Salut Yitzhak. Voici la copie avec quelques changements proposés. Le texte est intéressant et très bien traduit. J’ai indiqué les changements en les soulignant et quelques questions entre parenthèses. Voilà pour tes mains. Bises, Jean D
Talking hands
The language of the body
The hands animate the portraits and self-portraits of Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele. As a result, in the work of both these Expressionist artists – who launched a new body language – hands play a disconcerting, sometimes incomprehensible role that often betrays the body’s unavowed desires.
The effect is all the more striking in that perfectly coded hand movements were once a docile part of the message conveyed by the person represented. Neutralised in conventional postures, hands were no more than a simple extension of the body. Yet they had their role to play, just like the face, indisputably in charge of all forms of communication with other people and any psychological message. Hands could also send signals or play an expressive role through their position. In The Vocation of St Matthew by Caravaggio (Rome, Church of St-Louis-des-Français), the hand pointing clearly at Mark is a substitute for Christ’s profile, scarcely visible in the gloom. In various paintings of the Annunciation, Mary’s hand movements betray the feelings that the painter ascribed to her. The outstretched arms and raised hands of the Horatii in David’s painting plainly signify the heroism of the characters.
With Kokoschka and Schiele, hands escaped their ‘owners’’ control and became the focal point of the painting. The body’s props suddenly became plastic ‘actors’ and played an equal role on the pictorial stage.
Not only in painting but in literature and philosophie as well, the link between words and things has been challenged and questions have been raised about the ability of language to meet the needs of human communication or to express feelings clearly. For someone like Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who made no secret of his ‘disgust with words’, only the body, with its ‘pure gestures’ and ‘silent language’ can offer genuine expression.[i]This mistrust and demystification of language was contemporaneous with the birth of psychoanalysis. The importance placed on language by this new discipline sometimes hides the fact that it originated in physical symptoms, the best known of which were the symptoms of hysterical disorders. Jean Martin Charcot’s pioneering works on hysterics,[ii] practically became catalogues for artists who were fascinated by the dramatic aspects of this body language. It was no mere coincidence that Charcot, assisted by Paul Richer, returned to the subject in 1887, with Les Démoniaques dans l’art and, two years later, with Les Difformes et les Malades dans l’art.
These books, followed by many medical publications on patients treated by psychopathologists in Vienna, often illustrated by photographs, led to a new corporal typology which was exploited by many artists.[iii] Henceforth, hands were no longer merely part of the composition, entering into the spatial organisation of a group or the relationship of one figure to another, like (sans article)_____eyes were. Gestures escaped from conventional codes and became part of a desire for extreme subjectivity, signifying above all the expression of inner feeling.
Body language was not confined to painting. The new way of moving the body also found an outlet in dance, known as ‘free dance’, and its stars, women like Isadora Duncan and the Wiesenthal sisters, often performed in a fashionable cabaret, ‘Fledermaus’ (‘The Bat’), that was a favourite haunt of the artists, or even at the headquarters of the Secession.[iv] Spontaneous, unpredictable body language seemed to be the only guarantee of authentic artistic expression, a term that replaced beauty. The body became a surface on which inner experiences were imprinted in the most dramatic way and hands helped convey deep drives and thoughts.
Hands and faces: two poles of expressiveness in Kokoschka
Essayists writing on Kokoschka’s portraits particularly admire the way this ‘artist with a scalpel’ studied faces and they compare him systematically with Freud[v]. The art historians’ almost exclusive focus on Kokoschka’s portrayal of the face nonetheless masks another form of language that is no less essential – that of the hands. This language developed gradually in Kokoschka’s work: in an early portrait of Ernest Ebenstein (1909, Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, Joseph Winterbotham Collection) the hands are resting on the back of a chair in the foreground and seem in perfect accord with the rather reserved attitude of the famous Viennese tailor. However, the agitation of the hands in later portraits contrasts with the relatively static position of the body. In Kokoschka’s work, the body is not as hunched, distorted and twisted as it is in Schiele’s paintings. The hands perform strange gestures and become the peculiar feature of each person, the most remarkable translation of the sitter’s presumed psychic state.
With the portrait of Egon Wellesz (1911, Washington, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution), the gaunt, bony hands and knobbly, knotted fingers crippled with rheumatism almost spring out of the foreground. In the portrait of the famous architect Adolf Loos (1909, Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Neue Nationalgalerie), who introduced Kokoschka into bourgeois circles in Vienna, the fingers seem to be welded together. The eccentric gesture of the actor Ernst Reinhold, whose hands seem to be executing a little dance, gave rise to the title of Portrait of the actor Ernst Reinhold (Trance Player) 1909, (fig. 1).
This kind of portrait established a particular kind of gesture in Kokoschka’s work, which could be called non-functional. Generally speaking, hands, to the same extent as the face, seem to possess an almost unlimited arsenal of perfectly legible expressions. Montaigne gave an extraordinary description of the hands’ propensity to speak a subtle language: ‘What about hands? We ask, promise, call, dismiss, threaten, pray, beg, deny, refuse, question, admire, count, confess, repent, fear, blush, doubt, instruct, command, urge, encourage, swear, testify, accuse, condemn, absolve, curse, spurn, challenge, spite, flatter, applaud, bless, humiliate, mock, reconcile, recommend, exalt, celebrate, rejoice, complain, regret, disconcert, despair, astonish, write, stay silent and what not with a variety and diversity in emulation of the tongue.’[vi]
And certainly some of Kokoschka’s portraits include a gesture that still has a fairly precise meaning. The Portrait of Felix Albrecht Herta (1909, Washington, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution) seems to address the spectator and claim his attention. The extremely dynamic portrait of Baron Viktor von Dirsztay (1911, fig. 2) reflects the vitality of the sitter. Kokoschka sometimes even used the position of the hands in a perfectly conventional way, in the established iconographical tradition, as in his self-portrait in 1910 for the avant-garde Berlin magazine Der Sturm (Budapest, Szépmüvészeti Muzeum). Here the finger thrust into a wound immediately conjures up the image of the suffering Christ, the emblem of the artist as martyr which goes back to Dürer’s famous picture (fig. 8, p. 90)..
The autonomous gesture
Hands gradually ceased to express a clearly defined sensation and no longer had the role of a tool with which man manipulates the things and the world about him. These hands, even when turned outwards as a sign of activity, became solely the tangible sign of the model’s tension or the malaise due to the artificial situation of posing. Huge and disproportionate, the hands often loom up from a black background like independent beings and monopolise the spectator’s attention: Rudolf Blümner (1910, New York, private coll.), Conte Verona (1910, USA, private coll.). With Vater Hirsch (1909, Linz, Neue Galerie der Stadt Linz, Wolfgang-Gurlitt Museum), the figure with a staring face has a forearm that seems to stretch indefinitely across his chest. The stiff wrists are no more than a transition between the arms and the hands. The latter are like threatening tentacles, deceptively inert and passive-looking. Peter Altenberg (1909, New York, private coll.) exhibits his palms in an incomprehensible gesture.[vii] Sometimes hands emphasise their strangeness and their divorce from the body. Hans and Erica Tietze (1909, fig. 3) hold their hands away from their bodies as if trying to get rid of these cumbersome, unpredictable appendages.[viii]
The hands betrayed the tension of the model, or perhaps that of the artist who projected it on to his sitter: psychological tension or tension linked to the act of creation in which the hands are instrumental, the hand being the organ that turns mental activity into a material trace. As an Expressionist painter, Kokoschka tried to arouse strong feelings in the most direct way, avoiding any mediation between himself and the work. He avoided any sophistication by choosing the rawest representation. His paintwork is thick and brightly coloured; the broad brushstrokes sometimes blur the forms and create a turbulent effect. But it is his peculiar ‘technique’ that best reveals the Viennese artist’s determination to do without an intermediary. Indeed, Kokoschka painted directly with his hands. ‘He used the palm of his left hand like a palette to mix the colours. He painted with the fingers of his right hand. When he wanted a lighter area, he would scratch the paint off with his little finger so the white of the canvas showed through.’
Asked about his technique, he once said: ‘Listen, the path from the brain down the arm and through the brush is too long. If I could, I would paint with my nose.’[ix]
This suggests that the fact of not using a brush gave him greater freedom of movement but, above all, instead of being a manual ‘tool’, his hand played the role of the organ directly translating energy pulsing from the brain, a channel transmitting creative activity to the canvas, a seismograph faithfully recording the voltage.[x]
Schiele or the body caught between Expressionism and Jugendstil
Schiele also executed many portraits of members of the Viennese bourgeoisie. Arthur Roessler, one of his fiercest supporters, was shown with huge hands crossed like disturbing, inexplicable scissors (p. 245). Roessler was far from pleased with his portrait and at first refused to pay for it. Similarly, Eduard Kosmack, hunched up with staring eyes, seems to be trapping his hands under the weight of his body (p249). But, Schiele differs from Kokoschka in that his bodies are thinned down, distorted, crushed, almost two-dimensional. His tendency to contort the body attains its full force in his self-portraits in which his emaciated, skeletal body further accentuates his monstrous, outsized hands.
Yet Schiele stayed under the sway of his master and spiritual father, Klimt, much longer than Kokoschka did. His career is a marvellous illustration of the almost exclusive and sometimes unnatural coexistence that developed in Vienna between Jugendstil and Expressionism. These antagonistic forces came into play in his work. On the one hand, the determination to create a decorative surface; on the other hand the desire to achieve extreme expressive intensity. Thus Self-portrait with Spread Fingers (Selbstbildnis mit gespreitzten Fingern, 1909, private coll.) is almost an homage to Klimt’s ornamental style.[xi] Schiele used the very narrow format of some of Klimt’s paintings (more specifically that of Judith II, exhibited at the Kunstschau in 1909, p. 113). The decorative aspect is emphasised by the radical poster-like flattening of the picture, a practice favoured by all the artists in the Secession.
However, while the ‘stylistic cocktail’ that was characteristic of Klimt’s pictures had an ornamental basis with an added Expressionist element, the proportions in the composition of Schiele’s work were symmetrically opposed. While Klimt covered the entire surface with plant or geometrical motifs, Schiele let the black void accentuate the absence of the whole body, replaced by two radically separated fragments at the extremities of the composition – the face and the hands, shown from the side, motionless as if in a demonstration. Schiele quickly portrayed himself in a way which pointed to his own plastic research; elegance gave way to intensity, the face took on a harder expression, the skinny body was shown in full, and soon turned to cruder, more dramatic portrayals. The body ‘de-eroticised’ by its own perfection was replaced by the baring of its sexuality.
Instead of Klimt’s often literary symbolism with its sublimated sensuality, he created bold, erotic scenes, bodies with the focus on the genitals, naked self-portraits in which his hand was held away from his body as if he wanted to get rid of it or prevent it from indulging in irrepressible activities. The acute, spirited drawing cuts out the silhouette and isolates it against a background devoid of all artifice, locating it in an indeterminate space and in a precariously balanced posture as if on a razor’s edge. Half-Nude Self-portrait with Ornamental Drapery (Ger?, private coll.), painted in 1909, still bears Klimt’s signature; a significant detail in the foreground immediately attracts the eye – an arm wrapped in a piece of cloth with a decorative pattern. The suggestion is that this artistic hand cover is a perfectly effective way of neutralising the organ capable of reprehensible behaviour. Although not for long.
The dangerous liaison between the hand and the sex organs
Je dirai plutôt : The hand and the sex organs, liaison dangereuse Oui, pourquoi pas !
Self-portrait with Black Clay Vase and Spread Fingers (1911, p. 251) shows the hand escaping control, breaking loose from the body and becoming almost independent. Against the black background, it seems to be a threatening, additional element. The strange spread of the fingers, a recurring gesture in Schiele’s paintings and photographs of himself, accentuates the feeling that the hand has a life of its own.
But does this hand belong to the person whose face we can see? In fact, we are looking at a double self-portrait. A closer look reveals that the black vase on the table is also a head viewed from the side. Seen in this way, the hand is part of the continuation of this dark body lurking in the middle distance, a rather naïve way of showing the disturbing alter ego – our sexual drives – slumbering within us. So without suggesting that Schiele ‘illustrates’ Freud’s theories, it is tempting to make a link between the artist and his illustrious Viennese contemporary. His nudes, tormented by the effects of sexual repression, provide astonishing similarities with the discoveries made by psychoanalysis. It is unlikely that Schiele was conversant with Freudian thought. [xii] On the other hand, it is significant ‘that he instinctively anticipated the psychological concept of an unconscious self which was then developing’.[xiii] The best example is the series of double self-portraits in late 1910 and early 1911. With this series, Schiele’s other self is both himself and his antithesis, sometimes a spectre, sometimes an incubus that vampirises him, and sometimes death incarnate. In this vision, the hand seems isolated from the body, and thrust forward Self Seers I (Die Selbstseher I1910, unknown location). Double vision,$$$ but also (by no means) a double protection; not only does Schiele symbolically declare himself not responsible for the suspect behaviour of the limb that he exiles from his body, but he puts the blame on to this ‘other self’ that he does not control. Schiele’s fascination with hands does not stop at representations of sexuality. Even in a portrait like that of Max Oppenheimer (1910, Vienna, Graphische Sammlung Albertina), in which his friend, also a painter, is shown as if dancing, the hand in the foreground is ostensibly detached from the black suit. When Oppenheimer paints Schiele in his turn (1910, Wien Museum), his tentacular hand almost reaches out of the canvas.
But usually these strange gestures are part of the relationships between the naked body and intense, frustrated desire. Midway between attraction and repulsion, the hand in Schiele’s work becomes a formidable index of sexual hypocrisy in Vienna, the emblematic city of the Habsburg Empire in which a strongly conservative mentality still ruled under a hedonist exterior.
Clearly, in a social framework that strictly regulated any erotic activity, masturbation was the only outlet that escaped surveillance. A hidden, shameful activity, masturbation was inseparable from the guilt it inflicted on those who practised it. Schiele’s nude self-portraits are presented sometimes as an ostentatious, provocative demonstration of masturbation, in defiance of society, sometimes as a complicated series of stratagems designed to stop the hand from indulging in these irrepressible activities.
Two extreme images illustrate these tendencies in a simultaneously opposite and complementary way. Self-portrait in Brown Coat (Ger?, 1911, Vienna, Graphische Sammlung Albertina) shows Schiele in the scandalous trappings of an exhibitionist, staring openly at the spectator and obviously masturbating. In Nude Self-portrait, Grimacing (Ger?, 1910, Vienna, Graphische Sammlung Albertina) the face twisted into a grimace expresses the extreme tension of the body contorted by the force of the sexual drive, while his hand held behind his back seems practically tied in a desperate attempt to avoid the forbidden act. In other paintings, the body is disjointed like a puppet, with hands raised and turned back towards the spectator, denying any suspect activity (Kneeling Male Nude with Raised Hands / Ger?, 1910, unknown location).
But, faced with increasingly unbearable erotic desire and gnawed by guilt, Schiele chose a radical solution: amputation. Thus, in many self-portraits, there are only the forearms, without the hands, making any contact with the sex organs impossible. Amputation was surrounded by further precautions: the genitals are often deformed or darkened, covered with crossings out suggestive of the scars of castration. Atrophied genitals, missing hands – the artist spares his body nothing in his desperate struggle against exacerbated desire.
Like all social censorship, the prohibition on masturbation had its roots in Schiele’s family history, dominated by the figure of his father, who died, probably of syphilis, when Schiele was still a teenager. He was deeply affected both by the absence of his father and by the real or imaginary danger incarnated by sexuality. Throughout his life he looked for a substitute father, either in an artist he admired (Klimt), or in a loyal, reassuring patron. This need is clearly expressed in the double portrait of Heinrich Benesch, one of his first admirers, with his son, Otto, (1913,fig. 4). The two men, standing close together and dressed in the same way to underline their kinship, are nonetheless not in agreement. The son’s set face shows a clear resemblance to Schiele, as if in a form of extreme identification. The father’s face, in profile, has a severe expression. His hand is stretched horizontally across his son’s chest as the emblem of a major paternal prohibition, the refusal of any transgression. A highly symbolic gesture and a perfect condensation of Schiele’s inner tug-of-war.
But perhaps the transgression transformed into filial betrayal, as the artist imagined and dreaded it, was in fact twofold. The hand touching the body is also the hand that draws and we are familiar with the relationship between art and repression, between the scopic drive and the sexual drive. Obviously, to create his own style, Schiele had fatally to free himself from the influence of his unchallenged master, Klimt, his first father substitute, whose encouragement had been decisive in his early years. Even if Schiele’s work still kept a decorative element (his refined signature, for example), its themes and pictorial treatment struck off in a direction very different from that taken by the leader of the Jungendstil.
In a preparatory drawing for his famous painting, Two Men with Haloes (Zwei Männer mit Nimben, 1909, Vienna, Graphische Sammlung Albertina) Schiele shows himself with Klimt, both wrapped in the same sheet, as if united by a symbolic transfer of creativity. Klimt, like Heinrich Benesch, is shown from the side. With a solemn gaze and raised left hand, he seems to be lecturing Schiele or exacting a promise of artistic allegiance. In this work, only one of the young artist’s hands can be seen. His other hand, hidden as it often was, would betray his master.
Historic happenstance. The fact that Schiele died from Spanish flu barely a few months after Klimt, as if the artist found it difficult to survive his spiritual father, sometimes lets us forget—telescopic effect—the great age difference between the two artists. In 1918 Klimt was 56, while Schiele was only 28. Beyond the romantic aura conferred on Schiele by this precocious death, one can’t help noting that the latter already belonged to another generation—if not another world—than that of his elder. Relations that might be called frustrated, indeed insolent, filiation between Klimt and Schiele, were not foreign to the cohabitation—quasi-exclusive and sometimes against nature—that developed in Vienna between Jugendstil and Expressionism.
[i] Hugo von Hofmannsthal also wrote an essay on pantomime Über die Pantomime, in: Reden und Aufsatze I: 1891–1913, Bernd Schöler, Frankfurt/Main, 1911. It was no coincidence that the mime artist and painter Erwin Van Osen was a close friend of Schiele’s.
[ii] The three volumes of « Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière » (1876–80) and the « Nouvelle iconographie de la Salpêtrière » (1888–1918).
[iii] Schiele also shared the interest that his friend Erwin Van Osen showed in the pathological aspects of mental illness. (quels aspects de la maladie mentale ne sont pas pathologiques ??)Van Osen had himself admitted to Dr Steinhof’s mental asylum to study the patients’ gestures and executed drawings for a lecture by Steinhof entitled Pathological Expression in Portraiture.
[iv] Significantly, Kokoschka attended a performance by Grete Wiesenthal, which he described as a spectacle that he experienced with his entire body. Quoted in Patrick Werkner: ‘Gestik in den frühen Bildnissen Oskar Kokoschkas’, in:, Oskar Kokoschka: Das moderne Bildnis (1909 bis 1914), exh. cat., New York/Hamburg, 2002, p. 33.
[v] According to Serges (y a-t-il un « s » ?)Sabarsky, Kokoschka followed Freud whose analysis of the human soul revolutionized our thinking. See introduction to Oskar Kokoschka, Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Liège, 1988, p. 16. For a detailed study refer to Claude Cernuschi, ‘Kokoschka and Freud’, Re/casting Kokoschka, Ethics and Aesthetics, Epistemology and Politics in Fin-de-siècle Vienna, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Madison, Teaneck, 2002, p. 101-21.
[vi] Michel Eyquem de Montaigne: ‘Apologie de Raimond Sebond’ Essais II, 12, Jean de Bonnot, Paris, 1972, p. 180.
[vii]
Gesture giving food for thought, as it evokes—all the while differentiating itself— religious iconography. Actually artists have always positioned Christ’s wounds, as the stigmata of Saint Francis of Assisi, at the centre of the palms. Kokoschka, following other Symbolist and Expressionist painters, often exploited the emotive force of religious symbols outside their context.
8 Claude Simon gives a similar description of this almost hallucinatory relationship between the person and his hand: ‘…then his own hand appearing, entering into his field of vision, that is, as if he had dipped it into the water, watching it come closer and going away again with a sort of astonishment, a sense of stupor (as if it was separating from him, coming loose from his arm…)’, La Route des Flandres, Minuit, Paris, 1960, p. 223.
9 Jens H. Friedrich: ‘Ein Vagabundenleben Erinnerungen von Jens H. Friedrich’, unpublished typescript, New York, 1944, p. 121, in: ‘Träumender Knabe, Un enfant terrible, 1897-1910’, unpublished thesis, University of Salzburg, 1997, p. 201, quoted in Tobias G. Natter: ‘‘Charakterbildnisse, nicht Gesichtbildnisse’. Zu Kokoschkas frühen Porträts’, in: Oskar Kokoschka: Das moderne Bildnis (1909 bis 1914), op. cit., p. 91.
10 Artaud expressed the same fantasy in his own way, talking of ‘the sensation which swept through him and that he wanted to draw absolutely bare’, Antonin Artaud, Oeuvres, quarto-Gallimard, Paris, 2004, p. 1045 (commentary on the drawing La Mort et l’homme, May 1946).
11 Unlike the Expressionist artists, Klimt always refused to paint a self-portrait, saying that nobody was interested in his face.
12 There are no documentary clues to the relationship between Schiele and Freud or his possible interest in psychoanalysis.
13 Jane Kallir: Egon Schiele, Œuvre complet: biographie et catalogue raisonné, translation by Jeanne Bouniot and William Olivier Desmond, Gallimard, Paris, 1998, p. 92.