Abstraction and Empathy (2)

An Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style by Wilhelm Worringer.

Central tympanum, cathedral of Chartres, France (source)

Part II of Abstraction and Empathy is titled the Practical Section, so named because Wilhelm Worringer applied the theories set out in the first section to a discussion of art from Egyptian to the last of the Gothic.

Part I caused most of the ruckus. In what I admit was a bit of a splurge, I bought a second edition of Abstraction and Empathy published in 1997 that featured a foreword by Hilton Kramer.¹ Worringer’s ideas, Kramer notes, “were the subject of intense discussion in the Munich-based Blaue Reiter circle of Franz Marc and Vasily Kandinsky.” It’s difficult to imagine Kandinsky worrying whether Worringer was exactly right about, say, this claim on page 71:

If we leave all other factors on one side and adhere solely to our twin criteria of abstraction and empathy, we come to the following mediatory conclusion. We recall that the principle of Mycenean art was that of enlivenment, of naturalism, whereas the Dipylon style exhibits a marked abstract tendency. Classical art now seems to us to embody a grand synthesis of these two elements, with a clear preponderance of the naturalistic element, which, during the decadent period, became stronger and stronger and ended up as a complete travesty of the august beauty of Greek ornament.

But it proved useful to many artists of the time to cite Worringer’s assertion that abstraction, pursued as an exercise of form in the case of Kandinsky, and the turn away from naturalism, as in Marc, were not merely rejections of standards. Kramer recalls that he first heard of Worringer’s dissertation through an essay titled “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” by a critic named Joseph Frank published in 1945. Frank found in Abstraction and Empathy a viable literary theory. “It needs to be understood,” wrote Kramer (p. viii),

..that Worringer himself was not writing about modernist art in Abstraction and Empathy. He was writing about the art of the European past, but in a way that proved to be modernist in its assumptions. For it specifically called into question what, in the Foreword to the third edition of Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer described as “the one-sidedness and European-Classical prejudice of our customary historical conception and valuation of art.” This inquiry led him to ponder the spiritual implications of the stylistic differences that distinguished certain periods of Western art from each other as well as the even more dramatic stylistic differences that were seen to separate primitive art—the tribal art of primitive peoples—from, say, the tradition of Classical antiquity and the Renaissance in Europe.

Of course, once you begin that inquiry, many others follow. Page x:

From this perspective, abstraction was elevated to the plane of a universal principle as well as a spiritual imperative. For its real source was said to reside in something deeper than art itself—in what Worringer called “a psychic attitude toward the cosmos.”

I sense that Worringer, as a young art historian, was attempting to understand and justify his preference for Gothic art over that of the Renaissance. It explains his profound (and correct) disdain for the idea that all art ascends towards naturalism, or worse, mimesis, such as this dig at Vitruvius on page 74:

Absurd as it is to suppose that the leaf of the acanthus spinosus, or bear’s foot, was suddenly picked upon and made the predominant motif in the treasury of ornamental art, this assumption is nonetheless ubiquitous. It is admittedly supported by Vitruvius’ anecdote concerning the genesis of the Corinthian capital, which is intimately associated with the acanthus motif. Vitruvius recounts that the chance combination of a basket and an acanthus plant which grew out of the soil beneath it, and the observation by the sculptor Callimachus of the decorative effect of this combination, were the cause of the creation of the Corinthian capital in Corinth. This shallow interpretation merely shows that in Vitruvius’ time rapport with the authentic productive processes of a creative art instinct had been just as completely lost as it has to-day. And it is with such far-fetched and trite attempts at explanation that people hope to penetrate the mysterium of Greek artistic creation!

Worringer thrills at the reductive Ionic style, in whose temples “all the sensations of life flow uninhibitedly in, and the joyfulness of these stones irradiated with life becomes our own joy” (page 80). His taste for abstraction is so acute that it leads him to this bold claim on page 84:

There arose the postulate to give a different form of expression to the notion of material individuality, which had otherwise been attained only through the tactile nexus of the plane surface. This came about through the attempt to preserve this impression of unity and the tactile nexus as far as possible by the compactness of the material and its undivided corporeality. This fundamental law of sculpture has remained unchanged from the earliest archaic statues to Michelangelo, Rodin and Hildebrand. For there is, in principle, no difference between an archaic statue and one of Michelangelo’s tomb-figures.

Furthermore (page 85):

The artistic materialists naturally failed to see these deeper causes of the genesis of sculptural style; they explained all constraint by the resistance of the material. They were never struck by the absurdity of the idea that the chisel which exactly hacked out the face of an archaic figure, or the minute decorations of its vestments, should not have possessed the ability to separate the arms or the legs from the body and give these limbs some sort of support.

His denigration of art historical materialism throughout the book leads to the question of what he would have called his approach, by contrast. Spiritualism wouldn’t be the right word but his “Contribution to the Psychology of Style” is not a materialist psychology. It is attuned to the problem of how humans see their relation to the universe, a disposition of the entire being regarded both privately and culturally. “The instinct of man,” he writes on page 129, “is not reverent devotion to the world, but fear of it. Not physical fear, but a fear that is of the spirit. A kind of spiritual agorophobia [sic] in the face of the motley disorder and caprice of the phenomenal world.” Worringer was, in temperament, a Gothic sort of fellow. Page 113:

[Gothic] Man has transferred his capacity for empathy onto mechanical values. Now they are no longer a dead abstraction to him, but a living movement of forces. And only in this heightened movement of forces, which in their intensity of expression surpass all organic motion, was Northern man able to gratify his need for expression, which had been intensified to the point of pathos by inner disharmony. Gripped by the frenzy of these mechanical forces, that thrust out at all their terminations and aspire toward heaven in a mighty crescendo of orchestral music, he feels bimself convulsively drawn aloft in blissful vertigo, raised high above himself into the infinite. How remote he is from the harmonious Greeks, for whom all happiness was to be sought in the balanced tranquillity of gentle organic movement, which is alien to all ecstasy.

As he describes the last days of the Gothic, one senses his heart breaking (pp. 120-121).

Whoever has felt, in some degree, that all is contained in this unnaturalness, despite his joy at the new possibilities of felicity created by the Renaissance, will remain conscious, with deep regret, of all the great values hallowed by an immense tradition that were lost forever with this victory of the organic, of the natural.

That concludes the book, but an appendix, “Transcendence and Immanence in Art,” lays a sort of curse upon the pursuit of art history. Page 122:

[T]he sole cause of this misunderstanding [between art history and aesthetics] is the superstitious belief in the verbal concept art.² Caught up in this superstition, we again and again become entangled in the positively criminal endeavour to reduce the multiple significance of the phenomena to a single, unequivocal concept. We cannot shake ourselves free of this superstition. We remain the slaves of words, the slaves of concepts.

The remedy, offered later, is to recognize that “Only toward the Classical epochs can we be subjective and objective at the same time.” Otherwise we must be careful to evaluate art objects “not from our, but their own suppositions.” Our intuitions may be weak, but they’re better than prejudice. Page 126:

From the ability expressed in this material we have to deduce the volition underlying it. This is a deduction into the unknown, for which we have no guides but hypotheses. There is no possible means to knowledge here except divination, no certitude except intuition. But how poverty-stricken and menial would be all historical research without this great flight of historic divination. Or ought this kind of cognition to stand aside, when the other camp has nothing to offer but brutal violation of the facts by subjective bias?

On page 130 he notes that we moderns have paid for our understanding, our “mastery of the world,” with a “degeneration of [our] innate organ for the unfathomableness of things.” The claim raises the question of how we might rebuild it. There may be personal and spiritual answers that one could pursue fruitfully. But I see a rise of irrationalism that I suspect, having read Abstraction and Empathy, is a product of a surfeit in contemporary times of unsatisfactory, merely technical understanding. Data is available like never before. Wisdom is as obscure as ever.

A significant manifestation of that irrationalism is the worldwide and multi-party explosion of antisemitism, which Bari Weiss has noted is a “sign that society itself is breaking down.” The Republican candidate’s casualness about truth has been observed many times, particularly by Democrats. But the Democrat candidate is attempting to run a campaign on “joy” that was bereft of policy for months and arguably remains so.³ Each of these candidates appeals to irrationalism and attracts an uncritical awe that is unbecoming of an informed citizenry of a democracy established on Enlightenment principles.

We are entering a Gothic time. In that light, this passage on page 133 sounds like prophecy:

Since to the art beyond Classicism artistic creation and experience represents the activity of a diametrically opposite psychic function which, remote from all reverent affirmation of the phenomenal world, seeks to create for itself a picture of things that shifts them far beyond the finiteness and conditionality of the living into a zone of the necessary and abstract. Inextricably drawn into the vicissitudes of ephemeral appearances, the soul knows here only one possibility of happiness, that of creating a world beyond appearance, an absolute, in which it may rest from the agony of the relative. Only where the deceptions of appearance and the efflorescent caprice of the organic have been silenced, does redemption wait.

One hopes that we are constitutionally similar enough to all who came before us that what soothed them will soothe us as well.

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Our next title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is The Shape of Content by Ben Shahn. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.

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Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard is out now at Allworth Press. More information is available at the site for the book. If you own it already, thank you; please consider reviewing the book at Amazon, B&N, or Goodreads.

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2. The italics are mine, and I think what the author intended.

3. The recently stated policies contradict her previous stances, are nonsensical in themselves, or if they were serious proposals, could be implemented by the candidate now since she is currently in office. They are largely irrelevant to a campaign of vibes. In any case, the invocation of joy by a woman whose laughter makes her sound like a clinical sociopath is quite strange.