Fugitive Objects: Sculpture and Literature in the German Nineteenth Century

by Catriona MacLeod

Overview

Winner of the 2014 Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize for Best Book on Romanticism

In Fugitive Objects, Catriona MacLeod examines the question of why sculpture is both intensively discussed and yet rendered immaterial in German literature. She focuses on three forms of disappearance: sculpture’s vanishing as a legitimate art form at the beginning of the nineteenth century in German aesthetics, statues’ migration from the domain of high art into mass reproduction and popular culture, and sculpture’s dislodging and relocation into literary discourse. Through original readings of Clemens Brentano, Achim von Arnim, Adalbert Stifter, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, and others, MacLeod reveals that if sculpture has disappeared from much of nineteenth-century German literature and aesthetics, it is a vanishing act that paradoxically relocates the statue back onto another cultural pedestal, attesting to the powerful force of the medium.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810129344
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	12/11/2013
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Catriona MacLeod is a professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania.

Read an Excerpt

Fugitive Objects

Sculpture and Literature in the German Nineteenth Century

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By Catriona MacLeod

Northwestern University Press

Copyright © 2014 Northwestern University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-2934-4

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CHAPTER 1

The Matter with Sculpture: A. W. Schlegel and Hegel

Eine eigenthümliche Sculptur haben die Neueren gar nicht gehabt. (The moderns have never had a sculpture of their own.) —August Wilhelm Schlegel

Of all the arts, sculpture is certainly that which lends itself least to the Romantic idea. —Théophile Gautier

The Invisibility of Romantic Sculpture

What happens if we put to the test Frederick Beiser's assertion, in relation to the early Romantics and particularly Friedrich Schlegel, that what he calls the Romantic imperative involves the creation of a distinctly Romantic painting, a Romantic music, and so on, ultimately to be synthesized in a single artwork?1 Certainly, it seems on the face of it quite obvious that there is such a thing as German Romantic painting (Caspar David Friedrich, Philipp Otto Runge, the Nazarenes), Romantic music (Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert), and even Romantic architecture (Karl Friedrich Schinkel). Sculpture appears to be an anomalous art form. A look at a weighty recent German survey of Neoclassical and Romantic architecture, sculpture, painting, and drawing confirms that sculpture is still a vexing and anomalous case in the Romantic system of the arts, yet that this problematic status has dropped under the critical radar of art historians. The book, edited by Rolf Toman and well over five hundred pages long, announces that it will devote separate chapters to Romantic architecture, painting, and drawing, but without commentary, and in contradistinction to its treatment of the other arts, it folds "Romantic" sculpture into the end of a section on Neoclassicism. It is also at a loss to define Romantic sculptural practice, repeating vague phrases about "classical line with Romantic feeling." At best it can locate Romantic sculpture in the sentimentalism of a work such as Rudolph Schadow's 1820 Girl with Doves. In his compendious survey of German sculpture from the French Revolution to World War I, Bernhard Maaz, otherwise helpful in discussions of nineteenth-century trends such as small-scale sculpture for domestic settings, avoids altogether any questions of periodization or discussion of stylistic or aesthetic properties of Romanticism. Fritz Novotny's earlier survey of a century of European painting and sculpture from 1780 to 1880 asks, "[Why] should the transcendental aspect of Romantic feeling, the expression of boundlessness, not find expression in pure sculptural form, just as it had done in painting and the graphic arts?" but concludes that Romanticism exists in sculpture, even in the narrowest terms, only in France, while in Germany there is no Romantic sculpture "other than that of a late Classicism occasionally turning sentimental." Novotny is also rightly puzzled by the apparent contradiction of Romanticism's literary and philological interest in the Middle Ages, yet by the lack of influence of medieval sculpture (with its German masters) on contemporary sculptural practice. To turn from art history to a standard German reference work on literature, the Romantik-Handbuch edited by Helmut Schanze dedicates chapters to Romantic painting and music, with no reference at all to sculpture. Likewise, in the Bibliothek der Kunstliteratur's volume on Romantic writings on art, the emphasis of the Romantic gaze falls squarely and unsurprisingly on painting. Indeed, Wilhelm Waetzoldt's 1921 book on German art criticism had already announced that Romanticism, with its turn to self-conscious formlessness, simply did not know what to do with sculpture, a pronouncement that this chapter seeks to explore in its complexity.

Is the problem with German sculpture in the first decades of the nineteenth century one of low quality or scarce output? It seems that the scale of production was not the issue, as the sculptors did not put down their tools with the waning of Weimar Classicism, or even when Hegel delivered his lectures on aesthetics in Berlin in the 1820s, consigning sculpture to the past. In a diary entry of 1820, Goethe comments on the "grenzenlose Marmortätigkeit" (boundless activity in marble) that was then dominating the Berlin art scene. (Visiting sculpture studios was a popular activity for culturally minded travelers to the city.) Indeed, if anything, the late eighteenth century marked an explosion in the market for sculpture, albeit with an emphasis on smaller and reproducible forms in materials such as plaster, terra-cotta, and porcelain. Arguably, however, it was the very proliferation of sculpture and its successful penetration of a broadening consumer market for Neoclassical art that placed further pressure on sculpture, its burgeoning serial reproduction philosophically at odds with eighteenth-century notions of the inimitability of ancient art. Accompanying the culture of sculptural copying, as I have indicated elsewhere in essays on this consumer phenomenon in Germany, was a loss of site specificity, of sculpture's "rootedness," as it were—a decisive break with notions of decorum that had prevailed since the Renaissance. For example, entrepreneurs such as Friedrich Justin Bertuch in Weimar began to market "mix and match" busts and pedestals, advising consumers that the products could be displayed in interior or garden settings, according to individual taste. Of course, antique sculptures had long been replicated, even in Roman times, and the spread of Neoclassicism in Germany had been particularly dependent on the circulation of plaster copies, but the pace and industrialization of this process accelerated during the period in question. Not coincidentally, James Watt, the British pioneer of the Industrial Revolution, devoted the final years of his life to developing a "machine for executing sculptures." In Germany, which was eyeing the British mass production of fashionable goods both enviously and anxiously, the proliferation of Neoclassical art objects at the end of the eighteenth century produced a haunting question: what becomes of the status of the supposedly "inimitable," disinterested, and timeless antique sculpture when it is put on the market, often in miniature form and in inferior material such as plaster or ceramic, as a form of cultural currency? In his Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (General Theory of the Fine Arts), published in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Johann Georg Sulzer characterizes such dislodged statues at the end of his general entry on sculpture ("Bildhauerkunst") nervously as "geringer[n]" (inferior) decorative works that can in the best-case scenario be useful in developing taste but that are one short step away from problematic, unnatural, or hybrid Gestalten.

Yet this still does not fully answer the question of why the sculpture of the first decades of the nineteenth century is so difficult to locate, far less to classify. Is Johann Gottfried Schadow, for example, a sculptor commonly identified as a Romantic, not really better aligned stylistically with Neoclassical or even Biedermeier works—if we can see past his famous personal and aesthetic strife with Goethe—rather than with Romanticism? August Wilhelm Schlegel denigrated him in a critical Berlin exhibition review of 1803 precisely for his turn to realism and verisimilitude. Hugh Honour, eager to categorize Schadow as a non-Classical sculptor, seizes on the celebrated sculpture pair depicting the Prussian princesses Luise and Friederike, and again gestures to the terminology of Romantic yearning and inwardness; but much the same affective qualities had been evoked by Winckelmann in his descriptions of the Apollo Belvedere. Why is Romantic sculpture so elusive, if not impossible, to locate? As we shall see, this difficulty in identifying such a thing as "Romantic" sculpture resides already in contemporary writings about the arts.

Furthermore, how are we to explain the incommensurability between the extensive theorizing of sculpture in Idealist aesthetics and the mundane debates that occur on the terrain of sculptural practice during the same period, focusing as they do on questions such as the aptness, or otherwise, of modern dress for sculptural monuments? Around 1800, Berlin became a byword for prosaic modern sculpture standing uneasily between past and present: on the one hand, its sculptural works failed to be accommodated in Idealist aesthetics, but on the other hand, it stood in a tense relation to Weimar Classicism, as is well illustrated by the feud between Goethe and Johann Gottfried Schadow, who mordantly caricatured Goethe in 1800, depicting him as a self-anointed god flanked by acolytes: Novalis and the Schlegels. If anything, with the passing of the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the gulf between theory and practice became ever more extreme. Monumental sculpture in particular, a genre so reliant on public commissions, could hardly profile itself as autonomous, disinterested, or progressive. Schadow's most influential successor on the Berlin art scene, Christian Daniel Rauch, took sculpture still further away from ideality in the direction of the Denkmal (monument), with its functionalization of the medium and its relocation into public spaces, pressed into the service of the Prussian state. In the 1820s Rauch sculpted, among other monuments in Berlin commissioned by the state, statues of the generals Gerhard von Scharnhorst, Friedrich von Bülow, and Leberecht von Blücher. As the catalog Hegel in Berlin demonstrates, the 1826 Blücher monument in particular crystallizes the new departure of sculpture into public monumental art, while pointing to the tensions inherent in the development. The bronze statue, commissioned by the Prussian king, depicts a triumphant Blücher dressed in modern clothing, his foot resting on a gun seized in battle (figure 2). Yet there is an overt incongruity between the mythological representation of heroes on the upper relief and the sober, realistic depictions of warfare on the lower relief, which Rauch had modeled, with acute attention to detail, on uniforms and even a field cannon supplied by the War Ministry. Carl Seidel, who identified the public monument as the new national task of sculpture and whose major work on aesthetics, Charinomos, was owned by Hegel, precisely identifies the new priorities of sculpture in a nonpoetic age: "Das öffentliche Denkmal, die Ehrensäule, den um den Staat oder für die Wissenschaft und Kunst hochverdienten Männern gesetzt, ist, weit über alles reine Poetisieren mit der menschlichen Gestalt hinaus, unbedingt das Höchste der neueren Bildnerei" (The public monument, the statue commemorating the state or men revered in the arts and sciences, is, far beyond any pure poeticizing of the human form, unquestionably the highest achievement of contemporary sculpture). But this new priority was far from universally embraced. In a biting criticism of Johann Gottfried Schadow's sculpture in 1803, August Wilhelm Schlegel singles out for opprobrium the artist's designs for the bas-reliefs on the 1801 Münzgebäude (mint) designed by Heinrich Gentz: why, he asks, given Schadow's call for a new sculpture, did Schadow not represent the miners in contemporary costume, and pushing barrows, rather than reverting to classicizing motifs? In the first decades of the nineteenth century, then, sculpture seems to stand uneasily on each side of a divide between its antique past and a more prosaic modernity, with Romantic sculpture remaining a provocatively elusive concept.

The issue involves more than simply a generational break with the art body or corpus of a precursor movement. In the nineteenth century sculpture, an icon of German aesthetics since Winckelmann, began to engage with modernity as an art form that is inherently more "thingly" than others yet at the same time promises to represent human subjectivities along with human bodies, while carrying with it an ever-diminishing aura of Neoclassical beauty. At this point sculpture becomes a problem because it is, in equal measure, both a symptom of the future and a relic of the past. If, as Kenneth Gross has argued, histories of sculpture from Winckelmann to Hegel and Rilke open up a "series of crystallized moments that lay bare the inner metamorphoses of human culture," it is time to undertake a study that will join the history of art with German literary representations of the sculptures that figure such crisis and transition. This is all the more pressing since, as I proposed in the introduction to this book, sculpture and sculpture theory at the beginning of the nineteenth century undergo a migration into literary terrain. One of the main questions I attempt to answer concerns the status of the statue in symptomatic flux between subject and object, as well as the exchanges that occur between sculptures and human subjects. This is a critical question in light of the crisis of the object in German Romanticism, an object that all too often, in texts ranging from Ludwig Tieck's "Der Runenberg" ("Rune Mountain") to E. T. A. Hoffmann's "Die Bergwerke zu Falun" ("Mines at Falun"), puts pressure on subjectivity and that has been linked by Manfred Frank, among others, with the fetish aspect of capitalist commodification, with industrialization—which came late to Germany—exerting its influence on early nineteenth-century German culture.

The Impossibility of "Modern" Sculpture: August Wilhelm Schlegel's Art Criticism

The claim with which this chapter begins—that there is no such thing as German Romantic sculpture, at least in the material sense—can itself be problematized if we consider the one sculptor of this period who has been categorized as a "modern" both in Romantic aesthetic criticism and in current scholarship: Antonio Canova. Visits to his studio and to that of his chief competitor, the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, belonged to the must-see itinerary of cultural travelers in Rome. And as Lothar Müller reminds us, the pope bought Canova's Perseus specifically to replace the Apollo Belvedere in the niche left empty by Napoleon's invading armies. Paolo Chiarini carefully terms Canova the representative of a "pre-Romantic" Classicism, noting his departures from other Classicists in the reception and appropriation of antiquity. Chiarini's article refers to Stendhal's comments in 1811 that Canova had eluded the influence of Winckelmann, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and other Classical theorists, as well as to Canova's assertion that he was interested in carving out a style for himself. Erik Jayme, looking more closely at the sculptures themselves, sees in his bas-reliefs depicting scenes from the life of Socrates an artistic grace that has freed itself from earthly weight, thus articulating a distinctly Romantic aesthetic. Along similar lines, Jayme observes the dreamy softness and the new individuality of Canova's 1810–16 Paris statue. Another point that is noteworthy in Canova's practice is his emphasis on sensual polyperspectival viewing and mobility, a departure, albeit with precedents already in the Renaissance as well as in collections of plasters such as the Mannheim Antikensaal, from the niche, frontal position more common for late eighteenth-century sculpture. The Three Graces (1813–17 and 1815–17), to name one example among several, had a base with handles and was intended to be moved and touched by the viewer. Significantly, Carl Ludwig Fernow's unfavorable contemporary judgment of Canova takes up the issue of polyperspectival viewing critically, suggesting that the group compositions, such as Psyche Revived by Amor's Kiss (figure 3), rather than promoting a spectator's mastery over the statue, frustrate the viewer's efforts to attain visual control, "eine[r] befriedigende[n] Ansicht des Werks" (a more satisfactory view of the work): "Man mus um dieselbe herumspringen, bald von unten hinauf, bald von oben hinauf sehen, und verwirrt sich im Einzelnen der Theilanschauungen, ohne je den Eindruk des Ganzen zu erhalten" (One has to jump around it, looking at it first from below, and then from above, only to get confused in the particulars of the partial views, and never obtaining an impression of the whole). As Lars Olof Larsson has noted, the first two decades of the nineteenth century place increasing emphasis on viewing in the round, not just for plaster copies or contemporary works, but also for antique originals, as in the displays of the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum or the discussions about how to place statues to optimal effect in Leo von Klenze's Munich Glyptothek.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 3

Chapter 1 The Matter with Sculpture: A. W. Schlegel and Hegel 17

Chapter 2 Biting Back: Sculpture and the Wounds of Language in Clemens Brentano's Godwi 49

Chapter 3 The Statue as Volatile Object in Romanticism: Dislodging Sculpture 77

Chapter 4 Foreign Bodies: Of Sculpture and Cacti in Adalbert Stirrer's Der Nachsommer 107

Chapter 5 Plastic Poses: Tableau Vivant and Narrative Suspension in Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus im Pelz 143

Conclusion 171

Notes 177

Bibliography 225

Index 245

Editorial Reviews

"Fugitive Objects... unlike many other scholarly works, also tells an exciting story, full of suspense, which at times makes the book a genuine page-turner." —College Art Association Reviews

"Grounding her argument in historical context and close readings, MacLeod theorizes the cultural absence of nineteenth-century sculpture while simultaneously enumerating and analyzing its many appearances in literature. Fugitive Objects is an important and timely book not only because of its revolutionary analysis of literary sculptures, but also because it raises profound questions about the essence of art and literature that resonate in the nineteenth century as well as today." —Lauren Nossett, German Studies Review

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