Key Writers On Art The Twentieth Century - (Wilhelm Worringer (1881-1965) )

WILHELM WORRINGER
Bibliography
Main texts
Art and its Objects, 1968; 2nd edn, with six supplementary essays, Cambridge and
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
Freud, London: Fontana, 1971.
On Art and the Mind: Essays and Lectures, London: Allen Lane, 1973.
Panting As an Art: The A.W. Mellon Lectures in Fine Arts, London: Thames and
Hudson, 1987 (delivered at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC,
1984).
The Thread of Life, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984 (The
William James Lectures at Harvard, 1982).
The Mind and its Depths: A collection of essays, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1993.
On the Emotions, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999 (The Ernst Cassirer
Lectures, 1991).
Richard Wollheim on the art of painting: art as representation and expression, Rob van
Gerwen (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Secondary literature
Hopkins, J., and Savile, A. (eds), Psychoanalysis, mind, and art: perspectives on Richard
Wollheim, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.
LLOYD REINHARDT
WILHELM WORRINGER (1881–1965)

Copyright © 2002. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.
GERMAN ART HISTORIAN AND THEORIST
The immediate and lasting success of Wilhelm Worringer’s first book,

Abstraktion und Einfühlung: Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie (1908), reflects
its author’s fine sense of a new form of controversy that had been
overtaking the arts. By the year of its publication, the implacable
division between a generalized sense of avant-gardism on one side and
an apparently naturalized canon of taste on the other, had emerged in
full power. The first translation into English appeared in 1953, under
the title Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of
Style. The translator faithfully rendered both the exuberant polemical
spirit and the broad applicability of Worringer’s language to supply
readers in the English-speaking world with a text that has likewise
retained its incisiveness. That penetrating quality has little to do with
the solidity of an argument within the scholarly discipline of art
history, though the text was written as a doctoral dissertation in that
field, but rather lies in the strategy of its critique. Using the position of
Key Writers on Art: the Twentieth Century, edited by Chris Murray, Taylor
286 & Francis Group, 2002. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ifmg-ebooks/detail.action?docID=240427.
Created from ifmg-ebooks on 2020-05-26 13:58:38.
WILHELM WORRINGER
an art historian to attack what he describes as the established

preconceptions in the separate discipline of aesthetics, Worringer
develops a rhetoric of opposing tendencies derived from a sphere of
artistic production enlarged far beyond the classical aesthetic canon.
From this broad sphere of material, he derives a general psychology of
artistic response from two fundamental motivations of the human
spirit.
He invokes Kant as a model in asserting that all artistic necessity
should be founded on a prioris located in the contemplating
consciousness, though of course the tradition of aesthetics, and the
classical standard associated with it that he rejects, still looked to Kant
for its own philosophical basis. It is important to emphasize that what
he introduced in Abstraction and Empathy did not depend on any
positive declaration about the direction that should be taken by
contemporary artists. It contained no programmatic statement about
future developments in the manner of, say, Marinetti’s Futurist
Manifesto from the following year. His innovation lay in the expansive
quality of the polemic as such. He directs his critique at the narrow
sovereignty of the Western imagination. Though he attacks the idea of
a unified aesthetics, he has no interest in substituting an alternative
singular ideal such as one might find in some expressions of romantic
theory, or indeed, Futurism.
Drawing on the knowledge and critical analysis developed by art
historians during the last decades of the nineteenth century, he finds
himself well placed to make the multiplicity of artistic styles across the
regions of the world into a more appropriate basis of ‘objectivity’. The

classical ideal of Antiquity, the Renaissance, or of modernity as
constituted in the aftermath of the Renaissance, present a valid
direction in art, he readily concedes, but only one. Its form of
expression now offers an inadequate, narrow and subjective basis for
our artistic experience of twentieth-century humanity with its
suddenly expanded horizons of knowledge. Accordingly, he presents
an alternative framework elaborated between the two active poles of
‘abstraction’ and ‘empathy’, towards which all artistic sensibilities tend,
and between which all artistic developments move. He also asserts a
typology of three distinct metaphysical situations within which he
defines all national traditions of artistic style: ‘primitive man’, ‘classical
man’, and ‘the Oriental’. Each of these arises with a particular
condition of knowledge, and hence the confidence or insecurity that
characterizes the relationship between the human sphere and the
natural world that encompasses it.
The primordial condition of mankind entails a clear instinct for the
WILHELM WORRINGER
inadequacy of human knowledge, and the primitive man is therefore

prey to ‘an immense spiritual dread of space’ (eine ungeheure geistige
Raumscheu). Artistic ability does not fall short in any stage of
development, including this primitive phase, but human desires will
differ. Here, Worringer adopts the idea of an ‘artistic volition’
(Kunstwollen) from the enormously influential art historian Alois
Riegl. Primitive man creates his art in order to find release from that
dread of his world. Because he can bring only the most rudimentary
forms of knowledge to them, the phenomena of nature appear to him
to lack all stability or regularity. He desires art objects that compensate
for that lack. Accordingly, he develops a language of geometric or
crystalline motifs whose rigid, expressionless form ‘abstracts’ the
contemplating sensibility from the turmoil and torment of uncontrol-
lable changes apparent in nature.
The classical mode of art comes about under circumstances where
perceptual knowledge of nature overcomes the dualism between man
and his world, and replaces ‘primitive dread’ with a joyful sense of
harmony between the human and the non-human, or, as Worringer
puts it, with a total anthropomorphization of the cosmos. The
reconciliation between man and nature brought about by this
metaphysics produces the organic suppleness and harmonious form
of Greek antiquity. The abstraction of artistic contemplation gives way
to what he calls ‘empathy’ (Einfühlung), a term he adopts from the
German psychologist Theodor Lipps. In empathy, the contemplator of
an art object seeks the forms of living matter, and finds a beauty there
that Lipps calls ‘objectified self-enjoyment’. This experience corre-

sponds to beauty as defined by the terms of aesthetics. Worringer
insists that other traditions do not present this beauty because it does
not correspond to their artistic volition, and it does not correspond to
that volition because they do not inhabit a cosmos where everything
reflects the same anthropomorphized order of knowledge.
The Oriental cultural situation does not take its place ‘before’ the
advent of classical orders of knowledge, but stands ‘beyond’ that
knowledge in an immeasurably deeper sense of the impenetrable
universe. This more complex version of transcendent metaphysics also
gives rise to an art of abstraction. Its motifs also represent rigid, pure,
clear shapes, uninflected by the living expression of organic form. To
the ‘magnitude of the sensibility’ that creates such work, the notion of
beauty animating classical art would have to appear ‘quite petty and
insignificant’.
If there remained any doubt in the discussion of Abstraction and
Empathy that Worringer regards primitive art as also capable of
WILHELM WORRINGER
achieving this magnitude, he returned to this issue in 1911 with his

book Form in Gothic, where he observes that, with the transition from
primitive to classical modes of knowledge, artistic life ‘becomes more
beautiful, more joyful, but it loses in depth, in grandeur, and in force’.
It is obvious at once that his reduction of the world’s artistic
traditions into these three types weakens all authority in the art-
historical basis of his argument. While ‘primitive art’ may still survive
as the loose term used to describe the production of non-literate
societies, we have to baulk at his use of the term ‘Oriental’. His main
reference here is to Egypt, but he ascribes the same criteria to the
various civilizations of Asia as well. His distinction between them and
the heritage of Greek classicism clearly suggests that he has simply
imagined that entire non-European world as a foil by which to define
the European modernity he wishes to critique precisely for its
ethnocentrism. It is this, and many allied rhetorical turns, that allow us
to identify the principal force at work in his text as the critical
imagination rather than systematic analysis, historical discrimination or
philosophical construction. Indeed, we can now see how much the
daring qualities that have kept his thesis so vital and provocative from
his own time to the present have also limited his ability to establish a
school of followers in the discipline of art history, or even to sustain
this initial burst of innovative ideas through his own academic career.
Following a strategy that has become much more familiar in polemics
from later years of the twentieth century, Abstraction and Empathy
erected a structure of critical opposition to an established orthodoxy
through its primary terminology, and then boldly set about

dismantling accepted appearances through the perspective imposed
by this device. The kinship in method between his approach and those
corresponding enterprises in more recent years can be illustrated in
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (1980), in which the authors take over Worringer’s
concept of an inorganic crystalline language of artistic form as they
reject the inheritance of humanist order.
The difficulty that kept Worringer from building further on his
brilliant first foray into modernist art theory stands clearly on show in
1911, with the discussion of Gothic form. His intention to vindicate
the value of a quintessentially Germanic style leads him to complicate
his own conception of what is meant by ‘abstraction’. The abstract
elements of Gothic art remain opposed to the ‘expressive’ or ‘sensual’
quality of Mediterranean classicism, but also find their own mode of
expressiveness none the less in response to the restless energies of a
Germanic artistic volition. This produces an uncanny hybrid – not a
WILHELM WORRINGER
synthesis – that he calls ‘super-organic’. His conception grows in

complexity until he arrives at the hypothesis of a Gothic relationship
to nature of ‘sensuous–super-sensuousness’, whose objective basis then
begins to unravel.
He served at the front during World War One, but when he
resumed writing, his publications during the Weimar period reflected
a more conservative cultural politics. The national, and sometimes
even racial, turn that had freed his sensibility from subservience to the
classical model in earlier thinking, now introduced a damaging
narrowness into his viewpoint. The book he brought out in 1927,
Egyptian Art, engages its topic to present something of a German, or at
least a European, chauvinistic position on American modernity.
His relations with the expressionist movement in art underwent a
parallel shift between the years before and after World War One.
Although no document supports a direct impact of Worringer’s book
on Kandinsky’s first experiments with completely non-figurative
painting, it is clear that the two men quickly became aware of one
another, and grew warmly disposed to one another’s work during the
crucial period around 1911 when Kandinsky was forming the Blauer
Reiter group. Worringer is credited with introducing the term
‘Expressionismus’ in his review for the journal Der Sturm of an
exhibition by the Blauer Reiter. In 1920, in a lecture subsequently
published under the title Künstlerische Zeitfragen (‘Questions Concern-
ing Contemporary Art’), he explicitly stated that expressionist art did
not successfully represent the spirit of modern times. He also declared
that painted images (Malbilder) no longer stood in the forefront of

modern development, but that this role had now fallen to images in
scholarly and philosophical thinking (Denkbilder).
The impact of Worringer’s work depends much more on his
moving the term ‘abstraction’ to the centre of his speculations about
art rather than anything specific in those speculations. The appearance
of such a broad hypothesis about abstraction certainly helped the
sudden innovation of abstract art justify itself, even if it may not really
have done as much to help it explain itself. The term ‘abstraction’ in
the title of Abstraction and Empathy does not refer to any opposition
between figurative and non-figurative painting. In Worringer’s
opinion, the urge to create images that imitate objects in the world
should never be confused with the authentic artistic impulse. He never
passes up an opportunity to repeat this, nor to distinguish what he
means by naturalism from any ‘menial’ copying of nature. Looking to
ornament for the essence of artistic volition, he is able to insist that
both ‘naturalism’ and the geometrical style ‘represent at bottom an
WILHELM WORRINGER
abstraction, and their diversity is really only one of degree.’ Though

the formal language or rhythms of Greek art are ‘organic’, and it
therefore ‘appeals first and foremost, with the whole of its being, to
our empathic impulse’, it ‘still conforms to the abstract need’ that
determines every work of genuine art.
The polar opposition between abstraction and empathy remains
entirely within this permanent and universal feature of formal purity
in art. Drawing on Theodor Lipps, he even suggests that all art, and
perhaps ‘every aspect of the human sensation of happiness’, might be
attributed to the impulse of self-alienation active in our appreciation of
such objective form. Nevertheless, the fundamental distinction
between those poles leads back to a basis in psychology, or in
metaphysics as a reflection of a general psychological température d’âme
in a national tradition. The impulse to abstraction arises from an
alienated relationship to nature, the impulse to empathy from a joyful
unity with nature. Both the effectiveness of his analysis of the
contemporary situation in art, and the contradictions in his argument,
come into focus through the vexed question of a modern relationship
to nature.
Biography
Wilhelm Robert Worringer Born Aachen, Germany, 13 January

1881. He studied art history at Freiburg, Berlin and Munich before
moving to Bern, where he completed his doctoral dissertation in
1907. This dissertation, Abstraktion und Einfühlung: Ein Beitrag zur

Stilpsychologie, attracted immediate attention, and was published 1908.
He taught as a Privatdozent at Bern University between 1909 and 1914.
Worringer became acquainted with Wassily Kandinsky and the other
members of the Blauer Reiter group in Munich. He published Form in
Gothic in 1911. After military service in World War One, he taught at
Bonn University from 1918 to 1928, becoming Professor in 1920. In
that year he distanced himself from Expressionist painters and became
more interested in contacts with philosophers, including Martin
Buber. He taught at the universities of Königsberg, 1928–44; and
Halle, 1946–50. Worringer died in Munich on 25 March 1965.
Bibliography
Main texts
Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style (Abstraktion und
WILHELM WORRINGER
Einfühlung: Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie, 1908), trans. Michael Bullock, New
York: International Universities Press, 1953.
Lukas Cranach, Munich: Piper, 1908.
Form in Gothic (Formprobleme der Gothik, 1911), Introduction by Herbert Read,
London: Putnam’s, 1927.
Die altdeutsche Buchillustration, Munich: Piper, 1912.
Künstlerischer Zeitfragen, Munich: Piper, 1921.
Urs Graf: Die Holzschnitte zur Passion, Munich: Piper, 1923.
Deutscher Jugend und östlicher Geist, Bonn: Friedrich Cohen, 1924.
Die Anfänge der Tafelmalerei, Leipzig: Insel, 1924.
Buch und Leben des hochberühmten Fabeldichters Aesopi, Ulm 1475, Munich: Piper,
1925.
Egyptian Art (Ägyptische Kunst: Probleme ihrer Wertung, 1927), trans. Bernard
Rackham, London: Putnam’s, 1928.
Griechentum und Gotik: Vom Weltreich des Hellenismus, Munich: Piper, 1928.
Über den Einfluß der angelsächsischen Buchmalerei auf die frühmittelalterliche
Monumentalplastik des Kontinents, Halle: Niemeyer, 1931.
Fragen und Gegenfragen: Schriften zum Kunstproblem, Munich: Piper, 1956.
Secondary literature
Arnheim, R., ‘Wilhelm Worringer on Abstraction and Empathy’, New Essays on
the Psychology of Art, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1980.
Buttegieg, J.A., ‘Worringer among the Modernists’, Boundary 2, 6 (1979), 359–66.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
(1980), trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1987.
Donahue, N.H. (ed.), Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm
Worringer, University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995.
Holdheim, W.W., ‘Wilhelm Worringer and the Polarity of Understanding’,
Boundary 2, 7 (1978), 339–58.
Jones, A.R., ‘T.E. Hulme, Wilhelm Worringer and the Urge to Abstraction’,
British Journal of Aesthetics 1 (1960), 1–7.
Saint-Martin, F., ‘La vie et la mort en peinture’, Etudes Littéraires 31 (1998), 59–74.
Schulze, I., ‘Wilhelm Worringer und die bürgerliche Opposition gegen den
großdeutschen Nationalismus auf dem Gebiet der Kunstgeschichtsschreibung’,
Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Ge-
sellschafts und sprachwissenschaftliche Reihe 18, 1969, 65–85.
Sheppard, R., ‘Georg Lukács, Wilhelm Worringer and German Expressionism’,
Journal of European Studies 25, 3 (1995), 241–82.
Zijlmans, K. and Hoosgeveen, J., Kommunikation über Kunst. Eine Fallstudie zur
Entstehungs- und Rezeptionsgeschichte des ‘Blauen Reiters’ und von Wilhelm
Worringers ‘Abstraktion und Einfühlung’, Leiden: Alpha, 1988.
MARCUS BULLOCK

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WILHELM WORRINGER

WILHELM WORRINGER (1881–1965)

GERMAN ART HISTORIAN AND THEORIST

The immediate and lasting success of Wilhelm Worringer’s first book,

an art historian to attack what he describes as the established

regions of the world into a more appropriate basis of ‘objectivity’. The

inadequacy of human knowledge, and the primitive man is therefore

that Lipps calls ‘objectified self-enjoyment’. This experience corre-

achieving this magnitude, he returned to this issue in 1911 with his

through its primary terminology, and then boldly set about

synthesis – that he calls ‘super-organic’. His conception grows in

that painted images (Malbilder) no longer stood in the forefront of

abstraction, and their diversity is really only one of degree.’ Though

Wilhelm Robert Worringer Born Aachen, Germany, 13 January

1907. This dissertation, Abstraktion und Einfühlung: Ein Beitrag zur

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