A fresh contribution to the ongoing debate between Kunstwissenschaft (scientific study of art) and Kunstgeschichte (art history), this essay collection explores how German-speaking art historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century self-consciously generated a field of study. Prominent North American and European scholars provide new insights into how a mixing of diverse methodologies took place, in order to gain a more subtle and comprehensive understanding of how art history became institutionalized and legitimized in Germany. One common assumption about early art-historical writing in Germany is that it depended upon a simplistic and narrowly-defined formalism. This book helps to correct this stereotype by demonstrating the complexity of discussion surrounding formalist concerns, and by examining how German-speaking art historians borrowed, incorporated, stole, and made analogies with concepts from the sciences in formulating their methods. In focusing on the work of some of the well-known 'fathers' of the discipline - such as Alois Riegl and Heinrich Wölfflin - as well as on lesser-known figures, the essays in this volume provide illuminating, and sometimes surprising, treatments of art history's prior and understudied interactions with a wide range of scientific orientations, from psychology, sociology, and physiognomics to evolutionism and comparative anatomy.
Author(s): Mitchell B. Frank, Daniel Adler
Publisher: Routledge/Ashgate
Year: 2012
Language: English
Pages: 207
City: London
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction German Art History and Scientific Thought: Beyond Formalism
1 Body-Building: August Schmarsow's Kunstwissenschaft between Psychophysiology and Phenomenology
2 'Look at your fish': Science, Modernism and Alois Riegl's Formal Practice
3 Heuristic Constructs and Ideal Types: The Wölfflin/Weber Connection
4 The Formalist's Compromise: Wölfflin and Psychology
5 Recapitulation and Evolutionism in German Artwriting
6 The Physiognomics of Architecture: Heinrich Wölfflin, Hans Sedlmayr and Paul Schultze-Naumburg
7 Materializing Strukturforschung
8 Reine Wissenschaft: Art History in Germany and the Notions of 'Pure Science' and 'Objective Scholarship', 1920–1950
Bibliography: Selected Secondary Sources on Kunstwissenschaft
Index
