Wilhelm Worringer was a German art historian who wrote a 1908 book called "Abstraction and Empathy." It reputedly argued that representational art tended to give way to abstract art at times when artists and society were very restless, fearful and despairing of recent and especially coming changes in society. Worringer said that abstraction was an artist's attempt to transcend the ugly realities of life and it was a form of denial of terrifying imminences.
Worringer's ideas were later discovered by T.E. Hulme in London and expressed in lectures to modernists of London in 1914...on the eve of WWI, a war that many had been anticipating with dread for at least a year by then.
Hulme reputedly forecast the decline of representational art and the rise of abstraction in these same lectures.
I learned about Worringer and Hulme through John Tytell's biodgraphy "Ezra Pound: A Solitary Volcano."
Has anyone actually read Worringer's book?
Has anyone read any other books that make this or a similar argument about abstraction?
I have a vague recollection that this topic might have been discussed previously in one thread or another. My apologies if I am covering old ground.
Well, I'm going to punch this back up to the top...
just to make sure if anyone has read this book. The philosophy intrigues me and, because I often like modernist designs, and hope for a better, more peaceful tomorrow, I'd like to think that its not true. But...has anyone else explored this idea before?
My Thoughts
I haven't read the book, but am puzzled by 'tended to give way to abstraction'.
Abstract art was a fairly new concept in the early part of the Twentieth century, and had by no means been coming and going with sociological and political change.
It would be foolish for me to say that art wasn't affected by these things, and the Realists backlash to the Industrial Age is a good example.. the Pre Rapahaelites and their own brand of Medievalism for example, but I tend to think of it as a massive shift of the World's art scene which existed in itself: this is not to say it wasn't affected by world events, and to some extent fuelled by the new, emerging, World media.
War spawned it's own art, but I believe abstraction and the Modernist movement would have forged ahead without it.
I can think of no time since pre WW1 when abstraction has come to the fore at time of world unrest.. in fact, the mid sixties, in Britain at least, was a time of renewed interest in abstraction in art, and also one of comparative peace.
I guess what I'm saying is world events and changes must affect Art and Artists, as they do all of us, but my belief is it moves forward and evolves regardless, as a seperate entity if you like.
I suspect that we will...
gather a list of people that have not read the book. I am one of them. My only recollection is from Art History class, and what I remember is not all that positive. I am inclined to follow Robert's line. Let's not forget that the early years of the past century were also the years of Sigmund Freud (1858?-1938) and the exploration of the un-concious. Notwithstanding the historical importance of early century Vienna in the cultural development of the German speaking world, Not many of the theories developed at that time have survived further development. To link the circumstances of unsecurity with abstraction is as solidly based in fact as Adolf Loos' ornament was linked to crime. These were times when methods and tools for historians were not developed to a level reflecting the obvious need for more knowledge. The lack of reference of the past forced them to project visionary theories based more on imaginary relationships and anecdotical evidence than on solid research and facts. A child could have dismissed the assumption that tatoos are inevitably related to crime, in the same way, one could easily set out a dateline on past social risk and anxiety caused by war, famine, epidemies, religion, viking tourism and other calamities and not find any relationship with abstraction.
I am not surprised by the way that you found this reference in a book about Ezra Pound. I have no doubts about his poetry and writing qualities but he was also a strong supporter of Benito Mussolini(1883-1943) and the Axis country agreement and openly fascist. Fascism is to a large extend based, not on how society really is but on, in a particular and often personal vision, society should be, regardless real needs, real aspirations etc. Modernism has not always had clean hands in this. But there is a very basic difference between an attempt to explore form language by starting with very basic abstract elements with the ambition to develop it to a wider, more articulate language understood by all, and the ambition to make, from a very basic abstract language, the only acceptable one. Modernism has often played on both horses, not realizing that they were running in two different directions. In doing so they left the opportunity for Post-modernism, Memphis mouvements etc. to claim that they were more in touch with the form language of the "common" man and were more democratic.
It is strange (to me) that there is still some interest amoung art historians for people like Wilhelm Worringer...maybe I should read it
I also would tend to agree...
I also would tend to agree with Robert and Koen regarding the evolution of art, and would suspect the importance of the audience may be nearly as much a factor in the conception of movements as the artist. I remember though browsing one of the MOMA navigational books on the history of modern art with my ten year old niece. We were looking at something by Pollack, and I was explaining to her the possible role of society on his emergence in what I'm certain now were way too elaborate terms. She seemed to be pondering what I was saying, then responded in her most serious tone, "he liked to scribble, didn't he".
Social science inquiry in Germanic Europe of 1908...
was transitioning from historical determinism to subjectivism.
Freud represented the new subjectivism. It aimed to look at current activity through the unit of the individual and seek a change based on a change in the models of choice the individual used. It was basically deductive reasoning lashed to observation. It started from apriori principles (givens assumed based on often anecdotal obsservation) It assumed that though the decision models imposed by the past were largely determinant in an untreated patient, a treated patient could break with the historical determinants of choice, form new choice models and become free of his/her past. Something similar was going on in Austrian economics of the time. Individuals had been assumed to make choices on historically determined models, but the Austrians argued that if an economist uncovered other more crucial choice models, rationalized them, and then manipulated the inputs that triggered choice, the economic individual could be freed from the historically determined choice models and so controlled, directed economic change could occur collectively through altering the choices of individuals.
This subjectivism penetrated into many academic fields and into many Western countries.
For better or worse, it was resisted not surprisingly in the field of history, where historical determinism had its deepest roots. Historical determinism argued the past was prologue. Events unfolded from the past and so were not really able to be liberated from what the past determined. The individual was a prisoner, or a beneficiary, of his history and the history of society. Individuals only thought they could change. The truth was that they and the tendancies of the time were determined, according to this -ism. Historical determinists loved to study the past and discover patterns; then they liked to see if those patterns repeated over time; then they liked to make sweeping pronouncements about the inevitability of those patterns repeating. Perhaps I am oversimplifying a bit, but probably not much.
Pt. 2
Subjectivism was a great -ism for people who weren't getting a fair shake from the status quo. It suggested you could change and get a better shake.
Historical determinism was a great -ism for persons who were getting a fair shake from the status quo. It suggested that no matter how you screwed up, history and time favored you keeping what you had.
Now back to Worringer. I haven't read the book yet either. But he was a German art historian of 1908, so he was probably a historical determinist. He must have found one example of art shifting from representational to abstract. My guess is that he studied cave paintings, as that was all the rage in those days, and anecdotally observed that primitive representationalism gave way to primitive abstraction once, or vice versa. Next, he went looking for a repeat of the pattern. Most likely he saw some change from the representational to the abstract in Egyptian culture, and perhaps in some other classical civilizations. He found what he was looking for, so to speak, not necessarily the empirical truth, but a truth that confirmed his bias, or maybe it was the truth. Probably he found it many times...so many that he formulated his historically determistic theory (a heuristic really) that this would happen again when things got scary for a society again.
Now, none of this means he was right, or that he was wrong, for that matter.
Pt. 3
What it means is that it is probably not an empirically verifiable hypothesis. How exactly could you set up a valid, reliable time series statistical analysis to test his hypothesis? The best you could probably do was consider correlations, but again you'd be finding what you're looking for with the window dressing of quantitative analysis, because the statistic wouldn't really be randomized, and the underlying complexity vaguely symbolized by each parameter and variable formulated in any more rigorous parametric attempt of analysis would likely violate the assumptions of statistical inference (is the population really normally distributed, is the mean really zero, is the error factor really free of multicollinearity, etc.?). So analysis would necessarily default to some more arcane and limited statistical analysis, or to game theories and algorithms which themselves fail to produce empirically verified findings. They just produce deductive inferences with some statistical analsysis of drivers.
As an aside, society largely abandoned inductive empirical science in the age of the computer. There were so many interesting questions inductive empiricism could not even be applied to. So: we jumped headlong into algorithms,often resulting in the new quantitive voodoo of the algorithm predicts itself with high probability and so that is good enough for me, if it gets me a grant. No, I have no idea if its true. But aren't the computer plots and scatters impressive? And isn't using pseudo science to inquire into interesting problems better than not looking at all? But, wait, I digress...
Still, you see, there is something intriguing about Worringer's rule of thumb.
And if you're a producer, or a designer, for that matter, wouldn't it be interesting to know that when you were trying to provide products to a society that both you, the producers and the consumers of that society may be moving toward more abstraction because of fear and uneasiness, or moving away from it because of confidence and satisfaction and comfort?
My observation on all of this sort of thing is this: history often repeats itself in entirely unpredictable ways. 🙂
This is to assume
that 'abstraction' ever took place.
abstraction, for me, would require the intervention of an artist or an artistic mind. Depending one one's viewpoint, such a thing didn't really exist in prehistoric or Egyptian times..the two examples you have offered.
what we now call art at that time, and indeed up until much later- even up until the time of the Renaissance, was representation, information, idolatry or even propaganda, not the work of one man alone conveying an idea or a concept... i.e Art as we now know it.
Maybe you and I, and Mr. Worringer, have a differing notion of abstraction ?
Exactly so Robert, nor would...
Exactly so Robert, nor would we ever conclude today that abstact art is an "attempt to transcend the ugly realities of life or is a form of denial of terrifying immenences". Art prior to World War I, and particulary World War II and the dropping of the atomic bombs, is a horse of a different color.
So maybe the very premise is wrong. War, trauma, fear, all are hell,and despite that, somehow fiercely liberating. Once the artist became aware that the total annihilation of man was just the press of a button away, it may be only natural that he/she would rarely ever aspire to anything as exclusive as representation. What did Basquiat say, "build a fort, set it on fire".
I infer Worringer was defining abstraction as...
geometric formalism emphasizing forms like squares, circles, spheres, cylinders, pyramids.
I suspect that he saw things like the pyramids of Egypt, or the Acropolis of Athens as evidences of a tendancy toward "abstraction" during certain periods of classical antiquity.
I suspect he looked at the Sphinx as being more representational than, say, the pyramids, and also as evidence of periods where the representational was more embraced by society.
Knowing the rigor of some old German scholars, I suspect he looked at a lot more than the pyramids, the acropolis and the Sphinx to arrive at his conclusion.
I suspect he was either wrong, or that what he claimed could not be empirically verified by inductive scientific methods, or even by the deductions resorted to by contemporary social sciences, who then buttress them with flawed parametric statistics.
But here is why I REMAIN intrigued by his argument.
Modernist abstraction did surge around WWI.
Modernist abstraction did accelerate during during the WWII years. And it did reach a zenith in the 50s and 60s under the spectre of the mushroom cloud. And it was eclipsed in me decades of the 70s and 80s. And it did begin a resurgence with the awesome dislocations of globalization and fears of terrors that since the 90s.
Perhaps it is all a coincidence, or a problem of inadequate definitions and grouping to much unrelated phenomena together. But it is also possible that there is something to this.
Again, have any design scholars looked into this argument of Professor Worringer in the last two decades?
Isn't it often true dc that...
Isn't it often true dc that many nations of the modern day harbor movements that flourish or accelerate following periods of war, providing their geography is far enough away from the epicenter of disaster.
That is indeed one of the economics of war, isn't it. Call it the theory of relative obliteration.
After Hiroshima, maybe the artist decides painting a picture of a dour old man holding a pitchfork doesn't seem very gothic any more.
hudsonhonu...
Let me first be clear. Rationalizing past events into a formula and then claiming that formula has predictive efficacy about the past, present or future, beyond random chance is very tricky. Alot of great minds have developed scientific empiricism--induction backed by statistics--to separate wheat from chaff in assertions. I think that the chances of Worringer and later Hulme having been wheat and not chaff, i.e., right, or still being right, in any empirically verifiable sense, are VERY slim. Probably they were pesons who latched onto an empirically unverifiable notion, dressed it up as some kind of pseudo science, or pseudo philosophy, advocated it, and then seemed to be proven somewhat right, after the fact, IF one looked at events through an extremely narrow, and probably biased set of outcomes. Put another way, these kinds of ideas of Worringer and Hulme often fall victim to the problem of finding what one is looking for, and claiming it is the truth, because certain observable, yet anecdotal events support it, rather than finding an empirically verifiable truth that holds across a broad, set of events selected with minimal bias. For example, I have found enough anecdotal events consistent with Worringer's and Hulme's idea that I am curious whether there is any truth to it. I doubt it, but am curious. If instead, I leaped to the conclusion that they were correct, because of these anecdotal observations, then I would be committing the same fallacy of inquiry that I suspect they committed. I would be using a small, nonrandomized sample of events as proof, rather than as springboards for further inquiry. I belabor all of this, because I think it has some application to the very interesting idea that you describe also.
You suggest a "theory of relative obliteration" in the form of the following hypothesis: "many nations of the modern day harbor movements that flourish or accelerate following periods of war, providing their geography is far enough away from the epicenter of disaster."
To begin with I'm intrigued with the idea. It seems to imply that when all is said and done all manner of ideas--not just one or two like the Worringer/Hulme hypothesis survive. Hence, it suggests we should probably conclude the Worringer/Hulme hypothesis is just one of many ideas that survived the war; this is at root a kind of natural selection (of philosophies in this case) argument and it appeals to my own particular bias in favor of evolutionary biology models of natural selection and change. Distilled, if culture A is bombed to oblivion, and if culture B is not, the set of philosophical movements in culture B will survive and have a chance to flourish, whereas those in culture A will not, because they were blown to smithereens.
As I noted, this makes a kind of sense to me, because: a) it has a clear logic; and b) it appeals to certain of my other scientific notions. But is it in fact true in any thorough, miniimally biased sense?
Pt.2
Well, if what you say were true, I would say we should not find Germanic, Italianate or Japanic cultural movements flourishing after the obliteration of their societies by WWII. We should see American and British cultural movements flourishing instead.
In fact, what we saw was some of both flourishing. For example, and in support of your theory, American and English cultural philosophies of representative government and economic organization survived the war and flourished. And so too did American art world notions of abstraction and other American ideas of popular culture (movies, music). Cranbrook rooted design would probably support your theory.
Yet there is at least one glaring contradiction of your theory also. Germany's Bauhaus modernism survived the war and flourished widely. How could this be? I would probably find others, if I looked, but this one alone seems to refute your theory unless one limits your theory to a degree sufficient to permit an anomaly like Bauhaus modernism. But when a theory is limited enough to permit something a significant Bauhaus modernism's flourishing after the cultural obliteration of WWII, how "true" is your theory? How much predictive utility does it really have? How much dare we rely on it for insight and action regarding the present and future?
I'm not being harsh here. I find your theory intriguing. I'm just trying to point out the pitfalls of this kind of reasoning and inquiry in general.
Further, this is the same sort of case I would make against the Worringer/Hulme assertion. Well, yes, perhaps there are cases where abstraction has flourished during fearful times, but I can also find fearful times when representational art has flourished, perhaps even simultaneously. How can the latter be true and the Worringer/Hulme assertion both be true, unless the assertion is so limited that it really offers little insight?
Ah, but I have bored you to death with this. Let's return to design and beauty. Accept my apology.
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