representation in the age of mediumistic reproduction...

Representation in the Age of Mediumistic Reproduction, from Symbolism to the Bauhaus

Allison Morehead and Elizabeth Otto

If Symbolist art is defined by shared iconographical concerns or by associations between people and institutions, its exclusion from Modernism appears warranted. But if Symbolism is conceived of as a set of practices that assert particular, dialectical relationships between form and content, an argument made by Robert Goldwater and Reinhold Heller and more recently developed by Rodolphe Rapetti and Michelle Facos, Symbolism and Modernism emerge as potentially much more intertwined.1 Few would deny that certain Symbolist practices—the Proto-Expressionism of Edvard Munch, the “automatism” of August Strindberg, the quasi-abstraction of early Nabi works—appear to be harbingers of certain strains of Modernism. But the underlying structures of such formal similarities have rarely been explored.

One of the undoubtedly many rote Faden—red threads—between Symbolism and Modernism in Germany, and specifically the Bauhaus, is the esoteric journal Sphinx, launched in Leipzig in 1886. Sphinx included a wealth of visual material that provides for provocative points of comparison with formal approaches central to Symbolist and Bauhaus Modernist practices. The journal was well known within the Berlin-based avant-garde Zum Schwarzen Ferkel, which included Munch and Strindberg, and among members of Symbolist and Expressionist groups in Munich including Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), who read Sphinx as he reviewed occult literature in preparation for writing his major aesthetic and philosophical statement On the Spiritual in Art, the book that earned him fame in art circles and garnered his appointment at the Bauhaus.2

Initially subtitled Monthly Journal for the Historical and Experimental Foundation of the Transcendental Worldview on a Monistic Basis (Monatsschrift für die geschichtliche und experimentale Begründung der übersinnlichen Weltanschauung auf monistischer Grundlage), Sphinx published articles and research that sought a scientific basis for emerging spiritual and mystical perspectives, including numerous reports of research in experimental psychology into phenomena

13

THE SyMBOLIST ROOTS OF MODERN ART156

such as somnambulism, telepathy, and mediumship.3 In his forward to the first issue, Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden emphasized the journal’s intellectual ambitions and made it clear that the editors intended to enlist all manner of expertise—from that of the physicist, the philosopher, the medical doctor, the psychologist, the anthropologist, and the cultural historian—to investigate the relationships between Man, Nature, and the Universe.4 The journal typically reported not only on the purported evidence of spirits, it also hosted enthusiastic debates on the validity of various scientific approaches and life practices, including psychology, psychophysics, astrology, astronomy, and vegetarianism.

In Sphinx’s lofty quest to interrogate the relationships between Man, Nature, and the Universe, visual evidence of mediumistic phenomena was central to communicating with its broad, occult-curious audience. By focusing on particular instances of mediumistic representation prevalent in Sphinx—thought-transfer drawings, spirit photography, and inkblots (“klecksographs”)—and on how this material structured the visual strategies of Munch and members of the Bauhaus, we wish to suggest connecting threads between practices all too easily polarized. Sphinx set out to rationalize the irrational, and it thus serves as a lodestar for considering the work of artists often seen as firmly entrenched on either side of a rational/irrational divide. Analysis of Sphinx’s visual material in relation to the work of these artists reveals the persistent presence of the rational in symbolism and the irrational in Bauhaus Modernism.

In the summer of 1893, the Swedish playwright, author, painter, and photographer August Strindberg replied to a letter from the German writer and his fellow Schwarze Ferkel–member Richard Dehmel, who had noted that many of his letters had recently crossed with those of his correspondents. Strindberg suggested that these might not be chance occurrences, but examples of Gedankenübertragungen—thought-transfers, individual instances of telepathic communication.5 Dehmel told Strindberg that he was dubious about Gedankenübertragungen but was willing to reserve judgment until further experiments, such as those then being conducted by one Dr. Anton Lampa, could be carried out.6

Lampa’s experiments were published in Sphinx, some in the same issue as Dehmel’s own poetry.7 The following year, the journal would draw its readers’ attention to the work of two more Ferkel members when Sphinx contributor Franz Evers reviewed “Psychischer Naturalismus,” a recently published appraisal of Edvard Munch’s new Symbolist work by the Polish writer Stanisław Przybyszewski.8 By the early 1890s, Munch was self-consciously working to transform naturalist modes of representation into modes that a small community of viewers would identify as Symbolist. One persistent problem of Symbolist visual practice was communication. How was an artist both to transmit to and invoke in the viewer—in an immediate, direct way—inner thoughts and emotions, and moreover do so without recourse to what were increasingly seen as bankrupt illusionistic or naturalist modes?

ALLISON MOREHEAD AND ELIZABETH OTTO 157

How could paint on canvas, or paint, pastel, charcoal, or crayon on paper or cardboard, signify psychological experiences and inner states? What, in short, did the soul look like?

Symbolist theory dictated the search for a universal visual language that, in the name of a putative psychological universalism, would turn away from the appearance of things to signify the essence of things. In this search, the latest research in experimental psychology was especially useful.9 Alleged telepathic communication was a typical subject for psychological experimentation, one of the many abnormal cases used to bolster the scientific claims of the new psychology. Because scholarship has tended to focus on the use of photography to record spirit manifestations “objectively,” it is easy to forget that a wider range of visual strategies was mobilized, especially before the mid-1890s, to prove the existence of the od, the ether, or protoplasma, media through which many believed that thoughts could be transmitted.10 Prior to the first concerted attempts to photograph thought (in Romania in the summer of 1893),11 thought-transfer experiments usually relied on mediumistic reproductions of drawings as both testing grounds for and evidence of telepathy. Gedankenübertragungen experiments, first conducted under the auspices of London’s Society for Psychical Research, were soon repeated in Germany, fostered by the late nineteenth-century contexts of liberal theology and what Corinna Treitel has called epistemological anarchism.12

Gedankenübertragungen experiments typically used mediums, who were thought to have heightened perceptual faculties. An “agent”—an “experienced experimenter”—would first be shown a drawing made on the spot in a closed room. Then he (and it was invariably a “he”) would bring the drawing into another room in which a “percipient,” the medium, more often than not a young woman, was already seated with her eyes and ears covered. The agent would subsequently place the drawing behind the percipient, and he himself would stand further behind the medium, but in front of the drawing. He would then, with all his might, focus his thoughts on the drawing until the percipient signaled that she had received his mental suggestion. The drawing would then be removed from the room, the coverings removed from her head, and the percipient would then reproduce her “impression” of the “original” drawing. Total silence was to be observed from start to finish. While the percipient drew, the agent remained standing behind her, keeping her “most attentively under his gaze,” but taking care not to touch her or even follow her hand with his eye.13

The visual evidence from each of these experiments was usually a set of two related drawings labeled “Original” and “Wiedergabe” (or “Reproduction”) (Figure 13.1). The “originals” ranged from single combinations of geometric shapes to more complex drawings of people, animals, and musical instruments. The “reproductions” were invariably simplified, more schematic, usually smaller, and often more hesitant, even childlike in their execution. In some cases, they failed entirely to resemble the original drawing, although resemblance was nevertheless asserted through their placement

13.1 Sphinx 2, no. 4 (October 1886): 246. Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene e.V. Freiburg i. Br.


on the page and through their captions. Positioned next to their originals, the reproductions implicitly claimed that some essential visual aspect of the object had been communicated telepathically from agent to percipient. The man with the cigarette, for instance, “resembles” his wormlike reproduction only by virtue of proximity and placement, which assert that both drawings exist within the larger genus “face,” or perhaps, even more broadly, within some category of “elongated thing,” encompassing cigarette, worm, and the ultimate male signifier, phallus.

A number of Munch’s drawings from this period seek to reduce form in the realm of human representation, moving in the same essentializing direction as the Gedankenübertragung reproductions. On the verso of a more finished drawing, a representation of art as a seedling nourished by male-female copulation, Munch produced a crayon and ink drawing of a man’s head, a schematic profile recognizable as a self-representation that shares much with the Gedankenübertragung drawings, albeit with original superimposed onto reproduction in a different medium (Plate 18). Uncertain blue crayon lines are hardly if at all recognizable as a face without the tusche lines brushed over the top that synthesize elements of the profile. Underneath the strokes of tusche, three lightly and hesitantly drawn noses suggest not so much that Munch changed his mind in drawing the picture, as that he may have had his eyes closed and lifted the crayon up a number of times as he first drew the jerky lines later smoothed over with ink.

Interpreted in the context of the Gedankenübertragung drawings, Munch acts here as both agent and percipient. As agent, he concentrates on a mental image of his own profile, and as percipient, he recreates that image “blindly.” Such self-experimentation seems designed to access perceptual and creative faculties beyond or before artistic training, a search for the essentials of form that will, with a minimum of elements, communicate “man’s head in profile” to the viewer. In adding the tusche, Munch restores an original to the reproduction, literally enacting the dialectic mental work necessary to synthesize the image.14

Munch’s drawing of a man’s head and the Gedankenübertragung reproductions share a family resemblance to caricature, and might best be understood in relation to Munch’s search for what Erik Mørstad called a “form language,” a system of representation used as an alternate to wholly iconic or symbolic systems.15 yet Munch’s formal essences function less strictly as caricatures—they often lack the critical function of caricature—and more as Gedankenübertragung. They encourage a back and forth between original and reproduction, instantiating a dynamic, dialectic mode of viewing that enables both essential form and the existence of telepathic communication to be asserted. The drawing of a man’s head not only signifies the Platonic form Man’s Head but also allows a smaller community of interpretation—Munch’s patrons, supporters, and indeed his historians—to recognize the form language of profile, helmet-hair, jutting chin, and often closed eyes as a self-representation.


For Przybyszewski, well-versed in the research of experimental psychology and psychic phenomena, Munch’s paintings were the creations of a “somnambulant, transcendental consciousness,” “chemical preparations” of an “animalistic, irrational soul” that enabled the scientific study of the self’s most intimate functions.16 Munch himself, well aware of and interested in the scientific research on spirit or occult phenomena, often referred to himself as a medium, a thought-transmitter, a sleepwalker, or a night wanderer. Later in life, rereading notes he had made in the 1890s, Munch recalled his use of line as a premonitory sign of “waves in the ether,” a foreshadowing of scientific discoveries in electricity and telegraphy, the importance of which was that they transmitted “thought … through space.”17

In the same notebook, Munch wrote, “A line can be an accomplished work of art,” which perhaps justifies the leap from lines on a scrap of paper to the most recognizable work of Munch’s oeuvre. The central figure of Scream (1893, Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo) is more an evocation than a depiction of human form. Only cursory circles, dots, and small x’s signify the sufficient orifices—eyes, nostrils, and mouth—needed to identify a humanoid face. Similar reductive processes structure the Gedankenübertragung reproduction of a fish drawing (Figure 13.2). It would not signify fish were the original not also reproduced beside it, but the schematic representation of a cell-like body, shifting into a head and three orifices, helps to convey, once again by virtue of proximity, “primordial creature.” Reversing the processes carried out by the Gedankenübertragung experiments, Scream invited late nineteenth-century viewers to receive the mental suggestion of universal emotions and then to recreate their own personal experiences. As percipient, Munch provided something to be read as essential, universal form, an image that asks viewers to access their own specific forms, to conjure up originals from a reproduction, and ideally, to retrieve their own personal emotive experiences through engaging with the work.

Sphinx’s wide-ranging purview made it both a model and a resource for the continued exploration of new hybrid religions well into the twentieth century. Theories and beliefs illuminated in Sphinx were surprisingly central to the Bauhaus project. The 14 years of the Bauhaus’s existence are usually associated with the objective of form following function, art united with technology, and design paired with mass production, all in the service of capitalism and consumerism.18 Rationality and secularity, dominant tropes of modernity, are often taken as givens in relation to the Bauhaus. ‘However, the archives themselves reveal what some recent exhibitions and scholarship have also shown, a wide range of objects that have fallen outside of the Bauhaus canon and which reveal a much more complex view of the school. They demonstrate that this paragon of the rational was in fact nothing of the sort.”19

Many Bauhaus masters were quite knowledgeable about the experimental religions that were so avidly discussed in the intellectual circles in which they developed their practices. These included not only Kandinsky but also Paul Klee (1879–1940), Johannes Itten (1888–1967), László Moholy-Nagy


(1894–1946), and the Bauhaus’s influential instructor of Harmonisierungslehre, Gertrud Grunow (1870–1944), who taught students to dance colors in order to bring body and mind into harmony with each other. This made for a heady cocktail of esoteric and occult knowledge at the Bauhaus, one that nourished the school’s central project of creating art and objects that might instigate new ways of living. Bauhaus members viewed the visual as a tool to investigate new forms of spirituality from the world of the global occult as they understood it. Sphinx was not merely a source for those working at the Bauhaus; it also points the way for reconnecting the seemingly disparate trends of rational and irrational Modernity, and provides a model for understanding how, at the Bauhaus, the visual provided laboratory space for testing out ideas about sprit.

The Bauhaus’s engagement with the occult is most evident in its embrace of the hybrid religion of Mazdaznan, which was founded in the United States in 1890 by Otto Hanish and reached Germany in 1907. The new religion was a mixture of Zoroastrianism, Ayurvedic medicine, tantric Hinduism, Christianity, and Ancient Egyptian philosophy, brought together with Theosophy and modern research into occult phenomena. It was a distinct creation of its time and reflected much of the same intellectual curiosity about the occult that enlivened the pages of Sphinx. It took the Bauhaus by storm when Itten, a well-schooled devotee of Mazdaznan became one of the first faculty named to the school and the teacher of the Vorkurs, a class that every student had to take and pass before being accepted in one of the workshops.

13.2 Sphinx 1, no. 1 (January 1886): 37. Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene e.V. Freiburg i. Br.


Thus Mazdaznan became an organizing principal of Bauhaus life; members practiced fasting, singing, smiling, creative movement, as well as training their minds to uniquely positive thoughts, and the canteen only offered a Mazdaznan-proscribed diet. Most important of all, Mazdaznan profoundly inspired the art, design, and architecture of Bauhaus members.20

A 1924 work on paper by the Bauhaus student and Mazdaznan follower Paul Citroen (1896–1983) reveals a range of occultist sources that were first brought to light in Sphinx and had already informed Munch and others’ work in decades prior. Spiritist Séance engages with mediumistic forms of reproduction in two distinct registers (Plate 19). It operates both as a represented scene of occultist and spiritist practices, such that it appears to document an otherworldly scene. At the same time, the work functions as evidence because it provides direct traces of spirit presence.

The work’s title designates this as a scene of spiritism, a set of beliefs and methods—a Weltanschauung, in fact—relayed in Sphinx through the work of regular contributor Baron Carl du Prel. He defined “spiritism” as “the belief: (1) that man is immortal, (2) that the dead—so-called ghosts—can become visible under certain circumstances, and (3) that they can, in limited ways, intervene in our world.”21 Set in an inky darkness, Citroen’s Spiritist Séance evokes images typically found in spirit photography, a research tool especially prevalent in spiritist circles from the 1870s onward, and one that interested numerous scientists, intellectuals, and artists including Kandinsky.22 In the 1920s it was still in regular use by spirit investigators at research institutions including the Sorbonne.23 The German occult researcher Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, also a contributor to Sphinx, conducted extensive controlled experiments with mediums that were documented, analyzed, and disseminated using photography as an evidentiary tool. Citroen’s image of a séance could be based on an experiment he had witnessed or on photographic evidence he had seen, for it brings to mind such an interaction between a researcher and a medium. At the same time, Citroen’s watercolor and ink drawing invites comparison with one of many photographs in which “extras”—images of the deceased—were superimposed onto images of living loved ones to create a seemingly true representation of the spirit’s presence. Lastly, the indefinite character of Citroen’s female figure’s face and the male figure’s arm suggests an ambiguous corporeal presence that could signify as a laying on of hands or as the presence of ectoplasm. This latter was a substance that sometimes was seen to emerge from a medium’s nose or mouth as a productive, material trace of spirit possession.24

Even as it suggestively amalgamated various emblematic scenes of spiritism, Citroen’s picture engaged with mediumistic creativity and, in multiple ways, played off an agent/percipient relationship. The image includes passages of abstract watercolor and ink forms reminiscent of the inkblots published in Sphinx, which appeared immediately after the posthumous publication of Justinus Kerner’s Kleksographie (Figure 13.3).25 Kerner, a follower of Anton Mesmer, created the inkblots in the mid-nineteenth century and, as Strindberg


would do at the fin de siècle, ascribed spirit agency to these forms made by chance. Kerner “enhanced” the spirit forms he found in his inkblots, a strategy that Citroen also used when he introduced lines to make manifest details of faces and bodies from within abstract forms. Spiritist Séance visualizes a coming into being of spirit forms through definition by line, a technique practiced by occultists and artists alike. In other words, the image indexes the séance directly through the tensions between nebulous forms and defining lines; it evokes and is structured by the mental processes of making sense of a séance experience. As Sphinx did with textual descriptions, Citroen’s Spiritist Séance uses visuals to represent the otherworld happenings that made up a séance. Also like Sphinx, it offers direct visual evidence of the spirit world. In its simple composition and complex amalgamation of a wide array of spiritist

13.3 Justinus Kerner, Kleksographie (Inkblot), 1850s, ink on paper. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich, G 18402


thought and image making, it is profoundly Bauhaus, even if it fails to read as such in relation to conventional understandings of the school.

Itten left the Bauhaus in 1923 and Grunow the following year, and the school turned from an overt emphasis on spirituality and craft to a focus on “art and technology, a new unity!”26 But the Bauhaus’s engagement with the spiritual persisted even after its turn to the technological seemed absolute. The Bauhaus continued to be haunted by the spiritual in its links to surrealism, initially through Paul Klee and over time in the work of other members.27 The photographs and light projects of László Moholy-Nagy, the young constructivist hired to replace Itten, used the latest technologies to create new visual experiences and novel visual traces. Seen from this perspective, the project of the new vision is as much spiritual as it is Modern.

In his pre-Bauhaus years, Moholy-Nagy too was caught up in Europe’s transcendentalist spirituality. His wife and collaborator, Lucia Moholy, had been an adherent of Mazdaznan and rhapsodic musings on the life-giving properties of light appear frequently in his early writings. Therefore the Bauhaus’s new Constructivist was one who considered the spiritual alongside the practical and functional in his work and teaching. His view of light as an emerging artistic medium of the utmost importance would serve all of these purposes. This medium was not merely a way of creating pictures, like oil and canvas had been; it was also its own subject, both form and energy.28 Some of the same potentialities that others had seen in spiritism, transferred thoughts, mediumistic drawing, or the teachings of Mazdaznan—the conveyance of universal ideas in newly discovered forms or the rendering of profound meaning through abstraction—were for Moholy-Nagy bound up with the still emerging technology of electric lighting.

Moholy-Nagy’s experiments with and teaching about light and photography made manifest the school’s new alignment with technology as a source of transformation. Once the Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1925, the photogram became Moholy-Nagy’s primary means of artistic expression.29 An untitled 1926 photogram shows direct traces of the shadow made by Moholy-Nagy’s head and face on light-sensitive paper (Figure 13.4). His glasses are removed and placed directly on the paper; they are associated with his eyes but no longer function for him as such. Instead, they are offered up to the viewer so that she too may “see.” The lenses are reduced to their mechanics, made into compositional elements rather than instruments in Moholy-Nagy’s “cameraless”—and thus lensless—photography, a mode that Strindberg also explored in the 1890s with his “celestographs.”30 So direct is this process that the photogram bears traces of secretions from Moholy-Nagy’s face in its lower portion. He has also further defined this light apparition through additional light exposure, by using circle stencils to mask some parts of the light-sensitive paper and expose others, so that they become a structured realm of darkness out of which the face emerges. This photogram functions as a self-portrait that reveals Moholy-Nagy’s physical and physiological traces


and that gestures to the ideas and methodological processes operating within this man’s head, technology harnessed to index spirit.

In the age of mechanical reproduction, various kinds of mediumistic reproduction, from thought-transfer drawings to spirit photography to inkblots, held out the twin promise of making visible the invisible and rationalizing the irrational. The landmark exhibition The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890–1985, with its extraordinary wealth of documentation, revealed the esoteric, occult, and theosophic underpinnings of Modernist abstraction, which more recent exhibitions, such as the monographic show of the work of Hilma af Klint, have explored further.31 And yet, the relationship

13.4 László Moholy-Nagy, untitled, 1926, photogram on developing paper (b/w). Museum Folkwang, Essen. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New york/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn


between the various forms of Modernist abstraction propagated in early twentieth-century Europe and the spiritual and the spiritist have nevertheless remained, from art history’s point of view, the dark side of Modernism.

In taking three very specific instances of visual material disseminated by one journal, our goal here has been very simply to point to how the questions initially asked by Symbolist artists—how to “objectify the subjective” and how to paint the soul in universally understandable terms—were answered in ways that rhymed with the various existing forms of mediumistic reproduction. We suggest that those solutions continued to resonate well into the twentieth century, at moments and at institutions such as the Bauhaus, which have so often been seen, wrongly, as diametrically opposed to Symbolist visual practice.

Notes

1 Robert Goldwater, Symbolism (London: Allen Lane, 1979); Reinhold Heller, “Concerning Symbolism and the Structure of Surface,” Art Journal 45, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 146–63; Rodolphe Rapetti, Le Symbolisme (Paris: Flammarion, 2005); Michelle Facos, Symbolist Art in Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

2 On the Schwarze Ferkel group as an avant-garde, see Reinhold Heller, “‘Das schwarze Ferkel’ and the Institution of an Avant-Garde in Berlin, 1892–1895,” in Thomas W. Gaehtgens, ed., Künstlerischer Austausch = Artistic Exchange, vol. 3 (Berlin: Akademie, 1993), 509–19. For the link between Kandinsky and Sphinx, see Sixten Ringbom, “Art in ‘the Epoch of the Great Spiritual’: Occult Elements in the Early Theory of Abstract Painting,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes vol. 29 (1966), 416–17, and Corinna Treitel, A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 108; Ré Soupault, Das Bauhaus: Die heroischen Jahre von Weimar, ed. Manfred Metzner (Heidelberg: Verlag das Wunderhorn, 2009), 35.

3 For more on Sphinx, see Treitel, 71, 83–4, and Heather Wollfram, The Stepchildren of Science: Psychical Research and Parapsychology in Germany, c. 1870–1939 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 54–5, 60–61.

4 Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden, “Sphinx, Aufruf und Vorwort,” Sphinx 1, no. 1 (January 1886): i–iv.

5 August Strindberg to Richard Dehmel (Sellin, 4 July 1893), no. 2578, in August Strindberg, Brev, vol. 9 (Stockholm: A. Bonnier, 1965), 229.

6 Richard Dehmel to August Strindberg (Pankow bei Berlin, 1 July 1893), no. 41, in Walter A. Berendsohn, Briefe an Strindberg (Bei Florian Kupferberg, 1967), and Richard Dehmel to August Strindberg (7 July 1893), Strindberg papers, Ep S53b, Royal Library, Stockholm.

7 Dr. Anton Lampa, “Über die spiritistischen Phänomene vom physikalischen Standpunkt,” Sphinx 15, no. 84 (February 1893): 321–7; Richard Dehmel, “Das Gesicht,” Sphinx 15, no. 84 (February 1893): 361–75.

8 Franz Evers, “Psychischer Naturalismus,” Sphinx 18, no. 98 (April 1894): 319–21.


9 See the foundational work of Filiz Eda Burhan, “Vision and Visionaries: Nineteenth-Century Psychological Theory, the Occult Sciences and the Formation of the Symbolist Aesthetic in France” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1979), and Debora L. Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

10 The od is a late nineteenth-century term roughly synonymous with the others listed here, all of which indicate a unifying, circulatory matter or substance. For an exploration of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century understandings of the ether, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, “X-Rays and Ether Physics as the Context for the ‘Fourth Dimension,’” The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art [revised] (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 15–27.

11 Andreas Fischer, “‘La Lune au front’: Remarks on the history of the photography of thought,” in The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (New Haven: yale University Press, 2005), 139–46.

12 Corinna Treitel, “The Culture of Knowledge in the Metropolis of Science: Spiritualism and Liberalism in Fin-de-Siècle Berlin,” in Constantin Goschler, ed., Wissenschaft und Öffentlichkeit in Berlin, 1870–1930 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2000), 128. Treitel borrowed the term “epistemological anarchism” from Paul Feyerabend, Science in a Free Society (London: Verso, 1985), 125–8.

13 “Experimente übersinnlicher Gedanken-Übertragung in London,” Sphinx 1, no. 1 (January 1886): 34–41; “Übersinnlichen Gedanken-Übertragung nach den Untersuchungen der Society for Psychical Research in London,” Sphinx 1, no. 2 (February 1886): 105–29.

14 Reinhold Heller, “On Symbolism and the Structure of Surface,” Art Journal 45, no. 2 (Summer 1985), 146–53.

15 Erik Mørstad, “Edvard Munch’s formspråk: formler og karikaturer,” manuscript in Munch Museum of an article published in Italian as “Il linguaggio formale di Edvard Munch: formule e caricature,” in Øivind Storm Bjerke, ed., Munch 1863–1944 (Rome: Complesso del Vittoriano, 2005), 41–56.

16 Stanislaw Przybyszewski, “Psychischer Naturalismus,” Neue Deutsche Rundschau (February 1894), reprinted in Przybyszewski, ed., Das Werk des Edvard Munch (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1894), 12, 16.

17 Edvard Munch, Notebook T2748, p. 21, www.emunch.no.

18 Frederic Schwartz, “Utopia for Sale: The Bauhaus and Weimar Germany’s Consumer Culture,” in Kathleen James-Chakraborty, ed., Bauhaus Culture: From Weimar to the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 115–28.

19 Christoph Wagner, ed., Das Bauhaus und die Esoterik: Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee (Hamm: Gustav-Lübecke-Museum, 2005); and Christoph Wagner, ed., Esoterik am Bauhaus: eine Revision der Moderne? (Regensburg: Schnell und Steiner, 2009).

20 Wagner, Das Bauhaus und die Esoterik, 148.

21 “Du Prel über den Spiritismus,” Sphinx 1, no. 3 (1886): 215.

22 Sixten Ringbom, The Sounding Cosmos: A Study in the Spiritualism of Kandinsky and the Genesis of Abstract Painting, published as an issue of Acta Academiae Aboensis 38, no. 2 (1970): 49–55.


23 Françoise Parot, “Psychology Experiments: Spiritism at the Sorbonne,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, vol. 29 (January 1993): 22–8. See also Pierre Apraxine and Sophie Schmit, “Photography and the Occult,” in Chéroux and Fischer, 12–17; Louis Kaplan, “Where the Paranoid Meets the Paranormal: Speculations on Spirit Photography,” Art Journal 62, no. 3 (2003): 18–29.

24 On “extras” see Clément Chéroux, “Ghost Dialectics: Spirit Photography in Entertainment and Belief,” Chéroux and Fischer, 44–71. Ectoplasm is discussed in Martyn Jolly, “Ectoplasm,” Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography (New York: Mark Batty Publisher, 2006), 64–85, 154–5; and Chéroux and Fischer 184–5, 192–215, and 220–29.

25 Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden, “Kerners Kleksographien,” Sphinx 11, no. 61 (January 1891), 48–50.

26 Walter Gropius, “Breviary for Bauhaus Members” (Draft), c. 1924, Hans M. Wingler, trans. Wolfgang Jabs and Basil Gilbert (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1962), 76.

27 Ann Temkin, “Klee and the Avant-Garde, 1912–1940,” in Carolyn Lanchner, ed., Paul Klee (New york: Museum of Modern Art, 1987), 14–29.

28 Herbert Molderings, “Light years of a Life: The Photogram in the Aesthetic of Lászlo Moholy-Nagy,” in Renate Heyne and Floris Neusüss, eds., Moholy-Nagy: The Photograms, Catalogue Raisonné (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009), 20–21.

29 Molderings, 19.

30 Moholy-Nagy called one of his photograms “cameraless photography,” in Painting Photography Film [1925, 1927] (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 71.

31 Maurice Tuchman et al., The Spiritual in Art: Abstraction Painting 1890–1985 (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1986); Iris Müller-Westermann, Hilma af Klint: A Pioneer of Abstraction (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2013).

representation in the age of mediumistic reproduction...

Documents