TOWARD A PSYCHOLOGY OF ART 1919–32
Kris and the Vocation of Art History
The caricature project derived from an undiminished friendship and continuous exchange of ideas that began in Vienna in the final years of Austria’s First Republic and persisted through years of exile during and after the Second World War. As an émigré in England, Gombrich regularly sent to Kris in the United States detailed accounts of his work at the Warburg Institute and at the BBC monitoring service, including his analyses of German propaganda and his new theories on the psychology of art. He also shared with Kris his uncertainties about the postwar prospects for his family and career in Britain. Awaiting Kris’s first visit to London after the war, he anticipated the restoration of their prewar Viennese contact: “I am tremendously looking forward to discuss[ing] the world and the future of the humanities with you.”1 For his part, Kris envisioned a revival of their original collaboration, stating,
I have worked with many associates in these years, but I haven’t found anyone with whom I got along so famously as I used to get alone [sic] with you. And getting along with me means always that I can learn from the other chap, and in these years I have often had the longing to sit down with you for a good many hours and to compare notes about the world and ourselves.2
Upon receiving Oxford’s Slade Professorship, Gombrich expressed his sense of profound personal obligation: “Directly or indirectly of course I owe this like any other job I have ever had to your advice and encouragement.”3
The friendship and collaboration between the two scholars reflected in part shared family and educational backgrounds. They belonged to the highly assimilated Jewish middle class of Vienna, both of their fathers practiced law, and members of each family pursued careers in the arts as scholars, teachers, or performers.
Still, a historical divide separated Kris and Gombrich—one far wider than the nine years difference in their ages. Born in 1900, Kris carried strong memories and influences from imperial Vienna. As a result, the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy during the First World War and the creation of the First Republic in 1918 registered more deeply, both personally and intellectually, with him than with Gombrich. When the republic entered its death throes in the 1930s, Kris foresaw the consequences more quickly and clearly than did his younger colleague.
Kris’s father, Leo Kris, became a highly successful lawyer under the Habsburg regime and received the offer of a judgeship under the republic. The war years and the postwar inflation, however, had taken their toll. The offer of a judicial post was not enough to support his family and he turned it down.4 In matters of religion, Leo Kris contemplated conversion and even spoke with Ernst about their converting to Catholicism together. He did not pursue the idea, but the father’s religious leanings certainly encouraged the early interest in Roman Catholicism that Ernst shared with his older brother Paul. After his brother converted, Ernst, at the age of sixteen or seventeen, did so as well, only a year or two before centuries of Catholic rule came to an end in Austria. When in early 1919 he entered the University of Vienna, Kris recorded his religious affiliation as Roman Catholic.
His father had pointed the way and his brother had provided the model, but Kris’s decision to convert also reflected his deep, personal fascination with the traditions of visual symbolism in the Church and can be seen as of a piece with his early commitment to art history. The Austrian republic had only just come into being and Vienna’s Baroque tradition in art remained visible amidst the ruins of the monarchy. Kris’s decision to convert remained a personal one: when the time came, he decided against baptizing his two children, a choice that acquired deep significance in the years immediately prior to the Anschluss.5
Kris’s cousin, the art historian Betty Kurth, first instilled in him a serious interest in art. Thirteen years Kris’s senior, Kurth defined her religious identity as konfessionslos—unaffiliated.6 As an art historian, she concentrated on medieval German, French, and Flemish tapestry, but like Warburg, who had contributed to Baedeker’s guide to Florence, she incorporated art history into an illustrated companion for sightseers. Writing a few years after the First World War, she composed a guidebook to Schönbrunn, the Habsburgs’ former summer palace.
Labeled the Austrian Versailles, Schönbrunn survived as a historical relic, an impressive monument to the ambitions of the eighteenth-century empress Maria Theresa, who sought to solidify the Habsburg state as a central European Catholic empire by enforcing the Church’s religious supremacy, expanding the territories under Habsburg authority, and imposing administrative reforms. Her summer palace—a closely controlled synthesis of architecture, decoration, and finely sculpted grounds—typified French classicism and imperial order. But “in the playful grace of the ornament, in the strong predominance of naturalistic flower motifs,”7 it also, as Kurth pointed out, exhibited less orthodox features. Linked in memory to Theresian grandeur, Schönbrunn—and Kurth’s description of it—pointed to impulses that led Kris into art history: a fascination with the treasures linking throne and altar; an interest in classically inspired forms that nonetheless rebelled against classical constraints; and a curiosity toward artistic techniques that reflected biological variations and physical excesses in nature. Politically, too, Kurth’s interest in the Habsburg palace mirrored a trait that Kris exhibited throughout his life—what Gombrich described as his “soft spot for pageantry.”8
Introspection and a New Realism
At the university, Max Dvořák became Kris’s art historical mentor. The Czech scholar who held one of the university’s two chairs in art history was, in Gombrich’s phrase, Vienna’s “champion of Mannerism and Expressionism.”9 During the war, while still a Gymnasium student, Kris attended Dvořák’s lectures. A scholar of both ancient and contemporary culture, Dvořák called on art historians to reorient themselves toward the study of ideas, mentalities, and worldviews. His lectures and seminars—where he drew a small, dedicated group of followers—interpreted pictorial images as markers or symbols of intellectual and emotional concerns that were inaccessible through written documents.
Dvořák hoped the study of images would generate heightened cultural and spiritual awareness in his own day. His interpretation of Pieter Bruegel, the sixteenth-century Flemish artist whose paintings the Habsburgs had assembled into one of the most remarkable single collections in Europe, served as a crucial example. Bruegel’s vivid depictions of peasants and commoners had dispensed with both classical balance and medieval severity. Instead, his faces and gestures depicted spontaneous emotions, daily pains, or temporary, joyful release. With Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and the artist Jacques Callot, Bruegel brought about “the discovery and artistic expression of those vital truths which emerge when a careful observation is made of the psycho-physical characteristics of ordinary people.”10 His acute awareness and worldly vision produced, in Dvořák’s phrase, a “new realism.”11
By communicating the physical, sensual qualities of experience, Bruegel’s realism embodied “the plenitude of life and in a way which makes all attempts to arrange and define seem utterly superfluous.”12 It reflected “the artist’s insight which, in discovering the complex vitality of man’s social life, is raised to a higher level of consciousness, a consciousness which, in turn, is passed on to the observer through the medium of art.”13 The counterpart to Montaigne’s essays, Bruegel’s satiric vision and stoic sensibility expressed a humble attitude toward nature and a belief in the inextricable union between the earthbound and the transcendent, between the grotesque and the ethereal. He rejected both classical heroizing and medieval spirituality: “eternal, changeless laws of nature stand above our desires and passions, indifferent to the lives of individuals; when we imagine that we are in control we are, in fact, being led by fate, as unknowingly as blind men, towards the abyss.”14 Such formed the basis of a religion of humanity that “was to become one of the most fundamental factors in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European art and then in the nineteenth century, to gain a pre-eminence which it retained into the twentieth century where, almost at one stroke, it was replaced by a style that was its complete antithesis.”15 A modernist art that depicted metaphysical rather than material concerns, that renounced Bruegel’s documentary and politique attitude, succeeded the new realism. And “the origin of this new style,” Dvořák concluded, “is rooted in the work of the mannerist painters.”16
For Dvořák, Mannerism contained the seeds of modern spiritual strivings and anxieties. Embodied in the enigmatic works of El Greco, Mannerist art depicted the same inner torment that Expressionists conveyed in the years leading to the First World War. Dvořák saw the war as the final crisis of modern materialism, and expected that its consequences would lead people to reject liberal egotism—which he identified with Austria’s enemies and held responsible for the catastrophe—and revive the devotional search that anguished and inspired El Greco.17 By its end, however, disillusion overcame him. According to Otto Benesch—one of his most loyal students—Dvořák ultimately adopted the Expressionists’ aim to break with the past, teaching his pupils that “Expressionism exposed the absurdity of all earlier ideas of development and progress.”18
Dvořák’s disenchantment recalls the satirist Karl Kraus, who also advocated the Expressionist view of art as a moral astringent and instrument of spiritual chastening, and whose public readings Kris attended as a student in Vienna.19 Unlike Kraus, however, Dvořák believed that Mannerist and modernist artists filled a therapeutic function. In their spiritual search, Baroque painters, according to Dvořák, had anticipated the twentieth-century emphasis on clinical introspection, the “effort to enrich man’s life and understand its secret through psychological knowledge.”20 Mannerists thus possessed a kinship not only with Expressionist artists but also with scientists of the mind, and their creations foreshadowed the discoveries of scientific psychology and medical psychiatry.
From 1919 to 1921—the year of Dvořák’s death—Kris enrolled in his lectures on the High Renaissance, Baroque art, and Albrecht Dürer, as well as in several of his art seminars.21 There he would have heard Dvořák’s explanation of the links between artistic experimentation and psychological analysis, as well as his ideas on the significance of art for documenting social reality. And when in 1936 Kris sought to characterize Daumier’s artistic and political concerns in his exhibition catalog, he used the term Dvořák had applied to Bruegel and Callot: a “new realism.”’
Entering the Museum
Kris admired the Dionysian Dvořák—the cultural historian of crisis, torment, and recovery—but for his professional training, he turned to the Olympian Julius von Schlosser. Under Schlosser’s tutelage, Kris expanded his scientific vision and historical curiosity. Like Dvořák, Schlosser called for allying the study of art more closely to the discipline of history. Unlike Dvořák, he focused on tangible rather than intangible phenomena, adhering more closely to one of the founders of the Vienna School, Franz Wickhoff. Schlosser treated artworks not as records of psychological and emotional experiences that demanded symbolic or empathic interpretation but as material artefacts that required analysis of their distinctive features and components. His approach embodied the Vienna School’s emphasis on academic expertise, archival experience, and museum work, as well as his predisposition as a collector and preservationist.
Claiming a multinational Austrian identity, Schlosser stressed his family links to artistic traditions from both northern and southern Europe. His mother was Italian and he referred to himself on occasion as Schlosser-Magnino.22 A close friend of the eminent Italian philosopher-antiquarian Benedetto Croce, his History of Portraiture in Wax testified to Croce’s influence. Schlosser followed Croce in asserting that objects of art were discrete, autonomous entities whose history “cannot be an organic phenomenon, cannot be the evolution of a ‘species’ as understood by modern-day natural science.”23 An artwork “by its very nature is an individual thing, containing its own framework of values, never, on pain of losing its unique identity, deriving them externally from ‘history,’ let alone from the realm of Platonic ‘Ideas.’”24 What was true of objects was also true of symbols. Schlosser’s intense interest in typical images and iconic formulas—especially in medieval art—derived, for example, from a fascination with individual coins, the imprints stamped upon them, and the stories behind them.25
In 1901 Schlosser became curator of the collection of applied art and sculpture at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum. There he carefully looked after the museum’s gems, intaglios, gold and bronze works, artisanal creations, and small medieval and Renaissance statues almost as if they were his private possessions. His seminar students gained professional training and research experience by studying these distinctive objects. Beyond the curatorship, in his own scholarship, Schlosser produced an encyclopedic compendium and historical commentary on theories and conceptions of art from the Middle Ages through the Enlightenment—that is, the period before the modernist revolt shook the art world. After Dvořák’s death in 1921, he succeeded to Dvořák’s chair in the art historical institute, where he began to steer the Vienna School in a far more conservative intellectual direction.
Under Schlosser’s guidance, Kris—whom Schlosser described as his Urschüler, his original or model pupil—chose for the subject of his doctoral thesis the work of Wenzel Jamnitzer, the German goldsmith whose highly detailed castings from nature crossed the boundaries between art and science. Many experts interpreted Jamnitzer’s casts of plants, insects, and animals as purely technical accomplishments, but Kris found them intriguing for their combination of fantastic embellishment and precise observation. His choice fit within the decades-old tradition of the Vienna School—inspired originally by Wickhoff and Alois Riegl—to trace the history of art not only in the masterworks of well-known eras but also in the minor objects from less prominent periods, including figures and decorative objects produced for daily life.26 Wickhoff and Riegl explored art from the period of Roman imperial decline; Kris chose the waning days of the Renaissance. The thesis earned him his doctorate in art history in 1922. The same year, he became a museum curator in his mentor’s department of applied art and sculpture.27
Kris advanced rapidly in his profession, but, from the first, politics intervened in his career. During and after the First World War, his political inclinations remained steadfastly monarchist or kaisertreu. Such sympathies were widespread among much of Vienna’s Jewish middle class, who perceived Emperor Francis Joseph as the guarantor of political stability and gradual liberalization.28 The monarch seemed also the guarantor of the Austrian artistic patrimony that reached back to the late Renaissance. The Kunsthistorisches Museum—built in the nineteenth century as part of the Ringstrasse development—expressed Francis Joseph’s intention to preserve and display that legacy in a grand public monument. As Carl E. Schorske described, constructing it, together with its companion museum of natural history, required that the imperial court reach a political compromise with Vienna’s liberal municipal leadership.29 Now presiding over a portion of that dynastic patrimony, Kris acted upon both his Habsburg loyalty and his Viennese civic responsibility. He reorganized the imperial holdings under his care and brought more of them to public view. Through the curatorship he not only indulged his early passion for art but also expressed his ongoing attachment to the liberal monarchist ideal.
But Kris’s intellectual and political impulses derived from the last days of a fast disappearing political and cultural universe. He had embarked upon his university training and professional vocation after Francis Joseph’s death, after Austria’s overwhelming military defeat, and in the midst of the final disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Remnants of the fragmented Habsburg world survived in the imperial family’s art collections and in the imposing presence of the art historical museum, but that circumstance only emphasized the mutability and ethereal nature of Kris’s situation. The vocation of art historian to which he had committed himself during the war belonged after 1918 less to a living present than to a decaying past. After the first years of his curatorship, Kris came to regard art history as a stillborn professional choice and an uncertain refuge.
Borderline Art
As curator, Kris immersed himself in researching and cataloging the museum’s possessions in gold work, gems, medieval religious statues, and Renaissance craftsmanship—work that very soon won him an international reputation.30 Furthermore, as the Kunsthistorisches Museum was transformed from an imperial institution of the old monarchy to a national institution of the new republic, he began to give the applied art collection its contemporary organization. Yet, neither the prestige of having followed Schlosser as curator at such a young age nor the opportunity to build and reorganize the collection at such a decisive point in the museum’s history brought him personal satisfaction or professional fulfillment. By 1924, within two years after assuming his position, he shifted career directions dramatically.
Kris’s growing disillusionment with the academic study of art and what seemed to him the stale atmosphere at the museum began to evidence itself in his disenchantment with even the Vienna School’s new subjects and methodologies. He developed an increasingly intense interest in marginal artworks and pursued psychology as the most effective method for interpreting these borderline products. Like Schlosser, Kris explored such art as an overlooked cultural legacy; unlike his mentor, he hoped to find in it a key to the psychology of creativity.
An early inspiration to Kris’s study of borderline art derived from the very sculpture and craftwork whose care he inherited from Schlosser. Those objects recalled the Austrian tradition of the Kunst- und Wunderkammer, collections of artistic and natural curiosities that ranged from the sublime to the grotesque and that possessed the aura of the magical, miraculous, or fearful, from rare gems and minerals to unique products of human design such as automatons. The seventeenth-century emperor and founder of the imperial art collection, Rudolf II, had lent early impetus to the mania for curiosities, which subsequently inspired a long line of Habsburg collectors. And Rudolf not only gathered mysterious and wondrous objects but also catalogued them. As Horst Bredekamp has explained, the tradition of the Kunstkammer led collectors in Austria and throughout Europe to devise scientific classifications for what astonished or mystified them.31
Schlosser developed an intensive interest in waxen images, technical marvels—including automatons —and similar uncanny products of art and nature. His book on the late Renaissance Kunst- und Wunderkammer, originally published in 1908 and reprinted in 1923, focused on a wide selection of such objects from the museum’s collection. The pride and pleasure in possession felt by the original Habsburg collectors flourished anew in Schlosser’s scholarly exposition. As the title page states, he wrote the book as a manual for the enthusiast as well as the professional collector, who could find in its pages a silver penholder and inkwell cast from shells and small animals in the manner of Jamnitzer; an animal’s horn carved in the shape of a griffin that stood upon a tortoise and carried on its back a half-man, half-serpent; an ostrich-egg goblet; a whirring symphony of trumpeting figurines; and a mechanical, chiming bell tower. There appeared also a remarkable ebony cabinet carved in the design of an ancient temple and decorated with gold-encrusted satyrs and caryatids. Especially fragile objects provoked meditation on human transience and death, including a clock with a tiny ivory skeleton under glass and an ebony cabinet within which another small skeleton adopted a contemplative pose. Finally, Schlosser surveyed not only craftwork but also paintings, in particular Arcimboldo’s depictions of autumn and fire, two of the well-known faces that the painter composed from images of fruits, grains, utensils, and weapons.32
As Christopher S. Wood has explained, Schlosser’s antiquarian devotion reflected the reticence toward art historical speculation that he shared with Croce: “It was not indifference to art but the fastidious conviction that nothing pertinent could be said about art—that art could never be used as a document—that steered Schlosser away from the interpretation of the individual work of art and onto the unorthodox topics.”33 Deep conservative misgivings toward the intellectual value of art history had spurred Schlosser’s willingness to seek out the unusual. Kris developed similar apprehensions—but he drew far different conclusions from them.
Outside the Vienna School Kris’s questioning of art history received impetus from Emanuel Loewy, the historian and archeologist of antiquity who held professorships in both Vienna and Rome and who had strongly influenced Kris’s thinking as a student. Like his contemporaries in ancient studies—such as Jane Ellen Harrison and her colleagues known as the Cambridge Ritualists—Loewy interpreted archeological and artestic artefacts as psychological residues of the ancient past. In 1900, in his widely read treatise on the imitation of nature in ancient art, he traced the way in which highly schematized and starkly linear images from archaic art evolved into the natural likenesses found in classical Greek creations. Archaic painting, drawing, and sculpture relied upon “memory-pictures,” which kept before the mind’s eye only the definitive or essential aspects of external objects.34 They derived from a process of psychological abstraction or winnowing, and art that based itself on such memory pictures dispensed with natural contours, fluid backgrounds, and variable perspectives. Pre-classical artists reproduced these mental templates or prototypical images in their creations, leaving a storehouse of reminiscences and visions that classical artists later modified and adapted to nature.
The slaughter of the First World War compelled Loewy to rethink his notion of the links between art and mind. In contrast to his prewar ideas, he now interpreted archaic artwork as a technique of protective—or apotropaic—magic that aimed at defending against violent earthly and supernatural forces. Gombrich—who, like Kris, attended Loewy’s postwar seminars—recalled the shift: “In his lectures and naturally in his exercises as well he frequently dealt with his theories of the rendering of nature in art, the migration of types, and later also theories of apotropaic symbolism.”35 Based on the belief in a magical identity between images and their objects, primitive artists created symbols that, like ritual performances, would, as Loewy wrote, “simulate the presence of certain objects or beings whose appearance is supposed to act as a deterrent.”36 Artists and craftworkers produced frightening depictions of animals—bulls, lions, snakes—and fantastic or lurid human faces to serve, among many such images, as defensive weapons against terrifying external powers. Classical mimesis—the artistic imitation of reality— thus derived not only from a lineage of archaic memory pictures but also from a separate stream of primitive anxieties, ritual practices, and grotesque imagery.
Psychoanalysis and Art History
In 1924, Kris met Loewy’s close friend Sigmund Freud. An avid collector of ancient and Renaissance artefacts, Freud had asked Kris to evaluate his personal collection of cameos and intaglios. He contacted the young curator at the suggestion of Kris’s fiancée, Marianne Rie. The daughter of the Jewish physician Oskar Rie—Freud’s long-time friend and the pediatrician to Freud’s children—Marianne Rie was at that time studying medicine at the University of Vienna. In 1925, the year after the first meeting between Kris and Freud, she received her medical degree, and immediately upon graduation began her psychoanalytic training in Berlin. During that same year, Kris began his analysis with Helene Deutsch in Vienna.
While working with Deutsch, Kris decided to pursue a career in psychoanalysis. Although she initially believed that his decision derived from an identification with her as his analyst, Deutsch eventually supported the choice.37 Kris completed his training analysis with Deutsch in 1927, the year that Marianne Rie, having finished her own training, returned to Vienna. That year Kris and Rie married and both began to participate in the work of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, with Marianne Kris joining the recently founded seminar on child analysis.38
In January 1932, Freud asked Kris to become editor of Imago: Journal for the Application of Psychoanalysis to the Cultural Sciences (Zeitschrift für die Anwendung der Psychoanalyse auf die Geisteswissenschaften). He left Kris free to edit the journal alone or with Robert Waelder. Kris chose a co-editorship and informed Freud that he intended to move Imago away from traditional applied psychoanalysis. As he recalled in an interview with K. R. Eissler, he told Waelder: “[O]ne cannot edit Imago as a journal for applied psychoanalysis because there is no application of analysis, of psychoanalysis; there is psychoanalytic psychology and clinical psychoanalysis; there is no applied psychoanalysis in the old sense …”39 Waelder agreed, and after the two became co-editors, they changed Imago’s subtitle to Journal for Psychoanalytic Psychology, Its Allied Fields and Applications (Zeitschrift für Psychoanalytische Psychologie, ihre Grenzgebiete und Anwendungen). Two years later Kris began to serve as a lecturer and training analyst in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute.40
From the start of his own psychoanalytic education, Kris turned his attention to the psychology of art, which, as he made clear with regard to Imago, he conceived not as psychobiography—the approach most common within the Viennese Freudian movement—but as an investigation into the creative process, and in particular whether that process enhanced or diminished the artist’s and viewer’s contact with the world around them. Thus, in 1926, he had published Der Stil “rustique”: Die Verwendung des Naturabgusses bei Wenzel Jamnitzer und Bernard Palissy, an expansion of his dissertation on late Renaissance metalwork and sculpture to include Palissy’s, as well as Jamnitzer’s, castings from nature. Outwardly, the essay confronted the question of whether such artificially produced likenesses belonged to the mainstream of High Renaissance creativity. Inwardly, it dealt with the problem of whether art itself performed life-giving or life-denying functions. Natural castings conveyed rigidified, not revitalized, appearances, and Kris pointed out their links to medieval cults of the dead and the casting of death masks, a procedure revived by Quattrocento portrait sculptors in their efforts to achieve realism. Not only metallic casting but also the high art of portraiture derived original subject matter from figures emptied of life.41
Kris became increasingly interested in petrified or failed expression in art and life. He began to investigate the creations of persons suffering from severe mental illness, through which he explored the conflict between the vivid, living quality that sufferers perceived in their own artworks and the unlifelike, even lifeless, appearance that those same works conveyed to even sympathetic viewers. In 1932, he published his first paper on the subject: a study of the grimacing character heads created by Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, the famous eighteenth-century sculptor whom Kris diagnosed as suffering from psychosis. To their viewers the sculptures might appear as repetitive, frozen visages, but to Messerschmidt they functioned as magical devices or protective masks to repel the demons that in moments of illness he believed pursued him. But the grimacing masks that desperately defended against the world simultaneously expressed Messerschmidt’s desire to engage directly with it and so they deserved to be seen as works of art. The meanings conveyed by the character heads did not supplant or cover each other; they combined within a single configuration. Messerschmidt’s sculptures represented a recurrent, highly charged effort at social communication and “self-restitution.”42
Kris’s concern with the distance between art and life and the need for self-restitution reflected his deepening alienation from the art historical profession. He intended to relinquish his position at the museum but Freud convinced him to remain there.43 The curatorship provided professional security. Furthermore, always searching out new disciplinary footholds for psychoanalysis, Freud knew that from such a position Kris could better contribute to the aim of Viennese psychoanalysis—expressed in the original masthead of Imago—to bridge the humanities and psychology. Perhaps Kris referred partly to his own life experience when in 1935 he wrote about the tendency of individuals in times of crisis to live what he called enacted biographies:
In a world whose semi-darkness is again and again submerged in myths, the boundary between the individual and tradition grows hazy and identification with the ancestor decides the nature and direction of the individual’s existence. Under normal conditions, in our society, this bond plays on the whole a subordinated role. And yet many of us live even today the life of a biographical type, the “destiny” of a particular class, rank, or profession.44
Kris remained an art historian but was never of one mind about his decision.
At the close of the nineteenth century, Henry James had described his own similar disenchantment with art and, like Kris, he had tried to heal himself by meditating on the work of Daumier. In his famous essay on Daumier as caricaturist, first published in 1890, James expressed his ambivalence toward visual art in general and toward the mysterious effect of Daumier’s portraits in particular: “Art,” James wrote, “is an embalmer, a magician, whom one cannot speak too fair.”45 Although most artists used their skills to conceal signs of morbidity in their subjects, Daumier displayed the contorted, deathly faces of his subjects among the French bourgeoisie, who for their part responded with macabre fascination. The bourgeois class could not resist art’s capacity to preserve their images—their death masks—for posterity. That life-in-death, James explained, “puts method, and power, and the strange, real, mingled air of things into Daumier’s black sketchiness.”46
Through Daumier, future generations would recognize the bourgeois by his frozen grimace. At the same time, they would perceive in art a critical, documentary function that would offer it a new kind of life.
The Republican Interregnum
The museum gave Kris resources and contacts. Psychoanalysis provided conceptual orientation and a sense of intellectual community. Yet, doubt never abandoned him. The psychology of creativity offered no definitive resolution, merely an exploratory path. Furthermore, as he tested the possibilities of a psychoanalysis of art, the political ground again shifted beneath him. Soon, neither art history nor psychology promised personal or professional security.
By 1932, the Christian Social party had established a stronghold of antirepublicanism within the Austrian republic itself. Under the leadership of Karl Lueger, it had begun its political rise in the 1890s by opposing both traditional conservatism and the Socialist party. Lueger’s appeals to Vienna’s lower middle class and anti-Semites had won him repeated reelection as the city’s mayor and established a new right-wing model of political success. Although the Christian Socials lost their hold on Vienna’s local government after the First World War, they effectively used their antisocialist, conservative Catholic message to enlarge their base beyond the capital. The Socialist party and its supporters—the chief defenders of the new Austrian republic—now focused their activities on defending their municipal bastion of “Red Vienna.”
During the 1920s, Monsignor Ignaz Seipel, Austrian chancellor from 1922 to 1924 and 1926 to 1929, consolidated the Christian Social grip on the new state. Seipel trained for the priesthood at the University of Vienna and taught moral theology at the university in Salzburg, where in previous centuries archbishops had ruled the diocese as princes and ecclesiastics, building the city into a political power in central Europe and a religious bastion for German Catholicism.47 The palace-fortress atmosphere of Salzburg could not have been far from Seipel’s mind when toward the end of the war he returned to the University of Vienna to teach theology and launch a career in national politics.
Seipel and the Christian Social leadership constructed a Catholic political front within the framework of the First Republic. While open to occasional compromise, they treated Vienna’s Socialist civic and labor leaders as anathema and aimed at breaking the Socialist party and trade unions. At the same time, a feckless but nonetheless dangerous Austrian paramilitary organization—the Heimwehr—carried out its own assaults on the Left, trade unionists, and other republican supporters, thereby making its own claim to power, while strengthening the Christian Socials’ political hand.
From the time of Lueger, anti-Semitism served the Christian Socials as a ready organizing and propagandistic tool. In the 1920s, they aimed an increasingly insistent anti-Semitic message not only at Vienna—where the postwar party continued to remain comparatively weak—but more importantly at provincial cities and rural districts. Radical anti-Semites within the Christian Social movement called repeatedly for legislation that would define Jews as a separate racial minority and drastically limit or exclude altogether their participation in government, law, medicine, journalism, and education, demanding that such measures also extend to Jewish converts to Catholicism. The Church leadership, which viewed the Christian Social party as their political arm, objected to the racial categorization of Jews and discrimination against converts as antithetical to winning adherents and rebuilding a Catholic state. At the same time, members of the episcopate—such as Salzburg’s archbishop Sigismund Waitz—publicly declared that Jews represented an alien element within the Austrian population and therefore hindered the Church’s religious and social mission.
Christian Social followers, their propagandists, and allied clergy called for the social segregation of Jews and the imposition of an official numerus clausus—a limit on the number of Jewish civil servants, academics, and students at or below the percentage of Jews within the population as a whole. Although Christian Social electoral platforms throughout the country promoted that agenda and party journals supported it, neither Seipel nor his Christian Social successors passed anti-Semitic legislation. Seipel personally approved of the numerus clausus proposals—early in his career he had supported placing a restriction on the number of Jewish students who could enroll at the universities—but as chancellor he resisted turning such demands into law. They risked arousing international opposition and they promoted a racial determinism that competed with the party’s and the Church’s Christianizing ideology.48 Instead, under Seipel’s governments and those that followed, Christian Social officials used administrative directives and party influence—rather than their law-making authority—to reduce the number of Jews employed in government ministries, the civil service, the universities, and the schools. They gradually but persistently remade the Austrian republic into a conservative Catholic state.
Seipel envisioned Austria as a strong link in a chain of similar anti-socialist, Catholic states stretching across southern and Eastern Europe. His continental strategy overlapped and at times competed with that of Benito Mussolini, whose National Fascist party came to power in Italy the same year that Seipel first became chancellor of Austria. The Fascist leader sought to build an antisocialist alliance across the Mediterranean rim, with Italy as the political pivot. In 1928, his plan to negotiate an alliance between Italy, Austria, and Hungary against France and Czechoslovakia appealed to Seipel’s Theresian vision, but the possibility of forging such a coalition dissipated in the face of Mussolini’s call for Italian sovereignty over the South Tyrol. Seeking an eventual concordat with the Italian dictator, the papacy remained silent on the dispute, and in the following year, it agreed to the Lateran Accords. In the early 1930s, Christian Social governments allied more closely and openly with the Italian Fascist state. Following Seipel’s chancellorship, Austrian leaders perceived Mussolini’s Italy as a kindred regime, one that guarded European Catholic states against the dangers of socialism and the demands of pan-Germanists.49
In Austria, pan-German nationalists vehemently denounced Seipel’s grand diplomatic design. The ultra-nationalist Greater German People’s Party openly called for Anschluss with Germany. Far more crucially, however, the remnants of the supposedly apolitical Habsburg civil service rallied in growing numbers around the idea of a greater German state. From the time of Emperor Joseph II—Maria Theresa’s eighteenth-century successor—the Habsburg monarchy had depended heavily on a secularized German bureaucracy to enforce imperial laws and policies and to contain or suppress the multinational forces that threatened to split the empire. Already inclined toward German nationalism before the First World War, Austrian civil servants after 1918 now saw their influence—and their jobs—disappearing under the new clerical state.50 Discontented, insecure bureaucrats perceived a non-clerical Greater Germany—rather than a truncated Catholic Austria—as the state best suited to guarantee their employment and satisfy their political ambitions.
In response to pan-German nationalism, Seipel and his followers pursued a two-pronged strategy. To satisfy the nationalist Right and to win over former imperial servants, they appealed to bourgeois and bureaucratic animosity toward socialism and to Catholic hostility toward republicanism. At the same time, they avowed the ideological principle behind Anschluss by stressing Austria’s cultural identification—rather than political unification—with Germany. In the 1930s, Christian Social leaders appealed to both Italy and Germany as partners in a mission to uphold Catholic conservatism and German nationalism in an independent central Europe state.
Reflecting its pre-1914 support for German unification, the Austrian Socialist party in the early 1920s advocated Anschluss with the new Weimar republic. But the emergence of a Catholic authoritarian government in Austria, the rise of Nazism in Germany, and the growth of an Austrian Nazi party dispelled the illusion of union based upon republican principles. By the 1930s, the Austrian Left still preserved its German nationalism but now focused on the struggle against the Christian Socials.
Under the new republic, the University of Vienna—including the art historical institute—became a recurrent political and physical battleground. The German student association—Deutsche Studentenschaft—declared Jews an alien racial presence at the university and called repeatedly for a numerus clausus on Jewish instructors and students. In early 1923, truncheon-wielding members prevented Jews from entering the university’s lecture halls and laboratories. In November 1923—ten days after Hitler’s failed coup attempt in Munich—Austrian Nazis charged into classrooms, removing and clubbing Jewish students while police stood by impassively. The Christian Social government—claiming that it had no power or jurisdiction to interfere with the university’s traditional privilege to regulate its own affairs—refused to intervene against the attacks. Assaults on Jewish students, the storming of classrooms of Jewish professors, and violence against Jewish student organizations revived in the late 1920s. In 1927, the anniversary of the founding of the republic aroused particular fury: by then, Heimwehr members joined German nationalist youths in demonstrations and rampages.51
Nationalist students directed their rage also at non-students and non-academics. At the University of Innsbruck, Karl Kraus gave a reading from his antiwar drama, The Last Days of Mankind. A model of Kraus’s documentary method, The Last Days of Mankind utilized statements, phrases, and claims—written or spoken—that Kraus culled from newspaper accounts, political speeches, and government reports. “Theatergoers in this world,” he explained, “would not be able to endure it. For it is blood of their blood …”52 The Kaiser’s wartime statements and German generals’ declamations, heard again in Kraus’s drama, became self-caricature, and nationalist students in Innsbruck prevented a scheduled second reading.53
The historian Eric Hobsbawm, the son of a British father and Austrian mother, spent his youth in Vienna. He recalled that immediately after 1918 only devoted Habsburg loyalists rejected the idea of Anschluss outright.54 That observation applied to Kris, whose political convictions originated in the pre-1914 image of an enlightened Habsburg monarchy safeguarding constitutional government throughout the Austro-Hungarian lands. Among Vienna’s community of writers and artists, Kris encountered first hand the growing presence and pressure of the Austrian Right. He visited, for example, a circle that gathered at the studio of Trude Wähner, an aspiring artist who promoted Paul Klee’s Expressionist work. Her father Theodor Wähner, however, not only sat on the Vienna city council as a Christian Social representative but also published the anti-Semitic Deutsche Zeitung.55
Given the official policy of the Church hierarchy, Kris’s status as a convert to Catholicism temporarily provided him with professional and personal protection. His work abroad with international collectors, museum directors, and art patrons supplied a safety net beyond Austria if it became necessary. As his son Anton O. Kris recalled, Italian bishops readily gave Kris access to Church collections that they kept closed to the public.56 When the Metropolitan Museum of Art required an expert to catalog its cameo collection, it brought Kris to New York in 1929 to undertake the job.57 At the same time, Kris kept close track of deteriorating conditions in Austria and employed his contacts to find work abroad for his younger, Jewish colleagues.
A liberal royalist in post-imperial Vienna, Kris remained convinced of the irreversible disintegration of Austrian political life. At his first meeting with the university student Ernst Gombrich, he therefore made sure that the young researcher understood fully the uncertainties that attached to an art historical career in Vienna. In the years that followed, Kris became not only a professional mentor to Gombrich but also a political advisor.