Sensing, Perceiving, and Knowing in Modernism

Interest in German modernism has seen a resurgence in the UK, with exhibitions such as Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and The Blue Rider at Tate Modern and Making Modernism at the Royal Academy. This has offered opportunities to reconsider perspectives and research approaches relevant to twentieth-century German art and European avant-garde circles.

Yet, a distinct strain of European modernism that emerged out of an active engagement with theories of sensation and perception remains overlooked. This session aims to recover the ways in which modernists deployed knowledge steeped in the philosophy of perception, psychology and science to negotiate the processes of orienting themselves and/or their spectator via visual forms. Walter Benjamin described Dadaist works as a ‘bullet’ attacking the senses of its spectator; August Endell formulated his architectural theory based on his knowledge of psychological debates on empathy and emotional expression (Alexander, 2017); Kurt Schwitters’s study of advertising ‘techniques of attention’ fed back into his own Merz practice (Stinton, 2021).

Whilst the foundation of this session builds from a focus on Germanic schools of thought, we welcome papers that explore artistic developments in the modern period broadly construed that highlight and move beyond the five senses. How was the act of experiencing foundational to artistic experimentation? How did a realignment of the senses via artistic means relate to agency? What artistic innovations were developed out of a ‘technologically mediated crisis of the senses’ (Danius, 2002)? We are interested in proposals that cut across disciplines, cultures, and European territories.

Session Convenors:

Alyson Lai, University of York

Anne Grasselli, University of Edinburgh

Speakers:

Jennifer Marine, University of Virginia and Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History

Good Vibrations: Sensing Sound in the Voice Figures of Margaret Watt-Hughes (1847–1907)

In 1891, Welsh singer Margaret Watts-Hughes published a book describing her process and findings in making objects labeled Voice Figures – images created by sound. Using an invention of her own design, dubbed the “Eidophone” or “sound-image,” she sang into a horn-like tube with sealed surface of elastic, covered in pigment, powders, and liquids. The vibrations of her voice moved the substances across the surface which were then pressed and fixed onto a glass plate, creating objects that attempted to mediate a sense of hearing within the sense of seeing. Watts-Hughes and the Voice Figures have largely been overlooked in the histories of sound, art, and the occult, despite her connection to all three of these disciplines. Displayed at the Arts and Crafts Society Exhibition, the Royal Society, and even cited in Theosophist Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater’s foundational text Thought-Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation (1905), Watts-Hughes’s Voice Figures offer an account of the period that centers on the visualization of vibration and theories of hearing and perception. In this paper, I describe how these objects connect to the history of sound recording devices, modern art, and ideas of perception through an analysis of their materiality and reception. I demonstrate that the Voice Figures show that underlying the history of sound and acoustics is one that shares an interest in sensation and image-making with the history of modern art, and that these are both histories were women’s bodies, acts, and voices are central.

Stella Gatto, University of British Columbia

The Children’s Toys of Alma Siedhoff-Buscher: Psychotechnics, Play, and Pedagogy at the Bauhaus

Produced in 1923 by Bauhaus designer Alma Siedhoff-Buscher, “Bauspiel Schiff” became one of the best-selling objects to come out of the Weimar technical school. Art historical literature regarding Buscher’s toys are relatively sparse, focusing primarily on her designs as emblematic of the Bauhaus’ preliminary objectives in design. My research contributes to the developing literature by addressing a parallel field to that of educational reform at the turn of the twentieth century: the newly developing science of applied psychology, known in 1920’s Germany as psychotechnics. Born out of Wilhelm Wundt’s 1897 psychology laboratory, psychotechnics aimed at measuring the sensory, reflex, and intellectual aptitude of individuals to assign work best suited to their physical and cognitive strengths. Understood as a bifocal desire for worker satisfaction and efficiency, psychotechnics was prompted by a desire to rationalize and optimize the mental components of labour power. Considering the deeply bound nature of Bauhaus pedagogical interests to psychotechnics, I examine the relationship between modernist discourses regarding play and pedagogy, primarily how reformist pedagogy and psychotechnics overlapped. Buscher’s objects reveal the interstice between two simultaneous and intertwined discourses, thereby anticipating the effects the new ‘science of the mind’ was going to have within her own educational landscape, let alone that of the child. Via a media theoretical approach, this paper elucidates the ways in which psychotechnics “cultivated” a way of mapping interiority externally through its measurement-critical operations and shows how its adoption into the Bauhaus presents a far more complex reading of objects produced for children’s play.

Mario De Angelis, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

Embodying Ambiguity. Pierre Bonnard’s Le Grand Nu Bleu (1924)

In this article, I adopt an interdisciplinary approach – merging art history, image theory, and neuroaesthetics – to provide an in-depth analysis of Bonnard’s celebrated yet underexamined Le Grand Nu Bleu (1924). This study foregrounds aspects previously overlooked by critics: (1) the partially painted frame, enclosing the scene only on the bottom and left, which creates ambiguity as to whether the viewer is facing a mirror or a continuum of reality; (2) the bent leg in the foreground, whose distorted perspective conflicts with the viewer’s vantage point. By tracing the “adventures of the optic nerve” (Bonnard) as the beholder’s eye oscillates between conflicting perceptual cues, I argue that this painting transcends prior interpretations, such as an illustration of Ernst Mach’s Analysis of Sensations (Roque, La stratégie de Bonnard, 2006, 99) or an attempt to “escape the body boundaries (Whelan, Bonnard. Beyond Vision, 2021, 38). I propose, instead, that Bonnard merges two distinct memory-images within an artificial frame, as he anticipated in his notes, prompting an “empathic response” in the viewer that creates a unique “visual jamming” [inceppamento] (Ronchi, Matter and Memory: Una Sintesi, 2011), engaging perceptual, cognitive, and somatosensory responses simultaneously. This effect subtly mirrors Bergson’s concept of the “hesitation of the motor response” (Matter and Memory). Finally, incorporating biographical insights and reflections from Merleau-Ponty, Damisch, and Nochlin, I suggest that these strategies may also shed light on Bonnard’s complex feelings toward his subject, Marthe de Meligny.

Paul Smith, University of Warwick

Cezanne’s personal way of seeing

Cezanne’s letters show that he thought hard about seeing, particularly his remark, “study changes our vision.” He also read about perception, lifting the phrase “a personal way of seeing” (“une optique personelle”) from his favourite novel, Manette Salomon. Similarly, Cezanne’s use of the word “optique” implies a familiarity with texts about perception by Helmholtz and other scientists with the word in their titles. And significantly, his work represents several phenomena these describe, notably Troxler fading and stereofusion. Cezanne’s ability to record such effects was also premised on experience, particularly on watching his perceptions unfold as he stared fixedly at things for up to twenty minutes, often while attending to what lay in peripheral vision.

The extraordinary perseveration involved by these viewing habits is indicative of autism. Similarly, Cezanne’s “inhuman” treatment of faces implied “schizoidia” for Merleau-Ponty. Numerous accounts of his shyness, anxiety, mistrust, and rage also indicate autism, as could Pissarro’s and Tanguy’s opinions that he was “a bit cracked” or “mad.” Cezanne also manifested a characteristically autistic hypersensitivity to noise and touch; and he claimed to experience “very strong sensations” of light and colour.

For autistic people (as we prefer to be known) gaining control over hypersensitivity is vital to wellbeing. Painting plausibly played this role for Cezanne since it required him to moderate his sensations for the purposes of communicating them to the audience he envisaged. The act of painting thus gave Cezanne agency by making his “personal way of seeing” public.