Objects in Air: Artworks and Their Outside around 1900 9780226764801

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Objects in Air

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Objects in Air ... Artworks and Their Outside around 1900

Margareta Ingrid Christian

T he U ni v er sit y of C hicago Pr e ss C hi cago a nd 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 the United States of America 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21  1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­76477-­1 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­76480-­1 (e-­book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226764801.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Christian, Margareta Ingrid, author. Title: Objects in air : artworks and their outside around 1900 / Margareta Ingrid Christian. Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020048863 | ISBN 9780226764771 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226764801 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Air in art. | Space and time in art. | Arts, Modern—20th century. Classification: LCC NX650. A 37 C49 2021 | DDC 701/.8—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048863 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For my parents, and for Nora and Vera

Do you understand the power of form, of expression, of pretense, the arbitrary tyranny imposed on a helpless block, and ruling it like its own tyrannical, despotic soul? You give a head of canvas and oakum an expression of anger and leave it with it, with the convulsion, the tension enclosed once and for all, with a blind fury for which there is no outlet. . . . Weep . . . when you see the misery of imprisoned matter. Bruno Schulz, Sklepy Cynamonowe (The Street of Crocodiles)

Contents

I nt rod u ct ion

Artworks and Their Modalities of Egress 1 The Air within and without Artworks · 1 Politics of Extravagation · 8 Mesologies of Form · 10 Medium and Milieu, or the Material Spaces of Air · 13 World Loss, Sitelessness, and the Artwork’s Environments · 18 Aurai and Aura (Form and Space) · 20 Empathetic Artworks, Extensive Subjects · 23 c h apt e r 1

Aer, Aurae, Venti: Warburg’s Aerial Forms and Historical Milieus 25 Anima Fiorentina · 25 Inspiration · 29 Stimmung/Atmosphere · 34 Milieu as Air Ambiant · 36 The Accessories’ Milieu · 38 Botticelli’s Milieu · 39 The Physiology of Influence · 41 Disciplinary Milieus · 43 c h apt e r 2

Luftraum: Riegl’s Vitalist Mesology of Form 45 Horror vacui · 45 Umgebung · 48

Indehiscent Forms · 51 Cubic Space (“Air-­Filled Empty Space”) · 55 Air Space · 59 Respiración · 61 External Unity · 64 Kunstwollen · 67 c h apt e r 3

Saturated Forms: Rilke’s and Rodin’s Sculpture of Environment 71 Reticence and Radiance · 71 Aesthetico-­Biological Endeavors · 76 “Archaic Torso of Apollo” · 84 Aesthetic Metabolisms · 91 Absorbed Milieus · 94 Gravid Forms · 96 Forms Striving for Incompletion · 97 Temporal Ecstasis · 106 c h apt e r 4

The “Kinesphere” and the Body’s Other Spatial Envelopes in Rudolf Laban’s Theory of Dance 110 Choreutics · 110 Spatiomaterial Radiance · 115 Psychophysiologically Saturated Space · 120 Anima, Air, Atmosphere: Laban and Kandinsky · 126 Luftkur, Plein Air · 129 Dance’s Biological and Architectural Lifeworlds · 134 C oda

Space as Form · 143 Acknowledgments 149 Notes 153 Bibliography 211 Index 231

[   I nt rod u ct ion  ]

Artworks and Their Modalities of Egress

The Air within and without Artworks In his art writings, Rainer Maria Rilke observes that Rodin’s sculpture “exhales an atmosphere” and claims that Cézanne’s colors create “a calm, silken air” that pervades the empty rooms where the paintings are exhibited.1 Rilke suggests that sculpture and painting reach out to us, and in order to give weight to the idea that artworks “touch” us, he invokes the subtle materiality of air and atmosphere. He implies that when we perceive an artwork, we do not merely receive “forms without their matter,” as Aristotle suggests in De anima;2 instead, we perceive forms that convey to us some of their matter, albeit a very fine matter that is sensible the way the air is perceptible. Thus, in order to think the artwork’s ecstasis—its ability to “stand outside” of itself and affect us—Rilke posits air as the medium for its externalism. Taking my cue from Rilke, in this book I argue that the artwork’s external space becomes an aesthetic category in its own right in art writing around 1900. I contend that artworks continue beyond their material confines and that air is the embodiment of their continuity. In this sense, this book explores air as the material space surrounding an artwork, its milieu, and its environment in order to ask, What would an intellectual history of the idea of environment look like when told from the perspective of art writing around 1900? In contradistinction to recent studies in environmental aesthetics, which deal with the beauty of natural environments,3 this book addresses the aerial environments of the beautiful. The fact that I begin with Rilke—the poet who was engaged with art more than any other German writer of the twentieth century—is significant because Objects in Air is a literary study of art-­historical texts. It traces how Aby Warburg connects Botticelli’s representations of windblown accessories to the cultural “atmosphere” of the quattrocento; how Alois Riegl transgresses from the depicted “air space” (Luftraum) in a painting to the “palpable air circulation” around it; how Rilke mediates between what he 1

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Figure 0.1. Julius Yls, Interesting Moment. Photo © Julius Yls

describes as the inner “milieu” of Rodin’s statues and their external “atmosphere;” and how Rudolf Laban envisions unbounded dances in which movements mold not only the body but also its external, spatial envelope. I examine the language of these writers closely, and I persist with their texts’ paradoxes and contradictions—in general, with their texts’ linguistic labor— until they reveal their positive meaning, until they disclose the tenuous arguments that at times they appear to be at pains to conceal. By asking about the vocabularies that ground the artwork’s ecstasy, I show the literary dimension of art-­historical discourse. I thereby reveal how art history writing makes us receptive to ecstatic qualities in art. In his 1902 monograph on Rodin, Rilke notes that Rodin read Baudelaire and, through his sculptor’s perspective, saw verses that jutted out and appeared “to be formed more than written, . . . lines like reliefs to the touch, and sonnets like columns with twisted capitals.”4 Whereas in Rodin’s sculptural gaze, literary language acquires extensive qualities and stands out from the page like a relief or a column, in this book, it is conversely through the literary dimensions of art history that artworks extravagate, that they enact their “out-­standingness.”5 This book engages in a dual undertaking. On the one hand, it has a materialist impetus insofar as it contends that what Gaston Bachelard called the “very thin matter of air” enables the artwork to reach out and touch us.6 On the other hand, it has a figurative thrust insofar as it builds its arguments on analyses of the poetic aspects of art writing.

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Figure 0.2. Thomas Struth, Rijksmuseum 1, Amsterdam 1990. Chromogenic print; 641/2 × 831/2 in. Catalog 4121. © Thomas Struth

In 2017 the second place winner in National Geographic’s yearly travel photography contest was a photograph of Rembrandt’s Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild taken by a contestant named Julius Yls and titled Interesting Moment (fig. 0.1). The image, which won in the “People” category, captures how Rembrandt’s men, by looking intently outward, extend the framework of the painting to include the viewers. Whether knowingly or not, 2017’s National Geographic winner is referencing Thomas Struth’s famous series of Museum Photographs, in particular, his work titled Rijksmuseum 1, Amsterdam 1990 (1990), which shows a woman turning away from Rembrandt’s Syndics (fig. 0.2). Struth, the first living artist to have had his work featured in the Metropolitan Museum’s Great Hall, is interested in the encounter between the artwork and its surrounding space, including the architectural details of the museum and the particularities of the visitors. Both Yls’s image and Struth’s photograph capture Rembrandt’s Syndics in its emphatic address of the onlooker; they emphasize the artwork reaching out to the viewer. Whereas in Yls’s National Geographic photograph the syndics’ gaze ripples forth into modes of collective looking outside of the painting, in Struth’s image, one of the very few staged ones, the woman’s gaze doubles the syndics,’ and the colors she is wearing mirror those of the painting.7 Both photographs capture artworks not in their self-­containment but rather in their ecstasis, that

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Figure 0.3. Dirck Jacobsz, Group Portrait of the Amsterdam Shooting Corporation, 1532. Found in the collection of the State Hermitage, St. Petersburg. Photo: HIP / Art Resource, NY

is, in their ability to step outside of themselves into the spaces environing them, in their capacity to mediate between aesthetic space and real space. The Austrian art historian Alois Riegl, whose book The Group Portraiture of Holland (1902) offers one of the most compelling studies of spectatorship, was among the first to study Rembrandt’s Syndics in terms of its capacity to be drawn outside of itself into the space of the viewer. Although for the National Geographic contestant and for Struth the painting’s extravagation becomes recognizable through the mediation of photography, for Riegl, the painting’s externalism comes into its own through the mediation of language. For him, the Dutch group portraits’ projection outward goes hand in hand with their ability to depict what he terms the Luftraum, the “air space,” between the depicted members of a group. What does he mean by Luftraum? It is a key word that plays an important role in Riegl’s writing and that appears prominently not only in his study of Dutch group portraiture but also in his major work, The Late Roman Art Industry (1901). Whereas an early group portrait such as Dirck Jacobsz’s Group Portrait of the Amsterdam Shooting Corporation (1532) (fig. 0.3) shows the figures spatially isolated from one another insofar as they appear to be standing in front of a two-­dimensional plane and not within a three-­dimensional common

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Figure. 0.4. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Sampling Officials of the Amsterdam Drapers’ Guild, also known as The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild, 1662. Oil on canvas, 751/2 × 110 in. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

space, a later group portrait such as Rembrandt’s Syndics (1662) (fig. 0.4) represents figures as spatially unified, as situated in an immersive air space. The latter suggests that air can circulate among the members of the group and that they are all breathing the same air. Riegl contends that as group portraits become better at representing air space, they also become better at establishing the group’s unity: when compared with figures on earlier group portraits, Rembrandt’s figures share a common psychological quality of attentiveness, and they are caught in the same temporal moment and the same space. Significantly, however, their inner unity extends into an external unity with the viewer: that is, the more unified the figures are among themselves, the more unified their gaze at the viewer. When Riegl claims that the painting’s inner and outer unity go hand in hand, he implies that with air space, the planar space behind the figures is transformed into a three-­ dimensional space that does not stop at the depicted figures’ boundaries but rather pro­jects forth, beyond the confines of the artwork, into the “air space” of the onlooker. This outward projection helps to constitute the ultimate group of group portraiture: the group that includes the spectator. Riegl grapples with the Syndics’ extensiveness like Struth and the National Geographic contestant after him. While all three explore the artwork’s ability to reach out to the viewer, Riegl’s writing, in its repeated reliance on the idea of Luftraum, suggests that the vehicle of the artwork’s ecstasis is air. Much

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like in his earlier book Late Roman Art Industry (1901)—in which Riegl, looking at a sarcophagus relief, notes that the relief ’s depicted air space is continuous with “real respiration,” with the “palpable air circulation”8 around the sarcophagus—in his book on group portraiture he suggests that the represented air space within Rembrandt’s Syndics is continuous with the actual air space without it. Thereby, Riegl establishes a continuity between the aerial surrounds of depicted figures and the aerial environment of artworks, pointing to the continuity between image space and corporeal space, between what, in Christian Hartard’s terms, we can call the artwork’s “fictive visuality” and its “real objecthood.”9 This book takes such evocations of air within and without an artwork— evocations that cut across the separate realms of reference between artwork as image and as material object—as a starting point for examining how art writing thinks the space outside of works of art at the turn of the twentieth century. It investigates the artwork’s external space as an aesthetic category in its own right and it asks, What is the medium of the artwork’s externalism? I contend that air, the medium of continuity par excellence—the mediator between inner breath and external wind, between creative inspiration and physiological respiration—is where art writing enacts the permeable boundaries between art and life. The book explores air in its various capacities—as wind and atmosphere—to turn the indiscriminate space surrounding artworks into environments. Drawing on the history of science, it studies evocations of air as the material spaces of Milieu (milieu), Umgebung (surroundings), and Umwelt (environment), and it examines air as the site of aesthetic ecologies. In its pursuit of artworks and their unbounded forms, this book aims to recover an alternative narrative to that of the organic aesthetic form and that of the modernist self-­contained artwork. The book diverges from aestheticist discourses that, reveling in the self-­sufficiency of the work of art, view the intermingling of art and life as untenable. This project also diverges from many recent studies concerned with empathy aesthetics because it focuses not on viewers that pro­ject themselves into artworks but rather on artworks that stand outside of themselves. Furthermore, in its interest in the continuity between form and space, the book invites us to historicize the immersive spatial “environments” of minimalism from the 1960s onward and to consider their origins in turn-­of-­the-­twentieth-­century aesthetics. In their suggestion that artworks overstep their physical boundaries and reach into the spaces environing them, the writers on art that I examine in this book anticipate Martin Heidegger’s later ecstatic notion of the artwork. Heidegger, to be sure, introduces the term ecstasis not in a spatial but rather in a temporal context in Being and Time, in which it refers to

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Dasein’s standing outside of itself through temporality.10 In chapter 3, on Rilke and Rodin, I discuss in some detail Rilke’s understanding of the sculptures’ temporal ecstasis in relation to Heidegger’s term, though on the whole the book proposes a spatial understanding of the ecstatic.11 While diverging from Heidegger’s ecstatic temporality, the texts I examine nevertheless have an affinity with Heidegger’s notion of aesthetic spatiality, especially with his claim that the artwork engenders a world around itself and with his contention that sculpture collects around itself spatial domains or realms of heightened presence.12 Thus, the texts I study anticipate Heidegger’s conception of sculpture in terms of what Andrew J. Mitchell describes as “a material space of radiance” in which sculptural “bodies move past themselves, entering a space that is always receiving them to communicate and commingle in the physicality of the world.”13 When in “Art and Space” Heidegger ponders the relation between the volume of space enclosed within a sculptural block and the space that the sculpture “collects” without itself, he envisions this relation not as one of demarcation but rather of fluidity: Sculpture would be the embodiment of places. Places, in preserving and opening a region, hold something free [ein Freies in the sense of “an opening”] gathered around them. . . . If it stands thus, what becomes of the volume of the sculptured, place-­embodying structures? Presumably, volume will no longer demarcate spaces from one another, in which surfaces surround an inner opposed to an outer.14

Sculpture, as an embodiment of place, does not set itself apart from the space around it; instead, its forms are the means of its ecstasy, and its surfaces are the vehicle of its unboundedness. This is apparent in Rilke’s reading of Rodin, in which statues have surfaces that seem so ridden by atmospheric, climactic conditions that they ripple forth into their environment, that they appear continuous with their surroundings like statues in the open air whose surfaces are exposed to the elements. Furthermore, by playing with light and shadow on his statues’ surfaces, Rodin envelopes those surfaces in a sculptural chiaroscuro in the vein of Rembrandt until the statues appear continuous with their spatial surrounds, vibrating forth into their “atmosphere.” Drawing on Mitchell, we can say that Rilke and the other writers on art that this book studies view the artwork’s “limit permissively,” showing how it is not “a border of confinement but one of introduction.”15 It is tempting to think that such evocations of the continuity between an artwork’s depicted air and its actual air are inherent to the medium of sculpture. For in a group sculpture, such as the statue of Laocoön and His Sons,

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the air among the figures is necessarily also the air between the figures and viewer. In his Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel describes sculpture’s “sensuous spatiality” (sinnlich[e] Räumlichkeit),16 which implies that a statue’s space is accessible to the senses of a viewer in a way that a two-­dimensional painted figure’s space is not.17 Hegel suggests that a statue’s space is continuous with that of the viewer and, we can add, that air is a particularly apt embodiment of this sensory continuity. In this book, however, fluid transitions between internal and external air go beyond the “sculptural imagination” around 1900.18 They pertain to evocations of air as the sensuous space not only of sculpture but also of painting and dance. In writings of the period, various artworks become continuous with the space environing them; they “overspill their form,” to use a phrase by Deleuze and Guattari,19 and reach into their immediate aerial environment. This overspill appears forcefully in Laban’s theory of dance and his concept of the Körperumraum (literally, surrounding space body).20 In the latter, Laban moves fluidly between the corporeal forms and the spatial shapes of dance: he implies that the dancer not only forms her body but also molds the space around herself until body and space become continuous in kinetic figures. The dance cannot be corporeally contained by the dancer: in a manner that recalls the cubist coconstitution of figure and ground, the dancer “ex-­ists” beyond the limits of her body.21 Laban’s spatial extension of dance goes hand in hand with his more general freeing of dance from constraints (such as music or drama) and his consequent conception of a “free” dance for which dancing in the open air became important. Dancing en plein air, as in the artists’ colony on Monte Verità in Ascona, instantiated modern dance’s variously conceived freedoms, including its freedom from “solid material boundaries.”22

Politics of Extravagation Laban, to be sure, is a highly problematic figure. From 1934 until 1937, when he emigrated to England, he served as the director of the German Dance Theater under the jurisdiction of Joseph Goebbels’s Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Although his work was eventually deemed “hostile to the State,”23 Laban was involved with the National Socialists for at least three years, and his involvement points to structural affinities between an aesthetic of unstilled margins and political discourse in the first part of the twentieth century. It is no coincidence that art writings interested in the space surrounding an artwork—in what we can describe as its environmentality, its Umgebung, Umwelt, Umraum, and Milieu—coincide with a geopolitical interest in

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environing space around 1900. This interest, epitomized in the ideology of Lebensraum (living space), points to the way in which similar conceptual frameworks could be appropriated for different ends. It is telling that Leo Spitzer’s work on the historical semantics of milieu introduces Laban’s notion of dance space in the context of Lebensraum.24 Aesthetic and political thought since the eighteenth century, roughly since Kant and Herder, had a shared understanding of their object of study—of the artwork and the state respectively—as an “organism.” The biogeography of Friedrich Ratzel, who used Lebensraum for the first time explicitly, shows how around 1900 the notion of the state organism was equipped with a biological vocabulary that could scientifically legitimize and naturalize imperial ambitions of spatial expansion.25 Charles Darwin’s work also hovers above both aesthetics and politics, and all of the figures in this book, from Warburg to Laban, are explicitly in dialogue with Darwin. One of the earliest iterations of Lebensraum appeared in a German review of On the Origin of Species (1859) written by the biologist Oscar Penschel; the review coined Lebensraum as a term for the English habitat and the French milieu.26 Politicized evolutionary ecology justified the state’s stepping beyond its national borders precisely to strengthen its autarky, its economic self-­sufficiency, and racial purity. This geopolitical dynamic of overspill bears structural resemblances to the aesthetic dynamic of ecstasis that this book traces: in some of their writings, Riegl and Rilke are intent on reconceiving the artwork’s stepping beyond its material borders as a self-­enclosure, as an ecstatic enstasis in which the boundaries of the work of art have been redrawn to include its outside. To further understand terminological affinities but also ideological divergences between aesthetic and political discourse in the period, one could consider the semantic resemblance between Lebensraum and Karl Wolfs­ kehl’s term Daseinsbezirk (domain of being) from his essay “Lebensluft” (“Air of Life,” 1929), which influenced Walter Benjamin’s aura concept.27 Whereas Lebensraum encapsulated political goals of territorial expansion in Wilhelmine and Nazi Germany, Daseinsbezirk inspired Benjamin’s later belief that the loss of an artwork’s aura, of its “domain of being,” enabled an aesthetic opposition to fascism. Aesthetic and political conceptions of surrounding space diverge further when it comes to their elemental mediality: the concept of Lebensraum goes hand in hand with an agrarian-­Germanic ideology of “blood and soil.” Arguably, this ideology is reflected in Heidegger’s aesthetic environmentality understood in terms of “earth.” By contrast, the texts I explore conceive of artworks’ externalism in terms of air. There is, thus, a political dimension to the spatial ecology of media. The term Luftmensch (air person), a popular metaphor around 1900, encapsulates one such dimension: Luftmensch, initially a Yiddish word, was appro-

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priated by the National Socialists to designate all Jews. It “thematized the purported elemental opposition between Jews and their environments”28 insofar as Jews were supposed to be rootless and inhabit an aerial realm, an “ether of ideals,”29 whereas a “German’s” natural elements were allegedly “land, earth, soil.”30 Whereas Benjamin finds an artwork’s aerial envelope, its aura, politically suspect, the National Socialists frame aerial lifeworlds as dubious, showing how air could be adapted for different ideological ends. The cultural and national essentialism that subtends nineteenth-­century discourses of milieu—an essentialism that underlies not only Laban’s but also Riegl’s work—adds a further dimension to the political implications of extravagation and air. One of the aims of this book is to trace a model of aesthetic externalism that predates Walter Benjamin’s aura as cultic enclosure in the 1930s and that relies instead on an economy of fluidity, openness, and relationality. I am interested in this economy of unstilled margins as a moment in which the artwork is unified with its outside as with its other. However, as Lebensraum shows, this very dynamic of unstilled margins could also figure in different ideological projects in which the extravagation is not aesthetic but rather geopolitical and in which the oneness is not with “the other” but rather with nationalist and racially homogeneous groups. This homogeneity is particularly evident in the collective rhythm of Laban’s movement choirs, which are problematic in view of his penchant for thinking in terms of national and racial categories and in view of his choreographing of mass dances in the 1930s. In what follows, I would like to contextualize the aesthetic idea of unbounded form and to historicize the medium of its unboundedness, the air. By drawing on scientific notions of material space, I show that the “very thin matter of air” is a quintessential figuration of material expressions of space such as an artwork’s “milieu” or “environment.”

Mesologies of Form Notions of an artwork’s integrity and autonomy are common in turn-­of-­the-­ twentieth-­century aesthetics, and they are particularly evident in references to artworks as “organisms.”31 In The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts (1893), Adolf Hildebrand refers to the artwork as an “artistic organism” (künstle­ rische[r] Organismus) while emphasizing its enclosure: “The artwork is an active whole, self-­contained and based upon itself, and it contrasts this separately existing reality with nature.”32 A few years later, Wilhelm Worringer will reaffirm in Abstraction and Empathy (1907) the independence of the artwork-­organism: “Our investigations proceed from the presupposition

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that the work of art, as an autonomous organism, stands beside nature on equal terms and, in its deepest and innermost essence, is devoid of any connection with it.”33 Worringer’s claim, even as it denies the relation between artwork and nature, affirms the analogy between artwork and organism, illustrating thereby the centrality of the notion of the “organic” in conceptualizing the artwork’s self-­enclosure. Since underlying the idea of organism was what Amanda Jo Goldstein, in her recent book Sweet Science (2017), terms an autotelic logic of self-­organization, aesthetics resorted to the idea of organism to postulate the artwork’s self-­sufficiency.34 Although organic conceptions of form go back to Aristotle, who defined form alongside matter in Physics to explain the process of change in the natural world, the specific parallel between artwork and organism goes back to the beginnings of biology in late eighteenth-­century natural philosophy— in particular, to what Goldstein describes as Kant’s “conjoined discourses of organism and aesthetics” in the Critique of Judgment (1790).35 As Goldstein points out, “Kant in effect converted the problem motivating early biology (whence organization?) into its premise (organisms are self-­organizing).”36 For Kant, a natural object such as a tree is an “organized being” (i.e., an organism) in the sense that it relates to itself as both cause and effect.37 Whereas an organism is a self-­sufficient entity, aesthetic judgment entails “inner purposiveness.”38 Thus, aesthetic judgment relies on a mechanism of self-­enclosure that is analogous to an organism’s structure of onto-­itselfness. Given this tradition of affinity between aesthetic and biological form and their shared self-­sufficiency, how are we to understand evocations of artworks as “ecstatic objects,” that is, as objects that push beyond their limits and transcend themselves? How are we to grasp the artwork-­organism when it goes beyond its bounds, when it extravagates into the space of the beholder as Rembrandt’s Syndics do in Riegl’s reading? Indeed, it is Riegl’s writings that offer us a clue. In Late Roman Art Industry, Riegl repeatedly addresses a new notion of form that he sees exemplified in impressionism’s tendency to unify forms with their atmosphere. Underlying this notion of form is a new understanding of the organism as no longer self-­ enclosed but rather as imbricated with a milieu; in Riegl’s words, with an Umgebung (surroundings). As if in direct refutation of Kant’s example of the tree as representing an autonomous being, Riegl adduces the example of a tree that is “a collective being” rather than “a unit through its closed, individual form.”39 With the example of the tree, Riegl reconceives the “organic” form not in terms of a vitalist integrity but rather as a collective unity dependent on external conditioning. Artworks are thus “organisms” not in the sense in which these were understood in late eighteenth-­century biology but rather in the sense they were apprehended in the context of nineteenth-­

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century biological theories of milieu.40 Riegl references Hippolyte Taine’s tripartite dictum of “race, milieu, moment”; he writes about Darwin’s theory of evolution; and he mentions cell biology’s material milieus. Furthermore, the word Umgebung, a precursor to the later concept of Umwelt (environment), used in the nineteenth century as a synonym for milieu, is a keyword in both Late Roman Art Industry and The Group Portraiture of Holland. It thereby becomes apparent that artworks resemble organisms that extend into their surroundings as articulated, for instance, in Heidegger’s claim that “the human is not limited by the superfice of his supposed body”; instead, to quote from Mitchell’s exegesis of Heidegger, “we always extend beyond the skin, with the body a perpetual entrance to the world.”41 When Warburg writes about an artwork’s “environment” (Umwelt), Rilke references a sculpture’s “milieu,” and Laban theorizes dance’s “environing space” (Umraum), they reveal the transfer of knowledge between the sciences and the arts in the period. Taine’s historical positivism, insofar as it entwines aesthetics with biomechanism, is a particularly resonant instance of this transfer and one that plays an important role for the writers I examine in this book—writers preoccupied with the relation between form and space and, more broadly, with the continuity between the artwork and its environment.42 For them, the artwork’s ecstasis goes hand in hand with a reconceptualization of the organism’s autopoiesis in terms of its external determinacy, indeed, its permeability with the outside. It seems that, although trying to continue his teacher Robert Zimmermann’s study of pure form as laid out in his General Aesthetics as Science of Form (1865), Riegl’s work, along with that of other art historians’, must contend with a different kind of “form-­science,” namely, one espoused by the zoologist Ernst Haeckel in his General Morphology of Organisms, subtitled General Outline of the Science of Organic Forms, published one year after Zimmermann’s brand of “form-­science” in 1866.43 Insofar as they consider the relation between form and milieu, the texts this book studies entwine aesthetic and biological forms under the auspices of an ecologically oriented morphology. Ecology, defined by Haeckel in his General Morphology as the “science that deals with the relationship between an organism and its surrounding external world,”44 while at odds with an aesthetic discourse that emphasizes the internal unity and autonomy of the artwork, is consistent with writings on art that explore artworks as unbounded objects. In this book, I focus on “the surrounding external world” of artworks while tracing the continuities, indeed the untenable limits, between an artwork and its space. Georges Canguilhem tellingly described milieu as a domain in which “the individuality of the living does not come to an end at its ectodermal

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boundaries.”45 If milieu is thus the space of an artwork’s ecstasy, what is the medium of its extravagation? Riegl continues to provide us answers: he uses Umgebung (surroundings) and Luftraum (air space) interchangeably and implies that air is the medium for the forms’ extravagating corporeality.46 This correlation between milieu and air is suggested not only by Riegl but also by Warburg, who conceives of the artwork’s environment in terms of what was “in the air” in Florence in the quattrocento; by Rilke, who thinks of the “air” and “atmosphere” around Rodin’s sculptures as their self-­generated milieu; and by Laban, who describes the space form (Umraumform) created by the dancer as a fluid. Leo Spitzer proves this correlation philologically in his formidable study “Milieu and Ambiance: An Essay in Historical Semantics,” in which he shows that the French expression milieu ambiant (environment) relied on the semantic field of air ambiant, meaning the space around an organism or an object, which envelops it and is closest to it.47 With air as the medium of the artwork’s ecstasis, aesthetic effects are no longer ontologically grounded in form; instead, they are deterritorialized onto forms’ relationality with their outside, into the material space of air and milieu. Since air signifies both the milieu and the medium of the artwork’s “ecstatic corporeality,”48 I turn, in what follows, to a brief history of air as a material expression of space.49

Medium and Milieu, or the Material Spaces of Air Art-­historical engagements with air around 1900 crystallize a crucial moment in the history of science when the categories of matter and space become problematic at the same time. While the idea that space is pervaded by a fluid such as air is an ancient theory,50 the fascination with subtly material spaces emerges around 1900 from an important scientific discourse in the late nineteenth-­century when a series of discoveries rattled the traditional categories of matter and space. The discovery of radioactivity in 1896 suggested that matter was not solidly circumscribed but radiated into its surroundings; electromagnetic fields suggested that the void of space might be filled with a subtle matter; and the discovery of the electron in 1897 transformed matter into a collection of particles whose perpetual mobility undermined matter’s stably circumscribed boundaries.51 The idea that space and matter cannot be clearly extricated from one another was also echoed in theories of the ether, with which it became increasingly difficult to establish where matter ends and space begins—indeed, they were continuous.52 Ether blurred the distinction between matter and space by rarefying matter and substantializing space.

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In his book The New Scientific Spirit, Gaston Bachelard traces modern postulations about matter and space to materialist conceptions of the seventeenth century, the century that produced Rembrandt’s materialized spaces of chiaroscuro as well as Velázquez’s atmospheric spaces of respiración— with which Riegl’s notion of air space (Luftraum) is in dialogue. Bachelard shows how in the seventeenth century, materialism precluded action at a distance: in other words, an object, a piece of matter localized in one place, was conceived as incapable of producing effects at points in space other than where it was located. Since matter was conceived as fixed and contained, it became necessary to introduce an all pervasive yet elusive pseudomatter that could carry the effects of matter elsewhere in space. Bachelard writes, “To correct for this utterly abstract and geometric localization [for an immovably localized matter], materialism equipped itself with a physics of fluids, exhalations, and spirits. . . . It was all too easy to ascribe movement to one vague fluid or another, whose sole function was to convey elsewhere the usual properties of matter.”53 Since matter could not figure as the cause for effects located elsewhere in space, it became necessary to introduce an intermittent factor between matter as cause and its effect, a fluid medium that carries effects elsewhere in space. Descartes’s matière subtile is such a medium, one that Newton adopts as spiritus subtilis and that, Leo Spitzer points out, “anticipates the ether of modern physics.”54 In eighteenth-­ century natural philosophy, ether, understood as a tenuous substance that permeates empty space, was posited as a medium for the transmission of light and thus as a way to explain action at a distance.55 Air, however, was in currency as an alternative fluidal concept to the ether.56 Newton, who in his Opticks (1704) regarded ether as continuous with air,57 thus argued that material objects attracted one another through emanations produced by the action of the ether, the air, or another medium.58 Newton’s medium is translated by seventeenth-­century French physicists into the word milieu, which initially meant “middle” in the sense of its Latin etymon medius locus.59 Newton used medium to mean the ethereal intermediary agent between two bodies. With its transposition into the French milieu, the sense changed to mean the fluid enveloping these bodies. In the nineteenth century, milieu develops from the subtle medium of physics into the environment of a living being in biology and, eventually, in sociology it becomes the milieu that determines a person’s life. With time, the emphasis merely shifted from concepts of a mechanical milieu (such as air or water, in which organisms are immersed) to a conception of milieu understood, in Comte’s words, as “the sum total of outside circumstances necessary to the existence of each organism.”60 The word was popularized by Taine, who took the biomecha-

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nistic notion of milieu and applied it to literature and art. In the second half of the nineteenth century, milieu is translated into German as Umwelt.61 It is adopted by the biogeographer Friedrich Ratzel and is eventually popularized by the biologist Jakob von Uexküll.62 However, as Spitzer shows, surviving in the concept of milieu throughout its history is the notion of a material space such as air. When Warburg understands Renaissance paintings’ Umwelt as the cultural “atmosphere” enveloping them or when Rilke thinks about the milieu of Rodin’s sculptures in terms of “air,” they reactivate the semantic history of milieu as air. They conceive of artworks as enacting their encounterability by stepping forth into the real spaces environing them, into their aerial and atmospheric milieus. The artwork’s ecstasis has a spatiomaterial dimension, that is, a dimension that depends on the mingling between space and matter. Not unlike the Neoplatonist Proclus, for whom “space . . . [was] a corporeal, animate substance which, through the penetrative force of air, is infused in matter;”63 and not unlike the pre-­Socratic monist Anaximenes, for whom matter was a form of densified air, the Italian futurist Umberto Boccioni claimed in 1911 that “solid bodies are only atmosphere condensed.”64 With this statement, Boccioni perpetuated the view that matter and space are continuous. The subtle materiality of air was the embodiment of this continuum. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the occult saw an opportunity in the new discoveries of physics: it fed on its contestation of matter and its corresponding rethinking of space. Science’s own forays into seemingly metaphysical realities offered an occasion for the occult and for esoteric currents of thought such as theosophy to legitimize their own ventures into extrasensory realms.65 In 1887–1888, Heinrich Hertz proved James Clerk Maxwell’s theory that an electrical current does not flow in a copper wire but rather in alternating fields around the wire.66 The following passage from “A Record of Observations of Certain Phenomena of Trance,” written by the British physicist Oliver Lodge, illustrates the way in which scientific discoveries, such as electromagnetic radiation, could be coopted for occult and esoteric phenomena of emanation: That the brain is the organ of consciousness is patent, but that consciousness is located in the brain is what no psychologist ought to assert; for just as the energy of an electric charge, though apparently on a conductor, is not on the conductor, but in all the space around it; just as the energy of an electric current, though apparently in the copper wire, is certainly not all in the copper wire . . . ; so it may be that the sensory consciousness of

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a person, though apparently located in his brain, may be conceived of as also existing like a faint echo in space, or in other brains, though these are ordinarily too busy and pre-­occupied to notice it.67

Lodge’s space that bears the “energy of an electric charge” represents well the idea of auratic space prevalent in occult and esoteric discourses in the period. Lodge’s space is infused with displaced effects: it results from a problem of displacement in the sense that the current is not “where it should be,” in the wire, but rather somewhere else in the environing space. The energy of an electric charge is not in the conductor but rather in the space around it. Similarly, consciousness, according to Lodge, is dislocated from its organ, the brain, and scattered outside, in space. Such scientific phenomena of externalism substantiated occult fantasies of emanation. (The occult envisioned a whole array of effluvia radiating from a human being manifesting thoughts, dreams, and emotions.)68 Whereas the nineteenth century’s most recent fluid, electricity, produced visions of charged space arising around objects, occult and esoteric effluvia produced fantasies of auratic space appearing around bodies.69 These fantasies resurfaced in art writings around 1900, for instance, in Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911). Kandinsky’s text follows up on Rilke’s earlier claim that sculptures “exhale an atmosphere” by suggesting that the work of art is a “spiritually breathing subject” that “touches” us by “pouring forth,” “vibrating,” and “spreading” beyond its material limits.70 In Kandinsky’s description, the artwork is symptomatic of a problem of containment: like the occult’s emanating bodies, it cannot delimit itself; it spills over into its surrounding space. However, this environment functions in a dual sense for the work of art: it is both its medium of exteriorization and its milieu of aesthetic subsistence.71 Around 1900 evocations of fluids such as air, ether, and effluvia are symptomatic of an overarching interest in something that fluidal spaces themselves instantiate: namely, the concrete medium that surrounds one, the environment. The theme of air as a realm of habitation, as a concrete milieu of existence that determines the processes of life, was in high currency in the period. By the nineteenth century air was less and less inhabited by spirits and increasingly populated by bacteria. It served not only as a concrete physical milieu for microbes but also as a healing medium for diseases. In his popular scientific lecture “Regarding Good and Bad Air” (1880), the physician Agathon Wernich regards “bad air” as an invisible medium that harbors dangerous forces in the form of disease-­carrying microorganisms; it is a literal form of mal-­aria.72 Whereas vitiated air was regarded as a carrier

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of many diseases, fresh air was seen as a remedy for various illnesses. Thus, the Luftkur (air cure), a form of climate therapy meant for the treatment of tuberculosis, aimed to harness the healing properties of air.73 Not unlike in ancient times when “air baths” were recommended as ways of hardening one’s organism, around 1900 Luftbäder were prescribed as ways of fortifying the body and healing tuberculosis.74 Around the turn of the century, there was thus a heightened attention to air as the concrete space that surrounds one. Air was endowed with an increased significance as it became a realm that harbors countless invisible processes whose effects were concretely apprehensible. The discovery of new media—such as the telegraph and radio—problematized air as the space in which telegraphic impulses and radio waves travel.75 Aviation and telegraphy made the air into their new domain of work and, thereby, extended the space of the senses.76 These technological innovations served to extend the awareness of air as a human environment.77 However, as Paul Rabinow points out in his book French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment, the “geographic and geological ecology of fluids,” and we may add, the medial one, were expanded with “attention to the social dimension.”78 In other words, air as a concrete, physical milieu paralleled another sort of milieu, namely the social environment, something in the vein of Durkheim’s milieu social. This book claims that the artwork’s externalism turns on the dual medial nature of air, that is, its ability to be both a physical medium and a biological-­ sociological milieu. On the one hand, air is conceived as a vehicle of propagation for aesthetic effects that reach us—as such, it is the artwork’s space of reception (for instance, the Luftraum of group portraiture for Riegl or the atmosphere of sculpture for Rilke). On the other hand, air is posited as a milieu in which the artwork’s singularity does not come to an end at its material boundaries—as such, it is the artwork’s space of production (e.g., the cultural “atmosphere” and sociological milieu of quattrocento Florence for Warburg). Air reveals the intersections between the media-­theoretical notion of medium and the biological concept of milieu at the turn of the twentieth century. It is both the medium for the artwork’s ecstasis—insofar as it is the vehicle for its effect on the viewer, for its action at a distance as it reaches out to us—and the milieu—insofar as it is a realm that reveals the nebulous boundaries between the artwork’s individuality and its spatial context’s collectivity. This book undertakes to show that aesthetic discourses concerned with the artwork’s ability to engender its own space—discourses elaborated, for instance, by Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger—must be understood historically in the context of a reverse discourse, namely, one

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that turns on artworks as products of the spaces around them, of their milieu. Indeed, this book explores the continuity between artworks as both producers and products of their environs.

World Loss, Sitelessness, and the Artwork ’ s Environments The question of how art writing understands the artwork’s external space around 1900 must engage with the fact that starting with the rise of public exhibitions in the eighteenth century, artworks began to lose the original places that housed them.79 Around 1900 this sense of loss is particularly acute: in his treatise City Planning According to Artistic Principles (1889), the Austrian town planner and architect Camillo Sitte laments that Michelangelo’s statue of David had been moved from its native place chosen by the sculptor (namely, next to the entrance to the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence) and had been placed instead into an “art prison” called a “museum.”80 Similarly, in The Problem of Form (1893), Hildebrand bemoans the practice of spatially exposing monuments on plazas and thereby robbing them of their original connection with an architectural structure. Echoing Sitte, Hildebrand argues that the spatially disengaged sculpture is like an object in “solitary confinement” doing a “convict’s work.”81 Thus, when Rilke claims that sculptures, such as those by Rodin, are no longer appropriate for the space of a cathedral and are thus “homeless,” he is in dialogue with a discourse prevalent in the art history writing of his time, a discourse that, since Krauss’s essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” (1979), we have come to understand as the artwork’s “sitelessness,” its “absolute loss of place.”82 When Benjamin writes, years after Rilke, that the artwork is no longer “embedded” in tradition and ritual,83 and when Heidegger notes that works of art, placed into a museum collection, are “torn out of their own essential space” and displaced from their world,84 they both articulate an aesthetic theory that engages the artwork’s loss of its concrete exterior place and the thematization thereof in turn-­of-­the-­twentieth-­century art writing. Their approaches to this loss will be different: for Benjamin, the artwork’s commodification (as a photographic reproduction) is concomitant with its loss of the material space of aura; for Heidegger, by contrast, the artwork’s “world withdrawal” and “world decay”85 will be countered by meditations on the artwork’s ability to engender its own world, its capacity “to set up a world” from within itself.86 Whereas for Benjamin the artwork’s loss of place goes hand in hand with its loss of aura, for Heidegger the artwork’s spatial bereavement is all the more an occasion to ponder, in Mitchell’s phrase, its “material space of radiance.”87 The artwork’s loss of its locus naturalis

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thus accentuates the external spatiality of art and enables art history writings to begin to conceptualize this otherwise recalcitrant category of aesthetic space. In the context of the work of art’s loss of world—its transfer into museums and galleries—aesthetic discussions of its concrete environment function as discursive acts of world making. When Warburg writes about Umwelt, Riegl about Umgebung, Rilke about Milieu, and Laban about Umraum, they are all engaged in world building around the artwork in what Laban describes as “dancerly world giving” (tänzerisches Weltgeben).88 Having been extricated from its space of ritual and tradition, the work of art becomes accessible to analyses interested in its real spaces: its spaces of production and reception. Reflections on the artwork’s enveloping air are thus concomitant with the artwork’s objecthood, with its real contextual being as an object among other objects in space.89 (Warburg and Riegl see the artwork as participating in a broader material culture shared with mere objects such as belt buckles, earrings, stamps, and newspaper clippings.) This concomitance is evident, for example, in the rise of an art history that moves from aura-­based theories of genius and inspiration to an art history inflected by historical positivism and cultural history, both of which explore the artwork’s contextual presence. In this sense, the aesthetic reflections this book investigates diverge from Benjamin’s model because they regard the artwork’s continuity with its aerial milieu not as a sign of cultic (auratic) enclosure but rather as one of uncontainment: the artwork is beyond itself not in its auratic autonomy but rather in its aerial milieu of determinacy and relationality. In 2017, the same year that National Geographic published the photograph of Rembrandt’s Syndics extending into their outside space, the Guggenheim also realized, for the first time, one of the immersive environments of the American artist Doug Wheeler. Initially conceived in 1971, PSAD Synthetic Desert III (fig. 0.5), as the work was titled, changed the architectural space of the museum gallery to “induce a sensate impression of infinite space.”90 Experiencing the artwork amounted to entering its form as an environing space, much like Wheeler’s earlier work such as SA MI DW SM 2 75 Continuum Atmospheric Environment (1975) (fig. 0.6). The latter literalized the continuity between space depicted by an artwork and the actual space of the artwork. Wheeler’s recent work did not so much reach out as it engulfed the viewer. It took the desolate gallery, the space of nondwelling in which artworks appear forsaken in random spaces, and imbued it with qualities that approximate the work of art’s earlier sacred settings. Instead of religion conveying the infinite nature of God, PSAD Synthetic Desert III gave a sense of infinite space.91 In this book, I think of evocations of artworks as ecstatic objects as precursors to minimalism’s engulfing objects and to the rise of

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Figure 0.5. Installation view Doug Wheeler: PSAD Synthetic Desert III, March 24, 2017–­ August 2, 2017. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Photo: David Heald.

installation art in which, to use Krauss’s language, “actual site and representational sign” have become one and the same.92

Aurai and Aura (Form and Space) I would like to take the confluence of “site” and “sign” in Wheeler’s work as an occasion to emphasize that, for thinkers from Warburg to Laban, the work of art transcends itself into its external space from within, in Krauss’s terms, via the “representational sign.” In writings on art, when the artwork stands outside itself, it does so by stepping out from within its formal constitution. In other words, the artwork’s aerial environment pertains not merely to its objecthood but also to its imagehood.93 To illustrate this point I would like to return briefly to the concept of the aura. Initially, Benjamin’s aura builds on a structure of continuity between depicted aerial forms and external aerial surrounds. The aura, it is helpful to remember, rests on the idea of physical air. This is evident not only etymologically (insofar as the Latin aura means “breeze,” “breath,” or “air”) but also conceptually: the concept describes the realm of an artwork as a pneumatic space that can be breathed, as the concrete natural environment

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Figure 0.6. Doug Wheeler, SA MI DW SM 2 75 Continuum Atmospheric Environment, 1975. Installation view, Doug Wheeler, Galleria Salvatore Ala, Milan, 1975. ©  Doug Wheeler; photo: Giorgio Colombo; courtesy Galleria Salvatore Ala and David Zwirner

of air.94 However, the term aura also refers to an iconographic structure, namely, the iconography of the ancient aurai—daughters of the anemoi, nymphs of the breezes who have a circle-­shaped drapery fluttering in the wind behind them (velificatio). This iconographic structure suggests an image of aura as we customarily understand it today: namely, as an energy field around a body. In other words, aura pertains not only to the artwork’s external topology but also to its internal depiction of form, to the representation of the aurai. Initially, Benjamin’s aura perpetuates this duality. In his notes on hashish, he observes that “perhaps nothing gives such a clear idea of aura as van Gogh’s late paintings, in which one could say that the aura appears to have been painted together with the various objects.”95 Whereas for Warburg and Riegl, the physical atmosphere of an artwork is continuous with its fictive atmospheric depictions, for Benjamin, the quintessential manifestation of an artwork’s aura is to be found in van Gogh’s auratic depictions. However, by the final versions of Benjamin’s aura essay, the references to van Gogh’s atmospheric representations are lost, and the aura is developed independently of the artwork’s fictive auratic forms; instead of pertaining to the image, the aura pertains to the work’s status as an original. The cases this book explores suggest that the aerial milieu of the artwork, instead of expressing an exclusively topological problem of art, articulates

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an aesthetic that rests on the continuity between image-­immanent form and artwork-­transcending space. The artwork’s aerial environment does not only concern its status as object but also the very relation between artwork as image and object in space. This phenomenological thrust behind the artwork’s ecstasis is evident when Warburg strays outside the limits of Botticelli’s paintings via his analysis of the depicted forms of movement within the paintings, or when Riegl’s study of the dissolving dualism between figure and ground within Rembrandt’s Syndics spills over into his examination of the dispersed boundary between the painting and its outside. The artwork’s actual aerial milieu is a phenomenon of form, that is, one that arises immanently from within the artwork’s depictions. However, even as this book argues that the artwork’s aerial externalism is a manifestation of unbounded form, it must contend with accounts that paradoxically insist on the artwork’s integrity of form even as they describe its going beyond bounds. What are we to make of Riegl’s insistence on the absolute closedness (Geschlossenheit) of antique representations of figures, on their individuality and autonomy, even as he traces their relationality to surrounding space, to Umgebung? Similarly, how are we to understand Rilke’s repeated avowal of the self-­containment of Rodin’s sculptures, of their coming to an end within themselves, even as he shows that the sculptures’ forms undo the duality between surface and atmosphere and ripple forth into surrounding space? To conceptualize such paradoxical simultaneities between an artwork’s formal integrity and its spatial expansiveness, it is helpful to return to a suggestion by Riegl in his book The Group Portraiture of Holland. Therein, Riegl contends that the inner unity of Rembrandt’s syndics serves to extend the painting beyond itself; it reinforces its external unity with the viewer. This book follows Riegl’s lead in understanding the artwork’s formal demarcation as concomitant with its very framework of overreach. With Deleuze we could say that the artwork’s formal intensity reverts into spatial extensity;96 or drawing on the work of Elaine Scarry we could assert that the artwork’s “narrowing act is the location of . . . [its] most expansive potential.”97 This kind of ecstasy, which arises from within the artwork’s formal makeup—and not from the notion of an original artwork’s emphatic presence—coincides with an external space that can be captured through photographic reproduction. When Warburg includes photographs in his Mnemosyne Atlas, he shows how photography itself is a vehicle for forms’ extravagation. His Atlas allowed him to place iconographies side by side to better study how the Pathosformel wandered across centuries and geographies. Warburg was unperturbed by mechanically reproduced images of artworks because he developed their cultural atmospheres immanently

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from within the images. In his essay “Walter Benjamin’s Media Theory: The Medium and the Apparat,” Antonio Somaini speaks to this idea that the artwork’s ecstasis is amenable to photographic reproduction when he notes that “before presenting, in the artwork essay, the concept of aura as a synthesis of all the traditional values of the work of art that were being gradually ‘liquidated’ in the age of its technological reproducibility, Benjamin uses the term Aura in order to indicate a diaphanous halo that can be captured and recorded by the photographic camera.”98 In the texts this book studies, insofar as artworks extravagate from within their formal constitution and enact realms of continuity between internal form and external space, their ecstatic modalities can be captured through the mediation of photographic reproductions (as Struth’s Museum Photographs show). More importantly for the purposes of this book, they can be evoked, indeed brought about, in the mediation of art historiography’s linguistic transpositions.

Empathetic Artworks, Extensive Subjects By tracking how art objects pro­ject themselves outward, this book also diverges from studies interested in psychological aesthetics, which explore how viewers empathize with artworks. Instead of being about immersive viewers, about viewers who step into the looking glass, as it were, this book is about extensive artworks: it explores the work of art in its relationality— where the latter is understood not in terms of the viewers’ uncontainable subjectivity but rather the art objects’ uncontainable materiality. However, in the continuity between an artwork and its surroundings, the boundaries between artwork and viewer become blurry in a way that makes it difficult to establish whether the viewer is in the artwork or the artwork is outside of itself. The very separation between empathetic viewer and ecstatic artwork is spurious; indeed, it serves merely as a heuristic, for the artwork’s “out-­standingness” is ultimately the projection of an empathetic subject. As Diderot suggests at the beginning of “The Salon of 1765,” the artwork’s coming to us is predicated on our ability to receive it: “I opened my soul to the effects,” writes Diderot, “I allowed them to penetrate through me.”99 The artwork’s uncontainment is grounded in a quality of receptivity inherent in us, in our openness, in us being, in Aristotle’s sense, “percipient” and not “non-­percipient receptor[s].”100 Indeed, in Late Roman Art Industry, Riegl suggests that the more open forms are to their surrounding space, the more likely they are to allow incursions from the viewers’ subjectivities;101 the two, expansive artworks and extended subjectivities, are coconstitutive. While this book is in dialogue with the scholarship on empathy aes-

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thetics, it also diverges from it insofar as it focuses on the flipside of the empathetic viewer, namely, the extensive artwork, which troubles the distinction between its own boundary and the world environing it. The book changes the vector of the aesthetic encounter from the viewer’s autoprojection to the artwork’s self-­transcendence; it addresses texts that posit the continuity between art and life as a continuity driven by the artwork. This continuity comes through in the texts’ linguistic affinities, semantic histories, etymological revenants, and stylistic peculiarities—that is, in art historiography’s linguistic efforts. It is to these that chapter 1 turns. Warburg’s philological approach to the study of art illustrates particularly well how the artwork’s extravagations arise in the figurative dimensions of the language of art history. His writing shows how the artwork’s boundedness is undone in language first and foremost.

[   c h apt e r 1  ]

Aer, Aurae, Venti Warburg’s Aerial Forms and Historical Milieus

Anima Fiorentina In the autumn of 1900 the Dutch German art historian and literary scholar André Jolles wrote a letter to his friend Aby Warburg. In his letter Jolles announced that he had fallen in love. His object of affection was remarkable: she was born almost four hundred years before his time, between 1486 and 1490; she lived in a church in Florence; and she could fly. Jolles describes her wearing a windblown veil, floating as if on clouds, and hastening through the ether.1 The lady in question is the figure of the fruit-­bearing girl depicted on Domenico Ghirlandaio’s fresco The Birth of Saint John the Baptist (1486– 1490) (fig. 1.1) on the left wall of the Tornabuoni Chapel in the church Santa Maria Novella in Florence.2 She is unlike any other figure on the fresco: the billowing veil behind her recalls antique representations of aurai, ancient nymphs of the breezes (fig. 1.2).3 She is enveloped in a literal atmosphere; and she is excessively energetic. Jolles exclaims, “This is no way to enter a sick room, even if one wants to congratulate. This lively and light, yet highly animated way of walking; this energetic unstoppability, this length of step while all other figures have something untouchable, what is the meaning of all this? . . . Enough, I lost my heart to her. . . . Who is she? Where does she come from?”4 In his reply to Jolles, Warburg describes her as a “pagan play of winds” that whirls into Ghirlandaio’s picture of subdued Christianity. Her aerial animation is incongruous with her immediate environment: she is a pagan nymph in a Christian setting and a figure of antiquity in a Renaissance artwork. As an air dweller who is light footed, windswept, and excessively mobile, the nymph is at odds not only with her biblical environment and quattrocento milieu but also with her aesthetic medium. She is “the embodiment of movement” in an unmoving image.5 25

Figure 1.1. Domenico Ghirlandaio, The Birth of Saint John the Baptist, 1486–1490. Fresco (prerestoration). Tornabuoni Chapel, Florence. Photo: Scala / Art Resource, NY

Figure 1.2. Ara Pacis: The Fertile Earth. Museum of the Ara Pacis, Rome. Photo Credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY

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Figure 1.3. Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus. Ca. 1485. Tempera on canvas, 67.9 in × 109.6 in. Uffizi, Florence. Photo: Scala / Art Resource, NY

Warburg regards the discrepancy between the atmosphere surrounding the nymph and the general setting of the fresco as indicative of anachronisms and contradictions inherent in Renaissance culture at large. On the one hand, the eruption of an ancient pagan past into quattrocento Christianity, and on the other, the outbreak of an illogical exuberance of movement in purportedly rational Renaissance art. Therefore, the incongruity between the aerial nymph and her surroundings points in fact to the artwork as a product of a similarly incongruent cultural milieu. Warburg examines the latter in terms of negotiations regarding the fresco between “church, merchant, artist”6—the Dominican monks of the church Santa Maria Novella; Giovanni Tornabuoni, merchant in Florence, and patron of the chapel; and Ghirlandaio, artistic executor, decorator of the chapel’s walls. In this sense the aerial nymph points Warburg to the fresco’s broader context: the Florentine cultural and social milieu at the end of the quattrocento.7 Warburg argues similarly in his dissertation: he connects the depictions of hair and clothes blowing in the wind to “inspirers” in Botticelli’s cultural environment. These inspirers—poets, learned scholars of the period—advised the painter on how to represent his figures, and their inspiration of Botticelli is evident in literally inspired representations: windblown hair and textiles (fig. 1.3). These aerial accessories become embodiments of the anima Fiorentina, of the cultural atmosphere in Florence.8 In this chapter I examine Warburg’s dissertation for the layers of meaning

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that are implicit in his word choice, that encapsulate his unarticulated arguments, and that have been overlooked in the history of his text’s reception. I specifically unravel the thematic undercurrent of air—a theme cloaked in semantic affinities and philological minutiae—by tracing each term that makes up the semantic field around air: Inspirator (inspirer), Stimmung (mood, atmosphere), Milieu (milieu), and Einfluss (influence). In all these words, Warburg activates their reference to a circumambient medium—in particular, air. I suggest that air represents, on the one hand, the physical medium in which Botticelli’s windblown accessories move and, on the other hand, the anima Fiorentina,9 the Florentine artistic and intellectual milieu, the cultural atmosphere in which Botticelli’s paintings are born. Air as the formal manifestation of an artist’s inspiration becomes air as the spatial expression of an artwork’s environment. However, air functions in the dissertation not only as a thematic strain but also as an implicit disciplinary trope for the cultural history into which Warburg aimed to extend all traditional art history. Thus, I argue first that air figures the cultural medium in which artworks develop. Air points to the broadening of the analysis of an object into that of its milieu and its determining conditions. It points to the cultural-­historical reframing of art history, which requires artworks to be studied in their environments through an examination of the economic, artistic, and anthropological conditions that determine them. Second, I show that the semantic field around air is the site of confluence for Warburg’s philological sensibilities and physiological interests. The motif of air crystallizes the entwinement of humanistic and scientific methodologies that helps construct Warburgian art history as cultural history.10 Third, I contend that as an element shared by different disciplines (such as philology and biology), air embodies the common medium that enables the actio ad distans between fields of inquiry, acting as a disciplinary milieu that permits semantic sympathies between words and fosters affinities between texts and images from distant epochs. Therefore, in Warburg’s dissertation, air also figures a method of writing that hinges on the conceptual mobility that enables cultural history and its analyses of itinerant aesthetic forms across times, spaces, and branches of knowledge. This chapter analyzes unobtrusive terms that do not point to an immediate theoretical superstructure and then moves to the larger conceptual and cultural implications of this seemingly innocuous lexicon. The chapter enacts a method that combines philological attention with broad cultural and disciplinary concerns, including the formation of disciplines around 1900, ecological perspectives avant la lettre in the humanities, and the transfer of knowledge between the sciences and the humanities in the

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period. It shows how Warburg’s work can guide not only interdisciplinary work today but also intervene in recent methodological debates about the return to philology and the maintenance of larger cultural perspectives. In the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a growing trend toward understanding culture not as a series of symbolic human activities but as a collection of adaptive human mechanisms. The latter view regarded culture in evolutionary and biological terms:11 culture was the human environment, and cultural products were the result of human beings’ adapting to their surroundings. Warburg’s dissertation—with its conflation of air, environment, and culture—reveals a historical moment in which culture is increasingly viewed as an evolutionary-­ biological phenomenon. Culture is the quintessential human milieu. Furthermore, Warburg’s philological interest in influence—in the transmission of forms from antiquity to the Renaissance—goes hand in hand with an evolutionary-­biological interest in the transfer of information. His dissertation, in which he traces cultural transfer across epochs, lays the foundations for his later work, conceived as an evolutionary study of European cultural history.12 It reveals not only that Warburg relied on philological and biological knowledge to construct his disciplinary approach but also that his later cultural-­historical work goes back to a particular textual and visual practice and not an articulated theory. His dissertation shows the disciplinary extension of art history into cultural history in practice.

Inspiration According to Plutarch, the priestess presiding over the Oracle of Apollo in the temple of Delphi, the Pythia, delivered her prophecies in a state of inspiration induced by sacred vapors. The priestess’s inspiration was literal: she inhaled air rising from the Castalian’s fragrant streams through a cleft in the ground. Plutarch’s Morals includes several discussions of the Pythia’s prophetic powers. In a conference with Demetrius and Philippus, Ammonius notes, “Just now in our discourse we have taken away divination from the Gods . . . and now we are . . . referring the cause, or rather the nature and essence, of divination to exhalations, winds, and vapors.”13 In his dissertation, Warburg shows how antiquity was a source of inspiration for early Italian Renaissance art. He resorts to the word Inspirator (inspirer) to describe the humanist scholars who channeled the diffuse influence of antiquity into concrete aesthetic advice. For instance, Angelo Poliziano was one of Botticelli’s “inspirers”: he advised the painter to choose antique forms of movement. Inspirieren, borrowed from the Latin inspirare (literally, to blow into), is a loanword in German. Warburg insists on this

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loanword and especially on its uncommon form Inspirator throughout the dissertation. This seemingly innocuous philological detail becomes remarkable in view of Warburg’s attention to depictions of breezes, zephyrs, and breaths in images and texts from antiquity and the quattrocento. In the context of so much air in motion, Inspirator suggests that the inspirer’s advice was translated into depictions of literally inspired objects—the windblown garments and windswept hair locks of Botticelli’s figures. Aby Warburg argued for a cultural-­historical opening up of the field of art history, rejecting the strict formalist analysis of artworks espoused by contemporaries such as Heinrich Wölfflin. He saw artworks as embedded in their historical contexts and art historians as agents who unravel an image’s cultural, social, anthropological, and political layerings. At the heart of his cultural history lies an iconology that defined the image worthy of inclusion in art history broadly. Warburg analyzed postage stamps alongside Albrecht Dürer’s paintings; he examined advertising art, pamphlets, and news photographs alongside ancient and medieval reliefs. His attention to low and high art from different epochs and regions coupled with his disciplinary extension of art history into cultural history make Warburg a founding father of Kulturwissenschaft (literally, culture science) and his scholarly work a precursor of cultural studies.14 Today, Warburg’s work, famous for its capaciousness, is invoked whenever interdisciplinary pursuits are at stake. As an art historian with a contested disciplinary abode, Warburg is claimed by literary and cultural historians, scholars of visual culture, media theorists, and anthropologists. In fact, Warburg’s far-­reaching influence is the most defining aspect of his reception.15 Warburg has become “an emblematic figure of the contemporary humanities,”16 and his name is mentioned in a dizzying number of contexts extending from film studies,17 philology,18 memory studies,19 and network theory20 to studies on emotion and affect21 and the relation between cognitive neuroscience and the humanities.22 That Warburg’s name is so readily invoked today in so many fields is surprising if one considers his reception history. He was mainly discovered by scholars engaged with the work of Walter Benjamin. However, while the latter has enjoyed a wide reception in North America, the former, despite growing interest in his work, remains less well known here. One reason is that there is no coherent Warburg oeuvre. A considerable part of his work is made up of notes, jottings, diagrams, and drawings as well as essay outlines and drafts kept in the archives at the Warburg Institute in London. Further, an English translation of his selected works came late, in 1999.23 An even more important factor hinders Warburg’s reception not only in the English-­speaking world but even in Germany: his writing style.24 Warburg himself described it as an “eel-­soup style” (Aalsuppenstil),25 referring,

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on the one hand, to the density of the prose, his predilection, in Anna Guillemin’s words, for “compressed, cryptic theses, syntactically tightly wound sentences,”26 and on the other hand, to the tendency of his prose to lose itself in a plethora of details that, adduced as historical evidence, often fail to coalesce into larger conceptualizations.27 For example, in his dissertation on Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring (1892), Warburg never makes explicit the connection between inspiration and the windblown draperies and hair. This is accomplished through a philological undercurrent of the text involving his reliance on the peculiar word Inspirator (inspirer). Indeed, many of his arguments are concentrated in an unobtrusive word choice; they remain implicit in the subtle semantic dimensions and etymological past lives of words. This force of the understated and the implicit represents the continued challenge of reading Warburg. Critical approaches to his work often shy away from engaging his difficult language and amount to mere paraphrases of his arguments. This chapter seeks to remediate these lapses in Warburg scholarship by turning to his first published work, his dissertation, which is usually mentioned only in passing and is rarely analyzed in its own right. In 1888, while studying art history, history, and archaeology in Bonn, Warburg decided to spend a semester in Munich. There a friend helped him join seven other students and the art historian August Schmarsow on a trip to Florence.28 During the semester spent in Florence, Warburg began researching his dissertation topic under Schmarsow’s guidance. However, his teacher in Bonn, Carl Justi, declined to supervise the dissertation because of its methodological novelty. Ultimately, Warburg turned to Karl Janitschek in Strasbourg to oversee his dissertation.29 In 1892 he published the dissertation as a book—his first independent publication.30 Whereas Justi’s approach to art history was biographical, Warburg’s was contextual; unlike Justi, who regarded artists as heroes and geniuses whose biographies could shed light on their artworks,31 Warburg viewed artists as embedded in their cultural contexts and their artworks as determined by what was in the air. Warburg’s interest centers not exclusively on Botticelli or his paintings but on the network of influences behind Botticelli’s artworks. Working in the vein of the cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt, Warburg uses artworks as gateways to a cultural milieu he seeks to reconstruct—the early Italian Renaissance in Florence. According to Georges Didi-­Huberman, “Aby Warburg is probably the first Western historian of art to have placed the wind . . . at the center of a major exploration of Renaissance art.”32 In his dissertation, Warburg quotes twice from Angelo Poliziano’s descriptions of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, which mention the “breezes and winds bringing her [Venus] ashore” and the “two winds flying across the waves and propelling the goddess.”33 Warburg spe-

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Figure 1.4. Sandro Botticelli, Primavera (Spring). Ca. 1482/1487. Tempera on wood, 797/8 × 1235/8 in. Uffizi, Florence. Photo: Scala / Art Resource, NY

cifically selects passages that mention the wind: Venus is “by wanton zephyrs driven to the shore”; “real the breezes’ breath”; “the wind toys with their [the Horae’s] loose and flowing hair.”34 Warburg argues that Italian Renaissance artists cite antiquity in these details, such as the moving accessory forms of hair and drapery, which, as Spyros Papapetros emphasizes, are literally animated: they embody the anima, from the Greek ἄνεμος, or “wind.”35 To show that Botticelli, in Spring (fig. 1.4), relied heavily on Ovid’s account of Daphne’s flight from Apollo, Warburg quotes the relevant verses from Ovid, of which the following are particularly pertinent: “And the opposing breezes made her garments ripple as they met her / And a light air sent her hair flying back.”36 Since Poliziano used the same passage from Ovid for the description of a relief in Giostra, Warburg concludes that Poliziano must have been the “inspirer” behind Botticelli’s moving accessory forms. With his word choice, Warburg sets up an implicit relation between the act of inspiring and the depicted winds in the artworks. The windblown hair and garments are visual embodiments of the activity of the Inspirator who transmits to the painter the conceit of dynamic accessory. It is as if the inspirer’s activity were materialized in the pneumatic accessories, as if inspiration were embodied in actual air in motion—in aer, venti, aurae, and zefiri. Warburg’s loanword from Latin, Inspirator, evokes its etymological prehistory with its connotations of breathing, creative revelation, and anima-

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tion in the sense of moving and bringing to life. For Warburg, the word refers not only to the adviser who moves the painter with ideas but also to the painter who animates his depictions with accessories moving in the breeze. While clearly conceiving of Botticelli’s inspiration in terms of aerial animation, Warburg never states the relation between inspirer and air explicitly. The connection emerges from his constellation of words and images. Etymology and tacit semantic fields provide a fluid realm for crossovers between the discursive frameworks of image and word. The word Inspirator, which activates semantic past lives, is not unlike the animated accessories whose movement revives the life of antiquity. In this context Warburg’s employment of the term Vorbild is significant: while he uses it to mean “model,” the term literally denotes a preimage in the sense of a visual or literary image that precedes Botticelli’s paintings in time. Warburg’s conflation of visual and literary images foretells the cross-­disciplinary significance of the image in later criticism. He understands Botticelli’s paintings not just as aesthetic objects but, more importantly, as cultural documents and as images that circulate in the collective memory of the quattrocento—an understanding that prefigures the cultural-­historical opening up of the field of art history into visual studies.37 There is another dimension to the meaning of inspiration—one that illustrates how Warburg’s interests in philology and physiology converge in the word Inspirator. In 1888, while in Florence researching his dissertation, Warburg read the German translation of Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872).38 Darwin uses inspiration in its physiological sense to mean the breathing in of air in contrast to expiration.39 In the German edition, the word is translated as Inspiration, preserving the term’s medical context in English.40 In the German translation of Darwin, Warburg thus found Inspiration as a bodily function that induces muscle movement. He also encountered the term in the physician Theodor Piderit’s “Principles of Facial Expression and Physiognomy” (1858), where Inspiration is used in an analysis of sensory excitations (Erregung) and the muscle movements that follow them.41 In the dissertation, he continues this association between inspiration and excitation, but he transfers it to lifeless accessories—the drapery and hair—that are breathed on and subsequently animated in movements that recall bodily agitations (for the latter, Warburg uses the same word: Erregung). Later he reflects on the afterlife of antiquity in a language that reveals the confluence of his philological and biological concerns: in a note from 1908, he wonders about the “biologically conditioned survivability of this ancient form-­language” (biologisch begründeten Überlebensfähigkeit dieser antiken Formensprache).42 In this dense formulation, a linguistic conceptualization of style (“form language”) and a bio-

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logical understanding of the transmission of style (“biologically conditioned survivability”) are explicitly entwined. However, as Warburg’s deployment of Inspirator in the dissertation reveals, this imbrication of the philological and the physiological is not conceptualized or articulated. It remains cloaked in semantic correspondences and etymological details and requires the reader to actualize the dormant meaning of words, to draw out their larger implications, and to conceptualize their evidence into overarching arguments. Warburg’s refrain from overt conceptualizations, however, does not mean that his ideas lack a theoretical framework. Rather, this framework is enacted in his mode of writing (and later, in his Mnemosyne Atlas, in his mode of constellating images), and it befalls the reader and beholder to extract the theory. Just as the dialectical images in Benjamin’s Arcades Project were expected to reveal their meaning without relying on Benjamin’s interpretative mediation, in Warburg’s works it is the reader who is expected to subsume the plethora of case studies and examples under conceptual models.

Stimmung/Atmosphere A good illustration of the unarticulated in Warburg’s prose is his use of the unobtrusive word Kreis (circle) together with words semantically related to the circle, such as Kugel (sphere) and Ring (ring). It is as if Warburg, unable to articulate the conceptual implications of words, expected their sheer material presence to convey his ideas. He describes the movement of Botticelli’s accessories in terms of a circling motion; he refers to the “garment billowing out spherically” (kugelförmig geschwelltes Gewand),43 the “garment gathered up all around” (ringförmig aufgeschürztes Gewand) and the “spherical . . . hairstyles” (kugelförmiges Haar).44 The circular also appears in a figurative sense, in references to the “circle of working artists” (“Kreise der schaffenden Künstler”)45 and the “circle of ideas” (Ideenkreis)46 circulating among them. It is as if the curling hair and circling textiles materialized the “circle of thoughts”—the Gedankenkreis47—in the artistic circles around Botticelli, in the “circle of northern Italian artists” (Oberitalienischen Künstlerkreisen),48 and in “the circle of Venetian scholars” (venezianischen Gelehrtenkreisen).49 Therefore, Botticelli’s aerial accessories do not only localize the effect of the individual inspirer Poliziano; they also embody what was in the air—the artistic climate and the cultural atmosphere around Botticelli and his artworks. Their movement corresponds to the circulation of concepts of antiquity in the quattrocento. By advising Botticelli, Poliziano, a prominent member of Florentine humanist circles, channeled the diffuse collective knowledge and cultural anima of the early

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Italian Renaissance into concrete aesthetic choices. Thus, before being visually present in Renaissance artworks, what was in the air was embodied in the inspirer whose authority leads Botticelli to depict inspired accessories such as Venus’s waving hair or Flora’s swelling draperies.50 In a passage analyzing illustrations on an Italian bridal chest from the fifteenth century, Warburg describes the presence of “airs” (Lüfte), the “wind” (Wind), “wind gods” (Windgötter), and the “breeze” (Lufthauch) as elements of an artistic “atmosphere” or “mood” (künstlerische Stimmung).51 These aerial phenomena refer to the aesthetic atmosphere reigning not only in the images but also, and more importantly, in quattrocento Florence. The windblown hair and windswept textiles embody the current of ideas flowing through Florentine artistic circles—a current that Warburg understands to be part of a Stimmung, a spiritual or mental atmosphere.52 Leo Spitzer, a German-­speaking Romanist who resembles Warburg in his attempts to detect an histoire des mentalités behind philological minutiae,53 regarded Stimmung as the best figurative German rendering of atmosphere, of which the literal translation is “haze circle” or “air circle” (Dunstkreis or Luftkreis). In this respect, Spitzer’s project—his “word history within a general history of thought”54—parallels Warburg’s attempt to trace philological minutiae— including those of Ovid, Poliziano, or Homer’s poetry—and visual details back to the cultural memory of antiquity in the Renaissance. For Spitzer and Warburg, air plays a crucial role: Spitzer’s philological histoire des mentalités and Warburg’s art-­historical study of mental atmospheres rely on words such as ambiance, milieu, and Stimmung—words that lead back etymologically and semantically to classical notions of physical and spiritual air signifying a physical environment and a spiritual surrounding, or a reigning mentality. In the dissertation, Warburg mentions sonnets by Lorenzo de’ Medici that are accompanied by the poet’s explanation of the atmosphere out of which each poem arose. Describing the atmosphere at the origin of each poem contributes to Warburg’s goal in his thesis—to detect the quattrocento’s cultural-­atmospheric conditions in the depicted accessories and their aerial animation. Warburg conceives of the modus operandi of this atmosphere in philological terms (as influence) and physiological terms (as stimulus and corresponding reflex). In his examination of the philosophical concept of atmosphere, Michael Hauskeller argues that beginning with the second half of the eighteenth century, atmosphere was associated with influence, because “everything that is situated in the atmosphere [Dunstkreis] of something else is subject to the latter’s influence [Einfluss].”55 The term influence is crucial for Warburg’s dissertation, which posits a relation of influence between antique models and Renaissance representations of movement.56 Implicit in Warburg’s constel-

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lation of terms is his activation of an etymological layer in “influence” that goes back to the Medieval Latin influentia.57 Influentia had a widespread astrological meaning in the sense of an “astral influence” that relies on the concept of an ethereal fluid that acts on humans.58 This ethereal fluid presupposes the existence of an atmospheric medium, which serves as a vehicle for “astral emanations and influenzas”59 and is thus a transmitter of influences.60 In his popular scientific lecture “Regarding Good and Bad Air” (1880), the physician Agathon Wernich discussed air as the medium for invisible influences and forces, emphasizing air as a mala aria that breeds the agents of disease.61 For Warburg, Botticelli’s spiritual aer ambiens is not made up of gods, demons, microbes, or astrological influences; instead, it represents Botticelli’s historical surroundings permeated by cultural influences. Just as inspiration is no longer a matter of divine revelation or creative genius but one of learned reflection and concrete advice, atmosphere is no longer a matter of invisible forces. In Warburg’s dissertation, the aer ambiens surrounding Botticelli approximates notions of milieu—a concrete environment in which the circulation of diffuse ideas and vague influences can be traced to specific advisers and teachers and pinned down in particular texts and images. Warburg’s usage of Stimmung underscores his philological interests by activating the semantics of a physical and mental atmosphere and by describing the effects of this atmosphere in philological terms as “influence.” His treatment of Milieu continues this line of thought on the significance of Botticelli’s cultural context. However, it does so by pointing up Warburg’s scientific concerns: his recourse to physiological explanatory models of artistic creativity. These models mingle Botticelli’s artistic inspiration— received from his milieu—with his paintings’ depiction of literal animation conceived as physiological movement.

Milieu as Air Ambiant In “The Picture Chronicle of a Florentine Goldsmith,”62 an essay written six years after his dissertation, Warburg claims that the strictly art-­historical study of an artwork must yield to a broader analysis of the “artist’s mind” and, consequently, to a study of the artist’s “milieu.” “For anyone,” writes Warburg, “who can see the cultural history of the average artistic milieu as no less important than an art history confined to the major talents, the world reflected in the mind of our Florentine goldsmith will hold a great and growing fascination.”63 Art history as cultural history thus involves the study of the worldview of a cultural epoch through visual and linguistic images. Although written after the dissertation, this passage speaks to Warburg’s aim

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in his doctoral thesis to examine artworks as gateways to an artist’s personality, which, in turn, mirrors the artworks’ cultural environment. The goal of Warburg’s dissertation is to pre­sent a cultural history of Botticelli’s artistic milieu. In his article on milieu and ambiance, Spitzer demonstrates the semantic continuity between the Greek term for surrounding air and the concept of milieu: “We find in Greek ὁ περιέχων ἀὴρ or τὸ περιέχον, an expression meaning literally ‘that which surrounds, encompasses’ . . . used to refer to the all-­embracing air, space, sky, atmosphere, climate: the cosmic ‘milieu’ of man.”64 Thus, the French expression milieu ambiant (environment) relies on the semantic field of air ambiant, meaning the space around an organism or an object, which envelops it and is closest to it. As Georges Canguilhem showed in his essay “The Living and Its Milieu,” Auguste Comte’s Course of Positive Philosophy changed milieu into an overarching category encompassing “not only the fluid in which an organism is submerged but, in general, the totality of exterior circumstances that determine the existence of an organism.”65 In the nineteenth century, milieu develops from the fluid medium of physics into the environment of a living being in biology and, eventually, in sociology it becomes the abstract milieu that determines a person’s life. However, surviving in the concept of milieu throughout its history is the notion of an environing fluid similar to air. In the dissertation, we see how the notion of an aerial fluid persists in the concept of milieu when Warburg analogizes the accessories moved by external winds to Botticelli moved by his artistic milieu. Just as the depicted accessories’ medium is the moving air, his paintings’ surrounding medium is the cultural air governing the early Italian Renaissance. Warburg uses the question of inner versus outer animation in the paintings to thematize the problem of inner versus outer motivation in the artist’s creative process. “It is clear,” writes Warburg, “that Botticelli’s artistic temperament, dominated by a love of tranquil beauty, requires some external prompting before it is likely to turn to the depiction of scenes of passionate agitation.”66 The accessories, animated from without, resemble Botticelli, who receives his creative impetus from the outside. In an analogical move that is not made explicit but remains latent in philological detail, Warburg conflates the external movement of the accessories with the internal movement of the artistic imagination.67 By analogizing the air moving the accessories to the milieu motivating Botticelli’s creative process, he invokes a mechanistic model of milieu. He associates the movement of artistic creativity with mechanical movement (e.g., “automatic reflex”) and reveals, thereby, the psychophysiological stakes of his dissertation. In what follows, I examine the parallels he cre-

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ates between the accessories’ and Botticelli’s aerial milieus to point up the ways in which their physiological similarities are dormant in philological ­particulars.

The Accessories ’ Milieu In phrases such as “external movement,” “externally animated accessory,” and “externally heightened motifs of movement,”68 Warburg makes clear that the accessories move mechanically and are devoid of a vital principle of self-­animation. The accessories are bereft of a will (willenlos), and they function as extrinsic add-­ons (Zusatzformen) that lack an organic connection with the bodies to which they are appended.69 Their movement, “without being motivated by bodily motion,”70 is provoked instead by the extraneous fluid in which they are immersed: the surrounding air. With the moving accessories, Warburg thus invokes the mechanistic aspect of milieu-­ induced movement, and he also hints at physiological functions when he associates the accessories with “irritability” or “excitation” (Erregung). The term appears inconspicuously at the end of Warburg’s text: first, in a reference to Botticelli’s “scenes of passionate agitation [Erregung]” and, second, in the context of the artist’s representation of “human figures in a state of excitement, or even of inner emotion.”71 Irritability, described by the turn-­ of-­the-­century German physiologist Max Verworn as “a problem of fundamental physiological importance,”72 was conceived as a quintessential characteristic of animate substance. In 1911 Verworn wrote that “if we could analyze the irritability of living substance to its essence, then the nature of life itself would be fathomed.”73 However, as he showed, irritability is not an exclusive trait of living organisms but rather a characteristic that can also pertain to inanimate substance.74 Warburg’s text deals with the inanimate kind of Erregung because the accessories are moved by the wind and are thus not alive. Instead of being infused with life, they are merely signs thereof: as “external attributes” that give “the appearance of heightened life,” they simulate life.75 Warburg encountered Erregung, a central term of psychophysiological discourse in the second half of the nineteenth century, in the work of Theodor Piderit.76 If milieu was the collection of outside factors affecting an individual, irritability stood for the individual’s reactions to these factors when they were conceptualized as stimuli. Since, as Verworn points out, the precursors to the concept of stimuli were the “vague impressions of the various influences of different agents on the human being,”77 irritability substantiates the implications of milieu understood abstractly as the collection of influences acting on an organism. Thus, it becomes apparent that

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in his conceptualization of Botticelli’s cultural milieu, Warburg combines notions of philological influence with conceptions of physiological stimulus: on the one hand, the Florentine milieu influences Botticelli (and, as we have seen above, Warburg traces this influence philologically to the painter’s contemporaries, such as Poliziano, and to ancient sources, such as Ovid), and, on the other hand, the milieu’s influences are conceived as forms of stimuli that result in the physiological Erregung evident not only in the accessories’ movement but also in Botticelli’s imaginative mobility. This entwinement of philological and scientific discourse takes place in the analysis of Botticelli’s wider cultural-­historical context—in other words, in the kind of analysis that subtends the opening up of art history into cultural history.

Botticelli ’ s Milieu As we have seen, underlying Warburg’s text is a conception of a physical milieu that functions as a collection of stimuli: thus, the accessories’ movement is a mechanical reaction to the physical stimulus of the winds. Words such as efflat, boreas, and aura point to the aerial medium in and through which the accessories move.78 This physical sense of the aerial medium perpetuates the initial biological sense of milieu, understood as an air-­like substance that life required and in which life took place. At the same time, motivating Warburg’s text is a conception of a sociological milieu that acts as a knot of influences on Botticelli. In the nineteenth century, the necessity to subordinate the study of humanity to biology and more generally to science explains how the laboratory term milieu wandered into social science and came to mean “the sum total of outside circumstances” acting on a living being.79 Besides the physical conception of milieu as a “fluid of suspension” in which the accessories move,80 Warburg invokes the abstract sense of milieu as a sociological factor that conditions human beings. What unites Warburg’s biological and sociological milieus is not only their evocation of an aerial medium that can transmit stimuli and influences but also their reliance on a mechanical-­physiological model of determination. In the second half of the nineteenth century, milieu comes to stand for a formidable social force. In Warburg’s case, its determining power is visible in the accessories’ insistent fluttering, which indicates Botticelli’s lack of artistic independence. Warburg draws an implicit parallel between the painter’s inability to resist the propositions and guidelines of his advisers with the accessories’ inability to withstand the force of the winds. The more Botticelli succumbed to the inspiration coming from his advisers, the more windblown his figures became. By implication, the more wind and movement there are in the painting, the less individual artistic agency went into

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the creation of the image. Botticelli gives in to the views of his time because his deficient artistic autonomy cannot withstand the formidable force of the milieu acting on him. For Warburg, the “influence of antiquity,” as it was mediated by Botticelli’s advisers, “led to the unthinking repetition of superficially agitated motifs of motion. . . . The fault lay in the artists, and in their lack of mature artistic discretion. Botticelli was one of those who were all too pliable.”81 Botticelli was overly pliant, not unlike the fluttering textiles and loose hair that yield to the winds. The painter’s “unthinking repetition of superficially agitated motifs of motion” is materialized in the “external mobility of the will-­less accessories.”82 Warburg goes so far as to approximate artistic creativity with a motor function when he writes about Botticelli’s “automatic reflex of the artistic imagination.”83 By combining the motor function of reflex with the power of artistic imagination, he invokes the psychophysiological influences of his own time. Reconstructing trajectories of influence (antiquity’s on the Florentine Early Renaissance and the Florentine Early Renaissance’s on Botticelli) is one of the aims of Warburg’s dissertation, and it must be understood in the framework of Jacob Burckhardt’s cultural-­historical method as well as Hippolyte Taine’s historical positivism. For Burckhardt, works of art document the particular historical conditions that produced them and situate these conditions in the larger perspective of world history. For Taine, historical circumstances—famously, those of “race, milieu, moment”—mold works of art in the vein of a biological determinism. In “The Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgeoisie”(1902),84 Warburg refers to Burckhardt, and in his dissertation, he alludes to Taine. He situates the dissertation’s project in relation to Carl Justi’s interpretation of Taine’s theory of milieu: “the general—that which he [a great artist] derives from his ancestry, school, and period; that which he shares with others; and that which he bequeaths to others—is only his secondary essence (δευτέρα οὐσία): the individual, the idiosyncratic, is his primary substance (πρώτη οὐσία)”.85 In this passage, Justi reconceptualizes Taine’s tripartite dictum of “race, milieu, moment” into the threefold determinants of “ancestry, school, and period” in order to reflect on the problem of artistic creativity in terms of intrinsic qualities versus extrinsic motivations. He draws on the Scholastics’ reception of Aristotle’s categories and their differentiation between primary and secondary substance. If Justi, an adherent of genius aesthetics, is interested in an artist’s distinctiveness and singularity, his substantia prima, then Warburg, an advocate of Kulturwissenschaft, is captivated by the artist’s encounter with his cultural context, his substantia secunda. In this respect, Warburg resembles Alois Riegl, who concludes his Late Roman Art Industry (1901) by invoking Taine’s three conditioning factors behind a work of art: Riegl refers to “race,

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milieu, moment” (in his translation, “Volk, Ort und Zeit”),86 and thereby shows the hitherto neglected reach of Taine’s philosophy of art in German art historiography.87 Despite emphasizing Botticelli’s determinative context, despite stressing his excessive abidance by his contemporaries’ vision of antiquity, and despite criticizing his reflexive reaction to the demands of his cultural environment, Warburg nevertheless finds individual imaginary power in his depiction of the calm beauty of figures in The Birth of Venus and Spring. He undermines a mechanistic view of artistic creativity by allowing for a combination of individual aesthetics (“primary substance”) and collective influence (“secondary essence”). Despite this allowance, however, he ultimately considers Botticelli too much a “child of his time,”88 writing at the end of the dissertation that Botticelli succumbed to “unthinking repetition” and a “lack of mature artistic discretion.”89

The Physiology of Influence By emphasizing the role of Botticelli’s concrete environment in the development of his style, Warburg ensures that the aesthetic process cannot be reduced to such elusive phenomena as artistic genius or the effects of a “mysterious collective unconscious.”90 Whereas for Émile Durkheim the diffuse collective substance—the “collective soul,”91 the “impersonal anima of a society”92—still possessed spiritual qualities, for Warburg, the collective anima of the quattrocento is embodied in a specific cultural environment surrounding artists and their artworks. In Warburg’s analysis, images of billowing fabrics and windswept hair locks spill forth into Botticelli’s “inspiration,” which he traces back to the studious knowledge of humanist scholars. Ultimately, the spectral influence of antiquity becomes localized in Botticelli’s aesthetic decision making and becomes embodied in specific teachers, such as Poliziano and Lorenzo de’ Medici. However, Warburg’s endeavor to reveal antiquity’s influence manifests itself not only in his desire to localize that influence in a cultural milieu or to embody it in inspirers; it also expresses itself in his quest to submit the movements of antiquity’s influence to a formulaic order. His later concept of the Pathosformel (pathos formula), of which the moving accessories are precursors, relies on the assumption that inner emotion can be formalized into external motion and that the latter can, in turn, be categorized into types of movement. Under the influence of Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions, Warburg postulates a connection between states of mind and movements of the body and considers bodily reactions as corresponding to forms and patterns. Thus, the Pathosformel, with its promise

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Figures 1.5 and 1.6. Étienne-­Jules Marey, Photographies de courants de fumée pour étude des mouvements de l’air, 1899–1902. Cinémathèque française.

to capture emotion in bodily movements that hitherto had not been considered classifiable motion, bespeaks the appeal of typologizing and formalizing motion. Consequently, Warburg’s scientific interests are evidenced not only in his recourse to physiological models of movement in the conceptualization of Botticelli’s artistic process and not only in his adaptation of a biological milieu into a social environment and a cultural context; they are also evinced in his attempt to draw on evolutionary models of movement classification to categorize the movement of the accessories and the channels of influence they embody. Warburg’s interest in classifying movement must also be understood as part of the wider nineteenth-­century interest in capturing movement scientifically—in particular, invisible movement. The physiologist and photographer Étienne-­Jules Marey, for example, was intrigued by the possibility of “capturing motion beyond [the] visual threshold.”93 Whereas Marey used smoke to make air currents visible (figs. 1.5, 1.6), Warburg turned to hair and textiles, lightweight media that follow the wind’s movement, to make the trajectories of influence in the quattrocento perceivable.94 Warburg’s undertaking to isolate in visual forms the diffuse movement of the “historical

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winds” recalls Marey’s graphic method and its promise to formalize the indiscernible movement of the winds into lines on a sheet of paper.95 Didi-­ Huberman compares Marey’s laboratory images to visual poems that evoke Greek draperies.96 Marey’s moving lines indeed resemble the curving and twisting lines of Botticelli’s antique draperies; in addition, their entwinement of aesthetic and laboratory-­like qualities is not unlike the combination of philological methods and physiological frameworks in Warburg’s study of the accessories insofar as the latter also merge humanistic and scientific perspectives.

Disciplinary Milieus Warburg’s seemingly innocuous choice of words such as inspirer, atmosphere, milieu, and influence harbors a hitherto overlooked significance; these words evoke the semantics of air—of a circumambient medium in which Botticelli and his depicted accessories move. As the physical medium in which the accessories flutter, air is a representational domain in Botticelli’s paintings; as the cultural atmosphere of the early Florentine Renaissance, air represents the historical domain that is determinative of the paintings’ formal and iconographical constitution. Warburg conceptualized this aerial medium as a philological and biological entity; he combined his philological acumen with his interests in physiology to delineate the nature of this environment. Even as early as his dissertation, air stands for a disciplinary reconfiguration: Warburg enlists humanistic and scientific learning to draw attention to the cultural environment of an artwork. I conclude this chapter by examining Warburg’s conceptual move from a painting’s stylistic features to the painting’s surroundings in order to show not only how this move plays out in Warburg’s writing but also how it subtends his notion of cultural history. In the dissertation, Warburg analogizes the formal characteristics of the painting to the creative process of the artist: he implies that there is an affinity between the motion of the depicted accessories and Botticelli’s creative animation, and—as if he could not resist the pull of sympathy—he reenacts this affinity by establishing a resemblance between his writing and his object of study. First, Warburg’s methodological kinship to his object of investigation manifests itself in the fact that his study of the afterlife of antiquity relies on the activation of the semantic afterlives of words such as Inspirator, Stimmung, Milieu, and Einfluss. Warburg’s words, which carry a remembrance of previous meanings, are not unlike Botticelli’s forms, inscribed with memories of earlier cultural phases. Second, his analysis of the moving accessories translates into movement in his own writing—­ movement discernible in a peculiar conceptual mobility. Warburg entwines

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inner and outer frameworks: external movement and inner emotion, the inner realm of the image and the outer realm of the art object, the strength of the wind gods in moving the accessories and the power of the cultural atmosphere in influencing the artist. This conceptual fluidity is characteristic of Warburg’s thinking, which could move between frameworks with ease. His undertaking entails a study of forms that wander across media. His dissertation is a sweeping, contrasting project that covers a vertiginous array of objects and times: it examines images whose origins range from antiquity to the early Renaissance and media such as woodcuts and reliefs, medals and plates, sculptures and engravings, early Renaissance dramas and processions, sarcophagi and bridal chests. Underlying his dissertation is the assumption that there is a common element that unites all these distinct artworks and theoretical disquisitions, the poetic literature and the art theory, the Woburn Abbey sarcophagus and Niccolò Fiorentino’s medals, antiquity and the quattrocento—and even his own time, at the end of the nineteenth century. His conceptual mobility—the crossovers between adviser, artist, and artwork; between paintings and their environing space; and between images and text—is possible because of the assumption that there is a unifying element among all these realms, something like air, “shared by everyone yet possessed by no one,” or like anima, “a common property of all bodies[,] . . . a permanently migrating no-­body.”97 His perpetual crossings between disciplines and among figurative, conceptual, and visual domains hinge on this implicit assumption of the all-­connecting medium of air. In the dissertation, therefore, air figures not only as medium and milieu but also as a method of writing. It figures the shared medium enabling semantic sympathies between words and fostering affinities between texts and images from distant epochs. At the same time, air corresponds to the collective realm of culture, which is a desideratum for Warburg’s conception of the discipline of cultural history.

[   c h apt e r 2  ]

Luftraum Riegl’s Vitalist Mesology of Form

Horror vacui In 1871 the German physician Carl Westphal published an article about several patients with confounding symptoms that he had not seen documented in the medical literature. “For several years now,” writes Westphal, “patients have come to me lamenting that it is impossible for them to walk across empty squares or certain streets.”1 His patients were terrified at the prospect of crossing an open public space or an empty street. Since for Westphal the symptoms were linked primarily to large empty city squares, to what was the agora in ancient Greece, he decided to call his patients’ fear Agoraphobie. The term agoraphobia had a curious afterlife in art history writing around 1900.2 It reappeared as Platzscheu (literally, “fear of place”) in the Austrian architect and urban planner Camillo Sitte’s text City Planning According to Artistic Principles (1889),3 and most famously it resurfaced in Wilhelm Worringer’s anthropological account of art history in Abstraction and Empathy (1907). There is, Worringer claims, a psychological drive behind abstraction, namely, a “spiritual fear of space [Raumscheu],” which he compares with “that bodily fear of space [Platzangst], which governs some people like a disease.”4 If with Platzangst Worringer references Westphal’s urban disease, with Raumscheu he expressly cites Alois Riegl’s Late Roman Art Industry (1901). For Riegl, Raumscheu was an aesthetic principle of the art of antiquity. He detected an “artistic fear of space,”5 and he wrote about the “general ancient objective of capturing the individual form outside of space.”6 Indeed, one can trace the idea of Raumscheu further back to Riegl’s Problems of Style (1893), throughout which he mentions a related term: horror vacui.7 Riegl’s Raumscheu is a standard concern in his reception history.8 The wide reach of this idea is not surprising given Riegl’s discussion of “the nega45

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tion of space”9 and his declaration that “ancient art had to deliberately deny and suppress the existence of space.”10 Riegl argues—and ten years later, Worringer concurs—that for the ancients, the world appeared convoluted and indistinct because every object was seen in relation to another object in a web of mutual entanglements. When objects are depicted in space, their distinctiveness dissolves into enmeshment. The art of antiquity aimed to limit this disquieting perception of the world by presenting objects in their “clear material individuality”11—that is, by presenting objects not as interconnected with others but rather as autonomous forms.12 Raumscheu is thus consistent with Riegl’s emphasis on bordered forms, on the “complete closure of form.”13 Yet his emphasis on figures’ spatial isolation is puzzling because he was interested equally in the depiction of empty space. In his lectures on Italian baroque art, he writes that “the space between figures is equally important, if not more so, than the figures themselves.”14 Furthermore, in Late Roman Art Industry he suggests that one must recognize “in the formation of space, the true driving force in the development of architecture in imperial Rome,”15 declaring that ancient art’s great achievement is precisely the “emancipation of space.”16 Consequently, he writes about “the artistic pleasure of forming space.”17 How, then, are we to understand Riegl’s claim that the art of late Imperial Rome rests on space denial and yet it also articulates the emancipation of space? Despite Riegl’s interest in horror vacui, he wrote books about empty space, in particular, the empty space surrounding a figure or form.18 Late Roman Art Industry is concerned first and foremost with the “relation between figure and space,”19 which is itself merely part of the book’s larger question regarding “space’s function in art.”20 Riegl’s interest in empty space is fundamentally an interest in relational space—that is, a space charged with the presence of a nearby form. This space understood as “spatial surroundings” (räumliche Umgebung)21 is a space of contiguity: for example, it is the depicted space surrounding a figure on a sculptural relief or in a painting. Riegl uses Umgebung (surroundings), a central term throughout his writings, interchangeably with Luftraum (literally, “air space”);22 both terms refer to the artwork’s represented space, which enables the spatial rapport among figures and thereby leads to the loss of their self-­sufficiency. “Surroundings” and “air space” challenge what Christopher Wood describes as “the fiction of a thing’s closure and integrity and its differentness from the rest of the world.”23 This chapter pre­sents Riegl’s theory of space as a theory of aesthetic environment. It traces how his studies of the relation between figure and ground spill over into discussions of the relation between the artwork and its external space. Riegl’s deployment of the keyword “air space” illus-

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trates these overspills paradigmatically. In Late Roman Art Industry he concentrates on the sculptural relief, which, in its oscillatory quality between the flat space of painting and the sensuous one of sculpture, performs the threshold between image and thing. It is, thus, a fitting object of investigation for Riegl who, in his analyses, enacts the artwork’s ecstasis by trespassing between its depicted space and real space.24 For Riegl, the art historian who studied images meticulously and the museum curator who handled art objects every day, the artwork shimmers between imagehood and physicality, between what, in Riegl’s often-­cited terms, we can describe as its optical and tactile being. One of the challenges of reading Riegl’s texts is the abundance of terms, especially spatial ones, ranging from ground, cubic space, air space, open space, and deep space25 to semantically related ones invented by Riegl such as space-­enveloped (raumumflossen)26 or spatial enclosure (Raumgeschlossenheit).27 Much like Warburg’s ill-­famed writing style, Riegl’s testing prose is considered a hindrance to the ideas lying behind it. The infamous difficulty of his German is frequently commented on in the critical literature.28 In this chapter, I propose to take Riegl’s difficult language seriously by applying a literary-­critical, interpretive lens to it. I see his convoluted terms and abstruse lexica, rather than concealing an underlying argument, as being the very manifestations of the argument. I suggest that Riegl’s language—with its repetitions, strained vocabulary, and terminological innovations, that is, with its linguistic struggles—is symptomatic of his book’s conceptual superstructure: it is as if, in his studies of the relation between figure and ground, Riegl were trying to walk a tightrope between the preservation of individuality, illustrated in the idea of the self-­enclosed form, and the onslaught of collectivism, epitomized by the term Umgebung. Riegl’s texts negotiate the duality of bounded form and spatialized form; they endeavor to identify figures that preserve their individual enclosure despite being enveloped by space, despite being raumumflossen. In other words, they attempt to isolate pockets of individuality and autonomy while acknowledging the forces of determination and collectivism around 1900. Umgebung, used in German as a synonym for the French milieu and as a precursor for the later Umwelt (environment),  embodied these forces whose presence Riegl invokes in his references to aesthetic and scientific discourses of milieu. Scholarship focused on Riegl the formalist has overlooked these forces. By contrast, this chapter contends that even as Riegl’s art historiography strives to maintain the notion of self-­contained form, in its reliance on a semantics of Umgebung, it pushes forms beyond themselves into modalities of self-­ transcendence.

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Umgebung Riegl mentions a number of frameworks that help situate his interest in space as Umgebung, as “surroundings,” in art. These include late nineteenth-­ century impressionism and its tendency to dissolve figures in their atmospheric surrounds as well as biological and aesthetic theories of milieu in the period. Late Roman Art Industry references Hippolyte Taine’s tripartite dictum of “race, milieu, moment,”29 cell biology, changing conceptions of an organism, and Darwin’s theory of evolution.30 Some of these references appear in footnotes and thus require a certain level of philological persistence with the text. However hidden they may be, they help illuminate Riegl’s notion of surrounding space in its imbrications with aesthetic and scientific theories of environment. Historically, the word Umgebung was a topographical term semantically continuous with other words such as Außenwelt (external world) and Umwelt (environment). Indeed, from a linguistic perspective, the word Umwelt (environment) is an inherently art-­historical concept. It was first used by the Danish writer Jens Immanuel Baggesen in an ode written in German in 1800. However, the term goes back to the Danish word omegn, which Baggesen explicates by resorting to the loanword environs where the latter refers to the surroundings of cities depicted in paintings.31 Thus, before Jakob von Uexküll’s often-­cited biological employment of the term, Umwelt had an etymological and semantic antecedent in aesthetics where it referred to the painterly depiction of landscape and invoked the associated discourse of the picturesque. For instance, in Der Cicerone, Jacob Burckhardt writes at length about Umgebung as landscape. Riegl’s interest in Umgebung is, thus, an art-­historical interest par excellence, for Umgebung articulates the relation between figure and ground. More specifically, Riegl, associates Umgebung with the art of impressionism, that is, with what he regards as the quintessential example for figures merging with their surrounds.32 Regarding an ancient sculptural relief, Riegl thus writes that “figures . . . set themselves off sharply from the dark space, whereas we [who live at the turn of the twentieth century] demand of them the coalescence with their surroundings [Umgebung], the transition into the air space [Luftraum].”33 Late Roman figures maintain their life within their solid outlines and renounce the exchange with an outside. Impressionist figures, by contrast, are caught in a fluid becoming that rests on their permeable borders and their interchange with an exterior. Riegl’s Late Roman Art Industry was published between two significant publications that examine “ancient impressionism,” namely, The Vienna Genesis (Die

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Wiener Genesis, 1895), by Franz Wickhoff,34 and Impressionism: A Problem of Painting in Antiquity and Early Modernity (Impressionismus: Ein Problem der Malerei in der Antike und Neuzeit, 1911) by the Swiss German art historian Werner Weisbach.35 The former study, in particular, influenced Riegl, who refers to Wickhoff—his predecessor at the Vienna Kunstgewerbe-­Museum and one of the founders of the Vienna school of art history—repeatedly throughout Late Roman Art Industry. Wickhoff ’s The Vienna Genesis, which Schlosser describes as the “first history of Roman art,”36 is a study of the late Roman illustrated biblical codex owned by the imperial library of Vienna. Wickhoff ’s text frequently reads like an explicit application of impressionist tenets to those of late Roman painting: he traces the effects of “plein-­airism”37 in the artworks, which he examines in terms of their ability to reconstruct “atmospheric phenomena”38 and “atmospheric fantasies,”39 and he interrogates in what way “ancient painting rendered the changing lights of the time of day and the various atmospheric conditions dependent on the weather.”40 (The index for The Vienna Genesis lists “the different modalities of representing atmospheric phenomena”41 separately as an entry.) Indeed, certain sentences sound as if they were written about the art of the late nineteenth century and not that of the late Roman empire: for instance, Wickhoff addresses “the dissolution of forms in their surrounding light in painting en plein air.”42 Whereas Wickhoff analogizes between late Roman art and impressionism in their respective treatment of light and color, Riegl explores parallels between the two in view of their treatment of spatial surrounds (Umgebung). Thus, for Riegl, late Roman “figures . . . set themselves apart sharply from their surroundings [Umgebung] and provoke thereby the displeasure of the modern viewer who sees therein an evident contradiction, a lack of style, and barbarism, whereas the late Roman viewer would presumably have the same disproving attitude toward modern impressionism.”43 Riegl’s analysis of late Roman art is inextricably tied to the context of late nineteenth-­century impressionism: unlike the latter, which represents surrounding spaces that encroach on figures and undermine their autonomy, the art of antiquity insists on the individuation of forms by disengaging them from space. If impressionism is thus one context that sheds light on Riegl’s terms of Umgebung and Luftraum, then I would suggest that a bioclimatologically inflected philosophy of history and a mechanistically inflected biology serve as other backdrops against which Riegl’s key concepts can be read.44 On the one hand, Umwelt invoked the history of meteorological climate theories ranging from the Hippocratic corpus to Montesquieu, Herder, and Taine, and their view that the environment, by which they meant climate primarily, conditioned the nature of societies and nations. Yet Taine’s famous

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argument that “race, milieu, moment” were the major conditioning factors behind a work of art was influenced by biomechanism, a fact that points to the other semantic context of Umgebung,45 namely, nineteenth-­century biological theories of milieu such as Jean Baptiste Lamarck’s theory of evolution, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-­Hilaire’s ethology, and Louis-­Adolphe Bertillon’s mesology. In Late Roman Art Industry, Riegl is in dialogue with a biology that understands itself, among other things, as a “science des milieux.”46 He uses the biological term Sonderleben (literally, special life)—a term used earlier by botanists and later as Sondereigenschaft (special property) by Uexküll—to describe the material integrity of form in the art of antiquity.47 Late Roman figures resemble vitalist organisms that carry within themselves an inner principle of life, a vis vitalis that animates them from within and absolves them of dependencies on an outside. Riegl also references changing theories of what constitutes an organism, and he mentions new theories of cell biology,48 which transition from understanding a cell as a closed individual to studying it in its interactions with the external world. He laments that the “cell understood as an individual enclosure within a few walls . . . precisely this [idea] is being lost.”49 Much like impressionist renderings of atmosphere, which undermine the integrity of forms, biological notions of “mass composition,” “collective phenomenon,” “dependency,” and “collective character”50 challenge the idea of the self-­contained cell. The zoologist Wilhelm Roux, who alongside Darwin and Haeckel was known in art-­historical circles at the time,51 articulates the question of an organism’s relation to itself and to its Umgebung in terms pertinent to the way Riegl engages with the scientific discourse of the period. Whereas Riegl explores antique forms as “material individuals,”52—that is, as circumscribed, self-­sufficient units that are independent of their spatial surrounds—Roux claims that it is incorrect to speak of an organism’s “being-­ onto-­itself.”53 For him, there is no organismic essence that exists in itself. Whereas Riegl decries the loss of the unitary understanding of an organism, Roux regards an organism merely in terms of degrees of relationality. An organism is not an independent essence but rather a cluster of intense relationality as opposed to the looser relationality with its environment. An organism is more forcefully in relation with itself than with its surroundings; in Roux’s term, with its Umgebung. The implication is that organisms cannot be clearly separated from their surrounding spaces; indeed, they are continuous with their environs.54 Whereas Roux’s cell biology is interested in studying the metabolic processes of exchange (Stoffwechselprozesse) between a cell and its environment, Riegl’s art history, by contrast, is keen on proving the independence of ancient figures from their environment.

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In Late Roman Art Industry, we see how Riegl draws on biological terms that articulate modes of relation between an organism and its milieu to negotiate the aesthetic relation between figure and ground. His study must be understood in the context of early ecological theories of the nineteenth century, where ecology is understood, in turn, as it was defined by Haeckel in his General Morphology of Organisms, namely, as the “science that deals with the relationship between organism and its surrounding external world.”55 When Riegl writes that he is interested in “the existence of open surrounding space”56 and in the “relation of the figure to space,”57 he is interested in an inherently art-­theoretical problem, but he pursues and conceptualizes it in dialogue with the problem of Umgebung in biology. Thus, he engages with the scientific discourse of his time even as he opposes this discourse and its concern with organisms’ functional relation to their milieu.

Indehiscent Forms In his essay “The Modern Cult of Monuments” (1904), Riegl connects the self-­enclosure of aesthetic form with the self-­containment of natural organisms. He regards art and nature as being fundamentally about the production of bounded form: “All human artistic activity is nothing other than the consolidation of elements scattered in nature into a whole, bounded by form and color. In this creative work, man proceeds like nature itself: both produce bounded individuals.”58 The idea that art and nature converge in their affinity for delimited forms goes back to an Aristotelian and Scholastic conception of organic form59—a conception that, as Amanda Jo Goldstein points out in her book Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life, crystallizes in a moment of intersection between early biology and aesthetics at the end of the eighteenth century.60 According to Goldstein, there is a structural affinity between “the self-­sufficient objects of aesthetic judgment” and “the self-­sufficient organisms of natural-­philosophical judgment,” which implies that in Kant’s third Critique, aesthetics and biology “converge in the ideal of ‘organic form.’”61 Thus, when Riegl writes about art and nature’s shared interest in the creation of delimited individuals, he is positioning himself in a tradition that views the bounded form as the sine qua non of aesthetic activity.62 Whereas, in his third Critique, Kant adduces the tree as an instance of a “self-­organizing being,”63 in Late Roman Art Industry, Riegl gives the example of a tree as an organism to elaborate his own conception of organic form in antiquity: a tree is “a unit through its closed off individual form . . . and through its no less individual anima vegetativa, to which it owes its development and movement (growth).”64 Insofar as they manifest the vitalist development

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Figure 2.1. Image from Alois Riegl, Stilfragen: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik. Berlin: Georg Siemens, 1893. Riegl’s caption reads, “relief decoration of a stone cylinder, from Pompei.”

Figure 2.2. Image from Alois Riegl, Stilfragen. Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik. Berlin: Georg Siemens, 1893. Riegl’s caption reads, “frieze from the Forum of Nerva.”

of forms, Riegl’s vegetal ornaments in his Problems of Style (figs. 2.1, 2.2) would be instances of Kant’s tree understood as a self-­organized being as well as of Riegl’s tree conceived as a self-­regulated being with its individual anima. The ornaments articulate a logic of immanence, for, as Margaret Olin reminds us, they did not correspond to a “naturalistic rendering of the external world”; instead, “ornamental art represented its own material, symbolizing the structure of the surface it covered.”65 Riegl’s analyses of these forms revealed that it was not a “mechanical-­material, imitative drive” that animated art but rather “the freely creative Kunstwollen.”66 In the last sec-

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tion of this chapter, I will address the vitalist ground that subtends Riegl’s concept of Kunstwollen understood as a collective anima of art history that functions parallel to the individual anima of aesthetic forms. And yet, in the same tree passage above, in which Riegl draws on Saint Augustine’s concept of forma unitas to reinforce the idea of organic form, he also introduces a different, “modern” sense in which a tree is an organism. This modern sense regards the tree not as a self-­enclosed unit but rather as a relational being: In the eyes of modern humanity, however, the tree is a collective being made up of thousands of autonomous organisms; and in its actions it follows not a single driving cause [treibende Ursache] but rather thousands of such causes that . . . act on it. If, thus, the artist of antiquity wanted to produce unity as the essence and beauty of each object, then the modern artist wants to achieve the same goal when he expresses the collective character of natural objects in the artwork.67

The late Roman understanding of a tree as a forma unitas, a singular entity sealed off from its surroundings, is in stark contrast to the modern one, which regards a tree as a collective being governed by its interactions with the external world, indeed, inseparable from its external space. As we have seen, throughout Late Roman Art Industry, Riegl sees “modern humanity” embodied in impressionism and its collective—that is, its atmospheric— rendering of forms.68 However, Riegl introduces another “modern” understanding of form when he alludes to Hippolyte Taine’s tripartite concept of “race, milieu, moment” (in Riegl’s phrase, “Volk, Ort und Zeit”69). Perhaps Riegl owes his collective view of vegetal morphology to Taine’s Philosophy of Art.70 Taine, who is attempting to explain art according to natural laws, relies on the analogy between artworks and natural phenomena, in particular plants.71 (“Aesthetic science is like botany,” he claims.72) Just as specific geographic zones and the natural conditions reigning therein determine specific kinds of vegetation, similarly, intellectual and social milieus and the “governing circumstances”73 therein determine specific kinds of artworks.74 Therefore, even in its opposition to mechanistic notions of aesthetic form, Riegl’s study of ancient art’s enstatic figures must be understood in the context of milieu theories, which were interested in blurring the lines between forms and space in the manner of an ecological morphology. Even if Riegl claims that late Roman art’s self-­sufficient forms are the opposite of late nineteenth-­century art’s unbounded ones, his analyses of ancient art are nevertheless in dialogue with his own time’s rethinking of form as a col-

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Figure 2.3. Emperor Constantine distributing largesse to the Romans. North front of the Arch of Constantine. Marble bas-­relief, imperial Roman, 313–315 CE. © Vanni Archive / Art Resource, NY

lective entity that overflows into its surroundings.75 In other words, Riegl addresses the problem of endogenous form by engaging his cultural context’s interest in exogenous forms, that is, in unbounded conceptions of morphology. Just as Riegl insists on ancient art’s bordered forms and thereby in fact engages with his time’s boundless morphologies, similarly, he insists on forms’ space denial and in the process develops concepts of surrounding space. I contend these concepts to be first, “cubic space” (cubischer Raum), which is the physical aerial space around three-­dimensional figures on a sculptural relief; second, “air space” (Luftraum), which is the depicted space shared by figures of an artwork; and third, Kunstwollen (frequently translated as “aesthetic will”), which points to the broader real space of a work of art, that is, to its cultural context such as the time and place of late imperial Rome. The ensuing sections of this chapter pre­sent these concepts in their implications for Riegl’s vitalist mesology of form. In each of these realms of contextuality, Riegl navigates the idea of Umgebung by negotiating the duality of autonomous yet spatially immersed forms. In each of these spatial realms, Riegl’s analysis of the relation between figure and ground spills over into his consideration of the relationship between the artwork and its external space. In “cubic space,” “air space,” and Kunstwollen, Riegl transgresses beyond the material limits of the artwork and blurs the boundaries between an artwork’s depicted “air space” and its external aerial envelope. Even as his study of late Roman art espouses the containment of forms, his own writing at the turn of the twentieth century enacts their ecstasis.

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Cubic Space ( “ Air-­Filled Empty Space ” ) In what follows, I briefly reconstruct Riegl’s history of the relationship between form and space in Late Roman Art Industry in its teleological trajectory from ancient Egyptian art, which depicts figures in a plane, to late Roman art, which represents figures three-­dimensionally as detached from the plane.76 This reconstruction will clarify Riegl’s difficult terminology, and it will draw out the subtleties of his concept of “cubic space.” Riegl begins his art-­historical narrative with the space-­aversive art of ancient Egypt. Although he uses the example of architecture to clarify his argument, we may recall ancient Egyptian reliefs, which isolate forms from their surrounding space by presenting them against a plane. They do not give us a sense of a figure’s spatial situatedness; they do not depict the space around it. Classical Greek art, even as it allows forms to jut out from the plane, still relies on a plane-­based and not a space-­based composition, not a Raumcomposition. Classical sculptural reliefs do not elaborate on the depicted empty space between figures. Riegl considers the relief from the Arch of Constantine (fig. 2.3) to illustrate the transitional period between classical and late Roman sculpture. In it figures appear against a flat surface rather than within their environs. In contrast to Egyptian and classical Greek art, late Roman reliefs pre­sent figures in high relief and endow them thus with three-­dimensionality, with what Riegl terms cubic space. Forms are literally ecstatic insofar as they “stand out” from their background and emerge into the air surrounding the artwork, into what Riegl describes as “air-­filled

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Figure 2.4. Trojan War. The queen of the Amazons, Penthesilea, has just been killed by Achilles, who is holding her, having fallen in love with her after her death. Sarcophagus front, marble high relief, imperial Roman, ca. 230–250 CE. The lid (belonging to another sarcophagus) portrays the deceased couple and a dedicatory inscription. Marble high relief, imperial Roman, mid-­third century CE. Cortile del Belvedere. © Vanni Archive / Art Resource, NY

empty space.”77 However, despite immersing figures into the real space of air, the art of the late Roman Empire does not place them into the depicted space of air, into what Riegl calls air space (Luftraum) and Umgebung.78 As a late Roman relief sarcophagus (fig. 2.4) illustrates, the figures are huddled together behind and above one another. Since the relief represents different moments in time, their physical aerial contiguity belies their immersion into a diegetic air space. Figures are side by side yet without a common spatial denominator; they are physically contiguous without being spatially unified. In other words, they share a plane but not a space; they appear next to one another and yet not together. Instead of immersing figures into the depicted air space, the relief merely extends them into the actual air.79 The notion of cubic space turns on a differentiation between what we can describe as diegetic and extradiegetic space: when Riegl writes about the figures’ “full spatiality,”80 he means that the figures are in actual space: they are in high relief, stepping out of the image into Hegel’s “sensuous space” of sculpture—that real space that sculpture shares with the viewer.81 When, however, Riegl writes about the figures’ “denial of space,” he means that the

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figures are not in the represented space. In other words, their extradiegetic spatiality merely heightens their diegetic isolation within the image space, the Bildraum. Although Riegl’s analyses are keen on drawing distinctions in their semantics of air, they cross between the representational space within the image (the air space) and the space without the artwork (the air-­filled cubic space). With oxymoronic phrases that describe the figures’ “isolated full spatiality,”82 Riegl straddles the domain of the image (within which figures are space denying) and the domain of the artwork as object (within which figures protrude in their three-­dimensionality). He entangles image-­immanent and image-­external spaces in strained contradictory formulations: with “three-­dimensional space-­enclosure” and “fully spatialized enclosure” 83 he brings together spatial immersion with spatial isolation; he crosses freely between the space of the image and the space of the artwork and mingles the sensuous and the illusory spatiality of art. On the one hand, Late Roman Art Industry declares that ancient art was unrelenting in its denial of space around forms and, on the other, it announces that late Roman art initiated the modern immersion of figures in space by representing them as “enveloped by space,” that is, by cubic space.84 In this sense Riegl’s phrase “cubic-­spatial isolation”85 means both that figures are isolated from space and that they are isolated through space. It is as if the ecstasis of forms, their stepping out into real space, further ensured their self-­enclosure, their independence from depicted space. Figures’ three-­dimensionality goes hand in hand with the appearance of spatial niches that house and isolate them.86 Whereas in ancient Egyptian art the contour secured the figure’s self-­containment, on late Roman reliefs cubic space ensures the figure’s self-­enclosure. Whereas space as “surroundings” (Umgebung) undermines the figure’s unity, “cubic space,” the real surrounding space, is the very guarantor of its autonomy. Cubic space is thereby a spatial milieu that is inducted into the vitalist domain of form. Instead of exercising its conditioning power over figures, it manifests its protective function over them. It is a surrounding space that shelters figures from their entrance into the depicted large-­scale communal space in which forms, no longer able to stand onto themselves, must stand collectively. Whereas in mechanistic milieu theories space overrides forms, in Riegl’s aesthetics “cubic space” is subservient to the figures’ individuality and it endows them with a spatiality that is their very own.87 This idea of a personal milieu that encloses the individual and enhances its individuality is presentient of Uexküll’s early environmental theory, which argues that “each animal carries its environment like an impenetrable casing around with itself its whole life long.”88 Riegl’s insistence on the closure

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Figure 2.5. Jan van Scorel, Twelve Members of the Haarlem Brotherhood of Jerusalem Pilgrims, 1528. Oil on panel, 45 × 1081/2 in. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem. Photo: Margareta Svensson

(Geschlossenheit) of a figure’s “cubic space” reinforces the analogy between his notion of spatial environs as “impenetrable . . . space” (undurchdringlich[er] . . . Raum)89 and Uexküll’s later theory of Umwelt as an individual lifeworld that functions like an “impenetrable casing” (undurchdringliches Gehäuse). Riegl’s concentric spatiality of individual-­specific space within the general space of the image resembles Uexküll’s concentric spatiality of an organism’s “own world” within the general world at large.90 Furthermore, his argument that the cubic surroundings of a figure, instead of being at odds with its individuality, are in fact constitutive of it relies on a conception of environment that anticipates Uexküll’s later concept of an individualized environment, which is produced by and continuous with an organism. Although for Riegl cubic space and air space are different compositional categories in a work of art, I show the ways in which they intersect and point to fundamental structures of thought in his theory of art. On the one hand, these structures are manifest, as we have seen, in Riegl’s endeavor to conceptualize form as both a self-­supportive integrity and a “collective phenomenon.”91 On the other hand, they point to his tendency to disregard the artwork’s material boundaries even while continually affirming them. The concept of air space, as Riegl develops it in his study of Dutch group portraiture, makes this latter tendency evident, as does his notion of Kunstwollen, which spans all of his major works. While the ensuing sections of my chapter focus on Riegl’s understanding of air space, the last section centers on his conception of Kunstwollen. It shows this “aesthetic volition” to be both an autonomous historical anima that drives the development of art and a collective milieu that finds its stylistic depositions in artworks and that thereby acts as their conditioning cultural context.

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Figure 2.6. Dirck Jacobsz, A Group of Guardsmen, 1559. Oil on panel, 47 × 681/2 in. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Air Space In 1902, only a year after Late Roman Art Industry, Riegl published The Group Portraiture of Holland (Das Holländische Gruppenporträt), which is a study of Dutch group paintings between 1526 and 1662. Despite their thematic divergence, the two works continue a single historical narrative. Over time, so the latter text argues, the unity of individual forms in space emerges in art: the depicted figures begin to share a single, unitary space, an air space. For Riegl, the highpoint of this development is Rembrandt’s Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild, in which the depicted men, rather than being caught in separate times and distinct spatial domains, appear truly immersed in a single spatiotemporal moment. Instead of standing against a common two-­ dimensional plane, they are within a collective three-­dimensional environs (Umgebung); indeed, they appear to breathe the same air, to share the same air space (Luftraum). However, to understand Rembrandt’s intervention, we must take a step back and consider what came before him. The above group portraits by Jan van Scorel (fig. 2.5) and Dirck Jacobsz (fig. 2.6) have no air space; the figures are not immersed in surroundings. Riegl argues that there is no space between them; the spatial interval is not an object of representation in its own right. The group portraits appear to be made up of a series of individual portraits placed side by side. Figures are next to each other but not immersed in a unitary shared space; rather, they resemble ancient sculptural reliefs with figures placed above and behind each other in a plane-­based spatial construction. In this respect, they are like the sculptural figures of late antiquity: their “spatiality is emphasized intentionally through the piled overlaps, but the artistic unity is still sought in the line composition, that is, the connecting airspaces remain disregarded.”92 Consequently, the figures also lack psychological unity; they do not share a unitary psychological moment. To make up for this lack, they carry external

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Figure 2.7. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Sampling Officials of the Amsterdam Drapers’ Guild, also known as The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild, 1662. Oil on canvas, 751/2 × 110 in. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

objects meant to bring them together, though they are emotionally and often temporally disconnected. True air space between figures only emerges with Rembrandt’s Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild (1662) (fig. 2.7). In the Syndics, air space refers to the chiaroscuro, in which figures and space become coextensive. In Riegl’s words, the aim “was to suspend that dualism, to represent figures . . . and open space as a single homogeneous whole.”93 The syndics no longer represent forms enclosed on themselves but rather forms unified with others through the all-­connecting medium of aerial space. What Riegl identifies as a realm of continuity between figure and space corresponds to what Antonio Somaini calls a “material articulation of space,”94 for air space is a particularly revealing instance of the continuity between matter and space. While the void and air are mutually exclusive in the scientific concept of horror vacui, in Riegl’s writings they coincide, as his phrases “air-­filled empty space”95 and “empty air space”96 suggest.97 This paradoxical understanding of emptiness as filled space is symptomatic of a broader material understanding of space in the nineteenth century, such as that of the ether in physics or that of the milieu in biology.98 Descartes’s notion of a subtle matter was already an instance of a space-­filling fluid—as was Newton’s medium of ether. Understood as a very tenuous matter, space could be simultaneously

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nothing (i.e., a medium for something else) and a thing (in the sense of a quasi substance such as ether and air).99 Around the turn of the nineteenth century, this notion of material space wanders from natural philosophy into the concept of milieu in biology. As Canguilhem shows in his essay “The Living and Its Milieu,” the idea of milieu presupposed that “an organism’s individuality continued beyond its material, ectodermal boundaries,”100 reaching as it were into the space surrounding it. This continuity between organism and milieu lies at the heart of Riegl’s understanding when he contends that Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro washes out outlines until there appears a fluid continuity between figures and space. He implies that air space makes forms uncontainable until they appear to seep into the space adjacent to them. Riegl’s fascination with the continuity between figures and air space in Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro cannot be divested from his own artistic context, namely, the impressionists’ mingling of forms and space in atmosphere.101 While Riegl cannot condone the impressionists’ roaming forms, he does laud Rembrandt’s gently contoured forms and his chiaroscuro’s temperate continuity between figure and ground. He much prefers Rembrandt’s moderated air space to the impressionists’ atmospheric fixations. Consequently, he resists the late nineteenth-­century impressionists’ representations as too entropic and too intent on undoing individuality. However, he finds that the baroque’s impressionism avant la lettre, by contrast, is just the right balance between individual and milieu and by extension between autonomy and intersubjectivity. To understand this baroque sense of atmosphere, we must turn to a term that Riegl employs as a synonym for air space, namely, respiration.

Respiración In his critical biography of Diego Velázquez published in 1888, about a decade before Riegl’s Late Roman Art Industry, the German art historian Carl Justi described a striking feature of Velázquez’s painting as respiración. He borrowed the term from the painter’s eighteenth-­century biographer, Antonio Palomino, the “Spanish Vasari” who used respiración in his practical recommendation to painters: the latter should represent figures as linked by an “ambience” between them. He described this ambience as empty space filled with air: “vacío, que llamamos respiración.”102 When Justi uses the word respiración, he positions himself within a long history of describing Velázquez’s ability to depict space not as a void but rather as a material instance—as atmosphere, air, and ambience.103 This history reaches from Palomino’s eighteenth-­century text and Justi’s nineteenth-­century reception

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of it to the French art historian Élie Faure’s account of it in his History of Art (Histoire de l’art, 1909–1927): “Velázquez, after the age of fifty, never again painted sharply defined things, he wandered around the objects with the air and the twilight.”104 In Faure’s description Velázquez’s painting shifts from focusing on objects to depicting their atmosphere: He was no longer taking from the world anything more than the mysterious exchanges which cause forms and tones to interpenetrate one another in a secret and continuous progression, whose course is not manifested or interrupted by any clash or any shock. Space reigns. An aerial wave seems to glide over the surfaces, impregnating itself with their visible emanations in order to define and model them, and to carry away everywhere else a kind of perfume, a kind of echo of them which it disperses over all surrounding space as an imponderable dust.105

In Faure’s lyrical account, Velázquez transforms space from a lack into a positive representational instance. He represents objects in their exchange with their spatial environs, in continuity with their contexts. He depicts space as an aerial wave, as a “circulation of aerial atoms, a discreet envelopment.”106 Whereas his spaces gain materiality, his objects acquire a remarkable spatiality: they continue into their surroundings as the tenuous matter of emanations and thereby enact the untenable separation between matter and space. This continuous trajectory in the depiction of space as respiración (Palomino), as “circulation of air” (Justi), and as “circulation of aerial atoms” (Faure) takes a peculiar detour in the writings of Riegl and Wickhoff. In his introduction to The Vienna Genesis, Wickhoff describes the relief figures on the Arch of Titus (fig. 2.8) in Rome and the space that surrounds them in terms of Velázquez’s respiración: “The relief,” he writes, “has ‘respiration’ like Velázquez’s images.”107 Wickhoff suggests that the figures stand out from their background and are not one with the relief plane; furthermore, they are neither too far apart from one another nor are they spaceless in their agglomeration, implying that air can circulate between them. Significantly, however, since we are dealing with a sculptural relief and not a painting, the figures’ “respiration” is literal circulating air. In this sense, Wickhoff writes, “However, since it is the real air and not the painted one that spreads between figures, the artistry of the master had to be aimed at opening avenues for the air to move between figures, to surround them, despite their agglomeration.”108 This passage sets up a continuity between depicted aerial space and physical air circulation: the air enveloping the figures on the relief as image is the air surrounding

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Figure 2.8. The Roman Forum, relief from the Arch of Titus showing the triumphal procession after the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. Spoils from the second temple in Jerusalem, including the seven-­branched candelabra, the silver trumpets and the table of the shewbread are carried. Werner Forman Archive, location 01. Photo: HIP / Art Resource, NY

them on the relief as material object. In his analysis of the Arch of Titus, Wickhoff literalizes the connection between the impressionists’ depiction of atmospheric effects and their practice of painting en plein air. The image produces a spatial composition not merely out of the depicted forms but also in the interaction of forms with their real space: with the air and light that fall on the relief. Thereby, atmospheric phenomena become coconstitutive of the artwork, they participate in it. Wickhoff writes about “allowing natural lighting to participate in the completion of the artistic effect.”109 Whereas, in Faure’s text above, the depicted air models Velázquez’s forms, in Wickhoff ’s interpretation, natural atmospheric conditions model the relief ’s figures: the air helps “to complete the modeling . . . just like the light of the sun, which brings the figures to life.”110 Riegl establishes the same continuity between internal and external air as Wickhoff before him when he claims that “there is real ‘respiration,’ palpable air circulation between . . . figures”111 on a sculptural relief. Riegl, too, reconfigures Velázquez’s respiración from belonging to the artwork as image to pertaining to the artwork as object in real space. Whereas in Palomino’s

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Figure 2.9. Francesco Paolo Michetti. The Daughter of Iorio, 1895. Tempera on cloth, 2161/2 × 110 in. Palazzo della Provincia, Pescara.

reading of Velázquez, respiración represents the material continuity between represented figures and space, in Wickhoff ’s and Riegl’s interpretation of late Roman reliefs, respiración enacts a continuity between artwork and its external space. It is as if the figures’ depicted air were continuous with the beholder’s inhaled air, as if these aerial spaces could seamlessly cross frames of reference between representation and reality. While Riegl does not make this external overspill an overt point in Late Roman Art Industry, he does mention it explicitly in a later essay in which he argues that in the course of the development of art, artworks connect more and more with their environment.112 His example is Francesco Paolo Michetti’s La figlia di Jorio (1895) (fig. 2.9), in which a figure on the right is cut off by the frame, suggesting that the artwork continues beyond its material limits.

External Unity Michetti’s example of a painting that exists by exiting into its surroundings might seem like a minor point in Riegl’s essay “The Modern Cult of Monuments,” which is otherwise concerned with art conservation. By contrast, his work The Group Portraiture of Holland is centrally concerned with tracing how figures merge with their contexts. In the previous sections of this chapter, we have seen that in Late Roman Art Industry, forms’ ecstasis is an ambivalent one: there is a tension between their self-­containment and their immersion in space. Unlike in Late Roman Art Industry, in which this tension arises despite Riegl’s arguments, as it were, despite him insisting on the “closure” of forms, in The Group Portraiture there is a balance between

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forms’ autonomy and their self-­transcendence. Riegl explicitly celebrates this balance as an extraordinary achievement in the history of art. He sees it epitomized in Rembrandt’s Syndics, which embodies the historical equilibrium between forms’ isolation in antiquity and their dissolution in late nineteenth-­century impressionism. Corresponding to this historical equilibrium is a formal one: in a vitalist reappropriation of the idea of Umgebung, Riegl uses the idea of environment to reaffirm the autonomy of the self: he contends that the Syndics establishes its inner unity as a painting by extravagating into its external environment, into the space of the beholder. As the Dutch painters became better at depicting the space between figures, the air space, they became better at representing the psychological relation between them. In other words, Riegl analogizes spatial and mental relationality between figures and understands them as modes of internal unity in a painting. Just as the figures subvert their material insularity—their irregular and rugged outlines question their stringent physical boundedness113—so they break their psychological isolation. By the time of Rembrandt’s Syndics, we have a sense of a unitary space into which figures are immersed with air circulating between them, and we have a sense of a psychological common ground between them, a shared attentiveness.114 This attentiveness in Rembrandt’s painting is the opposite of figures’ psychological imperviousness in late imperial Roman artworks. In the former, “the figures do not face the beholder like those of ancient art, . . . each isolated onto itself, but rather they go mentally outside of themselves [gehen geistig aus sich heraus] by showing an apparent attentiveness.”115 The key aspect of this attentiveness is its ability to reside both within and without the image, for Rembrandt’s figures pay attention to each other (the syndics heed their president) as well as to the viewer. When the characters all listen to their president, they enact the painting’s inner unity (innere Einheit), a unity supported in spatial terms by the continuity between figure and ground in Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro. However, insofar as the characters also all look at a beholder situated beyond the frame, they establish the painting’s external unity. Since, in Riegl’s words, “the syndics pay attention simultaneously to the words of their president and to the effect that these words have on the [third] party [i.e., the beholder],”116 their internal unity reinforces the painting’s external unity with the viewer, that is, it extends the painting beyond itself into its outside. In this sense, Riegl argues that, The ultimate goal of Rembrandt’s striving was the extreme execution of that external unity with the viewing subject in which we . . . recognized the true raison d’être of all group portraiture[:] . . . external unity, that is, the connection of the depicted with the viewer.117

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The implication of Riegl’s argument is that as portraits become better at depicting the air space between figures, they become better at extending into the actual air space of the viewer. Air, that ultimate medium of continuity and plasticity, can traverse depicted space and real space with the ease of breath, which can connect our limited physical being with the external world’s expansiveness. In contrast to psychological aesthetics, Riegl envisions not viewers projecting themselves into the artwork but rather the artwork thrusting itself into the domain of the viewers. In Late Roman Art Industry, he was partial to inner self-­determined forms and critical of the impressionists’ subversion of these in atmosphere. Yet in The Group Portraiture of Holland, he balances these two extremes by making one the condition of the other. Riegl, thereby, suggests that the artwork’s straying outside its limits, far from implying self-­loss, is in fact continuous with its integrity of form; indeed, the latter is the very precondition for the art object’s overspill into its outside.118 This large-­scale simultaneity between the painting’s internal and external cohesion reenacts the small-­scale continuity between a figure’s internal psychological collectedness (gesammeltes Innenleben)119 and its dissipation into the external world (der Außenwelt offen).120 Riegl’s terms of intimacy (Innigkeit) and movement or commerce (Verkehr) capture this simultaneity well.121 The Dutch group portrait—above all, Rembrandt’s Syndics—­represents an in-­between, namely, a moment of balance between self-­regulation and external determination, between individuality and environment. Warburg argued similarly when he wrote that Botticelli “chose” to be influenced by his milieu, thus combining individuality and contextual determination. Rainer Maria Rilke grapples with something similar when he claims that artworks produce their own environment (Umgebung) from within themselves.122 I turn to Riegl’s notion of Kunstwollen to offer another conceptual framework in which to understand his transitions between the air circulating among depicted figures and the “real,” “palpable” air space around a work of art. These transitions between internal and external domains of aesthetic reference have to do with Riegl’s dual understanding of artworks as both formal creations and contextual products. These transitions are prefigured in the work of Riegl’s predecessor, namely, in Wickhoff ’s The Vienna Genesis and its slippage between the way the Arch of Titus represents atmospheric phenomena and the way it valorizes actual atmospheric conditions to create aesthetic effects. When Wickhoff connects these two domains, he is interested not only in how forms render meteorological factors but also in how forms are determined by real cultural-­atmospheric circumstances. Schlosser’s description of Wickhoff is particularly revealing in this respect: “Wick-

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hoff demanded the consideration of . . . the atmosphere [Atmosphäre] from which the artwork arises and in which it lives and breathes. . . . For him, the familiarity with the literary and intellectual atmosphere [Dunstkreis], in which the artists’ patrons as well as the artists themselves lived, was a self-­evident given.”123 Wickhoff ’s interest in late Roman painting’s depiction of atmospheric phenomena, while inextricable from his regard for impressionism,124 is also indicative of his interest in reconstructing the cultural-­ historical atmosphere around artworks. Wickhoff—like his younger contemporary Warburg and like his successor Riegl—enacted a cultural-­historical reframing of art history by conceptually redrawing the artwork’s frame to include the actual air circulating around it. Consequently, Riegl’s formalist studies of the relationship between figure and ground must be understood in terms of his overarching concern for the relationship between artwork and its cultural context. Riegl does not connect artworks to a specific social milieu (like Warburg), and he does not examine them against a cultural-­ literary backdrop (like both Warburg and Wickhoff ).125 However, insofar as he relates works of art to an era’s Kunstwollen, he does connect “artistic form to a wider cultural context.”126 Inspired by Hegelian notions of spirit, this context resembles a collective anima understood both as an autonomous spiritual drive and a powerfully determinative, milieu-­like force.

Kunstwollen Riegl’s concept of Kunstwollen—and its intervention in art-­historical debates—is best understood in the context of other theories of art, in particular those of Robert Zimmermann and Gottfried Semper. For the former, form, divested of all other components, represents the quintessential object of aesthetic inquiry (“The components outside of form, matter, are aesthetically irrelevant”).127 In contrast to Zimmermann’s aesthetics as a pure science of form, Semper’s “empirical study of art”128 is concerned with the marginalia around form, with the determinative components behind the “finished form-­language.”129 Semper suggests that aesthetics ought to concern itself not only with form but also with the engendering conditions of form that lie latent within it. It is the task of the art historian to unravel forms’ various dimensions of latency, such as “the components of form, which are not in themselves form, but rather idea, force, material, and means, so to speak, the pre-­constituents and fundamental conditions of form.”130 Whereas Zimmermann’s aesthetics is about form in its boundedness, Semper’s aesthetics, concerned with that which is not form yet is nevertheless constitutive of form, is about form in its beyondness. In this respect Semper’s theory bears affinities with Hippolyte Taine’s positivist aesthetics, which espouses that “a work of

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art is not an isolated production”131 and which, consequently, endeavors to reconstruct the conditioning circumstances of form. Riegl, seemingly in alliance with Zimmerman’s formal purism, rejects what he regards as Semper’s “materialist metaphysics” according to which the work of art is nothing but a product of “function, raw material, and technique.”132 As Riegl scholarship has repeatedly emphasized, in contrast to this deterministic view, Riegl’s notion of Kunstwollen posits an independent aesthetic will animating the history of art. On the one hand, this collective aesthetic volition must be understood as the conceptual counterpart to the “individual anima vegetativa” of ancient art’s enclosed forms.133 Kunstwollen’s self-­sufficiency is the collective counterpart to aesthetic forms’ self-­regulation. Just as in the art of antiquity he sees self-­enclosed forms endowed with their own “special life”—with an anima of their own—similarly, in the development of art he sees a self-­ sufficient artistic volition endowed with its own vital force. In this context, Wollen (“will,” inherent in Kunstwollen and understood as “aesthetic will”) must be understood as the vitalist counterpart to the mechanistic forces of interaction and “influence.”134 Both the historical aesthetic will and the formal aesthetic phenomenon follow a vitalist logic.135 Just as these forms, insulated from space, rely on an inner “driving cause,” the development of art, independent of material contextual factors, relies on an autonomous aesthetic drive. On the other hand, just as antiquity’s self-­regulative and purportedly space-­denying forms were nevertheless also “immersed in space” (raumumflossen),136 so Kunstwollen, as a self-­animated aesthetic will, is nevertheless determined by a broader context that resembles a formative milieu. Even as Riegl refutes Semper’s materialist metaphysics, he claims that the artwork is “the result” of a historically specific Kunstwollen; the latter is thus a conditioning, albeit spiritual, domain.137 Riegl, thereby, replaces Semper’s materialist conditioning factors with an immaterial historical force whose resemblance to Hegel’s Geist has frequently been noted.138 While the artwork might not be a product of its material context, it is nevertheless the product of a spiritual will that is very much tied to a specific time and place.139 In this sense, Riegl claims in his essay “Naturwerk und Kunstwerk I” that it is necessary to recognize that “the relevant artwork could develop only in this specific, and in no other, place.”140 Riegl’s temporal and geographical grounding of Kunstwollen represents a cultural-­historical reframing of Semper’s materialist aesthetics; it constitutes, in Wessely’s and Huber’s phrase, a “spiritual theory of environment.”141 This grounding is particularly evident in the argument, at the end of Late Roman Art Industry, that Kunstwollen is itself determined by the Weltanschauung of a particular epoch.142 Riegl’s recourse to the term Weltanschauung calls to mind Taine’s notion

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of milieu, to which Riegl alludes with “nation, environment, time” (Volk, Ort und Zeit).143 (A further fact that illumines this semantic association between Weltanschauung and environment is Uexküll’s decision to replace his term environment with that of Weltanschauung.)144 Riegl implies that whereas Taine’s triad of “race, milieu, moment” gives rise to a particular “worldview” (Weltanschauung), the latter manifests itself, in turn, as an era’s specific artistic will. Kunstwollen is thus ambivalent: on the one hand, it is a vitalist phenomenon, an autonomous, collective, will to art; on the other hand, it is a historical force both determinative of artworks and determined by Tainian environmental circumstances. This unexpected affinity between Riegl and Taine continues in their shared positivist method, which aims to identify determining factors behind works of art and which, rather than providing judgments on aesthetic quality, is in Taine’s words “historic and not dogmatic: that is to say, it imposes no precepts, but ascertains and verifies laws.”145 When in Late Roman Art Industry Riegl is at pains to justify his study of an artistic period considered to be one of decline, he invokes a Tainian approach of being nondogmatic.146 He insists on the necessity of judging late Roman art not by standards of beauty but rather by understanding the particular conditions of existence—in Riegl’s sense, the reigning Kunstwollen that gave rise to it and that inheres in its formal language. Therefore, the work of the art historian is to unravel forms into their conditioning factors, into their variously understood environing spaces. There is a transcendent dynamic at work in Riegl’s thought on several levels. First, as we have seen in the course of this chapter, in his studies of the relation between figure and ground, he explores how forms spill over into their atmosphere; the latter refers not only to the depicted air space but also to the real air enveloping the artwork. Second, Riegl’s formalism extends forms into their “spiritual environment,” into the Kunstwollen governing them in their historical context, such as in the Roman imperial period or in sixteenth- and seventeenth-­century Holland. Third, his philosophy of history relates Kunstwollen itself to broader forces determining it such as Weltanschauung and Taine’s conception of “nation, environment, time.” This concentric dislimitation of form into broader and broader circles of context is structurally similar to Taine’s extension of the artwork into wider and wider circles of circumstance: the artist’s oeuvre, the art movement to which he belongs, and finally society at large. In Riegl’s and Taine’s writing, forms create wider and wider ripples of space around themselves. They swell, heave, and become capacious, extending themselves into their progressively wider contexts. Thereby, they showcase the continuity between formalism and historicism. The idea that something does not exist in isola-

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tion but rather as part of an ensemble is central to Taine’s philosophy of art, which is intent on demonstrating that the artwork partakes of a concentric ensemble of forces and that it is, in Riegl’s terms, a “collective being” (Collektivwesen), or, to borrow Goethe’s phrase, that it is “not a singularity but rather a multiplicity.”147

[   c h apt e r 3  ]

Saturated Forms Rilke’s and Rodin’s Sculpture of Environment There are sculptures which carry the environment in which they are imagined, or out of which they are raised, within themselves, they have absorbed it, and they radiate it. Rilke, from notes relating to Rodin1

Reticence and Radiance In his early notes on Rodin, written in 1900, Rilke makes an argument that is in direct dialogue with Riegl’s later interpretation of Rembrandt’s Syndics: he claims that a “looking-­out-­of-­the-­picture” is never the case for Rodin’s statues.2 Instead, the depicted figures’ gaze always stays within the image and the figures appear separated from the viewer by a “nonconductive space that is void of air.”3 In contrast to Riegl, who sees in the Syndics’ gaze the artwork’s self-­extension into the realm of the viewer, Rilke recognizes in Rodin’s sculpture the epitome of the self-­preoccupied object (fig. 3.1). Unlike for Riegl, for whom the Syndics observe the viewer “attentively,” almost “coercively,” keeping him “under their spell,”4 for Rilke, Rodin’s sculptures turn their gaze inward: “no viewer,” Rilke argues, “(not even the most conceited one) could allege that a bust of Rodin’s . . . looked at him!”5 And finally, whereas in The Group Portraiture of Holland, Riegl traces the Syndics’ unity with the external viewer by analyzing the painting’s depiction of air space (Luftraum), in his notes on Rodin, Rilke stresses the sculpture’s separation from the viewer by invoking the image of “a space void of air” (luftleerer Raum).6 Yet Rilke’s insistence on statues’ self-­enclosure is surprising, for throughout his writings on Rodin, he explores the ways in which sculptures transcend their material boundedness by interacting with their surrounding external space, with their “atmosphere.” He suggests that the enveloping air is part of Rodin’s objects, that it participates in their being.7 It is as if Rodin had dissolved the stone into the air: “the marble appears to be a firm, fecund core, and the pulsating air its last, most delicate contour.”8 If Rilke’s early notes seem to allude to Rembrandt, his later monograph explicitly invokes Rembrandt to suggest that Rodin had learned from his chiaroscuro about the fluid continuity between surface and atmosphere.9 For Rilke, Rodin’s 71

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Figure 3.1. Auguste Rodin, Danaid (The Source), carved by Jean Escoula. Modeled 1885, enlarged 1889, and carved before 1902. Marble, 13 × 19 × 25 in. Gift of Alexander Harrison to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1902 and purchased by the Philadelphia Museum of Art with the Annenberg Fund for Major Acquisitions and other Museum funds, 2003. Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2003-­4-­1. Photo: Philadelphia Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY

seemingly weathered surfaces—which appear to have been exposed to the elements and abandoned to atmospheric conditions—point to a sculpture that is continuous with its environment (figs. 3.2, 3.3). Like Riegl and Worringer who, reacting to impressionism’s atmospheric excesses, argue that atmosphere undermines forms’ “material integrity,”10 Rilke suggests that Rodin’s atmospheric planes challenge his sculpture’s self-­containment. How then are we to understand Rilke’s writings on Rodin, in which statues both “come to an end within themselves”11 and continue beyond themselves into their atmospheric envelope? This strain between aesthetic enclosure and effusion, between art’s radical separateness from life and its emphatic mingling with it, is central to Rilke’s understanding of art. It is evident not only in his ambivalent view of sculpture’s boundaries but also in the tension between his insistence on poems’ stringent limits and his verses’ intersubjective exuberance. It is present in his claim that artworks are in fact “turning away from us”12 even as his poetry is famous for its overpowering sense of address, for its ability “to seduce the mind” of the reader into a sense of intimate understanding.13 His writings on Rodin crystallize in a paradigmatic way this strain between aesthetic enstasis

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and ecstasis in the tension between sculptures’ enfoldment into themselves and their self-­externalizing into surrounding space.14 In Rilke’s writings, the artwork’s coinciding capacity to stand within and without itself turns on its peculiar spatial constitution—namely, on an idea of environment that Rilke harnesses for art objects. This notion of environment is situated at the threshold of aesthetic and biological theories of milieu. It is this hybrid concept of milieu that animates his study of the relationship between works of art and their external surrounding space, in his words, their Umgebung (surroundings), Milieu (milieu), and Atmosphäre (atmosphere). This chapter’s dual task is to contextualize Rilke’s idea of aesthetic “environment” in his art-­historical and scientific interests around 1900 and to illustrate how this idea is concretely at work in the Rodin texts. I understand the latter to include not only Rilke’s early notes on the sculptor, his monograph from 1902, and his lecture published in 1907 but also relevant correspondence and exemplary poems written contemporaneously with his work on Rodin such as those from the collection New Poems (Neue Gedichte, 1907), the second volume of which bears the dedication “A mon grand Ami Auguste Rodin.” Most readings of Rilke’s writings on Rodin center on themes such as “patience,” “work,” and “learning to see.”15 This chapter, however, diverges from these established paradigms by focusing on how Rilke, who studied art history while also attending lectures on Darwin’s theory of evolution, makes the artwork’s autonomy amenable to the notion of milieu. When he argues that works of art carry their environment within themselves, as he does in the epigraph for this chapter, he both engages with the relation between artwork and its environment and diffuses this very relation. He reconfigures the artwork’s dependence on its milieu into the artwork’s vitalist creation of its own surroundings, namely, into statues’ spatial radiance. However, Rilke does this in a counterintuitive way. For it is his familiarity with art-­historical studies, written under the auspices of Hippolyte Taine’s historical positivism, that sensitizes him to modes of dependency between artworks and their milieu; conversely, it is his exposure to biological discourses of the period, in particular neo-­Lamarckian critiques of Darwin, that helps him refigure the artwork’s dependency on its environment into its self-­sufficiency. In the second part of this chapter I examine Rilke’s language at work. I trace how his language subsumes the idea of milieu under the vitalist reach of the artwork. In his evocations of Rodin, sculptures are internally saturated with space and externally surrounded by space; they contain “expanse,” “depth,” “sky,” and they are environed by “space,” “air,” “atmosphere.”16 The work of art is so suffused by space within and so enveloped by space without that we cannot help but question its impermeable enclo-

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Figure 3.2. Auguste Rodin, Colossal Head of Balzac. Modeled 1898; cast by the founder Alexis Rudier, Paris, 1925. Bronze, 20 × 161/2 × 151/4 in. Bequest of Jules E. Mastbaum, 1929. Philadelphia Museum of Art, F1929-­7-­1. Photo: Philadelphia Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY

sure even as Rilke insists on it. On the one hand, atmosphere, as we have seen, is the site of statues’ porous limits. On the other, however, atmosphere, described by Rilke as the ultimate outline of a statue, corrals the statue into self-­containment precisely by extending it beyond itself. Rilke’s argument that the statue’s overspill into its surrounding space, instead of being at odds with its individuality is in fact constitutive of it, articulates avant la lettre a conception of “environment” that resonates with the zoologist Jakob von Uexküll’s later concept of Umwelt. Whereas for Uexküll, each organism generates its environment and constitutes an indissoluble whole with it, for Rilke, the artwork’s spatial overreach is constitutive of its integrity. I suggest, thus, that in contradistinction to an art-­historical tradition that insists on the incompatibility between a form’s autonomy and its spatial immersion (a tradition arguably embodied in Riegl and Worringer), Rilke

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Figure 3.3. Auguste Rodin, The Left Hand. Modeled ca.1885; cast by the founder Alexis Rudier, Paris, 1925. Bronze, 18 × 101/2 × 61/2 in. Bequest of Jules E. Mastbaum, 1929. Philadelphia Museum of Art, F1929-­7-­32. Photo: Philadelphia Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY

pre­sents the space around an artwork as the measure of its self-­enclosure.17 In this respect his understanding of the artwork’s spatial envelope preempts two major currents of German aesthetic thought in the twentieth century. First, it articulates the dynamics of the aura where the latter is understood, in Steven Connor’s words, as “an emanation which, like the logos, goes forth from and yet also remains, and remains in, itself; as the Zohar says it breaks out and yet does not break out.”18 Second, Rilke’s assertion that the artwork summons a world around itself (“the acquisition of space [by the artwork]”)19 even as it remains corralled within its own bounds (“this turn inward”),20 resonates with Heidegger’s later insistence in “The Origin of the Work of Art” that the artwork opens up a world (“the work as work sets up a world”)21 even as it remains within itself (“the self-­subsistence of the work”).22 Rilke does not so much anticipate Heidegger’s thinking as Heidegger explicitly relies on Rilke’s poetics of art. Consider, for instance,

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that Heidegger’s description of “the mere thing which has taken shape by itself and is bereft of urges” (dem eingenwüchsigen und zu nichts gedrängten bloßen Ding)23 appears to have been lifted out of Rilke’s lecture on Rodin, which discusses “the great calm of things, bereft of urges” (die große Beruhigung der zu nichts gedrängten Dinge).24 Indeed, when Rilke declares that aesthetics stands on faulty grounds when it is based on beauty;25 when he is interested in the artwork in terms of its thinghood (he writes about the Kunst-­Ding);26 when he ponders the connection between artworks and tools;27 when he discusses the artwork’s ability to dwell in space—in all these instances Rilke formulates an aesthetic theory that continues to live on in Heidegger’s thought.

Aesthetico-­B iological Endeavors 28 Recently, Rilke scholarship has been interested in tracing intersections between his thought and that of Jakob von Uexküll, whom Rilke met in 1905 and with whom he corresponded for years afterward. Giorgio Agamben is an important driving force behind this interest.29 His book The Open: Man and Animal (2003) draws on the work of Uexküll, Heidegger, and Rilke, among others, to theorize a biopolitical concept of life by exploring the relation between man and animal. Yet in 1900, when in early notes on Rodin, Rilke pondered the relationship between a work of art and its “surroundings” (Umgebung) and “milieu” (Milieu),30 he was not yet familiar with Uexküll; in fact, the latter had not even published his first book. How then are we to understand the ecological impetus behind Rilke’s interest in an artwork’s environing space? Rilke had an abiding interest in art. He studied art history in Prague and in Munich, where he attended a course on Italian Renaissance art taught by the art historian Berthold Riehl, whose lectures Aby Warburg had also attended, as well as a course on aesthetics taught by Theodor Lipps.31 In 1905 he was enrolled in the department of art history in Berlin.32 He worked as an art critic and wrote about countless artists of his time from van Gogh and Cézanne to Picasso and Klee.33 For a while, he saw his own literary endeavors reflected in the Jugendstil art of his time; he viewed Rodin as his “maître.” When he considered writing a dissertation on art history, he sought out the art historian Richard Muther; it was he who commissioned the monograph on Rodin and eventually published it. Muther was a highly popular art historian at the time, a kind of feuilleton art scholar frowned on by established art historians such as Carl Justi and Franz Wickhoff. Muther relied little on primary research, his books contained many inaccuracies, his prose was sentimental (he cried in front of Velázquez), he plagiarized others, and he

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Figure 3.4. Title page from Richard Muther, Geschichte der Malerei im XIX. Jahrhundert, vol. 1 (Munich: G. Hirth’s Kunstverlag, 1893). Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, Aesth.C.22486.

fell for fakes.34 However, as a passionate champion of modern art, he was a powerful shaper of public opinion praised by Hofmannsthal and Freud. For years, Rilke pursued Muther’s support, praising his “intensive seeing and savoring” of art and the “colossal mobility of his spirit.”35 It was above all, Muther’s History of Painting in the Nineteenth Century (Geschichte der Malerei im XIX. Jahrhundert, 1893–1894) (fig. 3.4) that impressed him and that left its mark not only on his general taste in art, as it did on so many of his contemporaries,36 but also on his milieu-­focused interpretation of Rodin. For in Muther’s history of painting, “milieu” provided an overarching conceptual framework—one made explicit in his citing of Hippolyte Taine’s History of English Literature, which popularized an “ecological theory of literature,”37 as well as in his references to Émile Zola’s work, which consistently explored the conditioning forces of sociocultural environments.38 In his Rodin texts Rilke transfigures the idea of milieu, so pervasive in

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Muther’s History of Painting in the Nineteenth Century, from a sociocultural environment into an artwork’s immediate physical space, its “atmosphere.” To some extent this transfiguration is preempted by Muther when he connects England’s atmospheric conditions, its foggy and rainy weather, with what he regards as early impressionist renderings of atmosphere in Turner’s and Constable’s nebulous forms—in their clouds, sky, and smoke.39 Rilke, however, reconceptualizes the notion of milieu from a surrounding space that conditions the artist into one that is engendered by the artwork. Whereas for Muther, England’s climatic conditions create Constable’s meteorological renderings of landscape, for Rilke, Rodin’s sculptural forms create their own atmosphere—they heighten the presence of the air around them. First, insofar as their textured surfaces invite the play of light onto them and make them appear continuous with the surrounding air, Rodin’s sculptures emanate an atmosphere. Second, in more poetic terms, Rilke claims that Rodin’s sculptures are capable of pulling vast spaces around themselves. He suggests that their modeled surfaces endow them with many areas, thereby making them appear large; their rugged planes, seemingly exposed to the elements, make them resemble objects of nature that reside in vast spaces (“All expanses belong to this stone,” writes Rilke regarding one of the sculptures.)40 The statues are like trees that grow under the open sky, like boulders that are enveloped by the winds. It is the modern sitelessness of Rodin’s work, its estrangement from sculpture’s past abodes such as cathedrals, that forces it to engender its own spaces around itself. Whereas Muther regards the representation of “atmosphere” in painting as an extension of the deterministic idea of milieu in naturalist dramas,41 Rilke understands the atmosphere of sculptural forms in vitalist terms: statues are not dependent on their surrounding space but rather are generative of it. To him who sees them [the sculptures] correctly it is always their Own-­ ness that is their native setting, not the accidental room in which they are placed or the empty wall against which they stand out. Sculptures which have no milieu within them do indeed stand among the people, not encircled by any sacred ring and in no way different from objects of daily use.42

In this respect Rilke identifies in Rodin’s work a central concern of sculpture in the period: its thematization of physical milieu. This is evident, for instance, in Constantin Brâncuși’s brass pieces, which reflect their environment and thereby incorporate it within themselves (Brâncuși was deeply influenced by Rodin), and in Umberto Boccioni’s proclamation that futur-

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ists “will create a sculpture of environment”43 and in his injunction, “Let us . . . proclaim the complete abolition of the finished line and the closed statue. Let us open up the figure like a window and enclose within it the environment in which it lives.”44 Duchamp’s readymades will also take up the relationship between an art object and its concrete space (the museum). However, they reconceive it in playfully mechanistic terms: arguably, it is the surroundings, the exhibition gallery or Duchamp’s studio, that transforms a thing such as a bottle rack, pissoir, or snow shovel into a work of art. Unlike Duchamp, who seems to embrace the artwork’s spatial determination, and unlike Muther, who explicitly connects atmosphere with the idea of a conditioning milieu, Rilke refunctions the governing environment into an aesthetically immanent domain. In this respect he anticipates other antideterministic reinterpretations of “milieu,” like the prominent ones of Leo Spitzer, Jakob von Uexküll, and Georges Canguilhem.45 The presence of biological thinkers in this list is significant, for, as Wolf Feuerhahn suggests, there was an antideterministic construal of milieu that came from biology. If Muther’s invocations of aesthetic theories of milieu through the prism of Taine’s historical positivism and Zola’s naturalism constitute one backdrop for Rilke’s interrogations of the relation between the artwork and its surrounding space, then biological notions of environment represent another context for his explorations of aesthetic limits. Rilke’s interest in biology went beyond his much-­cited associations with Uexküll. He was, for instance, an eager reader of Maurice Maeterlinck, who alongside his literary output published a series of biologically inspired essays such as The Life of Bees (1901) and The Intelligence of Flowers (1907).46 Rilke’s analysis of bees’ work ethic, in his review of Maeterlinck written the same year as his monograph on Rodin, reverberates in his reflections on Rodin’s mode of working. (The latter is akin to the rhythm of nature: both instantiate utter self-­immersion, a doing without rushing, a creating without the awareness of a higher intention). Rilke was also interested in the work of Wilhelm Bölsche, a German writer who, although not a scientist himself, had popularized various topics of natural science, especially those related to Darwin’s and Haeckel’s work. Gerhard Hauptmann’s friend and a proponent of naturalism, Bölsche would have appealed to Rilke’s early dramas and their naturalist ambitions as well as to his texts’ affinity for what Eric Santner calls “creaturely life.” Bölsche’s works bear revealing titles such as Evolutionary History of Nature (1894– 1896), Evolutionary Theory (Darwinism) (1900), and Animal Book (1908– 1911).47 Whereas Rilke praised Bölsche in 1898,48 later in 1914 he expressed his enthusiasm for Adolf Koelsch, another writer whose work bridged literature and science. Koelsch’s publications of popular science included Biological Strolls through the World of Small Animals and Plants (1908), The

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Transformations of Life (1919), and Creature (1921).49 In a letter addressed to Uexküll, Rilke not only extols Koelsch but also conveys his ardent desire to study biology: “How exhilarating it would be to enter into the apprenticeship of this science. . . . Could you advise me how to seek active contact and friendship with the subjects of this delightfully youthful biology?”50 On the one hand, Rilke’s desire for “apprenticeship” reaffirms his unceasing curiosity about biology, in particular, as we have seen, about writers situated at the intersection of literary essayism and zoology or botany. On the other hand, however, this desire is slightly puzzling, since by the time of his correspondence with Uexküll, he had already had the chance to “befriend” the life sciences academically. During his stay in Paris, Rilke attended lectures on anatomy at the École des Beaux-­Arts,51 and while studying art history in Munich in 1896, he was enrolled in a course with August Pauly, professor of comparative zoology at the University of Munich.52 Pauly was a biologist with a philosophical mindset and a keen interest in art.53 His lectures on Darwin centered on a critique of the concept of natural selection: they raised the question whether the variations that put one organism at an advantage over another were truly random or whether there was an inner sense of purpose, an inner “teleology” within the organism.54 Pauly was an emphatic proponent of the latter view, which he presented in his book Darwinism and Lamarckism: Outline of a Psychophysical Teleology (Darwinismus und Lamarckismus: Entwurf einer psychophysischen Teleologie, 1905) (fig. 3.5). He argued that an organism could sense the usefulness of a variation and thus select the development of one trait over another. Since Pauly built his theory of active adaptation on a psychological foundation, and since he argued that phylogenetically accumulated experience guided the organism in its decision making, he was regarded as a “psycho-­Lamarckist.” In the words of the zoologist Hans Spemann, a student of Pauly’s around the same time as Rilke, “a central tenet of Pauly’s doctrine was that the organism was itself responsible for the satisfaction of its needs and the acquisition of the means to do so; no principle outside or beyond him could encroach on his limits and provide for it.”55 In other words, Pauly reconceived the organism’s directionless conditioning by its environment into a purposeful act of volition from within: he injected into the randomness of natural selection the teleology of directed change. On the one hand, when Rilke reconfigures the determinative power of the milieu into a vitalist force arising from within the artwork—namely, into the sculptures’ emanation of space—he enacts a neo-­Lamarckian vitalism in aesthetics. Pauly also undertakes to subsume the external causa efficiens of an organism to a causa finalis that resides within it.56 Thus, Rilke’s emphasis on the generative capacities of sculpture, on statues’ power over their environ-

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Figure 3.5. Title page from August Pauly, Darwinismus und Lamarckismus: Entwurf einer psychophysischen Teleologie (Munich: Ernst Reinhardt, 1905).

ment, must be understood in the context of a biology that reacts to the way the life sciences “lost track of the organism’s autonomy after Darwin.”57 (The lineage of this biology includes Lamarck, Pauly, Uexküll—the latter claims that the organism produces its Umwelt58—and Canguilhem—who thinks in terms of the living and its milieu.59) When Rilke declares that the artwork contains its milieu and radiates its own environment, he resonates with biological perspectives that insist on organisms’ “inherent capacity” (Eigenvermögen)60 even as they continually probe how these capacities react to extrinsic factors. That is, just as Pauly’s brand of vitalism is specific to an ecological turn in biology, so Rilke’s vitalism turns on an aesthetics of mesology that is more and more concerned with the artwork’s environments. On the other hand, it would be reductive to understand Rilke’s emphasis on the artwork’s agency as solely derived from Pauly—or as exclusively applied to Rodin. By drawing on Heidegger, we can reformulate Rilke’s project into a broader question: How can the living transform their passive

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“thrownness” into the world into a mode of intentional being? This question animates all of Rilke’s writing, and it can be understood not only as his biovitalist attempt to rescue the artwork’s autonomy in the face of mechanistic incursions but also as his Nietzschean (Zarathustrian) endeavor to rescue notions of will in the face of fate. Indeed, Rilke’s contention with the determinism inherent in the idea of milieu must be understood as a contention with the idea of fate. Consider the following quote from his Maeterlinck review: Besides those oppressed by people and circumstances, there are those other beings who are gifted with an inner force to which not only people but also surrounding events submit themselves. . . . Thereby, the events’ center of gravity . . . changes location; it is no longer in the mystery that surrounds us but rather in that which we carry within ourselves.61

When in his monograph on Rodin, written the same year as these lines taken from his review of Maeterlinck, Rilke argues that statues are endowed with an inner force that subjects their surroundings to themselves, he clearly echoes Maeterlinck’s strife with the idea of fate. Just as Rilke’s Rodin texts attempt to release works of art from the conditioning forces of their environing space, his later poems try to deliver us from being at the mercy of extraneous forces of control—forces such as loss, suffering, or transience.62 That impression of existential solace, so often attributed by readers to Rilke’s poetry, comes from this very attempt. When Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus instruct “Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were / behind you,”63 or when a late fragment maintains, “Losing too is still ours,”64 then these texts avow an ethos of affirmation even in the face of negativity. A similar ethos is at work in Rilke’s project to refigure statues’ surrounding empty space into filled space, into air and atmosphere. Just as he wants to reclaim our autonomy by injecting our will behind the impersonal events that wash over our life, similarly, he wants to regain the modern artwork’s autonomy by injecting self-­intentionality behind its spatial forlornness. When Rilke reconceives the external spaces of an artwork into occasions for its self-­realization, he not only resonates with Pauly, who tried to rethink the random events behind natural selection into acts of intentionality, but he also anticipates his later poems, which refunction the inexorable conditions of our existence into instances of self-­determination. Showing how this refunctioning plays itself out concretely in Rilke’s monograph and lecture on Rodin as well as his relevant poems is the task of the second part of this chapter, which asks, How can the idea of milieu, which

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Rilke reconceptualizes under the banner of autopoiesis, be compatible with that of atmosphere, which he understands as a site of relationality, as the very locus of the artwork’s permeable limits? In what follows, the answer to this question turns on a notion of aesthetic metabolism that subtends Rilke’s theory of art. For Rilke, the work of art is constituted as a threefold process of absorption, transformative containment, and release. It resembles an organism that metabolizes its outside or a human being that internalizes and processes the arbitrary events of its life. Just as organisms take in their external world and then, as in a feedback loop, after processing this world have an effect on it, similarly, aesthetic forms absorb their outside, transform it within, and act back on it in turn. This process corresponds to a metabolic self-­regulation in which the artwork’s relation to its outside supports its internal equilibrium. It is conceivable that Rilke’s aesthetics absorbed this biological thematic field from Pauly, who described the metabolic process suggestively in his Darwinism and Lamarckism.65 In his Rodin monograph written in 1902, Rilke describes a small statue of a bird in the Louvre that absorbed the bird’s environment (the sky), folded it into its form, and then resurrected it outside itself: There were [at the Louvre] small figures, particularly beasts, moving, stretching or crouching, and even when a bird was at rest one knew at once that it was a bird, there went forth from it a sky, which remained about it, distance lay folded on each of its feathers, one could spread it out and make it vast.66

The sky is not represented by the statue of the bird but rather it is infused in it, it is “interfolded” into its form, until the bird is saturated with the sky. The small statue holds this endless milieu within its delimitation; it encloses the “sky” and “distance.” Here, the artwork’s spatial containment bears resemblance to Heidegger’s suggestion, in the essay “Art and Space,” that a sculpture encloses a volume of space within itself.67 Under the weight of this encompassment, Rilke’s statue of the bird releases the spaces it contains and engenders vast milieus around itself: “there went forth from it a sky.” Indeed, Heidegger understands sculpture’s volumetric embodiment of space as continuous with its ability to bring forth a space outside itself (“Sculpture would be the embodiment of places. Places, in preserving and opening a region, hold something free [ein Freies] gathered around them”).68 Thus, the various spaces within an artwork—the metaphorically compressed ones in the sense of Rilke, the volumetrically enclosed ones in the sense of Heidegger—spill over into the spaces without the artwork. Heidegger expresses this continuity when he suggests that sculpture’s volumes

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“will no longer demarcate spaces from one another, in which surfaces surround an inner opposed to an outer.”69 When Rilke argues that in Rodin’s statues “the borders of forms . . . continuously spill over,”70 he posits an aesthetics that “no longer demarcates” the artwork’s inner spaces from its external ones, indeed, an aesthetics that undoes the very dualism between form and space. In Rilke’s reading, therefore, sculptures act as entities that under the pressure of their brimming wholeness—in other words, under the very pressure of their integrity—strive for egress. In Jean-­Luc Marion’s terms, we could say that artworks—under the pressure of their “saturation”71— strive for effusion, thus for modalities of incompletion. The artwork imbibes (experiences, past tradition, the marginalia around its object of representation such as the milieu of a bird); it contains into forms, into the completed image; and then it releases. Its moment of release coincides with its reception (with the beholder’s viewing). Significantly however, for Rilke, the artwork’s reception coincides not only with its metaphorical self-­dissipation into the beholder’s subjectivity but also with a materially understood dispersal, that is, a physical dispersion of surface into atmosphere. This was also one of Riegl’s points in Late Roman Art Industry: modern artworks’ material excursions beyond their physical limits go hand in hand with their openness to the viewer’s emotive incursions into them, with their susceptibility to the viewer’s straying subjectivity. In what follows, I turn to a reading of Rilke’s two Apollo poems, the famous “Archaic Torso of Apollo” and the lesser-­known “Early Apollo.” These texts, examined in conjunction with his monograph and lecture on Rodin, epitomize the idea of aesthetic metabolism at work. The poems illustrate the artwork’s logic of saturation: the artwork’s expansion into the space around it is a consequence of its intensive containment within itself. In this sense the second part of this chapter identifies an encounter between the artwork’s ecstasis and its self-­enclosure, a continuity between its extensivity and its intensivity. This domain is paradigmatically figured in Rilke’s texts on Rodin as the material space of air and atmosphere.

“ Archaic Torso of Apollo ” Rilke’s famous poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo” (“Archaischer Torso Apollos”) the first poem of his New Poems: The Other Part, is preceded by the dedication: “A mon grand Ami Auguste Rodin.” Published in 1908, while Rilke was still touring Europe lecturing on Rodin, it exemplifies his preoccupations with the question of an artwork’s boundedness in a paradigmatic way.

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Archaischer Torso Apollos Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt, darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber, in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt, sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug. Sonst stünde dieser Stein entstellt und kurz unter der Schultern durchsichtigem Sturz und flimmerte nicht so wie Raubtierfelle; und bräche nicht aus allen seinen Rändern aus wie ein Stern: den da ist keine Stelle, die dich nicht sieht. Du musst dein Leben ändern.72

Archaic Torso of Apollo We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, gleams in all its power. Otherwise the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could a smile run through the placid hips and thighs to that dark center where procreation flared. Otherwise this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur: would not, from all the borders of itself, burst like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.73

The last sentence of the poem, “You must change your life,” has puzzled readers for a long time. The poem, ostensibly about an ancient sculptural

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fragment of Apollo (fig. 3.6), the god of poetry, astounds when it ends with something thematically so divergent as the command to change one’s life. More shocking than the last sentence’s thematic discrepancy is its sudden departure in tone: it is an injunction, an order directed at us. The last verse captures a moment when the poem turns outward and addresses us directly. Its scandal stems from the way it stages a moment in which the poem steps outside of itself. It is a moment of egression in which the poem as well as the sculpture turn their commanding gaze outward. Indeed we cannot tell who is doing the commanding: the Apollo sculpture or Rilke’s sonnet.74 Poem and sculpture overlap and instantiate Rilke’s desire, in the wake of his association with Rodin, to approximate poetic objects and sculptural ones.75 The literary and the visual work of art renounce their self-­sufficiency and engage in a moment of heightened relationality, in Bezug.76 The fragmentary Apollo statue resembles a predator watching us and preying on our life as we know it. The poem conceives of the statue’s overpowering aesthetic effect in terms of an animal breaking out and—with the last sentence—pouncing on us. This animal, suggested by the “wild beast’s fur,” is not foreign to Apollo, whose epithet, among others, was Lykeios, meaning “belonging to a wolf.”77 In his Rodin monograph, Rilke explicitly invokes the animalic aspect of Rodin’s representations: he compares the sculptor’s drawings of gesture and movement with the “weight and warmth of a downright animalistic life.”78 The poem articulates a dynamic of restraint (“his gaze, now turned to low”), gradual growth (“for here there is no place / that does not see you”), and final discharge (“You must change your life”). This dynamic corresponds to an animalistic or sexual one as well as an epiphanic one. We move from physical visuality (of all the light motifs appropriate for Apollo, the god of light) to a higher kind of seeing, a spiritual perception, which is the insight of the last sentence. Insofar as the last verse contains an oracle-­like pronouncement, a prophetic injunction, it is in line with another of Apollo’s personas besides that of Lykeios, namely, his Pythian persona. In the last sentence, poem and statue act on the beholder like an animal’s pounce and a prophet’s pronouncement. Pounce and pronouncement stage the artwork’s egress out of its self-­confinement, its intrusion into our domain. The work of art enacts its commanding force on us when it attacks our life as it exists now and demands that we change it. Rilke’s monograph and lecture on Rodin appear to rest on the assumption that art and life are incompatible and that analogously the artwork, caught in self-­preoccupation, is “turned inward.”79 In his letters to Lou Andreas-­ Salomé, Rilke reaffirms the aestheticist credo according to which life and art cannot mingle when he notes that Rodin has given up life to dwell completely in his work. Unlike the painter Heinrich Vogeler, who lives in a house,

Figure 3.6. Male torso, called Torso of Miletos, ca. 480–470 BCE. Marble, 52 in high. Musée du Louvre, MA2792. Photo: Hervé Lewandowski, © RMN-­Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY

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Rodin dwells in his art: whereas the former inhabits a space of domesticity filled with sickly children, birthing mothers, and guests coming and going, Rodin inhabits the space of his artworks literally—he lives in his studio, surrounded by sculptures.80 These renounce the world (for they “mak[e] no appeal to the world”)81 like the artist who renounces life. Given Rilke’s insistence that “for sculpture there is one other circumstance that is exceedingly important: that the work of art should end within itself,” and given his claim that any ‘looking-­out-­of-­the-­picture’ can never arise,”82 we are all the more surprised by his poem’s evocation of the Apollo statue and its visual eruption beyond itself. Tellingly, Paul de Man compared the aggressive, omnipresent gaze in Rilke’s poetic rendering of the statue to an Argus eye.83 Indeed, the statue blinds us and appropriates our gaze; even as it lacks eyes, it watches us intensely. The poem begins with us looking at a sculpture and ends with the artwork looking back at us.84 Whereas, for instance, in J. K. Huysmans’s and Oscar Wilde’s writings, the mingling of art and life leads to the demise of the living,85 in Rilke’s poem, the encounter between art and life leads to a new life (via the destruction of one way of life and the demand for a different one). Far from making “no appeal to the world,” both sonnet and sculpture commerce with life.86 The poem ends in an epiphanic discharge in which it transitions from the lyric to the injunctive and in which it stages the disemboguement of art into life. How then are we to understand this contradiction between Rilke’s insistence that Rodin’s sculptures are self-­enclosed— to be sure, sculptures that included Rodin’s fragmentary torsos modeled on ancient statues (fig. 3.7)—and his poem’s suggestion that the ancient fragmentary torso of Apollo spills over into life? The work of art’s self-­transcendence in the “Archaic Torso of Apollo” stems not—as Rilke scholarship has often claimed—from the statue’s fragmentary status and its subsequent relation to a missing whole. Rather, in Rilke’s vision, the fragmentary statue constitutes a whole onto itself. Consequently, when it goes beyond its bounds, it does so by dint of its wholeness. The Apollo statue evokes space around itself as a result of its completion— thus, in a way that is compatible with Rilke’s vitalism and his yearning for immanence.87 This surprising continuity in the “Archaic Torso of Apollo” between integrity and unboundedness reenacts the correlation between enstasis and ecstasis in Rilke’s understanding of Rodin’s art. If in my ensuing reading of the Apollo poem I stress the unexpected measure of the fragmentary artwork’s integrity, in my reading of Rilke’s monograph and lecture on Rodin, I show the surprising degree to which Rodin’s sculptures, in their very enclosure, reach beyond themselves. As the “Archaic Torso of Apollo” progresses, the fragment of the ancient statue becomes uncontainable, bursting forth, and the power of the art

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Figure 3.7. Auguste Rodin, Torso of a Man, Louis XIV (Torse d’homme, Louis XIV), 1904. Bronze torso, 45.6 × 28.1 × 19.9 in. Musée Rodin, Paris. © Vanni Archive / Art Resource, NY

object, in contrast to the mere thing, resides precisely in its tendency, in Deleuze and Guattari’s phrase, to “overspil[l] the form.”88 What sets the Apollo torso apart from a mere rock is not only its suggestion of form in the curving breast or the turning loin89 but rather its bursting of form “from all the borders [Ränder] of itself.” In this respect the archaic statue resembles Rodin’s sculptures, about which Rilke wrote that “the borders [Ränder] of forms . . . continually flow over.”90 However, the artwork goes beyond itself not by dint of being a fragment.91 Instead, the fragmentary Apollo thematizes the workings of artworks as such (not merely those of fragmentary ones). It is significant to keep in mind that the torso “bursts like a star,” thus like a regular and complete shape and not like an amorphous entity. Further-

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Figure 3.8. Auguste Rodin, The Clenched Hand, 1884–1886. Bronze. Eugene Druet, photographer. DRUETB179. Repro photo: François Vizzavona. © RMN-­Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY

more, the statue’s overspill is captured within the formal constrictions of the sonnet. The archaic torso is not only whole in itself but its very eruptiveness is concomitant with its integrity.92 Given Rodin’s affinity for creating fragmentary statues, especially torsos but also disembodied hands (fig. 3.8) and heads, Rilke sensed the self-­ sufficiency of the fragment in his work. Indeed, this is what he suggests when, regarding Rodin’s armless figures, he claims that “Standing before them, one has the sense of a profound wholeness, a completeness that allows for no addition.”93 A torso as an instance of containment does not point beyond itself to the elements that would complete it because a torso is a complete artwork—even if it does not represent a complete object. As Rilke writes, “We learned . . . to see and believe that an artistic whole doesn’t necessarily coincide with the ordinary whole-­thing.”94 Rodin’s sculptures of

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hands by themselves are particularly revealing examples of artworks that in their depiction of fragments are nevertheless self-­sufficient units: In Rodin’s work there are hands, independent little hands, which are alive without belonging to any single body. . . . Rodin knows . . . that the body consists solely of scenes of life, a life that can become great and individual in any place, and he has the power to provide any part of this broad, variegated [schwingende] plane with the autonomy and richness of a whole.95

Rodin’s hands articulate a logics of immanence insofar as they have the capacity to concentrate life within themselves. They thereby resemble a phenomenological object that, in its very reduction of horizons (“small hands”) enables a transcendence (into “life”). The difference between fragment and whole is erased insofar as the fragment does not point to the whole but rather embodies it; the hands do not point to life but are alive (“lebendig sind”). Similarly, the fragment of Apollo does not point beyond itself to the missing eyes and their gaze; instead, the fragment is suffused with the very power of these eyes, it contains the gaze in the torso that watches and blinds the viewer. It is precisely by dint of their completion and wholeness that the Apollo torso and Rodin’s sculptures of hands are drawn beyond themselves: the former bursts out beyond its borders, while the latter pulsate forth beyond their surface through their “wide, vibrating plane.”96 Therefore, the dynamic of Rilke’s artworks is not that of fragments striving toward wholes but rather that of integrities that under the weight of their bursting wholeness strive for diffusion. The fragmentary statues both concentrate effects within themselves and eject these effects, send them forth as in a burst or a vibration.

Aesthetic Metabolisms “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” which introduces Rilke’s New Poems: The Other Part, stands in contrast with the poem “Early Apollo” (“Früher Apollo”), with which the first part of his volume New Poems begins: the early Apollo, unlike the later one, does not spring forth and go outside of itself; instead, it takes things in, it imbibes the world around itself. Früher Apollo Wie manches Mal durch das noch unbelaubte Gezweig ein Morgen durchsieht, der schon ganz im Frühling ist: so ist in seinem Haupte nichts, was verhindern könnte, dass der Glanz

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aller Gedichte uns fast tödlich träfe; denn noch kein Schatten ist in seinem Schaun, zu kühl für Lorbeer sind noch seine Schläfe, und später erst wird aus den Augenbraun hochstämmig sich der Rosengarten heben, aus welchem Blätter, einzeln, ausgelöst hintreiben werden auf des Mundes Beben, der jetzt noch still ist, niegebraucht und blinkend und nur mit seinem Lächeln etwas trinkend, als würde ihm sein Singen eingeflößt.97

Early Apollo As sometimes between the yet leafless branches a morning looks through that is already radiant with spring: so nothing of his head could prevent the splendor of all poems from striking us with almost lethal force; for there is yet no shadow in his gaze, his temples are yet too cool for the laurel crown, and only later from his eyebrows’ arches will the rose garden lift up on tall stems, from which petals, loosened, one by one will drift down on the trembling of his mouth, which now is yet quiet, never-­used, and gleaming and only drinking something with its smile as though its song were being instilled in him.98

This Apollo is tranquil and immobile. Instead of a piercing gaze, it has a timid blinking one. Instead of erupting, it is absorbing. Instead of emanating its own glow, it allows itself to be overrun by the radiance of other poems (“so nothing of his head / could prevent the splendor of all poems / from striking us with almost lethal force”). Instead of being the source of its own light (like the archaic torso of Apollo and indeed like Rodin’s sculptures which are “stone[s] [with] their own light”),99 it is merely the vessel for a foreign source of light.100 Whereas the second Apollo poem represents an artwork

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affecting the viewer, the first one illustrates, as Judith Ryan suggests, artworks affecting the poet. This early Apollo must take in the tradition that has come before it so that it can, in turn, go out like the later Apollo, which bursts from “all the borders of itself.” The past poetic tradition (of “all poems”) enters the first poem in order to be transformed into a new artwork with its own radiance in the second poem. We recognize, thus, in the relation between the first and second Apollo poems the workings of an aesthetic metabolism: first, the artwork takes in (“drinking” like the early Apollo); second, it contains and concentrates (the power of the gaze and the potency of sexuality in the second Apollo);101 and third, it disperses and ejects (like the bursting second Apollo). The artwork is thus engaged in a process in which it takes in the world, in this case, the preceding cultural tradition, and then, having subjected it to transformation,102 sends it out to the reader or beholder. In this respect, between the two Apollo poems, which introduce the two volumes of the New Poems from 1908, we can make out an aesthetic dynamic that Rilke first developed in early notes on Rodin from December 1900: There are sculptures which carry the environment in which they are imagined, or out of which they are raised, within themselves, they have absorbed it, and they radiate it.103 Es giebt Bildwerke, welche die Umgebung, in der sie gedacht sind, oder aus welcher sie gehoben werden, in sich tragen, aufgesogen haben und ausstrahlen.104

In the same note, Rilke writes that sculptures must engender their milieu from within themselves. In his monograph and lecture on Rodin, sculptures become paradigmatic for the way the work of art absorbs, contains, and dispels its outside. Taken together, the first and the second Apollo poems represent the artwork as an entity caught in a threefold dynamic reminiscent of the movement of breath: it begins with taking in, proceeds with containing, and ends with releasing. In this respirational dynamic, the artwork’s containment is merely an interval flanked by its relations to an outside. The texts on Rodin frequently envision the artwork’s outside as its air and atmosphere, reinforcing the idea of a respirational organization. In what follows, I explore these respirational instances. Whereas in the section titled “Absorbed Milieus,” I look at the artwork’s assimilation of its outside, in the one titled “Gravid Forms,” I examine its capacious containment of external space. Finally, in the section titled “Forms Striving for Incompletion,” I show how the artwork opens outward. These instances cor-

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respond to spatiotemporal ecstasies: for example, in its containment, the artwork holds an immense space and an interminable present; or, in its effusion, it opens onto a vast atmosphere and a large-­scale futurity. Ultimately, each of these respirational instances shows the artwork negotiating between enstasis and ecstasis. Whereas in Riegl’s reading of Rembrandt, the painting’s inner unity predicates its external unity with the beholder, in Rilke’s interpretation of Rodin, the sculpture’s inward turn is the ground that subtends its outward thrust. The latter is nowhere as evident as in sculpture’s capacity to mold its milieu and to dissolve into its atmosphere.

Absorbed Milieus In his 1905 monograph on Rodin, Rilke claims that the ancient sculpture of The Victory of Samothrace (The Winged Nike) (fig. 3.9), which he must have seen in the Louvre, represents movement in a dual way: it captures not only the animation of a woman but also the dynamism of her environment, the wind blowing around her.105 Not unlike Warburg who concentrates on the dynamic Dionysian aspect of ancient art, Rilke rejects the Winckelmannian association between antiquity and repose (Ruhe). “This sculpture,” writes Rilke, “gives us more than the motion of a lovely young woman going to meet her lover; it is also an eternal representation of the wind of Greece, of its breadth and glory.”106 The image of Nike captures the figure’s elemental environs, the wind. Like the statues of birds in the Louvre and, as Rilke will show, like Rodin’s sculptures, The Winged Nike contains and only indirectly depicts its object’s surroundings. The statue absorbed its object’s environment—it contains its milieu. In this sense Rilke emphasizes that “its [sculpture’s] surroundings had to lie in it,”107 and he claims that “The room in which a statue stands is its foreign land—it has its environment within itself, and its eye and the expression of its face relate to that environment concealed and folded within its shape.”108 For Rilke, the continuity between form and atmosphere does not undermine an artwork’s self-­sufficiency because the diffuseness of space is contained within the form. As such, the mimetic process involves not only the representation of form but always already of its environment. Rilke’s account thus undermines an understanding of form as one resting on the aesthetic principle of differentiation (Unterscheidung).109 In their very completion, forms contain that which is not them. Rilke’s argument that Nike contains its object’s surroundings—the wind—bears affinities with an art-­historical tradition drawn toward a mesology of form. This tradition which, as we have seen, includes the likes of Taine, Semper, and Warburg, hovers over Rilke’s writings on Rodin.110 In Warburg’s analysis of Botticelli, Venus’s hair blowing

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Figure 3.9. The Victory of Samothrace (The Winged Nike). Marble, 96 in. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: Scala / Art Resource, NY

in the wind and Chloris’s garment fluttering in the air are saturated with the atmosphere of the quattrocento just as in Rilke’s reading of Nike, her drapery is suffused with the wind around her. These forms, which contain their atmosphere, include what Semper described as “the components of form that are not themselves form[,] . . . the precomponents and basic conditions of form.”111 It is as if mimesis were not merely about copying things (birds, gods, humans) but rather about infusing the copies with the things’ beyondness, with their elemental milieus and natural environments.

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However, this corralling of vastness, this transformation of extensivity into intensivity—even as it is brought forward by Rilke to attest to the artwork’s containment—nevertheless suggests that in its very containment, the artwork does not come to an end within itself. Its capacious containment relies on a moment of discharge similar to the one of the archaic torso of Apollo, a moment when the statue’s gradual intensification of visual and sexual force finds an outlet, when the artwork erupts and the poem exhorts. This is the moment when the sky around a bird, after being “enfolded” into its statue, rises up and opens out around the statue. In what follows, I turn to this feature of the artwork, to what we can describe as its capacious containment and its ecstatic enclosure. These result in a moment of expansive release and in a lasting beyond material confines in the vein of waves and vibrations (both referenced by Rilke) that travel past their material carriers.

Gravid Forms 112 Rilke understands the artwork’s self-­containment in a literal way, in terms of its resemblance to a container: Even the stones of ancient cultures were not still. The restlessness of living surfaces was inscribed in the restrained, hieratic gestures of ancient cults, like water within the walls of a vessel. . . . Motion was never at odds with the spirit of sculpture (which means simply the essence of things); it was only motion that remained incomplete, motion that was not in balance with other forces, motion that extended beyond the boundaries of the thing. Works of sculpture resemble those ancient cities where life was passed entirely within the city walls. . . . No matter how great the motion in a work of sculpture may be, and whether it comes from infinite expanses or the depths of the heavens, it must always return to itself. The great circle of solitude in which the art object passes its days must be closed.113

Like a fortified city the artwork rests within itself. It is the repository for a movement that does not leave its confines. It might appear to be at rest, but it is in fact internally animated, circulating within itself a ceaseless movement. In this respect Rodin’s statues resemble Riegl’s ancient sculptural reliefs, which, in their stasis, seemingly devoid of life, are in fact caught in a “crystalline life,” in a life that takes place in the depth of their immutable forms.114 Like Warburg’s Pathosformel, which mediate between the animation of pathos and the constraint of the formulaic, Rodin’s statues are brim-

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ming with a life that represents a corralled becoming. When Rilke claims that movement does not leave the artwork’s confines, he anticipates Heidegger, who contends that the artwork’s movement is contained in its repose.115 Rilke’s attempt to combine within the artwork the opposing pulls of becoming and being, of movement and stasis, is symptomatic of his more overarching desire to combine within it the opposing forces of self-­enclosure and ecstasis. It is this attempt that echoes in Heidegger’s later endeavor to make compatible “the self-­subsistence of the work[,] . . . this closed, unitary repose of self-­support,”116 with its capacity to erect a world around itself. Although throughout his texts on Rodin, Rilke describes the artwork as a closed receptacle and a vessel, as an instance of self-­encasement, Rodin’s forms are self-­enclosed like gravid forms, which, in their plenitude, suggest egress. Indeed the latter metaphor, alluded to by Rilke in his description of Rodin’s Eve (fig. 3.10) as a statue of a woman who bears the weight of motherhood, is particularly revealing, for it suggests both a brimming containment and an eventual release.117 Rilke’s analysis of Rodin’s group sculpture Burghers of Calais (fig. 3.11) also points to the ways in which an artwork, in its very delimitation, can encompass vast domains. The Burghers is “self-­contained, a whole world in itself, filled with a life that circulated without escaping at any point.”118 Nevertheless, in its vast capacity (“vastness,” “depth,” “sky”),119 the sculpture suggests a breaking out that takes the form of a reverse ecstasis: instead of being an entity that stands outside of itself, the artwork is an entity that contains an immense outside within itself. It articulates the evacuation of the world into itself, the world’s stepping outside of the world and into the artwork.

Forms Striving for Incompletion Eventually, as if under the strain of the tensive unity between external delimitation and inner immensity, the artwork begins to spill into its surroundings, to give way at its boundaries. Like the torso of Apollo, which, under the mounting internal pressure of its ocular and sexual energy, erupts into the space around itself, Rodin’s sculpture, under the load of its enclosed immensity, percolates into the space surrounding it. The example of Rodin’s sculpture of hands illustrates the artwork’s dynamic of concentration and discharge well: “But then hands,” Rilke writes, “are a complicated organism, a delta in which life from the most distant sources flows together, surging [ergießen] into the great current of action.”120 This sentence is particularly revealing of sculpture’s threefold program of ingress, containment, and egress. Rodin’s hand mediates between densification (zusammenfließen)

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Figure 3.10. Auguste Rodin, Eve. Modeled 1881; cast 1925 by the founder Alexis Rudier, Paris. Bronze, 67 × 181/2 × 231/4 in. Bequest of Jules E. Mastbaum, 1929. F1929-­7-­127. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photo: Philadelphia Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY

and disemboguement (ergießen). Rilke suggests that the artwork-­container can pour out. Rodin’s objects are so saturated with space that they become diffusive. In his 1907 lecture on Rodin, Rilke describes this sense of saturation when he writes about things as being “still warm” from the life that went into them: “Things came into being blindly, in the fierce throes of work, still warm with the traces of an open, dangerous life.”121 In his initial draft of this lecture from 1905, Rilke describes artworks as emanating a warmth for those who perceive them: “Was is not always that which seized you in these things? That you found them filled like vases of flowers, like cans of ointment; that they emanated a warmth that was not of the stone and an inexplicable fra-

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Figure 3.11. Auguste Rodin, The Burghers of Calais. Modeled 1884–1895; cast 1919–1921 by the founder Alexis Rudier, Paris. Bronze, 821/2 × 94 × 75 in. Bequest of Jules E. Mastbaum, 1929. Philadelphia Museum of Art, F1929-­7-­129. Photo: Philadelphia Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY

grance?”122 The two quotes taken together suggest that there is a continuity between the warmth of life that was absorbed into the art object and the warmth that it, in turn, sends forth. The art object seeps beyond itself to give out a warmth, a scent; it is ready to impart something from that which went into its making. The artwork’s overspill (Überfluss) is a consequence of its being filled up (Fülle).123 This dynamic of the work of art corresponds to a respirational or metabolic movement in which the artwork takes in the world, transforms it, and then releases it into its immediate physical surroundings. Consequently, the work of art rests not only on a logic of containment but also on a pathos of giving. The following passage, in which Rilke refers to Rodin’s Saint John the Baptist (fig. 3.12), describes this pathos well: “He walks as if the whole wide world were in him, as if he were apportioning it [als teilte er sie aus] as he walks.”124 Rodin’s statues dispense the immensities that they contain; they distribute them. (In this sense, “he [Rodin] surrounded his things with distance.”125) For Rilke, the artwork’s structure of self-­sufficiency and its logic of gifting are not only compatible but codeterminative. The artwork’s self-­ interestedness lies precisely in its act of gifting.

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Figure 3.12. Auguste Rodin, Saint John the Baptist Preaching. Modeled 1878–1880; cast 1925 by the founder Alexis Rudier, Paris. Bronze. 79 × 213/4 × 381/2 in. Bequest of Jules E. Mastbaum, 1929. F1929-­7-­48. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photo: Philadelphia Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY

In an earlier version of his talk on Rodin, Rilke makes the promiscuity of forms—their tendency to wander and stray and not end within their limits— explicit when he argues that surfaces align themselves “as if under the influence of rotational forces, into two, three great directions—into directions that continue beyond the thing and grow into the sky like meridians.”126 Rodin works with gradually more and more expansive forms that extend beyond themselves as if under the pressure of rotational forces. In this respect Rodin’s work resembles that of the Czech painter and graphic artist

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Figure 3.13. František Kupka, Disks of Newton (Study for “Fugue in Two Colors”), 1912. Oil on canvas, 391/2 × 29 in. Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950-­134-­122. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

František Kupka: his work Disks of Newton (1912) (fig. 3.13) suggests a similar transgressive dynamic of forms, a dynamic that we can understand as an “unframing” rhythm that captures both the movement of forms within the image as well as the relations of the image to its outside.127 Rilke’s argument that Rodin’s statues overflow into their spatial context points forward to Heidegger’s understanding of van Gogh’s shoes in terms of their environing world. As Julian Young writes in his book Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, “Heidegger pre­sents the object [such as van Gogh’s shoes and a Greek temple] in such a way as to thematize the world or ‘environ-

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mentality’ to which the shoes and the temple belong.”128 This idea of aesthetic environmentality returns in Heidegger’s later essay “Art and Space,” in which, once more resonating with Rilke, he claims that the artwork both embodies space within itself and opens space around itself. The artwork mediates between its condition of self-­sustenance and contextuality, indeed it makes these conditions mutually codeterminative. While the statues, in Rilke’s account, summon immeasurable environing spaces such as the sky and the universe outside of themselves, they do this not by capitalizing on a topographically understood aura,129 but rather on one that spills forth from within the formal construct of the artwork. It is in this sense that “sculptures which have no milieu within them do indeed stand among people, not encircled by any sacred ring.”130 This early note, written in 1900, suggests that the originary aura, predating Benjamin’s, is an immanent phenomenon, one that arises from the artwork understood as a “saturated” phenomenon.131 In Rilke’s evocations, Rodin’s objects suffer from a problem of excess (of life, immensity, depth), and when we are “moved” by an artwork, we experience this excess as something that the artwork has “expelled” or otherwise located outside of itself. (Consider thus Rilke’s explanation of beauty in his first draft of the Rodin lecture from 1905 in which he describes the experience of an artwork’s beauty as an experience of something external to the artwork.132) Rodin’s sculpture “radiates space”133 like the “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” which in de Man’s reading is “capable of engendering, by itself, all the dimensions of space.”134 For Rilke, then, the artwork’s radiance arises from within its form just as for Warburg and Riegl the physical atmosphere of an artwork is continuous with its fictive atmospheric depictions. Rilke’s aesthetic spaces designate realms of continuity between artwork as representation and object. Rodin’s artworks move freely between their status as forms internally charged with space and their status as objects externally surrounded by space. The sculptures are so permeated by space and so pervaded by life that in their very intensity, they pro­ject themselves into an extensity.135 Form represents a gathering, a repletion, a densification—thereby resembling perhaps the processes of Verdichtung ascribed by Freud to the work of dreams.136 Rilke tries to grasp the inherently excessive nature of life in terms of spatial expansiveness: “the full breadth,” “climates,” “hemispheres,” “atmospheres,” “universe,” “cosmic,” and “celestial globe.”137 Forms are always already infused with exteriority. Thus, we must understand Rodin’s forms not only as enacting moments of transcendent phenomenology in which intensivity reverts into extensivity in a manner suggested by Deleuze but also as the opposite, namely, as instances in which extensivity is transformed into

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intensivity. In this latter context we may recall, for instance, Malte’s famous description of the vastness of experience that must be concentrated in a single verse: For the sake of a single poem [sic], you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn’t pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, but it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open windows and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return . . . only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.138

A single verse represents, in Freud’s terms, a “condensation of psychic material.”139 An artwork is an entity of densification, charge, and gravidity.140 This dual dynamic of concentration and subsequent release continues the Romantic dynamic of Verdichtung and Entgrenzung, a dynamic perhaps paradigmatically illustrated by Novalis when he writes, “My beloved is the abbreviation of the universe, the universe is the extension of my beloved.”141 One way to understand the tension between containment and overspill in Rilke’s aesthetics is to conceptualize the artwork as a dual entity that is both container and surface (fig. 3.14). If, as container, it is self-­enclosed and whole, as surface, it is spatially dispersed. Even Rodin’s small statues evoke through their surface’s interaction with the atmosphere vast spaces around them: “In giving them so many layers, so infinitely many complete and perfectly defined planes, he makes them great. The air wafts around them as it does around rocks.”142 The artwork as surface gives way at its boundaries, and it points to what Andrew J. Mitchell describes as “a rethinking of limit

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Figure 3.14. Auguste Rodin, Mask of the Man with the Broken Nose. Modeled 1863–1864; cast 1925 by the founder Alexis Rudier, Paris. Bronze. 101/4 × 67/8 × 93/4 in. Bequest of Jules E. Mastbaum, 1929. Philadelphia Museum of Art, F1929-­7-­55. Photo: Philadelphia Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY

whereby . . . the limit marks the beginning of a thing, not its end.”143 Here, Mitchell is referencing Heidegger’s writings on sculpture in which “things begin at their limits for it is here that they enter into relationships with the rest of the world. Thinking limit in this manner, not as a border of confinement but one of introduction, ties the thing in question indissociably to its surroundings.”144 For Rilke, it is the statues’ seemingly weathered surfaces, which appear to have been exposed to the elements, that articulate their oneness with their surroundings: The interaction of the air with the work it surrounds was always enormously important for Rodin. . . . It became apparent that the relation of the atmosphere to his works had intensified as well. . . . If his Things had

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simply stood in space before, now space drew the Things into itself. . . . The result closely resembles the way the atmosphere interacts with things that have been exposed to it for centuries.145

With the idea that the air participates in the artwork, with the notion that the artwork coalesces space around itself, and with the suggestion that the sculpture’s surface bears witness to its having been abandoned to the atmospheric conditions, Rilke challenges sculpture’s self-­enclosure and underwrites its relationality. Rodin’s surfaces do not seem to be self-­generated, and his forms are not merely self-­supportive but rather conditioned from without, as if determined by the weather conditions. By the end of his monograph and in his subsequent lecture on Rodin, Rilke suggests that sculptures do not merely enter into dealings and dependencies with the atmosphere; rather, they are indistinguishable from it: “While Rodin seems to have intended to draw the air as close as possible to the surface of his things, here it is almost as if he had dissolved the stone in it.”146 The artwork seeps into its surroundings until it is impossible to tell where a statue ends and the air around it begins. In the above passage, Rilke articulates the artwork’s atmospheric dispersal in a way that foretells his later realization with respect to the work of Cézanne that “there are actually no contours but rather many vibrating transitions.”147 This replacement of boundedness with graduated transitions, with vibrations, pulsations, and waves, points to a shift in Rilke’s attention from the problem of containment to that of continuity. This shift is, as we have seen, prefigured in his writings on Rodin as a tension between form’s self-­sufficiency and relationality. However, as the insight regarding Cézanne’s painting suggests, Rilke will embrace vibratory transitions more keenly in his later work. Whereas his “Apollo” poems and Rodin texts struggle with the strain between the artwork’s encasement and displacement, his later writings, in particular the Duino Elegies, will give way more readily to the idea of continuity, to a monist notion of an “eternal current” (ewige Strömung)148 in which praise and lament, life and death, immanence and transcendence are not fully distinguishable. If his New Poems were grounded in the sculptural model of an object’s materiality, his Duino Elegies will be grounded in the aerial model of spatial materiality exemplified by phenomena such as ether, music, force, and vibration. Poetry, in particular, will repeatedly be evoked as akin to the material space of music. In the last section of this chapter, I show how Rilke extends sculptures’ spatiomaterial self-­transcendence into a spatiotemporal one. Rodin’s forms “cannot contain themselves”149 not merely because they summon around themselves air and atmosphere as charged spaces of presence but also

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because they diffuse beyond their borders temporally. They embody past, present, and future as unlimited temporal orders.

Temporal Ecstasis Rodin’s sculpture absorbs a whole variety of past times: it draws its strength from ancient statues, medieval cathedrals, and the writings of predecessors such as Dante and Baudelaire.150 Since Rodin’s sculptures frequently do not fully arise out of their medium (e.g., stone), Rilke contends that they relate to stone as their “big, gigantic past.”151 Whereas Warburg’s Renaissance forms of movement contained their previous life as ancient models of movement, for Rilke, Rodin’s sculpture The Eternal Idol (fig. 3.15) contains “the sacred gesture of a primeval goddess from a distant, terrible cult.”152 In this respect Rodin’s works of art are like those bird statues in the Louvre that remember their form’s past life, in particular their past environment of the sky. They are caught in the unending remembrance of a previous life, of a life led in the open air. It is as if the statue of a bird remembered its childhood as an actual bird. (Indeed, for Rilke, childhood is an exemplary instance of uncessation, of what Eric Santner, drawing on the work of Alenka Zupančič, discusses as “failed finitude.”153) Elsewhere Rilke describes the artwork spanning vast temporal expanses that both go back far into the past and reach into a distant future. Antique statues in the Louvre—which Rilke introduces to illustrate the features of Rodin’s statues—are “heavy things of stone, traces of inconceivable cultures enduring into epochs still to come.”154 By representing an object, Rodin “unhinges” it from the present and lifts it into the future.155 Rodin’s work also pro­jects into the future insofar as his statues are temporally stretched between the past time of their production and the future time of their reception: regarding the gesture in Rodin’s First Man (Adam) (fig. 3.16), Rilke writes that “it awoke in the darkness of earliest times, and seems . . . to pass far beyond to those who will come.”156 Artworks are thus caught between historicity and eternity, for “they lived eternally the fervent and impetuous life of the time that had given rise to them.”157 It is as if past, present, and future were impossible to delimit, seeping into ever greater temporal realms. The past is not merely a time gone by but one excessively past and the future is not merely a time forthcoming but one overly distant. Rodin’s childhood is not merely the past of the nineteenth century but rather it is as if his life “had passed hundreds of years ago.”158 The past does not just escape into ever greater domains of pastness but also persists into the present and the future, while the present pro­jects into a future “far beyond [us],” “enduring into epochs still to come.”159 These instances of unbounded temporality resemble, avant la lettre, Heidegger’s ecstatic con-

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Figure 3.15. Auguste Rodin, The Eternal Idol (L’eternelle idole). Marble, 1889. Musée Rodin. © Vanni Archive / Art Resource, NY

cept of time in which the present is a “corealization” of past and future.160 Indeed, for Heidegger, past, present, and future instantiate the ecstasis of time: “temporality is the original ‘outside-­itself.’ ”161 Whereas for Heidegger, the ecstasis of temporality designates the wholeness of Being,162 for Rilke, spatiotemporal ecstasis expresses the self-­sufficiency of the work of art. Paradoxically, in its temporal and spatial self-­transcendence the artwork reaffirms its organic wholeness. In this sense the sculptures’ lives resemble the life of their creator Rodin, which was “a life that amasses even as it passes.”163 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting

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Figure 3.16. Auguste Rodin. First Man (Adam). Modeled 1880–1881; cast 1925 by the founder Alexis Rudier, Paris. Bronze, 751/2 × 291/2 × 291/2 in., weight 706 lb. Bequest of Jules E. Mastbaum, 1929. Philadelphia Museum of Art, F1929-­7-­125. Photo: Philadelphia Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY

and Poetry (1766) already points to the artwork’s ecstatic temporality when it prescribes that the visual arts must represent a present moment as infused with the past and the future. For Lessing, painting “can use but a single moment of an action, and must therefore choose the most pregnant one, the one most suggestive of what has gone before and what is to follow.”164 The artwork’s choice of a pregnant moment implies that it is a moment with the highest ability to point beyond itself; it is a moment of the most height-

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ened relationality. As we have seen, this relationality is manifest in Rilke’s account of the copresent times in an artwork as well as in his evocation of the artwork’s coconstitution of spaces. The spatial logic that underlies Rilke’s aesthetics resembles the temporal logic that subtends Lessing’s understanding of the visual arts: there is a structural similarity between Lessing’s temporally pregnant and Rilke’s spatially charged work of art. For Lessing, the “single moment” must, in Terence Renaud’s words, “be ‘pregnant’ with the maximum potential for contextualization”;165 for Rilke, the artwork is a “pregnant” entity in which spatial intensity is continuous with spatial extensity. For him, the notion of the artwork as a construct of concentration is concomitant with that of the artwork as a force of diffusion. Consequently, when we stand in front of a sculpture, we are moved by it not merely by dint of its form. We are moved by the way form conserves within and summons around itself that which it had to renounce in order to come into being— that is, its outside, its external surrounding world.

[   c h apt e r 4  ]

The “Kinesphere” and the Body’s Other Spatial Envelopes in Rudolf Laban’s Theory of Dance

Choreutics In a 1907 letter addressed to his wife, Rilke describes how he discovered drawings of dancers by Rodin at the Bernheim-­Jeune gallery in Paris.1 They showed the Royal Ballet of Cambodia, whose performance Rodin had seen in Paris in 1906 (figs. 4.1, 4.2). Rilke might not have known the sculptor’s sketches, yet Rodin, like many visual artists of the period who viewed dance as a form of animated sculpture,2 had an abiding interest in dance. He saw Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan, and Ruth St. Denis perform. He drew the Japanese actress Hanako and the acrobat Alda Moreno. And he completed dance sculptures, the so-­called Dance Movements in 1911.3 Rodin was drawn to dance not only because it dealt with the body’s expressive capacities but also because for him it problematized the relationship between the body and its “spatial envelope.”4 It is precisely this interest in the dancer and her environing space that Rilke discerns in Rodin’s sketches: “The whole body,” he notes, “is used to balance this dance of extremes in the air, in the body’s own atmosphere, in the gold of Eastern surroundings.”5 Rilke’s sentence lingers unexpectedly long over the body’s outside, shifting the balance between body and space in favor of the latter. Much like in his writings on Rodin’s sculptures, he locates the body’s outside in the “air” and “atmosphere” that surround it. And like Riegl, who examines a sculptural relief in relation to its external “air space” as well as to its broader late Roman context, Rilke transitions from the immediate, aerial envelopment of the dancer to her cultural, geographical environment of Southeast Asia. By mobilizing air both as a specific spatial denominator and a general cultural-­environmental indicator, Rilke intimates the complex relationship between the body and its spatial envelope in dance. This chapter focuses on Rudolf Laban, the supreme theorist of the con110

Figure 4.1. Auguste Rodin, Female Cambodian Dancer with Swirling Drapery. Graphite and watercolor on paper, sheet 113/4 × 71/2 in. Bequest of Jules E. Mastbaum, 1929. F1929-­7-­ 196. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photo: Philadelphia Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY

Figure 4.2. Cambodian Dancer, 1906. Found in the Collection of Musée Rodin, Paris. Photo: HIP / Art Resource, NY

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Figure 4.3. Rudolf Laban, drawing reproduced from Rudolf Laban, A Vision of Dynamic Space, comp. Lisa Ullmann (London: Laban Archives in association with the Falmer Press, 1984), 55. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. © Laura Laban

tinuity between body and space in dance at the beginning of the twentieth century. In particular, it centers on his early publication Die Welt des Tänzers: Fünf Gedankenreigen (1920)6 as well as his drawings and space models. In this chapter I argue that environing space becomes a central category in modern European dance; indeed, the thematization of the relationship between figure and surrounding space is a determinative factor in the very development of modern dance. With terms such as kinesphere, dynamosphere,7 or dance-­perimeter,8 Laban shows that space in dance is not an inert background but rather an active receptacle for bodily movements that extend dancers beyond their physical bounds. Dance movements create “choreutic shapes”9 not only in the body but also in space, which they endow with plastic qualities (figs. 4.3, 4.4). This chapter uncovers the many contextual layers—aesthetic, scientific, occult—deposited in Laban’s vision of dancerly environment. Laban

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Figure 4.4. Image reproduced from Rudolf Laban, Choreographie (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1926), 70. © Laura Laban

studied visual art alongside anatomy.10 He adapted the aesthetic ideas of August Schmarsow, Wilhelm Worringer, and Wassily Kandinsky while developing a geometry and topology of dance. And he dabbled in Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, and theosophy while drawing on the evolutionary theories of Darwin and Haeckel and the crystallographic studies of Viktor Moritz Goldschmidt. Inspired by the protoenvironmentalist “back to nature” movements en vogue around 1900, neo-­Romantic ecological concepts, and variously understood notions of “harmony,” he tried to develop a dance theory that turns on the coconstitution of form and space and a practice that implements the idea of spatial form (Umraumform) in dance. Scholarship often refers to Laban as the “father” of modern dance,11 a patriarchal narrative of modern dance’s birth that belies its origins in the performances of female American dancers such as Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan, and Ruth St. Denis.12 Laban is also frequently cited as someone who “gave theoretical definition” to German expressionist dance (Ausdruckstanz).13 Yet

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he is not only a questionable originator of modern dance but also a deeply problematic founder of modern dance theory. Laban, a Hungarian speaker born in Bratislava, Slovakia (formerly Austria-­Hungary), had a restricted formal education at schools and universities and no formal training in dance.14 His only schooling was in drawing and painting.15 Initially he worked as a painter, graphic artist, and caricaturist and studied under Hermann Obrist’s guidance in Munich. Later, he took courses in the visual arts and in architecture at the École des Beaux-­Arts in Paris. However, by 1929, the highpoint of his career, as John Hodgson tells us, “whole issues of leading dance magazines were devoted to his achievements.”16 In 1930 he choreographed the “Bacchanale” in Tannhäuser for the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth alongside Siegfried Wagner and Arturo Toscanini,17 and by 1934 he was the director of the German Dance Theater under the auspices of Joseph Goebbels’s Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.18 He was tasked with choreographing a community dance for a festival associated with the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.19 Eventually Goebbels rejected the piece, and deemed Laban’s work “hostile to the State,”20 so Laban left Germany in 1937.21 In his own time, Laban was seen as the “supreme theoretician and organizer of the new dance world,”22 and he was regarded as someone who provided a pedagogical foundation for the development of European modern dance. (Indeed, Laban schools continue to exist today.23) According to Karl Toepfer, “in the 1920s no one wrote more on dance, no one had more students, no one had more schools devoted to his teachings, and no one seemed to have such a huge slate of enterprises devoted to dance than Laban.”24 Between the two world wars, there were few major European cities without a Laban School.25 Laban developed a comprehensive movement notation system, Labanotation, as part of a movement analysis method (called Laban Movement Analysis) for “describing, visualizing, interpreting and documenting all varieties of human movement”26—a method still in use in dance and in movement therapies today.27 In the second half of his career, he became a movement theorist interested not only in dance dynamics but in all types of bodily movement ranging from working to walking. In this capacity he worked for the British Ministry of Defense and collaborated with the Ministry of Education. Notwithstanding Laban’s importance in his own time and his lasting influence on dance education, his work is significant in the way it brings to light early modern dance’s enfoldment in a broad range of cultural discourses of the period. Laban borrowed concepts from a range of fields and incorporated them into his capricious lexica without significantly reconceptualizing them. By concentrating on these concepts, which conserve Laban’s inter-

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texts, I reveal his eclectic influences ranging, for instance, from the movement of naturism, understood as “the widespread attempt to offset the ills of industrial modernism by reorienting the German people toward nature,”28 to Wassily Kandinsky’s notions of aesthetic effluvia or to biological and cosmological theories of harmony between humans and their space.29 These influences come together in the ecological thrust of his thinking about the relation between dancers and their spatial envelopes. Laban’s intellectual charlatanism makes it difficult to reconstruct a coherent philosophy of dance, yet his work nevertheless hints at what such an undertaking aspires to be. This is relevant today when, as Frédéric Pouillaude in his recently translated book Unworking Choreography (2017) reminds us, we continue to face the aporias of a philosophy of dance even as we attempt to overcome them.30 Furthermore, Laban’s work is useful not only because it charts early modern dance’s imbrication with its cultural framework but also because it sheds new light on this framework, specifically on aspects of what we have come to understand as “expressionism” and “abstraction.” In this chapter I put expressionism’s externalist impetus in a new perspective by showing that, beyond referring to artists who expel their subjective inwardness, it pertains to artworks that efflux beyond their physical limits. For Laban, dance is endlessly diffusing itself. In this regard Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1910)31 left its mark on Laban’s thinking. For Kandinsky, like Laban, the artwork is continually “radiating,” “pouring forth,” and “spreading out” (consider Kandinsky’s word choice: ausstrahlen, enströmen, ausströmen, verbreiten). “Flow” metaphors are central for both Laban and Kandinsky; figures and forms overspill into their external space, which they frequently conceptualize in terms of the quintessential fluids of “air” and “atmosphere.”

Spatiomaterial Radiance Laban’s The World of the Dancer (1920) is an early attempt to formulate a theory and philosophy of dance at a time when most books on dance were historical overviews that traced dance forms from their early cultic origins to their contemporary cultural manifestations at the beginning of the twentieth century.32 Laban’s book attempts an overarching analysis of dance by positing movement and space as the elementary constituents of all dance forms.33 Space refers to the dancer’s spatial husk, and it has two senses: first, it signifies the dancer’s “reach space” or so-­called kinesphere, that is, the domain that circumscribes all potential movements of the dancer’s outstretched limbs.34 Laban visualizes this domain in terms of encasing geometric shapes (figs. 4.5, 4.6), and claims that “we never . . . leave our move-

Figure 4.5. Rudolf Laban, sketches reproduced from A Vision of Dynamic Space, comp. Lisa Ullmann (London: Laban Archives in association with the Falmer Press, 1984), 30. Rudolf Laban Archive, National Resource Centre for Dance, Archives & Special Collections at University of Surrey. © Laura Laban

Figure 4.6. Image reproduced from Rudolf Laban, Choreographie (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1926), 93. © Laura Laban

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ment sphere but carry it always with us, like an aura.”35 The second sense refers to kinetic spatial figures that arise in the dancer’s gestures (figs. 4.7, 4.8).36 These establish a scaffold of movement traces, a framework of bodily routes that envelope the body into abstract spatial forms. For Laban, “space loses its shapelessness, it finds its embodiment in shape. The hands caress a shape of space in writing it in the air.”37 His theory of choreic space turns on the “prospect of contacting and physically experiencing the essential nature of space”38 for “the primary pleasure of dancing is the contact with space pure and simple.”39 When Laban writes that “man is able to fill the space around him with his movements and positions,”40 or when Mary Wigman, Laban’s student and colleague, understands the spatial radiance of dance in terms of dance gestures that can be flung into space,41 and when she describes this “space [as that] which can erase the boundaries of all corporeality and can turn the gesture, flowing as it is, into an image of seeming endlessness . . . like rays, like streams, like breath,”42 they both suggest that modern dance freed the figure’s movements by allowing them to ripple forth into space. In other words, modern dance not only liberated the body’s movements from the restrictive conventions of classical ballet and the prescriptions of musical rhythm and those of narrative, it also unfettered movements of the body and enabled them to flow forth into surrounding space. Classical ballet aimed for an equilibrium between movements that lead away from the body and threaten a fall and movements that lead the body back to itself and reaffirm its vertical uprightness. Ballet wanted to move away from the limits imposed by corporeality—in a leap that defies gravity, in a pirouette endowed with endless momentum—yet to do so within the very boundaries of corporeality. Modern dance, however, introduced a disturbance into this delicate balance between the body’s self-­transcendence and its return to itself: it allowed the body to not return to itself. It harnessed movements of its self-­expenditure: it embraced the fall, performed the collapse, and valorized horizontality.43 Laban conceived of this idea of the body that spends itself in terms of an uncontainable movement that overflows into the dancer’s spatial envelope. Consider the following passage from The World of the Dancer, which shows both how movements expend themselves and how Laban conceptualized their expenditure by drawing on the terminology of physics, a privileged discipline in his vision of dance: “Acting rays stream forth from each limb, each swing, and each trait of the body into endless directions.”44 Movements emerge from the body like self-­propagating waves of electric and magnetic fields, like electromagnetic radiation, which after the discovery of X-­rays and radioactivity at the end of the nineteenth century persisted in the popular

Figure 4.7. Image reproduced from Rudolf Laban, Choreographie (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1926), 30. © Laura Laban

Figure 4.8. Rudolf Laban, drawing reproduced from A Vision of Dynamic Space, comp. Lisa Ullmann (London: Laban Archives in association with the Falmer Press, 1984), 33, bottom. Rudolf Laban Archive, National Resource Centre for Dance, Archives & Special Collections at University of Surrey. © Laura Laban

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Figure 4.9. Rudolf Laban, drawing reproduced from A Vision of Dynamic Space, comp. Lisa Ullmann (London: Laban Archives in association with the Falmer Press, 1984), 56. Rudolf Laban Archive, National Resource Centre for Dance, Archives & Special Collections at University of Surrey. © Laura Laban

imagination of things emitting, emanating, and radiating into the space around them (fig. 4.9). Throughout The World of the Dancer, Laban invokes the image of “magnetic and other currents,” of “thought-­currents,” “light waves,” and “air waves”45 that all help visualize how motions disburse themselves past physical boundaries in dance, which Laban understands, in turn, to be reenacting the “play of atoms, and of the smallest components, the ions and electrons.”46 However, Laban transfigures not only the physics of electromagnetic fields into the spatial radiance of dance; he also transposes a phenomenon from a rather different cultural context. His vision of a choreic spatial envelope transposes his times’ skirt dances in which textiles extend the body past its physical bounds, such as Loie Fuller’s performances (fig. 4.10) with draperies whose folds evince, in Deleuze’s words, the “tendency of matter to overflow space.”47 Fuller’s dances and, in Ann Cooper Albright’s phrase, their “ongoing

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Figure 4.10. Samuel Joshua Beckett (fl. 1901–1908), [Loie Fuller Dancing]. Photograph, ca. 1900, gelatin silver print 4 × 51/4 in., irregularly trimmed. Recto. Gilman Collection, Purchase, Mrs. Walter Annenberg and The Annenberg Foundation Gift, 2005 (2005.100.950). The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art; image source: Art Resource, NY

transformations of figure and ground”48 are later echoed in Laban’s performance titled The Monk (fig. 4.11) and in Wigman’s dance Space Figure (Raumgestalt) (fig. 4.12), which manipulate fabrics to visualize the molding of space in dance. These dances’ textiles turned surrounding space into a material and plastic entity that acted as a vessel for movements beyond the limits of the dancer’s body. Like Cézanne’s still lifes, which in their heightened attention to fabrics insist on “the material presence rather than negative absence of space,” these drapery performances give “positive form to negative space”; they “present space as matter.”49 For Laban the external space of the dancer is not a diffuse realm of continuity but rather a formed domain of unremittance in which the period’s interest in textile’s plastic potential is transfigured into topological space forms (figs. 4.13, 4.14).

Psychophysiologically Saturated Space At this point it is useful to recall how Aby Warburg, whose fascination with fifteenth-­century fabrics is inseparable from his own time’s attention to flut-

Figure 4.11. The Monk, photograph of Laban reproduced from Die Welt des Tänzers: Fünf Gedank‑ enreigen (Stuttgart: Walter Seifert, 1920), image located between pages 24 and 25. © Laura Laban

Figure 4.12. Charlotte Rudolph, “Mary Wigman: Raumgestalt,” 1925. © 2020 Artists Rights Soci‑ ety (ARS), New York / VG Bild-­Kunst, Bonn

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Figure 4.13. Rudolf Laban, drawing reproduced from A Vision of Dynamic Space, comp. Lisa Ullmann (London: Laban Archives in association with the Falmer Press, 1984), 55. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. © Laura Laban

tering textiles (fig. 4.15),50 interprets the Renaissance’s animated cloths (figs. 4.16, 4.17). In Botticelli’s moving accessories, Warburg sees signs for “intensified life,” “a state of excitement, or even inner emotion.”51 Just as for Warburg the figures’ enveloping cloths imbricate motion and emotion, for Laban the dancer’s surrounding space is suffused by movements in which physis and psychis coincide. Like Duncan, who declares that for “the dancer of the future,” “the natural language of the soul will have become the movement of the body,”52 or like Kandinsky, who claims that the “new dance” must be based on the “inner sense of movement,”53 Laban upholds that movement signifies a psychophysiological entwinement of external and internal motion (“ohne Gemütserregung und ohne Denken gibt es auch keine Körperbewegung”).54 Since movements are inextricably tied to subjective inwardness, when they overflow the dancer into her spatial receptacle, they saturate

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Figure 4.14. Detail from Loie Fuller’s patent for her serpentine dance costume, “Garment for Dancers,” patented April 17, 1894.

it not only with mechanical animation but also with peripatetic elements of subjectivity (with “thought,” “feeling,” “willing”).55 In dance, surrounding space is a medium not only for the dancer’s illimitable bodily motion but also for her uncontainable inner self.56 Laban’s drawings of visible space forms (fig. 4.18) suggest that space is not only a medium but also an object of dance: it is both the means for and the target of dancers’ gestures. These gestures create space shapes (Umraumformen) in which body and space are as inseparable as motion and emotion

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Figure 4.15. Henri de Toulouse-­Lautrec, Miss Loie Fuller, 1893. Lithograph, 141/2 × 101/4 in. PD 1977, 1105.14. British Museum, London. © The Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, NY

are indissoluble. Consequently, dance is “expression” not only in the sense that bodily movements manifest internal sentiments but also in that they expel these sentiments past the body into the dancer’s external space. On the one hand, knowing that Laban was interested in Kabbalah, we might recognize in his vision of dancerly ecstasis the auratic logic of Kabbalistic vitalism in which, in Steven Connor’s words, “all living things [are] characterized, not by the hoarding or holding in of their essences, but by their exuberant qualities of overflow.”57 On the other hand, however, this logic of overspill is inherent in one of Laban’s scientific sources, namely, in Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), a text that Laban cites as a “foundation” of his own theory at the end of The World of the Dancer. Even if in Darwin’s book emotions are expressed immanently within the body (and not beyond its physical bounds),58 they articulate a

Figure 4.16. Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus, Ca. 1485. Detail of a dress (40-­07-­01/ 52). Tempera on canvas, 523/4 × 68 in. Inv. 878. Uffizi, Florence. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY

Figure 4.17. Sandro Botticelli. Detail of the Three Graces, from La Primavera (Spring). Ca. 1482/1487. Tempera on wood. Uffizi, Florence. Photo: Scala / Art Resource, NY

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Figure 4.18. Image reproduced from Rudolf Laban, Choreographie (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1926), 31. © Laura Laban

problem of “excess” that is addressed with anatomical strategies of “efflux,” “discharge,” and “overflow.”59 Darwin draws on Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Psychology and especially on his essay “The Physiology of Laughter,” in which Spencer “insists on the general law that feeling passing a certain pitch habitually vents itself in bodily action.”60 Echoing Darwin’s text in which muscular movements manifest the “nerve energy’s” discharge, Laban claims that “movement is a discharge of energy.”61 However, whereas in Darwin’s study expression consumes itself within the bounds of the body insofar as muscular movements are the very instances of its efflux (mental states vent, discharge, and exteriorize themselves as bodily movement), for Laban’s Ausdruckstanz, the exteriorization of feeling does not exhaust itself in human locomotion but rather overspills physical movement and vibrates forth into space.

Anima, Air , Atmosphere: Laban and Kandinsky If Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions is a scientific interlocutor for Laban’s theory of dance,62 Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art is an

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important aesthetic intertext, albeit not an explicitly mentioned one. Kandinsky brings up “dance reformers” of his time, such as Isadora Duncan,63 whereas Laban relies heavily on Kandinsky’s terminology when he writes about the “study of harmony” in dance or when he ponders the relation between “spirit” and “form.”64 Both delineate a theory of aesthetic exteriorization in which scientific discoveries and occult discourses merge: they evoke the subtle fluids of atmosphere and effluvia in which fixed matter dissolves and space materializes to some degree, blurring the boundary between matter and space—or in their case, between a work of art and its spatial surroundings. Air—both in its literal sense and in its figurative one of anima—is a privileged figure of this blurring. For Kandinsky, the artwork discharges the artist’s emotions, conserved in its forms and colors, and sends them forth to the viewer,65 just as for Laban, dance (in which, as W. B. Yeats reminds us, there is no separation between artwork and artist) releases psychophysiological movement forms into space. For Laban dance strays outside its corporeal limits when it “streams” onto the audience (“ein ganzer Kunsttanz auf uns einströmt”),66 whereas for Kandinsky, dance exceeds its bounds when it “streams forth” (entströmen) as a “vital power” that acts on the viewer.67 Along the same lines, Kandinsky describes the artwork as a “spiritually breathing subject,”68 “a being with a life of its own and with an effect ineluctably streaming forth from this life. Man is continually subjected to this psychological effect.”69 The arguments of both rely on the existence of the subtle matter of “atmosphere,” which serves as a medium for the emotional fluidum expelled by the artwork and by the dance. Atmosphere, a complex term in Kandinsky’s text, suggests that the work of art must be a material deposition of both the historical “spiritual atmosphere” (of l’air du temps as it were) and more importantly, of the subjective “atmosphere” of the artist (of his spiritual feelings, the “fine” vibrations of his “soul-­emotions”). However, the work of art entwines air and anima not only in the sense that it manifests what “is in the air” in its cultural epoch and what is in the “soul” of the artist; in addition, its forms and colors “pour out” in a quasi-­material sense (insofar as the artwork continues into its surrounding aerial space) as well as in a spiritual-­ emotional sense (insofar as the artwork touches the viewer psychologically). If the work of art’s creation thus combines what was in the air with what was in the artist’s soul, its reception is similarly situated at the interface of air and anima insofar as the artwork’s emotional effect (its action on the “soul” of the viewer) posits an aerial-­ethereal medium of transmission. When Laban describes dance as a self-­effusing entity, he also invokes the notion of “atmosphere” (Dunstkreis) to describe the mechanism of dislimitation subtending dance forms. While in the following quote Laban loses himself in a

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Figure 4.19. Rudolf Laban, drawing reproduced from A Vision of Dynamic Space, comp. Lisa Ullmann (London: Laban Archives in association with the Falmer Press, 1984), 12, top. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. © Laura Laban

dizzying medley of bodily ecstasies, the passage is nevertheless revealing for the way it mingles occult bodily encasements with scientific forms of emanation, intimating thereby how Laban, like Kandinsky, conceptualizes aesthetic unboundedness at the interface of scientific discoveries and occult discourses of the period. “The external envelopment of the tangible body,” writes Laban, “the haze-­like, iridescent skin is, like the whole body, woven out of platelets, saps, and tensions. Various atmospheres [Dunstkreise], scents, magnetic waves, light waves, chemical waves, air-­percussive heat, and other rays reach in a distinctly perceptible manner far beyond every skin barrier of the body” (fig. 4.19).70 Whereas Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art turns on the rhetoric of a subtle matter in line with his time’s debates concerning the ether,71 the “disintegration of the atom” and the subsequent “dissolution of everything into the air,”72 Laban’s writings invoke the reduction of “matter to a play of radiating and circling sparks,”73 “the marvelous atom”74 and “the radiating pattern in the dance of electrons.”75 On the one hand, it is these scientific phenomena that offer a framework within which to posit the artwork’s

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precarious material boundaries, its tendency to continue beyond itself by pouring out the very fine matter of “atmosphere.” On the other hand, it is occult auratic phenomena that enable Kandinsky and Laban to think aesthetic “out-­standingness.” When in a footnote Kandinsky mentions “experiments” that show the existence of a “spiritual atmosphere” around humans,76 he has in mind those occult photographic experiments that try to capture auratic emissions of emotion. In particular, he knew the images of Hippolyte Baraduc, the French neurologist working alongside Jean-­Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière Hospital, who attempted to capture the emotional effluvia of his subjects on a light-­sensitive plate.77 The latter’s visual documents are significant because like Kandinsky’s and Laban’s aesthetic objects, they arise at the interface of anima and air: whereas Baraduc’s images are iconographies of the movements of the soul yet often result from the physical air acting on the chemically emulsified plates, Kandinsky’s artwork and Laban’s dance exteriorize movements of the soul by positing around the artwork an atmospheric envelope as a vehicle for the diffusion of aesthetic effects.

Luftkur, Plein Air This encounter between anima and air is paradigmatically—and literally— visible in modern dance’s interest in exteriorizing the dancer’s inwardness in open-­air dances, as in Duncan’s plein air performances (figs. 4.20, 4.21) or Laban’s dances in nature on Monte Verità in Ascona, where he had set up summer schools between 1913 and 1917. (Duncan was also a guest at the artist’s and life reformers’ colony of Monte Verità.) Whereas flowing draperies in dance are situated at the interface of the dancer’s animation and the wind’s dynamism, Laban’s dances in the open (figs. 4.22, 4.23) activate the continuity between the dancer’s internal anima and her environing air. Draperies, as interfaces between body and space, give material form to the continuity between humans and their environment because the animation of those who wear them and the movement of the winds that blow on them merge. This continuity is visible in Laban’s dance experiments on Monte Verità in which dancers express “the life of their soul”78 while harnessing their natural environment, in particular the light and the air.79 Laban joined the Monte Verità community after doing a so-­called Luftkur, that is, after taking “air baths” at a sanatorium in Dresden, which, like many other sanatoria of its time that used climate therapy, wanted to exploit (what it posited to be) the healing properties of air.80 Once in Ascona, Laban occupied some of the light and air huts (the Lichtlufthäuschen) that the naturopath Adolf Just set up for patients of the Monte Verità Sanatorium.81 Laban’s space-­centered theory of dance, in which the dancer’s spatial atmosphere

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Figure 4.20. Isadora Duncan in outdoor theater at Acropolis. Jerome Robbins Dance Division Photograph files. New York Public Library. Photo: New York Public Library / Art Resource, NY

takes center stage, relies not only on the notion of an auratic “fluidal husk” (indeed, as we have seen, Laban claims that “we never . . . leave our movement sphere but carry it always with us, like an aura”82) but also depends on Laban’s experiences with the quintessential fluid of air encountered in its concrete sense in his climate therapies and in his choreographies of open-­air dances on Monte Verità. Laban transfers the body’s heightened experience of its aerial envelopment from his Luftkur, or the plein air performances, into the body’s heightened relation with its spatial environment in his dance theory. These conceptual dependences between choreic encasement, aura, and air show how Laban overlays the Kabbalistic ecstasis of living things in which “everything thus pushes beyond itself, surrounds itself with itself, with a weightless fluidal husk”83 with neo-­Romantic and protoenvironmentalist visions of a bond between humans and their surroundings.84 Therefore, Laban’s variously conceived continuities between the dancer and her spatial envelope—continuities understood in terms of “space form,” “radiance,”

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Figure 4.21. Isadora Duncan (1877–1927), American dancer, in the park of her chateau at Bellevue à Meudon, France, ca. 1910. France. Photo: Adoc-­photos / Art Resource, NY

“atmosphere”—express a larger-­order, ecological unity between humans and the space of nature. To be sure, this ecological oneness has significant political implications. Laban’s understanding of dance as vibratory, as overspilling into the atmosphere, implies not only a protoecological unity between humans and nature but also a social oneness performed in Laban’s so-­called movement choirs (Bewegungschöre). These collective dances found their early iteration in open-­air group performances on Monte Verità. They were meant to reawaken a lost sense of Dionysian festive culture,85 and they thematized a nostalgic “human communality.”86 Their staging of collective rhythms is disturbing given the racial and national essentialism of Laban's thinking as well as his later choreographing of a community dance in the context of events associated with the 1936 Berlin Olympics.87 His movement choirs point to the political subtext of his ecstatic theory of dance in a dual way. The first is that communal dancing is one facet of the fascist aestheticization of politics (along the lines of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will). It

Figure 4.22. Photograph from the series “Rudolf von Laban. Group for New Stage Dance. Five Pictures,” reproduced in Rudolf von Laban, Die Welt des Tänzers: Fünf Gedankenreigen (Stuttgart: Walter Seifert, 1920), first image in series, located between pages 17 and 18. © Laura Laban

Figure 4.23. Photograph from the series “Rudolf von Laban. Group for New Stage Dance. Five Pictures,” reproduced in Rudolf von Laban, Die Welt des Tänzers: Fünf Gedankenreigen (Stuttgart: Walter Seifert, 1920), second image in series, located between pages 17 and 18. © Laura Laban

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showcases the ideologically problematic susceptibility of the audience to the exercise of power through the conjuration of atmosphere.88 In contrast to Rilke, who pondered the ability of art to touch us and move us in the context of poetics and aesthetics, Laban demonstrates the capacity of dance to reach out to us in a politically manipulative sense.89 The second political subtext is expressed well in Laban’s description of movement choirs as a “new folk dance movement of the white race,” which contrasted with the “fashionable social dances which show an invasion of foreign racial movements.”90 Communal dancing pre­sents the political repercussions of an aesthetic of unstilled margins when this aesthetic goes hand in hand with the ideal of a racially and nationalistically defined ­community. In what follows, I show that in early modern dance the dancer’s external space is not merely a “microworl[d] of embodied plasticity,” to use Emily Apter’s phrase;91 it is also a macrocosmos of spatiocorporeal forms. In other words, it may be true that German expressionist dance, as Merce Cunningham put it, made “space into . . . forms that by their connection in time made a shape,” without however, opening this shape onto the “larger space of the stage.”92 However, even if Ausdruckstanz was not primarily interested in the space of the stage, it was nevertheless concerned with opening dance onto a different kind of “larger space,” namely, that of the natural environment and that of the cosmic milieu. If in Rilke’s assessment of Rodin’s sketches, the dancer is enveloped by gradually widening circles of space (air, atmosphere, cultural surroundings), in Laban’s writings, the dancer’s body is continuous with progressively expansive spatial environments. While this continuousness resonates with philosophical anthropology’s later explorations of humans and their “worldhood,”93 other discursive contexts are even more revealing of Laban’s environmental understanding of dance. For Laban channels not only the naturist thought of the period (embodied in Monte Verità’s life reformers and “back to nature” enthusiasts) but also cosmological theories of harmony, like the Vitruvian oneness between man and milieu as well as ecologically inflected notions of harmony as developed in the encounter between Lebensphilosophie and the life sciences in the theoretical biology of Jakob von Uexküll, the monist biology of Ernst Haeckel, and the vitalist botany of Raoul Heinrich Francé. These influences feed into Laban’s aesthetics of dance in which the dancer’s unity with her spatial envelope reenacts the large-­scale bond between humans and their natural environment. This extensive (and self-­extensive) bond is thematized in exemplary fashion in Laban’s drawings and space models, and it is to these that I now turn.

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Dance ’ s Biological and Architectural Lifeworlds Laban’s visualizations of movement show geometric structures of encasement around dancers that recall the Vitruvian model of harmony between microcosmos and macrocosmos. Indeed, depictions of the uomo vitruviano are helpful in explaining how, on the one hand, the movements create an individual domain around the dancer and how, on the other hand, this domain signifies a supraindividual harmony with space, a boundless cosmic extension of the individual. Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (ca. 1490) both points to and resolves the paradox of Laban’s spatial receptacles, for the latter, even as they suggest self-­enclosure, represent the body’s “ex-­istence” beyond itself in its affinities with the rhythms of nature and the motions of the planets. In this sense, Laban declares that “yes, all life and all being is dance: dance of the celestial bodies, dance of the forces of nature, dance of human actions and feelings, dance of cultures, dance of the arts.”94 As the incarnation of a vitalist state of flux,95 dance extends the figure’s spatial envelope to include the expanded space of nature and cosmos. In order to conceptualize this expanded worldhood of the dancer, The World of the Dancer cites Plato’s Timaeus. It comes as no surprise that Laban’s drawings and space models evince his interest in the Vitruvian Man’s preoccupations with sacred geometry. Laban models his space forms in which physis and psychis overlap on the Platonic solids, and his psychophysiological understanding of dance is indebted to what Thomas Johansen describes as “Timaeus’ geometrical conception of the interaction between . . . bodily motions and . . . psychic motions.”96 For Timaeus, all human movements are an imitation of the movements of the universe, suggesting that his “cosmology is in fact biology.”97 Similarly, when Laban claims that “we become aware of ever-­circling motions in the universe” through dance, he intimates how his dance theory can merge cosmological and biological notions of harmony (in Timaeus’ sense), how it can mingle the ancient cosmological accord between humans and the cosmos with biological interpretations of the bond between organisms and their environment.98 The latter sense is evident, for instance, in the affinities between Laban’s choreic spatial receptacles (inspired by Timaeus’s understanding of space as chora) and Uexküll’s notions of milieu, of Umwelten. In the above images (figs. 4.24–4.26), the emphasis on the central positioning of the human figure within space emphasizes Laban’s understanding of space in terms of the initial meaning of milieu understood as a literal mi-­lieu in the sense of its Latin etymon medius locus, or “middle place.”99 Historically, as Canguilhem

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Figure 4.24. Rudolf Laban, drawing reproduced from A Vision of Dynamic Space, comp. Lisa Ullmann (London: Laban Archives in association with the Falmer Press, 1984), 38. Rudolf Laban Archive, National Resource Centre for Dance, Archives & Special Collections at University of Surrey. © Laura Laban

tells us, the different meanings of milieu corresponded to different theories of space, including “a centered space, defined as being where the mi-­lieu is a center.”100 Underlying Laban’s dance space is an insistence on centered space in which the body functions as an inner focal point. Although as Canguilhem writes, in the history of the term milieu, it is ultimately the image of “the indefinitely extendable plane . . . with no definite shape or privileged position” that asserts itself,101 in Laban’s vision it is the “metaphor of the sphere or circle”102 that persists (fig. 4.27). (In this respect, he resembles Warburg, who associates the idea of milieu with semantic and visual circles.) The World of the Dancer describes the space around the dancer as a “spherical surrounding space-­form” (kugelhafte Umraumform), a “circumference-­ ball” (Umkreiskugel),103 and later works term it “kinesphere” and “dynamosphere,” continuing thereby that “intuition of a centered formation”104 that characterized the initial meaning of milieu.105

Figure 4.25. Illustration reproduced from Rudolf Laban, Choreutics, ed. Lisa Ullmann (Alton: Dance Books, 2011), 19, fig. 5. © Dance Books

Figure 4.26. Illustration reproduced from Rudolf Laban, Choreutics, ed. Lisa Ullmann (Alton: Dance Books, 2011), 140, fig. 53. © Dance Books

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Figure 4.27. Images reproduced from Rudolf Laban, Choreographie (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1926), 11. © Laura Laban

As an individual domain, Laban’s choreic space is a phenomenological particularization of space: it is a specific spatiality constituted by the dancer.106 Invoking the terminology of the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, he terms this specific space a “self-­world” (Eigenwelt)107 or “I-­world” (Ichwelt),108 suggesting that each dancer engenders her own spatial receptacle that encompasses “all motions anatomically possible to an individual dancer.”109 In this respect Laban’s Umraum produced by and specific to the dancer resembles Uexküll’s Umwelt created by and particular to an organism.110 As Canguilhem stresses, in Uexküll’s theory of environment, “it is a fundamental characteristic of the living thing that it makes its own milieu; it builds one for itself.”111 Dance’s individualization of space is in line with the Uexküllian idea of Umwelt understood as the “behavioral milieu that is proper to a given organism.”112 When Laban claims that “the individual dance is a duet between dancer and environment, or dancer and inner world,”113 he seems to confirm the affinity between his ecological dance theory and Uexküll’s theoretical biology, especially as the latter is laid out in the work whose title Laban echoes, namely, in Uexküll’s Environment and Inner World of Animals (1909).114 However, Laban’s choreic environment bears affinities not only with a biological lifeworld. Insofar as the dancer’s production of space always also entails that space is endowed with plastic qualities, that it is formed, Laban’s theory resonates with the idea of an architecturally produced and molded space—in particular, as the latter is described by August Schmarsow in his lecture “The Essence of Architectural Creation” (1894).115 As a student of architecture, Laban is likely to have encountered Schmarsow’s text. Indeed,

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the affinities between his and Schmarsow’s spatial visions are numerous. When Laban regards the production and figuration (“gestalten”116) of space as the preeminent functions of dance, he echoes Schmarsow, who sees in architecture a “creatress of space” (Raumgestalterin) that transforms space from a negative form into a positive moldable entity.117 Form is inextricable from Schmarsow’s notion of space understood in terms of space figure, space body, and space form.118 These words return in The World of the Dancer’s description of dance’s ability to bestow form on space.119 To recapitulate then, insofar as the space of dance represents an Umraum, a particularized space that is proper to each dancer, it invokes notions of a biological milieu. However, insofar as dance transfigures Umraum into Umraumform, it calls up theories of architectural space creation. Laban’s two spatial impulses behind his dance theory—that of the biological lifeworld and that of the architectural environment—are brought together suggestively in the text titled Space as Membrane (1926) by the utopian Bauhaus architect Siegfried Ebeling, who studied dance with Laban and who later influenced Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe before being rediscovered by ecological architecture today.120 A short excursus on Ebeling’s text, which is replete with Labanian dance terminology, is helpful not only for showing the reach of Laban’s ideas regarding the coextension of body and space in dance but also for contextualizing this coextension in the history of biology. Ebeling’s text echoes Laban’s writings in multiple ways: rhythm, space figuration, space form, space tension, crystal, space dynamic, and space body121 are words that could have been lifted straight out of Laban’s The World of the Dancer. Furthermore, Ebeling’s drawing of a figure inhabiting a cube (figs. 4.28, 4.29) is reminiscent of Laban’s drawings of dancers stretching in cubic kinespheres (fig. 4.30). Laban’s images of bodies moving in geometric envelopes and Ebeling’s illustration of a figure inhabiting a cubic space articulate the dance theorist’s and the architect’s fascination with husks and casings that redraw the material boundaries of forms and view them as coextensive with their spatial milieus. As Spyros Papapetros writes, “in Ebeling’s scheme, space is the new prosthesis—the inorganic extension of the human skin.”122 There is, however, a limit to the affinities between Laban and his student, for their illustrations inspired by the uomo vitruviano interpret this visual trope in different ways. For Ebeling the geometric encasings resemble a “membrane” insofar as they seal off and protect the individual within from the climatic conditions without.123 The dwelling cube around the figure functions not as a membrane of permeability between individual and milieu but rather as a wall of separation that isolates the figure and absolves it of its dependence on the vagaries of environmental factors. To illustrate this

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Figure 4.28. Cover page of Siegfried Ebeling, Der Raum als Membran (Dessau: C. Dünnhaupt, 1926). © Bauhaus Dessau Foundation

quarantining function of the architectural milieu around the inhabitant, Ebeling draws on a passage from Goethe’s The Metamorphosis of Plants— a passage that intimates the way in which botany can influence aesthetic conceptions of surrounding space. When Ebeling quotes Goethe writing that “all things, if they are to have a vital effect, must be enveloped,” he emphasizes the containing force of the envelope, its ability to keep life from dispersing, for, as Goethe claims, “all things that are turned toward the outside yield prematurely to a gradual decay.”124 Laban, by contrast, sees in the spa-

Figure 4.29. Detail from cover page of Siegfried Ebeling, Der Raum als Membran (Dessau: C. Dünnhaupt, 1926). © Bauhaus Dessau Foundation

Figure 4.30. Image reproduced from Rudolf Laban, Choreographie (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1926), 21. © Laura Laban

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tial envelope around the dancer, despite its evidently demarcative thrust, a figure of “uncessation.” For Laban, the geometric casings and husks around bodies figure their extensive bond with an environment understood expansively in natural and cosmic terms. As Colin Counsell puts it, for Laban, “the orbits of planets around the stars, the turning of the seasons, the whirling of atoms and the molecular oscillations of fluids are all . . . facets of a great Cosmic Dance, a ceaseless kinetic cycle of action and reaction, a rise and fall that is the life of the universe.”125 In line with the uomo vitruviano, the geometric enclosures figure not forms’ delimitation but rather their ecstasis. In this sense, Laban’s visualizations have a certain affinity with Sergei Eisenstein’s “Ex-­stasis” drawings from the 1930s, which make the ecstatic implications of the Vitruvian Man explicit.126 In their ecstatic interpretation of the encased form, Laban’s illustrations are also in line with more recent botanical conceptions than Goethe’s The Metamorphosis of Plants, conceptions epitomized by the word harmony, a central term in Laban’s writings, and one that spans a wide array of discourses around 1900 ranging from cosmology and aesthetics to biology. We can get a sense of Labanian harmony by doing some philological source tracing: Laban cites Haeckel explicitly in The World of the Dancer, and given his interest in crystallography (a field that also operates with the concept of “harmony”),127 he must have been familiar with Haeckel’s Crystal Souls: Studies of Inorganic Life, which appeared three years before The World of the Dancer.128 Furthermore, given Laban’s repeated engagement with questions of botany, with parallels between the dynamics of plants and the movements of dance, it is likely that he encountered the work of the botanist and cultural philosopher Raoul Heinrich Francé, whom both Haeckel and Ebeling reference.129 Francé wrote popular scientific texts such as The Plant as Inventor or Technical Achievements of Plants,130 which, while indebted to Goethean botany, propose an alternative to the idea of the enveloped, self-­contained plant. Francé’s texts are concerned with plants that are turned outward insofar as they live in “harmony” with other plants and with their environment;131 instead of being self-­sufficient, they are caught in a web of associations with the rest of the flora and fauna. Francé describes botanical structures of interaction in which he mingles classical notions of harmony with biological concepts of symbiosis. Although Darwin and Haeckel play an important role in Laban’s theory of dance, he understands the relation between the dancer and her environment not in terms of deterministic theories of milieu. When Laban posits the entanglement of the dancer and her spatial envelope in so-­called space rhythms and space forms, he bypasses regulative concepts of milieu and invokes instead the older, classical sense of milieu referring, in Paul Rabi­

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now’s words, to “an initial harmony between living beings and the milieu to which they sought to adapt.”132 Rabinow writes that “in Classical botany, habitat referred to the area inhabited by a particular plant species; a preexistent harmony between the species and its habitat was part of the concept’s definition.”133 This harmonious interrelation between the plant and its environment is a biological counterpart to Laban’s vision of a spatiocorporeal bond in dance.134 In contrast to a Goethean botany of envelopment or an Ebelingian architecture of spatial neutralization, Laban’s dance theory insists not only on a harmony between figure and ground; it also regards this harmony as enacting a large-­scale, ecologico-­cosmological accord between humans and their environment.

[   c oda  ]

Space as Form

To the extent that this book explores the permeability between the artwork’s depicted forms and its external spaces, it aims to carve out counternarratives within traditional aesthetic frameworks. First, it diverges from an understanding of aesthetic form primarily as an instance of distinction.1 Second, insofar as the book examines atmosphere not as the other of form but rather as its continuation, it drifts from Niklas Luhmann’s appraisal of atmosphere as “the other side” of form.2 This book’s objects of study, ranging from Warburg’s to Laban’s texts, suggest that atmosphere is not the other of form but rather it is form unbounded, it is aerial form within an image turned aerial environment without it. On the one hand, the continuity between form and atmosphere implies that forms are rarefied as they mingle with space, for instance, in what Riegl laments as the impressionist dissolve of figures in their atmospheric surroundings. On the other hand, however, the unboundedness of form implies not only the ability of forms to be volatilized by space but also the reverse: namely, the capacity of spaces to be molded into forms. This is evident, for instance, in Riegl’s notion that space is endowed with a “form potential” (Formpotenz):3 in the last chapter of Late Roman Art Industry, he suggests that the late Roman emancipation of space, which enclosed the figure even as it pushed it out into space, gave rise to the spatial interval between figures. This spatial interval became an aesthetic unit in its own right, endowed with form potential.4 In a similar vein, Laban’s “surrounding space form”5 suggests that the air enveloping artworks does not stand for the diffuse and formless but rather for the “plastic existence” of space.6 In this respect, however, the thinkers this book traces are not merely prefiguring cubist coconstitutions of figure and ground. Rather, they are continuing the late nineteenth-­century call to submit actual exterior spaces to aspirations of form. In his 1889 treatise on City Planning, Camillo Sitte had 143

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Figure 5.1. Rudolf Laban, photo of space model reproduced from A Vision of Dynamic Space, comp. Lisa Ullmann (London: Laban Archives in association with the Falmer Press, 1984), 14, bottom. Rudolf Laban Archive, National Resource Centre for Dance, Archives & Special Collections at University of Surrey. © Laura Laban

pleaded for the necessity of intentionally forming urban space,7 whereas in his 1893 lecture “The Essence of Architectural Creation,” August Schmarsow argued for the need to mold architectural space into “space figures” (Raumgebilde).8 Therefore, it is important to underscore that in the writings on art that this book studies, artworks not only depict the penetrability between form and space; more importantly, in their overspill into their actual aerial spaces, they also enact it. Laban shows this, for example, in his notion of a dancer’s “kinesphere,” that is, her surrounding external space, which imbricates body shapes and space forms in dance. Over time, Laban understood the bond between dancer and space in increasingly abstract terms: in his drawings and space models, space overtakes the dancer and makes the human figure disappear behind geometrical shapes, topological constructs, abstract “spatial entities” (figs. 5.1, 5.2).9 Dance is reduced to corporeal sculptures made out of space. In The World of the Dancer, the ultimate figure of dance’s spatiocorporeal bond becomes the crystal. Dancers enact “space crystals” that coalesce and dissolve with

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Figure 5.2. Rudolf Laban, photo of space model reproduced from A Vision of Dynamic Space, comp. Lisa Ullmann (London: Laban Archives in association with the Falmer Press, 1984), 59. Rudolf Laban Archive, National Resource Centre for Dance, Archives & Special Collections at University of Surrey. © Laura Laban

each movement and that recreate the fundamental structures of nature.10 For Laban, crystals are a monist emblem insofar as they figure a crystalline morphology assumed to subtend all forms of nature (such as plants, animals, and humans) as well as those of inorganic matter (such as musical instruments, pendulums, etc.).11 Indeed, the crystal is a favored motif in aesthetics in the period.12 It is a privileged site for negotiating the relationship between humans and the surrounding natural world in particular as this relationship

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is played out in theories of abstraction, which repeatedly recur to the image of the crystal. The central role played by concepts such as “form,” “space,” and “crystal” in The World of the Dancer reveals affinities between Laban’s text and Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy (1907).13 For both Worringer and Laban, the crystal embodies a fundamental structure; it is a universal image of eternal regularity; it is an ornament of pure form.14 And for both, abstraction is a gateway to formal essences, which are unclad of incidentals and particulars, and which assume geometric shapes and crystalline outlines.15 However, where Worringer associates the crystalline figures of abstraction with static and rigidly circumscribed objects, Laban correlates the crystalline ornaments of dance with moving and fluidly transitioning forms. For Worringer the crystalline ornament dispels the power of constant flux, and abstract structures are objects removed from the vitalist flow of life. The “rigid world of the crystalline-­geometric”16 enables “abstraction as the possibility of repose” (Abstraktion als Ausruh-­Möglichkeit).17 Abstraction ensures the overcoming of inconstancy and the subsequent attainment of “rest.”18 Laban, by contrast, conceives of abstract forms in conjunction with dance and the universal mobility it embodies.19 The dancers’ crystalline movement forms prove that they partake in the universal flux of nature insofar as the same crystalline movements underlie all natural phenomena. Whereas for Worringer abstraction offers a relief from the state of universal becoming, for Laban dance’s abstract space figures are precisely the means to participate in the state of universal motion. Dance materializes ontological fluidity without transposing it into an immutable form. Since for Worringer the abstract ornament stands for “geometric, crystalline regularity”20 and signifies the “life-­denying form,”21 abstraction is the very means to overcome the proximity and immediacy of nature and the reliance on “life.”22 For Laban by contrast the abstract figures of dance embody life, and abstraction is the means to situate humans within nature. Laban also diverges from Worringer’s theory of abstraction by declaring that abstraction and space are reconcilable. Worringer pleads for the abstract crystalline ornament that is not embedded in space (he regards “space . . . [as] the biggest enemy of abstracting endeavors”23); Laban by contrast sees in dance how body and space interlace and give rise to “human space crystals”24 in which corporeal form and spatial figure merge. If in Worringer’s expressionist account of abstraction, abstraction develops from the stringent separation of form and space (notably, following Riegl, “atmospheric” space), in Laban’s writings abstraction results from an excessive continuity between form and space. Unlike Worringer, who wants to restrict an object’s

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embeddedness in space by separating object and environment into ornament and plane, Laban wants to turn space itself into an ornament, a crystalline “space form.” Laban’s work draws our attention to the logic of ecstasis that subtends cubism and abstraction. If in his early writings, dance stages the body’s efflux into the environment, in his later work, dance performs the body’s self-­divestiture. Thereby, Laban makes dance, the art of the body par excellence, give an intuition of the nonfigurative. There is a historical trajectory that leads from the idea that form and space are continuous in nineteenth-­century theories of milieu and their reception in the work of Warburg, Riegl, Rilke, and Laban to the practice of endowing space with plasticity in cubism. Aesthetic externalism, insofar as it posits a continuous relationship between figure and ground, points to cubism’s break in distinction between figure and ground. For example, the volumetric shaping of space in Picasso’s Ma Jolie (1911–1912) resembles the loss of distinction between dancer and space in Laban’s dance theory. This idea of modeled space—as in Picasso, Braque, or earlier, Cézanne— is present in Riegl’s spatial “form potential” and Laban’s later space forms. Riegl’s and Laban’s plastic spaces pre­sent space not as an indifferent environment or as an inert background but rather in a cubist manner, as a plastic competitor with forms. This book’s horizon is abstraction insofar as the book views abstraction’s development via the cubist molding of space as opposed to the Worringerian suppression of space, which is an alternate, albeit related, account. Boccioni’s “Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture” is another relevant source here, for Boccioni pushes the figure-­ground-­centered account of abstraction further back to the impressionists’ depiction of “surroundings,” which “act simultaneously on the human figure and on objects;” futurist sculpture, he claims, “should give life to objects by rendering their extension into space palpable, systematic, and plastic.”25 Riegl, Laban, Boccioni, or cubist paintings wrestle with the relation between a determination (form) and its negation (space). This problem is at the heart of other contemporaneous discourses such as Gestalt psychology. In his study of visual figure-­ground phenomena, Edgar Rubin (of the famous Rubin vase) explicitly refers to Riegl’s study of ornamental patterns in which “as complementary ornamentations become more abstract, figure and ground will exchange more often.”26 Riegl also addresses this interchangeability between a determination and its negation at the end of Late Roman Art Industry when he claims that late Roman art’s forming of space into intervals resembles the valorization of the interval understood in the sense of the privatio in Saint Augustine’s ethics and aesthetics.27 In fact Gestalt psychology helps bring this book’s project to full circle. In his essay

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Thing and Medium (1926),28 the Gestalt psychologist Fritz Heider rethinks the figure-­ground problem in media-­theoretical terms as a thing-­medium relation. He reaffirms air as a privileged trope for conceptualizing the continuity between forms and their environing space when he uses air as an example that illustrates the ease with which a thing can become a medium, and a medium can, conversely, turn into a thing.

Acknowledgments

I have been fortunate to work on this book while being part of a very supportive and inspiring environment at the University of Chicago. I would like to thank especially my colleagues Christine Mehring, Eric Santner, and David Wellbery. I am grateful to Christine for her ceaseless guidance; her unparalleled mentorship helped bring this project to fruition. I am indebted to her for advice on many issues related to this book—and beyond. I thank Eric for his engagement with my ideas, for taking the time to read various versions of this work and discuss them in detail. He pushed and clarified my own thinking, and this book bears the marks of his intellectual influence on many of its pages. I am very thankful to David for helping me navigate my first year at the university, for his generosity with his time, and for his continuous assistance and support. His feedback on my writing, his questions, and his comments have helped guide this project. I also thank Jaś Elsner for conversations about Riegl and for his careful reading of my work. I have greatly benefited from his sharp critical insights. I owe much to the editorial acumen of my research assistant Matthew Johnson, who, frequently on very short notice, formatted my texts, tracked down citations, and typed up my bibliography, and who beyond all this was an intellectual interlocutor. This book began at Princeton University, where Michael Jennings and Joseph Vogl helped shape the project early on. I thank Mike for teaching me how to ask the right questions, for encouraging me to do what I was most interested in, and for his openness to my ideas. Mike has been an exemplary mentor, and I thank him for his unwavering support at Princeton and beyond. To Joseph, I am grateful for the challenges and for the lessons in intellectual clearheadedness and precision. This work owes much to his many helpful suggestions and his guidance. I also thank Sigrid Weigel for introducing me to the work of Aby Warburg and for the many illuminating discussions of his work; Brigid Doherty and Devin Fore for their detailed 149

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appraisals and helpful comments; Stanley Corngold for his intellectually inspiring courses; Petra Spies McGillen for pointing me to the work of Leo Spitzer; and Thomas Levin for his incisive feedback. There have been many others who sacrificed their time to read or discuss my work and help me make it better. I am especially thankful to Urs Büttner, James Chandler, Doreen Densky, Jake Fraser, John Fyler, Timothy Harrison, Florian Klinger, David Levin, Catriona MacLeod, Spyros Papapetros, Peter Probst, Na’ama Rokem, Zachary Samalin, Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky, Juliane Vogel, Johannes Wankhammer, and Arnd Wedemeyer. I also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers, the editorial board, and the copyeditors at PMLA, which published a version of my first chapter, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for the University of Chicago Press whose thoughtful comments helped improve the book. In addition, I owe thanks, at Tufts University, to the Department of History of Art and Architecture and my cohort at the Center for the Humanities in 2012–2014, and, at the University of Chicago, to the members of the Works-­in-­Progress Colloquium of the Department of Germanic Studies, the Junior Faculty Working Group organized by the Department of English Language and Literature, and my Franke Institute Fellowship cohort in 2017–2018. I am very grateful to my editor, Susan Bielstein, for her acceptance of this book, for her guidance of its completion, as well as for her advice on my writing. She has made me see things about my writing that I had never realized before. I thank James Whitman Toftness for his always prompt support and for his invaluable help with my images at a time when libraries and archives shut down throughout the world at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. I owe thanks to Susan and James for their patience. I also wish to thank Tamara Ghattas, Carl Steven LaRue, and Mary Mortensen for their help with finalizing the manuscript. I am thankful for the opportunities I had to share my work in public at a lecture organized by the German Department at Princeton University; a symposium on the “Elements in Modern Thought and Literature” organized at New York University’s Department of German; a conference on “Elemental Media” organized at the University of California, Berkeley; and the “Leerstellen Graphischer Künste” conference held at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz—all in 2018. I thank the organizers and the participants for their comments and questions. The latter event in Florence was particularly important for my chapter on Riegl and for the book’s introduction. I am thankful to Gerhard Wolf for the opportunity to write an essay for the forthcoming edited volume Ecologies, Aesthetics, and Histories of Art. For additional advice and institutional support, I am very grateful to Peter Probst (again), Anne Walters Robertson, Martha Roth, and Christopher J.

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Wild. I also owe thanks to Emily Anderson, Colin Benert, Meredith Dodd, Bridget Madden and the Visual Resources Center of the University of Chicago, Rodica Petrovici, Sophie Salvo, Marina Resende Santos, and Julius Yls. My research for this book has benefited greatly from generous funding from a Donald and Mary Hyde Fellowship at Princeton University; an Andrew W. Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Completion Fellowship; an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship; and, at the University of Chicago, a Franke Institute Faculty Fellowship, the Department of Germanic Studies, and the Office of the Dean in the Division of the Humanities. The support of my friends has been invaluable in the course of writing this book. I thank Elena Alexeeva and Pierre Deligne; Rina Foygel Barber and Mathew Barber; Emily Bowsher; Parween Ebrahim; Ilona, István, and Andor Görgicze; Angela Gradl; Alejandra Lastra; Emma Ljung and Robert Scogna; Georgios Vasilakis and Pinelopi Karadaki; and Rahel Villinger. Most importantly, I would like to thank my family. Thank you to my husband, Arvind Murugan, and his parents, especially my mother-­in-­law, Vijayalakshmi Karthikeyan. Thank you to our nanny, Sofia Gesheva, for her matchless reliability, and to her husband, Stoyan. Rosaria Munda, our children’s private tutor and babysitter during homeschooling times, was a godsend. I thank her for her energy and engagement. I am grateful to my brother, Albert Christian, for many things, but I would like to thank him, my sister-­ in-­law Brigitta Christian-­Oláh, and my nephew Ábel, especially for their hospitality, and for giving my daughters and me a haven in their house and garden in Solymár during summer months, and for taking us along to Croatia. And while I might have learned much in the course of writing this book, it all pales immeasurably when compared to what my daughters, Nora and Vera, have taught me. I thank them for being such sources of joy. My greatest gratitude goes to my mother and my father, Margareta and Aurel Christian. It is to them—along with my daughters—that I dedicate this book. Portions of this book were published in altered form in Oxford German Studies 49, no. 3 (2020), and as “Aer, Aurae, Venti: Philology and Physiology in Aby Warburg’s Dissertation on Botticelli,” in PMLA, vol. 129, no. 3, May 2014, published by the Modern Language Association of America (http:// www.mla.org).

Notes

Introduction 1. In reference to Rodin’s use of marble, Rilke writes, “Dieser Marmor atmet eine Atmosphäre aus wie die einer beginnenden Nacht.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Auguste Rodin: Mit sechsundneunzig Abbildungen (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 2007), 120. In reference to Cézanne, Rilke writes, “Wenn man mitten unter ihnen [den Bildern Cézannes] stand, [ging] ein weiches und mildes Grau als Atmosphäre von ihnen aus.” It is Cézanne’s colors that create “diese ruhige, gleichsam samtene Luft.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe an Cézanne, ed. Clara Rilke (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1983), 63. Throughout the book, translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. 2. Aristotle, De anima (On the Soul), trans. Hugh Lawson-­Tancred (London: Penguin Classics, 1986), 187. 3. See, for instance, Arnold Berleant, Aesthetics and Environment: Variations on a Theme (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Emily Brady, Aesthetics of the Natural Environment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003); Malcolm Budd, The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature: Essays on the Aesthetics of Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Allen Carlson, Aesthetics and the Environment: The Appreciation of Nature, Art and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2000). 4. Rainer Maria Rilke, Auguste Rodin, trans. Daniel Slager and with an introduction by William Gass (New York: Archipelago Books, 2004), 38. 5. I am indebted to Eric Santner for this pun. 6. Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, trans. Edith R. Farrell and C. Frederick Farrell (Dallas: Dallas Institute Publications, Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1988). 7. In his introduction to an edition of Struth’s Museum Photographs, Hans Belting notes that “gradually the fixed boundaries of what we are used to thinking of as ‘paintings’ and ‘museum visitors’ begin to dissolve” in Struth’s “game with the boundaries of art.” Hans Belting, Thomas Struth: Museum Photographs, trans. Michael Robertson (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1998), 9, 12. 8. “Da ist wirkliche ‘Respiration’, greifbare Luftcirculation zwischen . . . Figuren.” Alois Riegl, Die spätrömische Kunst-­Industrie nach den Funden in Österreich-­Ungarn (Vienna: Kaiserlich-­Königliche Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, 1901; reprint, Paderborn: Aischines, 2014), 96. 153

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9. “Fiktiv[e] Bildlichkeit und real[e] Objekthaftigkeit.” Christian Hartard, “Weltmaschine: Zur Geschichte des plastischen Raums; Essay” [Worldmachine: On the history of plastic space; Essay], http://hartard.com/texts/weltmaschine.pdf. 10. “Zeitlichkeit ist das ursprüngliche ‘Außer-­sich’ an und für sich selbst.” Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2006), 329. Although temporality is for Heidegger the manifestation of ecstasis as such when he writes about the ecstases of time, he does not mean that temporality is the property of an object that demonstrates the object’s ecstasis but rather that past, present, and future are temporality’s ecstases. He writes, “Wir nennen daher . . . Zukunft, Gewesenheit, Gegenwart die Ekstasen der Zeitlichkeit. Sie ist nicht vordem ein Seiendes, das erst aus sich heraustritt, sondern ihr Wesen ist Zeitigung in der Einheit der Ekstasen.” 11. Lessing’s Laocoon and the “pregnant moment” would be another temporal mode of aesthetic ecstasis—one that I discuss in the context of Rilke’s reading of time in Rodin. 12. For Heidegger, sculpture is “an embodying bringing-­into-­the-­work of places, and with them a disclosing of regions of possible dwellings for man” (Die Plastik: ein verkörperndes Ins-­Werk-­Bringen von Orten und mit diesen ein Eröffnen von Gegenden möglichen Wohnens der Menschen). Martin Heidegger, “Art and Space,” trans. Charles H. Seibert, Man and World 6 (1973): 8; Heidegger, Die Kunst und der Raum: L’art et l’espace (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2007), 13. 13. Andrew J. Mitchell, Heidegger among the Sculptors: Body, Space, and the Art of Dwelling (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 1. 14. Heidegger, “Art and Space,” 7. “Die Plastik wäre die Verkörperung von Orten, die, eine Gegend öffnend und sie verwahrend, ein Freies um sich versammelt halten. . . . Was wird, wenn es so steht, aus dem Volumen der plastischen, jeweils einen Ort verkörpernden Gebilde? Vermutlich wird es nicht mehr Räume gegeneinander abgrenzen, in denen Flächen ein Innen gegen ein Außen umwinden.” Heidegger, Die Kunst und der Raum, 11. 15. Mitchell, Heidegger among the Sculptors, 1. 16. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Ästhetik I/II, ed. Rüdiger Bubner (Ditzingen: Reclam, 2008), 147. 17. This reference to sculpture’s “sensuous spatiality” is in contrast with Hegel’s simultaneous argument about sculptural self-­containment. Catriona MacLeod argues that, for Hegel, “sculpture represents spirit contained within the body and not eager to transcend its physical confines.” Catriona MacLeod, Fugitive Objects: Sculpture and Literature in the German Nineteenth Century (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013), 37. Na’ama Rokem notes this contrast when she writes about the “spatial yet more spiritual [than architecture] form of sculpture.” Na’ama Rokem, Prosaic Conditions: Heinrich Heine and the Spaces of Zionist Literature (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013), 10. 18. See Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination. Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). 19. The original phrase is “overspills the form.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated and with a foreword by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 410. Quoted in Bill Brown, Other Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 5. 20. Rudolf von Laban, Choreographie (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1926), 62.

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21. I borrow the term “ex-­ist” from Alphonso Lingis, “The Sensuality and the Sensitivity,” in Face to Face with Levinas: Neighborhood Reinvestment and Displacement, ed. Richard A. Cohen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 220. 22. Vera Maletic, Body, Space, Expression: The Development of Rudolf Laban’s Movement and Dance Concepts (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1987), 6. 23. Martin Green, Mountain of Truth: The Counterculture Begins, Ascona, 1900–1920 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1986), 111. 24. Leo Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambiance: An Essay in Historical Semantics,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 3, no. 2 (December 1942): 217–18. 25. Ulrike Jureit, “Lebensraum,” in Online-­Lexikon zur Kultur und Geschichte der Deutschen im östlichen Europa, http://ome-­lexikon.uni-­oldenburg.de/p32732. See also Michael Heffernan, “Fin de Siècle, Fin du Monde? On the Origins of European Geopolitics, 1890–1920,” in Geopolitical Traditions: A Century of Geopolitical Thought, ed. Klaus Dodds and David A. Atkinson (London: Routledge, 2000), 27–51. 26. Heffernan, “Fin de Siècle, Fin du Monde?,” 45. 27. Karl Wolfskehl, “Lebensluft,” in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Margot Ruben and Claus Victor Bock (Hamburg: Claassen, 1960), 2:419–22. 28. Nicolas Berg, Luftmenschen: Zur Geschichte einer Metapher (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), 15. 29. Berg, Luftmenschen, 118. Berg quotes this phrase from Theodor Lessing’s Der jüdische Selbsthass ( Jewish Self-­Hatred, 1930). 30. Berg, Luftmenschen, 21. 31. In the entry under “form,” the historical dictionary Ästhetische Grundbegriffe writes that “die kunsttheoretischen Formdefinitionen des ausgehenden 19. und 20. Jh orientieren sich vor allem an Kunstwerken im Sinne formal abgeschlossener Verkörper­ ungen.” Klaus Städtke, “Form,” in Ästhetische Grundbegriffe: Historisches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden, ed. Karlheinz Barck, Martin Fontius, Friedrich Wolfzettel, and Burkhart Steinwachs (Stuttgart: Metzle, 2001), 2:485. 32. “So ist denn das Kunstwerk ein abgeschlossenes für sich und in sich beruhendes Wirkungsganzes und stellt dieses als eine für sich bestehende Realität der Natur gegenüber.” Adolf Hildebrand, Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst (Strassburg: Heitz, 1913; reprint, Paderborn: Klassik Art / Salzwasser [n.d.]), 27, translated by Matthew Johnson. 33. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, trans. Michael Bullock with an introduction by Hilton Kramer (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1997), 3. “Unsere Untersuchungen gehen von der Voraussetzung aus, daß das Kunstwerk als selbstständiger Organismus gleichwertig neben der Natur und in seinem tiefsten innersten Wesen ohne Zusammenhang mit ihr steht.” Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung: Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie, ed. Helga Grebing (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2007), 71. 34. Amanda Jo Goldstein, Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). See also Claudia Blümle and Armin Schäfer, “Organismus und Kunstwerk: Zur Einführung,” in Struktur, Figur, Kontur: Abstraktion in Kunst und Lebenswissenschaften (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2007), 9–25. 35. Goldstein, Sweet Science, 93. See also Eva Geulen, Aus dem Leben der Form: Goethes Morphologie und die Nager (Berlin: August, 2016), esp. 18. 36. Goldstein, Sweet Science, 49.

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37. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (Hamburg: Meiner Philosophische Bibliothek, 2001). See, in particular, sections 64 and 65, “Von dem eigentümlichen Charakter der Dinge als Naturzwecke” and “Dinge als Naturzwecke sind organisierte Wesen.” 38. Geulen, Aus dem Leben der Form, 18. 39. “So ist der Baum eine Einheit durch seine abgeschlossene individuelle Form. . . . In den Augen der modernen Menschheit ist der Baum hingegen ein Collectivwesen.” Riegl, Die spätrömische Kunst-­Industrie, 212n3. 40. To be sure, the early life sciences, as Goldstein shows, did not have an exclusively vitalist or idealist understanding of form; rather, Romantic form was already permeable to the incursions of milieu. Recently, Geulen and Goldstein have shown that Goethe’s Morphology serials develop a complex conception of organic form that overcomes vitalist reductionism: “the notion of ‘form’ . . . as the ‘unifying, closing, and enclosing shape of things’ does not survive its encounter with Goethean morphology intact.” Geulen quoted by Goldstein, Sweet Science, 74. 41. Mitchell, Heidegger among the Sculptors, 40. Indeed, in recent years, Heidegger scholarship has begun to reconstruct the influence of early ecological thought on Heidegger’s philosophy—especially the Umweltlehre of the zoologist and theoretical biologist Jakob von Uexküll. See, for example, Brett Buchanan, Onto-­Ethologies: The Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-­Ponty, and Deleuze (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008). 42. Taine’s tripartite dictum of “race, milieu, moment” is referenced by both Warburg (via Justi) and Riegl, while Rilke resorts to the term milieu to conceptualize the artwork’s overspill into its outside. 43. Robert Zimmermann, Allgemeine Ästhetik als Formwissenschaft (Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1865); and Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen: Allgemeine Grundzüge der organischen Formen-­wissenschaft, 2 vols. (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1866). 44. “Unter Oecologie verstehen wir die gesamte Wissenschaft von den Beziehungen des Organismus zur umgebenden Außenwelt.” Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1866), 2:286. Although Haeckel is always cited as the one who first defined “ecology” in his General Morphology, it is important to note that earlier definitions existed. For instance, in 1838 the Encyclopaedisches Wörterbuch der medicinischen Wissenschaften defines Oecologie as “the teaching of the arrangement of houses with respect to hygiene:” “die Lehre von der Anlage von Wohnungen . . . in Hinsicht auf Hygiene.” August Vetter, “Hygiene,” in Encyclopaedisches Wörterbuch der medicinischen Wissenschaften, ed. D. W. H. Busch et al. (Berlin: Veit, 1838], 17:​415) and, in 1847, the Allgemeine Realencyclopädie gives the meaning of Oekologie as “the doctrine of the health-­conformant arrangement of houses”: “Lehre von der gesundheitsgemäßen Anlage der Wohnungen” (E. Buchner, “Gesundheitspflege,” in Allgemeine Realencyclopädie oder Conversationslexicon für das katholische Deutschland, ed. Wilhelm Binder [Regensburg: Georg Joseph Manz, 1847], 4:781–82), both available at http://www .biological-­concepts.com/views/search.php?me=ecology&ft=&q=Start. 45. Georges Canguilhem, “The Living and Its Milieu,” trans. John Savage, Grey Room 3 (Spring 2001): 19. 46. See also d’Alembert and Diderot’s definition of milieu as “a material space” (un espace matériel) in their Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project (Autumn 2017 ed.), Robert Morrissey and Glenn Roe, eds., http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/.

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47. Leo Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambiance: An Essay in Historical Semantics,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 3, no. 1 (September 1942): 1–42; no. 2 (December 1942): 169–218. 48. Mitchell, Heidegger among the Sculptors, 9. 49. Antonio Somaini also writes about “material articulations of space” in “Walter Benjamin’s Media Theory: The Medium and the Apparat,” Grey Room 62 (Winter 2016): 6–41. 50. Donald R. Benson points out that “the seventeenth century had inherited a variety of ethers from antiquity—Aristotle’s fiery quintessence, the Neoplatonists’ immaterial light and anima mundi, the Stoics’ pneuma” in “Facts and Fictions in Scientific Discourse: The Case of Ether,” Georgia Review 38, no. 4 (Winter 1984): 828. In his essay on “Milieu and Ambiance,” Leo Spitzer notes that for Heraclitus, filled space resembled fire and was a kind of ether (6). Posidonius argued that space contained a spiritual fluid, while the Hellenistic materialists claimed that this fluid substance was actually Aristotle’s “vital heat.” In fact, as Spitzer notes, this “vital fluid penetrating all things” (6–7) was not unlike the vitalists’ “vital fluid” in the nineteenth century. 51. See Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). For a discussion of the disappearance of matter and dematerialization around 1900, with many examples from art and literature, see Christoph Asendorf, Ströme und Strahlen: Das langsame Verschwinden der Materie um 1900 (Giessen: Anabas, 1989). See also Linda Dalrymple Henderson, “Editor’s Introduction: I. Writing Modern Art and Science—An Overview; II. Cubism, Futurism, and Ether Physics in the Early Twentieth Century,” Science in Context 17, no. 4 (2004): 423–66. 52. Henderson writes that “discussions of the ether as interpenetrating (or even composing) all matter now made it possible to think of matter and ether-­filled space simply as degrees on a continuum. Henderson, “Editor’s Introduction,” 135. Also, as Henderson notes, in the second half of the nineteenth century, it was hypothesized that the building block of matter might be the ether (129). 53. Gaston Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 62. 54. Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambiance,” 34 (Spitzer quotes Newton on p. 35). 55. The ether was part of the so-­called imponderabilia or imponderable fluids, which served as material carrier substances for light, heat, magnetism, and electricity in the sense that they enabled the very manifestation of these phenomena. For a detailed discussion of the theory of imponderable fluids, see Rudolf Stichweh, Zur Entstehung des modernen Systems wissenschaftlicher Disziplinen: Physik in Deutschland. 1740– 1890 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984). In particular, see Stichweh’s chapter on “Chemie, Physik und die Theorie der Imponderabilien,” 94–173. 56. Stichweh, Zur Entstehung des modernen Systems, 124. 57. Canguilhem, “Living and Its Milieu,” 8. 58. Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambiance,” 35. 59. Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambiance,” 169, 171–72; Stichweh, Zur Entstehung des modernen Systems, 124. 60. Quoted by Canguilhem, “Living and Its Milieu,” 10. 61. See Spitzer’s discussion of the German term Umwelt in “Milieu and Ambiance,” 206–18. Furthermore, in their introduction to Raumtheorie, Dünne and Günzel note that “in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts wurde Umwelt zusätzlich ein Ersatz-

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wort für das aus dem Französischen entlehnte Milieu, ursprünglich eine Bezeichnung für das materielle oder immaterielle Substrat oder Medium, innerhalb dessen Leben entsteht und stattfindet—eine Hypothese der seinerzeitigen Lebenswissenschaften, das im Ansatz dem Äther-­Konzept der Physik nahestand.” Jörg Dünne and Stephan Günzel, eds., Raumtheorie. Grundlagentexte aus Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006). 62. See Gerhard H. Müller, “Umwelt,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Gottfried Gabriel, Karlfried Gründer, and Joachim Ritter (Basel: Schwabe, 2001), 11:​ 99–105. 63. Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambiance,” 7. 64. Quoted in Linda Dalrymple Henderson, “Vibratory Modernism: Boccioni, Kupka, and the Ether of Space,” in From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature, ed. Bruce Clark and Linda Dalrymple Henderson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 135. 65. Félix Nadar, for example, described the French physiologist and chronophotographer Étienne-­Jules Marey as a new type of scientist who, as Georges Didi-­Huberman recounts, “opens the physical world onto perspectives as yet inconceivable or imagined only in a metaphysical domain” (ouvrent le monde physique à des perspectives jusque-­là inconcevables ou imaginées seulement dans l’ordre métaphysique). Didi-­Huberman is referring to Nadar’s Quand j’étais photographe (1900). Georges Didi-­Huberman, “La danse de toute chose,” in Mouvements de l’air: Étienne-­Jules Marey, photographe des fluids, ed. Georges Didi-­Huberman and Laurent Mannoni (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 183. 66. Wolfgang Hagen, “‘Trancemedien und Medientrancen’: Über den Spiritismus als epistemologisches Problem,” Lecture presented at the Universität Siegen, 2008, 4. http://www.whagen.de/PDFS/10976_HagenTrancemedienundMe_2011.pdf. 67. Hagen, “‘Trancemedien und Medientrancen,’” 4. Hagen quotes from Lodge’s “A Record of Observations of Certain Phenomena of Trance,” pt. 1, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 6 (London 1890): 451. Historically, art writing’s evocations of the artwork exceeding its physical bounds parallel physiological conceptions of corporeal unboundedness. As early as 1826 the physiologist Johannes Müller, in his text “On the comparative physiology of sight” (Zur vergleichenden Physiologie des Gesichtssinnes des Menschen und der Thiere [Leipzig: Cnobloch, 1826]), conceives of perception as a process external to the body. (Müller’s project is recounted by Tobias Wilke in his book Medien der Unmittelbarkeit: Dingkonzepte und Wahrnehmungstechniken 1918–1939 [Paderborn: Fink, 2010], 73–74.) Müller’s study anticipates Oliver Lodge’s aforementioned description of consciousness as located outside the brain, “like a faint echo in space,” as well as later theories of a “physically unbounded perception” put forward by the German physiologist and psychologist Ewald Hering (an important influence on Warburg) and the Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach (to whom Riegl alludes). A later highpoint of these theories is the text titled “The Problem of Eccentric Sensation and its Solution” (1918) by the philosopher Ernst Marcus. Insofar as it conceives of the brain as expanding through ethereal undulations beyond the skull and as producing the object of perception outside of the body, Marcus’s text can be read as a kind of theory of “extended minds.” (See Andy Clark and David Chalmers, “The Extended Mind” Analysis 58, no. 1 [ January 1998]: 7–19.) Whereas Marcus’s theory, influenced by late nineteenth-­century occult conceptions of the auratic externalization of thought, relies on the assumption of an ethereal medium, the evocations of artworks that this book explores rely on aerial milieus to manifest their externalism.

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68. See Margareta Ingrid Christian, “Cameraless Photography and Its Imponderable Media,” History of Photography 42, no. 4 (2018): 319–37. 69. Of course, such visions existed earlier in religious representations, though their popularity was at a height in this period—fueled by the discoveries of science. Steven Connor writes, “A visible emanation is an act of self-­creation, imagined as a continuous phosphorescence, or solar radiance [Christian iconography of divine light]. According to this kind of luminiferous vitalism, all living things are characterized, not by the hoarding or holding in of their essences, but by their exuberant qualities of overflow. The essence of life is that it cannot remain with itself, but must ecstatically spill. To have life is always to have too much life.” Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 157. 70. Wassily Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Bern-­Bümpliz: Benteli, 2013), 136, 73, and 79, respectively. 71. See Eva Horn’s similar claim that “this aesthetic approach would have to tackle both aspects of the air: as a medium of sustenance and place (climate) and as a medium of dislocation, of transport and contact (meteors).” Eva Horn, “Air as Medium,” Grey Room 73 (Fall 2018): 22. See also the Gestalt psychologist Fritz Heider and his text Ding und Medium (Thing and medium), in which he resorts repeatedly to the example of air. Air represents not only both a medium for something else and a thing in its own right but also a spatial environment, a milieu. “Freilich,” writes Heider, “ist das Medium auch insoferne wichtig, als es unmittelbar biologisch einen Einfluss auf die Art der Gestaltung des Organismus ausübt. Wassertiere sind anders gebaut und bewegen sich anders als Lufttiere.” (Of course, the medium is also important insofar as it exerts an immediate biological influence on the design of the organism. Water animals are built differently and move differently from aerial animals.) Whereas earlier in Heider’s text, air was the ultimate example of a propagating medium, in this passage, air is adduced as an example for a biological environment. Fritz Heider, Ding und Medium (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2005), 67–68. 72. Agathon Wernich, “Über gute und schlechte Luft,” in Sammlung gemeinverständlicher wissenschaftlicher Vorträge, 344:​377–60 (Berlin: Habel, 1880). This view of air has a long history. Paul Rabinow points to the “topographic and climatological theories of the Classical Age,” which argued that “the principal culprit in spreading epidemics was the air.” Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 33. 73. We can also think of Franz Kafka exercising in front of the open window in the fresh morning air and his conviction that it could strengthen him and help him ward off disease. See Mark Anderson, “Body Culture: J.P. Müller’s Gymnastic System and the Ascetic Ideal,” in Kafka’s Clothes: Ornament and Aestheticism in the Habsburg Fin de Siècle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 74–98. 74. See, for instance, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and its detailed depiction of the daily routine of the inhabitants of the sanatorium in Davos and the “particular air” that pervades the place. After contracting tuberculosis, Kafka himself was in a lung sanatorium in Klosterneuburg in which he was subjected to long “Luft-­Liegekuren.” Nicolas Berg, Luftmenschen, 137; see also Sunny S. Yudkoff, Tubercular Capital: Illness and the Conditions of Modern Jewish Writing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018). 75. Berg, Luftmenschen, 76–77. 76. Berg, Luftmenschen, 80. 77. See Berg’s discussion of the progress in aviation in relation to the term Luft-

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mensch, especially his discussion of Theodor Herzl, who conceived of flight as a realized utopia (lenkbarer Luftschiff ) that he connected to the possibility of solving the Jewish question. Berg, Luftmenschen, 71–72. 78. Rabinow, French Modern, 34. Rabinow is referring to public health measures, living conditions, and so forth—thus, to issues addressed in Camillo Sitte’s Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen (1889; City planning according to artistic principles). 79. Potts, Sculptural Imagination, 1. 80. “Kunstkerker” in Camillo Sitte, Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen, 4th ed. (Vienna, 1909; reprint, Basel: Birkhäuser, 2015), 21–22. 81. “Einzelhaft” and “Sträflingsarbeit” in Hildebrand, Das Problem der Form, 91. 82. Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” in The Originality of the Avant-­Garde and Other Modernist Myths, 276–91 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986). 83. Walter Benjamin, Illuminationen: Ausgewählte Schriften, ed. Siegfried Unseld (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 143–44. The term Eingebettetsein is especially significant for Benjamin. 84. Martin Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, ed. Friedrich-­Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2012), 26; “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings, ed. Farrell Krell, trans. Albert Hofstadter (San Francisco: Harper, 1993), 143–212. 85. “Weltentzug und Weltzerfall,” Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, 26; Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 166. 86. “Eine Welt aufstellen.” Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, 30; “The work as work sets up a world.” Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 170. 87. Whereas for Benjamin the artwork’s spatial disengagement enables the viewers’ disengagement from a false world of ideology, for Heidegger the artwork’s spatial divestment allows for the viewer’s encounter with an emphatic (and ideologically suspect) “world” and “earth” that the artwork brings forth from within itself. Of course, we must note that Benjamin develops the very idea of “aura” precisely in the context of the artwork’s sitelessness; thus, in a sense, the aura as an idea results from the artwork’s loss of place even if it comes to designate this very loss. 88. Rudolf von Laban, Die Welt des Tänzers: Fünf Gedankenreigen (Stuttgart: Walter Seifert, 1920), 65. This is also evident in Heidegger’s claim that the world of art engenders around itself spatial domains such as a “region” (Bereich, Gegend), a “district” (Bezirk), and an “opening” (Eröffnung). 89. Benjamin and Heidegger develop the very idea of the artwork’s aura and world, respectively, as a reaction to the artwork’s affinity with commodities, its dissipation into objecthood. (This confirms Benjamin’s argument that things become visible in their very demise: the aura, too, becomes a concept in the context of its passing.) Echoing Rilke’s claim that in order to differentiate itself as a thing among other things, the artwork must create a space around itself, it must reside in its own “atmosphere,” Heidegger explores the thingness of the work of art as well as the manner in which its mere thingness is overcome in its ability to set up a “world” around itself. Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, 27. For Heidegger, to be sure, this world is not aerial but rather telluric— it is earth, Erde: “Indem das Werk eine Welt aufstellt, stellt es die Erde her” (32). “In setting up a world, the work sets forth the earth.” Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings, ed. Farrell Krell, trans. Albert Hofstadter (San Francisco: Harper, 1993), 172.

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90. “Doug Wheeler: PSAD Synthetic Desert III,” Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, https://www.guggenheim.org/exhibition/doug-­wheeler-­psad-­synthetic-­desert-­iii-­1971. 91. We might add that Wheeler achieves this by resorting to technological means, and he aims to create “natural” (desertlike) effects. The infinite is thus as much a jurisdiction of art as it is of technology and nature. Indeed, Wheeler’s work plays with the imbrication of the very categories of technology, nature, art, and religion. 92. Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” 33. 93. In Topologie der Kunst, Boris Groys argues for a topological interpretation of Benjamin’s aura; he contends that the aura pertains not so much to the original work of art as it does to the place of the work of art, its placement into a museum. (Duchamp’s readymades, for example, instantiate this topology of art.) Boris Groys, Topologie der Kunst (Munich: Carl Hanser, 2003). 94. “To follow with the eye—while resting on a summer afternoon—a mountain range on the horizon or a branch that casts its shadow on the beholder is to breathe the aura of those mountains, of that branch” (An einem Sommernachmittag ruhend einem Gebirgszug am Horizont oder einem Zweig folgen, der seinen Schatten auf den Ruhenden wirft—das heißt die Aura dieser Berge, dieses Zweiges atmen). Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 23; Benjamin, Illuminationen, 142. In the development of his aura concept, as Miriam Hansen noted, Benjamin was influenced by Karl Wolfskehl’s essay on “Lebensluft.” Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Benjamin’s Aura,” Critical Inquiry 34, no. 2 (Winter 2008): 336–75. Wolfskehl borrows from occult discourse to construct his own notion of an enveloping atmosphere that accompanies all objects and bodies; he writes, “Every material being radiates it, has, as it were, its own specific atmosphere” (Jedes stoffliche Gebilde strahlt sie aus, hat gewissermassen seine eigene nur ihm zugehörige Atmosphäre”). Karl Wolfskehl, “Lebensluft,” in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Margot Ruben and Claus Victor Bock (Hamburg: Claassen, 1960), 2:419; translation quoted in Hansen, “Benjamin’s Aura,” 362. Wolfskehl conceives of this realm environing bodies in terms of a specific environment, a “Milieu” for life, a “Daseinsbezirk” (420–21). Aura thus designates a spatial domain, in Wolfskehl’s sense, a “Milieu” for life, and in Benjamin’s, an atmosphere of aesthetic subsistence. 95. Walter Benjamin, On Hashish, trans. Howard Eiland et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 58. 96. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). 97. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 40. Scarry analyzes the monument of an enormous clothespin set up in Philadelphia’s City Hall. She writes about “its identification of pressing with expressing and holding in with reaching out—all these are translations of and tributes to the central, overwhelming characteristic of the domestic, that its protective, narrowing act is the location of the human being’s most expansive potential.” 98. Antonio Somaini, “Walter Benjamin’s Media Theory: The Medium and the Apparat,” Grey Room 62 (Winter 2016): 22–23. See also Hansen, “Benjamin’s Aura”: “Significantly, however, Benjamin suggests that aura as a medium of perception—or ‘perceptibility’—becomes visible only on the basis of technological reproduction” (342–43). 99. Denis Diderot, “The Salon of 1765,” in Diderot on Art, vol. 1, The Salon of 1767, trans. John Goodman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 3. Niklas Luh-

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mann also discusses the possibilities of a thing-­oriented ontology that undoes the metaphysical difference between thing and property, substance and accidence—possibilities that, Luhmann claims, do not go all the way to “the compelling consequence that both entities, subjects and objects, must be thought ‘ecstatically’” (der sich aufdrängenden Konsequenz, dass dann beide Entitäten, Subjekte und Objekte, “ekstatisch” gedacht werden müssen). Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System, trans. Eva M. Knodt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 103; Luhmann, Die Kunst der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), 166. 100. Aristotle, De anima, 187. 101. See also Riegl in Das holländische Gruppenporträt (Vienna: Facultas, 1997), 247: “Das Ziel alles Rembrandtschen Kunststrebens—das Zusammenfliessen der Seelen ineinander und mit der Seele des Beschauers.” Cf. Warburg’s and Rilke’s notions of Einfühlung and Benjamin’s aura and Versenkung.

Chapter One 1. The correspondence between Jolles and Warburg is reproduced in Aby Warburg, Werke in einem Band, ed. Martin Treml, Sigrid Weigel, and Perdita Ludwig (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2010), 198–210. 2. The painting shows a scene following the birth of Saint John the Baptist. The mother is lying in bed while two nurses attend to the newborn. In the background, a maid serves the mother something to drink. Three stately women enter the room dressed in the fashion of fifteenth-­century Florence. Their dresses are made of a heavy brocade fabric that appears unmoved even as they walk. It is behind these women, on the periphery of the image, that a woman steps into the room bearing a basket of fruit on her head. 3. Walther Amelung mentions “die Göttin der Luft . . . eine Aura velificans” (the goddess of air . . . an Aura velificans) in Führer durch die Antiken in Florenz (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1897), 102. Warburg refers to the figure as an “elemental spirit” (Elementargeist), invoking the elementals of Paracelsus, in particular the sylph, a mythological spirit of the air. The word sylph is a combination of the Latin sylvestris (pertaining to a forest) and nympha. 4. “Aber, der Teufel, das ist doch keine Manier, ein Krankenzimmer zu betreten, selbst nicht, wenn man gratulieren will. Diese lebendig leichte aber so höchst bewegte Weise zu gehen; diese energische Unaufhaltsamkeit, diese Länge vom Schritt, während alle andern Figuren etwas Unantastbares haben, was soll dies Alles? . . . Genug, ich verlor mein Herz. . . . Wer ist sie, woher kommt sie.” Warburg, Werke in einem Band, 200–202, emphasis in original. 5. “Die verkörperte Bewegung.” Warburg, Werke in einem Band, 202. 6. Warburg, Werke in einem Band, 206. 7. Warburg refers to the nymph as a “geflügelte Idee” (winged idea), as if she were the embodiment of ideas flying around Ghirlandaio. Warburg, Werke in einem Band, 203. 8. For more on the “anima Fiorentina,” see Joseph Mali, Mythistory: The Making of a Modern Historiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 155. Indeed, the connection between depictions of aerial animation and an artwork’s atmospheric environs is suggested in a literal way at the beginning of Jolles’s letter. He begins by describing the city of Florence in terms of its atmospheric conditions at the time of his and Warburg’s visit. He recalls a foggy evening when he and Warburg had talked

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about art. The city’s enveloping fog appears like the breath (“Atemhauch,” 198) of a woman. Jolles remembers having had a disagreement with Warburg because of their different approaches to art history: Jolles was impetuous, whereas Warburg was measured. Jolles’s reference to their contradictory traits recalls his description of contradictory features of Ghirlandaio’s fresco: his impulsiveness matches the nymph’s “energetic unstoppability,” while Warburg’s contemplativeness matches the other figures’ reserve. The two art historians eventually resolve their discord by contemplating natural beauty: “In the liquid clarity of the atmosphere,” Jolles writes, “our disagreements dissolved into a single admiration of nature” (198–99; In der liquiden Klarheit der Atmosphäre lösten sich unsere Meinungsverschiedenheiten in einer gemeinschaftlichen Naturbewunderung). (Page numbers refer to Warburg, Werke in einem Band.) He describes the atmosphere of Florence as a fluid medium that can harbor contradictory elements. Florence at the turn of the twentieth century can accommodate contradictory scholarly approaches (both Jolles’s hastiness and Warburg’s thoughtfulness in the study of art), just as Florence, in the fifteenth century, could accommodate contradictory aesthetic trends (both animation and immobility, paganism and Christianity). 9. Warburg, quoted in Mali, Mythistory, 154. 10. For more on how Warburg relies on scientific discourse to develop the methodology of a cultural-­historical art history, see the editor’s introduction to Warburg, Werke in einem Band, and Georges Didi-­Huberman’s L’image survivante: Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2002). An example of a study that focuses on the role of humanistic disciplines in Warburg’s cultural-­ historical method is Anna Guillemin, “The Style of Linguistics: Aby Warburg, Karl Vossler, and Hermann Osthoff,” Journal of the History of Ideas 69, no. 4 (October 2008): 605–26. 11. See, for example, Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, in which culture is regarded as an organism that goes through youth, maturity, and old age. Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1963). 12. Warburg, Werke in einem Band, 605. 13. Plutarch, Morals (Boston: Little, Brown, 1889), 4:52. 14. Kulturwissenschaft is usually translated as “cultural history,” “cultural theory,” or “cultural studies.” While there are many overlaps between Kulturwissenschaft as practiced in German universities and cultural studies as practiced in Anglo-­American institutions, there are nevertheless significant differences: Kulturwissenschaft is often regarded as a humanistic method of inquiry, not a new discipline; see Sigrid Weigel, Literatur als Voraussetzung der Kulturgeschichte: Schauplätze von Shakespeare bis Benjamin (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2004), esp. 7–38). In Germany there is a tendency to conceive of the humanities as a whole (Geisteswissenschaften) as “sciences of culture,” or Kulturwissenschaften. Anglo- American cultural studies are more dedicated to revealing political dynamics. For a history of these two fields and a comparison of their methodologies, see Lutz Musner, “Kulturwissenschaften und Cultural Studies: Zwei ungleiche Geschwister?,” KulturPoetik 1, no. 2 (2001): 261–71. 15. Conferences centered on Warburg have recently proliferated. Examples include “Aby Warburg: Art, Neuroscience, and Psychoanalysis” at the Helix Center for Interdisciplinary Investigation of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, October 2013; “Dear Aby Warburg: What Can Be Done with Images?,” a symposium accompanying an exhibition of the same title at the Museum for Contemporary Art in Siegen, Germany, December 2012–­March 2013; “Warburg, Benjamin and Kulturwissenschaft”

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at the Warburg Institute of the University of London, June 2012; and “Aby Warburg 150: Work, Legacy, Promise,” at the University College London Institute of Education, London, June 2016. An exhibition titled “Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne” at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin is planned for autumn 2020. 16. Tomasz Szerszeń, “Aby Warburg, Our Neighbour,” Konteksty 65, no. 2/3 (2011). 17. Thomas Hensel, Wie aus der Kunstgeschichte eine Bildwissenschaft wurde: Aby Warburgs Graphien (Berlin: Akademie, 2011). 18. Anna Guillemin, “Style in Motion: A Dialogue between Art History and Literature, 1890–1935” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2005). 19. Christopher D. Johnson, Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012). 20. Pepper Stetler, “Aby Warburg and the Networks of Art History.” Lecture presented at Network Archaeology, Miami University, Oxford, OH, April 19–21, 2012. 21. Philipp Ekardt, “Sensing—Feeling—Imitating: Psycho-­Mimeses in Aby Warburg,” Ilinx: Berliner Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft 2 (2011): 101–21. 22. The latter was discussed at the Helix Center conference noted above (n. 15). 23. Furthermore, his “work” includes the library he founded. An English edition of his writings appeared only in 1999; Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, translated by David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999). 24. Nonetheless, new secondary literature on Warburg is appearing today with great speed, which is all the more unexpected—if not alarming—in view of the persistent reluctance to read Warburg. In 1965 Gertrud Bing, Warburg’s assistant and later the director of the Warburg Institute, made a statement that still rings true: Warburg “is one of those authors whose fortune it is . . . to be more often praised than read.” Gertrud Bing, “A. M. Warburg,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 28 (1965): 300. Exceptions to the disinclination to read Warburg include Sigrid Weigel’s work, for example, “Aby Warburgs ‘Göttin im Exil’: Das ‘Nymphenfragment’ zwischen Brief und Taxonomie, gelesen mit Heinrich Heine.” In Vorträge aus dem Warburg-­Haus, edited by Wolfgang Kemp et al. (Berlin: Akademie, 2000), 65–103; Anna Guillemin’s “Style in Motion”; Philipp Ekardt’s essay “Sensing—Feeling—Imitating”; and Spyros Papapetros’ On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 25. Quoted in E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Phaidon, 1986), 14. 26. Guilleman, “Style in Motion,” 52. 27. Matthew Rampley notes, “In much of his work Warburg’s critical thinking is frequently lost amidst the mass of historical, philological, and art historical information.” Matthew Rampley, The Remembrance of Things Past: On Aby M. Warburg and Walter Benjamin (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2000), 57. 28. Schmarsow was a German art historian who founded the Institute for the His‑ tory of Art in Florence, one of the oldest research institutions dedicated to the study of Italian art and architecture. 29. Justi was an art historian who worked on Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian Renaissance painting, and Janitschek was a scholar of Romanesque art. 30. The book lists 1893 as the date of publication although it came out at the end of 1892. Perdita Rösch, Aby Warburg (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2010), 150n16.

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31. Rösch, Aby Warburg, 24. 32. Georges Didi-­Huberman, “The Imaginary Breeze: Remarks on the Air of the Quattrocento,” Journal of Visual Culture 2, no. 3 (2003): 275. 33. “Aure e venti che la fanno venire in terra” and “due Venti che volando sulle onde spingono la Dea.” Warburg, “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring: An Examination of Concepts of Antiquity in the Italian Renaissance,” in Warburg, Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 90; Warburg, “Sandro Botticellis ‘Geburt der Venus’ und ‘Frühling’: Eine Untersuchung über die Vorstellungen von der Antike in der italienischen Frührenaissance,” in Gesammelte Schriften, with the assistance of Fritz Rougemont, edited by Gertrud Bing and Bibliothek Warburg (Leipzig: Teubner, 1932; reprinted as one volume, Nendeln: Kraus, 1969), 6. Warburg is quoting from Poliziano’s Giostra. 34. “Da’ zefiri lascivi spinta a proda”; “ver soffiar di venti”; “L’aura incresparle e’ crin distesi e lenti.” Warburg, “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring,” 92; Warburg, “Sandro Botticellis ‘Geburt der Venus’ und ‘Frühling,’” 8. 35. Spyros Papapetros, “On the Animation of the Inorganic: ‘Life in Movement’ in the Art and Architecture of Modernism, 1892–1944” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2005), 89. 36. “Obviaque adversas vibrabant flamina vestes / et levis inpulsos retro dabat aura capillos.” Warburg, “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring,” 99; Warburg, “Sandro Botticellis ‘Geburt der Venus’ und ‘Frühling,’” 14. 37. I am indebted to Peter Probst for this insight. 38. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, 72. 39. Charles Darwin, Der Ausdruck der Gemüthsbewegungen bei dem Menschen und den Thieren, trans. J. Victor Carus (Stuttgart: E. Schweizerbart, 1877), 40, 92, 129, and 145. 40. Darwin’s use of inspiration in contrast with expiration is in line with the historical usage of the word in medicine (Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “Inspiration, N.,” https://www.oed.com). The rendering of the word in German as Inspiration invokes this history; see Darwin, Der Ausdruck der Gemüthsbewegungen, 68, 84, 131, and 142. 41. Warburg claimed, “My starting points were Darwin and Piderit” (Ich ging von Darwin und Piderit aus); quoted in Warburg, Werke in einem Band, 605. See also Theodor Piderit, Grundsätze der Mimik und Physiognomik (Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn, 1858). 42. Quoted in Warburg, Werke in einem Band, 607,. 43. Warburg, “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring,” 97; Warburg, “Sandro Botticellis ‘Geburt der Venus’ und ‘Frühling,’” 13. 44. Warburg, “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring,” 118; Warburg, “Sandro Botticellis ‘Geburt der Venus’ und ‘Frühling,’” 31. 45. Warburg, “Sandro Botticellis ‘Geburt der Venus’ und ‘Frühling,’” 5. 46. Warburg, “Sandro Botticellis ‘Geburt der Venus’ und ‘Frühling,’” 27. 47. Warburg, “Sandro Botticellis ‘Geburt der Venus’ und ‘Frühling,’” 41. 48. Warburg, “Sandro Botticellis ‘Geburt der Venus’ und ‘Frühling,’” 10. 49. Warburg, “Sandro Botticellis ‘Geburt der Venus’ und ‘Frühling,’” 18. 50. What is in the air is sometimes called the zeitgeist. According to the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, the zeitgeist is “the characteristic spirit of a historical era taken in its totality and bearing the mark of a preponderant feature which dominated its intellectual, political, and social trends. . . . The expression ‘it is in the air’ is latently

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related to the idea of Zeitgeist.” Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas (1973–1974), s.v. “Zeitgeist.” While beyond the scope of this chapter, it would be worthwhile to investigate the relation between zeitgeist—in Latin termed genius saeculi—and other conceptions of a reigning mental atmosphere. Johann Gottfried Herder, for example, describes zeitgeist by invoking aerial metaphors that resonate with Warburg’s association of cultural milieu with what is in the air. “Is it [the zeitgeist] a genius, a demon?,” asks Herder, “or a poltergeist, a revenant from old graves? or even a breeze of fashion, a sound of the eolian harp?” (“Ist er ein Genius, ein Dämon? oder ein Poltergeist, ein Wiederkommender aus alten Gräbern? oder gar ein Lufthauch der Mode, ein Schall der Äolsharfe?”) Quoted in Thomas Würtenberger, Zeitgeist und Recht (Tübingen: Mohr, 1991) 18. 51. Warburg, “Sandro Botticellis ‘Geburt der Venus’ und ‘Frühling,’” 31. 52. For other references to Stimmung in Warburg’s dissertation, see Warburg, “Sandro Botticellis ‘Geburt der Venus’ und ‘Frühling,’” 13–14, 49, 50. 53. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Vom Leben und Sterben der großen Romanisten: Karl Vossler, Ernst Robert Curtius, Leo Spitzer, Erich Auerbach, Werner Krauss (Munich: Carl Hanser, 2002), 94. 54. Gumbrecht, Vom Leben und Sterben der großen Romanisten, vi. 55. Michael Hauskeller, Atmosphären erleben: Philosophische Untersuchungen zur Sinneswahrnehmung (Berlin: Akademie, 1995): 33. 56. Warburg declares that Botticelli’s treatment of animated accessories serves as the criterion for the “influence of antiquity” (Einfluss der Antike), Warburg, “Sandro Botticellis ‘Geburt der Venus’ und ‘Frühling,’” 19. For other references to influence, see pages 25, 39, and 48n55. 57. “Einfluss m.,” in Das digitale Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, Berlin-­ Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, https://www.dwds.de/wb/Einfluss. 58. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “Influence, N.” Warburg’s later work on astrology confirms his interest in leading influence back to its astrological connotations. For example, in his famous talk “Italienische Kunst und internationale Astrologie im Palazzo Schifanoja zu Ferrara” (Italian art and international astrology in the Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara, 1912/1922), he traces the influence of “international astrology” on Italian art. Furthermore, at the end of the nineteenth century, the idea of an ethereal fluid is taken up by the occult, which argued that humans exteriorize a “vital fluid” that could be captured on photographic plates or otherwise perceived by “sensitives.” Margareta Ingrid Christian, “Cameraless Photography and Its Imponderable Media,” History of Photography 42, no. 4 (2018): 319–37. 59. M. Norton Wise, “Kultur als Ressource: Die Rhetorik des Einflusses und die Kommunikationsprobleme zwischen Natur- und Humanwissenschaftlern,” in Wissenschaftsfeinde? “Science Wars” und die Provokation der Wissenschaftsforschung, ed. Michael Scharping (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2001), 84. 60. Norton Wise mentions another sense of Einfluss: “influenza . . . what one inhales in a contagious atmosphere, in a miasma” (my translation). Cf. Wise, “Kultur als Ressource,” 83. 61. Agathon Wernich, “Über gute und schlechte Luft,” in Sammlung gemeinverständlicher wissenschaftlicher Vorträge, vol. 344, (Berlin: Habel, 1880), 377–60. 62. Aby Warburg, “Die Bilderchronik eines Florentinischen Goldschmiedes,” Gesammelte Schriften, with the assistance of Fritz Rougemont, edited by Gertrud Bing and Bibliothek Warburg (Leipzig: Teubner, 1932; reprinted as one volume, Nendeln:

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Kraus, 1969), 69–75; Aby Warburg, “The Picture Chronicle of a Florentine Goldsmith,” in Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 165–68. 63. Warburg, “Picture Chronicle,” in Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 168. “Wer die Kulturgeschichte des künstlerischen Durchschnittsmilieus als ein ebenso wichtiges Problem ansieht wie eine, nur die großen Talente würdigende Kunstgeschichte, wird sich mit steigender Teilnahme in das Weltbild, wie es sich im Kopfe unseres florentinischen Goldschmiedes spiegelte, vertiefen.” Warburg, “Die Bilderchronik,” 75. 64. Leo Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambiance: An Essay in Historical Semantics,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 3, no. 1 (September 1942): 2. 65. Comte, quoted in Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambiance,” 176–77, my translation. 66. Warburg, “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring,” 141. “Es ist klar, dass Botticellis künstlerisches Temperament, das von dieser Vorliebe für ruhige Schönheit getragen wird, eines äußeren Anstoßes bedarf, um Szenen leidenschaftlicher Erregung als Vorwurf zu wählen.” Warburg, “Sandro Botticellis ‘Geburt der Venus’ und ‘Frühling,’” 54, my emphasis. 67. By shifting from the depicted movement in the painting to the movement of the artist’s imagination, he establishes the same connection that Gaston Bachelard makes, decades later, in Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement. Bachelard argues that poetic images of flight and other aerial movements are symptomatic of the poet’s imaginative mobility. 68. “Äußere Bewegung” and “äußerlich bewegte Beiwerk”; “äußerlich gesteigerte Bewegungsmotive.” Warburg, “Sandro Botticellis ‘Geburt der Venus’ und ‘Frühling,’” 5 and 55, respectively. 69. Warburg, “Sandro Botticellis ‘Geburt der Venus’ und ‘Frühling,’” 58. 70. “Ohne durch die Körperbewegung begründet zu sein.” Warburg, “Sandro Botticellis ‘Geburt der Venus’ und ‘Frühling,’” 47. 71. Warburg, “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring,” 141; “erregter oder auch nur innerlich bewegter Menschen,” Warburg, “Sandro Botticellis ‘Geburt der Venus’ und ‘Frühling,’” 54. 72. Max Verworn, Irritability: A Physiological Analysis of the General Effect of Stimuli in Living Substance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1913), 1. 73. Verworn, Irritability, 1. 74. Verworn claims that “irritable systems also exist in inanimate nature” and later gives an example, “the formation of ethylacetat from acetic acid and alcohol.” This inanimate system, in which substances are “reacting on each other,” maintains “chemical equilibrium,” just as a living system maintains its “metabolic self-­regulation.” Verworn, Irritability, 1, 112, and 113, respectively. 75. “Äußeres Kennzeichen,” “Schein gesteigerten Lebens.” Warburg, “Sandro Botticellis ‘Geburt der Venus’ und ‘Frühling,’” 54. 76. Warburg, Werke in einem Band, 605. See also Piderit, Grundsätze der Mimik and Gehirn und Geist: Entwurf einer physiologischen Psychologie (Leipzig: C. F. Winter’sche, 1863). 77. Verworn, Irritability, 2. 78. Warburg, “Sandro Botticellis ‘Geburt der Venus’ und ‘Frühling,’” 32. Efflat, from the Latin efflare, meaning “to blow out”; boreas, from the ancient Greek bορέας, meaning “the North wind”; aura, from the Latin aura and the ancient Greek αὔρα, meaning “a zephyr.” 79. Georges Canguilhem, “The Living and Its Milieu,” trans. John Savage, Grey Room

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3 (Spring 2001): 10. Paul Rabinow describes how the meaning of milieu and conditions de vie changed from a biological medium to a social one. Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 127. 80. Canguilhem, “Living and Its Milieu,” 25. 81. Warburg, “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring,” 141. “Führte dabei der ‘Einfluss der Antike’ zu gedankenloser Wiederholung äußerlich gesteigerter Bewegungsmotive, so liegt das . . . an dem Mangel künstlerischer Besonnenheit der bildenden Künstler. Botticelli war schon einer von denen, die allzu biegsam waren.” Warburg, “Sandro Botticellis ‘Geburt der Venus’ und ‘Frühling,’” 55. 82. “Äußere Beweglichkeit des willenlosen Beiwerks.” Warburg, “Sandro Botticellis ‘Geburt der Venus’ und ‘Frühling,’” 54. 83. “Automatischer Reflex der künstlerischen Einbildungskraft.” Warburg, “Sandro Botticellis ‘Geburt der Venus’ und ‘Frühling,’” 58. 84. Aby Warburg, “Bildniskunst und Florentinisches Bürgertum,” in Gesammelte Schriften, with the assistance of Fritz Rougemont, ed. Gertrud Bing and Bibliothek Warburg (Leipzig: Teubner, 1932; reprinted as one volume, Nendeln: Kraus, 1969), 89–126. 85. Warburg, “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring,” 142. Warburg quotes from Carl Justi’s Velazquez und sein Jahrhundert (Bonn: Cohen, 1888), 1:123–24: “jenes Allgemeine von Stamm, Schule und Zeit, das er [ein Meister, d.h., ein Künstler] von andern hat, mit andern teilt und auf andere vererbt, ist nur sein sekundäres Wesen (δευτέρα οὐσία), das Individuelle, Idiosynkrasische [sic] seine erste Substanz (πρώτη οὐσία).” Warburg, “Sandro Botticellis ‘Geburt der Venus’ und ‘Frühling,’” 55. 86. Alois Riegl, Die spätrömische Kunst-­Industrie nach den Funden in Österreich-­ Ungarn (Vienna: Kaiserlich-­Königliche Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, 1901; reprint, Paderborn: Aischines, 2014), 215. 87. Wolf Feuerhahn writes, “De nos jours, on a peine à imaginer l’importance du transfert des théories de Taine dans l’Allemagne du dernier quart du XIXe siècle.” Wolf Feuerhahn, “Du Milieu à l’Umwelt: Enjeux d’un changement terminologique,” Revue philosophiqe de la France et de l’étranger 4 (2009), 431. 88. Warburg, “Picture Chronicle,” Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 166. 89. Only five years later, in the essay “Sandro Botticelli” (1898), Warburg grants the painter considerable artistic agency, praising his peculiar capacity to combine autonomous decision making with unconscious reception and artistic reflection with aesthetic reflex. In this later text Warburg argues that Botticelli’s tendency to be swayed by his advisers’ authority was a conscious goal (bewusste Ziel) of his life’s work. Aby Warburg, “Sandro Botticelli,” in Gesammelte Schriften, with the assistance of Fritz Rougemont, edited by Gertrud Bing and Bibliothek Warburg (Leipzig: Teubner, 1932; reprinted as one volume, Nendeln: Kraus, 1969), 68. Here Warburg’s interest in what Ernst Gombrich described as “combining . . . extremes without losing balance under the strain of . . . opposing pulls” becomes evident. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, 304. Warburg claims that Botticelli intentionally decided to allow his own creative personality to be enhanced by his environment. Therefore, Warburg reconfigures the determinative force of the milieu into Botticelli’s individual choice. 90. Roland Kany, Mnemosyne als Programm: Geschichte, Erinnerung und die Andacht zum Unbedeutenden im Werk von Usener, Warburg und Benjamin (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1987), 176. 91. Quoted in Spyros Papapetros, “On the Animation of the Inorganic: ‘Life in Move-

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ment’ in the Art and Architecture of Modernism, 1892–1944” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2005), 36. 92. Papapetros, “On the Animation of the Inorganic,” v. 93. Robert Hirsch, Seizing the Light: A History of Photography (Boston: McGraw-­Hill, 2000), 168. 94. For more on Warburg and Marey, see, Philippe-­Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York: Zone Books, 2004). 95. I thank Joseph Vogl for the term historical winds. In On the Animation of the Inorganic (2012), Papapetros writes that Warburg worked with maps, tables, and diagrams to chart “the geographic trajectory of these windswept motifs from one artist or artistic circle to the next, as well as their temporal migration from antiquity to the Renaissance” (52). Regarding one of the tables in Warburg’s dissertation, Papapetros adds, “Like the contemporary photographic experiments by Marey and Muybridge, the table is an attempt to track movement by analyzing it in a series of sections” (53). 96. Georges Didi-­Huberman and Laurent Mannoni, eds., Mouvements de l’air: Étienne-­Jules Marey, photographe des fluids (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 177. 97. Durkheim, quoted in Papapetros, “On the Animation of the Inorganic,” 35; Edward Tylor, quoted in Papapetros, On the Animation of the Inorganic (2012), 13.

Chapter Two 1. Carl Westphal, “Die Agoraphobie, eine neuropathische Erscheinung,” Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten 3 (1871–1872): 138. 2. Anthony Vidler sees agoraphobia—a “psychopathology of modern urban space”— as closely related to nineteenth-­century changes in urban planning and the appearance of wide boulevards and large empty squares. Vidler cites Westphal and other sources on this. Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 45. 3. Camillo Sitte, Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen, 4th ed. (Vienna, 1909; reprint, Basel: Birkhäuser, 2015), 56. See also Vidler, Warped Space. Sitte argues that just as people feel uneasy when having to cross a large empty plaza, sculptures and monuments feel uncomfortable when set up on a large empty square. They fall victim to the same spatial disease, to Platzscheu. 4. “Jener körperlichen Platzangst, wie sie als Krankheitszustand gewisse Leute beherrscht.” Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung: Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie, ed. Helga Grebing (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2007), 82. 5. “Künstlerische Raumscheu.” Alois Riegl, Die spätrömische Kunst-­Industrie nach den Funden in Österreich-­Ungarn (Vienna: Kaiserlich-­Königliche Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, 1901; reprint, Paderborn: Aischines, 2014), 22, hereafter SK. 6. “Gemeinantike Ziel der Erfassung der Einzelform außerhalb des Raumes.” SK, 60, my emphasis. 7. Riegl discussed the tendency to fill empty surfaces on objects such as vases as stemming not from a mimetic impulse but rather from a horror vacui, a fear of empty space that elicits the desire to ornament. In reference to “engraved reindeer bones,” he writes, “Their creation was guided by the same desire to decorate, or horror vacui, that informed the animal images” (Die Bestimmung war dictirt von dem gleichen Schmuckbedürfniss oder horror vacui, wie die Thierbilder). Alois Riegl, Problems of Style, trans.

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Evelyn Kain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 32; and Stilfragen: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik (Berlin: Georg Siemens, 1893), 23. 8. As early as 1905 August Schmarsow addresses Riegl’s idea of spatial fear: “The architecture of the whole of antiquity would have suffered from a ‘fear of space.’” Schmarsow also notes, “We are becoming suspicious of the alleged ‘fear of space’ of the ancient Egyptians” (die Baukunst des ganzes Altertums hätte an ‘Raumscheu’ gelitten”; “Wir werden misstrauisch gegen die angebliche ‘Raumscheu’ der alten Ägypter” [18].) August Schmarsow, Grundbegriffe der Kunstwissenschaft am Übergang vom Altertum zum Mittelalter, (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1905), 188 and 18, respectively, translated by Matthew Johnson. A few years later, Hermann Cohen writes about Riegl’s attribution of “fear of space” to antiquity, “der . . . ‘Raumscheu’ für das Altertum annimmt.” Hermann Cohen, Werke, ed. Helmut Holzhey (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2005), 9:218–19. More recently, Diana Reynolds Cordileone and Hugh Brigstocke have written about this aspect of Riegl’s work. See Diana Reynolds Cordileone, Alois Riegl in Vienna 1875–1905: An Institutional Biography (London: Routledge, 2016); and Hugh Brigstocke, “Alois Riegl (1858–1905),” in The Oxford Companion to Western Art, ed. Hugh Brigstocke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 9. “Raumnegation,” SK, 68. 10. “Die antike Kunst musste . . . geflissentlich die Existenz des Raumes verneinen und unterdrücken,” SK, 17. 11. “Klaren stofflichen Individualität,” SK, 17. 12. See Worringer’s quote from Riegl: “Their [referring to the people of antiquity] sense-­perception showed them things as confused and obscurely intermingled; through the medium of plastic art they picked out single individuals and set them down in their clearly enclosed unity. Thus the plastic art of the whole of antiquity sought as its ultimate goal to render external things in their clear material individuality, and in so doing to respect the sensible appearance of the outward things of nature and to avoid and suppress anything that might cloud and vitiate the directly convincing expression of material individuality.” Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, trans. Michael Bullock with an introduction by Hilton Kramer (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1997), 21. 13. “Lückenlose Abschließung in der Form.” This formulation is from Alois Riegl, “Der moderne Denkmalkultus: Sein Wesen und seine Entstehung,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. Artur Rosenauer (Vienna: Facultas, 1996), 155. Consider also Riegl’s keyword Geschlossenheit. 14. “Der Raum zwischen den Figuren ist gerade so wichtig als die Figuren selbst, ja mitunter sogar wichtiger.” Riegl, Die Entstehung der Barockkunst in Rom, ed. Arthur Burda and Max Dvořák (Vienna: Anton Schroll & Co., 1908), 1. 15. “In der Raumbildung das eigentlich treibende Element in der Entwicklung der Baukunst in der römischen Kaiserzeit.” SK, 16. 16. “Emancipation des Raumes.” SK, 26. 17. “Die künstlerische Lust an der Raumbildung.” SK, 99. 18. See Riegl’s description of “die Existenz des freien Raumes ringsherum.” SK, 32n. 19. “Verhältnis der Figuren zum Räume.” SK, 49. 20. “Function des Raumes in der bildenden Kunst.” SK, 58n. 21. SK, 127. 22. Riegl uses another interchangeable term: Freiraum (open space).

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23. Christopher S. Wood, “Riegl’s mache,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 46 (Autumn 2004): 161. 24. My argument, which aims to reconstruct the ecstasis of Riegl’s purportedly self-­enclosed forms, contrasts with Christopher Wood’s study of Riegl’s jewelry. Wood writes, “Riegl’s handling of the jewelry traces an inward collapse and refusal of transitive meaning not so different from that described by [Stefan] George.” See Wood, “Riegl’s mache, 158. Indeed, my chapter on Riegl, and my book overall, challenge precisely an aestheticist reading of the work of art. 25. The terms Riegl uses are Grund, cubischer Raum, Luftraum, Freiraum, and Tiefraum. 26. Riegl, SK, 83. 27. Riegl, SK, 114. 28. Margaret Olin, for example, refers to “the notorious difficulty of Riegl’s German.” See Margaret Olin, “Alois Riegl (1858–1905), Professor of Art History,” in Encylopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 29. “Volk, Ort und Zeit.” Riegl, SK, 215. 30. Franz Wickhoff, who was a great influence on Riegl, had initially studied natural science: “early on, [he] enjoyed the lessons of the well-­known botanist Josef Böhm: in particular, he was attracted by the much-­discussed ‘development theory’ of the time, which, without doubt, influenced his genetic approach” (schon frühe den Unterricht des bekannten Botanikers Josef Böhm . . . genossen: die damals vieldiskutierte Entwicklungstheorie hat ihn besonders angezogen und zweifellos auf seine genetische Betrachtungsweise eingewirkt.) See Julius von Schlosser, “Die Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte,” Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Institut für Geschichtsforschung 13, no. 2 (1934): 165, translated by Matthew Johnson. Several other studies of Riegl that focus on the idea of Kunstwollen trace the influence of evolutionary theory on his theory of art. For example, Marsha Morton situates Riegl’s work “within his scientific milieu, which was dominated by responses to Darwin.” She argues “that Riegl’s work evidences an absorption of evolutionary theory in its methodology, language, content (man’s interaction with the environment, forces of competition, free will and determinism).” See Marsha Morton, “Art’s ‘Contest with Nature’: Darwin, Haeckel, and the Scientific Art History of Alois Riegl,” in Darwin and Theories of Aesthetics and Cultural History, ed. Barbara Larson and Sabine Flach (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 53. 31. See Gerhard H. Müller, “Umwelt,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Gottfried Gabriel, Karlfried Gründer, and Joachim Ritter (Basel: Schwabe, 2001), 11:​ 99–105. For more on the origins of Umwelt, see Leo Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambiance: An Essay in Historical Semantics,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 3, no. 1 (September 1942): 1–42; no. 2 (December 1942): 169–218; Geoffrey Winthrop-­Young, “Afterword: Bubbles and Webs: A Backdoor Stroll through the Readings of Uexküll,” in A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, by Jakob von Uexküll (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 209–43; Fritz Hermanns, “‘Umwelt’: Zur historischen Semantik eines deontischen Wortes,” in Diachrone Semantik und Pragmatik: Untersuchungen zur Erklärung und Beschreibung des Sprachwandels, ed. Dietrich Busse (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1991), 235–57. 32. Christoph Asendorf, Ströme und Strahlen: Das langsame Verschwinden der Materie um 1900 (Giessen: Anabas, 1989), 9. The highly popular though not very academic art historian Richard Muther describes how “a fine atmosphere settled gently on

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forms . . . and doused them” (eine sanfte, von leichten Reflexen geschwängerte Atmosphäre, die sich leicht auf die Formen legt und sie mild übergiesst). Richard Muther, Geschichte der Malerei im XIX. Jahrhundert (Munich: G. Hirth’s Kunstverlag, 1894), 3:29. 33. “Die Figuren . . . setzen sich scharf gegen den dunklen Raum ab, während wir von ihnen das Zusammenfließen mit der Umgebung, den Übergang in den Luftraum verlangen.” SK, 50. Riegl also notes that “a favorite problem of modern art” (ein Lieblingsproblem der modernen Kunst) is how to represent objects the way “we see them in distant vision and the way they melt with their surroundings” (in welcher die Dinge in der Fernsicht uns erscheinen und in welcher sie auch mit ihrer Umgebung verschwimmen). SK, 21. 34. Although Wickhoff was responsible for most of the text of The Vienna Genesis, he had a coeditor, the philologist Wilhelm von Hartel, who would become minister of culture and education in Vienna in 1900. Franz Wickhoff, Die Schriften Franz Wickhoffs, vol. 3, Römische Kunst (Die Wiener Genesis), ed. Max Dvořák (Berlin: Meyer & Jessen, 1912). 35. Werner Weisbach, Impressionismus: Ein Problem der Malerei in der Antike und Neuzeit (Berlin: Grote’sche, 1911). 36. Schlosser, “Die Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte,” 176. 37. Wickhoff writes about “plein-­airismus” and “Freilichtmalerei.” He defines plein air as the “rendering of scattered light in the image” (Wiedergabe des zerstreuten Lichtes im Bilde). Wickhoff, Die Schriften Franz Wickhoffs, 3:166, translated by Matthew Johnson. 38. Wickhoff, Die Schriften Franz Wickhoffs, 3:163, 164, 166. 39. Wickhoff, Die Schriften Franz Wickhoffs, 3:164. 40. “In welcher Weise die antike Malerei die wechselnden Lichter der Tageszeiten und die mannigfachen Luftstimmungen der Witterung wiedergab.” Wickhoff, Die Schriften Franz Wickhoffs, 3:163. 41. “Atmosphärische Erscheinungen, die verschiedenen Arten ihrer Widergabe.” Wickhoff, Die Schriften Franz Wickhoffs, 3:207. 42. “Die Auflösung der Formen in dem sie umgebenden Lichte durch die Malerei in plein air.” Wickhoff, Die Schriften Franz Wickhoffs, 3:150. 43. “Infolgedessen setzen sich die spätrömischen Bauwerke und Figuren . . . hart und scharf gegen ihre Umgebung ab und erregen dadurch das Missfallen des modernen Beschauers, der darin einen offenbarem Widerspruch, Stillosigkeit, Barbarei erblickt, während der Spätrömer vermuthlich das gleiche absprechende Urtheil über den modernen Impressionismus fallen würde.” SK, 21n. This sentence shows the entanglement in Riegl’s analyses between late Roman art and the art of his own time—much like Wickhoff, whose interest in impressionism informs his study of late Roman painting. For a discussion of Wickhoff and other nineteenth-­century intellectual influences on Riegl, see Michael Gubser, Time’s Visible Surface. Alois Riegl and the Discourse on History and Temporality in Fin-­de-­Siècle Vienna (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006). 44. See what Christina Wessely and Florian Huber call a “spiritual theory of the environment” (geistige Umwelttheorie) and a “biological theory of milieu” (biologische Milieutheorie). Christina Wessely and Florian Huber, “Milieu, Zirkulationen und Transformationen eines Begriffs,” in Milieu: Umgebungen des Lebendigen in der Moderne (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2017), 7–17. For more on the history of milieu as well as its relation to Umwelt, see Georges Canguilhem, “The Living and Its Milieu,” trans. John Savage, Grey Room 3 (Spring 2001): 6–31; Wolf Feuerhahn, “Du milieu à

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l’Umwelt: Enjeux d’un changement terminologique,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 4 (2009): 419–38; Florian Sprenger, “Zwischen Umwelt und milieu: Zur Begriffsgeschichte von environment in der Evolutionstheorie,” Forum Interdisziplinäre Begriffsgeschichte 3, no. 2 (2014): 7–18. 45. Taine writes of the influence of the physics of a “mécanique psychologique.” Quoted in Wolf Feuerhahn, “‘Milieu’-­Renaissance auf den Schultern von Leo Spitzer und Georges Canguilhem? Zum Nachleben der Sekundärliteratur in der Wissenschaftsgeschichte,” in Milieu: Umgebungen des Lebendigen in der Moderne, ed. Florian Huber and Christina Wessely (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2017), 21. 46. Bertillon conceived of his mesology as a “science des milieux.” 47. Riegl claims that the depicted figures, despite appearing lifeless in their isolation from their surrounding space, are in fact pulsating with life, with “animation” (Lebendigkeit, SK, 49) and a “special life within the in-­itself closed mass” (Sonderleben innerhalb der in sich geschlossenen Masse; SK, 127). For a study of this peculiar animation, see Spyros Papapetros, On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), especially the chapter “The Afterlife of Crystals.” 48. “Die Zellen und Gewebelehre.” SK, 217n. 49. “Gerade das Charakteristische, das wir mit dem Begriff Zelle verknüpfen, die individuelle Geschlossenheit innerhalb weniger Wände, [geht] verloren.” SK, 173n. 50. Collektiv-­Erscheinung, Unselbstständigkeit, (SK, 209) and Massencomposition, Collektivcharakter (SK, 210). 51. Wilhelm Roux is cited, for example, by the art historian Wilhelm Waetzoldt in Das Kunstwerk als Organismus: Ein aesthetisch-­biologischer Versuch (Leipzig: Dürr’schen Buchhandlung, 1905). This text also refers to Darwin, whom Riegl mentions in Late Roman Art Industry, as well as to Haeckel and Mach. The latter was Riegl’s colleague at the University of Vienna, and Riegl alludes to Mach’s work in The Group Portraiture of Holland. 52. “Stoffliche Individuen” could also be translated in this context as “material integrities.” 53. “Auch nicht das Für-­Sich-­Sein ist hier anzuführen, denn dieses kommt jedem durch seine Consistenz oder sonstige besondere Qualitäten von der Umgebung gesonderten Processe ebenso viel oder richtiger ebenso wenig zu; denn streng genommen besteht es nirgends, sondern ist blos ein festeres unter sich Verbundensein und in Wechselwirkung stehen als mit der Umgebung, und der Grad desselben ergiebt sich aus der Art der Unterscheidung von der Umgebung und der Art der Verknüpfung unter sich ganz von selbst.” Wilhelm Roux, Der Kampf der Theile im Organismus: Ein Beitrag zur Vervollständigung der mechanischen Zweckmässigkeitslehre (Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1881), 211. 54. One needs to add that Roux cannot be classified as a pure mechanist as he holds on to the view that there remains a self-­animating substance within a cell that enables its regeneration: “Die Zellen oder bloß bestimmte Zellen dieser Thiere enthalten vielleicht, sei es etwa in ihrem Kerne oder in der Umgebung desselben, noch wirkliche, nicht modificirte Reste embryonaler Substanz, welche dann bei Defecten Gelegenheit erhält, ihre bildnerischen Eigenschaften zu bethätigen.” Roux, Der Kampf der Theile im Organismus, 54. 55. “Unter Oecologie verstehen wir die gesamte Wissenschaft von den Beziehungen des Organismus zur umgebenden Außenwelt.” Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie

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der Organismen: Allgemeine Grundzüge der organischen Formen-­wissenschaft (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1866), 2:286. 56. “Existenz des freien Raumes ringsherum.” SK, 32n. 57. “Verhältnis der Figuren zum Raume.” SK, 49. 58. “Alle bildende Tätigkeit der Menschen ist nichts anderes als das Zusammenfassen einer Anzahl in der Natur verstreuter. . . . Elemente zu einem geschlossenen, durch Form und Farbe begrenzten Ganzen. In diesem Schaffen verfährt der Mensch genau wie die Natur selbst: beide produzieren begrenzte Individuen.” Alois Riegl, Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. Artur Rosenauer (Vienna: Facultas, 1996), 154, translated by Matthew Johnson. 59. Klaus Städtke, “Form,” in Ästhetische Grundbegriffe: Historisches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden, ed. Karlheinz Barck, Martin Fontius, Friedrich Wolfzettel, Burkhart Steinwachs (Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag, 2003), 2:462–94. 60. Hegel hints at this intersection in his Lectures on Aesthetics when he describes Kant’s analogy between living organisms and aesthetic judgment in terms of their shared inner-­causal structure: “In the teleological judgement of living things, Kant comes to the point of so regarding the living organism that in it the concept, the universal, contains the particular too, and, as an end, it determines the particular and external, the disposition of the limbs, not from without but from within, and in such a way that the particular corresponds to the end of its own accord. . . . Similarly, Kant interprets the aesthetic judgement as proceeding neither from the Understanding as such, as the capacity for concepts, nor from sensuous intuition and its manifold variety as such, but from the free play of Understanding and imagination” (im teleologischen Urteil nun aber über das Lebendige kommt Kant darauf, den lebendigen Organismus so zu betrachten, dass der Begriff, das Allgemeine, hier noch das Besondere enthalte und als Zweck das Besondere und Äußere, die Beschaffenheit der Glieder, nicht von außen her, sondern von innen heraus und in der Weise bestimme, dass das Besondere von selbst dem Zweck entspreche. . . . Ähnlich fasst Kant das ästhetische Urteil so auf, dass es weder hervorgehe aus dem Verstande als solchem, als dem Vermögen der Begriffe, noch aus der sinnlichen Anschauung und deren bunter Mannigfaltigkeit als solcher, sondern aus dem freien Spiele des Verstandes und der Einbildungskraft). Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 1:57–58; Hegel, Ästhetik I/II, ed. Rüdiger Bubner (Ditzingen: Reclam Verlag, 2008), 68. 61. Amanda Jo Goldstein, Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 16–17. 62. In Riegl’s words, “the isolating aggregation of the whole into regular outlines remains even today the indispensable postulate of all the visual arts; in this very enclosure, there is an aesthetic moment, an elementary art value” (die isolierende Zusammenfassung des Ganzes in gesetzliche Umrisslinien [bleibt] noch heute das unumgängliche Postulat alles bildenden Kunstschaffens; es liegt in dieser Geschlossenheit allein schon ein ästhetisches Moment, ein elementarer Kunstwert). Alois Riegl, “Der moderne Denkmalkultus: Sein Wesen und seine Entstehung,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. Artur Rosenauer (Vienna: Facultas, 1996), 155. 63. “für sich selbst bestehen[d].” Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (Hamburg: Meiner Philosophische Bibliothek, 2001) 277. 64. “Eine Einheit durch seine abgeschlossene individuelle Form . . . und durch seine nicht minder individuelle anima vegetativa, der er seine Entwicklung und Bewegung

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(Wachstum) verdankt.” SK, 212n. Spyros Papapetros further analyzes Riegl’s reference to “anima vegtativa” in Papapetros, On the Animation of the Inorganic, 117–18. 65. Margaret Olin, “Alois Riegl,” in Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, vol. 3 of Philosophy and the Arts, ed. Helen Damico et al. (New York: Garland, 2000), 233. 66. Riegl quoted in Margaret Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art (University Park,: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 71. 67. “In den Augen der modernen Menschheit ist der Baum hingegen ein Collectivwesen, das sich aus Tausenden selbstständiger Organismen zusammensetzt; und in seinen Actionen folgt er ebenfalls nicht einer treibenden Ursache [so not a singular vital principle, not an anima], sondern tausenden solcher, die in tausendfacher Weise auf ihn einwirken. Wenn also der antike Künstler die Einheit als Wesen und Schönheit eines jeden Dinges producieren wollte, so erfüllt der moderne Künstler genau den gleichen Zweck, indem er den Collectivcharakter der Naturdinge im Kunstwerk zu einseitig gesteigertem Ausdrucke zu bringen trachtet.” SK, 212n, my emphasis. 68. “Wir [die moderne Menschheit] verlangen dagegen die . . . Einheit . . . mit dem umgebenden Räume”; “so sehr wurzeln wir in der Anschauung, dass die Einzelformen mit ihrer räumlichen Umgebung als materielle Erscheinung in Eins zusammengehören”; and “in der neueren Zeit hingegen das Streben nach Verbindung der Dinge untereinander.” SK, 35, 133, and 217n, respectively. 69. SK, 215. 70. Published in German in 1866. 71. Taine writes, “Let us resume a comparison already of service to us, that between a plant and a work of art, and note the circumstances in which a plant, or a species of plant, say the orange, develops and propagates itself in a given plot of ground.” Hippolyte Taine, Philosophy of Art, trans. and rev. by the author (London: H. Baillière, 1865), 80. Taine also notes, “The productions of the human mind, like those of animated nature, can only be explained by their milieu” (16). While Taine’s focus on the determinative function of the milieu clearly illustrates his interest in an environmental morphology, he also negotiates between the influence of external circumstances and the effect of inherent givens—or in today’s parlance between the weight of environmental factors versus that of genetic factors: “We have just observed the effect of circumstances and of physical temperature [on the development of an orange]. Strictly speaking, these have not produced the orange; the seeds were given, and these alone contained the vital force. The circumstances described, however, were necessary in order that the plant might flourish and propagate” (82–83). 72. Taine, Philosophy of Art, 21. 73. Taine, Philosophy of Art, 15. 74. Taine, Philosophy of Art, 14–15. 75. Indeed, Riegl repeatedly mentions parallels between the Kunstwollen of his time and of the past. 76. The last phase of late Roman art, however, qualifies this trajectory insofar as it equates plane and space. 77. “Lufterfüllte Hohlräume.” SK, 84. 78. According to Riegl, the “Sarcophagus of the Two Brothers” is a unique late Roman sculptural relief because it contains a very early example of “air space” (Luftraum) in the representation of the Pilatus group sitting around the table in the top right

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corner. Other than this singular late Roman depiction of “air space,” Riegl contends, there will not be another one until the Naumburg sculptures of the mid thirteenth century. 79. Riegl writes, “Objects in [late Roman] works of art are conceded full three-­ dimensionality. As such, the existence of space is acknowledged, however, only insofar as it adheres to the material individuals, in other words, only as impenetrably closed-­ off, cubic measurable space and not as unending deep space between the individual material objects” (Den Dingen wird im [spätrömischen] Kunstwerk volle Dreidimensionalität zugestanden. Damit erscheint auch die Existenz des Raumes anerkannt, aber nur soweit, als er an den stofflichen Individuen haftet, das heisst als undurchdringlich abgeschlossener, cubisch messbarer Raum, nicht als unendlicher Tiefraum zwischen den stofflichen Einzeldingen). SK, 21. 80. “Vollräumigkeit.” SK, 87. 81. Hegel, Ästhetik I/II, 147. 82. “Isolierte Vollräumigkeit.” SK, 89. 83. “Dreidimensionale Raumgeschlossenheit”; “vollräumige Abgeschlossenheit.” SK, 114, 209. 84. “Raumumflossen.” SK, 83. 85. “Cubisch-­räumliche Isolierung.” SK, 59. 86. “The spatial niche that houses the figures is . . . on top and below . . . right and left completely closed” (Die Raumnische, in welche die Figuren hineingestellt erscheinen, ist hier . . . oben und unten . . . rechts und links vollkommen abgeschlossen). SK, 77. 87. Cf. Camillo Sitte, Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen, 4th ed. (Vienna, 1909; reprint, Basel: Birkhäuser, 2015). Even as Sitte wrote about the necessity of enclosing “the organism of a gothic cathedral” (Organismus eines gotischen Domes, 74) and not giving in to a modern obsession with spatial exposure (Freilegung), he nevertheless grounded the idea of a monument’s enclosure—its closedness (Geschlossenheit) precisely in its relationality with an immediate Umgebung—in its organic wholeness with its environs. What his texts show is the effort to account for the new ecologies of an organism and its milieu in the framework of an old aesthetics of the organism and its self-­containedness. What these efforts result in are subsumptions of Umwelt and Umgebung under the vitalist reach of the artwork. 88. Uexküll writes, “Jedes Tier trägt seine Umwelt wie ein undurchdringliches Gehäuse sein Lebtag mit sich herum.” See Müller, “Umwelt.” 89. “Undurchdringlich abgeschlossener, cubisch meßbarer Raum.” SK, 21. 90. Initially, this small-­scale world specific to an organism is defined by Uexküll as an “environment” (Umwelt). However, in an essay published in 1912, he laments its deterministic misappropriation as a conditioning milieu and decides to introduce a new term, Merkwelt, which signifies that “for each animal, there is a special world, which is constituted of the properties that it absorbs from the outside world.” Jakob von Uexküll, “Die Merkwelten der Tiere,” Deutsche Revue 37 (1912): 352. See also the distinction between “eigene Welt” and “in einer fremdem Welt.” See Müller, “Umwelt.” 91. “Collectiv-­Erscheinung.” SK, 209. 92. “Die Räumlichkeit der Figuren wird durch die gehäuften Deckungen geflissentlich betont aber die künstlerische Einheit noch immer in der Liniencomposition gesucht, das heißt die verbindenden Lufträume zwischen den Einzelformen unberücksichtigt.” SK, 121. 93. “Die Absicht lief vielmehr darauf hinaus, jenen Dualismus endgültig aufzuheben,

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Figuren . . . und Freiraum als einziges homogenes Ganzes darzustellen.” Alois Riegl, Das holländische Gruppenporträt (Vienna: Facultas, 1997), 250, hereafter GP. 94. Antonio Somaini, “Walter Benjamin’s Media Theory: The Medium and the Apparat,” Grey Room 62 (Winter 2016): 6–41. 95. “Lufterfüllte Hohlräume.” SK, 84. 96. “Leere Luftraum.” SK, 175. 97. The horror vacui of physics as a discipline was described by Ernst Mach, at one point Riegl’s colleague at the University of Vienna (Riegl alludes to Mach in GP). Indeed it is conceivable that Riegl got his term horror vacui from Mach. Interestingly, the art-­ historical term of horror vacui is always associated with, even credited to, the twentieth-­ century Italian scholar Mario Praz, who started publishing in the 1930s—but Riegl used it already in the nineteenth century: in his Problems of Style (1893), he uses the phrase horror vacui to describe the fear of an unmarked space in art and the desire to fill it with ornamental motifs. 98. Of course, material understandings of space also go back to antiquity. See Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambiance.” 99. See Fritz Heider’s reference to air as a quintessential example of both a medium and a thing in Fritz Heider, Ding und Medium (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2005). 100. Canguilhem, “Living and Its Milieu,” 19. 101. Another context is Adolf Hildebrand’s Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst (Strassburg: Heitz, 1913; reprint, Paderborn: Klassik Art / Salzwasser [n.d.]). Luftraum appears, for example, on page 89. 102. Antonio Palomino de Castro y Velasco, El museo pictórico y escala óptica, vol. 3, El Parnaso español pintoresco laureado (Madrid, 1724), 128. 103. “Velázquez suchte fortwährend den Raum nach der Tiefe und den Seiten hin zu erweitern und aufzuhellen. In den ältesten Gemälden (dem Wasserträger, dem Bacchus) ist die Gruppe wie eingepackt im Rahmen; der Scheitel der Porträtfiguren reicht bis nahe an den oberen Rand; in einigen der letzten reichen die Figuren nicht bis zur Mitte der Leinwand. Dort ist der Himmel ein stählernes Blau ohne rechte Fernwirkung (Vulcan), später wiederholt er die Lichter der Figur in der Landschaft; in den Meisterwerken bringt er eine Lichtpartie von höchstem Helligkeitsgrad im Grund an. Die Figuren bekommen mehr Raum zwischen sich, was Palomino mit den Pausen in der Musik vergleicht; man nannte diese Circulation der Luft innerhalb der Gruppen respiracion.” Carl Justi, Velazquez und sein Jahrhundert (Bonn: Cohen, 1888), 2:16. 104. Élie Faure, History of Art, vol. 4, Modern Art, trans. Walter Pach (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1924), 124. 105. Faure, History of Art, 124–25. Famously quoted in the opening scene of Jean-­Luc Godard’s 1965 film Pierrot le Fou, Faure’s reading of Velázquez in terms of his ability to transform space from a passive background into a positive entity fits Godard’s valorization of the interstitial space of montage in Pierrot le Fou. Godard’s breaking of the fourth wall resembles the figures’ breaking out of the realm of Dutch group portraits to include the viewer in Riegl’s reading. 106. Faure, History of Art, 124. 107. “Das Relief hat ‘Respirazion’ wie die Bilder des Velasquez.” Wickhoff, Die Schriften Franz Wickhoffs, 3:87. The term Luftraum appears a single time in Wickhoff ’s The Vienna Genesis in the description of peculiar reliefs that were direct transpositions of antique paintings (77). However, it also appears in Adolf Hildebrand’s Das Problem der Form, an important influence on Riegl.

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108. “Da es jedoch die wirkliche Luft ist und keine gemalte, die sich zwischen den Gestalten ausbreitet, so mußte alle Kunst des Meisters darauf gerichtet sein, trotz der Gedrängtheit durch geschickte Gruppierung der Figuren der Luft Wege zu öffnen, so daß sie sich zwischen den Gestalten durchbewegen, sie umgeben.” Wickhoff, Die Schriften Franz Wickhoffs, 3:87–88, my emphasis. 109. Wickhoff writes about “allowing natural lighting to participate in the completion of the artistic effect.” (Dieses Mitwirkenlassen der natürlichen Beleuchtung zur Vollendung des künstlerischen Effektes.) Wickhoff, Die Schriften Franz Wickhoffs, 3:88. 110. “Die Modellierung zu vollenden . . . , ebenso wie das Licht der Sonne, das, wenn es einbricht, erst diese Gestalten zu zauberhaftem Leben erweckt.” Wickhoff, Die Schriften Franz Wickhoffs, 3:88. 111. “Da ist wirkliche ‘Respiration,’ greifbare Luftcirculation zwischen . . . Figuren.” SK, 96. 112. “Die Verbindung des Kunstwerkes mit seiner Umgebung.” Alois Riegl, “Denkmalkultus,” in Riegl, Gesammelte Aufsätze, 154. It must be noted that although Riegl writes that “Die Kunstgeschichte lehrt . . . , dass die Entwicklung des menschlichen Kunstwollens zunehmend auf eine Verbindung des einzelnen Kunstwerkes mit seiner Umgebung gerichtet ist, und unsere Zeit erweist sich darin naturgemäß am fortgeschrittensten,” at the end he nevertheless claims that, even today, art’s main concern is “isolierende Zusammenfassung des Ganzen, gesetzliche Umrisslinien . . . Geschlossenheit” (155). 113. “Betrachtet man endlich die einzelnen Köpfe auf ihr Verhältnis zum umgebenden Räume . . . so zeigen sich die Umrisse der . . . Köpfe jetzt weicher, duftiger, zur Verbindung mit dem umgebenden Lufträume geneigter.” GP, 111–12. 114. Margaret Olin has analyzed the concept of “attentiveness” in Riegl’s work in “Forms of Respect: Alois Riegl’s Concept of Attentiveness,” Art Bulletin 71, no. 2 (1989): 285–99. Attentiveness must be understood in a Christian context in Riegl. For him, it is the ideal mode of relating to the world, a mode that balances one’s unitary sense of self with one’s openness to the external world: in this sense, attention is both passive (“lässt die Außendinge auf sich wirken und sucht sie nicht zu überwinden”) and active (“sucht die Dinge auf, ohne sie gleichwohl der selbstischen Lust dienstbar machen zu wollen”) (GP, 19). For Riegl, will and feeling have to do with the isolation of the individual, but attention is about “die Außendinge freudig in sich aufzunehmen und sie geistig zu assimilieren, uneigennützig in die Außenwelt aufzugehen . . . das Individuum trachtet die ganze Außenwelt restlos in ihr subjektives Bewusstsein aufzunehmen” (GP, 19). In this respect baroque attention is very different from antiquity’s modes of subjectivity, which believed that “Individualität die Grundlage der Schöpfung bilde und die ganze Welt in lauter Einzelorganismen zerfalle” (GP, 19). 115. GP, 76. 116. “Die Regenten [merken] zu gleicher Zeit sowohl auf die Worte ihres Vorsitzenden als auch auf die Wirkung, die diese Worte in der Partei [i.e., the viewer] hervorbringen.” GP, 280. 117. “Nichtsdestoweniger war das letzte Ziel von Rembrandts Streben die extreme Durchführung jener äußeren Einheit mit dem beschauenden Subjekt, in der wir die . . . eigentliche Raison d’être aller Gruppenporträtmalerei erkannt haben . . . äußere Einheit, d. h. Verbindung des Dargestellten mit dem Beschauer.” GP, 241. 118. “Die innere Einheit bildet da gleichsam bloß die Voraussetzung, auf der sich die äußere aufbaut.” GP, 280. He also writes, “Man darf aber nie vergessen . . . dass das

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eigentliche Ziel der holländischen Kunst die äußere Einheit gewesen ist, die innere Einheit hingegen ihr bloß als ein Mittel zur Erreichung jenes obersten Zweckes gegolten hat und daher niemals Selbstzweck werden konnte noch durfte” (170). 119. GP, 32. 120. “Lebhaftigkeit direkten Verkehrs und die Innigkeit.” GP, 32. 121. This is, ultimately, a simultaneity of object and subject, and it is foreign to antiquity, which knew only objects (lacking subjectivities), and is also foreign to Riegl’s own times, which had only subjects and no objects. Here Riegl seems to allude to Mach when he writes about objects as “Empfindung des Subjekts.” Cf. GP, 262 and Ernst Mach, Die Analyse der Empfindungen und das Verhältnis des Physischen zum Psychischen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985). 122. Issues that I do not address in this chapter but that need to be mentioned are the problematic aspects of Riegl’s arguments, which include his idea that those who find the ideal balance between selfhood and relationality are the Northerners, the Germanics, the Dutch, and not the Romans, who remain isolated, intent on subjugating their surroundings like the Italians later, and not those who utterly dissolve in their environs like the French impressionists. Other issues include Riegl’s orientalism (“orientalische Indolenz,” GP, 42) and his reliance on concepts such as “Rassen-­psyche” (a term used by Schlosser, in reference to Riegl, in “Die Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte,” 186). 123. “Was Wickhoff verlangte . . . das war eben die Berücksichtungen der kulturhistorischen, oder . . . der ‘geistesgeschichtlichen’ Atmosphäre, aus der das Kunstwerk entspringt und in der es lebt und atmet . . . für ihn war die Vertrautheit mit dem literarischen und geistigen Dunstkreis, in dem vor allem die Gesellschaft der Auftraggeber der Künstler, dann aber auch diese selbst lebten, etwas selbstverständlich Gegebenes.” Schlosser, “Die Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte,” 179–80. See also Schlosser’s own usage of this sense of an aerial contextual substance: “Denn in der Tat, das Fluidum des . . . Herbartischen ‘Realismus’ . . . hat auch Riegl umflossen”; “um Riegls Beschäftigung mit der Barockkunst [weht] ein wenig österreichische Heimatluft”; and “auch hier wie durch Riegls Schaffen überhaupt, österreichische Luft weht” (182, 187, and 193, respectively). 124. This may also be related to Wickhoff ’s collaborator von Hartel’s own interest in concrete atmospheric phenomena: for example, von Hartel, the later minister of culture and education, will use the phrase “atmospheric phenomena” in a 1901 speech commemorating the establishment of the Imperial-­Royal Central Institution for Meteorology and Earth Magnetism. See Deborah Coen, “Climate and Circulation in Imperial Austria,” Journal of Modern History 82, no. 4 (December 2010): 839–75. 125. Riegl does actually refer to a literary-­cultural context briefly at the end of Late Roman Art Industry when he discusses Saint Augustine. In that section, he compares visual and literary cultural phenomena and situates them in the broader history of ideas in Imperial Rome. 126. Cf. Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), xxii; and Jaś Elsner, “The Birth of Late Antiquity: Riegl and Strzygowski in 1901,” Art History 25, no. 3 (June 2002): 358–79. In particular, Elsner writes about Riegl’s “conviction that the analysis of objects can lead us to large-­scale cultural understandings of a non-­trivial kind” (359). 127. “Die Teile außerhalb der Form, die Materie, sind ästhetisch gleichgiltig.” Städtke, “Form,” 478. 128. “Empirische Kunstlehre.” Gottfried Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und

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tektonischen Künsten oder praktische Ästhetik: Ein Handbuch für Techniker, Künstler und Kunstfreunde (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag für Kunst und Wissenschaft, 1860), 1:vi. 129. “Fertige Formensprache.” Städtke, “Form,” 480. 130. “Die Bestandteile der Form, die nicht selbst Form sind, sondern Idee, Kraft, Stoff und Mittel, gleichsam die Vorbestandteile und Grundbedigungen der Form.” Städtke, “Form,” 480. 131. Taine, Philosophy of Art, 4. There is a resemblance between what Riegl terms Kunstgeschmack (used as a synonym for Kunstwollen) and Taine’s “society possessing tastes and sympathies conformable with his [the artist’s] own” (8). Society’s taste (gout) in a given time and place is a good way to understand Riegl’s concept of Kunstwollen, which he uses interchangeably with the term Geschmack, e.g., “das Kunstwollen (der Geschmack) der germanischen Barbaren” (SK, 181). 132. Riegl quoted in Olin, Forms of Representation, 71. Riegl directs himself against deterministic theories, described by him as belonging to a “Dogma der materialistischen Metaphysik,” “derzufolge das Kunstwerk nichts anderes sein soll, als ein mechanisches Product aus Gebrauchzweck, Rohstoff und Technik” (SK, 5). His idealism-­inflected argument is that the development of art does not react to material factors such as the availability of raw material or levels of technique but rather follows an autonomous “creative artistic thought” (kunstschaffende Gedanke). In the Late Roman Art Industry, Riegl refers back to his Stilfragen to elucidate his intervention into a “mechanistic” theory of art: “Im Gegensatze zu dieser mechanistischen Auffassung vom Wesen des Kunstwerkes habe ich—soviel ich sehe als Erster—in den ‘Stilfragen’ eine teleologische vertreten, indem ich im Kunstwerke das Resultat eines bestimmten und zweckbewussten Kunstwollens erblickte, das sich im Kampfe mit Gebrauchszweck, Rohstoff und Technik durchsetzt” (SK, 5); “In opposition to this mechanistic conception of the character of the work of art, I advocated in Stilfragen, and as far as I know I was the first to do so, a teleological view according to which I saw in the work of art the result of a specific and consciously purposeful Kunstwollen that prevails in battle against function, raw material, and technique.” Quoted in Olin, Forms of Representation, 71. 133. To prove this parallel between the vital anima of self-­contained forms and that of Kunstwollen-­driven artworks, I would like to point to the passage quoted earlier, which discusses the changing nature of organisms by using the example of the tree. In that passage, Riegl discusses the “driving cause” (treibende Ursache) of a tree as an organism and understands this cause in terms of a singular vital principle that ensures the organism’s enclosure on itself. The phrase is striking because while it refers to the anima of self-­enclosed form, it is in fact suggestive of Riegl’s concept of Kunstwollen as a collective aesthetic anima that drives the development of art. Thus, in his essay “Naturwerk und Kunstwerk I,” published the same year as Late Roman Art Industry, Riegl describes Kunstwollen precisely as a “driving element” (treibende Element). Riegl, “Naturwerk und Kunstwerk I,” in Riegl, Gesammelte Aufsätze, 61. This description confirms the structural parallel in his thinking between the artwork as driven by an independent aesthetic will and relief figures as constituting independent formal units. See also references throughout Late Roman Art Industry to “den treibenden Kräften der ausgehenden Antike” (2) or “das eigentlich treibende Element in der Entwicklung der Baukunst in der römischen Kaiserzeit” (16). 134. See, for example, Riegl’s reference to the “influence of a thing by thousands of thousands of other, partially very distant, things.” SK, 217n. Margaret Iversen writes, “Its [Kunstwollen’s] emphasis on will was meant to retrieve agency in artistic production

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from the domain of causal explanation.” Margaret Iversen, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 6. 135. Schlosser claims that Riegl’s Kunstwollen represents the eruption of “neo-­ vitalism” in his thought. Schlosser, “Die Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte,” 190. 136. SK, 83. 137. “Indem ich im Kunstwerke das Resultat eines bestimmten und zweckbewussten Kunstwollens erblickte.” SK, 5. 138. See Jaś Elsner, “From Empirical Evidence to the Big Picture: Some Reflections on Riegl’s Concept of Kunstwollen,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 4 (Summer 2006): 741–66; and Henri Zerner, “Aloïs Riegl: Art, Value, and Historicism,” Daedalus 105, no. 1 (Winter 1976): 183. 139. Marsha Morton defines Kunstwollen as “the Hegelian concept that every cultural product, whether in the field of art, philosophy, science, law, or religion, was a historical document that instantiated prevailing beliefs unique to its era.” Morton, “Art’s ‘Contest with Nature,’” 53. 140. “Das betreffende Kunstwerk nur an diesem bestimmten und keinem anderen Platz entstehen konnte.” Cf. Riegl, “Naturwerk und Kunstwerk I,” in Riegl, Gesammelte Aufsätze, 61. 141. Christina Wessely and Florian Huber, “Milieu: Zirkulationen und Transformationen eines Begriffs,” in Milieu: Umgebungen des Lebendigen in der Moderne (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2017), 7–17. 142. In his essay “Naturwerk und Kunstwerk I,” in Riegl, Gesammelte Aufsätze, Riegl complicates this argument by claiming that one cannot tell what “determines” Kunstwollen: “Dasjenige, wodurch dieser [ästhetische] Drang determiniert sein könnte—ob nun Rohstoff, Technik oder Gebrauchszweck, oder Erinnerungsbild—ist für uns mindestens ein Ignoramus” (57). By the end of the essay, however, he qualifies this argument about the inability to know what determines the aesthetic drive by claiming that visual art might not be determined by Weltanschauung, yet it is evolving “simultaneously” and “in parallel” with it (60). 143. SK, 215. 144. Feuerhahn, “Du milieu à l’Umwelt,” 419–38. 145. Taine, Philosophy of Art, 19. 146. “Science neither pardons nor proscribes; she states facts and explains them. She does not say to you, despise Dutch art because it is vulgar, and confine yourself to Italian art; nor despise Gothic art because it is morbid, and confine yourself to Greek art. . . . As to aesthetic science, she has sympathies for every form of art, and for every school— even for those the most opposed to each other. She accepts them as so many manifestations of human intelligence, judging that the more numerous they are, and the more contradictory, the more they display the new and numerous phases of man’s genius.” Cf. Taine, Philosophy of Art, 20–21. 147. “Jedes Lebendige ist kein Einzelnes, sondern eine Mehrheit.” Goethe quoted in Eva Geulen, Aus dem Leben der Form: Goethes Morphologie und die Nager (Berlin: August, 2016), 18.

Chapter Three 1. Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin and Other Prose Pieces, trans. G. Craig Houston (London: Quartet Books,1986), 74, emphasis in original. “Es giebt Bildwerke, welche

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die Umgebung, in der sie gedacht sind, oder aus welcher sie gehoben werden, in sich tragen, aufgesogen haben und ausstrahlen.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin: Mit sechsundneunzig Abbildungen (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 2007), 116. I worked with two translations of Rilke’s texts on Rodin, the older one by G. Craig Houston cited above and the more recent one by Daniel Slager: Rainer Maria Rilke, Auguste Rodin, trans. Daniel Slager and with an introduction by William Gass (New York: Archipelago Books, 2004). I used both because the former contains some passages (from Rilke’s notes and drafts) that are missing from the latter. In addition, I provided some of my own translations where I wanted the English to stay as close as possible to the original German and where I felt this closeness did not come through in either Slager’s or Houston’s renderings. 2. Rilke, Rodin and Other Prose Pieces, 73. “Ein ‘Aus-­dem-­Bild-­Herausschauen’ ist insofern nie der Fall.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 115. 3. This is my translation, which tries to stay closer to Rilke’s language: “so dass der Blick der Gestalt immer noch im Bilde bleibt und vom Beschauer wie durch einen nicht leitenden luftleeren Raum getrennt ist.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 115, emphasis in original. 4. Attention and attentiveness are keywords in Riegl’s analysis of the Syndics; however, he suggests not only that depicted figures subordinate themselves to viewers by paying attention to them (as well as to an image-­internal speaker, as we saw in the previous chapter) but also that they have a coercive (“das Zwingende”), almost hypnotic effect on the viewer: “was das eigentlich Zwingende auf den Beschauer im Bilde der ‘Staalmeesters’ ausmacht.” Alois Riegl, Das holländische Gruppenporträt (Vienna: Facultas, 1997), 280, hereafter GP. Riegl further writes, “Je länger man schaut, desto zwingender teilt sich dem betrachtenden Subjekt die innere Spannung mit” and “mich persönlich hat der Zweite von links . . . am längsten im Bann gehalten.” GP, 280–81. 5. Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 115. 6. Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 115. 7. “The participation of the atmosphere had always been an important factor for Rodin. He had made all his things, plane for plane, in relationship to space.” Rilke, Rodin and Other Prose Pieces, 38. “Für Rodin war immer schon die Teilnahme der Luft von großer Bedeutung . . . an ihnen nahm die Luft in eigentümlicher Weise teil.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 59. 8. Rainer Maria Rilke, Auguste Rodin, trans. Daniel Slager and with an introduction by William Gass (New York: Archipelago Books, 2004), 65. “So ist es, als hätte er [Rodin] hier den Stein geradezu in ihr aufgelöst: der Marmor scheint nur der feste, fruchtbare Kern zu sein und sein letzter leisester Kontur schwingende Luft.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 64. 9. “Dating from the early period, there are the wash-­drawings, with amazingly strong light and shade effects, such as the famous Man with the Bull, suggestive of Rembrandt[,] . . . all jottings and studies which helped the artist to understand the life of planes and their relationship to the atmosphere.” Rilke, Rodin and Other Prose Pieces, 27. 10. For Riegl, it is “air space,” and for Worringer, it is “space filled with atmospheric air” (der mit atmosphärischer Luft gefüllte Raum) that challenge the self-­enclosed form. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung: Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie, ed. Helga Grebing (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2007), 99. I borrow the phrase “material integrity” from Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination. Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 100. 11. In reference to Rodin, Rilke writes, “For sculpture there is one other circumstance

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that is exceedingly important: that the work of art should end within itself.” Rilke, Rodin and Other Prose Pieces, 73. 12. In his letter to Magda von Hattingberg on February 13, 1914, Rilke writes, “The perfect work of art touches on our condition only in that it outlives us. The poem enters into language from within, from a side that is always averted from us, it fills language wonderfully, it rises within it up to the brim—but it no longer strives to reach us.” Rilke and Benvenuta: An Intimate Correspondence, trans. Joel Agee (New York: Fromm International, 1987), 50. 13. Paul De Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 21–22. Soldiers going to fight in the Second World War carried volumes of Rilke’s poetry in their knapsacks, and letters of fallen soldiers contained quotes from Rilke’s verse: “Who talks of victory? To endure is all.” For more on Rilke’s appeal see “Weisen von Liebe und Tod,” Der Spiegel, March 28, 1956, http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-­43061791.html. See also Judith Ryan, Rilke, Modernism, and Poetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 4. In German, the quote cited above is “Wer spricht von Siegen? Überstehn ist alles.” For a translation of the poem, titled “Requiem for Wolf Graf von Kalckreuth,” see Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Works, vol. 2, Poetry, trans. J. B. Leishman (London: Hogarth Press, 1976), 210. 14. Alex Potts notes that in Rilke’s texts, sculpture can be “imaginatively resonant” in two modalities—“either as a presence that is felt to be so close that we feel it almost as an extension of our inner world, or as something set in a sphere quite apart from the immediate environment we inhabit, seeming almost to hover against a distant horizon, like a mountain peak.” Potts, Sculptural Imagination, 87. This chapter argues that these two modalities coexist and are continuous in Rilke’s conception of art. 15. In my reading of Rilke’s Rodin texts, I diverge from the existing scholarship. Armand Nivelle summarized the trends of the literature in 1989, but, as Christoph König notes in his recent article from 2017, these trends still prevail today (to be sure, König’s interest in showing that Rilke saw Rodin from the outset as a poet [Dichter] in the struggle of the arts also strays from these trends). These trends include “Sehenlernen . . . Arbeitenkönnen, Gesammeltsein . . . Geduldhaben. Diese vier Momente gehören zu den Klischees der Rilke-­Rodin-­Forschung.” Cited in Christoph König, “Il fait toujours travailler: Rilke erschreibt sich Rodin,” Euphorion: Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte 111, no. 1 (2017): 95. 16. Weite, Tiefe, Himmel, Raum, Luft, and Atmosphäre are used throughout Rilke’s writings on Rodin. 17. In this sense, in a letter addressed to Lou Andreas-­Salomé on August 8, 1903, he writes that mere things are not as inward-­turned as works of art and therefore not as capable of engendering spaces and building worlds around themselves: “Nothing he [Rodin] chooses to sculpt has for him even the slightest hint of vagueness: it is a region where thousands of tiny surface elements have been fitted into space, and his task, when he creates an artwork after it, is to fit the thing even more tightly, even more passionately, a thousand times more adroitly than before, into the breadth of space around it—so that it wouldn’t move even if one shook it.” Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-­ Salomé: The Correspondence, trans. Edward Snow and Michael Winkler (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 70. 18. Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 158.

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19. My translation of the original: “die Erwerbung des Raumes [durch das Kunstwerk].” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 83. 20. Auguste Rodin, trans. Daniel Slager, 44. “Dieses Sich-­nach-­innen-­Biegen.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 29. 21. “Das Werk stellt als Werk eine Welt auf.” Martin Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks, ed. Friedrich-­Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2012), 31; the English translation is from Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings, ed. Farrell Krell, trans. Albert Hofstadter (San Francisco: Harper, 1993), 170. My reading of the Rodin texts draws on Heidegger not to provide a Heideggerian reading of Rilke in retrospect but rather to show concretely the ways in which Rilke’s text lives on in Heidegger’s essay on the artwork. In this respect my work does bear affinities with phenomenological readings of Rilke from Käte Hamburger’s analysis of Wesensschau to Luke Fischer’s recent The Poet as Phenomenologist. In his discussion on Rilke and the visual arts, Fischer, who is interested in the problem of dualism in Rilke in the context of phenomenology, traces what he describes as “Rilke’s vision . . . [which] enables a non-­dualistic disclosure of Nature” that, on the one hand, “transcends the horizon of a phenomenology of the life-­world in the mode of everydayness” and that, on the other hand, “can be explicated as a phenomenology of the exceptional.” Luke Fischer, The Poet as Phenomenologist: Rilke and the New Poems (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 71. 22. Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 173. “Das Insichstehen des Werkes.” Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks, 34. 23. Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, 14, my emphasis. Here I use Hofstadter’s translation but change it somewhat to show the similarity of the original with Rilke. Hofstadter translates the phrase as “the mere thing which has taken shape by itself and is self-­contained.” Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 154. 24. Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 72, my emphasis; Here I use Slager’s translation but change it somewhat to show the similarity of the original with Heidegger. Slager translates the phrase as “the great calm of things liberated from desire.” Auguste Rodin, trans. Slager, 68. 25. Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 80, 126. 26. This problem must be seen within a larger trajectory that includes, as Rosalind Krauss points out in Passages in Modern Sculpture, Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, and of course Michael Fried’s Art and Objecthood. Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: Viking Press, 1977), 203. 27. “Instrument,” “weapon,” “scales” (Werkzeug, Waffe, Waage). Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 80. 28. I borrow this subtitle from Wilhelm Waetzoldt’s Das Kunstwerk als Organismus: Ein aesthetisch-­biologischer Versuch (Leipzig: Dürr’schen Buchhandlung, 1905; reprint from the collection of the University of Michigan Library, 2018.). This text was published the same year that Rilke gave his lecture on Rodin, which forms the second part of his Rodin writings. 29. Agamben, however, is neither the sole nor the first driving force. See, for instance, Malte Herwig, “The Unwitting Muse: Jakob von Uexküll’s Theory of Umwelt and Twentieth-­Century Literature,” Semiotica 134, no. 1 (2001): 553–92. Eric Santner’s study On Creaturely Life does not deal with Uexküll, yet it draws on Agamben’s Uexküll-­inspired interpretations of Heidegger and Rilke to delineate the biopolitical conditions of creatureliness in modernity. Eric L. Santner, On Creaturely Life: Rilke,

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Benjamin Sebald (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Another strand of readings connects Rilke and Uexküll through the latter’s perceptual theory; these readings posit a similarity between Uexküll’s concept of individual Umwelten, belonging to each organism and determining its perception of the outside, and Kant’s categories of human understanding, which determine our perception of the world. Andrea Hübener, Rätus Luck, and Renate Scharffenberg, eds., Rilkes Welt: Festschrift für August Stahl zum 75. Geburtstag (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2009). See also John N. Bleibtreu: The Parable of the Beast (New York: Macmillan 1968), 13. 30. See the epigraph for this chapter as well as the following passage: “Sculptures which have no milieu within them do indeed stand among the people, not encircled by any sacred ring and in no way different from objects of daily use.” Rilke, Rodin and Other Prose Pieces, 74. 31. Manja Wilkens, “‘. . . ein Stück Kunstgeschichte, gesehen durch ein Temperament’: Rilke und die Kunstgeschichte,” in Rainer Maria Rilke und die bildende Kunst seiner Zeit, ed. Gisela Götte and Jo-­Anne Birnie Danzker (Munich: Prestel, 1996), 113. The two courses were “Zur italienischen Kunstgeschichte der Renaissance” (Riehl) and “Grundlagen der Ästhetik” (Lipps). See Antje Büssgen, “Bildende Kunst,” in Manfred Engel, ed., Rilke-­Handbuch. Leben, Werk, Wirkung (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2004). 32. In Berlin he studied with Georg Simmel and the cultural historian Kurt Breysig. Manja Wilkens “‘. . . ein Stück Kunstgeschichte, gesehen durch ein Temperament,’” 113. 33. See Manja Wilkens’s review of the extent of Rilke’s work as an art critic, including the number of art reviews he contributed to various venues. Manja Wilkens, “‘. . . ein Stück Kunstgeschichte, gesehen durch ein Temperament.’” 34. Dictionary of Art Historians, s.v. “Richard Muther,” https://arthistorians.info /mutherichf. 35. Quoted in Wilkens, “‘. . . ein Stück Kunstgeschichte, gesehen durch ein Temperament,’” 114. 36. Cf. August Stahl, “Rilke und Richard Muther: Ein Beitrag zur Bildungsgeschichte des Dichters,” in Ideengeschichte und Kunstwissenschaft: Philosophie und bildende Kunst im Kaiserreich, ed. Ekkehard Mai, Stephan Waetzoldt, and Gerd Wolandt (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 1983), 223–51. 37. Kenneth Rexroth, “Literature,” Encyclopædia Britannica, https://www.britannica .com/art/literature. See Muther’s claim that each epoch’s painter viewed nature through the eyes of his own time and nation: “Die Maler aller Epochen sahen die Natur mit ihren eigenen Augen an, also mit den Augen ihrer Zeit und ihres Volkes. Darum erscheint die Kunst jeder Periode als ‘der Spiegel und die abgekürzte Chronik’ [Hamlet quote] ihres Zeitalters.” Richard Muther, Geschichte der Malerei im XIX. Jahrhundert (Munich: G. Hirth’s Kunstverlag, 1893), 1:6. 38. Stahl, “Rilke und Richard Muther.” 39. “Gerade der englische Nebel, die Feuchtigkeit und Schwere der Atmosphäre musste die englischen Landschafter früher, als die der anderen Nationen auf die Beobachtung des Licht- und Luftlebens drängen.” Cf. Muther, Geschichte der Malerei im XIX. Jahrhundert, 2:305. Around 1900 this was a common way to pro­ject impressionism back to English landscape painting. 40. Auguste Rodin, trans. Slager, 63. “Diesem Stein gehören alle Weiten.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 60; Rilke is referring here to Rodin’s The Prayer. 41. Muther analogizes the dependency between characters and their context in naturalist dramas with the continuity between forms and their atmosphere in impressionist

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paintings. “Wie das moderne Drama gleichzeitig mit allen zu Gebote stehenden Mitteln die Träger der Handlung in der Abhängigkeit von ihrer physischen und moralischen Umgebung, von der wirklichen und sittlichen Atmosphäre darzustellen suchte, so war auch für die Malerei die Atmosphäre—Luft und Licht—das wichtigste Studienfeld geworden.” Muther, Geschichte der Malerei im XIX. Jahrhundert, 2:409–10. 42. Rodin and Other Prose Pieces, 74. “Für den, der sie richtig sieht, ist immer das Ihre, ihre Heimat um sie, nicht der zufällige Raum, darin sie aufgestellt sind, und nicht die leere Wand, von der sie sich abheben. Bildwerke die kein Milieu in sich haben, stehen tatsächlich unter den Menschen von keinem heiligen Kreis umzogen und nicht unterschieden von Dingen des Gebrauchs und des Alltags.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 116. 43. Umberto Boccioni, “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture,” in Modern Artists on Art: Ten Unabridged Essays, ed. Robert L. Herbert (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1964), 53, emphasis in original. 44. Boccioni, “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture,” 54, emphasis in original. 45. Cf. Wolf Feuerhahn, “‘Milieu’-­Renaissance auf den Schultern von Leo Spitzer und Georges Canguilhem? Zum Nachleben der Sekundärliteratur in der Wissenschaftsgeschichte,” in Milieu: Umgebungen des Lebendigen in der Moderne, ed. Florian Huber and Christina Wessely (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2017), 18–34. 46. The original titles are La vie des abeilles and L’intelligence des fleurs. Maeterlinck also wrote The Life of Termites (La vie des termites, 1926) and The Life of Ants (La vie des fourmis, 1930). 47. The original titles were Entwicklungsgeschichte der Natur, Die Entwicklungslehre (Darwinismus), and Tierbuch. 48. See Rilke’s lecture on “Modern Lyric” in Prague on March 5, 1898. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Moderne Lyrik,” in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 5, ed. Rilke-­Archive (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1965), 360–94. 49. The original titles are Biologische Spaziergänge durch die Kleintier- und Pflanzenwelt, Die Verwandlungen des Lebens, and Kreatur. 50. See Rilke’s letter to Uexküll: “Lieber Freund! so herzlich entzückt über einen Aufsatz von Adolf Koelsch in der Rundschau! Er scheint mir neben Ihren Schriften das schönste, was über verwandte Gegenstände geschrieben worden ist. Wie beglückend wäre es, bei dieser Wissenschaft in die Lehre zu gehen. Hätten Sie [Uexküll] einen Rat für mich, der mich zu einer tätigen Berührung und Befreundung mit den Gegenständen dieser köstlich jungen Biologie anwiese.” Quoted by Gudrun von Uexküll, Jakob von Uexküll: Seine Welt und seine Umwelt (Hamburg: Christian Wegner, 1964), 129–30. 51. See Rilke’s text “Ur-­Geräusch,” in which he recounts, “Es war in meiner ersten Pariser Zeit, ich besuchte damals mit ziemlichem Eifer die Anatomie-­Vorlesungen an der École des Beaux-­Arts.” Benjamin Bühler, Lebende Körper: Biologisches und anthropologisches Wissen bei Rilke, Döblin und Jünger (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2004), 187. 52. Weekly Journal Science 5 (January–­June 1897); and “August Pauly,” Encyclopedia .com, https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-­thesauruses-­pictures-­and -­press-­releases/pauly-­august. 53. Hans Spemann, Forschung und Leben, ed. Friedrich Wilhelm Spemann (Stuttgart: Engelhorn, 1943), 156–57. 54. It enabled the organism to recognize the usefulness of a variation and thus help select it, guiding thereby the development of one trait over another. 55. Spemann, Forschung und Leben, 160.

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56. August Pauly, Darwinismus und Lamarckismus: Entwurf einer psychophysischen Teleologie (Munich: Ernst Reinhardt, 1905), 178. 57. Pauly, Darwinismus und Lamarckismus, 194–95. 58. Uexküll writes, “For this world, which is the product of the organism, I tried to introduce the term ‘Umwelt’” (Ich habe es versucht, für diese Welt, die das Produkt des Organismus ist, das Wort ‘Umwelt’ einzuführen). Jakob von Uexküll, “Die Merkwelten der Tiere,” in Deutsche Revue 37 (1912): 352. 59. This is a reference to Canguilhem’s title “The Living and Its Milieu.” Feuerhahn draws our attention to this in “‘Milieu’-­Renaissance auf den Schultern von Leo Spitzer und Georges Canguilhem? Zum Nachleben der Sekundärliteratur in der Wissenschaftsgeschichte,” in Milieu: Umgebungen des Lebendigen in der Moderne, ed. Florian Huber and Christina Wessely (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2017), 27. 60. Pauly, Darwinismus und Lamarckismus, 194–95. 61. “Neben denen, welche durch Menschen und Verhältnisse unterdrückt werden, giebt es in der Tat andere Wesen, die mit einer inneren Kraft begabt sind, der sich nicht allein die Menschen, sondern auch die umgebenden Ereignisse unterwerfen. Der Schwerpunkt der Geschehnisse wird damit nicht aus dem Unbekannten in Bekanntes verlegt, er wechselt nur den Ort, er findet sich nicht mehr in dem Mysterium, das uns umgiebt, sondern in demjenigen, das wir in uns tragen.” Rainer Maria Rilke, “Maurice Maeterlinck,” Der Tag, March 1902, https://www.projekt-­gutenberg.org/rilke/rodin1 /rodin1.html. 62. Rilke’s writings persistently attempt to make these forces compatible with instances of our sovereignty or, in Nietzsche’s terms, with moments of “I willed it thus.” Nietzsche writes, “Alles ‘Es war’ ist ein Bruchstück, ein Rätsel, ein grausamer Zufall— bis der schaffende Wille dazu sagt: ‘aber so wollte ich es.’” Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra (Baden-­Baden: Insel, 1976), 155. In Maeterlinck’s sense, the only events that befall us are those that we want; for this, see Rilke’s quote of Maeterlinck: “‘Man müsste sagen können, dass den Menschen nur das zustieße, was sie wollen.” Rilke, “Maurice Maeterlinck.” 63. “Sei allem Abschied voran, als wäre er hinter / dir.” From sonnet 13 in the second part of the Sonnets to Orpheus. Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies: The Sonnets to Orpheus, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage Books, 2009), 158–59. 64. The full fragment reads, “Losing too is still ours and even forgetting still has a shape in the kingdom of transformation. When something’s let go of, it circles; and though we are rarely the center of the circle, it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous curve” (Auch noch Verlieren ist unser). Rainer Maria Rilke, “For Hans Carossa” (February 7, 1924), in Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 165, emphasis (missing in Mitchell’s rendering) is in the original. 65. See Pauly, Darwinismus und Lamarckismus, 194–95, 229, and 249. 66. Rodin and Other Prose Pieces, 5. “Es gab kleine Figuren da, Tiere besonders, die sich bewegten, streckten oder zusammenzogen, und wenn ein Vogel saß, so wußte man doch, daß es ein Vogel war, ein Himmel wuchs aus ihm heraus und blieb um ihn stehen, eine Weite war zusammengefaltet auf jede seiner Federn gelegt und man konnte sie aufspannen und ganz groß machen.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 11. 67. In Heidegger’s terms, this would be “the space, which the volumes of the figure enclose” (Der Raum, den die Volumen der Figur umschließen). Martin Heidegger, Die Kunst und der Raum: L’art et l’space. (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann,

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2007), 8. However, for Rilke, this space is not a delimited volume but rather a limitless expanse; furthermore, it is not concretely contained but rather metaphorically compacted. 68. “Sculpture would be the embodiment of places. Places, in preserving and opening a region, hold something free [ein Freies] gathered around them.” Heidegger, “Art and Space,” trans. Charles H. Seibert, Man and World 6 (1973): 7. “Die Plastik wäre die Verkörperung von Orten, die, eine Gegend öffnend und sie verwahrend, ein Freies um sich versammelt halten.” The quote continues: “Das ein Verweilen gewährt den jeweiligen Dingen und ein Wohnen dem Menschen inmitten der Dinge.” The discourse of dwelling is also central in Rilke’s texts on Rodin. Heidegger, Die Kunst und der Raum, 11. 69. Heidegger, “Art and Space,” 7. “Was wird . . . aus dem Volumen der plastischen, jeweils einen Ort verkörpernden Gebilde? Vermutlich wird es nicht mehr Räume gegeneinander abgrenzen, in denen Flächen ein Innen gegen ein Außen umwinden.” Heidegger, Die Kunst und der Raum, 11. 70. My translation of “die Ränder der Formen . . . fließen fortwährend über.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 63. 71. Jean-­Luc Marion, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002). 72. Rainer Maria Rilke, Neue Gedichte (Leipzig: Insel, 1974), 83. 73. Rilke, Ahead of All Parting, 67. 74. Peter Sloterdijk articulates the sense in which the poem’s last stanza is a stepping-­ out-­of: “Man weiß nicht, ob dieses Diktum senkrecht aus dem Boden schießt, um mir wie ein Pfeiler im Weg zu stehen, oder ob es vom Himmel stürzt, um die Straße vor mir in einen Abgrund zu verwandeln, so daß der nächste Schritt, den ich tue, schon zu dem geänderten Leben, das gefordert wird, gehören müßte.” Peter Sloterdijk, Du mußt dein Leben ändern: Über Anthropotechnik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009), 46. Judith Ryan addresses “the ambiguous origin of the hortatory phrase” in the following way: “To begin with, we cannot tell whether these words are a direct address by the statue or an interior monologue on the part of its observer.” Ryan, Rilke, Modernism and Poetic Tradition, 82. 75. Many have made a similar argument, for example, Jacob Steiner, “Rainer Maria Rilke,” in Deutsche Dichter des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Hartmut Steinecke (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1994), 166, as well as Judith Ryan, among others. 76. The artwork’s structure of overspill corresponds to poetry’s logic of reference (Bezug). 77. Λύκειος, http://perseus.uchicago.edu/perseus-­cgi/morph.pl?token=Λύκειος& lang=greek. Lykeios refers both to light and to that which belongs to a wolf. Rilke likely saw one of the Apollo Lykeios statues exhibited at the Louvre. 78. “Wucht und Wärme eines geradezu animalischen Lebens.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 44. 79. “Sich-­nach-­innen-­Biegen.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 29. 80. Rilke sides with Rodin, declaring that “Nun, da ich von ihm [von Rodin] kam, weiss ich, dass auch ich keine anderen Verwirklichungen verlangen und suchen dürfte, als die meines Werkes; dort ist mein Haus, dort sind die Gestalten, die mir wirklich nahe sind, dort sind die Frauen die ich brauche und die Kinder, die aufwachsen und lange leben werden.” Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-­Salomé, Briefwechsel, ed.

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Ernst Pfeiffer (Leipzig: Insel, 1979), 97. See also Rilke’s letter to Lou Andreas-­Salomé from August 8, 1903: “Und es wird immer kleiner um Heinrich Vogeler, sein Haus zieht sich um ihn zusammen und füllt sich mit Alltag aus, mit Zufriedenheit” (91). Regarding Rodin, he writes, “sein Werk selbst hat ihn beschützt; er hat darin gewohnt” (96). 81. Auguste Rodin, trans. Slager, 41. “Es [das Kunstwerk] wendet sich nicht an die Welt.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 24. 82. Rilke, Rodin and Other Prose Pieces, 73. “Für Plastik ist noch ein Umstand ungemein wichtig: dass das Kunstwerk in sich zu Ende gehe. Ein ‘Aus-­dem-­Bild-­ Herausschauen’ ist insofern nie der Fall.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 115. 83. De Man, Allegories of Reading, 44. 84. This looking back, however, is unlike Benjamin’s later concept of an artwork’s aura and its ability to return the gaze. (On looking back in Baudelaire and Benjamin, see Ryan, Rilke, Modernism and Poetic Tradition, 86.) For the aura, even as it stands for the artwork’s outward emanation, does not stand for the commerce between artwork and viewer. Indeed, the aura signifies the artwork’s remoteness from the viewer, its “einmalige Erscheinung einer Ferne, so nah sie sein mag.” Walter Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” in Illuminationen: Ausgewählte Schriften, ed. Siegfried Unseld (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 142. The aura thus points to the art object’s self-­enclosure and situates the artwork at a remove. By contrast, when Rilke’s poem asserts that we must change our life, it stages the artwork’s consequentiality for life. Whereas for Benjamin, the artwork’s auratic radiance stands for Ferne and unapproachability, for Rilke, its ecstatic reaching out stands for its entanglement with our life. In fact, Benjamin’s aura is captured in the poem by the image of the bell jar, thus precisely by what is adduced as a negative example for the statue. Whereas Benjamin understands the aura of an artwork as an encasement so that the destruction of the aura corresponds to the “Entschälung des Gegenstandes aus seiner Hülle” (Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk,” in Illuminationen, 143), Rilke’s poem states that the statue is precisely not as if under the enclosure of a bell jar: “Sonst stünde dieser Stein entstellt und kurz / unter der Schultern durchsichtigem Sturz / und flimmerte nicht so wie Raubtierfelle.” Judith Ryan suggests that the phrase “durchsichtigem Sturz” refers to “a protective glass cover for an art object or clock” (236n70). Whereas for Benjamin an artwork’s aura correlates with the viewers’ immersion into the artwork (he writes about Versenkung and cites precisely Rilke as an instance of a poetry of Versenkung), for Rilke the statue’s spatial extensivity wrests viewers out of their immersion and plunges them into life. The torso steps outside of itself as if it were breaking the fourth wall. Even if, as Sloterdijk suggests, the last verse points to an old-­fashioned religious epiphany—even if it is far from suggesting a political insight in which the veil of ideology ruptures (in the vein of Benjamin’s illuminations)—“Archaic Torso of Apollo” nevertheless brings together auratic radiance with the shock effect, the latter being precisely the opposite of the aura in Benjamin’s conceptualization. In its sudden address to the reader, in its unexpected turn outward, “Archaic Torso of Apollo” stages the continuity between aura and shock, between radiance and insight. Thereby, the artwork’s rupture of the fourth wall is concomitant with its auratic shining. 85. We may recall that in J. K. Huysmans’s A rebours, des Esseintes’s living turtle dies when he turns it into a bejeweled artwork, and, in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, the painting and its living subject (Dorian) ultimately cannot comingle and coexist: either the painting degrades or its subject dies.

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86. See the continuity of rhymes between the word Rändern (referring to the artwork) and ändern (referring to life). The sculpture erupts out of its borders (“Rändern”) to such an extent that it flows into life (“Leben ändern”). 87. The best illustration of this yearning for immanence is the Duino Elegies. 88. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated and with a foreword by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 410. Quoted in Bill Brown, Other Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 5. The poem thus meditates on the difference between an ancient piece of rock and an archaic fragment of a statue. Whereas in his Rodin monograph, Rilke describes ancient art objects exhibited in the Louvre as “heavy things of stone” (Auguste Rodin, trans. Slager, 32; “schwere steinerne Dinge,” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 11), in his Apollo poem, he refers to the statue as a dead rock under a glass cover, an image that recalls natural specimens exhibited under protective glass shields; it brings to mind rocks, ancient paleontological specimens, but also taxidermy, the latter especially in view of the poem’s subsequent contrast between the suggested inanimation of a disfigured rock and the implied animation of a flickering “wild beast’s fur.” Why is the former, as if under a protective sheath, inconsequential for us, while the latter is, as if exploding its bounds, aggressive toward us? In these instances, the poem is interested in what Heidegger would later call the “thing-­character of the work [of art]” (Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 165; “Diesen Dingcharakter des [Kunst]Werkes,” Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, 25) even as its main concern is precisely that which goes beyond its thingness. The poem claims that as a mere piece of rock, the exhibited specimen would be enclosed and onto itself—as if under a bell glass. In this respect the rock resembles Heidegger’s notion of the thing that is understood in terms of its “self-­ containment” (Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 152; “Insichruhen,” Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, 11). Rilke’s preoccupation in the sonnet resonates with Heidegger’s later interest in delineating the element that the artwork has in surplus vis-­ à-­vis the thing. Heidegger formulates this problem in the following way: “The art work is something else over and above the thingly element. This something else in the work constitutes its artistic nature” (Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 145; “das Kunstwerk [ist] über das Dinghafte hinaus noch etwas anderes. . . . Dieses Andere, was daran ist, macht das Künstlerische aus,” Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, 4). While being a thing, the artwork nevertheless contains something in excess that the mere thing lacks. Why does the torso “glow,” “shine,” “flicker,” and blind us, while the rock appears disfigured and enclosed as if under a bell jar? It is noteworthy that the torso glows like Rodin’s statues in Rilke’s writings on the sculptor; regarding Rodin’s Kiss, Rilke writes, “sein Licht liegt überall” (Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 33); regarding Eternelle Idole, he notes, “auch hier strahlt aller Glanz . . . aus” (34); and about Rodin’s statues in general, he observes that “es giebt da wirklich Steine mit eigenem Licht” (82). One explanation is that the statue—unlike the rock—enacts the transformation of matter into form. Certainly, the “Bug der Brust,” the “Drehen der Lenden,” and the “Lächeln . . . jener Mitte” suggest that the rock’s accidental materiality has been endowed with the intentionality of form. It is, to use a phrase by Yve-­Alain Bois, matter “made over into form” (Bois, “The Use Value of ‘Formless,’” in Bois and Kraus, Formless: A User’s Guide [New York: Zone Books, 1997], 25). However, the poem complicates this answer: on the one hand, it seems to locate the aesthetic in the force of form, while on the other, it seems to question the very category of self-­contained form. 89. As Heidegger notes later, the thing, too, is “formed matter” (Heidegger, “Origin

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of the Work of Art,” 152), so that it is unlikely that form is a sufficient criterion for explaining the aesthetic component of the work of art. 90. The above is my translation in which I emphasize the parallel between the two passages “die Ränder der Formen . . . fließen fortwährend leise über.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 63. 91. My reading differs from Judith Ryan’s in Rilke, Modernism and Poetic Tradition and Santner’s in On Creaturely Life (205–6). The fragment of a statue is a whole onto itself and thus a particularly good illustration of a general feature of the aesthetic (not merely of fragmentary artworks), namely, of the aesthetic capacity to pro­ject outward. 92. My reading differs here from that of Judith Ryan, who argues that “Archaic Torso of Apollo” rejects “a romanticist aesthetics that would seek to appreciate it in terms of organic wholeness.” Ryan, Rilke, Modernism and Poetic Tradition, 83. 93. Auguste Rodin, trans. Slager, 44. “Man steht vor ihnen als vor etwas Ganzem, Vollendetem, das keine Ergänzung zulässt.” Rilke, August Rodin, 30. Gottfried Biedermann also claims that “als besonders wichtig ist die Tatsache anzusehen, dass Rilke niemals auf den Torso-­Charakter Rodinscher Skulpturen hingewiesen hat. Es gibt kein ‘Non-­finito’ bei Rodin.” Gottfried Biedermann, “Rilke über Rodin: Einige Bemerkungen zur Kunstanschauung,” Jahrbuch des Kunsthistorischen Institutes der Universität Graz 11 (January 1976): 10. Although, to be sure, what my chapter shows is that despite the torso’s wholeness, Rodin’s statues suffer precisely from a condition of, in Santner’s words, “failed finitude.” Santner, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 210. 94. Auguste Rodin, trans. Slager, 45. “Man hat . . . einsehen glauben gelernt, daß ein künstlerisches Ganzes nicht notwendig mit dem gewöhnlichen Ding-­Ganzen zusammenfallen muss.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 30–31. 95. Auguste Rodin, trans. Slager, 45. “Es giebt im Werke Rodins Hände, selbständige, kleine Hände, die, ohne zu irgend einem Körper zu gehören, lebendig sind . . . Rodin . . . weiß, daß der Körper aus lauter Schauplätzen des Lebens besteht, eines Lebens, das auf jeder Stelle individuell und groß werden kann, hat die Macht, irgendeinem Teil dieser weiten schwingenden Fläche die Selbständigkeit und Fülle eines Ganzen zu geben.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 31. 96. “Weit[e] schwingend[e] Fläche.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 31. 97. Rilke, Neue Gedichte, 11. 98. Rainer Marie Rilke, New Poems, trans. Edward Snow (New York: North Point Press, 2001), 8. Since Mitchell does not seem to have this translation, I used Snow’s, although I cite Mitchell’s version of the “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” 99. “Steine mit eigenem Licht.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 82. 100. Ryan sees these lines as figuring the young poet’s taking in of tradition. The earlier verses “dass der Glanz / aller Gedichte uns fast tödlich träfe” is interpreted as an “image . . . remarkable in its frank expression of an anxiety about poetic influence.” Ryan, Rilke, Modernism and Poetic Tradition, 86. 101. For the relation between sexuality and sight, see Santner’s analysis that draws on Freud. As Santner, with reference to an essay by Wolfram Groddeck, points out, “both figures—the metaphor Augenäpfel, qualified as ‘ripening,’ and the metonymy Zeugung, emphasizing potency—underline the aspect of intensification or ‘potentiation.’” Santner, On Creaturely Life, 202. 102. Consider the use of Verwandlung in the Duino Elegies. 103. Rilke, Rodin and Other Prose Pieces, 74.

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104. Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 116. 105. Nike is an appropriate object of interest given the period’s Nike cult. See Gabriele Brandstetter, Tanz-­Lektüren:Körperbilder und Raumfiguren der Avantgarde (Freiburg: Rombach, 2013), 169–70. 106. Auguste Rodin, trans. Slager, 41. Rilke’s interpretation recognizes in Nike the famous “singular form of spatial continuity” that was later described by Maurizio Calvesi (Brandstetter, Tanz-­Lektüren, 168). Rilke writes, “Diese Skulptur hat uns nicht nur die Bewegung eines schönen Mädchens überliefert, das seinem Geliebten entgegengeht, sie ist zugleich ein ewiges Bildnis griechischen Windes, seiner Weite und Herrlichkeit.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 25. 107. “Ihre Umgebung [die der Plastik] mußte in ihr liegen.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 116. 108. “Der Raum, in dem eine Statue steht, ist ihre Fremde, - ihre Umgebung hat sie in sich, und ihr Auge und der Ausdruck ihres Gesichtes bezieht sich auf diese in ihrer Gestalt verborgene, zusammengefaltete Umgebung.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 116. 109. Klaus Städtke, “Form,” in Ästhetische Grundbegriffe: Historisches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden, ed. Karlheinz Barck, Martin Fontius, Friedrich Wolfzettel, Burkhart Steinwachs (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001), 2:462–94. 110. Gottfried Semper, for instance, argues that the rejectamenta of form—thus precisely what, in their formative process, forms sublimate, such as “idea,” “force,” “material,” and “means”—must be recognized in their conditioning function and in their continuity with form. Städtke, “Form,” 480. 111. “Die Bestandteile der Form, die nicht selbst Form sind . . . die Vorbestandteile und Grundbedigungen der Form.” Städtke, “Form,” 480, translated by Matthew Johnson. 112. Cf. “Containers that are still full” (Gefässe, die immer noch voll sind). From an initial draft of his 1905 lecture on Rodin. See Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 125. 113. Auguste Rodin, trans. Slager, 41–42. “Und sogar die Steine älterer Kulturen waren nicht ruhig. In die hieratisch verhaltene Gebärde uralter Kulte war die Unruhe lebendiger Flächen eingeschlossen, wie Wasser in die Wände des Gefäßes. . . . Nicht die Bewegung war es, die dem Sinne der Skulptur (und das heißt einfach dem Wesen des Dinges) widerstrebte; es war nur die Bewegung, die nicht zu Ende geht, die nicht von anderen im Gleichgewicht gehalten wird, die hinausweist über die Grenzen des Dinges. Das plastische Ding gleicht jenen Städten der alten Zeit, die ganz in ihren Mauern lebten. . . . Wie groß auch die Bewegung eines Bildwerkes sein mag, sie muß, und sei es aus unendlichen Weiten, sei es aus der Tiefe des Himmels, sie muß zu ihm zurückkehren, der große Kreis muß sich schließen, der Kreis der Einsamkeit, in der ein Kunst-­Ding seine Tage verbringt.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 25–26. 114. For more on the motif of the crystal and Riegl, see Spyros Papapetros, On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 115. “For what is rest if not the opposite of motion? It is at any rate not an opposite that excludes motion from itself, but rather includes it. Where rest includes motion, there can exist a repose which is an inner concentration of motion, hence a highest state of agitation, assuming that the mode of motion requires such a rest. Now the repose of the work that rests in itself is of this sort.” Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 173–74. “Denn was ist Ruhe, wenn nicht der Gegensatz zur Bewegung? Sie ist allerdings kein Gegensatz, der die Bewegung von sich aus-­, sondern einschließt. . . . Wenn Ruhe die Bewegung einschließt, so kann es eine Ruhe geben, die eine innige Sammlung der

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Bewegung, als höchste Bewegtheit ist, gesetzt, daß die Art der Bewegung eine solche Ruhe fordert. Von dieser Art jedoch ist die Ruhe des in sich beruhenden Werkes.” Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, 34–35. 116. “Das Insichstehen des Werkes . . . jene geschlossene einige Ruhe.” Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, 34; “The self-­subsistence of the work . . . this closed, unitary repose of self-­support.” “Origin of the Work of Art,” 173. 117. “Aber auch die Gebärde des Stehenden entwickelt sich weiter, sie schließt sich, sie rollt sich zusammen wie brennendes Papier, sie wird stärker, geschlossener, erregter. So ist jene Figur der Eva, die ursprünglich bestimmt war, über dem Höllentor zu stehen. Der Kopf senkt sich tief in das Dunkel der Arme, die sich über der Brust zusammenziehen wie bei einer Frierenden. Der Rücken ist gerundet, der Nacken fast horizontal, die Haltung vorgebogen wie zu einem Lauschen über dem eigenen Leibe, in dem eine fremde Zukunft sich zu rühren beginnt. Und es ist, als wirkte die Schwerkraft dieser Zukunft auf die Sinne des Weibes und zöge sie herab aus dem zerstreuten Leben in den tiefen demütigen Knechtdienst der Mutterschaft.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 29. 118. Auguste Rodin, trans. Slager, 62. “In sich selbst verschlossen, eine eigene Welt, ein Ganzes, erfüllt von einem Leben, das kreiste und sich nirgends ausströmend verlor.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 58. 119. Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 26. 120. Auguste Rodin, trans. Slager, 45. “Aber Hände sind schon ein komplizierter Organismus, ein Delta, in dem viel fernherkommendes Leben zusammenfließt, um sich in den großen Strom der Tat zu ergießen.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 31. 121. Auguste Rodin, trans. Slager, 69. “Da entstand etwas [ein Ding], blindlings, in wilder Arbeit und trug an sich die Spuren eines bedrohten offenen Lebens, war noch warm davon.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 74. It is important to keep in mind that although Rilke is talking here about things, he uses their example to lead his audience to Rodin’s art things (to his Kunstdinge). 122. In an initial draft of his 1905 lecture on Rodin, Rilke writes, “War es nicht immer Das, was Sie an diesen Dingen ergriff, dass Sie sie angefüllt fanden wie Blumen-­Vasen, wie Salben-­Büchsen, das eine Wärme von ihnen ausging, die nicht die des Steines war, und ein unerklärlicher Duft?” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 125. In On the Spiritual in Art, Wassily Kandinsky also writes, “Wie das . . . gemalte Bild immer eine geistige Wärme ausströmt.” Wassiliy Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Bern-­Bümpliz: Benteli, 2013), 98. 123. Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 37. 124. Auguste Rodin, trans. Slager, 43. “Er geht, als wären alle Weiten der Welt in ihm und als teilte er sie aus mit seinem Gehen.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 28, my emphasis. 125. “Er [Rodin] umgab seine Dinge mit Weite.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 63. 126. Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 138. An early draft of Rilke’s Rodin lecture from 1905. 127. As Claudia Blümle and Armin Schäfer argue, since Kupka’s paintings evidence an “unframing motion” within themselves, “in the rhythmic movement within the image, the relations of the image to its outside become visible.” Claudia Blümle and Armin Schäfer, “Organismus und Kunstwerk: Zur Einführung,” in Struktur, Figur, Kontur: Abstraktion in Kunst und Lebenswissenschaften (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2007), 23–24. 128. Julian Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 32–33. 129. This is in the vein of Boris Groys’s reading of Benjamin, according to which the

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aura articulates a work of art’s relationship to its concrete place, its external context. Groys writes, “Die Aura ist das Verhältnis des Kunstwerks zu dem Ort, an dem es sich befindet—zu seinem äusseren Kontext.” Boris Groys, Topologie der Kunst (Munich: Carl Hanser, 2003), 35. 130. Rodin and Other Prose Pieces, 74. “Bildwerke die kein Milieu in sich haben, stehen tatsächlich unter den Menschen von keinem heiligen Kreis umzogen.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 116. 131. Shane Mackinlay, Interpreting Excess: Jean-­Luc Marion, Saturated Phenomena, and Hermeneutics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). Furthermore, John D. Caputo writes, “Over and above these ‘poor’ phenomena described by Husserl, there are phenomena of such overwhelming givenness or overflowing fulfillment that the intentional acts aimed at these phenomena are overrun, flooded—or saturated.” One example of the saturated phenomenon is precisely “the bedazzlement of the ‘idol’ (work of art).” John D. Caputo, “The Erotic Phenomenon by Jean-­Luc Marion,” Ethics 118, no. 1 (October 2007): 164–68. 132. Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 125–26. 133. “Von ihnen ausstrahlenden Raum.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 138. 134. De Man, Allegories of Reading, 44. 135. We can compare their projection to what Daniel Smith and John Protevi describe as Deleuze’s understanding of intensity insofar as “intensity constitutes the genetic condition of extensive space.” Daniel Smith and John Protevi, “Gilles Deleuze,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2018 ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu /archives/spr2018/entries/deleuze/. The following passage from Rilke’s monograph on Rodin illustrates the artwork’s structure of intensity particularly well: “This method leads to massive combinations of hundreds of life’s moments: and this too is the impression we receive from these busts. . . . These people are assembled from the full breadth of their beings, and all the climates of their temperament are revealed in the hemispheres of their heads.” Auguste Rodin, trans. Slager, 57. “Diese Arbeitsweise führt zu gewaltigen Zusammenfassungen von hundert und hundert Lebensmomenten: und so ist auch der Eindruck, den diese Büsten machen. . . . Aus allen Weiten ihres Wesens sind diese Menschen zusammengeholt, alle Klimaten ihres Temperamentes entfalten sich auf den Hemisphären ihres Hauptes.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 50, my emphasis. 136. “Das erste was dem Untersucher bei der Vergleichung von Trauminhalt und Traumgedanken klar wird, ist, dass hier eine großartige Verdichtungsarbeit geleistet wurde.” Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2005), 285. 137. Auguste Rodin, trans. Slager, 75. “Allen Weiten,” “Klimaten,” “Hemisphären,” “Atmosphäre,” “All,” “kosmisch,” “Himmels-­Globus.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 50. 138. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage International, 1990), 19–20. “Um eines Verses willen muß man viele Städte sehen, Menschen und Dinge, man muß die Tiere kennen, man muß fühlen, wie die Vogel fliegen, und die Gebärde wissen, mit welcher die kleinen Blumen sich auftun am Morgen. Man muß zurückdenken können an Wege in unbekannten Gegenden, an unerwartete Begegnungen und an Abschiede, die man lange kommen sah,—an Kindheitstage, die noch unaufgeklärt sind, an die Eltern, die man kränken mußte, wenn sie einem eine Freude brachten und man begriff sie nicht (es war eine Freude für einen anderen—), an Kinderkrankheiten, die so seltsam anheben mit so vielen tiefen und schweren Verwandlungen, an Tage in stillen, verhaltenen Stuben und an Morgen am Meer, an das Meer überhaupt, an Meere, an Reisenächte, die hoch dahin-

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rauschten und mit allen Sternen flogen,—und es ist noch nicht genug, wenn man an alles das denken darf. Man muß Erinnerungen haben an viele Liebesnächte, von denen keine der andern glich, an Schreie von Kreißenden und an leichte, weiße, schlafende Wöchnerinnen, die sich schließen. Aber auch bei Sterbenden muß man gewesen sein, muß bei Toten gesessen haben in der Stube mit dem offenen Fenster und den stoßweisen Geräuschen. Und es genügt auch noch nicht, daß man Erinnerungen hat. Man muß sie vergessen können, wenn es viele sind, und man muß die große Geduld haben, zu warten, daß sie wiederkommen . . . erst dann kann es geschehen, daß in einer, sehr seltenen Stunde das erste Wort eines Verses aufsteht in ihrer Mitte, und aus ihnen ausgeht.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 21–22. 139. “Verdichtung des psychischen Materials.” Freud, Die Traumdeutung, 286. 140. In a letter to Emmy Hirschberg on November 20, 1904, Rilke writes, “Das tiefste Erleben des Schaffenden ist weiblich, denn es ist Empfangen und gebärendes Erleben.” Quoted in Siegfried Mandel, “Rilke’s Readings and Impressions from Buber to Alfred Schuler,” Modern Austrian Literature 15, no. 3/4 (1982): 268. 141. Novalis, Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Margaret Mahony Stoljar (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 85. 142. Auguste Rodin, trans. Slager, 50. “Indem er ihnen viele Stellen giebt, unzählbar viele, vollkommene und bestimmte Flächen, macht er sie groß. Die Luft ist um sie wie um Felsen.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 40. It is in this sense that William Gass writes, “When you view a Rodin from afar, it’s small, very small. But sculpture forms part of the air all around it.” Gass, “Rilke’s Rodin,” The Georgia Review 58, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 27–28. 143. Andrew J. Mitchell, Heidegger among the Sculptors: Body, Space, and the Art of Dwelling (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 1. 144. Mitchell, Heidegger Among the Sculptors, 1. 145. Auguste Rodin, trans. Slager, 62. “Für Rodin war immer schon die Teilnahme der Luft von großer Bedeutung. . . . Er [steigerte] damit auch das Verhältnis der Atmosphäre zu seinem Werke. . . . Hatten seine Dinge früher im Raume gestanden, so war es jetzt als risse er sie zu sich her. . . . [Er] verfuhr . . . ähnlich mit seinem Werke, wie die Atmosphäre mit jenen Dingen verfahren war, die ihr preisgegeben waren seit Jahrhunderten.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 59. 146. Auguste Rodin, trans. Slager, 65. “Rodin [hatte] das Bestreben . . . die Luft so nahe als möglich an die Oberfläche seiner Dinge heranzuziehen.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 63–64. 147. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892–1910, trans. Jane Bannard Greene and M. D. Herter Norton (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), 306. “Dass es eigentlich keinen Kontur gibt, sondern lauter schwingender Übergänge.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe an Cézanne, ed. Clara Rilke (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1984), 32. In a passage from his 1907 lecture on Rodin, Rilke introduces a very different conception of the contour—one that turns on an understanding of the art object as a counterforce to vitalist becoming. He identifies in form a capacity for transforming the becoming of durée into the being of space: “Alle Bewegung legt sich, wird Kontur, und aus vergangener und künftiger Zeit schließt sich ein Dauerndes: der Raum, die große Beruhigung der zu nichts gedrängten Dinge.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 72. It seems that the artwork is an entity antithetical to Lebensphilosophie in that it represents contour, repose, and lack of drive. Rilke suggests that the spatiality of the artwork absolves forms of their continuous temporal becoming, of the duress of durée (unlike Worringer, for whom, in Abstraction and

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Empathy, space immerses forms in a universal becoming). Later in his lecture Rilke claims that the artwork opposes form to the formlessness of its age, by which he means that Rodin managed to capture the changing and vague times of modernity and endow them with the reprieve of sculptural visibility. Rilke writes, “Aber die Plastik ist in eine Zeit geboren, die keine Dinge hat, keine Häuser, kein Äußeres. Denn das Innere, das diese Zeit ausmacht, ist ohne Form, unfassbar: es fließt. Dieser hier [Rodin] musste es fassen; er war ein Former in seinem Herzen. Er hat alles das Vage, Sich-­Verwandelnde, Werdende, das auch in ihm war, ergriffen und eingeschlossen und hingestellt wie einen Gott.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 103. The art object, in its concretion and visibility, is a counterforce to the ungraspable times of modernity. In this respect Rilke’s argument that Rodin’s sculptures endow and constrain becoming through form differs from Georg Simmels’s view that Rodin’s objects revel in the “sensation of becoming” (Simmel quoted in Bill Brown, Other Things, 4). Rilke’s negative valence of becoming stands here in contrast not only to other modernist thinkers but also to Rilke’s own thinking elsewhere in his Rodin texts in passages that emphasize the dissolution of forms’ borders in atmosphere. 148. See Rilke’s first elegy, in Duineser Elegien. Die Sonette an Orpheus (Leipzig: Insel, 2010), 13. 149. Mitchell writes, in reference to Bernhard Heiliger’s sculptures, that “the broken-­open forms cannot contain themselves.” Mitchell, Heidegger Among the Sculptors, 51. 150. The characters of Dante and Baudelaire rise up like memories that enter Rodin’s work as if it were their home. Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 21. 151. “Ihrer großen, gigantischen Vergangenheit.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 114. 152. Auguste Rodin, trans. Slager, 46. “Eine uralte heilige Gebärde . . . in welche die Göttin ferner, grausamer Kulte versunken war.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 33. 153. Santner, Royal Remains, 210. Regarding Rodin’s life, Rilke claims that it maintained its childhood: “And perhaps this childhood still belongs to this life. After all, as Saint Augustine once said, where can it have gone?” Auguste Rodin, trans. Slager, 32. “Und es hat diese Kindheit vielleicht noch, denn—, sagt der heilige Augustinus einmal, wohin sollte sie gegangen sein?” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 10. Cf. Heidegger’s later problematization of being’s impaired finality, “das Zu-­Ende-­sein des Daseins.” Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2006), 234. As Potts notes, Simmel saw Rodin’s sculptures as articulating a “state of unfinish.” Potts, Sculptural Imagination, 74. Hence, Rodin seems a particularly fitting object for Rilke’s interests. 154. Auguste Rodin, trans. Slager, 32. “Schwere steinerne Dinge, aus undenklichen Kulturen hinüberdauernd in noch nicht gekommene Zeiten.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 11. 155. “Er hat keinen gebildet, den er nicht ein wenig aus den Angeln gehoben hätte in die Zukunft hinein.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 47. 156. Auguste Rodin, trans. Slager, 43. “Sie [die Gebärde] erwachte im Dunkel der ersten Zeiten und sie scheint, in ihrem Wachsen, durch die Weite dieses Werkes wie durch alle Jahrtausende zu gehen, weit über uns hinaus zu denen, die kommen werden.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 28. 157. Auguste Rodin, trans. Slager, 33. “Sie lebten für ewig das inbrünstige und ungestüme Leben jener Zeit, die sie hatte erstehen lassen.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 12. 158. Auguste Rodin, trans. Slager, 32. “Als ob es vor vielen hundert Jahren vergangen wäre.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 10. 159. Auguste Rodin, trans. Slager, 32.

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160. This resonates in turn with Rilke’s notion of life, “in which nothing has been lost or forgotten . . . in which everything is present and alive and nothing past.” Rilke, Rodin and Other Prose Pieces, 3–4. (Ein solches Leben, in dem alles gleichzeitig ist und wach und nichts vergangen. Auguste Rodin, 10.) I take the term “co-­realization” from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Heidegger and its discussion of time. 161. “Zeitlichkeit ist das ursprüngliche ‘Außer-­sich’ an und für sich selbst.” Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 329, emphasis in original. Although for Heidegger temporality is the manifestation of ecstasis as such, when he writes about the ecstases of time, unlike Rilke, he does not mean that temporality is the property of an object that demonstrates the object’s ecstasis but rather that past, present, and future are temporality’s ecstases. “Wir nennen daher . . . Zukunft, Gewesenheit, Gegenwart die Ekstasen der Zeitlichkeit. Sie ist nicht vordem ein Seiendes, das erst aus sich heraustritt, sondern ihr Wesen ist Zeitigung in der Einheit der Ekstasen.” Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 329. 162. “Die ursprüngliche Einheit der Sorgestruktur [where Sorgestruktur articulates the being of Dasein: “Die Sorge ist das Sein des Daseins”] liegt in der Zeitlichkeit.” Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 327. 163. Auguste Rodin, trans. Slager, 32. “Ein Leben das sich versammelte, da es verging.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 10. 164. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Ellen Frothingham (Boston: Little, Brown, 1910), 92. Rodin himself echoes Lessing when, in a 1911 interview, he asserts that “to express a movement in all its character and truth, it is important that it be at once the result of the successive moments that have preceded the moment that one has fixed, and that it announces the sensation of those that will follow.” Quoted in Sara Faith, “Rodin’s Relationship to Dance Explored in New Unashamedly Academic Courtauld Exhibition,” Artlyst (October 22, 2016). 165. Terence Renaud, “Risk, Miscarriage, and Exile: The Critical Hazards of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory” (2011), http://terencerenaud.com/selected-­writings/risk-­miscarriage -­and-­exile/#sthash.qGDBPxQ0.dpuf.

Chapter Four 1. Letter from Rainer Maria Rilke to Clara Rilke, October 15, 1907. Cited in Kurt Neff, ed., Vom Tanz: Ein Insel-­Buch (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1993), 98–100. 2. Cf. Gabriele Brandstetter, Tanz-­Lektüren: Körperbilder und Raumfiguren der Avantgarde (Freiburg: Rombach, 2013), 171, and on plastique animée in particular, 65–66, 76–77, 123, 157. 3. Most recently, the latter exhibited at the Courtauld Gallery in 2017 and the Musée Rodin in 2018. 4. I borrow the phrase “spatial envelope” from Juliet Bellow, “Beyond Movement: Auguste Rodin and the Dancers of his Time” in Rodin and Dance: The Essence of Movement, ed. Alexandra Gerstein (London: Courtauld Gallery and the Musée Rodin in association with Paul Holberton Publishing, 2016), 42. 5. “Und der ganze Körper verwendet, diesen äußersten Tanz im Gleichgewicht zu halten in der Luft, in der Atmosphäre des eigenen Leibes, im Gold einer östlichen Umgebung.” Rilke correspondence cited in Neff, Vom Tanz, 99. 6. Rudolf von Laban. Die Welt des Tänzers: Fünf Gedankenreigen (Stuttgart: Walter Seifert, 1920).

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7. Terms used throughout Rudolf von Laban, Choreutics, ed. Lisa Ullmann (Alton: Dance Books, 2011). 8. Tanzumkreis. Term used in Rudolf von Laban, Choreographie, (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1926), 11. 9. Laban, Choreutics, 114. 10. Evelyn Dörr, Rudolf Laban: The Dancer of the Crystal, (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008), 9–11. 11. Harold Bergsohn and Isa Partsch-­Bergsohn, The Makers of Modern Dance in Germany: Rudolf Laban, Mary Wigman, Kurt Jooss, (Hightstown, NJ: Princeton Book, 2003), 1. 12. Gabriele Brandstetter, “Intervalle: Raum, Zeit und Körper im Tanz des 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Zeit-­Räume: Zeiträume—Raumzeiten—Zeitträume, edited by Martin Bergelt and Hortensia Völckers, (Munich: C. Hanser, 1991), 271. According to Brandstetter, Laban’s merit is not so much as a pioneer dance practitioner or in the invention of a new dance style but rather in the ability to bundle the different currents of modern dance into a theoretical and pedagogical superstructure. 13. Susan Manning and Melissa Benson “Interrupted Continuities: Modern Dance in Germany,” Drama Review: TDR 30, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 34. 14. John Hodgson, Mastering Movement: The Life and Work of Rudolf Laban, (New York: Routledge, 2001), 25–26. 15. Hodgson, Mastering Movement, 26. 16. Hodgson, Mastering Movement, 38. 17. Hodgson, Mastering Movement, 38. 18. Hodgson, Mastering Movement 39–40. 19. Hodgson, Mastering Movement, 41. 20. Martin Green, Mountain of Truth: The Counterculture Begins, Ascona, 1900–1920, (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1986), 111. 21. There is a tendency in the literature on Laban to downplay his involvement with the Nazis. Scholars often write about his “naiveté” or claim that he was not sympathetic to the Nazi ideology but simply used his collaborations for the advancement of his own career. Interpretations that sound like excuses for his collaborations are remarkable in the literature. This is thematized, for instance, by Susanne Franco: “Over the last few decades, scholars have debated whether Laban’s involvement with the third Reich resulted from his commitment to the regime or from his dedication to keep working without fully agreeing with the regime’s political agenda.” Susanne Franco, “Rudolf Laban’s Dance Film Projects,” New German Dance Studies, ed. Susan Manning and Lucia Ruprecht (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 64. 22. Green, Mountain of Truth, 108. Green cites the dance issue of Junge Menschen from September 1923. This is a lionizing perspective that frequently survives in the critical literature on Laban today. 23. In New York, there is the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies, while London houses the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. 24. Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy, 99. 25. Hodgson, Mastering Movement, 3. 26. See the website of the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies, https:// labaninstitute.org/about/laban-­movement-­analysis/. 27. His movement notation method differed from other such methods in that it cap-

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tured not only dance movements but all types of bodily motion. Laban introduced this notation system at the Essen Dance Congress in 1928; however, it was only after he had been living in England for a while that training in this notation system began. Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy, 106. 28. Quoted in Geoffrey Winthrop-­Young, “Afterword: Bubbles and Webs: A Backdoor Stroll through the Readings of Uexküll,” in A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, by Jakob von Uexküll (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 216–17. 29. Laban had tenuous connections to Dada and the Bauhaus. We know that Laban’s students danced for the Dadaists at Cabaret Voltaire (Hodgson, Mastering Movement, xvi). The literature has already pointed out Laban’s connections to Dada in Zurich. See, for instance, Vera Maletic, Body, Space, Expression: The Development of Rudolf Laban’s Movement and Dance Concepts (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1987), 35. It is important to note that Oskar Schlemmer of course was similarly concerned with the status of space in dance (Space Dance) and the relation between figure and surrounding space. Schlemmer and Laban both served on the “organizing committee of the first German Dancer’s Congress (1927).” Maletic, Body, Space, Expression, 34. 30. Frédéric Pouillaude’s book Unworking Choreography: The Notion of the Work in Dance, trans. Anna Pakes, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), is one of these attempts alongside others mentioned by Pouillaude: Graham McFee’s The Philosophical Aesthetics of Dance: Identity, Performance, and Understanding, (Alton: Dance Books, 2011), and David Davies’s Philosophy of the Performing Arts (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2011). 31. Wassily Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst, (Bern-­Bümpliz: Benteli, 2013). 32. An exception is Frank Thiess, Der Tanz als Kunstwerk: Studien zu einer Ästhetik der Tanzkunst; Mit 24 Kupferdruckstafeln (Munich: Delphin, 1923). Also Stéphane Mallarmé’s and Paul Valéry’s writings on dance. 33. Laban was not a good writer or a rigorous thinker. There is general consensus in Laban scholarship that he was incapable of conveying his ideas coherently. See Franco, “Rudolf Laban’s Dance Film Projects,” 64; Hodgson, Mastering Movement, 25, 28–29, 31–32, 34, 56–57, 118–19, 122; Green, Mountain of Truth, 108. Laban’s method for writing The World of the Dancer consisted in spreading his notes and papers on the floor and then organizing them “by prodding them onto a stick with a nail at the end” (Hodgson, Mastering Movement, 118). Not surprisingly then, his book has been described as “a meandering collection of notes” rather than “a cogently argued theory of bodily expressivity.” Karl Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 101. His German, considered a “nightmare for most translators,” is, to use Hodgson’s apt description, “figurative and folkloric,” his prose frequently “turgid . . . and inexact.” Hodgson, Mastering Movement, 34. Hodgson notes that “even those books in English where, because of their layout, we might be led to expect coherent prose, are more easily appreciated when read as a further arrangement of ‘thought round’” (31). “The ideas are not necessarily presented sequentially and rarely is there a chain of reasoning. Often aphoristic, sometimes magpie-­like jottings, Laban’s approach is fragmentary, regularly indulging in generalizations of a philosophical nature. His writing rarely has the clear logic of standard prose. More often, what he pre­sents is abstract and stylized, indicating shapes, patterns and relationships. There is theme and variation rather than reasoning and proof ” (32).

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34. “Die . . . Gebärdenkräfte . . . geben dem normal biegsamen Menschen die Möglichkeit, alle Punkte einer fast kugelhaften Umraumform mit den Extremitäten . . . zu berühren.” Laban, Die Welt des Tänzers, 85. 35. Laban, Choreutics, 10. 36. Let me note a complication here. While we can distinguish these two meanings of choreic space—first as given potential kinesphere and second as created actual space form—Laban’s writing collapses them into a single term such as that of Körperumraum (Laban, Choreographie, 62) or Umraumform. Figure 4.4 above illustrates this overlap and simultaneity visually. “Space form” (Raumform, in Laban, Die Welt des Tänzers, 208) refers to the movement sphere as well as to the kinetic figures created by dance movements. Laban reinforces this idea of a dual spatial environment in dance when he writes that “the dancer’s sensation of space rests on two fundamental energies, that which radiates from the center outward and returns to it, and that which circles or undulates around it.” See Rudolf Laban, A Vision of Dynamic Space, ed. Lisa Ullmann (London: Falmer Press, 1984), 79. It must be noted that this compilation of excerpts from Laban’s writings, accompanying the reproductions of his drawings and space models in A Vision of Dynamic Space, is not systematic. It contains quotes from Laban’s Die Welt des Tänzers, from here and there, without giving citations. 37. Excerpts from Laban’s writings and notes from the archives. Reproduced in Laban, Vision of Dynamic Space, 55. 38. Laban, Vision of Dynamic Space Vision, 19. 39. Laban, Vision of Dynamic Space Vision, 55. 40. Laban, Vision of Dynamic Space, 11. Elizabeth Selden describes it as a “dance-­ filled space.” See: Elizabeth S. Selden, The Dancer’s Quest; Essays on the Aesthetic of the Contemporary Dance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1935), 62. 41. “Da stand ich . . . und warf die erste weitausladende Gebärde von mir ab.” Mary Wigman, Die Sprache des Tanzes (Munich: Ernst Battenberg, 1986), 49. 42. Wigman, Die Sprache des Tanzes, 12; English translation taken from Mary Wigman, The Language of Dance, trans. Walter Sorell (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1966), The NEH/Mellon Open Book Program, Dance Titles—Open Access Ebooks, 8, https://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/wespress_dance/8. 43. My argument about dance here is in contrast to Malika Maskarinec’s study of verticality in modernism in her book The Forces of Form in German Modernism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018). 44. “Wirkende Strahlungen,” writes Laban, “enströmen jedem Glied, jedem Schwung, jeder Eigenschaft des Körpers hinaus nach den unendlich vielen Richtungen.” Laban, Die Welt des Tänzers, 73. 45. For example, “Sie [Haare] sind Antennen unserer Aufnahmekraft für magnetische und andere Strömungen.” Laban, Die Welt des Tänzers, 89, or “Was hat nun den Gedanken von einem zum anderen getragen? Es ist wohl eine jener Strömungen die ständig zwischen Körper und Körper unterwegs sind” (21). 46. “Spiel der Atome und der allerkleinsten Teile, der Ionen und Elektronen, ist selbst—Gebärdenkraft.” Laban, Die Welt des Tänzers, 78. 47. Gilles Deleuze, “The Fold,” trans. Jonathan Strauss, Yale French Studies 80 (1991): 229. In fact, in his Choreutics, Laban makes this association between his dance theory and skirt dances explicit. See Laban, Choreutics, 46. 48. Ann Cooper Albright, Traces of Light: Absence and Presence in the Work of Loïe Fuller, (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007), xv.

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49. These are quotes from a lecture held by Carol Armstrong on Cézanne at Princeton University ca. Spring 2006. 50. As for instance, in art nouveau depictions of Loie Fuller. 51. Aby Warburg, 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), 141. 52. Isadora Duncan. Der Tanz der Zukunft (The Dance of the Future): Eine Vorlesung, trans. Karl Federn (Leipzig: E. Diederichs, 1903) 24–25. 53. Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 128. 54. Laban, Die Welt des Tänzers, 20 and 38. It is difficult to overlook the influence of Wilhelm Wundt in Laban’s statements. For more on Wundt and Laban, see Katharine Everett Gilbert, “Mind and Medium in the Modern Dance,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 1, no. 1 (Spring 1941): 106–29. 55. “Denken,” “Gefühl,” “Wollen, used throughout Laban’s Die Welt des Tänzers. 56. “Wohl ist es möglich ein Tanzgebärde mit fast verschwindender Gemüts- und Verstandesbetonung auszuführen, was wir dann eine mechanische, leere Geste nennen. Immer wird aber die Erregung auch mit aus dem Gemüt und dem Verstandesleben strömen.” Laban, Die Welt des Tänzers, 20. In her handwritten notes to Laban’s text, the philosopher Katharine Gilbert put this especially eloquently: while “the dancer learns the expressive content” of movements “by direct self-­feeling . . . he fuses his rhythm with that of the environment.” (These are handwritten remarks of Katharine Gilbert in her copy of Laban’s World of the Dancer. The Laban edition is inscribed with her name in the front and it contains her annotations throughout. I received this Gilbert-­owned Laban copy by accident through the library.) 57. Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 157. 58. To be sure, Darwin also implies that expression is unlimited in one sense when he writes about the emotional communication between mother and child. Communication clearly implies that the emotion is not enclosed within the body but rather can travel past it, establishing networks of intersubjectivity. See Katharine Gilbert, “Mind and Medium in the Modern Dance”: “The dancer, then, may be defined as the one who has the maximum power of exchanging meaning with the rest of the world. He might be named the communicant, per se” (118, emphasis in original). 59. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (New York: D. Appleton, 1899), 200, for the first two terms and 32 for the last one. 60. Darwin, Expression of the Emotions, 9. 61. Laban, Vision of Dynamic Space, 22. 62. Laban also cites other scientific intertexts concerned with the psychophysiology of movement such as Wundt’s Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie (Laban, Die Welt des Tänzers, 263). 63. Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 127–29. 64. Laban, Die Welt des Tänzers: “Die Form ist der Ausdruck des Geistes. . . . Geist und Form als getrennte Erscheinungen sind wirkungslose, larvenhafte Phantome” (218). For further evidence of affinities between Laban and Kandinsky, see Laban’s references to harmony and monism (31), “harmonic laws of form” (harmonische Formgesetze, 32), “crystal” and “artistic harmonies” (künstlerische Harmonien, 32). Note another sense of harmony as between gestures and interiority in the vein of Kandinsky (20, 24), as well as other language reminiscent of Kandinsky’s text, such as “spirit and form” (Geist

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und Form, 218) or “accords of gesture” (Gebärdenakkorde, 49), that sound like dancerly enactments of Kandinsky’s form harmonies. 65. Kandinsky uses the terms expression and exteriorization in a way that implies that artists can “stand outside” of themselves in their art. However, their exteriorization (Entäusserung) unleashes a flow of emotion (Seelenemotion) that once deposited into the artwork is then released to reach the viewer. Significantly, for Kandinsky the artworks, too, can stand outside of themselves insofar as they “stream,” “vibrate,” and “ripple forth” to the viewer. 66. Laban, Die Welt des Tänzers 20 and 77: “Der ganze Körper des Zuschauers bebt mit, ohne seine Stellung äusserlich wahrnehmbar zu verändern. Kleinste Teile in uns schwingen den gleichen Tanz, wie ihn der ganze Körper selbst stürzend schwingen würde. Unser ganzes Wesen wird erschüttert.” 67. Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 129. 68. “Geistig atmende[s] Subjekt.” Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 136. 69. “Ein Wesen mit eigenem Leben und daraus unvermeidlich fließender Wirkung. Der Mensch unterliegt fortwährend dieser psychischen Wirkung.” Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 79. 70. “Die äußere Umhüllung des tastbaren Körpers, die schleierartige, schillernde Haut ist wie der ganze Körper aus Plättchen, Säften und Spannungen gewebt. Dunstkreise verschiedener Art, Gerüche, magnetische Wellen, Lichtschwingungen, chemische Wellen, lufterschütternde Wärme und andere Strahlen reichen deutlich wahrnehmbar weit über jede Hautgrenze des Körpers hinaus.” Laban, Die Welt des Tänzers, 69. Compare also to Plato’s Timaeus—an important text for Laban—in which we read that “‘color’ . . . is a kind of flame that streams off bodies of various kinds and is composed of parts so proportioned to our sight as to yield sense perception.” Plato, Timaeus and Critias, ed. Thomas Kjeller Johansen (London: Penguin Classics, 2008), 63. 71. See Linda Dalrymple Henderson’s work such as “Editor’s Introduction: I. Writing Modern Art and Science—An Overview; II. Cubism, Futurism, and Ether Physics in the Early Twentieth Century,” Science in Context 17, no. 4 (2004): 423–66, as well as “Vibratory Modernism: Boccioni, Kupka, and the Ether of Space,” in From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature, edited by Bruce Clark and Linda Dalrymple Henderson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 126–49. 72. Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 15–16. Kandinsky mentions a “Materie . . . die unseren Sinnen nicht zugänglich ist.” Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 45. 73. Laban, Vision of Dynamic Space, 13. 74. Laban, Vision of Dynamic Space, 51. 75. Laban, Vision of Dynamic Space, 48. Also, “the dynamic structure of material existence as discovered by science today” (38), “the marvelous atom and molecular patterns of carbon compounds, or the starlike scintillations of electric currents during an electrolytic process, have all parallels in dance movements” (51) 76. Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 51n2. 77. Besides emotions, Baraduc also tried to visually grasp projections of thoughts, dreams, and more generally, of “soul.” For more on this, see Margareta Ingrid Christian, “Cameraless Photography and Its Imponderable Media,” History of Photography 42, no. 4 (2018): 319–37. Kandinsky owned some of Baraduc’s images; some critics go so far as to see in these occult photographic experiments early instances of abstraction.

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78. This quote is a reference to Laban’s praise of Duncan and her dances which were, in his words, “the expression of the life of her ‘soul.’” Laban quoted in Bergsohn and Partsch-­Bergsohn, Makers of Modern Dance, 4. 79. Monte Verità, where Laban set up his Schools of Art, was a place that contained seeds of the later environmentalist movement. Whereas the slogan of living in harmony with nature was central to cultural movements—such as the neo-­Romantic youth group of the Wandervögel, left-­wing, alternative life communities, as well as völkisch settlements—the idea of dance embodying the movement harmonies within nature was central to Laban’s choreutics and frequently enacted in literal dances in nature in Ascona. 80. Green, Mountain of Truth, 96. 81. Just had also founded the health resort Jungborn, whose most famous patient was Kafka. Green, Mountain of Truth, 123. 82. Laban, Choreutics, 10. 83. As Karl Wolfskehl writes in his essay “Air of Life,” an essay that affected Benjamin’s aura concept, which was in turn also influenced by Kabbalah. English translation of Wolfskehl quoted by Antonio Somaini, “Walter Benjamin’s Media Theory: The Medium and the Apparat,” Grey Room 62 (Winter 2016): 23. 84. The latter articulated, for instance, in Ludwig Klages’s early ecological manifesto “Mensch und Erde” (1913). See Jan Robert Weber, “‘Mensch und Erde’: Das vergessene Manifest der Ökologie,” afterword to Ludwig Klages, Mensch und Erde: Ein Denkanstoß (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2013), 35–61. 85. Carole Kew, “From Weimar Movement Choir to Nazi Community Dance: The Rise and Fall of Rudolf Laban’s ‘Festkultur,’” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 17, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 73–96. On Laban’s movement choirs, see also Antja Kennedy, “Labans Bewegungschöre im Zeichen der Nationalsozialisten,” Tanz‑ wissenschaft online (2018): 1–10, https://www.deutsches-­tanzarchiv.de/fileadmin/user _upload/www.tanzarchiv-­koeln.de/Tanzwissenschaft_online/Ausgaben_der_Zeit schrift_TANZWISSENSCHAFT/Bewegungscho__re_im_Zeichen_der_National sozialisten.pdf. 86. Colin Counsell, “Dancing to Utopia: Modernity, Community and the Movement Choir.” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 22, no. 2 (2004): 156. 87. See Lucia Ruprecht, Gestural Imaginaries: Dance and Cultural Theory in the Early Twentieth Century, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 74–76. 88. See Gernot Böhme, Atmosphäre: Essays zur neuen Ästhetik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995). Translated into English as Aesthetics of Atmospheres (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). 89. It should be noted here that as Counsell observes, initially, “choir works were to have no audience . . . [they] were envisioned as an end in themselves, an experience for those taking part.” (Counsell, “Dancing to Utopia,” 154.) However, this initial aim was lost in Nazi community dances with mass audiences. 90. Laban quoted in Kew, “From Weimar Movement Choir to Nazi Community Dance,” 78. Kew argues that Laban’s concept of movement choirs fits into the völkisch ideology, yet also diverged from the Nazi propaganda program in that “Laban’s project was essentially cultural rather than political” (83). 91. Emily Apter, Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse, and the Impolitic. (London: Verso 2018), pt. 3, “Political Fictions,” sec. “Milieu,” n. 46. 92. Merce Cunningham, “Space, Time, and Dance,” Trans/Formations 1 (1952):

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150–51. https://www.mercecunningham.org/the-­work/writings/space-­time-­and -­dance/. 93. For example, Max Scheler, Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos, Darmstadt: Reichl, 1928. 94. Laban is of course echoing Duncan’s The Dance of the Future. The German original reads “Ja, im ganzen Leben, in allem Sein ist Tanz: Tanz der Gestirne, Tanz der Naturgewalten, Tanz der menschlichen Handlungen und Gefühle, Tanz der Kulturen, Tanz der Künste.” Laban, Die Welt des Tänzers, 158, and: “All being is movement. All action is dance” (Alles Sein ist Bewegung. Alles Handeln ist Tanz) (217). 95. For Laban, Vision of Dynamic Space, dance epitomized the “stream of life” (41) with its “flux of appearances” and “the dizzy-­making flux of happenings, in the eternal whirl of events” (21). Insofar as dance can materialize ontological fluidity without transposing it into an immutable form, it captures the substance of the world, which is caught in a constant state of unfolding, in which everything, to quote Bruno Schulz, “diffuses beyond its borders, remains in a given shape only momentarily, leaving this shape behind at the first opportunity.” Bruno Schulz, “An Essay for S. I. Witkiewicz: Afterword to Kafka’s The Trial,” trans. Walter Arndt, in Four Decades of Polish Essays, ed. Jan Kott (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990), 108. See Bruno Schulz’s story “Spring.” The state of becoming is in contrast to the immutability of the written text that the author fears cannot live up to the lack of finality within an ever-­changing reality in flux. Bruno Schulz, The Complete Fiction of Bruno Schulz, trans. Celina Wieniewska. (New York: Walker, 1989). 96. Plato, Timaeus and Critias, 116n29. 97. “The account of the cosmic soul and body occupies Timaeus . . . after which the exposition turns to the composition of the human soul and body, which is itself modelled on that of the cosmic soul and body. One might say, therefore, that Timaeus’ entire cosmology is in fact biology.” Plato, Timaeus and Critias, xxiv. 98. Leo Spitzer’s work is helpful in showing us the common denominator of “harmony” across such disparate fields: it is no coincidence that after his study on “Milieu and Ambience” (1942) Spitzer also wrote a book on the history of Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony (1963) for in the concept of harmony, Spitzer could continue to investigate the relation between living beings and their environment just as he did in his essay on the historical semantics of milieu. Whereas Spitzer begins his study of “milieu” by drawing on “the idea of an inexpressible harmony between men, things, and situations” (Leo Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambiance: An Essay in Historical Semantics.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 3, no. 1 [September 1942]: 1), in his later study on harmony, he thematizes the attunement between the human and the world soul, the “fusion of individual beings with the whole.” Leo Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony: Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word “Stimmung,” ed. Anna Granville Hatcher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963), 128. Spitzer’s two studies illustrate how classical understandings of harmony could be instrumentalized for protoecological discourses of milieu concerned, in Haeckel’s words, with “the relationship between the organism and its surrounding external world” (Unter Oecologie verstehen wir die gesamte Wissenschaft von den Beziehungen des Organismus zur umgebenden Außenwelt). Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen: Allgemeine Grundzüge der organischen Formen-­wissenschaft (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1866), 2:286. 99. Spitzer points out that in Old French, milieu “was regularly to be found in an

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exclusively ‘middle’ meaning (en milieu del prel)—which seems likewise to have been true of its Latin etymon medius locus.” Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambiance,” 169. 100. Georges Canguilhem, “The Living and Its Milieu,” trans. by John Savage, Grey Room 3 (Spring 2001): 24–25. 101. Canguilhem, “Living and Its Milieu,” 11. 102. Canguilhem, “Living and Its Milieu,” 11. 103. Laban, Die Welt des Tänzers, 85. 104. Canguilhem, “Living and Its Milieu,” 11. 105. While the circle is a privileged form in Laban’s dance aesthetics, his later works claim that among the rhythmic spatial figures, the twenty-­faced crystal, the icosahedron, is the ideal space form because that can best enclose all possible movements. 106. In this sense, Vera Maletic writes that “Laban distinguishes the space in general, the infinite space, from the ‘reach space’ immediately surrounding the body—the kinesphere.” Quoted in Lynn Matluck Brooks, “Harmony in Space: A Perspective on the Work of Rudolf Laban,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 27, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 34. 107. Laban, Die Welt des Tänzers, 101. 108. Laban, Die Welt des Tänzers, 102. 109. Gilbert, “Mind and Medium in the Modern Dance,” 114. 110. Jakob von Uexküll, “Die Merkwelten der Tiere.” Deutsche Revue 37 (1912): 352. Uexküll writes, “Ich habe es versucht für diese Welt, die das Produkt des Organismus ist, das Wort ‘Umwelt’ einzuführen. Das Wort hat sich schnell eingebürgert—der Begriff aber nicht. Es wird jetzt das Wort Umwelt für die spezielle Umgebung eines Lebewesens in dem gleichen Sinne wie früher das Wort ‘Milieu’ angewendet. Dadurch ist ihm sein eigentlicher Sinn verloren gegangen.” 111. Canguilhem, “Living and Its Milieu,” 19. 112. Canguilhem, “Living and Its Milieu,” 19. 113. “Der Einzeltanz ist ein Duett zwischen Tänzer und Umwelt, oder Tänzer und Innenwelt.” Laban, Die Welt des Tänzers, 210. My emphases. 114. Jakob von Uexküll, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere (Berlin: Springer, 1909). 115. August Schmarsow, Das Wesen der architektonischen Schöpfung (Leipzig: Karl W. Hiersemann, 1894). 116. “Dem Tänzer sind Raum und Raumgebilde ebenso wie Zeit und Krafterscheinung konkrete Einheiten, die von der Gebärdenkraft dauernd neu gestaltet werden.” Laban, Die Welt des Tänzers, 56. 117. “Raumgestalterin.” Schmarsow, Das Wesen der architektonischen Schöpfung, 11. Schmarsow conceives of architecture as a producer of space in the sense that inner architectural space is not a mere contingency of external design; rather, it is built and modeled purposefully. Space is no longer a mere derivative of a building’s external form, the accidental by-­product of its exterior appearance. Instead, Schmarsow underlines the construction of space as such. He argues that the starting point for architectural “space creation” is the body’s relation to space. Henry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, eds., Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics 1873–1893, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994), 57. See Laban: “‘Raum ist das Produkt des unendlich wechselnden Kristalles aller Gebärden.” Laban, Die Welt des Tänzers, 56. 118. In Schmarsow’s original, “Raumgebilde,” “Raumkörper,” and “Raumform.” Schmarsow, Das Wesen der architektonischen Schöpfung, 16, 21, 17 respectively. One

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can differentiate in Schmarsow’s text three categories of form: thus, he differentiates between form as “ornament,” form as a spatial construct (“Raumform”), and form as a Kantian pure form of intuition, or “Anschauungsform.” For Schmarsow, this latter “inner form” determines the architectural shaping of space to the same extent that sensory experience does. While architectural Raumform reenacts the pure forms of mathematics, it also incorporates the sensory experience of space: “Die starre reine Form allein wäre bei aller ausgesprochenen Vorliebe für Gesetzmäßigkeit und Regel dem Menschen auf die Dauer als seine tägliche Umschließung ein unerträglicher Zwang. Sie muß sich durchdringen mit Leben von seinem Leben.” Schmarsow claims that architectural space form must come alive in the sense that it must become a self-­sufficient, self-­ enclosed being with its own internal laws and drives—an “organism.” 119. See, for instance, “Raumform,” in Laban, Die Welt des Tänzers, 208. Laban did not regard the mutability of forms in dance as a challenge to dance’s plastic drive. Indeed, it is the dissolution of this very antinomy between movement and form that animates his thinking about dance, including his attempt to think of dance in terms of spatiocorporeal forms and his desire to capture these in a notation system. 120. Siegfried Ebeling, Space as Membrane, ed. Spyros Papapetros and trans. Pamela Johnston and Anna Kathryn Schoefert (London: Architectural Association London, 2010). 121. Siegfried Ebeling, Der Raum als Membran (Dessau: C. Dünnhaupt, 1926): 8 (“Raumgestaltung”), 12 (“Raumform”), 14, 20 (“Raumspannung”), 20 (“Kristall”), 24 (“Raumdynamik”), 25 (“Raumkörper”). 122. Ebeling, Space as Membrane, xv. 123. Ebeling’s argument, to be sure, is complex, and not straightforward. On the one hand, he argues that houses, through “the ‘breathing’ wall-­skin,” expose the inhabitant too much to external factors, significantly, however, to psychological factors. Ebeling, Space as Membrane, 8. Here, Ebeling has in mind the weather sensitive, for whom architectural encasings do not sufficiently ward off climatic psychosomatics. Furthermore, instead of space being a psychological factor in dwelling, Ebeling would like it to be a nonfactor (thus, presumably unlike Wölfflin’s psychology of form). He would like the house to act as a domain of isolation for the inhabitant, a domain in which one, free of external influences and suggestions (of the external environment as well as the internal psychology of spatial form), can develop autonomously, for oneself “zu einem eigenständigen Fürsichsein” (Ebeling, Der Raum als Membran, 11). Ebeling thus envisions a self-­sustaining house—“Dieses bedeutet nichts weniger als: das Haus selbst als seine eigene Energiequelle aufzufassen und anzulegen” (Ebeling, Der Raum als Membran 15)—and freeing humans of the “terrible” factor of “climate.” However, in order to shield the inhabitant from the climatic environment and its effects on him, the space must adjust to the specific environment, it must be in sync with it, it must be a “climatologically differentiated architecture” (Ebeling, Der Raum als Membran, 18)—­paradoxically however, in order to better neutralize it. The oneness of architectural space and natural milieu serves to reinforce the independence of the inhabitant from the natural milieu. The accord between house and environment enables the self-­containment of the dweller. Ebeling wants space in architecture to function as a “biologically determined membrane” (Ebeling, Der Raum als Membran, 19) between our body and the spheres. Ebeling’s meaning is far from intuitive, for he understands “space as membrane” not as a domain that enables the permeability between dweller and external space but rather as a skin of protection and regulation that neutralizes the effects of the environment on

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the individual even as it is itself adapted to these effects. Space as membrane is meant to turn space into a neutralizer of the effects of the climatic milieu just as our skin protects us from external intrusions and ensures our self-­enclosure. Space as membrane is meant to help us keep the environment at bay; however, it does that by being precisely a space that adjusts to the environment, that is sensitive and reactive to environmental factors. 124. Ebeling, Space as Membrane, 18. 125. Colin Counsell, “The Kinesis of Infinity: Laban, Geometry and the Metaphysics of Dancing Space.” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 24, no. 2 (January 2008): 109. 126. See Gerhard Wolf, “EXSTASIS e protoplasma: Dentro e oltre il disegno secondo Sergej M. Ejzenstejn,” in Ejzenstejn: La rivoluzione delle immagini, ed. M. Faietti, P. Nardoni, and E. Schmidt (Florence: Giunti Editore, 2018), 75–97. 127. At the end of The World of the Dancer, Laban includes in his “sources” a section titled “About crystallography and harmony” and lists Viktor Moritz Goldschmidt’s Über Harmonie und Complication (1901). In addition, musical harmonics were of course also important for Laban’s thinking about harmony in dance. 128. Laban mentions the physicist Otto Lehmann, who wrote Flüssige Krystalle (Liquid crystals, 1904) and Die scheinbar lebenden Krystalle (The seemingly living crystals, 1907) in conjunction with Haeckel. 129. Indeed, Francé and his book Die Pflanze als Erfinder had an effect on several Bauhaus figures beyond Ebeling, such as Moholy-­Nagy and Mies van der Rohe. Detlef Mertins, “Where Architecture Meets Biology: An Interview with Detlef Mertins” (2007), PennDesign Departmental Papers (Architecture) 7 (http://repository.upenn .edu/arch_papers/7), as well as Oliver Botar, “The Origins of Laszlo Moholy-­Nagy’s Biocentric Constructivism,” in Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond, ed. Eduardo Kac (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 315–44: “Francé’s article [a chapter of his book Die Pflanze als Erfinder, published in the art journal Das Kunstblatt] caused a minor sensation among members of the constructivist circle in Berlin; responses to it can be found in the writing and thinking of Moholy-­Nagy . . . , Lazar El Lissitzky, Mies van der Rohe, Raoul Hausmann, and the Hungarian critic Erno Kallai” (315).See also Botar, for instance, “Biocentrism and the Bauhaus,” Structurist 43/44 (2003/2004): 54. Botar describes Francé as a founder of soil ecology. 130. Raoul Heinrich Francé, Die Pflanze als Erfinder (Stuttgart: Kosmos, 1920); Die technischen Leistungen der Pflanzen (Leipzig: Veit, 1919). 131. Francé’s notion of harmony, while it perpetuates classical notions of an organism’s locus naturalis, also incorporates the more recent notion of biological “selection.” 132. Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 31. According to Rabinow, what aided this conceptual modification of milieu—from affinity to conflict between organism and habitat— was a concrete event, namely, the 1832 cholera epidemic in Paris. 133. Rabinow, French Modern, 31. With Lamarck, however, milieu became a “foreign environment” governing the organism from the outside. 134. See Ebeling’s idea of the “parapsycho-­logical interconnectedness of all creatures on earth” or, going further back, to Riegl’s notion of an organism as a “collective being” connected to others. Yet where Ebeling and Riegl are at pains to protect the self-­ contained form from various iterations of intrusive interconnectedness, Laban is eager to sustain that the choreic form is open to the outside; in his words, that the body “pulsates” and “radiates” forth into space: “Das stetige Pulsieren des Körpers pflanzt sich

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wellenförmig rundum durch die Welt hin fort. Er strahlt seinen Eigenpuls oder die sich an ihm brechenden Wellen des fremden Pulses in den Raum. Das räumlich . . . schwingende Pulsieren.” Laban, Die Welt des Tänzers, 52.

Coda 1. Klaus Städtke, “Form,” in Ästhetische Grundbegriffe: Historisches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden, ed. Karlheinz Barck, Martin Fontius, Friedrich Wolfzettel, Burkhart Steinwachs (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001), 2:463: “as a rule, form implies a distinction” (Form [bedeutet] in der Regel eine Unterscheidung). 2. “Atmosphere,” writes Luhmann, “is always what the individual objects that occupy places are not, the other side of their form, what perishes along with them.” Luhmann quoted in Christian Borch, “Spatiality, Imitation, Immunization: Luhmann and Sloterdijk on the Social,” Luhmann Observed: Radical Theoretical Encounters, ed. Anders La Cour and Andreas Philippopoulos-­Mihalopoulos (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 156. See also Martina Löw on Luhmann in Martina Löw, The Sociology of Space: Materiality, Social Structures, and Action, trans. Donald Goodwin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 121. 3. Alois Riegl, Die spätrömische Kunst-­Industrie nach den Funden in Österreich-­Ungarn (Vienna: Kaiserlich-­Königliche Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, 1901; reprint, Paderborn: Aischines, 2014), 210. 4. The form potential of late Roman space pointed forward to a time when space became an aesthetic object on its own terms in the history of art; this time finds its highpoint in Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro and its excess in impressionism’s atmosphere. 5. “Umraumform.” Rudolf von Laban, Die Welt des Tänzers, Fünf Gedankenreigen (Stuttgart: Walter Seifert, 1920), 85. 6. I borrow the phrase “plastic existence” from Yve-­Alain Bois, “The Sculptural Opaque,” Sub-­Stance 31 (1981): 27. 7. Camillo Sitte, Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen, 4th ed. (Vienna, 1909; reprint, Basel: Birkhäuser, 2015). 8. August Schmarsow, Das Wesen der architektonischen Schöpfung, (Leipzig: Karl W. Hiersemann, 1894). 9. I borrow this phrase from Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, eds., Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics 1873–1893, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994), 12. 10. Laban writes that dancers are “representations of the crystallization phenomena perceivable throughout nature” (Abbilder der überall in der Natur wahrnehmbaren geometrischen Kristallisationserscheinungen). Laban, Die Welt des Tänzers, 69–70. We might ask how one can reconcile Laban’s interest in crystalline forms—associated with petrified shapes and permanent figures—with the motility of dance. One way to understand this duality of fluidity and rigidity is by invoking the model of so-­called fluid crystals—a crystallographic model that Laban references explicitly in The World of the Dancer. First described by the chemist and botanist Friedrich Reinitzer in 1888 and later theorized by Otto Lehmann in his book Fluid Crystals (Flüssige Kristalle) in 1904, fluid crystals designate substances that when molten flow “directedly”; in other words, their movement follows a direction and establishes shapes. Fluid crystals illustrate that the flow of movement is not necessarily diffuse and directionless; instead, it can be endowed

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with form. Laban’s conceptualization of movement forms in dance recalls Lehmann’s investigation of movement morphology in crystals. Lehmann detected in the growth of crystals morphological tendencies rather than just formless expansion. Crystals, Lehmann argues, are unlike amorphous bodies in that they manifest a Wachstumsrichtung— a direction of growth. Laban invokes fluid crystals explicitly in his book, and he transfers their directional movement onto dance, which thus becomes a series of movements with a specific direction rather than aimless animation. 11. Laban’s particular “crystallographic monism” is in line with the one developed by Viktor Moritz Goldschmidt, who sought analogous crystalline forms in music and nature. Laban, Die Welt des Tänzers, 36. Additionally, Laban’s interest in forms of movement also goes back to his interest in eurythmics—both the discipline founded by Émile Jaques-­Dalcroze and the variant invented by Rudolf Steiner (via Goethe). The bewegte Klang form of eurythmics is transposed by Laban into a Raumgestalt. Ewald Koepke, Goethe, Schiller und die Anthroposophie: Das Geheimnis der Ergänzung (Stuttgart: Freies Geistesleben, 2002), 207. Laban, who was concerned with the emancipation of dance from the tutelage of music, transfers music’s ability to create Klanggestalt into dance’s capacity to give rise to Raumgestalt. (I borrow these terms from Koepke.) Chladni’s figures in acoustics might also have played a role in Laban’s conceptualization. 12. For example, in the writings of Riegl, Worringer, but also others. See Spyros Papapetros, On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Regine Prange, Das Kristalline als Kunstsymbol: Bruno Taut und Paul Klee; Zur Reflexion des Abstrakten in Kunst und Kunsttheorie der Moderne. (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1991) as well as Claudia Öhlschläger’s introduction to Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung: Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie, ed. Helga Grebing (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2007). 13. Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung. 14. Whereas Worringer’s text praises “abstract geometrical forms,” “geometric, crystalline regularity,” and the “rigid world of the crystalline-­geometric” (abstrakt-­ geometrisch[e] Formen, 97; geometrisch-­kristallinisch[e] Gesetzmässigkeit, 102; starr[e] Welt des Kristallinisch-­Geometrischen, 104), Laban’s writings describe the “crystalline tension” (Laban, Die Welt des Tänzers, 160) created by the dancer flexing and relaxing his limbs; his production of a “gestural crystal” (Gebärdenkristall, 56) and the ensuing “dance-­crystal” (73). 15. On Worringer in the above context, see Papapetros, On the Animation of the Inorganic, 228–29. 16. Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung, 102. 17. Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung, 104. 18. “Diese abstrakten gesetzmässigen Formen sind also die einzigen und die höchsten, in denen der Mensch angesichts der ungeheuren Verworrenheit des Weltbildes ausruhen kann.” Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung, 85. 19. As mentioned above, it is his interest in the phenomenon of fluid crystals that allows him to conjoin the crystalline with the dynamic. (Incidentally, Worringer, too, was interested in fluid crystals.) 20. “Geometrisch-­kristallinisch[e] Gesetzmässigkeit.” Worringer Abstraktion und Einfühlung, 102. 21. “Lebensverneinend[e] Form.” Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung, 18. 22. See Öhlschläger’s introduction to Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung, 17. In On the Animation of the Inorganic, Papapetros argues that there are traces of animation

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in Worringer’s lifeless ornaments and abstract shapes. He shows that even Worringer’s seemingly crystalline rigid forms—even if not outwardly moving—are animated from within. 23. “Der Raum . . . [ist] der grösste Feind alles abstrahierenden Bemühens.” Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung, 100. 24. “Menschlich[e] Raumkristall[e].” Laban, Die Welt des Tänzers, 73. 25. Umberto Boccioni, “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture,” in Modern Artists on Art: Ten Unabridged Essays, edited by Robert L. Herbert (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1964), 51. 26. Crétien van Campen, “Early Abstract Art and Experimental Gestalt Psychology,” Leonardo 30, no. 2 (1997): 134. 27. Riegl, Die spätrömische Kunst-­Industrie, 214. 28. Fritz Heider, Ding und Medium (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2005).

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Torso Apollos”; Rilke), 84–90, 91, 92– 93, 96, 102, 189n84, 190n88 architecture: Bauhaus, 138, 207n129; space and, 137–39, 144, 205–6nn117–18, 206–7n123 Arch of Constantine, 54–55, 55–56 Arch of Titus, 62–63, 63, 66 Aristotle, 1, 11, 40 artworks: aura, 16, 18–19, 21–22, 75, 102; autonomy, 10–11, 12, 22, 64–65, 73, 82; boundaries with viewers, 23; cultural context, 67, 68–69; extravagation, 2, 13; materiality, 6; in museums, 3–4, 18, 19–20, 160n87; as organisms, 10–12, 51, 53, 83; as products of milieu, 17–18; self-­enclosure, 9, 11, 51, 68, 71–72, 74– 75, 88, 97, 103; siteless, 18–19, 160n87; space within, 7–8, 83–84; viewers, 84, 88. See also paintings; sculpture artworks and air: air surrounding (milieu), 15, 16, 17, 21–22; in art writing, 1; Kandinsky on, 115, 127; Rilke on, 1, 13, 72– 73, 83, 104–5; Warburg on, 13, 27–28, 29–30, 31–34, 35–40, 43, 94–95. See also air; Luftraum artworks and environment: assimilation of milieu, 94–96; continuity, 1, 6–8, 12–13, 21–22, 23, 147, 148; emanations, 16; Heidegger on, 101–2; Rilke on, 73– 74, 83–84, 88–90, 91, 93, 94, 97–105,

abstraction, 45, 115, 146–47, 202n77 aesthetic metabolism, 83, 84, 93, 99 aesthetics: empathy, 6, 23–24; environmental, 1; positivist, 67–68, 69, 73; ­science and, 12 aesthetic will. See Kunstwollen Agamben, Giorgio, 76 agoraphobia, 44, 169n2 air: as environment, 17; material spaces of, 2, 6, 13–17; medical views of, 16–17, 36, 159nn73–74; as medium, 5–6, 14, 17, 148, 159n71; in Renaissance culture, 43. See also anima; artworks and air; atmosphere; Luftraum; milieu; space; wind air space. See Luftraum Albright, Ann Cooper, 119–20 Anaximenes, 15 ancient art: Egyptian, 55, 57; Riegl on, 45– 46. See also Greece; Rome Andreas-­Salomé, Lou, 86–88, 183n17 anima, 127, 129 anima Fiorentina, 27, 28, 34–35 Apollo: “Early Apollo” (“Früher Apollo”; Rilke), 84, 91–93; Torso of Miletos, 85– 86, 87, 88–90, 91, 97. See also “Archaic Torso of Apollo” Apter, Emily, 133 Ara Pacis: The Fertile Earth, 26 “Archaic Torso of Apollo” (“Archaischer

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artworks and environment (continued) 103–5, 109; sculpture, 78–79, 80–81, 82, 103–5. See also atmosphere; aura; milieu; Umwelt; wind atmosphere: of artworks, 127; of Florence, 162–63n8; as form unbounded, 143; Kandinsky on, 127, 129; Laban on, 127–29; in paintings, 78, 143; of Rodin’s sculptures, 7, 15, 16, 71–75, 78, 84, 93, 103–4; Warburg on Stimmung, 34–36. See also air; wind Augustine, Saint, 53, 147 aura: of artworks, 16, 18–19, 21–22, 75, 102; Benjamin on, 9, 10, 20, 21, 23, 160n87, 160n89, 161nn93–94, 189n84, 193–94n129; meanings, 20–21; in photographs, 23 aurai (nymphs of the breezes), 21, 25–27 Bachelard, Gaston, 2, 14, 167n67 Baggesen, Jens Immanuel, 48 ballet, 117. See also dance Baraduc, Hippolyte, 129, 202n77 Baudelaire, Charles, 2, 106 Bauhaus, 138, 199n29, 207n129 Beckett, Samuel Joshua, [Loie Fuller Dancing], 120 Belting, Hans, 153n7 Benjamin, Walter: Arcades Project, 34; on aura, 9, 10, 20, 21, 23, 160n87, 160n89, 161nn93–94, 189n84, 193–94n129; reception, 30; on siteless artworks, 18 Benson, Donald R., 157n50 Bertillon, Louis-­Adolphe, 50 Binswanger, Ludwig, 137 biology: botany, 139, 141–42; cell, 12, 50; climate theories, 49; harmony concept, 141–42; lifeworld, 58, 137, 138; monist, 133; physiology, 33, 43; psychophysiology, 201n62; in Riegl’s work, 50–51; Rilke’s interest in, 79–81. See also aesthetic metabolism; ecology; evolution; organisms; science; Uexküll, Jacob von biomechanism, 12, 50. See also mechanistic Birth of Venus, The (Botticelli), 27, 27, 31– 32, 37–38, 41, 125

Boccioni, Umberto, 15, 78–79, 147 bodies: emanations, 16, 159n69; Heideg­ ger on, 12; movements as emotional expressions, 41–42, 124–26; movement theory, 114; Vitruvian harmony, 133, 134, 138, 141. See also dance; dancers Bois, Yve-­Alain, 190n88, 208n6 Bölsche, Wilhelm, 79 Botticelli, Sandro: The Birth of Venus, 27, 27, 31–32, 37–38, 41, 125; cultural environment, 27, 34–35, 36, 37–40; inspirers, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31–33, 34–35, 39–40, 41, 168n89; Spring (Primavera), 31, 32, 32, 37–38, 41, 125; windblown accessories in paintings, 27, 32, 34, 35, 37–40, 41, 43–44, 94–95, 120–22. See also Warburg, Aby, on Botticelli Brâncuşi, Constantin, 78 Brandstetter, Gabriele, 192n105–6, 197n2, 198n12 Braque, Georges, 147 breathing, 93, 99. See also Inspirator; respiración Breysig, Kurt, 185n32 British Ministry of Defense, 114 Burckhardt, Jacob, 31, 40, 48 Cambodian dancers, Rodin’s drawings of, 110, 111, 133 Canguilhem, Georges, 12–13, 37, 61, 79, 81, 134–35, 137 Cézanne, Paul, 1, 105, 120, 147 Charcot, Jean-­Martin, 129 choreic space, 117, 119, 134, 137, 200n36 choreography. See dance classical ballet, 117 classical culture, 29, 35, 41. See also ancient art; Greece; Rome climate, 34, 37, 49, 102, 206n123; climate theories, 49; climate therapy, 129–30 Cohen, Hermann, 170n8 Comte, Auguste, 14, 37 Connor, Steven, 75, 124, 159n69 Constable, John, 78 cosmology, 133, 134, 141 Counsell, Colin, 141, 203n89 crystals, 113, 141, 144–47, 207nn127–28, 208–9nn10–11, 209n19

I n d e x  › 233

cubischer Raum (cubic space), 54, 55–58 cubism, 8, 143, 147 cultural milieu, 17–18, 25–27, 34–35, 36, 37–40 culture: as environment of artworks, 19; evolutionary-­biological view of, 29. See also classical culture; Renaissance culture Cunningham, Merce, 133 Dada, 199n29 dance: classical ballet, 117; emotional expression in, 124; expressionist, 113, 115, 126, 133; Laban Schools, 114; modern, 113–14, 117; open-­air performances, 8, 129, 131, 132; Rodin’s interest in, 110; Royal Ballet of Cambodia, 110. See also Laban, Rudolf dancers: Cambodian, 110, 111, 133; conti­ nuity of bodies and space, 8, 133; cos‑ tumes, 119–20, 129. See also Duncan, Isadora; Fuller, Loie; Laban, Rudolf, on space around dancers Darwin, Charles: The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 33, 41, 124–26, 201n58; On the Origin of Species, 9; Pauly’s lectures on, 80; theory of evolution, 9, 12, 48, 73, 113, 141 Daseinsbezirk (domain of being), 9 Deleuze, Gilles, 8, 22, 89, 102, 194n135 de Man, Paul, 88, 183n13, 189n13 Descartes, René, 14, 60 Diderot, Denis, 23 Didi-­Huberman, Georges, 31, 43, 158n65 Doug Wheeler: PSAD Synthetic Desert III, 19, 20 Duchamp, Marcel, 79 Duncan, Isadora: on dance, 122; Kandin­ sky on, 127; performances, 110, 113, 119, 129, 130, 131 Durkheim, Émile, 17, 41 Dutch group portraits: Group Portrait of the Amsterdam Shooting Corporation (Jacobsz), 4–5, 4; The Group Portraiture of Holland (Riegl), 4–6, 12, 22, 59–61, 64–66, 71; internal and external unity, 5, 65–66; psychological relations

among subjects, 5, 65; spatiality, 59. See also Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild “Early Apollo” (“Früher Apollo”; Rilke), 84, 91–93 Ebeling, Siegfried, Space as Membrane (Der Raum als Membran), 138–39, 139, 140, 141, 206–7n123 ecology, 12, 51, 130–31, 133 ecstasis: air as medium for, 5–6, 17; of artworks, 1, 3–4, 15, 17, 22–23, 66; ecstasy, 2, 7, 13, 22; Heidegger on, 6–7, 106–7, 197n161; self-­enclosure and, 97; temporal, 6–7, 105–9, 195–96n147 Egyptian art, 55, 57 Eisenstein, Sergei, 141 Elsner, Jaś, 179n126, 181n138 electromagnetism, 13, 15–16, 117–19 empathy aesthetics, 6, 23–24 environment. See artworks and environment; atmosphere; ecology; milieu; Umgebung; Umraum; Umwelt environmental aesthetics, 1 Erregung (irritability), 32, 38–39 ether, 13, 14, 16, 60–61, 105, 128, 157n50, 157n52, 157n55 eurythmics, 209n11 evolution: cultural, 29; Darwinian, 9, 12, 48, 73, 113, 141; Lamarckian, 50, 73; Pauly on, 80 expressionism, 113, 115, 126, 133. See also dance extravagation of artworks, 2, 13 Faure, Élie, 62, 63, 177n105 Feuerhahn, Wolf, 79 figure and ground, 8, 69, 120, 142, 143, 147–48 Fischer, Luke, 184n21 Florence: atmosphere, 162–63n8; Michelangelo’s David, 18; Renaissance culture, 25–27, 31, 34–35, 39, 43; Santa Maria Novella, Ghirlandaio fresco, 25– 27, 26, 162n2; Warburg in, 31, 162–63n8 fluids. See air; atmosphere; ether form: atmosphere and, 53–54, 143–44; bounded and unbounded, 6, 10, 22, 47, 51, 54, 67, 71, 84, 88, 128, 143;

234 ‹ I n d e x

form (continued) mesologies of, 10–13; organic, 6, 11, 12, 156n40, 51, 53; saturation, 73, 83, 84, 98–99, 102; study of, 67. See also abstraction; artworks Francé, Raoul Heinrich, 133, 141, 207n129 Freud, Sigmund, 77, 102, 103 Fuller, Loie, 120; influence, 113; Miss Loie Fuller (Toulouse-­Lautrec), 124; patent for serpentine dance costume, 123; performances, 110, 119–20 futurism, 78–79, 147 Gass, William H., 195n142 German Dance Theater, 8, 114 Gestalt psychology, 147–48 Geulen, Eva, 155n35, 156n38, 156n40, 181n147 Ghirlandaio, Domenico, The Birth of Saint John the Baptist, 25–27, 26, 162n2 Gilbert, Katharine Everett, 201n56 Godard, Jean-­Luc, Pierrot le Fou, 177n105 Goebbels, Joseph, 8, 114 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 70, 139, 141, 156n40 Goldschmidt, Viktor Moritz, 113, 209n11 Goldstein, Amanda Jo, 11, 51 gravid forms, 96–97, 109 Greece, ancient: sculptural reliefs, 55; Victory of Samothrace, 94, 95. See also Apollo; Aristotle Gropius, Walter, 138 group portraits. See Dutch group portraits Group Portraiture of Holland, The (Riegl), 4–6, 12, 22, 59–61, 64–66, 71 Groys, Boris, 161n93, 193–94n129 Guattari, Félix, 8, 89 Guggenheim Museum, 19 Guillemin, Anna, 31 habitat, 9, 142 Haeckel, Ernst, 12, 51, 113, 133, 141 Hamburger, Käte, 184n21 Hanako, 110 Hansen, Miriam, 161n94, 161n98 harmony: Laban on, 113, 141–42; Spitzer on, 204n98; Vitruvian, 133, 134, 138, 141 Hartard, Christian, 6 Hauptmann, Gerhard, 79

Hauskeller, Michael, 35 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 8, 56, 68, 154n17, 174n60 Heidegger, Martin: aesthetic environmentality, 9; “Art and Space,” 7, 83–84, 102; on artwork and environment, 101–2; on artworks in museums, 18, 160n87; Being and Time, 6–7; on bodies, 12; on ecstasis of temporality, 6–7, 106–7, 197n161; “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 75, 97, 190–91nn88–89; Rilke’s influence on, 75–76; on sculpture, 104, 154n12; on space around artworks, 7, 18–19, 160nn88–89; on van Gogh’s shoes, 101–2 Heider, Fritz, 148, 159n71 Henderson, Linda Dalrymple, 157n52 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 49, 165–66n50 Hering, Ewald, 158n67 Hertz, Heinrich, 15 Hildebrand, Adolf, 10, 18 historical positivism, 12, 19, 40. See also Taine, Hippolyte Hodgson, John, 114 horror vacui, 45–46, 60, 169n7 Huber, Florian, 68 Huysmans, J. K., 88, 189n85 imponderabilia (imponderable fluids), 157n55 impressionism, 48–49, 53, 61, 63, 66, 67, 143 influence, 28, 29, 35–36, 39–41, 166n58 inspiration, physiological, 33 Inspirator (inspirer), 28, 29–30, 31, 32–33, 34 irritability (Erregung), 32, 38–39 Iversen, Margaret, 180–81n134 Jacobsz, Dirk: A Group of Guardsmen, 59– 60, 59; Group Portrait of the Amster­ dam Shooting Corporation, 4–5, 4 Janitschek, Karl, 31, 164n29 Jaques-­Dalcroze, Émile, 209n11 Jerusalem, temple destruction, 63 Jews, Luftmensch term used for, 9–10, 159–60n77 Johansen, Thomas Kjeller, 134 Jolles, André, 25, 162–63n8

In d e x  › 235

Jugendstil, 76 Just, Adolf, 129, 203n81 Justi, Carl, 31, 40, 61, 62, 76, 164n29 Kabbalah, 113, 124, 130 Kafka, Franz, 159n73, 203n81 Kandinsky, Wassily: on artwork and air, 127; on atmosphere, 127, 129; Baraduc’s images and, 202n77; Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 16, 115, 126–27, 128, 129, 202n65; on dance, 122, 127; Laban and, 113, 115, 201–2n64 Kant, Immanuel, 11, 51–52 Klages, Ludwig, 203n84 Klee, Paul, 76 Koelsch, Adolf, 79–80 Krauss, Rosalind, 18, 20 Kulturwissenschaft, 30, 40, 163n14 Kunstwollen (aesthetic will): defined, 181n139; Riegl on, 52–53, 54, 58, 66, 67–69, 180–81nn133–35, 181n142 Kupka, František, 193n127; Disks of New‑ ton (Study for “Fugue in Two Colors”), 101, 101 Laban, Rudolf: on atmosphere, 127–29; on Ausdruckstanz, 113, 126, 133; Choreographie, 113, 116, 123–24, 126, 137, 140; choreography, 114, 129, 131, 132; Choreutics, 136; dance theory, 8, 13, 110–20, 134, 146–47, 198n12, 204n95, 206n119; on harmony, 141; influence of, 112, 114, 138; influences on, 112–13, 114–15, 124–29, 130, 133, 137–38, 141, 201n54, 207nn127–28; Kandinsky and, 113, 115, 201–2n64; life and career, 8, 114, 129–30; The Monk, 120, 121; movement analysis method, 114, 198–99n27; movement choirs, 10, 131–33, 203nn89–90; in Nazi Germany, 8, 10, 114, 131–33, 198n21, 203nn89–90; performances, 129; The World of the Dancer (Die Welt des Tänzers), 112, 115–19, 124, 132, 134, 138, 141, 144–46, 199n33; writing method and style, 199n33 Laban, Rudolf, on space around dancers: choreic space, 117, 119, 134, 137, 200n36; drawings and space models, 112, 134–

37, 138, 141, 144; kinesphere, 112, 115, 135, 144, 200n36, 205n106; Körperum­ raum, 8, 200n36; movements in, 117– 19, 122–24; as object of dance, 123; space crystals, 144–47, 208–9nn10–11; spatial envelope, 110, 115–19, 129–31, 134–38, 139–42, 143; spatial form (Umraumform), 13, 113, 123–24, 135, 138, 200n36; terminology, 112, 115, 117–19, 135; Umraum, 12, 19, 137–38; A Vision of Dynamic Space, 112, 116, 118, 119, 122, 126, 128, 135, 144, 145 Labanotation, 114 Laban Schools, 114 Lamarck, Jean Baptiste, 50, 81, 207n133 Late Roman Art Industry, The (Die spätrömische Kunst-­Industrie; Riegl): on artworks and space, 23, 57, 64; on Formpotenz, 143; history of form and space, 55–58, 66; influences on, 53–54, 68–69; on intervals of space, 147; on Kunstwollen, 68; Luftraum (air space), 4, 6, 47, 48, 54; on Raumscheu (fear of space), 45–46; on sculptural reliefs, 47, 63, 64; on Umgebung (surroundings), 11–12, 48–51; on viewers of artworks, 84; “Volk, Ort und Zeit” phrase, 40–41, 48, 68–69 Lebensraum ideology, 9, 10 Lehmann, Otto, 207n128 Leonardo da Vinci, Vitruvian Man, 134, 141 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, 107–9 life, 6, 9, 14, 16, 24, 33, 37, 38, 39, 48, 63, 68, 72, 83, 91, 96–99, 102, 106, 107, 139, 141, 146; afterlife, 33, 43, 45; biopolitical, 76; creaturely, 79; Lebensphilosophie: 133; life reformers, 129; 133; life sciences, 80, 81, 133; lifeless, 33; lifeworld, 10, 58, 137, 138; principle of life, vis vitalis, 50; Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” in the context of, 85, 86, 88; Sonderleben, 50; still life, 120 Lipps, Theodor, 76 Lodge, Oliver, 15–16, 158n67 Louvre: bird statues, 83, 106; Victory of Samothrace, 94, 95, 192nn105–6

236 ‹ I n d e x

Luftmensch (air person), 9–10, 159– 60n77 Luftraum (air space): Riegl on, 4–6, 13, 14, 46–47, 48, 54, 59–61; uses of term, 177n107 Luhmann, Niklas, 143, 161–62n99 Lykeios, 86, 188n77 Mach, Ernst, 158n67, 173n51, 177n97, 179n121 MacLeod, Catriona, 154n17 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 79, 82 Maletic, Vera, 205n106 Mann, Thomas, The Magic Mountain, 159n74 Marcus, Ernst, 158n67 Marey, Étienne-­Jules, 158n65; Photographies de courants de fumée pour étude des mouvements de l’air, 42–43, 42 Marion, Jean-­Luc, 84 materialism, 14 materiality: of artworks, 6; of space, 2, 6, 15, 61 Maxwell, James Clerk, 15 mechanistic, 37, 38, 41, 53, 57, 68, 180n132, 79, 82; biomechanism, 12, 50. See also vitalism Medici, Lorenzo de’, 35, 41 medicine, 16–17, 36, 159nn73–74 metaphysics, 15 meteorology, climate theories, 49 Michelangelo, David, 18 Michetti, Francesco Paolo, The Daughter of Iorio (La figlia di Jorio), 64, 64 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 138, 207n129 milieu (Milieu): as air ambiant, 36–37, 39; antideterministic view, 79; architectural, 138–39; artistic, 36; assimilation by artworks, 94–96; cultural, 17–18, 25–27, 34–35, 36, 37–40; etymology, 134; evolution of meaning, 10, 14–15, 37, 39, 134–35, 141–42; meanings in French, 9, 37, 204–5n99, 207nn132–33; Muther on, 77; of organisms, 12–13, 61, 141–42; personal, 57–58; Rilke on, 12, 19, 73, 77–78, 81, 82–83; social, 17, 37, 39–40; spatial envelopes of dancers and, 134–35; Taine on, 12, 40–41, 48, 49–50, 53, 68–69; Warburg’s use of

term, 36, 39–40. See also artworks and environment; Umgebung; Umwelt Mitchell, Andrew J., 7, 12, 18, 103–4 “Modern Cult of Monuments, The” (Riegl), 51, 64 modern dance, 113–14, 117. See also dance; Laban, Rudolf Monte Verità, 8, 129, 130, 131, 133, 203n79 Montesquieu, 49 Moreno, Alda, 110 morphology, 54, 175n71 Morton, Marsha, 171n30 Müller, Johannes, 158n67 Museum Photographs (Struth), 3, 23 museums: artworks in, 3–4, 18, 19–20, 160n87; installation art, 19–20. See also Louvre Muther, Richard: books by, 76–77; History of Painting in the Nineteenth Century (Geschichte der Malerei im XIX. Jahrhundert), 77–78, 77; Rilke and, 76, 77–78, 79 Nadar, Félix, 158n65 National Geographic, travel photography contest, 3 nature: art and, 51; “back to nature” movements, 113; beauty of, 1; humans and, 133, 134. See also biology; ecology; organisms naturism, 115, 133 Nazi Germany: German Dance Theater, 8, 114; Jews and, 9–10; Laban in, 8, 10, 114, 131–33, 198n21, 203nn89–90; Lebensraum ideology, 9, 10 Newton, Isaac, 14, 60 Nike, 192nn105–6. See also Victory of Samothrace Nietzsche, Friedrich, 82, 187n62 Novalis, 103 nymphs. See aurai object, 19, 22, 46, 57, 62, 63, 71, 78, 90, 94, 102, 146–47; art object 23, 44, 47, 79, 88–89, 99; objecthood, 6, 20. See also thing Obrist, Hermann, 114 occult, 15–16, 166n58 Olin, Margaret, 52

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organisms: artworks as, 10–12, 51, 53, 83; milieu of, 12–13, 61, 141–42; relations with environment, 50, 74, 80; trees, 11, 51–53, 180n133. See also biology; evolution Ovid, 32, 39 paintings: ancient Roman, 49; atmosphere depictions, 78; cubist, 8, 143, 147; Ghirlandaio fresco, 25–27, 26, 162n2; impressionist, 48–49, 53, 61, 63, 67, 143; of Velázquez, 14, 61–62, 63–64. See also artworks; Botticelli, Sandro; Cézanne, Paul; Dutch group portraits; Rembrandt van Rijn Palomino, Antonio, 61, 62, 63–64 Papapetros, Spyros, 32, 138, 169n95, 209– 10n22 Pathosformel (pathos formula), 41–42, 96 Pauly, August, 80, 81, 82; Darwinism and Lamarckism (Darwinismus und Lamarckismus), 80, 81, 83 Penschel, Oscar, 9 phenomenology, 22, 91, 102, 137, 184n21 philology, 28–29, 30, 31, 33–34, 35, 36, 37– 39, 43 photography: of artworks, 3–4, 22–23; at‑ tempts to capture emotional effluvia, 129, 202n77; motion captured by, 42– 43 physics, 13, 14, 117–19, 128–29 Picasso, Pablo, Ma Jolie, 147 Piderit, Theodor, 33, 38 Plato, Timaeus, 134, 202n70 plein air, 8, 49, 63, 129, 130 Plutarch, Morals, 29 poetry. See Baudelaire, Charles; Rilke, Rainer Maria, poetry politics, 8–10, 131–33 Poliziano, Angelo, 29, 31–32, 34–35, 39, 41 positivist aesthetics, 67–68, 69, 73 Potts, Alex, 183n14 Pouillade, Frédéric, 115 Praz, Mario, 177n97 Primavera (Botticelli). See Spring Problems of Style (Stilfragen; Riegl), 45, 52, 52, 177n97 Proclus, 15

psychology, Gestalt, 147–48 Pythia, 29 Rabinow, Paul, 17, 141–42, 159n72, 207n132 Ratzel, Friedrich, 9, 15 Raum. See space Raumscheu (fear of space), 45–46. See also agoraphobia Reinitzer, Friedrich, 208n10 Rembrandt van Rijn, chiaroscuro, 7, 14, 60, 61, 65, 71. See also Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild Renaissance culture, 25–27, 31, 34–35, 39, 43. See also Botticelli, Sandro Renaud, Terence, 109 respiración, 14, 61–64 Riefenstahl, Leni, 131 Riegl, Alois: approach to art history, 67, 68, 69, 180n132; on attentiveness, 65, 178n114, 182n4; biological influences, 50–51; on cubischer Raum, 54, 55–58; on figure and ground, 147; The Group Portraiture of Holland, 4–6, 12, 22, 59– 61, 64–66, 71; on horror vacui, 169n7, 177n97; on impressionism, 11, 48–49, 53, 61, 66, 143; on Kunstwollen (aesthetic will), 52–53, 54, 58, 66, 67–69, 180–81nn133–35, 181n142; on Luftraum (air space), 4–6, 13, 14, 46–47, 48, 54, 58, 59–61; “The Modern Cult of Monuments,” 51, 64; “Naturwerk und Kunstwerk I,” 68, 181n142; Problems of Style (Stilfragen), 45, 52, 52, 177n97; on race, 179n122; on respiración, 63–64; space-­ related terminology, 47, 54, 56–57, 58; theory of space, 46–47; on Umgebung (surroundings), 11–12, 13, 22, 46, 47, 48–54, 59, 65; vitalist mesology of form, 50, 51–52, 54, 57; writing style, 47. See also Late Roman Art Industry, The Riehl, Berthold, 76 Rijksmuseum 1, Amsterdam 1990 (Struth), 3–4, 3 Rilke, Rainer Maria: on aesthetic metabolism, 83, 84, 93, 99; on art and life, 86– 88, 189n84; art criticism, 76; on artworks and air, 1, 13, 72–73, 83, 104–5;

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Rilke, Rainer Maria (continued) on artworks and environment, 73–74, 83–84, 88–90, 91, 94, 97–105, 103–5, 109; on artworks as organisms, 83; on artwork’s assimilation of milieu, 94–96; on artworks opening outward, 97–105; on autonomy of artwork, 82; on Cézanne, 1, 105; education, 76, 80, 185n32; on gravid forms, 93–94, 96–97, 103, 109; influence on Heidegger, 75– 76; influences on, 76–81; interest in art, 76; letters to Andreas-­Salomé, 86–88, 183n17; on Milieu, 12, 19, 73, 77–78, 81, 82–83; Muther and, 76–77; The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, 103; philosophical project, 81–82; on saturation of artworks, 73, 83, 84, 98– 99, 102; scientific interests, 79–81; Uexküll and, 76, 79, 80, 184–85n29; on Umgebung (surroundings), 66, 73, 93 Rilke, Rainer Maria, on Rodin: on atmosphere of sculptures, 7, 15, 16, 71–75, 78, 84, 93, 103–4; Auguste Rodin, 1–2, 76, 78, 82, 83, 86, 93, 105; Cambodian dancer drawings, 110, 133; early notes, 71, 73, 76, 93, 102; on environment of sculptures, 13, 80–81, 93; on fragmentary sculptures, 90–91; on gaze of sculpted figures, 71; on hand sculptures, 90–91; on homeless sculpture, 18; lectures, 76, 84, 93, 98–100, 102, 105, 195–96n147; on promiscuity of forms, 100–101; on self-­containment of sculptures, 22, 71–72, 74–75, 84, 88, 96–97, 103; on surfaces of sculptures, 7, 71–72, 78, 104–5; temporal ecstasis, 105–9, 195–96n147; on warmth of sculptures, 98–99 Rilke, Rainer Maria, poetry: “Archaic Torso of Apollo” (“Archaischer Torso Apollos”), 84–90, 91, 92–93, 96, 102, 189n84, 190n88; Duino Elegies, 105; “Early Apollo” (“Früher Apollo”), 84, 91–93; New Poems (Neue Gedichte), 73, 84, 91, 105; Sonnets to Orpheus, 82 Rodin, Auguste: Baudelaire’s poetry and, 2, 106; The Burghers of Calais, 97, 99; Cambodian dancer drawings, 110,

111, 133; childhood, 106, 196n153; The Clenched Hand, 90, 90; Colossal Head of Balzac, 74; Danaid (The Source), 72; Dance Movements, 110; The Eternal Idol (L’eternelle idole), 106, 107; Eve, 97, 98; Female Cambodian Dancer with Swirling Drapery, 111; First Man (Adam), 106, 108; hand sculptures, 75, 90, 90, 97–98; interest in dance, 110; The Left Hand, 75; Mask of the Man with the Broken Nose, 104; Saint John the Baptist Preaching, 99, 100; on time, 197n164; Torso of a Man, 88, 89. See also Rilke, Rainer Maria, on Rodin Rokem, Na’ama, 154n17 Rome: Arch of Constantine, 54–55, 55–56; Arch of Titus, 62–63, 63, 66; paintings, 49, 67; sculptural reliefs, 25, 26, 47, 49, 55–57, 62–64. See also Late Roman Art Industry, The Roux, Wilhelm, 50, 173n51, 173n54 Royal Ballet of Cambodia, 110 Rubin, Edgar, 147 Rudolph, Charlotte, “Mary Wigman: Raumgestalt,” 121 Ryan, Judith, 93, 189n84, 190nn91–92, 191n100 Saint-­Hilaire, Étienne Geoffroy, 50 Santner, Eric L., 79, 106, 184n29, 190n93, 191n101 sarcophagus, Trojan War, 56, 56 “Sarcophagus of the Two Brothers,” 175– 76n78 Scarry, Elaine, 22, 161n97 Schlemmer, Oskar, 199n29 Schlosser, Julius von, 49, 66–67 Schmarsow, August, 31, 113, 137–38, 144, 164n28, 170n8, 205–6nn117–18 Schulz, Bruno, 204n95 science: aesthetics and, 12; crystallography, 113, 141, 144–47, 207nn127–28, 208–9nn10–11, 209n19; humanities and, 28–29; meteorology, 49; occult and, 15–16; physics, 13, 14, 117–19, 128– 29; study of matter and space, 13–17; study of movement, 42–43. See also biology

I n d e x  › 239

Scorel, Jan van, Twelve Members of the Haarlem Brotherhood of Jerusalem Pilgrims, 58, 59–60 sculpture: Egyptian reliefs, 55, 57; environments, 78–79, 80–81, 82, 103–5; fragmentary, 88–91; futurist, 78–79, 147; Hegel on, 8; Laocoön and His Sons, 7–8; Michelangelo’s David, 18; in museums, 18; Roman reliefs, 25, 26, 47, 49, 55–57, 62–64; space enclosed by, 7–8, 83–84; stone, 106; Torso of Miletos, 85–86, 87, 88–90, 91, 97. See also artworks; Rodin, Auguste Semper, Gottfried, 67, 68, 94, 95, 192n110 Simmel, Georg, 185n32, 196n147, 196n153 siteless artworks, 18–19, 160n87 Sitte, Camillo, City Planning According to Artistic Principles, 18, 45, 143–44, 169n3, 176n87 Sloterdijk, Peter, 188n74, 189n84 Somaini, Antonio, 23 space: architectural, 137–39, 144, 205– 6nn117–18, 206–7n123; around Rodin’s sculptures, 78; within artworks, 7–8, 83–84; cubic, 54, 55–58; diegetic and extradiegetic, 56–57; empty, 45–46, 60–61, 169n3; fear of, 45–46, 170n8; generated by artworks, 78, 80–81; Lebensraum ideology, 9, 10; materiality, 2, 6, 15, 61; urban, 18, 45, 143–44; in Velázquez’s paintings, 14, 61–62, 63– 64. See also air; artworks and environment; ecology; ether; Laban, Rudolf, on space around dancers; Luftraum; milieu, Umgebung; Umwelt Spemann, Hans, 80 Spencer, Herbert, 126 Spitzer, Leo: on harmony, 204n98; “Milieu and Ambiance,” 9, 13, 14, 37, 79, 157n50, 204–5nn98–99; on Stim­ mung (atmosphere), 35 Spring (Primavera; Botticelli), 31, 32, 32, 37–38, 41, 125 St. Denis, Ruth, 110, 113 Steiner, Rudolf, 209n11 Stichweh, Rudolf, 157nn55–56, 59 Stimmung (atmosphere), 28, 34–36. See also atmosphere

Struth, Thomas: Museum Photographs, 3, 23; Rijksmuseum 1, Amsterdam 1990, 3–4, 3 surroundings. See Umgebung Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild (Rembrandt), 5, 60; photographed in museum, 2, 3–4, 3; Riegl on, 4, 5–6, 22, 59, 60, 61, 65, 71, 182n4 Taine, Hippolyte: History of English Literature, 77; on milieu, 15; Philosophy of Art, 53, 175n71; positivism, 12, 40, 67–68, 69, 73; “race, milieu, moment,” 12, 40–41, 48, 49–50, 53, 68–69; Riegl and, 69–70, 180n131 temporal ecstasis, 6–7, 105–9, 195–96n147 theosophy, 15, 113 thing, 47, 61, 62, 76, 79, 89, 90, 96, 98–99, 104, 148, 159n71, 160n89, 161–62n99, 183n17, 190n88. See also object Toepfer, Karl, 114 topology, 21, 113, 120, 144, 161n93 Tornabuoni, Giovanni, 27 Torso of Miletos, 86, 87, 88–90, 91, 97. See also “Archaic Torso of Apollo” Toscanini, Arturo, 114 Toulouse-­Lautrec, Henri de, Miss Loie Fuller, 124 trees, 11, 51–53, 180n133 Trojan War, sarcophagus relief, 56, 56 Turner, J. M. W., 78 Uexküll, Jacob von: Environment and Inner World of Animals, 137; Laban and, 137; on Merkwelt, 176n90; Riegl and, 50; Rilke and, 76, 79, 80, 184– 85n29; theoretical biology, 133, 137; on Umwelt, 15, 48, 57–58, 74, 81, 134, 137; Weltanschauung (as term), 69 Umgebung (surroundings): Riegl on, 11–12, 13, 22, 46, 47, 48–54, 59, 65; Rilke on, 66, 73, 93 Umraum (space around dancers), 12, 19, 137–38 Umraumform (spatial form), 13, 113, 123– 24, 135, 138, 200n36 Umwelt (environment): etymology, 48; Uexküll on, 15, 48, 57–58, 74, 81, 134,

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Umwelt (environment) (continued) 137; uses of term, 48; Warburg on, 12, 15, 19. See also artworks and environment; milieu urban space, 18, 45, 143–44 van Gogh, Vincent, 21, 101–2 Velázquez, Diego, 14, 61–62, 63–64 Verworn, Max, 38, 167n74 Victory of Samothrace, The (The Winged Nike), 94, 95, 192nn105–6 Vidler, Anthony, 169n2 Vienna school of art history, 49 Vision of Dynamic Space, A (Laban), 112, 116, 118, 119, 122, 126, 128, 135, 144, 145 vitalism, 11, 50, 51, 53, 54, 57, 65, 68, 69, 73, 78, 80, 81, 88, 124, 133, 134, 146, 156n40, 159n69, 176n87, 195n147. See also life; mechanistic Vitruvian harmony, 133, 134, 138, 141 Vitruvian Man (Leonardo), 134, 141 Vogeler, Heinrich, 86–88 von Hartel, Wilhelm, 172n34, 179n124 Vorbild (model), 33 Waetzoldt, Wilhelm, 173n51, 184n28 Wagner, Siegfried, 114 Wagner Festival, 114 Warburg, Aby: approach to art history, 30, 31, 36, 43–44; “The Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgeoisie,” 40; on artwork and air, 13, 27–28, 29– 30, 31–34, 35–40, 43, 44, 94–95; on astrology, 166n58; on aurai, 25–27; on circles, 34; education, 31, 76; influence of, 30; Jolles’s letter to, 25, 162–63n8; Mnemosyne Atlas, 22–23, 34; Pathosformel (pathos formula), 41–42, 96; philology and, 28–29, 30, 31, 33–34, 35, 36, 37–39, 43; “The Picture Chronicle of a Florentine Goldsmith,” 36–37; reception, 30–31; on Renaissance culture, 27; scientific interests, 29, 41–42, 43; on Umwelt, 12, 15, 19; writing style, 30–31, 43–44 Warburg, Aby, on Botticelli: language used, 27–28, 29–30, 31–34, 35, 38, 43–44; “Sandro Botticelli,” 168n89;

“Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring,” 27–28, 29–30, 31–34, 35–41, 43–44, 169n95. See also Botticelli, Sandro Warburg Institute, 30 Weisbach, Werner, 49 Weltanschauung, 68, 69, 181n142 Wernich, Agathon, 16–17, 36 Wessely, Christina, 68 Westphal, Carl, 45 Wheeler, Doug, 161n91; PSAD Synthetic Desert III, 19, 20; SA MI DW SM 2 75 Continuum Atmospheric Environment, 19, 21 Wickhoff, Franz: Muther and, 76; scientific studies, 171n30; The Vienna Genesis (Die Wiener Genesis), 48–49, 62–63, 64, 66–67, 172n34 Wigman, Mary, 117; Space Figure (Raumgestalt), 120, 121 Wilde, Oscar, 88, 189n85 Wilkens, Manja, 185nn31–33 wind: aurai (nymphs of the breezes), 21, 25–27; in Botticelli paintings, 27, 31– 32, 34, 35, 37–40, 41, 43–44, 94–95, 120–22; effects on dancers’ draperies, 129; efforts to capture visually, 42–43; as environment of Victory of Samothrace, 94 Wolfskehl, Karl, “Lebensluft” (“Air of Life”), 9, 161n94 Wood, Christopher S., 46, 171n24 World of the Dancer, The (Die Welt des Tänzers; Laban), 112, 115–19, 124, 132, 134, 138, 141, 144–46, 199n33 Worringer, Wilhelm, 209–10n22; Abstraction and Empathy, 10–11, 45, 46, 146–47; influence on Laban, 113 Wundt, Wilhelm, 201n54, 201n62 Yeats, W. B., 127 Yls, Julius, Interesting Moment, 2, 3–4 Young, Julian, 101–2 zeitgeist, 165–66n50 Zimmermann, Robert, 12, 67, 68 Zola, Émile, 17 Zupančič, Alenka, 106