Reconstructing the Subject: Modernist Painting in Western Germany, 1945-1950 (review)

It would be too bad if the apparently narrow focus of this book—five years of post-World War II German art, represented by relatively obscure artists such as Ernst and Wilhelm Nay—caused it to be overlooked. Inside the deliberately circumscribed limitations of her topic, Yule Heibel makes a profoundly sophisticated contribution to scholarship on post-World War II art history. Concentrating on German artists’ and critics’ efforts to reestablish viable cultural practices, she turns her evaluation of the relatively minor painter Nay into a discussion that has implications for a great range of visual art produced after 1945. This is because the major issue in this study is the concept of artistic subjectivity as a battleground for ideological debate. In the post-1945 era of reconstruction and subsequent Cold War politics, ideas of the arts and the individual artist were freighted with heavy burdens of expectation. Both were to manifest the value-laden aims of the moment—to participate in healing, recovery, and renewal—while assuming the appearance of being mere aesthetic expression. Heibel achieves an exemplary integration of theory-based conception and philosophical analysis, bringing both to bear on a tightly focused study of particular artists and works in their interaction with specific historical circumstances.

The concept of subjectivity that is central to Heibel’s discussion is centered in philosophy rather than psychoanalysis, and she eschews conventional Freudian and Lacanian constructions of subjectivity, with their by now commonplace (in art history) formulas of identification, negation, and fetishism as mechanisms through which to examine the seductive effects of images in their replication of mirror stage activity or presymbolic conditions. Instead, her paradigm foregrounds the dialectic of subject/object relations. She contrasts the positions of Martin Heidegger and Theodor Adorno and their articulations of two radically different possibilities for understanding individual identity in post-1945 Germany (and, by qualified implication, the international community in the wake of World War II, the Holocaust, and Hiroshima). Acknowledging the well rehearsed discussions of Heidegger’s rejection of modernism and technology and his advocacy of a return to mythic origins, as well as Adorno’s equally well established critique of “instrumental rationality,” Heibel establishes a link between these two outlooks and certain varieties of formal visual language, demonstrating the engagement of individual painters with similar philosophical issues, even when their engagement is unwitting or evident mainly in aspects of their visual practice. Heidegger’s mythification of irrationality established a conceptual foundation for an “expressionless subject,” one that loses itself in a relationship with an object (art, thought, society, the mass, the group). Adorno pointedly opposed Heidegger’s position by demonstrating the need for a more subtle form of critical rationality, one in which an individual subject’s identity is formulated by maintaining a crucial awareness of difference from the object. Subject/object difference, at a philosophically fundamental level, is achieved by the recognition that thought (the object) is always distinct from that which thinks it (the subject). Adorno rejected Heidegger’s search for authenticity in archaic rituals that might efface this difference through a process of absorbing all perception into a condition of Being. For Adorno such a process replayed the all too obvious problems associated with the willingness of any subject to be entirely subsumed in relations of identification (individual with collectivity, soldier with army, citizen with leader, etc.).

The complexities of this argument are the stuff of critical theory, and Heibel’s assessment, lucid and distilled, has the intellectual rigor of the best critical texts, such as those of Douglas Kellner, Terry Eagleton, Martin Jay, or Susan Buck-Morss. She is able to plumb the depths of Adorno’s work, bring to the surface crucial features of a critical methodology, and paraphrase them in comprehensible terms. But for Heibel there is something else at stake: the necessity to locate her discussion within the particulars of the artistic crises of the period while defining critical activity in terms that preserve a belief in the...