Why Child Models?

Narrator: Philosopher and psychologist Theodore Lipps’s theory of empathy relates directly to philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s Dionysian concept of impassioned devotion to life and to the world of sensuous perception, in contrast to the enthusiasm for science and rationalism that prevailed at the time. Nineteenth-century individuals, in Nietzsche’s opinion, had been “ruined for living, for correct and simple seeing and hearing, for the fortunate grasping of what is closest at hand and natural and . . . without trust in any unique sensation which is not yet franked with words”.
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The Brücke artists were enthusiastic adherents of Nietzsche’s philosophy, professing as much in their manifesto when they spoke of a new “generation of creators and enjoyers” seeking to carve out a freedom for their “arms and lives” in opposition to “comfortably established older forces”.
 
Lipps’s theory was useful here because it offered guidance on how to render “directly and honestly” those things that “impell[ed] their creativity”. The role of the child models was evidently to supply an uninhibited life force that would help the artists to achieve greater authenticity in their open-air group nudes and live-in studios. Lipps maintained that children, lacking in experience, displayed a “rudimentary” and “undifferentiated” urge to move about, which unfolded fully in “free play” and exerted an impact on the “things of nature” because their inherent “vitality” triggered an “act of animation”. Nature, in other words, was more or less brought to life by the “free play” of the child.
 
Nietzsche felt similarly that the “powerful healing instinct of this same nature” was preserved in youth. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, which was a source of inspiration to the Brücke artists, Nietzsche described how the human spirit undergoes three metamorphoses on the path to healing, regressive steps that ultimately lead back to childhood.
 
Nietzsche wrote: “The child is innocence and oblivion, a new starting, a play, a wheel rolling by itself, a prime motor, a holy asserting. Ay, for the play of creating, my brethren, a holy asserting is wanted: it is its own will that the spirit now willeth, it is its own world that the recluse winneth for himself.”
 
In this sense, the group excursions by the Brücke artists might be interpreted as a live enactment of this third metamorphosis, with the child models functioning as guarantors for the ability of the artists to “live out life freely”, as Lipps proposed in his advice for putting into practice Nietzsche’s philosophical formula: the sacred act of “saying ay” to an aesthetic appropriation of the world.