Journal of Art Historiography (Dec 2013)
‘The rigorous and the vague: aesthetics and art history in Riegl, Wölfflin and Worringer’
Abstract
The paper approaches the art theory of Aloïs Riegl, Heinrich Wölfflin and Wilhelm Worringer from two perspectives. Firstly, the paper integrates the conception of the image of these three art historians into the phenomenological tradition as founded by Edmund Husserl where the image is described as an immaterial ‘image-object’ distinct from the subject and the material of the image. Further, the polarities that these historians introduced are interpreted from a structuralist perspective as anonymous deep level structures of visuality that are realised in the singular artwork. Secondly, Riegl, Wölfflin and Worringer rejected aesthetics from art history because of a specific understanding of philosophical aesthetics. However, the paper determines that their rigorous description of art historical styles is embedded in vague aesthetic categories and that, in the case of Riegl, the creative act as conceptualised by the notion of the Kunstwollen presupposes the aesthetic experience.
