The Enchantment of Art: Abstraction and Empathy from German Romanticism to
Expressionism
Author(s): David Morgan
Source: Journal of the History of Ideas , Apr., 1996, Vol. 57, No. 2 (Apr., 1996), pp. 317341
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3654101
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The Enchantment of Art:
Abstraction and Empathy
from German Romanticism
to Expressionism
David Morgan
A familiar tradition since the eighteenth century has invested art with the
power to heal a decadent human condition. Inheriting this ability from
religion-the romantic enthusiast Wilhelm Wackenroder considered artistic
inspiration to originate in "divine inspiration" in the case of his hero,
Raphael'-art eventually replaced institutionalized belief in an evolutionary
schedule of cultural development determined by German idealism. Hegel, for
instance, theorized the evolution of spirit from religion to art as a qualitative
advancement over time. Rejecting the metaphysics of German idealism,
Friedrich Nietzsche nevertheless contended that "Art raises its head where
religions decline." By assuming the "feelings and moods" of religion which
had been dismantled by enlightenment, Nietzsche claimed that art gave new
form to the life of feeling and imbued human endeavors with a "loftier,
darker coloration."2 In the early twentieth century Wassily Kandinsky believed that the "spiritual in art" was the historical manifestation of an "inner
necessity" that was in itself timeless and universal. Kandinsky portrayed the
"life of the spirit" as "a large acute-angled triangle divided horizontally into
unequal parts." In a kind of "trickle down" aesthetic, the compartments of
the triangle move slowly upward toward the apex, which is inhabited by the
solitary genius of an age whose vision gradually elevates all those who
occupy the lower stages.3
t Wilhelm Wackenroder, Confessionsfrom the Heart of an Art-Loving Friar, 1796, in
Confessions and Fantasies, tr. Mary Hurst Schubert (University Park, Penn., 1971), 83.
2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, tr. Marion
Fabor with Stephen Lehmann (Lincoln, 1984), 105 (? 150).
3 Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, tr. M. T. H. Sadler (New York,
1977), 6-7.
317
Copyright 1996 by Journal of the History of Ideas, Inc.
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318
David Morgan
The point for proponents of the spiritual in art from romanticism to
expressionism (and beyond) was to find in works of art what can best be
described as an enchantment.4 As the negotiation of the gaps or disjunctures
separating human beings from complete power over their lives, enchantment
conjoins the plane of immediate human experience to a desirable state of
affairs through the mediation of such symbolic devices as rituals, incantations, or charms. Thus, evil can be warded off by the use of an apotropaic
amulet, and fertility can be enhanced by the recitation of a suitable prayer or
the performance of a certain ritual. In a modem analogy a sense of impotence
is often alleviated by a trip to the mall where the bored therapeutically lose
themselves in symbolic acts of self-renewing consumption. In the traditions
of philosophy and science, systems of representation such as astrology, the
microcosm, the harmony of the spheres, the great chain of being, the celestial
hierarchies, or the mechanisms of theurgy and divination situate humanity
within a cosmos that follows a particular order accessible to and in some
degree manipulable by human beings. Enchantment consists of an apparatus
of belief whose form of representation or enactment is thought to exert
influence over the realities it configures.
But enchantment is not limited to the spells and magic of premodern
metaphysics (or modem consumerism). By means of religion, morality, and
aesthetics, Nietzsche once averred, "man likes to believe that ... he is
touching the heart of the world."5 This study will focus on the manner in
which art as constructed within the idealist tradition of German art theory
functioned as an enchantment. Specifically, it will explore what the history of
ideas about abstraction and empathy has to tell us about the spiritualization or
enchantment of art. After identifying the philosophical and aesthetic wherewithal of enchantment in nineteenth-century Germany, attention focusses on
Franz Marc's early twentieth-century theorization of abstraction. It is certainly more customary to study Kandinsky, whose writings and early efforts
at abstraction are much better known, but Marc's ideas offer more immediate
connections to German intellectual history and clarify the aims of his abstract
art as a strategy of enchantment. Moreover, Marc was unusually articulate
and wrote often, exploring ideas and artistic efforts with great insight.
Focusing on Marc therefore offers a corrective to the historiography that has
favored Kandinsky's writings. Finally, Marc differed from his Russian friend
over the cause of the war. Manifesting a difference that is portentous for this
study, Kandinsky left Germany for Russia in 1914, while Marc enthusiastically took up arms for the fatherland. Given these circumstances and the
unfortunate tendency of art historians to valorize expressionist art rather than
situate it in the ideological context of its production, it is time to delimit more
precisely than has usually been done what Marc sought to do and how it
4 On the role of enchantment in the history of scientific hermeneutics see Mark A.
Schneider, Culture and Enchantment (Chicago, 1993). For a contemporary advocacy of
enchantment in art see Suzi Gablik, The Reenchantment of Art (New York, 1991).
5 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 16 (?4).
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319
The Enchantment of Art
related to a nineteenth-century history of thought that has exercised enormous influence on the visual and creative culture of enchantment in European
and American society in the twentieth century.
Strategies of Enchantment:
Abstraction and Empathy from Schopenhauer to Marc
In the eighteenth century abstraction in the creation of a work of art was
generally defined as the determination of the essence of a thing.6 The artist
was thought to arrive at this essence by a process of generalization whereby
particulars were eliminated until only a subject's generic, universal quali-
ties-its essence-remained. It was this view that informed Hegel's discussion of the artist's treatment of the "essence" or "universal idea" and
Schopenhauer's assertion that the individual was raised to the "Idea of its
species" in aesthetic contemplation. Yet Hegel and Schopenhauer created
idealist philosophies which were distinguished by virtue of a peculiar interpretive value, a capacity to account in a sweeping manner for the human
condition and in a way that gave art a central importance. Hegel worked out a
dynamic of history in which Geist or spirit drew ever closer to its ultimate
self-expression and characterized in its development the historical ages of
mind that allowed Hegel and his contemporaries to locate themselves in the
final dispensation. "May the kingdom come," he wrote to Schelling, "and
may our hands not be idle."7 A darker vision animated Schopenhauer's
lamentation on the will as the basis of suffering. All existence groans and the
only redemption is to recognize the true nature of things and to pursue the
transcendence of art or the path of the ascetic. Each in his own way, Hegel
and Schopenhauer offered an immediate revelation of true being in art. It was
the concrete immediacy of this other that distinguished German romantic
idealism. The enchantment of romanticism was that the absolute was not
strictly absolute but immanent in nature, in the human self, and in the work of
art.
For Schopenhauer the art work disclosed the eternal platonic form under-
lying appearances. Thus, "the object of aesthetic contemplation is not the
individual thing, but the Idea in it striving for revelation."8 Knowledge of the
6 See David Morgan, "The Rise and Fall of Abstraction in Eighteenth-Century Art
Theory," Eighteenth-Century Studies, 27 (1994), 449-78.
7 Quoted in Walter Schmithals, The Apocalyptic Movement: Introduction and Interpretation, tr. John E. Steely (Nashville, 1975), 230. Schmithals writes of Hegel's view:
"This kingdom of the divine Spirit is actualized in history, and the eschatological
judgment of the world coincides with the history of the world as a whole" (ibid.). See also
M. H. Abrams, "Apocalypse: Themes and Variations," in The Apocalypse in English
Renaissance Thought and Literature, ed. C. A. Patrides and Joseph Wittreich (Ithaca,
1984), 360-62; and Karl L6with, From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revelation in NineteenthCentury Thought, tr. David E. Green (Garden City, N.Y., 1967), 29-49.
8 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, tr. E. F. J. Payne (2
vols.; Indian Hills, Col., 1958), I, 209.
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David Morgan
320
Idea is the aim of all art, according to Schopenhauer, and such knowledge is
achieved only by passing out of the contingency of space and time. This
occurs when we
devote the whole power of our mind to perception, sink ourselves
completely therein, and let our whole consciousness be filled by the
calm contemplation of the natural object actually present, whether it
be a landscape, a tree, a rock, a crag, a building, or anything else. We
lose ourselves entirely in this object ... we forget our individuality,
our will, and continue to exist as pure subject, as clear mirror of the
object, so that it is as though the object alone existed without anyone
to perceive it, and thus we are no longer able to separate the perceiver
from the perception, but the two have become one.... Now in such
contemplation, the particular thing at one stroke becomes the Idea of
its species, and the perceiving individual becomes the pure subject of
knowing. The individual, as such, knows only particular things; the
pure subject of knowledge knows only Ideas. (178-79)
The legacy of German idealism persisted throughout the nineteenth
century. The work of such philosophers and aestheticians as Friedrich
Theodor Vischer and Eduard von Hartmann was fundamentally indebted to
Schopenhauer, Schiller, and Hegel. Schopenhauer's philosophy was also
vital to Nietzsche in the early 1870s, when his first published works defended
direct access to the "primordial will" that he found embodied in Wagner's
music.9 In 1907 Georg Simmel published his Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, in
which he gave a long chapter to Schopenhauer's "Metaphysik der Kunst."'0
Schopenhauer's concept of self-alienation in aesthetic contemplation played
a particularly important role in the early work of someone who had attended
Simmel's lectures as a student in Berlin, the art historian Wilhelm Worringer.
In his well-known Abstraction and Empathy (1908), Worringer drew an
explicit analogy between his description of the transcendental inclination of
the abstract Kunstwollen or artistic volition and Schopenhauer's discussion
of escape from the realm of blind will by contemplative immersion in the
work of art."l Before we can fully assess the idealist components of
Worringer's thought, however, it is necessary to examine the development of
empathy as a legacy of idealism.
9 See Nietzsche's Die Geburt der Tragodie (1872) and Schopenhauer als Erzieher
(1874), and, on Nietzsche's debt to Schopenhauer, Julian Young, Nietzsche's Philosophy of
Art (Cambridge, 1992).
10 Georg Simmel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, trs. Helmut Loiskandl, Deena
Weinstein, and Donald Weinstein (Urbana, Ill., 1991).
1 Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, tr. Michael Bullock (London, 1963),
33, note. Worringer's admiration for Simmel is evident (ix) in the foreword he wrote for the
1948 edition of Abstraction and Empathy, where he remembers a chance encounter with
Simmel in Paris during his student years.
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The Enchantment of Art
321
Implicit in Schopenhauer's account of contemplative absorption in art is
a concept of empathy that went on to become one of the major themes in
nineteenth-century German aesthetics. Two broad phases in the history of
empathy theory should be distinguished. The first consisted of an enthusiastic aesthetic experience which sought to break down the distinction between
subjective feeling and objective realities, an experience often described in
pantheistic terms. The second phase represents the attempt to construct a
theory of perception in which human feeling is projected into forms through
the eye's constructive acts of visual interpretation.
In the first phase art was regarded as an affective, pantheistic, fundamentally romantic fusion of the soul with nature. The romantic poet Novalis had
claimed at the beginning of the nineteenth century that no one could grasp
nature who did not possess an "organ for nature" which, with an inner
affinity with all things, "mixes itself through the medium of feeling into all
natural entities, as it were, feels itself into them."'2 This idea persisted
among empathy theorists in Germany. In 1876 the young aesthetician
Johannes Volkelt expressed the enchantment of the pathetic fallacy: "When I
feel my soul from out of the wind and clouds, the mountain and heath, the
illumination of morning and evening, the presentiment penetrates me that
nature is spirit of my spirit, that there is in the strictest sense no duality in the
world."13
The most renowned advocate of empathy, Theodor Lipps, followed
Heinrich W6lfflin in eliminating Volkelt's pantheistic monism from the
treatment of empathy as a psycho-perceptual process. Lipps was instrumental
in putting in place the second major understanding of empathy in the nine-
teenth century.'4 In an essay of 1900 he sought to describe empathy as a
psychological function fundamental to aesthetic experience. He characterized
it as an "animation" of an object which becomes a mirror of the viewer's
personality. According to Lipps, "Aesthetic harmony is grounded in the
harmony of the personal and the foreign...."5 Empathy is a working out of
one's relations with the objective world by means of objectifying oneself.
"Aesthetic sympathy means this: to experience and feel oneself in another, at
12 Quoted in Paul Ster, Einfihlung und Association in der neueren Aesthetik. Beitrage
zur Aesthetik, V (Hamburg, 1898), 3.
13 Johannes Volkelt, Der Symbol-Begriff in der neuesten Aesthetik (Jena, 1876), 114.
14 Heinrich Wolfflin, "Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur," Kleine
Schriften, ed. Joseph Gantner (Basel, 1946), 13-47; translation in Empathy, Form, and
Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1983, intro. and tr. Harry Francis Mallgrave
and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica, 1994). See also Wilhelm Perpeet, "Historisches
und Systematisches zur Einfuhlungsaesthetik," Zeitschrift fur Aesthetik und allgemeine
Kunstwissenschaft, 11 (1966), 193-216, and for a discussion of Theodor Friedrich Vischer
and Robert Vischer, see Mallgrave and Ikonomou, "Introduction," 17-29.
15 Theodor Lipps, "Aesthetische Einfiihlung," Zeitschrift fur Psychologie und
Physiologie der Sinnesorgane, 22 (1900), 426.
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322
David Morgan
the same time in as characteristically intensified, pure, and free a manner as
the nature of the aesthetic object brings with it. Aesthetic enjoyment based on
this is the felicitous feeling of the objectified self."'6 This notion of empathy
inverted the kenosis or self-emptying of Schopenhauer's aesthetic contemplation. The presence in the work of art was ultimately the presence of one's
own self, the animation of otherness with the viewer's ego. As the concept of
empathy became more circumscribed within the bounds of perceptual psychology, the aspect of identity shifted from a pantheistic-ontological unity of
mind and nature to an epistemological imperialism of the human personality
responsible for overcoming all otherness, all difference with its powers of
animation.17 The experience of enchantment was replaced by a scientific
explanation of human feeling and perception.
But the two strands of idealist thought under consideration here-abstraction and empathy-were interwoven in Worringer's aptly titled Abstrac-
tion and Empathy. Worringer's attempt at a "psychology of style" combined
the nineteenth-century study of perception with a philosophical sensibility
colored by Schopenhauer. Worringer contended that the use of abstract line
in geometrical ornament offered comfort to primitive humanity because it
excluded all traces of organic life-that is, the change, growth, and decline
which made for an insecure and finite human existence.'8 Abstract form
created in the space of aesthetic experience a dimension composed of necessity and absolute, immutable regularity, which provided a refuge from the
"caprice" of the organic world (34-35). This yearning for the transcendent
corresponded to an abstract artistic volition or Kunstwollen. Worringer contrasted abstraction with empathy, which he defined after Lipps as the enjoy-
ment of the self projected into an object or form. Worringer repressed or
ignored empathy theorists such as Volkelt, whose thought exhibited an
important debt to idealist metaphysics. Limiting Lipps's empathy to organic
forms and identifying the "abstract Kunstwollen" as the impulse toward
geometrical, inorganic, crystalline forms, Worringer claimed that these forms
denied life because the viewer does not find in them the biomorphic design
which conforms with the design of one's own body.
16 Ibid., 432-33. Lipps was indebted to Robert Vischer's phenomenology of feeling in
Ueber das optische Formgefihl (Leipzig, 1873). Compare Vischer's statement with Lipps:
"To trace the outline of a form is a self-movement, an act that is predominantly subjective:
the form being no more than an arbitrary, willful, and unilateral means by which the body
can enjoy itself" (Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space, 107). But Lipps
moved beyond the idealist metaphysics which still informed Vischer's influential doctoral
dissertation; Vischer's paper is translated in Empathy, Form, and Space, 89-123.
17 Cf. Lipps, Grundlegung der Aesthetik (2 vols.; Hamburg, 1903-5), I, 106: "Der
'Andere' ist die vorgestellte und je nach der ausseren Erscheinung und den wahmehmbaren
Lebensausserungen modifizierte eigene Pers6nlichkeit, ein modifiziertes eigenes Ich. Der
Mensch ausser mir, von dem ich ein Bewusstsein habe, ist eine Verdoppelung und zugleich
eine Modifikation meiner selbst."
18 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, 19-21.
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Fig. 1: Franz Marc, "Small Blue Horses," 1911, oil on canvas, 61.5 x 101 cm. Reprinted by permission
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324
David Morgan
The influence of Worringer's dissertation on German expressionists,
particularly the artists of the Blue Rider, is customarily regarded as considerable. Many have even claimed for it the status of a manifesto.'9 While this is
dubious at best, Karsten Harries's claim that the book "suggested that the
situation of modem man demanded an abstract geometric art" seems an
accurate estimation of the book's significance.20 Early in his book Worringer
observed a parallel between "primitive" and modem humanity. Because the
primitive stood "so lost and spiritually helpless amidst the things of the
external world," he aspired to what Worringer characterized as the "thing in
itself."21 Likewise, though from the intellectual perspective of Kant's
criticial idealism, the modern indulges a "feeling for the 'thing in itself'"
when he refuses to accept phenomena as absolute reality but instead sees in
the visible world, as Worringer quoted Schopenhauer, "the work of Maya,
brought forth by magic, a transitory and in itself unsubstantial semblance,
comparable to the optical illusion" (18). The art of the modern world,
Worringer suggested, shares the abstract Kunstwollen of the primitive.
Yet the question remains just what abstract meant. In fact Worringer did
not intend by abstract the non-objective painting which Kandinsky and others
pursued only a few years later. In Abstraction and Empathy Worringer
praised the ancient Egyptians as those who "carried through most intensively
the abstract tendency in artistic volition" (42). Worringer regarded style as a
synonym for abstraction, and he contrasted style with naturalism in the same
manner that he opposed abstraction to empathy (26). The primary aim of
abstraction was to transcend nature by denying space in representation, as
Riegl had observed. Under the rubric of style Worringer included all artistic
expression whether representational or not-Gothic architecture, primitive
ornament, ancient relief sculpture-which was directed by this denial of
space and use of inorganic forms. Style, like abstraction, meant anything
anti-naturalistic, any art which did not function expressively through empathy. It seems clear, therefore, that Worringer's study was not a brief for non-
representational art.
As for Marc, the evidence is secure that he admired Worringer's general
thesis. In an essay published in PAN in March of 1912 Marc singled out
Abstraction and Empathy and Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art
for unique praise.22 In a group of aphorisms written early in 1915 Worringer's
discussion of abstraction was probably in Marc's mind when he compared
19 Peter Selz, German Expressionist Painting (Berkeley, 1974), 8, calls Abstraction
and Empathy "almost the official guide to expressionist aesthetics"; Ulrich Weisstein,
"Expressionism: Style or 'Weltanschauung,'" Criticism, 9 (1967), 52, refers to it as the
"aesthetic Bible of Expressionism."
20 Karsten Harries, The Meaning of Modern Art: A Philosophical Interpretation
(Evanston, Ill., 1968), 69.
21 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, 18.
22 Franz Marc, Schriften, ed. Klaus Lankheit (Cologne, 1978), 107. When no date
follows a Marc citation, this indicates the 1978 edition of his Schriften.
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The Enchantment of Art
325
the "pure will to the abstract" in tribal art with the modem European "will
to abstract form" (210). Furthermore, it is attractive to parallel Worringer's
ideas of abstraction and empathy with the development in Marc's art and
thought from an earlier affinity with empathy to a later preference for
abstraction. Yet this relationship must be carefully modified for Marc's
conception of empathy was not restricted to Worringer's or to Lipps's. In the
work he produced in 1911 before the influence of cubist and futurist art
(which he would shortly see in Berlin and in organizing the Blue Rider
exhibition) Marc celebrated animal life in the landscape in a way that recalls
the monistic-pantheistic version of empathy theorized by Volkelt. Work such
as Small Blue Horses (fig. 1) organizes animal and landscape into rhythmic
configurations whose curvaceous, rolling forms merge, fusing figure and
ground, and then dissolve the unity into gaseous swirls. This pulse of
formation and dissolution characterizes Marc's pictures of animal life at this
time, which, he wrote in 1910, were informed by "a feeling for the organic
rhythm of all things, a pantheistic feeling of oneself into the quivering and
flowing blood of nature, in the trees, in the animals, in the air" (Marc 98).
In a matter of one or two years Marc went from yearning to feel the life in
nature to creating images that violently dismantled the animal and its happy
existence in the landscape. By 1912-13 he understood the artist's task to be to
escape from all forms of anthropomorphic appropriation of the animal's
autonomous being. "We must unlearn from now on to relate animals and
plants to ourselves and to portray in art our relation to them" (113, emphasis
added). Instead-and here Worringer's notion of primitive mankind's longing for the "thing in itself" comes to mind-the artist must strive to see
things "as they really are," shorn of the categories of human knowledge
(112). Marc became unable to accept empathy as a means of enchantment
because he came to see it as only a projection of anthropomorphic interests.
As with Worringer, Schopenhauer's quest for the transcendence of human
reason in the aesthetic revelation of the Idea came to inspire him.
Yet Marc was not of one mind on this as the war opened and the call to
arms seized Germany. In the final stage of his abbreviated life (he died at
Verdun in 1916) Marc vacillated between an essentialism taken to its logical
extreme by scorning nature in abstract painting, on the one hand-and a
patriotic empathy with the blood and soil of the fatherland represented in the
animal and landscape subject matter of his art, on the other. Accordingly,
Marc's oft-quoted statement in a letter of 1915 that his art became more and
more abstract "out of an inner compulsion" as he came increasingly to
recognize the "ugliness and impurity of nature," which is often interpreted
as consistent with Worringer's view that the abstract artistic drive originated
in an antipathetic attitude toward nature,23 must be balanced against his
patriotic interpretation of Germany's military struggle with the Allies.
23 Franz Marc, Briefe aus dem Feld (Berlin, 1948), 64.
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326
David Morgan
The Rhetoric of Enchantment: Marc's Struggle for the Absolute
The expressionist aesthetic was premised on the rejection of naturalistic
representation because it implied the restriction of the artist to the "seen,"
what the young poet and critic Kasimir Edschmid called the "chain of facts,"
the positivist's building blocks of truth and reality.24 In an essay of 1912
Marc contrasted contemporary painting to the art of the nineteenth century
which, he wrote, was "carried to the grave in a small coffin: the camera"
(Marc 105). Marc asserted that the new art "takes the opposite direction than
all earlier movements, where volition and ability strove for ever greater
accord with the external image of nature, which banished with its bright light
of day the secret and abstract conceptions of the inner life" (105).
The "bright light of day" was an obvious reference to impressionism,
the artistic style which avant-garde voices in Marc's day identified as the
culmination of nineteenth-century naturalism. Critics directed their polemics
against impressionistic naturalism because it had come to dominate the
marketplace and exhibition system. Marc and others made use of a militarist
rhetoric of violent struggle to characterize their opposition to the old and their
search for the new. In the 1912 essay on "The Constructive Ideas of the New
Painting" Marc considered the rejection of extraneous or "foreign elements" (Fremdkorper) from the picture to constitute "the Great Revolution." He went on to maintain that the painter no longer depended on the
image of nature but destroyed (vernichtet) it in order to disclose the "power-
ful laws which rule behind beautiful appearances" (Marc 108). This use of
military rhetoric, which is consistent with the pervasive militarization of the
German middle class in the years leading up to World War I, should not be
misconstrued as a flat expression of Marc's artistic intentions.25 Instead, the
military trope adorns his pictures with a polemical character directed against
naturalistic painting. The fact is that at the time he wrote this, Marc's
painting was not at all-indeed, virtually never would be-non-objective. In
1912 he manifested the first tendencies toward the geometric abstractions of
Parisian art. As a result, the impassioned military rhetoric of the passage
depicts an inimical, embattled relationship between art and nature rather than
the final vanquishing of either foe.
Marc more frequently expressed this antagonism in another metaphor:
the opposition of an inner and an outer side of objects, which he joined in an
increasingly violent tension. The inner side was an aspect of reality governed
by its own laws rather than those of the outer, phenomenal side of things.
Marc developed this scheme in an essay entitled "The New Painting." In a
24 Kasimir Edschmid, "Expressionismus in der Dichtung," Die Neue Rundschau, 1
(1918), 364.
25 See Gerhard Ritter, The Sword and the Sceptor: The Problem of Militarism in
Germany, tr. Heinz Norden (2 vols.; Coral Gables, Fla., 1988), II, 93-104.
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The Enchantment of Art
327
familiar pattern of expressionist polemic, he contrasted modern painters to
"impressionists and plein-air painters of the nineteenth century."
Today we seek beneath the veil of appearances the hidden things in
nature, which seem more important to us than the discoveries of the
impressionists.... And, indeed, we seek and paint this inner, spiritual
side of nature not out of whim or desire for something different, but
because we see this side just as they "saw" violet shadows and
aether over all things. (Marc 102)
Two weeks later Marc published further meditations on the concept of
the "inner side" and asserted that opposition to "naturalistic form" was the
consequence of a deeper will that he claimed permeated the present generation: the urge to investigate metaphysical laws (106). Art, Marc believed, had
the ability to manifest the imperceptible, metaphysical essence of a thing, its
"absolute" or "abstract" being, the "true form" that was left behind when
appearances were completely removed (113). For Marc the task was to
withdraw from art the prejudices of human perception by rejecting mimesis
as an anthropomorphic mode of representation-in effect, to achieve a
manner of empathy that transcended human feeling altogether in favor of the
local feeling of another (nonhuman) being. He delineated this aim as the very
definition of "abstract art" in an important group of notes written in the
winter of 1912-13:
What we understand by "abstract" art.... It is the attempt {and
yearning to see and depict the world no longer with the human eye
but} to bring the world itself to speaking.... Art is, will be, metaphysical; it can be today for the first time. Art will free itself from
human purposes and human will. We no longer paint the forest or the
horse as they please us or appear to us, but as they really are, as the
forest or horse feels itself, its {abstract} absolute essence lives
behind the phenomenon, which we only see....26
Marc wrote that things contain their own will and form and that they
speak among themselves, and this led him to declare: "Why do we want to
interrupt? We have nothing intelligent to say to them" (Marc 113). Objects
become muter the more "we hold before them the optical mirror of their
appearance." By using this metaphor of a language of nature, Marc stressed
the autonomy of nature's underlying forms, its inherent integrity. The artist
was not to impose art on nature, but to penetrate to the essence of things
where nature speaks for itself. By emphasizing nature's own power of speech,
Marc sought to circumscribe humanity's reliance on its own perceptual habits
26 Marc, Schriften, 112 (brackets enclose original text which Marc crossed out;
emphasis in original).
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David Morgan
328
Fig. 2: Franz Marc, "Deer in the Forest, II," 1914, oil on canvas, 129.5 x 100.5 cm.
Reprinted by permission of the Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe.
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The Enchantment of Art
329
in a way that calls to mind Schopenhauer's desired transcendence of reason
(principium individuationis) in the mystical experience of aesthetic contemplation. Schopenhauer had characterized the problem of self-transcendence in
optical terms. In the state of "pure, will-less knowing," he wrote, "[w]e are
only that one eye of the world which looks out from all knowing creatures"
(I, 198). It was in this state that knowledge became absolute, free of all
relations, and therefore a disclosure of the platonic idea. According to
Schopenhauer, this vision occurs when the "pure subject of knowing gazes
through [the] struggle of nature" (I, 204), what he called the "permanent
battlefield" of the world, the "unending conflict" of the will individuated in
all phenomena (I, 265). Marc agreed:
We depend no longer on the image of nature, but destroy it, in order
to show the powerful laws which reign behind beautiful appearances.
As Schopenhauer put it, today the world as will is more important
than the world as representation. (Marc 108)
Marc held in common with Schopenhauer a deep appreciation of the suffer-
ing and turmoil that characterized existence as a whole. According to
Schopenhauer, all things are manifestations of a universal will struggling to
fulfill itself in the individual purposes directing each thing. Humans achieve
momentary deliverance from this blind striving of the will in the blissful
absorption of aesthetic contemplation. The degree to which Marc came to
regard nature as a struggle is evident in his militant rhetoric of revolution,
destruction, and the penetration beneath the surface of appearances to the
hidden metaphysical interior.
As his written reflections in 1912 and after indicate, Marc aspired to
depict objects as non-materialistic, as transparent to underlying or inner
dimensions hidden by conventional pictorial devices. He was seized by the
presentiment that nature was much more than the opaque surfaces portrayed
by naturalistic art. Abstraction was the pictorial means for getting at a
hitherto imperceptible reality. Marc proceeded to visualize the penetration of
the veil of appearances by an aggressive altercation between representational
and non-representational forms. The linkage of these two aspects replaced the
priority of the mimetic relationship of the image to visible phenomena but
did so without pursuing a purely non-objective art. For Marc to have forsaken
external reality entirely would have precluded the visual sensation of penetrating into the concealed interior of his subjects. It was just this enterprise
of disclosure which was so important to him, as suggested by his repeated use
of the term "durchschauend" or "looking-through" to describe his manner
of viewing the world of objects.27 Nature was not completely surrendered or
annihilated, but seen-through, visually infiltrated and, therefore, sustained as
27 See the letters of 24 December 1914 and 12 April 1915 (Marc, Briefe aus dem Feld,
41 and 65), and Marc, Schriften, 170; also 195, ?35, where Marc distinguished
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Fig. 3: Franz Marc, "Struggling Forms," 1914, oil on canvas, 91 x 131.5 cm. Reprinted by permission of Sta
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The Enchantment of Art
331
indispensable to artistic expression. The presence he sought was the absolute
in the act of becoming present.
The 1914 oil painting Deer in the Forest II (fig. 2) makes this eminently
clear. In this work the organic vitality of Small Blue Horses (fig. 1) has given
way to dissected, angular forms which somewhat unevenly compress the
nebulous space of former years into a fractured geometry clinging to the
picture surface. Marc achieved the revelatory clash of inner and outer aspects
in such visual devices as the stark contrast of surface and depth; by merging
the vertical line from the upper left with the left contour of the deer in the
foreground; and by the repetition of this deer's orange hue in the ground,
which can be read as either behind or above the deer. Likewise, the largest
deer takes its blue color from what may be fractured intervals of sky above.
Marc subverted but did not efface the descriptive function of line and color.
Recognizable forms are framed within broken templates that both echo the
forms and distill them into an abstract geometry. Contours disintegrate and
reemerge within a restless grid that oscillates between opacity and transparency. The contrast between the brilliantly colored animal family and the
violence of the abstract scheme seems to suggest a transformative event.
Marc meant to place the viewer before a nature become porous, a nature
whose surfaces submit to a momentous transformation from within. What
Marc intended for the viewer to behold in Deer in the Forest II and so many
pictures like it at this time was an ontological revelation, a disclosure of what
underlay reality. In a reversal of the Hegelian subordination of art to philosophy as the ultimate disclosure of Geist, Marc looked to art to reveal meta-
physical laws which only philosophy had previously known (Marc 106).
Despite the importance of representational form in this visual dialectic in
Marc's late work, several writers have focused on a small number of canvases
of 1914 which they believe are completely non-objective.28 The painting
most often adduced as evidence of Marc's allegedly non-objective aim is
Struggling Forms (fig. 3). But as even a cursory examination of this painting
demonstrates, the attempt to portray Marc's final works as decisively nonrepresentational is unfounded. The large red shape on the left suggests the
form of a bird, perhaps an eagle, and the linear forms possess the character of
lashing talons or tendrils reminiscent of futurist lines of force describing
violent motion. It may be that the combat between mimetic and abstract
forms tips in favor of the latter in Struggling Forms; but when viewed in the
Weltanschauung from Weltdurchschauung, regarding the latter as symptomatic of the new
art which did not seek form "im Aussen, in der stilisierten Facade der Natur" but
constructed "von innen heraus."
28 John Moffitt, "Fighting Forms: The Fate of the Animals: The Occultist Origins of
Franz Marc's 'Farbentheorie,' " Artibus et Historiae, 12 (1985), 122, repr. in Kathleen J.
Regier (ed.), The Spiritual Image in Modern Art (Wheaton, Ill., 1987); Klaus Lankheit,
Franz Marc (Cologne, 1976), 130; Marc Rosenthal, "Franz Marc: Pioneer of Spiritual
Abstraction," in Franz Marc: 1880-1916 (Berkeley, 1979), 31.
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David Morgan
332
context of Marc's entire oeuvre, the painting refuses to relinquish ties with
the painter's favorite subjects. Indeed, the struggle we witness may be the
very struggle of the artist to gaze, as it were, upon the reality that he believed
was concealed beneath the "stylized facade of nature" (Marc 195, ?35).
No appearance, no form of idealized imitation could express the absolute
for Marc as it could for Schiller and Schopenhauer. Schein as abstracted from
phenomena was still an imposition of the human will according to Marc, still
an aesthetic based on mimesis. To Marc the work of art was not an elevation
above or purification of nature, not a realm of free play of the imagination, as
Schiller characterized it, but a site of violent revelation, a destruction of
appearances, whether phenomenal or idealized. In an article of 1913 that he
entitled "Toward a Critique of the Past" Marc collapsed all forms of
apperception into the "mortal structure of our mind" and proceeded to
describe the nature and function of art:
The yearning for immutable being, for liberation from the sensory
deceptions of our ephemeral life is the fundamental disposition of all
art. Its great aim is to dissolve the entire system of our incomplete
sensations, to manifest an unearthly being that lives behind everything, to break the mirror of life [in order] that we gaze into being.
(Marc 169)
To break the mirror meant to transcend the mediated relation with nature that
representational art offered, to surpass the structures of appearance constructed by apperception. Marc strove to envision this revelation in art, to
show the break-through as an antagonistic engagement of abstract and figura-
tive forms: phenomena giving way to a higher ontology. This epiphany swept
away all forms of mimesis by suggesting the imminence of pure being. The
artist could not represent this in itself but could allude to or anticipate it by
envisioning the destruction of the present order as the birth of something
new.
The Ideology of Enchantment
As we have seen, because he regarded empathy as anthropom
Marc sought to move beyond it as an inadequate form of enchantm
it offered only a projection of human categories, empathy could not
hidden face of reality. He may have been encouraged in his re
empathy by Nietzsche's critique of anthropomorphism. In a pessim
struck by Schopenhauer and treated by the neo-Kantian historian o
phy, F. A. Lange, Nietzsche had argued that all human knowle
result of anthropomorphic projection:
The sublimity of nature, all those impressions of grandeur, nobi
grace, beauty, goodness, austerity, power, and rapture that we r
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The Enchantment of Art
333
in the experience of nature, history, and mankind are not immediate
feelings, but the aftermath of innumerable, deep-rooted errors-everything would appear cold and lifeless to us were it not for this long
schooling.29
On another occasion Nietzsche insisted that, "apart from our condition of
living in it, the world that we have not reduced to our being, our logic and our
psychological prejudgments, does not exist as a world 'in itself.' '30
Yet Marc must have drawn greater support from Schopenhauer's metaphysics of the will than from Nietzsche's post-Wagnerian demythologizing
of romantic metaphysics. The former offered an escape from anthropomor-
phic delusion while Nietzsche, in the words of one scholar, came to the
conclusion that "thought cannot transcend the human standpoint or escape
its anthropomorphic perspective."31 The Birth of Tragedy (1872) extolled the
Dionysian aesthetic experience of ecstatic mingling with the "mysterious
primordial unity" of the will behind the torment of phenomenal existence;32
but by 1878 Nietzsche repudiated his earlier infatuation or enchantment with
Wagner and Schopenhauer by arguing that the thing in itself, the will, was an
"all too human" projection. Rather than renounce the individual will in
himself and merge with this metaphysical reality through art, Nietzsche
affirmed this world. He satirized the Schopenhauerian-Wagnerian religion of
art with its prophetic seer-artist:
The belief in great, superior, fertile minds is not necessarily, yet very
often connected to the religious or half-religious superstition that
those minds are of superhuman origin and possess certain miraculous
capabilities.... They are credited with a direct view into the essence of
the world, as through a hole in the cloak of appearance, and thought
able, without the toil or rigor of science, thanks to this miraculous
seer's glance, to communicate something ultimate and decisive about
man and the world.33
29 Quoted in George J. Stack, Lange and Nietzsche (New York, 1983), 125.
30 Ibid., 131.
31 George J. Stack, "Nietzsche and Anthropomorphism," Critica: Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofia, 12 (1980), 48. Julian Young argues persuasively that Nietzsche's
middle period (Human, All Too Human, 1878; The Gay Science, 1882-87) rejected the
previous interest in Schopenhauer but that by 1888, with the Twilight of the Idols, he
returned to Schopenhauer's view of art in important respects (Nietzsche's Philosophy of
Art). Thus, opposing Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in any strict sense may miss Marc's debt
to both authors. Depending on what he read by Nietzsche, Marc could have found
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in accord with one another. Moreover, Nietzsche remained at
least somewhat ambivalent about the enchantment of music in Human, All Too Human (see
?153).
32 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy or Hellenism or Pessimism, tr. Wm. A. Haussmann
(New York, 1964), 27.
33 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 112-13 (?164).
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David Morgan
Nietzsche developed a critique of enchantment which contrasts with the
metaphysical aim which Marc assigned art. Nietzsche proposed a perspectivalism that embraced anthropomorphism as the necessary condition of
human knowledge. "Relativity" was inescapable. The "world" was unavoidably a valuation from the perspective of "the preservation and enhancement of the power of a certain species of animal."34
In notes written at the front in 1915 Marc explicitly rejected such
"Relativitat" as "a thoroughly secondary thought and as philosophy a false
doctrine which only exhausted minds could invent in order to give the
appearance of wit to their failure of judgment" (Marc 185, ? 1). In contrast to
Nietzsche, Marc insisted on the dualism of essence and appearance and
charged the artist with the task of penetrating to the "essence of the world,"
what he regarded as the purpose of abstraction, affirming that "[e]ach thing
in the world has its form, its formula, which we cannot touch with our coarse
hands, but which we can embrace intuitively in the degree that we are
artistically gifted" (Marc 113; 185, ?1). Schopenhauer's philosophy provided a special place for art as revelatory and redemptive. For this reason
Marc relied on Schopenhauer's construction of a dualistic contrast between
the surface of appearances and the will as the metaphysical basis for artistic
experience as a disclosure of the transcendent. For Marc this power was
nothing less than soteriological. In a group of notes from 1912-13 he proclaimed that "Faith in art is wanting, we wish to raise it up," and, complaining of the adulteration of the concept of art, concluded that "only a single
way out remains: return the word art to its purity and lead the people back to
God instead of the golden calf" (Marc 113, 114). Two years later, in the
midst of the war, he announced that "The coming art ... is our religion, our
center of gravity, our truth" (Marc 196, ?35). If Nietzsche sought to dismantle the religion of art, Marc yearned to reinvigorate it.
In spite of his vigorous rejection of animals and nature as ugly, Marc
could also write during the war years with a nostalgia that revived in him a
romantic ethos of empathy. In a letter of 1915 to his wife Marc described
gardens that reminded him of his own in Bavaria, and confessed: "More than
ever I am still in love with flowers and leaves. When I look at them some
feeling of compassion is always present, a kind of secret understanding."35
he embraced abstraction and empathy alternately because each in its own way
could reveal for him the deeper laws that governed appearances. With the
arrival of World War I and the emergence of the German nation as an
eschatological force in creating a new European order, Marc had turned with
even greater rigor to empathy as a patriotic enchantment. Not only did
34 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, tr. Kaufmann and R.
J. Hollingdale (New York, 1967), 305, ?567.
35 Marc, Briefe aus dem Feld, 66. letter of 13 April 1915: "Ich bin noch mehr als je in
die Blumen und Blatter verliebt. Ich seh sie jetzt so anders an, irgend ein Gefuhl von
Mitleid ist immer dabei, eine Art Mitwissertum...."
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The Enchantment of Art
335
empathy identify him with the elusive reality of the German nation unveiling
itself in the war as the future of Europe, the aesthetic of empathy allowed him
to express a mystical identity with Germany in conscious contrast to France
and its culture.
Two weeks before joining the army in the summer of 1914, Marc
revealed in a letter to the painter August Macke a fervent patriotism which
dismissed Parisian avant-garde painting. Suddenly the old romantic metaphors of blood and soil and the familiar contrast of Roman and Teuton serve
as the foundation of his art. In the pressing context of German mobilization
for the imminent war, we encounter the traditional rhetoric of German
nationalism extending from Vater Jahn to Julius Langbehn:
I am a German and can only plow my own field. What do I care about
the painting of the Orphists? As beautiful as the French are, we say:
Romans we cannot be. We Germans are and remain born graphic
artists, illustrators as well as painters. (Worringer says this very
nicely in his introduction to "Old German Book Illustration.") You
know how I love the French, but I cannot make myself into a
Frenchman. I dig [schiirfen] into myself, only into myself, and seek
what lives within me, to represent the rhythm of my blood....36
On the eve of the war, convinced of the unprovoked aggression against
the fatherland, Marc, like millions of Germans, prepared for the conflict by
seeking to ground his art within himself and his national identity. In this light
we do well to consider an alternative reading of Struggling Forms (fig. 3),
which was completed only shortly before the outbreak of conflict in a
summer dominated by rumors of war. An emphasis on abstraction as disinte-
gration sees the painting as visualizing the destruction of mimesis; but the
suggestive forms, one of which appears to be an eagle, invite, under the
auspices of empathy, a reading which puts the imagery to political use: as a
totem of imperial Germany, the eagle engages an enemy in battle for its
existence. Rather than passing out of existence, the eagle invites the viewer's
empathic conjuring of a narrative in which the German mascot fights for
dominance.37
Yet it was abstraction that remained the primary strategy for enchantment
for Marc until his death. The enchantment of abstraction consisted of a spell
cast by the new art of dissolving nature's appearances in search of a novel
36 Letter to Macke, 12 July 1914, Briefiechsel (Cologne, 1964), 184. For further
discussion, see Pese, Franz Marc: Leben und Werk (Stuttgart, 1989), 129. Already in 1910,
in Form Problems of the Gothic (New York, 1922), 416, Worringer had argued that the
Germans were the "conditio sine qua non of the Gothic."
37 On the political significance of the eagle for Marc see Peter Klaus Schuster, "In
Search of Paradise Lost: Runge-Marc-Beuys," Keith Hartley, Henry Meyric Hughes,
Peter-Klaus Schuster, and William Vaughan (eds.), The Romantic Spirit in German Art
1790-1990 (London, 1994), 74.
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336
David Morgan
order of being. Abstraction represented a new dispensation which Marc's late
writings demonstrate the war helped to usher in. The ideological function of
abstraction amounted to its magical ability to bring about a spiritual regen-
eration of Europe under a German aegis. What remains is to show the
mechanics of this enchantment.
Marc and the Problem of Modernity
The ideological significance of abstraction for Marc was framed within
his understanding of moder cultural history in Europe. Marc premised his
artistic efforts on a repudiation of nineteenth-century art and technological
developments and on an abiding, characteristically Germanic suspicion of
modernity. In effect, what he sought to exclude through abstraction was a
mechanized, industrialized modernity and its foundations in the applied
sciences and an economy geared to proliferate the moder urban world.
This is made clear in a number of Marc's writings in the last two years of
his life. For instance, in the midst of the catastrophic upheaval viewed firsthand from the trenches of the First World War, Marc defined "das
Abstrakte" as "natural sight, as primary, intuitive vision." He contrasted
this to "das Sentimentale": the "hysterical sickness and reduction of our
spiritual capacity to see," which he explicitly linked to a "deeply ill France"
and proclaimed was the sensibility that the war came to purge from the
moder world.38 "Our European will to abstract form," he wrote feverishly,
"is indeed nothing other than our highly conscious, energetic retaliation and
conquering of the sentimental spirit."39 This recalls Friedrich Schiller's
distinction between the naive and sentimental in poetry, where the naive
denoted simplicity, closeness to nature, and directness of expression and the
sentimental exhibited greater conceptuality, artificiality, and a longing for
nature from which it was estranged.40 Such an allusion in regard to abstract
art suggests that what Marc sought was a purified vision, a way of seeing
restored to "primitive" simplicity and directness. The appearances which he
sought to strip away were the artistic and social conventions which concealed
a spiritual view of nature whose features he could only anticipate in his
paintings. He grafted to Schiller's romantic primitivism the colonial discourse of German expressionism, which associated purity with the tribal
cultures of Germany's colonies. In contrast to moder society, "early man"
38 Marc, Schriften, 210 (?89); see also ?6 and ?86 on the question of the purification
and the war; and Briefe aus dem Feld, 60; on the sentimental sickness of France, 210, ?86.
39 Marc, Schriften, 210, ?87: "Unser europaischer Wille zur abstrakten Form ist ja
nichts anderes als unsre hochst bewusste, thatenheisse Erwiderung und Ueberwindung des
sentimentalen Geistes."
40 Friedrich Schiller, "Ueber Naive und sentimentalische Dichtung" (first published
in Die Horen, 1795). Marc reversed Schiller's scheme, which had located the naive in the
irretrievable past.
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The Enchantment of Art
337
had still not encountered the sentimental illness because, as Marc insisted,
"he loved the Abstract."4'
Many concerns which occupied Marc and shaped his estimation of the
significance of art can be found among those who sought to define a spiritual
and cultural agenda for Germany on the basis of the mythical idea of the Volk.
This ideology has been carefully studied in a classic work by George Mosse,
who has identified several themes among proponents of the Germanic Volk
that were also present in Marc's art and writings: an emphasis on intuition,
instinct, and feeling over reason; a suspicion of technology and moder
industry; a mystical, pantheistic experience of the German landscape; a
rejection of moder urban life; and a substitution of cultural ideals for
political and social praxis.42 It is of course important to point out that these
similarities to Marc's thought should be balanced against several significant
dissimilarities: Marc shared nothing of the antisemitism or the ardent nationalism of the volkish ideology; he spoke enthusiastically of the importance of
non-German artists at a time when it was not popular to do so; and he
exhibited an enduring ambivalence toward the aesthetic of empathy that
formed the basis of the volkish, patriotic, neo-romantic experience of the
landscape.43 Marc was not a rabid nationalist, but a patriot who came to
equate Europe's future with what he believed was the manifest destiny of
Germany.
In the fall of 1914 Marc wrote a brief essay in which he took care to
distinguish himself from the "narrowness of heart and of national desire"
and sought to redirect the "German cultural spirit and national impulse"
toward a broader European scope. Yet he did not hesitate to assert that
Germany would be, as France had formerly been, the "heart of Europe." On
the role of the war in accomplishing this Marc differed from his friend and
colleague, Wassily Kandinsky, who left Germany appalled at the violent
prospect of war.44 But Marc had no misgivings: "Germanness," he pro-
41 Marc, Schriften, 210, ?87. See Joan Weinstein, book review, Art Bulletin, 75 (1993),
183-87; also Jill Lloyd, German Expressionism: Primitivism and Modernity (New Haven,
1991); and David Morgan, "Empathy and the Experience of 'Otherness' in Pechstein's
Depictions of Women: The Expressionist Search for Immediacy," The Smart Museum of
Art Bulletin, University of Chicago, 4 (1992-93), 12-22.
42 George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third
Reich (New York, 1964), see especially the first four chapters.
43 See for instance Adolf Lasson, who wrote in the patriotic speech mentioned above:
"Idealistische Vertiefung in den Gegenstand, das ist der Grundzug des deutschen Geistes;
das bestimmt vor allem sein Verhaltnis zur Natur. Alles tiefere lebendige Naturgefuihl ist
deutschen Ursprungs" (Lasson, "Deutsche Art and deutsche Bildung," speech of 25
September 1914, repr. in Deutsche Reden in schwerer Zeit [Berlin, 1914-17], 21). See also
Elizabeth Kriegelstein, "Vom landschaftlichen Erlebnis," Preussische Jahrbiicher, 157
(1914), esp. 6. Mosse has considered and carefully differentiated expressionism and the
ideology of the Volk, Crisis of German Ideology, 157, 186-87.
44 Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, Briefwechsel, ed. Klaus Lankheit (Munich,
1993), 263ff, on the significance of the war.
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338
David Morgan
claimed, "will rise over all boundaries after this war."45 Thus, it is important
to recognize that certain affinities with conservative German nationalism
situate Marc within a cultural milieu that illuminates his ideology without,
however, fully defining it, and-it is important to bear in mind-help explain
why his art later appealed to the Nazis.46 As one recent study of expressionism has pointed out, "modernism and volkish-conservatism were not rigidly
separate phenomena, but rather parallel developments within a particular
historical context."47
A discussion of Marc's view of culture and modernity will bring his
ideology of abstraction into focus. If there was a single theme which charac-
terized the optimism behind the positivist conception of science and the
technocratic hopes for moder technology in the industrial state in the
nineteenth century, it was the fundamental belief in progress. This grew out
of the ideology of the enlightenment with such thinkers as Saint-Simon who
communicated a belief in progress to his pupil, Auguste Comte, through
whom it attained a permanent place in the presuppositions of positivism.48
The operative premise was that nature could be controlled by science and
technology to provide a secure environment for human development. Nothing could be more disenchanting: symbolic influence over the universe was
replaced by physical, technological control. Romantics early in the century
and neo-Romantics at the end resented this view because to them it tended to
reduce the experience of nature to a materialist framework shorn of the
beloved sublimity, mystery, and divine presence, in short, the power of
enchantment. Furthermore, the new industrialism with its techniques of mass
production made the tradition of Handwerk or craftsmanship obsolete and
thereby threatened to leave behind the customs and folkways inherited from
the past and transmitted in the arts and crafts. The rural, nationalist sensibility
was imperiled by an urban, pragmatic, and cosmopolitan understanding of
moder society.
Marc polemically described "progress" as a moder "system of religion" with its own prophets, priests, and laity (Marc 122). This new religion
replaced the "inner, inherited, and organic abilities of people with external,
learned, mechanical abilities." The gullibility of "the people" for this
religion disturbed Marc but not as much as the agents of technological
transformation of whom he spoke in the impersonal "they" as he lamented
the insidious effects of modern technology and its machines:
45 Marc, "Im Fegfeuer des Krieges," in Schriften, 161: "Das Deutschtum wird nach
diesem Kriege iiber alle Grenzen schwillen."
46 See Stephanie Barron, "Degenerate Art": The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi
Germany (Los Angeles, 1991), 295.
47 Lloyd, German Expressionism, 110.
48 Donald D. Egbert, "The Idea of the 'Avant-Garde' in Art and Politics," American
Historical Review, 73 (1967), 339-66.
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The Enchantment of Art
339
[T]hey build railroads for the people ... in order to spare them
walking and bearing burdens. But in reality, to make them bodily
dependent {and wretched}. They invent the telephone, the highspeed press, and the like for the people in order to impair their
independent thinking. They build machines so that people might
forget their wonderful abilities in the arts and crafts and become
sufficiently crude and stupid for the religion of progress.49
On another occasion Marc proclaimed that the "genuine art" of his day
was incompatible with "our scientific and technical age" (Marc 111). He
went on to prophesy that the "time will come very soon when we will find all
of our technology and science immeasurably boring; we will altogether
abandon it, even forget it; we will have no time for it because we will deal in
spiritual goods" (ibid.). Marc's aim to revive "faith in art" to lead the people
away from the false god of the mass cult of progress lead him to announce a
prophetic warning: the grand "achievements" of science and technology
were a "dangerous, bloody toy" in the hands of the people and may very well
lead to a violent end (Marc 123). Marc's art stands in contrast to the
mechanized world which his ongoing jeremiad bemoaned. In the place of
industrialized urban society he focused on the animal and its place in nature.
Even after Marc began dismantling the empathy between viewer and image,
nature remained the locus of epiphany, the violent epicenter of metaphysical
truth on which humanity depended for its spiritual welfare.
The revelation of metaphysical truths by the new art of abstraction
prophesied a transformation in European culture. During the war Marc wrote
passionately of what he called the "high type," the "few" who were being
"steeled" through the sacrifice of the war to carry on the struggle against the
bonds of the past (Marc 169). Marc took the trouble to point out that he was
not referring to politicians or their efforts or to the masses, but to the "good
European" whom he hoped would emerge from the war ready to assume the
task of ushering in a new age. The thought is indebted to Nietzsche's concept
of the Uebermensch. "Now is the hour," Marc wrote, "in which all values
will be measured anew ..."-transvalued (umwertet), Nietzsche would have
said.
During the war Marc became an avid reader of Nietzsche whose theme of
destruction developed Marc's antebellum reflections on struggle into a full
blown apocalyptic purge that promised a new age rising from the ashes of the
war.50 For millennia, we read, humanity has longed to overcome nature, to
peer behind the world, to see the back of divinity. The new European would
be poised to do just that. The war for Marc was a watershed that left the
Europe of the past steeped in absurdity.
49 Marc, Schriften, 122-23 (brackets enclose original text which Marc crossed out).
50 Ibid., 170, 66. On Nietzsche's importance for expressionist art and thought, see
Pese, Franz Marc, 51-58; and Donald Gordon, Expressionism: Art and Idea (New Haven,
1987), 11-25, esp. 16-17 and 24, on Marc's and Nietzsche's glorification of destruction.
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David Morgan
340
We stand on the other side, we few, the young, whom the jaws of the
war have spat on the far shore like the grumbling Jonah. Let us go
forth, onward, without looking back.... The great war has refreshed
and freed us.51
The war was a spiritual, cultural conflict in Marc's view, one waged in paint
and ideas as well as cannon and mortar shells. Indeed, this struggle was not
preeminently a political or social reality for Marc, but a metaphysical one.
Mosse has discussed the ways in which, since early in the nineteenth century,
volkish thought in Germany tended to detach itself from real events in the
political arena in order to address what it felt was the superior reality of the
spiritual crisis of the German Volk. Marc followed this pattern, although he
never exhibited extreme German nationalism. He had read Nietzsche too
attentively for that and, like the cosmopolitan philosopher, looked for a
supranational European elite to command affairs.52 Yet Marc was a proud
German who fully anticipated a just victory for his nation. And the "high
type" he awaited was going to be German. "The coming type of European,"
he wrote from the front in 1915, "will be the German type," although he was
careful to add that this would not occur before the German had become "a
good European" (Marc 161).
Marc's characterization of the relationship between art and nature in a
rhetoric of antagonistic struggle could easily be mystified by modernist
historiography as a noble struggle of the avant-gardist against a backward
establishment.53 However, this would overlook the fact that he forged his
rhetoric in a period of unprecedented German militarization. In fact his
ideology was able to mask German militarism. Rather than address the
political issues of Germany's foreign policy and historic preparation for war,
Marc mythologized the conflict into a search for European rebirth under the
star of German leadership. In November of 1914 he wrote the following:
Politics stand in a very loose and secondary relationship to the
meaning and course of world history, always merely the mask and
not the spirit, administration not imagination.... No and a thousand
times no, we Germans are not fighting for a place in the sun.... The
war concerns more [than that]. Europe ails from a deep-rooted weak-
51 Marc, Schriften, 173. The war was perceived by many German soldiers as possessing a cleansing, purifying power for modem Europe, see Wilhelm Pfeiler's examination of
letters from the front in his War and the German Mind (New York, 1941), 70-72.
52 Cf. The Gay Science, ?257, ?377, ?357, and ?377 contra German nationalism and in
favor of the "good European."
53 Helen Boorman, "Rethinking the Expressionist Era: Wilhelmine Cultural Debates
and Prussian Elements in German Expressionism," The Oxford Art Journal, 9 (1986), 315, examines the historiographical packaging of expressionism as "escapist" and "revolutionary," and originating in "anxiety" and "crisis."
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The Enchantment of Art
341
ness and longs to be healthy, thus it pursues a frightful path of blood.
(Marc 163)
Such was the cultural rather than formally political strategy for European
renewal. This was the way of enchantment, the magic of a cultural tradition
of yearning, an artistic incantation which summoned into being a longed-for
state that politics and economics could not finally be trusted to achieve. As
Schiller had argued, the aesthetic state must be attained before the political
one could become a reality. But Marc found himself in the midst of unprecedented conflagration and no doubt expected the new art and the new Europe
would share a violent birth. He admired the Nietzschean will to power as a
dire expression of the need for radical cultural transformation, as a purgatorial fire to cleanse Europe. But after the war, Marc was convinced, the will to
power would take a constructive turn and become the "will to form" in order
to build a new order to replace the destruction of the old one (Marc 193, ?26).
The form which would emerge among artists, which was even then taking
shape in early experiments in abstraction would, according to Marc, visualize
the truth of things rather than their surfaces. Marc charted a path between the
two philosophers whom he admired by transforming Nietzsche's will to
power and by dismissing Schopenhauer's pessimism. The "good European"
would create a vision of the absolute that was not anthropomorphic pace
Nietzsche and that offered a viable alternative to the void into which
Schopenhauer saw all things pass (Marc 197, ??40, 41).
As a cultural strategy of enchantment, abstraction consisted of destroying
a bankrupt materialist worldview just as the war would purge society of its
decadence. By violently perforating the outer shell of phenomena, abstract
painting promised to unveil the absolute. What Marc fashioned in his abstract
art was a practice of image-making that preserved the Germanic notion that
the fatherland's problems were spiritual in character, that nature remained the
site of revelation and national identity, and that a cultural rebirth, the
complete epiphany of a new age, summoned by the new art, would follow the
purgatory of the war. Gripped by the need to glimpse what was invisible, to
embrace what was transcendent, the artist-shaman cast a spell that bewitched
whoever shared his urgency. Abstraction and empathy were powerful means
of imaging a transcendence to venerate and pointing toward an invisible
reality to behold. Each performed the cultural work of evocation, an ideological operation that attempted to transfigure the world through the work of art.
Such was the aim of the spiritual in art as a form of cultural enchantment.
Valparaiso University.
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