Visions of the Human: Art, World War I and the Modernist Subject 9780755603558, 9781780766317

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List of Figures 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Wilhelm R¨ontgen, X-ray print of his wife, Anna Berthe R¨ontgen’s hand, 1896 Ernst Mach, shadowgraph of a bullet’s supersonic flow, 1887 Eadward Muybridge, ‘The Horse in Motion’, 1878 Eadward Muybridge, ‘Woman Walking Downstairs’ (from Animal Locomotion, 1887) ´ Etienne-Jules Marey, Chronophotography, c.1894 Abraham Bosse, from Desargues’s Universal Method, 1643 Leon Battista Alberti, from On Painting, 1435 Albrecht D¨urer, from Four Books on Human Proportion, 1528 ‘Comparison of eye and camera obscura. Early eighteenth-century’ Paul C´ezanne, Mount Sainte-Victoire, 1902–4 Albert Gleizes, La Femme aux Phlox, 1911 Fernand L´eger, Nues dans la forˆet, 1909–10 Albert Gleizes, La Cuisine, 1911 Albert Gleizes, D´epiquage des Moissons, 1912 Albert Gleizes, Portrait de Jacques Nayral, 1911 Albert Gleizes, La Ville et la Fleuve, 1913 Sonia Delaunay, Prismes e´lectriques, 1913 Sonia Delaunay, Binding for Blaise Cendrars’s Les Pˆaques a` New York, 1912 Sonia Delaunay, Couverture, 1911

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20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

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Sonia Delaunay, Le Bal Bullier, 1913 Sonia Delaunay, La Robe Simultan´ee, 1913 Sonia Delaunay, Danseuse, 1917 Alfred H. Barr, from Cubism and Abstract Art, 1936 Oskar Schlemmer, H¨auser (Klostergarten), 1912 Oskar Schlemmer, Komposition auf Rosa – Verh¨altnis dreier Figuren, 1915/16 Oskar Schlemmer, Plan mit Figuren, 1919 Oskar Schlemmer, Relief JG, 1919–21 Oskar Schlemmer, Relief JG in Bronzen, 1919 Oskar Schlemmer Relief im Gips und Glas, 1923 Oskar Schlemmer Halbfigur mit betonten Formen, 1923 Oskar Schlemmer, Figur und Raumlineatur, 1924 Oskar Schlemmer, Egozentrische Raumlineatur, 1924 Oskar Schlemmer, Raum und Figur, 1926 Cesare Cesariano, De Architectura, 1521 Cesare Cesariano, De Architectura, 1521 Mariano Taccola, De Ingenesis, c.1433 Francesco di Giorgio, Trattato di architettura, c.1480 Francesco di Giorgio, Trattato di architettura, c.1480 Leonardo da Vinci, The Vitruvian Man, c.1485–90 William Blake, Glad Day or The Dance of Albion, c.1794/5 Vincenzo Scamozzi, Idea della Architettura Universale, Venice, 1615 Carlus Dyer, Space Module of the Arms and Legs III, 1952 ‘Standing inside a cube’, author’s sketch from Laban, Choreutics (1966) ‘The three bodily planes synthesised: the dimensional basis of the static body’, author’s drawing sketch from Laban, Choreutics (1966) ‘The spherical framework’, author’s sketch from Laban, Choreutics (1966) ‘The icosahedron constructed from the convergences of the planes and sphere’, author’s sketch from Laban, Choreutics (1966) Leonardo da Vinci, ‘dodecahedron’ in Luca Pacioli’s De Divina proportione, Florence, 1509.

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LIST OF FIGURES

48. ‘Construction of square and polygons’ from Bartoli’s edition of Alberti’s De re aedificatoria, 1550. 49. Oskar Schlemmer, Ambulant architecture, 1924 50. Oskar Schlemmer, The marionette, 1924 51. Oskar Schlemmer, Bauhaustreppe, 1932 52. Le Corbusier, Modulor 2, 1955 53. Le Corbusier, Modulor 2, 1955 54. Le Corbusier, Modulor 2, 1955 55. Sonia Delaunay’s simultaneous design on a model and the Citro¨en B 13 at the 1925 International Exhibition 56. Sonia Delaunay advertisement, 1925–26 57. Fernand L´eger, Les Deux Femmes a` la Toilette, 1920 58. Fernand L´eger La Profil au Vase, 1927

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Acknowledgements This book is the result of several years of research and study. However, it all began many years before as an undergraduate. The work is indebted to Chris Townsend for not only noticing something in my thinking and writing, but actively supporting and encouraging it. This book owes Chris a massive intellectual debt, but also a very physical debt – without him, these words and this book would not exist. There are many people that I would like to thank for their advice and feedback over the course of this project. I am grateful to Barry Langford for his support and comments. Deborah Cherry, like Chris Townsend, helped sharpen my approach to cultural objects and also challenged my relation to academic theory. Peter Brooke provided generous and insightful comments on Albert Gleizes. Discussions with Barnaby Dicker were always refreshing and energetic. I could share difficulties and advice with Elizabeth English and Austin Fisher. I am grateful to Julia Moszkowicz for providing feedback on Chapter 1. Tim Armstrong and Neil Cox both gave great comments, and feedback on the project. I would like to thank Body and Society for allowing me to publish an early research direction in their journal. Fashion Theory featured an edited version of Chapter 2 on Sonia Delaunay’s simultaneous designs. Anne Quarles at RM Services was an excellent help in obtaining images and copyrights. I am grateful to Anna Coatman and Liza Thompson at I.B.Tauris for giving me the opportunity to publish my research as a book and to Pat FitzGerald for her copyediting skills. I would also like to acknowledge Southampton Solent University who provided funding xi

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for image copyrights. Alice Hogg at DACS replied to various copyright requests in a professional and timely manner. I am grateful to others, too numerous to name here, who kindly helped clarify and resolve different permission queries. Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders. Any errors or omissions brought to the attention of the publishers will be made good in future editions. An attempt has been made to keep reference to work in their original language where possible. English has been used for texts read and/or quoted in their translation, and at other times for matters of clarity. Similarly, both languages may be used where more familiar. Projects such as this are almost impossible without the support and love of those closest to oneself. ‘Thank you’ seems an inadequate sentiment for those qualities shown by my parents. Olive Richards and Margaret Harland passed away before the publication of this book, but their kindness, generosity and love are always present in my thoughts. Finally it is to Zoe and Emmy that I dedicate this book. Their patience and impatience has been instrumental to its development.

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Introduction The body is our general medium for having a world. Maurice Merleau Ponty1

The imagination of existence as a human being underwent an identifiable, radical transformation before, during, and after the Modern epoch. In 1913, the French writer Charles P´eguy declared that ‘the world has changed less since Jesus Christ than it has changed in the last thirty years’.2 And, with the global, catastrophic event of the ‘Great War’ in 1914, Adrian Gregory has claimed that no event since the Black Death had so deeply affected Western culture.3 This book will consider the interrelation between artistic, scientific, technological, political, philosophic and socio-economic forces and relationships that shaped new ideas of the modern human subject. The visual representation of the human body is a profoundly important index for how human subjectivity, being and existence have been historically understood within culture. The representation of the body is a site for the dynamic relation between subjectivity and society. The body both generates the capacity for subjective agency, in its embodiment, and is a site for its control. As John O’Neil writes ‘our. . . bodies are the permeable ground of all social behaviour, our bodies are the very flesh of society. . . human embodiment functions to create the most fundamental bond between the self and society’.4 The body’s depiction, then, can never be neutral: it is burdened with the weight of cultural pressures from its inception. However it is subsequently received, representation occurs in its specific historical moment, from a particular relation with a society in constituting its 1

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culture. The image is a site, an ‘artefact’, upon which analysis can proceed from the imagination of the body located at the convergence of interpenetrating and conflicting tensions, including those political, philosophic, socio-economic, technological, and scientific forces. The ‘subject’ emerges at this juncture through the image. It is precisely this view of the body, as an index of the historical relation between self and society, that helps us understand wider cultural transformation. Yet modern technological developments yielded new forms of knowledge about the nature of reality and repositioned the human body as the new ‘object’ of knowledge. New ‘visions’ of the human subject were created through a transformation of knowledge. The unfolding of technology, science and industrialisation within modernity yielded new knowledge about the nature of reality, revealing multiple, simultaneous fields of reality. Consider, for example, how Wilhelm R¨ontgen’s X-ray at the end of the nineteenth-century allowed for the penetration of visible reality. Upon photographing his wife’s hand, Anna Bertha reportedly remarked: ‘I have seen my own death!’ She surely was referring to her skeletal representation and its long symbolic relation to death, but we might also reflect upon the perceived obsolescence of the human body and the failure, in this example, of embodied perception to know and reveal the world. The perceptual limits of the body were exposed and supplanted by new visual technologies. This book will consider the affects of technological modernity and the imagination of a modern, human subject as it was represented by avantgarde artists working in Europe through different media, both old and new. The body has traditionally been neglected in Western philosophy, yet it is the founding principle upon which knowledge is based.5 The body, or rather embodiment, is a fundamental property that each shares with another, and therefore offers inter-subjective potential. As the basis for conceptual thought, we share our embodiment despite cultural difference. However, as Louis Althusser argued, the body is also a corporate site for ideological regulation.6 This book is concerned with the realisation of the body as a foundation for knowledge, and the subsequent imagination of human configuration within space and time, of varying states of harmonisation or alienation, emancipation or control, depending upon the cultural condition. As a complex site for culturally-constructed identity, the body in both its representation and imagination underwent a specific trauma throughout modernity.

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INTRODUCTION Figure 1. Wilhelm R¨ontgen, X-ray print of his wife, Anna Berthe R¨ontgen’s hand, 1896

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Indeed, certain imaginations of the body that characterised prewar modernity became closed as sites of ‘national security’7 during and after World War I. In its postwar production, the body became a rigid, yet vacant, site for ideological inscription. This new status was governed by a widespread turn towards classicism, informed by tropes of integrity and cohesion, within an urgent narrative for stability and order. This increased ideological management of the body was a consequence of the same shift in thinking about the human subject that had excited the modernist avant-garde imagination before 1914. Modernist, specifically ‘cubist’, ideas were used to unfold the body in relation to the world, but subsequently became a technology for its ‘closing’ through a ‘return to order’. Cubism’s influence upon the twentieth-century imagination of the body is an effect of the critical importance of an epistemic transformation in the nineteenth-century. Michel Foucault identified in the earlier period a significant shift towards ‘man’ as the object of knowledge, and Jonathan Crary sees in it the emergence of what he calls the ‘crisis of the subject’.8 The profound re-imagination of traditional representations of the figure in space and time, manifested in modernist art movements such as Cubism and Futurism, emerged from a fundamental shift in the understanding of the body’s relation to the technological and industrial transformation of culture. The advent of the ‘human sciences’ within ‘modern’ secular humanism led to technological interventions upon the body that might provide a new basis of knowledge. Tim Armstrong refers to the body subjected to ‘a barrage of devices . . . resolved into a complex of different biomechanical systems, conceived in thermodynamic terms’.9 These extracted new knowledges about the body, and consequently, the nature of reality. Part 1 of the book considers the body’s subjection to a vast array of interventions and pressures that arose from fundamental questions about the constitution of human experience and knowledge emerging after the philosophy of Locke and Kant. The nineteenth-century establishment of the ‘human sciences’, including physiology and even neuroscience,10 emphasised that knowledge in this transformed episteme was premised upon sensation. Subsequently, sensation was discovered to be highly unstable, and therefore human knowledge could not be based in any reality other than the unstable one it made for itself. The principle of axiomatic, objective truths was thus corroded; there was no simulacral relation of human perception to its perceived ‘reality’,

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or what Kant named noumena.11 Foucault has discussed this transparent relation between vision and knowing originating within Renaissance culture, and how such conflation could no longer serve as a legitimate basis for knowledge. The modern representation of the subject could, therefore, no longer be faithfully premised upon the stable relationship of the body to the space and time it occupied. Indeed, the subject also had an immediate relation to what Marshall Berman describes as the concurrent instability of social and capitalist conditions, of constant revolutionizing, disturbance, agitation; it needs to be perpetually pushed and pressed in order to maintain its elasticity and resilience, to appropriate and assimilate new energies, to drive itself to new heights of activity and growth.12

Modernity’s very instability created new forms of reactionary stability, something Edward Comentale argues contributed to British Modernism’s investment in classicism: an extension of modernity, but also a response to ‘the horrors of economic modernism’ and its incorporation of chaos, change, dynamism, alongside the production of a superficial, alienated modern subject.13 Visual articulations of a subjective condition must, however, be simultaneously grounded in the actual, as well as the conceptual, transformation of modern culture. As Stephen Kern writes: ‘From around 1880 to the outbreak of World War I a series of sweeping changes in technology and culture created distinctive new modes of thinking about and experiencing time and space.’14 The imagined and the lived experience of modernity aided both Cubism and Futurism, whilst providing a ground for a number of anticipatory radical thinkers, from C´ezanne and Bergson to Mach and Poincar´e, as well as nonEuclidean mathematicians (who proved that the founding assumptions for the structuring of space and time, based on Euclid’s Ancient Greek postulates, were incorrect. Within mathematics, the revision of earlier tenets of time and space allowed the emergence of non-Euclidean mathematics, relativity theory and Einstein’s notion of space-time.) All these thinkers schematised the complexities of the subject’s relation to culture in their various disciplines. However, despite the internal rhetoric of these discourses, they should not be considered hermetic. For example, Ernst Mach’s 1887 photograph (Fig. 2) of a bullet’s 5

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Figure 2. Ernst Mach, shadowgraph of a bullet’s supersonic flow, 1887

supersonic waves is reflected in the dynamic ‘force lines’ in futurist painting, itself a conceptual articulation of Bergsonian philosophy. Again, Nietzsche’s concept of ‘perspectivism’ finds accommodation with Henri Poincar´e’s work as well as cubist painting. The body, and even matter, came to be recognised as energy; in modernity, its force was compressed and made dynamic. The subject’s relation to culture is mutually determining in a continuously changing bionomic of the organism and its relation to the environment. The body does not simply exist in the space and time of its environment, it is in dynamic relation to it, and therefore should not be conceptualised through figurative separation. As we shall see, for the avant-garde, traditional modes of figurative representation appeared in this moment to no longer adequately describe the corporeal relation to the spacetime of the modern world. Thus in its moment of passing, existing concepts of the world were brushed aside, even if they remained as reactionary positions to which one might return. Whilst the age of Enlightenment and Positivism indexed and categorised the world as it changed (Figs 3–5), attempting to bring it

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Figure 3. Eadward Muybridge, ‘The Horse in Motion’, 1878

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Figure 4. Eadward Muybridge, ‘Woman Walking Downstairs’ (from Animal Locomotion, 1887)

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´ Figure 5. Etienne-Jules Marey, Chronophotography, c.1894

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after 1848 the idea that there was only one possible mode of representation began to break down. The categorical fixity of Enlightenment thought was increasingly challenged, and ultimately replaced by an emphasis upon

under the control of a disciplinary gaze, this project was premised upon veracity of representation. Yet, as David Harvey writes:

divergent systems of representation.15

He points to the effect of ‘insecure temporality’16 upon the arts, citing Paris after 1848 as the locus for the ‘shifts created by a crisis of representation’.17 Not only was the conceptual basis of culture transformed, but also everyday experience through the compression of time and space by technological modernity. In approaching World War I – which Kern describes as the collision of a new dynamic of time and space that outmoded autocratic institutions were unable to manage18 – Harvey adds, ‘[t]he map of domination of the world’s spaces changed out of all recognition between 1850 and 1914’.19 Again, such changes ranged from the international to the personal, as the lives of individuals were accelerated, not only through new modes of transportation, but by the reconfiguration of their own bodies, for example, through F.W. Taylor’s prewar formulation of ‘scientific management’.20 This engineered the body, reconfigured in time and space, for greater bodily efficiency and therefore economic productivity. Karl Marx already observed the process for the worker in ‘transform[ing] his life-time into working-time’21 whereupon ‘the capitalist form of large scale industry reproduces the same division of labour in a more monstrous shape; in the factory proper, by converting the worker into a living appendage of the machine’.22 Elsewhere, Emerson’s Works and Days (1870), Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) and Marey’s La Machine Animale (1873) conceptualised the human body in mechanical terms.23 Georg Luk´acs wrote: In this environment where time is transformed into abstract, exactly measurable, physical space, an environment at once the cause and the effect of the scientifically fragmented and specialized production of the object of labour, the subjects of labour must be likewise be rationally fragmented.24

Indeed, the human body became regimented both locally and internationally to the mechanistic rhythm of the homogenous interval 10

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INTRODUCTION

of the second with the introduction of global, local, private and public time on 1 July 1913. Through the transmission of the first International Instant from the Eiffel Tower, World Standard Time unified fragmented individual temporalities to a global timetable. A systemic network would impose itself to regiment the individual’s time-space: Kern comments: ‘It is one of the great ironies of the period that a world war became possible only after the world had become so highly united.’25 Modernity’s transformation of time and space irrevocably altered human experience of the environment. The individual was subject to both new dimensions of experience and its control, and this preoccupied modernist artists. Linear perspective and the discrete figuration of objects that provided the classical ‘mirror of nature’ no longer adequately described culture; a new basis for cultural representation was emerging. Yet as the ‘human’ became the producer of experience, there was no axiomatic law on which to premise representation. This lacuna, in part, led to the explosion of subjective modern-isms. The first chapter therefore considers existing Western practices of representation and its inherent relation to ‘pre’-modern forms subjectivity. This forms the contextual basis for a rupture between ‘classical’ perspectival representation and radical modernist ideas of visual form that articulated new aspects of reality. The cultural outrage over Cubism’s imagination of an entwined relationship between the subject and world is a consequence of such a rupture to traditional, coherent models of Western vision and representation. Cubist painting reconstructed the very basis of composition, replacing traditional figuration with dynamic interpenetration in the absence of once assured cultural axioms. For example, Albert Gleizes’s work, like that of Sonia Delaunay in Chapter 2, attempted to determine a new principle of representation, one concerned with the human specificity of looking (for example, in contrast to the mechanical eye of photography), the temporality of vision and the harmonisation of figure and environment. Confronted by the collapse of the intellectual foundations of classical representation, Cubism proposed a form of existence in space and time that coincided with French philosophical thought. As Pepe Karmel argues, the ‘invention’ of Cubism was entirely innovative given that no prior picture served as a model.26 Gleizes’s work embodies modernist ideas and influences that were

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expressed in his canvases, from the harmonisation of form and subject that articulated modern ideas concerning knowledge and science, ethics and technology, intersubjectivity and literature. Gleizes’s paintings are also concerned with modern industrial culture in the moment of its technological transformation. Chapter 2 considers what I will term Sonia Delaunay’s ‘biograph’: her simultaneous dress of 1913. Like Gleizes’s paintings, Delaunay’s work develops from nineteenth-century psychophysics. Crucially, however, she relocates the site of art to her body. This draws attention to corporeality as the active producer of experience (bios-), and also as the site of subjectivity, as she writes (graphe-) her autobiographical experiences through the medium of colour. Colour was of profound biographical and stylistic importance to Delaunay, beginning with her peripatetic upbringing to her experience of prewar Parisian modernity. Both Sonia and Robert Delaunay were influenced by nineteenthcentury investigations on colour, specifically those of J.W. Goethe, Arthur Schopenhauer and Michel Chevreul. The first two used the human experience of colour to support the philosophical claim surrounding bodily sensation as the producer of knowledge. Goethe, for example, noted that even in the absence of all light, the human body still produced coloured sensations. He concluded that instability of sensation pointed towards the instability of human knowledge about the world. Chevreul, however, was perhaps less concerned with the philosophical significance of colour and sensate knowledge, but realised that colour, the prime sensation upon which visual perception depends, was itself unstable. Colour was therefore a relative and not an absolute category, as it changed relative to human perception. These discoveries contributed to undermining Western traditions of conflating objective, exterior knowledge with vision. Like Gleizes, Delaunay was directly influenced by modernity’s transformation of subjective experience. However, instead of the cubist incorporation of form and perspective to provide a point from which to self-reflexively critique it, Delaunay moved towards abstraction to propose new principles of representation. Therefore, the internal principle of representation became colour rather than line and form, as it had remained in Cubism. For Delaunay, colour was archetypal, and this best offered intersubjective possibility with the viewer, rather than the restructuring of existing visual codes. Delaunay felt the dynamism and simultaneity of modernity could not be adequately realised within

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INTRODUCTION

linear models of space and time; in her simultaneous dress Sonia Delaunay synthesised colour and physical movement as a fundamental compositional principle. If culture no longer belonged to space, but to time, why should the work of art remain spatially bound and static? Additionally, the use of the body as the site of the artwork drew attention to questions surrounding it as the producer of knowledge and meaning. Within modernity’s collapsing of objective time and space, Delaunay represents a shift from pre-modern notions of transcendent and objective consciousness to emerging modern ideas of a self that was simultaneous with time and the environment. Delaunay’s work reflects proto-phenomenological aspects of modern French philosophy, as well as the ideas of Henri Bergson and Maurice Blondel. To paraphrase the latter, in overturning the Cartesian cogito: ‘I act therefore I am.’ Delaunay’s dress presents a complex nexus of her own biography, the mutual transformation of the subject and culture, modern philosophies of colour, and the profound importance of the body to knowledge and meaning. The body and its condition in space and time are inseparable – the spatio-temporal condition of the environment in the work of art is integral to the formation of the subject. Delaunay’s work therefore involves a radical relocation of the body as a vital characteristic of the experience of modernity, whilst simultaneously rejecting its tradition as coherent site separate from its environment. The third chapter of the book begins in the shadow of World War I and the effects of the rappel a` l’ordre27 on French culture into the 1920s. Even before the war ended, the radical imagination of the embodied subject became a casualty, as it became increasingly subject to reactionary ideologies in re-ordering the human experience of space and time (to which only perhaps Dada provided temporary resistance).28 However, whilst the pre-war avant-garde suffered, the principles it established before 1914 could not be erased. Cubism’s conceptual framework had been culturally implanted, and whilst ‘Cubism’ as a movement effectively ceased production of important work in France after the war, ‘Cubism’ became a flexible conceptual map upon which artists throughout Europe synthesised their production and imagined their cultural context. The cubist ‘grid’ served as a technology for rationalised instrumentation in different ways, and Cubism’s historical unfolding must be seen more as a dispersal, more akin to Walter Benjamin’s notion of constellated history, or Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome. This is in contrast to Alfred H.

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Barr’s ‘classic’ teleological model of avant-garde art. A rhizomic model of history reflects a reversible, mutating map – much like Cubism’s own compositional scaffolding – that connects to heterogeneous points, is in continuous negotiation, yet recognises historical tensions and fissures when such paths are obstructed and ruptured. Whilst the first two chapters trace conceptual affinities between artists working in different media, the third chapter considers the transEuropean and cross-disciplinary appropriation of the cubist ‘map’. Cubism’s reconstruction of perceptual reality unfolds into a technology of rationalised construction following the catastrophe of war and the annihilation of the French countryside between 1914 and 1919. Implicit within Cubism’s historical moment, in reconstructing the body within space and time, is the prior condition of modernity’s increasingly extensive control of the subject. The very mechanism by which the cubist subject was fractured and sutured into space and time thus became the biopolitical technology for Cubism’s ideological recuperation within representation. Although this book pays specific attention to the work of Oskar Schlemmer, Rudolf Laban and Le Corbusier, a number of ‘bodies’ are discussed in this chapter. The avant-garde’s reactionary turn has clear affinities with other reactionary ideological reconstitutions of the body, such as the industrialised Taylorist body, the classical Greek monumental body, athletic ‘body culture’ and the new body fashioned through consumerism and state regulation in the twentieth-century. Although each figure emerged through particular historical practices in response to its own specific historical formation – from the industrial reconstruction of efficient bodily operation, to the ‘external’ beautification in the individual’s care for its body against the perceived deleterious effects of industrial modernism – this book addresses the ideological reconciliation between them. They share an appropriation of cubist technologies for the reproduction of an antithetical reactionary imagination of the subject and its rationalised position to culture. The Bauhaus artist Oskar Schlemmer made work in a number of media, proceeding from a war in which he had fought. The experience is particularly relevant due to Schlemmer’s oscillation between styles, torn between new cubist visions of modernity and the stable, objective appeal of classical representation. What emerges in his sculpture, drawing, painting and theatre work is a complex negotiation

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INTRODUCTION

between progressive and reactionary ideologies and discourses within modernity. It is the specific ideological restoration of the human body as a stable, rational object that is the overarching theme of this chapter. Whilst the body for Gleizes, and perhaps even more for Delaunay, had been ‘emancipated’ within a radical intellectual turn before the war, the body became ‘closed’, fantasised as a transcendent ‘whole’. The most obvious example of this is perhaps the production of the body in sites of mourning across Europe. Here, the monumental body is carefully configured to conservative norms, to which, I argue, examples of the avant-garde production of bodies are congruent. Schlemmer’s cubistclassicist architectonic of the body within time and space is one response to this cultural turn. In Chapter 4, Rudolf Laban’s theorisation of dance also connects to cubism, and is informed by the culturally irrepressible ‘return to order’ of the postwar years. Laban was directly engaged with the body’s relation to time and space, conceiving corporeality in cubist terms. However, he departed from this principle by reconciling it within a ‘Taylorist’ technology of the body.29 Laban mapped the body within an icosahedron, or ‘space crystal’, derived from Platonic ideas, and reconciled with a photographic conception of the body found ´ in the works of Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge. In effect, he conceived of a body whose movements could be mapped, classified and disciplined within space and time. Le Corbusier’s concept of ‘man’ can also be understood in light of this imagined bodily architecture, this computationally modular human being subjected to mathematical abstraction. Corbusier’s work develops from his claims for the death of ‘Cubism’ during the war, whilst outlining ‘Purism’ in Apr`es le cubisme (1918). There he writes: ‘The highest delectation of the human mind is the perception of order, and the greatest human satisfaction is the feeling of collaboration or participation in this order.’30 As Kenneth Silver comments, ‘The chaos of the war was the base line for [Am´ed´ee] Ozenfant’s and Le Corbusier’s “Purism”’31 and they ‘returned’ to stable, logical, geometric objects. Not least in Fernand L´eger’s affiliation to the movement, Purism sought to synthesise the mechanical object with Platonic form to celebrate harmoniously simplified industrial modernity. In the postwar ‘return to order’, painters sought ‘definite pictorial certainty in the realms of abstraction or in coldly didactic movements such as Purism’.32 In

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returning to the Platonic object, Corbusier reconstructed the body according to a geometric, ornamental aesthetic. In his comparison of the machine and human subject, Corbusier proposed what Nina Rosenblatt describes as a ‘notion of subjectivity. . . oddly static and outdated for a set of artistic practices that sought to align themselves with the very dynamic forces of industrial modernity itself ’.33 Simon Richards also describes Corbusier’s ‘concept of self ’ as both dualistic and ‘pre-modern’.34 Corbusier eschews the ‘bioceptual’ – conceptual thought fundamentally derived from embodiment rather than, for example, the abstracted language of mathematics – for the stability of the geometric, the mechanical and the modular incorporated within his pseudo-scientific and aesthetic construction of a rationalised subject. All three artists – Schlemmer, Laban, and Le Corbusier – are connected not simply by the modernity of their work, but by the particular integration of classical philosophy and aesthetics into modernity. Indeed, all demonstrate this through their imagination of a fundamental and persistent icon of classical bodily abstraction in Western culture: Leonardo’s figure of the Vitruvian Man. Furthermore, the computation of the body in space and time that is presented in their work subsequently shapes the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in terms of the mathematical articulation of human beings within contemporary culture: an erasure of the organic, corporeal, haptic human being. In late capitalism we perhaps witness the ultimate, instrumental development of the body, mathematically abstracted outside of its own terms of corporeal embodiment. Following Foucault’s notion of ‘biopower’ – the state’s disciplinary control of subjectivity – Giorgio Agamben subsequently observes that ‘in modernity life is more and more clearly placed at the center of State politics’.35 He observes, through his distinction of existence into zo¯e (biological embodiment) and bios (cultural life), ‘the growing inclusion of man’s natural life in the mechanisms and calculations of power’.36 The bio-political paradigm of the West throws a sinister light on the models by which social sciences, sociology, urban studies, and architecture today are trying to conceive and organize the public space of the world’s cities without any clear awareness that at their very center lies the same bare life (even if it has been transformed and rendered apparently more human) that defined the biopolitics of the great totalitarian states of the twentieth-century.37

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In the cultural moment after 1918, it is rationalised subject that is imagined and produced by the avant-garde. Despite Cubism’s prior radical emancipation of the body at the beginning of the twentiethcentury, its ‘rhizome’ also contained the biopolitical dimension for a systematised, instrumentalised human being.

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1 New Visions of the Human Introduction This chapter will establish how, in the nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies, a radically different, ‘modern’, vision of humanity emerged in Western culture. This emergent figure gave rise to a new imagination and representation of the human subject within the European avant-garde. This chapter will consider Cubism in particular by considering the context for its emergence and the significance of the challenge it issued for overturning existing models of representation such as perspective. Cubism, however, certainly did not exist in a cultural vacuum. In response to reactionary claims in the early 1920s that writers no longer engaged in traditional mimetic conventions, Virginia Woolf suggested that ‘on or about December, 1910, human character changed’.1 Regarding architectural concepts of space Siegfried Giedion later wrote: ‘Around 1910 an event of decisive importance occurred: the discovery of a new space conception in the arts.’2 Reflecting upon modernism, Henri Lefebvre claimed: ‘The fact is that around 1910 a certain space was shattered’,3 whilst Michael Baxandall contends: ‘The extraordinary thing that happened in 1906– 12 was an abrupt internalisation of a represented narrative matter into the representational medium of forms and colours visually perceived.’4 We have already noted Charles P´eguy’s suggestion that the world had transformed more in the 30 years prior to 1913 – even without the knowledge that World War I was fast approaching. Although Hubert Damisch offers a wry ‘smile’ at the supposed sudden ‘fall of the reigning paradigm’,5 he nevertheless admits that a profound change 18

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occurred. Damisch identifies a shift from nineteenth-century pictorial structure, reflecting a transformation in the ordering of human knowledge. All these writers, whether within Modernism or considering it retrospectively, contribute to a sense of a profound shift in ‘human character’ and a concept of subjectivity imagined through how it constructs, and is constructed by, the environment in which it exists. Indeed, this ‘new’ figure emerged from instability in the nineteenthcentury culture, whereby Foucault writes that ‘man’ became a new object of knowledge.6 A simultaneous and massive change affected both the human subject and its environment through technological, sociopolitical, philosophical and scientific shifts. It is through representation that a shift in cultural thinking – specifically here the interrelation between subject and world – can be identified at an historical moment. This chapter will proceed to consider a number of cubist works to illustrate this modern reconfiguration of the subject. In modernity, the imagination of ‘time’ is increasingly important to representation and the urgent concern of artists. Embedding time within the canvas’s space to represent modernity’s new conditions had ideological implications. For example, the dynamic relation of a person to time was crucial for a philosopher such as Henri Bergson. However, this consideration of time had been consistently omitted from Western thought. Space and time are two concepts that have been forcibly cleaved from their experiential ontological relation within representation, just as human subjectivity has been imagined independent of its environment. Accordingly, Lefebvre argues that the Western production of a particular ‘classical’ space – both conceptual, abstract, philosophical and representational – was ‘shattered’ by the arrival of dynamic temporality within spatial representation. This section observes a transformation that allowed the formation of a radical concept of the self as simultaneous with the environment. For Woolf and Lefebvre, ‘time’ intersects the traditional relationship between subject and space. Neil Cox sees Bergson’s philosophy of Being and temporality as having ‘a profound effect on modernist literature and the creation of the “stream of consciousness” novel developed by Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf ’.7 Literature placed a new emphasis on narrative temporality and simultaneity, whilst in the plastic arts, representation underwent a shattering, or rather a ‘reimagination’, of traditional perspectival and geometric space. Such a static pictorial regime occluded the modern condition of temporal

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dynamism and simultaneity. Lefebvre explains that ‘[t]he pictorial avant-garde . . . were busily detaching the meaningful from the expressive’, and therefore developing ‘the beginnings of the “crisis of the subject” in the modern world’.8 Representing the subject in crisis meant a confrontation with classical representation and its perpetuation of an inherent pictorial regime. The modernist challenge to existing forms of knowledge through representation was nowhere more fervently articulated than in France, where Cubism emerged as a coherent force. Cubism’s challenge to established visual conventions engaged it in the cultural storm that surrounded the ‘crisis of the subject’. The canvases of the salon modernists, including those of Henri Le Fauconnier, Robert Delaunay, Jean Metzinger, L´eger and Gleizes, became caught up in streams of political turbulence, as art participated in cultural transformation through the re-imagination of the subject. However, whilst Lefebvre’s characterisation of the shattering of space specifically referred to Picasso, neither he nor indeed Braque had any significant relationship to the wider public. Their work, under the patronage of Daniel Kahnweiler, was largely confined to a hermetic, studiobased, painter-dealer-collector relationship. Cubism, as the French public knew it, largely belonged to those salon artists emerging out of Impressionism, post-Impressionism and Fauvism, influenced by the work of Gauguin, Courbet, Matisse and C´ezanne.9 It emerged from literary influences, in particular Symbolism, and engaged, if tangentially and inaccurately at times, with Bergson’s thought. Cubism’s unfolding from public Salon exhibition became a cultural phenomenon. As such, it was subjected to political debate regarding ‘social order’. It represented figuration after an epistemic transformation regarding the relations of experiential perception and representation that profoundly offended reactionary politicians. Even though the cubists submitted for exhibition through a process of gallery submission in which, as Baxandall argues, the ‘Black’ galleries ‘had much the same structural and institutional character as the official Salon [and] were concerned to point to their long pedigree’,10 they had provoked outrage in previous exhibitions in 1911. In 1912 the Salon d’Automne exhibition caused debate in the Chambre des D´eput´es regarding the appropriateness of the public exhibition of cubist work: I hope that you will leave the place as disgusted as many people whom I know . . . do I really have the right to give the use of a public monument to

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M. Lampu´e, a Parisian municipal councillor and ‘elder statesman’,12 addressed the issue of allowing public exhibition of such works to L´eon B´erard, the Under-Secretary of State responsible for the arts: ‘It is absolutely inadmissible that our national palaces should be used for manifestations of such an obviously anti-artistic and anti-national kind.’13 However, it was not only conservative factions that objected to the apparent threat to national integrity. The socialist Jules-Louis Breton remarked that cubist paintings consisted of ‘jokes in very bad taste’, painted by a large proportion of foreign artists. He subsequently requested the political censorship of work that evinced the ‘anti-artistic’ and ‘anti-nationalistic’. Following Marcel Sembat’s defence of Cubism, believing that it was not the Chambre’s place to dictate over artistic freedom, B´erard agreed to the principle of non-intervention, though he later attempted to exert his influence on Frantz Jourdain, President of the Salon d’Automne, to eliminate foreign, and especially cubist, painting. Gleizes later recalled that

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a band of crooks [malfaiteurs] who behave in the world of arts in the way that gangsters [apaches] behave in ordinary life.11

It was against these painters – and against them exclusively – that the attacks of the public authorities, provoked by the Parisian press and by pressure from the academies, were aimed. The Conseil Municipal de Paris threatened the Salon des Ind´ependants, where Cubism had begun, with its thunderbolts.14

Gleizes notes that, in defence of Cubism, Marcel Sembat spoke: ‘The Salon d’Automne this year [1912] has had the glory of becoming an object of scandal, and this glory it owes to the Cubist painters!!!’ That was how Sembat’s speech began, and this speech is an important event in modern history. For the first time in a parliament a question concerning the moral order, free of any material interest, a question of concern to the needs of the spirit, was raised. For the first time, the legitimacy and superiority of the appearances of unofficial art were openly proclaimed.15

By placing cubist paintings ‘in a dingy room and a cluttered display’,16 the Salon sought to control any controversy. Despite Francis Picabia’s 21

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election as an associate member to the Salon, the committee limited the visibility of the work. Nevertheless, it was the little side room, rather than grandiose public display, that produced the furore. Gleizes commented that Frantz Jourdain had tried to quell the rising debate by including more traditional portraiture from the Soci´et´e des Artistes Franc¸ais in the adjacent room. However, this gallery effectively became a waiting room for visitors queuing to see cubist canvases. A matter of representation erupted into political argument, public spectacle and media sensation. In response to the attacks upon them, the initially rather diffuse group of painters associated themselves under the initially derisory, and conceptually otiose, term ‘Cubism’. Gleizes’s paintings, however, were already embroiled in controversy. 1911 had been the year Cubism first attained international notoriety, and the public storm of 1912 had continued this first response. In the Salon d’Automne of 1911, Gleizes remembered: The opening-day crowds quickly condenses into this square room and becomes a mob . . . they interrupt one another, protest, lose their tempers, provoke contradictions; unbridled abuse comes up against equally intemperate expressions of admiration; it is a tumult of cries, shouts, bursts of laughter, protests.17

John Golding observes: ‘for the general public, who did not know the achievements of Picasso and Braque, the work of Delaunay, L´eger, Gleizes and Le Fauconnier represented cubism in its most advanced and developed form.’18 Indeed, Cox comments that they were the ‘only Cubists’.19 That the painters occupied room eight in 1911 was partly due to the organised presentation of their canvases. Raymond Duchamp-Villon’s and Roger La Fresnaye’s influence on the hanging committee furthered their position. The exhibition in Room 8 exceeded the sensation of the cubist presence in Room 41 at the Salon des Ind´ependants, as it ‘generated more scandal and ribald mockery’.20 The critic Armand Fourreau complained of the ‘unquenchable thirst for noise and publicity: basically that is the true evil which rages violently at this moment above all amongst young painters’.21 In some ways, the art market had facilitated this ‘outrage’, for these painters were without institutional or dealer security, and their ‘evil’ was in part self-promotion. With the decline in direct state influence, the rise of the private art market, the dealer-critic system and 22

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Salon exhibitions,22 avant-garde painters had courted publicity since the mid-nineteenth-century, and Cubism’s shock was a consequence of those conditions. Gleizes reflected that Cubism’s notoriety perhaps spread even more rapidly as a consequence of the ‘violence’ of its enemies’ preventative efforts: ‘Public opinion throughout the world was occupied with Cubism . . . excited by the new appearances that were being assumed by painting.’23

Vision and Knowledge Cubism’s challenge, and its contribution to modernity’s ‘crisis of the subject’, lay in its radicalisation of visual form. Although its subject matter was often unremarkable, even banal, this only highlighted the profound effects of its form. Like Realism, the ‘everyday’ became the object of attention. Cubist experiments extended to even the most mundane cultural object through its re-presentation. It investigated the embedded, spatial visual codes and conventions upon which systems of Western knowledge were based. To undermine these was to undermine culture itself with the proposal of a new, modern visuality based on time, simultaneity and instability of perception. Cubism’s critique of cherished, stable systems of visual knowledge makes the inflamed outrage of its critics a more understandable response. We might argue that Cubism made an earlier mode of radical thought accessible to an increasingly democratic age. For example, in many ways, its challenge was inherited, indirectly, from John Locke’s work on the relationship between seeing and knowing, the limits of visual language, and the notion that human vision is not ontologically veridical. Indeed, as Baxandall writes, ‘the issue of what a picture represents did not originate in 1906’.24 Baxandall cites Newton’s idea that colour exists as ‘sensations in the mind’ alongside Locke’s thought that visual perception is not inherent or axiomatic, but must be learnt according to rules. For Baxandall, Locke and Newton symbolise a divergence of thought in the seventeenth-century: ‘a series of shifts in thinking about perception in general that directed many people’s minds towards the subject in perception, towards the perceiver’.25 Indeed, William Molyneux’s letter of 1688 to Locke, written after having read an extract of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in some ways initiated the questions Cubism later visually introduced 23

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to a wider culture. Molyneux’s conundrum subsequently preoccupied such thinkers as Berkeley, Leibniz, Voltaire, Diderot, Helmholtz and William James. The question posed was whether a man born blind who learned to recognise a sphere and a cube by touch would be able to recognise them if suddenly given sight.26 Locke’s work concerned empirical ideas on the processes of knowledge.27 Rather than the classical understanding of meaning as something innate, or ‘rational’, as in the work of Ren´e Descartes, here knowledge is produced from sensory experience. Contrary to rationalism’s positing of geometric axioms or innate categories as the fundamental principles of knowledge, Locke proposed an understanding of the mind as a tabula rasa upon which experience forms the subject. He and Molyneux agreed that a person suddenly given sight could not distinguish objects, as the conceptual models needed for cognitive recognition would not have been developed. The chaos of sense impressions therefore could not be decoded into a coherent threedimensional model that constituted visual perception and symbolic language. The newly sighted subject may therefore receive sensation but not the conceptual framework to order, code and understand it; Locke recognised that opticality is not direct conscious knowledge. George Berkeley arrived at Locke and Molyneux’s conclusion at much the same time, arguing that a blind man given sight could not even tell up or down through optical means alone. William Cheselden also acknowledged this idea, as a physiological occurrence, after curing cataracts in a boy of 14: ‘He knew not the shape of anything, nor any one thing from another, however different in shape of magnitude’, having only considered the ‘objects’ as ‘partly-coloured planes, or surfaces diversified with paint; but even then he was no less supriz’d expecting the pictures would feel like the things they represent . . . and asked which was the lying sense, feeling, or seeing?’28 In early modernity, therefore, vision was crucially being aligned to what was actually experienced. Locke argued conceptual knowledge was not axiomatic: it was neither ‘God given’ nor deducible by mathematics and logic. Yet just as continental rationalism’s roots derived from the philosophies of Pythagoras and Plato, so it constructed Western relations between pseudo-axiomatic systems of perception and knowledge within a particular mathematical model of space and time. The work of Pythagoras and Euclid developed through Western culture as ‘classical’ models of geometric, spatial ordering. From Abraham Bosse’s

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Figure 6. Abraham Bosse, from Desargues’s Universal Method, 1643

configuration of the body in space (Fig. 6) in the Renaissance, to Muybridge’s photography, to contemporary computer virtual motion capture, these are all predicated upon a hypothetical model of time and space that derives from the technological realisation of the spatiotemporal linearity of classical space. Challenges to this order continue to remain peripheral to this dominant configuration of visual encoding. As Cubism drew attention to the process of painting, it questioned existing, culturally embedded representational practices of ordering space and time. Whilst a history of Western visual coding is too immense to be considered here, some consideration must be given in order to understand Cubism’s radical proposition. A few examples and a brief look at perspective demonstrate the notion of a picture as an ideologically encoded surface. Jesse Prinz writes:

Pictures play an integral role in the way we communicate, the way we learn, and, more generally, in the way we represent the world. Indeed, most cultures make wide use of pictures, inculcating their young with a preferred mode of pictorial representation.29

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A child must be taught how to think and represent in order to participate within its culture. One acquires the ability to participate in culture by learning and enacting its codes, regardless of their ‘truth’. Likewise, referring to non-Western cultures: ‘Some anthropologists observed that pictorially innocent people cannot interpret pictures at all (prior to some kind of training)’,30 Prinz notes that the Me’en tribe in Ethiopia, when shown two pictures of familiar animals, recognised these representations, ‘but that identifications never came immediately. They usually recognized particular elements of an image (a tail, a foot, horns, etc.) before piecing together the whole.’31 When shown something more complex, such as a hunting scene with pictorial depth, the Me’en, in common with other ‘pictorially innocent’ subjects, could not interpret the image.32 Western representation is not an inherent truth, but a regime of pictorial codes. Indeed, it has no axiomatic status, for indeed, to refer to the Kantian notion, no representation can ever adequately portray the totality of the existence of the ‘thingin-itself ’. It can only be spoken through language as a phenomenon.33 Prinz tells the story of another tribe: when presented with a picture of a horse, they could not understand what it represented. However, they made the link when the referent, a real horse, was brought to them. Sense was made through a cognitive relation between the horse and the representation, by decoding the image. This was also the beginning of the tribe’s inculcation into the Western pictorial tradition. Even recently, perspectival pictures of birds – therefore not simultaneously displaying all their limbs – disturbed Australian aborigines, who interpreted them as mutilated.34 Anthropology suggests that culture configures knowledge and inscribes representation – it is neither inherent nor intuitive. In Art and Illusion Ernst Gombrich explored the production of visual codes by initially referring to the West’s inability to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs. He suggested that the Egyptians actually ‘shunned’ the use of three-dimensional representation ‘because recession and foreshortening would have introduced a subjective element’.35 Likewise, Erwin Panofsky in Perspective as Symbolic Form claimed the ‘ancients’: ‘more or less completely rejected perspective, for it seemed to introduce an individualistic and accidental factor into an extra- or supersubjective world’.36 Perspective inherently configures space for a privileged subjectivity by providing a point from which the world is issued. The Egyptians produced ‘pictograms’ for differently privileged subjects,

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which proved intractable to Western modes of interpretation. For example, the dead are represented among the living without apparent difference. Such content belongs to a drastically different belief in existence and knowledge, and therefore representation. Also, what we know of Egyptian ideas about time suggests they greatly differed from Western models with teleological principles. Instead, time eternally recurs. Egyptian coding is too conceptually different for a Western subject, whose codes have been constructed around linear space and time, to understand. The Egyptian picture becomes a ‘cryptogram’ – an object of knowledge for decipherment. Gombrich repeats the term ‘cryptogram’ throughout, concluding: ‘The coding process of which Sir Winston Churchill speaks begins while en route between the retina and our conscious mind.’37 Whilst Gombrich’s explanation is simplified (for example, cognitive ‘pre-conception’ and early and late levels of object recognition in cognitive process occur), the idea persists of representation as crypto-gram – or the encoded drawing of the hidden (kryptos-gramma). A significant part of a subject’s cognitive processing is culturally produced, and Gombrich concludes, ‘primitive tribes that have never seen such images are not necessarily able to read them’.38 In a typically post-Kantian statement he writes: ‘There is no neutral naturalism. The artist, no less than the writer, needs a vocabulary before he can embark on a “copy” of reality.’39 The West understands the representations of other cultures as cryptograms whilst reciprocally the Me’en tribe, for example, attempt to decode the West’s kryptos through its gramma. According to Gombrich, Western art has derived from ‘Greek art of the classical period concentrated in the image of man almost to the exclusion of other motifs’.40 Anthropocentric content occurred as the Greeks ‘developed the cryptograms for the rounded form as distinct from the silhouette, that is, the three-tone code for “modelling” in light and shade which remained basic to all later developments in Western art’.41 Together with mathematics – and specifically geometry as a technology of configuring bodies in space – Greek philosophies constitute a set of visual codes that are intrinsic to the Western episteme. With specific reference to the Renaissance, Martin Kemp surveys this trajectory of mathematical integration of vision and knowledge within representation. Inherited from parts of Greek writings, linear perspective ‘was invented in the form we know it, during the early part of the fifteenth-century in Florence’.42 Kemp is referring to the

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Renaissance engagement with, and popularisation of, fragments of Greek and Latin works, particularly those concerned with geometry. Renaissance theorists were ‘engaged in the search for the “true” Euclid, in order to understand and amplify his exact science’.43 Subsequently, a system of drawing developed by the Florentine elite from ancient Greek fragments permeated Western culture. For some Renaissance intellectuals, representation was less concerned with pure mathematics than it was a means to develop their own Platonic ideologies and to discover the essence of elements, pure forms and solids. For others, linear perspective served as a convenient language to promote religious beliefs. Kemp proposes that ‘[f]or almost four hundred years from 1500 it [perspective] served as the standard technique for any painter who wished to create a systematic illusion of receding forms behind the flat surface of a panel, canvas, wall or ceiling’.44 Perspective as a ‘standard technique’ has now endured for more than 500 years, and survived its limitation to plastic representation. The dissemination of perspectival vision-machines continues to reproduce its tradition with every photograph. For Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard, the camera is an industrialised, even cybernetic, embodiment of perspective within culture, but crucially it cannot reconstitute the experiential continuity of the body. This production of vision can be linked with his notion of disembodied intelligence, producing a genderless, inhuman episteme that fractures the inseparability of body and thought: ‘a poor binarized ghost of what it was beforehand.’45 The perspectival configuration of time and space is simultaneously pictorial and conceptual, and the camera is perhaps today the most ubiquitous, accessible and ‘democratic’ of mediums. As an ‘invented’ system, mathematical geometry informs the Western construction and organisation of knowledge. Yet despite the striving for a ‘mirror of nature’, as Kant writes, ‘our representation of things, as they are given, does not conform to these things as they are in themselves, but . . . these objects as appearance conform to our mode of representation’.46

Cultural Encoding The establishment of geometry, as a form of representation, therefore configures the code upon which a subject has an imagined relation 28

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to an exterior time-space. In the Origin of Geometry, Husserl examined how geometry, symbolic of ‘all disciplines that deal with shapes existing mathematically in pure space-time’,47 came to constitute culture. He understood it as hypothetical concept, an invention embedded to order knowledge, although contrary to conscious ‘psychic existence’.48 (Although cognitive existence at a cultural level of visual decoding in turn supplements the notion of what a ‘psychic’ existence is, though Husserl’s point remains, geometry is not innate.) Its success, as Husserl sees it, lies in its condition as a ‘supertemporal’49 language; it remains outside of time whilst ordering it. For example, the linearity of time and space is both concept (episteme) and system (ontology). This condition allows it to become an ‘“ideal” objectivity’.50 Husserl’s enquiry takes a Kantian approach. Kant had himself been influenced by English empiricism in Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786). In the former, Kant concluded that human knowledge could only know phenomena of its own sensations; it cannot know ‘things’, noumena, outside of language’s internal rhetoric. What is understandable – something that Foucault argues is reflective of the post-Renaissance classical era – are empirical conclusions. An a priori condition may be concluded from a posteriori research. In Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, Kant argued that a priori concepts can relate to empirical information, but that human conceptual understanding transforms the noumenon, in a process characterised by concepts of force and energy, of ‘ether’. Anticipating Husserl, Kant believed the argument for the axiomatic position afforded to mathematics to be problematic, insofar as mathematics, whilst an incredibly useful system, fundamentally distorts the noumena. He complained that mathematics ‘only bases its cognition on the construction of conceptions, by means of the presentation of the object in an a` priori [sic] intuition’.51 Whilst philosophy and metaphysics are concerned with epistemic frameworks on which to base reason, mathematics is constructed upon prior metaphysical assumptions. (This is why Husserl questioned its axiomatic status.) It functions according to its internal rhetoric: it is a construction within a construction. Science, for Kant – as with geometry for Husserl – was premised upon an abstracted, metaphysical assumption. Consequently, ‘there may be as many natural sciences as there are specifically different things (for each must contain the inner principle special to the determinations pertaining to its existence)’.52 As no singular truth of reality exists, partial

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truths may build a body of knowledge. Nietzsche later used this idea in his philosophy of perspectivism, commenting: ‘There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective “knowing”; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more complete will be our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity”.’53 By accommodating an infinite number of approaches, the thing-in-itself can be more fully considered. Again, Kant anticipated later thinkers such as Bergson, William James and Husserl: mathematics is inapplicable to the phenomena of the internal sense and its laws, unless we consider merely the law of permanence in the flow of its internal changes; but this would be an extension of cognition, bearing much the same relation to that procured by mathematics of corporal knowledge, as the doctrine of the properties of the straight line does do the whole of geometry; for the pure internal intuition in which psychical phenomena are constructed is time . . . the observation itself, alters and distorts the state of the object observed. It can never therefore be anything more than an historical . . . internal sense.54

For Kant, mathematics is profoundly limited in articulating change. Instead it distorts ephemeral and unstable phenomena into objects of permanence. He proposed that the metaphysical foundation for natural science should instead be based upon ‘Phoronomy’ (motion and kinetics), Dynamics (the ‘quality’ of matter as force), Mechanics (the relation between motion) and Phenomenology (the phenomena of the senses). The investigation of these fields would constitute a foundation of science, harmonising the relationship of energy with subjective phenomena. This was a radical departure from existing regimes of knowledge and mathematical expression. Writing after modernity’s challenge to classical systems of thought and (perspectival) representation, Husserl’s philosophical problem therefore was how geometry became an ‘ideal object’ when it was ‘anything but a real psychic object’.55 Its first appearance could not have been objective existence, yet it came to attain that position in culture. Firstly, its possibility as a language provides self-evidence. Secondly, as language, it can be accessed through time and space (such as the example of Renaissance perspective drawn from Greek texts). Thus, Husserl writes, ‘what perhaps emerges with greater and greater clarity there belongs the possible activity of a recollection in 30

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which the past experiencing [Erleben] is lived through in a quasi-new and quasi-active way’.56 As a ‘supertemporal’ language, its framework reconfigures the past and structures the future through linear, and teleological, claims on time in a way that ‘can be actively understood by others’.57 Consequently, it becomes ‘self-evident’,58 disseminated throughout culture as ‘identically repeatable’.59 On this condition Husserl argues that ‘there is a passive taking-over of ontic validity’60 as geometry becomes axiomatic and separated from the contextual meaning of its historical invention. Husserl observed how, within modernity, geometry was a ‘ready-made concept’ within textbooks.61 Human knowledge therefore consisted of applying an internal structure of the language rather than perceiving the necessity and use of the structure in ‘overlook[ing] the genuine problem, the internal-historical problem, the epistemological problem’.62 Therefore the reduction of representation to linear perspective, what Panofsky termed as ‘a rational and repeatable procedure’,63 conforms precisely to Husserl’s model. Perspective is a communicable, ‘supra-temporal’ language, though one that fails to express its own historical and epistemological problems. For example, Damisch’s study of Piero della Francesca reveals his system ‘holds for countless perspectival sketches and studies: each is reducible to a principle of construction that can vary within certain parameters but that nonetheless conforms to a single design principle’.64 Perspective, as a mechanism of projection conceived over five hundred years prior to Husserl, continued to dominate cultural representation within modernity. After its Florentine reconstruction from Ancient Greek fragments, perspective achieved axiomatic status throughout Europe, its ‘transparency’ embedded in painting’s appeal to naturalism and veracity. We may usefully link Husserl’s concern here with Foucault’s later attention to the supposed transparency of the signifier’s relation with the signified in Renaissance art. Foucault elucidated some of Husserl’s problems, referring to language in the Husserlian sense as having ‘laws of a certain code of knowledge’,65 observing that order ‘is given in things as their inner law, the hidden network that determines the way they confront one another, and also that which has no existence except in the grid created by a glance, an examination, a language’.66 Whilst Husserl warned of perpetuating a certain regime of time and space, Foucault realised these are ‘the fundamental codes of a culture’67 governing subjectivity and experience, through the ‘already “encoded” eye’.68

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In The Order of Things (1966), Foucault discussed the cultural development of language since the sixteenth-century in terms of historical modes of existence. To put Foucault’s thesis simply, three epistemic shifts in Western history arose from the transformation of the relation between language and experience. The Renaissance was characterised by a transparent relation between the signifier and signified, whilst the Classical period (from the mid seventeenth-century) observed the conceptual difference between them. Lastly, the Modern, beginning in the 1800s, critiqued the relation of the signifier to the signified and consequent claims of knowledge through the relationship between form and content. During the Renaissance, the transparency of the sign in perspective was understood as the faithful reconciliation of the human with a divine ordering. According to Foucault the signifier and signified were united here through ‘resemblance’, before God’s dethronement in increasingly secular Classical and Modern periods. Foucault argued that Renaissance models of knowledge understood the universe as ‘folded in on itself ’.69 He states that ‘[p]ainting imitated space. And representation – whether in the service of pleasure or of knowledge – was posited as a form of repetition: the theatre of life or the mirror of nature, that was the claim made by all language.’70 Representation conceived as a ‘mirror of nature’ is particularly important here, as geometry became a ‘Divine’ architecture for structuring the world through perspective. Indeed, the term ‘mirror of nature’ is conflated with the commonly recognised ‘inventor’ of perspective, Filippo Brunelleschi. His experiments exemplify Foucault’s notion of language and the world as ‘a uniform and unbroken entity in which things could be reflected one by one, as in a mirror, and so express their particular truths . . . language is not an arbitrary system; it has been set down in the world and forms a part of it’.71 Brunelleschi’s tavoletta, a proto-photographic device, was described by Antonio Manetti as ‘seeing truth itself ’.72 For Damisch, Brunelleschi’s demonstration ‘implies a process of duplication, of repetition, of doubling whose agent is the mirror’.73 Damisch draws upon the same notions as Foucault and Husserl (synthesising the positions articulated in the former’s use of ‘similitude’ and the latter’s ‘ideality’) in his own statement regarding perspective: ‘The first experiment already appealed to a properly geometric idea of similitude, itself based upon a work of idealization.’74 Accordingly, Alberti’s On Painting (1435) – one of the fundamental texts of Western visual culture – ‘is an

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Figure 7. Leon Battista Alberti, from On Painting, 1435

entirely mathematical book’,75 part of a mode of idealising ‘pure limitshapes’,76 that sought to codify reality. The ‘truth’ of representation is simultaneously geometric and idealised, a divine ‘mirror of nature’. Geometry accounts for the apparently transparent relationship between the observer and the painting. The subject is positioned at a specific point within a perspective ‘governed by a system of rectangular Cartesian coordinates distributed across three axes’.77 The surface and subject are calculated within a ‘visual pyramid’ emanating from the static eye (Fig. 7). Here, one’s point of view is precisely constructed at the geometric intersection of subject and canvas. The vanishing point corresponds to ‘the centric ray’, emanating from the eye to ‘“pierce” the real object’.78 Within painting, the position of the spectator, reduced to a disembodied optic, is assigned a precise site. As we shall see, such a conception of the eye is anathematic to the modernism of both Gleizes and Delaunay, albeit in very different ways. Nevertheless, the eye conceiving of space defined by Euclidean laws consisting of planes, intersections and triangles is perpetuated throughout Western classical discourse. This is the classical cultural production of the relation between body, time and space. The production of coded representation and the disembodied subject is a prior condition of Renaissance epistemology that is necessary for ‘similitude’. Yet this ‘reality’ is premised upon inhibited vision, manipulated into a single, static viewpoint for which the illusion of reality is created. Damisch’s notion of the perspectival ‘mirror stage’ occurs as the subject is forced into a viewing position whereby the reflection is the mirror of reality, like Foucault’s notion of the transparent 33

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resemblance between signs. For Brunelleschi’s tavoletta, I suggest this depends on a prior vacuity, the hole, into which the subject is inserted to complete the punctured surface through its intercalation within the viewing position. The subject is aware that it completes the apparatus of vision through its participation. However, the transparency of the ‘mirror’ of reality provides a point that betrays its illusion as the subject observes itself in the process of looking. Therefore whilst Manetti exclaimed he was looking at ‘truth itself ’, the illusion contains an implicit critique of itself through its puncture: this is the simultaneous invisibility and intercalation of the subject, its conscious act of looking, and the force by which the system demands subjection to its perceptual regime. Indeed, whilst perspective is normally seen as privileging the epistemic superiority of the viewer, on the contrary, it envelops the subject in the established process of viewing. The viewer is subject to the physical positioning and illusory configuration, its intercalation in the vision-machine means it is ‘elided as subject of the geometral plane’.79 (This is in contrast to Cubism’s later incorporation of both subjective presence and viewing process.) This example is consistent with Foucault’s belief that ‘man’ as a subject did not exist before the eighteenth-century, as no place is assigned the subject other than an immobile viewing position. As we shall consider, the human subject in the nineteenth-century – as a new site of knowledge – began to overturn this optical stasis. Given that the mobility of vision is crucial to Cubism, this certainly suggests a radical shift away from the (im)mobility of the eye required by the Renaissance’s encoding of the static visual field and order of knowledge. The incorporation of the immobile eye within the perspectival vision-machine is crucial to Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Betrothal (1434). Like Brunelleschi’s tavoletta, there is a mirror at the vanishing point, but it reflects not the observer as captive spectator, but two men, one of whom may well be the artist. As with Brunelleschi’s invention, the painting elides the subject by enforcing their shared position with the artist, who is not in the process of painting, but witness in the focal point of the mirror. Whilst Damisch suggests that the viewer must take up a voyeuristic position because no view accommodates them, the viewer is nevertheless able to assume someone else’s point of view. Western pictorial construction has depended on the fantasy of vision from the site of another, a conflation of viewer and author. And, as Brunelleschi’s experiment inadvertently demonstrates, in its revelation

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of the point from which the subject is looking, the subject may indeed find itself as ‘other’ in the process of observing, but also as the creator of meaning. Whilst not necessarily satisfying Foucault’s model of uncritical observation in the Renaissance, it remains true that initially the tavoletta was constructed as a literal rendering of pictorial surface as ‘mirror of nature’, whereby one was supposed unable to tell whether one was observing the real thing or its simulacrum. It obeys Husserl’s model of procedural reification as both self-evident and repeatable. The subject of painting is simultaneously the object of knowledge, in which culture is mathematically configured, and therefore, to quote Damisch, anticipates a ‘positivist’ philosophical position ‘prepared to ignore the role of the subject in instituting a truth’.80 The world can be constructed, measured and observed through an objective procedure independent of the human subject.81 Perspective is therefore not ‘natural’ but a cultural construct with its own history. Its form may have evolved mathematically, but it also belongs to specific sets of cultural beliefs at particular historical moments. Neither its ‘invention’ nor its subsequent popularity and dissemination occurred in isolation. As Damisch claims, people ‘learn to see an image in perspective, instead of seeing’.82 Perspective was disseminated under the auspices of religious institutions, exporting an ideology premised on divinity to other cultures. Linear perspective became the visual realisation of the divinity of mathematics, its ‘perfection’ as a language mirroring the ‘perfection’ of God. This reflection corresponds with Foucault’s idea of representation as the literal reproduction, or resemblance, of ‘the invisible form of that which, from the depths of the world, made things visible’.83 For Kemp, such representation proposed ‘all figures in the whole universe can be drawn together’.84 Masaccio’s Trinity (c.1425–6) obeys the emergent spatial architecture of Brunelleschi’s model in its representation of the divine. The connection between the two subsequently became convention. Throughout the Italian Renaissance, perspectival composition for religious institution was concerned with centrality and the convergence of lines to a single point, namely the point of truth: God. The mathematical harmony of space and time was equated with a universal theological order, embedding spatial geometry within religious belief whilst eliding subjectivity and time. (Even an empiricist like Berkeley argued the ‘other’ was created by God and was therefore a stable principle from which to derive knowledge.) Late-Medieval and Renaissance Italy found in perspective a mirror

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for the laws of a divine universe and a truth of space. As such, there is a direct relation between God, the cosmos and human language. Foucault termed this ‘a non-distinction between what is seen and what is read, between observation and relation, which results in the constitution of a single, unbroken surface in which observation and language intersect to infinity’.85 Despite today’s desanctification of perspective in the proliferation of optical technology, the ideology of its inception remains as omnipotent, universal and objective. Yet the model of space emerged from a set of cultural conditions that formed the basis of Western visuality. As Kemp notes, the phenomenon which was to become ‘classical space’ was not inevitable, but possible because of the context of Florentine culture, in particular the practical use of mathematics in a mercantile society, with revived fragments of Greek and Roman science, and an impulse for rational, humanist laws. Therefore, ‘Brunelleschi’s measured representation . . . was deeply locked into the system of political, religious and intellectual values’.86 Linear perspective became popular because of receptive conditions at a specific historical moment rather than any inherent axiomatic properties. Political, religious and intellectual values were therefore crucial to perspective’s emergence and dominance. The attribution of perspective to Brunelleschi even originates, perhaps, in a desire by writers such as Vasari to construct its history. (For example, Giotto had conceived of three-dimensional space and form in the fourteenth-century, whilst Gombrich and Kemp both point to its conceptual origins in Ancient Greece’s ‘mirror’ or ‘imitiation’ of nature.)87 Damisch writes: ‘Such was the prototype of perspective to which is attached, like a brand name, like a certification of pedigree, the name of Brunelleschi.’88 Perspective was not invented so much as produced from cultural conditions that allowed for the development of certain pre-existing procedures. Brunelleschi’s work can nonetheless be understood by his production as a cultural subject. Employed as a sculptor, his preoccupation with mathematics converged into architecture, neatly synthesising the three-dimensional concerns of the three disciplines. Whilst Brunelleschi is credited for experiments on perspective, it was Alberti who fixed such an imagination of space within a documented treatise. Indeed, Kemp notes it is significant that the first written explanation of perspective comes not from a practising artist, who may have conceived of it as an artistic tool, but from a polymath, influenced by

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logic and classical architecture, who ‘unquestionably saw the geometric construction of space as a prerequisite for proper painting’.89 But just as Alberti formalised Brunelleschi’s experiments, so others built upon Alberti’s work as perspectival technique soon became widely practised. Kemp remarks that no artistic technique had ever been so successful, and that by 1650 every major country naturalised this system within its own culture.90 For example, Albrecht D¨urer, having access to Piero’s and Leonardo’s works, and having within his notebooks a translation of Euclid’s Elements, incorporated the research and beliefs of the perspectivists into his own work. Those mathematical principles extended to conceptualising the body within space. Eventually published in 1528, D¨urer’s Four Books on Human Proportion configured a geometrically rigid bodily architectonic (Fig. 8). His work, derived from extracts of Greek texts filtering through Renaissance Florence into Central Europe, marks Nuremberg’s establishment as a centre for the European Renaissance with a flourishing artistic culture specialising in the production of perspectivally derived objects within geometric space. As geometric perspective was disseminated throughout Europe, so it became secularised, alongside culture. The divine status afforded to it and the human body declined and scientific interest increased. The story of Galileo in the seventeenth-century marks a traumatic collision between religion and science in their respective imaginations of the purpose in representing ‘bodies’ accurately. Mathematics no longer complemented theology as Galileo undermined geocentric religious ideas through the ‘divine’ language of mathematics. We see here an early rupture between two epistemic modes – new scientific reason and established religious dogma. The French adoption of linear perspective also demonstrated a shift from ‘cosmological’ concerns to a more ‘modern’ representation of spatial architecture. Architects dominated perspectival research in France, and consequently linear perspective was conceived perhaps less theologically but more practically through architectonic demonstrations and examples. Perspective, freed from theology, entered into ‘the golden age of the perspective treatise’ after 1630.91 Panofsky writes that ‘these very forms . . . belong to the moment when space as the image of a worldview is finally purified of all subjective admixtures . . . replacing for the first time the simple Euclidean “visual cone” with the universal “geometrical beam”.’92 Mathematics and physics, with the scientific revolution of the seventeenth-century, moved perspective into the more ‘practical’

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Figure 8. Albrecht D¨urer, from Four Books on Human Proportion, 1528

domains of science, engineering and architecture, and into cultural consciousness. The notion that perspective constructed vision rather than was constructed by vision parallels Foucault’s argument that the Classical period breaks with the theological ‘mirror of nature’. Indeed, Locke and Molyneux would demonstrate this rupture through their probing of the axiomatic status of objective vision at the end of the seventeenth-century.

The ‘Crisis of the Subject’ Foucault identified the establishment of ‘man’ as an object for knowledge once subjectivity became the internal principle of first epistemic, 38

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and then governmental, organisation.93 Representation shifted from the objectively known to the subjective (as demonstrated in J.M.W. Turner’s treatment of perspective, for example). The epistemic emphasis shifted from the overcoding of human experience by mathematical abstraction to process, the production of knowledge by the body that demanded interpretation and regulation. The Classical episteme ‘presupposes a general ordering of nature [ . . . through] entire systems of grids which analyse the sequence of representations . . . and redistributing it in a permanent table’;94 this, for Foucault, was because ‘man’ as a concept did not exist until the end of the eighteenth-century.95 If the Renaissance encoded similitude, the Classical era, faced with the denigration of such an approach, constructed an encyclopaedic archive to categorise and classify knowledge. This included inserting the body within a panoptic regime, just as other cultural bodies were displayed within ‘curious’ cabinets. The modern era broke from these regimes as preoccupation with the relation of the human body to knowledge ruptured prior forms of knowledge. As Foucault observed, with modernity’s constitution of man: knowledge has anatomo-physiological conditions, that it is formed gradually within the structures of the body . . . there is a nature of human knowledge that determines its forms and that can at the same time be made manifest to it in its own empirical contents.96

This epistemic shift is critical to understanding the profound challenges that nineteenth-century works presented to visual representation. Impressionist canvases therefore ‘played on a tension between an openly dabbed-on plane surface and a rendering of sense-impressions of seen objects’.97 The importance of the dynamic between process and surface is profoundly important in anticipating Cubism’s ‘challenge’ to figurative representation. An avant-garde emerged – however marginalised in comparison to the culturally embedded classical perceptual model and its mechanical reproduction in modern technologies such as photography and film – whose inspiration derived from exploring the world through subjective phenomena as the new principle of reality, and therefore, representation. The establishment of the human sciences developed a new figure to accompany their transformed episteme: a subject of embodied perception as the producer of knowledge 39

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and meaning. Following Foucault’s identification of two types of knowledge yielded from the body, Crary writes: By the 1840s there had been both (1) the gradual transferral of the holistic study of subjective experience or mental life to an empirical and quantitative plane, and (2) the division and fragmentation of the physical subject into increasingly specific organic and mechanical systems.98

Yet despite the socio-political implications of new modes of bodily knowledge producing greater technologies of control and regulation of human subjects, the process of reimagining the human being was of profound importance scientifically, philosophically and artistically, in undermining the ‘axiomatic’ laws pertaining to an ‘external’ reality. However, as I will argue, modern ways of thinking about the subject, through its embodiment, contained forms of biopolitical control. Not only was the subject transformed into the new object of knowledge, but also the new object of power through new disciplinary techniques upon the subject through its body. (It is from this context that the ‘cubist grid’ would contain the possibility of emancipating, and controlling, the subject.) Crary suggests that the Modern era ‘collapsed’ the Cartesian optic and the camera obscura as the model for conceptualising visual experience (Fig. 9): ‘For over two hundred years it subsisted as a philosophical metaphor, a model in the science of physical optics.’ ‘Collapse’ is perhaps misleading, as the disembodied, geometric optic still dominates Western culture through the mass dissemination and accessibility of lens-based media. Nevertheless, in the Classical era, a critique of Cartesian optics was established, proposed by Locke, Molyneux and Berkeley, and in the 1820s and 1830s new models of the observing subject became increasingly clear. Rather than ‘collapse’, we might suggest an epistemological ‘divergence’ for these alternatives, yet it is within the nineteenth-century that Crary locates the demise of the existing configuration of the static optic, fundamentally incompatible with a regime of knowledge consisting of dynamism and flux. Both Crary and Baxandall refer to Jean-Simeon Chardin’s paintings as typifying this shift. For Crary, Chardin’s works are ‘a last great presentation of the classical object in all its plenitude’. However, the difference in the thought of each is evident when Baxandall argues that Chardin’s A Lady Taking Tea (1735) distorts perspective to create an 40

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NEW VISIONS OF THE HUMAN Figure 9. ‘Comparison of eye and camera obscura. Early eighteenthcentury’101

uncomfortable viewing position, suggesting theteapot is ahead of its time, as ‘rather 1910’.102 It appears overly flattened, whilst the lighting and colour scheme seem deliberately unreal. This, Baxandall suggests, implies Lockean ideas, received especially through Diderot, who wrote on both Chardin and Locke’s Letter of the Blind (1749). Baxandall also argues that proto-scientific investigations inform Chardin’s painting, and concludes that these ‘Lockean’ paintings ‘represent, in the guise 41

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of sensation, perception or complex ideas of substance, not substance itself ’.103 Even though his argument is somewhat attenuated, Baxandall nevertheless draws attention to the critical importance of a development in visual science regarding knowledge concerning the human subject.104 This research undermined the notion of the disembodied, geometric optic as a universal model of comprehensive vision. After the eighteenth-century, research became increasingly sophisticated as the shift of location in the production of reality to ‘man’ as the transformed object of knowledge signified new epistemological discourses. Clark and Jacyna observe that the first half of the nineteenthcentury saw a ‘revolution’ in neuroscientific concepts that overturned ideas of Classical Antiquity105 These neuroscientific foundations were dependent upon technological, but also conceptual developments, particularly relating to the emergence of romantic philosophies, especially in Germany, that influenced biology through ideas that universal laws connected organic nature and the human, in contrast to Cartesian discourses on the ‘mechanical’ body. Clark and Jacyna argue that protoneuroscientific research was influenced by Kantian philosophy and a Romantic emphasis on subjectivism, inspiring a proto-neuroscience through an ‘intimate association with the phenomena of the mind’.106 The Naturphilosophen of neurophysiology, according to Blustein, occupied ‘a pivotal position at the intersection of philosophy, biology, psychology, and medicine.’107 This epistemic shift nevertheless created cultural discord as the Acad´emie des Sciences defended the traditional view that the spinal cord grew from the brain, whilst Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Christoph Spurzheim showed, as it is now believed, the brain instead develops from the spinal cord. The emergence of visual physiology was concurrent with investigations into the ontology of light. Renaissance accounts of vision upon direct ‘rays’ still ranged from Alberti to Newton, ‘demonstrated’ by the camera obscura, emitted by the observer or entered the observer’s optic. However, the ‘science’ of ‘reality’ rapidly undermined existing beliefs about the world. The idea of the electromagnetic spectrum developed after Augustin Jean Fresnel’s demonstrations in 1821 of transverse light vibration and refraction. His theories were soon incorporated within James Clerk Maxwell’s work in electric and magnetic fields that demonstrated that light was constituted by waves, not linear rays.108 Reality was no longer geometric and mechanical, but understood as continuous and fluid, as physics and physiology

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bifurcated the once unified model of vision into diverging fields of the human sciences. Not only was light itself mobile but so was sensation. For example, Johannes M¨uller contributed to a specifically modern episteme by chemically and electrically manipulating bodily sensations, proving perceptual experience was not purely created from a stable external ‘reality’. Crary suggests that M¨uller’s research was as important for the nineteenth-century as Molyneux’s was in the eighteenth, especially as it inspired Helmholtz’s Optics. Indeed, these advances anticipate Ernst Mach’s characteristically modern ideas regarding knowledge as sensation that occurs exclusively within the human subject: In mentally separating a body from the changeable environment in which it moves, what we really do is to extricate a group of sensations on which our thoughts are fastened and which is of relatively greater stability than the others, from the stream of all our sensations . . . it would be much better to say that bodies or things are compendious mental symbols for groups of sensations – symbols that do not exist outside thought.109

Similarly, Henri Poincar´e wrote that ‘our perception of space is the product of an internal coordination of our various sensory faculties into a spatial gestalt we mistakenly identify as external to us’.110 In relocating meaning within embodied sensation, a fundamental transformation occurred concerning notions of truth and knowledge. In many ways, scientific knowledge about human relation to the world exemplified Kant’s established philosophical position: the ‘thing-initself ’ cannot be known, only known through representation. Human knowledge is restricted by perceptual limitations and the internal conceptual principles of knowledge regarding the object of enquiry. The demolition of an anthropocentric universal view occurs with the ‘crisis of man’ as humanity realised its limitations: modernity’s epistemic rupture profoundly severed any direct relation to the noumenon, the ‘thing-in-itself ’. Paul C´ezanne’s canvases unfolded from a historical moment when, from very different fields, Ruskin and Helmholtz converged in their understanding that perception was based upon a perpetually changing chaos of coloured sensation. The former referred to vision as an ‘arrangement of patches of different colours variously shaded’,111 whilst the latter commented that ‘[e]verything our eye sees it sees as an aggregate of coloured surfaces in the visual field’.112 William 43

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James continued the empiricist approach to vision and knowledge, inaugurated by Locke and Molyneux, hypothesising that a newborn baby’s environment appears without structure, as ‘a blooming, buzzing construction’.113 Karmel also shows how Hippolyte Taine’s empirical philosophy on psychophysics and linguistics within France is of contextual importance to understanding Cubism.114 Therefore, cross-disciplinary and trans-European research understood perception as not merely the transparent translation of ‘reality’, but a complex, mediated and encoded process. Vision was a psychophysical process, reconfiguring environmental energy into optical, cognitive information. Even at early level cognitive entry, energy is believed to turn into ‘part objects’ that are later coded into coherent objects with edges, relations, patterns and colour.115 Human perception, and therefore knowledge, is now understood as premised upon a process of alienation and difference between forms within the environment’s energistic continuum. Whilst the environment consists of dynamic, interpenetrating energy, psychophysical perception misrecognises the fundamentally interconnected condition of the world.

Cubist Perceptions C´ezanne helped rearrange pictorial order according to sensation and energy as the principle of representation. He configured the environment according to the experience of embodied phenomena, as argued by Ruskin, Helmholtz and James. The intercalation of the Western subject into geometric perspective and objective figuration was challenged as C´ezanne expressed matter as energy and flow, rather than through form, deforming objects into intensities of coloured brush-strokes in a profound meditation on the limits of perception. For example, a rock, or even a mountain, is commonly a metaphor of stability and constancy within Western spatio-temporal models of vision. However, it is still energy, vibrations in continuous transition through constant atomic migration. This is the condition of C´ezanne’s Mont Sainte Victoire (Fig. 10). The rock’s inertia is constructed by spatial thinking; human perception does not perceive the rock’s fluxive state because of its own internal construction. A perceptual regime with greater emphasis on temporality could even think the rock fluid. Humans, on the other hand, organise visual information into 44

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Figure 10. Paul C´ezanne, Mount Sainte-Victoire, 1902–4

a specifically contrived set of object coordinates that constitute its relation to space. Vision is psychophysical, even though the ‘truth’ of reality has been conflated with the veridicality of seeing. C´ezanne explained to Joachim Gasquet, using his interlocking fingers: That’s what you have to do. If I move too high or too low, it’s all wrong. Not one part must be out of true; there must be no chink through which arousal, light, truth can penetrate. I work the whole picture uniformly, you see, as a whole. I bring everything that tends to move apart into one rhythm and one conviction.116

Everything exists here as relativised relations, never fragmented into a linear schema; C´ezanne’s elaboration of colour created the impression of a writhing mass of interpenetrating intensities. In the later paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire, he used a technique labelled passage, whereby hitherto rigid objects within perspectival planes interpenetrate, moving beyond their supposed boundaries as they merge into each other. Cubist painters adopted the technique to appeal to a modern conception 45

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of human visuality rather than use Albertian perspective, with all that it implied for the coding of space and time. Gleizes later wrote with Metzinger: From [C´ezanne] we have learned that to alter the coloration of a body is to corrupt its structure. He prophesies that the study of primordial volume will open unknown horizons to us. His work, a homogenous mass, shifts under the glance, contracts, expands, fades or illuminates itself.117

Baxandall comments that whilst C´ezanne influenced many younger painters, they all drew upon different aspects of the work.118 His paintings helped open perceptual representation as an investigation into the derivation and production of knowledge. Thus Cubism’s challenge to the embedded status of classical vision, and its encoding of the body, was also an attack on the observer since it undermined culturally inculcated visual process of organisation and knowledge. Indeed, Gleizes believed the anger directed towards his work was a consequence of refiguring the sitter – the ‘anecdotal subject’ – as a set of interlocking planes. Whilst this challenge had begun in the nineteenthcentury, cubism crucially provided a quasi-coherent force through its radicalising of pictorial form through everyday objects. The modernists of ‘1910’ do not institute a sudden rupture; they are, rather, part of a historical unfolding. Nor is the significance of modern thought evenly disseminated (we do not live in a non-Euclidean culture, even if nonEuclidean mathematics has long been established). Cubism was radical because its conceptualisation of an epistemological rupture was made in a visually and publically accessible form. Gleizes exhibited La Femme aux Phlox (Fig. 11) at the Salon des Ind´ependants in 1911. Daniel Robbins suggests it was the Salon, rather than the more hermetic Cubism of Picasso and Braque, that effectively launched ‘Cubism’ as a public and international movement, making the five artists famous overnight.119 Robbins supports Gleizes’s claim that the Salon’s impact reverberated throughout Europe, and quotes his remark: Painting which until then had been touched only by a small number of amateurs, passed into the public domain, and each and everyone wanted to be informed, let into the secret of these paintings which represented – it

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Figure 11. Albert Gleizes, La Femme aux Phlox, 1911

seemed – nothing at all. It was necessary to press, as in a rebus, what they signified.120

The Salon was divided between the established Neo-Impressionists who occupied a central position, whilst Gleizes, Le Fauconnier, L´eger, Robert Delaunay, Metzinger and Marie Laurencin were marginalised in Room 41. The success and scandal provoked by the Cubists was in part due to their self-promotion, fuelled by a belief in their social importance and cultural significance. Closely aligned to literary figures such as Apollinaire, Andr´e Salmon and Roger Allard, the painters believed – after the Salon d’Automne of October 1910 – that they needed to be shown as a group. It was here they first recognised a convergence in styles. Gleizes had already been acquainted with Metzinger and Delaunay, but had apparently not realised the importance of their works for his, despite their having been hung nearby. The painters formed a small group, joined by Apollinaire, at the Closerie des Lilas. At these meetings they decided their individual work needed to be promoted collectively to enhance the impact of their work. 47

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By hijacking the Salon’s AGM weeks before the opening, the painters replaced unsympathetic Salon members with more openminded, progressive figures. (Metzinger’s application was so successful that it ironically received 500 votes out of a possible 350.) Le Fauconnier was chosen as President and he, Gleizes, L´eger, Delaunay and Metzinger chose ‘Salle 41’ to show their work. On opening day, perhaps because of the painters’ increased profile, the crowds around Room 41 made entry difficult. Golding writes that ‘a violent storm of criticism and derision was let loose in the press’,121 whilst Peter Brooke notes that ‘[t]he painters had hoped to make an impact by being exhibited together, but they were not prepared for a riot . . . culminating in a raging battle in the room itself ’.122 Gleizes referred to the ‘“involuntary scandal” out of which Cubism really emerged and spread in Paris, in France and through the world’.123 He proposes that Room 41 of the Salon des Ind´ependants was a revelation for everyone . . . It was from that moment on that the word Cubism began to be widely used. Never had a crowd been seen thrown into such a turmoil by works of the spirit [appearing] as a threat to an order that everyone thought had been established forever.124

It seems surprising that such ‘turmoil’ was largely generated by one work: Le Fauconnier’s L’Abondance of 1910. The painting does not appear pictorially radical, despite its monumental size. Thematically, it was perhaps even conservatively Bergsonian in its rural nostalgia and ‘organic’ depiction of the female body. It maintained perspective, and hardly seems cubist in its superficial Neo-Impressionism. However, this ‘accessibility’ of style and content may also account for its success. It was influential for those salon cubists, such as Gleizes, whose own work developed rapidly after seeing it. David Cottington suggests the painting was ‘perhaps the best-known cubist picture in Europe before 1914’125 and Le Fauconnier was generally, if briefly, regarded as the principal innovator behind Cubism. Offering subjective representation as the internal criteria for portraiture, Le Fauconnier’s Portrait de P.J. Jouve (1909) had already made a ‘profound impression’126 on Gleizes. L’Abondance influenced a wider circle: Metzinger, the Delaunays and L´eger, and the writers Merchand, Allard, Apollinaire and Salmon all visited Le Fauconnier’s studio during its painting. It derived from a proto-cubist literary background, especially that of the earlier Abbaye 48

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Figure 12. Fernand L´eger, Nues dans la forˆet, 1909–10

de Cr´eteil commune, which had been concerned with collectivity and preserving the relations of ‘man’ and environment against technological and economic modernity. Gleizes was deeply influenced by L´eger, whose La Couseuse (1909) informed his La Femme aux Phlox, whilst Portrait de Jacques Nayral (Fig. 15) reflected the planar synthesis of body and space within L´eger’s Nues dans la forˆet (Fig. 12). The synthetic reconciliation of environment and figure was fundamental to Gleizes’s work. It had already been demonstrated in L´eger’s painting, which Metzinger observed was ‘a living body whose trees and figures are the organs’.127 Gleizes commented of the painting that ‘the volumes were treated according to the process of progressively diminishing zones employed in architecture or mechanical models’.128 Indeed, Le Fauconnier and L´eger had a mutual influence on each other, as well as on Gleizes.129 L´eger had participated in the Abbaye de Cr´eteil commune, as had Gleizes, though he was concerned with C´ezannian visual strategies ‘disarticulating the figures and landscape’130 rather than having an interest in their more literary discussions. Following C´ezanne, L´eger’s painting interconnected form through the reorganisation of matter. Suffused by a green hue across the canvas, the classical pictorial convention of composing discrete objects within three-dimensional space from a static viewpoint was decomposed into angled planes, interlocking bodies with space. 49

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L´eger took C´ezanne literally, fragmenting the world into component parts of the cylinder, sphere and cone.131 This became the compositional basis for rejecting perspectival codes, as L´eger premised his painting on the importance of sensation. His work followed the ideas of Ruskin, James and C´ezanne.132 In this way the world is constructed through pre-established cognitive structures with memory. As mentioned, Cheselden’s cataracts patient had no prior conception of object formation and therefore, without the principles of organisation, could only see ‘partly coloured planes’. Virginia Spate writes that for L´eger, ‘changes in contemporary life had so transformed perception that reality lay in sensation rather than in comprehension of specific objects’.133 Metzinger gives an insight into L´eger’s synthesis of human and environmental bodies, recoded into interconnected matter, reflecting the world composed of energy within his desire ‘to dislocate the body.’134 L´eger’s work therefore existed within, and helped constitute, Cubism’s response to the transformation of culture. Following C´ezanne, L´eger expressed energistic flows, interfaces and multiple connections since perception no longer was bound to the opticalepistemological mirror of a hypothesised external reality. He subverted pictorial convention by applying C´ezanne’s model of geometric shapes in the construction of a world consisting of matter, whereby sensation is privileged at the expense of the anthropocentric organisation of rigid objects in Euclidean space. Similarly, Gleizes’s La Femme aux Phlox undermined existing pictorial encoding through reconstructing form according to temporal rhythm. (In fact, Gleizes later wrote regarding painting: ‘all the parts are connected by a rhythmic convention’.)135 Object boundaries are displaced, and are deliberately obfuscated in drawing attention to the process of seeing. As with L´eger’s painting, Gleizes’s planar technique provoked a different visually cognitive response. Like Helmholtz’s ‘surfaces in the visual field’, objects are parsed and partitioned into regions of matter rather than alienated objects in space. The viewer’s pre-established cognitive model for compositional decoding, to parse the surface before recombining those parts into the geometric whole, is frustrated by the disruption of classical techniques for representing bodies in space. And they anticipate the principles of camouflage developed in World War I that Picasso famously commented were derived from Cubism. Recognition is possible, but form is no longer the instantaneous and static

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condition it had become through photography as a perspectival visionmachine. Gleizes’s painting belongs to a reflexive turn on vision, and therefore on the processes of knowledge and experience. Disrupting the spectator’s visual expectations means an increase in time spent interpreting the scene. Gleizes employed a compositional rhythm, which manipulated the spectator’s visual processes in attempting to distinguish figure from environment by leading the eye in a circular motion following the upper arm, down through the body, along the figure’s right arm and up through the lines towards the originating arm. This circularity is supported by the use of colour, texture and luminosity – properties that are vital to immediate object recognition – which obscures the discrete relations between objects and space. Indeed, the relatively uniform application of colour and light intercalates the figure with the space it occupies. Gleizes would have seen this subversion of figureground relations used by C´ezanne and L´eger. However, perhaps it was most famously employed in Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (1907). Here body and space were refigured into planes whilst single point perspective was rejected for a process of figural rotation and condensation of perspective upon a facet. As single-point perspective confines the observer to a rational position within mathematical laws, Picasso’s painting represented a palimpsest of spaces condensed upon a single plane rather than using that plane to figure depth relations. Whilst anticipating cubist works that erase traditional object-space relationships, his striking use of colour here nevertheless maintains spatial distinction between figures. Later works such as Femme nue assise (1909–10) were almost monochromatic, facilitating the body’s fading into space. Gleizes and L´eger, among others, would suspend dominant regimes of spatial representation and figural visibility through their nearly monochromatic canvases. Yet Gleizes had never seen Picasso’s work, and according to Apollinaire and others, did not meet him until after 1911 (Apollinaire was eager to connect the two cubist groups, whilst Kahnweiler was not). However, Gleizes was no doubt aware of Picasso’s canvases through Metzinger, L´eger and Delaunay. Whilst ‘Cubism’ became a term for a heterogeneous mix of painters and styles, there was a shared concern with rethinking the compositional structure of painting since an external objective ‘reality’ no longer existed, whilst change and process were now understood as fundamental to perception. This shared aesthetic is precisely what Gleizes felt was being

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attacked in his work in 1911. Cubism reflected a crisis concerning the loss of the subject. Picasso’s subject in Les Demoiselles was profoundly re-imagined, and used by Lefebvre to illustrate his statement regarding the radical transformation of space in the early twentieth-century, whilst Gleizes’s camouflaged subject dissolves into space, in a manner akin to Femme nue assise. Brooke reports that even Gleizes’s friends found the painting hard to understand: ‘The visual convention that had baffled them was the apparent disappearance of the subject in its surroundings.’136 Although there is a perpetually unfolding relation between the individual and environment, a high proportion of perceptual attention is given to differentiating figure and environment. Before La Femme aux Phlox Gleizes’s paintings had maintained this traditional distinction between figure and world, for example in his earlier portraits of Robert Gleizes and Ren´e Arcos.137 However, La Femme aux Phlox overcame these limitations through mobilising the eye through the canvas, a technique important in Gleizes’s career. In an unpublished notebook,138 Gleizes discussed the cubist technique of perceptual flˆanerie throughout the canvas, and his intercalation of form achieves precisely that effect as the spectator’s visual expectation is subverted. Edgar Rubin’s pioneering research on the ‘phenomenological analysis’ of the visual experience of figure and space was contemporary with Gleizes’s painting.139 Rubin concluded that a figure is consistently perceived in front of space, but never within or part of it. He noted that the two-dimensional distinction of figure from space occurs if one region is completely surrounded by another, whereby ‘space’ encloses ‘figure’. Although human perception has developed according to object recognition, the imposition of a cognitive framework upon the ‘chaos’ of sensation causes the misrecognition of complex or ambiguous optical information. Rubin developed the ‘Rubin Vase’ around 1915, though earlier examples of ‘multi-stable perception’, such as Louis Albert Necker’s ‘Necker Cube’ of 1832 and the 1899 duck/rabbit by Joseph Jastrow, demonstrate the impossibility of simultaneous perception of bodies in perspectival space. However, whilst these depend on the singular viewing point of perspective, Cubism would also challenge the ‘impossibility’ of simultaneous perception by multiplying the spectator’s perspectival point of view to the object projected upon the canvas. Whilst Gleizes’s painting remains concerned with volume rather than the multiple perspectives, L´eger and Metzinger

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were developing under the influence of Picasso’s and Braque’s work. More specifically in L´eger’s and Gleizes’s painting, the ambiguity of interlocking bodies, with techniques of planar rotation condensing spaces upon a plane, provided multiple visual interpretations of matter before the spectator’s reconciliation of objective forms. Gleizes merged his figures within the environment and consequently required a greater sustained attention by the spectator to resolve the spatial ambiguity. Figuration – traditionally understood in the West as the object of painting – is not possible unless distinct form can be discerned from its environment. However, for Gleizes, the figure is continuous with its world. Whilst cognition prevents simultaneous forms, as visual logic precludes multiple interpretations of reality at a given moment,140 in La Femme aux Phlox the figure harmonises with the environment, although the topoi of face and hands resist total immersion. These are afforded greater detail as the location of human agency, and its identification as such by others. Therefore, whilst not dissolving the subject into space completely, Gleizes represents it imagined as interlocking form and space. Whilst he drew attention to the ‘loss’ of the figure by overturning classical spatial codes, Wittgenstein similarly used examples of multi-stable perception to critique naive realism – the belief external reality exists exactly as perceived – to argue that reality is constructed by the cognitive and symbolic processes of the subject. These examples of multi-stable figures accord with Foucault’s claim for the modern overthrow of the Renaissance episteme, by demonstrating perception as the internal construction of a projected external reality. As Bergson wrote, suggesting how the viewing subject imposes a cognitive model upon the world, ‘we perceive nothing but the outward display of our mental state.’141 Indeed, Bergson’s popular book Creative Evolution (1907) may have had a direct influence on Gleizes, proposing: matter has a tendency to constitute isolable systems that can be treated geometrically . . . The distinct outlines which we see in an object, and which give it its individuality, are only the design of a certain kind of influence that we might exert on a point in space . . . Suppress this action, and with it consequently those main directions which by perception are traced out for it in the entanglement of the real, and the individuality of the body is re-absorbed in the universal interaction which, without doubt, is reality itself.142

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Prior to this, in Matter and Memory, Bergson had discussed the perception of reality as a consequence of the ‘utilitarian origin of our perception of things’.143 The construction of reality therefore fragments the continuum of existence that is based on a projective schema which constructs ‘surfaces and edges of things’ in relation to a utilitarian consciousness. Gleizes’s painting provokes a specific conceptual sense of existence, space and time whilst undermining the apparent verisimilitude of perspectival representation. Indeed, shortly afterwards Gleizes reproduced Bergson’s argument very closely in Du ‘Cubisme’, arguing: ‘There is nothing real outside ourselves; there is nothing real except the coincidence of a sensation and an individual mental tendency.’144

The Bionomic of Body and Environment After the Salon d’Automne of 1910 Apollinaire announced ‘Cubism’ as a movement in the journal Po´esie. Initially, however, in adopting a term previously used to derogate vanguard art, his appellation was not positive. Leaving aside Andr´e Derain and Marie Laurencin, he declared it a ‘bizarre manifestation’ which he compared unfavourably with Picasso’s paintings: ‘The Cubism at the Salon d’Automne is only the jackdaw in borrowed feathers.’145 Although references to ‘cubes’ were already in print, Robbins proposes that this was the first time ‘Cubism’ was used to describe a group movement rather than the work of Picasso.146 Gleizes later identified 1910 as a critical year in his artistic development. He exhibited his first works as a painter in the Salon des Ind´ependants, and was placed alongside Le Fauconnier and Metzinger, possibly through the hanging committee’s recognition of similarities in their work. Gleizes became friendly with Metzinger147 and Robert Delaunay. He was particularly influenced by the former’s ‘Notes on Painting’, through which, Robbins writes, Metzinger discovered ‘what later came to be known as Cubism’.148 It argued that a ‘fundamental liberation’ of pictorial order was occurring through the battle against ‘the deceptiveness of vision’, through which ‘they [Picasso, Braque, Delaunay and Le Fauconnier] momentarily impose their domination on the external world’.149 Metzinger wrote of Picasso’s incorporation of physiology and tactility within vision as well as the creation of a system for a ‘free, mobile perspective’.150 He knew of Picasso’s work, 54

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but also referred to succession and simultaneity in Braque, Delaunay’s concerns with the epoch and Le Fauconnier’s creation of a modern art that was both historical and epic. Gleizes was particularly attracted to Metzinger’s notion of ‘the total image [that] radiates in time’.151 Gleizes’s painting developed dramatically in this period. He later wrote: ‘1910 was the year when, in the last months, there joined together a kind of coherent group [of painters and writers] that represented certain precise tendencies for our generation.’152 His artistic achievements paralleled those of his fellow painters, yet his earlier intellectual development was necessary for his particular contribution to Cubism. Gleizes’s expression of a subject continuous with the time and space of its environment was crucial here. It was a concept that developed through strong modernist literary, political, philosophical and social influences directly arising from the nineteenth-century. Gleizes was involved with socialist organisations, such as the Association Ernest Renan, in response to his growing concern with state ‘militarism’ (war understood as a consequence of military desire and – as he later argued – capitalist economic ambition) and attempted to forge links between students and workers for the eventual realisation of proletarian power within ‘democratic socialism’.153 Renan had died in 1892, but remained a potent symbol of democracy and fraternity.154 Gleizes spent mornings working for his father in a furniture fabric workshop in Courbevoie with the poet Ren´e Arcos; afternoons were spent painting and evenings devoted to the Association. Through Arcos he met Charles Vildrac, Alexandre Mercereau and Georges Duhamel, and became acquainted with Jules Romains through theatrical projects in working class areas of Paris. Gleizes’s interest in Cubism might suggest that he considered it a force for cultural reform, whereby human subjectivity could be transformed through vision. Indeed, Gleizes’s commitment to Cubism lay in its radical articulation of an implicit conceptual relationship between the subject and world. A wave of young artists, writers and intellectuals had become dissatisfied with the direction of industrial and economic modernity. The notion that the artist or writer should be tied to the service of ‘the people’, for which the growth of ‘little magazines’ provided a mouthpiece, gained currency. The idea for communal living came from Charles Vildrac and the Abbaye de Cr´eteil was established as a collective in a large country house in the village outside Paris. It was a

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concerted effort at living out a romantic ideal involving the individual’s production of work, removed from the commercialism inherent in a market economy that decided success or failure.155 Therefore the commune was not just an escape from economic pressures, but also from political and social interventions (even if such conditions create interesting counter-cultural responses). Cox writes that the commune became an ‘anarchistic and utopian attempt to found a genuine creative community.’156 To this end, the Abbaye supported itself through a recently installed printing press, together with farming, with the work, in theory, shared amongst the members. The initial finance came from Henri-Martin Barzun, a former political activist who became interested in ‘promoting a kind of artistic youth culture’.157 On Christmas Day 1906 Gleizes was the first to move in, and was later joined by Arcos, Vildrac and Georges Duhamel. The Abbaye was, as the Association Ernest Renan had been, ‘determinedly secular’.158 Whilst Gleizes valued the importance of spirituality – he was later influenced by early Christian art – he was suspicious of organised religion, seeing it as the cause of oppression and ignorance. Instead, the commune was based on Franc¸ois Rabelais’s fiction of the Abbaye de Th´el´ema: ‘a refuge of honest, idealistic thinkers against a hostile world’.159 Its idealism, however, was compromised, as certain individuals remained keen to advance their own careers. (Gleizes later mentioned his dislike of Duhamel for his careerism.) Furthermore, the withdrawal from social practice to concentrate on work contained an inherent danger in privileging artistic subjectivity over engagement with mass culture. Nevertheless, the work made within the Abbaye demonstrates its commitment to left-wing ideology. Paul Adam’s L’Art et la Nation was the first work produced, criticising the state for its support of conventional, conformist art when it should instead ‘encourage its true artist’.160 Barzun’s La Terrestre Trag´edie, printed in 1907, provided a synthetic vision of modernity, imbricating humanity and industrial technology within the city. In her discussion of the importance of simultaneist thought to orphism, Spate refers to Barzun’s work, together with Romains’s ‘La vie unanime’, as part of a desire ‘to embody the relationship of the individual to the collective and to the universal: the way the single “I” is absorbed in the rhythms of the city or the vast energies of the universe’.161 Mercereau’s L’Abbaye et le Bolshevisme discussed the inspiration of Russian revolutionaries as an influence upon the commune, whilst Cottington notes the significance

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of M´ecislas Golberg’s writings, especially his acerbic attacks on capitalist and elitist values and urging of the unification of cultural forces to resolve the energy of the masses.162 The Abbaye later published Golberg’s Cahiers Mensuels and writers such as Mercereau and Barzun were indebted to his ideas. Although the collective dissolved in 1908, the beliefs of its members were maintained, with the writings of Arcos, Vildrac, Mercereau, Duhamel and Gleizes later appearing in postwar socialist journals.163 It was these former Abbayeists who were subsequently denounced for undermining the French nation and encouraging Bolshevism. Within this context Brooke convincingly defends claims characterising Gleizes as a nationalist, right-wing figure.164 Indeed, Brooke’s and Robbins’s consideration of Gleizes includes an important literary context, referring to the influence of the poetry of Whitman, Verhaeren and Romains, and an association with Barzun and the Abbaye writers. Brooke describes Gleizes as ‘an enthusiast for the adventure of modern life, with left-wing and internationalist sympathies’.165 Whilst assigning a stable ideological position to anyone is usually reductionist, and often fraught with contradiction, Brooke’s and Robbins’s positions appear more evidentially justified, whilst claims of Cottington and Silver, for example, incorporate elements of doubt and even contradictory evidence.166 Gleizes’s career developed from the ‘anarchistic and utopian’ commune towards Cubism. He was published in left-wing journals, and with Raymond Lefebvre and Paul Vaillant-Couturier (who later founded the Parti Communiste Franc¸aise), became involved in the journal Clart´e. Gleizes left France during the war, and publicly denounced France’s part in it, as well as its later treatment of Germany, whilst expressing loathing for war as a symptom of capitalist economics. This is in stark contrast both to Silver’s description of him as ‘patriotic artist-soldier’,167 and indeed the behaviour of most French vanguard artists in 1914, who volunteered for the conflict or consented to conscription, and fought until the Armistice. Those artists would subsequently vilify Gleizes, along with Robert Delaunay, Picabia and Duchamp, for their evasions and criticisms of the war. Christopher Green argues that Gleizes was perhaps the only cubist artist to resist the reactionary effects of the postwar ‘return to order’ whilst maintaining a notion of an art whose status and function ‘fused aesthetic metaphysical, moral and social priorities’.168 As Green writes, ‘he can hardly be associated, except superficially, with the ideology

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of the French Right’.169 Furthermore, Brooke argues: ‘It is totally misleading to see Gleizes’s painting . . . as the simple expression of a racist or nationalist ideology of any sort.’170 Gleizes’s contribution to the ‘cubist’ movement was important even if his works were not as ‘outrageous’ as those of Delaunay and L´eger. Robbins even suggests that Gleizes chose not to submit his more radical work to the Salons, one reason perhaps being his investment in a nascent cubist direction that could contribute towards social change (indeed, Freud enforced strict control over his nascent radical psychoanalytic movement so that it might gain cultural acceptability). Gleizes’s reaction to the violent uproar against Cubism was apparently one of surprise.171 More radical work might rather provoke public outcry and alienation rather than outcry and debate. The initial success of Le Fauconnier’s less ‘difficult’ painting L’Abondance might confirm this notion. Gleizes’s participation within small, politically motivated groups such as the Association Ernest Renan and the Abbaye de Cr´eteil demonstrates his belief in the importance of structured organisations for producing social transformation. His large canvases lent a monumental aspect to his work – indeed he later became concerned with mural painting – but were also a consequence of his concern with the declining social importance of art, manifested, as he saw it, by ‘trivial’, small easel paintings for the bourgeoisie.172 Robbins argues: Gleizes did not follow in the footsteps of Picasso and Braque, not because he was untalented or incompetent, not even because he was unfamiliar with their painting, but because he saw cubism as a means of giving expression to ideas and feelings of a highly serious, metaphysical and visionary nature.173

Robbins’s argument has close synergies with Green’s understanding of Gleizes’s art as metaphysical, moral and social, and predominantly responsible for Cubism’s image as ‘collectivist’.174 In 1918 Gleizes was proud to reflect upon the Abbaye as ‘a communistic experience’175 despite the reactionary, nationalistic turn within French culture. Whilst individual conflicts marred the commune, there were undoubted conceptual affinities among its members. Much of the work produced reconsidered human relation to modern culture. Gleizes was closest to Mercereau, who later introduced him to Le Fauconnier and Metzinger. Whilst working for the publisher 58

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Eug`ene Figui`ere, Mercereau also facilitated the publishing of Abbaye writers, in addition to producing Gleizes and Metzinger’s Du ‘Cubisme’ and Apollinaire’s Les Peintres Cubistes. However, it was perhaps Jules Romains who became the most famous literary Abbayist. Brooke writes that although ‘Gleizes, Duhamel and Mercereau deny that there was a collective philosophy behind the Abbaye de Cr´eteil, they are denying that it subscribed to Romains’ philosophy of “Unanimisme”.’176 Gleizes directly mentioned his ‘admiration’ for Romains’s poetry, whilst his wife later referred to the Abbaye as Unanimist.177 In 1907 Romains had sent the Abbaye (specifically to Arcos, Duhamel and Vildrac) the manuscript of La Vie unanime, a collection of his poems. Gleizes was excited by this work, and Brooke confirms it was ‘by far the most influential book published by the Abbaye, so influential that . . . the Abbaye writers themselves began to be regarded as followers of Romains’.178 Elsewhere, Robbins notes that Arcos’s La Tragedie des Espaces and Mercereau’s Genide L`a et d’Auilleurs were inspired by Romains’s unanimist vision in their ‘simultaneous concern for the close and distant, both in geography and memory’.179 Romains claimed to have had, at 18, an epiphanic experience whereby everything and everyone in the world simultaneously formed part of a single, harmonious mass. He perceived that individual consciousness merges with the ‘dominant energy’ of the group or place.180 The subject was both the essence and the product of their world. Romains was especially interested in the formation of consciousness within modernity, and sought to reveal the unity he discerned. His Les Hommes de bonne volont´e, first published by the Abbaye press in 1908, began what became by 1933 a 27-volume reflection. In this sense, Gleizes’s art can be understood as a synthesis of C´ezanne’s artistic and Romains’s literary visions of modernity. The transformation of the environment into harmonious planes within La Femme aux Phlox, and later La Cuisine (Fig. 13), developed from Gleizes’s postAbbaye thought regarding simultaneity, intersubjectivity and antiindividualism. In addition, Gleizes became fascinated by the writings of Charles Henry, who was influenced by Helmholtz in conceiving of the universe as continuous energy. Henry wrote: ‘Everything is vibration . . . the Universe is a curve, is finite; time and extension dispute with each other, what is relative and what is absolute.’181 He similarly argued for the psychophysical production of reality, between ‘vibration on the resonator and also the effect of the resonator

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Figure 13. Albert Gleizes, La Cuisine, 1911

on the vibration’.182 Although Henry’s writing specifically affected Gleizes’s postwar art, Helmholtz’s work on harmonic vibrations had also influenced him through Ren´e Ghil who, according to Brooke, was even more important to Gleizes than was Bergson. Ghil applied Helmholtz’s research to poetry, arguing that energy was a totality in which all participated and were subjected to as flux; as form did not exist as energy, art was ‘movements of thought’.183 Through the interpenetration of figure and environment Gleizes challenged the figurative gestalt that Rubin identified as occurring in figure-ground 60

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Figure 14. Albert Gleizes, D´epiquage des Moissons, 1912

perception, and attended instead to what Bergson perceived as the ‘harmonious whole’.184 Space was no longer a container for bodies, but incorporated in a rhythmic arrangement of planes. Rejecting the anthropocentric figure, Gleizes proposed an ‘ecological’ body. Although he has been considered a conservative painter, I would argue this proposal assumes a prior privileging of the ‘progress’ within technological modernity. Rather, Gleizes criticised capitalistic and industrial modernity in his imagination of the bionomic (Greek bio – life, nomos – law) of the organism and environment that, rather than being traditionally conservative, was a radical rejection of Western anthropocentricism and its ‘progress’ within modernity. I shall shortly discuss this in more detail with reference to Gleizes’s painting D´epiquage des moissons of 1912 (Fig. 14). Alongside his reconstruction of form, Gleizes’s use of colour articulated metaphysical interests. I have already mentioned the use of monochromaticism in harmonising figure with environment, but this also established ‘equality’ of vision, distributing light across the surface with relative uniformity, rather than privileging of bodies over space through chiaroscuro. Indeed, at much the same time, Braque and 61

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Picasso were dissecting quotidian objects such as bottles, reorganising them on the plane, but with a similar tonality given to each part. It is possible Gleizes heard of their experiments through L´eger and Delaunay, who had been advised by Apollinaire and Max Jacob to visit Kahnweiler’s gallery. L´eger recalled: ‘Delaunay, surprised to see their grey canvases, cried, “But they paint cobwebs these guys!”’185 However, these ‘cobwebs’ represent an important issue. Through relatively even illumination, equal significance is granted to each part of the composition. Within ‘reality’ all surfaces, except those that are completely black or transparent, reflect light. Therefore light is reflected in virtually every direction from every surface, as secondary light sources. Classical representation depends on the use of relative light values to create tone and construct objects within space; within a three-dimensional schema, assumptions are made regarding occluded surfaces by the static subject. For example, perception of a cube may only be of half of the shape, whilst projective, cognitive modelling ‘completes’ it within a three-dimensional order. In La Femme aux Phlox, Gleizes gives equal importance across the environment. Instead of lighting for single point perspective, cubist painting, through a synthesis of multiple viewpoints, creates a ganzfeld (‘whole field’) whereby equal lighting from every direction creates the impression of a grey fog,186 or, Delaunay’s ‘cobwebs’. Although Gleizes did not use multiple perspectives, like L´eger he cast a relatively even distribution of light across the composition’s planes. La Femme aux Phlox anticipated the suggestion within Du ‘Cubisme’ that ‘the plastic continuum must be broken into a thousand surprises of light and shade.’187 Also, Gleizes and Metzinger wrote, echoing notions proposed by both Nietzsche and Proust: ‘If so many eyes contemplate an object, there are so many images of that object; if so many minds comprehend it, there are so many essential images.’188 The tonality of Gleizes’s work accords with the imagination of the environment as a collective space where equal value is given to the figure and space: ‘A thousand little touches of pure colour analyse white light, and the synthesis thereof should be accomplished in the eye of the spectator . . . the result of the sum of complementaries is a dingy grey, not a luminous white.’189 The principle of harmonising the body with space informs not just the form and colour of Gleizes’s painting, but its content as well. La Femme aux Phlox contains several narratives. At its simplest, the painting portrays a rhythmic, cyclical relationship between humanity

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and the environment. Robbins writes: ‘Exterior nature – a distant vista – is brought in to the interior as a reminder of how inside fits outside.’190 Gleizes repeated this motif in La Cuisine; by framing an apple tree through the doorway, he emphasised the seasonal relation between the environment and human sustenance. La Femme aux Phlox also framed a river, which, like the tree, we might understand as a compositional symbol for painting time. Gleizes was well versed in philosophies of time, and often cited Augustinian thought.191 Gleizes must have read Augustine’s Confessions previous to referring his students to the text after World War I. Whether he had done so when he came to paint in 1911 is unknown, though there are similarities between Augustine’s ideas and Bergsonian concepts of time that Gleizes would have known. Indeed, it is possible that Augustine’s writing was read and discussed with reference to Bergson within Gleizes’s intellectual milieu. Augustine proposed that since God created time and space they are therefore infinite, but human relations to them are finite. Augustine rejected the quantification of time through measuring the movement of bodies through space, since movement has a different quality to calculation. He argued that ‘[i]t is in my own mind, then, that I measure time’,192 and that time was bound to memory as movements preceding each other into the past. Only in the present does anything exist: ‘For if, wherever they are, they are future, they do not yet exist; if past, they no longer exist. So wherever they are and whatever they are, it is only by being present that they are.’193 Whilst William James would make comparable claims within modernity, Augustine proposed that the present was without time, as time comes ‘out of what does not yet exist, passing through what has no duration, and moving into what no longer exists’.194 James similarly rejected arbitrary divisions of time, arguing that the present exists only as past, referring to the consciousness, and existence, as akin to the movement of ‘a river or a stream’.195 Within the fluid dynamic of consciousness, past, present and future converge in a continuum of becoming. James wrote: ‘Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits . . . it flows.’196 Bergson repeatedly used this metaphor. In Time and Free Will he refers to the ‘flow of our sensations’197 and the ‘flow of time’,198 and in Matter and Memory speaks of images that ‘flow into consciousness’.199 Here, there is a ‘continuous flow of things . . . the past into present, because our action will dispose of the future in the exact proportion in which our perception, enlarged

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by memory, has contracted the past’.200 Later, in Creative Evolution Bergson wrote of ‘an endless flow’,201 a ‘flow of time . . . the entire past, present, and future of material objects or of isolated systems might be spread out all at once in space’.202 He commented that life ‘seems in its essence like an effort to accumulate energy and then to let it flow into flexible channels’.203 He also directly uses the metaphor of the river to suggest that ‘souls are continually being created, which, nevertheless, in a certain sense pre-existed. They are nothing else than the little rills into which the great river of life divides itself, flowing through the body of humanity’.204 The planes of Gleizes’s surface harmonise, interlocking the figure with the surrounding space. Form harmonises with content: like the metaphor of the river in the background, the planes move past one another rhythmically like ‘rills’ within the movement of the eye. ‘It seems to me then,’ Augustine wrote, ‘that time is merely an extension, though of what it is an extension, I do not know. I begin to wonder whether it is an extension of the mind itself.’205 The appeal of Augustine’s thought to Gleizes is clear, for there are parallels between it, his and Bergson’s philosophies of time, even including the modern notion of reality as an ‘extension of the mind’. Gleizes represented people engaged in seasonal tasks – such as La Femme aux Phlox, La Cuisine and D´epiquage des Moissons – as a synthesis of these themes; their very being is interconnected within the time and space of the environment. These paintings, extended from the artist’s mind, deliberately provoke an organic, Bergsonian sense of temporality as opposed to the relocation of time outside of, and operating upon, the modern subject. In contrast, global standard time was established shortly after, from the Eiffel Tower on 1 July 1913, reconfiguring people’s lives to the second within a homogenous global network.206 Bergson responded with disdain to modernity’s encoding of temporality through timepieces, mechanistic handheld devices dividing time into spatial segments that irrevocably transformed human relation to it. Indeed, a number of works reacted against modernity’s increasing temporal systematisation. Marcel Proust celebrated subjective time in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (1913–27), whilst Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent (1907) centred on a plot for the destruction of the Greenwich Observatory as the symbolic site for the standardisation of time zones. ‘Man’ as the object of knowledge in modernity also placed the human subject within a positivist matrix, organising life through new technologies of control into artificial segments in order to

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achieve a quantitative understanding and economic transformation of the body in space and time. Aristotelian time, as the measure of motion according to numerical value, based on a hypothetical objective reality, became increasingly invasive. This was in contrast to the Augustinian notion of time as an ‘extension of the mind’ whereby the soul ‘distends’, stretching out into memory to recover time’s passing into non-existence. Expressing subjective temporality against mathematical time, Gleizes’s paintings were concerned with existence in time within a technological and industrial age. Gleizes’s upbringing in Courbevoie, a rural suburb of Paris, serves as a context for his ambivalent attitude towards modernity’s urban sprawl and the disappearance of traditional rural life. (In Chapter 3, we will observe that the collision of the rural with the industrial also influences Oskar Schlemmer’s art, though with markedly different consequences.) Gleizes was profoundly concerned with the growth of industrial capitalism and urban transformation. The importance of Gleizes’s work has perhaps been overlooked compared to other modernist painters embracing technological modernity. Gleizes has a considered position to the techno-industrial transformation of culture, perceiving the dystopian consequences of such ‘progress’. Here Gleizes followed Ren´e Gu´enon by arguing that this culture was ‘mechanical, commercially minded, cruel in war, incapable of poetry – [and] in terminal decline’.207 Even after World War I, Gleizes remained consistent in his fear of the cultural consequences of mechanisation. He did not participate in the postwar rappel a` l’ordre discussed by Romy Golan,208 or in the avant-garde’s subsequent acceptance of rationalisation, mechanisation and consumerism. Green argues that Gleizes’s close colleague Metzinger, among others, betrayed Cubism.209 By contrast, however, Gleizes argued in Clart´e that machines and factories have a cultural place, but that ‘[t]heir appearance is logical like numbers, but with precision and coldness of numbers’.210 (And it was precisely a synthesis of technology’s coldness that lent enormous potential energy to the hot blood of human will in Ernst J¨unger’s reactionary modernist fantasy of a ‘new man’ fulfilling Germany’s great destiny, which I discuss later.)211 Whilst J¨unger imagined a rigid ‘man of steel’ emerging from the war, for Gleizes – instead influenced by Romains’s notion of opening subjectivity to be co-extensive with one’s environment and other people – the prospect of a modern industrial consciousness was disastrous. Industrial capitalism radically altered

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the bionomic between humanity and its environment; he perceived that human existence was overwhelmed by industrial rhythm. Unsurprisingly, Gleizes did not hurry to embrace the machine and the coming of war. Even during the avant-garde’s broad apr`es-guerre endorsement of rational systemisation, the machine aesthetic and capitalism, Gleizes criticised the intrinsic relationship between machine production and war. He saw modernity giving birth to overproduction, consequently producing high levels of consumption, establishing capitalist-imperialist hegemony over resources and markets, and destroying the proletariat’s skills and means of existence independent from the factory.212 War is a perfect system for economic modernity: it simultaneously consumes as it produces. Gleizes argued that mechanisation represented the antithesis of human progress; industrial prostheses were symptomatic of a West desperate for reinvigoration. His thought lies in profound contrast to notions of the utopian, prosthetically-enhanced body imagined elsewhere within modernity’s avant-garde. Gleizes also characterised Henry Ford as a ‘modern’ man – opposed to war but nonetheless making a fortune from its devastation, ‘unable to see the cleavage between his own personal decency and the immense horror he was creating in the world through his daily work’.213 However, Gleizes did not oppose technology as a ‘positive prosthesis’ – a concept that, as Armstrong writes, ‘involves a more utopian version of technology, in which human capacities are extrapolated’214 – harnessed to ‘natural’, organic rhythms. Gleizes’s critique of mechanisation instead related to the notion of ‘negative prosthesis’ – appending the body to supplement a perceived failure within the transformed demands of industrial culture. Indeed, positive prostheses were incorporated in industrial motifs within his work. The monumental D´epiquage des Moissons, exhibited at the 1912 Section D’Or, was a celebration of a mechanical prosthesis at work, and at over 2.5 × 3.5 metres the painting loomed over the rest of the exhibition.215 Through form and content Gleizes celebrated an interpenetration of machine, human and environment into one harmonious bionomic. Rather than reducing the world to an economic resource, or imposing a rhythm upon human relations to space and time, the machine is incorporated within an, albeit cautious, utopian vision of modernity. Gleizes’s concern was with human experience ‘reduced to the simple level of a sensory mechanism’216 rather than the use of technology in the service of humanity. In Homocentrisme

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the senses were indispensable for the realisation of man at once in his body and in relation to the world to which he belongs. We see at once that, in opposition to the humanist attitude, which separates man from the

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(1935) he later posited an ecological notion of the intimate ‘indissoluble alliance’ of the subject and world in opposition to the industrialised subject subjugated under capitalism:

surrounding world, the homocentrist unites man and the world intimately, in an indissoluble alliance. Remove the man and you remove the world. Remove the world and you suppress man.217

Cubism, Phenomena, and Intersubjectivity In the ‘indissoluble alliance’ between humanity and environment, Gleizes’s Portrait de Jacques Nayral developed the method of La Femme aux Phlox through the representation of matter based upon experiential phenomena rather than a linear perspectival order. Indeed, Husserl’s production of a phenomenological method, predicated upon his research of the structure of consciousness, and the problem between it and alterity, had parallels with Gleizes’s own artistic development. Whilst it is highly unlikely that Husserl’s work on phenomenology influenced French artists at this time, the conditions existed for the French reception of Husserlian phenomenology.218 Within Gleizes’s milieu, Bergson’s popular works were certainly well known, Ogden Rood had made Helmholtz’s work on vision understandable to artists (a French translation of Rood’s work appeared in 1881) and Maurice Princet, who has been named among the ‘creators’ of Cubism,219 made accessible non-Euclidean mathematics and possibly Einsteinian theory. Modern German thought had influenced French professors at Strasbourg (as Alsace-Lorraine then belonged to Germany) and at the prestigious Belgian university of Louvain. Husserl had actually been mentioned in French as early as 1910 – that recurring year – in L´eon No¨el’s argument that physiological mental processes conditioned thought, and therefore reality. Also in 1910, Victor Delbos contributed to a series of lectures on contemporary German philosophy. He presented a paper on Husserl, summarising his three epistemological presuppositions: firstly, the laws of ‘psychic life’ must not be imposed, but derived from experience; secondly, that logical method should 67

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proceed from subjectivity (and its representations); and thirdly, that truth consists only of the successful reconciliation of matter within language.220 Husserl was therefore discussed in print in 1910, though whilst the influence of Husserlian phenomenology on cubist painting would make an interesting theoretical proposition, it cannot be historically justified. Nevertheless, it is clear that Husserl’s ideas did not arrive in a philosophical vacuum.221 Indeed, the thought of the French philosophers Charles Renouvier, L´eon Brunschvicg, Maine de Biran, ´ F´elix Ravaisson, Jules Lachelier, and Emile Boutroux all influenced Bergson, whose thought was contemporaneous with Cubism. We might consider Gleizes’s Portrait de Jacques Nayral within the context of these radical developments of thought concerning the relation between subject and world. As we shall see, Gleizes’s process for portraiture realised aspects of experience in Bergsonian and Blondelian philosophy. The latter had written that ‘the most positive truths are drawn from action . . . knowledge is derivative of action and that it obtains its justification and its reality from it’.222 Similarly, Bergson’s emphasis on the fluidity of the subject’s relation to time and space is figured both in Gleizes’s writing in Du ‘Cubisme’ and his painting, premised upon a kinaesthetic ‘passage’ based on duration, rather than the observation of space within geometric perspective. Gleizes’s portraiture therefore not only synthesised artistic, scientific and literary influences, but also contemporary philosophical ideas about the phenomenal relocation of reality at the nexus between self and world. Gleizes and Metzinger sought to explain and defend Apollinaire’s appellation ‘Cubism’ in Du ‘Cubisme’, published after the 1911 Salon d’Automne that included Portrait de Jacques Nayral. Georges RibemontDessaignes wrote that through Du ‘Cubisme’ Gleizes and Metzinger ‘sought to establish a kind of legislation of the cubist movement, in order to raise it to the rank of an honourable means of expression, to integrate it into the Eternal and Universal Unity of art’.223 This cubist ‘manifesto’ emerged from weekly meetings at the Duchamps’ home in Puteaux, including figures such as L´eger, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Picabia, Kupka, Gris, Gleizes, Metzinger, Apollinaire, Princet, Archipenko and La Fresnaye, along with hosts Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon. Ribemont-Dessaignes described the Puteaux meetings as involving ‘passionate discussion on which it seemed the future of the human spirit depended’.224

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Figure 15. Albert Gleizes, Portrait de Jacques Nayral, 1911

According to Cottington, the group debated: ‘The philosophy of Bergson, the question of dynamism, the notion of simultaneity and their relevance to painting, the social purpose and epistemological status of art, the symbolic, the expressive and the formal possibilities for painting of number and geometry.’225 Gleizes’s investment in Cubism 69

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lay in a belief in its profound contribution to culture, a conviction that it was the artist’s duty to be both socially and ethically responsible at a critical historical moment. Du ‘Cubisme’ was a theoretical and pragmatic response to Cubism’s critics. In three articles between 1911 and 1912, Gleizes had already attempted to justify Cubism as a valid response in its ‘modern’ depiction of culture, by linking it to a classical heritage that included Giotto and Raphael.226 In Du ‘Cubisme’, Gleizes and Metzinger attempted to rebuff xenophobic claims about Cubism’s ‘treasonous’ Germanic tendencies, by locating it within a French realist tradition, whilst elevating the ‘everyday’ as subject matter through a sense of democratic social responsibility. Indeed, other cubist painters were concerned with their immediate surroundings: the Delaunays with urbanism and L´eger with technological modernity, whilst Gleizes responded to the convergence between the industrial and the rural. Attempting to legitimate ‘Cubism’ as a movement, Gleizes and Metzinger placed it within a lineage from C´ezanne via Courbet, David, Ingres and Manet after Leonardo and Michelangelo, amongst others. In fact, Du ‘Cubisme’ attempted to wrestle tradition away from classicism and nationalism in consolidating its basis within modernity. Accordingly, later in 1912, the Puteaux cubists organised the exhibition ‘Section d’Or’, despite only Gris making reference to the golden section.227 As an artist’s manifesto, Du ‘Cubisme’ is quite sophisticated in its theoretical architecture. Gleizes and Metzinger’s writings can be contextualised within nineteenth-century French thought in their rather Kantian proposal that representation has an arbitrary relation to a fundamentally unknowable world. They write, ‘[t]here is nothing real outside ourselves . . . except the coincidence of a sensation and an individual mental tendency’.228 Gleizes and Metzinger suggested that perception was not a ‘mirror of nature’, but a synthesis of ideas, impressions and emotions, echoing C´ezanne (whom they declare to understand as foreseeing Cubism) and his belief that painting lies at the intersection of sensation and intelligence. Therefore, as Gleizes and Metzinger wrote, ‘let no one be decoyed by the appearance of objectivity . . . [as] There are no direct means of valuing the process by which the relations between the world and the thought of the artist are rendered perceptible to us’.229 Nothing can be known except the phenomena at the juncture of ‘self ’ with ‘other’: existence is necessarily

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intersubjective as the picture, according to Gleizes, ‘harmonizes with things in general, with the universe: it is an organism’.230 Despite Du ‘Cubisme’’s emphasis on the synthesis between subject and world, Antliff argues that Gleizes and Metzinger’s text advocated their own ‘Nietzschean’ self-interest.231 Du ‘Cubisme’ does appear at first to privilege artistic subjectivity in the creation of form from matter, stating the painter ‘will fashion the real in the image of his mind, for there is only one truth, and that is our own, when we impress it on others’.232 There lies a potential conflict between the idea of painting as an indivisible phenomenal nexus between self and other, and the artist as a transcendent, privileged agent. However, contradictory elements are inherent within Du ‘Cubisme’. Whilst it suggested there was ‘only one truth’, it also proposed there was no such thing as truth since ‘an object has not one absolute form: it has many: it has as many as there are planes in the region of perception’,233 and, ‘If so many eyes contemplate an object, there are so many images of that object; if so many minds comprehend it, there are so many essential images’.234 This attitude towards the unknowable object stems from a notion that reality ‘is intermediate between our consciousness and the consciousness of others’.235 The celebration of the Nietzschean self does not easily cohere with Gleizes’s thought thus far. Indeed, there is, significantly, the degree of Metzinger’s responsibility for the material relating to Nietzsche within Du ‘Cubisme’. Cottington suggests that Metzinger’s elitist tendencies were already apparent in his poetry and in ‘the Bateau-Lavoir milieu of which Metzinger was a peripheral member . . . [but] nowhere evident in Gleizes’ thinking of the time’.236 Brooke reaches a similar conclusion, arguing that such ideas are consistent with Metzinger’s thought but not in Gleizes, who believed the artist only had the right to be judged through his work. Gleizes was rather more concerned with unanimism, the collective spirit, and art’s social and ethical responsibility than any insistence on the artist’s privileged status.237 I have already referred to Metzinger’s 1910 ‘Note sur la Peinture’ and its claim that artists should ‘impose their domination on the external world’. Correspondence between Metzinger and Gleizes during the war demonstrates the former’s concern with his own subjectivity. Metzinger believed he had gone beyond the ‘materialist perspective’ of Gris’s and Picasso’s ‘romantic perspective’, to establish a new ‘metaphysical perspective’.

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Consequently, he wrote it was his duty to impose ‘the rule of the mind’ expressed as mathematical relation.238 Antliff ’s specific claims concerning Portrait de Jacques Nayral are also dubitable. He argues that Gleizes’s concern for ‘collective nature’ expressed in La Femme aux Phlox subsequently becomes a concern with just ‘two individuals’ in Portrait de Jacques Nayral. For Antliff, Gleizes’s anthropocentrism is then further refined in Du ‘Cubisme’ through a Nietzschean ‘focus on the self ’.239 However, this radical tripartite transformation of Gleizes’s thought is flawed. Firstly, as Cottington and Brooke note, Metzinger is likely responsible for Nietzschean elements of Du ‘Cubisme’. Secondly, Antliff ’s identification of a shift from nature to individual neglects the wider context of Gleizes’s work. Gleizes not only painted portraits (what Antliff identifies as a concern between ‘two individuals’) before and after the Portrait de Jacques Nayral, but his earlier works actually privileged human figuration to a greater degree. In fact, Portrait de Jacques Nayral moves away from a stable relationship between artist and subject. Furthermore, Gleizes’s paintings after his portrait of Nayral consistently develop his interest in the temporal bionomic between individual and environment. Paintings made after Du ‘Cubisme’ – D´epiquage des Moissons, Les Baigneuses and La Ville et la Fleuve (Fig. 16) – all demonstrate a continuation of Gleizes’s intellectual commitment to articulating the relationship between human existence, nature, and industrial modernity. These paintings do not signify such a retreat into the ‘singular focus on the self ’. Rather than being complicit in a turn towards ‘self ’, Portrait de Jacques Nayral actually attempted a profound dissolution of the self within the other. Informed by Romains’s and Bergson’s metaphysical beliefs about self and world, Gleizes sought to harmonise the artist with the subject rather than impose one upon the other. For Gleizes, the ‘truth’ of portraiture lay in restructuring representation upon time rather than space and incorporating an element of Bergsonian dur´ee in the phenomenal temporality between painter and sitter. Du ‘Cubisme’ acknowledged the ‘indeformability’ of Euclidean spatial convention, and advocated the work of ‘non-Euclidean scientists’ in the expression of visual space through ‘convergence and accommodation.’240 In this sense, Portrait de Jacques Nayral developed, rather than indicated a break from La Femme aux Phlox. Again, the sitter’s body threatens to dissolve into the environment, as Nayral’s body ‘decomposes’ into patches of colour. Gleizes’s use of ‘passage’ merged perspectival space

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Figure 16. Albert Gleizes, La Ville et la Fleuve, 1913

upon planes, synthesising object boundaries through conflation and condensation. Similarly, the residual topoi of the face and hands again retrieve the figure from its complete dissolution as the body diffuses into its milieu, otherwise demanding spectatorial attention to maintain the figurative gestalt. Whilst vision is naturally attracted to facial details for recognition, the attention demanded in distinguishing Nayral’s face and hands prevents simultaneous perception of his whole body. The eye moves from those details to restore bodily cohesion, but, as with 73

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the phenomena of multi-stable perception, visual processes fluctuate between topographies of detail and whole in distinguishing the body from its environment: the figure always escapes at the place where the spectator is not looking. Brooke argues that the painting consists of interpenetrating volumes, [that break] the static nature of single-point perspective. The volumes, break, so to speak, in different directions so that, while the unity of the subject is seen from a single perspective point is respected, the eye is still directed over the whole surface of the canvas.241

At the limits of the spectator’s perceptual attention, Nayral’s body escapes into space. Nayral’s portrait is premised upon Gleizes’s participation in a phenomenological dynamic between the painter and sitter, of ‘the coincidence of a sensation and an individual mental tendency’.242 Thus whilst Du ‘Cubisme’ referred to the artist’s ‘Nietzschean’ role, it also proposed that ‘there are no direct means of valuing the process by which the relations between the world and the thought of the artist are rendered perceptible to us’.243 This is a fundamentally different position, and more attributable to Gleizes: the relocation of artistic imposition to consideration of the relation between world and artist. This is a view related to Gleizes’s later thought, influenced by Charles Henry, that all perception is the convergence of energy and the projection of the pre-constructed representation of form.244 Du ‘Cubisme’’s opinion that ‘we can only experience certitude in respect of the images which they produce in the mind’245 also appears to be Gleizes’s, emphasising images operating upon the mind rather than the mind’s imposition on events. Gleizes’s concern lies in the interaction of the impression of reality within consciousness. This is readily reconcilable with Romains’s belief that intuition could be discovered ‘through penetration, the internal order of the thing’246 and Bergson, who believed duration, the subjective experience of matter through time, was ‘the foundation of our being’.247 Robbins argues that time, for Gleizes, ‘was one of the principal ends of the new painting’.248 The expression of time consisted of simultaneous representations of multiple psychophysical sensations, cohering upon the canvas just as perception and memory sutured the chaos of sense perception. Gleizes also believed, like Le Fauconnier, Delaunay and L´eger, that the phenomenological experience of time, the synthesis of unfolding impressions in time within consciousness and 74

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memory, organised experience according to a fundamental, atavistic process through which the subject grasps the world. Therefore his work appealed to collective memory, as both ahistorical and the ‘accumulation of civilization’,249 that imbued the canvas with a profound meaning. Gleizes synthesised ‘collective memory’ and sensation as he elaborated another type of ‘passage’. The reference to a ‘sensible passage’ in Du ‘Cubisme’ concerns a reaching out for an other (rather than the C´ezannian ‘spatial’ passage), based upon the intersubjective relation of the artist and spectator (rather than the Nietzschean imposition of the artist’s will): ‘pictorial space may be defined as a sensible passage between two subjective spaces.’250 Meaning is thus generated through subjective interaction, rather than the viewer occupying the site of the artist. The artist’s ‘personality’ reflects, not imposes, the subject of the painting for a new dynamic with its audience. There is a fundamental connection – ‘passage’ – between subjectivities. This aspect of Du ‘Cubisme’ certainly does not reduce the importance of the spectator in the creation of meaning. Indeed, Gleizes later proposed a notion of the ‘death’ of the author, declaring: ‘Once it has left you, your work is no longer yours.’251 Therefore the spectator is incorporated within the very phenomenon of portraiture, becoming part of the passage between Nayral’s sitting, Gleizes’s subjectivity and their own observation. Robbins reflects that Gleizes’s artistic development was premised on an understanding of the world as an organic process of life moving towards harmonious interaction: ‘His individual consciousness, just as his conditioned perception of reality, was a part of collective consciousness.’252 Gleizes’s intersubjective concerns, and his preoccupation with alterity in a more collective sense, are expressed in both Portrait de Jacques Nayral and D´epiquage des Moissons. Whilst intersubjectivity was an important theme in the work of Romains and Bergson, it was also the contemporaneous concern of Wittgenstein, who wrote of abolishing the difference between ‘I’ and ‘Other’, arguing that true existence comes ‘only when we no longer concern ourselves with the I and have learned to face the world without being bothered over the question of its nature’.253 Whilst ‘Cubism’ attacked painting’s alienating, objective spatial laws, Wittgenstein criticised epistemic dependency upon a rhetorical differentiation between objects that also constituted the conceptual basis of the subject’s relation to the world. Subjectivity is

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the ability to use language, and as Wittgenstein wrote, ‘the limits of my language signify the limits of my world’.254 However, whilst the self is constructed from the exterior condition of language, whereby ‘I’ am ontologically ‘other’ (the subject articulates its ‘interiority’ through the ‘exteriority’ of language), Wittgenstein also believed the subject has a fundamental intersubjective relation to others because of their shared condition within language. Elsewhere Schopenhauer had written of the possibility of the sympathetic recognition of oneself in others as a salvation from the tyranny of one’s own will. Such recognition of interrelation becomes a source of ethics and knowledge, since reality itself is beyond representation. He writes that the ‘veil of Maya, the principium individuationis, is lifted from the eyes of a man to such an extent that he no longer makes the egoistical distinction between himself and the person of others’.255 Similarly, Mach proposed we shall arrive at a freer and more enlightened view of life, which will preclude the disregard of other egos and the overestimation of our own. The ethical ideal . . . [is removed] from the ideal of an overweening Nietzschean ‘superman,’ who cannot, and I hope will not be tolerated by his fellowmen.256

Gleizes’s concern with the ‘sensible passage’ was certainly not unique, nor isolated from contemporary thought, as he sought to articulate a harmonious relation between subjective positions within ‘plastic consciousness’. Gleizes’s own writings elaborate upon his ‘phenomenological’ process in generating portraiture. Discussing passage he described the merging of artistic and spectatorial subjectivities, but also tried to harmonise the relative ‘essence’ of the sitter with his own personality, intimately interconnecting sitter, artist and spectator. Writing about the specific relation between painter and sitter, he described the use of tactile and motor sensations, the faculties of personality, and a temporal response to the Other as the basis for representation. As Gleizes’s essay ‘Souvenirs’ (1957) revealed, Gleizes was conscious of the subjective cohesion between subject and spectator, attending to the empathetic and temporal relation of his own ego with that of the sitter. Gleizes describes his portrait studies not through the traditional static practice of sitting, but through a study of Nayral’s essential temporal characteristics (such as walking conversations) akin to Bergsonian dur´ee: ‘trying to 76

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isolate his true likeness from the accumulation of details and picturesque superfluities which always interfere with the permanent reality of a being. The portrait was executed without turning to the model.’257 Gleizes premised his portraiture upon the temporal existence of fleeting impressions within memory. Already, Gleizes’s Paysage a` Meudon of 1911 describes the actual kinaesthetic passage of walks from Courbevoie to see Metzinger in Meudon. Rather than traditional portraiture of an immobile subject, Gleizes engaged processes of empathy, memory, and temporality to capture his sitter. Nayral was already close to Gleizes; he was engaged to the artist’s sister, had supported the Abbaye de Cr´eteil, corresponded with Bergson and was editor-in-chief of the house that later published both Du ‘Cubisme’ and Les Peintres Cubistes. Gleizes described him as ‘one of the most sympathetic individuals he had ever met’.258 Through a synaesthetic ‘study’, Gleizes’s painting recovered elements of Nayral’s ‘essence’ to achieve empathetic intersubjectivity in time. For Robbins, Gleizes’s synthetic approach was an alternative method of perspectival shifting compared to Metzinger’s (or Picasso’s and Braque’s). Gleizes’s figuring of simultaneous, but apparently disparate, phenomena between the subject and environment expressed a direct connection between Nayral’s body and the environment. Robbins remarks upon the convergence of ‘the hair of Nayral with the wind tossed foliage of the trees. This is a fundamentally synthetic notion that points to the unity or compatibility of things.’259 This subjective impression is represented pictorially as Nayral’s hair fuses into the background, producing a form of multi-stable matter. The figure immersed within the environment is always at the borderline of dissolution, as Gleizes acknowledged: his hair in dark masses standing out lightly in undulations as his forehead, his body solidly structured, suggested to me immediately equivalences, recollections, relationships, penetrations, and correspondences with the elements of environment, the land, the trees, the houses.260

Through harmonising the body in space and time, Gleizes used cubist strategies to represent existence as fundamentally interrelated to the world. His own personality was subsumed within a greater phenomenal ‘passage’ between subjectivities. Indeed, Gleizes’s description of his sittings with Nayral is strikingly similar to Bergson’s intersubjective 77

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method. As Bergson wrote in his 1903 essay Introduction to Metaphysics (which Gleizes may well have known) the absolute grasp of the other requires an indivisible feeling I should experience if I were to coincide for a single moment with the personage himself. The actions, gestures and words would then to appear to flow naturally, as though from their source . . . The character would be given to me all at once in its entirety . . . It follows that an absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it.261

Elsewhere, Bergson argued that the ‘deep-seated self ’ emerges from the synthesis of states ‘melting into one another and forming an organic whole’.262 We might therefore propose that Gleizes sought to represent the essential elements of Nayral through an empathetic relation, expressed through time and memory, harmonising self with other to achieve an absolute, ‘indivisible’ state of being that could be figured through a ‘plastic consciousness’. Within the nascent cubist movement, through his conditional foundation based upon temporal phenomena, memory and empathy, Gleizes’s painting presented a profound challenge to the spatial practices of objective exteriority and alienation of Western art: subjective presence is understood as simultaneous with the time and space of existence.

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2 The Simultaneous Subject One cannot go further as long as man isn’t changed within. Sonia Delaunay

Introduction Vision is perhaps the most privileged human sense in acquiring knowledge, constituting approximately 70 per cent of sensation.1 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have demonstrated how the correlation between vision, knowledge and truth has permeated language through the persistence of common cultural metaphors. ‘Seeing is believing’, ‘seeing with one’s own eyes’ and ‘searching for truth’ are amongst numerous examples within language that conflate and embed the relation between vision and truth into cultural thought. Lakoff and Johnson propose that the origin of knowledge proceeds from vision, and even the traditions of ‘disembodied’ thought inherent within Western philosophy makes frequent recourse to embodied metaphors.2 However, as previously discussed, vision is conceptually unstable and cannot be a guarantor of truth; there is no ‘mirror of nature’ since representation, however indexical, reproduces matter according to its own structure. The internal conceptual rhetoric of language itself subsequently provides the fundamental problems of philosophy and art. Whilst mathematics and geometry became an absolute language for expressing space and time, Western artists became increasingly dissatisfied with representational limits regarding their own embodied experience. Michelangelo sought truth in the ‘compasses in the 79

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eye’, advocating measurement based upon what he subjectively knew through perception rather than according to geometric computation; rational calculation had to be integrated as a ‘positive prosthesis’ for artistic vision, rather than becoming its definition. Leonardo too was uncomfortable with perspectival configurations of reality. He concluded that linear perspective succeeded only as a singular viewpoint, divorced from the realities of perception. Perspective failed to incorporate the embodied terms of perception, such as its elimination of stereopsis (from the Greek stereo – solidity, opsis – vision, suggesting the ‘solidity’ of vision is derived from more than one point of view) whereby two angles are synthesised in the construction of a single image. Geometric perspective did not accommodate ‘natural’ stereoscopic perception, whilst binocular variance was still rejected in the eighteenth-century.3 Leonardo also discovered that geometric perspective could not account for the deformation of proportion and form by colour. The perspectival system, understood to be ‘divine’ and, as such, infallible, was therefore only accurate both monochromatically and monocularly. Finally, Leonardo realised that perspective fundamentally failed to represent to the temporal ontology of matter. It could not represent the condition of smoke or water – the processes of flow – outside of its own spatial ordering. Such matter had no singular, identifiable space. Indeed, to maintain its rigid perspectival, architectural ordering of space, Brunelleschi’s tavoletta had deliberately omitted the sky. Spatial bodies, as C´ezanne later showed, are stable only in relation to the temporal configuration of perception. As Kemp notes, Leonardo’s later work is characterised by ‘softly veiled distances, fluid transitions of form, blurred contours and horizons that refuse to be simply horizontal’.4 Despite the epistemic ruptures of the nineteenth-century – when reality became increasingly understood as the interior production of human psychophysical processes rather than an exterior objective, calculable world – artistic representation still largely conformed to perspectival tradition. Yet already by the seventeenth-century, Kepler had argued that light was inverted when passed through the retina. This claim undermined existing ideas of perception operating through vision rays emanating from the eye to exterior objects, the eye transmitting reduced replicas of objects into consciousness, or visual rays that were emitted and returned after interaction with the object. It was only in the early eleventh-century, with the Arab polymath Al-hazen’s

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Book of Optics (1011–21), that the eye was conceived as a ‘pinhole camera’: a receptor for incoming light. Kepler synthesised certain existing optical theories deriving from Arabic thought to develop a new theory of physiological optics.5 Indeed, as Kemp writes, the debate on modern accounts of vision subsequently ‘involved the most considerable philosophers of the eighteenth-century, from Locke to Kant, and the major students of geometrical optics and ophthalmology, including La Hire, Camper, Smith, Porterfield, Le Cat, Bouguer and Priestly’.6 Colour, memory, and time – together with a transformed understanding of visual phenomena – became essential concepts in a profoundly different understanding of subjective perception. Locke wrote of the mind’s ability to transform patches of colour from the visual field into a three-dimensional model, whilst in 1738 Robert Smith proposed that perception incorporated memory and the other senses.7 Leonardo had already discovered the deformation of linear geometry through colour, noting how ‘cool’ colours receded whilst ‘warm’ ones became prominent. Colour theory became increasingly sophisticated as its fundamental importance to sensation as a basis for experiencing reality was recognised. Philippe La Hire, an eminent mathematician and astronomer who had also studied painting in Venice, discovered the Purkinje shift – the apparent prominence of cool colours in low illumination – towards the end of the seventeenth-century.8 In the mideighteenth-century Claude Nicolas Le Cat recognised that perspective is also atmospheric, as the geometric perception of space depends upon the predominance of blue light waves at distance. Objects in space are constructed through colour relations at environmental distances, or as he declared, ‘a lay of Vapours proportional to that distance’.9 Later, in Grammaire des arts du dessin (1867), Charles Blanc developed ideas originating with Humbert de Superville’s Kantian Essai sur les signes inconditionels dans I’art (1827–32), on the emotional effects of colours and lines. Throughout the 1880s Charles Henry also built on Humbert’s work, proposing a psychophysical notion of human perception based on colour (dis)harmony rather than classical optics. He believed he could categorise the subjective effects used by the Romantic painters through a combination of mathematics, psychology and science derived from the activity of the brain. Henry’s work was well received by emerging modernist painters such as Georges Seurat, indicating a shift from optics to ‘psychophysics’ as the basis

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for representation. Like Leonardo, Henry had observed the difference between warm and cool colours, and was interested in the synthesis of rhythms arising from music and colour. He equated each colour with a directional tendency, an auto-kinetic movement created by perception that also produced emotional response. Kemp locates Henry’s work within a body of thought of the later nineteenth-century that sought to ‘shift human consciousness and society on to a new plane . . . [through] radically shift[ing] the focus of attention from the optical science of things seen in nature to the interior of the human mind’.10 Classical colour theory had been informed by Aristotelian ideas, aligning colours with elemental constants. For example, fire produced red, the air blue and the sea was responsible for green. The properties of these elements also suffused material objects. During the Renaissance, Alberti helped perpetuate this idea, whilst Gian Paolo Lomazzo attributed it to a cosmic system that suffused the (religiously important) seven planets of the solar system with colour-elementals.11 Despite Newton’s theorising of light as oscillating energy that consisted of varying configurations of wavelengths, it was religious faith that informed his decision to declare to the Royal Society in 1672 that seven colours constituted white light.12 Seven – the number of colours of the prism, or rainbow – is an arbitrary number reflecting theological significance since a continuous band of light (all colour) is refracted. Nevertheless, colour was understood as energy, and later Goethe, in Theory of Colours (1810), concluded that ‘colour’ does not exist outside of human perception as it has no correspondence in an external, objective world. Through his investigations into colour, Goethe realised his own sensory experience was irreconcilable with existing models of reality, thereby throwing the production of knowledge back onto embodiment. His experiments were made in a darkened room, in which he used a circular shutter, three inches in diameter. He gazed at the circle of light projected on the opposite wall and, after closing the shutter, experienced the phenomenon of an afterimage.13 Despite the total absence of light, colour was present, and even underwent transformation. Even with absent stimuli, an embodiment self still actively produced visual phenomena. It therefore could not be separated from the production of reality. Goethe developed a theory of physiological colour contrast from his observation of ringed colours, noting that the body responded to stimuli by actively producing its

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The eye cannot for a moment remain in a particular state determined by the object it looks upon. On the contrary, it is forced to a sort of opposition . . . whether the impressions are successive, or simultaneous and confined to one image.14

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contrast. For example, red light produces a green negative that is observable through the after-effect. Goethe wrote:

Goethe also observed what he termed epoptical colours. These were ‘physical’ colours in continual transformation, such as ‘bubbles, films or thin laminated plates . . . the very symbol of colour’s transience and mutability’.15 Elsewhere thinkers were also conceiving vision as a perceptual flux: Andre-Marie Ampere termed the blending of perception with preceding images ‘concretion’. Johann Herbart, Kant’s successor at K¨onigsberg, understood consciousness as the perception of phenomena that ‘underwent operations of fusion, fading, inhibition, and blending (Verschmelzungen) with other previous or simultaneously occurring ideas’.16 Herbart studied afterimages in an attempt to produce a mathematical theory for perception that later became important for scientific quantitative work on the senses.17 However, research on the human being as the object of knowledge also supported disciplinary and coercive technologies. For example, Herbart’s enquiries were partly inspired by developing techniques for controlling the ‘sequential input of ideas’ as such research developed into techniques for controlling attention in workers and students.18 Elsewhere, Purkinje’s work on afterimages was based on empirical research in the production of a body of classification and quantitative information. Crary argues that in this period ‘the eye itself became a field of statistical information’.19 The bodily technologies arising from the human sciences, whilst providing greater control and discipline, also contributed to the development of a number of nineteenth-century vision-machines which became popular distractions. The notion of the ‘persistence of vision’ derived from research into the phenomenon of the afterimage, and was mechanically configured to produce the sensation of simultaneous movement from separate images. This configuration ranged from the simplistic optical illusion of the thaumatrope to the increasingly mechanical phenakistoscope, stroboscope and zoetrope in the 1820–30s; film and television are technological developments of research into the physiology of temporally persistent vision. 83

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Like Goethe, Schopenhauer was inspired by the simultaneous presence and absence of colour in the afterimage, and proposed that the embodied subject produced its own reality. As Bernard Howells notes: ‘Schopenhauer attempts to wed Goethean colour-theory to Kantian epistemology.’20 The identification of the body as the producer of knowledge in a fundamentally unknowable world was crucial. Indeed, Schopenhauer sent Goethe a copy of his On Sight and Colours in 1815. Whilst he disagreed with Goethe’s colour distinctions, believing all colour was created at the convergence of psychophysical processes, the fundamental premise that reality existed as a phenomenal interaction between subject and world was maintained. Anticipating Poincar´e’s conceptualisation of the exterior world as the misconceived projection of interior perceptual processes, Schopenhauer dismantled the oppositions of subject and object, internal and external. As he commented: ‘Still less can there enter into consciousness a distinction, which generally does not take place, between object and representation.’21 At the beginning of his Contributions to the Analysis of Sensations (1885), Mach credited both Goethe and Schopenhauer. Maine de Biran, as mentioned previously, argued for the primary role of the body for subjectivity, whilst describing the transformation of colour relative to bodily fatigue. He noted how observation of a single colour for a prolonged period causes the admixture of other colours, writing: ‘over time the original color will no longer be contained in this new mixture.’22 Through investigations into colour it became clear that the human subject was not a passive recipient of information, but an active producer of its own world. Michel-Eug`ene Chevreul significantly influenced ideas concerning colour in nineteenth-century France. Originally a chemist involved in the preparation of dyes, at 27 he was appointed professor of chemistry at the Lyc´ee Charlemagne in 1813. After complaints regarding the inadequacy of colours produced by dyes, he became convinced that human perception, rather than the chemistry, was responsible. Whilst the coloured dye was chemically stable, the perception of colour was inconstant in relation to the surrounding colours of the fabric: colours affected each other within perception, destabilising their own categorisation. For example, black qualitatively altered when juxtaposed with blue, or appeared greener when adjacent to red. Chevreul published his ‘law of simultaneous contrast’ in De la loi du contraste simultan´e des couleurs

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et de l’assortiment des objets color´es (1839). His colour wheel accounted for variations in tone, hue and saturation, and their relationships and the (dis)harmony of colour relations. Chevreul’s work had an important influence on modern painting, including that of Robert Delaunay, who, in his attempt to give expression to the simultaneous relativity of existence, as Spate writes, ‘constructed his paintings so that no colour can be perceived in isolation and can only be seen “simultaneously” with the other’.23 Chevreul, unlike Schopenhauer, was not concerned with proving a philosophical position, though his work demonstrated the fissure between exterior matter and the interior, processual experience of reality. The fundamental relation of human knowledge of the world – the stable relations of form, space and time – was undermined. The notion that bodies cannot be fixed, that human perception does not have an absolute, but a relative relation to the world, is repeatedly figured in the canvases of Robert and Sonia Delaunay. Sonia Delaunay later fashioned a physical body that underwent dissolution through colour and movement to articulate the dynamic relation of the world and the subject. The Delaunays’ work came after Goethe and Schopenhauer’s assignment of the importance of colour to perception, relocating the production of knowledge to the psychophysical subject, and Chevreul had demonstrated the transient nature of perception. The stable geometric, linear perspective model of reality, containing solid bodies in mathematical space exterior to the subject, was no longer sustainable. The concept of colour ruptured fundamental assumptions pertaining to presence, being and the world. The relative properties of colour became the organising principle for the Delaunays’ work. Both were concerned with the development and application of colour theory, though Sonia was perhaps less interested in an academic sense. Following Leonardo’s suggestion of studying light through a hole in a darkened room and Goethe’s optical experiments, Robert locked himself away. The poet and critic Blaise Cendrars recalled Robert’s ‘addiction’ to such spectrum analysis . . . studying pure solar light . . . He now rediscovered the miniscule play which he studied in a ray of sunshine on a gigantic scale magnified in the ocean of light that washes over Paris. The same problems, but in another dimension on an immense scale.24

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´ Emile Szittya wrote that his friend Cendrars ‘wished to make Delaunay, this gamin of Paris, a philosophical painter. He spoke to him of the controversies of Schopenhauer and Goethe on colour problems.’25 Using Chevreul’s principles, the Delaunays developed a new basis of pictorial representation predicated on colour rather than line and form. Robert Delaunay felt that the line existed only to reproduce a geometrically abstracted architectonic for structuring a reality that did not exist. Colour was the fundamental principle, both primordial and, through its potential to describe simultaneously different states, modern. Both Delaunays made paintings proceeding from this philosophical position, but also inspired by their enthusiasm for modernity. For example, they were fascinated by the transformation in the quality of light between the electric lamps and the older gaslights that were being replaced as they passed by in their night-time walks down Boulevard Saint-Michel.26 (Giacomo Balla’s Lampada – Studio di luce of 1910–1 is similarly inspired by the juxtaposition of pure colours to represent newly installed electric lights in Rome. Jan Sluijters’s Bal Tabarin of 1907 portrays dancers in Montmartre illuminated by the electric lighting he had experienced the year before.) Michel Hoog asserts that the Delaunays’ studies of the conversion of light ‘bear witness to a new way of apprehending reality which was unique at the time.’27 Sonia Delaunay’s Prismes e´lectriques (Fig. 17) was painted after a number of preparatory colour drawings, inspired by the transformative effects of the electric street lamps,28 and exhibited at the 1914 Salon des Ind´ependants. In ‘bearing witness’ to the epistemic reconfiguration of reality, as a psychophysical phenomenon, the body became the foundation of experience within modernity. Marginalised in its importance as the connection between subject and world, the sensate, carnal body had been maligned for an objective, exterior reality established through the ‘divine’ concepts of mathematics and the monocular stasis of linear perspective. The Delaunays’ concern with the embodied relation to representation reflects the avant-garde’s critique of the pre-modern relation between epistemology and representation. By locating the sensate subject as the object of knowledge, the principle of representation was derived from the phenomenal relation of the subject to the world. Indeed, Lakoff and Johnson’s argument concerning philosophy’s dependence upon conceptual metaphors becoming an ontological commitment is relevant here, in that we might propose the Delaunays issue a sense of

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Figure 17. Sonia Delaunay, Prismes e´lectriques, 1913

the ‘bio-ceptual’.29 For example, Descartes used embodied metaphors to articulate a philosophical treatise of disembodiment whilst following classical philosophical method derived from deductive logic without empirical research. Indeed, Jean-Luc Nancy’s reflection on Descartes argues that knowledge is produced through bodily action and is also how ‘the mind shows itself in the body’.30 Lakoff and Johnson’s work on embodied linguistic metaphors in the projection of spatial relations demonstrates how our world is conceptually produced from our bodies, even though the body has been traditionally elided from thought. We might, therefore, consider ‘concepts’ rather as ‘bio-cepts’. Words like in, on, over, through and under only are conceivable because of the subject’s own concept of position emerging from the projection of bodily relations in space. Dynamic relations between exterior objects are typically bioceptually incorporated into human mechanisms of meaning as concepts projected 87

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from the body. Other ‘bodies’ are understood in these terms, for example, with the motion of water as running, still, flowing, rushing, crashing and breaking. Time is later bioceptually imagined as being ahead or behind, approaching, moving (with many anthropomorphic variations such as rushing, creeping, stealing), saved and wasted. Time is also conceived as a body in space regarding its quantity, being a lot or not enough, as a large amount or small amount of time. Time is a non-spatial phenomenon that nevertheless derives from the projected, embodied experience of its dynamic in an environment, as is clear in examples such as ‘the path ahead’ and ‘passed a milestone’. Indeed, by his references to Zeno’s paradoxes and the importance of dur´ee to perception, Bergson attempted to reclaim time from modernity’s rationalisation by relocating it to bodily action rather than in mathematically produced spatial fragments. Through the body, the subject has a world, and contrary to Descartes’s ideas, human conceptual thought cannot exist without a body. Originating with the body, knowledge is bioceptual; conceptual frameworks originally develop from sensorymotor experience.

Colour, form and memory For the Delaunays, colour was fundamental to representation. It expressed an idealist position towards the world, emphasising both the primacy of sensation and the unstable nature of exterior reality. For Sonia Delaunay, in particular, colour was not solely a philosophical approach to representation – a unique phenomenon of perception produced by a psychophysical subject – but it was also crucial to a visual regime incorporating subjective relation between time and space. Furthermore, it provided an emotional connection to the childhood experiences and reflections that subsequently provided material for her art, and was especially important to the re-presentation of her body in the robe simultan´ee of 1913. This ‘simultaneous dress’ was a form of self-portraiture, in the sense that its reconfiguration of corporeal surface reflected a corresponding transformation of consciousness. We might therefore consider the dress to be auto-biograph-ical. In wearing the dress, her existence is written, or rather, being written (graph¯e ), through the graphic. The dress also refers to the Greek bios, ‘human life’. Her dress is a writing of lived experience, an articulation of what Bergson 88

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called the ‘inner duration’ as her body becomes the rhythmic motion of colour that continued to unfold in time. The biograph, however, needs to be distinguished from autobiography to maintain not a distance from writing itself, but from having been written. Instead, the worn dress continued to become, Robert Delaunay described it as a ‘living painting’. Through the dress, as biograph, Sonia Delaunay inscribed her memories and emotions upon her body with colour bearing past and present – enacting a process of coming into being. Delaunay’s biographies emphasise the importance of colour in her earliest childhood memories. It was for Impressionist and Fauvist palettes that she left Russia for Paris, and it was the dynamic energy of Parisian modernity to which she responded, immersing herself in its rhythms. Sonia Delaunay’s inscription of memory through colour was organised without geometric construction. As with memory, so human experience is not systemically constructed according to mathematical laws. Delaunay’s work undermined the classical and rational characterisation of the subject, and its conventions of representation, just at the moment of its taking greater, and new forms of, control of the subject’s body through its rationalisation by new industrial ‘technologies’ such as Taylorism. Whilst memory is characterised within rational philosophy as having order and logic, Sonia Delaunay’s intuitive use of colour highlights memory’s condition as a synaesthetic combination of heterogeneous modes of experience. Memories deform, expand, change over time and are sensately interconnected, just as the colours ‘danced’ on Sonia’s robe simultan´ee. Delaunay attributed the importance of colour to her memory of the Ukrainian sun before her adoption aged five and a move to St Petersburg.31 Robert Delaunay speculated upon his wife’s specific use of Occidental and Oriental colours.32 Her close friend Jacques Damase described an innate Russian rhythm and the influence33 of bright colours found in Ukrainian folk fashion. Stanley Baron and Sherry Buckberrough also insist on the profound impression of the Ukrainian colours associated with Delaunay’s childhood on her work.34 More plausibly, Carrie Noland argues that Russian folk art motifs such as rainbows, arcs, triangles and trapezoids were frequently repeated in Sonia Delaunay’s bookbindings and paintings.35 Sonia Delaunay’s captivation with colour and changing form was perhaps related to a peripatetic childhood. Colour punctuates her

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earliest memories, much as taste does for Proust’s ‘Marcel’. Perhaps it was only fleeting coloured impressions of her environment – agreed on by those writing her biographies – that were all she remembered of her short time with her natural parents in her hometown. Baron notes that Delaunay gave her birthplace as Gradzinsk, Ukraine on 14 November 1885. Indeed, her autobiography confirms this, describing her father as working in a factory there. Yet her will states her birth was on 4 November 1885 in Odessa. Baron also speculates upon Delaunay’s condensation of the first 20 years of her life into just seven pages, suggesting ‘there were parts of her past that she did not easily discuss’.36 As a child Sonia Delaunay was ‘adopted’ by her bourgeois uncle and aunt living in St Petersburg. She looked back at her early childhood as ‘one of splendid dreams’, with her memories of the Ukraine being of ‘magical colors rather than harsh realities’.37 She met her father only once more, and never her mother. Her identity underwent enforced change, her name changed unofficially from Sonia Stern to Sonia Terk. (Later, it would change again with marriage to first Uhde, or Uhde-Terk, and then Delaunay, or Delaunay-Terk.) The vibrancy and tension of her colours, the violence in their opposition and contrast, perhaps has some correlation with her problematic biography, and a past upon which she did not dwell. After adoption, she led a comfortable bourgeois life. She learnt several languages, travelled and was exposed to classical arts, becoming acquainted with the paintings of ‘Masters’ that hung in her uncle’s house, as well as in museums and galleries throughout Germany, France and Italy. As her talent for drawing became clear, she was sent to the Karlsruhe Academy at the age of 18. Karlsruhe was renowned for its conventional portraiture and adherence to linear construction. Dissatisfied, after three years she left for the Acad´emie de la Palette in Paris, drawn towards Impressionistic uses of colour. It was at the Acad´emie that she met Am´ed´ee Ozenfant and Andr´e Dunoyer de Segonzac. Delaunay’s approach to painting, unfolding from a proclivity for colour in her childhood and later reinforced by the inspiration of the Ballets Russes, is testament to the excited passion of her memories and emotions. However, her work is also representative of the cultural conditions that shaped her and led her to explore the synthesis of the past, present and becoming in her ‘simultaneous dress’. In 1905, the year she arrived in Paris, there was a Fauvist exhibition at the Salon d’Automne, C´ezanne’s Les Grandes Baigneuses was exhibited publicly

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and the Salon des Ind´ependants exhibited Van Gogh, Derain’s protoCubism was shown in the Salon d’Automne, whilst the Bernheim Gallery displayed Bonnard and Vuillard and Gauguin exhibited at Rue Laffitte.38 Post-Impressionist and Fauvist canvases made quite a contrast to the strict line learned at Karlsruhe. Delaunay spoke of her direct influence by Van Gogh,39 and wrote (referring to herself in the third person): Since she began to paint, the pictorial research of Sonia Delaunay has been directed toward the purity and exaltation of color. From her very first works, she has tried to impart the maximum of intensity to color. Her spiritual masters were Van Gogh for intensity and Gauguin for the investigation of planar colored surfaces.40

In Paris, armed with Julius Meier-Graefe’s book on Impressionism, Delaunay lived with four other Russian girls. However, she became alienated from the Acad´emie, disagreeing with its method of ‘teaching through criticism’.41 Delaunay wrote: I’d bought three books on Impressionism in Germany. I wanted to live near it, near Sisley and Monet, near their airiness and lightness. I began in a horrible art school where five teachers took turns. In the evening we broke out and went to see the Bonnards and Vuillards at the Galerie Bernheim . . . We wanted to go further.42

Whilst Van Gogh and Gauguin were influential, so too were Matisse and Henri Rousseau, whose La charmeuse de Serpents (Snake Charmer) (1907) later hung in Delaunay’s dining room. (It was subsequently sold after the Bolshevik seizure of property in St Petersburg severed their Russian income at a time when Robert Delaunay had difficulty selling his paintings.) The most recent Fauvist work was also accessible to her, as she married Wilhelm Uhde,43 whose gallery contained works by Braque, Derain, Vlaminck and Dufy.44 She met Picasso and Braque through Uhde, who had a number of the latter’s paintings.45 The vitality of colour can be seen in Delaunay’s striking, if still figurative, work Jeune Finlandaise and Philom`ene of 1907. Even before meeting Robert Delaunay, colour was paramount, whilst challenging, if not yet erasing, linear form. She later suggested that even Matisse had not escaped recourse to chiaroscuro. She claimed: 91

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Linear contour persisted in his work. Such linear contour – the thread which connects the new vision to the past – is broken by the cubists who destroyed the vision of the object by attempting to seize it from all sides, pursuing even the ungraspable fourth dimension.46

However, she recognised Matisse’s importance through his ‘exacerbation’ of colour that ‘concluded by deforming and breaking the line’.47 This destruction of the line formed the basis of the Delaunays’ challenge to non-Euclidean geometry and the fourth dimension. Sonia Delaunay’s use of colour in Philom`ene demonstrated her early desire to make it the principal aspect of painting. It disrupted figuration as the colours on the woman’s face harmonise with the surrounding wallpaper. The heavy outline maintains linearity yet calls attention to its own structural artifice. Sonia Delaunay acknowledged that these early paintings are ‘rather commonplace’48 and suggested that ‘the color is still slave to line, to traditional chiaroscuro. Even so, the colors are dazzling . . . From her very first studies, a whole reserve of pictorial energy can be felt in its natural state.’49 It is arguable if colour is still a ‘slave’ here – it is the most expressive element within the visual hierarchy – though form has not yet decomposed into matter. Her subsequent pursuit of figurative erasure through colour in the development of a truly ‘abstract’ art is clearly manifested in these early experiments in rethinking the body’s relation to time and space through colour.

Simultaneous Forms Sonia Delaunay’s concept of the relationship between consciousness and the environment emerged from a relation to colour that was influenced by others, and became increasingly sophisticated in its theoreticisation, yet always remained personal. For her, colour was not purely a physical property of paint reflecting different wavelengths, which had been traditionally subservient to form. She was drawn to the colours of Impressionism and Fauvism despite her early training in Classicism and draughtsmanship. Inscribed in colour’s ontology (that is, as a human phenomenon) were memories and experiences. Furthermore, the Ballets Russes’s recent success in Paris reconnected Delaunay to the Russian crafts of her childhood. Although her canvases already 92

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demonstrated the importance to her of colour, Robert Delaunay’s influence and his ideas regarding Chevreul, colour simultaneity and the elimination of linearity in representation also informed her work. Robert was crucial to Sonia’s development of direct expression, forcing her to paint directly on the canvas. According to Gleizes, Robert Delaunay’s vision, although emerging from the cubist milieu, was more profound: ‘among all of us at that time, it was he, sustained solely by gifts of the first order and by his own abundant high spirits, who came closest to the truth’.50 Whilst Sonia Delaunay did not directly participate in the theoretical discussions on art that took place in their home, they nonetheless excited her, as did Robert Delaunay’s own investigations into the science of colour theory that subsequently informed her approach.51 Indeed, Spate suggests Sonia Delaunay was ‘an extremely intelligent woman who seems to have been more receptive to new ideas than he’.52 Her independent association with contemporary artists and poets, as well as her translation of works by Kandinsky, testifies us to how well informed Sonia Delaunay was. She even recalled Robert Delaunay’s deference to her advice in his belief of her viscerally intuitive relation to colour: ‘In the matter of colours, he had absolute confidence in me and always followed my suggestions.’53 The Delaunays’ theorisation and use of colour distinguished them from other painters in the Parisian avant-garde, although Apollinaire labelled them ‘Orphists’54 in a rather disparate group along with L´eger, Picabia, Duchamp and Picasso. Gleizes was added to that list in 1913,55 though he realised that ‘the more I deepen my understanding of the problem of form posed categorically by Cubism in 1911, the more Delaunay’s work reveals its worth’.56 If Cubism was concerned with restructuring experience through the spatial and temporal relationship of the subject to the object within its architectural ‘cobwebs’, Orphism appealed directly to experience as a consequence of an embodied relation to the world. Robert Delaunay wrote of the need to express experiential reality through relative phenomena rather than abstracted, stable reconstructions of space: ‘through relationships between color contrasts – form that is depth . . . Form-color – inseparably’.57 Indeed, neither cubists nor orphists considered their work ‘abstract’ but articulations of the condition of modern culture. Whilst Cubism deliberated over everyday objects in a realist vein, the Delaunays were fascinated with the possibilities of articulating the rhythmic, temporal sensation of modernity. (As we shall see, Sonia Delaunay further explored the

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possibility of the laws of simultaneous colour contrast away from the canvas and within the very fabric of modern culture.) For Robert Delaunay their concern lay with destroying ‘all the false ides, all the archaic methods of the old school of painting (the science of drawing, geometry, perspective, etc., the whole agonizing, intellectualist, neoclassical academy’.58 For him, “‘Simultaneous contrast” assures the dynamism of colors and their arrangement on the canvas, it is the most effective means of expressing Reality [and] . . . whose sole purpose is to translate human nature’.59 Artists and writers interested in simultan´eit´e were intimately associated within the Delaunays’ milieu. Cendrars later noted: At this time, about 1911, painters and writers were equal. We lived mixed up with each other, probably even with the same preoccupations. It could be said that every writer had his painter. I myself had Delaunay and L´eger, Picasso had Max Jacob, Reverdy; Braque and Apollinaire had everybody.60

Indeed, Sonia Delaunay also had a very close relationship to Cendrars, as well as connections to Ricciotto Canudo, whilst Robert Delaunay later had important ties to Herwarth Walden in Germany, corresponding at the beginning of 1913 over Walden’s organisation of Robert and Sonia Delaunay’s works in the Berlin Herbstsalon.61 (Chagall’s Homage a` Apollinaire (1911–2) contained the names of Walden, Cendrars, Canudo and Apollinaire around a pierced heart, in addition to his own name at the top of the composition.) When Walden came to Paris in March 1913, he met with the Delaunays, Apollinaire, Canudo and Cendrars. Whilst the Delaunays’ art was fundamentally visual, their approach had important affinities with Cendrars’ and Apollinaire’s poetic, ‘simultaneist’ vision.62 (Indeed, as the postwar avant-garde scene changed, the Delaunays’ group shifted, but nevertheless still included important avant-garde writers such as Breton, Aragon, Cocteau and Tzara. Breton, in his January 1922 ‘call for congress’ in Comoedia following a period of discontent with Dada, wanted Robert Delaunay to be the leader of a new movement.)63 Robert Delaunay had met Apollinaire in September 1910 accompanying the coffin of Henri Rousseau. With Sonia Delaunay, they constituted three of the seven present at the funeral. Apollinaire’s Calligrammes – one of which was entitled Moi aussi je suis peintre – was concerned with visual aspects of poetry, whilst Les Fenˆetres was based 94

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on Robert Delaunay’s painting of the same name, evoking a sense of simultaneity through his use of disparate ideas within free verse. Whilst Sonia Delaunay did not entirely trust Apollinaire’s entrepreneurial character and mercurial tendencies, she realised his importance to the avant-garde. Cendrars, who would become her favourite poet, later described how Robert Delaunay visited him at his hospital bedside between 1910 and 1911 and drew or painted the Eiffel Tower through his window.64 Yet Sonia Delaunay remembered meeting Cendrars in November 191265 at Apollinaire’s home after his return to Paris from America. The day after, he visited the Delaunays bearing his poem Les Pˆaques a` New York, having written it ‘hungry and alone, on a bitter late winter evening’.66 He read it aloud to a gathering in the artists’ studio, where it was proclaimed a form of ‘literary Cubism’, as neo-realist in its abstraction. However, the poem’s juxtaposition of locations and times in a couplet-based structure perhaps belonged to a modernist simultaneous aesthetic rather than a specifically cubist one. Clive Scott argues Cendrars’s subsequent La Prose du Transsib´erien et la petite Jehanne de France was less cubist as a ‘multiplication of space by time’ than ‘Futuro-Orphist’, since the work incorporated both the train’s mechanical dynamism and its penetration into the resistant ‘inner’ subject.67 Delaunay later recalled that Cendrars’s reading had moved the group ‘so profoundly that from then on until the war he became part of our life’.68 (Apparently Apollinaire, having turned pale during the reading, read the poem several times and hardly spoke that evening.) The next day Cendrars presented them with a printed version. Sonia Delaunay recollected I read Easter and was so taken with it that I set to work immediately to make a cover for it. I made one with suede and pasted paper, since we were, after all rather poor at the time . . . So I made this binding by superimposing paper and inside I made large paper squares – on the fly-leaves. And that’s what Cendrars saw.69

Arthur Cohen comments that Delaunay’s binding (Fig. 18) introduced a new language into the history of visual expression. Indifferent to figurative or descriptive allusion, far removed from any wish to exploit by visual means the poetic argument of the text, concerned only to execute a gesture of response to the work.70

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Figure 18. Sonia Delaunay, Binding for Blaise Cendrars’s Les Pˆaques a` New York, 1912

Whilst Cohen perhaps hyperbolises Delaunay’s achievement, his contention is nonetheless useful, as the binding harmonised with the simultaneity and lyrical abstraction of the poem to produce a visually subjective response. Delaunay later bound works by Romains, 96

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Rimbaud, Walden, Apollinaire, Canudo and Tzara and, according to Cohen, had an ‘unquestionable influence’ on later abstract work by artists such as Klee and the De Stijl painters.71 Subsequently, Cendrars sought a further collaboration on his La Prose du Transsib´erien. Delaunay’s ‘new language’ of visual expression derived from experimentation with different media, more as a pragmatic consequence of her abandoning painting between 1910 and 1912. Within this period she became ill, and was surprised to learn that she would shortly be a mother. She divorced Uhde in August 1910, married Robert Delaunay in November and gave birth to their son Charles in January. Delaunay devoted her time to ‘homemaking’ in the first years of marriage, with a new son, apartment and studio, and a husband who reportedly concentrated more on painting. Furthermore, she admitted that whilst Robert Delaunay was establishing himself as a painter of simultaneity, she withdrew from painting to ease the competitive pressure from her husband. Indeed, the perception of her role as a lesser artist was something Sonia Delaunay continued to encourage, despite her international success, and she sought to promote Robert’s reputation at her expense even after his death. Whilst Robert Delaunay’s painting and personality eclipsed hers in an androcentric avant-garde, Cottington refers to a wider campaign begun in the 1890s to pressurise women to remain within the decorative arts. This ‘reinforced both the republican pedagogic policy of gendered differences in art education and assumptions that decorative arts skills were part of the expected accomplishments of young ladies’.72 Robert Delaunay’s mother designed floral embroidery motifs for income, and Sonia Delaunay later also turned to material design, converting her simultaneous designs into fashion objects, as a means of supporting her family in the economically difficult postwar period. Tag Gronberg argues that Sonia Delaunay’s decorative absorption of their avant-garde iconography perpetuated an inferior status for women, since her later fashion objects transformed the profound concepts of Simultaneity into a means for ‘appearing stylishly up to date’.73 Cottington also suggests Delaunay’s applied activities were part of the couple’s ‘entrepreneurial approach’ to the European art market, fostered by a receptive climate for decorative art.74 Direct concern with marketability was, however, more specifically a postwar response to their economic misfortunes, and although the Bolsheviks had seized their property, Damase writes that the Delaunays

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wept from happiness despite their inevitable ‘financial ruin’.75 Sonia Delaunay’s turn to craft before such events was also a response to living beyond their means, compounded by the fact that Robert Delaunay’s mother, the ‘Comtesse de Rose’, could never give the newlyweds the money she had promised them due to her own spending. Sonia Delaunay later maintained she economised through making her own furnishings for their home.76 Nevertheless, she insisted there was, ‘no gap between my painting and my so-called decorative work . . . the minor art had never been an artistic frustration but a free expansion, a conquest of new space’.77 Buckberrough and Elizabeth Morano agree that her materials integrated, and extended, the approach of her painterly work.78 Indeed, the blanket Sonia Delaunay made for her infant son (Fig. 19) was a ‘breakthrough’ in research for both the Delaunays regarding the non-objective juxtaposition of texture and colour. Diana Vreeland wrote that it ‘aided their break with representation’,79 whilst Buckberrough claims it was Sonia Delaunay’s ‘constant curiosity about new media [that] provided inspiration for the formal development of their joint style’.80 The blanket was composed of a variety of scrap fabrics in a coloured montage in accordance with Russian traditions Delaunay recalled from her childhood, and further inspired by the Ballets Russes. The Delaunays’ friends proclaimed the blanket a cubist work, though we might object since the blanket had no identifiable subject as its object of representation and therefore perhaps marks a significant moment in the history of abstraction. Importantly, the blanket sutured her simultaneous aesthetic into the very materiality of modernity itself, inspiring a number of works in different, applied media outside the canvas. Robert Delaunay wrote of this development: ‘Simultaneism in color creates a total formal construction, an aesthetic of all the crafts: furnishings, dresses, books, posters, sculpture, etc. . . . The simultaneous: my eyes see up to the stars.’81

´ La Prose du Transsiberien La Prose du Transsib´erien was the first published simultaneous ‘book’, a synthesis of Cendrars’s poetry and Sonia Delaunay’s rhythmic coloured rainbows and arcs that unfolded into a lyrical epic over six feet in length. Robert Delaunay believed she used it to undermine the privileging 98

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Figure 19. Sonia Delaunay, Couverture, 1911

of the line in Western representation, a privilege that belonged to ‘an archaic stability’.82 He wrote: ‘With these experiments she first set out toward a form of art as yet unknown.’83 Robert Delaunay’s celebration of his wife’s success also points towards the dissemination of their simultanist concept throughout Europe and America, with its exhibition in Berlin, St Petersburg, Moscow, London and 99

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New York. The physical movement of the book testified to the simultaneous concept of the artwork in general – journeying greater distances in shorter time, juxtaposing spaces of exhibition through the speed of modernity, providing temporal unity to disparate locations. In addition, the journey in the poem, from a village in Russia to Paris, from youth to maturity, interconnecting simultaneous impressions and memories with the present, also reflected Sonia Delaunay’s own experience. There is a relation between the autotelos of the poem derived from the internal experience of its authors and its external movement through time and space; the poem is an incorporation and rematerialisation of subjective experience into a visual form that repeated the conditions of its production. Delaunay repeated the autotelic condition of the artwork in the re-assemblage of her body in her robe simultan´ee. Through it she articulated a concept of a fluid subject within the world, whereupon it was reinserted back into the very space of its inception to reflect those effects for others. The dissonance between reds and greens and blues and of discordant places and impressions mirrored Cendrars’s rhythms. Cendrars and Delaunay jointly chose the colours, font and point of the lettering to create what Buckberrough calls ‘visual unity of presence’.84 Cendrars clearly considered the exterior form of the poem to be the embodiment of his internal experience. The e´lan vital of the work was deeply felt by Cendrars, as he (writing in the third person) revealed: ‘Let us say that it is his love, his passion, his vice, his greatness. His vomit. It is a part of himself. His Eve. The rib that he has torn out. A mortal work, wounded by love, pregnant!’85 The poem, as a synthesis of impressions, simultaneous thoughts, imaginations, places and times also incorporated self-identity, as Cendrars, changing his name from Fr´ed´eric-Louis Sauser, inscribed his own name as a conflation of fire (reportedly inspired by the English word ‘blaze’, though it possibly also derived from the French ‘braiser’) and ash (cendre) into its lines: Paris has disappeared and its enormous flame There is nothing but continuous ash

He considered simultaneity a profoundly modern technique for expression, a unification of reality and representation, interior and exterior: ‘This simultaneous contrast is experienced depth-reality-formconstruction-representation-life. Depth is the new inspiration.’86 For 100

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Cendrars poetry was the realisation of internal experience through exterior representation, immersing his own identity through the incorporation of his signature within the poem’s text. Moreover, he described the relation between words and colour as ‘[l]ife, more life: with reds, blues, dreams, blood’.87 Therefore Cendrars proclaimed writing and colour as rematerialising his own ‘dreams’ and ‘blood’ through the carnal body as the basis for humanity’s unique realisation of the world, since colour has no corresponding exterior existence, as an indivisible nexus of what is traditionally perceived as separated interiority and exteriority. Indeed, as Scott writes, Cendrars considered poetry’s role as an instrument of subjectivity; Cendrars’s lines reveal an intercalation with the machine through the train’s repetitive linear progression. Scott shows that Cendrars used a number of techniques such as assonance and bi- and triphrasal lines (Scott argues that the former reveals subjective juxtapositions and multiplications, whilst the latter creates both horizontal motion and chain of events), as well as the repetitive blending of sensation through the incremental development of terms such as rou´e > rouge > route > rouler > rouiller. These near onomatopoeias of auditory sensation matched to corporeality were also important in unifying self and environment through language, whilst allowing the orphic juxtaposition of Ferris wheel, locomotive wheel and the sun (I shall return to the idea of interrelated elements shortly).88 Like Cendrars, Sonia Delaunay emphasised the importance of synthesising interior experience with external representation, writing: ‘The authentic work of art is the expression of interior life, it is the poetry of the Creator.’89 For Delaunay, the specific arrangements of colour created a rhythm that reflected a Bergsonian dur´ee understood as fundamental to the subject’s perception of reality; the internal temporality of the subject could be made exterior through the representation of its subjective rhythm. Max Imdahl writes of the Delaunays’ ‘historic achievement, [which] accomplishes the shift from the outward, mobile optical sensations of space to the inward motion sensations of colours and light radically and with incomparable logic’.90 The observer bears witness to the harmonious and dissonant succession of images produced by the infusion of Delaunay’s colours and Cendrars’s text that are simultaneously perceived and incorporated within the act of reading. Cendrars’s emphasis on the external production of internal depth had a correspondence with Cubism. This is confirmed by his acknowledgement of Cubism’s eschewal of colour – if only to

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emphasise the difference. ‘By neglecting colour the cubists neglected the emotional grounds of a work of art – that sensuous, irrational, absurd, lyrical element which brings a painting to life surrealistically.’91 Simultaneous colour contrast could transform the object, or the idea of the object, into temporal, rhythmic and emotional experience through harmonious or dissonant effects. As Apollinaire wrote in June 1914, invoking the condition of music with Cendrars’s words and Delaunay’s colours: Blaise Cendrars and Mme Delaunay-Terk have realized a unique experiment in simultaneity, written in contrasts of colors in order to train the eye to read with one glance the whole of a poem, as an orchestra conductor reads with one glance the notes placed up and down on the bar, as one sees with a single glance the plastic elements printed on a poster.92

Despite Delaunay’s largely non-objective painting, as the poem ends with thoughts of Paris, the Eiffel Tower is incorporated into the arrangement of colour swirls and arcs. As Cendrars inscribed his name within the very lines of the poem, the painted Eiffel Tower was not only a narrative response but also the inclusion of Delaunay’s own signature. Indeed, the Eiffel Tower later figured prominently in Delaunay’s designs for a letterhead. It also appeared in the logo for her boutique ‘Casa Sonia’ that synthesised her name, the female body and the Eiffel Tower, continuing the motif of immersing self-identity within modernity (see Fig. 56). Buckberrough argues for the Eiffel Tower’s importance to the Delaunays, for whom it became ‘an ultimate symbol of simultaneity’.93 Indeed, Robert Delaunay, influenced by cubist developments, had begun reconfiguring the Eiffel Tower into multiple perspectives from 1910, in a series of paintings that dominated his career. For the Delaunays, the Tower was a totem of modernity: it could be seen across the city, whilst its lights and radio transmissions reached into space and time; its pinnacle was visible 120 miles away, containing a beacon that flashed every 90 seconds with prisms of the French tricolor.94 It had presided over the meeting of the globe in two World Fairs (Robert Delaunay had painted the 1900 World Fair in his Exposition 1900 of 1910); it housed a meteorological laboratory, and became the symbol for what Roger de la Fresnaye understood as a ‘conquest’ of gravity in his La conquˆete de l’air (1913), being the mid-way point for a competition to fly there and back to the landing 102

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strip within 30 minutes. In 1903, Eiffel created an aerodynamics laboratory on its second platform, then a wind tunnel at the tower’s base, which Buckberrough understands as ‘the birthplace of a scientific approach to air flight’.95 Although the powerful forms of electric light that it emitted would have interested the Delaunays, so too would its architecture presenting its structural interiority from simultaneous viewpoints. There was no exterior to penetrate in intuiting its depth, as the stability and impenetrability of its interior core was transposed to the visibly accessible exterior frame that rose out of the city. The physical presence of the tower, its unification of a great many points in Paris from which it could be observed, its technological relation to space and time, and its symbolic exterior presentation of an interior structure, symbolised modernist Simultan´eit´e. Buckberrough writes: It represented the universal rhythms of life activity (movement) in space (depth) that appealed to them both. It is not surprising, then, that Delaunay saw the tower as calling out to the universe in general and as binding and synthesizing all aspects of the universe into itself.96

Vision and the Fourth Dimension Robert Delaunay incorporated the tower as an icon in paintings such as Hommage a` Bl´eriot, synthesising it with the crowd, an airplane, an enlarged propeller and rotary engine within a number of coloured circles. Sonia Delaunay integrated the Eiffel Tower as a form of signature within the arcs and circular forms of La Prose Transsib´erien. In Prismes e´lectrique (Fig. 17) she juxtaposed her name with Cendrars’s and the title ‘La Prose Transsib´erien’ in the halos she perceived as emanating from electric light. Both the Delaunays celebrated Paris as an environment where nothing was static or linear, but instead temporal and sensate, where reality consisted of dynamic energy and force. Whilst the Delaunays’ work was connected to ‘cubist’ experiments, its linear ‘cobwebs’ did not excite like colour’s potential for bearing the representation of lived experience. It was this conceptualisation of colour that led Robert Delaunay to differentiate their work from the Futurist canvases exhibited at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, in February 1912, though he subsequently used the term ‘simultan´e’ to describe them.97 The Delaunay-Futurist 103

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controversy has been documented elsewhere98 although it is perhaps enough to say that the futurists and the Delaunays were mutually influential, particularly over their interpretation of shared sources – especially Romains and Bergson. Delaunay and Apollinaire fell out, in part, over the claims for innovating visual simultaneity. Nevertheless, Delaunay’s differentiation between his work and Futurism established an important distinction despite their apparent similarities and allows us to apprehend each more fully. Delaunay understood visual simultaneity as a ‘formation’ and ‘transition’ inherent in his earlier paintings La Ville de Paris (1911), the Tours (1910) and Les Villes (1909), which then influenced Cendrars’s poetry.99 Indeed, Delaunay cited Cendrars’s ideas as support for his own: ‘The word “simultaneous” is a term of craft (metier). Delaunay uses it when he works with everything: harbor, home, man, woman, plaything, eye, window, book; when he is in Paris, New York, Moscow, in bed, or outdoors.’100 Delaunay differentiated his art from the Cubists, who ‘crystallize themselves, turning their backs on life’,101 whilst arguing, that for futurism, ‘[t]he line is the limit. Color gives depth (not perspective, nonsequential, but simultaneous) and form and movement.’102 It is clear that Delaunay understood Futurism as principally linear, and differentiated it from simultaneous colour contrast, whilst its incorporation of the term ‘simultaneity’ was dependent on a mechanistic conception of reality. Delaunay commented that ‘Futurism is a machinist movement. It is not vital.’103 Gustav Vrieson agrees, arguing that any claims of the direct influence of Futurism on the Delaunays are ‘erroneous’ since the former was concerned with transforming an object in space whilst the Delaunays re-presented the transformed materiality of an object. Of this, Robert Delaunay wrote: This has nothing to do with the descriptive motion of the Cubist-Futurists, which the painters call dynamism. The movements I mean – I experience them vividly; I do not describe them. Through their contrasts, they are simultaneous – not successive.104

Therefore for Delaunay, Cubo-Futurism was concerned with expressing the process of successive interpenetration of matter. It did this by presenting the prior condition of objects in the process of interpenetration through which the viewer witnessed ‘force-lines’ connecting 104

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matter. Instead of expressing the process of interpenetrating forms, the Delaunays were concerned with the exterior rematerialisation of form into matter through colour harmonies that expressed, both as media and through form, an ontological imbrication of subject and world. Despite the tension created by the Delaunays’ and the Futurists shared vocabulary, its sources and the inevitable similarity of their aims to profoundly re-articulate the experience of being in the modern world, the Delaunays were not engaged with, nor attempted to ‘emulate’, Futurism’s technical achievements. The Delaunays’ depictions of multicoloured halos produced by electric street lamps were seen as equivalents to Robert’s experiments into the primordial sensations of light, that connected the halos of electric light, his investigations into the beam of light, ‘jewels’ of light and his fascination with the qualities of light the sun and moon produced in the summer of 1913. Following Goethe’s comparison of light halos with the concentricity of water ripples, and Leonardo’s own perception of the relation between ripples in water with the ‘spirit of the universe’, Robert wrote: Since I wish for identification of myself and others, there is everywhere a halo, halos, movements of colours. And I believe that this is the rhythm. To see is a movement . . . and the essential quality of painting is representation, the movement of vision which functions by becoming aware of reality.105

Spate notes that he used the words ‘halo’ [or] ‘halos’ when speaking of his desire for union with others and insisted that profendeur (the word Bergson used to indicate the interpenetration of mental states in the depths of consciousness) was the essential quality of Simultanist art.106

The Delaunays sought to unite disparate objects and movements by incorporating them within a topographical circular structure, emphasising their interrelation within the whole, but also to interrelate forms through incorporating halos into their form, producing an effect of the subject as inseparable from its environment. Robert Delaunay used this compositional structure in paintings such as Hommage a` Bl´eriot but also Soleil, Tour, Aeroplane (1913), Drame politique (1914), La Verseuse 105

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(1916), Man`ege electriques (1922) and Football, L’Equipe de Cardiff (1922– 3) among others. Sonia Delaunay similarly abstracted form in her series of studies for dancers, such as Danseuse, deuxi`eme version (1916), but also transformed her body in a self-portrait (Autoportrait, 1916) into multi-coloured concentric circles. She also used ‘halos’ within larger scenes such as Nature morte portugaise (1916), March´e au Minho (1916) and her unrealised project Homage to the Donor in 1916 where the crowd synthesises circular and human form within a larger structural circularity. Whilst Robert Delaunay was already sympathetic to Leonardo and Goethe’s arguments, of particular importance was Bergson’s bestselling work, which the Delaunays would have at the very least known through their cubist and futurist contemporaries. In Matter and Memory Bergson described the microcosm found in the atom as ‘a vortex ring, ever whirling in this continuity, and owing its properties to its circular form, its existence and consequently its individuality to its motion’.107 This was related to ‘the circulation of our inner phenomena’,108 and the macrocosmic ‘lines of force emitted in every direction from every centre bring to bear upon the influences of the whole material world’.109 (The futurist notion of ‘force-lines’ may also have its source here.) Bergson understood the universe as transitory and fluid: ‘when we consider any other given place in the universe we can regard the action of all matter as passing through it.’110 This opposed any privileging of the self, set apart from the universe, like the Liebnizian monad that Bergson ultimately saw as deprived ‘of all the qualities which give it life’.111 Indeed, the Delaunays’ use of arcs and circles reflected Bergson’s proposition in Creative Evolution that life ‘appears in its entirety as an immense wave which, starting from a centre, spreads outwards, and which on almost the whole of its circumference is stopped and converted into oscillation’.112 Here, Bergson speculated on the existence of God, and whilst this was omitted in his earlier Matter and Memory, he conceptualised such an existence as a force that is creation, life, action and freedom. He expressed this as ‘a centre from which worlds shoot out like rockets . . . I do not present this centre as a thing but as a continuity of shooting out’.113 The importance of becoming-in-space through time was well established in Bergson’s writing. We might consider Delaunay’s simultaneous dress to also embody, if indirectly, the philosophy of Bergson’s contemporary, Blondel.114 Blondel’s 1893 thesis, Action: Essay on a

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Critique of Life and a Science of Practice, argues that action is the source of existence. While Bergson’s philosophy was more influential in a wider sense, Blondel’s work informed both Bergson’s and William James’s,115 from which discussions of existence, temporality and dimensionality developed. Along with Boutroux, L´eon Oll´e-Laprune influenced Blondel, imparting the importance of subjectivity with its environment, that ‘the view-point of the mind is always interdependent with the life of the person’.116 ‘Existence’ consists of the mind’s interrelation with the body and a dynamic relation to its environment. Subsequently, Blondel’s philosophy stressed the relation between subjective agency and environment through action as constitutive of Being. In fact, Blondel intended ‘action’ to be understood as synonymous with existence; Blondel opened his thesis: ‘I act, but without even knowing what action is, without having wished to live, without knowing exactly either who I am or even if I am.’117 Contradicting the idea of the Cartesian cogito, Blondel claimed action as the origin of Being – to paraphrase: ‘I act therefore I am.’ Later in the thesis he wrote, ‘I am what I sense, at the moment I sense it’.118 He did not claim that existence was logically formulated, whereby only God and mathematics are certain but, on the contrary, argued that it was simultaneous with action. Being lies in the process of engaging with the Other. For Blondel, science, like mathematics, will never fully ‘deduce . . . the complex nature, the discontinuity and the heterogeneity of the objects it takes as the manner of its research’.119 The mathematical and scientific organisation of ‘phenomena into systems’120 is irreconcilable with an ecological conception of phenomenal consciousness. Anticipating existentialism, Blondel posited that existence derives from action, and although he maintained problematic terms such as ‘substance’, and an independent ‘man’, he attempted to transcend the rigidity of his terms by implying that they were not static, but unfolded through action. The notion that existence is inherently synthetic with space and time is important, as is his ethical consideration of others: ‘Just as we cannot conceive the world without taking it to pieces and particularizing it, so we cannot see or think about its parts without realizing their interdependence and relating them to the universe.’121 Writing later, after the death of his wife, becoming near blind and his enforced retirement, Blondel’s synthesis of philosophy and theology produced the proposal: ‘Both man and the world are becoming; the

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instability of the object is as great as that of the subject. In its essence the universe is incomplete, open to indefinite growth, ready for the drama of a history that in some sense will unveil it to itself.’122 Likewise, Bergson’s speculation of the theological within his work is very close to Blondel, aligning ‘God’ with in Creative Evolution, as ‘a continuity of shooting out . . . He is unceasing life, action, freedom.’123 The work of Jules Romains, whose theory of unanimisme influenced Gleizes and the members of the Abbaye de Cr´eteil, also profoundly influenced the Delaunays. Apollinaire had been on ‘very friendly terms’ with Romains from 1908, which had influenced the development of his poetry,124 and when the Delaunays spent January 1912 in Laon, Robert Delaunay ‘struck up an acquaintance’ with Romains at a restaurant. Their relationship continued when they returned to Paris.125 Robert Delaunay may have also reinforced his friendship with Romains at the meetings in Mercereau’s house. This happened after Delaunay met Le Fauconnier, who had become acquainted with the ex-Abbayist Gleizes. Here Delaunay met a number of figures from the Abbaye group along with Marinetti, who subsequently incorporated Romains’s ideas into his own concepts of Futurism, although these were ideas with which Delaunay would already have been familiar.126 The Delaunays, who were later involved with the group meeting at Puteaux, discussed Romains alongside Bergson.127 Indeed, Sonia Delaunay owned copies of Romains’s work, for which she made a special binding for Puissances de Paris (1911).128 Developing Bergson’s emphasis on centres, circularity and profendeur in uniting simultaneous elements within an interconnecting force of becoming, Romains wrote: ‘Circular emanations move out from my body . . . They go out to propagate my best energy.’129 In ‘La vie unanime’, Romains described the same circular force issuing from a source of energy through which the individual ripples into the world like a drop into water (again, recalling Leonardo and Goethe). As Buckberrough writes, both Romains’s unanimism and the theories of Futurism announced ‘the death of the individual and the rise of a universal force’.130 However, among the futurists only Luigi Russolo produced work with a clear connection to Romains’s imaginations of circularity.131 Other futurists were concerned with different ‘Romainsian’ ideas regarding the interconnection of bodies. These were discussed in the 1910 ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting’:

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their turn the houses throw themselves upon the motor bus and are blended with it.132

The Delaunays were less concerned with realising the process of interconnecting separate forms. However, their desire to transform consciousness of the dimensional world as it was known at the limits of figurative representation through their reconfiguration of objects as rhythmic energies was consistent with Futurism’s ambitions as presented in the manifesto: ‘Our renovated consciousness does not permit us to look upon man as the center of universal life . . . movement and light destroy the materiality of bodies.’ Directly relevant to the Delaunays’ imagination of Parisian modernity was Romains’s vision of the city in which he described the interconnected harmonies of its various parts (contrasting markedly to the mathematically linear imagination of the subject and the city after World War I, which I discuss in Chapter 3). Within Robert Delaunay’s explanation of his cityscape in Hommage a` Bl´eriot, is a profound sense of the ‘power of sun and power of earth,’ whereby ‘Man’ is ‘not copied, nor drawn, nor detached from his surroundings . . . [because of] flowing spatial relationships’.133 His words are close to Romains’s lines in ‘La vie unanime’:

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Our bodies penetrate the sofas upon which we sit, and the sofas penetrate our bodies. The motor bus rushes into the houses which it passes, and in

The attraction that ties the flight Of the earth and the planets to the sun And directs them as well towards one another.134

Delaunay’s fascination with aviation created a temporal connection between the modern and the primordial through light. This was articulated in colour and circular forms as techniques for interconnecting matter. Romains shared Bergson’s enthusiasm for circularity as a metaphor for existence that also related consciousness with the sun. Romains wrote: ‘The sun rotates, and I turn towards the sun.’135 Indeed, knowing Romains’s lines may have enhanced the Delaunays’ excitement at the new electric lighting of Paris: At the top of the boulevard the human twilight Crystallizes into an electric arc . . .

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Now, the light traces a circular track; The rhythms turn there for a second, subjugated; ... The spirit cedes its force to the electric influx.136

The Delaunays, then, subscribed to Bergson’s and Romains’s ideas of circular rhythm, movement and energy, and attempted to unite the activity of the city and the individual through the relative values inherent in simultaneous colour contrast. Whilst their representations of the subject and the city were informed by Bergson’s theories of temporality, Romains’s idea of the loss of the subject would have influenced the Delaunays. Traditional three-dimensional composition could not sustain the demands on time and space that the Delaunays made. Their representation of temporality, simultaneity, dynamism and becoming was aligned with increasingly popular idealist speculation over n-dimensional existences. Cendrars’s notion of ‘depth-reality-form-constructionrepresentation-life’, Bergson’s ideas regarding interior temporality, the ‘indivisible and thus substantial continuity of the inner life current’137 and Romains’s conception of intersubjectivity inform the Delaunays’ expression of the external rhythm of internal states harmonious with, and incorporated within, the universal energies that penetrate and interconnect matter. Imdahl writes that the Delaunays’ paintings ‘bear witness to the radical thesis that duration or vital movement of the world can be sensually experience as visual reality which can be programmed by painting’.138 Robert Delaunay acknowledged his debt to C´ezanne’s conceptualisation of the environment as continuous energy through his use of colour over linear fragmentation. However, he felt C´ezanne had failed because he emphasised the single object rather than pursuing total de-objectification. Similarly Delaunay praised Matisse for bringing ‘to the fore a new element’,139 whilst criticising his inability to progress from Impressionism and its ‘scaffolding of the drawing, with the result that its linear aspect always supports color in the picture as a whole’.140 However, he saw in Impressionism, particularly Renoir and Seurat, together with the Romanticist Delacroix, a liberation of painting through a conceptual representation of ‘light’. Seurat’s use of complementary colour contrasts for emotional effect fascinated Robert; colour could produce subjective sensations of harmony and dissonance, whilst simultaneous colour contrast occurred through a

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specific juxtaposition of colours. (Futurism was similarly influenced through Divisionism’s optical blending of directional lines of colour inspired by Vittore Grubicy’s reports on Seurat.) Colour’s auto-kinetic possibilities therefore appealed to both Robert and Sonia Delaunay; sensations of rhythm and harmony, unavailable through the internal principles of linear perspective, could be produced through colour arrangements. Robert Delaunay’s work was perhaps more scientifically informed, additionally influenced by the work of Ogden Rood that made accessible Helmholtz’s developments of vision science,141 whilst Sonia Delaunay’s art remained more intuitive. She arrived at her own particular relationship to colour influenced through Impressionism and her early commitment to Fauvism and, despite her knowledge of scientific theory, was less directly affected by it in seeking the effects produced by simultaneous colour contrast. As Lucy Adelman and Michael Compton suggest, the interest of modern artists in non-Euclidean and n-dimensional geometries related to a concern with anti-materialist philosophy, a concept that threedimensional perspective could not sustain.142 Similarly, John Gage writes that the resurgence of idealist philosophy in the late nineteenthcentury supported painter’s claims for the existence of a ‘higher’, fourdimensional reality that they attempted to access.143 However, rather than these being unique innovations, Linda Dalrymple Henderson has demonstrated the prevalence and influence of n-dimensional and nonEuclidean concepts in literature of the nineteenth and early twentiethcentury. The radical philosophies of Romains and Bergson were discussed within the Puteaux group, influencing their ideas about a dimension of reality untranslatable by three-dimensional models, and which could not be scientifically analysed, but only intuited through psychophysical subjectivity. Non-Euclidean mathematics gained attention through its challenge to existing regimes of time and space.144 Parisian artists engaged with concepts surrounding the fourth dimension without needing to become fluent in scholarly discourse, since it was popularised within different forms of literature. A number of books and articles were published, such as Maurice Boucher’s Essai sur l’hyperspace (1903) and E.P. Jouffret’s Trait´e e´lementaire de g´eometrie a` quatre dimensions (1903) (which directly influenced Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass). Charles Leadbeater’s The Other Side of Death (1903) was translated into French in 1910, as was Edwin Abbott Abbott’s Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by a Square (1884). The newspaper Le

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Th´eosophie contained articles on this subject, including Revel’s ‘L’Esprit et l’espace: La Quatri`eme Dimension’ (an account of Leadbeater’s, Charles Hinton’s and Poincar´e’s thought). In an article in La Phalange (1909), Pierre Valin discussed Poincar´e and Bergson with reference to Lobachevsky and Riemann. Meanwhile, science fiction literature, a genre Henderson notes as ‘a major force’,145 became popular. H.G. Wells’s tales regarding the fourth dimension were published in Mercure de France, whilst Gaston de Pawlowski’s Voyage pays de la quatri`eme dimension (1912) was serialised in Comoedia, the journal established by Ricciotto Canudo, who was part of the Delaunays’ circle.146 Cox writes: ‘The idea that painting could now represent the Fourth Dimension, and that the Fourth Dimension was time in the sense of duration or time experienced, gained enormous currency at the end of 1911.’147 Poincar´e’s La Science et l’hypoth`ese (1902), La Valeur de la science (1904) and Science et m´ethode (1908) were influential in the popular dissemination of ideas surrounding the fourth dimension in journals such as La Phalange, Le Th´eosophie and Comoedia. Henderson writes: ‘If early Cubism is to be associated with any contemporary philosophical or scientific movement, then the conventionalism of Poincar´e provides not only a fundamental similarity of outlook but also the historic connections to justify such a comparison.’148 Indeed, Gleizes and Metzinger’s Du ‘Cubisme’ derived directly from (mis)interpretations of La Science et l’hypothese.149 However, Henderson argues that a number of ideas on the fourth dimension circulated among the modernist avant-garde. In 1910, the American painter Max Weber, who was in contact with Matisse, Metzinger, Apollinaire and Picasso, published ‘The Fourth Dimension from a Plastic Point of View’ in the New York journal Camera Work. In 1911 Apollinaire discussed the fourth dimension in a lecture. La Fresnaye wrote that this was successfully received (though Cottington notes that Apollinaire’s words led one audience member to storm out).150 Apollinaire also emphasised the importance of the fourth dimension and mathematics in ‘La Peinture nouvelle’ in the April 1912 issue of Les Soir´ees de Paris. In September 1912, Mercereau published a review of Julian Benda’s Le Bergsonisme, commenting on the impact of non-Euclidean mathematicians. Even before Du ‘Cubisme’, Gleizes defined the fourth dimension as ‘beyond the three dimensions of Euclid . . . the fourth dimension,

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which is to say the figuration of space, the measure of the infinite’.151 In 1913 Metzinger referred to it in his eponymous Nature morte (4me dimension). Shortly afterwards, Apollinaire published Les Peintres Cubistes, in which he described the fourth dimension in terms reminiscent of Bergson and Gleizes, as ‘engendered by the three known dimensions: It represents the immensity of space eternalizing itself in all directions at any given moment. It is space itself, the dimension of the infinite; the fourth dimension endows objects with plasticity.’152 (It is possible that Apollinaire’s understanding of the fourth dimension derived principally from Bergson’s similar description in Time and Free Will, with its proposal that mechanical calculations of ‘bodies in space’ are limited, but the inner duration of consciousness, ‘the melting of states of consciousness into one another’,153 is different as memory synthesises impressions within perception and ‘we create for them a fourth dimension of space’.154 Indeed, Bergson’s notion in Creative Evolution of energy circularly bursting out like ‘fire-works’ anticipates Apollinaire’s notion that space is created through ‘all directions at any given moment’). Among the ‘enormous currency’ of popular n-dimensional and nonEuclidean works, Henderson understands Poincar´e’s contribution as being ‘unquestionably’ important.155 Although Poincar´e’s work was published, the Puteaux group were informed about, and probably introduced to it – and that of Jouffret’s on Poincar´e156 – through Maurice Princet, an insurance actuary and keen mathematician. Princet had earlier been part of the group around Picasso at least since 1907 (the year he painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon). Whilst Picasso denied having discussed mathematics or the fourth dimension, as Henderson argues, this seems ‘highly unlikely’, especially once Metzinger was included within the group, since his theoretical inclinations found Princet’s ideas a source of inspiration.157 Indeed, Daniel Robbins notes Metzinger’s remark: ‘Princet marvelled at how rapidly Picasso understood him, when by contrast Matisse could barely get through “a work of vulgarisation” on hyperspace.’158 Andr´e Salmon understood Princet’s role in providing a mathematical rationalisation for the cubist’s idealist destruction of perspectival reality, commenting that Princet ‘preoccupies himself above all with painters who disdain ancient perspective. He praises them for no longer trusting the “illusory” optics of the past.’159 Princet’s knowledge of mathematical

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principles in challenging classical spatial regimes would certainly have appealed to Robert Delaunay, concerned in turn with uncovering perceptual laws in the process of transforming consciousness through vision. For the Delaunays, the fourth dimension was embodied in a realm of lived experience proceeding from the scientific, literary and philosophical ideas of Chevreul, Romains, Cendrars and Apollinaire, and Bergson that enhanced their visual aesthetic. In fact, Robert Delaunay referred to Princet when discussing colour synchronism: ‘These first measures and proportional dimensions give an infinite boost to our psyche, which is always an attentive (see Princet), impersonal and inexhaustible source’160 and also referred to ‘my friend Princet’ in a letter to Kandinsky on his research into the synaesthesia of colour and music.161 Cendrars reiterated the link in his essay The Eiffel Tower, citing Princet as ‘an enormous influence on the first generation of cubist painters . . . to whom they gave the first of their plastic works and who immediately devised mathematical formulae for them’.162 Since Princet had read, and even lectured on, Poincar´e, it is possible – though it remains doubtful – that he discussed the work of Einstein within this milieu – especially given Poincar´e’s important influence on Einstein. Whilst certain themes regarding the reconceptualisation of objects into relative motion appear similar, they can perhaps be attributed to the influences of Chevreul, Poincar´e, Bergson and Romains. Arthur Miller’s connection between Picasso and Einstein remains problematic. As he himself admits the extent of any influence remains unknown,163 whilst Henderson resolutely declares the cubists were not influenced by ‘Einstein’s relativising of simultaneity’.164 Whilst the Delaunays were not specifically interested in the geometric representation of the fourth dimension, Princet’s theorising of the artwork certainly appealed to Robert Delaunay’s interest in calculable laws behind objective reality. Always seeking to justify their researches, the Delaunays saw in Princet a thinker after Seurat, Rood, Helmholtz and Chevreul, who could justify their work on colour relativity and its psychophysical effects. Although Sonia Delaunay was perhaps less directly influenced than her husband, she later explained that her work nonetheless incorporated the ‘scientific interaction and classifiable [colour relations] according to Chevreul’s laws of simultaneous contrast’.165 She specifically cited the variance in the subjective

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We divide colors, or rather we divide the shades of colors into hot and cold. We begin with a pure color element and create planes, forms, depths, perspectives through it. No longer line or chiaroscuro: these have been replaced by photography and its descriptive cerebral aspect.166

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effect of colours juxtaposed to create dissonance in order to solicit a response:

Traditional forms of linear representation – its arrest of temporality, the fragmentation of space and the production of a demobilised spectator – are maintained within photography, its very existence anathematic to Delaunay. She believed modern visuality lay not in photography’s reproduction of optical conventions, but in the relations and rhythms of colours to ‘re-create nature more truly and accurately than chiaroscuro. The color range conceived in this manner becomes a more vibrant reality’.167 Spate comments: Each painter went through a phase in which he tried to express this form of consciousness . . . it was form, not specific image, which could embody the experience they sought, since specific images tied them to the world of verbal concepts and they wished to transcend verbal consciousness.168

Sonia Delaunay sought to express a simultaneous condition within the arrangement of shapes through colour. Indeed, the word ‘shape’ is unhelpful here as it assumes rigid, Euclidean form. ‘Direction’ or ‘movement’ more adequately describes Delaunay’s colours, for no shape was intended to be static; colour and movement vitiates shape and line whilst producing sensation and rhythm. Colours replaced form in the way verbs replaced nouns for describing the world, since the static principle of representation no longer expressed the transformation of time and space within the technological dynamism of the modern city. The simultaneity of life was more faithfully expressed through colour’s relative values. The Delaunays believed the simultaneous relationships of colour could present a new visual consciousness, gaining access to a fourth dimension as the relativity and kineticism of their works contained some of the non-Euclidean ideas in circulation. In the Delaunays’ work geometry and the line – although it remained integral to elements of Cubism and Futurism as the principle that was subsequently 115

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undermined – was overturned as the condition of construction for the movement of colours that reflected the idealist notion of an unstable reality, whilst interconnecting simultaneous matter. For the Delaunays in this prewar moment, colour and static geometry were not in fact indivisible but, on the contrary, irreconcilable. Robert Delaunay wrote of his own work in 1912: ‘You speak to me of geometry. I do not see geometry . . . my conviction is completely different.’169 Some years later, he maintained: ‘Abstract, living painting is not made up of geometric elements . . . but in the movement of the rhythmically constitutive elements of the coloured parts of the work.’170 Much more directly, as late as 1938, Delaunay reasserted: ‘There is no geometry in the simultaneous craft.’171 Yet even in 1926, when the Delaunays’ art was becoming increasing formal, Sonia Delaunay argued, in a lecture given at the Sorbonne, that ‘[i]f there are geometric forms, it is because these simple and manageable elements have appeared suitable for the distribution of colors whose relations constitute the real object of our search, but these geometric forms do not characterize our art’.172 Therefore, whilst she admitted the possibility of geometry entering their postwar work, she is quick to reject its influence in ‘characterising’ it. Indeed, Sonia Delaunay rejected geometric abstraction as a ‘false art’,173 whilst Robert Delaunay, in his belief that the universe was of a simultaneous harmony, completely rejected its geometric conceptualisation: ‘if one fragments the object, “one fragments the universe”.’174 Bergson critiqued the fragmentation of subjectivity within linear geometry, since it ‘congeal[s] this flowing either into an immense solid sheet, or into an infinity of crystallized needles’.175 Through its harmonising of colour and an inherent condition of becoming we might understand Sonia Delaunay’s simultaneous dress as resisting the reduction of the body into a set of tri-dimensional points. The dress is not a finished ‘whole’, but a process of movement through time. To conceive of her dress as fragmented is to deny its temporality. Already the Delaunays’ auto-kinetic canvases undermined the stasis and difference inherent to Western thought, whereby external spatial symbols signify the referent’s dependency upon relative fixity to construct meaning. Language works by altering the ‘thing’, arresting it through naming, and as a symbol it then elides the field of process in which it is constituted. Through its linguistic interpellation, the thing in question loses qualities outside of its condition within the

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symbolic order. Accordingly, classical representation reifies sensation into objects. Understanding of the Delaunays’ work should therefore exist outside of the prior objective condition inherent in the geometry or the ‘fragment’ that omits conditions of matter, time and perception. However, the conceptual principles of the system of representation become the truth of seeing conceptualised through language and thus become ontological commitments. Representation cannot express that which is outside the principle of its condition. (As Derrida observed, a sign that fully accorded with the object of its representation would no longer be recognisable as a sign.)176 Leonardo’s dissatisfaction with linear perspective derived from its inability to represent the temporal. Water cannot be fragmented, only rigid bodies can, but to assume things exist as such conforms to an a priori mode of thought. Robert Delaunay wrote: “‘Forms” is a prehistoric, scholastic word.’177 Like Gleizes, the Delaunays formulated a conceptual system of representation to describe the relation between the subject in time without referring to classical structures of space and objectivity. They rejected form and figure for something itself prior to the line: the sensation of phenomena, subjective and intuitive response to the fundamental embodied existence of colour. The Delaunays’ work contributed to the artistic break with the EuclideanCartesian spatial model, emphasising colour as the true representation of (intersubjective) reality. The Delaunays’ art almost rejects thinking in dimensions: colour erases boundaries, edges, discrete properties, as everything is an intensity of energy in perpetual engagement with the environment. Energy interconnects the universe, and objects lose their inherent alienation in the painting of matter rather than form, whereby the world loses its inherent condition of alienation. The model of disembodied optics within the tradition of three-dimensional representation is undermined by the Delaunays’ use of colour to express their understanding of existence and reality. The sensate, embodied subject was reinstated with the body as the principal source of perceptual knowledge. Instead, Le Bal Bullier (1913) (Fig. 20) – Sonia Delaunay’s painting of the interior of a Montparnasse dancehall – harmonised the body within a modern environment, its figures dancing the tango in the artificially illuminated night. Bodies became moving swathes of colour – reminiscent of Rousseau’s dancing figures in Le centenaire de l’independance (1892) – as the boundary between figure and milieu

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Figure 20. Sonia Delaunay, Le Bal Bullier, 1913

was disrupted. Figuration became matter and energy through light, sound, and movement. The body was immersed in a synaesthetic environment, form coloured into a rhythmic extension of music. Whilst for Descartes imagination was an unstable basis from which to proceed with an enquiry of existence, Sonia Delaunay celebrated it as the basis from which the world was experienced, ‘a new language of color was achieved from which all description had been banished. The imagination played free.’178 Robert Delaunay wrote later that she created her harmonies and rhythms of color from life itself . . . It’s truly the rhythm of the modern city, its prism, its illumination, the colors of its river. In short, the surface of the fabric, intimate with the surroundings of everyday life, presents something like visual movements comparable to chords in music.179

The notion of synaesthesia as a fundamental condition of embodied perception and experience undermined the conception of a rational Cartesian subject. The Delaunays’ work emphasised sensation and colour, time and experience, memory and the present as processual components in knowledge through perception. Cendrars explained the importance of colour to their project: ‘Colour is a sensuous element. The senses are reality. That is why the world is coloured. The senses build. Then intelligence arises. Colours sing.’180 Sonia Delaunay later wrote: ‘I consider the sonority and the visual movement of colours virgin territory from the point of view of the visual arts.’181 Rather than the visual reproduction of objective space and time, of an exterior conception of experience that contained within its ideology a domination of nature instead of its harmonisation, Delaunay expressed 118

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the body’s critical role in the subjective internalisation of phenomena to produce experience and knowledge. Colour and temporality, as fundamental processes for knowledge through embodied perception, now became the principal basis of subjective representation. The Delaunays’ projects developed alongside that of Kandinsky, whom Sonia Delaunay met through Elizabeth Epstein in 1905. Epstein later noted Robert’s work in the 1911 Salon des Ind´ependants and sent photographs to Kandinsky, who sent back images of his own paintings together with an invitation for Robert to exhibit at Der Blaue Reiter exhibition later that year.182 Epstein and Sonia Delaunay subsequently translated Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911) for Robert Delaunay. Additionally, Franz Marc excitedly wrote to Kandinsky after visiting Robert, claiming he was ‘eliminating representation altogether’.183 In 1912 Kandinsky exhibited three of his ‘improvised’ paintings at the Salon des Ind´ependants, and later that year he and Marc visited the Delaunays.184 Paul Klee, who exhibited with Der Blaue Reiter, translated Robert’s essay ‘On Light’ into German in 1913, and all were influenced by Chevreul and Rood’s research.185 Walden’s Herbstsalon exhibition in 1913 showed Sonia Delaunay’s simultaneous projects alongside her husband’s paintings. Her works included La Prose du Transsib´erien, the binding for Les Pˆaques a` New York, a painted toy chest, her ‘simultaneous’ fashions and, in response to Cendrars’s work Zenith, the first ‘poster-poem’. These were exhibited alongside the futurists, the German painters Marc, Macke and Klee, and also Chagall.186 In a letter to Kandinsky, Robert Delaunay wrote of their shared artistic interests and his ‘loosening up of the laws comparable to musical notes I have discovered, based on research into the transparency of color, which have forced me to find color movement’.187 He later commented that ‘this was a visual art whose forms, rhythms, developments all start from painting as music.’188 The Delaunays’ work incorporated colour’s ability to represent an unstable world with mechanisms of perception in the simultaneous transformation of the environment. They thus anticipated contemporary neuroscientific developments that demonstrate that the brain synthesises responses to shape, size, texture, motion and orientation with colour perception. Vision is an assemblage of processes involving form, surface, spatial relationships and movement, and colour perception is simultaneously interconnected through the processing of orientation,

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space, motion, pattern, movement and memory.189 Kandinsky’s notes on composition seem to recognise this bioceptual condition: If two circles are drawn and painted respectively yellow and blue, a brief contemplation will reveal in the yellow a spreading movement out from the center, and a noticeable approach to the spectator. The blue, on the other hand, moves into itself, like a snail retreating into its shell, and draws away from the spectator. The eye feels stung by the first circle while it is absorbed into the second.190

Visual experience is understood through bodily references to movement, speed, orientation, identification with another body and pain. Robert Delaunay referred to the interaction, vitality and subjugation of colour as constituting the ‘dimensional space of the picture’.191

´ La Robe Simultanee The Delaunays’ art was therefore an experience of light, of the sun and moon, of universal rhythms and the energy of an inner being. They considered their work to be simultaneously atavistic and modern, since light – as colour – connects time and space without having a materiality itself. It is the fundamental condition of embodiment, by which the subject has a world. Harmonious and dissonant relations between colours were considered the most primordial basis of sight, and the foundation from which knowledge and experience was derived. The line had no existence in the act of perception. If human existence existed beyond three dimensions, as Raynal pointed out, ndimensional space could be penetrated through the primordial relation to the world. Buckberrough notes: Physical objects could only be approached by considering the energy forces around them . . . [and the] human body had normally been considered a physical object. It was suddenly being examined in relation to the energy force outside of it (the universe) and the energy force within it (the mind).192

Sonia Delaunay regarded their work as ‘expressions of states of the soul.’193 120

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Sonia Delaunay’s Le Bal Bullier rendered visual her husband’s ‘Romainsian’ ideas concerning the ‘flowing spatial relationships’ of human and the world, and the ‘vitality of colour’ in giving presence to this relationship. Figures bleed into an environment, and shed their objective alienation within a structure that incorporates them. (We have seen the same effects within Cubism, and Chapter 3 will follow the ideological transformation of emancipatory techniques of visualising human subjectivity into rationalised and systematic processes of control and order.) The three-dimensional relationship between object and space within linear perspective dissolves into a harmonious topographical rhythm. Damase suggests Delaunay’s painting has affinities with Degas’ theme of dancing, but that his representation of movement remains part of an ‘intellectual process’ in which the ballerina is clearly distinguished from her background. Delaunay’s work suggests no ‘break in the continuity between the figure and the background’.194 Instead, Damase argues, there is a ‘subjective impression of the dancer himself, lost in a turmoil of noise and movement’,195 that reconciled Gauguin’s use of colour with a ‘cinematographic’ approach to representation; the painting becomes a form of screen on which the spectator witnessed the rhythmic relation of the subject and world. Damase points out that Sonia Delaunay’s painting is quite different to futurist images of dancehalls that expressed movement in order to decompose it.196 I have already demonstrated the difference between the futurist notions of bodily interpenetration and the Delaunays’ synthetic recomposition of matter, and as Buckberrough notes, unlike the futurist dance halls, Le Bal Bullier does not contain the individual.197 Instead, this large painting (0.97m × 3.90m) reflected Romains’s conception of the crowd as collective energy: ‘The group is transformed into a new life, a new organism with its own distinct rhythm. The scene is precisely such a unity of individuals within a new state of existence.’198 Le Bal Bullier is therefore an artistic precursor to Sonia Delaunay’s dissolution of her own body into a material environment of coloured intensities. Imagining her corporeality within the environment, articulated through Le Bal Bullier, Sonia Delaunay reconstructed herself through the robe simultan´ee as a fluid, rhythmic subject of modernity. Echoing Bergsonian ideas, Spate writes that the Delaunays’ work gave its viewer ‘an intense consciousness of the essence of life, of its movement, energy, dynamism. For Delaunay, this consciousness could approach the mystic consciousness of the imminent dissolution of the self in

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Figure 21. Sonia Delaunay, La Robe Simultan´ee, 1913

the impersonal movement of the universe.’199 Sonia Delaunay herself wrote of a profound transformation of conceiving of the subject and its relation to the world, as she wrote in her autobiography: ‘One cannot go further as long as man isn’t changed within.’200 According to Spate, Cendrars was at the Bal Bullier in the summer of 1913 when Sonia Delaunay arrived in her simultaneous dress, accompanied by her husband in a matching suit He recalled futurist fashions were directly influenced by her dress, as its Parisian affiliates telephoned Milan with details of the Delaunays’ clothes.201 They 122

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Figure 22. Sonia Delaunay, Danseuse, 1917

frequented the hall on Thursdays and Sundays.202 The dancehall, like Cendrars’s poetry, directly inspired a response in her: she had already painted her impression of the nightclub, and also a subjective simultaneous impression of dance, rhythm, and the city in Tango MagicCity (1913). She later wrote: I took up the movements of dance (tango, flamenco), which means the movement of color. Rhythm was introduced into painting by color (Gleizes spoke much later about ‘time’ in painting. He had discovered rhythm). This movement was not descriptive as it was with the futurists, but purely plastic, optical, and lyric.203

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other European capitals and reaching New York. Delaunay did not dance herself, but was mesmerised by the movement and rhythm. The rhythms made us want to make the colors dance, too. Everyday wear as well as Sunday clothes were really monotonous and drab. We wanted to end this general state of mourning. It was up to us to find a way. I myself wore my first simultaneous dresses.204

The dress, according to Robert Delaunay, initiated ‘new laws of color and technique. Dresses were no longer just a piece of material draped in a fashionable way, but a composite whole, like a living painting, so to speak, or a sculpture built on living forms’.205 Sonia Delaunay’s simultaneous designs were a development of, but firmly located within, the context of the Delaunays’ philosophical concepts and her own translation of them into an applied decorative art. Robert Delaunay also wore Sonia Delaunay’s fashions, a suit that according to Apollinaire, was ‘infinitely varied with color . . . purple jacket, beige vest, black trousers. Here is another: red coat, with a blue collar, red socks, yellow and black shoes, black trousers, green jacket, sky-blue vest, tiny red tie.’206 Meanwhile, Sonia Delaunay’s dress ‘swirled with a set of interlocking arcs of colour across the body’. Apollinaire wrote: Here is a description of one of Mme Sonia Delaunay’s simultaneous dresses: purple dress, wide purple-and-green belt, and under the jacket, a corsage bodice divided into brightly coloured zones, delicate as faded, where the following colors are mixed: antique rose, yellow-orange, Nattier blue, scarlet, etc., appearing on different materials, so that wooden cloth, taffeta, tulle, flannelette, watered silk, and peau de soie are juxtaposed.207

The dress contrasted primary and secondary colours: a violet and green belt slashed the body of red, yellow and blue, and different materials contributed to the overall effects of colour. Delaunay believed that she produced ‘for the first time a form which was established not by dark and light but by the depth of colour relations themselves’.208 The dress was worn, continuously unfolding itself in space through time; it contained the coloured arcs, distorted geometric shapes and spreads of colour found in her previous work, but further deformed static shape through the movement of these coloured surfaces according to the rhythmic dance of the human body. Delaunay believed ‘the 124

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real new painting will begin when people understand that colour has a life of its own, that the infinite combinations of colour have a poetry and a language . . . It is a mysterious language in tune with the vibrations, the life itself, of colour. In this area, there are new and infinite possibilities.’209 Like La Prose du Transsib´erien, the simultaneous dress fashioned the internal experience of the subject’s condition within modernity. We might consider La Robe simultan´ee as embodying the subject’s relation to the world, not through modernity’s objectification and regimentation of bodies in time as found in Taylorism, but rather through the subject’s dur´ee and ‘lived’ experience. Christopher Townsend refers to Roger Allard’s cubist notion that ‘rhythm is a subjective effect which one produces in order to reflect on the world and one’s place in within it’, whilst proposing that, ‘Futurist rhythm is an effect of that world on the corporeal surface by which one is produced as a subject.’210 The subject within Le Bal Bullier, and indeed Delaunay herself with the simultaneous dress, expressed a rhythmic relation between the subject and world through a surface articulation of a subjective condition. Delaunay’s display of corporeality articulated the dynamic effect of the world in the production of the subject synthesised with the subject’s production of the world. As Townsend argues: ‘The “simultaneous dress” fits into this space, not as critique, not as internalising of rhythm, but as repetition and extension of its surface effects: rather than seeking to find itself, the subject is lost in the play of modernity on corporeality.’211 Sonia Delaunay’s appeal to a transformed consciousness is based on conceiving a loss of the subject within modernity. For Delaunay, the reproduction of subjectivity is folded back into modernity through the body’s occupation of a borderline of consciousness and the environment. Indeed, we might argue her simultaneous dress is not just a repetition of modernity’s surface effects, but a re-imagination of the subject’s materiality within the fabric of the environment. The titular line of Cendrars’s poem dedicated to Delaunay’s fashion is ‘Sur la robe elle a un corps’. Her corporeality is dematerialised into a rhythmically fluid subject within the environment it moves through, embodying a simultaneous and relative dimension of existence. The specific rematerialisation of corporeality as a surface to imagine one’s intersubjective relation with the world is emphasised not just by Cendrars’s 1914 dedication, but also anticipated in his neglected

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poem ‘La Roue’, written in 1912. This text would have influenced Delaunay’s concept of simultaneous dematerialisation of corporeality. ‘La Roue’ appeared in a 1914 issue of Les Soir´ees de Paris, but was part of Cendrars’s ‘S´equences’ that he chose not to republish, and is missing from collections of his works.212 In it, Cendrars merged a female body and a wheel, a fusion that resonated with the Delaunays’ own ideas surrounding the circular, halos, bodies, and their interrelation, as demonstrated within Sonia Delaunay’s later Danseuse (Fig. 22). In ‘La Roue’ Cendrars wrote: A woman rose up, nude, dazzling, clothed only by her hair. Her radiance did not come from explicit beauty. It was internal, as if, through her carnal body, another body had shone forth, intermittently, through a half-opening: ideal! The internal Nude. ... She kept silent. She was a hub; all the spokes converged upon her from the rim of the world. The wheel turned, carried on through the night, struck sparks from universe to universe as if from cobble stones; the spokes writhed like lightning flashes and the Woman remained, unmoving, at the center of that whirlwind of desires unfurled into infinity.213

As with his later influential montage sequence that synthesised man and locomotive through speed, rhythm and juxtaposition in Abel Gance’s film La Roue of 1919 (whose formal properties L´eger described as elevating ‘the art of film to the plane of the plastic arts’214 through object fragmentation and plastic synthesis), Cendrars’s poetic composition here combined a woman’s body with the temporal rhythm of a rotating wheel, harmonised with the universe’s unfolding. Anticipating Delaunay’s simultaneous dress, Cendrars imagined the internal beauty of the woman displayed upon ‘another body’, that of ‘The internal Nude’, a subject produced through incorporation within a hierarchy of simultaneous rhythms. Given their close association, Delaunay would almost certainly have read Cendrars’s poem in 1912, at a time she was experimenting with simultaneous designs on fabric, and it must have therefore had a direct bearing upon Delaunay’s robe simultan´ee the following year. The poem testifies to Delaunay’s re-presentation of simultaneous being, describing existence as an indivisible bionomic between subject and world, rather than the cubo-futurist expression of form and its deformation. 126

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Delaunay would have similarly been influenced by Romains’s vision of the body within space and time, not as a process of interpenetration but as the simultaneous merging of two dynamic energies articulated through colour contrast. We can consider Delaunays’ interpretation of Romains’s words in ‘La vie unanime’ as more literal, especially with regard to the first and last lines: The eyes do not see separate forms . . . Each thing prolongs another. The metal Of the rails, the dazzling squares, the entrances To the houses, the passers-by, the horses, the carriages Join each other and join my body. We are indistinct.215

Therefore, whilst cubo-futurism articulates process in the deformation of bodies, the Delaunays describe an ontological indistinction. Romains once said that unanimism was ‘a discovery . . . a new perception of things by the soul’.216 However, within ‘discovery’ was the process of ‘becoming conscious’ (‘prendre conscience’) of modern experience, and a notion of the human subject as a monad that Romains considered ‘an archipelago of loneliness’.217 Indeed, Romains’s notion corresponded to Bergson’s belief that the monadic subject was emptied of everything that gave it life, for he deplored classical rationalism that ‘fragments . . . in order to reconstitute the unity of the person’, producing what he felt was modernity’s ‘shadows of the self ’.218 We might therefore consider the cubo-futurist notion of ‘becoming conscious’ as interpenetrating matter, whilst the Delaunays represented interpenetrated matter re-placed into the space of its inception, and becoming through the streaming of one plane or arc against another: the dance of the colours on the body. As Townsend argues: Rather, it is simultaneously concerned with the movement of one plane over or beneath another; that is, with the intercalation of one entity, the human subject, within another, its ‘landscape’. Delaunay’s fashion is both designed for, and first worn in, the environs of a nightclub – the Bal-Bullier in Montmartre [sic]. At this point the dress becomes not only a phenomenon within modernity – an item of fashion – it becomes an articulation of the modernist body in space, an expression of what it meant to be a mobile,

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fragmentary subject in a nightclub at the same time as it contributes to those conditions.219

Robert Delaunay commented that the dress was a ‘living canvas’, yet it is misconceived as an arrangement of geometric forms, partly because of prior conceptions surrounding its status as a canvas. Rather, the dress was made to express a ‘mobile’ subject in a dynamic environment. However, when framed into a canvas, compressed by glass on exhibition, the kinetic object undergoes a ‘material’ shift. In that condition it becomes an assemblage of sutured geometric fragments, but no longer a ‘simultaneous dress’. Through movement, the dress transformed its surface relative to time. Gleizes attempted to paint Jacques Nayral based upon the flow of kinaesthetic memory into the moment of painting that transformed the subject into a harmonious imbrication of figure and environment, perception and representation. Delaunay’s simultaneous dress, however, is radical in the sense that it must be worn; it is exists when given a body. On this condition, identity becomes an event. Sonia Delaunay’s project emerged from the context of a critical shift in philosophical thought, whether directly from Romains, Bergson and Cendrars, or indirectly, such as affinity with Blondel’s thought, but also visually through the influence of Robert Delaunay, Impressionism, Chevreul and cubist associates. These contributed to her articulation of a condition of modernity regarding dynamism and duration, action and existence, echoing Blondel’s proposition that ‘knowledge is derivative of action and that it obtains its justification and its reality from it’.220 Through action, subjective agency shapes, and is shaped by, the environment of which it is a part. La Robe simultan´ee similarly rethinks and reacts the relation of the body in time and space as undergoing a process of unfolding whose completion is perpetually deferred. Through action, the mind-body dualism collapses, as existence is an indivisible synthesis of presence and action. In an applied consequence of Delaunay’s concern with motion and rhythm in space and time, the simultaneous dress was consequently a direct challenge to the fashions imposed upon women. Apollinaire wrote: ‘On Thursdays and Sundays, you have to go to Bullier’s to see Monsieur and Madame Robert Delaunay, who are busy instituting the reform of clothing.’221 Delaunay’s dress was more practical, designed for movement in harmony with female bodily rhythms, as she herself critiqued the process of immobilisation of, and writing upon, the

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body by contemporaneous designers. She insisted her work was instead ‘made for women, and all were constructed in relation to the body’.222 Although she wrote this in 1968, she still cites 1913 as the point from which her concern with the becoming inherent in the body’s freedom within fashion developed, ‘I felt the need to make a dress to correspond to what we were doing. That was in 1913 . . . From that point on, my dresses were designed in accordance with the female form.’223 Robert Delaunay saw her work as responding to the ‘trapped’ female body, and understood that she was responding to the dynamic relation between the body, time and space, since corporeality extended into ‘the very surroundings in which her models move’.224 Sonia Delaunay’s material abstractions also challenged contemporaneous fashion designs. Robert Delaunay wrote that her simultaneous designs were far removed from popular figurative motifs such as flowers and decorative landscapes, but also the later ‘superficial’ incorporation of modernity into female fashion, such as variations of Mondrian and Op Art.225 On the contrary, he believed that Sonia’s materials innovated the notion of ‘functional structure’ within its design, fabric, manufacture and fashion.226 He reflected on the close relation between the female body and fashion: form expands or contracts according to the woman who wears it, according to the way in which the woman herself is built – which gives a mark of authenticity both to the woman and to the dress. No more of those dull nondescript dresses – the personality is now free to express itself and to come into play.227

Indeed, Sonia Delaunay’s work in fashioning identity and mobilising female form has a context in previous sartorial changes from the midnineteenth-century. Fashion historians agree that this period contained significant, even drastic, transformations in female fashion as the redefinition of acceptable femininity occurred through a number of cultural changes. Technological advances such as machine lace, aniline dyes and steel-framed crinolines increased the expressivity and mobility of the clothed body whilst health reformers criticised the damage restrictive dress caused to the female body. The decline of the corset saw a rise in popularity of ‘tea-gowns’, leading to high-waisted evening (and then day) dresses influenced by the Ballets Russes, the couture fashions of Paul Poiret and Lucile, and the arrival of South American dance. 129

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More dynamic female activities – such as cycling and tennis – became increasingly popular as did the corresponding fashion of bloomers and shorter skirts, which enabled greater mobility. Meanwhile sartorial and avant-garde fashions became visible through the rise of women’s fashion magazines and journals, department stores and distributable media such as postcards and cigarette cards. Although restrictions and repressions remained – the readers of fashion magazines were neither feminists nor working women, whilst fashion’s status as a capitalistic and transitory process grew through the imagined articulation of an ‘interior’ self through the consumption of exterior signifiers – Anne Hollander contends that ‘a new kind of visual imagination about the physical self ’ emerged.228 For Delaunay within this context, through the act of wearing, the dress embodied the notions of the simultaneous subject as contiguous with the environment, and that identity is perpetually created through the quality of action and movement inherent in ‘becoming’ with the world. This was the transformation of consciousness that Sonia Delaunay understood to be necessary in ‘going further’, in ‘changing’ than the monadic, alienated Western subject within. La Robe simultan´ee was woven from a network of influences and practices that unravels as a specific historical moment in its inception. Whilst Delaunay’s turn towards fabrics embodied a number of problems that the artist faced, her application of a simultaneous aesthetic also presented liberation from the canvas, transforming the very fabric of modernity’s surfaces in autotelic re-presentation of its effects. The influence of Cendrars and her husband impressed upon her notion of colour simultaneity as a rematerialisation of the object within a transformation of consciousness. Indeed, Baron suggests she ‘could see and understand the effect of contrasting colours all around her in everyday life’,229 whilst Vreeland wrote: ‘Sonia believed that art should not be restricted to the studio or exhibition hall, but should be integrated into all phases of life . . . exciting and vivid proof of an altogether new approach to art.’230 Her designs, whilst in one sense an enforced, pragmatic response to the conditions of their productions, nevertheless attempted to reconcile art and life whilst understanding the importance and responsibility of the theoretical and philosophical concepts that informed her work. In Bergson’s words, ‘it is the inner life of things . . . appearing through their forms and colours’.231 As with the synthesis of autobiography and self-presence as continuous with

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the world in La Prose du Transsib´erien, her dress externalised her ‘inner’ life: her biographical synthesis of place and colour, her artistic, literary and philosophical influences, her love of the dancehall, her wonder at Parisian modernity, the perceived emancipation of the female body and her belief in the obsolescence of classical representation within the historical emergence of a dynamic, simultaneous epoch. As Townsend writes: ‘it is a concept in which the body participates in modernity and reflects modernity.’232 The subject being articulated is one simultaneously past, present and future in becoming, expressed upon Sonia Delaunay’s biograph, within the time and space of culture. The subject’s condition upon the dress, in its spatial rematerialisation, overflowed its sculptural existence through temporal becoming. Sculpturally kinetic, it appealed to latent synaesthetic possibilities: a living (bios) representation (graph¯e ). Robert Delaunay wrote of Sonia’s invention of ‘a new art’ based on the latest research into colour laws around 1912, proclaiming her fashions as innovating a new art: Colour alone, in the way it is organized, its dimensions, the way its interrelations are distributed across the surface . . . determines the rhythm of the forms . . . Form and colour are one, and therefore the choice of content depends solely on the form desired and created by the artist . . . 233

Sonia Delaunay’s ‘biograph’ harmonised the bio-graphy in her synthesising of past and present through the graphic expression of interiority in order articulate a subjective relation with modernity. It was an innovative fashion project that clearly proceeded from a creative response to the forced conditions of its production, incorporating personal identity with the poetic simultaneity of disparate times and spaces through memory and perception in an expression of subjective existence. However, as I shall now show, with the onset of war in 1914 Delaunay’s ideas regarding the intersubjective rematerialisation of the body within the environment became the camouflaged surface, and lived experience that Ernst J¨unger called ‘Battle as Inner Experience’.234 We might also see that Romains’s notion of intersubjectivity, along with the consequences of war, enhanced the development of capitalism and reactionary politics in the period concerned. Capitalism reflected the merging of self with culture through the consumption of objects incorporated into identity, whilst Fascism was a catastrophic realisation 131

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of intersubjectivity, collective identity and ‘loss of self ’. Indeed, Adorno argued that fascism was ‘an act of devouring, of making the beloved object part of oneself ’.235 Delaunay’s representation of subjectivity and her idea of transforming ‘man within’, was confronted with – as Klaus Theweleit shows – both a ‘fear and longing for fusion’,236 embodied within a new utopian figure: ‘The new man is a man whose physique has been machinized, his psyche eliminated – or in part displaced into his body armor.’237 We might imagine that the armoured body, as an exterior expression of an interior subjective condition, grotesquely reflected aspects of the context and ideas of Delaunay’s simultaneous dress.

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3 Rationalised Existence Introduction: Cubism after the War The Delaunays were on holiday in Fuenterrabia, Spain, when war broke out in August 1914. Having been released from national service in 1908, Robert was not immediately required to join the French army, and since their son Charles was ill, the couple remained in Spain. However, the France to which they returned in 1920 was certainly not the one they had left. World War I catalysed radical changes in French culture. One consequence was the avant-garde’s endorsement of and enlistment in the war. By the winter of 1914 many Frenchmen were stationed at the Front, among whom were the artists Gleizes, Metzinger, L´eger, Braque, Derain, Duchamp-Villon, Villon, de la Fresnaye and Kupka. By 1919 Duchamp-Villon had died from kidney failure after contracting typhus, and Apollinaire from influenza after being seriously wounded. Cendrars lost an arm, whilst Braque and L´eger sustained serious head injuries. The French avant-garde suffered considerably from its enthusiastic call to arms. Elsewhere Boccioni was killed in a training accident, whilst Marinetti and Russolo – both of whom had been wounded – ceased their bellicose celebrations of beauty in the dynamic and geometric of mechanised warfare; praising the ‘liberation of war’ now seemed a terrible joke. Others, such as the Bragaglias, who did not fight, ceased artistic production. Grosz and MoholyNagy suffered ‘shell-shock’; Marc and Macke both died, though Kandinsky still remained from Der Blaue Reiter. Silver demonstrates that an important ideological shift within representation occurred during the war, highlighting a conservative artistic turn in Picasso, Matisse 133

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and Robert Delaunay. Whilst Spate exclaims that ‘[t]he war destroyed French non-figurative art’1 (echoing van Doesburg’s 1922 remark that ‘[i]n Paris everything is completely dead’), Christopher Green argues that avant-garde practice became ‘submerged’, supported by the same markets that had sustained cubism, and with only Kupka and Mondrian as its major practitioners until its re-emergence in 1922 through De Stijl.2 A particular period of flourishing avant-garde development and production ended, or at least was forced to unfold into different forms. Indeed, despite the election of Raymond Poincar´e – associated with Maurras and Action franc¸aise – to the presidency in January 1913, and a consequent period of militarily nationalist retrenchment, the last year of peace was, as Arthur Cohen writes, ‘full of prescient, urgent, nervous intuitions of the end and the new beginning’.3 With the coming of war, the production of art became its own battlefield.4 Despite Cubism’s vitality in articulating the experience of the trenches, the home front was an ideological world away despite being less than 70 miles distant.5 In the hysteria of war, fostering simplification and extremism, failure to conform to classical models of representation became a source of suspicion, if not a matter of national security.6 As a result of these pressures, as Silver comments, ‘[t]he Left in general was forced into a position of having to prove its patriotism’.7 More recently, Green has written ‘classicism when allied to the idea of tradition was easily appropriated all the way across the spectrum of right-wing politics’, describing this reinvention of a monumental culture as a ‘radical inauthenticity’.8 The war further polarised political positions. Those belonging to the Left saw an opportunity to harness right-wing ideologies and, in the case of Cubism, develop what Green regards as ‘its progressive distillation of “purification”, especially between 1916 and 1919’.9 Green argues that, far from being a fatality of war, Cubism developed in the 1920s, and eventually faded only after it had diffused into a multitude of movements such as Purism, Surrealism, Suprematism, Non-Objective art and even Dada. However, it had to survive repeated attacks from without whilst being reconstructed from within. In general, Cubism developed a more coherent geometric aesthetic. We see this in the increased geometric rationality in the work of Picasso, Gris, Metzinger and Lipchitz, which came to be known as ‘crystal Cubism’.10 Whilst prewar Cubism was perhaps more concerned

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with the unstable condition of phenomena, now ‘[e]verything about it was to be seen as stable, enduring and pure; everything about it invited . . . the classical analogy, with all that it implied concerning art and the ideal’.11 Cubism was therefore increasingly aligned with the ‘purity’ of classical aesthetics through cohesive figurative representation and coherent time and space. Meanwhile, Andr´e Lhote, in whom the Purists later found an ally, attacked ‘crystal Cubism’ to deflect criticism from his own recasting of the style. He criticised any Cubism based upon abstraction as a ‘synthetic’ configuration of perception, a priori Cubism. Rather, his cubist aesthetic was ‘analytic’, residing in nature itself. Lhote situated his Cubism within French tradition, whilst accusing the ‘synthetic’ cubism of Picasso and Gris of being foreign. Green observes that Lhote’s ‘appeal was that of a solid French traditionalist who looked (in his work) and sounded (in his writing) like a modernist’.12 He ‘betrayed’ cubism by renouncing its idealism, participating in an anti-cubist exhibition, and undermining cubist painters who attempted to maintain a ‘Cubist’ movement through simplifying geometric structural form.13 However, the demands for ‘restorative’ classicism and ‘traditional’ identity increasingly consumed French culture. Indeed, Silver suggests that in the wake of Marinetti’s rejection of his earlier concern with form and the ‘decomposition of bodies’, and with his continued advocacy of the need to ‘make a synthesis out of analytic deformation’, the concepts “analysis” and “synthesis”14 had become embedded not only in the rhetoric of postwar French culture but ‘nearly all social phenomena’.15 Indeed, for the first time since the formation of the Third Republic of 1871 a right-wing coalition, the Bloc National, came to dominate the Chamber of Deputies in 1919, with the bulk of the new deputies being the exsoldiers known as ‘the Blue horizon’. Picasso was one of the first artists to manifest conservative aesthetic and political tendencies (although his work maintains an aesthetic of ambiguity, and Ingres’s influence had continuities with his prewar work.)16 Green notes that his ‘highly distilled architectural images [are] absolved . . . from any of those expressive qualities found in the 1915 Harlequin or the most disturbing of the Avignon drawings’.17 Robert Delaunay responded to the demand for coherence by returning to logic and mathematical discourses on order and organisation.18 This movement towards static, linear representation is clear from the comparison of his Eiffel Tower paintings from before and after the

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war. Despite his absence from wartime France, Silver suggests that ‘Delaunay . . . was becoming virulently jingoistic, [and] anti-Cubist’.19 Even Severini, who maintained a cubo-futurist aesthetic during the war despite widespread criticism, subsequently inaugurated ‘a new NeoPlatonism in the Parisian avant-garde’.20 Severini’s break with Cubism came in 1921 as he turned towards Tuscan fresco style and proportion, the perspectival theories of Vitruvius, Alberti, Pacioli and Leonardo, and an incorporation of commedia dell’arte figures in works such as I due pulcinella (The Two Pulcinellos, 1922). Indeed, Green lists a number of ‘betrayals’ of Cubism by artists such as Lhote and Picasso, who were now seen as ‘heroes’ by certain critics for having defeated the battle against their cubist past. Once-supportive writers such as Andr´e Salmon and Roger Allard now attacked Cubism for its rejection of an organic, experiential art, whilst Cendrars published an article, ‘The Cube Tires’, in 1919 that argued that Cubism’s increased rationality was constrictive, and no longer bore the painter’s identity. Other artists were quick to pronounce the death of ‘Cubism’ for their own selfpromotion, as Am´ed´ee Ozenfant and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (‘Le Corbusier’ from 1920) did with ‘Purism’. Thus, despite its survival, Cubism was repeatedly derided as belonging to the past, whilst attempts were simultaneously made to exclude it from cultural history. Silver demonstrates how the postwar ‘order’ criticised the prewar imagination as liberal and feminine, citing Gabriel Boissy’s declaration: ‘We will date ourselves from this war, pivot of history, instead of from a toodistant past. It measures men against each other and from it surges a new nobility . . . a people rejuvenated, or rather, purified by sacrifice.’21 Somehow, a war-ravaged France was better than its peaceful, artistic, liberal condition of 1914.

The Cubist Rhizome In the moment of its emergence, cubism had nevertheless grasped a profound idea about the composition of space and time. Proceeding from radical nineteenth-century thought, its importance to challenging the relationship between vision, representation and knowledge is undeniable. Whilst unconventional representation was deemed an enemy to culture, Cubism provided a conceptual process for artists across Europe and beyond to reconceptualise the specifically subjective 136

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and psychophysical nature of reality, eliding both classical perspective and contemporary lens-based technologies through its construction of form. Cubism, in this sense, was ‘rhizomatic’. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome allows the connection of a point to any other given point. It is an unstable term, intentionally biological, deployed to allow the rethinking of ordered thought – such as organised models of history – into ephemeral sets of unstable, developing processes; the teleological schema of historical interpretation are replaced by a diffuse, multidimensional network in a continuous process of assemblage and separation. (However, we must acknowledge that the rhizome is itself schematic.) In some ways, like the cubist ‘grid’ itself, the system is not closed, but allows for multiple directions and dimensions rather than the rigid frameworks belonging to a specific movement. Those developments are always in play (especially as history’s meaning is always deferred), a horizon of possibility for histories, capable of experiential transformation. The cultural legacy of Cubism is not as a compositional framework but, I suggest, as a conceptual map. In this sense we might imagine it is ‘always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entranceways and exits and its own lines of flight’.22 The manner in which other artistic movements connected with the cubist rhizome, as an unstable conceptual influence – since unlike perspective it had never reified into a procedural narrative – allowed its continual mutation and hybridisation with artistic practices from other cultures. Paradoxically, Alfred H. Barr’s attempt to chart Cubism’s central position to modern art in Cubism and Abstract Art (1936) (Fig. 23) is problematic. Daniel Robbins, an American himself, comments that Barr has ‘shaped our understanding of Cubism until the present day, [and such a history] could only have been written by an American . . . who sought objective truth, was not partisan to the currents and counter movements of European, especially Parisian art politics’.23 A cubist historical dialectic developed from this as ‘[n]early every writer who has discussed Cubism since 1936 has used the terms “analytical” and “synthetic” in a paraphrase of Barr’s original text’.24 Yet we might even consider that, despite his reductive, simplified criteria, Barr succeeded in conversely demonstrating Cubism’s complex multiple interconnections. As Robbins notes, Barr’s schematisation became the version of cubist history accepted in America, Europe and even France itself. However, the plan’s simplistic teleological structure elides

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Figure 23. Alfred H. Barr, from Cubism and Abstract Art, 1936

connection such as Orphism, and emergent ‘non-geometric abstract art’ of 1935. Similarly, the lack of a direct connection between Cubism and Surrealism is problematic. Green demonstrates that a fundamental relation exists, particularly through Picasso and Gris, but also through Masson and Mir´o. Karmel’s analysis of structuralist semiotics in Picasso’s and Braque’s forms also emphasises the transformation of the sign as ‘Cubism emerged from its chrysalis with a new name: Surrealism’.25 Cubism provided techniques for representing metamorphosis, incorporating memory and subjectivity, inscribing language upon painting and bringing attention to self-reflexive process and exposing the signifier. Barr’s alembification of culture inhibits understanding 138

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of Cubism’s influence; yet his simultaneously simplified, but busy and complicated, schematisation attests to the need for a rhizomic ‘map’ to conceptualise Cubism as a probing network rather than spatio-temporally stabilised historical narrative. As Baxandall observes of C´ezanne’s diverse and evolving influence on future generations of artists, it is ‘a map, not a tracing’.26 To quote Deleuze and Guattari, ‘[t]he map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation.’27 Cubism was part of an ideological, philosophical and socio-political network that incorporated a number of emerging artists in Europe after 1918: they had witnessed an epochal turn, but were also traumatised by its effects and by an authoritarian call to order in the postwar cultural settlement. Guattari and Deleuze remark that ‘[a] rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old, or on new lines’.28 We will now consider how artists working in different media and cultures – Oskar Schlemmer, Rudolf Laban and Le Corbusier amongst others – assembled their postwar versions of Cubism as an effect of this ‘rhizome’, but that these forms are mapped upon displaced ideological vectors. Their work must be considered as a specific consequence of a shattered cubist rhizome, lying across the fault line of prewar inspiration and postwar calls to order. If the conceptualisation of figure-space-time in Gleizes and Delaunay’s work represented the emergence of a new cultural possibility of Being, the work of Le Corbusier, Schlemmer and Laban embodies a visually similar, yet ideologically different set of time-space configurations for both abstraction and figuration that characterise the twentieth-century. Through cultural trauma, we might imagine this conceptual map folded upon itself in an attempt to re-establish points of stability in moments of cultural anxiety. Already, Picasso’s development of the prewar cubist grid, integrating figure with environment, had become increasingly geometric. Indeed, those structures did not derive from ‘organic’ form. Duchamp and Picabia both perceived an affinity between Picasso’s and Braque’s compositional ordering with technical design and scientific diagrams.29 Such ‘post-cubist’ artists imagined an embodied subject within modernity whilst harnessing pre-modern constructions of space and time. These prior, stable and therefore less traumatic regimes contrasted

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with Ronald Schleifer’s identification of a general cultural condition that was ‘complexified’ around the turn of the twentieth-century.30 Indeed, it was this condition in modernity that had profoundly influenced Gleizes and Delaunay. For example, William James pointed to the inability of linear time to successfully describe experience: ‘Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits . . . it flows.’31 The future and past are bound in a present without singular existence. In proposing phenomenological existence not belonging to such systems of calculating bodies in space, Henri Bergson referenced Zeno’s paradoxes to undermine a static, mathematical spatial regime. Bergson’s reference to Zeno served to comment on Enlightenment thought in general and positivistic thought in particular. David Harvey argues that it ‘operated within the confines of a rather mechanical “Newtonian” vision of the universe, in which the presumed absolutes of homogenous time and space formed limited containers to thought and action’.32 Schleifer develops Harvey’s interpretation, discussing Bergson’s interpretation of time – rejecting the atemporality of the subject for its inherent immersion in the unfolding of non-sequential time – alongside other modernists in tracing the continuities in postEnlightenment literary, mathematical and philosophic thought. He argues that such thought was produced by the second Industrial Revolution through the multiple ‘abundances’ created by its technological and capitalist transformation of cultural experience. New multiple, fragmented, conceptions of existence and time replaced the singularity of literary realism, economic individualism and scientific positivism inherent in the quotidian needs and universal ideas that characterised the first Industrial Revolution.33 Schleifer argues that Enlightenment’s regime of ‘absolute, true, and mathematical time’, which, ‘from its own nature flows equably without relation to anything external’34 orders experience in George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss (1860) and has a relation to the conceptual temporal frameworks of Adam Smith’s and Karl Marx’s work on economics. This is the condition satirised by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels (1726). It is fundamental to notions of teleological historicism, universal reason and an atemporal subject. However, in common with Bergson’s post-Newtonian thought, Wittgenstein was also critical of time’s definition as a consequence of the comparison between two processes, arguing for its existence within multiple frameworks rather than any mechanistic sequentiality.35 Schleifer shows that Woolf and Joyce

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incorporated simultaneity and pastiche (through clich´e), articulating an analogical subject at the synthesis of present and past. This approach also characterised Walter Benjamin’s notion of ‘storytelling’ as intergenerational transmission of experience, which created complex multiplications of narrative across time through tradition, remembrance and redemption of the past. Neither past nor present ceased, but were transformed non-sequentially through confrontation and recovery.36 Therefore, the present and past can mutually inform each other – like Proust’s transformation of significance in the photograph of Marcel’s grandmother through the relation of time, information and context – since time is not mechanically sequential, but transitory. In fact, Benjamin wrote that time, imagined without relation to death, was the ‘miserable endlessness of a scroll’.37 He critiqued Bergson’s concept of dur´ee that ‘isolates [death] effectively from a historical (as well as prehistorical) order’ by ‘reject[ing] any historical determination of memory’.38 Thus, death transforms time in both communal and individual experience through avoidance, repetition, metonymy and representation. The materiality of time bears death’s weight, carrying memory that is constantly repeated in the present and future, rather than the mathematical accumulation of sequential moments that make absolute distinctions between past, present and future. Freud also understood time as continually engaged with experience through mechanisms of displacement, repression, repetition, deferral and working through. Elsewhere, Werner Heisenberg’s work in quantum theory incorporated notions of ‘simultaneity’, ‘alternation’ and ‘retrospective orientation’ in the past acting upon the present that Schleifer argues, together with Norbert Weiner’s thought, created ‘post-Enlightenment postmodernity’.39 ‘Information’ is continuously in play since signification and meaning is never completed, but subject to ‘alternation’ and ‘renewal’. Similarly, Bertrand Russell considered time not as flowing, but as endless ‘repetitions’ of ‘similarities, likenesses, and the analogues of understanding.’40 History, time and experience were imagined not just nonsequentially, but also according to multiple frames of interpretative and configurational reference, resulting in a notion of ‘polytemporality’.41 Benjamin used the metaphor of temporality as an analogical ‘constellation of ideas’, whereby meaning accumulates slowly ‘one on top of the other of thin, transparent layers . . . [through] a variety of retellings’,42 rather than through a process of ‘unravelling’ knowledge.

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Schleifer describes Benjamin’s aleatoric notion of accumulated temporality as a ‘nonhierarchic dialectic . . . mosaic technique’, ‘disrupt[ing] progressive causal explanation’.43 (We might also consider its relevance here to Sonia Delaunay’s mosaic ‘bio-graph’.) He compares this to Russell’s reconceiving of mathematics as an ‘assemblage of particulars, existing at different times’ to the Benjaminian ‘constellation’. Schleifer also relates this imagination of time to the narratives of Woolf and Joyce as ‘multiple, dialogic, and do[es] not oppose completeness . . . [as] constellated, within a field of nonlogical differences’.44 Time is not sequentially logical, but the past is complexly entangled with the present into the future. The turn towards the critical importance of context, referential frames and the problem of discourse was treated in multiple disciplines: Woolf ’s ‘alternating and multiplying levels of comprehension in narrative’45 is compared with Saussure’s structuralism, Freud’s mental topology and Heisenberg’s analogical quantum thought, whereby classical logic, time and space are suspended through possibility.46 Modernity’s narratives contain multiple and scattered events that unfold, interconnected with the subject. The narrator, for whom time is unique and bound to desire and intention, is necessarily entangled with lived events.47 However, we shall now consider that such unstable regimes of time and space in the constitution of knowledge and experience within modernity, whilst having formerly provided inspiration to the avant-garde, now became the principle object for artists concerned with re-establishing cohesion and stability in imagining the subject in modernity.

The European Avant-Garde The development of a postwar avant-garde in France was problematic; it was Jean Cocteau and Am´ed´ee Ozenfant who began shaping something resembling a new position. However, Silver writes that Cocteau’s magazine, Le Mot, was ‘jingoistic . . . [and] anything but cosmopolitan . . . Le Mot’s reading of culture was not very different from that of more reactionary critics’.48 It reasserted the Right’s belief in 1914 as a date of liberation: ‘everything is organised, everything clarified and purified’.49 Nevertheless, despite its complicity with the call-to-order, there were attempts to tone down right wing hysteria. 142

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The ambiguity of Cocteau’s politics – a ‘hesitation between selfconsciously modernist culture and anti-modernist reaction’50 – was successful for his own self-promotion. Ozenfant’s L’Elan meanwhile was the second ‘avant-garde’ journal to circulate after the outbreak of war. Its defence of the existing avant-garde was formed through a strategy of discrediting reactionary attacks. Only surviving for a year, its last issue nevertheless simultaneously criticised Cubism for its lack of coherent rules whilst praising its ‘purist’ aspect. Ozenfant collaborated with Jeanneret on L’Esprit Nouveau after the war, formulating their ‘Purist’ movement as ‘an important manifestation of post-Cubist rationalism’.51 As Sonia Delaunay had observed as early as 1905, Ozenfant was interested in the ‘purification’ of painting into colour and form. With Jeanneret, he advocated a return to classical representation based on the golden section, yet combined with a celebration of the machine. Ozenfant wrote: ‘The highest delectation of the human mind is the perception of order, and the greatest human satisfaction is the feeling of collaboration or participation in this order.’52 We might see Purism as both the patricidal offspring of Cubism and an important step towards a re-emergence of a credible avant-garde. Purism certainly looked to the cubist rhizome to assemble its own socio-political connections. However, whilst Purism retained cubist ideas – for example the belief that every object was worthy of contemplation as infinitely complex – this only persisted at a superficial level. In neo-Platonic terms, Purism aligned the mass-produced objects of industry with classical ideals in the context of a reinvigorated and fast-developing consumer capitalism. And yet, as Cox notes, L’Esprit Nouveau in 1920 ‘became the principal organ for the promotion of a return to order’.53 Whilst Cubism negotiated cultural ideology with difficulty, Purism had some facility in achieving its ascendancy. It remained figuratively abstract, but through abstraction it achieved an ideological synthesis that reconciled the classically Platonic with modern industrial products. (Picabia’s mechanomorphs meanwhile express ambivalence towards dehumanisation within a technological culture whereby the machine became part of the ‘soul’ and creativity was replaced with repetition.) Indeed, ‘Plato was enjoying a revival . . . change and fluctuation in general seemed so unattractive to almost all Frenchmen’.54 Elsewhere, Cubisms emerged in Czechoslovakia, Germany, Holland, Russia, Switzerland and the US from artists who had seen the prewar

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developments in Paris and Munich.55 For example, as Irena Zantovska Murray discusses, through visits, exchanges, exhibitions and journals, Czech artists and theorists incorporated Cubism – within their own ‘Viennese training’, ‘Bohemian heritage’ and the influence of nineteenth-century perceptual theory – into a range of media and decorative arts. One example was the Prague Art Workshops (PUD), which adopted a cubist style (as manifested in the Maison Cubiste of 1912) for designing living room furniture. However, Cubism became increasingly incorporated as a surface, reproduced for its style rather than its profound conceptuality. Cooper even suggests that some ‘cubist’-inspired movements were ‘the absolute antithesis of Cubism’.56 Elsewhere, Russian Cubo-Futurism developed with Aristarkh Lentulov’s 1913 exhibition in Moscow following his return from Paris. Kasimir Malevich’s canvases already demonstrated the influence of C´ezanne and L´eger, and through his Black Square in 1915 he situated himself ‘at the end of the process begun by Cubism’.57 Cubism’s and Futurism’s relationship had always been turbulent, and Marinetti’s denunciation of his earlier approach seems similar to Cubism’s own postwar development of ‘too trifling an analysis of forms, and to too fragmentary a decomposition of bodies . . . We are entering a period of firm and sure constructionism, because we want to make a synthesis out of analytic deformation.’58 However, the relationship between the cubists and their contemporaries in Germany had always been more harmonious. Golding describes Germany’s prewar art history as ‘the melting-pot for Western painting’59 and its association with cubist practices became important to a new generation of artists. Picasso had exhibited at the Thannhauser Gallery in Munich in 1909, and a second space, the Neue K¨unstlervereinigung (NKVM), showed work by artists that would later be recognised as cubist. Kandinsky, having helped found the NKVM, then helped establish Der Blaue Reiter, showing works by artists including Henri Rousseau, Robert Delaunay, Elizabeth Epstein, Macke, Marc and himself. As Golding notes, throughout 1912–3 the paintings of Picasso and Braque could be seen in Berlin, Cologne and Munich. Meanwhile the connection between the Delaunays and Der Blaue Reiter grew stronger, and ‘unlike the Italians the Germans made no attempt to disguise their interest in the movement, and several of the artists of Der Blaue Reiter actually thought of themselves as Cubist painters’.60

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If Klee and Marc had been influenced by Cubism, through the Delaunays, to organise the canvas ‘in terms of interacting and transparent facets or planes, which could be made to suggest movement and depth, while preserving the unity of the picture plane’,61 this is testimony to the connectivity of the cubist rhizome. Cubism also influenced artists to apply its ideas within media other than paint or sculpture. It came to influence Walter Gropius, along with other figures at the Bauhaus.62 It is in Gropius’s school that we find a rhizomic connection between Cubism’s map and the culture of the body. It exists in the work and teachings of Oskar Schlemmer in sculpture, painting and theatre. Like French artists, Gropius had declared the necessity of cutting ties with prewar culture and he advocated a concentration on applied arts within Germany. Art, craft, technology and mass production were seen as fundamental to a new era in German culture.

Oskar Schlemmer and Rational Cubism Oskar Schlemmer was born into an environment that had an uneasy relationship with modernity. It contained both the pastoral beauty of the Neckar valley and elements of technological and industrial transformation. Gottleib Daimler’s automobile factory was built in the area several years before Schlemmer was born.63 A synthesis of technology and nostalgic romanticism permeated his work, and indeed extended throughout German postwar culture.64 Schlemmer was taught at the Advanced High School of Science and Arts in Goppingen at the start of the twentieth-century, a moment at which Germany was, according to Vernon Lidtke, the ‘most powerful industrializing economy of any European country’.65 Its workforce was trained at technical colleges that supported new industries, with particular emphasis on developments in chemistry and electronics. Schlemmer’s postwar work was influenced by industrial design, though his artistic education remained tied to handicraft traditions. There was a tendency within German schools for traditional skills to be exploited for mass production, and as Schlemmer was finishing his early apprenticeship as a wood inlayer, the Werkbund was created in 1907 to bring artistic aesthetics to mass production. Gropius was one of those responsible for its creation, and Schlemmer attended, influenced by Adolf Holzel, his teacher at the Academy of Plastic Arts in Stuttgart. Whilst the Stuttgart academy itself 145

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was not nationally significant, Holzel made a significant impression on Schlemmer, encouraging the development of his work away from Impressionism and towards Cubism. Schlemmer was also drawn to the circle of artists that met at Walden’s gallery Der Sturm. Schlemmer was evidently uneasy about his gravitation towards abstract, non-figurative art. Lidtke notes he ‘articulated a view of artistic modernism that embodied rational order and discipline’.66 Indeed, both Jeffrey Herf and Anson Rabinbach have demonstrated the fundamental role of conservative modernism within German culture, and the notion of ‘reactionary cubism’ within European modernism is an issue we shall return. Schlemmer’s own notes attest to the widespread reactionary attitudes in postwar Germany and the demonising of the Left. Writing in January 1919, he commented: ‘Even painters who are only slightly modernistic are dubbed “Spartacuses.” Intellectual matters are being identified and confused with political matters in a most stupid fashion’.67 Schlemmer argued that artistic modernism was attacked by reactionary forces, politically condemned alongside the Sparticists (or the German Communist party, the KPD, as of 1918) that had failed in an attempted New Year’s Day uprising in 1919. Its leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, were murdered, along with hundreds of its members. In his letters and diaries Schlemmer repeatedly referred to the problem of right-wing reaction. In 1925 he wrote, referring to himself in the third person, ‘the German Nationalist prime minister, Bazille, came out against that fellow Schlemmer, who is a modern and a leftist’,68 whilst in 1932, the year before National Socialist control, he remarked ‘modernism will now be considered unpatriotic’.69 German patriotism quickly turned to reactionary nationalism after the war and Schlemmer’s disillusionment with the irrationality of German attitudes is manifest. He himself had enlisted and was sent to the front in 1914, and as Lidtke notes, it was ‘Schlemmer’s generation . . . which was most directly affected’.70 Schlemmer appears to have been far less affected, however, than other young modernists such as Kirchner, Dix, and Grosz.71 Despite his apparent lack of political motives, he was nonetheless the representative for Stuttgart’s Council of Intellectual Workers, founded in 1918. He was arrested because of his wife’s links to the Spartacists. However, this perhaps says more about the cultural climate than Schlemmer’s own radicalism, since he was selfconfessedly ‘non-political’, although the political climate was such that this in itself was nevertheless aligned to the Left. Indeed, his diaries

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reveal a dilemma in reconciling his artistic and intellectual approaches with contemporary culture. Whilst not as politically overt, or scathing, as Dix or Grosz’s commentaries on postwar Germany, Schlemmer’s work embodies the problems of painting after Cubism within a specific cultural condition. His is a complex response to Modernism in general and Cubism in particular within the context of the war, industrialisation and the postwar reconfiguration of the body in a climate of political retrenchment. The range of modernist avant-garde works exhibited in Berlin after 1910 had a profound influence on Schlemmer. He had already studied the relationship of colour and structure that C´ezanne opened up for investigation and thought that ‘Judging by my present work, people will perhaps assign me to the Cubists’.72 As Karin von Maur observes, Schlemmer’s H¨auser (Klostergarten) (Fig. 24) exhibits a cubist structure. He breaks up the perspectival field, configuring composition on the interplay of planes. He acknowledged in 1919 that: ‘The fractured quality of our age, the dismemberment of our time, fragmentation, are reflected in the paintings of the Cubists. Cubism is the most decisive, important achievement of modern art.’73 In a diary entry in May 1913 – after making H¨auser (Klostergarten) – he wrote: ‘New territory has really been broken by Cubism, a development based soundly on tradition . . . Cubism, then, as objective painting, a product of the cultivated eye.’74 Schlemmer was clearly excited by Cubism’s investigations; this entry suggests something specific about his interest. He was fascinated by its radical new claims surrounding artistic objectivity. As early as 1913, therefore, Schlemmer appeared specifically interested by Cubism’s possibility for compositional rationality rather than its direct challenge to visual representation. Indeed, Schlemmer’s ‘cultivated eye’ – produced by Cubism – is a departure from Braque’s interest in transforming the object to the point where it could be ‘touched’ with the eye, where response was synaesthetic rather than optically defined. Seeing, for Braque, was visceral, and composition phenomenological, in contrast to the sense of the disembodied optic that Schlemmer introduced. Schlemmer was also influenced by other German readings of Cubism. He remarked: ‘In a recently published book, an art critic points out what links these masters; he describes their chief common characteristic as: absolute form.’75 Whilst this is the aim of later Cubism and Purism, and although earlier Cubism is read

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Figure 24. Oskar Schlemmer, H¨auser (Klostergarten), 1912

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as the search for absolute form, this denies its proto-phenomenological foundations. Schlemmer became attracted to the ‘desire for ’systematic and basic artistic laws’ that Cubism provided.76 In his diary in 1915 he wrote of returning ‘to Henri Rousseau . . . away from the art-and-industry complex’.77 Yet in the same entry he discussed joining ‘forces with the idealists of form. Lehmbruck and Archipenko in sculpture, the cubists in painting. They form a bridge to architecture, for their paintings are constructed.’ The two entries seem almost contradictory in their admiration for Rousseau’s naivety and the constructed stylistic ‘ideal’ forms of the latter artists. However, we might see Schlemmer’s Figur und Raumlineatur of 1924 (Fig. 31) as a reconciliation of these very different aesthetic tendencies. Schlemmer, I suggest, is referring to Rousseau’s self-portrait of 1908. Here Rousseau inaugurated what he felt was a new conception in pictorial composition, what he termed the ‘portrait-landscape’. Figurative portraiture is incorporated within the overall environmental scene to produce a coupling of the two differing forms. Although this had long been a trope of Chinese portraiture, it is similar to Gleizes’s ideas in Portrait de Jacques Nayral, although Rousseau’s landscape more directly concerns the symbolic qualities of the sitter. With her ‘simultaneous dress’ Sonia Delaunay also conceptualised the idea of portrait-landscape as she literally achieved a self-portrait through her interpenetration of the body with the lived environment. Paradoxically, self-representation was therefore self-dissolution. Schlemmer’s interest in the relationship between figure and space in terms of environmental dynamism is crucial to his work and his development of the ‘cubist grid’. Schlemmer wrote regarding Rousseau’s work: ‘The pine tree, the acacia, the house. Also the human figure. The type.’78 He admired Rousseau’s freedom in symbolising psychological states through objects within the composition. Yet to restrict himself, Schlemmer was compelled to find fundamental representational laws that reflected a parallel interest in constructivist sculptors and painters. Figur und Raumlineatur is in part a synthetic response to the portrait-landscape that the ‘systematic’ maps of Constructivism and Cubism provide. The human figure is imbricated within the environment, but upon a specifically geometric, constructivist principle of representation. The internal principle of representation was difficult for Schlemmer. He fought with identifying and reconciling what he believed most

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important within his own work. This uncertainty reappears at various points in his diaries. We might see Schlemmer as ultimately attracted to cubist works and processes of deformation, but only as an inspiration from which to reconfigure the composition according to a rational model. As Peter Beye suggests, Schlemmer sought ‘a compositional theory based in the regulating laws of plane and colour independent of pictorial representation’.79 In 1915 Schlemmer wrote: ‘I must opt for C´ezanne or van Gogh, classicism or romanticism, Ingres or Delacroix, Leibel or B¨ocklin, Bach or Beethoven. I would like to present the most romantic idea in the most austere form.’80 Later, in September 1915, he explicitly stated, ‘I vacillate between two styles, two worlds, two attitudes toward life . . . Given my strong propensity in painting as in life for the rococo, wouldn’t the best antidote be to impose the most rigid discipline on myself?’81 Again, in April 1916, Schlemmer agonised between Van Gogh and C´ezanne’s ‘new rules’ in contrast to Leonardo and D¨urer’s self-imposition of restraints.82 In the throes of war, November 1915, he declared: All traditions are shattered. The tradition of Classical Antiquity has been toppled . . . So where do we find something really new? Absolutely new? In Cubism, one might be tempted to say . . . Cubism is a free development . . . The line is traced with pure, cold calculation; crystals appear; cubic forms. Universal aspiration toward the mystical . . . There are artists who seek these things in order, others in chaos. Still fresh and new: the simple, basic forms. The simple.83

Schlemmer’s un-Bergsonian development of Cubism synthesised the dialectic in which he oscillated. He reconciled the opposition of its terms by seeking cubist laws for order, even if they contradicted cubism’s affiliation with Bergsonism. Schlemmer’s reading of, and connection to, the cubist rhizome was concerned with the process of infra-compositional rules. He was interested in the ‘crystal’ and the ‘cubic form’; these are Platonic forms that I argue are an uneasy appropriation of earlier cubist tropes. He admired Cubism, as a revolutionary movement, but utilised it only at the level at which it could fulfil his need for plastic stability. He was therefore motivated by the possibility of an ‘objective’ framework that governs the object. Arguably, this might be akin to a German approach to composition that Sonia Delaunay felt compelled to abandon when she left for Paris. Indeed, it 150

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is revealing that Schlemmer’s admiration for Picasso lay in ‘his sense for the solid’84 even though arguably Picasso’s greatest cubist achievement was in breaking Euclidean space in a painting such as Les Demoiselles D’Avignon. Therefore, whilst Cubism opened the field of phenomenological investigation, Schlemmer understood its paradoxical potential to provide an objective map according to geometric laws. Schlemmer’s structure is that of a draughtsman, utilising what von Maur describes as ‘geometrically simplified structures’.85 Whilst on military service, having already served at both Western and Eastern fronts, and been hospitalised both times, Schlemmer wrote: ‘I admit I admire many of the moderns, although with considerable reservations, especially the Russians (for instance Kandinsky); for they help me perceive my own ideal as antithetical to theirs.’86

Schlemmer’s Bodies Schlemmer’s impulse for the modernity of Van Gogh, C´ezanne and cubism existed within a demand for stability. Cubism’s potential for composition excited Schlemmer, but the eternal laws of classical order impressed itself with urgency. In an early work, Schlemmer represented what would come to preoccupy his entire career: man. In Komposition auf Rosa (1915–6) (Fig. 25) von Maur notes that he ‘boldly introduced a system of schematised figuration that was paradigmatic for his future work’.87 The influences of both Cubism and Classicism are immediately clear in the abstraction of the human figure into reconfigured elements. The figure in the top left is perhaps the most affected by Cubism: it is rotated, to articulate its totality, as well as its duration in time, through the revelation of planes unavailable in perspectival representation. Schlemmer does not reconfigure these parts into a new, holistic form, but rather – and this is his distinctive appropriation of cubist technique – extracts fundamental characteristics from the thing in order to describe its fundamental construction. The other two figures are developed in geometrically stylised forms. The central one, diagonally aligned, draws attention to its geometric limbs, with the leg-torso existing as a central pillar for the composition. The arm is little more than a hinge to which the limbs are connected. This figure is clearly not the continuous, fluid body of temporal becoming found within the work of Gleizes and Sonia Delaunay. 151

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Figure 25. Oskar Schlemmer, Komposition auf Rosa – Verh¨altnis dreier Figuren, 1915/16

Instead, the body is rigid; as the arm-hinge suggests, its movements are completely predictable. The figure occupying the bottom right of the work is abstracted only in so far as is necessary to present an essential, Platonic, form. A harmoniously symmetrical shape constitutes 152

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Figure 26. Oskar Schlemmer, Plan mit Figuren, 1919

the body. Each figure in the composition informs the other in the manner of its construction. The top left figure presents the body shattered into fundamental forms whilst the middle is the summation of its recombination. The diagonal of its leg mimics the first figure, as does that of the waist, torso and head. Schlemmer’s cubist investigation thus yields a geometrically reductive body when its initial elements are recomposed, rather than his having created a more spatio-temporally elusive form. Schlemmer’s third figure ‘tidies’ the unwieldiness of the second body into an economic rigidity without the flailing extremities. For Schlemmer, the cubist practice yields figurative geometric abstraction. As testament to the continued relevance Schlemmer felt Cubism had for his work, we should note that he repeated the picture, more defined, in enamel in 1930. If Schlemmer’s figural construction proceeded in this way during the war, he explicitly acknowledged it as his method as the conflict came to a close: ‘The hour of the manifesto is past . . . the dividing lines [have been] drawn; now it is time to take stock, and the German method of bringing order out of chaos can come into play.’88 Plan mit Figuren (1919) (Fig. 26) consolidates this approach. Its figuration is more obviously condensed into rational forms. The unwieldy flailing 153

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limbs protruding uncomfortably out of the body are missing. The title itself is instructive; whilst Schlemmer always insisted that his work involved first placing his emotional responses on the canvas and then extracting essential elements from them, it suggests that schematisation is primary, and that his figures are located within the conceptual grid that organises compositional space. Whilst Cubism tended to organise that space from the dynamic of the object, the sense here is that the scheme is primary. Schlemmer’s imagination of the body does not derive from Bergsonian biocepts. Rather, his representations eschew the organic for bodies belonging to an architectonic conception derived from the geometric arrangement of space and volumes. The bodies resemble ornaments, static aesthetic designs based upon harmonious geometric forms. As Peter Beye argues: ‘What fascinated him in Cubism was the formal problem, the geometrical arrangement of the composition and the search for simplification and purification of plastic forms.’89 There is no consideration of dynamic interaction with respect to the bodyin-space: Schlemmer restores an anthropocentric approach within a logico-mathematical framework, even within his abstraction. In his earlier works, Schlemmer had already cultivated a bodily tectonic according to the objective laws he sought. His sculptural imagination of the body existed through the geometric cohesion of the abstracted figure. We might therefore reconsider von Maur’s claim that ‘Schlemmer had discovered what was to form the central theme of his work – a human form which determined the structural organization of the canvas’.90 Whilst the body is essential to Schlemmer’s work, it does not constitute its own structural organisation in the cubist sense. The figure is not represented from its own internal principles – for example through the biocept – but rather from an externally derived structural geometry. Schlemmer repeats this compositional strategy throughout his work. The imagination of corporeal time-space is premised upon an a priori architecture according to which essential human form is constructed. Indeed, the figure in Schlemmer’s designs is not the lived body, but a mechanical, or architectural one, one that we will also see in Laban and Corbusier. In the sculpture series Relief JG (Figs 27 and 28) the figure is similar to those abstracted forms Schlemmer has previously explored. There remains a central axis, an emergent arm hinge and a recognisable human hand. In sculpture, perhaps more than in painting (as a consequence of the medium) Schlemmer reconsidered the figure’s constitution in space. His spatial construction for the

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Figure 27. Oskar Schlemmer, Relief JG, 1919–21

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Figure 28. Oskar Schlemmer, Relief JG in Bronzen, 1919

geometric figure appears as a rough grid. Horizontal and vertical lines divide it into coloured rectangles that intersect the figure. Cubism’s influence is evident here as Schlemmer breaks up the visual plane. The configuration remains as immobile geometric blocks within a grid. His 156

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Figure 29. Oskar Schlemmer Relief im Gips und Glas, 1923

Relief H (1919) maintains the same imagination of the figure, though here reduced facial features replace the topology of the hand. The central, pivotal vertical dominates the relief as it is divided horizontally. A curvilinear element becomes a sensual and striking feature against such an austere framework; it suggests femininity, whilst the sculpture’s other side hints at masculinity through its hard, geometric linearity. Schlemmer’s mechanistic figures are sexually ambivalent: his primary interest is in their form and construction. Relief im Gips und Glas (Fig. 29) maintains the sense of the mechanical body, which is placed in a space divided by horizontal 157

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Figure 30. Oskar Schlemmer Halbfigur mit betonten Formen, 1923

shapes, whilst retaining a vertical central axis. Whilst perhaps less anthropologically figurative, this body is more recognisably figural. Here, Schlemmer’s figuration derives from a whirring motor and is sustained through a central regulatory system, drawing attention to the body’s condition as what Rabinbach describes as ‘the human motor’.91 There even appears to be a small heart-valve. By contrast, Halbfigur mit betonten Formen (Fig. 30) is created through the carving out of space. The form remains loyal to a central vertical component and reflects Relief im Gips und Glas in the shape of the disc to the left, of vessels 158

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and a valve. It also refers to earlier elements with its rudimentary face and an emerging limb from the right. The sculpture appears more organic, dependent on geometrically accurate curvature, whilst being simultaneously mechanical. Schlemmer uses cubist techniques to restore a rigid framework for conceptualising the human figure, but in doing so his postwar cubist bodies begin to take on cybernetic characteristics.

Man in Space In May 1920 Schlemmer received Gropius’s manifesto for the Weimar Bauhaus. He was offered a position and studio in August 1920 and accepted in December. It was in 1923 that Schlemmer took control of the Bauhaus’s stage work from Lothar Schreyer, partly due to his desire to develop media other than sculpture.92 Schlemmer’s work in theatre is crucial to his development of a geometrically derived bodily architectonic that retains cubist influences. In its conceptualisation of theatrical space, Schlemmer’s work had affinities with Gropius’s 1919 Bauhaus manifesto, which proclaimed: ‘The ultimate aim of all creative activity is a building!’ Indeed, all the Bauhaus’ directors were architects: Gropius, Hannes Meyer and Mies van der Rohe. As Schlemmer wrote in a letter to Otto Meyer, ‘from the perspective of the Bauhaus: much of modern art nowadays tends towards practical application, toward architecture’.93 Schlemmer’s conceptualisation, and subsequent tuition, of figure and space develops from, and proceeds along, an architectonic trajectory for fundamental rules in the presentation of the body in space and time. He discussed his own approach: The basic concepts were: the functional, the dynamic, the tectonic. Some of the works produced so resembled the structure of machines that they were different only in not being real machines . . . machines owe their existence not to abstraction but to pure considerations of functionality.94

This industrial-mechanic aesthetic becomes a ‘concrete’ one. The Bauhaus adopted Corbusier’s notion of the ‘Living-machine’ and, as Schlemmer observed in 1922, it aspired to be a ‘[h]eadquarters for superior industrial design’.95 However, he regretted that throughout the 1920s, painterly concerns were ‘tolerated as a necessary evil’96 as 159

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Gropius moved towards beliefs declared within his 1919 manifesto. These divided students because of their anti-art, pro-industry emphasis on producing work ‘filled with that true architectonic spirit’. Heimo Kuchling suggests that ‘[i]t was not until the twentiethcentury that the endeavour to create a theory of life was abandoned; instead all that concerns man’s relationship with his world and his world was called into question’.97 Rather, we have argued, radical thinkers in the nineteenth-century critically rethought the relationship between human knowledge and its environment. However, World War I was a point of historical trauma that effected profound changes on this mode of thought, and it continued to have a critical bearing upon culture, particularly through the post-1918 rationalisation of the Western imagination. Schlemmer’s case illustrates how a modernist’s imagination of his relation to the world is premised upon classical philosophy. Regarding architectural laws, he writes: ‘What I want is this: more architecture at the Bauhaus, more observance of the laws for all the rest; the Bauhaus should seek out, collect, conserve the possible laws – old and new.’98 Despite modernity’s claims to a sweeping cultural change, internal conservative forces – reinvigorated through and after World War I – continued to provide its dominant ideologies, as the ‘progressive’ entangled with the reactionary. Whilst Schlemmer discussed the problems of Modernism and stability, he also embodied the relation between modernity and Classicism. He admired Futurism but was hostile to it, he used cubism, but for representational stability. Yet Schlemmer recognised that modern art has utopian elements: ‘Once you reject classical painting in art, the sky is the limit’;99 ‘classicism vanishes, and boundless possibilities open up’.100 He clearly demonstrates the problem of classicism despite his adherence to it: ‘Simple form and nobility: I cannot fully advocate them, since in some sense they are not genuine, i.e. they contain an element of reflection, of intention, consciousness of the impact; the underlying idea does not totally permeate them.’101 Schlemmer realised that classical form was a fiction, yet his diaries demonstrate his oscillation between two conceptions of himself as a modernist and a neo-classicist, unable to synthesise the two positions. In April 1925 he wrote of ‘metaphysical spaces, metaphysical perspectives, the metaphysical figure . . . multiple figuration of man’102 whilst in the same passage discussing later ‘[t]he essential element: simple forms’. Yet the two passages are seemingly

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Figure 31. Oskar Schlemmer, Figur und Raumlineatur, 1924

contradictory: the former talked of flow and translucency whilst the latter celebrated the essential, the simple form. Significantly, Schlemmer was fascinated by the Ancient Greeks. His diary in June 1921 reported: ‘I spend a lot of time on the art of the past: the early Greeks and the like, the Old Masters, classicistic works . . . much of modern art (and I mean myself) strikes me as sheer folly.’103 Later, he talked to his wife of his plans after dinner: ‘then to the library to study palms and such, canon and Greek gods.’104 In a letter to Otto Meyer he described having been to a lecture by Theodor D¨aubler, who ‘spoke beautifully about Greece, one of his points being that the Greek example is periodically revived – he mentioned Hans von Mar´ees – and me’.105 In his studies of man-in-space such as Figur und Raumlineatur (Fig. 31) and Egozentrische Raumlineatur (Fig. 32) Schlemmer’s work reached a classical apogee. Here he established a ‘Greek’ conception of space related to Plato’s description of spatial geometry in his Timaeus and Euclid’s system for a geometric understanding of space. Here, he reconciled Cubism with Classicism. The cubist 161

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Figure 32. Oskar Schlemmer, Egozentrische Raumlineatur, 1924

draughtsmanship is synthesised here into a compositional matrix. There is a decomposition of the representational surface, but only through a rigid, systemic formula that melds spatial concepts deriving from his work in painting, sculpture, theatre and architecture. This is a completely systematised version of Cubism. Schlemmer had followed his interest in Cubism to its (mathematically) logical conclusion through appropriating its constructional architecture. Schlemmer’s drawings here are deeply concerned with the architecture of human presence in space, and rather than temporal inscription of the object (that he saw in Picasso), he returned the figure to its spatially rationalised objectivity. The synaesthetic Cubism of Gleizes or the sensate figure of Sonia Delaunay is absent: the body exists, is defined, as an architectonic form within a meta-architectural space. In his introduction to The Theatre of the Bauhaus (1924), Gropius wrote that Schlemmer ‘transformed into abstract terms of geometry or mechanics his observation of the human figure moving in space. His figures and forms are . . . eternal types of human character.’106 He also remarked upon Schlemmer’s request that his chapter should be ‘classic in form and content. In it he offers basic values for stage art 162

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cast in a beautiful and concise language . . . Such clarity and control of thought, reaching universal and timeless validity, mark a man of vision.’107 Schlemmer’s student Feininger wrote that it ‘had the quality of elementary form, demonstrating anew the problem of the theatre of Schlemmer’s concept: man in space’.108 Schlemmer’s schema demonstrated his belief that “‘absolute” art, the art of “pure” form and color, belongs to architecture and all that implies . . . Certain old principles seem unshakable, eternally fresh. If their restoration in a new guise were not a reality, someone would have to invent it’.109 Schlemmer’s concept of space coincides with the Bauhaus’s aim of architectural transformation and mechanisation, seemingly achieved at the expense of humanity. The human body is grafted into a regime of performance, defined within a specific configuration of space. This space, for Schlemmer, derived from his notion of ‘man’s innate sense of proportion’.110 Schlemmer thus conceived of the body as an architectonic configuration rather than involving the concepts ‘bioceptuality’ and organic being that underpinned the cubist art from which he derived certain compositional principles. Schlemmer posited: ‘Man, the human organism, stands in the cubical, abstract space of the stage. Man and Space. Each has different laws of order. Whose shall prevail?’111 Even though he recognised that ‘Man’ was not ontologically constituted by mathematical space, the question was redundant, as he had already configured subjectivity on the principles he accorded space. Schlemmer’s figures (Figs 49–51) suggest figural configuration according to mechanical principles, just as his representation in Figur und Raumlineatur and Egozentrische Raumlineatur assumes classical linearity. ‘Lines’ appear in both titles of Schlemmer’s works, although the line precludes bioceptuality (at least as it is conceived in the work of the Delaunays). The figure is both architectural and architecturally determined within a Cartesian matrix; Schlemmer thus answered his own question ‘whose [order] shall prevail’ through his cubist representations within a threedimensional space. His question, furthermore, assumed a dualistic conceptualisation of body and space fundamentally different to their cubist and futurist conception of being ontologically constituted in time, and divisible only through the conceptual excising of a particular relational quality. Sonia Delaunay articulated what Schlemmer rejected: the body is simultaneously in time as an event where space is projected from

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the body and corporeality a property of space itself. Both Delaunay’s and Schlemmer’s bodies are configured according to their defining relation to the environment. Simply put, however, Delaunay arrived at a modernistic concept from within, whilst Schlemmer was interested in exterior, quantifiable objectivity even though, for both artists, the bionomic of body and environment was structurally coupled. Thus Delaunay articulated a notion of subjectivity entangled in the past in the bio-graph, whose time is like the Benjaminian mosaic, whilst Schlemmer’s conception of Being is very different, based on order rather than process, though his retreat into the past in order to repeat pre-modern regimes belongs to Schleifer’s model of the modernist repetition of history. Indeed, in contrast to Delaunay’s representations of the Parisian dancehall, Schlemmer wrote that a stage is something that ‘can be perfected with mathematical precision’.112 Although he acknowledged that his abstraction was ‘contrary to nature’, it nevertheless created the order he desired: ‘Form is manifest in extensions of height, breadth, and depth; as line, as plane, and as solid or volume. Depending on these extensions, form becomes then linear framework . . . tangible – form.’113 He reconciled the exterior objectification of body-space-time thus: These arts – architecture, sculpture, painting – are fixed. They are momentary, frozen motion. Their nature is the immutability of not an accidental but a typified condition, the stability of forces in equilibrium. And thus what may appear at first as a deficiency, particularly in our age of motion, is actually their greatest merit.114

Importantly, therefore, Schlemmer sought the arrest of temporality as culturally, and therefore artistically, desirable. After witnessing the catastrophic effects of unrestrained modernity, the ‘stability of forces’ articulated in Greek and Renaissance conceptions of space, as in Alberti and Bosse’s models, and the positivistic grid derived from the Enlightenment, influenced his development of the ‘invisible linear network of planimetric and Stereometric relationships’ that ‘corresponds to the inherent mathematic of the human body,’ which is ‘determined mechanically and rationally’.115 It is only a small step from here for Schlemmer to announce the rationalisation of bodily movement through ‘the geometry of calisthenics, eurythmics, and gymnastics’.116 In technological modernity, the body is not only 164

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imagined cybernetically, but, as we shall we see, bodies are increasingly engineered through state organised gymnastics as rigid, mechanical bodies whilst simultaneously flexible to the desire of the state. We might even propose that the socio-political techniques for the production of conformist subjectivity are reflected in the post-cubist epistemic conception of body and space that Schlemmer developed.

The Figure of Reactionary Modernism The larger themes and concerns within Schlemmer’s work must be considered as a response to the wider brutalising and death of the subject within World War I. Indeed, Schlemmer is far from alone in recuperating the human figure through classical norms; many artists responded similarly to the devastation of war upon the body. Walter Benjamin wrote that ‘beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body’.117 For Siegfried Kracauer the proximity to death and spiritual despair had profound effects on postwar German culture. He noted mass culture’s obsession with signs of order even in its consumerism: ‘this is what characterizes die Neue Sachlichkeit in general, that it is a facade concealing nothing; that it does not derive from profundity, but simulates it. Like denial of old age, it arises from dread of confronting death.’118 Similarly, in consumable signifiers: ‘The flight of images is a flight from revolution and from death.’119 Figur und Raumlineatur and Egozentrische Raumlineatur both maintain that Benjaminian sense of fragility, necessitating a comfortable spatio-temporal regime that erases of the effects of warfare. They also, once again, locate the human figure within calculable, harmonious rules, and reinscribe the body according to rational order, as in Kracauer’s understanding of the ‘New Objectivity’. Schlemmer’s obsession with the representation of a universal man and the essential rules that govern being cannot be isolated from the culture to which he is sensitive. The immediate, mainstream, cultural reaction after World War I was to denounce an aleatoric prewar period and erect a systematic ‘redemptive’ figure according to enduring models of space and time, and a conservative telluric turn in representation. Artists returned to history to find a cure for modernity in their recuperation of culture; Schlemmer sought to restore classical order on the ‘chaotic’ wreckage of modernity whilst 165

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Germany was turbulently propelled into its technological future while entangled with the past. Elsewhere, I have discussed the trauma of the war upon its soldiery’s pre-modern subjectivity and the state’s attempt to reconstitute that subject through technologies of surgery, psychology and electrification focused upon a fantasy of ‘ego boundaries’ and the integrity of a rearmoured self.120 Just one month into war Britain received its first cases suffering from a previously unknown mental breakdown for which no consideration had been given.121 Official figures recorded 80,000 cases of ‘shell shock’ by the war’s end, although this number belies an official concealment of the scale. Furthermore, many were misdiagnosed, as physical injury was far easier to classify, and for soldiers to admit to, than a ‘feminised’ psychological wounding. Wendy Holden estimates the number of cases would have been closer to 200,000, whilst in comparison the German army registered 613,047 cases of nerve disorder between 1913 and 1918.122 Indeed, this ‘phenomenological’ disorder was so vast that Army statistics reveal 40 per cent of British casualties in 1916 were ‘shell shock’ cases.123 The subject’s ‘fragility’ was relative to the destructive potential of technological modernity. As H.G. Wells noted, the machine gun enabled the dispersal of ‘simultaneous bullets’. Holden writes that the Allied offensive on the Somme in July 1916 saw ‘the biggest losses ever sustained by an army in one day’124 (if we limit this to British military history), as the machine gun savaged bodies going ‘over the top’. Meanwhile, the impact of shelling simultaneously destroyed and mutilated bodies. The Battle of Verdun, from February to December 1916, left hundreds of thousands dead on each side, during which, at times, the Germans launched 100,000 shells an hour.125 At Passchendaele, in July 1917, over four million shells rained upon the German front in just two weeks.126 The trenches built between Switzerland and the English Channel contained millions of bodily remains.127 Although nine million died in the war, there were over 37 million casualties in all, and almost every person in Europe was confronted with death. Adrian Gregory suggests that ‘no event since the Black Death, neither revolution, religious upheaval or war, had touched the lives of Europeans in such a general and far reaching manner’.128 Even those who had not fought had directly helped in the war effort; they knew of people that had not returned from the Front, or endured the terror of a war no longer necessarily fought on distant fields, but that destroyed their

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very homes. Even the Messines Ridge campaign, whereby more than a million pounds of explosives secretly buried under German lines were detonated, had the body politic literally trembling as the resulting blast was so large its tremors carried to Southern Europe and even Downing Street, London, 130 miles away.129 All spaces became fronts; under sporadic aerial attack by airships and submarine blockade, Britain created a Home Front and for the first time its citizens experienced war beyond its very limited media representations. Death and destruction reached past the space of the battlefield and into the very homes of the absent soldiers, particularly as the influenza pandemic that emerged during the war is estimated to be the largest outbreak in history,130 causing 20 million deaths worldwide.131 In ‘Theories of German Fascism’, Benjamin argued that the German Right understood the catastrophe of war as a consequence of nineteenth-century idealism, liberalism and utilitarianism. As Herf writes, ‘Fascism in Europe and National Socialism in Germany promised creativity, beauty, aesthetic form, and the spiritual unity of the nation in place of . . . formless, soulless, and chaotic liberalism’.132 The avant-garde’s emergence from idealism and subjectivism in the nineteenth-century was attacked as symptomatising a decadent bourgeois subjectivity that weakened the strength, order and purity of the German Rationalist, Nationalist spirit. Ansgar Hillach notes that ‘[b]ourgeois subjectivity thus appeared to have arrived at the logical end of its degenerative process – a process which reached its most advanced state in the nineteenth-century with the aestheticist transformation of the arts’.133 The terrible failure of the war was also seized upon by the German Right as a failure of a culture ‘falsified in its essential form by ethical and humanitarian ideologies of progress’.134 Modern bourgeois humanism – although Herf denies Germany had a liberal historical phase that he then uses to account for the country’s attraction to National Socialism instead of democracy – was displaced by notions of ‘heroic nationalism’. Therefore, for the German Right, the war was the devastating consequence of technology that German idealism could not reconcile within its modern episteme of subjective relation to the world. Benjamin proposed that ‘the destructive power of war provides clear evidence that social reality was not ready to make technology its own organ, and that technology was not strong enough to master the elemental forces of society’.135 The ‘wreckage’ caused by war was therefore perceived as a consequence of the inability of idealism,

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humanitarianism and liberalism to not be consumed by the power of its own technology. Schlemmer’s work, and indeed the French rappel a l’ordre, accords with Hans Muhlstein’s notion that ‘cubism had foreshadowed a decentering of the self that brutally prevailed during World War I . . . it was now time for man to extricate himself from the chaos in which the anarchy of the sciences had left him’.136 Ernst J¨unger specifically rejected the radical imagination of the self as continuous with the world. The annihilation of subjectivity in the soldier’s experience of the Front was the extreme, traumatic consequence of the ‘decentered’ modern subject previously given radical expression by Gleizes and Delaunay. Hillach argues that J¨unger had experienced a crisis concerning his national consciousness; he ‘withstood the impending collapse by strategies of depersonalisation’.137 Since the German Right emphasised a nationalist reclamation of subjectivity in the service of spiritual destiny, it equated idealism with nihilism. ‘Nihilism thus appears as the ultimate historical consequence of idealism’s self-declared autonomous spirit . . . The economic correlate of this idealism lies in debasing nature to abstract matter, the mere object of arbitrarily imposed productive or destructive impulses.’138 Schlemmer’s postwar ‘cubist’ figures embody this recuperative process within German culture. If French cubists were eager to demean their earlier ‘analytic’ phase as a historical aberration in order to render their ‘synthetic’ art acceptable to the Right, so Schlemmer’s manifestation of Cubism demonstrates a similar process without the specific historical processes of the rappel a` l’ordre. Postwar Cubism and its rhizomatic off-shoots rejected what we might call ‘Idealist cubism’ for an operation of Aristotelian objective logic on the object in order to extract the most stable, universal laws, that is a ‘Rationalist cubism’. This is precisely the case that Lhote makes in his formulation of Cubism, as well as that of the aesthetics of Purism, non-objective art and Schlemmer’s articulation of the subject in space. Rationalism, with its heritage extending into antiquity, would become the defining feature of twentieth-century ‘modernity’, after a century that saw a transformation of human subjectivity according to ‘irrational’ psychophysics within idealism. It was symptomatic of the cultural turn within the defeated nation, which sought to blame modern culture whilst returning to atavistic myths. The victorious French meanwhile perceived the failure of progressive liberalism, returned to classical

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representation and sought regeneration from the decomposition of bodies and earth. Purism in France synthesised Cubism with nostalgia for the landscape and the peasant, indeed combining the two, in Platonic forms. It also participated in a much wider representational nostalgia through the ideas of the union of body and soil, as Romy Golan points out. Golan makes a quasi-psychoanalytic cultural reading of a French ‘selfinfantilization’139 in response to a world war fought almost entirely locally. (She suggests that ultimately this self-infantilisation produced Fascist father figures.) The rappel a` l’ordre was a ‘political and cultural agenda . . . largely aimed at repressing the trauma of war’.140 Vernacular portrayals of the landscape and nostalgic yearnings for rural life were part of telluric processes that laid claim to traditions of national identity when the northern French landscape remained devastated. L´eger, on the other hand, had been inspired by comradeship and the awesome realisation of technology he saw during the war. As Green writes, ‘L´eger’s reaction to the war was as positive as Marinetti’s had been to the Libyan War of 1911. Driven by his experience and, as we shall see, by the example of Cendrars, he turned in 1918 to a pictorial display of the dynamism of modern experience on every level . . . and even went so far as to resurrect the painting of simultaneity.’141 L´eger made simultaneous the subject, technology and the city. Whilst we observed L´eger’s prewar concern with the ‘dissolution of the body’ in the first chapter, with Purism in the 1920s he returned to the figurative to celebrate the urban subject.142 For Golan, Purism, as a movement, served as an ‘exemplary mouthpiece of the reactionary cultural politics of the retour a` l’ordre’.143 There was a similar ‘return to order’ within Weimar culture. Whilst in France the landscape was given ‘bioceptual’ projection in surrealist work, especially by Andr´e Masson (the only French Surrealist to have fought at the front),144 as Silver and Golan argue, others reverted to the figure of the peasant or the female body harvesting and its connotation of fertility. Schlemmer’s Bauhaus work – despite being attacked for its ‘Modernism’ – attempted to wed the modern with the technological in restoring conservative notions of the body and subjectivity. If French art sought to return to the particular configuration of an iconic bodyin-space in the rural peasant, Schlemmer concentrated on finding similar utopian bodily archetypes, for him residing in fundamental,

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classical and technological laws of man-in-space. Yet, although himself politically centre-liberal, Schlemmer’s cultural morphology envelops aspects of what Herf terms ‘reactionary modernism’, including a synthesis of myth and reason, but in particular it exhibits a reconciliation of technology with reactionary classical aesthetics that opposed ‘chaotic bourgeois order’.145 The ‘inner spirit’ and ‘will to power’ could be realised through technology, relocated as an expression of self rather than of positivism; technology would serve the state’s control of society rather than bourgeois, or Jewish, interests; ‘masculinity’ could be modernised through technology; finally, rooted between America and Russia, technology could be utilised at the service of, and to maintain, a specifically German geist and destiny. Instead of depersonalised self in harmony with space and time, the German Right produced an individual ‘armoured’ by technology, constructed upon myths of rationalism that manifested their will through technology for the superiority of the nation. Hal Foster and Klaus Theweleit both discuss a consequence of the ‘armoured’ body as a specific response to the challenge of modernity to the ego, something manifestly intensified by the war. Foster argues that the work of Max Ernst assumes autistic characteristics through a fantasised ‘defensive armoring’ of a mechanical body: the traumatised ego is replaced by a ‘military-industrial reconfiguration of the body’.146 After the war, Ernst began to sign his work ‘Dadamax Ernst’, and Foster argues that Dada replayed traumatic shock in a Freudian ‘working through’. Theweleit attempts a psychoanalytic sociological approach to the literature of the postwar German Freikorps, offering the concept of ‘ego’ armouring of the projected site of the body. After the confrontation with its possible dissolution, masculinity is preserved in the Germanic military mythology of the ‘man of steel’, constructed through the notion of ‘ego integrity’. Theweleit argues ‘they must acquire an enveloping “ego” from the outside’, which is a disciplinary technique by power, until ‘the armor of these men may be seen as constituting their ego’.147 This ego-armour also demands violence against the ‘other’, through misogyny, racism, anti-semitism, attacks on homosexuality and radical politics exemplified by Communism – all tendencies later developed by the Nazi Party. Even within the artistic avant-garde – in contrast to the literary avant-garde that was sometimes more dedicated to the aesthetics of politics – Schlemmer’s ‘non-political’ stance articulated a docile subject

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intercalated within a system of rational, calculable and logical rules taken from the structural principles of Cubism. Indeed his Modernism is very much bound to the pre-modern. His diaries and letters reflect how much the war affected him and suggest how it influenced his neoclassicist thought. Already by August 1917 Schlemmer had written, in a retrenchment remarkably close to his conservative critics: Only the renewal of both form and content can successfully forge a new spirit. In these times everything cries out for renewal . . . In the midst of this chaos, the artist must seek stability within himself. Out of the absolute subjectivity of many individuals who share the same attitudes the spirit of the new age will rise.148

In February 1919 he wrote of a forthcoming ‘purification process’,149 and this sense of abjection and purification is emphasised four days later: ‘The world must vomit up all its accumulated evils; no one has a right to ask to peace and order until that has been accomplished.’150 War has a sickening effect, an expression derived from ‘bioceptual’ metaphors such as vomit. It is this visceral conception of the subjective topos that Schlemmer excised from his art through an emphasis on sterility and harmony. (He later taught classical anatomy and hygiene for his course on the body.) It appears as almost a representational repression of the corporeal ills that George Grosz and Otto Dix so successfully emphasised at the same time. Thus Schlemmer talks in 1919 of an imaginary artist whose ‘art already depicts the post-revolutionary world – cleansed, a new Greece, purity’.151 The theme of a cleansed, pure spirit that Schlemmer describes can be found elsewhere in the rhetoric of postwar European culture, and specifically in the reactionary modernism of the German Right, which proposed the forging of a ‘new man’. As Herf notes, this figure ‘incorporated modern technology into the cultural system of modern German nationalism, without diminishing the latter’s romantic and antirational aspects’.152 The right promoted a new order to replace the chaos created by capitalism within the enhanced political power of the state. We must rather understand Schlemmer’s ‘new man’ as based on liberal, internationalist sympathies emerging from Enlightenment rationalism rather than directly aligned to, but located within the context of, the ‘new man’ produced by reactionary nationalist, anti-intellectual, v¨olkish ideologies. Herf argues that its development 171

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was a consequence of capitalist industrialisation proceeding without a concurrent bourgeois revolution, and weakly developed political liberalism.153 Foucault presents a similar argument regarding the difficulty of German ‘liberalism and liberal politics’.154 Whilst Schlemmer’s moderate political position conflicted with the forces of reaction, his synthesis of technology and myth, rationality and classicism can also be found in the expressions of the German right, which harnessed these positions for an aesthetic of control and power. Max Weber perceived this synthesis as ‘a politics of absolute ethics rather than a politics of responsibility’.155 (Schlemmer’s own political indifference could be interpreted as typifying Herf ’s notion of the modernist avant-garde’s amoral aestheticism that inherently contained aspects of Nietzchean ‘beyond good and evil.’ ) As Walter Benjamin understood, technological and industrial modernism did not necessarily mean the modernisation of culture itself.156 The utopian term ‘new spirit’ found within Schlemmer’s writings also appears in those of Oswald Spengler, whose personal relation with German industrialists and conservative politics spawned, as Herf writes, ‘an ambiguous synthesis of technics and irrationalism . . . to rescue Germany from the liberalism of the Weimar Republic’.157 Herf suggests that Spengler understood modernity’s ‘demonic’ as an ˇ zek refers to the ‘continuity elemental, potential force.158 Slavoj Ziˇ between primitive barbarism and modernity’ with the disintegration of bourgeois culture and the return to ‘barbaric mythopoetic violence’ ˇ zek therefore agrees with Benjamin, within conservative modernism. Ziˇ commenting that ‘the hegemony of early bourgeois liberal-rationalist individualism [was undermined] in favour of a renewed barbaric religious aestheticization of social life – new sacred mass rituals . . . asserting themselves, enacting new forms of barbaric sacrifice.’159 In the postwar retrenchment, Germanic Kultur became based on community, blood, will, race and self in opposition to Zivilisation, which was characterised by intellect, internationalism, liberalism and finance (containing the rhetoric for later ‘demonic’ anti-Semitic atrocities). It was this Kultur that a new modern German spirit, or geist, would foster. According to Herf, in Preussentum und Sozialismus (Prussian Virtues and Socialism) (1919) Spengler sutured Marx’s notion of socialism to Prussian values to conceive of a nascent ‘national socialist’ regime whereby the subject was constructed upon nationalistic loyalty, obedience and sacrifice, romanticism and technology. However,

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Spengler wrote that Socialism was instead ‘older, stronger, and more fundamental’ than Marxism, existed in the ‘spirit of Old Prussia’ and was tied to blood in the creation of the future. Indeed, Spengler set himself the task of ‘liberating’ German socialism from Marx. Instead, Socialism was the means for a unification of will that put technology at the service of the nation’s ‘Destiny’. Herf comments: ‘Behind the smooth, lean surfaces of modern technical artefacts, Spengler saw at work . . . dark, elemental, demonic forces.’160 Although Spengler wrote that Socialism is ‘not an instinct of dark primeval origin’, he suggested that political, social and economic modernity was continuous with ‘the old Faustian will to power’ that manifested itself through neoimperialism, world war, revolution and domination of the masses. Indeed, Spengler saw in Western science and technology the creative development of will and domination, although he neglected that the Classical and Renaissance episteme was intent on reproducing nature rather than imposing will upon it. The cult of the German ‘soul’ was destined to impose itself as order upon chaos, something to which even Schlemmer’s moderate liberalism aspired. Spengler’s ‘new man’ therefore emerged from the trenches, appropriating technology for the service of blood, instinct and tradition. His Der Mensch und die Technik (Man and Technics) (1931) reiterated the notion of ‘Destiny’. Spengler contrasted the technics inherent in ‘Nature’ through tactics of survival with those arising from human consciousness. He wrote that man’s primordial technics were language and the mastery of tools that evolved with the human hand. Both transcended the body’s limitations,161 allowing the subject’s will to dominate its environment. However, through the bourgeois ‘religion’ of materialism,162 Western society embarked on the destruction of the environment and its indigenous peoples.163 Indeed, Spengler argued that technics only posed a problem to culture in the nineteenth-century and therefore advocated, referring to Nietzsche and Darwin, returning to a more intuitive, primordial ‘Soul’ in harnessing technology for the domination of its world. Ernst J¨unger similarly promoted the reconciliation of technology with Kultur. In contrast to Gleizes’s argument that the excessive use of technology alienated humanity from its world, J¨unger fantasised the ‘new man’ as a powerful, mechanised, steel-like body that could realise the will of the individual human subject according to his national socialist ideologies. Like the French conservatives, J¨unger also

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characterised the war as liberating. Herf describes J¨unger’s memory as of ‘an exciting and romantic contact with sudden danger, death, masculine energy, and exotic and elemental forces . . . a heroic ideal of soldiers immune to the fear of death and the horror of killing’.164 J¨unger celebrated the frail human subject’s replacement by an awesome ‘new man’. The chaos of war created a subject that ‘melts into everything’165 – rather like Cubism’s ‘decentering of the self ’ – whilst maintaining an interconnective bond with others through his rebirth in a prostheticised ‘steel form’. Despite their evident ideological separation, J¨unger’s image of man, of ‘aesthetic clarity and form, and a utopian vision of a body so mechanized and tough that it was beyond pain’,166 has affinities with Schlemmer’s imagination of the mechanical subject within a geometric matrix, with both ‘new’ men arising from the ashes of a chaotic war. As J¨unger wrote: ‘New forms filled with blood and power will be packed with a hard fist. The war is a great school and the new man will be taken from our race.’167 J¨unger’s emphasis on technology and the ‘laws of blood’ is reminiscent of the whirring motor and central blood flow of Schlemmer’s cybernetic body, premised on Cubism’s extracting and synthesising of essential forms, as in Relief im Gips und Glas (Fig. 29) whereby ‘laws’ of blood and physics are conflated. For J¨unger, ‘the hot will of blood restrains and then expresses itself through the dominance of technical wonder works of power’.168 Schlemmer’s ‘non-political’, cool utopian elucidation of the cybernetic in rational time-space took a form not unrelated – in a purely biopolitical sense of the ‘new man’ – to J¨unger’s man-machine hybrid: We have transferred what lies inside us onto the machine. That includes the distance and ice-cold mind that transforms the moving lightning stroke of blood into a conscious and logical performance . . . [our nerves] intertwined with [weapons] and [blood] . . . flow[s] around every axle.169

Despite opposing ideological intentions, Schlemmer’s concerns regarding the ‘new man’ nevertheless derive from a shared cultural imagination as J¨unger’s sense of ‘logical performance’ combined with blood flowing around the mechanical axle in a cybernetic organism. Technological rationality in this instance did not mean the Americanism, commercialism, urbanism and mass culture inherent in Zivilisation but the blood, spirit, will of German Kultur.170 Like Schlemmer’s 174

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Figure 33. Oskar Schlemmer, Raum und Figur, 1926

‘vacant body’, a term to which I return, J¨unger advocated the heroic subservience of the individual to the spirit of the Nation, to Prussian values of discipline, empowered through technology. The body in Schlemmer’s oeuvre expresses vitality and dynamism but, perhaps through Cubism’s influence on the ‘depersonalisation’ of the subject opened unto the world that characterises his work, it is a body rendered ideologically vacuous. As Hans Freyer theorised, advocating revolution from the right, the ‘new man’ was ‘a pure reaction against the spirit of the nineteenth-century . . . and, in the final analysis, a child of this spirit itself ’.171 If liberal Europe could not control modernity’s relation of the subject to time and space through technology, then the reactionary right would do so in its production of a new man from the utopian dialectic of the nineteenth-century. Schlemmer’s construction of an ‘non-political’ figure in space and time therefore provides a parallel visual expression of the human subject as it was imagined within reactionary modernism, but its lack of overt political engagement leaves it as a malleable subject, a vacant surface, upon which the right could inscribe its aestheticisation of politics in the realisation of a biopolitical ‘new spirit’. It is an expression of reactionary modernity’s fantasy: an apolitical cybernetic ‘new man’, mechanically powerful in 175

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its domination of nature, atavistically suggestible to cultic mythology, and morally and politically manipulable.

The Monumental Body Schlemmer’s objective, cybernetic figure is a symptomatic recuperation of the body – a defence against the trauma of modernity. However, there is a striking congruence between Schlemmer’s conceptual work and the most visible postwar reconstruction of the body – the war memorial, where the absent mass is remodelled as a monumental body. As classical, pre-modern forms of subjectivity were re-imposed, so too were its bodily proportions and ideals. Albert Elsen notes: From the Renaissance the proportions of order, or composition, of sculpture were basically generated by the living human form or its ideal . . . The model’s deficiencies could be corrected by recourse to approved models of beauty from such paradigmatic periods as classical Greece.172

The monumental body would be engineered upon these principles, negating the new culture of the instant that had ravaged millions of bodies. More vernacular or ‘progressive’ works, such as Jacob Epstein’s bust An American Soldier (1918), were rejected by the Academy. It was upon classical ideals that a simulacrum of the ideal body of industrial modernity’s mass soldiery was produced, inscribed with the ideology of the body politic that had caused mass death in the first place. Classical representation of the body was its corollary, an index of metaphysical ‘being’ opposed to the ‘degenerate’ avant-garde creations of abstracted, fractured bodies. The decision to ban repatriation of the war dead caused a rupture in traditional modes of mourning. Many bodies had been completely obliterated and were often unidentifiable, and the strain of resource on economically exhausted states in retrieving and identifying dismembered combatants was too great. The monument offered a site where the violence visited on the body was replaced by cohesive materiality. The absence of deformation, in conjunction with homogenous expressions of courage, created tropes whose alteration of the body sought to alter the attitudes of mourners. Rather than absorbing hurt and blame, even when they, rarely, depicted the fallen, memorials projected 176

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positive myths of sacrifice and valour as states sought to control mourning behaviour. Indeed, the sculptors deemed most successful were those who erased identity, creating instead vacant bodies. A number of heroic ‘Greek’ bodies were repeatedly used as stereotypes of the bodily ideal upon which to construct the war memorial. These included the semi-naked Greek athletic body used particularly in Britain to depict ‘The Navy’, ‘The Army’ and the ‘Prisoner of War’ in the Exeter war memorial. Birmingham’s ‘Hall of Memory’, unveiled in 1925 by Albert Toft, used seated, noble bodies to represent ‘The Army’ and ‘The Airforce’. The Blackburn memorial (Bertram Mackennal, 1924) portrays a maternal figure behind a semi-naked Greek youth. The generic modelling of the faces in such monuments allowed freer inscription of meaning by the mourner, whilst there was a subtle engineering of ideological exscription through the management of the body in space. For example, the memorial allowed the regulation of mourning, directing it towards sentiment, neutralising any critical analysis of political responsibility. The monumental body defused hostility as it re-inscribed on the mourner the same ideologies of nationalism, pride and formal coherence that informed the sculpted figure. The Greek goddess Nike was repeatedly used to suggest that some greater, divine impetus for victory was being served. Newbury Abbott Trent’s winged female from Hove (1912) was recast to create three war memorials, and also appeared in Orkney, Pencoed, Emberton and Leominster. W. Gascombe John’s ‘The Response’ in Newcastle (1925) portrays Nike as leading masses of men. (Though intended as an inspiring image, we might imagine it as an ‘angel of death’ leading men to destruction.) Additionally, the monumental body was sometimes placed in a specific environment. In Britain the Royal Horticultural Society was asked to configure ‘spontaneous’ natural growth of vegetation to transform these spaces into contemplative sites. Siegfried Kracauer’s autobiographical Ginster described the technologies of managing such emotive spaces: ‘Ginster therefore applied his set-square and ruler to manufacturing a cemetery system that resembled a military chart . . . Laid out according to strictly scientific principles, open to all members of the public.’173 The memorial body’s construction is never confined to its corporeal boundaries: it is enveloped within a geometric space. The monumental landscape re-inscribes the body within a transparent ideological matrix. The construction of the absent

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body belongs here to a specific rational space promoting an ideal metaphysical form for social consumption. Furthermore, as Catherine Moriarty points out, ‘[a]s well as their mourning role, women were depicted with children, nurturing the next generation . . . whilst the men regained their patriarchal position’.174 Women resumed prewar iconographic roles, exemplified by Thomas Brock’s female figure with a wheatsheaf in the Victorian Memorial on the Mall, 1910. ‘Women’s Services’ in the Exeter war memorial portrays a Marian figure with wheat surrounding the base. At Port Sunlight, a young girl holding a baby presents her future maternal role.175 The idealised masculine nude demonstrates familial recuperation by holding a small child, the future, aloft in memorials in Kingston-upon-Thames, Crompton and Reigate. State technologies of commemoration elicited a calculated response as memorials had to cohere to regulations established, with its sculptors belonging to traditional institutions, the Royal Academy or the Royal Society of British Sculptors. They reproduced the bodies required by the state, and at a local level, commissioning committees consisting of the community’s empowered figures such as MPs, councillors, clergy and businessmen. The harmonisation of the body was similarly promoted in France. This is clear from the monuments of the sculptor Aristide Maillol. Elsen writes that Maillol was ‘bent upon retaining museum quality and viable aspects of tradition’.176 Sculpture was considered an important part of French identity, honoured in the educational system as a branch of philosophy. Indeed, it was considered ‘the last bastion of order and good taste after the fall of painting to “anarchy”’.177 Maillol’s success and fame came through the distinctive harmony of his sculptural bodies, despite general cultural trends that saw allegorical Greek figures replaced by classically-inspired depictions of the modern worker, and the emergence of more radical sculpture from artists such as Archipenko and Lipchitz. But Maillol’s bodies satisfied the state’s demand for recuperative representation of the absent body. His forms derived from Michelangelo’s sculptures but, importantly, as Elsen notes, ‘without the latter’s meaning of spiritual distress’.178 The pleasing harmony of his figures is in contrast to the rare example of overflowing ‘spiritual distress’ found in the contorted body of Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s remarkable Expressionist Der Gest¨urzte. Although Maillol’s sculptural development had reached maturity, a journey to Greece with his

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aristocratic patron in 1908 is worth noting since it probably led Maillol to rework Greek styles.179 According to Waldemar George, Maillol ‘acknowledged that he began with a geometric form – square, diamond, triangle. The statue is architectural.’180 This basis for the construction and formulation of the body is likewise crucial to its conceptualisation in the ‘avant-garde’ work of Schlemmer, Laban and ˆ Corbusier. It is exemplified by Maillol’s monuments, such as Ilede-France, the reconstruction in marble of the original limestone La M´editterran´ee, the memorial at Banyuls and the reclining female nude l’Air that was commissioned later, in 1938. Maillol’s influence on the British sculptor Frank Dobson was profound. Dobson’s earlier ‘cubist’ sculpture became increasingly informed by Maillol’s figures. Posted to the Somme in October 1916, Dobson returned to England with ‘shell shock’. In the 1920s, as Robert Hopper notes, ‘[t]hese works have poise, formal clarity and confidence which contrast with the rather forced angularities of the work immediately following his return from World War I’.181 Neville Jason argues that Dobson initially echoed the futurist desire for war as a cathartic, purifying experience. One of his letters to a friend states, ‘I am quite keen to know how the war has influenced you to a decision about the treatment of form, because I really expect great things from this war. I think everyone does’.182 However, the influence of Cubism and Vorticism upon Dobson waned in the 1920s. Writing in Vogue in February 1922, Clive Bell compared Dobson to Bernini, citing Dobson’s ‘pure form in its essence’.183 Whilst Epstein’s memorial Rima (1925) caused public outrage when it was unveiled in Hyde Park, Dobson’s Cornucopia led Bell to write in Vogue’s March 1927 edition in terms reflecting the delight of French conservatives at the betrayal of Cubism by its former practitioners in the return to order. Dobson came triumphantly out of the world of Cubism some nine or ten years ago, and entered the world of pure, academic sculpture . . . over which Maillol reigns . . . Here, dominating the gallery, is his masterpiece in this manner – this large female figure – this Choephora.184

Stanley Casson wrote: ‘Maillol is the apostle of tranquillity, the master of pure, flowing lines and simple masses. Dobson has inherited much, if not all, of the beauty of form which is Maillol’s great contribution to sculpture.’185 Jason comments: ‘The influence of Maillol on Dobson’s 179

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work is evident, and he was the first to acknowledge it . . . simplifying his forms in an attempt to get nearer the purity of Greek classical sculpture.’186 Although Dobson’s artistic trajectory had been different, moving through Cubism, his ‘purist’ turn reconciles his work with that of Maillol. It was Dobson who later broadcast Maillol’s obituary for the BBC in 1944, in appreciation of ‘the man who more than anyone else had inspired his work’.187 Schlemmer’s abstracted metaphysic of the body-in-space in Figur und Raumlineatur is critically located within this context as both the subject of mechanised warfare and a re-establishment of fundamental, and profoundly conservative, inscriptions on the body. Whilst Apollinaire before 1914 had been critical of classical Greek tendencies in modern art, as ‘a somewhat mechanical rhythm [that] constantly destroys the proportions’,188 Schlemmer sought to reconcile the body to universal laws and establish an anthropocentric harmony according to those very principles. Just as the Renaissance promoted the Ancient Greek view of rational man governed by objective universal laws, so it was restored in postwar representations. If the body had been imagined as fluid and open before the war, now it was being closed and solidified. Schlemmer created such a ‘closed’ body within the domain of the visual arts. Indeed, Williams and Bendelow suggest that such closure is ‘a consistent theme in Western thought, dating as far back as Plato’s deliberations in the Phaedus, Aristotle’s musings in De Anima, and exemplified par excellence in Descartes’ famous dictum “Cogito ergo sum”’.189 Schlemmer’s grid, or as I will propose later, Max Weber’s ‘iron cage’, is a rationally engineered space, premised upon classical myths, but justified as a technology in the ‘restorative’ configuration of Western subjectivity.

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4 Modernity’s Vitruvian Bodies Introduction: Vitruvian Men Schlemmer’s Figur und Raumlineatur was not a new conceptualisation of the body-in-space. It derived from a specific context alongside his own artistic development and continued the Western tradition of mathematical inscription upon the body. A comparison of Schlemmer’s Figur und Raumlineatur – literally ‘figure’ and ‘space lines’ – and Laban’s and Corbusier’s formulations of the body, with the representation of classical depictions of the ‘Vitruvian man’, yields remarkable similarities. The Vitruvian figure has been used throughout post-Renaissance Western culture as an index of the rational human subject. It continued into modernity as the hinge for certain ‘modernist’ representations of the body. Previously, the body was made to speak of its divine mathematical harmony. In modernity it articulated an aesthetic of order and stability. As I have shown, modernity’s investigation of ‘Man’ as a body of knowledge freed the body from its mathematical dependency in its relocation of epistemology to embodiment. Indeed, it was in this same historical moment that Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) argued for an environmental-genetic evolution of organisms, suggesting an organic process of bodily development. A modern Darwinian model of the human body therefore opposed the static ‘divine’ template afforded to humanity in Vitruvian man. Broadly speaking, the former idea conceived the body within a perpetual process of dynamic interaction with its environment whilst the latter offers a fixed, ‘closed’ body. Having been discussed in Vitruvius’s De Architectura more than two millennia ago, the ‘ideal’ figure persists as an index for a cultural 181

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Figure 34. Cesare Cesariano, De Architectura, 1521

imagination of the body that maintains its popular symbolism through cultural references. It is worth noting that Vitruvius is considered as the first architect to define his ideas in writing, as his proto-architectural doctrine describes a ‘symmetrical harmony’ of the body that can be utilised for ‘perfect buildings’.1 This architectonic conception of the body-in-space has already been demonstrated in Schlemmer’s work, and I now show how it informs the body produced by Laban and Corbusier. Vitruvius’s work was rediscovered in 1414 by Poggio Bracciolini and then was made more widely known by Alberti. Subsequent translations of Vitruvius’s writings appeared throughout Europe during the sixteenth-century. Fra Giovanni Giocondo – himself an 182

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Figure 35. Cesare Cesariano, De Architectura, 1521

architect – made the woodcuts that served for the first illustrated print of De Architectura in 1511, a treatise that influenced subsequent generations of architects. The Italian translation of Vitruvius, by Cesare Cesariano in 1521 (see Figs 34 and 35), attempted to reconstruct the guidelines he had laid out for architectural principles based on the proportion of man as a divine reflection. Vitruvius states firstly that the principles of architectural design for a temple must depend on ‘symmetry and proportion . . . [like] those of a well shaped man’.2 Whilst it may seem common sense for buildings to be proportioned in relation to the shape and movement of their users, the basic principle of architecture is premised on a specific male body. However, Vitruvius next reduces, or rather, forces, the body to conform to an aesthetic of 183

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Figure 36. Mariano Taccola, De Ingenesis, c.1433

perfect geometry that came to inspire the production of ‘Vitruvian man’: just as the human body yields a circular outline, so too a square figure may be found from it . . . nature has designed the human body so that its members are duly proportioned to the frame as a whole . . . and that there is a symmetrical correspondence between the members separately and the entire form of the body with a certain part selected as standard.3

The realisation of Vitruvius’s ideas by Renaissance artists created a striking religious iconography. Giocondo and Cesariano represent the harmony upon which architecture should be founded as akin to the 184

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Figure 37. Francesco di Giorgio, Trattato di architettura, c.1480

position of Jesus’s crucifixion. It must have occurred to Renaissance designers that the tortured, crucified body was reproduced in Vitruvius’s postulates. Whilst Jesus’s crucifixion occurred after Vitruvius wrote, crucifixion was a well-known method of execution in Classical times, one that Renaissance thinkers invariably recreated as they illustrated the tortured body whilst contorting it to geometric principles. We see this most emphatically in Cesariano’s depiction. Elsewhere the religious and the mathematical are conflated. In Francesco di Giorgio’s illustrations (Figs 37 and 38) – whilst not specifically of Vitruvian man – it is interesting to note the body’s structural and dimensional division into squares, with a central circle, grafted upon a direct representation of the cross. This served as the design for the architecture of a church. The central circle reflects Vitruvius’s claim that ‘[b]y means of this, through the architectural principles and the employment of the compasses, we 185

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Figure 38. Francesco di Giorgio, Trattato di architettura, c.1480

find out the operation of the sun in the universe. In the midst thereof, the earth and sea naturally occupy the central point.’4 The body was constructed therefore from the synthesis of a discursive network. Cesariano’s figure was close to Vitruvius’s ideal of the body within the geometry of the square and circle. However, like the tortured bodies configured by, and figuring, the cross, this body is disproportionate. Cesariano attempted to coerce the body into the Vitruvian ideal but instead skewed its representation. Mathematical rules distort the world in fitting it to an abstract model. For those that proceeded to read divine construction in Platonic geometry, Leonardo’s Vitruvian man (Fig. 39) testified, in its embodiment of a geometric harmony that governed the world, that man is the measure of all things. The image is still used support this claim. Philip Steadman remarks that ‘this is not evidence of an anthropocentric world-view. Since man 186

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Figure 39. Leonardo da Vinci, The Vitruvian Man, c.1485–90

was made in the image of God, so it was believed the proportions exemplified in the human form would reflect a divine and cosmic order’.5 I would suggest, on the contrary, that this implies that the Vitruvian man is evidence of an anthropocentric orientation because he is the image of God, and conversely, God is an image of man, since the mathematically proportioned body is a divine icon of truth. Human 187

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Figure 40. William Blake, Glad Day or The Dance of Albion, c.1794/5

relation to divinity was ‘proved’ through the mathematical inscription of the body. Wittkower writes: With the Renaissance revival of the Greek mathematical interpretation of God and the world, and invigorated by the Christian belief that Man as the image of God embodied harmonies of the Universe, the Vitruvian figure

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MODERNITY’S VITRUVIAN BODIES Figure 41. Vincenzo Scamozzi, Idea della Architettura Universale, Venice, 1615 inscribed in a square and a circle became a symbol of the mathematical sympathy between microcosm and macrocosm.6

This anticipates Schlemmer’s bodily regime constructed upon a cosmic order. Laban’s production of the body in postwar Weimar culture also participated in such a universal structure, constructed according to classical laws on dimension. Renaissance architects employed the Vitruvian figure as the basis for design, under the mistaken belief that this was actual classical practice, which satisfied contemporary discourses of geometry and divinity. Like Schlemmer’s question regarding its primacy, the body was conceptualised through existing geometric principles that came to constitute its internal structural order. The modernist redeployment of the Vitruvian man is part of a phantasmic recuperation of the traumatised subject and its body according to the fantasised aesthetics of a mathematically objective, universal order. 189

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The reclamation of Vitruvian ontology did not, however, pass without critique. Classical models of the subject’s location in space and time had been challenged in the nineteenth-century. William Blake challenged the Vitruvian figure as an index of Western rationality. Blake believed the body was something that should be open, containing ‘all being, time and space’7 rather than rationally closed. Steffi Engelstein points out, ‘Blake moves fluidly between the form taken by the human body, by human thought, and by human surroundings’.8 Western rationality inhibited a fundamental sense of the self as continuous with the world. As Anne Mellor writes on Blake: ‘all distinctions between the finite and infinite are merely modes of perception . . . Existence is then pure flux, motion energy.’9 Indeed, Jerusalem finally reunites his fragmented persona into an organic whole. Blake’s critique of the Western subject and its corporeal representation is re-imagined through the transcendent in rethinking man’s relationship to women and the environment. The body was conceived as part of the universe, but as a fluxive energy, which Blake attributes to an organic, infinite God, rather than to rational systems of mathematics and proportion.

Rudolph Laban’s Icosahedron Whilst Blake’s approach resonates with prewar imaginations of the subject considered thus far, it is the rationalistic aesthetic of Schlemmer’s version of Vitruvian man that is culturally dominant in the postwar return to order. Blake’s ‘mind-forged manacles’ are the compositional principle incarcerating Schlemmer’s figure, typifying the alignment of man with Pythagorian geometry that was restored in a postwar culture. This restoration was not just a nostalgic turn, but a cultural and ideological volte-face. Schlemmer’s Vitruvian man of Figur und Raumlineatur very much embodies the rationalised subject of postwar twentieth-century culture. Rudolf Laban, a Weimar dancer and choreographer, shared many similarities with Schlemmer in their postBlakean reconstitution of the Vitruvian man within stable parameters. Laban abstractly conceptualised the relations of body-time-space in real bodies. He paid meticulous attention to people’s movement, having grown up fascinated with puppet performances and the theatre in his youth. He perceived how social spaces ordered people’s bodily behaviour, for example in the psycho-spatial structures of ‘theatres’ such as funerals and weddings. Such ‘structures’ enforced a regime of 190

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bodily practice, modifying behaviour and regulating movement. Laban ´ studied architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and subsequently developed an interest in the dynamic relationship between form, movement and space. As with Schlemmer, Laban’s ‘modernity’ consisted of ideas that now seem rather difficult to reconcile. His imagination of being within the world is initially quite Bergsonian, or even Blondelian. He suggested, for example, that ‘the whole visible universe is Motion’, and that human movement is part of universal motions.10 Influenced by theosophy, Laban understood human movement as a microcosm for the celestial movements of planets, of waves, of the architectonic movements of the Earth: nothing exists without some degree of movement, as the ‘electrons which circulate around a central spark like planets around the sun’.11 Therefore the unifying principle of the universe was dynamic movement. He remarked that ‘[o]nce it has been seen that movement runs through every aspect of living reality, it is not a great step to realize that movement brings together and binds experience making it one’.12 Human knowledge, sensorially derived, depends upon waves and vibrations. Movement therefore forms the basis of experience, knowledge and being in the world. Movement could also transform modes of being; Laban observed that psychological states are both affected by, and affect, the type of movement in space. To give a simple example, walking upright, in comparison to a slouched posture, transforms both the person and the space in which they move. Indeed, this consideration of activity and the relativity it introduces to space and time is neglected in Schlemmer’s placing of the taut, rigid mechanised body at the centre of a static matrix. Despite his belief in movement as a fundamental principle, Laban developed essential laws for the constitution of this movement that were based on architectural, rather than temporal, principles. As Schlemmer sought to extract the fundamental laws of the fixed bodyin-space, so Laban sought to analyse its dynamic laws of movement. As Lynn Brooks writes: ‘As an architect, Laban was comfortable with plotting points in space, with manipulating geometric forms . . . [and he] made explicit in use of the term “body architecture”.’13 Whilst researching movement Laban did not conceptualise it from a ‘bioceptual’ premise, where he might have considered the Bergsonian notion of temporality as the source of being, but rather understood the mathematical organisation of time as the basis for his work.

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As Laban disseminated his rules for the body in dance through teaching and writing, he developed his concept of movement as vital to the knowledge and understanding of static form. In 1920 he published Die Welt des Tamers (The Dancer’s World), arguing that life exists not as meaningless flux, but as directed towards some purpose: ‘real dancers hope to communicate a sense of purpose and destiny for the human race’.14 The body’s relationship to space becomes the expression of personality. The two main influences cited by Laban were Plato’s Timaeus (particularly as it contained Pythagorian cosmology) and the Sufism of the Dervishes and their belief in the interconnection of existence through the essence of a unary divinity.15 As a teenager Laban had been trained in perspective and the golden section, and John Hodgson suggests that he was acquainted with Pythagorian thought, as he was taught compositional rules. Later, Laban was attracted by Ancient Greek philosophy, referring to Aristotle and Plato as well as Pythagoras. He developed neologisms like ‘choreosophie’ and ‘choreology’ from an interest in Greek language and etymology that he applied to his own research. Several concepts in the Timaeus appealed to Laban: notably the universal order of things and, fittingly given the postwar cultural turn, a God creating order from a state of chaos. Laban was particularly attracted to the notion that rules governing celestial planets in rotation and force (the macrocosm) could also be found in human movement (the microcosm). Hodgson comments: ‘Throughout Laban’s writing, there is an underlying belief in an ultimate harmonious structure of the universe.’16 Plato’s discussion of the golden ratio offered geometric shapes as the compositional terms for the divine universe – earth a cube, air an octahedron, water an icosahedron and fire a tetrahedron. If existence and the universe was constituted through four elements, and those elements related to three-dimensional geometric shapes, then Laban – in his desire to directly correlate movement with universal principles – conceptualised the body-in-space in relation to the monadic atom and the crystal with which he became fascinated in researching mathematics and crystallography. For Laban, the divine shape of the crystal – as the ‘shape’ of postwar modernism also seen in revisions of Cubism – was interconnected with the human body. Laban constructed another modern ‘Vitruvian Man’, not through the direct influence of the Renaissance, as Blake, or even Schlemmer had, but based on his Greek influences. In Choreutics (1966), a

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Laban decided that the icosahedron was the figure within which the human body could best express space relationships and the tensions which all parts of the body can project. By seeing the body in the icosahedron, Laban felt that he was pointing to the link, the relationship between human anatomy, cell structure and the whole cosmos.18

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collection of his postwar theories published posthumously, Laban wrote: ‘Pythagoras proved that the human body is built according to the Golden Section.’17 Hodgson argues:

Laban’s imagination of this relationship can be seen in Figure 42. In Choreographie (1926) Laban illustrated his use of the icosahedron. His contemporaries were also immersing themselves in classical Greek theory. Isadora Duncan travelled across Europe performing an imagined version of classical Greek dance19 and Emil Jaques-Dalcroze used Greek ideals in his own structuring of corporeal rhythms through ‘eurhythmics’, deriving his label from the Greek for ‘beautiful’ or ‘harmonious’ rhythm. Laban conceived human relations in a spatial matrix just as Schlemmer had done in Figur und Raumlineatur and Egozentrische Raumlineatur. Indeed, the two men knew one another: Schlemmer wrote to his wife regarding a dance congress, declaring Laban ‘a good man’.20 Conjuring an image akin to Schlemmer’s spatial rules, Laban explained his system thus: ‘When I put people anywhere, I do it according to angles and mathematical relationships to each other . . . I see . . . the whole group according to a mathematical pattern. You do it through your feeling.’21 Laban’s words demonstrate that his ‘feeling’ elided the subjective bioceptual for the objectivity of mathematical relations and patterns. In the introduction to Choreutics, Laban discussed his conception of movement and the environment.22 He began with what would appear to be an embodied principle: ‘Our own movement and those we perceive around us are basic experiences.’23 He described the ‘f]orms of objects, as well as the shapes assumed by living organisms, wax and wane uninterruptedly . . . The illusion of a standstill is based on the snapshot-like perception of the mind which is able to receive only a single phase of the uninterrupted flux.’24 From a Bergsonian position he condemned the artifice of stasis since ‘forms are simultaneously created with and through movement. The illusion of standstills creates an artificial separation of space and movement.’25 This conception of 193

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Figure 42. Carlus Dyer, Space Module of the Arms and Legs III, 1952

being is one that corresponds to the ideas of both Gleizes and Sonia Delaunay: we have clung too stubbornly to a static conception of our environment . . . Today we are perhaps still too accustomed to understanding objects as separate entities, standing in stabilised poses side by side in an empty space. Externally, it may appear so, but in reality continuous exchange and movement are taking place. Not for a moment do they come to a complete standstill, since matter itself is a compound of vibrations . . . [with the] unique and universal role of movement as a visible aspect of space.26

However, if Laban’s rejected the static in favour of organic, dynamic movement, he was nevertheless concerned, as Schlemmer was, with extracting ‘fundamental’ rules. To obtain laws of movement and 194

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space, he suggested that ‘[t]he unity of movement and space can be demonstrated by comparing the single snapshots of the mind with each other’27 that will provoke ‘similar laws’.28 In terms similar to those of Schlemmer describing bodily architecture, Laban wrote: ‘Movement is, so to speak, living architecture.’29 Discussing the body and a dynamic environment, Laban attempted to reconcile it within an objective language to observe the laws that structured this relationship. Yet, as Bergson demonstrated with Zeno’s paradox, the arrest of dynamism is inherent in such a language’s attempt to isolate movement into observable fragments; this fundamentally transforms the object of contemplation. Such is the not unrelated condition of both mathematics and photography. Laban, in establishing corporeal laws, arrests the body by constructing a ‘three-dimensional whole’.30 This idea is problematic: tri-dimensionality is not a ‘whole’, but a construction of space outside of time. Cubists attempted to go beyond the three dimensional to represent the totality of the object, simultaneously perceiving the surfaces obscured in linear perspective. Apollinaire understood the fourth dimension to be time, since it allowed the sense of a mobile spectatorship from a static position. Laban assumed an axiomatic tri-coordinated system of architecture from which a conceptualisation of the universe in flux was supposed to derive. Herein lies the contradiction in his, and much, postwar thought about the body-in-space. Three dimensions certainly do not constitute a ‘whole’, but rather an extracted, thereby fragmentary, relation to time-space. It is interesting that Laban suggests that: Children and the man of primitive ages see the world through a bodily perspective, that is through physical experience. They see the amazing unity of all existence. Man of later times loses this view . . . establishes stability in his mind as a contrasting partner to mobility. In this way he comes unrelated to his surroundings, which are, in the widest sense, the universe.31

There are aspects of de-anthropocentricised thought here, but there is a contradiction inherent in Laban’s understanding of movement through a method that fragments the ‘amazing unity of all existence’. He assumed that mathematical coordinates constituted a ‘whole’, later stating: ‘The principles of choreutics can easily be developed by taking the cube as the basis for our spatial orientation.’32 His insistence on an arbitrary shape that has a particular cultural, aesthetic appeal is 195

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repeated in its deployment as the form in which movement would be constituted. However, I would suggest that a cube plays no part in a child’s sense of infinite space. It is rather the lack of language, and therefore a lack of mathematics and geometry in conceptualising of space, which allows a child’s perception to be of an ‘amazing unity’. Such unity is shattered as the child is inculcated into a spatial coding that artificially fragments the surrounding world into concepts of discrete objects in perspectival space and linear time.33 In this sense all language is firstly spatial, since its symbolic encoding depends upon a prior sense of objects as spatially discrete and bounded. Laban believed that ‘[t]he conception of the cube . . . [is a] fundamental principle of our orientation of space’.34 The cube’s rigidity constituted the fundamental principle of human existence in space. Yet he also suggested that bodily movement was ‘fluid and curving’, and that ‘a scaffolding closer to a spheric shape’35 can represent this element. The representation of fluidity through the geometric seems paradoxical; by definition, fluidity resists solidification and hypostasis. There also seems no reason why something curved – and therefore linear – should necessarily represent fluidity, and by extension, that the spherical should represent flux faithfully. Yet Laban synthesized the cube and sphere into an icosahedron. He believed Plato first described this solid, which for him constituted the universe. This was important for Laban since his interest in modern crystallography led to his discovery of the same form in nature. For Laban, the icosahedron was both classical and modern, synthesising a computational model of the diamond structure with Platonic architectures, to graft on the subject’s movement in time. The icosahedron would harmonise the Vitruvian square and circle.

The Kinesphere Laban was fascinated by the quasi-architectural forms found in crystallography and imagined their relation to human movement, proposing: ‘We can understand all bodily movement as being a continuous creation of fragments of polyhedral forms. The body itself, in its anatomical or crystalline structure, is built up according to the laws of dynamic crystallisation.’36 Laban justified this position by recourse to the ‘ancient knowledge’ of Plato and Pythagoras,37 and referred to Plato’s notion that the universe is constituted by triangles, and 196

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that the golden section is a ‘ruling proportion’ for the ‘perfectly built human body’.38 Indeed he writes that ‘Pythagoras proved that the human is built according to the Golden Section’.39 Laban also mentioned the Greek sculptors Phidias and Polycletus, for whom Maillol expressed admiration.40 He informs us that they ‘represent the ideal human form and divine form’,41 and share with Leonardo their analysis of ‘the human figure based on the Golden Proportion’.42 These fundamental, classical principles served as the basis for Laban’s idea of the body-in-space: the ‘kinesphere’. The golden section is part of the apparatus used to formulate a notion of space that immediately surrounds the body and into which it can move. It is a geometric ‘personal space . . . like an aura’43 whose ‘periphery can be reached by easily extended limbs’.44 The kinesphere solidifies the geometric extension of the body’s space, like the notion of a ‘personal space’. It represented Laban’s development of a three-dimensional ‘Vitruvian man’. The Platonic solids – the tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron and icosahedron – were theorised as constituting the universe, as they also constituted each elemental state. Renaissance thinkers had resumed research into Platonic solids, as seen in Leonardo’s illustration of Pacioli’s De Divina Proportione of 1509 (Fig. 47), depicting ‘the solid that Plato considered the symbol of the Universe’.45 As Kemp writes, Pacioli sought to represent the three-dimensional skeletal structure of each Platonic solid and to relate these divine proportions to ‘their derivatives in three-dimensional form in a variety of materials, including wood and crystal’.46 Elsewhere, Alberti proposed that church architecture should consist of the circle, the square, the hexagon, the octagon, the decagon and the dodecagon.47 As Wittkower explains: Alberti’s well-known mathematical definition, based on Vitruvius, beauty consists on the rational integration of the proportions of all the parts of a building . . . the harmony of the whole . . . We may now conclude that no geometrical form is more apt to fulfil this demand than the circle or forms deriving from it.48

Laban’s production of the icosahedron clearly developed from such sources. Indeed, Brooks calls Laban a ‘truly a “renaissance” man’ as ‘[t]hese forms have long held mystical and alluring qualities for 197

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philosophers, theologians, scientists and mathematicians’.49 Laban perceived movement and Platonic geometric bodies as constitutive of the universe, and conflated these into a system where a relatively sized ‘space crystal’ could define human movement. However, herein lies the fundamental problem in Laban’s conception of the body-inspace when it is compared to the type of modernist thought found within Gleizes and Delaunay. Just as the bioceptual creates knowledge originating from the body, Laban’s representation defines the body through abstract mathematical proportions to guarantee its pseudoaxiomatic status. The icosahedron is a form of the Vitruvian squared circle in which the body may be measured. In Laban’s scheme it formed a kinespheric space. It is the most faceted of the Platonic solids, and therefore the nearest to a sphere whilst remaining a polyhedron; thus, unlike the sphere, it has definable three-dimensional points that can map the body within. Essentially, the kinespheric icosahedron exists three dimensionally as a conflation of the square and circle. Indeed, Schlemmer constructed a similar ‘kinesphere’ through circular and rectangularcrystal geometry. Laban referred to the icosahedron in Gymnastik und Tanz (Gymnastics and Dance) (1926), discussing man’s need to master choreology – the language of dance notation – by referring to ‘the laws of space in the icosahedron’.50 He conceived the cube as the ideal representation of space, whilst kinaesthetic movements of the bodyin-space produced the sphere. Thus, ‘we recognise the cube inside the kinesphere as being representative of the most important space directions’.51 Laban illustrated the cube’s importance by demonstrating the body’s insertion into three-dimensional planes that synthesise into the icosahedron (Figs 43–46). Whilst Laban fragmented the body’s movement in space to extract what he believed to be its fundamental laws, he nevertheless had a sense of embodied space. Despite his formalisation of this space by geometry, he seems to suggest that the body is not bounded by the limits of skin, but extends into space through time. The kinesphere therefore would appear to disrupt conventional narratives of the corporeal I/Other relationship by demonstrating that the space into which the body can dynamically move is also a part of the body’s time, despite appearing exterior to it. Body-space is a juncture between the space that lies outside the body’s immediate capacity to move into it and affect it, and

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Figure 44. ‘The three bodily planes synthesised: the dimensional basis of the static body’, author’s sketch from Laban, Choreutics (1966) 199

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Figure 45. ‘The spherical framework’, author’s sketch from Laban, Choreutics (1966)

Figure 46. ‘The icosahedron constructed from the convergences of the planes and sphere’ author’s sketch from Laban, Choreutics (1966)

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MODERNITY’S VITRUVIAN BODIES Figure 47. Leonardo da Vinci, ‘dodecahedron’ in Luca Pacioli’s De Divina proportione, Florence, 1509.

the space occupied by corporeal interiority. Therefore a static body occupies the space dictated by its location within three dimensions but a moving body in time expands its spatial boundary beyond its corporeal surface, and that space must be considered as part of it. Gleizes’s and Delaunay’s bodies harmonised with their surrounding environment, blurring the distinction between body, space and time, simultaneously imagining the body as opening into, and co-extensive, with its surroundings. However, having conceived this, Laban then codified the body-in-space into a geometric language through the body’s icosahedral limits: his kinetographie. In kinetographie, movement is reduced to the performer’s placement of their limbs at pre-designated points within the icosahedron that signifies the limits of the body. Within scripted movement the body moves through space, but it is a space of planes and geometric forms. Many students were attracted to Laban because of his ideas about the organic rhythm of human embodiment. However, in Mastery of Movement on Stage (1950) Hodgson, who studied and taught Laban’s work, asks ‘[w]here, one wonders, is the holistic approach so frequently recommended by Rudolf Laban?’52 He takes particular exception to 201

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Figure 48. ‘Construction of square and polygons’ from Bartoli’s edition of Alberti’s De re aedificatoria, 1550.

Laban’s excessive concentration on choreography, related to Greek metric form, and statements such as: ‘Modern industrial workers are very often confined to one or other of the fundamental rhythms determined by the ancient Greeks.’53 Indeed, Laban’s fragmented, geometric formulation of the body is strikingly reminiscent of that found in the ‘scientific’ study of the body in motion for greater productivity undertaken by F.W. Taylor, the Gilbreths and Marey. Whilst Laban appealed to ‘the great flux of infinite movement’, he sought to break down that movement ‘into discrete “snapshots” wherein one position follows another’.54 If Laban attempted to provide harmonious movement, it was through the perceived harmony of mathematics rather than one deriving from the body. The grafting of the icosahedron’s scaffold onto the body created not a bio-temporal 202

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rhythm, but one conceived geometrically, to which the fiction of the ‘ideal’ body is meant to conform. Concerned with movement as the universe’s fundamental rule, the icosahedron does not allow for the deformation of form during movement as demonstrated by modernists in different fields, from Delaunay to Einstein to Mach. Form becomes relative and cannot be considered spatially rigid. If a performer is to learn a series of movements according to their body’s conformity to prescribed points in the icosahedron, this can only be possible once movement is fragmented into mathematical rhythms: the spontaneity of the body in organic movement is impossible. I would also suggest that the body is incapable of the exact, precise movements required by its codification within the icosahedron. As spoken language derives from an abstracted representational system outside of bodily corporeality, perfect bodily adherence to ‘pure’ mathematics is achievable only through engineering. The body’s proportions, as well as its movement, must be mechanically derived for the configuration of the performer’s limbs to cohere perfectly to the Platonic solid into which its range of movement supposedly fits. There must at some point be a rupture caused by the contradiction between the static geometries of the spatial matrix and the biorhythms and variable proportions of the human body. Indeed, the icosahedron conceptualised by Laban has practical problems in the same way that the Vitruvian body is an idealised body. Bodies do not conform to fictions of perfection. Laban, however, like the classicists before him, found specific appeal in mathematical ‘truths’. He cited the ‘correspondence between the angles of the icosahedron . . . and the limbs. They appear to be either the same, or exactly half, or double, or those mentioned.’55 He also found that ‘the proportion between the length of the dimensional and diagonal transversals of the icosahedron and the length of its surface-lines follows the law of the Golden Section’.56 The implication is that the body is axiomatically constructed by the golden section if the icosahedron derives from laws that are common to both. The icosahedron, to function as conceptually ‘pure’, would surely require a type of ideal body based on ‘harmonious’ mathematical equations. This ‘ideal’ body is a mathematical fantasy, though it is disseminated and consumed as a desirable body in Western culture. Despite genetic realities, a ‘classical’ bodily aesthetic remains relatively unchanged (in thinking about the male rather than the female perhaps) as it is continually reproduced by culture industries for mass consumption.

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Cybernetic Bodies It was not just in the field of theatre and dance that the body reverted to classical types. As I have shown, the idealisation of the body figured in the Greek nude found its way into public spaces as statues symbolising bodily ideals substituted for the immense numbers of soldiers killed in the war. R. Tait McKenzie, a popular sculptor of soldiers’ memorials in Britain, wrote: I have tried to express the type on whom the future of England must depend. Blond, with hair wavy rather than curly, head well rounded, forehead slightly flat, the boss over the eyes large, but not so developed as it will be in later life. The brows are straight, nose not continuous with the brow as in the Greek, the mouth large and lips not too full.57

In England, we might therefore imagine that the soldier’s body in war memorials was configured largely on what later became understood as the ideal Aryan body. An aesthetic ideal was pursued that was antithetical to the ‘bantam’ physique of the average ‘Tommy’. This cultural programme was widespread in its attempt to envisage a new ideal body. It can be seen in Tait McKenzie’s Cambridge war memorial The Homecoming (1922) and the Scottish-American war memorial (1927) in Edinburgh. The production of monumental bodies reflected a pan-European neurosis about the physical quality of, particularly male, populations after the war that became bound up in both nationalist and racial discourses and the technical disciplining and management of its populations by ‘modern’ states. Eugenic discourses criticised the characteristics of the men who survived – believed often to be malingerers, pacifists and the disabled – whereas the ‘genetic elite’ had fought and died, or been physically and mentally traumatised, for their country. The future body needed to be both ‘modern’, to resist the shattering effect of technological shock, and to incorporate classical fictions of sculptural order. The monumental body therefore celebrated the transcendent, mythic body in contrast to the realities of disabled, disfigured and ‘diseased’ bodies that were not decomposing under French or mittel-European earth. Despite the apparent dissimilarity of their abstracted bodies, Schlemmer and Laban were engaged by the same cultural tendency that motivated the institutional production of ‘Greek’ bodies by traditional 204

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sculptors from Britain’s conservative art institutions. Indeed, in many ways their modern bodies constitute the most extreme reversion to the ‘beauty’ of Classical Greece, through the insistence on the origin of geometry at the bedrock of Western civilisation. Whilst British sculptors substituted the soldier’s body with an aestheticised Greek one, Schlemmer and Laban’s monumentality lay in their mathematical abstraction of the body, eliding the ‘bioceptual’ with the geometric, the human for the inhuman. Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard sees this as ‘a discourse of general physics, with its dynamics, its economics, its cybernetics’.58 Schlemmer’s and Laban’s abstractions lie in their conceptualising the body and its relation to space through movement as a medium through which to institute a cybernetic regime that imagines the body as a mechanical, mathematically derived object, which can be engineered. Lyotard argues the inhuman is produced when knowledge is no longer produced by embodied concepts, but is codified into information that is incapable of translated the overflowing codes of human knowledge. This is the body’s condition through its constitution in mathematical language. Matthew Biro observes the creation in postwar German culture of a cyborg fantasy: ‘a figure upon which a broad range of Weimar modernists could project their utopian fantasies.’59 Biro sees this ‘new man’ as ‘a synthesis of organic and technological elements’60 making a ‘fearful response’ to the destruction of mechanised warfare.61 We might also add that it was a response not just to the trauma of war but to humanity’s wider sense of organic frailty as the influenza pandemic of 1919 ravaged Europe. The development of a modern, mathematical matrix that governs Being through a modelling of space-time was a reactionary cultural response to the war, even when, in contrast to the overt retrenchment of French art in the 1920s, it imagined itself to be radical. The space created by Oskar Schlemmer and Rudolf Laban accommodated the emergence of the inhuman, or perhaps rather posthuman, ‘new man as cyborg’. Without focusing specifically on the robotic body itself, we might nevertheless see post-cubist conceptual articulations for its bionomic realisation in popular imaginations. Schlemmer and Laban’s conceptualisation of the body at the centre of this universal order of time and space is a mechanistic one, but also one that is vacant. This production of the body is located within a specific mathematical bionomic, concerned with the relation between mechanical organism and geometric environment. Schlemmer’s figures

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Figure 49. Oskar Schlemmer, Ambulant architecture, 1924

are constructed as a type, premised on bodily mechanics explicitly configured according to geometric laws. Schlemmer’s diagram of ‘The laws of motion of the human body in space’ is represented by ‘Ambulant architecture’ (Fig. 49).62 Thus, for Beye, The determination with which Oskar Schlemmer eliminated everything emotional from his work corresponds to a formal vocabulary whose strength and clarity is complete accord with the timeless, wholly generalized ideal nature of his figures . . . his aim is to model with such precision that any roughness which might suggest the calligraphic or the individual disappears.63

The cyborg is fundamental here as a symbol of utopian potential, but it is also a testament to death and the obliteration of the fragile human 206

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Figure 50. Oskar Schlemmer, The marionette, 1924

body within the forces of modernity. The body without emotion or devoid of individuality, the inhuman subject, is also effectively a utopian, immortal body that contains the fantasy of being resistant to trauma, shock and death. As I have demonstrated, Schlemmer and Laban conceive of such a body after the war. Schlemmer wrote of his radical ‘endeavour to free man from his physical bondage and to heighten his freedom of movement beyond his native potential in substituting for the organism the mechanical human figure’.64 In 1923 he ‘urged that we at the Bauhaus should no longer ignore the machine, technology, and engineering’,65 which is not surprising given his much earlier diary of October 1915 that equated the ribcage with a square; the head, eyes, belly, elbows, knees, shoulders and knuckles with a circle; the cylinder was a form for the neck, arms, and legs.66 The production of cyborg 207

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images in Weimar culture can be understood as part of a tradition of prosthesis.67 Yet Schlemmer presents a post-Vitruvian body closely resembling a utopian cybernetic body, but one vastly different from the dystopian corporeality that Biro identifies in a picture such as Raoul Hausmann’s montage Der eiserne Hindenburg (1920), ‘a dysfunctional, half-mechanized puppet, spouting military jargon, waving a sword, and propping up the initials of the Kaiser’,68 or Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Man that was Used Up’, or the grotesque hybridised body in the work of George Grosz and Otto Dix, to whom Armstrong and Biro both refer. Throughout Schlemmer’s career, the vacant body persists. It is asexual, mechanical, universally utopian. In 1922 Schlemmer wrote: ‘Life has become so mechanized, thanks to machines and a technology which our sense cannot possibly ignore, that we are intensely aware of man as a machine and the body as machinism.’69 Interestingly, Schlemmer contrasted the artist’s concern with the machine with a concurrent interest in atavistic art, of ‘primordial impulses’. He wrote: ‘they woke up to the unconscious, unanalyzable elements in the art forms of non-intellectuals: the non-Africans, peasants. Children, and madmen.’70 Nevertheless, Schlemmer and Laban sought to obtain the ‘primordial’ in the restoration of the body according to universal regulating geometries. Schlemmer’s mathematical scaffolding of the body can be seen in his teaching notes. It is the uncovering and implementation of bodily laws that motivates Schlemmer, writing in the shadow of World War I: ‘one great theme remains, ancient, eternally fresh, the subject and formgiver of all times: man, the human figure. It has been said that he is the measure of all things.’71 Yet mathematics is assumed to be axiomatically the measure of ‘man’, for ‘We must surrender ourselves to the miracle of the proportions, the magnificence of the mathematical relationships and correspondences, and derive our laws from the results.’72 A number of paintings by Schlemmer – for example Vier Figuren und Kubus (1928), Bekleidete un Unbekleidete in Architektur (1929), F¨unfzehnergruppe (1929), Bauhaustreppe (1932) among others – express his investigations of the principles and laws of the body within an environmental matrix. They are striking in their mathematically rational treatment of geometric space and the rigid body, or as von Maur writes, in their ‘clear, taut concept of space and figure’.73 The paintings seem almost prophetic in their depiction of social alienation and instrumentality, and the forms are reminiscent of Laban’s practice of placing people at angular

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Figure 51. Oskar Schlemmer, Bauhaustreppe, 1932

positions to each other to conform to a ‘mathematical pattern’. The bodies themselves incorporate the angular, geometric qualities of the space they occupy, testifying to the notion of the fundamental interconnectedness of subjectivity and environment. However, the quality of that relationship is significantly different to that found in Gleizes 209

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or Delaunay, as here human subjects become architectural bodies. The body is not configured bioceptually, but geometrically. This is conceptually approached, as in Vier Figuren und Kubus, but this core practice resonates throughout the preceding and proceeding works. Bauhaustreppe projects Schlemmer’s utopian vision into the composition of a cultural scene. These works demonstrate his observation in 1923 that: ‘One thing is certain, and that is that the application of scientific principles to art is now widespread. Basic laws, numerical configuration. Anything connected with the psyche has become suspect.’74 Schlemmer worked on Bauhaus Stairway in 1932 after the Dessau Bauhaus had been closed under pressure from the National Socialists.75 It is painted from memory, as with Gleizes’s portraiture Jacques Nayral, emphasising what von Maur describes as the ‘the transcendent architecture of the staircase in the Dessau Bauhaus building’.76 The painting is, Arnold Lehman writes, ‘a symbolic representation of Bauhaus enlightenment, of youth in transitions from one generation to another, of potential for transformation in art and life from the rigid socio-political strictures of the part to the Utopian freedoms of the future’.77 Whilst a utopian articulation, it is rendered through a compositional structure based on a strict structural geometric architectonic of verticals, horizontals and diagonals that demonstrates the influence of Mondrian on Schlemmer and the Bauhaus. Within the geometric matrix are young, deindividualised, vacant bodies based on ‘Greek statuary . . . a vision of perfection’.78 It is the ideological synthesis of such space and body that engineers the youth of tomorrow in Schlemmer’s utopian vision.

Le Corbusier, the Body, and the ‘Mass Ornament’ Echoing the arguments of Rabinbach and Herf, von Maur writes: Schlemmer and his contemporaries clearly evidenced a strong desire for centering and order, in response to an era made chaotic by political radicalization, emergency decrees, and mass unemployment. There can also be no question that Hitler knew how to harness this latent desire for order in the service of his own political aims.79

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specifically regarding fatigue, fragility and the trauma of imminent death. Kracauer observed other areas within Weimar visual culture that contained such synergistic ‘utopian’ articulations. Beyond his scrutiny of the neue sachlichkeit, he reflected upon the manner in which aesthetic rationality came to form an irrational ‘cult’ of the bodily ‘ornament’. He perceived the subject’s greater conformity within culture through what he identified as:

rationally. It consists of lines and circles like those found in textbooks on Euclidean geometry, and also incorporates the elementary components of physics . . . Both the proliferations of organic forms and the emanations of spiritual life remain excluded.80

Kracauer’s criticism centres upon the (aesthetic) mass configuration of bodies into formal geometric patterns. Kracauer writes that the ‘Tiller Girls’, a faceless geometric arrangement of bodies, ‘are no longer individual girls, but indissoluble girl clusters whose movements are demonstrations of mathematics’.81 Indeed, J¨unger had already written that ‘anonymous slavery’ is ‘certainly our innermost will to sacrifice our freedom, to give up our existence as individuals and melt into a large life circle, in which the individual has as little self-sufficiency as a cell’.82 Such displays of mass bodily organisation visibly demonstrated the docility of the subject to the will of the state – a metaphor for not only authoritarian politics but the wider structures of technical management and ‘discipline’ in which the modern state could organise its populations, as objects of control, knowledge and, indeed, spectacle. We might suggest that the mass organisation of the body within meta-geometric designs belongs to the notion of the monumental figure. Whilst a burgeoning body culture indeed existed before the war, the specific geometric configuration of lived monumental bodies presented a more disturbing political spectacle of control over Agamben’s notion of bios in the wake of its brutalisation in World War I. In his critique, Kracauer compared the ‘Tiller Girls’ to the ‘fragmented’ modernist body under capitalism and international Taylorisation, since the control of a proletarian mass could be ‘employed equally well at any point on the globe’83 after the destruction of ‘natural organisms’ it perceived as antithetical.84 Kracauer saw the complete rationalisation of bodily management in the spectacle of the ornament, stripped of 211

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the organic except for geometric coincidences with forms found in nature. Essentially, Kracauer identified a process of systematic dehumanisation characterising the rationalised, technological domination of the twentieth-century. Kracauer argued that the female body operated as spectacle for audiences through its organisation with the same ‘geometric precision’85 of lines, rows and segments. Therefore, whilst the postwar subject’s social performance became systematised, so the consuming subject was organised and controlled, but through distraction. The masses consumed the geometric conformity whilst unaware of their own implication as organised consumers and producers, a rationality that reflected the industrial and technological rationalisation of their working lives through practices such as Taylorism which were increasingly employed during, and after, the war. Even if Taylorism per se had not reformed working practices before the war, as Rabinbach argues, ‘many changes advocated by Taylor were already adopted before his ideas were widely disseminated’.86 The world war facilitated the further technical reorganisation of German industry, and Rabinbach notes that its engineers urged ‘the imitation’ of American factory organisation.87 In France, however, its implementation remained highly controversial and was a popular subject within the press despite its limited impact on industry, where Taylorist practices were largely confined to automobile production. The Billancourt Renault strike against Taylorist practices in March 1913 indicated worker resistance. The syndicalist leader Alphonse Merrheim rejected Taylorism as a technology that ‘eliminated, annihilated and banished personality, intelligence, even the very desires of the workers, from the workshops and factories’.88 However, the war facilitated the restructuring of European industry, and with the introduction of a new, initially unskilled workforce that included women and children, work restrictions were marginalised whilst the scientific standardisation of work increased productivity. Therefore, despite increasing resistance to ‘the detested time-motion study, the premium wage system, and long hours of work in both France and Germany after 1917’, as Rabinbach argues, Taylorism became mainstream practice.89 Kracauer also observed in the stands, bearing witness to the spectacle of bodily organisation, a new form of modern subjectivity: die angestellten (the office-worker). He commented that this new urban subject emerged to characterise modern culture, with an increased expendable

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income,90 had ideas of demographic superiority and conformed precisely to modern capitalistic regimes of production and consumption, particularly through distraction by the spectacle.91 Kracauer proposed: ‘At the same moment at which firms are rationalized, these establishments rationalize the pleasures of the salary-earning armies.’92 For Kracauer the office worker also presented a mass organisation of bodies, but at the level of lived experience. They represented a subjective regime that symptomatised political, capitalist and bureaucratic rationality. He argued that the ‘coherent figure’ was fragmented within society, and its consciousness transformed through the cultural construction of its subjectivity. Later, Deleuze and Guattari would argue that this fragmentation of the subject by the effects of modernity produced a schizophrenic condition through the multiple, fragmentary roles and in particular the discourses into which a subject splits itself. ‘The language of a banker, a general, an industrialist, a middle or high-level manager, or a government minister is a perfectly schizophrenic language.’93 ˇ zek now refers to the existential dimension of modernity’s condition Ziˇ whereby the state ‘compels me to betray the very ethical substance of my being’.94 Similarly, for Kracauer, writing within the moment of ‘modernity’, bios becomes ‘lost in an empty formalism’,95 and the ornament embodies the ‘monstrous’96 construction of modernity’s aestheticisation and politicisation of dehumanised organisation and rationalised control of its population. Kracauer therefore observed the absence of ‘nature’ and ‘organic unity’ within the ornament, whilst the organisation of the body into pseudo-naturalistic geometric shapes ‘dissects the human form here only so that the undistorted truth can fashion man anew’.97 This reconfiguration of the postwar subject is reminiscent of Marx’s earlier words: ‘the capitalist form of large scale industry reproduces the same division of labour in a more monstrous shape; in the factory proper, by converting the worker into a living appendage of the machine.’98 This is also something described by Chaplin in Modern Times (1936) and in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). The embodied subject becomes a fragment, an ‘appendage’ of a higher cultural mechanism. Consequently, the body’s subjection to mechanical rhythms through rationalised constructions of space-time becomes the basis for modern subjectivity. In the body’s gymnastic performance, Kracauer observed an exercise of subjective compliance in achieving ‘living star formations’ that ‘have no meaning beyond themselves’.99 This is distraction since:

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‘physical training expropriates people’s energy, while the production and mindless consumption of the ornamental patterns divert them from the imperative to change the reigning order.’100 Similarly, Aleksandr Rodchenko’s photographs of sports events in the Soviet Union demonstrated the state control of disciplined, yet docile, bodies based on ‘empty’ geometric formations becoming a ‘godless mythological cult’.101 According to Kracauer’s argument, we should consider Schlemmer’s and Laban’s models of the body as totemic manifestations of the metaphysical state of the body politic. ‘Monumental’ bodies replace the ‘atomised’ body as a fragment within a metastructural form of the body politic; it exists ‘above the masses, a monstrous figure whose creator withdraws it away from the eyes of its bearers’.102 The ‘Ornament’ surfaced in other areas of German visual art, such as the Neue Sachlichkeit103 and in the work of other Bauhaus artists, for example, Moholy-Nagy’s Traum des M¨adchenpensionats (1925), which celebrated specific models of organisation. We might argue Cubism’s fundamental structural function in subjective relations to space and time constitutes what Eleanor Hight perceives in Moholy-Nagy’s photomontage: ‘The system of lines and overlapping forms that unifies the various images on the picture plane demonstrates again his reliance on the pictorial structure established in his paintings.’104 To quote Lefebvre: ‘all thinking about space and time was bound up with social practice – more precisely, with industrial practice, and with architectural and urbanistic research.’105 Indeed, the aestheticisation of mathematics and geometry was manifested in social practice as simultaneously nostalgic and reactionary in its production of a utopian future for a traumatised culture. Rodchenko’s photographic documentation of the Russian ornament, such as his photographs Pioneer (1930) and Pryzhok v vodu (1934), was severely criticised for failing to capture the idealistic body. Margarita Tupitsyn argues that ‘the reader wants to see a beautiful trained body. In Rodchenko’s photograph, the character is killed by biological detail’.106 The boy’s smile in Pioneer cannot hide his ‘imperfect’ humanity, whilst Pryzhok v vodu exhibits the body in asymmetric pose and ‘ugly’ close-up detail. Rodchenko was condemned for ideologically emphasising transcendental individualism over the organised, anonymous, subservient body. Consequently, as Tupitsyn observes, Rodchenko’s status waned, and he was later assigned documentary projects devoid of human figures. Indeed, as Kracauer warned, the

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ornamental aesthetic consists of geometric patterns, from which ‘man as an organic being has disappeared’.107 Therefore, the ornamental organisation of subjects by the state, as Kracauer implied, is a utopian surface disguising a political ideology controlling the masses, themselves distracted by their own spectacle. Such a rationalisation, when wedded with reactionary politics, produced a subject that Theweleit identifies as having an armoured ego, as a consequence of external forces upon the subject, but also ‘capable of seamless fusion into larger formations with armorlike peripheries’.108 Theweleit sees in the ornamental structure a dammed libidinal energy, a sublimated surging torrent of reactionary irrationality, ‘a body in dissolution’,109 which Fascism could translate from ‘internal states into massive, external monuments or ornaments as a canalization system, which large numbers of people flow into, where their desire can flow’.110 Spengler’s socialist Prussian nationalism and J¨unger’s celebration of the individual soldier who ‘melts into everything’ describe synthetic intersubjectivity within a community of masculinity and fascist politics, which constitutes a reactionary version of Romains’s ‘loss of self ’. We might therefore consider the ‘Ornament’ as constituting a political body into which the subject is incorporated within a collective identity, the structures of which, given a reactionary turn, became the fascistic bodily geist based upon what J¨unger called the ‘community of blood’ (Blutgemeinschaft).

The Geometry of Utopia The ‘retreat . . . into mythological structures of meaning’, the ‘irreality’111 produced in the rationalisation of postwar culture, Kracauer argued, was premised upon classical myth. In an attempt to re-inscribe stable laws of existence, the irreality of pseudo-axiomatic geometric universal laws were imagined in the control of the subject, itself conceived as the utopian figures Schlemmer and Laban represented. Kracauer also characterised the ornament as androgynous, ‘composed of thousands of bodies, sexless bodies in bathing suits . . . they are a linear system that no longer has any erotic meaning’.112 He perceived the body emptied of its relation to nature, reconstructed through mechanical function and mathematical engineering (although I disagree that this body loses its ‘erotic meaning’, and suggest it perhaps has even come to bear higher sexual potency).113 Nevertheless, for Kracauer, 215

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the figure of modernity is ‘[t]he human figure enlisted in the mass ornament [that] has begun the exodus from lush organic splendour and the constitution of individuality toward the realm of anonymity’.114 The individual is subsumed within a geometric mass derived from the very foundations of Western culture: mathematical order. As Kracauer wrote: It is the rational and empty form of the cult, devoid of any explicit meaning, that appears in the mass ornament. As such, it proves to be a relapse into mythology of an order so great that one can hardly imagine its being exceeded, a relapse.115

These rationalised forms recur in Schlemmer’s and Laban’s production of modern man, alongside, to refer again to Lefebvre, ‘social practice . . . industrial practice, and . . . architectural and urbanistic research’.116 This is most overtly manifested in the work of Charles Edouard Jeanneret (who adopted the pseudonym ‘Le Corbusier’ with the publication of L’Esprit nouveau in 1920).117 He envisaged the architectural transformation of Western culture according to certain mythologies surrounding the subject’s subordination and conformity to ‘utopian’ universal, mathematical, laws. Corbusier’s vision of the twentieth-century has fundamental similarities with that of Schlemmer and Laban in his development of an architectural imagination of the body-in-space. He envisaged an architectural reification of abstracted, reactionary ideologies of the body through its mathematical and capitalistic rationalisation. Whilst Corbusier’s architecture, embodying an entire regime of reactionary aesthetics, is celebrated as the embodiment of Modernism, we might suggest that he was more concerned with classicism than being a modernist: ‘Today I am accused of being a revolutionary. Yet I confess to having had only one master: the past; and only one discipline: the study of the past.’118 Indeed, as he often repeated in Towards a New Architecture (1923), society demands ‘Architecture or Revolution’. His aim was to provide Western culture with an ideologically compliant architecture for the postwar industrial masses and the bourgeois individual, precisely to avoid revolution. His architecture was fundamentally conservative in its anti-revolutionary objectives. In The City of Tomorrow (1924), Corbusier contrasted his architectural matrix with an organic development of space and dwelling. He 216

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described the pre-modern urban development as the ‘pack-donkey’s way’ – his metaphor for ‘organic’ population which spread according to geographic features. Instead, Corbusier perceived technological modernity as a historical moment that could erase the environment’s influence on architecture. Whilst the traditional growth of cities, like the donkey, ‘meanders along’,119 Corbusier believed its organising precepts should be geometrically logical and progressive – repeating Enlightenment concepts of sequential time and space – regardless of environment. His foreword states that geometry provides the basis for human knowledge, and that through it ‘we perceive the external world and express the world within us’.120 He insisted that ‘[g]eometry is the foundation . . . Machinery is the result of geometry. The age in which we live is therefore essentially a geometrical one; all its ideas are orientated in the direction of geometry.’121 For Corbusier, technological modernity was therefore a teleological progression from Greek classicism. Like Schlemmer, he imagined a quasi-cybernetic body as the index for modern man. For example, in his comparison of the city with the body he insisted on avoiding the death of growth through environmental surgery – replacing organic ‘capillaries’ for geometric ‘arteries’. His ‘city of tomorrow’ is the cybernetic body and, like Schlemmer’s ‘Man’, was dependent on geometric flows for mechanical regulation, whilst his conception of space correlated to Schlemmer’s geometric web. Indeed, Corbusier praised the straight line, believing: ‘The curve is ruinous, difficult, dangerous; it is a paralysing thing. The straight line enters into all human history, into human aim, into every human act.’122 He equated Platonic and Pythagorean geometry with Enlightenment rationality in architecture. ‘The right angle is the essential and sufficient implement of action, because it enables us to determine space with an absolute exactness.’123 Corbusier’s imagination of modern subjectivity demonstrates his engagement with the regimes of reactionary modernity:

man, by reason of his very nature, practises order . . . the straight line is instinctive in him and that his mind apprehends it as a lofty objective. Man, created by the universe, is the sum of that universe, as far as he himself is concerned . . . he has formulated [laws] and made of them a coherent scheme, a rational body of knowledge of which he can act, adapt and produce.124

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For Corbusier, humanity’s ‘very nature’ is axiomatically geometric; the straight line is universally ‘instinctive’. Yet even more directly than Schlemmer, Corbusier emerged from Cubism. It was Ozenfant who encouraged Corbusier to paint after their introduction in 1918 and, as mentioned, it was Ozenfant’s L’Elan that credited Cubism with developing compositional structure. Franc¸oise Ducros comments: ‘this sumptuous magazine reveals the transformations that turned the evolution of Cubism toward a form of classicism, although its title may also evoke a Bergsonian elan vital.’125 In L’Elan’s final issue, Ozenfant wrote ‘Notes sur le cubisme’, discussing ‘Purism’ whilst implying the passing of Cubism’s historical moment: ‘Cubism has assured itself a place of true importance in the history of the plastic arts, because it has already partly realized its purist aim of cleansing plastic language of extraneous terms . . . CUBISM IS A MOVEMENT OF PURISM.’126 Corbusier’s understanding of Cubism was profoundly affected by Ozenfant’s analysis as a ‘direct result’127 of their acquaintance. Indeed, he proclaimed his meeting with Ozenfant as momentous since ‘[t]he country was in the process of being reborn: We had the sense that an age of steel was beginning . . . the hours of construction would follow.’128 Later in 1918, they had a two-man show at Galerie Thomas, exhibiting works based on geometric shapes and classical aesthetics within a rationalised cubist structure. Corbusier wrote upon La Chemin´ee: ‘[My] first picture is a key to the understanding of [my] plastic vocabulary: volume in space. Space.’129 In advance of the exhibition Ozenfant and Corbusier had published Apr`es le cubisme, its very title repeating the claim regarding Cubism’s consignment to history. Its first sentence declared: ‘The War over, everything organizes, everything is clarified and purified.’130 Cubism was discussed as ‘not without merit’, but was not ‘the art of tomorrow’131 that a ‘grateful’ purism was. Therefore they acknowledged the ‘uproar’ that Cubism provoked132 but insisted that ‘[w]e must search for the solid foundations of a fertile art’.133 The second chapter called for an art that responded to the culture of mechanisation, mass production, scientific analysis, organisation and classification, whereby Taylorism ‘is only a matter of the intelligent exploitation of scientific discoveries’.134 Modern industrial culture is based on ‘[t]he constructions of a new spirit [that] rise everywhere, the embryos of an architecture to come; there already reigns in them a harmony whose elements proceed from a certain rigor, from a respect for and application of laws’.135 Their manifesto was antithetical

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machines, because of their numerical calibration, have evolved more rapidly, attaining today a remarkable refinement and purity. This purity creates in us a new sensation, a new delectation, whose significance is cause for reflection; it is a new factor in the modern concept of Art . . . We are not unmoved by the intelligence that governs certain machines . . . they almost seem like

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to Kracauer’s ideas in its combination of painting with architecture through rationalised Cubism, within their imagination of twentiethcentury culture:

projections of natural laws.136

As with Schlemmer’s model, Ozenfant’s and Corbusier’s emphasised the ‘[p]hysical and mathematical geometry [that] define the laws of force that are effectively [nature’s] organizing axes’.137 Their section on ‘Laws and their Relationship to Plastic Art: The Choice: Anthropocentrism, Anthropomorphism’ similarly proposed that the human body is ‘organized in accordance with the laws of symmetry’.138 It is in Apr`es le cubisme that they offer ‘Purism’ as the term for their ‘modern spirit’, articulating their relation to the Ancient Greeks, reconciling art, science, industry, reason and order.139 Their magazine L’Esprit nouveau pursued their purist ideas and ambitions from 1920, maintaining the relationship of the classical to the modern through technology, as in the juxtaposition of Greek architecture, automobile design and the technological aesthetics of urban planning. Indeed, Antliff suggests that ‘the machine-made anonymity of the objects portrayed in [Corbusier’s] purist paintings became a metaphor for the international rationalisation of space and time precipitated by Taylorism’.140 Corbusier and Ozenfant felt they could pursue Cubism’s teleological “‘evolution” to its logical conclusion’,141 through the recuperation of Platonic ideals in ‘their simplest geometric forms’.142 In contrast to Cubism’s radical prewar intent, Silver suggests: ‘Purism was in the deepest sense a self-consciously anti-revolutionary theory and was, equally self-consciously, a movement that depended on the maintenance of the social order and believed in that social order.’143 As Paul Turner writes, Jeanneret’s intellectual arrival at Purism and architecture was ‘an expression of ideas and transcendent principles instead of issues of function, economy, structure and material integrity’.144 Jeanneret’s teacher at La Chaux-de-Fonds was L’Eplattenier, who expressed the importance of the architectural, geometric ornament. 219

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‘My teacher has said: “Only nature inspires, is real . . . Ponder its cause, its form, its vital development and synthesize it by creating ornaments.”’145 Together with Jeanneret’s ‘Platonic conviction’146 of the conception of time, a conceptual structure of space and time harmonised his thought within a ‘divine Idea’.147 L’Eplattenier introduced Owen Jones’s Grammar of Ornament (1856) to Jeanneret, emphasising the harmonious geometries and ornamental patterns of architecture across cultures. Turner argues that Corbusier’s designs actually follow Jones’s propositions, such as ‘natural forms should always be stylized and conventionalized before being used as ornament’.148 Corbusier’s library reveals his pre-war research, including Eugene M¨untz’s Raphael, which expressed an academic attitude towards the High Renaissance.149 Maxime Collignon’s Mythologie figur´ee de la Grece was awarded to the 16 year-old Jeanneret in school, presenting classical figurative representations of Greek deities. Turner suggests these became figurative ‘norms’ that were ‘assimilated by the student and then applied to new problems’.150 A third book in Jeanneret’s formative years (containing his pre-1907 signature) was L’art de demain by Henry Provensal, a work that theoretically and conceptually aligned art history with philosophy, reflecting L’Eplattenier’s views that were so influential upon Jeanneret. A similar work, inscribed to Jeanneret from L’Eplattenier, is Edouard Schure’s Les grands initi´es. It follows a mystical figure reappearing throughout history to reveal esoteric truths, referring to Krishna, Hermes, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato, Jesus and others.151 Both Schure’s and Provensal’s work influenced Jeanneret’s conception of the epoch’s ‘need for . . . spiritual revival’152 based on esoteric laws. Particularly relevant to Jeanneret’s ideas was Schure’s estimation that Pythagoras was most relevant to modern man. Indeed, this chapter was the one most heavily annotated in Jeanneret’s copy.153 Turner concludes that Corbusier’s career, from Purism to the later Modulor, was ‘characterized most essentially by a search for generalization, universality, and absolute formal truths which would put Man in touch with a harmony underlying nature – a divine “axis,” as he called it’.154 Stanislaus von Moos identified in Jeanneret’s first built designs an obsession for ‘a strict, geometric language . . . the urge to make the structural laws of nature visible and to express them in clear, universal, geometric patterns.’155 These designs became increasingly influential as France began an immediate period of reconstruction when war –

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not expected to last five years – broke out in 1914. Jeanneret designed Maison Domino within this context. These buildings consisted of two horizontal planes traversing vertical columns connected by diagonal stairs. They were conceived as mass-produced prefabricated buildings for individual completion, but a synthesis between technological, industrial and aesthetic processes in the ‘purity’ of the horizontal, vertical and diagonal was fundamental in their design. After the war, Jeanneret exhibited his plans for the Maison Monol in 1919, and the Maison Citrohan156 in 1920–2 at the Salon d’Automne, along with designs for the Immeubles Villas and a city designed for three million people: the Ville Contemporaine. However, alongside mass housing designs, the Maison Citrohan was conceived for a single artist or intellectual who appreciated Corbusier’s cellular design based on the Platonic cube. Its conceptual and architectural development was made possible through the support of his clients – individual men who accepted his vision of the individual Platonic house-cell-machine. As Peter Serenyi notes, artists such as Ozenfant, Albert Jeanneret and Jacques Lipchitz, as well as businessmen like the Swiss banker Raoul La Roche, Michael Stein and Pierre Savoye all sought Corbusier’s designs. Many of them were foreigners living in Paris, less interested in the organic historical development of a region’s architecture when compared to a new international style. His clients were ‘modern’ men who were constantly travelling, for whom the architectural cell provided a fashionable residence-machine. The requirement and support of his wealthy clients, and the need for mass-produced housing, therefore allowed Corbusier to pursue his geometric model of man and the environment. Corbusier’s Immeubles Villas followed the Maison Citrohan, operating as cellular geometric units that constituted the wider ornamental framework of the apartment block. Serenyi refers to it as ‘an apartment super-block consisting of many individual “Maisons Citrohan”’.157 Corbusier himself referred to the ornamental construction of ‘cells’ to form a ‘whole’. The Immeubles Villas are a collection of, in Corbusier’s words, ‘cells’, or ‘machines for living in’, with designated communal areas within the multicellular ornament. The consideration of mass housing also informed his later Plan Voisin, whose designs, Corbusier stated, were based on the Monastery of Ema. This religious aspect – the monastery as temple of God and therefore as an architectural reflection of the body as metaphor for the ‘godly’, well-ordered,

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society – is important regarding the underlying harmony between the individual and the collective, the monad and the whole. As Georges Duby writes, many monasteries were based on the ‘ideal’ plans for the monastery of Saint-Gall (c.820), which embodied the mathematical order and universal harmony of the ‘heavenly court’ whilst monks were garrisoned within the overall organism.158 Richard Sennett refers to Christianity’s influence on medieval monastic organisations through ‘a new understanding of the Christian body’.159 John of Salisbury defined ‘body politic’ in 1159 as reflecting social order in the human body. Consequently, the city was to be codified and constructed according to the body, just as, for example, the ruler should surgically remove any rebellious factions as if they were a diseased organ.160 Corbusier’s imagination for mass, modern existence was influenced by a cellular monastic design that reflected an alienated, hermetic self – something Serenyi argues reflected Corbusier’s own condition as ‘an uprooted, single, lonely man’161 – that embodies a particular imagination of culture. Indeed, Corbusier’s designs omit consideration of the family as a multiple, complex, mobile, emotional set of relationships.162 As Richards shows, Corbusier envisaged the ‘self ’ as a hermetic monad, removed from social and political participation, and subject to its instrumentalisation within a hierarchical, technocratic culture.163 We might therefore highlight architecture as a form of self-representation, just as fashion design was for Sonia Delaunay. The first ‘communal’ building realised from Corbusier’s plans was the Palais du Peuple for the Salvation Army in Paris, 1926. The building was based on a geometric arrangement of the individual cells; Corbusier believed its architecture benefited the interior life of its inhabitants through ‘normalisation . . . standardisation . . . measure and proportion . . . [an] alliance between human values and numbers’.164 Whilst this building may have been successful for its inhabitants – largely single, retired war veterans – the Unit´e d’Habitation in Marseilles has widely been considered a failure since it was unable to provide a successful architectural space for families of different sizes and dynamics. Corbusier’s successes depended upon single men and women who could accommodate structural isolation into their existence.165 The ‘Ornament’ emerges in Corbusier’s designs too, as the body becomes a fragmentary appendage for architectural topos. As a fragment, the subject is organised monadically according to a

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mathematically objective (rather than bioceptually subjective), measurable existence. The complex embodied, existential relation the subject has to space, time and others is subjugated by the subject’s instrumental value to the state that has harnessed the avant-garde’s reversion to primary aesthetic principles as a disciplinary technology. We might subsequently consider the consequences in the perceived denigration of the family and community within the twentiethcentury.166 The bionomic of the subject and space is premised upon a geometric architectonic whereby the ‘masses’ are arranged according to the aesthetics of reactionary modernism. (Indeed, Richards argues that Corbusier firmly believed in anti-parliamentary authoritarianism, and was committed to the rhetoric and practice of violence. Again, revealing rhetorical affinities with a writer such as J¨unger, Corbusier wrote: ‘Through the blood and the sufferings of battles, we must observe the flawless unfolding of the creative work . . . let us build for ourselves a new consciousness.’ Corbusier’s advocation of violently reorganising culture was increasingly aligned with ultra-right politics in the 1930s. He ‘embraced’ Italian Fascism, and accepted a position in France’s Vichy government.)167 The cellular utopia becomes ‘open prisons for the poor’.168 Such modern architectures render the subject akin to Schlemmer’s lonely, geometrically isolated body in Figur und Raumlineatur. We shall now consider that perhaps it is no coincidence that Corbusier’s architectural utopia of cellular living, walkways and communal areas is reminiscent of prison architectures and science fiction dystopias. The idea of the living-machine reconciled primary aesthetic concepts, economics, politics and technology with the imagination of a vacant mechanical subject. The machine incorporated both classicism and technology to produce modernity’s ‘utopian’ architectures and an ‘anaesthetic’ pre-modern subjectivity.169 Corbusier’s estimation of the machine’s importance in replacing subjective existence, something Rosenblatt describes as producing ‘a monolithic aesthetic subject’,170 was fundamentally influenced by the inscription of a modular grid that effected disciplinary and regulatory operations upon the urban ‘population’. Whilst Rosenblatt locates Corbusier’s work within the late nineteenth-century positivist theorisation of mass society,171 Foucault has identified the disciplinary and regulatory mechanisms of this period.172 For him, these were embodied in the ‘the town of

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utopian reality’,173 conceived and built in the nineteenth-century for the working class: One can easily see how the very grid pattern, the very layout, of the estate articulated, in a sort of perpendicular way, the disciplinary mechanisms that controlled the body, or bodies, by localizing families (one to a house) and individuals (one to a room) . . . and the normalization of behavior meant that a sort of spontaneous policing or control was carried out by the spatial layout of the town itself. It is easy to identify a whole series of disciplinary mechanisms in the working-class estate.174

Foucault even suggests at this point that such an inscription on population exists in all modern political regimes (an idea Agamben shows has its apotheosis in Nazi concentration camps).175 Foucault refers to the architect Charles Fourier as an example of the rationalisation and normalisation – which he argues is the basis for ‘liberalist’ racism – of mass society in the nineteenth-century whereby the state’s function was ‘to take control of life, to manage it, to compensate for its aleatory nature’.176 It was Fourier who had a profound importance upon Corbusier. Fourier’s claims for a ‘new world order’ after the French Revolution inspired Corbusier’s investigation of modern human and social sciences to find stable laws to reconcile his primary aesthetic concepts in re-establishing order amidst his perception of social chaos and despair.177 Fourier’s ideas were based on the emergent machine’s potential, perceived at the moment of his writing in the first industrial revolution178 and, like Corbusier, he reverted to classicism for laws of order in a revolutionary culture. Likewise, Fourier found intellectual refuge in the ‘perfection’ of linear Newtonian space-time – of its supposed cosmic harmony179 and treatment of temporality – in seeking ‘unity of man with himself, a unity of man with God and a unity of man with the universe’.180 These elements are echoed in Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture. Indeed, Fourier described beauty as belonging to proportions that resonate within us, ‘beyond our senses’ in a neo-Platonic fashion. It is this proportion, or ‘axis’, Corbusier writes, ‘on which man is organized in perfect accord with nature and probably the universe . . . If the results of mathematical calculation appears satisfying and harmonious to us, it is because they proceed from the axis.’181 224

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Corbusier discovered in Cubism a technique of linear construction through which to develop a stable geometric regime of compositional order. Similarly, Schlemmer and Laban developed a geometric cubist bionomic in the construction of a mathematical bodily architectonic. Indeed, Corbusier was not the only artist who sought to extend this technology – the geometric ornament as metaphor for a ‘new’ existence – in the reconstruction of culture itself; Doesburg and Mondrian also extracted cubist laws, as Green writes, to ‘make the ideal a reality not just in paintings but in the environment as a whole’.182 Whilst Doesburg was perhaps more concerned with international socialism and the downfall of European capitalism, he reached similar conclusions to those derived by Mondrian’s more theosophic approach, regarding the transformation of society through reconstructing the dynamic between humanity and the environment. Indeed, as Delaunay had sought to fashion her body into the fabric of modernity, internal spiritual conversion could be achieved through external cultural reorganisation. However, in 1919, Doesburg wrote of a ‘new plasticity, which only could appear in and by a period which was able to revolutionize completely the spiritual (inward) and material (outward) proportions’.183 Similarly, Mondrian wrote in the same year: ‘If we conceive these two extremes as manifestations of interiority and exteriority, we will find the new plasticism the tie uniting mind and life is not broken . . . a reconciliation of the mindmatter dualism.’184 Therefore, Mondrian asserted the importance of reconstructing existence upon a stable model: ‘In terms of composition the new plasticism is dualistic. Through the exact reconstruction of cosmic relations it is a direct expression of the universal.’185 Doesburg had a direct relation to cubist Paris from 1917 onwards. He met figures such as Severini and the dealer L´eonce Rosenberg, and saw the work of Gleizes, Metzinger and Gris at the Section d’Or. When Doesburg took the exhibition to Holland, he termed his and Mondrian’s De Stijl work, which was included at that point, as ‘NeoCubist’.186 His interpretation of Cubism emphasised its geometric basis, whilst critiquing its a posteriori approach in drawing form from nature. Meanwhile, for Mondrian, Cubism’s weakness was its incorporation of process, of the ‘fragmentary’ nature of phenomena rather than the stable laws of universal harmony he believed existed. Both artists derived a constructivist aesthetic from Cubism’s structural foundations.

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Whilst such ideals seem reconcilable with Purism, the Purists initially rejected non-objective painting as irrelevant ‘ornamental art’. Subsequently, they marginalised the De Stijl exhibition at the Galerie de l’Effort Moderne in 1923. Nevertheless, the 1923 De Stijl exhibition influenced Corbusier, particularly in the calculated, rational use of colour. Similarly, L´eger was impressed, perceiving the importance of De Stijl’s non-objective canvases for architecture through their articulation of a ‘new spirit’ based on geometric abstraction, industrial design and universal harmony. He subsequently facilitated Doesburg’s and Mondrian’s reception in France.187 Schlemmer’s meeting with Doesburg after the latter’s visit to the Bauhaus in 1920, and his subsequent teaching of a De Stijl course in 1922, is testament to Cubism’s multiple connections. Later, Schlemmer wrote in a letter of 1926, Mondrian: he is really the god of the Bauhaus, and Doesburg is his prophet. Perhaps Doesburg’s fanatical role as an agitator and prophet has distorted what started out a good thing. Mondrian is a god, and what he does is perfectly consistent with a certain type of Dutch architecture.188

Indeed, Mondrian’s view of ‘Man’ accorded with Schlemmer’s, as well as Laban’s and Corbusier’s thought. He wrote: ‘Modern man . . . exhibits a changed consciousness: every expression of his life has today a different aspect, that is, an aspect more positively abstract.’189 Mondrian attempted to represent what he perceived as the changed consciousness of the modern subject through art: ‘pure representation of the human mind, art will express itself in an aesthetically purified, that is to say, abstract form . . . [within a] universal consciousness, which is one.’190 The avant-garde therefore – as Green notes – took ‘the collective role of “organizing man’s progress”, of becoming the agent of social and political change’.191 To this end, Mondrian’s paintings are, as Cox writes, a ‘para-mechanical pattern’ that ‘converts the logic of figure and ground . . . into a rationalist harmony of space and incident, horizontal and vertical’.192 Mondrian’s compositional matrix is constructed from a belief in the line as the foundation for a harmonious universal order upon which society should proceed. Doesburg’s painting, such as Contre-compositie VI (1925) articulates a similar regime of technological modernity, whilst we might consider his representation of a Russian dance in 226

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rejects craftsmanship (the focus of the Bauhaus) in favor of the most modern tool: the machine. Exclusive and consistent use of only the horizontal and the vertical in art and architecture will, he thinks, make it possible to create a style which eliminates the individual, in favor of collectivism.193

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Ritme van een Russische dans (1918) through a geometric relationship of lines in stark contrast to the embodied becoming of Sonia Delaunay’s simultaneous dress that was inspired by a similar source. Schlemmer commented of Doesburg that he

Doesburg also attempted to represent higher spirituality through the dynamic diagonal, though Mondrian insisted on the Pythagorean purity of the right angle. Cubism’s fate became the adoption of linear abstraction, classical proportion and universality, in deriving the fundamental laws of being-in-space on which a new modern world was imagined. As Mondrian wrote in 1922: ‘Architecture, sculpture, painting and decorative art will then merge into architecture-as-ourenvironment.’194 Consequently, Corbusier’s Villa Savoye is a ‘cubist’ architecture, in his words, ‘a box hovering in the air . . . in a Virgilian dream’.195 It synthesised the vertical, horizontal and diagonal that concerned Doesburg through ‘the vertical penetrations’ and ‘bold diagonals’196 upon which a transformation of humanity was believed to be possible. For the artists mentioned in this chapter, this geometric aesthetic principle was fundamental in the schema that imagined twentieth-century Modernism’s transformation of the subject. The imagination of cultural experience therefore proceeded through the reconciliation of aesthetics and technology within the reactionary postwar ideology of the state. The work of Schlemmer, Laban, Doesburg, Mondrian and Corbusier all continued to transform Cubism according to their own beliefs regarding order but, as Green argues, the postwar avant-garde betrayed Cubism through extracting from it the very laws of stability and order that its most progressive practitioners rejected. The architect Walter Curt Behrendt, for example, took exception to Corbusier’s abstracted rationality, especially in comparison to Frank Lloyd Wright’s approach to architecture and the environment. He criticised Corbusier’s concern not with ‘the structural problem of the building, but with the esthetic problem’,197 lamenting that international Cubism produced ‘a return to elementary geometry than a turn towards organic order’.198 Indeed, as Rob Imrie 227

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has recently argued for contemporary architecture, the embodied, existential subject is omitted for mathematical ideals of the body within a linear compositional matrix.199 Responding to Corbusier’s focus on the geometric, ornamental topography in his vision of the future, the Swiss architect Alexander von Senger rejected such architectural conceptions as communistic and mechanistic. Whilst perhaps not negative as terms in themselves, when combined within an aesthetic that elides embodiment, the remodelling of culture contains inherent problems. Serenyi notes that the German art historian and architect Cornelius Gurlitt responded to The City of Tomorrow and the concept of the plan Voisin with disbelief, and was left wondering if it was meant as an ironic gesture. The English architect Trystan Edwards regarded Corbusier’s proposals as ‘an oversimplified solution to the complex problems of the big city’, whilst S.D. Adshead criticised Corbusier’s inhumanity.200 The concern with aesthetics at the expense of the embodied subject is demonstrated in Corbusier’s Mundaneum, and his parliamentary buildings in Chandigarh, India. Karel Tiege, an avant-garde artist influential for the reception of modern art and artists (including Corbusier) into Czechoslovakia, famously critiqued the Mundaneum in 1929, arguing: ‘[the] fallacy of Le Corbusier’s Mundaneum is one of monumentality . . . the Germanic monumentality of architectural megalomania.’201 Tiege also critiqued Corbusier’s previous conceptualisation of the house as a machine for living as ‘a possible cover-up for all kinds of aestheticism and academicism’.202 There remains a central issue of neglecting practical, embodied needs at the expense of modern mythology. As Tiege continued: the Mundaneum highlights the failure of those aesthetic and formalistic theories of Le Corbusier which we have always opposed from the constructivist viewpoint: the theory of the Golden Section, of geometric proportionality, in short, all a priori aesthetic formulae deduced from a formalistic perception of historical styles.203

For example, the ‘monumental unity’ and ‘harmonious proportionality’ of the building caused the windows in the exhibition hall to be ‘sacrificed to numerical and astronomical symbolism’.204 Tiege found that Corbusier’s lack of functionalism derived from his concerns with 228

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aesthetic style derived from a priori concepts and ‘historical clich´e’. This, he deemed, was ultimately irresponsible,205 and he concluded: ‘Life of course is neither symmetrical nor triangular, neither starshaped nor based on the Golden Section . . . [and] The Mundaneum is a fiasco of aesthetic theories and traditionalist superstitions.’206 However, the reconstruction of the body, transformed through mathematical and cosmological aesthetics, abstracted it from its own embodiment, something Tiege believed ‘foreshadows the attitudes of progressivistic architects and city planners of today’.207 Imrie reaches the same conclusion regarding the disappearance of embodiment from twenty-first century-architecture.208 He demonstrates that the majority of architects work only from a reductive concept of the body as a disembodied machine, devoid of sex, gender, race or disability.209 Schlemmer’s, Laban’s and Corbusier’s bodies all anticipated such an attitude, whilst Mondrian already omitted the importance of the body altogether. These bodies, and what Imrie describes as the ‘post-Galilean’ body, are presented as ‘neutral’ but are undeniably androcentric. Architecture continues to reproduce modernity’s ideal of the utopian body – white, male, athletic – but cybernetically and ideologically docile, especially since the body itself has become regarded as ‘impure and degenerate’210 compared to its mathematical purity inherent in modular design. One architect interviewed by Imrie commented, ‘the modular figure is a standard male but I think that it’s a universal concept’.211 Indeed, the body is no longer just mathematically reductive, it is absent, even obsolete. Bodily erasure and mobilisation of the mass into systematic, rationalised social patterns of production and consumption is one outcome of Corbusier’s ultimatum: ‘architecture or revolution’. Corbusier’s designs for parliamentary buildings in Chandigarh from the 1950s instead receive different criticisms from Norma Evenson. She identifies the domination of a particular environment and subjectivity through the imagination of the subject-monad within a geometric matrix. Shortly after Indian independence from Britain’s colonial rule in 1947, Prime Minister Nehru declared on Chandigarh: ‘Let this be a new town, symbolic of the freedom of India, unfettered by the traditions of the past . . . an expression of the nation’s faith in the future.’212 The irony exists that the ‘architectural freedom’ is based on an ideology that sought to control movement, whilst the ‘expression of the nation’ became a homogenous internationalist style with Corbusier’s

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‘universal laws’ deriving from of an earlier historical moment. Even a book as general (albeit classicist) as David Watkin’s A History of Western Architecture comments: ‘The massiveness and near-megalomaniac scale of these buildings . . . are functionally disastrous.’213 Evenson’s more detailed critique refers to Corbusier’s alteration of the initial planner’s designs by ‘classicising and geometricizing [sic] the plan, straightening major streets and transforming the slightly irregular superblocks into rectangles. He sought to give the city a large-scale unified design appropriate to its monumental character.’214 Even though Evenson does not consider the architectural intentions and motives of the government commissioning the work, she nevertheless concludes it lacks ‘the functional viability’215 of native Indian towns that were constructed as a response to the bionomic between environment and subject.

The Modulor My dear old chap, thank you for the Roman dedication, but I don’t give a hang for your Modulor. Blaise Cendrars to Le Corbusier, postcard dated 25 July 1950216

The design for the Chandigarh project incorporated Corbusier’s ‘Modulor’. The design was developed during World War II, patented in 1947 as an invention and sold out when published a year later.217 Corbusier envisaged that every architect and engineer would have a Modulor scale on their drawing board ‘so that every object designed for human use shall correspond to a single all-pervading harmony’.218 Just as Schlemmer and Laban reconfigured the Vitruvian man according to mathematical systems of bodily proportion and space, Corbusier’s Modulor was also a modernist imagination of the Renaissance figure reconfigured through a rationalisation of the human body-in-space as the basis for architectural design. His Modulor further omitted the necessities of embodied space in favour of an idealised mathematical computation of the human body and the universe in accordance with his own research in the thought of Plato and Pythagoras. Despite Corbusier’s ‘high Modernist’ status, there is hardly anything modern about the Modulor. Modulor 2 (1955), published just seven years after Le Modulor, maintained conservative Modernism’s fascination with 230

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Figure 52. Le Corbusier, Modulor 2, 1955

the Renaissance and the Classical through the reinvigoration of the universal ‘Vitruvian’ man (see Fig. 53). Corbusier’s Unit´e d’Habitation was the first building to apply the Modulor. Wittkower argued that the theoretical shaping and order of the Modulor was derived from a set of numbers. ‘Always tied to higher civilizations. All systems of proportion are implicitly intellectual, for they are based on mathematical logic.’219 Wittkower is sympathetic to Corbusier’s position, and accepts the abstracted aesthetic based on disembodied rationalism as characteristic of ‘higher’ civilisation. As such Wittkower heralded the ‘bridge’ crossed by thinkers between ‘abstract mathematical thought and the phenomenal world that surrounds us . . . [as one of the] most extraordinary events in the early 231

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Figure 53. Le Corbusier, Modulor 2, 1955

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Figure 54. Le Corbusier, Modulor 2, 1955

history of mankind’.220 We might agree that this is fundamental in a particular conception of the Western subject and yet, as discussed in the first chapter, is highly problematic. According to Wittkower, ‘[t]he quest for symmetry, balance, and proportional relationships is deeply embedded in human nature’221 which elevates humans above ‘lower’ animals, and with his notion of the subject’s intuitive ‘divine proportion’, was the problematic ground on which he supported Corbusier’s abstracted domination of the environment. Wittkower saw that the Modulor ultimately derived from Greek thought.222 Indeed, Pythagoras was particularly important to Corbusier because of his discovery of a harmonious scale that had important consequences for rationalising the interrelationship of sound, space and numbers within universal mathematical harmony.223 The ratio of 1:2 was associated with beauty, and became the ratio of perfection. Corbusier, like Laban, was influenced by Plato’s Timaeus, which described an all-encompassing theory of the universe through simplistic geometric figures. Such a system was advocated in Vers une architecture, and even supported by French academics at the time, such as Franc¸ois Blondel, the first Academy director.224 Wittkower wrote: ‘Renaissance theory and practice pronounced axiomatically that the proportions of architecture must echo those of the human body . . . The Bible tells us that Man was created in the image of God. It logically follows that 233

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Man’s proportions are perfect.’225 The golden section, based on the Fibonacci system, is set according to number ratios226 calculated as a /b = b/a+b or, 1.618, the ‘number of beauty’.227 Yet Peter Collins suggests that Palladio was the only leading Renaissance architect to seriously attempt such theoretical proportion in practice, and experienced difficulties in implementing such a regime. (Similarly, there are frequent logistical disparities between the ‘defects’ in Corbusier’s designs and the built architecture.)228 Collins also argues that Vitruvian systems were not actually supported by the classical monuments of Greece and Rome, but adopted by Renaissance thinkers under a mistaken assumption.229 Within modernity’s classical turn, however, as Wittkower succinctly wrote: ‘Le Corbusier is thus in line of descent from Vitruvius and the Renaissance’,230 yet his modernity was based on an ‘objective and universal validity’ already exposed as fallacious. The Unit´e d’Habitation therefore reintroduced Renaissance anthropometry to the design of the twentieth-century through the Modulor, itself consisting of the Fibonacci system applied to a human male six feet tall. Figure 52 demonstrates the Fibonacci series applied to rectangles that intersect the body at symbolic points. The red measurements to the left of the elliptical scale are from a Fibonacci series based on the square, whilst the blue measurements of the vertical are from the rectangle. Thereby a 1:2 ratio is maintained. However, Collins argues that the model fails ‘by the fact it is not capable of subdivision’.231 Additionally, whilst the measurements at the base level are small, it soon grows proportionately, whereby measurements ‘rapidly assume astronomic values as the logarithmic spiral progresses’.232 Corbusier attempted to counter this by introducing a second, blue spiral, though it was only the prior red that was based on the height of the body. In the Unit´e d’Habitation, the mathematics unravelled as the rooms fail to correspond to the Modulor’s designated dimensions. Collins somewhat sardonically quotes Corbusier, explaining the discrepancy as ‘a personal interpretation of the Modulor, the limitations which it imposes and the liberties which it allows’.233 Whilst Corbusier insisted that he had the right of freedom to alter his system at any time, he also wondered why American industry had not used the Modulor for the dimensions of mass manufacturing production.234 Collins writes: ‘One can imagine the chaos which would result if the norm were to be changed once mass production had started!’235 In addition, Corbusier’s six-foot man was

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originally based on 175 cm (or 5ft 912 in). However, calculations based on 175 cm were impractical for translating into inches, so he altered the anthropometric dimension to 72 inches to fall within a prescribed Fibonacci series. Instead of mathematics reflecting the ‘truths’ of human experience, ‘Man’ is consistently reconfigured to conform to abstracted mathematical patterns upon which a notion of Western subjectivity is rationalised. Ultimately, it is for the technological rationalisation of existence that Wittkower praises Corbusier’s work as ‘a perfect means of unification in the mass production of manufactured articles’.236 Corbusier’s mass housing projects incorporated mathematical ratios of the human body in the design, systemic production and control of mass populations, whilst endorsing Taylorism as ‘one of the fundamental bases of his proposals for mass-produced housing’.237 As Brian Brace Taylor wrote, for Corbusier ‘the Machine commands the Man’.238 The mechanisation of the human body was based on an aesthetic derived from universal Platonic measurements – as the Modulor proposed – fantasised as obedient and productive within his Ornamental aesthetic for the ‘city of tomorrow’. Within this was the ‘human of tomorrow’ that Corbusier claimed could be organised into ‘garden cities and . . . “scientifically” managed in the factory’.239 Alongside Schlemmer’s utopian articulation of the human subject, the postwar modernist vision of the twentiethcentury subject emerges. Indeed, Schlemmer described his own course based on ‘Man’ as a ‘nice totality’ that incorporated ‘[h]eredity, racial theory, reproductive biology, ethics, and so on’.240 The ‘modern’ subject was to emerge within this framework of a scientifically managed body-automaton, its energies regulated, its behaviour monitored and its development controlled according to positivistic human sciences. The bionomic between subject and environment imagined by the avant-garde in this chapter produces quite a different figure from that imagined by the modernist avant-garde before 1914: fractured, mechanised and abstractly rationalised outside of its own embodied existence.

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Conclusion: From n-Dimensional Imagination to One Dimensional Man The shifts within the modernist avant-garde reflected, in different ways, Western biopolitical practices concerning the instrumentalising of the subject by the state from the nineteenth-century. Gleizes’s and Delaunay’s treatment of the embodied subject, and its relation to others, demonstrates the modernist avant-garde’s response to the relocation of the subject as the object of knowledge. Indeed, despite their relatively minor position in histories of Modernism, such artists were engaged with modernity’s new radical episteme, in which knowledge, consciousness and experience was understood as fundamentally embodied. Their work contributes in signifying a radical, if brief, moment in the imagination of the subject and its relation to the world. However, whilst the nineteenth-century’s epistemic shift reconceptualised subject and environment, it also provided techniques for the greater extension of power over the subject and the space it participated within. Cubism’s own critical, internal principle of representation became the simultaneous foundation for a new regime of order and stability as the avant-garde became complicit in the state’s ‘call to order’ through the harnessing of its aesthetic, spiritual and technological dimensions to a reactionary turn. As we have seen, artists in the postwar retour a` l’ordre even took refuge in what Foucault termed the

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‘cosmo-theological’1 framework of pre-Classical, sixteenth-century regimes of power and order. Cubism was a casualty of war, although its fragmentation also promoted a wider dissemination of its ‘rhizome’. One of these cubisms was ‘crystal cubism’, a development Green identifies as ‘stable, enduring and pure; everything about it invited the most adhesive and durable of analogies, the classical analogy’.2 Elsewhere, Schlemmer’s cubist modelling became a geometric architecture for structuring the body’s relation to space, whilst Laban’s kinesphere, the ‘space crystal’, mirrored the distillation of form occurring within modernity’s appeal to various classicisms. Meanwhile, Ozenfant and Corbusier discussed how ‘man takes delight in these forms because he finds in them what seems to be a confirmation for his abstract geometric concepts. Nature and the human mind find common ground in the crystal as they do in the cell.’3 The appeal of the crystal as a visual metaphor for the harmonising of the classical and modern in the rigidifying of figurative space ran against Bergson’s promotion of the continuous flow of consciousness against ‘clear-cut crystals and this superficial congelation’.4 Similarly, the canvases of Doesburg and Mondrian envisaged, and perhaps provided, a geometric matrix for structuring subjective experience within society, eliding the concept of bodily proportion and time in their formulation of ‘architecture-as-our-environment’5 Cubism, synthesised with classical influences, provided the structuring technology for the interpellation of the postwar human subject within culture according to a systemic rationality. Classicism combined with industrial application in post-cubist constructions of the subject-environment bionomic, and rejected the embodied subject described by Gleizes and Delaunay in their proposition of subjective relations to time and space. In contrast, mathematically calculable matrices could not admit an experiential, or even bioceptual, response to space. Laban’s kinesphere, for example, omits a phenomenological conception whereby extension into space and time is emotional, responsive and fluid. Its rigid three-dimensional plasticity denied the possible bodily condition of becoming space through time. Similarly, Mondrian’s ‘neo-plasticism’ distilled the concept of being and society upon two dimensions in which the stability of the vertical and horizontal enunciated fundamental conditions for a harmoniously ordered society. (Principles of collective existence nevertheless inform

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both Gleizes’s and Delaunay’s work, particularly in their challenge to anthropocentric figuration through memory, rhythm and movement, rather than the imposition of an external geometric network.) Whilst dynamic relations emerge from the tensions in linear construction, in proceeding from an a priori geometric conception of the universe Mondrian sought to extend this universal order through culture, to the individual, and the canvas itself as a microcosm for its laws. The systemisation of Cubism therefore involved not only the transformation of an imagination of four-dimensional existence into the crystallised stability of three, but even the disavowal of body and time in two dimensions. For Herbert Marcuse, reviewing the cultural process, this process of abstracted rationalisation within culture culminated in what he termed ‘one-dimensional man’.6 We might therefore argue that the subject’s repositioning as the object of knowledge in modernity provided a radical moment even before the onset of war and its subsequent call to order catalysed a set of power relations that Foucault identified in his model of modernity’s biopolitical paradigm. Indeed, we might consider Delaunay’s biograph in particular as reflecting the operations of biopower upon the subject’s body in fabricating the individual subject (and therefore the new object of power) through the network of relations pertaining to the individual and the mass. Since life became modernity’s principle object of power, Gleizes’s and Delaunay’s rhythmic dispersal of the body in space and time anticipated the subject’s inscription into crystalline matrices imposed by an avant-garde increasingly complicit with reactionary ideologies in its conceptualisation of biopower. If the modernist avant-garde was principally concerned with embodied perceptual phenomena, the transformations surrounding World War I indicate a shift in its representation of the subject. Cubism provided a ‘technology’ for the construction of the subject, regardless of the techniques employed, which facilitated the avant-garde’s ultimate complicity in the rationalisation of the subject and the annihilation of the radical freedom it once announced. Indeed, we might consider that the subject’s rationalised instrumentalisation within aesthetics reflected mechanisms of that power that Foucault argues exist across the spectrum of fascist, capitalistic and democratic regimes. The cubist reconstruction of the Vitruvian man, as one example of this, transformed the subject as a technical and aesthetic object, containing what Foucault perceived as the ‘relations of subjugation [that] . . . manufacture subjects’.7

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Cubism’s historical moment thus occurs within the context of a particular historical regime. The strategies for representing the experiential phenomena of perception and their consequences for articulating the subject, relation to others and the environment, emerged from a wider, intensive, concern over the human body and its instrumental potential for the state and capital. The cubist representation of the individual and others, for example, reflects modernity’s development of biopower in response to concepts of ‘population’, the ‘social body’ and the ‘social individual’ within a critical shift in the operations of power. Indeed, Foucault elaborated on a continuous mutation in the deployment of power, from sovereign rule that evolved into the ‘art of government’, or ‘governmentality’8 in the sixteenth-century as a response to monitoring its own processes in relation to massive demographic and industrial change.9 Government became its own ´ developed to object of knowledge and analysis,10 as the raison d’Etat intervene upon production and economic circulation for achieving financial and population development. However, strict sixteenth- and seventeenth-century market regulations shifted to a model of ‘political economy’ in the mid-eighteenth-century as the state reflected on its processes of organisation, distribution and limitation of power based on ‘natural’ market dynamics and laissez-faire ideals. Extensive and limiting governmental intervention transformed according to a particular cultural moment of gold influx, currency stability and an intensification of agricultural production, all within overall economic and demographic growth. Accompanying these new forms of indirect economic intervention, Foucault identifies a shift from the regulation of subjects through disciplinary and prohibitive mechanisms to the emergence of techniques of control such as surveillance, inspection and management. These are fundamental to the modern imagination of the subject as the ‘instrument, relay, or condition for obtaining something at the level of the population’.11 The prior, seventeenth-century concern with applying direct power upon a mechanical, anatomo-political concept of the body through institutional disciplinary regimes12 mutated into eighteenth-century ‘civil society’ as direct ‘disciplinisation’ [sic] declined, whilst a ‘permanent matrix of political power’13 was instituted across socio-economic fields that were coextensive with rational governmentality, manifesting concern about the biology of the subject and population. The concept of ‘security’ further altered technologies of power through its

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concern with maintaining the strength of the state based on concepts of ‘population’ and its economic behaviour. Individual and society were conceptualised as operations within statistical fields: a physics of phusis. Governmental reason therefore gave birth to mechanisms for managing economy, disease, madness, sexuality and punishment, in accordance with a shift in its operations from direct state intervention to institutional techniques of observation, checks, establishing practices and processes, economies of action and its effects. Governmental liberalisation in the Classical age developed a ‘bipolar’ strategy of harnessing, intensifying, distributing and adjusting its economy of energy and discipline, and the regulation of population through the deployment of micro-technologies including surveillance, spatial management and medical and psychological examination based on statistical assessments of the ‘social body’.14 Modern forms of ‘liberal’ governmental technologies derive from preceding regimes of governmentality;15 biopolitics emerged from eighteenth-century practices of rationalisation on the biological phenomena of ‘population’ – birth, death, illness and production – as the source of state power.16 During this moment the term ‘human species’ replaced the concept of ‘mankind’.17 Agamben’s notion of modernity’s incorporation of zo¯e (bare life) into bios (socio-political life) derives from Foucault’s idea that: there was an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations, marking the beginning of an era of ‘bio-power.’ The two directions taken by its development still appeared to be clearly separate in the eighteenth-century.18

The unification of zo¯e and bios in modernity occurred as embodied existence and its bionomic organisation became the object of political strategy,19 since power altered the human species by acting on the milieu – itself a modern ‘project’.20 Indeed, Foucault wrote: ‘For the first time in history, no doubt, biological existence was reflected in political existence.’21 The paradox of liberalism lies in its production of ‘freedom’; the mechanisms developed to reduce direct state intervention instituted a simultaneously greater dispersed and penetrative matrix of power upon its new object. Such ‘liberalism’ constituted the ‘general framework of biopolitics’.22 Therefore, we might consider the same process occurring in modernity’s representation of the subject: 240

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It is almost as if, starting from a certain point, every decisive political event were double-sided: the spaces, the liberties, and the rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers always simultaneously prepared a tacit but increasing inscription of individuals’ lives within the state order, thus offering a new and more dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power from which they wanted to liberate themselves.23

I suggest the harnessing of aesthetics to the postwar rappel in its rationalisation of the subject, space and time can be understood as an extension of disciplinary normalisation based upon mechanisms of security.24 Certainly, Taylorist practices encouraged corrective bodily procedures from their perception of the risk an inefficient human instrument posed to greater production, wealth and power. The corporeal inscription of modernistic techniques followed those developed for treating disease in the eighteenth-century, as the body became subjected to corresponding regulations, grids, inspections and statistical norms in the establishment of risk, security and management. We might even imagine the establishment of biopolitics as a response, in part, to a conceptualisation of the human body as ‘disease’, as well as the new object of power, when considered in terms of its instrumental value. (This is certainly reflected in claims against ‘degenerate’ avant-garde art.) The biopolitical mapping of existence in time and space constitutes the modern state’s concept of the subject as a statistic of ‘population’, one that is reflected in the metaphor of the ‘bodily ornament’: the individual as constitutive of, and constituted by, the whole. Biopower therefore represents a shift in the external operation upon the individual as an instrument for security at the level of population. As Foucault writes in Security, Territory, Population, eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury practices of identification and classification constituted an ‘internal organization of the organism’ alongside the ‘milieu in which it lives’.25 In modernity, Agamben’s distinction between bios and zo¯e ! becomes blurred as power operates on embodiment in the production of the social subject through its concern for the individual and the mass.26 Therefore, whilst Western epistemology is overturned, as the

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the ‘emancipation’ of the body figured in pre-war cubism is the very condition for its subsequent rationalised dispersal within biopolitical practices harmonised to the state. Agamben’s view of history is instructive here:

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subject becomes the new objective foundation of knowledge, in the same motion it is the new object of power. The responses to Cubism after the call to order exemplify the processes of normalisation, purification and the harnessing of the individual to ideology. Indeed, prewar Cubism was considered abnormal, a cultural disturbance that undermined the strength of the body politic.27 The criticism of Cubism as a foreign ‘aberration’, together with its ‘purification’ by its own practitioners, mirrors modernity’s own biopolitical racial dimension; the alignment of aesthetics with normalisation corresponds to how the liberal state’s concern with ‘making life’28 also consumes life. The state’s complicity in the death of the very life it placed as ‘its subject and its object’29 is a transformation from the traditional sovereign right to ‘take life’ or ‘let live’ to the right of the modern state to “‘make” life’ and “‘let” die’30 after the Classical era’s development of techniques of power. (For Foucault, this mutation in power was ‘one of the greatest transformations political right underwent in the nineteenth-century’.)31 The critical rhetoric employed by those announcing Cubism’s ‘death’ reflected contextual notions of abnormality and degeneracy, purity and proliferation32 that modernity used to justify its requirement of death as a ‘basic mechanism of power’33 in its protection of life. Foucault also argues – perhaps less successfully since wars were not fought over ‘elimination’ – that this is inherent in ‘the biological continuum’34 of all modern states: ‘In the nineteenth-century – and this is completely new – war will be seen not only as a way of improving one’s own race by eliminating the enemy race . . . but also as a way of regenerating one’s own race.’35 Agamben notes the extreme potential of this was later realised within Nazi Germany: ‘ . . . For the first time in history, the possibilities of the social sciences are made known, and at once it becomes possible both to protect life and to authorise a holocaust.’36 Death, or, thanatopolitics,37 contained within modernity’s operations upon life, became acceptable in a society that mutated the old sovereign right to kill through modernity’s ‘rational’ logic of normalisation.38 Although Foucault argued Nazism reproduced the sovereign right to kill, rather than the liberal state’s ‘let die’, he proposed Nazism was a paroxysmic development of the condition inherent in all modern, capitalist states.39 Nazism extended the existing concept of eugenics into a disciplinary mechanism of normalisation, reconstituted as racism, harmonised with mythic fantasies of blood and superiority.40 In fact

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for Agamben, ‘since the First World War, the birth-nation link has no longer been capable of performing its legitimating function inside the nation-state’.41 He argues that the sovereign ‘state of exception’ and the denationalisation of the state’s population was not novel to Nazi Germany, but first occurred in France in 1915,42 or, as the rappel a` l’ordre emerged as a cultural force. The call to order, as an organising principle, was inscribed over cultural representations of the body. The avant-garde was reconciled to the ideologies of the state, aligning the scientific, biological and political with the aesthetic and spiritual. Essentially the object of organisation that modern forms of security demanded was, as Foucault writes, ‘living beings, and their environment’.43 Elizabeth Cowling’s otherwise problematic thesis concerning a pre-war avant-garde ‘call to order’ also maintains that World War I helped precipitate an existing set of less visible power relations.44 She writes that the avant-garde’s ‘clarity, order and universality’ reflected the will of the ‘the Establishment – bourgeois patrons and their favourite dealers, critics . . . political leaders on the right, who . . . vaunted ‘racial purity’ in the arts’.45 The important notion is that the postwar rappel was not a rupture, but a continuation of prior biopolitical elements within culture catalysed by war in its incorporation of aesthetics. Indeed, a pre-war body culture based on antiquity and purity – in response to fears of bodily degeneration in an industrial age – anticipated the postwar monumentalising of the body that indexed the political instrumentation of the subject in modernity. This was based on the synthesis of modern science and aesthetics in the promotion of the ‘beautiful’ body opposed the new discourses of disease, degeneracy and premature death, which were without instrumental value. Michael Hau discusses the neoclassical body’s appearance before World War I within German body culture as a response to advances in medicine, hygiene and the life sciences. These became increasingly visible through a visual culture that emphasised health, disease and degeneration. In addition, Daniel Pick studies ‘degeneration’ as a European concern over the individual and collective body.46 Following Foucault, he argues that such fears were partly cultivated through burgeoning human sciences which provided the impetus for cultural reform. Conversely however, Hau argues that body culture reacted against the ‘professionalisation of medicine’, as well as fears concerning the deleterious effect of modern industrial civilisation.47 Although,

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considering Bakhtin, Hau gives particular attention to various cultural groups that attributed different, sometimes contradictory meanings to cultural experience,48 a consistently shared belief concerned the cultivation of the body as a positive assertion of self-agency through its discipline, but also as a response to negative anxieties concerning the degeneracy of self made visible through one’s external appearance. Of course, this was judged on neoclassical ‘norms’. The care of the body was a source of both liberation and anxiety. Prewar body culture therefore contained a set of ideas increasingly manipulated by political and capitalistic mechanisms of power: ‘The idealization of beauty and health set the stage for the devaluation and stigmatisation of people who were sick, handicapped, or non-Aryan.’49 However, Pick writes that the war ‘consolidated perceptions of civilisation’s degeneration’50 and provided new ‘discursive permutations’ such as fascist theories and its subsequent horrors. For Pick, ‘Nazism [w]as the apotheosis of such earlier socio-biological ideas’51 which manifested techniques of eugenicism, sanitisation, exhibition, excoriation and elimination. Therefore, the rationalised body of democratic nations, such as Corbusier’s Modulor I and II, already exists in Gustav Fritsch’s Modulus of 1896 – a ‘canon of body proportions’52 constructed upon classical norms. We might see Cubism’s ‘purification’, and its ‘liberalised’ figurative embodiment by Schlemmer, Laban and Corbusier, as containing modernity’s racial biopolitical reconstruction of the subject. Cubist techniques unfold during and after World War I into a modular system, no longer critiquing, but complicit with, governing ideologies. David Harvey recognises these as ‘speak[ing] to the eternal values only by freezing time and all its fleeting qualities’.53 This aesthetic reconciled itself with industrial production in the rationalised management of the human subject by systems such as Fordism and Taylorism. At the very moment radical concepts of being in the world were imagined, the catastrophe of war – as an outcome of modernity that artists did little to oppose – afforded the opportunity for reactionary ideologies to control the future direction of technological modernity. What subsequently characterised the twentieth-century’s worst excesses were the consequences of a reprise of Enlightenment rationality, ‘a logic of domination and oppression’.54 Whilst Harvey here specifically refers to post-World War II effects, what he identifies clearly has a prior conceptual affinity in the post-World War I

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It was almost as if a new and revivified version of the Enlightenment project sprang, phoenix-like, out of the death and destruction of global conflict. The reconstruction, re-shaping, and renewal of the urban fabric became an essential ingredient within this project . . . modular housing, schools, hospitals, factories, etc. through the adoption of the industrialized construction systems and rational planning procedures that modernist architects had long proposed. And all this was framed by a deep concern, expressed again and again in legislation, for the rationalization of spatial patterns and of circulation systems so as to promote equality (at least of opportunity), social welfare, and economic growth.56

When Corbusier warned ‘Architecture or Revolution’, his phrase carried within it a subtextual proposition: ‘architecture as repression’ This is precisely the condition Kracauer feared in ‘The Mass Ornament’: the rationalisation of the human being and its relation to culture. Marcuse critiqued this construction of culture, arguing that whilst modernity’s utopian plan avoided revolution through increased standard of living and entertainment (or ‘distraction’ for Kracauer), its irrational utopian rationality transformed culture: ‘The internal instrumentalist character of this scientific rationality by virtue of which it is a priori technology . . . namely, technology as form of social control and domination.’57 The ‘new spirit’ and ‘new objectivity’ articulated within the postwar avant-garde not only incorporated technological, industrial and capitalistic rationality within the art work, but based it on those principles within wider social transformation of ‘experience, transformation, and organization of nature as the mere stuff of domination’.58 Even if artists did not claim a direct political stance, representation – as social index – overflows with ideological meaning: since ‘technological rationality has become political rationality’,59 representation and politics converge. Cubism itself can be understood as a structural technology, utilised as such, as the importance of certain projects, such as Corbusier’s to culture today, suggests. Whilst certain avant-garde notions of mechanisation and standardisation were perhaps naive regarding the freeing of humanity from its devastation by war and its subjugation by labour,

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imagination, just as Richard Kuisel locates the ‘massive overhaul’ of Western culture between 1914 and 1950 through capitalism and the state proceeding from World War I.55

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we might argue the opposite has occurred as power exerts itself upon the individual precisely through the organisation of its technologies. As Marcuse wrote: ‘The government of advanced and advancing industrial societies can maintain and secure itself only when it succeeds in mobilizing, organizing, and exploiting the technical, scientific, and mechanical productivity available to industrial civilization.’60 Modularity was effectively a technique of power in the modern state. Indeed, Foucault highlighted the intrinsic connection between fascist and liberal-democratic regimes, as deriving their power from existing socio-political mechanisms for the inscription of subjectivity according to ‘population’ and the ‘government of the living’,61 as: ‘the body of society . . . becomes the new principle in the nineteenthcentury.’62 For Foucault, totalitarian and capitalist origins exist in the development of disciplinary techniques to create docile bodies, manifest in the relations between capital and labour for which the nineteenth-century factory served as a model. For Agamben it is therefore possible, through political repositioning of the biological – the control and use of bare life – as central to its operations, to understand the reversible transformations between parliamentary democracies into totalitarian states.63 For Foucault and Agamben, ‘bare life’ in modernity enters an economic field. As Eric Vogt writes, the individual’s instrumental value to civil society ‘becomes the nomos of modernity, functioning within and in place of the normal political order’.64 The mutation of Cubism into a rationalised technique for systematising the relationship of subject and environment also symbolised what has been described as ‘the shift from a war economy to a mass consumer society’.65 Kracauer demonstrated, in addition to its harnessing of aesthetics to modernity’s political paradigm, the development of spectacular society as intrinsic to modern states. Whilst Foucault also described mass society as one of ‘consumption, the spectacle, simulacra’,66 Guy Debord proposed that the inherent problem of spectacular culture derives from Modernism’s exacerbation of the Western philosophical tradition of privileging of vision at the expense of the haptic.67 Consequently, technological modernity reproduces signs and surfaces in different mediums ad finitum. (Indeed, we might argue against Benjamin’s notion of the cinema as the training of sensorial resistance against shock, but rather consider the

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desire and pleasure in shock, of dissolving oneself into the cinematic image as a visual compensation for the loss of haptic experience in technological modernity – a problem cubism, and futurist experiments in intermediality, attempted to resolve. In an increasingly disembodied and simulated society, ‘shock’ perhaps provides not a resistance, but compensation for the effects of modernity.) For Kracauer the postwar economy had come to depend upon its ‘corresponding consumer needs . . . [as] Fashion and economy work hand in hand’.68 Likewise, he argued that capitalism infiltrated all formations of mass cultural entertainment, from film to sports and consumerism, as distraction. The political apathy of the young and the ‘salaried masses’ derived from such cultural conditions, particularly from the distraction industry. In ‘Shelter for the Homeless’ Kracauer described the production of this subculture as ‘spiritually homeless’,69 removed from the existential satisfaction that once was found in work, and instead attracted by the superficiality of glamour and the overflowing of almost useless objects within the consumer market. The modern subject is distinguished through its excessive consumption of ‘cultural requirements’70 beyond the principle consideration of shelter and nutrition. For Kracauer, the aesthetics of ‘New Objectivity’ synthesised with capitalism in the entertainment complex ‘Haus Vaterland’ – a fac¸ade concealing an existential abyss, one ‘of confronting death.’71 The ‘spiritually homeless’ are distracted from the conditions of society through the consumption of kitsch products. He wrote: ‘at the same moment at which firms are rationalized, these establishments rationalize the pleasures of the salary-earning armies.’72 Through the example of glossy magazines, Kracauer argued that the social circulation of imagery ‘is a flight from revolution and from death’.73 Marcuse defined ‘one dimensional’ existence as the pacification of Being through the ‘false’ consciousness of rationality, the false ‘needs’ of consumption, alienation, and being simultaneously entertained and indoctrinated through mass media (especially through a type of discursive rhetoric that is almost Orwellian). He later observed a capitalist society whereby ‘people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in the automobile . . . ’.74 The vacuous nature of ‘private’ space is infiltrated by ‘technological reality. Mass production and mass distribution claim the entire individual.’75 Indeed, Kracauer predicted such a rationalisation of society in ‘The Mass Ornament’, whilst

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identifying trends that Marcuse observed reified in the domination of culture only decades later. In Die Angestellten Kracauer perceived modernity’s production of a new, mass human subculture conforming to an ornamental capitalist rationality: that of the ‘office worker’. In the rationalisation of the workforce, the presentation of a superficially exterior ‘morally pink complexion’, as the sign of inner experience, became of prior importance whereby ‘Speech, clothes, gestures and countenances become assimilated and the result of the process is that very same pleasant appearance’.76 Although Kracauer, Marcuse, Foucault and Debord all agree that modern spectacular society distracts and consumes, the subject is nevertheless responsible for its own consumption. Post-cubist works describe modern forms of control through the regulating of the production of individuality according to mechanisms of consumption. We might also consider that the subject does not just become an object of state power, but through the cultivation of its own exteriority in the one-dimensional consumption of signs and spectacles, the subject becomes an object for itself. In the series of transformations from the sovereign’s display of power over the subject’s body to techniques of power increasingly manipulating the subject indirectly, the subject finally becomes responsible for the production and regulation of its own body as object. Writing in 1925, Corbusier reflected on Lenin, a year after his death, in pre-revolutionary exile, as a rationalised, purist figure. He described Lenin’s geometric corporeality, his standardised fashion and consumption of mass-produced items: Lenin is seated at the Rotonde on a cane chair; he has paid twenty centimes for his coffee, with a tip of one sou. He has drunk out of a small white porcelain cup. He is wearing a bowler hat and a smooth white collar. He has been writing for several hours on sheets of typing paper. His inkpot is smooth and round, made from bottle glass. He is learning to govern one hundred million people.77

Corbusier, Ozenfant and L´eger all advocated the transformation within a mechanically standardised culture of the human subject into ‘cultural engineer’. Not only was the postwar reconstruction of culture designed to suppress revolution through the imposition of order, Corbusier also draws attention in his description to the process of consumerism allied to mass production. The article coincided with the 1925 International 248

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the 1920s version of Paris as a woman’s city presented the technology of the motor car as component of a feminized consumer culture: the automobile was not only an up-to-date means of going shopping, it also formed part of the modern woman’s fashionable ensemble.78

Kracauer noted that the economic consequences of war had produced a market economy increasingly geared towards financially independent women. Indeed, postwar economic reconstruction was not only premised on producing an expanded, more efficient workforce, but also a corresponding consumer culture. The car (as fashionable object for consumption) is symbolic of the convergence of capitalism, industry and art, also resulting in both standardisation and the acquisition of identity and, indeed, the standardisation of identity. Sonia Delaunay’s postwar fashion project proceeded according to the avant-garde turn towards capitalistic technological standardisation. Even though the Delaunays, writing in 1924, recognised ‘the reactionary attempt on behalf of a neoclassicism that seeks to ignore all the innovations of the past few years’,79 as Silver demonstrates with Robert Delaunay’s paintings, they were in fact complicit in the return to order. (Townsend argues that such complicity was already embedded within the Delaunays’ prewar work regarding the subject’s fragmentation into visual planes and the environment, reflecting the practices of both industrial modernity and bourgeois consumption.)80 Sonia Delaunay’s ‘simultaneous’ designs became perceptibly more ornamentally geometric, displacing her own corporeal rhythms to the surface of the automobile: the icon of fashion and luxurious consumption, but also the mechanical standardisation of urban culture (Fig 55). If Delaunay’s robe simultan´ee had been concerned with embodying the intersubjective relation between self and the rhythms of modernity, re-presenting the transformed materiality of

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Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, a state-supported trade fair to encourage competition in international markets. Within it, the automobile served as an icon of the alliance between politics, technology, consumerism and the arts. Corbusier consistently exalted the automobile as a pseudo-Platonic ‘type’ to which other objects, such as the house (as a ‘machine’ rather than home) should conform. Although Marcuse later attacked the investment of subjectivity in consumer objects such as the car, it was precisely this relationship that was given such importance. Tag Gronberg writes:

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Figure 55. Sonia Delaunay’s simultaneous design on a model and the Citro¨en B 13 at the 1925 International Exhibition

the temporal body as inner experience, the simultaneous designs offered a wealthy female market an engagement with modernity through consumption. The geometric turn with Delaunay’s art, far from proposing the unstable, idealist reality within which the fluid subject enacted existence, resembled the ornamental stability of classical Greek and Roman fret design. Rather, Delaunay’s fashion project anticipated later consumer culture whereby self-identity is constituted by the incorporation of images. Instead of enacting existence through the notion of a temporal self as simultaneously continuous with the world, ‘Modernity’ is enacted through performances of consumerism. In contrast to Delaunay’s prewar inclusion of simultaneous motifs in her work, the design for her high market boutique synthesised name, the female body and the Eiffel Tower as an upper market brand for consumption (Fig. 56). Also in the same year of 1925, Walter Benjamin published his article ‘Naples’. He traced the permeability between private and public space in capitalistic development from a context of postwar reconstruction that systematised practices of production and consumption. Kuisel shows that from 1924 to 1929 industrial production in France grew 250

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Figure 56. Sonia Delaunay advertisement, 1925–26

massively, 5 per cent annually, as it incorporated a ‘hodgepodge’ of technologies employed: ‘Rationalisation was [inter alia] . . . Industrial concentration, the assembly line, product standardization, mass marketing, “scientific management,” producers’ ententes, organizational 251

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reform, a “technical state,” and a managerial approach to labor relations.’81 France adjusted techniques deemed responsible for American prosperity and German industrial strength. With the ‘scientific management’ of work and rationalisation of consumerism, Corbusier celebrated the urban organisation of shopping whereby individuality could be purchased. Baudelaire’s ‘anatomical works for sale on the dusty banks of the Seine’82 became replaced by another body: the fashioned female mannequins in a shop window, or even Delaunay’s expensive ornamental material designs based on a once radical moment. Nicole in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night (1934) represents a figure of consumer spending ‘from the first burst of luxury manufacturing after the war’.83 Fitzgerald goes into lengthy, self-reflexive, detail in describing Nicole’s consumption of a vast array of bourgeois, even ‘kitsch’, products that mobilised a whole (exploitative) economy. She herself constitutes a traumatised subject, existing in a state of fragile suture upon which her continuous consumption is pathologically symptomatic: her life is based upon consumption, even of her husband. Benjamin suggested that ‘capitalism serves essentially to allay the same anxieties, torments and disturbances to which the so-called religions offers answers . . . In capitalism, things have a meaning only in relation to the cult.’84 Kracauer similarly perceived the ‘cult’ of capitalism that consumed the subject. However, with the purists, L´eger praised the spectacle of the shop window, equivalent to the cinematic image, as the ‘public’ and ‘private’ converged through capitalism. Writing in 1922 he declared: ‘I will have to bring about a new architectural order: mechanical architecture. All architecture, ancient and modern, also has a basis of geometric forces.’85 His paintings, Les Deux Femmes a` la Toilette in 1920 (Fig. 57) and Le Profil au Vase in 1927 (Fig. 58), like his earlier cubist work, represent the dissolution of the individual in the environment, though now profoundly different:

We are bound to our environment . . . like everything else we ‘relate’. This could help us resist: I am a firm believer in a slow and continual inroad brought about by the manufactured object which holds the secret of any Renaissance we may have. A man living for a long time in the environment of these stern geometric forms will unconsciously find himself won over by them . . . their spirit dominates our era.86

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Figure 57. Fernand L´eger, Les Deux Femmes a` la Toilette, 1920

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Figure 58. Fernand L´eger La Profil au Vase, 1927

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In these canvases, the subject is intercalated with the object of consumption. This was the condition Marcuse abhorred: the subject constituted by ‘their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.’87 Deux Femmes a` la Toilette demonstrates the mechanised female body consuming, and consumed by, the industrial production of femininity, whilst Le Profil au Vase merges the human profile with the mass-produced object: one completing the other’s identity. We might even align this new subjective regime with Foucault’s identification of homo oeconomicus in the twentieth-century: the subject of ‘enterprise and production’88 rather than exchange and consumption. But rather than accepting the capitalistic split between commodity and enterprise Foucault discussed,89 we should consider governmental ‘neoliberalism’, and the economic market produced, as promoting the effective enterprise of commoditisation. Although Foucault argued that the power of business increased through neoliberalist economic policy, that state was effectively produced through the market after World War II, and we might argue that governmental power has produced and increased standardisation, mass society, consumption and spectacle throughout the twentieth-century, precisely through its construction and regulation of the economy and the market – essentially the creation of enterprise. Government cannot be dissociated from the commodity produced through the market enterprise it developed. Indeed, by making the subject the object of itself, in other words, making oneself a field of enterprise within spectacle society, we might then consider capitalism, enterprise and consumption as the self-regulatory mechanisms of security. Individuality is constructed through one’s own enterprise of production and consumption of signs. As Agamben writes: ‘Confronted with phenomena such as the power of the society of the spectacle that is everywhere transforming the political realm today, is it legitimate or even possible to hold subjective technologies and political techniques apart?’90 In his late seminar ‘Technologies of the Self ’, Foucault shifted his focus to the technologies that allowed the individual to express themselves: ‘operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness . . . perfection, or immortality.’91 This necessarily implied a self-monitoring and regulation. This was an area Foucault intended to develop, believing he perhaps insisted too much on the mechanisms of power rather than a focus upon the interaction

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of self and others, and the individual exercise of technologies of the self.92 He recognised that subjectivity had shifted from its construction through the sixteenth-century pastorate – controlled by ideals of salvation, interiority and fixity of identity93 – to its nature as a rationally calculated phenomenon in the concern to ‘make life’ on the ‘threshold’ of modernity through scientific rationality, political economy and population demographics.94 The process of ‘liberalisation’ involved the transference of investment by centralised state power, to the individual objectification and enterprise of their own body. The technologies of self involve a process in the transition from ancient to modern states ‘of subjectivisation [that brought] the individual to bind himself to his own identity and consciousness and, at the same time, to an external power’.95 Agamben describes this political ‘double bind’ as the subject’s ‘[objectification of] his own self, constituting himself as a subject and, at the same time, binding himself to a power of external control’.96 The subject’s concern, care and cultivation of identity and body involved in the regulation of self, replaced the state’s extensive investment of discipline. However, Foucault had already discussed modernity’s intensification in the ‘desire of one’s own body’97 in ‘Body/Power’. Here, the self-production of a ‘powerful’ body is a consequence of the persistent, meticulous objectification of the body in the nineteenth-century as a site of control through surveillance, especially of its sexuality. In the twentieth-century, eroticism becomes a site for its economic exploitation: ‘Get undressed – but be slim, good-looking, tanned!’98 He argues that from the 1960s, power’s investment upon the body was unnecessarily meticulous and extensive. Foucault’s understanding of the instrumentalising of the ‘erotic’ through enterprise actually overlaps Marcuse’s notion of control through the operations of distraction, consumption and the spectacle – what Foucault calls the ‘play of signs and spectacles’.99 We might proceed to suggest the monitoring, ‘enterprise’ and fashioning of one’s own body as a new form of control that required a significant reduction of economic investment by power as it reconsidered its own operations as a finite economy of forces. Indeed, in the neoliberal ‘economization of the entire social field’100 whereby the individual becomes a ‘permanent and multiple enterprise’,101 social phenomena – even power’s conception of itself – are understood through economic mechanisms.102 Thus we have seen the market and economy as most important to the security of

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the state (as Foucault divines in Security, Territory, Population), with the biopolitical instrumentation of the subject as the object of state power, and now we can trace a merging of economics and bare life. Techniques of economic analysis inscribe themselves upon noneconomic fields, such as demography, sociology, psychology, social sciences, urban studies, architecture103 and even university education, that constitute for Agamben ‘the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we are still living’.104 The subject therefore exists within a network of fields for stimuli, reinforcement, observation and instruction.105 For Foucault, ‘the person who accepts reality or who responds systematically to modifications in the variables of the environment, appears precisely as someone manageable, someone who responds systematically to systematic modifications artificially introduced into the environment’.106 The avant-garde’s aestheticisation of the geometric within industrial capitalism, from L´eger and Delaunay to Schlemmer, Laban and Corbusier, produces ‘utopian’ figures, reflecting the process Max Weber had outlined in the 1905 essay ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’: ‘order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism.’107 Weber’s ‘iron cage’ is reflected in the treatment of the body in Schlemmer’s Figur und Raumlineatur, Laban’s ‘kinesphere’ and its specific social configuration by Corbusier. Weber’s cage of rational, bureaucratic control and dependency upon ‘external goods’ is arguably the ‘utopian’ subject constructed by Corbusier and Schlemmer, who in particular envisioned scientific management enveloping the subject life through disciplinary technologies. Marcuse, following Bergson, Weber and Kracauer, saw in this process the ‘mutilation’ of the human being through its industrial, scientific and capitalistic abstracted rationalisation by industry an science under the aegis of capital: a world is ‘given to him . . . whose behavior is one-dimensional and manipulated. By virtue of the factual repression, the experienced world is the result of a restricted experience.’108 Consequently, the subjugation of the individual through the modern state, its apparatuses and the scientific abstraction of human experience become the ‘repressive conditions in which men think and live’.109 The body in space articulated within the postwar avant-garde by Corbusier, Laban and Schlemmer (and we might add Doesburg and

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Mondrian through their erasure of the subject within their fundamental structures of space and experience) was utopian in some cases, such as Schlemmer, whilst consciously repressive in the work of Corbusier. Such ‘utopian’ visions of the subject’s synergist relation to operations of (state) power, however, derive from an aesthetic concept that is necessarily dependent upon that subject’s abstracted interpellation. The appropriation of cubism as ‘technology’ within the postwar avantgarde leads to a process whereby, to quote Marcuse, ‘the exploitation of man and nature becomes ever more scientific and rational . . . [and] Scientific –technical rationality and manipulation are welded together into new forms of social control’.110 Marcuse criticised modernist art and literature for failing to produce a ‘two-dimensional’ dialectic through cultural critique. He perceived art’s role through enacting an antagonism towards dominant culture as revealing the dimension of being that is repressed within hegemonic notions of reality. Instead, the avant-garde within the rappel a` l’ordre sacrificed its critical function to the catalysed political implementation of biopolitical mechanisms, suborning itself instead to classicism, technology and industry. Dada and Surrealism provided radical positions, particularly in their representation of the body and consciousness in an increasingly modular culture, and burned intensely, but too briefly in comparison to the harnessing of the avant-garde to mass culture. Gleizes, made increasingly morose by the war, perceived Dada to be a bourgeois tantrum, and through its individualism it failed to engage with working class politics whilst retaining a resemblance to capitalism in its superficial spectacle and insistence on shock as a means of survival. The failure of the modernist avant-garde is at the heart of Marcuse’s statement: ‘The rationality of art, its ability to “project” existence, to define yet unrealised possibilities could then be envisaged as validated by and functioning in the scientifictechnological transformation of the world.’111 Embodied, lived experience as expressed by Gleizes and the Delaunays was therefore a casualty of war within the ideologies of postwar Europe. In the representation of being in time, Cubism provided both a radical imagination and reactionary technology for the dynamic between subject and society. The intersubjective potential that Gleizes and Delaunay imagined became replaced by an atavistic subjection of the self in totalitarian states or the standardised consumption of subjectivity by the consumer object within liberal capitalism. In his work on cultural space, Lefebvre wrote: ‘What did war produce? The

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answer is: Western Europe – the space of history, of accumulation, of investment, and the basis of the imperialism by means of which the economic sphere would eventually come into its own.’112 This conceptualisation of space produced an ‘abstraction wielding awesome force vis-`a-vis “lived” experience’.113 Cubism, as with culture, was rendered increasingly rational and systematic, removed from the conditions of an embodied existence. Avant-garde work abstracted the human body in time and space alongside the scientific ‘de-materialization of nature’114 as society became increasingly technocratic. In the contemporary moment, corporeality itself has become abstracted, even elided from cultural consideration. Even more, however, the human body is dematerialising through the biochemical alteration of the environment, which in turn strengthens the medicalisation of the subject. A recent, though hardly unusual, news story demonstrates the bodily wastage of a young woman as a consequence of the political, capitalistic, scientific and mathematical abstraction of the body in culture115 that illustrates ˇ zek’s notion regarding post-modernity’s continuity with an aspect of Ziˇ modernity’s barbarism.116 It contains elements of what Carl Schmitt, a friend of J¨unger and Nazi party member, believed regarding the social rationalisation of culture: ‘the limitless power and domination over nature, even over the human body, in the unlimited recession of natural boundaries . . . One can call this fantastic or demonic.’117 The girl’s corporeal degeneration was caused by an erroneous mathematical model used for years in predicting the risk of nearby chemical spraying of fields that had changed from grazing to crop production. There was no legal obligation to reveal the type, periods and records of chemicals used, nor any existing requirement for training and purchasing them. Similar instances of the ‘scientific management’ of the body and the environment through a flawed mathematical model, capitalistic interest and political regulation exposed at least a million people to such chemicals resulting in consequent geographical clusters of bodily disorders such as cancer, leukaemia, Parkinson’s disease, ME and asthma. (Subsequently a five metre ‘buffer zone’ between public and farmed land became law, despite evidence demonstrating a threemile chemical drift.) Indeed, there are endless cases of the wreckage involved in the abstracted de-materiality of the human subject and the world. Yet within Weber’s ‘iron cage’ of capitalism, Kracauer’s ‘cult of distraction’ and Marcuse’s ‘one-dimensional man’ – each writing at different stages of twentieth-century modernity – rationality became

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increasingly irrational, vacillating towards Lyotard’s proposition of the ‘Inhuman’ disembodiment of culture.118 This is a consequence of modernity’s rationalisation of the subject, its body, time and space, which modernist artists witnessed, and were complicit with, through the reactionary ideological turn of a once radical imagination.

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Notes Introduction 1. Maurice Merleau Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception [1945], trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), p. 146. 2. Quoted in Robert Hughes, Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change (London: BBC, 1980), p. 9. 3. Adrian Gregory, The Silence of Memory: Armistice Day 1919–1946 (Oxford and Providence, RI: Berg, 1994), p. 1. 4. John O’Neil, Five Bodies: The Human Shape of Modern Society [1985] (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press 1986), pp. 22–3. 5. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999). 6. Louis Althussuer, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus’, in Essays on Ideology [1970] (London and New York: Verso, 1984). Althusser argues that the individual is controlled through a number of Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) which he lists as religious, educational, familial, legal, political, trade union, communicational and cultural (p. 17). These work upon the individual, who is converted into a subject. 7. See Kenneth Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989), p. 31. Matisse, when writing to ask the French Minister of Public Works how he might best serve his country, took seriously the response ‘to paint well’. Painting was ‘a national concern’ with a ‘patriotic rationale’. 8. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things [1966] (London and New York: Routledge, 2007) and Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1990).

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9. See Foucault, The Order of Things and Crary, Techniques of the Observer. 10. See Edwin Clarke and L.S. Jacyna, Nineteenth-Century Concepts of Neuroscientific Concepts (Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 1987). 11. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason [1787], trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1965). 12. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity [1982] (London and New York: Verso, 1991), p. 118. 13. Edward P. Comentale, Modernism, Cultural Production, and the British Avant-Garde. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). For quote, see p. 6. 14. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 1. 15. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change [1989] (Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 28. 16. Ibid., p. 262. 17. Ibid. 18. Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, see ch. 10, ‘Temporality of the July Crisis’. 19. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 262. 20. From Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: W.W. Norton, 1911). 21. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I [1867], trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), p. 799. 22. Ibid., p. 614. 23. Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 80. 24. Georg Luk´acs, ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’, in History and Class Consciousness [1922], trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin Press, 1971), p. 90. 25. Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, p. 240. 26. Pepe Karmel, Picasso and the Invention of Cubism (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 1. 27. See Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1995). 28. See Valerie Preston-Dunlop, ‘Notes on Bodies in Dada’, in Stephen C. Foster (ed.), Dada: The Coordinates of Cultural Politics (New York: Prentice Hall, 1996), pp. 171–96 29. Taylorism is the scientific theory of bodily management within time and space in order to improve labour productivity developed in the late nineteenth-century. It is often perceived as fragmenting the relation

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31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

NOTES PP. 15–20

30.

between the subject and its task into parts, whilst alienating a dehumanised subject from the products of its labour. Tools and machines became standardised, whilst wages were linked to productivity through ‘time and motion’ studies. Taylor therefore created a system of modern industrial management. Cited in Carol S. Eliel, ‘Purism in Paris, 1918–1925’, in L’Esprit Nouveau: Purism in Paris, 1918–1925 (New York: Harry N. Abrahms, 2001). Silver, Esprit de Corps, p. 379. John Golding, Cubism: A History and Analysis 1907–1914 [1959] (London and Boston, IL: Faber and Faber, 1988), pp. 196–7. Nina Rosenblatt, ‘Empathy and Anaesthesia: On the Origins of a French Machine Aesthetic’, Grey Room 2 (Winter 2001), pp.78–97, p. 79. Simon Richards, Le Corbusier and the Concept of Self (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 80 and 111. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 111. Ibid., p. 119. Ibid., pp. 181–2.

1 New Visions of the Human 1. Virginia Woolf, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ [1924], in The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1950), p. 91. 2. Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture [1941], 3rd edn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), p. 26. 3. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space [1974], trans. Donald NicholsonSmith (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991), p. 25. 4. Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 71. 5. Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective [1987], trans. John Goodman (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press 1994), p. 28. 6. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences [1966] (London and New York: Routledge, 2007). 7. Neil Cox, Cubism (London: Phaidon, 2000), p. 192. 8. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 300. 9. Gleizes and Metzinger state in their opening to Du ‘Cubisme’: ‘To estimate the significance of Cubism we must go back to Gustave Courbet’, setting Cubism within a Realist tradition, although also suggesting ‘he remained the slave of the worst visual conventions.’ Albert Gleizes and

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10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31.

264

Jean Metzinger, ‘Cubisme’ [1912], in Herschel B. Chipp (ed.), Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1968). Baxandall, Patterns of Intention, p. 50. Quoted in Peter Brooke, Albert Gleizes: For and Against the TwentiethCentury (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 25. Cox, Cubism, p. 211. Quoted in John Golding, Cubism: A History and Analysis 1907–1914 [1959] (London and Boston, IL: Faber and Faber, 1988), p. 14. Albert Gleizes, ‘The epic: from immobile form to mobile form’ (1928). Available at http://www.peterbrooke.org.uk/a&r/gltexts/epic (accessed 9 May 2014). Ibid. Cox, Cubism, p. 209. Albert Gleizes, ‘Souvenirs – le Cubisme, 1908–1914’ [1957], in Edward Fry (ed.), Cubism [1966] (New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 174. Golding, Cubism, p. 167 Cox, Cubism, p. 136. Ibid. p. 176. Ibid. See Michael Moriarty, ‘Structures of cultural production in nineteenthcentury France’, in Peter Collier and Robert Lethbridge (eds), Artistic Relations: Literature and Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994). Gleizes, ‘Souvenirs – le Cubisme’. Baxandall, Patterns of Intention, p. 74. Ibid., p. 77. See D´esir´ee Park, ‘Locke and Berkeley on the Molyneux Problem’, Journal of the History of Ideas 30/2 (April–June 1969), pp. 253–60, p. 254. The term ‘empiricism’ itself is formed from the Latin experentia, knowledge as experiential. Quoted in Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 235–6. Jesse Prinz, ‘Toward a cognitive theory of pictorial representation’ (1993). Available at csmaclab-www.uchicago.edu/philosophyProject/ picture/picture.html (accessed: 15 December 2006) (link no longer working). Ibid. Ibid.

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NOTES PP. 26–31

32. Ibid. 33. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason [1787], trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1965), pp. 24–5. 34. Ernst H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation [1960] (London: Phaidon Press, 1968), p. 119. 35. Ibid., p. 15. 36. Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form [1927] (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 71. 37. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, p. 46. 38. Ibid., p. 47. 39. Ibid., p. 75. 40. Ibid., p. 122. 41. Ibid., p. 35. 42. Kemp, The Science of Art, p. 7 (my emphasis). 43. Ibid., p. 76. 44. Ibid., p. 7. 45. Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard, The Inhuman [1988] (London: Polity Press, 1991), p. 17. 46. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 69–70. 47. Edmund Husserl, Origin of Geometry [1936], trans. John P. Leavey Jr (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraksa Press 1989), p. 158. 48. Ibid., p. 160. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 51. Immanuel Kant, ‘Preface to the metaphysical foundations of natural science’ [1786], trans. Ernest Belfort-Bax, in Joseph J. Kockelmans (ed.), Philosophy of Science: The Historical Background (New York: The Free Press and London: Collier-Macmillan, 1968), p. 19. 52. Ibid., p. 17. 53. Quoted in Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 150. 54. Kant, ‘Preface to the metaphysical foundations of natural science’, pp. 20–1. 55. Husserl, Origin of Geometry, p. 163. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid., p. 166. 60. Ibid., p. 167. 61. Ibid., p. 169.

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62. Ibid., p. 180. 63. Christopher S. Wood, ‘Introduction’, in Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, p. 13. 64. Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, p. 11. 65. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. x. 66. Ibid., p. xxi. 67. Ibid., p. xxii. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid., p. 19. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid., p. 38. 72. Ibid. 73. Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, p. 98. 74. Ibid., p. 159. 75. Ibid., p. 163. 76. Ibid., p. 164. 77. Ibid., p. 119. 78. Ibid. 79. Lacan quoted ibid., p. 129. 80. Ibid., p. 151 81. Damisch’s reference to the elided subject and/or its body from knowledge anticipates the radical turn that Foucault proposes when it becomes the object of knowledge in the seventeenth-century, and of new forms of rationalised ‘governmentality’ after the eighteenth-century, in the construction of an ‘encyclopaedic order’ (Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 42) reconstituting ‘the very order of the universe by the way in which words are linked together and arranged in space’ (ibid.). 82. Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, p. 10. 83. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 30. 84. Kemp, The Science of Art, p. 24. 85. Ibid., p. 43. 86. Ibid., p. 14. 87. Ibid., p. 83. 88. Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, p. 90. 89. Ibid., p. 21. 90. Ibid., p. 53. 91. Ibid., p. 119. 92. Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, p. 70. 93. Foucault, The Order of Things. 94. Ibid., pp. 330–1. 95. Ibid., p. 332. 96. Ibid., p. 347.

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105.

106. 107. 108.

109.

110.

111. 112. 113.

Baxandall, Patterns of Intention, p. 45. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 81. Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., p. 81. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 49. Baxandall, Patterns of Intention, p. 80. Ibid., p. 103. Baxandall claims that acuity, ‘distinctness across the visual field’ (ibid., p. 85) developed after seventeenth-century retinal research. Pieter Camper’s thesis on vision in 1746 drew attention to different foveal sensitivities, astigmatism, and ‘blind spots’ in affecting visual processes. Baxandall references Camper’s modernist account of vision and attention to subjective phenomena such as visual degradation over distance and visual dissipation to understand A Lady Taking Tea. In 1719 S´ebastien Le Clerc noted the importance of attention to vision, and claimed objects were known only gradually as the eye scanned different parts (although he maintained, as Kepler had done, the eye emitted visual rays to objects). Philippe La Hire had recorded the phenomenon of the Purkinje Shift. William Porterfield’s A Treatise on the Eye (1759) observed a transformation in the shape of the eye when focusing upon varying distances. Edwin Clarke and L.S. Jacyna, Nineteenth-Century Concepts of Neuroscientific Concepts (Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 1987), p. 1. Ibid., p.4 Bonnie Ellen Blustein, ‘Review of Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts’, Isis 79/4 (December 1988), pp. 709–10, p. 710. See J. Clerk Maxwell’s ‘A dynamical theory of the electromagnetic field’ (1865). Available at http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/ 1/19/A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field.pdf (accessed 9 May 2014). Ernst Mach, ‘The economical nature of physical enquiry’ [1882], in Joseph J. Kockelmans (ed.), Philosophy of Science: The Historical Background (New York: The Free Press and London: Collier-Macmillan, 1968), p. 180. Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 82–9. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 95. Ibid. Quoted in Stephen E. Palmer, Vision Science: Photons to Phenomenology (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1999), p. 255.

NOTES PP. 39–44

97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104.

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114. See Pepe Karmel, Picasso and the Invention of Cubism (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2003). 115. See Palmer, Vision Science, particularly ch. 6. 116. Quoted in Maly and Dietfried Gerhardus, Cubism and Futurism: The Evolution of the Self-sufficient Picture [1977], trans. J. Griffiths (Oxford: Phaidon, 1979), p. 35. 117. Gleizes and Metzinger, ‘Cubisme’, in Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, p. 209. 118. Baxandall, Patterns of Intention, p. 60. 119. Daniel Robbins, ‘The formation and maturity of Albert Gleizes: a biographical critical study; 1881 through 1920’, unpublished PhD thesis (New York University, 1975), p. 85. 120. Ibid., p. 86. 121. Golding, Cubism, p.7 122. Brooke, Albert Gleizes, p. 17. 123. Quoted ibid., p. 21. 124. Gleizes, ‘The epic’. 125. David Cottington, Cubism in the Shadow of War: The Avant-Garde and Politics in Paris 1905–1914 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 87. 126. Quoted in Robbins, ‘The formation and maturity of Albert Gleizes’, p. 68. 127. Cited in Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 35. 128. Daniel Robbins, ‘Jean Metzinger: at the center of Cubism’, in Jean Metzinger in Retrospect (Iowa City: University of Iowa Museum of Art, 1985), p. 17. 129. Whilst painting their submissions, Le Fauconnier and L´eger had some degree of influence on each other, though exactly what remains in some question. See Golding (Cubism, p. 169) and Cottington (Cubism in the Shadow of War, p. 97). Cottington supports his position by referring to Christopher Green’s assertion that L´eger finished painting after seeing L’Abondance develop. 130. Virginia Spate, Orphism: The Evolution of Non-Figurative Painting in Paris 1910–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 234. 131. Paul C´ezanne, ‘To Emile Bernard, Aix, 15 April 1904’ [1904], in Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, p. 234. 132. And also anticipated Irving Biederman’s geon theory a century later, which proposed that perception occurs through ‘recognition by components’. See Irving Biederman, ‘Recognition-by-components: a theory of human image understanding’, Psychological Review 94 (1987), pp. 115– 47. Biederman proposes over ten million objects can be constructed from

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136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141.

142. 143.

144. 145. 146. 147.

148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159.

two ‘geons’. For example, an ice-cream cone is cognitively constructed from the relationship of a conic and spherical shape. Biederman proposes there are ‘306 billion 3-geon objects’. Spate, Orphism, p. 229. L´eger, quoted ibid., p. 233. Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, ‘Cubism’ [1912], in Edward Fry, Cubism [1966] (New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 105–11, p. 109. Brooke, Albert Gleizes, p. 18. See ibid. See ibid., p. 284. Palmer, Vision Science, p. 280. Ibid., p. 6. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic [1900], trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (London: Macmillan, 1913), pp. 153–4. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution [1907], trans. Arthur Mitchell (London: Macmillan, 1922), pp. 11–2. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory [1896], trans. Nancy Margaret and W. Scott Palmer (London: George Allen & Unwin; New York: Macmillan, 1929), p. 102. Gleizes and Metzinger, ‘Cubisme’, in Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, p. 214. Robbins, ‘Jean Metzinger’, p. 14. Ibid. Gleizes recalls meeting Delaunay and Metzinger through Mercereau in 1910, although Metzinger believed he and Gleizes met in 1906 (though Robbins suggests he meant 1909), noting that Gleizes admired and sympathised with his paintings exhibited at the Salon des Ind´ependants. See Robbins (‘Jean Metzinger’, p. 10). Ibid. Jean Metzinger, ‘Note sur la Peinture’ [1910], p. 59. Ibid., p. 60. Ibid. Robbins, ‘Jean Metzinger’, p. 16. Robbins, ‘The formation and maturity of Albert Gleizes’, p. 27. Ibid., p. 26. See Brooke, Albert Gleizes, p. 4. Cox, Cubism, p. 141. Ibid. Brooke, Albert Gleizes. Ibid.

NOTES PP. 50–56

133. 134. 135.

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160. 161. 162. 163. 164.

165. 166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172. 173. 174. 175. 176. 177. 178. 179. 180. 181. 182. 183. 184. 185. 186. 187. 188. 189.

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Quoted in Robbins, ‘Jean Metzinger’, p. 42. Spate, Orphism, p. 21. Cottington, Cubism in the Shadow of War, p. 77. See Brooke, Albert Gleizes, p. 11. Ibid., pp. 27–8. Different claims are made by David Cottington, Cubism and its Histories (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), Antliff (Inventing Bergson) and Kenneth Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989). See Tom Slevin, ‘The body in modernity: radical imaginations and reactionary ideologies’, PhD thesis (University of London, 2009) for a further analysis of different claims. Brooke, Albert Gleizes, p. 28. See, for example, Silver, Esprit de Corps, pp. 48–9, 57. Ibid., p. 47. Christopher Green, Cubism and its Enemies (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 87. Ibid., p.153 Brooke, Albert Gleizes, p. 43. Robbins, ‘Jean Metzinger’, p. 17. Robbins, ‘The formation and maturity of Albert Gleizes’, p. 13. Ibid., p. 12. Green, Cubism and its Enemies, p. 153. See Gleizes’s essay ‘The Abbey of Cr´eteil, A Communistic Experience’ (1918). Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., pp. 9–10. Ibid., p. 10. Robbins, ‘The formation and maturity of Albert Gleizes’, p. 44. Spate, Orphism, p. 186. Quoted in Brooke, Albert Gleizes, p. 125. Ibid. Ghil, cited in Brooke, Albert Gleizes, p. 81. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 53. Quoted in Golding, Cubism, p. 129. See Palmer, Vision Science, p. 107. Gleizes and Metzinger, ‘Cubism’, in Fry, Cubism, p. 109. Gleizes and Metzinger, ‘Cubisme’, in Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, p. 214. Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, ‘Cubism’, in Robert L. Herbert (ed.), Modern Artists on Art [1965] (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2000), p. 8.

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NOTES PP. 63–67

190. Robbins, ‘The formation and maturity of Albert Gleizes’, p. 82. 191. Brooke, Albert Gleizes, p. 121. 192. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions of St Augustine [397], trans. R.S. PineCoffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), p. 276. 193. Ibid., p. 267. 194. Ibid., p. 269. 195. William James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I [1890] (London: Macmillan 1901), p. 239. 196. Ibid. 197. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness [1889], trans. F.L. Pogson (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1910/1950), p. 14. 198. Ibid., p. 12. 199. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 182. 200. Ibid., p. 279. 201. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 3. 202. Ibid., p. 9. 203. Ibid., p. 267. 204. Ibid., p. 284. 205. Augustine, Confessions, p. 274. 206. See Kern, The Culture of Time, ch. 1. 207. Brooke, Albert Gleizes, p. 199. 208. Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1995). 209. Green, Cubism and its Enemies, p. 45. 210. Gleizes in Clart´e [1920], quoted in Brooke, Albert Gleizes, p. 69. 211. See Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich [1984] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 212. See Brooke, Albert Gleizes, pp. 210–1. Gleizes’s ideas, some of which contributed to his creation of the Moly Sabbata commune, are reflected in Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008) whereby the crafts that formed surnames became lost through industrial process, and the disappearance of social, religious and guild craft practices. 213. Ibid. 214. Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 78. 215. See Cottington, Cubism and its Histories, p. 94. 216. Quoted in Brooke, Albert Gleizes, p. 196. 217. Quoted ibid., pp. 196–7.

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218. Christian Dupont, ‘Reception of phenomenology in French philosophy and religious thought, 1889–1939’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of Notre Dame, 1997). 219. See Fry, Cubism, p. 61. He mentions that by 1925 Andr´e Warnod mentioned him among the creators of Cubism, as well as Alice Halicka (Marcousiss’s wife) who lived in Montmatre before World War I, as well as ‘many other writers in their memoirs’ (ibid., p. 61) 220. See ibid., p. 138. 221. See Slevin, ‘The body in modernity’. 222. Quoted ibid. p. 81. 223. Quoted in Cottington, Cubism in the Shadow of War, p. 167. 224. Ibid., p. 158. 225. Ibid. 226. ‘L’Art et ses repr´esentants: Jean Metzinger’, in La Revue ind´ependante (September 1911), ‘Les Beaux-Arts: A Propos du Salon d’Automne’, in Les Bandeaux d’Or (November 1911) and ‘Contribution a` l’Histoire du Cubisme’, in Gil Blas (January 1912). See Cottington, Cubism and its Histories, p. 139. 227. Spate, Orphism, p. 36. 228. Gleizes and Metzinger, ‘Cubisme’, in Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, p. 214. 229. Ibid., p. 212. 230. Ibid., p. 210. 231. Antliff, Inventing Bergson, p. 63. 232. Quoted in Brooke, Albert Gleizes, p. 32. 233. Gleizes and Metzinger. ‘Cubism’, in Herbert, Modern Artists on Art, p. 11. 234. Ibid., p. 48. 235. Ibid., p. 54. 236. Cottington, Cubism in the Shadow of War, p. 160 and Cubism and its Histories, p. 143. 237. Brooke, Albert Gleizes, p. 32. 238. Robbins, ‘Jean Metzinger’, p. 21. 239. Antliff, Inventing Bergson, p. 63. 240. Gleizes and Metzinger, ‘Cubism’, in Fry, Cubism, p. 212. 241. Brooke, Albert Gleizes, p. 19. 242. Gleizes and Metzinger, ‘Cubism’, in Fry, Cubism, p. 214. 243. Ibid., p. 211. 244. See Brooke, Albert Gleizes, p. 152. 245. Gleizes and Metzinger, ‘Cubism’, in Fry, Cubism, p. 214. 246. Cited in Antliff, Inventing Bergson, p. 57. 247. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 45. 248. Robbins, ‘The formation and maturity of Albert Gleizes’, pp. 83–4.

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254. 255. 256.

257. 258. 259. 260. 261. 262.

Ibid., p. 84. Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, ‘Cubism’, in Fry, Cubism, p. 214. Gleizes quoted in Brooke, Albert Gleizes, p. 49. Robbins, ‘The formation and maturity of Albert Gleizes’, p. 125. Hans D. Sluga, “‘Whose house is that?” Wittgenstein on the self ’, in Hans D. Sluga and David G. Stern (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 343. Quoted ibid., p. 329. Quoted ibid., p. 344. Ernst Mach, The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical [1897], trans. C.M. Williams (Chicago and London: Open Court Publishing, 1914), p. 25. Gleizes, ‘Souvenirs – le Cubisme’, translated by Peter Brooke (from personal correspondence). Antliff, Inventing Bergson, p. 56. Quoted in Robbins, ‘Jean Metzinger’, p. 20. Quoted ibid. Henri Bergson, ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’ [1903], in The Creative Mind (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), pp. 188–90. Bergson, Time and Free Will, p. 128.

NOTES PP. 75–82

249. 250. 251. 252. 253.

2 The Simultaneous Subject 1. Brian Seaward, Achieving the Mind-body-spirit Connection (Sudbury, MA and London: Jones & Bartlett Publishers, 2005), p. 137. 2. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999). 3. Stephen E. Palmer, Vision Science: Photons to Phenomenology (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1999), p. 224. 4. Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 51. 5. Palmer, Vision Science, p. 24. 6. Kemp, The Science of Art, p. 234. 7. See Robert Smith’s A Compleat System of Optics (1689–1768). 8. See Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 89–90. It was later researched by the physiologist Purkinje in the 1830s. 9. Quoted in Kemp, The Science of Art, p. 236. 10. See ibid., pp. 257 and 319. 11. See ibid., pp. 266–70.

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12. Ibid., p. 285. 13. See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1990), p. 68. 14. Quoted in Bernard Howells, ‘The problem with colour. Three theorists: Goethe, Schopenhauer, Chevreul’, in Peter Collier and Robert Lethbridge (eds), Artistic Relations: Literature and the Visual Arts in NineteenthCentury France (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 80. 15. Ibid. 16. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 100. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., p. 102. 19. Ibid., p. 104. 20. Howells, ‘The problem with colour’, p. 84. 21. Quoted in Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 75. 22. Quoted ibid., p. 73 (fn. 13). 23. Virginia Spate, Orphism: The Evolution of Non-Figurative Painting in Paris 1910–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 197. 24. Blaise Cendrars, ‘The Eiffel Tower’ [1924], in Arthur A. Cohen, The New Art of Color: The Writings of Robert and Sonia Delaunay (New York: The Viking Press, 1978), pp. 173–4. 25. Quoted in Spate, Orphism, p. 207. 26. Gas remained the dominant form of lighting from the 1840s. The initial cost of electric lighting (and its unreliability) together with problems in lamp production and a shortage of trained engineers, and its dazzling glare (a Punch cartoon of 1889 depicts women using parasols to shade themselves from its light), meant that its installation by the 1870s was limited to large areas such as factories and building sites. As Lynda Nead writes: ‘Gas lights darkness, whereas electricity annihilates it’ (p. 84). By 1880, electricity lit several significant places in Paris such as the Place de la Concorde, the Opera Garnier and the square in front, the Avenue de l’Opera, the Arc de Triomphe, the Place du Corps legislature and the Thˆeatre du Chˆatelet. See Linda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000); Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth-Century [1983], trans. Angela Davies (Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 1995); William T. O’Dea, The Social History of Lighting (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1958); Maureen Dillon, Artificial Sunshine: A Social History of Domestic Lighting (London: National Trust, 2002). 27. Michael Hogg, ‘Preface’, in Jacques Damase, Sonia Delaunay: Rhythms and Colours (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972), p. 17.

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NOTES PP. 86–93

28. See ibid., pp. 17–8 and Arthur A. Cohen, Sonia Delaunay [1975] (New York: Harry N. Abrahams, 1988), ch. 5 and pp. 64–5. 29. Lakoff and Johnson Philosophy in the Flesh, p. 391. 30. Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Dum Scribo’, Oxford Literary Review 3/2 (1978), pp. 6– 20, p. 12. 31. Elizabeth Morano, ‘Introduction’, in Sonia Delaunay: Art into Fashion (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1986), pp. 11–2 and Stanley Baron and Jacques Damase, Sonia Delaunay: The Life of an Artist (London: Thames & Hudson, 1995), p. 7. 32. Robert Delaunay, ‘Sonia Delaunay-Terk’ [1938], in Cohen, The New Art of Color, pp. 132–3. 33. Damase, Sonia Delaunay: Rhythms and Colours, p. 40 and Jacques Damase, Sonia Delaunay: Fashion and Fabrics, trans. Shaun Whiteside and Stanley Baron (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), p. 59. 34. Baron and Damase, Sonia Delaunay, p. 24 and Sherry Buckberrough, Sonia Delaunay: A Retrospective (Buffalo, New York: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1980), p. 13. 35. Carrie Noland, Poetry at Stake: Lyric Aesthetics and the Challenge of Technology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 119. 36. Baron and Damase, Sonia Delaunay, p. 7. 37. Buckberrough, Sonia Delaunay, p. 13. 38. See Baron and Damase, Sonia Delaunay, p. 14. 39. Quoted in Damase, Sonia Delaunay: Fashion and Fabrics, p. 71. 40. Sonia Delaunay, ‘Sonia Delaunay by Sonia Delaunay’ [1967], in Cohen, The New Art of Color, p. 194. 41. Baron and Damase, Sonia Delaunay, p. 13. 42. Quoted in Cohen, Sonia Delaunay, p. 39. 43. Whom she married, though it is accepted that this was a marriage of ‘convenience’, with some speculation concerning Uhde’s sexuality. 44. See Baron and Damase, Sonia Delaunay, p. 14. 45. Buckberrough, Sonia Delaunay, p. 214, Delaunay, ‘Sonia Delaunay by Sonia Delaunay’, p. 195. 46. Ibid., p. 194. 47. Sonia Delaunay, ‘The influence of painting on fashion design’, Lecture given by Sonia Delaunay at the Sorbonne [1926], in Cohen, The New Art of Color, p. 205. 48. Delaunay, ‘Sonia Delaunay-Terk’, ibid., p. 133. 49. Ibid. 50. Albert Gleizes, ‘The epic: from immobile form to mobile form’ (1928). Available at http://www.peterbrooke.org.uk/a&r/gltexts/epic (accessed 9 May 2014).

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51. See Morano, Sonia Delaunay, p. 12 and Buckberrough, Sonia Delaunay, p. 40. 52. Spate, Orphism, p. 161. 53. Cited in Baron and Damase, Sonia Delaunay, p. 139. 54. In Les Peintres Cubistes (1912). The term itself was used by Apollinaire at a lecture given in October 1912, identifying the movement of Robert, L´eger, Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp away from ‘pure painting’. Spate, Orphism, p. 1. 55. L’Intransigent, 18–25 March 1913. 56. Gleizes, ‘The epic’. 57. Robert Delaunay, ‘Letter’ [1917], in Cohen, The New Art of Color, p. 71. 58. Robert Delaunay, ‘A Note on the Construction of Reality in Pure Painting’ [1913], ibid., p. 94. 59. Ibid., p. 95. 60. Cendrars, ‘The Eiffel Tower’, p. 169. 61. Robert Delaunay sent 20 pictures, mostly of his ‘sun and moon’ series, whilst his largest painting was L’Equippe de Cardiff. Sonia Delaunay sent four paintings, together with La Prose du Transsiberien, book covers, lamps shades, cushions, a cash box and the first simultaneous poster. ‘It was the first time that the application of the new color sense to everyday objects would be shown in Germany.’ See Gustav Vrieson and Max Imdahl, Robert Delaunay: Light and Colour, trans. Maria Pelikan (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1967), p. 64. 62. Both of whom indeed lived with the Delaunays for different periods. 63. See Buckberrough, Sonia Delaunay, p. 50. 64. Cendrars, ‘The Eiffel Tower’, p. 72. 65. See Sherry Buckberrough, Robert Delaunay: The Discovery of Simultaneity [1978] (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982), p. 197. 66. Cohen, Sonia Delaunay, p. 22. 67. Clive Scott, Reading the Rhythm: The Poetics of French Free Verse 1910– 1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 86. 68. Sonia Delaunay, ‘The Poem “Easter in New York”’ [1962], in Cohen, The New Art of Color, p. 198. 69. Sonia Delaunay, ‘Interview with Sonia Delaunay’ [1970], ibid., p. 221. 70. Cohen, Sonia Delaunay, p. 28. 71. Ibid. 72. David Cottington, Cubism and its Histories (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 186. 73. Tag Gronberg, ‘Sonia Delaunay’s simultaneous fashions and the modern woman’, in Whitney Chadwick and Tirza True Latimer (eds), The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris between the Wars (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), p. 110.

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78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107.

Cottington, Cubism and its Histories, p. 187. Damase, Sonia Delaunay: Fashion and Fabrics, p. 103. Buckberrough, Sonia Delaunay, p. 25. See Diana Vreeland, ‘Foreword’, in Sonia Delaunay: Art into Fashion (New York: George Braziller, 1986), p. 13. Buckberrough, Sonia Delaunay, p. 105; Morano, Sonia Delaunay, p. 12. Vreeland, ‘Foreword’, p. 13, my emphasis. Buckberrough, Sonia Delaunay, p. 40. Robert Delaunay, ‘Simultaneism in contemporary modern art, painting, poetry’ [1913], in Cohen, The New Art of Color, p. 48. Delaunay, ‘Sonia Delaunay-Terk’, ibid., p. 134. Ibid. Buckberrough, Sonia Delaunay, p. 32. Cited in Cohen, Sonia Delaunay, p. 35 (my emphasis). Cited in Damase, Sonia Delaunay: Fashion and Fabrics, p. 51. See ibid., p. 50. Scott, Reading the Rhythm. Cited in Buckberrough, Sonia Delaunay, p. 106. Vrieson and Imdahl, Robert Delaunay, p. 74. Cited ibid., p. 47. Quoted in Cohen, Sonia Delaunay, p. 35. Buckberrough, Sonia Delaunay, p. 34. Buckberrough, Robert Delaunay, p. 48. Ibid. Ibid., p. 49. Buckberrough, Sonia Delaunay, p. 219. See Vrieson and Imdahl, Robert Delaunay; Spate, Orphism, Buckberrough; Robert Delaunay; Marianne Martin, ‘Futurism, unanimism, Apollinaire’, Art Journal 28/3 (Spring 1969), pp. 258–68. Robert Delaunay, ‘The discovery of the simultaneous craft’ [1913], in Cohen, The New Art of Color, pp. 46–7. Ibid. Ibid. Delaunay, ‘Simultaneism in contemporary modern art, painting, poetry’, p. 48. Ibid. Vrieson and Imdahl, Robert Delaunay, p. 65. Quoted in Spate, Orphism, p. 212. Ibid., p. 44. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory [1896], trans. Nancy Margaret and W. Scott Palmer (London: George Allen & Unwin; New York: Macmillan, 1929), pp. 265–6.

NOTES PP. 97–106

74. 75. 76. 77.

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108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117.

118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127.

128. 129. 130. 131. 132.

133. 134. 135. 136.

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Ibid., p. 274. Ibid., p. 31. Ibid., p. 32. Ibid., p. 33. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution [1907], trans. Arthur Mitchell (London: Macmillan, 1922), p. 280. Ibid., p. 262. See Tom Slevin, ‘The body in modernity: radical imaginations and reactionary ideologies’, PhD thesis (University of London, 2009). There was correspondence between James and Blondel, and the former cited the latter in his preface to Pragmatism (1907). Jean Lacroix, Maurice Blondel: An Introduction to the Man and His Philosophy [1963], trans. J.C. Guinness (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1968), p. 13. Maurice Blondel, Action: Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice [1893], trans. O. Blachette. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 3. Ibid., p. 56. Ibid. Lacroix, Maurice Blondel, p. 38. Blondel, The Tetralogy, cited in Lacroix, Maurice Blondel, p. 52. Lacroix, Maurice Blondel, p. 58 (my emphasis). Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 262. Martin, ‘Futurism, unanimism, Apollinaire’, p. 267. Vrieson and Imdahl, Robert Delaunay, p. 39. Buckberrough, Robert Delaunay, p. 54. See Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 67. Buckberrough, Robert Delaunay, p. 54–55, and Buckberrough, Sonia Delaunay p. 39. Jules Romains, La Vie Unanime, Poˆemes 1904–1907, cited in Buckberrough, Sonia Delaunay, p. 138. Ibid. Ibid. Umberto Boccioni, ‘Futurist painting: technical manifesto’, in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds), Art and Theory, 1900–2000 (London: Blackwell, 1910), p. 151. Robert Delaunay, Du Cubisme a` l’art abstrait, cited in Vrieson and Imdahl, Robert Delaunay, p. 84. Cited in Buckberrough, Sonia Delaunay, p. 190. Ibid. Ibid.

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NOTES PP. 110–115

137. Henri Bergson, cited in Vrieson and Imdahl, Robert Delaunay, p. 83. 138. Ibid. 139. Robert Delaunay, ‘Constructionism and Neoclassicism’ [1924], in Cohen, The New Art of Color, p. 9. 140. Ibid. 141. See his Modern Chromatics: Students’ Text-Book of Colour (1879). 142. Lucy Adelman and Michael Compton, ‘Mathematics in early abstract art’, in Towards a New Art: Essays on the Background to Abstract Art 1910–1920 (London: Tate Gallery, 1980), p. 65. 143. John Gage, ‘The psychological background to early modern colour: Kandinsky, Delaunay and Mondrian’, in Towards a New Art: Essays on the Background to Abstract Art 1910–1920 (London: The Tate Gallery, 1980), p. 340. 144. Henderson, The Fourth Dimension, p. 67. 145. Ibid., p. 56. 146. Ibid., p. 57. 147. Neil Cox, Cubism (London: Phaidon, 2000), p. 189. 148. Henderson, The Fourth Dimension, p. 99. 149. Ibid., p. 96. 150. David Cottington, Cubism and its Histories (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 141. 151. Cited in Henderson, The Fourth Dimension, p. 61. 152. Cited ibid. p. 62. 153. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness [1889], trans. F.L. Pogson (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1910/1950), p. 107. 154. Ibid., p. 109. 155. Henderson, The Fourth Dimension, p. 71. 156. Ibid., p. 72. 157. Ibid., p. 69. 158. See Daniel Robbins, ‘Jean Metzinger: at the center of Cubism’, in Jean Metzinger in Retrospect (University of Iowa Museum of Art, 1985), p. 13. 159. Cited in Henderson, The Fourth Dimension, p. 64. 160. Robert Delaunay, ‘Letter to Kandinsky’ [1914], in Cohen, The New Art of Color, p. 57. 161. See ibid., p. 113. 162. Cendrars, ‘The Eiffel Tower’, p. 172. 163. Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty that Causes Havoc (New York: Basic Books, 2001). 164. Henderson, The Fourth Dimension, p. 89. 165. Sonia Delaunay, ‘Letter’ [1926], in Cohen, The New Art of Color, p. 202. 166. Ibid.

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167. Ibid. (my emphasis). 168. Spate, Orphism, p. 3. 169. Robert Delaunay, ‘Letter to August Macke’ [1912], in Cohen, The New Art of Color, p. 114. 170. Robert Delaunay, ‘Concerning Impressionism’ [1934], ibid., p. 33. 171. Robert Delaunay, ‘Image and craft’ [1938], ibid., p. 54. 172. Sonia Delaunay, ‘The Influence of Painting on Fashion Design’, p. 207 – my emphasis. 173. Delaunay, ‘Letter’, ibid., p. 201. 174. Spate, Orphism, p. 203. 175. Henri Bergson, ‘Introduction to metaphysics’ [1903], in The Creative Mind (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), p. 220. 176. Whilst ‘[t]he sign is born at the same time as imagination and memory, at the moment when it is demanded by absence of the object for present perception’. Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature event context’ [1972], in Peggy Kamuf (ed.), A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, trans. Alan Bass (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 88. 177. Robert Delaunay, ‘Letter to Franz Marc’ [1912], in Cohen, The New Art of Color, p. 116. 178. Sonia Delaunay, ‘The color danced’ [1958], ibid., p. 212. 179. Robert Delaunay, ‘The “simultaneous” fabrics of Sonia Delaunay’, 2nd version [1938], ibid., p. 137. 180. Damase, Sonia Delaunay: Rhythms and Colours, p. 47. 181. Sonia Delaunay, ‘Letter from Sonia Delaunay to Jacques Damase, May 1968’ [1968], in Damase, Sonia Delaunay: Fashion and Fabrics, p. 72. 182. See Spate, Orphism, p. 29. 183. Quoted in Baron and Damase, Sonia Delaunay, p. 50. 184. See Cohen, Sonia Delaunay, p. 112. 185. Cox, Cubism, p. 222. 186. Sonia Delaunay, ‘Sonia Delaunay by Sonia Delaunay’, p. 195; Robert Delaunay, ‘Sonia Delaunay-Terk’ [1938], in Cohen, The New Art of Color, p. 136; Baron and Damase, Sonia Delaunay, p. 49. 187. Robert Delaunay, ‘Letter to Kandinsky’, p. 113. 188. Robert Delaunay, ‘To Sam Halpert’ [1924], ibid., pp. 36–7. 189. Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience [1991] (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1992), p. 162. 190. Ibid. 191. Robert Delaunay, ‘Three notes on the differences between Delaunay’s art and Impressionism and Expressionism’ [1920], in Cohen, The New Art of Color, p. 11. 192. Buckberrough, Robert Delaunay, p. xxi.

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203. 204. 205. 206. 207. 208.

209. 210.

211. 212. 213. 214.

215. 216. 217. 218. 219. 220. 221. 222. 223.

Buckberrough, Sonia Delaunay, p. 106. Damase, Sonia Delaunay: Rhythms and Colours, p. 48. Ibid., p. 75. Damase, Sonia Delaunay: Rhythms and Colours, p. 48. Buckberrough, Sonia Delaunay, p. 39. Ibid. Spate, Orphism, p. 161. Buckberrough, Sonia Delaunay, p. 103. See Spate, Orphism, p. 57. See Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘The seated woman’ [1914], in Cohen, The New Art of Color, p. 179. Delaunay, ‘Sonia Delaunay by Sonia Delaunay’, p. 196. Quoted in Morano, Sonia Delaunay, p. 14. Robert Delaunay, ‘Sonia Delaunay-Terk’, pp. 134–5. Apollinaire, ‘The seated woman’, p. 180. Ibid. Quoted in Maly and Dietfried Gerhardus, Cubism and Futurism: The Evolution of the Self-sufficient Picture [1977], trans. J. Griffiths (Oxford: Phaidon, 1979), p. 62. Quoted in Baron and Damase, Sonia Delaunay, p. 199. Christopher Townsend, ‘Slave to the rhythm: Sonia Delaunay’s fashion project and the fragmentary, mobile modernist body’, in Jan Brand and Jos´e Teunissen (eds), The Power of Fashion: About Design and Meaning (Amsterdam: Terra, Artez, 2006), p. 373. Ibid., p. 378. Buckberrough, Robert Delaunay, notes that La Roue is ‘almost unmentioned’ in writings on Cendrars. See p. 154. Cited ibid., p. 155. Cited in Judi Freeman, ‘L´eger’s Ballet m´ecanique’ [1987], in Rudolf E. Kuenzli (ed.), Dada and Surrealist Film (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2001), p. 29. Cited in Martin, ‘Futurism, unanimism, Apollinaire’, p. 261 (my emphasis). Ibid., (my translation.) See ibid., p. 260 (my translation). Bergson, ‘Introduction to metaphysics’, p. 205. Townsend, ‘Slave to the rhythm’, p. 361. Cited in Lacroix, Maurice Blondel, p. 36. Quoted in Damase, Sonia Delaunay: Fashion and Fabrics, p. 67. Sonia Delaunay, ‘Letter from Sonia Delaunay to Jacques Damase, May 1968’, p. 72. Ibid.

NOTES PP. 120–129

193. 194. 195. 196. 197. 198. 199. 200. 201. 202.

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224. Robert Delaunay, ‘Sonia Delaunay-Terk’, p. 136. 225. Robert Delaunay (1923) ‘Simultaneous fabrics’, in Damase, Sonia Delaunay: Fashion and Fabrics, p. 62. 226. Ibid., p. 63. 227. Robert Delaunay, ‘Sonia Delaunay-Terk’, p. 135. 228. Valerie Steele, Paris Fashion: A Cultural History [1988] (Oxford: Berg, 1998), p. 228. Also see Ulrich Lehman, Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2000); Nancy Troy, Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); Christopher Breward, The Culture of Fashion: A New History of Fashionable Dress (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); Amy de la Haye and Valerie Mendes, 20th-Century Fashion (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999); Linda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000). 229. Baron and Damase, Sonia Delaunay, p. 30. 230. Vreeland, ‘Foreword’, p. 8. 231. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic [1900], trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (London: Macmillan, 1913), p. 155. 232. Townsend, ‘Slave to the rhythm’, p. 370. 233. Robert Delaunay, ‘Simultaneous fabrics’ pp. 63–6. 234. See Jessica Benjamin and Anson Rabinback, ‘Foreword’, in Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies II: Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the white terror [1978], trans. Chris Turner and Erica Carter (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), p. ix. 235. Cited in ibid., p. xx. 236. Ibid., p. xxi. 237. Theweleit, Male Fantasies II, p. 162.

3 Rationalised Existence 1. Virginia Spate, Orphism: The Evolution of Non-Figurative Painting in Paris 1910–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 59. 2. Christopher Green, Cubism and its Enemies (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 93. 3. Arthur A. Cohen, Sonia Delaunay [1975] (New York: Harry N. Abrahams, 1978), pp. 21–2. 4. See Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian AvantGarde (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993) and Kenneth Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989).

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9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

Ibid., p. 81. Silver comments upon Matisse’s conservative turn. Silver, Esprit de Corps, p. 26. Christopher Green, “‘There is no antiquity”: modern antiquity in the work of Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, Fernand L´eger, and Francis Picabia (1906–36)’, in Modern Antiquity: Picasso, de Chirico, L´eger, Picabia (Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011). Green, Cubism and its Enemies, p. 2. Ibid., p. 37. Ibid., p. 36. Ibid., p. 65. Ibid., pp. 9 and 182. This was an initial distinction Blau and Troy attribute to Kahnweiler. See Eve Blau and Nancy J. Troy ‘Introduction’ [1997], in Eve Blau and Nancy J. Troy (eds), Architecture and Cubism (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2002), p. 5. Silver, Esprit de Corps, p. 349. The image d’Epinal was a simple, linear design style deriving from sixteenth-century woodcuts in Epinal, whose tradition continued through 1850 as lithographs. Its popular appeal lay in its historical tradition whilst allowing modern artists their interest in Primitivism. See Silver, Esprit de Corps, p. 38. Green, Cubism and its Enemies, p. 20. Silver, Esprit de Corps, p. 200. Ibid., p. 147. Ibid., p. 215. Gabriel Boissy cited ibid., p. 28. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia [1980] (London: Continuum, 2002), p. 21. Daniel Robbins, ‘Abbreviated Historiography of Cubism’, Art Journal 47/4 (Winter 1988), pp. 277–83, p. 277. Ibid., p. 278. Pepe Karmel, Picasso and the Invention of Cubism (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 194. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 12. Ibid. Ibid., p. 9. Karmel, Picasso and the Invention of Cubism, pp. 84, 148, 169, 194. Ronald Schleifer, Modernism and Time: The Logic of Abundance in Literature, Science, and Culture, 1880–1930 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

NOTES PP. 134–140

5. 6. 7. 8.

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31. William James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I [1890] (London: Macmillan 1901), p. 239. 32. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change [1989] (Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 252. 33. Schleifer, Modernism and Time, pp. 113, 117, 230. 34. Ibid., p. 37. 35. Ibid., p. 49. 36. Ibid., pp. 61–9. 37. Ibid., p. 84. 38. Walter Benjamin, ‘On some motifs on Baudelaire’ [1939], in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations [1940], trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1977), pp. 159 and 187. 39. Schleifer, Modernism and Time, pp. 65, 123. 40. Ibid., p. 181. 41. Ibid., p. 174. 42. William Benjamin, ‘The storyteller’ [1936], in Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, p. 93. 43. Schleifer, Modernism and Time, p. 96. 44. Ibid., p. 103. 45. Ibid., p. 79. 46. Ibid., p. 192. 47. Ibid., pp. 77–8. 48. Silver, Esprit de Corps, p. 45. 49. Cited ibid., p. 230. 50. Ibid., p. 51. 51. Carol S. Eliel, ‘Purism in Paris, 1918–1925’, in Carol S. Eliel, Franc¸oise Ducros and Tag Gronberg, L’Esprit Nouveau: Purism in Paris, 1918–1925 (New York: Harry N. Abrahms, 2001), p. 12. 52. Charles Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier) and Am´ed´ee Ozenfant, ‘Purism’ [1920], in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds), Art in Theory, 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. 239. 53. Neil Cox, Cubism (London: Phaidon, 2000), pp. 377–8. 54. Silver, Esprit de Corps, p. 216. 55. Cox, Cubism, p. 310 and Spate, Orphism, p. 59. 56. Douglas Cooper, The Cubist Epoch (London: Phaidon, 1971), p. 206. 57. See Cox, Cubism, p. 350 and Irena Zantovska Murray, ‘The burden of Cubism: the French imprint on Czech architecture, 1910–1914’ [1997], in Blau and Troy, Architecture and Cubism. 58. Marinetti cited in Silver, Esprit de Corps, p. 348.

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NOTES PP. 144–151

59. John Golding, Cubism: A History and Analysis 1907–1914 [1959] (London and Boston, IL: Faber and Faber, 1988), p. 30. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid. 62. The Bauhaus followed the merging of the Weimar School of Arts and the Weimar Academy of Arts. 63. Vernon L. Lidtke, ‘Twentieth-century Germany: the cultural, social, and political context of the work of Oskar Schlemmer’, in Arnold L. Lehman and Brenda Richardson (eds), Oskar Schlemmer (Baltimore, MD: Baltimore Museum of Art: 1986), p. 22. 64. See Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich [1984] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 65. Lidtke, ‘Twentieth-century Germany’, p. 22. 66. Ibid. 67. Oskar Schlemmer, The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer [1958], ed. by Tut Schlemmer, trans. K. Winston (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990), p. 65. 68. Ibid., p. 161. 69. Ibid., p. 300. 70. Lidtke, ‘Twentieth-century Germany’, p. 25. 71. These manifested in Kirchner’s nervous breakdown, Otto Dix’s furious criticism in his painting, Brecht’s increasing radicalism, Grosz’s ‘shell shock’ and their subsequent attacks of the bourgeois. Indeed, one response to war was the nihilism of Berlin Dada that had begun in Zurich. 72. Karin von Maur, ‘The Art of Oskar Schlemmer’, in Lehman and Richardson, Oskar Schlemmer, p. 39. 73. Schlemmer, The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer, p. 72. 74. Ibid., p. 10. 75. Ibid., p. 16. 76. Von Maur, ‘The Art of Oskar Schlemmer’, p. 39. 77. Schlemmer, The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer, p. 27. 78. Ibid. 79. Peter Beye, ‘Introduction’, in Karin von Maur, Oskar Schlemmer, trans. Anne Engel (London: Thames & Hudson, 1972), p. 8 (my emphasis). 80. Schlemmer, The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer, p. 29. 81. Ibid., pp. 30–1. 82. Ibid., p. 38. 83. Ibid., p. 32. 84. Ibid., p. 18. 85. Von Maur, ‘The Art of Oskar Schlemmer’, p. 43.

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86. Schlemmer, The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer, p. 48 (my emphasis). 87. Von Maur, ‘The Art of Oskar Schlemmer’, p. 44. 88. Ibid., p. 45. 89. Beye, ‘Introduction’, p. 8. 90. Karin von Maur, Oskar Schlemmer, trans. Anne Engel (London: Thames & Hudson, 1972), p. 13. 91. See Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity [1990] (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992). 92. According to Karin von Maur, because ‘it was the unsatisfactory rigidity of sculpture that drew Schlemmer to the dance’. Von Maur, Oskar Schlemmer, p. 38. 93. Schlemmer, The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer, p. 107. 94. Ibid., p. 108. 95. Ibid., p. 116. 96. Ibid., p. 221. 97. Heimo Kuchling, ‘Introduction’, in Oskar Schlemmer, Man: Teaching Notes from the Bauhaus, ed. by Heimo Kuchling, trans. Janet Seligman (London: Lund Humphries, 1971), p. 11. 98. Ibid., p. 16. 99. Ibid., p. 33. 100. Ibid., p. 35. 101. Ibid., p. 112. 102. Ibid., p. 166. 103. Ibid., p. 108. 104. Ibid., p. 149. 105. Ibid., p. 256. 106. Walter Gropius, ‘Introduction’, in Walter Gropius (ed.), The Theater of the Bauhaus, trans. Arthur S. Wensinger (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), p. 8. 107. Ibid., p. 10. 108. Ibid., p. 9. 109. Schlemmer, The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer, p. 193. 110. Debra McCall, ‘Reconstructing Schlemmer’s Bauhaus dances: a personal narrative’, in Lehman and Richardson, Oskar Schlemmer, p. 155. 111. Oskar Schlemmer, ‘Man and art figure’ [1924], in Gropius, The Theater of the Bauhaus, p. 22. 112. Ibid., p. 20. 113. Ibid., p. 21. 114. Ibid., p. 22. 115. Ibid., p. 23 (my emphasis). 116. Ibid.

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NOTES PP. 165–169

117. Benjamin, ‘The storyteller’, p. 84. 118. Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany [1930], trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Verso, 1998), p. 92. 119. Ibid., p. 94. 120. Tom Slevin, ‘The wound and the First World War: “Cartesian” surgeries to embodied being in psychoanalysis, electrification and skin grafting’, Body and Society 14/2 (June 2008), pp. 39–61. 121. Wendy Holden, Shell Shock (London: Macmillan, 1998), p. 13. 122. Ibid., p. 70. 123. Ibid., p. 42. 124. Ibid., p. 33. 125. Ibid. 126. Ibid., p. 42. 127. Jay Winter, The Great War and the British People (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), p. 146. 128. Adrian Gregory, The Silence of Memory: Armistice Day 1919–1946 (Oxford and Providence, RI: Berg, 1994), p. 1. 129. Holden, Shell Shock, p. 41. 130. J.S. Oxford, ‘The so-called great Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918 may have originated in France in 1916’, Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences 356/1416 (December 2001), pp. 1857–9, p. 1859. 131. Youri Ghendon, ‘Introduction to pandemic influenza through history’, European Journal of Epidemiology 10/4 (1994), pp. 451–3, p. 451. 132. Herf, Reactionary Modernism, p. 31. 133. Angscar Hillach, ‘The aesthetics of politics: Walter Benjamin’s “Theories of German Fascism”’, trans. Jerold Wikoff and Ulf Zimmerman, New German Critique 17, Special Walter Benjamin Issue (Spring 1979), pp. 99– 119, p. 101. 134. Ibid., p. 105. 135. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theories of German Fascism: on the collection of essays “War and Warrior”, edited by Ernst J¨unger’ [1930], New German Critique 17, Special Walter Benjamin Issue (Spring 1979), pp. 120–8, p. 120. 136. Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 102. 137. Hillach, ‘The aesthetics of politics’, p. 106. 138. Ibid., p. 103. 139. Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia, p. x. 140. Ibid., p. ix. 141. Green (1970) p. 38. 142. Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia, p. 274.

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143. 144. 145. 146. 147.

148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154.

155. 156. 157. 158.

159. 160. 161.

162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172.

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Ibid., p. xiii. Ibid., p. 15. Herf, Reactionary Modernism, p. 224. Hal Foster, ‘Armor Fou’, October 56 (Spring 1991), pp. 65–97, p. 69. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies II: Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the white terror [1978], trans. Chris Turner and Erica Carter (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), p. 164. Schlemmer, ‘Man and art figure’, p. 47 (my emphasis). Ibid., p. 66. Ibid., p. 67. Ibid., p. 69. Ibid. Ibid., p. 232. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Coll`ege de France 1978–1979 [1979], trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 107. See Herf, Reactionary Modernism, p. 14. Benjamin, ‘Theories of German Fascism’, p. 120. Also see Herf, Reactionary Modernism, p. 34. Ibid., p. 49. The ‘demonic’ is also a term Jacques Derrida uses in reference to the Czech philosopher Jan Patoèka’s views on its appearance in response to technological modernity. See Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 35–6. ˇ zek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: Five Interventions in the Slavoj Ziˇ (Mis)use of a Notion (London and New York: Verso, 2001), p. 37. Herf, Reactionary Modernism, p. 50. Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life [1931], trans. Charles Francis-Atkinson (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976), p. 21. Ibid., p. 43. Ibid., p. 47. Herf, Reactionary Modernism, p. 72. J¨unger, cited ibid., p. 75. Ibid., p. 75. J¨unger, cited ibid., p. 76. Ibid., p. 77. Ibid., p. 79. See ibid., p. 87. Freyer, cited ibid., p. 125. Albert Edward Elsen, Modern European Sculpture 1918–1945, Unknown Beings and Other Realities (New York: G. Braziller, 1979), p. 14.

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NOTES PP. 177–189

173. Kracauer (1928), cited in Gertrud Koch, Siegfried Kracauer, trans. Jeremy Gaines (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 7. 174. Catherine Moriarty, ‘Narrative and the absent body: mechanisms of meaning in First World War memorials’, unpublished DPhil thesis, University of Sussex (1995), pp. 203–4. 175. Ibid., p. 205. 176. Albert Edward Elsen, Origins of Modern Sculpture: Pioneers and Premises (London: Phaidon Press, 1974), p. viii. 177. Ibid., p. 5. 178. Ibid., p. 17. 179. Ibid., p. 138. 180. Waldemar George, Maillol (London: Cory, Adams & Mackay, 1965), p. 43. 181. Robert Hopper, ‘Foreword’, in Neville Jason, The Sculpture of Frank Dobson (London: Lund Humphries, 1994). 182. Letter to Edward Marsh (9 December 1914), cited ibid., p. 29. 183. Ibid., p. 41. 184. C. Bell, ‘Art notes on some recent and current exhibitions’ [1927], Vogue (March), cited ibid., p. 66. 185. Casson, cited ibid., p. 76. 186. Ibid., p. 76. 187. Ibid., p 95. 188. Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘The beginnings of Cubism’ [1912], in Herschel B. Chipp (ed.), Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1968), p. 224. 189. Simon J. Williams and Gillian A. Bendelow, The Lived Body: Sociological Themes, Embodied Issues (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 1.

4 Modernity’s Vitruvian Bodies 1. Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Morris Hicky Morgan (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1960), p. 14. 2. Ibid., p. 72 (my emphasis). 3. Ibid., p. 72–75 (my emphasis). 4. Ibid., p. 257. 5. Philip Steadman, The Evolution of Designs: Biological Analogy in Architecture and the Applied Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 17. 6. Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism [1949] (London: Academy Editions: 1973), p. 16.

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7. Anne K. Mellor, ‘The human form divine and the structure of Blake’s Jerusalem’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 11/4 (1971), pp. 595– 620, p. 596. 8. Stefani Engelstein, ‘The regenerative geography of the text in William Blake’, Modern Language Studies 30/2 (Autumn 2000), pp. 61–86, p. 76. 9. Mellor, ‘The human form divine’, p. 617. 10. Laban, cited in John Hodgson, Mastering Movement: The Life and Work of Rudolf Laban (London: Methuen, 2001), p. 169. 11. Ibid., p. 170. 12. Ibid., p. 171. 13. Lynn Matluck Brooks, ‘Harmony in space: a perspective on the work of Rudolf Laban’, Journal of Aesthetic Education 27/2 (Summer 1993), pp. 29–41, p. 32. 14. Hodgson, Mastering Movement, p. 119. 15. Laban refers to Sufism as the expression of ‘something of this universal occurrence when they talk about the “dance of the spheres around god” (ibid.). 16. Ibid., p. 57. 17. Laban, cited ibid., p. 59. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., p. 68. 20. Oskar Schlemmer, ‘Man and art figure’ [1924], in Walter Gropius (ed.), The Theater of the Bauhaus, trans. Arthur S. Wensinger (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), p. 206 21. Laban, cited by Hodgson, Mastering Movement, p. 77. 22. Published posthumously, Laban effectively wrote an English language ‘manifesto’ of earlier research after having fled Germany in 1937. 23. Rudolf Laban, Choreutics, ed. Lisa Ullman (London: MacDonald & Evans, 1966), p. 3. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., p. 4. 27. Ibid., pp. 4–5. 28. Ibid., p. 5. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., pp. 6–7. 32. Ibid., p. 101. 33. This also relates to Jacques Lacan’s concept of the Symbolic – the cultural inculcation of the infant into social codes upon which subjectivity is performed.

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46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

Laban, Choreutics. Ibid. Ibid., p. 105. Ibid. Ibid., p. 108. Ibid. (my emphasis). George, op. cit., p. 39. Laban, Choreutics, p. 108. Ibid. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid. Jo˜ao P. Xavier, ‘Exhibit review: Nel Segno di Massacio’, Nexus Network Journal 5/1 (Spring 2003), pp. 163–70, p. 164. Available at http://www .nexusjournal.com/volume-5/number-1-april-2003.html (accessed 21 May 2014). Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 62. Wittkower, Architectural Principles, p. 5. Ibid., p. 7. Brooks, ‘Harmony in space’, p. 33 Hodgson, Mastering Movement, p. 126. Laban, Choreutics, p. 18. Hodgson, Mastering Movement, p. 154. Ibid., p. 156. Brooks, ‘Harmony in space’, p. 35. Laban, Choreutics, p. 108. Ibid. Robert Tait McKenzie, ‘Victory memorial to the men of Cambridgeshire’, Studio (August 1922), pp. 111–2. Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard, The Inhuman [1988] (London: Polity Press, 1991), p. 5. Matthew Biro, ‘The new man as cyborg: figures of technology in Weimar visual culture’, New German Critique 62 (Spring–Summer 1994), pp. 71– 110, p. 71. Ibid. Ibid. Schlemmer, ‘Man and art figure’, p. 27. Peter Beye, ‘Introduction’, in Karin von Maur, Oskar Schlemmer (London: Thames & Hudson, 1972), p. 8. Schlemmer, ‘Man and art figure’, p 26.

NOTES PP. 196–207

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

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65. Oskar Schlemmer, The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer [1958], ed. Tut Schlemmer, trans. K. Winston (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990), p. 146. 66. Ibid. p. 32. 67. See Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Biro, ‘The new man as cyborg’. Within modernity, the fantasy was increasingly a reality due to the refinement of mechanical techniques. From the Luddites in England wrecking the machines that replaced their embodied skills, to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus of 1818 featuring a corpse reanimated through electrical charge, to Louis Senarens’s writing of a mechanical man powered by electricity in the popular Frank Reade and his Electric Man (1885). Jean de la Hire had written of Nyctalope in The Man who can Live Underwater (1908), a cyborg-superhero through virtue of having an artificial heart, and then later, artificial gills grafted on to his skin. The term ‘robot’ – though not technically a cyborg as it has a crucial difference – was coined by ´ Karel Eapek in the play R.U.R (1920), where the term derives from the Slovak robota meaning labour, servitude and drudgery. E.T.A Hoffman’s The Sandman (1817) features a mechanical female puppet, and this story reappeared in Freud’s look at it in ‘The Uncanny’ (1919). Armstong’s chapter on ‘Prosthetic Modernism’ is particularly helpful on this subject in tracing the prosthetic imagination in literature. 68. Biro, ‘The new man as cyborg’, p. 77. 69. Schlemmer, The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer, p. 126. 70. Ibid., p. 127. 71. Ibid., p. 133. 72. Ibid., p. 142. 73. Karin von Maur, ‘The art of Oskar Schlemmer’, in Arnold L. Lehman and Brenda Richardson (eds), Oskar Schlemmer (Baltimore, MD: Baltimore Museum of Art: 1986), p. 56. 74. Schlemmer, The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer, p. 147. 75. The NSDAP had become the most popular party in Dessau after local elections in 1931. 76. Von Maur, ‘The art of Oskar Schlemmer’, p. 74. 77. Arnold Lehman, ‘Foreword’, in Lehman and Richardson, Oskar Schlemmer, p. 9. 78. Schlemmer, The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer, p. 147. 79. Von Maur, ‘The art of Oskar Schlemmer’, pp. 71–2. 80. Siegfried Kracauer, ‘The mass ornament’ [1927], in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1995), pp. 77–8.

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87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

92. 93.

94.

95. 96.

97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102.

Ibid., pp. 75–6. J¨unger (1926), cited in Herf, op. cit., p. 88. Kracauer, ‘The mass ornament’, p. 78. Ibid. Ibid., p. 76. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity [1990] (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), p. 240. Ibid., p. 254. Merrheim, cited in Rabinbach, The Human Motor, p. 241. Ibid., p. 261. Seigfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany [1930], trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Verso, 1998), p. 29. This is perhaps even more pertinent today given the growth of such the distractable ‘mass’ throughout the twentieth-century, but is also reminiscent of David Harvey’s comment on the compression of time-space in capitalism that increasingly has sought to commodify the temporal Event through as ‘a history of successive waves of time-space compression generated out of the pressures of capital accumulation with its perpetual search to annihilate space through time and reduce turnover time’. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change [1989] (Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 306–7. Kracauer, The Salaried Masses, p. 91. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia [1972], trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London: The Athlone Press, 1984), p. 246. ˇ zek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: Five Interventions in Slavoj Ziˇ the (Mis)use of a Notion (London and New York: Verso, 2001), p. 14. Kracauer, ‘The mass ornament’, p. 82. Or ‘demonic’, as Derrida puts it, after the Czech philosopher Jan Patoèka’s notion that ‘[t]he domination of technology encourages demonic irresponsibility’. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 35–6. Kracauer, ‘The mass ornament’, p. 84. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I [1867], trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), p. 614. Kracauer, ‘The mass ornament’, p. 77. Ibid. p. 85. Ibid. Ibid., p. 78.

NOTES PP. 211–214

81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

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103. See for example, Albert Renger-Patzsch’s characterisation of the world through geometric laws from nature to industry. 104. Eleanor Hight, Picturing Modernism: Moholy-Nagy and Photography in Weimar Germany (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1995), p. 161. 105. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space [1974], trans. Donald NicholsonSmith (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991), p. 126. 106. Morozov cited in Margarita Tupitsyn, The Soviet Photograph 1924–1937 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 154. 107. Kracauer, ‘The mass ornament’, p. 84. 108. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies II: Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror [1978], trans. Chris Turner and Erica Carter (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), p. 164. 109. Ibid., p. 42. 110. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies I: Women, Floods, Bodies, History [1977], trans. Stephen Conway (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), p. 431. 111. Kracauer, ‘The mass ornament’, p. 86. 112. Ibid., pp. 76–7. 113. Female bodies participating in ornamental performance are common sexual objects embodying youth and malleability, beauty and control. For example, the female body within the ornament is de-personalised in its uniformed conformity and therefore its physical objectification through the spectacle can be eroticised. Also, the body may exhibit more flesh than is concealed, especially female bodies. Indeed, Kracauer’s own picture exhibits naked legs, which are common fetish objects. In other examples, sometimes only the erogenous zones are concealed. The specific exposure and objectification of the uniformed body are fetishised in Western culture, for example, American cheerleading practices systematic bodily performance, but the cheerleaders’ bodies are also erotically charged within its culture. 114. Kracauer, ‘The mass ornament’, p. 83. 115. Ibid., p. 84. 116. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 126. 117. L’Esprit Nouveau was an avant-garde arts journal created in 1920 by Le Corbusier, Ozenfant, and Paul Derm´ee that supported the entwinement of industry and technology with Classicism to foster a ‘new spirit’ of rational modernity. 118. Karel Tiege, ‘The Mundaneum’ [1929], in Peter Serenyi (ed.), Le Corbusier in Perspective (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1975), p. 41. 119. Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and its Planning [1924], trans. from Urbanisme (8th edn) by Frederick Etchells [1929] (London: The Architectural Press, 1977), p. 11. 120. Ibid., p. 1 (my emphasis).

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126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141.

142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153.

Ibid., pp. 1–2. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 23. Franc¸oise Ducros, ‘Am´ed´ee Ozenfant, “Purist Brother”: an essay on his contribution’, in Carol S. Eliel, Franc¸oise Ducros and Tag Gronberg, L’Esprit Nouveau: Purism in Paris, 1918–1925 (New York: Harry N. Abrahms, 2001), p. 73. Ozenfant, cited ibid. Ducros, ‘Am´ed´ee Ozenfant’, p. 76. Corbusier, cited in Carol S. Eliel, ‘Purism in Paris, 1918–1925’, in Eliel, Ducros and Gronberg, L’Esprit Nouveau, p. 16. Ibid. ´ Am´ed´ee Ozenfant and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, ‘After Cubism’ [1918], in Eliel, Ducros and Gronberg, L’Esprit Nouveau, p. 132. Ibid., p. 133. Ibid., p. 134. Ibid., p. 137. Ibid., p. 142. Ibid. Ibid., p. 143. Ibid., p. 152. Ibid., p. 155. Ibid., p. 165. Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian AvantGarde (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 181. Kenneth Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989), p. 382. Ibid., p. 383. Ibid., p. 388. Paul Venable Turner, ‘The beginning of Le Corbusier’s education 1902– 07’ [1971], in Serenyi, Le Corbusier in Perspective, p. 18. Ibid., p. 20 (my emphasis). Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 23.

NOTES PP. 217–220

121. 122. 123. 124. 125.

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154. Ibid., p. 24. 155. Stanislaus von Moos, ‘Origins, youth, travels’ [1968], in Serenyi, Le Corbusier in Perspective, p. 14 156. The name ‘Citrohan’, is ‘a conscious pun to avoid saying “Citroen.” In other words, a house like a car’. See Reyner Banham, ‘Progressive building in Paris: 1918–1928’ [1960], in Serenyi, Le Corbusier in Perspective, p. 37. 157. Peter Serenyi, ‘Le Corbusier, Fourier, and the Monastery of Ema’ [1967], in Serenyi, Le Corbusier in Perspective, p. 104. 158. Georges Duby, Dominique Barth´elemy and Charles de la Roci`ere, A History of Private Life: II – Revelations of the Medieval World [1985], ed. Georges Duby, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press, 1988), pp. 40–1. 159. Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994), p. 157. 160. Ibid., pp. 23 and 166. 161. Serenyi, ‘Le Corbusier, Fourier, and the Monastery of Ema’, p. 111. 162. See ibid., p. 105. 163. Simon Richards, Le Corbusier and the Concept of Self (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2003). 164. Serenyi, ‘Le Corbusier, Fourier, and the Monastery of Ema’, p. 112. 165. Ibid., p. 115. 166. See Lynsey Hanley, ‘Behind these walls’, Guardian Weekend, 13 January 2007, pp. 32–5 for a lived response to the ‘utopian’ mass housing of the 1950s and 1960s in England. 167. Richards, Le Corbusier, pp. 32–50. 168. Foucault interestingly suggests in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Vintage Books, 1975)) that the state manufacturers disenfranchised petty criminals to justify policing. 169. See Nina Rosenblatt, ‘Empathy and anaesthesia: on the origins of a French machine aesthetic’, Grey Room 2 (Winter 2001), pp. 78–97, p. 91. 170. Ibid., p. 79. 171. Ibid., p. 89. 172. Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Coll`ege de France, 1975–76 [1975], trans. David Macey (London: Penguin, 2003). 173. Ibid., p. 251. 174. Ibid. 175. Ibid., pp. 259–61, Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 3–4, 121–2. 176. Ibid., p. 261. 177. Serenyi, ‘Le Corbusier, Fourier, and the Monastery of Ema’, p. 106.

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183.

184. 185. 186. 187. 188. 189. 190. 191. 192. 193. 194. 195. 196. 197. 198. 199. 200. 201. 202. 203. 204. 205. 206. 207. 208. 209. 210.

Ibid. See ibid. Fourier cited in Serenyi, ibid., p. 107. Ibid. Christopher Green, Cubism and its Enemies (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 230–1. Theo van Doesburg, ‘Introduction to Volume II of De Stijl’ [1919], in Herschel B. Chipp (ed.), Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1968), p. 324. Piet Mondrian, ‘Natural reality and abstract art’ [1919], in Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, p. 323. Ibid. See Green, Cubism and its Enemies, p. 226. See ibid., p. 93. Schlemmer, The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer, p. 188. Mondrian, ‘Natural reality and abstract art’, p. 321. Ibid., pp. 322–3. Green, Cubism and its Enemies, p. 234. Neil Cox, Cubism (London: Phaidon, 2000), p. 341. Schlemmer, The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer, p. 118. Cited in Green, Cubism and its Enemies, p. 237. Colin Rowe, ‘The mathematics of the ideal villa: Palladio and Le Corbusier compared’ [1947], in Serenyi, Le Corbusier in Perspective, p. 47. Banham, ‘Progressive building in Paris’, p. 56. Curt Behrendt, ‘Le Corbusier’ [1937], in Serenyi, Le Corbusier in Perspective, p. 44. Ibid. Rob Imrie, ‘Architects’ conceptions of the human body’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21(1) (2003), pp. 47–65. Peter Serenyi, ‘Le Corbusier’s changing attitude towards form’ [1965], in Serenyi, Le Corbusier in Perspective, p. 3. Tiege, ‘The Mundaneum’, p. 41. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 42. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 42–3. Serenyi, Le Corbusier in Perspective, p. 4. Imrie, ‘Architects’ conceptions of the human body’. Ibid., p. 47. Ibid., p. 60.

NOTES PP. 224–229

178. 179. 180. 181. 182.

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211. Ibid., p. 58. 212. David Watkin, A History of Western Architecture (London: Laurence King, 2000), p. 651 213. Ibid. 214. Norma Evenson, ‘Chandigarh’ [1969], in Serenyi, Le Corbusier in Perspective, p. 145. 215. Ibid., p. 152. 216. Cendrars, cited in Le Corbusier, Modulor 2 [1955], trans. Peter de Francia and Anna Bostock (London: Faber and Faber, 1958), p. 150. 217. Evenson, ‘Chandigarh’, p. 146. 218. Peter Collins, ‘Modulor’ [1954], in Serenyi, Le Corbusier in Perspective, p. 79. 219. Rudolf Wittkower, ‘Le Corbusier’s Modulor’ [1963], in Peter Serenyi (ed.), Le Corbusier in Perspective (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1975), p. 85. 220. Ibid. 221. Ibid. 222. Ibid. 223. Pythagoras is the credited discoverer of the musical scale that depends on the strings of the lyre in a given ratio of 1:2, 2:3, 3:4, and 1:4. The Greek musical scale thus consists of 1:2:3:4. 224. Blondel was, however, criticised by Claude Perrault, who claimed that his buildings were based on proportions that were only beautiful because of a customisation to cultural visual conventions. Indeed, Blondel’s successor, Jacques-Franc¸ois Blondel, demonstrated that his Porte S. Denis did not actually coincide with those proportions published. See Collins, ‘Modulor’, p. 81. 225. Wittkower, ‘Le Corbusier’s Modulor’, p. 86. 226. Such as 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 (a, b, a + b, a + 2b, 2a + 3b, 5a + 8b . . . ). 227. Collins, ‘Modulor’, p. 86. Collins points out the maths is not perfectly accurate as 1 = .999924 in his calculations. Wittkower also writes that Le Corbusier had mistakenly believed in the Renaissance claim that the body is in alignment with the series, though Wittkower does however suggest that the body is ‘commensurate’ with musical scales. See Wittkower, ‘Le Corbusier’s Modulor’, p. 88. 228. Collins, ‘Modulor’, p. 81. 229. Ibid., p. 80. 230. Wittkower, ‘Le Corbusier’s Modulor’, p. 87. 231. Collins, ‘Modulor’, p. 81. 232. Ibid. 233. Corbusier, cited ibid., p. 82. 234. Ibid., p. 82.

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NOTES PP. 235–240

235. Ibid. 236. Wittkower, ‘Le Corbusier’s Modulor’, p. 88. 237. Brian Brace Taylor, ‘Le Corbusier at Pessac’ [1972], in Serenyi, Le Corbusier in Perspective, p. 98. 238. Ibid. 239. Ibid. 240. Schlemmer, The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer, p. 229.

Conclusion: From n-Dimensional Imagination to One Dimensional Man 1. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977–78 [1978], ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 347–8. 2. Christopher Green, Cubism and its Enemies (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 33. ´ 3. Am´ed´ee Ozenfant and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, ‘Towards the crystal’ [1925], in Edward Fry (ed.), Cubism [1966] (New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 171. 4. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind [1903] (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), p. 192. 5. Quoted in Green, Cubism and its Enemies, p. 237. 6. Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964). 7. Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Coll`ege de France, 1975–76 [1975], trans. David Macey (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 265. 8. See Foucault, Security, Territory, Population. 9. Ibid., pp. 249–50. 10. Ibid., p. 247. 11. Ibid., p. 42. 12. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction [1976], trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), pp. 139–40. 13. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Coll`ege de France 1978–1979 [1979], trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 298. 14. Ibid., p. 145–146. 15. Ibid., p. 311 and Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 3–4. 16. Ibid., p. 317 and Foucault, Society Must be Defended, p. 243. 17. Ibid. 18. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 140.

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19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

47.

300

Ibid., p. 143. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 23. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 142. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 22. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 121. Mechanisms that Foucault discusses in Security, Territory, Population. Ibid., p. 77. See Foucault, Society Must be Defended, p. 249. See Kenneth Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989), inter alia. Ibid., p. 241. Ibid., p. 254. Ibid., p. 241. Ibid. Ibid., p. 257. Ibid., p. 254. Ibid., p. 255. Ibid., p. 257. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 3. Ibid., p. 122. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 256. Ibid., pp. 260–1. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, pp. 149–50. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 131. Ibid., p. 143. Foucault, Society Must be Defended, p. 245. See Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy, On Classic Ground: Picasso, L´eger, de Chirico and the New Classicism 1910–1930 (London: Tate Gallery, 1990). Cubism’s change within the postwar ‘call to order’ was not the same as the prewar incorporation of Classicism that Cowling proposes. See Tom Slevin ‘The body in modernity: radical imaginations and reactionary ideologies’, PhD thesis (University of London, 2009) for further consideration of other issues present in Cowling’s argument. Ibid., p. 10. Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder 1848–1918 [1989] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). For example, in England, there were ‘deep conservative and liberal fears of Socialism, democracy and “mass society”’ (p. 10). Michael Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany: A Social History, 1890–1930 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 2.

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NOTES PP. 244–247

48. For example, for feminists and health reformers it meant the fight for liberation against corsets. For the upper middle class, a beautiful body reflected a health body and mind. The lower middle class used the athletic, disciplined, ascetic body as a rejection of the perceived debauchery of upper classes, the materialism of an increasingly industrial society and the ‘academicism’ of the upper bourgeoisie. On the other hand, nudists perceived the naked body as transcending social and class distinction by being ‘authentic’. 49. Ibid., p. 202. 50. Pick, Faces of Degeneration, p. 233. 51. Ibid., p. 27. 52. Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany, p. 42. 53. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change [1989] (Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 21. 54. Ibid., p. 13. 55. Richard F. Kuisel, Capitalism and the State in Modern France: Renovation and Economic Management in the Twentieth-Century [1981] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. x. 56. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, pp. 68–9 (my emphases). 57. Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, pp. 157–8. 58. Ibid., p. xvi. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid., p. 3. 61. Foucault, Society Must be Defended, pp. 276–7. 62. Michel Foucault, ‘Body/Power’ [1975], in Power/Knowledge, trans. C. Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), p. 55. 63. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 122. 64. Erik Vogt, ‘S/citing the camp’, in Andrew Norris (ed.), Politics, Metaphysics and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 79. 65. Whitney Chadwick and Tirza True Latimer, ‘Introduction’, in Whitney Chadwick and Tirza True Latimer (eds), The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris Between the Wars (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2003), p. xvii. 66. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 146. 67. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle [1967], trans. Ken Knabb (London: Rebel Press, 2004), p. 11. 68. Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany [1930], trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Verso, 1998), p. 39. 69. Ibid., p. 88. 70. Ibid.

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71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

79.

80.

81. 82.

83. 84.

85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

92. 93.

302

Ibid., p. 92. Ibid., p. 91. Ibid. Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, p. 9. Ibid., p. 10. Kracauer, The Salaried Masses, p. 39. Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today [1925], trans. and intro. James I. Dunnett (London: Architectural Press, 1987), p. 7. Tag Gronberg, ‘Making up the modern city: modernity on display at the 1925 Exposition’, in Carol S. Eliel, Franc¸oise Ducros and Tag Gronberg, L’Esprit Nouveau: Purism in Paris, 1918–1925 (New York: Harry N. Abrahms, 2001), p. 113. Robert Delaunay, ‘Constructionism and Neoclassicism’ [1924], in Arthur A. Cohen, The New Art of Color: The Writings of Robert and Sonia Delaunay (New York: The Viking Press, 1978), p. 4. Christopher Townsend, ‘Slave to the rhythm: Sonia Delaunay’s fashion project and the fragmentary, mobile modernist body’, in Jan Brand and Jos´e Teunissen (eds), The Power of Fashion: About Design and Meaning (Amsterdam: Terra, Artez, 2006), pp. 364–9 and 378–9. Kuisel, Capitalism and the State in Modern France, p. 77. Walter Benjamin, ‘On some motifs on Baudelaire’ [1939], in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations [1940], trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1977), p. 170. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night [1934] (Middlesex: Penguin, 1968), p. 85. Walter Benjamin, ‘Capitalism as religion’ [1921], in Selected Writings Vol. I 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996), p. 288. L´eger, ‘A letter’, in L´eger and Purist Paris (London: Tate Gallery 1970), p. 88. Fernand L´eger, ‘The machine aesthetic, the manufactured object, the artisan and the artist’ [1922], L´eger and Purist Paris, p. 86 (my emphasis). Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, p. 9. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 147. Ibid., p. 149. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 6. Michel Foucault, ‘Technologies of the self ’ [1982], in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: New York Press, 1997), p. 225. Ibid. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 232.

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103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117.

118.

Ibid., p. 350. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 5. Ibid., p. 119. Foucault, ‘Body/Power’, pp. 55, 56–7. Ibid., p. 56. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 113. Ibid., p. 242. Ibid., p. 241. This ranges from the normalised and optimal amount of hours a mother ‘invests’ in her child as an exercise in investment capital, to the economic rationalisation of marriage in the coexistence of individuals, to processes for criminalisation. (Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, pp. 229 and 245). See ibid., pp. 243, 245 and Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 182. Ibid., p. 166. See Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 270. Ibid. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism [1905], trans. Talcott Parsons. (London: Unwin, 1974), p. 181. Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, p. 182. Ibid., p. 185. Ibid., p. 146. Ibid., p. 239. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space [1974], trans. Donald NicholsonSmith (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991), p. 277. Ibid., p. 52. Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, p. 155. Jonathan Leake, ‘Pesticide nun’, The Ecologist 36/3 (April 2006), pp. 50– 7. ˇ zek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: Five Interventions in the Slavoj Ziˇ (Mis)use of a Notion (London and New York: Verso, 2001), p. 38. Schmitt, cited in Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich [1984] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 121. Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard, The Inhuman [1988] (London: Polity Press, 1991).

NOTES PP. 256–260

94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102.

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Index ‘1910’, 18, 41, 46, 54–55, 67 Abbaye de Cr´eteil, 48–49, 55–57, 58, 59 Abbaye de Th´el´ema, 56 Adam, Paul, 56 Adelman, Lucy & Michael Compton, 111 Adorno, Theodor W., 132 Adshead, S. D., 228 Agamben, Giorgio, 16, 211, 224, 240–241, 242–243, 246, 255–257 (see also biopolitics) Alberti, Leon Battista, 32, 33, 36, 82, 136, 182, 197, 202 Al-hazen, 80 Allard, Roger, 47, 48, 125, 136 Althusser, Louis, 2 Antliff, Mark, 71–72 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 133, 180 Cubism, 47, 48, 51, 54, 68 fourth dimension, 112, 113, 114, 195

‘simultaneity’ and the Delaunays, 93, 94–5, 102, 104, 108, 124, 128 Archipenko, Alexander, 149 Arcos, Ren´e, 52, 55, 56, 57, 59 Aristotle, 180, 192 Armstrong, Tim, 4, 66, 208 Association Ernst Renan, 55, 56, 58 Balla, Giacomo, 86 Ballets Russes, 90, 92, 98, 129 Baron, Stanley, 89, 90, 130 Barr, Alfred H., 13–14, 137–139 Barzun, Henri-Martin, 56–57 Baxandall, Michael, 18, 20, 23, 40–42, 46, 139 Behrendt, Walter Curt, 227 Bell, Clive, 179 Bendelow, Gillian (see Williams, Simon & Gillian Bendelow) Benjamin, Walter capitalism, 250, 252 history, 13 shock, 246–247

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Benjamin, Walter (cont.) storytelling, 141 ‘Theories of German Fascism’, 167, 172 time, 141–142, 164 World War I 165, 167 Bergson, Henri cubism, 20, 54, 61, 63–64, 67, 68, 69, 72, 77, 108, 111, 112 intersubjectivity, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77–78, 113, 127 modern context, 5, 6, 114, 128 perception and reality, 53–54, 101, 116, 130, 140, 195, 237 time, 19, 63–64, 74, 76, 82, 88–89, 106, 110, 140 Berkeley, George, 24, 35, 40 Berman, Marshall, 5 Beye, Peter, 150, 154, 206 biocept, 16, 87–88, 119–120, 154, 163–164, 169, 171, 191, 193, 198, 202–203, 205 biograph, 12, 13, 88–89, 131, 142, 164, 238 see also Delaunay, Sonia; La Robe Simultan´ee biopolitics, 14, 16–17, 40, 174, 175, 236, 238–244, 257, 258 biopower (see biopolitics) Biran, Maine de, 68, 84 Biro, Matthew, 205, 208 Blake, William, 188, 190 Blaue Reiter, Der, 119, 133, 144 Blondel, Maurice, 13, 68, 106–108, 128, 191 body embodiment, 1, 2, 12, 16, 39, 40, 42–43, 50, 213, 229, 236, 247, 258

ideological representation, 1–2, 3, 14, 15, 20, 25, 238–244 modern ‘object’ of knowledge, 2, 4, 19, 38–44 monumental body, 14, 15, 176–180, 204, 205, 214 movement and female fashion, 129–130 society, 1–2 vision and knowledge, 79—88 see also biopolitics see also subject see also Taylorism see also vision Bosse, Abraham, 24–25 ´ Boutroux, Emile, 68, 107 Braque, Georges, 20, 46, 54–55, 61–2, 139, 147 Breton, Andr´e, 94 Brooke, Peter, 48, 52, 57–58, 59, 60, 71, 72, 74 Brooks, Lynn, 191, 197–8 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 36 tavloletta, 32, 34–35, 36, 80 Brunschvicg, L´eon, 68 Buckberrough, Sherry, 89, 98, 102, 108, 120 Butler, Samuel, 10 Canudo, Ricciotto, 94, 97, 112 Casson, Stanley, 179 Cendrars, Blaise, 100–101 La Prose du Transsib´erien, 98–101, 102, 103 relation to the avant-garde, 85–86, 94, 95, 104, 110, 114, 136, 230 relation with Robert Delaunay, 85–86

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‘analytic’ and ‘synthetic’, 137 composition, 49–50, 52 ‘crystal’ cubism’, 134, 125, 237 cubo-futurism, 104, 126, 127, 144 Du ‘Cubisme’, 54, 59, 62, 68, 70–71, 75, 112 emergence, 18, 20–23, 51, 54, 68 ganzfield, 62 ‘grid’, 13, 137, 149, 236, 237, 241 legacy, 136–139, 143–145, 147, 179, 192, 218–219, 225, 227 notoriety, 46–48 philosophical context, 67–69 political debate, 20–22 Puteaux Group, 68–69, 111, 113 radical visual form, 23–25, 34, 39, 44–46, 77 rationalisation, 258–259 reaction and WWI, 133–6 ‘rhizome’, 237, 238, 241

INDEX

work with Sonia Delaunay, 95, 97, 118, 119, 122, 125–126, 130 Cesariono, Cesare, 182, 183, 184–185, 186 C´ezanne, Paul, 5, 43, 44–45, 50, 70, 75, 80, 110, 139, 150 Chaplin, Charlie, 213 Chardin, J.S., 40–41 Cheselden, William, 24, 50 Chevreul, Michel Eug`ene, 12, 84–85, 114 Clark, Edmund & L. S. Jacyna, 42 Clart´e, 57, 65 classicism, 4, 5, 11, 15–16, 32–33, 39, 160, 172, 210, 223, 237, 258 World War I, 134–6, 139–140, 143 Closerie de Lilas, 47 Cocteau, Jean, 142–143 Cohen, Arthur, A., 95–97, 134 Collins, Peter, 234–235 Comenthale, Edward, 5 Compton, Michael (see Adelman, Lucy & Michael Compton) Conrad, Joseph, 64 consumerism, 14, 65, 165, 212–3, 247, 248, 250, 252 Cooper, Douglas, 144 Cottington, David, 48, 56–7, 69, 71, 72, 97, 112 Courbet, Gustave, 20, 70 Cowling, Elizabeth, 243 Cox, Neil, 19, 22, 56, 112, 143, 226 Crary, Jonathan, 4, 40, 43, 83 see also subject; ‘crisis’ of Cubism, 4, 5, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 90, 101, 195

Dada, 13, 134, 170, 258 ´ Dalcroze, Emile Jaques, 193 Damase, Jacques, 89, 97, 121 Damisch, Hubert, 18–19, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36 Darwin, Charles, 173, 181 death, 2, 27, 108, 141, 165–167, 176, 210–211, 242, 247 Debord, Guy, 246, 248 Delaunay, Robert, 133 artistic concerns, 115 artistic milieu, 20, 22, 47, 58, 62, 68, 94–95, 119, 144–145 career with Sonia Delaunay, 97–98, 131 Futurism, 103–5 Hommage a Bl´eriot, 103, 105, 109

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Delaunay, Robert (cont.) influences, 12, 85–86, 93, 106–110, 113–117, 119 modernity, 102–105 postwar affects, 133–134, 135–6 Delaunay, Sonia, 12–13, 15, 79 Advertisement, 251 artistic influences, 68, 90–91, 94–95, 111, 127, 145 Autoportrait, 106 background, 89, 92, 97–8 Binding for Blaise Cendrars’s Les Pˆaques a New York, 95, 96, 119 consumerism, 249–250 Couverture, 98, 99 Danseuse, 123, 126 gender attitudes, 97–98, 129 Jeune Finlandaise, 91 La Prose du Transsib´erien, 94, 98–103, 119, 131 La Robe Simultan´ee, 12, 88–89, 100, 120–132, 227, 249–250 Le Bal Bullier, 117–119, 121, 125 Philom`ene, 91–92 philosophical influences, 85, 93, 106–110, 114–117, 119 Prismes e´lectriques, 86, 87, 103 Tango, Magic-City, 123 see also biograph Delbos, Victor, 67 Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari, 13–14, 137, 139, 213 Derain, Andr´e, 54, 91, 133 Derrida, Jacques, 117 Descartes, Ren´e, 24, 40, 42, 87, 88, 117, 118, 180 De Stijl, 134, 225–226 Diderot, Denis, 24, 41 Divisionism, 111

Dix, Otto, 146, 147, 171, 208 Dobson, Frank, 179–180 Doesburg, Theo van, 134 225–227, 237, 257–258 Duchamp, Marcel, 57, 68, 93, 111, 139 Duchamp-Villon, Raymond, 22, 68, 133 Ducros, Franc¸oise, 218 Duhamel, Georges, 55, 56, 57, 59 Duncan, Isadora, 193 D¨urer, Albrecht, 37, 38 Edwards, Tristan, 228 Eiffel Tower, 11, 64, 95, 102–103, 135–136, 250 Einstein, Albert, 5, 67 114 Elsen, Albert Edward, 176, 178 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 10 Engelstein, Steffi, 190 Epstein, Elizabeth, 119, 144 Euclid, 5, 24, 28, 33, 37, 161 Evenson, Norma, 229, 230 fascism, 131–132, 167, 215, 242–243, 246 Fauvism, 20, 90, 91, 92 Feininger, T. Lux, 163 Fibonacci series, 234–235 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 252 Ford, Henry, 66, 244 Foster, Hal, 170 Foucault, Michel see also biopolitics see also body; new ‘object’ of knowledge on German liberalism, 172 see also subject; ‘crisis’ of

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Gage, John, 111 Galileo, 37 229 Gall, Franz Joseph, 42 Gance, Abel, 126 Gasquet, Joachim, 45 Gauguin, Paul, 20, 91, 121 George, Waldemar, 179 Ghil, Ren´e, 60 Giedion, Sigfried, 18 Giocondo, Giovanni, 182, 184 Giorgio, Francesco di, 185, 186 Gleizes, Albert, 11–12, 15 Abbaye de Cr´eteil, 55–7, 59 attitudes towards Modernity, 65–67 cubist development, 55 cubist controversy, 21–23, 51–52 D´epiquage des Moissons, (61), 64, 66, 72 figure-enviromnent bionomic, 61–64, 65–66, 71–2, 74–8 fourth dimension, 112–113, 140 influences, artistic, 46, 48–49, 50, 51, 54, 58, 63–65 influences, theoretical, 53–55, 56, 59–60, 67, 68–70, 71, 72, 74–76

La Cuisine, 59, 60, 63, 64 La Femme aux Phlox, 46, 47, 50–54, 59, 62–64, 67, 72 La Ville et la Fleuve, 72, 73 Les Baigneuses, 72 Paysage a` Meudon, 77 political orientation, 57–58, 65–66, 70, 134 Portrait de Jacques Nayral, 67–8, (69), 72–8, 127 Robert Delaunay, 93 see also Abbaye de Cr´eteil see also Association Ernst Renan see also Clart´e see also Cubism see also Salon d’Automne see also Salon des Ind´ependants Giotto, 36, 70 Goethe, J.W., 12, 82–83, 84 Golan, Romy, 65, 169 Golding, John, 22, 48, 144 Gombrich, Ernst, 26, 27, 36 Green, Christopher, 57–58, 65, 134, 135, 136, 169, 225, 226, 237 Gregory, Adrian, 1, 166 Gris, Juan, 68, 70, 71, 134, 135, 138 Gronberg, Tag, 97, 249 Gropius, Walter, 145, 159, 160, 162–163 Grosz, George, 133, 146, 147, 171, 208 Guattari, Felix (see Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari) Gurlitt, Cornelius, 228

INDEX

vision and knowledge 5, 29, 31–32, 34, 35, 36, 38, 53 Francesca, Piero della, 31 Fresnaye, Roger de la, 22, 68, 102, 112, 133 Fresnel, Augustin, Jean, 42 Freud, Sigmund, 58, 141, 142, 170 Freyer, Hans, 175 Futurism, 4, 5, 6, 103–105, 108–109, 111, 121, 122, 125, 144

Harvey, David, 10, 140, 244 Hau, Michael, 243–244 Hausmann, Raoul, 208

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Heisenberg, Werner, 141, 142 Helmholtz, Herman von, 24, 43, 44, 50, 59, 60, 67, 111 Henderson, Linda Dalrymple, 111, 112, 113, 114 Henry, Charles 59–60, 74, 81–82 Herbart, Johann, 83 Herf, Jeffrey, 146, 167, 170, 171–172, 173, 174 Hight, Eleanor, 214 Hillach, Ansger, 167, 168 Hodgson, John, 192, 193, 201 Holden, Wendy, 166 Hollander, Anne, 130 Hoog, Michel, 86 Hopper, Robert, 179 Howells, Bernard, 84 human sciences, 4, 39, 42–43, 83, 243 Husserl, Edmund, 29, 30–31, 32, 35, 67, 68 see also perspective Imdahl, Max, 101, 110 Imrie, Rob, 227–228, 229 intersubjectivity, 12, 70–71, 74–78, 125, 131–132, 215, 249–250, 258 Jacob, Max, 62 Jacyna, L. S. (see also Clark, Edmund & L. S. Jacyna) James, William, 43–44, 140 Jason, Neville, 179–180 Jastrow, Joseph, 52 Johnson, Mark (see also Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson) Jones, Owen, 220 Joyce, James, 19, 140–141, 142

326

J¨unger, Ernst, 65, 131, 168, 173–175, 211, 215, 223 Kahnweiler, Daniel, 20, 51, 62 Kandinsky, Wassily, 93, 114, 119–120, 133, 144, 151 Kant, Immanuel, 4, 5, 26, 28, 29–30, 43 Karmel, Pepe, 11, 44, 138 Kemp, Martin, 27–28, 35, 36–37, 80, 81, 82 Kepler, Johannes, 80–81 Kern, Stephen, 5, 10, 11 Klee, Paul, 97, 119, 145 Kracauer, Siegfried, 165, 177, 211–216, 219, 245, 246, 247–248, 249, 252 Kuchling, Heimo, 160 Kuisel, Richard, 245, 250 Kupka, Frantiˇsek, 68, 133, 134 Laban, Rudolf, 180, 257–258 bodily conceptualisation, 15, 139, 190–191, 195, 202–3 icosahedron, 15, 192, 193, 196, 197–198, 200, 201–203 ‘Kinesphere’, 196–203, 237, 257 philosophy, 191–194, 195–196 Lachelier, Jules, 68 Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson, 79, 86–87 Laurencin, Marie, 47, 54 Le Corbusier, Apr`es le cubisme, 15, 218, 219 architecture as self-portrait, 221, 222, 229–230 classicism, 16, 217, 237 cybernetics, 217

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Luk´acs, Georg, 10 Lyotard, Jean-Franc¸ois, 28, 205, 260

INDEX

influences, 219–222, 223, 224, 233 L’Esprit nouveau, 216, 219 Modulor, 220, 230–234, 231, 232, 233, 244 philosophy & aesthetic, 16, 216, 220–223, 228–9, 231 see also Purism rationalisation, 154, 216–218, 221–223, 226–229, 230, 235, 237, 248–249 reactionary views, 216–217, 223 Le Fauconnier, 20, 22, 47, 48, 49, 55 L’Abondance, 48, 58 Lefebvre, Henri, 18, 19–20, 52, 214, 216, 258 L´eger, Fernand, 126 cubism, 20, 22, 47, 51, 52–53, 58, 70 La Profil au Vase, 252, 254, 255 Les Deux Femmes a` la Toilette, 252, 253, 255 Nues dans la forˆet, 49–50 Purism, 15, 169, 226, 248, 252–255, 257 World War I, 133, 169 Lehman, Arnold, 210 Lehmbruck, Wilhelm, 149, 178 Lenin, Vladimir, 248 Lentulov, Aristakh, 144 Leonardo (da Vinci) modernist influence, 70, 105, 108 perspective, 80, 81, 85 105, 117 Vitruvian man, 16, 186, 187, 197, 201 Lhote, Andr´e, 135, 136, 168 Lidtke, Vernon, 145, 146 Locke, John, 23–24, 38, 40, 41, 44, 81

Mach, Ernst, 5–6, 43, 76, 84 Maillol, Aristide, 178–180 Malevich, Kasimir, 144 Marc, Franz, 119, 133, 144 Marcuse, Herbert, 238, 246, 247, 248, 249, 255–9 ´ Marey, Etienne-Jules, 9, 10, 15, 202 Marinetti, F.T., 108, 133, 135, 144 Marx, Karl 10, 140, 172, 173, 213 Masaccio, 35 Masson, Andr´e, 138, 169 Matisse, Henri, 20, 91, 92, 113, 133 Maurras, Charles, 134 Maxwell, James Clerk, 42 McKenzie, R. Tait, 204 Meier-Graefe, Julius, 91 Mellor, Anne, 190 Mercereau, Alexandre, 55, 56–57, 58, 59, 112 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1 Merrheim, Alphonse, 212 Metropolis (Fritz Lang), 213 Metzinger, Jean, 20, 47, 48, 51, 52, 54, 65, 68, 71–2, 113 Michelangelo, 79–80 Miller, Arthur, 114 modernity industrial, 14, 15, 65–66, 89 knowledge, 4, 19–20, 32, 39, 236 nostalgia, 48, 169 technology, 1–2, 5, 19, 42, 61, 64–67, 86, 102–103, 129, 167–8, 174–175 Moholy-Nagy, L´aszl´o, 133, 214 Molyneux, William, 23–24, 38, 43, 44

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Mondrian, Piet, 134, 225, 226, 227, 237, 257–258 Moos, Stanislaus von, 220 Morano, Elizabeth, 98 Moriarty, Catherine, 178 Muhlstein, Hans, 168 M¨uller, Johannes, 43 Murray, Irena Zantovska, 144 Muybridge, Edward, 7, 8, 15, 25

O’Neill, John, 1 Oll´e-Laprune, L´eon, 107 Orphism, 56, 93, 138 see also Delaunay, Sonia see also Delaunay, Robert Ozenfant, Am´ed´ee, 90, 142–143, 218, 237, 248 see also Purism

modernity, 11, 12–13, 18, 25, 39, 40–41, 44, 46, 51–53, 54, 75, 80–86, 111, 115, 195 Picabia, Francis, 21, 57, 68, 139, 143 Picasso, Pablo conceptual significance, 20, 51–52, 113, 114, 139 Cubism, 22, 46, 54–55, 58, 61–62 Surrealism, 138 World War I, 50, 133–134, 135, 136 Pick, Daniel, 243–244 Plato, 143, 161, 180, 192, 196, 197–198, 233 Poe, Edgar Allan, 208 Poincar´e, Henri, 5, 43, 112, 113, 114 Poincar´e, Raymond, 134 Poiret, Paul, 129 Princet, Maurice, 67, 68, 113, 114 Prinz, Jesse, 25, 26 Proust, Marcel, 64, 90, 141 psychophysics, 12, 44–45, 59–60, 74, 80, 81–82, 84, 85, 86, 88, 114 Purism, 15, 134, 136, 143, 147, 168, 169, 218, 219, 226 See also Le Corbusier See also Ozenfant, Am´ed´ee Pythagoras, 24, 193, 196, 197, 220, 227, 233

Panofsky, Erwin, 26–27, 31, 37 ‘passage’, 45, 68, 72, 75–77 P´eguy, Charles, 1, 18 perspective cultural, religious and historical construct, 24–38

Rabinbach, Anson, 146, 158, 210, 212 ‘rappel a` l’ordre’, 4, 13, 15, 65, 168–169, 241, 243, 249, 258 Ravaisson, F´elix, 68

Nancy, Jean-Luc, 87 Necker, Albert, 52 new ‘geist’, 170 171–175, 215, 226, 245, 252 ‘new man’, 132, 164–165, 167–171, 172–5, 180, 205–208, 215 Newton, Isaac, 23, 43, 82, 140 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 71, 72, 76 ‘Perspectivism’, 6, 30, 62 No¨el, L´eon, 67 Noland, Carrie, 89

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Salisbury, John of, 222 Salmon, Andr´e, 47, 48, 113, 136 Salon d’Automne, 20–22, 54 Salon des Ind´ependants, 21, 22, 46–48, 54 Scamozzi, Vincenzo, 189 Schleifer, Ronald, 140–142, 164 Schlemmer, Oskar, 14–15, 16, 65, 139, 210, 226, 227, 235 artistic context, 145–6, 159–160 Ambulant architecture, 206 Bauhaustreppe, 209, 210 cubism, 145, 147, 149–162, 168, 208, 210, 237 cultural and political context, 146–7, 160, 170–172, 173–175, 204

Egozentrische Raumlineatur, 161, 162, 163, 165, 193 Figure und Raumlineature, 149, 161, 163, 165, 180, 181, 190, 193, 223 Halbfigure mit betonten Formen, 158–159 H¨auser (Klostergarten), 147, 148 Komposition auf Rosa, 151, 152 Marionette, 207 mechanised body, 153–159, 163, 164–5, 175–6, 189, 205, 208 Plan mit Figuren, 153–4 Raum und Figur, 175 Relief im Gips und Glas, 157–158, 174 Relief JG, 155 Relief JG in Bronzen, 156 Schmitt, Carl, 259 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 76, 84 Scott, Clive, 95, 101 Section D’Or, 66, 70 Segonzac, Andr´e Dunoyer de, 90 Senger, Alexander von, 228 Sennett, Richard, 222 Serenyi, Peter, 221, 222, 228 Seurat, Georges, 81, 110 Severini, Gino, 136, 225 Silver, Kenneth, 15, 57, 133, 134, 135, 136, 142, 169, 219, 249 simultaneity, 12–13, 19–20, 23, 69, 94, 100–105, 115–120, 131, 140—141 see also Delaunay, Sonia see also Romains, Jules Sluijters, Jan, 86 Spate, Virginia, 50, 56, 85, 93, 105, 115, 121–122, 134

INDEX

Raynal, Maurice, 120 Ribemont-Dessaignes, Georges, 68 Richards, Simon, 16, 223 Robbins, Daniel, 46, 54, 57, 58, 59, 63, 74, 75, 77, 113, 137 Rodchenko, Aleksandr, 214 Romains, Jules, 55, 57, 59, 65, 72, 74, 97, 131, 215 see also intersubjectivity ‘Unanimism’, 56, 59, 108, 109, 110, 121, 127 R¨ontgen, Wilhelm, 2, 3 Rood, Ogden, 111 Rosenblatt, Nina, 16, 223–224 Rousseau, Henri, 91, 94, 117, 149 Rubin, Edgar 52, 60 Ruskin, John 43, 44, 50 Russell, Bertrand, 141

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spectacle, 211–212, 213, 215, 246, 248, 255, 256, 258 Spengler, Oswald, 172–173, 215 Spurzheim, Johann Christoph, 42 St. Augustine, 63–65 Steadman, Philip, 186 subject see also body crisis of, 4, 20, 23, 38–44 environment, 6, 19, 61–67, 70–75, 77, 92, 116–119, 124–5 new form, 1, 18 representation of, 11, 14 Sufism, 192 Surrealism, 134, 138, 258 Symbolism, 20 Szittya, Emile, 86 Taccola, Mariano, 84 Taine, Hippolyte, 44 Taylor, Brian Brace, 235 Taylorism 10, 14, 15, 202, 211–212, 218, 219, 235, 241, 244 Theweleit, Klaus, 132, 170, 215 Tiege, Karel, 228–229 time and space collapse, 13, 19–20 compression, 6, 10 modernity, 11, 19, 24, 51–2, 63–65, 136, 140–142, 226 non-Euclidean mathematics & the fourth dimension, 5, 46, 67, 72, 92, 111–117, 121 perception of, 42–44, 50 see also simultaneity subjectivity, 55, 74–76, 190

330

Townsend, Christopher, 125, 127–128, 131, 249 Tupitsyn, Margarita, 214 Turner, J.M.W., 39 Turner, Paul, 219, 220 Uhde, Wilhelm, 90, 91, 97 Unanimism see Romains, Jules Eyck, Jan Van, 34 Van Gogh, Vincent, 90, 91 Maur, Karin von, 147, 151, 154, 208, 210 Vildrac, Charles, 55, 56, 57 Villon, Jacques, 68 vision see also body; embodiment cultural construct, 24–28, 31, 35–37 embodiment, 32–35, 42–46, 50, 79–89, 119–120 gestalt, 52–53, 62, 70–74 knowledge, 32, 79–80 see also perspective philosophy of, 23–25 Vitruvius, 136, 196 Vitruvian Man, 16, 181–190, 192, 197, 203, 230–231, 238 Vogt, Eric, 246 Vreeland, Diana, 98, 130 Vrieson, Gustav, 104 Walden, Herwarth, 94, 97, 119, 146 Watkin, David, 230 Weber, Max, 172, 180, 257, 259 Weiner, Norbert, 141 Wells, H.G., 166

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World War I, 50, 133 affect upon artistic avant-garde, 133–5, 142 cultural affects, 133–4, 160, 165 trauma, 139, 160, 166–169, 170, 189, 204, 205, 207

INDEX

Williams, Simon & Gillian Bendelow, 180 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 53, 75–76, 140 Wittkower, Rudolph, 188, 197, 231, 233–234, 235 Woolf, Virginia, 18, 19, 140–141, 142

ˇ zek, Slavoj, 172, 213, 259 Ziˇ

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