The Myth of Abstraction: The Hidden Origins of Abstract Art in German Literature 9781640141049, 9781800102071, 9781800102088, 2020951583

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The Myth of Abstraction

Meyertholen, Andrea. The Myth of Abstraction : The Hidden Origins of Abstract Art in German Literature, Boydell & Brewer,

Copyright © 2021. Boydell & Brewer, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture

Meyertholen, Andrea. The Myth of Abstraction : The Hidden Origins of Abstract Art in German Literature, Boydell & Brewer,

The Myth of Abstraction: The Hidden Origins of Abstract Art in German Literature

Copyright © 2021. Boydell & Brewer, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Andrea Meyertholen

Meyertholen, Andrea. The Myth of Abstraction : The Hidden Origins of Abstract Art in German Literature, Boydell & Brewer,

Copyright © 2021 Andrea Meyertholen All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2021 by Camden House Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA and of Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com

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Cover Image: Wassily Kandinsky, Kleine Welten V (Small Worlds V), 1922. © 2020 The Metropolitan Museum of Art / © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Reproduced with permission from Art Resource, New York. ISBN-13: 9781640141049 (hardcover) ISBN-13: 9781800102071 (ePDF) ISBN-13: 9781800102088 (ePUB) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Control Number: 2020951583 The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Meyertholen, Andrea. The Myth of Abstraction : The Hidden Origins of Abstract Art in German Literature, Boydell & Brewer,

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To my parents, who don’t actually have to put up with me but who do.

Meyertholen, Andrea. The Myth of Abstraction : The Hidden Origins of Abstract Art in German Literature, Boydell & Brewer,

Art is what you can get away with.

—Andy Warhol

It would be a lowly art that allowed itself to be understood all at once. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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Stop worrying if your vision is new. Let others make that decision—they usually do. —Stephen Sondheim

Meyertholen, Andrea. The Myth of Abstraction : The Hidden Origins of Abstract Art in German Literature, Boydell & Brewer,

Contents List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments xi Introduction: The Many Origins of Abstract Art

1

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1: Apocalypse Now: Heinrich Von Kleist’s Sublime Deframing of Caspar David Friedrich’s Der Mönch Am Meer (1810) 22 2: The Kleistian Sublime Is Now: Kazimir Malevich, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman

55

3: The Clouding of Perception: Seeing The (Un)Real Potential for Abstraction in the Poetry and Science of Goethe’s Clouds (1821)

99

4: In the Service of Clouds or Optical Illusion?: Romanticism, Pointillism, and Impressionism

138

5: Driven to Distraction and from Abstraction: The Birth and Death of Abstract Art in Gottfried Keller’s Der Grüne Heinrich (1854/55, 1879/80)

174

6: Inside the Mind and Outside the Margins: The Unruly Lines of Paul Klee, André Masson, and Cy Twombly

206

Epilogue: Laocoön and His Sisters: The Future of Literature and Art

243

Bibliography 259 Index 285

Meyertholen, Andrea. The Myth of Abstraction : The Hidden Origins of Abstract Art in German Literature, Boydell & Brewer,

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Illustrations Figures 0.1

0.2

0.3

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4

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2.1 2.2

2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 4.1

Installation view of the exhibition, “Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925,” December 23, 2012–April 15, 2013, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo by Jonathan Muzikar 1 The Artist Network Diagram for the exhibition, “Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925,” December 23, 2012–April 15, 2013. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 4 Dust jacket, with chart and annotations by Alfred H. Barr Jr., of the exhibition catalogue for “Cubism and Abstract Art,” March 2–April 19, 1936, Museum of Modern Art, New York 10 Caspar David Friedrich, Der Mönch am Meer (The Monk by the Sea), c. 1808–10 23 Claude Lorrain, Seaport, Effects of Fog (Embarkation of Ulysses), c. 1646 27 Caspar David Friedrich, Meeresstrand im Nebel (Sea Beach in the Fog), c. 1807 29 Caspar David Friedrich, Kreidefelsen auf Rügen (Chalk Cliffs on Rügen), c. 1818 33 Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1913 (first version) 57 0.10—The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings, 1915, Petrograd. View of the room with Malevich’s Black Square in the upper “icon corner” 58 Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: White on White, 1918 65 Mark Rothko, No. 10, 1950 72 Detail of margins on Mark Rothko, No. 10, 1950 74 Mark Rothko, Yellow and Blue (Yellow, Blue on Orange), 1955 77 Barnett Newman. Vir Heroicus Sublimis / 1–1951, 1950–51 82 Detail comparisons of Barnett Newman’s vertical bands (“zips”) in Vir Heroicus Sublimis / 1–1951 (1950–51) 86–87 Barnett Newman, Onement I, 1948 90 John Constable, The Hay Wain, 1821 145

Meyertholen, Andrea. The Myth of Abstraction : The Hidden Origins of Abstract Art in German Literature, Boydell & Brewer,

x   List of Illustrations

4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5

4.6 4.7 4.8 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7

John Constable, Seascape Study with Rain Cloud, ca. 1824–1828 145 Joseph Mallord William Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed—The Great Western Railway, 1844 147 Joseph Mallord William Turner, Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth, 1842 148 Joseph Mallord William Turner, Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory)—the Morning after the Deluge—Moses writing the Book of Genesis, 1843 150 Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. 1884, 1884/86 155 Georges Seurat, Poseuses, 1886–1888 158 Claude Monet, Haystack (Sunset), 1891 169 Paul Klee, Bauchredner und Rufer im Moor (Ventriloquist and Caller in the Marsh), 1923 206 Paul Klee, Um den Kern (At/Around the Core), 1935 219 André Masson, Dessin automatique (Automatic Drawing), 1924 221 André Masson, Invention du labyrinthe (Invention of the Labyrinth), 1942 227 Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1970. Oil, house paint, and crayon on canvas, 136 x 159.2 in. (345.5 x 404.3 cm) 233 Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1954 237 Cy Twombly, Academy, 1955 238

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3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7

The compositional structure of the poem maps out its narrative components in a tripartite scheme The unified trinity of the imagination duplicates the primary process of natural cloud formation The cloud’s tempo slows as it steadily dissipates through forms The sentence fragments in Line 9 for example are grammatically parallel but semantically oppositional The chiasmic reversal in Lines 9 and 10 crosses two predators with two prey animals The contrasting positive and negative values of strategically arranged lexical items work to sustain oscillatory motion Like the cloud, the poem moves downward through stanzas only to cycle back to the beginning

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121 126 127 131 131 132 136

Acknowledgments

M

long been vocal and steadfast in her belief that I should “become an author” and “publish a book” someday. Of course, the book she imagined was more along the lines of literary fiction or a memoir recounting my many travels throughout Germany and Europe. While far from the travelogue of my mother’s mind, this book does document a journey of sorts—one that would not have been possible without the many people who professionally and personally supported its long and winding road from concept to publication. To that end, I thank Camden House and Boydell & Brewer for their interest in and support of my project, as well as all those involved in perfecting the final product. I am especially grateful to Jim Walker, who accompanied me through the publication process and remained steadfast and enthusiastic in his belief in my manuscript and myself. Without his patient guidance, gentle editing, and general expertise, this would have been a far lesser (and less colorful) work. I also express my gratitude to the production editor Tracey Engel for the beautiful cover design, the international sales and marketing director Michael Richards for the constructive criticism and strategic advice, the copy editor Gabriel Bartlett for his linguistic savvy and attention to detail, the production editor Jane Best for getting me across the finish line, and the anonymous readers whose reviews surpassed even my most optimistic expectations. A very special thanks is due to Amanda Kerbel who put her life on hold to spend an obscene amount of hours compiling and perfecting the index for this book. I am grateful to the following organizations and individuals, which/ who generously provided permissions and licensing rights to reproduce the artworks and artists appearing in this book: Art Resources, Inc., especially Robbi Siegel; the Artist Rights Society (ARS), especially Alan Baglia; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Barnes Foundation; the Barnett Newman Foundation; the Belvedere Museum Vienna; the Carnegie Museum of Art; the Cy Twombly Foundation, especially Eleonora Di Erasmo; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio, especially Nicola Del Roscio; Kate Rothko Prizel, and Christopher Rothko; the Menil Collection, Houston; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Musée du Louvre; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art; the Museum Oskar Reinhart, Winterthur; the National Gallery, London; the Royal Academy of Arts, London; the Russian State Archive

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y mother has

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xii A cknowledgments 

of Literature and Art, Moscow; the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; the State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg; and the Tate Britain. For kindly sharing their research collections and personal time with me, I extend a special thanks to Donovan Thomas Degner at the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Viola Geyersbach at the Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek, and the staff of the Handschriftenabteilung at the Zentralbibliothek Zürich. The financial and institutional support of the University of Kansas facilitated the research and writing of this project in many ways. I am profoundly grateful to the KU Office of Research for a New Faculty General Research Fund award as well as two subsequent General Research Fund awards. Assistance provided by the Vice Chancellor for Research Book Subvention Award had an enormous impact on the production of this book. I greatly appreciate the professional development opportunities provided by the Hall Center for the Humanities. Special thanks are due to grant-writing guru Kathy Porsch of the Research and Grant Development Office, who helped me hone successful applications; to Celka Straughn of the Spencer Museum of Art, who walked me through the bewildering world of permission rights; and to Katherine Berger, who assisted in the copyediting and proofreading of this project. I would also like to acknowledge the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and in particular the dynamic and collegial individuals in the Department of German Studies, whose friendship, humor, and encouragement have directly and indirectly contributed to the completion of this book: Ari Linden, Jim Morrison, Bill Keel, Samantha Raines, Schirin Kourehpaz, and Stephanie Wille. I especially want to thank my chair, Nina Vyatkina, and Bruce Hayes for their mentorship and motivation. Also deserving of recognition are the hundreds of undergraduate students who have been through my classrooms over the years, sharing my love of the German language and culture while also keeping me from falling too far into the depths of writing mania, in particular: Caelan Graham, Korbin Painter, Matthew Fawcett, Ashlyn Pretz, Anastasiya Skvortsova, and Emily Jacobson. Finally, I owe a special debt of gratitude to the staffs and librarians at the Watson Library, the Murphy Art and Architecture Library, and the Interlibrary Loan Services, who managed to procure whatever materials I required. I was most impressed by and grateful for how my incessant requests, frequent visits, and ever accruing stacks of reserved books were tolerated with what I can only imagine must have been silent frustration. Beyond my current institution, I wish to thank those who have played formative roles in my career in German studies: Scott Gardner, my high school German instructor; my undergraduate professors at the University of Texas, especially Robert Mollenauer; and the faculty in the departments of Germanic Studies and Art Studies at Indiana University, including Ben Robinson, Johannes Türk, Susanne Even, Nikole Langjahr,

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Acknowledgments

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xiii

and Troy Byler. Four individuals in particular warrant my warmest and most earnest gratitude for taking the time to read and critique parts of this manuscript. I thank Michelle Facos for lending her art historical expertise and for understanding my interdisciplinary vision; Marc Weiner for being unwavering in his emotional and intellectual support; and Bill Rasch. His intelligence, sense of humor, and yes, even the classic rock references motivated me to become the professor I am today. Finally, this project would not exist without the indefatigable Fritz Breithaupt, who has never failed to make time for me despite his perpetually and frenetically full schedule. To say that his scholarship has deeply influenced my own is an understatement and an honor to acknowledge. His honest and incisive criticism, boundless cheer, and confidence-boosting advice provoked my intellectual curiosity and pushed me to become a more selfassured scholar and person. It is a great pleasure to express my appreciation to my friends and family. First, a shout-out to the friends I made in graduate school who continue to inspire and impress me with their accomplishments, notably Sharon Munger, Dana Weber, Zvi Gilboa, Megan Barrett, Tyler Hafen, Andrew Hamilton, Chris Chiasson, Madhuvanti Karyekar, Olivia Landry, and Orsi Kiss. Jill Giffin, Elizabeth Dickie, Friederike Schlaefer, and especially Anita Lukic were with me every step of this journey; each sharing my frustrations and excitement with endless empathy and true friendships that have enriched my life. I am especially appreciative of and indebted to my dear friend Bridget Gillaspy, her husband Tobi Lichtsteiner, and their son Henry for generously opening their home to me whenever I visit Switzerland. The necessary research for chapter 5 would have been impossible if not for their incredible support and physical labor: they provided crutches when I could not walk, procured and transported books to me when I could not travel (thank you, Tobi!), and filled the evenings and weekends with laughter and lively debate when I could not read another word about Gottfried Keller. I also wish to thank my German friends, Stephan and Annegret Klein, and relatives, Andreas and Sabine Meyerthole, for making it clear that I will always have a home in Eutin and Cologne, respectively. None of this would have been possible without family members’ love and patience as well as their financial, logistical, and emotional support. Cheering me on and never failing to ask me about when they can buy my book are my godparents Lindsey and Dennis Minchella along with a litany of aunts, uncles, and cousins: Kathy and Donald Wheaton, Jill Machado, Debbie O’Neill-Blong, Cindy O’Neill, Penny and Joe O’Neill, Charlotte and Bobby Mullen, Sarah Mullen, Zach Forman, and David Forman. To my aunt and uncle, Susan and Gary Forman, I owe immeasurable gratitude for sharing with me their love of literature, music, and art, and for giving me their love, period. They made possible the visits to

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xiv A cknowledgments 

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museums and exhibitions that determinatively shaped the direction and construction of this book. Any and all Sondheim references are made in their honor. I thank my sister Kristin, my brother-in-law Nick, and my two wonderful nephews Nate and Ben for their unconditional encouragement and understanding, the trips to zoos and children’s museums, and for all the smiles. Finally, no one has supported me more than my parents Edward and Patricia Meyertholen. Their love has sustained me over the long course of this manuscript’s creation, and it is to them that I dedicate this book. It may not be the Great American Novel of my mother’s imagination, but surely the pleasure of seeing my name in print and the knowledge of having been proved right in her prediction that I should and would “become an author” is compensation enough. An earlier, truncated version of chapter 1, “Apocalypse Now: On Heinrich von Kleist, Caspar David Friedrich, and the Emergence of Abstract Art” appeared in German Quarterly 86, no. 4 (2013): 404– 19. A section of chapter 3 was published as “Zum ersten Mal sah ich ein Bild”: Goethe’s Cognitive Viewing Subject as Scientist and Artist,” in Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 55, no. 3 (2019): 203–28. Finally, subsections from chapter 5 were reworked and integrated from the article “It’s Not Easy Being Green: The Failure of Abstract Art in Gottfried Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich” from German Studies Review 39, no. 2 (2016): 241–58. I am grateful to the respective presses for their permission to reprint this material.

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Introduction: The Many Origins of Abstract Art

F

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rom December 23, 2012, to April 15, 2013, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City held an exhibition entitled Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art. The landmark retrospective celebrated the centennial of its titular event by bringing together over 350 artworks from museums and collectors across North America and Europe. On display were representatives of German Expressionism, Italian Futurism, Russian Constructivism, French Cubism, American Synchronism, and all manner of artists and artworks eluding neat categorization into an “ism.” Representing a veritable “who’s who” of the early twentieth-century art world, the collection did more than commemorate a historical moment. It told a story. In this case, that story was the origin of abstract art as something made viewable, walkable, and digestible to a general public on the walls and in the vitrines of

Figure 0.1. Installation view of the exhibition, Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925. December 23, 2012–April 15, 2013. Photograph by Jonathan Muzikar. Museum of Modern Art, New York. © The Museum of Modern Art. Reproduced with permission from SCALA / Art Resource, New York.

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2 I  ntroduction: The Many Origins of Abstract Art

a few gallery rooms. Curated by Leah Dickerman and Masha Chlenova of MOMA’S painting and sculpture department, the impressive array of names and images reconstructed a visual chronicle of the development of abstraction as aesthetic pursuit: how it originated as “radical idea,” experienced its historical birth into incarnate form, and subsequently “changed modern art” in the early years of its praxis.1 Visitors entering the exhibition were greeted by the biggest name of all, at least for the emergence of abstract art: Wassily Kandinsky (1866– 1944). “Must we not then renounce the object altogether, throw it to the winds and instead lay bare the purely abstract?” asked the words emblazoned over the portal leading into the first installation space.2 That question was posed by Russian-born artist in 1911.3 This year—more specifically, December of this year—is key. For it was in December of 1911 that Kandinsky, who had been working in Munich since 1896, published the text in which this question first appeared; this was the aesthetic treatise Über das Geistige in der Kunst: Insbesondere in der Malerei (Concerning the Spiritual in Art: Especially in Painting). It was in December of 1911 that the avant-garde artist circle known as the Blauer Reiter (Blue Rider) staged its inaugural show in Munich. And it was in December of 1911 that Kandinsky, a founding member of the group, unveiled at this show the first painting “to step away from a long-held tenet of artistic practice: that paintings should describe things in a real or imaginary world,” as MOMA’s exhibition catalogue puts it.4 In short, it was in December of 1911 that Kandinsky exhibited the world’s first abstract artwork. This work, Komposition V, would, a hundred years later at MOMA’s retrospective, be positioned in accordance with its storied status, prominently hanging on the wall of the second gallery (see fig. 0.1). I wish I had something profound to write about my own experience of the painting in March 2013, when I attended the exhibition. I distinctly recall standing there before it, the painting that had started it all, waiting to be overcome by some Benjaminian aura. What struck me most about this work, however, was its size. It is, as can be seen in the photograph, a big painting. There is no mistaking its reality or intention. There is no overlooking the flagrancy of the heavy black whiplashes cutting and curving across the spacious canvas and through the thick coats of muted colors. It was as if Kandinsky had wanted, through the painting’s deliberately sizeable dimensions, to assure its first audiences in 1911 at the Blauer Reiter 1 See Museum of Modern Art, “Inventing Abstraction.” Dickerman served as Curator of Painting and Sculpture at MOMA from 2008 to 2015. 2 Kandinsky, “On the Spiritual in Art,” 169. 3 My preferred translations of “Wassily” and “Concerning the Spiritual” stem from their frequency of use in scholarship and museums. 4 Dickerman, “Inventing Abstraction,” 14.

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Introduction: The Many Origins of Abstract Art

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3

exhibition to say, “No, this is not accident; yes, I meant to hang it here”; and “Yes, this is art.” Any residual uncertainty regarding the brazen announcement made by the painting or its artist was addressed in—or, ideally, preempted by— the publication of the artist’s aesthetic treatise. Kandinsky choreographed the release of Über das Geistige in der Kunst to accompany the grand debut of his “Great Abstraction.” This foundational document outlined the motivation, process, and rationale for an abstract art—for his abstract art. Shortly thereafter, artists on both sides of the Atlantic began publicly exhibiting abstract images as art, most with their own self-authored philosophical tracts and all with their own conception of abstraction: Robert Delaunay’s Window series, Fenêtres (Ausstellung des Modernen Bundes, Kunsthaus Zürich, July 1912); Arthur Dove’s first one-person show (Stieglitz Gallery, New York, February 1912); the Czech artist František Kupka’s Amorpha paintings; Francis Picabia’s La Source; Fernand Léger’s La Femme en Bleu (Salon d’Automne, Paris, October 1912); and the work of American Synchronists Morgan Russel and Stanton MacDonaldWright (Neue Kunstsalon, Munich, June 1913).5 The velocity and relative synchronicity with which news traveled, images and ideas circulated, and artists inspired each other was captured by the Artist Network Diagram (see fig. 0.2), designed for MOMA’s exhibition and reproduced in interactive format on its website. Its tautly strung red lines interlink the names of eighty-four persons who worked with different media in various countries during the time frame encompassed by the retrospective. Their interconnectivity constructs the dense communicative nexus of cross-cultural inspiration and collaboration that led to the invention and advancement of abstract art. Though its nodes signify singular names, the network of relationships illustrates the complexity of the historical moment and the importance of the exchange of ideas for innovation. Kandinsky might have hung the first abstract artwork, but the enterprise of abstract art and its acceptance by the public was not a solo endeavor. The diagram charts what the exhibition displayed: the invention of abstraction. And yet, the story told by the exhibition presented nothing essentially new; it basically retold the same story, by now well-known to both amateur and academic art historians: Beginning in late 1911 and across the course of 1912, in several European and American cities, a handful of artists . . . presented paintings that differed from almost all of those that had preceded them in the long history of the medium in the Western tradition: 5 Two other momentous exhibitions of the time were the 1912 Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne and the 1913 Armory Show in New York.

Meyertholen, Andrea. The Myth of Abstraction : The Hidden Origins of Abstract Art in German Literature, Boydell & Brewer,

Meyertholen, Andrea. The Myth of Abstraction : The Hidden Origins of Abstract Art in German Literature, Boydell & Brewer,

Figure 0.2. The Artist Network Diagram for the exhibition, Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925. December 23, 2012–April 15, 2013, organized by Leah Dickerman with Masha Chlenova. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. © The Museum of Modern Art. Reproduced with permission from SCALA / Art Resource, New York.

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Introduction: The Many Origins of Abstract Art

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5

shunning the depiction of objects in the world, they displayed works with no discernible subject matter. Indeed they abandoned the premise of making a picture of something.6

The elements of the familiar tale are assembled, and the traditional terms set. Enumerated are the expected names and normal dates, the “handful of artists” in the early twentieth century working concurrently but independently to reinvent a medium explicitly identified as painting and to redefine the parameters within a tradition expressly marked as Western. In abandoning the premise of “pictures of something,” these individuals effected “a great rewriting of the rules of artistic production as had been since the Renaissance” and hence “would fundamentally shape artistic practice in the century that followed.”7 From its birth, with the public exhibition of Kandinsky’s Komposition V in December 1911, abstract art incited both derision and celebration, but it always was—and still is—a topic of controversy. This is a good story. It is an important story. However, it is not the whole story, because it is not the only story. Nor is it my story. That story, the one recounted in this manuscript, assembles unexpected characters and sets unusual terms. Its plot does not unfold on the international stage of the early twentieth century but is particular to nineteenth-century central Europe. Its cast consists not of artists but authors, and its medium is decidedly not pictorial. The invention of abstract art as recounted here takes place in German and it takes place in writing.

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Writing Abstraction: Questions and Methodology Let me be clear up front: I am not looking to dispute, reverse, or rewrite the standard account as told from the perspective of art history. Whether Kandinsky truly did create the first abstract painting has already been subject to dispute on art historical grounds. As much as Kandinsky’s theoretical treatise might frame the narrative of (his) invention as a solitary act, the relative simultaneity of abstract paintings appearing throughout the Western art world not only attests to a multiplicity of inventors but also confounds scholarly attempts to determine with certainty which artist or artwork could have historically preceded Komposition V. Of the possible contenders—a list that includes Robert Delaunay, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Kazimir Malevich, and Piet Mondrian— many are known or believed to have backdated their works. Other artists, though just as active, kept their more revolutionary works private. One such artist is Swedish-born Hilma af Klint (1862–1944), who evidences 6 7

Dickerman, “Inventing Abstraction,” 13 (italics in the original). Dickerman, “Inventing Abstraction,” 13 (italics in the original).

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6 I  ntroduction: The Many Origins of Abstract Art

the earliest breakthrough into abstraction with a cycle of 193 spiritually infused paintings created between 1906 and 1908.8 Klint began systematically progressing toward the abstract as far back as 1896, but because she did not exhibit her paintings or formulate her approach as a conscious aesthetic program of abstraction, which her predominantly male colleagues did do, she is absent from MOMA’s exhibition and is less well-known to art history. Also missing are the abstract spiraling forms of another largely forgotten, spiritualist-cum-artist, the British medium Georgiana Houghton (1814–84). Unlike Klint, Houghton presented her abstractions to the public: in 1871 at a self-organized exhibition of 155 watercolors that lasted four months, drew hostile reviews, and caused her financial ruin. Although Houghton attempted to clarify her divinely inspired symbolism in catalogue entries and through personal interactions with gallery visitors, her words could not successfully communicate such an arcane subject matter to what was still an unreceptive public.9 Therefore, Kandinsky perhaps deserves most credit for his strategic marketing and masterful self-promotion; initiatives that at once initiated public interest in abstract art and secured the mythic character of his creation in the popular imagination. Yet in the end, this is not a project about the invention of abstract art; it is about the invention of abstract art in literature, specifically in German literature from 1800 on. What follows is an examination of three disparate moments in the German literary canon in which abstract art is imagined or becomes theoretically possible: Heinrich von Kleist’s Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft (1810), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s poem “Howards Ehrengedächtnis” (1821), and Gottfried Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich (1855, 1879). Composing these moments are three different authors who write in three different decades, who speak through three different genres, and who conceive three different modes of abstraction, none of which contemporaneously achieved painted form as a physical art object intended for exhibition. Connecting these moments is the following argument: each instance constitutes an example of the invention of abstract art in a nineteenth-century literary text prior to the visual actualization of abstract art in the early twentieth century.

8 Exemplary of Klint’s experiments with abstraction, the cycle Paintings for the Temple (1906–8) was inspired by theosophical teachings and the invisible forces of the occult, and thus shared influences with Kandinsky. For more on Klint, see Almqvist and Belfrage, eds., Hilma af Klint: Seeing is Believing; Enderby, Blanchflower, and Larner, eds., Hilma af Klint: Painting the Unseen; and Müller-Westermann and Widoff, eds., Hilma af Klint—A Pioneer of Abstraction. 9 More on Houghton can be found in Lars Bang Larsen, Simon Grant, Marco Pasi, eds., Georgiana Houghton: Spirit Drawings, and Rachel Oberter, “Esoteric Art Confronting the Public Eye.”

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Introduction: The Many Origins of Abstract Art

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These three birth moments do not comprise a comprehensive collection of literary imaginings of abstract art, if one can be assembled, but they are crucial. Prior to this study, the most comparable compilation surveying the topology of abstract art in literature was Otto Stelzer’s Die Vorgeschichte der abstrakten Kunst: Denkmodelle und Vor-bilder (1964). As the title indicates though, Stelzer primarily focuses on the “vor”— that is, the prehistory of abstraction—which suggests that he himself does not count the examples in question as “real” abstract art, and so regards them as somehow separate from its “real” history. This might account for the cursory treatment devoted to each, for his intervention amounts to little more than brief description as opposed to critical analysis. Aside from Keller, other authors mentioned by Stelzer include Novalis, Adalbert Stifter, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Victor Hugo, Jean Paul, and Ludwig Tieck. Excepting Tieck, who arguably presents the philosophical possibility of painting colors with no objective correlates in Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (1798), the passages Stelzer singles out are not true instances of abstraction. The manners in which these passages describe landscape and art are unconventional, even modern when compared to the prose of contemporaries. As provocative as these narrative portrayals are, the objects they illustrate are still objects and thus pictures “of something.” The three authors discussed in this manuscript do not by chance or experiment “discover” abstraction; nor do they hide their narrative images from public eyes, dismissed as private dalliances.10 These are active inventions, carefully manipulated into language and judiciously organized and edited for intended publication. In the chapters to come, I cannot provide a summary of content as made visually navigable through a diagram of movements or a nexus of individuals like the MOMA exhibitions. I cannot even present actual images of the three artworks at the center of my study, for these exist only in words. What I offer is a narrative that complicates the traditional tale of abstract art by giving voice to hitherto untold tales of its invention from the perspective of literature. What appears to the medium of painting as 10 A few nineteenth-century authors dabbled in visual (as opposed to written) abstraction. George Sand (1804–76) made her “dendrites” by pressing together painted sheets of paper to create bizarre and unforeseen forms on separation, a process anticipated by Justinus Kerner’s (1786–1862) “Klecksographies” and the “Kaffeeklexbilder” of Wilhelm von Kaulbauch (1805–74). Later inspiring the Rorschach test, such playful experiments were often enlisted in the service of representational art and served as the basis for more complete paintings or sketches, like the landscapes of Alexander Cozen (1717–86) or the seascapes and haunted castles of Victor Hugo (1802–85). Hugo left numerous fold-blottings of ink in their original nebulous state without attempting to reveal representational objects, but these images were never shared, framed, or hung alongside his other graphic works.

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a teleologically oriented story or a sudden unfolding over the short span of fifteen years is revealed to be multiple origin stories arising at disparate and disconnected points in time. From these multiple origins spring multiple forms of abstraction, each with its own manner of appearance, method of creation, and motivation for existing. Moreover, each image in its unique manner, method, and motivation would eventually have a twentieth-century correlative as a physical artwork and popular mode of abstraction, even if the artists in question had no knowledge of their literary precedents. Investigating these very complications contributes to our understanding of how this radical mode of self-expression came to be and what changed or had to change in Western culture to accommodate and facilitate its emergence. In other words, I ask: What prevented artists from painting what authors could and were already describing? What forces, attitudes, or institutions needed to transform before the image conceived in words could be executed in paint, and then hung for public exhibition? What factors or events initiated these transformations? To answer these questions, I move diachronically between medial forms and histories: I first tell the story of abstract art as it unfolded within the world of literature; I then go on to compare these literary origins with the historical development of abstract art in painting. My methodology aims to mediate disjunctures of micro/macro, literature/art, and past/ present. Focusing first on the singular literary case study, I derive the manner, method, and motivation of each origin story through close reading and textual analyses that contextualize the author and his impulses before considering what precluded the particular literary abstraction from being recognized as a legitimate aesthetic expression in its time. These specific studies open into greater and broader insights that allow me to draw conclusions about the intangible yet institutionalized cultural mentalities that had to be challenged, addressed, or altered before abstract art could achieve physical form. I argue that the three literary instances of abstract art establish three crucial conditions involving the production, reception, and consumption of abstract art in painting: (1) the need for a new form of art; (2) an audience willing and able to engage with it; and (3) an artist willing to create and defend it. These literary developments may have no direct influence on Kandinsky but they do lay crucial theoretical groundwork for an artist’s creation of an abstract artwork and they advance a cultural climate amenable to its public reception. What is more, they teach us why abstract painting did not occur earlier and they serve to indicate why and when attitudes did change. To make this change palpable, I follow each literary case study with a chapter comparing the mode of abstraction articulated in the nineteenth century with actual artworks and art forms that emerged as abstract art in the twentieth. By evaluating these physical manifestations of abstract art against the mode of abstraction invented through the literary image, I identify what forces—historical, art historical, scientific,

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or otherwise—potentially helped artists and audiences regarding these forms realize why Western illusionism was inadequate, how they could come to find abstract art engaging and enjoyable, and what artists would and could ultimately make it. In this way, I open new narrative accounts of parallel origins and histories that complicate not only how we think about literature and art but also how we construct the very notions of origin and history.

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Charting Abstraction: The Man, the Myth, and MOMA That MOMA’s exhibition, Inventing Abstraction, did not fundamentally alter or challenge the standard account mythologizing the origins of abstract art is, in many ways, to be expected. The museum itself is principally responsible for the perpetuation of the original tale. As one critic’s review of the retrospective commented, MOMA “is still heavily invested in a narrative of modern art that was largely spun by Alfred H. Barr Jr. (1902–81), the museum’s first director” after its founding in 1929.11 An inherent and central plot point of this narrative is the development of abstraction as a defining factor for modern art. This was made famously clear in the illustrative graphic for the 1936 exhibition, Cubism and Abstract Art (fig. 0.3), the museum’s first major exhibition on abstraction. First published on the dust jacket of the exhibition catalogue, the “Barr chart” or “Barr diagram” plots out a road map to abstraction and follows its forward-moving flow through a series of artistic movements from 1890 to 1935. In addition to having curatorial expertise, Barr, a former university professor, was both a gifted educator and showman, and so he drafted the schematic with two objectives in mind.12 Within the immediate context of the 1936 show, it provided an organizational principle (and concrete floor plan) that rendered the nearly four hundred artworks and media on display accessible and navigable to a wide audience. For the overall future of the museum, it served to legitimize the abstract art at the heart of MOMA’s modernist mission by explaining its invention as the logical and inevitable culmination of positivist forces. 11 Alexander Alberro, “A Messier Coherence,” 371. 12 General overviews of Barr’s chart and his establishment of MOMA include Sandler and Newman, eds., Defining Modern Art: Selected Writings of Alfred H. Barr, Jr.; Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War; Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art; Marquis, Alfred H. Barr, Jr.: Missionary for the Modern; Rosenblum, foreword to Cubism and Abstract Art, 1–2; and Staniszewski, The Power of Display. A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art.

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Figure 0.3. Dust jacket, with chart and annotations by Alfred H. Barr Jr., of the exhibition catalogue for “Cubism and Abstract Art.” March 2–April 19, 1936. © The Museum of Modern Art. Reproduced with permission from SCALA / Art Resource, New York.

The staying power of this dominant origin story is due in large part to Barr’s masterful appropriation of a visual vernacular endemic to science. The systematic movement of vectors documenting the birth and early years of abstraction construct a genealogy suggestive not only of hereditary relationships but evolutionary development as well. In this,

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Barr’s diagram differed from previous timelines and genealogical trees.13 The generators propelling the transformations of style and form, moreover, appear to borrow from popular positivist and social Darwinist notions involving technological and cultural advancement. Red boxes for “Japanese Prints,” “Near-Eastern Art,” “Negro Art,” and “Machine Aesthetic” highlight indigenous peoples and modern technology as vital nodes of influence that might also be understood as precursors.14 To describe artistic innovation with the discourses of natural and social sciences seemed to subject the story of abstract art to the same methodological rigor and empirical investigation associated with these fields. Emerging as “hermetic” and “unchangeable,” Barr’s persuasive and pervasive account of abstraction endowed the discipline of art history, not to mention MOMA, with the authority of scientific fact, impersonal and detached. The catalogue became standard reading and source material for students of art history, and although subsequent generations would further develop the central axes and trajectories laid down by Barr, the basic structure of his analysis continues to inform our teaching of modern art and thinking about abstraction.15 Of course, the Barr chart is by no means infallible or unbiased and, despite the persistence of its narrative, has undergone a stream of consistent criticism from a variety of disciplinary fronts since its introduction.16 One of the earliest voices came from Meyer Schapiro (1904–96), who objected to Barr’s “essentially unhistorical” conception of modern art as a product of autonomous stylistic change. In his 1937 essay, “The Nature of Abstract Art,” the art historian takes issue with the museum director’s account, writing: “[Barr] gives us, it is true, the dates of every stage in the various movements, . . . but no connection is drawn between the art and the conditions of the moment.”17 As a result, he argued, “the history of modern art is presented as an internal, immanent process among 13 Vere, “Oversights in Overseeing Modernism,” 258. For a history of genealogical models, see Weigel, Generation: zur Genealogie des Konzepts—Konzepte von Genealogie and Burkhardt-Schmidt, Stammbäume der Kunst. Zur Genealogie der Avantgarde, 114–84. 14 Cf. Lowery, “Abstraction in 1936: Barr’s Diagrams,” 361. 15 Cf. Smith, Making the Modern, 387. For more on how this premise is accepted, see Scott and Rutkoff, eds., New York Modern; Wallach, Exhibiting Contradiction; and Zilczer, “Beyond Genealogy,” 4–9. 16 Notably missing, for example, is Hilma af Klint. A sampling of critical revisions includes: Brzyski, Partisan Canons; Craven, “Marxism and Critical Art History”; Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks; Harris, The New Art History; Hauser, A Social History of Art; Iskin, Re-envisioning the Contemporary Art Canon; Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” 1–39; Pollock, Vision and Difference; and Said, Orientalism. 17 Meyer Schapiro, “The Nature of Abstract Art,” 14.

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the artists; abstract art arises because, as the author says, representational art had been exhausted.”18 Ignoring historical context and social conditions as key factors for motiving artistic development “reduces human activity to a simple mechanical movement, like a bouncing ball.”19 At the same time, it does a disservice to both “realistic” and abstract modes of art, portraying the former as “a passive mirroring of things and therefore essentially non-artistic” and the latter as “a purely aesthetic activity, unconditioned by objects and based on its own eternal laws.”20 Expanding on Meyer Schapiro’s critique in 2010, Griselda Pollock specifies what Barr’s “distillation of formal necessity” fails to consider: Barr’s timeline of descending from post-impressionism in the 1890s to abstract mid-1930s passes chronologically, and without interruption, massive historical upheavals of the horrors of the first war, revolutions, colonial and imperial campaigns, the rise of fascisms, the Third International, Stalinism, the Popular Front, scientific interventions, and massive social changes brought about by suffrage and mass movements by workers and, of course, by women. Nothing that might pertain to a history of gender transformation, colonial history, racism, technology, philosophy, or physics could be registered of the conversations that initiated, or were negotiated, by rapid artistic change.21

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As much as MOMA’s 2012–13 retrospective celebrates a story that helped to premise and justify its institutional existence, it also responds to the criticism accumulated over the years and issues a corrective to its 1936 18 Schapiro, “The Nature of Abstract Art,” 14. 19 Schapiro, “The Nature of Abstract Art,” 14. 20 Schapiro, “The Nature of Abstract Art,” 17. The establishment of MOMA as an authoritative institution and the acceptance of abstraction by the American public both benefited from the sort of historical and social contextualizing circumstances that were elided from the Barr model. At the time of the 1936 exhibition, the National Socialists in Germany were carrying out their attack on modern art, particularly its abstract strains, which were confiscated and often destroyed as “degenerate” art. Barr was actively engaged in saving many pieces of “degenerate” art, even traveling to Germany and personally smuggling out artwork. When advocating for MOMA, he adopted a political line of argumentation for opening the building. Quoting Franklin D. Roosevelt, Barr made a claim for artistic freedom directly related to the American political stance against the Nazis in Germany. As a result, the attitudes toward modern art and abstraction were formulated as an ideological battle pitting democracy and modern art against the forces of fascism. See Langfeld, “How the Museum of Modern Art in New York Canonised German Expressionism,” 1–13; Peters, Degenerate Art; and Saehrendt, Die Brücke zwischen Staatskunst und Verfemung. 21 Pollock, “Moments and Temporalities of the Avant-Garde,” 806, 808.

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exhibition. Homage and critique in one, the Artist Network Diagram harkens back to its prototype with its color scheme and font, yet seeks to redress many omissions, biases, and weaknesses evident in its presumptions of universality and perfectibility.22 Rather than attribute the invention of abstraction to internal and “eternal laws” guiding the autonomous forces of form, the retrospective discards Barr’s evolutionary schematic of style to present a condensed snapshot of the historical context and social connections conditioning the first fifteen years of abstract art. The newly designed graphic identifies no movements or geographic locations, but only the names of individual artists who move to the forefront of the story as its actors and art’s creators.23 Included in their expanded ranks are more women and previously unsung heroes of abstraction from unacknowledged or underrepresented countries, including the United States and much of Eastern Europe. The international affair is also an intermedial endeavor reaching beyond paintings, drawings, and prints to feature books, sculptures, films, photography, dance and choreography, design, and music. Gone are the solid, single-arrowed (and even dotted) lines pointing the way to progress. In their place, delicate red threads weave together a cat’s cradle of reciprocal communication and mutual influence. The select progenitors for hereditary lines of abstract styles suggested in the Barr chart explode into a multiplicity of origin points and possible birth moments. Although their linkages amass clusters of stylistic and philosophical unity that spread out along vaguely geographic terms, social relationships are the driving dynamic behind this updated version of abstraction. For all its improvements, the update’s telling amounts to a basic retelling of the original narrative, even repeating some of the same shortcomings. To represent the invention of abstraction is simply too much to ask of any one art historical graphic or narrative, as a caricature in Vanity Fair by Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias (1904–57) already makes clear in 1933. The Tree of Modern Art—Planted 60 Years Ago visualizes the course of modern art over the span of two centuries. From the roots of seven preimpressionist French masters, it branches out into movements and artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before blossoming into fifty leaves of outstanding European artists. Covarrubias’s parodic interpretation of similar art historical trees exposes the deeply entrenched problematics plaguing such genealogical histories. Although the paradigm does well to systematize certain 22 Dickerman, “Inventing Abstraction,” 21. 23 Probably not by coincidence, the artists at the top of the Barr chart as progenitors (Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat) comprised the subject of MOMA’s first major exhibition in its opening year (1929). See Lowry, “Abstraction in 1936: Barr’s Diagrams,” 361.

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interconnectivities of artists and approaches, the tree is a self-sufficient organism, and thus, by its very nature, self-contained and restricted in terms of what it can describe: temporally, geographically, socioculturally, and medially. For example, it leaves (no pun intended) little room for rara aves like Henri Rousseau or other artists resistant to its classificatory logic. The tree, moreover, appears to undermine its own logic by looping back into itself and knotting together the bifurcations of its branches. In doing so, it pictorially points back to the constraints of its own self-containment while also questioning the sense or senselessness of its classificatory attempts. At the base of the trunk, an African sculpture and the decapitated head of an ancient Greek sculpture represent entire traditions and cultures excluded from the lineage of modern art. They are also emblematic of the omissions discernible to varying degrees in the Barr chart, the Artist Nexus Diagram, and both MOMA exhibitions. Covarrubias only indicates the treatment of ancient and non-European forms of art, mishandlings also noted by Meyer Schapiro and Pollock.24 To those we might also add the long list of so-called “crafts,” “applied arts,” or “decorative arts” such as ceramics, glassware, basketry, jewelry, clothing, textiles, furniture, and so on, which throughout most of Western history did not fall under the label of “art” and therefore under the tree of art history.25 And that really gets us to the root of the issue (again, no pun intended): this tree, along with other such mythologies and historiographies, grows according to predetermined or predeterminable conclusions that dictate the inclusion and exclusion of information. In this case, that information concerns the constitution of modern art and the criteria by which it unfolds and should expect to be judged. Whatever and whoever do not spring from the tree’s parentage do not, by implication, count as “art.” Although under the guise of inevitable organic growth, this tree does not develop in accordance with natural law; its foliage has been pruned to fit within prescribed dimensions (here the size of Covarrubias’s drawing). Violence has been done to the tree, as we see in the four amputated branches leading nowhere past Cézanne, the futurists, the Dadaists, and the expressionists. While certain courses, forces, and circumstances are uncontrollable, deliberate decisions can be and have been made to shape the genealogical story told by the tree into 24 Meyer Schapiro attempts to contextualize the “new respect” for “primitive art” and “primitive peoples” with respect to impressionist, neo-impressionist, and expressionist artists on pp. 16–21 (“The Nature of Abstract Art,” 20). 25 Cf. Schapiro, “On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art,” 9–19. Schapiro’s historical account of the development of aesthetic conventions reveals the arbitrariness of frameworks defining Western illusionism as well as its implications for our own viewing habits.

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an attractive topiary of art. Making these sorts of determinations is the wealthy, white man dressed in formal Western attire resting in contemplative repose under the tree’s right canopy. This tree is a European species bearing the fruits of European artists, but the presence of this man places it firmly on American soil. A caricature of Alfred Barr Jr., bespectacled and balding as he was later in life, holds up an empty, ornate frame, perhaps wondering what artwork to hang next in his new museum. We know that the artwork chosen will belong to the medium of painting, for only it will fit within the frame. As keeper of the frame and mediator of art history, Barr uses it with unconscious or conscious bias to formulate the narrative of modern art, whether from the perspective he desires or simply from the one he knows. He has the power of deciding what to privilege and what to omit, where to draw the boundaries defining art, and how to sever the branches that could tell its tale. In 1936, he would apply this frame again, as we saw, to articulate the birth of abstract art as a tale of art and artists. Yet even before Barr, the tale of abstract art had been told from the perspective of painters and painting. Although subsequent iterations, such as the 2012–13 MOMA retrospective, would rectify and complexify a great deal of the narrative set in 1936, in the end they adhered to an archetypal template that traditionally and understandably emphasized concerns specific to the medium. As a result, we tend to encounter a limited cast of characters with their familiar plotline recounting the thematic and technical innovations leading up to the watershed moment of abstraction. From this point of view, Kandinsky’s presentation of the physical artwork in 1911 logically marks the origin of abstract art; the other modes and nodes of abstraction hung by contemporaries and collaborators on his heels mark points of many others. While there is much that is accurate in this account of the rise of abstraction, its frame focuses our attention on only one artistic modality and renders other birth moments and origin stories invisible. Not seen are the images of abstract art that were invented prior to Kandinsky in modalities other than the visual arts and thereby introduced to Western audiences from unexpected sources at unanticipated times. To be sure, when we move beyond the medium and outside the frame, we learn that neither Kandinsky nor his forward-thinking artist kin were the first to create or even conceive of an abstract artwork. Abstract images were already in existence, but in the form of literature as opposed to physical art. Falling outside the frame of art history’s mythic account are three such literary origin stories that comprise the collective subject of this book. Their narrative reveals abstract art as first emergent in the words and from the minds of three nineteenth-century German authors: Heinrich von Kleist in 1810, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1821, and Gottfried Keller in 1855.

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Inventing Abstraction: Chapter Summary The six chapters in this book alternate between literature and art. The literary chapters (1, 3, 5) move chronologically through the nineteenth century to present three instances of abstract art from three different pretwentieth century texts. Assuming a greater art historical perspective, the even-numbered chapters (2 ,4, 6) connect the three nineteenth-century literary births of abstraction to their closest twentieth-century relatives by exploring affinities and discrepancies with existing artworks between the two media. Given that paintings abstract from reality in a variety of manners and thus constitute abstract art in different ways to different audiences, I use the terms abstract and abstract art here to describe artworks whose content does not originate with or appear to refer to objects of the material world. Instead, abstract artworks rely on shapes, colors, and gestural forms to create aesthetic effects. When articulating “how” and “why” an artwork, artist, or approach might abstract from reality, I specify the certain mode, register, or type of abstraction. From this foundational definition of abstraction, I advance three different modes through the texts and images of the ensuing six chapters. Chapter 1 discovers how the struggle to represent the sublime, an incalculable und unknowable greatness, results in an image devoid of content when a radical loss of frames brings forth an apocalyptic emptiness. I argue that this form of abstract art, the empty image, first appears in the early nineteenth century, more specifically in the 1810 article “Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft” (“Sensations before Friedrich’s Seascape”) by Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811). In the short prose piece, the author issues a response to the initial exhibition of Caspar David Friedrich’s Der Mönch am Meer (The Monk by the Sea, 1808–10). For Kleist, Friedrich’s strivings to evoke the sublime in the picture are exhilarating but also agonizing; he laments that the artist can only go so far when constrained within the framework of Western illusionism. To breach the limitations imposed on Friedrich’s nonabstract image, Kleist reimagines and narratively represents Der Mönch am Meer in a manner that is abstract. In considering and then transcending the perceived inadequacies of the traditional framework instituted by Western illusionism, the author reveals the need for an alternate mode of aesthetic expression and awakens this awareness in the mind of the reader as well. To discover when the world was ready for Kleist’s sublime apocalypse, chapter 2 turns to the visual arts to locate twentieth-century modes of abstraction that best reflect the optical affect and the philosophical desires articulated by the author. Whereas nineteenth-century representations of sublimity in the visual arts were inhibited by the constraints set by artistic and institutional frameworks, the supremacist squares of Kazimir

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Malevich (1878–1935), the floating rectangles of Mark Rothko (1903– 70), and the monumental monochrome canvases of Barnet Newman (1905–70) deframed art along with the conceptual thinking underpinning its creation. It took unprecedented failures of reason akin to the sort of traumatic ruptures in Kleist’s literature for the fragility and mutability of existing orders to be exposed before the search for previously and unthinkably different modes of expression would be initiated. In chapter 3, I turn my attention to the creation of an audience willing and able to engage with abstract art. Here, scientific inquiry merges with aesthetic play to give birth to a new type of spectator who draws on sensory organs and cognitive faculties to assume greater responsibility and therefore subjectivity in aesthetic encounters. In this moment, abstract art becomes theoretically possible, because it initiates what I call a “clouding of perception”: the mode of viewing necessary for appreciating and engaging with an objectless art. This moment takes shape among the modulations of clouds as portrayed in the 1821 poem “Howards Ehrengedächtnis” (“In Honor of Howard”) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). Close analysis illustrates how the lyrical life cycle of a cloud reconfigures the dynamic process of viewing developed by Goethe for scientific observation in his earlier texts on optics and morphology. When the scientific gaze as theorized by Goethe is redeployed for aesthetic pleasure, the result is a “clouding of perception,” a radical mode of viewing that asks the audience to actively participate in the production of their own aesthetic experience. Chapter 4 ventures deeper into the realm of science and its influence on artistic innovation to explore the real and theoretical implications of the “clouded” perception derived from my analysis of Goethe’s poetry and morphological studies. Connecting Goethe’s clouds to scientific insights into meteorology, optics, and the physiology of the eye, I consider artists and approaches that created scientifically informed optical effects for the spectator: Romantic landscapists like John Constable (1776–1837) and J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851); impressionists like Monet (1840–1926); and pointillists such as Seurat (1859–91). However, while such artists thematize optical perception, they do not engage the spectator’s cognitive faculty in the manner described by Goethe. Instead, the potential for abstract art ultimately exists in the eye of the beholder, as a close reading of Kandinsky’s narrative retelling of his storied first encounter with Monet’s Haystacks reveals. Here, I explore the extent to which the artist may have experienced a “clouding of perception” before Monet’s painting, an event famously credited for helping to bring about abstract art. That the audience is ready to receive a new type of artwork does not guarantee that the painter is prepared to produce it. Chapter 5 focuses on the psychology of the artist and the problem of portraying inner states of being and feeling without visual or verbal correlative. The most significant

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case in point emerges in the mid-nineteenth century from Swiss author Gottfried Keller (1819–90) in his semiautobiographical Bildungsroman Der grüne Heinrich (Green Henry), first published in 1850–55 and again in 1879. In both editions, the protagonist, a failing landscape artist, produces a colossal scrawl when subconscious drives, desires, and emotions usually unfit for social expression find release on canvas. The result is a mode of abstract art characterized by an excess of expression and a presentation that results in a chaotic nonrepresentation. Unfortunately, Heinrich’s invention is quickly destroyed by critics because the artist does not act to defend its integrity as art. The death of the scrawl was not inevitable, as is revealed in another, non-German literary example of abstract art in the 1831 short story, “The Unknown Masterpiece” (“Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu”), by Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850). Through comparative analysis of these fictional artists and their fictional artworks, I argue that the self-awareness of the artist is a necessary component for the type of abstract painting that would come a half century after the initial publication of Keller’s novel. Finally, chapter 6 considers how mental states and the search for authentic humanity drove three unique artist personalities in the twentieth century to produce their own abstract works of chaotic nonrepresentation, including those resembling giant scrawls. Beginning with Paul Klee (1879–1940), the chapter traces the evolution of the abstract use of line in art as it winds its way through the surrealist automatism of André Masson (1896–1987) and the irreverent scribbles of Cy Twombly (1928– 2011). Their efforts to access the unconscious and to unleash primal feeling through unruly line are highly indebted to the discovery of the human unconscious as a scientific object and an agent of aesthetic expression. Directly or indirectly inspiring these artists were Sigmund Freud’s development of psychoanalysis and clinical use of automatic drawing, in addition to his reevaluation of the artwork of populations outside the margins of society: so-called “primitive” peoples, children, and the clinically insane. Both phenomena provided intellectual and scientific justification for the universality of creative power and its most immediate expression in the abstract line. The epilogue considers the role of literature in the post-1911 life of abstract art by revisiting the central issue addressed by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81) in his pivotal tract Laokoon (1766): to what extent the sister arts of visual art and literature should intertwine or be held separate. Indeed, my thesis challenges those who bemoan the literary adulteration of the visual arts and who rely on Lessing’s insistence on medial integrity to define abstract art and even art itself. Engaging with a selection of twentieth-century critics, I approach the “problem” of the confusion of the arts as an aperture for cross-medial exchange that furthers the expressive possibilities of both. As this book demonstrates with the

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case of abstract art, an instrumental force and a transformative power in the activity of art have been and continue to be literature, and the bond between the sister arts is necessary for the advancement, if not the survival, of each.

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Reading Abstraction: A User’s Manual The chapters of this book are best understood as complementary pairs, each dyad devoted to a specific strain of abstraction and a particular condition necessary for the emergence of that strain of abstract art in painting. That being said, the organization of the book and the choices made for its construction do not dictate that chapters be read in order of appearance from start to finish or at all. In consideration of readers approaching this book from a range of backgrounds and for a variety of reasons, chapters or chapter pairs do not continue a progressive line of argumentation or assume an accumulation of knowledge that would hinder those wishing to skip ahead or target areas of greater interest. Those more interested in art history or less interested in German literature or close literary analysis, for example, can focus on these chapters and vice versa. Even-numbered (i.e., art historical) chapters summarize the results and arguments from the preceding literary analyses that will be most beneficial and important for moving forward with the artworks at issue. Prior knowledge of German is not essential although it is recommended, mainly for the odd-numbered chapters (i.e., the literary analyses). When close literary analysis is the touchstone of the chapter, the language integrated into the body of my text is German. When not, as is typically the case in the even-numbered chapters, I mainly use English translations in my text to facilitate those without reading knowledge of German. Translations are provided for all German texts, excerpts, and citations. I do not assume intimate or immediate familiarity with the many authors, artists, philosophers, critics, scholars, curators, artworks, or publications mentioned in this book. When important personages and the titles of publications and artworks are initially mentioned, I provide dates and a brief explanatory orientation as a courtesy for readers less familiar with the instance at hand. Given the wide range of dates, genres, media, people, and themes highlighted in this book, I am unable to venture down every path, pull every thread, and fall down every rabbit hole—pick your metaphor of choice—encountered along the way. Consistency in terminology has been attempted, although it has not always been made easy. Several synonyms are commonly invoked to describe abstraction or to replace the word abstract: nonobjective, nonrepresentational, nonrealistic, nonmimetic, nonfigurative, nonphysical, nonillusionistic, nonmaterial, immaterial, unnatural, unnaturalistic. Removing the prefix “non” from the constituents of the above list results

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20 I  ntroduction: The Many Origins of Abstract Art

in an equally robust repertoire of descriptors and their nomial permutations overlapping within the semantic field for nonabstraction—that is, realism. The most prevalent are objective, representational, mimetic, figurative, and naturalistic. Realism is generally understood to characterize an art in the service of naturalism. That is to say, the intention of the artist is to reproduce or start from tangible or physical objects encountered in the natural world. Traditionally, this has demanded faithfulness to the principles of Western illusionism (the conventional “rules of artistic production”). Through most of art history, painting was valued according to its mimetic exactitude or its ability to represent the content of the world as it appears and would be experienced in lived reality. Yet a painting or another artistic modality can abstract from reality in diverse ways to diverse degrees and for diverse reasons. Consequently, no unified or standard verbiage encompasses the manifold conceptualizations of what it could mean to be abstract. A surrealist rendering of melting pocket watches or tigers leaping from pomegranates could be mimetically exacting and so meet the formal criteria for realism, and yet be considered abstract in terms of content. Then again, not all would deem the chaotically dissolute geometry of a cubist artwork abstract because its planar exploration commences from the objective world—despite the final unrecognizability of the initial object.26 To further complicate the issue, artists have their own preferences, nomenclatures, and connotations to express how their art abstracts or whether it abstracts at all. To be sure, one artist’s abstraction is another artist’s anathema.27 Even if applicable only within the argumentation of one section, I adopt the vocabulary of the individual artists, especially as their own words become instrumental in understanding their approach and aesthetic. One final note: All literary analyses were conducted prior to the intensive art historical research necessary for my readings of the featured artworks in an attempt to avoid any undue influence of developments, art historical or otherwise, occurring after the times in which Kleist, Goethe, and Keller published their respective works. All close readings of texts and artworks are my own, carried out prior to any consultation with secondary scholarship. Approaching each text and each artwork with a “naïve” eye and mind, so to speak, was intended to ensure that any and all conclusions arose from the text or artwork itself, and not according to any potentially preformulated thesis. The paths, threads, and rabbit holes that 26 Such was the stance of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), who reasoned in a 1935 interview: “There is no abstract art. You must always start with something.” Quoted in Bois, “Pablo Picasso: The Cadaqués Experiment,” 40. 27 As would be expected, a similar lack of terminological unity also afflicts the writings of art historians, critics, and theoreticians.

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are pursued more fully in this book are done so as they naturally arose and as they proved germane if not imperative to the contexts of the authors, artists, and works at issue. The artists and artworks discussed in the even-numbered chapters were selected because they best approximated the modes of abstraction extracted from my literary analyses in terms of formal appearance and philosophical motivation, what typically is not immediately evident if at all. For this reason, an artist like Alexander Rodchenko (1891–1956) does not enter into this volume. His black square might not visually appear so dissimilar from the black square by Malevich encountered in chapter 2, but each artist arrived at their squares through alternate routes and for divergent reasons. Whereas Rodchenko emphasizes the physical, material properties of painting to reduce his art to the sum of its tangible parts, Malevich’s nonobjective supremacism does something radically different and more in line with the mode of abstraction envisaged by Kleist. But to understand that, you’ll have to read this book.

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1: Apocalypse Now: Heinrich von Kleist’s Sublime Deframing of Caspar David Friedrich’s Der Mönch am Meer (1810)

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ll art is an abstraction from reality, whether in cave paintings or in naturalist depictions of the perceptual world. However, not all art is an abstraction in service of reality. While some artworks encourage or provoke onlookers to reflect on this discrepancy, others tend to lead its observers to forget it. Some works of art even lead later observers to see its abstract moments where contemporaries did not, and vice versa. Thus, to ascribe “the” discovery or invention of abstract art to any specific artwork or artist would be irresponsible or at the very least problematic. Nevertheless, examining how onlookers of art have perceived its abstract moments remains quite fascinating and relevant not only to our understanding of art but to literature as well. Written documents by critics, connoisseurs, and philosophers form their own history, many histories even, of reflections about abstraction in art, each opening specific registers of abstraction. This chapter will feature one such written reflection and the distinct form of abstraction it engenders. The choice of this particular written reflection is neither arbitrary nor unfounded. Although it existed prior to Kandinsky, it augments one of the multiple lineages of abstraction in the visual arts that will lead to and beyond Kandinsky and his kin—namely, those artists who initially realized the promise of nineteenth-century literary imaginings of abstract art by physically creating abstract artworks in the twentieth century. Yet this unpainted birth moment of abstract art did arise from an artwork, one that, though still attempting to portray reality, did so in a manner so abstracted that it provoked the conceptual shift in a critical viewer. The artwork is Der Mönch am Meer (The Monk by the Sea) by Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840); its critical viewer was Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811). This early imagining of abstract art finds expression through narrative form in the words of Kleist and his 1810 commentary “Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft” (“Sensations before Friedrich’s Seascape”). Kleist’s short piece is perhaps the most famous reaction to a controversial artwork that created a stir in its audacious flouting of tradition and convention. For all its inherent radicality and despite its departure from mimetic representation, Der Mönch am Meer as painted by Friedrich never

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Figure 1.1. Caspar David Friedrich, Der Mönch am Meer (The Monk by the Sea), c. 1808–10. Oil on canvas, 43.3 x 67.5 in. (110 x 171.5 cm). Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Photo Credit: bpk Bildagentur / Alte Nationalgalerie / Andres Kilger. Reproduced with permission from Art Resource, New York.

fully makes the jump to abstract art as such.1 Rather, Der Mönch am Meer as reimagined by Kleist breaches the threshold of abstraction, constituting a vision of nonrepresentational art nearly a century prior to its purported existence. The author’s struggles to represent the incalculable and unknowable greatness of the sublime opens a new register of abstraction for the visual arts and a concept of the sublime distinctive from the model associated with Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Descriptive of both an aesthetic object and the subjective feeling elicited by it, the Kleistian sublime does not affirm human cognitive capacity to triumph over empirical limitations but viciously subjugates the eye through the violent removal of its defenses against the emptiness at the end of the objective world. At the same time, it leads the spectator to discover a hitherto unoffered measure 1 On Friedrich as precursor to modern art, see Bridgwater, “Friedrichian Images in Expressionist Art,” 103–28; Börsch-Supan, Caspar David Friedrich; Hilda M. Brown, “Zwischen Erde und Himmel,” 157–66; Jähnig, Caspar David Friedrich. Gemälde, Druckgraphik und bildmäßige Zeichnungen; Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape; Phillip B. Miller, “Anxiety and Abstraction: Kleist and Brentano on Caspar David Friedrich,” 205–10; Morgan, “The Enchantment of Art: Abstraction and Empathy from German Romanticism to Expressionism,” 317–41; Pöpperl, Auf der Schwelle; Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition; and Sumowski, Caspar David Friedrich—Studien.

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of subjective freedom and aesthetic autonomy. In recognizing and then transcending the inadequacies of the traditional framework instituted by Western illusionism, the author reveals the need for an alternate mode of aesthetic expression and awakens this awareness in the mind of the reader as well. Thus, what Friedrich anticipates with visual image, Kleist describes in written text.

The Lone Man and the Sea: Friedrich Radically Reframes Art

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For an early nineteenth-century painting, Friedrich’s Der Mönch am Meer (fig. 1.1) is many things: reductive, monochromatic, spatially flat, even avant-garde.2 It is not, however, abstract.3 The objects on canvas are quite banal; the spectator observes exactly what the title suggests. From the horizontal strips of sea, sand, and sky to the lone figure of the monk, the artwork consists solely of recognizable elements transcribed from the natural world but recombined to represent the painter’s version of our given reality. That scholars commonly accept the figure of the monk as one of Friedrich’s self-portraits further anchors the painting in the perceptual world.4 While those with twenty-first-century perspectives might 2 Innovative qualities of Der Mönch am Meer are discussed in Begemann, “Brentano und Kleist vor Friedrichs Mönch am Meer,” 54–95; Börsch-Supan, Caspar David Friedrich, 79–85; Hilda M. Brown “Zwischen Erde und Himmel”; Grave, Caspar David Friedrich, 142–69; Hofmann, Caspar David Friedrich, 55–82; Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape, 142–46; Lankheit, “Die Frühromantik und die Grundlagen der gegenstandslosen Malerei,” 45–99; Phillip B. Miller, “Anxiety and Abstraction: Kleist and Brentano on Caspar David Friedrich”; Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition, 10–30; Schmied, Caspar David Friedrich, 62–64; and Zeeb, “Kleist, Kant und / mit Paul de Man,” 299–336. 3 Sumowski, Caspar David Friedrich—Studien, Phillip B. Miller, “Anxiety and Abstraction: Kleist and Brentano on Caspar David Friedrich”; Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape; and Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition, point to Friedrich as only prefiguring abstract art. 4 See Amstutz, “Caspar David Friedrich and the Aesthetics of Community,” 447–75; Börsch-Supan, “Caspar David Friedrich’s Landscapes with SelfPortraits,” 620–30; Busch, Caspar David Friedrich. Ästhetik und Religion; Haladyn, “Friedrich’s Wanderer: The Paradox of the Modern Subject,” 47–61; Hofmann, Caspar David Friedrich, 56–58; Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape, 89; Waldheim, Kunstbeschreibungen in Ausstellungsräumen um 1800, 174; and Reinhard Zimmermann, “Das Geheimnis des Grabes und der Zukunft,” 187–257. Börsch-Supan credits himself as the first person to identify the monk as a self-portrait: “the thick fair hair, the sprouting beard, the

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wonder how an ostensibly simple seascape caused so much irritation and such inspiration, within the context of nineteenth-century landscape painting, the most innovative aspects of Der Mönch am Meer were also its most subversive insofar as they widened the horizons of what art could express and how it could appear.5 Friedrich executed Der Mönch am Meer at a moment when the middleaged artist’s career was finally on the rise. After celebrating his first success five years earlier in Weimar where he received a prize from Goethe, his name garnered even greater exposure in 1808 when his Tetschen Altarpiece, commonly known as Das Kreuz im Gebirge (The Cross in the Mountains), stirred widespread controversy over the current state and future direction of landscape painting.6 The exhibition of Der Mönch am Meer and its pendant piece Abtei im Eichwald (Abbey in the Oakwood, 1809/1810), at the Berlin Academy in 1810 further developed his notorious reputation.7 Although the paintings comprised the largest and most unconventional landscapes to date, they nevertheless secured Friedrich entry into the Academy of Art when the Prussian crown prince, the future round-shaped skull and the gaunt stature are features of Friedrich’s appearance as it is known from authenticated portraits and written descriptions” (“Landscapes,” 624). Reinhard Zimmermann questions the identity of the monk, given that Brentano first uses the term “Kapuziner” and no existing evidence has Friedrich naming the figure as such (“Das Geheimnis des Grabes und der Zukunft,” 226–27). X-ray imaging led Busch to confirms the monk’s robe as a later addition (Ästhetik und Religion, 59–64). 5 Prevailing attitudes toward art in Friedrich’s time are surveyed by BörschSupan, “Berlin 1810,” 52–75. 6 Goethe’s opinion of Friedrich’s work deteriorated as the poet’s stance against Romanticism became more unforgiving in his later years. First lauding the painter for images of rare and unusual perfection, he later deemed his work better smashed against the edge of a table. The two men met twice: in Dresden at Friedrich’s studio in September 1810 and in June 1811 in Jena. See Hermand, Grüne Klassik, 70, 93–99, 104–7; and Schmied, Caspar David Friedrich, 43–44. Countess Theresia von Thun-Hohenstein originally commissioned the work for her family’s chapel in Tetschen, Bohemia. Yet, as was discovered in 1977, the artist already had the piece envisioned as a homage to King Gustav IV Adolf of Sweden (deposed in 1808), a man whose Protestant ideals and anti-Napoleon stance aligned with Friedrich’s own. The Thun-Hohensteins objected both to the painting’s original intention as well as its price and format. Although vowing never to display it in the chapel or the castle, the family bought it in 1809 for the countess’s bedroom, its home until 1921. See Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape, 59–61 and Praeger, “Kant in Caspar David Friedrich’s Frames,” 68–86. 7 Organized by the Royal Prussian Academy of Arts, the exhibition opened on September 23, 1810, featuring 369 works from famous and lesser-known artists alike. It took place on Unter den Linden in the former royal stables.

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King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, purchased the two for a then handsome sum of 450 taler.8 That his membership came down to a narrow vote of five to four attests to the divisive nature of an artist whose career was similarly marked by conflicting opinions and periods that vacillated between eminence and irrelevance owing to the turning tides of public tastes.9 The originality and individuality that propelled him to popularity in 1809 was passé by the time of his death in 1840. The artist’s fortunes would again reverse after a 1906 retrospective exhibition in Berlin launched him back into public consciousness—henceforth to be celebrated as a harbinger of modernity too progressive for his times.10 Indeed, for an era dominated by normative precepts of classical landscape painting, Der Mönch am Meer proved quite extraordinary in its defiance of traditional expectations.11 Largely governed by French and British discourses, classical landscape art found its most esteemed representations in the canvases of Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) and Claude Lorrain (1600– 1682). Their work dutifully reflected the precepts of the genre as would be prescribed in formative texts like Brook Taylor’s Linear Perspective (1715) and J. H. Pott’s An Essay on Landscape Painting (1782).12 Above all, these 8 Börsch-Supan, “Berlin 1810”; Grave, Caspar David Friedrich, 145; Rühse, “dies wunderbare Gemählde,” 238–55, 253; Schmied, Caspar David Friedrich, 44; and Waldheim, Kunstbeschreibungen in Ausstellungsräumen um 1800, 162–66. 9 Once hailed as a “brilliant oddity,” the “most imaginative landscape painter of [the] time,” and even “among the greatest landscape painters who ever lived,” Friedrich had fallen so far into obscurity when he died that even obituaries had to remind readers who he had once been: “This artist caused something of a stir about thirty years ago, for in a total departure from the accepted style of that time he was the first to imbue landscape with emotional and allegorical significance. It was a great pity that with his gloomy melancholy he later became too one-sided” (Quoted in Schmied, Caspar David Friedrich, 11, 12, 13). Friedrich was partly paralyzed in 1835 by a stroke, which inhibited his ability to paint. Accounts from visitors such as painters Wilhelm von Kügelgen (1802–67) and Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869) describe Friedrich in poor health and spirits before his death on May 7, 1840. See Hofmann, Caspar David Friedrich, 15–36; Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape, 75–79; and Schmied, Caspar David Friedrich, 9–18 for overviews of contemporary reactions and later rediscoveries of his work. 10 Cf. Börsch-Supan, Caspar David Friedrich, 31; Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape, 78; Schmied, Caspar David Friedrich, 18–20; Waldheim, Kunstbeschreibungen in Ausstellungsräumen um 1800, 168. 11 Cf. Schmied, who classifies Der Mönch am Meer as “the most radical picture Friedrich ever painted. In no other work did he break so violently with traditional notions of landscape painting” (Caspar David Friedrich, 62). 12 Taylor’s Linear Perspective and New Principles of Linear Perspective (1719) are widely considered to be the most important works on perspective from the period. See de Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime, 187.

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Figure 1.2. Claude Lorrain, Seaport, Effects of Fog (Embarkation of Ulysses), c. 1646. Oil on canvas, 46.8 x 59 in. (119 x 150 cm). Musée du Louvre, Paris, France. © RMN-Grand Palais. Reproduced with permission from Art Resource, New York.

required that a painting adhere to the rules of linear perspective that had been ascendant since the Renaissance and that sought to perfect the representation of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. As was outlined in Taylor’s handbook, the gifted artist would paint with such mathematical precision and technical exactitude so as to create the optical illusion of looking through the transparent surface of a window.13 Like the window frame, the edges of a canvas determine the limits of the landscape and the world unfolding recessively within its bounds. For example, Lorrain’s 1646 seascape Seaport, Fog Effect (fig. 1.2) coordinates the positioning and sizing of pictorial elements in proportion to a carefully plotted system of lines that converge at the painting’s center vanishing point. Buildings and natural formations flanking the frame to the left and right shrink into a seemingly distant background where thinner applications of paint contribute to the effect. Chiaroscuro, the use of light and shadow, imitates the impression of a light source shining from the back of the painting that radiates outward 13 De Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime, 188.

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over the water up to the darkened foreground. So as not to dispel the illusion or irritate the eye, Lorrain layers the oil paint in translucent glazes for a smooth surface in a manner that is akin to the transparent glass of a windowpane. Artful staging regulates the painting’s viewing by arranging the objects on canvas in order to direct the spectator’s eye to a preconceived entry point and lead it through the interior pictorial space. Figures interspersed throughout the protruding foreground and the receding middle ground provide the eye brief resting points on its journey and imply narrative action. In this regard, the classical landscape negotiates a paradoxical tension of naturalism (window vista) and the artifice (theatrical stage). Der Mönch am Meer dismantles both frameworks of window and theater. While Friedrich does not fully break with the codified habits of Western illusionism or outright reject the transcription of recognizable objects, he does upend conventional orders by drastically departing from them.14 Yet it is in this departure that the abstracted, but not abstract, quality of his work lies. The artist initiates the move away from the objective world by emptying his canvas of objects themselves. Where nineteenth-century audiences were accustomed to groupings of precisely transcribed and readily recognizable figures strategically positioned to guide the spectator through the painting, Friedrich removes such visual cues by dissolving and even outright obliterating forms, a process already manifest in his 1807 Meeresstrand im Nebel (Sea beach in the fog, fig. 1.3) and the 1808 Morgennebel im Gebirge (Morning Mist in the Mountains). The former depicts two boats hovering just offshore, barely visible behind a thick blanket of mist. Friedrich plays with themes of departure in terms of content and style: as the ships disappear from shore, they also disappear from the spectator’s sight, lost in the nebulous expanse eating into the picture’s middle ground.15 Unlike in the case of the sharply focused foreground of thin, rocky beach, here the eye strains to discern any outline of ship through the uncertain curtain of vapor. Similarly, the conical solidity of the mountain towering up the middle axis of Morgennebel im Gebirge dematerializes into the impenetrable morning mist so completely at points that its fragmented outcroppings and evergreen spires appear to float, freed from terrestrial mooring, in the heavens. Enveloped by dense cloud coverage, the physical world is 14 On traditional landscape painting and its visual consumption, see Begemann, “Brentano und Kleist vor Friedrichs Mönch am Meer,” 67–71; de Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime, 186–222; Fried, Absorption and Theatricality; Hofmann, Caspar David Friedrich, 21–22; Maisak, “`Caspar David Friedrich und Claude Lorrain,” 123–29; and Praeger, “Kant in Caspar David Friedrich’s Frames,” 71–77. 15 Both Börsch-Supan (Caspar David Friedrich, 68–69) and Koerner (Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape, 100–112) read the painting as a meditation on death.

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Figure 1.3. Caspar David Friedrich, Meeresstrand im Nebel (Sea Beach in the Fog), c. 1807. Oil on canvas, 13.5 x 19.8 in. (34.2 x 50.2 cm). Belvedere, Vienna. © Belvedere, Vienna.

crowded out of the canvas to be supplanted by pictorial elements without objecthood. In this, “Friedrich’s works differ noticeably from those of all other landscape painters,” as Johanna Schopenhauer (1766–1838) commented after an 1810 visit to the artist’s studio. “The air, which he handles masterfully,” she continues, “takes up much more than half the space in most of his paintings, and frequently a middle ground and background are altogether lacking, because he chooses subjects in which there are none to depict.”16 Schopenhauer is not quite correct; Friedrich has a subject matter, only one that unexpectedly prioritizes the ethereal over the material. With the “Gebirge” in the title largely absent from the canvas, we realize that the true subject of the painting is not the mountain but the air enveloping around it. In this way, Friedrich builds up multiple layers of paint over the objects until a wall of fog very nearly conceals their forms. However, not until the completion of Der Mönch am Meer is this dissolution fully 16 Quoted in Schmied, Caspar David Friedrich, 60. “Friedrichs Arbeiten unterscheiden sich besonders durch die Wahl der Gegenstände auffallend von denen aller anderen Landschaftsmaler. Die Luft, die er aber meisterhaft zu behandeln weiß, nimmt bei den meisten seiner Gemälde weit über die Hälfte des Raumes ein, und oft fehlen die Mittel- und Hintergründe ganz, weil er Gegenstände wählt, bei denen keine darzustellen sind.”

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realized. Eyewitness accounts, together with recent X-rays, provide evidence that Friedrich had originally included sailing ships and astral bodies.17 Over the course of several revisions, he deliberately expunged these objects from the picture until the monk stood alone amid the topographical trinity of sand, sea, and sky.18 The systematic erasure of all distraction other than this skeletal framework empties the central space of the canvas. This maneuver in turn advances the creation of a new object—namely, the central space of the canvas. Such unfettered emptiness awakened a horror vacui for contemporaneous viewers unaccustomed to so much lack in their landscapes. On seeing a later reworking of the painting in Friedrich’s studio in 1809, Marie Helene von Kügelgen, in a letter dated June 22 of that year, describes its lack of appeal: It shows a wide, endless expanse of sky; under it a stormy sea, and in the foreground a strip of white sand, along which the darkly shrouded figure of a hermit is creeping. . . . There is no storm, no sun, no moon, and no thunder. Yes, even a thunderstorm would be consolation and pleasure, for then one would at least see some kind of movement and life. For there is no boat or ship, indeed not even a sea monster to be seen on the endless sea. And in the sand there is not even one blade of grass. Nothing but a few seagulls flitting around, which makes the loneliness of the scene all the more grim and desolate.19

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Von Kügelgen’s wish for a stormy sky would eventually be realized in the final version, yet her comments, which were meant as a form of rebuke, nonetheless confirm the artist’s success in engendering what was likely the 17 See Börsch-Supan, “Bemerkungen zu Caspar David Friedrichs ‘Mönch am Meer,’” 63–76; and Busch, Ästhetik und Religion, 49–55. 18 Jena publisher Karl Friedrich Frommann described the painting in a diary entry dated September 24, 1810, with a fourth-quarter moon and morning star over the Baltic, while X-rays reveal two ships on each side of the monk. The moon, star, and sailing vessels were painted over by Friedrich before the 1810 exhibition. See Börsch-Supan, Caspar David Friedrich, 82. 19 Von Kügelgen in a letter to her friend Friederike Volkmann, quoted in Börsch-Supan, Caspar David Friedrich, 79.“Ein großes Ölbild sah ich auch, welches meine Seele gar nicht anspricht. Ein weiter, unendlicher Luftraum. Darunter das unruhige Meer und im Vordergrunde ein Streifen helles Sandes, wo ein dunkel gekleidetes Eremit umherschleicht . . . kein Sturm, keine Sonne, kein Mond, kein Gewitter—ja, ein Gewitter wäre mir ein Trost und ein Genuß, dann sähe man doch Leben und Bewegung irgendwo. Auf der ewigen Meeresfläche sieht man kein Boot, kein Schiff, nicht einmal ein Seeungeheuer, und in dem Sande auch nicht ein grüner Halm. Nur einige Möwen flattern umher und machen die Einsamkeit noch einsamer und größer.” The original is available in Frank, Aussichten ins Unermessliche, 85.

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purposeful horror of the spatial vacuum. Unlike the way that the staffage is conscientiously deployed in Lorrain’s seaport, here Friedrich supplies the eye with no such orientation, points of repose, or items of narrative or contemplative interest. The presence of this absence is further enhanced through the artist’s disruption of conventional compositional structure, linear perspective, and scale.20 Such tactics had already brought Friedrich to the public’s attention just a year earlier, when conservative art critic Basilius von Ramdohr (1757–1822) printed a vitriolic critique of Das Kreuz im Gebirge for its lack of spatial unity, illogical aerial perspective, and general offense against the rules of optics.21 The so-called “Ramdohr dispute” did not discourage Friedrich from taking more extreme liberties with formal principles of the art world in Der Mönch am Meer, which actively works to dispel the very principles touted by the art critic and his ilk. Rather than enclose the painting with trees, buildings, or other outstanding figures that would push the eye toward the central scene and increase the sense of depth, Friedrich’s framing strategy consists of the platform of sand running along the bottom. This natural border is paralleled by the horizon line, which, though traditionally hovering at or above eyelevel, plunges downward under the weight of the sprawling sky. With no repoussoir to restrain the already enlarged space, the painting also has no outstanding verticals or incidental figures to interrupt its uniform horizontality. Having already expunged superfluous objects, Friedrich continues to break down forms by dissolving the natural boundary between sea and sky with heavy cloud coverage. The absence of limits and clearly defined perimeters provokes expectation and uncertainty, atmospheric effects that can be alternatively exhilarating, like in Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818), or ominous, like in Abtei im Eichwald. In Der Mönch am Meer, it is both. The dynamic dark clouds, which the artist later painted into the composition, obfuscate the abnormally low horizon line.22 At once thrilling and threatening, they 20 On absence in Romantic landscape painting, see Kuzniar, “The Vanishing Canvas,” 359–76. 21 Ramdohr condemned Friedrich’s departure from Western illusionism, the discrepancies between the painting and its frame, and the painting’s failure as allegory. On the Ramdohr dispute see Börsch-Supan, Caspar David Friedrich, 76–78; Busch, Ästhetik und Religion, 34–45; Drügh, “Präsenzen und Umwege— Kleists medienanalytische Ekphrasis,” 181–208; Hofmann, Caspar David Friedrich, 41–52; Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape, 117–26, 147–59; Praeger, “Kant in Caspar David Friedrich’s Frames,” 70–74; and Schmied, Caspar David Friedrich, 58–60. 22 Grave’s study of Friedrich’s fog reveals how the cloud effects obscured the viewer’s attempt to perceive clear meaning or signification in the artist’s work. See Grave, “Amor als romantischer Landschaftsmaler?,” 398.

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effectively merge the two layers into one immense body, thereby forming a cohesion that Friedrich intensifies with a monochromatic color palette of surging blues and grays. Collapsing the distinction between sea and sky also robs the composition of its middle ground, a dearth censured by Ramdohr in his polemic against the altarpiece. As in Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer and Kreidefelsen auf Rügen (Chalk Cliffs on Rügen, fig. 1.4) Friedrich foregoes, from 1818, the orderly succession of background layers that, according to the conventions of Western perspective, should gradually recede into the painting. Foreground is placed directly adjacent to background, creating a bold juxtaposition made even more visually jarring through color contrast, which is especially egregious in the stacking of vertical planes in Kreidefelsen auf Rügen.23 Although the artist features what scholars cite as an actual geographic location on the eponymous German Baltic island, his presentation of its vista is as optically unrealistic and unsettlingly twodimensional as the crucifix-crowned mountain maligned by Ramdohr.24 To bring the back of the picture in contact with the front, Friedrich raises the horizon line, along with the height of the cliffs, and drags the chalky precipice up to the bottom edge of the canvas to verge on the spectator’s space. Consequently, the composition traps the spectator’s gaze between the cliff walls and beneath the overarching trees, funneling the eye downward into the jagged jawline of white rock. This draws attention to the absence of a middle field when the spectator perceives the white cliffs in the foreground abutting without gradual transition the blue background. The panel of sea seems at once claustrophobically close and still far apart from the foreground. Similarly, the thin band of pale sand in Der Mönch am Meer, appears infinitely disconnected from the darkness beyond, causing the painting to lose the illusion of depth and gain a flatness of space. The artist further compresses the spatial recession of the scene through a thick coat of paint that overturns the principles of aerial perspective. Whereas Lorrain lines his horizon with the thinnest glazes so that the innermost frontiers of the picture appear farthest from the viewer, Friedrich applies heavier paint at the sunken skyline. The regions, which should disappear in the distance, instead rush forward to greet the eye. The thickening brushwork, unusual for an artist typically preferring the barely there polish of 23 On the painting’s structural disruptions in Kreidefelsen, see Grave, Caspar David Friedrich. Glaubensbild und Bildkritik, 221–22; Hofmann, Caspar David Friedrich, 127–28; and Schmied, Caspar David Friedrich, 81–82. 24 Scholars disagree about the precise location of the pictured cliffs and have variously identified them as Rügen’s Klein-Stubbenkammer, the Große Stubbenkammer and the Feuerregenfelsen, the Wissower Klinken, and the Königsstuhl (Schmied, Caspar David Friedrich, 81).

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Figure 1.4. Caspar David Friedrich, Kreidefelsen auf Rügen (Chalk Cliffs on Rügen), c. 1818. Oil on canvas, 35.4 x 27.6 in. (90 x 70 cm). Found in the collection of Museum Oskar Reinhart, Winterthur. Reproduced with permission from HIP / Art Resource, New York.

Lorrain’s transparent surface, is thus both visually and physically closer to the spectator. The foreground, conversely, shares the pasty white of the unpainted canvas otherwise underneath the layers of paint. The element

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that should appear closest by perspectival law is more easily misjudged as farther away.25 What emerges is an image at odds with perceptual reality and difficult for the eye to navigate. The composition offers little structural orientation, only a multiplicity of underlying diagonals leading not to a unified vanishing point but to nowhere.26 Although drawn upward, the eye is left to wander aimlessly, trapped in the flat field of sky.27 Combined with the large scale of the painting and the narrow foreground, the general impression of interminable emptiness and limitlessness positions the vacant space as the focal point of the painting. An object in and of itself, the gaping void occupies roughly four-fifths of the picture plane, swelling into an expansive and uninterrupted field of color that presented a startling sight to nineteenth-century audiences, if von Kügelgen’s letter is any indication.28 Her unease before a desolate scene reveals how skillfully Friedrich manipulates the interrelationship between the visual disorientation and psychological discomfort elicited by extreme absence. Despite his minimalist approach, Friedrich has not cleared the canvas only to leave it devoid of content. He is just not the one to supply it. As is evident from his own writings about this painting, the artist sets the empty stage by assembling a framework of forms from the objective world:

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Es ist nemlich ein Seestük, vorne ein öder sandiger Strand, dann, das bewegte Meer, und so die Luft. Am Strande geht tiefsinnig ein Mann, im schwarzen Gewande; Möfen fliegen ängstlich schreiend um ihn her, als wollten sie ihn warnen, sich nicht auf ungestümen Meer zu wagen.29 25 Cf. Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape, 143. 26 Busch asserts the complete absence of an ordering schema; see Busch, “Unmittelbares Naturstudium und mathematische Abstraktion bei Caspar David Friedrich,” 23. Waldheim conducts an extensive study of the artist’s disruption of space in Der Mönch am Meer, including a review of outstanding scholarship on the topic (Kunstbeschreibungen in Ausstellungsräumen um 1800, 174–75). 27 Ralph Köhnen characterizes the lack of centralized perspective as an “allover Perspective,” owing to its complete decentralization (Das optische Wissen, 294). 28 Phillip B. Miller proposes that this may have been the first painting to feature an ocean without vessels (“Anxiety and Abstraction: Kleist and Brentano on Caspar David Friedrich,” 207). 29 All Friedrich citations are quoted in Börsch-Supan, “Berlin 1810,” 74. All English-language translations of Friedrich are my own. Reinhard Zimmermann emphasizes the importance of Friedrich’s written thoughts for the development of his aesthetics and employs the term “Bildgedanken” (picture-contemplations) to refer to these writings, differentiating them from mere “Beschreibungen” (descriptions). Friedrich often stressed “die Relevanz von ‘Gedanken’ als

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[It is a seascape, to be specific, in the foreground a barren, sandy shore, then, the restless sea, and the skies. A contemplative man in black robes goes along the shore; gulls fly around him crying anxiously, as if they wanted to warn him, not to venture out into the tumultuous ocean.]

With simple words and a forthright manner, Friedrich sketches the basic premise of the seascape and the objects it contains. However, this objective description precipitates a subjective turn, as the artist abruptly changes tone: Dies war die Beschreibung, nun kommen die Gedanken: Und sännest du auch vom Morgen bis zum Abend, vom Abend bis zur sinkenden Mitternacht; dennoch würdest du nicht ersinnen, nicht ergründen, das unerforschliche Jenseits! Mit übermüthigem Dünkel, erwegst du . . . zu enträtseln der Zukunft Dunkelheit! . . . Tief zwar sind deine Fußstapfen am öden sandigen Strandte; doch ein leiser Wind weht darüber hin, und deine Spuhr wird nicht mehr gesehen: Thörichter Mensch voll eitlem Dünkel!—

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[This was the description; now my thoughts: And would you contemplate from morning until evening, from evening until dwindling midnight; you would nevertheless not conceive, not fathom the inscrutable Beyond! With wanton arrogance you would endeavor . . . to decipher the obscurity of what is to come! . . . Your footprints on the barren sandy shore are deep indeed; yet a gentle wind blows over them and your traces are seen no more: foolish man full of proud arrogance!]

Speaking as if the reader were already embedded in the scene, Friedrich addresses us, the audience (“Und sännest du,” “würdest du,” “erwegst du”), urging, almost demanding, that we walk in the monk’s sandy footprints. When looking outward, the object of our gaze would be not wind or water but a limitless expanse, too dark to discern forms and too inscrutable to fathom. Despite the futility of our efforts, the artist suggests that we, “thöricht” (foolish) and “voll eitlem Dünkel” (fool of vain conceit) would wantonly and arrogantly try anyway. Some may find this struggle uplifting and exhilarating, others humbling and demoralizing; whatever sentiments or ideas that are evoked within us and that fill this empty realm are particular to our experience. Friedrich does not dictate our reactions and cannot control our feelings but frames the empty space konstitutiver Momente eines Bildes” (the relevance of contemplations as constructive moments for a picture) (“Das Geheimnis des Grabes und der Zukunft,” 188).

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as an arena where aesthetic response happens; he subsequently calls on the spectator to fill in the blank. This same demand is occasioned by the painting through the inclusion of one of the artist’s famous Rückenfiguren.30 Not as imposing as the monumental wanderer who partly obstructs the view of the oceanic fog, the diminutive figure in Der Mönch am Meer cedes centrality to the lacuna before him but is nonetheless granted a privileged status by his location near the golden section. With his back to the audience, the monk serves as a point of identification, an implicit invitation to step into his metaphorical shoes or, in this instance, to stand in his footprints. Doing so, we become the individual on the edge of this natural frontier, confronting the mysteries of metaphysical space; and as the monk, we no longer see his figure or any other object on canvas for that matter; we only see the interminable distance of which Friedrich writes. Thus, this moment of identification preconditions the moment of abstraction. This anticipatory moment is revisited by Friedrich to varying degrees in Kreidefelsen auf Rügen and Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer, yet while both the sea and the sea of fog in these paintings are still recognizable, the dark forms beyond the monk and his sandy scaffolding deteriorate into an abstracted abyss. For a fleeting moment, the artist approaches the threshold of a new type of image that places new demands on the spectator. Yet the threshold is as far as the audience ventures. Although Friedrich’s forms are abstracted, Friedrich himself never fully departs from his constructed framework of representational objects. He indicates the possibility of abstract art, suggests what it might look and feel like, and even anticipates techniques used to achieve it; but indicating, suggesting, and anticipating are not the same as doing. As implied by the deep impressions left in the sand, the audience’s feet never leave the safety of the shore and so remain at the brink. While the promising aesthetic experience in Friedrich’s writing does not materialize when put to canvas, the departure from the painting’s abstracted forms into an autonomous abstract image still occurs. This image does not appear decades later, when the virtues of hindsight and subsequent aesthetic developments foster more favorable attitudes toward Friedrich’s work; nor does it spring from the mind of a fellow artist. 30 Gustav Carus summarizes the dominant interpretation of the Rückenfigur as the “site of identification or mediation between painting and viewer, nature and consciousness, finite and infinite” (Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape, 245–46) whereas Kroeber perceives Friedrich’s Rückenfiguren as impeding the viewer’s participation in the picture. Given the extent to which Friedrich conditions reader engagement in his writings, it is more likely that Friedrich conceived his Rückenfigur as a device to invite interaction between spectator and painting. See Karl Kroeber, “The Clarity of the Mysterious and the Obscurity of the Familiar,” 338–412.

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Instead, this vision of abstract art emerges the very same year from the imagination of Heinrich von Kleist, a writer who perceives the revolutionary potential of Friedrich’s ideas after reading the reactions to the painting’s unveiling.31 He recognizes that the artwork does not generate as evocative and absorbing an aesthetic experience as it could yet sees the emptiness of Der Mönch am Meer as a space full of possibility. In revealing one such possibility through narrative image, Kleist rips the ground out from under the spectator’s feet and plunges into an instance of abstract art well before its recognized emergence.

Brave New World: Kleist Radically Deframes Art

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On October 13, 1810, Kleist published an essayistic reflection on Friedrich’s Der Mönch am Meer under the title “Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft” (“Feelings Before Friedrich’s Seascape”) in his short-lived daily periodical, the Berliner Abendblätter.32 The article that went to print was not the original version, nor was Kleist its original author. Clemens Brentano (1778–1842), with input from Achim von Arnim (1781–1831), first wrote the text that Kleist subsequently appropriated and made so distinctively his own through drastic alterations that his colleagues’ names are irrevocably divorced from its ownership.33 In truncating Brentano’s six-page article to about 360 words, Kleist fundamentally transformed the tenor, style, and format of the piece to reorient the critical perspective taken toward Der Mönch am Meer.34 Whereas 31 It is uncertain whether Kleist viewed Friedrich’s painting firsthand before reworking Brentano’s article. Since the author makes no mention of the Berlin exhibition in his correspondences, which otherwise document his museum visits, it is unlikely that he did see the original painting (Kunstbeschreibungen in Ausstellungsräumen um 1800, 162). 32 One of the many daily and weekly ephemeral publications that were popular at the time, the Abendblätter ran for six months from October 1, 1810, to March 30, 1811. Its pages consisted of a single sheet, folded in four, and it contained a lively mixture of entertainment and political agitation by intermingling newspaper reporting and cultural criticism. Its untimely end largely stemmed from Kleist’s increasing disfavor with Prussian officials and censors, as well as his loss of exclusive rights to city police reports. See Franzel, “Kleist’s Magazines,” 487–507. 33 Whereas Kleist’s attendance at the Berlin Academy exhibition is a matter of question, Brentano and Arnim did view the original painting before penning their piece. A diary entry dated September 18, 1810, indicates that Goethe saw the painting before the exhibition in Friedrich’s atelier and wrote favorably of it (Waldheim, Kunstbeschreibungen in Ausstellungsräumen um 1800, 162, 164). 34 The original piece largely consisted of dialogic vignettes lampooning Berlin’s Bildungsbürgertum. Kleist cuts the vignettes, saving only a few sentences.

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Brentano censoriously parodies Friedrich’s unprecedentedly reductive framing, Kleist’s intervention not only reverently emphasizes the painting’s innovatory qualities, it radicalizes them further for a sublimely abstract deframing of pictorial space. Kleist’s published response to the painting is surprisingly brief and still incredibly fraught. In its few lines, “Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft” praises Friedrich’s revolutionary aesthetic, identifies the inherent limitations thereof, and then supersedes them by painting a picture, albeit figuratively, which is even more radical. The opening text places us, the viewer, right where Friedrich and his painting presumably left us, at the edge of the earth facing the boundless sea: Herrlich ist es, in einer unendlichen Einsamkeit am Meeresufer, unter trübem Himmel, auf eine unbegrenzte Wasserwüste, hinauszuschauen. Dazu gehört gleichwohl, daß man dahin gegangen sei, daß man zurück muß, daß man hinüber möchte, daß man es nicht kann, daß man alles zum Leben vermißt, und die Stimme des Lebens dennoch im Rauschen der Flut, im Wehen der Luft, im Ziehen der Wolken, dem einsamen Geschrei der Vögel vernimmt. Dazu gehört ein Anspruch, den das Herz macht, und ein Abbruch, um mich so auszudrücken, den einem die Natur tut.35

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[Splendid it is, in infinite loneliness, at the seashore, under a murky sky, to look out onto an unlimited desert of water. To this belongs, however, that one has gone there, that one must go back, that one wants to get across, that one cannot do so, that one misses everything needed to live, and yet [one] hears the voice of life in the rushing of the tide, in the wafting of the air, in the drifting of the clouds, [in] the lonely screams of the birds. To this belongs an appeal which Brentano and Arnim were displeased with the liberties taken with their essay. In a private letter dated October 14 and a public notice in the October 22 edition of the Abendblätter, Kleist issued passive-aggressive apologies to both men, whose contributions were crucial to the success of the journal (Miller, “Anxiety and Abstraction: Kleist and Brentano on Caspar David Friedrich,” 205, 207, 210). Various scholars have dissected discrepancies between the two versions. I neither supplement these treatments, nor do I consider them relevant for this discussion. The words and imagery inserted into the original version, especially the ones most significant for my analysis, were written by Kleist, and the remnants of Brentano’s satirical commentary were edited to express Kleist’s ideas and intentions. For more on Brentano’s version, see Begemann, “Brentano und Kleist vor Friedrichs Mönch am Meer”; Burwick,“Verschiedene Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft,” 33–44; Grave, Caspar David Friedrich, 157–59; Kurz, “Vor einem Bild,” 128–140; and Waldheim, Kunstbeschreibungen in Ausstellungsräumen um 1800, 161–86. 35 Kleist, “Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandshaft,” 543–44.

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the heart makes, and, to put it this way, an abruption which nature inflicts on one.]36

Absent from this initial scene is the monk. Unlike Friedrich’s description, which begins outside Der Mönch am Meer, Kleist situates the reader directly on the shores of the objective world, not remotely observing it and not as mediated by the framework of a painting. If Friedrich inserted himself into the scene as a self-portrayed monk, then Kleist executes a textual equivalent that figuratively paints himself and the reader at the limits of the earth staring out into dark, indeterminable distance. That being said, Kleist starts with neither sea, shore, nor distance, but with the sentiments evoked by the objects (“Herrlich ist es”). Using human emotion as his starting point deemphasizes the painting and focuses the essay on the sentiments before Friedrich’s seascape as literally announced by the title. Kleist inverts the original formulation (“Es ist herrlich”) penned by Brentano, who began with the impersonal pronoun “es.”37 By supplanting the empty placeholder with the splendid feeling in the author’s body, Kleist immediately proceeds from subjective experience. This takes precedence over the painting and the objective world depicted in the painting. For a reflection on a visual medium, Kleist’s essay places greater emphasis on the nonvisual aspects of the experience. One feels how “splendid it is, in infinite loneliness,” and hears “the voice of life” in the surrounding nature. Visual images, rushing tides, drifting clouds, and screaming birds enter the mind’s eye by way of the ear. Even the elements of perceptual reality listed by Kleist (shore, sky, and sea) are not exactly observable. The heavens are “trüb(e),” murky, turbid, and unclear: the sea one supposedly looks out onto (“hinausschauen”) is in actuality a desert (“Wasserwüste”); and the shore is also not in view, because the spectator stands at its frontiers (“am Meeresufer”). The sensations before the painting are elicited by its sight, yet Kleist suggests that these sensations do not depend on perceiving discernible objects when only unending murkiness and emptiness confronts the eye. The confrontation initiates another demand of sorts, an “Anspruch,” which, for Kleist, is not analogous to Friedrich’s call to the spectator to identify with the monk.38 Here, the viewer is issuing the appeal, an appeal 36 Kleist, “Feelings Before Friedrich’s Seascape,” translated by Silke-Maria Weineck from “Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft,” Berliner Abendblätter, ed. Heinrich von Kleist, p. 12, October 13, 1810. See Weineck, “Thoughts Before a Line by Kleist,” 65. 37 Cf. Rolf-Peter Janz, “Mit den Augen Kleists,” 142. 38 Börsch-Supan (Caspar David Friedrich) and Janz (“Mit den Augen”) relate the “Anspruch”/“Abbruch” tension to the Romantic concept of Sehnsucht. Begemann rightly associates the concept of “Sehnsucht” more strongly with the subject predicating Brentano’s version of the essay, while discourses of the sublime

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from the heart to cross over. In Kleist’s language, the struggle to “cross over” amounts to a question of boundaries (“daß man dahin gegangen sei,” “daß man zurück muß,” “daß man hinüber möchte”). One would like (“möchte”) to go over but must (“muß”) come back, being prevented from obtaining an unspecified objective by the set peripheries. The article’s evocation of boundaries opens onto the topos of Romantic Sehnsucht, the endless pursuit of the unattainable.39 A goal in itself, this unfulfilled and continual longing often arises in the Romantic project as the desire for boundlessness, for self-dissolution, and for unity with the infinite beyond. This could certainly be the case for Kleist, whose imagery interfolds oppositional concepts to forge concord among contradiction through the upheaval of boundaries. Sea merges into land (“Meeresufer”); water and desert collide (“Wasserwüste”). Life is missing (“alles zum Leben vermißt”) but we hear its voice (“Stimme des Lebens”). Birds cry out in loneliness although they fly in a flock. Kleist’s “Anspruch” could also be an appeal to institute one’s own boundaries and create order where none exists through sensory and cognitive faculties. Once the organ of Enlightenment knowledge, the eye is struck blind, unable to demystify the obscure and empty space stretching beyond our perch at the shore. Faced with this limitless expanse, it demands to place within the bounds of human understanding what lies beyond its limits. Along with the rational faculties it represents, the eye wants to make the infinite finite by imposing its own framework and attaining some degree of ascendency over it. Kleist, like Friedrich, acknowledges the futility of this endeavor, conceding “daß man es nicht kann.”40 One accepts the splendid loneliness of absolute estrangement when the appeal collides with resistance in the form of nature’s “Abbruch,” a rejection or breaking away. Crossing the ocean to frame it as an object of human experience is an impossibility, yet it is enough of an imaginative possibility to arouse the “herrlich” and intense sensations within our hearts to do so. Friedrich’s painting, however, does not allow for this possibility, and so fails to elicit the effect Kleist desires from it: Dies aber ist vor dem Bilde unmöglich, und das, was ich in dem Bilde selbst finden sollte, fand ich erst zwischen mir und dem Bilde, and panoramic media inform Kleist’s reworking (“Brentano und Kleist vor Friedrichs Mönch am Meer,” 58–69). 39 Cf. Begemann, “Brentano und Kleist vor Friedrichs Mönch am Meer,” 61. 40 Cf. Monika Ehlers’s study on boundary setting and subverting in the major works of Kleist, including “Empfindung vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft.” Her project examines the author’s strategies for portraying the simultaneity of framing and deframing as a feature of modernity related to the struggle of reestablishing order after its traumatic loss. See Ehlers, Grenzwahrnehmungen, 73–104.

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nämlich einen Anspruch, den mein Herz an das Bild machte, und einen Abbruch, den mir das Bilde tat. . . .

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[This, however, is impossible before the picture, and that which I should have found in the picture itself, I only found between me and the picture, namely an appeal that my heart made to the picture, and an abruption the picture imposed on me. . . .]

Here the author switches from the impersonal pronoun “man” to the first-person formulations of “ich,” “mein,” and “mir.” Whereas human encounters before nature share a certain universality of experience, the interaction with the artwork is highly individualized and personal to the singular subject, or so his language implies. Moreover, in comparing these dueling seascapes, Kleist points to a fundamental discrepancy between the aesthetic response to imitated reality and reality itself. Gazing into Friedrich’s painted reproduction of the ocean will not necessarily generate the same effect or affect as gazing into the actual ocean. By occupying the monk’s shoes, Kleist’s feet will never leave the shore and hence will stay rooted to the objective world. He perceives the potential in Friedrich’s painting to evoke sentiments that are truly “herrlich,” while also recognizing that the artist is not iconoclastic enough. How can Kleist struggle to frame the formless fields before him if Friedrich has already done so through the very framework provided by the painting? Its objective forms, however abstract, mitigate the immediacy of the encounter and further distance him from his desire. What Kleist “in dem Bilde selbst finden sollte”—namely, an unmediated and unframed experience of what he beholds—he does find, but “erst zwischen mir and dem Bilde.” Instead of a representation of this dynamic portrayed in the painting, Kleist’s imagination creates the dynamic itself as occurring between viewer and painting.41 To do so, the author transposes Friedrich’s arrangement of monk, shore, and sea, writing: 41 Emphasis added. While scholars generally agree that Kleist conjures what Ehlers calls a “Schwellenerlebnis” (“experience at the threshold”) that unites the spectator with the picture, where this union spatially occurs is in contention (Grenzwahrnehmungen). Believing Kleist to enter into the picture are Apel: “. . . Nur ich Allein Ging Leer Aus,” 126; Gernot Müller, Man müßte auf dem Gemälde selbst stehen, 207; Pfotenhauer, Sprachbilder, 87; Zeeb, “Kleist, Kant und / mit Paul de Man,” 322; and Jörg Zimmermann, “Bilder des Erhabenen,” 117. Begemann rejects Kleist’s entry (“Brentano und Kleist vor Friedrichs Mönch am Meer,” 72), while Bernhard Greiner argues that the objects in the painting move beyond the picture into the spectator’s space (Kleists Dramen und Erzählungen, 30). Waldheim places the union in the physical space between spectator and painting (Kunstbeschreibungen in Ausstellungsräumen um 1800, 175).

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Und so ward ich selbst der Kapuziner, das Bild war die Düne, das aber, wo hinaus ich mit Sehnsucht blicken sollte, die See, fehlte ganz. Nichts kann trauriger und unbehaglicher sein, als diese Stellung in der Welt: der einzige Lebensfunke im weiten Reiche des Todes, der einsame Mittelpunkt im einsamen Kreis. Das Bild liegt, mit seinen zwei oder drei geheimnisvollen Gegenständen, wie die Apokalypse da, als ob es Youngs Nachtgedanken hätte. . . .

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[And thus I myself became the Capuchin, the picture became the dune, but that out to which I ought to gaze with longing, the sea, was wholly missing. Nothing can be sadder or more uncomfortable than this position in the world: the sole spark of life within the wide realm of death, the lonely midpoint within the lonely circle. The picture, with its two or three enigmatic objects, lies there like the apocalypse, as if it had Young’s Night Thoughts. . . .]

Situating himself as monk and painting as dune, Kleist removes both objects from sight, effectively clearing the image of Friedrich’s framing devices. From this vantage point, nothing is left in the empirical world to experience, as the imagined scenario dispenses with any framework that would intercede or distance spectator from spectacle. Fully departing from earthly reality, we arrive at an infinite expanse of a new world where we are fully alone with and absorbed in the vision of boundless space, the “einsame Mittelpunkt im einsamen Kreis.” The allusion to Edward Young’s elegiac cycle Night-Thoughts (1742–45), a poem wallowing in death and loss, emphasizes the emptiness of nonexistence.42 From roaring surf to crying gulls, all distinct boundaries and knowable objects are gone, and what few amorphous shapes remain dissipate into oblivion. A canvas lacking forms, perspective, and indeed any reference to given reality, this absolute nothingness unfolds like the apocalypse before the viewer. With no framework of representational objects, this image is abstract, but is it art? Continuing his narrative, Kleist explicitly and graphically conveys to the reader how this emptiness evokes an aesthetic response: Und da es, in seiner Einförmigkeit und Uferlosigkeit, nichts, als den Rahm, zum Vordergrund hat, so ist es, wenn man es betrachtet, als ob einem die Augenlider weggeschnitten wären. 42 Cf. Waldheim, who perceives a disjuncture between the essay’s intertextual overtures (here Young and the biblical apocalypse, later Ossian and Kosegarten) and the predominantly visual imagery, even when these are evocative of other sensory experiences. She attributes their inclusion to Kleist’s effort to appeal to his Berliner Abendblätter readership (Kunstbeschreibungen in Ausstellungsräumen um 1800, 177).

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[And since, in its uniformity and shorelessness, it has nothing as its foreground but the frame, it is, while one gazes at it, as if one’s eyelids had been cut away.]

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Here is the moment in which abstract art is envisioned. The void elicits an aesthetic response akin to having had one’s eyelids sliced off, an affect with metaphorical dimensions but real implications.43 Unable to close, lidless eyes are compelled to look but have no means to limit or distance themselves from the object of perception. The eye is exposed, vulnerable; it cannot protect itself, block out what it witnesses, or exercise authority over what it sees. With no means to obstruct the visual flood or gain some measure of control, the eye plunges into an overwhelming image enveloping the entire field of vision. For this reason, Kleist’s metaphor of lidless viewing and the severe horizontality of Friedrich’s painting are frequently linked or even attributed to the rising popularity of the panorama in turn-of-the-century Europe.44 Both Kleist and Friedrich knew of the invention, with only Kleist having firsthand experience from attending the Berlin staging of Breysig’s famous Panorama der Stadt Rom in August 1800.45 The panorama presents a compelling parallel because its cylindrical scaffolding surrounds the eye with an immersive image, yet the extendedly horizontal picture, an ultimate disappointment for Kleist, 43 Cf. Begemann, “Brentano und Kleist vor Friedrichs Mönch am Meer,” 70; Ehlers, Grenzwahrnehmungen, 95–103; Janz, “Mit den Augen,” 144–45; Pfotenhauer, Sprachbilder, 87; Jörg Traeger, “. . . als ob einem die Augenlider weggeschnitten wären,” 86–106; Seeba, “The Eye of the Beholder,” 103–22; Waldheim, Kunstbeschreibungen in Ausstellungsräumen um 1800, 177–78; Weineck, “Thoughts Before a Line by Kleist,” 67–68; and Jörg Zimmermann, “Bilder des Erhabenen,” 125. 44 Derived from the Greek for “all” (pan) and “seeing” or “view” (horama), this relatively modern term came into being to designate the specific form of large circular paintings, the technology for which was simultaneously albeit separately invented by English artist Robert Barker (1739–1806) and Johann Adam Breysig (1766–1831) between 1785 and 1790. Barker patented the term in 1792 to refer to the specific technology for cylindrical viewing before the word “panorama” assumed its general meaning describing a survey or overview such as of a landscape or skyline. General histories of the panorama are offered by Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium; Comment, The Panorama; and Koschorke, Die Geschichte des Horizonts. For the panorama in nineteenth-century German literature, see Byrd, A Pedagogy of Observation. 45 Kleist wrote of his experience of Breysig’s panorama in a letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge dated August 16, 1800. On Kleist and the panorama, see Begemann,“ Brentano und Kleist vor Friedrichs Mönch am Meer,” 67–71; Hilda M. Brown, Heinrich von Kleist, 15–26 and “Zwischen Erde und Himmel,” 194– 206; Ehlers, Grenzwahrnehmungen, 89–103; Köhnen, Das optische Wissen, 292– 308; and Gernot Müller, Man müßte auf dem Gemälde selbst stehen, 210–17.

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does not reflect his eyelid metaphor in two important regards. The panoramic picture does not inflict on the subject the pain described in the text. Secondly, it grants a privileged position to the spectator, who sees vistas and perspectives that are otherwise inaccessible or impossible.46 On the contrary, Kleist’s metaphor assumes a disempowered spectator violently forced into a state of helpless passivity, as its classical heritage suggests. While this is one of the author’s most famous lines, the unique metaphor is Kleist’s addition but not his invention. Peter Bexte has shown that Kleist likely appropriated it from Cicero’s narrative account of Regulus.47 The Roman statesman was taken prisoner by the Carthaginians, who cut away his eyelids before binding him to a rotating platform to die eventually from lack of sleep. Even if not new per se, the imagery of eyelid removal as deployed within an aesthetic discourse reconfigures the act of viewing to presume a radically new type of image. It violently removes the body’s natural mechanism for framing visual experience, taking to the extreme the aesthetic experience of an object itself extreme in its limitlessness. The collapse of framing and boundaries ensuing from an incident of bodily mutilation recalls Kleist’s Penthesilea (1808), only instead of a desiring subject consuming an aesthetic object, the situation is reversed. Image dominates eye and, by extension, absorbs the entire body, which is itself powerless to turn away from the exquisitely painful sight until oversaturation results in death. As a result, the new register of abstraction for visual art opened by Kleist’s written reflection is defined by the loss of internal and external framing devices proceeding (1) from the absence of internal division between foreground and background, and (2) from the lack of external control mechanisms. The loss of a referential framework tying the image, however loosely, to perceptual reality results in the loss of recognizable objects, of scale and perspective, of measurability and proportion. With no frame separating the viewing subject from the object of perception, with no frame enclosing and presenting the image as a totality, the aesthetic experience is boundless. 46 Begemann, “Brentano und Kleist vor Friedrichs Mönch am Meer”; Hilda M. Brown (Heinrich von Kleist), and Gernot Müller (Man müßte auf dem Gemälde selbst stehen) interrelate the panoramic picture and the rise of a more empowered viewer. While Grave does not discuss panoramic vision, he also interprets the lidless eye as signifying a mode of viewing out of the spectator’s control owing to the absence of internal framing devices. As a consequence, the painting exerts power over those who view it (Caspar David Friedrich, 159–60). 47 Kleist had referenced Cicero two years earlier in his drama Die Hermannsschlacht (The Battle of Hermann, 1808). Bexte points to the popularity of the Regulus account around 1800 and the singularity of the word “Augenlider” in Kleist’s oeuvre (262, 256). The only other work featuring the word is Das Käthchen von Heilbronn (1807–8). See Bexte, “Die weggeschnittenen Augenlider des Regulus,” 254–66.

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The moment the eye loses its eyelids is also the point of no return. Kleist and his frameless image not only abandon the spectator to the expanse but cut off any means of finding a way out. Friedrich’s Der Mönch am Meer challenges the authority of the eye and undermines its expectations but does not completely sever it from its mechanisms of security and control. Although Friedrich departs from Western illusionism and its claims to the objective world, he still supplies the spectator with sufficient visual markers to measure distance and scale, discern discrepancies of perspective, and make sense of the image. The audience never loses its eyelids, so to speak, because Friedrich never fully departs from the framing devices anchoring his image to our knowable and calculable reality. The infinite space abstractly framed and contained frustrates, even threatens, the ability to comprehend, but the eye can always employ its own framing devices, the eyelids, as instruments of control. In this manner, the audience reestablishes its footing on the shore, confirming its separation from and superiority over the painting. In stripping away the eyelids, however, Kleist strips away means of framing and processing the image as a totality.48 As has been noted, both Friedrich’s painting and Kleist’s ideas can be related to the Kantian sublime, since both painting and the experience of viewing without eyelids expose the viewer to an experience of the unlimited.49 With no bounded or measurable forms, no scale, and no perspective for evaluating this alien environment, the eye cannot gain ascendency over what it sees. Moreover, the lidless eye cannot determine what, how, or even if it sees. It is absorbed into something beyond calculation that it cannot control. However, Kleist’s discovery does not lead to a Kantian-inspired dialectic of the sublime that ultimately leads back to a concept. For Kant, the struggles of the mind to grasp the infinite sensation of something too large, too dark, or too extreme and the failure to tie that to a conceptual understanding leads to an infinite oscillation, a back-and-forth between sensual impression and conceptual thinking. Kant therefore resolves this struggle by claiming that the oscillation in itself becomes the adequate expression of the concept of the sublime. Crucial for Kant’s theory is 48 Begemann (“Brentano und Kleist vor Friedrichs Mönch am Meer”) and Kuzniar (“The Vanishing Canvas”) also interpret Kleist’s eyelid imagery in terms of framing and the spectator’s ability to gain ascendency over that which is seen. 49 See Begemann, “Brentano und Kleist vor Friedrichs Mönch am Meer,” 67–95; Denneler, “‘Denn nie besser ist der Mensch,’” 713–32; Ehlers, Grenzwahrnehmungen, 73–85, 97–100; Grave, Caspar David Friedrich und die Theorie des Erhabenen, 51–84; Görner, Gewalt und Grazie, 25–56; Bernhard Greiner, Eine Art Wahnsinn, 106–29, and Kleists Dramen und Erzählungen; Praeger, “Kant in Caspar David Friedrich’s Frames,” 74–75; Pöpperl, Auf der Schwelle, 144–50; and Ränsch-Trill, “‘Erwachen erhabener Empfindungen bei der Betrachtung neuerer Landschaftsbilder,’” 90–99.

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the preservation of distance: the subject gazes at far enough a remove so that it can put the picture into perspective and impose a frame of understanding onto it. As a result, no selves feel as though they are harmed in experiencing sublimity; they merely feel threatened. The initial feelings of being overwhelmed and overawed—be they by fear, terror, horror, or some other negative emotion—are converted into the uplifting admiration and elevation that account for the dual structure of the sublime’s complex affect. Yet for Kleist and the Kleistian sublime, the loss of control is just that: a loss of control. His uniquely Kleistian permutation of sublimity eliminates the distance from danger necessitated by Kant to frame the image and ultimately arrive at a moral principle. For Kleist, to place the eye at the apocalypse indicates that the spectator has not reached but exceeded the limits of nature and reason. Ceasing the struggle to define something without definition, the eye surrenders to the image and cedes authority to it. To continue Kleist’s metaphor, the spectator relinquishes a piece of the self to the painting, a wounding that cuts both ways. While the destruction of framing devices deprives the eye of resistance and distance to this optical onslaught, the directionality of the encounter is not necessarily one-sided. The eye’s nomadic existence within Kleist’s all-consuming image also culminates in new liberties for the viewing subject, more so than with Friedrich. With the evocative arena opened in Der Mönch am Meer, the artist does not overtly proscribe reactions. Instead, he gently guides them through the constraints of a given framework that constructs a generous space for the spectator to fill. Kleist imposes no limits and offers only space, so that the violent loss of eyelids is a radical gain of freedom for aesthetic response. Such violence frequently shocks Kleist’s literary worlds. From the rape of the Marquise von O to the earthquake in Chili, these brutal events wound the bodies of his characters and rip apart the seams of the symbolic order for better and for worse.50 Achieving rupture through visceral means, an art inducing the sense of having had one’s eyelids sliced off leaves a lasting impression, changing the viewer in some small but noticeable way. It causes the audience to see and to see art in a new light, with fresh eyes unobstructed by the blinders of conventional dogma. Kleist is right to invoke the apocalypse, which in Greek means “lifting of the veil” or “revelation”; indeed, Kleist’s imagining of abstract art exemplifies both concepts. His apocalyptic void not only brings about the destruction of 50 Cf. Denneler’s identification of the violent fissures and wounds in his texts as indicative of the sublime’s failure (“‘Denn nie besser ist der Mensch’”) and Ehlers’s readings of the breakdown of boundaries and comprehension in Die Verlobung in St. Domingo and Das Bettelweib von Locarno (Grenzwahrnehmungen, 21–42, 43–72).

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the physical world, at least as it appears in art, but it also opens the eyes of the viewer by unveiling a revelatory vision of what art can be and do.

The Waste Land: The Failure of Mimetic Representation In the closing lines of his commentary, Kleist acknowledges that his revelation of what would now be called abstract art is only prophecy yet to be fulfilled. While Der Mönch am Meer inflames the author’s own artistic passions, Friedrich never actually crosses the line from transcription into creation. Be that as it may, Kleist still appreciates the artist’s innovative approach, and lauds his forays into abstraction in the article’s closing lines:

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Gleichwohl hat der Maler zweifelsohne eine ganz neue Bahn im Felde seiner Kunst gebrochen; und ich bin überzeugt, daß sich, mit seinem Geiste, eine Quadratmeile märkischen Sandes darstellen ließe, mit einem Berberitzenstrauch, worauf sich eine Krähe einam plustert, und daß dies Bild eine wahrhaft Ossiansche oder Kosegartensche Wirkung tun müßte. Ja, wenn man diese Landschaft mit ihrer eigenen Kreide und mit ihrem eigenen Wasser malte; so, glaube ich, man könnte die Füchse und Wölfe damit zum Heulen bringen: das Stärkste, was man, ohne allen Zweifel, zum Lobe für diese Art Landschaftsmalerei beibringen kann. [Nonetheless, the painter has without doubt broken a wholly new path in the field of his art; and I am convinced that, with his spirit, a square mile of the Mark’s sand could be represented, with a barberry bush on which a lonely crow fluffs itself, and that this painting would truly have to have an Ossianic or Kosegartenish effect. Yes, if one painted this landscape with its own chalk and its own water; then, I believe, one could make the foxes and wolves howl with it: the strongest words, without any doubt, that one can contribute to the praise of this kind of landscape painting.]

Even if the territory between Friedrich’s abstracted seascape and Kleist’s abstract void is wide and uncharted, the writer nevertheless recognizes in Der Mönch am Meer the opening of a “ganz neue Bahn.” In a testament to Friedrich’s technical expertise and revolutionary aesthetics, Kleist presents the antithesis of Der Mönch am Meer in the description of a fictitious painting: instead of a solitary monk standing on a dune before an infinite expanse of sea, a scavenging crow roosts in thorny shrubbery on a spatially and geographically determinate square mile of Prussian sand. Invoking the verses of the sentimentalist poets Ossian and Kosegarten, Kleist seems initially to insist that even the most odious of landscapes becomes poetry

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under the artist’s brush.51 Friedrich could work from a Spartan framework assembled from uninviting, unpleasant, and unattractive objects, and still create a moving and evocative experience for the spectator. However, the paean to Friedrich’s talents and initiative also points to the fundamental limitations of his approach.52 For Kleist, the critical weakness lies not with the choice of objects structuring the framework but with the fact that the artist uses objects or any framework at all. The new direction in which his art advances leads unequivocally away from an art mimetically reproducing the objective world, as closer inspection of the included objects and intertextual references reveals. The attributes of this final image are calculatedly extreme exaggerations of the conventions and values championed by the tradition of Western illusionism. An image made with its own chalk and its own water, the crow tableau is illusionism par excellence, transforming the two-dimensional forms on canvas into the three-dimensional objects they depict. The illusion of perceptual reality is so complete and so perfect that foxes and wolves mistake it for an actual landscape and are set howling by it. Rather than departing down the “ganz neue Bahn” of abstraction, this art entrenches itself in an earthen framework, unable to awaken the viscerally affective sentiments predicated by a Kleistian sublime. For one thing, that its earthen framework yields unfertile soil for a sublime aesthetic experience is indicated by the nature of the soil itself. As with his eyelid metaphor, the “square mile of the Mark’s sand” (“eine Quadratmeile märkischen Sandes”) was Kleist’s insertion. The peculiar specificity of the topographically locatable onetime principality of Mark Brandenburg in eastern Germany contrasts with the indefinitely wide and geographically unspecific realm of the afterlife (“weiten Reiche des Todes”). Yet the square mile of actually existing earth is just as lonely and desolate as the circular stretch of apocalyptic emptiness, only without the exhilarating and violent effects on the spectator. In a letter from September 1800, Kleist writes to Wilhelmine von Zenge of their 51 Suggesting a specifically German quality to Friedrich’s art is the explicit mention of a “Quadratmeile märkischen Sandes” coupled with allusions to Ossian, a source of Scottish pride, and Kosegarten, the pastor-poet whose verses immortalize the shores of Rügen. More on Kleist’s allusions to Kosegarten and Ossian are found in Lamport, “Eine Wahrhaft Ossianische Oder Kosegartensche Wirkung,” 56–73; and Rühse, “dies wunderbare Gemählde.” Conversely, Hilda M. Brown downplays Kleist’s mention of the men as merely indicative of his choosing “two fashionable sentimentalists” of the time (Heinrich von Kleist, 88). 52 Hilda M. Brown highlights Kleist’s qualification of his praise for Friedrich yet interprets it as irony (Heinrich von Kleist, 88). See Lamport, “Eine Wahrhaft Ossianische Oder Kosegartensche Wirkung,” 57; Rühse, “dies wunderbare Gemählde,” 252; and Waldheim, Kunstbeschreibungen in Ausstellungsräumen um 1800, 179.

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“traurigen märkischen Vaterlande” (sad fatherlands of the Mark), linking the chalky heathlands of their homeland with all the cheerlessness that the thorns of a barberry bush (“Berberitzenstrauch”) would convey.53 The sands of Mark Brandenburg appear in a concomitant Kleist work, the 1810 play Prinz Friedrich von Homburg. In the first scene of that play, the Kürfurst asks the sleepwalking prince where he found not a barberry bush but a laurel wreath in the Mark’s sand (“Wo fand er den in meinem märkschen Sand?”).54 The concurrence with the Abendblätter article could be Kleist regurgitating a line that happened to be on his mind. Or it could constitute a subtle allusion to a drama that muddles notions of illusion and believability at internal (confusion between dream and reality) and metatextual (extremely loose retelling of a historical figure and events) levels. Supportive of the latter possibility is the subsequent invocation of Ossian and Kosegarten, neither of whom occurs elsewhere in Kleist’s oeuvre.55 The legendary Gaelic bard “Ossian,” who nostalgically eulogized his national countryside, is widely held to be the invention of the Scottish poet and the cycle’s true author James Macpherson (1736–96). Thus, to have a “wahrhaft Ossiansche” effect would be absurd and oxymoronic, but perhaps Kleist intends to impress on his readers the problematic premise of mimetic reproduction. Its pursuit would be a lose-lose proposition: it inhibits the artist from expressing truly original creativity while also constraining the power of the picture’s affect and precluding the possibility for sublimity. In the end, the sentimental effects of Ossian are interchangeable with those of Kosegarten, as Kleist’s noteworthy “or” signifies.56 Likewise producing melancholic paeans to his native land, the German preacher-poet included several imitations and adaptations of Macpherson’s poetry among his works.57 All three references play with the imitation of reality to persuade their audiences into accepting some morose imitation of reality for reality.

53 Kleist unfavorably compares his native region with the Saxon Erzgebirge near Zwickau in the letter dated from September 4/5, 1800. See Kleist, Sämtliche Werke, 261. 54 Quoted in Waldheim, Kunstbeschreibungen in Ausstellungsräumen um 1800, 179. 55 Kosegarten and Ossian were inherited from Brentano’s version. 56 See Janz, “Mit den Augen,” 147. 57 Lamport writes: “Kleist’s bracketing of Ossian and Kosegarten may be fortuitous, but it is none the less pertinent, for Kosegarten was a major Ossian enthusiast, and his work includes several direct translations, adaptations, and imitations of Macpherson’s work, as well as numerous individual Ossianic echoes” (“Eine Wahrhaft Ossianische Oder Kosegartensche Wirkung,” 61). Kosegarten was also an acquaintance of Friedrich and a proponent of his landscapes.

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Painted “with its own chalk and its own water,” Kleist’s fictitious picture attempts to achieve the same sleight of hand encouraged by the precepts of classical landscape art, seeking to confound the two-dimensional representation on the picture plane with the three dimensionality of perceptual reality such as what is seen through a window frame. If successful, it would enact the same deception perpetrated by the legendary ancient Greek artist Zeuxis who painted grapes so mimetically perfect that a bird—though presumably not the lonely crow mentioned by Kleist— flew down to peck at it. More so than the crow, the hyperrealistic image of Mark Brandenburg recalls Zeuxis’s trompe l’œil because it sets wolves and foxes howling.58 Does Kleist by implication reduce spectators to animals if their human sensory and cognitive apparatuses react so strongly? Would a painting made of the very same chalk and water it represents so easily deceive an audience’s eyes? The author seems to suggest not when this imagery is compared with his response to another supposedly perfect illusion, Breysig’s famous panorama of Rome. First staged for public exhibition in Berlin in June 1800, the spectacle constructed a 360-degree, three-dimensional simulation of viewing the city from atop the overlooking “ruins” of the emperor’s palace.59 The “ruins” consisted of canvas or pine boards painted as marble on which real rocks, stone rubble, and leaves were strewn like a stage set. These natural elements did little to bring the artificial cylindric painting to life for Kleist, who found himself disillusioned in the literal sense of the word. Registering his disappointment in a letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge, Kleist recommends that the contraption be reconceived for the illusion to succeed: Denn da es nun doch einmal darauf ankommt, den Zuschauer ganz in den Wahn zu setzen, er sei in der offenen Natur, so daß er durch nichts an den Betrug erinnern wird, so müßten ganz andere Anstalten getroffen werden. Keine Form des Gebäudes kann nach 58 See Ehlers, Grenzwahrnehmungen, 94; Janz, “Mit den Augen,” 147–48; and Rühse, “dies wunderbare Gemählde,” 251. Brinkmann argues against interpretations involving mimetic renderings, reading the beastly reactions as a testament to the picture’s emotional power and finding support in the references to Kosegarten and Ossian. See Brinkmann, “Zu Heinrich von Kleists ‘Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft,’” 181–87. Jörg Zimmermann (“Bilder des Erhabenen,” 127) and Greiner (Kleists Dramen und Erzählungen, 34) compare the howls of the foxes and wolves to the howling of leopards and wolves in Kleist’s “Die heilige Cäcilie” (1810). 59 For Kleist’s reaction to Breysig’s panorama, see Hilda M. Brown, Heinrich von Kleist, 22–25; Byrd, Pedagogy of Observation, 6–8; Comment, Panorama, 51–52; Ehlers, Grenzwahrnehmungen, 91–95; and Oettermann, Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, 196–201.

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meiner Einsicht diesen Zweck erfüllen, als allein die kugelrunde. Man müßte auf dem Gemälde selbst stehen, u[nd] nach allen Seiten to keinen Punct finden, der nicht Gemälde wäre.60

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[Since the aim of the whole is to make the spectator believe he is outdoors, nothing must be visible to remind him of the deception. Very different arrangements would be necessary for this deception to succeed. In my opinion, the only building that can serve this purpose is one that is round in shape. Spectators should stand in the painting itself and not be able to see any point, in any direction, that is not part of it.]61

Transporting spectators to an altered mental state (“in den Wahn setzen”) and convincing them to stand in the midst of nature itself, the painting and its framework must in no way call attention to the visual deceit. Situated in the painting itself (“auf dem Gemälde selbst”), the spectator would stand at the precipice of the image, like Kleist standing as the monk on the dune in Friedrich’s painting. From this point, no part of the panorama’s framework would be visible. To be sure, the framework incurs most of Kleist’s criticism, requiring considerable effort on the viewer’s behalf (“große Gefälligkeit”) to suspend disbelief willingly. The pine planks of the platform bear little resemblance to the Carrara marble they purport to represent; the spectator is bounded (“begrenzt”) by a wooden railing reminiscent of barriers used for high jumping at horse shows; and the central skylight above is obviously concealed by a wooden roof. Around it hang mirrors that reflect the natural light and illuminate the painting with a hideous artificiality (“widerliche künstliche Art”) that slices through the illusion with the figurative dagger of reality (“Dolch der Wirklichkeit”). The skylight would have to be hidden by some natural element like a tree whose thick leafy branches (“dick belaubte Zweige”) would not only hide the scaffolding but also engender the impression of being outdoors in the shade. In other words, the wooden artifice would only deceive, and thereby succeed in imitating nature, if it were essentially something entirely else—namely, natural reality. Even if the framework were replaced by trees as real as the rocks, foliage, and crumbling blocks posing as “ruins,” Kleist indicates that the panorama would inevitably disappoint on account of its poorly executed (“schlecht ausgeführt”) painting. It overflows with an overabundance of objects (“eine Fülle von Gegenständen, ein Reichtum von Schönheiten 60 Kleist, Sämtliche Werke, 167–68, 171, emphasis in the original. The letter is dated August 16, 1800, from Berlin. All citations from the August 16 letter are from this source. 61 Quoted in translation from Oettermann, Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, 199.

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und Parteien”), which the author goes on to enumerate. The artist, he observes, has cleverly depicted Rome in the hour of twilight so that the blue-violet veil (“Azurschleier”) of dusk masks most details that might otherwise alert the eye to the illusion, though apparently not well enough to work on Kleist. Finally, with no cooling breeze from the west (“kein kühler Westwind wehte über die Ruinen”), the suffocating heat inside the panorama’s cylindrical support drives him back out into Berlin. Ultimately, simulated reality is not reality; artifice endeavoring to be natural is simply not natural; and the Panorama von Rom is and cannot be Rome, no matter how elaborate the illusion or realistic the materials. The very framework devised to perfect the illusion enacts its destruction and diminishes the potential power of its aesthetic effect. The panorama cannot offer this experience and owes its fame purely to its novelty in Kleist’s estimation (“es scheint seinen Ruhm niemandem zu danken, als seiner Neuheit”). Novelty will not evoke the exhilaratingly painful sentiments such as those communicated in Kleist’s vision of a frameless abstract art and its lidless affect. Just as his reimagining of Friedrich’s Der Mönch am Meer removes internal and external framing devices, the author finds fault with both the wooden structure outside the panoramic painting and the scaffolding of objects inside it. His proposed modifications dismantle the panorama’s frames to position spectators on the painting at its middle, effectively implanted into the image where their eyes would encounter an allover perspective of a purely painted canvas. This scenario divests the audience of the control mechanisms that would afford them distance from and ascendency over the imitated reality in the panoramic vista.62 While this approaches the Kleistian sublime evoked in the deframing of Friedrich, the author’s amendments to the panorama are not yet beholden to equivalent radicality. That would entail the destruction of Rome down to “two or three enigmatic objects.” The ensuing apocalyptic abstraction would rather “lift the veil” altogether than hoodwink spectators with an “azure veil” of twilight or scatter faux stones in a misguided manufacturing of hyperrealism. Since illusion will never be the real thing, an alternate framework for a new mode of art is necessary to create an aesthetic experience that could generate such profound human emotions (set humans howling as it were), or at least strip away their eyelids. 62 Begemann’s analysis suggests that the panorama (as a viewing contraption and as a mode of viewing) would not be sublime in and of itself, at least not in the Kantian or Burkean sense. Noting that the early nineteenth-century rise of the panorama coincides with a declining theorical interest in the sublime, Begemann attributes the concurrence to the normalization of the mode of viewing conditioned by the panorama (“Brentano und Kleist vor Friedrichs Mönch am Meer,” 74).

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What can a trompe l’œil of dirt and water do, aesthetically speaking, for its human audience? Compared with the monk’s dramatic confrontation with the enormity of nature, this dreary prairie is unexciting, uninspired, and laden with the physicality of its objects. It will not suggest profound metaphysical mysteries, it will not arouse overwhelming sentiments, and it most certainly will not make its spectator feel lidless. From the prickly barberry bush to an ill-tempered crow, nothing here is particularly welcoming and is in fact more prone to repel any desire for absorption. As far as the author is concerned, the strongest praise one could lavish on this kind of landscape is that it fools animals. Thus, this utterly antiabstract art is a dead end. In order to generate a more evocative aesthetic experience, to broaden the expressive possibilities of art, to show what lines cannot form and communicate what words cannot formulate, art must head in the opposite direction. It must move away from the natural world and away from conventional painting, and toward the brave new world of abstraction. And this is where Kleist’s article comes to an abrupt halt. After envisioning a revolutionary future for painting, after imagining a new register of abstraction, and even after showing us how to reach this destination, the author simply stops. With his infamous dash, he then attaches one last sentence:

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—Doch meine eigenen Empfindungen, über dieses wunderbare Gemälde, sind zu verworren; daher habe ich mir, ehe ich sie ganz auszusprechen wage, vorgenommen, mich durch die Äußerungen derer, die paarweise, von Morgen bis Abend, daran vorübergehen, zu belehren. [But my own feelings about this wonderful painting are too confused; therefore, I have resolved, before I dare to express them fully, to instruct myself through the utterances of those who, in couples, from morning to night, walk past it.]

Professing his own “Empfindungen” regarding Der Mönch am Meer to be “zu verworren,” Kleist chooses not to articulate them and listens instead to the presumably insipid comments of his fellow museumgoers, who in all likelihood are members of the bourgeoisie. Is he conceding that the world of abstraction is perchance a bit too new and too brave for now? Does the dash represent the author’s inability to express his confused sentiments? Or is it symbolic of the communicative limitations of Western illusionism? And what of the “postdash” barb at a caste whose tastes dominate greater society? His satirical take on bourgeois art consumption typifies the middle-class patron as unable or unwilling to really open their eyes

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to the significance of Friedrich’s painting. That the public processes the painting “paarweise” already diminishes the true appreciation of the artwork, as Friedrich’s invitation to identify with the solitary monk presupposes a personal and individual encounter. Blind to the artist’s address, the pairs pass by without pause but not without the superficial and disassociated evaluation that lacks insight into the painting’s evocative qualities. This does not preclude them from pretending otherwise; Kleist’s oblique remark about learning from incidental commentary suggests that its speakers believe their opinions to be of intellectual and didactic value. Where they wax philosophical with quickly formed judgments all too easily put into words, Kleist is speechless, merely listening and contemplating the complexity of his own response. To that end, the dash could be the distinguishing marker dividing the author’s perspicacity from the philistine frivolities of the unperceptive public. Whatever Kleist’s original intention may have been, the hyphenated break is a proper poetic gesture of the rupture between where painting stands in 1810 and what Kleist envisages for the future. It is the difference between transcription and creation, between abstracted art and abstract art. Whether the author would have arrived at this new world had he not first encountered Der Mönch am Meer is debatable, but this instance of abstract art was borne from a symbiotic relationship of sorts. Kleist most likely needed to see the unfilled space in Friedrich’s painting with his own eyes before his mind’s eye could visualize an unfilled space as a painting. Likewise, Friedrich, with his radically empty composition, may have abstracted from all kinds of norms involving the illusionist tradition and landscape conventions but his work needed Kleist’s imagination to envision what revelatory art could arise from such revolutionary techniques. In other words, while the artist created the conditions for the apocalypse, the author created the apocalypse itself. Of course, Kleist unfortunately never saw such a textual image on canvas; his work of art, though conceived as early as 1810, would remain trapped in written form, not translated into paint for at least another century.63

63 Kleist died the next year at the age of thirty-four, shooting himself at the banks of the Wannsee near Potsdam on November 21, 1811, in a suicide pact with his terminally ill lover Henrietta Vogel.

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2: The Kleistian Sublime Is Now: Kazimir Malevich, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman

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W

hen was the world ready, so to speak, for the apocalypse? The twentieth century witnessed numerous and diverse forms of abstract art, but the most provocative manifestations of the particular moment of abstraction envisioned by Kleist, both visually and philosophically, are the Suprematist shapes of Russian-born Kazimir Malevich (1878–1935) and the monumental color field paintings of post-World War II America, particularly the works of Mark Rothko (1903–70) and Barnett Newman (1905–70). Their fields of overwhelming size and overpowering color envelop the spectator in an unframed realm of metaphysical space and immediate sensation whose presence defies distance or restriction. The visual and formal affinities between works like Der Mönch am Meer and Rothko’s Green on Blue (1956) were noted already in 1961 by American art historian Robert Rosenblum (1927–2006), who developed the term “abstract sublime” to establish a common spiritual heritage linking nineteenth-century Romantic landscape painting with the abstract expressionism of mid-century modern America.1 Rosenblum’s controversial thesis has been largely dismissed as, to quote former New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer, “the sheerest hokum—brilliant hokum, amusing hokum, but hokum all the same” owing to insufficient factual grounding and an overreliance on loose formal correspondences like size and shape.2 While Rothko’s and Newman’s seas of abstract color and even Malevich’s smaller monochrome fields contain vestiges of Friedrich’s abstracted seascape, these twentieth-century creations more closely answer Kleist’s prophetic nineteenth-century call for an apocalyptically abstract art that brings forth sublime sensations that are able to pull the earth out from under the spectator’s feet and blow the eyelids off any viewer.

1 See Rosenblum’s article, “The Abstract Sublime,” 38–41, 56, 58 and its later book version Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition. 2 Kramer, The Revenge of the Philistines, 35. Kramer did not mince words: “When Professor Rosenblum wrote, as he did in 1961, that “what used to be pantheism has now become a kind of ‘paint-theism,’” he was allowing a facile use of words to function as a substitute for visual and historical intelligence” (35).

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56 T he Kleistian Sublime Is Now 

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To Infinity and Beyond: Malevich’s Suprematist Geometry Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square from 1913 (fig. 2.1) is not what it seems. Contrary to its appearance, the image is neither a square nor truly black; nor, indeed, is Black Square even its true title. The color perceived as “black” is really a mixture of variegated pigments—not a single one of them being black. The shape perceived as “square” is really what the artist called a “painterly mass” of thick oil and enamel paints applied by hand with such uneven distribution and mathematical imprecision that its sides do not parallel the edges of the canvas.3 Those visiting the original painting in Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery are rewarded for their careful viewing: indentations of agitated brushstrokes and impressions of the artist’s fingerprints visibly reveal how Malevich sculpted the dense “painterly mass” onto the two-dimensional surface with dark impasto that has since dried and fractured. Barely discernible through these craquelures are the colorful geometric remnants of an earlier composition now buried beneath the not black nonsquare.4 The painting premiered in 1915 in Petrograd, today Saint Petersburg, at the Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0.10 (Zero-Ten) under its given name of Quadrilateral, the term for the general category of shapes to which the more specifically defined square belongs.5 Audiences and critics quickly began calling the artwork Black Square because of what they saw—or thought they saw—in the painting, much to the chagrin of its artist who regarded the indelible label as an unwelcome indicator of the lack of appreciation for his achievement. To reduce his all-encompassing Quadrilateral to the objectively descriptive Black Square missed the point of his new aesthetic platform of suprematism and misrepresented the form actually on canvas.6 While Malevich did not change the painting’s name, he did alter its date along with those of other paintings. Backdating the “square” from 1915 to 1913, he manipulated the circumstances surrounding its genesis to construct an alternate timeline where suprematism represented the pinnacle of his artistic development.7 The symbolic supremacy of Black 3 Malevich, quoted in Nakov, Malevich: Painting the Absolute, 14. 4 X-ray imaging indicates this aborted attempt is cubo-futurist in nature. Aleksandra Shatskikh includes a side-by-side comparison of the Black Square and an X-ray image of the underlying composition. Shatskikh, Black Square, 45. 5 For more on the exhibition see Lodder, “Malevich as Exhibition Maker,” 94–113; Nakov, Malevich: Painting the Absolute, 118–42; and Shatskikh, Black Square, 101–35. 6 Nakov, Malevich, 18–20. 7 Jakovljevic, “Unframe Malevich!, 19; Nakov, Malevich: Painting the Absolute, 18; and Shatskikh, Black Square, 32–33.

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Figure 2.1. Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1913 (first version). This version: early 1920s. Found in the collection of the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Reproduced with permission from HIP / Art Resource, New York.

Square was reflected in its physical placement at the initial “0.10” exhibition (fig. 2.2). All twenty paintings visible in the oft-reproduced photograph of the suprematist installation are organized with deference to the black square hanging in the upper east corner of the room. Contemporaneous audiences would have immediately grasped the significance of hanging the new icon of avant-garde art in the so-called “icon corner,” the sacred space traditionally reserved for religious images in Russian Orthodox households.8 The calculated arrangement alluded to the Latinate root 8 Lodder, “Malevich as Exhibition Maker,” 94–95; Nakov, Malevich: Painting the Absolute, 135; and Shatskikh, Black Square, 106; 109. On the intersections

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Figure 2.2.  0.10—The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings, 1915, Petrograd. View of the room with Malevich’s Black Square in the upper “icon corner.” Winter 1915–1916, 1915–1916. Found in the collection of Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, Moscow. Reproduced with permission from HIP / Art Resource, New York.

of the movement’s name; adapted from the Catholic liturgy, supremacia signified the “superiority” and “dominance” of higher spiritual realities and their revelation.9 For Malevich, the square delivered his revelation of a new art and new direction for the future. Appropriating the icon corner was not a rejection of religion itself, but of all institutionalized traditions which belonged to the past, not in a rapidly changing modernity. The simplest composition of the group, the square founded the core of Malevich’s suprematist geometry, the baseline image and original progenitor of the forms evolving outward and downward from its primal sign, as staged in the exhibition’s curation. What is not evident in the black-and-white photograph are the colors of the tilting shapes in the other paintings. Though Malevich divided of Malevich’s art with traditional iconography of Russian Orthodox religion, see Petrova, “Malevich’s Suprematism and Religion,” 89–95. 9 See Fauchereau, Malevich, 21; Nakov, Malevich: Painting the Absolute, 106–10; and Shatskikh, Black Square, 54. Nakov reports that the term “Suprematism” first appears in Malevich’s writings in September 1915 (Malevich: Painting the Absolute, 18).

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development into discreet phases of black, colored, and white, the essence of suprematism and its purest form was the elemental dichotomy of black and white. Suprematist color philosophy granted these two tones privileged positions outside of the spectrum as being all and no colors at once, just like the aggregation of non-black pigments building the “painterly mass” featured in Black Square.10 As both all and nothing, the black square was a tabula rasa and the “zero form” referenced in the exhibition title, containing within itself an “embryo of all [formal] possibilities,” because it “destroyed the ring of the horizon and escaped from the circle of things, from the horizon-ring that confines the artist and forms of nature.”11 Moving beyond the “horizon-ring” circumscribing the “circle of things” in knowable reality brought Malevich into a spatial and spiritual territory of nothingness: the supreme reality with nothing like the art world had ever conceived. Feeding the artist’s suprematist fantasies was his interest in cosmic bodies and planets, magnetism, electricity, and other forces independent of human action and perceptual reality.12 Analogous to religious belief, human cognition accepts their presence as reality even though they inhabit the ether beyond the seeable, touchable, and knowable. Suprematism sought to surpass the limits of human experience and familiar frames of thought to deliver these spiritual realities down to earth in a visible, tangible, and knowable form. Black Square was the “gateway” beyond the “horizon-ring” and “circle of things.”13 Though not heralding the end the of art, the painting enacted a revelatory and revolutionary rupture with figurative painting to indicate its end point and mark the start of new and greater expressive possibilities that celebrated the sacrilege of aesthetic dogmas and iconoclastically overthrew the old values of art, above all the framework of Western illusionism. Thus, the single black square, irreducible against its white field, comprised the most absolute representation of the movement and the most radical statement the artist could make in its name. Nearly seventy years later, Jean-François Lyotard (1924–98) singled out Malevich’s square as a symbol for postmodernism, exemplary of the

10 Cf. Cullinan, “Colour Masses,” 118–43; Nakov, Malevich: Painting the Absolute, 258–302; and Zhadova, Malevich: Suprematism and Revolution, 11–40. 11 Malevich quoted in Chlenova, “Language, Space and Abstraction,” 46, 69. 12 Shatskikh, Black Square, 37. On the impact of powered flight and outer space, see John Golding, Paths to the Absolute, 67–70; Nakov, Malevich: Painting the Absolute, 159–160; Shatskikh, “Malevich: The Cosmos and the Canvas,” 78–87; and Zhadova, Malevich: Suprematism and Revolution, 54–59. Shatskikh credits Malevich for first using the word “sputnik” (Russian for “fellow traveler” or “companion”) as satellite (83). 13 Malevich, referring to his square, as quoted in Nakov, Malevich: Painting the Absolute, 71.

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“non-representability” of the Kantian sublime.14 Yet Lyotard’s reading of the square as a presentation of nostalgia-inducing absence that makes “one see only by prohibiting one from seeing,” ultimately overlooks other sublime potentialities signaled by the painting. Shifting focus from its quadratic black geometry to the white space beyond reveals how Malevich de-frames art physically and metaphysically to approach a sublimity more characteristic of Kleist than of Kant. That the white square does not denote absence is specified by the artist himself in his key manifesto The Non-Objective World, first published in 1926:

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The black square on the white field was the first form in which nonobjective feeling came to be expressed. The square = feeling, the white field = the void beyond this feeling. Yet the general public saw in the nonobjectivity of the representation the demise of art and failed to grasp the evident fact that feeling had here assumed external form.15

Despite audience expectations, neither the square nor the white field want anything or serve any instrumental purpose, they simply are. What they simply are, however, needs to be contextualized within the conceptual framework of the suprematism, for Malevich had a clear understanding of what nonobjectivity and, conversely, objectivity entailed. Objectivity encompassed earth-bound approaches such as cubism and futurism, which, while not striving to imitate the natural world, still took it and its objects as starting points in their investigations into space, movement, and time. They were therefore objective (originating from natural objects) and abstract (not beholden to mimetic reproduction). Abstraction could act as a preliminary staging ground on the way to nonobjectivity, but it had not yet fully liberated itself from the world of objects. In suprematist vernacular, abstract art concerned the material realities above which Malevich’s spiritually oriented geometry freely floated. In setting his sights on nonobjectivity and disavowing the label of abstraction, the artist indicated the radicality of his break with previous avant-garde platforms to create a revolution “from nothing,” that is, no-thing or object.16 Consequently, the black square and white void are doubly nonobjective, being both without objective correlative and without objective.17 14 Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained, 11. 15 Malevich, “Suprematism,” 119. “Suprematism” is the second of the two essays comprising The Non-Objective World, first published in Germany in 1927. 16 Malevich, quoted in Nakov, Malevich: Painting the Absolute, 82. Cf. Jakovljevic, “Unframe Malevich!,” 20; and Nakov, Malevich: Painting the Absolute, 82–85. 17 Jakovljevic, “Unframe Malevich!,” 24.

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Instead, the black square consists of feeling. This energy is palpable and perceptible through the immense complexity of Malevich’s deeply layered and multitextured surface treatment.18 Unlike the impersonal coldness of analytic cubism or the pristine geometry of purism, the gestural brushwork and generous strokes of paint record the physicality of the painting’s creation and engender a sculptural quality that challenges the two-dimensionality of the medium. Consistent with the artist’s embryo metaphor, the “blackness” as embodied through paint pulls together its energy to bring the form into being. In other words, the “blackness” does not saturate the form; it is the form.19 The animate surface and emotional movement demonstrate why Malevich called his shapes “painterly masses” and “projections into space,” and “painterly beings” with “tremendous power.”20 His projectiles repurposed recognizable geometric symbols and made them arcane by fashioning “an altogether new and direct form of representation of the world of feeling.”21 Each nonobjective embodiment of intuition, feeling, and energy materialized onto canvas as a dynamic “painterly mass” and, via the hand of the artist, molded itself from nothingness into the physical existence of a geometric plane floating through white space. What is this white space? Present in every suprematist artwork, the spatial field should not be dismissed as mere background matter. Composed in the verses of a liturgical text, the artist’s meditations on his crucial development of white proclaim that “the very revelation of white is not a foundation / evoked purely by paint like the vacillations of color, / but is an expression of something more . . . my notion of color ceases to be color / Merging into a single color—white.”22 Like black, white is no color and all colors, at once empty and full. Intimate inspection of Black Square’s nonblack surface discloses its striking vitality; churning brushstrokes and even fingerprints suggest that Malevich’s empty white is equally full of feeling.23 While the artist’s axiomatic equation boils his philosophy of feeling down to the difference between black and white (“The square = feeling, the white field = the void beyond this feeling”), it does not presuppose an antagonist differential or presume Black Square to be a yin-and-yang of contrastive complements. A “void 18 Cf. Cullinan, “Colour Masses”; Nakov, Malevich: Painting the Absolute, 46–61; and Shatskikh, Black Square, 251–57. 19 Cf. Nakov, Malevich: Painting the Absolute, 46 and Cullinan, “Colour Masses,” 119, Malevich conceived of black and white as charged with superior energy which revealed or disclosed form. 20 Malevich, quoted in Nakov, Malevich: Painting the Absolute, 14, 43, 48, 22. 21 Malevich, “Suprematism,” 119. 22 Malevich, quoted in Shatskikh, Black Square, 260. 23 Nakov, Malevich: Painting the Absolute, 61.

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beyond feeling” is not a void without feeling. It is a space beyond black, full of something else. However, this white field of something else is not to be read as a border or frame around the inner square. What might appear as a perimeter encircling the black square performs the opposite purpose. It represents the erasure of limits and effectively deframes the square along with the entire canvas. In this sense, the artist’s figurative imagery of breaking the “horizon-ring” functions analogously to Kleist’s eyelid metaphor. Malevich’s espoused desire to “escape from the circle of things” refers not only to leaving behind objective representation and the frameworks of Western illusionism but also to the frame itself as a physical and conceptual device. Photographs of suprematist paintings at exhibitions and in ateliers attest to the absence of a physical frame in the original hang. Any thin strips of edging that might be visible are not frames of the sort found around Malevich’s cubo-futurist work; rather, they are only the molding typically used to guard against tears or unequal distribution of pressure.24 The absence of the physical device mirrors the conceptual program laid out by the suprematist manifestos that repeatedly stress Malevich’s innovatory triumph of liberating painting from traditional philosophical frameworks structuring how art is perceived, depicted, and understood. In talking about the revolutionary effect of suprematism on his oeuvre, the artist marks an unbridgeable break between the “pictures” of his presuprematist period and his suprematist art. The former comprises the “window through which we discover life,” the artist clarified in 1920 in reference to his presuprematist work.25 As in the previous chapter, the painting-as-window conceit reflects a frame of thought which defines art through its attachment to the world of objects. However richly or sparsely populated with objects, landscapes such as Lorrain’s, Der Mönch am Meer, or Malevich’s “pictures” open implicit literary dimensions that regulate how the eye perceives and the mind processes the images. Narrating what the picture illustrates, sensory and cognitive faculties make sense of an objective painting’s composition in terms of conventional hierarchies of top and bottom, foreground and background. For this reason, viewers are conditioned to order the elements of a nonobjective image like Black Square into a framework of understanding consonant with the window conceit: the black becomes the foreground framed by the white in the background. Put bluntly, this reading is categorically wrong. The viewer looks for a “picture” where none exists. Suprematist artworks are not “pictures,” as Malevich specifies in a letter from 1915 describing Black Square: “I am currently working on a picture (actually they are no longer pictures, for the age of pictures is over 24 Jakovljevic, “Unframe Malevich!,” 27. 25 Malevich, quoted in Nakov, Malevich: Painting the Absolute, 24.

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and done with). . . .”26 Unlike a conventional “picture,” suprematist artworks have no up and no down, no foreground and no background. Underscored by their utilitarian titles, they also nullify narrative impulses, because their “painterly masses” have no objective other than themselves. If Black Square is not a “picture,” then its white field is neither background nor frame.27 The most visually succinct case for white’s coequal status is Four Squares (1915). Here, Malevich levels the planar dimensions leveled into one, allover flat surface and rearranges the elements in Black Square into a checkerboard pattern so that white and black literally share the same amount of canvas area.28 With white achieving the same prominence as black, Malevich effaces the very existence of backgrounds and frames, as is exhibited to a greater degree in Black and White: Suprematist Composition (1915). By engulfing a lower-left quadrant of white with an overabundance of black, the unevenly apportioned painting dispels any notion of framework. Moreover, the wealth of suprematist works showing any number of odd-angled shapes floating through white demonstrate that Malevich never intended for white to function as the frame in Black Square or elsewhere. Remembering Malevich’s axiom, white is the space beyond feeling, not the void behind or the frame around it. Put differently, it is everything but feeling. It is an everything that, without a frame, theoretically expands ad infinitum, as Malevich would attest. By breaking through the “horizon-ring” and the frame, the artist believed he had “overcome the lining of the colored sky.”29 When his exhortations call on us to “swim in the white free abyss, [for] infinity is before you,” white is identified as infinity itself.30 As the “gateway” to the infinite void beyond feeling, the black square of Black Square, like one of Friedrich’s Rückenfiguren, occupies the precipice between worlds. Treating the square as the monk and positioning oneself in its place bring the viewer to the brink of feeling and into a confrontation with the great white void beyond it. This white void has yet to be articulated, but that is the point. Suprematism for Malevich “did not bring into being a new world of feeling”; it created “an altogether new and direct form” of its representation.31 The black square and the 26 Malevich, quoted in Nakov, Malevich: Painting the Absolute, 24, emphasis in the original. 27 Cf. Schapiro, “On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art,” 9–19. Schapiro reviews the development of aesthetic conventions to reveal the arbitrariness of frameworks and viewing habits in Western illusionism (11–12). 28 For this reason, Jakovljevic regards “the evolution of the notion of white as one of the central developments of Suprematism” (“Unframe Malevich!,” 31). 29 Malevich from the catalogue of the Tenth State Exhibition in Moscow (1919), reproduced in Zhadova, Malevich: Suprematism and Revolution, 283. 30 Malevich, quoted in Zhadova, Malevich: Suprematism and Revolution, 283. 31 Malevich, “Suprematism,” 119.

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repository of “painterly masses” proceeding from its foundation do away with traditional frameworks and objectivity to index the feelings of experiential reality more immediately. They comprise what is knowable. The revelation beyond their “gateway” is the great white world that stretches into the limitlessness of what is unknowable, not yet experienced, or not yet conceived. If the black square signifies what is felt but not expressible through words or other preexisting frameworks, then white exists beyond feeling and expression: the ineffable emptiness beyond words.32 Malevich continues along this conceptual path in his liturgy of white: “But even the color white is still white and, to / show shapes in it, it must be created / so that the shape can be read, so that the sign / can be taken in.”33 Practically and philosophically speaking, the white field renders all other shapes visible. The infinite white expanse of unknown reality allows viewers to see (“read”) the shapes of knowable reality and identify the contours (“take in”) of the signs by which they are understood. Awareness of a reality beyond the knowable one will not lead to knowing, feeling, or experiencing it, yet it will alert audiences to the limitations of knowable reality and the frameworks determining how it is felt and experienced. That an unknown beyond is always out there in the ether and unexperienced is conveyed in the white paintings from Malevich’s final suprematist period. The obliquely tilted white square in Suprematist Composition: White on White from 1918 (fig. 2.3) nearly attains absolute infinity, but its contours remain nonetheless visible despite the monochromatism promised by the title. An alternate “whiteness” will inevitably be beyond the limitations of existing conceptual or visual frameworks, for it ultimately enables the eye to see. Considering that Black Square, the “zero of form,” announces the starting point of the suprematist revolution, White on White takes audiences to its final, sequential phases. The painting suggests that the white void in Black Square has been conquered because the viewer has moved beyond the knowable feelings of black into the infinity of the white void. The once-unknown white beyond in Black Square appears in White on White as a knowable white “painterly mass” of feeling. This white “painterly mass” now experienced and signified in the shape of square is the new ground zero, which does not represent the end. As the artist explained, suprematism forever reaches for the next infinity, reducing everything to zero and then moving beyond.34 Even as White 32 Jakovljevic theorizes the white field of the beyond as the “threshold of thinking” and space before thought (“Unframe Malevich!,” 24). 33 Malevich, quoted in Shatskikh, Black Square, 260. 34 Malevich explained the title of the 0.10 as follows: “We intend to reduce everything to zero, we have decided to call it that, ‘Zero,’ and then afterward we will move beyond zero” (quoted in Shatskikh, Black Square, 101).

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Figure 2.3. Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: White on White, 1918. Oil on canvas, 31.25 x 31.25 in (79.4 x 79.4 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. © The Museum of Modern Art. Reproduced with permission from SCALA / Art Resource, New York.

on White sustains the suprematist striving beyond zero, it acknowledges the endlessness of its endeavor in the revelation of another infinite white beyond the beyond. Yet, that something else exists beyond the beyond and outside of knowable frames of representation fills the emptiness of white with the potential for eternal newness. In showing the void beyond the known, suprematist art points to the infinite possibilities beyond current frameworks, calling attention to their arbitrary structure and undermining the monolithic claims of systems asserting their categorical essentialism.35 35 Malevich and other avant-garde artists found themselves at a ground zero amid shifting sociopolitical frameworks when the centuries-old structures of tsarist Russia were replaced by the Soviet Union and World War I swept away the

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The image of infinite white relates to discourses of sublimity even if its infiniteness feels restricted by the small dimensions of the painting. What suprematist canvases lack in size is compensated for in the conceptual limitlessness of its deframed art. As in the Kantian construct, sublimity appears to originate as a feeling within the subject, evoked by the suprematist artwork that indexes the limitless formlessness of the white beyond, even if not physically exhibiting the properties of the sublime. Whereas Kant formulates the sublime as a moment of triumph for human rationality when sensible intuition fails, the sublimity suggested by Malevich would overwhelm both. Paintings such as the Black Square or White on White confront the viewer with a limitless formlessness (white field) and frame it as rational idea (black or white square). Even after instituting a frame of rational cognition on the expanse, however, another limitless formlessness still exists beyond that. Like the shapes floating in the artworks signify, parts of the void may be framed, but as the ever-present white field establishes, the void in its entirety is never fully framed. Further defying Kant, Malevich’s prioritization of feeling and intuition constructed the square as a transrational entity.36 The artwork and its conceptual reach reign supreme over rational cognition—hence the movement’s name and Malevich’s symbolic hanging of Black Square above the heads of his public. Given the inability of reason to present the totality, the squares of suprematism would seem to exhibit greater affinity with the type of sublimity arising from the mode of abstraction described by Kleist. We might imagine White on White as featuring “two or three enigmatic objects” floating through a white field whose “uniformity and shorelessness” stretch out “like the apocalypse” and offer the subject no total control over its vastness. The white field conceivably is unframed and infinite, which corresponds to the loss of eyelids. At the same time, the loss of control appearing in Kleist is more absolute than the agency arising in Malevich. While both grant the subject a radically new openness to an aesthetic response, viewers of White on White still retain enough control of their faculties (or their eyelids) to frame the floating square within the conceptually unframed field as an object of intuition. As a result, suprematism is in an eternal and exhilarating pursuit of the next echelon beyond the beyond, each expanse filled with new potential for feeling. In Kleist, the loss of control ends at the beyond after life, the apocalypse. With its interest in the imaginative failure of presenting the infinite, the Kantian sublime is Lyotard’s source for “an outline of an aesthetic of sublime painting.” His reasoning is as follows: once solid pillars of Western society. On Malevich and the Russian Revolution, see Fauchereau, Malevich, 25–27. 36 See Nakov, Malevich: Painting the Absolute, 55.

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As painting it will evidently “present” something, but negatively. It will therefore avoid figuration or representation; it will be “blank” [blanche] like one of Malevich’s squares; it will make one see only by prohibiting one from seeing; it will give pleasure only by giving pain.37

Malevich avoids figuration in the traditional sense, yet he does not preclude representation by presenting a “negative” image of a “blank” square. Representing pure feeling, his “painterly masses” signal the existence of the “blankness” beyond. Their contours allow viewers to perceive the infinite white expanse of the unknowable space through which they swim. Rather than prohibit seeing, Malevich’s square allows one to see beyond the limitations of knowable reality, a space that the artist encourages his audience to explore. The sublime element in Black Square is not the square itself but the white field beyond it. Formulated in terms of a Kleistian sublime, the still operative internal framework of the “painterly masses” leads to an appreciation of the external framelessness. With the conditions for Kleist’s mode of abstraction only half fulfilled, one might suffer the loss of one eyelid, perhaps, but one is spared the sort of visceral pain portended by both the author and Lyotard.

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The Veil Lifted: Mark Rothko at the Margins of Revelation The sort of painful pleasure of prohibited seeing described by Lyotard resonates more strongly in the paintings of Russian-born American artist Mark Rothko.38 His signature style of vertically aligned hazy-edged rectangles came to embody abstract art in mid-century America, even if the artist adamantly disassociated his work from the word (“I am not an abstractionist”).39 In contradistinction to Malevich, the self-styled spiritualist, Rothko called himself a “materialist” committed to a “realistic” painting that adhered to the “substance of things.”40 His quadrangles accordingly remain anchored to 37 Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained, 11. 38 Rothko (Marcus Rothkowitz) was born in 1903 in Dvinsk, Russia (present-day Latvia) to a Jewish family whose members had all emigrated to the United States by 1913. For a biographical account, see Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography. 39 Rothko to a critic, quoted in Elderfield, “Transformations,” 101, emphasis in the original. Cf. Chave, Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction, 25. 40 Rothko, quoted in Chave, Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction, 3, 194, 25; and Rothko, quoted in Weiss, “Rothko’s Unknown Space,” in Mark Rothko, 307. On Malevich’s lack of influence on Rothko, see Chave, Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction, 190–93.

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earth where they vibrate with solemn gravity. “Abstract art never interested me,” he insisted in 1952; “I always painted realistically. My present paintings are realistic.”41 As an artist, Rothko practiced a “trade,” putting “things” on canvas that are truthful to and experienceable in lived reality. The deceits of three-dimensionality and mimetic reproduction perpetuated by Western illusionism were at odds with the essence of the medium and prohibited Rothko from establishing an honest relationship with his spectator. Figurative art disrupted the painter-spectator dialogue; this could, as Anna C. Chave puts it, lead viewers “to confuse the object in the painting for the object of painting.”42 To reassert the flatness of the picture plane was both a moral obligation and a matter of aesthetic integrity. The “familiar identity of things has to be pulverized,” Rothko concluded, “so that the painter can “destroy the finite associations with which our society increasingly enshrouds every aspect of our environment.”43 Nonfigurative painting provided a more appropriate mode of representation for Rothko’s subject matter, which lay beyond what narration could convey. It fostered more immediate and intimate communion between the painter and his audience, which could better connect with the true “substance of things” presented in the artworks. Rothko was not a color field painter and “not a colorist” in the same way he was “not an abstractionist,” despite a critical and popular overemphasis on the meaningfulness of his palette.44 Viewers of his signature bi- or tripartite chromatic blocks “who are moved only by their color relationships,” he said disdainfully, “are missing the point.”45 Yet “the point” was left unsaid. The artist was notoriously reluctant to define the things of concern that comprised the substance of his art, and he ceased issuing any written statements about it from the 1950s on in order to avoid undue influence on the viewer or pigeonholing the painter.46 Lectures, treatises, and museum labels provided supplementary commentary that would, in Rothko’s eyes, “tell the public what to look for. While on the surface this may be an obliging and helpful thing to do, the real result is 41 Rothko in a 1952 interview with William Seitz, quoted in Chave, Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction, 25. 42 Chave, Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction, 28. 43 Rothko, “The Romantics Were Prompted,” 141. 44 Rothko, quoted in Chave, Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction, 13. On Rothko’s resistance to the label “colorist,” see Bersani and Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment, 101; Chave, Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction, 13, 25, 177; Gage, “Rothko: Colour as Subject,” 246–63 (247–48); Selz, Mark Rothko, 9; Kozloff, “Mark Rothko’s New York Retrospective,” 409–11; and Rosenberg, “Mark Rothko,” 414; and Weiss, “Rothko’s Unknown Space,” 303. 45 Rothko, quoted in Rodman, Conversations with Artists, 93. 46 Cf. Chave, Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction, 16, 188; and Christopher Rothko, “Rothko and the Resonance of History,” 9.

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the paralysis of the mind and the imagination (and for the artist a premature entombment).”47 Instead, he erred on the side of silence (“Silence is so accurate”); anyone seeking explanations would find them only in the “consummated experience between picture and onlooker.”48 Rothko scholarship has filled this silence with a great many metaphors that have attempted to capture the affective experience of standing in the presence of his paintings. Passageways (“doorway,” “threshold,” “portal,” “passport to a more luminous world”) speak to feelings of transport and travel into unknown territory, while poetry and music (Shakespeare’s sonnets, a Mozart mass) convey the lyrical quality of color tonality.49 Sometimes Rothko’s rectangles are the image of solidity; they erect walls and barricades, opaque facades that occlude vision and encroach on the viewer to evoke claustrophobia. At other times, they are the hollow nothingness of spatial recess (void, vacuum, abyss, or cavity). Or his color floats in the liminal regions between substance and emptiness as atmospheric phenomena (clouds, vapors, and mists) that threaten to dissipate. Like fog or shadows, they perform the concealing function of a veil, screen, or mask that hints at a hidden, otherworldly dimension. Colors shimmer, glow, radiate, and vibrate with calming timbres to strike chords of tranquillity in the viewer. That tissues of his forms also quiver, shiver, and tremble in anxious vibrato, however, suggests that one also experiences angst and unease before his paintings. The ways in which words recreate Rothko’s art and the feelings it elicits range from conflicting to irreconcilable: his color forms promote quiet and disquiet, are opaque and translucent, close doors and open windows, and erect looming walls and empty into receding voids. A common denominator among these dissonant reactions is the physicality of affect. Being before a Rothko painting is a full-body, multisensory event. Producing sensory effects of tactility and musicality, his arrangements of color, light, and space generate strong emotions within the spectator. Whether audiences feel at peace or are agitated, they are transported to another state beyond the profane realities of life before and after the encounter. The feeling of transport bespeaks the metaphors of passageways leading to some undefined elsewhere. Images of screens or walls might obscure or obstruct the implied passageway, yet their presence, however hazy or substantial, still intimates the existence of some mysterious place or thing beyond the limits of knowable reality. That the rhetoric of complex affects and transport beyond limits gestures toward a theory of the sublime has not gone unnoticed.50 Although the adjec47 Rothko, quoted in Crow, “The Marginal Difference,” 25. 48 Rothko, quoted in Chave, Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction, 16; 188. 49 See Ashton, About Rothko, 3 and “Art: Mark Rothko,” 402–5. 50 Cf. Arya, “Reflections on the Spiritual in Rothko,” 315–35; Chave, Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction, 16–17; Crowther, How Pictures Complete Us,

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tive “sublime” is often applied by others to his paintings, the artist himself never laid out a theory of sublimity. However, limited writings and conversations with contemporaries would indicate a sublime construct consonant with tragedy and the sense of the tragic that emerges from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, 1872).51 Rothko considered himself and his aesthetic approach “reformed” after his early reading of this work, developing his own metaphor for the substance of his art: that of drama, another multisensory, transportive experience.52 Critiquing the devolution of modern culture, Nietzsche’s first philosophical publication celebrates Greek tragedy as a pinnacle of human cultural expression arising from the eternal interplay between two oppositional elements, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The Apollonian principle of individuation governs the realm of enlightenment and knowledge, like the sun-god Apollo whose name it bears. Concerned with surface and illusion, it creates bounded forms, instills order and control, and satisfies the classical desire for beauty and joy. While the Apollonian occupies the provinces of the plastic arts, the contrasting duality associated with Dionysus, the god of music, disrupts order through the pressures of its primal energies. Its ecstatic throes transport individuals back to the dark depths of the primordial unity before form or individuation. The destructive Dionysian revelry breathes life into the static contours of Apollonian arts, which reciprocate by bestowing form on the Dionysian impulse as quickly as its frenzy rips them apart. Through the marriage 96–106; Rosenblum, “Rothko’s Sublimities,” 41–60; and Sandler, “The Sectionals 1949–1969,” 83–93. 51 Cf. Ashton, “Rothko’s Frame of Mind,” 13–24. For an overview of the literary and philosophical influences, especially Greek tragedy, on Rothko, see Ashton, About Rothko. Cf. also Ashton, “Frame of Mind,” 16–17; Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography, 170; Chave, Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction, 82–90; Fer, “Rothko and Repetition,” 162; Novak and O’Doherty, “Rothko’s Dark Paintings,” 265; and Selz, Mark Rothko, 12. 52 See Seitz, Abstract Expressionist Painting in America. As recounted by Seitz, art historian and curator at MOMA, Rothko considered himself “reformed” after studying the “dramatic themes of myth . . . and [engaging in] an early reading of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy” (8). The artist likely first studied Nietzsche during his time at Yale. For the influence of Nietzsche on Rothko, see Arya, “Reflections on the Spiritual in Rothko,” 321, 327–28; Ashton, About Rothko, 51–57; Bersani and Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment, 140; Breslin, Mark Rothko, 173–176; Chave, Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction, 79–83; Collins, “Beyond Pessimism,” 46–75; Crow, “The Marginal Difference,” 35–36; Fer, “Rothko and Repetition,” 162–63; Hobbs, “Mark Rothko,” 418–21; Novak and O’Doherty, “Rothko’s Dark Paintings,” 265–81; and Selz, Mark Rothko, 14. An unpublished fragment written by Rothko on Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy is reproduced in Haag and Sharp, Mark Rothko: Toward Clarity, 165.

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of antagonistic forces, Greek tragedy compels its audiences to face the unbearable realities of life, specifically the excruciating unknown of death. Rothko’s art enacts a rebirth of tragedy in the spirit of Nietzsche, restaging the drama of human mortality and vitality in its staging of light, color, and space. The reality of his paintings, the “substance of things,” does not play out center stage. Rather, the true drama unfolds at the margins of his color shapes as the unraveling of their margins, a process that points to the limits of experience and confronts us with the inevitable tragedy of what lies beyond. Rothko rehearses the production of his paintings-as-dramas in “The Romantics Were Prompted” (1947), writing: “I think of my pictures as dramas; the shapes in the pictures are the performers. They have been created from the need for a group of actors who are able to move dramatically without embarrassment and execute gestures without shame.”53 All the picture’s a stage and all the shapes merely players whose performances take on a life of their own. “Neither the action nor the actors can be anticipated, or described in advance. They begin as an unknown adventure in an unknown space,” Rothko explains. “It is at the moment of completion that in a flash of recognition, they are seen to have the quantity and function which was intended. Ideas and plans that existed in the mind at the start were simply the doorway through which one left the world in which they occur.”54 Although Rothko as artist-playwright conceives the initial idea for the drama and devises its basic set design, he does not know in advance how the plot plays out or how the performance ends once he enters the painting-play. The actor-shapes are the driving force of the enacted events, dictating the storyline and assuming control of the canvas, with the artist’s hand serving a facilitating role. Rothko trusts his actors to deliver a performance of “the quantity and function which was intended,” but only “in a flash of recognition” does he intuit the “moment of completion” when his picture-drama expresses what has to be expressed. For the artwork to arrive at its dramatic resolution, the show must go on long after the artist ceases the process of its production. Providing the primordial push into animate form and the momentum to keep the action ongoing is the reciprocal antagonism between Apollonian and Dionysian forces. Their interplay infuses the inanimate fields of paint with the agency necessary to complete the performance, such as in No. 10 from 1950 (fig. 2.4). This early example of Rothko’s paradigmatic work features multiple actor-shapes in shades of white, blue, and gold. No. 10’s “cast” totals four members vertically cascading from top to bottom with no immediately apparent logic guiding the positioning of 53 Rothko, “The Romantics Were Prompted,” 140. 54 Rothko, “The Romantics Were Prompted,” 140.

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Figure 2.4. Mark Rothko, No. 10, 1950. Oil on canvas, 90.25 x 57.63 in. (229.2 x 146.4 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. © The Museum of Modern Art / © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Reproduced with permission from SCALA / Art Resource, New York.

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their irregularly contoured bodies or the arrangement of color—an element altogether absent from Rothko’s essay. The omission is unsurprising given the artist’s determination to deemphasize role of color in his art. Yetthis omission is surprising when one physically faces No. 10’s towering hues of yellow, azure, and white. While one might initially feel cheered up by the sunny yellow or bright combination of blue against white, after sitting with the painting and watching the movement and gestures of the actor-shapes evolve, one moves past the obviousness of color and realizes that its structure tilts off kilter. This is not to say that the picture is unbalanced; its composition threatens to but ultimately does not unravel at the seams precisely because the calibrated push and pull of the ApollonianDionysian dichotomy prevents things from falling apart. Rothko initially sets the stage with the scaffolding of Apollonian order: background (blue field) and foreground (shapes); four geometric forms; canvas divided into segments; distinct colors remaining within their quadrants. The dramatic actions that Rothko claims cannot “be anticipated, or described in advance” are triggered by the incursion of the Dionysian element. Its primal energies creep in from the margins to unmake the Apollonian makings of form. As a result, the four actorshapes align unsteadily, teetering at the brink of collapse and fighting their own dissolution. Making their movements and gestures possible, the crucial but secondary contributions of color assist the shapes in executing their performance. The painting’s carefully stacked shapes, uncentered on the canvas, cling to a precarious equilibrium that slowly succumbs to a slightly rightward lean. The rectangles appear out of proportion, with the largest gold block resting on a white mass of smaller stature while a thinning bar of white floats impossibly above them both, disconnected by a thicker slab of blue that nearly blends fully into the background, almost reclaimed by the Dionysian drive to end individuation. The blue background further destabilizes the balancing act of white-blue-gold-white by eating into each of the masses, erasing the boundaries traced by the Apollonian impulse. As their edges deteriorate, the underlying geometry is exposed, revealing an additional stratum of color. A reddish-brown crust overlies the blue background. Although its halo ensconces both larger rectangles, the rust-colored undercoating is most visible at the right edge of the lower white (fig. 2.5). A white wisp sweeps outward as the rest of the shape is yanked inward. Running down the border beneath it, a more pronounced outline of white creates the effect of acid-frayed ends. Similar corrosion occurs in the upper regions of yellow where a thin layer of translucent blue advances downward over the exposed red underbelly into the yellow. Reminiscent of copper patina, a light bluish-green fringe erodes the shape’s surface while the visible strata of red contaminate the field of gold from behind. The purity of Rothko’s whites and, to a less perceptible

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Figure 2.5. Detail of margins on Mark Rothko, No. 10, 1950. Oil on canvas, 90.25 x 57.63 in. (229.2 x 146.4 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photographs taken by author on December 15, 2019.

degree, his blue bar is likewise sullied by a darker deposit underneath. The chromatic relationships engineered by the artist, while not comprising the heart of the drama, engender the optical effects that make the actions of players visible to the audience and accord them the anthropomorphic agency specified in Rothko’s drama metaphor.

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As “organisms with volition and a passion for self-assertion,” they “move with internal freedom, and without need to conform with or to violate what is probable in the familiar world.”55 Being distinct from the “familiar world” allows his actor-shapes the freedom to move without the aforementioned feelings of “shame” or “embarrassment” that would result from social nonconformity. This distinction also justifies Rothko’s aesthetic nonconformity in completely breaking with figurative art to paint forms that are not abstract in his understanding. Not attempting to reproduce the physical environment, his amorphous shapes “have no direct association with any particular visible experience, but in them one recognizes the principle and passion of organisms.”56 Recognizing their own essences and emotions in his color forms, viewers are moved to identify with them as one would any actor in a play. In connecting with the artwork on an existential level, audiences reconnect with the most essentially human parts of themselves that have no outlet for expression in modern society. “The presentation of this drama in the familiar world was never possible,” Rothko concludes, “unless everyday acts belonged to a ritual accepted as referring to a transcendent realm.”57 The panacea for the lost metaphysical realm made physically real through ritual is art. Hence, “pictures must be miraculous, . . . [must be] a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need” that will resolve the estrangement of the modern individual.58 The call for recovering the “miraculous” in art responds to the Nietzschean lament that scientific positivism has robbed the world of myth and religion. The Socratic quest to explain human existence in physical rather than metaphysical terms resulted for Nietzsche in the loss of a central, stabilizing anchor of society and led to the death of tragedy. The need for the mysterious, for the miraculous and mythic, becomes further and unmistakably Nietzschean in Rothko’s essay when he echoes the dominant critique issued by The Birth of Tragedy: “Without monsters and gods, art cannot enact our drama: art’s most profound moments express this frustration. When they were abandoned as untenable superstitions, art sank into melancholy. It became fond of the dark, and enveloped its objects in the nostalgic intimations of a half-lit world.”59 Reintroducing “monsters and gods” precipitates the rebirth of tragedy and rekindles artistic greatness, because it reinstates the destructive Dionysian forces able to counteract the Apollonian insistence on reason. Lifting art out of its melancholy, the rebirth of tragedy offers catharsis for the larger 55 56 57 58 59

Rothko, “The Romantics Were Prompted,” 141. Rothko, “The Romantics Were Prompted,” 141. Rothko, “The Romantics Were Prompted,” 141. Rothko, “The Romantics Were Prompted,” 141. Rothko, “The Romantics Were Prompted,” 141.

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modern society still suffering from the self-inflicted wound of scientific knowledge. For Rothko, as for Nietzsche, the stakes are nothing less than the meaningfulness of human existence. Nietzsche’s tract finds the greatest potential for tragedy’s rebirth in the musical dramas of Richard Wagner (1813–83), a position Nietzsche would famously later reverse. Entrusting music as the redemptive art harkens back to the genre’s etymological roots, according to which the term “tragedy” is derived from the Greek words for “goat” (tragos) and “song” (oidos). The “goat song” reflected the role of the chorus in ancient Greek tragedy. Whereas Nietzsche associated the individual actors with the Apollonian, the many-membered chorus singing in unified voice represented Dionysus and his goat-legged consorts. In Nietzsche’s retelling, tragic theater arose around the chorus, the primary point of identification for the audience. When the hero embarks on his tragic path toward destruction, the audience does not tumble after by virtue of its identification with the chorus. Being anchored in its unified whole allows spectators to survive the individual’s pain and suffering. Although the drama’s Apollonian scaffolding shields spectators from sliding too far into Dionysian ecstasy, its surface sheen cannot cover the ugly elements of tragedy. Instead of experiencing the superficial sentiments of pity or fear, as might be proper to the Aristotelian understanding of drama, the audience would experience a complex affect akin to the sublime pain of destruction and the pleasure of not being destroyed. Greek tragedy thus allowed spectators to experience the extremes of the human condition within the safe space of the theater, before being transported back to the “familiar world,” comforted and reinvigorated. In lieu of music, Rothko positions painting as cultural salvation to stage tragic picture dramas with similarly sublime affect. In addition to unleashing Dionysian energies at the margins of his shapes, Rothko resurrects the original spirit of the tragic goat song in the musical timbres of his colors and their compositional relationships. Yellow and Blue (Yellow, Blue on Orange) from 1955 (fig. 2.6) reduces its actor-shapes to a cast of two rectangles and two to three dominate colors arranged in dualistic confrontation. The bisected composition cuts the canvas into the oppositional light and darkness of Apollo and Dionysus. The battle line where the two hues collide falls just off the golden ratio, ever so slightly destabilizing the structure. On top rests the sun-god Apollo, in this painting appropriately colored. Although yellow covers nearly two-thirds of an eight-and-a-half-foot canvas, the artwork does not feel top-heavy. More massive shapes often appear higher in Rothko’s art; bottom-heavy compositions tend to sag into stagnancy, whereas larger rectangles placed higher impress power and vitality on the viewer. Rothko intensifies the impression through his application of paint and his careful attention to the margins. Soaking the color into the canvas (here a background coat of orange), he slowly built up layers of thickly and thinly applied yellow

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Figure 2.6. Mark Rothko, American, 1903–1970, Yellow and Blue (Yellow, Blue on Orange), 1955. Oil on canvas, 102.25 × 66.69 in. (259.72 x 169.39 cm). Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA. © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph © 2020 Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

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78 T he Kleistian Sublime Is Now 

pigments. Shades of variegated yellow spread unevenly across the surface to create a deep yet diffuse sensation of light that radiates out to the feathery edges of the rectangle where its blurry frontiers blend into the orange background. Appearing to advance ominously at the audience, a “hot” yellowish color rises like a great, weightless sun whose glaring intensity forces the eye upward as it pushes the spectator away.60 The heroic Apollonian principle emanates enlightenment and order but threatens to lead the audience down the path of destruction, because the pulsating fireball is painful to look at. Like Regulus, the audiences would be blinded by the light if not for the soothing effects of the “cool” blue rectangle at the bottom of the canvas. Playing the part of the tragic chorus, the blue actor-shape corresponding to the Dionysian element provides enough equilibrium and relief so that the audience can withstand the suffering of the hero. As warm tonalities of yellow push audiences away from the canvas to force separateness as individuals, the colder tones of blue pull them in by serving as a primary point of identification that facilitates unity with the artwork. That achieving unity with the Dionysian would mean annihilation is portended at the painting’s decaying margins. There, the edges unravel as the tangerine undercoating erodes through the patchy sediments of blue. Whereas the yellow rectangle seems to spread, the blue field withers into itself as Dionysian energies dissolve the form from the inside out. To repel the audience’s attraction to the destructive cool tonality, Rothko inserts a streak of magenta down the perimeter of the blue rectangle. Extending from the overhang of yellow on the right, the magenta blends and clashes with the orange behind it. While suggestions of pink warm the blue field, the coolness of its purple undertones tempers the heat of the yellow and orange. The vertical stripe simultaneously pushes and pulls at the viewer who cannot discern where it rests vis-à-vis the blue or tell which shapes are nearer or farther from the eye. Pictorial space is thrown into turmoil; flatness and depth fluctuate; and spatial orientation is lost. As the eye bounces between the pain-inducing yellow and pain-relieving blue, the painting is at once pleasurable and terrible, harmonic and dissonant, beautiful and ugly. This choreographed painting-as-drama welcomes the eye into its tragic performance to experience the painful and unpleasant substance of life, all while maintaining enough order and balance to distance us from being consumed by it. Rothko seems to convey that the tragedy of his paintings is the knowledge of death and the necessity to keep living 60 Gage notes Rothko’s interest in harnessing “contrast and assimilation” of color for his art but stresses the artist’s differing language and his ability to manipulate a given color to “push” or “pull,” terms popularized by the abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann (“Rothko: Colour as Subject,” 251–53).

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despite death’s immanent presence. The return to the disindividuation prior to form looms large over the spectator who, like the composition, does not buckle under its weight, because the even larger and livelier beautiful appearances of the Apollonian element make reality bearable for individual human beings. Audiences walk away from Rothko’s art and reenter the “familiar world” feeling changed but comforted. In one of the few reviews that Rothko felt grasped the paradoxical affect of his art, British critic David Sylvester reported: “He [Rothko] uses the apparatus of serenity in achieving violence. . . . Violence and serenity are reconciled and fused—that is what makes Rothko’s a tragic art.”61 Even though Rothko characterized his work as “the most violent painting in America today,” few in America seemed to appreciate the tragedy and violence that he took pains to orchestrate.62 The tragic and terrible elements of Rothko’s art were more overt in his darker and black-form paintings, but they consistently lurked throughout classic works as the barely suppressed violence of clashing colors, corroding forms, and colliding forces. While Rothko prized his darker paintings as his most profoundly moving work, the public preferred the vivid colors of his earlier forms, tending to misread the spirit in which they were intended and the truths they imparted.63 The superficial equation of bright colors with happy emotions likely strengthened Rothko’s resolve to downplay the role of color in his art and to pulverize familiar associations with it. Those who found his dark canvases too “difficult” or “depressing” to confront were, in Rothko’s eyes, only refusing to face the depths of their own emotions and the terrifying inevitabilities of life.64 “I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on,” the artist insisted, “and the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures show [sic] that I communicate those basic human emotions.”65 A person willing to weep before his paintings was Rothko’s target audience. 61 David Sylvester, quoted in Chave, Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction, 182. Sylvester’s review appeared in the New Statesman on October 20, 1961. 62 Rothko in 1957 as related by Ashton (Chave, Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction, 182). This widespread misunderstanding has often been considered a contributing factor of the depression that led to Rothko’s his darkened palette and his suicide in 1970. Cf. Bersani and Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment, 115–16; Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography, 521–44; and O’Doherty, “The Dark Paintings,” 141–42. 63 An overview of the critical reception of Rothko’s work in the 1950s and propagation of his work as “decorative” or “relaxing” is found in Rich, “Staring into Space,” 81–100. 64 Chave, Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction, 183. 65 Rothko, quoted in Baal-Teshuva. Mark Rothko, 1903–1970: Pictures as Drama, 50.

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To facilitate the receptivity of the single sensitive observer, Rothko stipulated the heights at which all pictures should hang (no more than six inches above the ground), manipulated the ambient lighting (lower lights for darker pictures), and packed the room with his paintings to saturate the viewer with their emotionality and to induce feelings of claustrophobia.66 Turning the exhibition room into a theater that transported audiences out of their “familiar world” and into his paintings was the rationale for his characteristically frameless, oversized canvases. As the artist wrote in 1951: “I paint very large pictures. I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them,” he qualifies, “is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside experience. . . . However you paint a larger picture, you are in it. It isn’t something you command.”67 The experience of Rothko’s art as the semiautonomous drama he imagines feels real and material to the spectator swept up inside the picture and experiencing the emotions it elicits. Too close to frame the experience as a rational idea, the human subject cannot realize its calling as a creature of reason à la Kant. For Rothko, we realize ourselves as creatures of feeling, metaphysically interconnected with other beings by virtue of the common experience of physically being—and hence feeling—human in the world. The artist therefore scaled his paintings according to the human body. Its humanness and humanity comprise the measure, meaning, and “substance of things” shared by his art. Transfiguring the ugly truths of life into beautiful form, Rothko’s art stages the tragedy of humanity’s unmaking by revealing its own unmaking in the fraying margins and decomposing shapes. It assembles elements of the Kantian sublime but brings the audience closer than Kant could ever concede to pulling back the veil of familiar reality to show the apocalypse of not-being that exists beyond: the certainty of death that undercuts every life. Yet the apocalypse in Rothko’s art is not the one described by Kleist. The “two or three enigmatic objects” of the painting’s color shapes do not congeal into interminable “uniformity and shorelessness,” and Rothko seeks to overpower and subsume audiences into his color forms, not annihilate them in Dionysian oblivion. While the eye approaches the painful limits of nothingness, it is never wholly bereft of framework, because the background field around the color shapes makes 66 Cf. Arya, “Reflections on the Spiritual in Rothko,” 330–32; Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography, 447–49, 482–83; Chave, Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction, 181; Cohn, “The First Installation of the Harvard Murals,” 55–62; Crow, “The Marginal Difference,” 26; Fer, “Rothko and Repetition,” 163–65; and Oliver Wick, “Mark Rothko, ‘A consummated experience,’” 23–36. 67 Rothko in 1951, quoted in Harrison, “Abstract Expressionism,” 196.

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their margins visible. Instead, experiencing Rothko’s artworks is like the desiccation seen at their margins: the slow process of having one’s eyelids torn off. Even as Rothko lifts the veil to show the frightening nothingness behind its form, he simultaneously uses the form to veil this nothingness so that the unknowable beyond is never truly seen.68 The eye experiences the pain of knowing what is to come but the pleasure of not yet experiencing it. Rothko’s work thus performs what Lyotard envisions for Malevich: it “will make one see only by prohibiting one from seeing; it will give pleasure only by giving pain.”69 Kleistian sublimity does not prohibit seeing; its painful pleasure results from only seeing and, with no eyelid to protect or provide distance, seeing too much.

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To Finity and Beyond: Barnett Newman’s New Man, Heroic and Sublime If gazing at Malevich’s squares would be akin to having had one eyelid cut away, and if staring at Rothko’s raveling veils would create the sensation of eyelids slowly being sliced away, Barnett Newman stretches space into proportions capable of blowing both eyelids off. Vir Heroicus Sublimis (fig. 2.7) dominated the exhibition space of the Betty Parsons Gallery when Barnett Newman unveiled the painting in 1951.70 At eight feet tall by eighteen feet wide, the overlarge canvas stretched down the baseboard and up to the ceiling, covering the wall with over a hundred square feet of undifferentiated red. Expanding to nearly twice the width of any of his previous canvases, the painting was a marked departure for Newman, who nevertheless consistently maintained that “size doesn’t count. It’s scale that counts. It’s human scale that counts, and the only way you can achieve human scale is by content.”71 Vir Heroicus Sublimis remains Newman’s most famous work and the one most sublime in scale for the human body viewing its content. It is also the painting whose content, while not quite Kleistian, nonetheless comes closest to realizing the author’s vision of a frameless art and its affect of lidless sublimity. The painting’s title, which is simply the Latin for “man, heroic and sublime,” announces its ambitions for sublime content. By the artist’s own admission, Newman’s titles are evocations of the “emotional complex that I was under.”72 Communicated to the public in the painting that “I 68 Natalie Kosoi analyzes Rothko’s works as representations of “nothingness” as conceptualized in the philosophies of Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger. See Kosoi, “Nothingness Made Visible,” 20–31. 69 Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained, 11. 70 A retrospective of the exhibition is found in Bois, “1951,” 362–67. 71 Newman, “Interview with Emile de Antonio,” 307. 72 Newman, “Interview with David Sylvester,” 258.

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Figure 2.7. Top: Barnett Newman. Vir Heroicus Sublimis / 1–1951, 1950–51. Oil on canvas, 95.34 x 213.25 in. (242.2 x 541.7 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. (240.1969). © The Museum of Modern Art / © 2020 The Barnett Newman Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Reproduced with permission from SCALA / Art Resource, New York. Bottom: Photograph taken by the author’s mother on December 15, 2019.

call Vir Heroicus Sublimis, [is] that man can be or is sublime in relation to his sense of being aware.”73 However, its initial viewers did not have this crutch, because these words were absent from the inaugural exhibition 73 Newman, “Interview with David Sylvester,” 258.

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where no names, only numbers, identified the objects.74 Audiences had no way of knowing that the image catalogued as 1–1951 meant “man, heroic and sublime” to Newman. Even if they had, a search for “man, heroic and sublime” in the poppy-red field would not have been successful. Instead, they had to turn off rational thought and open themselves to the painting—not as an exercise in intellectual analysis but as conveyer of an “emotional complex” that would awaken the feeling “that man can be or is sublime in relation to his sense of being aware.” Let us approach the painting as originally intended, then, and first sense the sublimity in 1–1951 before the title Vir Heroicus Sublimis articulated it as such. Despite the absence of titles, visitors entering the Betty Parsons Gallery were not wholly without aid. Typed on a handout were a few words of explanation from the artist: “There is a tendency to look at large pictures from a distance. The large pictures in this exhibition are intended to be seen from a short distance.”75 The restrictive space of the gallery left viewers little choice. The close quarters, coupled with the overwhelming size of the canvas, compelled their nearness and prohibited them from attaining enough distance to take in the entirety of the great red expanse. As viewers, we would be forced to physically move eyes, head, and feet in order to negotiate the length of the painting. Doing so causes us to encounter five vertical bands of varying colors and length: orange-red, white, maroon, orange-red, and tan. Interspersed across seemingly random intervals, they cut through the red field with surgical precision to segment its eighteen feet into six panels. As the only color contrasts on the picture plane, the bands “solicit” our attention, to use Yve-Alain Bois’s term, but even as “we find ourselves tempted to zoom on to the next one,” our eyes are arrested by a more sensational spectacle: the red field. By 1951, the idea of a monochrome painting was not without precedent (Malevich); neither was the idea of a very large painting (Rothko) or a very large monochrome (Rothko).76 The novelty of Newman’s achievement lies in his ductus. Whereas the varied textures and tonalities of Rothko’s floating rectangles evidence the emotion and labor of its artist, the sweeping uniformity of the seamless red surface in 1–1951 hides the material of its making. The only visual incidence on canvas, the five vertical bands, seem too sharply executed to have been hand drawn. Impassive, homogenous, and minimal, the stretches of red between the 74 Temkin, “Barnett Newman on Exhibition,” 41. Press reports for the exhibition made it clear that the titles were not to be disclosed to the public. 75 Newman, quoted in Bois, “1951,” 365. 76 On the legacy of the “big painting,” see Goosen, “The Philosophic Line of Barnett Newman,” 332–35; Thomas Hess, Barnett Newman, 17; and Temkin, “Barnett Newman on Exhibition,” 41.

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bands appeared vaster and emptier to its first audiences. Staring straight into the maw, it is easy to get lost in so much red. Although its spread reaches a physical stopping point at the margins of the unframed canvas, the color appears frameless and limitless when viewed at the prescribed short distance because upper and lower boundaries of the painting are not visible without moving the head up or down. All the spectator can absorb is the vivid “ocean” of unchanging cadmium without incident, orientation, or proportion. The flat, smooth color appears to modulate the longer we stare at it, causing the static paint to undulate with the fluidity of water, thereby assuming the “vibrating” and “violent” effects observed by Bois. The painting engulfs the eye from above and submerges it from below to engender an optical experience that Kleist’s words could describe: the object of vision, “in its uniformity and shorelessness, it has nothing as its foreground but the frame . . . as if one’s eyelids had been cut away.” With nothing left to distance us from the painting, we feel subsumed in and surrounded by its space. The apocalypse of red, lifeless and inhospitable, is effaced by human touch and overpowers the eye because Newman’s ideal viewing conditions deny the security of distance that would spare viewers the sight of a world beyond nature and reason. Viewed from the short distance recommended by Newman, 1–1951 very nearly complies with the criteria for the mode of abstraction derived from Kleist and the sublime feeling of lidlessness evoked by the experience of limitlessness. Except that limitlessness is not what Newman really painted and it is not what is experienced when staring into the “vibrating ocean of violent color.” There is an additional element in the composition—five, to be exact—that extends a lifeline to the eye by offering an unearthly sign of life. The quintet of vertical stripes braces our vision with their peripheral presence, even if we are not consciously aware of their support. Interspersed across the eighteen feet of unchanging vermillion, the five bands of varying colors and length run through the canvas at irregular but not arbitrary intervals. With each vertical calibrated to occur at its precise moment, wherever we stand to view the painting and however close we stare into the red, at least one band falls into the field of vision. While the painting expands above and below the eye for an essentially “frameless” effect, the lateral flow of red is held in check by the verticals. Newman’s verticals are not comparable to Malevich’s “painterly masses” or Rothko’s floating rectangles. Set against chromatically contrastive fields, both black square and disintegrating veil are essentially frames within a frame that encourage the optical distinction of depth and divide the spatial plane into foregrounds and backgrounds. Their shapes prevent spectators from perceiving a space on canvas that would index an unpresentable “beyond,” and so mark the frontiers between what rational cognition can represent as totality and what remains out of reach.

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Newman does something different. Neither his verticals nor the red field can afford the distance to safeguard the spectator’s eyelids because they do not block the vision of a “beyond.” The center square and side panels partitioned by the verticals do not constitute additional shapes, separate from the red field; they are the red field itself. Stretching the full height of the canvas, the five verticals apportion the painting’s width into six subdivisions that are equally spatially flat. No one panel appears closer or farther if viewed from afar. By contrast, the vertical bands appear amid vermillion at various strata of depth with disconcerting optical effects that simulate the illusion of fore- and middlegrounds. White lunges at the eye, followed by maroon and tan, while the thinner and less contrastive orange-red stripes fade to deeper recesses of the picture plane. Closer inspection of the bands communicates the method of their making and the involvement of the artist (fig. 2.8). The imprint of the masking tape used to mark their paths is obvious, especially in the orange-red strips. The edges where red paint abuts the band reveal that Newman must have applied the tape to the canvas before laying down the vermillion overcoat. Thus, the verticals actually occupy the deepest space of the painting farthest from the spectator, and yet they appear closest because their chromatic contrast causes them to sit on the surface. The verticals vacillate between background and foreground, never committing to a spatial plane or allowing the eye to determine one for them. Their movement animates the impervious and emotionless red field, as do the subtle details at the outer margins of each band. Not as razor sharp as they seem from afar, their imperfect edging further disrupts illusions of depth.77 White, tan, and maroon cut through the red more cleanly, while the orange-red couplet alternately evaporates and materializes like an object of varying visibility in fog. Never completely before or behind the red, the bands exist amid it because the eye constantly perceives their forms emerging from it. Like the irregular beats of a metronome, their spurious movement perforates the endless red with contingencies of time and space. Since the unstable fluctuation of the bands does not fully interrupt the red, time and space are detectible but not determinable. The specifics of what viewers might perceive or experience when viewing 1–1951 up close as Newman wanted depends on one’s position before the canvas. If we stare into the center red square or one of the side panels, one or possibly two verticals fall into the line of sight but not as a primary focus. That remains on the overwhelming red, which “solicits” 77 When the artist painted up to the demarcated line, the red seeped under the masking tape to cover partial sections of each band to shifting degrees. Newman could control the precision of each edge depending on how firmly the tape was affixed. See Temkin, “Barnett Newman on Exhibition,” 49–51.

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Figure 2.8. (Above and opposite.) Detail comparisons of Barnett Newman’s vertical bands (“zips”) in Vir Heroicus Sublimis / 1–1951 (1950–51). Photographs taken by the author on December 15, 2019.

our attention and consciousness most completely. Instead, the verticals are pushed to the periphery of our sight and to the edge of consciousness. We see them (they too “solicit” our attention), only not as completely and not as consciously, if at all. Our mind registers their presence but without

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a firm grasp.78 As the bottomless red overwhelms the eye and gives rise to feelings of disorientation, we merge into the painting’s perspectiveless 78 Cf. Michael Schreyach’s reading of Vir Heroicus Sublimis, which discusses the orienting/disorienting effects of the verticals in terms of foveal vision in Schrevach, “Barnett Newman’s ‘Sense of Space,’” 360–62.

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space, but the bottom does not drop out from under our feet. The peripheral presence of the verticals—partly seen or unconsciously felt— prevents us from falling headlong into the vastness. The verticals buttress our vision with the stabilizing awareness of temporality and perspective that keeps us grounded in our time and space. The effect of the five bands is not the same as a framework that would distance spectators from or enable rational cognition of the experience. The bands do not obstruct or mitigate the immediacy of the red field or its unnerving affect; they exist alongside us in the painting, seen or intuited out of the corner of the eye and the margins of the mind. The eye still cannot frame the red field. Unable to gain ascendency over what it sees, the eye loses its lids and is exposed to the “uniformity and shorelessness” stretching out “like the apocalypse.” Yet the experience of 1–1951 is not as frameless as Kleist’s scenario. Even though we surpass earthly limitations and reach the point of no return with the loss of eyelids, we return through the vertical orienting devices provided by Newman. They do not distance us from the red; rather, they subtly support our viewing with formal entities substantial enough to establish some measure of perspective, proportion, and, ultimately, control. This, and not absolute freedom alone, induces the feelings of uplift that would turn an otherwise simply terrible sight into a sublime one. With this, we discover the sublimis in the eventual title of 1–1951. Consideration of the other two components reveals further discrepancies between a Kleistian sublime and the sublimity presented and provoked by Newman’s painting. Vir heroicus—“man, heroic”—attaches the artist’s notion to a definitive concept suggestive of the subjective transcendence in Kant’s theory. To experience the overawing impact of limitless formlessness but not to be lost to it elevates man to a heroic status and awakens the feeling “that man can be or is sublime in relation to his sense of being aware.” With the verticals in eyesight marking time and space, we are aware of ourselves and the human ability to overcome extremes and continue being. Yet, as objects of peripheral vision, their support is only intuited, not consciously grasped. The heroism of the painting would therefore not arise from our rational faculties as in the Kantian model. The eye, moreover, never overcomes the red field, and the intellect never gains the distance or perspective to present it as an object of cognition. For this reason, the vertical bands do not constitute limits or forms. Newman’s preferred term for these elements was the “zip.”79 The five zips in 1–1951 are but one variant of an archetype invented by 79 Not until a 1966 interview with Thomas Hess did Newman introduce the term “zip” to signify his unique use of the stripe. See Rich, “The Proper Name of Newman’s Zip,” 96–114.

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Newman in the 1948 painting Onement I (fig. 2.9). The artist had affixed a strip of masking tape down the middle of a two-foot-tall vertical rectangle-stained maroon before applying a layer of bright-orange paint on top with a palette knife. “I realized that I had filled the surface,” the artist remembered. “I felt that for the first time for myself there was no picture making. That stroke made the thing come to life for me.”80 Newman insists the zip did not rupture the canvas to create oppositional forces and breed conflict: “I feel my zip does not divide my paintings . . . it unites the thing. It creates totality. . . .”81 The zip both produces unity and reproduces a second generation of the space through which it travels. Before Onement I, his paintings had only “manipulated” color and space, because the vertical element had been painted into a textured background after the tape’s removal. This encouraged depth and “a sense of atmosphere” not unlike the effects of Western illusionism.82 Since the evenly applied, untextured maroon pigment of Onement I does not draw attention to its own materiality, the canvas as physical object recedes into the background so that its metaphysical space might ascend. The intensity of the orange zip stands apart as an autonomous entity that both fills the space with color and generates the space itself. The zip was therefore not a line for Newman; rather, it was “a field that brings to life the other fields.”83 Its life-giving capacity distinguished the manipulation of surface from true creation: “I have never manipulated colors—I have tried to create color,” he maintained in 1962.84 In the same vein, he said, “I don’t manipulate or play with space. I declare it. It is by my declaration that my paintings become full” and “that [space] is felt at once” by the spectator.85 In creating color and declaring space, the zip establishes what New­ man considered the “real problem of a painting”: the sense of scale.86 Although scale involved size, it operated independently from it. This allowed the artist “to transcend the size or, better still, [to] overcome it,” because it indicated the possibility of extrapolating new values beyond the given data points through calculable ratios.87 “Scale is a felt thing,” 80 Newman, “Interview with Emile de Antonio,” 306. Cf. the Bois, “Perceiving Newman,” 186–211. 81 Newman, “Interview with Emile de Antonio,” 306. 82 Newman, quoted in Bois, “Perceiving Newman,” 192. Bois highlights how the bisecting ray functions as a repoussoir that pushes the field of differentiated color into a shallow background. 83 Newman, “Interview with David Sylvester,” 258. 84 Newman, “Frontiers of Space,” 249, emphasis in the original. 85 Newman, “Frontiers of Space,” 249; “Interview with Andrew Hudson,” 272. 86 Newman, “Interview with Andrew Hudson,” 272. 87 Newman, “Interview with Andrew Hudson,” 272.

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Figure 2.9. Barnett Newman, Onement I, 1948, Oil on canvas and oil on masking tape on canvas, 27.25 x 16.25 in. (69.2 x 41.2 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. (390.1992). © The Museum of Modern Art / © 2020 The Barnett Newman Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Reproduced with permission from SCALA / Art Resource, New York.

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Newman maintained, and “standing in front of my paintings you had a sense of your own scale.”88 As with Rothko, the measure of Newman’s artworks was the human body, the metaphorical analog to the zip.89 Accordingly, the zip in Onement I stands the height of the picture plane. Upright and outward facing, it mirrors the erect posture of its human audience and returns its gaze. Newman himself often described the zip as an anthropomorphic presence that, when encountered, is “no different, really, from one’s feeling a relation to meeting another person. One has a reaction to the person physically.”90 The conceptualization of the zip as another body occupying space would later achieve corporeal form in several sculptures (e.g., the Here series) and in a sextet of ultrathin paintings completed in 1950. At eight feet tall but a mere inch and a half wide, the most famous of these, The Wild, protrudes from the wall as if having extricated itself from painted space to share the physical space of the spectator as a freestanding figure.91 Newman’s zips retain the threedimensional character of another being in space even when encountered two-dimensionally. On engaging with an artwork like Onement I, we “feel a relation” to this other person (the zip) through the sensation of shared space and intuition of scale. And feeling oneself in relation to the zip begets the feeling of oneself as a human self. Newman summarized this point as follows:

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The onlooker in front of my painting knows that he’s there. To me, the sense of place not only has a mystery but has that sense of metaphysical fact. . . . I hope that my painting has the impact of giving someone, as it did me, the feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality, and at the same time of his connection to others, who are also separate.92 88 Newman; “Interview with David Sylvester,” 258. 89 Based on the artist’s conversations with friends like Thomas Hess and Harold Rosenberg, the zip has often been interpreted as a self-stylized symbol for the artist’s own body. See Temkin, “Barnett Newman on Exhibition,” 45–46. 90 Newman, “Interview with David Sylvester,” 258. Cf. Bois, who characterizes Onement I in terms of a face-to-face discourse; an “attempt to address the spectator directly, immediately, as an ‘I’ to a “You,’ and not with the distance of a third person” (“1951,” 365; “Perceiving Newman,” 193). Michael Schreyach coins the term “facingness” to designate zip’s pictorial address in Schreyach, “Barnett Newman’s ‘Sense of Space.’” 91 On Newman’s “sculptural zips” (sculptures and ultra-thin paintings), see Allen, “Barnett Newman’s ‘The Wild,’” 71–94; Ashe, “On Barnett Newman’s The Wild,” 30–43; Rosenthal, “The Sculpture of Barnett Newman,” 115–31; Schor, “Barnett Newman’s ‘Here’ Series,” 148–60; Schreyach, “Barnett Newman’s ‘Sense of Space,’” 356–366; and Temkin, “Barnett Newman on Exhibition,” 42–44. 92 Newman, “Interview with David Sylvester,” 258.

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The zip paradoxically confirms our integrity as autonomous agents while also connecting us with other singular individuals. We are both at one and separate with the zip because we measure ourselves against this other “self,” seeing ourselves as separate from it even as we recognize our humanness in it. Our humanness is then projected farther outward as we place ourselves into perspective as proportional to the whole of humanity. The sense of human scale affirmed by the zip also establishes a feeling of connectedness to space. In contrast to the perspectiveless, fathomless space of his seamless color fields, the space declared by the zip (the “there”) connects the viewer to a particular space, one that is tangible (“felt at once”) and so bound together with time. It orients the viewer with a sense of groundedness, of place, of being “there.” “There,” however, did not correspond to the spectator’s physical location in the art gallery, as Newman stressed: “The scale of a painting in the end depends on the artist’s sense of space, and the more one succeeds in separating the painting from the sense of environment. . . I hope my work is free of the environment.”93 A painting like 1–1951 would transport us out of the gallery “environment” and into the immeasurable space of the red field. Whereas the full-frontal zip in Onement I commands attention, the lateral dispersal of the five zips permits the red to dominate the eye and envelop us in its space. Yet, through the peripheral presence of the zips, we feel ourselves oriented in space and time in a transcendental capacity. We are “there” at a place that “has a mystery” in its indeterminacy but is definitive in “that sense of metaphysical fact” and feels like a physical location. Feeling the sense of place and human scale awakened by the zips, audiences experience the full “fearsome sense” of disoriented space without losing any more of themselves to it other than their eyelids. The awareness of corporeality would be heightened, as Newman wished: “the sense of space created by my painting should make one feel, I hope, full and alive in a spatial dome of 180 degrees going out in all four directions.”94 From this embodied position and precarious perspective, we would, like Kleist, be “the lonely midpoint within the lonely circle” but not feel ourselves to be “the sole spark of life within the wide realm of death.” “There,” in the red, we are under the dome as lone human beings, yet we feel the shared experience of being human. Although not from a safe distance to preserve one’s eyelids, the dual-structured affect endemic to sublimity would be conditioned when the overawing and “fearsome” space of being alone without time and place elicits the elevating sensation of being “full and alive” and wholly human. In short, we would experience 1–1951 as Vir Heroicus Sublimis.

93 Newman, “Interview with Andrew Hudson,” 272. 94 Newman, “Frontiers of Space,” 250.

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While the sublime as engineered by Newman approximates Kleist’s mode of frameless abstraction, the inherent sublimity of sensing shared humanity through Vir Heroicus Sublimis is not Kleistian owing to the ethical imperatives attached to the concept. These come to light in Newman’s exchange with David Sylvester, in which the artist expresses his hope that his imagined viewer is both “aware of himself” as an individual as he “relates to me when I made the painting because in that sense I was there.”95 By relating to Newman through the painting, the viewer understands “this problem of our being involved in the sense of self that moves in relation to other selves. . . . I think you can only feel others if you have some sense of your own being.” Awareness of oneself—being “there” and being human—necessarily entails the awareness of other beings also being in the world. Our “sense of self” only “moves in relation to other selves”; hence we can only be in the world in relation to others who, though separate in body, are united in humanity. As Sylvester summarizes the point with Newman’s approval, the “certain sense of exhilaration in one’s own being” carries with it the ethical obligation not only to acknowledge “the otherness of others” but to accept it. In exposing us to the absoluteness of being alone in space, the painting reveals the “fearsome sense” of a reality that disregards the natural limits of being human. Yet, in moving us in relation to the zips, the painting reassures us with the exhilaration of knowing that this red infinity is not our finite reality. Vir Heroicus Sublimis suggests that “man” could exceed his limitations and live without regard or respect for others and our shared space but doing so would not be “heroic” or “sublime.” Heroism and sublimity result from accepting ourselves and others in relation to each other and to the world. While both Newman and Kant attach an ethical or moral concept to the sublime, they diverge regarding the ability to conceive rationally of a totality when confronted with limitless formlessness.96 Vir Heroicus Sublimis allows the intellect a vision of an infinity beyond the threshold of sensible experience, but when viewed as Newman wished viewers to view it, the painting does not actually grant the distance to frame the red as a totality thinkable by reason. Rather than resuscitating Kant’s construct, Newman invents a different sublime for his modern era. His 1948 essay “The Sublime is Now” broadly delineates the development of Western art relative to the struggle to navigate the antagonism between the sublime and the beautiful.97 He 95 Newman, “Interview with David Sylvester,” 257–58. 96 Paul Crowther observes the commonalities between Kant’s theory and Newman’s own idea of sublimity. See Crowther, “Barnett Newman and the Sublime,” 53. 97 The artist published the essay in the short-lived art journal Tiger’s Eye on December 15, 1948.

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summarily rejects traditional theories of sublimity, which he deems inappropriate for modernity and perceives as erroneous in their conflation of the sublime with the beautiful.98 What Newman conceives of as sublimity has little to do with the classic philosophical texts or his dubious understanding of them. He seems to have appropriated the term to describe his preoccupation with what other essays from 1940s call “tragedy” and “terror.”99 While tragedy, sublimity, and terror are not interchangeable, they are interlinked. In an earlier essay he suggested that art itself arose from terror as a “vehicle for an abstract thought-complex, a carrier of the awesome feelings. . . felt before the terror of the unknowable.”100 “The Sublime is Now” commences from the loss of man’s original terror with the “intervention of beauty by the Greeks.”101 The classical ideal became the “bugbear of European art and European aesthetic philosophies” and was increasingly unable to distinguish its “fetish of quality” from sublimity.102 “Beauty” for Newman is a term bound to the standards of Western traditions, either to reproduce them or revolt against them. European painters from the impressionists onward responded to the claims of the classical ideal by perpetuating conventional frameworks instead of instituting new ones. The modern American artist, “free from the weight of European culture” and “the obsolete props of an outmoded and obsolete legend,” could at last cast off “any concern with the problem of beauty and where to find it.”103 Newman accordingly formulates a new question: “if we are living in a time without a legend or mythos that can be called sublime, if we refuse to admit any exaltation in pure relations, if we refuse to live in the abstract, how can we be creating a sublime art?”104 As proclaimed by the title, the time for action is now and American artists, by virtue of their exceptionalism, are primed to act and answer the question of the absent sublime. Shifting the power from the Europe of yesteryears to the America of now, Newman addresses the question of how he and his circle could conceive of sublime content:

98 His dubious handling of their treatments can likely be credited to his having just read them in preparation for an essay written on commission (Bois, “1951,” 365). 99 Cf. Bois, “1951,” 365; and Shiff, “Whiteout,” 81. 100 Newman, “The Ideographic Picture” (1947), quoted in W. Jackson Rushing, “The Impact of Nietzsche and Northwest Coast Indian Art,” 189. 101 Newman, “The Sublime is Now,” in: Selected Writings and Interviews, 171. 102 Newman, “The Sublime is Now,” 171. 103 Newman, “The Sublime is Now,” 173. 104 Newman, “The Sublime is Now,” 173.

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We are creating images whose reality is self-evident and which are devoid of the props and crutches that evoke associations with outmoded images, both sublime and beautiful. We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you that have been the devices of Western European painting.105

Liberation from the “props,” “crutches,” and “impediments” of Western paradigms left painters at the brink of an unprecedentedly unexplored territory on which new paths could be charted. It was tragedy that hastened the urgency for a sublime now and instigated the need for Newman to start art anew. In the wake of World War II, the Holocaust, and two atomic bombs, artists of Newman’s generation were faced with a new “moral question” when “we realized that the world wasn’t beautiful. . . . What was there to beautify?”106 When “Hitler was ravaging Europe [could we] express ourselves by having a beautiful girl lying naked on a divan?” he elaborated by way of rhetorical question. “I felt the issue in those years was—what can a painter do?”107 Conventional standards and traditional structures were suddenly inapplicable and arbitrary. Dogmatic faith in rationality and progress had not prevented the unprecedented and previously unimaginable events of the 1940s; it had spawned them. Speaking in a 1966 interview, Newman remembered, “the feelings I had at the time of the war in ’41 was that the world was coming to an end. And to the extent that the world was coming to an end,” he continued, “the whole issue of painting, I felt, was over because it was impossible to paint flowers, figures, etc., and so the crisis moved around the problem of what I can really paint.”108 Left with nothing “to beautify,” Newman ceased painting altogether from 1940 to 1944 and eventually destroyed all the works he had created prior to 1944.109 Starting over from the tabula rasa of the original artist was impossible, however. Newman could not feel the same “terror of the unknowable” because his modernity had since gained consciousness of it: “We now know the terror to expect. Hiroshima showed it to us. We are no longer, then, in the face of a mystery,” he wrote in 1948. “The terror has indeed become as real as life. What we have now is a tragic rather than terrifying situation.”110 Terror, when known, is no longer terrible or terrifying, only tragic. The atom bomb had delivered this tragedy, showing 105 Newman, “The Sublime is Now,” 173. 106 Newman, “Interview with Emile de Antonio,” 303. 107 Newman, quoted in Shiff, “Whiteout,” 81. 108 Newman in an interview with Alan Solomon in 1966, quoted in Godfrey, “Barnett Newman’s Stations and the Memory of the Holocaust,” 37. 109 See Thomas Hess, Barnett Newman, 19; Strick, The Sublime is Now, 7–8. 110 Newman, “A New Sense of Fate,” 169.

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what devastation the rational faculties of human beings can wreak when creating unnatural technologies. The problem for the modern artist in pursuit of a timely sublime, then, lies not in overcoming the terror of the unknowable. Rather, the challenge is continuing forward when this threshold has been breached and the terror is known; after its conversion into tragedy has destroyed all prior precedence and shown what terror and tragedy could come again if humanity does not chart for itself a better path forward. Newman believed that the artist was uniquely prepared for this challenge. Painting, he told Thomas Hess, “is the process [you go through] as you move into the blank area, and the terror of the blank area is the whole issue. What is the most difficult thing about painting? The most difficult thing is sitting in that room by yourself. . . . You are there all alone with that empty space. . . .”111 The “terror of the blank area” overwhelming Newman’s creative process corresponds to the “empty space” confronting his postwar modernity. It had to “move into the blank area” after the terror of the unknown had become a real tragedy with Hiroshima and the terror of repeating the known (or facing an even worse yet-to-be-imagined unknown) was now possible. When we stand before Vir Heroicus Sublimis, we too “are there all alone with that empty space,” feeling the “fearsome sense of space” amid the boundless red. In its devastating vastness and lifelessness, we see the tragic vision of what the world became and could become again if old dogmas persist. The image is perspectiveless and hopeless save for the zips. Their stabilizing, corporeal presence grounds us in the here and now, providing the orientation and support to continue forward in the face of tragedy despite knowing the terror of what once was unknown.112 The painting celebrates “man, heroic and sublime” as the human capacity to recover and endure. Yet it also warns us not to lose sight of our human self in relation to others or disregard the finitude of our natural limits, lest we forget the alternative: infinite desolation and devastation. In this sense, the title of Newman’s essay reads as both declarative statement and critical imperative. The sublime is now because modernity, like the spectator before his painting, stands at the precipice of the unprecedented and must act to “move into the blank area” despite having knowledge of the unknown. It is Newman’s existential condition as 111 Newman, “A Conversation: Barnett Newman and Thomas B. Hess,” 282. Newman “took his analogy between the technological terror of a war-torn society and the psychological terror of the studio completely seriously” to the extent that “it justified the politics of his art” (Shiff, “Whiteout,” 81). 112 Cf. Lyotard, “Newman: The Instant,” 240–49. Lyotard interprets this precarious distinction between annihilation and preservation as giving rise to the sublime in Newman’s art because “one feels that it is possible that soon nothing more will take place” (245).

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artist. In the closing sentences of “The Sublime is Now,” he announces his program for “creating a sublime art” now: “Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or ‘life,’ we are making [them] out of ourselves, out of our own feelings. The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history.”113 The “image we produce” is “self-evident,” for in it we evidence ourselves in relation to others through the creation of space and scale facilitated by the zip. This transaction is only possible for receptive viewers willing to discard “the nostalgic glasses of history” and open their eyes to the new. How a viewer capable of engaging with abstract art could come into being is addressed in the literature and art of the next two chapters. In 1810, Kleist was this receptive viewer, perceiving in the stark forms and monochromatic palette of Friedrich’s seascape a moment of abstractness that led him to conceive of an entirely new mode of artistic representation unfettered by internal and external frameworks. Over a hundred years later, Malevich’s Black Square initiated an aesthetic revolution whose philosophical strivings toward the absolute were actualized in the stark geometry and monochrome color planes of his suprematist artworks. Rothko and Newman would follow fifty years after that with massive canvases of brilliant color and expansive space. Turning away from traditional relationships and conventions of representation, each artist unframed their art by degrees to effect greater immediacy and communicative possibility. Despite their detractors, all had the vision and the viewership to have their abstractions acknowledged and defended as art. For Rothko and Newman, the traumas born of World War II irrevocably separated the present from the past and made return to previous forms of life and systems of thought impossible. Those had proved inadequate and outdated, and they revealed the need to invent new idioms. “It was that awakening,” Newman emphasized, “that inspired the aspiration—the high purpose . . . to start from scratch, to paint as if painting never existed before. It was that naked revolutionary moment that made painters out of painters.”114 Although he came from an earlier time and experienced a different world war, Malevich too witnessed how the fall of institutions and birth of technologies exposed the mutable nature of rules and frameworks. It conceivably took unprecedented failures of reason akin to the sort of traumatic ruptures in Kleist’s literature for the fragility of existing orders to be realized. In the terror and freedom of the ensuing tabula rasa, the search was initiated for radically original and hitherto unthinkably different modes of expression, ones that could account for the unprecedented experiences of a quickly changing world and the inconceivable 113 Newman, “The Sublime is Now,” 173. 114 Newman, “From Jackson Pollock: An Artist’s Symposium,” 192.

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knowledges gained by technological advancement. Malevich’s suprematist optimism professes its faith in the ability to identify and surpass the limitations of established frameworks; the canvases of Rothko and Newman loom large as testaments to the importance of acknowledging the limitations of human finitude. Some sublimities more steeped in tragedy than others, their abstract art was still in some way premised on human feeling and the empathic power of their frameless aesthetic.

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3: The Clouding of Perception: Seeing the (Un)real Potential for Abstraction in the Poetry and Science of Goethe’s Clouds (1821)

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and the importance of Goethe for its formation has long been an acknowledged object of scholarly investigation. Emerging from the shifting paradigms transforming late eighteenth-century European culture, Goethe’s literary portrayals of how a newly interiorized self with a greater sense of freedom and autonomy struggles to relate to society have prompted Michel Foucault, Friedrich Kittler, and Marshall Berman to single out the author as an early voice of modernity.1 Others have pointed to Goethe’s work in the natural sciences, which, though underappreciated by his contemporaries, seems to anticipate discourses of the twentieth century.2 Depending on disciplinary perspective, Goethe’s subject heralds or embodies the idea of modernity and the modern subject in what Jane K. Brown calls a “variety of mutually complementary forms,” be they sociological, philosophical, or scientific.3 Of importance here is the final form and how it compliments another such form, that of modern aesthetics and abstract art. Although the long nineteenth century separates the advent of abstraction from Goethe’s poetry and writings on science, the two are nevertheless connected by a specific mode of viewing crucial for the existence of abstract art. Goethe’s conception of the subject as an embodied observer who actively engages sensory organs and cognitive faculties to understand

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odern subjectivity

1 For paradigm shifts of modern subjectivity, see Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781–1801; Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air; Jane K. Brown, Goethe’s Allegories of Identity; Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject; Kittler, Aufschreibesysteme, 1800/1900; Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century; Taylor, Sources of the Self; and Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self. 2 For Goethe’s influence on optics and twentieth-century regimes of vision see Allert, “Hidden Aspects of Goethe’s Writings on Color, Seeing, and Motion,” 144–91; Crary, Techniques of the Observer; Köhnen, Das optische Wissen; Moore and Simpson, eds., The Enlightened Eye: Goethe and Visual Culture; and Gage, Color and Culture and Color and Meaning. 3 Jane K. Brown, Goethe’s Allegories of Identity, 7.

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the natural world also marks the birth of a subject capable of assuming a critically significant degree of responsibility and subjectivity in aesthetic encounters. This, in turn, provides a theoretical basis for the abstract art that becomes historical reality in the early twentieth century. The structural underpinnings of this mode of viewing are already explicated by Goethe in 1792 in the essay “Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt” (“The Experiment as Mediator between Object and Subject”), where the poet articulates a scientific methodology contingent on the human body and cognition. However, it is not until Goethe deploys his method of scientific viewing for the purposes of aesthetic pleasure in the stanzas of his cloud poem “Howards Ehrengedächtnis” (“In Honor of Howard”) in 1821 that the inception of a new mode of cognitive spectatorship—a “clouding of perception”—comes about and reconfigures the way an individual is willing to think about what constitutes art and an aesthetic experience. By viewing the playful modulations of an objectless cloud alongside the spectator in Goethe’s poem, the reader discovers that changing how one perceives the forms in art also changes what one might conceive to be art. This is not to say that Goethe himself promoted abstract art or would have even been a fan of it. Goethe’s writings on aesthetics, as well as his own creative production and personal tastes indicate his consistent, deep-seated faith in the principles of mimetic representation, as the title “Einfache Nachahmung der Natur, Manier, Stil” (“Simple Imitation of Nature, Manner, Style,” 1789) suggests. Although Goethe’s affirmative response to Lessing in Über Laokoön (1798) circumscribes the disciplinary boundaries separating art from science, the ideal artist, in Goethe’s view, still acts like a scientist by reproducing nature’s forms and lawfulness through careful observation and direct experience.4 Indeed, from within their analogous albeit autonomous domains, both artist and scientist are expected to preserve interconnectedness with nature. Becoming disconnected from the natural world constituted an unforgiveable sin for Goethe, who disliked the excesses of subjective vision displayed by more Romantically inclined contemporaries. Instead of carefully observing and emulating the outer world to create harmonious, beautiful art, the Romantic artist turned away, looking into the recesses of the mind.5 With the eye focused too narrowly on itself, the artist’s hand produced 4 Goethe, Goethes Werke, Hamburger Ausgabe XII, 33. All citations will refer to this edition, henceforth abbreviated HA. 5 Offending artists included Wackenroder, Tieck, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Caspar David Friedrich, and Otto Philip Runge (Hermand, Grüne Klassik, 100–101). Goethe repeatedly referred to such artists and authors as “krank” or sick. On Goethe’s attitude toward Romanticism, see Hermand, Grüne Klassik; Osterkamp, Wechselwirkungen; and Apel, “Der lebendige Blick: Goethes Kunstanschauung,” 571–78.

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an unnatural and distorted reflection of a world discolored by subjectivity and out of balance with objective reality. If the misshapen forms of the Romantic inward turn injured Goethe’s classicist principles, an abstract art without clear reference to the natural world would consummately violate it.6 Secondly, this is also not to say that Goethe’s writings on art or science led pioneering abstractionists like Kandinsky to abstract art. To this point, scholarship relating the two men gravitates toward the former’s Farbenlehre (Theory of Colours, 1810) and its intersections with the latter’s treatise Über das Geistige in der Kunst (1911). Yet, while Kandinsky’s interest in contrast and in the psychological effects of color echoes core components of Goethe’s own color theory, the linkage is not causative.7 Only twice does the artist’s treatise directly mention Goethe, and in neither case does Kandinsky refer to the Farbenlehre or colors; rather, the author laments that painting lacks a theoretical system of the sort that exists in music.8 What is clear from the original context is that Goethe’s analogy to music does not extend to the ideas involving synesthesia or musical correspondences that did guide Kandinsky toward artistic accounts of the abstract and immaterial. In the end, Goethe’s role in inventing abstraction is not about the act of making abstract art but about the act of beholding it. Hence, the focus lies not on the artwork (the object) but on the artwork’s observer (the subject) and its role in facilitating the existence of abstract art. The presence of the object is not negligible; after all, since it articulates the ways that the subject’s gaze operates necessarily entail defining the terms of the relationship between the beholder and what it 6 On Kandinsky’s aesthetic philosophy, see Long, Kandinsky: The Development of an Abstract Style; Morgan, “The Enchantment of Art: Abstraction and Empathy from German Romanticism to Expressionism,” 317–41; Ringbom, The Sounding Cosmos: A Study in the Spiritualism of Kandinsky and the Genesis of Abstract Painting; and Tuchman, Freeman, and Blotkamp, The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985. 7 On scholarship linking Goethe’s ideas to abstraction, see Gage, “The Psychological Background to Early Modern Color,” 22–40; Hentschel, Kandinsky und Goethe: Über das Geistige in der Kunst in der Tradition Goethescher Naturwissenschaft; Schindler, “Producing a Grammar of Painting,” 69–94; Torbruegge, “Goethe’s Theory of Color and Practicing Artists,” 189–99; and Vergo, “Introduction,” 9–25 and “Music and Abstract Painting: Kandinsky, Goethe and Schoenberg,” 41–63. 8 In a conversation with Riemer dated May 19, 1807, Goethe notices that painting “has long since lacked knowledge of any Generalbass; it lacks any established accepted theory such as exists in music.” Quoted in Barasch, Modern Theories of Art: From impressionism to Kandinsky, 332. Ironically, the idea that the different color hues correspond to notes on a musical scale was subject to much experimentation by Newton. See Gage, Color and Meaning, 139–43.

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beholds. Yet with respect to Goethe, the constitution of the subject, as well as the terms of its subjectivity, cognition, and gaze are key, for this subject would perceive the world in such a way that it could find value in an abstract image and acknowledge it as art—and not, to use Kandinsky’s example, as a decorative pattern befitting a tie or carpet.9 In other words, the subject with “clouded perception” would possess the capacity of producing an aesthetic experience with a physical object of art that needs not depict a physical object. Although Goethe writes no explicit roadmap for abstract art, what is crucial for its emergence is the creative cognitive process of the viewing subject that he describes.

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The Great Divide: Linnaeus, Spinoza, and Kant The ideal scientist described throughout Goethe’s corpus would not fully develop into a cognitive viewer with a defined methodology until 1792, and yet we find the seeds of this subject beginning to take root in earlier scientific essays written during the 1780s and in the Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären (The Metamorphosis of Plants, 1790).10 As is evident in the latter text, Goethe relied mostly on what Eckart Förster calls “less the conscious application of a method than instinct . . . and ‘intuition’ in the more ordinary sense of the term.”11 Förster uses “ordinary” to differentiate Goethe’s yet-to-be-defined approach from Spinoza’s scientia intuitiva, which had interested the author from the outset of his scientific endeavors.12 It appeared to offer a corrective to the failures of the reigning standard of scientific investigation exemplified by the rigidity of the Linnaean classificatory system. Although Goethe was inspired by Linnaeus’s work, he found its presumption of a static, inflexible order unable to account for the variability of nature’s constantly evolving forms. In boxing natural forms into separate categories through binomial nomenclature, Linnaean taxonomy left little openness for change, new discoveries, or newly generated forms. Moreover, it classified forms on a superficial level, asking the scientist to consider only external differences but not to observe intensely enough 9 Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 119. 10 Although Metamorphose der Pflanzen was first published in 1790, Goethe’s botanical ideas were developing in the 1780s. On Goethe’s morphology, see Ronald H. Brady, “Form and Cause in Goethe’s Morphology,” 257–300; Breidbach, Goethes Metamorphosen Lehre; Geulen, Aus dem Leben der Form; and von Mücke, “Goethe’s Metamorphosis,” 27–53. 11 Förster, The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy, 98. 12 For Spinoza’s influence on Goethe’s scientific thought, see Amrine, “Goethean Intuitions” 35–50; and Förster, The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy, especially chapters 4 and 11; and Yonover, “Goethe, Maimon, and Spinoza’s Third Kind of Cognition,” 267–87.

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to glean underlying unities. For Goethe, who was himself resistant to Cartesian duality and affirmative of human interconnectedness with the natural world, Linnaeus was out of touch with the objects he studied and imposed on them a transcendental order not adequately grounded in the act of perceiving the actual phenomena.13 With Linnaeus’s oversights in mind, Goethe proceeded from an observation-centered approach for Metamorphose der Pflanzen, thinking that one could be capable of intuiting the totality of the plant by watching it metamorphize through successive stages. Spinoza’s ideas complemented the importance that Goethe placed on perception (“Anschauung”) for cultivating a higher form of knowledge, because they provided a means of overcoming the transcendental barriers separating subject from object.14 In arguing for the unity of God and nature, Spinoza unified mind with matter, and put within man’s sensible grasp a mode of knowledge capable of comprehending this totality: the scientia intuitiva. Frederick Amrine’s characterization of this faculty as a “non-discursive, synoptic perception of Nature in its entirety, a thinking of wholeness in its immediacy” helps us appreciate how the Spinozist emphasis on unity as well as the ability to intuit it appealed to Goethe’s efforts to bridge the subject/object divide.15 At the same time, Spinoza sparked controversy by relocating God in nature and endowing man with a mode of knowledge otherwise reserved for a divine or transcendent being. Thus, in Goethe’s preference of a Spinozist approach, we already discern the traces of a more authoritative subject, one privileging perception and possessing a nondiscursive faculty such as intuition. Two prominent issues, though, still troubled Goethe: (1) how to translate intuition as a mode of knowledge into a systematic scientific methodology, and (2) how to negotiate the parameters of his authoritative subject. As Goethe’s irritations with Romanticism indicate, the author may have empowered his subject, but this subjectivity should not come at the expense of the objective world or the faithful representation of its forms and laws. Even if intuition forms a basis for scientific methodology, the viewing scientist must control for overly subjective conclusions and develop a system to maintain integrity between subject and object. Enter Kant, whose Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of Judgment, 1790) provided the intellectual impetus necessary for Goethe to crystallize 13 For more on Goethe contra Linnaeus, see Larson, “Goethe and Linnæus,” 590–96. 14 A letter to Jacobi from May 5, 1786, expresses Goethe’s indebtedness to Spinoza and communicates his great faith in direct sensory experience, above all the act of seeing (“anschauen”) for acquiring knowledge of the world. Portions of the letter are reproduced and discussed in Amrine, “Goethean Intuitions,” 37, and Förster, The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy, 94. 15 Amrine, “Goethean Intuitions,” 40.

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his ideas about subjecthood, objecthood, and their interrelationship.16 Contrary to Spinoza and Goethe, Kant set limits to human knowledge and so did not place within human ability the power of comprehending the whole. Instead, he reserved a nondiscursive mode of intellectual intuition like Spinoza’s scientiva intuitiva for a transcendental being. One could posit the existence of such a faculty (for Kant, the intellectus archetypus) but never realize it. Here we see the Kantian split between “Vernunft” and “Verstand,” reason and understanding, of which Ronald H. Brady provides a lucid summary:

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Verstand works in “concepts,” is analytic, and duplicates the separations forced upon us by sensible conditions. Vernunft deals in “ideas,” which are synthetic and capable of unifying elements that must be separate for Verstand. Kant supposed that “ideas of reason” provide a framework for investigation, they could never constitute scientific knowledge, for unlike the “concepts of understanding,” they cannot be “filled-in” by perception.17

As Brady explains, Kant doomed man to “Verstand”; contingent on sensory perception, this mode of intellect could only “represent the organic in a manner that we would never fully comprehend, since it was by intention beyond analysis.”18 Goethe flatly rejected not only the decisive severance of these intellectual modes and the crevasse it created to distance the viewing subject from the objects around it but also the teleological judgment that Kant assumed for the natural world. For Goethe, life had the singular purpose of life itself. Presuming otherwise was, as Brady phrases, “to force the phenomena into a pre-conceived mold,” language that recalls Goethe’s reproach of Linnaeus.19 While Goethe’s critiques of Kant and Linnaeus cannot be conflated, they do share in common the condemnation of the attempt to impose transcendental paradigms on the organic world, a theoretical maneuver that reinforced the very subject/object duality disdained by Goethe. In delivering a superficial 16 Förster provides excellent readings of Kant throughout The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy as well as in “Die Bedeutung von §§ 76, 77 der ‘Kritik der Urteilskraft,’” 169–90. 17 Brady, “Form and Cause in Goethe’s Morphology,” 284. Förster further distinguishes between “two distinct faculties of cognition that Kant takes to be conceivable, but humanly unrealizable”: intellectual intuition and intuitive understanding (The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy, 142–52, here 152, italics in the original). For our purposes, this distinction is not relevant since Goethe diverges from Kant here. 18 Brady, “Form and Cause in Goethe’s Morphology,” 284 (emphasis in the original). 19 Brady, “Form and Cause in Goethe’s Morphology,” 289.

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understanding of natural form, such overly determinate and undesirably abstract frameworks could misrepresent the essence of life. Now, abstraction in the sciences must be distinguished from abstraction in art. With respect to art, the term designates artworks whose content does not originate with or appear to reference objects of the material world. Goethe’s antipathy to the Romantic flight inward led to my postulating his likely distaste for abstract art. In the arena of science, Goethe’s aversion to “abstract” methodologies exhibits the inherent similarity of too much distance between the subject and its direct sensory experience of the natural world. This, as Goethe instructs, should be the basis of knowledge: “Man suche nur nichts hinter den Phänomenen: Sie selbst sind die Lehre” (Let us not seek for something behind the phenomena—they themselves are the theory).20 The oft-cited maxim expresses a sentiment that served Goethe well throughout his scientific endeavors, including his initial botany studies and critique of Linnaeus. Yet it is with particular stridency that this dictum drives the author’s infamous disparagement of Newton, whom Goethe names in the “Vorwort” to the Farbenlehre as a chief perpetrator of the “Abstraktion, vor der wir uns fürchten” (the abstraction that we fear).21 Although his color theory was not published until 1810, Goethe began his investigations into optics around that critical year of 1790, when his Spinozist “intuitive” approach in Metamorphose der Pflanzen dovetailed with his encountering Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft. Optics gave Goethe the impetus and occasion to articulate a methodology that, as Förster puts it, “mediates between Spinoza and Kant and seeks to make discursive and intuitive thinking compatible.”22 To bridge the divide between subject and object, Goethe worked out a means of scientific investigation that hinged on a scientific observer with a nondiscursive mode of thought and a greater degree of subjectivity.

The Gaze of Goethe: The Goethean Subject as Scientist Isaac Newton and his Opticks (1704) ended up in Goethe’s crosshairs after the author returned to Weimar in 1788 from his Italian journeys hoping to derive a systematic understanding of color phenomena that could aid painters. When attempting to recreate Newton’s prism experiments, albeit under less objective conditions, Goethe failed to reap the 20 Maximen und Reflexionen Nr. 488. HA XII 372, translated by Douglas Miller, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Scientific Studies, 307. Translations of Goethe’s scientific studies stem from this volume and are henceforth cited only by page number. 21 HA XIII 317. 22 Förster, The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy, 254.

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same results and readily believed he had proven Newton false—along with his experimental philosophy involving the demonstrative power of the experimentum crucis, or single “weighty” experiment.23 For Goethe, circumventing direct sensory perception in favor of abstract mathematics and theoretical projection had led Newton to formulate a quantifiable yet reductive theory positing color as a purely physical phenomenon independent of human perception. Contrary to Newton, Goethe asserted the importance of physiological processes, and he accordingly devised his own methodology around the principles of direct observation and experimental series. Informed by his readings of Spinoza and Kant, he put this methodology to paper in 1792 in what would be known as “Der Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt,” (The Experiment as Mediator between Object and Subject), a title expressing the essence of the essay.24 When confronted with the divide between inherently subjective ideas about the phenomenon (i.e., “Subjekt”) and the phenomenon itself (i.e., “Objekt”), the scientist turns to the experiment or rather to a series of experiments (what amounts to the “Versuch”), to serve as mediator and facilitator (“Vermittler”) of the dynamic interaction between the two poles.25 Although Goethe was preoccupied with optics when he was originally writing the essay, the reappearance of this theme later in his collected morphological writings indicates the consistency with which Goethe advocated for a scientific approach remedying the rigidity and abstractness of the Newtonian or Linnaean framework. In a way, the model presented in “Versuch als Vermittler” composes the backbone of Goethe’s morphology, for it constructs both the ideal methodology for gathering knowledge of the natural world and the ideal scientist for conducting it. As the “science of forms” and a science of science, morphology for Goethe comprises a method of describing and appreciating the various dynamic forms of nature as well as a model for understanding how one physiologically 23 Scholarly examination of Goethe contra Newton includes Burwick, The Damnation of Newton; Marcum, “The Nature of Light and Color,” 457–81; and Sepper, Goethe contra Newton. 24 In addition to Goethe’s engagement with Kant, the essay was likely a reaction to a negative critique appearing in the Jenaer Allgemeinen Literaturzeitung (January 28, 1792) about Goethe’s Beiträge zur Optik, which had been published the previous fall. See von Engelhardt, “Der Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt,” 9–10. 25 The essay likely received this title from Riemer shortly before its 1823 publication in Zur Naturwissenschaft überhaupt, besonders zur Morphologie (On natural science in general, in particular morphology), which was in print from 1817 to 1824. The original title, Kautelen des Beobachters (Conditions of the viewer) conveyed Goethe’s concern with defining a viewing subject beholden to scientific objectivity. See Schimma, Blickbildungen, 89.

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and cognitively perceives those forms. Seeking to uncover the inner relations guiding nature’s metamorphoses through meticulous observation, this method analyzes how humans process knowledge of a phenomenal object while also accounting for the subject’s sensible experience. A close reading of the essay, augmented by supporting morphological texts, reveals this viewing subject as an embodied observer who actively engages discursive and nondiscursive cognitive faculties along with sensory perception to elicit the inner essence of the objects of the world. Goethe begins the essay thus: “Sobald der Mensch die Gegenstände um sich her gewahr wird, betrachtet er sie in Bezug auf sich selbst, und mit Recht” (As the human being becomes aware of objects in his environment, he will relate them to himself, and rightly so).26 The sentence introduces the two sides of the divide, establishes which holds the greater authority, and informs the reader of its Spinozist slant.27 While subject (“Mensch”) and object (“Gegenstände”) face each other, Goethe places greater weight on the subjectivity of the “Mensch,” who rightly regards the circumstances of nature in itself (“die Gegenstände der Natur an sich”) as relative to his body.28 Nonetheless, the opening paragraph closes with an acknowledgement of the subject’s fallibility and the fundamental need to institute checks on subjectivity.29 If the subject inhabits a human body limited to what is directly observable by its sensory perception, how does the scientist seeking knowledge of nature’s objects in their own right (i.e., their essence or idea) ensure that he sees objects as they really are?30 For that matter, how does he repel the inner enemies of imagination, impatience, haste, self-satisfaction, and formalistic thought to avoid overly abstract conclusions?31

26 HA XIII 10. 27 Noteworthy treatments of the essay are offered by Günther Böhme, Goethe: Naturwissenschaft, Humanismus, Bildung, 51–96; Jane K. Brown, Goethe’s Allegories of Identity, chapter 5; Wolf von Engelhardt, “Der Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt,” 9–28; Förster, The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy, 250– 57; Geulen, Aus dem Leben der Form; Hennigfeld, “Goethe’s Phenomenological Way of Thinking,” 143–67; Marcum, “The Nature of Light and Color”; and Schimma, Blickbildungen, 51–96. 28 Förster emphasizes how closely Goethe’s formulation of what I would regard as an empowered subjectivity echoes Spinoza’s Ethics (The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy, 255). The masculine pronoun “him” reflects the grammatical gender of Goethe’s use of “Der Mensch.” 29 HA XIII 10. 30 HA XIII 10. 31 HA XIII 14. For an overview of the perceived role of imagination in the natural sciences in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Daston, “Fear & Loathing of the Imagination in Science,” 16–30.

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Enter Kant once again. On the one hand, Goethe keeps with the Kantian turn in the belief that understanding the natural world starts from within the human body, which as a result places the objects of the world at arm’s length and makes them not immediately knowable. Striving for the utmost objectivity, scientists “sollen als gleichgültige und gleichsam göttliche Wesen suchen und untersuchen, was ist, und nicht, was behagt” (as a neutral, seemingly godlike being he must seek out and examine what is, not what pleases).32 Both Goethe and Kant recognize the value of disinterested judgment, but Kant, as we saw, does not endow us with the capacities described by Goethe. Acting with such godlike detachment or the ability to intuit a totality would be for Kant a mode of the nondiscursive Vernunft synthesizing elements that must remain separate for Verstand. Only the latter, analytic and sensory bound, can form the basis of scientific knowledge. Yet, in a departure from Kant, Goethe not only places within human power the godlike faculty to grasp the totality of an object, but he suggests that one can even refine the innate gift of observation (“Beobachtungsgabe”) through exercise and experience.33 In brief, his process reconciles subject and object, mediates subjectivity and objectivity, and employs both discursive and nondiscursive modes of thought by requiring the scientist as subject to gather empirical data about the object through Verstand before activating Vernunft to process it as a totality and intuit its inner essence. Goethe provides his own summary in the later essay “Erfahrung und Wissenschaft” (“Empirical Observation and Science,” 1798): “Das reine Phänomen steht nun zuletzt als Resultat aller Erfahrungen und Versuche da. Es kann niemals isoliert sein, sondern es zeigt sich in einer stetigen Folge der Erscheinungen” (The pure phenomenon now stands before us as the result of all our observations and experiments. It can never be isolated, but it appears in a continuous sequence of events).34 Here are the terms structuring the core of “Versuch als Vermittler”: experience (“Erfahrung”), experiment (“Versuch”), and series (here, “Folge”). Starting with Erfahrung, the word first appears a few paragraphs into the essay: Daß die Erfahrung, wie in allem, was der Mensch unternimmt, so auch in der Naturlehre, von der ich gegenwärtig vorzüglich spreche, den größten Einfluß habe und haben solle, wird niemand leugnen, so wenig als man den Seelenkräften, in welchen diese Erfahrungen aufgefaßt, zusammengenommen, geordnet und ausgebildet werden,

32 HA XIII 10. [11]. 33 HA XIII 11. 34 HA XIII 25. [25].

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ihre hohe und gleichsam schöpferisch unabhängige Kraft absprechen wird.35 [It is undeniable that in the science now under discussion, as in every human enterprise, empirical evidence carries (and should carry) the greatest weight. Neither can we deny the high and seemingly creative independent power found in the inner faculties through which the evidence is grasped, collected, ordered, and develop.]36

Goethe speaks here not of Erfahrung as general experience but as one discreet instance. As singular sensory impressions belonging to a unique individual, these experiences can be collected, ordered, and further developed through activating a nondiscursive mode of thought. Before reaching this stage, however, the scientist must call on the faculty for discursive thought to gather enough singular sensory experiences (Erfahrungen) from which to glean a sense of overarching order or to draw conclusions. Later in the text, Goethe’s usage of Erfahrungen in its plural form expands its semantic reach beyond the individual sensory impression to assume a formal character of empirical data: Wenn wir die Erfahrungen, welche vor uns gemacht worden, die wir selbst oder andere zu gleicher Zeit mit uns machen, vorsätzlich wiederholen und die Phänomene . . . wieder darstellen, so nennen wir dieses einen Versuch.37

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[When we intentionally reproduce empirical evidence found by early researchers, contemporaries, or ourselves, when we re-create . . . phenomena, we speak of this as an experiment.]38

Goethe’s methodology hinges on the connectedness of experience and experiment: in contradistinction to the singular event of Newton’s experimentum crucis, the Versuch represents the accumulation of many isolated Erfahrungen. Indeed, individual experiments should not exist in isolation, since the scientist’s interest lies in the relationship between them: “So schätzbar aber auch ein jeder Versuch einzeln betrachtet sein mag, so erhält er doch nur seinen Wert durch Vereinigung und Verbindung mit andern” (As worthwhile as each individual experiment may be, it receives its real value only when united or combined with other experiments).39 As a consequence, the scientist must often repeat (“öftere Wiederholung”) 35 36 37 38 39

HA XIII 12. HA XIII 12. HA XIII 14. HA XIII 13. HA XIII 14. [13].

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his individual experience of the phenomenon through an extended process of data collection, a repetitive activity that functions as a restraint against undesirable abstraction and his own precarious subjectivity.40 Rather than work from hypotheses about what “should” be, the scientist remains focused on the object and acts as his own severest observer (“sein eigner strengster Beobachter”) as a viewing subject with inherent weaknesses and biases.41 This process of continual observation and selfobservation encourages the scientist to rely on sensory perception while still being attentive to its limitations. At the same time, Goethe does not simply advocate repetition as redundancy, and instead strives to explore “alle Seiten und Modifikationen . . . eines einzigen Versuches” (every possible aspect and modification . . . of every bit of empirical evidence).42 Through observing repetition plus modification—that is to say, through observing difference—the scientist can begin to organize the similarities into a sequence illustrating gradations of change. Indeed, “das Nächste ans Nächste zu reihen oder vielle das Nächste aus dem Nächsten zu folgern” (to connect things in unbroken succession, or rather, to derive things step by step) allows the interconnectivity and underlying unity of the object’s modulations to be intuited by the subject.43 I use the word intuit here, because Goethe clearly signals that we are ready to transition from a discursive mode of thought and to activate another faculty: “Aber eben zwei Versuche, die miteinander einige Ähnlichkeit haben, zu vereinigen und zu verbinden, gehört mehr Strenge und Aufmerksamkeit, als selbst scharfe Beobachter oft von sich gefordert haben” (However, to unite or combine just two somewhat similar experiments calls for more rigor and care than even the sharpest observer usually expects of himself).44 While the scientist discursively constructs a series of adjacent experimental protocols and observes their results, organizing them into a seriality so that the sought-after totality progressively discloses itself demands a (higher) mode of nondiscursive thought or intuition.45 Here’s how Goethe gets us there. In checking and rechecking the object to observe its modulations, the viewing subject initiates an oscillatory motion sustained throughout the “öftere Wiederholung” comprising

40 HA XIII 15. 41 HA XIII 11. Here Goethe posits a corrective to the anxiety surrounding the “unstable physiology and temporality of the human body” of the sort that Jonathan Crary references (Techniques of the Observer, 68). 42 HA XIII 17. [15]. 43 HA XIII 18. [16]. 44 HA XIII 14. [13]. 45 Cf. Geulen’s chapter “Reihenbildung” (Aus dem Leben der Form, 109–22); and Steinle, “Das Nächste ans Nächste reihen,” 141–72.

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the Versuch.46 This oscillation is important for several reasons: first, the movement itself forms a unity between disparities by connecting the polarities of subject and object. Second, Goethe conceives of this unity as a movement that posits the Versuch as an animate entity capable of responding to the object’s potentiality for change. Thirdly, because the experiment equals the mediating back-and-forth between subject and object, this oscillation introduces a temporal dimension to the model. Goethe clarifies from firsthand experience how the process unfolds both sequentially and consequentially over time: Ich habe in den zwei ersten Stücken meiner optischen Beiträge eine solche Reihe von Versuchen aufzustellen gemacht, die zunächst aneinander grenzen und sich unmittelbar berühren, ja, wenn man sie alle genau kennt und übersieht, gleichsam nur einen Versuch ausmachen, nur eine Erfahrung unter den mannigfaltigsten Ansichten darstellen.47

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[In the first two parts of my Contributions to Optics I sought to set up a series of contiguous experiments derived from one another in this way. Studied thoroughly and understood as a whole, these experiments could even be thought of as representing a single experiment, a single piece of empirical evidence explored in its most manifold variations.]48

Out of a series of experiments emerges one unified experiment, and out of consequential Erfahrungen emerges the collective Erfahrung. We need to take a moment to unpack this crucial passage to clarify the importance of seriality in Goethe’s methodology. For brevity’s sake, I will henceforth adopt Eva Geulen’s preferred term Reihenbildung to characterize the “series of contiguous experiments” described above.49 In conducting a series of experiments that border on and immediately connect with each other, the scientist effectively resolves two seemingly insurmountable, yet all-too-human hindrances at once. The first appears in “Bedenken und Ergebung” (“Doubt and Resignation”) from the morphological writings in which Goethe identifies the constraints of space and time as proving particularly obstructive for scientific research. Whereas the sensory experiences of the human observer are inevitably beholden to spatial and temporal limitations, the inner essence of the

46 Geulen also stresses the importance of this oscillation, only uses Goethe’s morphological term “Schwanken” (Aus dem Leben der Form, 65–76). 47 HA XIII 18, emphasis added. 48 HA XIII 16. 49 Geulen, Aus dem Leben der Form, 109–22.

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natural phenomenon exists independently of both.50 Seriality provides Goethe the key to unlocking this inner essence; individual experiments, when conducted serially—even though separately—merge into a collective experience that unites successive and simultaneous time. That the scientist can discover simultaneity in serial experiences also presents the opportunity for nondiscursive thought to intuit aspects of the phenomenon that otherwise lie beyond sensory perception. Although the subject collects and constructs a chain of experiences, this chain is incomplete because it offers only discrete glimpses of the object at various moments in time and space. What is missing are the developments occurring in the space between. In other words, the scientist witnesses the forms assumed by the phenomenon after it has changed and before it changes again, but the actual change during the transitional phases does not readily reveal itself to human apperception. However, with the transcendence of space and time conditioned by Goethe’s methodology, these dynamic, in-between forms begin to emerge as the scientist constantly compares each new experience of the phenomenon with the one that came before. Scrutinizing gradations of difference allows the scientist to “fill in the gaps” and ultimately build an unbroken chain of similarities and difference, of forms and movement of forms. Demanding that the unbroken chain arise from the observation of the series, Goethe’s methodology works to ensure that no gradation or transitional stage is omitted or overlooked. In this way, the scientist reproduces an uninterrupted and interdependent progression of forms and movement of forms with each necessarily reliant on its predecessor and successor. Paraphrasing the above-cited words from “Erfahrung und Wissenschaft,” as the result of all observations and experiments, the pure phenomenon can never be isolated but appears in a continuous sequence of events.51 This unbroken chain constitutes nothing less than the underlying unity or totality of the phenomenon, emergent out of the experimental series as the collective experience. Thus, from the two polarities of object and subject, a new construction is born: a synthesis of a higher order generated from the upward progression into a higher Erfahrung (“höhere Art der Erfahrung”). Goethe’s language leaves no doubt regarding the directionality, using the word “höher” no less than three times to describe the methodology, the task of the scientist, and the synthesis itself.52 Its threefold appearance 50 See HA XIII 32–33. 51 HA XIII 25. 52 “Eine solche Erfahrung die aus mehreren andern besteht ist offenbar von einer höheren Art. . . . Auf solche Erfahrungen der höheren Art loszuarbeiten, halt ich für höchste Pflicht des Naturforschers.” (Such a piece of empirical evidence, composed of many others, is clearly of a higher sort. . . . In my view, it is the task

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indicates the upward movement to a higher order, a nondiscursive faculty needed to shape the Reihenbildung from the discrete experiences collected through the discursive mode of thought. What results from this is a tripartite scheme consisting of thesis (cognitive subject), antithesis (phenomenal object), and the higher order synthesis generated from their fruitful interaction, or what here amounts to the experiment/experience.53 Accounting for the unstable processes of change, the experiment/ experience exists in the liminal space between the polarities of subject and object to mediate the distance separating objective reality from the subjective experience of it. In contrast to the stable boundaries around the subject and object, the character of the synthesized experiment/experience is essentially unstable and objectless. Neither wholly subjective nor wholly objective at this stage, their synthesis effectively inhabits no body and so reflects the linguistic distinction Goethe makes between Gestalt and Bildung in “Die Absicht eingeleitet” (“The Purpose Set Forth”). The stable boundaries of subject and object are redolent of the type of structured form signified by the word Gestalt, which assumes “ein Zusammengehöriges festgestellt, abgeschlossen und in seinem Charakter fixiert” (an interrelated whole [that] is identified, defined, and fixed in character).54 Unbound to time and place are the sort of animate formulations implied by Bildung, where “alles in einer steten Bewegung schwanke” (everything is in a flux of continual motion).55 The cloud icon subsequently suggests the dynamism of the Bildung that the scientist experiences when conducting, collecting, and organizing the experimental series: the formless movement occurring in the transitional phases between phenomenal forms not immediately present to the senses. In this regard, Geulen’s characterization of a Reihenbildung truly encapsulates the Goethean sense. Through the synthesis into a “höhere Art der Erfahrung”(higher kind of experience), the viewing subject is at once unified with the object, yet he is distinct, and capable of intuiting the object’s potentiality for change while also being receptive to the

of the scientific researcher to work toward empirical evidence of this higher sort— and the example of the best men in the field supports this view.) HA XIII 18 [16], emphasis added. 53 For Goethe’s efforts to resolve irreconcilable dualities in his literary and scientific writings, see Fritz Breithaupt, Jenseits der Bilder. Breithaupt traces the changing structural position of the synthesized third element (a “Drittes” in his terminology), which disturbs the classical order by defying clear alignment with either pole. 54 HA XIII 55. [63]. 55 HA XIII 55. [63].

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same transformative processes.56 Appreciative of all past, present, and potential future forms, the scientist can gain a full insight into the pure phenomenon.57 Visualized in this manner, the methodological model proscribed by the essay distinguishes itself as a modified configuration of Polarität und Steigerung, the polarity and intensification that Goethe called the two great gears of all nature (“Triebräder aller Natur”) in the commentary to “Die Natur” (1783).58 More than a methodology, this model illustrates the way of cognitive viewing vital for conducting the experimental protocol, since it is the subject whose observation initiates these particular “Triebräder” and then intuits the essence of the object placed beyond the bounds of human knowledge by Kant when he grants man analytical Verstand but not synthetic Vernunft. A close reading of Goethe’s “Versuch als Vermittler” reconstructs a scientist subject capable of activating a nondiscursive faculty to unify a Reihenbildung of individual experiences collected through a discursive one to ultimately uncover the underlying essence of the object. While not every subject has yet to exercise or refine this nondiscursive faculty, all individuals nonetheless innately possess one and therefore could do so. That Goethe establishes a scientific method on a form of intuition and reconciles both modes of thought is highly significant; his method creates an authoritative subject with the power to shape what is perceived and intuit what is not by actively participating in the process through cognitive and sensory means. The word “Beobachtungsgabe” indicates how absolutely Goethe associates the functioning of intellectual intuition with the sense of sight, although his essay only indirectly suggests how the two work together. Although I have been using the phrase “cognitive mode of viewing,” owing to its outstanding features, Goethe adheres to no single designation for the sort of nondiscursive cognition represented by Kant’s Vernunft and Spinoza’s scientia intuitiva. In his morphological writings Goethe uses the terms “exakte sinnliche Phantasie” (exact sensory imagination), “anschauende Urteilskraft” (intuitive perception), and “lebendiges Anschauen” (living perception).59 Of these, the 56 Cf. Breithaupt, Jenseits der Bilder, 73–80. 57 “Erfahrung” offers a point of comparison with Goethe’s archetypal “Urpflanze.” Cf. Breithaupt, Jenseits der Bilder, 69–73. 58 HA XIII 48. 59 To this we could add the “zarte Empirie” (“delicate empiricism”) of Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre and a maxim: “Es gibt eine zarte Empirie, die sich mit dem Gegenstand innigst identisch macht und dadurch zur eigentlichen Theorie wird. Diese Steigerung des geistigen Vermögens aber gehört einer hochgebildeten Zeit an” (There is a delicate empiricism that makes itself utterly identical with the object, thereby becoming true theory. But this enhancement of our mental

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third term, the lebendiges Anschauen, best characterizes how this faculty is inherently one of perception, and how, as a mode of cognitive viewing, it powers Goethe’s methodology and empowers his scientific subject. It positions the viewing subject as both actor in and creator of the surrounding forms of the world through observing and cognitively participating in Nature’s metamorphoses. Returning the term to its original context in “Die Absicht eingeleitet” recalls the essential schematic for natural development as a continual Polarität und Steigerung, a process Goethe claims should be studied with a mode of perception as fluid and flexible as nature itself: Das Gebildete wird sogleich wieder umgebildet, und wir haben uns, wenn wir einigermaßen zum lebendigen Anschauen der Natur gelangen wollen, selbst so beweglich und bildsam zu erhalten, nach dem Beispiele, mit dem sie uns vorgeht.60

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[When something has acquired form it metamorphoses immediately to a new one. If we wish to arrive at some living perception of nature we ourselves must remain as quick and flexible as nature and follow the example she gives.]61

As it duplicates the same primary processes generating natural form, lebendiges Anschauen lives and breathes along with the organic forms it studies. Also generative, it keeps alive the potential for change, formulates a relationship with the world subject to constant negotiation and renegotiation, and presents an alternative to Newton’s experimentum crucis or Linnaeus’s static transcendental order.62 Yet, more than “living,” the lebendiges Anschauen is also “life-giving,” for it is through this mode of cognitive viewing that a series of Erfahrungen connect the varied phenomena of the world to produce what we experience of the world around us. Goethe reiterates in “Der Sammler powers belongs to a highly advanced age.) (Maximen und Reflexionen Nr. 509, HA XII 435 [307]). The reciprocal interaction and interlinking of subject and object, along with the implications of “Steigerung,” strongly suggest that the “zarte Empirie” refers to the methodology in “Versuch als Vermittler.” However, the term “zarte Empirie” is not included above, because it lacks both cognitive/ visual connotations of the other terms. 60 HA XIII 56. Emphasis added. 61 Douglas Miller, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Scientific Studies, 64. 62 For Goethe’s morphology as distinct from Linnaean methodology, see Amrine, “The Metamorphosis of the Scientist,” 187–212; Breidbach, Goethes Metamorphosen Lehre; von Mücke, “Goethe’s Metamorphosis”; Thomas Pfau, “‘All Is Leaf,’” 3–41; Stephenson, Goethe’s Conception of Knowledge and Science; and Wellmon, “Goethe’s Morphology of Knowledge,” 153–77.

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und die Seinigen” (“The Collector and his Circle,” 1798/99) how every experience has an appropriate organ (“Zu jeder Erfahrung gehört ein Organ”) that must produce (“muß produzieren können”), and that what this organ specifically produces is experience itself: “Die Erfahrung! Es gibt keine Erfahrung, die nicht produziert hervorgebracht, erschaffen wird” (Experience! There is no experience that is not produced, brought forth, created).63 Contrary to the a priori principles erected through Kant’s transcendental reason, Goethe’s understanding of Erfahrung is created by us, as “produziert” (“produced”) “hervorgebracht” (“brought forth”), and “erschaffen” (“created”) from an “Organ” (“organ”) in our possession. That this organ indeed exercises a lebendiges Anschauen is emphasized in Maximen und Reflexionen: “Der Mensch ist als wirklich in der Mitte einer wirklichen Welt gesetzt und mit solchen Organen begabt, daß er das Wirkliche und nebenbei das Mögliche erkennen und hervorbringen kann” (Man is placed in the middle of an actual [real] world and endowed with such organs so that he can recognize and bring forth the actual [real] as well as the possible).64 The “Mensch” presented here could be an avatar of Goethe’s scientist subject, who, in his interrelatedness with nature, makes sense of the world as infinitely variable and constantly changing. Experiencing the natural objects around him “mit solchen Organen” (with such organs) as his eyes and cognition, the subject animates their potentiality (“das Mögliche”) through active observation, thereby constructing both his reality (“das Wirkliche”) and their reality for him. Without the cognitive viewing subject to lift the natural object out of stasis, reanimate it, and make it “lebendig” (alive), we are not really seeing the world around us for all it is and all it could be. That he observes and participates in the potentiality of all natural forms endows this “Mensch” with an authority and autonomy exemplary of a new prototype for subjecthood.65 From the idea of a series of mediating Versuche, whose practical execution constructs Erfahrung as unified totality, Goethe leads us to formulate a cognitive viewing subject with the authority to create his own 63 HA XII 85. My translation. 64 Maximen und Reflexionen Nr. 58. HA XII 373. My translation. 65 For this reason, Goethe’s account of phenomenal experience is often said to foreground the twentieth-century development of phenomenology. See Hennigfeld’s excellent account of Goethe’s phenomenological thinking in “Goethe’s Phenomenological Way of Thinking,” 143–67; as well as Gernot Böhme, “Goethes Farbenlehre als Paradigma einer Phänomenologie der Natur,” 31–40; Simms, “Goethe und die Phänomenologie,” 177–94; and Vogl, “Der Weg der Farbe,” 157–69, and “Goethes Farben,” 129–39.

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lived experience. Through this theoretical grounding, understanding the objects of the natural world starts from within the individual’s body and emerges from a continual dialogue between viewing subject and viewed object to animate otherwise lifeless forms and makes them “wirklich” (real). In short, objects attain their objecthood because the viewer sees them. By extension, the oscillation into objecthood produced by and contingent on the beholder’s cognition constructs the human experience of reality. Constantly in flux, what the cognitive faculties call forth with the senses to experience as reality hovers like a cloud just beyond solid objecthood, incessantly modulating through an infinite series of forms whose appearances vary in accordance with the body of the viewer. Nevertheless, the constant dialogue between subject and object ensures that its forms do not fluctuate so greatly as to ascend into unconstrained or arbitrary subjectivity. In this way, Goethe advances a concept of subjecthood with a newly defined autonomy whose engagement with the world successfully navigates the Scylla and Charybdis of natural philosophy, thereby avoiding Newton’s objectivism and Romantic subjectivism run rampant. Thus, the theoretical model for a lebendiges Anschauen presented in “Versuch als Vermittler” heralds the turn to a newly empowered subject possessing an authoritative way of seeing. If the oscillations of the lebendiges Anschauen as first formulated for the scientist could now be deployed in the aesthetic sphere for the artist or art spectator, it stands to reason that its oscillations could also construct an aesthetic reality. A supposition with significant implications, the application of Goethe’s scientific gaze in the aesthetic sphere would exemplify one possible new way of seeing and engaging with art whereby the cognitive viewing subject participates in the construction of a radically subjective aesthetic experience. This subject would possess the capacity of producing an aesthetic experience with a physical object of art that need not depict a physical object by drawing on cognitive faculties such as imagination and intellect and human sensory organs like vision to redefine both its sense of self and the objects in its orbit, be they forms of nature or forms of art. This subject arises at the confluence of art and science in the viewing of the clouds in “Howards Ehrengedächtnis (“In Honor of Howard”), a poem written in praise of the English scientist Luke Howard (1772–1864), who devised the cloud classification system still largely in use today. In the poem, a fruitful interplay of natural processes and aesthetic pleasure unfolds when the scientist’s lebendiges Anschauen is activated in the realm of art and emerges as the spectator’s “clouding of perception.”

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The Not-so-Useless Pursuit of Shadows: Howard and Goethe Aside from his literary dominance as poet, playwright, and novelist, Goethe maintained an active and productive profile in a variety of other areas, serving as statesman for the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, indulging his aesthetic inclinations as critic and amateur artist, and pursuing his interests in the natural sciences, meteorology included. Indeed, in the wake of Howard’s 1802 lecture, “On the Modification of Clouds,” Goethe himself was among the many people turning skyward to contemplate or qualify the Englishman’s solution to naming the clouds vis-à-vis his own meteorological studies.66 Previous attempts at cloud classification systems, including those by Linnaeus and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), had failed owing to their inaccuracy and unwieldiness. Leaving little openness for the possibility of change, the rigid taxonomy designed by Linnaeus presupposed a static and inflexible natural order fundamentally at odds with the infinitely variable cloud. Working in 1802 from the then-unpopular albeit correct hypothesis that cloud activity was not arbitrary, Lamarck devised a fatally flawed system of nomenclature whose exceedingly descriptive and confusing categories of secondary characteristics did not reflect a true appreciation of cloud mutability.67 Instead of recognizing each formation as a stage in a cycle of continual cloud movement as Howard would, Lamarck treated each formation as its own cloud and arranged groupings according to color, contour, and apparent surface consistency. In the end, his system atomized the clouds because it ran into the Linnaean problem of naming each new and divergent formation. Howard designed a different method, grouping the clouds not by how they looked at a given moment but by how and why they changed and ostensibly would always change. At a lecture in 1802 to the Askesian Society, a club for the scientifically oriented, Howard demonstrated that cloud classification was not a “useless pursuit of shadows” by persuasively and plainly reducing the bottomless heterogeneity of possible cloud formations into three essential forms displaying the most basic of visual features.68 Published a year later as “On the Modifications of Clouds, and on the Principles of their Production, Suspension, and Destruction,” the essay identified the basic categories of cirrus (“curl of hair”), cumulus (“heaps”), and stratus (“layers”), with the rain cloud 66 Richard Hamblyn’s books offer the best histories of cloud classification. See Hamblyn, Clouds: Nature and Culture and The Invention of Clouds. 67 Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds, 104–10. 68 Quoted in Stephens, “The Useful Pursuit of Shadows,” 442.

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nimbus (“cloud”) serving as an amalgamation of the three. Although the names communicate a sense of how one could expect each type to appear, Howard stressed that these formations represented not discrete species but stages of a larger cycle governed by systematic behavior itself conditioned by fluctuations in temperature, air pressure, and humidity. Even Howard’s pointed use of “modification” to connote the state, variety, or act of change expressed the immutable mutability of cloud as it passed from one stage into the next, gathering, flattening, and dispersing only to begin anew. Equally significant was the way Howard recognized and accommodated intermediate stages and responded to change.69 His typology anticipated change and embraced complexity by remaining flexible and open to unexpected permutations with descriptions vague enough to allow for abnormalities yet precise enough to convey information about typical tendencies and atmospheric conditions. Any novel ambiguity could subsequently be appraised with near certainty as one of his classifications. Moreover, in grouping his “species” according to behavior and explaining the cloud as observable effects of invisible causal movements, Howard made visible the hidden atmospheric fluctuations of temperature and pressure. Simple, sound, and immediately successful, Howard’s classifications are still in use today, albeit in a slightly modified version. It is not coincidental that Goethe’s earnest cloud studies began in 1815, the year in which Howard’s 1803 “Essay on the Modifications of Clouds,” first became available in German translation.70 Goethe enthusiastically responded to Howard’s system, adopting the new categories as a vocabulary for describing his own observations, which he eagerly tested against Howard’s studies: “Ich ergriff die Howardische Terminologie mit Freuden, weil sie mir einen Faden darreichte, den ich bisher vermißt hatte” (I seized on Howard’s terminology with 69 Howard designated these aggregate modifications according to their approximate location in the cycle (cirrocumulus, cumulostratus, etc.). For the appeal of Howard’s nomenclature for Goethe, see Sommerhalder, Pulsschlag der Erde!, 43–69. 70 Howard’s essay appeared twice in German in Gilbert’s Annalen der Physik; first, translated from French in 1805, and then from English in 1815. Goethe encountered the second translation in 1816, and then the English essay in 1818. See Schlesinger, “Wolken: Zur Funktion und Geschichte,” 321. For an overview of Goethe’s meteorological studies, see Bernhardt, “Johann Wolfgang von Goethes Beziehungen zu Luke Howard,” 28–40; Busch, “Die Ordnung im Flüchtigen,” 519–70; Gedzelman, “Cloud Classification Before Luke Howard,” 381–467; Nickel, “Neues vom ‘Camarupa,’” 118–25; Phelps, “Goethe’s Meteorological Writings,” 317–24; Slater, “Luke Howard, F.R.S.,” 119–40; and Zajonc, “The Wearer of Shapes,” 34–45.

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delight because it gave me a missing thread).71 As his many letters to Howard attest, Goethe seems to have found in Howard a kindred spirit who practiced science with an approach resonant with the principles and insightful cognitive views of his own morphological thought.72 Regarding the clouds with fresh eyes and new insights, Goethe penned the poem “Howards Ehrengedächtnis” in honor of the Englishman’s achievement. In the three stanza’s of “Howards Ehrengedächtnis,” the immutable potentiality of cloud modulates into metaphorical “clouding” in a tripartite scheme of two polarities (object and subject) and the movement in between (as the two interact).73 The cloud activity in the first stanza and Howard’s spectatorship in the last cross paths in the middle stanza, where the cognitive activity of the viewing subject reanimates the potentiality of the natural object in a process occurring between cloud and human perception that I call a “clouding of perception” and believe to be a theoretical basis for abstraction.74

71 Goethe “Wolkengestalt nach Howard,” as quoted in Sucker, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe als Naturwissenschaftler, 59. Translation from Slater, “Luke Howard, F.R.S.,” 120. 72 See especially Bernhardt, “Johann Wolfgang von Goethes Beziehungen zu Luke Howard”; Hamblyn, Clouds: Nature and Culture, 51–58; Slater, “Luke Howard, F.R.S.”; and Sommerhalder, Pulsschlag der Erde!, 43–70. 73 For studies on Goethe’s cloud poetry not focused on modern subjectivity, see Martin, “Goethes Wolkentheologie,” 182–98; and Werner Keller “Die antwortenden Gegenbilder,” 191–236. Within the context of literary meteorology, see Gamper, “Der Mensch und sein Wetter,” 79–97 and “Rätsel der Atmosphäre,” 229–43; and Mauer, “Adalbert Stifter’s Poetics of Clouds and Nineteenth-century Meteorology,” 421–33. As “Lehrgedicht,” see Luborsky, Goethe’s Scientific Language in Prose and Poetry, 166; Schöne, “Über Goethes Wolkenlehre,” 26–54; and Sommerhalder, Pulsschlag der Erde!. 74 Vogl and Begemann examine the subjecthood emergent in this poem, linking cloud activity to the subject’s ability to express higher scientific truths just beyond the grasp of human perception. See Begemann, “Wolken. Sprache,” 225–42; and Joseph Vogl, “Wolkenbotschaft,” Archiv für Mediengeschichte, vol. 5 (2004): 69–79. For Goethe’s cloud poetry and painting, see Attanucci, “Atmosphärische Stimmungen,” 282–95; Badt, John Constable’s Clouds and Wolkenbilder und Wolkengedichte der Romantik; Busch, “Die Ordnung im Flüchtigen,” 519–70; and Gedzelman, “Weather Forecasts in Art,” 441–51.

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The Clouding of Perception: The Goethean Subject as Cloud Gazer Beginning high in the heavens with the “Gottheit Camarupa” and ending on earth in “die Welt,” the poem’s three stanzas cycle through the life of the cloud up in the sky, down on earth, and in the turbid medium between.75 As becomes clear, a tripartite scheme constructs the compositional integrity of the poem, whose salient components are mapped out in the ensuing diagram (table 3.1):

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Table 3.1. The compositional structure of the poem maps out its narrative components in a tripartite scheme.

On a superficial level, the narrative and syntactic structure of the poem follows the cloud on a downward spiral as it dissipates in a descent from heaven to earth. However, the movement of the clouds is more complex than a linear journey from a viewed object to a viewing subject. In fact, the text employs several devices designed to complicate if not aggressively counteract a steady fall from opening line to final word, including an iambic pentameter whose rising meter steadily pushes upward even as the syntax spills downward. Progressing through the poem, these strategies

75 “Turbid medium,” and “turbidity” are the most common translations for the concept Goethe formulated in his Farbenlehre as “trübe,” the mediating space between light and darkness where “chroagenesis” occurs and colors are generated. Cf. Allert, “‘Trübe’ as the Source of New Color Formation,” 30; and Attanucci, “Atmosphärische Stimmungen,” 290.

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participate in the construction of a lyric that emulates and illustrates the cloud and cognitive activity it narrates. The first stanza presents the primary process of cloud formation as observable in nature: the cloud is an active and actively changing objecthood arising out of the oscillation (“schwanken,” “wandeln”) between atmospheric polarities:

I.

1  Wenn Gottheit Camarupa, hoch und hehr, 2  Durch Lüfte schwankend wandelt leicht und schwer, 3  Des Schleiers Falten sammelt, sie zerstreut, 4  Am Wechsel der Gestalten sich erfreut, 5  Jetzt starr sich hält, dann schwindet wie ein Traum: 6  Da staunen wir und traun dem Auge kaum;

When Camarupa, wavering on high, Lightly and slowly travels o’er the sky, Now closely draws her veil, now spreads it wide, And joys to see the changing figures glide, Now firmly stands, now like a vision flies, We pause in wonder, and mistrust our eyes. 76

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That this activity is self-generating and self-perpetuating is conveyed with reflexive verbs (“sich halten,” “sich erfreuen”) and through the sentence’s subject, an agent christened the “Gottheit Camarupa.”77 The name refers to an Eastern deity appearing in the Meghadūta (The cloud messenger), a lyric love poem by the fifth-century Indian poet Kālidāsa in which a heartbroken spirit, exiled to the mountaintops, asks a passing cloud to deliver a message to his beloved in a faraway city below.78 From the kama (Sanskrit for “desire, pleasure”) and rupa (“shape”), the godhead Camarupa takes joy in wearing and changing shapes at will. Goethe thus perceived in the deity a potent Indian symbol for the mutable quality of the cloud to assume an inexhaustible number of new identities.79 Although on the move, Goethe’s “Gottheit Camarupa” does not travel 76 Goethe, “Howards Ehrengedächtnis,” 350. The translation is quoted in Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds, 296–97. All citations are from these sources. Part of a cycle of meteorologically themed poems, “Howards Ehrengedächtnis” was originally published along with its English translation in the July 1821 issue of London Magazine and Theatrical Inquisitor (Gold and Northhouse). 77 Cf. Attanucci, “Atmosphärische Stimmungen,” 289; Begemann, “Wolken. Sprache,” 234; Luborsky, Goethe’s Scientific Language in Prose and Poetry, 144; and Schöne, “Über Goethes Wolkenlehre,” 32. 78 Goethe also chose “Camarupa” as the title of the first meteorological study submitted to the Grand Duke in 1817, intending it as a “Metamorphosis of Clouds” in the spirit of his Metamorphosis of Plants (Nickel, “Neues vom ‘Camarupa,”). 79 Zajonc, “The Wearer of Shapes,” 42.

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in the same manner as Kālidāsa’s “camarupa”—that is, on an instructed or instrumental path from sky to earth. Instead, the motion engendered by antitheses such as “sammeln” / “zerstreuen” and “sich starrhalten” / “schwinden” simulates the back-and-forth movement between polarities that emulates the generation of natural clouds. The first line deifies the cloud as “Gottheit,” but the second qualifies the deification by suggesting that this divine activity and its shifting “Gestalten” do not in fact act on arbitrary whim. The words “Durch Lüfte schwankend” vaguely define the cloud as forming through movements of the air, while the complimentary pair of words, “leicht und schwer,” indicates an underlying logic guiding its formulaic movements: they speed up and slow down, transforming at varying tempos like natural clouds loosely conforming to this repetitious oscillation. While the cloud as “Gottheit” portrayed in the first stanza enjoys agency, it still exhibits typical cloud behavior such as found in nature. In this respect, Goethe’s “Camarupa” differs from its Indian namesake, which conducts itself as a personified cloud performing a human activity (delivering a message) for human reasons (love). To emphasize this personification, Kālidāsa tells the tale as cloud through a first-person narrative, much like the eponymous cloud in the 1820 poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822). Goethe’s cloud does not speak with an “I” or any other pronoun. Instead, that it is a “Gottheit”—something explicitly not mortal nor beholden to mortal form—implicitly distances Goethe’s cloud from personhood and the human world of objects. The predominance of verbs reinforces how the cloud in the first stanza moves without clear identity; in fact, the only certain aspect of the cloud’s appearance is its constant change. Restlessly furling and unfurling through a variety of guises, as suggested by the word “Schleier” or veil, the cloud is neither opaque nor transparent. As something shadowy and in between, its unstable and insubstantial objecthood exists between polarities to reinvent itself through the continuous oscillation of atmospheric forces. What “jetzt starr sich hält” in the next instant “schwindet wie ein Traum,” only to condense and disperse anew. The fluidity and continuity of these metamorphoses is structured into the phonetic and syntactic composition of the poem, where alveolar sibilants and bilabial nasals stream throughout the stanza, such as in Line 3 (“Des Schleiers Falten sammelt, sie zerstreut”). Except for the affricate (ts), each of the marked consonants can be sustained indefinitely. The points of articulation of the fricatives actualize in the mouth of the reader as soft, euphonic hissing or shushing sounds. While the lack of cacophonic consonants reinforces the cloud’s enjoyment of its own activity (“sich erfreut”), the rush of air evokes the cloud’s fluid and endless movements “durch Lüfte.” Also without terminus, the extended, sparsely punctuated

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sentence comprising the first stanza simply continues on, briefly pausing but not stopping at the semicolon to lead us into the openness of the break before the second stanza commences and the sentence potentially concludes. Indeed, the notion of potentiality becomes increasingly important in the life of the cloud as the poem progresses. Given that clouds constantly modulate through a process of building and rebuilding, of fluctuation and change, Goethe’s cloud is likewise in a perpetual state of becoming; always in between identities, it is neither real nor unreal, but always contains within itself the potential to be either or both at once. As a result, the “Auge” of the “wir” introduced in the final line is not sure what it perceives. However, waiting in the wings is another faculty belonging to the “wir”: the “eignen Bildens Kraft,” the power of the imagination that takes control in the second stanza as agent:

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II.

7  Nun regt sich kühn des eignen Bildens Kraft,

Then boldly stirs imagination’s power,

8  Die Unbestimmtes zu Bestimmtem schafft:

And shapes there formless masses of the hour;

9  Da droht ein Leu, dort wogt ein Elefant,

Here lions threat, there elephants will range,

10  Kameles Hals, zum Drachen umgewandt;

And camel-necks to vapoury dragons change;

11  Ein Heer zieht an, doch triumphiert es nicht,

An army moves, but not in victory proud,

12  Da es die Macht am steilen Felsen bricht;

Its might is broken on a rock of cloud;

13  Der treuste Wolkenbote selbst zerstiebt,

E’en the cloud messenger in air expires,

14  Eh er die Fern erreicht, wohin man liebt.

Ere reach’d the distance fancy yet desires.

It is here, among an array of cloud formations taking shape that the genesis of a new cognitive viewing subject is located. With the cognitive faculty of the imagination exercising the agency in this stanza, Goethe marks the importance of cognition in the constitution of this subject. And yet the way in which he introduces its presence as complement to the clouds is curious. At first, the caesura separating lines 6 from 7 would seem to split the subject in two by separating the “Auge” in the first stanza from “des eignen Bildens Kraft” in the second. Rather than signal a split subjecthood, however, the caesura appears to serve two functions. First, the gaping absence created by its presence draws attention to another absence: that of a body. Goethe speaks of eye and mind, but separately and without

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corporeal context. For this reason, the subject is not fully embodied. When the third stanza introduces a human body as acting agent (spoiler alert: It’s Howard!), the poetic unity will be realized as one displayed in the triptychal arrangement of no body (I), disembodied body (II), and human body (III). The second function of the caesura consists of separating the eye from the imagination, both on the page and in their lyric actions. Operational within a single subject, the two faculties are interconnected but not interdependent, because the space of the caesura marks the distinction between perceiving and conceiving, between seeing with the physiological eye (“Auge”) and “seeing” with the “mind’s eye” of the imagination (“des eignen Bildens Kraft”). The mode of perception promoted in the poem involves a synergy with both perception and cognition playing active roles, albeit with the “eignen Bildens Kraft” assuming dominance over the “Auge.” Subordinated by Goethe through locational and grammatical positioning, the “Auge” does not enjoy the autonomy of an active agent such as the preceding cloud and the succeeding imagination. It is slipped into the end of the first stanza (already claimed by “Camarupa”) and flanked by words questioning its reliability (“. . . und traun dem Auge kaum”). Even as assonance emphasizes the import, the consonance of nasals draws attention to the eye’s relegation to the dative, an oblique case. Still, the eye is not an afterthought or idle bystander. In placing it between cloud and imagination, Goethe situates the eye as a conduit through which cloud reaches imagination and imagination reaches out to cloud. Perhaps the strongest indication of the privileged role assigned to the “eignen Bildens Kraft” is the unusual construction of the concept itself. Goethe breaks apart the composite noun “Einbildungskraft” and puts it back together again as a triptych, three separate pieces united as one. Stretching out the concept across three words accentuates the presence of the imagination and more urgently portends its unique role. While its reconfiguring into a unified trinity allots the poet an extra syllable to complete the meter and creates a happy constellation of three, larger consequences are gained. The word’s transformation brings added emphasis to the last unit (“Kraft”), whose promotion to independent and capitalized noun stresses that “Kraft,” in keeping with its definition, exercises an active power as agent in this stanza.80 Since this cognitive faculty is disembodied, it has the potential to exert greater agency than the confines of a body would allow. So, when the disbelieving “Auge” falls off into the

80 Alternatively meaning power, force, or energy, “Kraft” is, as Goethe writes, a “Trieb,” a drive or impulse (see “Erläuterungen,” 408).

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caesura, the imagination suddenly and boldly springs to life (“Nun regt sich kühn”) to perform the newly stated action. The new action, now initiated by the “Kraft” of the imagination, is not so different from the previous action, the self-sustaining modulations of the cloud. That Goethe would dissemble the word, rearrange and adjust its components only to assemble it anew—a process not dissimilar to the cloud’s natural cycle of generation, transformation, and degeneration—ascribes a cloudlike quality to the cognitive functioning of the imagination. In this context, for the imagination to operate in a cloudlike capacity suggests that its activity mirrors the process by which clouds form in nature—that is, the continuous oscillatory movement between polarities also exhibited by Camarupa in the first stanza. However, the participation of the imagination institutes a different yet duplicate set of polarities with an analogous oscillatory activity taking place between them. The new polarities are both types of “Kraft”: the “eignen Bildens Kraft” of the subject and of the cloud (itself a force of nature). The interaction between the new polarities is just as constructive as the primary process occurring in nature that is signaled by the meaningful rhyme between the verb (“schafft”) and the noun above it (“Kraft”). Here, the creative power amounts to the “Bilden” in “eignen Bildens Kraft,” or what the eighth line reformates as “Unbestimmtes zu Bestimmtem schafft.” The imagination gives form to the cloud, bringing something of indeterminacy into something of determinacy. Closer inspection of imagination as unified trinity uncovers a duplication of the natural process of cloud formation, only now as occurring between “eignen” and “Kraft” to generate the “Bildens” in space between (table 3.2):

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Table 3.2. The unified trinity of the imagination duplicates the primary process of natural cloud formation.

To reformulate and explicate: The primary process as observable in nature and in the first stanza (the “Kraft” of the cloud activity”) is now observed in the middle stanza by an observer (the elided “eignen” pointing to “wir”). In observing the atmospheric oscillation from which the formlessness of clouds forms, a new channel (“Bildens”) between the polarities of spectator and cloud is created. Consequently, a new process

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of oscillation begins, a duplication of the primary natural process occurring between viewing subject and viewed object. The noteworthy evocation of “Bildung” through the use of “Bildens” alerts us to the type of activity occurring in the medium between subject and the natural object. Meaning to cultivate, generate, and develop, “Bilden” expresses the idea that the activity between polarities creates new forms. Perceiving truly is conceiving for this mode of perception, because the mind crafts (“schafft”) what the “Auge” sees: no longer perceiving a natural cloud, we instead conceive—or recognize—cloud as a lion, as an elephant, as a camel’s neck, as a dragon, even as an army.81 Undertaking its own active journey through time, Goethe’s “Wolkenbote” shifts through a menagerie of forms, first quickly then slowly. The accumulation of verbs in the three couplets indicates one very busy cloud performing a range of dramatic activities: “drohen,” “wogen,” “umwenden,” “anziehen,” “[nicht] triumphieren,” “brechen,” “zerstieben,” “erreichen,” and “lieben.” Closer attention to both the diversity of shapes complementing these verbs as well as the interpunctuation regulating their actions allows us to chart the tempo of the transitions and observe the steady deceleration of action (table 3.3):

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Table 3.3. The cloud’s tempo slows as it steadily dissipates through forms.

The movements of lines 9 and 10 are hurried and restless with the lineinternal commas signaling the abrupt change of form, shifting first from voluminous bodies (a lion, an elephant) before their hasty modulations into flatter forms (a camel’s neck, a dragon). After the semicolon’s intervention, the movement in lines 11 and 12 slows and spreads into two lines, much like the scattering of shape when “die Macht am steilen Felsen bricht.” In lines 13 and 14, the dispersal continues as the cloud messenger 81 The camel would seem a pointed reference to Hamlet’s cloud play with Polonius in act 3, scene 2 of Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (161).

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“zerstiebt” before it can alight to earth. Despite the literary allusions and the storybook character of the imagery, the cloud still behaves according to a natural lawfulness, even when momentarily arrested as animal or as army. Moreover, that the cloud displays such dynamism reveals the extent to which the action verb “Bilden” mediates the interaction between “eignen” and “Kraft.” In the first two stanzas, then, we find the interplay between two types of “Kraft”: the subject’s imagination and the volatile cloud activity. When the cloud activity manifests as forms recognizable to the subject as observed in the previous paragraph, we notice that the cloud, even during the moments of being molded by the mind, still exhibits cloudlike behavior. From this I conclude that the oscillation between the two polar forces is not a one-sided dialogue where the imagination imposes or impresses form onto the cloud activity. On the contrary, the cloud maintains enough agency to act as cloud and therefore perform the actions of the verbs in lines 9–14. Yet, as reinforced by the colon marking the end of line 8, the prevailing action of the stanza (creation) still occurs under the agency of the “eignen Bildens Kraft”: “Die Unbestimmtes zu Bestimmtem schafft:” At the same time, while the imagination creates these forms and identifies these images in the cloud’s modulations, it does not create or dictate the action of the cloud’s modulations. Rather, it seems to move with the cloud. The cloud continues metamorphosing in its cloudlike way from the first stanza even as the subject’s cognitive faculties in the second initiates the duplicated oscillatory process and generates new forms out of the formlessness. Called forth from the imagination of the spectator, these forms are inherently subjective and, as conveyed by the choice of literary references, imagery, and dramatic verbs, a source of aesthetic titillation. In sum, although not disrupting the cloud’s natural modulations or maligning its autonomy, the subject derives pleasure from the creative act of seeing and building objects while in dialogue with the cloud. What forms may arise from this cognitive engagement are constructions of the subject’s cognition as perceivable through the “Auge,” the point of access for the imagination and conduit through which images of the phenomenal object are gained. Since the “eignen Bildens Kraft” instigates the new oscillatory channel and plays the decisive role, implicit within this mode of perception are greater subjective authority (we create forms for ourselves and our enjoyment) and the allowance for a diversity of subjective interpretations. Were additional cognitive viewing subjects to view this same cloud with this same mode of perception, they would not necessarily perceive or conceive the phenomenal object as the same objecthoods of lions, elephants, and dragons, and they would be free to do so. Thus, the second stanza institutes the authoritative shift to a type of subject who constructs the reality of the cloud through cognition by

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creating new objecthoods in the oscillation between image and imagination—objecthoods whose very being is dependent on the presence of that spectator.82 However, while subjective apperception gives determinate form to the formless indeterminacy of the cloud and makes the “Unbestimmtes zu Bestimmtem,” Goethe does not want the cognitive subject in this poem to enact determinacy with these clouds. For one, the phrasing itself is indeterminate and predicates the precariousness of the objecthood in question. As adjectival nouns, “Unbestimmtes” and “Bestimmtem” lack substance and refer to no concrete object, evoking instead an abstract concept. How does the imagination form something indeterminate into something determinate with no “thing” at hand? Furthermore, the difference between the two words is the difference of the prefix “un-” navigated by the directional preposition “zu.” Rather than commend an act of determinate closure, the making of “Unbestimmtes zu Bestimmtem” is better understood as a gesture from indeterminate nondeterminacy toward indeterminate determinacy, a motioning from something vague in the direction of something less vague.83 When the imagination “Unbestimmtes zu Bestimmtem schafft,” it performs the action of closing without achieving the terminus of full closure. As a result, what the viewer might have earlier recognized in the second stanza (cloud as a lion, as an elephant, as a camel’s neck, as a dragon, as an army), are not the shapes per se but the potential therefor. While the imagination of the observer perceives the cloud modulating through its menagerie of shapes, none of these shapes is truly actualized. “Da droht ein Leu, dort wogt ein Elefant”: the lion only threatens; the elephant undulates but does not solidify. To be sure, “Kameles Hals, zum Drachen umgewandt” are not even complete thoughts, merely impressions, abruptly contrasted and broken by a comma. “Ein Heer zieht an, doch triumphiert es nicht”; breaking and scattering before it can. Even “der treuste Wolkenbote” dissipates before reaching its destination. From messenger to army and animals, each begins to gather in the observer’s imagination but then inevitably disperses before crystallizing into definite form. This lack of definition and clear boundaries is reproduced in the poem’s syntactic presentation of these images. They cascade down one long sentence, loosely disrupted by commas and semicolons that provide contour but preserve fluidity without stopping the stream of activity: One great cloud, constantly moving, perpetually transforming, punctuated by moments where it almost becomes something yet never becomes anything. Instead, Goethe leaves open a great deal of unactualized potential, but this is a positive, even exciting, aspect for his cloud gazer. The point 82 Goethe, “Erläuterungen,” 408. 83 Cf. Begemann (“Wolken. Sprache,” 236–44).

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of observing cloud activity is in fact not to see the cloud as something, as a definite object, but to imagine and play with the dynamic potentiality of the cloud. A formless form constantly in flux, the cloud can be anything, but to be anything it cannot be something. The conversion from seeing to seeing as delivers the blow that kills the potentiality of the experience by resolving the tension between the indeterminateness of the cloud and the determinacy of identifying it. The cloud would no longer enjoy that wonderful potential to be anything because we would now see it as something. To keep the potentiality of the cloud in the second stanza as alive and as animate as the natural cloud in the first, the motor of the “eignen Bildens Kraft,” the active cognitive engagement, must use its power not only to initiate a new channel for oscillatory motion but to sustain it as well. The aesthetic duplication of the primary process reanimates the cloud and sets it back in motion, deforming, obscuring, and “clouding” its once recognizable forms. I enclose this particular “cloud” with quotation marks to designate its usage as metaphor for a visual form lacking objecthood or an objective correlate. What began with actual clouds and instances of cloud gazing gives way to metaphorical “clouds” and the “clouding of perception” facilitating the appreciation of an art without objects.84 Once in flux as a form without form, the cloud is no longer cloud but “clouding”: the potential to be cloud or any form. It is its once and future forms, the sum of all that it was, will be, or could ever be. In the second stanza, natural cloud and metaphorical “clouding” coalesce: the “Leu,” the “Elefant,” the “Kameles Hals” are all both cloud modulations and “cloudings” constructed by the act of a cognitive subject. This process, since it takes place amid the “clouding” clouds of the second stanza, is what I call a “clouding of perception.” It is the process by which the cloud is lifted out of its objecthood in a dynamic dialogue between object and the active cognition of the beholder to become “clouding.” In this nebulous state of potentiality, a reanimation originating from the cognitive activity of a perceiving subject, the object is objectless, ambiguous, and abstract. During these periods of “clouded” perception, objecthood is lost but the potentiality for objecthood is gained and celebrated. As potentiality is tantamount to sustaining “clouded” perception, the poem works to keep its “cloudings” in flux and animate by counteracting the very narrative and syntactic gestures toward closure that it enacts. The key phrase “Unbestimmtes zu Bestimmtem” represents the most overt overture toward determinate form and so greatest threat to 84 Here I take inspiration from Hubert Damisch’s theory of “/cloud/,” which employs slashes to signify cloud as a semantic operator pointing to a visual experience of reality beyond the representational order encompassed by linear perspective. See Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/.

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desired potentiality, yet Goethe obstructs its resolution through a series of reversals and inversions culminating in the chiasmic reiteration “Bestimmt das Unbestimmte,” which structurally reinstitutes the tension between the polarities in the third stanza. Before then, the second stanza juxtaposes a series of contrasting lexical items to reverse momentum: “leicht / schwer,” “sammeln”/ “zerstreuen,” “starrhalten”/ “schwinden,” “da”/ “dort.” Also interwoven throughout the poem are the inverted genitival constructions “Des Schleiers Falten,” “des eignen Bildens Kraft,” “Kameles Hals,” and then later “neuer Lehre herrlichsten Gewinn.” Words like “doch” and “aber” further signal sudden turnabouts to alternate the motion of the poem, and even the “cloudings” churn back and forth between semantic polarities (table 3.4): Table 3.4. The sentence fragments in line 9, for example, are grammatically parallel but semantically oppositional.

Charting out the four faunae in lines 9 and 10 discloses another chiasmic reversal, this time involving two wild beasts of storied predatory behavior and two nonpredatory pack animals traditionally domesticated for human purposes (table 3.5):

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Table 3.5. The chiasmic reversal in lines 9 and 10 crosses two predators with two prey animals.

Continuing, lines 11–14 exhibit more of this back-and-forth between antitheses as the next sequence of “cloudings” takes potential shape. Diagrammed in the graphic below, the verbs in lines 11 and 14 are of a positive (+) quality: to draw near or attract (“anziehen”), to triumph (“triumphieren”), to reach or succeed (“erreichen”), and to love (“lieben”) denote typically constructive or affirmative concepts. Neutralizing their positive qualities, though, are the negatively (--) weighted verbs in the inner two lines, where to break (“brechen”) and to disperse (“zerstieben”) signify destructive and deconstructive acts. Together, the matrix of verbs constructs a pattern of behavior whereby the cloud (and its “cloudings”)

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folds back on itself along the horizontal axis between lines 12 and 13, all the while modulating through a cycle of constructive and deconstructive activity (table 3.6):

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Table 3.6. The contrasting positive and negative values of strategically arranged lexical items work to sustain oscillatory motion.

With the symbolic value of the nouns accompanying these verbs, the poem stages equivalent reversals but it promotes this oscillation on a metalevel. For the four implicated stanzas, only two nouns exert agency: “Heer” and “Wolkenbote.” The throngs of advancing soldiers are first repelled internal to the line before completely scattering into the singular “Wolkenbote,” who overturns the menace of war with a message of love in the next two lines.85 These structural and semantic reversals imitate the oscillatory motion inherent in both the primary process of cloud formation as well as in its duplication between cognitive subject and cloud. Although antithetical concepts and abrupt turnabouts are not unique to this stanza (they occurred in the first stanza as the oscillation comprising the primary process of cloud activity), their presence is stronger. That the second stanza demonstrates greater and more variable activity makes sense; here is where the action is, structurally and conceptually speaking. Not only do two sets of oscillatory processes unfold in these few verses (primary cloud and duplicated “clouding”) but the second stanza mediates the middle ground between the polarities of the first and third stanza where the oscillation and fruitful interaction between creative forces takes place. Consequently, this turbid medium is where “clouding” occurs, potentiality peaks, and both clouding and potentiality are sustained through the tension born of theses and antitheses. It is this oscillation between imagination and image that the cognitive viewing subject wants to keep open, for this oscillation preserves the potentiality of the cloud to keep it animate and alive. 85 This message could also portend peace if we consider how “Bote” has an alternate connotation of angel.

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As is consonant with the scientific model of lebendiges Anschauen, for the second stanza to become a turbid medium where the formless forms of “clouding” are perceived, there needs to be two polarities from which they may emerge. If the first stanza builds the first polarity with the formless cloud of the godhead in the heavens, the third stanza consists of the human body standing on the solid grounds of earth.

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III.

15  Er aber, Howard, gibt mit reinem Sinn 16  Uns neuer Lehre herrlichsten Gewinn. 17  Was sich nicht halten, nicht erreichen läßt, 18  Er faßt es an, er hält zuerst es fest; 19  Bestimmt das Unbestimmte, schränkt es ein, 20  Benennt es treffend! Sei die Ehre dein! 21  Wie Streife steigt, sich ballt, zerflattert, fällt, 22  Erinnre dankbar deiner sich die Welt.

But Howard gives us with his clearer mind The gain of lessons new to all mankind; That which no hand can reach, no hand can clasp, He first has gain’d, first held with mental grasp. Defin’d the doubtful, fix’d its limit-line, And named it fitly.—Be the honour thine! As clouds ascend, are folded, scatter, fall, Let the world think of thee who taught it all.

From the distanced perspective of stanza III, Howard observes the cloud and employs the novel way of perceiving its activity that led to his classification system. His classification system delineates form and arrests the crucial oscillatory movement by imposing its scientific framework on the shifting shape of the cloud. Switching the active subject to the “er” denoting Howard, this last stanza does in syntax what it describes in words. As Howard pins down potential cloud forms, Goethe likewise demarcates boundaries with his punctuation marks. Contrary to the single sustained sentence flowing through stanzas one and two, the third stanza is clearly and emphatically cut into four sentences. Exclamation points sever the third to last line and coincide with Howard executing the giving of names. As these dividing lines box in “was sich nicht halten, nicht erreichen läßt,” they end the action of the sentence and the active potential of the clouds in one fell swoop. Further bounding the otherwise boundless cloud activity are separable prefix verbs: “Er faßt es an,” “er hält zuerst es fest,” “[er] schränkt es ein.” The grammar reenacts what Howard performs with the classification system: the Howard of the sentence (the “er”) constrains and contains the clouds (the “es”) through the borders erected by the verb and its prefix. Ending the potentiality of the phenomenal cloud, the completed action establishes identity and recognizable form.

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While Goethe would rather sustain the cloud’s playful modulations as would be stipulated by a “clouding of perception,” the structure of the poem and the potentiality of the cloud demands an opposite polarity, even if it (Howard) arrests the cloud activity. Without this other extreme, no oscillation could occur in the turbid medium in between. Where the middle stanza leaves a sense of incompleteness and open possibility, the final stanza works toward completing the incompleteness while also honoring the man—the “er”—who realizes its finality. The poem draws attention to Howard’s scientific achievement and function as complementary pole with the chiasmic reversal of “Unbestimmtes zu Bestimmtem” into the phrase “Bestimmt das Unbestimmte.” In addition to the reordering of the words, what previously consisted of two indeterminate adjectival nouns linked by a directional preposition is reformulated as a verb denoting determinacy and an indeterminate adjectival noun. The gesture originally made by the imagination, a gesture from vagueness toward less vagueness, becomes more distinct and more forceful as Howard performs the express act of determining the indeterminate. However this may be, this act still cannot fully conclude, as is revealed by the third stanza’s efforts to undermine completion. As his distance in stanza III is farther than that of the cognitive viewing subject in stanza II, Howard’s perception is less “clouded” and his purpose is more scientific. His scientific detachment, while affording greater determinacy, nevertheless stops short of determination, even as the marked use of the particle “er” as verbal prefix and pronoun conveys the concept of completed action throughout the third stanza. As verbal prefix, “er-” signals that the gesture toward culmination initiated by the action of the main verb has indeed been enacted, at least to an intensified degree. Hence the reaching movement inherent in the verb “reichen” comes to an end with the addition of the “er” prefix when the object of the verb is caught or achieved. As pronoun, “er” signifies the agent completing the action (Howard). The incidence of this “er,” and the coincidence of its grammatical usages, is brought to our attention through the repetitious vibration of the er: in addition to the word “er” (appearing in triplicate no less), this sound surfaces in “neuer,” “Lehre,” “zuerst,” “herrlichen,” “Ehre,” and “zerflattert.” Then there are the verbs “erreichen” and “erinnern,” both suggesting a more complete state of the respective roots’ implied actions, a reaching and internalizing, and both requiring an agent to realize them.86 As this agent is Howard, Goethe sets up an interesting wordplay involving the dual usages of “er” in the fourth line: “Er faßt es an, er hält zuerst es fest[.]” As written, the line establishes “er” as the subject 86 Although no verb “innern” exists in the German language, the idea of “er-innern” or of an “Er-innerung” does on a conceptual level suggest the more deeply impressed internalization of something.

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and the verbs as “fassen” and “(fest)halten.” When read aloud, however, the word boundaries are blurred. The ear does not necessarily hear the separation between words that “he grasps” and “he holds,” perceiving instead their more complete forms and deeper realizations in “erfaßt” and “erhält,” the third-person singular conjugations of the verbs “erfassen” and “erhalten.” What one initially might hear and possibly conceptualize is different from what the eye might initially read. With syntactical units that unbind and recombine, that flow over boundaries to create new forms, and that inhabit two meanings at once depending on our perception, the ambiguity of the line yet again exemplifies the cloudlike character of Goethe’s writing. This, in turn, sustains the potential of the cloud despite its containment in the third stanza. Howard grasps the cloud and completes the action, and still he does not; Goethe’s wordplay with “er” allows definite meaning to slip through our fingers—as is emphasized by the negation immediately preceding the verb “erreichen.” The action cannot be completed, and the cloud cannot be caught, even if Howard in the next line fully catches it (or does not) by the verbs and their possible prefixes. Howard’s “er” would appear to represent a third alternative to the formless forms of “clouded perception,” on the one hand, and the implicit formalism of seeing the cloud as or like something, on the other. This third alternative approaches the finality of the “as/like” (or “als/wie”) but still maintains enough of the potentiality of “clouding” to prevent complete closure. Howard makes boundaries to derive a formal model, but without the inflexibility and fragmentation of previous attempts. In this regard, Howard’s viewing aligns more closely with the potentiality of “clouded” perception, a partial overlap that also allows for the recognition of the underlying unity of the various cloud modulations. The fluctuating movement generating the “cloudings” bridge the distance between subject and object, creating a unity of the three so long as the oscillation continues. The identified clouds still modulate through identities, and their potential for novel and unexpected manifestations is kept open even as the classifications close in on it. The poem reproduces this cyclical unity in line 21, when Howard’s clouds move through all shapes at the end of the final stanza: “Wie Streife steigt, sich ballt, zerflattert, fällt.” The ostensible end to the action coincides with the cloud’s own fall from the atmosphere, driven downward by the added thrust of the rhyme “fällt” and “Welt.” Yet this push downward necessitates its own reversal upward, as the poem’s constant structural and lexical back-and-forth has prepared the reader to anticipate. Denoting a lack of finality with its connotations of continual renewal, the final verb of the poem, “sich erinnern,” obstructs any sense of closure. Through this cognitive activity, the imagination presents something physically absent and keeps it alive. The memory of the clouds leads back to the title (“Gedächtnis”) and the skies

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of the first stanza as memory works in tandem with the imagination to thread together the interior of the poem (table 3.7):

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Table 3.7. Like the cloud, the poem moves downward through stanzas only to cycle back to the beginning.

Thus, while seemingly concluding, the poem remains open-ended enough for the cyclical motion to begin anew and for the cognitive subject’s “clouded” perception to awaken the potential of a new aesthetic experiencing and continual reexperiencing of Goethe’s clouds. To summarize: a “clouding of perception” is the process by which the cloud is lifted out of its objecthood in a dynamic dialogue between object and the active cognition of the beholder to become “clouding.” Taking place amid the “clouding” clouds of the second stanza of “Howards Ehrengedächtnis,” this process bridges the divide between cloud activity and spectator to unite the two otherwise irreconcilable polarities of subject and object as described and enacted by Goethe’s verses. The first stanza establishes a naturally occurring primary process of oscillatory movement, the modulations of Camarupa. The animate cloud generated through this primary process is viewable to a spectator, as is represented in the third stanza by Howard. Like Howard, the spectator stands outside the primary oscillation, watches from a distance, and takes no part in this animation. From this detached vantage point, the spectator perceives the primary activity as inanimate object, a shape whose potentiality has been actualized into the recognizable but now inert form of a cloud. However, by active cognitive engagement, the motor of the “eignen Bildens Kraft” in the second stanza, the spectator has the power to initiate a new channel for oscillatory motion, this time between subject and object. The aesthetic duplication of the primary process reanimates the cloud and sets it back in motion, deforming, obscuring, and clouding its once recognizable forms.

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The cloud is lifted out of its objecthood in a dynamic dialogue between object and beholder. Once in flux as a form without form, it is no longer cloud but the potential to be cloud, to be any form. In this nebulous and unformulated state of potentiality, a reanimation originating from the cognitive activity of a perceiving subject, the object is objectless, ambiguous, and abstract. As structurally and narratively evident in the poem, between clouds and perception is a “clouding of perception,” the turbid medium where objecthood is lost but the potentiality for objecthood is gained. The spectator engaging this mode of cognitive viewing and thus gazing with “clouded perception” is a cognitive viewing subject who finds aesthetic pleasure in the clouds, not because they achieve definable form but precisely because they do not. In the poetic portrayal of a cognitive viewing subject able to derive enjoyment from the abstract, formless, and immaterial, Goethe presents the possibility for abstract art. It is this spectator in possession of this mode of viewing who could appreciate the aesthetic value of artworks without definitive object or material form, and it is with this spectator that abstract art begins.

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4: In the Service of Clouds or Optical Illusion? Romanticism, Pointillism, and Impressionism

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T

he idea of deriving a theoretical construct for a cognitive mode of scientific viewing of the sort that Goethe’s lebendiges Anschauen represents and then applying it to the realm of art originates with Goethe himself. In addition to the Farbenlehre’s desired practical application for painting, Goethe believed that art and artists could greatly benefit from the mode of lebendiges Anschauen necessary for botanists to perceive the metamorphosis of plants, for geologists to grasp the underlying patterns of rock formation, or for a scientist like Howard to classify the clouds. Given Goethe’s aesthetic sensibilities, the author envisaged quite a different role for the cognitive viewing subject than the “clouding of perception” at stake for abstract art. He conceived of its value as a means of furthering the genre of landscape painting, encouraging artists to study nature with a lebendiges Anschauen that would provide the final product with a scientific basis. To be clear, Goethe was not looking to subordinate or enslave art in the service of science; rather, he was looking to enhance the character of its truthfulness and beauty.1 The insights provided by scientific study would allow the artist to grasp the inner essence of the phenomenon, to understand the natural processes bringing it into being, and to better represent its intrinsically dynamic reality on canvas. To realize this calling as it pertained to clouds, Goethe approached artist acquaintances of his with the request for a series of cloud studies illustrating Howard’s cloud classifications because no visual account of that sort existed yet.2 Although he considered himself, among many

1 On Goethe and the interrelatedness of scientific viewing and aesthetics, see Apel, “Der lebendige Blick: Goethes Kunstanschauung,” 571–78; Badt, Wolkenbilder und Wolkengedichte der Romantik and John Constable’s Clouds; Hennigfeld, “Goethe’s Phenomenological Way of Thinking,” 143–67; Hermand, Grüne Klassik; Lichtenstern, Die Wirkungsgeschichte der Metamorphosenlehre Goethes; von Mücke, “Goethe’s Metamorphosis,” 27–53; and Naumann, Ein Unendliches in Bewegung. 2 See Busch, “Die Ordnung im Flüchtigen,” 524–26; and Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds, 220.

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other things, an amateur artist and, like Howard, even produced sketches of the typological categories, he recognized that a professional was needed in order to do the endeavor justice. The mutable behaviors of clouds had bedeviled artists for centuries, as their conspicuous absence in pre-Renaissance painting indicates.3 Even seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting, with the benefits that optical devices and the awareness of weather events afforded it, could not execute cloud forms that were naturally accurate and in perspectival harmony with the land or sea below them. Howard’s classification scheme provided the long-needed paradigm for interpreting a meteorologically accurate and a harmoniously integrated cloud, and Goethe made it his mission to put this knowledge at artists’ fingertips. In the end, Goethe never saw his series realized. Friedrich flatly declined, not wanting to force his atmospheric cloud coverage into scientific paradigms. And neither Johann Christian Clausen Dahl (1788– 1857), a Norwegian painter working in Dresden, nor the Berlin-based Carl Blechen (1798–1840) had an interest in the scientific formations of clouds. The only artist who did in fact acquiesce, Friedrich Preller (1804–78), yielded dissatisfactory results.4 The most notable headway that Goethe made in awakening artists to the lebendiges Anschauen of clouds came by way of Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869) who, in addition to being a practicing gynecologist, maintained an active profile as painter. His portrayal of a “sinnliche Anschauung” in the epistolary treatise Neun Briefe über Landschaftsmalerei (Nine Letters on Landscape Painting, 1831) pointedly references Goethe’s lebendiges Anschauen.5 In seizing on the mode of cognitive viewing promoted by Goethe for the natural sciences and bringing it to the attention of artists, Carus hoped to pioneer a new, scientifically based landscape painting, for which he devised the clumsy coinages Erdlebenbild and Erdlebenbildkunst (“earth-life painting” and “earth-life art”).6 Carus echoes the upward directionality emphasized 3 On clouds in art, see Badt, Wolkenbilder und Wolkengedichte der Romantik; John Gage, “Clouds over Europe,” 125–34; and Thornes, John Constable’s Skies. 4 Busch attributes Dahl’s reluctance to his close friendship with Friedrich, with whom he often sketched the skies from the banks of the Elbe (“Die Ordnung im Flüchtigen,” 526). For more on the cloud studies of Dahl and Blechen, see Badt, “John Constable’s Clouds” 35–41; Busch, “Die Ordnung im Flüchtigen,” 526–27; and Thorne, John Constable’s Skies, 184–85. 5 Goethe’s influences surface in the fifth letter from around 1821/22, even before Carus sent the first of his letters to the author. After receiving feedback, Carus took a break in writing before beginning the sixth letter in 1823. See Allert, “J. W. Goethe and C. G. Carus,” 195–219; Bätschmann, “Carl Gustav Carus,” 7; and Busch, “Die Ordnung im Flüchtigen,” 525. 6 Cf. Busch, “Die Ordnung im Flüchtigen,” 525; and Müller-Tamm, Rumohrs ‘Haushalt der Kunst’, 95–123. Both treat “sinnliche Anschauung” as

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by Goethe’s descriptions of lebendiges Anschauen as a higher-order experience (“höhere Art der Erfahrung”) when he defines such landscapes as paintings of a new and higher kind that would uplift viewers into higher contemplation of nature (“Bilder vom Erdenleben einer neuern höheren Art, welche den Beschauer selbst zu höherer Naturbetrachtung heraufheben”).7 An elevated and elevating genre able to stimulate the spectator’s capacity for cognitive viewing, Erdlebenkunst would appear to hold value for Goethe’s scientific program—namely, as a presumed means of honing the innate gift of observation premised in “Versuch als Vermittler.”8 Carus’s neologism never caught on and Erdlebenkunst failed to gain much traction (or respect) among painters.9 Yet the idea that scientific study could assist with the challenges of revealing natural laws and dynamic forms through a static medium continued to preoccupy artists, although most did not respond as directly to Goethe’s poetic or morphological writings as Carus. Throughout the nineteenth century, the work and working processes of several prominent painters would appear to assume the presence of a cognitive viewing subject of the sort that could approach nature with a lebendiges Anschauen and appreciate the full complexity of clouds in the spirit of Goethe. At the same time, these same artworks and artists might not deliberately address a cognitive spectator with “clouded perception” whose imaginative engagement enjoyed the full potential of “clouds.”

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Giants in the Sky: Constable’s Clouds and Turner’s Chromatics It is remarkable how much and how little the landscape artists John Constable (1776–1837) and Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775– 1851) have in common. Born only a year apart, these pillars of English Romanticism upended the conventions of landscape art by upgrading the sky and its clouds to the centerpiece of their paintings as both men

purposefully suggestive of lebendiges Anschauen. 7 Quoted in Carus, Nine Letters on Landscape Painting, 131. 8 This supposition is consistent with Carus’ view that, as Allert formulates, “visual art is not passive but involves active participation” and could have practical value (201). Owing to personal tragedies, Carus held especially strong beliefs about painting’s therapeutic potential, although Goethe rigorously upheld its autonomy. See Allert, “J. W. Goethe and C. G. Carus,” 201; and Bätschmann, “Carl Gustav Carus,” 4–7. 9 One of the few public commentaries on Carus’ Erdlebenkunst is an 1848 caricature by Moritz von Schwind (1804–71) published in the Fliegende Blätter, Munich’s weekly satirical magazine (Bätschmann, “Carl Gustav Carus,” 40).

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sought more exacting reflections of reality.10 To capture the dynamism of the natural world, both channeled contemporary scientific currents and, although finishing their formal pieces indoors, they spent time outside conducting informal plein air cloud portraiture or, in Constable’s words, “a great deal of skying.”11 These similarities are not immediately evident in their work though. That the same sky could appear so dissimilar to two men on the same island is a symbolic testament to the personal and professional rift separating the artists. A quiet family man and a member of the gentry, Constable stayed in his native English countryside. The more eccentric Turner, however, rose to fame from working-class roots, and his landscapes typically feature or are inspired by his world travels or his native London. Given their differences in background, temperament, and artistic missions, it is highly unlikely that either artist formatively influenced the other.12 What united the two, however, was a shared disinterest in clouds per se and their common pursuit of the atmosphere and the forces around the clouds that conditioned their manifestation and modulations. The artist capable of harnessing the intangible and incorporeal elements of light, wind, and time could reproduce the wonders of nature and its lawful behavior with greater veracity. Their attention to “abstract” forces did not translate into “cloudings” or painting for the sake of abstraction but was a means to paint with greater truth to nature, a notion conceptualized differently by each artist. Far from “clouds,” John Constable always intended for his clouds to be clouds—that is, true to life, identifiable modulations that could be read by the spectator like books to elaborate the narrative arc related by the overall image.13 Especially when we compare him to Turner, it could be easy to regard Constable as conservative or conventional for his meteorologically precise clouds, but it is precisely therein that the artist’s radicality lies. At a time when the customs of classical art privileged invention and idealization over direct transcriptions of nature, clouds and the surrounding sky were expected to complement the landscape, the real star of the show, below. Thus, Constable’s scientific treatment of clouds and his prioritizing of the sky constituted an exceptional rebellion against landscape orthodoxy. 10 Constable considered the sky the “key note,” the “standard of Scale” and the chief “Organ of sentiment” in every class of landscape art. Constable, Correspondences, 76–78. 11 Constable, Correspondences, 76–78. The term “skying” also appears in the above-cited letter to Fisher from October 23, 1821. Turner left behind numerous watercolor and pencil sky sketches suggesting that he worked in plein air on occasion. Constable is famous for his practice of “skying.” See Lyles, “That immense canopy,” 135–50. 12 Thornes, John Constable’s Skies, 181. 13 Wilcox, “Keeping Time,” in Constable’s Clouds, 161.

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Like Goethe, Constable was fascinated by the inexhaustible dynamism of nature and believed that knowledge of its inner operations could help convey this vitality through painting.14 Although the self-proclaimed “man of the clouds” is commonly considered the first known artist to study meteorology, he did so less for the sake of the cloud as such than for the atmospheric elements that made its mutable forms visible and that comprised the totality of sky.15 From his younger days working at his father’s windmill, Constable watched the skies for shifting weather conditions and so experienced firsthand how powerfully atmospheric phenomena affected the earth.16 In observing how the light reflected off various cloud formations, the way the winds swept them across the sky, or what shades of chiaroscuro darkened their contours, he learned how to read the clouds as harbingers of change and he became attuned to the inherent temporality in their movements. In this regard, the clouds functioned as signposts: from each immediate moment one could deduce the moment before and anticipate the moment after. Just as Goethe had appreciated, clouds existed in simultaneous and successive time with each immediately visible form containing its past and future modulations. This attention to change and time was carried over into his art, where Constable struggled to unify successive and simultaneous time. Indeed, his picture-as-book metaphor could not avoid the inadequacies of a static medium to represent the passage of time, but the dynamism of clouds seemed to offer the artist a solution for telling his story.17 If natural clouds embodied a sequence of events that allowed for weather prediction, the painted cloud would provide the spectator with a cipher that could unlock the duration of time and extend the narrative sequence suggested by the landscape below. Depicting clouds in the process of moving required understanding how natural processes moved the clouds in and out of their forms, as well as how these forms were related to atmospheric conditions and weather patterns. To calibrate his compositions with the laws of nature, Constable availed himself of the latest literature on physical meteorology, most intensively between October 1820 and October 1822

14 Thornes regards German influences on Constable’s art highly unlikely (see John Constable’s Skies, 185). 15 Constable, Correspondences, 142. The artist wrote these words in a letter to Fisher from November 1823. 16 Thornes, “Constable’s Meteorological Understanding,” 155. Thornes provides an extended discussion of the influence of Constable’s early years in John Constable’s Skies, 53–55. 17 On Constable’s preoccupation with time and narrative in his painting, see Wilcox, “Keeping Time,” 165–67.

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and most notably from Thomas Forster’s Researches about Atmospheric Phenomena (1813).18 Complementing this newly gained theoretical knowledge was his extensive practical experience of nature itself. From 1821 to 1822, Constable conducted his famous period of “skying” during a sojourn in the village of Hampstead in southeastern England, an elevated locale whose exposed heathlands witness a wide spectrum of weather phenomena.19 On its hills, he worked directly before (or below) his natural object at regular times of day, using oils to sketch accounts of the sky as it appeared at that occasion. The back of each sketch bears the artist’s written notes recording the date, the time of day, the wind direction, and the description of the clouds. Never meant to be finished artworks, the sketches served as raw empirical data and technical exercises while Constable worked through this artistic problem.20 His sketches and their annotations indicate that he ultimately pursued intangibles such as wind, light, speed, and time, all elements of change that lack objective form but that can be read through the cipher of cloud formations. The 1822 sketch Cloud Study: Evening, for example, positions the spectator under frameto-frame clusters of cumulus clouds as they pass overhead from left to right. Constable wielded the agency of light to great effect, here impressing its fingers into the clouds through yellow-tinted shades of blues and grays to engender the shape of movement in the desired direction. The darkening underbellies portend rain, but neither the luminous cumulus near the center nor the most sinister bands sweeping through the upperright quadrant have the height or thickness for precipitation. As indicated by the trailing gauzy cirrostratus clouds, the weather will clear up in the coming moments.21 18 The copy of Forster’s book was catalogued from the artist’s personal library in the 1970s. Notated and underlined by the artist’s own hand, its pages verify Constable’s fluency with the subject matter (he even marked his disagreement with Forster) and his knowledge of Howard’s classification system, but they also suggest that he had not himself read Howard prior to this point. For Constable’s meteorological understanding, see Badt, John Constable’s Clouds, 50–61; Thornes, “Constable’s Meteorological Understanding,” 159; and John Constable’s Skies, 51–80. 19 Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds, 223; Thornes, “Constable’s Meteorological Understanding,” 154; and Thornes, John Constable’s Skies, 55. 20 As Constable revealed to the biographer C. R. Leslie, he approached his plein air sketches like a scientist: “Painting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not a landscape be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but experiments” (quoted in Wilcox, “Keeping Time,” 161)? 21 Thornes, John Constable’s Skies, 264. For more on the sky studies, see Badt, John Constable’s Clouds, 41–49; Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds, 222–30,

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Constable relied on such “skying” experiments to help him harness in paint the fleeting effects of wind, luminosity, and shade necessary to execute the formal final product in his studio: his famous “six-footers.”22 How his studies informed their prominent skies can been seen in the 1821 six-footer The Hay Wain (fig. 4.1). The monumental painting situates the viewer in a scene of working-class rural life along the River Stour where a team of horses pulls a hay wain, or farm cart, through the river toward a cottage. To propel the narrative arc through time, Constable shapes the cloud movements through the reflection of light and shadow in the overhead expanse. Reading the cues of the sky as illustrated leads the viewer to determine that the story takes place around midday, when cumulus clouds are at their densest, the sun at its highest, and shadows at their sparsest. Although the painting was originally titled Landscape: Noon, it was probably renamed The Hay Wain because Constable felt that the original title was unnecessary owing to the time of day already being emblazoned across the sky, clear enough for the spectator to read through the verisimilitude of cloud.23 In a way that is similar to Goethe’s attempts to account for the activity of motion and time in his scientific methodology, Constable focuses on the process occurring in the in-between stages of form. The most provocative example of a natural process depicted in its process of happening is the 1824 oil sketch Seascape Study with Rain Cloud (fig. 4.2), which was praised by the noted Constable scholar John E. Thornes as one of the artist’s “most impressionistic,” “most expressionistic and powerful” pieces: “the swarthy exploding cumulus shower, the pouring rain with the shaft of sunlight and the illuminated cumulus towers behind, encapsulates in one scene the full glory of the hydrological cycle.”24 The heavy downward sheets of gray, black, and white thrust from cloud to water to unite in simultaneous time the successive motion of a full process that consequently lacks clear form. Showing this transition and not merely its effects implicates the viewer in a new way as Constable moves away from the cloud as classificatory object to the spectator’s subjective impression of it. The move from object to viewing subject as precipitated by depicting nature in states of transition is effected to a greater degree by Turner, whose approach to representing dynamic natural processes compels the spectator to go beyond seeing or reading natural forces to actually experiencing them. Like Constable, Turner pursued developments in contemporary science, greater truth in painting, and the immaterialities of light, Thornes, John Constable’s Skies, 58–67 and 116–25. 22 These six-foot paintings, or “six-footers,” were composed in the artist’s studio with recourse to his cloud sketches from 1819 to 1821. 23 For more on The Hay Wain and time, see Wilcox, “Keeping Time,” 167–68. 24 Thornes, John Constable’s Skies, 128.

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Figure 4.1. John Constable, The Hay Wain, 1821. Oil on canvas, 51 1/5 x 73 in. (130.2 x 185.4 cm). The National Gallery, London. Presented by Henry Vaughan, 1886. Photo © National Gallery, London. Reproduced with permission from Art Resource, New York.

Figure 4.2. John Constable, Seascape Study with Rain Cloud, ca. 1824–8. Oil on paper laid on canvas, 9 1/4 x 12 4/5 in. (23.5 x 32.6 cm). Royal Academy of Arts, London. © Photo: Royal Academy of Arts, London. Photographer: John Hammond / © DeA Picture Library. Reproduced with permission from Art Resource, New York.

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wind, and speed.25 Yet what is obvious from a glance at their artworks are the undeniably different definitions of truthfulness and the ways to go about achieving it. Constable’s brand of truth tended toward the objectively verifiable, such as what might be provided by taxonomic categories or the type of quantifiable data found in his annotated cloud sketches. Uninterested in the legibility of identifiable cloud types, Turner concentrated on the moments of the cloud’s dissolution and genesis, sacrificing meteorological accuracy in pursuit of optical truth. Like The Hay Wain, Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed—The Great Western Railway (1844, fig. 4.3) features another vehicle crossing a river, here a train going over the Thames, but whereas the weight of the wain encumbers the forward moment of Constable’s horses, Turner’s train must break through the sickly off-white miasma choking the skies. As the cloud coverage descends onto river, land, and machine, its diffuse vapors permeate the entire surface and merge with the other title elements. Instead of suggesting the dynamism of rain, steam, and speed through atmospheric effects on cloud, Turner fuses them with cloud, thereby transmuting invisible or visually elusive variables into visible reality. For all their cloudiness and unorthodox staging, paintings like The Great Western Railway are not at odds with lived reality but rather a closer approximation of it. To simulate how the eye would perceive an oncoming train, several aspects in the painting’s composition appear deliberately amiss: proportion and perspective are off; the foreground is blurred; and the train’s wheels hover just above the tracks. These not insignificant details mark the discrepancy between what the eye sees and what the mind believes the eye sees—or should see in a painting. Were we to stand before the moving train, our vision obscured by rain and steam, we would not optically register a mathematically precise, clear-cut tableau. While our brains would know how the train should appear and that its wheels should be touching the track, the observed reality of the scene would be far messier, even after our eyes adjust. Notwithstanding the obfuscating atmospheric conditions, the sheer velocity of the train’s momentum would impede optical precision, making detailed observation of the object impossible and creating the impression that its spinning wheels are floating. The blurred foreground is a further sign of optical accuracy, because Turner assumes that the viewer’s eye is focused elsewhere in the painting.26 The artist departs from pictorial convention to portray reality as perceptually experienced. 25 Turner’s circle included the chemist Humphry Davy (1778–1829), the mathematician Mary Somerville (1780–1872), and the physicist Michael Faraday (1791–1867). For Turner and his scientific influences, see Hamilton, “Earth’s Humid Bubbles,” 52–64. 26 As the Victorian art critic John Ruskin (1819–1900) pointed out, Turner blurred his foregrounds to paint near and distant objects as we actually saw them.

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Figure 4.3. Joseph Mallord William Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed—The Great Western Railway, 1844. Oil on canvas, 35 4/5 x 48 in. (91 x 121.8 cm). The National Gallery, London. The scene is certainly identifiable as Maidenhead railway bridge, which runs across the Thames between Taplow and Maidenhead. The bridge, which was begun according to Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s design in 1837 and finished in 1839, has two main arches of brick, which are very wide and flat. The view is to the east, toward London. Turner Bequest, 1856. Photo © National Gallery, London. Reproduced with permission from Art Resource, New York.

Reflecting the new realities of steam, fog, and factory fumes clogging the skies of industrial Europe, Turner’s characteristic cloudiness convey the optical impression of speed, motion, and change melting the edges of what our eyes might initially perceive. As Turner’s painted forms dematerialize into each other, they fuse together in colored clouds that drift above the objects they mean to define. In his more intense paintings, this fusion of climate and color folds into the turmoil borne of other natural forces, as the 1842 maritime drama Snow Storm; Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (fig. 4.4) exemplifies. The critic and staunch defender of Turner, John Ruskin (1819– 1900), notes of the painting that “there is indeed no distinction left between air and sea; that no object, nor horizon, nor any land-mark or Cited in Richter-Musso, “Fusion,” 209.

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Figure 4.4. Joseph Mallord William Turner, Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth, 1842. Oil on canvas, 36 x 48 in. (91.4 x 121.9 cm). Tate Britain, London. © Tate, London. Reproduced with permission from Art Resource, New York.

natural evidence of position is left. . . .”27 His words illustrate how the raw primacy of Turner often teeters between control and chaos, his forms sometimes being so violently in flux that they fuse with the atmosphere around them.28 Ruskin continues: “Suppose the effect of the first sunbeam sent from above to show this annihilation to itself, and you have . . . the Snowstorm, one of the very grandest statements of sea-motion, mist, and light, that has ever been put on canvas, even by Turner.”29 From the “first sunbeam” to “annihilation,” Snow Storm thematizes the cycle of creation and destruction also enacted by the artist’s dissolution of form and emulated by the spherical vortex structure. 27 Ruskin, Modern Painters, 381. 28 By his own account, the artist claimed to undertake extreme measures for rendering the accuracy of the depicted event: “I did not paint it to be understood, but I wished to show what such a scene was like; I got the sailors to lash me to the mast to observe it; I was lashed for four hours, and I did not expect to escape, but I felt bound to record it if I did.” For a barometer of Turner’s success, we need only look to Ruskin’s mother, who, as the critic reports, was arrested by the painting, because she “once went through just such a scene, and it brought it all back to her.” See Wilton, Turner in his Time, 208. 29 Ruskin, Modern Painters, 381.

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Deployed even in early paintings, the vortex as compositional device served Turner and his subject matter well.30 As the circular organization replicates the underlying unity and the cyclical movement of organic life, it also separates and makes visible the fundamental polarities whose conflict gives rise to new forms. In Snow Storm, the cyclonic clouds of colors rotate on several axes of opposing forces: modern man and primordial nature; water and wind; darkness and light. All swirl into the center where the sails of the flailing ships build a beacon of incandescent white light. That the interaction of antagonistic forces generates this light betrays Turner’s engagement with contemporary color theory, particularly with Goethe’s Farbenlehre.31 The notations in Turner’s copy of Charles Eastlake’s 1840 translation indicate the artist’s receptivity to Goethe’s (erroneous) theory that our perception of color is created from the polarities of light and dark.32 Although not wholly won over by this theory, Turner found inspiration enough in Goethe to grant the author title accolades in two vortex paintings from 1843: Shade and Darkness—the Evening of the Deluge, and its more famous companion piece, Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory)—the Morning after the Deluge—Moses Writing the Book of Genesis (fig. 4.5).33 Light and Colour represents Turner’s most radical demonstration of how he transfigures the spectacle of natural processes into a spectacle of vision. Its vortex breaks down the landscape format absolutely as its contrasting color tonalities stir the circle into an apocalyptic frenzy. From Goethe’s theory of color Turner chose a primary contrast between blues and yellows to symbolize the descent into darkness cycling into the rebirth of morning, with its most luminous qualities just left of center where Moses sits above his serpent-crowned staff. As Jonathan Crary suggests in his reading, the vortex structure mirrors both the shape of the human eye and the sun, thereby merging the processes of light, creation, and perception. Closely resembling “the pupil of the eye and the retinal field” on which color perception takes place, the vortex completes the fusion of 30 See, for example, Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (1812). Richter-Musso reports that Turner experimented with the vortex structure as early as 1809/1810 (“Fusion,” 210). 31 For more information on Turner’s use of color and the Farbenlehre, see Clark, The Romantic Rebellion, 245–63; Finley, “The Deluge Pictures,” 530–48, and “Pigment into Light,” 357–76; and Gage, Color and Culture, 203–4. 32 Finley, “The Deluge Pictures,” 532; and Gage, Color and Culture, 203–4. 33 Finley’s analysis of the Deluge paintings disagrees with Jutta MüllerTamm’s assessment that Goethe’s Farbenlehre was not a great influential factor for Turner (“The Deluge Pictures,” 531–32). Gage maintains that Turner had a “far from straightforward” relationship to the poet’s ideas, but ultimately “did not endorse them as a whole” (Color and Culture, 203). Clark concludes that general aspects appealed to Turner, and in particular Goethe’s emphasis on visual experience over mathematical calculation (The Romantic Rebellion, 260).

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Figure 4.5. Joseph Mallord William Turner, Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory)—the Morning after the Deluge—Moses writing the Book of Genesis, 1843. Oil on canvas, 31 x 31 in. (78.7 x 78.7 cm). Tate Britain, London. © Tate, London. Reproduced with permission from Art Resource, New York.

painting and vision.34 In doubling the primary process of seeing color (as conceived by Goethe), the cyclical processes of nature become optically real. Light and Colour generates these very values when the retinal field of the spectator provides the backdrop for the drama of Turner’s colors to unfold. Like a centrifuge, Turner pulls us into the painting where we, as viewing subjects, are complicit in his chromatics and responsible for their dissolution of form.35 34 Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 138–41. 35 Finley asserts that Turner was looking for “scientific advice and support” for developing techniques for depicting light and color as early as 1820 (“Pigment into Light,” 361).

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Along similar lines, Turner implicates the observer as participant in the manufacturing of his blazing light effects. For example, the 1828 painting Regulus addresses the spectator in the title, placing us in the role of the lidless Roman prisoner of war blinded by unadulterated exposure to the sun. Here, however, we create the very light that dazzles our vision, for it is within the retinal space of our eyes that the blending of unmixed yellows and white, side by side on canvas, occurs. With every glance, the eye initiates and reinitiates the blending of pigments, generating similar hues yet never the exact ones as the instant before. The viewed painting is in constant flux, its light moving and shimmering, its colors always in the process of becoming.36 Like the lebendiges Anschauen of Goethe’s scientist, Turner’s chromatic evocations of light and fusion into clouds directly involves an embodied viewing subject. His cloudy colors solicit human vision to animate the processes giving rise to form, thereby producing an aesthetic experience both unique to the individual and less dependent on representational objects. Moreover, the artist did not paint with abstraction as his end goal and, like Goethe, he wanted to remain in touch with nature to engender the experience of a perceptual reality as lived and seen. At the end of the day, neither the clarity of Constable’s clouds nor the cloudiness of Turner’s canvases constitutes “clouds” or “clouding,” for neither presumes a cognitive viewing subject. While the events depicted in Constable’s painted stories and Turner’s dramatic maelstroms appeal to the spectator’s eye and imagination, they do not involve a nondiscursive faculty that assembles a Reihenbildung to sustain formlessness, let alone to take joy in it. Constable’s clouds enliven the landscape through suggestion of movement and time, directing the spectator to interpret their natural processes as quantitatively verifiable through direct observation and scientific study. Reality for Turner, on the other hand, is a product of human perception. He places the viewer directly amid nature’s turbulence and employs his understanding of the eye’s physiology to construct and dissolve form. However, the two English artists do provide a pivotal point of transition between clouds and color that moves farther from Goethe’s original purpose for a cloud typology and closer to artistic features and practices important for “clouded perception.”

36 For more on light in Turner’s painting, see Bockemühl, Turner; Finely, “Pigment into Light”; Gage, J. M. W. Turner: A Wonderful Range of Mind; and Richter-Musso, “Fusion,” 180–85.

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Sunday in the Park with Georges: Seurat and the Physiologically Cognitive Spectator

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To an unprecedented degree, the French postimpressionist painter Georges Seurat (1859–91) developed a methodology calibrated to the scientific advancements in optical physiology revolutionizing the way nineteenth-century society saw the world and made cognitive sense of it. Replacing the traditional brushstroke was the systematic application of contrasting color points intended to fuse into an organic, properly hued whole (mélange optique) in the spectator’s eye—ergo, the designation “pointillism.”37 First applied in a pejorative sense by critics, the term nonetheless succinctly conveys the visual appearance of works constructed with the technique.38 Its most well-known practitioner, Seurat plotted and painstakingly dotted entire compositions in consultation with prominent theories of colors and in accordance with current discoveries in the relatively recent field of physiological optics. In shifting focus from the objects depicted on canvas to the spectator’s perception of them, Seurat, like Turner, allowed his audience to share in the creative act and to “finish” the painting by fusing its colors in their eyes and minds. Unlike his predecessor, however, Seurat considered himself a “technician of art” who perfected his signature style through a methodical rigor and scientific basis lacking in Turner’s time.39 While optical science existed well before Goethe’s turn-of-the-century experiments, only in the latter half of the nineteenth century did this interest burgeon into a fully fledged field of systematic study, owing in no small part to the concomitant emergence of neurology as a medical specialty and physiology as a scientific field.40 Seurat numbered among the many seeking to enhance their painting—as product and practice—with this newly enriched understanding of the eye’s physiological mechanics and the theories of color being newly rewritten in the wake 37 Herbert, Seurat: Drawings and Paintings, 8–13. 38 While the term “divisionism” often accompanies scholarship on pointillism, and is sometimes even exchanged indiscriminately with it, the former refers more generally to the theory and practice of separating color into individual units (dots or strokes) to achieve optical effects. Pointillism is more explicitly the technique of applying dots. For clarity and consistency’s sake, I simply use the more widely known term “pointillism,” given the relatively limited scope of this discussion. More on pointillism and divisionism, especially in connection with Seurat, can be found in Berger, Jooren, and Veldink, eds., Seurat; Courthion, Georges Seurat; Foa, Georges Seurat: The Art of Vision; Gage, “The Technique of Seurat,” 448–54; Homer, Seurat and the Science of Painting; Hutton, Neo-Impressionism and the Search for Solid Ground, 17–45; and Michael F. Zimmermann, Seurat and the Art Theory of his Time. 39 Herbert, Seurat: Drawings and Paintings, 3. 40 Schapiro, Impressionism: Reflections and Perceptions, 210.

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of this understanding. The publication of the three-volume Handbook of Physiological Optics (1856–67, French translation 1867) by the German physician Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–94) served to confirm or correct many leading theories proposed by peers or forerunners, because it described previously known phenomena, such as afterimages and effects of color contrast, in physiological and neurological terms using the latest biological knowledge. His experiments had an immediate importance for artists because they scientifically established visual perception and sensation as products of the human body. Inferring that the retina has three photoreceptors sensitive to red, green, and blue, Helmholtz unequivocally separated the primary colors of pigments from those that the eye physiologically perceived. Together with his explanation of additive and subtractive color mixture, this altered how artists conceived of color complementarity and how they could combine or, in the case of pointillism and impressionism, juxtapose their pigments to achieve more vibrant optical effects.41 Both Helmholtz and the German physiologist Ernst Brücke highlighted the artistic implications of these findings, but the American physicist Ogden Rood most successfully presented their practical application to painters in terms of pigments and painting techniques in Modern Chromatics (1878, French translation 1881). Accounts from friend and art critic Félix Fénéon, as well as from fellow artist Paul Signac, attest to Seurat’s familiarity with Rood and Helmholtz.42 However, the paintings themselves are perhaps the most persuasive evidence that the revelations of Helmholz’s physiological optics profoundly influenced Seurat’s development of his pointillist or chromoluminarist approach.43 The products of the artist’s experimentations with color contrast, technique, and perspective, paintings like A 41 Additive color mixing creates new colors or white light in our eyes by combining different wavelengths of color, whereas subtractive color mixing creates new colors by removing wavelengths from a wider spectrum. The latter occurs when mixing paints, dyes, or pigments. On Helmholtz’s optics and painting, see Cahan, Hermann von Helmholtz: Science and Culture; Foa, Georges Seurat: The Art of Vision, especially chapter 1; Gage, “The Technique of Seurat”; Gamwell, Exploring the Invisible, 68–74; and Michael F. Zimmermann, Seurat and the Art Theory of his Time, 54–55. 42 Recent scholarship casts doubt on how stringently Seurat complied with Rood’s physiologically grounded recommendations, and suggests instead a greater attraction to Chevreul’s theory and its emphasis on color harmony. On the influence of various color theories on Seurat’s approach, see esp. Gage “The Technique of Seurat,” 450; Foa, Georges Seurat: The Art of Vision, 206n11; and Michael F. Zimmermann, Seurat and the Art Theory of his Time, 28–44, 52–55, and 213–20. 43 Seurat personally characterized this approach as chromoluminarism. See Courthion, Georges Seurat, 35–39; and Homer, Seurat and the Science of Painting, 112–79.

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Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884–86, fig. 4.6) oblige viewers to make visual and cognitive sense of their painted illusions by assembling forms and space in a manner consistent with the physiological model of vision provided by Helmholtz. A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte’s debut at the eighth and final impressionist exhibition in May 1886 thematically situated Seurat within the lineage of the by then well-known older generation of artists who had achieved fame through their depictions of urban leisure and their attention to visual perception. At the same time, though, the fact that La Grande Jatte looked nothing like the impressionists’ loosely executed worlds of spontaneity and ease allowed Seurat to distinguish his aesthetic interests and technique as fundamentally different. Whereas the impressionists pursued the fleeting effects of natural light and color to record a dynamic glimpse of reality in its singular instantaneousness, time seems to stagnate for the frieze-like procession of stringently dotted figures in Seurat’s park.44 Despite the flurry of activity that likely was emblematic of the actual Parisian isle so densely populated on any given sunny Sunday afternoon, the artist brings every man, woman, child, dog, and monkey under the strictest control through careful calibrations of color harmonies. Orchestrating these effects was a time-consuming enterprise for Seurat, who worked on the canvas in two distinct stages over the course of several years. What began in 1884 as short horizontal brushstrokes of complementary colors was subject to a subsequent layering of small dots in 1885, as Seurat perfected a suitable painting process and developed a signature approach predicated on an increasingly anatomical understanding of optics.45 Seeking to clarify the artist’s methodological commitment to optics, Félix Fénéon’s attempt to articulate the raison d’être of La Grande Jatte presented pointillism as the more objective, scientifically grounded younger sibling of impressionism. Yes, the critic conceded, the latter also “involved decomposing colors; but this decomposition was carried out in an arbitrary way.”46 On the other hand, Seurat’s system of “painting

44 See Herbert, Seurat: Drawings and Paintings, 149–50. La Grande Jatte was compared to Egyptian art by art critics like Octave Mirbeau and Paul Adam (Berger, Jooren, and Veldink, Seurat, 82, 136n21). Jean Moréas preferred a “Parnathenaean procession” (Courthion, Georges Seurat, 21). 45 Foa attributes the two production phases to the artist’s “commitment to a specifically physiological definition of vision” (Georges Seurat: The Art of Vision, 4). 46 Fénéon, “The Impressionists in 1886,” 278. For a commentary on Fénéon’s article in light of La Grande Jatte, see Michael F. Zimmermann, Seurat and the Art Theory of his Time, 213–16. For his coinage of the term, see Homer, Georges Seurat and the Science of Painting, 161–62.

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Figure 4.6. Georges Seurat (1859–1891). A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. 1884, 1884/86. Oil on canvas, 81 3/4 x 121 1/4 in. (207.5 x 308.1 cm). Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection, 1926.224. Photo Credit: The Art Institute of Chicago. Reproduced with permission from Art Resource, New York.

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with the dot” served to “divide tones in a deliberate and scientific way,” as Fénéon details: Separated on the canvas, these colors reconstitute themselves on the retina: thus the result is not a mixture of material colors (pigments), but a mixture of colored rays of lights. Is it necessary to recall that where identical colors are concerned, the mixture of pigments and the mixture of light rays do not necessarily produce the same results? It is also generally understood that the luminosity of optical mixture is always greatly superior to that of material mixture, as is revealed by the many equations concerning luminosity established by M. Rood. . . . The retina, forewarned that it is being assailed by distinct luminous clusters, perceives the colored elements separately in extremely quick succession, and then in combination.47

Although Fénéon never mentions the German scientist by name, his description exemplifies how the hidden hand of Helmholtz molds the model of perception explored in the painting. Fénéon’s differentiating between mixtures of pigments and light rays implicitly references 47 Fénéon, “The Impressionists in 1886,” 278–79.

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Helmholtz’s discovery of the photoreceptors that Rood’s color theory subsequently popularized among artists when he interpreted their significance for color complementarity. This delivers a physiological justification for Seurat’s dots as strategically arranged colors that, though isolated on canvas, “reconstitute themselves on the retina.” The spectator does not passively receive the image of the painting but actively contributes to its construction by means of physiological operations. While Fénéon speaks only of the retina, the questions of how and where in the human body the harmonious picture envisioned by the artist actually coheres for the viewing subject strike to the heart of the revolution heralded by Helmholtzian optics: visual perception is not merely a result of ocular physiology but far more a function of human cognition. As explicated in the scientist’s theory of vision, what the cells of the eye’s photoreceptors receive as sensory data are external impressions of light that begin, in Fénéon’s words, to “reconstitute themselves on the retina.” Yet they then travel further, being transmitted to the brain through the optic nerve, for “it is in the brain that these impressions first become conscious sensations, and are combined so as to produce our conceptions of surrounding objects.”48 In other words, what we know and understand of the world around us is literally all in our heads: As Helmholtz obligingly summarizes the point, “ordinary vision is not produced by any anatomical mechanism of sensation, but by a mental act.”49 So now we not only have an active viewing subject but a cognitive one at that. Like the cognitive viewing subject posited by Goethe, the one established through Helmholtz’s theory of physiological optics experiences the natural surroundings of the world by using eyes and especially cognition to make them “real.” Only now, we might formulate this subjecthood in physiological terms, explaining that the subject creates reality when the synapses of the brain makes sense of visual sensory data. What is more, Helmholtz recognized this process as one learned from experience and through constant verification using touch and memory. Given the inherent two-dimensionality of binocular optical perception, he reasoned that the brain requires additional input to read refractions of light as edges and three-dimensional forms. Accordingly, the sensory data gathered by touch delivers the compensatory information necessary to make sense of movement, perspective, and spatial depth, while the memory of our interactions with the world causes us to become more adept at doing so.50 In this regard, our automatic and innate use of cognition to 48 Helmholtz “The Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision,” 148. 49 Helmholtz, “The Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision,” 192, emphasis added. 50 “The two senses [sight and touch] which really have the same task, though with very different means of accomplishing it, happily supply each other’s

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construct and interpret the objects of the world resembles what Goethe designated as our Beobachtungsgabe, the innate gift of observation that also improves through exercise and experience. Seurat’s paintings implicitly invite the viewer to refine or at least to consciously investigate the typically unconscious and seemingly instantaneous process of human vision. In Through them the artist offers an extended meditation on how we cognitively assemble reality by dividing colors and separating the haptic and optic components of perception. The importance of touch for constructing a unified field of vision and developing the perception of depth is central to the visual experience conditioned by Seurat’s next painting, Poseuses (Models, 1886–88), the first fully pointillist work in concept and design (fig. 4.7).51 The painting affords the audience a peculiar glimpse into Seurat’s atelier, where three models in various stages of undress pose in front of the massive expanse of a painting within a painting (here La Grande Jatte). With its prominent inclusion, Seurat doubles down on the pointillist platform announced by the earlier artwork while also advancing a greater inquiry into vision as a cognitive process reliant on optic and haptic experience. To this end, Seurat scatters throughout the atelier a variety of objects that appeal to the viewer’s experiential memory of touch to correctly interpret the solidity and depth in the painted space. Stockings and dresses lie in limp heaps on the floor; hats and parasols rest about the room; a corset hangs on the right wall. All of these things are items of clothing that stretch over or around the curves of the human body and intimately enclose the skin, the sensory organ for touch. That these tactile clothes are precisely those worn by the models seen in La Grande Jatte, the painting behind them, creates in Poseuses a visual intersensory dialogue evocative of the cognitive symbiosis between touch and sight that, according to Helmholtz, informs the mental act comprising ordinary vision. Further enlisting the sense of touch are numerous surface edges and corners whose deciphering as such calls for the cognitive negotiation of depth. Seurat situates the audience directly across from the corner of the room, cutting the painting’s center axis. At this odd angle, we cannot fully discern any of the paintings in the atelier. Then again, the artist is less concerned with their content than he is with their frames. In recognizing their surface edges, a skill honed through the tactile experience deficiencies. Touch is a trustworthy and experienced servant, but enjoys only a limited range, while sight rivals the boldest flights of fancy in penetrating unlimited distances” (174). Helmholtz later describes the formation of visual judgments on the basis of touch and memory—namely, through the example of an infant learning to coordinate touch and sight (Helmholtz, “The Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision,” 193–95). 51 Foa, Georges Seurat: The Art of Vision, 89.

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Figure 4.7. Georges Seurat, Poseuses, 1886–88. Oil on canvas, 78¾ x 9⅜ in. (200 x 249.9 cm). The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia.

of objects, we are able to interpret the light and shadows as the room’s spatial recession and accordingly organize our field of depth.52 Not to be overlooked are the painting’s title figures, the three poseuses who also communicate a spatial position. Posing from different perspectives in discrete locations in the room, their figures are at once familiar and foreign. For centuries, trios of nude females have waltzed across canvases as allegorical depictions of muses or graces (see, e.g., Botticelli’s Primavera [ca. 1477–82] or Rubens’s The Three Graces [ca. 1630–35]). Seurat departs from this tradition by presenting three views of the same woman. Despite the plural noun and the multiple bodies, the identical hairstyles and the recurring red ribbon indicate that the pyramid of women amounts to the 52 Given the importance of frames and edges in Poseuses, Foa highlights a frequently overlooked feature of Seurat’s oeuvre—that is, his habit of extending his paintings onto the physical frames surrounding them. Relating the “imagined expansion” of the picture plane into the viewer’s space to Seurat’s exploration of the cognitive components of depth perception in accord with Helmholtzian visual theory, her analysis concludes that it represents Seurat’s “desire to invent new techniques of spatial illusionism” (Georges Seurat: The Art of Vision, 102–11, here 104).

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visual experience of one woman extended over time in the course of posing for La Grande Jatte. Moving through the room and in three stages of dress, Seurat’s model is closer in kin to the pioneering work of Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) and Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904), whose sequential photographs documented the motion of bodies through time.53 With Muybridge in mind, we can see that Seurat’s painted model serves to represent the movements of our own bodies through space, which in turn elicits the memories of corporeal experience necessary to cognitively construct a unified vision of reality.54 The simultaneous appearance of successive facets of the female nude introduces the elements of temporality and seriality crucial to Goethe’s characterization of the Reihenbildung forming the basis of his scientist’s lebendiges Anschauen. Although the creation of an aesthetic object is at issue, Seurat’s artistic concerns and methodology are undeniably scientific: in addition to investigating and replicating the mechanics of human vision as guided by physiological theories of optics and color, the artist went about his work with all the analytical objectivity and methodical precision of a scientist conducting an experiment. In effect, a painting like Poseuses comprises the results of a series of experiments, or what in Goethe’s terminology amounts to a singular Versuch. By this logic, one might imagine Seurat collecting a series of individual experiences of the model and sequentially organizing them into a chain experienced simultaneously in the painting. Overtures of such a Reihenbildung can also be seen in the serial logic of the artist’s various seascape series off the northern coast of France (1885–90).55 With each series offering a closely knit, interrelated grouping of individual views of the same area, the artist and his viewers collect a series of experiences (or experiments) that are cognitively reconstructed into a totality. Here, the “höhere Art der Erfahrung” (higher kind of experience) is a panoramic, three-dimensional experience of Grandcamp, Honfleur, or Port-en-Bassin.56

53 Michael F. Zimmermann postulates that Seurat was likely to have at least been familiar with Muybridge’s work, given the sustained interest it enjoyed at the École des Beaux-Arts beginning in 1882, well before the publication of Animal Locomotion in 1887 (Seurat and the Art Theory of his Time, 358). 54 Cf. Courthion, Georges Seurat, 130–36; Foa, Georges Seurat: The Art of Vision, 87–10; Homer, Georges Seurat and the Science of Painting, 171–75; Hutton, Neo-Impressionism and the Search for Solid Ground, 126–28; and Michael F. Zimmermann, Seurat and the Art Theory of his Time, 332–45. 55 Cf. Foa’s treatment of Seurat’s seascapes, which emphasizes their serial nature (Georges Seurat: The Art of Vision, 7–62), and Michael F. Zimmermann’s treatment of his seascapes and harbors, although it should be noted that the latter are not conceptualized as series (Seurat and the Art Theory of his Time, 393–444). 56 See Foa, Georges Seurat: The Art of Vision, 38–43.

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However, neither case reflects the seriality described by Goethe in “Versuch als Vermittler.” There the scientist strives to reproduce an unbroken progression of forms omitting no gradation or transitional stage. To experience the pure phenomenon in its totality, each experiment in the series immediately borders and necessarily relies on its predecessor and successor, requiring our nondiscursive cognitive faculty to supply whatever transitional gaps cannot be grasped through discursive means. Seurat’s series shows no interest in scrutinizing ever finer gradations of change or reproducing an unbroken chain of movement. While respectively interconnected, the Gestalt of each model in Poseuses or seascape in the series is spatially, locally, and even temporally so disjointed from the next that intuitively filling in the chasmic-sized gaps between them as Goethe imagines would require a feat of cognitive gymnastics. In the models’ movements, moreover, Seurat suggests a narrative of undressing and dressing, a purposeful arc sharing more in common with Muybridge’s serial photography than with the theoretically endless and directionless repetitions of Goethe’s seriality. Whether woman or seascape, seriality for Seurat does not on a fundamental level play the same role for cognitive vision as it does for Goethe. The artist’s painted experiments do not investigate human forms or geographic formations. While not fully neglecting the object, Seurat’s art presumes a viewing subject turning inward to explore the physiological processes of perception itself. The shift away from objective reality to study the subjective perception of it violates Goethe’s insistence on maintaining a focused contact with the natural world. On one level, Seurat’s deconstruction of physiological perception on canvas effectively relocates the creation of the painting not to the eye but to the mind of the beholder, whose cognitive faculties reconstruct a comprehensible and visually navigable artwork. In this regard, Seurat’s canvasses do presume the presence of a cognitive viewing subject. However, this subject is not the Goethean cloud gazer who sees with “clouded perception.” Although Seurat’s chromoluminary explorations recall key aspects of the scientist’s lebendiges Anschauen, the artist’s particular concerns with cognition, temporality, and seriality are not those conveyed in “Versuch als Vermittler”; nor do they promote the mode of imaginative spectatorship inherent in Goethe’s poem. There the “cloudings” bring aesthetic joy as a result of not knowing what almost-shapes they might assume. Not subject to such free play, any “cloudings” of color that emerge from our cognitive engagement with Seurat’s pointillist paintings are byproducts of a mathematical rigor and a physiological impulse meant to crystallize into recognizable shapes. To ensure as much, Seurat spent years on any given painting, fastidiously arranging dots in in accordance with a scientific understanding of vision. Defined physiologically, the type of cognition entailed for this art operates more

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involuntarily than inventively, does not call on discursive and nondiscursive modes of cognitive viewing, and lacks the element of playfulness evident in Goethe’s “clouding perception.” Given this prioritizing of scientific principles and logical control, Seurat’s pointillism does not lead to abstract art by way of Goethe. Instead, it more closely reflects what the artist’s own critics called a “straight-jacking of art” rather than the spirit of imaginative play.57

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A Serial Man: Monet and his Haystacks A greater latitude for the imaginative play enjoyed by the poem’s cloud gazer, and a closer approximation to Goethe’s concept of seriality might be found in the colorful clouds of the movement from which Seurat sought to distance himself—namely, impressionism. As both a predecessor and a contemporary of pointillism, the impressionist approach signaled a new way of looking that asserted the legitimacy of subjective impressions, whether those are sensations of the world impressed on the viewer or the viewer’s communication of them as artist through the idiosyncratic script of brushstroke impressed on the canvas. While these two modalities present certain visual similarities owing to basic, shared practices of optical mixing (versus mixing on the palette) and interests in human perception, their attitudes and methods decisively diverge from each other. By his own admission, Seurat admired the impressionist “intuition” of Claude Monet, that movement’s most prominent representative.58 Nevertheless, he believed the impressionists’ technique and color effects to be, as Meyer Schapiro puts it, “unscientific, inconsistent in the analysis of light and color, insufficiently structured, and lacking rigor in form.”59 Félix Fénéon communicated Seurat’s methodological critiques to the public as evidenced through brushstroke, characterizing the “impersonal” maculae of pointillism as the scientifically objective and analytically rigorous advancement of its predecessor, the “arbitrary” and “abrupt” impressionist streak.60 What is visibly manifested through work process and paint application is symptomatic of a deeper divide undercutting the self-evidence of 57 Courthion, Georges Seurat, 35. 58 Quoted in Michael F. Zimmermann, Seurat and the Art Theory of his Time, 107. Adapted from the title of a Monet painting (Impression, soleil levant), the label of “impressionist” was first used by art critic Louis Leroy to describe a group of like-minded painters in his review of their first exhibition in 1874. Tradition holds that it was originally intended derogatorily before being appropriated by Renoir to defend the group (Schapiro, Impressionism: Reflections and Perceptions, 21). 59 Schapiro, Impressionism: Reflections and Perceptions, 302. 60 Fénéon, “The Impressionists in 1886,” 283, 278.

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sight. Although both pointillism and impressionism thematized the act of perception and revolutionized the nineteenth-century modes of viewing as these were experienced in art and modern life, each operated according to a certain conception of visual experience. Monet, as opposed to Seurat, predicated his art on a notion of visual perception as an instantaneous process that, by virtue of its rapidity, inherently severed it from cognitive processes.61 Monet’s vision of the world was naïve in the sense that his brain would not have time to cognitively interpret depth, space, or form from his eye’s sensory information, provided he painted quickly enough. In order to record these still raw visual data on canvas before the chromatic clouds assumed a crystalline shape, Monet was compelled to work in the moment. His rapid, loose brushstrokes lack the precision of Seurat’s deliberate dot, but in this they communicate their liberation from the “straight-jacket” of science. Of course, this does not mean that science and impressionism did not intersect with each other; the impressionists’ use of divided color alone betrays the influence of contemporaneous advances in physiological optics (here, the phenomenon of simultaneous contrast).62 Nineteenth-century discourses in color theory, psychology, and physics seem to inform several impressionist features—for example, their characteristic blue shadows and their accumulation of color as sensations. Monet kept abreast of such scientific developments, but he and the loose coterie of impressionist artists did not approach painting as the mathematically calculable and scientifically calibrated art form that Seurat approached it as. In fact, advice from scientists such as Helmholtz was deliberately disregarded if the scientific theory did not lead in practice to the desired aesthetic results. Furthermore, whereas Seurat’s art dismantles the components of vision to understand the act of vision itself, impressionism details the act of seeing objects and so remains more focused on the natural world, as it were. As a result, the relatively amorphous forms that document the unreflective and immediate seeing of nature open the possibility of aesthetic play of the sort that Goethe’s cloud gazer might enjoy. Regarding visual experience, impressionism announced a new measure of aesthetic pleasure. As Meyer Schapiro puts it, “more than any previous style of painting it explored and

61 Foa, Georges Seurat: The Art of Vision, 30–31. 62 As with pointillism, science was wielded as a justification for and a weapon against impressionism, as proponents explained its aberrant appearance with scientific rationalizations and critics decried it for not being scientific enough. For the influence of science on impressionism, see Broude, Impressionism: A Feminist Reading; Gamwell, Exploring the Invisible, especially chapter 3; Hutton, NeoImpressionism and the Search for Solid Ground, James Henry Rubin, Impressionism and the Modern Landscape; and Schapiro, Impressionism: Reflections and Perceptions, especially chapter 10.

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pictured everyday objects and occasions that we enjoy with our eyes and value for their sensuous qualities.”63 Also inherent in the naïveté and spontaneity of Monet’s vision is a unique awareness of the temporality and movement that also informed his working method. Embracing the plein air practice of the Barbizon school (a group of artists who were themselves influenced by Constable), impressionist artists headed outdoors to observe and record the ephemeral and less tangible qualities conditioning their physiological perception of the object: light, shadow, wind, and speed. Like Goethe, they were keenly aware that temporal and spatial contingencies of subjective vision affected how they perceived the world, and so they sought to capture the fleetingness of natural light, color, and time in quickly executed oil sketches whose unpolished surfaces were nevertheless valued as finished works. From their attentiveness to transience and change there developed a renewed fascination with serial imagery and a new approach toward seriality in painting at the end of the nineteenth century. Contrary to the types of series seen in Seurat, the seriality arising from impressionism strongly resonates with Goethe’s methodology regarding its interest in sight, scientific observation, and study of transition. Yet a closer look at the impressionist modality and the seriality pioneered by Monet, reveals that the correspondences, though compelling, do not reproduce the sort of cognitive viewing experience enjoyed by Goethe’s subject. The essence of any series lies in its basic structure of repetition, but it is the nature of the repetition as well as the thematic content that distinguishes Monet and best approximates Goethe’s Reihenbildung.64 Although serial imagery was by no means unknown to the art world, its pre-nineteenth-century variants differed considerably. Series depicting seasonal change, such as the four seasons or the times of day, rotated through a cyclical narrative with a specific temporal order and tended to convey an allegorical import about transformation. As interest in painting natural effects driven by seasonal or meteorological change expanded in the seventeenth century, so too did the number of artists who repetitiously and often systematically recorded the effects of light and weather from their direct observation of nature outdoors. Yet the resultant groups of nature studies only served as preparatory sketches for the idealized or imaginary city- and landscapes that would be executed and polished indoors (such as with Constable). Being loosely bound together by a common theme or object may qualify such preliminary studies as “series,” 63 Schapiro, Impressionism: Reflections and Perceptions, 16. 64 Overviews of seriality before and during impressionism can be found in Coplans, Serial Imagery; the essays in Scheede, Monets Vermächtnis—Serie—Ordnung und Obsession; Seiberling, Monet’s Series, especially chapter 2; and Sykore, Das Phänomen des Seriellen in der Kunst.

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but they do not necessarily exhibit seriality, since their repetitions elude logical or systematic interrelation.65 Not until Monet’s series from the 1890s does a conception of seriality emerge whose purpose and process share a critical affinity with Goethe’s Reihenbildung and align with the mode of cognitive viewing in “Versuch als Vermittler.” Like Goethe’s scientist, Monet started from a meticulous and repeated observation of a singular object in its natural environment—a poplar, a cathedral, or, in the case of his first series, a haystack. The artist often resorted to finishing or reworking canvases in his studio when unavoidable or necessary, but he never wavered from the ideal of direct observation in nature to reflect intensively on the object in situ and refine his artistic transcription of it.66 In isolating a singular, stationary object and in recording his perception of it as bound to a particular moment in time at a particular distance, Monet zeroed in on transitional moments, analyzing sameness only to disclose difference.67 As Monet progressed through his serial themes (Haystacks, Poplars, Rouen Cathedral, Houses of Parliament, Charing Cross Bridge, Venice, and Waterlilies), he markedly reduced the complexity of his compositions and limited the number of variables. Note, for example, the simplified structure of the later Waterlilies series in which the artist initially includes but eventually excludes the Japanese bridge in his garden at Giverny as he moved ever closer to the changes of the natural phenomenon. The omission of surrounding scenery and the increased absorption in the object demonstrates the way in which Monet did not paint landscapes per se. Unlike Constable or Turner, he did not pursue the effects of light and atmosphere for or within a larger narrative or geographic scene.68 65 Characterizing this underlying interrelatedness as its “macrostructure,” Coplans emphasizes that not all series exhibit seriality: “To paint is series is not necessarily to be Serial. . . . Seriality is identified by a particular inter-relationship, rigorously consistent, or structure and syntax: Serial structures are produced by a single indivisible process that links the internal structure of a work to that of other works within a differentiated whole” (Serial Imagery, 10–11). Heinrich draws further distinctions between the series and other genres of repetitious groupings: cycles, theme and variations, and work groups (see “Serie—Ordnung und Obsession,” 7–8). 66 Seiberling proposes that Monet’s sensitivity to criticism and desire for acceptance might account for his studio modifications. Monet’s alleged “lack of finish” and “sketchiness,” which are due to his characteristically impressionist brushstroke, left him vulnerable to attacks about the seriousness of his paintings and the soundness of his technical ability (Monet’s Series, 60–61, 261). 67 Coplans observes in the Cathedrals series how the “threshold of difference between the paintings in this Series is very low” (Serial Imagery, 27). 68 Monet himself said: “For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere

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Rather, Monet considered his paintings “une série d´effets différents” (a series of different effects), as he wrote of his haystacks.69 This focus on the gradations of change in light and color (what he called the enveloppe) also distinguished the artist’s series from Muybridge’s photographic analyses of motion.70 The absence of narrative, linear or otherwise, further separates the two. Unbeholden to hierarchy, directionality, or determinacy, Monet’s series multiply under an open principle of theoretically endless repetitions and therefore unending potential.71 From his first series, the Haystacks of the early 1890s, Monet conceived of each series as a whole, but he did not begin with a set quantity in mind. Given the eternal and ephemeral nature of atmospheric change, the pursuit of its differing effects has no terminus. To take one case, the later series contains many more paintings, as the artist’s preoccupation with subtle change, fugitive effects, and instantaneity became ever more exacting before finally culminating in his Waterlilies series.72 For all of Monet’s emphasis on capturing difference, the notions of ephemerality and instantaneity unify his repetitions with a vague semblance of substructure. The isolation of one moment theoretically implies the existence of previous and successive ones, even if Monet in practice could not feasibly paint them all. Regardless of the number or order of completion, Monet worked on individual paintings with the larger group in mind, expressing the underlying totality of a given series through motif as well as color and tonal relationships. A final point worth mentioning is the importance of color to Monet, because it illustrates how the transformations captured on canvas (the enveloppe) not only concern both subject and object but in fact connect subject to object. Like the other artists of the period, Monet used the term enveloppe to designate the enveloping and perpetually fluctuating

brings it to life—the air and the light, which vary continuously. For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value.” Quoted in House, Monet: Nature into Art, 221. 69 See Heinrich, “Une série d’effets différents,” 13–22. 70 Regarding Muybridge, Seiberling highlights this key difference while also noting that his photography was already influential among artists in France before the publication of Animal Locomotion (1887), as the work of Degas and Meissonier indicate (Monet’s Series, 30–31). For Muybridge’s influence on Monet and serial painting, see Derenthal, “Die Erziehung des Auges,” 23–28. 71 Seiberling, Monet’s Series, 268. 72 Seiberling, Monet’s Series, 262. Highly sensitive to light and atmosphere, this otherwise mundane motif best demonstrates Monet’s attempts to paint the perpetual dynamism of and around objects. Since he worked on this series from the late 1890s until his death in 1926, his deteriorating vision likely influenced the move to larger canvases, looser composition, and ambiguous forms.

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atmosphere that unified him with the object he viewed.73 In setting the enveloppe down in color, Monet painted change itself in all its contingency, insofar as he, the viewing subject, perceived it as affecting the natural object in that moment. Yet, remembering the oscillatory motion sustained throughout the repetitions of Goethe’s Versuch, we see that the potential for change cuts both ways—hence the greater need for serial repetition to help control for it. Just as Monet’s viewing changes the object, so too does the object influence the artist as he responds to it imaginatively and emotionally. Monet did not calibrate his color choice or calculate its arrangement to any scientific system and would often return to paintings in the studio to adjust tonalities and ensure cohesion within a group.74 So far, we have discerned in Monet’s series the following: a scientific or quasiscientific methodology involving direct observation of nature; a dynamic reciprocity inherent in his vision that shifts content of the artwork away from objective representation to subjective sensory experience; and a notion of seriality bearing structural and philosophical resemblance to Goethe’s Reihenbildung. Still to be determined are the role of cognition and the nature of its engagement. In contrast to the physiological cognition that arose from our discussion of pointillism, Monet’s impressionism appears to call on both discursive and nondiscursive modes. We might imagine Monet accumulating his series of studies through a discursive mode of thought by constantly returning to the natural object and recording his impressions of it at a different moment in time or during a different time of year. His growing insistence on an increasingly subtle nuance of change could even be an effort to eliminate gaps in the moments recorded in his repetitions. Organized into a totality through Goethe’s nondiscursive cognitive viewing, the series could amount to the perceived reality of one object as experienced over time or to the haystack as a pure phenomenon. This is not, however, how the comparison really plays out. Let us consider two scenarios with respect to Goethe’s tripartite model for a lebendiges Anschauen. We first position the artist as subject and a haystack or waterlily pond as object so that Monet’s process of painting functions as the Versuch. Since the artist directly observes nature not simply in order to enjoy the nebulous modulations of the enveloppe but to study and document them, even if in a medium intended for aesthetic consumption, I believe his cognitive spectatorship is more akin 73 House, Monet: Nature into Art, 221. Corot and Boudin were conversant with the term. 74 Seiberling, Monet’s Series, 4. This author also mentions on several occasions the poetic and emotional quality of Monet’s work—as that quality is communicated by the painter and perceived by the viewer (see, e.g., 53, 86, 264).

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to a lebendiges Anschauen than a “clouded perception.” When the artist activates that lebendiges Anschauen, he unifies subject and object to experience the enveloppe of the haystack or pond not as a stable Gestalt but as a constantly metamorphosing Bildung. Unfortunately, any dynamism is suspended when Monet tries to transpose this “höhere Art der Erfahrung,” for as soon as the artist commits a form to canvas, it is once more objectified into a fixed, painted Gestalt. While these Gestalten might get us a series of artworks, they do not necessarily get us to abstract art via Goethe. In a later Waterlilies, for example, when differentiations of color, space, and shape melt together, the image might not appear to reference any natural objects; but would a spectator perceiving the now frozen world as generated by Monet’s lebendiges Anschauen be appreciative of an artwork filled with the potential of Bildung or dismissive of a canvas of unrecognizable Gestalten? What is needed is another subject also possessing a lebendiges Anschauen refined enough to reanimate Monet’s Gestalten. Let’s try a second scenario. If we reposition the artist to serve a mediating function between art spectator as subject and the object in nature, the series of images conceivably equals a collection of individual experiences from which the spectator’s lebendiges Anschauen can organize a Reihenbildung. As seen in the previous section, the Reihenbildung asks the subject not only to construct a chain of experiences connected through difference, but also to fill in the gradations of change not immediately given to human perception. Intuiting or imagining these dynamic missing links entails the unity of simultaneous and successive time and ensures a series whose progression of forms, while not teleological, are nevertheless interdependent. What the series creates and the spectator observes does not constitute a Reihenbildung resulting in a higher experience of the pure phenomenon, for it violates Goethe’s stipulation that the totality “zeigt sich in einer stetigen Folge der Erscheinungen.”75 Even if we proceed from the assumption that a spectator can, for example, view all twenty-five Haystack paintings simultaneously and sequentially, we see that Monet’s images have no sequential interdependence where each necessarily and absolutely relies on its predecessor and successor. Nor does it appear that the artist intended any such compulsory mutual dependence.76 Every painting can de facto stand alone as an autonomous artwork or be grouped into interchangeable larger ensembles that 75 Goethe, HA 13: 25. (The pure phenomenon now stands before us as the result of all our observations and experiments. It can never be isolated, but it appears in a continuous sequence of events) (25). 76 For a history of the Haystacks series, see Brettel, “Monet’s Haystacks Reconsidered,” 4–21; Heinrich, “Une série d’effets différents”; Seiberling, Monet’s Series, 84–110; and Sykora, Das Phänomen des Seriellen in der Kunst, 38–40.

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interconnect according to any number of narratives. What vague substructure underlies the series is not guided by interrelationships as lawful as those defining the unity of the sort that Goethe’s pure phenomenon represents. As this malleability reflects the artist’s own ambivalence about whether the spectator should experience the paintings separately or together, we find ourselves facing a familiar problem of mediation.77 It is still Monet’s haystack; it is his creation of experiential reality as he lived and saw it at that moment. Whether the artist intends to include or address a cognitive viewing subject (or any subject) in the composition of a given artwork does not determinatively condition the theoretical possibility of abstraction, because neither artistic intent nor the painting itself is at issue; the subject’s engagement with it is. This we discover via a third scenario that removes the artist from the equation and focuses on the interaction between one painting and one spectator who sees with “clouded perception.”

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‘Zum ersten Mal sah ich ein Bild’: Kandinsky’s “Clouded Perception” That spectator also happens to be an artist and indeed the one credited for inventing abstraction in art: Wassily Kandinsky. In his 1913 essay “Rückblicke,” the artist identifies a mind-altering moment at an 1896 exhibition of impressionist painting in Moscow as formatively influencing his invention of abstract art. At no point in his retelling does Kandinsky refer to Goethe, yet the author’s model for a cognitive mode of viewing would seem to provide the theoretical framework for and shape the artist’s vision of a pure painting without objects. The moment, recounted below, occurs when Kandinsky beholds a painting from Monet’s Haystacks (fig. 4.8) but does not immediately recognize the haystack: Und plötzlich zum ersten Mal sah ich ein Bild. Daß das ein Heuhafen war, belehrte mich der Katalog. Erkennen konnte ich ihn nicht. Dieses Nichterkennen war mir peinlich. Ich fand auch, daß der Maler kein Recht hat, so undeutlich zu malen. Ich empfand dumpf, daß der Gegenstand in diesem Bild fehlt. . . . Das alles war mir unklar, und ich konnte die einfachen Konsequenzen dieses Erlebnisses nicht ziehen. Was mir aber vollkommen klar war—das war die ungeahnte, früher mir verborgene Kraft der Palette, die über alle meine Träume hinausging. Die Malerei bekam ein märchenhafte

77 Brettel, “Monet’s Haystacks Reconsidered,” 7; Seiberling, Monet’s Series, 262.

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Figure 4.8. Claude Monet, Haystack (Sunset), 1891. Oil on canvas, 28⅞ x 36½ in. (73.3 x 92.7 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photograph © 2021 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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Kraft und Pracht. Unbewusst war aber auch der Gegenstand als unvermeidliches Element des Bildes diskreditiert.78 [And suddenly, for the first time, I saw a picture (Bild). That it was a haystack, the catalogue informed me. I didn’t recognize it. I found this nonrecognition (Nichterkennen) painful, and thought that the painter had no right to paint so indistinctly. I had a dull feeling that the object (Gegenstand) was lacking in this picture. . . . It was all unclear to me, and I was not able to draw the simple conclusions from this experience (Erlebnis). What was, however, quite clear to me was the unsuspected power of the palette, previously concealed from me, which exceeded all my dreams. Painting took on 78 Kandinsky, “Rückblicke, 1913,” 32, emphasis in the original. The exhibition attended by Kandinsky was held in Moscow and featured French painting. Although the painting to which Kandinsky refers cannot be definitively identified, it was most likely a version of a painting akin to Monet’s 1890–91 Haystack (Sunset), which now hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. See Roethel and Hahl-Koch’s footnotes for “Rückblicke, 1913” 151–52.

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a fairy-tale power and splendor. And, albeit unconsciously, objects (der Gegenstand) were discredited as an essential element (unvermeidliches Element) within the picture (des Bildes).]79

The moment unfolds like a revelation, even if a highly contrived and carefully reconstructed revelation. While likely not spontaneous themselves, Kandinsky’s words here describe an event that happens abruptly and unexpectedly: “Und plötzlich zum ersten Mal sah ich ein Bild,” he tells us. The rhetorical gesture of “plötzlich,” directly followed by “zum ersten Mal,” certainly emphasizes the immediacy or presentness of the moment, but we must still ask ourselves what Kandinsky means. Does seeing a picture “zum ersten Mal” imply for the first time that day? Ever? Before we begin to suppose how he, a student of art, can possibly claim to see a “Bild” for the first time, we should first consider the spectrum of interpretive possibilities communicated by those four letters. Although he beholds a “Bild,” the great revelation is that the “Bild” lacks an object, that “der Gegenstand in diesem Bild fehlt.” We know this to be false and in fact he knows it to be false; the catalogue has told him it is a haystack. Only he cannot see it. Yet, if Kandinsky is not seeing a haystack, what exactly does he see? The “Bild” Kandinsky perceives takes shape as a “clouding”: a “höhere Art der Erfahrung” of the sort symbolized by the cloud icon in the graphic derived from the preceding chapter. The colorful modulation taking shape before the artist’s eyes assumes neither substance nor form— not a recognizable one in any event. Kandinsky’s “Nichterkennen” is crucial, because this verbal noun marks the difference between Bild and Gegenstand and thereby distinguishes the moment when Bild detaches itself from Gegenstand. Kandinsky sees some undefined and undefinable image, a Bild, but he cannot quite reconcile it with his experience of its purported objective identity, the Gegenstand. In Goethean terminology, the viewed object of Monet’s haystack is a Gestalt, as is the viewing subject of the artist. What Kandinsky sees during this “Nichterkennen” is something in between Bild and Gegenstand and akin to Bildung: a Bild lacking a Gegenstand, or an image without objecthood. That Bild could recall Goethe’s Bildung would imply that Kandinsky engaged in the sort of higher cognitive activity necessary for Reihenbildung to reanimate the Gestalt. For one, the objectless object that is the Bild (or “clouding”) lacks substance, as is emphasized in Kandinsky’s astonishment that “der Gegenstand in diesem Bild fehlt.” Secondly, the passage works to engender the requisite concurrence of simultaneity and succession; the immediacy of the moment elongated through narration recreates the experience of collapsed time sequenced into a chain of events. 79 Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, 363.

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The dynamic character of the experience and the unstable existence of the Bild stems from the artist’s description and his own use of the verbal noun “Nichterkennen.” Unfolding in the interaction between viewing subject and viewed object, the act of seeing or of not recognizing is an actively ongoing process and therefore is subject to volatility and variability. Moreover, the presence of an action presupposes the presence of an agent to perform it, a realization to which Kandinsky shortly comes. Initially “peinlich” (embarrassing), his “Nichterkennen” prompts Kandinsky to direct indignation at Monet for painting so “undeutlich” (unclearly), but then he turns inward from viewed object to himself as viewing subject. Perhaps he is “plötzlich” (suddenly) aware that the perceived lack of object stems not from incompetent painting or the absence of a Gegenstand or physical object, and instead occurs within his own body. Although one could attribute the Bild to a cataract or ocular degeneration, Kandinsky’s words do not suggest physiological interference or deficiency. On the contrary, they demonstrate the presence of a higher cognitive faculty beyond material physiology, because his aesthetic pleasure extends beyond the visual to involve the imagination. His imagery of “Träume” (dreams) and “märchenhafte Kraft und Pracht” (fairytale power and splendor) evokes the splendor and imaginative power of dreams and fairy tales, both of which require cognitive activity and promise fictional narratives of magic, mystery, and childlike wonder. Certainly, in the moments of perception when the “Gegenstand fehlt” (object was lacking), the Bild suddenly has the potential to assume any shape and be any object. Kandinsky’s reaction suggests that the potential for perceiving these animate and abstract clouds of color in lieu of an object is present from a painting’s inception, like a secret waiting to be discovered. “Ungeahnt,” “unbewusst,” and “verborgen” (unsuspected, unconscious, and concealed)—it was hidden from view, not because it was absent from the painting as viewed object but because he, the viewing subject, did not see it. Kandinsky realizes what comprises the crux of Goethe’s cognitive viewing subject: eyes alone do not suffice. Rather than relying on passive accumulation of visual sensory data, seeing with “clouded perception” to reanimate the Gegenstand into a Bild entails an active and imaginative viewership. Kandinsky’s final words emphasize that the power to perceive abstracted images lies within an imaginative viewership and not with the object. The Gegenstand is only discredited as an “unvermeidliches Element des Bildes”; a Bild can indeed have a Gegenstand, it just no longer must. Put differently, an artwork does not need a recognizable object—or any object—from the material world to engage or entertain its audience. What it needs is a spectator with “clouded perception”; a spectator willing and able not only to see the potential for aesthetic enjoyment, but to actively

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create it through use of cognitive faculties. Whereas “intuition” serves the sciences for the purposes of lebendiges Anschauen, “imagination” offers a more suitable descriptor for the type of nondiscursive cognition in the aesthetic realm that can elicit enjoyment from abstract art. Like the Beobachtungsgabe honed by Goethe’s scientist to intuit the potentiality of natural form, each art spectator has an ability beyond sight alone to imagine the potentiality of aesthetic form. One need only to activate and develop it, as Kandinsky presumably did on this occasion. While the moments of “clouded perception” that he could have experienced were brief, it was enough to broaden the frontiers of aesthetic possibility. Convinced of the potential for an objectless art, the artist went on to create compositions that also might have inspired viewers not in spite of but owing to this “living” and “life-giving” mode of perception. Kandinsky’s words may not intentionally articulate it, but I believe they do demonstrate that what is at stake for the emergence of abstract art is not what one sees but how one sees, and that how one sees does not require a recognizable or preformulated image to be aesthetically engaging. As a cognitive viewing subject who actively employs the imagination and has the potential to make of the experience what he will, Kandinsky can look to Monet’s haystacks or any painting for that matter, and see colored paint with every conceivable modulation, just as Goethe’s cloud gazer could look to the sky and see almost-elephants, not-quitecamels, and very-nearly-lions. At the same time, another art spectator or cloud gazer might immediately perceive a haystack, a fully formed carnival of creatures, or another fixed object, and entertain no possibility for anything else. If something about Monet’s art intrinsically proves more conducive to imaginative play, it is perhaps because of the qualities we considered above. Regardless of whether or not this is the case, Kandinsky could have theoretically experienced the same “cloudings” before Seurat’s dots, Turner’s light, or Constable’s clouds. The potentiality occurs in the oscillation between subject and object; but, as we remember from the cloud gazer in “Howards Ehrengedächtnis” and the scientist in “Versuch als Vermittler,” it is always the subject who must initially reach out to the object to set the process in motion and produce an Erfahrung of a higher order. Aware that the potential for abstract art arises from the imagination of the spectator, Kandinsky and other early abstractionists recognized the importance of audience receptivity for the success and survival of their aesthetic endeavors. Therefore, to cultivate public acceptance, they coordinated the unveiling of their abstract artworks with publications such as Über das Geistige in der Kunst to teach audiences how to look at and think about their abstractions while also laying out the motivation, process, and theoretical justification for an objectless art. However, a theoretical framework for a mode of cognitive viewing necessary for a subject to appreciate and

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engage with abstract art was already in existence; it was one that could be actively and consciously employed by a certain type of spectator, a cognitive viewing subject, as imagined by Goethe as early as 1792. Why does the theoretical existence of “clouded perception” not lead to abstract paintings until 1911? From Goethe and the Romantics to pointillism and impressionism, the most outstanding common theme is the pervasive influence of science, particularly in the way that its discoveries, innovations, and insights shape optics and the understanding of human perception. Goethe, Constable, and Turner investigated the mechanics of subjective sight in their endeavors to comprehend more fully and to represent more accurately the essence of the natural world. The shift away from objective reality to the study of our subjective perception of it yielded new theories that were to be substantiated, refuted, and furthered throughout the long nineteenth century as technology improved and scientific knowledge of physiology and anatomy reached cellular levels. That the writings of Helmholtz in particular, along with color theorists, were being used to inform and justify unfamiliar artistic practices and aesthetic effects by artists and art critics helped reassure a skeptical public that what they were seeing really was all in their heads—but in a scientifically sound and physiologically explainable way. Unlike Seurat’s pointillism or Kandinsky’s spiritual vision for abstract art, the “clouding of perception” derived from Goethe is not a physiologically grounded cognitive exercise; nor does it aspire to uncloak or discard the material world and unlock a transcendental realm of immateriality. Rather, its conceptual underpinnings are dialectical, subject participating with object to produce an experience contingent to the material world, to temporality, and to the individual’s body using discursive and nondiscursive modes of cognitive viewing. The turn to the observer and the shift to an active and embodied participant is a key feature of Goethe’s scientific methodology and it is essential for the emergence of abstract art, even if Goethe himself is not writing an instruction manual on how to paint it. In the end, what is seen on canvas, whether cloud, haystack, or nonobjective color, is less important than who is seeing it and how. The affect and the effectiveness of this aesthetic demand more from the viewing subject than from the viewed object, for neither painter nor painting can perform the crucial cognitive task of the spectator. Like the reality posited by Goethe, the potential for abstraction and abstract art ultimately exists in the eye of the beholder.

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5: Driven to Distraction and from Abstraction: The Birth and Death of Abstract Art in Gottfried Keller’s Der Grüne Heinrich (1854–55, 1879–80)

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Keller’s semiautobiographical novel Der grüne Heinrich (Green Henry) ultimately comes down to one word: failure. Following the eponymous protagonist on an ill-fated journey to become an artist, its eight-hundred-page plot loosely recounts the author’s own attempts from childhood on to make it as a landscape painter in nineteenth-century Switzerland. When Keller’s artistic ambitions ended in failure and he took a desk job as an administrative clerk in Zurich, he wrote the Bildungsroman that eventually led to a robust career as an author, even though his fictional alter ego would not experience similar success.1 Knowing in advance that he wanted Heinrich’s life to end in failure, Keller planned Der grüne Heinrich from its unhappy ending and worked backward.2 Just how tragic and sad a fate Keller’s protagonist meets depends on the version: the Heinrich published in 1854/55 version (Heinrich I) wastes away into a solitary death, whereas the Heinrich revised for republication in 1879/80 (Heinrich II) lives on as a melancholy and monosyllabic civil servant.3 In both versions, Heinrich creates an artwork so bizarre that it pounds the final nail in the coffin for his dreams of painting professionally. Although this artwork closely resembles, if it does not uncannily anticipate, works of abstract art that would be created by twentieth-century painters, within the world of the novel Heinrich’s handiwork ultimately amounts to nothing more than a

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ottfried

1 On the Bildungsroman genre in German literature can be found in Kontje, The German Bildungsroman: History of a National Genre; Jacobs und Krause, Der deutsche Bildungsroman: Gattungsgeschichte vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert; Mayer, Der deutsche Bildungsroman: von der Aufklärung bis zur Gegenwart; Selbmann, Der deutsche Bildungsroman; Martin Swales, The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse; and Voßkamp, Ein anderes Selbst, 83–102. 2 Keller, cited in Kittstein, Gottfried Keller, 45–46. Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf emphasizes the melancholic origin of the novel and the degree of overlap between Keller and his hero in Die Melancholie der Literatur, 419–20. 3 This chapter refers to the second edition and occasionally has recourse to the first when discrepancies between versions are noteworthy.

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“kolossale Kritzelei” (colossal scrawl) bound for the trash heap and destruction.4 Yet the death of this early instance of abstract art so soon after its birth was not inevitable, as intertextual and intratextual references indicate.5 Comparative analysis with the short story that inspired the Kritzelei episode, “Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu” (“The Unknown Masterpiece,” 1831) by Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) reveals how Heinrich could have behaved differently to save his career as artist and spare the Kritzelei as abstract artwork. Reinforcing this contention are other artist figures that are encountered within the novel and whose accounts implicitly and explicitly parallel Heinrich’s trajectory. The artist figures Ferdinand Lys and Oskar Erikson demonstrate potential alternative paths forward and affirm the author’s faith in human action. Keller ultimately attributes Heinrich’s failure to Heinrich himself. Even if hopelessly entangled in overwhelming social forces beyond his control, the protagonist is not completely without recourse or without influence over his own destiny. In the novel, there is always a window of opportunity for individual agency and self-determining action. Heinrich had occasion to defend his artwork and to effectively invent abstract art, but he chose to accept failure by not acting to reject it. As a result, Der grüne Heinrich remains at heart a novel of failure: the failure of education; the failure of an artist; and the failure of abstract art.

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Oh, What a Tangled Web: Heinrich Succeeds as Abstract Artist Even though it was an incredibly brief episode in an otherwise extensive chain of events, the creation of the Kritzelei constitutes the turning point in the novel and the culmination of the protagonist’s pursuit of landscape painting. The artwork is spawned when Heinrich finds himself at an emotional nadir owing to his unsuccessful efforts at establishing a career as a 4 Keller, Der grüne Heinrich: Zweite Fassung, 566–67. German-language citations from the novel will refer to this source unless otherwise indicated. Gottfried Keller, Green Henry, 498–99. All English-language citations from the novel will refer to this source unless otherwise indicated. 5 Scholarship linking the Kritzelei to abstract art or its predecessor include Fehr, Gottfried Keller: Aufschlüsse und Deutungen, 200–205; Bätschmann, Entfernung der Natur—Landschaftsmalerei 1750–1920, 32; Günther Hess, “Die Bilder des grünen Heinrich. Gottfried Kellers poetische Malerei,” 373–95 and Panorama und Denkmal, 222–28; Jin, Inszenierte Visualität, 119–31; Kaiser, Das gedichtete Leben, 186; Meuthen, Eins und doppelt oder Vom Anderssein des Selbst, 192; Dominik Müller, Vom Malen erzählen, 307–10; Naumann, “Die ‘kolossale Kritzelei’, der ‘borghesische Fechter’ und andere Versuche,” 166–70, “Körperbild und Seelenschrift,” 221, and “Von der Kunst, den Grünen Heinrich zu lesen,” 48; and Stelzer, Die Vorgeschichte der abstrakten Kunst, 55–56.

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landscape artist. Attempting to lift his spirits, he transposes the twists and turns of his tormented soul onto canvas: Fröstelnd schleppte ich, um eine Zuflucht zu suchen, einen neuen, kaum angefangenen Karton hervor, eine auf den Rahmen gespannte graue Papierfläche von mindestens acht Schuh Breite und entsprechender Höhe. Es war nichts darauf zu sehen als ein begonnener Vordergrund mit je einem verwitterten Fichtenbaume zu beiden Seiten des künftigen Bildes, dessen Idee ich damals vor Monaten aufgegeben. . . . Um nur etwas zu tun und vielleicht meine Gedanken zu beleben, machte ich mich daran, den einen der zwei mit Kohle entworfenen Bäume mit der Schilffeder auszuführen, gewärtig, was dann weiter werden wollte. Aber kaum hatte ich eine halbe Stunde gezeichnet und ein paar Äste mit dem einförmigen Nadelwerke bekleidet, so versank ich in eine tiefe Zerstreuung und strichelte gedankenlos daneben, wie wenn man die Feder probiert. An diese Kritzelei setzte sich nach und nach ein unendliches Gewebe von Federstrichen, welches ich jeden Tag in verlorenem Hinbrüten weiterspann, so oft ich zur Arbeit anheben wollte, bis das Unwesen wie ein ungeheures graues Spinnennetz den größten Teil der Fläche bedeckte. Betrachtete man jedoch das Wirrsal genauer, so entdeckte man den löblichsten Zusammenhang und Fleiß darin, Krümmungen, welche vielleicht tausende von Ellen ausmachten, ein Labyrinth bildete, das vom Anfangspunkte bis zum Ende zu verfolgen war. Zuweilen zeigte sich eine neue Manier, gewissermaßen eine neue Epoche der Arbeit; neue Muster und Motive, oft zart und anmutig, tauchten auf, und wenn die Summe von Aufmerksamkeit, Zweckmäßigkeit und Beharrlichkeit, welche zu der unsinnigen Mosaik erforderlich war, auf eine wirkliche Arbeit verwendet worden wäre, so hätte ich gewiß etwas Sehenswertes liefern müssen. Nur hier und da zeigten sich kleinere oder größere Stockungen, gewisse Verknotungen in den Irrgängen meiner zerstreuten gramseligen Seele, und die sorgsame Art, wie die Feder sich aus der Verlegenheit zu ziehen gesucht, bewies, wie das träumende Bewußtsein in dem Netze gefangen war. So ging es Tage, Wochen hindurch, und die einzige Abwechslung, wenn ich zu Hause war, bestand darin, daß ich, mit der Stirne gegen das Fenster gestützt, den Zug der Wolken verfolgte, ihre Bildung betrachtete und indessen mit den Gedanken in der Ferne schweifte (566–67). [Shivering, to find some diversion, I dragged out a new board, hardly begun, an expanse of grey paper of at least eight feet in width and corresponding height, stretched on a frame. Nothing was to be seen on it but the beginning of a foreground with a weather-beaten pine tree at each side of the picture that was to be; I had given up the idea of it, months before this. . . . Just for something to do, and possibly to cheer myself up, I set to work to carry out, with my reed pen, the

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design of one of the two trees sketched in with charcoal, waiting to see what would come next. But I had scarcely been drawing for half an hour, and [had] clothed a few branches with the uniform needles, than I became lost in deep preoccupation, and went on making strokes unthinkingly, as one does in testing a pen. Close to this scrawl there gradually came to be an unending web of penstrokes which I spun out further every day, sitting in fruitless brooding, as often as I tried to begin work, until the monster, like a vast grey cobweb, covered the greater part of the surface. If you observed the tangle more closely, you could discover therein the most commendable coherence and application, as it formed a labyrinth which could be followed up from the starting point to the end, in a continuous progression of strokes and windings which perhaps amounted to thousands of yards. At times a new style manifested itself, to a certain degree a new epoch of the work; new designs and motives, often delicate and graceful, appeared, and if the amount of attention, sense of the appropriate, and perseverance, that was required for this absurd mosaic, had been applied to a real task, I certainly should have produced something worth looking at. Here and there only, hesitations, smaller of greater, appeared, certain twists in the labyrinth of my distracted soul, and the careful manner in which the pen had sought to extricate itself from the dilemma proved how my dreaming consciousness was caught in the net. So it went on for days and weeks, and the sole variation, when I was at home, would be that, with my forehead leaning against the window, I would watch the progress of the clouds, observe their shape, and in the meantime let my thoughts rove afar into the distance. (498–99)]

Speaking through Heinrich, Keller produces a description of the scrawl’s appearance through the narrative content of his words while the cascading rows of his meandering sentences reproduce the form of its unending and unruly line. Despite the sheer amount of words in the unstructured block of text and the variety of terms applied to the image, Keller never directly describes what exactly his fictional artist scrawls, only what it is not: an “unending” (unendlich), “nonsensical” (unsinnig), and “unpleasant” (ungeheuer) “nonbeing” (Unwesen). Even the term itself—scrawl or Kritzelei—eludes definition and does not provide the reader with enough information to form a definitive mental image of the picture’s appearance. The nominalization of the verb kritzeln (to scrawl) conserves the negative connotation of haphazard, illegible scribbling that could encompass a variety or hybrid varieties of irregular curlicues, doodles, cross-hatchings, and scratchings.6 In German, the suf6 In Duden, the word kritzeln has two definitions: “wahllos Schnörkel, Striche o. Ä. zeichnen” or “klein und eng, in unregelmäßigen Schriftzügen schreiben.” (To draw indiscriminate curlicues, lines, or the like, or to write small

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fix -lei denotes a variety of manners, which suggests that Heinrich engages in all kinds of indiscriminate drawing, irregular writing, or an odd mix of the two. Like scribbles and scrawls, the Kritzelei falls somewhere in between the graphic and literary arts as something amorphous without pictorial precedence, outside of traditional forms, and uncontained by conventional categories. This is indescribable in the literal sense of the word, and so even the author lacks adequate vocabulary for such a novelty. Forced instead to describe around the image with negative modifiers and metaphors, the narration characterizes the mode of abstract art generated by Heinrich’s unruly line as a chaotic nonrepresentation resulting from contradictory impulses, hybridity, and excessive expression. Keller’s specific choice of metaphors reflects this definition of abstraction and the way it came into being. It first emerges in a “Gewebe von Federstrichen” (unending web of penstrokes), which then mutates into an “Unwesen” (monster) that sprawls into a “Spinnennetz” (cobweb) with the seeming disorder of a “Wirrsal” (tangle), the disorientation of a “Labyrinth,” the complications of a “Mosaik,” and finally, the connotations of a “Netz.” The imagery of spiderwebs, labyrinths, and nets communicates the line’s delicate dance between antithetical forces (e.g., order/disorder, logic/illogic, control/abandon, intentionality/compulsion, consciousness/unconsciousness) while sewing the contradictions together even as it weaves in and out of each extreme. The Kritzelei exists as both and so falls within neither category. The incongruous qualities and the meandering path of line reproduce the inner conflictedness and the aimless wandering of the artist’s own thoughts. The line begins as a conventional landscape intended to provide diversion or refuge (“Zuflucht”) from his sorry circumstances, but it quickly devolves into the monstrous Kritzelei that causes Heinrich to sink into ever deeper preoccupation as his mood spirals downward and the amount of ink on the canvas spirals outward. His excessive emotions and contradictory thoughts spill out in analogous fashion as the artist’s inward descent becomes outwardly visible through the unraveling taking place in the trees on the canvas. In this regard, the Kritzelei is a synchronic self-portrait of the artist’s immediate psychological condition that converts the immateriality of his inner state into an external representation in form and as a material object. Like Narcissus, Heinrich becomes ever more absorbed in his own image and refuses to leave the image’s orbit for days on end.7 Keller’s and narrowly in irregular strokes) (my translation). The noun form is defined through the verb as a “[dauerndes] Kritzeln” or a continual scrawling. See Duden, s.v. “kritzeln,” accessed December 11, 2020, https://www.duden.de/ rechtschreibung/kritzeln. 7 Cf. Nadja Wick’s study on narcissism in artists in Wick, Apotheosen narzisstischer Individualität, 143–95.

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imagery casts the relationship between artist and image in an unhealthy light, emphasizing how Heinrich externalizes his interiority only to internalize it again when confronted with the visual manifestation of his own unhappiness. Whether lost in a labyrinth or caught in a cobweb, the artist cannot find his way out of a vicious cycle feeding the emotional state he seeks to escape. The Kritzelei is tethered to Heinrich as both an extension of his psychology and a mimetic reproduction of it for as long as the activity of creating is sustained and the artist acts as a conduit between the subjective experience of his mental strife and its objectification into material form. At the same time, Keller’s metaphors and prose convey that Heinrich’s pen “spins” (weiterspinnen) out of control in a controllable manner that constructs complex networks of fabric and intricate spiderwebs that, like labyrinths and mosaics, require craftsmanship, careful planning, and meticulous labor.8 Closer inspection of the confused chaos reveals an internal order advancing logically from beginning to end that undergoes stylistic permutations through new designs and motifs. The time-intensive labor necessary to create the Kritzelei’s cogently structured nonsense likewise walks the fine line separating control and discipline from passive unruliness. Heinrich sets to work (“[ich] machte . . . mich daran”) but also waits to see what will come next (“gewärtig, was dann weiter werden wollte”). Shifting from active first-person narration into alternate passive constructions and including reflexive verbs (“sich setzen,” “sich ziehen,” “sich zeigen”), the text cedes agency to the image and the process of making it. Metaphors of weaving and spinning absorb Heinrich in mindless (“gedankenlos”) and uncontrollable mechanical activity for days and weeks on end—albeit not without pause. The artist in fact takes several pauses, leaning his head against the window to stare at the clouds with wandering thoughts before continuing with the Kritzelei. These pauses imply the capacity for deliberate thought and intentional decisionmaking despite the evidence of compulsion and powerlessness. To stop, pause, think, and then recommence working in the same manner indicates Heinrich’s ability to exert enough control over his mind and body to reproduce with conscious occupation the same effects and forms that began as unconscious preoccupation. This suggests that Heinrich suppresses his agency into willful latency; that he could cease scrawling but chooses otherwise to the detriment of the world around him when he neglects responsibilities of daily life. His 8 On labyrinths, cf. Stopp, “Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich. The Pattern of the Labyrinth,” 129–45; Laufhütte, Wirklichkeit und Kunst, 274; and Wagner-Egelhaaf, Die Melancholie der Literatur, 465–66. On textiles, see Meyer, “Texture & Text. Knots and Bindings in The Green Henry of Gottfried Keller,” 7–17; and Selbmann, Gottfried Keller: Romane und Erzählungen, 21–22.

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social isolation and solipsistic flight from reality would seem to provide Heinrich the refuge (Zuflucht) he originally sought when returning to the half-begun landscape as a self-therapeutic measure. The artist turns inward and away from society because he is perpetually at odds with it. Thus, the internal contradictions of the Kritzelei’s unruly line mirror the inner conflictedness driving his psychological and emotional strife that itself arises from his continual conflicts with the greater social network. Well before the colossal scrawl, Heinrich happily manipulated the conventions of landscape painting into imaginative topographies according to his whim and his personal vision. For Heinrich, artistic activity is more about the activity and how it serves him, and less about how his art serves society or whether it fits in with normative expectations. The Kritzelei represents the logical conclusion of an artistic trajectory marked by excessive subjectivity and the inability both to balance it with and contain it within the given limits of objective form.9 Despite his claims that he wants success, Heinrich does not take actions that are more likely to achieve it. Rather than engaging in rational consideration of aesthetic convention or consumer tastes, he creates artworks according to his emotional needs of the moment or whenever discouragement with the outside world sends him fleeing into his art and himself for comfort. When this excessive navel-gazing wrenches his landscapes out of alignment with conventions of genre and form, the sought-after external validation never materializes, which feeds his failures as artist and instigates more depressive episodes. This, in turn, begets more bizarre images as Heinrich comforts himself by making art about himself. The vicious spiral propels the protagonist through his unsuccessful career until his lowest point of professional desperation culminates in the Kritzelei. As first-person narrator, Heinrich reflects on his youthful endeavors from an ironic distance with the benefits of hindsight and even registers an awareness of the behavioral pattern that, time and again, precipitates his failure.10 Yet, for all his introspection, the artist never meaningfully intervenes in the cycle to increase his prospects of a successful career. In the end, the Kritzelei and his other paintings are symptoms of a deeper conflict: the artist’s inability to bring himself into accord with normative expectations of the art world is indicative of the failure to align 9 Cf. Karl Moormann’s monograph, which uses the novel as a case study of the bourgeois subject caught in the dialectic between the individual’s independence and his or her dependence on society. In Moormann’s reading, Keller treats subjectivity as a character deficit (Subjektivismus und bürgerliche Gesellschaft, 46). 10 Cf. Potter, Three Great Artists Reflecting on the Spiritual Purpose of Art, 92 and Voßkamp, Ein anderes Selbst, 99–102 on the significance of the narrative discrepancy.

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himself with the world at large. More specifically, he cannot fit himself within the externally imposed social roles structuring a reality that, like the author’s own, is governed by the interests and the institutions of a bourgeois capitalist society that asks its citizens to operate within external frameworks of model bourgeois subjecthood. Although Heinrich’s uncontained subjectivity, incompatibility with objective categories, and narcissistic flights of fancy are portrayed by Keller as flaws, the author does not hold his hero responsible for displaying these characteristics or for delaying his own development into adulthood. Rather, he attributes Heinrich’s failures in society to the failures of society, illustrating with literary examples the many ways it unfairly disadvantages individuals like the protagonist and leaves them ill-prepared to meet the very expectations imposed on them. Keller identified childhood as the most vulnerable and most formative period (“d[ie] weichsten und bildsamsten Jahre”) for determining the course a life may take.11 Belaboring the point, the novel devotes a disproportionate amount of attention and number of pages to Heinrich’s early development, more so than any other Germanlanguage Bildungsroman.12 Taking time to explore the psychological processes occurring in susceptible young minds, Keller walks through young Heinrich’s experiences with institutions, communities, and individuals acting on their behalf so that the reader appreciates how their effects, which last long past childhood, result in the melancholy failed artist found at the novel’s end. In retracing the social failings and conflicts that bring Heinrich to the point of emotional discord that generates the Kritzelei, Keller sketches a record of his movement through time that charts out the vicious cycles, the labyrinthian paths, and the roundabout detours undertaken by Heinrich on his life journey, one that finds objective representation in the unruly line of the Kritzelei. With this, synchronous and diachronous levels of meaning collapse into one artwork where the objectification of his psychological state is the objectification of societal reality. Heinrich’s scrawl resembles the graphic lines used to convey the biographical wanderings of Laurence Sterne’s picaresque hero; only Tristram Shandy’s squiggles are not as convoluted. For Heinrich, what ideally should have been a straightforward progression through life in the prescribed mold of bourgeois subjecthood veers unalterably off course at the death of his father.13 He is gone within the first two chapters of the novel, yet 11 Keller, 78–79. (The most impressionable and plastic) (66). 12 See Dominik Müller, “Der grüne Heinrich (1879/1880),” 36. 13 That the novel’s first two chapters describe the lineage of Heinrich’s family and events prior to his birth indicates the significant role that external social and hereditary circumstances play in determining an individual’s future. Keller indicates that children are very much victims of circumstance, being either helped

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even without a true physical presence, the specter of the absent father looms over Heinrich for his entire life as both the much-admired paragon toward which he strives as well as the much-resented source of his problems. The former leads to the latter when the son inevitably cannot attain the inherently unattainable ideal of the father. A potent symbol of the weight of this legacy is the green jacket that will forever signify his identity (see the novel’s title). Made by his mother out of his dead father’s clothes, the jacket is a tangible reminder of the economic and psychological consequences of this loss: the burden forever carried on his back and an emblem of his eternally “green” state of arrested development.14 It is also the empty placeholder for the successful person Heinrich wishes to become. Mother Lee stitched together the jacket from the “leftover civic garments” (“nachgelassenen bürgerlichen Gewänder”) that designated Meister Lee’s professional and hence socioeconomic role as citizen in their rural Swiss community.15 As his first piece of masculine clothing, the green jacket awakens in Heinrich the expectation to follow the linear arc of his father’s footsteps.16 However, the financial struggles ensuing from the loss of the family breadwinner erect very real socioeconomic barriers that limit the opportunities available to young Heinrich and plague both mother and son for the remainder of their days. Besides the new economic realities, the loss of his father has a profound impact on his psychological and emotional development. The lack of a male role model leaves Heinrich in the hands of a religious, distanced, but ultimately well-meaning mother, who cannot compensate for the lost emotional support or provide her son with the practical knowledge to enter the working world.17 Both become socially or hindered by their parents’ socioeconomic status, the social milieu, and available opportunities. On the impact of the father’s death, see Amrein, Gottfried-KellerHandbuch, 18; Eisert, Kunst und Künstlerwerdung, 41–44; Kittstein, Gottfried Keller, 53–54; Selbmann, Der deutsche Bildungsroman, 134–37, and Gottfried Keller: Romane und Erzählungen, 22–24; and Nadja Wick, Apotheosen narzisstischer Individualität, 156–57. 14 Already in the second chapter, Heinrich waxes hypothetical about how his life could have been had his father lived, and he uses his father’s probable actions as the standard by which to measure his own. On the green jacket as a paternal symbol affecting his development, see Amrein, Gottfried-Keller-Handbuch, 18; Kaiser, “Grüne Heinrich—ein Epochaler Typus,” 53; Kittstein, Gottfried Keller, 54; Selbmann, Gottfried Keller: Romane und Erzählungen, 25. 15 Keller, Der grüne Heinrich: Erste Fassung, 129. Citations from the first version will be marked as such to distinguish them from the second version. Translations from this volume are my own. 16 Erste Fassung, 129. 17 On the mother’s emotional distance, see Eisert, Kunst und Künstlerwerdung, 36–39; Potter, Three Great Artists Reflecting on the Spiritual Purpose of Art,

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isolated, which causes an increasingly introverted Heinrich to develop an overactive imagination and an odd codependency on his mother.18 While Heinrich’s childhood tendencies are not personal defects per se, Keller implies that they became so owing to the social forces designed to mold the subjectivity of the individual into the productive, altruistic subjecthood of citizenry. In the novel, these interventive forces most prominently take the form of religion and education, two social institutions that could have righted Heinrich’s inauspicious track. Yet, instead of helping him tame his imagination, restrain his excessive tendencies, and balance his individual impulses with the needs of the community, the state’s religious and pedagogical organs fail Heinrich in their impersonal and disciplinarian approach to socialization.19 His dealings with church and school play out in a dispiriting pattern: adults acting on the institutions’ behalf misinterpret the natural guilelessness of children as malevolence or depravity, and then retaliate with disproportionately harsh or outright abusive measures. As the string of failed encounters with the outside world continues throughout the novel, the protagonist’s reflections make narrative note of the junctures when unforeseen events, external conditions, and institutional inadequacies—whether in love, in friendship, in politics, or in art–throw his life. With his training incomplete, his social skills immature, his character underdeveloped, but his imagination overdeveloped, Heinrich possesses neither the technical proficiency nor the aesthetic sophistication to produce art in accordance with the conventions of his time and in tune with the tastes of the market. Put simply, he cannot succeed—at least not as an artist embodying the sort of ideal citizenry represented by his father: working within society to produce much-desired goods for it and thereby being rewarded with material prosperity. In this regard, the protagonist of this Bildungsroman, the novel of formation, remains “ungebildet” as both uneducated individual and not fully formed bourgeois subject. Failed by his family situation and by public institutions, he has neither the nature nor does he receive the nurture to become the productive citizen, 36–40. 18 For psychoanalytic accounts of Heinrich and his mother, see Jennings, “The Model of the Self in Gottfried Keller’s Prose,” 196–230; Kaiser, Das gedichtete Leben, 63; Kessel, Sprechen—Schreiben—Schweigen: Mutterbindung Und Vaterimago; and Muschg, Gottfried Keller. For more on spinning, Heinrich’s art, and his failed relationships with women, see Downing, “Binding Magic in Gottfried Keller’s Der Grüne Heinrich,” 156–70; Meyer, “Texture & Text. Knots and Bindings in The Green Henry of Gottfried Keller”; Selbmann, Gottfried Keller: Romane und Erzählungen, 19–26, 201–19; Schneider, “Ikonen der Liebe: Heinrichs Frauenbilder,” 201–19; Wagner-Egelhaaf, Die Melancholie der Literatur, 469–73; and Nadja Wick, Apotheosen narzisstischer Individualität, 157–64. 19 Cf. Selbmann, Gottfried Keller: Romane und Erzählungen, 24.

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let alone the artist, that the structures of bourgeois capitalist society presume he must fit into. Since any natural sensibilities for aesthetic creation are not recognized or cultivated during these formative years, he develops into an artist so conflicted, uncontained, and at odds with society that he uses his art as an outlet for expressing his psychological and social alienation. The Kritzelei as a pictorial representation of Heinrich’s life as a labyrinth, spiderweb, and net substantiates just how far from the straight and narrow he has strayed. The metaphor of the Kritzelei as textile implicitly juxtaposes the protagonist with his father, whose linear path coincided with work productively contributing to the socioeconomic system. By contrast, the labyrinthian journey of the son culminates in unorthodox images made in social isolation and unlikely to find favor with critics or consumers. Although Heinrich observes the delicate grace of the scrawl’s stylistic transitions and lauds his own industriousness, he questions whether his energies count as “real work” (wirkliche Arbeit) or produce “anything worth looking at” (etwas Sehenswertes). Instead, the activity generating his penstrokes more closely resembles the mother’s weaving. Other than sewing her son’s clothes, Mother Lee spins the cloth for the canvases Heinrich will never paint. She lives out her days alone producing work and work products that are not “real” because they exist outside of socioeconomic relations. Nevertheless, these are the socioeconomic relations that weave together the complex network depicted in the Kritzelei. In communicating the subconscious conflicts and emotions typically unfit for social expression in a visual language beyond aesthetic conventions, the artist creates an image disconnected from the web of relations that it portrays.20 As the creator attached to it, Heinrich demonstrates his own disconnection from the social network as well as his tenuous but inseverable connection to it, as is indicated by his longing for more meaningful connection. Whether caught in its spiderweb or ensnared in its net, the protagonist is dependent on the objective structures of a society with little tolerance for independent thinking and unconventional output. Unfortunately for Heinrich, this is the only way he can create as an artist, and so he seems doomed, perhaps being predestined to fail. And yet, his failure was not inevitable, as Heinrich’s telltale pause at the window confirms. Coupled with the narrative ambivalence about the Kritzelei as “real work,” such instances signal to the reader that the image has the 20 For the Kritzelei as a commentary on the abstractness of socioeconomic relations, see Breithaupt, Der Ich-Effekt des Geldes, 159–60, and “Einspruch gegen die Selbstregulierung,” 583–90; Kontje, “Der gescheiterte Realist im Zeitalter der Abstraktion,” 79–98; and Sautermeister, Gottfried Keller: Beiträge zu seinem Werk, 12.

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potential to be “Sehenswertes” as legitimate art. The Kritzelei only fails as art because Heinrich fails as an artist. Much of the blame falls on society for making the protagonist into the man and artist that he becomes, but the novel still maintains a firm belief in the human capacity for selfactualization and so places the onus of responsibility on the individual. In the end, the novel thematizes what Georg Lukács considers to be the premise of any work by Keller—namely. the processes by which an individual becomes a citizen.21 Keller has in mind a very clear concept of citizenry, one beholden to strict standards of honor, ethics, and obligation. Writing to his publisher about Der grüne Heinrich in 1850, the author explains: Die Moral meines Buches ist: dass derjenige, dem es nicht gelingt, die Verhältnisse seiner Person und seiner Familie im Gleichgewicht zu erhalten, auch unbefähigt sei, im staatlichen Leben eine wirksame und ehrenvolle Stellung einzunehmen. Die Schuld kann in vielen Fällen an der Gesellschaft liegen. . . . Im gegebenen Falle aber liegt sie größtenteils im Charakter und dem besonderen Geschicke des Helden und bedingt hierdurch eine mehr ethische Bedeutung des Romans.22

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[The moral of my book is: that he who cannot succeed in balancing personal and familial relations is also incapable of assuming an effective and honorable position in civic life. The blame can fall in many cases on society. . . . Yet, in the present case, it falls largely on the character and the particular destiny of the hero and thus endows the novel with greater ethical meaning.]

For Keller, being a citizen is the ethical imperative not merely to exist in society but to contribute to its functioning in a meaningful and productive way. It is the idea of a responsible citizenship based on personal accountability that necessitates moderation and balance within one’s own person and without. Those who cannot or will not resolve their inner conflicts and reconcile their subjective desires as individuals with the objective 21 Of Der grüne Heinrich Georg Lukács writes: “Das Thema dieses Romans ist dasselbe wie das aller Novellen Kellers: die Erziehung eines Menschen zum Staatsbürger. . . .” (The theme of this novel is the same as in all of Keller’s novellas: the development of an individual into a citizen. . . .”) (my translation). See Lukács, Deutsche Realisten des 19. Jahrhunderts, 206. Lukács regards capitalism as an impediment to the full formation of the individual. 22 Letter to Eduard Vieweg, dated May 3, 1850. Keller quoted in Lukács 206. My translation. Lukács’s chapter on Keller emphasizes the centrality of productive and honorable civic activity to the author’s worldview (Deutsche Realisten des 19. Jahrhunderts, 145–230).

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demands of society are not able to assimilate into society as productive members. While ill-prepared and internally conflicted individuals can certainly lay some of the blame on social institutions and forces beyond their control, it is still the individual who has the final say and bears the final responsibility for his or her own failings. To illustrate that the individual is not completely a victim of circumstance and that an individual artist is not necessarily at the mercy of the market or the public, Keller incorporates the presence of three artist figures into the fabric of his novel. Their examples demonstrate to the reader that Heinrich had the potential to alter his course of action at any turn and insist on the validity of his abstract art. When faced with adversity, the helpless individual is never completely without choice or influence over his or her own destiny, but must also incur the consequences of his or her actions.

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A Foot above the Rest: Balzac’s “Unknown Masterpiece” The 1831 short story “The Unknown Masterpiece” by Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) is widely believed to have provided Keller with the inspiration for the Kritzelei episode. Indeed, a diary entry from July 1838 alludes to the fanatical perfectionism (“Vollkommenheitswahn”) of Balzac’s illfated genius (“verunglückte Genie”), the artist Maître Frenhofer.23 Not unlike Heinrich, Balzac’s artist sinks into a solipsistic cycle of painting and repainting until his canvas amounts to a chaotic accumulation of lines.24 Yet, unlike Heinrich, Frenhofer’s fervent defense of the unacknowledged value in his painting expands the definition of painting while also endowing the artist with the authority to establish its parameters. In interrogating the status of the artwork, “The Unknown Masterpiece” renegotiates the definition of what counts as art and stipulates who determines its legitimacy. Much like Keller would with Der grüne Heinrich, Balzac revised the story following its first publication in 1831 to transform what he originally called a “fantastic tale” (“conte fantastique”) about a mad artist-genius into an ambiguous meditation on aesthetics that numbered 23 Keller quoted in Weber, Gottfried Keller, Landschaftsmaler, 65. 24 For recent scholarship comparing Keller and Balzac, see Brandstetter, “Kritzeln, Schaben, Übermalen,” 360–62; Jin, Inszenierte Visualität, 159–98; and Naumann, “Die ‘kolossale Kritzelei’, der ‘borghesische Fechter’ und andere Versuche,” 171–72 and Bilderdämmerung, 88–90. Notable older accounts include Bätschmann, Entfernung der Natur—Landschaftsmalerei 1750–1920, 32; Kaiser, Bilder lesen: Studien zur Literatur und bildenden Kunst, 45; and Stelzer, Die Vorgeschichte der abstrakten Kunst, 21.

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among his more philosophical works.25 While the second version from 1837 adheres to the same basic plot structure, significant additions and a new ending substantially alter the story’s implications, when the happily mad artist from 1831 is replaced with a nuanced and lucid character who could in fact be, as art historian Dore Ashton puts it, a “plausible painter.”26 In the revised ending, the painter destroys both his abstract creation along with himself; but left open is the question whether Frenhofer’s painting might nevertheless represent a new modality of art and thus truly be an unknown masterpiece.27 Set in Paris in 1612, the story revolves around three artists with two incompatible attitudes toward art. Representing the convention-bound conservative perspective are the historical personages of Flemish court artist François Porbus (1569–1622) and French classical landscapist Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665). The former introduces the latter to the fictional Frenhofer, who has struggled for ten years to perfect a painting of Catherine Lescault, a courtesan of unparalleled beauty. When Frenhofer finally declares his masterpiece finished, its triumphant unveiling to Porbus and Poussin ends in tragedy. Instead of the visage of an ideal woman, the two younger artists behold a wall of strange lines and paint smears, completely incomprehensible save for a single perfect foot protruding out from underneath the chaos. Their bewilderment shocks Frenhofer, who recovers and counters their adverse reaction with his own indignance. Refusing to believe that he has created anything less than a masterpiece, he scorns Poussin and Porbus for their inability to appreciate his work, takes his painting, and leaves. The next day, Poussin and Porbus learn that the disgraced but defiant old artist has died during the night, his canvases all having been burned. For Balzac, the central conflict comes down to the difference between creation (production) and imitation (reproduction). Frenhofer’s agony over the unfinished painting stems from his rejection of a fundamental 25 Balzac likely conceived the idea for the story in 1830/1831 after becoming acquainted with Hoffmann’s works, first published in Mercure starting in 1829. For historical overview and analysis, see Ashton, A Fable of Modern Art, 9–29. 26 Ashton, A Fable of Modern Art, 15. That Balzac spent six years reworking the piece, more so than with most of his other works, attests to the definitive nature of the second version and the final intentions of the author. Not only did Balzac reposition artist and artwork to form the story’s core, but its amended passages resist reductive readings that could dismiss the 1837 version of Frenhofer as merely insane and his painting as mere insanity. 27 Naumann characterizes the open-endedness of the second version as “poly­ perspectival” (“polyperspektivisch”), given the incompatible and irreconcilable positions about the status of the artwork. See Naumann, Bilderdämmerung, 89.

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distinction between art and life, a divide unbridgeable so long as the artist persists in depicting preexisting forms. Thus, the representation of a woman can only ever rival reality but never fully be it, because it imitates nature’s forms rather than creating new ones. Since art resting on the presumption of mimesis is inherently artifice and in Frenhofer’s eyes remains “unfinished,” the artist must invent a means of aesthetic expression that does not originate in or refer to representational reality.28 To do so, the artist circumvents existing modes for a more direct aesthetic expression whose resultantly abstract forms appear nonsensical to those unversed in its language. In the story, the mode of abstraction materializes as the artist’s creative process: channeling his inner turmoil, Balzac’s artist releases, through a subjective gesture, an unrestrained outpouring of emotion. Like Heinrich, he compulsively, albeit consciously, adds excessive layers of material (here, paint) until the energy of painting and his actions as a painter become the artwork itself. In destroying the very notion of a divide separating art from life, Frenhofer shifts from reproducing to producing the vitality of his reality in paint. Announcing the originality of his work and its real existence as art is the exultation: “this woman’s not a creature, she’s creation” (cette femme n’est pas une créature, c’est une création.).29 Frenhofer’s painted Catherine is no creature found in nature and reproduced on canvas; she is a creation produced through the energy of the artist. In his quest to create reality as expressed through art, the artist moves beyond mimesis into a form of abstract art. Yet Frenhofer’s newly invented art form fails in the eyes of his critical audience, Poussin and Porbus. Their perspective is limited by a concept of art as imitation and representation, and so it only allows them to perceive a “so-called painting” with “colors daubed one on top of the other and contained by a mass of strange lines forming a wall of paint.”30 From this vantage point, the two artists zero in on the only element their eyes and conventional understanding will recognize as valid aesthetic form: the foot. As they neared the painting, they discerned, in one corner of the canvas, the tip of a bare foot emerging from this chaos of colors, shapes, and vague shadings, a kind of incoherent mist; but a delightful foot, a living foot! They stood stock-still with admiration before this fragment which had escaped from an incredible, slow, and advancing destruction. That

28 Balzac, The Unknown Masterpiece, 12. All subsequent citations from the story will refer to this source. 29 Balzac, 34. Sandy Petrey also points to the creature/creation distinction and comes to a similar conclusion in Petrey, “Catherine Lescault and LouisPhilippe,” 737. 30 Balzac, 40–41.

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foot appeared there like the torso of some Parian marble Venus rising out of the ruins of a city burned to ashes. ‘There’s a woman under there!’ Porbus cried. . . .31

Poussin and Porbus mistake the intended artwork (the production of incoherent color, shape, and line) for what they would have intended as artwork (a reproduction of a woman), but they attribute their misjudgment to the artist, who must surely have been insane to leave “nothing on his canvas” but a foot.32 Still, the professed delightfulness of the foot testifies to Frenhofer’s continued talent, if not his sanity; he can still imitate masterfully when reliant on mimetic reproduction but he willfully chooses to create and present something different as his finished painting. That his audience is so captivated by this foot would seem to point to the absurdity of their narrowly defined expectations of what constitutes art. Balzac reinforces the irreconcilability of their perspectives when Porbus directs the old artist to look again and see the same nothingness that the younger artists do. All three artists behold the same artwork, but they only see as much as falls within the parameters of their respective viewpoints.33 For Poussin and Porbus, an artwork not beholden to mimetic representation of the objective world constitutes not art but its demise.34 Although the audience rejects the artistic merit and legitimacy of Frenhofer’s creation, the crux of the matter is how Frenhofer reacts to their negative judgment. The 1831 Frenhofer doubts his own sanity and dismisses his achievement as the “nothing” that the audience perceives. The 1837 Frenhofer, however, responds with a vitriolic display of indignation and accusation. After an initial moment of self-doubt, he stands up with “great pride” and furiously declares: “‘But I can see her!. . . I can see her and she’s marvelously beautiful.’”35 The decisive moment of his reaction occurs when the artist, despite registering the rejection, returns to his original viewpoint and fights for his painting’s reality as art. Refusing to accept the perspective of his audience, Frenhofer rejects their rejection to insist that any perceived shortcomings of his painting exist only as the short-sightedness of his critical audience. Poussin and Porbus only see nothing because his creation corresponds to no preexisting aesthetic mode, and therefore lies outside their experience. In the ensuing standoff, eyes dart back and forth between painters and painting as the men exchange glances and opinions in a rapid interplay of differentiated viewpoints that destabilizes any fixed standpoint. When Frenhofer reoccupies 31 Balzac, 40–41. 32 Balzac, 42. 33 Balzac, 43. 34 Cf. Brandstetter, “Kritzeln, Schaben, Übermalen”; Naumann, Bilderdämmerung, 89. 35 Balzac, 43.

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his original position and defiantly holds it to his death, the story concludes with multiple perspectives left open.36 The inconclusive ending of 1837 leaves the reader with a speculative world where the potential of abstract art could be a reality. The deliberateness of Balzac’s reworked ending and its consequences for abstract art are encapsulated by another striking discrepancy between the two versions. Whereas the 1831 Frenhofer declares his painted Catherine to be not a creation but a creature (“cette femme n’est pas une création, c’est une créature”), the second version reverses this position by switching the placement of its key nouns: “cette femme n’est pas une créature, c’est une création.”37 The difference between creature (“créature”) and creation (“création”) epitomizes the painters’ contrasting beliefs about the divide separating art from life, imitation from creation, and the role of the artist. As creature, the 1831 painting reproduces a copy of a natural object subsequently beholden to conventional aesthetic criteria governed by the expectation for mimesis. Catherine’s upward evolution to creation in 1837 elevates the artist to a divine creator who produces new lifeforms through his own creative process. The artist’s work as labor and the work of art become one and the same, thereby collapsing the distinction between life and art. With this, Balzac reifies the painting’s potential to present a valid aesthetic expression of Frenhofer’s reality as individual and artist. The reversal of creature and creation also reinforces the reversal of scorn between audience and artist after the critical eyes of Poussin and Porbus prompt Frenhofer’s initial self-doubt. His defiant rejection of their verdict enacts a turnabout that redirects the critical gaze back at his audience and accuses them of blindness. This change in directionality signals a change in consciousness in Frenhofer, who asserts the authority of his abstraction to constitute art along with his authority as artist to produce it. By acting to resist the resistance of his critics and defend his perspective against theirs, the artist holds the spectator accountable for recognizing or misrecognizing artistic worth. The tragedy of the story is not Frenhofer’s failure to create art but his audience’s failure to see his creation as art: Poussin and Porbus look for a créature where only a création exists. They find in the fragment of the foot a relic of the past representing the old, traditional modes of representation. Balzac suggests that Frenhofer might have moved onward to avant-gardes modes of aesthetic expression that, judging by the final destruction of artist and artwork, are probably far too new for 36 Cf. Naumann, “Die ‘kolossale Kritzelei’, der ‘borghesische Fechter’ und andere Versuche,” 171. 37 Quoted in French from Petrey, “Catherine Lescault and Louis-Philippe,” 733.

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his contemporaries. Only Frenhofer sees it and defends it to the death, unwilling to settle for a life reproducing imperfect imitations of reality as opposed to producing his perfect creations of it. With the imagery of the lone foot “rising out of the ruins of a city burned to ashes,” Balzac implies that Frenhofer’s type of art, his abstraction, is not dead, just dead for now. Although alien to Frenhofer’s time and still not recognized as art in Balzac’s, the potential for abstract art is nevertheless present, waiting to be reborn like a phoenix. Its latency is subtly conveyed in the story’s French title (“Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu”): the final word, commonly translated as “unknown,” also signifies that which is “strange,” “alien,” or “unrecognized.” Frenhofer’s painting could be a masterpiece, but it is not seen, known, or recognized as such during his lifetime. That the artwork does not survive the story’s end indicates that Balzac acknowledges the inevitable rejection a radical mode of expression like abstraction would incur in his mid-nineteenth-century historical context. Although the story explains the motivations and meaning behind the unorthodox artwork, the author does not ask readers to agree with Frenhofer or find his work visually attractive but to entertain its viability as art and therefore its right to exist. Accepting abstraction as a legitimate art form and trusting the vision of the artist put the verdict of the critical audience into question. The presumption that the individual artist could be right necessarily suggests that the scornful voices of unreceptive audiences such as Poussin or Porbus might be wrong, however respected and formidable they may be in their field. This does not entail immediate acceptance or guarantee a prosperous or successful career as artist, as the fate of Balzac’s hero demonstrates. Yet it does save the artwork from failure by upholding its integrity to be art, which in turn creates the possibility for its eventual recognition as such. Frenhofer destroyed his painting as physical object, but his purposeful defense secured its legacy as revolutionary artwork and his legacy as pioneering artist. The intertextual dialogue between Balzac’s story and the Kritzelei episode underscores the importance of individual action. With respect to Keller’s moral, Frenhofer behaves in accordance with the Swiss author’s belief in individual responsibility for social integration, even if he provides a negative example. At odds with social and aesthetic conventions, the eccentric artist must decide whether to integrate himself into the social network or secede from it. Instead of sacrificing his aesthetic vision and autonomy as artist, Frenhofer chooses to defy the forces dictating his social reality and insist on the legitimacy of his own, an action whose consequences must be borne. If the artist will not compromise his subjectivity to contribute productively to objective society, he must either live outside it, alienated as artist and citizen, or not live at all. Preferring the latter option, Frenhofer destroys himself and his art. Balzac’s story illustrates the high costs of social nonconformity, but its multiperspectival

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ending suggests that they are costs worth incurring for the sake of aesthetic autonomy and individual expression. While Keller would prefer to sacrifice both in the interest of a smoothly functioning society, for the Kritzelei episode to recall and partly replicate aspects of “The Unknown Masterpiece” signifies the awareness of a perspective other than the one imparted by the novel’s moral. The awareness implicit in his intertextual allusion becomes explicit through other artist figures in Der grüne Heinrich, whose paralleling and contrasting accounts present the protagonist with alternative models of behavior and action.38 On two occasions in particular, Heinrich has the opportunity to undertake Frenhofer’s defiant course of action; one such opportunity could have conceivably saved his Kritzelei and staved off the death of abstract art. On both occasions, Heinrich fails to assert himself against the negative judgment of others, indicating that he possesses neither the willingness nor the wherewithal to act as Frenhofer does or to act at all.

At the Seat of the Scornful: Learning How to Reject Rejection

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The first opportunity arises when Heinrich walks before the High Commissioners, a fictional artwork painted by a fellow artist, the Dutchman Ferdinand Lys.39 As is communicated by its tongue-in-cheek title, the painting means to represent the fearful committee of experts before whom apprehensive artists, including Lys, must stand to hear judgment of their work.40 In the novel, the painting serves a dual purpose.41 First, 38 Keller conceived the novel’s other artists as “Parallel-und Kontrastfiguren” who were meant to parallel and contrast with Heinrich and shed light on his actions and possible pathways (see Keller quoted in Laufhütte, Wirklichkeit und Kunst, 215, fn 57). Through this technique, Keller could lead the reader to his intended moral without having to preach it overtly. See Amrein, Gottfried-KellerHandbuch, 29–30; Laufhütte, Wirklichkeit und Kunst, 214–48; Dominik Müller, Vom Malen Erzählen, 296–306; Ruppel, Gottfried Keller and his Critics, 14–15; and Erika Swales, “Gottfried Kellers (un)schlüssiges Erzählen,” 91–108. Heinrich Richartz shows how Keller developed this approach into a mode of storytelling that transformed his works into newer models of preexisting literature like Shakespeare or Goethe. Comparison and contrast raised readers’ critical consciousness of social change. See Richartz, Literaturkritik als Gesellschaft. 39 The visual and phonetic similarities of their names indicate that Lys was constructed as alter-ego and point of comparison for Heinrich. The Dutch pronunciation of “Lys” is even the plural form of “Lee.” See Kittler, “Fleur de Lys,” 100. More on Lys as Heinrich’s Doppelgänger, see Wagner-Egelhaaf, Die Melancholie der Literatur, 433. 40 Keller, 470 [413]. 41 Cf. Jin, Inszenierte Visualität, 112–19; Laufhütte, Wirklichkeit und Kunst, 224–29; and Wagner-Egelhaaf, Die Melancholie der Literatur, 434.

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its depiction of the high commissioners as art experts delegitimizes the critical institution of the academy whose judgments can make or break an artist’s career.42 Secondly, it configures a similar artist-artwork-critic audience constellation at the end of Balzac’s short story, when Heinrich beholds Lys’s painting and becomes the object of the picture’s scornful yet hypocritical gazes. In reversing the customary directionality of the subject-object relationship, Lys removes himself from critical scrutiny and shines an unforgiving light on the character of its spectator instead. Being thrust into the spotlight as the spectator before the High Commissioners forces Heinrich into a situation akin to Frenhofer’s encounter with Poussin and Porbus. In this regard, Lys’s painting functions as a litmus test for ascertaining how Heinrich might react when he, as potential professional artist, must expose himself and his art to the critical eyes of the actual board of high commissioners. Keller does not lead the reader to presume that the young aspirant would fare well. In Lys’s painting, the invisible hand preconfigures the gaze and body of the spectator into the composition of the fictional scene, a costume drama inspired by the biblical verse: “Blessed is the man that sitteth not in the seat of the scornful!” (Wohl dem, der nicht sitzet auf der Bank der Spötter!)].43 The “scornful” are a group of four to five men arranged to face the viewer from behind a marble table in the canopied garden of a Roman villa: a youth of barely nineteen, a silver-haired old man, a buffoon, a dignified man in uniform, and an abbot in silk soutane.44 Opposite their ranks, a voluptuous young woman tuning a lute sits with her back to the spectator. While each figure is allotted a flute of champagne, only the woman partakes in the libations, drinking from a glass held to her lips by the youth. All eyes save hers are directed outward at the spectator with undisguised, or poorly disguised, scorn. Set in eighteenth-century Italy, the scornful group assembles the stock characters associated with the commedia dell’arte, a genre notorious for its bawdy content and social criticism. Staging the high commissioners of academy judges as a comedic theater troupe emphasizes the emptiness of the ritual of going before the real academy. The painting interrogates the expertise of its so-called art experts by exposing their painted equivalents as hypocrites without honesty or integrity. Closer inspection obscures the initial transparency of their identities, as each character presents himself as something other than what he first appears to be. The beautiful youth carries the experience of 42 As Markus Schöb relates, attending the academy was a necessity for anyone who hoped for a successful career as an artist. Keller personally experienced the difficulties of achieving success as a Swiss artist at the Munich Academy. On the academy in Keller’s time, see Schöb “München leuchtet,” 18–21. 43 Keller, 468 [412]. The verse paraphrases Psalms 1:1. 468. 44 Keller, 468–69 [412–13].

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an old man; the old man exudes the wantonness of a youth; the buffoon holds a rose before his mouth trying to hide his derision; and the abbot holds a pinch of snuff under his nose. Nevertheless, even as these men conduct themselves in false and deceptive manners, they scorn the object of their gaze, and would seek to extract feelings of inadequacy and evidence of hypocrisy from the spectator. Lys’s painting suggests that these insincere men are in no position to determine the sincerity of the viewer, even if they have been placed in such a position. Through the technique of inversion, Lys enacts a role reversal that challenges his critical audience, rejecting the critics’ scorn by dislocating and objectifying them as receptacle of the artist’s scorn. The artist overturns the traditional relationship between spectator and painting so that the viewing subject becomes the object of judgment. Effecting this turnabout is the faceless maiden, the axial point where spectator and painting converge, and where viewing subject becomes viewed object.45 She serves a paradoxical purpose, bringing the spectator into the painting’s theatrical performance while at the same time ensuring his or her utter detachment from it. On the one hand, as a backward-facing figure (Rückenfigur) sitting closest to the picture plane, she functions as a point of identification that invites the audience to sit in her seat. Described as voluptuously figured and splendidly appareled, the young woman is likely a courtesan, an inference supported by the symbolic attributes of lute (profane love) and wine (earthly pleasure). Providing the entertainment sexually and musically, she exists for the men’s viewing pleasure, if only they would glance at her. Their scornful stares are reserved for the spectator, who, despite identifying with the female Rückenfigur, is still detached enough from the painting to be objectified by it. While the maiden does invite audiences into the painting, she does institute a barrier blocking their entry so that identification is only partial. Her backward-facing body pushes them back out of the picture and distances the spectator from the proceedings to remain an object of vision for the men. Were identification with her complete, the audience would be fully inside the picture and in her seat at the table, and therefore would not be objectified by the scornful stares passing over her head. Yet, because the maiden paradoxically enables audience participation while ensuring its alienation, her presence preserves the definable distinction between artwork and spectator, so that one may view the other. As a site of split identification, the maiden acts as pivot point 45 Kaiser refers to the maiden as a “blinder Fleck”: the “gehaltlose Rätsel Ich zum Rätsel Frau erklärt.” He makes much of this faceless female figure in light of Lys’s troubled relationship with women as well as Heinrich’s own mother complex (Das gedichtete Leben, 194).

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between subject and object where viewing subject in fact becomes viewed object. The audience conscripted into identifying with her becomes the object of the painting and is obligated to play the role of maiden in this farce. Occupying the lower and weaker end of a fundamentally inequitable balance of power, they must endure the scornful and objectifying gazes of men who, through the masks of their own hypocrisy, have little to no authority to sit in judgment. That Lys equates this comedic production and its cast of characters with the practice of art criticism impugns the “expert” opinion of the critic, but it also implicates those artists like Lys or Heinrich who must bring their work before the commissioners. Assuming a role comparable to the maiden, the artist undergoes a parallel split to act as a member of the troupe who is nonetheless distanced from the performance. As a successful career requires the approval of “experts,” the artist must play along in the comedic routine, performing on stage with the ensemble but also for the ensemble. Like the maiden with her lute, drinking whatever wine is poured down her throat, an artist like Lys must prostitute himself and his talents to entertain the commissioners and is expected to accept whatever opinion is offered. He participates in the charade, while nonetheless standing apart from it as the object of vision, scrutiny, and scorn. For Lys, the theater of art criticism degrades the artist compelled to play along for the sake of his career. Even he steps in front of their critical stares with trepidation. To go before the high commissioners then, is to be vulnerable, on public display, and open to the derision of those whose words have power, but not necessarily integrity or truth. It is to experience the same sensation that Heinrich and every spectator feels when walking under the artwork’s battery of gazes, being acutely aware of the painting’s disapproval. As Heinrich relates, the spectator cannot escape the scornful stares that schienen mit unabwehrbarem Durchdringen jede Selbsttäuschung, Halbheit, Schwärmerei, jede verborgene Schwäche, jede unbewußte oder bewußte Heuchelei aus ihm herauszufischen. . . . Der Betrachter, der seiner nicht ganz bewußt war, befand sich so übel unter diesen Blicken, daß man eher versucht war auszurufen Weh dem, der vor der Bank der Spötter steht (469)! [seemed, with a penetration that could not be warded off, to drag out of him every self-deception, superficiality, extravagant enthusiasm, every hidden weakness, every bit of unconscious or conscious hypocrisy. . . . The observer, who was not quite conscious of his own, felt so uncomfortable beneath their glance that he was tempted to alter the words and exclaim: “Woe unto him who stands before the seat of the scornful!” (413)]

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Heinrich’s inversion of the Bible verse recognizes how the painting curses the spectator and perverts the normally blessed position of detached onlooker into one of woe when receiving the impact of its negativity (“verneinender Natur”).46 With every self-deception, hidden weakness, and hypocrisy forcibly extricated and brought to the surface for all to see and judge, Heinrich feels exposed and highly self-conscious about his perceived inadequacies. Lys means to elicit acutely uncomfortable feelings, and even derives sadistic pleasure from bringing unsuspecting guests before the painting to watch their embarrassed faces (“die verlegenen Gesichter”). When the actual committee of academy “experts” sits in judgment of this painting, its members become the spectators in its crosshairs. They view the maiden as a site of split identification and are made into the objects of their own scorn. The act of exhibiting the confrontational painting reverses the directionality of stares and allows Lys to project the artist’s scorn onto the critics, brazenly declaring his contempt for these “experts” and the enterprise of art criticism as they perform it. This gesture of projection works to emasculate the critics under the same objectifying gazes they level at the artist. Objectified by their own scorn, judged by their own judgments, the critics are forced by the hand of the artist to face their personal shortcomings and hypocritical behavior. Throwing their stares back in their faces, Lys categorically rejects their scorn. This crucial moment of self-awareness for the artist expresses belief in his work and lays claim to an artistic identity independent of audience reception. Instead of caving to the social pressure exerted by the scornful stares, Lys asserts the authority of the individual artist to accept or reject the opinion of others, to determine the parameters of one’s own aesthetic consciousness, and to produce art as personally envisioned. The gesture implied by Lys’s picture mimics the moment when Balzac’s Frenhofer rejects the critical gazes of Poussin and Porbus. As with Frehofer’s accusations, the painting’s confrontational gazes command the judges to judge themselves, questioning the validity of the critic’s opinion and the right to insist on this one possible interpretation. Sustaining these open and alternate perspectives allows for the possibility that different sets of eyes could look at the same image but not necessarily see or respond to the same thing. Such nonconformist perspectives not only nurture novel modes of expression such as abstract art but they also endow artists with the autonomy to define concepts such as art, success, and failure on their own terms. That being said, it falls on the artist to open this perspective and fight for its viability in the way that Frenhofer does for his unknown 46 “Waren nun Absicht und Wirkung dieses Bildes verneinender Natur” (469). (The design of the picture and the impression it produced were of a negative nature.) (413).

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masterpiece and Lys would ostensibly do with his painting should he ever bring it before the academy’s high commissioners. Yet, when Heinrich steps before High Commissioners as a painting, his reaction exposes the unlikelihood that he could ever take a stand for aesthetic independence and self-advocacy as an artist. Overwhelmed by feelings of insecurity, inadequacy, and incompetence, Heinrich is rendered incapable of verbal articulation and silently makes the same embarrassed faces (“verlegene Gesichter”) as Lys’s other guests. The stares seem to cut into Heinrich, reaching an internal level where he is struck dumb and unable to speak even after Lys leads him away from the judgmental committee.47 Whereas the painting challenges the critic’s gaze, Heinrich’s silent discomfort points to a hesitancy, even an inability, to respond in a similar manner when the opportunity arises with the Kritzelei, as it does a few chapters later.

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It’s Not Easy Being Green: Heinrich Fails as Artist Heinrich’s second opportunity to act as Frenhofer does or as Lys’s painting recommends occurs when the Danish artist Oskar Erikson interrupts Heinrich’s self-absorbed scrawling and beholds the Kritzelei. He then issues a critically scornful invective against the image and its artist that reconfigures the artist-artwork-critic audience constellation recognizable from Balzac and the encounter with Lys’s painting. Erikson’s lengthy, rambling, and overblown diatribe substantiates the Kritzelei’s ability to generate an affective response, while also undercutting the integrity of his own words. As a mediocre commercial artist (“Handelsmaler”), he functions as a surrogate for the bourgeoisie and adopts their narrow-minded mentality to speak with the voice of philistine convention rather than in recognition of genuine aesthetic expression or creative innovation.48 His grossly ironic misrepresentation of the Kritzelei misuses Kant and misconstrues Heinrich’s motivations for creating the work, which testifies to an essential estrangement between what the artist creates and how the audience receives. The moment of conflict between viewpoints affords Heinrich the opportunity to contest the negative judgment in the manner of Frenhofer or Lys. Both instances imply that a painting’s failure to sell or a critic’s failure to connect with it does not necessarily doom either

47 “[Ich] wußte. . . nicht ein Wort zu dem Gespräche beizutragen” (Keller, 470). (By myself I was incapable of contributing one word.) (414). 48 Keller 460. Compare with Eisert, Kunst und Künstlerwerdung, 108–10; Jin, Inszenierte Visualität, 120; and Selbmann, Gottfried Keller: Romane und Erzählungen, 41–42.

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artwork or artist to failure. Unlike either, Keller’s protagonist does not act at all when presented with the chance to defend his work. The decisive moment for action occurs halfway through the scornful monologue when Erikson is interrupted by his wife. Flustered at the disruption, Erikson pauses, opening his mouth and his eyes, as if momentarily uncertain of how to answer or what to say. This pause presents a prime opportunity for Heinrich’s action. It does not last long, but Keller brings it out by drawing attention to Heinrich. This is the younger artist’s moment to say or do something: to disagree with Erikson and defend his scrawl; to explain the process of its creation; to assert his voice as artist. Here is a moment when Heinrich could insist on the legitimacy of his creation, and abstract art could emerge as a real possibility for artistic expression. Yet nothing happens. The moment is rife with a potentiality unseized by the protagonist, who silently stands “verlegen am Fenster” (at the window, embarrassed). The moment for potential action ends when Erikson launches into the second half of his critique. What follows is an ensuing paragraph of commentary that climaxes with the older artist’s fist punched through the scrawl: “Was soll das Gekritzel? Frisch, halte dich oben, mache dich heraus aus dem verfluchten Garne! Da ist wenigstens ein Loch!” Mit diesen Worten stieß er die Faust durch das Papier und riß es kreuz und quer auseinander (571).

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[“What’s the meaning of the scrawl? Come, keep your head above water, get out of the damned net! There’s a hole at any rate!” With that, he thrust his fist through the paper and tore it across and across.” (502)]

And still, Heinrich stands by in idle silence. He does not act out in anger; he does not act out in creative defiance like Lys and his confrontational painting; nor does he even act out to save his own creation from physical destruction. He does not act, period. Yielding to his reproving friend, the younger artist finally, albeit silently, manages to move at the episode’s conclusion, but only to extend his hand in thanks (“ich reichte ihm dankbar die Hand”), grateful that Erikson has acted for him.49 The existence of the image ends with Erikson’s action, but the existence of its potential to be abstract art ends with Heinrich’s inaction, specifically his failure to act or speak during the pause in Erikson’s commentary. Therein lies the problem—for Heinrich’s career as artist as well as for the emergence of novel art forms such as abstraction. Since doing nothing provokes no 49 Keller, 571.

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change in established norms, Heinrich’s inaction ends any potential for his scrawl to represent a legitimate mode of aesthetic expression. Any aperture for an alternative perspective willing to entertain the possibility of abstract art is sealed shut. Erikson’s punch constitutes the death blow for the Kritzelei and Heinrich’s career as artist only because Heinrich does not react like Frenhofer did to challenge the critical words and unwelcoming gaze of his audience. A probable cause for the protagonist’s inaction is found in the author’s language. In the original German, Keller qualifies Heinrich’s passive silence with the word “verlegen,” both when challenged by Erikson and when confronted with Lys’s painting.50 In its current use, the term designates a feeling of embarrassment, but the word “verlegen” itself is etymologically rooted in inaction. According to Duden, the middle-high German equivalent denotes a long period of inactivity during which one incurs damage or detriment as a result of being in an excessively inert state: “durch langes Liegen Schaden nehmen oder träge werden.”51 While this definition certainly pertains to the protagonist’s behavior, we find in its contemporary usage a viable explanation for Heinrich’s silent inaction: embarrassment. Duden defines the adjective or adverb “verlegen” as an expression of uncertainty and helplessness occurring when one is in an awkward, unpleasant situation and does not know how to act or conduct oneself (“in einer peinlichen, unangenehmen Situation nicht so recht wissend, wie man sich verhalten soll; Unsicherheit und eine Art von Hilflosigkeit ausdrückend”).52 At once powerfully personal and socially situated, it is an emotional state involving internal sensations elicited by external conditions or conditioning. While these internal sensations can range from intense discomfort and doubt to confusion and self-consciousness, they typically arise from the awareness that one has committed a socially unbefitting transgression witnessed by others. The feeling of embarrassment would then presuppose an awareness of socially acceptable behavior and an apprehension of the unwanted attention that is the result of its violation.53 50 Cf. Loosli’s identification of inner passivity (“innere Passivität”) as a dominant motif of the novel (Fabulierlust Und Defiguration, 217). 51 (To incur damage or become inactive due to lengthy recumbency). Duden online, s.v. “verlegen,” accessed December 12, 2020, https://www.duden.de/ rechtschreibung/verlegen_befangen_schuechtern. 52 Ibid. 53 Other scholars have characterized Heinrich’s embarrassment (Verlegenheit) as self-consciousness (Befangenheit or Ich-Befangenheit), a word not appearing in the Kritzelei episode but whose possible connotations of being constrained by one’s own self dovetails with the visual metaphors used by Keller to describe the scrawl. See Kittstein, Gottfried Keller, 73; Laufhütte, Wirklichkeit und Kunst, 273; and Locher, Gottfried Keller: Welterfahrung, Wertstruktur und Stil, 51–77.

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Accordingly, Heinrich’s embarrassment in the novel stems not from the act of creating the scrawl but from the fact that an audience sees it. In defying aesthetic norms, the knotted web on the canvas represents a defiance of social norms and constitutes visual proof of Heinrich’s socially unacceptable behavior. Standing “verlegen am Fenster” in response to Erikson’s words, he is caught in a social transgression and does not know how to extricate himself from the spider web—hence his convenient perch by the window, a symbolic desire for a “way out.” The architectural orifice prefigures the outlet made for him by Erikson when he punches a hole in the drawing and exhorts his young friend to “get out of the damned net! There’s a hole at any rate” (“mache dich heraus aus dem verfluchten Garne! Da ist wenigstens ein Loch!”). As the two then look through the window of what was once the scrawl, Heinrich and the reader realize that the “way out” only opens when the offending creation is eradicated, and convention is upheld. Although Balzac’s foray into potentially abstract images also ended in ruin, the destruction of the Kritzelei fundamentally differs from the destruction of the unknown masterpiece. Whereas Heinrich’s lack of agency allows for his work to be destroyed by another, Frenhofer demonstrates his agency as individual and artist by burning his abstract painting—a defiant action against his critics. He dies, still clinging to his perspective and the belief in his art. By contrast, Heinrich is delivered from the unpleasant situation and brought into conformity with social expectations by complying with his audience’s perspective rather than moving to maintain his. His embarrassed silence and his passive response to Erikson’s scorn indicate that he has tacitly accepted and internalized the judgment externally assigned by his audience. Like the maiden in Lys’s picture, drinking the wine poured down her throat, Heinrich takes the criticism, the ridicule, and the scorn leveled at him and swallows them. That he has truly accepted these things and accepted them into himself is conveyed through the conspicuous recurrence of “verlegen.” This particular word and the feeling it denotes appear in conjunction with Heinrich’s response to the High Commissioners and Erikson’s critique of the scrawl. Heinrich’s narration tells of “verlegene Gesichter,” the embarrassed faces made when the scornful stares in the painting appear to recognize his self-deceptions, hypocrisies, and inadequacies. What is originally imagined in the eyes of others is then acknowledged within himself, received and accepted through his silence. Shortly thereafter, the word surfaces again when Heinrich stands “verlegen am Fenster” during the pause in Erikson’s scornful monologue. The term then appears a second time as a description of Heinrich’s response to Erikson’s critical viewing of the scrawl. When the older artist first sees Heinrich’s work, he stares at his young friend with a dubious or critical expression (“mit bedenklichem Gesichte”). Perceiving

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Erikson’s doubt and possibly sensing the impending critique, Heinrich becomes “verlegen und rot” (embarrassed and red). This sign of outward embarrassment initiates a lopsided silent dialogue between critic and artist. It is lopsided in the sense that the critic’s gaze occupies the dominant position of power: an actively viewing subject (Erikson) versus a passively viewed object (Heinrich), who registers his receipt of the stare by blushing. The physical response serves as a rejoinder continuing the wordless exchange between the two artists: Erikson conveys his dubious stance toward the scrawl; Heinrich receives and internalizes the social reproach in his embarrassment, and then makes his internal feelings externally apparent by turning red. This is not the first lopsided dialogue between scornful critic and embarrassed artist encountered in the novel; we recall Heinrich’s embarrassment before Lys’s High Commissioners,” a painting that deliberately contrives the unpleasant experience of the artist-critic dialogue. It is therefore not surprising that Heinrich, initially “verlegen und rot,” later stands “verlegen am Fenster” and does not act to defend his creation when the opportunity arises. He has already internalized the social censure and conformed to the perspective that his abstraction has no potential as art. Emphasizing the significance of the protagonist’s embarrassment, Keller juxtaposes Heinrich’s reddened face with the pointed use of his epithet by Erikson in the next sentence: “Du hast, grüner Heinrich, mit diesem bedeutenden Werke. . .” (With this significant work, Green Henry . . .). For our “grüner Heinrich” to turn red signals a change in his being and identity, one remaining in effect to the novel’s end. Just as he wears his father’s green coat, Heinrich wears his embarrassment on his body as a sign. While the coat signifies his purported profession, his redness signals that he has accepted and internalized the judgment of others. Suddenly Heinrich is less “green” than he previously knew himself to be, because, until his scrawl was scorned by Erikson, he understood himself as an artist in the vein of his father, even if this identity was not fully formed. The critical response of his audience and his passive submission to it cast doubt on a once-assured identity that is never brought to fruition. His career as artist effectively ends here. As is suggested by his early work and confirmed by his overall lack of success, Heinrich exhibits no desire to produce conventional art that would appeal to a bourgeois market or its critics. Nor does he have the wherewithal or sense of self to reject the perspectives of others and defend the work he produces. Heinrich’s inaction enables Erikson’s destruction of the scrawl because it conveniently provides him a “way out” of unpleasant criticism at that moment. In the larger trajectory of the story, Heinrich’s inaction saves him from the action of forming his identity as artist. In being “verlegen” and in passively internalizing externally imposed parameters, Heinrich is “verlegen” in the literal sense of the word: he is displaced, mislayed.

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When the censorious gazes and words of his audience instill in him the feeling of being misplaced, Heinrich allows himself to be displaced as artist by not acting against his critics and for his art. At the end of the novel, he is accordingly displaced from his original career path into a life of civil servitude. This denouement of social displacement is absent from Keller’s initial 1855 publication, which tragically concludes with Heinrich I dying quietly in poverty and solitude as a failed artist. In the second version, Keller resuscitates the artist but not his career; Heinrich II still fails at art but finds a new life in a new social role. Resolving the story in this manner reaffirms the cultural norms already in effect instead of proffering the potential for new ones. Heinrich II’s final integration into society as a civil servant is also the integration of his individual aesthetic perspective into the mainstream conventions of the communal whole. The revised conclusion of the second version cautions against new aesthetic possibilities such as abstract art rather than heralding their potential. Even an empowered artist figure like Lys still maneuvers within the given precepts and might not be quite as defiant as his painting. Although his artistic identity is more developed than Heinrich’s, whether he would use his authority and autonomy to advocate institutional change is less definite, with no indication that his provocative picture experienced public exhibition or ever went before a real board of high commissioners. Implicit in Lys’s defiance is the understanding that the conventional boundaries of aesthetic standards, while perhaps adjusted, will remain essentially intact. The status of abstraction within the text, as well as the potential for its nonliterary emergence beyond its pages, rests in the hands of individuals prepared to defend its integrity. In Balzac and Keller, the critical audiences resist the unorthodox artworks and move to dismantle the construction of heterogeneous perspectives. As a result, it falls on the artist figure to either withstand the external pressure or capitulate to it. Frenhofer acts to withstand the views of his naysayers, choosing to end his life and his art instead of complying with the status quo. Heinrich does not act and hence by default capitulates under Erikson’s ridicule. By passively yielding to his critic’s position, Heinrich allows himself to be redirected back in line with social norms, thereby following a trajectory that eventually merges into prevailing aesthetic conventions and directs the protagonist toward a new profession. With Heinrich not acting to counter Erikson and to save his creation from destruction, the novel concludes with a uniperspectival stance: limits of aesthetic acceptability should exist and the scrawl violates them. Heinrich’s unruly line violates these limits because it conflicts with Keller’s vision for an aesthetic sphere that is subject to objective standards and socioeconomic regulation. Keller communicates a general concern for how the individual is integrated within the organization of the greater

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social scheme, choosing to write Der grüne Heinrich as a Bildungsroman. Keller makes clear in his moral and in the novel that social norms do not conform to the individual; rather, the individual has the task of “building” himself in the preparation of assuming a functional and worthy social role.54 While Heinrich II succeeds in accommodating himself to society and finding his place in it as a civil servant, he fails in his endeavor to become an artist. Thus, the second version succeeds as Bildungsroman because it fails as Künstlerroman. Integration within the given social order precludes Heinrich’s pursuit of the idiosyncratic and aesthetic perspective that could have offered the potential for alternative art forms such as abstraction. Still, Keller’s conservatism is not uncritical; nor is it unsympathetic to his failed protagonist. The author suggests that the systemic failures, contradictions, and feelings of social estrangement experienced by Heinrich are simply endemic to the new modernity in which the author and his avatar find themselves, as nineteenth-century society transitions from community-based cottage industries to the alienating technologies of mass production take place. As the novel’s alternate endings make clear, the stakes are high—either adapt or die, be it metaphorically or literally.55 In the end, Heinrich does not fail as an artist owing to lack of talent or creativity. He is neither prepared nor willing to live life on the margins of society, to be an outsider unable to communicate normatively with his fellow citizens or contribute productively to his social milieu. Unlike Frenhofer, he cannot bring himself to be society’s sacrificial lamb and act in the interest of his individual aesthetic vision at the cost of his social inclusion.56 Although his wearing his father’s green coat announces his eccentricity and difference, he never leaves the social order for the life of bohemian artist. Never his to begin with, the coat is less a marker of his identity than it is a costume that Heinrich tries on in his own 54 Voßkamp’s discussion cleverly plays out the etymological affinities between Bild (“image”), Bildung (“formation”), and Einbildungskraft (“imagination”) in the process of building oneself into a more perfect version of oneself in society (Ein anderes Selbst, 83–89). 55 Erikson and Habersaat accommodate themselves to mechanical reproduction and market interests to achieve economic success at the expense of quality and singularity. Lys operates outside the market and society by virtue of his independent wealth. Römer does not adapt at all and is institutionalized, removed from social life. Cf. Lukács, Deutsche Realisten des 19. Jahrhunderts, 213; Potter, Three Great Artists Reflecting on the Spiritual Purpose of Art, 102–16 and Nadja Wick, Apotheosen narzisstischer Individualität, 171–86. 56 See Kaiser’s observation that Heinrich wants to be neither the sacrificial lamb (“Opferlamm”) nor the court jester (“Hofnarr”) of bourgeois society: “Heinrich will als Künstler weder das Opferlamm noch der Hofnarr der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft sein” (Das gedichtete Leben, 215).

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commedia-dell’arte production; it allows him to play the role of ideal artistcitizen without actually assuming the full responsibilities or consequences of being one. Perhaps this accounts for the embarrassment Heinrich feels when standing before Lys’s painting, conveying a self-deception or hidden weakness momentarily made conscious under the penetrating stares of the painted high commissioners. The especially scornful look of the buffoon standing directly opposite the spectator reminds Heinrich that he too “masks” his true self, and simply wears the costume of an artist rather than the clothes. Yet Heinrich does not want to be society’s fool either, making fanciful creations like the Kritzelei that provoke scorn and rebuke. That he wants to participate in the social order and not operate outside its bounds is loudly communicated through his silent inaction at Erikson’s criticism. When compelled to do so, Heinrich does not act to justify or vindicate his work in the way that Frenhofer does through his verbal defiance, or Lys might do through his intentionally provocative art, or even as Kandinsky later would do through his written treatises. Heinrich submits to the servile role of public functionary, integrating himself into society by living in servitude to it. With his extraordinary life and his potentially extraordinary art brought back in line with the ordinary expectations of the social order, the scrawl no longer promises a new aesthetic tendency. Instead, it is little more than the doodle (“Gekritzel”) Erikson sees. Contrasting Heinrich’s distracted doodling with real work (“wirkliche Arbeit”), Keller implies that the scrawl is not a socially useful (“wirksam”) or honorable (“ehrenvoll”) aesthetic expression represented by Meister Lee or advocated by the novel’s moral. He reduces its labor of creation to something akin to the fruitless weaving of Heinrich’s mother, a wasted effort contributing nothing to the social good. In a manner that is similar to Homer’s Penelope, she sits by the window at her spinning wheel waiting in vain for the return of her unproductive son and tirelessly spinning the cloth for canvases he will never paint.57 Like Heinrich’s spinning lines, the mother’s spinning wheel starts as idle distraction and spirals into solipsistic behavior alienating the individual from productive social engagement. While Mother Lee in all likelihood dies happy in her deluded belief in her son and her uneconomical use of her craft, Keller does not advocate her example. This fact is demonstrated by the piteous demise of Heinrich I, who similarly clings to a wasteful and marginalized life as an artist.58 Heinrich II survives because 57 On economic factors ultimately ruining both mother and son, see Lukács, Deutsche Realisten des 19. Jahrhunderts, 215; and Moormann, Subjektivismus und bürgerliche Gesellschaft, 57–61. 58 Cf. Hart, Readers and Their Fictions in the Novels and Novellas of Gottfried Keller, 28–31.

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he, like the other artists in the novel, makes the same choice as his author to abandon his desired career as artist and enter into civil servitude. Keller subjects the protagonist to countless inequitable and inhospitable socioeconomic circumstances that help pave the way to failure, but he still accords his characters opportunities to exercise freedom of choice. The outcomes of their decisions strongly suggest to the reader that the proper and ethical path is social assimilation even at the expense of individual happiness. Heinrich II is still unhappy, but his work is socially useful, honorable, and therefore “real.” While Heinrich may not consider the scrawl “real work,” the image does accomplish valuable work for the emergence of abstract art in the twentieth century. Its sheer existence demonstrates that abstract images were circulating in literature well before 1900, even if artists might not have defended or endorsed their legitimacy as art. However that may be, Heinrich’s own lack of self-awareness establishes that the self-awareness of the artist is a necessary component for the abstract painting that was to come a half century after Der grüne Heinrich’s initial publication, when artists such as Kandinsky had the wherewithal to defend their startling creations against resistant and uncomprehending audiences. Still resistant himself, Keller drives Heinrich to abstraction only to drive him from it, to express what could be, only to enforce that it should not be. He does so, perhaps, in the interest of the social organism; to convey to the reader that the potential for an abstract art would be misplaced and therefore demands to be displaced, because it ultimately has no place within a wellordered society.

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Figure 6.1. Paul Klee, Bauchredner und Rufer im Moor (Ventriloquist and Caller in the Marsh), 1923. Oil transfer drawing, pencil and watercolor on paper on cardboard, 15.2 x 10.9 in. (38.7 x 27.9 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Reproduced with permission from Art Resource, New York.

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6: Inside the Mind and Outside the Margins: The Unruly Lines of Paul Klee, André Masson, and Cy Twombly

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P

aul Klee (1879–1940) completed the Bauchredner und Rufer im Moor (Ventriloquist and Caller in the Marsh, fig. 6.1) in 1923, nearly seventy years after his Swiss compatriot Gottfried Keller initially published Der grüne Heinrich and brought his unfortunate title artist with his doomed abstract artwork into existence. Despite the untimely discrepancy, the work is just as applicable to Keller’s time as to Klee’s. The Bauchredner presents an imaging of the novel’s central theme and the intended destination of Heinrich’s long and winding road: the integration of the individual and the artist into society. The painting’s title figure calls out against a grid of darkening gradations, appearing unwelcome in the world around him and fundamentally incompatible with its rigidly set dimensions. Pushed outward from the picture plane, the title figure’s disproportionately bulbous body cannot fit inside the rectangular boxes of the landscape behind him. His fleshy peach tones and his body’s soft curves contrast starkly with the muted grays and greens of the landscape’s tabular regularity. Although alienated, the Bauchredner still lives in the world as part of it, for the same matrix that bars his assimilation also prevents his escape. A rectilinear pattern runs through his insides to lock him in the grid. Like the fish caught in his lure between water and air and his positioning on the canvas, he occupies an uncertain place in this world, belonging neither to light nor dark, right nor left, top nor bottom. He floats in the center and strives upward, but his feet never leave the solidity of a ledge bent once upward and again downward. He is at home nowhere and communicates with no one, although his inaudible call suggests his yearning for both. Like the curvilinear Bauchredner, the protagonist of Der grüne Heinrich is at odds with objective society, unable to constrain his excessive subjectivity within its rigidly linear mold for subjecthood. Time and again, Heinrich fails to align himself with the expectations for responsible citizenship when his egocentric impulses and solipsistic behavior thwart his sincere desire to join the social whole as an artist. Sharing the Bauchredner’s in-between status, Heinrich cannot fit inside the box meant for the artist, but he also cannot fully disentangle himself from the social network. Consequently, his integration remains only partial and he hovers

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for most of the novel on the margins, experiencing a social alienation that subsequently results in and is reflected through artworks that also fail to remain within conventional aesthetic standards. His problems with the world consume his thoughts and beget emotions that roil inside his mind, bursting to get out like the fanciful creatures in the Bauchredner’s belly. These hybrid mutations, so out of place in the outside world, remain unuttered and unexposed to hostile surroundings until Keller’s protagonist expels his demons through his art. With pen strokes corresponding to the turbulent turns of his emotional state, Heinrich gives visible form to the chaos in his head, expressing an inner conflictedness that is itself exacerbated by external conflicts with society. However, because no conventional genre or preexisting mode can properly give form to their confusion, his increasingly abstracted forms eventually culminate in a fully abstract image: the Kritzelei, a colossal scrawl spiraling across a monumentally sized canvas. Although this mode of abstract art dies shortly after its birth in literature when Heinrich fails to defend it, Keller’s unruly line lives on in the legacy of the twentieth-century artists—Paul Klee (1879–1940), André Masson (1896–1987), and Cy Twombly (1928–2011)—who detach line from object and elevate its abstract usage into an art form. Each of these artists turns inward in search of authentic humanity to bring forth their primal creativity in pictorial forms reminiscent of the metaphors invoked by Keller to convey the symbolic import and visual appearance of the Kritzelei: the labyrinth, the web, and the scrawl. Like the members of the avant-garde in general, these artists purposely sought out the margins, establishing themselves as insiders through their outsider status and deliberately distancing themselves from the mainstream so that they could issue critiques or correctives through art.

From Margins to Middle: Klee Takes the Line for a Walk The line has traditionally existed on the periphery of art, as counterintuitive as this might seem. After all, the line is an essential element of composition, the very backbone of drawing; it is something so simple to form that even a child can do it. Its plainness and unassuming innocence might lead us to overlook the line, to take its presence for granted, or to assume it to be present that it is present when it really isn’t. As a result of its traditionally subordinate role, it would be easy to underestimate the line until it becomes disruptive and declares itself the center of attention such as it did in Der grüne Heinrich. Erikson’s reaction to the Kritzelei and the significance of its failure for Heinrich illustrate how well Keller understood the transgressive potential of the line. Instead of serving as secondary characteristic, a tool to bound forms within a composition,

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Heinrich’s line becomes the form and itself constitutes the composition. It is an active agent that assumes control of the canvas and, to an extent, the artist as well. With the protagonist only semiconsciously moving his pen; the line described by Keller acts largely of its own accord, proceeding freely forward as aimlessly as its artist wanders through life. Heinrich’s line does what Paul Klee would theorize in 1920 was the essence of modern art and the genesis of an absolute art: it “takes a walk for its own sake” (“ein Spaziergang um seiner selbst willen”).1 To endow his line with the authority and momentum to take this walk, Klee develops a methodological program that lets the abstract line loose on a narrative stroll to make visible the metaphysical energies of an in-between world or a Zwischenwelt through the physical elements of drawing. For Klee, the line that takes a walk for its own sake has categorically no place in naturalist or nonabstract art. The conventional conception of line—used in the service of naturalism—inherently ascribes an imitative function that restricts its freedom of movement. This constricts the freedom of expression and self-expression exercised by the artist who, to some subsequent degree, is obliged to reproduce what is already given by nature rather than to create something new from within him or herself. The line “taking a walk for its own sake” necessitates an act of creation on the artist’s behalf, because its graphic path is not endemic to nature. In a 1908 diary entry, Klee observes of naturalism that “there are no lines as such in it; lines are merely generated as borders between areas of different tonalities or colors. By using patches of color and tone, it is possible to capture every natural impression in the simplest way, freshly and immediately.”2 Since all lines are a form of invented expression and therefore superfluous to naturalist painting, Klee concludes that naturalism “leaves no room for my capacity for linear treatment.” Linear treatment marks the line between creation and imitation. The solution to this conundrum is not necessarily to dispense with naturalism but to transcend it: “A work of art,” Klee claims, “goes beyond naturalism when the line enters in as an independent pictorial element.”3 Only when freed of external obligation and the mediating restraints of 1 Klee, Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch, 6. My translation. The critical body of writing consulted here encompasses the artist’s personal diaries (Tagebücher 1898– 1918, 1957), his Creative Credo (Schöpferische Konfession, 1920), The Pedagogical Sketchbook (Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch, 1925) and the two bands of Bauhaus lectures (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre), The Thinking Eye (Das bildnerische Denken, 1956) and Infinite Natural history (Unendliche Naturgeschichte, 1964). Translations from the Credo will be my own, while all others will be from John Sallis, which can be found in that author’s work, Klee’s Mirror. Citations from Sallis will note the original source as well as the translation’s page number. 2 Klee, Tagebücher, §842; Sallis, Klee’s Mirror, 66. 3 Klee, Tagebücher, §842. Sallis, Klee’s Mirror, 69.

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convention can the line realize its potential as expressive device, and only when unbeholden to the limits of naturalism can the artist realize the full potential of art. The purpose of art and the way the line enters into it are laid out by Klee in his “Schöpferische Konfession” (“Creative Credo,” 1920). The artist’s first systematic reflection on visual representation and the creative process, the “Credo” opens with a statement of such significance that it bears citing in its original German: “Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern macht sichtbar.”4 Art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible. With visibility and creation defining artistic production for Klee, it is for good reason that Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61) enlists this artist and this particular sentence in his essay “Eye and Mind” (“L’oeil et l’esprit,” 1961) to advance his ontological definition of painting as a medium that at its core “celebrates no other enigma but that of visibility.”5 At first his words seem somewhat enigmatic themselves: why should visibility be an enigma when it is presumably right before our eyes? However, Merleau-Ponty only echoes the same enigma already inherent in Klee’s opening statement, an enigma that underscores Klee’s understanding of art and his liberation of line. Klee, however, had a different phrase to characterize the enigma that sets the abstract line walking: the “Geheimnis des Schöpferischen” (mystery of creativity).6 To begin with, Klee defines art not by what it is but by what it does. As the first clause suggests (“Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder”), what art does would not involve naturalism, or at least something exclusively adherent to naturalism. Art does not simply reproduce the objects already visibly evident. That Klee refers to objects is signified by his nominalization of the adjective (“das Sichtbare”). Despite the definitive importance of creation asserted in the first clause, the words “make visible” in the second clause (“sondern macht sichtbar”) give reason to pause. On the one hand, the act of making entails some aspect of creating, of bringing something new into existence. Combined with the switch from noun to adjective (“das Sichtbare” to “sichtbar”), the phrase to “make visible” implies the existence of something invisible; something that does not necessarily predates the world or humanity, only predates the visible. Moreover, this invisible is not unequivocally invisible because it is still able to be made visual and to be visualized by an observer. In other words, Klee posits a neither visible nor absolutely invisible realm of an in/visible. 4 Paul Klee, Schöpferische Konfession, 28. 5 Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 5. For Klee’s influence on MerleauPonty see Carbone, The Flesh of Images, 31–40; Johnson, “On the Origin(s) of Truth in Art: Merleau-Ponty, Klee, and Cézanne,” 475–515; Kaushik, Art, Language and Figure in Merleau-Ponty, 97–122; Sallis, Klee’s Mirror, 129–38; Watson, Crescent Moon over the Rational, 11–34. 6 Klee, Unendliche Naturgeschichte, 255. Sallis, Klee’s Mirror, 58.

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An effective articulation of this liminal third region is found in Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and Invisible (Le visible et l’invisible, 1964):

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It is therefore not a de facto invisible, like an object hidden behind another, and not an absolute invisible which would have nothing to do with the visible; rather it is the invisible of this world, that which inhabits this world, sustains it, and renders it visible, its proper and interior possibility, the Being of this being (l’Être de cet étant).7

As Merleau-Ponty explains, the eye might not see the in/visible now, but it could see it at some point and through some means. The means, Klee asserts, is art. For art to “make visible” would then cast its producer— that is, the artist—in the role of revealer as opposed to creator. Therefore, the artist does not create something new; he or she only reveals what already exists but has yet to be seen. What exists as or in this in/visible apparently lacks shape, depth, and solidity. Unlike the noun (“das Sichtbare”), the use of the adjective (“sichtbar”) and the omission of any noun explicitly avoid giving the in/visible objective form. To summarize Klee’s conception of art: art does not reproduce objects already plainly visible. Art creates by revealing what already has been created yet cannot be seen but could be seen when given form that it does not have through a visual medium. Laying out the core concepts of Klee’s “Credo” in visual expression, the Bauchredner und Rufer im Moor reads as a programmatic statement. Returning to the painting, the image depicts the setting (marsh) and subject (ventriloquist/caller) described in the title. Skilled in the art of ventriloquism, the Bauchredner, translated literally, means “stomach speaker”; he speaks from his stomach, that is, to project his voice beyond his body so that it appears to emanate from another object. In this sense, because the Bauchredner calls to and through another object, he acts as the caller signified by the title. Yet the word in both languages has a second meaning, which alludes to the Greek origins of ventriloquism as a religious practice.8 Ventriloquists were engastrimanteis, the “belly prophets” who foretold the future by interpreting messages from the unliving through their stomach and by translating them to the living. Klee’s Bauchredner is not just an artist who calls; he is the artist as visionary prophet who calls out the future while hoping to redeem the present. In the painting, these elemental forces assume the fantastical forms gestating in the Bauchredner’s translucent belly. Visible to the viewer but invisible to the rest of painting, these bizarrely shaped beings exist 7 Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l’Invisible, 198. Translation by Sallis, Klee’s Mirror, 130n8. 8 Goldblatt, Art and Ventriloquism, 34.

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in some reality as potentially perceptible by a wider audience. And yet, their residing wholly within the Bauchredner institutes their apartness and grants the artist-prophet privileged access to them. Like a ventriloquist, he or she acts as intermediary to reveal the invisible truths beyond the realm of visibility by projecting his or her visionary voice through another object, such as a fish or an artwork. Thus, the artist’s mission not only involves revealing and creating; it is revealing by creating. In addition to the art object, he must also invent a formal idiom that preserves the purity and the immediacy of the invisible revelation delivered through his visual medium. He must make visible, as Klee pronounces in his “Credo.” As artist, Klee projects his “voice” through another object, the painting. Since he works in a visual medium, Klee must create a visual vernacular to reveal the in/visible forces that the spectator cannot perceive until he, the artist-prophet, reveals them through art. The religious connotations of the artist-prophet resonate throughout Klee’s “Credo,” where the artist relates the revelatory process of giving graphic form to the biblical creation. As architect of the painted world, Klee identifies four elements at his disposal: point, line, planar energy, and spatial energy. Here things get Heideggerian. In the beginning there was the line: the most primitive element and the dawn of creation. But before there was the line, there was the point: the ordering principle preceding the line, the Urelement prior to creation that exists as a thing but is not quite yet a real element. Klee later describes the point in his Bauhaus lectures as an “infinitely small planar element, which, as an agent carrying out zero motion, is at rest.”9 Owing to this absence of motion, the “Credo” consistently refers to the “dead point” (“toten Punkt”) even though its deadness is not absolute but rather some nebulous concept in between birth and death lacking oppositional complement: a life before life or a prebirth. Klee likens its dormancy to an egg because it contains the promise of life and the potential for form. As Klee would write in The Thinking Eye, the artist sets the conditions for creation prior to the painting’s genesis through the “establishment (Feststellung) of a point in chaos, which, in principle concentrated, can only be gray, lends this point a concentric primal character (Urcharakter). The order thus awakened radiates from it in all dimensions.”10 As its grayness indicates, the point rests at the threshold of the in/visible, able to be alive and visible, but not yet revealed as such. Life begins first with the line and only then is there movement. With comparisons to biblical creation and the universe, the “Credo” stipulates, “movement is the basis of all becoming (Werden).”11 The active line (“aktive Linie”) now “takes a walk for its own sake” (“ein Spaziergang um seiner selbst 9 Klee, Das Bildnerisches Denken, 105. Sallis, Klee’s Mirror, 55. 10 Klee, Bildnerisches Denken, 4. Sallis, Klee’s Mirror, 55. 11 Klee, Schöpferische Konfession, 32.

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willen”).12 From the active line all other dimensions unfold: the birth of motion from the timeless (“zeitlos”) point simultaneously creates time and space, from which planes develop.13 Once the events of creation are set in motion with the genesis of line, the creative process never ceases; the active line continuously generates and regenerates as the artist continues to make visible its developing motion. The nominalization of the verb “to become” (“werden”) conveys how Klee conceptualizes the line as a dynamic process of ongoing change that animates all aspects of the image, from the artist’s creation to the viewer’s reception. Even the spectator’s eye “walks” along: “The graphic work arose out of movement, is itself fixated movement, and is received in movement (eye muscles).”14 As with life, the artwork exists as an eternal becoming never to be experienced as a final product.15 In his Pedagogical Sketchbook and The Thinking Eye, the artist exemplifies the active line with the image of a fish, an organic body that must maintain some modicum of perpetual motion, to sustain its life. For this reason, the fish held by the Bauchredner hangs in the foreground, the sole object immune from the gridding and the only creature outside the confines of the painting’s central figure. The fish’s linear affinity with the animal-like organisms swimming inside the Bauchredner attest to their connectivity, as does the netting line, which hooks the fish to the belly flesh. This suggests that the netting line is the conduit that transmutes the spiritual forces in the Bauchredner’s belly into the material form of the fish. As the emblematic artwork that is made visible by the artist-prophet within the painting, the fish coincides with the frontmost plane of the physical artwork made visible by Klee. Here, the active lines of the fish share the real time and space outside the painting with the spectators living in objective reality. Representation merges with reality; the active lines set in motion by the artist continue their activity through the spectator’s eyes; and Klee performs the role of the artist-prophet heralded in the painting with his painting. In this way, Klee’s art does not reproduce visible reality; rather, it makes visible in/visible reality. Klee devised his own designation for the heterocosmic reality of the in/visible. It is the Zwischenwelt, the “inbetween world,” which is spoken of as such because it “exists between the worlds our senses perceive,” as Klee explained in a conversation with Bauhaus colleague Lothar Schreyer.16 In the Bauchredner, it appears as the amorphous belly creatures that are floating in but yet are not quite 12 Klee, Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch, 6. My translation. 13 Klee, Schöpferische Konfession, 33. 14 Klee, Schöpferische Konfession, 35. 15 Klee, Schöpferische Konfession, 34. 16 Schreyer, Erinnerungen an Sturm und Bauhaus, 170–71. The English translations here are from Felix Klee, Paul Klee: His Life and Work in Documents, 182–83.

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of the painted world. Their in-utero potential to assume or not assume form reflects Klee’s image of the Zwischenwelt as a “realm of the unborn and the dead, the realm of what can be, might be, but need not necessarily be.” Placed at the physical center of the individual body and the spiritual center of the world he inhabits, the Zwischenwelt is just as real, natural, and human as the objective world—only it exists prior to attaining an objective form. The creation of visible forms that are unlikely to compromise the spiritual purity of his revelation prompts the artist to rely on the most basic formal elements—above all, the active, independently operative line.17 To support his confidence in the line and the basic forms it engenders, Klee consults the artistic activity of those he believes share his visionary perception. The artist assigns a special power to “the child, the madman and the savage,” for they “can still, or again, look into” the Zwischenwelt, and moreover, have created forms to make it visible.18 Their art provides a validation that his beliefs “aren’t fancies, but facts,” because “what they see and picture is for me the most precious kind of confirmation. For we all see the same things, though from different angles.” Why this triangular constellation of seemingly disparate factions should also enjoy a closer proximity to the Zwischenwelt and possess a greater truth, in their testimony, invokes the modernist fantasies involving the “discovery” of artistic originality and emotional authenticity in sources of absolute alterity. Even before their conceptualization as Romanticist ideals, these figures were perceived to live in a more natural state of humanity, unfettered by moral and social constraints by virtue of their physical and psychological separation from society: the child had not entered into it; the madman’s illness alienated him from it; and the “savage” existed prior to it.19 As social outsiders, they lived in harmony with their instinctual physical and emotional drives. Any artistic activity was accordingly introspective and unpersuaded by external motivations that could also influence the form their images might take. Uninterested in economic concerns, unknowledgeable of aesthetic conventions, and untouched by social pretense, their artwork

17 On the metaphysical intermediary world of the sort that Klee’s Zwischenwelt represents, see Dorthe Jørgensen, “The Intermediate World: A Key Concept in Beautiful Thinking,” 50–58. 18 Sebastian Zeidler refers to a prototypical constellation of “the child, the madman, and the savage” as the “modernist paradigmatic triad of modernist primitivism” (“Form as Revolt,” 261). See also his expanded project in Form as Revolt: Carl Einstein and the Ground of Modern Art. 19 For comprehensive histories of “the child, the madman, and the savage” as cultural ideals, see Foucault, Madness & Civilization; Goldwater, Primitivism and Modern Art, 192–215; Heller, “Expressionism’s Ancients,” 81–82; and John MacGregor, The Discovery of the Art of the Insane.

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exemplified a raw creativity and made visible the human mind in its most authentic state in the most emotionally immediate formal language. For Klee, the marginalization of “children, madmen and savages” ensures proximity to the Zwischenwelt, because these things, hovering before or beside civilized society as its irrational other, “can still, or again, look into” its mystical in/visibility. To “still” have or to have “again” this special vision bespeaks the universality of it and a realm that, in being of “the unborn and the dead,” assumes a primordial character synchronized with the wheel of time. To revolve in, away from, and back into the Zwischenwelt implies that the ever-present possibility of a visionary visit would entail a measure of regression: a premature return to an earlier time, a flight into a freer, more isolated state of mind; or a retreat from the normative obligations of adult social life. In a 1912 review of the inaugural Blaue Reiter exhibition, Klee argues that “primitive beginnings in art, such as one usually finds in ethnographic collections or at home in one’s nursery” or in “parallel phenomena . . . provided by the works of the mentally diseased” are “to be taken very seriously, more seriously than all the public galleries, when it comes to reforming today’s art.”20 Although “children, madmen and savages” inhabit some timeless and unchanging conceptual utopia, Klee looks to models rooted in the present time. Oceanic and African artifacts, the drawings of one’s own children, or the images made by the mentally ill are developmentally divorced from the modern adult European in the popular imagination, and yet they are close enough at hand to experience in the burgeoning number of museums and world fairs, or in illustrated catalogues and the daily newspapers.21 In summoning the archetypal imagery associated with the presocialized and precivilized psyche, Klee parlays the cultural cachet of “the child, the madman, and the savage,” into an implicit defense of their form making, which ultimately justifies his form making as evidence of direct spiritual visions. More than just a useful rhetorical device or a social critique, the conceptual unity of “children, madmen and savages” is a central principle of Klee’s methodology, and the artist derived much intellectual and inspirational fodder from studying their artistic activity in his quest to make visible. Economic lines, stick figures, prehistoric ciphers, 20 Cited in Klee, The Diaries of Paul Klee 1898–1918, 265–66. See entry 905 in Klee’s diaries. The passage was copied from the article printed in Die Alpen 6, no. 5, January 1912. 21 Scholarly studies on primitivism and German expressionism include Connelly, The Sleep of Reason: Primitivism in Modern European art and Aesthetics, 1725–1907; Errington, The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress; Pan, Primitive Renaissance: Rethinking German Expressionism; Lloyd, German Expressionism: Primitivism and Modernity; Rhodes, Primitivism and Modern Art; and Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives.

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pictograms, archaic symbols, heteroglossic arrangements, and geometric mosaics of bold colors dominate an oeuvre developed from an intense engagement with a diversity of rich sources: from drawings by his fouryear-old son Felix and his own childhood scribbles, to his 1914 trip to Tunisia with Blaue Reiter companion August Macke (1887–1914), to Hans Prinzhorn’s Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the Mentally Ill, 1922), a copy of which he reportedly kept in his Bauhaus office.22 If, as Klee tells Schreyer, “what they see and picture” provides “the most precious kind of confirmation” of the Zwischenwelt, their images afforded additional means of accessing the in/visible and an exemplary repertoire of pictorial strategies to achieve its transcription into visibility with minimal mitigation. Even though Klee and his prototypes “all see the same thing” and draw from the same well of in/visibility, their doing so “from different angles” preserves the singular perspective of the individual artist. In “the realm of what can be, might be, but need not necessarily be,” the artist must determine what will be. In this way, Klee weds the universal with the particular; he recovers a universal language to communicate universal truths through a singular expression appropriate for making visible the experience of that particular body at that particular moment. Like an ancient “belly prophet,” Klee looks away from the visible world to “absorb [the in/visible Zwischenwelt] inwardly to the extent that” he “can project it outwardly in symbolic correspondences” as a visible, graphic form. It is his calling as artist that induces him to create properly formal means that, as “symbolic correspondences,” will only ever approximate the absolute. The unavoidable slippage opens a chasm that Klee appears hesitant to bridge, and for this reason, Merleau-Ponty’s enigma of visibility and Klee’s “mystery of creativity” will never be fully resolved. For Klee, the artist “sought to approach this mystery by inquiring whence it came and by seeking to trace it back to its sources. We were not so bold as to wish to uncover the secret origin of creativity, but we were urged on to come as close to it as possible.”23 As the “Credo” preaches, coming as “close to it as possible” means going back to the most basic formal element: the active line, the most poignant and most potent conduit of human expression. For the active line to come into being and to continue becoming as it goes on its walk, only the primordial push is needed to animate the dead point. The inner drive of the artist occasions this push; engendered by his visionary communion with the Zwischenwelt, Klee provides the “spark” to make visible its in/visibility: “A certain fire, becomes, comes to life [lebt auf], conducts itself through the hand onward; it flows into the picture 22 From a conversation with Schreyer (Erinnerungen an Sturm und Bau­ haus, 169). 23 Klee, Unendliche Naturgeschichte, 255; Sallis, Klee’s Mirror, 58.

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and on the picture bursts as spark, closing the circle from whence it came: back into the eye and onward.”24 The energies feeding the combustion of this “certain fire” simmer on imperceptibly in ever-present dormancy until the artist rekindles them. The mystery of artistic creation, like that of human creation, is by design fundamentally unknowable in its entirety for Klee. Yet, once animated, the line springs to life as a conductor cable that facilitates a circular flow of energy among artist, artwork, and art spectator and entertains a boundless potential of becoming infinite forms to communicate any number of visionary or lived experiences. The “Credo” submits an example of how the abstract line as an active and independent element walks the spectator through a drawing:

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Let us develop: let us create a topographical plan and take a little journey to the land of better understanding. From the dead point, the first act of movement (line) sets off and away. After a short while stop, catch our breath. (interrupted line or an articulated line with several stops). Look back, how far are (countermovement). Consider the road in this direction and in that (bundles of lines). A river gets in the way, we help ourselves to a boat (wavy motion). Farther upstream would have been a bridge (series of arches). On the other side we meet a like-minded man, who also wants to go where better understanding is to be found. At first delighted that we agree (convergence), but differences gradually arise (development of two separate lines). A certain agitation on both sides (expression, dynamics, and psyche of the line).25

The journey continues, but a land of better understanding is already in view based on the above-cited depiction of how Klee abstracts the graphic line to create a pictorial voyage through a physical or spiritual landscape. Abruptly juxtaposed sentence fragments are interspersed with their partitioned linear translations as the artist imitates linguistically what his active line records graphically. The spectator/reader follows along by exercising 24 Klee, Schöpferische Konfession, 34. 25 “Entwickeln wir, machen wir unter Anlegung eines topographischen Planes eine kleine Reise ins Land der besseren Erkenntnis. Über den toten Punkt hinweggesetzt sei die erste bewegliche Tat (Linie). Nach kurzer Zeit Halt, Atem zu holen. (Unterbrochene oder bei mehrmaligem Halt gegliederte Linie.) Rückblick, wie weit wir schon sind. (Gegenbewegung). Im Geiste den Weg dahin und dorthin erwägen (Linienbündel). Ein Fluß will hindern, wir bedienen uns eines Bootes (Wellenbewegung). Weiter oben wäre eine Brücke gewesen (Bogenreihe). Drüben treffen wir einen Gleichgesinnten, der auch dahin will, wo größere Erkenntnis zu finden. Zuerst vor Freude einig (Konvergenz), stellen sich allmählich Verschiedenheiten ein (selbständige Führung zweier Linien). Gewisse Erregung beiderseits (Ausdruck, Dynamik und Psyche der Linie).” Klee, Schöpferische Konfession, 29.

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eye muscles and mind to “walk” in Klee’s footsteps and retrace motions made visible by his hand. The artist’s play with language and line aggressively interrogates the boundaries between the visual and the verbal, a practice on full display in countless facets of his graphic work. Similarly to his attempts to free the line, Klee experimented with the creation of abstract languages through the intermedial interweaving of words, letters, arrows, musical notations, and hieroglyphs. His graphic storytelling recalls Keller’s meandering textual representation of the analogously rambling lines of the Kritzelei along with the image’s graphic representation of the wide-ranging wanderings of the protagonist’s life. The “little journey” on Klee’s “topographical plan” demonstrates how Heinrich’s unruly line could come to life as one of the artist’s paintings. While Klee’s liberation of line establishes the art historical foundations for the mode of abstraction imagined by Keller a half century earlier, the artist does not himself put forward a work resembling the Kritzelei. An intriguing approximation is the 1935 painting Um den Kern (fig. 6.2). As is typical of Klee’s graphic treatment, this line travels with discretion and never walks farther or makes visible any more than is necessary. The viewer perceives in its slowly swooping spiral a less convoluted version of the Kritzelei—a life less complicated if interpreted as a symbolic correspondence of Heinrich’s life trajectory. Yet, when invited by Klee to follow the graphic journey spinning farther from the center, we recognize ourselves to be reliving the narrative of Klee’s methodology. The title places us either “at the core” or “around the core,” depending on our interpretation. We discover both to be accurate. To “trace the mystery of creativity,” we begin “at the core” with the “establishment [Feststellung] of a point in chaos,” the in/visible primordial element that precedes the genesis of line and preconditions the creation of visibility. Since a “dead point” in principle “can only be gray,” Klee positions it in the gray zone of the centermost circle. He does not reveal the point, however. Instead, the red kernel directs us to the location where, like the mythic egg, the “concentric primal character” of dormant life incubates. The painting offers only absence, for we cannot and do not see the “certain fire” sparking the artist’s inner drive to send the line walking. What is depicted is empty gray space surrounded by a sudden coil of line. The dead point jumps to live wire, signifying the lingering indeterminacy of a mystery that can never be fully explained and the slippage between absolute and approximation that neither language nor image can every fully communicate. This is the “mystery of creativity” and the enchantment of the line. The “order thus awakened radiates from it in all dimensions” to make visible Klee’s vision from the Zwischenwelt. A concentric line guides us “around the core” in ever larger loops to the picture’s edge, thereby

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Figure 6.2. Paul Klee, Um den Kern (At/Around the Core), 1935. Oil and mixed media on burlap mounted on board, 18.63 x 23.63 in. (47.31 x 60.01 cm). Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX, anonymous gift in appreciation for Dr. Dorothy Kosinski, The Barbara Thomas Lemmon Curator of European Art. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

“closing the circle from whence it came: back into the eye and onward.”26 Falling off the bottom margins of the picture plane, the line loops the spectator’s eye into its path and continues onward back into the painting where we trace it to the center from whence we came. We do not reach a destination; nor do we return to our absolute origins. Rather, we circle back around and continue our journey, finding ourselves caught in a process of perpetual development in a state of eternal becoming. When we step back to observe our journey as fixed line, the painting’s cyclopic eye stares back. Perhaps Klee holds a mirror to our faces as if to confront us with the graphic reenactment of our own biography, itself a work in progress. Perhaps this is the mystery of our own creation by our own creation when our eye traces the line to unravel the enigma of visibility. The 26 “Ein gewisses Feuer, zu werden, lebt auf, leitet sich durch die Hand weiter, strömt auf die Tafel und auf der Tafel, springt als Funke, den Kreis schließend, woher es kam: zurück ins Auge und weiter.” Klee, Schöpferische Konfession 34. My translation.

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free abstraction of line and color reveals an image of the world in material earth tones floating amid ethereal blue. Does the creation of our life path coalesce with the creation of the cosmos as we bear witness to the genesis of art? In the end, the spectator must unearth the layers of meanings left blank in the terra-cotta gaps. Klee encourages introspective contemplation through his introspective travels to the Zwischenwelt so that we give voice to our own stories through the graphic narrative made visible from this in/visible arena. It is here that the artist receives his visions, that the point receives the primordial impulsion into line, and that the active line receives its communicative authority to “take a walk” as an independent element. The backbone of his distinctive aesthetic and embryonic principle of his methodology, Klee’s abstract line holds greater truth to nature and the naturally human than a line in the service of naturalism.

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The Twisted Labyrinth: Masson and Surrealist Automatism André Masson’s 1924 Dessin automatique (Automatic Drawing, fig. 6.3) is the image most referenced in Keller scholarship when searching for twentieth-century equivalents to Heinrich’s colossal scrawl.27 As Keller says with respect to the Kritzelei, its “unending web of penstrokes,” like a “vast grey cobweb, cover[s] the greater part of the surface,” and yet “you could discover therein the most commendable coherence and application, as it formed a labyrinth which could be followed up from the starting point to the end, in a continuous progression of strokes and windings which perhaps amounted to thousands of yards.” Masson’s automatic drawing appears to bring Keller’s literary “monster” into art historical reality as a biomorphic throng of lines lithely contoured with fingers and toes. Masson conceptualized his practice of automatism as a “kind of writing,” consisting of the following sequence: “(a) The first condition was to make a clean slate. The mind freed from all apparent ties. Entry into a state bordering on trance, (b) Surrender to the interior tumult, (c) Speed of writing.”28 The notion of a semiconscious process of writing reflects both the intermedial connections of Keller’s imagined abstract art and the historical origins of automatism, which itself encompassed more than just drawing. 27 See, for example, Stelzer, Die Vorgeschichte der abstrakten Kunst, 55; Sukyoung Jin, Inszenierte Visualität, 121–22; Maclagan, Line Let Loose, 100–101; Dominik Müller, Vom Malen Erzählen, 307; Naumann, “Körperbild und Seelenschrift,” 218. 28 Lanchner, “André Masson: Origins and Development,” 107. On the history of automatic drawing and spiritualism, see Massicotte, “Spiritual Surrealists: Séances, Automatism, and the Surrealist Unconscious,” 23–38.

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Figure 6.3. André Masson, Dessin automatique (Automatic Drawing), 1924. Ink on paper, 9.3 x 8.1 in. (23.5 x 20.6 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © The Museum of Modern Art / © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Reproduced with permission from SCALA / Art Resource, New York.

Broadly defined, automatism refers to the absence of conscious awareness or deliberate intent when carrying out behaviors such as speaking, writing, or drawing. As Peter Stockwell puts it, automatism “removes any sort of studied willfulness underlying craft or technique and it deflects the creative impulse or source elsewhere.”29 The concept arose out of nineteenth-century spiritualism, which “deflected” the sources to forces 29 Stockwell, The Language of Surrealism, 51.

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outside the self or the realm of the living through mediums, séances, or Ouija boards. While spiritualist techniques were dialogic in nature, automatism within the context of fin de siècle psychopathology was monologic, “deflecting” its sources to regions outside normal frames of consciousness yet still inside the human mind. This meant that individuals might be vaguely aware of performing activities such as speaking or drawing but have no sense of output or content, not unlike Heinrich’s “dreaming consciousness” or “distracted soul” as he “became lost in deep preoccupation and went on making strokes unthinkingly.” Among pre-Freudian psychiatrists, automatism seemed the “perfect mode for the expression of socially repressed emotions such as extreme joy, grief, frustration, or ecstasy,” because it was “clearly a means of gaining access to that authentic experience . . . without being distorted by social norms, civilized conventions, or rational protocol.”30 The psychiatrists’ use of hypnotic suggestion, along with automatic writing and drawing as therapeutic measures for treating psychological conditions (e.g., hysteria, psychosis, obsessivecompulsive behaviors), provided evidentiary support for the development of psychoanalysis, whose core principle assumes a psychic apparatus split into heterogeneous selves at varying levels of consciousness and accessibility. Artists looking for new modes of expression and sources of creativity explored the possibilities of automatist techniques for “gaining access to that authentic experience,” which, arising from deep within their psyche, was still wholly their own and incontrovertibly original. Looking for sources of creativity from the Zwischenwelt, Klee experimented with automatism in his quest to make visible the energies of the primitivist triangle. Although he admired “primitive” art, along with the art of children and the mentally ill, for its spontaneity and simplicity, the fact that the artist was himself none of these things undermines the authenticity of these claims. The philosopher Georges Bataille (1897– 1962) critiques this essential central paradox: What distinguishes modern man . . . is that in returning to the primitive he is constrained to consciousness even as he aims to recover within himself the mechanisms of the unconscious, for he never ceases to have consciousness as his goal. Consequently, he is at once both closer and yet further away.31

As implemented in the aesthetic realm, automatism would seem to resolve Bataille’s paradox. It did not attempt an end run around conscious thought; rather, it aimed to unify the conscious mind with its unconscious counterpart. Fusing the fractured self, artists could be actively passive, 30 Stockwell, The Language of Surrealism, 53. 31 Bataille, quoted in Lomas, The Haunted Self: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, 3.

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consciously granting the unconscious mind free reign to act of its own accord and unleash what the rational mind otherwise kept under wraps. Like the mode of abstract art portrayed by Keller, automatic drawing is inherently contradictory. However, it allows for the transcendence of its antithetical constituents so that its practitioners can generate artworks akin to Heinrich’s creation of the Kritzelei through controlled abandon, intentional compulsion, ordered disorder, and logical illogic. Rationality, irrationality, consciousness, and unconsciousness compound the various aspects of human personality and the fonts of creativity to produce a hyperrealistic or surrealistic experience. Meaning a position on top of or above, the French preposition “sur,” when attached to “realism,” connotes the sense of a “hyperrealism” or “heightened realism” of the sort that supersedes visible experience and is like what Klee presumes to make visible with line.32 Yet automatism as emergent in Klee is not unproblematic. Typically remaining within the realm of the recognizable, Klee’s figures are not fully abstract.33 Klee therefore does not practice a “pure” automatism.34 Reminiscent of the Spanish artist Joan Miró (1893–1983), his version involved an initial stage of simulated automatism to call forth figurations that would then serve as a springboard to or scaffolding for a more sophisticated, carefully crafted project. The two-stage process of unconscious activity, followed by conscious elaboration, effectively dispelled the imagined unity of personality promised by automatic drawing. Masson too often added descriptive elements, but much of his practice of automatism fundamentally differs from Klee and Miró. While in a trance-like state (a) and surrendered to his inner tumult (b), he consciously resists consciousness by insisting on the third element, speed (c), to produce as much as possible with minimal interference of rational thought. Masson’s automatism is in this regard “purer,” yet his discovery of the technique owes much to Klee’s automatist overtures in art and writing. In 1914, Klee evokes the imagery of “drawing in the dark,” suggesting a form of simulated automatist activity that might reclaim the untutored child within: “Graphic work as the expressive movement of the hand holding the recording pencil—which is essentially how I practice it—is so fundamentally different from dealing with tone and color that one can use this technique quite well in the dark, even in the blackest night.”35 Divorced from the visible world and emptied of optical input, the conscious mind must turn inward for inspiration and let the active 32 Stockwell, The Language of Surrealism, 3. 33 Cf. Ann Temkin, “Klee and the Avant-Garde,” 68. 34 “Partial” was how Surrealist pioneer André Breton described Klee’s automatism (Temkin, “Klee and the Avant-Garde,” 67). 35 Klee, The Diaries of Paul Klee 1898–1918, 307. This passage appears as entry 928 (1914).

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line loose to walk as it will. Such was the internally generated pictorial language sought by Masson, whose aesthetic vision moved increasingly away from external reality and toward a line unbeholden to description. “Line,” he writes of his art, “is no longer essentially informative; it is pure élan; it follows its own path or trajectory, it no longer functions as a contour.”36 Until he discovered Klee in 1922, Masson experimented with cubism but found himself increasingly at philosophical odds with its disengagement from the interior realities of human existence.37 Klee’s line was the sought-after means for inventing truly individual aesthetic idioms that, rather than reproducing the visible, conjured up the imaginative, the intuitive, and the instinctual energies beyond it. For Masson, these energies were dark, dynamic, and driven by base human appetites. Of his art and his attitude, art broker Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1884–1979) writes, “Masson’s world of forces is shaken by frenzied passions. It is a world where people are born and die, where they are hungry and thirsty, where they love and kill. . . . This tragic art, which remains a stranger to nothing that is human, is truly the art of a generation which, even as it aspires to the Dionysian exaltation of Nietzsche, trembles before the prevailing weltangst.”38 Klee extended a philosophical roadmap that positioned Masson before a metaphysical dimension where such primal forces and “frenzied passions” thrived, and he provided the methodological means to access it. In the surrealist imagination, however, the primitivist triangle of Klee’s Zwischenwelt resides not in the stomach but in the psyche. Through automatic drawing, the artist threads a path into the human unconscious with the active line to reveal the socially regressive and transgressive forces lurking in and hidden from the mind. Surrealist automatism for Masson was hence both a means for self-expression and a mechanism for self-exploration. Although Masson’s conception of automatic drawing presumes the existence of an unconscious dimension within the self, the artist did not develop his practice of it with recourse to the theories of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). In this regard, Masson stands apart from other surrealist artists like André Breton (1896–1966), for whom Freudian psychoanalysis constituted the theoretical framework.39 Even if Masson did not directly develop his ideas from Freud’s writings, his art and his forays 36 Masson quoted in William Rubin, “André Masson and Twentieth-Century Painting,” 68. 37 Lanchner, “André Masson: Origins and Development,” 203, fn. 73. 38 Kahnweiler, quoted in William Rubin, “André Masson and TwentiethCentury Painting,” 16. 39 William Rubin, “André Masson and Twentieth-Century Painting,” 21. Overviews of Surrealism include Ades, Dada and Surrealism Reviewed; Alexandrian, Surrealist Art; Caws, Surrealism (Themes & Movements); and Durozoi, History of the Surrealist Movement.

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into automatism proceed from the conceptual grounding of psychoanalytic theory as laid out to the greatest cultural extent in 1900 with the publication of Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams).40 Freud popularized the paradigm of the split self at the core of the surrealist endeavor, and he legitimized the inner psychic reality that its adherents sought to recover and reproduce in their art. The level of thought beyond the control exercised by reason emerges in Freudian theory as the unconscious dimension to human identity and experience of reality.41 Freud does not imagine the unconscious as the “unconscious”—that is, as the opposite of or complement to conscious thought whose regions are consequently unknowable, unexplainable, or attributable to intuition. Instead, he transforms the category into an autonomous entity housing the primitive, irrational forces that consciousness does not know or wish to acknowledge, as well as those things that the restrictions of civilization would rather repress. These include the sexual instincts of Eros and the violent urges of Thanatos. In addition, the unconscious stores the memory traces and previous experiences that have likewise been rendered unavailable to conscious awareness, either to repress traumatic memories or to protect against becoming overwhelmed from the sheer volume of stored impressions. While Freud goes on explicate the complex relations between further subdivisions, the surrealists tended to avoid such complications and considered the unconscious as a monolithic, amorphous entity.42 Important both for Freud and for surrealism, these warehoused memories and repressed thoughts can be recovered or raised to the level of consciousness. Not directly knowable per se, they must be interpreted by the psychoanalyst as revealed through gaps in discourse, imagery in dreams, and accidents of speech or behavior. To bring forth revelations from the unconscious and infer their meaning, Freud develops the psychoanalytic techniques of dream interpretation and free association. Surrealists like Breton believed themselves to be following Freud’s logic when they seized on psychic automatism as an equivalent of free association that 40 Cf. MacGregor, The Discovery of the Art of the Insane, 274; Lomas, The Haunted Self: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, 9–25; Massicotte, “Spiritual Surrealists: Séances, Automatism, and the Surrealist Unconscious,” 26–27; and Stockwell, The Language of Surrealism, 39–42. 41 Before the unconscious comprised the cornerstone of psychoanalytic theory, philosophical awareness of its existence was evident in the writings of early nineteenth-century Romanticists, who imagined a metaphysical aspect of mental activity as the complement of conscious thought. See MacGregor, The Discovery of the Art of the Insane, 67–90, 185–87; and Stockwell, The Language of Surrealism, 39. For a comprehensive study, see Ffytche, The Foundation of the Unconscious: Schelling, Freud, and the Birth of the Modern Psyche. 42 Stockwell, The Language of Surrealism, 39.

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would facilitate access to the superior reality of the unconscious in artistic creation. Whereas surrealist approaches imagine free-flowing streams of graphic activity running directly from the unconscious to his pen without mediation from conscious thought, Freud’s free association is more roundabout in its conclusions, constructing a chain of images from which meaning must be indirectly inferred. Most major surrealist artists quickly abandoned automatic drawing after the visual medium did not embody its theoretical ideal or achieve a desirably rich repertoire of effects.43 Masson, however, never fully abandoned the automatist process and continued to use the device as the basis for his compositions. His art linked together images and associations into threads of abstract lines that meander through the tunnels of the artist’s unconscious to transpose the “frenzied passions” of Dionysian energies into pictorial form. Following surrealist trends of the 1930s and 1940s, Masson frequently used myth as an organizing principle and a communicator of collective experience. Just as the inner truths of the unconscious were unique to the individual psyche yet fundamental to the human condition as a whole, classical mythology appeared to offer a repertory of universally understood symbols that could convey the irrational energies and functioning of thought.44 Masson came to identify with the mythological symbol of the Minoan labyrinth, the architectural maze housing the monstrous Minotaur who would do battle with the Athenian prince Theseus.45 The emergence of the labyrinth motif in Masson’s work dovetails with the reemergence of the artist’s interest in automatic drawing in the 1930s.46 The Invention of the Labyrinth from 1942 (fig. 6.4) comprises one of the strongest examples of the automatic process. Clustered about the longer stretches of line are tightly wound curlicues and sprung coils that evoke the Dionysian aspects of the labyrinth emphasized by Karl Kerényi’s extensive studies of the structure. 43 Including Salvador Dalí and Henri Magritte, the second phase of surrealism moved toward an aesthetic more analogous to Freud’s actual intentions with free association (Lomas, The Haunted Self: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, 150). 44 William Rubin, “André Masson and Twentieth-Century Painting,” 47. For myths in surrealism, see Chadwick, Myth in Surrealist Painting, 1929–1939. 45 Cf. Lanchner, “André Masson: Origins and Development,” 141–52; Lomas, The Haunted Self: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, 26–51; William Rubin, “André Masson and Twentieth-Century Painting,” 47–57. For a specific treatment of the Pasiphaë myth, see Birmingham, “Masson’s Pasiphaë: Eros and the Unity of the Cosmos,” 279–94. 46 William Rubin (“André Masson and Twentieth-Century Painting,” 48) and Lanchner (“André Masson: Origins and Development,” 136) submit that Masson anticipates his Minotaur imagery as early as 1922 in the painting The Great Deflowerer Feted by his Victims from the same year.

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Figure 6.4. André Masson, Invention du labyrinthe (Invention of the Labyrinth), 1942. Ink on colored paper, 23.1 x 18.3 (58.7 x 46.4 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © The Museum of Modern Art / © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Reproduced with permission from SCALA / Art Resource, New York.

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Identifying the spiral (“Spirale,” “Spiralbau”) as its most basic formal element, Kerényi locates its origins in the Cretan cult of Dionysus, whose ritual dances followed spiral paths and moved with meandering gestures.47 The Invention of the Labyrinth alludes to the origins of the structure as related by the legend of Pasiphaë. According to Greek mythology, the labyrinth was constructed by the architect Daedalus at the behest of the Cretan king Minos to imprison the Minotaur, the illegitimate son of his unfaithful queen Pasiphaë. The Minotaur, a monster with the head of a bull and the body of a man, came from Pasiphaë’s unnatural union with a bull, which had itself been brought about by Poseidon to punish Minos. Minotaur and labyrinth, then, are both products of bestiality, brought into the world through a carnal love outside the bounds of social propriety, morality, and law. Conveying the base animalism of the event, Masson’s lines explode in ecstatic spirals, hatchings, and strokes that are interspersed with longer swooping and sometimes straight slashes of ink. Although this was not Masson’s first or most graphic depiction of Pasiphaë and the bull, it is one of the rawest in that its automatist origins are most visible. In the upper-right quadrant, Pasiphaë’s head lies supine in the corner, eyes wide and mouth thrown open with the electrified shocks of tongue and hair carrying her silent shrieks, while beneath her the face of the bull, hovering over an arrow-like tail, stares angrily out at the viewer. The labyrinth unfolds around the passageways delineated in the composition, which at several points suggest male and female sex organs. The overall effect is at once vaginal and labyrinthine, thereby depicting the invention (birth) and the labyrinth announced by the title. In the picture, these two things are one and the same. This could represent the confluence of oppositional forces, considering what transpires in the Minoan labyrinth. On a nine-year cycle, the city of Athens dispatched seven youths and seven maidens to send into the labyrinth to be sacrificed to the Minotaur. The labyrinth, then, is synonymous with bloody death; it is the counterbalance to the genesis of life heralded by the sex act that spawned its invention.48 The contradictory unity of life and death finds expression in the polarities of light (paper) and dark (ink), a contrast recalling the major players of the drama. Daedalus (“skillful worker”) and Pasiphaë (“all-illuminating”) represent Enlightenment principles of reason, industry, and causality, whereas the Minotaur, whose name reflects 47 Karl Kerényi connects the labyrinth and the meandering ancient dance movements to the modern-day Grecian folk dance in his landmark study Labyrinth-Studien: Labyrinthos als Linienreflex einer mythologischen Idee, 37–42. 48 As Lanchner points out, the artist often conflated the imagery of the vagina and the labyrinth. Especially in the paintings between 1938 and 1940, the vaginal orifice also represented the entrance to a labyrinth, whose encompassing structure resembled or was a human body (“André Masson: Origins and Development,” 146).

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his hybridity, is again like the labyrinth: the place where light cannot reach, reason does not hold, and linear progress is upended. There is no logical destination, only death. While Masson indirectly relies on Freudian psychoanalytic theory, he directly credits the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) and Heraclitus (late sixth century BCE) for their formative influence on his art.49 The Heraclitean concepts of flux and the paradoxical unity of opposites driving a cyclical process of constant change predicate the prophesies from Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883) and the Apollonian-Dionysian dialectic set in motion by his Die Geburt der Tragödie (The Birth of Tragedy, 1872).50 The circular patterns of Masson’s labyrinths have generally been interpreted as visualizations of Zarathustra’s doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same, the infinitely repeated course of things, although what is more evident in this particular drawing are the intoxicated raptures and the powers of the Dionysian impulse. Procreation collides with death as carnal love morphs into violent carnage in a collective orgy of lines to dissolve the Apollonian overtures toward the individuation of form.51 Masson’s psychological labyrinths thus merge the oppositional forces (man/woman, love/death, beast/human) in an eternally recurring struggle between the Apollonian fusion of form and its Dionysian dissolution. From the resulting chaos, Masson constructs a labyrinth of fluctuating energies that, like the meandering spirals of the cultic Dionysian dances, lead the viewer around the conceptual cycle of genesis and destruction. In Ariadne’s Thread (1938), Masson descends into the underworld of the unconscious to navigate the “twists in the labyrinth” of his own “distracted soul.” Masson made the image by pouring sand over lines of glue and paint improvised on wood, canvas, or board. The consequently coarser finish of these “automatic” sand paintings conveys an impression of immediacy and tactility.52 Ariadne’s Thread positions the audience inside the minotaur’s head where the uneven tonality of dark red paint has the visual texture of organ tissue. Floating in the upper-left 49 According to Masson, his discovery of Nietzsche in April 1914 precipitated an intellectual and spiritual transformation, and even prompted him to undertake a rigorous retraining of body and mind with barefoot treks and ascetic living à la Zarathustra in order to achieve the prophesied perfection of the Übermensch. Citing the artist himself, Lanchner relates that “Masson holds it as an article of his ‘personal mythology’ that Nietzsche fell from the Paris skies ‘to give me birth’” (Lanchner, “André Masson: Origins and Development,” 83). 50 See William Rubin, “André Masson and Twentieth-Century Painting,” 48–49; and Lanchner, “André Masson: Origins and Development,” 83. 51 Lanchner, “André Masson: Origins and Development,” 83. 52 A fuller description of the process used by Masson is found on William Rubin, “André Masson and Twentieth-Century Painting,” 22.

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corner, the beast’s blue-tinted eye angles downward to direct attention to the yellow-feathered tail in the lower-right. Between eye and tail are vascular pathways of dilating black lines, snaking across the membranous field. They spread out in a vaguely circular pattern from which ambiguously formed body parts of intertwined lovers emerge. The fluctuating thickness and the irregular tracks of the black lines betray their automatist origins, yet they do not compose the implied labyrinth. The labyrinth takes shape as the bright red laceration winding around the surface in an oblong spiral. This is the title object, Ariadne’s red thread, given to the Athenian prince by the Minoan princess to help him defeat the monster and escape the twisted prison. In the painting, the thread spins out behind Theseus as he moves through corridors to mark the path of a labyrinth that, like Heinrich’s, “could be followed up from the starting point to the end.” The viewer follows Masson as he retraces the steps of the allegorical Theseus, venturing into the Dionysian depths of the unconscious with red string unspooling so that he can find the way back to consciousness after conquering the repressed bestial energies fomenting inside him. MOMA curator William Rubin classified the Theseid as the “most expedient” myth in “providing a paradigmatic schema for the surrealist drama, as indeed, for the process of psychoanalysis.”53 An “allegory of the conscious mind threading its way into its own unknown regions” of the unconscious,” Theseus slays the Minotaur at its center and “finds his way back again by virtue of intelligence, that is, self-knowledge— Ariadne’s thread symbolizing the fabric of revelations provided by free association and dream analyses.”54 Even if archetypical for most surrealist stagings, this psychoanalytic reading is at odds with the artist’s own contextualization: It [the labyrinth] has an entrance but no exit. The exit is Death. It is the Minotaur. It begins with Ariadne with her knees half parted. Her vagina serves as an entrance; you feel that in its midst is an evident place of battle, and, at the very end, the exit is blocked by the Minotaur. In the Greek theme the Minotaur is killed, in mine he is the victor. He kills whoever comes inside.55

Theseus does not triumph over the Minotaur in Masson’s labyrinth but he does reemerge from the labyrinth with the aid of Ariadne’s thread, as analysis of the painting reveals. The viewer enters via the circuitous spiral of red that, being visually evocative of a vagina, provides passage into the 53 William Rubin, “André Masson and Twentieth-Century Painting,” 47. 54 Rubin, 47d. 55 Masson quoted in Lanchner, “André Masson: Origins and Development,” 148.

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bodily cavity of the beast. Leading the eye through the Dionysian throes of oppositional forces represented by the clashing bodies in the black capillaries, the artery of red winds into the innermost recesses where a bright scarlet stain of paint drifts. It is the epicenter of the painting, the heart of the beast, and the exit to the labyrinth. The red stain is the “evident place of battle” where the hero confronts the pure essence of the Minotaur and reveals the absolute truths hidden within the unconscious. But in Masson’s labyrinth, the Minotaur is never conquered, the deepest truth never revealed, and the exit never reached. Ariadne’s thread does not actually connect to the center point. The hero does not and cannot challenge the Minotaur, whose translucent red stain blocks the exit of the labyrinth that is discernible underneath. Instead, the hero must turn around and follow its twists back out of the unconscious, having weathered but not defeated the inner demons that are portentous of death, carnal passion, and inevitable destruction. Unresolved, the labyrinth and the truths it contains persist as ever-present beneath the conscious, waiting for the hero to attempt battle once more. From the ubiquity of labyrinths in his oeuvre, Masson returns many times over, never quite able to put its violent imagery behind him. While Masson’s hero may emerge as victor, he never reaches the Minotaur at the center of the labyrinth, where the beast surely “kills whoever comes inside.” In foreseeing imminent death on contacting the centrum, Masson suggests that some truths will always be arcane and some areas of the unconscious unexplored. In this sense, Ariadne’s thread weaves an umbilical cord attaching to what Freud would characterize as the “dream’s navel” (der Nabel des Traumes). This is the point that “in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream . . . has to be left obscure; . . . [for] at that point . . . there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unraveled and which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the content of the dream. This is the dream’s navel [der Nabel des Traums], the spot where it reaches down into the unknown [die Stelle, an der er dem Unerkannten aufsitzt].”56 In Freud’s original German, the navel is 56 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 528.“In den bestgedeuteten Träumen muß man oft eine Stelle im Dunkeln lassen, weil man bei der Deutung merkt, daß dort ein Knäuel von Traumgedanken anhebt, der sich nicht entwirren will, aber auch zum Trauminhalt keine weiteren Beiträge geliefert hat. Dies ist dann der Nabel des Traums, die Stelle, an der er dem Unerkannten aufsitzt.” Freud, quoted in Schuller, “Sigmund Freuds Schrift Die Traumdeutung. Eine fortgesetzte Lektüre,” 46. Freud references the “dream’s navel” twice in the Interpretation: first in an early footnote, and again near the end of text. Schuller notes a discrepancy in language when the image moves from footnote to the main body. In the footnote, Freud describes “einen Nabel, durch den er mit dem Unerkannten zusammenhängt” (46, emphasis added). This is the difference that has to do with whether the navel connects to (“zusammenhängt”) the unconscious

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placed on top of (“aufsitzen”) the unknowable, a verbal equivalence to the tantalizing translucence of the red stain concealing yet revealing the unbreachable exit underneath. If, as Freud writes, the dream’s navel is fundamentally indecipherable and if, as Masson paints, the red stain blocking the labyrinth’s exit is essentially unapproachable, why venture into the unconscious to begin with let alone keep returning to its tunnels? For Masson, automatic drawing does serve a purpose, one that is, if not therapeutic, then at least related to self-revelatory: “With eyes closed . . . I would plunge, with the certainty of finding myself again, into a maze of lines which at first would seem to be leading nowhere. And upon opening my eyes, I would obtain a very strong impression of something ‘jamais vu’ [never seen].”57 It is the “jamais vu,” the never seen, that the artist discovers within himself. It is the blind spot that words cannot describe, images cannot represent, and reason cannot comprehend. Perhaps the severing of Ariadne’s thread, the knowledge of its absolute inaccessibility, is the reassurance that conscious thought—that which makes one human—can never be fully surrendered. Guiding Masson through this perpetually recurring, personal odyssey of self-discovery, the abstract line delivers the thread that evolves into a private iconography of mythic proportions.

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Ceci n’est pas une “Scrawl”: Twombly’s Line Circles Back to Literature On September 25, 1994, MOMA opened a retrospective exhibition featuring the work of Cy Twombly, an American artist whom the press release feted as “a singular master in postwar art.”58 Despite the “critical role [Twombly’s] work has played in the international development of contemporary art,” the museum anticipated certain lines of critique that would wind their way around the celebration of an artist “more widely appreciated and exhibited in Europe than in his native country.”59 This or rests on the unknown (“aufsitzt”). As Masson depicts it in Ariadne’s Thread, because the navel rests on the unknown, the passage to this area is impeded and is therefore fundamentally impossible. 57 Masson, quoted in Lomas, The Haunted Self: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, 26. 58 Museum of Modern Art, “Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, September 25, 1994–January 10, 1995,” 1. For Twombly’s early life and education, see Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 10–15. Twombly was born Edwin Parker Twombly, Jr., but nicknamed “Cy” after the legendary baseball pitcher Cy Young. Twombly’s father, also nicknamed “Cy” for the same reason, was a pitcher for the 1921 Chicago White Sox. 59 Museum of Modern Art, “Cy Twombly: A Retrospective, September 25, 1994–January 10, 1995,” 1, 2.

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Figure 6.5. Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1970. Oil, house paint, and crayon on canvas, 136 x 159.2 in. (345.5 x 404.3 cm). The Menil Collection, Houston, Gift of the artist. Photographer: J. Littkemann. © Cy Twombly Foundation / © Menil Foundation, Inc.

was true to such an extent, in fact, that then-curator Kirk Varnedoe published a preemptive defense of the artist and his work to accompany the exhibition’s opening in an essay entitled “Your Kid Could Not Do This, and Other Reflections on Cy Twombly” (italics in the original). Although Varnedoe’s apologia speaks to larger complaints about modern art and abstraction in particular, he adopts the specific case of Twombly, who is best known for his famous or infamous “Blackboard” paintings (fig. 6.5). In actuality, the artist did not write on blackboards, nor did he use chalk. The sobriquet stuck after critics of the nation’s leading art magazines compared the visual effect of the paintings to schoolroom chalkboards.60 Created between 1966 and 1973, the artist’s signature series features rows of white scribbles running across a ground painted in gray, a notoriously difficult color. Even if unfavorably deployed, the blackboard metaphor is not unapt. Twombly worked the canvas with washes and 60 See Leeman, Cy Twombly: A Monograph, 167.

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diluted bleach that reproduce the illusion of a board whose chalk-pocked surface has been erased and sponged off many times over. At roughly eleven feet wide and twelve feet tall, a painting like Untitled (1970) has enough surface area to cover the wall of a classroom. To execute the work, the artist allegedly sat on the shoulders of a friend who scuttled back and forth in front of the canvas. The resulting lines of nonsensical looped scrawlings are not the practiced hand or expert language of an instructor. Here, Twombly seems to play the disobedient pupil punished with the rote task of repetitiously reproducing sentences on the chalkboard. Instead of spelling out assurances for future good behavior in the alphabetic language taught in school, his lines erupt in furious tantrums of defiant scribbles. It is precisely this insistence on illegibility and an affinity with the infantile that occasions the protests implied by the title of Varnedoe’s essay. Directly taking on the cliché in the title, he writes,

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“This is just scribbles—my kid could do it.” That kind of remark, often directed at Cy Twombly’s paintings and drawings, echoes one of the classic protests against modern art. It asserts that what is being touted as specially talented is in fact only something commonplace, which requires no skill and therefore merits no respect.61

That “kind of remark” (“‘This is just scribbles’”) is not unlike one we have already encountered. It recalls the reproachful query (“‘Was soll das Gekritzel?’”) directed at Heinrich’s scrawling right before Erikson destroys the abstract image.62 Like “Gekritzel,” the dismissive “just scribbles” implies the absence of effort and forethought while denying the presence of talent and technical skill. It implies that the cacographic figures on canvas not only comprise a form of writing but bad writing. Hence, that “kind of remark” implies that the image in question has little value in general, no redeeming value as “art” and, in Twombly’s case, no right to hang in a museum proclaimed as such. How are Twombly’s scribbles, so the sentiment seems, any different from my child’s, or from my own, for that matter? If this is what the intelligentsia touts as art, then surely we are all artists. The difference, as Varnedoe explains to the “doubters” and “mockers,” lies in the “validating precedents” that premise Twombly’s art, serving to shape his artistic identity and substantiate his vision. These are the artists and approaches, among them “a lot of ‘classic’ and widely loved modern art,” from which Twombly consciously draws and to which his 61 Varnedoe, “Your Kid Could Not Do This, and Other Reflections on Cy Twombly,” 18. 62 Cf. Jin, Inszenierte Visualität, 123–24.

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work alludes with reverence or, more typically, with irreverence to achieve a desired effect or evoke an anticipated affect. As Varnedoe elucidates in the exhibition catalogue:

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For all the complex linguistic structure of his aesthetic and the rich web of his references, what his achievement may ultimately depend upon most heavily is the power he has drawn from within himself and from so many enabling traditions, to isolate in a particularly raw and unsettled fashion that primal electricity of communication, in his apparently simplest acts of naming, marking, and painting.63

However spontaneous their execution, Twombly’s scribbles are the consequences of a premeditated process; their convulsive movements are calculated as part of a structured composition whose underlying framework is visibly ascertainable. Littered among graffiti and other graphic flotsam and jetsam are ancient symbols, modern letters, phallic signs, erotic ideograms, fragments of illegible and semilegible words. What is not immediately visible or appreciable in Twombly’s scribblings are the “complex linguistic structure of his aesthetic and the rich web of his references” that inform it.64 Like the many “modern artists [who] have repeatedly drawn from ‘outsider’ areas,” Twombly’s references are tangential to the primitivist triangle and they relay on the active lines, automatic drawing, and outsider art that triangle inspired.65 Yes, Varnedoe concedes, Twombly’s naysayers are correct to compare his scrawlings to a child’s but they likely do not realize that “the specific attraction to the childlike also connects to a broader tide in Western cultural life” of the sort evidenced by “Paul Klee and many others [who] studied children’s renderings . . . and found encouragement for their various rejections of academic methods of depiction.”66 By the same token, the disdain for Twombly’s seemingly unpracticed script or savaging of the canvas does not take into account the fact that “[he] inherited a part of Surrealism’s courtship of the unconscious.”67 Reading Twombly’s scribbles pursuant to their “enabling traditions” allows audiences to decipher

63 Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 51. 64 Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 51. 65 Varndedoe, “Your Kid Could Not Do This, and Other Reflections on Cy Twombly,” 18, 66 Varndedoe, “Your Kid Could Not Do This, and Other Reflections on Cy Twombly,” 18, 19. On the “childlike” appearance of Twombly’s scrawl and the recovery of an originary state of writing, see Barthes, “Non Multa Sed Multum,” 88–113. 67 Varndedoe, “Your Kid Could Not Do This, and Other Reflections on Cy Twombly,” 19.

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the artfulness “in his apparently simplest acts of naming, marking, and painting” and to discover how his scrawlings are not “just scribbles.”68 For instance, the artist regarded the untitled colored pencil drawing from 1954 (fig. 6.6) as his breakthrough to developing a greater musicality of line and idiosyncrasy of gesture.69 Twombly was influenced by his contact with members of the New York School who met regularly with exiled surrealists in the early 1940s to practice drawing while blindfolded. Disposing with the blindfold in his own experiments in automatic drawing, Twombly “blinded” himself by doing as Klee metaphorically suggested, literally drawing in the dark in order to detrain his adept hand and unlearn the skills acquired from his formal art studies.70 A “blind” drawing such as Untitled (1954) exhibits the reduced control and stick figure simplicity typical of a child’s drawing.71 With Twombly deprived of eyesight and visible surroundings, his line wanders across the paper, first looping down and around hesitantly from the upper-left corner, then running with more assurance in a nearly continuous stroke to a vaguely anthropomorphic form in the middle, before forcefully culminating in the turbulent scribbles on the right. While the artist does not copy from the encompassing darkness, his hand appears to follow an internally visualized schematic. The latent image emerging from the verticals and the dangling shapes just left of center is strongly suggestive of the African fetishes featured the year before in a series of black-and-white works that Twombly executed on returning from his travels in Italy and North Africa.72 Volubilus, Quarzazat, and Tiznit bear the names of Moroccan villages, but they were more inspired by the artist’s encounters with Abyssinian tribal objects in Rome’s 68 Kirk Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 51. 69 Cullinan, “American-Type Painting?,” 45. 70 Twombly began formal training at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (1947–49), before continuing at Washington and Lee University in Virginia and eventually landing at New York City’s Art Students League in 1950. There he had the opportunity to attend gallery shows and to circulate among members of the New York School (also known as abstract expressionists). For more on Twombly and automatic drawing, see Cullinan, “American-Type Painting?,” 57; Leeman, Cy Twombly: A Monograph, 27–31; Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 19–20. 71 Barthes develops the concept of “Gaucherie” as metaphor for the disconnect between mind and mechanical gesture to convey why Twombly’s work “looks as though he did all his drawing with his left hand—avec la main gauche” (“Non Multa Sed Multum,” 92). A “gauche,” he explains, “is somehow considered blind: he can’t get his directions straight, can’t understand the implications of his gestures; he guided only by his hand, by the desires of his hand and not by its aptitude as instrument.” 72 Twombly, quoted in Shiff, “Charm,” 15.

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Figure 6.6. Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1954. Colored pencil on paper, 19.1 x 25 in. (48.5 x 64 cm). Private Collection. © Cy Twombly Foundation. Courtesy Archives Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio. Photo by Mimmo Capone.

ethnographic museum. Phallic hieroglyphs embellished with tassels and fringes are carved into the encrusted surface by dragging course verticals of black paint down the wet surface of the ivory-coated canvas. The end effect is one of paleolithic graffiti, rubbed and scratched into a pseudostone surface in an uncultured act of defacement. Twombly turns to a primitivist “anti-aesthetic” further personalized by his interest in classical antiquity, archaeological ruins, and ancient languages, along with his experience as an army cryptographer.73 Resulting from these influences, a different vernacular of scribble manifests in works such as Academy (1955, fig. 6.7). The white picture plane is a jumble with scratchy zigzags and discombobulated swirls that contrast with the freer outpourings in the automatist drawings; and yet Twombly retains the graffiti-like abrasiveness of his tribal-themed paintings owing to his treatment of the surface fabric. The ground consists of multiple surfaces and several strata of paint into which colored 73 Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 18. Cf. Leeman, Cy Twombly: A Monograph, 14–23. Twombly’s fascination with Antiquity is explored in Greub, Cy Twombly: Bild, Text, Paratext.

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Figure 6.7. Cy Twombly, Academy, 1955. House paint, crayon, pencil, and pastel on canvas, 75.25 x 94.9 in. (191.1 x 241 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © The Museum of Modern Art / © Cy Twombly Foundation. Reproduced with permission from SCALA / Art Resource, New York.

pencils and crayons work their markings in, around, and under the texture. Creation and erasure coexist as fragmented words and in the residue of signs and symbols. Examining the irregular tangles of script uncovers the vestiges of recognizable characters or the genesis of written language itself. Scattered about the surface and hidden among the graphic debris are various letters (e.g., A, M, N, I, T, D, O, X), which are disarticulated from any linguistic context and so estranged from any forms of conventional meaning-making. The once-familiar signs of the culturally acquired alphabet are rendered as undecipherable as the encompassing scribbles and as enigmatic as a newly uncovered archaic glyph. In viewing the painting, audiences enact an archaeological excavation, returning to the rudiments of drawing and writing to excavate some hybrid combination of both through prolonged study of the site.74 74 For this reason, secondary literature invokes what Thierry Greub calls a “vocabulary of archaeology” to discuss Twombly’s work as a “palimpsest” with

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That Twombly conflates the tribal and the classical in order to unearth a precivilized past does not mean that he aspires to restore the splendor of ancient Rome or to play the artist-prophet. While the artist’s lines summon the primitivist impulses and can be said to make visible our universal humanity, they do not reveal higher spiritual ideals or recapture childlike innocence. His scribbles rejuvenate the juvenile, but only in order to throw the explosive tantrums of a frustrated toddler and perform the petty rebellions of a disobedient schoolchild. Academy transforms the ancient palimpsest into the dingy white walls of a graffitied bathroom stall smudged with the traces of schoolyears past. Upending his neoclassical influences, the artist evokes the pinnacle of humanism to show human creativity at its basest and most childish. The careful viewer who sifts through the sediments of scribbles is even treated to the obscenity “FUCK” no less than three times. Although the artwork presents itself in the guise of a painting, everything is calculated to counter normative taste and the dominant practices of the time. The allover coverage nods at the drip painting of Jackson Pollock, but Twombly;s marks are made from pencil not the traditional paint.75 Adhering to no tradition or technique, Academy seems to find purpose in doing the exact opposite of what a reputable art academy might teach. With his regression from adulthood manifest in his acts of linear transgression, Twombly thumbs his nose at the modern institutions of art and issues an overtly stated “F-you” at doubting museumgoers, professional critics, and members of the academy. If the artist resorts to juvenile shenanigans by issuing expletives and defacing the hallowed halls of “art” with his graffiti, his pointed title accuses critics of engaging in similar behavior. Twombly collapses “academy” (a place of socialization and education) into “Academy” (the historically powerful cultural institution that defined “art”), thereby equating the expert opinions and pretentious lecturing of titled professionals to adolescents. For the ordinary pencil and these thin, emasculated lines to be his weapons of choice makes the subtle humor of the attack bitingly obvious. Although Twombly’s vernacular of line emerges in different scripts depending on period and series, it nevertheless shares the genetic material key to the Kritzelei in its excess, hybridity, and play of contradiction.76 “layering” and “sediments” in which “traces” and “fragments” of a “disappeared” past must be “relived,” “recovered,” and “discovered” (227). See Greub, “Cy Twombly’s ‘Inverted Archeology,’” 227–36. 75 On the influence of Pollock, see Cullinan, “American-Type Painting?,” 55–58 and “Abject Expressionism,” in Cycles and Seasons, 99–103 (101–2); Leeman, Cy Twombly: A Monograph, 45–47; and Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 21–22, 42–43. 76 On the paradox as a constitutive element of Twombly’s art, see Göricke, Cy Twombly—Spurensuche, 141–46.

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What is radically different, however, is the wanton truancy of Twombly’s line. Whereas the Kritzelei stands as a product and a record of the alienating effects of a modernizing society unaccommodating of individuality, its social critique is derivative from its primary incentives. For Heinrich, who does not intentionally defy, these things are self-therapeutic. On the contrary, his inability or unwillingness to advocate for himself and his abstraction facilitated the demise of his career and the destruction of his creation. Twombly’s line exists to defy, its antiauthoritarian streak encoded in its DNA. Academy was completed, along with a series of visually similar, “academically” titled works from the same summer, including The Geeks, the clearly derisive Criticism, and Free Wheeler. The latter likely functions as a self-referential declaration of the artist’s own freewheeling tendencies and his refusal to conform. His statements, while not political, resist attempts to impose externally defined categories or conventions onto either his work or his artistic self-determination. In this, the artist exhibits the requisite self-awareness that is not present in Heinrich in order to defend the puerile gestures of his abstract lines against resistant and uncomprehending audiences. Of course, as Varnedoe’s essay indicates, the artist benefits from the assistance of the institutions that he also critiques—namely, the critics and curators who translate the scrawls of the Blackboard paintings to uninitiated spectators and explain why “your (school)kid could not do this.” Unlike the unknowing child, Twombly knowingly adopts the untutored lines and linguistic codes characteristic of childhood graphic activity. He intentionally trains himself to untrain his hand and mind so that he may regress to an infantile order of language. This is effectively no language: the word infant derives from the Latin infans, which means “unable to speak; inarticulate.”77 A child, moreover, is not mining the prehistoric genesis of written language or manipulating signs and symbols of ancient societies. Where “your kid” intuitively draws, Varnedoe insists, an artist like Twombly orchestrates a “previously uncodified set of personal ‘rules’ about where to act and where not, how far to go and when to stop.” Moreover, he does so “in such a way that the cumulative courtship of seeming chaos defines an original, hybrid kind of order, which in turn illuminates a complex sense of human experience not voiced or left marginal in previous art.”78 In short, your kid is not trying to make abstract art, but Twombly is. In some sense, the self-awareness separating Twombly’s line from Heinrich’s also distinguishes the artist’s compositions from the artwork of a child. It is not enough for Twombly to come 77 Barthes, “Non Multa Sed Multum,” 93; Leeman, Cy Twombly: A Monograph, 168. 78 Varndedoe, “Your Kid Could Not Do This, and Other Reflections on Cy Twombly,” 22.

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after Klee’s free-walking line or surrealist forays into automatic drawing. Aware of himself and of what came before, Twombly consciously quotes what he will, discards what he dislikes, and upsets the orders that his artistic sensibilities wish to disrupt. While Twombly’s deliberately childish idiom enhances the validity of his art for aficionados like Varnedoe, others might find his willful obscurity “esoteric” and “elite.”79 Approaches based on emulating the perceived naïveté of the primitivist triangle run into paradoxes involving planned spontaneity and artful artlessness. Twombly’s purposeful projection into the child’s graphic activity robs the line of the innocence and sincerity that first attracted Klee and other admirers to the childlike. For Varnedoe to speak of the “orchestration” and “choreography” of artists seeking to claim unoccupied territory on the margins for oneself would presume a level of conscious transgression that would discredit much outsider art or art of the mentally ill as “art.”80 And what of Heinrich’s scrawl? Keller’s protagonist “defines an original, hybrid kind of order,” but he does not calculatingly orchestrate a new mode of abstraction with an eye to “validating precedents” or the intent of “illuminat[ing] a complex sense of human experience” that was previously unsaid. He just does, and without awareness of himself or his art, which conceivably exacerbated his lack of self-awareness as an artist. Self-awareness is once again key, but it cuts both ways in Varnedoe’s essay to implicate the self-awareness of the audience as viewers of art. Relating knowledge and appreciation to each other, self-awareness assumes that “doubters” and “mockers” might be more accepting of modern art, abstract art, or Twombly’s art if they are aware of its “validating precedents” or contextual circumstances. Certainly, having more information at our disposal opens unexpected avenues for interpretation that may or may not coincide with artistic intentions. We could, for instance, look at a Blackboard painting like Untitled (1970) and remember elementary school days involving handwriting drills and cursive script. Or we could read these scribbles—the intermingling of drawing and writing—as a rumination on Lessing’s warnings against the literary contamination of the visual arts and the artist’s flagrant proclamation that Laocoön is dead. Or, in presenting a semblance of our cursive script as an indecipherable scrawl, Twombly alienates us from the familiarity of language and forces a confrontation with the conventions of our culture, including those that would deign to define “art.” Or, perhaps we are to ponder the limits of representation itself, be it linguistic or visual. Like Freud’s 79 Varndedoe, “Your Kid Could Not Do This, and Other Reflections on Cy Twombly,” 18. 80 Varndedoe, “Your Kid Could Not Do This, and Other Reflections on Cy Twombly,” 22, 23.

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“dream’s navel” or Klee’s “mystery of creativity,” there is always something that words cannot express and images cannot envisage. Or, with knowledge of the history of handwriting and the severity of classroom drills designed to efface individuality and enforce obedience, we could read these scrawls as a statement against disciplinary measures and sociocultural conformity.81 Or we could look at Untitled (1970) and see “just scribbles.” Not all audiences want to be taught and not all viewers enjoy art that “makes you think.” But maybe that is the ultimate message of Twombly’s Blackboards. Those looking for answers will find none on this blackboard and receive none from this teacher. Twombly’s increasingly frenetic scrawls emphasize their illegibility as they expand, loudly declaring their refusal to communicate and denying the student’s desires to be taught. Their barbed wire fencing barricades our entry into the painting to push us back from the picture plan and into our imaginations. Unable to read the writing on the proverbial wall, we are left to our own devices to make of the painting what we will. While the words of a docent or a knowledge of art market trends might tell us about art historical value or economic worth, being conversant with conventions and “validating precedents” is not a prerequisite when approaching art; only the openness to finding meaning from within ourselves for ourselves along with the self-awareness to stand by it is. So, when is a scrawl not a scrawl and when are scribbles “just scribbles”? That is that question that Twombly poses to us.

81 Twombly learned to write through the Palmer Method, a drill-based technique requiring children to practice their script daily with rote exercises that trained them to write by moving arm only (no fingers or wrists). Physiologically unnatural and intolerant of deviation, this severe method arose in reaction to growing fears about masculinity, class, and immigration. Poor writing indicated a weakness and lack of control associated with femininity, as well as the working classes’ inability to finance a good education. By contrast, disciplined and orderly handwriting represented the virtues of the American male and the upper class. The Blackboard paintings could be a subversive inverting of the Palmer method: running lines evoke the rote uniformity of its drills, but unruly scrawls in lieu of good lettering serve to defy the method’s attempts to contain the artist’s individuality and to reveal the folly of disallowing the use of wrist and fingers. Moreover, the “effeminate” scrawls could be a reactive statement to the virile machoism associated with the New York school or a cultural critique on the reigning constructs of American masculinity and Americanism in general. For discussions of the Blackboard paintings and history of handwriting, see Leeman, Cy Twombly: A Monograph, 167–85. Cf. Göricke, Cy Twombly—Spurensuche, 94–117; Kozloff, “Cy Twombly,” 54–55; Pincus-Witten, “Learning to Write,” 56–60; and Varnedoe, “Inscriptions in Arcadia,” 39–43.

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Epilogue: Laocoön and His Sisters: The Future of Literature and Art In the beginning we got rid of nineteenth-century storybook realism. Then we got rid of representational objects. Then we got rid of the third dimension altogether and got really flat (Abstract Expressionism). Then we got rid of airiness, brushstrokes, most of the paint, and the last viruses of drawing and complicated designs. . . . There, at last, it was! No more realism, no more representational objects, no more lines, colors, forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes. . . . Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher in an ever-decreasing tighter-turning spiral until . . . it disappeared up its own fundamental aperture . . . and came out the other side as Art Theory! —Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word

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W

hen Tom Wolfe first published The Painted Word in 1975, his book was guaranteed to receive a sound critical drubbing. Given what I know of Mr. Wolfe, I have no doubt that he anticipated and likely delighted in the rancor that his essayistic take on modern art incurred. After all, one does not take aim at the most influential members of the art establishment and New York intellectualism, nearly an institution unto itself, and expect to be placed on a pedestal in the press or invited to the next gallery opening in SoHo. Accordingly, the book “hit the art world like a really bad, MSGheadache-producing, Chinese lunch,” as Rosalind Krauss put it with a few well-painted words of her own.1 Predictably, the art world responded by tossing its MSG-laced leftovers into the garbage in the best way it knows how: with caustic pretentiousness dismissing Wolfe as a philistine too ignorant to understand, let alone write about art and its critics.2 To be fair, Wolfe does not make a mockery of the entire art world; his social criticism is leveled less at the artist than at the art critic—three such critics

1 Krauss, “Café Criticism,” 630. 2 For an idea of Wolfe’s reception by the “art world,” see Krauss, “Café Criticism”; Hamblen, “There You Go Again, Tom,” 52–54; and Mitchell, “Ut Pictura Theoria,” 348–71.

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in particular.3 Bearing the brunt of the author’s wrath are the “kings of Cultureburg”—the unholy trinity of Leo Steinberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Clement Greenberg—who, as he charges, dominate the art scene with their theoretical writings and are complicit in what he sees as an increasing estrangement between modern art and the average audience. While Wolfe’s frustration with the “Cultureburg” does stem in part from the almost willful impenetrability of their writings, it revolves around a deeper issue: “These days, without a theory to go with it, I can’t see a painting.”4 What is evident from the sweeping retelling of art history quoted above is that the art “these days” that Wolfe impugns is undeniably abstract. It has cast out “storybook realism” and “representational form.” It has shed itself of the dead weight of both figures of the material world as well as the very material of its medium, flying farther and farther away from paint and picture until reaching “Art Theory pure and simple, words on a page, literature undefiled by vision.”5 The “vision” of which Wolfe speaks is not the visionary genius of the artist but the actual visual character of the artwork. This is not only what we as the audience physically see when we behold a painting; it is also the idea that we in fact see something. Wolfe’s satire does not take the visuality of the art object for granted, for amid all this ridding and emptying running rampant in abstract art, there might very well be nothing left for us to see. All that remains are words. Of course, Wolfe is clear that he does not mean words on a canvas or snippets of text of the sort that might be found incorporated into the works of Dada practitioners, for example. He means “words on page”— that is, the theory and literature that one must read in order to understand the art one sees. In reaching these increasingly stratospheric heights of abstraction, modern art has also divested the audience of any anchoring point of orientation. The opacity of the visual compels the uncomprehending spectator to turn to the sphere of the verbal to read about the work in theoretical tracts by artists and critics. For the author, the reliance on textual explanation to derive meaning in an abstract artwork has opened a nice little niche market for “Cultureburg” intellectuals to corner and it has enabled them to mediate definitions of and access to the art world. Yet, what seems even more urgent for the medium itself is how Wolfe’s story ends. In his version, the obligatory presence of the verbal compromises the integrity and autonomy of the visual to the point 3 This does not mean to say that artists did not come under fire at all in The Painted Word. Wolfe took issue with a few prominent representatives of the avantgarde, citing Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol. 4 Wolfe, The Painted Word, 4. 5 Wolfe, The Painted Word, 108.

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where painting ceases to be itself, at least as we and art history know it.6 Dissolving its definition as the visual art, it assumes the identity of its sister art. As Wolfe (sarcastically) prophesizes, “late twentieth-century Modern Art was about to fulfill its destiny, which was: to become nothing less than Literature pure and simple.”7 While I understand Wolfe’s complaint and do not necessarily disagree with his critique, I also believe that the role of literature in the developments of art history cannot be so glibly derided, and that its words are of special importance for the invention of abstract art in painting. In fact, I have just spent a few hundred pages arguing as much. Still, Wolfe’s narrative gets at the same “problem” with abstract art that made literature so indispensable to its birth in the first place: its inability to speak for itself, an inability that therefore requires it to somehow explain itself. Unfortunately for Wolfe, what he views as the increasing abstraction in art has reached the point where painting cannot communicate with its audience through the artistic syntax specific to its medium. When meaning no longer originates from within the artwork itself and is instead sought in literature outside it, the explanatory words of theory saturate the space that should be left open for the art. Paintings cease to communicate with their audience through their own medium and of their own accord. The situation has become so absurd, Wolfe implies, that “the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text,” and we will soon find ourselves at the point where we will not even have use for the illustrations.8 As a result, “literature pure and simple” serves as a sort of villain in his version, a verbal foil to the vanquished visual arts. In my story however, it is precisely the power to speak and explain that allows literature to come forward in a more heroic fashion to facilitate the emergence of abstract art in painting. Unfolding in the preceding chapters, my story has presented three discrete moments in which abstract art is imagined or becomes theoretically possible in nineteenth-century literature: Kleist’s deframing of Friedrich’s seascape in 1810; Goethe’s clouding of perception in 1821; and the self-conscious lack of containment that, while ultimately not asserted by Keller’s Heinrich, still finds expression in the defiant action of Balzac’s Frenhofer. Each of these literary instances could be said to constitute a story in and of itself, as each in effect explains and justifies the creation of the very image its words describe. From these three separate 6 Although the “visual arts” and even “abstract art” can include more than those artworks painted on a canvas, I will be referring, for the sake of simplicity and clarity, explicitly to painting until the epilogue’s conclusion, when it will be obvious that I am referring to works and objects beyond the pictorial surface. 7 Wolfe, The Painted Word, 108–9. 8 Wolfe, The Painted Word, 7.

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stories I have pieced together a master narrative that leads the reader from the invention of abstract art in literature up to the invention of abstract art in painting. Showing that abstract images were circulating throughout the cultural sphere well before 1911, my tale hinges on the crucial role of literature in foregrounding the cultural developments necessary for such works of abstraction to “speak for themselves” in the medium of painting by establishing certain preconditions. In Kleist we saw an explanation for the need of alternate means of expression when the traditional forms of Western illusionism proved insufficient for communicating the immediacy of the author’s emotion. Through Goethe’s play with potentiality we then derived a precondition calling for a different type of spectatorship and a new breed of cognitive spectator willing to actively engage with a work of art. Finally, the lack of self-awareness exhibited by Keller’s artist figure allowed us to determine that the self-awareness of the artist is an essential component for the emergence of abstract painting. Not to be forgotten is the crucial role of the written word beyond the genres of literary fiction and poetry, most notably in the form of treatises and manifestos. Published concomitantly with the abstract art they promoted, these writings were largely penned by the artists themselves, artists who spoke for their artworks through texts in order to explain how they came to be, what they could convey, and why the expressive potential of a nonrepresentational art could surpass that of a representational one. To be sure, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, much ink was spilled preconditioning the emergence of abstract art, justifying its invention, and speaking for its existence. Therefore, it is little wonder that the written word, literature, should be the hero of my story. It served as pretext and provided context for the moment when Kandinsky’s “Great Abstraction” could speak for itself in an exhibition hall without necessarily having to explain itself through the immediate aid of any text. But is this really how the story ends? Perhaps a better question would be: How does the story continue? I myself have spilled much ink explaining the importance of literature, justifying my arguments, and speaking for the images coming before the invention of abstract art in painting, but what happens afterward? Does the demand for the written word simply fall away? Is abstract art really able to speak for itself without literary intervention? Do the visual and the verbal part ways or do they ride off together into the sunset? The tale that Wolfe tells does not end with a “Happily Ever After”—neither for abstract art nor for the relationship between painting and literature. While his version, as I have argued, proceeds from the “problem” with abstract art’s inability to speak for itself and subsequent reliance on literature to speak for it, it also parodies a fundamental paradox underscoring the relationship between these sister arts: in speaking for abstract art, literature leads to its birth, but it might just as easily dictate its death as well.

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As is made clear by the flood of manifestos in the early twentieth century and from the writings of the nineteenth century, a certain amount of hand-holding was involved in bringing the radical innovation of abstract art off the page, onto the canvas, and into communication with an audience. At the same time, by holding on too tightly to the hand of her literary sister, art pulls painting away from its own medium and encumbers its ability to function independently. I would now like to conclude with a look forward at the “rest of the story” by considering the life of abstract art extending forward in time from that birth, with particular focus on the role of literature. In examining a relevant selection of opinions and accounts written by critics and intellectuals with more clout in the art world than Tom Wolfe, perhaps we can salvage some semblance of a “Happily Ever After” ending.

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Laocoön and His Sisters As tends to be the case with sisters, the visual arts and the literary arts have a relationship that throughout the centuries has been at times affectionate, at times contentious, and always complex. Where Horace’s Ars Poetica posited an analogy between the two with the dictum ut pictura poesis (as is painting, so is poetry), writers and painters from the Renaissance on have tended to characterize the bond between the sister arts as a competition or a paragone, as Leonardo da Vinci called it. Unsurprisingly, Leonardo regarded painting as the more noble of the two, his reasons for that being rooted in his own time period’s hierarchal ordering of vision over hearing, the sense most associated with poetry.9 In the rest of sixteenth-century Italy, however, opinions were divided and debates raged about whether to stress the contrast or the unity between the two kinds of art. I do not wish to detail the extent of a discussion that can be traced back before Horace, but I will instead focus on comparatively more recent conversations involving the sister arts and their impact on twentieth-century art, conversations that inevitably implicate the theme of abstraction. We have already seen one opinion; from Wolfe’s satirical retelling of art history, we gather that the author prefers a more detached relationship between the two, lest modern art fulfill its destiny and become “nothing less than Literature pure and simple.” Yet as we know, separating the sisters is anything but pure and simple. Even Wolfe’s scathing send-up highlights their intrinsic connectedness when he apparently regrets the loss of representational art’s “storybook”

9 Silver, “Step-sister of the Muses: Painting as Liberal Art and Sister Art,” 36–69.

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character.10 This “storybook” character would seem to refer to the narrative devices on which painting relies in order to speak to its spectators. It is the story the picture depicts or the story we as an audience build around the events that we believe we are seeing depicted. It is a literary element, one we might take for granted until deprived of its presence, such as with abstract art. But faced with this absence, we are wont to substitute one literary form for another, only now with actual “words on a page.” So it would seem that Wolfe does not want to completely cast out literature from painting but rather to have it play the role of quiet sister, dutifully lurking in the background. In a way, this insistence on separation but recognition of interaction is reminiscent of the classic standpoint advanced by Lessing in 1766 in Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie (Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry), albeit with not as much caustic wit and aplomb as Wolfe. Rejecting debates regarding ut pictura poesis as a question of supremacy, Lessing lays bare the fundamental difference between painting and poetry, as broadly understood, on theoretical grounds (painting is an art of space addressed to the eye, poetry one of time appealing to the ear) and argues for their individuality. The sisterly bond is broken up and the relationship between the two reformulated as “zwei billige freundschaftliche Nachbarn” who try to avoid each other as much as possible.11 Still, conceding the inevitability of the odd neighborly transgression, Lessing acknowledges the allowance of small concessions if absolutely necessary. Where the German philosopher is most like Wolfe is in his fear of the ensuing confusion when the boundaries between the visual and the verbal are too often breached. He expressly warns both artists and poets against blurring the lines between their disciplines, for the integrity and quality of their respective media will suffer if they do. Although Wolfe reserves his critique for the art world, his prophesy projects his discomfort with the increasing intrusion of one sister’s not so neighborly presence in the other’s territory. It is important to emphasize that the anxieties expressed through these two texts concern the general confusion of the boundaries between the arts—that is, that the borders get muddied as opposed to how they get muddied. Lessing’s warnings are mostly against one art emulating the other, whereas Wolfe’s complaint appears to involve the lack of emulation. For the latter, confusion results when abstract art eschews any and all narrative elements, which forces “Art Theory!” to swoop in and fill the void with meaning. 10 Wolfe’s “storybook” image is not coincidental and is meant to evoke literature. Early in the essay he locates the beginning of the “Modernist movement” with “a complete rejection of the literary nature of academic art,” an occurrence that he dates to around 1900 (The Painted Word, 7). 11 Lessing, Laokoön oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie, 129–30.

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Well before Wolfe, Clement Greenberg very pointedly picks up Lessing’s unease with blurred lines in 1940 in his essay “Toward a Newer Laocoön,” but he changes the terms of the debate by using its questions about emulation and self-definition to essentially define abstract art. At the outset he maintains:

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There has been, and will be, such a thing as a confusion of the arts. From the point of view of the artist engrossed in the problems of his medium . . . purism is the terminus of a salutary reaction against the mistakes of painting . . . in the past several centuries which were due to such a confusion.12

That Greenberg’s “purism” refers to abstract art becomes clear as he goes on to portray the history of visual art as the purging of narrative content and a struggle to purify painting of linguistic contamination. Once accomplished, painting is free to focus on its own identity, becoming increasingly able to define itself through limitations proper to its medium and not those of literature. According to Greenberg’s account, literature had been the dominant art form in Europe since the seventeenth century and has thus served as prototype for its subservient sisters to imitate. Forced “to deny their own nature in an effort to gain the effects of the dominant art,” the lesser arts are “perverted and distorted” as they “become nothing more than ghosts and ‘stooges’ of literature.”13 With respect to the visual arts, “all emphasis is taken away from the medium and transferred to subject matter” and, as he continues, “it is no longer a question even of realistic imitation, since that is taken for granted, but of the artist’s ability to interpret subject matter for poetic effects.”14 As imitation is always in the service of what Greenberg derisively refers to as “literature” (and what I would interpret as the narrative possibilities enabled by this illusionism), any trace of either must be cast out if painting is to be redeemed. As Greenberg reasons, to “restore the identity of an art, the opacity of its medium must be emphasized.”15 For painting, this consists in reclaiming and exploring those materials and qualities unique to what should be a purely optical medium: the material picture plane (flatness), paint, primary colors, brush strokes for their own sake, line, and so on.16 Beginning with Gustave Courbet (1819–77), the “first real avant-garde 12 Greenberg, “Toward a Newer Laocoön,” 23. 13 Greenberg, “Toward a Newer Laocoön,” 24, 25. 14 Greenberg, “Toward a Newer Laocoön,” 25. 15 Greenberg, “Toward a Newer Laocoön,” 32. 16 Greenberg cites line as “one of the most abstract elements in painting since it is never found in nature as the definition of contour.” See “Toward a Newer Laocoön,” 34–35.

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painter,” Greenberg describes the progression toward abstraction as the “escape from ‘literature,’” otherwise formulated as the effort to “expand the expressive resources of the medium, not in order to express ideas and notions, but to express with greater immediacy sensations, the irreducible elements of experience.”17 This is the “visual” component of the visual arts; ideas and imagination are expunged from the canvas in favor of pure opticality. The rather fitting imagery Greenberg chooses to illustrate this pure abstraction is that of a disembodied eye, a lone perceiving organ traveling around the spatially flat canvas unencumbered by any other bodily faculties, or body for that matter.18 The reliance on optical experience with little to—ideally—no recourse to cognitive faculties is at odds with Goethe’s model spectator as well as the mode of abstraction developed in the third chapter of this book, where I discussed a clouding of perception as conditioning a new, cognitively active spectator. I would make the same distinction regarding the first chapter as well. Although Greenberg’s excised eye recalls Kleist’s ocular imagery of sliced-off eyelids, the eye Kleist describes is ostensibly still attached to its body and to the thoughts, sentiments, and other Empfindungen coursing through it. Moreover, Kleist the author is obviously unconcerned with the “opacity of the medium” and its material qualities. Greenberg the art critic, on the other hand, writes of painting coming into its own as a “‘pure’ art, as an art which is abstract because it is almost nothing else except sensuous.”19 It operates on a formal logic that is internal to the work but outside the subjective experience and what it can articulate in words. Thus, the clasped hands of the sister arts are pried apart and pulled into separate corners where they can be “isolated, concentrated, and defined” by the terms of their respective media.20 In keeping with Greenberg’s story of abstraction in painting, then, the move away from representation or objective reality is of ancillary importance: the primary objective is to keep literature out. Michael Fried expounds on Greenberg’s premise in his influential essay from 1967, “Art and Objecthood,” in which he examines the specific case of minimalism to develop his own pejorative term for the “confusion of the arts”: theatricality.21 He begins by linking minimalist art with words and ideas, defining it as a “largely ideological” enterprise that “seeks to declare and occupy a position—one that can be formulated in words, and in fact has

17 Greenberg, “Toward a Newer Laocoön,” 29, 30. 18 Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” 89. 19 Greenberg, “Toward a Newer Laocoön,” 38. 20 Greenberg, “Toward a Newer Laocoön,” 38. 21 Fried would further develop this concept in the later publication Absorption and Theatricality.

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been formulated by—some of its leading practitioners.”22 This use of rhetorical means “distinguishes it [minimalism] from modernist painting,” which, by this logic, presumably steers clear of literary commentary. As W. J. T. Mitchell notices in his own analysis of Fried’s essay, “obviously this cannot mean that Modernist art is beyond all verbal commentary,” but it “suggest[s] that modernism in the visual arts involves a certain resistance to language” and so “occupies a position that either cannot or need not, in some basic sense, be formulated in words.”23 Keeping in mind the interference of language, Fried refers to movements such as minimalism as “literalist art,” a term with the same basic import as Greenberg’s “literature.” Unlike Greenberg, though, Fried does not appear to be defining abstraction or relating the history of its development through the exclusion of literalism. Rather, he seems to be differentiating a certain kind of abstract art, one coincident with “modernist painting” that does not confuse the visual and verbal. At issue is art itself:

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The concepts of quality and value—and to the extent that these are central to art, the concept of art itself—are meaningful, or wholly meaningful, only within the individual arts. What lies between the arts is theater.24

What emerges from the confusion born of linguistic adulteration and what falls “between the arts” is not art but “theatricality.” The notion of theatricality can be applied to instances beyond the singular case of minimalism or the intermingling, specifically, of literature and painting; and, as I interpret it, this notion encapsulates the general idea of hybridization between genres, movements, and arts that should remain unambiguously distinct. Hybrid forms such as minimal (literalist) art endanger the future development of the medium, for they do not insist on “a discipline of the eye . . . that seeks to acknowledge the pure, silent presence of the work,” as Mitchell puts it. It is this “pure, silent presence” that Rosalind Krauss also sees in modern art and seeks to safeguard. Yet, instead of merely sending the sister arts to separate corners, she erects a wall between them; in her terminology, this wall is called a “grid.” An image inspired by the rectilinear geometry in the works of artists like Piet Mondrian, the grid acts as a barrier between the visual and verbal:

22 Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 438. 23 Mitchell, “Ut Pictura Theoria,” 351, emphasis in the original. 24 Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 457, emphasis in the original.

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The absolute status of the grid, its lack of hierarchy, or center, or inflection, emphasizes not only its anti-referential character, but— more importantly—its hostility to narrative. This structure, impervious to both time and to incident, will not permit the projection of language into the domain of the visual, and the result is silence.25

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And in the ensuing silence, “what many artists thought they could hear was the beginning, the origins of Art,” because “the grid was emblematic of the sheer disinterestedness of the work of art, its absolute purposelessness, from which it derived its promise of autonomy.”26 In functioning as the barrier that explicitly “refuses speech” and is “impervious to language,” Krauss’s grid confines artists within their medium; however, it is also their protection “against all intrusion from the outside,” and so both defines the identity of the medium and preserves its purity.27 In the quest to banish literature from the kingdom of art, Krauss, Fried, and Greenberg succeed in producing a great deal of it. This is an inconsistency they are perfectly willing to overlook. Hence, even amid their calls to suppress language, we do find a “Happily Ever After,” so as long as art is coupled from a specific type of literature written by a certain class of critics. Of course, this is the sort of unhappy ending foretold by Wolfe, who, groaning at the inner contradiction, notes that this particular pairing of art and literature only grants the keys to the kingdom (of art) to an intellectual few. W. J. T. Mitchell agrees with Wolfe—up to a point. In his essay “Ut Pictura Theoria” from 1989, he parses the problematics of ut pictura poesis for abstract art and begins by singling out Krauss’s grid. He does so not only to call attention to the contradictory nature of her standpoint but to question the feasibility and necessity of building a wall between the arts in the first place. In accordance with my own views, Mitchell recognizes that the wall erected between language and literature by the grid of abstraction only kept out a certain kind of verbal contamination, but it absolutely depended, at the same time, on the collaboration of painting with another kind of discourse, what we may call, for lack of a better term, the discourse of theory.28

By “theory,” Mitchell means that “curious hybrid of mainly prose discourse compounded from aesthetics and other branches of philosophy, as well as from literary criticism, linguistics, the natural and social sciences,

25 26 27 28

Krauss, “The Originality of the Avant-Garde,” 54. Krauss, 54. Krauss, “The Originality of the Avant-Garde” 54, 56. Mitchell, “Ut Pictura Theoria,” 354.

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psychology, history, political thought, and religion.”29 Although we may know it by other names, such as “intellectual prose” or simply “criticism,” it is generally characterized by its “refusal of disciplinary identity.”30 The “theory” Mitchell likely has in mind includes the artists’ manifestos, the inquiries of the self-identified critics (that is, Greenberg, Fried, and Krauss), or any textual accompaniment provided by the artists themselves. Yet, in contrast to Wolfe, Mitchell does not want to ward off its intrusion, nor does he fight against the “confusion of the arts” that Krauss, Fried, and Greenberg fear the contamination of words might cause. Mitchell openly acknowledges the contradictory disposition of abstract art and its tendency to rely on and guard against literary intermingling, and he further contends that this contradiction also applies to works that are not abstract. Representational art, too, relies on its audience’s familiarity with narratives external to the paintings themselves; for Raphael’s Transfiguration to “make sense,” for example, one must already have knowledge of the biblical account. However, those outside the Christian tradition or unacquainted with the text of the Bible are still free to have recourse to their own invented narrative to explain the depicted figures. And yet the same could and, in my opinion, should hold true for abstract art and its audience. When there are, to quote Mitchell, “fewer verbal promptings provided by the painter in the form of titles, narratives, or subject matter,” there is a greater demand to “fill the void with language.”31 Perhaps this language takes form as the idle chatter of museum-goers, or perhaps it is articulated as theory. Whereas I am apt to include the former, Mitchell’s emphasis is on the latter, at least for the purposes of his essay. He rightly points out, “‘theory’ is the ‘word’ (or words) that stands in the same relation to abstract art that traditional literary forms had to representational painting.”32 He therefore suggests that Horace’s ut pictura poesis should be reformulated as ut pictura theoria so as to reflect the circumstances of abstract art.33 So, it would appear that Mitchell at any rate has managed a more inclusive “Happily 29 Mitchell, “Ut Pictura Theoria,” 355. 30 Mitchell, “Ut Pictura Theoria,” 355. While “literature” can have a wideranging definition, Mitchell is clearly zeroing in on a certain type of prose that would not count Goethe’s cloud poem or Keller’s Bildungsroman among its ranks; in fact, even the connection to Kleist’s article is debateable. Nevertheless, these nineteenth-century narrative images not only dovetailed with “theoretical” discourses; they also collaborated with painting and contributed to its development of abstraction. 31 Mitchell, “Ut Pictura Theoria,” 354. 32 Mitchell, “Ut Pictura Theoria,” 355. 33 While Mitchell actually turns to the words of Tom Wolfe to clarify his new maxim (“These days, without a theory to go with it, I can’t see a painting”), he joins with his intellectual brethren in reproaching Wolfe for his “philistine

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Ever After” ending for the relationship between painting and literature, however tragic it might appear in the eyes of the antiverbal camp. But what does a “Happily Ever After” for the sister arts imply for the future of abstract art? In this final section we will survey a few perspectives, seeing who believes that abstract art is over, when it supposedly started to die, and where reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated.

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Breached Boundaries and Brillo Boxes In 1936, less than three decades after Kandinsky debuted his Great Abstraction in Munich, MOMA staged its exhibition, Cubism and Abstract Art. Despite the celebratory mood of birth and beginnings, Alfred H. Barr Jr. framed the phenomenon of abstract art as an event past its prime. His preface to the companion catalogue stressed the historicizing and retrospective character of the exhibit, as did the genealogical diagram gracing the front of its dust jacket. The Barr chart situated abstraction as the most recent rung on an evolutionary ladder; it was no doubt designed to legitimate its emergence but it also served to suggest that its trajectory was moving toward its closing stages (especially given that the proverbial rung is at the bottom of the page). If the diagram failed to convey to American public of the 19302 that they were at the tail end of this trajectory, Barr spelled it out for them with his assertions that “many of the conclusions in the development of abstract art were reached before the War” and that “ten years ago one heard on all sides that abstract art was dead.”34 Now, I do not claim that Barr was heralding the end of abstraction, and in fact, the director did mention that interest in the subject was still alive. Nonetheless, the general impression delivered by his introduction is one of a golden age not gone but certainly gone by. Mitchell is less ambiguous. He initiates his essay with a discussion of abstraction’s obsolescence; a “familiar feature of our cultural landscape,” it has “become a monument to an era that is passing from living memory into history.”35 For Mitchell, this waning period of cultural history is the “period of modernism, ranging roughly from the beginning of the twentieth century to the aftermath of the Second World War.”36 At this time, put-down” and “cheap shots” at abstraction’s reliance on language. See Mitchell, “Ut Pictura Theoria,” 354. 34 Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, 9. 35 Mitchell, “Ut Pictura Theoria,” 348. 36 Mitchell, “Ut Pictura Theoria,” 348. “Modernism” begins and ends at different moments for different scholars. Since Mitchell regards modernism and “the age of abstraction” as coinciding, he accordingly attributes its onset to Kandinsky. I would gesture toward an earlier date, as have others: T. J. Clark looks to the

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the “experiments of cubism and abstract expressionism are no longer ‘experimental’ or shocking” and abstraction ceases to be what we might call “avant-garde.”37 Why did abstraction lose its shock value? One answer might be found at the 1936 MOMA exhibition, for Barr himself admits that his “retrospective” is “in no sense a pioneering effort.”38 That the great masterpieces of abstract art, once so provocative, could be canonized in the annals of art history books and sanctified in museums indicates a degree of assimilation into the greater cultural hegemony. We could attempt to blame literature. The canonizing of abstraction contextualizes it with a narrative, which, in assigning it a history, thereby consigns it to history. By this logic, however, the literary narrative is formulated after the fact; it is a symptom of abstraction’s decline, not the cause of any demise. And yet I believe literature can still be to blame, especially in light of what Mitchell calls the “death knell” of abstraction. For him, that death knell rings in 1955 when Korean War veteran Jasper Johns “began to produce a series of paintings that outraged high abstractionists and are widely regarded as bringing the end of modernist abstraction and the beginning of postmodernism.”39 Johns’s work proved shocking for at least three reasons: (1) its sober geometric forms were rendered with “expressionistic, anti-geometrical brushstrokes”; (2) its favored motifs of flags and targets were familiar icons of mass culture; and (3) these features combined to disrupt the purity of the purely optical by integrating “editorial comment.”40 This editorial commentary would seem to amount to “Literature pure and simple,” only now it is of a different ilk and it blurs the line between the sister arts in a novel manner. Johns’s work occupies a theoretical position that not only relies on discourse outside the painting but is also integrated into its very material constitution by the artist’s hand. With this noticeable intrusion of literature into the realm of painting, modern art has “come out the other side as Art Theory” or postmodern art. Mitchell’s choice of Jasper Johns is an interesting one, for he is not alone in supposing that the rise of Pop Art or of artists with Dadaist tendencies ushers out the modern period—and with it the heyday of abstraction. Arthur C. Danto avers that the truly revolutionary moment—indeed, the entire “end of art”—occurs in 1964 when Andy Warhol unveils Brillo Box. For Danto, Brillo Box opens a Pandora’s box of new philosophical avant-garde of the 1840s, while Robert Rosenblum and Michael Fried motion toward Romanticism and the eighteenth century. 37 Mitchell, “Ut Pictura Theoria,” 348. 38 Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, 9. 39 Mitchell, “Ut Pictura Theoria,” 368. 40 Mitchell, “Ut Pictura Theoria,” 368.

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questions: why are Warhol’s boxes christened art while the Procter and Gamble variety in the supermarket is not? What determines the function and value of visually identical objects? How do we tell the difference between “art” and “not-art?” With visible difference completely effaced, the principle determinants of an artwork are its ideas and intent, words that Danto terms “philosophy” and that I regard as comprising another form of literary narrative. In posing these questions, Danto argues, the artist has ceased to be an artist and has embarked on the new career path of philosopher, because the task of formulating the answers to those questions falls within the domain of the philosopher. Once the medium is liberated from any Greenbergian project of self-definition, the teleology of art ends and artists are free to experiment as they please. As Brillo Box proclaims, anything can be art.41 The confusion born of Brillo Box surpassed the mere erasure of the distinction between the visual and verbal. It swept through other spheres to undermine the integrity of long-held definitions that separated art from life and high culture from low, leaving the rubble of these broken barriers in its wake. Danto’s thesis may devastate the art world, but instead of amounting to an obituary, it describes another fundamental shift in the story of art that changes what we understand art to be and how we relate to it. Pronouncing the death of any vestiges of a linear narrative, it portrays a landscape where any object or image can ostensibly claim to be “real” art, irrespective of its beauty, appearance, or creator. Although not as extreme as Warhol’s piece, the flags and targets of Jasper Johns, themselves icons of popular culture, also illustrate the blending of art and life instigated by the “confusion of the arts.” This type of literary incursion could debatably be traced back to Marcel Duchamp’s first experimentations with the readymade in 1913. Duchamp was already breaking from picturing to privilege the idea, defining his found objects as “thing plus text” meant to “carry the spectator toward other regions more verbal.”42 In these instances of visual and verbal intermingling, literature again played an essential role in advancing a paradigmatic transformation of art. Although this shift pushes art out into new directions beyond what is specific to the medium or achievable on a pictorial surface, I still would contend that art, even abstract art, has not died. It has transformed and been given new life with infinite possibilities. Furthermore, it appears to me that the debates and concerns surrounding art’s transformation from its modernist forms, such as abstraction, into postmodernist varieties bring us back to the discussions that arose before and about the invention of abstract art in painting. The appearance of the artwork at issue drastically differs, and yet: is the 41 Cf. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. 42 Duchamp quoted in Leah Dickerman, “Inventing Abstraction,” 34.

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question of what (visually) distinguishes Kandinsky’s compositions from the work of a five-year-old really that far away from the question of what distinguishes Warhol’s Brillo boxes from their generic counterparts? Both essentially adopt a line of inquiry regarding the value, status, and definition of art, and they implicitly demand justification for their answers. Whereas we might assume that Kandinsky and his kin anticipated the questioning of abstraction and so published their treatises and manifestos to explain their justifications to the spectator, postmodernist artists such as Warhol turned the question back on the spectator. Whether Brillo Box is art and whether it makes Warhol an artist is a problem posed to the audience, and any demand for justification we would have to answer ourselves. We might consider this a new form of cognitive spectatorship for a new form of art, one less interested in clouding perception than in challenging preconceptions. Hanging a piece of postmodern art alongside the examples of abstract art in literature allows us to discern interesting correlations that seem to comprise an inverse relationship to my eyes. In the case of the former, the artist works within the visual idiom to create and present provocative philosophical inquiries; in the latter, the author works within the verbal medium to create and present provocative images.43 In both instances, we the audience, whether as viewers or readers, are prompted to reflect on the nature of art and our relationship to it. And in either instance, the creator crosses medial boundaries to generate innovation in and awareness of his or her own medium. This “confusion” might run the risk of straining relations between the sister arts or injuring the integrity of one, but it also leads to the likelihood of making these arts’ bond stronger and helping each other flourish in ways otherwise unimaginable. Posing such questions and articulating such concerns are what keep the visual arts alive and relevant regardless of their current configuration. Literature continues to be an instrumental force and a transformative power in the activity of art, its language ranging from fiction to poetry, from theory to philosophy, and from idle to intellectual chatter. I therefore tend to approach the “problem” of the “confusion of the arts” as an aperture for a cross-medial exchange that holds the promise of furthering the transformation and expressive possibilities of both.

43 Robert Morris’s reading of the history of modern art identifies a division of labor between artist and critic: early abstract artists wrote their own manifestos, while later abstract expressionists relied on critics to act as spokesperson. In the next historical stage, minimalists and postmodern artists once again produced their own texts, thereby robbing the critics their voice. See Morris, “Words and Images in Modernism and Postmodernism,” 337–47.

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Index

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1–1951, 83–85, 86 (figure), 88, 92 absence, 31–32, 34, 44, 60, 62, 124, 139, 165, 171, 212, 218, 221, 234, 248 abstract art: audience for, 253; in Balzac, 188–92; in Barr, Alfred H, Jr., 10–11; contradictory nature of, 253; in Cubism and Abstract Art, 9; definition of, 249, 251; engagement with, 9, 173; failure of, 175; forms of, 16; future of, 254–57; and Goethe, 99, 101; in Heinrich, 198–99; history of, 8–9, 205, 245–47, 255; in Kandinsky, 1–19, 173; in Keller, 174–86, 202, 207–8, 220, 223; in Kleist, 37; laws of, 12; in Mitchell, 252–53; modes of, 18; origins of, 1–19, 22–23, 168, 245–46 247–54; and perspective, 196; pleasure from, 172; compared to postmodern art, 257; potential for, 172–73; prehistory of, 7; and selfawareness of artist, 205; shapes in, 16; theoretical basis for, 99–100; topology of, 7; in Twombly, 240– 41; in Wolfe, 244–45, 248 abstraction: in art compared to science, 105; in Barr, 254; “clouding of perception” as basis for, 120, 173; contradictions in, 253; definition of, 16, 18, 178, 251; and intention, 168; in Kandinsky, 2–19, 254; in Keller, 208; in Klee, 219; in Kleist, 21; in Mitchell, 252–55; mode of, 8; in Newton, 105; and nonrepresentative art, 23;

origins of, 1–19, 101, 247; and postmodernism, 256–57; and the sublime, 38; synonyms for, 20 Academy, 237, 238 (figure) aesthetic experience, 2, 17, 23, 31–31, 37–48, 52, 55–56, 66–69, 75, 78, 80, 83–85, 88, 91–92, 100–102, 151, 168–73, 189, 193–94, 219– 20, 242 agency, 66, 71, 74, 123–25, 132, 143, 175, 179, 200 alienation, 184, 194, 203–4, 207–8, 214, 240–41 Also sprach Zarathustra, 229 Amrine, Frederick, 103 animal imagery, 38–40, 47–50, 124– 31, 136, 172 annotation, 10, 143, 146 apocalypse / apocalyptic imagery, 16, 22, 42, 46, 48, 52, 54–55, 66, 80, 84, 88 Apollo / the Apollonian, 70–79, 229 archetypes / archetypal imagery, 15, 88, 104, 114, 215 230 Ariadne, 230–32 Ariadne’s Thread, 229–32 Arnim, Achim von, 37 Ars poetica, 247 “Art and Objecthood,” 250–51 art critics. See critics art historians, 3, 11, 20, 55, 187 art history, 5–6, 8, 11, 14–16, 19–20, 218, 220, 243–47, 255 art movements, 9, 11, 13, 224, 251 Artist Network Diagram, 3, 4 (figure), 14 Ashton, Dore, 187

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assimilation, 186, 205, 207, 255 atmosphere / atmospheric imagery, 31, 69, 89, 119, 122–23, 126, 135, 141–43, 146, 148, 165–66 audience, 2, 8–9, 15, 17–18, 34–36, 45–46, 49–50, 52–53, 56–57, 60, 64, 67–68, 71, 74, 76, 78–80, 83, 91–92, 152, 157, 171–72, 188–91, 193–202, 205, 212, 229, 235, 238, 240–41, 244–45, 247–48, 253, 257 autobiographical novel, 18, 174–86. See also Der grüne Heinrich automatic drawing, 18, 220–32, 235–36, 241 autonomy, 24, 99, 116–17, 125, 191– 92, 196, 202, 244, 252 avant-garde, 2, 12, 24, 57, 60, 190, 208, 223, 249, 252, 255 avant-garde artists, 2, 65, 208, 249–50 awakening, 16, 24, 30, 83, 88, 92, 97, 136, 139, 182, 212, 218 background (of painting), 27, 29, 32, 44, 61–63, 73, 76, 78, 80, 84–85, 89 Balzac, Honoré de, 18, 175, 186–93, 196–97, 200, 202, 245 Barr, Alfred H., Jr., 9–13 Barr diagram. See Cubism and Abstract Art Bataille, George, 222 Bauchredner und Rufer im Moor, 206 (figure), 207–8 Bauhaus lectures, 212–13 beauty, 70, 78–80, 93–95, 138, 187, 256 “Bedenken und Ergebung,” 111 Berliner Abendblätter, 37 Berman, Marshall, 99 bias, 13, 14, 110–11 Bildnerei der Geisteskranken, 215 Bildungsroman, 18, 174–86, 203 Black Square, 56, 57 (figure), 58–67, 97 Blauer Reiter, 2, 16 Blechen, Carl, 139 Bois, Yve-Alain, 83–84

boundaries, 15, 31, 40, 42, 44, 73, 84, 100, 113, 133, 135, 202, 218, 248, 254, 257 bourgeoisie, 53, 181–84, 197, 201 Brady, Ronald H., 104 Brentano, Clemens, 37, 39 Breysig, Johann Adam, 43, 50 Brillo Box, 255–56 Brown, Jane K., 99 Brücke, Ernst, 153 caricature, 13, 15, 154 Carus, Carl Gustav, 139–40 catalogue / cataloguing, 2, 6, 9–11, 63, 83, 143, 169–70, 215, 235, 254 change, 1–2, 12, 102, 110, 112–13, 115, 119, 123–24, 125, 127, 141– 43, 147; in Impressionism, 163–64; in Keller, 201; in Klee, 213; in Monet, 164–67; social change, 12, 192; of style, 11 chaos, 18, 20, 148, 178–79, 186–88, 208, 212, 218, 229, 240 Chave, Anna C., 68 chiaroscuro, 27, 142 Chlenova, Masha, 2 classification, 14, 102, 26, 102, 144, 230. See also cloud classification systems clothing, 14–15, 157, 181–84, 201–4 cloud classification systems, 118–20; in poetry, 121–36 Cloud Study: Evening, 143 “clouding of perception,” 17, 99–137, 138, 141, 151, 160–61, 170, 172– 73, 245, 250, 257 clouds / cloud imagery, 28, 31, 38–39, 69, 113, 117, 118–20, 138–39; in Constable, 140–46; in Goethe, 121–37, 140; in Turner, 147–51 cognition, 23, 50, 59, 62, 66, 84, 88–89, 100, 102, 107, 113–14, 116, 122, 126, 128, 135, 156. See also mind “cognitive viewing,” 17, 99–100, 114–17, 120, 124–25, 128, 130,

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Index 132, 134, 136–37, 138–51, 154, 157, 159–64, 166, 168, 170–73, 246, 250, 257 collaboration, 3, 252–53 color, 7, 16, 32, 34, 55–56, 58–59, 61, 63–64, 68–59, 69, 71, 73, 75–76, 78–80, 83–84, 89, 92, 97, 101, 105–6, 147, 149–56, 159–67, 170–73, 189, 206, 209, 216, 220, 223, 233, 236, 238, 249 color field painting, 55, 92 commedia dell’arte, 193, 204 conditions, 11–13, 19, 36, 52, 54, 62, 67, 84, 92, 104–5, 112, 119, 141, 157, 163, 183, 199, 212, 218, 220, 246, 250 Constable, John, 17, 120, 138–39, 140–52, 163–64, 172–73 controversy, 5, 25, 103 convention, 7, 14, 22, 25, 28, 31, 46, 62, 77, 248; in Balzac, 187, 190–91; in Impressionism, 94; in Keller, 191, 197, 200, 202, 208; in Klee, 209–10, 222; landscape conventions, 54, 140, 178, 180; in Twombly, 241–42; Western conventions, 20, 32, 48 Covarrubias, Miguel, 13–14 creative process, 3, 8, 96, 176–79, 187–88, 210–13 criticism, 11–12, 51, 193, 195–96, 200–201, 204, 240, 243, 252–53 critics, 18, 22, 56, 152, 154, 161–62, 173, 190, 194, 196, 200, 202, 233, 239–40, 243–44, 247, 252– 53, 257 cubism, 1, 10 (figure), 20 Cubism and Abstract Art, 9, 10 (figure), 11, 254 cultural context, 8–9, 11, 202, 225, 246, 254–55 Dadaism, 14, 224, 244, 255 Dahl, Johann Christian Clausen, 139 Danto, Arthur C., 255–56 definition of art, 9, 15, 62, 100, 186, 196, 210, 239, 241, 244–45, 250, 252, 256–57

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Delaunay, Robert, 3, 5 description, 8, 20, 118, 155, 171–72, 200, 233; of Black Square, 56; of clouds, 119, 143; of cognitive viewing, 140; of loneliness, 39; of scrawl, 177; of the sublime, 23 Dessin automatique, 220, 221 (figure) Dionysus / the Dionysian, 70–80, 224, 226, 228–31 drive. See impulse Duchamp, Marcel, 256 “Einfache Nachahmung der Natur, Manier, Stil,” 100 emotions. See feelings Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft, 6, 16, 22, 37–47 emptiness, 16, 23, 28, 30, 34–35, 37, 39–40, 42, 48, 54, 61, 64–65, 69, 84, 96, 182, 193, 218, 244 engagement, 171; with abstract art, 8, 17, 173; with abstraction, 168; cognitive engagement, 107, 128, 130, 136, 140, 160, 166, 170, 246; disengagement, 224; reader engagement, 36; social engagement, 204 “Erfahrung und Wissenschaft,” 108, 112 Erikson, Oskar, 175, 197–204, 234 essay, 11, 26, 37–39, 42, 60, 73, 75, 93–96, 100, 102, 106–8, 114, 118–19, 163, 168, 210, 233–34, 240–41, 243, 248, 250, 251–54 evolution, 10, 13, 37, 69, 254 exhibitions, 1–19, 25–26, 30, 37, 50, 56–67, 80–98, 154, 161, 168–69, 215–20, 232, 232–42, 246, 254–55 expression, 8, 16, 18, 24, 222; and abstract art, 22, 196, 198; in Balzac, 188, 190–92, 245; in Keller, 178, 204; in Klee, 211, 216; in Kleist, 97, 178, 246; in Malevich, 61; of the sublime, 45 eyelid imagery / eyelid metaphor, 43–46, 48, 52, 55, 62, 67, 81, 84–85, 88, 92, 250

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eyes / eyesight, 17, 23, 28, 31–32, 34, 39–40, 43–48, 52, 55, 62, 64–67, 78, 80–81, 83–85, 87–88, 92, 100, 116, 122, 124–25, 146–47, 149, 151–53, 156, 162–63, 171, 189, 193, 196, 198, 210–11, 213, 217–19, 228, 230, 232, 236, 248, 250–51, 257 failed artist, 174–205 Farbenlehre, 101–5, 138, 149 feelings, 17, 246; and automatism, 222; in Balzac, 188–92; in Friedrich, 35; in Kandinsky, 169–70; in Keller, 175, 178–86, 194–97, 199–205, 208; in Klee, 214–15; in Kleist, 23, 37, 39, 46, 53; in Malevich, 60; in Monet, 166; in Newman, 81–84, 87–88, 91–98; in Rothko, 69, 75, 79–80 Fénéon, Félix, 153–56, 161 Fenêtres, 3 fictional artists / artworks, 18, 174– 205, 207–9, 218, 220, 222–23, 230, 234, 240–41, 245 finitude, 40, 81, 93, 96, 98 fluctuation, 78, 85, 119, 123–24 fluidity, 84, 115, 122–23, 129 foreground, 28, 30, 32–35, 43–44, 62, 73, 84–85, 146, 176, 213 form, 8, 11, 13–14, 16, 43, 140, 257; in Balzac, 188, 191; in Constable, 142–44; in Friedrich, 28–29, 31, 34–36, 41, 48; in Goethe, 99–107, 110–14, 116–17, 127–29, 133, 135–36, 160, 172; in Helmholtz, 156; in Howard, 118; in Impressionism, 162, 165, 167; in Johns, 255; in Keller, 177–78, 180; in Klee, 208–18; in Kleist, 55, 97, 246; in Malevich, 56, 58–61, 63–64; in Masson, 226, 229; in Newman, 85; in Rothko, 69–71, 73, 75, 78–81; in Seurat, 154; in Turner, 147–51; in Twombly, 236–38 formlessness, 16, 42, 45, 66, 88, 93, 113, 124, 126, 128–30, 133, 135, 137, 151, 161

Förster, Eckart, 102–5 Forster, Thomas, 143 Foucault, Michel, 99 Four Squares, 63 frames / framing, 16, 55, 66, 97–98, 143; in Friedrich, 24–25, 27–28, 30–31, 35; in Kandinsky, 15; in Keller, 176; in Kleist, 37, 41, 44–46, 52, 93; in Lorrain, 27; in Malevich, 56–60, 62–63, 65–67; in Newman, 81, 84; in Rothko, 78; in Seurat, 157–58; window frame, 50 Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, 7 Frenhofer, Maître (character), 186–93, 196–97, 199–200, 202–4, 245 Freud, Sigmund, 18, 224–26, 229, 231–32, 241 Fried, Michael, 250–53 Friedrich, Caspar David, 16, 22–55, 63, 97, 100, 139, 245 Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, 26 futurism, 1, 14, 56–62 gaze, 32, 91; in Balzac, 190; in Friedrich, 35; in Kant, 17, 46, 101– 2, 105–17, 121, 129, 161–62, 172; in Keller, 193–97, 199, 201–2; in Kleist, 42–43 Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, 70, 229 genealogical trees, 11 Geulen, Eva, 111–13 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 6, 15, 17, 20, 25, 99–140, 142, 144, 149–52, 156–57, 159–64, 166–68, 170–73, 245–46, 250; and Gestalt, 130, 160, 167, 170; and Verstand, 108, 114; and Vernunft, 108, 114 “Gottheit Camarupa,” 121–26, 136 greatness, 16, 23, 26, 75–76, 114, 144, 180, 182, 203, 214, 220, 255 Greek tragedy. See tragedy Greenberg, Clement, 244–53, 256 Der grüne Heinrich, 6, 18, 174–86, 192, 203, 205, 207–8 Handbook of Physiological Optics, 153

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Index

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The Hay Wain, 144, 145 (figure) Haystack series, 17, 161–68, 169 (figure), 170, 172–73 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 153–58, 162, 173 Here series, 91 Hess, Thomas, 96 Hiroshima, 95–96 historical context, 13, 100, 191 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 7 Horace, 247 horizon imagery, 31–32, 59, 62–63 Houghton, Georgiana, 6 Howard, Luke, 17, 100, 117–39, 172 “Howards Ehrengedächtnis,” 6, 17, 100, 117, 121–37, 121 (table), 127 (table), 131 (table), 132 (table), 136 (table), 172 Hugo, Victor, 7 human body, 80–81, 91, 93, 96, 100, 107–8, 124, 133, 153, 156–57, 171, 207 humanity / human condition, 18, 39–40, 52, 59, 71, 75–76, 79–81, 88, 91–93, 96, 98, 108, 111, 117, 123, 175, 185, 208, 214, 216, 224–26, 232, 239–41 hybridity, 177–78, 208, 229, 238–41, 251–52 ideal artist, 100, 204 identification, 36, 39, 54, 64, 75–76, 78, 141, 147, 168, 194–96, 226 idiom, 97, 212, 224, 241, 257 illusionism / illusion, 9, 14, 16, 20, 24, 31–32, 45, 48–51, 53–54, 59, 62–63, 68, 70, 85, 89, 246, 249; optical illusion, 27–28, 52, 138–73, 234 imagination, 69, 107, 114, 117, 124– 26, 128–29, 132, 134–36, 151, 171–72, 183 imitation, 41, 49, 51–52, 100, 132, 187–91, 209, 217, 249 Impressionism / Impressionists, 101, 138, 144, 153–54, 161–64, 166, 168, 173; post-Impressionism, 12–13, 152–55, 159, 161–68, 173

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impulse, 8–9, 70, 73, 160, 178, 183, 207, 220–21, 229, 239 inadequacy, 16, 23–24, 97, 142, 183, 194, 196–97, 200 influence, 6, 11, 13, 27, 70, 99, 102, 139, 146, 153, 165, 173, 210, 229, 236–37, 239 inner state / inner conflict, 17–18, 51, 178–80, 185, 188, 199, 207–42 innovation, 3, 11, 15, 17, 24–25, 38, 47, 62, 173, 197, 247, 257 insanity, 18, 189, 214 inspiration, 3, 66, 71 intention, 2–3, 20, 54, 83, 104, 178– 79, 204, 223, 240 interconnectedness / interrelatedness, 3, 14, 80, 93, 100, 103, 109–10, 116, 125, 160, 168 Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art, 1–2, 2 (figure), 3–19 The Invention of the Labyrinth, 226, 227 (figure) Johns, Jasper, 255–56 judgment, 14, 54, 103, 108, 157, 189, 192, 194–97, 200–201 Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry, 224 Kālidāsa, 122–23 Kandinsky, Wassily, 1–19, 22, 101–2, 168–74, 204–5, 246, 254, 257 Kant, Immanuel, 23, 45–46, 60, 66, 80, 88, 93, 102–6, 108, 114, 116 Keller, Gottfried, 6, 15, 18, 20, 174– 86, 191–93, 197–206, 207–9, 218, 220, 223, 241, 245–46, 253 Kittler, Friedrich, 99 Klee, Paul, 18, 206–20, 222–24, 235– 36, 241–42 Kleist, Heinrich von, 6, 15–17, 20–21, 22–54, 55, 60, 62, 66–67, 80–81, 84, 88, 92–93, 97, 245–46, 250 Klint, Hilma af, 5–6 Komposition V, 2, 5 Kosegarter, Ludwig Gotthard, 47–49 Kramer, Hilton, 55 Krauss, Rosalind, 243, 251–53

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Kreidefelsen auf Rügen, 32, 33 (figure), 36 Das Kreuz im Gebirge, 25, 31 Kritik der Urteilskraft, 103, 105 Kritzelei (fictional artwork), 174–81, 184–96, 190–92, 197, 199–200, 204, 208, 218, 220, 223, 239–40 Kügelgen, Marie Helene von, 30, 34 Kupka, František, 3 labyrinth imagery / metaphor, 178– 79, 184, 208, 220, 226, 227–31 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 118 landscape painting, 7, 26, 47, 55, 138–39, 175, 180 language, 19, 34, 39–41, 86, 122–36, 138–40, 159–60, 166–67, 170–72, 177–79, 184, 190–94, 199–201, 204, 210–11, 213, 232, 244, 252, 256 Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie, 18, 100, 247–50 Larionov, Mikhail, 5 Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0.10, 56, 58 (figure) laws, 12–13, 34, 100, 141–43, 168, 228; natural law, 14, 128, 140–43 layering, of paint, 28–29, 33, 61, 73, 76, 89, 144 lebendiges Anschauen, 114–17, 133 138–40, 151, 159–60, 166–67. See also cognitive viewing Lee, Heinrich (character), 18, 174–86, 188, 192–205, 207–9, 218, 220, 222–23, 234, 240–41, 245 Léger, Fernand, 3 Lescault, Catherine (character), 187– 88, 190 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 18, 100, 241, 247–50 letters, 30, 34, 48–49, 50, 62, 120, 139 light, 27, 69, 71, 76, 78, 80, 141–44, 148–51, 154–56, 158, 163, 165, 172, 228 Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory)— the Morning after the Deluge—Moses

Writing the Book of Genesis, 149, 150 (figure) limits / limitlessness, 16, 23, 27, 31, 34–35, 38–40, 44–46, 59, 62, 64, 66–67, 69, 71, 80, 84, 88, 93, 98, 133, 180, 202, 248–49; of experience, 59, 71; of knowledge, 23, 64, 67–69, 104; of perception, 110–11, 157; of perspective, 188; of representation, 241 lines, 18, 27, 31–32, 177–78, 180–81, 186–88, 202, 204, 207–42 Linnaeus, Carl, 102–6, 115, 118 loneliness, 30, 38–40, 42, 47–48, 50, 92 Lorrain, Claude, 26–33, 62 Lukács, Georg, 185 Lyotard, Jean-François, 59–60, 66–67, 81 Lys, Ferdinand (character), 175, 192–204 MacDonald-Wright, Stanton, 3 Macke, August, 216 Macpherson, James, 49 Malevich, Kazimir, 5, 16–17, 21, 55–67, 81, 83–84, 97–98 marginalization, 18, 204, 208, 215 Masson, André, 18, 6, 208, 220–32 medium, 5, 7, 15, 17, 39, 43, 51, 61, 68, 121, 127, 132–34, 137, 140, 142, 166, 211–12, 226, 244–46, 247, 249–52, 256–57 Meeresstrand im Nebel, 28, 29 (figure) Meghadūta, 122 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 210–11, 216 metaphor, 43–44, 46, 48, 61–62, 69, 74, 91, 120, 130, 142, 178–79, 184, 208, 233, 236 meteorology, 17, 118, 139–42, 146, 163 meter, 121, 125 mimesis, 19–20, 47–50, 60, 68, 100, 179, 188–90 mind, 16, 62, 86, 88, 146, 220, 222; allegory of, 230; in Bataille, 222– 23; in Goethe, 100, 103, 124–25, 127, 133; in Kandinsky, 168–69;

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Index in Kant, 45; in Keller, 208; in Klee, 215–18, 223; in Masson, 224; in Merleau-Ponty, 210; and Seurat, 160; of reader, 20, 24; in Rothko, 68–69, 71; in Twombly, 240–41 minotaur, 228–31, 226, 228 Miró, Joan, 223 Mitchell, W. J. T., 251–55 modern art, 1, 11, 13, 215; history of, 14–15, 23, 187, 214, 257; and Johns, 255; in Klee, 209; in Krauss, 251; and the sublime, 96; and Twombly, 233–35; in Varnedoe, 241; in Wolfe, 243–47 Modern Chromatics, 153 modernity, 11, 26, 58, 94–96, 99, 162, 203 Der Mönch am Meer, 16, 22, 23 (figure), 24–54, 55, 62 Mondrian, Piet, 5, 251 Monet, Claude, 17, 161–72 monk, 16, 22–25, 30, 35–36, 39, 41–42, 51, 53–54, 63 monochrome palette, 18, 24, 32, 55, 64, 83, 98 Morgennebel im Gebirge, 28 morphology (Goethe), 17, 102, 104, 106–7, 111, 114–15, 120, 140 mother, 182–84, 204 motivation, 8, 21, 172, 191, 197, 214 mountain imagery, 25, 28–29, 322, 122 Munich, 2–3, 140, 193, 254 Museum of Modern Art, 1–19, 65, 70, 72, 74, 90, 96, 221, 227, 230, 232, 238, 254–55 Muybridge, Eadweard, 159–60, 165 myth / mythology, 6, 9, 14–15, 70, 75, 94–95, 218, 226, 228–30 names / naming, 20, 56, 58, 66, 70, 88–89, 91–92, 122–23, 133, 192, 228, 235–36 narration, 22, 121, 137, 141–42, 144, 163, 170, 178–80, 200 narrativity, 5, 7, 11–13, 15–16, 123, 130, 160, 171, 177, 218, 252–53, 255–56

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natural world, 20, 24, 99–100, 103–6, 108, 117, 141, 150, 162, 173 “The Nature of Abstract Art,” 11–15 Neun Briefe über Landschaftsmalerei, 139 Newman, Barnett, 17, 55, 81–98 Newton, Isaac, 105–6, 109, 115, 117 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 70–71, 75–76, 224, 229 No. 10, 71, 72 (figure), 73, 74 (figure) nonrepresentational art, 18–19, 23, 178, 246 objectivity / nonobjectivity, 19–21, 35, 39, 41, 45, 56, 60–64, 108, 113, 129, 154, 159, 161, 170, 173, 213–14 objects, 7, 20, 24, 28–29 16, 35–36, 38–39, 42, 51, 53, 60, 62, 66, 75, 80, 88, 104, 107–8, 116–17, 123, 128, 147, 152, 156–58, 162–63, 210, 236, 256 observation, 119, 140, 146, 151, 157; of clouds, 119; of nature, 116, 140, 151, 166; scientific observation, 17, 100, 103, 106–8, 110, 112, 114, 163–64 omission, 13–15, 73, 164, 225. See also absence “On the Modifications of Clouds, and on the Principles of their Production, Suspension, and Destruction,” 118–20 Onement I, 89, 90 (figure), 91–92 Opticks, 105 optics, 17, 31, 99, 105–6, 152–54, 156, 159, 162 oscillation, 45, 110–11, 117, 122–23, 126, 128–30, 132–33, 135–36, 166, 172 Ossian, 47–49 The Painted Word, 243–48, 252–53 paintings-as-drama theory (Rothko), 71–78 Panorama der Stadt Rom, 43, 50 paradox, 28, 79, 92, 194, 222, 229, 241, 246

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292 I  ndex Paris, 3, 27, 152–57, 187, 221, 227 parody, 13, 38, 246 Paul, Jean, 7 Pedagogical Sketchbook, 213 performance, 73, 78, 81, 123, 127, 194–95, 213 perspective, 26–27, 31–32, 37, 44–46, 52, 88, 92, 146, 153, 158, 188–90, 192, 196, 200–203 phenomena, 69, 102–15, 128, 133, 138, 142–43, 153, 160, 162, 164, 166–68, 215, 254 physiology, 106, 173; of the eye, 17, 106, 125, 151–56, 159, 162, 166; of perception, 160, 163 Picabia, Francis, 3 pictorial plane, 32, 50, 61, 68, 83–85, 91, 194, 207, 213, 219, 237, 249 play, 17, 49, 130, 160–62, 172, 218, 239, 246 pleasure, 9, 17, 100, 117, 122, 128, 137, 161–62, 171, 194, 196 pointillism, 17, 138, 152–62, 166, 173 polarities, 111–15, 120, 122–23, 126–27, 131–34, 136, 228 Pollock, Griselda, 12, 14, 276 Porbus, François (character), 187–91, 193, 196 Poseuses, 157, 158 (figure), 159–60 positivism, 9, 11, 75 postmodernism, 59, 255–57 Poussin, Nicolas, 26 Poussin, Nicolas (character), 187–91, 193, 196 Pott, J. H., 26 power, 18–19, 61, 76, 98, 106, 108– 9, 114, 124–26, 136, 169–71, 195, 201, 214, 229, 235, 245, 257 Preller, Friedrich, 139 primitivism, 18, 58, 70, 73, 208, 212, 218, 224; influence on Klee, 222– 25; and surrealism, 224–25, 241; influence on Twombly, 235–37; and the Zwischenwelt-primitivist triangle, 222, 224, 235, 241 Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, 49 Prinzhorn, Hans, 216

progress, 13, 156–57, 215 proportion, 27, 44, 73, 81, 88, 84, 146 protagonist, 18, 174–75, 180–85, 192, 198–99, 201–3, 205, 207–9, 218, 241 provocation, 7, 55, 144, 202, 204, 235, 255, 257 235 psychoanalysis, 18, 222, 224, 230 psychological state. See inner state the public, 3, 6–7, 26, 31, 54, 60, 66, 68, 79, 81, 161, 172–73, 195, 215, 254 purpose, 9, 51, 62, 97, 100, 113, 134, 164, 191–92, 194, 210, 232, 252 Quadrilateral. See Black Square Rain, Steam and Speed—The Great Western Railway, 146, 147 (figure) Ramdohr, Basilius von, 31–32 reader, 16, 19, 24, 26, 35–36, 39, 42, 49, 100, 107, 123, 135, 177, 181, 184, 186, 190–93, 200, 204–5, 217, 246, 257 reality, 138, 156–57, 166, 225–26, 250; and abstraction, 22; in Balzac, 188–91; in Constable, 140; in Friedrich, 24, 34, 45; in Goethe, 100–101, 173; in Kant, 80, 100– 101, 113, 116–17, 128; in Keller, 181; in Klee, 213; in Kleist, 39, 41–42, 49, 51–52; in Malevich, 59, 64, 67; in Masson, 224; in Monet, 168; in Newman, 93–95; perception of, 44, 48, 50, 173, 212; in Rothko, 68–71, 79–80; in Seurat, 154, 159–60; in Turner, 146, 151 recognition, 20, 24, 28, 36–37, 44, 47, 61, 71, 75, 116, 127–30, 133, 136, 157, 160, 167–72, 188, 190– 91, 197, 200, 223, 238, 248 rectangles, 16–17, 67, 69, 73, 76, 78, 83–84, 89 Regulus, 44, 78, 151 rejection / scorn, 40, 187, 190–94, 196–98, 200–201, 204

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Index

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Researches about Atmospheric Phenomena, 143 Romanticism, 40, 71, 100–101, 103, 105, 140, 214 “The Romantics Were Prompted,” 71–75 Rood, Ogden, 153, 156 Rosenberg, Harold, 244 Rosenblum, Robert, 55 Rothko, Mark, 17, 55, 67–81, 83–84, 97–98 Rousseau, Henri, 14 Rückenfigur, 36, 63 Ruskin, John, 147–48 Russel, Morgan, 3 sand imagery, 24, 30–32, 35–36, 47–49 Schapiro, Meyer, 11–12, 14, 63, 152, 161–63, 278 Schopenhauer, Johanna, 29 scientia intuitiva, 102–3, 114 scientific investigation / methodology, 17, 102–6, 111, 114–15, 144, 151, 159, 163, 166, 173 scientific knowledge, 76, 100, 104, 108, 173 scientists, 138, 151, 155–56, 159–60, 162, 164, 172 scrawls / scribbles, 18, 175, 177–80, 184, 197, 198–205, 208, 216, 220, 232–39, 241–42 sculpture, 2, 13–14, 91 Seaport, Effects of Fog, 27 (figure) seascape, 22–37, 39, 41, 47, 55, 97, 144–45, 159–60, 245 Seascape Study with Rain Cloud, 144, 145 (figure) self-awareness, 18, 88, 92–93, 107, 171, 180, 196–99, 205, 240–42, 246 semantics, 20, 109, 130–32 sensory perception, 40, 42, 50, 62, 69–70, 93, 99, 103–7, 109–12, 114, 117, 156–57, 162, 166, 171, 213 seriality, 110–12, 159–66 Seurat, Georges, 13, 17, 152–63, 172–73

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293

Shade and Darkness—the Evening of the Deluge, 149 shapelessness, 42, 75, 211 shapes: in Balzac, 188–89; of clouds, 119, 129, 131, 133–35, 144, 160, 162; color shapes, 71, 80; in Constable, 144; in Goethe, 122–24, 127, 129, 136–37; in Kandinsky, 170–73, 177; in Klee, 211, 236; in Kleist, 51; in Malevich, 55–56, 58, 61, 63–66; in Newman, 84–85; in Rothko, 71–73, 76–78; in Turner, 149; in Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 123. See also rectangles; squares Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 123 short story, 18, 175, 186–93 Signac, Paul, 153 the “sister arts,” 247–54 size, of artwork, 2, 14, 27, 55, 66, 76, 80–83, 85, 88–89, 91 Snow Storm; Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth, 147, 148 (figure) La Source, 3 space, 24, 28, 30–37, 40, 41–42, 45, 46, 54, 57, 60–63, 67–71, 76, 78, 81, 85, 87, 91–93, 96–97, 111, 125, 154, 158, 162, 167, 218, 248; of gallery, 83–84, 157; metaphysical space, 36, 55, 89; three-dimensional space, 27; white space, 60–61 spectator, 6, 17, 23–24, 28, 32–33, 36–37, 39, 41–42, 44–45, 48, 50–53, 55, 68–69, 76, 78–80, 84–85, 88, 91–92, 96, 100, 117, 120, 127–29, 136–37, 140–44, 150–51, 152–61, 166–68, 171–73, 190, 193–96, 204, 212–13, 217, 219, 240, 244, 246, 248, 250, 256–57. See also viewer Spinoza, Baruch de, 102–7, 114 spirituality, 55, 58–60, 67, 173, 213– 17, 221–22 spontaneity / instantaneousness, 123, 154, 157, 162, 165, 222, 241 squares, 16, 21, 56–67, 81, 84–85, 97 Steinberg, Leo, 244

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294 I  ndex Stockwell Peter, 221 story / storytelling, 1, 3, 5, 8, 13, 14, 71, 128, 142, 144, 192 201–2, 218, 220, 243–45, 248, 250; origin story, 8, 10, 15; retelling, 17, 63, 76, 168, 244–45, 247–48 style, 11; and abstraction, 13, 115; of Friedrich, 26, 28; in Goethe, 100; in Keller, 177; of Kleist, 37; of Rothko, 67–68; of Seurat, 152, 162 the subconscious / the unconscious, 18, 88, 157, 170–71, 178–79, 184, 222–26, 229–32, 235 the sublime, 16, 22–23, 38, 45–46, 48, 52; Kantian sublime, 45, 60, 66 80, 88; in Kleist, 38, 45–48, 52, 55–98; in Lyotard, 59–60, 66–67, 81; in Rosenblum, 55 “The Sublime is Now,” 93–97 subject-object relations, 23, 35, 44, 68, 100–108, 110–14, 116–17, 120–21, 127–29, 135–37, 144, 152, 160, 163, 165–67, 170–73, 179–81, 191, 193–95, 207 subjectivity / subjecthood, 17, 99–105, 107–8, 110, 117, 156, 180–81, 183, 191, 207 A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 154, 155 (figure), 157–59 suprematism, 16, 55–67, 97–98 Suprematist Composition: White on White, 64, 65 (figure), 66–67 surrealism, 18, 20, 220–32, 235–36, 241 Sylvester, David, 79, 93 symbol / symbolism, 6, 46, 53, 56, 59, 61, 66, 122, 149, 200, 208, 216, 218, 226, 230 Synchronists, 3 syntax, 121, 123, 129–30, 133, 135, 245 tabula rasa, 59, 95, 97 Taylor, Brook, 26–27 technology, 11, 43, 96–98, 173, 203 temporality, 14, 88, 111, 142, 159– 60, 163, 173

terror, 46, 94, 96–97 Tetschen Altarpiece, 25 textiles, 14, 179, 184 theatricality, 28, 194, 250–51 The Thinking Eye, 212–13 Tieck, Ludwig, 7 title, 7, 19, 24, 29, 39, 56, 59, 63, 81, 83, 88, 94, 96, 100, 106, 135, 144, 151, 182, 191–92, 207, 211, 218, 228, 230, 234, 239–40 tradition, 3, 5, 9, 16, 20, 24, 28, 31–32, 45, 48, 53, 59, 62–63, 68, 89, 93–95, 235, 246 tragedy, 70–71, 75–76, 78–80, 94–98, 187, 190, 229 transcendence, 16, 24, 75, 88, 92, 103–4, 112, 116, 209, 223 transformation, 19, 48, 114, 125, 129, 163, 165, 239, 256–57 Die Traumdeutung, 225 treatise, 2–3, 5, 68, 101, 139, 204, 246 tree imagery, 32, 176–78 truth, 138, 141, 144, 146, 212, 214, 216, 220, 226, 231 Turner, Joseph Mallord William, 17, 140–51, 152, 172–73 Twombly, Cy, 18, 207–8, 232–42 typology, 119, 139, 151 Über das Geistige in der Kunst: Insbesondere in der Malerei, 2–3, 101, 172 Um den Kern, 218, 219 (figure) understanding, 8, 20, 22, 40, 45–46, 60, 62, 75, 93, 99, 104–8, 117, 138, 142, 151–54, 156, 160, 162, 173, 188, 202, 210, 217, 244, 256 uniformity, 31, 42–43, 66, 80, 83–85, 88, 177 unity, 31, 40, 70, 89, 103, 110–12, 124, 135, 149, 167–68, 215, 223, 228–29 universality, 13, 18, 41, 215–16, 226, 239 the unknown, 16, 23, 64, 67, 69, 71, 81, 94–96, 191, 217, 225, 230–32

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Index “The Unknown Masterpiece,” 18, 175, 186–93, 196–97, 200, 202, 245 Untitled, 1954, 237 (figure) Untitled, 1970, 233 (figure), 234–36

295

Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 81, 82 (figure), 86 (figure), 92–93, 96 The Visible and Invisible, 211 the void, 34, 43, 46–47, 60–61, 63–66, 69, 248, 253 Die Vorgeschichte der abstrakten Kunst: Denkmodelle und Vor-bilder, 7 Wagner, Richard, 76 Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer, 31–32 Warhol, Andy, 255–57 web imagery / metaphor, 177–79, 184, 200, 208, 220, 235 The Wild, 91 Wolfe, Tom, 243–48, 252–53 women, 12–13; in Balzac, 187–97; in Seurat, 158–61, 183, 194 World War I, 12, 79, 97, 111 World War II, 55, 95, 97, 254 Yellow and Blue (Yellow, Blue on Orange) 76, 77 (figure) Zenge, Wilhelmine von, 48–51 Zeuxis, 50 “zips,” 86 (figure), 88–93, 96

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Vanity Fair (magazine), 13 Varnedoe, Kirk, 233–42 “Der Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt,” 100, 106, 108, 114, 117, 140, 160, 164, 172 Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären, 102–3, 105, 193 viewer, 22, 30, 32, 38–39, 42, 45–47, 51, 55, 62–64, 66–69, 75, 78, 80–85, 92–93, 97, 102, 117, 129, 140, 144, 146, 151, 154, 157, 159, 161, 172, 193–94, 211, 213, 218, 228–30, 239, 241, 257 viewing subject, 44, 46, 99, 102, 104, 107, 110, 113, 115–17, 120–21, 124, 127–28, 132, 134, 137–38, 140, 144, 150–51, 156, 160, 166, 168, 170–73, 194–95, 201 violence / violent imagery, 14, 23, 44, 46, 79, 84, 148, 229, 231

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Meyertholen, Andrea. The Myth of Abstraction : The Hidden Origins of Abstract Art in German Literature, Boydell & Brewer,

Copyright © 2021. Boydell & Brewer, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Meyertholen, Andrea. The Myth of Abstraction : The Hidden Origins of Abstract Art in German Literature, Boydell & Brewer,