CHAPTER 3

THE VIENNA–LONDON CONNECTION 1932–36

Gombrich and the Question of Art History

Like Leo Kris, Gombrich’s father, Karl Gombrich, built a successful career in law. His mother, Leonie Gombrich, achieved equal success as a renowned pianist and music coach, whose friends included Adolf Busch and Rudolf Serkin. Both parents participated in the circle of culture critics and religious seekers who surrounded Gustav Mahler. Both converted from Judaism to Protestantism—the faith in which they baptized their children—adopting a tolerant and non-evangelical stance distinct from the religious mysticism that characterized others among Mahler’s followers. Karl Gombrich joined a Masonic lodge, a place of social refuge for many assimilated Viennese Jews and an organization that still remained, at the behest of the Church hierarchy, illegal in Austria. Each Freemason committed himself to the Masonic vision of global citizenship.1 His family’s secularized Jewish background and liberal Protestant ethos thus combined to shape Gombrich’s later sympathy with the skeptical and experimentalist traditions of English Dissent.

Like the Kris family, the Gombrichs suffered from the postwar economic decline that struck the Viennese middle class.² Leonie Gombrich’s income as a teacher and her contacts as a musician became increasingly important to the household. Her pupils came from families throughout Europe, among them the daughters of Lady Violet Bonham Carter, the daughter of the last prewar Liberal prime minister of Britain, Herbert Asquith.

The link to the Asquiths embodied the Gombrichs’ religious and political liberalism, but more importantly it would prove crucial to the family’s escape from Austria. Educated in a Dissenting Protestant home in Yorkshire, Asquith attended Balliol College, Oxford, where he could have remained as a classical scholar. Instead, seeking an opening into politics, he pursued a career in law. Before the First World War, he fought for the disestablishment of the Welsh Church and confronted the combined forces of Church and peers in the struggle over eliminating the veto of the Lords in Parliament. He did not last as a wartime leader. His Liberal government split and finally collapsed under the pressure of political rebellion in Ireland and military stalemate along the Western Front. After 1918, the Liberal party went into irreversible decline; the scholar-lawyer had led Liberalism into the political wilderness. Still, after 1918, Violet Bonham Carter became active as a Liberal party organizer and candidate for Parliament—this despite her father’s opposition to women’s suffrage. Her ties to the Gombrichs remained strong enough for her to sponsor their emigration to Britain.3

Within the family Gombrich did encounter a spirit of political radicalism. His older sister Amadea—named for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—followed her mother’s path into the world of music, becoming a respected concert violinist. But his younger sister Lisbeth joined Austria’s Socialist party. Through discussions with her, he received an education in political argument.⁴ But argument did not translate into conviction. Attached to a liberalism in decline, Gombrich, like Kris, regarded contemporary politics with mistrust. In accord with the Masonic tradition of his father and the Dissenting tradition with which he later identified in England, he deplored aristocratic privilege, on the one hand, and the politics of the street, on the other. He committed himself instead to scholarship.

The Gombrichs enrolled their son in the Theresianum, the prestigious classical preparatory academy that had once served as the educational bastion of the Viennese Catholic aristocracy and imperial officer corps.5 After the war, the school had become a Gymnasium for the middle classes of the new Austrian republic. Yet, Gombrich felt himself “rather an outsider.”⁶ Certainly, his profile as a Protestant student from a Jewish and Freemason background ran counter to that of the traditional student at the once exclusive Gymnasium.

Devoting himself chiefly to the study of German literature and modern physics, Gombrich’s interest in art history developed late. Vienna’s Baroque artworks and architectural monuments did draw his attention as an urban explorer, but as the ubiquitous remains of Austria’s past. It was Dvořák’s inspired writings and the Expressionists’ vivid artwork that led the young Gombrich to approach art not merely as a relic but as the living representation of an idea. He recalled:

When I was about fifteen or sixteen, I read books on Greek art and on medieval art. As soon as Max Dvořák’s book came out, with the title—not by him—Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte (Art History as the History of the Spirit), I was given it as a present and devoured it.⁷

The book had an immediate impact. Dvořák “convinced me that the art of the past offered an immediate and exciting access to the mind of bygone eras.”⁸ The intellectual curiosity that Dvořák generated gave him a professional direction: “With this idea in mind, that art was a marvelous key to the past—an idea which I learned from Dvořák—I decided I wanted to read the history of art at Vienna University.”⁹

At the university, Gombrich chose Schlosser as an advisor. Under his influence he began to reject the idea that art conveyed a collective spiritual dilemma or shared consciousness. While researching his dissertation on the Mannerist artist Giulio Romano and his Palazzo del Tè in Mantua, Gombrich discarded much of Dvořák’s approach, explaining years later that in studying the archival records of the citizens of sixteenth-century Mantua he “found it hard to credit them all with that spiritual predicament Dvořák and others had found expressed in the style of Mannerism.”10 The Palazzo del Tè itself represented a conflicted product:

At the time I maintained that Giulio Romano had two completely opposed aesthetic languages: one classical and relatively severe, the other extravagantly Mannerist … Much later, I realized that I had undoubtedly been influenced by Picasso; Picasso had worked in a Neoclassical style—in his designs for the Ballets Russes, and so on—and he had also carried distortion to an extreme.¹¹

From the Palazzo del Tè to the workshops of caricaturists: despite Gombrich’s rejection of Dvořák, Giulio Romano—and Picasso—helped prepare him to collaborate with Kris.

Loewy’s classes on ancient archeology provided another source of inspiration. Years later, while with the BBC monitoring service, Gombrich transplanted Loewy’s exegeses on magic to the English countryside. He informed Kris:

The other day I “lectured” in a kind of studio, which one of our supervisors has opened for the benefit of bored colleagues and of the local population. I need scarcely tell you the subject I chose. It was, of course, “Art and Magic” and you can imagine that it was full of plagiarism of Loewy’s and your work.¹²

Thus while Gombrich’s work with Kris did not revive his early interest in Dvořák, it did encourage an interest in how to bridge cultural history and scientific psychology.

Confronting Doubt

Gombrich first met Kris during the academic year 1931/32, when in connection with a seminar assignment from Schlosser he came to the curator’s office for permission to examine a medieval ivory pyx.¹³ Almost instantly, Kris attempted to dissuade the student from pursuing a career in art history:

But if your interest [in art] is intellectual, you must realize that you have chosen the wrong field. We really know too little about art to make any valid statements. The best our colleagues can do is to escape to some more advanced branch of study; they want to draw on psychology, but really psychology is not yet sufficiently developed to help the art historian. Take my advice, and change your subject.14

Kris’s open alienation and his frank warning left a powerful impression on Gombrich—so strong that he worked the curator into a verse play that he wrote for end-of-term celebrations in summer 1932. The performance, with Kris in attendance, included a scene that “showed a young historian being tempted by Doubt, and Doubt was represented by Kris because he was so skeptical about art history by then.”¹⁵ In a letter written to Carl E. Schorske more than sixty years later, Gombrich—almost surely working from memory—reproduced his satirical tribute to Kris, titled simply “Doubt” (“Der Zweifel”).¹⁶

In Gombrich’s theatrical masque, Doubt attempted to open the eyes of a young novice standing before him in the museum. After sternly dismissing academicians and connoisseurs, he offered a blunt evaluation of job opportunities:

Now tell me, to what end are you studying art history?

What will you do with it, what do you have in mind? To expound expertly on Titians …?

Are you that rich? No? And you are truly convinced

Someone will employ you? Here? That is out of the question!

Abroad?¹⁷

Doubt, unlike the professors of the Vienna School, rejected art historians as cultural or historical scientists. Archeologists, however, possessed a true scientific eye and with it a new power of vision: “You enjoy science? Then why do you not study Archeology? Those people can see!”18

Art history could not become a scientific discipline, but at most could turn to the new mental sciences for support:

Are we a science? No, pay attention to me:

We are not yet so far removed from the artwork to say that

We can do absolutely nothing under our own power.

At best one can flee to the sister science

And attempt to draw psychology in with us.

Doubt’s somber reflections on art history ended with a shudder of intellectual and personal despair:

Here with us art will soon be no fun for you

Neither art not science, my friend, can here be satisfied.¹⁹

Kris’s challenge and his call to link art history to a true science of perception became a lasting impulse—as well as a lingering, Mephistophelean warning—within Gombrich’s work.

Kris’s disenchantment reflected the moment at which the meeting with Gombrich took place: he had begun—or would soon begin—to assume his duties as an editor of Imago and had to reconcile himself to sharing those desired responsibilities with his required obligations as a curator. Yet, as Kris indicated and Gombrich recorded, his comments did not simply, or even predominantly, derive from personal ambivalence or professional frustration. As Kris’s alter ego, Doubt emphasized more than once that it was “here”—in Vienna—where the pure scholarly pursuit of art history—the “fun”—lacked fulfillment. As with Gilbert’s Machiavelli, Kris’s questioning of intellectual authority and academic convention accompanied recognition of political realities. Finding a job and institutional affiliation went, as he stressed, to the heart of the matter: Vienna’s cultural institutions had become not only constricted but also menacing.

The Crisis of the Republic

In April 1930, the University of Vienna’s Senate approved a proposal to categorize students according to their so-called nations: German, Jewish, mixed, and other, with Jewish converts to Catholicism classified as members of the Jewish nation. To be considered German, one’s parents and grandparents had to have received baptism. A classification for “Austrian” did not exist. The Christian Social cabinet and the Ministry of Education voiced no opposition. Austria’s high court, however, questioned the regulation’s constitutionality and in June 1931 overturned the proposed measure. Nationalist and Nazi students reacted immediately. Armed Nazis laid siege to the Renaissance-style university building and attacked Jewish and socialist students. Campus police refused to respond and the university rector denied access to the city police. Only after three days of violence did the rioters leave the streets.20

As Nazi agitation extended into the university, Gombrich observed at close range how opposition to Nazi intimidation withered within the academy. At the art historical institute, his close friend—and Kris’s first research assistant—Otto Kurz became the target of a savage anti-Semitic assault. Gombrich vividly remembered:

The University enjoyed “extraterritorial” immunity from police interference, a fact which led to a reign of terror by Nazi thugs. Kurz was among the victims of their brutal violence when he was assailed at the University library and hit over the head with a steel truncheon.²¹

Kris soon secured employment for Kurz outside of Austria—a position at the Warburg Library in Hamburg. On one occasion Gombrich himself faced threats when a line of Nazis obstructed his entry into the art historical institute. Yet, almost as disturbing as the physical intimidation was the behavior of professors who remained silent when student organizations posted the virulent anti-Semitic invective from the pages of Julius Streicher’s Nazi tabloid, Der Stürmer.22 Neither academic administrators—“they employed ‘marshals’ who participated in the outrages of these student organizations”²³—nor the mute professoriate organized a response. Instead, Christian Social chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss restored a temporary peace by providing greater policing against Nazi student agitation and prohibiting party leaflets and publications.²⁴

Gombrich’s experiences—particularly his disappointment at the university’s response—led him to feel “a little clearer about my origins and about the situation.”²⁵ Still, he fully intended to pursue a career in Vienna. “The professors could certainly have shown more backbone,” he concluded, “but that the situation might become a danger to people’s lives—that I never thought.”²⁶

In March 1933, Chancellor Dollfuss dissolved the Austrian parliament. After barely fifteen years of existence, the Austrian First Republic came to an end in all but name. To protect his new authority and contain pressure from Austrian Nazis, Dollfuss relied on a loose political alliance between the antisocialist middle class, Church authorities, rural townspeople, and homegrown Heimwehr paramilitaries. Through this conservative governing coalition—the Vaterländische Front—he aimed to stabilize the Christian Social regime in Austria and advance the cause of political Catholicism in central Europe. Dollfuss moreover aligned his government with Mussolini’s. He admired the antisocialist, dictatorial cast of the regime, which had also been formally accepted by the Vatican in the Lateran Accords, and sought its protection against Hitler’s mounting foreign demands. Ultimately, to gain broader international support—especially from the United States—and to solidify the new Catholic authoritarian state, Dollfuss outlawed the Nazi party in June 1933.

Temporarily more secure in his leadership and urged on by his patron Mussolini, in February 1934 the chancellor carried out his counter-revolution against the Socialist municipal government in Vienna. Fighting extended into Vienna’s streets and housing projects, to Linz, and to isolated industrial centers beyond, but after several weeks, troops and police suppressed the last Socialist and worker opposition.27 Dollfuss banned the Socialist party, abolished trade unions, and claimed sole governing power for the Vaterländische Front. As a self-described patriotic and Catholic organization, the Front imposed no racial laws. Dollfuss instead enforced an administrative numerus clausus: having ended Socialist power in Vienna, he removed Jews from the city’s civil service and proscribed the employment of Jewish physicians in Vienna’s hospitals and health services. In the meantime, Nazi party members and sympathizers—with the government’s acquiescence—shifted their publications from party organs to private presses.²⁸ Announced at home and abroad as a defense of independent Austria, Dollfuss’s counter-revolution installed an Austro-Fascist regime and initiated the first wave of emigration.

Shared Scholarship

In the summer of 1933—between the dissolution of Parliament and the suppression of the Socialist party—Gombrich graduated the University of Vienna with a doctorate in art history and began his search for an academic position. He soon realized the nature of the difficulties facing him. Finding a job, he recounted, “proved virtually impossible. There was a great deal of unemployment among intellectuals then, but my Jewish origins certainly also had something to do with it.”²⁹

Dvořák’s follower Otto Benesch stepped in with an offer of support. As a specialist in northern Renaissance prints, Benesch served as curator at the renowned Albertina collection of graphic arts. He encouraged Gombrich to apply there for a position as a trainee:

He was very nice, he thought a lot of me, and I was very pleased. It seemed like the first step. On his advice I therefore submitted an application and gave the necessary references. My application was turned down. That was not only a heavy blow, but also the first real proof that things could not go on like this. This happened still under Dollfuss.³⁰

The expanding anti-Semitism that closed off his opportunity at the Albertina showed him that his parents’ conversion counted for less and less within state institutions.

In 1934 Gombrich accepted an offer from Kris—who had recently begun a project on the psychology of caricature—to become his research assistant. As with his investigations into metal castings and sculpted character heads, Kris turned to caricature as a means of exploring the borderline regions of art history and psychological science. This new project contained richer, even more protean lines of inquiry. The caricaturist—the keen psychological observer and insensate scribbler—combined the mimetic receptivity of a classical painter with the aggressive experimentalism of a Mannerist or Expressionist artist. The fusion between life-affirming and life-negating motives, between generative and defensive patterns, and between magical and critical impulses nowhere came to the fore more clearly for Kris than in caricature.

Gombrich already knew that Kris functioned in several vocational capacities—as curator and consultant, as art historian and psychoanalyst—and pursued those various lines of research simultaneously. Experience had taught him that Kris spoke his mind openly with colleagues, questioned conventional professional assumptions, and struggled personally, like Gombrich, with the dilemma of how to bridge the studies of art and mind. An astute clinician and adventurous scholar, he also paid close heed to the world beyond his office.

Kris and Gombrich began their collaboration in an atmosphere of rapidly intensifying uncertainty and threat. Hitler’s followers in Vienna assaulted their opponents on the Left and lashed out at their competitors on the Right. The crushing of the Socialists had not protected Dollfuss. In July 1934, during a failed putsch attempt, Austrian Nazis assassinated him in his office. The Austrian minister of justice, Kurt von Schuschnigg, succeeded the slain political leader as chancellor. A fervid Catholic, and as vehemently antisocialist as his predecessor, Schuschnigg continued to govern through the Vaterländische Front coalition. Attempting to maintain Dollfuss’s previous balancing act, he sought the good will of France, Britain, and the United States, but like Dollfuss, he looked chiefly to Mussolini to protect Austria from Hitler’s pressure. While he tried to keep his Catholic regime free of Nazi control, he opted at the same time to accommodate the demands of pan-German Austrians.

Schuschnigg’s government staggered toward collapse. It refused to join with the Left in a genuinely pro-republican and anti-Nazi front. It fostered the steady spread of anti-Semitism, through which Schuschnigg hoped to strengthen his support among political Catholics, gain the approval of German nationalists, and consolidate his leadership over the Right. After Dollfuss’s murder, Schuschnigg suppressed the vitriolic Der Stürmer but he continued to exclude Jews from government service and teaching positions, and in September 1934 he allowed his Education Ministry to issue regulations that would begin the religious segregation of classrooms.31 For decades, Christian Social leaders had deployed anti-Semitism strategically; the stratagem now helped prepare the way for Anschluss.

The movement for unification with Germany drew growing support from the traditional Christian Social base. In April 1932, the Nazi party had already made significant inroads among voters outside Vienna, winning almost 17 percent in town and provincial elections.³² As the political writer and sociologist Franz Borkenau explained at the time, after Hitler came to power, middle-class Catholics who previously supported the Austrian authoritarian government’s cooperation with the Church hierarchy now called instead for alliance with Germany. Moved by antisocialism, German nationalism, anticlericalism, and anti-Semitism, increasing numbers advocated a pact with Nazism.³³

Kris had already concluded that the Austrian government offered little or no hope against the spread of Nazism. He perceived that the Kunsthistorisches Museum provided at best a temporary refuge. Just as he had no hope that the Christian Social authorities or bourgeois elite would provide protection from above, he had no expectation that Hitlerism would be resisted from below: “He was convinced that the Nazis would come to power.”34 Continuously evaluating the pace of the growing political danger, he assessed carefully the security of his academic, psychoanalytic, and Jewish colleagues. He remained highly conscious of the embattled position of young museum and university staff in particular and the dangerously tenuous position of Viennese Jews in general:

It was particularly difficult for a person of Jewish descent. Kris was deeply aware of all the undercurrents of resistance he had to encounter within the Museum and in the University. Unlike many who were in the same situation he did not close his eyes to these dangers. On the contrary, he kept them wide open. He made a point of reading the Völkische Beobachter and he had no illusions. In Austria itself the scene had also darkened with the abolition of Parliament and the establishment of a dictatorship. It was when telling an anti-government joke at the office and being met with frozen stares that Kris began to reflect on the instability of the effect of the comic.³⁵

In his colleagues’ faces he saw the frozen grimaces that until then he had confronted only in works of art.

Like Freud, Kris followed especially closely the Catholic hierarchy’s responses to the expansion of Nazi influence in Austria, monitoring as best he could the strength of its opposition to Anschluss. He had already experienced personally a shift within the Church. After the formation of the Vaterländische Front, pressure bore upon him to become public in his commitment to Catholicism and to place greater distance between himself and his Jewish background. One such occasion had been the birth of his son Anton in July 1934, the month of the Nazi putsch attempt. Acting on his own volition, a museum colleague visited the secretary of a cardinal to inquire into having this—Kris’s second—child baptized. Through the secretary, the cardinal responded that he would be willing to remarry Ernst and Marianne Kris within the Church, baptize their son, and ignore the unbaptized state of their daughter Anna. Kris had already confronted the political change within the museum; Jewish members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society had begun to seek safe haven abroad. Yet he refused the offer, a decision that would significantly compromise his standing with the Church.36

Thus at the moment they began their scholarly collaboration, Kris and Gombrich lived almost as outcasts within their own profession and their own city. Politically vigilant, Kris sought to convince his new assistant of the desperate nature of the situation, urging him: “You’ve got to leave, you have no prospects here, and things will get worse.”³⁷ Soon London became the only city and the Warburg Library the only institution where either scholar could imagine a future.

Warburg, Freud, and the Psychology of Caricature

Writing shortly before the First World War, Aby Warburg stated in his famous essay on the Palazzo Schifanoia that art historians had to pursue research across disciplinary and national boundaries. Kris’s career embodied Warburg’s professional credo, but the affinity went much deeper. In both scholars an early passion for art history gave way to a more challenging, more expansive project: a psychology of the human being as imagemaker from antiquity to the present.

At the turn of the century, Warburg began to assemble a personal research library devoted to tracking the afterlife of antiquity in Renaissance and modern culture. The eldest son of the eminent Jewish banking family of Hamburg, he received his brothers’ moral and financial support to live as an independent scholar. Before 1914, he began to open his holdings to others, and after the war, the library, with the support of the new University of Hamburg, expanded into a site for research and teaching. Warburg and his assistants Fritz Saxl and Gertrud Bing sponsored lectures and seminars, published journals and monographs, and supported a circle of researchers from the humanities and social sciences, including Erwin Panofsky and Ernst Cassirer. What had been a small, idiosyncratic library became during the 1920s a formal institution for the study of culture and psychology, and above its entrance was now inscribed: Warburg Library for the Cultural Sciences.38 Following Warburg’s death in 1929, Saxl became the library’s director. Under his and Bing’s guidance, it escaped Nazi Germany for London, where in 1933 the Warburg Library became the Warburg Institute.

Art history in Hamburg moved in fundamentally different directions than in Vienna. Like the Vienna School, Warburg demanded that art history acquire a firmer social scientific grounding. But to that end he immersed himself in the family papers, business files, and civic records of Florentine citizens, thereby initiating the systematic study of Renaissance patronage and the humanist institutional network. Again, like the Vienna School, he encouraged explorations at the boundaries of art. For Warburg, however, such efforts encompassed astrological tables, broadsheets, theatrical designs, and carnival pageantry. In travels to Italy and to the American southwest, he approached art as a branch of symbolic communication. Images functioned as visual signs and art history traced the creation, transformation, and psychological meanings of those signs over time, beginning with the ancient world.

Just as Loewy explored archaic memories, fears, and defenses within classical Greek art, so Warburg discovered their continuing presence within Renaissance painting. Seemingly modest gestures, which humanists found in ancient monuments and relics, and which painters incorporated into their creations, recalled violent Dionysian enthusiasms and mysterious Orphic ecstasies. Like Loewy, Warburg interpreted those disarming gestures as memory pictures—what the Hamburg scholar referred to as “pathos formulas.” The use of such formulas not only gave renewed life to ancient images but also generated modern experimentation with visual thought and communication. Renaissance artists transformed fragments of pagan art and ritual into more highly spiritualized, Platonic symbols, and astrologists reworked mythic pictures of the universe into new, philosophic conceptions of the cosmos. Like Freud, however, Warburg believed that every artistic rebirth contained a memento mori, a regressive pull. The same premonition of death that Freud recognized in Shakespeare’s Cordelia, Warburg detected in Botticelli’s Venus.39

Kris first made contact with the Warburg circle when in 1922—the year that he accepted his curator’s position—he wrote to Warburg with a request for research information. Schlosser provided an indirect point of contact: according to Gombrich, Warburg had chosen Schlosser to serve as the executor of his will.⁴⁰ Saxl and Panofsky, as well as Kris and Loewy, contributed to Schlosser’s academic festschrift.⁴¹ Contact between Kris and the Warburg Library continued throughout the interwar period: Kris published in the Warburg journal; he contributed reviews to the Warburg Library’s projected multi-volume bibliography of the classical tradition, of which two volumes were published; and he regularly met with Saxl during the latter’s annual trips to Vienna.⁴² Although Saxl, in Gombrich’s words, “had no interest in the Psychology of Art,”⁴³ he did seek better understanding of psychoanalysis, at least so far as to strengthen the bridge between Hamburg and Vienna. In October 1932, he reported to Kris: “Just today I spoke at length and in breadth with our colleague Dr. [Edgar] Wind, because for the entire summer he studied Freud from his [Wind’s] standpoint as a philosopher.”⁴⁴

Warburg reinforced for Kris the idea of image making as a vital psychological process with both life-denying and life-affirming potentials, a theme that Kris pursued in his first book, Die Legende vom Künstler: Ein geschichtlicher Versuch (The Legend of the Artist: A Historical Experiment), which he dedicated to the Warburg Institute.⁴⁵ Completed with Kurz’s research assistance and published in 1934, Die Legende vom Künstler examined recurring formulas in the biographies of artists. Chief among those formulas was the artist as someone who gave life to inanimate objects, as had Daedalus, the fabled craftsman of self-moving automatons.⁴⁶ Just as Messerschmidt perceived in grotesque masks the power to guard against demonic forces, myth-making biographers and even scholarly experts saw in art a living presence. Such perceptions derived from the primal belief in image magic, a belief that, as Warburg had shown, lasted into the Renaissance. Kris cited Warburg’s seminal study of Florentine portraiture, which established that sculptures continued to be perceived as effigies possessing magical power.47 But unconscious attachment to image magic reverberated even among contemporary advocates of naturalism who argued that true art had to re-create lived experience. The psychology of ancient image making—the conviction in the identity between image and object and a belief in the power of effigies—still impelled people to seek from artwork the illusion of life.⁴⁸

Kris’s study of artist biographies confirmed his commitment to a new psychoanalytic psychology. Although he saw psychoanalysis as a necessary corrective to narrow biographical accounts, he never adhered strongly to the psychobiographical approach that gained great popularity among his colleagues first in Vienna and later in New York, and that risked promoting another species of illusion about the artist. His study of Messerschmidt instead had approached image making as a visual language, as a medium of thought and communication. For Kris, Panofsky’s work epitomized that approach, in particular his 1924 book Idea, which explored the influence of Neo-Platonist philosophy on the birth of art theory in the Renaissance and Baroque periods.⁴⁹ As Panofsky described, art theory emerged not only as a theory of creativity but also as a theory of cognition, a philosophy of how human beings formed and communicated ideas about the self and the world.

Kris conceived of his book as a companion study to Panofsky’s. Legends about the artist and myths about the vital, animating force within artworks accompanied the emergence of a genuine theory of art and mind. He hoped to publish his study as a Warburg Institute monograph. But Austrian politics compelled him to change plans. In a letter to Saxl in April 1934 requesting permission to dedicate Die Legende vom Künstler to the institute, Kris described the impact of immediate political circumstances:

In good times, so it seems to me, the book could have become larger, more circumspect, and more technical. It would then have been destined for the Studies of the Warburg Library, and might have carried the modest title: The Typical Biography of the Artist or something similar. But what is useful in this book, which would like to be a first successor of Panofsky’s Idea, is indeed connected with Warburg.50

Writing in the period of heavy, unnatural calm that fell between Dollfuss’s February counter-revolution and the Nazis’ July putsch attempt, Kris described the fetid atmosphere of Vienna. He looked to the Warburg Institute as a location to pursue his projects: “Perhaps I will still succeed in coming to London before summer. My longing is always for there. Here it is gloomy, narrow, and the possibility for work very limited.”⁵¹ Such was the environment in which, as he stated in the letter, “I am struggling with my large caricature work.”⁵²

In August 1934, at the international psychoanalytic congress at Lucerne, Kris presented his first and only psychoanalytic paper on caricature, which later that year he published in Imago under the title “Zur Psychologie der Karikatur” (On the Psychology of Caricature).⁵³ In caricature, art revealed itself to be not a life-negating illusion but a vital, continuous psychological experiment, requiring the engagement of the audience as much as that of the artist. In producing a likeness, the caricaturist “overcharged”⁵⁴ or exaggerated one or more of the subject’s features. Messerschmidt’s character heads had expressed the psychological method behind this distorted portrait: “In our thoughts, as it were, we cause our model’s features to become twisted into a grimace.”⁵⁵ The reconfiguration of the subject’s countenance drew the beholder’s attention away from the subject’s visible persona and focused it instead on inward character: “the natural harmony of an appearance is destroyed, and this has the result in many cases of revealing a contrast in the personality between looks and character.”⁵⁶ Similar to the mechanism of jokes as Freud had described it in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, the caricaturist rechanneled an inherently destructive impulse—“[t]he dissolution of unity in the interests of aggression”—into an inspired psychological insight, in this instance expressed not in words but in images.⁵⁷

Kris traced the beginnings of caricature to the late Renaissance and early Baroque periods among artists who experimented with classical conventions. Such artists rejected portrait likenesses as idealized masks of the personality and turned instead to a de-idealizing art or “unmasking.”58 Again, as with jokes, their technique relied on the distortions and exaggerations, condensations and displacements that typified primary unconscious thought. In Kris’s seminal formulation, caricature represented a “regression in the service of the ego,”⁵⁹ a functional, even intentional, retreat into primary unconscious processes. The ego withdrew its attention and activity from the world in order to allow the primary process to enter consciousness. This regression led not to inward disintegration or immobilization but to artistic innovation, psychological awareness, and a return to the world: “the ego enrolls the primary process in its service and makes use of it for its purposes.”⁶⁰ Caricature thus reflected the ambiguous, hybrid nature of all creativity.⁶¹

Kris also traced mechanisms of caricature before the Renaissance into the distant past, in the regressive play with image magic. He asserted that whenever and wherever caricature became an artistic practice “we are invariably able to discover the use of effigy magic at some point in its development.”⁶² The effigy as a visual symbol, not as a lifelike illusion, elicited an acting out of aggression: “the action is performed in relation to an image which is regarded as identical with the person it represents.”⁶³ Operating at a further remove from magical ritual, caricature manipulated not the effigy or bodily sign but the mask or portrait. Ancient and medieval effigies meant their targets to writhe and wince physically. Caricature left that result to the viewer’s fantasy: “the pleasure gain in caricature is due to our imagination, as it were, forcing the features of the person caricatured to assume a grimace.”⁶⁴

Creator and spectator thus collaborated in the aggressive depiction of their targets, whose contorted reactions—real or imagined—remained part of a comic, experimental game and effort at criticism. In Messerschmidt’s sculptures, grimaces had risked remaining frozen as ritualized defenses or deathly visages. But through caricature, artists and spectators reengaged with the world, breathing again, in the words of Henry James, “the strange, real, mingled air of things.”

Saxl, Read, and the Art of Caricature

Kris’s work on caricature received essential support from London, most importantly from Fritz Saxl. But it was caricature as an artistic experiment, not as a psychological paradigm, that held Saxl’s interest. At the same time Kris presented his ideas to the psychoanalytic community, Saxl brought them to the notice of scholars at the Warburg Institute and art critics beyond it. His efforts reflected a commitment both to advance Kris’s work—and perhaps ease his emigration—and to demonstrate the institute’s value to the British art community.

In July 1934—less than a year after the Warburg Library transplanted itself to London—Saxl brought Kris’s project to the attention of Herbert Read, who also saw in caricature a crucial artistic experiment. A poet, radical culture critic, and communitarian anarchist, Read assailed the tendencies in industrial society that isolated persons and undermined self-fulfillment. A veteran of the First World War, he became an uncompromising pacifist. A proponent of the Surrealists and of Carl G. Jung, he supported ventures in art and psychology that challenged the routinized or machine qualities of twentieth-century British life.

Saxl worked hard to convince Read, who had become editor of the Burlington Magazine the previous December, to have Kris review W. R. Juynboll’s The Comic Genre in Italian Painting During the Seventeenth and the Eighteenth Centuries: Contribution to the History of Caricature. He prevailed and wrote to Kris:

The Burlington Magazine would like to have a short critique of Juynboll, and I proposed to Herbert Read that I write to you about it. Read did not want to have the book reviewed at all. I could, however, imagine that it would be quite pleasant for you to say something already now on this topic in the Burlington Magazine and to have the book in return. R. [Read] requests that the review not contain more than 500 words.65

Toward the end of 1934, Saxl—with Kris’s review in hand—directed Read to Kris’s other writings:

I immediately passed on the very nice review [of Juynboll] to Herbert Read. I also discussed with Read the review of the anecdotes book [Kris’s book on artist biographies]. He is very interested in it. Hopefully he will also find a reasonable person as the reviewer.⁶⁶

The Burlington Magazine never published a review of Die Legende vom Künstler, but when Penguin Books published Kris and Gombrich’s wartime pamphlet on caricature, Read himself reviewed it for the BBC’s Listener. By then he had become intrigued by Kris’s psychoanalytic approach, which uncovered in caricature the aggressive passion and resolute individuality that for Read fueled innovation not only in art but also in politics.

In his Juynboll review, Kris showed that he had begun to consider caricature as not only an artistic but also a political experiment. As he emphasized, Juynboll—although neglecting Freud’s psychology of jokes and the comic—identified key artistic foundations of caricature in late Renaissance and Baroque Italy: the upsurge of interest in Leonardo’s drawings, the realist approach taken by the Carracci school in Bologna and its particular interest in street life, and the Roman tradition of portraiture. But just as importantly, Juynboll recognized how the stage types of Florentine commedia dell’arte resurfaced in the work of Jacques Callot, who transmitted them to caricaturists and who, like Read, became a critic of modern war:

Through Jacques Callot, whose style was formed during his stay in Florence, this source of Italian caricature became of decisive importance. The types which Callot had created were copied for two hundred years by engravers and craftsmen of all European countries, so that we can hardly compare any other artist’s influence with his on the evolution of this branch of art.67

Although Daumier—Callot’s modern successor—did not receive mention in the review, the exhibition of his work in Vienna would soon enter the planning stage.

While composing the Imago essay and the Juynboll review, Kris sought to secure positions for both Kurz and Gombrich at the Warburg Institute. For more than two years, Kris had urged Gombrich to leave Vienna. The events of 1934—the antisocialist crackdown and Dollfuss’s murder—led to even more urgent pleas. In October, Kris waited no longer. He provided Saxl with information about Julius von Schlosser that he thought would impress upon him the precariousness of Kurz and Gombrich’s situations. Kris had already explained to Saxl how Schlosser had begun to distance himself from the Warburg Institute after the Nazis had come to power: in a letter in December 1933, he had characterized as “grotesque” Schlosser’s refusal to include any reference to the Warburg circle in a soon to be published overview of the Vienna School.⁶⁸ Now, in October 1934, Kris wrote:

I hear nothing from Kurz, I am as apprehensive on his behalf as I am for my other friend and collaborator on caricature, Gombrich, who here despite protection and despite advantageous paperwork—only his race still remains Jewish—has no chance. No wonder, when one hears that a man like Schlosser in a private letter to a friend (with Jewish wife) expresses himself to the effect that his blood draws him to Hitler! That is confidential!⁶⁹

Thus Schlosser—the Austrian son of an Italian mother, the advisor who looked upon Kris as his model pupil, the art historian who preached the autonomous quality of imaginative creations, the seminar leader who counseled against interpretive speculation, the sober and cosmopolitan collector—at the moment of political decision aligned himself with Nazi enthusiasts.70

Kris knew the significance in Vienna of private utterances such as Schlosser’s. Surrounded by museum objects that he inherited from his mentor and that cast increasingly oppressive intellectual shadows, his alienation from art history had now reached its extreme. The gloom receded only at those moments when he contemplated pursuing a research program in London on the psychology of art and creativity.

The program Kris had in mind combined the perspectives of Freud and Warburg, and would permanently attach Kurz and Gombrich to the institute. Writing to Saxl in December 1934, he spelled out his plan: “You know,” he began, “how my work, divided between art history and psychoanalysis, converges toward a place of connection.”⁷¹ The “preoccupation with caricature”⁷² reflected this ambition to build a bridge between the two fields in general and between the circles of Warburg and Freud in particular:

The more detailed work, which I am now preparing with my other young collaborator, E. Gombrich, should be a treatise of a mixed character, as far as possible an aesthetic rather than a history of caricature and attempting somewhat in the Hegelian sense to sketch the system in the outline of the history.⁷³

The caricature book, together with the studies of Messerschmidt and artist biographies, set out a consistent intellectual vision: “All three works constitute for me introductions to the more central problems, which in decades to come should help to sketch some principles of a ‘psychology of visual art.’ The idea of such a work I carry with me.”⁷⁴ A psychology of visual art would begin with psychological anthropology, in particular the question: “What is image magic, what are its historical, its psychological foundations?” It would then move toward a study of “the art of the untrained”—primitive drawings as well as cross-cultural creations by children—all intended to answer: “Where is the commonality between visual representations that are primitive in the ontogenetic sense?”75 The Warburg circle provided crucial direction: “It is easy to see, and I do not have to describe for you just now, where both follow from A. Warburg’s life work and what they could mean art historically.”⁷⁶ The third object of study derived from Freud: the representation of dreams and dreaming in the visual arts.

Kris knew that he could not realize this program in Vienna. As long as he remained bound to that city, his plan amounted to little more than a creative fantasy:

I seek themes, as you know, without committing myself in advance to the more particular problem, which can emerge only in the course of the work. In this case, too, I can do nothing else than stick to this imaginative habit.⁷⁷

A month later, in January 1935, he wrote to Saxl that the hours he spent reorganizing the museum’s applied art collection left little time for realizing his psychology of art: “I am at present in the middle of the work of conversion in the museum and my remaining workday, gradually growing to 16 hours, is now dedicated in part to caricature and in part to psychoanalysis.”⁷⁸ Kris resigned himself to remaining in Vienna but he intensified his efforts to find positions for Kurz and Gombrich. Relying on his contacts with the psychiatrist Bettina Warburg and her cousin Edward Warburg in New York, he attempted to secure a stipend for Kurz at the Warburg Institute.⁷⁹ He assured Saxl that an assistantship for Kurz would not commit the institute itself to Freudian research: “The relation [of Kurz] to the Library could also be as loose as you want, so that you and your circle will not through my engagement with psychoanalysis be burdened by it.”⁸⁰

In January 1935, he wrote to Edward Warburg about his personal plan to bridge the schools of Freud and Warburg, explaining that Kurz, who had held assistantships at the Warburg Library in Hamburg and at the institute in London, would act as Kris’s assistant. Kurz could not return to Vienna: “In his homeland of Austria, as a Jew he has no prospects whatsoever; a position abroad is his only possibility.”81

Kris summarized his plan to investigate the role of image magic in art, explaining that such a study required the help of Kurz, whose “comprehensive”⁸² intellect ranged across specializations:

It is also no accident but rather a proof of my assertion, according to which the life’s work of your uncle points the way toward psychoanalysis, that Dr. Kurz, who is employed at the Warburg Library, represents an immediate connection between this [Aby Warburg’s] direction and my labors devoted to the application of psychoanalysis.⁸³

In March 1935, Edward Warburg informed Kris: “I think your plan for the use of the Warburg Institute for scholarship from a Freudian standpoint naturally a most interesting one.”⁸⁴ He provided Kurz with a stipend for another year in London —an essential stopgap for the young scholar, who would remain at the institute throughout his career.

Although the idea of leaving Vienna for London appealed greatly to Kris, for the time being he felt protected in a way that his younger associates did not:

I actually would have every reason to think of my own future more than I do, but I suffer extraordinarily from the disturbing feeling of being able to do nothing for my younger colleagues although I know that I am so closely indebted to them and they have such pressing need.⁸⁵

In April, he stated, “I set the [Warburg] Library as a workplace above all others.”⁸⁶ Looking forward to a planned meeting with Saxl in London, he emphasized that he intended to initiate collaboration between the Freudian movement and the Warburg circle—most immediately through the caricature project. At the same time, with the help of Ernest Jones—Freud’s close associate and the leading Freudian in Britain—he hoped to draw the international psychoanalytic movement closer to the institute:

I believe also that I can bring along the disposition, that is, an exact and very detailed disposition of the book about caricature, on which I work in my few spare hours together with Ernst Gombrich … For the summer I plan to take up again Warburg’s writings in order to try to frame the question concretely as to what depth psychology could accomplish toward the extension of this line of research. In the meantime, with some not completely uninfluential London friends who are at present in Vienna, I made propaganda for the Library. One of them, Dr. Ernest Jones, the president of our international association and the director of the London psychoanalytic institute, is very interested, I believe, in making personal contact with you above all.87

Kris continued to seek a position for Gombrich. He had already suggested to Saxl that when a place was finally arranged for Kurz, a position should also be worked out for Gombrich, although “the circle of themes of the works that would absorb him would presumably be defined somewhat differently.”⁸⁸ In January 1935, Gombrich had begun to correspond directly with Gertrud Bing.⁸⁹ Later that year, Kris suggested that Saxl bring him to the institute to assist with Saxl’s plan to publish Warburg’s papers. Finally, in September 1935, during one of his last visits to Vienna before the Anschluss, Saxl arranged with Gombrich a two-year fellowship. Bing looked forward to his arrival:

I have not for a long time had such a feeling of relief and absolutely correct judgment as when Saxl said that you would be ready to collaborate on the Warburg-Nachlass … I do not want, however, to encroach on your work with Dr. Kriss [sic] and would only ask you to tell me when you want to come.⁹⁰

In January 1936, Gombrich arrived in England to work with Saxl on editing and annotating Warburg’s copious manuscripts and cryptic, fragmentary notes, as well as composing a biographical study to accompany the papers.91

That summer Kris traveled briefly to London. Bing wrote about the visit to Gombrich, who had returned to Vienna to work on the caricature book: “I was very glad to speak with Dr. Kris here. I did not know him or rather only very superficially and now for my part I have the feeling that the London–Vienna connection has been very much strengthened.”⁹² Kris derived crucial intellectual and personal sustenance from the London connection, as he expressed to Saxl: “[T]he lonelier one stands in art history—I mean here in Vienna—the more convincing appears that direction which today attaches only to Panovsky [sic] and you.”⁹³

He always remained sharply aware of here. He repeated the word—here—in his meetings with Gombrich and in his correspondence with Saxl. And each trip abroad intensified his consciousness of isolation and made him more insistent. Here referred not only to his city and the museum but also to the unavoidable sensation that they produced in him. But not yet ready to leave for London, Kris created a temporarily protected, alternative refuge in Vienna where he could exhibit the work of Honoré Daumier.

From spring 1935 to autumn 1936—the period coinciding with the inception and rise of the Popular Front movement in France—Kris organized the Daumier exhibition. Through Daumier, he and Gombrich—who assisted with the exhibition—moved beyond the psychology and theory of caricature to engage directly with its history. In the world of European galleries, the exhibition became unique: in continental Europe, Daumier’s art appeared in no other place outside France during the 1930s. By displaying Daumier’s work in Vienna at that moment—here in 1936—Kris and Gombrich attached their scholarly researches to the antifascist cause. The space for examining Daumier’s artwork would allow the public to view a culture of republicanism and internationalism that was disappearing in Austria but that still survived beyond its borders.