222 223 1 Henri Matisse, ‘Notes d’un peintre’, La Grand Revue 52, 25 December 1908, no. 24, 731–745. See: Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Matisse: His Art and His Public, New York 1951, 119–123. 2 Donald E. Gordon, ‘Expressionism: Art by Antithesis’, Art in America 69, March 1981, 105. Cf. Paul Vogt et al., Expressionism: A German Intuition 1905–1920, New York – San Francisco 1980. 3 Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung. Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie, München 1908. Czech edition: Wilhelm Worringer, Abstrakce a vcítění, Prague 2001; idem, Formprobleme der Gotik, München 1911. 4 Max Raphael Schönlank, ‘Der Expressionismus’, Nord und Süd 35, September 1911, no. 437, 360–365. 5 Hermann Bahr, Expressionismus, Berlin 1916. Impressionists’, Burlington Magazine 18, January 1911, no. 1, 21–29; Carl David Moselius, ‘Impressionism och expressionism’, Dagens Nyheter, 20. 3. 1911. 8 Benedeto Croce, Aesthetica, Prague 1907, e.g. 13. 9 Charles Sanders Peirce, ‘Ikón, Index a symbol’, in Bohumil Palek (ed.), Sémiotika, Prague 1997, 57–73. C. S. Peirce, ‘Logic as Semiotic. The Theory of Signs’, in idem, Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. by J. Buchler, New York 1955, 98–119. 6 Arthur C. Danto, ‘Konec umění’, Estetika 1, 1998, 1–18. Arthur C. Danto, ‘The End of Art’, in The Death of Art, ed. by Berel Lang, New York 1984, 5–35. 7 XXXI. výstava SVU Mánes – Les Indépendants, Prague 1910 (preface by Antonín Matějček). It comes as no surprise that Matějček applies the term to the output of French post-impressionism, as at the same time did the theoretician Alan Cluton-Brock and the critic Carl David Moselius. Alan Cluton-Brock, ‘The Post- THE IMPRINT OF RESTLESSNESS Marie Rakušanová The semiotic character of expression at the start of the twentieth century The art of expression Restlessness in art around the turn of the twentieth century is traditionally associated with the problematic of expres- sion. There was much discussion in German art theory at that time of ‘expressive art’ (Ausdruckskunst), which was soon sub- sumed into the German concept of ‘Expressionismus’, a term that, however, only appeared in English art criticism (Expres- sionism) from the mid-19th century onwards. The origin of the term expressionism continues to trouble many art historians. Some of them, for instance Donald E. Gordon, have atempted to foreground the French lineage of the term by pointing out that Gustav Moreau had emphasised the self-expression of the artist in his teaching activities. The same term was adopted by Moreau’s student Henri Matisse in his Notes of a Painter irst published in La Grand Revue in 1908.1 Gordon’s eforts to highlight the French provenance of the term were undoubt- edly in reaction to the stereotypical embedding of expression- ism deep within the German cultural identity. For instance, Gordon was critical of the curators of the exhibition Expres- sionism: A German Intuition 1905–1920, held in 1980–1981 in New York and San Francisco, which presented expressionism as a purely ‘Nordic, Germanic’ phenomenon represented by artists ‘deeply immersed in the mysterious and obsessive crea- tive process, artists with the national character in their blood’.2 A racial interpretation of expressionism as the manifestation of a Central European, Germanic yearning for transcendence in sharp contrast to Romance (French) supericiality and fri- volity inds its origin in the theories of Wilhelm Worringer and was originally applied in his Abstraction and Empathy (Abstraktion und Einfühlung) and Formal Problems of the Gothic (Formprobleme der Gotik) to ancient art.3 Worringer formulated a psychological typology of the artistic personal- ity. The coniguration of the artist’s desire, dependent on his relationship with the outside world, determines the inal form of the work. The endeavour to imitate nature is based on the maximum conidence of an individual in the world of external phenomena, on an empathy manifest in art through natu- ralism and reaching its peak in impressionism. Conversely, stylisation, simpliication and the geometrisation of natural forms and phenomena results from the horror experienced by the artistic personality, from the face-to-face encounter with a world of elusive phenomena and the desire to extract the essence from its diversity and rid it of the sediments of the material world. Worringer associates this second approach with a compulsion for abstraction characteristic, he believes, of primitive art. Taking Worringer as their model, several ex- pressionist theoreticians and artists explained the endeavour of ‘new German art’ and its negative stance towards impres- sionism using this psychological motivation. Max Raphael, a theoretician of the New Secession, which from 1910 onwards boycoted the old Berlin Secession and brought together artists now deemed expressionists, was in agreement with Worringer when he wrote of the impulse on the part of expressionists to overcome the multiplicity of impressions from the external world by refashioning it into a clear idea.4 Worringer’s polarity was reworked into a speciic form by Hermann Bahr in his book Expressionismus from 1916.5 In relation to the artist as naturalist he writes of a ‘physical’ mode of seeing typical of artists who completely exclude sub- jective aspects from the artistic process and seek the most objective transcript possible in relation to nature. Conversely, he atributed a ‘spiritual eye’ to the expressionist that averts its gaze mistrustfully from the outside world, preferring in- stead to focus inward on its own ego. Let us leave to one side the question of what happened to expressionism in its capacity as the art of expression (Aus- druckskunst) ater it became once and for all closely linked with German modern art following the First World War. A ra- cial underpinning of the theory of expressionism would divert our atention from far more fundamental problems linked with the emergence of expressive art as a category of art history and theory at the end of the 19th/beginning of the 20th centuries. When Arthur C. Danto in The End of Art de- scribed the transformation that he maintains took place in art around 1900, he did not invoke the name of Wilhelm Wor- ringer but appealed to another thinker of that time. Danto wrote that the Italian philosopher and aesthetician Benedeto Croce had identiied ‘the expression of feelings’ as the main objective of the new art of fauvism and expressionism. Ac- cording to Danto, Croce understood that the task of produc- ing equivalents to perceptual experiences was transferred at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries from painting and sculpture to cinematography, thus absolving sculpture and painting from their duty to create an illusion of reality. How- ever, artistic progress in the sense of linear development was thereby lost, since art that turned away from mimesis and plunged back into primitive signs could no longer be subject to evaluation using clearly stipulated criteria pertaining to the quality of illusion.6 These days Benedeto Croce is rarely mentioned in con- nection with the question of expressionism and expressive art, mainly because he played no part whatsoever in the creation of its racial construction. Expressionism nowadays is generally considered to be a German phenomenon and Worringer’s suc- cessors deemed to be the founders of its period theory. On the other hand, Croce in his aesthetics expanded on an older un- derstanding of expressive art dating back to the 19th century. His theories were subsequently interpreted as a symptom of more extensive transformations that took place in European art in the early 20th century. In his time Croce was a respected thinker, the creator of intuitional aesthetics inluenced by the philosophy of Henri Bergson. In Bohemia his ideas were relected strongly in the early texts of Antonín Matějček, including the later’s intro- duction to the exhibition Les Indépendants organised in 1910 by the Mánes Association of Fine Artists.7 Croce emphasised the autonomy of artistic expression, the signiicance of inner vision, and the transcendence of art.8 Arthur C. Danto drew on Croce’s model of the art of expression as a theoretical base explaining the shit of art away from illusion in the direction of self-expression. Though Danto did not succumb to clichéd modes of thought linking expressive art and a speciically Germanic or Nordic ethos, he failed to sidestep another piece of ingrained thinking. The turn by artists in the direction of inner feelings and ideas was usually regarded – again in the spirit of the polarities deined by theory at the time – as a negative reaction to illusive art, to naturalism and impressionism. This entrenched idea creates in advance a clear demarcation line, not this time between races, but between ‘styles’. Expression mints, presses and imprints Sculpture at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries represents material that cries out for a reassessment of ingrained ideas regarding expressive art. If we trace the semiotic character of sculptural production of that time, we arrive to conclusions that blur the boundaries outlined in advance by art theory up until that time. Let us place the generally accepted idea of the tran- sition of modern art from the imitation of nature to the description of internal life within a semiotic framework. The founder of semiotics, the American philosopher and logician Charles Sanders Peirce, divided signs into three classes. The irst class comprises icons; the icon represents its object mainly by means of resemblance. The second class is made up of indices. An index is a sign that relates to its object on the basis of ‘physical connection’. An indexical symbol is a material trace, remnant or imprint. The third class of signs comprises symbols. All works, sentences and other con- ventional signs are symbols. The symbol denotes its object thanks to its idea in the mind of the interpretant. It arises and operates on the basis of convention.9 Peirce’s system is obviously far more complex than this. The triad presented here describes the relationship between the sign and the object. The aim of this study is not to apply Peirce’s complex and ontologically and metaphysically oriented semiotics to modern art. However since the 1970s the term ‘index’ has put down irm roots in the terminology of art theory and history and is used here in light of its extensive application in post-structuralist texts by Roland Barthes and Rosalind Krauss, as well as, for instance, in recent work by Georges Didi-Huberman, Alexander Nagel and Karel Císař. At irst sight Peirce’s description of signs, or more accurately the way that post-structuralist theory and art history work with it, tempts one to characterise the situation of art at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries as a shit from icon (or symbol) DEMO : Purchase from www.A-PDF.com to remove the watermark