Journal of Art Historiography (Jun 2015)
Ornamental “borderlands”: Elisabeth Wilson and Martin Heydrich’s historiographies of “primitive” ornament
Abstract
This article examines texts by Elisabeth Wilson and Martin Heydrich written in 1914 at the University of Leipzig on the subject of ‘primitive’ ornament. Both synopsize the history and literature of this field from its beginnings in the nineteenth century to the time of their writing. This article considers how Wilson and Heydrich represent this history and how the field’s multidisciplinary practitioners perceived its pressing problems. Above all, Wilson and Heydrich set up a number of recurring oppositions between major approaches to ‘primitive’ art and ornament, between ‘materialist’ interpretation, allied with archaeology, symbolic interpretation practiced for the most part by ethnologists, and an ‘aesthetic’ approach, pursued by art theorists and focused on the psychological will of its creators. These issues and this configuration of approaches are further examined in one of August Schmarsow’s important essays on art history and ethnology.
