Edgar Wind and Modern Art

In Defence of Marginal Anarchy

Ben Thomas

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501341731
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

This book presents the first comprehensive study of the philosopher and art historian Edgar Wind's critique of modern art. The first student of Erwin Panofsky, and a close associate of Aby Warburg, Edgar Wind was unusual among the 'Warburgians' for his sustained interest in modern art, together with his support for contemporary artists. This culminated in his respected and influential book Art and Anarchy (1963), which seemed like a departure from his usual scholarly work on the iconography of Renaissance art. Based on extensive archival research and bringing to light previously unpublished lectures, Edgar Wind and Modern Art reveals the extent and seriousness of Wind's thinking about modern art, and how it was bound up with theories about art and knowledge that he had developed during the 1920s and 30s. Wind's ideas are placed in the context of a closely connected international cultural milieu consisting of some of the leading artists and thinkers of the twentieth century. In particular, the book discusses in detail his friendships with three significant artists: Pavel Tchelitchew, Ben Shahn and R. B. Kitaj. In the process, the existence of an alternative to the prevailing formalist approach of Alfred Barr and Clement Greenberg to modern art, based on the enduring importance of the symbol, is revealed.

1

In Defence of Marginal Anarchy

In a satirical survey of the early 1960s New York art scene, the director of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, John Bernard Myers, imagined a new collector of modern art gaining access to fashionable museum circles where at pre-opening dinner parties he could ‘shake hands with a Rockefeller or pass the buns to Mrs. E. Bliss Parkinson or have a short chat with Dr Edgar Wind or listen to Barney Newman tell how it really happened in the pioneer years’.¹ The philosopher and art historian Edgar Wind, author of Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (1958) and first professor of history of art at the University of Oxford, appears here in an unfamiliar context for a leading scholarly exponent of the iconographical method in art history: as a fixture on the fashionable contemporary art circuit. The fact that in 1964, when Myers’ piece was published, Wind had been living in Britain for nine years (he was appointed to the post in Oxford in 1955) is a testimony to the enduring memory of his charismatic presence as an habitué of private views and salons, an acquaintance of wealthy trustees and an interlocutor with leading artists. Wind was one of the scholars hailing from the circle around Aby Warburg in Hamburg during the Weimar Republic who engaged most enthusiastically and seriously with modern art and, during the 1940s and 1950s in particular, he was considered a respected pundit on the current state of the arts on a par with figures like Herbert Read, Kenneth Clark or Meyer Schapiro. As his widow, Margaret Wind (née Kellner), put it in 1981 when asked what her husband thought about modern art: ‘He was passionately interested in it.’²

This book aims to examine in detail this less well-known aspect of Wind’s life and thought, particularly by attending closely to the relationships he forged with three significant artists: Pavel Tchelitchew, Ben Shahn and R. B. Kitaj. The fact that none of these artists is mentioned in Wind’s published writings indicates the extent to which his engagement with modern art was predominantly through the medium of public speech, in dialogue at conferences or more formally in lectures. Wind, who was reputed to be one of the most dazzling lecturers of his generation, always spoke from memory, showing one black-and-white slide at a time (not for him the double projection method of Heinrich Wölfflin, which he felt resulted in unfortunate and distracting juxtapositions). While the content of his lectures, and his contributions to public debates, was never improvised, it was rarely recorded. As a result, the researcher is often, as is the case with the important series of lectures on the ‘Tradition of Symbols in Modern Art’ given at the Museum of Modern Art in April 1942, forced to rely on slide-lists and correspondence to reconstruct the argument. Inevitably this means that a certain amount of informed speculation is involved in the process of reconstructive interpretation – can a particular sequence of images really amount to a theoretical position? and how reliable is a hostile review as a source? – but it helps that Wind reached many of his conclusions relatively early in life, that he tended to refine his ideas through repetition, accumulating evidence along the way, and that there are consequently no major reversals of viewpoint. Attending carefully to the evidence with this characteristic trait in mind, it is often possible to illuminate an earlier fragmentary note by referring to a later more complete statement of the same position. The most obvious example of this is Art and Anarchy, Wind’s series of Reith lectures broadcast by the BBC in 1960 and printed in The Listener, then published in book form in 1963 and subsequently revised in 1969. Here the original recordings, extensive drafts and the published versions exist of Wind’s magisterial summary of his views on art, morals and society. This book begins with an account of these lectures, and identifies the occasions on which certain themes were first developed and the contexts that gave them meaning.

While the first step taken here is to reconstruct Wind’s views on modern art, and to assess their influence, two broader aims are pursued: to relate Wind’s analysis of modern art to his better known iconographical interpretations of Renaissance art and to his early philosophical writings; and to indicate the significance for the history of twentieth-century art of what Wind described as the ‘tradition of symbols’. Wind had a close intellectual bond with his mentor Aby Warburg, and thought that Warburg’s approach to the analysis of cultural memory was applicable to modern art. However, this ‘application’ of the iconographical approach to the art of Klee, Picasso or Dali was not merely a playful exercise in methodological eclecticism or an intriguing sideline to the more significant study of Renaissance masterpieces. Wind’s analysis of modern art was of a piece with his overall intellectual project, just as his unprecedented studies on eighteenth-century British art had been.³ Arguably, modern art represented an ‘experimentum crucis’, as Wind had defined this term in Das Experiment and die Metaphysik (1934), his Habilitationschrift: in other words, an experiment devised to test the viability of a hypothesis, but which also involved the researcher in circular argument and the use of instruments that embody metaphysical speculations. In this respect, Wind’s approach to modern art reveals significant aspects of his particular understanding of a method of historical analysis of symbols deriving from Warburg, although inflected in his case by a philosophical position where German idealism has been revised in the light of American pragmatism.

In addition, this book will argue that Wind had the scope to apply the iconographical method to modern art because of the enduring importance of ‘the eloquence of symb ols’. The historian of American art, Sam Hunter, described how many mid-century artists associated with Jackson Pollock were prepared to leave the ‘high road of twentieth-century painting tradition’ for the ‘byways of myth and symbolism’.⁴ These designations – ‘high road’ and ‘byway’ – reflect the critical assumptions of the prevailing explanatory narrative for the development of modern art: namely, the critical tenets on which the formalism of Roger Fry, Alfred Barr and Clement Greenberg was based, where modern art was conceived of as a process of progressive refinement towards abstraction in each art form driven by a self-critical exploration of each medium’s means of representation. Wind’s critique of this approach linked formalism with a tendency to departmentalize the arts and also with ‘art for art’s sake’ attitudes; he, in contrast, saw art as meaningful when it had a relationship to life, when it embodied knowledge or gave form to the vital forces of the imagination. In this respect, he was closer to surrealism, or even pop art, than to the various forms of abstraction that Greenberg championed. Wind’s identification of a ‘tradition of symbols in modern art’ was an approach that saw the problem of subject matter as intrinsic to, rather than irrelevant to, modern art’s development – even when it came to abstract expressionism.

Interestingly, some of the subject matter of the modern art that Wind attended to, for example in the work of artists like Tchelitchew or Ernst, drew on the same hermetic sources that he studied to elucidate the art of Botticelli and Michelangelo. To a certain extent, Wind’s interest in these artists was a pursuit of ‘pagan mysteries in modern art’ (to coin a phrase), and he can even be discovered acting as an ‘iconographical advisor’ to contemporary artists, recommending that Tchelitchew read Paracelsus, and Kitaj read Warburg. In order to recover some of these fascinating connections between iconography and modernism in the visual arts, the elusive topic of Wind’s involvement in contemporary art has been approached through the archive: a ‘detour’, as Wind was fond of describing the iconographical method, taken to describe a cultural milieu that provides the context for his theories and opinions.

Edgar Wind (1900–71)

Before moving on to a summary of Art and Anarchy, it will be helpful to give a brief resumé of Wind’s biography, emphasizing here those aspects of his life that have a direct bearing on the themes of this book.⁵ Edgar Wind was born on 14 May 1900 in Berlin into a secular Jewish family. His mother, Laura Szilard, was of Romanian origin, and his father Maurice Delmar Wind, who acted as a financial agent in the export of optical goods to South America, had Argentinian nationality, although he was of Russian origin. This meant that Edgar Wind was ‘Argentinian by German law but German by Argentinian law’ (as Lloyd-Jones put it). Although this confusion was only resolved when Wind obtained German nationality in 1930, this did disqualify him from military service towards the end of the First World War. An older sister, Felice, shared his cosmopolitan and multilingual upbringing but not his studious character.

Wind attended the Kaiser-Friedrich-Schule in Charlottenburg from 1906 until 1918, the same school that his older contemporary Walter Benjamin attended, and which was described as ‘a decidedly progressive institution’ by Gershom Scholem in the recollections of his friendship with Benjamin. While Wind was too young to be part of this circle, Scholem’s memoir gives some insight into the cultural milieu in which young middle-class Jews in Berlin moved in the early twentieth century, formed of an intense mixture of advanced literature, philosophy, left-wing politics and Zionism. According to Scholem, his friends were defined by ‘a resoluteness in pursuing our intellectual goals, rejection of our environment – which was basically the German-Jewish assimilated middle class – and a positive attitude towards metaphysics’.⁶

At this stage, Wind’s interest in the visual arts was orientated towards the modern, and he admired the French impressionist paintings assembled at the Nationalgalerie by its director Hugo von Tschudi, particularly those by Manet and Cézanne, and the contemporary art displayed at the Berlin Secession (also collected for the Nationalgalerie by Tschudi’s successor, Ludwig Justi, from 1918).⁷ Although Wind’s father encouraged his love of learning, after his father’s death in 1914 tensions began to manifest themselves in his relationship with his mother and sister, who both disapproved of his unwillingness to embark on a business career and whose primary concern appears to have been to maintain a bourgeois lifestyle in the face of rampant hyperinflation. Eventually this would result in Wind becoming estranged from, and effectively disinherited by, his immediate family – a situation that continued until 1944 when Wind heard of his mother and sister’s escape from war-torn Budapest to Sweden, then via Lisbon to New York. Contact was restored, and Wind helped financially, but they were never close.⁸

In 1918 Wind began academic studies at Berlin, where he spent three terms attending lectures on classical art and archaeology, history, philosophy (with Ernst Cassirer who was then a Privatdozent) and history of art (with Adolph Goldschmidt). This was a volatile time politically when Germany oscillated between extremes in the aftermath of defeat in the First World War: the November Revolution, the establishment of the Weimar Republic, the Kapp Putsch, the General Strike and the disastrous economic decline following the punitive terms of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. The arts were in a similarly turbulent state in Berlin, with expressionism and Dada dominating contemporary art (Karl Schmidt-Rottluf became president of the Berlin Secession in 1919), and with proletarian theatre, avant-garde film and experimental cabarets flourishing.

Following brief visits to Munich (to hear Wölfflin lecture on Rembrandt) and Marburg (which Wind left after three days due to its ‘intolerable atmosphere’), Win d travelled in 1919 to Freiburg where he studied philosophy with the pioneer of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, whom he found mystifying, and Martin Heidegger, whom he found bullying. Wind then moved to Vienna for the Summer term of 1920 where he studied art history with Max Dvorak, Josef Strzygowski and Julius von Schlosser. Unimpressed, however, with the ‘reigning sovereigns’, Wind moved to Hamburg in 1920, where he became Erwin Panofsky’s first pupil and engaged further with the neo-Kantianism of Ernst Cassirer.⁹ At this time Aby Warburg was absent from Hamburg, as he was being treated by Ludwig Binswanger in the Kreuzlingen Sanatorium in Switzerland (1918–24) for a mental breakdown, and Wind did not meet him until 1927.¹⁰ However, Wind did study in the Warburg Library and found that Warburg’s ‘ghostly presence was very evident’. Wind obtained his doctorate in 1922, which was examined by Cassirer and Panofsky. His concern in this dissertation was to explore the methodological paradox that the art historian’s attempts at rational scientific analysis were grounded on aesthetic judgements that were intrinsically irrational: an insoluble contradiction.¹¹

Returning to Berlin in 1922, Wind lived in the family apartment at 102 Bismarckstrasse while he prepared for his Habilitation, and worked in a clerical role for Polyphonwerke, answering customer letters. Wind’s mother had made use of family connections to find him this job, but his musical ability also suited him for it: he was an accomplished pianist who had taken private lessons with Martin Krause of the Stern Conservatory who trained Claudio Arrau and Edwin Fischer.¹² In his spare time, Wind frequented the Paul Cassirer Salon in the Victoria Strasse, visiting exhibitions and attending the meetings of an art historical society that met there every three months (the Kunsthistorisches Gesellschaft). Paul Cassirer, a cousin of Ernst Cassirer, was one of the principal promoters of modern art in Berlin, through his gallery and through the publishing house that he ran with his brother Bruno. His wife at this time was the famous actress Tilla Durieux, a star of avant-garde theatre who had posed for Auguste Renoir and Franz von Stuck among others. In fact, Cassirer committed suicide when Durieux divorced him in 1926. According to Margaret Wind, Wind ‘often lunched at Paul Cassirer’s’.

Paul Cassirer had left-wing connections, particularly in the immediate post-war period when he was a member of the Independent Socialist Party and published political texts, including work by Rosa Luxemburg.¹³ A sense of the tense atmosphere of artistic and political debate in Cassirer’s circle can be obtained from Max Beckmann’s prints The Ideologues and The Disillusioned II from the Trip to Berlin (Berliner Reise) portfolio of lithographs from 1922, and also from the Hell (Die Hölle) set of prints from 1919 that commemorates the murder of Rosa Luxemburg in The Martyrdom (Das Martyrium). The Disillusioned II depicts Paul Cassirer, Tilla Durieux, the musician Leo Kestenberg and the artist Max Slevogt as cultivated people on the political left disappointed by the turn of events in post-war Germany; while in The Ideologues, Beckmann portrayed himself with the intellectuals gathered around the figure of Heinrich Mann declaiming from a lectern, among whom is the art historian Carl Einstein.¹⁴ Wind would later refer to Beckmann as a ‘remarkable talent’ but one ‘caught in that most cantankerous of genres, the serious cartoon’.¹⁵

Through his contacts in the Cassirer circle, Wind was able to visit the artist Käthe ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 In Defence of Marginal Anarchy
• 2 Art and Anarchy
• 3 The Tradition of Symbols in Modern Art
• 4 ‘Cher Magus’ – Pavel Tchelitchew
• 5 ‘The Muses’ sterner laws’ – W. H. Auden and Ben Shahn
• 6 ‘Certain Forms of Association Neglected Before’ – R. B. Kitaj
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright