Empathy abstracted : George Fuchs and the Munich Artists' Theater

Abstract

Founded by the art critic Georg Fuchs and built by the architect Max Littmann in 1908, the Munich Artists' Theater is famous for its shallow "relief stage." Reworking the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche and Richard Wagner in the service of the emerging mass audience, Fuchs advocated "the stage of the future," but created one embedded in its historical moment. Eliciting reactions from major figures in theater, architecture, and the visual arts, it provoked debate over the nature of spectatorship and crystallizes the complex relationship between empathy and abstraction, foundational concepts in modernist aesthetic discourse and artistic production. The relief stage embodied the modernist discourse of flatness; the performances it presented may be allied to the contemporaneous birth of abstraction in Munich. Evoking the newly popular film screen, it faced an amphitheatrical auditorium suitable for the emerging mass audience. The publication that year in Munich of Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy, which articulated the "urge to abstraction," a universal, visceral response to art, registered the spectator's changing status in aesthetic discourse. But Fuchs was inspired by the discussion of relief sculpture presented in 1893 by the sculptor and visual theorist Adolf von Hildebrand. Through Hildebrand, he absorbed the theory of empathy, developed in late nineteenth-century aesthetic philosophy, psychology, and visual theory to describe the spectator's experience as a form of active and embodied vision. Fuchs attempted both to create and serve the mass audience, but he relied on an outmoded aesthetic model while abstraction was brewing in Munich. Ignoring Worringer's displacement of theoretical allegiances from empathy to abstraction, he never linked the relief stage to the aesthetic theory being embraced by the Munich avant-garde. His political leanings were equally conservative; he valued theater's ability to mold a group of individual spectators into the unified audience that he considered necessary for the creation of a strong German state. The promotion and reception of the Artists' Theater in 1908 present a turning point between the solitary bourgeois viewer of the nineteenth century implied by empathy and the mass audience of the 1920s, often described in terms of abstraction, distraction, and estrangement.