ANALECTA HUSSERLIANA

THE YEARBOOK OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH

VOLUME LXIII

Editor-in-Chief:

ANN,q,- TrnesA, TvI\4IeNIECKA

The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning

B elmont, Mas sdchus etts

E ORCHESTRATION OF THEARTS _ A CREATIVE

MBIOSIS OF EXISTENTIALPOWERS

Vibrating Interplay of Sound, ColorImage, Gesture, Movement, Rhythm,

Fragrance, Word, Touch

Edited by

MARLIES KRONEGGER

M ichi gan State U niv ersity

" Published under the auspices ofWorld Institute for Advanced Phenornenological Research and Learning

A-T. Tlmieniecka, President

eYEMIC PUBLISHERSBOSTON/LONDON

Lrl

KLUWERACADDORDRECHT/For sequel volumes see the end of this volume.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

rsBN 0-7923-6008-7

TABLE OF CONTENTS

EDGEMENTS/ The Orchestration of the Arts: A New Approach to

QuestionsI(RONEG GER / Introduction

SECTION ONEHISTORY, ARCHITECTURE, STAGING,. PAINTING, DECORATION:

WITHIN A SYMPHONY OF THE ARTS

KIMMEL / Paradox and Metaphor: An Integrity of the Arts 5BRUHN /Aesthetic Symbiosis and Spiritual Quest:

Isenheim Altarpiece in Hindemith's Operafur Maler,OSEPHS / The Ambiguity of Baroque Enchantment:Mlse enAbyme

E, ORIM / The Musicalization of Prose: Prolegomena to theof Literature in Musical Form

TOUILLBR / Calder6n's Dramatic Technique: The Orchestrationrlfitt, From Drama to Opera 75

E: HOOPLE / Baroque Splendor: Vierzehnheiligen Church andB-Minor Mass

SECTIONTWOSHARING IN CREATIVE AND COSMIC SYNERGIES

RAY / Orchestration of tle Universe: Reflections on Tagore,s

COBLSCH.FOISNER / The Synergies of Mind and Muse:on Nineteenth-Century Thought and A Comparative

of Dante Gabriel Rosetti's Poem and Painting The Blessedrnd Claude Debussy's La Demoiselle Elue

3CHOLZ / The Interdependency of Literature, Architecture,fnd Music as an Expression of Baroque Absolutism at the

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Court in Vienna 135

v1 TABLE OF CONTENTS

MARIE-oDILE SwEETSER / Literature and Architecture as a Metaphor

of "Grandeur" and "Decadence"RICHARD A. ErLIN / Louis Sullivan: The Life-Enhancing Symbiosis

of Music, Language, Architecture, and OrnamentSIDNEY FESHBACH /An Orchestration of the Arts in Wallace Stevens'

"Peter Quince at the Clavier"

SECTION THREETHE SYMBIOSIS AND THE INTERACTION OF THE ARTS

JASoN sNART / The Harmonic Conceit: Music, Nature and Mindin Wordworth's Prelude

RACHEL E. PERRY I Histoire de L'Aveugle: "Matidrisme"'s Critiqueof Vision

CYNTHIA RUoFF / Images of Water and the Sea in Tristan L Hermite's"La Mer" and in Painting

SECTION FOURARTS INTERACTING WITH OUR PERCEPTION OF NATURE AND HUMAN LIFE

PATRICIA TRUTTY-CooHILL / Fire and lce: Le Vrai Magique,RoBERT c. SCHAFFER / W. E. B. du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk

as an Example of the TragicToNY RACZTa / The Blending of Natures and the Perception of

the RealNANCY CAMPI DE CASTRo / The Symbiosis and the Interaction of

the Arts: Cesdrio Verde, Poet / PainterKAREN KARBIENER / This is Mine, and I Can Hold It:

Edna St. Vincent Millay and her Music

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183

197

209

241

257

265

275

283

293

SECTION FIVETHE POETIC INTER-REFLECTION OF THE ARTS

DEBRA sAN / The Terpsichorean Poem 305

cEoRGE R. TIBBETTS / A Study in Nostalgia: The Orchestrationof Life in Fagade. The Edith Sitwell-William Walton Musico-Poetic

Collaboration 315

LYDIA V0RoNINA / Interreflection of Complementary Expressive

Means in Combined-Media Art Performances 325

---.,=ffi,"--

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ELISABETH McCULLoUGH / The Orchestration of theIn Lei'la Sebbar's Shdrazade, l7 ans, brune,.frisde,

yau& vertsROSSI / Beauty and the Dialogue of the Arts:

about Gadamer

vll

343

351

365

379

391

4014r7

437

469

SECTION SIXARTS NURTURING HUMAN CULIURE

N. VAN LIERE / A Look at Modernism from the Keyboard:Plano in the Parlor and Abstract Art

TRoUSDALE / Pierre Puvis de Chavannes,Wagner and 6mile Bernard: Composition and Meaning

Late Nineteenth CenturyF, VOLKMAR / The Temporal Character of Catherine Schieve's

OperaI, BURNS /An Unfolding of Theory and Practice:Ingarden to a Phenomenological Aesthetic for Opera

SHIBLES / Emotion, Metaphor, Music, and HumorIE WEAVER / The Cultural Milieu of Francis Poulenc

1963) and his "Musique de Tous les Jours" (including a

of his works for piano)

OF NAMES

164 MARrE-oDrLE swEETsER

2t La Fontaine, Le Songe de Vaux in Oeuvres diverses,6d. Pierre Clarac, Pldiade (Paris:Gallimard, 1958), p. 82. All references to La Fontaine's Oeuvres diverses will be to this editionand will be indicated in the text by 0. D.22 Alain Gdnetiot, "Un art podtique galant: Adonis, lz Songe de Vaux, Les Amours de Psychi,"Littiratures classiques 29, 1997, 4746. OnPalatiane & Calliopde,6546.23 Robert N. Nicolich, "The Triumph of Language: The Sister Arts and Creative Activity in LaFontaine's Songe de Vaux," L'Esprit crdateur, Jean de La Fontaine issue, Guest ed. David LeeRubin, vo1. XXI, No.4, Winter 1981, l0-21.

RICHARD A. ETLIN

LOUIS SULLTVAN: THE LIFE-ENHANCING SYMBIosISOF MUSIC, LANGUAGE, ARCHITECTURE,

AND ORNAMENT*

Louis sullivan is generally regarded as the architect who pioneered acompelling form for the new American building type, the tall office building,and who devised an inimitable system of architectural ornament. Sullivan,scontributions to metaphysics and aesthetic education are less well known andhave usually been treated primarily as echoes of the thought of Schiller andwhitman. when scholars have noted the transcendentalist aspect ofSullivan's mind, they then have proceeded to consider those qualities ofSullivan's architecture and ornament which display a translation of transcen-dentalist ideas or related Swedenborgian principles into symbolic form.r Incontrast to this approach, which is certainly valid within its establishedparameters, I will focus on the phenomenological aspect of Sullivan's workto relate the deep aesthetic and spiritual experience which he sought to instillin his audience to those specific qualities of his writings and his visual andplastic art which he developed for that purpose.

Louis sullivan, in the words of his friend, the architect and critic claudeBragdon, was "the ecstatic soul shot through with awe and wonder at thebeauty and mystery of ever-unfolding life."2 As with the transcendentalists,nature for Sullivan presented a spectacle of a universal life force. If theindividual could feel deeply the power and rhythm of that "flow of life,"3then he or she would know the moral force which shows us goodness; theexistential power which reveals to us our inherent, latent capacities for self-development and for social cooperation and cohesiveness, these threecapacities - moral, individual, and societal - forming the basis ofdemocracy; and the aesthetic capacity which sensitizes us to the beauty ofthis world, a beauty that is essentially a coloration of the life force whosefullest experience imparts spiritual understanding, grounded in wonder andawe.

All of these capacities and powers were for Sullivan, as for Emerson, thedifferentiated facets of a unifying central divine principle, which Sullivanvariously called "the Infinite Creative Spirit,, (126), the..Infinite power,,(204), or "the ultimate One" (245), as if this plurality of designations could

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M. Kronegger (ed.), Analecta Husserliana LXIll,165-182.@ 2000 Kluwer Academk: Publishert Printed in the Netherlunds.

r66 RICHARD A. ETLIN

somehow capture its all-embracing inclusiveness and completeness.a InEmerson's words about the Over-Soul:

[T]he soul in man... is the vast background of our being, in which [our organs, functions, and

facultiesl lie, an immensity not possessed and that cannot be possessed. ... When it breathes

through his intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows

through his affection. it is love.s

Similarly, Sullivan would write, "every function is neither more nor less than

a subdivision of that energy which we call the Infinite Creative Spirit." This,he explains, is "the metaphysical basis of our philosophy" (126). To followSullivan into the realm of political philosophy would entail a study of how he

saw this undifferentiated power subdivided or colored differently as religion,morals, and government, all branches in his mind of the democratic principleand all directed by "the power to choose," which is "the central power of the

Ego" and the force that makes man into o'a moral being" (131). To followSullivan into the realm of spirituality and the arts would entail a study of howhe understood the work of "the ultimate One" which "spreads as a spectacle

before us the FLOW OF CREATION," a spectacle to which man must"awaken" (245).

To understand this "flow of creation," which Sullivan also calls "the flowof life," requires an experiential or phenomenological appreciation. Its path is

through the senses; its organ ofunderstanding is the heart; its goal is the spiritdeep within each one ofus. "I have talked to you ofthe training ofthe senses;

and I have told you that physical senses are the only avenues whereby the

outer world can reach your inner world; that the senses.have a higher and

lower range, the one called physical, the other spiritual" (184). "I have sought

to impress upon you, with all the insistence of my own nature, that the heart

is greater, worthier, nobleq finer than the head: - that the heart is the innersanctuary of the temple of Man" (183). The heart, as the seat of feeling, mustbecome attuned to nature, whose essential message, in conveying the lifeforce, is rhythm. Sullivan's task as an artist was to sensitize his audience tonature's rhythms directly through an account of nature itself and indirectlythrough an art which captures the same vital energy: "For I would give you ofyour art some adequate notion of its possible beauty, its endless capacity forexpression, its fluency, its lyric quality, its inexhaustible dramatic power -when it comes into kinship with Nature's rhythms" (222). Sullivan the artistwished to place people "in touch with Nature" such that they would 1'be

vitalized by her infinitely subtle power" (198). To that end he invested hiswritings, his architecture, and his ornament with rhythms that conveyednature's vital energies. Each of these art forms - prose poems, buildings, and

LOUIS SULLIVAN

decoration - were differentiated aspects of "the Infinite Creative Spirit" and"the ultimate One." Each was life enhancing. All operated in a mutuallyreinforcing symbiosis ofconcerted effect and shared principles.

When we consider Sullivan's writing, his architecture, and his ornament,we find that they share two main features: the rhythmic patterning conveysthe sense of flow and often creates an effect of crescendo. Both wereconceived to express nature's vitality and to stimulate the inner feeling ofvital energies within the audience or the viewer. This rhythmic patterning,along with the particular ambience of a scene - what Sullivan called nature's"mood" - he readily assimilated to music, as he repeatedly spoke of the songof the seasons, especially of the life-enhancing season of spring: hence, "themelody of spring" (239,252) and the "song of spring" (39). Sullivan usedthese reiterated references to song as equivalents to the "rhythm" of nature:hence, "Nature's moods and rhythms" (156) and "the rhythm of Summer'sclose" (156). This reference to the song of nature is not an empty metaphor;neither is the conjunction of rhythm with song an idle play of words. Rather,they both reflect the lyrical sense of flow that one feels in the "inmost soul"(222) when viewing the world of nature.

In addition, this coupling of rhythm with song responds to the musicalaccomplishments of the two most important nineteenth-century composerswhose music operated directly in the realm of vital feeling, Beethoven andWagner. Beethoven's driving rhythm, with its successively buildingcrescendos, finds echoes in Sullivan's prose style, as does the general sweep

of Wagner's musical form, which, even more than Beethoven, broke downthe clear periodic phrase structure bequeathed by the age of Haydn andMozart to effectuate a sense of long-range flow through ambiguousbeginnings and endings to the musical phrase, while investing this music withchords whose dissonance is resolved in a multiplicity of ways. We know thatSullivan was 'an ardent Wagnerian," a self-characterization that should haveimportant implications for understanding not only Sullivan's style of writingbut also his system of ornament.6 Wagner's sense of flow and Beethoven'sbuilding crescendo inform the following out-of-doors passage of trulyWagnerian length from the Kindergarten Chats, in which Sullivan criticizesthe creative insensitivity of the contemporary Beaux-Arts architect, whom he

derisively calls an "arkitek":

I will hazard a surmise that this particular arkitek never made his bed of boughs in the sombergloom of the primeval forest; never saw the gleam of opalescent eyes across the waning firelight;never heard the curdling cry of the screech-owl overhead; nor the distant wolfish bark, - nowfaint, now louder, - always hungry, - ever passionately mournful; nor the low, sudden moan ofthe forest, in night's stillest, breathless hour, as an aged giant hemlock sank heavily to earth; nor

167

168 RICHARD A. ETLIN

saw the dawn break, pale and white through the filmy branches, interlaced, of pine and tamarackand their stately brethren, - clustered upright and close in mute communion; nor heard the belchof a fired musket bellow and roar and roll along the edge of a slumbering woodland lake, - nowfainting around its capes and bays, now swelling aloud and dying again, reaching around and

turning back in reverberation upon reverberation along the upright wall of woods, and breakingand flying to and fro across the startled waters in a wild harangue of echoes, - slowly blending,subsiding and melting into the air and into the forest slowly away, until, after long and long,stillness reigns again, and solitude: - engulfing and resolving the strange, harsh dissonance(6r-62).

I abbreviate this text, which continues onward one-and-a-half times as longas this excerpted passage. Such passages constituted for Sullivan what hecalled "the throb of universal life" (47). They were the song of nature, whichhe attempted to convey through words so that we would feel in "our hearts"what he called "the ceaseless song ofthe spirit" (47).

Words, Sullivan explained, acquire full meaning only when "inrhythmical, organized motion" (46). This motion the poet was to use for thepurpose of "seeking an expression of life" (226),becatse "the vital essence

of things... is... the search after life" (52). To this end, Sullivan used figuresof elocution codified by classical rhetoric which could be employed to createeither a sense ofcrescendo or a bursting forth ofthe spirit. The quintessentialfigure of elocution with the potential to deliver a forward thrust of psychicenergy is systrophe. Apparently introduced formally as a concept in Englishrhetoric by Peacham's Garden of Eloquence (1593), systrophe involvesa "heaping together" of attributes.T Each successive item adds to thecumulative effect of the previous ones, thereby engendering a feeling ofexpansiveness and, if carried to an extreme, of surfeit. .The itemization isoften felt as engaging sentience into a rhythmic pattern.

Sy strophe is one form of what Jean Mouton has termed I' inumiration andAnthony Hecht, "itemization," the former studying the crucial role of enu-meration in Proust's prose, the latter asserting the nearly universalappearance of "lists, catalogues, and itemizations" in poetry.8 Sullivan foundin systrophe the figure of elocution well suited to his enthusiasm for the vitalrhythms of life bursting forth in nature, which he celebrated in his poeticprose. In a passage in which Sullivan admonishes his readers to be true to"that divine energy which creates the springtime as it creates all things," he

combines two applications of systrophe with two related flgures of elocutionthat operate with syntactical symmetry, i.e, isocolon, which refers to clausesof equal length, and parison, which designates corresponding structure inconsecutive clauses, these two thereby creating a seesa% balancing motion:"Then will each new problem as it arises be for you an invitation, a welcome,

LOUIS SULLIVAN

a stimulant, an inspiration, a joy, and a thing to be affirmed; and not, aspitifully now, with the majority, a threat, a defiance, an obstruction, adispiriting wearisome obstacle, and a thing to be evaded, temporized with,shunned, and denied" (235). One variation on this rhetorical technique occursin the figure of incrementum, whercby the sense of intensification derives notmerely from the piling up of attributes but also by having each successiveterm augment in intensity, as in this criticism of American architecture: "Butthis is it! This droll and fantastical parody of logic, this finical mass ofdifficulties, this web of contradictions, this blatant fallacy, this repellent andindurated mess, this canker on the tongue ofnatural speech, this stupid bluff'(6). Note how just as in the earlier passage Sullivan ends with a directreference to a Wagnerian treatment of music - "engulfing and resolving thestrange, harsh dissonance" - here he culminates in an analogy between theunworthy building and disnatured speech.

But the real power comes from Sullivan's longer passages, in whichsystrophe creates a swelling crescendo. The following passage is dominatedby systrophe, to which Sullivan has added the effect of anaphora. wherebythe same word begins consecutive phrases or clauses. The use of anaphorahere intensifies the effect of cumulative building. Applied several times withdifferent and repeated opening words, with the figures even intertwined, thesemultiple instances of anaphora, gathered in conjunction with the overarchingorganization based on systrophe and seconded with isocolon and parison,create a complex rhythmic patterning:

Open the mind, open the heart to impressions at the very beginning. These are to the human heartwhat sunlight, soil and rain are to plants. Then let utterance of tlese impressions begin as soon asit is evident that they are impressions. Then new impressions, then new utterance - everreciprocal, ever penetrating, ever broadening, slowly but surely organizing, upbuilding,unfolding, ever growing more coherent, more plastic, more fluent, ever growing in receptivity,ever growing in aspiration, ever growing in mobility, ever growing in serenity. ever growingmore complex - paralleling the complexity of life, ever growing more simple - paralleling thesimplicity of life; ever gaining in strength, ever gaining in delicacy, ever fermenting, everclarifying those elemental qualities which are so subtle, and the most potent of all - the power ofreceiving, the power of uttering! (228)

With the interweaving of multiple figures of elocution in this invocation to"upbuilding" and "unfolding," the medium becomes the message, where thestructure mirrors Beethoven's music with its building motion that reachestemporary plateaus before continuing to build upward once again.e

At the heart of Sullivan's appreciation of nature is a Lucretian sense offlux, conveyed most effectively in the most Lucretian passage of the

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170 RICHARD A. ETLIN

Kindergarten Chats.ro Here Sullivan adds still another figure of elocution tosystrophe, this time using a form of inversion, antimetabole, by which the

terms of one clause are reversed in the next clause as in a mirror. Once againthis creates a seesaw parallelism. This long quotation is extracted from a stilllonger paragraph. I present the last section of the text, which also employsisocolon, parison, and anaphora:

A1l is growth, all is decadence. Functions are born of functions, and, in turn, give birth or death

to others. Forms emerge from forms, and others arise or descend from these. A1l are related,

interwoven, intermeshed, interconnected, interblended. They exosmose and endosmose. Theysway and swirl and mix and drift interminably. They shape, they reform, they dissipate. They

respond, co-respond, attract, repel, coalesce, disappear, reappear, merge and emerge - slowly orswiftly, gently or with cataclysmic force - from chaos into chaos, from death into life, from lifeinto death, from rest into motion, from motion into rest, from darkness into light, from light intodarkness, from sorrow into joy, from joy into sorrow, from purity into foulness, from foulnessinto purity, from growth into decadence, from decadence into growth. Al1 is form, all is function

- ceaselessly unfolding and infolding; and the heart of Man unfolds and infolds with them: -Man, the one spectator before whom this drama spreads its appalling, its inspiring harmony ofdrift and splendor, as the centuries toll and toll the flight of broad-pinioned Time, soaring frometernity to etemity, while the mite sucks the juices of the petal, and the ant industriously wandershere and there and there again, the song-bird twitters on the bough, the violet gives her perfume

sweetly forth in innocence. All is function, all is form, but the fragrance of them is rhythm; - forrhythm is the very wedding-march and ceremonial that quickens into song the unison of formand function, - or the dirge of their farewell as they move apart and pass into the silent watches

of that wondrous night we call the past. So goes the story on its endless way (40-41).

Notice that once Sullivan has reached the rhetorical climax, he introduces theconcept of rhythm, which explains the entirety of the effects of the precedingpassage. At that point, the text eschews repetition, which had been employedto reach a cumulative effect; instead, the pattern of the last two sentences

gives the impression that the ongoing processes of nature are trailing off intodeath and inflnity. Once again Sullivan provides a lesson on the nature ofwriting, as we have seen earlier with the references to Wagnerian dissonanceand disnatured speech.

Throughout these quoted passages, Sullivan has been instructing thelistener to "Open the mind, open the heart to impressions..." (228). Thisadmonition commences still another paragraph whose upbuilding, crescendoeffect ends with the phrase "the power of uttering!" As Sullivan furtherexplains, different arts have the capacity for different types of utterance. ForSullivan, architecture was the highest art of them all:

But there is a vast domain lying beyond the ordinary reach of words, and, to express ourimpressions of it, our insight into it, our contact with that which lies beyond man, the fine arts

enter and carry on a form of l4nguage, of expression, of communication, of explanation, that lies

LOUIS SULLIVAN 171

beyond words. '.. [A]rchitecture... is truly a fine art when its capabilities are once understood,when its true nature is once known, when its plasticity, its power for eloquence, its dramatic, itslyric resources, its fluency of expression are once grasped by the mind and the heart. No fbrm ofexpression can excel it in force, beauty, subtlety and versatility when in sympathetic hands (50).

Just as words have to be ,,vitalized,, to make a poem a poem, .Just so withbuilding materials; they must be vitalized in order that i real uuitaing mayexist" (194). Architecture becomes "the plastic medium whereby you shallexpress, not word-thoughts, but building thoughts" (54).

when we look at Sullivan's architecture we find a similar message about thevibrancy of life which he had expressed in his pror" po"-r. The moreprofound meaning of the aphorism, "form ever follows function,,, whichSullivan coined to express the artistic nature of the tall office building, refers,as the essay on this building type explicitly tells us, to the expression of theuniversal life force that we find throughout animate and inanimate nature:

It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and meta-physical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, ofthe heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever fbllowsfunction. This is the law.ll

This we see in "the sweeping eagle in his flight, or the open apple-blossom,the toiling work-horse, the blithe swan, the branching oat, trre windingstream at its base, the drifting clouds, over all the coursing sun.,,t2

For Sullivan the greatest opportunity to apply this lesson of nature appearsto have been the tall office building, for here humankind has the opponunity toexpress what he termed a "Dionysian" power: "The appeal and the inspirationlie, of course, in the element of loftiness, in the suggestion of slenderness andaspiration, the soaring quality as of a thing rising from the earth as a unitaryutterance, Dionysian in beauty."l: Sullivan himself understood his wainwright(st. Louis, 1890-1891) and Guaranty (Buffaro, ls94-1g96) buildings,especially through the vertical thrust of the piers that rise above the solidlyplanted base, as conveying that utterance of vibrant life. we can follow thearchitect's progress with increasing the effectiveness of the soaring theme as wepass from the wainwright to its later "sister":ra the diminution oi the encasingframe, the attenuation of the vertical piers, and the application of an ornamentalpattern which causes the piers of the Guaranty to shimmer with life.r5

ornament, as Sullivan once exprained, must deepen and intensify thetheme of the overall architectural form. This decoration is ,.but the moremobile, delicate and sumptuous expression of the creative impulse or identitybasically expressed in the structure" (233), the word structuie here meaning

172 RICHARD A. ETLIN

edifice. In the exterior of the Guaranty, Sullivan achieved that fit betweenarchitectural form and ornament which he poetically conceived throughanalogy to nature, by which the "building thought" would "flow to theminutest details of form in orderly sequence, as surely as the sap flows to thetip of the slenderest tendril of a vine, - to the tips of the uttermost leaves ofthe giant forest tree" (54), a doubly apt verbal metaphor when one considersthe visual floral metaphor of the ediflce's upper region.l6

We would be remiss if we limited Sullivan's efforts to convey the vitalityof life through architecture merely to the general properties of architecturalform and to their enhancement with ornamentation. There is a third techniquethat Sullivan utilized which has largely passed unnoticed and when noticed,unappreciated. I am referring to Sullivan's use of modeling, what the Frenchengineer and architectural historian of Sullivan's time Auguste Choisy termedla moddnature.tT In the nineteenth-century literature on what was calledornamental art, "modeling" was a central concept in the popular study byRalph N. Wornum, Analysis of Ornament. The Characteristics of Styles: AnIntroduction to the Study of the History of Ornamental Art (London, 1856),with multiple editions appearing in each succeeding decade, culminating inthe 1896 tenth edition. Wornum divided decoration into "two great classes":"the flat and the round," the former characterized by "painting," the latter by"modeling."l8 Throughout his book, Wornum clearly conceived of ornamentas including the entire gamut of scales and forms of art, ranging from thedecoration of a handkerchief to the detailing of a building's parts. In thismanner Wornum recognized the continuum between ornament and archi-tectural modeling, including but not limited to moldings.

Perhaps largely because neither Sullivan nor his contemporaries of theChicago School seemed to have talked extensively about this practice aseither "modeling" or la moddnature, eyetn the most eminent Americanhistorians of our time have mistakenly interpreted its features.le Both Henry-Russell Hitchcock and James O'Gorman, for example, have misinterpretedSullivan's use of modeling in the Auditorium Building (Chicago,1887-1890). For these two historians, Sullivan's building was a paleimitation of Richardson's Marshall Field Wholesale Store (Chicago,1885-1887). Yet Hitchcock did not see that Sullivan was developing adifferent approach to the treatment of mass and surface through theapplication of the layering of moldings.2o O'Gorman, on the other hand,noticed the change, but criticized it as wantingi

The openings of the main arcades at the Field store were voids neatly omitted from the con-structional rock-faced stonework. Those of the main arcades of the Auditorium turn hesitatingly

LOUIS SULLIVAN 173

into voids from the smooth-faced stonework of the wall through a series of receding archivolts.Sullivan is groping here; his handling of the detail lacks the conviction that ciaracterizesRichardson's fi nest works.2l

To the contrary, Sullivan was working with total assurance at the AuditoriumBuilding where he layered the facade both in the archivolts and along thecornices of the tower with a celebratory modeling of the thickness of stone.Here we find the same "upbuilding, unfolding" with its crescendo effect withwhich Sullivan invested his prose poems. The architect would return to thislayered technique of modeling throughout his career, as in the SchillerBuilding (1891-1892) where, like the Auditorium, the layered archivolts echothe great telescoping and fully ornamented arched forms of the theater spaceinside each of these buildings.22 These ornamented serial arches wouldfurnish the theme of Sullivan's so-called Golden portal to the TransportationBuilding of the 1893 world's columbian Exposition. In his last completebuilding, the Framers and Merchants union Bank (columbus, wisc., l9l9),Sullivan combined the two approaches while stepping back the front facadewith three layers of telescoping archivolts, leaving the first two blank,decorating the third and innermost ring, and preceding the entire sequencewith a preliminary arched form built up on the surface of the brick wall witha deep, three-dimensional block of ornate terra-cotta ornament.

we should consider Sullivan's modeling of these facades and theaterinteriors within the broader cultural situation established by John Ruskin,sinvoking the "Lamp of Life" in The seven Lamps of Architecture (1g49), aswell as by the contemporaneous appreciation of the feeling of life ascertainedin the new studies of the Parthenon, where discovery of the inclination of thewalls and columns and the subtle curvature of all the horizontal lines of thebuilding were deemed an intentional application of the feeling of life to inertstone.23 within this context, Richardson imparted life to his stone facades, firstthrough the carefully gradated sizing of the stones with their slightly bulgingrock-faced finish, set up in random ashlar courses, and then, in his late work,such as the Marshall Field wholesale store, through the use of regular stonecourses with subtly gradated sizes and rock-faced surfaces, where largecourses were alternated with smaller ones, the latter creating a cushioningappearance. Apparently in response to Richardson's achievement, Sullivandeveloped his echeloning effect in the layering of the walls, thereby creatingthe same lively repetitive sequencing which he used in his ornament.2a

Sullivan's ornament presents the image of vibrant life. Although christopherDresser recognized and celebrated the inherent dynamism of line and form,

174 RICHARD A. ETLIN

which he termed their "power," and although he stressed the importance ofcomplementing the "line of beauty" with the "line of life,,, neithei he nor thetwo other major writers about ornament in this period, Ralph wornum andowen Jones, developed an entire system of ornament based primarily upon thegoal of conveying the image of life, while simultaneously wishing to impressthe feeling of life within the sentiments of the viewer.25 yet this was both thepurpose and the accomplishment of Sullivan's A system of Architecturalornament According with a philosophy of Man's poweri (1924). HereSullivan not only reiterated his recurrent vitalistic theme, he also explainedhow his system ofarchitectural decoration achieved that goal.26

The subject of Sullivan's focus in this book, as the author himselfexplains, is "Life": "the all-embracing domain of Life, the universal power,or energy which flows everywhere at all times, in all places, seekingexpression in form, and thus parallel to all things.',27 Here Sullivandemonstrates how he takes inanimate geometric forms and invests them withlife through the application of gently curving ornamental lines. Centralizedpoints, conceived as the "seed-germ," become the occasion for ornamentaldisplays of irradiating forces, power, and life. Straight lines are made tobulge with energy or to point with directive force. In Sullivan,s words, eachline can be either a "container ofenergy" or a "directrix ofpower.,,28 Througha "fluent parallelism"2e Sullivan creates endless series o1 interpenetratingdecorative shapes with a wagnerian flux in which harmonies are establishedand dissonances appear to resolve themselves, much as Sullivan in his prosepoem had described the resolution of "the belch of a fired musket... along theedge of a slumbering woodland lake."

Finally, the colors of Sullivan's ornament. In a letter to the vice-presidentof the National Farmers' Bank in owatonna, Minnesota, where he wasdesigning the decoration in 1908, Sullivan spoke of his notion for theornament to be applied there as inspired by a deep sympathy for nature whosecolors of spring had become a symphony for him:

This is to let you know that I arrived right side up and ok; after a 5 o'crock adventure studyingtre color effects of the lovely grass, of very early skies, as seen along the valley of the IllinoisRiver. My whole Spring is wrapped up just now in the study of color and out of doors for thesake of your bank decorations - which I wish to make out of doors-in-doors if I can. I am notsure that I can, but I am going to try. I am almost abnormally sensitive to color just now andevery shade and nuance produces upon me an effect that is orchestral and patently sensitive to allthe instruments. ... I don't think I can possibly impress upon you how deep a hold this colorsymphony has taken upon me.3o

certainly, as has been observed, Sullivan would choose color schemes thatevoked the physical features of a particular season.3l yet Sullivan,s intricate

Lours suLLrvAN 175

color patterns also_ served another purpose. They presented complexwagnerian images of flow and flux. when we consider Sullivan,s numerousrepeated explanations about rhythm affording an intense feering of rife forces,we can safely apply this intention to the "coror symphonies; of Sullivan,sdecoration.32

Even the blank brick walls of Sullivan,s late buildings, the banks, appearto have been conceived in this spirit. In order to infuse his banks with ,.thatcomplexity of emotions and sentiments we call the heart,,, Sullivan createdsubtle coror textures by mixing bricks of many shades of co10r.33 In his article"Artistic Brick" (c. 1910), sulrivan extolled the visual qualities of modernrough-faced "tapestry" brick and suggested how it should be laid up to makea wall:

A feature, however, that was positively fascinating lay in the fact rhar these bricks, as they camefrom the kiln, showed a veritable gamut of colors.-Not m".ely a scare of shading, o. g.uooutio^of intensity all related to a single average color. . . but a series of distinct colori having eacrr itsown gradations and blend'ings. These colors are soft in tone and very attractive.... As might beexpected, these recent bricks, depending, as they do, for their full eifectivenes, ,fo, "oto.

unOtexture, are handicapped when laid with a flush mortar joint of whatever color o, width. They areat their best when laid with a raked-out joint leaving th" irdiuiduur brick to play its pu.t ,, u urittherein, and the mass free to express its color and texture in a broad way. Inasmuch as the cororscale varies from the softest pinks through dericate reds, yellows (varying tt" int"rrity; trr.ougtthe light browns, dark browns, purples and steel blacks - each of these colors with its owngraduations and blendings - the possibilities of chromatic treatment are at once evident.3a

In explaining the architecture of his peopre's Savings Bank in cedar Rapids,Iowa (1909-1910), Sullivan recounted that he used bricks of about fourteendifferent colors, "laidup promiscuously" with raked joints. "it"-g"r"ruteffect," he noted, "is that of an antique Oriental rug.,is Writing ab'out thewagnerians in his study of opera, peter Conrad has observed thit wagner,ssuccessors tended to dissolve the master's melodies into more fluid patterns.wagner's melodies, writes conrad, "could never respond to what bebussylalte! 'lne mobile quality of souls and of life.",conrad then describesGabriel Faur6's score for pdn1lope (1913) as a..chromatic plaiting,,renderedas a "musical web."36 Such characterizations seem to flt Sullivan,s post_Wagnerian brick walls, of the same period, where u g"ntt". iyrl"ir_equivalent to this latter phase of musical impressionism heris way.3't "

In conclusion, we should remember that while Sulrivan was designing hisarchitecture and its ornament and writing his prose poems, arl to celebrate thelife force of nature, which we also feJ oeep wittrin us, German-ranguagephilosophers and arr historians of the Einfiihtung scnoit w;;;ffirg un

ryL

t76 RICHARD A. ETLIN

analytic vocabulary to describe the same phenomenon. To designate thefeeling of sentience or vital life they employed the terms Vitalgefiihl andLebensgefiihl. These feelings, the Eiffihlung philosophers believed, con-stituted the basis of aesthetic experience, which, in the flnal analysis, theysaw grounded in a desire for a pantheistic union with the cosmos. To accountfor the orchestration of Vitalgefiihl and Lebensgffihl as aesthetic responses toart, as well as to scenes of nature, they used the word Formgefilhl todesignate empathetic response to qualities of line, form, and mass, and the

words Kdrpergefilhl and Raumgefilftl to identify the sense of bodily par-

ticipation in the sentiment and even the sense of existential space that wouldbecome involved, especially in responses to sculpture and architecturalinteriors.38 As an American, Sullivan had but the simple word "sympathy" torefer to such a complex psychological, aesthetic, and spiritual phenomenon.3e

Yet through his prose writings, his architecture, its modeling and its orna-mentation, Louis Sullivan emerges as the poet and philosopher par excellence

of the Einfiihlung approach to art.

University of Maryland

NOTES

-Narciso Menocal and Joseph Siry have kindly read earlier versions of this manuscript and have

offered helpful comments for which I am extremely grateful. I am, of course, responsible for any

errors or other shortcomings that might remain.1 See Narciso Menocal, Architecture as Nature: The Transcendentalist ldea of Lttuis Sullivan(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), 25; Lauren S. Weingarden, "Naturalized

Technology: Louis H. Sullivan's Whitmanesque Skyscrapers," The Centennial Review 3O (Fall

1986): 493; and "Louis Sullivan's System ofArchitectural Ornament," in Louis H. Sullivan, A

System of Architectural Omarnenr (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1990), 15-18, 20.2 Claude Bragdon, "Letters from Louis Sullivan," Arclu i tecture 64 (July 193 1 ): 8.3 Louis H. Sullivan, "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered," Lippincott's 57 (March

1896):408.a Louis H. Sullivan, Kindergarten Chats |901-19021, ed. Claude Bragdon (Lawrence, Kans':

Scarab Fraternity Press, 1934), 227 . Although all page references to the Kindergarten Chats refer

to the Bragdon edition, the actual texts themselves correspond to the original published version,

as collated and corrected when necessary through consultation with the carbon copy of Sullivan'styped manuscript and his handwritten manuscript, both conserved in the Avery Library,

Columbia University. I use Sullivan's original publication rather than the second edition both

because it is closer in date to the tall office buildings and because I find it closer in spirit to his

architecture. As for Bragdon's edition, it eliminated about 17,000 words, as well as the system ofpunctuation with its extensive use of dashes and colons that made Sullivan's text into a tran-

scription of an essentially oral document. As Sullivan himself had explained to Bragdon, "a con-

siderable art of the K. C. is in rhythmic prose - some of it declamatory. I have endeavoured

LOUIS SULLIVAN 177

throughout this work to represent, or reproduce to the mind and heart of the reader the spokenword and intonation - not written language. It really should be read aloud, especially thedescriptive and exalted passages" (Claude Bragdor,, Architecture and Democracy, [New york:Alfred A. Knopf, 19181, 145). Yet Bragdon essentially modernized Sullivan's writing style whenhe assembled the fifty-two articles into a book. I am curently establishing a new edition ofSullivan's Kindergarten Chatsbased on the first printed edition rnThe Interstate Architect andBuilder in conjttnction with the carbon copy of the typescript and the manuscript. Because of therarity of the first printed text, it makes sense to use the page numbers of the Bragdon edition,which are placed in parentheses in the text itself to avoid a cumbersome number of footnotes.s Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Over-Soul ," Essays (New York and London: Merrill and Baker,n.d,.), 172-173.6 Louis H. Sullivan, The Autobiography of an Idea (New York: Peter Smith, 1949), ZO8-20g.commenting on wagner's music, Sullivan wrote, "Louis needed no interpreter. It was all plain tohim. He saw it all. It was as though addressed to himself alone.,, Suzzanne Shulof, in ..An

Interpretation of Louis Sullivan's Architectural ornament Based on His philosophy of organicExpression" (Columbia University M. A. Thesis, 1962), 67 n. 42, quotes Halsey C. Ive,scomments inThe Dream City tl893l on Sullivan's Transportaiion Building for the 1893 World'sColumbian Exposition: "the architects of the building have called its vari-colored effects'wagnerian' . . .." Sullivan's appreciation of Beethoven still needs elucidation. In his "Notebook"(Avery Library, Columbia University, AA 685.Su5.Su5434), Sullivan made a list of his readingsfor 1875, which includes as the entry for February 1 1 (fol. 190), La vie de Beethoven. Aletter ofDecember 7,1911, from Carl K. Bennett, vice-president of the National Farmers, Bank inowatonna, Minnesota, which Sullivan had designed in 1906-1908, links Sullivan to the greatcomposer: "I have likened your work to that of the great musicians or poets, and have thought ofourselves as though we possessed exclusively...one of the symphonies of Beethoven" (quoted inRobert R. Warn, "Part II. Louis H. Sullivan, '... an air of finality,"' The prairie School Review10, no. 4 (1973): 6. As an accomplished chorister and conductor, Bennett had undoubtedlyspoken with Sullivan about music over the course of their developing professional and personalrelationships. Had they discussed Beethoven as well and in what ways? on sullivan's rela-tionship with Bennett, see Robert R. warn, "Part I. Bennett and Sullivan, client and creator,"The Prairie school Review 10, no. 3 (1973):5-15, as well as the sequel cited above, and LaurenS. Weingarden, Louis H. Sullivan: The Banks (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT press, 1987), 48-49.7 Salomon Hegnauer, "The Rhetorical Figure of Systophe," in Brian Vickers, ed., RhetoricRevalued: Papers from the International society for the History of Rhetoric, Medieval andRenaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 19 (Binghampton, N. Y.: center for Medieval and EarlyRenaissance Studies, 1982), 179-186.8 Jean Mouton, Le Style de Marcel Proust (Paris: A. G. Nizet, 1968), 147-172 (ch. 5"L Enumdration"); Anthony Hecht, "A Note on the Relations of poetry and prose,,, talk given atthe Second National Conference of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, Boston,August 26, 1996.e [n the same vein, consider also: "The well trained mind never tires, - can never tire. For, withproper nourishment, with proper discipline, with proper and natural openness to impressions, inother words, with proper receptivity, there pours into it steadily and unintemrptedly a vitalizingstream from the great well-spring of Nature's boundless energy, which causes it to grow, tounfold, to organize, to build up and expand, to increase ever steadily in power and subtlety, inclarity of vision, in soundness ofjudgment, in integrity of purpose, until the power to absorb and

178 RICHARD A. ETLIN

the power to utter have reached their glorious culmination in unison, and the greater the task the

greater the power and the joy in the doing" (235).10 The relationship between Lucretius and both Sullivan's prose style and his philosophy has

yet to be elucidated. The parallels are striking. Was there a direct influence or did Sullivan

imbibe his Lucretian language and rhythms via the influence of Whitman, whom he is known to

have admired? One can juxtapose nearly any passage from John Mason Good's popular verse

translation of De rerum natura with Sullivan's writings about nature to see the parallels. One

might begin by comparing Lucretius' opening invocation to Venus to the opening hymn to spring

in Sullivan's "Essay on Inspiration."In Good's rendition, Lucretius' poem reads as a hymn to life, to the vitality of life and more

generally to the vitality found throughout the world both animate and inanimate. Virtually any

selection of lines from Lucretius' poem would provide a sensation of a vitalistic movement that

"streams forth for ever, void of dull repose" (IV. 233), a movement so similar to Sullivan's own

concem with "upbuilding" and "unfolding":

Come, then and mark how seeds primordial formCreated things, and how, when formed, dissolve:

Their force, their action, whence, and power to move,

Pass, and repass, through al1 th'immense of space:

Benign attend, while thus the muse explains (I1.63-67).

But one same nature flows from heat and air,

And mystic vapour, and the power unnamed

That rears the incipient stimulus, and firstDarts sentient motion through the quivering frame.

Far from all vision this profoundly lurks,Through the whole system's utmost depth diffused,

And lives as soul of e'en the soul itself.As with each limb the general spirit blends,

Though ne'er discerned, so subtle and so fewIts primal seeds - so, through the spirit, spreads

This form ineffable, this mystic power,

Soul of the soul, and lord of mortal man (III. 279-290).

Although first published in 1805, Good's translation was still deemed "by far the best extant"

(xxi) by the Rev. John Selby Watson, who appended it to his prose transation of Lucretius on the

Nature ofThings (London: George Bell and Sons, 1898), a volume in Bohn's Classical Library.1r Sullivan, "TheTall Office BuildingArtistically Considered," Zippincott's 57 (March 1896):408.12 Ibid.13 Sullivan, The Autobiography of an ldea, 313-314. This passage reiterates Sullivan's earlier

expression of this sentiment: "We must now heed the imperative voice of emotion. It demands ofus, what is the chief characteristic of the tall office building? And at once we answer, it is lofty.

This loftiness is to the artist-nature its thrilling aspect. It is the very open organ-tone in its appeal.

It must be in turn the dominant chord in his expression of it, the true excitant of his imagination.

It must be tall, every inch of it tall. The force and power of altitude must be in it, the glory and

pride of exaltation must be in it. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing..." ("The Tall

Office Building," 406).la Louis H. Sullivan, letter of November 8, 1903, to Claude Bragdon, as reproduced in

Bragdon, "Letters from Louis Sullivan," Arcftltecture 64 (July 193 1): 9.

LOUIS SULLIVAN 179

rs The author developed this idea further in .,Louis Sullivan's Tall office BuildingReconsidered, read at the annual meeting of the Society ofArchitectural Historians, Los Angeles,April 17, 1998."16 Scholars disagree about who designed the ornament for the exterior of the Guaranty.Reasoning on the basis of connoisseurship rather than with documentary evidence, paulEdward Sprague argues, "Although Sullivan personally designed the terminating flourishes atthe topmost corners of the Guaranty Building, his hand is not evident in the decorationsdirectly below him. The large number of angular shapes and starlike motifs in these areasargues for a different designer, namely Elmslie" (..The Architectural ornament of Louissullivan and His Chief Draftsmen" [princeton University phD. Dissertation, 196g], 127).Here Sprague is following David Gebhard's argument published earlier in The Journar of thesociety ofArchitectural Historians 19 (May 1960):63. In contrast, suzanne Shulof, who alsoadduces arguments to support her case from James Marston Fitch, challenges Gebhard,s con-clusions: "It cannot be said with certainty that Elmslie was the originator of the .imaginativepatterns and forms' of the exterior of the Guaranty Building,, (,,An Interpretation of LouisSullivan's Architectural ornament Based on His philosophy of organic Expression,,[columbia University M. A. Thesis, 1962], 14,67 nn.3'r,39). In any case, whether thisexterior ornament originated as an initial idea or was fully developed by Sulhvan or whetherit comes from Elmslie's hand, it is fully consistent with the aitistic goals of Sullivan,sbuilding.t7 I-a modinature was the subject ofa briefessay by that title which Le Corbusier published inAlmanche d'architecture moderne (1926),1 16-1 18. Remarking on how unaccustomed architectswere with this term and how it was unknown to Louis Bonnier, Architecte en Chef des Servicesd'Architecture de la Ville de Paris, Le Corbusier explained: "Monsieur Bonnier le mot est dans ledictionnaire. Mais plus que cela, la chose est dans 1'architecture. c,est le moment aigu de l,ar-chitecture; c'est lorsque les traits du visage prennent leur qualitd par le profil qui du h-aut en basva ddterminer l'ombre et la lumidre, c'est a dire ce que I'oeil uoit

"t pu. consdquent ce qui va,

pour beaucoup, nous donner l'dmotion architecturale" (Monsieur Bonnier, the word is in thedictionary' But more than that, the thing is in architecture. It is the defining moment forarchitecture. It is when the traits of a face take on their distinctive qualities throigh the profilethat from above to below is going to determine the light and shadow, that is to say,-what the eyewill see and consequently that which, even more, is going to give us the architeciural emotion).La moddnature, explained Le Corbusier, is not limited to the modeling of architectural moldings.Rather it pertains to the entire profile of a building's wals. Repeatin! an aphorism expressed inhis earlier study of la modinature of the Greek Doric order, especially as found at the iarthenon,published in L'Esprit Nouveau and then reprinted in Vers une Architecture (1923),Le Corbusierexplained, "La moddnature est la pierre de touche de l'architecte... La moddnature est une purecr6ation de l'esprit." (La modinature is the architect,s touchstone... In mod1nature is a purecreation of the spirit [his ellipses]). As Le corbusier reminded his readers , .,Le mot est danstoutes les pages d'Auguste choisy, ... auteur du plus digne ouvrage qui f0t sur |architecture,,(The word is on every page of Auguste choisy, ... author oithe most worthy book onarchitecture ever written).

The entire chicago School needs to be studied from the perspective of the importance ofmodeling. one scholar who has written perceptively on this subjeci is william H. Jordy, who inAmerican Buildings and Their Architects: Progressive and Academic ldeals at the Tirn oJ thecentury (1972 Gafien city: Doubleday/Anchor, 1976), 4'.,-50,63, has broached rhis themewhen discussing, for example, Bumham and Root's Monadnock Building, Holabird and Roche'sGage Buildings, and sullivan's wainwright, where he observed about the rolled moldings, ..They

180 RICHARD A. ETLIN

sharply bound the face of the piers; they visually stiffen them the better to accelerate the sense of

.i."'; (iOS, see also 125 on theTrust and Savings Building project). Nor should the importance of

kt modinature be limited to the chicago school but it should rather, for the modem era, reach

back at least to Labrouste and extend forward at least to Olbrich and Wagner' For a consideration

of the modeling of the facade of Labrouste's Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevieve, see David Van

ZaJ]len, Design Paris: The Architecture of Duban, I'abrouste, Duc, and Vaudoyer (Cambridge'

Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), 93, 96. For suggestive illustrations that point to the central importance

of la moddnature in the design of Olbrich's Secession Building and Wagner's Postal Savings

Bank, both in Vienna, s"" Akos Morav6nsky, "The Aesthetics of the Mask," in Harry Francis

Mallgrave, ed., Ouo Wagner: Reflections on the Raiment of Modemiry (Getty Center for the

History of Art and the Humanities and the University of Chicago Press, 1993), 214_2|5 (Fig. 5),

andlanLatham,losephMariaOlbrich(NewYork:Rizzoli,1980),31(topleft)'1e Ralph N. wornum, Analysis of ornament. The characteristics of styles: An Introduction to

the Stuiy of the History of Ornamental Art (Londorr: Champman and Hall, 1860' 2nd ed.), 8.

1e For example, although Montgomery Schuyler criticized the detailing of Sullivan and Adler's

Auditorium nuitaing by advocating, among other changes, "a more vigorous modelling of the

main cornice," he does not seem to have entertained a notion of modelling as an actual aesthetic

category (,,Glimpses of western Architecture: Chicago" t18911 in American Architecture and

Othir Writings, eds. William H. Jordy and Ralph Coe [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University

Press, 19611, I, 260). Similarly and at a later date, Hugh Morrison would praise the modeling of

the tower of the Schiller Building without using any specific terminology: "The chief motive in

the design is the seventeen-story tower, which is positively expressed in the lower stories by the

strong relief of the vertical piers carried upward throughout its whole height 'without a single

disseiting line"' (Louis sullivan: Prophet of Modern Architecture [New York: w. w. Norton and

the Museum of Modern Art, 19351, 158).20 Henry-Russell Hitchcock, The Architecture of H. H. Richardson and His Times (1936; 1961

rev. ed.; Cambridge' Mass.: MITPress, 1966, 1981 5th printing), 277:,,The design [of the

Marshall Field wholesale Storel is so elementary that any attempt to copy it was bound to be

inferior. Sullivan,s first attempt, in the Auditorium Building begun two years later, magnificent

though that is, is a case in point." Hitchcock has nothing further.to say here about Sullivan's

building, nor does he note Sullivan's modeling of the facade's surface in his discussion of the

buildin! it Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1958; New York, Penguin, 1977

4th ed., 1978 printing), 339-340.21 James F. O'Gorman, Three American Architects: Richardson, Sullivan, Wright, 1865-1915

(Chicago; University of Chicago Press)' 85.i, Wiitirg about the Schilier, David Van Zanten has observed, "Here is a magisterial

orchestration of volumeffic shapes, but not of the arbitrary Sort that so often characterized the

French student designs as well as Sullivan's Pueblo project. Instead Sullivan uses a single form,

the segmented barrel vault, determined by the sight lines and acoustics of the space, simply and

po*".folly elaborated" ("Sullivan to 1890," Wim de Wit, ed', Louis Sullivan: The Function oJ

Ornament [Saint Louis: Saint Louis Art Museum, 1986], 47-48)'23 For abrief overview of this outlook, which includes not only Ruskin's thought but also the

importance of this concept in the popular writings of viollet-1e-Duc, James Fergusson' anci

Camilto Sitte, as well as the reevaluation of the nature of Greek architecture at the Athenian

Acropolis by architects and classical scholars from several nations, see Richard A' EtliJfl, Frank

ttoyi Wrigit and Le Corbusier: The Romantic Le*acy (Manchester: Manchester University

press. 1994), ch. 2. For a brief discussion of the emphasis placed by Ruskin on "the expression

LOUIS SULLIVAN I81

of vital energy" and on the "lamp of life" within the context of the architecture of Furness,Richardson, and sullivan, see Lauren S. weingarden, '.Naturalized Nationalism: A RuskinianDiscourse on the Search for an American Style of Architec$re," Winterthur portfolio 24 (Spring1989),51-52 and note 15. Elsewhere Weingarden has written about the echeloning effect ofthepiers at the Schiller Building, created by "the sequence of planar recessions [which] continuesunbroken as the piers gracefully wrap around half-circle arches', as presenting a.,metaphor forthe organic life cycle" ("Louis H. Sullivan's Search for an American style,', in pauline Saliga,ed., Fragments of Chicago's Pasr [Chicago: the Art Institute of Chicago, lgg}l, 122).2a On Sullivan's admiration of Richardson's Marshall Field Wholesale Store and his efforts toemulate its achievements in his own mannet see Kindergarten chats,l5-lg (.,The oasis,,), andde Wit, ed., Louis Sullivan: The Function of Omament,36-37, 67_:14.2s christopher Dresser, The Art of Decorative Design (London: Day and son, lg62), 9g, 100,and' Principles of Decorative Design (1873; London: cassell, petter, Galpin and co., 4th ed,n.d.), 17.26 As might be expected, different scholars have emphasized different aspects of this book. InArchitecture as Nature,25, Menocal has given a swedenborgian reading oi sullivan's system ofornament presented there with emphasis on the balance achieved through organic and geometricforms, the former understood as the "feminine-emotional," the latter as "masculine-rational." In"Naturalized rechnology," 493, weingarden also emphasizes Sullivan,s pairing of the organic assubjective with the inorganic as objective. Weingarden develops this symbolic reading more fullyin "Louis Sullivan's System ofArchitectural Ornament,, I5_lg,20.27 sullivan, A system ofArchitectural ornament (Chicago: The Art Institute of chicago, 1990),137 (Plate 9, "Interlude: The Doctrine of paralellism,,). I follow the capitalization of-.,Life', asfound in the manuscript.28 Louis H. Sullivan, A system of Architectural ornament According with a philosophy ofMan's Powers (New York: American Institute of Architects, 1924),plate 5.2e Sullivan, A system of Architectural ornamenr (chicago: The Art Institute of chicago, 1990),139, manuscript for Plate 10. This text was omitted from the published version.30 Louis H. Sullivan to Carl K. Bennett, as quoted in John vinci, The Art Institute of chicago:The stock Exchange Trading Room (chicago The Art Institute of Chicago, lg77),36.3r Menocal, Architecture as Nature,l32; Lauren S. weingarden, ,,The colors of Nature: Louissullivan's Architectural Polychromy and Nineteenth-century color Theory,,, winterthurPonfolio 20 (Winter 1985),25o,255,259. Sullivan himselfdescribed the coloring, narrative, andsymbolism of the two side murals in the auditorium of the Auditorium Building as representativeof spring and autumn, "Plastic and Color Decoration of the Auditorium,,, in Robert Twombly,ed., Louis sullivan: The Public Papers (chicago: University of Chicago press, 19gg), 75-76.32 Although weingarden, in "The colors of Nature," discusses wagnerism primarily in terms ofthe Gesamtkunstwerk and synaesthesia, she ends this study with a highly suggestive quotationfrom Jules Laforgue's assessment of Impressionist painting, which she applies as *"il ,.to th.aesthetic experience Sullivan cultivated in his polychromatic architecture: 'No longer an isolatedmelody, the whole thing is a symphony which is living and changing like the ..foiest-voices" ofWagner, a1l struggling to become the great voice of the forest - like the Unconscious, the law ofthe world"' (260). Throughout this article, weingarden cites instances of Sullivan using colorand light, both natural and artiflcial, to effectuate "a subtly shifting dematerialization of the two-dimensional surface" (248), a process that weingarden traces back to the Auditorium Building(248, 252, 25 4-25 5, 257 ).33 Louis H. Sullivan, "Artistic Brick,,, in T\vombly, ed,., The public papers,2O4.

:*:l

t82 RICHARD A. ETLIN

34 Ibid.,202-203.3s Louis H. Sullivan, "Lighting the People's Savings Bank, Cedar Rapids, Iowa: An Exampleof American TWentieth Century Ideas of Architecture and Illumination" (1912), in ibid., 206.36 Peter Conrad, A Song of Love and Death: The Meaning of Opera (New York:Poseidon/Simon and Schuster, 1987), 204.37 For a different discussion of the relationship of Sullivan's banks to Impressionist music, see

Menocal, Architecture as Nature, 128-129.38 On this subject, see Richard A. Etlin, "Aesthetics and the Spatial Sense of Self," The Journalof AestheticsandArtCriticism 56(Winter 1998): 1-19. Severalof theprincipalEinfiihlungtextsare translated in Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, eds. and fians, Empathy,Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893 (Santa Monica: The Getty Centerfor the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994).3e For other treatments of Sullivan's interest in "sympathy" and its relationship to theEiffihlung school, see Vincent Scully, "Louis Sullivan's Architectural Ornament: A Brief NoteConcerning Humanist Design in the Age of Force," Perspecta no. 5 (1959): 74-75; Menoca|Architecture as Nature,64; Weingarden, "Louis Sullivan's System of Architectural Omament," inSullivan, A System of Architectural Ornament (Chicago: The A( Institute of Chicago, 1990),t3-14.

: tt:t: i: l

SIDNEY FESHBACH

AN ORCHESTRATION OF THE ARTS IN WALLACE

STEVENS' "PETER QUINCE AT THE CLAVIER"

Any discussion of the topic of "The Orchestration of the Arts: the Fullness ofLife Expressed in Correspondence of Sound, Image, Color, Movement,Rhythm, Gesture, Word, Fragrance, Touch" must include reference toWallace Stevens' "Peter Quince at the Clavier," for it begins with the idea

that the clavier can produce, as it were, the music of many instruments, e.g.,

violin, cymbals, horns, etc., and that, in its turn, the music presents a complexof emotions springing from desire, with some critics suggesting its form isanalogous to a musical form, such as the sonata. Its similarity to the topicdoes not stop there, for while the poem refers priniarily to expression ofmusic, its reference to Susanna and the Elders makes use of the (Apocryphal)

narrative inserted h the Book of Daniel and to that story's representations inpainting, such as by Tintoretto. Then, its words also refer to colors,movements, fragrance, etc., these references making use of arts associated tothese categories, e.g., painting, dance, and musical composition, and these, inturn, alluding perhaps to paintings by Tintoretto and Botticelli and to musicby Bach. "The Orchestration of the Arts" is so exactly suited to this poem thatit may be thought sufficient to simply present the poem in its entirety and tolet it speak for itself. For example, the fifteen lines of the first section begin inthe movement of fingers on the keyboard (of a clavier) to make music; itfinds correspondence in music, sound, and feeling; it continues with the

visual and tactile; and it makes a transition to Susanna and the Elders. Then,

orchestrating all these, it returns to music again. This set of correspondence is

associated with the erotic, both celibate and rapacious.

IJust as my fingers on these keys

Make music, so the selfsame sounds

On my spirit make a music, too.

Music is feeling, then, not sound;

And thus it is that what I feel,Here in this room, desiring you,

Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,Is music. It is like the strainWaked in the elders by Susanna.

183

M. Kronegger (ed.), Analecta Husserliana IXIII, 183-194.@ 20OO Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.