Plenitudes of Painting: Wilhelm Worringer and the Relationship between Abstraction and Representation in European Painting at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Art History and Theory at the University of Canterbury by Cristina Silaghi University of Canterbury 2012 i Table of Contents Acknowledgments ................................................................................................ vi Abstract ................................................................................................................. ix Key words.............................................................................................................. ix Preface .................................................................................................................... x Introduction ........................................................................................................... 1 Part 1: Outer pictures, inner contours ............................................................ 10 Wilhelm Worringer: sketch for a portrait ..................................................... 10 About Worringer: W. Eugène Kleinbauer, Hilton Kramer, Debbie Lewer ....................................................................... 14 Worringer, T. E. Hulme and Herbert Read .................................................. 17 Recent opinions, 1960-2008 .......................................................................... 23 Gazing in the mirror of history: Worringer’s forewords to Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic ........................................... 37 1908: first foreword to Abstraction and Empathy ....................................... 38 1910: Abstraction and Empathy, third foreword ......................................... 41 1918 and 1919: Form in Gothic forewords .................................................. 42 1948: Abstraction and Empathy republished ............................................... 44 1957: a new edition of Form in Gothic ........................................................ 47 Worringer’s approach to the writing of art history and theory ................. 49 Immanuel Kant and Theodor Lipps: creativity, aesthetics and experience ............................................................. 51 Empathy: Friedrich Theodor Vischer and Robert Vischer ......................... 54 Heinrich Wölfflin: embodiment and expression .......................................... 57 Objects, feelings, and aspects of empathy .................................................... 59 Worringer: subjectivity and objectivity ........................................................ 62 Empathy, abstraction and representation in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy ....................................................... 65 Empathy and abstraction: Lipps and Worringer .......................................... 65 From aesthetics to art-making: naturalism and style ................................... 75 W. J. T. Mitchell and Juliet Koss about empathy ........................................ 77 Abstraction and representation: Clement Greenberg, Frances Colpitt ....... 81 Representation and abstraction in art-making: Worringer’s perspective .................................................................................... 86 Adolf Hildebrand: nature, form, imitation ii and artistic self-sufficiency ............................................................................ 87 Imitation, naturalism, empathy and abstraction in Abstraction and Empathy .......................................................................... 90 Ferdinand Hodler: exactness and expressiveness, emotion and parallelism ................................................................................. 92 Distinctions and transitions: Alois Riegl on the art of antiquity ............................................................... 103 Abstraction: representational inflections .................................................... 106 Worringer and Classicism ........................................................................... 109 Part 2: Predecessors, critics, supporters ....................................................... 111 ‘Common to all’: form for Kant and Worringer ........................................ 111 Form, beauty, charm and emotion .............................................................. 113 Senses and form ............................................................................................ 113 Wölfflin and Worringer: beauty, form, matter and will ............................ 115 Regularity and uniformity............................................................................ 117 A matter of will: Schopenhauer and Worringer on life and art ............... 122 Distancing, urges, and will .......................................................................... 123 Riegl and artistic will ....................................................................................... 127 Will, perception, inner drive, and art-making ............................................ 128 Abstraction, representation, opposition: Worringer and Rudolf Arnheim .................................................................... 132 Withdrawal, productive thinking, and abstraction ..................................... 133 Re-examining Abstraction and Empathy.................................................... 134 The relationship between abstraction and representation: highlights from Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy, and Gilles Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1984) ........ 140 Classical ornament and Gothic line ............................................................ 141 Non-organic dynamism in Gothic art ......................................................... 144 Painting, representation and abstraction according to Deleuze ................ 146 Part 3: Around Expressionism ....................................................................... 149 The words of Worringer: ‘Expressionism’ at the beginning of the twentieth century ..................................................... 149 ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’ (1911): Worringer’s early response to Expressionism ............................................. 158 Worringer’s impact: Expressionism (1914) by Paul Fechter, iii and Expressionism (1916) by Hermann Bahr .............................................. 185 Current Questions on Art (1921): Worringer revisits Expressionism ................................................................. 196 Questioning Worringer: critical discussions on the writings of Worringer and his association with the Expressionism movement ......... 199 Georg Lukács and the decline of Expressionism ....................................... 200 Richard Sheppard, and Lukács’ debt to Worringer ................................... 204 Joseph Frank’s Worringer: expressiveness, emotion and the passage of time ................................................................. 205 William Spanos: empathy, abstraction, and the urge to engagement ......................................................................... 207 Ulrich Weisstein: Worringer, Expressionism, and abstract-representational middle grounds ............................................ 210 Neil Donahue: ‘world feeling’ and the history of ideas in Abstraction and Empathy ........................................................................ 211 Worringer and Expressionism: late twentieth-century perspectives ...... 215 Part 4: Redrawing antithesis .......................................................................... 225 Antithesis: Classical, modern and contemporary contexts ....................... 225 Aristotle and antithesis ................................................................................. 227 Worringer’s rhetoric: Neil Donahue, Geoffrey C. W. Waite, and Joshua Dittrich ....................................................................................... 230 Kant, Schopenhauer, Riegl, Wölfflin, antithesis ........................................ 233 Gradation, displacement and transposition: alternatives to antithesis in Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy ..................................................... 244 Form in Gothic: interplay readdressed ......................................................... 254 History and Ego: Worringer’s approach ..................................................... 257 Interplay in naturalism .................................................................................... 260 Interplay in the Gothic art of Northern Europe: memory, assimilation, interpolation .............................................................. 261 Schiller, Worringer, interplay ........................................................................ 264 Interplay: a dual, hybrid state in Gothic art ................................................ 270 iv Part 5: Interplay in painting ........................................................................... 274 Worringer, his contemporaries, and early twentieth-century art-making in Abstraction and Empathy ............................................................................. 274 Pictorial contexts for abstract-representational interplay: Cézanne’s realized sensations ......................................................................... 278 Monet, Worringer’s Impressionism, and the interplay of abstraction and representation