,” from above to below, from the head to the genitals. Further, that displacement in the Balzac was coupled to a repudiation of the metaphorical “burden” of thought expressed through the head’s heaviness. The author’s head, Rilke noted, appears to “crown this figure like those spheres which dance upon the jets of fountains.” As the poet declared of the work, “all heaviness had become light.”88 Indeed, following Rilke, we could say that the Balzac marks a transition from a formal language of gravity to one of levity. A sense of weightlessness permeates the entire sculpture, descending from this head that dances like a ball on a spray of water down into a body that pitches precariously backward, neatly inverting the forward hunch of the Penseur, whose heavy head seems to drag the torso down so he is almost doubled over. Furthermore, Balzac’s feet are entirely obscured by his cloak. This concealment of the limbs on which the figure stands lends the whole figure a floating aspect and imposes quite literally that “evasive relationship to a supporting ground” identified by Leo Steinberg as a hallmark of Rodin’s mature sculpture.89 Rodin’s transition in this sculpture from a corporeal language of gravity to one of levity coincides with a new symbolic vocabulary for thought—­ one we must describe as specifically ejaculatory. For if “thought” in the Penseur was evoked by “a head bent beneath the onus of the idea,” in the Balzac, as Marc Legrand wrote in 1900, “thought is the lava that erupts from this human volcano.”90 That this new corporeal vocabulary for the creative thinker was widely seen as an assault upon the “pride of thought” is evident in the decision of the Société des Gens de Lettres to reject Rodin’s statue and reassign the commission to Jean Alexandre Joseph Falguière. In 1902, the Société erected Falguière’s sculpture (fig. 64), which presented Balzac “in a meditative attitude appropriate to a profound thinker,” a pose—­seated, hands clasped, head bowed gently forward—­described by one critic as “not open to criticism, although . . . not very new.”91 This “creditable but quite commonplace achievement by Monsieur Falguière” presented a striking contrast to Rodin’s figure, as was noted in numerous caricatures (fig. 65).92 The historical significance of the controversy referred to in the Parisian press as the “Balzac affair” lies in the fact that it culminated in what was essentially a contest between two competing poses: [ 122 ]

Oldsters with roses in their boutonnières Tramps with their mutts on leashes, Bald-­headed legislators, Children in the arms of mothers: Every mouth in turn the question proffered:

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Figur e 64 . Jean Alexandre Joseph Falguière, Monument to Honoré de Balzac, photographed 1900. Photographer unknown. Ullstein Bild–­ Valerian Gribayedoff/ Granger; all rights reserved.

“Is it better, standing, like Rodin’s? Or is it better sitting, like Falguière’s?”93

While this contest was obviously fodder for much light-­hearted humor, there was something more fundamental at stake in this question of whether a sculpture of Balzac was more successful “standing, like Rodin’s” or “sitting, like Falguière’s.” For the choice between the opposing postures of these two sculptures forced the Parisian public to consider whether employing the time-­honored metaphor of ponderation was still a convincing way to celebrate a human thinker—­a question that necessarily broached the broader philosophical problem of whether existing conventions for thinking about thought in Western culture could still be maintained as valid.

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Fig u re 65 . Henry Gerbault, “Balzac embêté par les sculpteurs.” From La Vie parisienne, June 3, 1899. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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The manifest contrast between the two Balzacs is productive for thinking through the contradictory visions of human genius held in tension at the Klinger-­Beethoven exhibition. The Beethoven-­Denkmal’s vision of creative thought ultimately had less in common with the crude corporealities of Rodin’s seated Penseur or his volcanic Balzac than with the “creditable but quite commonplace achievement by Monsieur Falguière.” Klimt’s mural, by contrast, must be aligned with the radical gesture of the Balzac. Indeed, the Beethovenfries—­the work Kraus blamed for having “poisoned” his experience of Klinger’s sculpture—­went far beyond the Balzac in conspicuously transgressing, or even inverting, a celebration of human thought processes founded on the metaphors of grasp and gravity. The programmatic upending of those metaphors in the Beethoven­ fries—­through both its iconography and its innovative formal tech­ niques—­fulfills a tendency in Klimt’s work already several years in the making. The genesis of the allegorical composition Philosophie (fig. 66) makes apparent that Klimt had already rejected the kinds of corporeal conventions Klinger relied upon to signify and dignify contemplation. Philosophie was the first of three allegorical panels commissioned by the University of Vienna depicting academic faculties (the other two were C h a pt e r T w o

Figur e 66. Gustav Klimt, Philosophie (first state), 1900. Oil on canvas, 400 × 300 cm. Destroyed in 1945. akg-­images/interfoto / picturedesk​.com​/ÖNB.

Medizin and Jurisprudenz). When unveiled at the Secession in 1900, it provoked a controversy not unlike the “Balzac affair” that had captivated Paris two years prior, as acknowledged in French reporting on the “Klimt affair.”94 More than simply a second instance of a proposed public artwork eliciting such pitched opposition that it became fodder for comedy and the selling of newspapers, the Klimt affair echoed the Balzac controversy in that it was likewise sparked by allegations that “the pride of thought” had been insulted. Once again, the alleged assault can be traced to the violation of familiar conventions of corporeal language. When he began the so-­called Faculty Paintings in 1894, Klimt conceived a compositional structure that was heavily indebted to Rodin. As Alice Strobl has established, Rodin’s Gates of Hell served as the likely model for Klimt’s three pictures: Beethoven’s Farewell

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Figur e 6 7. Gustav Klimt, study for the figure of Wissen, ca. 1896. Black chalk on paper, 45.3 × 33.5 cm. Collection of the Albertina Museum, Vienna. Photo courtesy Albertina Museum.

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­ ertical columns of myriad naked bodies contorted into diverse, gesturv ally dynamic postures. (Within these writhing towers of figures, Strobl also identified quotations of specific Rodin sculptures.95) While the thrusting hips and sagging bellies within these columns of bodies were criticized for their naturalistic frankness, it was Klimt’s decidedly unnaturalistic treatment of the figures personifying the different faculties that ultimately proved the more objectionable feature—­certainly, at least, in the case of Philosophie. As in the Gates, where the cascade of intertangled bodies on and around the vertical surface of the doors provides the ambiance for the single, visually privileged figure of the Penseur, in the faculty pictures, Klimt organized each composition around a single figural linchpin. In Philosophie, this was a female personification of Knowledge, or Wissen.96 Strobl suggests, significantly, that Rodin’s Penseur may have served as the initial model for this personification, although of course Klimt’s allusion to that sculpture, which repurposes a formulaic pose, would have positioned Wissen within a much longer art-­historical chain of cogitating figures.97 Ultimately, however, the formula proved unsatisfactory. When Klimt reworked Philosophie in 1900, he left the majority of the composition intact. But the figure of Wissen—­shown seated, stooped, propping up the “burden” of her head against the downward pull of gravity in all of his initial sketches from 1896–­1899 (fig. 67)—­was revised significantly. The figure became a disembodied head at the canvas’s bottom edge, depicted in perfect frontality and with a blank expression.98 The numerous visual and verbal caricatures published in the wake of Philosophie’s unveiling all fixate on this personification, perhaps C h a pt e r T w o

intuiting that Klimt had been particularly anxious about successfully pulling off this “very important head representing ‘das Wissen,’ ” as he described it in a letter.99 This “very important head,” which most contemporary viewers identified simply as “Philosophy,” seems to have embodied the assault on the dignity of the philosophical discipline perceived in Klimt’s allegory.100 Carl Schorske, in his classic cultural history of fin-­de-­siècle Vienna, associates Klimt’s new figure of Wissen, in her revised aspect of what he calls “challenging frontality,” with the “midnight singer” who appears in the most rhapsodic and experimental of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical texts, Also sprach Zarathustra (1883–­1885).101 Schorske’s observation chimes with the general perceptions of contemporary viewers, one of whom remarked sardonically that “Klimt’s Philosophie, whether one regards it a priori or a posteriori, is permeated with Nietzschean profundities.”102 Leaving aside the question of Nietzsche’s influence on the philosophical vision of Philosophie, the philosopher’s writings provide an intellectual context vital for understanding Klimt’s abandonment of the conventional pose of contemplation.103 For Nietzsche was the historical figure who, in the words of Gilles Deleuze, had proposed “a new image of thought,” overthrowing its “dogmatic image.” With the phrase “new image of thought,” Deleuze meant to convey that Nietzsche had reconceptualized philosophy as a vocation, rejecting the presumption that “truth” was its object, that it might have a “method,” or that its mission involved setting aside the “body, passions, [and] sensuous interests.”104 But far more concretely, Deleuze’s notion of “a new image of thought” is manifest in Nietzsche’s explicit rejection of what we could call the “dogmatic pose” of contemplation. In Twilight of the Idols (1888) and elsewhere, Nietzsche railed against the received wisdom that, as Gustave Flaubert put it, “on ne peut penser . . . qu’assis” (one can only think when sitting).105 Flaubert’s seemingly banal observation, quoted by Nietzsche, incited the philosopher to proclaim that “sitting down” or sedentariness (das Sitzfleisch) “is a true sin against the Holy Spirit.”106 Thoughts produced while sitting with a “bowed” head, the philosopher asserted in The Gay Science (1882), will always betray the “cramped intestines,” the “eagerness . . . seriousness . . . [and] ire” of the thinker who thought them.107 Nietzsche himself, who through the mouth of Zarathustra preached a dogma in which “all heaviness becomes light,” claimed to do his thinking only while standing up, “walking, jumping, climbing, dancing.”108 Indeed, in Zarathustra and elsewhere, Nietzsche declared himself the “enemy of the spirit of gravity.”109 This emphatically expressed antipathy—recurring across his writings as an insistent leitmotif—­was integral to the larger polemic of Nietzsche’s project, at the core of which was a critique of the “absurd overestimation of consciousness” upheld by a prideful human species, inclined to regard itself as “not an animal, but at best some sort of cogital.”110 To “[stick] human beings back among the animals,” to rediscover “the basic text of homo natura,” was the core task of Nietzsche’s philosophizing—­or his psychologizing, to Beethoven’s Farewell

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use his ­preferred terminology.111 Upending the cultural values encoded in the metaphors of grasp and gravity was integral to Nietzsche’s self-­ appointed task of “translat[ing] man back into nature,” a translation that entailed reinscribing human self-­understanding in the recent discoveries of physiology and evolutionary biology, and inverting a hierarchy that ranked consciousness and “thinking” (a word often bracketed in sneer quotes by Nietzsche) above unconscious drives and instincts.112 That this thrust of Nietzsche’s reasoning was crystallized through strategic invocations of the metaphors of ponderation is evident, for instance, in the description he offers of the wretched consequences of humanity’s “violent separation from his animal past,” the event that allegedly “reduced [human beings] to thinking . . . reduced [them] to their ‘consciousness,’ their most feeble and most mistake-­prone organ!”113 ­Nietzsche used pointed language to describe this fateful event, when “das Tier ‘Mensch’ ” was “reduced” to consciousness. He equated it to the moment in evolutionary history when primordial aquatic animals were forced to adapt for survival on land. “From now on,” the philosopher intoned, “they would have to go on foot and ‘carry themselves,’ when earlier they were carried by the water: a horrific gravity lay upon them” (eine entsetzliche Schwere lag auf ihnen).114 This evocative evolutionary parable is emblematic of Nietzsche’s unyielding delight in reversing, deconstructing, and mocking the logic that produced stock metaphors such as the one Symons produced in response to Rodin’s Penseur—­“the burden of the pride of thought”—­a “burden” that in Nietzsche’s metaphorical language no longer constitutes the “pride” and “glory of man” but simply a literal and “horrific gravity,” emblematic of the “deep sickness” of humanity.115 As a philosopher whose mission was to “unmask the metaphors which constitute every concept,” as Sarah Kofman has argued, Nietzsche was necessarily sensitive to the ways in which all metaphorical thinking extrapolates from the concreteness of the body—­a fact that allows primary metaphors to be instantiated in particularly potent form in figural imagery.116 The image-­saturated rhetoric of Nietzsche’s philosophy positions itself in dialogue with the picture gallery of European art history, as much if not more so than with an accumulated library of Western philosophical texts.117 We know, for instance, that the philosopher spent some time with Dürer’s Melencolia I (in 1869 he gifted the print to Cosima Wagner), and it is tempting to imagine him thinking back to Dürer’s picture in 1880, when he composed the aphorism “Man as Measurer.”118 The polemical thrust of this maxim was essentially to de-­metaphorize ponderation, to insist that humanity’s conception of its own capacity for mental reflection, the source of its self-­identity and inflated self-­regard, had its derivations in the highly concrete discovery of “measure and measuring, scales and weighing.”119 Nietzsche’s unmasking of humanity’s most treasured and allegedly metaphysical endowment as a mere weighing operation was a key tactic in his attack on “the spirit of gravity” or Geist der Schwere, for by t­ racing

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Figur e 68. Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I (detail), 1514. Engraving, 24.5 × 19.2 cm. Clark Art Institute, 1968.88. Image courtesy Clark Art Institute.

the metaphor of ponderation back to its etymological origin of simple weighing, he undermined the tendency to value thought on the basis of its presumed difficulty—­which is the crucial double sense of the German word Schwere. The ubiquitous tendency (among philosophers especially) to venerate thought as “worthy of the sweat of the noble,” to equate “ ‘thinking’ ” with “taking a matter ‘seriously,’ or considering it ‘grave’ ” (schwer nehmen), becomes a primary target of Nietzshe’s mockery. These terms of veneration were inverted in Nietzsche’s “new image of thought,” which posited thinking as something “gay” rather than grave, “as something light,” as something effortless for the thinker (“a thought comes when ‘it’ wishes, not when ‘I’ wish . . . It thinks” [Es denkt]).120 But Nietzsche was not content simply to offer a “new image” of human intellection. He also wanted to definitively desecrate thought’s “dogmatic” image, an impulse essential to understanding his voluble derision of what I have called the “dogmatic pose” of contemplation, manifest in works such as those by Dürer, Rodin, and Klinger. In ­Nietzsche’s writings the venerable figure of the seated, “burdened” thinker is recast—­or unmasked—­in scatological terms, as a figure above all for poor digestion, and more specifically for the affliction of constipation.121 (And here we should note the potential presence in Melencolia I of a clyster—­or enema syringe—­poking out from beneath the skirt of the seated figure, just below the artist’s monogram; fig. 68).122 Indeed, we could say that Nietzsche saw in the dogmatic pose of contemplation what certain skeptics saw in Rodin’s Penseur: “a constipated man exerting himself on a chamber pot.” The thinker’s “burden” becomes overfull intestines, his “noble’s sweat” a struggle for defecation. It is symptomatic of a broader cultural crisis surrounding the status of thinking as such in European culture around the turn of the century—­ a crisis dramatized in Nietzsche’s philosophy—­that the scatological

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Fig u re 69. “Kikeriki bei Klingers Beethoven.” From Kikeriki, May 4, 1902. © ÖNB Vienna.

metaphorics perhaps implicit in the dogmatic image of contemplation began to surface with a new degree of explicitness and blatancy in works of art and in the discourse responding to them. Thus, despite the absence, in the Beethoven-­Denkmal, of what appears to be an almost deliberate excretory allusion in Rodin’s Penseur, we nevertheless find caricatures of Klinger’s sculpture such as the one published in Kikeriki, where the magazine’s eponymous rooster proffers a bottle of liquid laxative, above the solemn caption “the man can be helped!” (fig. 69). Or another, in which the gesture of the pointing putto on the composer’s throne is redirected downward, while the second putto holds his nose (fig. 70). Beneath the picture, a poem spells out the conflation of constipation with the “hard struggle with the ascending idea” expressed in such emphatic terms in Klinger’s figure, whose tightly grasping fist seems to signify the will and the effort required for his intellectual endeavor, a fist that says, “the master will conquer!”123 Very grave, Beethoven, seems your mood Your sweat flows and your cheeks bloom Ah, Master, we comprehend your fury Great is the torment, in vain your efforts!124

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Works of art produced around the turn of the century are rife with visual evidence of an impulse analogous to Nietzsche’s, an impulse to reject images of thought conceived in a “spirit of gravity”—­a spirit embodied so powerfully by Klinger’s sculpture, which elicited from the young Paul Klee: “I hate this brutal striver more than ever!”125 It was perhaps a similar antipathy to this “spirit of gravity” that motivated Klimt to abandon, in his first faculty picture, “the treasury of classical forms . . .

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Fig ur e 70. F. Grätz, “Wenn die Stadt Wien Klinger’s Beethoven ankaufen sollte.” From Der Floh, May 4, 1902. © ÖNB Vienna.

which, since the time of Raphael, have been decked with the label of ‘Philosophy.’”  126 How can we characterize the “new image of thought” that displaces the “dogmatic image” in Klimt’s Philosophie? Departing from an initial conception reliant upon Sitzfleisch and the physical burden of the head, Klimt concentrated Wissen into a frontal face at the bottom of the canvas, her chin just touching its lower edge (see fig. 66). No longer inclined to one side or “drooping,” her head is erect and turned directly forward, aligned in perfect frontality with the canvas support. Her countenance, framed within a stylized, egg-­shaped oval of hair liberally flecked with gold, conforms precisely to what Claude Quiguer has characterized as the quintessential female visage of Jugendstil—­“empty eyes, immobile traits, cold hieraticism.”127 Indeed, contemporary viewers were particularly struck by the absence in the face of Wissen of any visible trace of tension, exertion, or effort: she appeared “imperturbable and motionless,” her “expression [one] of complete indifference.”128 If this “very

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F igu re 71. (facing) “Sezession!” In Kikeriki 40, no. 27 (April 5, 1900). © ÖNB Vienna.

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important head” was to personify the vocation of philosophy, certainly her body did not betray any outward indications that she esteemed her discipline to be “worthy of the noble’s sweat.” This replacement of corporeal signs of striving with an image of indifference was at the crux of what contemporary viewers found so offensive, and also so comical, about Klimt’s picture. The absence of evident tension in the visage of Wissen went hand in hand with the perception that there was nothing whatsoever inside her head. As one critic observed, the figure appears “illuminated (not enlightened)”—­the gold surrounding her face a mere ornamental sheen, not the symbolic emanation of intellectual understanding within.129 Indeed, the literal empty-­headedness of Wissen was frequently implied in criticism, as when the head was described and depicted as a “shimmering gold pumpkin” (fig. 71).130 Pumpkins, of course, enclose a void within their orblike flesh. For this reason German, like many European languages, conventionally analogizes “the head of a stupid man to a pumpkin or other gourd,” as in the derogatory expression Kürbiskopf, or “pumpkin-­head.”131 Part of the comical quality perceived in Klimt’s picture was the insinuation that his “very important head representing ‘das Wissen’ ” was hollow like a pumpkin, a perception that works fully within the familiar logic of the primary metaphor knowledge is the physical contents of the head . The apparent emptiness of the head of Wissen is precisely the thrust of Edward Pötzl’s facetious remark that it was “a head in which nothing is hidden—­I mean, apart from intellect.”132 When they derided the head of Wissen as vacant, contemporary critics were not simply using stock terms to dismiss Klimt’s picture. They were responding to something intrinsic in the artist’s conception and formal presentation of the allegorical figure. The implicit absence of any heavy physical contents in the head corresponds to, and governs, the way this “very important head” behaves in the pictorial space of Klimt’s composition. If the implication underlying the “motif of the drooping head” is that a head droops because it is thoughtful, in the concrete sense of being “filled” with “thoughts” that behave as heavy physical substance, then we might infer that a head devoid of such contents—­not thoughtful but thoughtless—­would lack as well any trace of heaviness. Such a head would not droop under the pull of gravity but would exhibit lightness, and appear more or less buoyant. And that is precisely how the head of Wissen appears in Klimt’s composition (see fig. 66). The pictorial space surrounding the allegorical figures in Philosophie evinces Klimt’s general interest, already well established, in environments where the human body would experience sensations of floating and lightness. The tower of figures at the left edge of the composition hovers in a vague spatial ambiance that appears like an amalgamation of outer space and liquid. To the right, Klimt represents “two mask-­like heads afloat in [this] irritating haze,” or in this medium of “ether, mixed with chloroform,” as Pötzl described it.133

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Crucially, the figure of Wissen has a double in Klimt’s composition—­ the large sphinx’s head that appears to congeal from out of this gold-­ flecked ether. The sphinx’s expressionless gaze and disembodied frontality perfectly twin the visage of Wissen.134 The formal echo between Wissen and this floating sphinx, a figure frequently treated as the emblem of Egyptian art and culture, seems to insist that Wissen appears here as a formal archaism or “hieratic motif,” identified by Walter Benjamin as the first among “the three defining ‘motifs’ of Jugendstil.” (The two others were “perversion” and “emancipation.”)135 The formal echo between this newly hieratic Wissen and the floating sphinx’s visage emphasizes a sense of disencumberment or emancipation from the force of gravity. In part, this sense of emancipation is intrinsic to Klimt’s ­“hieratic” formal treatment of the figures. The sphinx’s head and Wissen, in contrast with the other figures in Philosophie, are aligned in parallel with the vertical surface of the canvas; they conform, that is, to the “law of frontality,” which, as I have stressed, deprivileges the impression of the body’s subjection to gravity. This disencumberment is made more emphatic through the stacking of these two heads within the picture. The fact that many reviewers labeled the sphinx as Wissen, muddling the allegorical identifications the catalogue provided, suggests the way in which the eye is drawn from Wissen to the sphinx overhead, creating a rising movement that, more than simply the absence of weight, suggests an active lightness drawing Wissen upward to merge with the floating sphinx.136 What Klimt arrived at, then, in his revised personification of Wissen, is a new corporeal motif, which I will call “the motif of the levitating head.”137 The introduction of this motif in Philosophie, which coincided with a stylistic shift toward a simultaneously archaizing and ornamental figural technique, signified a form of release from the metaphorical “burden” of thought. There is the distinct suggestion that the two levitating heads that preside over this “dreamworld which is the exact opposite of all true philosophy,” as one critic described Klimt’s composition, float upward precisely because they have been liberated from “thinking”—­ that they float upward because, as Pötzl comically suggested, the “ether, mixed with chloroform” in the composition’s surrounding environment has “concentrated” in these heads, and “robb[ed them] of consciousness” (Besinnung).138

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Klimt began the Beethovenfries in the summer of 1901, some months after the scandal over Philosophie had been reignited and exacerbated by the debut of the Medizin mural at the Secession.139 Much like Seurat’s Poseuses, the Beethovenfries is a highly mediated visual response to critical controversy. The central wall of the mural recycles the female figures from Goldfische (1901–­1902), the painting Klimt wanted to name “To my critics.”140 In the Beethovenfries, as in Poseuses, we see the artist

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identify—­and then advance—­the specific figural devices that lay behind the core offense of the prior work—­in both cases, a perceived degradation of the human being’s higher cognitive faculties. (Though Klimt, never a paragon of subtlety, doubled down on his position with far less evident ambivalence.) In the Beethovenfries, Klimt revisits and builds upon “the motif of the levitating head” that had served as the butt of jokes in Philosophie, making the association between nonconcious mental states and forms that appear hollow, light, and buoyant integral to the realization of the frieze. During the furor over Philosophie, one critic had compared Klimt with Herostratus, that icon of infamy who made his name by burning down the temple of Artemis.141 If Klimt was already recognized as a desecrator of temples based on the faculty pictures, this role became more literal with his contribution to the Secession’s “Beethoven temple.” In the context of the Klinger-­Beethoven exhibition, Klimt pressed the formal and philosophical provocations of Philosophie toward a new threshold of obscenity; he expanded and sharpened the implications of the “motif of the levitating head,” which he made the centerpiece of the “materialistic punch line” at the conclusion of the Beethovenfries. Before laying out the specifics of Klimt’s challenge to the model of the creative subject celebrated in Klinger’s figure of a “sunken-­in-­thought Zeus-­Beethoven,” it is necessary to touch upon the Beethoven­fries’s distinctive material qualities and the basic outline of its allegorical narrative. Numerous scholars have stressed that the Beethoven­fries marked a turning point in Klimt’s stylistic development, establishing him, as Arpad Weixlgärtner observed in 1912, as a “master of a purely decorative style.”142 As the catalogue specified, the “ornamented plaster surfaces” of the mural had been composed according to a deliberately “decorative principle,” the key features of which come into view clearly if we compare the Beethovenfries to Philosophie.143 First, there is a change in the shape and material of the pictorial support. Long, narrow, horizontally oriented plaster panels replace the vertically oriented, rectangular canvas of Philosophie. Oil paint is replaced with the more ancient, milk-­ based medium of casein, which Klimt applied to the bare plaster ground in combination with graphite, pastel, and colored pencil, as well as applied and encrusted accents: gold leaf, aluminum foil, mirror, upholstery tacks, mother-­of-­pearl, polished colored glass, and costume ­jewelry.144 This change in material structure went hand in hand with a change in compositional style, a shift that follows the opposition the Secessionists had outlined between “pictures” (Bilder) and “surface decorations” (Flächendecorationen).145 While Philosophie and the other faculty pictures maintained an illusion of spatial recession, in the Beethoven­fries, as one critic put it, Klimt “refuse[d] the illusion of depth and forcefully preserve[d the] wall’s character” and, in the process, “boldly reshaped the human form for his ornamental purposes.”146 This new tendency toward “unconditional flatness” asserts itself most forcefully in the frieze’s new figural technique. As the critic Joseph Lux

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Figur e 72. Alfred Roller, poster for Klinger-­ Beethoven exhibition, 1902. Three-­color litho­ graph, 230.1 × 80 cm. Private collection. HIP/ Art Resource, NY.

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described it, the Klinger-­Beethoven exhibition instituted a new figural style for the Secessionists in which “the memory of nature, of the model, of anything human dissolves, shattered in a purely ornamental, almost geometric form in which the human body’s contours are only schematically indicated.”147 The poster for the exhibition (fig. 72), which notably eschews any visual references to either Klinger or Beethoven, programmatically demonstrated this new figural approach. It reproduces instead C h a pt e r T w o

the figural leitmotif repeated in the inlaid, stenciled mural Die sinkende Nacht (The Sinking Night), which Alfred Roller had created to decorate the wall behind the Beethoven-­Denkmal (see fig. 50). This mural, Hevesi provocatively asserted, “signified the humanization of ornament.”148 If Roller’s poster and wall decoration can be seen to diagram that general strategy, we could say that the “humanization of ornament” entailed the following formal operations: the abandonment of obliquity in favor of aligning bodies at right angles to a planar surface, the conventionalization of the figure into a schematic silhouette, the incorporation of the figure into a larger field of pattern, and finally, a correspondent unsettling of figure-­ground relationships, with ground here meant in the senses of both campo and piano, field and floor—­the space circumscribing the outer edges of the figure, and the horizontal surface upon which its weight is ostensibly supported.149 Indeed, Roller’s decision, in the mural and the related poster, to deprive the figure of feet by cropping her just above the ankle, is emblematic of a more pervasive formal tendency within the Secession’s ornamental figuration to disavow the firm and familiar foothold of terrestrial gravity. The embrace of the “high-­hieratic” figuration that Hevesi recognized in Roller’s “humanization of ornament” is also evident in Klimt’s Beethoven­fries.150 While in Philosophie the frontal, hieratic depiction of the sphinx’s head and Wissen are contrasted stylistically with the column of naturalistic, writhing, Rodin-­inspired bodies, this stylistic distinction falls away in the Beethovenfries. Klimt imposed the “law of frontality” on the entire composition, limiting the disposition of bodies almost exclusively to the two orientations of frontal and profile, and placing emphasis on the repetitive device of parallelism. (The mural is composed to a large degree of identical repeating figures patterned off generic stencils.) Klimt’s contemporaries, like most art historians who have written on the mural, recognized this new figural style to be “Assyrian” or “Egyptian” in inspiration. They perceived it to be at once an Orientalism and an archaism, which in either case was synonymous with a figural style that lacked the hard-­won technical sophistication required to make human figures, as Leonardo put it, “look lively and awake and not asleep.” While the frieze’s three plaster surfaces espoused this decorative strategy of “the humanization of ornament,” Klimt’s figural composition, unlike Roller’s, also advanced an intricate allegorical narrative, which the exhibition catalogue laid out in a short didactic text. (Klimt’s was the only work given an explanatory text in the catalogue for the Klinger-­Beethoven Ausstellung, and both caricatures and criticism describe visitors as dutifully, if somewhat skeptically, relying on this text to make sense of the exhibition.) The text explained that the “three painted walls form a coherent sequence,” a sequence that seems to roughly follow the arc of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as glossed by Richard Wagner in the program notes for his famous performance in 1846 in Dresden. There, Wagner interpreted the Ninth as the musical narration of a “titanic struggle of the Beethoven’s Farewell

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soul” against a “joy-­devouring demon” that ends ultimately with the triumph of joy, as “Light breaks on Chaos.”151 In the Beethovenfries, as the catalogue made explicit, the triumphant arc of the symphonic narrative was translated into a broader allegory of art and its redemptive role in human existence. The frieze’s first wall, opposite the entrance to the exhibition, began with a series of figures symbolizing humanity’s “Longing for Happiness,” here making a plea to a “well-­armed warrior” to “take up the fight for happiness” on their behalf. The second wall depicted obstacles confronted in humanity’s struggle for happiness, identified as “the Hostile Forces.” Dominated by the figure of a large gorilla surrounded by nude and seminude female figures, this central section of the mural, significantly shorter and more densely painted than the first and third, presented a series of allegorical figures identified as “the ­giant Typhon” alongside “his daughters, the three Gorgons,” as well as allegorical figures of Lust, Unchastity, and Excess. The third, concluding wall resumed the mural’s opening motif, depicting the “satisfaction” of humanity’s Longing for Happiness as “the Arts lead us into the Kingdom of the Ideal, the sole realm where we can find pure Joy, pure Happiness, pure Love.” This final wall culminated in a direct visual translation of the Ninth Symphony, a point made explicit through the catalogue’s quotation of lines intoned by the chorus of human voices that erupts in the symphony’s fourth movement: “Freude, schöner Götterfunken! Diesen Kuß der ganzen Welt!”152 In the sense that Klimt conceptualized the Beethovenfries not simply as a tribute to Beethoven, or to Klinger’s sculpture, but as an allegory of art itself, the mural can be seen to function as a sort of fourth faculty picture, albeit one that shifts from the domain of higher learning to that of artistic appreciation and creativity. Notably, in this allegory, Klimt took up far more enthusiastically than in Philosophie, Jurisprudenz, or Medizin the task that had been assigned to him by the University of Vienna—­to convey an allegorical “victory of light over darkness.”153 But if the scandal of Philosophie hinged upon Klimt’s perceived failure to communicate that triumphant message, the optimistic conclusion of the Beethovenfries, where “Light breaks on Chaos,” proved just as scandalous. As is clear from the archive of journalistic denunciations Hermann Bahr collected and published in the book Gegen Klimt in 1903, the Bee­ thovenfries provoked a degree of outrage equivalent to that prompted by Philosophie and Medizin.154 For many critics, the “three frescoed walls [Klimt] had ‘decorated’ ”—­a number of reviewers placed “decoration” in derisive quotations—­defiled the very concept of art.155 As one critic exclaimed, “The hideous gorilla, the shameless caricatures of the noble human form—­this is no longer a work of art, these are insults to our most sacred feelings!” He then went on to remind his readers that “Christian Vienna” still existed, and that the city should “reject this onset of a new barbarism” just as the city had repelled the conquering forces of the Ottoman empire in 1683.156 The frieze was described at once as an

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assault on its audience’s purportedly “Christian” (or white, European) identity and an assault on their humanity. Another critic condemned it as an affront to “good taste and common sense” or, more precisely, good taste and gesunden Menschenverstand—­literally, “healthy human understanding.”157 Indeed, the frieze simultaneously incorporated Orientalizing motifs and reveled in a decorative style that flouted formal conventions associated with “European” representation and advanced a narrative that resituated the arts, and the human aesthetic faculties, in a less Kantian, less rarefied, less species-­specific mental province—­ one perhaps akin to what Nietzsche punningly referred to as gesunden Tierverstand (“healthy animal understanding”).158

The “Assyrian Swimming School” It is a general consensus in the literature on the Beethovenfries that Klimt succeeded in evoking in his mural “an unconscious realm of life” or “the functioning of drives within the unconscious mind.”159 I do not wish to contest this fundamental observation but, rather, to specify the formal mechanism through which Klimt was able to visualize these mental properties—­namely, through the systematic reversal of the corporeal metaphors of grasp and gravity. We can assume that this strategy was deployed in knowing opposition to the corporeal language of the Beethoven-­Denkmal. Klimt must have been aware when he began his mural in the summer of 1901, from the descriptions of colleagues who had visited Klinger’s studio and from widely circulated photographs of the work-­in-­progress (fig. 73), of the key postural and gestural features of the statue his organization was planning to honor—­which were, to repeat, the Sitzfleisch, the head “sunken-­in-­ thought,” and the “fist balled up with strong will.”160 But of course, given

Figur e 73. Max Klinger at work on Beethoven-­ Denkmal in his Leipzig studio, ca. 1900. Ullstein Bild–­Haeckel Archiv/Granger; all rights reserved.

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Fig u re 74 . Gustav Klimt, Beethovenfries (detail of Choir of Paradise Angels). Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

the utter conventionality of these features, Klimt might just as easily have anticipated them without seeing or hearing a word about the sculpture. In that sense, his inversion of the corporeal language of the sculpted Beethoven has far broader significance. It is part of a more widespread renunciation of postural and gestural language tethered to the notions of human consciousness and contemplation. The programmatic nature of Klimt’s inversion of the metaphors of grasp and gravity is most obvious if we examine his treatment of the two primary groups of stock figures that populate the mural—­the sixteen figures composing the Choir of Paradise Angels (fig. 74) at the frieze’s conclusion and the twenty personifications of humanity’s Longing for Happiness that traverse nearly the full length of the mural (fig. 75). While both groups are depicted with eyes closed as if in sleep, Klimt uses other, perhaps more communicative bodily signifiers to qualify the mental states of these figures. The sixteen angels, drawn from stencils and stacked one atop another in serried rows, form a continuous pattern that frames the frieze’s final passage. Their hands, visible only in the first row of figures, assume a distinctive gesture: both palms cupped open and turned upward, with little rosebuds held between the tips of the thumbs and index fingers. This repeating hand position, which appears in a crucial location framing the mural’s climax, appears as an exoticizing gesture; it may loosely approximate a vitarka mudrā, the finger posture that denotes preaching or theological discussion in representations of the Buddha (fig. 76).161 Although Buddhism had emerged as a topic of intense interest in late nineteenth-­century Europe, it seems unlikely that Klimt’s appropriation of this mudrā was informed by any deep knowledge of Buddhist iconography, which he freely manipulated to his own purposes (the vitarka mudrā is a single-­handed gesture typically held near the heart, not a doubled one with both hands framing the head). The appropriation of the mudrā was likely informed by what the finger posture could signify from within the gestural iconography of Klimt’s own artistic culture—­in terms of both its specific form and its capacity to signify as a visual shorthand for certain psychological concepts turn-­of-­the-­century Europe had come to equate with Buddhism. If in European art a fist squeezed tightly to expel any pockets of air functioned as a conventional gestural symbol for intellectual “grasp” and the strong will and effort required for mental comprehension, the opening of the palm like an empty cup and the framing of a circular void between the thumb and index finger might effectively convey an anti­thetical psychic condition, an absence of conscious, ego-­directed thought. New psychological concepts were folded into the turn-­of-­the-­ century reception of Buddhism, a religion many authors of the era embraced as an “anticipation of modern scientific discovery,” specifically with regard to the “discovery” of the unconscious recesses of the mind being systematically investigated by psychologists.162 This dimension

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F i g u re 75 . Gustav Klimt, Beethoven­fries (detail of Longing for Happiness figures). Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY. F i g u re 76. Hand of a sixth-­century Southern Indian Buddha in vitarka mudrā. From Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, “Hands and Feet in Indian Art,” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 24, no. 130 (1914). Digital image courtesy Robarts Library, University of Toronto.

of an emerging “Buddhist modernism”—­a Buddhism unmoored from traditional rituals, ethics, and cosmologies and regrounded in Western psychological science—­is implicit in Bahr’s branding of Buddhism as the “religion of the decadence, because it is the religion of nerves.”163 Klimt, whose knowledge was likely filtered through Bahr, deploys the vitarka mudrā in this new psychological sense—­as a visual shorthand for unconsciousness or, more broadly, as an emblem for the inversion of “meditation” or “mindfulness” as conceptualized within what Bahr called “the old psychology.” Klimt’s inversion, through the vitarka mudrā, of Klinger’s “fist balled up with strong will” seems to materialize a revelation similar to the one Lafcadio Hearn, one of the late nineteenth century’s most widely read writers on Japanese culture, claimed to have gleaned from studying the affinities of Western science and the “ancient faith” of Buddhism: “for thousands of years we have been thinking inside-­out and upside-­down.”164 Significantly, Klimt’s turning inside­out of the metaphor of thinking as grasping through the angels’ hand gesture works in tandem with a turning upside ­down of the metaphor of thought as weight in these figures. As Hearn noted, the notion “prevailed in Europe and America” that the mental state of nirvana cultivated in Buddhism was “neither more nor less than absolute nothingness.”165 If that was so, then we can see why for Klimt the depiction of a state of nirvana might have demanded the absence of corporeal and cranial weight, for if thought is the physical

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contents of the head, a subject in the nirvanic state would have a head emptied of contents, hollow like a pumpkin, or like the voids framed within the circles of the angels’ fingers. Further, the heads of these gesticulating angels—­framed by graphic disks of hair that transform their heads into distinctly ball-­like shapes—­ appear to levitate toward the ceiling, drawing their bodies upward. The white, toeless feet of the angels point down, directly parallel to the vertical plane of the wall, superimposed over a carpetlike expanse of flowering grass that extends beneath the dangling feet to the frieze’s bottom edge, but which is also visible above the leftmost angel’s head. This vertical extension of the grass from the top to the bottom edge of the mural cancels any sense of horizontal “ground” upon which physical weight might be supported. In concert with the ungrounding of the feet, this vertical expanse of grass emphasizes how Klimt exploited the “unconditional flatness” of Flächendecoration as an opportunity, as Lux put it, to “relieve things of the earth’s gravity” (Erden-­Schwere).166 The “expansion of the realm of the representable” that Lux saw achieved by this release from gravity was at bottom psychological. But this expansion into new mental provinces was enabled through Klimt’s emphasis on certain properties intrinsic to painting as a two-­dimen­ sional medium. The Beethovenfries drew attention to painting’s status as a vertical medium—­a medium that can “hang” up on the wall, detached from the gravitational plane of the horizontal, unlike a sculptural object obliged to “sit” on the floor. The correspondence Klimt established between unconscious psychic states and the material properties of the frieze itself is formulated with greatest clarity in the most iconic figures of the frieze—­the repeating forms of the female personification of the Longing for Happiness (fig. 75). These figures create, as Hevesi described it, a “continuous ornament right under the ceiling,” a “rhythmic series of flowing shapes of stylized human limbs and heads.”167 Alternating between two standard stencils, each used nine times across the width of the mural, Klimt produced a pattern of elongated prone and supine bodies stretched out horizontally, swaddled in white, feet-­encasing, sacklike shrouds. In the more prominent of the two variations, the bodies are prone, the arms stretched forward with downward-­facing open palms, the heads surrounded by graphic disks of brown hair ringing the faces, so that each head appears like the empty hole of a doughnut. The rhythmic repetition of these figures, whose heads all point right, in accord with the left-­to-­right orientation of the mural’s narrative sequence, creates a propulsive horizontal vector running the width of the mural—­an arrow, almost, that advances the allegorical narrative, pointing the eye toward the frieze’s concluding passage. At the same time that they propel the allegorical narrative, the figures exhibit an obvious recursive relationship to the form of the frieze itself. Occupying the uppermost edge of the mural, they reiterate the mural’s position in the room,

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hovering some twenty-­five feet up on the wall (see fig. 53). Their elongated, colorless silhouettes echo the horizontality and cool plaster color of the Beethovenfries’s first and final walls, where Klimt left bare large swaths of unpainted plaster. (The bare plaster on these two long walls makes up more than half of the frieze’s 645-­square-­foot surface area.168) Klimt stressed this identity between the frieze itself and the Longing for Happiness figures by retaining the bare plaster for their flesh tones, adding color only in the brown and golden, jewel-­dotted disks of hair, leaving their heads and hands as unfilled contours that merge with the wall’s bare surface. In one of his most evocative commentaries on the aesthetics of Jugendstil, Walter Benjamin observed that the rhythmic (or typographic) structure of Nietzsche’s writing in Also sprach Zarathustra, where frequent pauses punctuate the prophet’s speeches, was an “exact counter­ part to the tectonic phenomenon so basic to this style—­namely, the predominance of the hollow form over the filled.”169 The Beethovenfries makes evident that this formal preference for the unfilled, typical of Jugendstil, can be considered an “exact counterpart” to Nietzsche’s antipathy to the “spirit of gravity.” The preference has less to do with Jugendstil’s predilection for the unfilled as such than with an inclination toward certain “preferred states of forms,” states of “hanging and floating, levitating and undulating,” states that “belong to a Klimtian vision more than anything,” as Hevesi noted in reference to the Longing for Happiness figures.170 In Jugendstil, as in Nietzsche, this predilection for states of levitation, for forms ungrounded and unfilled, is inseparable from a psychologizing impulse that confers new value on unconscious and oneiric mental states. Indeed, F. D. Luke has argued that Nietzsche’s dreamlife significantly informed the negative values he ascribed to the so-­called Geist der Schwere. Through dreaming, Luke proposes, Nietzsche arrived at a “cluster or ‘complex’ of ‘height-­imagery’ ” matching the “psychic complex or ‘constellation’ ” that the clinical psychologist Henry Murray named “ascensionism,” a psychic tendency determined by the “wish to overcome gravity.”171 Whether or not we accept this clinical diagnosis, the published writings of Nietzsche, whom Bachelard likewise classifies as the “prototype of the . . . ascentional poet,” certainly emphasize a connection between dream experience and the sensation of flight.172 “Suppose,” the philosopher postulated, in a thinly veiled confession, “someone has flown often in his dreams.” “How could a human being who had had such dream experiences and dream habits,” Nietzsche declares, “fail to find that the word ‘happiness’ has a different color and definition in his waking life, too? . . . ‘Rising,’ as described by the poets, must seem to him, compared with this ‘flying,’ too earthbound, muscle-­bound, forced, even too ‘heavy.’ ”173 Klimt’s personifications of the Longing for Happiness might be seen to paint the color (or colorlessness) of the word “happiness” for such a

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person, who finds something “too earthbound . . . too ‘heavy’ ” in waking consciousness. Certainly, we must view these unfilled, ungrounded, horizontally outstretched figures as evocations of the dream of flight—­the dream that, as one period researcher noted, “may fairly be considered the best known and most frequent [dream] type.”174 Just as crucially, these figures materialize this quintessential oneiric experience in a form that insists upon its rootedness in the human subject’s animal history. In 1882, Siegmund Exner, a comparative physiologist who taught Sigmund Freud and worked alongside him in Ernst Brücke’s laboratory at the University of Vienna, delivered a lecture titled “The Physiology of Flying and Floating in the Fine Arts.”175 In patient detail—­through comparison of human and bird anatomy, and mathematical analysis of the hypothetical weight, air resistance, and velocity of a winged putti in Raphael’s Galatea (1514)—­Exner performed a scientific demystification of the motif of flight as portrayed throughout the history of Western art, proving that, from the perspective of physics and evolutionary biology, “a flying human figure in the mechanical sense of the word could never be represented artistically.”176 What provoked Exner’s interest was that, over centuries, artists had been portraying airborne angels, putti, and other divinities in ways that succeeded in convincing viewers of their inherent plausibility. The scientist rationalized this enigma by arguing that artistic representations of flight were based on kinesthetic memories of a different state. Wings, he concluded, were merely conventional symbols, appended to human figures represented as if in a state of flotation (Schweben), defined by Exner as the condition of a body “sustained in air without its own power,” a condition a human being could experience “if it were weightless or, to express it properly in terms of physics, if it had the same weight as the air.” This condition of weightlessness was one experienced by every human being, for “in fact, the human body is entirely or almost entirely weightless in water.” Exner argued that in art, the conditions of flying and floating were “painted with a psychological palette . . . [of] memory-­ pictures [Erinnerungsbilder],” memory p ­ ictures of swimming, more specifically. To prove this assertion, Exner offered up his own recurrent dreams of flying, which he described as “nothing more than the sensation of swimming in air.”177 “Swimming in air” would be a good description for the activity Klimt’s personifications of the Longing for Happiness engage in. The figures seem to float to the top edge of the blank white plaster. Mechanically speaking, their hovering makes a kind of logical sense, since Klimt’s decision to delineate the figures as unfilled contours effects a visual equivalence in weight between their bodies and the surrounding ambiance. What distinguishes the Longing for Happiness figures from previous representations of flight in Western art is that Klimt seems not to dissimulate but to call attention to the devices through which he makes his figures appear to hover. Beyond the obvious formal effort to equalize the weight of these bodies with their spatial surround, something in

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Figur e 7 7. Gustav Klimt, Fischblut. In Ver Sacrum 111 (1900). Private collection. Bridgeman Images.

Klimt’s treatment of the figures seems to have made viewers hyperaware that this image of flight was painted with a “psychological palette . . . [of] memory ­pictures.” It was precisely this seeming conflation of swimming and flying that Pötzl emphasized in his humorous review of the Klinger-­ Beethoven exhibition, which he titled “The Assyrian Swimming School.” Pötzl described Klimt’s mural as a decoration produced for the “ladies’ side of a bathhouse built in the modern taste for Nineveh,” depicting “elongated women swimming above everything with life-­preservers.”178 (Presumably, the life ­preservers are the figures’ circular coiffures, functioning here, we could say, as prosthetic flotation devices to ensure that the heads rise to the top edge of the picture.) “I beg you,” Bahr used to say to egg on Klimt, “paint something Pötzl doesn’t understand.”179 But Pötzl, as usual, comprehended Klimt’s formal strategies only too well. His insistence on the swimming aspect of the figures situates their bodies in relation to atavistic experience at the level of both phylogeny and ontogeny (indelibly linked in German biological thinking at the time through the widespread influence of Ernst Haeckel’s biogenetic principle).180 Klimt, as Hevesi pointed out, based these personifications on earlier compositions of naked women drifting in liquid (fig. 77).181 Given the insistent references to evolution embedded throughout key narrative passages of the Beethovenfries (as we shall shortly see), it is difficult to imagine that Klimt was not also interested in the evolutionary significance attached to states of weightlessness.

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“Our animal ancestors were not birds,” Stanley Hall asserted in an 1897 study of “gravity fears,” “but they floated and swam far longer than they have had legs.”182 The common delusion of individuals whose dreams make them “almost think they can fly,” Hall opined, derived from that time alluded to by Nietzsche, the time before the human being was burdened with “horrific gravity” and had “to go on foot and ‘carry themselves.’ ” “We have before us,” Hall concludes with respect to such dreams of flight, “some of the oldest elements of psychic life, some faint reminiscent atavistic echo from the primeval sea,” an echo that simultaneously conjures memories of the prenatal state of suspension in fluid, memories activated by any “removal of the pressure always felt on the soles of the feet, podex, or other sustaining surface.”183 In referring to the Klinger-­Beethoven exhibition as “The Assyrian Swimming School,” Pötzl seemed to be mocking the Secession’s self-­ conscious mission to relieve modern subjects of “horrific gravity,” to serve as a training ground for the cultivation of states of regression emblematized in depictions of bodies “hanging and floating, levitating and undulating.” Crucially, the moniker also satirizes the stylistic devices marshaled by the Secession to implement this “unburdening.” That Pötzl characterized the Secession’s exhibition as an Assyrian swimming school specifically helps us comprehend why the “overcoming of naturalism” Bahr endorsed so passionately was essential in formal terms. For if Bahr believed that overcoming naturalism would result in removal of “the burden of logic and the heavy care of the senses,” the visual mechanism that allowed for this unburdening was a return to “hieratic” figural styles—­like the Assyrian—­that appeared to lack the ability or the inclination to acknowledge the forces of gravity.184 The disinclination to acknowledge gravity that was evident in the Secessionists’ “hieratic” human ornaments presented a marked stylistic contrast to Klinger’s “sunken-­in-­thought” figure of Beethoven, whose bodily heaviness is conveyed through naturalistic figuration, or what Julius Meier-­Graefe derided, in 1905, as the artist’s “cheap anthropomorphism.”185 More than simply establishing a formal contrast, this opposition between “Assyrian” and “anthropomorphic” figuration had the effect of canceling Klinger’s terms for valorizing Beethoven, which implied, once again, a reciprocal relation between weight pressing downward and an imagined vertical elevation. By situating his frieze twenty-­ five feet overhead and placing his line of “elongated women swimming above everything with life p ­ reservers” at the intersection of wall and ceiling, Klimt’s mural had the effect of deposing Klinger’s sculpture from its imagined mountaintop, casting it down, perhaps, to the floor of an imagined swimming pool or ocean. In other ways, too, the high-­ceilinged space so fundamental to the design of the Klinger-­Beethoven exhibition dramatically inflected viewers’ perceptions of scale. The expanse of empty space looming over the Beethoven-­Denkmal dwarfed Klinger’s slightly larger-­than-­life sculpture, which appeared like a Nippes­figur, or little figurine, in the center of the Secession building, as several critics

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observed.186 This diminution of the idol at the center of the “Beethoven Temple” and, perhaps more importantly, the superseding of its claim to preeminent elevation by a series of ornamental figures floating, evidently disencumbered from consciousness, at the physical summit of the exhibition space, encapsulates the underlying philosophical gambit of the exhibition, which inverted the hierarchy that ranked “the burden of thought” above the levity of unconscious states.

“Schweben in Wollust” “It is a winged rising and floating, freed from the earth, into azure lust, when the unbridled nerves dream.”187 Such a triumphant state, Bahr imagined, could be the ultimate achievement of the “overcoming of naturalism.” At this point, I want to turn from the floating “human ornaments” at the commencement and close of the Beethovenfries to address the erotic charge that colors the mural’s presentation of these states of levitation. The figural leitmotifs we have just examined serve as ornamental settings for two narrative passages in the mural—­the middle wall depicting the Hostile Forces and the concluding passage visualizing the Ninth Symphony’s Freudenmelodie—­that situate these ornamental personifications of unconscious states in relation to humanity’s animal descent and sexuality. Recent scholarship has rightly emphasized that in the Beethovenfries Klimt presented the struggle for happiness in evolutionary terms.188 As Emily Braun observes, the middle wall of Hostile Forces appears as a painted materialization of Darwin’s conviction that “our descent . . . is the origin of our evil passions!!!—­The Devil under the form of Baboon is our grandfather!”189 Dominated almost entirely by a figure the catalogue identified as “the giant Typhon,” the middle wall presents this fiercest monster of Greek mythology in a form that departs markedly from ancient descriptions, namely as a gorilla with wings and snake tails (fig. 78).190 Moreover, this wall of Hostile Forces presents “evil passions” inherited from animal descent as closely bound to instinctual sexual appetites. The trio of Lust, Unchastity, and Excess appears just to the right of the head of Typhon, framed within an abstract egg of gold pattern. The design consists of intersecting vertical and horizontal lines that integrate stylized gold phalli and quasi-­vaginal triangles in various sizes and colors. Surrounding the central golden phallus, Klimt painted black triangles with tips bisected in red lines that echo the black wedges of pubic hair on the three naked, black-­haired Gorgons standing to the left of Typhon, as well as the genital area of Lust, whose lavish ginger tresses (which she fingers) sweep down from around her face to delineate a red vaginal gash between her legs. This entire area of sexualized pattern appears as an extension of the copiously jeweled golden headpiece worn by the figure of Excess, who stands directly beneath it. Modeled on the figure of Ali Baba from Aubrey Beardsley’s 1897 cover illustration for

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F igu re 78. Gustav Klimt, Beethovenfries ­(detail of Typhon, with Lust, Unchastity, and Excess). Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, this female figure associates a racialized caricature of the “Orient” with a surfeit of jewelry and ornament. More than any other figure, she was singled out by critics as a personification of the affronting qualities of the frieze as a whole; one critic described how the figure provoked him to “silently calculate . . . how many millions in dowry would be necessary to win [her] a husband.”191 This remark suggests that the offensiveness of Excess stemmed not only from the undaintiness of her feminine silhouette but more specifically from the way the figure put viewers in mind of questions surrounding the solicitation of mates. There is the suggestion of a crude sexual lure (directed outward toward the viewer) conveyed through the ornate immodesty of her bodily adornments, which, despite their copiousness, fail to cover her bare protruding belly and breasts. Klimt concentrated the mural’s densest encrustation of jewels and other applied ornaments on the belt, armbands, and headpiece of Excess. Her combination of bejewelment and nakedness recalls Alois Riegl’s assertion, in his Foundations for a History of Ornament, that “the urge to decorate” was “one of the most elementary human drives, more elementary in fact than the need to protect the body.”192 The wall of Hostile Forces reflects this understanding of ornament as an expression of “elementary human drives.” Indeed, the formal association Klimt created between the copiously decorated body of Excess and the area of sexualized abstract pattern hovering above her helps to frame this wall within the broader cultural and philosophical reconceptualization of ornament in the wake of Darwin’s controversial theory of sexual selection in the second part of The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). Sexual selection, it has been argued, was “Darwin’s really dangerous idea”; it introduced what the philosopher Elizabeth Grosz has characterized as “a principle of excess in relation to survival” that was, unlike natural selection, “fundamentally irrational.”193 More so than with any other of his controversial propositions, Darwin met with entrenched “opposition to [this] doctrine,” in particular from “persons who,” as Grant ­Allen wrote in 1886, “still desire to erect an efficient barrier of one sort or another between the human and animal worlds” and “arrogate to mankind alone all the higher faculties either of sense or intellect.”194 Sexual selection broke down that barrier by suggesting that bodily “ornaments” or “attractions” on animal organisms (nonfunctional anatomical features such as decorative coloration, feathers, horns, or antlers; fig. 79) had evolved as the functional byproduct of aesthetic preferences exercised by animals when selecting mates. Darwin held that “almost every decorative adjunct” on animal organisms could be traced to “the action of these ‘lower’ passions,” as Allen put it. In this view, the “aesthetic sense . . . [was] in the last resort, a secondary sexual attribute” and something common to “all sentient beings, be they pigs or philosophers, saints or starfish.”195 Darwin’s postulation of this second primary mechanism of organic change on earth “produced a cultural shock” and presented artistic

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Fig u re 79. Illustrations from Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1871). Digital image courtesy Princeton Theological Seminary Library.

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practice and traditional philosophical aesthetics with “a problem, if not a threat,” as Kurt Bayertz has argued.196 For it seemed to many, such as the German writer Wilhelm Bölsche—­a close acquaintance of Bahr’s, and perhaps the best-­selling German-­language nonfiction writer prior to 1933—­that Darwin’s “genetic-­erotic hypothesis” had illuminated “the entire structure of higher artistic sensations and the development of the arts” and resolved satisfactorily certain problems previously restricted to the intellectual purview of “brooding philosophers.” Thence forward, Bölsche proclaimed in 1888, “all thinking about aesthetics will owe something to philosophy, but even more to natural scientists.”197 The devaluation of “philosophy”—­and by extension the conscious mental faculties—­implicit in Bölsche’s reduction of aesthetics to biology is perhaps best encapsulated in the way Darwin’s evolutionary theory “turned on its head” Kant’s notion from the Critique of Judgment of “a purely ‘intellectual interest’ ” elicited by the aesthetic object.198 Darwin, as Bölsche insisted, had proved that “the perception of beauty was originally something useful, something species-­preserving.”199 This idea of a functional purpose for beauty, rooted in sexuality, went hand

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in hand with the disassociation of the faculty of aesthetic “judgment” from reason and deliberative consciousness. As Darwin clarified in 1876, “It would be more accurate to speak of [animals] as being excited or attracted in an especial degree . . . than deliberately selecting.”200 Even before the Klinger-­Beethoven exhibition, the Viennese public closely associated Darwin’s new evolutionary notions of beauty with the ornamental aesthetics of the Secession. In one caricature satirizing the organization’s magazine Ver Sacrum (fig. 80), the words “Secessionistische Zeitung” are spelled out beneath the eyespots on the outspread tail of a peacock, the animal that, since the publication of Darwin’s Descent of Man, served in the popular imagination as the “crest, mascot, [and] emblem . . . of sexual selection.”201 This emblem returns with non­satirical intent in Klimt’s Hostile Forces, which Hevesi described as a “reservoir for the wild currents of Klimt’s imagination.”202 As Hevesi rightly observed, this section of the Beethovenfries consisted of “forms and nuances borrowed from the concept of plumage, which excite the optic nerve in almost mechanical fashion.”203 More than half of the wall appears to have the monster’s outstretched wing spread across its surface. This wing not only recapitulates the theme of floating or flight, it does so in a manner that creates an equivalence between Klimt’s own decorative cladding of the wall and an animal’s

Figur e 80. “Secessionistische Zeitung,” souvenir program from a dance held by the Vienna Association of Journalists and Writers, April 17, 1899. Digital image courtesy Getty Open Content Program.

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Fig u re 81. Gustav Klimt, Beethovenfries (detail of Hostile Forces wall with feathers and skins). Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

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­ornamented epidermis. The genital-­like forms Klimt embedded beneath this wing, within the golden patterning above the figure of Excess, insist upon the biological function of ornament as a mechanism for attracting sexual interest. The Hostile Forces segment of the mural also suggests an equivalence between cultural ornament and biological embellishment, as, for instance, in the transition from the bright cerulean of the gold-­studded sarong of Excess to the striated blue highlights in the fur of Typhon, which then swoop up into a gray-­blue feathered wing that extends across the wall’s top right half (fig. 81). Chief among the forms Klimt borrowed from the concept of plumage was the device of the ocelli, a motif central to Darwin’s exposition of sexual selection, which turned on his detailed analysis of the eyespots on the tail of the so-­called argus pheasant—­an animal named ­after the Greek mythological monster Argus Panoptes, a hundred-­eyed giant. In the Hostile Forces wall, Klimt combined ornamental eyelike forms with a host of actual eyes staring out from the composition, most prominently, the large mother-­of-­pearl eyes appliquéd onto the figure of Typhon, who appears alongside three female figures identified as “his daughters, the three Gorgons.” The visual convergence staged in this section of the mural—­between the mythological iconography of the Gorgon and the biological ornament of ocellated plumage, the prime exemplar of a sexual “attraction” for Darwin—­seems to hinge on Klimt’s recognition of these forms as eliciting an analogous type of visceral, nonrational reception—­whether of repulsion or attraction. Further, the middle wall of the Beethovenfries—­the wall that faced the viewer “frontally” from

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the room’s threshold—­associates this receptive mode with a particular orientational disposition. As Jean-­Pierre Vernant has argued, frontality is the first and most essential characteristic of Gorgon iconography. Through this orientation, the figure of the Gorgon stages a “face-­to-­face encounter with frontality,” producing a reaction that might be equated to that of an argus hen regarding the ocelli on the outspread tail of a male argus pheasant, a reaction of “fascination . . . [as the viewer’s] eye is lost in the eye of this Power, which looks at him as he looks at it.”204 Critics perceived that the “ornamented plaster surfaces” of Klimt’s mural were soliciting from them a de-­intellectualized, automatic form of responsiveness linked to sexual excitation. One critic referred to the mural as a “psychopathia pictoria”; another described it as something made not for a shrine to Beethoven but rather a “[Richard von] Krafft-­ Ebing ­temple.”205 Indeed, Klimt moved in the same social circle as this pioneering sexologist, who was also famous for his controversial experiments with hypnosis. If it is accurate to describe the Beethovenfries as suitable for a “Krafft-­Ebing ­temple,” this is because its allegorical narrative is fully aligned with Krafft-­Ebing’s claim, in the introduction to Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), his wildly popular encyclopedia of human sexual aberrations, that “sexual feeling is the basis upon which social advancement is developed” and the prime impetus for the “awakening of aesthetic sentiments.”206 The Hostile Forces wall of the Beethovenfries ostensibly presents animal descent and the biological basis of aesthetics (or aesthetics reconceived as attraction to ornament) as something negative, something to be transcended in the struggle for human happiness. But as the critics recognized, this negative valuation is not wholehearted. In the mural’s climax, all of these negative associations are shed. The final passage revisits the theme of animal descent in an overtly celebratory sense, presenting it as new ground for venerating art and aesthetic experience. Klimt rerouted the familiar meaning of lines from the Ninth Symphony’s closing choral refrain (“Freude, schöner Götterfunken . . . Diesen Kuß der ganzen Welt!”). Beethoven’s joyous proclamation of universal brotherhood—­premised upon, as the composer scribbled in 1820 in a conversation notebook, the Enlightenment tenets of “the moral law within us and above us the starry sky. Kant!!!”—­is transmuted in the Beethovenfries into a celebration of art’s address to an animal and unconscious, rather than rational and moral, human subject.207 The final passage of the Beethovenfries (fig. 82) matches the wall of Hostile Forces in ornamental density and revisits a number of its key motifs. At the base of a large, gold oval superimposed over the repeating figural pattern of the Choir of Paradise Angels, Klimt depicted the roots of a rosebush branching upward, supporting a series of successively narrowing, uterine-­shaped forms. A solid gold phallic column, a dramatically enlarged reiteration of the ornamental phallus in the Hostile Forces section, extends up the center of the nested ovals.208 Within this phallic form, Klimt encloses two naked bodies, pressed up against

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Fig u re 82. Gustav Klimt, Beethovenfries (detail of the final passage “Diesen Kuß der ganzen Welt!” on third wall). Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

one another. The female half of the couple is barely visible, apart from a tuft of brown hair and upraised arms; a dorsal view (the frieze’s only dorsal view) of the legs, muscular back, and clenched buttocks of the male partner dominates the image. Their embrace, decidedly not a “kiss” in the sense to which Beethoven’s lyrics would seem to allude, has been described by Joseph Koerner as an image of “the conjugal bed, the holy sanctuary of domestic space where husband and wife unite to create a family.”209 Connubial connotations aside, the embrace is certainly suggestive of penetrative coitus.

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Figur e 83. Gustav Klimt, study for “Diesen Kuß der ganzen Welt,” ca. 1901–­1902. Black chalk on paper, 45 × 30.8 cm. Collection of the Albertina Museum, Vienna. Photo courtesy Albertina Museum.

Hovering over the embracing couple, we find one of the oddest and most striking details of the Beethovenfries: a pair of flat gold circles with schematic facial features, one with rounded dots for eyes, the other with stylized closed eyelids. These forms—­which for us today resemble, ­almost unavoidably, two golden emojis—­have been only rarely addressed in extant scholarship. When noted, the faces are typically identified as symbols of the sun and moon, in keeping with the cosmic motifs central to the Secessionists’ overall decorative theme.210 And indeed, as sun and moon, the faces do presage the two murals behind and in front of the Beethoven-­Denkmal in the main hall, Adolf Böhm’s The Dawning Day and Roller’s The Sinking Night. But this interpretation is certainly inadequate. For the two gold faces also bear a more earthly, biological significance. With these two floating gold faces, Klimt returned to, and pressed to a formal and symbolic extreme, the motif of the levitating head deployed throughout the Beethovenfries in the figures of the Longing for Happiness and the Choir of Paradise Angels. His preliminary studies (fig. 83) reveal the willfulness with which he decapitated his kissing couple. In their final form in the Beethovenfries, Klimt preserved only the merest suggestion of hair poking up above their embracing arms to indicate that these bodies extended up beyond the neck. His rendering of the two lovers as virtually headless allows the viewer to read the subtly gendered facial discs, suspended directly above the male and female figures, as floating substitutes for their invisible or absent heads.

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Bringing to a formal climax the mural’s association between a repudiation of physical weight and gravity and a state of release from the metaphorical burden of conscious thought, these levitating gold faces express that release as a state of gratification simultaneously erotic and aesthetic. Positioned at the apex of the frieze’s culminating decorative passage—­surrounded by the levitating Choir of Paradise Angels, whose gestures allude to the state of nirvana—­the golden faces seem to externalize the mental states of the kissing couple, expressing the “satisfaction” the human subject experiences within the Kingdom of the Ideal—­a kingdom only ever accessed, so the catalogue claimed, through the arts. The floating faces can be read as expressing the aesthetic rapture of two listeners hearing the final movement of the Ninth Symphony. Or, equally, they can be read as expressing Beethoven’s state of inspiration as he realizes his highest creative potential. Significantly, the face hovering over the male body is the one with eyelids open. Although Klimt’s paired presentation of closed and open eyes in these two faces seems to deliberately confound any conventional opposition between sleep and waking consciousness (the juxtaposition seems intended precisely to call into question the possibility of such an opposition), the open eyes of the face above the male figure do evoke a sense of rapt awakening to an inner vision. The mise-­en-­scène of the Klinger-­Beethoven exhibition and the layout of Klimt’s mural encouraged an integral visual relationship with Klinger’s Beethoven-­Denkmal. Hoffmann, perhaps at the painter’s behest, built an aperture into one wall of the room in which Klimt exhibited, so that beneath the third and final section of the Beethovenfries, the Beethoven-­Denkmal was visible in the adjacent hall (fig. 84). Klimt organized his mural to visually incorporate the sculpture into its narrative flow. His “warrior” on the first wall, a medieval knight encased in an extravagant gold, silver, and jewel-­studded suit of arms, was placed in line with the Beethoven-­Denkmal in the adjacent central hall, establishing a symbolic equivalence between Beethoven and the frieze’s heroic champion of human happiness.211 On the frieze’s final facing wall, Klimt abruptly halted the decorative program in the area above the opening that framed the view of the Beethoven-­Denkmal. After this caesura to showcase Klinger’s monument, Klimt moved immediately into the mural’s finale, the passage illustrating the phrases “Freude, schöner Götterfunke . . . Diesen Kuß der ganzen Welt!” This spatial coordination between the mural and the monument would have allowed, or even strongly invited, an interpretation of the frieze as a materialization of the “pondering” enacted by the sculpted Beethoven. Indeed, the Beethoven-­Denkmal, which many critics referred to as “Klinger’s Ninth Symphony,” evoked not a generic state of “highest mental concentration” but the more specific perception that the composer was represented in the throes of conceiving his Ninth Symphony, his “highest” musical creation.

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If the Beethovenfries incorporated the Beethoven-­Denkmal to construct a narrative about the invisible creative thoughts of the sculpted Beethoven, it did so in a manner that reflected the comprehension of art as embedded in unconscious instinctual functions that the entire frieze elaborates and crystallizes formally in the levitating gold faces that stand in, in the mural’s climax, for the “sunken-­in-­thought” head of Beethoven. In these two facial disks, which echo the circles and dots that form the basic decorative vocabulary of the Beethovenfries, art’s return to its ostensibly primordial decorative function merges with a reversion to an earlier phase of biological evolution. For the golden emoji-­like faces appear at once as archaic metallic ornaments—­or gold coins, even—­and stylized monkey visages.212 There is a distinct suggestion of facial fur in the mottled, spotted golden patterning that encroaches upon the features of both faces; it is especially conspicuous in the face hovering over the male figure. Both floating faces resemble illustrations of species of New World monkeys found in the Illustrierte Naturgeschichte der Thiere (fig. 85), which Klimt kept in his library, and which it seems certain he consulted in composing the figure of Typhon.213

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Fig ur e 84 . Installation view, showing third wall of Klimt’s Beethovenfries with view of Klinger’s Beethoven-­Denkmal. From Joseph August Lux, “Klingers Beethoven und die Moderne Raum-­Kunst,” Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration 10 (1902). History Collection/Alamy Stock Photo.

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Fig u re 85 . New World monkeys. From Illustri­ erte Naturgeschichte der Thiere, ed. Philipp Leopold Martin (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1882).

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The evolutionary allusions Klimt embedded throughout this climactic passage of the Beethovenfries substantiate a reading of these levitating gold faces as deliberately simian in aspect. The branching structure of his Edenic rosebush or tree of life strongly evokes the “arboreal diagram of diversification by genealogical descent published by Darwin and extrapolated by Haeckel in his sprawling phylogenetic trees,” as Braun has demonstrated.214 Notably, Klimt attached the floating faces to what historians have typically identified as “comets’ tails,” which extend downward to meet the base of the tree beneath the kissing couple.215 But the astronomical symbolism of these forms again merges with a biological one. These comets’ tails exhibit a curiously sinuous, wiggling movement, as they attach on either side to golden heads that appear to push from the perimeter into the much larger golden orb hovering over the couple. Indeed, these supposed comets also plainly resemble the distinctive “pin-­shaped form” of sperm, those swimmers par excellence, with their “so-­called ‘heads,” illustrated and described at length in popular volumes by Haeckel (fig. 86).216 (The precise mechanism of fertilization in gamete fusion had only recently been discovered.)217 As in “The Mystery of the Sperm-­Cell and the Ovum-­Cell,” a chapter from Bölsche’s popular science bestseller Love-­Life in Nature (1898–­ 1901), the Beethovenfries portrays the “process that takes place in and on the human female egg . . . preceding the great act of impregnation by the male semen” as an event occurring in the solar system, an event in the “inward life of the cosmos” that is “in its way even mightier and more important . . . than the flaming sun of the planets.”218 The incorporation, in the final passage of the Beethovenfries, of Bölsche’s cosmic vision of impregnation, which conflates planets in outer space with gametes in the fluid channels of the female reproductive system, vividly demonstrates the inescapably sexual implications of the frieze’s overarching repudiation of a “spirit of gravity.”

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Figur e 86. Human sperm and sperm fertilizing an ovum. From Ernst Haeckel, Anthropogenie oder Entwickelungsgeschichte des Menschen (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engel­ mann, 1874). Digital image courtesy Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh.

What I am describing as Klimt’s invention here—­the deployment of two frontal, ornamental, monkey-­faced heads of sperm, suspended in cosmic fluid as if in the moment of fertilization, to express symbolically the inner mental states of a man and a woman experiencing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or perhaps to express Beethoven’s own mental state in the transcendent moment when the Ninth Symphony took shape in his imagination—­might, admittedly, seem outrageous. It is an invention that would seem to invite the sort of reception recounted by Kraus when he complained of “shallow materialistic punch lines” that “poisoned” his encounter with the Beethoven-­Denkmal at the Klinger-­Beethoven exhibition. The Beethovenfries, in co-­opting Klinger’s statue into its own ornamental narrative, inverted the terms in which Beethoven’s achievement was commonly celebrated. As “one of the most enduring hero-­types of modern man,” Beethoven was regularly represented as a personification of humanity’s—­or, rather, European humanity’s—­ongoing intellectual or even biological development. Indeed, as Hevesi remarked on viewing the Beethoven-­Denkmal, “Darwinian evolution goes from the skull of the Neanderthal to the Beethoven mask.”219 Adolf Loos, the Viennese architect who emerged in the decade following the Klinger-­Beethoven exhibition as an outspoken and overtly racist “enemy of ornament” (Ornamentenfeind), advanced a very similar view of the composer’s significance.220 Despite the fact that they had antithetical aesthetic agendas—­one being an advocate for, the other an enemy of, the Secession—­Hevesi and Loos shared a similar understanding of Beethoven. For Loos, Beethoven was a figure of enormous symbolic importance (alongside, tellingly, Kant). He regularly referred to the composer, and especially to his final symphonic creation, as the exemplar of the kinds of “undreamt-­of heights” modern Western civilization had achieved in the arts and in intellectual culture by harnessing energies that, in his

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view, less culturally advanced societies would have expended upon the production of ornament.221 As Loos memorably asserted, “The Critique of Pure Reason could not be written by a man with five ostrich feathers in his cap, the Ninth did not come from a man with a plate-­sized wheel around his neck.”222 While Loos took for granted the Darwinian insight that “all art is erotic,” he equated the progress of European civilization with an ever-­ increasing capacity to sublimate sexual “surplus energy.” The very first artists who “smear[ed] the walls with erotic symbols,” Loos asserted, had “felt the same urge as Beethoven,” felt themselves to be “in the same heaven in which Beethoven created the Ninth Symphony.” But for a modern subject to engage once again in this ornamental production represented, for Loos, a degenerate or even criminal activity, and certainly a deviation from art’s essentially progressive purpose.223 “Art is there to lead humanity always further and further, always higher and higher, to make humanity more godlike,” Loos asserted.224 The Klinger-­Beethoven exhibition, and especially the Beethovenfries, can be regarded as an elaborate counterpoint to that proposition. Although this is still a hymn to art—­an allegorical narrative in which “the Arts lead us into the Kingdom of the Ideal”—­in Klimt’s vision, art leads humankind higher by leading “lower,” back toward culturally primitive and animal origins.

“Er klimmt nach Höhe”: Klimt’s Apotheosis

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In 1903, Peter Altenberg identified Klimt as “someone [who wants] to fly up high, to fly away from earthly difficulties.” To this, his friend Karl Kraus replied, no doubt with a touch of irony, “Er klimmt nach Höhe” (he climbs to the heights).225 This play on the painter’s surname perhaps sardonically acknowledges how the new conception of art’s purpose advanced in the Beethovenfries went hand in hand with a new basis for idolizing the artist—­an artist conceived, to play on the terms of Nietzsche, not as a cogital, but at best some sort of animal, not as a “pondering,” godlike creator, gifted with a contemplative “inner life of utmost tension,” but rather as a creature (a male creature, more specifically) gifted with a particular facility for externalizing instinctual sexual impulses. (Not irrelevantly, the sexual script for the artist implicit in the Beethovenfries was lived out by its artist publicly; upon his death, more than a dozen presumptive children claimed to have been fathered by the creator of the mural’s levitating monkey-­sperm.226) The cultural ascendance of this new “idol” of the artist is exemplified, I propose, in the emergence of Klimt, rather than Klinger or Beethoven, as the ultimate luminary of the Klinger-­Beethoven exhibition. Klimt’s frieze has become, in Gottfried Fliedl’s words, “the principal memento of the most famous of all Secession exhibitions.”227 Klimt’s contemporaries would have been surprised by this outcome, since at the time of the exhibition, the Secessionists circulated the rumor that when the

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­exhibition terminated and Klinger’s cult statue left the Secession building, they would destroy all of their decorations.228 But it seems that Klimt never really intended that, as Bahr and Hevesi lamented dramatically in the press, his “masterpiece would go up in smoke on the altar of Beethoven.”229 Although designed to appear as an ancient fresco or mosaic, integral to the wall and architecture, the Beethovenfries had in fact been executed in situ on detachable panels that only simulated the wall’s plaster surface—­a decision Klimt clearly made with an eye toward the work’s future preservation. The mural was covered but left in place after the close of the Klinger-­Beethoven exhibition, unveiled again for Klimt’s solo exhibition at the Secession in 1903, and finally moved to storage after its purchase on that occasion. Acquired by the Austrian state in the 1970s under now-­contested terms, the Beethovenfries was restored and reinstalled at the Secession in 1986 in a specially constructed room matching the dimensions of its original antechamber at the Klinger-­Beethoven exhibition.230 Since then, it has become one of the most popular artifacts of fin-­de-­siècle art in any European museum, while Klinger’s sculpture, now in the collection of the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, has been “largely forgotten.”231 A well-­known photograph by Moritz Nähr, Klimt’s personal photographer (fig. 87), suggests that Klimt and his Secessionist colleagues more or less anticipated this displacement of ergon by parergon in the historical reception of the Klinger-­Beethoven exhibition.232 It shows the artist posing inside the main hall of the exhibition just before its opening, sitting, directly facing the Beethoven-­Denkmal, in one of two armchairs Ferdinand Andri designed for the event. Andri’s “throne” featured stylized, half-­human, half-­reptilian finials that clearly ape the two ivory putti on Klinger’s throne that enframe and point at the drooping head

Beethoven’s Farewell

Figur e 8 7. Moritz Nähr, photograph of the Secessionists gathered before the opening of the Klinger-­Beethoven exhibition (detail), April 1902. Collection of the Bildarchiv der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, Vienna. Neue Galerie New York/Art Resource, NY.

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Fig u re 88. Pauline Hamilton, photograph of Gustav Klimt in painting smock, ca. 1909. Private collection. Image courtesy Clark Art Institute.

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of Beethoven. Surrounded by men in black suits, Klimt assumes Andri’s throne wearing his signature painting kaftan—­for Klimt always worked, we could say, dans un sac, much like Rodin’s Balzac (fig. 88).233 His face framed between Andri’s animalistic finials, Klimt affects an expressionless aspect, holding his head erect and turned directly toward the camera, in a frontal pose that almost recalls the one he gave to his figure of Wissen in Philosophie. Obviously mimicking, while also transforming, the aspect of the deified artist embodied so powerfully in the sculpture across the room, this photograph mischievously announces the new aesthetic hierarchy the Secessionists proposed at the Klinger-­Beethoven exhibition, one in which the throne of a “pondering god of thunder” was usurped by the man who “smeared the wall with erotic symbols.”

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The Mise-­en Scène of Dreams L’Après-­m idi d’un faune

*

In the summer of 1910, Serge Diaghilev, impresario of the Ballets Russes, granted Vaslav Nijinsky, his lover and the troupe’s celebrated premier danseur, the opportunity to make his debut as a choreographer. By autumn of that year, music had been secured for the first ballet Nijinsky would not only star in but also author. Claude Debussy had granted rights to stage a “choreographic adaptation” of his symphonic poem Prélude à l’après-­midi d’un faune (1894), a ten-­minute orchestral composition inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé’s classically inspired poem L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876).1 “Overjoyed with the prospect of this work,” Nijinsky immediately set about devising choreography for Debussy’s music, with a plan in place, as he told his sister Bronislava Nijinska, “use archaic Greece.”2 He began to experiment in secret with Nijinska, a fellow dancer in Diaghilev’s troupe. In the family living room in Saint Petersburg, they would “spend all evening long on the floor in front of the mirror trying out different poses.”3 Out of these sessions grew a style of movement that jettisoned all the classical ballet techniques Nijinsky had been perfecting since the age of nine, when he entered Saint Petersburg’s Imperial Ballet School and quickly became its star pupil.4 In the ten-­minute sequence of movement Nijinsky devised to perform together with seven ballerinas, he made what Lincoln Kirstein termed “a break absolute with classic tradition, the first of such impact in four centuries. Nothing was retained from the academy save disciplined dancers.”5 He had conceived a choreography so exacting and difficult to master that it required somewhere between sixty and one hundred and twenty rehearsals—­an unprecedented number—­before the dance premiered two years later, on May 29, 1912, at Paris’s Théâtre du Châtelet, to a house of more than two thousand spectators.6 Before L’Après-­midi d’un faune, Nijinsky had been known to his fans as the “young hero of rhythm and movement,” the idol of “life in action,

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Fig u re 89. Publicity photo of Nijinsky for the cover of L’Illustration (May 22, 1909). Courtesy L’Illustration.

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in the force of its indomitable élan” (fig. 89).7 He was celebrated for the extraordinary pathos of his acting and the acrobatic dynamism of his dancing, particularly the height and speed of his jumps and leaps. These qualities of movement were precisely what Nijinsky jettisoned in Faune. “No expression in the face; you must just be as though asleep with your eyes open,” he instructed his performers.8 The “lack of emotion” perceived in Nijinsky and his fellow dancers, with their “blankly expressionless” countenances, went hand in hand with what audiences found to be an even more surprising feature of this dance: its lack of motion as such.9 L’Après-­midi d’un faune, in the words of one astonished American reviewer, was “as motionless, almost, as if it had been mute.”10 There was, one newspaper explained, “no dancing in it whatever, but only certain movements and postures.”11 The replacement of dancing with mere “movements and postures” stimulated in audiences feelings of deprivation and bafflement. “What? They paid four hundred francs per box

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to see the flying Nijinsky . . . and suddenly they are shown a boring bas-­ relief! . . . What does this ‘ballet without dance’ mean?”12 This chapter will hazard some possible answers, proceeding from the conviction that the “meaning” of Faune is already implicit in the copiously recorded public reactions. Despite a widespread consensus that the dance was “boring,” the performance simultaneously “accomplished the apparent miracle of shocking a Châtelet audience in Paris to such an extent that its principal defender, Auguste Rodin . . . ran a serious risk of complete social ostracism!”—­to quote the breathless account of one newspaper.13 Word of the dance spread quickly around the world, producing headlines such as “Blush on the Face of Paris” or, from the Pittsburgh Gazette, “Wicked Paris Shocked at Last.”14 This chapter aims to specify the nature of the shock Nijinsky’s first ballet administered. I will suggest that its core provocation lay in the relation Nijinsky established between the corporeal technique of the dance—­a technique that not only departed from balletic classicism but estranged or negated the very concept of dance as a medium grounded in motion—­and its allegedly obscene narrative content. By foregrounding that relation, I hope to elucidate how the shock Faune administered resided principally in the nature of its address to its spectator. The choreography was designed to reflect back to its audience a psychic process it presented as if occurring inside their own heads. The dance, which the Ballets Russes would eventually tour to all the major cities of Europe, as well as North and South America, can be seen as a spectacular public encounter (equal parts titillating and traumatic) with the nature of dreaming as modern culture was coming to understand it.15

“I too have studied nature” This chapter turns to a work that was far more distant from the milieu that gave birth to psychoanalysis than the subject of the last. Klimt’s Beethovenfries debuted about a half hour’s walk from the office of Sigmund Freud, who had published The Interpretation of Dreams a little more than a year before the Klinger-­Beethoven exhibition. Despite a greater geographical and temporal distance from this founding event of psychoanalysis, in Faune we will encounter a formal logic and a conceptualization of the unconscious far more closely aligned with the specific innovations of Freud’s theories—­with respect both to the function of distortions, or “mechanisms of displacement,” in unconscious thinking and to the primacy of “infantilism”—­the “infantilism of sexuality” as well as “psychical infantilism” more broadly.16 While obviously a product of a moment when, as Freud put it, “the concept of the unconscious [had] long been knocking at the gates of psychology and asking to be let in,” the vision of the unconscious welcomed in by Klimt does not encompass certain factors specific to the psychoanalytic framing of this concept, which Freud “seized upon” and gave “a fresh content.”17 Klimt’s ejaculatory emblem of unconscious

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inspiration—­monkey-­faced heads of sperm on either side of a floating ovum, hovering over a man and a woman in coital embrace—­envisions sexuality as procreation. In this sense, his mural monumentalizes the “unduly restricted concept of sexuality” Freud felt compelled to move beyond.18 Psychoanalysis abandoned the presumption that the instinctual aim of sex was “the union of the two sex-cells,” or the notion that “human sexual life consists essentially in an endeavour to bring one’s own genitals into contact with those of someone of the opposite sex.”19 The unconscious as Freud conceptualized it went hand in hand with what he called the “ ‘stretching’ of the concept of sexuality.”20 This enlargement, where “sexuality” comprised “many things which could not be classed under the reproductive function,” proceeded from the most controversial and perhaps the most central of all psychoanalytic precepts, “the pivot,” as Havelock Ellis observed in 1907, “on which the whole doctrine . . . turned.”21 That pivot was Freud’s determination to dispel “the fairy tale of an asexual childhood,” his insistence that “sexual interests and activities occur in small children from the beginning of their lives.”22 Nijinsky’s only exposure to psychoanalysis came some years after he had created the work that concerns us here. In 1919, in the midst of a mental collapse from which he would never recover, he was diagnosed and committed to an asylum by Eugen Bleuler, the first medical psychiatrist to practice psychoanalysis.23 Subsequently, the dancer spent years at the Bellevue Sanatorium at Kreuzlingen, run by Freud’s close friend Ludwig Binswanger, who used psychoanalysis as a “basis of understanding . . . in every single case.”24 But in 1912, years before he had assumed the status of a “case” for psychoanalyzing doctors, and independent of any direct or indirect knowledge or cultural contact with psycho­analysis, the twenty-­three-­year-old dancer had already staged a performance that put on display, in the form of high-­cultural entertainment, some of the topoi and metaphors most distinctive to Freud’s new theory of the psyche. According to Binswanger, Freud’s most original contribution to a “total understanding of man” was his specific elaboration of “the scientific concept of homo natura, man as nature.”25 “More than any other biological conception of man,” Binswanger stated, Freud’s homo natura was distinguished by “the idea . . . of instinctuality, i.e., the drivenness of human existence.”26 This recognition of instinctuality led to Freud’s double achievement; he arrived, for the first time in history, at “a genuine somatography of experience,” a theory recognizing that “the basis of man’s being is . . . bodiliness”—­that “the needs of the body” determine “even the subtlest, most spiritual aspects of human experience.”27 At the same time, in Binswanger’s view, Freud demonstrated “in an undreamed of way . . . the unqualified universality of mechanism.” He identified the “particular mechanisms” that “set in motion” what Binswanger referred to as “the psychic apparatus built into homo natura.”28 “I know I will be told that I too have studied nature,” Nijinsky prophesied in the manuscript he composed in the weeks preceding his institutionalization.29 At once a chronicle of encroaching psychosis, a memoir of childhood and life as a celebrity performer, and a work of “philosophy” C h a pt e r T h r e e

(“I am writing philosophy, but I do not philosophize. . . . I am an unthinking philosopher”), Nijinsky composed his so-­called ­diary with the explicit intent of publication. In its opening pages, he affirms his conviction that he was among a pantheon of other illustrious figures defining the concept of homo natura for turn-­of-­the-­century culture.30 The manuscript contains multiple references to “Darwin who said that man is descended from an ape,” though it is obvious the dancer had only an indirect, somewhat distorted knowledge of the theories of this “learned man . . . [who] wrote scholarly things in French called ‘The History of Nature.’ ”31 The name Nietzsche is also invoked repeatedly throughout the manuscript, which Nijinsky wrote while living in St. Moritz. Whether or not he had carefully read the philosopher’s texts, the dancer identified powerfully with this former denizen of the Engadin who also eventually “lost his head.”32 Indeed, Nijinsky’s work of autobiographical “philosophy”—­an extraordinary artifact of psychological exhibitionism—­might be considered his answer to Ecce Homo (1888), Nietzsche’s last, autobiographical book. Yet there is a crucial distinction in the respective efforts of the dancer and the philosopher to make posterity “behold the man”: Nijinsky’s autobiography did not elide material for the indispensable chapter Freud complained was missing from Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo—­the chapter that could have been titled “On my sexuality.”33 That Nijinsky’s final artistic act recorded for all to read intimate details of his sexual habits and impulses dating back to childhood suggests in some sense that he anticipated and invited his art to be received through the kind of interpretive method Freud introduced to art history in his 1910 study “A Childhood Memory of Leonardo da Vinci.” Freud’s psychobiographical interpretive method posited works of art as “re­ actions” to “impressions of the artist’s childhood and his life-­history” and, most infamously, refused to “silently pass over [the] subject’s sexual activity or sexual individuality.”34 Nijinsky’s innovative choreography already contains a self-­reflexive engagement with the notion of art as an arena for the refiguration of childhood memories. This is the case most overtly in the first of his four dance compositions, which in 1919 he singled out unequivocally as a work of autobiography: “The ‘Faun’ is me.”35 To supply a psychobiographical interpretation of Nijinsky’s art is not the aim of this chapter. Rather, I want to show, from the point of view of cultural history, how Freud and Nijinsky similarly envisioned the functioning of the human psyche.36 By analyzing Nijinsky’s first ballet alongside concepts from contemporaneous psychoanalytic texts, my aim is a reciprocal interpretation that levels the power imbalance between interpreted object and interpretive method—­between artist (or patient) and analyst—­that was endemic to psychoanalysis as Freud conceived and practiced it. I take for granted the sophistication, deliberateness, and analytical intelligence of this performing artist who, though his talent is uncontested, is still often regarded as an “idiot of genius.”37 One intention of this chapter is to affirm with this alleged “idiot” that indeed he too had “studied nature,” that he too was a philosopher, albeit a self-­consciously “unthinking philosopher” who communicated the The Mise-en-scène of Dreams

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results of his studies via his body, “work[ing] with [his] hands and feet and head and eyes and nose and tongue and hair and skin and stomach and guts,” as he put it.38 What Nijinsky communicated through the staging of posed bodies contained a theory of mind—­or more precisely, a theory of the “psychic apparatus [that is] built into homo natura”—­that is isomorphic in certain important aspects to the one Freud formulated in published text.

A Choreographic Picture We can approximately reconstruct the original performance of L’Après-­ midi d’un faune because of the unprecedented measures the choreographer took to translate the dance into graphic media. Most of the photographs illustrating this chapter are drawn from a lavish picture album of the ballet that Nijinsky personally financed.39 In 1915, the choreographer also invented his own system of dance notation to write out the dance’s definitive “score of movement” (fig. 90).40 These unusual efforts

Fig u re 90. Vaslav Nijinsky, choreographic score to L’Après-­midi d’un faune, 1915. Manuscript. Collection of the Vaslav Nijinsky Foundation. © The British Library Board, MS 47215, f.

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to preserve the dance through text and image reflect Nijinsky’s special investment in Faune, which was by far the most painstakingly planned of the four dances he mounted in his short career, and one whose title character he identified with intensely. The existence of these various documents also reflects the ballet’s inherently static character. The official Ballets Russes program billed L’Après-­midi d’un faune not as a dance but as a “choreographic picture” (tableau chorégraphique). This unusual description was accompanied by a three-­line synopsis of a schematic plot for the dance: “A Faun slumbers—­some Nymphs dupe him—­a forgotten scarf satisfies his dream.”41 The action unfolded onstage as follows: The curtain rose to reveal the faun, Nijinsky, motionless, in profile, and alone onstage.42 He is costumed with small horns and a prominent scut, in a nude body stocking painted with coffee-­colored splotches. He appeared, as one critic put it, “disguised as a little calf” or “piebald horse” (fig. 91).43 This peculiarly bovine or equine faun reclines on a moss-­covered rock (or “little mountain,” as Nijinsky’s production notes termed it), which protrudes in literal relief from a painted toile de fond only a few meters behind the footlights, so that, as one observer noted, the backdrop appears to occupy the position of a front curtain.44 Flush against this backdrop representing “landscape in summer”—­a mottled, tawny, almost furlike pattern of hills and

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Figur e 91. Adolphe de Meyer, Nijinsky as the faun in the ballet’s opening posture. From Le Prélvde à L’Après-­midi d’vn favne (Paris: Paul Iribe, 1914). Photo: ­Patrice Schmidt, © RMN-Grand Palais/ Art Resource, NY.

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Fig u re 92. Adolphe de Meyer, Seven nymphs. From Le Prélvde à L’Après-­midi d’vn favne (Paris: Paul Iribe, 1914). Photo © RMN-­Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

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leaves in grays, russets, yellows, and greens, painted by Léon Bakst—­the faun holds his pose.45 For the first several measures of music, in time with the arabesque of the solo flute that opens Debussy’s Prélude, the faun remains lying still with a flute held to his lips. He continues to rest there as the music progresses, periodically manipulating several hand props, picking up a bunch of grapes or lifting his instrument, gesturing with flattened hands held perpendicular to the audience, the four fingers pressed together without any space between the fingers. As the faun again sits motionless, two groups of “nymphs” in gauzy, semitransparent Grecian tunics glide onstage from house left, walking in unison in triplet groups.46 Within the “large horizontal slit” of space at the stage’s front edge, they walk, assimilating their bodies to the planarity of the painted surface behind them. Contorting their torsos to maintain a posture that appeared stiff and two-­dimensional, the trunks of their bodies face outward toward the audience, while their feet and heads point sideward, in constant profile to the viewer (fig. 92).47 A taller nymph arrives, moving in the same manner. The other nymphs begin to help her disrobe for a bath, awkwardly manipulating the garment while maintaining the flattened “mitten” hand posture. Some moments later, the faun’s head abruptly reverses direction. He rises to a standing posture and descends from the rock, walking backward in the same contorted posture as the nymphs: the torso facing out, the extremities pointing sideward. Walking in a parallel line behind the rows of nymphs, the faun remains unobserved until he swivels abruptly to face and startle one of them. The smaller nymphs scatter, leaving the tallest alone onstage with the faun, clutching across her chest a veil that the other nymphs had removed from her dress. While maintaining the same contorted body posture and traversing the stage exclusively from side to side, the tall nymph and the faun begin a short and faltering pas de deux, or “seduction dance,” as one historian has referred to it.48 Punctuated by repeated intervals of total stillness, the duet consists primarily

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of the faun assuming certain static postures oriented in the direction of the nymph. In one such pose, repeated several times during the dance, he extends both of his arms forward in profile, with his right arm on the center line of his body and both hands held flat with the thumbs pointing up at a ninety-­degree angle from the palm.49 The duet culminates in a very brief moment of physical contact, lasting for about two musical measures: a walk in unison back and forth across the stage with elbows linked (fig. 93). The groups of nymphs return in the midst of this duet, and the tall one leaves the stage with them, dropping the veil she had been holding in the process. The faun does not pursue her; standing in place for three

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Figur e 93. Adolphe de Meyer, Vaslav Nijinsky and Lydia Nelidova performing the pas de deux in Faune. From Le Prélvde à L’Après-­midi d’vn favne (Paris: Paul Iribe, 1914). Photo: Patrice Schmidt, © RMN-­Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

Fig u re 94 . Karl Struss, Nijinsky as the Faun with Flore Revalles as Tall Nymph. From L’Après-­midi d’un faune (New York, 1916). Courtesy New York Public Library.

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measures as she exits, he makes a gesture in the direction of the departing nymphs that Nijinsky referred to in the score as “pointing with his thumb like a horn”; the faun touches his thumb to his forehead and holds his flat, outward-­facing palm in front of his face (fig. 94).50 Alone onstage once again, the faun walks slowly toward the abandoned garment. Several nymphs return, gesticulating in his direction with abrupt, angular, stabbing motions, to “jeer the faun” (in Nijinsky’s wording), before exiting again. The faun then picks up the gauzy fabric, “laughs like an animal,” “smells the dress,” and, returning to where he had reclined when the curtain opened, “carries the frock carefully to his bed on the hillock” and “has fun with it” (Nijinsky’s wording again).51 Maintaining his body in constant profile to the viewer, the faun lays out the fabric beneath him, suspends himself above it in a plank position, points downward toward it from his pelvis with a flattened palm facing outward, and finally lowers his body lengthwise over it (fig. 95). In time with the clinking crotales that conclude Debussy’s Prélude, and with his hand positioned just under his pelvis, the faun arches his back (fig. 96).52 The curtain descends.

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Figur e 95. Adolphe de Meyer, Nijinsky performing one of the final movements of Faune. From Le Prélvde à L’Après-­midi d’vn favne (Paris: Paul Iribe, 1914). Photo: Patrice Schmidt, © RMN-­Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY. Figur e 96. Adolphe de Meyer, Nijinsky performing the final movement of Faune, from Le Prélvde à L’Après-­midi d’vn favne (Paris: Paul Iribe, 1914). Photo: Hervé Lewandowski, © RMN-­Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

A Dissonant Dream In a special issue of Comœdia illustré dedicated to L’Après-­midi d’un faune, Henri Gauthier-­Villars (Willy) described how the novelty of this performance announced itself through an apparent dissonance between the “vision” presented onstage and the poem and score that inspired Nijinsky’s dramatization—­two works that, by 1912, were familiar, even canonical, artifacts from the recent artistic heritage of Impressionism and Symbolism:

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As soon as the first sonic curl rises from the Debussyan flute like the intoxicating smoke from a pipe of opium, our little personal cinematograph starts itself up and unwinds its fairy-­like film under our closed eyelids. With unconscious memories of literature, of painting and of sculpture, everyone models their own particular faun and makes the sunny light of the undergrowth dance on his supple body: this naive young lady colors him with the palette of Bouguereau, that ardent virgin outlines him with the burin of Rops. Monsieur Arthur Meyer mentally essays him in bulging underpants, a detachable collar, and cuffs. Monsieur Gaston Calmette, holding in his hand the razor of Le Figaro, duplicitously approaches the pursuer of nymphs to propose a tryst in the rafters of the Sistine Chapel, while that old widow, embellishing to her liking the exploits of her obliging satyr, forges for herself a felicity that makes her weep with tenderness! All that, Nijinsky endeavored to replace at a single blow with his own vision. The attempt was almost impertinent: and we know with what unexpected means he realized it.53

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To stage L’Après-­midi d’un faune, Gauthier-­Villars observed, was to court the risk of “disappointing the auditor’s imagination,” for the Debussy Prélude “posed more than ever the question of the superiority of the interior dream over theatrical exteriorizations.”54 Nijinsky danced to a piece of music famous for its exceptionally suggestive sonic properties, a score devised to echo in the minds of its listener the erotic fervor of Mallarmé’s faun-­narrator, a stock mythological protagonist whose hallucinatory musings the poet had based on Ovid’s fable of Pan and Syrinx, as well as on the imagistic afterlives of that myth. François Boucher’s Pan et Syrinx, 1759 (fig. 97), may have directly inspired the poet.55 Whether or not Mallarmé knew Boucher’s canvas, the poem that supplied Nijinsky’s ballet with its pretext—­pretext both in the senses of excuse or alibi and of preexisting cultural script—­addressed a topic with an especially long and dense history of visual associations. In European art, no text apart from the Bible could rival Ovid’s Metamorphoses (the “painter’s bible,” as Carel van Mander christened it in 1604) in terms of the sheer accumulation of figural imagery it spawned. And as Aby Warburg stressed when he coined the word Pathos­formel to describe an illustration of Ovid’s myth of Orpheus, one of the striking characteristics of Ovidian imagery was its consistency; certain gestures performed by mythological figures tended to perpetuate themselves in stable forms across centuries.56 Nijinsky’s staging appeared so unexpected in part because it dispensed with the corporeal formulas associated with its source myth. Through its new technique of posing the body, Faune brought a disruptive new visual language to a well-­trodden terrain of the mythological imagination, breaking a long and apparently seamless chain of visual, verbal, and musical remediations. After hearing the Prélude in 1894,

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Mallarmé praised its utterly faithful translation of his poem’s spirit, writing to Debussy, “Your illustration of L’Après-­midi d’un faune has no dissonance with my text, except to go further, truly, into nostalgia and brightness.”57 By contrast, Nijinsky’s ballet was repeatedly faulted for providing “a translation which is nothing but an antonym.”58 The composer despised what “le terroriste Nijinsky” had done with his score.59 Describing his “horror” at seeing his “soothing, flexible, curling” music accompanied by “figures of cardboard” who moved “as if their schematic gestures were regulated by the laws of pure geometry,” Debussy dismissed the ballet as “an atrocious dissonance, without possible resolution!”60 If, as Gauthier-­Villars indicates, Mallarmé’s poem and Debussy’s prelude were especially suited to stimulating the human capacity for reverie, it was precisely this capacity Nijinsky’s ballet was seen to disappoint, estrange, or frustrate. The “cardboard” aspect of Nijinsky’s dancers, with their angular gestures, not to mention their affectless demeanor, dealt a violent “blow” to the dream-­figure confected from memories of pastoral paintings and poems of past eras—­visual fantasies that revolved

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Figur e 97. François Boucher, Pan et Syrinx, 1759. Oil on canvas, 32.4 × 41.9 cm. Collection of the National Gallery, London. Photo: © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY.

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around the faun’s “supple body,” as Gauthier-­Villars made clear. If, as Warburg argued, Ovidian imagery served as European art’s “main trading firm” and “treasure house for expressions of emotional dynamism,” the “choreographic picture” of L’Après-­midi d’un faune abandoned precisely those expressive qualities European art had looked to find in Ovid: motion and emotion, animated body language and affective intensity.61 Gauthier-­Villars was unimpressed by Nijinsky’s staging. Beyond just dishonoring the works of Mallarmé and Debussy, he accused the choreographer of having perpetrated a kind of psychological violence on the spectator. Because the ballet had made its brazen attempt “to bend the body to the naïve conventions of primitive draftsmen,” Gauthier-­ Villars complained, presenting an Après-­midi d’un faune that looked like a “learned archaeological compilation,” the choreography had punctured the fantasy the poem and music were intended to conjure.62 Yet if Gauthier-­Villars objected to the basic conceit of a choreographer he derided as “this knowing faun, this satyr of the library,” there is an underlying logic that he and Nijinsky share. In his attention to the psychological and sexual appetites of the spectator and, more specifically, in his envisioning of a mechanics of dreaming, of a human mind functioning like a “little personal cinematograph”—­mechanically activating figures stored in a mental archive of pictures—­Gauthier-­Villars lays out premises fundamental to Faune’s conceptual architecture. In its staging of the dream as a psychological process, L’Après-­midi d’un faune approximates a mechanics of dreaming. If this mechanics of dreaming seemed to contradict the “fairy-­like film” Gauthier-­Villars imagined unwinding in the mind of the hypothetical viewer, it comes much closer to those envisioned by the founder of psychoanalysis, who “regard[ed] the process of dreaming as a regression occurring in our hypothetical mental apparatus” and looked to dreams for the discovery of “mental antiquities,” interpreting them as privileged evidence of thought processes distinctive to a mental system defined as the unconscious.63 Indeed, as I shall detail in this chapter, by structuring his ballet through the choreographic conceit one reviewer aptly summarized as “cinematography of bas-­relief,” Nijinsky synthesized two of the key metaphors Freud exploited to define and rhetorically picture his new conception of the psyche—­ancient archaeology and the modern mechanical apparatus.64 Styling itself as a relief fragment salvaged from the ancient past, the dance enlisted its performers to inhabit the types of archaic postures manifest in the “little statues and images” Freud arrayed around him in his consultation room and study—­those “old and dirty gods” (alten und dreckigen Götter) who, Freud joked, helped him compose The Interpretation of Dreams, “tak[ing] part in the work as paperweights for [the] manuscript” (fig. 98).65 More than simply incarnating on the theatrical stage the kind of figural imagery that played such a vital role in the mise-­en-­scène of psychoanalysis, Nijinsky’s ballet acts out a psychologi-

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Figur e 98. Max Pollack, portrait of Sigmund Freud, 1914. Etching with drypoint on woven paper, 47.5 × 47.5 cm. Private collection. Album/Alamy Stock Photo.

cal interpretation of archaic figuration. This interpretation of archaism aligns closely with the thinking of Emanuel Löwy, a classical archaeologist who had been one of Freud’s closest friends since they met at university in 1873, with whom Freud liked to discuss ancient art “until three in the morning.”66 Crucially, Faune also coupled its psychological interpretation of archaic figuration to a specific set of mechanical metaphors for unconscious thought processes. In this manner, it echoed the author of The Interpretation of Dreams, who described the process that produced dream images by introducing “the fiction of a primitive psychical apparatus,” finding it expedient for his reader to “picture the instrument which carries out our mental functions as resembling a compound microscope or a photographic apparatus, or something of the kind.”67 It was an analogous “fiction” that Nijinsky’s “cinematography of bas-­relief” invited its viewer to picture. The ballet confronted its spectators with a vision of their dreaming as a “primitive apparatus” activating archaic pictures. And it advanced an analogous understanding of where that “apparatus” found its source of power. “For the construction of dreams,” as Freud wrote in 1911, “repressed infantile sexual wishes provide the most frequent and strongest motive-­forces.”68

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The Dream-­Work: A Panic Episode

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“It does not think, calculate, or judge in any way at all, it restricts ­itself to giving things a new form.”69 This was how Freud described the metamorphic process he termed “dream-­work.”70 Dream formation, as he envisioned it, was a translation in which “the same subject-matter” shifted between “different languages” or different “mode[s] of expression” as this mental subject matter moved from a conscious to an unconscious locality in the psyche.71 To translate into the language of the unconscious, Freud insisted, required a specific kind of transformation: “a colourless and abstract expression” must be exchanged for “a pictorial and a concrete one.”72 This, in his estimation, was “the most general and the most striking characteristic of dreaming: a thought, and as a rule a thought of something that is wished, is objectified in the dream, is represented as a scene.”73 Crucially, Freud was always ambiguous as to whether the “conversion to the illustrative” (Umarbeitung aufs Anschauliche) performed by dream-­work should be articulated in terms of animated or static images; he variously described the results of dream-­work as “thoughts transformed into pictures” (in Bilder verwandelte Gedanken) and “thoughts [transformed] into situations (‘dramatization’)” (Dramatisierung).74 Although on this point he equivocated, he was always unequivocal that the process of converting thoughts into images must be “characterized . . . with the word ‘regressive.’ ”75 Freud stated that “der Schauplatz der Träume ein anderer ist als der des wachen Vorstellungslebens”—­“the theater of dreams is a different one from that of waking ideation.”76 By this, he meant that dreams were staged on a “show-­place” in the psyche (this is the literal sense of the word in German) that ontologically and phylogenetically predated the attainment of the conscious system. The formation of dreams for this “theater” entailed a psychic regression at once temporal and formal, “in so far as what is in question is harkening back to older psychical structures,” and in so far as this harkening back required translation into the native language of this older system, which was for Freud a fundamentally imagistic language. He called this imagistic language of dreams a “pictographic script,” a term that, with its evocation of hieroglyphics, distills his assumption of the antiquated nature of visual thought as such, which Freud understood as a mode of thinking in which “primitive methods of expression and representation take the place of the usual ones.”77 I begin by rehearsing Freud’s definition of dream-­work because, in a sense, the intermedial translation process that generated Nijinsky’s Faune functioned analogously. The production resulted from a series of conversions in which the raw subject matter of Mallarmé’s poem moved from a “colorless and abstract expression” into a “pictorial and . . . concrete one”; from text to musical composition and finally into Dramatisierung, and more specifically, dramatization in the form of a “choreographic picture” that visually insisted upon its own archaism.

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The ballet’s dream-­work-­like refashioning of its source poem can be considered a reversal of the decade-­long process of revision one scholar has referred to as the travail de mallarméisation (“work of Mallarmization”).78 In arriving at the the final form of the 1876 poem, Mallarmé progressively deconcretized and dedramatized his poetic material, rendering it more abstract and purely textual. In 1865, Mallarmé had commenced with a dramatic script for a short, three-­scene theatrical recitation, complete with stage directions, to be titled Le Faune, intermède héroïque. By the time the work saw publication, in a limited-­edition, lavishly printed booklet—­a “candy box . . . of dreams” (sac à bonbons mais de rêve), as the poet praised it—­the text had become a soliloquy in an ancient pastoral genre, with a new title stylized with the classical roman alphabet: “L’Après-­midi d’vn favne. Éclogve.”79 Although this shift from stage to page was to some degree prompted by the Théâtre-­Français’s refusal to stage the play, from the outset of the compositional process Mallarmé had recognized that “dramatization” posed a problem for his subject, which he described as “absolutely scenic, not possible in theater, but demanding the theater.”80 The impossibility of an actual staging became increasingly central to the poetic thrust of L’Après-­midi d’un faune. In its final version as an eclogue, the printed format merely evokes a theatrical script, and the elision of the erotic “scene” that would have been staged in the playlet sustains the central psychological drama of the poem, which follows a faun in his effort to distinguish between fantasy and reality, sleep and waking thought. “Aimai-­je un rêve?” Did I love a dream? This question launches the faun’s monologue, which consists of the creature’s recounting of a failed attempt to rape two succulent nymph sisters and his parsings of his uncertainty as to whether that encounter was real or dreamed. The monologue is in fact a dialogue or an intertext. The speaker shifts between two distinct vocal registers, which correspond to two temporalities and two cognitive faculties within the lyric protagonist. The lucid, waking thoughts of the faun and his erotic dream or memory are differentiated typographically. Thirty lines in italics, enclosed by quotation marks, denote the faun’s recollections of the erotic encounter he acknowledges might have been “un rêve” or “un souhait” of his “sens fabuleux.” Set in the past tense and containing some of the poem’s most vividly concrete bodily imagery, these italicized lines have been compared by A. R. Chisholm to “a past . . . reconstructed pictorially.”81 Surrounding these comparatively meager passages are eighty lines of uncited roman type. In them, in the present tense, the faun produces “glosses” and “reflections” on the sexual content of the italicized text (“Réfléchissons . . . / Ou si les femmes dont tu gloses . . .”). Mallarmé’s typographic differentiation of these two vocal registers seems almost to forecast Freud’s treatment of so-­called dream-­texts in The Interpretation of Dreams. There, accounts of his own dreams transcribed just after waking, as well as accounts of dreams reported by his patients, were printed in spaced type (Sperrdruck), setting them off

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from the textual register of “interpretation,” the voice of consciousness and waking thought, rendered in regularly spaced text.82 Admittedly, the typographic similarity between the poem and the psychoanalytic text is superficial. But it helps to foreground the basic point that Freud and Mallarmé were both at pains to dramatize graphically a duality of psychical functions. The speaker of L’Après-­midi d’un faune, like the author of the Traumdeutung, exhibits a self-­critical faculty and a degree of self-­ consciousness in relation to his own “dream-­text.” The analytical side of the faun’s personality might in fact be said to be the dominant one: the speaker of the eclogue was described by one interpreter as a “self-­ conscious and self-­critical creature” who “almost philosophizes about love.”83 In the original stage version, as Renato Poggioli has observed, Mallarmé directed this “thoughtful introvert” to sit for a moment with his head resting on his hand (“le front dans les mains”) “in the same pose as Rodin’s Penseur.”84 What preoccupies Mallarmé’s faune-­penseur is precisely his own dual nature, externalized in the body of the virtual figure the poem conjures—­goat below the navel and human above. This divided creature meditates not only on the problem of distinguishing between sleeping and waking thought, dream and reality, but on the related tension between his own reproductive instincts and his creative faculties. A wish that could lead in two directions is articulated in the first line of the monologue—­“Ces nymphes, je les veux perpétuer.” That infinitive verb, as numerous commentators stress, contains “the joint possibilities of procreation and creation . . . perpetuate them in art, perpetuate them in offspring.”85 The poem’s ensuing 109 lines debate the relative merits of those opposing propositions—­the gratification of an instinctual animal urge (perpétuer, by 1876, was surely a species-­oriented, evolutionarily inflected verb) or the distinctly human, intellectual pleasure of aesthetic representation.86 The crux of the faun’s meditation, as many interpreters have commented, is closely related to sublimation, a word coined by Freud in 1905 to describe what he regarded as one of the principal feats and prerequisites of human civilization. This feat was “the diversion of sexual instinctual forces from sexual aims and their direction to new ones,” aims that were “finer and higher” and “not sexual.”87 Mallarmé’s preoccupation, avant la lettre, with something akin to such a process is obvious simply from his identification of the eclogue’s antique speaker, whose name derives from Faunus, a Roman appellation for Pan, the Greek demigod. The Ovidian myth of Pan that Mallarmé adapted in Faune—­and invoked when the faun addresses his flute as “ô maligne syrinx” in the middle of the poem—­is perhaps the prototypical myth of sublimation. Among the many dozens of tales of erotic pursuit in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the story of Pan’s foiled rape of the water nymph Syrinx stands out as the most explicit of many thematizations of unfulfilled desire and its potential aesthetic outcome.88 Chased by the goat-­god to a river’s edge, Syrinx transformed into reeds at the very moment Pan had her in his grasp. Left clutching the vegetation, Pan let out plaintive C h a pt e r T h r e e

sighs of disappointment and, in so doing, noticed the pleasing sound made by his breath as it blew through the hollow stalks. So the mouth organ was invented by the goat-­god, who named his new instrument syrinx after the nymph who had eluded him, declaring to her, “This converse, at least, shall I have with thee” (hoc mihi colloquium tecum . . . manebit).89 Mallarmé’s eclogue was essentially a long elaboration of that single, laconic elocution of Pan in the Metamorphoses. The god is given not one but 110 lines of speech and a complex and conflicted self-­awareness that allows him to reflect upon the gains and losses inherent in inventing the flute as a substitute for the sexual gratification of rape. The faun’s ambivalence about this tradeoff and the ironies that issue from the doubling of his voice with that of the poet are at the core of Mallarmé’s eclogue. As in the original telling of the Pan and Syrinx myth, rich with self-­reflexive allusions to Ovid’s own authorship of the Metamorphoses, Mallarmé’s poem hinges on the self-­reflexive activity of the faun’s piping—­and the poet’s poetizing—­“en un solo long . . . une sonore, vaine et monotone ligne.”90 Even if the musical alexandrines spoken by the faun profess doubt about art’s capacity to substitute satisfactorily for more physical forms of perpetuation, even if, as Steven Walker suggests, the faun would be “quite happy” to “reverse . . . the original metamorphosis of Syrinx” and “have his flute turned [back] into a woman,” Mallarmé, as author of this “faunesque protestation,” stands in an “ironic” relation to his protagonist’s persona.91 The poet has made his faun’s wish to turn his flute back into a woman into the subject of a poem. In that sense, the eclogue is indeed, as Leo Bersani argues, a “domesticating and civilizing project of self-­recognition” that “performs sublimation as a mode of Mallarmé’s irony.”92 This ironical attitude also infuses Mallarmé’s attitude to the animality of the poem’s mythological speaker—­an animality that, by 1876, could not have failed to carry evolutionary overtones. “Am I satyr or man?” began one satirical poem, signed “Gorilla,” mocking evolutionary theory in 1861.93 That question permeates Mallarmé’s L’Après-­midi d’un faune, which was composed over the course of the decade when Darwin’s works were first translated into French. Mallarmé’s substitution of the name Pan with the more generic le favne makes an implicit gesture towards natural history: le favne is a homophone of la faune (fauna), a new term for animal life—­itself based on the mythological terminology—­that the taxonomist Carl Linnaeus had introduced into European languages a century prior.94 Scholars of Mallarmé’s poetry, typically hyperattentive to his complex plays with homophones, have never addressed this seemingly unavoidable double sense of favne. Perhaps this is because Mallarmé’s faun seems so very distant from the fauna studied by modern biology. Despite occasionally referring to his fleece and horns, he strikes readers as “disturbingly human”; indeed, he seems to embody two quintessentially human capacities—­speech and writing.95 At the most fundamental level, Roger Pearson argues, Mallarmé’s faune is un phone (phoneme), “the voice of language speaking.”96 The Mise-en-scène of Dreams

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Fig u re 99. Manuel Luque, Stéphane Mallarmé as the faun. Cover of Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui 6, no. 296 (1887). Photo © BnF, Dist. RMN-­Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

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The faun’s animality is treated as fodder for a sophisticated comedy that for Mallarmé and his readers did not ultimately seem to threaten the dominance of everything represented by the upper half of the faun’s body, that “Tronc qui s’achève en homme,” as the poet described his protagonist in one of his “Gifts to a Few from the Faun,” the little dedicatory verses he composed when offering friends the sumptuous edition of his poem.97 The eclogue’s mood of indulgent humor, mingled with self-­ assurance, is nicely captured in the rendering of the faun published in 1887 in Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui (fig. 99). Seated on a mound of earth, in the classic sedentary but upright posture of a thinker, the faun daintily crosses his cloven hoofs and, in a nod to modesty, covers his groin with a loincloth. Topping this goatish lower body is Mallarmé’s torso.

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His arms brandish an oversize panpipe. His bearded head is crowned not with horns but a halo. If Mallarmé’s eclogue holds in delicate balance a cluster of dualities correspondent with the faun’s lower and upper body and the poem’s italicized and roman text—­between dreaming and waking, animality and humanity, sexual instincts and artistic creation—­that balance tipped decidedly in one direction in the poem’s reimagining by Nijinsky. If the Ovidian fable of Pan inspired Mallarmé to reflect upon what Freud might call the “elementary animal instinctual source” of the “artistic achievements of humanity,” the same cannot be said for the choreographer of L’Après-­midi d’un faune.98 Nijinsky evinces less faith than either the ancient or the modern poet in the capacity to move beyond an initial, arousing “dream” or progress successfully to art from sexual stimulus. His dreamlike transformation of the poem removed the faun from the domain of human cultural achievement and resituated him in the psychological realm of wish fulfillment, a realm in which the desires of the faun’s feral lower body take on new urgency. The program notes for Faune’s premiere read as follows: “This is not Stéphane Mallarmé’s L’Après-­midi d’un faune. It is set to the musical prelude to that panic episode, a short scene which precedes it. A Faun slumbers; some Nymphs dupe him; a forgotten scarf satisfies his dream. The curtain falls for the poem to commence in everyone’s memories.”99 These notes, most likely composed by Jean Cocteau, make clear that the creators of the production anticipated an audience intimately familiar with the eclogue version of L’Après-­midi d’un faune. Although Nijinsky seems to have relished announcing to journalists that he did not know Mallarmé’s poem, claiming his French was “not yet good enough for reading literary texts,” the choreography responded sensitively and often directly to the poem’s structures and motifs.100 At the very least, someone in Nijinsky’s orbit must have discussed it with him in depth. Nijinsky’s claim to ignorance, however, carries great conceptual significance. It underscores the degree to which his reading of the poem prioritized—­against the grain of the text—­the primacy of some concrete and prelinguistic visual scene or dream, rather than its subsequent, waking interpretation or aesthetic sublimation into music or “literary text.” Engaging knowingly, it would seem, with the bifurcated structure of Mallarmé’s poem, the ballet presented itself as the pré buried in après named in the title of the poem. It presented itself, in other words, as the remembered, italicized dream encounter and deferred until the falling of the curtain the moment of fictional awakening that begins the poem. Nijinsky’s insistence on remaining solely within the preliminary realm of the scene—­or the dream—­that “precedes” and provokes the faun’s analytical reflections went together with a crucial tonal and thematic shift between poem and dance. Indeed, the 1912 staging of L’Après-­ midi d’un faune represents a pivotal moment in the destiny of the Pan and Syrinx myth and perhaps more broadly of myth itself in early twentieth-­ century Europe. The “myth-­work” Nijinsky accomplished, to borrow a

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phrase from Hubert Damisch, was to adapt this story for the new intellectual climate that had solidified in the nearly four decades since the publication of Mallarmé’s Ovidian eclogue.101 Tales of “bodies changed into new forms” (mutatas formas corpora) were now unequivocally the province of evolutionary biology in this new era of science, an age when Freud could avow that “the theory of the instincts is so to say our mythology.”102 The mythological narrative of Pan and Syrinx, refracted at several orders of remove across a chasm of innumerable centuries, was desublimated in Nijinsky’s choreography. In the choreographic picture—­which, as the program insisted, was “not Stéphane Mallarmé’s L’Après-­midi d’un faune”—­the faun’s desires did not go ungranted. As the synopsis stated, “un écharpe oublié satisfaît son rêve.” Emblematic of Nijinsky’s reorientation of the mythological script is one of the most iconic elements of his production: the piebald costume he wore as the titular faun. The classical faun had been a “familiar figure” in European visual culture since the renaissance, and there were “few uncertainties about his physique.”103 The splotches dotting the body (lower and upper) made the faun look “naked and spotted like a red and white cow.” This deviated glaringly from the standard morphology of the faun, summed up in 1609 by Francis Bacon as a figure “biform: human in the upper parts, the other half brute; ending in the feet of a goat” (fig. 100).104 Some chauvinistic French critics groused that Nijinsky’s unorthodox costume proved that Russians were insufficiently schooled in the classics. This was false. Rather, the costume—­designed by Léon Bakst, an exceedingly knowledgeable student of classical culture—­aptly emblematized the broader impulse of the production to foreground “animal realities,” as Gaston Calmette complained the morning after Faune’s premiere, in his famous editorial denouncing the production on the front page of Le Figaro.105 The fact that “Mr. Nijinsky retained only animality” in his interpretation of the classical faun was the most obvious signal of the choreographer’s ambition to redirect the poetic content toward a status quo ante on multiple levels.106 Significantly, the fable Mallarmé’s eclogue elaborated was not particularly ancient; the Pan and Syrinx myth likely dates to the Hellenistic period, a comparatively mature phase in the evolution of the goat-­god’s mythological persona.107 Nijinsky’s myth-­work restored the form of Pan from the earliest extant representations, from circa 700 bce (fig. 101), when the only visible sign of the god’s semi-­humanity was his upright stance on his hind legs.108 In tandem with this reversion to an earlier iconography, the ballet revived elements of Pan’s mythology that would seem to make him far less a paragon for artistic activity than for occupations associated with the controversial phenomenon Freud named, in his 1905 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, “infantile sexuality.” It is fully in keeping with the earliest figurations of Pan that “Nijinsky saw in the faun only the animal.”109 Another aspect of his interpretation seems far more idiosyncratic: Nijinsky seems to have imagined the faun

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as a distinctly juvenile animal. From the outset of the creative process, he insisted that there be a visible height discrepancy between the faun and the principal nymph.110 Ballerinas for the role were selected above all to fulfill this criterion. The importance that this famously exacting choreographer placed on height (over dancing ability) suggests just how much it mattered to him to signal the faun’s immaturity, to make obvious his status as, so to speak, “little.” Much like Freud’s psychoanalysis, the ballet insistently activated a set of “associations between littleness and interiority and between history and childhood.”111 One could say that Nijinksy’s petit faune, as numerous critics referred to him, unmasked the homophony between faun ( faune) and fawn (faon), collapsing the distinction between the mythological deity and the zoological entity of the juvenile animal. (The etymology of fawn, as of the French faon, is from the Latin foetus.)112 It is primarily in this sense that Nijinsky can be seen to engage with what Calmette called “animal realities.” Not from the perspective of any stylistic or morphological naturalism, for indeed the most distinguishing feature of Faune’s choreography was its denaturalizing stylization. Rather, animal realities surface in Nijinsky’s choreography through the ballet’s overarching engagement with the phenomena of the infantile. Nijinsky’s myth-­work on Mallarmé’s Ovidian poem reflects a conviction, shared with Freud, that it was only “possible to understand mythology” through recourse to “knowledge of infantile sexuality.”113 In the mythological “dream” as Nijinsky staged it—­a dream in which a solitary faun encounters a group of bathing nymphs, tries and fails (perhaps

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F igur e 100. Illustration of Pan in George William Cox’s pagan catechism for schoolchildren, Manual of Mythology in the Form of Question and Answer (London: Longmans, Green, 1867). Digital image courtesy University of California Libraries. F igur e 101. Relief figure of Pan, ca. 700 bce . Illustrated in Frank Brommer, “Pan im 5. und 4. Jahrhundert v. Chr.,” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 15 (1949–­1950). © 1949 Verlag des Kunstgeschichtlichen Seminars der Philipps-­Universität Marburg.

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i­ ntentionally) to seduce one, and then retreats to a rock with a dropped piece of cloth and, in Nijinsky’s wording, “has fun with it”—­the “wish to perpetuate” voiced by Mallarmé’s faun is resolved in a manner Freud would define as prototypically infantile. That is, the dream is “satisfied” autoerotically.114 In Nijinsky’s choreographic picture, Pan was embodied not in his guise as discoverer of flute music and pastoral poetry but, rather, as “Pan Erfinder der Onanie,” an aspect of the demigod’s identity that had been recently brought to light in Wilhelm Roscher’s Detailed Lexicon of Greek and Roman Mythology (1884–­1937).115 Pan, as Roscher highlighted, was credited in multiple classical sources as the inventor of masturbation; Diogenes, for instance, whose habit it was to “rub” himself in the agora “before the eyes of all,” habitually told his onlookers that “this sort of intercourse was a discovery made by Pan,” who then disseminated his invention.116 If, as Cocteau stated in his program notes, Nijinsky’s choreographic picture found a “panic episode” in Mallarmé’s poem—­ connecting Pan the demigod with the origin, or the etymology, of terror, “la peur panique, la terreur panique”, as Cocteau stated in another text on the dance—­this new emphasis on terror cannot be separated from the ballet’s recovery of Pan’s association with the etiology of autoeroticism, an etiology very different from the one the god was linked with in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.117 As the public scandal caused by Nijinsky’s Faune dramatized, to place Pan on the Schauplatz der Träume in his identity as the Erfinder der Onanie was to reveal him as a figure of anxiety, to turn him into a sower of panic.

An “Exhibitionism of Prudery”

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“Like a doctor loves a good symptom,” remarked one journalist of the proliferation of outraged commentaries sparked by Nijinsky’s dance, “I enjoy this current ‘exhibitionism’ of prudery.”118 Deploying with a flourish a relatively new diagnostic term—­the word exhibitionniste was coined by a French psychiatrist in 1877 and was in wide, cross-­cultural circulation by 1912—­this assessment demonstrates how Faune activated in popular discourse a set of newly solidified sexological concepts.119 The phrase “ ‘exhibitionism’ of prudery” also captures the paradoxical formal logic intrinsic to Faune itself. The ballet can be described as dreamlike, in Freudian terms, not only because it translated Mallarmé’s panic episode into an archaizing “picture” in which wishes achieved gratification. The ballet was also composed in a manner that seemed to presuppose, and seek to evade, the intervention of censors. The premiere galvanized the press, and then the police, to enforce norms of public decorum. Articles denouncing “the faun’s too expressive and too precise pantomiming” proliferated the morning after the premiere.120 The faun’s final movement was repeatedly singled out as overly explicit, most often without articulating exactly what took place during the ballet’s dénouement: “The faun represented by the Russian dancer

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translates his voluptuous sentiments in an excessive manner, certainly at the falling of the curtain”; his final attitude was “a little too precisely amorous”; the moment was “absolutely immoral in its naturalism”; its “realism offended taste and decency.”121 The most consequential denunciation was Gaston Calmette’s. Replacing what was supposed to have been a regular, below-­the-­fold review, the editor in chief of Le Figaro took it upon himself to ostentatiously denounce the ballet on the front page—­an act of critical censorship that effectively catapulted the production into fame. The article is worth quoting at length: Our readers will not find, in the regular theater column, the account of my excellent colleague Robert Brussel on the first performance of L’Après-­ midi d’un faune, choreographic picture by Nijinsky, directed and danced by this astonishing artist. I have suppressed the review . . . I am persuaded that all the readers of Figaro who were at the Châtelet last night will approve if I protest against this too special exhibition [l’exhibition trop spéciale] which pretends to serve as a profound production, perfumed with precious art and harmonious poetry. Whoever speaks of art and poetry in this spectacle is making fun of us. This is neither a gracious eclogue nor a profound production. We had an indecent faun [faune inconvenant] with vile movements of erotic bestiality and gestures of clumsy immodesty. That’s it. And righteous hissing accompanied the too expressive pantomiming of the body of this badly constructed beast, hideous from the front, even more hideous in profile [hideux de face, encore plus hideux de profil]. The true public will never accept these animal realities.122

Calmette insisted on the ballet’s essential pretentiousness. He pointed to its engagement with “precious art and harmonious poetry”—­the art of Mallarmé and Debussy, but also the art of classical sculpture, far more pointedly—­as mere pretexts to exhibit, as masks that enabled Nijinsky to throw in the face of the audience some kind of réalité animale that was indecent, or “too expressive.” In this, his review was quite insightful. In the aftermath of the “world-­wide scandal” instigated by Calmette’s editorial, Nijinsky repeatedly professed his innocence by insisting on the classical derivation of his dance. “Mr. Calmette saw pornography where never—­never, I swear to you—­did I ever have the least equivocal intention, the least tendentious thought.”123 Elsewhere, he stated, “it is a mistake to suppose that either the plot or the production . . . has any suggestion that is incorrect or immodest  . . . it is simply a fragment drawn from a classic bas-­relief.”124 He professed to be “very surprised, shocked even, that part of the public and some journalists discovered an unhealthy intention in his gestures,” since, he insisted, “in composing his character, he simply sought to go back to classical attitudes.”125 In the 1919 manuscript, Nijinsky boasted, “I know audiences because I have studied them well . . . I know what is needed to astonish an audience.”126 It is unlikely that the provocation of his performance could have escaped him. The diary of Harry Graf Kessler, who was at the time

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owner of Seurat’s Poseuses, records the lengths to which he and Cocteau went to assist Diaghilev and Nijinsky in drumming up favorable publicity in advance of a performance they all expected would “alienate the public.”127 In particular, extraordinary measures were taken to secure a public endorsement of the ballet from Auguste Rodin, who was by then an éminence grise, known to be a dance enthusiast, and also very comfortable with explicit eroticism.128 Rodin had never before seen Nijinsky perform. He was escorted to a dress rehearsal by Kessler, and the next day the journalist Claude Roger-­Marx was dispatched to the sculptor’s studio to record his encomium for the newspaper Le Matin.129 When solicited, however, the sculptor was apparently at a loss for words to praise Nijinsky’s choreographic picture and could produce no more coherent statement of appreciation than to repeat again and again, “c’est de l’antique, c’est de l’antique.” Roger-­Marx therefore composed a text himself and forged Rodin’s signature.130 The article was signed “Rodin” and published the morning after Faune’s premiere. It praised Nijinsky’s new ballet as the greatest achievement of the greatest genius in a new lineage of modern dancers (Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan) who were “recovering the liberty of instinct.”131 The plan to involve Rodin in the fate of L’Après-­midi d’un faune proved to be extremely shrewd: “The best-­laid schemes of the most unscrupulous press agent in the United States,” one editorial observed acidly, “could never have generated such a tornado of publicity.”132 Diaghilev forwarded the article to Le Figaro and beseeched Calmette to “offer to the public the opinion of the greatest artist of the epoch.”133 At this point, the sculptor’s forged testimony became, as one member of the British press reported, “the fertile seed of a world-­wide scandal.”134 Calmette reprinted Rodin’s praise on the front page of Le Figaro, accompanied by an editorial suggesting that the famously womanizing sculptor was ill-­ equipped to arbitrate in affairs of public morality. Rodin, he pointed out, had deigned to exhibit, in the converted chapel and convent the French government had bestowed upon him for a studio, a “series of libidinous drawings and cynical sketches specifying, with even more brutality, the impudent attitudes of the faun.”135 Diaghilev doubled the number of Faune’s scheduled performances, and by the time of its second showing, supervised by the prefecture of police, “all Paris was there. There were the Nijinskyists and Anti-­ Nijinskyists, the Rodinists and the Anti-­Rodinists, the Calmettists and the Anti-­Calmettists. Cocteau circulated in the corridors . . . You’re going to see the wagging [Vous allez voir le frétillement], everyone was saying in the audience.”136 While the violation of propriety alleged to have taken place in Nijinsky’s ballet was never stated explicitly, there was little ambiguity about what was fueling the uptick in ticket sales. Frétiller de la queue meant literally to wag a tail, and queue was typical slang for penis (as previously noted with regard to the tail of the monkey in the Grande Jatte). The onanistic connotations of the verb being murmured in the auditorium are vividly demonstrated in an 1892 prose poem, “Little Goldfish in Their Jar,” likely by the Symbolist writer Rémy de GourC h a pt e r T h r e e

Figur e 102. E. T. Reed, “Le Lendemain d’un faune” (or, “What an Afternoon!”). From Bystander, February 26, 1913. © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans.

mont, who a decade later wrote a scientific survey of “sexual instinct” in animals: “Leur queue frétille, frétille, frétille, et nul sperme n’en sort pour féconder le réseau des œufs femelles, car leurs organes sont stériles et c’est en vain qu’ils se masturbent.”137 Masturbation was not the only aspect of the ballet’s alleged violation of sexual propriety. In addition to the recognition that Nijinsky had acted out “a kind of ‘alleviating’ ” in the last moment of his ballet, there was a sense that he was guilty of a specific kind of indecent exposure.138 As a columnist reported in the newspaper L’Autorité: Nijinsky having heard it said that the natural is the summit of Art wanted to be faun right down to the tail [queue] and presented himself, onstage, in front of the crowd of attentive spectators, in a mimicry so unexpected and so singular that a profound stupor, diversely manifested, seized its spectators: a magistrate confirmed to me that each week, individuals who are neither Russians, nor dancers, find themselves condemned by the correctional tribunal for an offense known by the name of ­exhibitionism.139

Disciplinary language—­of law, of medicine—­surrounded Nijinsky’s self-­ presentation as a “faune jusqu’au bout de la queue,” even if the use of that language was sometimes spiked with humor. (“Hello? Hello? Bureau chief? We’ve got a faun here . . .” began a caption below one caricature of the faun seated for interrogation in a police station, flanked by two enormous officers (fig. 102). The rhetoric of policing that sprang up around the ballet stemmed from its emphasis on sexual acts that contemporary European culture deemed to be pathological or criminal, or at least beyond the pale of adult sexual behavior.140 The “shock” of Faune, however, cannot be reduced to merely the perceived perversity of masturbation and exhibitionism. The Mise-en-scène of Dreams

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Fig u re 103. Auguste Rodin, Minotaure, or Faun and Nymph, ca. 1885. Bronze, 32.6 × 30.3 × 22.1 cm. Collection of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photo: Adrien Didierjean, © RMN-­Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

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The ballet’s alleged perversity cannot be disentangled from its distinctive approach to body language. This point becomes particularly clear if we consider Rodin’s complex role in the media reception of the ballet. Presumably, Diaghilev sought to embroil Rodin in the controversy surrounding Faune because the sexual acts evoked in the ballet were already familiar motifs in the oeuvre of this sculptor, who by 1912, a decade and a half after the “Balzac affair,” was no longer such a controversial figure. As a now virtually state-­sanctioned artist, Rodin could have served as a kind of cover, as an artist who approached motifs of masturbation and exhibition in a form more readily assimilable in mainstream artistic culture. Although in the media the scandal around Faune was identified with the obscenity of Rodin and “the liberty of instinct” for which he and his art were understood to stand, there was a profound formal breach between the sculptor’s and the choreographer’s approaches to the hu-

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Figur e 104 . Auguste Rodin, Nijinsky in poses from Faune, 1912. Pencil on paper, 32.1 × 23.5 cm. Collection of the Musée Rodin, Paris. Photo: Jean de Calan, © Musée Rodin.

man figure. This formal breach betrays the underlying philosophical divergence between their respective conceptions of the sexual. Rodin’s apparent speechlessness in the face of Nijinsky’s choreographic picture, his inability to produce any statement more coherent than “c’est de l’antique, c’est de l’antique,” indicates how profoundly Nijinsky’s translation of Mallarmé’s poem challenged the formal language of the sculptor. The statuette sometimes titled Faune et nymphe (ca. 1885; fig. 103), which Mallarmé displayed in his dining room after Rodin gave him a plaster cast, shows how the sculptor projected himself into the poem’s “panic episode.” (The seated, thickly bearded faun pulling the nymph onto his lap is almost certainly a self-­portrait.)141 The hesitant, partially effaced sketches Rodin made of Nijinsky as faun on the evening of the ballet’s premiere (fig. 104) attest to the sculptor’s difficulty assimilating a very differently imagined faun into his own formal vocabulary.142 If Rodin and Nijinsky could both be understood to have proceeded from a conviction that, to return to L’Autorité’s assessment, “the natural is the summit of Art,” they took divergent paths to realize their naturalisms. Rodin’s art, Arthur Symons professed, was “founded on the conception of . . . the vivifying force of sex.”143 The sculptor tried to access that force by liberating the body, establishing its freedom of movement. Rodin conceived of himself as releasing his subjects from both psychological inhibitions and the regulating conventions of academic posing; the (female) model could “come and go in the studio like an escaped horse,” as he put it.144 This calculated (or, we might say, sexually coercive) liberation of the posing session very often resulted in s­ culptures and drawings

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Fig u re 105 . Auguste Rodin, sketch of masturbating woman, ca. 1900. Pencil and watercolor, 25.1 × 32.4 cm. Collection of the Musée Rodin, Paris. Photo: Jean de Calan, © Musée Rodin.

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of splay-­legged or masturbating men and, especially, women (figs. 105, 106), artworks that often possessed, according to Anne Wagner, “something of the character of mime: wordless demonstrations of the very existence of the female genitals.”145 The uninhibited expression of sexuality in Rodin’s art coincided with a formal emphasis on unconstrained, even fluid movement, in both the sculptor’s preferred materials (watercolor, pliant clay, bronze cast to retain traces of its molten state) and the restlessly writhing, surging bodies he so often represented with them. The Monument to Balzac, discussed in chapter 2, crystallizes this systematic association between sexuality and liquefaction, and demonstrates how it went hand in hand with a specific attitude toward sexuality. Developed from a study of a nude man with his hand gripped around his erect penis, the final form of the sculpture—­in which, as one critic wrote, the author’s “thought” appears as “lava erupting from this human volcano”—­communicates the genius of Balzac by formalizing an equation of sublimation and ejaculation. And this equation goes hand in hand with a seeming release from the burden of weight and gravity. The Balzac encapsulates how Rodin’s art presented sexuality, including nonprocreative sexual behaviors such as exhibitionism and masturbation, in an idiom that was celebratory. He conceived sexuality as an organic force that was both generative and emancipatory. Nijinsky’s Faune decoupled its presentation of acts of masturbation and exhibitionism from a formal language of “vivification” expressed through unconstrained freedom of movement. An almost one-­to-­one inversion of Rodin’s formal strategies could be mapped in Nijinsky’s Faune. Here, the “force of sex” seems to exert not a vivifying but rather a petrifying effect. Far from the sensation of physical and psychological emancipation Rodin wanted his “escaped horses” to experience, Nijin-

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sky’s dancers described being made to feel as if their bodies were “carved out of stone” and had been robbed of “a single free movement.”146 Subjugating the bodily freedom of each dancer to the exacting, planimetric demands of the total choreographic picture, Faune demanded that the dancers become not only more still but also more self-­conscious of their bodies as they would appear “from the outside,” from the perspective of an observing audience.147 The most striking feature of this choreography was the “lack of that which in military school is called ‘at ease,’ ” as Sergei Volkonskii noted; Nijinsky and his dancers appeared “always held at gunpoint, always subordinate.”148 The formal distinction separating Rodin and Nijinsky conveys the choreographer’s far more ambivalent attitude toward the “liberation of instincts,” to quote the phrase from the sculptor’s forged article. The understanding of sex Nijinsky conveyed through his corporeal strategies comes closer to a Freudian comprehension of sexuality. Nijinsky created an explicit formal link between infantilism and acts of masturbation or

Figur e 106. Auguste Rodin, sketch of splay-­ legged figure submerged in water, ca. 1900. Pencil and watercolor, 32.6 × 25cm. Collection of the Musée Rodin, Paris. Photo: Jean de Calan, © Musée Rodin.

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exhibitionism. He also structured his ballet in a manner that seemed to foreground something like the “susceptibility to ‘fixation’ ” Freud recognized in childhood sexual behaviors—­a susceptibility that caused the psychoanalyst to identify infantile sexuality as the “tenderest point” in the human subject’s psychological development.149 Implicit in Faune is the recognition of the “tender,” potentially perilous nature of its content. Adopting strategies of exhibition and camouflage simultaneously, the formal conceit of the dance—­a sequence of figures contained within an archaic bas-­relief—­internalized the kind of “distortion” Freud ascribed to dreams, which he described as “wolves in sheep’s clothing.”150 The form of Faune served as a kind of “sheep’s clothing” for the ballet’s graphic sexual content. Indeed, when addressing authorities and critics, Nijinsky’s habitual line of self-­defense was, “It is simply a fragment drawn from a classic bas-­relief.” The efficacy of this defense is confirmed by the many critics who pronounced Calmette’s accusations ridiculous and faulted the ballet for being “innocent to excess.”151 “Where did the editor of Le Figaro spend his evening,” Gauthier-­Villars wondered, “when he denounced the bestiality and immodesty that so profoundly troubled him? Certainly not at the Châtelet . . . Between us, it’s only Debussy who has committed an affront against modesty . . . his exhibitionistic score . . . breathes with a lasciviousness ignored by the Châtelet’s erudite goat-­man.”152 For Gauthier-­Villars, Nijinsky had committed a “sin” against his audience “because of an insufficiency and not an excess of sensuality.”153 The music critic Pierre Lalo shared that perspective, seeing in the ballet “no offense against morality” but, rather, an offense against “art.”154 “It would be impossible to go further in miscomprehending the works interpreted,” he asserted; there was “about as much sensuality in contemplating these mechanical silhouettes of dancers, these schemas of nymphs, as in considering the figures that serve in a demonstration of the square of a hypotenuse.”155 Lalo’s evocation of the sensory boredom of a schoolroom proof of the Pythagorean theorem gets at the essential insight of Nijinsky’s formal strategy: the merging of disguise and device of revelation. As Freud stressed with increasing emphasis as he revised The Interpretation of Dreams, “the form of a dream . . . is used with quite surprising frequency for representing its concealed subject matter.”156 This is precisely the case for the “dream” presented in L’Après-­midi d’un faune. The archaic bas-­relief was “sheep’s clothing” and “wolf” simultaneously. That paradox registers in the telling complaint that the ballet was “archaic without a doubt, but too expressive nevertheless.”157 Or in Nikolai Minskii’s observation that “the ancient bas-­relief helped Nijinsky to body forth into images a modern, almost topical plot,” a plot that seemed to him to have been taken less from Mallarmé’s eclogue than from Frank Wedekind’s play Spring Awakening: A Children’s Tragedy (1891).158 This play featured youths engaging in masturbation, exhibitionism, and a host of other perversions; it was the subject of a formal discussion at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1907, where Freud acknowledged Wedekind’s “deep understanding of sexuality.”159 Due to its explicit content, C h a pt e r T h r e e

Spring Awakening remained unperformed for almost two decades and was not staged uncensored until 1958.160 By contrast, as Nijinsky took pains to stress, Faune very successfully evaded censorship. He boasted to the Pall Mall Gazette, “In Berlin the Police Commissioner, having heard of the absurd cabal against it in Paris, came to the dress rehearsal, and after seeing it, expressed his satisfaction and pleasure at the strange spectacle.”161

Archaeological Exhibitionism Nijinsky’s account of the reaction of the Berlin police commissioner, with its echo of the suggestive line from the program notes (“satisfies his dream”), captures the double function of the bas-­relief form in Faune. it had the power at once to mollify an official censor and to provide him with a distinctly sexualized kind of “satisfaction and pleasure.” Faune, much like Wilhelm Jensen’s novel Gradiva (1903), which tracks a young archaeologist’s fixation on the figure of a maiden walking in profile in a Roman relief at the Museo Chiaramonti, was a work that seemed to want to make explicit how there was, as Freud noted in the margins of his copy of Jensen’s novel, “sexual interest concealed behind the archaeological one.”162 The antique specimen that “conceals” the sexual interest of the archaeologist in Jensen’s novel was neo-­Attic, likely created in Rome sometime between 100 bce and 200 ce . Faune’s audience of armchair archaeologists was confronted with a simulated bas-­relief that appeared to be of much more ancient provenance. The artist Jacques-­Émile Blanche wrote that the ballet represented “the latest model, ‘the 1912 model” of antiquity, which was “the antiquity of primitive times, our modern vision of the archaism of the sixth century [bce ].”163 The conspicuous formal archaism of Nijinsky’s bas-­relief allowed it to perform a special function. In Faune, the formal laws of archaic bas-­relief, which scholars theorized extensively during the “age of the great excavations” (1870–­ 1914), were staged in a manner that revealed their special suitability for exposing and indulging visual proclivities associated with infantile sexuality. The ballet forged an association between archaic figuration and the dynamics of looking and showing that Freud posited, alongside autoeroticism, as primary components of infantile sexuality—­the twinned, reciprocal urges he defined in 1905 as “der Trieb der Schaulust und der Exhibition.”164 Audiences were acutely aware that Faune confronted them with a glimpse of an antiquity that had become known only recently, as the “archaeology of the dig” (Archäologie des Spatens) had taken its place, alongside evolutionary biology, “among the conquering sciences of the nineteenth century.”165 The classicist Percy Gardner stated that modern archaeology was an answer to “a Darwinian age, when the search for origins seems to fascinate men more than the search for what is good in itself.”166 Théophile Homolle, who uncovered numerous archaic-period artifacts during excavations at Delphi and Delos, declared in 1895 that The Mise-en-scène of Dreams

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“primitive art [took] pride of place in archaeological research, and studies multiplied as least as quickly as discoveries.”167 Some of Homolle’s finds were cited in reviews of Nijinsky’s choreography, which abounded with amateur exercises in archaeological attribution. Hostile and enthusiastic reviewers alike were struck by Nijinsky’s seemingly scrupulous attention to archaeological artifacts, dubbing him a “library satyr” or a “little faun escaped from the British Museum, hiding so much erudition under his horned forehead.”168 His ballerinas were “knowing nymphs” whose “attitudes from one to the next . . . are so many citations.”169 And the ballet as a whole was a “precise, rigorous, minute reproduction of the poses one sees in the figures of primitive Greek art,” in which “specialists could indicate in passing the reference for each attitude and its provenance.”170 Henry Bidou, one of the ballet’s most ardent fans, proposed some of the most specific sources. He praised the ballet by saying that spectators “with a bit of culture” could have the experience of witnessing “all of archaic Greek art reanimating itself,” citing a number of sixth-­century artifacts.171 He suggested that the faun’s distinctive port de bras copied the position of the arms and hands in the Chrysapha relief in Berlin’s Altes Museum (ca. 550–­540 bce; fig. 107), or the British Museum’s copy

Fig u re 10 7. Chrysapha relief, ca. 550–­540 bce . Gray-­blue marble, partially colored red, 87 × 65 cm. Collection of the Altes Museum, Berlin. bpk Bildagentur/Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen, Berlin/Jürgen Liepe/Art Resource, NY.

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Figur e 108. Mikkiades of Chios and Achermos of Chios, Nike of Delos (reconstructed state), ca. 570–­560 bce . 90 cm. Collection of the National Archaeological Museum, Athens. From Edmund von Mach, A Handbook of Greek and Roman Sculpture (Boston: Bureau of University Travel, 1905). Digital image courtesy Getty Open Content Program.

of an Apollo by Kanachos. The nymphs fled the faun by replicating the “famous image” of the Nike of Delos (ca. 570–­560 bce; fig. 108), attributed to Mikkiades and Achermos, discovered by Homolle in the 1880s.172 Other reviewers made more general comparisons, asserting that Nijinsky “has discovered, or somebody has discovered for him, there is such a thing as the ‘Aeginetan’ school of pre-­classical sculpture.”173 They linked the ballet to the nineteenth century’s first major discovery of art from the archaic period: pedimental sculptures from the Temple of Aphaia (ca. 500 bce ), found in 1811 and displayed since 1828 as the centerpiece of the new Glyptothek in Munich.174 Others pointed to the famous series of korai uncovered in 1886 during excavations of the Athenian Acropolis.175 Some saw allusions to even older figural forms: from “the earliest Ionian sculptures” to “Assyrian bas-­reliefs” or the “bas-­reliefs on ancient Egyptian monuments.”176 The conviction among spectators that each and every posture in the dance was modeled on those seen in actual artifacts, although it was misperception, highlights two important dimensions of the production. First, that the dance, through its evident archaeological erudition, gave an aura of historical authenticity to the movements it enacted. Second, that the viewing experience the dance created for spectators was less reminiscent of the theater than of the museum, where static artifacts were on display and could be inspected at leisure. “Too museum-­ like” was the flaw Yakov Tugendkhol’d identified in Nijinsky’s choreography, while Lalo described the dance as “servile archaeology . . . a display

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­ itrine of archaism” (étalage d’archaïsme).177 Calmette’s condemnation v of the ballet as an “exhibition trop spéciale”—­echoed in other references to the ballet as “cette exhibition”—­pinpoints the deliberate slippage Faune created between a mode of displaying associated with the edifying domain of museum exhibition and the “offense known by the name of exhibitionism.” In these senses, Nijinsky’s dance activated a metaphorical structure that also operated across Freud’s psychoanalytic corpus, where the archaeology of the dig” served as the metaphor for the recovery of infantile sexual memories and impulses—­“put [your] spade in so as to dig down to the buried infantile element,” he once instructed Binswanger in a 1909 letter.178 Through its corporeal language, Faune made that metaphorical equivalence between childhood sexuality and unearthed archaic artifact both literal and vivid. The ballet performed an anterior “classicism” largely ignored by archaeologists and art historians until the late nineteenth century systematically turned its attention toward “the earliest forms”; simultaneously, it performed those dimensions of the sexual life of childhood that were being brought into discourse by psychoanalysis, a science that prided itself on having “lift[ed] the veil of amnesia” that “turns everyone’s childhood into something like a prehistoric epoch.”179 The metaphorical overlay of archaeology and sexuality that Faune forged relies upon its ingenious interpretation of formal laws associated with primitive figuration. This interpretation resonates with other theoretical studies of the period, in which archaic Greek art and its distinctive stylistic qualities were used as props to engage in broad speculation concerning theories of mind and developmental psychology. More specifically, Nijinsky’s ballet shares certain assumptions about archaic figuration voiced in one of the period’s most influential psychological inter­pretations of archaism, Emanuel Löwy’s The Rendering of Nature in Earlier Greek Art, published in 1900, a few months after his friend published The Interpretation of Dreams.180 Löwy described his inquiry as a project parallel to Lange’s study of primitive figuration. He stressed that in his first foray into this subject, the 1891 study Lysippos and His Place in Greek Sculpture, he had independently confirmed Lange’s conclusion in The Representation of the Human Figure in its “cardinal point.”181 While Lange primarily sought to establish the laws governing the external appearance of primitive figuration, Löwy claimed that he was seeking to “penetrate beyond the actual phenomenon of art to the causes which gave them rise.” He argued the distinctive body positions of archaic figures resulted from mental processes universal to the earliest developmental phases of human psychology. All “naïve individuals,” he argued, whether “children and savages” or archaic Greek sculptors, sought to represent external reality indirectly, by reference to internal mental imagery. He suggested that the “entire development of art” could be understood as a “morphological progress . . . from the psychological to the physiological, retinal picture.” He distinguished categorically between “the pictures that reality pres-

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Figur e 109. Corrado Ricci, title page of L’Arte dei bambini (Bologna: Nicola Zanichelli, 1887). Digital image courtesy Robarts Library, University of Toronto.

ents to the eye” and “another world of images, living or coming into life in our minds alone, which even though indeed suggested by reality, are nevertheless essentially metamorphosed.” The Rendering of Nature in Earlier Greek Art sought to explain the mental transformation of visual impressions in the primitive imagination, and to do so through the visual evidence of archaic art itself, which Löwy understood as a more or less “mechanically true transcript of psychical processes.”182 To conceptualize the structure of mental imagery, Löwy drew on two key bodies of literature. First, his argument incorporated recent literature about the drawings of individuals deemed to be “natural” or un­ acculturated (several such drawings were also illustrated).183 Löwy cited extensively from L’Arte dei bambini (fig. 109), a richly illustrated study of drawings made by three-­to eight-­year-­old Italian children, published in 1887 by the art historian Corrado Ricci.184 Ricci’s was the first major publication in an exploding arena of inquiry that analyzed children’s graphic depictions as tools for comprehending human developmental psychology.185 Ricci’s book became a touchstone for both psychologists and anthropologists, who initiated a widespread practice of soliciting pencil-­and-­paper drawings from peoples forced under the gaze of Western science as objects for study. One of the texts that drew directly

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on Ricci was Karl von den Steinen’s Unter den Naturvölkern Zentral-­ Brasiliens (1894), which Löwy also cited.186 Central to both anthropological and child-­psychological discourses was the idea articulated clearly by Ricci: that infantile figuration was “ideoplastic,” representing things as they were thought rather than as they were seen, or, as Ricci put it, “describing man and things . . . in their absolute character, not as they appear optically.”187 Löwy’s second key point of reference for understanding mental imagery was work on the artistic function of memory pictures (Erinnerungsbilder) by the physiologist Ernst Brücke, Freud’s former professor, and by Sigmund Exner, his fellow student at the Vienna Physiological Institute.188 In particular, Löwy drew on Brücke’s 1881 essay on the depiction of motion in painting and sculpture. This essay sought to explain why the positions of the body revealed by the recent invention of chronophotography failed to correspond to depictions of movement in the figural tradition of European art history.189 Brücke regarded chronophotographs as proof of the general rule that artists always worked with images of movements that “impress themselves to memory most explicitly and durably,” that is to say, movements of longest duration and minimum velocity—­start points, midpoints, and endpoints, rather than intermediate phases.190 Löwy applied the theories of Brücke and Exner about how artists tended to favor forms that “impress the observer with the clearest memory picture” and expanded upon these theories by trying to specify the nature of the selective process that takes place in the mind to form mental pictures.191 In doing so, he turned to a form of imagery very different from that studied by Brücke and Exner, who based their theories of mnemonic images on works by Raphael and other renaissance painters. By contrast, Löwy theorized the operations of memory by looking at representations made by children and by certain historical or non-­European adults whom Löwy likewise classified as “naïve individuals.” As a consequence, he described a memory that was far more rigorously selective. For instance, he attributed the absence of facial expressions and delicate hand gestures in archaic figuration to the fact that primitive artists possessed no mnemonic traces of such subtle movements, which “lie outside that selection of the memory” or were “not . . . firmly retained” because they are “seen in reality for too short a moment.”192 Although he took for granted that a childlike imagination necessarily directed its attention to “the animated and active features of a scene,” he nevertheless maintained that, for a naive subject, most movements “do not suffice for an exact picture” and are retained in the memory as “mere impressions of direction.”193 Thus, he attributed the awkward “dissonance” of the earliest attempts to represent moving bodies in archaic Greek art to the fact that artists constructed movements by calling upon static memory pictures of the body facing in different directions. Citing the famous Nike of Delos discovered by Homolle (see fig. 108), considered to be Greek sculpture’s earliest known representation of flying, Löwy suggested that

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primitive artists first sought to “represent motion through a profile view of the legs,” because this view corresponded to the image of running as it was preserved in the earliest memory pictures.194 The duration of an observer’s exposure to a visual impression was not the only factor Löwy saw as determining the formation of memory pictures. Drawing on the observations about the positioning of bodies by Lange as well as Ricci, whose study had asserted that for a child, “a man should stand, as you like, either in profile or frontal,” he also postulated that memory pictures must be made up of “two canonical views, frontal and profile” (Face und Profil).195 He believed that the orientations of front and back, right and left were the aspects that human beings most “note in others, and which are most early and most deeply impressed in our memories, ever ready to neglect that which is unaccentuated and merely intermediate.”196 The imagination then assembles these impressions into figures or groups of figures “without concern as to how they would present themselves to the eye from a given standpoint,” so that the pure mental conception of an upright human being would present “a body in frontal view with the legs in profile.”197 Such a presentation of the body would obviously deviate from any posture that could actually be assumed by a human body. But such positioning would be consistent, Löwy argued, with the primitive artist’s impulse to represent and view the human (or animal) body “in the greatest possible clearness and completeness of its constituent parts,” so that “not a detail is withdrawn from sight by being slanted away, foreshortened, or in shadow; each part lies before the physical eye full, entire, and clear, just as the unselfconscious mind would picture it.”198 Löwy’s theory of visual imagination presupposed the filtering presence of some preexisting invisible plane in the mind, a “detached plane [that] offers in itself no hold on the imagination,” but against which “a form can be seized by consciousness.”199 Similarly, he implied that memory, in its most primitive stages of development, receives impressions by aligning, registering, and measuring figures against a flat surface, which refuses to “apprehend and retain” forms when they “turn away” from it. Archaic figuration re-created a quality of conspicuousness he described as “conceptual-­pictorial visibility” (gedankenbildlichen Sichtbarkeit).200 The mind’s predilection for this type of visibility meant that ephemeral movements and oblique views of the body would be rejected as a kind of “turning away” from the “mental eye” (geistigen Auge). Löwy understood this psychic predilection for Sichtbarkeit as determining not only the existence of a law of frontality but also more broadly what might be called a “law of flatness” or of planarity. In a remarkable passage, Löwy outlined how a psychic process of assimilating forms to an imaginary planar surface would determine the memory’s predilection for forms perceived at right angles: The naive memory-­picture  . . . has a repugnance to depth. An arm extended forward is intolerable to it, since the elementary imagination can

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apprehend a form, and retain it, only when seen in its fullest and most comprehensive aspect; and neither here nor elsewhere will it endure any surfaces that, by being turned away and foreshortened, partly escape apprehension. In the mind’s eye every form must be expanded and smoothed out: the naive mental image cannot be other than flat.201

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The artistic medium that provided the clearest analogue of that mental process, for Löwy, was bas-­relief sculpture. He concluded his study by noting that his “historical conclusions” confirmed the sculptor Adolf Hildebrand’s physiologically grounded argument in favor of the “relief view” (Reliefauffassung) in Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst (1893), a widely influential practical treatise urging modern artists to organize space in painting and sculptures to mimic planar relief.202 Löwy singled out bas-­relief (Flachrelief) as the “truest exponent” of the visual impulses “primordial in all art” because this medium manifested more clearly and enduringly than either painting or sculpture a mode of representation faithful to psychic morphology. It enabled a mode of visualization in which figures appear “lacking in depth in every sense and spread out to fullest and most comprehensive visibility.”203 Faune presented living bodies in a manner that strove to conform to all the formal peculiarities Löwy identified as typical of “psychological” rather than “retinal” images. Nijinsky instructed his performers to maintain blank, unchanging facial expressions throughout the dance. He eliminated all delicate hand gestures, choreographing his dancers so that they appeared to have “fused metacarpals” and “disarticulated phalanxes.”204 He also made his dancers labor—­against the visible constraints of nature—­only to present their bodies in what Löwy referred to as the two “canonical views.” The dancers appeared onstage, as Gauthier-­ Villars stated, “twisting their busts on their hips to superimpose on a frontal torso a face in perfect profile.”205 Finally, Nijinsky subsumed all of these formal strategies under the larger conceit of the tableau chorégraphique as a bas-­relief. His production notes make his intentions clear: “the aim is for everything to be almost flat . . . like a low-­relief.”206 By 1912, it was not a novelty to organize stage space to simulate relief. Many theatrical reformers in the first decade of the twentieth century, influenced by Hildebrand’s Problem der Form, advocated for a “stage of the future” that would take its model “not from the perspectival depth of painting, but from flat relief.”207 The first specially constructed Relief­ bühne—­a stage only eight meters deep—­debuted in 1908 at the new Munich Artists’ Theater (fig. 110).208 The architecture of this theater and the theoretical writings of its director, Georg Füchs, influenced a range of theatrical productions, including stagings by Vsevelod Meyerhold that were certainly known to Diaghilev, Bakst, and Nijinsky.209 As the Russian critic Minskii emphasized, L’Après-­midi d’un faune attempted to do something very different from such stagings. “The originality of Nijinsky’s production,” he asserted, “was that the bas-­relief system was not merely circumstantial but, rather, developed to the farthest possible

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degree.”210 In addition to exaggerating the shallowness of the relief—­the depth of stage space in Faune was much less than eight meters—­Nijinsky used the premise of relief to regulate the postures of his performers, who no longer simply occupied a compressed stage space but, rather, were required to contort their bodies to align with the planarity of the toile de fond, spreading their bodies laterally to achieve what Löwy would call “fullest and most comprehensive visibility.” The ballet did not simply ­apply “bas-­relief technique,” it pretended to actually be a bas-­relief. This pretense, as Minskii suggested, enabled Nijinsky to “body forth into images” a “topical plot” akin to that of Wedekind’s “child tragedy.” As Minskii perceived, the sexual script of Faune was inherent in its form as simulated bas-­relief. The bas-­relief’s mode of presenting bodies becomes the formal device that enables the satisfaction of impulses associated with infantile sexuality. Nijinsky’s decision to present the “dream” of Mallarmé’s faun as an archaic relief seems to reflect an understanding quite similar to Löwy’s of the psychological laws that govern form in archaic figuration. Where Faune’s psychological interpretation of archaic figuration goes further, however, by extrapolating from those laws certain sexual implications. Faune’s choreography emphasizes how the positioning of bodies in archaic art’s “psychological” imagery revealed the primitive psyche’s innate predilections for conditions of optimum visibility. The stillness of the bodies in Faune and also, more pointedly, their posturing according to the conventions of archaic relief communicated an effort on the part of choreographer and dancers to make bodies more fully and clearly “legible” to viewers. In Faune, Löwy’s law of gedankenbildliche Sichtbarkeit—­understood as a form of v ­ isibility

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Figur e 110. Münchner Künstler-­Theater, performance of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, 1908. Bayerische Staats­ bibliothek München, 4 Art. 49 sk-­19, p. 140, urn: nbn: de: bvb: 12-­bsb00087544-­7.

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Fig u re 111. Adolphe de Meyer, Vaslav Nijinsky and Lydia Nelidova performing the pas de deux in Faune. From Le Prélvde à L’Après-­midi d’vn favne (Paris: Paul Iribe, 1914). Photo: Patrice Schmidt, © RMN-­Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

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allowing the psychic ­apprehension of the body with all its “parts,” all at once, fully and clearly legible—­was performed precisely as a form of ­“exhibitionism.” This attitude of exhibitionism was embodied most explicitly by the ballet’s title character. Calmette’s memorable exclamation that the faun was “hideux de face, encore plus hideux de profil” captures how Nijinsky exploited the “canonical view” of the profile to showcase the “frontal” parts of the male body. Perhaps the specific attitude Calmette had in mind, when he wrote of Nijinsky’s “hideous” profile, was the stance that might be characterized as the faun’s corporeal leitmotif—­the posture that, alongside the final movements performed horizontally on the rock, stands out as the ballet’s most sexually suggestive. In this pose (fig. 111), which repeats several times throughout the ballet, both of the faun’s arms point off to the right in profile with the thumbs angled upward, his

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left arm held at about the level of the waist. Perhaps it was this iconic port de bras, with the doubled, lateral extension of the outstretched arms, that prompted Bidou’s allusion to the Chrysapha relief, a work cited by Löwy as one of the clearest examples of “unadulterated memory picturing.”211 Nijinsky’s choreography recalls such archaic imagery, while also giving a sexual connotation to the arm’s sideward extension that is quite absent in a work like the Chrysapha relief. Faune’s archaic profile formally and metaphorically actualizes the “pseudo-­atavism” of the exhibitionist, whose open pride and interest in the genitals could be, as Havelock Ellis asserted in 1906, “placed on the same mental level as the man of a more primitive age.”212 The laterally extended arms and hands quite unambiguously stand in for—­or delineate with a virtual line in space—­an elongated erect penis. In this posture most unequivocally, but indeed all throughout the choreography, the faun, as a “gentleman who presents himself always in profile,” seems to gratify his own inclinations to self-­exposure and concede to the projected appetites of a naïve spectator who would demand that the faun’s body appear before them in “full and comprehensive visibility.”213

The Little Faun Freud’s first example of a “typical dream” in The Interpretation of Dreams —­the class of embarrassing “dreams of being naked or insufficiently dressed in the presence of strangers”—­demonstrates the exemplary status exhibitionism assumed for him as a manifestation of infantile sexuality, especially as expressed in dreams.214 Freud’s interpretation of this typical dream, which he assumes most of his readers have experienced, encapsulates the general theory of dreaming postulated in The Interpretation of Dreams: “Dreaming is on the whole an example of regression to the dreamer’s earliest condition, a revival of his childhood, of the instinctual impulses which dominated it and of the methods of expression which were then available to him.”215 This revival of childhood is emblematized in the dream of public nakedness, which restores the dreamer’s body to its natal state of undress. More significantly, the dream exemplifies Freud’s theory that dreams are wish fulfillments and, more specifically, fulfillments of “the powerful wishful impulses of childhood,” which he believed could be classified “without exception . . . as sexual.”216 For the dream, as Freud interprets it, is a disguised fulfillment of the childish “desire to exhibit.” It enables adult dreamers to relive forgotten “scenes” from their childhood when they would have taken “unmistakable satisfaction in exposing their bodies, with especial emphasis on the sexual parts.”217 Nijinsky’s staging of L’Après-­midi d’un faune translated the “dream” of Mallarmé’s faun—­a dream of frustrated rape—­into a “typical dream” in Freud’s sense, a dream of exposing the body, “with special emphasis on the sexual parts.” This transformation comes into view most clearly if we compare the exhibitionistic port de bras of Nijinsky’s faun to the

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Fig u re 112. Pan Painter, Bell Krater, ca. 470 bce . Red figure, 37 × 42.5 cm. Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photograph © 2020 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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Pathosformel most typical of Pan, which the faun’s memorable posture of standing with both arms extended both evoked and upended. Once representations of Pan progressed beyond simply portraying the god as an animal upright on his hind legs, and the upper part of the god’s body became humanized, a pattern of representation emerged in which, as Philippe Borgeaud observed, “the god turns up in very much the same pose (running with his arms extended).”218 This pose appears in the beautiful bell krater (ca. 470 bce ; fig. 112) that gave the name to the so-­called Pan Painter. Classified by Warburg as the Pathosformel of ­“pursuit” (Verfolgung) in his 1927 exhibition on Ovid and “primary words of passionate gesture-­language,” this gesture also appears in the Metamorphoses, which may have drawn on preexisting visual imagery of Pan.219 Although Warburg traced the “prototype” of the pursuit Pathos­ formel to the tale of Apollo and Daphne, in Ovid’s text the clearer verbal picture of that gesture occurs in the telling of Pan’s pursuit of Syrinx. Ovid used two key verbs referring to the actions of Pan’s forelimbs and hands: prensare, to clutch at, and tenere, to hold.220 The action of reaching and grasping became prototypical attributes of Pan, present in all Renaissance depictions of Ovid’s tale, whether in printed emblems and book i­llustrations (fig. 113) or canvases by painters such as Annibale Carracci, Nicolas Poussin, or Peter Paul Rubens (fig. 114).221 C h a pt e r T h r e e

Figur e 113. Bernard Salomon, Pan and Syrinx. Illustrated in Les Métamorphoses d’Ovide figurée (Lyon: Jan de Tournes, 1557). Bibliothèque nationale de France. Figur e 114 . Peter Paul Rubens, Pan and Syrinx, 1636. Oil on canvas, 26 × 26.4 cm. Collection of the Musée Bonnat, Bayonne. Photo: René-­Gabriel Ojéda, © RMN-­Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

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While the faun’s stance with arms extended recalls the Pathosformel of “pursuit” that typified Pan for centuries, the outstretched arms suggest an erotic constitution in Nijinsky’s choreography quite different from the one implied by the traditional iconography. The gesture of “pursuit”—­with the implication that forced intercourse will result if the arms catch hold of the body they stretch out to grasp—­becomes a mere gesture of exhibition, without any implied threat of physical violation. The fact that the faun assumes this arm posture, which he typically holds for at least a musical measure and only when standing in place, makes obvious that this is certainly not a gesture of “pursuit” in the Ovidian sense. Indeed, part of what surprised audiences of the ballet was that pursuit was precisely what Nijinsky’s faun did not attempt. The faun remains onstage for the ballet’s entire ten-­minute duration, as the nymphs freely enter and exit, always looking back toward the faun as they move offstage. That the faun never follows them offstage struck audiences as strange; as one critic put it, they “not unnaturally expected M. le Faune to make a dash for the pretty little dryads.”222 Even more than his failure to give chase, the faun’s posture with both arms and thumbs extended departs from preceding convention by conspicuously disavowing the human hands as grasping agents. Classical ballet taught dancers to hold their hands in a way that showcased the differentiation of the digits and evoked their capacity for fine motor skills, with “fingers . . . gathered as if they were playing the violin.”223 The planar mitten-­hands the faun maintains throughout the ballet visually negate their capacity to take hold of objects, let alone perform fine motor skills. As in prior works examined here, this disavowal of manual grasp gives emphasis to mental states beyond the metaphorical “grasp” of consciousness. This negation of prehensility takes on a second layer of meaning in the faun’s signature posture, where the opposable thumb—­a hallmark of the human, enabling the capacity to grasp—­is redirected toward a less specifically human function. Here the thumb performs as the faun’s genital, externally registering his internal excitations. The faun’s signature pose, through its stationary aspect and its emphasis on a hand gesture that negates prehensility, embodies a faun who seems neither inclined to nor capable of catching hold of a nymph and forcing intercourse. If this is still a pose of “pursuit,” it is pursuit in the manner of those animals Darwin described assuming “extraordinary” and “indescribably odd attitudes” when “perform[ing] their love-­antics.”224 The pursuit amounts to the faun’s display of his body in what appears to be a seduction attempt. But unlike peacocks and other mature animals with their ornate plumage and complex dances, the faun’s attempt at seduction seems remarkably crude and unaesthetic— or ­infantile perhaps. The little “child of two or three who lifts up his shirt in front of one,” Freud observed, does so “in one’s honour.”225 The “little faun” bestows upon the nymph to whom his gesture is directed—­who is, once again, scripted to be significantly taller—­a similar kind of honor. The chore-

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ography foregrounds an analogous understanding of exhibitionism as a “process of erotic symbolism” that involves, as Ellis argued, “a conscious or unconscious attitude of attention in the exhibitionist’s mind to the psychic reaction of the [person] toward whom his display is directed. He seeks to cause an emotion, which, probably in most cases, he desires should be pleasurable.”226 The little faun seems to presume that the nymph would want to see his genitals, and his intentions do not appear to go beyond the aim of showing them to her. Like the original “exhibitionist” who prompted Charles Lasègue to coin the term, we could say of the little faun, “He showed himself, and did not go further.”227 Faune’s narrative hinges on the failure of its protagonist’s strategy as a means of “seduction,” though the faun certainly succeeds in making himself an object of the nymphs’ vision—­in nine of their eleven stage exits, the nymphs swivel their heads around in perfect profile to look back at the faun as they move away from him.228 The irony that structures the gesture of exhibition that is directed, within the diegesis, at the tall nymph is that this gesture could achieve its visual effect only from the perspective of an audience facing the “choreographic picture.” The faun’s failure to follow the nymphs offstage thus also underlines a more primary relationship between the faun and the audience, as the ultimate entity toward whom his “display is directed.” The compositional structure of Nijinsky’s “choreographic picture” acknowledges Exhibitionslust and Schaulust as a reciprocal pair of opposites, a pair of opposites the ballet seems to posit, just as Freud did, as part of the infantile ontology of theater as such. Freud regarded infantile exhibitionistic impulses as the primordial drive engendering the stage performer’s “impulsion to . . . theatrical display.” Schaulust, the word he used for the corresponding inclination, carries strong resonances of a theatrical audience, not to mention strong associations with his key phrase “Schauplatz der Träume.”229 Nijinsky’s ballet staged a mode of viewing appropriate to the Schauplatz der Träume by fulfilling the kinds of childish wishes that were typically sublimated in the art of theater. The exhibitionistic acts of the faun demonstratively ascribe to the audience the logical “counterpart of this supposedly perverse inclination”—­ “curiosity to see other people’s genitals.”230 While Freud understood the “desire to see the organs peculiar to each sex exposed” as an “original component of our libido,” he also took for granted that this desire had to be harnessed and controlled in the waking life of civilized human adults.231 Indeed, he suggested that it was precisely the sublimation of infantile sexual interest “away from the genitals on to the shape of the body as a whole” that had enabled the invention of figural representation.232 That sublimating procedure, as Freud imagined it, was reversed in Faune, which used the “shape of the body as a whole” to represent the genitals. Some of the graphic depictions Freud used as evidence of infantile Schaulust can help us imagine the kind of psychic disposition Nijinsky’s choreographic picture might have presupposed in its viewer. Signifi-

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F igur e 115. Illustration from Sigmund Freud, “Analyse der Phobie eines fünfjährigen Knaben.” In Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische und Psychopathologische Forschungen 1 (1909). Digital image courtesy Collection of the International Psycho­ analytic University Berlin.

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cantly, the two case histories that addressed the phenomenon of infantile sexuality most directly—­those of the so-­called Wolf Man and Little Hans, “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-­Year-­Old Boy (1909) and “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis” (1918)—­both included childlike drawings. In the earlier study, the reader is provided with an illustration of a graphic mark made by that “funny little fellow” Freud referred to as “der kleine Hans,” the five-­year-­old son of a man in his Wednesday Psychological Society who had heeded the doctor’s injunction to “collect observations of the sexual life of children.”233 Based on reports supplied by the father, Freud wrote up a case history revolving around the child’s lively interest in “that portion of his body which he used to describe as his ‘widdler’(Wiwimacher),” an interest the child expressed by showing his Wiwimacher to friends and family members, as well as by seeking actively to catch a glimpse of the Wiwimachern of others.234 The graphic exemplum of this “lively interest” appears in the case history in the form of a drawing of a giraffe (fig. 115), made for the child by the father, which der kleine Hans has “corrected” for optimum visual pleasure: “Draw its Wiwimacher too,” Hans apparently demanded upon receiving the picture from his father. “Draw it yourself,” the father answered. So Hans added “a short stroke, and then added a bit onto it, remarking: ‘its ­Wiwimacher’s longer.’”  235 We can point to certain key features shared between the little faun’s most overtly exhibitionistic posture and the drawing produced collaboratively by Little Hans and his father. The father’s schematic rendering of the giraffe in profile itself appears as if it might have been drawn by a child, perhaps because the father deliberately drew for his son in an infantile style. Nijinsky’s arms, extended off to the side in his exhibitionistic posture, might be compared with the strokes that the Little Hans added to his father’s giraffe—­the strokes that gave, and then elongated, the animal’s genitals. Also fundamental to the affinity between these visualizations is that in both Faune and the drawing “corrected” by Little Hans, the body’s key “part” is exposed on a figure that is actually or ostensibly an animal. C h a pt e r T h r e e

Nijinsky’s stylization of his faune as a faon (fawn) not only emblematizes the ballet’s overarching engagement with the phenomenon of the infantile, it presents the infantile dynamics of Schaulust and Exhibitionslust as inextricable from the figure of the animal. For Freud, the special role played by animals in the erotic lives of children depended on the animals’ status as (unwitting) exhibitionists, “the openness with which they display their genitals and their sexual functions to the inquisitive little human child.” Thus, in the case of Little Hans, we trace the boy’s delight in viewing animals in his early years—­when he visits the zoo and calls out “in a joyful and excited voice: ‘I saw the lion’s widdler!’ or when he looks at a picture of a monkey with a tail and exclaims ‘Daddy, look at its widdler!’ ”—­and then the subsequent transmutation of that Schaulust into an animal phobia at the age of five.236 The animal phobias suffered by little boys (and little boys specifically) with such striking frequency in Freud’s case histories serve as evidence of Oedipal conflict, the fear of castration by the father he believed all boys developed after recognizing the anatomical difference between male and female.237 However, as Elissa Marder has argued, Freud’s own writings point toward less limited interpretive frameworks for comprehending the animal’s privileged role in the drama of the child’s psychosexual development. The child’s charged and ambivalent attitude to the animal, she suggests, emerges in Freud’s thinking as one of the primary “indices to the very specificity of the human psyche.”238 The human being comes to experience its own sexuality through a process of interspecies identification and through “the incorporation of animal figures within the psyche.”239 Through this process of psychological incorporation—­ which takes place, Freud implies in his writings, through the presentation of real and represented animals to the child and through the frequent reappearance of these animal figures in dream imagery—­the human being experiences “radical alterity and separation from animals” precisely on the basis of an identification with the animal on the shared level of the sexual.240 Within the framework of Freud’s thinking, the act of exhibiting the genitals carried special significance for the human being’s psychological negotiation of its relation to the animal. The genitals, in Freud’s estimation, were humanity’s least “evolved,” least species-­specific organ. Or, as he stated, “the genitals have not taken part in the development of the human body in the direction of beauty: they have remained animal.”241 The act of exhibiting, therefore, can also be understood as an act through which the human being performatively asserts identification with the animal body. In Nijinsky’s 1919 manuscript he alternately (or simultaneously) denies and affirms his own animality with great frequency: “I am not an ape in man . . . I am a reasonable being, but an ape is not reasonable”; “I am a turkey cock with God’s feathers. I gobble-­gobble like a turkey cock, but I realize that I gobble-­gobble”; “I am not a man without paws”; “I am a beast.”242 Thinking about animals was clearly a fundamental dimension of Nijinsky’s ambivalent experience of his own sexuality and, more The Mise-en-scène of Dreams

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broadly, his experience of his species identity. Perhaps it is not irrelevant to this theme in Nijinsky’s writing that he was the child of itinerant dancers who sometimes performed in the milieu of the traveling circus. One of his first public performances, which took place at the age of six, and which his sister recalled as having “affected Vaslav very deeply,” was directed by the clown and animal trainer Vladimir Durov (1863–­1934).243 A fascinating figure in whom the fields of children’s entertainment, animal psychology, and science intersect, Durov was renowned across Russia and Europe for “his human-­like animal troupe,” a motley crew of creatures trained with hypnosis and other new scientific methods to perform comic feats of unprecedented complexity before audiences composed of large numbers of children.244 In his stage debut with Durov, for instance, Nijinsky played a chimney sweep who, together with a monkey dressed as a fireman, rescued a dog, rabbit, piglet, and other fauna from a burning building.245 Because he commenced his stage career as a member of Durov’s “human-­like animal troupe,” we can assume the young Nijinsky would have been granted particularly frequent access to the animal “displaying” Freud found so consequential for child sexuality. We might look to one promotional photograph from around 1900 (fig. 116), reproduced by Durov in his 1924 scientific treatise on animal psychology, as characteristic of what the young Nijinsky might have seen. Here, the clown leans forward to light his cigarette from one held by Bisha, a smoking dog who balances on his hind legs on a carved stone pedestal, exposing his genitals. The “exhibitionism” of Bisha, as documented in this photograph, resonates with the exhibitionism of Nijinsky’s faun on several levels. Most fundamentally, both figures hybridize human and animal features in a manner that intensifies the “indecency” of the posture. One of the effects of human bipedalism that Freud came to regard as most consequential was the repositioning of the genitals that resulted from the postural shift of the body’s axis from horizontal to vertical. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), he theorized that both repression and sublimation, as distinctively human psychological tendencies, had emerged in response to the human sexual organs becoming more visible than those of quadruped animals.246 Durov’s smoking dog invokes such developments precisely in their absence: he offers up for theatrical delectation the spectacle of a shameless animal in a human’s upright posture. The little faun in Faune perhaps evokes something similar. Though he is vertical for only roughly half of the performance, his pivotal act in the dance is the assumption of an erect posture. When he stands up on his two feet, he simultaneously assumes the distinctive human posture and announces his intention to “show himself”—­or the animal part of himself—­to the nymphs and the audience. Of course, compared to Durov’s dog on its hind legs, the faun’s self-­ exposure is more complex, because it communicates through distortion. The ballet translates the exhibitionist act of Durov’s performing animal into the medium of the bas-­relief pedestal on which Bisha balances

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Figur e 116. Undated photograph of the dog Bisha smoking, from Vla­ dimir Durov, Dressirovka zhivotnykh: Psikholo­ gicheskie nabliudeniia nad zhivotnymi, dressiro­ vannymipo moemu metodu (40-­letnii opyt) [Animal Training. Psychological observations on animals trained by my method (40 years experience)] ­(Moscow: Krasnaia pechat’, 1924). Cotsen Children’s Library, Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Courtesy Princeton University Library.

in the photograph. By making an animal figure the protagonist of its ­archaic bas-­relief, the choreographic picture affirms that the animal plays a starring role in the human being’s psychological picture of sexuality, precisely because the animal’s propensity to “hide so little of [its] sexual life” generates intense gratification, as well as potential trauma, for the “little human child.”247 In the manuscript, Nijinsky often articulates his denials or affirmations of his animality in connection with expressing conflicted feelings about his past and ongoing masturbatory activities—­a recurrent theme in the text.248 In one revealing passage, he recounts how as a “kid,” he knew “a dog named ‘Tsytra’ ” (Zither), whom he taught to masturbate,

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and afterward “did what the dog did, but with my hand.” Many readers of the 1919 manuscript have found such confessions unpleasant and inseparable from other signs of an encroaching psychosis, but Nijinsky’s recounting of such memories of childhood sexual activities is never a question of mere confession or autobiographical recollection. Like Freud, Nijinsky was interested in theorizing the universality of this dimension of human experience; he made it a topic of his art and his reflection. Thus, the anecdote about Tsytra is followed with the declaration: “I did all these things when I was a kid. . . . I know that everyone does this sort of thing.”249 More than its staging of exhibitionism or masturbation, the “shock” of Faune had to do with the way it formalized the second part of that autobiographical assertion—­“I know that everyone does this sort of thing.”

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 As I have already noted, the thematization of dreaming and infantile sexuality in L’Après-­midi d’un faune relied on a double and paradoxical metaphor: the conceit of the live performance existing as what the critic Charles Méryel called a “cinematography of bas-­relief.” Having now established how the ballet’s simulation of archaic relief sculpture enabled Nijinsky to simulate a form of mental imagery compliant with infantile Schaulust, I want to move on to the second, more contemporary portion of that metaphor. A laconic statement in Nijinsky’s manuscript—­“I am familiar with cinema”—­asserts his cognizance of the burgeoning medium.250 This is hardly a surprise. At the height of his career (1909–­1914), Nijinsky often performed on stages that also offered screens for the projection of “animated pictures.” The Théâtre du Châtelet, where Faune premiered, had been hosting séances de cinématographe since 1907.251 The more intriguing question is when exactly Nijinsky might have first become acquainted with the medium, which proliferated in its earliest years in precisely those milieus, like the circus fairground and the variety theater, that sometimes employed the young Nijinsky’s parents (both dancers).252 His career coincided almost exactly with the evolution of this new medium. Indeed, his stage debut as the chimney sweep in Durov’s circus act took place in the summer of 1896—­a few months after the Lumière brothers debuted the cinématographe in Russia.253 A common refrain among Faune’s enthusiasts was that it produced a pleasurable, paradoxical impression of a mobilized but still static image, “showing a bas-­relief that moved, so to speak, in thrusts, in permutations.”254 As Cocteau described it, Faune had unlocked a potential latent within the stasis of archaic bas-relief: “The Greeks fixed their play for posterity in immobile bas-­relief, and voilà, inverse route, the mobile bas-­relief here reveals to us its initial raison d’être.”255 Such comments cast Faune within the mold of another familiar mythological script in-

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cessantly restaged in European art, literature, and theater: the “dream of the moving statue” recounted in Ovid’s myth of Pygmalion and Galatea.256 Yet the descriptions of Nijinsky’s “mobile bas-­relief” depart in key respects from the typical script associated with the moving statue theme. The “dream of the moving statue” was a fantasy of imbuing a statue with a specific type of motion—­motion that could be classed under the philosophical category of self-­movement, the kind of motion Aristotle defined as the differentiating property of living beings.257 In European art, successful representation of self-­movement was understood to depend on capturing the body’s conspiracy of motion, the way in which every change in any one limb’s position implicated all the others. The body was understood as an organic integration of co-­responsive parts, “full of proportions, one limb to another,” a body in which, in the words of a renaissance poet, “each part may call the furthest brother,” and “head with foot hath private amitie.”258 Nijinsky tried to disrupt this balance and counterbalance linking limb to limb and head to feet. Because he asked dancers to hold their torsos completely static while their legs moved or vice versa, their movements did not look like self-­movement. Rather, the motions performed by the figures in his simulated bas-­relief evoked caused movement, activation rather than animation, movement instigated by an external mechanism rather than issuing from an anima within the ­dancers. The bas-­relief technique of Faune called to mind various technologies of projection and mechanically simulated movement. The shallowness of the scenography exceeded the antique referent, simultaneously evoking the literal flatness of surfaces associated with a range of cinematic and precinematic “screen entertainments.”259 Henry Bidou described how in this “living frieze,” mobilized static figures seemed to “glide [glisser] from left to right” across the surface of the Châtelet stage “as in a shadow theater,” or “as if they were on the glass plate of a magic lantern.”260 Émile Vuillermoz compared watching Faune in performance to a mechanical “clicking through” (déclic) of pages from an album of archaeological photographs, a comparison that evokes the specific screen entertainment of the slide lecture, a popular fairground genre repurposed and fully institutionalized by the turn of the century as the dominant teaching apparatus of academic art history.261 Above all, the choreography called to mind one particular kind of screen entertainment: the displays of moving pictures produced by the cinématographe, an “apparatus serving for the obtaining and viewing of chrono-­photographic pictures.”262 As many critics stressed, Nijinsky’s choreography could be conceptualized as cinematographic because it presented bodily motions as if not actual but illusive, artificially reconstituted after being broken down into individual static poses and then put back together again. One critic described the performance as an “erudite gymnastics” in which “numbered poses followed one another mechanically.”263 René Chavance observed that Nijinsky “decompose[d] gestures . . . fixe[d] a multitude of

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attitudes, like the silhouettes of a gyroscope or the images in a cinematographic film to obtain, in uniting them, a suite of, as it were, stylized movements.”264 Pierre Lalo concurred: “decompose is the right word.” “The nymphs and the faun ‘decompose movement’ [‘décomposent le mouve­ment’] exactly as in a military exercise; they make you think at the same time of the gestures of an automaton, and the marching of a Prussian infantry parade.”265 The word “decomposition” carried a specific meaning in this context, as Lalo indicated by demarcating it with quotation marks; decomposition alluded to the well-­known process employed in the chronophotographs produced by Étienne-­Jules Marey in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. In the words of the physiologist, chronophotography was a type of imagery that “applies instantaneous photography to the study of movement, permits the human eye to see phases of movement it could not perceive directly, and leads also to the reconstitution of the movements it first decomposed.”266 As any educated French writer in 1912 would have known, Marey’s efforts to conceive new graphic methods for recording human and animal locomotion, intended among other things to aid in training the disgraced French military in the aftermath of the Franco-­Prussian War, had inadvertently laid the groundwork for cinematography as an industrial instrument of “entertainment for children young and old,” as Marey dismissively described this invention.267 There were some obvious visual parallels between Marey’s chronophotography and Nijinsky’s choreography. The relief stage scenography created a vantage for the theatrical audience that closely mimicked the one Marey constructed at his Station physiologique, where he and his assistant, the physical culture specialist Georges Demenÿ, photographed their subjects (soldiers, acrobats, baby goats, and so on) moving in profile on narrow lateral runways in front of a sort of shallow makeshift stage hung with black or white backdrops.268 While the restriction of movement to linear pathways perpendicular to the audience undergirded the ballet’s self-­presentation as an archaic bas-­relief, it also produced strong visual analogies to chronophotographic imagery (fig. 117), which were characterized by a distinctive bandlike format and an almost exclusive reliance on the profile view of moving figures.269 The illustrated press made this analogy explicit. Both Comœdia and Sketch framed their coverage of the performance with decorative bands created by repeating decoupaged photographs of the nymphs over narrow monochrome backgrounds (fig. 118)—­plainly resembling chronophotographs, or “decomposed” movement sequences that could potentially be “reconstituted” by a cinématographe. In Comœdia’s special issue on Faune, containing Gauthier-­Villars’s review as well as the article identifying Faune as “cinematography of bas-­relief,” the borders on these decorative bands almost approximate the regular perforation of film stock (fig. 119). This translation of the ballet’s figures into the form of a filmstrip prefigured Nijinsky’s subsequent decomposition of his ballet into a series

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F ig u re 117. Étienne-­Jules Marey, Georges Demenÿ running, 1883. Chronophotograph. Science History Images/Alamy Stock Photo. F ig u re 118. Detail of decorative band from Sketch Supplement, June 26, 1912.

F ig u re 119. Studio Walery, L’Après-­midi d’un faune in performance at the Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris. Published in Comœdia illustré, June 15, 1912. Photo © BnF, Dist. RMN-­Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

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of staged photographs. Indeed, one could argue that Nijinsky produced Faune in two alternative versions: the mobile version of the live performance, and the static version of the picture album. After its run of performances in Paris in the spring of 1912, Nijinsky and his cast restaged the ballet in London for the photographer Adolph de Meyer, who produced a suite of thirty images tracking the ballet’s entire narrative, from the faun’s first pose to his last. These photographs were published in an album in 1914, with Nijinsky’s financial backing.270 Four years later, Nijinsky shot another, less complete series in New York with Karl Struss, who became a Hollywood cinematographer soon thereafter.271 Considered as two complementary components of a single oeuvre, the performance and its photographic remediations suggest Nijinsky’s interest in the potential to shift between “decomposed” movement sequences rendered in static images and the mechanical “reconstitution” of those movements.272 If Nijinsky’s conceptualization of Faune was inherently cinematic, it must be stressed that the ballet most likely invoked a very particular phase in the historical evolution of cinema. In a manner that anticipated how teleological histories of Greek sculpture would come to provide the master terms of periodization (i.e., primitive, classic) eventually mapped onto the history of film, the archaism of Faune was once again layered and redoubled. Nijinsky’s “cinematography of bas-­relief” not only looked back “twenty-­six centuries” toward the primordial origins of figural depiction, it likewise performed an archaeology of the far more recent aesthetic past, looking back at the infancy or archaic origins of cinema. If we examine the decorative bands that translated Faune into the formal idiom of the filmstrip, we see they do so while also acknowledging Nijinsky’s glaring deviation from that technology’s most fundamental structural premise. For the spacing in these “films” is irregular, the successive poses simply repeat again and again or abruptly shift, rather than differentiating gradually from one to the next. If run through an apparatus, these “films” would necessarily fail to produce a convincing illusion of continuous motion. They translate Faune into a motion sequence faithful to its irregular and jerky rhythm—­extended periods of slow motion or stasis, punctuated by abrupt postural alterations, which passed “with an excessive velocity from one attitude to the next.”273 Or as Émile Jacques-­Dalcroze put it in a 1919 essay that violently critiqued Faune, “The dancers . . . gave the choppy impression produced in a cinematograph by a series of gestures in which someone has suppressed the essential frames of film.”274 Dalcroze’s image of “someone” (Nijinsky) removing frames from a cinematographic sequence attributes to the choreographer an almost montagelike intervention into the technology of film. It suggests that the simulation of cinematography in Faune laid bare the apparatus that was not present, through a sort of danced demonstration of the fact that

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­ motion in the cinema cannot be divorced from the still images from “ which it is manufactured.”275 But this abrupt and jerky style of movement, which for Dalcroze evoked “a series of gestures in which someone has suppressed the essential frames of film,” was also a feature that could have recalled the so-­called cinéma des premiers temps, harkening back to that moment when multiple inventors across the Western world were still seeking to achieve or perfect the mechanical simulation of continuous motion. The very concept of “cinematography of bas-­relief” conjures up a kind of technological archaism. It evokes what was in 1912 an already outmoded phase in cinematography’s accelerated process of technical evolution, before it had become an exclusively photographic medium. In 1892, twenty years before the premiere of Faune, the first public projections of moving images on perforated film took place at the Musée Grevin in Paris, where the inventor and artist Émile Reynaud used his Théâtre Optique to project hand-­painted “flexible bands of indefinite length, carrying suites of successive poses” (fig. 120).276 In these so-­ called Pantomimes lumineuses, Reynaud presented, in front of static projected backgrounds, the whimsical and bawdy actions of swimmers and clowns, dogs and Pierrots, all depicted in series of between three and seven hundred sequential poses.277 Yet, as the first historians of film unfailingly stressed, Reynaud’s animations were very soon surpassed, in both a formal and a commercial sense, by the chronophotographic technique associated with the Lumière brothers’ cinématographe. In his Origines du cinématographe (1909), Demenÿ, Marey’s assistant, described Reynaud’s enterprise as doomed from the outset because of its “capital flaw” of relying on “figures drawn by hand, from the imagination of the artist.”278 This hand-­painted imagery, Demenÿ said, produced a “false and strange” impression of movement. The “insufficiency of images” on the filmstrips as well as the continual recycling of the same figural postures within a sequence meant that Reynaud’s animations could only ever achieve a partial illusion of movement, sorely lacking in “continuous sensation.”279 By 1912, Reynaud’s animations were already long-­forgotten relics.280 The basic technological components of cinema had reached a level of

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Figur e 120. Émile Reynaud, Autour d’une cabine (poses 25–­27 out of 636), 1894. Hand-­painted filmstrip from fifteen-­ minute animation for the Théâtre Optique.

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inter­national standardization, and certain representational and institutional factors had contributed to forming what historians have identified as a new paradigm for film. The time of so-­called primitive cinema had passed, giving way to so-­called classical cinema.281 Or, to use more recent terms of periodization, the paradigm of the “cinema of attractions” was displaced by the new paradigm “cinema,” as cinema established itself as an autonomous, institutional medium centered on the production of feature-­length narrative films.282 This shift is typically dated to a moment just prior to Faune’s premiere, somewhere in the years spanning 1907 and 1911.283 By this moment, studios and nascent cinephiles were increasingly determined to appeal to more sophisticated audience sensibilities, and, as one article in Ciné-­Journal put it in 1912, “disabuse the public of the idea that the cinema is only a spectacle for children.”284 The “false and strange” impression of movement Faune generated, its abbreviated and circular narrative, not to mention its animal protagonist, all would have appeared anachronistic, more reminiscent of a ten-­minute animation by Reynaud than, for instance, the nearly three-­ hour adaptation of Les Misérables that Pathé released in 1912. As a whole, Faune evoked a dense patchwork of technologies and representational strategies that were protocinematic, or characteristic of the earliest phase of cinema. The ballet could have recalled “screen entertainments,” like the slide lecture or shadow theater, as well as the “crude toys,” like the zoetrope, praxinoscope, phonoscope, or tachyscope, in which “the cinematograph found its earliest conception.”285 Or it could have evoked things such as Marey’s animated chronophotographs, Reynaud’s hand-­ painted animations, or the earliest films, which were, as Tom Gunning has argued, less invested in the development of complex dramatic narratives than in the “harnessing of visibility” through “act[s] of showing and exhibition.”286 While Nijinsky’s diary makes intriguing mention of a desire to work in film, it also makes explicit how the popularity of cinema might have been incompatible with his aesthetic vision, given his deep investment in the distinction between the art of dance and mere commercial entertainment. “I wanted to work with cinema,” he asserted, “but I realized its significance. Cinema serves to increase money. Money serves to increase the number of cinema theaters.”287 Animated pictures as they existed during the reign of the cinema of attractions, when Nijinsky began his training in dance—­with their fairground associations, their predilection for trained practitioners of movements and subjects such as “Skirt Dancing, Gymnastics, Boxing, Steeple-­Chasing, Flat-­racing, Haute-­Ecole Stepping Horses, Military Riding, Leaping Dogs, Camels, and Elephants in motion, Indians on the war path &c”—­likely embodied the kind of displays of movement that Nijinsky came to regard as juvenile and beneath his rank, prone as he was to self-­important pronouncements such as “I am not a jumper, I am an artist!” and “I refuse to be sandwiched between performing dogs and acrobats!”288 At the same time, certain features of so-­called primitive cinema made it a very logi-

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cal complement to the choreography’s archaic exhibitionism. There is, for instance, an obvious connection to “filmic art’s interest in the animal,” as well as the general “exhibitionistic tendency” that Gunning understands as structural to early film.289 In Faune, as I have argued, Nijinsky presented an archaic bas-­relief in a manner that overtly presupposed the Schaulust of its audience, in Freud’s specifically sexual sense of the term. Notably, Schaulust was also applied, in a looser sense, to the emerging audience for cinema. In 1913, for instance, the German writer Walter Serner noted that Schaulust was the only word that could explain the rapid proliferation of cinema, a medium “entirely devoted to the eye and to its pleasure.”290 Commentators across Europe echoed Serner in his belief that the extraordinarily wide popularity and swift spread of cinema, a medium whose commercial potential was understood to have been first recognized by “showmen for children,” exposed something new and fundamental about the human being’s primitive attraction to visual imagery.291 As Virginia Woolf memorably put it, the first impression made by this medium was that it was “simple, even stupid,” providing an experience in which “the brain, agreeably titillated, settles down to watch things happening without bestirring itself to think.”292 Many writers who first encountered the medium took for granted the infantile or infantilizing character of cinematic visuality. One indication of the depth of this association can be found in Corrado Ricci’s 1919 reissue of L’Arte dei bambini, which appended two short works addressing “art for children” (arte pei bambini): an 1896 essay on the magic lantern and a 1912 essay on cinema.293) This same assumption structured Freud’s first encounter with the medium. In a letter to his family in 1907, he recounted watching “short cinematographic performances” being projected in a loop on an outdoor screen in a Roman piazza, emphasizing the “spellbinding” effect of these moving images on the assembled crowd of “old children (your father included).”294 Freud’s assessment of cinema echoes Marey’s almost exactly—­though his parenthesis admitted the attraction that this “entertainment for young and old children” exerted on the child that still remained within him. His description of this infantilizing viewing scenario resonates strongly with his descriptions of dreaming, which he described as a “revival of childhood” that occurred through viewing self-­produced hallucinatory images. The invocation of cinematography in Nijinsky’s cinematography of bas-­relief was fundamental to its dream-work–­like translation of the Mallarmé poem. Both dreaming and cinema were understood in this period as forms of experience in which pictures assumed perceptual or psychological priority. An allusion to that specific—­dreamlike—­quality of early cinema would have been cemented by the innovative audio­visual structure of Nijinsky’s choreography. The apparent disconnection between music and movement in the performance would have enforced a powerful analogy to the distinctive audiovisual texture of cinema in the so-­called silent era, when it was, in Rémy de Gourmont’s words, a spe-

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cies of “mute theater” in which “images pass[ed] carried along by light music.”295 For many historians of dance and theater, the most significant innovation of Faune was its emphatic departure from the Wagnerian paradigm of fusion between music and stage gesture.296 We know that performing Faune demanded from its dancers an unprecedented level of musical attentiveness, and that even the slightest movements in the dance, as one nymph reported, were correlated to a “corresponding sound in the score.”297 Paradoxically, Nijinsky’s close attention to Debussy’s Prélude was marshaled to create an illusion of acoustic obliviousness or even deafness. The correlations Nijinsky choreographed were deliberately offbeat and erratic; as the musicologist Davinia Caddy has suggested, they consisted of an unpredictable combination of “mismatches” and certain highly conspicuous “synch points.”298 Lalo commented that it appeared as if Nijinsky never bothered to listen to the Prélude before choreographing his performance, while Vuillermoz observed, “the dancers ignore . . . what is happening just beyond the ramp, in the dark valley of the orchestra.”299 This cinematic audiovisual aspect of the dance—­or what Debussy reviled as its “dissonance”—­is an aspect of both the humor and the strangeness of its response to its score. The Prélude, a composition of extraordinary tonal and rhythmic complexity, singled out by Pierre Boulez as the single work in which “modern music awakens,” was introduced as if it were simply “light music” to accompany a screened entertainment (fig. 121). Numerous viewers described the experience of watching Faune as one in which the visual tableau asserted its precedence, so that, as Volkonskii put it, “you forget about the music . . . and the visual side takes possession of you.”300 After the Berlin premiere, Hugo von Hofmannsthal observed similarly: “[T]he music is certainly not the key to the ballet as, say, Schumann’s music is the key . . . to Carnaval. Carnaval seems at every moment like an improvisation welling up from its music. By contrast, the strong inner power of Nijinsky’s short scene seems to me to make Debussy’s music recede, to become an accompanying element.”301 If, as Siegfried Kracauer argued, music fulfilled its proper function for silent film when it simply “remove[d] the need for sound” and was “not heard at all,” then Debussy’s music functioned for Faune just as “musical accompaniment” was intended to function for silent film; it receded to the background of consciousness so that visual imagery could fully occupy the mental foreground.302 “In dreams, to be sure, we hear nothing, but we see,” Freud wrote to Wilhelm Fliess in 1897.303 Freud’s contemporaries seem to have agreed intuitively with this assessment. The particular audiovisual experience of cinema, which gave emphatic perceptual priority to images, was one of the primary aspects that prompted so many viewers to describe it as an unequivocally dreamlike medium.304 Hoffmannsthal’s description of how the choreographic picture made Debussy’s music “recede” seems almost to forecast his comments on cinema a decade later, in his 1921 article “Der Ersatz für die Träume” (“The Substitute for Dreams”). “They are dumb like dreams,” he wrote of motion pictures, they “fill . . . imagC h a pt e r T h r e e

inations with pictures, powerful presentments.”305 The fact that audiences perceived neither the accompanying music nor the muteness of on-­screen figures demonstrated how films enabled “a particular form of psychism,” one critic wrote in 1912.306 “There is no popular spectacle in which the imagination of the spectator plays a greater role than in theater-­cinema,” he continued, “cinema-­theater is an art of suggesting dreams.”307 Freud never directly compared “the psychic apparatus [that is] built into homo natura” to a cinematograph. However, when he invited readers to “picture the instrument that carries out our mental functions as a compound microscope or a photographic apparatus, or something of the kind,” we can be confident that, by 1912, the cinematograph was likely the “something” they would have conjured. Certainly, this was the psychic apparatus that Faune invited its audience to picture—­“our little personal cinematograph,” as Gauthier-­Villars put it. That analogy of human mind and cinematograph appears as an anodyne, seemingly familiar figure of speech in Gauthier-­Villars’s review of Faune. What this remark did not do, certainly, was extrapolate and explore the implications of such an analogy as a model for comprehending the human psyche. That exploration did happen in Nijinsky’s choreography. In that sense, Faune might be called a work of metapsychology. The Mise-en-scène of Dreams

Figur e 121. Orchestra playing to ballet film, advertisement for the Edison Vitascope, 1896. Color lithograph, 73 × 97 cm. Collection of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, LC-­ DIG-­ppmsc-­03761. Courtesy Library of Congress.

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“I  Am the Eye in the Brain” Nijinsky’s “cinematography of bas-­relief” identified a metaphorical language enabling the articulation of certain hypotheses about the mechanics, or the dynamics, of the psychic apparatus, which Freud called “that most marvellous and most mysterious of all instruments.”308 It dramatized those dynamics by simulating presentational strategies often used in cinematography’s early, so-­called primitive phase of development. The “choreographic picture”—­its beginning and ending in particular—­ imitated processes of activation and fixation analogous to those used in the earliest presentations of animated pictures to dramatize for viewers “the novelty and fascination of the cinématographe” by flaunting the device’s newfound capacity to activate, and reactivate, static pictures.309 Through these pseudocinematic strategies, Faune communicated the simultaneously mobilizing and immobilizing energies of infantile sexual drives on the “instrument” of the human psyche. Although previous scholarship has ignored this fact, it is far from insignificant that Faune was “presented twice” to its audiences, as advertised on the cover of Sketch Supplement in 1913. This practice of double presentation, which seems to have been ultimately adopted as a standard performance procedure, dates to the evening of Faune’s premiere. As Prince Peter Lieven remembered: When the curtain came down there was an outburst of talk in the auditorium and protests and hisses were heard. Diaghilev gave the order to repeat the ballet. By this bold decision he scored a victory on the first evening of the performance. Whether the public’s indignation changed to astonishment, or it was simply Diaghilev’s obstinacy which prevailed, applause broke out when the curtain fell after the repetition of the ballet.310

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In the estimation of Lieven and other witnesses, Diaghilev’s order to repeat was a spontaneous, obstinate response to an evidently hostile audience. But there is evidence to suggest that this “bold decision” may have been premeditated in the choreographic conception. Repetition was structural to Faune’s genesis, with its inordinate number of rehearsals, and the ballet’s internal form and narrative seem almost to demand repetition. In addition, Faune made programmatic allusions to another, closely related Ballets Russes production that was often immediately encored. If one were to identify the single ballet that achieved greatest popularity during the Ballets Russes’s first three Parisian seasons, it would have to be Spectre de la rose, the sensation of 1911. This “vision of a young girl’s innocent dream of love and joy,” as one viewer described it, became synonymous with Nijinsky’s astonishing virtuosity and, more broadly, with popular narratives surrounding Ballets Russes spectatorship as an experience that plunged the viewer into pleasurable states of reverie.311 Dance itself, as both stimulus for and stuff of fantasy, was the subtext of

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Spectre. Quite fittingly, it had been conceptualized by an enthusiastic member of the Ballets Russes audience. The critic Jean-­Louis Vaudoyer, who had praised the company for satisfying “the appetite for dreaming,” had pointed to the first lines of Théophile Gautier’s 1827 poem as a perfect script for the company to more deliberately stage a dream scenario: “Soulève ta paupière close / Qu’effleure un songe virginal; / Je suis le spectre d’une rose / Que tu portais hier au bal.”312 This amorous ode, spoken by a rose to a young virgin who has conjured him in sleep, was translated by the choreographer Michel Fokine into a one-­act pas de deux (fig. 122) that was essentially a showcase for Nijinsky to perform a long and virtuosic solo. (The prominence Spectre gave to the male dancer was unprecedented.)313 Tamara Karsavina played a lovestruck maiden who, upon returning to her bedroom after an evening of ballroom excitement, falls asleep in a chair shortly after walking on set. Nijinsky then appeared at the window in a pink-­petaled body stocking and bonnet, and began, in the words of the program notes, “to lavish her with caresses.”314 Leaping and pirouetting around the armchair where the girl sat snoozing, to Carl Maria von Weber’s concert waltz Invitation to the Dance, the rose stroked the air around her, circled her chair, fluttered and curled his arms above her head until, “obedient to the spell, she rises to her feet.”315 The rose guided her in a brief waltz, which Karsavina danced with eyes closed. He then returned her gently

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Figur e 122. Vaslav Nijinsky and Tamara Karsavina in Spectre de la rose, 1911. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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to her seat before performing a final solo that climaxed in a stunning athletic feat. Traversing the stage with his impressive grand jeté, Nijinsky “literally flew through the window on the dying vibrance of a masterly crescendo!”316 The girl woke, glanced toward the window, and the curtain closed. Audiences, Nijinska reported, invariably “went mad” for Le Spectre de la rose.317 On several evenings, Nijinsky’s performance produced such thunderous applause that Diaghilev took the unprecedented step of ordering an immediate encore.318 Such a repetition was feasible, of course, only because of the ballet’s exceptionally short duration—­at about eight minutes, the length of this “trifling divertissement,” as Vaudoyer described it, was more typical of a variety act or one-­reeler film.319 Relevant to Faune is not only Spectre’s abbreviated format but also the metatheatrical poetics of dreaming established in it. The dream scenario staged in Spectre—­conceived, once again, by a member of the audience—­hinges on a self-­reflexive acknowledgment of the viewer’s eroticized pleasure in the spectacle of Nijinsky dancing, which it presented as an oneiric wish fulfillment. The ballet established a mirror relation between the seated spectator and the innocent girl asleep in her chair, whose erotic longings dreamed Nijinsky’s dance into being. “One saw the ballet in a kind of trance,” Cyril Beaumont wrote; “when it was over you had a feeling as though the warm theatre had caused you to doze,” and you had “suddenly awakened from an entrancing dream.”320 In staging the dream of Mallarmé’s faun, Nijinsky seems to have deliberately exploited the familiar dream of Gautier’s “virgin,” working within the metatheatrical fiction established in Spectre, which remained on programs in 1912, including the evening of Faune’s premiere. That audiences intuited the connection between these two dances is evident from the insistent allusions to Spectre in Faune’s critical reception, most notably in the front-­page article by Gaston Calmette, who scolded Nijinsky for failing to recognize that if he wanted to “to conquer a room with poetry, emotion, dreams and beauty,” Spectre was “the type of spectacle one should give to the public.”321 The programmatic nature of Nijinsky’s departure from this officially sanctioned dream script was recognized by Albert Bazaillas, who noted that the dancer still “achieved his usual success in Spectre de la rose,” and wondered, “is it the taste for contrast which has driven Mr. Nijinsky to give a completely contra­ dictory impression in L’Après-­midi d’un faune?”322 Indeed, Faune is predicated on a more or less point-­by-­point inversion of Spectre.323 Each work took its name and scenario from a well-­known poem that gave voice, in first person, to an erotic dream narrative. In Faune, as in Spectre, the poem became the pretext for an unusually brief ballet, around ten minutes long, with a simple, circular, climactic plot proceeding from a protagonist in solitude, to a brief danced encounter, then back to solitude again. While the storylines are analogous, there is an obvious transposition of roles. No longer the leaping virtuoso, in

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Faune it is Nijinsky who spends half the ballet lounging and virtually motionless, remaining onstage for the whole ballet as the nymphs come and go; it is Nijinsky, in other words, who inhabits the young virgin’s dreaming, desiring role. Going hand in hand with this transposition of roles is a transposition in the arc of dramatic action, a transposition that exposes in a deliberately explicit manner Spectre’s implicitly sexual subtext.324 If the famous leap out the window served as a symbolic climax to the songe virginal staged in Spectre—­in which desire was sublimated into kinetic energy, and into art itself, through the grand jeté that would “rest in the annals of ballet history as the best demonstration of the aerial essence of classical dance”—­in Faune, the dream’s moment of “satisfaction” was desublimated.325 Desublimated literally, in the sense that the dance appeared to culminate in a masturbatory climax marked acoustically by the ting of an antique cymbal, and also metaphorically, in the sense that the absence of all virtuosic movement was the key aesthetic strategy of Faune as a whole.326 This is no “innocent dream.” Indeed, there can be no “innocent dream”—­that seems to be the gist of Faune’s riposte to Spectre. The conceit of cinematography of bas-­relief was the device that actualized this riposte. This device enabled Faune to literalize two key features of Spectre. First, by presenting itself as an archaic bas-­relief, Faune placed a new degree of dramatic emphasis on the notion of a “choreographic picture” (tableau chorégraphique), a designation the company had applied for the first time to Spectre, possibly due to its exceptionally short duration.327 While the designation passed unnoticed for viewers of Spectre, audiences of Faune were made acutely aware of the ballet’s pictorial character. Nearly every review repeated the phrase to articulate the ballet’s simulation of stasis.328 Second, by presenting itself as “cinematography,” the ballet internalized a pseudomechanical means to satisfy the demand for encore demonstrated by the audiences of Spectre, who seem to have exhibited the same appetite for repetition that Freud associated with children, who could never “have their pleasurable experiences repeated often enough” and were “inexorable in their insistence that the repetition be an identical one.”329 By assuming a form that gave new emphasis to these two features of Spectre—­repetition, and the conceit of a “choreographic picture”—­Faune asserted a far more overt and forceful connection between dreaming and infantile sexual impulses, which had been merely implicit in the “virginal” and “innocent” Spectre. Also, and inseparably, it established a newly mechanical metaphorical language for dreaming as a psychic process. Faune began by establishing its status as a “picture,” insistently withholding the spectacle of motion its audience had come to observe. Contrary to theatrical norms, Nijinsky specified that the curtain should rise before the orchestra began to play, so that when the opening flute solo of Debussy’s Prélude commenced, the audience already sat staring at a motionless stage picture: the faun reclining on the “little moun-

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tain” projecting from the backdrop in such a way that he appeared to be lounging “inside” the background.330 For approximately thirty seconds after the music commenced—­a long time for a performance of only ten minutes—­the faun remained motionless in his initial position, propping up his torso just slightly on his left elbow, the right knee bent and the right hand holding the flute to his lips.331 As emphasized in the forged review ascribed to Rodin, the effect of the opening was to establish Nijinsky as an inanimate object: “You would say Nijinsky is a statue when, at the rising of the curtain, he is stretched out on the ground, the knee bent, the pipe to his lips.”332 The impression of stasis at the ballet’s outset would have been dramatically heightened by the “musical literalism or sound effect” built into this opening tableau, a musical literalism that was, as Caddy has stressed, willfully crude and blatant.333 There was an obvious effort to “synch” sound and stage image, so that, as one reviewer put it, “the spotted faun fingering his flute” appeared “as though he himself had found Debussy’s lovely phrase for his musings—­motionless, solitary, dream-­rapt.”334 This synching served, paradoxically, to present the choreographic picture as if at an order of remove from the live accompaniment.335 Because the static faun “fingering his flute” was presented to the audience before the orchestra began to play, the effect was less to link the music and the diegesis than to announce, in effect, “the show is beginning.” By building an experience of waiting for activation into Faune’s opening, Nijinsky recalled the strategic manipulation of audience suspense and boredom that structured the earliest public presentations of cinematographic pictures. As Tom Gunning has emphasized, in the first demonstrations of moving pictures by the Lumière brothers and others, screenings began with projections of still photographs. By slightly delaying the illusion of motion that was “the apparatus’s raison d’être,” presenters of early film were able to place great perceptual emphasis on the mechanical achievement of “the astonishing moment of movement.”336 When the projector cranked the still projection into motion, audiences experienced not simply an astonishing mobilization of stasis but a cognitive encounter with the mechanism of that mobilization, an awareness of “the force of the cinematic apparatus,” as Gunning puts it.337 Faune invoked this cinematographic screening practice in a “live” context where the cinématographe was patently absent, but where motion was likewise precisely what was promised. By establishing pictorial stasis at the outset, Nijinsky gave dramatic emphasis to the felt presence of some external force that seemed to act upon the choreographic picture to mobilize it. Caddy, who has offered the most sophisticated interpretation of Faune’s complex and sophisticated audiovisual relationships, makes an essential point when she suggests that Faune presents its movement as “under the influence of an external stimulus.” But I disagree with her suggestion that Nijinsky invites us “to imagine the music as that stimulus.”

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To suggest that the choreography treats music “like a hypnotist’s voice, galvanizing onstage bodies” is to miss the multiple levels of mediation (technological, psychological) intrinsic to Nijinsky’s dramatic conceit.338 The decision to lift the curtain before launching into the score demonstrably subverted the long and deeply held assumption that music functions for dance as an impetus or animating force. The timing of the curtain’s lifting necessitates the interpretation that, rather than dancers “dancing to” the score, the orchestra was “playing to” the choreographic picture, somewhat in the manner of what was called, in the parlance of American silent cinema, “ ‘cue-­music,’ i.e., music specifically corresponding to an on-­screen cue such as a bugler blowing his bugle.”339 Thus the impetus for movement in Faune seemed to come from somewhere other than the “intoxicating” sounds of the live music that, by appearances, only the audience could hear. The structure of Faune suggests a more convoluted, multistep procedure: the curtain opens to reveal the choreographic picture, the orchestra plays to it, and that sonic stimulus signals the ignition of a psychological activation process, the “little personal cinematograph” inside each audience member “start[ing] itself up and unwind[ing] its fairy-­like film under . . . closed eyelids,” to recall again the language of Gauthier-­Villars. “I know what an eye is. An eye is the theater. The brain is the audience. I am the eye in the brain.”340 This extraordinary statement from Nijinsky’s 1919 manuscript reveals the degree to which he comprehended stage and auditorium as interdependent components of a single, integrally functioning psychic system. Nijinsky’s inaugural piece of choreography implemented this conception of theater. For quite clearly, in the dream mechanics implied by L’Après-­midi d’un faune, “the brain is the audience,” and in that brain is Nijinsky’s faun. Jill Beck, who supervised the Juilliard Dance Ensemble’s 1989 reconstruction of the choreography from Nijinsky’s notation, provided one of the most insightful observations on the ballet when she stated that “the audience is as if watching the projection of the faun’s dream on a two-­dimensional screen.”341 Her insight must be pressed further. The dreamer of this dream is located simultaneously within and in front of the choreographic picture. The “eye in the brain,” the eye that “is the theater,” is an eye that sees, we could say, “under closed eyelids.” As in Spectre, Faune operates through a paradoxical equation in which the actual eyelid closing equates to a mental eye opening and a dream beginning. Spectre, which staged a dream script that launched with the injunction “Soulève ta paupière close” (Open your closed eyelid), plays this out simply: the girl walks onto the empty set, sits down, closes her eyes and falls asleep, the rose arrives, waltzes her with her eyes still closed, and flies out the window; then the girl’s eyes open. In Faune this organizing logic is less obvious because it is not acted out but internalized structurally, absorbed into the logic of auditorium as brain and theater stage as eye, or the Schauplatz der Träume. The moment of the dream’s beginning

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“under our closed eyelids” coincides with the curtain rising to reveal a picture in which the faun’s eyes never close, but in which all characters perform, as Nijinsky specified, “as though asleep with . . . eyes open.” The open eyes of the faun and the nymphs who appear to him match onstage the metaphorical situation of the theater spectator (or cinematographic spectator) as dreamer. Perhaps part of the significance of “cinematography of bas-­relief” as a choreographic conceit resided in the fact that animated pictures were widely understood to provide an experience in which seeing was equivalent to sleeping. “They sleep; their eyes no longer see,” Jules Romains wrote in a 1911 article titled “The Crowd at the Cinematograph.” “They are no longer conscious of their bodies. Instead there are only passing images, a gliding and rustling of dreams . . . they imagine that it is they who are experiencing all these adventures, all these catastrophes, all these celebrations.”342 Nijinsky’s choreography solicited precisely this kind of vicarious identification with the ­title character’s celebrations, catastrophes, and adventures. We see this most overtly in the homage to L’Après-­midi d’un faune filmed by Charlie Chaplin, who saw Nijinsky perform the ballet in Los Angeles in 1916.343 Three years later, he reenacted parts of the little faun’s dance in a dream sequence that commences after his signature character, the Little Fellow, has been knocked unconscious.344 Nijinsky’s choreography for Faune emphasized the “completely egoistic” structure of dreams, in which “the person who plays the chief part in their scenes is always to be recognized as the dreamer.”345 Even if he frankly identified the dance as autobiography (“The ‘Faun’ is me”), the ballet involved the spectator in a manner that simultaneously implied “the faun is thee.” Just as in Mallarmé’s eclogue, where the faun’s first-­ person speech simultaneously speaks as the “I” of the poet concealed behind the mythological character and as a voice in the head of the poem’s reader, who is invited to be “during the reading, the faun himself,” in Nijinsky’s choreography the faun is a character in whom the selves of choreographer and audience merge.346 In the ballet, however, what is affirmed in this merging of subjectivities is the common currency of infantile sexuality as a dimension of human experience that is shared. That the dream acted out by the faun could be classified as what Freud termed a “typical dream”—­a dream of exhibiting—­suggests the degree to which the faun might be considered a prototypical dreamer. Similarly, it is the faun’s masturbation that makes him, as Minskii stated, a figure “in whom 99 out of 100 young men recognize themselves,” a recognition that Nijinsky himself would likely have imagined extending further, beyond distinctions of gender.347 “I know that girls and boys practice masturbation,” he wrote in 1919.348 While Nijinsky’s choreography places obvious emphasis on the form of the male genitalia, in a certain sense the faun is a figure for boys and girls equally—­it is not insignificant that the faun’s postures were initially tested on the body of Nijinsky’s sister, who reassumed the role of faun when she briefly revived her brother’s dance for the Ballets Russes ten years later.349

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If archaic bas-­relief serves as the formal structure through which the ballet materialized the impulses ascribed to infantile sexuality, cinematography serves as the means of expressing more broadly the dynamic function of infantile sexuality, as something that serves as what Freud described as the “driving force—­il primo motore” in the construction of dreams and in the mechanisms of the human psyche more broadly.350 Faune suggests that Nijinsky conceptualized childish sexual impulses along similar lines, in terms of a “motor factor” or Triebe (“drives,” from treiben, to urge).351 What distinguishes his conception of sexuality from, for instance, Rodin’s materialization of the “vivifying force of sex” is that vivification is cast in machinic terms. Hence, for Nijinsky, there is nothing inherently dynamic in the way that sexual drives motorize the human subject. As a “driving force that sets the vehicle in motion,” the sexual drives seem to act upon a subject not capable of self-­movement.352 This concept of static motion is communicated most powerfully in Faune’s opening tableau, as well as its ending, which answers the opening moment of activation with an allusion to the cinematographic potential for repetitive reactivation. Faune invoked cinema’s astonishing capacity not only for activation but also for fixation. One of the principal wonders of a cinematographic spectacle, Rémy de Gourmont wrote in 1907, was that it was “always identical to itself.” It could “function day and night for a century,” he stated; “the actors perform once, and it is forever; their gestures are fixed.”353 This testimony bears out the assertion by film historians Nicolas Dulac and André Gaudreault that the “attraction” of early cinema was “based above all on repetition . . . its model par excellence [was] the endless loop.”354 Faune’s inordinate number of rehearsals, not to mention Nijinsky’s subsequent invention of a system of dance notation to record a “score of movement” dictating every detail of the choreography “down to the gesture of each finger,” betrays his investment in eradicating the irregularities and spontaneous variations inherent in live performance. He wanted to ensure the dance would be “always identical to itself” from one performance to the next.355 Implicit in Faune’s form and narrative is the potential—­if not the demand—­for repetition. As numerous commentators have observed, the narrative progression of Nijinsky’s short ballet is almost perfectly circular. The faun begins and ends the dance alone on his rock, at the same physical location onstage and in horizontal supine and prone poses that read as inverted versions of one another.356 The opening and closing poses also mirror each other at the level of symbolism. The flute in hand at the ballet’s outset prefigures the final masturbatory gesture of reaching under the pelvis, so that the “playing” that begins the dance resolves ultimately into what Freud described as the infantile sense of this word, “used in the nursery to describe the activity of the hands upon the genitals.”357 The shock of the ballet’s conclusion consisted not simply in its suggestion of a masturbatory climax but in its invocation, precisely in that moment, of a particular cinematographic analogy to the looped

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Fig u re 123. Ottomar Anschütz demonstrating his electrical tachyscope. From Scientific American 61, no. 20 (November 16, 1889). © 1889 Scientific American, Inc.

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movement sequences characteristic of “animated pictures” before the linear format of film became dominant. Many early cinematographic apparatuses produced an illusion of movement by arranging successive chronophotographs around rotating disks (fig. 123), following the example of earlier nineteenth-­century optical toys such as the zoetrope or phenakistoscope. These cinematographic loops restricted possibilities for narrative development by eradicating “any hint of temporal progression,” presenting a type of movement Friedrich Tietjen has described as “kinetic stasis, a present progressive in permanence.”358 Even after the linear format of film superseded these circular structures, “kinetic stasis” persisted. As Tietjen argues, early films often incorporated the loop as a “formal and narrative element.”359 He cites the Lumière brothers’ Workers Leaving a Factory (1895) as an example of a linear film that “ends with roughly the same scene as it started.”360 After its initial projection, this circular film was screened again because the audience “demanded that the film showing be immediately repeated.”361 If, as Tietjen argues, the formal pre­ condition for the loop’s “kinetic stasis” was the “seamless joining of the first and last images,” the faun’s return to a recumbent position on the rock at the ballet’s end creates just this type of seamlessness.362 This return can be seen both to anticipate and to announce the potential for the repetitive reactivation of a loop that begins with a static faun “fingering his flute” and ends with his self-­administered “satisfaction.”

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Needless to say, the suggestion of a loop underscores the obscenity of the ballet’s final gesture. It makes material and structural the pervasive notion of masturbation as a paradigmatically compulsive, repetitive behavior—­the “primary addiction,” as Freud put it.363 More importantly, the form of the loop in Faune makes vivid a conception, fundamental to Freud’s thinking, of the human subject’s potential to become arrested in its sexual development. Perversions, as Freud understood them, were nothing more than “fixations at early stages of development.”364 He regarded masturbation specifically as “a way of fixating the infantile state,” preserving an erotic disposition that never ascended above “the lowest of the sexual strata.”365 In one of eight seminars on masturbation hosted by the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1912, he asserted that the most significant peril of maintaining this infantile activity was “the setting of a pattern in which the individual becomes accustomed to reach the satisfaction of his needs, not by means of great efforts but by means of a ‘short circuit.’”  366 The sense of a short circuit that arrests the subject at the level of the infantile is implied in Faune both within the plot and on the metatheatrical level. For the double presentation of the ballet implicated the audience and its desires in its looping structure. Although much public outrage was expressed at “the morals and manners of the faun—­to say nothing of his attitude upon the sex question,” the repetition of the ballet necessarily evoked the theatrical convention of an encore.367 “The fact that the scene had to be repeated,” as one British journal stated of Faune, “seems to indicate that the majority is distinctly in its favor.”368 For viewers like Calmette, this must have been Nijinsky’s crowning offensive gesture: the insinuation that the audience, like children who could “never have their pleasurable experiences repeated often enough,” would desire to rewitness immediately—­perhaps infinitely—­the “exhibition” just presented to them. But beyond ostentatiously acknowledging the infantile Schaulust of the spectator, the offensiveness of Faune’s repetition resided in the way it insinuated that this repetition was activated by, and occurring in, the “little personal cinematograph” lodged in the spectator. The circularity of Faune and its double presentation function as a powerful metaphor for a tendency toward fixation in psychological terms. Through its allusion to the cinematographic loop, the ballet can be seen to anticipate a theory—­formulated by Freud during his 1910–­ 1914 analysis of the Russian nobleman Sergei Pankejeff (now commonly known from Freud’s case study as the Wolf Man)—­that “early impressions of sexual life are characterized by an increased pertinacity or susceptibility to fixation,” particularly in “persons who are later to become neurotics or perverts.”369 A full discussion of Faune’s many congruences with Freud’s case history of Pankejeff, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis” (1918), is beyond the scope of this chapter. It is important to note, however, that the case—­a crucial one in the history of psychoanalysis, in which Freud formulated new theories about both repetition compulsions and the potentially traumatic psychic effects of infantile

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sexuality—­revolved around a psychic process Freud described as the “activation” (Aktivierung) of sexual memories from early childhood in the form of a static dream picture.370 Faune can be understood to stage an argument analogous to Freud’s. Both in form and in narrative, the ballet implies that in dreams people are necessarily destined to repeat, or reactivate, certain kinds of sexual scenes remembered from childhood: scenes of viewing human or animal genitals, scenes of engagement in exhibitionism or masturbation. To quote the words of Romola Nijinsky, the woman the choreographer eventually married, Faune dramatized a universal category of experience: “simple incidents from ordinary life which happen to every human being.”371

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Perhaps the most significant innovation of the ballet L’Après-­midi d’un faune, as the endpoint of a chain of works drawing on ancient visual and textual precedents all orbiting around the interlocking themes of sexuality, sleep, and dreaming, was to give physical embodiment to a comprehension of dreaming as a perpetual looping back of human thought and psychosexual development to its beginnings. This reversion to beginnings became increasingly radicalized as the faun passed from Mallarmé to Debussy to Nijinsky. Mallarmé’s eclogue was already structured as a loop. The poem commences with the faun seeming to awaken from a dream and closes just after his announcement that he must go back to sleep (“il faut dormir”); as Evlyn Gould writes, his monologue “ends in a beginning that closes it into a circle.”372 This circularity departs from the classical poetic model invoked in Mallarmé’s subtitle. Virgil’s cycle of ten eclogues, taken as a corpus, emphasizes an asymmetrical structure that is established by reference to the bodily postures of the poems’ speakers. The verb recubare (“to recline”) in the famous first line of Eclogue I—“Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi / Silvestrem tenui Musan meditaris a ­ vena” (You, Tityrus, reclining under the canopy of a spreading beech / wooing the woodland Muse on slender reed)—­articulates an image of the body in a liminal state of horizontality that will be brought to a close in the third to last line of the tenth and final eclogue, with the injunction surgamus (“let us rise”).373 As Massimo Scalabrini and Davide Stimilli have explicated, Virgil’s recubare—­a verb that, as they stress, is fundamentally ambiguous in Virgil’s usage, articulating a kind of sprawling on the ground that “indifferently becomes humans and animals”—­established the quintessential “pastoral posture” that European art and literature would deploy to represent states of withdrawal into nature, whether for sleep, music, poetry, or philosophical discourse.374 However, for Virgil, reclining is a condition destined to be terminated: the surgamus of Eclogue X “negates . . . the reclining position and demises the pastoral register in favor of higher poetic goals.”375 That final repudiation of the hor-

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izontal was elided in Mallarmé’s poem, which concluded with the faun declaring his intention to abandon his waking state with the words “il faut dormir.” The text never references the postures of the faun. The illustration for the first edition—­done by Manet—­shows him sitting upright on a mound of earth. Although the eclogue clearly conjures the classic image of a pensive, seated thinker, it also emphasizes horizontality as the baseline condition of the faun’s existence. It is the state to which he will always return, to sleep and dream and fuel his fantasies. Mallarmé’s L’Après-­midi d’un faune is a circuit. But it is not, in my reading, a “short circuit.” Even if the poem implies, as Gould suggests, that the faun’s “activities take place in the same way every day,” there is not a sense that the faun is psychologically stunted or imprisoned in a repetitive pattern.376 Mallarmé entitled the draft prior to the final version “Improvisation du faune,” suggesting that in some sense he regarded his faun’s waking reflections as exploratory and open-­ended. His faun passes an afternoon that is quite productive: as he discourses on his “wish to perpetuate” the nymphs, he makes intellectual progress toward self-­knowledge, if not toward the sublimation of desire into art. The poem’s circularity perhaps evokes the cyclical structure of the rhythmic alternation of sleep and waking thought that structures all human existence, and affirms the intellectually generative function of a continual return to sleep as a state from which to awaken. Debussy’s symphonic translation gave a more radically nonprogressive form to the circularity of the eclogue. The Prélude à L’Après-­midi d’un faune, which condensed material from a composition originally to be titled Prélude, interludes et paraphrase finale pour L’Après-­midi d’un faune, manifests the composer’s preference for static harmonies that create an “absence of ‘progression’ or forward drive.”377 The Prélude does not unfold in time according to any existing plot archetypes, such as sonata form. Over the course of the 110 measures of the composition—­one measure for each line of Mallarmé’s poem—­the opening flute motto, or “faun theme,” repeats seven times, accompanied by different textures, without ever resolving or truly developing. Indeed, we could say of the Prélude à L’Après-­midi d’un faune, as of Debussy’s preludes in general—­ which were, according to philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch, the composer’s signature form, as the perfect embodiment of his “refusal of development”—­that the prelude is a “perpetual preface,” or a “prelude [that] never finishes commencing.”378 This perpetually prefatory tendency in Debussy’s music led Jankélévitch to identify in it a temporal structure that could be described as aural “kinetic stasis.” “The most Debussyan paradox,” the philosopher proposed, was “the immobility of movement or, if one prefers, the movement of the immobile.”379 “Even when the music of Debussy seems animated by the genius of perpetual movement, this mobility assumes again an inexplicably stationary aspect: for the mobility of Debussy is more ‘cinematic’ than truly dynamic.”380

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A prelude that never finishes commencing is an apt way of describing Faune’s vision of the temporal dynamics that structure the “psychic apparatus that is built into homo natura.” For Nijinsky’s cinematography of bas-­relief presents this apparatus as if built to reactivate the archaic, the infantile, and the animal, on a nightly basis. Mechanizing the circularity of Mallarmé’s eclogue through the form of a cinematographic loop, the faun’s “wish to perpetuate” resolves in the ballet into a choreographic form matching Debussy’s kinetic stasis. The “wish to perpetuate” no longer mobilizes the subject toward the production of art or offspring but, rather, entraps the faun and his audience in a “perpetual preface.” In that sense, the pointed retitling of the ballet on the cover of the photographic album published in 1914 is more than an insignificant detail. Here, the title Le Prélvde à L’Après-­midi d’vn favne appears above a photograph of the frontal face of Nijinsky as faun (fig. 124). The image is cropped tightly around his head—­or his “brain”—­from which the contents of the book seem to be issuing. His eyes are, quite notably, closed. This retroactive retitling—­which reinstated the Latin v in place of the u through which Mallarmé gestured toward the ancientness of his poetic material—­repeats the overwriting of Mallarmé’s eclogue that the dance had enacted on the night of its first live performance. The force of the circularity embedded in the choreography was such that it demonstrably foreclosed the moment of metaphorical awakening deferred until the falling of the curtain. When the curtain fell on Faune so that Mallarmé’s poem could “commence in everyone’s memories,” as the program notes proposed, the curtain simply opened onto the scene again.

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The visual impact of L’Après-­midi d’un faune as a spectacular transformation in the aesthetics of dreaming is given force through Nijinsky’s assumption, at the ballet’s outset, of the quintessential “pastoral posture”—­reclining on the ground, leaning back on his left elbow, on the little mound Nijinsky also referred to as the faun’s “bed” in his choreographic notes. This opening pose condenses within it a kaleidoscopic inventory of recumbent bodies in European art history, from singing pastoral shepherds to sleeping nymphs to contemplative river gods, even perhaps the figure of Adam on the Sistine Ceiling, “half slumb’ring on its own right arm,” as John Keats described him.381 The faun’s closing pose, which flips this supine posture to prone, has, by contrast, a far less extensive artistic pedigree. Turning the front of the body back toward the ground like a quadruped animal, or like a baby (the creature that, according to the riddle of the sphinx, “walks on four legs in the morning”), this final posture of prone recumbency spells out the newly explicit associations of the recumbent body not only with autoeroticism but also with the animal and the infantile. That the reclining body, whether asleep in bed or propped up slightly on the analyst’s divan (or Ruhebett, “rest-­

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Fig ur e 124 . Adolphe de Meyer, cover of Le Prélvde à L’Après-­midi d’vn favne (Paris: Paul Iribe, 1914). Photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY.

bed” in German), became the most recognizable e­ mblem for the psycho­ analytic project, is a truism we need not belabor.382 What Nijinsky’s choreography reveals, with astonishing clarity, is how new understandings of what occurred under the “closed eyelids” of reclining bodies informed the affectation of historical circularity enacted in European figural art around the turn of the century, when artists were intent on restoring human figures to the postures they assumed in what then were deemed to be the “preludes” to art’s history.

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Acknowledgments

The fingerprints of a multitude are invisible but omnipresent on every page herein. The mistakes that I am sure remain are very much my own, but it would be most honest to all that was best about the years of writing to attribute collective authorship. A long cavalcade of teachers and students, archivists, librarians and scholars, friends and family members made it not simply possible but also joyful to write this book. After completing final edits in the relative isolation forced upon the world by the pandemic, I see this book above all as the residue of a history of conversations with other people—­a blessed many of which took place in the flesh, in museums and stacks, and around seminar and dinner tables. Knowing now how they tend to build vast and surprising networks of people around them, and turn strangers into treasured friends, I can never be in doubt that scholarly books—­for all that they can force one to live in sedentary confusion, at the limits of one’s mental powers—­are worth the effort and delayed gratification, at least for the writers of them! My first and most important intellectual debt is to the teachers who made my scholarship conceivable. Since the germ of this book took shape in her seminar in my first year as a student at Prince­ton, my doctoral advisor Brigid Doherty set an example for how to think and write with imagination, rigor, and appreciation for the absurd. She understood my questions many years before I did. Spyros Papapetros likewise shepherded my early research, and still continues to bestow bottomless insights, sources, and criticisms and encouragement. Brigid and Spyros, in their own writings, modeled for me ways of caressing details and interpreting the farthest reaches of their implications from interdisciplinary perspectives. I am very lucky that theirs are the two pedagogical voices planted permanently in my head. For their humor and humanity, I am also immensely lucky to have gained them both as friends. During my years at Princeton and since, Hal Foster and Bridget Alsdorf both have given generously of their time and knowledge, con-

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tributing in innumerable ways to this book and to my education as an art historian. The insights and research suggestions of Anne McCauley, Michael Koortbojian, and Simon Morrison also substantially shaped the direction of my arguments. I must also thank two teachers from earlier periods of my education. Helaine Smith made me love to read and write through her inspired teaching of English. As an undergraduate, Jonathan Crary’s lecture course “The Origins of Modern Visual Culture” tilted the direction of my interests toward the nineteenth century. My indebtedness to his scholarship will be evident throughout the book. Fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York provided havens and material support for the research that became this book. The past several years of writing have taken place at the Clark Art Institute, while teaching in the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art. When I arrived, I did not fully fathom just how fortunate I was. Marc Gotlieb has been the most generous colleague, interlocutor, and mentor, and his comments on the manuscript at multiple stages have significantly improved it. I have also had much fun in Marc’s company, as well as in the company of Graduate Program staff, Karen Kowitz and George Ferger, who have been immensely supportive of and patient with me. Teaching at Williams, and in the orbit of the Clark and its Research and Academic Program, has enabled vital intellectual exchange and camaraderie with many remarkable people over the years. I thank especially Esther Bell, Shira Brisman, Victoria Brooks, Horace Ballard, Mari Rodriquez Binnie, Julia Bryan-­Wilson, Lauren Canady, Jill Casid, Mel Chen, Lisa Dorin, Laure de Margerie, Nina Dubin, Caroline Fowler, Brynn Hatton, Guy Hedreen, Christopher Heuer, Michael Anne Holly, Matthew Jesse Jackson, Agnes Lugo-­Ortiz, Liz McGowan, Olivier Meslay, Keith Moxey, Kailani Polzak, Mary Roberts, Avinoam Shalem, Rob Wiesenberger, and Caitlin W ­ oolsey. The students in my graduate seminars discussed this material with me many times over, and influenced my thinking profoundly. More concretely, many provided detailed critical feedback on chapters. For their careful readings and comments, I thank Andrew Kensett, Charles ­Keiffer, Jonathan Odden, Gabriella Moreno, Brandon Scott, and, especially, Jessie Alperin, my current research assistant, who drafted meticulous reports on every chapter. Several other brilliant research assistants contributed to the book, starting with Ewan Wallace. Jalen Chang “trudged onwards” alongside me in writing the first full draft and reviewing the final proofs, making many original contributions while also always lifting my spirits. Cole Gruber oversaw the final year of work on the manuscript and ensured that it saw completion, making many substantive improvements to my arguments in the process. I am grateful for thought-­provoking exchanges along the way with André Dombroski, Martha Lucy, Holly Clayson, Elizabeth Cropper, ­Peter Lukehart, Justine de Young, Aaron Glass, Chris Wood, Étienne ­Jollet, Maria Stavrinaki, Andrei Pop, Charlotte Hale, Subhashini Kaligotla,

Ac k n o w l e d g m e n t s

­ atie Hanson, Elaine Yau, Susan Wager, Martha Ward, Susan Stein, K Kris Kersey, Mary Morton, Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Aparna Kapadia, Megan Heuer, Jeff Fraiman, Laura Corey, ­Christiana ­Bonin, Ralph Ubl, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Tamar Mayer. While at the Met, it was my great good fortune to form a writing group with Trevor Stark and Sam Johnson; their critical feedback on many occasions vastly improved the manuscript. Richard Neer, Joseph Rishel, Kristina Haugland, Judith Dolkart, and Judy Dion led me to important iconographic insights about Seurat. My work on Nijinsky has been sustained through conversations with Lynn G ­ arafola, Juliet Bellow, and Nicole Svobody, all of whom read the chapter and commented insightfully. Elizabeth H. Stern made possible my engagement with Russian sources (with additional thanks to ­Matthew Jesse Jackson for a crucial, late-­stage piece of guidance). Jennifer Homans on several occasions provided a lively intellectual forum to discuss my work on dance, as did Alastair McCauley. Emily Braun and Nina Dubin generously read my chapter on Klimt, which was also improved through stimulating dialogue with Eva Giloi. I am particularly grateful to Mark Haxthausen for his penetrating comments on the entire manuscript. Two anonymous readers for the University of Chicago Press made sensitive, farseeing suggestions that enabled me to articulate my core arguments with more force and nuance. The many librarians and archivists who helped me find my way in repositories across Europe as well as in New York, Washington, and Princeton, are too numerous to name here. But in Williamstown, special thanks are due to Alison O’Grady, interlibrary loan supervisor at Sawyer library. Most of all, I am immensely indebted to Karen Bucky, Melissa Segalla, Terri Boccia, and Marisa Daley in the Manton Research Center Library. Beyond the massive logistical efforts that they have each made on countless occasions to hunt down books and sources (as well as help keeping track of those already in my office), they have created a paradise in which to work, not simply because of their efficiency but also because of their patience, warmth, and palpable enthusiasm for the progress of the many scholars whose works they nurture. I am grateful to my editor, Susan Bielstein, for believing in my project at an early stage; the initial handshake of our “ladies’ agreement” gave me confidence and impetus. My prose also greatly benefited from her line edits. I thank James Whitman Toftness for facilitating with such professionalism and kindness, Joel Score for copy­editing, Fronia Simpson for proofreading, and Gina Broze for her work on procuring images. Matt Avery designed the book with verve and sensitivity. The Barr Ferree Publication Fund from Princeton’s Department of Art & Archaeology provided crucial financial support for this publication. I thank Diane Schulte and Maureen Killeen for their expert administration of that grant. I am not sure the extent to which most authors involve their friends and family in the intimate mechanics of the editorial process; my sneaking suspicion is that I exceed the norm. So many of my loved ones have

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been drafted into the composition and revision of this manuscript: ­ ordan Kirk and Eva Kenny, members of my first writing group and the J dearest of friends, kept me laughing through the agonies of early chapters and sketched the book’s structure on a cocktail napkin. Alex Bevilacqua has become my intellectual and emotional home away from home in Williamstown—­the book in its present form is a testament to four years of conversation and scrumptious meals in his company, and mercifully, the introduction bears the marks of his particularly astute advice and intervention. I have been in a fifteen-­year-­long dialogue about art and every other possible topic with Ken Okiishi and Nick Mauss; their conversation, their curiosities, and their laughter are stamped all over the text, which they have championed, and read again and again. Michael Sanchez is my fellow traveler in art history. I am privileged to exchange all my writing with him, and to profit in life as in writing from his humor and lucidity. Julia Hyland Bruno and Lily Foster have accompanied me through life since the start; their thoughts and critical interventions have shaped me, and this book, at every important juncture along the path; they anchor me and buoy me simultaneously. I am grateful to have gained from these de facto sisters Adam Weg, Lorez Hyland Bruno Weg, and Adam Holmes, who deserves particular thanks. In addition to driving dinners across mountaintops, he produced invaluable Danish translations of Julius Lange. Alex Zachary has been a steadfast, cherished friend and chosen family member; his boundless faith in me is a primary engine of my progress, and our constant dialogue has oriented my writing and my world. In the last years of work, John ­Lansdowne brought delight and insight; he has showered me and this book with love, and both are better for it. The dedicatees are Suzanne Butterfield and Stuart Rosen, my mother and father. They have supported my work at every step in every way conceivable. On the page and in the world beyond, it is my hope that I can reflect back one smidgen of their spirit of generosity and joie de vivre; the happiest periods of writing were in my mother’s garden, a beautiful setting that is the product of the bottomless aesthetic and emotional care she pours into everything and everyone around her. I have been the most profound beneficiary. My father, a wildly partisan cheerleader of this endeavor, has read and edited every line of the book, dozens of times. The book is for them—­Bien sûr!

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Ac k n o w l e d g m e n t s

Notes

Due to constraints of space, endnotes do not reproduce quotations in their original languages. When particular words carry particular resonance for my argument, or when we are attending to historical shifts in semantics or to neologisms, the original is in the body of the text. When I have modified published English translations, I include reference to the original. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own, though my notes will indicate how many are indebted to the kindness and expertise of my friends and fellow scholars. In chapter 3, all translations from the Russian, unless otherwise noted, are unpublished translations made on my behalf by Elizabeth H. Stern.

Abbreviations AR Faune Score

Fonds Maus GK GW MDN

NPD

SE

Archives Rodin, Musée Rodin, Paris Ann Hutchinson Guest and Claudia Jeschke, Nijinsky’s Faune Restored: A Study of Vaslav Nijinsky’s 1915 Dance Score and His Dance Notation System, 2nd ed. (Hampshire, UK: Noverre Press, 2010) Fonds Octave Maus, Les Archives de l’Art contemporain en Belgique Hermann Bahr, Gegen Klimt: Historisches, Philosophie, ­ edizin, Goldfische, Fries (Vienna: Eisensteiner, 1903) M Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke: Chronologisch Geordnet, 18 vols. (London: Imago, 1991) Ann Hutchinson Guest, Philippe Néagu, and Jean-­Michel Nectoux, eds., Afternoon of a Faun: Mallarmé, Debussy, ­Nijinsky (New York: Vendome, 1989) Ruth Berson, ed., The New Painting, Impressionism, 1874–­ 1886: Documentation, 2 vols. (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1996) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–­74)

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Introduction









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1. Félix Fénéon, “Les Impressionnistes,” La Vogue, June 13–­20, 1886, reprinted in NPD, 1:441–­45, 244. 2. Félix Fénéon, “L’Impressionnisme aux Tuileries,” L’Art moderne, September 19, 1886, reprinted in Oeuvres plus que complètes, ed. Joan Halperin, 2 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1970), 1:53–58, 56. 3. Maurice Hermel, “L’Exposition de peinture de la rue Lafitte,” La France libre, May 28, 1886, in NPD, 1:457. 4. Related issues of figural orientation have featured centrally in some accounts of earlier nineteenth-­century art practices; see in particular the discussions of the dorsal Rückenfigur in Joseph Leo Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), and of “facingness” in Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism; or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 5. I use “figural art” throughout this book to designate works of art containing presentations of human figures. I understand “figural art” as a subcategory of European “figurative art” more broadly, but one that played an especially constitutive role in defining the representational as such. 6. Exemplary of this new self-­consciousness of European art as a broad category is Charles Blanc’s multivolume, thirty-­year project Histoire des peintres de toutes les écoles (1849–­1876), which brought together the art of various nations of Europe. While writing this survey, Blanc also conceived a project for a so-­called musée universel that would present, chronologically, reproductions of all significant works of art created in Europe, briefly realized in 1873 as the “Musée Européen.” For the works included, see Louis Auvray, Le Musée européen, copies d’après les grands maîtres, au palais des Champs-­Élysées (Paris: Renouard, 1873). I return to Blanc in chapter 1. 7. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, new ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 4. 8. David Summers, “Conventions in the History of Art,” New Literary History 13, no. 1, “On Convention: I” (Autumn 1981): 103–­25, 115. 9. The first edition of the Systema naturae, published in 1735, places the genus Homo in the Quadrupedia class of the animal kingdom, in the order of the Anthropomorpha. An epithet—­the Delphic maxim nosce te ipsum—­is attached to the genus, which is then separated into four varieties: Europaeus, Asiaticus, Americanus, Afer. The tenth edition, published in 1758, changed the class designation to Mammalia, and the order to Primates, and introduced the descriptive epithet “sapiens” to identify the species, maintaining the racial varieties. For the coinage of this term of classification by Linnaeus, see Michael Chazan, “The Meaning of Homo Sapiens,” in Ape, Man, Apeman: Changing Views since 1600, ed. Raymond Corbey and Bert Theunissen (Leiden: Department of Prehistory, Leiden University, 1995), 229–­39; Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 23–­26; Staffan Müller-­ Wille, “Linnaeus and the Four Corners of the World,” in The Cultural Politics of Blood, 1500–­1900, ed. Kimberly Anne Coles, Ralph Bauer, Zita Nunes, and Carla L. Peterson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 191–­209; Londa Shiebinger, “Taxonomy for Human Beings,” in The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader, ed. Gill Kirkup, Linda Janes, Kath Woodward, and Fiona Hovenden (London: Routledge, 2000), 11–­37. The protagonists of this book—­both artists and writers—­all fall within the subgroup of humans Linnaeus would have classified as Homo sapiens europaeus, N o t e s t o P a g e s 1– 5

















which is to say, the subgroup of (male) humans who projected their racial and gender identity into the defining type of the human. 10. Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 171. For a similar critique of posthumanism, see Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 5–­10. Like Mignolo and Walsh, I understand posthumanism as fully enmeshed in the exclusionary origins of humanism by maintaining “the universalization of a regional vocabulary” and by assuming the task of defining the properties of the human, even if negatively. See Cary Wolf, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xxv: “Far from surpassing or rejecting the human—­[posthumanism] actually enables us to describe the human and its characteristic modes of communication, interaction, meaning, social significations, and affective investments with greater specificity once we have removed meaning from the ontologically closed domain of consciousness, reason, reflection, and so on.” 11. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “disposition.” 12. Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, vol. 3, Books 6–­8, trans. and ed. Donald A. Russell, Loeb Classical Library 126 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 151. 13. Michel Foucault, in a 1977 roundtable interview with Alain Grosrichard et al., in Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–­1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 196. 14. Thomas Puttfarken, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in Painting 1400–­1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 65, and “Composition, Disposition and Ordonnance in French Seventeenth-­Century Writings on Art,” in Pictorial Composition from Medieval to Modern Art, ed. Paul Taylor and François Quiviger (London: Warburg Institute, 2000), 131–­45. There is an extensive literature on the influence of rhetoric on renaissance theories of composition. See especially Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350–­ 1450 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971); Caroline van Eck, Classical Rhetoric and the Visual Arts in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 15. Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting (Codex Urbinas Latinus 1270), trans. A. Philip McMahon, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956), 1:130–­33, 104, 159. For the wide influence of this work, see Claire Farago, ed., Re-­ reading Leonardo: The Treatise on Painting across Europe 1550–­1900 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009). 16. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. John Spencer, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 76, 77. 17. Leonardo, Treatise on Painting, 1:131, 146, 145. 18. For an important discussion of how this paradigm was systematized in the late renaissance, see Jennifer Montagu, The Expression of the Passions: The Origin and Influence of Charles Le Brun’s “Conférence sur l’expression générale et particulière” (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). 19. The term psychologie sans âme was popularized by Théodule Ribot, first in La Psychologie allemande contemporaine, École expérimentale, 2nd ed. (Paris: Alcan, 1885), xiii, 60. 20. The special importance sculpture holds as a point of reference and counter-­refer­ ence for the main works I examine rests on a notion long established in European aesthetic practice and theory: that the medium of sculpture, more than any other, Notes to Pages 5– 7

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“finds the human figure available as the fundamental type for its productions,” as Hegel stated in his lectures on fine art; see G. W. F. Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 2:713. 21. A theoretical object, or “theoretico-­historical object,” as Hubert Damisch defines it, is one that “obliges you to do theory but also furnishes you with the means of doing it,” and which can “claim an emblematic status”; Yve-­Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Hubert Damisch, “A Conversation with Hubert Damisch,” October, no. 85 (Summer 1998), 3–­17, 8. 22. I refer to the animal here with the recognition that, as Jacques Derrida has emphasized, to speak of “The Animal” as a coherent category is an “asinanity” that crops up invariably in philosophical attempts to define the human being by recourse to a notion of “every living thing which is held not to be human”; Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 31. For the modernity of the “essentially binary  . . . duo human/animal,” see Laurie Shannon, “The Eight Animals in Shakespeare; or, Before the Human,” PMLA 124, no. 2 (March 2009): 472–­79, 477. 23. Sigmund Freud, “A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-­Analysis” (1917), SE, 17: 135–­44, 140, 142. 24. William Coleman, Biology in the Nineteenth Century: Problems of Form, Function and Transformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 94. If in this period artists and writers felt compelled to become, in the words of Nietzsche, “deaf to the siren songs of old metaphysical bird catchers who have been piping at him all too long, ‘you are more, you are higher, you are of a different origin!’ ”—­the toppling of that metaphysical hierarchy established a new one. The human being, as Nietzsche freely admitted, was certainly the “most interesting” animal; see Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), 161; Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-­Christ, in The Anti-­Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 12. Freud and Darwin spoke in equivalent terms. Despite his conviction that it was “absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another,” the biologist also took it as given that humanity was “the highest and most interesting problem for a naturalist”; Charles Darwin to A. R. Wallace, December 22, 1857 (letter 2192), Darwin Correspondence Project, accessed May 30, 2018, http://​www​.darwinproject​.ac​.uk​/DCP​-­­LETT​-­­2192. Freud remarked in 1897, “Since I have been studying the unconscious, I have become so interesting to myself”; Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, December 3–­5, 1897, in The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–­1904, ed. and trans. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1985), 285. 25. Mignolo and Walsh, On Decoloniality, 170. Mikkel Borch-­Jacobsen and Sonu Shamdasani emphasize the ubiquity of Freud’s self-­important metaphors around the turn of the century, when there was “a veritable plethora of candidates vying for the title of the Darwin, Galileo, or Newton of psychology”; see The Freud Files: An Inquiry into the History of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 2. 26. See also Grant Allen’s assertion that the Origin of Species “marks the year 1 of a new era, not for science alone, but for every department of human thought,” in “Obituary: Charles Darwin,” Academy 21, no. 521 (April 29, 1882): 306–­7, 306. I borrow “epochal consciousness” from Dipesh Chakrabarty, who borrows it from Karl Jasper’s 1931 book Man in the Modern Age; see Chakrabarty, “The Human Condition in the Anthropocene,” in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, ed. Mark Matheson, vol. 35 (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 2016), 139–­88. N o t e s t o Pa g e s 7– 8



27. This book’s methodological reliance on criticism means that the distinctively modern journalistic phenomenon of artistic “scandal” will be central to the ensuing chapters. My intention is not to reinscribe old myths about modernist vanguardism, but rather to isolate visual details and formal features striking to period eyes. Just as the widespread fascination with Darwinian theory in the late nineteenth century rested on the capacity of the scientist’s theories to instigate in the public imagination “both horror and delight,” as argued in an 1871 editorial titled “What Makes Darwin Popular,” these works directed themselves toward audiences that had perhaps grown accustomed to experiencing a certain kind of pleasure in taking “blows” to their supposed species-­narcissisms. See Alfred Dove, “Was macht Darwin populär?” (editorial), Das Ausland 44, no. 34 (1871): 813–­15. For this reason, negative criticisms couched in the form of humor often take on particular evidentiary importance in my interpretations. The comic mode best captures the ambivalence—­both the “delight” and the “horror”—­elicited by the new vision of the human subject Seurat, Klimt, and Nijinsky put on display in their “scandalous” works.



28. Ludwig Binswanger, “Freud’s Conception of Man in the Light of Anthropology” (1936), in Being-­in-­the-­World: Selected Papers of Ludwig Binswanger, ed. and trans. Jacob Needleman (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 149–­81, 164. The concept of a “psychic apparatus built into homo natura” will be discussed at greater length in chapter 3. 29. Mitchell Ash points out that a “common feature of the ‘new’ psychology was the use of physiological analogies, in turn often based on mechanical physics and technology” and “blended organic and machine metaphors.” See Ash, “The Uses and Usefulness of Psychology,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 600, “The Use and Usefulness of the Social Sciences: Achievements, Disappointments, and Promise” (July 2005): 99–­114, 100. In art, this feature of the new psychology emerges more overtly in the early twentieth century, especially in the Dada movement. 30. The psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Paul Schilder described primary postures as the set of positions to which the body always returns, and which therefore structure the mental body image and serve as “the crystallized units of the postural model”; see Schilder, The Image and Appearance of the Human Body (1935; London: Routledge, 2014), 270. 31. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1871), 1:142. “To have his hands and arms free and to stand firmly on his feet” was, for Darwin, the key “advantage” that granted man “pre-­ eminent success in the battle of life.” For awakeness and uprightness, see Erwin W. Straus, “The Upright Posture,” Psychiatric Quarterly 26, no. 1 (1952): 529–­61, 535. I am also indebted to Justin E. H. Smith’s observations regarding “the importance of posture in the history of philosophy”; see Smith, “Language, Bipedalism and the Mind-­Body Problem in Edward Tyson’s Orang-­Outang,” Intellectual History Review 17, no. 3 (2007): 291–­304. The formal logic employed by the artists in this study is more invested in deconstructing the metaphorical valences of posture within a preceding representational tradition and philosophical discourse than with giving positive form to the “anatomical humanism” that was emergent in nineteenth-­ century scientific discourse. Within this new discourse, upright posture became central to a “struggle to establish the exceptional status of the human without recourse to the metaphysical.” A central—­though never successful—­ambition of this new “anatomical humanism” was to prove the superior intelligence of the subgroup who coined the name Homo sapiens by linking the verticality of human posture to the supposed verticality of facial angles attributed to the white race. See







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Kay Anderson and Colin Perrin, “Up from the Ape: Colonialism, Craniometry and the Emergence of Anatomical Humanism,” in Challenging (the) Humanities, ed. Tony Bennett (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013), 1-­16, 4; Sander Gilman, Stand Up Straight! A History of Posture (London: Reaktion, 2018), 221-­ 280. 32. Charles Darwin, “Old & Useless Notes about the Moral Sense & Some Metaphysical Points” (1838–­1840), in Howard E. Gruber, Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974), 382–­413, 393. 33. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 54–55, 58. Crary dates the major intellectual-­historical innovations that laid the groundwork for the eruption of formal innovations in the late nineteenth century much earlier, to the 1830s; see Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). 34. [George Mivart], “Darwin’s Descent of Man,” Quarterly Review 131 (1871): 47–­90, 88. 35. Charles Darwin, “Notebook E” (ca. 1838), in Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–­ 1844: Geology, Transmutation of Species, Metaphysical Enquiries, ed. Paul H. Barrett, Peter J. Gautrey, Sandra Herbert, David Kohn, and Sydney Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 409. For histories of this debate, see Georges Romanes, Mental Evolution in Man: Origin of the Human Faculty (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1883); Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Concepts of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Robert Boakes, From Darwin to Behaviorism: Psychology and the Minds of Animals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Ben Bradley, Darwin’s Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 36. The category of the “human” has necessarily held a different status for those subjects reified by Western thought as occupying this category completely, and those who, on the basis of sex and race, were positioned as not fully human within the intrinsic hierarchical ordering written into the definition of Homo sapiens, or “Man” in the broad sense theorized by Sylvia Wynter in “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—­An Argument,” CR: New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 257–­337. Seurat, Klimt, and Nijinsky fall within the small class of individuals overrepresented as “Man.” For this reason, arguably, their works remain entrapped within relatively simple binaristic frameworks built around identity or opposition of the animal/human categories. As much recent scholarship has stressed, such binaristic frameworks are insufficient for comprehending how processes of racialization operated in modernity, and for this reason, as several scholars have argued recently, African diasporic cultural production developed more complex and nuanced ways of understanding the categorical distinction of humanity and animality than those articulated in Western science and philosophy; see Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Anti-­Black World (New York: NYU Press, 2020); Joshua Bennett, Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). 37. On the popularity of Darwin, see Dove, “Was macht Darwin populär?”; for his memelike proliferation in culture, see G. Bruce Retallack, “The Mocking Meme: Popular Darwinism, Illustrative Graphics, and Editorial Cartooning,” in Darwin in Atlantic Cultures: Evolutionary Visions of Race, Gender, and Sexuality, ed. Jeannette Eileen Jones and Patrick B. Sharp (London: Routledge, 2010), 143–­69; Janet Browne, “Darwin in Caricature: A Study in the Popularisation and Dissemination

Notes to page 10







of Evolution,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 145, no. 4 (2001): 496–­509. 38. “Herrin der Wissenschaften”; Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Leipzig: C. G. Naumann, 1886), 31; for the “new master discipline,” see Silke-­ Maria Weineck, “Digesting the Nineteenth Century: Nietzsche and the Stomach of Modernity,” Romanticism 12, no. 1 (2006): 35–­43, 37. Two pivotal moments of institutionalization were the founding by Alexander Bain of the journal Mind, in 1876, and by Wilhelm Wundt of his laboratory at the University of Leipzig, in 1879. Literature on the emergence of scientific psychologies in the nineteenth century is vast. Overviews I have relied on include Edwin G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology (New York: Century, 1929); Kurt Danziger, Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Katherine Arens, Structures of Knowing: Psychologies of the Nineteenth Century (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989); William Woodward and Mitchell Ash, eds., The Problematic Science: Psychology in Nineteenth-­Century Thought (New York: Praeger, 1982); Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1970); John Carson, “Minding Matter/Mattering Mind: Knowledge and the Subject in Nineteenth-­Century Psychology,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 30 (September 1999): 345–­76; Kenton Kroker, The Sleep of Others and the Transformation of Sleep Research (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007); Laura Salisbury and Andrew Shail, Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems, 1800–­1950 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 39. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Roger Woolhouse (London: Penguin, 1997), 302. For an important historicization of this definition, see Marcel Mauss, “A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person: The Notion of Self” (1938), in The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History, ed. Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins, and Steven Lukes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 1–­25. I am addressing the psychological underpinning of Locke’s definition of personhood, with the understanding that it had broad and complex implications for the conceptualization of legal personhood in European nations and the United States; see Colin Dayan, The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 88–­90, passim. 40. Wilhelm Wundt, Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology, 2nd ed. (1892), trans. J. E. Creichton and E. B. Titchenar (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1907), 363. See also, for instance, William James’s concluding statement in the article “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods 1, no. 18 (September 1904): 477–­91, 491: “the stream of thinking . . . is only a careless name for what, when scrutinized, reveals itself to consist chiefly of the stream of my breathing. The ‘I think’ which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is really the ‘I breathe’ which actually does accompany them.” Both Wundt and James, as Zeynep Çelik Alexander has shown, were invested in theorizing a positive alternative to the loss of the rational subject postulated by the Kantian “I think.” Both participated in theorizing an alternative form of ratiocination rooted in bodily kinesis; see Alexander, Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). The works examined here are less invested in that recuperative project; they explore the dissolution of the prior model of subjectivity without positing the body as a locus for recuperating rationality.

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41. L. S. Jacyna, “The Physiology of Mind, the Unity of Nature, and the Moral Order in Victorian Thought,” British Journal for the History of Science 14, no. 2 (1981): 109–­32, 111. There is now a robust literature addressing the impact of physiological psychology and psychophysics on understandings of aesthetic perception in the second half of the nineteenth century, replacing, in the words of Gustav Theodor Fechner, the “Aesthetics from Above” forged by speculative, idealist philosophy with an experimental “Aesthetics from Below,” which locates aesthetic perception in automatic bodily responses. In addition to Crary’s Suspensions of Perception, see Robert Michael Brain, The Pulse of Modernism: Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-­de-­Siècle Europe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015); Benjamin Morgan, The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); Alexander, Kinaesthetic Knowing. These discussions do not address how the new psychology and the aesthetics from below with which it was associated might have destabilized prevailing conventions for representing the form of the human figure or, more broadly, the anthropocentric biases built into Europe’s existing Beaux-­Arts system.



42. Théodule Ribot, La Psychologie anglaise contemporaine, école expérimentale (Paris: Librairie Philosophique de Ladrange, 1870), 22. 43. The epistemological crisis to which this book refers was prompted in part by the growing recognition among biologists, psychologists, and anthropologists that it was intellectually untenable to maintain a definition of the “human” that extrapolated into universality a notion of humanity based upon the settler-­colonial white male. See Andrew Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Celia Brickman, Aboriginal Populations in the Mind: Race and Primitivity in Psychoanalysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). 44. Sigmund Freud, “An Autobiographical Study,” SE 20:7–­74, 31. 45. A. A. Liébeault, Du Sommeil et des états analogues considerés surtout au point de vue de l’action du morale sur le physique (Paris, 1866). 46. For the blurring of sleeping and waking, see George Henry Lewes’s representative statement: “how very superficial is the analogy of Sleep and Death, supposed by the ancient mythology to be brothers . . . strictly speaking, there is not only no true antagonism between Sleep and Life, there is not even an antagonism between Sleep and Waking”; Lewes, The Physiology of Common Life, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1860), 2:243. 47. Jan Goldstein, “The Advent of Psychological Modernism in France: An Alternate Narrative,” in Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences, ed. Dorothy Ross (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 190–­209. See also Mark Micale, “The Modernist Mind: A Map,” in The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America, 1880–­1940, ed. Mark Micale (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 1–­19. 48. The word “unconscious” came into common usage in various European languages in the 1860s, and by 1870–­1880 numerous books had been published with this word in the title; see Lancelot Law Whyte, The Unconscious before Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1960), 154–­55. 49. Aby Warburg, “Dürer und die italienische Antike,” Verhandlungen der 48. Versammlung deutscher Philologen und Schulmänner in Hamburg vom 3. bis 6. Oktober 1905 (1906): 55–­60, 56; Aby Warburg, “The Absorption of the Expressive Values of the Past,” trans. Matthew Rampley, Art in Translation 1, no. 2 (2009): 273–­83, 278. 50. The research institute Warburg founded in 1921, now the Warburg Institute in London, was originally to be named the Institute for the Afterlife of Antiquity; see









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Salvatore Settis, “Pathos und Ethos, Morphologie und Funktion,” in Vorträge aus dem Warburg Haus, vol. 1 (Berlin: Akademie, 1997), 31–­44, 51. 51. Warburg’s key statement of method is in “Italian Art and International Astrology in the Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara” (1912), in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999). 52. Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture,” in Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 48–­59, 48, 52. Agamben includes Warburg’s scholarship in a list of cultural activities—­among others the birth of silent cinema, Rilke’s poetry, and the dances of Isadora Duncan—­that participated in what he called a “precipitous attempt to recover the lost gestures,” a recovery effort that occurred “too late!” 53. Aby Warburg, quoted in Ernst Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 263. See Crary’s suggestive remarks on the Warburg school and its “recognition, subliminal or otherwise, . . . that nineteenth-­century art was fundamentally discontinuous with the art of preceding centuries,” in Techniques of the Observer, 22. 54. Martha Ward, Pissarro, Neo-­Impressionism, and the Spaces of the Avant-­Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 45; Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1956), 271. See also Carol Armstrong’s discussion of gesture in Degas’s nudes of the 1880s, in Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2003), 186: “Gestures, stances, and expressions, which once had been signs of characters and passions, were now signs of the body’s deviance from bourgeois norms.” Broadly, the dynamics of gesture can be described in terms of a loss of middle ground. Artists either eliminate naturalistic gesture or, like Degas or Rodin, push it to extremes that could be closely connected to the newly pathological status of gesture in contemporary culture, as expressive body movements increasingly became linked to the human being’s animal genealogy or to neuroses, such as hysteria. 55. Warburg, “Absorption of the Expressive Values,” 281. 56. I make a distinction between “art” and other kinds of documents in the Atlas with the understanding that one of the primary achievements of Warburg’s iconology was the deprivileging of art objects through “analysis that can scrutinize the purest and the most utilitarian of arts as equivalent documents of expression”; Warburg, “Italian Art and International Astrology,” 585. Nevertheless, the Atlas, like Warburg’s work in general, does still orbit around acknowledged masterpieces by canonical artists such as Botticelli, Rembrandt, and Dürer. 57. Warburg, “Absorption of the Expressive Values,” 282, 277. 58. Aby Warburg, “Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe” (1928), trans. Dimitrios Latsis, in “The Afterlife of Antiquity and Modern Art: Aby Warburg on Manet,” Journal of Art Historiography 13 (December 2015): 1–­28, 11. Warburg’s notebook entries and letters on Manet while researching this essay are gathered in Aby Warburg, Miroirs de faille: À Rome avec Giordano Bruno et Édouard Manet, 1928–­1929, ed. Maurizio Ghelardi (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2011). 59. Warburg, “Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe,” 10. 60. Michel Foucault, Manet and the Object of Painting, trans. Matthew Barr (London: Tate Publishing, 2009), 28; Michael Fried, “Painting Memories: On the Containment of the Past in Baudelaire and Manet,” Critical Inquiry 10, no. 3 (March 1984): 510–­42, 522.

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61. Fried, Manet’s Modernism, 128. 62. This issue touches on Fried’s rich comments on Manet’s use of the model, which he identifies as “one of the most vital but also hardest to conceptualize aspects of Manet’s art,” which would require “a book in its own right”; Fried, Manet’s Modernism, 336–­46, 336, 339. 63. Fried, Manet’s Modernism, 342. Fried’s project, the germ of which was a 1969 study on “Manet’s Sources,” complements and complexifies Michel Foucault’s remarks on Manet’s paintings of the 1860s as a “manifestation of the existence of museums”; Foucault, “The Fantasia of the Library” (1967), in Language, Counter-­Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. and trans. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 87–109, 92. For Manet as for Warburg, this kind of “imaginary” museum space necessarily presupposes concrete advances in image reproduction technology, as well as the proliferation of illustrated publications of art history, as Walter Grasskamp emphasizes in The Book on the Floor: André Malraux and the Imaginary Museum (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2016). As Salomon Reinach argued in 1924, the imaginary museum also enables a new art-­historical attention to gesture: “There exists in art a history of gestures, like a history of schools of art and artists. The history of gestures is much less well known; it is much more difficult to write” because it requires “tens of thousands of reproductions”; Reinach, “L’Histoire des gestes,” Revue archéologique 20, no. 5 (July/December 1924): 64–­79, 64. Manet’s source for the classical postures that, via Raimondi, made their way into Déjeuner sur l’herbe was likely Blanc’s Histoire des peintres de toutes les écoles. See Theodore Reff, “Manet and Blanc’s ‘Histoire des Peintres,’”  Burlington Magazine 112, no. 808 (July 1970): 456–­58, 457. 64. Fried, Manet’s Modernism, 163. Carol Armstrong similarly emphasizes that Manet “made of ‘Realism’ a repertoire of poses from the history of art”; Armstrong, Manet Manette (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 19. It is appropriate to speak of Manet engaging with a “repertoire of poses” from a history of European art writ broadly, beyond simply a history of “old master” painting, as Fried tends to stress. As Warburg demonstrated, the figural language in Manet’s works ultimately reaches back to ancient sculpture. In Le Vieux Musicien (1862), the posture of the titular figure is derived from a Hellenistic statue in the Louvre, thought to represent the Stoic philosopher Chrysippos; see Alain de Leiris, “Manet, Guéroult and Chrysippos,” Art Bulletin 46, no. 3 (September 1964): 401–­4. 65. Fried, Manet’s Modernism, 343. 66. This was noted by Wayne Anderson, “Manet and the Judgment of Paris,” Art News 72 (February 1973): 63–­69, 65. 67. Fried, Manet’s Modernism, 340. 68. As if to call attention to his removal of the arm’s support, Manet placed a little rowboat in the river behind the figures, its oar jutting out almost exactly parallel to the outstretched arm. 69. Carlo Ginzburg, in response to my question about the persistence of Pathosformeln in Déjeuner sur l’herbe, “Pathosformeln—­Aby Warburg in Context” (seminar, Zentrum für Literatur-­und Kulturforschung, Berlin, July 13, 2011). 70. Such a reading is implicit in Crary’s description of the male figure’s hand in Manet’s In the Conservatory (1879) as “shaped, albeit hesitantly, into a pointing finger as if the possibility of such a signifying gesture has atrophied from the thousands of times it has been deployed through several centuries of Western painting”; see Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 113. 71. Marcel Mauss first articulated the concepts of habitus and hexis in “Les Tech-

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niques du corps (Lecture at the Société de Psychologie, 15 May 1934),” Journal de psychologie 32, nos. 3–­4 (1936): 271–­93. These were refined by Pierre Bourdieu; see esp. Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), and The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990). 72. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Auguste Rodin, Part 1” (1902), in Auguste Rodin Illustrated, trans. G. Craig Houston (New York: Dover, 2006), 21. 73. Georg Simmel, “Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben,” in Die Großstadt: Vorträge und Aufsätze zur Städteausstellung (Dresden: v. Zahn und Jaensch, 1903), 187–206, 193. Simmel’s concept of blasé affect (Blasiertheit) is cited in Robert L. Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 80; T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers, rev. ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 255; Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 97. 74. Clark, Painting of Modern Life, 255. 75. Michael Lambek, “Body and Mind in Mind, Body and Mind in Body: Some Anthropological Interventions in a Long Conversation,” in Bodies and Persons: Comparative Perspectives from Africa and Melanesia, ed. Michael Lambek and Andrew Strathern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 105, 119. Lambek notes that the distinction between phenomenologists and cognitivists such as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson could be characterized in terms of this embodiment/imagination distinction. The present book has been informed more by the cognitivist perspective. 76. Kurt Danziger, Naming the Mind: How Psychology Found Its Language (London: Sage, 1997), 40; Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 5: “The words ‘passions’ and ‘affections’ belonged to a network of words such as ‘of the soul’, ‘conscience’, ‘fall’, ‘sin’, ‘grace’, ‘Spirit’, ‘Satan’, ‘will’, ‘lower appetite’, ‘self-­ love’ and so on. The word ‘emotions’ was, from the outset, part of a different network of terms such as ‘psychology’, ‘law’, ‘observation’, ‘evolution’, ‘organism’, ‘brain’, ‘nerves’, ‘expression’, ‘behaviour’ and ‘viscera.’ ” The Pathosformel concept is often connected to Warburg’s reading of Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions in 1888, but as Sigrid Weigel has emphasized, the influence of this text on Warburg’s thinking has been misrepresented. That Warburg habitually referred to Darwin’s text as “On the Expression of Mind” is perhaps symptomatic of the broader sense in which his thinking remained rooted in a paradigm of expressivity that Darwin destabilized: that is, the notion that expressions proceed from the “mind” outward. See Weigel, “Ausdrucksbewegungen als Kunstschlüssel: Warburg als Leser Darwins, Über einen Mythos der Forschung,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 12, 2012, N3. 77. This catchphrase, coined by the French counterrevolutionary philosopher Louis de Bonald (1754–1840), had by 1870 made its way into the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in “Works and Days,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Major Prose (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2015), 517–35, 517; Darwin, “Notebook N” (1838–­1839), in Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 564. 78. This principle was still operative in Darwin’s two most important sources on emotional expression, notably Charles Bell, Essays on the Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression, 3rd ed. (London: Murray, 1844), and Guillaume-­Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne, Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine, ou analyse électro-­physiologique de l’expression des passions applicable à la pratique des arts plastiques (Paris: Renouard, 1862).

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79. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London: John Murray, 1872), 226–­27, 253. On the non-­expressiveness of Darwin’s expressions, see Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 166; on Darwin’s concept of gesture as “defunctioned” and maladaptive, see Matthew Rowlinson, “Foreign Bodies; or, How Did Darwin Invent the Symptom?” Victorian Studies 52, no. 4 (Summer 2010): 535–­59; see also Angelique Richardson, “ ‘The Book of the Season’: The Conception and Reception of Darwin’s Expression,” in After Darwin: Animals, Emotions, and the Mind, ed. Angelique Richardson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), 51–­58. 80. Théodule Ribot, The Psychology of the Emotions [1896] (London: Walter Scott, 1897), 96, 93, summarizing William James, “What Is an Emotion?” Mind 9, no. 34 (April 1884): 188–­205, and Carl Georg Lange, Om Sindsbevægelser: En psykofysiologisk Studie (Copenhagen: Jacob Lunds Vorlag, 1885). 81. James, “What Is an Emotion?” 190, 197. 82. James, “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” 83. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “gesture.” 84. See the etymological discussion in Anthony Corbeill, Nature Embodied: Gesture in Ancient Rome (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 17–­18. 85. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “posture”; “positional behavior” was coined in J. H. Prost, “A Definitional System for the Classification of Primate Locomotion,” American Anthropologist 67, no. 5, pt. 1 (October 1965): 1198–­1214. 86. Reinach, “L’Histoire des gestes,” 64. Reinach’s attitude is translated here as “posture.” 87. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “position.” 88. Leonardo Impett and Franco Moretti, “Totentanz: Operationalizing Aby Warburg’s Pathosformeln,” New Left Review 107 (September–­October 2017): 68–­97, 75, 94. 89. For a comprehensive bibliography up to roughly 1980, see Jean-­Claude Schmitt, “Introduction and General Bibliography,” History and Anthropology 1 (November 1984; special issue, “Gestures”): 1–­28, 18–­20. See also Moshe Barasch, Giotto and the Language of Gesture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Jan N. Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg, eds., A Cultural History of Gesture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992); André Chastel, Le Geste dans l’art (Paris: Liana Levi, 2001); Herman Roodenburg, The Eloquence of the Body: Perspectives on Gesture in the Dutch Republic (Zwolle: Waanders, 2004). Two recent publications, one a general-­interest art survey and the other a cultural history, foreground posture. See Desmond Morris, Postures: Body Language in Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2019); Gilman, History of Posture. 90. Reinach, “L’Histoire des gestes,” 65. 91. Emanuel Löwy, Die Naturwiedergabe in der älteren griechischen Kunst (Rome: Loescher, 1900), trans. John Fothergill, under the author’s supervision, as The Rendering of Nature in Early Greek Art (London: Duckworth, 1907), 24. 92. Alfred Pichon, “Vérité et archaïsme dans l’art ancien et dans l’art moderne,” La Grande revue 79 (May 10, 1913): 69–­96, 76, 79. 93. Warburg, “Absorption of the Expressive Values,” 283. 94. Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 308. 95. Warburg described himself as a “psycho-­historian of the Occident”; see Kurt W. Forster, “Aby Warburg’s History of Art: Collective Memory and the Social Mediation of Images,” Daedalus 105, no. 1 (Winter 1976): 169–­76, 173. 96. Fred Myers, “ ‘Primitivism,’ Anthropology, the Category of ‘Primitive Art,’ ” in Handbook of Material Culture, ed. Chris Tilley et al. (London: Sage, 2006), 267–­84, 268; Frances Connelly, The Sleep of Reason: Primitivism in Modern European Art

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and Aesthetics, 1725–­1907 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 14. I am also indebted to Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Objects (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 97. James Porter, “Introduction,” in Constructions of the Classical Body, ed. James Porter (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 1–­18, 2, 13. 98. William Rubin’s widely criticized exhibition “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern set the terms of scholarly debates around primitivism for many decades to follow. It began from the premise that “the first decades of the twentieth century saw both a change in meaning and a shrinkage in the scope of what was considered Primitive art. With the ‘discovery’ of African and Oceanic masks and figure sculptures by Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck, and Picasso in the years 1906–­07, a strictly modernist interpretation of the term began.” See William Rubin, “Modernist Primitivism: An Introduction,” in “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, ed. William Rubin, exh. cat., 2 vols. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984), 1:1–79, 2. The exhibition was criticized for its lack of critical reflection on the conditions of colonialism and its ambition to present the work of African and Oceanic sculptors as “part of the narrative of modern art yet not central enough to be considered constitutive.” See Simon Gikandi, “Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference,” Modernism/Modernity 10, no. 3 (September 2003): 455–­80, 457; Simon Gikandi, “Africa and the Epiphany of Modernism,” in Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity, ed. Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005), 31–­50; Hal Foster, “The ‘Primitive’ Unconscious of Modern Art,” October, no. 34 (Autumn 1985): 45–­70; James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-­Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). More recent work has underlined the transcultural character of modernist “primitivism,” showing how African objects emulated by European artists were already responsive to the modernity of the colonial situation on their own formal terms. See Jonathan Hay, “Primitivism Reconsidered (Part 1): A Question of Attitude,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 67–­68 (2016/2017): 61–­77, and “Primitivism Reconsidered (Part 2): Picasso and the Krumen,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 69–­70 (Spring–­Autumn 2018): 227–­ 50; Joshua I. Cohen, The Black Art Renaissance: African Sculpture and Modernism across Continents (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020). For Cohen, “ ‘primitivism’ remains an impoverishing lens, because it operates as a taxonomic catchall. Its generalizing premise enshrines old classificatory orders rather than enabling more focused investigations of particular interventions within modernism. Herein lies the paradox of ‘primitivism.’ It accurately reflects a Eurocentric pattern of classifying innumerable nonclassical traditions as ‘primitive,’ yet its totalizing view perpetuates the same pattern by obfuscating ways in which artists drew formal lessons from specific sculptural objects”; Black Art Renaissance, 24. It is urgent for future scholarship to densely historicize the specific African, Oceanic, and Indigenous American objects encountered and taken up as models by modernist artists. Simultaneously, we must deconstruct and expose the simplistic formal logic that enabled the “old classificatory order” of primitivism. The concept of frontality, I believe, was part of what allowed European-­trained writers and artists to group together such wildly diverse practices under a “taxonomic catchall.” 99. Ward, Pissarro, 65. The history traced here, which begins with Fénéon’s description of Seurat’s figures in 1886, cannot be disconnected from the later moment in the early twentieth century when African and Oceanic objects became a primary

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focus of artists, collectors, and critics. In this regard, it is not incidental that, sometime between 1904 and 1919, Fénéon began to amass what would become one of the most significant collections of art from Africa and Oceania in Paris; see Philippe Peltier, “Fénéon’s Collection of Art from Africa and Oceania,” in Figura, Cahn, and Peltier, Félix Fénéon, 183–­95. See also Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen, “A History of Violence: On Félix Fénéon,” Artforum 59, no. 6 (April 2021): 118–27, 159. 100. Elazar Barken and Ronald Bush, “Introduction,” in Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism, ed. Elazar Barken and Ronald Bush (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 2. 101. See, for instance, Gustave Geffroy, “Les Vrais primitifs,” in La Vie artistique: Huitième et dernière série (Paris: H. Floury, 1903), 1–­31; Nouveau Larousse illustré (Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1897–­1904), s.v. “primitif.” 102. Fabian, Time and the Other, 31. This text remains the foundational analysis of the temporality of the “primitive.” 103. The phrase “European nest” is Josef Strzygowski’s in “Ostasien im Rahmen vergleichender Kunstforschung,” Ostasiatische Zeitschrift 2 (1913/1914): 1–­19, quoted in Michael Falser, “The Graeco-­Buddhist Style of Gandhara—­a ‘Storia ideologica’; or, How a Discourse Makes a Global History of Art,” Journal of Art Historiography 13 (2015): 1–­53, 23; Karl Woermann, Geschichte der Kunst aller Zeiten und Völker, 6 vols. (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1900–­1911). For attempts to study non-­ Western art, see Wilfried Van Damme and Raymond Corbey, eds., “The European Scholarly Reception of ‘Primitive Art’ in the Decades around 1900,” special issue of Journal of Art Historiography 12 (June 2015); Ulrich Pfisterer, “Origins and Principles of World Art History—­1900 (and 2000),” in World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches, ed. Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried Van Damme (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2008), 69–­89; Susanne Leeb, Die Kunst der Anderen: “Weltkunst” und die anthropologische Konfiguration der Moderne (Berlin: b_books Verlag, 2015). 104. Work I have found particularly useful on the collecting and display of art from around the world, and especially art classed as “primitive,” includes Bénédicte Savoy, Charlotte Guichard, and Christine Howald, eds., Acquiring Cultures: Histories of World Art on Western Markets (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019); John Warne Monroe, Metropolitan Fetish: African Sculpture and the Imperial French Invention of Primitive Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019); Glenn H. Penny, Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Nélia Dias, Le Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro (1878-­1908): Anthropologie et muséologie en France (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1991); Annie E. Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). 105. For a helpful analysis of European modernism’s embrace of a “global” identity at the turn of the twentieth century, see Sam Rose’s essay “Post-­Impressionism: Universal, British, Global,” Art History (forthcoming), and his Art and Form: From Roger Fry to Global Modernism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019). 106. Julius Lange, Billedkunstens Fremstilling af Menneskeskikkelsen i dens ældste Periode indtil Højdepunktet af den græske Kunst (Copenhagen: F. Dreyer, 1892). Lange’s book was never translated from the Danish, but the original publication included a résumé in French, “Étude sur la représentation de la figure humaine dans l’art primitif jusqu’à l’art grec du Vième siècle avant J. C.,” 437–­66. Lange’s summary was subsequently partially republished, again in French, under the new German title “Gesetze der Menschendarstellung in der primitiven Kunst aller

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Völker und inbesondere in der ägyptischen Kunst,” in Julius Lange, Darstellung des Menschen in der Älteren Griechischen Kunst, trans. Mathilde Mann (Strasbourg: Heitz, 1899), ix–­xxxi. Despite the wide diffusion of his language in art history, Lange remains profoundly understudied. The most comprehensive historiographic treatment can be found in Viljen til det Menneskelige: Tekster omkring Julius Lange, ed. Hanne Kolind Poulsen, Hans Dam Christensen, and Peter Nørgaard Larsen (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanums, København Universitet, 1999). To my knowledge, there exist only two English-­language articles addressing Lange’s career. See Marianne Marcussen, “The Reception of Antiquity and Danish Art History: Julius Lange and the Representation of the Human Figure in the Visual Arts,” in The Classical Heritage in Nordic Art and Architecture, ed. Marjatta Nielsen (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen, 1990), 229-­39, and “The Danish Art Historian Julius Lange: His Attitudes to Trends in Art History in Europe and His Collaboration with Scandinavian Colleagues,” in Towards a Science of Art History: J. J. Tikkanen and Art Historical Scholarship in Europe, ed. Johanna Vakkari (Helsinki: Society of Art History, 2009), 71-­84.







107. Whitney Davis, Visuality and Virtuality: Images and Pictures from Prehistory to Perspective (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 121, 143. 108. Adolf Furtwängler, foreword to Lange, Darstellung des Menschen, iii–­v, v. See also Furtwängler’s review of Lange’s original 1892 publication in Berliner Philologische Wochenschrift 14 (1894): 13–­18. For citations, see Alois Riegl, Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts, trans. Jacqueline Jung (New York: Zone Books, 2004), 357, 370; Wilhelm Wundt, Völkerpsychologie: Eine Untersuchung der Entwicklungsgesetze von Sprache, Mythus und Sitte, vol. 3, Die Kunst (Leipzig: W. Englemann, 1908), 160–­61. 109. Lange, Billedkunstens, 7. Lange’s world history explicitly excludes the art of South and East Asia, which he claims conforms to different aesthetic and cultural norms outside the scope of his study. Primitive art, in Lange’s very explicit definition in the French synopsis, encompasses the art made by “noncivilized people” from all parts of the globe, people of the Americas prior to European colonization, all ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, and Assyrians prior to the conquest of Alexander the Great, and Greek and Italian peoples prior to circa 500 bce . 110. Lange notes that his studies for the book were conducted predominantly at the British Museum; see Lange, Billedkunstens, 437, 439. Although his text refers to Berlin’s Museum für Völkerkunde, the majority of his illustrations of art made outside Greece or the ancient Near East come from the British Museum’s ethnographical collection, with many likely based on photographs included in Catalogue of a Series of Photographs from the Collections of the British Museum, Taken by S. Thompson, First Series (London: W. A. Mansell, 1872). 111. Seated Scribe, painted limestone and mixed media, ca. 2600–­2350 bce , Musée du Louvre, inv. E 3023; Kouros of Tenea, marble, ca. 560 bce , Glyptothek Munich, inv. 168 (this kouros, labeled “Greece before the Persian wars,” was the only object in this list that Lange dated); statue of Ashurnasirpal II, magnesite, 883–­859 bce , British Museum, inv. 118871; maoi kavakava, wood, late eighteenth to mid-­nineteenth century, British Museum, inv. Oc,+.2595; Nuu-­Chah-­Nulth wooden figures, British Museum, inv. Am,NWC.64 and Am,NWC.66, both wood, both dated “before 1778.” I thank Aaron Glass for helping me identify the Nuu-­Chah-­Nulth works. Other objects illustrated in Lange’s first chapter that I have been able to identify include a Taíno wooden statuette, dating probably to the sixteenth century, taken from present-­day Jamaica in the late 1700s (British Museum, inv. Am1977,Q.3),

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and an Aztec statue of Mictlantecuhtli from ca. 1325–­1521 (British Museum, inv. Am1849,0629.2). 112. Lange, Billedkunstens, 464. 113. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 1, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–­1985 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 2. 114. I am referring to the influential argument crystallized in Bruno Snell, The Discovery of Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought, trans. T. G. Rosenmeyer (1946; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953). Brook Holmes has recently elaborated and inverted the terms of Snell’s argument by proposing that the “discovery of mind” was in fact a discovery of body. She writes, “Scholars interested in exploring how this [mind/body] problem takes shape in classical Greece have focused on changing ideas about the psukhē. I argue that we may better understand the defining urgency of Western dualism by exploring how sōma comes to be conceptualized in physical terms, thereby creating the need for an account of mind or soul in terms compatible with human experience and agency”; see Holmes, The Symptom and the Subject: The Emergence of the Physical Body in Ancient Greece (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 22. As J. Lorand Matory has stressed, “not all cultures recognize the existence of a ghostly, nonphysical organ of the sort implied by the term ‘mind,’ or Geist; . . . not all cultures distinguish the ‘mental’ from the ‘physical’; and . . . not all cultures even associate thought exclusively or even principally with the vicinity of the brain or the head. In Yorùbá, for example, thinking is typically called ‘stirring one’s insides’ (ro inún), and the ‘insides’ referred to are typically located in the belly”; see Matory, The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 109. See also Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body: The Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (New York: Zone Books, 2002). 115. Lange, Billedkunstens, 437. See Pliny, Natural History, vol. 9, Books 33–­35, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library 394 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), 168: “hic consummasse hanc scientiam iudicatur et toreuticen sic erudisse, ut Phidias aperuisse. proprium eius est, uno crure ut insisterent signa.” The word contrapposto is an early modern invention, deriving from the Latin con­tra­positum, which translates the Greek word antithesis; see David Summers, “Contrapposto: Style and Meaning in Renaissance Art,” Art Bulletin 59, no. 3 (1977): 336–­61. 116. Lange, Billedkunstens, 464. 117. Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques (1849), s.v. “Moi,” quoted in Jan Goldstein, “Mutations of the Self in Old Regime and Post-­Revolutionary France: From Âme to Moi to Le Moi,” in Biographies of Scientific Objects, ed. Lorraine Daston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 86–­116, 86. 118. Jan Goldstein, The Post-­Revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750–­ 1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 329. The moi concept was formulated by philosopher and academic administrator Victor Cousin, whose power in the French educational bureaucracy lasted from 1815 to 1851 but whose influence persisted into the early twentieth century. 119. Clement Greenberg, “The Crisis of the Easel Picture,” in Art and Culture: Critical Essays, 3rd ed. (Boston: Beacon, 1989), 154–­63, 154. 120. Rosalind Krauss, “On Frontality,” Artforum 6, no. 9 (1968): 40–­46, 43. 121. The prevailing aesthetic tendency of the period this book examines—­which spans the decades leading up to a widespread turn among artists in Europe toward abstract or nonfigurative representation—­has often been comprehended in the

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terms of what José Ortega y Gasset defined in 1925 as “the dehumanization of art”; see The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature, trans. Helene Weyl, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 3–­54. Scholars such as Devin Fore have enquired into the mechanisms of art’s “rehumanization” after the First World War; see Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). But the concrete mechanics of how European art traditionally bestowed the honorific designation “human” on figural images has never been unpacked with much precision. This book suggests that a central aspect of what often gets termed “dehumanization” inhered in a transformation of postural language. 122. I foreground the concept of frontality as articulated in art-­historical literature because the psychological valences of the opposition between frontal and oblique views of the body were formulated most explicitly there. But it is significant that this art-­historical focus coincided with a moment when new forms of photography were tending to eliminate obliquity. Standardized frontal views of objects or persons, shown in full-­face or profile, became the norm in photographs intended for scientific or evidentiary purposes—­notably, for instance, in the photographic documentation of artworks. On this development, see Kerr Houston’s “The Communicative Viewpoint: Photography, Frontality, and Multiplicity in the 1800s,” in The Place of the Viewer: The Embodied Beholder in the History of Art, 1764–­1968 (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 27–­107. More importantly, frontal and profile orientations emerged as a key device in photography aimed at the study of human bodies—­from the strictly lateral views of figures moving in profile predominant in chronophotography to the pairing of full-­face and profile photographs favored by the disciplines of physical anthropology and criminology. (Alphonse Bertillon standardized the format of the modern mug shot in Paris in 1883, the year before Seurat began work on the Grande Jatte.) For these formal developments, see especially Josh Ellenbogen, Reasoned and Unreasoned Images: The Photography of Bertillon, Galton, and Marey (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008); Elizabeth Edwards, “ ‘Photographic Types’: The Pursuit of Method,” Visual Anthropology 3 (1990): 235–­58; Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October, no. 39 (Winter 1986): 3–­64. Put in schematic terms, the formal opposition between frontal and oblique poses of the body, which art history conceptualized primarily in reference to “primitive” and classical sculpture and linked to an opposition between conscious and unconscious figures, parallels an emerging opposition between objectivity and subjectivity in nineteenth-­century culture that materialized concretely in photography. As Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have argued, the stance of scientific objectivity was conceived as the inverse of artistic subjectivity; it required methods of image-­making structured by a “drive to suppress the willful intervention of the artist-­author”; Daston and Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 121. The fact that frontality was intrinsic to new kinds of “objective” imagery of the body betrays not only the degree to which the frontal viewpoint was associated with the negation of subjectivity, but also how it raised complicated questions of agency with respect to both the creators of images and photographed persons. If the makers of mug shots, chronophotographs, and similar kinds of photographic images voided their authorial presence by implying that they had relinquished the vagaries of “artistic” composition in favor of submitting their subjects to standard regulations of composition, this abnegation of authorial presence still communicated powerful agency in a different sense. These images underscored the power of their producers to make photographic subjects submit their bodies to a rigid,

note to page 28

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externally imposed order—­a fact brought into relief by the reality that frontal and profile dispositions of the body, in the context of criminology and anthropology, were imposed by force or coercion on criminalized and/or racialized persons. The frontality of bodies in this new corpus of scientific photography contrasts with early portrait photography, which tended to scrupulously maintain the honorific convention of postural obliquity (on this point, see Honoré Daumier’s brilliant caricature of the poses effected by people of different classes confronting the camera for their portraits, which shows a “civilized” initiate, in contrast to a provincial country peasant, instinctively positioning himself toward the camera in a correct, three-­quarter view (“Pose de l’homme de la nature/Pose de l’homme civilisé,” Le Charivari, March 31, 1853). The contrast between frontality and obliquity in scientific and portrait photography highlights how, if frontality was often associated with a human being situated as the subject of discipline or a passive test subject, obliquity was, by contrast, employed for honorific images of subjectivity, and specifically a subjectivity charged with self-­determination and inner agency. Indeed, oblique torsion in posture had long been one of European art’s most con-











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ventionalized visual signs for the agentive properties of embodied selfhood. For instance, Hegel, in his Lectures on Aesthetics, explained that the “free position” of classical sculpture was a major advance from the “forced and stiff” postures of Egyptian art precisely because it enabled the illusion of a self-­posing figure: “The posture must appear entirely unforced, i.e. we must get the impression that the body has adopted its position by its own initiative”(Lectures on Fine Art, 2:739-­40). 123. Maurice Denis, “Définition du néo-­traditionnisme”(1890), in Théories 1890–­ 1910: Du symbolisme et du Gauguin vers un nouvel ordre classique (Paris: Rouart et Watelin, 1920), 1–­13, 7. This misguided doctrine, Denis asserted, “leads from the first academies of the Carracci to our current decadence.” Thus, for his ça, we can perhaps read “model.” 124. Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, vol. 5, Books 11–­12, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell, Loeb Classical Library 494 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 285; Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, vol. 1, Books 1–2, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell, Loeb Classical Library 124 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 343–45. 125. For this passage and renaissance responses to it, see E. H. Gombrich, “The Debate on Primitivism in Ancient Rhetoric,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 29 (1966): 24–­38; David Summers, “Maniera and Movement: The Figura Serpentinata,” Art Quarterly 35 (1972): 269–­301, 277. 126. For the classic scholarly treatment of this concept, see Erich Auerbach, “Figura” (1938), in Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach, trans. Jane O. Newman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 65–­113; Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, vol. 4, Books 9–­10, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell, Loeb Classical Library 127 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 15, 17. 127. Caroline van Eck, “A New Interpretation of Vermeer’s Allegory of Faith: Vividness and Figural Interpretation,” in Imago Exegetica: Visual Images as Exegetical Instruments, 1400–­1700, ed. Walter Melion, James Clifton, and Michel Weemans (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 157–­85, 170. 128. Quintilian, Orator’s Education, 1:345. As Auerbach argues of figura, “The idea of something that is new and appears for the first time, of something that creates change in things that normally resist change, marks the entire history of the word”; see Auerbach, “Figura,” 66. 129. In “Frontal and Profile as Symbolic Forms,” Meyer Schapiro observes that because in “late antiquity throughout the Middle Ages a schematized three-­quarters face Notes to Pages 28–30





was a standard form,” this “dominance of the three-­quarters view gave to the exceptional profile or frontal figure the value of the unique or the opposed.” In the medieval period, deviations from obliquity could invest symbolic meanings on certain figures within a composition. In the works this book examines, frontal or profile presentation is applied to all figures in a composition, not simply those figures marked as important. If frontal and profile are still functioning as “symbolic forms” here, their symbolic meaning no longer derives from a system of formal oppositions within the composition but, rather, in opposition to preceding works of figural art dominated by oblique or three-­quarters views; see Schapiro, Words and Pictures: On the Literal and the Symbolic in the Illustration of a Text (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), 36–­49, 38. 130. My understanding of the bodily basis of metaphors for consciousness relies on studies such as Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), and Embodied Mind, Meaning and Reason: How Our Bodies Give Rise to Understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); see also Mark Johnson and George Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999). 131. “The effectiveness of archetypical metaphorical constructions depends quite crucially on their unintentional and taken-­for-­granted nature. In this way they are very different from novel literary metaphors that are intentionally invented by specific individuals for relatively short-­term quasi-­rhetorical purposes. By contrast, the origin of root metaphors cannot be traced to any single author; they are effectively ‘collective representations.’ Their life typically extends over long periods, and rather than being deliberately invented, the recognition of their metaphorical nature would probably destroy their effectiveness.” Kurt Danziger, “Generative Metaphor and the History of Psychological Discourse,” in Metaphor in the History of Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 331–­56, 349.

Chapter One





1. Seurat drafted four different versions of his “Esthétique” in August 1890 at the request of Maurice Beaubourg. The version quoted here is reprinted in Robert L. Herbert et al., Georges Seurat, 1859–­1891, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1991), appendix E, 381–82. He was referring to the four large figure paintings he had thus far completed: Un Baignade à Asnières (1883–­1884), Un Dimanche à la Grande Jatte–­1884 (1884–­1886), Poseuses (1886–­1888), and C ­ hahut (1889–­1890). Parade de cirque (1887–­1888) and La Poudreuse (1889–­1890) are left off this list, presumably because Parade is a smaller picture and Poudreuse a singlefigure portrait. Seurat would produce only one more major figure painting before his death, Cirque (1890–­1891). 2. Michelle Foa suggests Beaubourg did in fact receive the statement; see Foa, Georges Seurat: The Art of Vision (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 34, 210n35. 3. Hermel, “Exposition de peinture,” NPD, 1:457. Paul Signac subsequently adopted the identification of the Grande Jatte as a “tableau-­manifeste”; see Paul Signac, “Les Besoins individuels et la peinture,” in Encyclopédie française, ed. A. de Monzie (Paris: Encyclopédie française, 1935), 16:1684–87. 4. Ward, Pissarro, 6. 5. André Chastel, “Le ‘système’ de Seurat,” in Fables, formes, figures, 2 vols. (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), 2:408. 6. I discuss Seurat in relation to a longer history of the hierarchy of genres in “The Notes to Pages 30–31

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Hierarchy of Genres and the Hierarchy of Life Forms,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, nos. 73/74, “La parade” (Fall 2020): 1–­18. 7. For Seurat’s indebtedness to Blanc, see Georges Seurat to Félix Fénéon, June 20, 1890, in César-­M. de Hauke, Seurat et son oeuvre, 2 vols. (Paris: Gründ, 1961), 1:xxi; see also Michael F. Zimmermann, “Seurat, Charles Blanc, and Naturalist Art Criticism,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 14, no. 2 (1989; special issue on Grande Jatte): 198–­209, 246–­47. 8. The most extensive discussion of Chevreul can be found in Charles Blanc, Grammaire des arts du dessin: Architecture, sculpture, peinture (Paris: J. Renouard, 1867), 594–­611. The color theory Seurat extracted from the Grammaire was a minor component of the book, which asserted “the superiority of drawing to color” as one of art’s foundational “principles.” Blanc links the superiority of drawing to the superiority of the masculine to the feminine sex, of thought to emotion, of absolute to relative properties, in short, to a wholly conventional set of binaries that had been used, since Aristotle, to assert the supplemental or parergal status of color. Blanc’s introductory section, titled “On the Human Figure,” deepens and expands this argument, arguing that color is characteristic of creations ranking lower than man in the chain of being: animals, plants, and inorganic matter. “Drawing triumphs,” Blanc asserted, “when man arrives on the scene, and with him intelligence”; see Blanc, Grammaire, 21–­33. 9. André Félibien, Conférences de l’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture pendant l’année 1667 (Paris: Frederic Leonard, 1669), preface. For Blanc’s recapitulation of Félibien, see Pierre Vaisse, “Les Genres dans la peinture du dix-­neuvième siècle,” in Les Genres picturaux: Genèse, metamorphose, et transpositions, ed. Fréderic Elsig et al. (Geneva: MétisPresses, 2010), 165–­82, 171. 10. Charles Blanc, “Salon de 1866,” Gazette des Beaux-­Arts 20, no. 6 (1866): 497–520, 503–­4. 11. Paul Signac, quoted in Gustave Coquiot, Seurat (Paris: Albin Michel, 1924), 30. 12. Ludovic Vitet, L’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture: Étude historique (Paris: Lévy, 1861), 71. This passage, significantly, discusses the importance, but also potential pitfalls, of working from the model, a type of individual who always risks betraying itself as “a professional type, feeling nothing, expressing nothing, barely living, a sort of contorted vegetable placed in attitude.” 13. Hippolyte Taine, De l’intelligence, 2 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1870), 1:13–­14. 14. Paul Signac, quoted in Coquiot, Seurat, 30. Nancy Ireson’s archival discoveries place Seurat at the École for approximately four rather than two years, from 1876 to 1880. She also convincingly argues for the enthusiasm with which the young Seurat sought to excel within the École’s prescribed frameworks of excellence, in particular competing for the Prix de Rome; see Ireson, “Seurat and the ‘Cours de M. Yvon,’ ” Burlington Magazine 153, no. 1296 (2011): 174–­80. 15. Robert L. Herbert, “Un Dimanche à la Grande Jatte,” in Herbert et al., Georges Seurat, 175. For Herbert’s most comprehensive definition of Seurat’s primitivism, see Robert L. Herbert, Seurat and the Making of “La Grande Jatte,” exh. cat. (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2004), 106–10. As Leila Kinney remarked of the Grande Jatte, Seurat’s “ ‘technique of the body’ is perhaps the first to depart from the residual principles of physiognomic encoding that had characterized figurative painting and portraiture for several centuries”; see Kinney, “Fashion and Figuration in Modern Life Painting,” in Architecture: In Fashion, ed. Deborah Fausch (Prince­ton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994): 270–­313, 277. For Linda Nochlin, the canvas “nullified” the “Western tradition of representation” by denying the figure’s capacity to signify as an “articulate, unique, and full human presence”;

Notes to Pages 32–34











see Nochlin, “Seurat’s Grande Jatte: An Anti-­Utopian Allegory,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 14, no. 2, “The Grande Jatte at 100” (1989): 123–­53 and 241–­42, 135. For T. J. Clark, who understands Seurat’s oeuvre in general as “the moment of negation,” Seurat represents figures who are “not people—­not objects of empathy or sympathy. Not actors. Not things with insides,” but rather “ghosts of an endless, ignominious energy”; see Clark, “We Field-­Women,” in Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 55–­137, 111, 108. Clement Greenberg states, “For the ‘inhumanity’ of which modern art has been accused we can blame history, but Seurat was one of the principal channels by which it entered painting”; Greenberg, “Seurat, Science, and Art: Review of Georges Seurat by John Rewald” (1943), in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1, Perceptions and Judgments, 1939–­1944, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 167–­70, 169. 16. Michael F. Zimmermann, Seurat and the Art Theory of His Time (Antwerp: Fonds Mercator, 1991), 332. 17. Alexandre Arsène, “Chroniques d’aujourd’hui: Un Vaillant,” Paris, April 1, 1891, 1–2. 18. A. J. Wauters, clipping, La Gazette, February 2, 1889: “Seurat: Édition revue, corrigée et singulièrement augmentée de la Grande Jatte.” 19. Seurat kept numerical tally of the content of his reviews. See Georges Seurat to Félix Fénéon, June 24, 1890, in Hauke, Seurat et son oeuvre, 1:xxiii. For the “dealer-­ critic system,” see Harrison C. White and Cynthia A. White, Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French Painting World, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 94–­102, 121–­24. For the dramatic expansion of press coverage in Seurat’s period, see Emmanuel Pernaud, “Les Beaux-­arts à l’épreuve du kiosque,” in La Civilisation du journal: Histoire culturelle et littéraire de la presse française au XIXe siècle, ed. Dominique Kalifa et al. (Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2001), 1569–­86. For the proliferation of the little magazines that published the majority of positive assessments of Seurat’s figure painting, see Pamela Antonia Genova, Symbolist Journals: A Culture of Correspondence (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). 20. Félix Fénéon to César-­M. de Hauke, August 29, 1937, Fonds César-­M. de Hauke, Bibliothèque de l’INHA–­Collections Jacques Doucet, Paris. Fénéon, who helped prepare Seurat’s catalogue raisonné, recognized the importance of these documents for comprehending Seurat’s oeuvre and proposed that the catalogue begin with a section on criticism titled “L’Opinion à l’origine.” Fénéon was also an executor of Seurat’s estate and owned more than two hundred works by Seurat at different points in his lifetime. For his involvement in Seurat’s posthumous reputation, see Isabelle Cahn, “Fénéon and Seurat: Preserving the Painter’s Legacy,” in Félix Fénéon: The Anarchist and the Avant-­Garde, ed. Starr Figura, Isabelle Cahn, and Philippe Peltier, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2020), 46–­57. 21. Unsigned, untitled clipping, La Belgique, February 6, 1887; unsigned, untitled clipping, La Gazette, February 10, 1887; “Chronique,” unsigned clipping, L’Étoile belge, February 6, 1887—­all Fonds Maus. 22. Most of Seurat’s clippings were supplied by the service Argus de la Presse, founded in 1879. Signac, Pissarro, Monet, and Rodin also subscribed to such clipping agencies. Ward emphasizes their importance in establishing a dynamic interplay between painterly production and print reception in Neo-­Impressionism; see Ward, Pissarro, 12. 23. Seurat’s personal collection of press clippings is conserved in the Fonds César-­M. de Hauke, Bibliothèque de l’INHA, Archives 036, Carton 1. The booklet of handwritten transcriptions is unusual for the period, when agencies issued printed

Notes to Pages 34–35

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24.



25.



26.



27.





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passages pasted onto sheets with standardized labels. The writing, because copied quickly in cursive, is difficult to confirm as in Seurat’s hand. After reexamining the papers on my behalf, Sébastien Chauffour, former archivist at l’INHA, confirmed that transcriptions of the reviews of the Salon des Indépendants in 1884 are in Seurat’s hand. I believe it is likely Seurat also copied the reviews of the Grande Jatte. Henry Fèvre, “L’Exposition des impressionnistes,” La Revue de demain, May–­June 1886, in NPD, 1:445–­47, 445. Linda Nochlin, “Body Politics: Seurat’s Poseuses,” Art in America 82, no. 3 (1994): 71–­76, 121–­23, 75; Daniel Catton Rich, Seurat, Paintings and Drawings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 16. See, for instance, Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-­Edouard Jeanneret, “Sur la plastique,” L’Esprit nouveau 1 (1920): 38–­39; Roger Fry, “Seurat,” in Transformations: Critical and Speculative Essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1926), 188–­96; Claude Roger-­Marx, Seurat (Paris: G. Crès et Cie, 1931); Greenberg, “Seurat, Science, and Art.” Robert L. Herbert, Seurat’s Drawings (New York: Shorewood, 1962), 127. See also

Roger Fry, “Seurat’s La Parade,” Burlington Magazine 55, no. 321 (1929): 289–­93, 290; Jonathan Crary, “1888: Illuminations of Disenchantment,” in Suspensions of Perception, 149–­280. Neither Fry nor Crary addresses Poseuses and its relation to Parade, although, as Herbert notes, “it is as though Poseuses had brought on Parade, in the same way that La Grande Jatte had led to Poseuses”; see Herbert et al., Georges Seurat, 275. 28. Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 145. 29. Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 224, 170, 239. 30. Arsène, “Chroniques d’aujourd’hui,” 1–2. 31. For the reforms of 1863, see Alain Bonnet, L’Enseignement des arts au XIXe siècle: La Réforme de l’École des Beaux-­Arts de 1863 et la fin du modèle académique (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2006). 32. Arsène, “Chroniques d’aujourd’hui,” 1–2. 33. [Félix Fénéon], “Matérialisme,” La Revue indépendante 1, no. 1 (1884): 1–­4, 3, 4. 34. For a description of Duval’s anatomy course, see Philippe Comar, ed., Figures du corps: Une Leçon d’anatomie à l’École des Beaux-­Arts (Paris: Beaux-­Arts de Paris, 2008), 51–­56, 475–­76; Anthea Callen, “The Body and Difference: Anatomy Training at the École des Beaux-­Arts in Paris in the Later Nineteenth Century,” Art History 20, no. 1 (1997): 23–­60. Duval received his degree with a thesis on the physiological functions of the retina; see Duval, Structure et usages de la rétine: Anatomie et physiologie: Thèse pour le concours d’agrégation (anatomie et physiologie) (Paris: Baillière, 1873). Also in 1873, Étienne-­Jules Marey cited Duval’s experimental use of a zootrope to synthetically reconstruct movement in his La Machine animale: Locomotion terrestre et aérienne (Paris: Germer Baillière, 1873), 143, 184–­86. Alongside experimental psychology, Duval was steeped in evolutionary biology. As early as 1873, he joined Paul Broca’s Société d’Anthropologie, later delivering there a series of lectures that would become the first major summary of Darwin’s theories in French; see Duval, Le Darwinisme: Leçons professées à l’École d’anthropologie (Paris: Delahaye et Lecrosnier, 1886). 35. Étienne Roc, “Le Professeur Mathias Duval,” Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui 6, no. 273 (1886): n.p. 36. Philippe Comar, “Une Leçon d’anatomie à l’École des Beaux-­Arts,” in Comar, Figures du corps, 19–­65, 53; Alexis Lemaistre, L’École des Beaux-­Arts dessinée et racontée par un elève (Paris: Firmin-­Didot, 1889), 119–­27, 120, 124.

Notes to Pages 36–39

















37. Darwin was incorporated into the course in 1874; see Comar, “Une Leçon,” 53. 38. For Seurat’s familiarity with physiology and experimental psychology, see Crary, Suspensions of Perception; Zimmerman, Seurat, 227–­75; Foa, Georges Seurat, 21–28. 39. Ribot, Psychologie allemande, viii. Ribot’s Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, founded in 1876, became a key venue for promoting these disciplines in France in the 1870s and 1880s. 40. For the organization and reception of the 1886 exhibition, see Martha Ward, “The Rhetoric of Independence and Innovation,” in The New Painting, Impressionism 1874–­1886, ed. Charles Moffett, exh. cat. (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1986), 421–­42. 41. Émile Verhaeren, “Chronique artistique: Les XX,” La Société nouvelle 7 (1891): 248–­54, 249; Jules Antoine, “Georges Seurat,” La Revue indépendante 19, no. 54 (April 1891): 89–­93, 93; Gustave Kahn, Les Dessins de Georges Seurat (Paris, 1928), 1:n.p. Foa was the first to foreground this disparity of reception; see Foa, Georges Seurat, 7. 42. For a catalogue of pictures exhibited in the eighth exhibition, see NPD, 2:239–­79. 43. Zimmermann, Seurat, 223; Herbert, Making of “La Grande Jatte,” 118. Le Bec du Hoc and La Rade de Grandcamp again accompanied the Grande Jatte at the Salon des Indépendants in 1886 and the Exposition des XX in 1887, but it is unclear if the same triptych was repeated in these exhibitions. We can presume Seurat had a hand in the hanging. Pissarro described the advantages of the separate Neo-­ Impressionist gallery as complete control over the installation of works, see Camille Pissarro to Lucien Pissarro, May 8, 1886, in Correspondance de Camille Pissarro, ed. Janine Bailly-­Herzberg, 5 vols. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1980–­1991), 2:47, letter no. 335. 44. Hermel, “Exposition de peinture,” NPD, 1:457. 45. Félix Fénéon, “Sur Georges Seurat” (1926), in Oeuvres plus que complètes, 1:487–­88. 46. Madeleine Octave Maus, Trente années de lutte pour l’art: Les XX, la Libre esthétique, 1884–­1914 (Brussels: Oiseau Bleu, 1926), 52. Alongside the Grande Jatte, Seurat exhibited five landscapes, including Le Bec du Hoc, Grandcamp, and La Rade de Grand-­Camp. 47. Paul Adam, “Les Artistes indépendants,” La Vogue 1, no. 8 (1886): 262. 48. Joris-­Karl Huysmans, “Chronique d’art: Les Indépendants,” La Revue indépendante 3, no. 6 (April 1887): 51–57, 53, 54. 49. Seurat produced eleven small panels and five marine canvases on this trip. For the Grandcamp campaign, see Zimmermann, Seurat, 197–­223, esp. 205–­11. Although the ocean landscape served as a testing ground for divisionism, Seurat implemented and quite likely conceived of it as one technical component of a broader program already focused on figure painting. The composition of the Grande Jatte was fully laid out when Seurat went to Normandy. Immediately after returning to Paris, he set out to expand the technique from landscape to figural motifs, first executing La Seine, à Courbevoie in 1885, which depicts a woman and animal strolling at the tip of the island of Grande Jatte—­by all appearances, she is the same scandalous woman as in the right foreground of the Grande Jatte. He then returned to the large canvas, sharpening the contours of certain figures and resurfacing it with an overlay of dabs and dashes of pointillist color. See Zimmermann, Seurat, 219–­20; Herbert, Making of “La Grande Jatte,” esp. 200–­202. 50. Jean le Fustec, “Exposition de la societé des artistes indépendants,” Journal des Artistes 5, no. 34 (August 22, 1886): 282. Significantly, Seurat had already produced

Notes to Pages 39–41

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51.



52.



53. 54.



55.







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a version of the picture without figures: L’Île de la Grande Jatte (1884), an unpopulated landscape identical to the one in Un Dimanche à la Grande Jatte–­1884, but much smaller in format (65 × 81 cm). A. J. Wauters, “Aux XX, III, M. Seurat, ‘La Grande Jatte,’ ” clipping, La Gazette, March 1, 1887, Fonds Maus. Louis-­Pilate de Brinn Gaubast, “Exposition des artistes indépendants,” Le Décadent 1, no. 24 (1886): 3. Huysmans, “Chronique d’art,” 53. Paul Adam, “Les Artistes indépendants,” La Revue rose 3, no. 10 (1887): 144, in response to Seurat’s submissions to the 1887 Salon des Indépendants, which focused on landscape. It should be noted that Huysmans was associated with Symbolism and responded positively to many artists, like Odilon Redon, associated with the movement. The adverse reaction to Seurat might be attributed to his work’s middle position between realism and antinaturalism. Fénéon, “Les Impressionnistes,” La Vogue, June 13–­20, 1886, in NPD, 1:441–­45. A slightly edited version of the original review was reprinted in Félix Fénéon, Les

Impressionnistes en 1886 (Paris: Publications de “la Vogue,” 1886). The most comprehensive study of Fénéon’s career remains Joan U. Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-­de-­Siècle Paris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988). 56. For Fénéon’s critical innovations, see Joan U. Halperin, “Scientific Criticism and le beau modern of the Age of Science,” Art Criticism 1, no. 1 (1979): 55–­71; Michael Andrew Marlais, “Symbolism Divided: Félix Fénéon and the Defense of Modernism,” in Conservative Echoes in Fin-­de-­Siècle Parisian Art Criticism (Philadelphia: Penn State, 1992), 73–­116. 57. Fénéon, “Impressionnistes,” 443–­44, 444. 58. Fénéon, “Impressionnistes,” 444. 59. Clark, Nude, 352. 60. Jean Ajalbert, “Le Salon des impressionistes” (June 20, 1886), in NPD, 1:430–­34, 433. 61. Huysmans, “Chronique d’art,” 53. 62. Huysmans, “Chronique d’art,” 53. 63. Aubin-­Louis Millin, Dictionnaire des Beaux-­Arts (Paris: Desray, 1806), s.v. “extremités” (1:580). 64. The hand of the cigar smoker was a last-­minute addition; see Making of La Grande Jatte, 82. 65. Marcel Fouquier conveyed this in his quip that Seurat’s “jockey” appeared to have lost a leg in his last race; “Les Impressionnistes,” Le XIXe Siècle, May 16, 1886, in NDP, 447–­49, 449. 66. Fénéon, “Impressionnisme aux Tuileries,” 56. 67. Georges Seurat, final study for Un Dimanche à la Grande Jatte–­1884, 1884, oil on canvas, 70.5 × 104.1 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. 51.112.6. 68. Fénéon, “Impressionnistes,” 444. 69. Thadée Natanson, “Un Primitif d’aujourd’hui: Georges Seurat,” La Revue blanche 21 (April 1900): 610–­14; Jules Christophe, “Chromo-­Luminaristes: Georges Seurat,” La Plume 1 (September 1891): 292. 70. Goldstein, Post-­Revolutionary Self, 115. 71. Adam, “Peintres impressionnistes,” La Revue contemporaine, April–­May 1886, in NPD 1:429–­30. 72. Adam, “Peintres impressionnistes,” 1:427, 430; Paul Adam, “Les Impressionnistes à l’exposition des Indépendants,” La Vie Moderne, April 15, 1888.

Notes to Pages 42–47













73. Coquiot, Seurat, 179. 74. Émile Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française (Paris: Hachette, 1873), s.v. “hiératique” (2:2024); Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “hieratic.” The earliest example the OED gives for this usage is “1841: W. Spalding Italy & Ital. Islands I. 176: Art in all its stages, from the rudest of the archaic or hieratic paintings to the finest design and finish of the Macedonian times.” 75. Georges Verdavainne, “L’Exposition des XX,” unpaginated clipping, La Féderation artistique, February 12, 1887, Fonds Maus; “Ouverture du Salon des XX, l’instaurateur du Néo-­Impressionnisme, Georges-­Pierre Seurat,” L’Art moderne 12, no. 6 (1892): 41–­43, 42. 76. See, for instance, John Rewald, “Extraits du journal inédit de Paul Signac: I, 1894–­ 1895,” Gazette des Beaux-­Arts 36 (July–­September 1949): 107. 77. Robert Rey, La Renaissance du sentiment classique, la peinture française à la fin du XIXième siècle (Paris: Les Beaux-­Arts, 1931), 120. 78. Lange, Billedkunstens, 453. 79. Lange, Billedkunstens, 464, 445. 80. Lange, Billedkunstens, 440. 81. Lange, Billedkunstens, 440, 442. 82. Riegl, Historical Grammar, 357. This text, unpublished during the author’s lifetime, was compiled by Otto Pächt and Karl Swoboda from lecture drafts for the years 1897–­1898 and 1899. 83. Emanuel Löwy, Lysipp und seine Stellung in der griechischen Plastik (Hamburg: J. F. Richter, 1891), 18, 23. 84. Löwy, Lysipp, 6. 85. Lange, Billedkunstens, 445, 442. 86. Lange, Billedkunstens, 463. 87. Lange, Billedkunstens, 464. 88. Riegl, Historical Grammar, 359. 89. Gustave Kahn, “Réponse des symbolistes,” L’Événement, September 28, 1886, 3. 90. Adam, “Peintres impressionnistes,” 430. 91. See especially Feliz Eda Burhan, “Vision and Visionaries: Nineteenth-­Century Psychological Theory, the Occult Sciences, and the Formation of the Symbolist Aesthetic in France” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1979); Serena Keshavjee, “ ‘L’Art inconscient’ and ‘L’Esthetique des esprits’: Science, Spiritualism, and the Imagining of the Unconscious in French Symbolist Art” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2002); Allison Morehead, Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018); Andrei Pop, A Forest of Symbols: Art, Science, and Truth in the Long Nineteenth Century (New York: Zone Books, 2019). 92. Definition of “Moi” from Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques (1849), quoted in Goldstein, “Mutations of the Self,” 86. 93. Kahn, “Réponse,” 3. 94. Gustave Kahn, “La Vie artistique,” La Vie moderne 9, no. 15 (1887): 229–­31, 229. 95. Félix Fénéon, “Le Néo-­impressionnisme à la IVième exposition des artistes indépendants,” in Fénéon, Oeuvres plus que complètes, 1:71–76, 74. 96. Diderot apparently coined the adjective mannequiné, which later came into more general French usage. See Pierre Larousse, Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle (Paris: Administration du Grand Dictionnaire Universel, 1866–­1873), s.v. “mannequiné” (10:1087); see also Jules Adeline, Lexique des termes d’art (Paris: Quantin, 1884), s.v. “mannequiné” (277). 97. Fèvre, “Exposition des impressionnistes,” 2:148–­56, 445. For the Zinnfiguren, see

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 47–52

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[ 272 ]





Léon Duplessis, “L’Empire d’allemagne: Les soldats de plomb,” Bulletin consulaire français 17, no. 1 (1889): 97–­111. 98. Herbert, Making of “La Grande Jatte,” 105. Placing circular bases beneath the feet of figures to analogize them to toys was common in caricature and was a device used on numerous occasions to mock figural compositions by Gustave Courbet; see the examples in Charles Léger, Courbet selon les caricatures et les images (Paris: Rosenberg, 1920), 19, 29. 99. Herbert, Making of “La Grande Jatte,” 105; Alfred Paulet, “Les Impressionnistes,” Paris, June 5, 1886, in NPD, 1:469. 100. Seurat’s cadets may be modeled on some image of the soldier produced for children. Robert Herbert found “sheets of toy soldiers” in a preliminary inventory of Seurat’s papers, which were unfortunately lost shortly after; see “Appendix C: Seurat’s Collection of Prints, Reproductions and Photographs,” in Herbert et al., Georges Seurat, 378–­80. 101. Jules Christophe, “Georges Seurat,” Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui 8, no. 368 (March–­ April 1890): n.p. 102. The starring role this woman assumed in Steven Sondheim’s musical Sunday in the Park with George (1984) theatrically reconfirms what was, from the first moment of the canvas’s reception, a pervasive tendency to fixate upon the woman in the foreground. 103. See Roger-­Marx, Seurat, 9; Meyer Schapiro, “Seurat,” in Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries, Selected Papers (New York: George Braziller, 1978), 101–­9, 108; Herbert, Making of “La Grande Jatte,” 98. Portions of the following discussion are adapted from my essay “Mannequin and Monkey in Seurat’s Grande Jatte,” in Justine de Young, Fashion in European Art: Dress and Identity, Politics and the Body, 1775–­1925 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2017), 150–77. For a general history of the artist’s mannequin, see Jane Munro’s magisterial catalogue, Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014). 104. Larousse, Grand dictionnaire, s.v. “mannequin” (10:1086). For theoretical and practical concepts of the mannequin d’atelier in France, see Millin, Dictionnaire des Beaux-­Arts, s.v. “Mannequin” (2:389–­90); Adeline, Lexique, s.v. “mannequiné” (276–­77). Henri Lehmann, Seurat’s professor at the École, had one of his Salon paintings mocked in this manner; see Munro, Silent Partners, 78. 105. For the rise of Parisian department stores, see Bernard Marrey, Les Grands magasins: Des origines à 1939 (Paris: Picard, 1979), 9–­109; Philip G. Nord, The Politics of Resentment: Shopkeeper Protest in Nineteenth-­Century Paris (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2005), esp. 60–­99, 143–­82. Nord points to the 1880s as the key transitional period, simultaneously witnessing the takeoff of the ready-­to-­wear business and “democratization of store clienteles.” 106. Léon Riotor, Le Mannequin (Paris: Bibliothèque Artistique et Littéraire, 1900), 85, 94. 107. Octave Uzanne, “Le Mannequin, son histoire anecdotique: Les Femmes dociles,” in Riotor, Mannequin, x. 108. Encyclopédie des Beaux-­Arts, quoted in Larousse, Grand dictionnaire, s.v. “mannequin” (10:1086); Uzanne, “Mannequin,” x. 109. See the table of related works in Hauke, Seurat et son oeuvre, 1:200–­201. In the years leading up to the Grande Jatte, the artist produced several sketches of urban strollers approaching luminous window displays. See the drawings Un Magasin et deux personnages, ca. 1882 (cat. no. 476), and Rencontre, ca. 1882 (cat. no. 477), reproduced in Hauke, Seurat et son oeuvre, 2:84. 110. See Riotor, Mannequin, 94–­96.

Notes to Pages 52–55



















111. Le Fustec, “Exposition de la societé des artistes,” 282; Émile Hennequin, “Notes d’art: Les Impressionnistes,” La Vie moderne, June 19, 1886, in NPD, 1:454. 112. Wauters, “Aux XX,” n.p. 113. Henri Bergson, Le Rire (1900), in Oeuvres, ed. André Robinet (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970), 383–­485, 391. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2005), 5. 114. Bergson, Laughter, 14/Le Rire, 400. 115. Bergson, Laughter, 14/Le Rire, 400. 116. Bergson, Laughter, 14/Le Rire, 400, Laughter, 24/Le Rire, 410. 117. Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 324–­27. 118. Bergson, Laughter, 17/Le Rire, 403, Laughter, 24/Le Rire, 395. 119. Bergson, Laughter, 10/Le Rire, 396. I have modified the translation in reference to the original. For a discussion that situates Bergson’s essay in the context of the 1880s literature, see Rae Beth Gordon, “From Charcot to Charlot: Unconscious Imitation and Spectatorship in French Cabaret and Early Cinema,” Critical Inquiry 27, no. 3 (2001): 515–­49, 533. 120. Paulet, “Les Impressionnistes,” 469. 121. Ellenberger, Discovery of the Unconscious, 171; Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 230; Jacqueline Carroy, Hypnose, suggestion et psychologie: L’Invention de sujets (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991); Jacqueline Carroy and Regine Plas, “The Origins of French Experimental Psychology: Experiment and Experimentalism,” History of the Human Sciences 9 (1996): 73–­84; Allan Gauld, A History of Hypnotism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 122. Charles Richet, “Les Travaux du Congrès de psychologie physiologique,” in Congrès international de psychologie physiologique (Paris: Bureau de Revues, 1890), 32–­38, 37. The Scottish doctor James Braid was responsible for renaming the phenomenon “hypnosis,” after the Greek god of sleep, in Neurypnology: Or the Rationale of Nervous Sleep: Considered in Relation with Animal Magnetism (London: J. Churchill, 1843). For a nineteenth-­century account of this transition, see Alfred Binet and Charles Féré, Le Magnétisme animal (Paris: Alcan, 1887). 123. Richet, “Congrès de Psychologie Physiologique,” 36; Pierre Janet, L’Automatisme psychologique: Essai de psychologie expérimentale sur les formes inférieures de l’activité humaine (Paris: F. Alcan, 1889). 124. Tarde’s signature essay on social psychology, later developed into a book, was published the same year as Hippolyte Bernheim’s major text challenging the pathological theory of hypnotic phenomena, De la suggestion dans l’état hypnotique et dans l’état de veille (Paris: Doin, 1884). 125. Gabriel Tarde, The Laws of Imitation, trans. Elsie Clews Parsons (New York: Henry Holt, 1903), 77. Throughout, I quote from this translation of Tarde, Les Lois de l’imitation (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1890). 126. Gabriel Tarde, “Qu’est-­ce qu’une société?” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 18 (July–­December 1884): 489–­51, reprinted in Tarde, Lois de l’imitation. For the relevance of Tarde’s social theory for Seurat’s practice, see Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 240–­44. Rosalind H. Williams situates Tarde in relation to emerging theories of consumption in the early Third Republic; see Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-­Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 342–­84. 127. Bergson, Le Rire, 403. 128. Tarde, Laws of Imitation, 11. 129. In particular, he cites George Romanes, Mental Evolution in Animals, with a Post-

Notes to Pages 56–57

[ 273 ]

















[ 274 ]



humous Essay on Instinct by Darwin (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1883), and notes the relation between instinct and imitation. 130. Tarde, “Qu’est-­ce qu’une société?” 499; Tarde, Laws of Imitation, 88, 75. For these observations, Tarde drew on psychological studies by Hippolyte Taine and Henry Maudsley. 131. Tarde, “Qu’est-­ce qu’une société?” 500; Tarde, Laws of Imitation, 75. 132. Tarde, Laws of Imitation, 82. 133. Tarde, Laws of Imitation, 76n2. 134. Paulet, “Les Impressionnistes,” 469. The marching-­in-­unison of soldiers was one of Tarde’s examples of behavior dependent on the mind’s innate imitative tendencies; Tarde, Laws of Imitation, 195. 135. Tarde, Laws of Imitation, 77, 82. On fashion, as opposed to custom, as the hallmark of modern imitation, see Tarde, “Extra-­Logical Influences,” in Laws of Imitation, 244–­55, 192. 136. Adam, “Peintres impressionnistes,” 1:429–­30. 137. Fèvre, “Exposition des impressionnistes,” 1:445–­47, 445; Lucien Rigaud, Dictionnaire d’argot moderne (Paris: Ollendorff, 1888), s.v. “poseur, poseuse” (308). 138. Paul Signac, “Le Néo-­impressionnisme: Documents,” Gazette des Beaux-­Arts 11, no. 852 (1934): 49–­59, 55. Signac refers in particular to a group of mocking onlookers led by the painter Alfred Stevens. 139. Fénéon, “Sur Georges Seurat,” 1:488. 140. Littré, Dictionnaire, s.v. “singer”: “imiter, contrefaire” (4:1949); Petit dictionnaire universal: ou, Abrégé du dictionnaire français de É. Littré (Paris: Hachette, 1876), s.v. “singerie”: “Grimaces, gestes, tours de malice. Minauderies. Imitation gauche ou ridicule. Manières hypocrites. Ménagerie de singes. Tableau représentant des singes en costume d’homme” (791). 141. Tarde, Laws of Imitation, 79. 142. Tarde, Laws of Imitation, 229, 196. 143. Tarde, Laws of Imitation, 108–­9. I have modified the translation in reference to Gabriel Tarde, “L’Archéologie et la statistique,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 16 (July–­December 1883): 363–­84, 492–­511, 378. 144. Paul Signac, “Les Besoins individuels et la peinture,” in Encyclopédie française, ed. Anatole de Monzie (Paris: Comité de l’Encyclopédie Française, 1935), 16:84–­87. 145. Kinney, “Fashion and Figuration,” 284. See also Clark, Painting of Modern Life, 261–­67; Meyer Schapiro, “Seurat and ‘La Grande Jatte,’ ” Columbia Review 17 (November 1935): 9–­16, 14. 146. George Moore, “Half-­a-­Dozen Enthusiasts,” The Bat (May 1886), in NPD, 1:436. 147. Kahn recalls Seurat as an avid reader of Zola’s Naturalist novels. See Kahn, Les Dessins de Georges Seurat, 1: n.p.; Henri Mitterand, Émile Zola: Carnets d’enquêtes, une ethnographie inédite de la France (Paris: Terre Humaine/Plon, 1986), 225. For the visibility of demoiselles de magasin promenading on their Sundays off, see Pierre Giffard, Paris sous la Troisième République: Les Grands bazars (Paris: Havard, 1882), 13, 116. Shop-­girls were distinctively attired in uniform black silk. The black bodice of the monkey’s mistress might therefore mark her professional relationship to a store. 148. Mitterand, Émile Zola, 186. 149. Tarde, Laws of Imitation, 84. 150. Octave Uzanne, L’Ombrelle, le gant, le manchon (Paris: Maison Quantin, 1883), 61. See also Paul Ginisty, “La Parapluie,” in Paris à la loupe (Paris: Marpon et Flammarion, 1883), 175–­81. For further discussion of the Grande Jatte in relation to fashion and this retail revolution, see Kinney, “Fashion and Figuration.”

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 5 7– 6 1





















151. Henri Pollès, “L’Art du commerce” (1937), quoted in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project: Walter Benjamin, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1999), 78. 152. While Seurat’s monkey may be an eclectic construction combining features of various species observable in Parisian zoos, the emphasis given to the long, prehensile tail and the face’s contrasting coloration suggests an animal from the genus Cebus: New World monkeys with distinctive caps of fur on their crowns, named for the robed monks in the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin. Highly trainable and considered to be the most intelligent species of New World monkey, capuchins in human attire were the ubiquitous companions of organ grinders in nineteenth-­century cities. See Dorothy M. Fragaszy, Elisabetta Visalberghi, and Linda M. Fedigan, The Complete Capuchin: The Biology of the Genus Cebus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1–­15. 153. Tarde, Laws of Imitation, 244. Tarde refers to the “almost instantaneous” spread of Darwinian theory to exemplify the accelerated pace of imitation in modernity, 370. When addressed, the monkey has mostly been interpreted as an allusion to prostitution; see, e.g., Richard Thompson, Seurat (Oxford: Phaidon, 1985), 123. A possible allusion to Darwin was noted briefly in Albert Boime, “Studies of the Monkey by Seurat and Pisanello,” Burlington Magazine 111, no. 791 (1969): 79–­81, 80n18; Joan Halperin, “The Ironic Eye/I in Jules Laforgue and Georges Seurat,” in Seurat Re-­Viewed, ed. Paul Smith (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 2009), 113–­46, 124. 154. For the monkey as “emblem of the arts, and more particularly painting and sculpture,” see H. W. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1952), 287–­325. See also Bertrand Marret, Portraits de l’artiste en singe: Les Singeries dans la peinture (Paris: Somogy, 2001), esp. 59–­85. 155. Constantin James, Du Darwinisme; ou, L’Homme-­singe (Paris: Plon, 1877), 67. Note that here James is referring to both Darwin and Émile Littré, whom he describes as “l’alter ego de Darwin.” 156. Moore, “Half-­a-­Dozen Enthusiasts,” 1:436. 157. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, part 2 (1871), vol. 22 of The Works of Charles Darwin, ed. Paul H. Barrett and R. B. Freeman (New York: New York University Press, 1987–­1989), 634. The presence of what appear to be cage bars in three of the five conté crayon studies supports Herbert’s claim that “when Seurat decided that his promenading woman would have a monkey, he went to the zoo”; see Herbert et al., Georges Seurat, 199. The Jardin zoologique d’acclimatation is the likeliest candidate, because it was highly publicized in the 1880s, and because the singerie contained sajous, or brown capuchins; see Guide du promeneur au Jardin zoologique d’acclimatation au Bois de Boulogne (Paris: Librairie Spéciale du Jardin Zoologique d’Acclimatation, 1877), 27. 158. For the role of this caricature as an emblem of the British public’s “sexualized responses to evolution,” see Gowan Dawson, Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 74. 159. Frank Zuccari and Allison Langley, “Seurat’s Working Process: The Compositional Evolution of La Grande Jatte,” in Herbert, Making of “La Grande Jatte,” 178–­95, 187. 160. For further discussion of these compositional changes, see Butterfield-­Rosen, “Mannequin and Monkey in Seurat’s Grande Jatte,” in De Young, Fashion in European Art, 150–­77. 161. George Moore, Confessions of a Young Man (1886; New York: Capricorn, 1959), 43–­44.

N o t e s t o P a g e s 6 1– 6 4

[ 275 ]















[ 276 ]



162. J. C. Flügel, The Psychology of Clothes, ed. Ernst Jones (London: Hogarth Press/ Institute of Psycho-­Analysis, 1950), 161. 163. Albert Robida, “Le Phare de la mode,” La Caricature, no. 302 (October 10, 1885), 2. 164. Coquiot, Seurat, 112. 165. Adolf Loos, “Ladies’ Fashion” (1902), in Spoken into the Void: Collected Essays, 1897–­1900, trans. Jane O. Newman and John H. Smith (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), 99–­103, 100. 166. The essay is reprinted in Charles Blanc, L’Art dans la parure est dans le vêtement (Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1875), 373–­75. 167. Kahn, Dessins de Georges Seurat, 1: n.p. 168. For descriptions and illustrations of monkeys (including capuchins) performing at the Cirque Corvi see Hugues Le Roux, Les Jeux du cirque et la vie foraine, illus. Jules Garnier (Paris: Plon, 1889), 70, 86–­89. The monkey was the signature feature of advertisements for the Cirque Corvi. See the examples collected in Richard Thomson, Seurat’s Circus Sideshow, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017), 47–­51, especially Jules Chéret’s monkey-­filled 1881 poster advertising “quadrupèdes & quadrumanes”; for the wider proliferation of trained monkeys in popular performances between 1880 and 1910, see Rae Beth Gordon, Dances with Darwin, 1875–­ 1910: Vernacular Modernity in France (London: Ashgate, 2009), 93–­99. 169. Osbert Sitwell, “Les Poseuses,” Apollo 6 (June 1926): 345. 170. For the history of this concept, and the influence of modern fashion on its conceptualization, see Evelleen Richards’s magisterial Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), esp. 221–­58. I will return to the topic of sexual selection in chapter 2. 171. See in particular Darwin, “Display by Male Birds of Their Plumage,” in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1871), 2:86–­98. Seurat’s cover for Victor Joze’s 1890 novel La Ménagerie sociale, l’homme à femmes, in which a woman wearing an enormously exaggerated cul de Paris, presented in profile, interrupts the title, continues this triad of association between the animal kingdom, the fad for the faux cul, and modern courtship (Hauke, Seurat et son oeuvre, cat. no. 211). 172. The persistence of this association is evident, for instance, in the titles of publications such as Rudolf Heidenhain’s Hypnotism; or, Animal Magnetism: Physiological Observations, trans. L. C. Woodbridge (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1888). I thank Jessie Alperin for noting this connection. 173. Gustave Kahn, “Seurat,” L’Art moderne 11, no. 14 (April 5, 1891): 107–­10, 108. 174. Significantly, Maurice Denis dated the “decadence” of art to the formation of academies organized around the model; see his “Préface de la IX Exposition des Peintres Impressionnistes et Symbolistes” (1895), in Théories, 1890–­1910: Du symbolisme et de Gauguin vers un nouvel ordre classique, 4th ed. (Paris: Rouart et Watelin, 1920), 28. 175. A facsimile of the catalogue entry listing Seurat’s submissions to the 1887 Exposition is included in Hauke, Seurat et son oeuvre, 1:221. 176. A facsimile of the catalogue for the 1888 Exposition is in Hauke, Seurat et son oeuvre, 1:222. 177. Christophe, “Georges Seurat,” n.p., English in original. The height measurement is based on calculations I made together with conservator Judy Dion at the Barnes Foundation in December 2011. I thank Judith Dolkart, former chief curator of the Barnes Foundation, for allowing me to examine Poseuses at eye level during the collection’s relocation from Merion. Without that visit, much of the analysis that follows would have been impossible.

Notes to Pages 64–68

















178. Gustave Kahn, “Peinture: Exposition des indépendants,” La Revue indépendante 6, no. 18 (1888): 160–­64, 161. 179. My gratitude to Joseph Rishel for introducing me to Kristina Haugland, who generously shared her knowledge of nineteenth-­century undergarments. For the common misidentification as a bag, see, for instance, Nochlin, “Body Politics,” 75. More recently, Foa has perceptively described this object as “an item of female clothing or an accessory of some sort,” that has been “plucked from one of the room’s various horizontal surfaces and relocated, literally and figuratively, into the vertical field of vision, akin to the four framed pictures . . . that hang to its left”; see Foa, Georges Seurat, 98. 180. For the metaphorics of backside views, especially as expressions of disdain, see Patricia Rubin, Seen from Behind: Perspectives on the Male Body and Renaissance Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 28. 181. Viktor Joze, “Sztuki plastyczne: Malarstwo i rezezba we Francyi,” Przeglad-­ Tygosmowy, undated clipping (Spring 1888?) in Signac Archives, Paris. I thank Anna Jozefacka for her translation. 182. Octave Maus, “Le Salon des XX, à Bruxelles,” La Cravache, March 2, 1889, clipping, Fonds Maus. 183. Henry van de Velde, “Georges Seurat,” La Wallonie 6, nos. 3–­4 (1891): 167–­71, 169. 184. “Beaux-­Arts: Les Artistes indépendants,” Petite République française, May 21, 1886, in NPD, 1:470. 185. L’Observateur français, March 26, 1888, quoted in Henri Dorra and John Rewald, Seurat: L’Oeuvre peint, biographie et catalogue critique (Paris: Beaux-­Arts, 1959), 216. 186. See Camille Pissarro to Paul Signac, August 1888, in Bailly-­Herzberg, Correspondance de Camille Pissarro, 2:248, letter no. 503. 187. Comar, “Une Leçon,” 19–­65, 19. Diderot’s Encyclopédie similarly defines “académie de peinture” as “a public school where painters go to draw or paint, and sculptors to model, after a nude man called the model,” quoted in James H. Rubin, “Concepts and Consequences in Eighteenth-­Century French Life-­Drawing,” in Drawing: Masters and Methods, Raphael to Redon, ed. Diana Dethloff (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1992), 7–­18, 7. For a splendid survey of academic nude figure studies, see Susanne Müller-­Bechtel, Von allen Seiten anders: Die akademische Aktstudie 1650–­ 1850 (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2018). 188. Kahn, “Seurat,” 107–­10, 107. 189. In the small Poseuse exhibited in 1887, the model stands directly below the vertical-­ format picture pinned to the wall, as if Seurat coordinated the model’s placement with this image. I thank Judy Dion for discussing the results of her infrared analysis of Poseuses. Until further scientific research is undertaken, there is much we cannot know. The recent discovery of an effaced self-­portrait beneath the flowerpot in Jeune femme se poudrant confirms Seurat’s tendency to paint in, and then obscure, personally revealing information; see Aviva Burnstock and Karen Serres, “Seurat’s Hidden Self Portrait,” Burlington Magazine 156, no. 133 (April 2014): 240–­42. 190. On the voting process, see Lemaistre, École des Beaux-­Arts, 35; William Chambers Morrow, Bohemian Paris of Today (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1899), 54. 191. Herbert argues that only two preparatory studies for the Grande Jatte were executed in the studio; see Making of “La Grande Jatte,” 86. One was a fabric study of the standing woman’s bustle, probably done from a mannequin (Hauke, Seurat et son oeuvre, cat. no. 624). The other was a full-­length sketch of the standing woman, done from a posed model (Hauke, Seurat et son oeuvre, cat. no. 625). 192. Adeline, Lexique, s.v. “académique” (9).

Notes to Pages 68– 71

[ 27 7 ]













[ 278 ]



193. Van de Velde, “Georges Seurat,” 169. 194. For the dating of this sketch, see Françoise Cachin, “Poseuses 1886–­1888,” in Herbert et al., Georges Seurat, 273–­95, 275. 195. For the claim that these were executed from life, see Thomson, Seurat, 137. 196. Rey, Renaissance du sentiment, 123; Thomson, Seurat, 137; Richard R. Brettell, “Georges Seurat, 1886: Model Facing Front,” in Brettell et al., The Robert Lehman Collection, vol. 9, Nineteenth-­and Twentieth-­Century European Drawings (Prince­ ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 208–­11. 197. Christophe, “Georges Seurat,” n.p. 198. Rich, Seurat, Paintings and Drawings, 16. A number of scholars have used the term “reversal” to describe the relationship between Poseuses and the Grande Jatte. See also Kinney, “Fashion and Figuration,” 229. 199. Nochlin, “Seurat’s Grande Jatte,” 143. 200. I refer here to Judy Dion’s infrared analysis in December 2011. 201. The reproduction of the Grande Jatte in Poseuses exaggerates its streamlining of extremities, which underscores this contrast. 202. For a discussion of Standbein and Spielbein, see Löwy, Lysipp, 6. 203. Paul Richer, “Des différents modes de station chez l’homme sain,” in Nouvelle iconographie de la Salpêtrière (Paris: Salpêtrière, 1894), 65–­98, 86. 204. Guy P. R. Métraux, Sculptors and Physicians in Fifth-­Century Greece: A Preliminary Study (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 1995), 30. See E. H. ­Gombrich, “Reflections on the Greek Revolution,” in Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1960), 116–­45. 205. Gombrich, “Reflections on the Greek Revolution,” 117, 118. 206. Fry, “Seurat’s La Parade,” 290. The central figure in Parade might be based on the initial conté study for Poseuses but subjected to a process that reversed the additive one that produced the nudes in the larger canvas. The trombone slide loops over the musician’s crotch to echo the clasped arms of the central model in Poseuses, while the figure’s lower body schematically mimics her legs in their Standbein/Spielbein configuration. But in this echo of the central model’s stance, Seurat undermined Poseuses’s “advance” into classical posture, for, as Crary argued, the trombonist conveys a sense of “mechanical and automatic movement” that “[negates] the possibilities of classical contrapposto”; see Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 229, 228. 207. Kahn, “Vie artistique,” 230. 208. Gustave Geffroy, “Chronique: Pointillé-­Cloisonnisme,” La Justice, April 11, 1888; Van de Velde, “Georges Seurat,” 169. 209. Adam, “Les Impressionnistes à l’exposition des Indépendants,” 229. 210. Christophe, “Georges Seurat,” n.p. (Christophe first made the comparison in “Le Néo-­Impressionnisme au Pavillon de la ville de Paris,” Journal des artistes 7, no. 19 [1888]: 147–­48); Fénéon, “Néo-­impressionnisme,” 75. 211. The pose appears in Petite Baigneuse (1826), Petite Baigneuse, Intérieur d’Harem (1828), and Bain turc (1867). Herbert suggests the allusion to the Ingres; see Seurat’s Drawings, 128. Scholars who accept this include Cachin, “Poseuses 1886–­ 1888,” 286; Nochlin, “Body Politics,” 121; Thomson, Seurat, 141. 212. Eugène Véron, Aesthetics (1878), trans. W. H. Armstrong (London: Chapman & Hall, 1879), xviii. 213. The identification was first made in Herbert, Seurat’s Drawings, 128. For the Spinario, see Frances Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500–­1900 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981),

Notes to Pages 73– 76



214.



215.



216.



217.







308–­10; as well as “Tireur d’épine,” in Jean-­Pierre Cuzin, Jean-­René Gaborit, and Alain Pasquier, D’après l’antique, exh. cat. (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2000), 200–­224. For the Louvre bronze, an Italian copy of 1540, see Cuzin, Gaborit, and Pasquier, D’après l’antique, 220, cat. no. 64. For the Spinario in Seurat’s textbook, see David Sutter, Esthétique générale et appliqué: Contenant les règles de la composition dans les arts plastiques (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1865). For the use of this textbook during Seurat’s time at the École des Beaux-­Arts, see Zimmermann, Seurat, 403. For the photographic académies, see Sylvie Aubenas, L’Art du nu au XIXe siècle: Le Photographe et son modèle (Paris: Hazan, 1997). Ireson, “Seurat and the ‘Cours de M. Yvon,’ ” 177–­80; for the tradition of posing models after antique sculptures, see Emmanuel Schwartz, “Poser l’antique,” in Cuzin, Gaborit, and Pasquier, D’après l’antique, 103–­9. Henri Lechat, “Une Loi de la statuaire primitive: La loi de la frontalité,” Revue des universités du Midi 1 (1895): 1–­23, 22. Clara Clement, An Outline History of Sculpture for Beginners and Students (New York: White, Stokes, and Allen, 1885), 81. The narrative function of the Spinario

in Heinrich von Kleist’s 1810 essay “On the Puppet Theater” also confirms that “absorption” was at the heart of its wide appeal for nineteenth-­century viewers. Further consideration of the complex role of the Spinario in Kleist’s prose sketch, and this essay’s broader relevance for Poseuses, is beyond my scope. Suffice it to say that Bergson’s definition of “grace” in Le Rire inverts Kleist’s definition in “Puppet Theater,” where gracefulness is associated precisely with the absence of consciousness. The reception of Seurat’s painting, alongside Bergson’s essay, suggests how the popular diffusion of scientific psychology by the end of the nineteenth century and the emphasis it had placed on various unconscious states might have reoriented thinking about grace of body and spirit. 218. Roger Fry, “Seurat” (1926), in Seurat, ed. Anthony Blunt (London: Phaidon, 1965), 15. 219. Cachin, “Poseuses 1886–­1888,” 283. 220. Nochlin, “Body Politics,” 74. 221. Herbert, Seurat’s Drawings, 128. As Cachin points out, among Seurat’s thirty-­three surviving drawings of antique sculpture, three are of female figures and thirty are of males; see Cachin, “Poseuses 1886–­1888,” 275. 222. Nochlin, “Body Politics,” 121; Thomson, Seurat, 241. 223. J. J. Tikkanen was the first to analyze the pudica pose, specifically with regard to the closed-­knee stance as a “specifically feminine leg position”; see Tikkanen, Die Beinstellungen in der Kunstgeschichte. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Künstlerischen Motive (Helsingfors: Druckerei der Finnischen Litteraturgesellschaft, 1912), 79. For further discussion, see Nanette Salomon, “Making a World of Difference: Gender, Asymmetry, and the Greek Nude,” in Naked Truths: Women, Sexuality and Gender in Classical Art and Archaeology, ed. Ann Olga Koloski-­Ostrow and Claire L. Lyons (London: Routledge, 2003), 197–­219. Glenys Davies suggests that the emergence of the pudica of the Praxitelean Venus in opposition to the contrapposto of the Doryphoros was the key moment in the evolution of a gender-­divergent body language in Western art; see Davies, Gender and Body Language in Roman Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 82–­87. 224. I thank Richard Neer for first pointing me toward the resemblance. 225. Plutarch, Lives, vol. 7, Demosthenes and Cicero; Alexander and Caesar, trans. Bernadotte Perrin, Loeb Classical Library 99 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

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Press, 1919), 76: “εἴπερ ἴσην ῥώμην γνώμῃ, Δημόσθενες, εἶχες, οὔποτ᾿ ἂν Ἑλλήνων ἦρξεν Ἄρης Μακεδών.” I have modified the translation and thank Alex Zachary for his help. 226. John Edwin Sandys, “La Statue de Démosthène à Knole Park,” in Mélanges Weil: Recueil de mémoires concernant l’histoire et la littérature grecques dédié à Henri Weil (Paris: A. Fontemoing, 1898), 423–28, 424. 227. For a list identifying the copies on the façade of the Palais des Études, see Eugène Müntz, Guide de l’École nationale des beaux-­arts (Paris: Maison Quantin, 1889), 45–­46. The sculptures remain in place today. 228. The year 1876 saw the inauguration of a museum of casts in the school’s newly covered interior courtyard. For documentation of Demosthenes in the Cour Vitrée as of 1876, see Guillaume Crocquevieille, “Les Moulages d’après l’antique de la Cour Vitrée de l’École des Beaux-­arts de Paris,” 2 vols. (Mémoire d’étude, École du Louvre, 2008), 2: xxv–­xxvi. For Ingres’s commission of the Demosthenes cast, see Christiane Pinatel, “Les Envois de moulages d’antiques à l’École des Beaux-­arts de Paris par L’Académie de France à Rome,” in Les Moulages de sculptures antiques et l’histoire de l’archéologie, ed. Henri Lavagne and François Queyrel (Geneva: Droz, 2000), 75–­120, 86. 229. Coquiot, Seurat, 225. 230. “Les XX, le Mouvement Littéraire,” unsigned, unidentified clipping, February 8, 1892, Fonds Maus. 231. The painting is often incorrectly referred to as “Les Poseuses,” which disregards the pointed ambiguity of Seurat’s original title: in his letter to Maurice Beaubourg, Seurat wrote and then crossed out the plural article “Les.” He exhibited it under the title “Poseuses” at the Salon des Indépendants in 1888; for a facsimile of the catalogue, see Hauke, Seurat et son oeuvre, 1:222. 232. See, for example, Gustave Courbet’s Woman with White Stockings, 1864, oil on canvas, 65 × 81 cm, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia. 233. Hermogenes, On Types of Style, trans. Cecil W. Wooten (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 101. 234. The drawing was produced to accompany Paul Adam’s review; see Adam, “Les Impressionnistes,” 229. That Seurat reproduced this figure for circulation in print perfectly crystallizes the feedback loop between print media and art production that was structural to Poseuses. 235. See Jerome Jordan Pollitt, “Personality and Psychology in Portraiture,” in Art in the Hellenistic Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 59–­78, 62; Adolf Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, trans. C. A. M. Fennell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1882), 418. 236. Sandys, “Statue de Démosthène,” 424. 237. Richard Cobden, “Roman Journal of 1847,” quoted in W. Watkiss Lloyd, “Statue of Demosthenes,” The Portfolio: An Artistic Periodical 16 (1885): 177–­78, 178. 238. Lloyd, “Statue of Demosthenes,” 178; Adolf Michaelis, “Die Bildnisse des Demosthenes,” in Arnold Dietrich Schaefer, Demosthenes und seine Zeit (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1887), 401–­30, 422. 239. Michaelis, “Die Bildnisse des Demosthenes,” 421. 240. Paul Zanker, The Mask of Socrates: The Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity, trans. Alan Shapiro (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 88, 89, 85. 241. The Greek γνώμη, root of the verb “to know,” designates activity of mind, thought, judgment, opinion, and, in plural (γνῶμαι, a rhetorical term for concise or gnomic sayings, maxims), what in Latin is termed sententiae; see Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “gnome.” As Plutarch noted, many ancient viewers of sculpture

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assumed that “Demosthenes himself composed these lines”; see Plutarch, Lives, 77. 242. Salvatore Settis, “Images of Meditation, Uncertainty and Repentance in Ancient Art,” trans. Peter Spring, History and Anthropology 1, no. 1 (1984): 193–237, 209, 210, 198, 206. I thank Michael Koortbojian for directing me to this text. 243. Settis, “Images of Meditation, 210, 202. 244. Settis, “Images of Meditation,” 197. 245. Settis, “Images of Meditation,” 197. 246. Plutarch, Lives, 77. The error of the restoration was noted in scholarship as early as the 1830s; see Michaelis, Ancient Marbles, 418. Michaelis refers to a terra-­cotta statuette of Demosthenes from the Campana collection at the Louvre that retained the clasped hands of the Polyeuktos original. I cannot locate documentation of that statuette, now apparently lost, but it might have remained on display in the Louvre in the 1880s. In 1898, Sandys also locates this statuette in the Louvre but notes that its authenticity is in doubt; see Sandys, “Statue de Démosthène,” 426. A copy from ca. 100 bce –­200 ce , in the collections of the Harvard University Art Museums, preserves the original pose. For this object, see Caroline Houser, “A New Introduction to a Portrait of Demosthenes,” in Teaching with Objects: The Curatorial Legacy of David Gordon Mitten, ed. Amy Brauer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, 2010), 120–­33. The statue owned by the Duke of Dorset passed into the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in 1929 and was restored to match Plutarch’s description in 1954. The museum ultimately reversed this correction; see Mette Moltesen, “De-­Storing and Re-­Storing: Fifty Years of Restoration Work in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek,” in History of Restoration of Ancient Stone Sculptures: Papers Delivered at a Symposium Organized by the Department of Antiquities and Antiquities Conservation of the J. Paul Getty Museum 25–­27 October 2001, ed. Jerry Podany, Janet Burnett Grossman, and Marion True (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2003), 207–­ 38, 209–­10. 247. G. M. Wagner, “Sulla statua di Demostene gia della Villa Aldobrandini in Frascati, e ora nel Museo Vaticano,” Annali dell’instituto di corrispondenza archeologica 8 (1836): 159–­64, 161. For more on the debate surrounding the statue’s hands, see Claudia Valeri, “Il Demostene di Polyeuktos e la ricostruzione Hartwig nella gipsoteca di Emanuel Löwy,” in Ripensare Emanuel Löwy: Professore di archeologia e storia dell’arte nella R. Università e direttore del Museo di Gessi, ed. Maria Grazia Picozzi (Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2013), 101–­10. 248. For the scrolls as a “short-­hand iconographic marker for ‘intellectual,’ ” as well as the popularity of this marker in early modern restorations, see Jane Masséglia, Body Language in Hellenistic Art and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 80, 79–­86. 249. Michaelis, “Die Bildnisse des Demosthenes,” 425. 250. Paul Hartwig, “Zur Statue des Demosthenes,” Jahrbuch des Deutschen archäologischen Instituts 18 (1903): 25–­33, 33. 251. Cicero, Academica 2.144–­45, cited in Zanker, Mask of Socrates, 90. 252. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth,” in Unfashionable Observations, trans. Richard T. Gray (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 317–­18. 253. Marius-­Ary Leblond, quoted in Debora Silverman, “Amazone, Femme Nouvelle, and the Threat to the Bourgeois Family,” in Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-­de-­ Siècle France: Politics, Psychology and Style (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 63–­74, 70. 254. Alice Michel, Degas and His Model (1919), trans. Jeff Nagy (New York: David Zwirner Books, 2017), 40.

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255. That the Demosthenes was perceived in the nineteenth century as a work that, in both subject and execution, exuded intense masculinity is hinted at in Henry James’s allusion to the sculpture in Roderick Hudson; see James, “Roderick Hudson IX,” Atlantic Monthly 36 (1875): 269–­81, 278: “Once, when they were standing before that noblest of sculptured portraits, the so-­called Demosthenes, in the Braccio Nuovo, she made the only spontaneous allusion to her projected marriage . . . ‘I’m so glad,’ she said, ‘that Roderick is a sculptor and not a painter. . . . It’s not that painting is not fine,’ she said, ‘but that sculpture is finer. It’s more manly.’ ” 256. The sculpture was first exhibited in Copenhagen in 1888 as an independent work, and again under the title Le Penseur: Le Poète, at Georges Petit’s Monet-­Rodin exhibition in 1889. Rodin had been referring to the figure as “Le Penseur” since at least 1884; see Albert E. Elsen, Rodin’s Thinker and the Dilemmas of Modern Public Sculpture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 57; Naomi Schor, “Pensive Texts and Thinking Statues: Balzac with Rodin,” Critical Inquiry 27, no. 2 (2001): 239–­65, 241. 257. Fénéon, “Impressionistes,” 441. Ward argues that Poseuses is a direct response to this commentary on Degas’s bathers; see Ward, Pissarro, 98–­103. 258. Marie Lathers, Bodies of Art: French Literary Realism and the Artist’s Model (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 8. 259. Paul Dollfus, “Paris qui pose,” La Vie moderne 9, nos. 18–­21 (1887): 274–­77, 300–­302, 313–­14, 329–­48; Dollfus, Modèles d’artistes (Paris: Marpon et Flammarion, 1888). 260. Lathers, Bodies of Art, 32–33. 261. Dollfus, Modèles d’artistes, 5. 262. Dollfus, Modèles d’artistes, 300. This idea of models becoming obsolete was widespread. See, for instance, Adeline, Lexique, s.v. “modèle vivant” (289). For the modèle classique and modèle moderne, see “Paris qui pose,” 274. 263. For an overview of trends in modeling prior to the 1880s, see Susan Waller, The Invention of the Model: Artists and Models in Paris, 1830–­1870 (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2006); Waller, “Realist Quandaries: Posing Professional and Proprietary Models in the 1860s,” Art Bulletin 89 (2007): 239–­65. 264. Dollfus, Modèles d’artistes, 300. 265. Kahn, “Peinture,” 160–­64, 160. 266. Adam, “Les Impressionnistes,” 229. 267. Mitterand, Émile Zola, 213. 268. Rilke, “Auguste Rodin, Part 1,” 11. 269. Edmond Duranty, “La Nouvelle peinture: À propos du groupe d’artistes qui expose dans les galeries Durand-­Ruel,” in NPD, 1:72–­81, 78. 270. Fénéon, “Impressionnistes,” 441. 271. Auguste Rodin, L’Art: Entretiens réunis par Paul Gsell (Paris: B. Grasset, 1911), 26. 272. Lemaistre, École des Beaux-­Arts, 36. 273. Morrow, Bohemian Paris of Today, 55. 274. Lemaistre, École des Beaux-­Arts, 308. Ireson offers convincing visual evidence that an académie by Seurat from ca. 1877 is of Gélon, who began posing regularly at the École in the 1860s and was still working there as of 1890; see Ireson, “Seurat and the ‘Cours de M. Yvon,’ ” 175. 275. For a description of Gélon’s posing skills and biography, see Lemaistre, École des Beaux-­Arts, 308–­15. Lemaistre presents Gélon as the successor to the famous Charles-­Alix Dubosc, now remembered primarily for his hostile encounter with Manet. When the painter complained about his mannered posing style, the model retorted, “Monsieur, thanks to me, more than one has gone to Rome.” For this possibly apocryphal exchange, see Antonin Proust, Édouard Manet: Souvenirs (Paris: H. Laurens, 1913), 21. Notes to Pages 86–91















276. For the motif of the chin resting on the hand, see Zanker, Mask of Socrates, 90. I discuss this motif at length in the following chapter. 277. Rigaud, Dictionnaire d’argot moderne, 308. 278. See Albert Barrère, Argot and Slang: A New French and English Dictionary of the Cant Words, Quaint Expressions, Slang Terms and Flash Phrases Used in the High and Low Life of Old and New Paris (London: C. Whittingham, 1889), s.v. “poseuse.” 279. Lloyd, “Statue of Demosthenes,” 178. 280. Friedrich Nietzsche, “The History of Greek Eloquence” (1872–­1873), in Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, ed. Claire Blair, Sander Gilman, and David Parent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 213–42, 227. For the importance of Demosthenes for Nietzsche’s conception of style as “dissimulation, and the wearing of masks,” see Kathleen Merrow, “ ‘The Meaning of Every Style’: ­Nietzsche, Demosthenes, Rhetoric,” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 21, no. 4 (2003): 285–­307, 307. 281. Ward, Pissarro, 128. 282. Fénéon, “Néo-­impressionnisme,” 84. 283. John Shirley-­Fox, An Art Student’s Reminiscences of Paris in the Eighties (London: Mills and Boon, 1909), 175, 177, 185. 284. Mathias Duval, “Hypnotisme,” in Nouveau dictionnaire de médecine et de chirurgie pratiques (Paris: Baillière, 1873), 18:123–­51, 145. 285. For the identification of the individuals in the group portrait, see Nadine Simon-­ Dhouailly, La Leçon de Charcot: Voyage dans une toile, exh. cat. (Paris: Musée de l’Assistance Publique, 1986). Duval’s own professional portrait, François Sallé’s Une Leçon d’anatomie à l’École des Beaux-­Arts (1888), was modeled directly on Charcot’s. See Anthea Callen, “Doubles and Desire: Anatomies of Masculinity in the Later Nineteenth Century,” Art History 26, no. 5 (2003): 669–­99. 286. Paul Richer was anatomy professor from 1903 to 1922; for his tenure, see Comar, “Une Leçon,” 56–­60. 287. Sigmund Freud, “Charcot” (1893), 3:7–­23, 11. 288. Jean-­Martin Charcot, lecture of October 20, 1888, quoted in Paul Richer, Anatomie artistique: Description des formes extérieures du corps humain au repos et dans les principaux mouvements (Paris: Plon, 1890), xiv. 289. Andreas Mayer, Sites of the Unconscious: Hypnosis and the Emergence of the Psychoanalytic Setting, trans. Christopher Barber (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 63, 49–­92. 290. Jean-­Martin Charcot and Paul Richer, “Note on Certain Facts of Cerebral Automatism Observed in Hysteria during the Cataleptic Period of Hypnotism,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases 10, no. 1 (1883): 1–­13, 9. 291. Charcot and Richer, “Cerebral Automatism,” 3, 9. 292. Paul Richer and Gilles de la Tourette, “Hypnotisme,” in Extrait de Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences médicales (Paris: Asselin, 1887), 67–­152, 88. 293. Richer and de la Tourette, “Hypnotisme,” 89. 294. Dollfus, Modèles d’artistes, 301. 295. Dollfus, Modèles d’artistes, 21. 296. Janet, Automatisme, 12. 297. “Platonic Technology: A Glossary of Distinctive Terms Used by Platon and Other Philosophers in an Arcane and Peculiar Sense, Compiled by Alexander Wilder, Professor of Psychological Science,” The Platonist 1 (January 1882): 188–­94, 190: “Katalepsis, κατάληψις. A seizure; an apprehension; catching an idea; perception; conception; a condition induced by mesmerism; catalepsy.” For the philosophical meaning, see Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods: Academics, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library 268 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933), N ot es to Pag es 92–96

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653–55: “Zeno used to demonstrate by gesture: for he would display his hand in front of one with the fingers stretched out and say ‘A visual appearance is like this’; next he closed his fingers a little and said, ‘An act of assent is like this’; then he pressed his fingers closely together and made a fist, and said that that was comprehension (and from this illustration he gave to that process the actual name of catalēpsis, which it had not had before) [qua ex similitudine etiam nomen ei rei, quod ante non fuerat, κατάληψιν imposuit].” 298. Ward, Pissarro, 104. 299. French models were known for the coquettish practice of letting their petticoats drop around their feet to create a “piédestal improvisé”; see Henri Detouche, Propos d’un peintre (Paris: Librairie de l’Art Indépendant, 1895), 46. Dollfus also alludes to this practice in Modèles d’artistes, 73–­75. 300. Face-­to-­face encounter with Poseuses enables a reciprocal mirroring between the standing figure and the standing viewer that is altogether lost in Poseuses’s high-­ hanging position at the Barnes Foundation. My argument here depends to a large degree on my experience of viewing Poseuses at eye level, when the painting was moved to the new location of the Barnes Foundation in 2011. 301. The caveat here is Seurat’s Jeune femme se poudrant (1889–­1890), the picture that followed Poseuses, which suggests layers of personal depth in Seurat’s inter­actions with models that this chapter cannot address. This is a portrait of Madeleine Knobloch, a model with whom Seurat had a relationship that began perhaps as early as 1885, and which he kept secret from family and friends until the eve of his death. The relationship produced two children, both of whom died as infants. It is tempting to speculate about the role Knobloch might have played in modeling for the Grande Jatte, not to mention Poseuses. It does not seem impossible she modeled for the monkey’s mistress, but given the absence of documentary evidence, that possibility is purely speculative. 302. For Seurat’s embrace of psychophysics in his late work, see Ward, Pissarro, 124–­46. For his turn to protocinematic imagery, see Edith Balas, “A Contribution towards the Understanding of Seurat’s Late Works,” Gazette des Beaux-­Arts 142, no. 1581 (2000): 154–­58; Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 257–­80. 303. Fénéon, “Néo-­impressionnisme,” 85.

Chapter Two



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1. M. B., “Beethoven’s Abschied,” Wiener Bilder: Illustrirtes Familienblatt 6, no. 23 (June 4, 1902). My translation is loose but preserves the spirit of the text: “Wie dacht ich der Zeit / in der ich so froh in des Olymps Paradies war / Wogegen im Eden der Secession / Es mir schon gar fürchterlich ‘mies’ war.” 2. On the history of the Beethoven exhibition, see Stefan Lehner, “The Beethoven Exhibition 1902, A Documentation,” in Gustav Klimt, Josef Hoffmann: Pioneers of Modernism, ed. Agnes Husslein-­Arco and Alfred Weidinger, exh. cat. (Munich: Prestel, 2011), 52–­116; Alessandra Comini, “Vienna’s Beethoven of 1902: Apotheosis and Redemption,” in The Changing Image of Beethoven: A Study in Mythmaking, rev. ed. (Santa Fe, NM: Sunstone Press, 2008), 388–­415; Sabine Forsthuber, Moderne Raumkunst: Wiener Ausstellungsbauten von 1898 bis 1914 (Vienna: Picus, 1991), 65–­89. 3. Ernst Stöhr, “Unsere XIV. Ausstellung,” in Vienna Secession, XIV. Kunstausstellung Vereinigung der bildender Künstler Österreichs Secession Wien: Max Klinger, Beethoven; April–­Juni 1902 (Vienna: Adolf Holzhausen, 1902), 9–­12, 11. 4. Ludwig Hevesi, “Max Klingers Beethoven,” in Acht Jahre Sezession (März 1897–­ Juni 1905): Kritik, Polemik, Chronik (Vienna: Carl Konegen, 1906), 385–­89, 388. N o t e s t o P a g e s 9 6 –1 0 1



















5. The cost is cited in Friedrich Morgenthal, “Max Klinger’s Statue of Beethoven,” Brush and Pencil 10, no. 5 (1902): 305–­12, 307. See also Elsa Asenijeff, Max Klingers Beethoven: Eine Kunst-­Technische Studie (Leipzig: H. Seemann, 1902); Barbara John, Max Klinger: Beethoven (Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 2004). 6. Ludwig Hevesi, “Sezession” (April 18, 1902), reprinted in Acht Jahre Sezession, 390–­94, 390. 7. Josef Hoffmann, “Rundgang durch die Ausstellung,” in Secession, XIV. Kunstausstellung, 23–­24, 24. 8. The exhibition was open from April 15 through June 27, 1902 , and received 58,141 visitors. Jean-­Paul Bouillon, Klimt: Beethoven; The Frieze for the Ninth Symphony (New York: Skira, 1986), 8. 9. Hermann Bahr, “Die Überwindung des Naturalismus” (1891), in Kritischen Schriften Hermann Bahrs in Einzelausgaben, vol. 2, Die Überwindung des Naturalismus, ed. Claus Pias (Weimar: VDG, 2004), 128–­33, 130. 10. Bahr, “Die Neue Psychologie” (1890), in Überwindung des Naturalismus, 89–­101, 94. 11. Ludwig van Beethoven, letter to Emilie M. of Hamburg, July 17, 1812, quoted in Alexander Wheelock Thayer, Ludwig van Beethovens Leben, 3 vols. (Berlin: Weber, 1901–1911), 3:319. 12. M. R., “Beethoven’s Abschied.” 13. For the term Zierath, see Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (Berlin: Lagarde and Friedrich, 1790), §14. 14. Alois Riegl, Problems of Style: Foundations for a History of Ornament (1893), trans. Evelyn Kain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 21, published originally as Stilfragen: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik (Berlin: G. Siemens, 1893). 15. Sarah Kofman, The Childhood of Art: An Interpretation of Freud’s Aesthetics, trans. Winifred Woodhull (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 10. 16. Berta Zückerkandl, “Klingers Beethoven in der Wiener Secession,” Die Kunst für Alle 17 (1902): 385–­88, 386. 17. Anna Celenza also notes the discontinuity; see “Music and the Vienna Secession: 1897–­1902,” in “Music in Art: Iconography as a Source for Music History,” special double issue, Music in Art 29, nos. 1–­2 (2004): 203–­12, 210. 18. Deutsches Volksblatt, April 15, 1902, quoted in Lehner, “Beethoven Exhibition,” 115. 19. Josef Hoffmann, Selbstbiographie = Autobiography (1948), ed. Peter Noever and Marek Pokorny (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009), 22/91. 20. Morgenthal, “Max Klinger’s Statue,” 307. 21. Marian Bisanz-­Prakken, “The Beethoven Exhibition of the Secession and the Younger Viennese Tradition of the Gesamtkunstwerk,” in Focus on Vienna 1900: Change and Continuity in Literature, Music, Art, and Intellectual History, ed. Erika Nielsen (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1982), 140–­49, 140. 22. Secession, XIV. Kunstausstellung, 25. 23. Hermann Bahr, “Beethoven: Brief an Harden” (1902), in Kritischen Schriften Hermann Bahrs in Einzelausgaben, vol. 10, Buch der Jugend, ed. Gottfried Schnödl (Weimar: VDG, 2010), 35–­38, 37. 24. Morgenthal, “Max Klinger’s Statue,” 312. 25. Karl Kraus, “Kunsthistoriker,” Die Fackel 4, no. 117 (September 1902): 27–­28. 26. Neues Wiener Tagblatt, April 20, 1902, quoted in Lehner, “Beethoven Exhibition,” 115. 27. M. B., “Beethoven’s Abschied.” 28. Kraus, “Kunsthistoriker,” 27–28. N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 0 1–1 0 8

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29. Zanker, Mask of Socrates, 89. 30. Klinger became acquainted with the archaeologist, collector, and private antiquities dealer Hartwig during his sojourn in Rome (1888–­1893); see Richard Hüttel, Petra Roettig, and Hubertus Gassner, Eine Liebe: Max Klinger und die Folgen, exh. cat. (Bielefeld: Kerber, 2007), 345. Hartwig was also acquainted with Emanuel Löwy, with whom he discussed his restoration of the Demosthenes; see Valeri, “Il Demostene di Polyeuktos.” 31. Zanker, Mask of Socrates, 6, 338. 32. Willy Pastor refers to “the often remarked upon reliance of Klinger’s Beethoven on the ‘Hugo’ and ‘Thinker’ of Rodin,” and quotes a letter in which Klinger emphatically denies this connection; see his Max Klinger (Berlin: Amsler, 1919), 168. Since Klinger was in Paris in the 1880s, it is possible he knew of Rodin’s work on the Porte de l’Enfer and, as Ina Gayk notes, might have seen the Penseur illustrated in L’Art in 1887, while he was working on the plaster model for the Beethoven-­Denkmal; see Gayk, Max Klinger als Bildhauer: Unter Berücksichtigung des zeitgenössischen französischen Kunstgeschehens (Hamburg: Kovač, 2011), 95; see also John, Max Klinger: Beethoven, 33–­34. It is certain he saw the plaster model of the Penseur when he visited Rodin’s exhibition in 1900 at the Pavillon de l’Alma. 33. Elsen, Rodin’s Thinker, 3. 34. For Klinger’s thoughts on polychromy, which I will not fully address here, see Max Klinger, Malerei und Zeichnung (Leipzig, 1891). For the turn to polychromy in sculpture of the late nineteenth century, see Andreas Blühm, The Colour of Sculpture, 1840–­1910, exh. cat. (Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum, 1996). Klinger’s experiment with sculptural polychromy is less radical than others from this period. He abandoned an initial plan to render Beethoven himself in colored materials, ultimately restricting these to the supplementary surroundings of the composer’s face and body. When he produced a second version of the Beethoven-­Denkmal for the Wittgenstein family, he condensed the monument to the composer’s white marble torso, a gesture that made explicit the degree to which he still conceptualized this sculpture, at its core, according to conventions established by a fine art tradition that upheld a hierarchical division between ergon and parergon, form and color, figure and ornament. 35. The first major study in English deals exclusively with Klinger’s graphic works; see Marsha Morton, Max Klinger and Wilhelmine Culture: On the Threshold of German Modernism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014). My reading of the Beethoven-­Denkmal will seem to contradict Morton’s arguments, which stress how the graphic works evince Klinger’s preoccupations with contemporary research in evolutionary theory (particularly as pertaining to human sexuality) and in aspects of the unconscious and dream experience. In Klinger’s sculpture these preoccupations did not achieve the same kind of explicit thematization, perhaps because of the technical limitations of the artist’s figural style of academic realism—­which allowed for innovation primarily at the level of iconographic juxtaposition enabled by the graphic medium—­ and, I would argue, the self-­consciously honorific intentions of much of his work in the sculptural medium, most of all in the Beethoven-­Denkmal. 36. Rodin, quoted in Berta Zückerkandl, Österreich Intim: Erinnerungen 1892 bis 1942, ed. Reinhard Federmann (Vienna: Propyläen, 1970), 58. 37. Franz Servaes, “Klingers Beethoven,” Neue Freie Presse, April 16, 1902, 1–­3, 3. See also Franz Servaes, “Klinger und Rodin,” Deutschland: Monatsschrift für die Gesamte Kultur 1 (1903): 298–­300; Roger Bonnard, “Le ‘Beethoven’ de Klinger,” undated clipping, Tribune Libre, AR. Comparisons were also made to the related Victor Hugo monument; see Paul Vitry, “Le Victor Hugo de Rodin et le Beethoven de Max Klinger,” undated clipping, Les Maitres Artistes, AR. N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 0 8 –1 1 0













38. Heinrich Bulle, Klingers Beethoven und die farbige Plastik der Griechen (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1903), 3, 42. 39. Hartwig, “Zur Statue des Demosthenes,” 33. For Klinger’s soujourn in Rome, see the timeline in Morton, Max Klinger and Wilhelmine Culture. 40. Hevesi, “Max Klingers Beethoven,” 388. 41. Rodin, interview in Saturday Night (1917), quoted in Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-­de-­Siècle France, 261. 42. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 20. 43. Johnson, Meaning of the Body, 166; Joseph E. Grady, “Foundations of Meaning: Primary Metaphors and Primary Scenes” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1997), 264–­65. 44. Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 57; Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, trans. Edith R. Farrell (Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1988), 10. 45. Georg Simmel’s writings on gravity begin to emphasize the culturally specific quality of representations of gravity; see, for instance, “Aesthetics of Gravity,” in Georg Simmel: Essays on Art and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Austin Harrington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 143–­47, 144: “In the figures of a Japanese woodcut, a peculiar sense of brokenness, of simultaneous dispersal and gathered form—­so hard for us Westerners to understand—­indicates that, on the one hand, earthy weightiness and, on the other, nervous impulses combine in these bodies in a manner quite different from anything known to us. . . . The defining degree and character of humankind’s way of weaving psychic energies into nature’s elementary structures and making each aspect vanquish, impede, or support another—­all of this evidently occurs quite differently for Japanese people than for us.” 46. See the sections on “Balance of Standing Figures” in Leonardo, Treatise on Painting, 1:130–­33, 131. Étienne Jollet, “La Pondération au XVIIe siècle: Norme technique ou norme sociale?” in L’Art et les normes sociales au XVIIIe siècle, ed. Christian Michel, Thomas Gaehtgens, Daniel Rabreau, and Martin Schieder (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2001), 49–­60, 49; Jollet, Les Figures de la Pesanteur: Newton, Fragonard et les hasards heureux de l’escarpolette (Nîmes: Chambon, 1998). See also David Young Kim, ed., Matters of Weight: Force, Gravity, and Aesthetics in the Early Modern Period (Berlin: Imorde, 2013); T. J. Clark, “Painting at Ground Level,” presented at Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Prince­ ton University, April 17–­19, 2002, https://​tannerlectures​.utah​.edu​/​_documents​ /a​-­­to​-­­z​/c​/clark​_2002​.pdf. Malika Maskarinec addresses how ponderation became a sustained preoccupation in German modernist art and literature in The Forces of Form in German Modernism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018). Here I am undertaking what she acknowledges is the necessary complement to her study of modern art’s engagement with “the heavy body and the labor of uprightness”—­the dream of emancipation from gravity. 47. In this regard, see especially Étienne Jollet’s discussion of Fragonard’s exploitation of an association between daydreaming and corporeal levity in “Gravity in Painting: Fragonard’s Perette and the Depiction of Innocence,” Art History 16, no. 2 (June 1993): 266–­85. 48. Leonardo, Treatise on Painting, 1:146. Of course, this norm is transgressed repeatedly in renaissance painting; the opposition of figures subject to and released from gravity is in this period and after one of the primary mechanisms for visualizing states of religious ecstasy and establishing distinctions between the divine and the human. What concerns us in this chapter is the secularization of that opposition, which invokes but also radically recasts these religious connotations. N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 1 0 –1 1 2

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49. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “ponderation”: “[from] classical Latin ponderātiōn-­, ponderātiō the marking of weights along the beam of a balance, in post-­classical Latin also meditation, reflection (6th cent.), evaluation, judgement, weight.” 50. William S. Heckscher, “Melencolia (1514), an Essay in the Rhetoric of Description by Joachim Camerarius: Edition, Translation with Commentaries and Notes,” in Joachim Camerarius (1500–­1574): Essays on the History of Humanism during the Reformation, ed. Frank Baron (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1978), 32–­120, 33. 51. Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1979), 330. 52. Grady, “Foundations of Meaning,” 297–­98. 53. Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy, 286. The deliberateness of this “drooping” quality, as the authors underscore, is evident in the fact that the “upright figure in the preliminary study has been . . . changed to a drooping one,” 320. 54. For the emergence of the heavy head in classical sculpture, see Zanker, Mask of Socrates, 90; Masséglia, Body Language, 190. 55. Théophile Gautier, “Melancholia,” in La Comédie de la mort (Brussels: E. Laurent, 1838), 90–­98, 94. On the tendency to interpret Melencolia as a self-­portrait, see Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-­Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 26–­27. 56. Morgenthal, “Max Klinger’s Statue,” 309. 57. The pointing gesture appears only in the Paris version, painted ca. 1483–­1486. 58. Zanker, Mask of Socrates, 90; Aby Warburg, “Pagan-­Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther” (1920), in Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 597–­697, 645. 59. Grady, “Foundations of Meaning,” 136. 60. Significantly, the two visual artists frequently identified as the first to have been referred to by their contemporaries with the epithet “divine”—­Dürer and Michelangelo—­both created iconic works of figures propping up their “drooping heads.” Dürer’s Melencolia I is closely related, in terms of its reception, to Michelangelo’s statue of Lorenzo de’ Medici (1519–­1534), referred to in the renaissance and after as the “Penseroso.” From Raphael’s hidden portrait of the painter in the guise of Heraclitus in the School of Athens (1508) to Delacroix’s picture of the artist in his studio (1850), Michelangelo “il divino” was himself, like Dürer, often identified with this pose. 61. Quoted in “Le ‘Penseur’ au Panthéon,” unsigned clipping, L’Echo de Paris, April 22, 1907, AR. It was in 1901 that Rodin decided to enlarge to monumental proportions the twenty-­seven-­inch figure conceived for the Porte de l’Enfer; see Elsen, Rodin’s Thinker, 75–­141. 62. Arthur Symons, “For le Penseur of Rodin (to be erected in Paris before the Pantheon),” in Knave of Hearts: 1894–­1908 (London: William Heinemann, 1913), 22. 63. “Beethoven,” in Dwight’s Journal of Music 30, no. 20 (December 17, 1870): 1. This poem was recited by William Story at the inauguration of a statue of Beethoven for the Boston Music Hall in 1856. 64. Julius Vogel, Max Klingers Leipziger Skulpturen (Leipzig: Hermann Seemann, 1902), 63. 65. Vitry, “Le Victor Hugo de Rodin,” AR. 66. Kevin Karnes, A Kingdom Not of This World: Wagner, the Arts, and Utopian Visions in Fin-­de-­Siècle Vienna (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 37. It is relevant

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to the metaphor of ponderation in the Beethoven-­Denkmal that monetary value also originated as the measuring of weights. The extrapolation of abstract value from the literal heaviness of the sculpture is closely related to the notion (stressed by Klinger himself and in the journalistic discourse on the sculpture) that the material costliness of the monument correlated to the elevated status of its subject matter. 67. Bachelard, Air and Dreams, 11. Barry Schwartz emphasizes that the valences associated with the up/down polarity can reverse in relation to different objects, noting that in cases “when [this polarity is] used to convey ideas about knowledge rather than power, the lower pole takes on a positive value”; see Schwartz, Vertical Classification: A Study in Structuralism and the Sociology of Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 39. 68. Servaes, “Klinger und Rodin,” AR; Vogel, Max Klingers Leipziger Skulpturen, 63, 90. 69. Vogel, Max Klingers Leipziger Skulpturen, 75. 70. The mountain was also a stock metaphor in this period for musical monumentality and greatness; see Alexander Rehding, Music and Monumentality: Commemoration and Wonderment in Nineteenth-­Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 30. 71. For the important etymological valences of “pedestal” and related words, see Étienne Jollet, “Objet d’attention: L’Intérêt pour le support en France à l’époque moderne,” in Display and Displacement: Sculpture and the Pedestal from Renaissance to Post-­Modern, ed. Alexandra Gerstein (London: Courtauld Institute of Art Research Forum, 2007), 33–­61. 72. Vogel, Max Klingers Leipziger Skulpturen, 90; Arthur Bernard Cook, Zeus: A Study in Ancient Religion, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914–­1940), 2:752. See also Cook’s analysis of “The Mountain as the Throne of Zeus,” 1:124–­48. 73. Gabriel Boissy, “Les Salons français,” L’Idée libre 7 (1904): 349–­60, 359. 74. Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 49. I have modified the translation of Rilke’s comments in accordance with the translation in Brigid Doherty, “Rilke’s Magic Lantern: Figural Language and the Projection of ‘Interior Action’ in the Rodin Lecture,” in Interiors and Interiority, ed. Ewa Lajer-­Burcharth and Beate Söntgen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 313–­45, 334. 75. Rodin, in conversation with Marcel Adam, quoted in Marcel Adam, “Le Penseur,” Gil Blas 26, no. 9039 (July 7, 1904): 1. 76. Boissy, “Les Salons français,” 359. The fame of this slogan should not be underestimated. For the moniker “Urin-­Vogt,” see Wilhelm Bölsche, “Vom dicken Vogt,” in Vom Bazillus zum Affenmenschen: Naturwissenschaftliche plaudereien (1900; Jena: Diedrichs, 1906), 277–­300, 291; Karl Vogt, Physiologische Briefe für Gebildete aller Stände, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1846), 2:206: “Die Gedanken stehen in demselben Verhältniß zu dem Gehirn, wie die Galle zur Leber oder der Urin zu den Nieren.” 77. Max Nordau, “Auguste Rodin,” in On Art and Artists, trans. W. F. Harvey (London: T. Fischer Unwin, 1907), 275–­93, 290; unsigned review in Chronique d’art (1909), quoted in Elsen, Rodin’s Thinker, 134. 78. For more on the scatological evocations of the sculpture, see Schor, “Pensive Texts and Thinking Statues,” 252. 79. Elsen, Rodin’s Thinker, 27. 80. For the Balzac monument and its reception, see 1898: Le Balzac de Rodin, exh. cat. (Paris: Musée Rodin, 1998). 81. Already in 1891 Rodin was quoted in the press asserting, “I would want to execute

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82.



83.



84. 85.



86.







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a figure standing rather than seated”; see Albert Elsen, “Monument to Honoré de Balzac,” in Rodin’s Art: The Rodin Collection of the Iris & Gerald B. Cantor Center for the Visual Arts at Stanford University, ed. Bernard Barryte (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 353–­91, 353. Anne Wagner, “Rodin’s Reputation,” in Eroticism and the Body Politic, ed. Lynn Hunt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 191–­242, 223. See the poem by Raoul Ponchon in Le Courrier français, May 8, 1898, AR. The ubiquity of this designation is evident in Charles Chincholle, “Le Nouveau Balzac,” Le Figaro, November 8, 1898, AR. Gil Blas, May 8, 1898, AR. André Leroi-­Gourhan, “Libération de la main,” Problèmes, revue de l’Association des étudiants en médecine de l’Université de Paris 32 (1956): 6–­9, 6. For the seal comparison, see Henri Fursy, “Le Balzac de Rodin,” in Chanson rosses (Paris: Ollendorf, 1899), AR; for the tadpole comparison, see Nordau, “Rodin,” 286. The phallic symbolism of Balzac, a ubiquitous topic in the Rodin literature, is explored fruitfully in Michael D. Garval, “A Dream of Stone”: Fame, Vision, and Mon-

umentality in Nineteenth-­Century French Literary Culture (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 209–­11. The sexualization of the form cannot be limited to phallic symbolism. Doherty contends that the protuberance beneath Balzac’s robe “might be seen to show something like a conjunction or coalescence of erect penis and bulging belly,” and points out that Rilke’s description of Balzac in his 1905 lecture “would seem to promise if not a unity or coincidence of ejaculation and parturition then some sort of correspondence between them”; “Rilke’s Magic Lantern,” 341. To this, I would add another layer of corporeal metaphor. The evocations of pregnancy and erection are also answered in the womblike encasement of the figure, a quality I believe was registered in the ceaseless comic riffings on Balzac’s “sac,” which certainly referenced the embryonic sac (sac embryonnaire). 87. Rodin recommended viewing Balzac from the right side—­the vantage from which the bulge is most noticeable, see Charles Chincholle, “La Vente de la statue de Balzac,” Le Figaro, May 12, 1898, 2–­3, 3. Numerous caricatures, as well as Edward Steichen’s iconic photographs of the sculpture, take this lateral vantage. 88. Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 39. Rilke borrows this language from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra, about which I will have more to say below. 89. Leo Steinberg, “Rodin,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-­Century Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 322–­403, 358. See also the excellent chapter on Rodin in Maskarinec, Forces of Form, 35–­55. My reading of the relationship between the Penseur and Balzac aligns with her reading of two parallel tracks in Rodin’s oeuvre: “meditations on matters of weight” and explorations of a “disposition to flight” (41–­42). 90. Roger Miles, undated, untitled clipping, Éclair, AR; Marc Legrand, “Hommage à Rodin,” poem quoted in “L’Art Méridional,” Le Réformiste, September 28, 1900, AR. 91. Henri Debusschère, La Dépeche, December 2, 1902, AR; “The Sculptors of Balzac,” unsigned, undated clipping, AR. 92. “Pictures in the Paris Salons,” Western Press, May 23, 1899, AR. Among the other caricatures that stage this comparison, see especially Maurice Radiguet’s “Rodin-­ Falguière,” for the cover of Le Petit illustré amusant, May 13, 1899. 93. “Les Balzac,” Le Gaulois, May 6, 1899, AR. 94. Gustav Babin, “Rodin et Klimt,” Le Journal des débats, June 22, 1900. For a timeline of the commission and ensuing controversy, see Alice Strobl, “Zu den Fakultätsbildern von Gustav Klimt,” Albertina Studien 2, no. 4 (1964): 138–­69.

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Klimt ultimately withdrew his paintings in 1905, publicly airing his grievances with the Ministry of Culture in a statement published by Berta Zückerkandl; see “Die Klimt-­Affäre: Anlässlich der Zurückziehung der Universitätsbilder” (April 12, 1905), reprinted in Zeitkunst Wien 1901–­1907 (Vienna: Hugo Heller, 1908), 163–­68. As was the case for Rodin in the German-­speaking countries, Klimt received a far less hostile reception in Paris than in his native city. Just after its unveiling in Vienna, Philosophie was sent to Paris for the Exposition Universelle, where it won a gold medal; see Elke Krasny, “Sind sie modern gewesen? Kunst auf der Pariser Weltausstellung 1900,” in Wien-­Paris: Van Gogh, Cézanne und Österreichs Moderne, 1880–­1960, ed. Agnes Husslein-­Arco (Vienna: Belvedere, 2007). For Rodin’s reception in Austria, see Rodin and Vienna, ed. Agnes Husslein-­Arco and Stephan Koja, exh. cat. (Vienna: Hirmer, 2010). 95. Strobl, “Zu den Fakultätsbildern,” 150. The quotations are of Bourgeois de Calais (1884–­1889), “Celle qui fut la belle heaulmière” (1885–­1887), and Danaïde (1885). 96. Strobl, “Zu den Fakultätsbildern,” 150. The allegorical figures in Philosophie are identified in the Katalog der VII. Kunstausstellung der Vereinigung Bildender Künstler Österreichs Secession (Vienna: Secession, 1900), n.p. 97. This tradition remains intact in another potential source of inspiration for Klimt’s Wissen mentioned by Strobl, the figure of Saturn in Hans Canon’s recently completed mural The Circle of Life for the staircase of Vienna’s Natural History Museum (1884–­1885); see Strobl, “Zu den Fakultätsbildern,” 148. Hevesi singles out The Circle of Life as the antithesis of Klimt’s achievement in Philosophie, noting that the protesting professors would only be satisfied with “another Canonesque [composition] with the familiar allegorical puppets”; see Hevesi, “Der protest gegen Klimts ‘Philosophie’ ” (18 Mai 1900), in Acht Jahre Sezession, 261–­64, 264. 98. Strobl, “Zu den Fakultätsbildern,” 150. 99. Gustav Klimt, undated letter to Franz Hanke, secretary of the Secession, quoted in Christian M. Nebehay, Gustav Klimt: Dokumentation (Vienna: Galerie Christian M. Nebehay, 1969), 209. 100. See, for instance, Ludwig Hevesi, “Bilderstürmer von Wien” (March 30, 1900), in Acht Jahre Sezession, 250–­54, 252. 101. Carl E. Schorske, Fin-­de-­Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Knopf, 1980), 231. 102. “Der Streit um die ‘Philosophie,’ ” Der Floh 32, no. 13 (April 1, 1900): 8. 103. The connection Schorske draws to Nietzsche is premised on the assumption that Klimt “moved in social and intellectual circles” where Nietzsche’s thinking was a lingua franca; see Schorske, Fin-­de-­Siècle Vienna, 228. Lisa Florman argues convincingly on the basis of visual evidence that Klimt was familiar with the arguments of Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872); see Florman, “Gustav Klimt and the Precedent of Ancient Greece,” Art Bulletin 72, no. 2 (June 1990): 310–­26. It is more difficult to infer from iconography Klimt’s potential familiarity with the later writings of Nietzsche, which are more consequential for my interpretation here. The bulk of the painter’s large library was destroyed during World War II, and Nietzsche goes unmentioned in the few written testimonies describing Klimt’s reading habits, which apparently tended toward rereadings of Goethe’s Faust and Dante’s Divine Comedy. For the destruction of the library, see Peter Vergo, “Gustav Klimts ‘Philosophie’ und das Programm der Universitätsgemälde,” Mitteilungen der österreichischen Galerie 22/23, no. 66/67, Klimt-­Studien (1978/1979): 69–­100. A partial catalogue of titles from Klimt’s library can be found in Nebehay, Dokumentation, 52–­53.

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104. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 103–­10, 103. 105. Nietzsche’s attribution of this saying to Flaubert likely derives from Guy de Maupassant’s Souvenirs littéraires, originally published in 1881 and 1882 in the Revue des deux mondes. See Guy de Maupassant, “Gustave Flaubert [Extraits],” in Gustave Flaubert: Mémoire de la critique, ed. Didier Philippot (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-­Sorbonne, 2006), 559: “All his life, he remained . . . sedentary. He could not tolerate walking or moving around him without getting exasperated; and he declared, with his biting voice, loud and always a little theatrical: that it was not philosophical. ‘You can only think and write while seated.’ ” 106. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, in The Anti-­Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, 160; the German term is literally “sitting meat.” See Nietzsche, Götzen-­Dämmerung: Oder, Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophirt, in Friedrich Nietzsche: Sämtliche Werke; Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 6 vols. (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1988), 6:64. N ­ ietzsche reprises this statement verbatim in Ecce Homo, in Anti-­Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight, 87. 107. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff and Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 230 (fragment 366). 108. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ed. Adrian Del Caro and Robert Pippin, trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 186: “And if that is my alpha and omega, that all heaviness becomes light [alles Schwere leicht], all body dancer, all spirit bird—­and truly, that is my alpha and omega!” Nietz­sche, Also sprach Zarathustra, in Nietzsche: Sämtliche Werke, 4:290; Nietzsche, Gay Science, 230 (fragment 366). 109. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 153. 110. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), 285; Nietzsche, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 119. I have modified the translation in reference to the German in Nietzsche, Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben (fragment 10): “kein animal, sondern höchstens ein cogital.” 111. Nietzsche, The Anti-­Christ, in Anti-­Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight, 12; Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), 161. 112. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 161. On Nietzsche’s reception of evolutionary theory and, relatedly, his discourse surrounding the animal, see Werner Stegmaier, “Darwin, Darwinismus, Nietzsche: Zum Problem der Evolution,” Nietzsche-­ Studien 16 (1987): 264–­87; C. U. M. Smith, “ ‘Clever Beasts Who Invented Knowing’: Nietzsche’s Evolutionary Biology of Knowledge,” Biology and Philosophy 2, no. 1 (1987): 65–­91; Gregory Moore, Nietzsche, Biology, and Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Christa Davis Acampora and Ralph R. Acampora, eds., A Nietzschean Bestiary: Becoming Animal beyond Docile and Brutal (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). 113. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic, in Beyond Good and Evil/On the Genealogy of Morality, 272–­73. 114. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, 272; Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral (Leipzig: C. G. Naumann, 1887), 77. 115. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, 272. 116. Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor, trans. Duncan Large (Stanford, CA: Stan-

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ford University Press, 1993), 18. It is beyond my scope to address the centrality of metaphor as both object of Nietzsche’s critique and instrument of his method. Suffice it to say that what cognitive linguists define as “primary metaphors” were already a central preoccupation for him. Mark Johnson singles Nietzsche out as a forerunner, one of the few Western philosophers to emphasize the “pervasiveness of metaphor in all thought”; see Johnson, Meaning of the Body, 187. 117. Integral to the “new image of thought” launched in Nietzsche’s philosophy is the invention of a philosophical discourse “couched in experimental images rather than articulated in concepts constituting a theory”; see Graham Parkes, Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche’s Psychology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 19. For more on the crucial distinction between pictures and concepts in Nietzsche’s thinking, and the importance of “thinking in terms of pictures” for affirming “the continuity between human and animal life,” see Vanessa Lemm, Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy: Culture, Politics, and the Animality of the Human Being (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 116. I will discuss pictorial thinking at greater length in chapter 3. 118. Cosima Wagner noted in her diary in June 1870, “Pr. N. hat mir die ‘Melancholie’ von Dürer gebracht”; see Nietzsche Briefwechsel: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 7 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1998), 464. Although, as Ernst Bertram attests, it appears that Nietzsche was quite indifferent to Melencolia I, he retained for all his life a feeling of “identification” with Dürer’s 1513 engraving Ritter, Tod und Teufel. On Nietzsche’s appreciation for this print, see Bertram, Nietzsche: An Attempt at a Mythology, trans. Robert E. Norton (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 37–­55. 119. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 310. Kofman argues that for Nietzsche, “the metaphorical equivalence between ‘think’ and ‘weigh’ represents the metaphorical character of every equivalence”; see Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor, 44. 120. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 139, 24. 121. We cannot know the degree to which Nietzsche’s claim that he did all thinking while “walking, jumping, climbing, dancing” fictionalized the corporeal reality of his intellectual endeavors. It is perhaps relevant to the philosopher’s diatribe against sedentary scholars with their “cramped intestines” that he was himself afflicted with chronic constipation; see Gregory Moore, “Nietzsche, Medicine, and Meteorology,” in Nietzsche and Science, ed. Gregory Moore and Thomas H. Brobjer (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2004), 71–­90, 78–­79. For an important discussion of Nietzsche’s “ventral obsession” and the critical importance of the stomach in his reconceptualization of human thought processes, see Weineck, “Digesting the Nineteenth Century.” 122. For the identification of the enema syringe, see Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Dürer’s Melencolia I: Eine quellen-­und typengeschichtliche Untersuchung (Leipzig/ Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1923), 51. Panofsky’s later writings on Melencolia I identify the enema syringe as a bellows. For this shift and the larger interpretative history of the print, see Peter-­Klaus Schuster, Melencolia I: Dürers Denkbild, 2 vols. (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1991), 1:44. I am grateful to Ewan Wallace for bringing the syringe to my attention. 123. Dr. K. St., “Klinger’s ‘Beethoven,’ ” Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt 31, no. 104 (April 16, 1902): 5. 124. “Wenn die Stadt Wien Klinger’s Beethoven ankaufen sollte,” Der Floh 34, no. 18 (1902): 12.

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125. Paul Klee to Lily Stumpf (May 11, 1902), in Paul Klee: Briefe an die Familie, 1893–­ 1940, 2 vols. (Cologne: DuMont, 1879), 236–­39, 239 126. Richard Muther, on Philosophie, quoted in Peter Vergo, Art in Vienna, 1898–­1918: Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele and Their Contemporaries, 3rd ed. (London: Phaidon, 1993), 50. 127. Claude Quiguer, Femmes et machines de 1900: Lecture d’une obsession moderne style (Paris: Klincksieck, 1979), 37. 128. Franz Servaes, “Der Fall Klimt,” Die Zukunft 31 (1900): 64–­69, 65; Albert Franz Seligmann, “Revenants. Die drei Fakultäten von Gustav Klimt,” in Kunst und Künstler von Gestern und Heute (Vienna: Carl Konegen, 1910), 235–­39, 236. 129. Neue Sonn-­und Montags-­Zeitung, March 12, 1900, reprinted in GK, 16. 130. Unidentified clipping, April 7, 1900, in GK, 29–­31, 30. 131. The expression traces back to the classical period; see F. A. Todd, “Some Cucurbitaceae in Latin Literature,” Classical Quarterly 37, nos. 3/4 (July/October 1943): 101–­11, 101. 132. Eduard Pötzl, untitled, undated poem, in GK, 28–­29, 29. 133. Seligmann, “Revenants,” 236; Pötzl, poem, in GK, 28. 134. For the importance of the sphinx as a Jugendstil and Theosophical motif, see Astrid Kury, “Okkultismus und Symbolismus: Gustav Klimts Philosophie,” in Heiligenscheine eines elektrischen Jahrhundertendes Sehen anders aus: Okkultismus und die Kunst der Wiener Moderne (Vienna: Passagen, 2000), 141–­94. 135. Walter Benjamin, “Convolute S: Painting, Jugendstil, Novelty,” in The Arcades Project: Walter Benjamin, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1999), 557. 136. This tendency to confuse the figures is cited in Vergo, “Gustav Klimts ‘Philosophie,’ ” 99n40. 137. A precedent for this feature of Klimt’s work, and one in which suspensions of gravity is likewise deployed in connection with an effort to represent dream-­states, is Odilon Redon’s frequent mergings of hot-­air ballons and disembodied human heads, especially in the series Dans le rêve (1879); see Vojtěch Jirat-­Wasiutyński, “The Balloon as Metaphor in the Early Work of Odilon Redon,” Artibus et Historiae 13, no. 25 (1992): 195–­206. 138. Plein-­air, March 12, 1900, in GK, 17; Eduard Pötzl, untitled, undated poem, in GK, 28–­29, 29. 139. Medizin debuted at the tenth Secession exhibition, held March 15–­May 12, 1901; for the start date of the frieze, see Marian Bisanz-­Prakken, Gustav Klimt—­Der Beethovenfries: Geschichte, Funktion, Bedeutung, 2nd ed. (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980), 51. 140. Bisanz-­Prakken, Beethovenfries, 36. 141. Montags-­Zeitung, March 19, 1900, in GK, 19. 142. Arpad Weixlgärtner, “Gustav Klimt,” Die graphischen Künste (1912), quoted in Nebehay, Dokumentation, 295. Klimt had trained in Austria’s recently founded Kunstgewerbeschule (now known as the University of Applied Arts Vienna, or Die Angewandte) and had launched his career painting decorative ceilings and spandrels of major public buildings in Vienna, including the Burgtheater (1886–­1888) and the Kunsthistorisches Museum (1890–­1891). But until the Beethovenfries, Klimt’s functionally decorative pictures were not conceived in a self-­consciously ornamental style. 143. Secession, XIV. Kunstausstellung, 25. 144. For a material analysis of the frieze, see Ivo Hammer, “Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze at 110,” in Husslein-­Arco and Weidinger, Gustav Klimt, Josef Hoffmann, 140–­48. The

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Secession catalogue identifies the materials as “Kaseïnfarbe, Aufgetragener Stück, Vergoldung.” 145. Secession, Katalog der V. Ausstellung der Vereinigung Bildender Künstler Österreichs. Secession (Vienna: Secession, 1899), 5–­6. 146. Hermann Ubell, “Klinger’s Beethoven in der Wiener Secession,” Die Gegenwart 62, no. 29 (1902): 41–­42, 42. 147. Joseph August Lux, “Klingers Beethoven und die Moderne Raum-­Kunst,” Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration 10 (1902): 475–­82, 479. 148. Hevesi, “Sezession,” 391. 149. On the history of this distinction, see Jeroen Stumpel, “On Grounds and Backgrounds: Some Remarks about Composition in Renaissance Painting,” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 18, no. 4 (1988): 219–­43. 150. Hevesi, “Sezession,” 391. 151. Bisanz-­Prakken, Beethovenfries, 49–­51. For a translation, see Richard Wagner, “Beethoven’s Choral Symphony at Dresden,” in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis, 8 vols. (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1894–­1900), 7:239–­55, 247–­48, 252. Other scholars have also convincingly argued for Klimt’s debt to Wagner’s essay “Beethoven” (1870); see Kevin Karnes, “Wagner, Klimt, and the Metaphysics of Creativity in Fin-­de-­Siècle Vienna,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 62, no. 3 (2009): 647–­97. 152. Klimt’s level of involvement in authoring the unsigned catalogue text is unclear. The full exegesis is as follows: “Decorative principle: regard for the layout of the hall. The three painted walls form a coherent sequence. First long wall, opposite the entrance: Longing for Happiness. The suffering of Weak Humanity. They beseech a powerful Knight in Armor as an external force, and Pity and Ambition as an internal force, to take up the struggle for happiness. Narrow wall: the Hostile Powers. The giant Typhon, against whom even the gods fought in vain; his daughters, the three Gorgons. Disease, Insanity, Death. Lust, Unchastity, and Excess. Gnawing worry. The longings and desires of humanity fly away over these. Second long wall: the Longing for Happiness finds its satisfaction in Poetry. The Arts lead us into the Kingdom of the Ideal, the sole realm where we can find pure joy, pure happiness, pure love. Choir of Paradise Angels. ‘Freude, schöner Götterfunke.’ ‘Diesen Kuß der ganzen Welt!’ ” Secession, XIV. Kunstausstellung, 25–­26. 153. Strobl, “Zu den Fakultätsbildern,” 142. In the scheme proposed by the university for the decoration of the aula ceiling, the various allegories of the faculties would orbit around a central panel by Franz Matsch explicitly treating the “Victory of Light over Darkness.” 154. Gegen Klimt: Historisches, Philosophie, Medizin, Goldfische, Fries (GK) likely was inspired by the dossier of negative press James McNeill Whistler self-­published in 1890, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (London: William Heinemann, 1890). As many artists were realizing, negative publicity was becoming integral to the public validation (not to mention subsequent historical canonization) of artistic creations. 155. A. R., untitled article, Vossische Zeitung, April 18, 1902, in GK, 68. For the demarcation of the decorative concept in sneer quotes, see also S. G., unidentified article, April 22, 1902, in GK, 70. 156. S. G., in GK, 70. 157. B., in unidentified source (April 20, 1902), in GK, 70. 158. Friedrich Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (Chemnitz: Ernst Schmeitzner, 1882), 185. For the importance of this concept in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, see Robert Nehring, Kritik des Common Sense, Gesunder Menschenverstand, reflek-

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tierende Urteilskraft und Gemeinsinn: Der Sensus communis bei Kant (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2010). 159. Joseph Leo Koerner, “The Kiss,” lecture 1 of 2 on “The Viennese Interior: Architecture and Inwardness,” Tanner Lectures Series, Cambridge University, November 13, 2012, http://​upload​.sms​.cam​.ac​.uk​/media​/1447311; Karnes, A Kingdom Not of This World, 119. 160. Asenijeff, Max Klingers Beethoven, 4. Alfred Roller traveled to Leipzig to discuss the exhibition with Klinger, saw the statue in the studio, and very likely described it to his colleagues; see Bizanz-­Prakken, Beethovenfries, 16. 161. Fredrick W. Bunce, Mudras in Buddhist and Hindu Practices: An Iconographic Consideration (New Delhi: DK Printworld, 2001), 278; E. Dale Saunders, Mudra: A Study of Symbolic Gestures in Japanese Buddhist Sculpture (Princeton, NJ: Prince­ ton University Press, 1960), 66–­75. While we know Klimt was an avid admirer of Japanese woodblock prints, the question of his familiarity with Buddhist iconography is more uncertain. With regard to the deliberateness of the Orientalizing gesture, it is relevant that Emil Orlik gave a toast in fake Japanese on the evening of the opening of the Klinger-­Beethoven exhibition; Felix Salten, “Erinnerung an Klimt” (1936), quoted in Nebehay, Dokumentation, 285. 162. Lafcadio Hearn, Gleanings in Buddha-­Fields: Studies of the Hand and Soul in the Far East (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1897), 240. Among others, Hearn cites Herbert Spencer and Wilhelm Wundt. For Hearn’s influence on Bahr, see Marcus Neuwirth, “Hermann Bahr und Gustav Klimt: Exotism als Fluchtpunkt,” in Hermann Bahr: Für eine andere Moderne, ed. Jeanne Benay and Alfred Pfabigan (Bern: P. Lang, 2004), 263–­307. 163. Hermann Bahr, “Buddhismus” (1891), in Überwindung des Naturalismus, 83–­88, 88. On this context, see David L. McMahon, The Making of Buddhist Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), esp. chap. 7, “Meditation and Modernity”; Donald S. Lopez Jr., The Scientific Buddha: His Short and Happy Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). 164. Hearn, Gleanings in Buddha-­Fields, 266. 165. Hearn, Gleanings in Buddha-­Fields, 211. 166. Lux, “Klingers Beethoven,” 480. 167. Hevesi, “Sezession,” 392. 168. Manfred Koller, “The Technique and Conservation of the Beethoven Frieze,” in The Beethoven Frieze and the Controversy over the Freedom of Art, ed. Stephan Koja (Munich: Prestel, 2007), 155–­68, 161. 169. Benjamin, “ Convolute S,” 557. 170. Ludwig Hevesi, “Weiteres zur Klimt-­Ausstellung” (November 21, 1903), in Acht Jahre Sezession, 448–­51, 449. 171. F. D. Luke, “Nietzsche and the Imagery of Height,” in Nietzsche: Imagery and Thought, ed. Malcolm Pasley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 104–­ 23, 107, 111, 112. The primary interconnected ideas that Luke discusses include “(1) climbing in general and mountain climbing in particular; (2) flying and hovering, and in particular the flight of birds; (3) leaping and dancing. Of these activities, 1 and 2 are specifically mentioned by Nietzsche as having been manifest-­content of his dreams” (110). 172. Bachelard, Air and Dreams, 127. 173. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 106. I have slightly modified the translation in reference to Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, 116. As Sara Kofman has argued, the transvaluation of values Nietzsche espouses is itself conceptualized in terms of weight and weightlessness: “The ease with which one moves from high to low and back again is a lightness and absence of weight, a dance, or rather flight. The N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 3 9 –1 4 5













privilege of being able to transmute values is linked to the privilege and happiness of flight. It corresponds to a frequently repeated oneiric experience”; see Kofman, “Baubo: Theological Perversion and Fetishism,” in Feminist Interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Kelly Oliver and Marilyn Pearsall (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1998), 21–­49, 34. 174. Havelock Ellis, “Aviation and Dreams,” in The World of Dreams (1910; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916), 129–­47, 129. 175. Siegmund Exner, Physiologie des Fliegens und Schwebens in den Bildenden Künsten (Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1882), 7. This is a transcript of a lecture delivered at Vienna’s Museum for Art and Industry in 1882. As Peter Geimer observes, the objective tone with which Exner analyzes topics such as God’s or a putto’s flight behavior sounds parodic to today’s reader. But the text is a fully serious attempt to extend physiological methods to a different type of research object; see Geimer, “Das Gewicht der Engel: Eine Physiologie des Unmöglichen,” in Kultur im Experiment, ed. Henning Schmidgen, Peter Geimer, and Sven Dierig (Berlin: Kadmos Kulturverlag, 2014), 170–­90. 176. Exner, Physiologie des Fliegens, 16. 177. Exner, Physiologie des Fliegens, 9, 26, 36, 27. 178. Eduard Pötzl, “Die assyrische Schwimmschule,” April 20, 1902, reprinted in Eduard Pötzls gesammelte Skizzen, ed. Peter Rosegger, 18 vols. (Vienna: R. Mohr, 1906), 13:49–­55, 50, 51. 179. Felix Salten, Gustav Klimt: Gegentliche Anmerkungen (Vienna: Wiener Verlag, 1903), 16. 180. As multiple historians have stressed, Darwinism in the German-­speaking context was filtered to a large degree through Haeckel’s biogenetic principle, taking on a distinctively developmental inflection that disavowed the fundamentally nonteleological character of evolution by means of natural selection as conceptualized by Darwin; see Peter J. Bowler, The Non-­Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 83–­85. 181. Hevesi, “Weiteres zur Klimt-­Ausstellung,” 449. 182. Stanley Hall, “A Study of Fears,” American Journal of Psychology 8, no. 2 (January 1897): 147–­249, 158. 183. Hall, “Study of Fears,” 157, 158. The notion that oneiric flight is based upon “the principle of continuity in the dynamic images of water and air” is a basic axiom of Bachelard’s thinking, which he connects to a frequent imaginary trope of “continuous, imaginary evolution from fish to bird”; Air and Dreams, 42. 184. Bahr, “Die Überwindung des Naturalismus,” 132. 185. Julius Meier-­Graefe, Der Fall Böcklin und die Lehre von der Einheiten (Stuttgart: Julius Hoffmann, 1905), 269. 186. Hermann Ubell notes the resemblance to a Nippesfigur and remarks that the Secessionists forgot that the Phidian Zeus occupied a room with a ceiling low enough to make the enthroned god appear as if he would break through the roof of the temple if he rose to his feet; Ubell, “Klinger’s Beethoven,” 41. Otto Julius Bierbaum made the identical observation, adding that future generations would perceive the statue as a scaled-­down copy of an original; see Mit der Kraft: Automobilia (Berlin: Bard Marquart, 1906), 55. More than simply its display conditions at the Secession, Bierbaum implied there was something inherently diminutive in the form of the sculpture, whose ornamental details he derided as “teenage girl taste” (Backfischgeschmack). 187. Bahr, “Die Überwindung des Naturalismus,” 132–­33. 188. Emily Braun, “Ornament as Evolution: Gustav Klimt and Berta Zuckerkandl,” in Gustav Klimt: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections, ed. Renée N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 4 6 –1 4 9

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Prince (New York: Neue Galerie, 2007), 145–­69; Anna Harwell Celenza, “Darwinian Visions: Beethoven Reception in Mahler’s Vienna,” Musical Quarterly 93, nos. 3–­4 (2010): 514–­59. 189. Charles Darwin, “M Notebook” (1838), in Metaphysics, Materialism, and the Evolution of Mind: The Early Writings of Charles Darwin, ed. Paul H. Barrett (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 29. Partially quoted in Braun, “Ornament as Evolution,” 156. For Darwin’s reception in Austria, see Werner Michler, Darwinismus und Literatur: Naturwissenschaft und Literarische Intelligenz in Österreich, 1859–­1914 (Vienna: Böhlau, 1999); Marsha Morton, “Nature and Soul: Austrian Responses to Ernst Haeckel’s Evolutionary Monism,” in Darwin: Art and the Search for Origins, ed. Pamela Kort and Max Hollein (Cologne: Wienand, 2009), 126–­41. 190. Most ancient Greek sources describe Typhon as possessing hundreds of dragon heads; see the descriptions collected by Aaron J. Atsma, “Typhoes 1,” Theoi Greek Mythology Project, http://​www​.theoi​.com​/Gigante​/Typhoeus​.html. 191. Bouillon, Klimt: Beethoven, 56; Reichswehr [pseud.], unidentified article, April 20, 1902, in GK, 68. 192. Riegl, Problems of Style, 31. 193. Richard Prum, The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World (New York: Doubleday, 2017), 18; Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 118, 141. Prum describes sexual selection as an idea that “has been neglected, distorted, ignored and almost forgotten for nearly a century and a half” (17). While this assessment may be accurate from the point of view of the biological sciences, within the domain of turn-­of-­the-­century aesthetic theory and philosophy, the “dangerous” idea of sexual selection had a swift and unmistakable reception. Sexual selection has been a topic of growing interest in recent cultural-­historical literature; see especially the invaluable Richards, Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection. 194. Grant Allen, Darwin (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1886), 152, 153. 195. Grant Allen, The New Hedonism (1894; New York: Tucker, 1900), 18, 16, 4. 196. Kurt Bayertz, “Biology and Beauty: Science and Aesthetics in Fin-­de-­Siècle Germany,” in Fin-­de-­Siècle and Its Legacy, ed. Mikuláš Teich and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 274–­95, 280. 197. Wilhelm Bölsche, “Charles Darwin und die Moderne Ästhetik,” Der Kunstwart 1 (1888): 125–­26, 125. For Bölsche, see Alfred Kelly, “Erotic Monism—­The Climax of Popular Darwinism,” in The Descent of Darwin: The Popularization of Darwinism in Germany, 1860–­1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 37–­56. If the mechanism of natural selection was downplayed in the German context, Haeckel and other German-­speaking thinkers seem to have been quicker to recognize and accept the full implications of sexual selection. From the first, the sexual dimensions of Darwin’s theory were brought to the fore in the German-­ speaking context, where the earliest translation of the Origin, published by H. G. Bronn in 1860, translated “selection” as Zuchtung, or literally, “breeding.” 198. Winfried Menninghaus, “Biology à La Mode: Charles Darwin’s Aesthetics of ‘Ornament,’ ” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 31, no. 2 (2009; special issue, “Darwin in Culture”): 263–­78, 266, quoting Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment. 199. Bölsche, “Charles Darwin,” 125. 200. Charles Darwin, “Preliminary Notice,” in W. T. Van Dyck, “On the Modification of a Race of Syrian Street-Dogs by Means of Sexual Selection,” Proceedings of the

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Zoological Society of London, no. 25 (April 18, 1882), 367–69, 367. Richard A. Kaye has rightly emphasized the crucial ambiguity in Darwin’s writing on the essential question of whether “the female animal was consciously or unconsciously motivated in her judgments”; see Kaye, “The Flirtation of Species: Darwinian Sexual Selection and Victorian Narrative,” in The Flirt’s Tragedy: Desire without End in Victorian Fiction (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002), 84–­117, 106. 201. Matt Ridley, The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature (New York: Harper Perennial, 2003), 135. Grant Allen confirms that this association was already cemented in the period, claiming in 1877 that “the peacock and the argus pheasant at once occur to the readers of Darwin”; see Allen, Physiological Aesthetics (London: Henry S. King, 1877). For Darwin’s special association with the peacock in British popular culture and in the Aesthetic movement, see Laurence Shafe, “Why Is the Peacock’s Tail So Beautiful?” in Darwin and Theories of Aesthetics and Cultural History, ed. Barbara Larson and Sabine Flach (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013), 37–­51; Richards, Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection, 221–­57. 202. Hevesi, “Sezession,” 392. 203. Hevesi, “Sezession,” 392. 204. Jean-­Pierre Vernant, “Death in the Eyes: Gorgo, Figure of the Other,” in Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 111–­38, 137. 205. Plein-­air, unidentified source (April 28, 1902), in GK, 71; Dr. Robert Hirschfeld, unidentified article, April 20, 1902, in GK, 68. 206. Richard von Krafft-­Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), trans. Franklin S. Klaf from 12th ed. (New York: Arcade, 2011), 1, 6. For a useful summary of Krafft-­ Ebing’s career that stresses the popularity of his sexology among a lay public, see Harry Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-­Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); for his use of hypnosis, see Mayer, Sites of the Unconscious, 131–­45. Both Klimt and Krafft-­Ebing frequented the Zuckerkandl salon, where the psychiatrist once performed a hypnotic séance in front of a mixed audience; see Berta Szeps-­Zuckerkandl, My Life and History, trans. John Sommerfield (New York: Knopf, 1939), 165. 207. Beethoven’s conversation book of 1820, quoted in Esteban Buch, Beethoven’s Ninth: A Political History, trans. Richard Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 106. 208. Schorske describes this passage of the mural as “a young man in transport, framed with his mate in a column shaped unmistakeably like an erect penis within Art’s uterine bower of bliss”; see Schorske, Fin-­de-­Siècle Vienna, 263. 209. Koerner, “Kiss.” This couple can be viewed as consummating the potential union Klimt hinted at in Medizin, exhibited in March 1901 at the Secession. The rear view of the naked male body strongly recalls the figure in Medizin whose arm reaches out—­in vain—­as if to meet the outstretched arm of the forward-­facing female nude floating atop a blue, embryo-­encasing uterus. Klimt’s treatment of these figures, as Braun has noted, revises the scenario of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam from the Sistine Ceiling, so that “creation” no longer appears as the function of a deus artifex but of sexual reproduction; see Braun, “Ornament as Evolution,” 153. 210. Bisanz-­Prakken, Beethovenfries, 69. 211. Because Klimt contributed an image of the knight to the volume Gustav Mahler: Ein Bild seiner Persönlichkeit in Widmungen (Munich: Piper, 1910), many readings view the “well-­armed warrior” as a veiled portrait of Mahler. For a typical reading in this vein, see Anna Celenza, “Vienna’s Golden Knight: A Tale of Science,

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[ 299 ]











[ 300 ]



Symphonies, and Scandalous Art,” Hopkins Review 3, no. 4 (2010): 464–­95, 484. I agree with Kevin Karnes in doubting that Klimt intended this direct reference; see Karnes, “Wagner, Klimt, and the Metaphysics of Creativity,” 682n83. To my mind, the spatial position of the knight within the frieze insists upon a relationship to Beethoven, or Beethoven as a personification of the artist in general. 212. I am grateful to Julia Hyland Bruno for her crucial insight on this point. 213. Nebehay, Dokumentation, 53. Braun called attention to this book as a crucial source the artist drew on throughout his oeuvre; see “Ornament as Evolution,” 151. 214. Braun, “Ornament as Evolution,” 157. 215. Bouillon, Klimt: Beethoven, 62. 216. Ernst Haeckel, The Evolution of Man: A Popular Exposition of the Principal Points of Human Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1874), 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1896), 1:173, 174. Scott F. Gilbert and S. Brauckmann propose that Klimt may have gained sophisticated knowledge of the biology of fertilization through Emil Zuckerkandl and Hans Przibram; see Gilbert and Brauckmann, “Fertilization Narratives in the Art of Gustav Klimt, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo: Repression, Domination and Eros among Cells,” Leonardo 44, no. 3 (2011): 221–­27. 217. The key text was Oskar Hertwig, Das Problem der Befruchtung und der Isotropie des Eies: Eine Theorie der Vererbung (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1884). For the history of this discovery and its implications, see John Farley, Gametes and Spores: Ideas about Sexual Reproduction, 1750–­1914 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). 218. Wilhelm Bölsche, “The Mystery of the Sperm-­Cell and Ovum-­Cell,” in Love-­Life in Nature: The Story of the Evolution of Love, vol. 1, trans. Cyril Brown (New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1926), 41–­114, 46, 63; the first volume of Bölsche’s text appeared in German in 1899. The potential relevance of this text to Klimt’s mural is cited in Celenza, “Darwinian Visions,” 542. 219. Hevesi, “Max Klingers Beethoven,” 388. 220. This satirical moniker was derived from the anonymous article “Der Ornamentenfeind,” Ulk, March 18, 1910, reprinted in Kontroversen: Adolf Loos in Spiegel der Zeitgenossen, ed. Adolf Opel (Vienna: Georg Prachner, 1985), 33–­35. Loos never referred explicitly to the Klinger-­Beethoven exhibition in his writings, yet it was a deliberate subtext in his commentaries on Beethoven. For Loos’s strange silence on Klimt, see Beatriz Colomina, “Sex, Lies and Decoration,” in Gustav Klimt: Painting, Design, and Modern Life, ed. Tobias Natter and Christoph Grunenberg, exh. cat. (London: Tate Publishing, 2008), 42–­51. 221. Adolf Loos, “Ornament und Verbrechen,” in Trotzdem, 1900–­1930, ed. Adolf Opel (Vienna: Georg Prachner, 1982), 78–­88, 88. I have modified the translation of “Ornament and Crime” by Michael Bullock, reprinted in The Theory of Decorative Art: An Anthology of European and American Writings, 1750–­1940, ed. Isabelle Frank (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press/Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, 2000), 288–­94. The argument advanced by Jimena Canales and Andrew Herscher has been decisive for my understanding of Loos in the context of this chapter; see their “Criminal Skins: Tattoos and Modern Architecture in the Work of Adolf Loos,” Architectural History 48, no. 1 (2005): 235–­56. 222. Adolf Loos, “Surplus to Requirements” (1908), in Opel, Adolf Loos, 155. 223. Loos, “Ornament and Crime,” 288/“Ornament und Verbrechen,” 78–­88, 78–­79. 224. Adolf Loos, “Architektur” (1909), in Opel, Trotzdem, 90–­104, 102. 225. Peter Altenberg, “Gustav Klimt,” Kunst 7 (December 3, 1903): 22. 226. Following Klimt’s death, the mothers of fourteen children made claims on his

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227.



228.



229. 230.





estate; see Susanna Partsch, Gustav Klimt: Painter of Women (Munich: Prestel, 2004), 58. Gottfried Fliedl, Gustav Klimt, 1862–­1918: The World in Female Form (Cologne: Taschen, 1998), 105. Wasted labor was at the heart of Loos’s diatribe against ornament. The architect’s thoughts on this matter are echoed in Kraus’s comment that “The whitewashers are already coming to scrape off the casein colors on the walls of the Secession building, which they spent months painting”; see Kraus, untitled article in Die Fackel 4, no. 106 (1902): 17–­21, 21. The conceit of producing decorations for destruction—­even if actual destruction was never intended—­was structural to the exhibition’s self-­ sacrificing posture, and its engagement with concepts of excess and Überflußigkeit central to both Darwin’s and Nietzsche’s theorizations of aesthetic drives. Hevesi, “Sezession,” 392. The mural was expropriated from its Jewish owner after the Anschluss. The heirs, forbidden from taking the work abroad, sold it to the state. See Sophie L ­ illie, Feindliche Gewalten: Das Ringen um Gustav Klimts Beethovenfries (Vienna: Czernin

Verlag, 2018). 231. Celenza, “Darwinian Visions,” 535. 232. Nähr was the only individual permitted into Klimt’s studio to document his paintings and creative environment. His purportedly “idolatrous” attitude toward the painter structured their model-­photographer relationship. This group photo became the basis for Nähr’s later portrait closeup of Klimt “enthroned” in a chair at the Secession, wearing his painting smock and brandishing paintbrushes. See Uwe Schögl, “Klimt in Contemporary Photographs,” in Klimt: Up Close and Personal; Paintings, Letters, Insights, exh. cat., ed. Franz Smola, Tobias G. Natter, Peter Wein­häupl (Vienna: Brandstätter, 2012), 84–­97, 90, 92. 233. The smock, which Egon Schiele recalls “h[anging] down to his heels,” obscuring the painter’s feet, was central to Klimt’s image; quoted in Schögl, “Klimt in Contemporary Photographs,” 92. Klimt was certainly not the only turn-­of-­the-­century artist to sport such a garment. As Christian Huemer points out, inspiration for Klimt’s kaftan may have come from Joséphin Péladan, who called himself Sâr (“King” in ancient Assyrian) and was depicted in an engulfing, “sack”-­like blue smock in an 1892 portrait by Alexandre Séon; see Huemer, “Gustav Klimt—­The Prophet of Viennese Modernism: Marketing and Cult at the Secession,” in Gustav Klimt: Landscapes, ed. Stephan Koja (Munich: Prestel, 2002), 145–­59. Bahr is also documented wearing a “sack” in numerous photographs and caricatures.

Chapter Three



1. Lynn Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 1998), 180. 2. Bronislava Nijinska, Early Memoirs, ed. and trans. Irina Nijinska and Jean Raw­ linson (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1981), 317, 315. Nijinska’s heavily edited manuscript was originally titled “My Brother Vaslav Nijinsky”; see Lynn Garafola, “Crafted by Many Hands: Re-­Reading Bronislava Nijinska’s ‘Early Memoirs,’”  Dance Research 29, no. 1 (Summer 2011): 1–­18. 3. Nijinska, Early Memoirs, 316. 4. Alongside Nijinska’s Early Memoirs, the most useful account of Nijinsky’s early life remains Richard Buckle, Nijinsky (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971). 5. Lincoln Kirstein, Four Centuries of Ballet: Fifty Masterworks, 2nd ed. (New York: Dover, 1984), 198.

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[ 301 ]













[ 302 ]

6. In a 1912 interview, Nijinsky specified sixty rehearsals. Later reminiscences claim double that number; see Romola Nijinsky, Nijinsky (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1934), 165; Serge Grigoriev, The Diaghilev Ballet: 1909–­1929, trans. Vera Bowen (London: Constable, 1953), 66. Nijinska recalls ninety rehearsals; see Early Memoirs, 427. 7. Albert Bazaillas, “Musique: Les Ballets Russes—­le cas Nijinski,” undated clipping [1912], Courrier européen, AR. For his public reception, see Hanna Järvinen, Dancing Genius: The Stardom of Vaslav Nijinsky (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 8. Nijinsky, quoted in Marie Rambert, Quicksilver: The Autobiography of Marie Rambert (London: Macmillan, 1972), 62. 9. Cyril Beaumont, Bookseller at the Ballet: Memoirs 1891 to 1929 Incorporating the Diaghilev Ballet in London; A Record of Bookselling, Ballet Going, Publishing and Writing (London: C. W. Beaumont, 1975), 121; A. E. Johnson, The Russian Ballet, with Illustrations by René Bull (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), 185. 10. P. H. T., “Under Sea and over Land with the Russian Ballet,” Boston Evening Transcript, November 10, 1916. 11. “The First Effort of Nijinsky as a Ballet Master,” Sketch Supplement, June 26, 1912, 6. 12. Nikolai Minskii, “Sensatsionnyi Balet (Pis’mo iz Parizha)” [Sensational Ballet (Letter from Paris)], Utro Rossii, May 24, 1912. 13. Francis Toye, “L’Après-­midi d’un faune: Nijinsky’s Much-­Discussed Ballet at Covent Garden,” The Bystander, February 26, 1913, 448. 14. Headline from unidentified press clipping, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York, and from Pittsburg Gazette, June 5, 1912, quoted in Nesta MacDonald, ­Diaghilev Observed, by Critics in England and the United States, 1911–­1929 (London: Dance Books, 1975), 78. 15. Nijinsky performed Faune fifty-­eight times between its premiere and final performance in Buenos Aires in 1917. See the venue list in MDN, 126–­30. 16. “Infantilism of sexuality” comes from Freud, “My Views on the Part Played by Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses” (1906), SE 7:269–­79, 275; “psychical infantilism” from Freud, “The Claims of Psycho-­Analysis to Scientific Interest,” SE 13:17. 17. Freud, “Some Elementary Lessons in Psycho-­Analysis” (1940), SE 23:279–­86, 286. 18. Freud, “The Claims of Psycho-­Analysis to Scientific Interest” (1913), SE 13:163–­90, 180. 19. Freud, “New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-­Analysis” (1933), SE 22:1–­182, 122; Freud, “An Outline of Psycho-­Analysis” (1940), SE 23:139–­208, 152. 20. Freud, Three Essays on the History of Sexuality (1905), SE 7:123–­246, 134. 21. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), SE 18:1–­64, 51; Havelock Ellis, “Psychoanalysis in Relation to Sex,” Journal of Mental Science 63 (1917): 537–­55, 542. 22. Freud, “The Resistances to Psycho-­Analysis,” SE 19:220. 23. On March 6, 1919, Bleuler diagnosed Nijinsky as a “confused schizophrenic.” Two days later, and against Bleuler’s recommendations, he was committed to the psychiatric ward at the Burghölzli hospital in Zürich. For the next thirty years, until his death in 1950, he remained incapacitated, very often catatonic, and in and out of institutions. For a history of Nijinsky’s illness, see Peter Ostwald, Vaslav Nijinsky: A Leap into Madness (New York: Carol Publishing, 1991). Bleuler’s promotion of and subsequent disillusionment with Freud’s ideas was pivotal for the early history of the psychoanalytic movement; see Ernst Falzelder, “The Story of an Ambivalent Relationship: Sigmund Freud and Eugen Bleuler,” Journal of Analytical Psychology 52 (2007): 343–­68.

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24. Ludwig Binswanger to Sigmund Freud, January 7, 1920 (letter 121B), in The Sigmund Freud–­Ludwig Binswanger Correspondence, 1908–­1938, ed. Gerhard Ficht­ ner, trans. Arnold Pomerans (New York: Other Press, 2003), 147–­50, 148. “Homo natura” is borrowed from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. 25. Binswanger, “Freud’s Conception of Man,” 158, 150. 26. Binswanger, “Freud’s Conception of Man,” 151, 168. 27. Binswanger, “Freud’s Conception of Man,” 160, 161, 159, 160. 28. Binswanger, “Freud’s Conception of Man,” 164. 29. Vaslav Nijinsky, The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky: Unexpurgated Edition, ed. Joan Acocella, trans. Kyril Fitzlyon (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 17. The manuscript is conserved at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library. It was written between January 19 and March 4, 1919, when Nijinsky was taken to Zürich for psychiatric treatment. For Nijinsky’s intentions for publication, see Diary, 35, 41, 46, 83, 84, 106, 120, 145, 168, 174, 185, 216. Nijinsky titled this manuscript “Feelings” and divided it into two books called “Life” and “Death.” He intended to publish it not in print but as a photographed facsimile. As Nicole Svobodny insists, Nijinsky never referred to his work with the Russian word for diary (dnevnik) and instead “uses the words kniga (book), rukopis’ (manuscript), tetradi (notebooks), pisanie (writing), and zapis’ (note, record)”; see S ­ vobodny, “Walking with a Tolstoyan Dancer: Physical and Psychic Mobility in Vaslav Nijinsky’s Diary,” in Migration and Mobility in the Modern Age: Refugees, Travelers, and Traffickers in Europe and Eurasia, ed. Anika Walke, Jan Musekamp, and Nicole Svobodny (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 80–­107, 103n6. My use of the 1919 manuscript throughout this chapter is informed by my reading of Svobodny’s brilliant, vitally important book in manuscript, The Feeling Mind: Vaslav Nijinsky Leaps into Literature. This work makes an unimpeachable case that the “diary” is not simply an artifact of mental illness but also a sophisticated literary and philosophical text in self-­conscious dialogue with authors such as Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Nietzsche. 30. Nijinsky, Diary, 45, 52. 31. Nijinsky, Diary, 17. 32. Nijinsky, Diary, 24, also 17, 40, 225. 33. Freud, quoted in minutes 56, in The Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, vol. 2, 1908–­1910, ed. Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn, trans. M. Nunberg (New York: International Universities Press, 1967), 25–­33, 32. 34. Freud, “The Claims of Psychoanalysis to Scientific Interest,” SE 13:165–­90, 187; Freud, “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood” (1910), SE 11:57–­138, 69. I have modified the title to reflect the priority of the “childhood memory” in the essay’s original German title, “Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci.” 35. Nijinsky, Diary, 207. In addition to Faune, Nijinsky composed Jeux (1913), Sacre du Printemps (1913), and Till Eulenspiegel (1916). 36. Nijinsky, Diary, 185. 37. The phrase is Misia Sert’s, quoted in Järvinen, Dancing Genius, 2. 38. Nijinsky, Diary, 44. 39. Adolphe de Meyer, Le Prélvde à L’Après-­midi d’vn favne (Paris: Éditions Paul Iribe, 1914). For the details concerning the de Meyer photographs and the subsequent Iribe album, see Philippe Néagu, “Nijinsky and De Meyer,” MDN, 55–­63. 40. For Nijinsky’s concept of the partition du mouvement, see Hector Cahusac, “La Vie de Paris: Debussy et Nijinsky,” Le Figaro, May 14, 1913. Because Nijinsky’s notation system was idiosyncratic, Faune’s score was not decoded until 1991; see Ann Hutchinson Guest and Claudia Jeschke, Nijinsky’s Faune Restored: A Study of Vas-

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[ 303 ]









[ 304 ]



lav Nijinsky’s 1915 Dance Score and His Dance Notation System, 2nd ed. (Hampshire, UK: Noverre Press, 2010), hereafter cited as Faune Score. This chapter relies extensively on the work of Guest and Jeschke, but because of my reliance on period reviews it will at times contradict their conviction that Faune’s “definitive” version was smoother, less jerky and angular than the memory-­based versions. 41. Programme officiel des Ballets Russes, Théâtre du Châtelet, mai–­juin 1912, troisième spectacle, 29 et 31 mai, 1er et 3 juin 1912 (Paris: Comœdia illustré, 1912), n.p. 42. The following description draws from accounts of contemporary viewers, the Guest-­Jeschke Faune Score, and the videocassette recording of the Juilliard Dance Ensemble’s restaging of Faune in 1990, directed by Jill Beck and assisted by Ann Hutchinson Guest. 43. Pierre Lalo, “La Musique,” Le Temps, June 11, 1912, 3. 44. For Nijinsky’s production notes and the scenographic setup, see Faune Score, 15–­ 16; Lalo, “La Musique,” 3. 45. Nijinsky production note, quoted in Faune Score, 15. 46. Original cast members and subsequent cast changes are listed in MDN, 125–­30. 47. Jean Cocteau, “Une Répétition du ‘Prélude à L’Après-­midi d’un faune,’ ” Comœdia, May 28, 1912. 48. Eric Heller, “The Scandal of Nijinsky’s Faun,” in Ballet Review 22, no. 2 (1994): 10–­19, 16. 49. Faune Score, 40. 50. Nijinsky, quoted in Faune Score, 42. 51. These lines come from Nijinsky’s plot synopsis and notes in the 1915 score, translated in Faune Score, 14, 132, 137. 52. Significantly, Nijinsky did not notate the precise final movements in his otherwise fastidious score. There has been debate about how the final movements might have been performed at the premiere. I agree with Buckle in reading the de Meyer photographs as clear evidence that, in the original choreographic conception, Nijinsky slid his hand under his groin at the ballet’s close; see Buckle, Nijinsky, 285. The same gesture was recorded in a drawing by Valentine Gross, conserved at the Victoria and Albert Museum, inv. no. S. 639-­1989. 53. Henri Gauthier-­Villars, “Deux ballets russes de musiciens français,” Comœdia illustré, June 15, 1912 (special issue on L’Après-­midi d’un faune), n.p. 54. Gauthier-­Villars, “Deux ballets russes,” n.p. 55. Albert Thibaudet first proposed this connection in 1912; see La Poésie de Stéphane Mallarmé (Paris: M. Rivière, 1912), 394. While this connection was subsequently challenged, Eileen Souffrin-­Le Breton convincingly argues that Mallarmé saw a miniature or a print reproduction; see “The Young Mallarmé and the Boucher Revival,” in Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry: New Essays in Honor of Lloyd Austin, ed. Malcolm Bowie, Alison Fairlie, and Alison Finch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 283–­313. 56. The importance of dance for Warburg’s conceptualization of the Pathosformel is beyond my scope. Suffice it to say he presumed and emphasized the transmissibility of gestures between performing bodies and static figurations; the 1905 text on Dürer asserts that Poliziano’s opera Orfeo (which Warburg referred to as a Tanzspiel) was an instance in which the passionate body language of Orpheus in Dürer’s drawing was dramatisch verkörpert. See Warburg, “Dürer und die italienische Antike.” 57. Stéphane Mallarmé to Claude Debussy, December 22, 1894, in Mallarmé, Correspondance, ed. Henri Mondor and Lloyd James Austin, 11 vols. (Paris: Gallimard,

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1959–­1985), 7:116. In the quatrain Mallarmé inscribed in the copy of the poem he gave to Debussy, he imagined his faun playing the Prélude; see “Offrandes à divers du faune,” in Stéphane Mallarmé, Vers de circonstance (Paris: Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Française, 1920), 60–­65. 58. Lalo, “La Musique,” 3. 59. Claude Debussy to Gabriel Pierné, February 8, 1914, in Claude Debussy, Correspondance, 1872–­1918, ed. François Lesure and Denis Herlin (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 1760. 60. “C. Debussy a Roma, un profilo et un colloquio,” La Tribuna, February 23, 1914, translated in François Lesure, “Une Interview romaine de Debussy,” Cahiers Debussy 11 (1987): 3–­8, 5. 61. The phrases come from Warburg’s notes for an exhibition on Ovid at his library in 1927; quoted in Isabella Woldt, “Urworte leidenschaftlicher Gebärbensprache,” in Aby Warburg, Bilderreihen und Ausstellungen, ed. Uwe Fleckner and Isabella Woldt, vol. 2.2 of Gesammelte Schriften: Studienausgabe, ed. Horst Bredekamp (Berlin: Akademie, 2012), 73–­79, 77. 62. Gauthier-­Villars, “Deux ballets russes,” n.p. 63. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4–­5, 5:543, 549. Simon Hecquet and Sabine Prokhoris briefly argued for Freud’s relevance to Faune in their study of Nijinsky’s notation, primarily with regard to the dream as a system of writing; see Fabriques de la danse (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2007), 101, 107. 64. Charles Méryel, “L’Adieu aux Ballets Russes,” Comœdia illustré, June 15, 1912 (special issue on L’Après-­midi d’un faune), 749–­64, 751. 65. H. D., Tribute to Freud (New York: New Directions, 1974), 116. Freud to Fliess, August 1, 1899, in Complete Letters, 363. As Lydia Marinelli points out, Freud referred to the dream analyses he sent to Fliess while writing the Interpretation as his drekkologischen Berichte (filth reports); see “Meine . . . alten und dreckigen Götter”: Aus Sigmund Freuds Sammlung, ed. Lydia Marinelli (Frankfurt: Stroemfeld, 1998), 12. At the time of his death, Freud’s collection comprised around three thousand objects, more than half of which were Egyptian. See Sigmund Freud and Art: His Personal Collection of Antiquities, ed. Lynn Gamwell and Richard Wells (New York: Abrams, 1989), 21–­32. 66. Freud to Fliess, November 14, 1897, in Complete Letters, 278. For Löwy’s career, see Emanuel Löwy: Ein vergessener Pionier, ed. Friedrich Bein (Vienna: Kataloge der Archäologische Sammlung der Universität Wien, 1998); Ripensare Emanuel Löwy: Professore di archeologia e storia dell’arte nella R. Università e direttore del Museo di Gessi, ed. Maria Grazia Picozzi (Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2013). For Löwy and Freud, see Harald Wolf, “Archäologische Freundschaften: Emanuel Löwys und Ludwig Pollas Bedeutung für den Sammler Freud,” in “Meine . . . alten und dreckigen Götter,” 60–­71. 67. Freud, Interpretation, SE 5:598, 536; Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung (Leipzig and Vienna: Franz Deuticke, 1900), GW 2–­3:i–­701, 604, 541. 68. Freud, On Dreams (1901), SE 5:629–­86, 682. Section 12 of this essay, added in the second edition (1911), refers back to Freud’s Three Essays. 69. Freud, Interpretation, SE 5:507. 70. Freud, Interpretation, SE 5:543. 71. Freud, Interpretation, SE 4:277. 72. Freud, Interpretation, SE 5:339. 73. Freud, Interpretation, SE 5:534. 74. “Conversion to the illustrative” is my modification of Strachey, “Umarbeitung aufs

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[ 305 ]













[ 306 ]



Anschauliche”; Freud, Über den Traum (1901), GW 3:684. “Thoughts transformed into images”/“Bilder verwandelte Gedanken”: Freud, Interpretation, SE 5:544/Die Traumdeutung, GW 3:549. “Thoughts into situations”/“Dramatisierung”: Freud, On Dreams, SE 5:653/Über den Traum, GW 3:666. 75. Freud, Interpretation, SE 5:547. 76. Freud, Die Traumdeutung, GW 2:51/Interpretation, SE 4:48. This line, which Freud adapts from Gustav Fechner, is a crucial one for him. He follows it with the statement, “this is the only hypothesis that makes the special peculiarities of dream-­ life intelligible.” 77. Freud, Interpretation, SE 4:277, 5:548. A “different, so to say archaic, method of expression”; see Freud, “Two Encyclopaedia Articles” (1923), SE 18:233–­60, 242. 78. Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes (Paris: Éditions Seuil, 1981), quoted in David J. Code, “Hearing Debussy Reading Mallarmé: Music après Wagner in the Prélude à L’Après-­midi d’un faune,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 53, no. 3 (2001): 493–­554, 499. 79. Cited in Jean-­Nicolas Illouz, “L’Après-­midi d’un faune et l’interprétation des arts: Mallarmé, Manet, Debussy, Gauguin, Nijinski,” Littérature 4, no. 168 (2012): 3–­20, 9. The dramatic script contained an initial “Monologue d’un faune,” a “Dialogue des nymphes,” and then a final monologue, “Le Réveil du faune.” An inter­mediary state, reduced to a poetic monologue, was titled “Improvisation d’un Faune.” The key source on the text’s genesis remains Henri Mondor, Histoire d’un Faune, avec un état inédit de “L’Après-­midi d’un Faune” (Paris: Gallimard, 1948). For the various versions, see Stéphane Mallarmé, Mallarmé: Oeuvres complètes, ed. Bertrand Marchal, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 1:152–­66. 80. Stéphane Mallarmé to Henri Cazalis, June 15 or 22, 1865, in Mallarmé, Oeuvres, 1:678. 81. A. R. Chisholm, Mallarmé’s L’Après-­midi d’un faune: An Exegetical and Critical Study (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1958), 10. While this structural polarity is established with consistency, Mallarmé also unsettles it; see Mary Lewis Shaw, Performance in the Texts of Mallarmé: The Passage from Art to Ritual (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 147–­48. 82. See Freud, Traumdeutung. In the Standard Edition the spaced type is rendered in italics. 83. Renato Poggioli, The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 311; Wallace Fowlie, Mallarmé (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 160. 84. Poggioli, Oaten Flute, 293. 85. Robert Greer Cohn, Towards the Poems of Mallarmé (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 13, 14. 86. While this goes unmentioned in the many commentaries on this polysemic choice of verb, perpétuer appears in the first French translations of Darwin’s major works. See De l’origine des espèces ou des lois du progrès chez les êtres organisés, trans. Clémence Royer (Paris: Guillaumin, 1862); La Descendance de l’homme et la sélection sexuelle, trans. J. J. Moulinié, 2 vols. (Paris: C. Reinwald, 1872–­1873). 87. Freud, Three Essays, SE 7:178; Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), SE 21:57–­146, 79; Freud, “Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood,” SE 11:78. 88. Pan’s tale immediately echoes and deepens the metamorphic prototype established in the inaugural myth: Apollo’s failed pursuit of Daphne, who transforms into a laurel tree to avoid rape and becomes the god’s personal emblem of poetic inspiration. “Since thou canst not be my bride,” declared the deity, “thou shalt at

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least be my tree! . . . my lyre . . . shall always be entwined with thee.” Ovid, Metamorphoses, Books 1–­8, trans. Frank Justus Miller, ed. G. P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library 42 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916), 1:451–­567. The two tales are separated by only 150 lines. 89. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1:52. For analysis of the narrative structure, see P. Murgatroyd, “Ovid’s Syrinx,” Classical Quarterly 51, no. 2 (2001): 620–­23. Mallarmé’s version closely echoes Ovid’s in that both are related as an interpolated narrative and told as an inducement to slumber. 90. Daphne and Syrinx become symbols of two different aspects of Ovid’s poetic practice. Whereas Daphne is associated with “bookish” poetry in written text, Syrinx “comes to symbolise the musical aspect of poetry not as script, but as pure melody”; see Joseph Farrell, “The Ovidian Corpus: Poetic Body and Poetic Text,” in Ovidian Transformations: Essays on the Metamorphoses and Its Reception, ed. Stephen Hinds, Philip R. Hardie, and Alessando Barchiesi (Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society, 1999), 127–­41, 135. Syrinx is obviously resonant with Mallarmé’s musical poetry and, moreover, was specifically associated with the ancient, songlike genre invoked by his subtitle, “Éclogve”; see Sarah L. McCallum, “Primus Pastor: The Origins of Pastoral in Ovid’s Metamorphoses,” in Roman Literary Cultures: Domestic Politics, Revolutionary Poetics, Civic Spectacle, ed. Alison Keith and Jonathan Edmondson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 124–­38. 91. Steven F. Walker, “Mallarmé’s Symbolist Eclogue: The ‘Faune’ as Pastoral,” PMLA 93, no. 1 (January 1978): 106–­17, 115, 114. 92. Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 111, 49. 93. [Philip de Malpas Grey Edgerton?], “Monkeyana,” Punch, or the London Charivari, May 18, 1861, 206. 94. Linnaeus introduced this term in Fauna Svecica, sistens animalia Sveciae regni: Quadrupedia, Aves, Amphibia, Pisces, Insecta, Vermes, distributa per Classes & ordines, genera & species (Stockholm: Sumtu & Literis Laurentii Salvii, 1746). 95. Chisholm, L’Après-­midi d’un faune, 30. 96. Roger Pearson, Unfolding Mallarmé: The Development of a Poetic Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 110. 97. “Pan / Tronc qui s’achève en homme / Moins gravement embrassait / Les Pipeaux / Que je ne nomme / La comtesse de / Grasset”; Mallarmé, “Offrandes à divers du faune,” 64. 98. Freud, “The Resistances to Psycho-­Analysis,” SE 19:218; Freud, “On Psycho-­ Analysis,” SE 12:205–­12, 209. 99. Programme officiel des Ballets Russes, Théâtre du Châtelet, mai-­juin 1912, troisième spectacle, n.p. These notes recycle lines from a text signed by Jean Cocteau, published the day before the premiere, “Une Répétition du ‘Prélude à L’Après-­midi d’un Faune,’ ” Comœdia, May 28, 1912. 100. Nijinsky, quoted in “Souvenirs de Nijinsky,” Je sais tout, November 15, 1912, 417–­20. 101. For this concept, see Hubert Damisch, The Judgment of Paris, trans. John Goodman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 94–­123. 102. Freud, “New Introductory Lectures to Psycho-­Analysis” (1933), SE 22:1–­182, 95. 103. John Boardman, The Great God Pan: The Survival of an Image (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1998), 9. 104. “More Russian Ballet,” unsigned, unidentified clipping, NYPL, Jerome Robbins Dance Division; Francis Bacon, Pan, or Nature, in The Wisdom of the Ancients (1609), in The Works of Francis Bacon, vol. 3 (Boston: Brown and Taggard, 1860), 92. As Juliet Bellow noted, there was an insistent strain of bigotry in the French

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reception of the Ballets Russes; see Modernism on Stage: The Ballets Russes and the Parisian Avant-­Garde (New York: Routledge, 2016), 27–­29. Gaston Calmette, “Un faux pas,” Le Figaro, May 30, 1912, 1. Paul Soudax, “Les Premières: Châtelet,” undated clipping, Ballets Russes pressbook, Département des Arts du Spectacle, Bibliothèque nationale de France. On the faun’s perceived nakedness, see “Dancing without Space—­on Nijinsky’s L’Après-­midi d’un Faune (1912),” Dance Research 27, no. 1 (2009): 28–­64, 33, 55n10. Philippe Borgeaud, The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece, trans. Kathleen Atlass and James Redfield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 79–­83. Frank Brommer, “Pan im 5. und 4. Jahrhundert v. Chr.,” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 15 (1949–­1950): 5–­42, 7. Untitled article, Soleil du Midi, June 2, 1912, AR. Ida Rubinstein and then Lydia Nelidova, after Rubinstein abandoned the role. Nijinska, Early Memoirs, 405. Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–­1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 77.



105. 106.



107.



108.



109. 110.



111.



112. Hensleigh Wedgwood, Dictionary of English Etymology, vol. 2 (London: Trübner, 1862), 35, s.v. “Fawn”: “The Fr[ench] faon, feon, was applied to the young of animals in general as of a lion, bear, dragon; faoner feoner to bring forth young, to lay eggs. Explained by Diez from Lat foetus, through a derivative fedon feon as from feta (used by Virgil in the sense of sheep, properly breeding ewes).” 113. Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis (1926), SE 20:177–­258, 211. 114. Heller argues that the faun’s final movement was meant to evoke “spasmodic, yet most certainly and triumphantly spontaneous, ejaculation”; see Heller, “Scandal,” 18. Even if this was so, it strongly evoked masturbation for audiences. 115. Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher, “Pan,” in Ausführliches Lexikon der Griechischen und Römischen Mythologie, vol. 3 (Leipzig. Teubner, 1897–­1902), 1348–­1481, 1396–­97. For further discussion of Pan’s sexual adventures as “disordered . . . lacking in assurance, and . . . ultimately sterile,” as well as broadly “non-­familial” and connected with “perversions,” see Borgeaud, Cult of Pan, 75–­78. 116. Dio Chrysostom, “Diogenes; or, On Tyranny,” in Discourses 1–­11, trans. J.  W. ­Cohoon, Loeb Classical Library 257 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932), 249–­84, 261. 117. [Cocteau], Programme officiel, n.p.; Cocteau, “Une Répétition,” 1. The English “panic” comes from the French panique, coined in the sixteenth century, while the French is associated with Pan. See Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 9th ed., s.v. “panique”: “Emprunté du grec panikos, ‘du dieu Pan’ et, substantivement, ‘terreur,’ car on attribuait au dieu Pan tous les bruits inquiétants entendus dans les montagnes ou les vallées.” Pan also provides the figural prototype for the devil; see Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher and James Hillman, Pan and the Nightmare: Two Essays (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1979). 118. Léon Werth, “La Pudeur du jour,” La Grande revue 17 (June 25, 1912): 817–20, 817. 119. For the coinage of the term, see Charles Lasègue, “Les Exhibitionnistes,” L’Union medical 23, no. 50 (1877): 709–­14. “Exhibitionism” was introduced into English and German through Charles Gilbert Chaddock’s translation of Krafft-­Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis. According to Angus McLaren, “the last third of the nineteenth century witnessed, if one is to judge by the legal and medical writings of the time, an epidemic of male exhibitionism”; see McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries, 1870–­1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 182. 120. “Fin de l’incident ‘L’Après-­midi d’un faune,’ ” Le Gaulois, June 1, 1912, 1. 121. “Théatres,” Le Journal des débats, June 1, 1912, 3; H. G., “Deux récentes scandales











[ 308 ]



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—­Le ‘Faune’ de Nijinski et la ‘Salome’ de Regnault,” La Nouvelle revue française 8, no. 43 (1912): 196; “Échos de partout,” Le Gaulois, May 31, 1912; Le Gaulois, June 1, 1912. 122. Calmette, “Un Faux pas,” 1. 123. Émile Deflin, “Le Départ de Nijinsky, Convérsation en russe avec le faune,” L’Intransigeant, June 13, 1912, 1. 124. Nijinsky, interviewed in Pall Mall Gazette, February 15, 1913, reprinted in MacDonald, Diaghilev Observed, 79. 125. “Souvenirs de Nijinsky,” 417–­20. 126. Nijinsky, Diary, 25. 127. Harry Graf Kessler, diary entry for May 23, 1912, in Das Tagebuch, 1880–­1937, ed. Hans-­Ulrich Simon, Werner Volke, and Bernhard Zeller, 9 vols. (Stuttgart: Cotta, 2004–­2010), 4:826. Diaghilev was far more fearful than Nijinsky about the repercussions, postponing the debut for a year. According to Nijinska, he tried to convince Nijinsky to create a different work using Debussy’s Les Nuages or Les Fêtes, “but Vaslav insisted that his first ballet must be L’Après-­midi d’un faune; he refused to consider anything else”; see Nijinska, Early Memoirs, 328. 128. Sjeng Scheijen, Diaghilev: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 247. 129. Kessler records visiting Rodin on May 23, 1912, to invite him to a rehearsal and notes that Rodin had seen Nijinsky only in a photograph. He escorted Rodin to the rehearsal on May 27, 1912, and Roger-­Marx spent the entire following day with the sculptor trying to generate quotations; see Kessler, Tagebuch, 4:826, 830, 835. 130. Harry Graf Kessler, diary entry for May 29, 1912, in Kessler, Tagebuch, 4:835. For Nijinsky’s account of this episode, see Diary, 204. 131. Auguste Rodin, “La Rénovation de la danse: Loïe Fuller, Isadora Duncan, Nijinski,” Le Matin, May 30, 1912, 1. 132. “The Faun That Has Startled Paris,” Current Literature 53, no. 2 (August 1912): 208–­10, 208. 133. Diaghilev, quoted in Calmette, “À propos d’un faune,” Le Figaro, May 31, 1912, 1. 134. “Faun That Has Startled Paris,” 208. 135. Calmette, “À propos d’un faune.” The specific drawings to which Calmette alludes are unknown. 136. “Nijinski,” Le Cri de Paris, June 9, 1912, AR. The review goes on to specify that “le frétillement ne vint pas. . . . Ce fut une déception tant pour ceux qui étaient favorables que pour ceux qui étaient hostiles au frétillement.” 137. Quasi [pseud.], “Les Petits poissons rouges dans leur bocal; ou, Anatomie du poème en prose,” Mercure de France, modern series 6, no. 34 (1892): 167–­68. For Rémy de Gourmont as possible author, see Suzanne Bernard, Le Poème en prose de Baudelaire jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Librairie Nizet, 1959), 503. See also Rémy de Gourmont, Physique de l’amour: Essai sur l’instinct sexuel (Paris: Mercure de France, 1903). 138. Anatolii Lunacharskii, “Russkie i memetski noveshestva,” Teatr i iskuustvo 29 (1912), partially translated in Stanley J. Rabinowitz, “From the Other Shore: Russian Comment on Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes,” Dance Research 27, no. 1 (2009): 1–­27, 8. As Lunacharskii rightly insists, the perception that a “kind of alleviating” took place onstage was invited by what he referred to as “the absurd phrase with which the anonymous compiler of the explanatory libretto concluded his work” (i.e., “un écharpe oublié satisfait son rêve”). 139. Guy de Cassagnac, “Le Danseur bien connu,” L’Autorité, June 12, 1912, AR. 140. For an analysis of why masturbation was framed as a problem in modern, post-­ Enlightenment European culture, see Thomas W. Lacqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (New York: Zone Books, 2003). N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 8 9 –1 9 1

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[ 310 ]





141. Faune et nymphe was the favored title after Minotaure; see Elsen, Rodin’s Art, 510–­ 12. For the eclogue’s possible inspiration for the statuette, see Claudine Mitchell, “Metaphor and Metamorphosis: Rodin in the Circle of Mallarmé,” Cantor Arts Center Journal 3 (2002–­2003; special issue on Rodin): 111–­27. 142. This challenge is summarized in Juliet Bellow, “Reforming Dance: Auguste Rodin’s ‘Nijinsky’ and Vaslav Nijinsky’s ‘L’Après-­midi d’un Faune,’ ” Cantor Arts Center Journal 3 (2002–­2003; special issue on Rodin): 172–­85. The diaries of both Nijinsky and Kessler report the failure of Rodin’s attempt to sculpt Nijinsky from life when he came to pose shortly after the premiere of Faune. After Rodin’s death a small statuette was discovered. As Bellow has argued, it condenses into a single figure several of Nijinsky’s key poses from the dance; Bellow, “Movement Beyond: Auguste Rodin and the Dancers of His Time,” in Rodin and Dance: The Essence of Movement, ed. Alexandra Gerstein, exh. cat. (London: Courtauld Gallery, 2016), 41–­59. 143. Arthur Symons, “Rodin,” in From Toulouse-­Lautrec to Rodin, with Some Personal Impressions (New York: Alfred H. King, 1930), 219–42, 230–31. 144. 145. 146. 147.

Judith Cladel, Auguste Rodin, pris sur sa vie (Paris: Éditions de la Plume, 1903), 29. Wagner, “Rodin’s Reputation,” 223. These complaints are paraphrased in Nijinska, Early Memoirs, 427–­28. Nijinsky, quoted in Nandor Fodor, “The Riddle of Vaslav Nijinsky,” in Between Two Worlds (West Nyack, NY: Parker, 1964), 24: “I always see myself . . . I make myself dance from the outside.” 148. Sergei Volkonskii, “Russkii Balet v Parizhe, 1913–­1914: Sviashchennaia vesna i Favn” [The Russian Ballet in Paris, 1913–­1914: The Rite of Spring and Faune], in Otkliki teatra (Petrograd: Sirius, 1914), 44. 149. Freud, Three Essays, SE 7:242; Freud, “The Resistances to Psycho-­Analysis,” SE 19:220. 150. Freud, Interpretation, SE 4:183. 151. Lalo, “La Musique,” 3. 152. Gauthier-­Villars, “Deux ballets russes,” n.p. 153. Gauthier-­Villars, “Deux ballets russes,” n.p. 154. Lalo, “La Musique,” 3. 155. Lalo, “La Musique,” 3. 156. Freud, Interpretation, SE 4:332. This line was added in 1909 and printed in Sperrdruck from 1914 onward. 157. “Échos,” L’Éclair, June 1, 1912, AR. 158. Minskii, “Sensatsionnyi Balet.” 159. Freud, quoted in minutes 13, in Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, 1:111–­18, 112. 160. Elisabeth Bond-­Pablé, “Introduction,” in Frank Wedekind, Spring Awakening, ed. Elisabeth Bond-­Pablé, trans. Edward Bond (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 40. 161. Nijinsky, Pall Mall Gazette interview, 79. 162. Sigmund Freud, quoted in Andreas Mayer, “Gradiva’s Gait: Tracing the Figure of a Walking Woman,” Critical Inquiry 38, no. 3 (2012): 554–­78, 560. 163. Jacques-­Émile Blanche, “L’Antiquité en 1912,” Le Figaro, May 29, 1912, 1–­2, 1, 2. 164. Freud, Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (1905), GW 5:29–­149, 66. The phrase the “age of the great excavations” was coined in Andreas Rumpf, Archäologie: Einleitung, historischer Überblick (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1953), 92. 165. Adolf Michaelis, A Century of Archaeological Discoveries, trans. Bettina Kahnweiler (London: J. Murray, 1908), 1. 166. Percy Gardner, preface to A Century of Archaeological Discoveries (London: Macmillan, 1905), viii–ix. N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 9 3 –1 9 7













167. Théophile Homolle, “Découvertes de Delphes,” Gazette des beaux-­arts 36 (1894): 441–­54; Gazette des beaux-­arts 37 (1895): 206–­16, 320–­31, 207. 168. Émile Vuillermoz, “La Grande saison de Paris,” Revue musicale S.I.M. [Société Internationale de Musique, Section de Paris] 8, no. 6 (1912): 62–­68, 65. 169. Vuillermoz, “Grande Saison,” 65. 170. Lalo, “La Musique,” 3; Gauthier-­Villars, “Deux ballets russes,” n.p. 171. Henry Bidou, “La Semaine dramatique,” Journal des débats politiques et littéraires, June 10, 1912, 1–­2. 172. Bidou, “Semaine dramatique,” 2. 173. Francis Toye, “The Russians at the Lane,” London Graphic, July 19, 1913. 174. The Aegina pediments became the centerpiece of Europe’s first public museum devoted to classical archaeology; see Elizabeth Prettejohn, “The Discovery of Greek Sculpture,” in The Modernity of Ancient Sculpture: Greek Sculpture and Modern Art from Winckelmann to Picasso (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012), 38–­103. 175. Vaudoyer, “Après les ballets russes,” n.p. Excavations took place on the Athenian Acropolis continuously between 1885 and 1900, and in February 1886 fourteen archaic korai were unearthed from the Erechtheum. For these discoveries, see Guy Dickins, Catalogue of the Acropolis Museum, vol. 1, Archaic Sculpture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912). 176. Reynaldo Hahn, unidentified press clipping, Ballets Russes Paris season press dossier of 1912 (RO 12522), Département des Arts du spectacle, Bibliothèque nationale de France; Fourcaud, “Théâtre de Châtelet—­Répresentations de la troupe des danseurs Russes,” Le Gaulois, June 4, 1912; Tugendkhol’d, “Pis’mo iz Parizha,” 53; Volkonskii, “Russkii Balet v Parizhe,” 51. 177. Tugendkhol’d, “Pis’mo iz Parizha,” 54; Lalo, “Musique,” 3. 178. Sigmund Freud to Ludwig Binswanger, May 17, 1909 (letter 16F), in Sigmund Freud–­Ludwig Binswanger Correspondence, 16–­22, 20. 179. Freud, “The Resistances to Psycho-­Analysis,” SE 19:221; Freud, Three Essays, SE 7:176. 180. Löwy, Naturwiedergabe, 5. 181. Löwy, Naturwiedergabe, 3. The prior text to which he refers is Lysipp und seine Stellung in der griechischen Plastik (Hamburg: J. F. Richter, 1891). 182. Löwy, Rendering of Nature, 2, 18, 33, 18, 24. 183. The book’s first illustration is a tracing Löwy made of a drawing of a man done by a schoolboy from the Austrian state of Styria. The second is a page of “drawings by natives of British New Guinea,” primarily of animals but with a few human figures, taken from Alfred Cort Haddon, The Decorative Art of British New Guinea: A Study in Papuan Ethnography (Dublin: Academy House, 1894). 184. Corrado Ricci, L’Arte dei bambini (Bologna: Nicola Zanichelli, 1887). For the influence of this text, see Benedetta Cestelli Guidi, “Genesi e ricezione internazionale de L’Arte dei bambini di Corrado Ricci (1887),” in Corrado Ricci: Storico dell’arte tra esperienza e progetto, ed. A. Emiliani and D. Domini (Ravenna: Longo Editore, 2004), 29–­49. For a comprehensive bibliography of writing on art by children in the decades around 1900, see Jessica Boissel, “Quand les enfants se mirent à dessiner, 1880–­1914: Un Fragment de l’histoire des idées,” Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne 31 (1990): 15–­43; Barbara Wittmann, Bedeutungsvolle Kritzeleien: Eine Kultur-­und Wissensgeschichte der Kinderzeichnung, 1500–­1950 (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2018), 65–­117. 185. Also cited is James Sully, Studies of Childhood (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1895), by a psychologist directly involved with Darwin; see Marjorie Lorch and Paula Hellal, “Darwin’s ‘Natural Science of Babies,’ ” Journal of the History of Neuroscience 19 (2010): 140–­57. Darwin’s scientific study of infants dates back N o t es t o Pag es 198–2 01

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to the period of his “Transmutation Notebooks” of the 1830s, but it was not until the publication of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872, with its copious gallery of photographs of sobbing babies, and his 1877 article “A Biographical Sketch of an Infant,” published in the inaugural issue of Mind, that the centrality of babies and children to Darwin’s evolutionary theory became fully apparent. 186. Karl von den Steinen, Unter den Naturvölkern Zentral-­Brasiliens: Reiseschilderung und Ergebnisse der zweiten Schingú-­expedition, 1887–­1888 (Berlin: D. Reimer, 1894). On the analysis of drawing in this text and, more broadly, as a tool of anthropology, see Pierre Déléage, “The Origin of Art According to Karl von den Steinen,” Journal of Art Historiography 12 (June 2015): 1–33. 187. Ricci, L’Arte dei bambini, 11. For the opposition between ideoplastic and physioplastic art, see Max Verworn, Zur Psychologie der primitiven Kunst: Ein Vortrag (Jena, 1908). 188. Ernst Brücke, “Die Darstellung der Bewegung durch die bildenden Künste,” Deutsche Rundschau 26 (1881): 39–­54; Siegmund Exner, Physiologie des Fliegens und Schwebens in den bildenden Künsten (Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1882). For further discussion of Löwy’s dialogue with these works, see Marco Galli, “ ‘Immagini della Memoria’: Teoria della visione in Emanuel Löwy,” in Ripensare Emanuel Löwy, 141–­86. 189. Brücke, “Die Darstellung der Bewegung,” 46–­47. He refers to chronophotographs by Eadweard Muybridge published on the cover of Scientific American, October 19, 1878. 190. Brücke, “Die Darstellung der Bewegung,” 42. 191. Brücke, “Die Darstellung der Bewegung,” 39, 54. 192. Löwy, Rendering of Nature, 25/Naturwiedergabe, 13. 193. Löwy, Rendering of Nature, 16–17/Naturwiedergabe, 8. 194. Löwy, Rendering of Nature, 51n13. 195. Ricci, L’Arte dei bambini, 16; Löwy, Rendering, 80. For the privileging of these views in children’s art, see also Bernard Perez, L’Art et la poésie chez l’enfant (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1888), 186; Sully, “Front and Side View of the Human Figure,” in Studies of Childhood, 356–­72. 196. Löwy, Rendering of Nature, 58–59/Naturwiedergabe, 32–­33. 197. Löwy, Rendering of Nature, 14, 49. 198. Löwy, Rendering of Nature, 12, 71–72/Naturwiedergabe, 40. 199. Löwy, Rendering of Nature, 13–14/Naturwiedergabe, 7. 200. Löwy, Naturwiedergabe, 11. 201. Löwy, Rendering of Nature, 68/Naturwiedergabe, 38. 202. Löwy, Rendering of Nature, 105n51/Naturwiedergabe, 57n3. Adolf Hildebrand, “The Problem of Form” (1893), in Empathy, Form and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–­1893, ed. and trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center, 1994), 227–­79, 236; Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst (Strassburg: Heitz und Mündel, 1893), 27. 203. Löwy, Rendering, 105, 74/Naturwiedergabe, 58, 41. 204. Cocteau, “Une Répétition,” 1. 205. Gauthier-­Villars, “Deux ballets russes,” n.p. 206. Nijinsky, quoted in Faune Score, 13. 207. Georg Füchs, Die Schaubühne der Zukunft (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1905), 47. 208. This word was coined in Georg Füchs, Die Revolution des Theaters: Ergebnisse aus dem Münchener Künstler-­Theater (Munich: G. Müller, 1909). For the Munich Artists’ Theater, see Juliet Koss, “Empathy Abstracted: Georg Füchs and the Munich Artists’ Theater” (PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2000). N o t es t o Pag es 2 02–2 04



















209. For Meyerhold’s influence on Faune, see Garafola, Ballets Russes, 53–­56. For Füch’s influence on Meyerhold, see Koss, “Empathy Abstracted,” 11. Diaghilev’s 1911 trip to Munich may have been to meet with Füchs at the Künstler-Theater; see Scheijen, Diaghilev, 241. 210. Minskii, “Sensatsionnyi Balet,” 2. 211. Davis, Visuality and Virtuality, 134. 212. Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Erotic Symbolism, the Mechanism of Detumescence, the Psychic State in Pregnancy (1906; Philadelphia: F. A. Davis, 1920), 100. 213. Francis de Miomandre, “À propos de tout: Nijinski, Rodin, la vertu et l’Administration,” Gazette de Lausanne, June 23, 1912. 214. Freud, Interpretation, SE 4:241, 244. 215. Freud, Interpretation, SE 4:548. The passage from which this quote was taken was added in 1919. 216. Freud, Five Lectures on Psycho-­Analysis, SE 11:41. 217. Freud, Interpretation, SE 5:244; Freud, Three Essays, SE 7:192. See Freud, Interpretation, SE 5:546: “infantile scenes (or their reproductions as phantasies) function in a sense as models for the content of dreams.” 218. Borgeaud, Cult of Pan, 74. 219. For this exhibition, see Woldt, “Urworte liedenschaftlicher Gebärdensprache.” For Ovid’s presentation of figures as they appear in already famous artworks, see Joseph B. Solodow, The World of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 224, 220. 220. “Panaque cum prensam sibi iam Syringa putaret / Corpore pro nymphae calamos tenuisse palustres.” Metamorphoses, 705–­6. 221. For a useful compendium of Renaissance imagery, see Pan & Syrinx, eine erotische Jagd: Peter Paul Rubens, Jan Brueghel and ihre Zeitgenossen, exh. cat. (Kassel: Staatliche Museen Kassel, 2004). In most of these representations, Pan’s arms wrap around and reach for reeds that interpose between him and Syrinx, whose body appears in varying degrees of metamorphosis. A common feature, in the prints especially, is that the reeds go between Pan’s legs as he chases, so that he appears to hump the grass in place of Syrinx. 222. “Wicked Paris Shocked at Last!” Pittsburgh Gazette, 1912, as quoted in Penny Farfan, Performing Queer Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 47. 223. A. L. Volynskiĭ, “The ABC’s of Classical Dance,” in Ballet’s Magic Kingdom: Selected Writings on Dance in Russia, 1911–­1925, trans. Stanley J. Rabinowitz (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 131–­262, 155. 224. Darwin, Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2:93, 68. 225. Freud, Interpretation, SE 4:244. 226. Ellis, Erotic Symbolism, 96. 227. Lasègue, “Les Exhibitionnistes,” 709. 228. Jill Beck, “Recalled to Life: Techniques and Perspectives on Reviving Nijinsky’s Faune,” Choreography and Dance 1, no. 3 (1991; special issue on L’Après-­midi d’un faune): 45–­79, 61. 229. Freud, Five Lectures on Psycho-­Analysis, SE 11:44. 230. Freud, Three Essays, SE 7:192. 231. Freud, Jokes and the Unconscious (1905), SE 8:1–­247, 98. 232. Freud, Jokes and the Unconscious, SE 7:156. 233. Freud, “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-­Year-­Old Boy” (1909), SE 10:1–­150, 41, 6. Freud had six children, and many grandchildren, whose dreams and sayings make appearances in his writings from The Interpretation of Dreams forward. 234. Freud, “Phobia in a Five-­Year-­Old Boy,” SE 10:7. N o t es t o Pag es 2 04 –2 12

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235. Freud, “Phobia in a Five-­Year-­Old Boy,” SE 10:13. Freud notes that Hans had pictures of a giraffe and an elephant hanging above his bed. 236. Freud, “Phobia in a Five-­Year-­Old Boy,” SE 10:9, 14. The prototypical character of this reaction is crucial. For Freud, animal phobias were “a very common, and perhaps the earliest, form of psychoneurotic illness occurring in childhood”; see Freud, Totem and Taboo, SE 13:126–­27. 237. In addition to Little Hans, key theriophobes in Freud’s writings are the so-­called Rat Man (1909), Leonardo, and, most significantly, the Wolf Man. On animal phobias, see Maud Ellmann, “The Psychoanalytic Animal,” in A Concise Companion to Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Culture, ed. Laura Marcus and Ankhi Mukherjee (Chichester: Wiley & Sons, 2014), 328–­50, 338. 238. Elissa Marder, “The Sexual Animal and the Primal Scene,” in Sexuality and Psychoanalysis: Philosophical Criticisms, ed. Jens de Vleminck and Eran Dorfman (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2010), 121–­37, 122, 125. 239. Marder, “Sexual Animal,” 122. “In other words, in general, we do not suspect that wolves commonly dream of little boys, even if little boys commonly dream of wolves.” Freud’s own dreams revealed to him the importance of animal illustrations encountered in his boyhood in books such as Alfred Brehm’s Illustrirtes Thierleben (1864–­1869) or the animal abecedaries of Wilhelm Busch, Naturgeschichtliches Alphabet für größere Kinder und solche, die es werden wollen (1859); see Lawrence Ginsberg and Sybil Ginsberg, “A Menagerie of Illustrations from Sigmund Freud’s Boyhood,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 42 (1987): 469–­86. 240. Marder, “Sexual Animal,” 122. 241. Freud, “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love” (1912), SE 11:177–­90, 189. 242. Nijinsky, Diary, 17–­18, 44, 252, 154. 243. Nijinska, Memoirs, 42–­43. 244. Advertisement for Durov’s circus quoted in Joel Schechter, Durov’s Pig: Clowns, Politics, and Theatre (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985), 7. Durov’s pioneering approach to animal training presumed the fundamental intelligence of animals and eliminated pain-­based training in favor of interspecies empathy and culinary rewards—­or what he called “cookie power.” Durov’s techniques, which also incorporated suggestion and hypnotism, directly intersected with the scientific fields of physiology and animal psychology. During the Soviet years he operated a laboratory for the study of animal behavior and intelligence. For sources in English, see Vladimir Durov, My Circus Animals, trans. John Cournos (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1936); Emmanuel Dvinsky, Durov and His Performing Animals, trans. Phyl Griffith (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961); Ann Kleimola, “A Legacy of Kindness: V. L. Durov’s Revolutionary Approach to Animal Training,” in Other Animals: Beyond the Human in Russian Culture and History, ed. Jane Costlow and Amy Nelson (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 164–­78. I am grateful to Matthew Jesse Jackson for helping me navigate Durov’s Dressirovka zhivotnykh and translating material related to the dog Bisha on my behalf. 245. Nijinska, Memoirs, 42–­43. 246. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, SE 21:99. 247. Freud, “On the Sexual Theories of Children,” SE 9:215; Freud, “Phobia in a Five-­ Year-­Old Boy,” SE 10:9. 248. Nijinsky, Diary, 101, 117, 118, 133, 154, 155, 205, 206. 249. Nijinsky, Diary, 155. 250. Nijinsky, Diary, 107. 251. Rémy de Gourmont, “Epilogues: Cinématographe,” Mercure de France, modern series 69, no. 245 (1907): 124–­27, 126. When Nijinsky mounted an independent N o t es t o Pag es 2 12–2 16

















Saison Nijinsky at London’s Palace Theatre of Varieties in 1914, he performed from 10:05 p.m. until a bioscope screening began at 10:50 p.m.; MacDonald, Diaghilev Observed, 109. There has been much speculation about the existence of film footage of Nijinsky, but as far as we know he was never filmed; see Daniel Gesmer, “Nijinsky and Film,” Ballet Review 27, no. 1 (1999): 77–­84. For an overview of Diaghilev’s nonexistent involvement with cinema, see Lynn Garafola, “Dance, Film and the Ballets Russes,” Dance Research 16, no. 1 (1998): 3–­25. 252. Nijinska recounts that after summer 1896 their father had a contract with the Oman Variety Theater in Moscow, which she describes as a “Café-­Chantant”; see Early Memoirs, 47. 253. The first cinematograph screenings in Russia took place in Saint Petersburg in May of that year and proliferated widely via traveling fairs in cities across Russia by 1897. For a discussion of film’s introduction in Russia, see Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 1–­12. By 1910, there were 84 cinemas in Saint Petersburg, and 130 by 1913; see Birgit Beuhmers, A History of Russian Cinema (Oxford: Berg, 2009), 7. 254. Lunacharskii, “Russkie i memetski noveshestva,” 8. 255. Cocteau, “Une Répétition,” 1. 256. Kenneth Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue, 2nd ed. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006). 257. For the history of this concept, see the useful essays in Self-­Movement: From Aristotle to Newton, ed. Mary Louise Gill and James G. Lennox (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 258. George Herbert, “Man,” in The Temple, Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations (Cambridge: Printed by Thom[as] Buck and Roger Daniel, 1633). 259. This term is from Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990), 22. As Koss notes, the Reliefbühne stage at the Munich Artists’ Theater also “evoked the newly popular cinema screen” and was in fact converted into a cinema after World War I; Koss, “Empathy Abstracted,” 12, 264. 260. Bidou, “Semaine dramatique,” 1, 2. 261. Vuillermoz, “Grande saison,” 66. The use of photographic slides and the Skioptikon, projector, or magic lantern for displaying reproductions of art began as early as the 1870s. For a discussion of the importance of lantern slides specifically in the context of archaeological pedagogy, see Percy Gardner, A Grammar of Greek Art (London: Macmillan, 1905), v–­vi. 262. I cite here the definition of the cinématographe in the Lumière brothers’ patent application of February 13, 1895, quoted in Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema, trans. Richard Crangle (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 2000), 352. 263. Vuillermoz, “Grande saison,” 66. 264. René Chavance, “Avant-­Premières,” Gil Blas (1913), undated clipping in Ballets Russes pressbook, Bibliothèque nationale de France. 265. Lalo, “La Musique,” 3. 266. Étienne-­Jules Marey, La Chronophotographie (Paris: Gauthier-­Villars, 1899), 5. 267. Marey, Chronophotographie, 22 268. For the Station physiologique, see Mannoni, Great Art of Light and Shadow, 333–­46. 269. Others had already noted this formal similarity. Chronophotography quickly infiltrated the study of ancient art and archaeology, and “leading scholars of antiquity” were preoccupied by “the quest for a scientific morphology of moving bodies”; see Mayer, “Gradiva’s Gait,” 566. 270. The studio sessions took place sometime in June or July of 1912, during the comN o t es t o Pag es 2 16 –222

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pany’s London season, which did not include Faune because of the scandal it had created in Paris. Nijinska recalls her brother writing a check for a thousand pounds to finance the edition; see Nijinska, Early Memoirs, 508. 271. This series of twelve photographs does not comprise the full arc of the dance, documenting mainly its middle section. For this series, see Joan Acocella, “Photo Call with Nijinsky: The Circle and the Center,” Ballet Review 14, no. 4 (1987): 49–­71. 272. The animator Christian Compte, who in 2009 used the de Meyer photographs to produce a two-­minute animation of Faune that he briefly passed off as rediscovered original film footage, merely actualized a possibility already implicit in the choreography. See Joan Acocella, “Fool’s Gold Dept.: The Faun,” New Yorker, June 29, 2009, 25–­26. 273. Lalo, “La Musique,” 3. 274. Émile Jacques-­Dalcroze, “La Rythmique et la plastique animée” (1919), in Le Rythme, la musique et l’éducation (Lausanne: Foetisch Frères, 1965), 131–­51, 139. Dalcroze couched his critique of Faune in the philosophical terms of Henri Bergson, noting Nijinsky’s failure to apprehend that all vital manifestations of life are tied to la durée. 275. Tom Gunning, “New Thresholds of Vision: Instantaneous Photography and the Early Cinema of Lumière,” in Impossible Presence: Surface and Screen in a Photogenic Era, ed. Terry Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 71–­99, 98. 276. Émile Reynaud’s patent application of 1888, quoted in Michel Coissac, Histoire du cinématographe de ses origines jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Éditions de Cinéopse, 1925), 104. 277. Mannoni, Great Art of Light and Shadow, 378. 278. Georges Demenÿ, Les Origines du cinématographe (Paris: Paulin, 1909), 10. 279. Demenÿ, Origines du cinématographe, 10, 11. 280. Reynaud screened his last animated film in 1900, sold his equipment in 1912, and threw his filmstrips into the Seine in 1913. See Mannoni, Great Art of Light and Shadow, 385–­86. 281. For this periodization schema, see Kristin Thompson, “From Primitive to Classical,” in The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, ed. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 157–­74. 282. I refer here to the conceptual categorization of so-­called early cinema, developed by Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault and first formulated in Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction, Early Film, Its Spectators and the Avant-­Garde,” Wide Angle 8, nos. 3–­4 (1986): 63–­70. Gaudreault proposed the term “kine-­attractography” as less problematic; see his Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema, trans. Timothy Barnard (Urbana-­Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 47. In what follows I use the term “cinematography” in the sense outlined by Gaudreault to connote practices relating to the production of animated pictures prior to the institutionalization of cinema around 1910. 283. Gaudreault, Film and Attraction, 35. For Gaudreault, 1910 is the key transition moment, when “kinematography” is replaced by institutional cinema. Gunning identifies the “cinema of attraction” as “cinema before 1906”; see Gunning, “Cinema of Attraction,” 64. 284. Yhcam [pseud.], “La Cinématographie,” Ciné-­Journal, April 27, 1912, as translated in Richard Abel, ed., French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 67–­77, 68. 285. Cecil M. Hepworth, Animated Photography: The ABC of the Cinematograph (London: Hazell, Watson and Viney, 1900), 1.

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286. Gunning, “Cinema of Attraction,” 64. 287. Nijinsky, Diary, 107. 288. This is a list of subjects advertised in 1893 for an exhibition of Ottomar Anschütz’s Schnellseher, quoted in Deac Rossell, Ottomar Anschütz and His Electrical Wonder (London: Projection Box, 1997), 18; Nijinsky interviewed in T.P.s Magazine, May 1911, quoted in MacDonald, Diaghilev Observed, 108. 289. Étienne Souriau, “L’Univers filmique et l’art animalier,” Revue internationale de filmologie (January/March 1956): 51–­62, 57; Gunning, “Cinema of Attraction,” 65. Souriau’s article links cinema’s obvious success as an animal art to the widespread supposition of “the infantile character of cinema as such,” deriving from the “tendency to think that aesthetic interest in animals is something puerile, a constituent of childish psychology.” 290. Walter Serner, “Kino und Schaulust,” Die Schaubühne 9 (1913): 807–­11, translated as “Cinema and Visual Pleasure,” in The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907–­1933, ed. Anton Kaes, Nicholas Baer, and Michael Cowan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 42–­45, 43. 291. Serner, “Kino und Schaulust”; Yhcam, “Cinématographie,” 67. 292. Virginia Woolf, “The Cinema” (1926), in The British Avant-­garde Film, 1926–­1995: An Anthology of Writings, ed. Michael O’Pray (Luton, Bedfordshire: University of Luton Press, 1996), 33–­37, 33. 293. Ricci, L’Arte dei bambini, 8. 294. Sigmund Freud, letter to his family, September 22, 1907, in The Letters of Sigmund Freud, 1873–­1939, ed. Ernst L. Freud, trans. Tania Stern and James Stern (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 261–­62. 295. Gourmont, “Epilogues,” 126. I have modified the translation provided in Abel, French Film Theory and Criticism, 47–­50. 296. Stephanie Jordan, “Debussy, Dance and the Faune,” in Debussy in Performance, ed. James R. Briscoe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 117–­34, 131. 297. Lydia Sokolova, Dancing for Diaghilev: The Memoirs of Lydia Sokolova (London: John Murray, 1960), 40. These correlations were so “ingeniously thought out” that she mistakenly believed Nijinsky had “had enormous help from the composer.” 298. Davinia Caddy, The Ballets Russes and Beyond: Music and Dance in Belle-­Époque Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 100. 299. Vuillermoz, “Grande saison,” 65. 300. Volkonskii, “Russkii Balet v Parizhe,” 50. 301. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Nijinskys ‘Nachmittag eines Fauns,’ ” Berliner Tageblatt, December 11, 1912, reprinted in Die Berührung der Sphären (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1931), 172–­75, 173. See also Beaumont’s description of Debussy’s music as “only . . . an accompaniment”; Bookseller at the Ballet, 119. 302. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Prince­ ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 135. 303. Sigmund Freud, “Draft L: ‘The Architecture of Hysteria,’ ” enclosed in Freud to Fliess, May 2, 1897, in Complete Letters, 238–­42, 240. 304. Laura Marcus argues that for the earliest filmmakers, “dreams and dream states seemed from the outset to be an essential part of film’s ontology. While ‘dream sequences’ within films may seem to be bounded, they are never fully sealed off from the film-­space containing them”; see Marcus, “Dreaming and Cinematographic Consciousness,” in The Dreams of Interpretation: A Century Down the Royal Road, ed. Catherine Liu, John Mowitt, Thomas Pepper, and Jakki Spicer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 197–­214, 198. 305. Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, “A Substitute for Dreams” (1921), London Mercury 9

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[ 317 ]











[ 318 ]



(November 1923–­April 1924): 177–­79, 178, 177; “Der Ersatz für die Träume,” Das Tage-­Buch 2, no. 22 (June 4, 1921): 685–­87. 306. Yhcam, “Cinématographie,” 67–­77, 69. 307. Yhcam, “Cinématographie,” 69. 308. Freud, Interpretation, SE 5:608. As Jean Laplanche has emphasized, the effort to conceptualize the psyche in relation to “mechanics and, more precisely, to dynamics . . . will always remain central for Freud”; see Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 70. For a discussion of these metaphors in relation to the paradoxical status of the moving image in Freud’s model of the psyche, see Pasi Väliaho, Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Thought, and Cinema circa 1900 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 116–­23. 309. Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 114–­33, 119. 310. Prince Peter Lieven, The Birth of Ballets Russes, trans. Leonid Sergeevich Zarin (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1936), 176. 311. Johnson, Russian Ballet, 110. 312. Jean-­Louis Vaudoyer, “Variations sur les ballets russes,” La Revue de Paris, July 15, 1910, 333–­52, 341. Vaudoyer used the first lines of Spectre de la rose as an epigraph in this article. The poem first appeared in La Comédie de la mort (Brussels: E. Laurent, 1838), 143. 313. See Ramsay Burt, The Male Dancer: Bodies, Spectacle, Sexualities, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1996), chap. 4. We can assume that Nijinsky played a major part in devising this role. As Garafola has stressed, unlike Nijinsky, Fokine “made the act of creation a collaborative endeavor,” allowing dancers to contribute significantly to the development of their roles; see her Ballets Russes, 47. 314. Programme officiel des Ballets russes, Théâtre du Châtelet, juin 1911: Premier spectacle, 6 et 8–­10 juin 1911 (Paris: Comœdia Illustré, 1911), n.p. 315. Johnson, Russian Ballet, 110. 316. Anatole Bourman, The Tragedy of Nijinsky (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1936), 185. 317. Nijinska, Early Memoirs, 370. 318. Françoise Reiss, Nijinsky: A Biography (New York: Pitman, 1960), 90; Beaumont, Bookseller, 102. 319. Vaudoyer, quoted in Alexander Schouvaloff, The Art of the Ballets Russes: The Serge Lifar Collection of Theater Designs, Costumes and Paintings at the Wadsworth Atheneum (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 67. Spectre was at the time the shortest of Diaghilev’s one-­act ballets. For the association of short-­form theater with the influence of cinema, see Yuri Tsivian, “Russia, 1913: Cinema in the Cultural Landscape,” in Silent Film, ed. Richard Abel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 194–­214. 320. Beaumont, Bookseller, 102. 321. Calmette, “Un Faux pas,” 1. 322. Bazaillas, “Musique,” n.p. 323. Here, the issue of chronology is relevant, for the timing of the two productions suggests that they were in development simultaneously and thus could have informed each other. For relevant facts about chronology, see Schouvaloff, Art of the Ballets Russes, 67. 324. On this point, see also Harry Graf Kessler, diary entry for May 27, 1912, in Tagebuch, 4:830.

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 22 7–23 1













325. Julie Sazonova, “Chorégraphie des Ballets Russes de Diaghilev,” La Revue musicale 11 (1930): 69. Throughout his performing career, Nijinsky was anxiously fixated on an inverse correlation between his balletic abilities and the frequency of his masturbation; the diary is replete with references to his struggle to resist engaging in an activity he felt to be “death to [his] dancing,” about which he continually “said to [him]self, ‘I mustn’t’ ”; see Diary, 206, 118, also 117, 205. The performative lifting of that self-­prohibition in Nijinsky’s inaugural piece of choreography cannot be separated from the symbolic “death” that this performance wrought upon “dance,” or “dance” conceived in the terms crystallized by Spectre. 326. Caddy, Ballets Russes, 94. 327. Programme officiel des Ballets russes, Théâtre du Châtelet, juin 1911. There was nothing inherently “new” about conceptualizing dance or theater in terms of pictures or, more properly, in terms of tableaux, a word with both pictorial and well-­ established theatrical connotations in French. Under Fokine, the Ballets Russes modernized a tradition of dramatic ballet (or ballet d’action) initiated in the eighteenth century by Jean-­Georges Noverre, whose widely influential treatise commenced with the declaration “a ballet is a tableau, the stage is the canvas, the movements of the dancers are the colors . . . the choreographer is the painter”; Lettres sur la danse (Lyon: Aimé Delaroche, 1760), 2. What is new about Faune’s tableau is that, first of all, it is no longer conceptualized as paint on canvas. The tableau is now the archaic stone tablet, a mode of representation that emphasizes rather than dissimulates its stasis. For important discussions of Nijinsky’s reimagining the theatrical tableau, see Hecquet and Prokhoris, “L’Intrigue graphique,” in Fabriques de la danse, 115; Hanna Järvinen, “Dancing without Space—­on Nijinsky’s L’Après-­midi d’un Faune (1912),” Dance Research 27, no. 1 (2009): 28–­64, 38–­41. 328. For instance, “ ‘Choreographic picture’ he calls it, for want of a terminology for this so new thing”; see Richard Capell, Daily Mail, February 18, 1913, quoted in MacDonald, Diaghilev Observed, 80. 329. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, SE 18:35. 330. For Nijinsky’s treatment of the curtain, see Jill Beck, “Recalled to Life: Techniques and Perspectives on Reviving Nijinsky’s Faune,” Choreography and Dance 1, no. 3 (1991; special issue on L’Après-­midi d’un faune): 45–­79, 69. 331. Faune Score, 33. This is my approximation based on average orchestral tempo. 332. Rodin, “Renovation de la danse.” 333. Caddy, Ballets Russes, 75, 94. 334. P. H. T., “Under Sea and over Land,” n.p. 335. Jordan, “Debussy, Dance and the Faune,” 131. 336. Gunning, “Aesthetic of Astonishment,” 118. 337. Gunning, “Aesthetic of Astonishment,” 118. 338. Caddy, Ballets Russes, 111. 339. Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University, 2004), 199. 340. Nijinsky, Diary, 52. 341. Beck, “Recalled to Life,” 76. 342. Jules Romains, “La Foule au cinématographe,” in Les Puissances de Paris (1911), as translated in French Film Theory, 1:53. 343. For Chaplin’s recollections of this performance, which he looked back on as one of the best he had ever seen, see My Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964), 192. 344. The dream sequence takes place in Chaplin’s bucolic-­themed film Sunnyside (1919) and consists of the Little Fellow running back and forth with his arms extended on

N o t e s t o P a g e s 2 3 1– 2 3 4

[ 319 ]















[ 320 ]



a narrow bridge in front of several nymphs in Grecian tunics, and then sitting on a rock, where he punctures his bottom on a cactus. For further discussion of this homage, see Paul B. Franklin, “The Terpsichorean Tramp: Unmanly Movement in the Early Films of Charlie Chaplin,” in Dancing Desires: Choreographing Sexualities On and Off the Stage, ed. Jane Desmond (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 35–­72, 44–­47. 345. Freud, “A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams” (1917), SE 14:217–­35, 223. 346. Catulle Mendès, “L’Après-­midi d’un faune par Stéphane Mallarmé,” La République des lettres, April 20, 1876, in Stéphane Mallarmé: Memoire de la critique (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-­Sorbonne, 1998), 47–­48, 47. 347. Minskii, “Sensatsionnyi Balet.” 348. Nijinsky, Diary, 133. 349. Unfortunately, there is to my knowledge little surviving visual evidence of this revival, which was limited to ten performances in the summer of 1922. 350. Freud, “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood,” SE 11:74. 351. Freud, “Triebe und Triebschicksale” (1915), GW 10:210–­32, 214, 211. 352. Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis, SE 20:201. 353. Gourmont, “Epilogues,” 126. I have modified the translation provided in Abel, French Film Theory and Criticism, 47–­50. 354. Nicholas Dulac and André Gaudreault, “Circularity and Repetition at the Heart of the Attraction: Optical Toys and the Emergence of a New Cultural Series,” in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 227–­44, 240. 355. Nijinska, Early Memoirs, 427. Nijinsky’s ambition to rigorously “fix” his choreography has rightly been understood to reflect a historically new conception of the choreographer as an “author”; see Järvinen, “Dancing without Space.” 356. Beck, “Recalled to Life,” 66. Järvinen likewise emphasizes a circular structure that created “a sense of return—­[so] that when the work ended, it could begin anew”; see Järvinen, “Dancing without Space,” 43. Neither mention how this circularity was actualized through the convention of double presentation. 357. Freud, “Dostoevsky and Parricide” (1928), in SE 21:173–­94, 192. 358. Dulac and Gaudreault, “Circularity and Repetition,” 232; Friedrich Tietjen, “Loop and Life: A False Start into Protocinematic Representations of Movement,” History of Photography 35, no. 1 (2011): 15–22, 18. 359. Tietjen, “Loop and Life,” 22. 360. Tietjen, “Loop and Life,” 22. When Max Sladanovsky first exhibited films at Berlin’s Wintergarten in November 1895, he glued the ends of the filmstrips together to create loops. 361. Gunning, “New Thresholds of Vision,” 94. 362. Tietjen, “Loop and Life,” 18. In the de Meyer album, the photographs are ordered so the opening pose appears at the end of the photographic sequence, just before the two final pictures of the closing masturbatory postures. This configuration emphasizes the dance’s looped structure. For a facsimile of the de Meyer album in sequence, see MDN, 65–­95. 363. Freud to Fleiss, December 22, 1897, in Complete Letters, 287–­89. 364. Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis, SE 20:210. 365. Freud, quoted in minutes 166, in Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, 2:562; Freud to Fliess, December 9, 1899, in Complete Letters, 390. 366. Freud, quoted in minutes 110, in Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, 2:561.

N o t es t o Pag es 234 –23 7













367. Standard, February 18, 1913, in MacDonald, Diaghilev Observed, 81. 368. A. Kalisch, “The Beecham Opera Season,” Musical Times, March 1, 1913, 164–­65. 369. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, SE 7:242. This passage was added in 1915. 370. Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis” (1918), SE 17:1–­124, 93, 109; Freud, “Aus der Geschichte einer infantilen Neurose” (1918), GW 12:29–­157, 143: “Die Aktivierung des Bildes.” 371. Romola Nijinsky, Nijinsky, 148. 372. Evlyn Gould, Virtual Theater from Diderot to Mallarmé (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 166. 373. Virgil, Eclogue I, in Eclogues. Georgics. Aeneid: Books 1–­6, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. G. P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library 63 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916), 24; Virgil, Eclogue X, in Eclogues, 94. 374. Massimo Scalabrini and Davide Stimilli, “Pastoral Postures: Some Renaissance Versions of Pastoral,” Bibliothèque d’humanisme et renaissance 71, no. 1 (2009): 35–­60, 38. For instance, as the authors note, in Aeneid III.390–­93 the adjective recubans describes a sow sprawled on the ground after giving birth. 375. Scalabrini and Stimilli, “Pastoral Postures,” 60. 376. Gould, Virtual Theater, 166. 377. After Mallarmé canceled the dramatic reading of the poem the score was supposed to accompany, Debussy chose the prelude form. See Jean-­Michel Nectoux, “Debussy et Mallarmé,” Cahiers Debussy 12–­13 (1988–­1989): 54–­66, 58; Richard Taruskin, Music in the Early Twentieth Century, vol. 4 of The Oxford History of Western Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 76. 378. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Debussy et le mystère de l’instant (Paris: Plon, 1949), 285, 284. 379. Jankélévitch, Debussy et le mystère, 124. I thank Simon Morrison for guiding me through the Prélude and toward the key musicological sources. 380. Jankélévitch, Debussy et le mystère, 124. 381. John Keats, “Sleep and Poetry” (1817), as quoted in Davide Stimilli, “Dream Bodies: On the Iconography of the Dreamer,” in The Art of Dreams: Reflections and Representations, ed. Barbara Hahn and Meike Werner (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 97–­119, 117. 382. See the various essays in Die Couch. Vom Denken im Liegen, ed. Lydia Marinelli (Munich/Vienna: Prestel/Sigmund Freud Privatstiftung, 2006).

[ 321 ]

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 23 7–24 1

Index

Italic numbers refer to illustrated material. Page references enclosed in square brackets indicate textual references to endnotes. abstraction, 27, 36, 151, 262n121 académies, 43, 70–­71, 72, 77, 77, 92 academy. See École des Beaux-­Arts Achermos, Nike of Delos, 199, 199, 202 Adam, depiction of biblical, 88, 240, 299n209 Adam, Paul, 41, 46, 58, 75, 86, 88, 280n234 adornment. See ornament/decoration aesthetic pleasure, 105, 152–­53, 182, 230 affect, 17–­19, 58–­59, 91–­92, 164, 177–­ 78, 241; blasé affect/Blasiertheit, 18, 257n73; “Guess what I am thinking!,” 51, 83, 94, 96–­97; metropolitan, 18–­ 19, 56, 58, 60, 66. See also demeanor/ comportment; imitation/mimicry (singerie) African sculpture, 23, 259n98, 259n99 Agamben, Giorgio, 13, 19, 255n52 agency: portrait photography and, 263n122; in Seurat’s Poseuses, 96–­97 Alberti, Leon Battista, 6, 20 allegory, 88, 102, 107, 124, 127, 132, 135, 137, 138 Allemagne, Henry René, d,’ 53 Allen, Grant, 151, 250n26 Altenberg, Peter, 162 amniotic sac, 121, 148, 290n86. See also biological reproduction

anatomy: education of artists in, 10, 37–­39, 44, 62, 94, 268n34; human, 20, 146; rhetoric and, 5 Andri, Ferdinand, 163–­64 animals: in animation, 224; behaviors, 20, 57; horns, 151, 171, 174, 183, 185, 198; mating rituals, 66, 151, 153–­55, 191, 210; motifs of, 8, 11, 12; nonfunctional features, 151, 155; phobias about, 212–­13, 314n236, 314n239; Rodin’s Balzac compared to, 121; in Secession headquarters, 101; sexual selection and, 66, 149, 151, 155. See also birds; dogs; gorillas; monkeys animation: activation vs., 217; body language and, 178; dreams and, 180; memory pictures of, 202–­3. See also film animation; self-­movement/ caused movement Anne, Saint, depictions of, 83, 83, 96 Anschütz, Ottomar, tachyscope, 236 Anthropocene. See posthumanism anthropocentrism, 32, 112, 249n10, 254n41. See also hierarchy of genres anthropology, 19, 38, 201–­2, 259n98, 260n104, 312n186; definition of “human” in, 254n43; ethnographic museums and, 25, 260n104, 261n110; photography and, 264n122 Apollo Philesios, 199

[ 323 ]

[ 324 ]

185–­87; narrative, 171–­74, 185, 228, Après-­midi d’un faune, L’ (Mallarmé), 231–­32, 235; Nijinsky’s defense of, 165, 175–­76, 178, 180–­86, 189, 193, 189, 196; Nijinsky’s painstaking 196, 205, 234, 238–­40, 310n141 preparation for, 165, 171, 228, 235, Après-­midi d’un faune, L’ (Nijinsky): 302n6; nymphs, 171–­74, 181, 182, abrupt motion in, 172, 174, 222–­23, 185, 187, 198–­99, 210–­11, 214, 231; 226, 304n40; advance publicity for, opening tableau, 171–­72, 231–­32, 235, 189–­90; archaic figuration in, 165, 240; photographs, 170, 171, 172, 173, 178–­80, 188, 189, 196–­200, 204, 205, 174, 175, 206, 218, 219, 220–­21, 241; 207, 217, 222; balletic classicism and, posing of bodies in, 170–­73, 176–­ 165–­67, 176, 187, 210; as bas-­relief, 78, 194–­95, 204–­7, 217; premiere, 167, 178, 179, 189, 196, 197, 204, 205, 165–­67, 170, 185, 186, 188, 190, 193, 215–­18, 225, 231, 240; censorship 216, 224, 228, 230, 304n52, 310n142; and, 188–­89, 197; as choreographic primacy of visual thought in, 185, picture, 171, 178, 180, 186–­90, 193, 231–­34; profile postures in, 171–­74, 195, 211, 215, 228, 231–­33; choreo189, 204, 206–­7, 211, 218; reception, graphic score for, 166, 170, 170, 171, 166–­67, 171, 175–­78, 186, 188–­89, 192, 174, 204, 233, 235, 240, 304n40, 198–­200, 210, 217–­18, 226, 228; re­ 304n52; circularity of, 228, 235–­37, titling of, 240; role of viewer in, 167, 240, 320n362; climax of narrative, 178, 179, 195, 207, 211, 218, 225, 231, 174, 185, 188–­89, 206, 231, 235, 240; 233, 234, 237; set design, 171–­72, 204, Cocteau on, 185, 188, 216, 307n99; 217, 218; static postures in, 172–­73, compared to Fokine’s Spectre de la 177, 178, 187, 194–­95, 199, 205, 210, rose, 230; costumes, 171–­74, 186; 216, 217, 231, 232; stiffness in, 196; dancers as “asleep with eyes open,” Tall Nymph, 172–­73, 174, 187, 210–­ 12, 166, 177, 204, 233–­34; Debussy 11; unconscious mental states in, and, 165, 172, 174–­78, 185, 189, 196, 166, 167, 179, 185, 196, 225, 230, 231; 225–­26; depth of stage, 205, 217, 218; viewed as obscene, 167, 188–­89, 192, dream mechanics in, 178, 185, 188, 196, 216, 237; worldwide tour, 167, 196, 207, 233–­34, 238, 240; duet, 226, 234, 302n15 172–­73, 206, 229; exhibitionism in, archaeology, 47, 178–­79, 197–­200, 217, 169, 191, 194, 196, 200, 206–­8, 210–­ 222 12, 214, 234; extremities in, 173, 174, “archaeology of the dig” (Archäologie 206–­7, 210; faun as title character, des Spatens), 197, 200 169, 171–­75, 185–­89, 206–­8, 210–­12, archaic Greek art, 23–­24, 28–­30, 47, 231–­32, 234–­35, 240; fixation in, 196, 165, 178, 199, 200, 202, 203, 208, 228, 235, 237; flute as metaphor in, 311n175 172, 176, 182, 188, 231–­32, 235–­36, 239; forged review by Rodin, 167, 190, arms: Leonardo da Vinci on, 6; in Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 17; 192–­93, 195, 232, 309n129; Freud’s in Nijinsky’s Faune, 198, 206–­7; in theories and, 167–­69, 178, 188, 195–­ Seurat’s Grande Jatte, 1, 44, 52, 54; 96; frontality in, 206; hand gestures in Seurat’s Poseuses, 73. See also in, 172, 173, 174, 204, 207, 208, 210; ­gestures; hierarchy of organs height discrepancy in, 187, 210; inArsène, Alexandre, 37 fantilism in, 9, 167, 169, 186–­88, 197, Art Nouveau. See Jugendstil 205, 211, 228, 231, 234; inner life in, art of the Americas, 24, 47, 261n109 187; Löwy and, 204, 205; Mallarmé Assyrian art, 25, 47, 77, 137, 148, 199 and, 176, 178, 185, 186, 188, 189, 196, attitudes: classical, 50, 71, 77, 82, 86, 205, 207; masturbation in, 174, 188–­ 89–­91, 112, 189; contemplative, 89, 194–­96, 206, 216, 231, 234, 236; 9–­10, 75, 82, 92, 119, 122; Leonardo mechanically stimulated movement da Vinci on, 6; in Nijinsky’s Faune, in, 217, 233; as moving pictures, 217–­ 189, 190, 198, 206, 218; in Rodin’s 18, 222, 224, 228, 232; as museum Penseur, 118–­19; in Seurat’s Grande exhibition, 199–­200; as myth-­work,

Index

Jatte, 1, 70, 74; in Seurat’s Poseuses, 86, 119; sexually suggestive, 189, 190, 206; static, 1, 70; variety of, 32, 34. See also frontality; postures/poses autoeroticism. See masturbation automatic processes and behaviors, 10, 12, 20, 39, 48, 56, 92, 155. See also psychological automatism; un­conscious thought processes Bacon, Francis, Pan, 186 Bahr, Hermann, 104, 106–­7, 137, 138, 143, 147–­49, 152, 163, 301n233 Bakst, Léon, 172, 186, 204 Ballets Russes, 165, 167, 171, 228–­29, 234, 307n104, 319n327. See also Après-­midi d’un faune, L’ (Nijinsky); Fokine, Michel, Spectre de la rose Balzac, Honoré de: caricatures of, 122, 124; Falguière’s monument to, 122–­ 24, 123; Rodin’s monument to, 119–­ 24, 119; “in a sack,” 120–­21 Bazaillas, Albert, 230 Beardsley, Aubrey, 149, 151 Beaumont, Cyril, 230 beauty, notions of, 152–­53, 213, 230 Beethoven, Ludwig van: depictions of, 117, 161; as intellectual hero, 108, 161–­62; life cast of, 115; as locus of racism, 162; Ninth Symphony, 106, 137, 138, 149, 155, 158, 161–­62; popular reverence for, 108, 109, 115, 117; on universal brotherhood, 155 Beethoven-­Denkmal (Klinger), 102, 103, 116, 139; afterlife of, 163; caricatures of, 110, 111, 130, 130, 131; compared to Demosthenes, 108, 110; conception of, 108; gestures of contemplation in, 108–­10, 115, 124, 129–­30, 139, 164; Goethe inscription, 117–­18; inner life in, 107–­8; Klimt’s Beethovenfries, juxtaposed with, 107, 108, 148, 158–­59, 159, 161; materials, 109; pathos of, 108; pedestal, 107, 117–­18; as portrait of genius, 106, 108, 109, 161; reception, 101, 105, 106–­7, 109–­10, 117, 161; reverence conveyed in, 115, 117; Rodin’s dis­approval of, 109; Rodin’s Penseur and, 108–­10; role of gravity in, 111, 112–­13, 115, 117; Secessionist response to, 105–­7, 164; thought depicted as heaviness in, 117–­18,

135, 139, 148, 159. See also Klinger-­ Beethoven exhibition Beethovenfries (Klimt), 107, 140, 142–­ 43, 150, 154, 156, 159; afterlife of, 163; allegorical narrative, 137–­38, 144, 149, 162; allusions to evolution, 147, 149, 155, 160; allusions to Ninth Symphony, 106, 137, 138, 149, 155, 158, 161–­62; astronomical symbolism, 157, 160; bare plaster in, 135, 145, 146; Beardsley and, 149, 151; Choir of Paradise Angels, 138, 140, 141, 143, 155, 157, 158, 295n152; climax of narrative, 138, 141, 144, 155, 158–­59, 160, 167–­68; Diesen Kuß der ganzen Welt, 138, 155–­56, 156, 158, 167–­68; eroticism of, 149, 151, 154–­58, 160–­61, 164, 167–­68; Excess depicted in, 138, 149, 151, 154, 295n152; eyelike forms, 154, 157, 159; female figures, 107, 134, 138, 141, 144, 151, 156–­57, 161, 168; fertilization motif, 160–­61, 167–­68; flatness, 135; floating forms, 144–­47, 149, 153, 157–­58; formal techniques, 124; Gorgons depicted in, 138, 149, 154–­55, 295n152; gorilla and monkeys in, 8, 138, 149, 159, 161; hand gestures in, 141, 143, 144, 157; hieratic postures in, 137; hollow forms, 135, 144, 145, 146; horizontality, 144–­46; Hostile Forces section, 138, 149, 151, 153–­55, 154, 295n152; humor, 108, 135, 251n27; inner life in, 162; juxtaposed with Beethoven-­ Denkmal, 107, 108, 148, 158–­59, 159, 161; law of frontality and, 137; Longing for Happiness, 138, 141, 142–­43, 144–­46, 157; Lust depicted in, 138, 149; male figures, 138, 158, 159, 161, 168, 299n211; materials, 135, 144, 145, 154, 163; medieval knight, 138, 158, 299n211; mudrā in, 140, 141, 143, 158; ocellus (eyespot) motif, 154–­55; ornament in, 106, 135, 137, 138, 144, 151, 153–­55, 159; parallelism in, 137; parody of, 107; plumage in, 153–­55; portability, 163; posing of bodies, 135, 141, 144–­46, 149, 151, 155–­56; profile postures in, 137; purchase of, 163; reception, 106–­8, 138–­39, 147, 151, 155, 161, 163; reinstallation of, in 1986, 163;

Index

[ 325 ]

[ 326 ]

Beethovenfries (Klimt) (continued) as response to controversy, 134–­ 35; Rodin’s Balzac and, 124; role of artist in, 162–­63; shroud-­like garments in, 144; sperm motif, 160–­ 61, 162, 168; tree of life, 155, 160; Typhon depicted in, 138, 149, 154, 159; Unchastity depicted in, 138, 149, 295n152; unconscious mental states in, 135, 139, 141, 143, 144, 146, 149, 167; use of stencils for, 137, 141, 144. See also Klinger-­Beethoven exhibition “Beethoven’s Farewell” (poem), 100, 101, 105, 107 Bergson, Henri, 54–­57, 59, 316n274 Bernheim, Hippolyte, 57 Bertillon, Alphonse, 263n122 Bidou, Henry, 198, 207, 217 Binswanger, Ludwig, 168, 200 biological reproduction, 9, 57, 121, 168, 182, 299n209. See also amniotic sac; ejaculation; embryos; fertilization; gametes/insemination; genitals; ova; sexual selection; sperm bipedalism: Darwin on, 9–­10; Freud on, 214; Nietzsche on, 128, 148; in Seurat’s Grande Jatte, 44 birds: anatomy, 146, 148; argus pheasants, 154, 155, 299n201; eagles, 109, 118; mating rituals, 155, 210; peacocks, 153, 153, 210, 299n201; plumage, 151, 152, 153–­54, 155, 210, 213 Blanc, Charles: on fad for bustles, 64; on hierarchy of genres, 32–­33, 43–­44; Manet and, 256n63; Seurat and, 31–­32, 46, 85, 266n7; on weight distribution, 46. See also imaginary museums Blanc, Charles, works: “Consideration of Ladies’ Fashion,” 64; Grammaire des arts du dessin, 32, 266n8; History of Painters of All Schools, 17, 248n6, 256n63 Blanche, Jacques-­Émile, 197 Bleuler, Eugen, 168, 302n23 body language. See attitudes; gestures; hierarchy of organs; postures/poses; and specific body parts Böhm, Adolf, The Dawning Day, 157 Bölsche, Wilhelm, 152, 160, 300n218 Boucher, François, Pan et Syrinx, 176, 177

Index

Boulez, Pierre, 226 Broca, Paul, 38, 268n34 Brücke, Ernst, 146, 202 Buddhism/nirvana, 140, 141, 142, 143–­ 44, 158, 260n103, 296n161 “burden of the pride of thought,” 117–­19, 122, 125, 128–­29, 131, 134, 148–­49, 158 bustle, 61–­66, 62, 64, 69, 69, 86, 88, 276n171, 277n191 Calmette, Gaston, 176, 186, 189, 190, 196, 200, 206, 230, 237 Camerarius, Joachim, 113 Capitoline Venus, 78, 79 Caravaggio, Madonna dei Palafrenieri, 83–­84, 83, 96 caricatures: “Balzac embêté par les sculpteurs,” 122, 124; of Beethoven-­ Denkmal, 110, 111, 130, 130, 131; of Darwin, 62, 62, 275n158; of evolution, 10; of Falguière’s Balzac, 124; of Klimt’s Philosophie, 126–­27, 132, 133; “Le Lendemain d’un faune,” 191; of Nijinsky’s Faune, 191, 191; “Penseuse,” 86, 87; “Poseuses” at café-­concert, 93; of Rodin’s Balzac, 121, 121, 124, 290n87, 290n92; of Secession, 153; of women’s bustles, 64, 64 Carracci, Annibale, 208, 264n123 catalepsy, 95–­96, 110, 283n297. See also katalepsis (mental comprehension) censorship, 188–­89, 197 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 4, 250n26 Chaplin, Charlie, 234, 319n344 Charcot, Jean-­Martin, 37, 38, 56, 57, 94–­95 Chavance, René, 217–­18 Chéret, Jules, 98 Chevreul, Michel-­Eugène, 32, 266n8 children: cinema and, 218, 224, 225; depictions of, 44, 46; drawings by, 12, 201–­3, 201, 212, 311n184, 312n195; fears of, 213; repetition and, 231, 237. See also exhibitionism (Exhibitionslust); infantilism Christophe, Jules, 73–­75, 278n210 chromo-­luminarism. See divisionism/ pointillism chronophotography, 202, 218, 219, 223–­24, 236, 263n122, 312n189, 315n269

Chrysapha relief, 198, 198, 207 cinema: of attractions, 224, 316n283; audience suspense in, 232; children and, 218, 224, 225; cue-­music in, 233; debut of cinématographe, 216–­ 18, 223, 227; dreams and, 225–­27; early technologies of, 217, 223–­24, 235, 235; exhibitionism and, 225; filmstrips, 218, 222, 223, 223, 320n360; fixation of, 235; Freud on, 225; illusion of motion in, 222–­24, 232, 235; kinetic stasis in, 235–­36; loops in, 225, 235–­37, 240, 320n360; Nijinsky on, 216, 224; primacy of visual thought and, 225; “primitive” vs. “classical,” 224, 225, 228; shift to feature-­length films, 224; silent era of, 225–­28, 227, 233, 255n52; as sleep, 234; Virginia Woolf on, 225 classical art/classicism, 22–­26, 29, 33, 37, 43, 46, 50, 70–­71, 74–­77, 89, 108 classical rhetoric, 5, 28, 29–­30, 93 Cocteau, Jean, 185, 188–­90, 216, 307n99 cognition, 12, 22, 111, 127, 135, 181, 232 cognitive linguistics. See metaphors colonialism/imperialism, 4, 5, 12, 23, 249n10, 254n43, 259n98. See also Eurocentrism concentration. See tension/concen­ tration/effort consciousness: automatic processes vs., 56, 97; Bahr on, 104; corporeal norms for communicating, 12, 19, 91, 112; corporeal weight and, 112; Descartes on, 26; emotions and, 20; Locke on, 11; in Neo-­ Impressionism, 37; Nietzsche on, 127–­28; obliquity and, 28, 263n122; as slippery concept, 21 constipation, 119, 127, 129, 130, 130, 293n121, 293n122 contemplation/meditation: Demos­ thenes sculpture and, 82, 85, 95, 96; Dürer’s Melencolia I and, 114; Falguière’s Balzac and, 122; Klimt’s Philosophie and, 127; Klinger’s Beethoven-­Denkmal and, 110–­11, 112, 115, 130, 141; Rodin’s Thinker and, 109–­12, 115, 130; statuette of pensive young man, 114, 115. See also ponderation

contrapposto, 1, 26, 27, 74, 112, 262n115. See also uno crure insistere (standing on one leg) conventions of representation. See figural art Coquiot, Gustave, 47, 64, 80 Cox, George William, 187 Crary, Jonathan, 10, 36–­37, 39, 56, 252n33, 255n53, 256n70, 278n206 criminology, 263n122 Dalcroze, Émile Jacques-­, 222–­23, 316n274 Dante, 109, 115, 119, 291n103 Darwin, Charles: on aesthetic drives, 151–­53, 162; on animal descent, 62–­ 63, 149, 151; on bipedalism, 9–­10; on bodily reflexes, 20; caricatures of, 62, 62; French translations of works of, 183; historical rupture caused by, 8, 151–­52, 251n27; Mathias Duval on theories of, 39; on mating rituals, 66, 151, 210; mechanical conception of the universe, 37; on mind-­body relation, 19–­20; monkey as alter ego of, 61–­62, 62; Nijinsky on, 169; opposition to, 151; on semantics, 10; on sexuality, 9, 151, 154; tree of life drawing by, 160. See also evolution; sexual selection Darwin, Charles, works: The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 10, 66, 151, 152, 153; The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 11, 20, 39, 311n185; On the Origin of Species, 8, 160, 250n26; private journal, 10 dealer-­critic system, 34, 35 Debussy, Claude, works, Prélude à l’après-­midi d’un faune, 165, 172, 174–­78, 189, 196, 226, 239, 304n57. See also Après-­midi d’un faune, L’ (Nijinsky) Degas, Edgar, 86, 89, 255n54 dehumanization, 263n121 Deleuze, Gilles, 127 demeanor/comportment, 18–­19, 50, 60, 93, 177. See also affect Demenÿ, Georges, 218, 219, 223 demoiselles de magasin, 19, 60–­61, 88, 274n147 Denis, Maurice, 28, 276n174 Derain, André, 259n98

Index

[ 327 ]

[ 328 ]

Diaghilev, Serge, 165, 190, 192, 204, 228, 230 Dimanche à la Grande Jatte–­1884, Un (Seurat), 2–­3; animals in, 43, 44, 46, 52–­53, 62–­65; association with Darwin, 62–­63, 66; debut of, 1, 14, 32, 34, 35, 40; exhibition of, 14, 32, 34–­35, 40, 41, 66–­67; extremities in, 44, 52, 74, 270n64; faces in, 44; fashion in, 61, 62–­65; female figures in, 40, 44, 46, 51–­54, 59–­65, 70, 71, 88; figures compared to mannequins, 51–­54, 60–­61, 66, 69, 75; figures compared to toy soldiers, 51–­52, 58, 75, 78; formal mechanisms in, 34, 139; hieratic postures in, 47, 50, 51, 52, 73, 75, 86; as humorous, 55–­56, 65, 70, 251n27; hung in artist’s studio, 67; imitation in, 61, 63–­64, 66; interiority in, 34, 43, 48, 67; law of frontality and, 66, 69, 70; male figures in, 44, 46, 51, 52, 66, 88; as manifesto painting, 31–­33, 41, 43, 67, 96; modeling sessions for, 71, 284n301; monkey in, 8, 40, 44, 52–­53, 59–­66, 80, 92; obliquity in, 65; orientational schema, 1, 46, 69; posing of bodies in, 1, 34, 40–­42, 44, 46, 52, 58, 63, 65, 69–­70; possible allusion to prostitution, 60, 275n153; “primitive” forms in, 46–­47, 50, 51, 75, 79, 259n99; profile postures in, 1, 42, 46, 52, 54, 64–­66; as public sensation, 35, 40–­42, 52, 59, 66; quoted in Poseuses, 34–­35, 67, 69, 70, 75, 80, 88, 92, 96, 98, 268n27; reception of, 34–­35, 40–­ 43, 46–­47, 51–­52, 54–­55, 57, 80, 81; sexuality in, 62–­63, 66; shadows in, 52, 78; stiffness of figures in, 46–­47, 51, 52, 55–­56, 58, 75, 278n206; studies for, 46, 54, 55, 63, 63, 64, 64, 65, 275n157, 277n191 “discovery of mind” in classical Greece, 26, 262n114 dispositif (apparatus), Foucault on, 5 dispositio, in classical rhetoric, 5 disposition, defined, 5 divisionism/pointillism, 36, 40–­44 dogs, 20, 214, 215, 215, 216, 223, 224 Dollfus, Paul, 87–­88, 95, 284n299 dorsal views, 156 Doryphoros, 26, 49

Index

dreams/dreaming: of animals, 213; cinema and, 225–­27, 234; distortion of, 167, 196; dream-­figures, 177; dream-­texts, 181–­82; dream-­work, 180–­81, 225; of flying, 145–­46, 149; in Fokine’s Spectre de la rose, 228–­30, 231, 233; Freud on, 179–­81, 196, 207, 225, 226, 235; imagistic language of, 180; life vs., 51, 57–­58; mechanics of, 178–­79, 233; of the moving statue, 217; in Nijinsky’s Faune, 178, 225, 230, 231, 233–­34, 240; of public nakedness, 207; reverie and, 176–­78, 228; seascapes and, 42. See also Schauplatz der Träume (theater of dreams); somnambulism; wish fulfillment drives. See instincts/drives Duchenne de Boulogne, Guillaume-­ Benjamin-­Amand, 39 Duncan, Isadora, 190, 255n52 Duranty, Edmond, 89 Dürer, Albrecht: depiction of enema syringe, 129, 293n122; Nietzsche on, 128 Dürer, Albrecht, works: Melencolia I, 113, 114, 115, 128, 129, 129, 288n55, 288n60, 293n122; Ritter, Tod und Teufel, 293n118 Durov, Vladimir, 214, 215, 314n244 Duval, Mathias, 37–­39, 39, 62, 94, 268n34 École des Beaux-­Arts: académies used at, 77; anatomy courses, 38–­39, 44, 62, 94, 268n34, 283n286; Charles Blanc as director of, 31–­32; Darwin’s works taught at, 11; drawing instruction at, 37; as École du Modèle, 71; façade of Palais des Études, 79–­80, 80, 84, 280n227; interest in hypnosis at, 94; life models, 70–­71, 71, 89, 90, 90, 91; norms for posing bodies, 23, 89–­90; reforms of, 37; Seurat at, 33, 33, 37, 62, 70, 84, 89–­90, 266n14; students, 33, 71, 77, 94; use of female models, 37, 71 effort. See tension/concentration/ effort ego, 50, 74, 141. See also moi, le (the me) Egyptian art, 46–­47, 75, 77, 134, 137, 180, 199, 264n122, 305n65; Seated Scribe, 25, 261n111

ejaculation, 122, 167, 194, 290n86, 308n114. See also biological reproduction; masturbation elbows, 115, 173, 232, 240 Ellis, Havelock, 168, 207, 211 emancipation/liberation, 134, 149, 193–­95, 287n46 embryos, 121, 148, 290n86. See also biological reproduction emotions, 13, 19–­22, 27, 166, 178, 211, 230, 257n78. See also passions ethnology/ethnography. See anthropology Eurocentrism, 5, 11, 23, 47, 49, 50, 139, 249n9. See also Chakrabarty, Dipesh; colonialism/imperialism; “primitive,” the European art: classical faun in, 188; as coherent category, 4, 24; corporeal language of, 12, 18, 30, 50, 74, 139; depictions of flight in, 146; depictions of movement in, 202, 217; female nudes in, 78; hierarchy of genres, 31–­32, 43, 265n6; Lange on inception of, 25, 27, 50, 74, 112, 186; moving-­statue dream in, 217; mutation of, 4, 10, 11–­12; Ovidian imagery in, 176, 178, 217; panoramic perspective on, 17–­18; pastoral postures in, 177, 238, 240; postures and gestures in, 4, 5, 12–­13, 141, 264n122; repetition-­structure of, 17–­18, 19. See also figural art evolution: dissemination of theory, 61–­62, 147–­48, 153, 297n180, 298n197; Freud on, 8; as humorous, 10, 62, 64, 183; Kant’s aesthetic philosophy and, 152; as meme of modernity, 10; metamorphosis and, 186, 197; primordial origins and, 128, 148, 159, 204, 211, 222; as “psychological blow,” 8, 251n27; significance of weightlessness to, 147–­48. See also bipedalism; Darwin, Charles; natural selection excretion/lower bodily functions, 118, 119, 131. See also constipation exhibitionism (Exhibitionslust), 188, 191, 196, 197, 205, 207, 210–­16, 225, 234, 237. See also Schaulust exhibitions: Impressionist, 1, 87; of “primitive” art, 259n98, 260n104, 261n110; Salon des Indépendants

(1886), 67, 269n43; Salon des XX (1887), 34, 41, 269n43. See also Klinger-­Beethoven exhibition Exner, Siegmund, 146, 202, 297n175 expressivity/expressiveness, 44, 50, 54, 166, 178, 189, 196 faces/facial expressions, 78, 80, 92, 110, 154, 157–­58; blank, 18, 126, 131, 166, 202, 204; blurred, 44, 73 Falguière, Jean Alexandre Joseph, Monument to Honoré de Balzac, 122–­ 24, 123, 124 “false ass” (faux cul). See bustle fashion, 54, 58–­64, 64, 66, 88, 274n135, 274n150, 276n170. See also demoiselles de magasin Faune. See Après-­midi d’un faune, L’ (Nijinsky) feet, 21, 32, 148; de-­articulation of, 7; in Klimt’s Beethovenfries, 144; in Klinger’s Beethoven-­Denkmal, 117–­ 18; Leonardo da Vinci on, 112; in Nijinsky’s Faune, 217; in Rodin’s Monument to Balzac, 122; in Roller’s Die sinkende Nacht, 137; in Seurat’s Grande Jatte, 44, 46, 52; in Seurat’s Poseuses, 74; in Spinario, 77. See also gravity, subjection to; weight distribution Félibien, André, 32 female figures: in Klimt’s Beethovenfries, 107, 134, 138, 141, 144, 151, 156–­57, 161, 168; in Klimt’s Philosophie, 126, 131; in Nijinsky’s Faune, 171–­74, 181, 182, 185, 187, 198–­99, 210–­11, 214, 231; in Seurat’s Grande Jatte, 40, 44, 46, 51–­54, 59–­65, 70, 71, 88; in Seurat’s Poseuses, 69–­70, 73–­75, 78, 80, 85, 88 feminism: late nineteenth-­century, 86; Poseuses and, 86; posthumanism and, 249n10. See also women Fénéon, Félix: on the affect “Guess what I am thinking!,” 51, 83, 91, 94, 96–­97; African and Oceanic art collection, 260n99; on Degas, 89; on depictions of models, 87, 89; on Grande Jatte, 1, 35, 40, 42–­44, 46, 53, 59, 69, 70, 259n99; “Materialism” editorial, 37, 50; on Neo-­Impressionism, 42, 51; on Poseuses, 75, 99; on Seurat’s treatment of figures, 1, 68, 259n99

Index

[ 329 ]

[ 330 ]

fertilization, 160–­61, 167–­68, 300n216. See also biological reproduction figural art: analysis of, 12; conventions of, 4, 21, 33, 34, 39, 67, 111, 118, 125, 135; defined, 248n5; Freud on, 211; as highest genre, 31–­33, 43; naturalistic, 11, 36, 126, 137, 148; precision of extremities in, 7, 44; relations between figures in, 48, 50, 126; role of gravity in, 111–­12, 122; symbolic representations in, 27, 110–­11, 128, 264n129 film animation, 98, 216, 223–­24, 223, 316n272 finger postures: interlaced, 73–­74, 84; in Manet’s In the Conservatory, 256n70; in Nijinsky’s Faune, 173, 174, 206, 210; pointing, 115, 130, 256n70; in Seurat’s Grande Jatte, 44. See also grasping/gripping; mudrā flatness, 27, 135, 144, 203, 217 Flaubert, Gustave, 127, 292n105 flexion. See torsion Fliess, Wilhelm, 226, 250n24 flight/flying, 145–­48, 153, 167, 202. See also water/swimming floating/levitation, 122, 132, 135, 144, 145, 148 Flügel, John Carl, 63–­64 flute, 57, 172, 176, 182–­83, 188, 231–­32, 235–­36, 239. See also masturbation Fokine, Michel, Spectre de la rose, 228–­31, 229, 233, 318n312, 318n313, 318n319, 319n325 foreshortening. See perspectival depth Foucault, Michel, 5, 256n63 Freud, Sigmund: on activation of memories, 238; on archeology, 178–­ 79, 186; on art interpretation, 169; on artistic creation, 106, 211; on bipedalism, 214; Brücke and, 146, 202; on Charcot, 94; on cinema, 225; concept of homo natura, 168, 185, 227, 240; concept of the psyche, 178, 235, 240; on dreams, 179–­81, 196, 207, 225, 226, 235, 306n76; on evolution, 8; on exhibitionism, 197, 210–­13, 234; Exner and, 146, 202; on fixation, 196, 237; giraffe drawing, 212, 212; on historical rupture, 8; on infantilism, 179, 187, 196–­96, 200, 207, 211, 235, 238; on Jensen’s

Index

Gradiva, 197; letter to Binswanger, 200; Löwy and, 179; on mastur­ bation, 235, 237; on Nietzsche, 169; on Oedipal conflict, 213; portrait of, 178, 179; on psychic apparatus, 179, 228; psychobiographical method of, 169; on repetition, 231, 237; on Schaulust, 211, 225; on sexuality, 168, 186–­87, 193–­94, 196–­97, 207, 211–­14, 237; on sleep and the unconscious, 12, 146, 167, 178, 188; on sublimation, 182, 211, 214; on visuality, 226; on Wedekind, 196–­97 Freud, Sigmund, works: “A Childhood Memory of Leonardo da Vinci,” 169; Civilization and Its Discontents, 214; “From a History of an Infan­tile Neurosis,” 237–­38; The Interpreta­ tion of Dreams, 167, 178–­79, 181, 196, 200, 201, 207, 313n233; Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 186 Fried, Michael, 16–­17, 256n63, 256n64 frontality: abstraction and, 27; as confrontational, 70; in Gorgon iconography, 155; in Klimt’s Philosophie, 126–­27, 131, 134, 137; Lange on, 27, 48, 50, 112; law of, 25, 47–­51, 49, 66, 69, 77, 134, 203; of male body, 206; mechanical quality of, 48, 50–­51; modernism and, 27; in Nijinsky’s Faune, 206; “objective” imagery and, 263n122; primitive, 24, 48, 50, 263n122; Reinach on, 22; Ricci on, 203; in Seurat’s Grande Jatte, 66, 69, 70; as visual strategy, 28, 155, 263n122. See also obliquity Fry, Roger, 36, 75, 78 Füchs, Georg, 204, 313n209 Fuller, Loie, 190 Furtwängler, Adolf, 24 gametes/insemination, 160–­61. See also biological reproduction Gardner, Percy, 197 Gauguin, Paul, 7 Gauthier-­Villars, Henri, 175–­78, 196, 204, 218, 227, 233 Gautier, Théophile, 114, 229, 230 Geffroy, Gustave, 75 Gélon (model), 90–­92, 90, 91, 282n274, 282n275 gender: identity and, 249n9; man­­ nequins and, 54; masturbation and,

234; toy soldier-­mannequin binary, 51–­52. See also female figures; male figures genitals, 21, 74, 120–­22, 149, 168, 194, 207, 210–­15, 234–­35, 238. See also biological reproduction; exhibitionism (Exhibitionslust) genius, depictions of, 106–­8, 111, 117, 124, 194 Gérôme, Jean-­Léon, 94 gestures: clasping, 74, 84–­85, 85, 120, 122, 208; declamatory, 17; defined, 21; exclamatory, 17; as formulas, 18; inherited from antiquity, 13, 14; Leonardo da Vinci on, 6; loss of, 13, 19, 20; mimicry of, 59; petrification of, 83, 89; problematic status of, 13–­14; of pursuit, 208, 210; Reinach on history of, 256n63; reverent, 115; shift to postures from, 20–­21; Warburg’s study of, 13–­14, 208. See also grasping/gripping; hand gestures; head positions Gilles de la Tourette, Georges, 95 Ginzburg, Carlo, 18 gnome (intelligence), 79, 82, 86, 280n241 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Faust, 117–­18, 291n103 Gombrich, Ernst, 22, 74–­75 gorillas, 8, 138, 149, 183 Gourmont, Rémy de, 190–­91, 225, 235, 309n137 Grande Jatte. See Dimanche à la Grande Jatte–­1884, Un (Seurat) grasping/gripping: Demosthenes and, 85, 110; in depictions of Pan, 182, 208, 210; in Klimt’s Beethovenfries, 141, 143; in Klinger’s Beethoven-­ Denkmal, 110–­11, 130, 139. See also katalepsis (mental comprehension); prehension gravity, subjection to, 4, 48, 50, 111–­13, 117, 128, 137, 144–­48, 194. See also floating/levitation Greco-­Roman sculpture, 78, 79; Apollo Philesios, 199; bell krater, 208, 208; Capitoline Venus, 78; Chrysapha relief, 198, 198, 207; cult status of Zeus, 101, 103; Demosthenes, 78–­79, 79, 81–­86, 84, 85, 92–­96, 108, 110, 281n246; Discobolus, 29, 29, 30; Doryphoros, 26, 26, 74, 279n223;

Knidian Aphrodite, 78, 279n223; Nike of Delos, 199, 199, 202; Pathos­ formel and, 13, 14, 208; poses in, 25–­26, 29, 50; renaissance art and, 4, 22; sculptures by Lysippos, 48; statuette of pensive young man, 114, 115; Venus de’Medici, 78; Venus pudica, 78, 279n223. See also classical art/ classicism Greek mythology: Apollo, 199, 208, 306n88; Argus Panoptes, 154; Daphne, 208, 306n88, 307n90; Galatea, 217; Gorgons, 101, 138, 149, 154–­55, 295n152; Pan, 176, 182–­83, 185–­86, 187, 208, 307n90; Pygmalion, 217; river gods, 15, 17, 240; Syrinx, 176, 182–­83, 185–­86, 208, 307n90, 313n221; Three Graces, 80; Typhon, 138, 149, 154, 159, 295n152, 298n190; Zeus, 101, 103, 117, 118, 135, 297n186. See also Ovid Greenberg, Clement, 27 Gunning, Tom, 224–­25, 232, 317n283 habitus/hexis, 18. See also Mauss, Marcel Haeckel, Ernst, 147, 160, 161, 297n180 Hall, Stanley, 148 hallucination, 12, 42, 176, 225 hand gestures: in archaic art, 202; clasping, 74, 78, 84–­85, 85, 120, 122, 208; clenching, 110, 118, 121, 139, 141; in Klimt’s Beethovenfries, 141, 143; mudrā, 140, 141, 142, 143, 158; in Nijinsky’s Faune, 172–­74, 204, 207; pointing, 17, 115, 130, 173, 174, 256n70, 288n57; in Seurat’s Grande Jatte, 44; in Seurat’s Poseuses, 78. See also finger postures; grasping/ gripping hands: concealment of, 120–­21; de-­ articulation of, 7; in Spinario, 77. See also hierarchy of organs; prehension Hartwig, Paul, 85, 108, 110, 286n30 head positions: bowed, 122, 127; disembodied, 126, 134; drooping/heavy, 110, 114–­16, 118, 122, 126, 131–­32, 139, 164, 288n60; frontal, 46, 48, 73; Leonardo da Vinci on, 6; levitating, 132, 134–­35, 144–­45, 148–­49, 157–­ 60; in profile, 211; resting on hand, 181; sideways turn, 78; tilted, 1, 73, 91, 112

Index

[ 331 ]

Hearn, Lafcadio, 143, 296n162 heaviness. See weight/heaviness/ lightness Helmholtz, Hermann von, 37 Hennequin, Émile, 54 Hevesi, Ludwig, 110, 137, 144–­45, 147, 153, 161, 163, 291n97 hierarchy of genres, 112, 254n41; Blanc and, 31–­33, 43–­44; Seurat and, 31–­34, 43–­44, 265n6 hierarchy of organs, 10, 19, 21, 128 Hildebrand, Adolf, 204 Hodler, Ferdinand, 7 Hoffmann, Josef, 106, 158 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 226–­27 hollow forms/emptiness/negative space, 132, 135, 141, 144, 145 Homolle, Théophile, 197–­99, 202 homo natura, 9, 127, 168–­70, 227, 240. See also psychic apparatus humanism, exclusionary origins of. See anthropocentrism humor, 55–­56, 65, 70, 191. See also caricatures Huysmans, Joris-­Karl, 41–­44, 46, 74 hypnosis/hypnotism, 56–­58, 214, 273n122, 273n124, 299n206, 314n244; animal magnetism and, 66; hysteria and, 19, 56; illustration of, 97; imitation and, 58; Krafft-­ Ebing and, 155; life models and, 94–­95; study of, 12; susceptibility to suggestion and, 58, 60–­61 hysteria, 12, 19, 56, 57, 95, 255n54

[ 332 ]

imaginary museums, 17, 248n6, 256n63. See also Blanc, Charles; Warburg, Aby imitation/mimicry (singerie), 57–­60, 59, 63–­65, 92–­94 imperialism. See colonialism/imperialism; Eurocentrism Impressionism, 4, 14, 22, 31, 33, 40–­41, 89, 175 Indian art, 141, 142 infantilism: Freud on, 179, 187, 195, 200, 207, 211, 235, 238; in Nijinsky’s Faune, 9, 167, 169, 186–­88, 197, 205, 211, 228, 231, 234 Ingres, Jean-­Auguste-­Dominique: cast of Demosthenes commissioned by, 79; Lehmann and, 37, 76; as prototype, 76

Index

Ingres, Jean-­Auguste-­Dominique, works: La Baigneuse, 76, 76, 81, 90; La Source, 75 instincts/drives, 9, 10, 20, 28, 39, 168; in Klimt’s Beethovenfries, 139, 149, 151, 159; in Klinger’s Beethoven-­ Denkmal, 106; in Seurat’s Grande Jatte, 66; in Seurat’s Poseuses, 92. See also homo natura; infantilism; moi, le (the me); ornament/decoration; sublimation; unconscious thought processes; wish fulfillment intelligence/intellectual power, 43, 56, 82, 108, 110 intelligent design, 20, 105–­6 interiority/inwardness/inner life, 6, 17, 19–­21, 82, 91; in Klimt’s Beethovenfries, 162; in Klinger’s Beethoven-­Denkmal, 107–­8; in Nijinsky’s Faune, 187; in Seurat’s Grande Jatte, 34, 43, 48, 67; in Seurat’s Poseuses, 67, 74, 77, 82, 86, 93, 94; in Spinario, 77. See also moi, le (the me) James-­Lange theory of emotion, 20 Janet, Pierre, 57, 95 Jensen, Wilhelm, Gradiva, 197 Joze, Viktor, 70 Jugendstil, 131, 134, 145, 294n134 Kahn, Gustave, 50–­51, 64, 67, 68, 71, 86 Kanachos, Apollo Philesios, 199 Kandinsky, Wassily, 27 Karsavina, Tamara, 229–­30, 229 katalepsis (mental comprehension), 85, 96, 110, 283n297. See also catalepsy Keats, John, “Sleep and Poetry,” 240 Kessler, Harry Graf, 189–­90, 309n129, 310n142 Klee, Paul, 130 Klein, Franz, life cast of Beethoven, 115 Klimt, Gustav: archaism, 134, 159; as Herostratus, 135; interest in Buddhism, 143, 296n161; interest in natural science, 159; Krafft-­ Ebing and, 155; Nietzsche and, 127, 291n103; photographs of, 163, 164, 164; progeny of, 162; Rodin and, 125–­ 26, 137; role in Secession, 106; solo exhibition, 163; stylistic development, 135

Klimt, Gustav, works: Faculty Paint­ ings, 125, 126, 130–­31, 134, 135; Fischblut, 147, 147; Goldfische, 134; Jurisprudenz, 124, 138; Medizin, 124, 134, 138, 294n139, 299n209; study for Diesen Kuß der ganzen Welt, 157; study for figure of Wissen, 126, 126, 131; “To My Critics,” 134. See also Beethovenfries (Klimt); Philosophie (Klimt) Klinger, Max: Hartwig and, 108, 110; photographed at work, 139; Rodin and, 108–­11; technique, 109 Klinger, Max, works: A Glove, 109; study for Beethoven-­Denkmal, 109. See also Beethoven-­Denkmal (Klinger) Klinger-­Beethoven exhibition, 101–­2, 105–­10, 124, 147–­49, 158; Andri armchairs designed for, 163–­64; catalogue for, 137; close of, 163; focus on Klimt in, 135, 162–­63; installation views of, 103, 104, 107; opening of, 163, 296n161; poster for, 136–­37, 136; reception of, 102, 163. See also Beethoven-­Denkmal (Klinger); Beethovenfries (Klimt); Roller, Alfred, works; Secession knees, 78, 115, 232, 279n223 Kouros of Tenea, 25, 25, 29, 29, 30, 48 Krafft-­Ebing, Richard von, 155, 229n206, 308n119 Kraus, Karl, 107–­8, 124, 161, 162 Krauss, Rosalind, 27, 28 Lalo, Pierre, 196, 199–­200, 218, 226 Lange, Carl, 20, 27 Lange, Julius: definition of primitive art, 47, 260n109; on inception of European art, 25, 27, 50, 74, 112; Löwy and, 200, 203; The Representation of the Human Figure, 24, 25, 47, 112, 200, 260n106, 260n109; Seurat and, 47, 51, 73, 74. See also contrapposto; Eurocentrism; frontality; moi, le (the me); “primitive,” the Lasègue, Charles, 211. See also exhibitionism (Exhibitionslust) Lathers, Marie, 87 Layard, Austen Henry, 25 Lechat, Henri, 77 le Fustec, Jean, 41, 54

Legrand, Marc, 122 legs: in Klimt’s Beethovenfries, 156; in Seurat’s Grande Jatte, 44, 52; in Seurat’s Poseuses, 73–­74. See also bipedalism; contrapposto; motion/ stasis; uno crure insistere (standing on one leg); weight distribution Lehmann, Henri, 33, 37, 76, 272n104 Lemaistre, Alexis, 89, 90, 91 Leonardo da Vinci: anatomical studies, 112, 113; on figuration, 6, 20, 112, 137; Freud on, 169, 314n237; Madonna of the Rocks, 115 levity. See weight/heaviness/lightness Lieven, Prince Peter, 228 Linnaean taxonomy, 5, 183, 248n9, 307n94 liquefaction/fluidity, 29, 193–­94 liveliness, 6, 34, 52, 56, 74, 75, 193 Loos, Adolf, 107, 161–­62, 301n228 “lower” organs. See hierarchy of organs Löwy, Emanuel, 286n30, 311n183, 312n188; on archaic art, 22, 74, 200–­ 201, 203–­4; on Brücke and Exner, 202; on conceptual-­pictorial visibility, 203, 205; Freud and, 179, 200; Lange and, 200, 203; on memory pictures, 202–­4, 207 Löwy, Emanuel, works: Lysippos and His Place in Greek Sculpture, 29, 48, 49, 200; The Rendering of Nature in Earlier Greek Art, 200, 201, 311n183 Lumière brothers, 216, 223, 232, 236, 315n262 Lux, Joseph, 135–­36, 144, 159 Lysippos, 48 male figures: in Klimt’s Beethovenfries, 138, 158, 159, 161, 168, 299n211; in Nijinsky’s Faune, 169, 171–­75, 185–­ 89, 206–­8, 210–­12, 231–­32, 234–­35, 240; in Seurat’s Grande Jatte, 44, 46, 51, 52, 66, 88 Malevich, Kasimir, 27 Mallarmé, Stéphane: caricatured as faun, 184–­85, 184; compositional process, 181; on Debussy’s Prelude, 177, 304n57; Rodin statuette owned by, 192, 193 Mallarmé, Stéphane, works: dramatic script, 181; “Gifts to a Few from the Faun,” 184. See also Après-­midi d’un faune, L’ (Mallarmé)

Index

[ 333 ]

[ 33 4 ]

Mander, Carel van, 176 Manet, Édouard, works: Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 14, 16–­20, 16, 256n63, 256n69; illustrations for Mallarmé’s Faune, 239; In the Conservatory, 256n70; Le Vieux Musicien, 256n64. See also imaginary museums mannequins: as articulated dummies, 54; defined, 54; fashion, 54, 55, 60; gender and, 54, 88; as obscene, 60; Seurat’s figures compared to, 51–­54, 60–­61, 66, 69, 75; in Zola, 60, 88 Marey, Étienne-­Jules, 38, 218, 223–­25, 263n122, 268n34 masturbation: in Faune, 174, 188, 191–­92, 231, 234–­35, 237–­38, 240, 308n114; Freud on, 235; Nijinsky on, 215–­16; in Rodin’s works, 120, 194, 194; in Wedekind’s play, 196. See also ejaculation; flute Matisse, Henri, 259n98 Maus, Madeleine, 41 Maus, Octave, 70 Mauss, Marcel, [18], [19], 256n71 mechanisms, psychological, 9, 56–­ 58; of displacement, 167; Freud on, 167, 168, 179, 228, 235, 318n308; Nijinsky’s Faune and, 179, 228, 231, 235. See also psychic apparatus; psychological automatism meditation. See contemplation/ meditation Meier-­Graefe, Julius, 148 Memling, Hans, 46 memory pictures (Erinnerungsbilder), 146–­47, 202–­4, 207 Méryel, Charles, 216 Mesmer, Franz, 56 mesmerism. See hypnosis/hypnotism metaphors, 265n131; backside views as, 69, 70, 277n180; considering is weighing , 113–­14; difficulty is heaviness , 115–­17; of elevation, 111, 117–­18, 148–­49; of grasping, 110–­11, 128, 139, 143; of gravity, 128–­ 31, 139, 143–­44; importance is weight , 115–­17, 148; of infantilism, 200; knowledge is the physical contents of the head , 113, 132; of pregnancy, 121, 290n86; of procreation, 121–­22; of thinking, 110, 112–­16, 119, 128, 129, 143; understanding is grasping ,

Index

110. See also “burden of the pride of thought” methodology, 5, 6–­7, 19, 30, 108, 249n10, 251n27, 257n75, 262n121, 263n122 Meyerhold, Vsevelod, 204, 313n209 Michaelis, Adolf, 82 Michelangelo, 88, 288n60, 299n209 Mikkiades, Nike of Delos, 199, 199, 202 mimesis, 27, 33, 52, 61, 112 mindfulness, 143. See also Buddhism/ nirvana; contemplation/meditation Minskii, Nikolai, 196, 204, 205, 234 modèle classique/modèle moderne, 88–­ 89, 284n299 models, life: at art academies, 23, 33, 37, 71; hypnotism and, 94; interest in, 87–­88; in Poseuses, 67, 69, 81; vivacity and, 52. See also académies; Gélon (model) moi, le (the me), 26–­28, 50, 74, 112, 262n118. See also ego; interiority/ inwardness/inner life; Lange, Julius monkeys, vii, 21, 59–­66, 160; as alter ego, 61, 62; at Cirque Corvi, 65, 276n168; in Klimt’s Beethovenfries, 159; as metaphor, 61, 275n153; in Seurat’s Grande Jatte, 8, 40, 44, 59–­ 61, 62–­65; in Seurat’s Poseuses, 69 monumental sculpture: of intellectual heroes, 108; late nineteenth-­century, 108, 116–­17. See also Beethoven-­ Denkmal (Klinger) Moore, George, 62 Morrow, William Chambers, 89–­90 motion/stasis, 21, 48, 49, 74, 202–­3, 218, 235–­36 Mount Olympus, 101, 105, 117, 118 Mourney, Gabriel, 116 mudrā, 140, 141, 142, 143 Munich Artists’ Theater, 204, 205, 315n259 Myron, Discobolus, 29, 29, 30 Nähr, Moritz, 163, 163, 301n232 Natoire, Charles-­Joseph, 38 “natural peoples” (Naturvölkern), 47, 201–­2 natural science. See Darwin, Charles natural selection, 151, 297n180, 298n197 Near Eastern art. See Assyrian art

neck, 26, 50, 54, 115, 157, 162 Nelidova, Lydia, 173, 206, 308n110 Neo-­Impressionism, 31–­32, 36–­37, 39–­ 40, 42, 51, 269n43 new psychology, 11–­12, 27, 104–­5, 143, 251n29, 254n43 Nietzsche, Friedrich: attack on “the spirit of gravity,” 128–­30, 145–­ 46, 148; on bipedalism, 128, 148; Deleuze on, 127; on Demosthenes, 93, 283n280; on dreams, 145, 148; on Dürer, 128, 293n118; Freud on, 169; on “healthy animal understanding,” 139; Klimt and, 127, 145, 291n103; new image of thought, 127, 129, 131, 293n117; Nijinsky on, 169; on psychology, 11, 127–­28; on sedentariness/Sitzfleisch, 127, 129, 292n105, 293n121; on unconscious drives, 127–­28; unmasking of metaphors by, 128; on Wagner, 85, 105 Nietzsche, Friedrich, works: Also sprach Zarathustra, 127, 145, 290n88, 292n108; Beyond Good and Evil, 129, 250n24; Birth of Tragedy, 291n103; Ecce Homo, 169, 292n106; The Gay Science, 127; Human, All Too Human, 128; “Man as Measurer” aphorism, 128; Twilight of the Idols, 105, 127 Nijinska, Bronislava (Nijinsky’s sister), 165, 214, 230, 234, 301n2, 302n6, 309n127, 315n252, 315n270 Nijinsky, Romola (Nijinsky’s wife), 238, 302n6 Nijinsky, Vaslav: on animality, 213–­14, 215; childhood, 214; on cinema, 216, 224; on Darwin, 169; as dynamic dancer, 165–­66, 228; family of, 214, 216, 238, 315n252; as “idiot of genius,” 169; mental collapse of, 168–­69, 216, 302n23; Meyerhold’s stagings and, 204; on Nietzsche, 169; photographs, 166, 171, 173, 174, 175, 206, 220–­21, 229, 241; preservation efforts, 170–­71, 222; reputation, 165–­68, 189; Rodin’s sketches of, 193, 193; sexuality, 165, 169, 193, 213, 215–­16, 319n325; in Spectre de la rose, 228–­30, 229; system of dance notation, 235 Nijinsky, Vaslav, works: 1919 manuscript, 169, 189, 213, 215–­17, 224, 233,

234, 303n29, 319n325; “Au hommes,” vii; Jeux, 303n35; Sacre du Printemps, 303n35; Till Eulenspiegel, 303n35. See also Après-­midi d’un faune, L’ (Nijinsky) Nike of Delos, 199, 199, 202 Noland, Kenneth, Stria, 27, 28 non-­Western art. See African sculpture; art of the Americas; Assyrian art; Buddhism/nirvana; Indian art; Oceanic art Nordau, Max, 118–­19 norms of representation. See figural art objectivity, scientific, 263n122 obliquity: abandonment of, 4, 7, 46, 137; consciousness and, 28, 263n122; in medieval art, 264n129; photography and, 263n122; “primitive” frontality vs., 24, 48, 203, 263n122, 264n129; in Seurat’s Grande Jatte, 65; in Seurat’s Poseuses, 74. See also frontality Oceanic art, 23, 24, 25, 259n98, 259n99 Olitski, Jules, Magic Number, 28 Orientalism, 137, 139, 149, 151, 296n161 ornament/decoration, 64, 66, 137, 151, 155, 162 ova, 160, 161, 168. See also biological reproduction Ovid: fable of Pan and Syrinx, 176, 182–­83, 186, 188, 208, 307n90; gestures in, 176, 208; myth of Orpheus, 176; myth of Pygmalion, 217 Pan, 176, 182–­83, 186, 187, 208, 210 panic/anxiety, 67, 185, 188, 193, 308n117 Pankejeff, Sergei, 212, 237 Pan Painter, bell krater, 208, 208 Parisian ass. See bustle passions, 6, 19, 60, 127, 149, 151. See also emotions pathos, 13, 14, 18, 108, 166 Pathosformel: arm movement and, 21, 207–­8; Manet and, 18; of pursuit, 208, 210; term coined by Warburg, 13, 14, 18–­19, 176 Paulet, Alfred, 58 pedestals, 52, 78, 96, 117–­18, 214, 289n71

Index

[ 335 ]

[ 336 ]

penis. See genitals personhood, 11, 33, 253n39 perspectival depth, 22, 27, 135, 203–­5 “perversion,” 12, 19, 134, 192, 196, 211, 237 Phidias, cult statue of Zeus, 101, 103 philosophers: Aristotle, 217, 266n8; Descartes, 26; Diogenes, 188; Hegel, 24, 250n20, 264n122; Kant, 58, 105, 139, 152, 155, 161, 253n40, 295n158; Locke, 11, 253n39; Stoic, 85, 110. See also Nietzsche, Friedrich Philosophie (Klimt), 124–­27, 125, 131–­ 32, 134–­35, 137–­38, 164, 290n94 philosophy, 11, 20, 26–­27, 50, 105, 127, 149, 152, 251n31. See also Nietzsche, Friedrich: new image of thought photography: agency and, 263n122; criminal mug shots, 263n122; imaginary museums and, 256n63; obliquity and, 28, 263n122; portrait, 264n122. See also chronophotography physiological psychology, 39, 57 physiology, 37, 38, 50, 200 Picasso, Pablo, 7, 259n98 Pichon, Alfred, 22 Pissarro, Camille, 40, 70, 259n99, 269n43 planarity. See flatness Plutarch, 83–­84, 280n241 pointillism. See divisionism/ pointillism Pollack, Max, portrait of Freud, 179 Polyeuktos, Demosthenes, 79, 81–­86, 84, 85, 92–­96, 108, 110, 281n246 Polykleitos, Doryphoros, 26, 26, 74, 279n223 ponderation, 26–­27, 112, 113, 117, 123, 128–­29, 287n46, 288n49, 289n66. See also bipedalism; contemplation/ meditation; gravity, subjection to; weight/heaviness/lightness popular entertainments, 67, 92, 93, 214, 215, 216, 276n168 Poseuses (Seurat), 35; académie as subtext in, 70–­71, 92; allusions to hypnosis in, 94–­97; androgyny in, 86; archaic figuration in, 96; bustle padding depicted in, 69–­70, 277n179; climax of narrative in, 81; composition of, 68, 73; debut, 34, 67, 70, 75; Demosthenes sculpture

Index

quoted in, 78–­79, 81–­82, 84–­85, 90, 92, 93, 95–­96; drawing after, 81–­82, 81; duality of mental states in, 95–­ 97; exhibited, 82; extremities in, 73, 74, 78; faces in, 73, 78, 80, 92, 94, 96; female figures in, 69–­70, 73–­75, 78, 80, 85, 88; hand gestures in, 85; imitation in, 92–­94; infrared analysis of, 71, 277n189; Ingres Baigneuse pose quoted in, 76, 81, 90; inner life portrayed in, 67, 74, 77, 82, 86, 93, 94; as manifesto painting, 67; modeling sessions for, 73, 98, 284n301; modernized conception of the subject in, 39; monkey absent from, 69, 92; nudes in, 75, 78, 80, 81; obliquity in, 74; orientational schema, 69–­70, 76, 90; as origin scene of figure painting, 67; owned by Kessler, 189; posing of bodies in, 69–­71, 73–­76, 78, 88, 90, 92, 98, 102; as preposterous, 92; profile postures in, 68, 86; reception, 34, 67–­68, 70, 75, 80, 94, 98; as response to Grande Jatte, 67–­70, 73, 75, 80, 85, 86, 88, 92, 96, 98, 268n27; role of gender in, 86, 92, 96; sexuality in, 86; shadows in, 88; Spinario pose quoted in, 76–­78, 81, 90; studies for, 67, 73, 73, 74, 81–­82; studio depicted in, 71, 92, 96, 97; suppleness in, 70, 75, 97; surface texture, 74; theatrical motifs, 92; Three Graces motif, 80; title of, 34–­35, 92; undergarments in, 69–­70, 88, 96, 277n179 posthumanism, 5, 249n10, 250n26 postures/poses: antinaturalistic, 11, 12, 27, 126, 187, 263n121, 270n54; defined, 21; feminine, 78; floating/ levitating, 122, 134; genitals and, 21, 74, 214–­15; hieratic, 41, 42, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 73, 75, 134; Löwy on, 200, 203; meditative/contemplative, 82, 85, 90–­91, 90, 112–­14, 126, 127, 130; parallel, 59, 63, 65, 137; positional behavior and, 21, 258n85; primary postures, 9, 251n30; professional models’ knowledge of, 88–­91; profile views, 1, 42, 46, 52, 54, 64–­66, 68, 86, 137, 203, 204; prone/supine, 9, 21, 144, 235, 240; reclining, 17, 44, 231, 238, 240–­41; and relation to surroundings, 21; shift from gestures to, 20–­21; standing, 9–­10, 26, 44, 95,

112, 120, 123; stooped, 126; uno crure insistere (standing on one leg), 26, 112, 262n115; upright, 1, 29, 57, 73, 111, 148, 184, 186, 203, 208, 214; variety of, 6, 30, 126; walking, 48, 52. See also attitudes; contrapposto; sitting/ Sitzfleisch; weight distribution Pötzl, Edward, 132, 134, 147–­48 Poussin, Nicolas, 208 preclassical art. See archaic Greek art pregnancy. See biological reproduc­­­ tion prehension, 21, 30, 62, 64, 110, 111, 210. See also grasping/gripping “primitive,” the: cinema and, 224–­25, 228; colonial discourse and, 12, 23, 259n98; concept of “European nest” and, 23, 260n103; denial of co­evalness and, 23; Eurocentrism and, 23, 47, 49, 259n98; exhibitionism and, 207; figural restrictions of, 23, 48, 49, 50, 200; Frances Connolly on, 23, 259n96; Freud on, 179, 180; imitation and, 58–­59; Johannes Fabian on, [23], 258n96, 260n102; Klimt and, 162; Lange on, 48–­50, 200; Löwy on, 200–­203; modernism and, 259n98; in Nijinsky’s Faune, 178, 197, 200, 205; as nineteenth-­ century art-­historical category, 23–­ 24, 48–­50; psychological study of, 12, 200–­201, 205, 254n43; Seurat and, 34, 46–­48, 73, 75, 79, 86; as “taxonomic catchall,” 259n98; as term of opposition, 22–­23, 46, 47, 259n98. See also frontality; Lange, Julius; Löwy, Emanuel procreative metaphors. See biological reproduction profile views, 1, 42, 46, 52, 54, 64–­66, 68, 86, 137, 203, 204 psychic apparatus, 7, 9, 168, 170, 178–­ 79, 227–­28, 240, 251n28 psychoanalysis: concept of sexuality in, 9, 168, 200; Nijinsky and, 168; power imbalance of, 169; reclining posture in, 240–­41; unconscious thought processes and, 167–­68. See also dreams/dreaming; Freud, Sigmund psychological automatism, 18, 19, 28, 56–­57, 95, 97, 218. See also mechanisms, psychological

psychological modernism. See new psychology psychology: archaism and, 200–­201; Buddhism and, 141, 143; child, 201–­ 2; colonializing gesture of, 11–­12, 254n43; education of artists in, 39; experimental, 11, 12, 39, 50, 56, 94; human-­animal distinction in, 12, 214–­15; neuroses, 12; Nietzsche on, 11, 127–­28, 145; physiological, 39, 128, 146, 254n41; psychological portraits, 82; role of gravity in, 112, 145–­46; Symbolists’ interest in, 50; theories about women, 12; theories of “perversion,” 12; without soul, 6, 39, 249n19. See also dreams/dreaming; infantilism; memory pictures (Erinnerungsbilder); new psychology; unconscious thought processes Quatremère de Quincy, Antoine Chrysostôme, Le Jupiter olympien, 103 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 5, 29–­30 race: caricatures of the “Orient” and, 151; identity and, 139, 249n9; in Linnaean taxonomy, 248n9; posthumanism and, 249n10; “primitive” art and, 23; psychological theories about, 12, 254n43 Raimondi, Marcantonio (after Raphael), Judgment of Paris, 14, 16, 17, 256n63 rape, 181, 182, 183, 207, 210, 306n88 Raphael, works, 130, 202, 288n60; Galatea, 146; Judgment of Paris (after), 14, 16, 17 reason/rationality, 5, 9, 10, 11, 20, 27, 104, 153 regression, 95, 148, 178, 180, 207 Reinach, Salomon, 21, 22, 256n63 religious art, 40, 47, 83, 83, 88, 96, 115, 117 renaissance art: aesthetic theory and, 5–­6, 29; Blanc on, 32; classical faun in, 186; depictions of movement in, 202; depictions of Pan in, 208; gestures in, 208; Greco-­Roman formulas in, 4, 13, 14, 22, 208; Pathosformel and, 13, 14, 208; as “primitive,” 23; repetition-­structure in, 17–­19

Index

[ 337 ]

[ 338 ]

repetitive behaviors, 51, 57, 237 repression, 179, 214. See also sublimation Revalles, Flore, 174 Rey, Robert, 47 Reynaud, Émile, 99, 223, 223, 224 Ribot, Théodule, 11–­12, 39 Ricci, Corrado, L’Arte dei bambini, 201, 201, 203, 225 Rich, Daniel Catton, 74 Richer, Paul, 74, 94–­95, 283n286 Riegl, Alois, 24, 48, 50, 105, 151 rigidity. See stiffness (raideur) Rilke, Rainer Maria, 18, 89, 118, 122, 255n52, 290n88 Riotor, Léon, Le Mannequin, 54, 55 Ripa, Cesare, “Imitation,” in Iconologia; or, Moral Emblems, 59 Rodin, Auguste: caricatures of works by, 121, 121; eroticism and, 120–­22, 190, 193–­94, 235, 290n86; forged review for Faune, 167, 190, 192–­93, 195, 232, 309n129; Klimt and, 125–­ 26, 137; Klinger and, 108–­11; pathos and, 14; studio, 190, 193; technique, 109, 194; use of conventional poses, 119–­20, 255n54; use of models, 89, 193–­94 Rodin, Auguste, works: Faune et nymphe (Minotaure), 192, 193; first study of Nude “F” (study for Balzac), 120, 120, 194; Monument to Balzac, 119–­24, 119, 121, 124, 164, 192, 194, 290n86, 290n87; Le Penseur, 86, 87, 108–­11, 109, 115–­19, 122, 124, 126, 128–­30, 182; Le Porte de l’enfer, 109, 125–­26, 286n32, 288n61; sketches of Nijinsky, 193, 193, 310n142; sketch of masturbating woman, 194; sketch of submerged figure, 195; water­ colors, 194–­95 Roger-­Marx, Claude, 190, 309n129 Roller, Alfred, works: Klinger-­ Beethoven exhibition poster, 136–­37, 136; Die sinkende Nacht, 103, 137, 157 Roscher, Wilhelm, 188 Rubens, Peter Paul, Pan and Syrinx, 208, 209 rupture vs. continuity, 4, 7–­8, 13–­14, 16–­18, 74, 77 Salomon, Bernard, Pan and Syrinx, 209

Index

scandal: evidentiary importance of, 295n154; of Klimt’s Beethovenfries, 138; of Klimt’s Philosophie, 125, 134–­ 35; of Nijinsky’s Faune, 167, 188–­90, 192; of Seurat’s Grande Jatte, 41, 52, 60, 70, 88 Schaulust, 197, 211–­13, 216, 225, 237. See also cinema; exhibitionism (Exhibitionslust) Schauplatz der Träume (theater of dreams), 180, 188, 211, 233, 306n76 Schlemmer, Oskar, 7 scientific materialism, 37–­38 screen entertainments, 217, 224, 226. See also cinema Secession: cosmic motifs of, 157; criticism of, 107, 153, 161; exhibitions, 102, 125, 134, 162–­63, 294n139, 299n209; linked to evolutionary notions of beauty, 153; photograph, 163, 163; on pictures vs. surface decorations, 135–­37, 153; Ver Sacrum magazine, 147, 153. See also Klinger-­ Beethoven exhibition self-­movement/caused movement, 4, 20, 30, 217, 235 semen. See sperm Serner, Walter, 225 Servaes, Franz, 110 Seurat, Georges: aesthetic theory, 31, 40, 265n1; allusions to sculpture, 78; anatomy courses taken by, 38–­39, 44, 62; café-­concert and cabaret drawings, 67, 92; canvases of combat, 31, 34, 40; at Cirque Corvi, 65; color application, 32, 36, 40, 42, 43, 54, 74, 269n49, 275n152; commitment to figure painting, 31, 40, 42, 46, 67, 68, 70; critical reception, 40–­ 41, 46–­47, 66, 267n19; at École des Beaux-­Arts, 33, 33, 37, 39, 62, 67, 70–­71, 76, 77, 79–­80, 89–­90, 266n14; influence of Charles Blanc on, 31–­32, 266n7; influence of Mathias Duval on, 38–­39; interest in Zola’s novels, 60, 274n147; landscapes, 31, 40, 41, 46, 67, 68; in Lehmann’s atelier, 37, 76; light effects, 42, 43; nude figure studies, 43, 71, 72, 76, 90; physiological psychology and, 39; Pissarro on, 70; praise for technique of, 41–­42, 43; as a “primitive” of today, 46–­47, 50; Reynaud and, 99; seascapes, 40,

41, 42, 67; sketchbooks, 44, 45; studio, 67, 68, 71; temperament, 32, 66; use of clipping agencies, 35, 267n22. See also divisionism/pointillism Seurat, Georges, works: Le Bec du Hoc, 40, 41, 42, 269n43, 269n46; Chahut, 98, 265n1; Cirque, 98, 98, 265n1; copy of nude in Ingres’s Roger Freeing Angelica, 76; Dancing Dandy, 65, 65; Parade de cirque, 36–­37, 36, 65, 67, 75, 92, 265n1, 268n27, 278n206; Poseuse, ii, 67, 68, 73, 74, 75, 78, 81, 277n189; Le Rade de Grandcamp, 40, 41, 42, 269n43, 269n46; Sept Singes, 63, 63. See also Dimanche à la Grande Jatte–­1884, Un (Seurat); Poseuses (Seurat) sexology, 155, 188, 299n206 sexuality: aesthetics and, 152–­53, 155, 162; androgyny and, 86; archeology and, 197, 200; fixation and, 196, 228, 235, 237; Freud’s theories on, 168, 186–­87, 193–­94, 196–­97, 207, 211–­14, 235, 237; instincts/drives and, 10, 149, 151, 182, 185, 191, 228, 235; in Klimt’s Beethovenfries, 149, 151, 154–­58, 160–­61, 168; liquefaction and, 193–­94; motifs of, 81, 120–­21; procreative/nonprocreative, 9, 121, 168, 182, 188, 194, 239; in Seurat’s Grande Jatte, 62–­63; signifiers of, 60, 149, 151; “surplus energy” of, 162; as vivifying, 193, 235. See also infantilism; sublimation sexual selection, 10, 66, 151, 153–­55, 298n193, 298n197. See also biological reproduction shadow theater, 217, 224 Shirley-­Fox, John, 94 shoulders, 6, 52, 88, 115 Signac, Paul, 32, 40, 59, 70, 265n3, 274n138 Simmel, Georg, 18–­19, 287n45 sitting/Sitzfleisch: in caricature of Mallarmé, 184; in Dürer’s Melen­ colia I, 113; in Falguière’s monument to Balzac, 122–­23; in Klimt’s study for figure of Wissen, 126; in Klinger’s Beethoven-­Denkmal, 111, 139; Nietzsche on, 127, 129; Rilke on, 118; in Rodin’s Penseur, 111, 118–­19, 126. See also gravity, subjection to

Sitwell, Osbert, 66 sleep/wakefulness, 6, 12, 21, 56, 112, 141, 181–­82. See also dreams/ dreaming sleepwalking. See somnambulism slide lectures, 217, 224, 225, 315n261 Société des Gens de Lettres, 122 soldiers/toy soldiers (Zinnfiguren), 48, 51–­52, 53, 73, 218, 272n100 somnambulism, 12, 57–­58, 63, 66, 75, 94–­95. See also dreams/dreaming; hypnosis/hypnotism soul/âme: lack of, 43–­44, 46, 74, 217; laughter and, 56; le moi (the me) and, 26, 262n114; revealed by body movement, 6, 48, 51. See also animation sperm, 160–­62, 161, 168, 191. See also biological reproduction Spinario, 76–­77, 77, 81, 90 stasis. See motion/stasis Steinen, Karl von den, 201 Stella, Frank, 27 stiffness (raideur): Bergson on, 56; in dreams, 180; in Egyptian art, 264n122; Hegel on, 264n122; in kouros, 29; in Manet, 17; in Nijinsky’s Faune, 172–­73, 177, 178, 205; Quin­tilian on, 29–­30; in Seurat’s Grande Jatte, 44, 46–­48, 51–­52, 60, 70, 75. See also suppleness (souplesse) Struss, Karl, 174, 222 subjectivity, 4, 5, 10, 234, 263n122 sublimation, 162, 182–­83, 185, 186, 194, 211, 213, 214, 239. See also repression suppleness (souplesse), 48–­50, 56, 70, 75, 176, 178. See also stiffness (raideur) Symbolism, 37, 42, 46, 47, 50–­51, 175, 190, 270n54 symmetry/asymmetry, 6, 26, 46, 50, 73, 238 Symons, Arthur, 117, 128, 193 Syrinx, 176, 182–­83, 186, 208 tail (queue), 40, 62–­66, 88, 153–­55, 160, 190, 191 Taine, Hippolyte, 33 Tarde, Gabriel, 57–­61, 66, 273n124, 273n126, 274n134. See also imitation/mimicry (singerie)

Index

[ 339 ]

tension/concentration/effort, 56, 82, 107–­8, 110, 117, 131–­32, 162 theater: arrangement of bodies in, 92, 93, 205; cinema and, 226; encores in, 228, 230, 231, 237; infantilism in, 211; Reliefbühne, 204, 315n259; sublimation in, 211; use of tableaux in, 171, 204, 226, 231, 232, 235, 319n327. See also Munich Artists’ Theater; Schauplatz der Träume (theater of dreams) thought (pensée): in Dürer’s Melencolia I, 113–­14; in Klinger’s Beethoven-­Denkmal, 115, 139, 148, 159; Lange on, 49; motif of the drooping head and, 114; in Rodin’s Monument to Balzac, 120, 122, 124, 194; in Rodin’s Penseur, 120; in Seurat’s Grande Jatte, 32, 44, 46, 51, 52, 66, 74; in Seurat’s Poseuses, 74, 82, 84–­85, 91; sleeping vs. waking, 181–­82, 182, 239; as “stirring one’s insides,” 262n114. See also “burden of the pride of thought”; unconscious thought processes thoughtlessness/thoughtfulness, 14, 82, 98, 110, 132, 182 three-­quarters views, 264n122, 264n129 Tikkanen, J. J., 78, 279n223 toes, in Rodin’s Penseur, 110, 118 torsion, 1, 4, 7, 25, 30, 46, 48, 50 torso, 1, 44, 48, 54, 76, 122, 172, 204, 217, 232 tournure. See bustle trance. See catalepsy; hypnosis/ hypnotism “tribal” art. See African sculpture Tugendkhol’d, Yakov, 199

[ 3 40 ]

unconscious thought processes: ­frontality and, 28, 263n122; in Klimt’s Beethovenfries, 135, 139, 141, 143, 144; mechanical imagery and, 9, 179; Nietzsche on, 127–­28, 145; in Nijinsky’s Faune, 179; study of, 57, 141; Symbolists’ interest in, 50–­51; visualization of, 12, 19, 139, 141, 180. See also automatic processes and behaviors; hypnosis/hypnotism uno crure insistere (standing on one leg), 26, 112, 262n115. See also

Index

contrap­posto; ponderation; weight distribution vagina. See genitals Van de Velde, Henry, 70, 73, 75 Vasari, Giorgio, 112 Vaudoyer, Jean-­Louis, 229–­30 Venus de’Medici, 78 Venus pudica, 78, 279n223 Véron, Eugène, 76 Virgil, Eclogues, 238 Vitet, Ludovic, 33 vivacity/vitality. See liveliness Vlaminck, Maurice de, 259n98 Vogel, Julius, 117 Vogt, Karl, 118, 289n76 Volkonskii, Sergei, 195, 226 Vuillermoz, Émile, 217, 226 Wagner, Cosima, 128, 293n118 Wagner, Johann Martin von, 84 Wagner, Richard, 85, 105, 137–­38, 226 Warburg, Aby, 255n52; on gestures in art, 13, 18, 19, 21, 22; on Manet, 14, 16; Mnemosyne Picture Atlas, 14, 15, 21, 255n56; on Ovidian imagery, 176, 178, 208. See also imaginary museums; Pathosformel Ward, Martha, 14, 23, 31, 94, 96, 267n22, 282n257 water/swimming, 146–­48, 195, 223. See also flight/flying Weber, Carl Maria von, 229 Wedekind, Frank, 196–­97, 205 weight distribution, 4, 21, 26, 44, 46, 48, 50, 74, 78, 112–­13, 137. See also contrapposto; uno crure insistere (standing on one leg) weight/heaviness/lightness, 17, 27, 111, 113–­18, 122, 132, 134, 143–­44, 146, 194 Weixlgärtner, Arpad, 135 will, 10, 82, 86, 130, 141 wish fulfillment, 180, 182, 185–­86, 188, 205, 207, 211, 230 Woermann, Karl, 24, 260n103 women: clothing or accessories of, 1, 46, 61, 65, 80, 81, 88, 274n147; feminism and, 86; femme nouvelle, 86; as modèles modernes, 88; as prostitutes, 60; psychological theories about, 12, 254n43; as thinkers,

86; as un­conscious automatons, 97; under­garments, 69–­70, 69, 88, 96. See also demoiselles de magasin; female figures woodenness. See stiffness (raideur) Woolf, Virginia, “The Cinema,” 225

working class/leisure class, 60, 81, 88 Wundt, Wilhelm, 11, 24 Yvon, Adolphe, 77 Zola, Émile, 60, 88, 274n147