Hundert Jahre “Abstraktion und Einfühlung”. Konstellationen um Wilhelm Worringer by Norberto Gramaccini, Johannes Rößler (review)

This volume contains sixteen essays and some supporting materials that, true to its title, cover Wilhelm Worringer’s apparent influence since the appearance in 1908 of his earliest and most consistently discussed book, Abstraktion und Einfühlung. In the first of the critical articles, Hannes Böhringer notes that it stands alongside many other theories in endeavoring to create a comprehensible order in its material by establishing a radical opposition between two concepts: in this case obviously those, abstraction and empathy, named in the title. Böhringer then makes a rather strange claim about Worringer’s understanding of his own division by stating that these concepts are not really separate at all. “Abstraktion und Einfühlung gehen ineinander über” (40), he writes. Not only that, but he further claims that Worringer himself works quite comfortably with the collapse of his own principles: “Worringer interessiert sich für ihre Mischformen” (40). This observation may in fact be correct when applied, as in Böhringer’s commentary, to Worringer’s personal empathic feeling for the abstract rhythms of the Gothic. Yet it is by no means clear that Böhringer grasps how completely he thereby disrupts everything that Worringer claims. The one thing that is missing from this collection is indeed any single analysis that takes in the extent to which Worringer’s study, while a brilliant and entirely absorbing work, also rests on a set of untenable precepts. For example, “Mischformen” should not develop if the terms that Worringer describes as a priori concepts in art in Chapter Two of Abstraktion und Einfühlung “sind Gegensätze, die sich im Prinzip ausschliessen” and if the history of art that unfolds according to these principles “stellt eine unaufhörliche Auseinandersetzung beider Tendenzen dar” (Abstraktion und Einfühlung, München 1921, 60).

The polarity of terms on which Worringer’s aesthetic theory stands creates a scale along the single dimension of whose axis all cultures and societies may be compared and differentiated relative to one another. The origin of the values measured out along that scale lies in the metaphysical sense of either anxiety about the worldly condition, stirring the impulse to abstraction, or security in the world, stirring the impulse of empathy with its forms. This expresses itself in either the anorganic angularity or organic suppleness of an artistic tradition, especially in its ornament. The elegance of this measurement is purchased at the cost of its psychological realism, or the historical explanatory power proceeding from those terms, even though the subtitle of Worringer’s book describes it as “ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie.” What Worringer writes in Abstraktion und Einfühlung about Gottfried Semper’s book Stil (that is, Der Stil in technischen und tektonischen Künsten, 2 vols, München 1861that is, Der Stil in technischen und tektonischen Künsten, 2 vols, München 1863) applies perfectly to his own, namely that it takes its place as “eine Großtat der Kunstgeschichte, die wie jedes großaufgerichtete und durchgearbeitete Gedankengebäude jenseits der historischen Wertungen von ‘richtig’ und ‘falsch’ steht” (9). That is to say, it fulfills a need exactly like that which he ascribes to abstract aesthetics in its function of providing relief from impenetrable phenomena. It reduces the enormously complex set of phenomena loosely gathered by undisciplined minds under the word ‘art’ to a “Querschnitt” of rigidly formal proportions.

The reception documented in the essays reveals it as a succès d’exstase. Abstraktion und Einfühlung contributed little enough to the scholarly or scientific investigation of art, but released all manner of discursive and expressive life whenever twentieth-century culture struggled to make a place beyond classical values. These essays agree in showing how this slim book acquired a kind of symbolic value in its own right. Though Worringer wrote it as his doctoral dissertation while still in his mid-twenties, the radical contradiction of established...