Empathy

This week the National Gallery of Victoria announced its program for 2021. A highlight will be a major exhibition of 100 masterworks of French Impressionism in partnership with the Museum of Fine Arts from Boston. Describing her love of these works, Boston curator Katie Hanson said: “To have that immersive experience of being surrounded by beautiful colour, by the presence and the painterly touch of impressionist paintings … it’s a sensual pleasure being with them, you sense the individual, the maker … the person who touched that brush, they’re there with you”. Hanson’s comment reminded me of the role of art in the development of the concept of empathy.

Surprisingly, ‘empathy’, that noble ability to reach our highest human potential and see through another’s eyes, has a short history of little more than one hundred years – and, it originated in art. It was the result of ideas from a 19^th century German doctor, Wilhelm Wundt, a German philosopher, Theodor Lipps, and subsequently, the Viennese psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud.

Wundt (1832-1920) is regarded as the ‘father of experimental psychology’ and founder of the first psychology laboratory in Leipzig. In the late 19^th century, Wundt, using his method of objective introspection, proposed the concept of ‘einfühlung’ which described the projection of a sense of our own inward feelings onto inanimate objects. Wundt’s English student, Edward Titchener, took this sense of ‘feeling into’ to coin the English word ‘empathy’ in 1909  as a derivation from Greek roots: ‘pathos’ for feeling and the prefix ‘em’ for in.

Einfühlung /Empathy was elaborated on as an aesthetic theory by Theodor LIpps (1851-1914) in seeking to understand why art affects us so powerfully. For Lipps, it was the solitary, one-on-one reciprocal experience of viewing an artwork that destabilised the identity, emotional, cognitive and even physical state of the viewer, while animating the object, which was critical.

Central to Lipp’s concept of ‘empathy’ was his idea of ‘einsehen’ or ‘inseeing’ – the ability to consciously penetrate to the ‘heart’ of an object – something that Rachel Corbett in her book ‘You Must Change Your Life’ describes as ‘seeing not only with the eyes, but with the skin’. (For art lovers, Corbett’s book is a fascinating account of fin-de-siecle Paris and the influence sculptor Auguste Rodin had on poet Rainer Maria Rilke).

While recognising the power of art, unlike his predecessors, Lipps used the notion of ‘empathy’ to explain not only how people experience inanimate objects, but also how they can understand the mental states of others. This expansion of empathy was acknowledged and embraced by Sigmund Freud who confessed to being ‘immersed’ in Lipps’ theories. Freud made the case that empathy was an essential tool for understanding patients and that psychoanalysts should eschew judgement and strive to ‘put themselves into the other person’s place’.

This notion of ‘empathy’ has increased in popularity and has gained widespread currency – particularly in the last couple of decades. Although its connection with art has been highlighted by creatives from Leo Tolstoy  (‘What is Art?, 1898) to Mark Rothko (Transcendent Power of Art in ‘Conversations with Artists’, 1961) to Susan Sontag (‘Art is a form of consciousness’, 1964), to Alain de Botton and John Armstrong  (‘Art as Therapy’, 2013), ‘empathy’ is now more often discussed in the world of psychology.

However, it is still very easy to ‘get lost’ in a powerful work of art and connect with the thoughts, feelings and the lives of others. While it is clearly ‘the impressionists’ for the Boston curator, I was aware of this as I strolled quietly through Kengo Kuma and Geoffrey Nees’ ‘Botanical Pavilion’ in the Triennial at the National Gallery of Victoria.

Referencing the approach one might take along an ancient forest path to a Japanese  Shinto shrine, one does have the sense, as Curator of Asian Art Wayne Crothers describes, of: “ journeying from a place of everyday existence to the spiritual realms of nature”.

The climax of the journey is arriving at the painting ‘Dialogue’ by Lee Ufan. What appears as one single large ‘calligraphic’ brushstroke is a masterwork of control and meditative brushstrokes. Lee’s simple but powerful abstraction is both an object of contemplation and a reminder of restraint and refinement. Although it is a powerful image, for the artist the work is not just the object itself but the space it creates. As I watched viewers engage with the artwork, there was a palpable silence, reverence and sense of connectedness with the artist and … also with the other viewers.

As Lee Ufan said in 1982: “Empty space is beautiful not because it is empty but because it is a place where things and space respond to each other with high-energy reverberations’.

I can’t think of a better description of art as a truly empathetic experience.