DAUMIER IN VIENNA 1936
The Discreet Charm of the Austrian Bourgeoisie
Kris first brought caricature to a Viennese museum-going public in autumn 1933. Sponsored by the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the exhibition displayed caricature sculptures by the little known French artist Jean-Pierre Dantan.1 From an Austrian palais—perhaps with its own Kunstkammer stocked with such objects—an anonymous private donor lent Dantan’s statues to Kris.2 Dating from 1831 to 1839, the caricatures belonged to the first decade of Louis-Philippe’s bourgeois constitutional monarchy, which had come to power after the popular revolt of July 1830 and was overthrown by the French Second Republic in 1848. Amidst crossing political and cultural currents, Dantan steered an uncontroversial course. As Kris wrote in his introduction to the exhibition catalog, Dantan “primarily chose as his subject leading stage artists, musicians, and writers, the representatives of the intellectual culture of the bourgeois monarchy—the world between two revolutions.”3 Surrounded by former Habsburg possessions, Dantan’s sculptures recalled the twilight of the liberal royalism that had defined Kris’s early political convictions.
But if the demise of Francis Joseph’s monarchy during the First World War recalled the collapse of Louis-Philippe’s rule in 1848, Dollfuss’s dissolution of the Austrian parliament in 1933 evoked Louis Napoleon’s disbanding of the French Chamber of Deputies in 1851. Backed by a coalition of antirevolutionary bourgeoisie, French Church leaders, rural conservatives, police officials, and paramilitary gangs, Louis Napoleon dismantled the government of the French Second Republic and replaced it with his Second Empire. In Austria, Schuschnigg governed through a similar political alignment inherited from Dollfuss. He saw his Bonapartist coalition as the embodiment of both the Theresian and Josephan traditions, through which he would unite supporters of authoritarian Catholic government and bourgeois German rule, limit the hostility of Austrian Nazis to clerical government, and negotiate a compromise with Hitler.
What was formally known in Austria as Kulturpolitik reflected the confused, dual character of Schuschnigg’s policies. Scholars and novelists who identified with official, antirepublican cultural politics claimed fidelity to both a Catholic homeland—the Austrian Heimat—and a German heritage.4 In the performing arts, a parallel movement promoted a non-bifurcated Austrian identity at once devoutly Catholic and ethnically German, a movement that thrived at the Salzburg Festival where productions of classical German theater reinforced German national traditions and performances of Christian morality plays evoked European Catholic legacies.5 Salzburg, which had for centuries preserved doctrinal orthodoxy and followed its prince-archbishops, now in its yearly theatrical pageant joined the ages-old longing for a universal Church with the contemporary passion for a single German state.
At the art historical institute in Vienna, Kulturpolitik and German racial ideology made significant inroads, as evidenced by the work of the young scholar Hans Sedlmayr and his university colleagues. Saxl had met Sedlmayr, a former student of Schlosser, in 1932 and tried to draw his attention to Edgar Wind’s work on Warburg’s aesthetic philosophy, as he wrote Kris at the time: “I asked Wind to forward to you his essay on Warburg and aesthetics, about which I spoke with you and Sedlmayr.”6 That year Sedlmayr joined the Nazi party. Although ceasing party membership in 1933, the up-and-coming scholar continued to advocate openly what Schlosser supported only quietly: Anschluss with Germany.7
In 1934, Sedlmayr published his Habilitationsschrift on Pieter Bruegel’s macchia, a lengthy and detailed essay on Bruegel’s compositional techniques and their relation to Mannerist and modernist tendencies. Although acknowledging a debt to Dvořák’s lectures, Sedlmayr showed disdain for Mannerism and moral repugnance toward modernism. Appearing in the same year as Kris’s paper on caricature, Sedlmayr’s essay examined artistic phenomena familiar to Kris: the Mannerist distortion of bodies, the impenetrability of facial expression, the manufacturing of masks, and the depiction of demonic fear. In Sedlmayr’s view, such phenomena gave Bruegel’s creations an aura of estrangement. Relations between individuals lacked organic qualities, gesture and expression appeared disjointed, inner reality hid from and remained closed to the viewer. Such features in Bruegel and in Mannerism—and by extension in their modernist counterparts—corresponded to the inchoate behavior of the masses and the pathologies of the mentally ill. The subjects of Bruegel’s paintings, Sedlmayr concluded, lingered at the fringes of humanity as sources of distress and dissociation.8
Neither Dvořák nor Kris had seen a threat to art in Bruegel’s concentration on depth psychology and mass behavior. In his study of Messerschmidt, Kris described the use of masks or masklike visages as the ego’s attempt at self-restitution and the artist’s effort to communicate with the outside world. The petrified, alien quality of Messerschmidt’s character heads represented a defense against private, demonic terrors, not an effort to represent for the public an unstable, deranged universe. Far from inducing immobilizing anxiety or disorientation, Bruegel inspired social and political recognition—“a new realism.” As Dvořák had explained:
If, and of this there can be no doubt, artistic form is the result of social involvement, then, and this is particularly evident in the work of great artists, the way in which it is developed represents a genuine contribution on the part of the artist to his contemporaries’ understanding of the age in which they live.9
The estranged stare that Sedlmayr perceived in Bruegel’s figures emanated from Sedlmayr not Bruegel.
Elsewhere Sedlmayr’s views did not meet with disfavor. In 1936, he was elevated to Schlosser’s chair at the art historical institute. The promotion established him as the leading representative of the New Vienna School both in and outside of Austria.
In June 1936, in collaboration with Leo Planiscig, the curator of bronze work at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Kris resumed his exhibitions of borderline art, beginning with a display of small sculptures and craftwork from the early Italian Renaissance. The exhibition catalog announced:
After a long pause, that was filled with the labors devoted to the reclassification and rearrangement of the collection for sculpture and applied art, it has now become possible to take up again an old program: to organize, within the scope of our collections and corresponding to their character, temporary displays of existing art objects in private or public possession that are difficult to access and so supplement the museum’s stock from time to time in another direction.10
Before the end of the year, with the Austrian republic entering its death throes, Kris brought from France Honoré Daumier’s equally “difficult to access” works.
Looking Toward France
In France, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne had openly acknowledged their artistic debts to the caricaturists in general and to Daumier in particular. A collector of Daumier lithographs, van Gogh asserted that in Daumier’s work “the proportions will sometimes be almost arbitrary, the anatomy and structure often anything but correct in the eyes of the academicians. But it will live.”11 Cézanne himself “liked to talk about the caricaturists, Gavarni, Forain, and most of all Daumier. He loved their exuberant movement, bulging musculature, the impetuosity of their hand, and the bravura of their pencil lines.”12 For van Gogh and Cézanne, Daumier belonged to the ranks of those avid experimenters and rejuvenators who removed the dead hand of the academy from French art.13 That same experimental drive also forged a weapon against Bonapartism.
Early in his career Daumier contributed illustrations to Honoré de Balzac’s La Comédie humaine, attaching visual images to the novelist’s finely grained psychological portraits and scathing social criticisms.14 Inspired by a personal, mystical faith, Balzac believed in the transmission of influence between body and spirit, a near heretical pantheism that contained proto-Freudian insights. The spirit—in the form of a resolute will, a powerful idea, or even divine inspiration—acted through the pathways and synapses of the nervous system to arouse and guide external behavior. Simultaneously, physical nature—whether as bodily inheritance, material surroundings, or social environment—shaped the inner being with a deep, determining force.
Yet, however close he may have come to biological determinism, sociological predestination, or outright religious heresy, Balzac as a young man remained loyal to the ideal of a Catholic monarchy shepherding and instructing its flock. The prolific French writer opposed radical republicanism and reacted with horror at the revolutionary politics of the barricade. At the same time, however, the venalities of the aristocracy and the artificial pieties and soul-destroying ambitions of the French bourgeoisie infuriated him. Modern society, reducing all human relations to status and business transactions, emptied both the spirit and the flesh of their intrinsic worth. Building upon outraged moral sensibility and detailed social analysis, Balzac’s human comedy became a recurrent scourge and ruthless documentary of a world where “life has no longer anything sacred or real.”15
Balzac sympathized with those in Paris and the provinces who had been cruelly used, whose hardships multiplied, and whose everyday lives succumbed to forces beyond their control. In the decade before the 1848 uprisings, he supported the idea of a Catholic republic to replace the bourgeois monarchy of Louis-Philippe. Catholic teaching would give legitimacy and direction to republican government and republicanism would restore the Church to its rightful mission. In such a republic, the physically destitute and spiritually abandoned would continually challenge the Church’s indifference and the bourgeoisie’s inveterate bad conscience.
Balzac’s literary landscape inserted the pattern of Dante’s divine comedy into a non-transcendent, earthly framework. Victims and perpetrators alike wandered through infernal social realities to arrive at stark, pitiless illumination—flashes of oppressive clarity that provided insufficient recompense to victims and only meager punishment to perpetrators. Balzac documented social ills not to encourage revolution but to demonstrate the absence of spiritual consolation and the impossibility of atonement. Foreseeing the day when writers, journalists, and publishers would be hired agents in the new business of mass communication, he declared his deepest inward fear: “wrong will be done without anybody being guilty.”16
There were those in interwar Austria who received Balzac’s prescient, disenchanted vision with desperate sympathy. In the final years before his suicide in 1942, the exiled Viennese writer Stefan Zweig wrote a biography of Balzac. In The World of Yesterday, his testament to the lost universe of the Habsburg monarchy, he recalled:
For years I had been accumulating material preparatory to a large two-volume study of Balzac and his work but had never had the courage to start on so comprehensive a labor that was calculated to occupy a long period. But it was just my gloom that produced the courage.17
Balzac—who overcame repeated literary setbacks with “uncurbed spirit and stubborn determination, as after every disappointing crisis throughout his life”—provided one of Zweig’s final, brief inspirations.18
Equally despondent, Kris also turned toward Balzac’s moral example and literary imagination. Like Balzac, he and Zweig remained attached in memory to the ideal of a protective Catholic monarchy. Also like Balzac, both he and Zweig dwelled among a decorous but cruel and self-protective middle class. And like him, they lived under an unconstitutional and unprincipled bourgeois regime that, despite claims to the contrary, sacrificed both its independence and its faith—in Austria’s case, on the altar of Anschluss and a pan-German Reich. Ultimately, Kris—like Balzac—adopted republican ideals as the necessary political embodiment of his earlier convictions. Daumier provided visual images for those ideals.
During Louis-Philippe’s monarchy, Daumier and fellow caricaturists began to test the limits of governmental censorship and bourgeois tolerance. The first turning point came in the 1830s with the publication of “Les Poires”—Charles Philipon’s and Daumier’s famous portraits of Louis-Philippe, in which the head of the politically hybrid king slowly transformed into a visually hybrid pear.19 (Figs. 1 and 2) But Daumier’s vision, like Balzac’s, extended to the margins of society, to the innocent souls betrayed by a crass and rapacious society. His illustrations of Balzac’s stories, in Ségolène Le Men’s words, “made palpable the erosion of the individual life force that Balzac … sought to demonstrate throughout the entire Comédie humaine.”20 Thus, unlike caricaturists such as Dantan who depicted on-stage performers, Daumier, when he turned to the theater, focused on the despairing, off-stage world of saltimbanques and other itinerant entertainers whose struggles to survive remained beyond public view. Self-display, self-aggrandizement, and emotional manipulation belonged to the new skills of the politician, and Daumier—like Karl Marx—recognized that the farcical aspect of such behavior—finally crystallized in Louis Napoleon—represented a new type of political threat.
After Louis Napoleon’s overthrow of the Second Republic, Daumier became an unseen observer of his agents and an unofficial portraitist of his victims. His stark vision targeted government warmongering and documented the spread of political violence. It was with the rise of Louis Napoleon that Daumier created his most widely recognized figure: the pathetic yet disturbing Bonapartist agent Ratapoil, who united the appearance of the out-of-luck performer with that of the disingenuous politico, and who began to appear in Daumier’s work during the Second Republic’s final disintegration. Ratapoil, according to T. J. Clark, epitomized the arch-manipulator who himself became the puppet of his political handlers.21 To Daumier, Ratapoil also resembled a sadly corrupted Quixote, badly treated but incapable of resisting Bonapartist propaganda.
An increasingly fatalistic mood clung to Daumier’s drawings. As Clark suggests, the pessimism that pervaded Daumier’s early work never left him completely and even led him into long periods of silent withdrawal. The sense of desolation that enveloped the saltimbanques captured their portraitist as well. Unlike Marx, Daumier possessed the heart not of an unwavering revolutionist and hard-bitten theorist but of a restive experimentalist and skeptic who struggled against his own fatalism. When he turned his energy to political causes, he mobilized a combative pessimism rather than an unshaken spirit.22
Before and during the Daumier exhibition, Kris maintained steady contact with associates in France, including at Pontigny. There the Cistercian abbey provided the site for an annual conference that brought French scholars and writers into contact with European counterparts. The conference—a series of ten-day symposia held every summer—often featured new psychological research. Jane Ellen Harrison—the Cambridge classicist who combined the ideas of Freud, Jung, and James Frazer in her studies of ancient religion—made at least one visit to Pontigny. Regular participants included André Gide and Roger Martin du Gard, both of whom recognized a vital identity between literature and psychology as records of ego development and products of self-examination. In the 1920s, Pontigny devoted a meeting to “telling one’s own story—autobiography in fiction and fiction in autobiography” and in 1930 it posed the question: “Are there three psychologies—infant, primitive, abnormal—or are the three the same?” Such topics converged directly with Kris’s research, and after Charles de Tolnay—one of Dvořák’s Viennese followers—introduced him to the conference, Kris attended several times in the 1930s.23
Kris felt an immediate intellectual affinity with modern Pontigny. Through the conferences, he developed a lasting friendship with Martin du Gard, not only a renowned novelist but also a supporter of French socialism. According to Albert Camus, Martin du Gard felt highly protective of his literary detachment and deeply uncertain about political activity. With Gide and fellow members of the Nouvelle revue française, he belonged to the circle of writers who prior to the First World War began by “entering literature (the history of the Nouvelle revue française group is clear proof of this) rather as one enters the religious life.”24 Martin du Gard, however, recognized “the collapse of bourgeois Christianity”25 and shifted his concern toward history and politics. Thus, the characters in his massive novels fight against personal, professional, and intellectual confinement, and ultimately “leave their private universe to rejoin the world of men.”26
Kris knew their choices. In Martin du Gard’s Jean Barois, a young Catholic renounced his conservative faith to join the Dreyfusards in defending the republic and advancing a new rationalist ethic. Like Kris, the title figure not only suffered in youth from a chronic heart ailment, the effects of which returned in adulthood, but also moved gradually toward political engagement. Introspective questioning of doctrinal belief produced a temporary acceptance of religion as a “symbolist compromise”27 but finally ended with a commitment to new scientific teachings that brought him “outside the pen, in the clear light of day” and ultimately led him to support Alfred Dreyfus.28 Kris would have recognized the influence of Balzac and Daumier on the novel’s depiction of Zola’s trial. Present among the observers, Barois saw the courtroom’s combination of theatrical display and political menace:
The courtroom is filled with a seething, chattering, gesticulating crowd, amongst which one notices a sprinkling of uniforms, gold epaulettes, smartly dressed women. People are eagerly pointing out to each other well-known figures—staff officers, popular journalists, leading lights of the stage and political world. A black phalanx of gowned lawyers separates the spectators from the still-empty Bench, over which hangs Bonnat’s melodramatic “Christ” … A clock strikes three and the crowd heaves, as if rocked by a ground-swell, while a flood of new-comers seeps into the smallest crannies of the all-but-solid mass. Students in berets, lawyers in their gowns, clamber over the high barrier separating the public from the Bench and Bar and perch themselves on window-sills and ledges.29
The chief judge, “a burly, moon-faced man whose shaven lips are like a narrow horizontal line drawn between the bushy side-whiskers, scowls darkly.”30 Despite his combativeness, fatality weighed upon Barois. No intellectual or ethical ideal countered the force of his self-doubt. Instead, he questioned the value of his profession as editor and scholar. Witness to the rise of a Catholic authoritarian movement from the vortex of the Dreyfus affair, he finally lost faith in political progress.
In On Aging, Jean Améry, the Viennese-born wartime resister who survived Auschwitz, recalled that Jean Barois became a defining book for young men of his generation and educational background.31 Thus, even in the final years of his life, he wrote in his book On Suicide that he wanted to believe in the greater authenticity of the Barois who was “a declared atheist,”32 not the Barois who called from his deathbed for a priest. Like Améry, Camus recognized Barois’—and his creator’s—inner struggle. Martin du Gard represented the modern stoic whose socialism arose not from determined hope or commitment but rather from “the refusal to despair.”33
Pontigny’s organizers confronted that struggle in the theme of the 1937 conference: “The Social Vocation of Art in Epochs of Mental Confusion and of Despair.” Kris had his response: he described for the participants the oppression of Jews in Austria, where a republic had for all practical purposes met its fate several years earlier.34
Daumier and Austrian Politics
Bringing Daumier to the crumbling Austrian state required Kris to take advantage of Schuschnigg’s remaining willingness to placate Britain and France and demonstrate independence from Germany. As Gombrich recalled, Kris
was determined to stay as long as Freud stayed in Vienna. But he knew very well that time was running out and used his diplomatic skill to make contacts abroad. Thus he arranged a Daumier Exhibition in Vienna to help us with our researches, but also to have the pleasure of displaying subversive cartoons and to collaborate with French colleagues.35
The sheer organizational ambition of the exhibition demanded those professional and diplomatic talents that Kris had honed through his years as a museum curator, as a friend to churchmen, and as an advisor to private collectors.
In the Dantan exhibition, Kris had relied almost exclusively on holdings in Vienna and the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Now he called upon not only private Viennese sources but also contacts in France and associates in the émigré community. He drew extensively upon collections in Paris and Rotterdam to secure the widest possible selection.36 In early summer 1936, Saxl granted Gombrich a leave from the Warburg Institute to return to Vienna so he could work not only on the final draft of the caricature book but also on the exhibition.37 Otto Benesch, the art historian and Albertina curator who had once offered support to Gombrich, now helped Kris obtain sponsorship and gallery space at the Albertina.38 In Vienna, this kind of support for international cultural events would become increasingly scarce. Thus, in March 1937, the Viennese Konzerthaus demanded that two Jewish musicians from the United States alter their names for a performance program.39
In August 1936, Kris had warned Saxl—who still planned on making his annual trip to Vienna—about the unstable conditions in Austria. The letter began with a brief, unusually direct political comment that Kris wrote in English, the only time that he used English in letters to Saxl from Austria:
This only to tell you that you can come to Austria, as quietly as last year. You wont [sic] find any German. I was told that after the Nazi riots in Vienna (July 29th) the present government is resolved to make no further steps in the pro-German direction. Of course—the strength of the government seems to be considerably diminished. But this concerns the future and does not concern the present situation.40
The Nazi riots and the Austrian government’s pro-German direction referred to the events surrounding the July 1936 agreement between Hitler and Schuschnigg.
On 11 July, after completing negotiations with Hitler’s loyal emissary Franz von Papen, Schuschnigg had signed the Austro-German Agreement, in which Hitler formally recognized Austria’s international sovereignty and its autonomy in domestic affairs, while Schuschnigg agreed to pursue foreign policies in line with Austria’s identity as a German state. That much of the agreement became public, and led the writer G. E. R. Gedye—one of the most astute English-speaking journalists in Austria—to state that Schuschnigg had just signed Austria’s “death-warrant.”41 The consequences of the agreement’s secret clauses, however, might also have suggested to Kris that he protect his communications to Saxl.
Under the heading of a “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” appended privately to the treaty, Germany and Austria pledged to prevent criticisms of each other’s countries appearing in print, in film, on radio, or on stage. As a result, a new wave of Nazi propaganda began to flow to and from Austria: Hermann Goering’s Essener Nationalzeitung crossed the border and Austrian newspapers friendly to the Nazis in Graz and Linz—the Grazer Tagespost and the Linzer Tagespost—circulated in Germany. At the same time, the Austrian government suppressed émigré and anti-Nazi literature. Schuschnigg—who steadfastly refused pardons for incarcerated leftists—agreed to grant amnesty to Austrian Nazis imprisoned, or merely indicted, for any but the most serious crimes. Perhaps of greatest political consequence, he promised to offer cabinet positions to the so-called “National Opposition in Austria,” a coalition of Catholic conservatives and German nationalists who lobbied persistently in support of Hitler. The Austrian chancellor soon conferred ministerial posts on future wartime collaborators, including the interior minister, Dr. Arthur von Seyss-Inquart, who envisioned the Catholic Austrian state becoming a full and equal ally of Hitler’s Reich. He briefly replaced Schuschnigg as chancellor after the Anschluss, and became Reich commissioner for Holland; the Nuremberg tribunal convicted him of crimes against humanity.42
The Austro-German treaty and the Gentlemen’s Agreement led immediately to Nazi street riots. On 29 July—the day that the Berlin Olympic torch passed through Vienna—Austrian Nazis and the still banned Austrian stormtroopers demonstrated in Vienna’s Heldenplatz in front of the imperial Hofburg. Under the eye of police, Nazis and their sympathizers greeted the torch with chants of Sieg Heil, Deutschland über Alles, and the Horst Wessel song—the Nazi Party’s anthem, illegal in Austria. They drowned out the Austrian national anthem and for several hours easily blocked half-hearted police efforts to disperse them. Schuschnigg responded by revoking amnesty for Austrian Nazis—a near meaningless gesture, as most had already gained release. At the same time, using the excuse of a renewed threat to public order, he kept socialists and other leftists in their prison cells. On the day following the Nazi torch rally, Schuschnigg organized a Vaterländische Front counter-demonstration; without the participation of the Left opposition, it sparked little enthusiasm.43
These events might also help to explain a brief, incomplete change of attitude among Viennese psychoanalysts toward the Left. In 1934, both the International Psychoanalytical Association and the Communist party had expelled Wilhelm Reich from membership: neither psychoanalysts nor Communists accepted Reich’s linkage of sexual and political revolution. Later that year, Robert Waelder published in Imago a critique of Reich’s theories as unscientific and politically driven. The psychoanalyst and Marxist theorist Otto Fenichel drafted a rejoinder, which in 1935 and early 1936 produced a series of negotiations with Waelder and finally Kris.44 Neither Kris nor Waelder supported a sociological revision of Freud—Kris criticized that direction when it appeared in Erik Erikson—but they arrived at a compromise to have Fenichel publish his own overview of psychoanalytic theory in Imago. Unlike Reich, Fenichel remained an orthodox Freudian psychologist: he advocated Freud’s instinct theory while also emphasizing the psychological impact of social structures and institutions. Further, by 1935, the Popular Front between Socialists, Communists, and republicans was gradually taking shape. Echoing the recent Communist call for an alliance with socialists and labor reformers, Fenichel described his negotiations with Kris and Waelder as an effort to produce a “united front.”45
In the weeks following the Austro-German treaty, Kris began to serve as one of the first Austrian contacts for London’s Academic Assistance Council. The AAC—later renamed the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning—identified scholars and educators who needed to escape the Continent, assisted with their emigration, and sought employment for them in Britain. Kris sent names and résumés of Austrian scholars to Saxl and Bing, who relayed the information to the council. On 14 September 1936, soon after Saxl’s visit to Vienna, Kris mailed to him by registered parcel a copy of the University of Vienna’s personnel directory; in it Kris marked the names of “the ones living under the cloud of suspicion.”46 Kris stressed that the situation in Austria already resembled that of Germany. Thanks to the rule of the Christian Social government and the rise of Nazism, there remained few working Jewish scholars: “You will be convinced of how extraordinarily small is the number of those who come into consideration for the A.A.C.”47
In Vienna, some whom the Nazis labeled “half-Jews” (“jüdisch Versippte”)48—men whose wives were Jewish—kept their jobs, but only a small number of those, if any, remained in the humanities and social sciences. Among the recent generation of scholars, Catholic authoritarianism had done its work:
Naturally the list is very deficient, although I do not believe that many eluded us. But it is deficient for the reason that there are half-Jews of whom one does not know; people with grandmothers or wives. That does not hold for the Philosophy Faculty and not for the last ten years, during which that too [intermarriage] was already causa exclusionis.49
Kris offered to gather names of scholars and researchers employed outside the university, but those figures would merely confirm the picture that emerged from within official academia. He enumerated:
1) I could try to obtain from the Ministry of Social Welfare a list of the Jewish doctors still employed in hospitals outside of the university system whose habilitation recently was refused or not attempted as being senseless. The number also cannot be large. Estimated under 10.
2) I could try to sort the entire class of scientific employees in public services. For the sphere of the scientific institutions in Vienna I have done that, so far as it concerns the cultural scientific institutions. The result is that in all libraries, archives, and museums—including a one-eighth Jewess, including the chair of the Association of German-Catholic Academic Women, further including two roughly 55-year-old and pension-qualified supervisory librarians in the university library of whom one is likewise only a one-quarter Jew, further including my person, a young man in the Albertina (one-quarter Jew) and Dr. Schwarz (Austrian Gallery)—the number 7 can be accepted as the maximum number. This number, however, is incomplete because the possibility exists that outside of Vienna one Jew might be found; further, it would take into account the non-cultural scientific institutions, but it still would not result in doubling the proposed number.50
Kris concluded that for the AAC to protect academics and scientists outside the university, the council would need exact numbers of the intermarried:
3) What is really absent are people with Jewish wives. That can hardly be determined.51
Kris relied on well-placed contacts, among whom he counted an associate at the museum who for his own reasons kept track of the backgrounds of other scholars: “Dr. Hans von Dehmel, the director of our Egyptian department, four-fifths Nazi with strong racial standpoint.”52 The National Socialist Egyptologist exhibited no personal hostility toward Kris, but the museum had ceased to be a secure workplace. Thanking Saxl for his recent visit, Kris described his personal isolation: “The evening with you was enjoyable, almost too enjoyable, for here there is otherwise hardly anyone with whom I can speak freely.”53
On 22 October 1936—only days before the opening of the Daumier exhibition—Kris sent to Saxl a report for the AAC that further described the situation confronting Jewish scholars in Vienna, most particularly the younger generation. In it Kris pressed the council to focus especially on the fate of colleagues who had embarked on careers at the moment Nazism came to power, among whom he included Karl Popper:
The real conditions in Austria appear somewhat differently than the way they are used to being viewed abroad or even at home. The anti-Semitism predominant since the Eighties has become so much stronger in the last twelve years or so in Austria that one can speak of a systematic exclusion of the Jews from all academic and scientific positions. This exclusion was never a complete one, but in the time period to which I refer, it is a growing one. It first laid hold of the teaching profession in the high schools, then the scientific institutes, and finally, since about 1926/27 in increasing measure also the hospitals and clinics. Since the year 1933, the barring of the Jews has been a total one, so that the question what would happen if National Socialism came to power in Austria must be replaced with the question: What should happen since it is not only the case that a dominant tendency debars a rising generation of Jews and those of Jewish descent from research but also that no opportunity for development is given to an indeed small number of young Jewish scholars who have already been admitted to training?54
Concerned that word of his ties to the AAC might find its way back to Austria, Kris had been adamant that Saxl and Bing keep his work anonymous—including to AAC members, who at this time also were helping arrange for the Warburg Institute to remain in London beyond 1936. When forwarding the first report, however, Bing had allowed his identity to become known within the council. Kris repeated his demand for anonymity, emphasizing that the Church hierarchy’s once friendly attitude toward him had begun to turn cool and even hostile:
I believe I am not mistaken that in the course of time severe difficulties await me and that certain Catholic ecclesiastical authorities are preparing to act against me. The reason lies on the one hand in analysis and on the other in my family circumstances (children not baptized). In any case, one of the most prominent representatives of the Viennese clergy refused to appear at the same time with me in a neutral lecture program. I know very little still about this affair, will report to you in more detail when I know more, and ask that for the time being you treat this communication as strictly confidential (namely from all Austrians).55
Dispirited by Schuschnigg’s policies, marginalized by the New Vienna School’s nationalist Kulturpolitik, and disowned by Church leaders, Kris worked on the Daumier exhibition. His attempt to turn Austrian eyes from Berlin toward Paris would be his last significant project in Vienna.
A Republican Art Exhibition
In Austria, Schuschnigg’s government continued its political and diplomatic maneuvering. Against this background Kris secured for Daumier’s artwork a last trip outside France before the war.56 With two hundred and sixty-nine drawings, watercolors, sculptures, and lithographs, the extensive survey held in the Albertina in November–December 1936 was nearly twice the size of the Daumier exhibit organized in Berlin a decade earlier.57
To accompany the exhibition, Otto Benesch contributed an essay on Daumier to the Österreichische Rundschau. Appearing in February 1937, it reinforced the vision of the artist as psychological portraitist, artistic experimenter, and political tribune. Daumier’s early paintings revealed the artist’s interest in the monumental and heroic, but his later drawings, lithographs, and sculptures—and most importantly caricatures—reflected his concern with the quotidian, revelatory details of daily experience and his deepening attachment to the life he saw immediately around him. The combined figure of Quixote–Ratapoil expressed both sides: Daumier instilled in Quixote the “vital intensity”58 of a classical poetic character, while he gave to Ratapoil a documentary realism, creating “a concrete figure, of which one could believe that it had actually lived.”59 Daumier’s mastery of light, his use of color, and his preoccupation with antiquity recalled late Renaissance and Baroque artists—Tintoretto and the Venetians, Rubens, and most tellingly Rembrandt. His heroic impulse ultimately derived from a deep sympathy for the common citizen: in his last images, the social mass itself became the monumental figure of his art. But the individual subjects within the collective remained distinctive personalities and all too human.
By the end of the 1920s, left-wing critics had begun to deplore the fact that, in France, only Daumier the painter, not Daumier the caricaturist, received recognition.60 Kris’s exhibition restored the balance. The Albertina presented Daumier’s full depth and range, from the contemplative and psychological to the moral and political. The works on view combined self-examination, artistic invention, and social criticism, demonstrating to Viennese spectators Daumier’s well-known credo, “One must be of one’s time.”
In the exhibition’s first rooms, drawings and lithographs displayed middle-class existence as a revel of acquisition. Bourgeois sociability suppressed the qualities of inwardness and meditation; more dangerously, it provided a cover for possessiveness, complacency, and heartlessness. Art offered a source of light and a spirit of genuine communion. In Daumier’s tribute to the artist Auguste Raffet, the prints illuminate a trio of intent collectors (cat. no. 24, Plate 3), while in his image of a single beholder examining a copperplate, the light from the beloved engraving inspires purely private contemplation (cat. no. 59, Plate 4).61 As in his images of collectors browsing tranquilly through an art shop rack or losing themselves in thought, this solitary figure embodied the vision of a humanity still capable of inward communion.
Bourgeois self-conceit, absence of conviction, and pitilessness denied that vision. In the law chambers, legislative halls, and courts of justice, Daumier witnessed and recorded self-dramatizing defense lawyers, sedentary deputies (cat. no. 99, Plate 5), and splenetic judges (cat. no. 29, Plate 6). Daumier’s depiction of the bourgeoisie, Kris wrote in the exhibition catalog, reflected the disfigurements that they caused in others: “To the Parisian bourgeois he holds up a mirror in which the life of the little man appears in grotesque distortion.”62
Under conditions of extreme poverty, even introspection became unnaturally distorted, as revealed in the unsparing vision of The Soup (cat. no. 37, Plate 7). At the table, inwardness turns visceral. Each exhausted figure—father, mother, and infant—withdraws into the state of desperate concentration demanded by survival. An intense, enforced introversion pervades the dismal scene, producing between the mother and the child at her breast a tragic, mutual obliviousness.
In sharp contrast to the somber, self-engrossed world of The Soup, Daumier’s Ratapoil conveyed calculated, unnerving gregariousness. Thus his relentless attention to the goddess of the Republic can only arouse suspicion (cat. no. 108, Plate 8). Still, his exaggerated, histrionic bow betrays something more than the insincerity of his republican sentiments: it exposes his instinctive deference, of which Ratapoil himself is unaware and which his Bonapartist managers manipulate to their advantage. Ratapoil insists on his nobility of character, yet proves always willing to sell himself to the highest bidder. Aggressive in pursuit of his political targets and submissive toward authority, he recalls the Balzacian agent, the claqueur, both “ferocious and fawning.”63 Without reliable social standing or self-direction, Ratapoil’s highest aim is to become indispensable. His freedom and power to act depend on being another’s agent: indispensability, as Balzac lamented, redefined the meaning and limits of liberty.64
Daumier’s famous sculpture of Ratapoil, brought to the Albertina, explored in detail the fractured personality of the political agent (cat. no. 84, Plate 9). Completed a year before Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état, the small statue communicates its subject’s unstable, fragmented identity.65 Comparing the figure to distant precursors, including creations by El Greco, Clark explains that the “only parallels are with Mannerism at its most extreme and expressive.”66 He describes the grim and evocative nature of the small statue:
In Ratapoil the broken surface, marked with the comb at every point, seems to eat into the solid of the figure, making it tenuous and fragile. That is why the sculpture conjures up skeletons and the dance of death: the wrinkled trousers and the great billow of the creased tail-coat are mimicked, on a smaller scale, by the folds and openings of every surface, so that there seems to be no flesh inside the clothes.67
In the twisted and rumpled bronze figure, Daumier produced a psycho-political case study. The theatricality and sense of self-importance that emerge from one angle cannot hide the caustic anger visible from another or the vacant stare that appears from yet another. Ratapoil’s outward persona as the agent of someone else’s designs cannot protect against disintegration from within. Whatever aspirations he claims for himself, they fail him. His excess of sociability signals a wasted personality and empty superfluity, marking him as the first modern agent of propaganda and foreshadowing Jacques Ellul’s characterization: “In the very act of pretending to speak as man to man, the propagandist is reaching the summit of his mendacity and falsifications, even when he is not conscious of it.”68
According to Kris, Daumier later transferred the disheveled and disjointed features of Ratapoil to the figure of Quixote—but a Quixote who senses approaching death, seeks rest in this world, and whose visionary struggles exist only in his memory. Quixote–Ratapoil represented the mass exhaustion of republican ideals, the wearing away of hope by a corrosive, Bonapartist society, and the feeling of political weariness and personal alienation in those who, like Daumier, lived through the bourgeois monarchy and Second Republic and who, after becoming disenchanted by both politicians and the people, devoted themselves to remembrance. As Kris stated:
When he shows us the lawyers who swarm around clients in the Palace of Justice, shows us the multitude in the theater, in the railway train where the individual is swallowed up by the masses and the masses react as a totality, when he—critically disillusioned—casts an eye over the Second Republic and parliamentary government or with unrelenting severity scourges the menacing danger of Bonapartism and its representatives, that is more than satire or broadsheet. “Ratapoil,” whom he brought to life in a fine statuette and in numerous lithographs, Ratapoil, who advocates for the golden days of a second empire, is more than a swaggering agent of Napoleon III. He is at the same time a dreamer from the line to which belonged a great favorite of Honoré Daumier; Ratapoil is a descendant of Don Quixote. Satire becomes character portrait.69
From the distorted, shattered lines of Ratapoil emerged the faded, disappearing outline of Quixote.
And of Daumier. Henry James looked on Ratapoil as Daumier’s alter ego—and James’s own double. Thus his essay on Daumier conjured an image of himself loitering in a print shop. There he discovers Daumier’s lithographs and ponders their effect: he is, in other words, the bourgeois art connoisseur examining prints in a Daumier drawing, a character within a Daumier creation. James becomes uneasy about his admiration for Daumier’s antibourgeois images—especially their leaning toward the ugly and grotesque—and wonders how they can strike such a sympathetic chord in him and in others. He regrets having placed himself within Daumier’s shops and streets and suddenly fears that his decision reveals a sense of morbidity. Like Ratapoil, Daumier exploits that fear and subtly “bribes”70 his targets with thoughts of restored grandeur. Just like Ratapoil, who “in a whisper”71 twists the mind of his mark, so the figure of art “whispers even to the great”72 that only art guarantees their survival in the eyes of posterity. Ultimately, James must assimilate Daumier to his own self-image. Baudelaire had stated, “Caricatures are often the most faithful mirror of life,” to which James responds that Daumier was in fact the essential bourgeois artist, but one “to whom a big cracked mirror has been given.”73
In Daumier’s drawings the bourgeoisie paraded in their death masks, their crisis well advanced. But in their last gesticulations they clutched desperately at phantasms of Bonapartist glory and control, inevitably dragging the exhausted masses into a lethal arms race and disastrous militarist adventures. In the Albertina, one could see the giddy firearms inventor whose dreamscape was a wasteland (cat. no. 113, Plate 10), the figure of Peace accepting a crown ringed with bayonets (cat. no. 122, Plate 11), and the images of Bonapartism’s last gamble: the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, which ended in political self-destruction, foreign occupation, and the starvation of besieged Paris. In Daumier’s drawing from that year, “The Empire is Peace,” smoke descends upon the ruins of an empty town, and the unburied bodies reveal the absolute tranquility that Louis Napoleon had promised the French people after he seized imperial power (cat. no. 126, Plate 12). But the title–“L’empire, c’est la paix”—did more than recall the emperor’s declaration from the year following his coup d’état. It revived Victor Hugo’s memorial to the victims of the first imperialist slaughter: the civilians shot down in the streets of Paris by Louis Napoleon’s soldiers in the coup’s immediate aftermath. In Les Châtiments, Hugo condemned Bonapartism in the name of the innocent: “Dormez dans vos cercueils! taisez-vous dans vos tombes! / L’empire c’est la paix. [Sleep in the coffin! be calm in the tomb! / Empires, we know, bring peace.]”74
In the room adjacent to Daumier’s drawings of modern war, the exhibition placed his depictions of classical heroes and foot soldiers. Selected from the artist’s early collection, Ancient History, these parodies of Homeric myths foreshadowed Daumier’s broadsides against militarism. “Menelaus the Conqueror” (cat. no. 131, Plate 13) exposed the falseness of the heroic code. It did so neither in the self-righteous pose of the sybaritic king, nor in the disdain for him shown by his wife Helen, but instead in the contempt both figures display toward the corpse of the nameless soldier, face buried in the sand, lying at their feet. Even before the Franco-Prussian War, Daumier had extracted the lesson of Troy: heroism meant self-glorification, sacrifice imposed anonymity. For Kris, Daumier’s vision conveyed a shattering impact, both morally and emotionally:
The travesties of ancient scenes that show the poor bourgeois, the commonplace man playing the part of the hero of antiquity, in which the comic contrast reaches the point of being frightening or often moving, are as alive as the political sheets of the later period. These are the sheets in which, out of a deep longing for peace, is depicted the armaments fever of a sick Europe on the eve of the war of 1870. These are the sheets in which the sorrow and pain brought by the war of 1870 are portrayed with stirring pathos; across more than two generations they have lost none of their power to affect us and many of them might be more powerful today than at the time.75
In a similar spirit, the “Page of History,” also on display at the Albertina, depicted the Bonapartist eagle lying punished and powerless beneath the weight of Victor Hugo’s Les Châtiments (cat. no. 124, Plate 14).
Daumier reached far beyond Dantan’s stage world, expressing what Benesch described as a concrete vision of society or what Kris—reviving Dvořák’s description of Bruegel—called in the exhibition catalog a “new realism.”76 Daumier’s realism encompassed both mind and society:
In his works, what stands before us are not the types that the English caricaturists and their French imitators circulated in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, but rather human beings who are deeply familiar to us, human beings who live, breathe, and suffer, human beings in their physical and psychological reality. Caricature unmasks; it seeks the essence, it makes us laugh, but with Daumier it teaches us to know human beings. They are the human beings whom we find as heroes in the epic written by Daumier’s friend, Balzac.77
Like Balzac’s La Comédie humaine, Daumier’s visions became a documentary record, bearing witness to the endurance demanded by daily survival.
The Disasters of War
In London, Saxl understood clearly the political significance of displaying Daumier’s artwork in the Albertina and the personal meaning that the exhibition held for Kris. Immediately after the First World War, with the support of Austria’s Socialist government, he had organized in Vienna an antiwar exhibit that featured Goya’s etchings, The Disasters of War.78 He now circulated Kris’s exhibition catalog at the Warburg Institute and in January 1937 conveyed to Kris his own and the staff’s praise: “The Daumier exhibition must have been splendid. Everyone in this library enjoyed the catalog with delight and admiration, and were also very glad that the foreword [to the catalog] does full justice to you and your work.”79
Support such as that shown by Benesch in Vienna and by Saxl in London would have helped relieve Kris’s sense of isolation, but the most crucial sign of fellowship came from France. The months when Kris prepared and displayed the Daumier exhibition coincided with the first triumphs and final crisis of the French Popular Front. In May 1936, led by the Jewish socialist Léon Blum, the Popular Front had formed an antifascist government in Paris, where it struggled to survive against internal dissension and unrelenting middle-class, Church, and nationalist opposition, until it fell in June 1937. For his efforts in organizing the largest Daumier exhibition between the wars, and the only European exhibition outside France during the 1930s, a presidential decree signed on 12 August 1937 bestowed on Kris membership in the Légion d’Honneur. The Grand Chancellery of the Légion d’Honneur certified it on 22 September. Receiving membership so soon after the collapse of Blum’s ministry indicates that it was his government that made the nomination, a sign of recognition that, Gombrich recalled, Kris “valued as a safeguard.”80
By the time of the Daumier exhibition, Kris no longer expected the Viennese art historical profession or the Austrian Church to offer any reliable protections. In bringing the French artist’s work to his own city, he now identified himself intellectually and politically with a broad Popular Front movement. The French Légion d’Honneur—and the presence of a European audience that the honor confirmed—both justified the exhibition and encouraged Kris to continue the caricature project.
Gombrich, who had assisted with the exhibition, would not present his work again to an Austrian audience for decades. His career and new family became firmly rooted elsewhere. During his return to the Continent in 1936, he married Ilse Heller, who came from a Jewish family in Prague and had been a piano student of Leonie Gombrich in Vienna. Their wedding took place in Czechoslovakia. In 1937, their son Richard was born in England.81 Much later, when Gombrich described his ties to his original and adopted homes, he discarded national identifications, characterizing himself simply as “a Central European working in England.”82
In summer 1937, the Spanish Popular Front government displayed in the Spanish pavilion at the Paris Exhibition Pablo Picasso’s Guernica. Depicting the recent German bombing of a defenseless Basque town, it presented a riveting vision of anguish that defied all previous traditions of mural painting. Both Saxl and Kris immediately regarded Picasso’s creation as the highest artistic achievement of the twentieth century. In a lecture presented immediately after the war, Saxl recalled: “It made a deep impression on hundreds of thousands of visitors, and I think it will go down in history as one of the few great and prophetic works of art created between the wars.”83
During the war, in a talk delivered at the Dayton Art Institute, Kris placed Guernica within a lineage of centuries of antiwar art, a lineage that included caricature. Both types of art exposed ugly material realities and unmasked false ideals:
In the beginning of the 17th century engravings of the Frenchman Jacques Callot depicted neither the glory nor the excitement, but the horrors of war. And since that time, three spheres of war imagery have coexisted: The imagery of victory which commemorates; the imagery of the reporter which describes, [sic] and the imagery of the anti-war movements. The three types correspond to three social areas: The first, the imagery of victory, is that of the official painters: they usually paint large canvasses, murals and battle prospects; the second is the area of popular imagery, of the artisans, the picture reporters of the past; the third is that of a few enlightened leaders of mankind, of artists like Callot, Goya, or Daumier, who kept the torch of higher convictions and human ideals alive.84
In the contemporary world, Picasso’s antifascist and antimilitarist mural sustained this line of prophets:
I do not pretend to know where in this complex world, in which the polarity of individualism and conformity splits our lives, the artist’s place should be. But let me quote at least one instance, well known to all, illustrating the potential function of the individual creator where art and war are concerned. I refer to Pablo Picasso’s Guernica. If the great artist turns to war as his subject, he—accidentally—may become propagandist as well. His choice, it appears, will be to join the small group of those who have endeavored to show the horrors not of this war or that but of war as an institution.85
Picasso had brought Daumier’s experiment into the twentieth century.86