Journal of Art Historiography (Jun 2015)
‘‘Thus we forever see the ages as they appear mirrored in our spirits”: Willhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy as longseller, or the birth of artistic modernism from the spirit of the imagined 0ther
Abstract
As welcome as Worringer’s plea for a global broadening of art-historical research may seem from the present perspective, his theoretical approach, which is tied to a fictive other and determined by primitivist ideas remains problematic. His work helped to draw attention to non-European art, but it impeded its understanding. So the question is all the more pressing as to what actually made the book an internationally acclaimed longseller of modernism, which is referenced not only by artists but also by art and cultural theorists. The answer is to be sought in the adoption and subtle transformation of the primitivist figure of thought, which corresponded not only to the spirit of the early twentieth century, but to the very self-image of modernism as a whole. This article will attempt to show this.
