The Living Line: Modern Art and the Economy of Energy

By Robin Veder

Robin Veder’s The Living Line is a radical reconceptualization of the development of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American modernism. The author illuminates connections among the histories of modern art, body cultures, and physiological aesthetics in early-twentieth-century American culture, fundamentally altering our perceptions about art and the physical, and the degree of cross-pollination in the arts. The Living Line shows that American producers and consumers of modernist visual art repeatedly characterized their aesthetic experience in terms of kinesthesia, the sense of bodily movement. They explored abstraction with kinesthetic sensibilities and used abstraction to achieve kinesthetic goals. In fact, the formalist approach to art was galvanized by theories of bodily response derived from experimental physiological psychology and facilitated by contemporary body cultures such as modern dance, rhythmic gymnastics, physical education, and physical therapy. Situating these complementary ideas and exercises in relation to enduring fears of neurasthenia, Veder contends that aesthetic modernism shared industrial modernity’s objective of efficiently managing neuromuscular energy. In a series of finely grained and interconnected case studies, Veder demonstrates that diverse modernists associated with the Armory Show, the Société Anonyme, the Stieglitz circle (especially O’Keeffe), and the Barnes Foundation participated in these discourses and practices and that “kin-aesthetic modernism” greatly influenced the formation of modern art in America and beyond. This daring and completely original work will appeal to a broad audience of art historians, historians of the body, and American culture in general.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dartmouth College Press
• Release date: Apr 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781611687255

Book preview

Interfaces: Studies in Visual Culture

Editors Mark J. Williams and Adrian W. B. Randolph, Dartmouth College

This series, sponsored by Dartmouth College Press, develops and promotes the study of visual culture from a variety of critical and methodological perspectives. Its impetus derives from the increasing importance of visual signs in everyday life and from the rapid expansion of what are termed new media. The broad cultural and social dynamics attendant to these developments present new challenges and opportunities across and within the disciplines. These have resulted in a transdisciplinary fascination with all things visual, from high to low, and from esoteric to popular. This series brings together approaches to visual culture — broadly conceived — that assess these dynamics critically and that break new ground in understanding their effects and implications.

For a complete list of books that are available in the series, visit www.upne.com

Robin Veder, The Living Line: Modern Art and the Economy of Energy

Tanya Sheehan, ed., Photography, History, Difference

Ory Bartal, Postmodern Advertising in Japan: Seduction, Visual Culture, and the Tokyo Art Directors Club

Ruth E. Iskin, The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860s–1900s

Heather Warren-Crow, Girlhood and the Plastic Image

Heidi Rae Cooley, Finding Augusta: Habits of Mobility and Governance in the Digital Era

renée c. hoogland, A Violent Embrace: Art and Aesthetics after Representation

Alessandra Raengo, On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value

Frazer Ward, No Innocent Bystanders: Performance Art and Audience

Timothy Scott Barker, Time and the Digital: Connecting Technology, Aesthetics, and a Process Philosophy of Time

Bernd Herzogenrath, ed., Travels in Intermedia[lity]: ReBlurring the Boundaries

Monica E. McTighe, Framed Spaces: Photography and Memory in Contemporary Installation Art

Alison Trope, Stardust Monuments: The Saving and Selling of Hollywood

Nancy Anderson and Michael R. Dietrich, eds., The Educated Eye: Visual Culture and Pedagogy in the Life Sciences

Shannon Clute and Richard L. Edwards, The Maltese Touch of Evil: Film Noir and Potential Criticism

Steve F. Anderson, Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past

Dorothée Brill, Shock and the Senseless in Dada and Fluxus

Janine Mileaf, Please Touch: Dada and Surrealist Objects after the Readymade

J. Hoberman, Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film between Two Worlds, updated and expanded edition

THE LIVING LINE

Modern Art and the Economy of Energy

Robin Veder

DARTMOUTH COLLEGE PRESS | HANOVER, NEW HAMPSHIRE

Dartmouth College Press

An imprint of University Press of New England

www.upne.com

© 2015 Trustees of Dartmouth College

For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766; or visit www.upne.com

Cover image/frontispiece: Shapiro Studio, Ted Shawn and his Men Dancers in "Brahms Rhapsody," Ted Shawn [scrapbook], 1934. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Veder, Robin, 1968–

The living line : modern art and the economy of energy / Robin Veder.

pages cm.—(Interfaces: studies in visual culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61168-723-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-61168-724-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-61168-725-5 (ebook)

   1. Modernism (Art) —United States. 2. Art, American — 20th century. 3. Human body (Philosophy) 4. Aesthetics. I. Title.

N6512.5.M63V43 2015

709.73'0904 — dc23   2014036573

This book is dedicated to Brandy Parris.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Body Cultures, Physiological Aesthetics, and Kin-aesthetic Modernism

1 Poise

2 Empathy

3 Motive

4 Habit

5 Shock

6 Signature

7 Caricature

8 Rhythm

9 Vibration

10 Discomfort

11 Organization

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Color illustrations

Acknowledgments

This project began in 2006, when Leo Mazow invited me to look at a small collection of paintings, prints, and drawings by Arthur B. Davies at the Palmer Museum of Art. His collegiality was a precious gift to a new faculty member at Penn State. I promised to toss around some exhibition ideas, even though Davies’s work seemed dull. How wrong I was! Without that introduction, there would be no Living Line. Thank you Leo, and thank you Palmer Museum of Art, for investing in Breathing Motions: Figure Studies by Arthur B. Davies. Eight years later, my thanks go to Richard Pult, the editorial board, anonymous reviewers, and staff members of the University Press of New England for bringing the much-expanded version to readers in this more permanent format.

Before arriving at the conclusions presented in The Living Line, I released a handful of preliminary studies. Earlier versions of some material in chapters 1 and 2 appeared in Arthur B. Davies’ Inhalation Theory of Art, American Art 23 (Spring 2009): 56–77 (© 2009 Smithsonian Institution, all rights reserved) and The Joy of Breathing: Physical and Emotional Uplift in the Art of Arthur B. Davies, in Gravity in Art: Essays on Weight and Weightlessness in Painting, Sculpture and Photography, ed. Mary Edwards and Elizabeth Bailey, 198–211 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2012). A shorter version of chapter 3 was published as Modern Motives: Arthur B. Davies, ‘Continuous Composition,’ and Efficient Aesthetics, in Modern Movements: Arthur Bowen Davies Figurative Works on Paper from the Randolph College and Mac Cosgrove-Davies Collections, ed. Martha Johnson, 10–33 (Maier Museum of Art at Randolph College, 2013). Earlier versions of a few paragraphs in chapters 4 and 7 and in the introduction originally appeared in Seeing Your Way to Health: The Visual Pedagogy of Bess Mensendieck’s Physical Culture System, The Visual Turn in Sports History, special issue of International Journal of the History of Sport 28, no. 8 (May 2011): 1336–52 (published by the Taylor & Francis Group); Tableaux Vivants: Performing Art, Purchasing Status, Theatre Annual: A Journal of Performance Studies 48 (1995): 14–29; The Expressive Efficiencies of American Delsarte and Mensendieck Body Cultures, Modernism/Modernity 17, no. 4 (Nov. 2010): 819–38 (published by Johns Hopkins University Press); and "Walking through Dumbarton Oaks: Early Twentieth-Century Bourgeois Bodily Techniques and Kinesthetic Experience of Landscape," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 71, no. 3 (March 2013): 5–27 (published by the University of California Press).

For essential funding, I am indebted to my employer, Pennsylvania State University. In particular, I acknowledge the College of Arts and Architecture, the Institute for Arts and Humanities, and at Penn State Harrisburg, the School of Humanities and the Office of Research and Graduate Studies. Additional funding to support publication costs was provided by the Society for the Preservation of American Modernists. Under Penn State’s largesse, Carolyn Lucarelli of the Visual Resources Center provided invaluable technical support, as did graduate research assistants Jamie Hirami, Sarah Hopkins, Lori Lane, Megan McGee, Ashley Stahle, Sarah Wilson, and, most extensively, Silvia Margarita Serrano, who stayed on the project long after graduation. Silvia’s dedication, precision, and insight always exceeded my expectations.

During three residential fellowships, The Living Line grew tremendously, thanks to institutional resources and great company. I am much obliged to the administration, staff, and my research cohort at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center, and the Garden and Landscape Studies Program at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. For their support during and after my fall 2008 fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, I particularly thank curators Wendy Wick Reaves, Anne Collins Goodyear, William Treuttner, Virginia Mecklenburg, and Joann Moser; Cynthia Mills and Amelia Goerlitz of the American Art journal and fellowship office; Cecilia H. Chin and Douglas Litts of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery Library; and Marisa Bourgoin and Wendy Hurlock Baker of the Archives of American Art. When I was at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center Library in the summer of 2010, Barbara Buhler Lynes, Carolyn Kastner, Dale Kronkright, Eumie Imm Stroukoff, and Elizabeth Ehrnst introduced me to Georgia O’Keeffe’s art and archive, and thus a book about Arthur B. Davies started to become a book about a range of American modernists who engaged with contemporary body cultures. A similarly unexpected expansion occurred during my 2011–12 fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks. While working on early twentieth-century American landscapes designed and used for recreational physical activity, I came to understand the jointed nature of the period’s body cultures and physiological aesthetics. John Beardsley, Michael Lee, Sheila Klos, James Carder, Sarah Burke Cahalan, and Linda Lott were all incredibly helpful and patient as I worked through the application of these ideas to the history of the Dumbarton Oaks landscape. The relevance for my parallel work on The Living Line was undeniable, so I credit the flowering of both projects to the conducive hospitality of the Dumbarton Oaks research facility and community.

Librarians, archivists, and collections managers are truly a historian’s best friends. Among the generous guides, too numerous to recall and mention, are Dean Smith of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Katy Rawdon, Barbara Anne Beaucar, and Deborah Lenert of the Barnes Foundation; Rachael DiEleuterio of the Helen Farr Sloan Library, Delaware Art Museum; Charles Perrier and Channan Willner of the New York Public Library Performing Arts Division; Karen Schneider of the Phillips Collection Library; Debra Royer, director of the Crumpacker Family Library, Portland Art Museum; and Ray Bonis at the Virginia Commonwealth University Library. Eiichi Ito at the Library of Congress facilitated communication with librarians at the Kunitachi College of Music in Tokyo, Japan. Many curators kindly granted access to their storage facilities and often talked through the collections with me. For their kind attention and assistance, I am grateful to Heather Campbell Coyle, Delaware Museum of Art; Aimee Soubier, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Helen C. Evans and Kevin Avery, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Charles Brock, National Gallery of Art; and Martha Johnson and Deborah Spanich, Maier Museum of Art, Randolph College.

For sharing their private collection and for their stimulating enthusiasm for open inquiry, I would like to extend special recognition to Malcolm and Lisa Cosgrove-Davies and their daughters Marie, Helen, and Annie. I have tried to the best of my ability to locate the descendants or other copyright holders for all material quoted, cited, and visually reproduced here. Credits and acknowledgments can be found in this book’s captions and endnotes. I express sincere apologies to anyone I have missed, and I welcome your corrections for future editions.

For their constructive criticism, enlightening conversation, and helpful leads on earlier versions of this material, my gratitude goes to many friends, colleagues, cofellows, teachers, students, conference copanelists and audiences, reviewers, and editors. While acknowledging that their advice was essential to this project’s growth, I take full responsibility for errors and excursions beyond the bounds of their good judgment. In addition to those named above, I thank John Andrick, Lori Belilove, Sarah Burns, Sandra G. Carter, Sarah Anne Carter, Donna Cassidy, Scott Davis, Seth Feman, Ellery Foutch, Ednie Garrison, Doug Goldstein, Grey Gundaker, Kenneth Haltman, Valerie Hellstein, Aaron Jackson, Margaret Rose Jaster, Patricia E. Johnson, Jonathan Keally, Julie Kearney, Cathryn Keller, Jason LaFountain, Elizabeth Lee, David Lubin, Glen Mazis, Kathleen McAllen, Geoffrey Nutter, John Ott, Kelly Quinn, Matthew Reynolds, Linda Ross, James Salazar, David Serlin, Serena Shelley, Bill Short, Richard Shusterman, Yvonne Sims, Mark M. Smith, Troy Thomas, Anne Verplanck, Alla Vronskaya, Jonathan Walz, and Catherine Zweig.

For their intellectual guidance, emotional support, and hospitality at crucial stages in this project, my heartfelt thanks go to Matt Cohen, Jennifer Luff, Charles F. McGovern, and Phyllis Rosenzweig. From beginning to end, I am indebted to my mentor Alan Wallach, my mother Carol Veder, my husband Walter Howell, and to our families: the Veders, Pickrens, Deans, Lees, Praters, and Howells. Most of all, I am beholden to my bosom friend and this book’s midwife, Brandy Parris. Every day, in every way, these loved ones made this book — as they make my life — better and better.

INTRODUCTION

Body Cultures, Physiological Aesthetics, and Kin-aesthetic Modernism

The Living Line

The term living line came to my attention from an art dealer’s praise of drawings and prints by the American artist Arthur B. Davies, written soon after his death in 1928. In the artist’s work, wrote Frederic Newlin Price, color harmonies grew through the beautiful drawing of a living line. His work became full in bloom and fruit.¹ Eventually, I realized the phrase living line sums up a concept pervasive in American modernism. Artist and art educator William Zorach employed the expression living line twice in his 1921 explanation of The New Tendencies in Art. First, it illustrates how an artist’s being creeps into the most infinite crevices of his forms. His line becomes a living line only in so much as it is in relation to the rhythm of the whole. In this sense, it is both an indexical record of the artist’s movement and part of the compositional unity. But then Zorach uses living line again to explain how the new art breaks from the tradition of representational imagery, the ever growing slavish dependence on the thing before our eyes. Instead, abstraction captures the essential qualities of the felt experience, and rather than depicting life, births it. A line drawn from memory is a living line, a line seeking life. A line drawn from the thing before one is too often a dead line, having no relation to the conception.² In the 1910s, Robert Henri taught his followers at the Art Students League that a successful painting will be an organization of living elements: It will be living line, living form, living color. He explained the transformation that warrants my use of the word ‘living’ is the quality of formal elements that seem to move — rise and fall in their intensity, are in perpetual motion — at least, so affect the eye.³ These art critics and teachers believed the living line transmitted the artist’s sensation of movement into the artwork, and from there directly into the body of the viewer. This concept not only resonated with but directly drew upon the earlier work of physiological psychologists like Hugo Münsterberg, who in his 1904 Principles of Art Education wrote, "to take an aesthetical attitude towards the forms; or to interpret them as energies which must correspond to the relations of our own bodily movements as if we lived in lines [my emphasis]; or, finally, to isolate these optical impressions in our own consciousness from all other ideas, so that they as impressions control our motor discharges — are . . . merely three different expressions for the same thing."⁴ Why members of modern-art communities used this terminology and how they saw these animated qualities is the topic of this book.

As conceptualized here, the living line is the complex and multifaceted relationship between the dynamic line of the human body and the two-dimensional static line in a visual image. In this period, a line might be seen as having an animated or animating quality in several contexts. The living line is the line of the material body, the arcs and angles that postures and gestures occupy in space, whether in a single body or in organized group choreographies. But the living line could also be the formal qualities of direction and thickness that indicate how the artist’s hand moved while drawing. Or it describes a line’s generative act of bringing form into being. Finally, the living line describes how viewers felt themselves stimulated to mimic the lines they saw in art with empathetic positions and movements. As theorized in this period, these multiple versions of the living line were all kinesthetic experiences.⁵

In the United States from the 1890s through the 1930s, modernism’s formalist approach to art was galvanized by theories of bodily response and facilitated by exercises for physical self-control. Diverse participants in the art world believed modern art was about body movement and that breathing and posture exercises prepared artist, model, and viewer to produce and consume art. They thought if an artist can pay attention to her own breath, then she can give that sensation form in a painting; if a viewer can self-consciously adjust his own posture, he can see balance in a sculpture. Such beliefs and practices show that far from being a strict refusal or an anti-intellectual embrace of the body, aesthetic modernism was repeatedly formulated in terms of somatic self-consciousness. Kinesthesia is more than movement; it includes the body’s sense of muscular tension, motion, rhythm, balance, and orientation in space. A substantial number of modernists believed that the experience of making and looking at visual art was inseparable from physiological movement. For them, kinesthesia was the seat of consciousness and the basis of aesthetic experience.

The Living Line illuminates connections among the histories of modern art, body cultures, and physiological aesthetics in early twentieth-century American culture. Diverse modernists associated with the Armory Show, the Société Anonyme, the Stieglitz circle, and the Barnes Foundation participated in these discourses and practices. Modern artists depicted bodily motion in styles that ranged from mildly abstract figuration to radically nonobjective imagery, referencing bodies despite showing no recognizable image of one. Contemporary body cultures such as modern dance, yoga, and rhythmic gymnastics were a rich source for poses, group compositions, and aesthetic theories. This study includes and reaches far beyond such schematic readings. Art producers and consumers explored abstraction with kinesthetic sensibilities and used abstraction to achieve kinesthetic goals.

While contemporary exercise cultivated the bodily sense of movement, experimental (non-Freudian) psychology aestheticized it. Physiological aesthetics asserted that viewers respond to art through these exact sensations, proposing that art could cause the viewer physical pain or pleasure. In an articulated relationship, the period’s body cultures offered techniques for enhancing, reducing, or otherwise changing such responses. These networks of activity formed an interwoven logic, for which I use the term kin-aesthetic modernism to refer simultaneously to body cultures’ and physiological aesthetics’ shared strategies and sensibilities.⁶

In the late nineteenth century, American proponents of modern art, kinesthetic-awareness techniques, and physiological aesthetics were each developing their own constituencies, institutions, and markets. This book focuses on the 1910s through 1930s, when a series of events and publications catalyzed debate over modernist visual art. The terms of the debate were often derived from physiological aesthetics, sometimes articulated with explicit citation of this body of research but frequently in altered versions that leaned toward esoteric vitalist spiritualism, progressive and potentially fascist environmental determinism, or populist invective. During that time, enthusiasm for posture-improvement programs infused progressive public health education. These developments spurred a variety of modern art theories, practices, and objects informed by both physiological aesthetics and kinesthetic-awareness techniques. This approach persisted into the late 1930s. By the 1940s, scientific, educational, and aesthetic agendas all had changed course, and by the 1960s neither physical training nor physiological aesthetics had a recognized place within the discourse of modernism.

Artists, models, collectors, critics, museum founders, and educators interpreted art — object and experience, representational and abstract — in somatic terms. They explored and debated versions of modernism that were embedded in the physical encounter with the art object and conscientiously felt in the living body. Placing these discussions in the contexts of body cultures and physiological aesthetics brings to light a common and mutually reinforcing investment in kinesthetic awareness. The Living Line identifies distinct and related forms of kin-aesthetic modernism in the art communities of Armory Show curator Arthur B. Davies, Katherine Dreier of the Société Anonyme, the Stieglitz circle, and the Barnes Foundation. This book’s art-world cast includes Lillie Bliss, Duncan Phillips, John Sloan, Georgia O’Keeffe, Marius de Zayas, Arthur Wesley Dow, Willard Huntington Wright, Charles H. Caffin, Wassily Kandinsky, Gustavus Eisen, Edward Wales Root, Albert Barnes, Leo Stein, John Dewey, Thomas Munro, and more.

The story of modern art’s living line reveals that aesthetic modernism and industrial modernity were equally concerned with energy-resource management. In both settings, efficient body movement was the mode of regulating energy expenditure. Kinesthetic awareness was necessary for achieving this goal. What made body practices and art discourses modern was their systematic investigation into energy and motion. Their commitment to efficiency (energy conservation), measurement, and regulation toward the goal of maximum productivity puts them firmly within the processes of modernization. The term social modernity describes the extensive social and cultural changes that occurred at the turn of the twentieth century in the wake of industrialization, scientific discovery, and global communication. Modernity is characterized by the embrace of efficiency through innovation, speed, and standardization. Social modernity demanded people whose bodies moved quickly, with strength and purpose, to serve production. Artistic modernism responded by calling for corporeal freedom from social constraints and by promoting physical flexibility, expressiveness, and individuality. The cultivation of energy and movement awareness is perfectly consonant with the goals of aesthetic modernism: a subjective introspective exploration of individual consciousness expressed with formal innovations rather than the conventions of visual representation or moralizing literary, historical, or religious narratives.⁷ As I will show, techniques for self-regulation of physiological energy established skills and vocabulary for looking at modern art.

Modernity and modernism simultaneously disciplined and released the body, breaking down and forming new ways of moving, seeing movement, and conceptualizing movement. Variable in ideological content, kin-aesthetic modernism’s practices and discourses served both conservative and progressive social agendas. The aesthetic discourses referenced art’s effect on the body in order to pathologize artists, incite intolerance for non-normative bodies, claim elevated sensibilities, and offer avenues of mass control and activation, but also to democratize access to art, encourage individual agency, and promote harmonious social integration.

Body Cultures

Significant figures in the history of modern art in America intentionally engaged with period-specific methods for body maintenance and carriage. The key modernists in this study learned one or more of the following body cultures: Delsartism, modern dance, the Mensendieck system of functional mechanics, the American Posture League’s public school pedagogy, Coué auto-suggestion, Rolf structural integration, Dalcroze eurhythmics, and the Alexander Technique. These Progressive-era body cultures featured postural alignment, structural movement mechanics, and conscientious rhythmic breathing. It often looked like dance, but was really an art of the body (fig. I.1). According to practitioners at the time, such ameliorative and disciplinary techniques instrumentally improved kinesthesia, which they saw as the sixth sense that unifies the other senses and harmonizes the fragmented or neurasthenic body.⁸

At the turn of the twentieth century, an extended community of American and European actors, dancers, and physical-culture teachers created a spectrum of body cultures that responded and contributed to social modernity and artistic modernism.⁹ Body cultures are theories about how bodies should look, feel, work, and move, and physical practices for training and presenting oneself accordingly. Such combinations of somatic theory and practice are culturally and historically specific, determined by the needs, interests, and places of their making. In this period, they occurred within multiple contexts, including theater, dance, fashion, medicine, labor, sport, and physical culture (the contemporary term for calisthenic exercise). Collectively, they crafted and visualized a modern body, ready for work, play, and self-expression. Most of the modern body cultures discussed here simultaneously reached for industrial, disciplinary efficiency and individualized, emancipatory expressiveness, thus uniting social modernity and artistic modernism. This may seem paradoxical, but in the early 1900s efficient expression was no oxymoron — not in body cultures and certainly not in modern art.

Fig. I.1 Edwin F. Townsend, photograph of Marguerite Agniel in a lifted bent-knee pose in frontispiece to Marguerite Agniel, The Art of the Body: Rhythmic Exercises for Health and Beauty (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company), 1931.

The body cultures most explicitly connected to industrial and social modernity are those that conformed to regimes of engineered efficiency. This somatic ideal can be seen in the rationalized, disciplined, and mechanized body of Taylorized assembly line workers, the Tiller Girls and Ziegfeld Follies theatrical extravaganzas, physical education jumping jacks, the modern military assembly, and the mass movement performances recorded by Leni Riefenstahl at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Alternatively, the body cultures that are most obviously associated with artistic expressive modernism valued holistic fluidity and the search for archaic, primitive, and authentic somatic experience. This relaxed, flexible, and individualized body is associated with the uncorseted and lounging avant-garde elite, the athletic New Woman, Isadora Duncan and other barefoot modern dancers, and German Nacktkultur’s nudists frolicking in meadows. Following Kracauer, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Foucault, it is tempting to see bodies in the first category as the subject of discipline, against which those in the second react by remaking the body into a site of liberation. Then again, we might see those in the second category as a technique for cultivating the false sense of subjectivity that ultimately serves the interests of institutional powers.¹⁰ Although they seem to be at odds, these two modes of embodiment — disciplinary efficiency and emancipatory expressiveness — actually coexisted and were even united within specific body culture praxis. Modern body cultures often elided the question of the relation between external and internal disciplines, between a mechanical and a motivational or expressive model of the body, Tim Armstrong argues in his study of writers’ physical regimes and self-reconstructions.¹¹ This convergence makes perfect sense within the energy-economy discourse that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century.

The Economy of Energy

The body cultures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — both the fear of neurasthenia and its cures — were premised on the idea of an energy economy. Before motor meant machine, it referred to the source of power, a muscle, thought, person, or thing that causes movement. In physiological studies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, muscles were also called motor organs, and the motor sense or motive sense was muscular movement. Hermann von Helmholtz initiated a scientific and cultural paradigm shift when he reinterpreted the universe in terms of energy that takes the form of matter in movement. Building upon the first law of thermodynamics (1847) — that energy is constant within a closed system — Helmholtz elaborated that the universe is a closed system of energy exchange between all the natural forces, human and nonhuman. The second law of thermodynamics, introduced soon after by Rudolf Clausius, recognizes that energy in the form of heat dissipates during movement. Thus driven by fears of limited or permanently decreasing resources, the energy economy became the central concern of scientific research and its practical applications in the second half of the nineteenth century.¹²

Helmholtz was a physiologist, so the body’s central role in his theory was not just an element in his energy paradigm; it was the data source from which he elaborated a transcendental understanding of thermodynamics. Helmholtz described the nerves as a conduit for energy, equivalent to electric wires. Just as charged wires can excite movement in any electrically powered apparatus, the nerves of the human body stimulate muscular movement with nerve-force.¹³ Consequently, scientists raised many questions about the human body’s capacities for energy and the role of movement in energy reception, storage, and transfer. They agreed that in the human body, movement was a manifestation of energy. This led to new questions about bodily movement itself, chief among them: What is the relationship between sensory stimuli and muscular action? What causes movement? Is the feeling of movement only the innervating effort of will being sent through the nerves to the muscles, or is it a reverse process, the muscles generating sensation through movement? Are thoughts physiological movements in the brain, making thinking a form of motor activity? Is movement evidence of consciousness? Is consciousness possible without movement? When is movement an automatic reflex and when is it an individual expression? What is the relationship between emotion and physicality? To answer these questions, physiologists set to work measuring, quantifying, and charting physical movement, both externally visible actions and subtle internal processes. The questions that Helmholtz originally posed about the human motor persisted and evolved along these lines.

In The Human Motor, historian Anson Rabinbach showed that Helmholtz’s nineteenth-century studies of thermodynamics provided industrial capitalism with a useful metaphor. If the phrase human motor describes movement, heat, energy, and power in the human musculature, from the perspective of industrial capitalism it also codified the equation that humans are machines. With this in mind, scientists set to work examining the physiological and psychological operations of the human motor. Following the thermodynamic model, they assumed that overstimulation or overexertion without sufficient rest produced an energy deficit — fatigue — that weakened the stability and productivity of the human organism. The resulting experiments, with their protocols, hypotheses and theories, and material and ideological applications were multiple. Best-known today are the time-movement labor-efficiency studies that aimed to maximize worker productivity by reducing wasted energy and consequent nervous fatigue (fig. I.2).

Industrialists dreamed of a perpetual-motion machine capable of ceaseless productivity. The scientists asked questions like: How can human energy be harnessed, preserved, and most efficiently put into action? How can fatigue from overexertion or nervousness from overstimulation be prevented? Rabinbach demonstrated that these questions about the human motor propelled people to think differently about labor conditions. More specifically, it offered an ideological springboard for industrial labor, affecting both the exploitative processes of the assembly line and the protective legislation for working hours and conditions. Although some of the outcomes held the promise of improved quality of life for workers, for example the eight-hour workday, this model ultimately reduces people to machines whose individual sensory experience and intellectual perspective is irrelevant so long as their motor is still running.

Fig. I.2 Étienne-Jules Marey, Linear Graph of Running Man in Black with White Stripes, ca. 1882, in La station physiologique de Paris, La Nature (1883): 11(2): 277.

The nineteenth-century malady of neurasthenia, the catch-all category for nervous pathologies, is also premised on the energy economy. Its symptoms were legion, and contradictory, including catatonic and hypersensitive responsiveness to environmental stimuli. At the time, physicians like George Beard considered neurasthenia a disease of modernity, resulting in particular from the sensory stimulation brought on by mental overwork and physical exposure to new technologies and spectacles of urban and global capitalism. The rapid advance of civilization in the northeastern United States led Beard to diagnose an epidemic of American nervousness, also the title of his 1881 book. Too tired to recuperate, too amped up to rest, the neurasthenic brain sent will power messages, but the nerves would not — could not — translate them into muscular action, making the neurasthenic impotent to either act or resist incoming stimulation.¹⁴

The question of whether neurasthenia was real by today’s medical standards is irrelevant. In the United States and Europe, first the medical community and then the general public considered it real. By 1903, neurasthenic language and representations were everywhere, wrote Tom Lutz in the first major study of neurasthenic discourse in American literary history. The term neurasthenia was applied to such a dizzying array of symptoms that physicians eventually admitted that it was ineffectual, and the official diagnosis appears to have died out in the 1910s. Outside of physicians’ offices and psychological journals’ pages, other communities — certainly those in the worlds of art and physical education — continued to obsess over nervous stimulation, exhaustion, and regulation into the 1930s.¹⁵

In these multiple settings, neurasthenia was more a discourse than an identifiable malady. Its primary metaphor was the economy, such as the problem of nervous bankruptcy that George Beard predicted if brain-workers did not accumulate and protect a large amount of reserve force like an electric battery. Even someone with little financial capital could be one of the millionaires of nerve-force — those who never know what it is to be tired out.¹⁶ By the time Beard introduced the term neurasthenia, the instability and vulnerability of the nervous system’s energy balance was such a widespread concern that discussions putatively focused on other topics were nevertheless framed in terms of nerve force and depletion. This is evident in Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary philosophy, Theodore Roosevelt’s international politics, and Simon Patten’s turn-of-the-century trickle-down economics, in which surplus wealth leads to surplus energy, distributed through consumer demand.¹⁷

The treatments for neurasthenia covered a wide spectrum, including Silas Weir Mitchell’s incarcerating rest cure in the late nineteenth century, and later technological interventions like weight-lifting machines that unblocked energy, electrical devices that transferred energy to the body, and potions that promised to create fresh energy.¹⁸ For those who wanted neither a month in bed nor an electric belt, modern body cultures emerged to meet this perceived need. Muscle building, nerve training, and other techniques for moderating the body’s energies were a preventive measure against neurasthenia. Body cultures examined in this book focused on achieving heightened function through muscular strength, alignment, relaxation, and flexibility. Within the logic of neurasthenia, muscles that work well prevent the nervous dissonance that ensues when a body cannot carry out intended actions. Whether calming or stimulating, many of these physical techniques were believed to help regulate the human organism through rhythm, the accented pace of repetitive but variable motions such as breathing and walking. Rhythmic movements created motor (muscle and/or nerve) memories, patterns that were physiologically embedded in each person. Such rhythms could be stimulated or reawakened through environmental prompts (including other people and art), for better or worse. For instance, a busy train station or a Futurist sculpture could beneficially stimulate or detrimentally antagonize those who did not enjoy their rhythms. A slow walk through an open field or viewing a Tonalist painting could slow one’s rhythm and induce relaxation, or it could retard regular activity. Consequently, some of the training concerned controlling kinesthetic responses to external stimuli. Others, like Delsarte and Dalcroze rhythmic gymnastics, experimented with alternating patterns of tension, release, and relaxation, and slow, balance-challenging movements that were equally directed toward personal energy regulation. These therapeutic programs prevented and potentially cured neurasthenia by increasing the participant’s kinesthetic self-control. Neurasthenia was caused by an overstimulating modernized lifestyle, in which inefficient overactivity (in work and leisure) deteriorated the nerves. The obvious answer was nerve training.

Modern or Antimodern?

Seen in this context, the late nineteenth-century therapeutic body cultures seem antimodern, part of the broad cultural movement that sought a return to authentic, organic, and essential experience, as described by T. J. Jackson Lears in No Place of Grace (1981). Certainly, their philhellenism can signal a reactionary and racist agenda, but these body cultures were built also on contemporary scientific materialism, which offers yet another contrived notion of the natural body. As Hillel Schwartz established in his groundbreaking essay Torque: The New Kinaesthetic of the Twentieth Century, there was a cluster of body culture activities created in reaction against and in relation to social modernity’s rationalized mechanization of the body into isolated parts. The current wisdom that we have managed speed but not coherence, repetition but not meaning, isolation but not independence, juxtaposition but not integrity, in the twentieth-century Western experience of the body is only one part of the equation. This critique of the mechanized body assumes a solution: alternate ideals of movement that were themselves a distinctly modern approach to the body. These ideals, found in the movement techniques of Delsartism, modern dance, and penmanship, as well as in the technologies of zippers, escalators, and artificial limbs, were articulated and explored in full-bodied and fluid movements. These revealed and contributed to the making of a unique sense of self. Schwartz argues that it is not enough to believe that a fragmented sense of the body, based in lived experience, led to protest, resulting in the search for an aesthetic and expressive kinesthetic ideal. These experiences and ideals emerged in creative tandem.¹⁹ Schwartz’s argument tempers Lears’s antimodernist claim, and I add here that the seemingly dichotomous kinesthetic experience of industrial efficiency and ideal of artistic expressiveness not only coconstruct each other, but are actually variant solutions to the same underlying concern about the energy economy.

In his study of the German cult of the will, Michael Cowan charts a broader Western movement that sought to transform mental states through bodily performance. Rather than seeing neurasthenia as the problem of overintellectualization of the body, many body culture proponents viewed it as one of the overwhelming presence of a body in excess, one whose nervous tics, twitches, spasms, pains, cramps, convulsions, and paralyses refused to obey the dictates of the will. . . . Learning to control the excessively nervous body was a key ingredient in the fantasy of regaining control over a modern world that no longer allowed it. Cowan thus argues in opposition to the oft-repeated contention that early twentieth-century reform programs constituted a ‘rediscovery’ of the body after its ‘suppression’ under nineteenth-century rationalism. Instead these programs were driven by precisely the opposite imaginary project; that of taming a rebellious, nervous body in excess. Containment strengthened and calmed the body, thus readying it for energy-efficient action. But, Cowan argues, such body cultures pacified both the bourgeoisie and working classes into feeling that self-determination on the physiological level was a sufficient substitute for social action and true political or economic agency.²⁰ Cowan’s study is a valuable contribution, and yet, like most accounts of neurasthenia, The Cult of the Will discounts the possibility that introspective psychology’s kinesthetic awareness (cultivated sensitivity, not just self-control) was a viable site of agency. Many period body cultures engaged with this middle ground between hypersensitive reactive neurasthenia and the mind-controlled numbness of will-powered habit.

While the turn-of-the-century kinesthetic body cultures most obviously appear to be disciplinary projects of false consciousness, they should also be interpreted within the nineteenth-century framework of skill. In this context, kinesthetic awareness was a cultivated skill with particular meanings and techniques in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was a constitutive element of modern life, contributing to both industrial modernity and artistic modernism. While the ideological agendas, material techniques, and outcomes of various body cultures are diverse, what unites them is the inquiry into energy, manifested in the human body’s subtle, enforced, and exuberant movements. Some believed kinesthesia was consciousness, others believed it was a barrier to consciousness; either way it was a central mediating term in the discourse of modern concepts of bodily energy.

Kinesthesia: The Sixth Sense

In sensory terms, visual modernism is generally understood to be vision’s ascendency over the remaining four external senses (hearing, touch, taste, and smell), each increasingly boxed or bureaucratized.²¹ Under industrial capitalism, the sensory history of the human motor is the story of fragmentation and alienation that Charlie Chaplin dramatized in Modern Times (1936). Repetitive actions and conditioned responses turn men into automatons, extensions of the larger machines in which they work, unable to control twitching muscles that cannot help but apply the assembly-line wrench-twist to noses and nipples in addition to bolts on unidentifiable gadgets. A man who is treated like an interchangeable moving object eventually treats others in the same way, the film demonstrates. What if, in addition to enabling assembly lines, repetitive stress injuries, numbness, and political docility, the history of the human motor is the bid for a sixth sense, the sense of bodily movement that would be an unalienable corporeal skill, one that enhanced physical cohesion and self-consciousness? In American culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (and European culture, to varying degrees and with slightly different timelines), the motor sense — also referred to as kinesthesis, kinesthesia, muscle sense, movement sense, and proprioception — in fact battled for and gained a place in the sensorium.

If sensorium is the full range of the senses, then our historical accounts of the modernist sensorium should be recalibrated to recognize kinesthesia, both conscious and unconscious movement. Aside from a few notable contributions, most cultural historians who study the history of the senses have yet to accord kinesthesia the recognition it has secured in the histories of medicine, performance, and cultural geography, not to mention today’s medical and psychological practice.²² In April 2011, Martin Jay challenged readers of The American Historical Review’s special issue on the history of the (five) senses to ask How has the general sensorium been discursively differentiated in various contexts? Have all cultures posited the same five senses, or have others been included? . . . Has the process of differentiation and ranking ever been reversed so that intersensorial de-differentiation occurred instead? . . . How can we plausibly periodize and narrate changes in the sensorium in different contexts?²³ In reply, I submit that kinesthesia offers the perfect case study precisely because it garnered scientific attention and entered popular discourse within a discrete period and has since lost its prior acknowledged status, at least for the general public. That some historians of the senses consider it a putative sixth sense²⁴ and that it is excluded from most sensory history scholarship actually makes the argument that in kinesthesia we have a historical phenomenon.

Certainly, there is a long history of anatomists and artists whose interests merged in the study of muscle formation and function (the latter being the focus of physiology), but such inquiries took a new direction when nineteenth-century physiologists suggested that musculature provided a sixth sense. In 1826 Charles Bell, a Scottish physiologist, identified the muscle sense as a sixth sense that accompanied all of the others: There is an inseparable connection between the exercise of the sense of vision and the exercise of the voluntary muscles of the eye. When an object is seen, we enjoy two senses.²⁵ Furthermore, the muscular sense worked in a nervous circle of communication between the brain and the muscles, connecting brain messages to muscles and muscle sensations to the brain (what we would now call a feedback loop).²⁶ The term kinaesthesis was introduced by Henry Charlton Bastian in 1880 to replace the insufficient existing term, Muscular Sense. It captured better the overall sense of movement, as a separate endowment, understood to include tendons, joints, fascia, and skin as well as muscle. And it scanned more smoothly than the alternative phrase: To speak of a ‘Kinæsthetic Centre’ will certainly be found more convenient than to speak of a ‘Sense of Movement Centre.’ ²⁷ The word kinesiology first appeared in Baron Nils Posse’s 1894 physical education textbook Special Kinesiology of Educational Gymnastics, and continues to exist as the field of study concerned with the mechanics of (human) bodily movement.²⁸ In 1906, English neurologist Charles Sherrington provided the term proprioception, which is the function and awareness of body position, equilibrium, tension, and movement in the musculoskeletal framework: muscles, tendons, and joints.²⁹ It may be experienced through the vestibular system, nervous system, vascular system, and related activities such as respiration and digestion. In this period, those outside the laboratory were most likely to use the terms motor and muscular while kinesthesis and proprioception were technical scientific terms; when these words crossed into the arts and body culture, they were interpreted as basically interchangeable.

The rise and fall of kinesthesia studies can be seen through its etymology. According to Edwin G. Boring, professor of experimental psychology and the first authoritative historian of the field, kinesthesis got its full share of attention from 1850 to 1920.³⁰ Boring stated, Physiologists after [Charles] Bell [who introduced muscular sense in 1826] all accepted the muscle sense as a ‘sixth sense,’ arriving in the latter part of the nineteenth century at a considerable body of research on the perception of weight, effort, resistance, movement and position. Then in the 1880s, the field welcomed Bastian’s new word kinaesthesis. It loomed large in the sensory introspections, [which were] so important in the experimental psychology of 1890 to 1920. In professional usage, Sherrington’s term proprioception replaced kinesthesis and kinesthesia gradually, from the 1910s through the 1930s. This change was part of the "ultimate decline