Constructing the Viennese Modern Body

Art, Hysteria, and the Puppet

Nathan Timpano

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138220188
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315413679
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

This book takes a new, interdisciplinary approach to analyzing modern Viennese visual culture, one informed by Austro-German theater, contemporary medical treatises centered on hysteria, and an original examination of dramatic gestures in expressionist artworks. It centers on the following question: How and to what end was the human body discussed, portrayed, and utilized as an aesthetic metaphor in turn-of-the-century Vienna? By scrutinizing theatrically "hysterical" performances, avant-garde puppet plays, and images created by Oskar Kokoschka, Koloman Moser, Egon Schiele and others, Nathan J. Timpano discusses how Viennese artists favored the pathological or puppet-like body as their contribution to European modernism.

1 “The Semblance of Things”

Re-Visioning Viennese Expressionism

Someone should break every bone in that man’s body!¹

—Archduke Franz Ferdinand, referring to Oskar Kokoschka, 1911

This astonishingly severe declaration, uttered by the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was perhaps the most politically charged of all the adverse critiques directed toward modern artistic representations of the body in fin-de-siècle Vienna. According to anecdotal evidence, Ferdinand, who was known for his moral earnestness, expressed this damning sentiment at a private viewing of the February 1911 Hagenbund exhibition held in the Austrian capital.² The reason for his hostility was the inclusion in the exhibition of more than twenty paintings by the young Viennese expressionist artist and playwright Oskar Kokoschka. While obviously extreme in his desire to maim (if only metaphorically) the artist, the archduke was not alone in his contempt for Kokoschka’s images. Indeed, individuals throughout the Viennese art world were both repulsed and intrigued by the contorted, strange, and “pathological” bodies in his paintings.³

One such image was Kokoschka’s Portrait of Lotte Franzos (1909, Plate 4), which was included in the Hagenbund exhibition. In the painting, a young woman with a wavy, bobbed haircut is pictured in three-quarter pose, wearing a pale dress. She appears demure, or lost in thought, as her eyes are cast downward and away from the viewer. Unconventionally, the woman is surrounded by thick, blurred outlines painted in blues, purples, and yellows, giving the illusion that these colorful auras were radiating directly from her body. Her face, neck, and hands are mottled and distorted, giving the impression that her skin has been afflicted by an extreme form of eczema or lined with deep wrinkles. The fingers of her left hand, in particular, are bent into unnatural angles, suggesting that the woman may also suffer from broken appendages, arthritis, or other disfigurements.

Franzos, a friend of Kokoschka’s and herself an artist and art historian, as well as the wife of a prominent Viennese lawyer, was reportedly far from pleased when she saw the finished portrait, a reaction shared by local critics who viewed the canvas two years later at the Hagenbund.⁴ The prominent Austrian art historian Josef Strzygowski was one such detractor who vehemently denounced Kokoschka’s paintings and artistic vision. In an article published in the Viennese newspaper Die Zeit (The Times) on 9 February 1911, Strzygowski declared:

Here is Oskar Kokoschka. […] With Koko-rays from his psyche he X-rays those persons who have the misfortune of coming under his paintbrush. What a putrid smell emanates from the picture of Frau Dr. L. Fr.! [… Here one] envisions off-putting pictures of syphilis and paralysis.⁵

Although Franzos was not openly named in Strzygowski’s review, the inclusion of her initials makes clear that the critic was referring to her portrait. Writing as though Kokoschka’s mind were capable of physically penetrating the bodies of his subjects, Strzygowski argued that the artist’s subjects (including Franzos) were contaminated by his inner vision, the results of which might be confused for the telltale signs of venereal disease or some other illness. By suggesting that Franzos’ portrait might actually smell bad, Strzygowski was claiming that Kokoschka’s paintings were not only damaging to the bodies of his sitters, but were also a danger to their viewers, who were at risk of smelling rotten flesh, or figuratively contracting the diseases emanating from his artistic subjects.

Another Viennese critic, Karl Schreder, expressed similar disdain toward Kokoschka’s paintings at the Hagenbund. In his review for Vienna’s Deutsches Volksblatt (German People’s Paper), also published on February 9, Schreder wrote that Kokoschka:

paints “portraits,” including well-known local figures. These gruesome pictures, whose faces seem to bear the disfigurement of a corrupting disease or the rotting process of decay, appear as if they have risen from a foul-smelling crypt or madhouse.⁶

Schreder further argued that some of Kokoschka’s sitters appeared to have “crippled hands,” or to have been afflicted by leprosy—no doubt a reference to the “corrupting disease” that Schreder believed was the cause of their visual disfiguration.⁷ The critic Franz Grüner, writing for Karl Kraus’ polemic newspaper Die Fackel (The Torch), likewise argued that individuals depicted in Kokoschka’s Hagenbund portraits seemed as though they suffered from “severe disease and, having known years of imprisonment, were afflicted with repulsive physical and psychological ailments.”⁸ Grüner’s critique was published more than two weeks after Strzygowski’s and Schreder’s reviews, so it is possible that his contempt for Kokoschka’s canvases was merely an echo of the damning sentiments already offered by his colleagues. Regardless of the origins of Grüner’s opinions, his article essentially summed up prevailing public opinions of Kokoschka, namely that the artist painted grotesque bodies rife with disease and decay.

Bearing in mind the negative criticism leveled against Kokoschka’s paintings in the Hagenbund exhibition, there is an undeniable irony in Ferdinand’s aggressive proclamation, given that the archduke proposed to leave Kokoschka’s body in the same state that he and the critics found so repulsive in the artist’s representations of “crippled hands” and disfigured bodies. It would be inaccurate, however, to presume that Ferdinand’s sentiments were in any way insincere, despite there being no actual threat to Kokoschka’s wellbeing. To be sure, Ferdinand only figuratively proposed a breaking of bones, and yet—in a very real sense—Kokoschka’s images signaled a definitive break with art history, as well as a rupture with contemporary conceptualizations of artistic vision. It is clear that the artist’s decision to distance his aesthetics from depictions of the academic body in favor of images of the newly emerging modern body—a body that appeared as though it were riddled with disease—was undoubtedly jarring to the archduke’s sight and traditional sensibilities. Without a doubt, Kokoschka’s art had disturbed the vision of fin-de-siècle Vienna, for his was a revelation of the pathological body.

As stated in the introduction to this book, the literature on Viennese expressionism has tended to analyze the movement alongside a Europe-wide interest in more dominant, non-figurative styles, or by adopting a psychoanalytic methodology. Moreover, the current scholarship on the Wiener Moderne has promulgated the notion that artists associated with this particular style were wholly concerned with expressing inner emotions and feelings. In contrast to the existing literature, this volume examines how artists affiliated with expressionism did not in fact abandon the aesthetics of the outer body for the inner mind. The current chapter consequently examines the radical nature of Kokoschka’s theory of vision (which embraced both optical and inner vision) and how this model of expressionistic sight (which continually favored figuration over pure abstraction) helped to construct artistic representations of the Viennese modern body in the early twentieth century (see, for example, Plates 1–4). Importantly, this chapter explores how Kokoschka’s novel conceptualization of artistic vision diverged or converged with contemporaneous theories of expressionistic sight offered by his interlocutors in the German-speaking art world, namely Hermann Bahr, Paul Fechter, Wassily Kandinsky, Egon Schiele, and Wilhelm Worringer.

On the Nature of Visions

Oskar Kokoschka visually and theoretically explored the changing role of vision in fin-de-siècle Vienna more than any other Austrian artist or playwright of his period. Kokoschka’s personal conceptualization of artistic vision is not only evident in a number of his paintings, including those displayed at the 1911 Hagenbund exhibition, but also in his seminal essay “Von der Natur der Gesichte” (“On the Nature of Visions”), which he first delivered as a public lecture in 1912 at Vienna’s Akademischen Verband für Literatur und Musik (Academic Association for Literature and Music). In this quasi-manifesto on visual culture and modern aesthetics, Kokoschka theorized the dialectical nature of expressionistic vision, one informed by inner visions, as well as their binary opposite: optical sight. In conceiving of this dialectic of vision, Kokoschka declared:

Without intent I draw from the outside world the semblance of things; but in this way I myself become part of the world’s imaginings. Thus in everything imagination is simply that which is natural. It is nature, vision, life.⁹

Kokoschka, who was twenty-six years old at the time, spoke with the authority of an artist who had long recognized the stakes involved in defining one’s art (and one’s self) as avant-garde within the cultural milieu of fin-de-siècle Vienna. As a burgeoning painter-playwright, he equally understood the importance of establishing a unique, theoretical basis in which to root the iconography of his developing style. Kokoschka’s essay therefore persists as a foundational text in the conceptualization of the relationship between inner emotions and optical vision in Viennese expressionism. At the close of his treatise, Kokoschka acknowledged that the catalyst for his work, the inspiration for the visions of his inner imagination, was drawn from the “semblance of things” that he observed and collected from the daily, optical stimuli of his immediate surroundings. More precisely, Kokoschka argued that the awareness of these inner visions, or Gesichte, did not materialize through a state of mere remembrance on the part of the viewer, but operated on “a level of consciousness” that allowed the viewer to experience visions within his or her own self.¹⁰

Kokoschka further posited that this awareness on the part of the viewer was part and parcel to the act of living, or of collecting images optically from the material world:

The effect is such that the visions seem actually to modify one’s consciousness, at least in respect of everything that their own form proposes as their pattern and significance. This change in oneself, which follows on the vision’s penetration of one’s very soul, produces the state of awareness, of expectancy. At the same time there is an outpouring of feeling into the image, which becomes, as it were, the soul’s plastic embodiment […] The life of the consciousness is boundless. It interpenetrates the world and is woven through all its imagery.¹¹

This passage is significant not only for its contextualization of emotive feeling in the image-forming process, but also of the supposed psychological effect that visions have on the mind of the agent. Kokoschka, however, suggests that this effect transpires not through involuntary psychic activity, but through the active awareness (or consciousness) of the viewer in whom the vision arises. But here Kokoschka also indirectly proposes two different ways of thinking about consciousness. On the one hand, he posits that consciousness is one’s awareness of the external world and its visual stimuli. On the other, he quite specifically defines consciousness as “the source of all things and of all conceptions. It is a sea ringed about with visions.”¹² In this sense, consciousness is not merely an awareness on the part of the agent, but rather, it is something akin to his or her “inner core,” or fundamental understanding of all things external and internal.¹³

One might infer that the simple act of remembering a material image is an essentially thoughtless act, given that, according to Kokoschka, this process occurs beyond the consciousness (or “awareness”) of the agent who creates, experiences, and draws inspiration from the vision in question. What is more, if the agent lacks consciousness on both levels, then the vision will fail to materialize, insofar as Kokoschka implies that an unconscious vision is indistinguishable from a mere memory of the outside world. Should the viewer fail to acknowledge the presence of the vision, the self will be denied this particular image of the soul. The suggestion that consciousness sets meaning into a vision is therefore seemingly contradictory, insofar as visions are typically understood to be psychic phenomena; and yet the conscious awareness of Gesichte is patently fundamental to Kokoschka’s conceptualization of the semblance of things. Rather than arguing that Kokoschka’s theory is inconsistent—given that his formulation of artistic vision argues for the centrality of both inner and outer processes in the development of this sensorial construct—the present chapter proposes that this rather radical handling of the role of opticality in the development of expressionism implicitly explains expressionistic sight as a process formed through the dialectical tension that arises from these two prevalent, though oppositional views of artistic vision. This multivalent understanding of vision and its relationship to the historiography of expressionism has, until now, eluded scholarship on this particular movement.

Binaries of Vision I: Kokoschka, Worringer, and Fechter

To appreciate the uniqueness of Kokoschka’s position in the debate over the role of physical sight in Viennese expressionism, it is important (and necessary) to recognize how his paradigm of vision differed from more dominant theories put forward in the German-speaking art world (namely Austria and Germany) at the beginning of the twentieth century. From a historical perspective, inner vision overwhelmingly dominated this discourse, thereby positioning physical vision as a contestable and peripheral construct. Charles Townsend Harrison has rightly suggested...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Plates
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Conundrum of the Viennese Modern Body
• 1 “The Semblance of Things”: Re-Visioning Viennese Expressionism
• 2 “The Woman Emerges”: Medical Vision and the Spectacle of Hysteria
• 3 Performing Hysteria: A Vogue for Hystero-Theatrical Gestures
• 4 A Tale of Three Hysterics: Elektra, Isolde, and Salome
• 5 The Inanimate Body Speaks: The Language of the Marionette Theater
• 6 Pathological Puppets: The Body and the Marionette in Viennese Expressionism
• Bibliography
• Index