Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Circus (Circus Rider), 1913. Oil on canvas Pinakothek der Moderne. Photo: Pinakothek der Moderne
This is an excerpt from Meike Hoffmann’s catalogue essay “The Children Who Modelled for Brücke: Observations from the Perspective of Aesthetic Theory and Moral Ethics”.
The Specific Beauty of the Human Body
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Narrator: The Brücke artists drew inspiration from Munich philosopher and psychologist Theodor Lipps, for whom everything revolved around the psychological process of empathy.
The group’s founders had been taught his theory when they were studying architecture in Dresden. According to the aesthetic theory published by Lipps in 1903, “the key to understanding beauty [lies] within the human soul” insofar as “it is only from within the human that the beauty of nature outside the human can be understood at all”.
This beauty was not rooted in external form, the symmetry of the body, or pleasant proportions, and so people were not of merely anatomical interest to painters.
“People . . . are not beautiful because of their shapes; the shapes are beautiful because they are human shapes and hence, for us, the vehicles of human life.”
To Lipps, anything was beautiful as long as it exuded life and vitality. The “specific beauty of the human body”, he argued, lay in its ability to “directly demonstrate the content and potential of life”.
Capturing the “specific beauty” of a person required empathy with their body. (…) Only when the artist empathised with a form did this form acquire content, enabling it to be perceived aesthetically. This was most easily achieved with a moving body, for a body displays its “life content” most intensely in a state of motion.
By “feeling into” the movements of a body, the observer was able not only to imagine the “inner condition” of the person observed but also “in a certain sense or to a certain degree to experience it”.