Crafting Interiority, or the Evolutionary Objectivity of Vibrating Worlds: An Introduction to Adolf Behne’s “Biology and Cubism” (1915)

Abstract

Sublimating the transgressive atrocities of modern warfare in an enigmatic text written within a year of the outbreak of WWI, art historian and architectural theorist Adolf Behne (1885-1948) takes recourse with humanity by tracing the uncanny thresholds between the human and non-human as proliferated by contemporary theories of biology. Disguised as a manifesto-like book review of biologist Jakob Johann von Uexküll’s Building Blocks of a Biological Worldview (1913), Behne’s “Biologie und Kubismus” (1915) engages Uexküll’s pluriversal worldview to complicate straightforward dualisms between artifice and nature, subtly imbricating the geopolitical and biopolitical spheres with the expressions of modern art. Dismantling impressionist art as lacking external-natural parallelism, Behne’s text champions expressionist art, whose forms and shapes evolve organically from a biologically-encoded creative interiority, as “true” art. A critical introduction to the author, text, and context prefaces the first English translation of “Biology and Cubism” more than a century after publication in the editorial outlet of artist-gallerist Herwarth Walden’s influential syndicate Der Sturm.