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ABSTRACT
The art historian Leo Steinberg regularly recommended imitating the poses of figures depicted in artworks as a means of understanding the motivations of the figures. Such an approach was related to the concept of Einfühlung, or empathy, which had been discussed in German aesthetic circles in the late 1800s. But when Steinberg began to use the approach, it was also associated with the world of dance, a sphere with which he was also familiar. This essay considers Steinberg's method in relation to the discursive traditions of art history and dance theory, detailing connections while also acknowledging distinctions in motivation.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank George Jackson for his perceptive reading of this essay in an earlier stage, and for his various constructive suggestions; thanks are also due to the two anonymous reviewers for Dance Chronicle, whose insightful comments were deeply useful and aided in developing my position. Finally, I would also like to express my sincere appreciation to Joellen Meglin, for her help in overseeing this essay in its development from a first foray into a fuller argument.
Notes
* Ken Johnson, “Leo Steinberg, Art Historian, Dies at 90,” New York Times online, March 14, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/arts/design/leo-steinberg-art-historian-is-dead-at-90.html?_r=0 (accessed December 16, 2016). For a similar assessment of Steinberg's importance, see Michael Hill, “Steinberg, Leo,” in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 2nd ed., ed. Michael Kelly (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 6:44–48.
† See, for example, the essays in Source: Notes in the History of Art, vol. 31, no. 4 (2012), a special issue dedicated to the memory of Steinberg; especially relevant here are John Cunnally, “Antiquarianism and the Origins of the Flatbed Matrix,” 6–12; Richard Shiff, “Our Cézanne,” 27–31; Richard Brilliant, “Reading the Figure,” 32–35; David Rosand, “Reading the Figure,” 36–44; and Robert V. Storr, “Leo's Lessons,” 61–69. Also useful, as a meditation on Steinberg's working methods, is David Carrier, “Erwin Panofsky, Leo Steinberg, David Carrier: The Problem of Objectivity in Art Historical Interpretation,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 47, no. 4 (Autumn 1989): 333–47.
* Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); and Leo Steinberg, “Observations in the Cerasi Chapel,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 41, no. 2 (1959): 183–90. The Cerasi Chapel is a part of the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo, in Rome; it was decorated in 1600–1601 with paintings by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and Annibale Carracci.
* Robert Morris, e-mail to the author, March 24, 2013. Similarly, in an e-mail dated May 28, 2016, his longtime assistant Sheila Schwartz told me that Steinberg “always encouraged his students to replicate the gestures and poses of painted and sculpted figures in order to understand them.” I am grateful to both Morris and Schwartz for their thoughtful responses to my questions on the subject.
* Leo Steinberg, “False Starts, Loose Ends,” The Brooklyn Rail online, June 12, 2006, http://www.brooklynrail.org/2006/06/art/leo (accessed May 17, 2016). Related here is Steinberg's claim, in a 1998 interview: “If I work on, say, Leonardo's Last Supper, which I am doing again now, I draw every one of those figures over and over. I put myself in those positions: I act them out.” See Leo Steinberg, The Gestural Trace: Leo Steinberg Interviewed by Richard Candida Smith (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 2001), 44, https://archive.org/stream/gesturaltraceleo00stei/gesturaltraceleo00stei_djvu.txt (accessed May 17, 2016).
* Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form and Space, 154. In his use of the word “sensory” in this context, Wölfflin probably refers to a motoric response that is felt kinesthetically via the proprioceptive system.—Editor
* Theodor Lipps, “Empathy, Inner Imitation, and Sense-Feelings,” in A Modern Book of Esthetics, 3rd ed., ed. Melvin Rader (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), 378. Lipps dealt with the theme of empathy in several works, including Raumästhetik und geometrisch-optische Täuschungen (Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1893); “Einfühlung, innere Nachahmung und Organenempfindungen,” Archiv für die gesamte Psychologie, no. 1 (1903): 465–519; and Aesthetik: Psychologie des Schönen und der Kunst (Hamburg: L. Voss, 1903).
* On the place of empathy theory in architectural discourse, see Juliet Koss, “On the Limits of Empathy,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 88, no. 1 (2006): 139; among several recent examples, see especially Philip Tidwell, ed., Architecture and Empathy (Espoo, Finland: Tapio Wirkkala Rut Bryk Foundation, 2015), with essays by Juhani Pallasmaa, Henry Francis Mallgrave, Sarah Robinson, and Vittorio Gallese.
* John Martin, Introduction to the Dance (New York: W. W. Norton, 1939), 161. Martin also invoked, in the same passage, the work of Karl Groos and Vernon Lee.
† Ibid., 47. Martin almost certainly derived the term “inner mimicry” from the writings of Groos, which he may well have come to know through Aram Torossian, A Guide to Aesthetics (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1937); see, for example, 23.
‡ Ibid., 53. It is worth noting here that the early writings of Mary Wigman had also occasionally included roughly comparable assertions. In a 1925 essay, for example, Wigman writes, “To experience an artistic dance creation means absorbing it through the eye and feeling it kinesthetically.” Mary Wigman, The Mary Wigman Book: Her Writings Edited and Translated, ed. Walter Sorrell (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1975), 82. And in 1933 she writes that the audience “should allow the rhythm, the music, the very movement of the dancer's body to stimulate the same feeling and emotional mood within itself.” Sally Banes, “An Open Field: Yvonne Rainer as Dance Theorist,” in Yvonne Rainer: Radical Juxtapositions 1961–2002, ed. Sid Sachs (Philadelphia: University of the Arts, 2002), 28.
Wigman's allusions to such processes, admittedly, were invariably brief, and she never seems to have attempted to develop them into a coherent theory. As Joellen Meglin has pointed out to me, however, John Martin attended performances by Wigman and frequently wrote about her in his New York Times column in the 1930s, and his subsequent interest in kinesthetic empathy may have been informed at least in part by her work.
§ Subsequent editions of Martin's book were published in 1965, 1969, and 1972, implying a steady readership throughout the 1960s. For useful discussions of recent interest in (and critiques of) Martin's ideas, see Matthew Reason and Dee Reynolds, “Kinesthesia, Empathy, and Related Pleasures: An Inquiry into Audience Experiences of Watching Dance,” Dance Research Journal, vol. 42, no. 2 (2010): 53; and Dee Reynolds, “Kinesthetic Empathy and the Dance's Body: From Emotion to Affect,” in Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices, eds. Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2012), 123.
* Chace began to lead a dance program at Saint Elizabeths in 1942, but only began to publish her thoughts on her work with any frequency in the early 1950s. For biographical information, and a comprehensive bibliography of her writings, see Susan L. Sandel, Sharon Chaiklin, and Ann Lohn, eds., Foundations of Dance/Movement Therapy: The Life and Work of Marian Chace (Columbia, MD: The Marian Chace Memorial Fund of the American Dance Therapy Association, 1993).
† Ibid., 200. Chace also quoted Martin repeatedly in “Dance Therapy for Adults,” a talk reprinted in Ibid., 256–60.
* Thus, for example, Sara Shelley claims, “Chace possessed a unique ability for entering the patients' world, by reflecting in her own body the feeling that she saw being expressed in the bodies of patients.” Sara Shelley, “Marian Chace: Her Later Years,” in Sandel, Chaiklin and Lohn, Foundations of Dance/Movement Therapy, 28. Other Chace scholars, however, have expressed unease about claims that her gestures were reflective, or rooted in mirroring; see, for example, Susan L. Sandel, “The Process of Reflection in Dance Therapy,” in Sandel, Chaiklin, and Lohn, Foundations of Dance/Movement Therapy, 100.
† Miriam Roskin, “The Use of Dance as a Therapy for Personality Disturbances” (unpublished senior project, Bard College, 1956), 122. As she notes, the anecdote was originally related by Chace, who nevertheless used a different wording. (Roskin, upon marrying, subsequently went by the name Miriam Roskin Berger.)
* Carrie Lambert, “On Being Moved: Rainer and the Aesthetics of Empathy,” in Sachs, Yvonne Rainer, 42. It is worth noting that Lambert does go on to temper this claim, concluding that Rainer also resisted a commitment to an intertwining of self and other; see esp. 50.
† Sally Banes, Democracy's Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962–1964 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 150. Banes based her summary largely on the accounts of John Herbert McDowell and Jill Johnston. Accounts of the specific works employed by Rothlein vary, but one performer subsequently remembered paintings by Jacques-Louis David and Eugène Delacroix.
* Or, as dance critic and scholar George Jackson pointed out to me, they could follow Edwin Denby to a nearby restaurant after a performance. “Denby,” notes Jackson, “had the habit of repairing to a deli or coffee shop after performances, and he would invite his younger friends and acquaintances along. First he'd ask others in the group what they thought about the dancing just seen. Then he would start in, not only talking about it, but also physically imitating it. On occasion, Denby cartooned the styles he was discussing and he could do so brilliantly.” George Jackson, e-mail to the author, January 8, 2017.
† Regina Flowers, “Material and Motion: Phenomenology and the Early Work of Carolee Schneemann 1957–1973” (unpublished thesis, University of Nebraska, 2012), 39. Morris, in an e-mail dated March 24, 2013, wrote, “I found this rather narcissistic and added it to the black marks I already had against him.”
‡ I would like to thank Daniele Di Cola, who is currently researching the place of the viewer in the work of Steinberg, for the reference to Steinberg's collection of images of dancers. E-mail to the author, July 24, 2016.
§ For a broader variant of this claim, see Steinberg, The Gestural Trace, 87. Steinberg goes on to cite the work of Frederick Hartt as an example: “He would compare two figures, and great consequences would flow from their alleged likeness. I'd look and find that they had nothing in common except that both showed an arm crossing the chest.”
* Much of this paragraph is based on a series of e-mails (May 25–26, 2016) with Sheila Schwartz, for whose help I am grateful. Unfortunately, as Schwartz notes, the evidence for Steinberg's interest in dance is otherwise limited.
† Steinberg, “False Starts, Loose Ends.” For a useful discussion of additional Renaissance examples of physical empathy, see Ethan Matt Kavaler, “Gossart's Bodies and Empathy,” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, vol. 5, no. 2 (2013): 1–20. Kavaler cites, for example, a 1549 discussion of the relative merits of sculpture and painting in which Anton Francesco Doni alleged that viewers examining the Laocoön were occasionally so moved by the representation of the doomed family that they actually began to writhe, imitating the carved figures in an act of apparent association. See 7, n. 17.
* For examples of what has broadly been called a “corporeal turn” in recent scholarship, see Deidre Sklar, “Can Bodylore Be Brought to Its Senses?” The Journal of American Folklore, no. 107 (1994): 9–22; Maarten Coëgnarts and Peter Kravanja, eds., Embodied Cognition and Cinema (Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2015); and Richard Shusterman, Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Happily, too, there is now considerable recent literature on dance, bodily knowledge, and kinesthetic empathy; in addition to the several studies cited above, see also Deidre Sklar, “Five Premises for a Culturally Sensitive Approach to Dance,” in Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader, eds. Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press: 2001), 30–32; Vittorio Gallese, “The Roots of Empathy: The Shared Manifold Hypothesis and the Neural Basis of Intersubjectivity,” Psychopathology, vol. 36 (2003): 171–80; Susan Foster, “Movement's Contagion: The Kinesthetic Impact of Performance,” in The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies, ed. Tracy C. Davis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 46–59; Susan Foster, Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance (New York: Routledge, 2011); and Ann Cooper Albright, Engaging Bodies: The Politics and Poetics of Corporeality (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013), esp. 237–46.
1. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, eds., Empathy, Form and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893 (Santa Monica, CA: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994).
2. Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 241–42.
3. Leo Steinberg, introduction to Rodin: Sculptures and Drawings, exhibition catalog (New York: Charles E. Slatkin Galleries, May 1963), 15. Subsequently republished, in an altered form, in Steinberg, Other Criteria, 322–403.
4. Leo Steinberg, “Michelangelo's ‘Last Judgment’ as Merciful Heresy,” Art in America, vol. 63, no. 6 (1975): 52.
5. Leo Steinberg, “The Line of Fate in Michelangelo's Painting,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 6, no. 3 (1980): 453, n. 42.
6. Robert Vischer, Über das optische Formgefühl: Ein Beitrag zur Ästhetik (Leipzig: Hermann Credner, 1873). For an English translation, see Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form and Space, 89–123.
7. On the reception of Vischer's thesis, see Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form and Space, 22 and 28.
8. For a general discussion of relevant precedents, see Juliet Koss, “On the Limits of Empathy,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 88, no. 1 (2006): 139; and Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form and Space, 17. On the place of Schopenhauer's ideas in Vischer's work, see Harry Francis Mallgrave, Architecture and Embodiment: The Implications of the New Sciences and Humanities for Design (Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis, 2013), 122; and Michael Podro, The Manifold in Perception: Theories of Art from Kant to Hildebrand (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 108.
9. See, for example, Moritz Geiger, “On the Essence and Meaning of Empathy, Part I,” trans. Florian Gödel and Massimiliano Aragona, Dialogues in Philosophy, Mental and Neuro Sciences, vol. 8, no. 1 (June 2015): 19.
10. The translation is that of Podro, The Manifold in Perception, 107, n. 8.
11. Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form and Space, 94.
12. Ibid., 104.
13. Mark Jarzombek, “De-Scribing the Language of Looking: Wölfflin and the History of Aesthetic Experientialism,” Assemblage, no. 23 (1994): 28–69.
14. Heinrich Wölfflin, Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur (Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture) (Munich: Kgl. Hof- & Universitäts-Buchdruckerei, 1886). For an English translation, see Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form and Space, 149–90.
15. Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form and Space, 157–58. See also 151: “Physical forms possess a character only because we ourselves possess a body [italics in original].”
16. Ibid., 155.
17. Ibid., 43.
18. Quoted in Amelia Jones, foreword to Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason, eds., Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2012): 13.
19. Theodor Lipps, “Empathy, Inner Imitation, and Sense-Feelings,” in A Modern Book of Esthetics, 3rd ed., ed. Melvin Rader (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), 378–79.
20. Geiger, “On the Essence and Meaning of Empathy, Part I,” 21.
21. Ibid.
22. Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form and Space, 28–29.
23. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, trans. Michael Bullock (New York: International Universities Press, 1953). For discussions of this point, see Koss, “On the Limits of Empathy,” 146, and Moritz Geiger, “On the Essence and Meaning of Empathy, Part II,” trans. Florian Gödel and Massimiliano Aragona, Dialogues in Philosophy, Mental and Neuro Sciences, vol. 8, no. 2 (December 2015): 79.
24. See, for example, Koss, “On the Limits of Empathy,” 139.
25. John Martin, Introduction to the Dance (New York: W. W. Norton, 1939), 47.
26. Ibid., 53.
27. Ibid., 47–48.
28. Ibid., 50–51.
29. Ibid., 55. For the reference to psychological research, see 49.
30. Albert Michotte, Michotte's Experimental Phenomenology of Perception, ed. Georges Thinès, Alan Costall, and George Butterworth (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991). Michotte's study was originally published as “La participation émotionelle du spectateur à l'action représentée à l'écran” in Revue Internationale de Filmologie, vol. 4 (1953): 87–96.
31. Michotte, Michotte's Experimental Phenomenology of Perception, 211.
32. Susan L. Sandel, Sharon Chaiklin, and Ann Lohn, eds., Foundations of Dance/Movement Therapy: The Life and Work of Marian Chace (Columbia, MD: The Marian Chace Memorial Fund of the American Dance Therapy Association, 1993), 247. The passage originally appeared in Marian Chace, “Dance Alone Is Not Enough . . . ,” Dance Magazine, vol. 38 (1964): 58.
33. Sharon Chaiklin and Claire Schmais, “The Chace Approach to Dance Therapy,” in Eight Theoretical Approaches in Dance-Movement Therapy, ed. Penny Lewis Bernstein (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hut, 1979), 18.
34. Miriam Roskin, “The Use of Dance as a Therapy for Personality Disturbances” (unpublished senior project, Bard College, 1956). Roskin, upon marrying, subsequently went by the name Miriam Roskin Berger.
35. See, for example, William Burton Michael, “Factor Analyses of Tests and Criteria: A Comparative Study of Two AAF Pilot Populations,” in Herbert S. Conrad, ed., Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, vol. 63, no. 3 (1949); 42, and Ernest G. Schachtel, “Projection and Its Relation to Character Attitudes and Creativity in the Kinesthetic Responses: Contributions to an Understanding of Rorschach's Test, IV,” Psychiatry, vol. 13, no. 1 (1950): 71.
36. For a useful recent account of the early history of dance therapy, see Laurice D. Nemetz, “Moving with Meaning: The Historical Progression of Dance/Movement Therapy,” in Creative Arts Therapies Manual: A Guide to the History, Theoretical Approaches, Assessment, and Work with Special Populations of Art, Play, Dance, Music, Drama, and Poetry Techniques, ed. Stephanie L. Brooke (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 2006), 95–108, esp. 102–4.
37. On the history of the Judson Dance Theater, see Sally Banes, Democracy's Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962–1964 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); and Ramsay Burt, Judson Dance Theater: Performative Traces (New York: Routledge, 2006).
38. For an excellent series of profiles of a number of the primary figures associated with the Judson Dance Theater, see Sally Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979).
39. Carrie Lambert, “On Being Moved: Rainer and the Aesthetics of Empathy,” in Yvonne Rainer: Radical Juxtapositions 1961–2002, ed. Sid Sachs (Philadelphia: University of the Arts, 2002), 42. Also relevant here are the observations of Mary M. Smyth, “Kinesthetic Communication in Dance,” Dance Research Journal, vol. 16 (1984): 19–22; and Meredith Morse, Soft Is Fast: Simone Forti in the 1960s and After (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 176–77.
40. Lambert, “On Being Moved,” 42.
41. Wendy Perron and Daniel Cameron, Judson Dance Theater: 1962–1966 (Bennington, VT: Bennington College, 1981), 70.
42. Ibid.
43. Banes, Democracy's Body, 139–40.
44. Regina Flowers, “Material and Motion: Phenomenology and the Early Work of Carolee Schneemann 1957–1973” (unpublished thesis, University of Nebraska, 2012), 39.
45. On Steinberg's interest in, and references to, dance, see Michael Hill, “Steinberg's Complexity,” in The Baroque in Architectural Culture, 1880–1980, eds. Andrew Leach, John Macarthur, and Maarten Delbeke (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 214 and 216.
46. Steinberg, “Michelangelo's ‘Last Judgment’ as Merciful Heresy,” 4.
47. Susan Sandel, “The Process of Empathic Reflection in Dance Therapy,” in Sandel, Chaiklin and Lohn, Foundations of Dance/Movement Theory, 98.
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Kerr Houston
KERR HOUSTON has taught art history and art criticism at the Maryland Institute College of Art since 2002. He is the author of An Introduction to Art Criticism (2012), and his writings on modern and contemporary art have appeared in Art Journal, Nka, and Source: Notes in the History of Art, among other journals. He is also a regular contributor to BmoreArt, a Baltimore-based arts blog.