Painterly politics: Wölfflin, formalisn and German academic culture, 1885–1915

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In this Subject: Arts (General)
By this author: Adler D.

Author: Adler D.

Source: Art History, Volume 27, Number 3, June 2004 , pp. 476-477(2)

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Abstract:

At the turn of the twentieth century, Heinrich Wölfflin, August Schmarzow and other formalist art historians contributed greatly to the formation of their field's institutional identity. Art history, they believed, was falling prey to a ‘spiritless’ (geistlos) condition that supposedly existed among the student population and which was associated with rapid industrialization and the mechanization of society. Expressing themselves in pedagogical treatises – which have largely been unnoticed by historiographers of art history – formalists focused on the ability of the ‘painterly’ (malerische) aesthetic to convey ‘germanic’ moral and spiritual values to a student population that was being wrongly influenced by an ‘elitist’, traditional art history overly preoccupied with philological and contextual research.

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0141-6790.2004.433_4.x

Publication date: 2004-06-01