Hubert Damisch, 'L'œil théoricien', in: Josef Albers [exhibition catalogue] (Tourcoing: Musée des Beaux Arts, 1988), translated by Anthony Auerbach.

This translation was first made for a seminar at Jan van Eyck Academie in 2008. It is published in the Journal of Art Historiography, no. 5, December 2011.

The eye, the most theoretical of all the senses.

Karl Marx, 1844 Manuscripts [note 1]

Contrary to received opinion, Freud’s respect for artistic types was not unqualified. ‘Meaning is but little with these men, all they care [for] is line, shape, agreement of contours. They are given up to the Lustprinzip.’ [note 2] This judgement, reported by Ernest Jones, does not necessarily belie the interest the founder of psychoanalysis showed in artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and even Signorelli, who enjoy a truly exceptional status in our culture. The nuance of contempt it implies (that seemed to justify the fascination with ‘pure visibility’ among the German aestheticians of the end of the [nineteenth] century that Benedetto Croce denounced around the same time) could just as well go hand in hand with a poorly disguised envy. Neither Leonardo’s personality, the Orvieto frescos, nor the figure of Moses would have held Freud’s attention for long, or awoken in him an echo, be it unconscious, were it not for the enigma which they posed to him. An enigma which was not a matter of lines, forms or contours (as for colour, Freud did not breathe a word about it in his letter to Jones), but whose scope was measured out for him in terms of meaning [signification], and moreover in terms of the Reality Principle, in so far as it was [an enigma] susceptible of interfering with his own history, his own past, his own obsessions, his own neurosis.

Josef Albers is without any doubt, among modern artists, the one who would seem to correspond the best, the most explicitly, the most deliberately, with Freud’s characterisation: disregarding every consideration of representation or of expression, did not this artist, usually seen as the product par excellence of Bauhaus ideology, set himself the programme of working, as both painter and teacher, on the development of a veritable, but strictly experimental, culture of the eye, supposed to lead, as he said about colour, to an increase of pleasure [un plus de plaisir] (‘its greatest excitement’ [note 3]), beyond received rules and canons? [note 4 ] To this end, a good part of Albers’ work, and still more of his teaching, was brought to bear precisely on colour considered in and for itself. But the neglect of colour among the formal components of art would not be surprising on the part of someone like Freud, who always insisted, not without some complacency, indeed with a barely hidden feeling of superiority, that he was not, himself, a ‘visual’ type and that words were his natural element.

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‘The Theoretical Eye’, paper presented by Anthony Auerbach at the symposium Hubert Damisch: Dialogues with Others, University of Amsterdam, 29 May 2009 ...
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Notes [The translator's additions are indicated with square brackets]

1. [Damisch writes, ‘L’œil, le plus théorique de tous les sens.’ Marx writes, ‘Die Sinne sind daher unmittelbar in ihrer Praxis Theoretiker geworden.’ ‘The senses have therefore become directly in their practice theoreticians.’ Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. by Martin Milligan, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing, 1959, 107.] [back to text]
2. Sigmund Freud, letter to Ernest Jones, 8 February 1914, cited by Jones. Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, The Last Phase 1919–1939, London: Hogarth Press, 1957, 441. [Jones’ alteration of Freud’s English is indicated. See Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones, The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones, 1908–1939, ed. by R. Andrew Paskauskas, Cambridge MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993, 260–61. Freud writes, ‘In the Moses affair I am growing negative again, the last artist I consulted showed me what the way of artists in such matters is and made me afraid of too sharp an interpretation. Meaning is but little with these men, all they care is line, shape, agreement of contours. They are given up to the Lustprinzip. I prefer to be cautious.’] [back to text]
3. [In English in the original.] [back to text]
4. Josef Albers, Interaction of Color, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1971, 66. [Albers writes, ‘With the discovery that color is the most relative medium in art, and that its greatest excitement lies beyond rules and canons, a more sensitive discrimination was needed’ - compared, that is, with the formal colour systems, theories, wheels, etc. that could be taught.] [back to text]