You Must Change Your Life (25 page)

The professor apparently did not see his former student that day and they never spoke. Yet it was during those hours, coexisting in the museum “in a contact consisting solely in the atmosphere created by his presence,” that Worringer experienced “in a sudden, explosive act of birth the world of ideas which then found its way into my thesis and first brought my name before the public.”

When Worringer returned home he set to work on a sprawling, speculative inquiry into why artistic movements occurred when they did throughout history. He never explained precisely what effect Simmel's presence had on him that day. But it undoubtedly reminded him of the sociologist's research into social upheavals and the creative movements they fostered. Worringer now merged these ideas with the theories of another former professor, Theodor Lipps, whose research on
einfühlung
informed Worringer's belief now that two categories encompass all art: abstraction and empathy. The entire continuum of art history spanned these two poles, he argued. The point at which any one art movement appeared on the spectrum had to do with the psychological health of the society that produced it.

Empathic art tended to be representational and to flourish during times of prosperity. Artists in these periods developed techniques to convey dimension, depth, and other painterly illusions in order to surround themselves with reflections of their blissful reality. Worringer argued that holding up mirrors to the outside world allowed artists like those of the Italian Renaissance or Greek antiquity to identify with its beauty.

Meanwhile, abstraction arose out of turmoil. Artists who endured
war or famine attempted to organize their chaotic lives through the use of orderly mathematical forms, like the geometric mosaics of the Byzantine Empire or the pyramidal architecture of ancient Egypt. Repetition was soothing, Worringer argued, while the angular shapes ran counter to the soft roundness of the human figure in an attempt by artists to distance themselves from their miserable realities.

When he finished the manuscript, Worringer mailed copies to anyone he thought might give it a cursory glance. One recipient was the critic Paul Ernst, who did not realize that it was an unpublished student paper when he decided to review it in the popular German art magazine
Kunst und Künstler
and praised it for its prescient timeliness.

Worringer's binary may have been overly simplistic, but its bold scope garnered immediate curiosity. As soon as the issue hit newsstands, bookstores started receiving orders for the text that was not yet even bound. The Munich publisher Reinhard Piper also inquired about receiving a copy. When he discovered it didn't yet exist, he had his company publish
Abstraction and Empathy
in 1908. It has since undergone twenty reprints, nine translations and inclusion in “more editions than any other theoretical work of German modernism,” according to the art historian Ursula Helg.

Simmel himself was among the first to congratulate Worringer on the book. It turned out that the
Kunst und Künstler
reviewer was a friend of Simmel's and had sent the professor a copy early on. When Simmel wrote the young author to tell him how impressed he'd been, the letter had “the effect of establishing a bridge, both mysterious and meaningful,” Worringer said, to his “happiest hour of conception.”

A few years later, Andreas-Salomé sent a copy of the book to Rilke, who probably did not realize his tangential role in its genesis, in arranging for Simmel to be in Paris at the same time as Worringer. He wrote back that he had found himself “in absolute agreement.” (Andreas-Salomé was less impressed and told Rilke to keep her copy since he had liked it so much.)

By proposing that art functions as an articulation of the self, Worringer's book became a testament to the German Expressionist movement
and to artists like Wassily Kandinsky, August Macke, and Franz Marc, who formed the spiritualist art collective Der Blaue Reiter. “Finally, for once, there was an academic who was receptive to and understanding of these new ideas, who would perhaps step up for them and defend them against so many conservatively inclined art historians, who rejected from the outset everything new and unusual, or didn't even bother with it to begin with,” wrote Macke's wife, Elisabeth Erdmann-Macke.

The book debuted at such a serendipitous cultural moment that it accorded Worringer an almost prophetic status. During the two years he had spent writing about premodern abstract art movements, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso were in their studios inventing a new one by flattening time and motion onto singular planes. The year
Abstraction and Empathy
came out, Matisse complained that Braque's contribution to the 1908 Salon d'Automne was nothing but a bunch of “little cubes.”

The previous year, Picasso painted
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
, the apocalyptic masterpiece that came to define the end of one era and the beginning of another. Like Cézanne's bathers, the flattened nude prostitutes in Picasso's 1907 painting reject classical rules of perspective. Lacking depth, the three women on the left side seem to advance to the front of the canvas, as if soliciting the viewer. The two on the right wear African masks. Picasso went to cruder extremes than Cézanne, sharply slicing up the figures and piecing them back together to form new geometries.

Like Worringer's dissertation, the idea for Picasso's
Demoiselles
came to him during a visit to the Trocadéro Museum. It was there that Picasso caught his first glimpse of Congolese masks, which had an artistic logic that both he and Worringer tried to explain. For Worringer, the mask was a catalyst toward abstraction because it concealed its wearer and withdrew him from a frightful society. To Picasso, the masks were “weapons,” used to protect tribal artists against evil spirits. They believed that by giving form to their fears they would purge themselves of them. It was then and there in the Trocadéro
that Picasso “understood why I was a painter,” he said. “
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
must have come to me that very day, but not at all because of the forms; because it was my first exorcism painting—yes absolutely!”

Around that time, Picasso saw an El Greco painting hanging in his friend Ignacio Zuloaga's studio that confirmed his ambitions for
Les Demoiselles
. He returned again and again to look at this picture of a saint with an elongated body, beckoning the stormy heavens. The painting,
The Vision of St. John
, was the same El Greco canvas that Rodin had tried to dissuade Zuloaga from buying during their trip to Spain two years earlier. With that painting, which today hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Picasso concluded that Cubism proceeded from El Greco and thus was “Spanish in origin.”

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY REVIVAL
of El Greco, an artist Rodin for so long despised, was a sign of the sculptor's growing alienation from the new generation. He thought Cubism was a contrived movement and that “young people want to make progress in the arts too quickly.” They were “striving for originality, or what they believe to be originality, and they hasten to imitate it.”

As European artists increasingly took inspiration from far-flung colonies, Rodin's heroic monuments to French culture began to feel out of touch. In 1908, the year Picasso ventured most deeply into his African period, Rodin finished
The Cathedral
, a sculpture of two marble hands whose fingertips meet in an A-shape. They frame an internal space shaped like that of a cathedral vault. The new guard rolled their eyes at what they saw as typical Rodin schmaltz. The sculptor was becoming the symbol of art's most tired traditions. “For the majority of young artists, looking to develop their own identity, the problem was Rodin,” wrote the art historian Albert Elsen.

“When I began to do sculpture I didn't understand [Rodin] at all,” said Aristide Maillol. “His works made absolutely no impression on me. I found them bad, that's all.”

Whereas Rodin's work expressed movement and emotional intensity,
younger artists now strove for static, mathematical indifference. Maillol, along with Amedeo Modigliani, thought Rodin's art was overly representational and that his precise method of copying every last line and wrinkle made it feel slavishly constrained. They were interested in stripping away all that detail to reduce forms to their essential parts.

When the twenty-eight-year-old Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi moved to Paris in 1904, he got a job as an apprentice to Rodin, only to quit a few weeks later. He realized that he had been unconsciously imitating the artist's work and decided that “nothing grows under big trees.” In principle he agreed with Rodin that an artist should try to convey the essence of their subject, but his views diverged sharply when it came to its execution. “It is impossible for anyone to express anything essentially real by imitating its exterior surface,” he said.

Three years after Brancusi quit, he made his own sculpture called
The Kiss
. He summarized the pose of Rodin's embracing lovers with the briefest of forms: a single limestone cube, divided down the center by a line. Brancusi etched long hair and a breast into one side, but otherwise showed no trace of Rodin's arch-naturalism or emotionality in his primitive form, carved by Brancusi's own hand.

Henri Matisse, too, declared his independence from Rodin after receiving an unproductive critique from the sculptor in 1900. Matisse, then thirty, had brought some of his drawings to Rodin, who received the artist kindly in his studio, but showed little interest in the work. “He told me I had facility of hand, which wasn't true,” Matisse recalled. Rodin then advised the young artist to “fuss over it, fuss over it. When you have fussed over it two weeks more, come back and show it to me again.”

Matisse never returned. He wasn't interested in fussy drawings and he was put off by Rodin's dismissive attitude. That day Rodin “merely showed his petty side,” he recalled years later. “He could not do otherwise. For the best of what the old masters possess, that which is their raison d'être, is beyond their grasp. Having no understanding
of it, they cannot teach it.” He claimed that Rodin's feedback mattered little to him anyway by then. His practice was rapidly becoming “the reverse” of Rodin's. He saw that while Rodin could chop a hand off his
St. John the Baptist
and work on it in a separate room before reattaching it, Matisse could only see a work in terms of its overall architecture. It was a practice based on “replacing explanatory details by a living and suggestive synthesis.”

The same year as their disagreeable studio visit, Matisse remade a version of Rodin's
Walking Man
. He hired the same Italian model and sculpted the man in a nearly identical stance, armless and paused mid-stride. But Matisse's figure, titled
The Serf
, is lumpier, cruder and less anatomically defined. Matisse had manipulated Rodin's expressive vocabulary to create a more unified, painterly form.

Each passing insult seemed to entrench Rodin more firmly in the past, and he embraced the position with ever more defiance. He turned his back on the future altogether, becoming “a man of the Middle Ages,” as Cézanne once described him. He began to amass a serious collection of antiquities from Greece, Egypt, the Orient and Rome, and he filled his library with antiquarian books. He bought up funerary sculpture, votives, reliefs, vases, Tanagra figurines, busts and torsos with such indiscriminate gusto—everything was,
Que c'est beau!
—that some of his dealers began inflating their prices and selling him forgeries. After his death, the
Connoisseur
magazine suspected that Rodin probably owned more fake antiques than authentic ones. But this never seemed to detract from the pleasure his collection gave him. “At home, I have fragments of gods for my daily enjoyment,” he once said. These works “talk to me louder, and move me more than living beings.”

ANTIQUE DEALERS WERE NOT
the only opportunists to notice Rodin's careless accounting. Whether she meant to exploit him or help him, the Duchesse de Choiseul was a brilliant businesswoman. She nimbly marketed Rodin to American art collectors, who had previously been unmoved by his “obscene” nudes. When the artists Edward
Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz brought Rodin's erotic drawings to a New York gallery in 1908, American critics denounced the exhibition. “Stripped of all ‘art' atmosphere they stand as drawings of nude women in attitudes that may interest the artist who drew them but which are not for public exhibition,” declared the
New York Press
.

Choiseul saw an ingenious opportunity, however, to tap into America's capitalistic national psychology. She knew that collectors there were more likely to buy art as a means of displaying their wealth than their taste. So Choiseul raised Rodin's prices solely for American collectors, then sat back and watched the demand grow. In particular, she marketed Rodin's busts to them, predicting that portraiture would appeal to their vanity. It worked: When Rodin met Choiseul, she claimed he was making less than $12,000 a year. Once she started personally handling all of his Paris sales, she boasted of raising it to $80,000.

When the American railroad and tobacco tycoon Thomas Fortune Ryan came for his bust sitting, Choiseul pushed her strategy further. First she stoked his pride with a bit of patriotic camaraderie, bragging about how their country was the greatest in the world. The United States harbored more talent and potential than anywhere else, but she lamented the way its elite failed to support the arts the way they did in France. Ryan, however, was in a unique position to change all that, she said. Wouldn't it be a shame to waste his fortune on this life? she asked. Why didn't he start thinking about his legacy? Wouldn't he consider buying more of Rodin's work to donate to the Metropolitan Museum? Didn't he want to go down in history as the philanthropist who enlightened the American people to great art?