Private Utopia: Cultural Setting of the Interior in the 19th and 20th Century 9783110455496, 9783110454635

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Private Utopia

August Sarnitz, Inge Scholz-Strasser (Eds.)

Private Utopia Cultural Setting of the Interior in the 19th and 20th Century

Editors: August Sarnitz Inge Scholz-Strasser Contributions by: Beatriz Colomina, Rubén Gallo, Cornelia Klinger, Spyros Papapetros, August Sarnitz, Inge Scholz-Strasser, Helmut Strutzmann, Jeanne Wolff-Bernstein This book was made possible by the generous support of the Sigmund Freud Foundation, der Gesellschaft der Freunde der bildenden Künste Wien, dem Dorotheum and der Wissenschaftsund Forschungsförderung der Stadt Wien.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the German National Library The German National Library lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, re-use of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in other ways, and storage in data­bases. For any kind of use, permission of the copyright owner must be obtained. © 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Proceedings of the symposium: Interiors — Living-Space, Art-Space, Work-Space, held at the Sigmund Freud Museum, November 21–22, 2013 in cooperation with Vienna Art Week / Interiors 19th and 20th Century. Translations: Text Inge Scholz-Strasser/Helmut Strutzmann: translated by Christopher Barber, Vienna Text August Sarnitz: translated by Rupert Hebblethwaite with August Sarnitz, Vienna Text Cornelia Klinger: translated by Camilla Nielsen, Vienna Copy editing: Alun Brown, Vienna Layout, cover design and typography: Martin Gaal, Vienna Printing and Binding: Holzhausen Druck GmbH, Wolkersdorf © Cover image: Thomas Freiler This publication is also available as an e-book (ISBN PDF 978 -3-11- 045549- 6; ISBN EPUB 978 -3-11- 045514 - 4). Printed on acid-free paper produced from chlorine-free pulp. TCF ∞ Printed in Austria ISBN 978 -3-11- 045463-5 www.degruyter.com

Contents

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August Sarnitz, Inge Scholz-Strasser Introduction 10



Helmut Strutzmann in conversation with Inge Scholz-Strasser The Sigmund Freud Museum as Interior?

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Jeanne Wolff-Bernstein Between the Artist’s Studio and the Psycho-Analytic Office: A Comparison of Lucian Freud’s and Sigmund Freud’s Interior Spaces 42

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Rubén Gallo Proust’s Interiors: Between Montesquiou and Yturri Spyros Papapetros Drop Form: Freud, Dora, and Dream Space Cornelia Klinger Interior Spaces and Other Playgrounds of Inwardness

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August Sarnitz Reconstructing Ludwig Wittgenstein as an Architect: Ludwig Wittgenstein and Margaret StonboroughWittgenstein — Defining and Designing a New Interior 124



Beatriz Colomina Endless Interior: Kiesler’s Architecture as Psychoanalysis

151 Biographies 155 Index 159

Credit of Illustrations

Introduction

The essays included in this publication grew out of a symposium hosted by the Sigmund Freud Foundation in Vienna in 2013. They are an extended distillation and refinement of the symposium with new papers added in order to open up the discourse to a wider frame of perspectives. The two-day symposium on the topic “Interiors — Living-Space, Art-Space, Work-Space” took place in cooperation with the Vienna Art Week on 21st and 22nd of November 2013 and was organized within the context of the photo exhibition “Lucian Freud: In Private” which was on show at that time at the Sigmund Freud Museum. Spatial concepts of interiors from the 19th and 20th century were lectured on and discussed from various perspectives. Discussing “Interiors” includes not only the discussion of design and architecture in their most radical and experimental qualities, but also their social, cultural, philosophical, and psychological aspects which directly and indirectly influence our physical wellbeing. “The particularization of every interior, as Benjamin reveals, is at once an impoverishment and an attempt to overcome this. For every dwelling denies its own existence as a place, once inhabited, it becomes marked by the traces of habits that negate or mask its essential character. The home becomes a nostalgic microcosm in which the consumption and end of experience and the manifestation of poverty overlap, with neither superseding the other. In the face of this interwoven system of contradictions that confounds and throws into disorder the very purpose of dwelling, certain episodes of modern architecture may be seen as attempts to realize an ultimately impossible utopia … The modern utopia of dwelling takes its characteristic features from the nostalgia that wafts through every intérieur.” (Francesco Dal Co, Figures of Architecture and Thought, p.13) The discussion starts with a conversation between Helmut Strutzmann and Inge Scholz-Strasser on the theme of “The Sigmund Freud Museum as Interior?” It will seek to place “Berggasse 19” within its diversity — as a former medical practice, knowledge area of new theories about the human soul, a meeting place of many intellectuals 7

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of the time, and a private apartment for the Freud family – and to understand the apartment in its entire meaning in today’s presentation. Referring to Pierre Nora’s understanding of a “Lieu de mémoire,” — the importance of a historically charged place in the history of the 20th century — the Sigmund Freud Museum will receive attention at the same time in the context of the current museum debate. Jeanne Wolff-Bernstein in her contribution reflects on the distinct interiors, the time and the space in which Lucian Freud’s models and Sigmund Freud’s patients experienced the interior spaces. It refers to the possible parallels between the working methods of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and his grandson Lucian Freud and on the function of the interiors in their diversity, drawing on each individual formative intimate setting. In his literary-historical contribution “Proust’s Interiors; Between Montesquiou and Yturri”, Rubén Gallo refers to the importance both personalities had in the Paris of the late 19th century to the biography of Proust and the genesis of his publication of the “Recherche du Temps Perdu.” Fascinated and attracted to the wealthy dandy Montesquiou and his lover and secretary Yturri, the death of the latter was decisive in Proust’s withdrawal into his “inner worlds.” Both forgotten as writers long ago, they find a place in the “Recherche du Temp Perdu” as a “repository of lost time,” their place in “the pantheon of literary history.” Spyros Papapetros in his paper: “Drop Form: Freud, Dora and Dream Space” investigates a possible link between the origin of modern theories of architectural space and the institutionalization of Freud’s therapeutic practice. The proposed reinterpretation focuses on the interaction between articles of adornment and the interior spaces that the later famous analysand “Dora” occupied during the dream narrative. Perhaps Freud’s introduction of these “drop form” pendants aimed not simply to make these small artefacts oscillate but to drop the very concepts of form and space entirely. Cornelia Klinger focuses in her article “Interior Spaces and Other Playgrounds of Inwardness” on the socio-historical conditions of modern subjectivity, as this constitutes itself in interior space. She makes the case that the specifically modern form of subjectivity / individuality with the right to self-expression and self-realization finds its actual unfolding in the private and in the aesthetic sphere of the interior. At the end of the present volume, two contributions from two pioneering architects / philosophers of the 20th century will be discussed: Ludwig Wittgenstein and Frederick Kiesler. 8

Introduction

August Sarnitz discusses the radical nature and modernity of the architecture of the Stonborough-Wittgenstein House (1926–1928), designed by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (jointly with Paul Engelmann) for his sister Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein. Architecture and interior design combine to form a personal cosmos — a private utopia in the truest sense — represented by the collecting passion of Margaret Stonborough. Contemporary and historical art objects, valuable historical (Louis XVI) and modern furniture (Josef Hoffmann, Dagobert Peche) “inhabit” the built utopia as a collage. The radical house of Ludwig Wittgenstein “allowed” no curtains, no carpets and no lighting fixtures other than the bare bulb. The private utopia can only be as radical and as subjective in a “Freudian dreamland” placed in Vienna. The radical nature of Frederick Kiesler’s architecture addresses parallel worlds of urbanism and the private. In her contribution “Endless Interior: Kiesler’s Architecture as Psychoanalysis”, Beatriz Colomina argues this specific position of the architect. Colomina presents convincing arguments when analyzing Frederick Kiesler. This still too-little-known architect, designer, sculptor, and theorist (concept of “correalism”) founded radical positions of self-realization. His “Endless House” is an example of the metaphorical utopia of a continuous interior. Discussing interiors reveals multi-layered arguments on private, artistic, and professional environments of the human habitat. Discussing interiors leads to people’s secrets and unknown positions and possessions. For Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny is what is familiar and yet at the same time strange. It involves what is both secret and formerly familiar in itself. (The Uncanny, in: Freud Sigmund, The Standard Edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, translated by James Strachey, London: the Hogart Press, Volume XVII). In that sense, we would like our “PRIVATE UTOPIA” to be understood also as a research into the field of the uncanny. “The editors would like to thank all authors for their contributions and their wonderful cooperation and patience in the production of this book.”

August Sarnitz Inge Scholz-Strasser Vienna, 2015 9

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1.1  „Therapy Room“, Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna. Photo Gerald Zugmann (1993). Archive Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna.

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The Sigmund Freud Museum as Interior? Helmut Strutzmann in conversation with Inge Scholz-Strasser

Walter Benjamin characterized the interior as the intrusion of the object world into the private world. “Interior spaces become thing worlds.” At first glance the Sigmund Freud Museum conveys the impression of being the reconstruction of an interior. It presents an interior that seems to reconstruct a historical site. Sigmund Freud did in fact live and work in this house, in these apartments, for more than forty years. In 1938 he was forced to leave the country, and he died in exile. In those forty years, he created a very specific interior in the Benjaminian sense, whose components he was for the most part able to take with him undamaged into exile. In 1971, these rooms were opened as a place of remembrance. Only seemingly does the partial reconstruction reflect the interior in which Freud lived. Not only did Freud practice medicine in this house: he also lived in it. His apartments were modest in comparison to the interiors of the great Ringstrasse palaces of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sigmund Freud came from a modest background, from a provincial Moravian town in the Danubian Monarchy. His father achieved some success as a wool merchant, but the family lived in close quarters. Freud’s youth in Vienna’s second district was also characterized by a shortage of space. It was only in the course of his career that he became acquainted with the haute bourgeois interiors of the Ringstrasse, mainly through his house calls — for example to Anna von Lieben in the family’s palace by the Burgtheater. This was certainly something new for him; it was the first time he came into contact with the wealthy Jewish society, its residences and interiors. One might also consider this as 11

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Freud’s learning phase with regard to his conception of an interior design, including features which he would later install in his own apartment in the ninth district, ten minutes’ walk from the Ringstrasse. How do we even know about the arrangement of this interior? Shortly before the Freud family’s escape in 1938, the young photographer Edmund Engelman was commissioned to document the apartments in pictures.1 When the Museum opened in 1971, this photographic material was used to create collages arranged along the walls of Sigmund Freud’s former office, where they can still be seen today. What do the collages show? You see two rooms, the consulting room and the study, with their numerous antiques, his famous collection, arranged with seeming randomness, but nonetheless in accord with a certain logic. You see his extensive library, barely accessible behind vitrines and tables holding the collection, layers of knowledge, bildungsbürgerlich and materialized along the walls. At the center of the consulting room is the couch with his chair. Sigmund Freud was able to take almost the entire interior with him into exile. The rooms remained behind, empty. Subsequently this apartment, and several others in the house at Berggasse 19, were transformed by the Nazis into “collective apartments” for expropriated Jews. More than ninety people lived in cramped quarters in the house before being deported to concentration camps in 1941. The rooms Freud left behind acquired a second, horrifying connotation: emptied of their former bourgeois interior, they became a locus of terror. Thus the twentieth century’s layered narratives condense at Berggasse 19, making it into a lieu de mémoire in the sense of Pierre Nora.2 Here the continuity of the historic house museum is broken, and charged with additional meaning, making it into a site of collective memory of the twentieth century. By meticulously documenting the history of this single Viennese house, the 2003 exhibition Freud’s Lost Neighbors shed light on the massive wound torn through history during the last century.

1

For photos see: https://www.google.at/search?q=edmund+engelmann+fotograf; or Sigmund Freud. Berggasse 19 Vienna by Edmund Engelman 2 See also: Pierre Nora: Les Lieux de mémoire (Gallimard) 12

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In summary: the Sigmund Freud Museum cannot be seen as a reproduction of a classic historical interior; rather it exists as an attempt to reconstruct the multiplicity of ever-changing attributions that come together in this specific place. It has primarily been able to serve the wider calling of a museum and research center since 1996, with the opening of the expanded museum which was facilitated by the incorporation of the Freud family’s former residence, next door to the office. Since then the modified apartment space has been in use as an exhibition hall and a specialized psychoanalytic research library. Eighty-percent of the Sigmund Freud Museum’s visitors prob­ably come expecting to see a historicizing celebration of Sigmund Freud. They arrive at a house in which nothing remains as it was, with the exception of a few fragments of a discontinuous past. The attempted reconstruction undertaken in the Sigmund Freud Museum is many-sided and multi-layered. On the one hand, there is a bit of a replication: the waiting room furnishings were returned to Vienna by Anna Freud. This gives rise to an “auratic location”, as it were, albeit on a small scale. On the other hand, there is the labyrinth of interlocking rooms, which conveys an air of absence and emptiness. Lastly there is the yawning gap, the missing couch, which is in London. Here in Vienna there is only a reference to its former place, an image on the wall showing where it once was. Most of the Sigmund Freud Museum’s visitors come with a host of fantasies regarding Berggasse 19, where they are seeking the genius loci. This is a characteristic aspect of numerous house museums. I am thinking of the Goethe House in Weimar, the Balzac Museum in Paris, the Mozart House in Vienna, and also of the Tenement Museum3 in New York, to name just a few. These places share the common quality of being the “original scene” of history, and they are enriched by their supposed “aura”. In the case of the Sigmund Freud Museum, visitors are searching for traces of the exploration of the soul. One might say they want to hear the lost voices of the patients, the echoes lingering in what once was a space for psychical complaints and

3

See also: https://www.tenement.org 13

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1.2  „Entrance Door to Sigmund Freud’s Practice in Vienna, Berggasse 19”, View from Inside. Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna. Photo August Sarnitz (2015).

1.3  “Entrance Door to Sigmund Freud’s Practice in Vienna, Berggasse 19”, View from Inside. Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna. Photo August Sarnitz (2015).

afflictions, dreams and fantasies. In walking through the museum, visitors display a certain frustration in the truest sense of the word: the awaited interior seems to have absented itself, to have disappeared, to have been swept away. Delivering a complete reconstruction of Sigmund Freud’s office — something which has often been discussed — would not be sufficient. It would remain a fake, and in my opinion it really would not be proper, because it would negate an essential part of these rooms’ history: their use, as I mentioned above, as a collective apartment for Jews who would subsequently be deported to the concentration camps. After the close of the Second World War, the Freud apartments were rented to new tenants. In the late 1960s, when plans were already being made to open a place of remembrance for Sigmund Freud, these residents were asked to vacate and received assistance in finding new homes. The 14

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1.4  “Therapy Room”, Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna. Photo Gerald Zugmann (1993). Archive Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna.

museum’s current arrangement uses emptiness as an indicator for the events of the twentieth century, which remain inscribed in these rooms. The project of setting up a full museum spanned a period of thirty years, and it was executed in several phases. The expansion culminated in the museum’s incorporation of the Freud family’s former living quarters, which have been used for exhibition and research facilities since then. In the early 1990s, before work had begun on the construction of an exhibition hall, the artist and philosopher Joseph Kosuth created large wallpaper installations in the empty rooms of the private apartment featuring manipulated text passages from Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. Although it was originally conceived as a temporary intervention, this installation — entitled Zero&Not — remained in place for several years. It became the first of many artistic traces 15

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1.5  Joseph Kosuth 1987: “O. & A./F!D!( TO I. K. AND G. F.)”. Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna. Photo Margherita Spiluttini (1987). Archive Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna.

that would be left in these rooms. Kossuth’s work was nothing like the remembered wallpaper that Anna Freud ordered for the waiting room, and nothing like the didactic exhibition with its photo history: this was the written word on the wall, the artwork as a palimpsest. After it was finally removed, a doubled emptiness remained behind: the traces of its predecessors had been erased and the installation was gone, although several fragments of it were kept and archived. It was at this point that the Sigmund Freud Museum’s contemporary art collection was initiated. For the most part, it is comprised of works of Conceptual Art. Conceptual art as a form of reconstruction? The works of the artists in this collection represent an intensive exploration of concepts like condensation and repression, the joke and the dream. Here conceptual art takes up Freud’s theories, realizing them in the medium of the artwork. In part these works are based on a sort of psychoanalytic reconstruction. 16

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1.6  Joseph Kosuth 2002/03: „A View to Memory“. Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna. Photo Gerald Zugmann (2003). Archive Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna.

The next step, again taken under the guidance of Joseph Kosuth, was a series of installations presented in cooperation with several artists who created overtly psychoanalytic pieces for the street-level storefront of the former Siegmund Kornmehl butcher shop. Here the aim was to move beyond the “cave” in which Sigmund Freud had lived and worked by opening a window to the outside. The museum’s strategy was to leave behind the fantasized interior and establish an interior/exterior on the façade, passagère for passersby, in which a psychoanalytic discourse was initiated through the medium of contemporary art. Are these interventions visible and localizable elements of the museum? The interventions forming the series mentioned above, presented under the title A View from Outside, were temporary, while the conceptual art collection is a permanent part of the museum. Moreover, the collection represents an opportunity to 17

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communicate content from the Sigmund Freud Museum worldwide, beyond Berggasse 19: it has been and continues to be shown around the world. These works visually manifest psychoanalytic modes of thought and formalization in a manner that is appropriate for exhibitions in international contemporary art spaces. What is the Sigmund Freud Museum, then: library, apartment, art space? Or is it the reconstruction of a process of alienation and appropriation? The Sigmund Freud Museum has a unique quality, a central theme: psychoanalysis as a form of thought, of intellectual activity, but also as a form of therapy and a theory. This theory — expounded by a Jew — was considered degenerate by the Nazis and persecuted. Its author was forced into exile. Hence, the Sigmund Freud Museum is also a site of alienation and reappropriation. It is both an empty shell and a hub of knowledge distribution via symposia, lectures and exhibitions. Furthermore, it also serves the function of a lieu de mémoire through its uniqueness as a place in which events of such gravity occurred. It functions as a memorial, regardless of its fullness or emptiness. Additionally, the museum narrates the history of a doctor’s office. It is no coincidence that the consulting room is the center of interest. I would even dare to assert that almost all visitors come with the desire to lie upon the couch at least once — just to try it out. But the couch is present at Berggasse 19 only as an image, an Oriental point of reference. The remarkable thing about the consulting room, and most of all the couch, was that it was a restaging of the antique and the Oriental. One must be aware that the 1873 World Exposition in Vienna made a deep impression on Sigmund Freud. This event coincided with the highpoint of Orientalism in Europe. Here I am talking about an idealized Orientalism associated with seduction, eroticism and the attractive flair of the foreign, of exoticism, fragrant flowers and suggestive depictions of women. These stereotypes are well known from the era’s art, music, literature and theater. In his book Orientalism, Edward Said exposed them as projections of the West. Patients lie upon the couch amid this ambiance, opening themselves to it in a position of repose and verbalizing their desires and forbidden erotic fantasies.

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Reclining upon the couch? There are theories stating that the interiors of bourgeois residences illustrate a doubled enclosure: corseted existence, spatial limitation, closeness. On the one hand, there is spatial enclosure, the security of having the room to oneself with the analyst. On the other hand, there is also the temporal limitation of the precisely defined time span available for the analysis. Together these limitations make up the analytic setting, which was conceived to engender freedom in the mind and in the soul. Regarding the setting: the rooms are pretty dark on the first floor, with the windows facing out on the small courtyard. Generally, they require artificial light. All of this might recall the atmosphere of the boudoir, a space that can be defined as semipublic; it is a room for dressing and undressing, and at the same time the path of access to the “inner chambers”. The partial reconstruction undertaken in the museum rooms in their current form aims to convey this intimacy at certain points, such as in the waiting room, while simultaneously maintaining the original arrangement of the residence and the office as they were. Visitors are able to get a feel for bourgeois living through an experience of space that is independent of the information presented in each room. In moving through the apartments, visitors become familiar with the ways in which they functioned as a residence, and also as a fin-de-siècle Viennese doctor’s office. It was the era of the grand Ringstrasse palaces, which nowadays are put to very different uses, but which still retain their original flair. What is so special about this former doctor’s office, with its waiting room, consulting room and study? Not only did the conversations between patient and analyst take place in the consulting room: subsequently Freud wrote about them in his study, the last room of the labyrinth. Here he sketched out his case studies, or he formulated them for publication, or in later years he dictated them to his daughter Anna. And it was here that he developed many of his ideas in correspondence with his colleagues and friends, often late into the night; in this interior which he had been so painstakingly filling and arranging for decades. The office’s first room, the waiting room, which is situated between the consulting room and the entry area, was more than just a place where patients waited. Beginning in 1905, it was the meeting place of the Wednesday Psychological Society, a loosely 19

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1.7  Sigmund Freud’s cabin trunk, used for the last time in 1938, when the Freud family emigrated to London. Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna. Photos August Sarnitz (2015).

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1.7b  Detail from Sigmund Freud’s cabin trunk, with the label Wien Westbahnhof to London, see 1.7. Photo August Sarnitz (2015).

organized group of Viennese intellectuals who elaborated, discussed and formalized psychoanalytic theories. One of the Sigmund Freud Museum’s key missions is to continue this tradition, and this effort takes several forms; for example, exhibitions and symposiums. It seeks to address current issues in a critical fashion and explore questions that remain open in psychoanalysis. Does the museum represent an intellectual reconstruction of the psychoanalytic process, confronting the visitor with a certain emptiness, providing the opportunity for a reconstruction of the ego there? Places of remembrance, in the sense of the lieu de mémoire, confront visitors with a situation in which they can decide how intensely they will engage themselves with the place and its narratives. I am thinking here of places like the Holocaust Museum in Washington, the Jewish Museum in Vienna, or Yad Vashem in Israel. All of these places attempt to encompass and communicate the dimension and significance of the historical situation. 21

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And yet one can also do the same on the level of the individual; in this case Sigmund Freud. Visitors can choose the depth of their own research. For me this is a fruitful approach to the milieu de mémoire. Information is offered in such a way that the hurried visitor can surf through it quickly, while an opportunity is also left open for the deeper exploration of certain themes, which can then reflect back upon the ego, revealing gaps in the self, piquing curiosity and stimulating learning processes. There are scientists and communication researchers who claim that it is possible to equate the psychoanalytic process with today’s concept of digitization — the deconstruction of a haptic world and its reconstruction in a digital, enterable space. This space can even be reformalized, again made tangible, by means of a 3D printer. In the Digital Age, the ego increasingly orients itself through access to networks — as soon as it becomes available, virtual space opens the way to places that are detached from the real world, and subsequently to information and knowledge. Hence it is already possible for the individual to move virtually through spaces, for example through museum spaces, which can even be printed out and reconstructed. Concurrently, people’s yearning for real places seems to be increasing: they still want to travel and to experience the world, to investigate. To put it bluntly, the unique — in this case the original scene of history — appears to retain precedence over the net’s virtual interior. And yet technological progress also offers new chances. The Freud Museum in London, opened in 1986, has taken a different approach in presenting its rooms. This museum has at its disposal more or less all of the furnishings, the collection of antiquities, Freud’s library. And thus one has opted here for a complete restaging of Freud’s life during his last years. If one were to bring these two sites together with the Sigmund Freud Museum in Prˇíbor, Czech Republic — the house of Sigmund Freud’s birth — one could create a virtual interior on the net, present at each of the three places. The museums could be linked using technology so that visitors at each location would have visual access to the rooms of the other two museums. This would be a form of synchronization process opening pathways to new experiences, along the lines, as it were, of condensation and afterwardness (Nachträglichkeit), two central concepts of psychoanalysis. 22

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Does this demystify the real place, robbing it of its aura through duplication? In The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, Walter Benjamin for the most part already anticipated this process at the beginning of the twentieth century, on a theoretical level — of course he could not have imagined the impact of today’s digital and virtual world. Nonetheless, the real places, as long as they have not been destroyed by natural disaster or war, always remain places of myth, and these want to be experienced locally. In this respect, the net has the function of a “teaser”, inviting its audience to take a closer look at the actual place. This also explains the attraction of archaeological excavation sites, where the past — the place in its full historical dimensions — becomes emotionally tangible through fragmentary relics and reconstructions. A residence can have the character of a place of accumulation. Benjamin speaks of acquisitiveness and the mania for false riches. Freud had a huge collection of antiquities. Was it “false riches” or was it connected to his work? The collection of antiquities played a central role in Freud’s life and work. More than anything else, it defined his interior, and it was closely connected to his travels. Aside from his cigars, traveling and collecting were Freud’s greatest passions. As a traveler his interest was focused on history-loaded cities like Rome and on archaeological sites like Pompeii. Freud himself saw a close relationship between archeology and psychoanalysis, the strong similarity of the two activities: digging out that which has been buried over time, interpreting finds through contextualization. Items found on his travels, small or medium-sized statuettes, originals and reproductions, formed the basis of the collection and fed its continual growth — often in close conjunction with the subject upon which he was currently working. Here I would like to quote Lydia Marinelli, who was the museum’s scientific director for many years: “Every new gaze upon Freud’s collection brings surprising new discoveries, not only suddenly noticed objects, but also new facets of individual objects, of which one becomes aware when one sees them not as anonymous museum pieces, but in relation to their owner. Some objects … transform the collection into a kaleidoscope: every turn reveals new perspectives, and every object leads off in a new direction, 23

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1.8  Showcase with antiquities from Sigmund Freud’s collection. Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna. Photo August Sarnitz (2015).

telling of incidents in its owner’s life, of friends and patients, connecting the present with a prehistoric past and stimulating theoretical reflection.”4 An object like the plaster cast of a striding woman, the “Gradiva” which hung to the right of the couch, refers not only to the turn-of-the-century archeological novella by Wilhelm Jensen, which Freud analyzed in Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’. The “privileged position” on the wall also indicates how important the owner’s trips to Rome and Pompeii were for his theoretical assumptions. Now a replica of the plaster cast hangs on the wall as part of the reconstruction of the consulting room in Vienna. Photographs along the walls of the former office, both overviews and details, document how the collection was spread throughout the two rooms. The 1996 opening of the exhibition space in Freud’s former private residence gave rise to a host of new possibilities, such as presenting thematic exhibi-

4

L. Marinelli: “Meine … alten und dreckigen Götter”. Aus Sigmund Freuds Sammlung, Frankfurt, Stroemfeld, 1998, p. 15

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tions tracing aspects of Freud’s life and work, for example “My … old and dirty gods”: From Sigmund Freud’s Collection (1998) or Freud’s Travels: Cultural Experiences — Psychoanalytic Thoughts (2014). In setting up the exhibition rooms, we intentionally refrained from returning them to their original state. Instead we went searching for traces, preserving them, but in the end opting for a “white cube”, deconstructing the space, as it were, and defining it as a shell for thematically-oriented presentations. Are there any documented instances of a patient giving him such a figurine as a gift? Freud received pieces for his collection from his patients, and these he valued greatly. In some instances he also gave an object to a patient he particularly liked. Thus the collection of antiquities always remained alive in a certain way, and it also served the function of providing an impetus to analyses. Sometimes it played a central role, for example in the case of the author H. D. (Hilda Doolittle). The seemingly random arrangement of countless objects that filled his most private room, the study, is striking, in itself somehow akin to an archeological site. Contrastingly, the individual objects on his desk were meticulously and lovingly arranged, as if they were his “conversation partners”. While planning his emigration, Freud sent his favorite piece, a Pallas Athene, ahead on her way with his close confidante and colleague Marie Bonaparte, not believing that it would really be possible for him to take the entire collection with him to England. Was Freud, on some of his trips, searching for confirmation of his theories, for example in the case of Moses or of Leonardo’s childhood memories? I think that there was a close interrelationship between Freud’s travels and his life and work at Berggasse 19. Figuratively speaking, one might say: inwardly he read, listened and formulated, while outwardly he explored. And yet one could also define this process the other way around, maintaining that he explored inwardly, while outwardly, on his trips, he worked through his inner explorations, testing his hypotheses and theories at his travel destinations and comparing them to his impressions and experiences, while also receiving new stimulation in a continuous intensive interaction. Here I am thinking of his frequent trips to 25

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Rome, during which he often visited Michelangelo’s Moses statue in the church San Pietro in Vincoli. The church assembles a breathtaking array of sacred art, with Moses positioned centrally as part of the monument for Pope Julius II. Freud expressed his sentiments more or less as follows: “Not that I can shake him off. The man and what I wanted to make of him pursue me everywhere.”5 With regard to Moses, there are a number of Freud letters which make this quite clearly comprehensible. One could say that the figure of Moses represented a central pole in Freud’s thinking in his late work. Beginning in the late 1920s, he devoted his attention increasingly to questions relating to the theory of culture and the philosophy of religion — here I am thinking of Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents. With the rise of National Socialism, Freud felt an urgent need to explore his own origins, religion and Judaism. His father was a devout Jew. Freud considered himself an atheist, and he had a deep distaste for any kind of religion. Nonetheless he felt a strange ambivalence toward Judaism, as is expressed in his letter of 1923 to B’nai B’rith “… but plenty of other things remained over to make the attraction of Jewry and Jews irresistible — many obscure emotional forces which were the more powerful the less they could be expressed in words, as well as a clear consciousness of inner identity, the safe privacy of a common mental construction.”6 In one of his last writings, Moses and Monotheism, Freud delivered a radical reinterpretation of the history of the Jewish people under the leadership of Moses, albeit one that was judged untenable by historians. Still, Moses became a radical figure of identification for him in the last decades of his life, a point of reference for his own biography, which in Vienna ended with the necessity of escape, of leaving his home and setting off on a last, involuntary journey.

5

Freud, Ernst L. (Ed.): The letters of Sigmund Freud and Arnold Zweig. New York Univ.press, NY, 1970, p. 98 (Letter of Dec. 16th 1934) 6 Freud, S. (1926): Address to the Society of B’nai B’rith in Standard Edition, Vol. 20. Hogarth Press 1971, p. 273 f. 26

Inge Scholz-Strasser

1.9  Plaque with the house number “Berggasse 19”. Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna. Photo August Sarnitz (2015).

In closing, does one feel this “leaving” upon entering the museum? To quote Rainer Metzger: “Freud’s apartment, and hence the Sigmund Freud Museum as well, can be seen as a sort of padded case [Futteral, in the sense of Walter Benjamin]. ‘We cannot be surprised that our libido, thus bereft of so many of its objects, has clung with all the greater intensity to what is left to us…,’ wrote the Master in his short essay “On Transience”, which was strongly marked by his experience of the First World War. In this sense, there are not many objects that have remained, and hence we are all the more attached to them. And yet we know why they have all been lost.”7 Since their opening, the rooms at Berggasse 19 have successively gone through many-layered processes of transformation in becoming a museum. Often the presentation runs against visitors’ expectations of memorials and places of remembrance. To a certain degree, the place retreats from those seeking entry, but at the same time, in its very presence, it recalls many things to memory.

7

40 Jahre Sigmund Freud Museum, eine Festschrift, 2012, p. 47 27

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2.1  Freud’s couch. Freud Museum London.

28

Between the Artist’s Studio and the Psycho-Analytic Office: A Comparison of Lucian and Sigmund Freud’s Interior Spaces Jeanne Wolff-Bernstein

The relationship between Lucian Freud and his grandfather Sigmund Freud has always been a delicate subject matter. When reading the different texts about Lucian Freud’s work, one gains the definitive impression that he had tolerated the relationship to his famous grandfather, the founder of psychoanalysis, but that he had not been necessarily proud about this kinship link. Lucian Freud carried the name of “Freud” in good British style, but he did not make any big waves about it. He never attributed much significance to the influence psychoanalysis might have exerted upon his own artistic work, and he was inclined to brush comments aside which aimed at linking his paintings to the field of psychoanalysis. Instead of taking this connection seriously, he preferred to recount on occasion a few amusing anecdotes about his grandfather, such as that when he was a young boy, his grandfather had a habit of playing with his mouth prosthesis to amuse and terrify his grandsons, much to the annoyance of his daughter-inlaw, Lucian’s mother, who considered this game no laughing matter. At other moments, Lucian Freud recounted causally that his grandfather had supported his artistic endeavors and had recognized his artistic talent rather early on. Sigmund Freud gave his grandson Lucian two books about Egypt and Antiquity, which Lucian Freud immortalized in one of his paintings [Still life with books, 1993]1. One may conclude from these light-hearted memories and anecdotes that the work of his

1

Seen in Lucian Freud, Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, edited by Sabine Haag & Jasper Sharp, p.133 29

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grandfather had a more incisive influence upon his art works, but it is exactly this conjecture that has not been considered in any discussions about the work of Lucian Freud. The conscious and perhaps unconscious avoidance of the effect psychoanalysis may have had upon Lucian Freud’s work, and his rather deliberate and somewhat annoyed response to questions about this familial relationship, inspires one to examine even more vigorously their relationship. Here, I am not interested in examining their personal relationship, but rather in the relationship their similar working styles and methods bear upon their exploration of the human subject’s interiority. Let me begin with the creation of the interior room, the studio and the time schedule Lucian Freud fashioned for his models and compare it with the clinical recommendations Freud formulated for the proper conduct of a psychoanalytic treatment. Thanks to the many descriptions of various models who posed for Lucian Freud, in particular Martin Gayford, an art historian who wrote a diary about his experience of posing for the famous painter, we are in possession of many details on how Lucian Freud established a given atmosphere and working style in his studio. No matter how famous or infamous models were — with the exception of Queen Elizabeth — every model had to arrive at Lucian Freud’s front door right on time; always at the same time every day, either in the morning or in the evening. Freud did his utmost to maintain similar light conditions and for that reason, he maintained two different studios; one for the day when natural light infiltrated the room, and one for the evening, when that studio was hermetically restricted to artificial light. Lucian Freud worked every day from early morning to evening, preserving a strict working schedule which stands in stark contrast to what one otherwise knows about his rather hectic lifestyle filled with drug-related and sexually explorative escapades. Regardless of how busy Lucian Freud might have been during the night, his daily activities followed a strict schedule. His friend, assistant and also model, David Dawson would unlock his studio every morning before 7:00am and get the studio ready for Freud to work in. At 7:00am on the dot, Freud would enter his studio and begin his work. If a model was late, Freud was known not to take these latecomings lightly and consequently, some portraits were abandoned because some models could not adjust to such a regimented lifestyle. Other models, on the contrary, savored their sittings with Freud and described them as quasi-therapy sessions with the great artist. They 30

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2.2  Working at Night, (2005), by David Dawson (b.1960), Bridgeman Artists Copyright

enjoyed the rhythm he had imposed on their life. Martin Gayford reports, “In the studio, there is an eternal present. Time stops. There is always an item to examine, a color to mix. There is no sense of hurry. That is one reason why it is relaxing, almost therapeutic.”2 At some point in his life, Lucian Freud also characterized his sittings as therapeutic, especially with regard to the portraits he painted of his mother. In 1970, shortly after the death of Ernst Freud (Sigmund Freud’s fourth child and Lucian Freud’s father), Lucie Freud, Lucian’s mother, had made a serious suicide attempt. Freud writes, “She was simply terribly depressed about the fact that she was still alive even though she had taken the decision to end her life. I started to paint her, because she had lost interest in everything, also in myself. Before that, I had always avoided her because she possessed a strong intuition and I experienced her therefore as a menacing intrusion into my private life … She became a great model for me because she had no more interest in me. But in the end, I also painted her because I wanted to cheer her up and provide her with a task … Either I picked her up, or

2

Gayford 2010, p. 114 31

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had her being picked up every morning, and this went on for eight or nine years until her death. I have painted many paintings.”3 Even though Sigmund Freud did not pick up his patients, or had them driven to his office, his daily analytic schedule did not differ much from that of his grandson. In Freud’s analytic practice, the maintenance of regular hours during the week and the punctual arrival at those analytic hours were, and remain to be, of great importance. In On Beginning the treatment (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis I), he writes: “In regard to time, I adhere strictly to the principle of leasing a definitive hour. Each patient is allotted a particular hour of my available working day; it belongs to him and he is liable for it, even if he does not make use of it. This arrangement, which is taken as a matter of course for teachers of music and languages in good society, may perhaps seem too rigorous in a doctor, or even unworthy of his profession … I work with my patients every day except on Sundays and public holidays — that is as a rule, six days a week. For slight cases or the continuation of a treatment, which is already well advanced, three days a week will be enough. Any restrictions of time beyond this bring no advantage either to the doctor or to the patient; and at the beginning of an analysis they are quite out of the question. Even short interruptions have a slightly obscuring effect on the work.”4 Sigmund and Lucian Freud also shared similar views regarding the length of treatment or the final date. Sigmund Freud answered his patients’ questions as to how long a psychoanalytic treatment may last with Aesop’s cynical response to the Wanderer who asks for the length of the path, “… Walk! And afterwards [he] explained his apparently unhelpful reply on the grounds that he must know the length of the Wayfarer’s stride before he could tell how long his journey would take. This expedient helps one over the first difficulties; but the comparison is not a good one, for the neurotic can easily alter his pace and may at times make only very slow progress. In point of fact, the question as to the probable duration of a treatment is almost unanswerable.”5 Lucian Freud adopted a similar stance; he did not want to feel pressured by his models’ questions as to when their portraits were to be

3

In Smee, 2012 p. 43, 44, translation by JWB S. F. 1913, 126, 127 5 S. F. 1913, p. 128 4

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finished. He never signed any contracts regarding the length or the completion of a painting, so that his models never knew to what time frame they had committed themselves once Freud had begun their portrait. Gayford writes in his diary “In the case of a sitter for Thomas Gainsborough or Rembrandt, there was in reality a reciprocal agreement. One of Rembrandt’s clients made a fuss because he didn’t like the way his daughter looked in her portrait. With LF — as with Alberto Giacometti, Bacon or Van Gogh — there is no such understanding, and no grounds for appeal.” 6 The relationship and the internal tension which establishes itself between the painter and his model over time, constitutes an important element in Lucian Freud’s paintings and imbues them with a kind of fascination that the viewer can immediately sense. A similar intersubjective process can also be detected in the transference/countertransference dynamic that develops between analyst and analysand, which, in turn, becomes a nodal point of any analytic treatment. While Sigmund Freud describes the transferential matrix in his case histories, thus inviting his reader into his inner cabinet, Lucian Freud incorporates the atmospheric dynamic between himself and the model in his paintings, thus allowing his spectators to become direct witnesses of this unfolding process. Lucian Freud observed “The advantage of taking so long is that it allows me to include more than one mood, though goodness knows I don’t always succeed.”7 There was no going back, once the painter had decided to paint a model and surrender himself to the intimate relationship with his models. Lucian Freud created a whole atmosphere around his models, seducing them ever deeper into an increasing intimate sphere: He cooked for them once a sitting was completed, or he invited them to his favorite restaurant. All these caring and entertaining gestures also served as means for the painter to study his models even more closely while they perhaps felt less keenly observed. His sittings ended rarely prematurely since Lucian Freud was known to take sometimes years to complete a painting. However, on a rare occasion, a given model would flee from her sittings/sessions with Lucian Freud, producing similar dramatic reactions as Dora was able to evoke in Sigmund Freud when she prematurely left her treatment with him in 1901.

6 7

Gayford 2010, p. 135 Gayford 2010, p. 153 33

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The strict frame of space and time enables both the artist and analyst to let the interieur of the model or patient freely unfold. Once the clear frame is set by the analyst, who provides his patients with a predictable time schedule and the same setting of his office, the patient can begin to explore freely the interiors of his/her psyche and involve him/herself in the multi-faceted relationship with the analyst, otherwise known as the transference /countertransference relationship. The patient’s reliance upon the same space and the regularity of the weekly hours gradually opens up the space for the analysand to engage in a process of free association, a process that is not easy to achieve. Invoking Schiller, Freud writes, “Nevertheless, what Schiller describes as a relaxation of the watch upon the gates of Reason, the adoption of an attitude of uncritical self-observation, is by no means difficult.”8 Through the process of free association, the interpretations in the transference/ countertransference relationship and the analysis of dreams, slips of the tongue and bungled actions, the realm of unconscious phantasies and desires can be gradually explored and unlocked. Again, Lucian Freud’s method did not differ too much in this aspect from his grandfather’s proceedings. He also established a strict frame of time and space to create an intimate rapport with his models, which authorized him to notice the smallest changes or movements in the models he portrayed. Their working methods reveal similarities again: What a brushstroke was for Lucian Freud was a word or slip of the tongue for Sigmund Freud. Lucian Freud had a very particular style of painting, he was known for observing his models with a keenly sharp eye, holding his brush in a highly elevated position, checking his model again, before finally applying a single brushstroke on the canvas. An equally slow and precise way of working can be detected in Freud’s analytic work where he listens carefully to the patient’s words, word-deformations and silences, before he offers his own interpretations, constructions and reconstructions. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud writes, “Our first step in the employment of this procedure teaches us that what we must take as the object of our attention is not the dream as a whole but the separate portions of its content. Thus, the method of dream interpretation, which I practice already, differs in this first important respect from the popular, historic and legendary method of inter-

8

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S. F. 1900, p. 103

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pretation by means of symbolism and approximates to the second or ‘decoding’ method. Like the latter, it employs interpretation en detail and not en masse; like the latter, it regards dreams from the very first as being of a composite character, as being conglomerates of psychical formations.”9 In other words, what for Lucian Freud was his piercing eagle-eye regard before he applied his brush-stroke, was for Sigmund Freud his unconscious mind which he turned towards his patients, like “… a receptive organ towards the transmitting unconscious of the patient. He must adjust himself to the patient as a telephone receiver is adjusted to the transmitting microphone. Just as the receiver converts back into sound waves the electric oscillations in the telephone line which were set up by sound waves, so the doctor’s unconscious is able, from the derivatives of the unconscious which are communicated to him, to reconstruct that unconscious, which has determined the patient’s free associations.”10 A similar intuitive, resonating, and receptive stance can be attributed to Lucian Freud. Gayford, the man with the blue shawl observed about Lucian Freud, “Indeed he is intensely interested in you. Obviously, this too is charming. That interest in other people is always awake in him, but is perhaps especially strong when you are the subject of a picture.“11 Elsewhere he remarks, that “LF, as a mature artist, has never invented anything. He wants, as he has said, his models to be the drama in his pictures: just them, in the studio.”12 Lucian’s own daughter Bella reveals in a movie about her father how comfortable most models felt in her father’s studio, even though they often had to adopt very uncomfortable positions for many months. She describes the atmosphere in his studio as “cozy, special and safe.”13 Lucian Freud was convinced that his models were ready to reveal everything to him as long as they had the sense that they were observed with great care and attention. “The subject must be kept under close observation: if this is done, day and night, the subject – he, she, or it — will eventually reveal the all without which selection

9

S. F. 1900, p. 104 S. F. 1912, p. 115, 116 11 Gayford, 2010, p. 19 12 Gayford, 2010, p. 15 13 Vazques, (2014) 10

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itself is not possible.”14 His grandfather had arrived at a similar conviction when he spoke about the transference that unfolds in the analytic treatment. “We render the compulsion to repeat harmless, and indeed useful, by giving it the right to assert itself in a definitive field. We admit it into transference as a playground in which it is allowed to expand in almost complete freedom and in which it is expected to display to us everything in the way of pathogenic instincts that is hidden in the patient’s mind.“15 It is important to notice how both grandfather and grandson focus their interest and activity upon the process of close attention they pay toward their patients or models. In the Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning, Freud describes the gradual evolvement of the reality principle out of the pleasure principle. He explains that the more the internal apparatus turns away from the internal processes, as it has to bear and confront the external world with all its real frustrations, the more the activity of thinking develops out of three separate functions: “attention, notation and memory.”16 It is as if Lucian Freud had read his grandfather’s text, as he was known to pay exquisite attention to his surroundings. His models remember his inquisitive gaze. He was known to observe the slightest changes in their faces, voices or body. One day, he even noticed that Martin Gayford came to his studio with a slightly differently colored blue shawl, and became irritated with that barely noticeable change in the color blue of his shawl. He was passionately attached to the idea that the painter adopt “… the attitude of a fiction writer. The artist wants to know as much as possible about his models, their characters and their way of being in the world. The painter is interested in their moods and emotions and gathers as much as possible of this information through talking with them … There is no narration what so ever in the paintings, the model is supposed to represent the drama in the studio, and in order to achieve that, Freud takes all the time in the world.”17 Through his intense focus upon the human body, Lucian Freud created a pictorial language through which his models also gained a new experience about their own body. They recognized themselves

14

Gayford 2010, p. 21 S. F. 1914, p. 154 16 see S. F. 1911, pp 220/221 17 Gregori, D. 2013, p. 73, translation JWB 15

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so accurately that Esther, his daughter and one of his many models exclaimed in a movie, “wow, how my arm is exactly my arm. He is not trying to depict an image of me, instead, he is painting who I am.”18 Freud’s unique method of collecting observations and emotions over a long period of time, in addition to the various impressions he gained about his sitters, change over time and produce an entirely new composite painting, saturated by the passage of time within its completion. In the Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning, Freud characterized the artist as a hybrid between the reality and pleasure principle, who, unlike the psychotic or neurotic can combine both principles with one another. He writes, “An artist is originally a man who turns away from reality because he cannot come to terms with the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction which it at first demands, and who allows his erotic and ambitious wishes full play in the life of phantasy. He finds the way back to reality, however, from this world of phantasy by making use of special gifts to mold his phantasies into truths of a new kind, which are valued by men as precious reflections of reality.”19 Lucian Freud used his artistic talents to translate his desires and his erotic longings into a painterly language. He did not aim at painting a resemblance to his sitters, but rather at portraying them in the way he saw them. Despite, or rather because of this highly egotistical stance, he was so acutely interested in the interior of the individuals who posed for him. Gayford writes that Lucian Freud was the kind of artist who “… sees beyond the external appearance of the sitter, he sees into their mind — and if there is such a thing — soul.“20 Lucian Freud required intimacy: brutal intimacy for his work, in order to create such an in-between area; a “potential space”, Winni­ cott would say, within which the naked truth about the human subject could make its appearance. The same attention to the discovery of the subject’s internal, unconscious truth was the principal endeavor of Sigmund Freud, who defined the transference as an “ … intermediate region between illness and real life through which the transition from the one to the other is made.”21 The studio was such an intermediate region for Lucian Freud, where a new scene was created with the

18

Vazquez, 1914 S. F. 1911, p. 224 20 Gayford 2010, p. 116 21 S. F. 1914, p. 154 19

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same props for each separate painting. Once a scene was designed for a given subject, it was fixated like a crime scene, with chalk and color markings in order to ensure that the same props, like the bed, the plant, the mattress or chair remained in exactly the same position. Over a period of months, sometimes years, the scene would always be re-set until the painting was completed. The need to re-draw and re-invoke the same scene every day to position his models in the same scene anew reminds one of Freud’s concept of “repetition compulsion”, within which the human subject is often paralyzed when he has not worked through a painful part of his past. He is unconsciously compelled to repeat that part in the present until he has found this lost and repressed part and can symbolically reintegrate it into his conscious life. Once the repressed wish can be known and experienced, it no longer pushes to be repeated. When Lucian Freud was asked how he knew when a painting was completed, he answered, “I begin to think a picture is finished when I have the sensation I am painting someone else’s picture …”22 Lucian Freud’s studio setting serves as a powerful reminder of Sigmund Freud’s own staging of the analytic frame where he does not hide behind a canvas, but behind the couch, in order to listen to and follow the phantasies, wishes and memories of his patients. He invites his analysands to behave like “… a traveler sitting next to the window of a railway carriage and describing to someone inside the carriage the changing views which you see outside.”23 The free associations are to occur in a lying position on “a sofa” (Ruhebett) with the analyst being out of sight. “This arrangement has a historical basis, it is the remnant of the hypnotic method out of which psycho-analysis was evolved … The patient usually regards being made to adopt this position as a hardship and rebels against it, especially if the instinct for looking (scopophilia) plays an important part in his neurosis.”24 As with the analysand, who embarks upon an uncertain voyage when he enters into psychoanalysis, so also the models who posed for Lucian Freud did not know what the finishing point would be once they began to sit for the painter. In order to begin such a journey, both patient and model entrust themselves to the analyst or painter who

22

Gayford 2010, p. 141 S. F. 1913, p. 135 24 S. F. 1913, p. 133, 134 23

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2.3  Painting of Rita almost finished (2007), by David Dawson (b.1960), Bridgeman Artists Copyright.

hears and looks beyond their confronting Other, to search ruthlessly for their subjective truth. The staging of the analytic scene represents an important element in the exploration of the unconscious, as does the staging of the studio scene for the process of painting. It is interesting to realize that both Sigmund and Lucian Freud invested a great deal into the staging of a scene that served primarily as a means for exploring as precisely as possible the internal psychic life of the Other facing them. Both were convinced that a certain theatricality was necessary to evoke the bare truth of the human mind and body. No matter whether it was an analytic couch or a dilapidated leather chair, they, in addition to other carefully chosen props, all served primarily to reveal the interiority of the human soul, which, in turn, may only show itself when it is staged onto another scene. If one compares Sigmund Freud’s rather small and almost stuffy analytic office with Lucian Freud’s messy, but rather empty studio, one cannot forget the theatricality Freud attributed to the production of a dream. In the early chapters of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud invokes the name of 39

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one of his scientific predecessors, G. H. Fechner, who once suspected that “the scene of action [Schauplatz] of dreams is different from that of waking ideational life.25 Freud realized through his copious studies of his own dreams, that dreams want to show and unveil something on a scene altogether different from that of waking life. In our waking life, there are many different performances and representations (Vorstellungen) behind which the human subject can conceal himself. It is as if both grandfather and grandson knew how to turn this all-too-human narcissistic inclination around and prepare a precisely crafted stage so that the human masks could be gradually dropped in exchange for the revelation of an interiority of the human soul. The more formal the exterior setting for both Sigmund and Lucian Freud were, the more both analyst and painter could concentrate their focus upon the Other. They both embodied the composite figure of a surgeon who functioned like an unreflecting mirror and a telephone receiver, absorbing the unconscious waves of the other in order to pursue their unyielding explorations into the human psyche, either on the canvas or in the psychoanalytic cabinet. Even though Lucian Freud did not show any manifest interest in psychoanalysis and, according to his oldest daughter Annie, “… rarely talked about Sigmund and didn’t seem to like the idea of psychoanaly­sis altogether,”26 his working methods seem to show unquestionable parallels to those of his grandfather. While Lucian Freud chose to remember his grandfather in a purely personal way as a loving and jovial relative rather than the inventor of a theory of modern subjectivity, his paintings show a different truth in the end. Despite his conscious reservations and resistance to the influence of psychoanalysis, he irrevocably pursued a very similar path to the one left behind by his grandfather, Sigmund Freud.

25 26

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S. F. 1900, p. 48 Almut Spiegler in Die Presse, 2013, p. 26, 27, translation JWB

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Bibliography Freud, A. (2013) Mit einer gewissen Sorge, Zur Eröffnung der Ausstellung von Lucian Freud im KHM, von Almuth Spiegler, Die Presse, 26/27. Oktober. Freud, S. (1900) The Interpretation of Dreams, The Standard Edition of the complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated by James Strachey, London: The Hogarth Press, Volume IV. Freud, S. (1911) Formulations on the two Principles of Mental Functioning, S. E. Translated by James Strachey, London: The Hogarth Press, Volume XII. Freud, S. (1912) Recommendations to Physicians Practicing PsychoAnalysis, S. E. translated by James Strachey, London: The Hogarth Press, Volume XII (1913) On Beginning the Treatment (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis I.), S. E. translated by James Strachey, London: The Hogarth Press, Volume XII. Freud, S. (1914 Remembering, Repeating and Working Through (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis II). S. E. Translated by James Strachey, London: The Hogarth Press, Volume XII. Gayford, M. (2010) Man With a Blue Scarf. On sitting for a portrait by Lucian Freud. London: Thames & Hudson. Gregori, D. (2013) Das Atelier als Bühne der Autobiographie, Lucian Freud und seine Modelle. Parnass KUNSTMAGAZIN, Wien: Austria, pp. 70–77. Smee, S. (2012) Lucian Freud, Köln: Taschen Verlag. Vazquez, G. (2014), Lucian Freud, Painted Life, 2nd part, video available on YouTube.

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3.1  Photo of Gabriel de Yturri, ca. 1885–1890. BNF, Nafr 15146, f. 18.

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Proust’s Interiors: Between Montesquiou and Yturri Rubén Gallo

Around the time Proust met Reynaldo Hahn, he became close friends with another Latin American living in Paris: Gabriel Yturri, an Argentinean who was the secretary and lover of Count Robert de Montesquiou, a poet and aristocrat who was also one of the most celebrated dandies in France. Proust was introduced to Montesquiou and Yturri in 1893, at the salon of Madeleine Lemaire. The unusual couple must have made quite an impression on him: Montesquiou came from one of the oldest, richest, and most aristocratic families in France; he traced his ancestry back to D’Artagnan, one of the three musketeers, and spent his childhood at a vast hôtel particulier on the Quai d’Orsay built by his father. He was a sharp dresser, an avid collector, and a compulsive decorator who spent most of his time and fortune furnishing various estates in Paris, Versailles, and Neuilly. He had a passion for Chinese art and a love for bonsais that led him to hire a full-time Japanese gardener. He was famous for owning a turtle, whose shell had been incrusted with precious stones so that it would match the rich décor of his apartment, and that would walk around his living room. [Fig. 3.3] In his Journal, Edmond de Goncourt left the following testimony of his visit to one of the Count’s apartments: Visite à Montesquiou-Fezensac, le Des Esseintes de A Rebours. Un rez-dechaussée de la rue Franklin, percé de hautes fenêtres aux petits carreaux du XVIIè siècle, donnant à la maison un aspect ancien. Un logis tout plein d’un méli-mélo d’objets disparates, de vieux portraits de famille, d’affreux meubles de l’Empire, de kakémonos japonais, d’eaux fortes de Whistler.1

1

Edmund de Goncourt, Journal: Mémoires de la vie littéraire (Montecarlo: Editions de l’Imprimerie Nationale de Monaco, 1956), vol. 18, 52–53 43

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3.2  Robert de Montesquiou, Sketch of Gabriel de Yturri, BNF, Nafr 15146, f. 14.

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[Called on Montesquiou-Fezensac, the Des Esseintes of Against the Grain. A ground floor on rue Franklin, its high mullioned windows given seventeenthcentury panes, to make the house look old. A dwelling stuffed with an incoherent assortment of old family portraits, hideous Empire-style furniture, Japanese kakémonos, Whistler etchings.]

Montesquiou had a passion for collecting and he spent his life acquiring not only furniture and artworks, but also thousands of curious objects supposed to have had some historical significance, and which he inflicted, along with interminable accounts of their origin, on his hapless visitors. Léon Daudet recalls the long list of objects that the Count would parade before his guests: Poil de la barbe de Michelet, vieille cigarette de Mme Sand, larme séchée de Lamartine, baignoire de Mme de Montespan, pot de chambre de Bonaparte à Waterloo, casquette du maréchal Bugeaud, balle qui tua Pouchkine, soulier de bal de la Giuccioli, bouteille d’absinthe ayant abreuvé Musset, bas à jour de Mme de Raynal, avec autographe de Stendhal, nez en pomme de terre détaché du masque de Parmentier…2 [A hair from Michelet’s beard, a cigarette smoked by Madame Sand, a dried tear shed by Lamartine, Madame de Montespan’s bathtub, Bonaparte’s chamber-pot at Waterloo, Marshal Bugeaud’s cap, the bullet that killed Pushkin, a dance slipper worn by La Giuccioli, Mme de Raynal’s stocking, with an autograph by Stendhal, a tuberous nose taken from the death-mask of Parmentier.]

Montesquiou’s eccentricities inspired several novelists to paint literary portraits of his exuberant life: Joris-Karl Huysmans turned him into Des Esseintes, the protagonist of Against the Grain (1884); Jean Lorrain — a writer who fought a duel with Proust — depicted him in Monsieur de Phocas (1901); and Proust was so taken with the personage that he devoted one of his early articles to the count and later modeled one of his novel’s most memorable characters, the Baron de Charlus, on Montesquiou. [Fig. 3.6, 3.7, 3.8] Gabriel de Yturri — his real name was Gabriel Iturri, but the Count insisted that he should insert an aristocratic-sounding particle into his signature — looked like Montesquiou’s double: the two were tall,

2

Léon Daudet, Fantômes et vivants (Paris: Grasset, 1917), 238. 45

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3.3  Photo of Robert de Montesquiou’s apartment, Quai d’Orsay, 1880s. BNF, Nafr 15037, f. 126.

slender, and sharply dressed. They often wore what seem like identical versions of the same outfit. In a series of photos taken in 1886 by Otto, for instance, the two are dressed alike and play at being doppelgangers: in one photo Yturri stands next to a column while Montesquiou has his back to the camera; in the next, they have switched places and it is the Count who faces the camera. Yturri shared the Count’s obsessions: he spent much of his time scouting for paintings, sculptures, and antiques to furnish their numerous residences. The two friends might have looked alike, but their backgrounds could not be more different. Montesquiou was born into wealth and privilege, while Yturri came from a more modest background. Despite his dapper looks, expensive clothing, and aristocratic acquaintances, it was abundantly clear that he came from another world. He spoke French with a thick Spanish accent and sometimes mixed up the two languages. Behind his back, many of the Count’s friends mocked the way he rolled his Rs (“Le connté a dit…Écoutez la parole merrveillouse 46

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3.4  Photo of Gabriel de Yturri atop the marble basin that once belonged to Madame de Pompadour, Neuilly, Pavillon des Muses, 1900. BNF, Nafr 15049, f. 82.

3.5  Photo of Gabriel de Yturri atop the marble basin that once belonged to Madame de Pompadour, Neuilly, Pavillon des Muses, 1900. BNF, Nafr 15049, f. 142.

qui vient dé tomber des lèvres du connté…admirable, positivement étrange et admirable,” parodied Léon Daudet).3 Montesquiou told his friends he had met Yturri in 1885 at the École des Beaux-Arts during an exhibition of paintings by Delacroix — the young man introduced himself as an admirer of the Count’s work, and expressed such passion for his poetry that he decided to hire him as a secretary.4 Others, however, told the story of a less distinguished encounter: Yturri started out as a tie salesman at Le Carnaval de Venise, a clothing store near La Madeleine, where he was discovered by Baron Jacques Doasan, who took him in as his protégé, until the young man left him for Montesquiou in 1885.5 At the time of their meeting, Yturri was 25 and Montesquiou 30. Regardless of which version of their meeting was correct, Montesquiou’s friends and relatives eyed Yturri with suspicion. In a circle that privileged birth, family, and social class above all, the young Argentine remained an inscrutable figure. He was as elegant and as graceful as any of them, but he was a foreigner and thus eluded most

3

Daudet, L’entre-deux-guerres (Paris: Nouvelle Imprimerie Nationale, 1915), 91. Painter gives some English renditions of these linguistic eccentricities: “Mossou le Connte; I was ze secretary of ze Baron Doasan,” Painter, Marcel Proust (London: Chatto and Windus, 1989), I:130. 4 Robert de Montesquiou, Le Chancelier de Fleurs (Paris: La Maison du Livre, 1907), 34. 5 Painter, Marcel Proust, I:130. 47

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of the class markings that allowed Parisians to chart each other in the vast and complex social landscape. Many considered him a gigolo intent on exploiting Montesquiou — but his lifelong devotion to the Count left no doubt about the sincerity of his motives. For most, he remained an opaque and inscrutable figure. In his memoirs, Léon Daudet wondered “Who was he? Where did he come from?” — a question many of the Count’s friends must have asked often.6 Proust and Yturri When Proust met the couple in April 1893, he was a 22-year old aspiring writer who had only published a handful of articles. The Count, already a celebrity, was 38 and Yturri was 33; the two friends had been together for almost eight years. Proust was smitten by Montesquiou’s celebrity, and looked up to him as the kind of writer he hoped to become one day: sophisticated, elegant, accepted by society. A few days after their meeting, Proust wrote the Count a letter thanking him for the kindness he had shown him at Madeleine Lemaire’s reception, and telling him he would like to see him again.7 This was the beginning of an epistolary friendship that lasted until Montesquiou’s death in 1921. At this early stage of their friendship, Proust often wrote to Yturri and asked him to convey messages and special requests to the Count.8 As Montesquiou’s secretary, the Argentine often played the role of go-between: he was easier to reach than the Count, and many who felt intimidated by Montesquiou’s arrogance found it easier to communicate with him through the more personable Yturri. Proust was excessively formal in his correspondence with Montesquiou — he always addressed him as “Monsieur” — but used a slightly more familiar tone with Yturri, and called him “poet, colleague, and friend.”9 Early in their acquaintance, Proust often referred to Yturri as “Montesquiou’s Eckermann,”10 drawing a parallel between the Count’s secretary and Goethe’s confidant, biographer, and literary executor (in one letter Proust went as far as to tell the Count his Eckermann was

6

Léon Daudet, L’entre-deux-guerres, 92. Proust to Montesquiou, April 15, 1893. Corr. I:205–206. 8 See, for instance: Proust to Yturri, April 17, 1894, Corr. I:289. 9 Proust to Yturri, May 13, 1896, Corr. II: 65. “Cher Monsieur, poète et ami.” 10 See, for instance, Proust to Montesquiou, November 1893, Corr. I:254–55. “Si vous voyez votre Eckermann, faites-lui agréer, je vous prie, mes plus sympathiques assurances.” 7

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“intellectually, far superior to the other”).11 The French translation of Johann Peter Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe had been published in 1893, and Proust’s comparison flattered both Montesquiou —  who was no doubt pleased to think of himself as Yturri’s Goethe — and Yturri — who liked to imagine that, like Eckermann, he would one day enter the pantheon of literary history.12 Proust seems to have been slightly envious of Yturri’s stature as Montesquiou’s Eckermann. In a letter written to the Count less than a year after their initial meeting, he tells him he longs to take part in his conversation and “have sometimes dreamed of being its Eckermann, empathetic and understanding.”13 Proust yearned to spend more time with the Count and revel in his famously witty conversation, but his comment also reveals an unconscious desire to take Yturri’s place as Montesquiou’s friend and confidant. To be an Eckermann meant not only to be privy to the Count’s sparkling repartee and bon mots, but also to live in lavish surroundings, wear fashionable clothes, and be invited to all the society parties one could dream of attending. But Proust was not a jealous person, and his desire to become the Count’s Eckermann was merely a fantasy. As the years went by, his bonds with Yturri strengthened, even as his admiration for the Count cooled. The Argentine once sent Proust one of his poems, and Marcel wrote back an enthusiastic letter expressing admiration for his work.14 He repeated this judgment in a letter to Montesquiou in which he praised the “grace and erudition of ‘La chasse aux perroquets [The parrot hunt],’” a prose piece written by Yturri and reprinted by the Count in his volume Roseaux pensants.15 Proust was a keen observer of human nature, and in his corres­ pondence he pays tribute to some of the Argentine’s most salient traits. In a letter to Yturri he writes: “I am doubly in awe of your manifold organization which allows you to have a window on dreams and at the same time a foot firmly set on life.”16 Yturri had a vivid imagination and an intense fantasy life, but he could also get things done

11

Proust to Montesquiou, December 1893, Corr. I: 264–5. Conversations de Goethe pendant les dernières années de sa vie (1822–1832) recueillies par Eckermann. Tr. Émile Délerot (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1893). 13 Proust to Montesquiou, January 14,1894. Corr. I:273–4. 14 Proust to Yturri, October 1899, Corr. II: 363. 15 Proust to Montesquiou, January 13, 1894, Corr. I:272. 16 Proust to Yturri, May 11, 1894, Corr. I:295. 12

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and was a skillful executor of Montesquiou’s wildest plans. In a letter to Montesquiou, Proust makes some more candid comments about Yturri: “I fell under the spell of his spiritual graces,” he writes, before adding: “Such a tactful, civilized person! Such a wild cat! Such kindness and energy!”17 The Argentine was both idealistic and practical, “wild” and “civilized” at once. It was his wilder side that rendered him exotic in the eyes of both Montesquiou and Proust. Proust seems to have developed a genuine affection for Yturri. He even saw him a few times without Montesquiou, and his letters to others praise the Argentine’s wit and intelligence.18 In the summer of 1894, a year and some months after his initial encounter with Montesquiou and Yturri, Proust met Reynaldo Hahn. The Count loved the company of young people — Hahn was 20 years old and Marcel 23 —, and he began inviting Marcel and Reynaldo to come visit him together. The two couples met often and went out — to the theater, to dinner — on what we would now call double dates. Montesquiou, who had always been fond of doubles, probably saw Marcel and Reynaldo as a younger version of himself and Yturri. Like his own secretary, Reynaldo was a Latin American — although, as we will see later, from a very different background. “Come with your brother Hahn,” the Count urged Marcel as he invited him to a party. Marcel, likewise, invited Montesquiou and Yturri to several dinners he organized at his parents’ apartment.19 How strange these occasions must have been! One wonders if Proust felt self-conscious, inviting a Count who spent his life between lavish mansions particuliers and chateaux, to his parents’ relatively modest apartment on boulevard Malesherbes — a flat filled with dark, outmoded furniture that could not be further from the fashionable salons frequented by Montesquiou. And one wonders what Proust’s parents, who were rather conservative bourgeois, thought of their son’s odd friends: a snobbish aristocratic dandy and his inseparable Argentine sidekick, both dressed to the nines, who could spend hours recounting elaborate anecdotes about celebrities from Princess Mathilde Bonaparte to Countess Greffulhe.

17

Proust to Montesquiou, November 18, 1894, Corr. I:322. See, for instance, Proust to Montesquiou, Corr. I:317; Proust to Yturri, August 14, 1894, Corr. I:318. 19 Montesquiou to Proust, July 23, 1895. Corr. 1:412. On the double dates, see also Corr. I:403 (June 17, 1895); and Corr. II:186 (April 15–20, 1897); Corr. II:284 (April 21, 1899). 18

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In 1900, Proust got a first-hand glimpse of one of Montesquiou’s and Yturri’s most famous projects. The Count had just moved to a vast new house in Neuilly which he baptized “Le Pavillon des Muses”. Yturri, as usual, was in charge of helping with the decoration, and one day he surprised Montesquiou with a most unusual find: a huge marble basin that had been commissioned by Louis XIV for the bathing quarters in Versailles, and which now lay, forgotten, in a nearby estate owned by a religious order. It was an impressive monolith, over nine feet in diameter, carved out of a single block. Montesquiou gave the go-ahead, Yturri bought the basin from the nuns, and supervised an impressive operation to unearth it, transport it to Neuilly, and install it at the Pavillon des Muses. Montesquiou was ecstatic: the basin had once belonged to Madame de Montespan, the mistress of Louis XIV, and was later given to Madame de Pompadour, who had it installed at her estate near Versailles.20 The Count, who was an obsessive collector of bibelots, considered this his crown jewel. Yturri was so impressed with the basin — and with the list of its famous owners —, that he asked a number of poet friends to write literary tributes to this marble monolith. “Yturri loved this basin so much,” Montesquiou wrote, “that he wanted to add to its past pedigree a more contemporary contribution.”21 Many of the couple’s friends accepted the invitation: Anna de Noailles wrote a poem to the basin, and so did Jean Lorrain. The marble monument was also painted and photographed by the couple’s artist acquaintances. To cap off the artistic homages, the Count wrote the following sonnet to the basin:

20 In a letter written shortly after the discovery of the basin, M. Lobre expresses the great enthusiasm felt by Montesquiou’s friends about this object: “Pour les nouveaux détails que désire l’Ami, Mr Yturri, il n’y en a, hélas, pas d’autres sur la vasque; les dessins de Le Brun ont disparus et il n’existe rien des bronzes de Cucci — Nolhac m’a bien certifié la chose. Il a tout dit ce qu’il savait là dessus. Il paraît en effet que c’est merveilleux, ne ferons-nous pas une pleine-eau dans la vasque qui reçu la Pompadour et toutes les petites maîtresses de Louis XV?..(!!!) Avec les Muses qui doivent l’inaugurer?” M. Lobre to Montesquiou, March 27, 1900. BNF, Nafr. 15049, fl.155. Oh! Flameng où es-tu! Quel heureux mortel vous êtes et comme vous devez être dans une bonne fièvre d’exhumation de chef-d’œuvre! 21 Montesquiou, Chancelier, 130.

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Les larmes des objets sont dans ce bloc de Rance, Vasque de Montespan, miroir de Pompadour, Piscine qui mesure un incroyable tour, Et, du faste des dieux, symbolise l’outrance Les filons azurés, les veines de garance, Du bleu sang de nos rois, du sang vif de l’amour, Dans ce marbre immortel mêlent, encore un jour, Le souverain Éros aux monarques de France. Des lignes de batiste ont traîné sur ces bords; Les uns glissant au long de voluptueux corps, Les autres ablués aux doigts de mains pieuses. Car l’Hermitage, qui fut temple à Cupido, Devient chapelle; et des candeurs religieuses, Frôlant l’impur bassin, le changement d’âme et d’eau.22 [Objects’ tears within the marbled block from Rance Montespan’s basin, Pompadour’s looking glass Pool of girth beyond belief That all the pomp of gods exceeds. In azured skeins and veins of madder Blue blood of kings and scarlet blood of love Shall mingle still in this immortal marble Sovereign Eros with the Royalty of France. White batiste pleats have brushed along this rim; Some over a voluptuous body sliding, Others by pious fingers softly rinsed. Just as the Hermitage, that once was Cupid’s temple, Is now a shrine, so blessed whiteness th’impure basin Cleansed, for soul and water both to be refreshed.]

22

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Montesquiou, “La cuve,” Le Chancelier de Fleurs, 133.

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3.6  Otto, Paris: Robert de Montesquiou and Gabriel de Yturri in Conversation at the Apartment at 41, quai d’Orsay, ca. 1886–1888. Albumen print, 9 x 6 cm. Robert de Montesquiou, Ego Imago: mes photographies, album II, folio 33. Private collection [from Robert de Montesquiou ou L’art de paraître (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2000), p. 63].

3.7  Sem, Caricature of Robert de Montesquiou lecturing in New York. Gabriel de Yturri, in the audience, exclaims «Prodigieux», Le Gaulois (18 January 1903). BNF, Nafr 15063, f. 159–160. 53

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Proust was not among those who devoted poems or essays to the marble monument, but he seems to have understood that the way to Montesquiou’s heart was through his basin, and he made sure to sing its praises in a letter: “Allow me, one day,” he wrote, “to come and see you by the basin that bathes its marbled flesh in the waters that yesteryear caressed the less voluptuous body of Madame de Pompadour.”23 [Fig. 3.4, 3.5] Proust still lived in his parents’ apartment, but Montesquiou and Yturri moved in together: they shared the Pavillon Montesquiou at Versailles and later installed themselves at the Pavillon des Muses in Neuilly. Even though he always introduced him as his “secretary,” it was clear to most who knew them that they were living as a couple. The two were inseparable, and the humorist Sem (1863–1934) published several cartoons showing Montesquiou and Yturri as an eternal couple who dressed alike, spoke alike, and even shared the same tics and mannerisms. Montesquiou took dozens of photos of his friend and had his portrait sketched by their artist friends, including Antonio de La Gandara and Louise Breslau. According to Elisabeth de Clermont-Tonnerre, Montesquiou even commissioned a painting of Yturri’s legs — attired in cycling breeches — that has not survived.24 On New Year’s Day 1901, an unusually melancholic Montesquiou wrote Yturri a letter that reveals how close the two had become, and how much the Count loved his companion and secretary. In response to Gabriel’s New Year’s greetings, Montesquiou wrote: Cher, Votre chère dépêche est la seule étrenne qui puisse m’atteindre. Le reste c’est la famille incompréhensive et haineuse, l’amitié insuffisante et distraite, la vie injuste et brutale. Vous, au moins, avec vos graves défauts, vous représentez ce qui, non seulement ne doute pas, mais qui sait de confiance, ce qui croit et ce qui espère. Pour cela, je vous aime et je puis bien dire: je n’aime que vous. L’année s’ouvre, le siècle prélude, épineux et ardu. La première verra nos peines. Mais (nous avons le droit d’y compter) la seconde verra nos gloires! Ainsi soit-il, RM25

23

Proust to Montesquiou, June 20, 1901, Corr. II:435. Elisabeth de Clermont-Tonnere, Robert de Montesquiou et Marcel Proust (Paris: Flammarion, 1925), 60. 25 Montesquiou to Yturri, January 1, 1901. BNF, Nafr. 15146, f. 80–81.

24

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3.8  Sem [pseudonym of Georges Goursat], Caricature of Robert de Montesquiou and Gabriel de Yturri dining at the Ritz, n/d. BNF, Nafr. 15067, f. 68.

[My dear, Your cherished dispatch is the one gift that can touch me. The rest is but a family filled with incomprehension and hate, friendships that are few and uncaring, and the brutal unfairness of life. But you, for all your flaws, you represent what knows no doubt, and more than that, what is confident in knowledge, and believes, and grows greater. I love you for that, and can even say: I love only you. The year opens, the century embarks on its thorny and arduous prelude. The first will see our travails. But the second (we have the right to depend on it) will see our glories! So be it, RM]

Conclusion In his early years as a writer, Proust looked up to Montesquiou as the type of writer he hoped to become one day: elegant, respected in society, surrounded by riches, beauty, and glamour. As he grew older and matured, he became more interested in Yturri than in Montesquiou, 55

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3.9  Gabriel de Yturri lounging in Robert de Montesquiou’s Japanese garden in Versailles, 1894-97. BNF, Nafr 15146, f. 21.

and grew closer to the dying friend than to the glamorous dandy. Yturri became Marcel’s “colleague in malady” and taught him much about illness and death. Marcel had always liked Yturri, but it was only after he fell ill that a truly special bond developed between the two. Most of Proust’s writings on Yturri — the letters to Montesquiou and other friends; the transpositions of his character traits into La Recherche — came after his friend’s death, and these are more involved and complex than the light pastiche published during Yturri’s life. Marcel identified with the sick Yturri, but especially with the dead Yturri. Watching Yturri die unpublished made Marcel fear for his own destiny: would he also die without publishing a major work? What if he, like Yturri, disappeared without leaving a trace? The figure of the cultured man who could have written but never did haunted Marcel, and it made its way into the novel, where the narrator repeatedly laments that some of the most brilliant characters, like Swann and Charlus, never bring themselves to publishing a book. Yturri was one of the first to teach him about this missed opportunity, which would become one of the fundamental tropes of the Recherche. Proust incorporated into his novel the verse from Ovid’s Metamorphoses that Montesquiou chose for Yturri’s grave: non est mortale quod opto. This line, which can be roughly translated as “your 56

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3.10  Photo of Gabriel de Yturri dressed as an Arabian Prince for a costume party at the Pavillon des Muses, BNF, Nafr 15146, f. 34.

3.11  The Angel of Silence, Tomb of Montesquiou and Yturri, Gonards Cemetery, Versailles, 1905. From Robert de Montes­ quiou, Le Chancelier de Fleurs (Paris: La Maison du Livre, 1907), p. 290.

destiny is that of a mortal; you ambition that of an immortal,” echoes one of the main themes in Proust’s novel: only literature allows us to transcend our mortal condition, only through writing can one achieve immortality. It is significant that Montesquiou inscribed this phrase on a tomb, while Proust placed in a novel that is the literary equivalent of a tomb, a repository of lost time. In real life, Montesquiou wrote but did not achieve immortality —  his poems, he himself confessed, were no more than bibelots. Yturri did not achieve immortality either, mainly because he never wrote. Marcel, in contrast, avoided the fate of Swann, Charlus, and Yturri. He achieved his share of immortality, and he did so, in part, by observing Yturri’s tragic end and turning his reflections into literature. Perhaps it would not be too much of an exaggeration to conclude that Yturri’s death jolted Marcel into action and allowed him to write the book he had always planned but had been unable to write. After 1905, in order to avoid the destiny that befell his Argentine friend — the lot of all mortals — he retired from the world, locked himself in his cork-lined room, and wrote until he died, but not before his name had been inscribed, for eternity, in the pantheon of literary history. 57

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4.1  Merano Postcards, c.1900

58

Drop Form: Freud, Dora, and Dream Space Spyros Papapetros

Does psychoanalysis have a theory of space? Is there any relation between the origin of modern theories of architectural space in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the institutionalization of Freud’s therapeutic practice around 1900? If yes, how does his dream interpretation move beyond the symbolic identification between interior organs of the body and the interior spaces of a building to offer a new form of correspondence between subjects, objects, and the architectural settings that enclose them? Moreover, how does the novel status of objects — interior furnishings, small domestic artifacts, and bodily adornments — correspond to these new spatial relationships? From clothing accessories to jewel boxes, objects themselves, more than the testimonies of their users, offer the key to unlocking the mysteries of dream interpretation. Can we then transfer the processes discovered by Freud in the “dream-work,” namely condensation and displacement, to the architectural spaces and artifacts that comprise the dream’s plastic setting? Would architecture then be part of the dream’s manifest or its latent content? In other words, would architectural objects cover up (like added ornamental layers) or expose the inner core of psychoanalytic constructions? Architectural theory and practice were radically altered at the turn of the century: a massive number of buildings as well as institutional settings were torn down and new ones were erected. The oscillating spaces of psychoanalysis can retroactively project part of this profound reorganization. While seemingly shielded within the protective enclosure of the turn-of-thecentury interior, the architectures restored in Freud’s dream narratives are animated by the very turmoil that agitated contemporary urban conditions. It may be no accident that one of the psychoanalyst’s most well-known dream narratives starts with a house whose dark interior is nesting the threat of imminent conflagration. 59

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I. Houses, rooms, locations “There’s burning in a house, […], father stands before my bed and wakes me up. I dress quickly. Mama however wants to save her jewel box; but papa says: I do not want myself and both my children burn to death because of your jewel box. We hurry downstairs, and as soon as I am outside, I wake up.”1 The brief narrative describes Dora’s “first dream” as quoted in Freud’s “Fragment from an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” published in 1905 yet most of it written in 1901, immediately after Freud’s analysis of the adolescent analysand was abruptly terminated.2 The reason for reciting it here is that Dora’s dream as contextualized in Freud’s interpretation acquires a double, yet somewhat covert, architectural significance. First, a broader topological signification, in terms of the locale in which the dream occurs. Immediately after quoting the dream’s content as relayed by Dora during her analysis, Freud discovered that even if Dora dreamt of the burning house a few nights ago in Vienna and again while undergoing analysis with Freud, she first had the same dream while in L_, the vacation place by the lake where Dora was indecently propositioned by Herr K., a friend of the family who was

1

The English translation of the same passage by James Strachey in the Standard Edition reads: “A house was on fire. My father was standing beside my bed and woke me up. I dressed quickly. Mother wanted to stop and save her jewel-case; but father said: ‘I refuse to let myself and my two children be burnt for the sake of your jewel-case.” We hurried downstairs, and as soon as I was outside I woke up.” Sigmund Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” (1905 [1901]) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953), [Hereafter cited as SE] 7:64. The entire passage in the original German text reads: “I.Traum: ”In einem Haus brennt es, erzählte Dora, der Vater steht vor meinem Bett und weckt mich auf. Ich kleide mich schnell an. Die Mama will noch ihr Schmuckkästchen retten, der Papa sagt aber: Ich will nicht, daß ich und meine beiden Kinder wegen deines Schmuckkästchens verbrennen. Wir eilen herunter, und sowie ich draußen bin, wache ich auf.“” Sigmund Freud, “Bruchstück einer HysterieAnalyse” (1905 [1901]) in Sigmund Freud, Studienausgabe (Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag, 1971), Bd. VI, 136. In my own translation, I rely (with some exceptions) on the translation provided by Patrick J. Mahony in his Freud’s Dora: A Psychoanalytic, Historical, and Textual Study (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 77 (translation modified). Mahony also points out several peculiarities in Strachey’s translation of Freud’s case history of Dora. 2 See Freud’s “Prefatory Remarks” in the Standard Edition VII:8. For the English translation of Freud’s entire text see Standard Edition, VII:2-122 (this is the edition which I am quoting in the main text; hereafter see page numbers in the main text). For the German edition, see Studienausgabe, VI:83-195.

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also vacationing in the same place with his wife. [64] Dora apparently had the same dream no less than three times during the four nights she spent by the lake following the incident with Herr K. [66–67] But apart from Vienna and the L_ place by the lake, there are other locales that, even if less frequently mentioned in Dora’s recollections, further spatialize Freud’s description. As for example, the resort place B_ (apparently the “Tyrolean town of Merano”)3 where Dora and her family had moved because of her father’s illness, as well as an unnamed “factory town” (actually Reichenberg) to which her family moved briefly because of her father’s business before returning to Vienna.4 [Fig. 4.1] However, her father would occasionally travel back to resort place B_, supposedly on account of his illness but actually to meet with his lover Frau K., the wife of Herr K. who continued to pursue Dora. As Dora herself remarked to Freud, the urban and/or rural relocations of the two families — Dora’s own and the K.s — would mysteriously appear to coincide. The very recurrence of this spatial identification oscillates between the utterly predictable and the uncanny. In addition to the geographic settings in which this double Oedipal scenario takes place, Dora’s first dream acquires a more intimate architectural significance when Dora, during her analysis with Freud, gives more specific information about the rooms associated with the “house” about to be set on fire; and there is apparently more than one house. We learn for example that Dora’s fear of a fire in the house was linked to her mother’s habit of locking the door of the dining room that led to the bedroom in which her brother was sleeping. Her father insisted that the dining room door remain unlocked in case “something might happen in the night” that would necessitate exiting the room. [65] And yet we learn that Dora’s brother was not with her and her father while they visited L_. [72] Dora apparently refers to her brother’s bedroom in Vienna and therefore it could not have entirely been his bedroom that triggered the dream’s original inception, which first occurred while in the L_ place by the lake. There seems to be a

3

For this and other factual details in Dora’s case, see the “Chronology” established by Mahony in Freud’s Dora, 17–21, (for Merano, 18). 4 Mahony, 19-20. 61

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certain incompatibility between the urban and the building enclosure, the geographic locale and the setting of the architectural interior; the dream superimposes parts of both, however distant they might be from one another. During the narrative unfolding of the dream, rooms, houses, and locales become interchangeable with one another as if the spaces themselves were united in undermining the intentions and/ or memories of their former inhabitants. However hard Freud and his commentators try to pin each space down to one particular location, none of them entirely belongs either to one living inhabitant or one singular architectural setting. They rather behave like a series of modular units, parts of which can rotate and turn into their opposite, leading to variable tectonic assemblages. Therefore the contradictions surrounding the identity of the “house” in Dora’s dream is only provisionally clarified, after we learn that it was neither her brother nor her mother, but Dora who had locked herself in the bedroom while at L_ whenever she wanted to take a nap or change clothes, so as to avoid the sexual advances of Herr K. The key to that bedroom would mysteriously disappear the next day and therefore her fear of losing her spatial security was increased. [66] The possibility of free access to her spatial compartments terrifies Dora, who feels compelled to immediately flee a building enclosure as soon as an imminent threat appears. As Freud points out in a footnote, the German word for room, “Zimmer”, also stands for female genitals and their availability, open or locked, to male pursuers. [67] His bedroom is then her bedroom; not only would sister and brother be subject to an idiopathic form of identification, passing sicknesses and fluids to one another throughout their pre-adolescent life, but the settings they inhabit would also be subject to a similar contamination. What we ostensibly are dealing with is an architectural form of substitution or transference in which a certain group of inner qualities as well as spatial and typological characteristics often signified by individual objects such as a door, bed, or (missing) key, are exchanged between different architectural settings. In Freud’s dream interpretation, Vienna and the L_ or the B_ location, his bedroom and her bedroom—which is adjacent to her mother’s and father’s bedroom — as well as (occasionally) Herr and Frau K.’s bedroom appear as a series of perforated and/or movable enclosures: the vertical layers of walls between these rooms and the horizontal surfaces of beds they enclose gradually appear to move (if not entirely collapse), establishing a chain of continuous spaces in62

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stead of a series of immovable partitions. It is no surprise then that Dora could never have a proper rest in any of these semi-open spaces, constantly being shaken from sleep while dreaming of “a house” about to be set on fire. Emotional or psychological identification often precedes or follows spatial identification, as for example when Dora initially identifies with her father’s lover, Frau K., with whom, as we learn, Dora used to share the same bedroom [61]. We also learn that during her father’s most “serious illness,” Dora had become his nurse and would stay close to him, while “her mother kept away from” the “bed of the sick man (die Mutter sich vom Bette des Kranken ferne hielt.)” [SE, 32 and Studienausgabe, 109] Yet during a summer holiday following her father’s recovery, this pattern of spatial identification would become confused, since as we learn, the two families “had taken a suite of rooms in common at the hotel ([d]ie beiden Familien hatten gemeinsam einen Trakt im Hotel gemietet.” [32/109] One day Frau K. would give up the bedroom she was sharing with one of her children and a few days later, Dora’s father would do the same so that ultimately both would move “into new rooms — the end rooms, which were only separated by the passage (den Korridor), while the rooms they had given up had not offered any such security against interruption.” [33/109] In this case, a spatial divider like the corridor facilitates movement, while the spatial sequence of enfiladed rooms freezes any sexual commotion. In his well-known article “Figures, Doors, and Passages,” the architectural historian Robin Evans (also a reader of Freud) argues that it was only through a gradual transition that takes place from the midseventeenth to the nineteenth century that the “matrix of connected” or “enfiladed” rooms communicating directly with one another via series of doors gave way to the emergence of the “corridor” or common “thoroughfare” leading to individual compartments accessed by a single door.5 By way of this new spatial arrangement, Evans argues, each room could no longer “molest” the others, and thus the danger of “carnality”, previously increased by the uncontrolled “passing

5

Robin Evans, “Figures, Doors, and Passages,” first published in Architectural Design 48:4, (1978), 267–278. Also reprinted in Robin Evans, Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays, (Cambridge, MA: Architectural Association Publications, 1997), 55–92. 63

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through” of bodies, was abated.6 In this reformed architectural typology, the corridor establishes a spatially restrained mode of sociality that replaces the aberrant sexuality of the permeable spaces of earlier eras. Similar to several private and public establishments from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, the “hotel” in Dora’s description is apparently a hybrid type that contains both “sections” with enfiladed rooms, as well as private “end-rooms” separated by a corridor, thus conflating a more recent typology with rudiments of an anterior spatial arrangement. The hotel itself constitutes a transition and/or “passage.” However in Dora’s case, it is precisely the multi-door space of the enfiladed rooms that frustrates sexual desire and the corridor that ultimately facilitates the latter. This does not invalidate Evans’s historical account; on the contrary, it demonstrates that once a new spatial configuration has been established, the modes of psychological distribution are reversed and human sexuality has to plastically adapt to the new architectural parameters. It is precisely transitional typologies such as that of the resort building implicated in Freud’s narrative that externalize the tensions caused by such ongoing transformation. Similar to Freud’s theorization of “die Bahnung” or “pathway making” (known in English as “facilitation”) in his “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” it is precisely the blocking of certain pathways that facilitates movement by a process of splitting and bifurcation into new, oblique channels.7 Unlike the pathways described in the first chapters of Totem and Taboo, which become inaccessible by prohibition (as for example the pathway marked by the footsteps of the mother-inlaw), here obstruction leads to new oblique avenues and new building perspectives.8 What Corbusier would later call “plan libre” — the new open plan with continuous spaces and no interior walls in modern architecture — versus the “plan paralysé” — the compartmental-

6

Evans, “Figures, Doors, and Passages” Architectural Design, 272 and 275. See especially paragraphs 10 and 12 entitled “The paths of conduction” and “The experience of pain,” in Sigmund Freud, The Origins of Psychoanalysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Drafts and Notes, 1887–1902, ed. Marie Bonaparte and Ernst Kris, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1954), 376–83. 8 My reading of die Bahnung as a liberating path creation is indebted to the innovative discussion of the same process by Kaja Silverman in the chapter “The Milky Way” of her World Spectators (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 111. 7

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ized house interior predicated on a sequence of semi-individuated room-spaces — appear to exchange positions in the dream narrative.9 But let us go back to the spatial origin of things, that is the “primal scene” that precedes Dora’s dream of fire: The adjacency between the bedroom of Dora’s brother and the dining room in her house in Vienna, as well as the enfiladed rooms of the aforementioned “hotel section,” suggest an even more charged spatial intimacy between rooms. As we learn from Freud’s account, Dora’s bedroom as a child “had been next door to her parents,” which allowed Freud to assume that Dora would hear her father “breathing hard (since he was always out of breath)” during intercourse with her mother [79] — an auditory communication of spaces which, according to Freud, would eventually trigger Dora’s asthma and dyspnea attacks from the age of seven. [80] This and other adjacencies as well as displacements and substitutions between movements, fluids, sounds, and spaces demonstrate that the walls of buildings and other architectural partitions in dream descriptions act mainly as permeable thresholds, alternatively facilitating and/or blocking movement. What we experience is not only “substitution” and “displacement,” but also a form of transference, where feelings, qualities, and attachments are sympathetically transported less between human subjects (namely, from the analysand and the analyst) but rather between the spaces these subjects are inhabiting and dreaming. Such transference appears to occur among the various individual rooms, and within the clustering of these spaces, as in the sequence of enfiladed rooms in Dora’s childhood house in Vienna and later the hotel her family and the K.s temporarily occupied. In other words, what appears to be transferred and replicated is less the individual spaces themselves but rather the relation between these spaces, either direct or hyphenated by a common “passage.” In earlier dream investigations, such as those of Karl Albert Scherner in Das Leben des Traums (The Life of the Dream) quoted (approvingly) by Freud in the first volume of his Interpretation of Dreams, objects, buildings and urban settings become part of dream interpretation via concrete bodily symbolism: “Dream imagination has one

9

See Le Corbusier, Précisions, sur un état présent de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme (Paris: G. Crés, 1930), p. 123; as well as the collection of essays Raumplan Versus Plan Libre: Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier 1919–1930, edited by Max Risselada (Delft: Delft University Press, 1988). 65

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particular way of representing the organism as a whole: namely as a house.”10 However such parallels between architectural organisms and human bodies are not unequivocal or singular, as a particular organ or organic symptom may, according to Scherner, correspond to a series of building units: the dream “may make use of a whole row of houses to indicate a single organ; for instance a very long street of houses may represent a stimulus from the intestines.”11 Similarly, “separate portions of the house may stand for separate portions of the body,” and here Freud cites Scherner’s example of a “dream caused by a headache” in which “the head may be represented by the ceiling of a room covered with disgusting, toad-like spiders.”12 But in Freud’s reconstruction of Dora’s case, such direct and often crude analogies are destabilized since here the body itself becomes a more plastic organism, allowing the perforation and substitution of one spatial compartment via another. Such spatial transference is similar, but not identical, to the “displacement” described in Freud’s dream interpretations. Transference here designates a fluidity of continuous movement and not an automatic reversal of location from one place to a foreign one. Nothing is essentially displaced or misplaced; there is no right or wrong “place” or spatial location. Closer to the other possible signification of Verschiebung, there is simply a “shifting” of intensity from one idea or psychological element to another.13 Everything is left free to renegotiate its position within the psychological and the material organism including the organs, interior and exterior, of both bodies and buildings. In this new “open plan” scheme, everything belongs beyond its previously assigned territory. The dream could in fact revive a “pre-architectonic” state of being, a condition in which bodies and objects are left free to rearrange their own spatial adjacencies beyond the fixed parameters of an architec-

10 Karl Scherner, Das Leben des Traums (Berlin: H. Schindler, 1861) quoted in Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams in Standard Edition, 4:85. 11 Ibid. 12 Scherner Das Leben des Traums, 33f. quoted in SE, ibid. 13 For this particular reading of Verschiebung (displacement) in Freud, I am indebted to Patrick J. Mahony, Freud’s Dora, particularly chapter two “Bisexuality and Transference,” ibid., 22–48 (here, 46).

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tural building.14 What is then essentially “displaced” in Freud’s dream interpretation is the very unfolding of such a pre-architectural state based on the ambient spatial conditions of transference — a form of loose and more pliable ontological organization that the dream simultaneously uncovers and recovers. II. Boxes, jewelry, accessories Next to their transposition in terms of location, the architectural enclosures delineated in Freud’s dream descriptions also become subject to sympathetic exchanges in scale. Apart from the building enclosure of the house, there are other containers much smaller in size, yet equally substantial in psychological importance. I refer particularly to the small “jewel case” or “jewel box” (Schmuckkästchen) whose attempted retrieval by Dora’s mother during the house fire described in the analysand’s dream caused the intense reaction of her father: “I do not want myself and both my children burned to death because of your jewel box.” [64 (translation modified)/92]. It appears that the jewel box and its untimely retrieval could cause the death of Dora’s father, brother, and herself; however, her mother, who is the owner of the box, is not included among the persons about whom Dora’s father is concerned. Like the derelict frame of the house, the jewel box bonds the destiny of Dora’s family members, even if the existence of its owner is already shielded by a symptomatic act of oblivion. The most emblematic artifact of visual distinction and display, the jewel box also frames a moment of spatial indistinction and ontological veiling. While neither Freud nor Dora describe these two particular jewel boxes in detail, we know that such containers would come in various sizes, and during the turn of the century would usually be locked with a small key that could remain hidden in another location in the house. The key is not the only commonality between a jewel case and a house, since such boxes were often divided into several compartments, drawers or pockets that were specifically shaped for safekeeping different

14 I draw the term “prearchitectonic” from Gottfried Semper’s use of the adjective “vorarchitektonisch” describing spatial conditions before the establishment of monumental architecture in Egypt and the Near East. See for example his remarks on ceramic art from the “earliest times” in his Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics, trans. H. F. Mallgrave and M. Robinson (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2004), 468. For the original work, see Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten, oder Praktische Aesthetik, vol. 2, Keramik, Tektonik, Stereotomie, Metallotechnik (Munich: Bruckmann, 1863), 2.

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types of jewelry, such as necklaces, finger-rings, bracelets, and earrings. The external surfaces of these boxes were often decorated with metal intarsia, filigree designs; and just like their content, they too were valuable possessions that granted their owner a magnifying layer of distinction.15 [Fig. 4.2] It is intriguing that the first time he mentioned Dora’s initial visit to his practice to Wilhelm Fliess, Freud described her case as “opening smoothly” to his “collection of picklocks (Sammlung von Dietrichen).”16 Freud’s comment conflates Dora’s medical case with both the box and the “picklock,” the illicit instrument that can open this or another, larger enclosure. We soon learn that Dora herself owned a similar jewel case given to her as a gift by Herr K. [69] Dora was apparently eager to fill her own box with jewels which she too like her mother, “used to be very fond of,” but following her assault by Herr K. and consequent illness, no longer wore. [68] Resting inside the box, jewels would equivocally disappear from Dora’s neck, ears, or other parts of her body, enhancing her austere appearance with their absence. Even more intriguing is a small object, specifically a piece of jewelry that was never added to the contents of either of these two boxes, yet is described in Dora’s description as causing “a great dispute” among her parents. I refer to a set of “pearl drops” (Tropfen von Perlen) which, as Dora recounts, her mother “wanted to be given” in order to “wear them in her ears.” [Fig. 4.3] Dora’s father, “did not like

15 Another detail from the history of these boxes (which might potentially be significant in Dora’s case yet is not picked up by Freud), is that at the beginning of the twentieth century they were also sold as souvenirs from tourist towns and other attractions, both in Germany and the US. These souvenir jewel boxes were often decorated by the image of a well-known building monument impressed on their cover. This could enforce the link between the jewel box and another box owned by Dora, in which — as we learn later — she kept pictures, at least some of which depicted towns and public monuments, including a “health resort” as well as a “square with a monument in it.” (96-6). On American jewel boxes of that period, see Joanne Wiertella, The Jewel Box Book: The definitive Guide to American Art Metal Jewelry Boxes 1900–1925 (Dexter, Mich.: J-Victorie Books, 2004). 16 Letter from Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess dated October 14, 1900 in Sigmund Freud, The Origins of Psychoanalysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess trans. Eric Mochacher and James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1954), 325. The original text in Freud’s letter reads: “Die Zeit war belebt, hat auch wieder einen neuen und für die vorhandene Sammlung von Dietrichen glatt aufgehenden Fall eines 18jährigen Mädchens gebracht.” Sigmund Freud, Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess 1887–1904 (ungekürtzte Ausgabe) ed. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Frankfurt, Main: S. Fischer, 1985), 469.

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4.2  WMF [Württembergische Metallwarenfabrik] Germany, “Four Seasons” art nouveau jewelry box, c. 1900.

4.3  Oriental pearl and diamond screw pendant earrings. Central Europe, ca. 1900.

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that sort of thing” and so instead of the pearl drops, he handed his wife “a hand-bracelet (Armband)” which Dora’s mother refused, and suggested to her husband that “as he had spent so much money on a present she did not like, he had better just give it to someone else.” Freud had speculated that Dora would have liked to accept such a gift for herself, yet Dora had given no reply to her analyst’s suggestion. [68–69/140] Like the pearl drops that were never handed to a person, the whereabouts of the misprized “hand bracelet” remain unknown. Since Dora’s father never gave either of the two women in his family these highly contentious pearl drops, Dora, according to Freud, apparently decided to “make” one for herself. When describing her persistent cough and hoarse throat attack symptoms, Freud suggested that this “organically determined irritation” of the throat acted “like the grain of sand around which an oyster forms its’ pearl.” [83] In Freud’s description of her pathological symptom, Dora gradually builds up the pearl drop her mother desired not on her earlobe but inside her throat; it is a jewel that is worn inside the bodily interior constantly pushing to come out and retrieve its visibility. Had Dora coughed strong enough she would perhaps have spat out that grainy pearl. By creating this dark jewel of a metaphor, Freud himself retroactively grants Dora the very piece of jewelry that her father refused to give to her mother. Similar to the pathological excretion and accumulation of matter observed in Ferenczi’s phenomenon of “hysterical materialization,” the creation of this precious object is a matter of both ejection and introjection produced by the regurgitation of form.17 Yet in Dora’s case, we discover that what may initially appear as an autoplastic psycho-somatic projection gradually built up by the analysand might eventually be a very peculiar form of injection performed by the interpretation of the analyst. Yet it is astonishing how, after they have solidified into the mineral forms of “oyster pearl” and been framed by the metal casing of a droplet earring, the same “drops” gradually turn back into liquid form and trickle down Freud’s interpretation. Freud ascertains that by “that age and given her advanced sexual education,” Dora would have already known that “during the act of copulation the man presented the woman with something liquid in the form of drops (etwas Flüssiges in Tropfen-

17

Sandor Ferenczi, “The Phenomena of Hysterical Materialization” (1919) in Further Contributions to the Theory and Technique of Psychoanalysis edited by John Rickman (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927), 89–104. 70

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form — emphasis in the original).” [90/158] Here, sperm, the original liquid substance of the drops, does not produce a living organism but generates an inorganic article of adornment — an ear pendant that oscillates by the very gravitational power that occasioned its original displacement.18 The pair of droplet earrings that were strongly desired yet were missing from both actual jewel-cases, reappear in Freud’s dream interpretation having regained their former splendor in sexual etiology. Jewels and their box are part of a circle of symbols that, as Freud points out to Dora, stand for female genitalia. [69] Like the room (Zimmer), the jewel case (Schmuckkästchen) is an enclosure that contains, spatializes, as well as embellishes or augments sexual desire. In a footnote in the English Standard Edition, the editors suggest that the German word “Schmuck” means something much broader than jewelry, such as “finery in general, not only personal adornments, but embellishments of objects, and decorations in general.” In its rare uses as an adjective, the editors add, that “schmuck” also signals “something smart, tidy or neat.” [91n] Even if theorists of adornment would note that the earliest forms of adornment are scarifications and incisions, in this case Schmuck ostensibly purifies and solidifies sexual desire by transforming it into an ornamental object that is attached to the body without violently entering it.19 Furthermore, the editors’ note in the Standard Edition reminds us that articles of bodily adornment have spatial properties; they gradually transform from an individual object into a decorative system that projects into space and covers the exterior and interior surface of a building including its domestic furnishings and portable implements.20

18

Patrick Mahony mentions that “in Viennese dialect at the turn of the century, Bauer [Dora’s last name in real life] was slang from “sperm.” Mahony, Freud’s Dora, ibid., 92. 19 See the essay by Gottfried Semper, “Über die formelle Gesetzmässigkeit des Schmuckes und dessen Bedeutung als Kunstsymbol,” Monatsschrift des wissenschaftlichen Vereins in Zürich 1 (Zürich: Meyer & Zeller, 1856), 101–30; republished in Semper, Kleine Schriften, 304– 343. The first section of the essay has been translated into English by David Britt as “From Concerning the Formal Principles of Ornament and its Significance as Artistic Symbol” in The Theory of Decorative Art: An Anthology of European and American Writings, 1750–1940, edited by Isabelle Frank (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2000), 91–104. For techniques of “piercing” and “tattooing” as primal forms of bodily adornment see, ibid. 92–94. 20 On the expansion of decoration as a mechanized system in 19th-century architectural interiors, see the chapter “The Mechanization of Adornment” (originally titled “Die Mechanisierung der Ausschmueckung”) in Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (1948), (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1969), 344–363. 71

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Indeed, the droplet earrings are part of a circle of ornamental objects that periodically appear inside the interior spaces occupied by Dora and her family. Such decorative artifacts have not only a heuristic function, but also an intermittent presence in Freud’s interpretation. The psychoanalyst tends to use them as “ornaments,” decorative details that may appear to be marginal yet gradually acquire a structural role by punctuating the dream interpretation in rhythmic intervals. One of these objects is associated with Dora’s mother, whose love for jewelry, especially when she did not receive the particular jewels she wanted, led her to create her own adornments with an alternative technique. Freud describes her as suffering from “housewife’s psychosis” because of her constant preoccupation with keeping the house clean, including its utensils, which made all domestic objects “impossible to use or enjoy them.” [20] If a utensil or household implement (Gerät) becomes obsolete in terms of use it then turns into an object of display, a brilliantly shining Schmuck whose inaccessibility adds to the radiating glow of its shining surface. [Fig. 4.4] One could guess that Dora’s mother would keep such precious implements, for example silver cutlery, also inside boxes, just as she did for her jewelry collection. Like the droplet earrings, these unusable implements become unreachable objects of desire deferring circulation and exchange. One has to note that the women implicated in this story as described by Freud emulate these decorative articles that are “impossible to use or to enjoy” in terms of their sexual availability. Herr K., for example, would often complain (both to Dora and one of the maids he was sexually pursuing) that he “got nothing from his wife;” [106] and we also know that because of her husband’s syphilis, Dora’s mother would also abstain from sexual relations with her husband, which following Freud, led to her obsessive cleaning, but also, more implicitly, her love of jewels. Finally Dora herself, in her unwilling involvement in the sexual exchanges of the four adults, is an unobtainable object of desire, which might explain why she, too, once loved jewels, but after her sexual pursuit by Herr K., she no longer wore any. Whatever Schmuck she might have owned had also become “impossible to enjoy.” The unworn jewels in her jewel case became doubly rarified by inactivity. But there is also another piece of female adornment which Dora did continue to carry, and though quite small, it plays a central role in Freud’s interpretation. I refer to the “reticule” (described as an “angehängte[s] Täschchen” [140] or “Portemonnaietäschchen” [146] in the original text), the small handbag or pouch currying money and 72

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4.4  Silver cutlery in box, J. C. Klinkosch, Vienna, c.1900.

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4.5  Female silver handbag. Germany, c.1900.

other small objects that Dora is prominently wearing during at least one of her visits to Freud’s office. [Fig. 4.5] Freud first introduces the reticule in connection to the “jewel case” [69] but then returns to it several pages later to offer more details on its handling by Dora. Freud observes that Dora would persistently keep opening and closing the small pouch as well as “putting her finger into it” throughout the analytic session, and which Freud, given the reticule’s analogy to female genitals, interprets as evidence of Dora’s masturbatory habit. [77] Used as articles of female adornment throughout the nineteenth century, such small bags were shaped in various suggestive forms and patterns. Held by the hand (or sometimes hung from the shoulder or the waist), the portable handbag would oscillate with the female carrier’s movements, similar to the palindromic movement of an ear pendant. Like the small jewel box, the reticule also conflates the jewel with the box; it is a piece of female adornment but also an enclosure containing other articles of female adornment, or sometimes nothing at all. The small handbag speaks to the essentially envaginating structure of articles of adornment which both contain and are contained by a larger material and signifying structure. 74

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Nineteenth century architectural theorists of ornament, such as Gottfried Semper, underline bodily adornment’s cosmological analogies (based on the double signification of the Greek word Kosmos connoting both bodily adornment and world order) by emphasizing its spatial properties. In an 1856 lecture analyzing the “regular formal principles” of adornment, Semper divides bodily ornament (Schmuck) into rings, pendants and directional ornaments.21 All three of these categories have spatial properties since they retrace the growth, movement, and directionality of a living or a building organism during its territorial expansion. Among these, the category of the pendant (Behang), such as the droplet earrings or even the hanging reticule, have psychographic qualities, as they externalize the character of the carrier. “The nature and individuality of the customary motions of a lady’s earrings,” writes Semper, “allow us to draw conclusions with some degree of certainty as to her nature and character.”22 Following Semper, the earrings of a nervous woman, for example, would perhaps oscillate too much. Semper’s lecture on adornment indicates a shift towards the psychological function of ornamentation as an externalization of steady character traits as well as momentary passions. It is indeed towards the end of the second half of the nineteenth century that the direction of the cosmic properties of adornment appears to circuitously loop from the external to the interior world of the psyche. While describing how “unconscious processes of thought are twined around a preexisting structure of organic connections,” Freud compares the latter to “festoons of flowers twined around a wire (Blumenfestons über Drahtgewinde).” [84–5/153] Like ornaments, psychological associations proliferate by the process of a decorative form of accretion and accumulation. In his interpretation of Dora’s “first dream,” Freud converts the droplet earring and the reticule into minute psychological symptoms whose palindromic physical movement in space retraces further oscillations in the psychological interior. Within the universe of Freudian dream interpretation, objects of adornment perform like hysterical symptoms: similar to the grains of sand that gradually build the oyster’s pearl, they, too, push autoplastically towards expression until they reach the spiraling heights of a building monument.

21

See Semper, “From Concerning the Formal Principles of Ornament and its Significance as Artistic Symbol,” ibid., 91 and 94. 22 Ibid., 95. 75

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Architecture itself, at that point, becomes a form of adornment: an ambient sheath that covers, extends, and plastically enhances all contours by adding another layer to the bodily or the architectural enclosure. While the aforementioned theories by Scherner cited by Freud in the first sections of the Interpretation of Dreams draw direct analogies between the bodily and the architectural interior, adornment appears to break down the very barriers between these two analogical entities. Adornment reunites the body with its intimate surroundings and mediates between the subject and the world via a series of circuitous interrelationships. Moving in and out of textual and architectural surfaces, these threads stitch both the body and the building onto the shifting fabric of the psyche. Architecture then becomes part of the process that, in his Dora fragment, Freud defines as “die psychische Umkleidung” [152] or psychological “dress change.” From earrings to reticules, Freud’s own dream interpretation of Dora’s case could be construed as another experiment attempting to decipher the texture of this shifting psychological and cultural fabric, via a scrupulous dissection of its oscillating appendages and mobile decorative edges. The oscillation of these rarified articles of adornment in physical space externalizes their fundamental ambivalence in the psychological space of the dream: from fire to water and from the radiance of their conspicuous display to the darkness of the boxes and other enclosures in which they are hidden, these ornamental artifacts acquire a veiled or ambivalently oscillating texture. Like the missing pearl drops or the well-polished utensils, such precious items are preserved precisely because they remain invisible for long periods of time; as in the masses of bodily adornments uncovered by archaeologists at Troy, burial or protective enclosure shields the life of these valuable articles as they periodically oscillate from darkness to luminosity. The gradual demise of ornamentation in modern architectural practice, initiated by Adolf Loos in Vienna during the early twentieth century, is but another chapter in ornament’s life history of survival in its occasional withdrawal from the visible environment, including the exterior or interior surfaces of buildings.23 It is precisely this disappearing world of orna-

23

I expand on the idea of ornament’s survival via a periodic eclipse from visibility in “World Ornament: The Legacy of Gottfried Semper’s Essay on Adornment,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 57/58 (Harvard University Press, 2011), pp. 309–329. 76

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ment that Freud’s turn-of-the-century dream interpretations capture just before it is once again buried into safety. The oscillating character of Freud’s ornamental pendants reveals, then, not only the ambivalence of “emotions,” as the analyst would later formulate the principle of psychological fluctuation in his Totem and Taboo, but also the fundamental ambivalence of objects and architectural environments whose ontological status during the turn of the century was radically shifting. Objects, too, perform a gradual Umkleidung — a changing of clothes or “redressing” that essentially rehearses on an ontological level the process of Bekleidung or “dressing” of building surfaces proposed by contemporary architectural theorists from Semper to Adolf Loos.24 I refer to the split epistemological foundation, oscillating between subjective empathy and object-centered animism on which implements, ornaments, houses, as well as larger architectural and/or urban settings are precariously established around the turn of the century. Like fabrics, such settings have predominantly two sides; they are “double-face,” which also speaks for the versatility of their “twin” (as in the pair of droplet earrings) structure. III. Cities, pictures, geographies The setting’s twofold nature introduces another side of Dora, whom we can now present by her real name, Ida Bauer, the woman whose life history and suspended treatment under Freud has become the object of numerous recent histories and critical biographical commentaries.25 This shift of focus on the actual person that becomes the subject of such extensive Umkleidung in Freud’s interpretation also marks the entrance of “counter-transference,” or the conspicuous lack of it, during the analytic process. Such a contraction of transference was manifested in Freud’s own ambivalence, attraction and intense curiosity but also his disdain and frequent impatience; which as several commentators

24

See Adolf Loos, “Das Princip der Bekleidung” (1898) in Sämtliche Schriften. Ed. Franz Gluck. Vol.1. (Vienna: Herold, 1962), 105–12. English edition: Adolf Loos, “The Principle of Cladding” in Spoken into the Void: Collected Essays 1897–1900 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1982), 66–69. 25 Most prominently, Hannah S. Decker, Freud, Dora, and Vienna 1900 (New York: Free Press, 1991); Charles Bernheimer and Claire Cahane editors, In Dora’s Case: Freud — Hysterias — Feminism, second edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); and Phillip McCaffrey, Freud and Dora: The Artful Dream (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984). 77

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have observed may account for the analytic treatment’s early termination by Ida’s own initiative as well as the postponement of the case history’s publication by Freud. But one may also read the overabundance and often dazzling detail of interpretation in Freud’s “redressing” of Dora as the effect of negative counter-transference or even a belated attempt towards compensation and atonement for the very failure of transference during Ida’s actual analytic treatment. Freud himself acknowledges this failure in the “postscript” to his case study (written later than the rest of the essay), which addresses the spatio-temporal mechanisms of transference in detail. [116] Yet one should underline that it is precisely the failure of transference in the analytic setting that occasions its retroactive description in the case history. The jewels and other adornments that further embellish Dora’s story by Freud are tokens of an abortive history of communication. The earrings that are repeatedly mentioned but never actually given by the real men of the story are instead offered by Freud himself in his dream interpretations. However, just as Dora’s mother rejected her husband’s offering of the hand bracelet (instead of the pearl drops she really wanted), Ida could have similarly responded to Freud’s gift of interpretation by asking him to “give it to somebody else;” which the psychoanalyst certainly did, and in abundance, through his various writings on other cases of “female hysteria.” One may start deciphering the covert side-effects of this counter-transference via its architectural repercussions, including the artfully elided presence of the analyst, Freud, within the shifting architectural setting of the dream. After all it is not only Dora’s father who would stand “before” her bed (“vor meinem Bett”) during Dora’s “first dream” of the looming house fire; nor is it only Herr K., who would also stand next to Dora’s bed or sofa while trying to take a nap at the resort place L_ and waking up only to find the older man staring; but it would also be Freud himself, who was similar in age to her father and who would sit beside the sofa on which the young Ida would sit or recline during her analytic sessions.26 Freud’s detailed descriptions of Dora’s finger movements while playing with her reticule corroborate

26 On the presence of the sofa in Freud’s treatment setting since around 1900, see Annegret Pelz, “Aufstellungen: Freud’s Schreibtisch” in Freud und die Antike, edited by Claudia Benthien, Harmut Böhme and Inge Stephan (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2011), 55, and Lydia Marinelli, ed. Die Couch. Vom Denken im Liegen. (Munich-Vienna: Sigmund Freud Privatstiftung/Prestel, 2006).

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that the analyst was not just writing in his notepad while listening to his patient but attentively observing her. We also know that Ida Bauer was born in 1882 in Vienna at Berggasse 32, only a few doors from Berggasse 19 where Freud would relocate his residence and analytic practice in 1891, three years after the Bauers left Vienna to move to Merano. Even if temporally asymptotic, Freud never mentions this striking spatial coincidence. However, Vienna becomes important once again when the Bauers, (Dora’s family) and the Zellenkas (Herr and Frau K.’s family in Freud’s description) relocated to Vienna around 1900. Dora recounts seeing Frau K. accompanying her father in the city streets, and also encountering Herr K. (including a rather traumatic recollection in which she saw Herr K. “being knocked down by a carriage” months after her analysis by Freud had ended) [121]). But wasn’t there the possibility of another uncomfortable encounter of coming across her analyst on the street (whose practice was only three blocks away from her own house), a prospect that would become even more uncomfortable after her analysis was abruptly terminated? 27 Reconsidering the urban setting of Vienna also brings forward other locales introduced in Dora’s “second dream,” in which Dora wanders, first through the streets and squares of a “strange town” and then through a wood after she learns that her father has died. The death of her father was announced in a letter written by her mother during Dora’s unauthorized absence, inviting Dora “to come” and join her if she liked. While looking for the “train station (Bahnhof),” Dora suddenly arrives at home only to learn that her mother and “the others” were already at the “cemetery (Friedhof).” [94/162] Freud assumes that the “strange town” introduced in the dream originates from an album with town views of a “German health-resort” that Dora had looked at a few days earlier. [95] Dora had put that picture album containing photographs, including one of “a square with a monument in it” given to her by a “young engineer” who nurtured an interest in her, inside another box. Dora had interrogated her mother about the whereabouts of that box when she could no longer find it. [95–6] This second box does not contain jewels, but rather images of cities and architectural monuments.

27

During their return to Vienna the Bauers moved to Liechtensteinstrasse 32, only “three blocks away from the Freuds.” Decker, Freud, Dora, and Vienna 1900, ibid. 46. 79

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From three dimensional enclosures to two-dimensional pictures, cities and architectural environments become a matter of projection during Dora’s second dream. This also becomes evident in Dora’s recollection of her visit to the city of Dresden, which is only mentioned for its famous Old Masters Picture Gallery (Gemäldegalerie Alter Meister, designed by Gottfried Semper), as if the city were condensed into a collection of paintings. [Fig. 4.6] While visiting Dresden, Dora had apparently wandered alone in the city’s famous painting museum looking at “pictures that appealed to her.” [96] Both the pictures inside the photo-box and the pictures of the Gallery in Dresden act according to Freud as “nodal points” (Knotenpunkte). [96/164] City views and paintings are impressed on the psyche and are carried like portable adornments whose directional properties become signs of a selective form of orientation for the bewildered subject. The box with postcards and other images of cities expand the jewel-case’s compact enclosure into the vast perimeters of the urban scale. Freud in fact speculates that in her second dream, Dora substitutes the “box” with the “train station.” [97] While in the Dresden gallery, Dora experiences an ecstatic identification with the museum’s most famous acquisition, Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. [Fig. 4.7] After all, Dora too feels like a mother by having substituted Frau K. in her parenting role as a nanny for her two children, but also in her capacity as a nurse for her father (the role her mother refused to assume) during his illness. In his 1887 essay on “The Symbol (Das Symbol),” the nineteenth-century philosopher and empathy theorist Friedrich Theodor Vischer (who also wrote a commentary on the dream theories of Johannes Volkelt mentioned by Freud) describes the animistic “rustling” of the Madonna’s mantle as it announces her arrival from the metaphysical to the physical world.28 The interior of Vischer’s study or Arbeitszimmer in fact featured a reproduction of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, so that the philosopher could study by reframing this metaphysical passage on the very walls of his

28 Friedrich Theodor Vischer, “Das Symbol” in Altes und Neues, Neue Folge, ed. Robert Vischer (Stuttgart: A. Bonz, 1889), 302. On F. T. Vischer’s comments on dream literature, see his essay “Der Traum. Eine Studie zu der Schrift: Die Traumphantasie von Dr. Joh. Volkelt” (1875), which is mentioned by Freud in the bibliography for his Traumdeutung); reprinted in Altes und Neues (Stuttgart: A. Bonz, 1881) Vol. 1, 187–232.

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4.6  Dresden, Gemäldegalerie, postcard, 1900.

4.7  Raphael, Sistine Madonna, Dresden, Gemäldegalerie, postcard, 1897.

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everyday setting.29 Similar to the palindromic movement of the droplet earrings, the synesthetic “rustling” of the Madonna’s mantle painted by Raphael steers Dora’s memories and associations. The young museum visitor stands in front of this painting for “two hours (emphasis in the original by Freud)” [96], twice as long as her analytic session with Freud would have lasted. Freud himself marks the uneven parallel between Dora’s museum visit and the analytic session with him, when in his “postscript” he notes that the “two hours” spent by Dora in front of the Madonna was the “same length of time” that she spent with him during her final two visits following her description of the “second dream” (including the recollection of her visit to Dresden). [119] But in her “session” with the Madonna, Dora is conducting the analysis and asking most of the questions; unlike her sessions with Freud, there appears to be a less forced and less coerced conversation between the two “discussants.” In other words, it is as if during the museum visit in Dresden, the painting retroactively offered the desired transference that the analysis with Freud in Vienna would later fail to offer. 30 During his reference to Dora’s unaccompanied visit to the Dresden Gallery and in other parts of his interpretation, Freud expresses great astonishment toward Dora’s independent wandering around urban and other spaces with no parental permission or guide. Her freewilling spatial movement becomes a matter of concern but also fascination for the analyst. Freud endeavors to retrace step by step all the movements of the young flaneuse in real life and link each of them to specific points in the condensed itinerary rehearsed during her dream. While Dora appears to evade both her parents and her analyst about her whereabouts, the latter spends the final part of his interpretation trying to geographically pin down all the spatial settings of her dream, even if most of them appear to be condensed, displaced and overdetermined. The young analysand appears to recreate the ornamental

29

A reproduction of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna appears in photographs and depictions of Vischer’s “Arbeitszimmer” in his residences in Berlin and Stuttgart. Auch einer: Friedrich Theodor Vischer zum 100. Todestag, ed. Andrea Berger-Fix (Ludwigsburg: Städtisches Museum, 1987), 86–87. 30 Freud had also looked at the same picture by Raphael in the Gallery in Dresden and noted his observations in his correspondence; to him Raphael’s Madonna appears as a “charming, sympathetic nursemaid, not from the celestial world but from ours.” (Letters of Sigmund Freud (1873–1939), edited by E. Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1960), 97; quoted in Mahony, 94n). It is intriguing that like Vischer, Freud marks the transition from the “celestial” to the real world marked by Raphael’s more-human-than-divine figure. 82

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loops of her missing jewels by her meanderings within urban and/or natural landscapes. For example Freud further links Dora’s visit to the “strange town” in her dream and the city of Dresden in real life with the invitation by Frau K. to visit L_, “the place by the lake” where her traumatic interaction with Herr K. had originally occurred. [98] This spatial identification is occasioned by a minute similarity between the letter written by Dora’s mother announcing her father’s death in Dora’s dream and the letter she had received from Frau K. inviting her to come to L_, concerning the placing of a question mark “in a most unusual fashion in the very middle of a sentence, after the intercalated words ‘if you would like to come’.” [ibid.] The question mark in question was idiosyncratically placed after the word “like,” and was previously omitted by Dora in her original dream description but added later after quoting the letter by Frau K. This misplaced punctuation point is the displaced enigmatic signifier that mobilizes the space of interpretation by stabilizing all geographic identifications to a singular origin. Not surprisingly after a detour to the iconography of the “forest” (which Freud reassociates with yet another picture that Dora had seen in a Secessionist exhibition of a forest with “nymphs” in the background), the analyst links the dream’s “Bahnhof (train station)” and “Friedhof (cemetery)” to the “Vorhof (vestibule or ‘fore-court’)” — “an anatomical term for a particular region of the female genitals.” [99] This circuitous identification between locales and body parts constitutes for Freud the “symbolic geography of sex (Sexualgeographie)” [99/166], also an iconography of sex since, for the greater part, such geography is predicated upon images which appear to constantly loop back to a single origin. In attempting to compensate for the liberating transference experienced by Dora in front of Raphael’s Madonna in one of her several escapades and Freud’s opposite intent to circumscribe and restrict the young woman’s movements into a singular origin or pattern, we are led back to the original space in which all transferences would originate, and that is Freud’s consultation space in Vienna. As is wellknown, Freud’s apartments in Berggasse 19 combined his consultation space and private residence, and were divided into rooms and vestibules with only minimal “passages” or corridors in between, including enfiladed spaces, similar to those described by Dora. From 1891 to 1908 Freud’s practice was located at the right side of the elevated ground floor (or “Hochparterre”) where Dora’s analysis would have taken place during the last three months of 1900, while Freud’s 83

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private residence was upstairs at the left of the mezzanine (or “first level”) directly above the space of his consultation practice on the lower floor. Freud was initially sharing the upper floor with his sister Rosa Graf, and only when she moved out in 1908 was he able to occupy the entire mezzanine and move his practice upstairs to the rooms across his bedroom (Fig. 4.8–4.9).31 The consultation room and study, which have remained the same in terms of their location within the building from 1908 until today, have a very different plan from the spaces in which Dora was analyzed in 1900. The elevated ground-floor spaces are also smaller in size as well as lower in height compared to those of the mezzanine as shown in the building’s section (Fig. 4.10).32 In the earlier state of Freud’s split level arrangement, there was still a common spatial element between work and life; that being the floorplan which was approximately the same with the psychoanalyst’s bedroom and his former practice space downstairs. Like the upstairs bedroom, this “former” analytic space has an irregular polygonal shape and is perforated by several doors leading to other rooms of the house in order to facilitate the circulation of patients who could thus enter and exit Freud’s practice without encountering one another. Yet upstairs, such a circulation cutting through Freud’s master bedroom (including access to the adjacent bedroom of his sister-in-law Minna Bernays) might have created more spatial tensions; perhaps not unlike those that Dora would have experienced in one of the enfiladed rooms with multiple doors in the L_ place by the lake when she was trying to undress or take a nap while feeling threatened by Herr K.’s presence. Perhaps her final decision to terminate her analysis with Freud and “walk out” of the space of his practice was also spatially motivated. Similar to her first dream of a house about to be set on fire, Dora apparently only feels safe when she comes out of an architectural enclosure. Architecture marks the end and origin of her analysis as well as Freud’s interpretation. One is struck by both the changes and similarities in the “before and after (1908)” condition of Freud’s work and living compartments in

31 See the drawings (floorplans and sections) submitted in 1889 for the redesign of the Berggasse 19 apartment building, available at the Freud Museum, Vienna, reproduced here. 32 Among the architectural drawings, the building section (“Profilab[schnitt]”), a detail of which is reproduced in fig. 3, shows that the height of the elevated ground-floor apartment that served as Freud’s former consulting office is 3.30 meters, while the height of his practice and study spaces after 1908 located on the mezzanine from 1908 onwards is 3.50 meters.

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4.8  Berggasse 19, Floor plan, Hochparterre.

4.9  Berggasse 19, Floor plan, Mezzanine.

4.10  Berggasse 19, Building section.

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Berggasse 19. The former consultation space was once the bedroom in plan while the current consultation space is across from the same bedroom yet on the same level in terms of section. The former inscribes a vertical form of correspondence, the more recent one a horizontal mode of (interrupted and/or filtered) continuity. This sectional rearrangement shows not only the mediated reciprocity between work and private space but also their “diagonal” correspondence, as well as their vertical and/or horizontal mirroring and transposition. Perhaps the “displacement” of Freud’s analytic practice in 1908 produced a continuous “shift,” a form of oscillation and mental reverberation between anterior and present spatial conditions, however irreversible this spatial redistribution might be. The persistent presence of enfiladed spaces in Freud’s descriptions of Dora’s recollections divulges Freud’s own attachment to his former analytic setting (and current private bedroom) in which these complex spatial narratives were first recited. The counter-transference disavowed by Freud on the level of his personal engagement with Dora ostensibly found an outlet in her “spatial” circumstances, with which Freud could finally identify (even if analyst and analysand would have experienced these circumstances differently). Freud appears to empathize less with human subjects than with their spatial circumstances, the fossilized trace of their movement or the ossified boundaries of their inhibitions.33

33 A similar attachment to the (original) analytic setting becomes even stronger when Freud is required to step out of the space of his private residence and practice in order to teach psychoanalysis in the public space of a university (specifically the University of Vienna, where Freud became professor in 1902, approximately fifteen months after Dora’s analysis was terminated as well as other venues in which Freud regularly lectured before his university appointment). But as attested to in the rather grudging prefatory remarks to his “Introductory Lectures,” Freud considered the teaching of psychoanalysis in a university almost impossible. Why? Because the setting is not right (among other reasons). The university amphitheater will never be able to replicate the intimate setting of the analyst’s consultation room in which psychoanalysis is being practiced and apparently (self-)taught via a direct exchange with the analysand. The only ostensible solution would be to try and turn the amphitheater into a substitute analytic space and the lecture into a quasi-therapeutic session in which students are ostensibly treated as neurotic patients at once engaging and resisting the teachings of the analyst-professor. The same professor now has to speak in a form of soliloquy in which he rehearses both his own conclusions and what his patient-students would presumably object to. Psychoanalysis can then only be taught by relying on the ambient effects of spatial transference. See, Sigmund Freud, “Introduction” in “Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1916[1915])” Standard Edition, 15: 15–24, and “On the Teaching of Psychoanalysis in Universities (1919[1918])” in SE, 17: 169–73.

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Based on the “substitutional” character of rooms, accessories, artifacts, and urban scenes related to Dora’s dreams, actual spaces, too, can be realigned by the inverted syntax of the “dream-work,” most prominently the work of perpetual shifting and non-hierarchical “displacement” in which no structure can be permanently located at a single point. It is striking how specific, and at the same time heuristic, the spatial compartments of the dream can be. They can instantly shift but are not interchangeable; in fact they remain highly determined, or overdetermined. While in Freud’s descriptions, human subjects are reduced to typological versions of the same figure via means of an idiopathic form of identification — for example, Dora in her consecutive identification with Frau K., her aunt, and the Sistine Madonna —  transferences within the setting (in spite of Freud’s insistence to link all of them back to the same geographic location or somatic origin) retain a more pliable and/or plastic contour. Parts of the dream’s built structures gradually bend and overlap so that their common surfaces become permeable thresholds allowing the effects of spatial transference to take place, or merely run through the tectonic container. There is then something accessory not only in the assortment of ornamental artifacts that appear in Freud’s dream interpretation but also in the oscillating behavior of architectural spaces that are enclosed within the same tectonic frame. Like bodily accessories, none of these spaces are entirely fixed or necessary, nor are they dispensable or negligible. The pearl drops absent from Dora’s jewel-box are not marginal details in Freud’s analytic reconstruction of her dreams — they are models of their inner space, or even kernels presaging the ultimate dissolution of that space. These tropfenförmig pendants are then not only shaped like “drop forms” but their very purpose is to drop form: to drop the very concepts of space and form entirely by shifting the meaning of “[t]ropfen” from a plural noun into an active verb that both collapses and enfolds dream space towards a radical re-form of human subjectivity.

87

Interior Spaces as Playgrounds of Inwardness Cornelia Klinger

Walter Benjamin was an intimate connoisseur, a keen observer and and unrelenting critic of the interior.1 In the fourth of the six exposés found in his oeuvre Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century 2, which remained uncompleted, he sketched the rise, transformation and decline of the bourgeois inner world in a passage titled Louis Philippe, or the Interior. First reading »La tête … Sur la table de nuit, comme une renoncule, Repose.« Baudelaire: Une martyre

Under Louis Philippe, the private individual makes his entrance on the stage of history. (…) For the private individual, the place of dwelling is for the first time opposed to the place of work. The former

1

On Benjamin’s critic of the interior, cf. for instance the short text “Erfahrung und Armut” (Experience and Poverty) (1933). 2 Benjamin worked on this project for thirteen years, from 1927 up until his death in 1940. The exposés were written in 1935. It was only in the 1980s that the fragment which, in addition to the exposés (in German and French), comprises a large collection of notes and material, drafts and sketches was published as Passagen-Werk. If the author had had the chance to complete his project it would have been — in the words of the editor Rolf Tiedemann — “nothing less than a material philosophy of history of the 19th century” (PW Editor’s introduction, 12). Quotes taken from Passagen-Werk, Benjamin 1983 = PW. Exposé IV Louis Philippe or the Interior = PW 1, 52 f. (German version). Page numbers are not indicated for subsequent quotes from this exposé. In “Aufzeichnungen und Materialien”, Rolf Tiedemann ascribed the Konvolute 1 das Interieur, die Spur to this Exposé (PW 1, 281–300). The following quotes from Benjamin’s writings are always italicized without quotation marks. 89

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constitutes itself as the interior. Its complement is the office. The private individual, who in the office has to deal with reality, needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions. This necessity is all the more pressing since he has no intention of allowing his commercial considerations to impinge on the social ones. In the formation of his private environment, both are kept out. From this arise the phantasmogorias of the interior — which, for the private man, represents the universe. In the interior, he brings together the far away and the long ago. His living room is a box in the theater of the world. (p. 8–9) These are the first (slightly abridged) and second paragraphs from this five-paragraph long passage. Benjamin dates the development of the interior with the reign of the so-called ‘roi citoyen’ beginning right after the July Revolution of 1830 and ending with the February Revolution of 1848; the years in between constituted the formative phase of bourgeois rule in France. The third paragraph, almost just as long as the preceding two and both of the following ones, is set off as an Excursus on Jugendstil3 where Benjamin has widened the time frame to include the turn of the century. It is in these years that the seemingly well-structured constellation of the office — interior, place of work — living space underwent a crisis. Around this time, the real gravitational center of living space shifts to the office, as we can read in the Excursus and in his notes Benjamin goes on to observe:

3

The complete wording: Excursus on Jugendstil. The shattering of the interior occurs via Jugendstil around the turn of the century. Of course, according to its own ideology, the Jugendstil movement seems to bring with it the consummation of the interior. The transfiguration of the solitary soul appears to be its goal. Individualism is its theory. With van de Velde, the house becomes an expression of the personality. Ornament is to this house what the signature is to a painting. But the real meaning of Jugendstil is not expressed in this ideology. It represents the last attempted sortie of an art besieged in its ivory tower by technology. This attempt mobilizes all the reserves of inwardness. They find their expression in the mediumistic language of the line, in the flower as the symbol of a naked vegetal nature confronted by the technologically armed world. The new elements of iron construction — girder forms — preoccupy Jugendstil. In ornament, it endeavors to win back these forms for art. Concrete presents it with new possibilities for plastic creation in art. Around this time, the real gravitational center of living space shifts to the office. The irreal center makes its place in the home. The consequences of Jugendstil are depicted in Ibsen’s “Master Builder”: the attempt by the individual, on the strength of his inwardness, to vie with technology leads to his downfall. (p. 9)

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The twentieth century, with its porosity and transparency, its tendency toward the well-lit and airy has nullified dwelling in the old sense. Jumping-off point of things, like the ‘homes for human beings’ in Ibsen’s “Master Builder”.4 Not by chance a drama rooted in Jugendstil, which itself unsettled the world of the shell in a radical way. (p. 864)

The 19th century, which was addicted to dwelling, proved to be brief! However, there is reason to harbor doubts about this quick parting with the interior. Even though the gravitational center of living space shifts to the office, the private sphere does not disappear altogether. Paradoxically, the private living space unfolds its own activity as one that is also (or perhaps first and foremost) irreal. It creates the prototype of the 20th century suburban home (Eigenheim). Both spheres — office (Kontor) and interior — become modernized around 1900 as office and home. However, the tension existing between them, between public and private space, work and life, remains. Benjamin gives expression to this ambivalence when he describes Jugendstil not just as the shattering, but also as the consummation of the interior. While Jugendstil experiments with new technical possibilities (iron construction, girder forms, concrete), it seems, in keeping with its ideology, to entail the consummation of the interior. The transfiguration of the lonely soul seems to be its goal. Individualism is its theory. The connection between subjectivity, individuality, personality and dwelling is expanded even more in the sense that not just interior spaces, but also the entire house is addressed as expression of personality. Benjamin cites Henri Van de Velde and the fictive “Master Builder” who at the end of the eponymous drama by Henrik Ibsen tumbles from the church tower he himself built — an ending that Benjamin relates to Jugendstil with the failure of the attempt by the individual, on the strength of his inwardness, to vie with technology, which he sees as paradigmatic for the decline of the interior and inwardness around 1900.5 For Benjamin, this period was marked by the conflict between old and new, between nature and technology, flowers and reinforced concrete — a struggle that he clads in military metaphors.

4

In this passage Benjamin refers to Henrik Ibsen’s play with the same name from 1892. The Master Builder’s clear intention to build “homes for human buildings” runs through Ibsen’s drama like a red thread. 5 Whether Benjamin’s interpretation does justice to Ibsen’s intentions cannot be addressed here. 91

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The last word in the Excursus is downfall, and so one might naturally ask whether in this final third part 6, which is set apart from the excursus with a quote, Benjamin intended to venture further into the 20th century. While the jump in time of about fifty years between the first and second section is clearly indicated by the reign of the cited French king and the term Jugendstil, a temporal sequence cannot be noted in the last section.7 To be sure, this final part does not look ahead but rather sums up the two preceding sections by referring succinctly to the interior as an asylum of art and to the collector as the true resident of the interior. With the two sentences (“The collector delights in evoking a world that is not just distant and long gone but also better” and “The interior is not just the universe but also the étui of the private individual”), Benjamin is referring — with his use of a double ‘not just … but also’ — to his first section, which he in part contradicts, in part fleshes out. The three phantasmagorias of the interior cited there, namely universe, distant world and long gone world become attributed to, or juxtaposed with, the terms étui and case (relating to universe) and better world (referring to distant and long-gone worlds). However, Benjamin does not juxtapose the distant or long gone world with his own present or the prospect of a better future. Rather, he portrays such hopes

6

The complete version: “I believe … in my soul: the Thing.” (Léon Deubel: Oeuvres: Paris 1929, p. 193) The interior is the asylum of art. The collector is the true resident of the interior. He makes his concern the transfiguration of things. To him falls the Sisyphean task of divesting things of their commodity character by taking possession of them. But he bestows on them only connoisseur value, rather than use value. The collector dreams his way not only into a distant or bygone world but also into a better one — a world in which, to be sure, human beings are no better provided with what they need than in the everyday world, but in which things are freed from the drudgery of being useful. The interior is not just the universe but also the étui of the private individual. To dwell means to leave traces. In the interior, these are accentuated. Coverlets and antimacassars, cases and containers are devised in abundance; in these the traces of the most ordinary objects of use are imprinted. In just the same way, the traces of the inhabitant are imprinted in the interior. Enter the detective story, which pursues these traces. Poe, in his “Philosophy of Furniture” as well as in his detective fiction, shows himself to be the first physiognomist of the domestic interior. The criminals in early detective novels are neither gentlemen nor apaches, but private citizens of the middle class. (p. 7) 7 The assumption that this could refer to the period after Jugendstil can – apart from its position in the sequence of paragraphs — be weakly justified by Benjamin having placed this short quote listing the year 1929 in the bibliographical information that was added so precisely. 92

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as failing or being dashed by their drifting away from people to objects: that is to say; their reification. Benjamin looks back at the preceding Excursus on Jugendstil by once again taking up the transfiguration of the lonely soul addressed in the Excursus with the idealization of objects, thus pursuing the slightly ironic, slightly blasphemous usage of the religious term of transfiguration.8 Reification, the triumph of dead things over the living individual or the approximation and identification of soul and thing — as is so aptly stated in the quote: “I believe … in my soul: the Thing” 9 — is actually the theme of the final section. And so Benjamin moves away from art to the everyday objects created by industrial design in the 19th century for private consumption and marketed as a mass commodity. In a note, Benjamin points to a further contrast (highlighted with not…but…) that is relevant here: The original form of all dwelling is existence not in the house but in the shell. (…) The latter bears quite visibly the impression of its occupant. In the most extreme instance, the dwelling becomes a shell. The nineteenth century, like no other century, was addicted to dwelling. It conceived the residence as the receptacle for the person, and it encased him, with all his appurtenances, so deeply in the dwelling’s interior that one might be reminded of the inside of a compass case, where the instrument with all its accessories lies embedded in deep, usually violet folds of velvet. It is scarcely possible nowadays to think of all the things for which the nineteenth century invented étuis: pocket watches, slippers, eggcups, thermometers, playing cards. What didn’t it provide with jackets, carpets, wrappers! (p. 864)

With the house becoming the shell, the expression of the personality becomes the impression of its occupant. Traces are left — now primarily by the objects, the most everyday objects and, in contrast,

8

The word ‘Verklärung’ (transfiguration, idealization) also often recurs in other passages of the exposé. 9 Benjamin dedicated one of his “critics and reviews” to Léon Deubel, the author of this creed of reification, which opens the third section. The little known, prematurely deceased French lyricist seems to have been a typical resident of an interior; or at least, this is the way Benjamin described him: … on this great talent lay, just as on the slow, ponderous man himself, with his melancholy and anxiety, which forced his existence and poetry into solitude… He secluded himself with his activities in the princely, but now deserted and musty apartments of those who had preceded him, Baudelaire’s … and the seeds of his images sprout up in shapes resembling chalices, shafts, beams. (Benjamin 1980, III, 182) 93

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almost only secondarily by humans. The traces of the occupants leave their impression in the interior. In the claustrophobically cramped conditions of the shell things become surprisingly alive, while the living become reified, yes, even coming to resemble dead things, and the familiar (heimelig) becomes uncanny (unheimlich). In the line taken from Charles Baudelaire’s poem “Une Martyre” which is placed at the beginning of the exposé as a motto, Benjamin alludes to the uncanny aspects of the interior; namely the connection between sexuality, death and crime (sexually motivated killing).10 And when at the end of his text Benjamin refers to Edgar Allan Poe’s detective novels, the shadow of the uncanny and criminal nature of the interior almost creates something like a secret frame for the exposé, which ends with the following sentence: The criminals in early detective novels are neither gentlemen nor apaches, but private citizens of the middle class. By addressing the perpetrators as neither-nor derivatives of distant worlds or long-gone times, but very explicitly as bourgeois private individuals, he once again takes up the themes of distance (apaches) and past (gentlemen — nobility) so as to reveal the modernity of the interior. Sigmund Freud, too, refers to 19th century literature to explain the connection between the familiar and the uncanny. In his 1919 study on “The Uncanny” Freud refers to E. T. A. Hoffmann and his novella “The Sandman”, which takes a good-night story as a point of departure. However, Freud’s interpretation of the experience of the uncanny as reflecting the male child’s castration anxiety, “repressed emotions” or “infantile complexes” offers a rather weak interpretation. With an explanation that is both naturalizing and pathologizing — assuming there are parallels between the “psychic life” of the child, the primitive man and the neurotic, from which conclusions could be drawn regarding the normality of the modern ‘citoyen’ or ‘bourgeois’ — Freud contributed more, in a way that was typical of the 19th century, to mystifying the phenomenon than actually explaining it. Whereas Freud contributes to the portrayal of the modern city dweller in archaic, animalistic and infantile terms, Benjamin addresses and problematizes how the seemingly primal, ancient, historical along with the supposedly eternal meets with the most advanced level of culture and technology in the interior of the 19th century:

10

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The difficulty here is that on the one hand, in the dwelling, the age-old — perhaps eternal – has to be recognized: the image of that abode of the human being in the maternal womb. And then, on the other hand, this motif of primal history notwithstanding, we must understand building in its most extreme form as a condition of nineteenth-century existence. (p. 862)

Second Reading Benjamin drew a causal link between the private individual making his appearance on the stage of history and the distance that emerged between living space and working space, interior and office in the 19th century. He thus identified a private sphere that was taking shape while the various subsystems of society were in the process of being differentiated. In modern social theory it is largely uncontested that a structural change took place in society with the bourgeois revolution coinciding with the first industrial revolution. As a result, not only did the fields of knowledge and action become emancipated from religion as the guiding discourse (Leitdiskurs) of society, they also broke away from each other and evolved into functionally different realms of society. Relatively autonomous and only pursuing their own intrinsic logic, politics/state, economy/market, law, science, etc. yielded to the same principle of rationality, the same path of growing rationalization. An increasingly anonymous, formal and mechanical system of functional relationships emerged which was to follow a-personal/impersonal, objective laws (‘inherent necessities’). The dominant modern systems of action, politics and economy developed into a bureaucratic state apparatus and a capitalist industrial apparatus. To put it in very simple terms: through the process of modernization, Western society became transformed into a bureaucratic system machine and an industrial machine system. In an apparatus that seemed to be without a beginning or end, individuals no longer had a place for facing the contingencies of life, their particularism and plurality. In a society that had become alienated under the sway of mechanisms and machines, people could only find refuge in the home, which, relieved by the state and market of its political and economic tasks, now appeared to be free of political constraints and economic hardships. A dividing line emerged, an unprecedented one, between all of the functionally differentiated subsystems on the one side and the private sphere that had now shifted to the other side. 95

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An interior space emerged in society where the immediately physical and emotional part of human life could take place in nonrational, non-objective — that is to say, emotional, personal intimate relationships. The private sphere of the family constitutes a sort of exterritorium within the social system, a hidden place where individuals were protected from the direct inroads of a system “not built on a human scale” (Luhmann 1989, 258), where they could be born and raised in a secure setting; where they could live and die. As a place for life to unfold between birth and death, as a refuge for the individual as a creative creature, with all its manifold psychophysical needs and desires, wishes and longings, fears and dreams — the private sphere becomes contrasted with the modern system as a “life world”. In this constellation, it may indeed appear as an animalist, primitive place, as a place of origin, the primal and early age of life, in short, as a preserve of eternal nature, which seems to remain as a relic from a distant past behind the rapidly changing, artificial and increasingly mechanized, dynamic and productive, infinitely progressing system. The private sphere as a “world of familial interiority (is) a world that in opposition to the … bourgeois society is being reclaimed as a biotope of the genuinely humane.” (Doyé/Heinz/Kuster 2002, 8) In the 19th century, and even in the 20th century, no effort was spared in society and social theory to create and maintain this illusion of the private sphere as an enclave of nature, of natural life and what is given by nature in order to uphold the inalterable relationships between the sexes and generations.11 Yet there can be no doubt that the private sphere is a formative part of modern society. It is and continues to be its most important reservoir; first, in the sense that it is here that human manpower as the most significant ‘resource’ is generated and regenerated in the private sphere. Moreover, it also constitutes the refuge of human beings who, given their neediness and the nature of their contingent life, fall behind the enormous dynamic of the machinery they have created. And finally in the course

11 The naturalization of domestic relations also has the purpose of safeguarding the traditional personal, patriarchal rule of the man and father over the woman and children, since its historical roots in the Christian religion had disappeared over the course of the modernization process. Even though the notion of the (small) family and the “reciprocity of femininity and the interior… is an idea that can be traced throughout the entire 19th century” (Söntgen 1998, 204), Benjamin does not pursue this central aspect of the formation of the interior. His gaze goes in different directions.

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of modernization, the hopes for the future that had been roused by this process have proved impossible to fulfill. Unlike in the bold visions of the Enlightenment, modern man — used in the universal singular as man par excellence or in the cosmopolitan collective singular of humanity — does not become master of his fate and history. Rather, he must subordinate himself to the system of the nation state and the capitalist operating system as just one cog in a machine, becoming split in the roles of “citoyen” and “bourgeois” as a result of the differentiation of the system. Instead of evolving into a self-determining subject, the individual is allowed to and even supposed to develop his own subjectivity as “homme”, that is, as a private man within the refuge of a life world. In other words, the retreat to the private sphere is sought from opposite directions; that is to say, coming on the one side from the loss of a nature-given origin as well as from the background of an old culture and, on the other side, from the failure of the utopia of a complete freedom hoped for the future. In the 19th century a kind of ‘spatial turn’ took place, instead of a movement back in time to nature or forwards into the future of a mankind freed of all contingencies. There was an inner movement of evasion instead of the attempt to either restitute a lost ‘golden age’ in a reformation or to bring forth the ‘new man’ through a revolution. In this way, a new social interior has emerged as a result of contrary nostalgic and utopian aspirations coming together, strangely linking the really grand universal human and the really small human-all-too-human. This mix has brought forth something fundamentally new and specifically modern: the idea of the private citizen as an individual endowed with individuality. Let’s return to Benjamin again. When he notes the discrepancy between the commercial and social considerations of the actor as a factor that makes the retreat into the interior seem all the more pressing, then he is addressing the failed hopes for emancipation that had been roused in the early phases of the revolutionary changes — hopes that were then dashed in the course of modernization. Niklas Luhman must have had something similar in mind when he wrote: “As a parasite of the difference between the general and the particular the individual gains his individuality from the fact that these do not converge.” (Luhmann 1989, 207) As different as they are, both authors derive the necessity of a third position from the difference between the general and the particular or the incongruity between social and business interests — a position that in Benjamin is assumed by the private 97

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individual who inhabits the interior, while it is referred to by Luhmann as the “individual”. In the cracks between the somehow not-correctly fitting parts of the fragmented modern building of society the individual or to be more precise, the individual citizen12 — the Western male — is given a new, specifically modern status and is now able to develop something novel, namely “his individuality”. Sociologists have assigned important functions to this individual emerging in the process of modernization as a result of the differentiation between politics and the economy. Luhmann expects the individual to develop a self-understanding that is “suited for a life and action in plural, not integrated contexts.” (Luhmann 1989, 215) This does not mean that the individual should integrate himself as a cog in the machinery of corporations and apparatuses, but quite the contrary. The individual is expected to counter the centrifugal dynamic of the system, its open, infinite motion, with a centripetal dynamic so as to stabilize and to provide a counter-balance to the ‘perpetuum mobile’ of modern society that is geared to endless expansion and progress. In the same vein, Stuart Hill ascribes to the individual the role of a “still point in a turning world.” (Hall 1997, 175) However, his formulation is not entirely precise, since “this turning world” does not exist. In the transition from a closed, finite cosmos to an infinite, open universe, from a stratified to a functional differentiation of society, it turns out “that a representative self-description of the social system as a whole can no longer be imposed in society.” (Luhmann 1987, 68) Consequently, the individual is not just a “still point in a turning world”, but rather he actually creates this world or view of the world. “The individual is understood as something singular, unique, one that becomes conscious through the ego, as a relationship with the world realized as human being; and the world (or socially seen: mankind) is that what is ‘autopoietically’ displayed in the individual.” (Luhmann 1989, 215) The individual should be the focal point of the unity and totality that as “world” has been lost in the secularization process or failed as “humanity” in an unfinished revolution; the individual thus becomes a point where nostalgia and utopia come together.

12 There can be no doubt about the existence of both the gender-specific and the class-specific bourgeois connotation of the individual, which is neutral in grammatical terms. These limitations have both shaped and negatively impacted the idea of the individual and individualism.

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In order to meet these demands, the individual must of necessity be positioned outside the social system: “No matter what the individual does with himself and no matter how society plays along: it has its site in itself and outside of society. Nothing else is symbolized by the term ‘subject’.” (Luhmann 1989, 212) In this light, “the term ‘subject’” is the modern translation of the old term ‘God’. However, there is neither a god nor is man god-like but the sociologist does not tackle this problem. With the two phrases “no matter what” and “no matter how”, Luhmann almost underlines his disinterest with regard to how and by which means the individual should be made capable of assuming the position of God that has been lost in the process of secularization and has been substituted by the human subject achieving this enormous feat of functioning as the still point in a turning world, the unmoved mover. By claiming that this is a process of autopoiesis, Luhman dismisses the question regarding the constitution of the individual as not pertinent to social theory. Returning to Benjamin again; by making the claim: The interior represents the universe for the private citizen, he proves to be the better social theorist. Unlike Luhmann, Benjamin does not proceed from the individual who supposedly creates his world “autonomously” (as only a god can) but focuses instead on the special space, which is both within society and outside of it or, rather, appears to be. Even more precisely, it is a space which is placed and constructed, endowed and developed with social means so that it can represent the necessary and/or sought-after ex-territorium. With the key term “representation” that is central for Luhmann and even more so for Benjamin, the interior is basically described as the sphere of aesthetics and appearance. The salon becomes a box in the world theatre; the interior entertains the illusions of the private individual by playing the universe, which does not exist (as such). For structural social-topological reasons, the private sphere comes closer to the realm of artificiality and art. Given its ex-territorial status vis-àvis the system, the individual is supposed to be capable of substituting the transcendental point of reference that has been lost through secularization in the process of modernization: the “world view of God”, a god that can view the world as his work, his creation; that is, as a totality that is created in a meaningful way according to his will — like an artist. The unity and totality of the world that would have required a god as builder/architect has become a fiction in the modern age, an effect “in the eye of the beholder”. As a beholder in the 99

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theater room, in the box which serves as his salon in front of the peepshow stage, the private individual is an aesthete, enjoying the relics of the old cosmology and metaphysics as art, as a great narrative in the modern novel between two book covers, as a framed world-image on the wall. In the modern age not just the private sphere has become a space of art, but it is only now that art has become aesthetic. Martin Heidegger defines the modern age as “time of the world image”, not least because he is noting the entry of art into the “horizon of aesthetics” (Heidegger 1938) 1972, 69). Liberated from servitude to the throne and the altar and having become autonomous in the course of the emancipation and differentiation of the modern age, art no longer represents (or at least has the tendency to do so ever less) a spiritual or secular power. Within the “horizon of aesthetics” the artwork is transformed into “the object of experience and thus art is seen as the expression of a human life.” (Heidegger (1938) 1972, 69) “The discovery of subjectivity, the liberation and legitimation of the individual … is the feat and the task of aesthetic experience.” (Jauß 1989, 111) The specifically modern realm of aesthetics can thus be divided into the private sphere as a sphere of aesthetics in the everyday, bourgeois understanding referring to circles of family and friends, and the sphere of the aesthetic in the non-everyday sense as the sphere of art. Given its external position vis-à-vis the mechanical system, both spheres can assume the function of providing meaning and identity. They turn the single, socially alienated person into an individual, endowing him with new qualities of inwardness and individuality. As life world or art world, these spheres now assume world-forming functions or promote such a world-forming capacity in the individual. At this point one might wonder why Benjamin did not foreground the active-productive, creative artist instead of the passivereceptive, re-creative, indulging (art) collector as the real occupant of the refuge of art. In reality it is, however, the figure of the artist who in the modern age appears as the subject par excellence. Nowhere else does the synthesis of the subject in universal and individual singular seem so close at hand as in the artist and through his work, despite the fact that the early romantic hope is soon disappointed — the hope that the genius-artist would be able by virtue of his eccentric, extravagant individuality to heal the great “crack in the world” by creating a new mythology. Even if this utopia has shrunk to the scale of “private mytholo100

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gies”, the artist is still seen as an exemplary subject. For only the figure of the artist can rise up to the loftiest heights of the spirit (associated with the most heightened masculinity of the modern understanding of the subject) and at the same time descend to the deepest depths of soul and body (reflecting a private, feminine form of subjectivity, sensibility and sensuality). In short: “…no figure embodies or promotes the fantasies and fictions of the bourgeois individual under capitalism more dramatically than that of the artist.” (Drucker 1994, 109) The liberty granted to the artist as creative subject in bourgeois society is not just limited to the work but also extends to the way of life. The idea of art as experience (Erlebniskunst) is not just linked to the idea of artistic freedom and authentic self-expression in creating an autonomous work produced for its own ends, but also to the idea of self-realization of a way of life outside of the rules and conventions of bourgeois normality: the aesthetic life style in the alterity, the alternative life world of the bohème increases the rather modest freedoms of the private sphere that are limited spatially and temporally to ‘leisure time’. Moreover, there is hardly any salon or living room that could make as legitimate a claim to the status of the interior as a space for the development of soul and body as the artist’s studio. As with only a few other professions, in the so-called freelance professions (aside from creative work, there are also those in the medical and therapeutic field) the delineation between working and living space is not so strictly implemented in the studio. With the private furniture piece of the 19th century par excellence, that is, the Oriental divan that served him as the tool for his work with the imagination and the world of dreams, Sigmund Freud — a collector of antiquities — was also a typical inhabitant of the interior. His grandson Lucian Freud followed suit in his studio where he explored his own emotional life and that of others in the portrait; in the representation of bodies.13 Therapeutic and creative work as work with and on human bodies and souls continues to take place close to home.14

13

Cf. Wolff-Bernstein’s text in this volume. If the Sigmund Freud Museum is referred to as “Futteral” (case), then this has to do with the fact that it was Freud’s flat — his home and private sphere. Cf. the text by Scholz/ Strutzmann in this publication. 14

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So once again, the question arises why Benjamin focused on private man in his apartment and not on the artist and his studio. A possible clue could be found in the sentence that may have been overlooked in the middle of the three sentences in which Benjamin briefly but succinctly describes the functions of the interior at the end of the first section of his ‘Exposé’. In the first and third sentence, he addresses the role of the interior as formative for a world view – a task that becomes all the more pressing the clearer it becomes that the modernization process cannot fulfill the utopian hopes for a future in which mankind’s subject position is completely liberated from the fetters of contingency. By contrast, the central second sentence refers to the increasingly pressing nostalgic longing for lost, alienated, distant nature. It is in the interior that private man can bring together distant and long-gone worlds. To be sure, the artists and the writers associated with historicism and orientalism/primitivism can be seen as the discoverers and inventors of remote places and times. Yet Benjamin’s gaze goes further: from art to technology. Following him we discover the note “imperial panorama” in Benjamin’s “Berliner Kindheit um 1900” (Berlin Childhood around 1900): In 1822, Daguerre opened his Panorama (Diorama, C. K.) in Paris.15 Since then these translucent, shimmering cassettes, the aquariums of the distant places and long-gone times are at home on all the stylish boulevards and promenades and here as in the arcades and kiosks they readily engaged snobs and artists before they became the chambers in which children became acquainted with the globe … Benjamin reports that panoramas had long gone out of style towards the end of his childhood. Still for him the travelling around and around in a half-empty room …, whose last audience were children, … had lost none of its magic (Benjamin 1980, vol. IV.1 = 10, 240). And it amazed him: … The yearning that this magic spell

15 “With his invention of the diorama in Paris in 1822, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre … added another facet of imaginary journeys to his illusion of the panorama. In a theater-like auditorium… images painted on both sides were presented. When the lighting was gradually changed from incident light to transmitted light, the audience believed it could recognize something happening in a scene. A temporal illusion had been added to the spatial one… However, the diorama was more entertainment for the upper middle-class, since the price for the tickets … was relatively high… Whereas initially the images were unique and handpainted by travelling presenters, towards the end of the 19th century serially produced strips of glass on the theme of traveling could be bought at any toy store for the laterna magicadevices found in middle-class children’s rooms” (Storch 2008, 17).

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triggers is both a longing for distant places and a longing for home. For this was strange about traveling; that its distant worlds were not always unfamiliar and that the longing that they roused in me was not always one that pulled one towards the unfamiliar; rather, it was sometimes mitigating the yearning to return home. (ibid.) In the innermost space of the interior, a child’s emotional world, the times of nostalgia and utopia that are expressed in spatial terms as a yearning for home and for distant places merge to form a synthesis in which the contrast to the here and now of modern European society becomes visible. And it is precisely at this point that society, in the guise of technological innovation, comes to resemble an ‘agency’ of inwardness. It is the gaslight! In the laterna-magica apparatuses of the bourgeois children’s room a yearning for distant places is created, while in the lamp on the desk where it illuminates a child’s everyday activities — the homework, the school exercises — it has a homey effect; it feels like home. The strange feeling that the distant world is not always unfamiliar and the yearning … sometimes mitigates the yearning to a return home. This … perhaps was the task of the gaslight that fell so gently on everything. And when it rained … (I) stepped inside and found the same light there in the fjords and on coconut palms, the same one that in the evenings illuminated my desk when I would do my homework (Benjamin 1980, 240) — And since, when it snowed, the distant places no longer led into outer expanses but rather inside, Babylon and Bagdad, Akko and Alaska, Tromsö and Transvaal were located inside of me (Benjamin 1980, 275). Come snow come rain, the bad weather between north and west, the path going into the distance leads inwards, provided that the apartment is well-lit and heated. With gas and electricity, the “municipal works” of the 19th century provided new and efficient solutions for dealing with this problem. In the reminiscences of Benjamin’s own Berlin Childhood of 1900 the heart chambers of inwardness open up even more than in the Exposés of the Arcades envisioned by its author as opus magnum. And here something amazing emerges: The real occupant of the interior, the ultimate collector of the virtual images of distant places and bygone times is the child. Its dark chamber is lit up by image-producing machines – from the laterna magica of the past to today’s tablets and play stations – that not only bring closer what is distant in temporal and spatial terms but also make possible the vicinity, the virtual inner space of the individual, his interiority. In the furthest recesses of the family’s private sphere, the 103

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children’s room, the individual as the most important product of nature — one created through an act that is allegedly symbolic of the last remaining ‘natural’ physical contact between the sexes — grows up to become the future actor/agent of the enterprise. Here the artificial character of the social-topological constructions of the private sphere and of individuality is most visible. The inner world of the child as an individual or the individual as a child is a socially induced and technologically produced artifact. The brightest images of life, the most authentic feelings related to a yearning for home and distant places are indeed produced in the most perfect, realistic way by the apparatus. In his exposé, Benjamin explores the reification of the individual on the basis of an overwhelming wealth of the most everyday objects, which the thriving consumer commodity industry of the 19th century set about manufacturing to furnish the interior. Following the model of the artist and his ability to express himself in an authentic way, the individual hoped to express his individuality at least in a re-creative way by acquiring and owning aesthetically designed, industrially produced goods so as to make his own life an artwork and to leave traces of his ephemeral, but singular existence. The occupant of the 19th century interior became addicted to dwelling — to the point that he himself appears to be an instrument which, lying embedded with all spare parts in deep, usually violet velvet caves, had become a dead object, reified instead of becoming eternalized. By contrast, in his reflections on the Kaiserpanorama (Imperial Panorama) (as in other contexts as well) Benjamin addresses the development of new media of aesthetic expression that give rise to virtual spaces. And here it becomes clear that the humanity of man does not just become reified and deadened in the course of modernization but is actually brought to life. Léon Deubel’s bold creed: “I believe … in my soul: the Thing” reveals the second facet when it is reversed: “I believe … in the Thing: my soul.” The age of technology brings the soul to life by creating machines that both awaken, satisfy, but above all endlessly fuel the wishes and desires of the individual who is not really alienated but constructed as ‘alien’. Just like the machines of the consumer goods industry that create gadgets in serial production, which both unleash and serve the insatiable appetite of those wanting to possess them, there are the audio-visual apparatuses that have revolutionized signs and images, generating and promoting in series the insatiable hunger for being and meaning, for absolute presence, for eternal life. 104

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The cases, enclosures (Gehäusewesen) of the private sphere evolved in the course of the 19th century. At the end of that century, yesterday’s autonomous artworks as well as hand-crafted objects were reduced to child’s play as a result of changing styles and technological progress. The trajectory of the diorama from an artistically designed hand-made luxury good to a mass product sold in toy stores runs parallel to the path of the self-empowered, self-centered subject to the most recent and weakest member in the chain of subjectification: to the child. Just as the subject in the androgynous guise of the artist corresponds to the concept of autonomous art of experience (Erlebnis­ kunst), there is an analogy between the infantile form of subjectivity/ individuality and advanced technology. In the time of Benjamin’s childhood at around the turn of the century, the production of images and signs was affected by a second large wave of the industrial revolution. The artwork entered the age of its mechanical (re)reproduction and subsequently the large dream factories of the information and info/entertainment society emerged, which continue to fuel the processes of individualization and infantilization up to this very day.

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6.1  Josef Hoffmann and Felix Augenfeld, 1924, Illustration as “contemporary” example of Interior Design by Hoffmann with oriental carpets, decorated curtains, walls with applicated decorum.

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Reconstructing Wittgenstein as an Architect Ludwig Wittgenstein and Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein — Defining and Designing a New Interior August Sarnitz

This text is based on my research on Wittgenstein’s Architecture — the reconstruction of a built idea, and will focus on just two main issues: first, a short biographical album (to quote Michael Nedo) about Ludwig Wittgenstein and some information describing the cultural and architectural context of Vienna, and second, a critical discourse on the architectural and interior qualities embodied in the Wittgenstein house. It is very important to underline that this presentation is neither conclusive nor definitive, in the sense that it offers an explanation of Wittgenstein’s architecture. It is rather a work in progress — a statement designed to provoke further discussion.1 Introduction On Monday 27th July 1914, the day before the outbreak of the First World War, Wittgenstein and Adolf Loos met in the very elegant Café Hotel Imperial — the top address in Vienna, comparable with the Plaza in New York City — brought together by the publisher Ludwig von Ficker. Loos was the avant-garde architect in Vienna, the controversial architect who had designed the building on the Michaelerplatz, which had officially opened in May 1912 (the date of the building permit).

1 This

article was first presented at a symposium at the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna on 21st November 2013. The article is based on my book on the architecture of Ludwig Wittgenstein, August Sarnitz, Die Architektur Wittgensteins, Vienna, 2011 107

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Adolf Loos: the author of “Ornament and Crime” (written 1908, published 1913), the friend of Karl Kraus (publisher of the Fackel), Peter Altenberg (the writer) and Oskar Kokoschka (the painter). The building on the Michaelerplatz: “naked façades” and “material opulence in the interior”, with marble, mirrors and wood paneling — but no applied ornament as defined by Loos. To quote Beatriz Colomina: “When Loos said, ‘the house does not have to tell anything to the exterior; instead, all richness must be manifest in the interior’, not only had he recognized a limit to architecture until then unknown, not only had he recognized a difference between dwelling in the interior and dealing with the exterior, but at the same time he had formulated the very need for this limit, which itself implies the need for a mask. The interior does not have to tell anything to the exterior.”2 After the meeting with Loos, Wittgenstein returned home — a five-minute walk — to his parents’ house, a city palace with interiors very much like those of the Hotel Imperial. The next day, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia and, eleven days later, Wittgenstein volunteered to serve. During the war, Wittgenstein met Paul Engelmann, to whom he was introduced by Adolf Loos. Aside from this, he worked on his Tractatus, which he completed in the summer of 1918 (between July and September, during a break from the front). After the end of the First World War (November 1918) and his release from captivity in August 1919, Wittgenstein returned to Vienna. Within just two weeks, Wittgenstein left for a meeting with his old friend Adolf Loos full of expectation but he was appalled by Loos and his ideas about a “Kunstamt”: “a few days ago I looked up Loos. I was horrified and nauseated. He has become infected with the most virulent bogus intellectualism! He gave me a pamphlet about a proposed ‘fine arts office’, in which he speaks about a sin against the Holy Ghost. That surely is the limit! I was already a bit depressed when I went to Loos but that was the last straw …”3

2

Beatriz Colomina, “On Adolf Loos and Josef Hoffmann” in Raumplan versus Plan libre, edited by Max Risselada, New York, 1991, p. 66 3 August Sarnitz, Die Architektur Wittgenteins, op. cit., p. 148, (Translation from Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary, Marjorie Perloff, University of Chicago, 1996, p.224) 108

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6.2  Adolf Loos, 1929, Appartment of Dr. Josef Vogl, Pilsen, the large living room has a cherry tree wall decoration with integrated furniture made of cherry tree, built in furniture (cupboards) and oriental rugs on the floor. Different lighting lamps designed by Loos for different lighting moods. Illustration as “contemporary” example of Interior Design by Adolf Loos.

After this, Wittgenstein spent ten days at his parents’ country home, which had been partly remodeled by Josef Hoffmann. This is very important: Josef Hoffmann, the proponent of the Gesamtkunstwerk or total work of art, founding member of the Wiener Werkstätte and member of the Secession, was the artistic and intellectual antithesis of Adolf Loos in Vienna: Yet it was precisely Hoffmann who had realized numerous architectural projects for the Wittgenstein family in close cooperation with Ludwig’s father and — very significantly — had also been responsible for his sister Margaret’s first apartment in Berlin in 1905. In the years between 1914 and 1919 much had happened within the Wittgenstein family: Shortly before the First World War, Ludwig’s favorite sister Margaret had bought the Villa Toskana in Gmunden on the Traunsee in the Salzkammergut, Salzburg‘s Lake District, which was then renovated — not, as previously suspected, by Josef Hoffmann, but by Rudolf Perco, a young, unknown architect and pupil of 109

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6.3  Paul Engelmann and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Architects, official building plan, approved 13th November 1926, main floor with indications of different building materials (concrete —  green colour, maisonary — red colour, load bearing and not load bearing).

Otto Wagner. Ludwig Wittgenstein himself had decided in autumn 1919 to become a “primary school teacher” — a teacher who sought to pass on completely primary, or elementary, knowledge. Wittgenstein opted for a post outside Vienna — establishing a distance between him and the city, which would enable him to work in seclusion. As a teacher he even published a “book of words” (Wörterbuch — but not a dictionary) for primary schools in 1926. The major change came in April 1926 when Wittgenstein saw himself as compelled to leave the teaching profession for having slapped a pupil. These were the circumstances in which Wittgenstein returned to the family fold and, in particular, to his favorite sister Margaret. And here there is a very interesting set of social, psychological and family circumstances: In the previous year, Margaret had completed the rebuilding of her house in the Salzkammergut. Margaret now 110

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6.4  Main floor, analytical drawing of all openings (doors and windows, indicating the different materials — transparent glass, opaque glass, and metal doors).

wanted to build a townhouse in Vienna. At the same time Wittgenstein had given up his work as a teacher, and his sister wanted to help her brother in this situation. Ludwig Wittgenstein therefore became involved in the townhouse-project for Vienna upon the intervention of Engelmann and his sister. Rather than merely becoming involved as a collaborator, Ludwig gradually took over the entire design process, which his friend Paul Engelmann had already began to design. Thus, in May 1926 Wittgenstein was back living in Vienna and starting his new two-year long stint as an architect. This is a very crucial point in our discussion. From this moment on, Wittgenstein described himself as an “architect” and no longer as a “teacher”: This is documented by the residency form that Wittgenstein himself filled in after returning to live in Vienna. 111

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Josef Hoffmann and Adolf Loos The things that we have so far learnt about Wittgenstein’s background, life and architectural experiences were very important in the design of a house for his sister: Most specifically, in the sense of a “reaction.” My argument is that Ludwig Wittgenstein is the anti-architect to both Hoffman and Loos. Josef Hoffmann is the architect who represents the total work of art as embodied by the Wiener Werkstätte - architect, interior architect and designer, and Adolf Loos is an architect in the sense of “Critical Conventionalism” (as wisely formulated by Stanford Anderson); an architect of spatial conception and architectural spatial design — but no designer of objects. Ludwig Wittgenstein is the architect who understood a building to be an elementary and structural envelope, a sequence of spaces —  of autonomous spaces with defined proportions. The furniture was not part of his responsibility, but the responsibility of residents and users. The internal space was a “collage” of architecture and objects. Ludwig Wittgenstein as architect The story sounds unbelievable: Between 1926 and 1928, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein built a house in Vienna for his sister Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein which can be described as particularly radical when compared with the work being produced at the same time by modernist architects in Vienna. This “clothing” of his sister in an architecture of radicalism, modernity and considerable frankness (or even nakedness) goes far beyond the usual architectural act of “dressing-up”. For Margaret, the house truly was “Living-Space, Art-Space and Work-Space” and its cultural context was broad: it overcame the cultural and architectural conventions of its time while also reflecting the growing emancipation of its owner. Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein wanted a townhouse that fulfilled her personal wishes. She knew exactly what she didn’t want —  a house from Hoffmann, (her first apartment in Berlin – a gift from her father — had been designed down to the last detail by Josef Hoffmann and was thus a total work of the Wiener Werkstätte) or a house by Loos (whose building on the Michaelerplatz had been the target of Margaret’s sharp tongue). In short, she didn’t want a house from an obviously artistically inclined architect.

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Plans and construction – from the inside to the outside The plan of the main floor is complex and dense: here, Ludwig created a world of living and working for his sister Margaret which can be interpreted — as it could be used — in many ways. This is not monodimensional functionalism in the sense of the modernism of the Bauhaus, but rather constructive rationalism, which can be interpreted as the framework for the cultural collage of how it can be used. The “spatial program” for the Stonborough-Wittgenstein villa reflected Margaret’s family and social life: the family consisted of her husband Jerome Stonborough (who by this time was largely separated from his wife), their two sons Thomas and John Jerome, two aristocratic foster sons from Berlin, Wedigo and Jochen von Zastrow, and the domestic staff. “Ideologically”, the Kundmanngasse House consists of two houses: the house as spatial architecture and the house as used object. Wittgenstein himself said that the house could be used and furnished in a number of different ways, just as long as the “quality” is right. The modernity of the plan also results from its unconventionality when compared with the common approach in Vienna at the time. The main floor combines public and private areas in the sense that one of the doors in the large (public) hall opens directly into the living and sleeping area of the lady of the house (which is labeled as “living room” in the plan). An alcove opposite the window contains the niche for the bed, which also serves as a couch during the day. The neighboring dressing area — which is confusingly labeled “bedroom” in the plan — is hidden behind a screen. One could describe this entire main floor as the “stage” on which Margaret Stonborough lived her life, because this was the focal point of all her activities. The other floors were reserved for her (separated) husband, the children and the domestic staff. The reality is that there is no evidence of the oft-mentioned affinity with Loos’ architecture: There is neither a spatial plan nor a central living hall as favored by Loos; open transitions between spaces do not feature in Wittgenstein’s architecture and the internal spaces are completely devoid of material ‘padding’. Loos’ interiors celebrate the sensual and haptic use of materials such as natural stone, colored marble and granite, timber-paneling, leather and other wall coverings, cut and faceted glass and, later, color as a very consciously-used spatial finish. Loos’ “wall architecture” is carried over into his very deliberate selection of items of occasional furniture which are often so diverse 113

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6.5  Main floor, interior view, main staircase looking towards the salon (Saal) and Margaret WittgensteinStonborough’s private drawing room. Photo Thomas Freiler (2009).

6.6  Main floor, interior view, looking from Margaret’s private drawing room to the entrance hall. Photo Thomas Freiler (2009).

6.7  Main floor, former library, with the famous metal sheets to darken the interior rooms in the evening. Photo Thomas Freiler (2010).

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and juxtaposed that the guiding hand of the architect is hidden by an apparent “randomness” which is, in turn, interpreted as the especially “laisser-faire” approach of Loos the architect. In 1926, Wittgenstein was already a step further. He saw his concrete architecture as a completely abstract background, a basic spatial envelope which drew its quality from such immaterial architectural values as proportion, the use of light, rhythm and materialized tangibility and which ought to reflect his mechanical approach and truth. This aspect was especially visible in the architectural objects that he knew from his time as a student of mechanical engineering: metal doors, metal windows, radiators, sliding elements and elevators. This terminology of Wittgenstein’s architecture brings us to the relationship between background and foreground — between “aura” and “use”. It is almost as if the auratic quality of the architecture is being juxtaposed with the use of the building by its inhabitants. Walter Benjamin qualified the term “aura” by addressing the technical reproducibility of artworks. Older artworks have an aura because tradition attaches itself to — and leaves its traces on — an object from the here and now. And, according to Boris Groys, aura emerges as a sort of “contextual topology”. This assertion can be directly transferred to architecture. Hence, for Wittgenstein, the ability to autonomously use a space is an essential quality criterion. Furniture and visitors are both interchangeable — and not part of his architecture. Hence, Wittgenstein left the use and aesthetic consumption of his architecture to his sister Margaret. In 1949 Ludwig wrote to her, “Yesterday I thought, I don’t know why, about the Kundmanngasse House and about how delightfully and how beneficially you had furnished it. In such matters we understand each other.”4 The question about aesthetic usage is relevant insomuch as it raises the issue of the value of architecture “over time” and depicts the longer usability of a building as a concrete quality. Building volume and façade When one looks at the house one is primarily struck by the strong plastic presence of the architecture, which has a “cubist” form that was unusual for Vienna in 1928 and can only have been interpreted as very radical and modern. (The sculptural effect of the only comparable

4

August Sarnitz, Die Architektur Wittgensteins, op.cit., p. 40 115

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contemporary building by Adolf Loos, the Moller House, is much more reserved.) Viewed in perspective, the projections and recesses of the building’s volume result in an apparently random arrangement of windows. The orthogonal drawings of the façades, on the other hand, reveal axially arranged windows which enjoy a particularly complex relationship with the interior spaces. The basic conclusion is that the fenestration offers no clues about the sort of room located “behind” each window. Unlike in the works of Adolf Loos, bathrooms and small ancillary spaces are not represented on the façade by small windows. Wittgenstein’s façade is not a “functional” illustration of the various spaces but rather a composed “whole” which works with axes and rhythms. In the main floor in particular there is a radical use of virtually identical glazed metal doors both internally and on the façade. This clearly demonstrates a very conscious desire for design which cannot be explained by functionalism and which does not feature in the often-cited architecture of Adolf Loos. The metal and glass double doors are arranged as Viennese casement windows, once in the form of French doors opening to the terrace and once as French doors opening to the hall. The hall is thus transformed into the external element of the internal space, a sensitively semantic interpretation of the spatial hierarchy and the “public” and private character of the rooms. Internally, the large living room (library) and Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein’s small living room are the only spaces whose internal double doors have no glass and consist entirely of metal. By thus controlling the amount of “light” passing through the glass doors, Wittgenstein simultaneously starts to direct “movement” through the house: Upon entering the house, the visitor is drawn by light from the left side (the glass wall to the terrace) towards the dining room and the small breakfast room. The large living room (library) on the right can also be entered via glass doors. This morphology of the entrance doors and terrace doors continues in the same manner throughout the house. This is the source of the detached serenity of the hall, which so effortlessly fulfills its role as an articulating space. Ludwig Wittgenstein appears to have particularly valued certain of the photos of his sister’s house because he stuck these in the “pocket book” that accompanied him everywhere. A total of eight photos taken by Moritz Nähr (the photographer of the Secession and 116

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one of the best photographers in Vienna at that time) after the house was completed demonstrate the great meaning that it held for Wittgenstein himself. This pocket album containing photographs of his family, his friends and “his” house was produced in the early to midthirties — after Wittgenstein’s emigration from Vienna to Cambridge in 1929. The small-format (approximately 10 x 16 cm) book with 148 lined pages (which is actually called a notebook) contains his very personal selection of photos, most of which are pasted on the right-hand page while the left-hand pages, with one exception, remain empty. Perspective of a Positioning From the perspective of architectural history and in a reflective architectural context, the Stonborough-Wittgenstein House occupies a radical architectural position. We are now at the critical point of our discussion at which we can use the above reflections as the historical framework for a “re-evaluation” of the architectural work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The basic conclusions are that before 1926 — that is to say before the design work of Wittgenstein-Engelmann – no similarly radical dwelling had been realized in Vienna — and that the building is also remarkable at a European level. The architectural interpretation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s interior design is particularly interesting. This was almost completely separated from the architectural volume and the architectural envelope has a fundamental and elementary quality, which is virtually untouched by the furniture. It is this aspect that embodies the greatest difference between Wittgenstein and his architectural contemporaries who opposed the separation of architecture and internal finishes. Each of these incrementally different positions was represented on the Viennese architecture scene: For Josef Hoffmann, architecture — and the dwelling in particular — was a total work of art of which every aspect (in German: “Das Gesamtkunstwerk”) – sometimes right down to everyday objects — should be determined by the artistic predilection of the architect. Adolf Loos argued that the “walls” — and hence the design of in-built furniture, wall cladding and chimney-nooks — belonged to the architect, but not such moveable elements as chairs, dining chairs and armchairs. In spite of this however, by very consciously choosing such elements, Loos developed his own closed aesthetic. He had no difficulty incorporating inherited items of furniture or oriental carpets into a new architectural design. Quite the contrary: his interiors were even somewhat characterized by the use of ornamental oriental carpets 117

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in that these were a status symbol essential to their overall bourgeois quality. Here, one can see the great difference between both Loos and Josef Frank and “Bauhaus Modernism”, whose understanding of architecture diverges completely from this Viennese approach. In the case of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the instructions and guidelines passed on to his sister Margaret regarding the furnishing of her own house were very strict. She was to use neither carpets, nor curtains nor chandeliers. Here we see a major contrast with Loos’ pupil Paul Engelmann, whose interiors for the Stonborough-Wittgenstein House had looked very different (or, so to say, Loosian!). Wittgenstein’s absolute position regarding carpets and curtains is, however, easy to explain: his architecture had already addressed the functional issue of the curtain — the ground floor windows incorporated vertical blackout elements that were “parked” at basement level during the day. And the anthracite-black artificial stone floor with the very detailed joint pattern was part of the architectural design in which the reflection of the black stone effectively led to its own “dematerialization”. Given the very conscious dimensioning of the interior spaces, the arbitrary laying of carpets would have caused aesthetic irritation: a carpeted surface on the floor surface seen as an act of haphazard design. Wittgenstein’s approach to the issue of artificial light was similar: Light is essential to the way spaces are perceived. Without light there is no space. The nature of a space is heavily determined by the control of the incoming light; a room with just one window on one wall is very differently perceived than a room with a completely glazed wall. Wittgenstein’s final decision in favor of a “naked” 200 Watt bulb at ceiling level reflected a statistically standard way of using light — an almost objective, primary way of illuminating a room. All further lighting sources were “mood lighting”, induced by candles or standing lamps which could be used by the owner herself in line with each specific situation. In the case of artificial light, Wittgenstein the architect also adopted an almost elementary position. In cases where only a single need was to be fulfilled, a design solution was not required. Furniture itself was not a matter for Wittgenstein the architect. Here, he allowed his sister — the user of the house — complete freedom: Ludwig knew his sister’s furniture and art collection because he had often been her guest in her bel-étage in the Palais SchönbornBatthyány. He knew how his sister’s house operated at the social level. One cannot escape the feeling and suspicion that Ludwig Wittgenstein saw “furniture”, “users” and “visitors” as merely temporary and, 118

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6.8  Photo from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Fototaschenbuch” (photo-pocketbooklet) taken in Margaret’s private drawing room. This page of the photopocket-booklet was later numbered page #1. From left to right: Marguerite Respinger, Margaret Stonborough, Dr. Foltanek, Talla Sjögren (standing), Ludwig Wittgenstein, Schönherr-Buchheim, Arvid Sjögren. Archive Stonborough Family, Vienna. Wittgenstein Archive, Cambridge

6.9  The Wittgenstein house from the garden looking towards the entrance and the terrace in front of the dining room and the hall. Photo from the “photo-pocket-booklet” by Ludwig Wittgenstein, page later numbered as page #17. Photo by Moritz Nähr after completion of the house. Archive Stonborough Family, Vienna. Wittgenstein Archive, Cambridge 119

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in relative terms, less significant events in an absolute architectural space. The spatial design was the stage on which life was lived: his sister and the furniture changed continuously and yet this “elementary space” remained. During a social event, the house functioned differently as when only the family was present. His architecture had to be equal to both situations: hence the dark, almost black floor, which levels out the objects placed upon it — enveloping them in a world of continuity. Margaret Stonborough’s visitors, furniture and works of art “inhabit” the Wittgensteinian space almost as if they are the egalitarian guests of the elementary architecture. This is an approach which reveals the radicalism of a modernism which simultaneously believes in both the elementary and autonomous qualities of the architecture itself. Here, Wittgenstein’s artistic intention reveals itself as an abstract creative will triggered by the architectural debate about the Viennese modus vivendi. This “collage” of architecture and furniture occupies a position which, in the fine arts, is otherwise only found in film and photomontage. The sequence of spaces creates an almost cinematic spatial and temporal chronology of uses which is expressed in the diagonal nature of the visual axes: the glass doors establish visual axes from the dining-room, through the hall and into the large living room (library); and from the small living room (Margaret Stonborough’s salon), through the music room and into the hall. There are visual axes which are both linear and diagonal, and axes which are both real and virtual. And when the doors stand open, the activities in the building take on an almost cinematically sequential character. With this clue and with a reference to Francis Galton’s “Compo­ site Photography”, Wittgenstein effectively starts to develop the central themes of the Philosophical Investigations, — the themes of “Games” and “Language Games”, “Families and Family Resemblances”. “71. One might say that the concept ‘game’ is a concept with blurred edges. But is a blurred concept a concept at all?…” — Is an indistinct photograph a picture of a person at all? — Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn’t the indistinct one often exactly what we need?”5 This quotation opens a new field of further discussion between the “blurred”, the “indistinct”, and the “sharp”.

5

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6.10  The Wittgenstein house, interior view of the hall, photo by August Sarnitz. The photo is intentionally “blurred”, according to Wittgenstein’s statement about the blurred and the indistinct: “But is a blurred concept a concept at all?… — Is an indistinct photograph a picture of a person at all? — Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn’t the indistinct one often exactly what we need?”. Photo August Sarnitz (2010).

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Distinct and indistinct are a pair of concepts which can be applied to the situation of the different glass doors in the house. These glass doors connect both internal spaces with other internal spaces and internal spaces with external spaces. There are glass doors with frosted glass and glass doors with clear glass, double glass doors and single glass doors with metal doors: the entire subjects of “doors and glass”, “distinct and indistinct” and “private and public” could almost be described as an “architectural game”, in which space is defined by optical ambivalence. Seen thus, the architecture of Ludwig Wittgenstein gains a complexity whose starting point is its own fundamental structuralism. The entire spatial order makes possible a partial and differentiated interpretation. In this sense, his architecture also has an analogy and an affinity with the art of music, which he so loved in that musical composition is also a matter of theme and variation. The visual-physical presence of the building has led all observers, architects and architectural historians to question the extent to which the house is “modern” or just looks “modern”. Our knowledge about Ludwig Wittgenstein as an architect naturally lends this question a certain weight: the suggestion of a connection with his philosophical text seems especially important to many interpreters. Chronologically, the design and the realization of the Kund­ manngasse House occurred between writing the text of the “Tractatus logico-philosophicus” (Logical-philosophical Treatise) (1918) and the texts that he produced in Cambridge after 1929 along with the “Philosophical Investigations”. In terms of content, the architecture is neither a text nor an interpretation of philosophy. Wittgenstein’s texts in the Tractatus are a representation of the essence of speech: “The book would thus draw a limit to thinking, or rather — not to thinking, but rather to the expression of thoughts: Because in order to draw a limit to thinking, we would have to be able to think both sides of this limit (we would thus have to be able to think what cannot be thought.” 6 However, Wittgenstein’s texts are neither instructions for architects nor can they be interpreted as analogies of a built environment. His foreword contains an important clue about the character of his text. “On the other hand the truth of the thoughts communicated

6

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, Werkausgabe Band 1, Suhrkamp, 1984, Introduction

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here seems to me unassailable and definitive. I am therefore of the opinion that the problems have essentially been finally solved. And if I am not wrong in this, then the value of this work now consists secondly in that it shows how little has been achieved by the solving of these problems.”7 Architecture can only be understood as an autonomous discipline, but one with the legitimate qualification that architecture itself must be subject to a moral basis. And herein, precisely, is the “modernity” of Wittgensteinian architecture: in the moral imperative of the modern — as a pedagogical process of enlightenment. The question of modernity in the iconographic sense can only be asked in the narrow confines of the notion of a homogenous modern architecture — on the other hand, an open, heterogeneous treatment of the modern makes it possible for this idea to be interpreted as creative pluralism. Hence, if “adapt” stands for all the complex relationships re­ presented by a process of positive integration and adaptation, then “adapted” immediately embodies a linguistic double-meaning: that is to say both “adapted” and also “not adapted” — in the sense of nonconformist, anomalous, mischievous and disobedient. We are clearly interested in the other end of the range of meanings: the autonomous independence from conventions and norms. In other words, the personal freedom of the lady of the house who, refusing to conform with the times, experiences her own emancipation as a woman — and realizes a highly personal Living Space.

7

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, Werkausgabe Band 1, Suhrkamp, 1984, Introduction, last paragraph 123

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7.1b  F. Kiesler, original drawing in archives of Kiesler, Vienna 7.1  F. Kiesler, Drawing of Vienna’s Karlsplatz in the 1920s, as published in the July 1961 issue of Progressive Architecture.

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Endless Interior: Kiesler’s Architecture as Psychoanalysis Beatriz Colomina

In a drawing by Frederick Kiesler of Vienna’s Karlsplatz in the 1920s [Fig. 7.1], the traditional spatial arrangement of the city has been replaced by a dense web of lines punctuated by the isolated façades of several major monuments. There is a vague sense of zones, each of which has a number (as in a tourist map). Yet Kiesler’s city is not to be found in streets and monuments, but in the urban recesses, the “caves of the artists” between and within them. His is a city of interiors located in the heart of public spaces. The complex weave of the drawing links cave to cave in a web, as if the visible city is but the cover for a single vast interior, a system of chambers carved into the landscape like the interconnected spaces of a mine. Kiesler’s drawing of Vienna, which resonates with Guy Debord and Asger Jorn’s psycho-geographic maps of Paris [Fig. 7.2], was produced as an illustration for an interview with T. H. Creighton in the American journal “Progressive Architecture” in 1961.1 In the interview, Kiesler, a Romanian-born Austrian architect who immigrated to the United States in 1926, goes back to his early years in Vienna and describes the life of an artist in the city. He insists that there were not only “extraordinary individuals, but extraordinary groups and, most significantly, meeting places, private apartments, studios, and above all cafés where we would gather.”2 For Kiesler, the cafés and homes were more important than the big art institutions “for the creation of a warm climate for the artists to thrive.” Different groups met at specific places. To map these interiors is to map the intellectual life of the city.

1

T. H. Creighton, “Kiesler’s Pursuit of an Idea,” Progressive Architecture, July 1961, pp. 104–123. 2 Ibidem. p. 106. 125

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7.2  Guy Debord, Guide Psychogéographique de Paris, 1955.

At the Imperial, it was Karl Kraus (most feared satirist and critic), and with him gathered daily, among others, Adolf Loos, Kokoschka, often Schönberg, Alban Berg, and Anton von Webern; and at the Café Museum I remember a long table at the end of the room in front of an all-wall mirror where after lunch and after dinner assembled the composers — Franz Lehar, Oscar Straus, and others. The Museum was “the Café” for all of us artists and architects. And in the Kremser am Ring (editors’ note: another well known café in Vienna at that time) Hoffmann presided, with the professors of the School of Industrial Design. There were intense group meetings at the home of writer Fritz Lampl, with Franz Werfel, Kafka, and Albert Ehrenstein. No wonder, as I recall it now, that such groups, fighting it out with each other and against each other, caused the heat-lightning and the showers that produced what are now so nostalgically called the “creative 20’s.” That, my dear Tom, is what’s missing here — the caves of the artists for the germination of their ideas.3

3

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Ibidem, pp. 106–109.

Beatriz Colomina

For Kiesler, the city is a collection of interiors, a system of caves loosely connected by overlapping physical trajectories. Only a few isolated public monuments break through the network of private pathways. The visible order of the exterior city is overwhelmed by a more bodily form of perception. Indeed, Kiesler’s drawing of Vienna is a blueprint for all his architecture. All he ever did was produce caves, understood as psychological retreats and sensual emporia. These caves are not simply a retreat from the public space of the city. Rather, they are a retreat in public, carving a private space right out of the very substance of public life. In his interview with Progressive Architecture, Kiesler goes on to say that in occupying a public space, Viennese intellectuals and artists “made it their home for discussion.” Public life, discourse, becomes a home. Public space is interiorized, domesticated. This reversal of public and private dominates Kiesler’s projects. Indeed, he claimed to have worked on only one project, “one basic idea,” all his life: the Endless, formulated in Vienna with the Space Stage of 1924 [Fig. 7.3] and culminating in the multiple versions of the never-realized Endless House. It is not by chance that the drawing of Vienna is itself a drawing of an Endless. The city becomes a series of amorphous zones defined by overlapping trajectories. It has exactly the quality of Kiesler’s Endless House in which one space continuously flows into another with almost no openings to an exterior world. Architecture becomes a set of loosely organized squiggles. Kiesler’s freehand drawings convey this quality of his architecture. The tangle of lines traced and retraced obsessively in his sketches of the Endless House [Fig. 7.4, 7.5], similar to the drawings of a small child or the insane, suggest the trajectories of the everyday life of an artist in Vienna, from café to café, from cave to cave. Kiesler sometimes calls his “one basic idea” of the Endless “continuity,” or “Space-in-Architecture,” or “Time-Space-Architecture.” The word space assumes a significant role. His early works are titled “space-theater,” “space-stage,” “space-scenery,” “space-sculpture,” “space house,” and so on.4 In fact, he used the word so often that

4

“For most of his 50 years, Vienna-born Architect Frederick Kiesler has been obsessed with his concepts of space and has designed what he calls space-theaters, space-scenery, spacecities, space-houses … space-sculptures.” Life vol. 32, May 26, 1952. 127

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7.3  F. Kiesler, Spage Stage, Vienna, 1924. [Published in Dieter Bogner’s book Friedrich Kiesler 1890–1965, p. 18.]

7.3b  F. Kiesler, Spage Stage, Vienna, 1924.

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7.4  F. Kiesler, Study for Endless House, c. 1959–65. Pencil on paper. Kiesler Archives

7.5  Model for an Endless house, plaster, 1950, MoMA.

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Viennese journalists used to call him “Doktor Raum” — Doctor Space.5 For Kiesler, the word space marks the breaking out from some kind of confinement. For him, a room, a floor, a wall, the frame of a painting, the proscenium of a theater — in other words, “the finite” — are confining. He says that “the ordinary wall or floor is a concentration camp”6 and that his “galaxies,” which he traces back to his World War I activities in the front, are some of the ways in which he has “tried to break through the borders of the finite, the prison of the frame.”7 The traditional limits provided by the architect — walls, floors, roofs — must be undermined to liberate an unlimited condition. In his 1925 “Manifesto of Tensionism,” Kiesler writes: “We will have NO MORE WALLS, these armoires for body and soul … No walls, no foundations.”8 In his 1933 Space House [Fig. 7.6], a full-scale model house built in Manhattan for the Modernage Furniture Company and one of his rare realized projects, Kiesler finds an expression for his theories. The “eggshell,” he says, “is the perfect example of a structure in which walls, floors and ceiling are self-supporting in an architectural sense.”9 The shell is in continuous tension, a construction principle developed to reduce dead load and to eliminate column support.10 It was intended for die-cast unit construction, which does away with foundations. Likewise, the house dispenses with walls. A noisesuppressing rubber curtain activated by a push-button constitutes the vertical separation between two spaces whenever one is needed. To unleash space, Kielser has to undermine any sense of individual, selfcontained, static spaces. His principle of “Time-Space” in the house is based on the idea that the same space can be used for different activities at different times: recreation, work, sleep and so forth.

5

Elaine de Kooning, “Dickinson and Kiesler,” Art News, April 1952, p. 20. “Design’s Bad Boy,” Architectural Forum, February 1947, p. 138. 7 F. Kiesler, “Art in Orbit,” The Nation, May 11, 1964, p. 487. 8 F. Kiesler “Manifesto of Tensionism,” first published in De Stijl, April, 1925. In English in Kiesler’s book Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and its Display (New York: Brentano’s, 1930), p. 48. 9 “Kiesler Model Uses Egg Form as His Ideal in Perfect Home,” clipping in Kiesler archives, journal and date unknown. 10 “Space House by Frederick Kiesler,” Architectural Record, January 1934, p. 45. The column seen in some photographs belongs to the exhibition floor, not the house. 6

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7.6  F. Kiesler, Space House, façade, New York, 1933. Archives Frederick Kiesler.

The same principle is applied to the design of doors. The pushbutton roll-down doors in the Space House allow spaces to flow into each other without obstacles. As Kiesler says in the context of his 1930 discussion of shop windows: “Doors in general are not good. They may be necessities which we must tolerate, but if we can do without them so much the better. Their purpose is to keep out drafts, dust and noise, which can now be eliminated from inside by scientific devices. Sometimes they act as barriers …”11 Doors are a threat to continuity. Even when open, traditional doors are obstacles that invade space. Roll-down doors can be made to disappear. Visual obstacles are the most confining of all. Kiesler’s concept of the Endless and his mode of drawing, modeling, and theorizing begins with a radical repositioning of the concept of vision. Vision, the dominant sense of modernity, is demoded precisely because of its link to reality. In his article “Pseudo-Functionalism in Modern Architecture” (1949), Kiesler insists:

11

F. Kiesler, Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and its Display (New York: Brentano’s, 1930), p. 80. 131

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Form does not follow function Function follows vision Vision follows reality.12

Links to outside reality act as limitations rather than expansions. Paradoxically, vision is the most limiting because it is the sense capable of traveling the farthest from the body (aside from “conscience,” which Kiesler describes as a sixth sense). In notes kept in his file on the Space House, he writes: Our senses are not given us to enlarge our knowledge of the universe but to limit our capacity of understanding. In that respect we could clarify the degree of limitation of our senses, like: 1. touch — shortest 2. taste — next 3. smell — next 4. ear — next 5. eye — next 6. conscience (?) longest (time-space) [Fig. 7.7]

The senses are understood and measured in spatial terms, and space is understood in sensorial and psychological terms. Because vision is the sense able to reach farther from the body, it loses touch with space. It is unable to comprehend space. Kiesler seems more interested in its limitations, compared to those of the other senses. His long series of experiments with the idea of a Vision Machine are experiments in folding vision back onto the sensuous body, or even the sensuous psyche. The Vision Machine is a set of optical instruments, windows in which the subject does not look outward but inward. The limitations of sight are undone [Fig. 7.8]. Kiesler’s drawings are likewise not visions of an outside reality, but of an inner previsual, preconscious condition. They use visual means to access the space before vision. Vision itself has to be

12

F. Kiesler, “Pseudo-Functionalism in Modern Architecture,” Partisan Review, July 1949, p. 738. 132

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7.7  F. Kiesler, Study of human perception c. 1937–41, ink on paper. Archives F. Kiesler.

7.8  F. Kiesler, study for Vision Machine, c. 1937–41. Ink on Paper. Kiesler Archives. 133

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7.9  Kiesler with Endless house model, 1959.

delayed. In one of the few moments that Kiesler directly addresses what it is to draw, he speaks of drawing with a “blindfold,” literally taking the conventional sense of sight away to expose a different sense of vision: Drafting is grafting vision on paper with lead, ink, or — or. Blindfolded skating rather than designing, significantly keen, directed by experience and will, and channeling one’s feelings and thoughts, deliberately proud of pruning them to clarity and definition. Chance drawing and sculpting or painting is an ability to let go, to be entirely tool rather than a guide of tools. It is to design with one’s whole body and mind, never mindful of either. No, it is not sketching, the bastard version between chance and will. It is capturing vision not seen through kodachromes, paper-book transparencies or sparking it by elbow-rubbing with pro-colleagues and new marauders.13

13

Frederick Kiesler, “Hazard and the Endless House,” Art News, November 7, 1960. Reprinted in Friedrich Kiesler: Endless House 1947–1961 (Hatje Cantz, 2003), p. 63. 134

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Capturing vision is also what photography does. In fact, Kiesler uses photography as a form of drawing. His endless photographs of the multiple models of the Endless House are used to capture visions of a never-realized project. He looks for a particular kind of photograph that has the sense of an X-ray, capturing more than vision’s outer surface.14 If fleeting inner vision has to be captured, the physical sense of sight is always disappointing. In the margins of a drawing [Fig. 7.8: FK15] that is part of his Vision Machine series, he writes: The short-coming of human sight: The inability of penetrating objects of different densities with the eye-ray. It proves that we see only the reflection, namely the surface wich [sic] is opposite our eye, wich [sic] acts as a mirror of what is in front of it. We cannot see behind object or between objects that lie behind each other. We have therefore only a frontal and not a three-dimensional sight. We cannot see space therefore. What appears to be space is an illusion of it, namely a succession of Foregrounds in configuration of objectforms one behind the other until we are unable to see them anymore. It seems that we perceive much more real when we breathe air into our lungs, that we grip much more real when we grip an object; that we taste not an illusion of taste when we eat, but we perceive the food three dimensionally; and even in hearing we have much more real volume than volume in sight. I wonder if any animal has a more penetrating sight? Sight seems to be primarily “feeding of the body by light” and not a specific mechanism for observing what is outside of the body. A piece of radium has better eyes than the human being. An X-ray tube, made by man, sees, “better” than the eye.15

Space cannot be perceived with the eye. What appears to be space is an illusion. Space therefore is psychological and can only be apprehended by the unconscious. Throughout his work, Kiesler in-

14

Kiesler commissioned Percy Rainford to photograph the copper wire mesh model of the Endless house in 1959. Rainford, Kiesler writes, “… in the era of the slick-clicking Leica, he works with a big hatbox of a camera, the type that you see only in posters … or in Luna Parks.” Kiesler arranged the backdrop and the lighting of the wire model before it was covered in cement. “When the proofs came two days later, we were all happy to see that he [Rainford] had succeeded in forming the total image, bringing out its plasticity rather than its fragmentation, as in X-rays.” Inside the Endless House, pp. 195–196. 15 Text in the margins of drawing FK15 and continuing text. 135

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7.10  Cover of F. Kiesler’s book Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and its Display, 1930.

sists that space is primarily psychological. The space of the house is the space of psychological interiority, understood as a unique kind of theater. In his 1930 book Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display [Fig. 7.10], Kiesler introduces the concept of “psycho-function”: “The ‘psycho-functional’ influence is exhibited not only in lines, planes and form, but also in materials and colors. Glass has a different psychological effect from leather, wood from metal. The same applies, of course, to color schemes. Function and efficiency alone cannot create art works. ‘Psychofunction’ is that ‘surplus’ above efficiency which may turn a functional solution into art.”16

16

136

Frederick Kiesler, Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display, p. 87.

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Kiesler continues the argument in his later essay “Pseudo-Functionalism in Modern Architecture,” where he writes: “we must strive from the outset to satisfy the psyche of the dweller.”17 The house, he says, is a human body, “a living organism with the reactivity of a fullblooded creature,” with organs (the stairs are the feet, the ventilation system the nose, and so on), a nervous system, and a digestive system that can “suffer from constipation.”18 More than that, he insists, the house, like man, lives “in emotions and dreams through the medium of his physique.” The psyche cannot be separated from the body. Indeed, the house is the product of “the erotic and creative instinct,” and its experience is erotic. With the concept of “psycho-function,” the material condition of the building and its mechanical operations give way to a form of sensuality understood as psychological pleasure. The architect becomes a kind of therapist unlocking repressions. At one point, Kiesler describes the model of his Endless House as “rolled up like a sex kitten.” The primary role of the architect is to satisfy appetites, whether sexual or gastric: “If art could be accepted like sex and sex like eating, men and women would not feel like perverts, shamelessly obscene in the presence of modern art or architecture.” For Kiesler, modern architecture was filled with repressions that needed to be unblocked in the name of pleasure. To talk about projects like the Endless House that Kiesler did in the United States is to talk about the city of Vienna, the city of Freud. It is to talk about the Vienna carried around the world by émigrés — the portable city. Perhaps hyper-centralized Vienna is actually the most portable city of all. The city that so self-consciously preserved its unique identity inside a ring ends up being reproduced everywhere. Kiesler had no doubt that everything in his work could be traced to his early years in Vienna. “The three years 1922, 1923, 1924, were the most fruitful years of my life. What I am doing today are follow-ups of these ideas, and I’m still looking, as I was 40 years ago, for a chance

17 Frederick Kiesler, “Pseudo-Functionalism in Modern Architecture,” Partisan Review, July 1949, p. 735. Emphasis in the original. 18 “A house must be practical. To be practical means to serve. To be serviceable in every respect. In any direction. If any directions are closed, the house suffers from constipation.” “Pseudo-functionalism in Modern Architecture,” p. 739.

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to build them.”19 Kiesler’s drawing of Vienna’s Karlsplatz, late in his life, is a kind of self-analysis. What is carried around the world is precisely the concept of self-analysis. Vienna is the figure of a complex intersection of architecture and psychoanalysis: architecture as psychoanalysis. But if his lifelong idea of the Endless goes back to this primal scene in the caves of Vienna, exactly where in Vienna did it come from? For that we must turn to the figures Kiesler mentions alongside the drawing. In the 1961 interview, Kiesler writes himself into a compact history of Viennese architecture, a history of generations: “[Otto] Wagner was the first generation. Then came Adolf Loos and Josef Hoffmann. I was the third generation.” It was his teacher and perhaps collaborator20 Loos who rethought the city in terms of the interior. No longer could either Kiesler or Loos draw the city as a whole. Unlike Wagner, whose vision of the modern city was an open-ended street grid organized by the train transportation-system and punctuated by his elaborately decorated train stations, Kiesler and Loos could no longer come up with a comprehensive urban plan; at most some sketches, some fragments of urban spaces understood as interiors and psychological refuge. In that sense, they are both closer to Camillo Sitte, who accused the modern city of creating mental problems such as agoraphobia: “Recently a unique nervous disorder has been diagnosed — ‘agoraphobia’. Numerous people are said to suffer from it, always experiencing a certain anxiety or discomfort whenever they have to walk across a vast empty space … Agoraphobia is a very new and modern ailment. One naturally feels very

19

“Kiesler’s Pursuit of an Idea,” p. 110. Numerous sources cite collaboration between Kiesler, including a typed biography kept in the archives of the Museum of Modern Art and numerous obituaries. Kiesler’s biography in Alfred Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936) lists collaboration with Loos in 1910. A 1941 biography of Kiesler dates this collaboration in 1920. Matthias Boeckl, “Kiesler and the Viennese Architects,” in Dieter Bogner, Friedrich Kiesler. Architekt, Maler, Bildhauer 1890–1965 (Vienna: Löcker, 1988). Cynthia Goodman specifically speaks about Kiesler’s work on the housing projects of Vienna during the 1920s: “The Current of Contemporary History: Frederick Kiesler’s Endless Search,” p. 119. Dieter Bogner writes that this collaboration has not been established. Dieter Bogner, Friedrich Kiesler. Architekt, Maler, Bildhauer 1890–1965, p. 11. Whether Kiesler actually worked with Loos or not, he would have learned from him by simply being in Vienna and participating in the city’s culture of the cafés where, as Kiesler himself points out, intellectuals and artists exchanged ideas.

20

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cozy in small, old plazas, and only in our memory do they loom gigantic, because in our imagination the magnitude of the artistic effect takes the place of actual size.”21

Sitte was a Viennese urban planner who proposed urban spaces as cozy, open-air interiors. Loos has always been thought as an architect of the house, but what his houses speak about is precisely the city: The interior becomes a kind of cityscape. Loos’s interiors are like exteriors. Internal spaces are able to take the position of exterior to other interior spaces; there are even windows between rooms. As with Kiesler, domestic life becomes a form of theater, a psychodrama in which vision plays a subordinate role to the tactile experience of textures, the sensuality of space. It is not by chance that both Kiesler and Loos distrusted the conventional architectural drawing of plan, section and elevation, preferring to work with half-opened models. As Kiesler put it: “The floor plan is not more that the footprint of a house. From a flat impression of this sort it is difficult to conceive the actual form and content of the building. If God had begun the creation of man with a footprint, a monster all heads and toes would probably have grown up from it, not man.”22

If a building can’t be conceived in plan, the reverse is not possible either: A good building does not translate into drawing. Loos wrote: “The sign of a truly felt architectural work is that in plan it lacks effect. If I could erase from the minds of my contemporaries the most powerful architectural phenomenon, the Palazzo Pitti, and let the best draughtsman present it as a competition project, the jury would lock me in a lunatic asylum.”23 Architecture is felt, not seen. It is a form of touch: “The architect first senses the effect he wishes to produce, then he visualizes the spaces he wishes to create.”24 Loos privileges

21

Camillo Sitte, City Planning According to Artistic Principles (Vienna, 1889), transl. by George R. Collins and Christiane Crasemann Collins. In George R. Collins and Christiane Crasemann Collins, Camillo Sitte: The Birth of Modern City Planning (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), p. 183. 22 Kiesler, “Pseudo-Functionalism in Modern Architecture,” Partisan Review, July 1949, p. 738. 23 Adolf Loos, “Architektur” (1910). 24 Adolf Loos, “Das Prinzip der Bekleidung” (1898), Sämtliche Schriften, Adolf Loos, Vol. I, p. 105 and ff. 139

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7.11  Adolf Loos, bedroom for Lina Loos, Adolf Loos apartment, Vienna.

the bodily experience of space over its mental construction. For Loos, architecture is a form of covering, but it is not the walls that are covered. Structure plays a secondary role, and its primary function is to hold the covering in place: “The architect’s general task is to provide a warm and livable space. Carpets are warm and livable. He decides for this reason to spread one carpet on the floor and to hang up four to form the four walls. But you cannot build a house out of carpets. Both the carpet on the floor and the tapestry on the wall require a structural frame to hold them in the correct place. To invent this frame is the architect’s second task.”25

The spaces of Loos’s interiors cover the occupants as clothes cover the body. As Josep Quetglas has written, “All the architecture of Loos can be explained as the envelope of a body.” From Lina Loos’s

25

Ibidem. English trans. “The Principle of Cladding” (1898), in Adolf Loos, Spoken into the Void (Cambridge: MIT, 1982), p. 66. 140

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bedroom (this “bag of fur and cloth”) [Fig. 7.11] to Josephine Baker’s swimming pool (“this transparent bowl of water”), the interiors always contain a “warm bag in which to wrap oneself.” It is an “architecture of pleasure,” an “architecture of the womb.”26 For Kiesler, the womb is the architecture. He repeatedly identified architecture with the womb and claimed to have “discovered architecture” when at the age of three he crept under the “voluminous peasant skirts of his Ukrainian nanny and struck a match.”27 Kiesler even described architecture itself as the “skin of the body.” The house is the interior of the body itself. Architecture is the sensuous limit of the body. Kiesler goes one step further than Loos. The sensuality of his house extends from the tactile into the psyche. A series of sketches illustrate this point. In one, the interaction of the nervous system with a chair becomes part of a multi-sensual engagement with the world [Fig. 7.7: FK2]. In another, the chair becomes part of an interior and the human is described as “a terrestrial spectra,” the environment as a “stellar spectra (with the objects taking the place of stars)”. Space for Kiesler is always outer space. Everything in his architecture floats. The floors go up and down, the structure hangs, and even the furniture, the cabinets, the tables and the lighting fixtures are suspended. Time-Space is a surrealist project. The radicalism of Kiesler’s architecture, detached from any sense of ground or stasis, separated Kiesler from the architects of the modern movement. While he believed that his work on Time-Space had influenced architects such as Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, he also notes that his early Space projects were ambivalently received. About the “City in Space,” for example, that was exhibited in the Austrian pavilion at the Grand Palais in the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, he says that its attempt to “illustrate” the “Time-Space-Architecture” principles was “ridiculed as to their purpose and theoretical coherence.” Le Corbusier is supposed to have asked Kiesler if he intended “to hang the houses from Zeppelins,” and Mies dismissed his “Time-Space-Concept.” Only Theo van Doesburg and Loos supported

26

Josep Quetglas, “Lo Placentero,” Carrer de la Ciutat, no. 9–10, special issue on Loos (January 1980): 2 27 Press release of an exhibition of Frederick Kiesler’s “Galaxies” in the Howard Wise Gallery in New York, April 12–May 10, 1969. 141

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his theories. Van Doesburg published the “Manifesto of Tensionism,” first printed as a leaflet to be distributed in the exhibition, in De Stijl, and Loos came to his defense when “City in Space” was under attack.28 Kiesler learned a lot from Loos.29 The idea of the house as a theatrical space in which the visitor is some kind of actor may be Kiesler’s biggest debt to him. But not just in the sense, often referred to, of Loos’s so-called spacial system of the Raumplan, in which spaces of different heights open into each other. Kiesler takes Loos one step further. Continuity for him is linked to new forms of communication. The push-button is everywhere in his architecture. Already in 1923, in his stage design for Karel Capek’s R.U.R. at the Theater am Kurfürstendamm in Berlin, Kiesler had introduced a system of other media (film, proto-TV) activated by push-button remote control: “This R.U.R play was my occasion to use for the first time in a theater a motion picture instead of a painted backdrop, and also a television in the sense that I had a big, square panel window in the middle of the stage drop which could be opened by remote control. When the director of the human factory in the play pushed a button at his desk, the panel opened and the audience saw two human beings reflected from a mirror arrangement backstage. The actors appeared in this window as a foot-and-a-half tall, casually moving and talking, heard through a hidden loud-speaker. It was quite an illusion, because a minute later you saw the same actors appear on stage in full size.”30

This would be a constant in Kiesler’s architecture, pushing a new medium into an old one — film into the theater, television into the shop window, the museum, the house — in order to update it, to literally expand its horizon. He often does so even before the new medium is established. In Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display, he writes about “broadcast decoration” in our future homes: “Radio music is phonetic decoration … Television will bring motion picture and talkies, current events and scenes on other continents,

28 “Loos, brilliant pacemaker, came to my rescue in defending Josef Hoffmann, his life long adversary who, after commissioning me to demonstrate a City-in-Space as part of the official Austrian exhibition, was attacked by petit-bourgeois Austrian parliament members for having spent tax money on suspended houses.” “The Space House,” unpublished manuscript, Archives Frederick Kiesler. 29 See note 17. 30 “Kiesler’s Pursuit of an Idea,” cit. p. 109.

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right into your home, and turn it at will into a theater, a stadium; into Paris or Peking.”31 He even speaks of a future “Telemuseum”: “Just as operas are now transmitted over the air, so picture galleries will be. From the Louvre to you, from the Prado to you, from everywhere to you. You will enjoy the prerogative of selecting pictures that are compatible with your mood or that meet the demands of any special occasion.”32 In a 1926 project for a model apartment of the future for an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, Kiesler introduced “sensitized panels which will act as receiving-surfaces for broadcast pictures.”33 A 1932 article in The New York Times about the mass-produced house of the future (“Everyman’s House,” for those whose income was less than $1,400 a year) reports on Kiesler’s idea of a small dwelling in which “rooms will be fewer and larger, so that space may be more fully utilized and so that adequate walls may be provided for the inevitable television scenes and motion pictures of the future.”34 Technologies are seen as breaking the limits of a space. As Kiesler points out, when film is introduced to the R.U.R. set, the spectator is given the illusion of walking into another space – in that case, the space of the factory. The limits of the space of the theater are opened up.35 In the houses, technologies of communication take over from traditional walls, doors, and windows, to establish a continuous flow from space to space in the city and between cities. For Kiesler, the limits are always internal, never external. Even his “City in Space” of 1925 floats in some kind of dark cave. Rejecting the idea of discrete rectangular boxes limited by a structural grid, Kiesler saw his work in direct opposition to that of Le Corbusier, Mies, and J.J.P.Oud. That is, in opposition to the main architects represented in the “The International Style” exhibition organized by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock for the Museum of Modern Art in 1932. The exhibition included Kiesler in only a marginal role, with a single photograph of his Film Guild Cinema in the

31

Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display, p. 120. Ibidem, p. 121. 33 Ibidem, p. 121. 34 “Everyman’s House,” The New York Times, May 29, 1932. 35 “Kiesler’s Pursuit of an Idea.” See also, R. L. Held, Endless Innovations: Frederick Kiesler’s Theory and Scenic Design (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Umi Research Press, 1977), pp. 11–17. 32

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section “The Extent of Modern Architecture.”36 In the Progressive Architecture interview, Kiesler describes the discomfort of the curators with his work: “Philip Johnson came with Henry-Russell Hitchcock to see plans of my work. Among our friends of the De Stijl group it was known that I have deviated from the ‘quadrat,’ but van Doesburg stood by enthusiastically, as did Mondrian. The others were doubtful; Mies was neutral and reserved … Here were the plans for a building that looked like an egg, not like the customary box. It wasn’t square, it wasn’t in steel, it wasn’t in glass, it wasn’t in aluminum, it was absolutely outside the mode of the International Style.”37

Two years after the exhibition, Kiesler responds to it in an article on the Space House for Hound & Horn, the journal in which Hitchcock’s first essays appeared. Indeed, the Space House itself can be understood as the architect’s response to the exhibition. Kiesler insists that what makes his design different is that his house is but a single result of an ongoing theoretical enquiry, rather than a one-off attempt to build an aesthetic object. The fact that it could be realized was for Kiesler the least significant aspect of it: “Architecture was always threefold: social, tectonic, structural. But Corbusier, Mies, Oud and others have started with the concept of a House … They started with the Idea of a House: not with a Unified architectural dogma. Not from Architecture as a Science, Not from Architecture as Biotechnique … The work of these men deals with Houses: aesthetic or semi-functional semi-solutions, from which an architectural principle might be deducted, if the spectator is creatively inclined …

36

The section, which was organized by country and represented each project by a single photograph, included Kiesler under “U.S.A.” 37 “Kiesler’s Pursuit of an Idea,” cit., p. 113–114. Twenty years later, Johnson will support Kiesler’s work. In 1950 he acquired, for the Museum of Modern Art, the model of the Endless House that had been exhibited in the Kootz Gallery. He also facilitated Kiesler’s subsequent exhibitions of the Endless House in the Museum of Modern Art: “Two Houses, New Ways of Building,” 1952, with Buckminster Fuller; and “Visionary Architecture” 1960, with Bruno Taut, Frank Lloyd Wright, Buckminster Fuller and Le Corbusier. 144

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Opposing such ‘designs’ I always advocated the principle of a new unified theory first — from which new Houses, Factories or whatever structure it might be — result; not vice versa. That was and still is the difference. I was never eager to build; nothing at the moment can satisfy.”38

It is as if Kiesler’s disinterest in building for building’s sake gives his building more integrity. Others may have seen it that way too. Philip Johnson would later say: “There are about five architects in America who are interested in architecture and not in money, and Kiesler is one of them.”39 Or, in Johnson’s famous remark about Kiesler: “He is the greatest non-building architect of our time.”40 The fate of the Endless House is in this respect also sympto­ matic. Despite his disparaging remarks about building, Kiesler seemed desperate to build it; but nothing seemed to work out. MoMA was expanding, making the project of building it in the courtyard impossible; also, a potential client from Montreal backed off. When a developer from Florida showed up and was serious about building it near Cape Canaveral, Florida, it turned out that she wanted the house just for its publicity value. She had 3,000 acres of swamp to sell as lots, and thought the Endless House would attract customers. Kiesler, who needed the money, declined the commission: “The decision must be either to quit or accept the challenge to be just an architect-developer of terrains, a state of mind I never knew or have been in, but which most, if not all, of my colleagues are scafandered in … It had dawned on me, through my agonizing dilemma — to build or not to build —  that: thou shalt not build.”41

Was it Kiesler himself who boycotted the realization of his own projects? Philip Johnson guessed that he really didn’t want to see the house built: “That, in a way, would be an ending. Kiesler could not bear endings.”42 The Endless House could only remain endless by

38 Frederick Kiesler, “Notes on Architecture: The Space House,” Hound & Horn, JanuaryMarch 1934, p. 292. 39 “Design’s Bad Boy,” Architectural Forum, February 1947, p. 140. 40 Philip Johnson, “Three Architects,” Art in America n. 1, 1960, p. 70. 41 Inside the Endless House, p. 444. 42 Helen Borsik, “Fame is Endless,” review of Inside the Endless House, newspaper and date unknown, Cleveland, Ohio. Clipping in Archives Frederick Kiesler.

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never being finished. Or, as Kiesler would write: “Strange; it seems I shun an ultimate solution as a cat postpones the killing of a mouse. There is lust in postponement.”43 The resistance to building heightened the very desire he was attempting to design. Even the concept of the Endless that underpins the Space House is sexualized. Kiesler said of his Endless House that “there is no beginning and no end to it, like the human body … The ‘Endless’ is rather sensuous, more like the female body in contrast to sharp-angled male architecture.”44 Architecture for him is always erotic. For Kiesler, architecture is even meant to produce a kind of high. In the course of an interview Kiesler was asked, “What do you think would happen if architects generally became interested in what you have done and in your approach? Isn’t it a terribly dangerous, undisciplined sort of architecture for most people?” To which he responds, “I can assure you, it will be like giving them marijuana, architecturally speaking.”45 An even more striking aspect of this blurring between the body and the mind is Kiesler’s understanding of architecture as an eating disorder. In the course of the same interview, he explains modern architecture as “architecture on a diet.” In an extraordinary confusion of his own body with architecture, he describes the aftermath of World War I: “We had nothing to eat. I recall very well my own situation: after the war I lived on the dole for many years; I got about seven Kronen a week, which would be the equivalent of seven dollars per week now. But one could live on that monastically; I had rice, chiefly, and mushrooms … I remember only too well the mushrooms which I dried and reheated again just as I did with tea-leaves. As in our living habits, we started to clean off everything that was surplus in design — ornamentation, certain luxurious materials, moldings, this and that. Everything became, over the years, simpler, cleaner, whiter, and … you know, what we call functionalism was on its natural way. So functionalism was really a reaction to the overstuffing of the Victorian age. Architecture had to be put on a diet. And the rectangular style did it. Now the period of

43

Inside the Endless House. Ibid., p. 566. 45 “Kiesler’s Pursuit of an Idea,” p. 115. 44

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Beatriz Colomina

diet is over and we can eat normally again. However that does not mean that we should overeat, stuff ourselves with whipped cream, ice cream — or with architecture either.”46

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum was an example of “overstuffing”: “His building is sensuous, the most architectural in New York, but structurally overweight.”47 For Kiesler, a balanced diet meant his Endless House: the elimination of any residue from what he calls “the rectangular style,” the skin-and-bones architecture of the modern period. Everything in the Endless House is skin. The skin is the structure, as in an egg. He traces this idea back to his Space Theatre of 1923, which he says was his “first Endless.” When he came to the U.S. in 1926, he says, he carried the Endless with him, but no one understood. Kiesler was literally starving. Apparently, he survived thanks to a coffee-shop owner on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan who fed him and his wife every day. And when he was thrown out of his apartment because he could not pay the rent, he was let in by the doorman while the new tenants were out so he could use the drafting table, which had been confiscated by the landlord, to work on designing the shop windows for Saks Fifth Avenue. Inside the Endless House describes his inability to afford even basic expenses in terms of the same emaciated body that he identifies with modern architecture: “All in all, I’m down at the bottom and have practically nothing left: these expenses are the bone structure, and there is no hope for either skin or flesh with which to cover the skeleton.”48 Just as Le Corbusier’s ideas about health and architecture started with obsessions with his own body, Kiesler’s physical condition organized his theories and designs. He could not separate himself from his architecture, could not be separated from his shell. Symptomatically, he always photographed his own body inside the body of the building. With his fragile frame inside the egg, it was as if the house had become his surrogate body. Kiesler thought of the body as a kind of house and of the house as a body. It is not by chance that his memoirs are entitled Inside the Endless House. Psyche and architecture are inseparable. The architect

46

“Kiesler’s Pursuit of an Idea,” p. 106 “Kiesler’s Pursuit of an Idea,” p. 112 48 Inside the Endless House. 47

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cannot let go of his projects. To build would be to let go. To draw and make models is to cling ever more tightly. The project of the Endless is one of endless redrawing. Kiesler even refuses the idea of a finished drawing. The drawings are forever unfinished, and what they try to capture is the experience of the forever unfinished, the unlimited, uncontrollable movements of the psyche, the psyche that like the map of Vienna can only ever be experienced as a continuous flow from cave to cave. The drawings try to capture the world before vision, before consciousness — the ultimate cave that is the unconscious. Kiesler did almost as many drawings of the psychological apparatus as he did of architectural projects, and in the end they are the same. The great enemy of confinement remains confined within his unrealized, endless projects, the “one basic idea” he worked on all his life. Kiesler was ultimately confined in the very idea of escaping confinement, a “pressure chamber” that he describes to a psychoanalyst: “I visit you haphazardly, now is a chance to dig into this cave. I wonder if today we can’t discuss this automatic reluctance of mine to remain alone with my ideas, secluded and shut off from any possibility of making them concrete, that is, three dimensional, to walk in and out of. At such moments my unrealized ideas crowd me in, almost choke me. I feel helpless. It has by now become so intense that I am fearful if there is even a stretch of an hour between two appointments in which I’m left alone. I’ve become a nuisance to myself. Can’t we excavate the roots of this conflict?”49

49

148

Ibid., pp. 41–42.

Biographies

Beatriz Colomina is Professor of Architecture and Founding Director of the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University. Her books include “Manif­esto Architecture: The Ghost of Mies” (Sternberg Press, 2014), “Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196x– 197x” (2010), “Domesticity at War” (2007), “Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media” (1994) and “Sexuality and Space” (1992). She is the curator, along with a team of Princeton Ph. D. students, of the exhibitions “Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196x–197x”, which opened in New York in 2006 and has travelled to eleven cities around the world; “Playboy Architecture, 1953–79”, which opened in Maastricht in 2012 and was in Frankfurt in 2014; and “Radical Pedagogies: Architectural Education in a Time of Disciplinary Instability” (Lisbon Triennale, 2013 and Venice Biennale 2014). Recently she was appointed co-director, with Mark Wigley, of the 2016 Istanbul Design Biennial. Her forthcoming book “X-Ray Architecture” will be published by Lars Müller in 2016.

Rubén Gallo is an award-winning writer and scholar. He is the author of “Freud’s Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis” (2010), an essay on Freud’s fantasies about Mexico. He has also published “Mexican Modernity: the Avant-Garde and the Technological Revolution” (2005), an essay about the Mexican avant-garde’s fascination with machines, and two books about Mexico City’s visual culture: “New Tendencies in Mexican Art” (2004) and “The Mexico City Reader” (2004). His new book on “Proust’s Latin Americans” appeared in 2014. He is a member of the board of the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna, and in 2009 he was the Freud-Fulbright Visiting Scholar in Psychoanalysis at the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna. He teaches at Princeton University and lives in New York City.

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Cornelia Klinger Between 1983 and 2014 she was a permanent scientific member (Permanent Fellow) at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. Since 2003 she has been an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Eberhard-Karls-University in Tübingen. Latest book publications: “Die Erfindung des Subjekts. (forthcoming).” (ed.) “Blindheit und Hellsichtigkeit. Künstlerkritik an Politik und Gesellschaft der Gegenwart.” Wiener Reihe Themen der Philosophie, 2013. (ed.), “Perspektiven des Todes in der modernen Gesellschaft”, Wiener Reihe Themen der Philosophie, 2009. (ed with Gudrun-Axeli Knapp.) “Über-Kreuzungen. Fremd­ heit, Ungleichheit, Differenz.” 2008.

Spyros Papapetros is associate professor of history and theory at the School of Architecture, a member of the executive committees of the Program in European Cultural Studies and the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University. He studies the intersections between art, architecture, historiography, psychoanalysis, and psychological aesthetics. He is the author of “On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life” (University of Chicago Press, 2012), the editor of “Space as Membrane” by Siegfried Ebeling (Architectural Association Publications, 2010) and the co-editor with Julian Rose of “Retracing the Expanded Field: Encounters between Art and Architecture” (The MIT Press, 2014). He is currently completing a second personal book project titled “World Ornament: Adornment on a Global Scale”.

August Sarnitz is an architect and professor at the Institute of Architecture and Art at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. After his architectural studies at the University of Technology Vienna, the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, USA, August Sarnitz habilitated as professor in the field of architecture and architectural history. The focus of his publication is on urbanism and architectural history. Publications among others: “Ernst Plischke”, 2003 Prestel Verlag, and “Die Architektur Wittgensteins”, 2011 Böhlau Verlag, “R. M. Schindler”, Brandstätter Verlag and Rizzoli Publisher, “Ernst Lichtblau”, Böhlau Verlag, and “Lois Welzenbacher”, Residenz Verlag.

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Biographies

Inge Scholz-Strasser is an author, who lives in Vienna. She was Secretary General of the Sigmund Freud Society from 1987 to 2003, and served as director of the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna from 1996 to 2013. From 2003 until 2013 she was chairman of the Sigmund Freud Foundation. In 1989 she founded with Joseph Kosuth and Peter Pakesch the conceptual art collection “Contemporary Art Collection, Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna”, which was shown in New York, Moscow and Istanbul. She is an advisor on exhibitions and cultural projects, and she has contributed to the biography of Sigmund Freud and published on the social history of Vienna. Furthermore, she has published and edited several books and exhibition catalogues.

Helmut Strutzmann Author and Expert for Communications, Studies: German Studies, Theatre, and Semiotics. Member of the Austrian Pen-Club. Publications among others: Sacher Masoch, Max Winter, Culture and Coffee. Owner of the “MultiArt” Agency.

Jeanne Wolff-Bernstein Ph. D. works as a psychoanalyst in Vienna. She was president and training analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC) in San Francisco. She teaches at the Sigmund Freud University in Vienna, at PINC and at the New York University Postdoctoral Program of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in New York. She is a member of the Wiener Arbeitskreis. Jeanne Wolff Bernstein is the chairwoman of the Sigmund Freud Foundation’s advisory board in Vienna, and was the 2008 Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna. Her recent publications include “Beyond the Bedrock in Good Enough Endings” (2010), Routledge Press, “The Space of Transition between Lacan and Winnicott” (2011), Routledge Press, and she wrote the chapter on Jacques Lacan in “The Textbook of Psychoanalysis” (2012).

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Index Aesop, 32

Clermont-Tonnerre, Elisabeth de, 54

Anderson, Stanford, 112

Concentration Camps, 14

Alaska (United States), 103

Conceptual Art, 16

Antiquity, 29

Creighton, T. H., 125

Akko (Israel), 103 Augenfeld, Felix, 106

Dal Co, Francesco, 7

Austria-Hungary, 108

Daguerre, Louis Jacques Mandé, 102 Danubian Monarchy, 11

B_ , 61, 62

Daudet, Léon, 45, 47, 48

Babylon, 103

Dawson, David, 30

Bacon, Francis, 33

Debord, Guy, 125

Bagdad (Iraque) 103

Delacroix, Eugène, 47

Baker, Josephine, 141

De Stijl, 142, 144

Balzac Museum Paris, 13

Deubel, Léon, 93, 104

Baudelaire, Charles, 93, 94

Doasan, Baron Jacques, 47

Bauer, Ida, 77, 79

Dora (Ida Bauer), 59–68, 70–72,

“Bauhaus Modernism”, 118

74–80, 82–84, 86, 87

Bekleidung, 77

Doolittle, Hilda, H. D., 25

Benjamin, Walter, 7, 11, 23, 27,

Dresden (Germany), 80, 82, 83

89–95, 97, 99, 100, 102-105, 115 Berg, Alban, 126

Eckermann, Johann Peter, 48, 49

“Berggasse 19”, 7, 12, 13, 18, 25, 27,

École des Beaux-Arts, 47

79, 83, 84, 86

Egypt, 29

“Berggasse 32”, 79

Ehrenstein, Albert, 126

Berlin (Germany), 109, 112, 142

Endless House, 9, 127, 134, 135, 137,

Bernays, Minna, 84

145–147

Bonaparte, Marie, 25

Engelmann, Paul, 9, 108, 111, 117, 118

Bonaparte, Princess Mathilde, 50

Engelman, Edmund, 12

Breslau, Louise, 54

England (United Kingdom), 25

Brooklyn Museum (New York), 143

Enlightment, 97, 123 Evans, Robin, 63, 64

Café Museum, 126 Cambride (United Kingdom), 117, 122

February Revolution 1848 (France), 90

Cape Canaveral (Florida), 145

Fechner, G. H., 40

Capek, Karel, 142

Ferenczi, Sandor, 70

Charlus, 56, 57

Ficker, Ludwig von, 107 155

Private Utopia

Film Guild Cinema (New York), 143

Hoffmann, Josef, 9, 106, 109, 112,

First World War, 27

117, 138

Fliess, Wilhelm, 68

Holocaust Museum Washington DC.,

Florida (United States), 145

21

France, 90

Holy Ghost, 108

Frank, Josef, 118

Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 45

Frau K., 61–63, 80, 83, 87

Hysteria, 60, 78

Freud, Anna, 13, 16 Freud, Bella, 35

Ibsen, Henrik, 91

Freud, Ernst, 31

International Style, 143, 144

Freud, Esther, 37

Itturi, Gabriel, 45

Freud, Lucian, 7, 8, 29–32, 34–40, 101 Freud, Lucie, 31

Jensen, Wilhelm, 24

Freud Museum London, 22

Jewish Museum Vienna, 21

Freud, Sigmund, 8, 11, 14, 17, 18,

Johnson, Philip, 143–145

21–27, 29, 32–40, 48, 59–62, 64–68,

Jorn, Asger, 125

70–72, 74–80, 82–84, 86, 87, 94, 101,

Judaism, 26

137

Jugendstil, 90–93 July Revolution 1830 (France), 90

Gainsborough, Thomas, 33 Galton, Francis, 120

Kafka, Franz, 126

Gayford, Martin, 30, 31, 33, 35–37

Karlsplatz Vienna (Austria), 124, 125,

Gesamtkunstwerk, 109, 117

138

Giacometti, Alberto, 33

Kiesler, Frederick, 8, 9, 124, 125, 127,

Gmunden (Austria), 109

130–139, 141–148

Goethe House Weimar, 13

Kokoschka, Oskar, 108, 126

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 48, 49

Kornmehl, Siegmund, 17

Goncourt, Edmond de, 43

Kosuth, Joseph, 15, 17

Graf, Rosa, 84

Kraus, Karl, 108, 126

Grand Palais (Paris), 141

Kundmanngasse House (Wittgenstein

Greffulhe, Countess Élisabeth de, 50

House), 113, 115, 122

Groys, Boris, 115 Guggenheim Museum (New York), 147

L_, 60–62, 78, 83, 84 La Gandara, Antonio de, 54

156

Hahn, Reynaldo, 43, 50

La Madeleine, 47

Heidegger, Martin, 100

Lampel, Fritz, 126

Herr K., 60–62, 68, 72, 78, 79, 83, 84

Le Carneval de Venise, 47

Hill, Stuart, 98

Le Corbusier, 64, 141, 143, 144, 147

Hitchcock, Henry-Russel, 143, 144

Lehar, Franz, 126

Hoffmann, E. T. A., 94

Lemaire, Madeleine, 43, 48

Index

Lieben, Anna von, 11

Peche, Dagobert, 9

London, (United Kingdom), 13

Peking (China), 143

Loos, Adolf, 76, 77, 107–109, 112,

Perco, Rudolf, 109

113, 115–118, 126, 138–142

Philosophical Investigations, 120

Loos, Lina, 140

Plan libre, 64

Lorrain, Jean, 51

Plan paralysé, 64

Louis XIV, 51

Poe, Edgar Allen, 94

Louis Philippe, 89

Pompadour, Madame de, 51, 54

Louvre (Paris), 143

Pompeij (Italy), 23, 24

Luhmann, Niklas, 96–99

Pope Julius II, 26 Prado (Madrid), 143

Mahony, Patrick, 71

Proust, Marcel, 8, 43, 45, 48–51,

Marinelli, Lydia, 23

54–57

Merano (Italy), 58, 61, 79 Metzger, Rainer, 27

Quai d’Orsay, 43

Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 141, 143,

Queen Elisabeth II, 30

144

Quetglas, Josep, 140

Moller House, 116 MoMA (Museum of Modern Art,

Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, 80, 82,

New York), 143, 145

83, 87

Montespan, Mademe de, 51

Raumplan, 142

Montesquiou, Count Robert de, 8, 43,

Reichenberg (Austria), 61

45–51, 54, 56, 57

Rembrand van Rijn, 33

“Montesquiou’s Eckermann”, 48, 49

Ringstrasse, 11, 12, 19

Montreal (Canada), 145

Rome (Italy), 23, 24, 26

Moses (Statue of Michelangelo), 25, 26 Mozart House Vienna, 13

Said, Edward, 18 Salzkammergut (Austria), 109, 110

Nähr, Moritz, 116

Saks Fifth Avenue (New York), 147

Neuilly (France), 43, 51

San Pietro in Vincoli, 26

Nedo, Michael, 107

Scherner, Karl Albert, 65, 66, 76

Noailles, Anna de, 51

Schiller, Friedrich von, 34

Nora, Pierre, 8, 12

Schönberg, Arnold, 126 Schönborn-Battyány (Palais), 118

Orientalism, 3, 18

Secession, 116

Oud, J. J. P., 143, 144

Second World War, 14

Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), 56

Sem (pseudonym of Georges Goursat), 54

Pallas Athene, 25

Semper, Gottfried, 71, 75, 77, 80

Paris (France), 43, 89, 125, 141, 143

Serbia, 108 157

Private Utopia

Sexuality, 64, 94

Vischer, Friedrich Theodor, 80

Sexualgeographie (symbolic geo­

Volket, Johannes, 80

graphy of sex), 83 Sigmund Freud Museum, 7, 11, 18,

Wagner, Otto, 110, 138

21, 27

Webern, Anton von, 126

Sitte, Camillo, 138, 139

Wednesday Psychological Society, 19

Sigmund Feud Museum Príbor, 22

Werfel, Franz, 126

Space House, 130–132, 144

Whistler, James, 43, 45

Stonborough, Jerome, 113

Wiener Werkstätte, 109, 112

Stonborough, John Jerome, 113

Winnicott, Donald, 37

Stonborough, Thomas, 113

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 8, 107–113,

Stonborough-Wittgenstein House, 9,

115–118, 120, 122

113, 117, 118

World Exposition 1873, 18

Stonborough-Wittgenstein, Margaret,

Wright, Frank Lloyd, 147

9, 107, 109, 110, 112, 113, 115, 116, 120

Yad Vashem Israel, 21

Straus, Oscar, 126

Yturri, Gabriel de, 8, 43, 45–51, 54–57

Swann, 56, 57 Zastrow, Jochen von, 113 Tenement Museum New York, 13

Zastrow, Wedigo von, 113

Totem and Taboo, 77

Zellenkas, 79

Transvaal (South Africa), 103 Traunsee (Austria), 109 Tromsö (Norway), 103 Umkleidung, 77 Uncanny, The, 9 United States, 125, 137 Utopia, 7, 100 Van de Velde, Henri, 91 Van Doesburg, Theo, 141, 142, 144 Van Gogh, Vincent, 33 Versailles (France), 43, 51, 54 Vienna (Austria), 18, 24, 61, 62, 65, 76, 79, 82, 83, 107–109, 111, 113, 115, 117, 124, 125, 127, 137, 138, 148 Villa Toskana, 109 Vinci, Leonardo da, 25 158

Credit of Illustrations The publisher and editors kindly wish to inform you that in some cases, despite efforts to do so, the obtaining of copyright permissions and usage of excerpts of text is not always successful. Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, University Library, Heinrich Kulka, Adolf Loos, 1930, Illustrations: 6.2, 7.11 Archive Beatriz Colomina, Guy Debord, Guide Psychogéographique de Paris, 1955, Illustration: 7.2 Freud Museum London, Illustration: 3.1 Archive Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna, Gerald Zugmann, Illustrations: 1.1, 1.4, 1.6 Archive Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna, Margherita Spillutini, Illustration: 1.5 Archive Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna, Illustrations: 4.8–4.10 Archive Spyros Papapetros, Illustrations: 4.1–4.7 Archive August Sarnitz, Illustrations: 6.1, 6.4 (August Sarnitz with students of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna) Archive Stonborough Family, Vienna, Illustrations: 6.8, 6.9 Archive City of Vienna, MA 19, Illustration: 6.3 Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna, Illustrations: 7.1, 7.4–7.10 Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna/MoMA, NYC, Illustration: 7.10 Bibliothèque Nationale de France, BNF, Illustrations: 3.1–3.5, 3.7–3.10 Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2000, p. 63, Illustration: 3.6 Paris: La Maison du Louvre, 1907, p. 290, Illustration: 3.11 Wittgenstein Archive, Cambridge, Illustrations: 6.8, 6.9 Dieter Bogner, Friedrich Kiesler 1890–1965, p. 18, Illustration: 7.3 Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and its Display, 1930, Illustration: 7.8 Progressive Architecture, July 1961, Illustration: 7.1 Copyright Photo David Dawson, Bridgeman Artist Copyright, Illustrations: 2.2, 2.3 Copyright Photo Thomas Freiler, Illustrations: 6.5–6.7, and Cover Copyright August Sarnitz (VBK), Illustrations: 1.2, 1.3, 1.7, 1.7b, 1.8, 1.9, 6.10 Copyright Photo Gerald Zugmann, Illustrations: 1.1, 1.4, 1.6 Copyright Photo Margherita Spiluttini, Illustration: 1.5

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