The Difference Experience Makes in "The Philosophical Brothel"

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The Difference Experience Makes in “The Philosophical Brothel”* Lisa Florman

One of the first things we ought to notice about “The Philosophical Brothel,” Leo Steinberg’s 1972 essay on Pablo Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, is just how thoroughly it has permeated our understanding of that painting.’ Today it seems impossible to write or even think about the Demoiselles in terms unrelated to those of Steinberg’s interpretation. This has everything to do, I would argue, with the essential aptness of the essay - the fact that it is an interpretation of the painting, and not something imposed on it from outside. Yet I would also argue that the nature of that interpretation, and consequently the nature of the painting, have been widely misconstrued. Indeed, it seems to me that the situation demands an attentive rereading of “The Philosophical Brothel”- one as fully attentive as Steinberg himself was to the insistent demands of the Demoiselles. The commentary that follows is offered, then, as an opening or catalyst to that process of rereading, in the hope that we might, collectively, be moved in and through it to experience both the essay and the painting on somewhat different grounds. * An earlier version of this paper was delivered in February 2000 at the annual meeting of the College Art Association, in the session chaired by Michael Ann Holly, “Reading and Writing Art History.” A debt of gratitude is owed to all who read or listened to and commented on the essay at that time. I would also like to thank Richard Brilliant, whose questions (and doubts) served as important goads to the paper’s recent revision, and Stephen Melville, for his sound editorial advice, as well as for sharing his thoughts on the nature of “experience.”

Unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine.

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We can get a fairly good idea of current regard for “The Philosophical Brothel” from the anthology of writings about the Demoiselles that was published just over a year ago.2 In the introduction to that volume, Steinberg’s text is described as having had a transformative significance: Before [his] essay, the Demoiselles d’Avignon was the birthplace of cubism, the marker of an epochal shift from content to form in modern painting; after Steinberg’s essay, it has become the marker of an epochal shift to a new kind of engagement with sexuality, one whose immediacy was unprecedented in the history of painting. The Picasso behind such a picture is a man whose biography might be as important as his artistic influences; psychoanalysis might be as important to grasping such a picture’s meaning as practical criticism. And... those meanings are to be found in the spectator as much as in Picasso, for the spectator constructed by Steinberg’s essay is not merely an implied reader looking in reflectively from outside, but... the ultimate maker of meaning - in a sense, the picture’s own center of attention.3

A number of things are nicely brought out by this description, particularly the sense that “The Philosophical Brothel” did not simply give us a new context in which to consider the Demoiselles; rather, the paragraph suggests, it changed how the work itself appeared, which in turn fundamentally altered the sort of interest that we took in it. The (perhaps unintentional) conflation of viewers and readers in the paragraph’s final sentence might also be held to reinforce the point with which I began - namely, that in looking at the Demoiselles we invariably think of “The Philosophical Brothel.”

Again, I take this as confirmation of the essential rightness or “fit” of its interpretation.

Unfortunately, other aspects of those introductory remarks fall, to my mind, a bit wide of the mark. As characterizations of recent scholarship on the Demoiselles, they are, admittedly, accurate enough: psychobiographical analyses of the painting have become commonplace since the publication of Steinberg’s essay, as has the assumption that the demoiselles’ direct address (which Steinberg explicitly called to our attention) somehow empowers the viewer and so licenses his or her subjective response.4 The implication that these approaches are actually grounded in or sanctioned by “The Philosophical Brothel,” however, is clearly based on a misreading (or, rather, separate misreadings) of that text. The psychobiographical analyses, after all, ignore or repress the point Steinberg had made about the viewer’s involvement with the work, while the other accounts, conversely, overestimate the authority invested in that role. To see the painting’s viewer as “the ultimate maker of meaning” is fundamentally to misrecognize how, in “The Philosophical Brothel,” we are held to stand in relation to the Demoiselles.

We can perhaps get a better sense of Steinberg’s actual position if we compare his essay with another written in its wake; I have in mind specifically William Rubin’s account of the painting and its “genesis.”5 Although Rubin’s text is dedicated to Steinberg and clearly takes its impetus from many of his observations, Rubin distances himself from certain views advanced in “The Philosophical Brothel.” By, in effect, taking our measure of that distance and then examining the position staked out by Rubin vis-à-vis the Demoiselles, we should be able to arrive - through something like a process of triangulation - at approximately the place where “The Philosophical Brothel” would have us stand. First, though, it might be helpful to get an overview of the ground to be covered, by sketching the general contours of the argument that Steinberg’s essay lays out.

In making its argument, “The Philosophical Brothel” drew heavily on the artist’s numerous preparatory drawings, asserting that “whatever Picasso’s initial idea had been, he did not abandon it, but discovered more potent means for its realization.”6 These drawings, surprisingly academic in composition, depict what is plainly a brothel interior, in which two male figures are present among the company of women. Details in the sketches, along with certain comments made by Picasso, 2

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allow us even to assign occupations to these figures: there is a sailor, who is seated at a table in the center of the room, and a medical student, at the threshold, his detachment sharply contrasted with the other man’s full immersion in the scene. As Steinberg pointed out in his discussion of the medical student (and, specifically, of one of the early drawings, in which that student carried a skull): The fact that in Picasso’s evolving conception a second drawing shows the man burdened with both book and skull, and thereafter with a book only, suggests that these attributes served as symbols of knowledge, and of a particular brand of knowledge - non-participatory and theoretical. They signal the chilling approach of analysis. Hence the death’s head in the hand of the medical student - as against the sailor’s ithyphallic life symbol. For while the meek sailor behind his Bacchic porrón is in the thick of it, his counterpart, the knowing man at the curtain, becomes the outsider. Not a personifier of pious death consciousness, nor (as R. de la Souchère has suggested) a man imperiled by entering into sin ... but the opposite - a man apart, self-exiled by reliance on studious dissection; condemned for not entering.... He is the non-participant, the excluded one in the ultimate game of inclusion.7

The male figures were, of course, dropped from the final painting. However, as Steinberg emphasized, the entire composition was simultaneously reoriented - swung ninety degrees outward into space - so that we, the viewers, would take their place as the focus of the demoiselles’ attention. The much-noted stylistic discontinuities of the painting and the various (in some cases “proto-Cubist”) spatial disjunctions served as means of detaching the remaining figures from one another so as to tighten their hold on us: “The five demoiselles . . . cohere like tensed fingers, and the whole collapsing interior stage of the picture closes in like a fist.”8 “What then,” Steinberg writes, “has happened to the original drama - the polarity of external knowledge and initiation? As the action turns through ninety degrees to confound the viewer, the picture ceases to be the representation of an adventure enjoyed by one or two men and becomes instead an experience of ours, an experience, that is, of the painting.”9 In this regard, it is also important to note how in the preparatory drawings the demoiselles appear to turn their heads so as to look specifically at the entering medical student, while the sailor gazes downward, roughly in the direction of the fruit on the table. That we, as viewers of the painting, are meant to take up both of the positions abandoned by the male figures seems indicated by the fact that the demoiselles of the painting face us directly, and yet we also look down at the fruit that, in effect, positions us at the table in thelr midst.10 Rubin’s Diagnosis

In his own essay on the Demoiselles, Rubin traced his disagreement with Steinberg’s interpretation back to the preparatory drawings, and especially to the skull carried by the medical student. As was hinted at in the long passage quoted above, Steinberg had been at considerable pains to wrest that skull, and so the early sketches for the Demoiselles, from the interpretation given to both by Alfred Barr. According to Barr, the skull suggested that Picasso had originally “conceived the picture as a kind of memento mori - an allegory or charade on the 3

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wages of sin.’’11 Steinberg, clearly skeptical that such moralizing interests could be ascribed to the artist, enlisted Friedrich Nietzsche to his cause: “For Picasso, seventy years ago, was not listening to Church Fathers, but hearing the voice of the philosopher who had written: ‘Christianity gave Eros poison to drink: he did not die of it but degenerated - into a vice.’’’12 Accordingly, Steinberg argued, the skull must have been intended as something other than a vanitas symbol; he pointed out that “a medical student is the one member of human society who can, and who does, look at a skull with thoughts other than thoughts of death - that is, looks at it as an object of scientific inquiry.’’13 Hence, his conclusion - precisely the point that Rubin found “the least convincing aspect of Steinberg’s interpretation’’14 - that “the Demoiselles project began, not as a charade on the wages of sin, but as an allegory of the involved and the uninvolved in confrontation with the indestructible claims of sex.’’15

For his part, Rubin was anxious to retain the memento mori associations of the skull and thus restore to the painting some of its former connotations of death. But those connotations were now given a different inflection. “Of crucial importance to the changing meaning of the skull motif,” Rubin argued, “is the fact that brothel sex involved possibilities of physical degeneration and death not traditionally implied by the vanitas symbol.’’16 “Picasso’s choice of a sailor as the client in the Demoiselles,” he added, not only characterized his bordello as the working-class type then known in the vernacular as “slaughter-houses,” but implied the theme of venereal disease, insofar as sailors were universally considered transmitters of the pox.... Nevertheless, the inclusion of the medical student in the Demoiselles to signal sickness and mortality in relation to the sailor - a contrast between he who cures the pox and he who gets it - probably struck Picasso in time as overly anecdotal, and perhaps even too banal. The artist’s subsequent elimination of the student - and, somewhat later, of the sailor himself - . . . did not, however, imply the disappearance of the themes of disease and death. Picasso became aware that these concerns need not be embodied allegorically, but could be subsumed into the female figures themselves - as is vividly the case in the figure of the crouching prostitute on the lower right in the final painting.17

Rubin goes on to argue that the asymmetrical “distortions” of that figure’s face were intended to invoke - without, he assures us, actually illustrating - the atrocious structural deformations of the head that occur in the advanced stage of syphilis osseuse.18 Much of the work’s formal innovation can thus be seen to derive, according to Rubin, from Picasso’s deepseated fear of syphilis and gonorrhea.

In gauging his distance from Steinberg, Rubin suggested that what separated them was fundamentally a disagreement over content, over the inherent meaning of the work’s various figures and motifs. “Steinberg’s dissociation of the medical student and skull from any symbolism involving disease or death,” Rubin wrote, is a function of what I consider his overly restricted view of the Demoiselles as essentially an image of “orgiastic immersion” and “Dionysian release.” . . . In focusing on the robust erotic aspect of the Demoiselles, Steinberg dealt with only 4

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one side of an equation. For me, the final picture is less a Dionysian orgy than a sexual battleground in which both Eros and Thanatos contend for Picasso’s psyche.19

Rubin is certainly right to claim that “Dionysian release” - an expression taken directly from Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy - is pivotal to Steinberg’s interpretation of the Demoiselles. Indeed, Rubin deserves considerable credit for being one of the few scholars to have recognized and acknowledged the strong Nietzschean strains of “The Philosophical Brothel.” But he is mistaken in his assumption that “Dionysian release” carries with it none of the implications of mortality and the disintegration of the self that his own essay works so diligently to locate within the painting’s imagery. It was, according to Nietzsche, precisely in Dionysian art, in ancient tragedy and music, that “the annihilation of the individual” was accomplished.20 Attic tragedy induced in each individual member of its audience a state of ekstasis: a sense of being overwhelmed, torn apart, even ripped out of oneself by the power of events - if not an experience of death per se, then at least of something within the purview of the death drive.21 In fact, the experience was such, according to Nietzsche, that even to speak of “individual” members of the audience is misleading.

It was Apollo, not Dionysus, who stood for the principium individuationis; Apollo’s symbolic powers were directed toward preserving the illusion of discrete individuality specifically so as to mask the Dionysian “truth” that the world was excessive, unbounded by either moderation or meaning.22 In ancient myth the god Dionysus had been torn apart by the Titans, and the individual pieces of his body scattered; the coming together of participants at the tragic festivals of Dionysus can be seen, then, as reenacting that moment when the scattered pieces of the god were rejoined. Greek tragedy aimed, Nietzsche said, at achieving a moment of “Dionysian joy” when the individual could feel that s/he, too, was reunited with a “primal unity,” made a part of that deeper reality behind all phenomena, prior to all individuation. As Georges Bataille has written, in what is clearly a reflection on Nietzsche’s account of “Dionysian release”:

We are discontinuous beings, individuals ... but we yearn for our lost continuity.

We find the state that binds us to our random and ephemeral individuality hard to bear. Along with our tormenting desire that this evanescent thing should last, there stands our obsession with a primal continuity linking us with everything that is.23

And this obsession, Bataille claims, lies at the base of all eroticism. He then adds:

We cannot imagine the transition from one state to another one basically unlike it without picturing the violence done to the being called into existence through discontinuity.... What does physical eroticism signify if not a violation of the very being of its practitioners? - a violation bordering on death, bordering on murder.24

However differently Rubin may conceive of such matters, clearly for Bataille - as for Nietzsche - both Eros and Thanatos are children of Dionysus.

And all of this, it seems to me, is implicit in Steinberg’s invocation of “Dionysian release” to describe the erotic encounter staged by the Demoiselles. But even more is entailed by the reference; it might be helpful to quote (and at some length) the specific passage of “The Philosophical Brothel” to which Rubin’s text alludes.

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Whatever the original subject had been - wages of sin or detachment versus engagement - that subject seems superseded when the confrontation proceeds between the contained work of art over there and its observer outside.

But, I think, the picture says otherwise. It declares that if you wholly accept and undergo the aesthetic experience, if you let it engulf and scare you - as Gertrude Stein says Alice B. Toklas was scared by the Demoiselles - then you become an insider. It is in the contagion of art that the types of knowledge, the external and the engaged, intermingle, and the distinction between outsider and insider falls away.

Not every picture is capable of such overriding contagion. Few works of art impose the kind of aesthetic experience which the young Nietzsche called “a confrontation with stark reality.” And this, surely, is why Picasso strove to make his creation a piece of “wild naked nature with the bold face of truth.” He wanted the orgiastic immersion and Dionysian release.25

It is evident from these paragraphs that Steinberg’s appeal to The Birth of Tragedy is intended to underscore the way that the Demoiselles is able to overpower and “engulf” its viewers. Every bit as important as the intimation of mortality, though, is the sense that this engulfment renders obsolete any notion of a “contained work of art over there and its observer outside.” According to Nietzsche, in the earliest Dionysia, out of which the later tragedies grew, only the chorus was ever present, which is to say that there was no distinction between the performers - or the performance and its audience. At some level that initial indistinction continued, even as the form of Attic tragedy developed and was increasingly subjected to Apollonian control and differentiation. “Audience and chorus,” Nietzsche asserted, “were never fundamentally set over against each other: all was one grand chorus of dancing, singing satyrs, and of those who let themselves be represented by them.”26 Everyone present, that is, shared equally in the Dionysian state of ekstasis; this just was the “work” of tragedy, and the actors, the staging, the written play itself, all were only means to its attainment.

I take something similar to be the main point of Steinberg’s invocation of Dionysian tragedy in the face of the Demoiselles: we, its viewers, fundamentally belong to the work. As participants rather than spectators, we are not meant to stand over and against it as subject to object. It might even be said that we are, like the players on the stage, simply the way that the work happens, the vehicle through which it comes into being.27 In fact “The Philosophical Brothel” says as much: “Without the mutual dependency of aroused viewer and pictorial structure there is no picture.”28 Art Historical Precedents

More than any disagreement over the relative importance of Eros and Thanatos, what separates Steinberg’s interpretation from Rubin’s is Rubin’s determination to separate the Demoiselles from its viewers. Although he places great emphasis on the disappearance of the male figures from the composition, he essentially disregards the simultaneous redirection of the women’s gazes.29 At best, we might imagine that he intended an oblique reference to that redirection in the claim, made near the beginning of his essay, that the Demoiselles served as a vehicle for Picasso’s “relentless selfconfrontation.”30 In that case, however, the painting will be seen to have turned not toward us, its viewers (as Steinberg claimed), but exclusively toward Picasso. And Rubin’s foregrounding of Picasso’s relation to the Demoiselles does effectively shield us, in his account, from any direct involvement with the work.31 6

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We can usefully sharpen this distinction between the two essays if we also consider the respective art historical traditions to which they belong. Rubin’s article, I think it is fair to say, falls squarely within the interpretative tradition of Erwin Panofsky, in that his methods might be generally described as iconological - and not, we should note, merely iconographic. The distinction is evident in Rubin’s aim to recover for the Demoiselles not only whatever conventional or preestablished meanings it might be seen to contain but also, and even especially, those conditioned by Picasso’s personal psychology, as well as by the cultural predispositions of early-twentieth-century Paris.32 Rubin’s understanding of what aspects of the work are capable of bearing meaning is equally expansive, extending well beyond subject matter to encompass features more properly deemed stylistic. Rubin goes so far as to assert that “style displaces subject matter as a carrier of content for the first time” in the Demoiselles. “We are at that point in Picasso’s career,” he says, “where style first ceases to be a fixed, a priori language or medium... [and becomes instead] a series of optional representational modes that can in themselves deliver particulars of his message.”33 What is important to hear in these comments, and what connects them with the tradition of Panofsky, is the fundamental assumption that the painting’s function is above all to deliver a message - to be, as Rubin said, “a carrier of content.”

Steinberg’s “Philosophical Brothel,” by contrast, looks much more to the art historical heritage of Aloïs Riegl. While discussing the reorientation that the Demoiselles underwent between preparatory sketches and final painting, Steinberg explicitly referred to Riegl’s study of Dutch group portraiture.34 He wanted to call to our attention the way that the internal coherence so evident in the early sketches for the Demoiselles was deemphasized in the final painting, largely to be replaced by an external cohesion. Whereas the initial composition was unified by an implied narrative - and the coordinated action of the women as their heads turn (or at least tilt) in response to the medical student’s entrance-the painting, Steinberg argued, adheres to “an anti-narrative counter-principle” much like that of the early Dutch group portraits that interested Riegl. Again, it was in this reorientation of the composition that, as Steinberg phrased it, the Demoiselles ceased being “the representation of an adventure enjoyed by one or two men and [became] instead an experience of ours, an experience, that is, of the painting.”35 And this, it seems to me, suggests yet another way in which we might characterize the difference between Rubin’s essay and “The Philosophical Brothel”: for Rubin, what the painting offers is a meaning, whereas for Steinberg, it offers an experience. I should perhaps add that in making this distinction, I do not intend to imply that Steinberg considers the Demoiselles to be meaningless.

It is simply that he understands meaning to be not a property of the painting but rather one of its effects.

Given the Dionysian nature of the Demoiselles, however, we should avoid assuming that what the painting offers is a subjective experience - at the very least, we should avoid assuming that we know what is entailed by that term.36 Even Riegl, for his part, was careful to distinguish between three different modes of subjectivity or, better said, three different ways an individual might be in relation to both the work of art and the world. Will (Wille), he explained, involves a display of autonomy and power in which the subject seeks to subordinate or assimilate anything external to it; emotion (Gefuhl), whether it be driven by pathos or a conscious search for pleasure, is no less self-absorbed. But attentiveness (Aufmerksamkeit) - the attitude that Riegl believed Dutch portraits both depicted and encouraged from their viewers-”allows external objects to affect it, and does not seek to overcome them.”37 It is “a state of mind,” Steinberg 7

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wrote in paraphrasing Riegl, “that [dispels] the distinction between active and passive,”38 in that it involves a conscious relinquishing of power, a laying aside of the vain illusions of Wille and Gefahl.39 In the case of the Demoiselles, we might say, our attentiveness is what allows the painting to achieve its full effect; it is what first opens us to (and so makes us available for) the radical, Dionysian experience of the work, in which all of our usual relations as subjects to objects are confounded, that very opposition beginning to break down.

It is important to remember, too, that the Panofskian method at work in Rubin’s approach to the Demoiselles was developed in no small measure as a response to Riegl’s impact on the field.40 Both Riegl’s study of Dutch group portraiture and his earlier discussion of the play between the “haptic” and “optic” in late Roman art answered to a conviction that the Viennese scholar first expressed quite early in his career - namely, that consideration of the viewer’s relation to the work was the very stuff of art history, precisely what ought to constitute the future of the field.41 By contrast, in his 1920 essay on Riegl’s notion of the Kunstwollen, Panofsky asserted, in clear contradiction of Riegl himself, that “the artistic intention of art must be strictly separated from ... the mirroring of the artistic phenomena in contemporary consciousness, or indeed from the content mediated by the experience of latter-day observers.”42 Panofsky believed that the rigorous study of art could proceed only from principles that in no way derived from an experience of the work but that were instead brought to that experience in order to give it intelligibility.

What was wanted, he said, was something on the order of the a priori concepts of “Pure Reason,” which in Immanuel Kant’s epistemology provided the bases for the natural sciences.43 There is, of course, a certain irony in Panofsky’s appeal here to Kant, in that Kant himself insisted that aesthetic experiences were precisely those for which determinant concepts proved inadequate.

Kant even argued that in certain aesthetic encounters (those he characterized as “sublime”), our existing conceptual capacities were entirely overwhelmed, the thing in question being simply too frightening or powerful for us to assimilate.44 Kant’s discussion of art and aesthetics more generally was included, then, not in the first Critique (of Pure Reason) but in the third, The Critique of Judgment. By patterning his iconological method after a Kantian epistemology of Pure Reason, Panofsky specifically closed it to the possibility that a work of art might actually overrun or exist in excess of its meaning.

Panofsky sought above all to escape the indeterminacies of judgment and to secure for art history a “fixed Archimedean Point” from which it might grasp the “ultimate meaning residing in the artistic phenomenon (not for us but objectively).”45 As Michael Ann Holly and others have helped us to see, Panofsky eventually found a model of that desired Archimedean Point in the Renaissance system of linear perspective.46 The triumph of that system, after all, had been its apparent objectification of the subjective - its rationalization of the coordinates of psychophysiological space - a feat that it achieved through the establishment of what might be termed an “appropriate distance” between the viewer and the field of his or her interest.47 And this is where our extended consideration of Panofsky returns us to our own interest in the Demoiselles: for, to the extent that Rubin concerns himself with the immanent meaning of that painting and its preparatory sketches, he can be seen as taking up a vantage point vis-à-vis the work that is roughly analogous to the position staked out by Panofsky. Adhering more to the terms prepared for us by the Demoiselles itself - and given Rubin’s diagnosis of that painting as involved with the symbolism of disease and physical degeneration - it might in fact be more appropriate to say that he has taken up a vantage point analogous to the medical student’s. That vantage point is, of course, a specific one, but one whose distance nonetheless allows Rubin to imagine that he 8

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stands nowhere in particular or, in any case, outside the picture. He is the detached observer, the man apart, at risk neither of infecting the demoiselles nor of being infected by them.48

In this light, the fact that Rubin characterized Steinberg’s view of the painting as “overly restricted” - as dealing “with only one side of an equation” - seems highly ironic. A careful reading suggests that it is actually Rubin who limited his focus and who narrowly attended to only half of the experience that the Demoiselles has to offer. This, despite the fact that Steinberg had explicitly warned against taking such a partial view: The work... is not a self-existent abstraction, since the solicited viewer is a constituent factor. And no analysis of the Demoiselles as a contained pictorial structure faces up to the work in its fullness. The picture is a tidal wave of female aggression; one either experiences the Demoiselles as an onslaught, or shuts it off.49

Writing against Method

Almost all of the various other, more recent misreadings of “The Philosophical Brothel” have proceeded, it seems to me, from the erroneous assumption that the vantage it opened on the Demoiselles was one that could accommodate a range of methodologies, the important question then becoming which methods and procedures one might choose to bring to the painting in order to make it most fully intelligible. Given such an understanding, the distinction between Steinberg’s essay and Rubin’s will appear to be itself largely methodological, the consequence of different conceptual frameworks having been taken up in the authors’ respective approaches to the work. That this is a misunderstanding of the situation is perhaps most easily argued by pointing out that “The Philosophical Brothel” cannot properly be said to adhere to any method not if “method” is to be understood along the lines of Panofsky’s iconology, that is, as a systematic, established procedure one might master and then apply to a wide variety of distinct objects. Again, Panofsky believed that art historical interpretation could proceed only from a priori principles that were brought to the work and that in no way derived from one’s experience of it. By contrast, “The Philosophical Brothel” is almost entirely an articulation of experience, and so a matter not of method but of description and judgment - that is to say, of writing.50 Consequently, Steinberg’s approach to the Demoiselles can itself be judged only at the level of specific language, in the various cadences of his actual prose. Listen, for example, to the following passage, concerning the figures and space on the left-hand side of the painting: What [Picasso] wants is a restless beat and a reactive presence. So the backbend of the curtain is steadied by its supporter. Her rigid profile abuts on a rampant gisante, who twins with a pillar nude, who in turn surmounts the entrant tip of the table. Our vision heaves in and out; a variable pressure, like the pitching of a boat in high seas, or a similitude of sexual energy.51

The near-ecstatic tone at the passage’s end intimates that Steinberg has assumed, in effect, the role of the “sailor,” the insider or initiate. And yet that tone and its attendant imagery are tersely dismissed with the very next line - “Permissive similes,” the text declares - and we return to language on a more even keel. One could pick out any number of similar passages elsewhere; throughout “The Philosophical Brothel” there is a constant alternation of two more or less distinct voices. We repeatedly come across places where, sometimes briefly, sometimes 9

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at greater length, a “poetic” and distinctly nonstudious tone interrupts and enlivens the scholarly proceedings. If we want to be somewhat prosaic and literal about matters ourselves, we can associate these voices with the two male figures of the preparatory drawings and so hear them as what remains of the original intentions for the Demoiselles.

In much the same way, we might also want to hear those voices as responsive to what Yve-Alain Bois, in his own comments on “The Philosophical Brothel,” has described as the contradictory movements of “protention” and “retention” encouraged by the painting.52 Emblematic of these movements, he says, is the frightening “squatter” in the lower right corner: the figure that Steinberg had described as a “spatial amphiboly,” both oriented toward the interior of the room and squarely facing out. We could point as well to the “rampant gisante,” second from the left. As Steinberg showed, she can appear invitingly recumbent, but we might equally see her as bolt upright - and then, “relieved of gravitational pull, she arrives like a projectile.”53 If the pulsatile, throbbing space generated by these figures is indeed a “similitude of sexual energy,” it also gives shape to the alternation of attraction and repulsion - absorption and a compensating detachment-that is aroused in our encounter with the Demoiselles.54 “The Philosophical Brothel” explicitly states the price of admission: you have to let the painting “engulf and scare you-as Gertrude Stein said Alice B. Toklas was scared by the Demoiselles....”

More subtly, the essay’s alternating voices suggest that you may in fact be required to pay repeatedly, or at any rate on more than one occasion. They suggest, in other words, that, however much the painting may draw us in, we will always be taken somewhat aback by the radical otherness of the Demoiselles.

The masklike faces of the women are clearly most overtly responsible for this effect; having been summoned by the painting, we are brought up short by the demoiselles’ own, inhuman withdrawal, their evident self-concealment. In writing about these faces - “masks of impersonal passion with no interference of personality” - Steinberg specifically compared them with the masks of ancient Greek tragedy.55 These, according to Nietzsche, were originally intended to give a face to the Dionysian, and thereby a visual focus to the chorus’s ecstatic frenzy. But the actual appearance of the masks was an Apollonian contribution to the drama, since Dionysus, incomprehensible and fundamentally elusive, was by himself not given to visual representation.56 Much the same could be said of the African masks that so powerfully impressed Picasso when he encountered them in the ethnographic collection at the Trocadéro: their purpose (even, or especially, in their original context) was to give concrete form to beings that were so radically Other that they could not otherwise appear. In this sense, the masklike faces of the demoiselles can also be regarded as emblematic of the “protention” and “retention” - the simultaneous tangibility and withdrawal - that seems characteristic of the painting as a whole.

It might be said, moreover, that the question of masks goes to the very heart (and so to the very writing) of The Birth of Tragedy - and that this is the reason Steinberg invokes it, both here and in his discussion of the Demoiselles more generally. After all, Nietzsche’s explicit aim had been to make the Dionysian visible. Ever since the arrival of Socrates (and his coconspirator, Euripides), the Dionysian, according to Nietzsche, had been willfully obscured. It was not that the play of the Apollonian and Dionysian had ceased - it could not - but Socratic reason had succeeded in turning Dionysian concealment against itself. The Dionysian persisted, unacknowledged - until The Birth of Tragedy reawakened us to its existence. The problem that Nietzsche faced (and the one confronting Steinberg as he stood before the Demoiselles) was how to evoke art’s Dionysian aspect, what language to use?57 Again, any attempt to articulate 10

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features of the Dionysian would necessarily involve an imposition of (Apollonian) limits, so that its expression could only ever be partial and displaced. But poetic or metaphoric language language, in other words, that acknowledged both its partiality and its status as displacement - was seen by Nietzsche as vastly preferable to a Socratic language of concepts, whose claim to grasp things in themselves effectively concealed the metaphoric nature of thought.58 This is why, in his later “Attempt at a Self-Criticism,” Nietzsche expressed regret over what he felt was The Birth of Tragedy’s altogether too conceptual approach to the Dionysian. He spoke of the “strange voice” in which its argument had been couched, the voice of a “disciple of a still ‘unknown god,’ disguised beneath the scholar’s hood”: “It should have sung, this ‘new soul’ - and not spoken!

What I had to say then - too bad that I did not dare say it as a poet.”59 We cannot help but notice, though, that the “Self- Criticism” is not “sung” either, and we are left to assume that the Socratic tone can never be entirely eliminated, that it has in fact become inextricably bound up with what it now means to engage in philosophy (or, for that matter, art history).60 Nonetheless, we do still hear in The Birth of Tragedy an impassioned and remarkably “poetic” voice, which repeatedly erupts from out of the more sober, philosophical discourse through which the book’s logical argument proceeds. The very terms “Apollonian” and “Dionysian” are spoken specifically in this voice, and Nietzsche explains how he “borrowed those adjectives from the Greeks, who revealed the profound mysteries of their artistic doctrines through embodiments, and not through purely conceptual means.”61 “Embodied” language – metaphor - in fact seems an apt characterization of all of Nietzsche’s attempts to articulate the Dionysian.62

One could well say much the same thing, of course, about the “poetic” voice of “The Philosophical Brothel.” It, too, seeks to describe the experience of art in a metaphoric language of embodiment and not merely of conceptual apprehension.63 It seems at its most effective, moreover, in just those places where what is being articulated is both our continuity with or attachment to the work and the work’s alienating otherness. Consider, for example, the following passage, which concerns that “near-Cubist space” on the right of the Demoiselles: No terms taken from other art - whether from antecedent paintings or from Picasso’s own subsequent Cubism - describe the drama of so much depth under stress. This is an interior space in compression, like the inside of pleated bellows, like the feel of an inhabited pocket, a contracting sheath heated by the massed human presence.64

It would be hard to imagine a description of pictorial space more vividly suggestive of embodiment than “the feel of an inhabited pocket.” Subsequent paragraphs continue in much the same vein, even as they attribute the origin of such metaphors to the structure of the work itself: The Demoiselles d’Avignon seems to me to have one insistent theme to which everything in the picture contributes: the naked brothel interior, the male complicity in an orgy of female exposure, the direct axial address, the spasmodic action, the explosive release in a constricted space, and the reciprocity of engulfment and penetration. The picture is both enveloping and transfixed; it sorties and overwhelms and impales itself. And it ought to be seen as it was painted - hung low in a narrow room, so that it spills over into it, tupped by the entrant wedge of the table. In one sense the whole picture is a sexual metaphor, and Picasso will have used all his art to articulate its erotics.

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But it is also the opposite, a forced union of dream image and actuality.

The picture is about the image in its otherness locked in with the real world.

And like those mystics of old who used sexual metaphor to express union with the divine, so Picasso will have used sexuality to make visible the immediacy of communion with art. Explosive form and erotic content become reciprocal metaphors.65

These paragraphs come, it should be emphasized, very near the end of “The Philosophical Brothel,” in a final summation of its interpretation that serves also as a sort of climax to the text. Here one detects little of the scholarly tone that had carried some of the earlier passages - with the result that we are invited to imagine that the voice of the “student” has at last been drowned out by the ecstatic reveries of the “Dionysian” initiate.

The Dionysian and the Sublime

No doubt some readers will feel at this point that I have leaned too heavily on The Birth of Tragedy in pressing my case for “The Philosophical Brothel.” They are likely to object that Steinberg made overt reference to Nietzsche only three times in his essay - a fact that I can hardly deny. I would nonetheless insist on the centrality of those three passages to the text’s unfolding interpretation of the Demoiselles.66 My suspicion is that Steinberg deliberately understated the Nietzschean aspects of his essay out of fear that The Birth of Tragedy would be seen as providing the painting’s interpretative “key,” and that a broad search of the preparatory drawings for hidden Dionysian “motifs” might ensue.67 I imagine, too, that Steinberg felt the experience of the ancient Dionysia as described by Nietzsche offered only a metaphor or analogy for the distinct experience afforded by the Demoiselles, and that he wanted nothing to overshadow that face-toface encounter with the work. If in the preceding discussion I have made rather more frequent appeals to Nietzsche myself, I have also tried to offset those appeals with references to others who hold similar views on art and its relation to the world: to Bataille, for example, and (in a note) to Jacques Lacan - and certainly Martin Heidegger could have been included in there as well.68 My hope is that in this way, we might come to see both “The Philosophical Brothel” and the Demoiselles d’Avignon as not dependent on The Birth of Tragedy but instead, like the works of Bataille and Lacan, as engaged with that text in the course of thinking through the nature of artistic experience.69

In order to appreciate the full extent of that engagement, though - as well as the demands it implicitly places on the reader of “The Philosophical Brothel” and the viewer of the Demoiselles we need to tie up a few threads left dangling in earlier parts of this essay. Some of those strands lead fairly directly back to Kant, and so also to a number of the issues raised in relation to the choices that Panofsky made in reinforcing his particular vision of art history. Above all, I want to return to Kant’s account of the experience of the sublime. It seems to me that that experience, as he describes it, has much in common with the ancient Greek tragedies that captivated Nietzsche and with what Steinberg wants to show us about Picasso’s Demoiselles as well.70

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example) so powerful that we feel ourselves nearly overwhelmed in the face of it. All of our existing conceptual categories, our mental capacities as such, prove totally inadequate to its assimilation. The experience, Kant says, is initially almost intolerable - we recoil - and yet it ends in something very nearly like pleasure.71 The change is brought about not because we have finally found concepts that would allow us to take in the power of the sea; we still cannot, and in fact the whole experience will be missed if we continue to look from a scholarly or “scientific” vantage point.

Instead, we must be able to view the ocean as poets do, merely in terms of what manifests itself to the eye - e.g. if we observe it while it is calm, as a clear mirror bounded only by the sky; or, if it is turbulent, as being like an abyss threatening to engulf everything - and yet find it sublime.72

Kant claims the pleasure that we take in such experiences arises importantly from a selfdiscovery - the discovery of a capacity within us that we did not know we possessed, or at least not to that degree. In trying to understand the nature of this capacity, specifically in relation to the passage quoted above, Stephen Melville has written: What strikes the eye - and, finding no entry, evidently bounces off, remains outside - we also make something of, and “as” is the operator of this transition: the ocean’s vastness escapes us and yet we see it before us as ... a clear mirror bounded by the sky. The infinity of the starry sky escapes us, and yet it remains spread there as... a vast vault encompassing everything.

It looks very much like what’s being discovered in these examples ... is most concretely a capacity for metaphor.73

Drawing out these implications, we might say that in our encounter with the extreme otherness of the sublime, we discover within ourselves a poetic voice, previously unheard, which is able to articulate (albeit through a certain binding and displacement) something of the experience that would otherwise have escaped us.

Self-Discoveries

“It is a classical Spanish notion that self discovery occurs in intercourse with another, that a meeting of persons is a reciprocal mirroring.”74 Steinberg makes this observation about threequarters of the way through “The Philosophical Brothel,” in a section where he is considering the possible relation between the Demoiselles and the last major painting to have preceded it in Picasso’s oeuvre, the Two Women of 1906. In truth, Steinberg is engaging in a kind of fantasy, imagining that the two women in the earlier painting are in reality only one, self-identical - until the first one steps through the parted curtains and, in that moment of “intercourse” with the otherness we represent, is transformed into the haunted and haunting figure who looks out of the Demoiselles from the rear. The fantasy is acknowledged as just that, and yet Steinberg persists: “For both the Two Women and the Demoiselles are about the human condition, about that perpetual moment in which self-knowledge arises in sexual confrontation.”75 He might have added - I take this to be the main point of the whole extended fantasy - that self-knowledge may arise in confrontation, too, with a painting that employs a sexual metaphor to show us the way 13

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that we stand before it, face to face, our selves no less exposed.

“What must be kept in mind in all these investigations,” Nietzsche wrote, “is that the audience of Attic tragedy discovered itself in the chorus of the orchestra.”76 This was the reason “audience and chorus were never fundamentally set over against one another”; it was in fact the very raison d’etre of Dionysian art. Not being fully present to themselves, the members of the audience turned to the extreme otherness of tragedy as to a kind of mirror in which they might see themselves reflected.77 But, of course, they were not left unchanged by the experience - which is to say, it was never quite the same self involved in that process of specular self-discovery.

Steinberg makes much the same point when he concedes that the figure in the Demoiselles “is not the ‘same’ character as the one outward bound in the Two Women”: “More important to Picasso than a sustaining identity is precisely the transformation of character implicit in the two states - from bluff simplicity to keen-edged articulation.”78 This is, as I take it, again a way of saying that the process of self-discovery is always a process of becoming (and so of becoming otherwise) thus, Steinberg’s reference to “that perpetual moment in which self-knowledge arises.” By the same token, the play of voices within “The Philosophical Brothel” might best be understood not as a dialogue in two parts but as a monologue within a character self-divided. The entire essay can be read, that is, as a narration or enactment of self-discovery: the detached observer’s transformation through his (or, I dare say, her) encounter with the Demoiselles. The difference between the essay’s two voices, then, would be precisely the difference that the work itself has made. “The Philosophical Brothel” shows us how the original sketches for the Demoiselles had attempted to depict (externally, as it were) a contrast between “external knowledge” and “initiation” - and then how the painting reoriented itself, making that drama over into the very stuff of our experience. The demoiselles do not address us as detached observers, nor do they hold out for us either intelligibility or control.

On the contrary, they seem to exist specifically to take us out of that sort of relation to seeing and knowing, to recall us from our “discontinuous” regard. Through our experience of the work, we are made to feel the inadequacy of conceptual analysis, and so to confront the painting on noticeably shifted ground.79 Indeed, it might be said that the Demoiselles enables us to see that our scholarly detachment is, or had been, in reality only a displacement of - a means of fending off - the division within our selves that the painting assiduously demands. That division, that process of becoming, just is what that work is about. We can, of course, decline the whole experience and simply continue on as before, but we will then have missed precisely what it is that most differentiates the painting from its conventional and rather banal preparatory sketches. We will have been left unaffected by the Demoiselles.80 I am tempted here to quote Hans-Georg Gadamer, who says that this is the structure of any true hermeneutic encounter - to think with the other, “and to come back to oneself as if to another.”81 But given the Dionysian nature of the Demoiselles, it seems even more appropriate to listen once again to Nietzsche: What happens in the dramatic chorus is the fundamental dramatic phenomenon: projecting oneself outside oneself... This is no longer the art of the rhapsodist, who does not merge with his images but… contemplates them as something outside himself; what we have here is the individual effacing himself through entering a strange being. It should be made clear that this phenomenon is not singular but epidemic: a whole crowd becomes rapt in this manner.82

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All of this will, I hope, have driven home the importance of having - and hearing - the play of voices within “The Philosophical Brothel.” It perhaps remains only to remind ourselves that, if those voices are to be taken as articulating something like a process of self-discovery, such “discovery” involves not so much the finding of one’s self as that self s loss or abnegation.83 (“What we have here,” as Nietzsche said, “is the individual effacing himself through entering a strange being.”) Undoubtedly, there are still some scholars who feel that the metaphoric language of “The Philosophical Brothel” is “overly subjective.” But it seems to me more accurate to regard it, on the contrary, as an example of that rare “objectivity” that remains attached to its object, attentive to its specificity.84 It would be a mistake, as a result, to equate either of the essay’s voices simply with Steinberg’s own. Rather, we need to see how the essay gives voice to positions actually articulated by the Demoiselles itself. Our understanding of the painting depends rather heavily, in fact, on our taking those voices to be not those of a particular individual but instead as in some sense communal or representative-so that we might be inclined to take them up (at least provisionally) as our own, and to imagine ourselves standing roughly in the places from which they seem to have arisen. If we can manage to do that, we will have discovered something important about both ourselves and the works of art that claim us-and no less, I would argue, about the self-imposed discipline of art history.

Frequently Cited Sources Nietzsche, Friedrich, Die Geburt der Tragidie, in Gesammelte Werke (Munich: Musarion, 1920), vol. 3, 3-165.

Kaufmann, Walter, trans., The Birth of Tragedy (New York: Random House, 1967).

Rubin, William, “The Genesis of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, special issue of Studies in Modern Art, no. 3 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994), 13-144 Steinberg, Leo, “The Philosophical Brothel,” October 44 (spring 1988): 7-74.

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1. “The Philosophical Brothel” was first published in Art News 71, nos. 5-6 (Sept.-Oct. 1972): 22-29, 38-47; a revised version was translated into French for the catalogue of the Musée Picasso’s 1988 exhibition on Les demoiselles (H6elne Seckel, ed., Les demoiselles d’Avignon, 2 vols. [Paris: Reunion des Mus6es Nationaux, 1988]) before appearing, in English, in October44 (spring 1988): 7-74. All citations refer to the pagination in the October version.

2. Christopher Green, ed., Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Unfortunately, because of its length, “The Philosophical Brothel” itself was omitted from the anthology - a fact that will certainly do little to facilitate the close rereading of the text that I hope to encourage.

3. Christopher Green, “An Introduction to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” in Green (as in n. 2), 9. Elsewhere in the essay (2), Green says, “Its immediacy, the directness with which the stares of each individual prostitute invite the spectator in, underlines its role in one of the central developments of art in the twentieth century: the empowering of the spectator.”

4. The earliest example of the psychobiographical type was Mary Matthews Gedo, “Art as Exorcism: Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon,” Arts Magazine 55, no. 2 (Oct. 1980): 70-83. Carol Duncan’s “The MoMA’s Hot Mamas,” ArtJournal 48, no. 2 (summer 1989): 171-78; and Anna Chave’s “New Encounters with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon: Gender, Race, and the Origins of Cubism,” Art Bulletin 76 (1994): 596-611, are the best-known examples of writings that take up the question of the Demoiselles on the assumption that its viewer is invested with a certain power or authority over the image. It is perhaps worth noting that the latter two articles engage in an explicitly feminist critique of the painting, influenced directly or indirectly by Laura Mulvey’s much-read essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (autumn 1975), which appeared only three years after “The Philosophical Brothel.” That the viewer of the (patently nonnarrative) Demoiselles cannot simply be equated with the spectator in Mulvey’s essay - and that the experience offered by the painting is quite distinct from one of “visual pleasure” - is something I hope to make evident in due course. In any case, one way to think about the differences between the interpretation that I have drawn from Steinberg’s text and those cited above is in terms of their fundamentally different understanding of what has come to be called “the Gaze.” Regarding the latter, see Stephen Melville’s entry on “the Gaze” in The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), vol. 2, 284-86.

5. William Rubin, “La genèse des Demoiselles d’Avignon,” in Seckel (as in n. 1), vol. 2, 368-487; a revised Englishlanguage version was published as “The Genesis of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (see Rubin).

6. Steinberg, 12.

7. Ibid., 41-43.

8. Ibid., 63.

9. Ibid., 45-46.

10. This is not a point that Steinberg himself strongly emphasizes. In fact, his most direct comments on the subject might be taken to imply that ours is the vantage point of the sailor. However, I would argue - and, indeed, will be arguing - that our occupation of both positions is everywhere implicit in the way that Steinberg writes about the Demoiselles.

11. Alfred H. BarrJr., Picasso: Forty Years of His Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1939), 60.

12. Steinberg, 43. The quotation comes from Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 168.

13. Steinberg, 41.

14. Rubin, 45.

15. Steinberg, 43.

16. Rubin, 56.

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17. Ibid., 57-58.

18. Ibid., 58. On 131, Rubin even includes - presumably for the purposes of formal comparison - some photographs of syphilitic patients horribly disfigured by the disease.

19. Ibid., 49.

20. Nietzsche, sec. 16, trans. Kaufmann, 104.

21. David B. Allison has given a specifically Freudian interpretation to the ekstasis of Dionysian tragedy: “This experienced state of... emotional intensity and dissociation, when one’s drives themselves are no longer bound - what Freud would later describe as the psychological level of primary process formation - is precisely the Dionysian state of disindividuation or dispossession.” See Allison, Reading the New Nietzsche (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 66.

22. Nietzsche, sec. 1; on this point, see, for example, Allison (as in n. 21), 34-43.

23. Georges Bataille, Eroticism, trans. Mary Dalwood (London: Penguin Books, 2001), 15.

24. Ibid., 17. It seems important to note in this context that Bataille was also a frank admirer of the work of Picasso. See in particular his essay on the artist “Soleil pourri,” Documents, no. 3 (1930): 174, translated as “Rotten Sun” by Allan Stoekl in Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 57.

25. Steinberg, 46. A footnote mentions the popularity of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy among the artists of Barcelona and Paris at the turn of the century, implying Picasso’s probable awareness of that text.

26. Nietzsche, sec. 8. This would remain the case, Nietzsche tells us, until Euripides arrived on the stage and, in a bid to make tragedy more fully comprehensible, restricted the role of the chorus. Holding to an “aesthetic Socratism, whose supreme law reads roughly as follows, ‘to be beautiful everything must first be intelligible,’ “ Euripidean drama also included a prologue summarizing the events that had previously transpired, as well as everything that was to come; as a result of these changes, the audience was transformed from tragic participants into mere spectators of the drama. On these matters, see The Birth of Tragedy, secs. 11-12.

27. Nietzsche writes (sec. 5), “For better or worse, one thing should be quite obvious to all of us: ... art is not played for our own sakes - for our betterment or education-nor can we consider ourselves the true originators of the world of art; rather, we have every right to view ourselves as aesthetic projections of the true creator [Dionysus] and to derive such dignity as we possess from our status as art works.” Hans-Georg Gadamer makes this same sort of claim in his insistence that the artwork’s ontology is best understood on the model of play and, specifically, plays; see Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall (New York: Crossroads, 1989), esp. sec. 1.2.1.B. Also pertinent to our understanding of “The Philosophical Brothel” and its references to The Birth of Tragedy are the following remarks, from a reading of Truth and Method: “What the work does to the spectator, its Wirkung, has been included since Aristotle in the definition of the tragic play. That a tragedy works on, plays, the spectators is not incidental but essential to its being a tragedy, and the same is true of the work of art in general.”

SeeJoel C. Weinsheimer, Gadamer’s Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 116.

28. Steinberg, 47.

29. In this regard, Rubin is adhering to the argument of an earlier essay in which he had characterized the differences between the composition of the Demoiselles’s preparatory sketches and that of the finished painting as charting a movement from narrative to “iconic,” the latter being defined simply as “a progressive disengagement from anecdote, an increased emphasis on frontality, and a shift from dispersal to intense concentration in the play of pictorial forces.” See Rubin, “From Narrative to ‘Iconic’ in Picasso: The Buried Allegory in Bread and Fruitdish on a Table and the Role of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” Art Bulletin 65 (1983): 615-49.

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30. Rubin, 13.

31. It might be interesting in this connection to note that Rubin, 44, also compares, if not the Demoiselles itself, at least the preparatory drawings to a play. It is, however, a very un-Nietzschean conception of drama: “These drawings make clear, I believe, that from the very beginning, the role of the student was not to introduce the play, so to speak, by opening the curtain, but to write finis by drawing it closed. Such an action is more consistent with the sudden glance of the sailor in the first sketch, and with the nature of at least one of [the student’s] symbolic attributes, the skull. To this extent, the student is the dramatist - the surrogate of the painter - and thus holds the destinies of the other figures in his hands.” In Greek tragedy, of course, the characters’ destinies were not in the hands of the dramatist (who was more or less bound to the outcome given in myth); they were instead in the grip of something deeply inhuman and excessive, a tragic fate far out of scale with all reason or comprehension.

32. It is true that in his 1920 essay “Der Begriff des Kunstwollens” (The concept of the Kunstwollen), Erwin Panofsky argued vehemently against what he regarded as “psychologistic forms of interpretation” and asserted that the “artistic intention achieved in a work of art... is not a (psychological) reality” (see Panofsky, Aufsatze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft, ed. H. Oberer and E. Verheyen [Berlin: Hessling, 1964], 199-208). In his later introduction to Studies in Iconology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), however, he reopened the possibility for a psychological analysis. As the famous chart that accompanied that essay reveals (14-15), interpretation at the iconological level proceeds specifically through a “synthetic intuition (familiarity with the essential tendencies of the human mind), conditioned by a personal psychology and Weltanschauung.”

33. Rubin, 59.

34. Steinberg, 13-14.

35. Ibid., 45-46.

36. This is especially the case in that Steinberg, 13, himself characterizes the unity of the Dutch group portrait as “not objective-internal, but externalized in the beholder’s subjective experience.”

37. Alois Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, trans. Evelyn M. Kain and David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999), 75. For more on these matters, see Margaret Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art (University Park, Pa.: Penn State University Press, 1992), 165ff. We might also want to note, if only in passing, that something very much like Wille and Gefuhl are said by Nietzsche to be what Euripides introduced into Greek tragedy.

38. Steinberg, 13. Steinberg uses a remarkably similar phrasing in an essay on Filippo Lippi’s Annunciation in the National Gallery, London; specifically, it appears in his description of Roger Bacon’s theory of vision, which Steinberg suggests Lippi adopted as a kind of model for his depiction of the Virgin’s impregnation by the Holy Spirit. Briefly, Bacon contended that when the eye beholds something, a power or “species” issuing from it “alters and ennobles the [intervening] medium and renders it commensurate with sight, and thus prepares it for the approach of the species of the visible object.” This theory offered an alternative to the existing models of intromission (which held that the eye merely passively received the impression of incoming species) and extromission (which explained vision as the result of a radiant emission from the eye that sought out and apprehended objects in the world). We will perhaps not be forcing things too much if we think of Bacon’s theory as roughly analogous to the Aufmerksamkeit of Riegl, for vision as described by Bacon seems to perfectly model active but selfless attention. This, Steinberg concludes, is what made it such an appropriate metaphor for Mary’s reception of the Holy Spirit, depicted by Lippi as an act of reciprocity: rays from the descending dove are met by others apparently issuing from Mary’s womb.

This selfless attentiveness is also, I am tempted to add, what makes Bacon’s theory a fitting model for the beholder’s contemplation of the Annunciation - and, of course, for Steinberg’s own observant regard. See Leo Steinberg, “’How Shall This Be?’ Reflections on Filippo Lippi’s Annunciation in London,” pt. 1, Artibus et Historiae 16 (1987): 25-53.

39. It seems important in the context of our discussion to note that Riegl felt (in many ways like Nietzsche) that the modern world was plagued by an excessive subjectivity. “The dominant tendency nowadays,” he wrote, “is to let 18

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the work of art vanish as a physical object and become absorbed into the inner subjective experience of the viewer” (see Riegl [as in n. 37], 64). Clearly, his work on Dutch portraits was designed to show that this had not always been the case, and so also to open up alternative possibilities for the imagining of contemporary art.

40. Indeed, the “immanent meaning [immanenten Sinn]” that Panofsky holds up as the goal of art historical study is a willful rewriting of Riegl’s term Kunstwollen. On this matter, see, for example, Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), 79ff.; Margaret Iversen, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 149-56; and Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant l’image (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1990), 131ff.

41. In a note to himself found among the papers related to his work on Spitromische Kunstindustrie, Riegl wrote, “Aesthetics: relation of parts to the whole. Relation of parts among themselves. Has not taken the relation to the beholder into consideration. The relation to the beholder constitutes art history. Its general principles make up historical aesthetics” (Riegl, Nachlass, carton 9, folder 2, quoted and trans. in Olin [as in n. 37], 156). The note makes plain the fact that Das Hollandische Gruppenportrit was aimed, like Steinberg’s “Philosophical Brothel,” against a prevailing formalist aesthetic.

42. Panofsky, 1964 (as in n. 32), 38, quoted and trans. in Iversen (as in n. 40), 154.

43. On Panofsky’s turn to Kant’s epistemology, see Iversen (as in n. 40), 152-56; and Didi-Huberman (as in n. 40), 107ff.

44. We nonetheless manage to make something of our experiences of the sublime, according to Kant. I will return to this point later.

45. Panofsky, 1964 (as in n. 32), 39.

46. See Holly (as in n. 40); and Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).

47. The parallels between Renaissance perspective as presented by Panofsky and Euripidean drama should not escape us. Both might be said to turn crucially on repositioning the audience at a certain distance from the action.

Similarly, Panofsky’s admiration for Renaissance perspective can be seen as a manifestation of what Nietzsche termed “aesthetic Socratism, whose supreme law reads roughly as follows, ‘to be beautiful everything must first be intelligible” (seen. 26 above).

48. Of course, the same might equally be said of the positions taken up by any number of other scholars. One thinks especially of Michael Leja in his “ ‘Le Vieux Marcheur’ and ‘Les Deux Risques’: Picasso, Prostitution, Venereal Disease and Maternity, 1899-1907,” Art History 8, no. 1 (Mar. 1985): 66-81; and David Lomas (who, as it turns out, actually was once a medical student). See Lomas’s two essays “A Canon of Deformity: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Physical Anthropology,” Art History 16, no. 3 (Sept. 1993): 424-46, and “In Another Frame: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Physical Anthropology,” in Green (as in n. 2), 104-27.

49. Steinberg, 15.

50. ‘Judgment” here, as elsewhere in this essay, should be understood in the Kantian sense of reflective judgment, which proceeds from a given particular and seeks, but never arrives at, an a priori universal under which that particular might be subsumed. It is the failure of an adequate universal to present itself that relegates such judgments to a descriptive (rather than a conceptual) language, and thus also leaves that language, in the words of Michael Baxandall, “heroically exposed.” See Baxandall, Patterns of Intention (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 11.

51. Steinberg, 33.

52. At the end of his review of “The Philosophical Brothel,” and especially of that essay’s explanation of how the painting works to draw us in, Yve-Alain Bois asks, “And yet, in characterizing this picture, can we not speak of a radical exclusion of the spectator?” He then proceeds to describe the “contradictory movements of visual protention/retention” and how they might be seen “as a metaphor for coition.” See Bois, “Painting as Trauma,” Art 19

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in America 76, no. 6 (June 1988): 130ff.; reprinted in Green (as in n. 2), 31-54, with the references to protention and retention beginning on 41.

53. Steinberg, 33.

54. Again, we might think of Bataille’s essay Eroticism (as in n. 23), and especially his discussion of how, as discontinuous beings, we long to shed our individuality (and so become continuous with the world), even as we perceive any prospect of continuity as a violence directed at our very self-existence. In this light, we might say that what Bois describes as the “protention” and “retention” encouraged by the Demoiselles is precisely a manifestation of the Bataillean play of “continuity” and “discontinuity” enacted in eroticism.

55. Steinberg, 53-54. The relevant passage reads as follows: “[The] women’s faces were to be orgiastic; masks of impersonal passion with no interference of personality. Like the original chorus of satyrs whom Nietzsche saw giving birth to Greek tragedy, Picasso’s strumpets were to be ‘nature beings who dwell behind all civilization and preserve their identity through every change of generations and historical movement.’ And the assimilation of African forms was but the final step in the continuing realization of an idea - the trauma of sexual encounter experienced as animalistic clash, a stripping away even of personal love - again, parlor reverting to jungle; again, Nietzsche’s ‘wild naked nature with the bold face of truth.’ “

56. There are, it seems to me, interesting parallels to be drawn between Nietzsche’s discussion of the relation between the Apollonian and Dionysian and Jacques Lacan’s account of what he terms the Symbolic and the Real.

(Presumably, Bataille’s writings were an important intermediary here.) Lacan’s Real names something like brute existence-or what Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in his own fashion, described as “the flesh of the world” (see esp.

Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis [Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968]). It is essentially full and continuous with itself, but it cannot be remarked or articulated without introducing discontinuity-without, that is, immediately turning itself over to signification and the Symbolic.

The masks of ancient tragedy thus could be described as a Symbolic (Apollonian) remarking of the Dionysian Real.

And just as one will never be able to get “behind” the Symbolic to a direct encounter with the Real, so one will never lift the mask of the Dionysian. It masks exactly the thing that it manifests, without ever allowing us to dissociate the two. On these matters, see Jean Granier, “Nietzsche’s Conception of Chaos,” in The New Nietzsche, ed. David B. Allison (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977), 135-41.

57. That this was a problem for Steinberg is, of course, only the case because something like it was a problem for Picasso. The latter’s solution, as we have seen, was found in the “language” of African masks and the uncannily (dis) continuous space he created for the Demoiselles. Steinberg’s own response, if it were to be even partially successful, would have to not only pick out those particular features of the painting, but to do so in a way that could be seen as structurally or functionally analogous.

58. Nietzsche is adamant that even what we have come to regard as the a priori concepts of logical reasoning are but metaphors of the Dionysian, “retained and solidified in the memory.” Such concepts are, moreover, particularly weak metaphors, in that they are “compatible with very many phenomena and [are] for that reason extremely rough and inadequate to each particular appearance” (Nietzsche, “The Philosopher: Reflections on the Struggle between Art and Knowledge,” in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks, trans. Daniel Breazeale [Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Harvester Press, 1979], 144). Translating Nietzsche’s comments on language back into the terms of the Demoiselles, we might add that although all metaphors are masks, there are some that also contrive to mask that very fact. On these matters, see Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor, trans. Duncan Large (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), esp. chap. 3, “The Forgetting of Metaphor,” 23-58.

59. Nietzsche, sec. 3, “Attempt at a Self-Criticism”; trans. Kaufmann, 20.

60. Nietzsche himself seems to have arrived at something like this conclusion: “Great dilemma: is philosophy an art or a science? Both in its purposes and its results it is an art. But it uses the same means as science-conceptual representation. Philosophy is a form of artistic invention. There is no appropriate category for philosophy; consequently, we must make up and characterize a species for it.” Nietzsche (as in n. 58), 53, “The Philosopher,” quoted in Kofman (as in n. 58), 1.

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61. Nietzsche, sec. 1.

62. See Kofman (as in n. 58), esp. chap. 2, “Metaphor, Symbol, Metamorphosis,” 6-21.

63. On the issue of embodiment, see the “Editorial Note,” 3-6, by Rosalind Krauss that preceded “The Philosophical Brothel” when it was republished in October. Krauss points in particular to a passage on 50 (4-5): “Having contrasted the postures in Two Women (1906) [Fig. 6] with those in the Demoiselles, Steinberg writes, ‘Let the reader repeat these respective motions to experience the explosive psychic effect of abruptly released elbows.’ For Steinberg is speaking here of the difference in signification generated by means of the body - lived meaning, as it were - by comparing the ‘elbows that cleave to the trunk’ of Picasso’s Two Women and the subsequent abandon effected in the Demoiselles. In Steinberg’s analysis the meaning of the Demoiselles in all its profundity and ‘contagion’ is secured again and again in relation to the experience of the viewer’s inhabited body, a body which is understood as reenacting those meanings - ‘let the reader repeat . . .’ - in the present moment of experiencing the work. And it is clear that it is through this reenactment that meaning is wrested from the grip of all those texts that preceded the image, to be made, instead, a function of the reception of the work, since the corporeal resonance upon which meaning is shown to depend structures such meaning as present to, present along with, the image.”

64. Steinberg, 63.

65. Ibid.

66. Despite the fact that I have already cited each of them at some point above, it would perhaps be useful to list all three of the passages together here. The first appears on 43, where Steinberg quotes directly from Beyond Good and Evil in characterizing Picasso’s attitudes toward sex, as those attitudes are figured in the preparatory drawings for the Demoiselles. The accompanying footnote directs the reader to the next citation, on 46, for a fuller understanding of “Nietzsche’s relevance.” And it is on that page that we get both several quotations from The Birth of Tragedy (including the reference to “orgiastic immersion and Dionysian release”) and the footnote mentioning the popularity of that text among “the artists and poets of Barcelona and Paris at the turn of the century”; at this point, Steinberg also thanks Mark Rosenthal “for his insights into the Picasso-Nietzsche relation.” Finally, on 53-54, there is the passage describing the masklike faces of the right-most demoiselles, in which once again both explicit quotations from and more general references to The Birth of Tragedy are found. (I cite that passage in full in n.55 above.) It is perhaps also worth remarking that Steinberg chose to call his essay, as Picasso initially called his painting, “The Philosophical Brothel”-a superficially oxymoronic designation whose rough handling of “philosophy” Nietzsche no doubt would have applauded.

67. Although this has not happened, a number of scholars have picked up on the Nietzschean aspects of “The Philosophical Brothel” and attempted to link, even more explicitly than Steinberg, both Picasso’s oeuvre in general and the Demoiselles in particular to The Birth of Tragedy. See, for example, Karen Kleinfelder, “Monstrous Oppositions,” in Picasso and the Mediterranean (Humlebaek, Denmark: Louisiana, 1996), 22-33; and Mark Rosenthal, “The Nietzschean Character of Picasso’s Early Development,” 87-91, and RonJohnson, “The Demoiselles d’Avignon and Dionysian Destruction,” 102-13, both in Arts Magazine 55, no. 2 (Oct. 1980).

68. What Heidegger is trying to point to in “The Origin of the Work of Art” in writing of the interplay between “world” and “earth” seems closely related to what Nietzsche would show us under the rubrics of the “Apollonian” and “Dionysian.” As a recent commentator on Heidegger has written, “Earth is a pseudonym for the without-name.

It corresponds neither to the material, nor the sensible, nor even the elementary (or the a-historical), and resists all appropriation by meaning, so that to say earth as such is properly to disfigure it. This is nonetheless what happens in the project of the world. Earth appears, then, as an inappropriable remainder. Earth wants to say/means the unsayable, which precisely cannot and does not want to say (or be said), and which nonetheless will be said, but as unsayable, in and through the work.” Marc Froment-Meurice, That Is to Say: Heidegger’s Poetics, trans. Jan Plug (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 154.

69. In this respect, the present article might be compared with Stephen Melville’s “Positionality, Objectivity, Judgment,” in which parallels are drawn between The Birth of Tragedy and Michael Fried’s account of the 21

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development of modern art. See Melville, Seams: Art as a Philosophical Context (Amsterdam: G and B Arts International, 1996), 68-88.

70. I should admit that this interpretation of the Kantian sublime gives it a distinctly Heideggerian inflection. (For one thing, it imagines that works of art might offer instances of the sublime, whereas Kant insists that only nature does, since these things are, by definition, beyond human measure.) Should we feel ourselves in need of permission to take Kant in this direction, we can find it in, of all places, an article by Panofksy (one never translated into English and seemingly forgotten in his move to the United States): “In his book on Kant, Heidegger has some remarkable sentences about the nature of interpretation, sentences that on their face refer only to the interpretation of philosophical texts but at bottom characterize the problem of any interpretation. ‘Nevertheless, an interpretation limited to a recapitulation of what Kant explicitly said can never be a real explication, if the business of the latter is to bring to light what Kant, over and above his express formulation, uncovered in the course of his laying of the foundation. To be sure, Kant himself is no longer able to say anything concerning this, but what is essential in all philosophical discourse is not found in the specific propositions of which it is composed but in that which, although unstated as such, is made evident through these propositions.... It is true that in order to wrest from the actual words that which these words “intend to say,” every interpretation must necessarily resort to violence.’ We do well to recognize that these sentences concern also our modest descriptions of paintings and the interpretations we give of their contents to the extent that they do not rest at the level of simple statement but are already interpretations” (Panofsky, “Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der bildenden Kunst,” Logos 21 [1932]: 103ff.).

For a related discussion of Kant and the sublime, see Stephen Melville, “Counting /As / Painting,” in As Painting: Division and Displacement, by Philip Armstrong, Laura Lisbon, and Stephen Melville (Columbus: Wexner Center for the Arts; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 13. Melville also discusses Panofsky’s reference to Heidegger in his “Attachments of Art History,” In[]visible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Studies (Rochester, N.Y.) 1 (1999), at www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue 1 /melville/melville.html; as does Didi-Huberman (as in n. 40), 126-27.

71. We might want to see this pleasure as akin to what Nietzsche calls”tragic joy.”

72. Immanuel Kant, Critique ofJudgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 130.

73. Melville, 2001 (as in n. 70), 13.

74. Steinberg, 51.

75. Ibid., 52.

76. Nietzsche, sec. 8, my emphasis.

77. In sec. 8 Nietzsche says specifically that “we may call the chorus in its primitive form, in proto-tragedy, the mirror image in which the Dionysian man contemplates himself’; trans. Kaufmann, 63.

78. Steinberg, 52-53.

79. To the extent that the Demoiselles is able to recall us from our detached or “discontinuous” regard, it bears comparison with much of what Merleau-Ponty has to say about vision and painting. The similarities are all the more striking in that, like the Demoiselles, Merleau-Ponty’s writings were produced out of a prolonged engagement with the art of Paul Cezanne. In particular, Merleau-Ponty is interested in Cezanne’s “touch” and the way that, at least in his landscapes and still lifes, those probing strokes of paint appear to emphasize a continuity between the visual and the tactile (or, to borrow Riegl’s terminology, the optic and the haptic), which in turn emphasizes the painter’s own continuity with the “flesh” of the world. This is in marked contrast to our usual imaginings of vision, which tend to regard it as a substitute for direct contact rather than another mode of it. (As Stephen Melville [as in n. 4] has written, for Merleau-Ponty human vision is a way that “the world touches itself and imagines that touch as distance.”) On this view, the development of both Renaissance perspective and Panofsky’s iconological method might be seen as symptomatic of our tendency to misrecognize our relation to the visual-or, again, as ways in which our (Dionysian) continuity with the world has been made to conceal itself.

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80. In his essay “The ‘Primitive’ Unconscious of Modern Art,” Hal Foster writes of the Demoiselles as if he had been left unaffected in just this way-or, rather, he writes as if the painting were specifically intended to leave us in that state. He characterizes Picasso as an artist who “turned the ‘trauma’ of the other into an ‘epiphany’ of the same” and argues, “If, in the Demoiselles, Picasso transgresses, he does so in order to mediate the primitive in the name of the West (and it is in part for this that he remains the hero of MOMA’s narrative of the triumph of modern art). In this regard, the Demoiselles is indeed a primal scene of primitivism, one in which the structured relation of narcissism and aggressivity is revealed. Such confrontational identification is peculiar to the Lacanian imaginary, the realm to which the subject returns when confronted with the threat of difference.” It seems to me significant, however, that Foster’s essay is, in the main, a review of the 1984 exhibition “Primitivism” in Twentieth-Century Art held at the Museum of Modern Art, which was curated by William Rubin. If Foster sees the Demoiselles, then, as reflecting only the Lacanian imaginary (rather than some intertwining of the Symbolic and the Real, as I argued in n. 56 above), it may well be because he was responding primarily to the presentation of the painting given in the exhibition and in Rubin’s essay on Picasso in the accompanying catalogue. See Foster, “The ‘Primitive’ Unconscious in Modern Art,” October 34 (fall 1985): 45-70; and Rubin, “Picasso,” in “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, ed. William Rubin (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984).

81. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter, ed. Diane Michelfelder and Richard Palmer (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), 110, quoted in James Risser, Hermeneutics and the Voice of the Other (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), 182.

82. Nietzsche, sec. 8. In truth, Nietzsche says, “This is no longer the art of the rhapsodist, who does not merge with his images but, like the painter, contemplates them as something outside himself’ (my emphasis). If I omitted the reference to painting in my original quotation of the text, it was - I hope obviously enough - because the whole point is that the Demoiselles is not a work of that sort. But, of course, the understanding of painting implicit in Nietzsche’s remark also has its place in the present argument: what makes the Demoiselles such a compelling work is that most other paintings allow us more easily to imagine that we contemplate them as something wholly outside ourselves.

83. This may be the place to point out that despite his aggressively phallic porrón - a Spanish vessel for drinking wine-the sailor of the preparatory drawings appears (and is indeed characterized by Steinberg as) “strangely demure,” overshadowed by the demoiselles, and in this sense “inundated by womankind”; see Steinberg, 37-38.

84. Nietzsche, sec. 5, makes a similar point about the objectivity of Archilochus’s lyrical poetry, which earlier scholars had characterized as thoroughly subjective. The issue of Steinberg’s own “subjective” voice is raised probably somewhat less frequently among modernists than it is by Renaissance art historians, who are rather more accustomed to a willfully detached, Panofskian tone. Perhaps we will be forgiven if their criticism reminds us yet again of a passage from The Birth of Tragedy (sec. 2, trans. Kaufmann, 40-41): “To grasp this collective release of all the symbolic powers, man must have already attained the height of self-abnegation which seeks to express itself symbolically through these powers - and so the dithyrambic votary of Dionysus is understood only by his peers.

With what astonishment must the Apollonian Greek have beheld him! With an astonishment that was all the greater the more it was mingled with the shuddering suspicion that this was actually not so very alien to him after all, in fact, that it was only his Apollonian consciousness that, like a veil, hid this Dionysian world from his vision.”

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