Modern Art and the Remaking of Human Disposition

By Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen

How artists at the turn of the twentieth century broke with traditional ways of posing the bodies of human figures to reflect modern understandings of human consciousness.
 
With this book, Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen brings a new formal and conceptual rubric to the study of turn-of-the-century modernism, transforming our understanding of the era’s canonical works. Butterfield-Rosen analyzes a hitherto unexamined formal phenomenon in European art: how artists departed from conventions for posing the human figure that had long been standard. In the decades around 1900, artists working in different countries and across different media began to present human figures in strictly frontal, lateral, and dorsal postures. The effect, both archaic and modern, broke with the centuries-old tradition of rendering bodies in torsion, with poses designed to simulate the human being’s physical volume and capacity for autonomous thought and movement. This formal departure destabilized prevailing visual codes for signifying the existence of the inner life of the human subject.

Exploring major works by Georges Seurat, Gustav Klimt, and the dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky— replete with new archival discoveries—Modern Art and the Remaking of Human Disposition combines intensive formal analysis with inquiries into the history of psychology and evolutionary biology. In doing so, it shows how modern understandings of human consciousness and the relation of mind to body were materialized in art through a new vocabulary of postures and poses. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Nov 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9780226745183

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Cover Page for Modern Art and the Remaking of Human Disposition

Modern Art & the Remaking of Human Disposition

Modern Art & the Remaking of Human Disposition

Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago & London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2021 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2021

Printed in China

30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-74504-6 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-76418-3 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226745046.0001

This publication is made possible in part from the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Butterfield-Rosen, Emmelyn, author.

Title: Modern art and the remaking of human disposition / Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021007592 | ISBN 9780226745046 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226745183 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Human figure in art. | Seurat, Georges, 1859–1891. Sunday afternoon on the island of la Grande Jatte. | Klimt, Gustav, 1862–1918. Beethoven frieze. | Afternoon of a faun (Choreographic work : Nijinsky) | Art, Modern.

Classification: LCC N7570 .B88 2021 | DDC 704.9/42—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021007592

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For my mother and father

Suzanne Butterfield & Stuart Rosen

. . . Je suis ça je suis un singe

Je suis singe mes pas un singe

Je suis singe sent ettree singe

Singe et singe ne pas un singe

Singe et sage ne pas un singe

Sage sage et sage et sage

Je suis sage je suis un singe . . .

. . . I am that I am a monkey

I am monkey but not a monkey

I am monkey without being monkey

Monkey and monkey is not a monkey

Monkey and wise is not a monkey

Wise wise and wise and wise

I am wise I am a monkey . . .

From Vaslav Nijinsky, Au hommes [sic] (To Humankind)

Contents

Introduction

1  Figures of Thought

Poseuses and the Controversy of the Grande Jatte

2  Beethoven’s Farewell

The Creative Genius in the Claws of the Secession

3  The Mise-en-scène of Dreams

L’Après-midi d’un faune

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Introduction

In Paris in the spring of 1886, at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition, the twenty-seven-year-old painter Georges Seurat debuted a peculiar composition (fig. 1). On a large, seven-by-ten-foot canvas, he presented a throng of his fellow Parisians partaking of a Sunday stroll on the banks of the Seine, outfitted in their finest attire, equipped with all the accoutrements of outdoor leisure—walking sticks, fishing rods, parasols, pets. This scene of recreation taking place in a major European metropolis might have seemed of a type with other scenes of modern life exhibited regularly in the 1880s by Impressionist and other painters—but for the striking manner in which the artist posed the bodies of his promenaders. As the critic Félix Fénéon observed in a review of the exhibition, the men, women, and children in Seurat’s painting were rigorously treated, presented at right angles, either from the back or full face or in profile (ou de dos ou de face ou de profil).¹ Whether standing or seated, most figures were bolt upright, exhibiting what Fénéon elsewhere described as the verticality of a sundial.² Almost none of these figures appeared to shift their weight onto one leg or to pace forward, extend or intertwine their forelimbs, twist their torsos, or turn or tilt their heads. Their attitudes, as another critic put it, seemed somehow constricted, reined in, condensed with an astonishing concision.³

This book was sparked by a simple formal observation: in European art in the decades before 1900, the body language in depictions of the human figure changed. Un Dimanche à la Grande Jatte–1884 (1884–1886), Seurat’s now-iconic canvas, is merely one early example of a set of techniques for posing human bodies that would become commonplace. Around the turn of the twentieth century, several related strategies emerged across a heterogeneous range of works: artists posed multiple figures in identical positions, restrained the maneuvering and extension of limbs, distributed weight evenly throughout the body, and abolished oblique torsions around the body’s central vertical axis, aligning figures frontally—either parallel or perpendicular to a support and the imagined standpoint of a viewer.

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

These figural strategies, which have never received sustained analysis in art history, evince a historical mutation in European art’s normative modes of imagining the human person.⁴ To pose bodies in this new manner was a primary visual device through which turn-of-the-century artists manifested a philosophical rupture with some of the most basic assumptions about what it meant to successfully represent a human figure, assumptions that had undergirded the production of figural art in Europe for centuries prior.⁵

If European art could be considered a coherent aesthetic category—as many art historians were beginning to conceive it by the second half of the nineteenth century, as the intensification of imperial networks populated European museums and reproductive imagery with a vastly expanded panoply of objects from around the world—the coherence of this category was recognized to consist, to a large degree, in a set of norms for representing the human body’s postures and gestures.⁶ Rather than reinscribing European art as a monolithic and hermetic entity, this book aims to estrange this category by showing how, in art as well as political philosophy, "Europe . . . is an imaginary figure that remains deeply embedded in clichéd and shorthand forms, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has stated.⁷ Highlighting the concrete postural shorthand around which a taxonomy such as European art" could consolidate is necessary groundwork for its provincialization and deconstruction.

To reiterate some timeworn art-historical truisms: certain techniques of pose first formulated in classical Greek statuary were taken up systematically by artists early in the European renaissance; these techniques then held fairly constant for several centuries, right up through the moment of Impressionism. An interconnected set of formal strategies became both habitual and obligatory. To vary postures and gestures between discrete figures, to turn bodies obliquely, to acknowledge their subjection to gravity through an uneven distribution of weight to the lower extremities—all were regarded as indispensable strategies for conveying not only the human body’s corporeal mass and volume but also, more fundamentally, its indwelling capacity for autonomous thought and movement. This ensemble of techniques stands as a primary example of a deeply implicative convention that, as David Summers has argued, remains invisible in stylistically periodized histories of Western art precisely because it is a constant.⁸ The constancy of these conventions over the longue durée underscores the import of their disruption at the end of the nineteenth century, when artists exposed this invisible line of continuity by severing it conspicuously.

This book examines the motivating circumstances and expressive consequences of the repudiation of these inherited conventions of pose. Its broadest and most basic ambition is to show how new concepts of subjectivity were materialized in works of art by means of new dispositions of the body. My aim is to restore to view a highly tangible dimension of an epistemological transformation: how a new vocabulary of poses and postures in art participated in reconceptualizing what it meant, for the hegemonic cultures of Western Europe around 1900, to be human.

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

Disposition

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

In renaissance aesthetic theory, which adopted many of its terms from classical rhetoric, the terms disposition and composition were virtually synonymous, though disposition often referred more specifically to the arrangement of figures.¹⁴ The paramount importance painters ascribed to the disposition of postures and gestures stemmed from the understanding that they served a dual aesthetic function, establishing certain abstract norms of visual order within a figural composition, while simultaneously providing viewers with imaginative access to a depicted figure’s invisible psychological interior. As Leonardo da Vinci stated, The good painter has two principal things to paint: that is, man and the intention of his mind. The first is easy, the second difficult, because it has to be represented by gestures and movements of the parts of the body. And thus, attitude is the first and most important part of the portrayal of a figure.¹⁵

When, for instance, Leon Battista Alberti proposed in On Painting (1435) that painters should always endeavor to compose a picture with bodies in many dissimilar poses, he did so not only because he believed that the human eye was always pleased by variety, but also because he took for granted that a variety of poses was necessary if a painter was to convey that each human being was imbued with a unique and autonomous soul. The movements of the soul are made known by movements of the body, he asserted, and in a picture, each man . . . [must] clearly [show] the movement of his own soul.¹⁶ Similarly, Leonardo instructed that there should always be variation in the limbs of posed figures, so that if one arm goes forward, the other should be still or go backward, and if the figure poses on one leg, the shoulder that is above that leg should be lower than the other. Moreover, the painter should never make heads straight on the shoulders, but turn them to the right side or the left. Such turns of the body were necessary, he explained, because figures should not seem to be pieces of wood, and because it is necessary for them to look lively and awake and not asleep.¹⁷

I draw on these familiar passages not only to point toward norms that artists working around the turn of the twentieth century would violate ostentatiously, but also to emphasize how formal conventions for posing figures were inflected by—and constitutive of—historically specific comprehensions of the human disposition. For Leonardo and Alberti, the compositional desiderata of postural variety among figures and asymmetry in the tilt of a figure’s head and the set of its legs were tied to a concept of the mind as synonymous with lively wakefulness and of the soul as a motor of passions externalized legibly in gestural body actions.¹⁸ By 1900, in the wake of the rise of scientific psychologies—or what one psychologist termed, in 1885, psychology without soul—such conceptualizations of human interiority had been disputed vociferously.¹⁹ The transformation in strategies of pose in modern art of the late nineteenth century manifests this fundamental revision in European culture’s modes of comprehending the human mind or soul.

That, in brief, is the core premise of my argument, which draws on—and puts into conversation—four primary bodies of evidence. First, a series of artworks that adopt a changed approach to figural pose. Second, responses to those works of art (both visual and verbal) recorded by period critics. Third, a corpus of art-historical literature that emerged in the late nineteenth century that sought to describe and explain the distinctive modes of bodily presentation found in forms of art that turn-of-the-century Europeans often characterized as primitive. And fourth, scientific, psychological, and philosophical literature—much of it already familiar within canonical cultural histories of turn-of-the-century Europe—in which new concepts of mind and embodiment were articulated. Shuttling between these four registers of discourse, this book aims to pinpoint with new precision connections between the history of concepts of the psyche and the formal logic of artworks.

Seurat, Klimt, Nijinsky

The elimination of oblique turns of the body, the emphasis on stiffness and uniformity of gesture, the de-articulation of hands and feet, and the positioning of bodies with ambiguous spatial relationships to the ground are strategies prevalent across modern art produced in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They feature in works by artists from different styles and schools—from Ferdinand Hodler to Pablo Picasso, Paul Gauguin to Oskar Schlemmer, to name only a few. This book does not attempt to trace the scope of these formal tendencies. Rather, through sustained engagement with the intricate workings of a few individual artworks, I aim to defamiliarize and enrich our understanding of figural devices relevant beyond the handful of works discussed here. The examples at the center of this book are more exceptional than representative. Each is an artwork with long tentacles, structured by dense networks of references to other cultural artifacts: paintings, poems, musical compositions, and, especially, sculptures.²⁰ The self-reflexive engagement with the aesthetic past in each of these works indicates how the emergence of new postural conventions was bound up in preoccupations with continuity and rupture. And the deliberateness with which these works grapple with ontological questions about the human being’s inner disposition, and the psychological valences built into European art’s existing conventions of posture, earn them a somewhat special status as theoretical objects.²¹

The three works that anchor the three chapters are major, manifesto-like projects by well-known artists: the canvas Poseuses (1886–1888) by Seurat (1859–1891), the French Neo-Impressionist; the Beethovenfries (1902), a mural by the Austrian Secessionist Gustav Klimt (1862–1918); and the ballet L’Après-midi d’un faune (1912) by the Russian dancer and Ballets Russes choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky (1889–1950). The work of sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) also features, with varying prominence, across all three chapters. As an artist who worked from within—albeit at the very limit of—a formal paradigm of corporeal expression abandoned by the book’s main protagonists, Rodin is a clarifying counterexample who offers singular insight into the stakes of modern art’s new approach to body language.

The heterogeneity of my three core examples is strategic. The analogies that reverberate across these works, produced by artists from different national backgrounds, working in different mediums and in very different styles and cultural contexts, reveal not only how common formal strategies were being applied to the human figure across different materialities—from oil on canvas, to site-specific fresco mosaic, to live performance—but also how these formal strategies responded to a set of preoccupations that had become urgent throughout turn-of-the-century Europe.

The motif of the nonhuman animal, for instance, is pivotal for all three artists—from the leashed pet monkey in Seurat’s Grande Jatte, to the winged gorilla looming overhead in Klimt’s mural, to the piebald faun who stars in Nijinsky’s dance.²² This animal presence signals the embeddedness of these three works in the new cultural environment inaugurated by the event that Sigmund Freud referred to in 1917, as the biological blow to human narcissism. These works participate in the broader reckoning with the imaginative consequences of admitting humankind’s animal ancestry that came in the wake of Charles Darwin’s publication, in 1859, of his sensationally popular book On the Origin of Species. Equally and inseparably, these works participate in the reenvisioning of the human psyche that accompanied the popularization of evolutionary ideas. They were produced in the throes of what Freud extolled by extension as the "psychological blow to human narcissism—the recognition, in the distinctly modern disciplines of scientific psychology, of the unconscious dimensions of human mental life.²³ The figural art produced in this moment, coincident with the birth-period of self-conscious and assertive sciences of man (psychology, anthropology, sociology), evinces, if not quite a blow" to human narcissism, its regrounding on a new basis.²⁴

The belief that a momentous shift had taken place in the status of humanity as a conceptual category was vital to European self-understanding in the decades around 1900. This attitude—marking a new phase in European culture’s self-ascribed role of managing and controlling the idea of [the] human and humanity—is encapsulated in Freud’s portentous rhetoric of rupture, his positioning of himself and Darwin as the two historical figures consummating a Copernican revolution that deposed the human species from its previously privileged position in the cosmos and among all creatures on earth.²⁵ My concern is not to substantiate that interpretation of history but rather to show how works of art participated in fundamental ways in its epochal consciousness.²⁶ Visual materials—and complex works of art especially—possess a capacity to communicate ideas with a potency that exceeds language. Seurat’s canvas, Klimt’s mural, and Nijinsky’s dance demonstrate with particular vividness how the perception of epistemological rupture could be actualized or even acted out in artworks.²⁷ My inclusion of choreography is meant to underscore that impulse toward materialization; Nijinsky’s dance—which he choreographed to perform with his own person—is only the most literal and self-reflexive example of a more general artistic impulse to stage and give body to new conceptions of the human psyche, and hold them up before large audiences for collective scrutiny.

The main argument of this book unfolds episodically. The three chapters examine works made at intervals of roughly a decade (1888, 1902, 1912). They can be read as autonomous histories; each is a discrete web of texts and images, organized around nodal points in the artworks where philological and iconographic analysis can intersect very directly. The through-lines linking the three episodes will be apparent as the chapters unfold, and I have largely left them to be synthesized by the reader. The first chapter, "Figures of Thought: Poseuses and the Controversy of the Grande Jatte," focuses on two related pictures by Seurat to introduce bodily pose as both a central topos of the history of art and an aesthetic device that came into crisis under the pressure of new conceptions of the psyche in Europe at the close of the nineteenth century. The subsequent chapters examine more specific ramifications of the relationship staged by Seurat in Poseuses—between new paradigms of pose and a new epistemology of the subject, which no longer presumed a fundamental distinction between animal and human nature or, relatedly, that the human being’s defining endowment was the activity of an alert, autonomous, and rational consciousness.

Read in chronological sequence, the chapters suggest the increasing complexity of ideas of animal descent and unconscious mentation over the course of a quarter century, in terms of both artistic strategies and psychological theories. If, in the case of Seurat, we begin with the basic figural problem of whether and how to represent an unconscious human being in some semblance of real (public or private) space, by the time we reach Nijinsky, it is more a matter of representing internal mental imagery and the mind itself as a structure—or rather, as a mechanism envisioned as a "psychic apparatus built into homo natura."²⁸ And if we begin with artists thinking about sexuality through a Darwinian lens, which is to say, in terms of the heterosexual and the procreative, we end with an envisioning of sexuality closer to the one proposed by psychoanalysis in the early decades of the twentieth century. In tandem with an eruption of unambiguously inorganic, mechanical imagery for the metaphorizing of unconscious thought processes, we arrive at a vision of sexuality as something fundamentally nonprocreative and inextricable from infantile drives and activities.²⁹

The three chapters center on three different primary postures.³⁰ My discussion of Seurat crystallizes around the figure of the standing studio model. With Klimt, I take up the motif of the seated human thinker. With Nijinsky, the recumbent dreamer. The impulse across these works to shed culturally specific corporeal signifiers for communicating human uniqueness—and more specifically, human consciousness—is encapsulated in this episodic progression from standing, to sitting, to lying prone on the ground, in a posture that relinquishes the erect attitude Darwin identified as the most conspicuous difference (perhaps the only difference of real significance) separating humans from other animal species, and an attitude that had long served, in European art and philosophy, as the postural synonym for a uniquely human form of awakeness.³¹

Mind and Pose

The meanings of words must be made out: Reason, Will, Consciousness, Darwin wrote in 1838, in a private journal exploring the metaphysical implications of his nascent theory of the genealogical relation of all living organisms.³² This note-to-self is emblematic of a pervasive tendency in nineteenth-century thinking, shared across many disciplines, to redefine and put into question mental endowments that Western culture previously conceived as the grounding of a uniquely human form of subjectivity. Jonathan Crary has described this intellectual development, which became pronounced in late nineteenth-century figuration, as a turbulent transition from a philosophy of consciousness . . . to a philosophy of life. This is a useful rubric for contextualizing the formal transition enacted in L’Après-midi d’un faune, the Beethovenfries, and Poseuses. Broadly, these works articulate the turbulent mutation of European art’s working visual concept of the human person; a mutation occurring at a historical juncture when the previously inevitable congruence between subjectivity and a thinking ‘I’ no longer exists.³³ In each of these three works, the dimension of the subject that presents itself to be showcased visually is no longer consciousness or thinking (in the nineteenth century these words were often used interchangeably). Rather, it is, roughly speaking, biology in all its capaciousness, encompassing the mind as a function of the body with its lower organs, automatic processes, reproductive capacity, and attendant instincts of sexuality.

Is man, as a whole, to be spoken of by preference from the point of view of his animality, or from the point of view of his rationality?³⁴ This question, voiced in a review of The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), was perhaps the most polemical one raised by Darwin’s publications—a question that was in essence psychological. For Darwin, it was self-evident that human beings had inherited not just the structure of their bodies but also their mental equipment from the so-called lower animals. Having proved mens & brutes bodies on one type, he wrote already in 1839, almost superfluous to consider minds.³⁵ What would it mean to accept and represent this dimension of the evolutionary idea? And what would it look like?

That basic question is explored—with varying degrees of ambivalence—by Seurat, Klimt, and Nijinsky.³⁶ We can be sure that each of these artists confronted formulations of Darwin’s ideas. His evolutionary theories circulated widely in popular culture through highly transmissible verbal catchphrases and visual caricatures that, it has been argued, were perhaps the first true memes of modernity.³⁷ In certain cases I specify how the idea of evolution directly intervened in an artist’s life—such as Seurat’s encounter with Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) in his compulsory anatomy course at the École des Beaux-Arts. But on the whole, what is at stake is not tracing lines of causality but elucidating structures of analogy between relatively synchronic visual and verbal hypotheses about human mental disposition and functioning—in some cases entirely outside the possibility of direct influence. The point is not that such analogies exist—that they do is hardly surprising—but rather to show the concrete, corporeal logic through which they could materialize.

The works of art at the center of this book broadcast their preoccupations with evolutionary descent in a relatively simple way, by foregrounding animal motifs. There is greater complexity in the ways they call up ideas emerging from what was then the nascent discipline called psychology. In the decades after becoming institutionalized in the 1870s, psychology accrued profound cultural prestige, becoming, as Friedrich Nietzsche claimed in 1886, Mistress of the Sciences and usurper of the throne of philosophy as a new master discipline . . . in articulating what it means to be human.³⁸ Rather than through iconography, it is through the specific device of posture that these works can be said to parallel psychology’s upending of that category of the human mind known as the person—if "what person stands for had been, in John Locke’s influential definition, a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking.³⁹ Structured into the basic form of turn-of-the-century figuration is the obsolescence of European culture’s old metaphysical prejudice that man ‘always thinks,’ and the replacement of that old prejudice with a newly conventional view that man really thinks very little and very seldom," as Wilhelm Wundt, founder in 1879 of the world’s first laboratory of experimental psychology, stated in his Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology.⁴⁰

Seurat, Klimt, and Nijinsky posed human bodies in ways that departed decisively from inherited paradigms of naturalistic figuration. Yet their postural antinaturalism can be seen as instituting naturalism of another kind; it was a visual sign for acknowledging the naturalization of mind that, by the end of the nineteenth century, had transformed understandings of the psyche.⁴¹ In different ways and with different kinds of emphases, these artists each gave form to the expanded concept of mind that emerged from this naturalization, which went hand in hand with an expansion of the prototypical subject of psychological theorizing. New scientific psychologies programmatically rejected the habitual solipsistic tendency in prior European philosophy of mind to simply take for its object the adult male, white and civilized, as Théodule Ribot observed derisively in 1870.⁴² The practitioners of the new psychology were still adult white men, almost exclusively. But they began to premise their generalizing psychological theories on everyone left out of their own hegemonic subcategory of the species—in particular women, children, racialized colonial subjects deemed primitive or noncivilized, not to mention animals and certain adults (so-called hysterics, neurotics, and perverts, among others) who were deemed to exhibit pathological tendencies.⁴³ In tandem with this colonizing gesture to incorporate new populations of minds into psychological theory, Euro-American psychologists embraced a vastly expanded concept of mind that no longer presumed, as Freud put it, that ‘conscious’ and ‘mental’ were identical.⁴⁴ The new psychology placed particular emphasis on the many precognitive aspects of human behavior that functioned involuntarily or automatically, beyond or beneath the thresholds of will and awareness. Most famously, this new psychology privileged sleep and analogous states: activities of the mind outside of waking consciousness such as dreaming, hallucination, hypnotic trance, and somnambulism.⁴⁵

Seurat’s Poseuses, Klimt’s Beethovenfries, and Nijinsky’s L’Après-midi d’un faune each put on display not only animal motifs but also human figures who appear to be—to quote a stage direction of Nijinsky—asleep with eyes open. As an ensemble, these works make evident a thorough cross-contamination in the turn-of-the-century visual imagination between evolutionary theory’s blurring of the categories animal and human and the new psychology’s blurring of a categorical distinction between states of sleep and wakefulness.⁴⁶ More importantly, considering these works together reveals a fundamental and heretofore unrecognized formal logic intrinsic to modern art’s engagement with psychological modernism (as the new psychology is sometimes termed).⁴⁷ That is to say: the visualization of the unconscious mind, like its linguistic articulation, could not be communicated positively. Its figuration invited postures of the body that functioned much like the privative prefix un-, postures that signified by means of an implicit negation of a preceding set of corporeal norms in European art history, which had communicated consciousness as a positively representable psychic entity.⁴⁸

The Exhaustion of Gestural Formulas

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

The heightened attention to artistic body language circa 1900 is exemplified in the work of the German scholar Aby Warburg. In 1905, he coined the term Pathosformel to describe postures and gestures that were prefigured in the art and sculpture of Greco-Roman antiquity and subsequently redeployed by renaissance artists to express the human figure’s inner psychic states, specifically states of heightened emotion or pathos.⁴⁹ Tracing the legacy of these so-called formulas of pathos in postmedieval art and civilization was the core preoccupation of Warburg’s research, which treated gesture as the primary vehicle of continuity within a European aesthetic tradition he understood to be the afterlife (Nachleben) of classical antiquity.⁵⁰

Warburg’s scholarship modeled a form of close attention to expressive gestures in art and framed them as a topic of foundational interest for a new science of culture that would treat visual artifacts as components of cultural phenomena in all their interconnectedness.⁵¹ This book is indebted to those innovations. But Warburg’s ideas serve primarily as a foil or counterpoint to the argument that follows, which highlights a historical and formal development in modern art that allows us to recognize Warburg’s research as a far less singular phenomenon. His conceptualization of the Pathosformel was simply one symptom of a much broader crisis in European modernity of the late nineteenth century—a crisis surrounding the origin, meaning, and expressive efficacy of bodily gestures.

"By the end of the nineteenth century, the Western bourgeoisie had definitely lost its gestures. This intriguing, telegraphic statement launches Giorgio Agamben’s short essay Notes on Gesture. Agamben does not qualify his claim or provide a concrete explanation of what exactly is meant by a loss of gestures. Nor does he stipulate an explicit reason why the loss occurred at this precise juncture in history, though he implies that scientific studies of movement, by practitioners of both medical psychiatry and protocinematic photography, contributed to conditions in which gestures lose their ease under the action of invisible powers. Nevertheless, the art-historical record supports Agamben’s hypothesis that something like a loss of gestures occurred before 1900—at least within the imaginative domain of artworks. This loss can be seen as the context informing Warburg’s expansion of the discipline of art history around the visual-conceptual category of gesture. For an age that has lost its gestures, as Agamben stated, is, for this reason, obsessed by them."⁵²

Warburg emphasized Greco-Roman antiquity’s enduring bequest to European art of a primal vocabulary of passionate gesticulation during a moment when many modern artists were systematically eradicating that gestural language.⁵³ Historians have repeatedly noted that gesture in European art of the late nineteenth century appears to take on an overtly problematic status. This recognition surfaces, for instance, in Martha Ward’s observation that in French art of the 1880s the depiction of gestures was becoming problematized across an array of artists and subjects, or Kenneth Clark’s comment: With Rodin an epoch and an episode has come to an end. The idea of pathos expressed through the body has reached its final stage and is in decay.⁵⁴ Warburg—who began his formal study of art history at the University of Bonn in 1886, the same year the Grande Jatte debuted at the final Impressionist exhibition—recognized the persistence of Pathosformeln in the aftermath of the exhaustion and obsolescence of such formulas in much contemporary practice. Indeed, for the three works at the center of this book, the relevance of Warburg’s argument concerning the afterlife of a classical language of gesture lies in the fact that it no longer seems to apply to them.⁵⁵ When pre-coined classical gestures come into play in Seurat’s, Klimt’s, and Nijinsky’s works, they do so to be transformed, travestied, or supplanted by opposing postural modes.

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

Modern art, in other words, presents a theoretical and iconographic problem for Warburg’s project. Consider Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, a painting included in the art historian’s famous Mnemosyne Picture Atlas. This assemblage of nearly a thousand images was conceived as an inventory of pre-coined classical forms that had shaped the representation of bodily gesture and movement from the European renaissance forward. Known for its sweeping historical scope, the Atlas incorporated imagery from contemporary newspapers and magazines—but no images postdating Manet’s 1863 canvas that could be classified as art, in the old fine art sense.⁵⁶ The Déjeuner thus occupied a charged, ambiguous position within a constellation of reproductions assembled to demonstrate the survival of Pathosformeln, or the ineradicable force of the pictorial language of gesture.⁵⁷ It inhabited the Atlas as a point of continuity but also of terminus.

In one sense, Manet’s painting could serve as linchpin evidence of Warburg’s core historical conviction: that in art, as he put it, expressive values draw their penetrating strength not from the rejection of older forms, but from the nuances in the transformations to which they are subjected.⁵⁸ As Warburg demonstrated on panel 55 of the Atlas (fig. 2) and discussed in a short essay on the Déjeuner, Manet had patterned the poses of the canvas’s three central figures on an ancient formula. Tracing their postures all the way back to a Hellenistic sarcophagus, Warburg showed how this pattern of postures was repeated in a composition by Raphael (preserved in a print by Marcantonio Raimondi, ca. 1510–1520; fig. 3), a seventeenth-century Dutch picture, and eventually, Manet’s Déjeuner (fig. 4). Yet Warburg’s determination to situate the Déjeuner as a last link in a chain extending back to Hellenistic Greece stemmed, perhaps, from his unstated recognition that the picture represented something more than a mere confirmation of the ineradicable force of the gestural formulas Greco-Roman art had long ago established. No modern painting, he acknowledged in his essay on the Déjeuner, poses more difficulties for an art critic who wants to demonstrate the crucial, essential role of formal and thematic links with tradition.⁵⁹

Figure 3. Marcantonio Raimondi (after Raphael), The Judgment of Paris (detail), ca. 1510–1520. Engraving, 29.1 × 43.7 cm. Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Figure 4. Édouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1862–1863. Oil on canvas, 208 × 265.5 cm. Collection of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photo: Benoît Touchard/Mathieu Rabeau, © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

In treating Manet’s Déjeuner as evidence of the survival of classical forms, Warburg’s account of the painting’s historical significance is at odds with those of later scholars, who have tended to regard Manet as the initiator of a deep rupture in modern aesthetic culture, and Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, in particular, as a caesura in the history of painting.⁶⁰ The most lucid account of the art-historical dynamics of that caesura comes from Michael Fried, who has described Manet as the last modern painter who felt the need to secure the connectedness of his art to that of the distant past, to the enterprise of the Old Masters.⁶¹ Fried acknowledges but does not develop the basic point at issue for us here: bodily gestures stand at the crux of Manet’s stance in relation to the history of European art. For Manet, figural poses were the primary unit of quotation, the primary vehicle through which connectedness to that history could be made manifest.⁶² And if paintings such as the Déjeuner adopt a newly panoramic perspective on the history of European art—presupposing the availability of all previous painting in an imaginary museum space and drawing from new universal histories of European art like Charles Blanc’s fourteen-volume History of Painters of All Schools (1849–1869)—they reflect an insight quite similar to the one Warburg, a half century later, placed at the heart of his research and the imaginary museum of the Atlas.⁶³ Manet calls attention to "the repetition-structure of European painting from the early Renaissance on," and emphasizes how this repetition-structure implicates above all human figures, operating through their postures and gestures.⁶⁴

What separates Manet’s perspective from Warburg’s, however, is the complex endgame overtly at stake in the painter’s recycling of pre-coined poses—a practice he largely abandoned after the 1860s. Manet’s assertion of historical continuity in his works of the 1860s, through pervasive, undisguised citations of poses borrowed from various genres, national schools, and periods of European art history, ultimately had the effect of making obvious, as Fried suggested, that the art of the past was no longer alive, no longer capable . . . of giving life to the present.⁶⁵

In Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, suffice it to say, the pre-coined gestural formula patterned on Raimondi’s mythological print (patterned, in turn, on the Hellenistic sarcophagus) is rendered conspicuously strange. Manet frankly acknowledged that the figures were posed models. He chose to clothe two of the three figures, all of whom were originally naked, and—a crucial detail almost never mentioned—to delete the oar lodged in the riverbank that supports the outstretched arm of the river deity reclining at the right in Raimondi’s print.⁶⁶ By removing this oar, Manet transformed a resting limb into an unsupported arm extended in space; it reads—necessarily, if not convincingly—as a gesture of pointing, exclamation, or declamation. These modifications produce not only the sense of physical frozenness Fried has stressed but also, more profoundly, a sense of psychological foreclosure, a barring of access to interiority or authentic affect.⁶⁷ Indeed, once one perceives how Manet created the arm’s gesture, it becomes impossible to unsee this feature. One’s sense of the deliberate estrangement of body language in the picture becomes even sharper.⁶⁸ The relaxation of the prior gesture, with its acknowledgment of the body’s need to support its physical weight, is both evoked and canceled. The arm appears to rigidify in place. And the elusive expressive quality of this trio—who already project a sense that some formula has been imposed upon their bodies, an arbitrary formula that bears no motivated relation to their mental states—becomes far more flagrant.

To quote the succinct summation of Carlo Ginzburg in reference to Manet: "If there is a Pathosformel, there is no pathos."⁶⁹ Indeed, contrary to Warburg’s conviction in the ineradicable force of the pictorial language of gesture, Manet’s painting almost seems to register an art-historical second law of thermodynamics, demonstrating that over time the energy stored in a gestural formula is inevitably subject to entropic decay. An integral dimension of the meaning of Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, as a statement about modern life and as a statement about the possibility—or impossibility—of carrying on in modernity that self-important enterprise of the Old Masters, is the suggestion that European art’s classical formulas of corporeal expression could no longer go on repeating themselves as they long had.

Why was the repetition-structure of figural gestures disrupted in Manet’s art in this way? This question remains relatively unexamined, though almost all scholarship acknowledges the artist’s profound estrangement of inherited conventions of expressive body language. Does Manet’s draining of pathos from Pathosformeln emerge from a newly synthetic understanding of the history of European art? Does it betray