Georg Simmel - Essays on Art and Aesthetics

EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY AUSTIN HARRINGTON

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2020 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2020

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-62093-0 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-62109-8 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-62112-8 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226621128.001.0001

Sociological Aesthetics, On Aesthetic Quantities, On the Third Dimension in Art, and The Dramatic Actor and Realilty reprinted with permission of the publisher from Georg Simmel: The Conflict in Modern Culture and Other Essays (New York: Teachers College Press). 1968 Teachers College Press, Columbia University. All rights reserved.

The Handle and The Aesthetic Significance of the Face reprinted with permission of the publisher from George Simmel, 18581918: A Collection of Essays, with Translations and a Bibliography, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1959).

Goethe and the Creative Life reprinted with permission of the publisher from The Anthem Companion to Georg Simmel, ed. Thomas Kemple and Olli Pyyhtinen (London: Anthem Press/Wimbeldon Publishing, 2016).

The following essays are reproduced with permission of the publisher from Theory, Culture and Society: On Art Exhibitions, 32, no. 1 (January 2015): 8792; The Picture Frame: An Aesthetic Study, 11, no. 1 (February 1994): 1117; Individualism in Art, 24, nos. 78 (December 2007): 7176; Germanic and Classical Romanic Style, 24, nos. 78 (December 2007): 5358; and The Philosophy of Landscape, 24, nos. 78 (December 2007): 2029. 1994, 2007, 2017 SAGE Publications.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Simmel, Georg, 18581918, author. | Harrington, Austin, 1970 translator, editor.

Title: Essays on art and aesthetics / Georg Simmel ; edited and with an introduction by Austin Harrington.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2020. | Translated from German. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020001532 | ISBN 9780226620930 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226621098 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226621128 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Aesthetics. | ArtsPhilosophy. | ArtPhilosophy.

Classification: LCC B3329.S62 .E54 2020 BH21 | DDC 111/.85dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020001532

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI / NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Georg Simmel (18581918) is best known today as the author of several groundbreaking studies in modern European social criticism and philosophy. Many readers will know him for works such as The Philosophy of Money (1900) or Sociology: Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms (1908), and for essays such as The Metropolis and Mental Life, The Stranger, and The Concept and Tragedy of Culture. Yet less well appreciated are many highly original writings by Simmel on movements and personalities of the arts in European cultural history from the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century. These include book-length studies of Goethe and Rembrandt, as well as a plethora of essays on figures from Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci to Auguste Rodin, on forms and media of art, on philosophies of the arts after Kant and Schopenhauer, and on sociological circumstances of the arts in modern culture and economy.

Scholars of Simmels writings have long recognized the importance of art and aesthetics to Simmels vision of modern forms of society. Commentators have long emphasized that artistic and aesthetic images of the world form at once an object of Simmels concerns and a mediumperhaps even the mediumof his entire style and practice of investigation. Constantly, Simmel writes in a way that elaborates symbols, metaphors, tropes, and analogies as experimental clues to an illumination of the deep structures of mind and behavior that preoccupy him. Yet the distinctively plastic, relational, even in some respects diffuse, character of his writing, combined with the highly dispersed fate of his publications after his death, has meant that for many years, the significance of art and aesthetics in his oeuvre has been difficult to determine in the overview.

Himself very aware of the scattered and incomplete nature of his writings on art, Simmel had at many stages sought to produce some form of integrated volume on the field. Repeatedly, he spoke to friends of his plans for a major study of the Philosophie der Kunst, as he termed it. Writing to the philosopher Heinrich Rickert in May 1901, he described the project as a burning and dominant interest of his for some years. This declaration he reiterated to Rickert in April 1902, and again in 1905, and yet again in 1907 to his son Hans. On 26 September 1918, Simmel died, barely six weeks before the end of the Great Warleaving behind a vast array of texts, many of them largely unknown before work began in the 1980s on a collected edition of his writings, the Georg-Simmel-Gesamtausgabe, published in Germany by Suhrkamp Verlag (19892014).

This collection of Simmels essays presents a thematic arrangement of his writings. It follows a format designed to suggest the shape of the project he might have sought to develop in his lifetime. Approximately a third of the volumes content exists in English translations already, but the pieces are dispersed over journal issues and edited collections dating back to the 1960s, and some are not easily accessible. Those earlier translations, slightly edited, are here supplemented with fresh translations of the remaining two-thirds of Simmels texts. A thematic arrangement has been chosen to highlight Simmels prevailing concerns and to honor the priority he almost certainly would have given to substantive clusters over simple linear chronology.

Readers wholly new to these writings, however, may appreciate first of all an account of the complex threads underlying the essays, few of which are likely to be clear from any one item read in isolationor perhaps even two or three items. Thus this extended introduction begins by outlining the circumstances of Simmels involvement with artistic currents of his time and the concepts he brings to bear in his analyses (1, 2). Subsequent sections explain the key ideas driving his picture of formative events in European art history, together with the importance he attaches to urbanization, industrialization, and individualization as dynamics in the shaping of modern structures of culture (3, 4, 5). Four further sections elucidate Simmels statements on problems of autonomy, representation, and expression in art and on diverse forms, genres, and styles of modern art (6, 7, 8, 9). A final section surveys Simmels impact in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art theory and his import for debate today (10).

In contrast to his great contemporary in German sociology, Max Weber, relatively little is known about Simmels personal circumstances and the direct sources of inspiration for his writings. Rarely a user of footnotes, Simmel seldom offers clues to the contexts, motives, and origins of his ideas, and much of what was almost certainly a voluminous correspondence with friends and associates, which might have revealed these impulses, is today lost. In the late 1880s, through his Berlin friend Sabine Lepsius, daughter of Gustav Graef and wife of Reinhold Lepsiusall three paintersSimmel met his future wife, Gertrud Kinel (herself a painter), and, together, the couple played host to and attended numerous salons of artistic figures throughout the following two decades.