Introduction

German Art History and Scientific Thought:

Beyond Formalism
Mitchell B. Frank and Daniel Adler

One of the frequently made assumptions about early art-historical

writing in Germany is that it depended upon a simplistic and narrowly
defined formalism. This book attempts to help 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 human,
social and natural 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 Wlfflin as well as on lesser-known figures, the essays
in this volume provide illuminating, and sometimes surprising, treatments
of art historys prior and understudied interactions with a wide range of
scientific orientations, from psychology, sociology, and physiognomics to
evolutionism and comparative anatomy.
The contributors to this volume examine a variety of issues related to
formalist approaches identified with the methods of Kunstwissenschaft
(scientific or rigorous study of art), which appeared in the latter part of
the nineteenth century as an alternative to already established methods
of Kunstgeschichte (art history). The older methods were practised in the
academy by central figures such as Herman Grimm, Georg Dehio and
Eduard Dobbert, who consistently drew causal connections between the art
object and a range of historical, biographical, philological and theological
source materials. For this earlier generation, art historical knowledge
tended to be defined by the explanatory value of extra-artistic sources and
the process of historical contextualization. In contrast to these approaches,
practitioners of Kunstwissenschaft, which refers more to a tendency in

german art history and scientific thought

art historical scholarship than a specific school of thought or a coherent

programme, were convinced that only scholarly narratives that alternated
between two levels, the historically and empirically specific, on the one
hand, and the abstracted and aesthetic, on the other, would succeed in
conveying a discourse that is objective. Accordingly, leading academic
authorities such as Grimm and Dobbert denigrated kunstwissenschaftlich
methods as a non-rigorous and intuitive quest for the artworks essence,
and labelled such approaches as a form of dilettantism associated with the
museum context; such supposedly amateurish pursuits were insufficiently
concerned with textual sources and therefore did not permit the student
access to rigorous scholarly knowledge.1
In response to such criticism, practitioners of Kunstwissenschaft were
forced to develop methodological practices that had systematic features.
By arranging a plurality of artistic phenomena into a highly coherent
network of synchronic comparisons and diachronic successions, formalist
art historians provided their methodologies with an element of scholarly
and scientific (wissenschaftlich) rigour.2 As Renate Prange has argued, art
history as a scientific discipline (wissenschaftliche Disziplin) was rooted
in a German tradition, greatly influenced by Hegel, which can be traced
back to the writings of Johann Domenico Fiorillo and Carl Friedrich von
Rumohr.3 To some extent, Kunstwissenschaft methods also subscribe to
the norms of positivist scholarship that were firmly established by the
mid- to late nineteenth century in the leading academic institutions of
England, France and German-speaking countries. Many of these norms
were derived from the earlier, basic doctrinal tenets of Auguste Comtes
Cours de philosophie positive (183042).4 Kunstwissenschaft scholars were
likely to be familiar with Comtes work, which was widely available in the
189294 German translation of the fifth edition of the Cours de philosophie.
Wlfflins well-known aspiration to write an art history without names, for
example, is, as Arnold Hauser points out, quite similar to Comtes concept
of an histoire sans noms.5 Moreover, the notions of synchronic comparison
(or resemblance) and diachronic sequencing (or succession), which are
central to much Kunstwissenschaft scholarship, can also be found in Comtes
writing.6
In the late nineteenth century, the scientific rigor associated with
positivist research was well established in several fields of the natural
sciences (Naturwissenschaften), including physics, physiology and
psychology.7 Research scientists, such as Wilhelm Wundt and Ernst Mach,
conducted experiments under controlled laboratory conditions that focused
on immediately observable phenomena. This experimentation became
increasingly prominent during this time and had a profound effect on
scholarship produced not only in the natural sciences but in the humanities
as well. At this time, the notion of Wissenschaft was changing under the

Mitchell B. Frank and Daniel Adler

influence of empirical researchers who placed little emphasis on the role of

philosophical and personal reflection as the means to pursue knowledge.
Positivists, including perceptual psychologists, sought to discover principles
of causality based on the direct observation of the subjects reactions to
stimuli, which they measured with recording instruments or apparatuses.
The resulting data which was often measurements of reaction times or
attention spans was arranged in tabular form and regarded as knowledge
that was the product of precise instrumentation and the strict emphasis on
the empirically given (Gegebene) as directly observable relationships.8
In applying a positivist model to art and its experience, formalists
of the Kunstwissenschaft tradition faced the problem of the perceiving
subject, and more specifically the perceiving subject of different eras and
places. In working through these problems, they looked to the results of
perceptual psychologists like Wundt, Gustav Fechner and Hermann von
Helmholtz, who examined the mental and material conditions of perception
and concluded that perception involved both external stimuli and mental
activity. Fechner described the field of psychophysics as the study of the
relation of the material and the mental, of the physical and the psychological
worlds.9 Helmholtz similarly argued that the theory of perception belongs
properly in the domain of psychology and that visual perceptions are ideas
[Vorstellungen] rather than merely sense-impressions.10
This intellectual orientation was crucial in the late nineteenth-century
shift towards new methodological orientations in various fields of study.
In the case of Kunstwissenschaft, Neo-Kantian art historians like Wlfflin
and August Schmarsow were focused on articulating and comparing
psychological and physiological responses to the aesthetic object. Although
Kants non-critical writing, as Andrea Pinotti explains in his chapter in this
volume, might be seen as looking forward to aspects of Neo-Kantian thought,
his critical writings articulate a notion of transcendental subjectivity that
was independent of empirical qualities. Kant was mainly concerned with
treating the art object or, more often, nature as a pretext for the exercise
of judgments of taste. Neo-Kantian art historians, on the other hand,
considered the beholder, not as a passive observer that is distanced from
the empirical reality of the object, but as a historically and geographically
defined subject that experiences works of art sensually and psychically. The
understanding of this experience, they argued, was the key to acquiring a
form of knowledge that is unique to the realm of art.11 Wlfflins concept
of the painterly (Malerische), as Daniel Adler explains in his contribution
to this volume, articulates this form of knowledge, which focuses on the
psychological and perceptual qualities of objects specific to the baroque era.
And yet in many academic disciplines, including art history, there
were fundamental and bitter differences of belief about what constituted
rigorous (wissenschaftlich) knowledge; these differences lie at the heart of

german art history and scientific thought

the methodological debate (Methodenstreit) occurring during the time of art

historys institutionalization in German-speaking countries.12 Many scholars
in the humanities took sides, with some choosing to align themselves with
research scientists such as Mach, who contended that all higher functions,
including emotional states, may be conceived as collections of sensations
that, in turn, are analyzable with reference to portions of the nervous system
that are connected directly to the brain. On the other end of the spectrum
was the aesthetic philosophy of Konrad Fiedler, whose influential position
was largely incompatible with positivist lines of thought. There is within
human beings, he wrote, no organ [such as the nervous system] which
could explain what the goal of artistic aspiration is. (Es gibt im Inneren
des Menschen gar keine Organe, die das ausfhren knnten, was das Ziel des
knstlerischen Strebens ist.)13 For Fiedler there were other types of knowledge
beyond positivisms principles of scientific proof and evidence based on
observable and causal connections. Academic art history, he believed, was
trying to emulate these principles by emphasizing causal and mechanical
relationships between the artwork and either a preconceived set of traits
synchronically reflecting the artworks cultural context or a diachronic
arrangement of artistic precedents and antecedents. Fiedler thought that the
nature of these mechanical relationships constructed by art historians was
evocative of the positivists conception of the sensory organ as a kind of
machine, which yields the only information worthy of being called scholarly
knowledge.14
Many academic practitioners of Kunstwissenschaft undertook, in different
ways, a negotiation or dialogue between the main principles of positivist
doctrine and aesthetic introspection.15 While adhering to numerous
conventions of positivist scholarship, they also believed that such an
approach was incapable of fully expressing the essence of artistic experience.
In this volume, we will observe how so-called formalists used non-positivist
language to refer to aspects of aesthetic perception that are unobservable.
Such devices were regarded as methodologically essential and crucial
to the practice of imparting cultivation (Bildung) to students and readers
precisely because they are incompatible with the idea of positivist fact.16
Kunstwissenschaft scholars developed different conditions of compromise
with the analytical scientific tradition, which reflects an invocation of a
Wissenschaft that is avowedly scientific and sympathetic to experimentation,
but not fully positivist in orientation because it is committed to the study
of introspective and intuitive processes.17 This objective/subjective
opposition constitutes one of the main conceptual threads of this book. We
believe, then, that our primary focus on shifts between these twin registers
of meaning provides coherence to the volume which contributes to the
books uniqueness as all of the essays investigate the same philosophical
territory in remarkably different ways. Accordingly, the essays are not meant

Mitchell B. Frank and Daniel Adler

either to provide an exhaustive account of the textual material dealt with,

or to encapsulate the intellectual lives of the pioneering art historians who
wrote them. As such the book is intended to help generate further study,
either within monographic contexts (e.g., pertaining to Wlfflin or Riegl)
or on crucial thematic issues (e.g., the relationships between formalism and
ideology, or art history and science).
We have been arguing that art historians of the Kunstwissenschaft
tradition adopted Neo-Kantian assumptions about perception and
positivist analytical methods as means to describe and compare artistic
phenomena. They also sought, with comparable emphasis, to include in
their interpretive process hypothetical and speculative statements that
many empirical scientists would have summarily dismissed. In other words,
champions of the Kunstwissenschaft tradition consistently sought to situate
the work of art on two different levels: on the one hand, the descriptive
level of empirical evidence and concrete, analytical observations; and, on
the other, the hypothetical level of theories and abstract laws. As longtime
editor of the Stuttgart-based journal Zeitschrift fr sthetik und allgemeine
Kunstwissenschaft, Max Dessoir stressed the importance of adopting a
systematic approach to artworks based on the assumption that knowledge
of the individual case is only possible through its inclusion in a meaningful
connection to other works. (Erkenntnis des Besonderen ist nur mglich durch
Einbeziehen in einen sinnvollen Zusammenhang.)18 The connection spoken of
here is only meaningful if it reflects an unavoidable circular movement
(unvermeidliche Kreisbewegung) between the empirical realm of individual
artworks and an abstracted realm inhabited by concepts of aesthetic
perception. When the student compares historically specific artworks while
simultaneously making reference to contrasting abstract aesthetic categories
such as the painterly and the linear, in the case of Wlfflins method he
or she arrives at a form of knowledge that is unique to the realm of art and
that is foreign to those who are preoccupied with the investigation of extraartistic documents. Dessoir and other formalists strove to establish and
enrich the new disciplinary category of Kunstwissenschaft in contrast to older
forms of Kunstgeschichte that, they believed, remained mired in antiquated
standards of historical evidence outside the artwork proper.19
The interpretive balance between the empirical and the abstract in
formalist art writing is one of the central issues addressed by this book.
The problem stems in part from the fact that artworks, as Michael Podro
has observed, seem context-bound and yet at the same time are irreducible
to contextual conditions that are empirically observable and verifiable.20
For Podro, critical art historians, such as Riegl and Wlfflin, were always
operating between empirical fact and irreducible abstraction. And, as
the essays in this book suggest, the movement between these poles was
supported, facilitated and enabled with reference to scientific discourses.

german art history and scientific thought

The contributors to Beyond Formalism demonstrate the historiographic need

to examine the relationships constructed between these two interpretive
levels in a thoroughgoing way, exploring a range of scientific discourses
that inspired the descriptive level and the rhetorical, nationalistic and
philosophical claims that motivated the shift from the descriptive to the
abstract.
The speculative leap from the empirical to the lawful, which served as
an intellectual grounding and disciplinary driving force in German art
history of the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth,
represents some of the most original thinking and argumentation that
has ever been performed by art historians, formalists or otherwise. It
has also been met with suspicion because of its associations with racial
categorization and its use of abstract laws for the purpose of cultural and
national characterization. This categorization of art by race can be traced
back in part to Hippolyte Taine, who was often invoked as a key opponent
of strains of spiritualist and introspective philosophy that had previously
dominated France, but whose discourse could be distinguished from the
relatively strict positivist position of Comte.21 Using a comparative method,
Taine persuasively drew correspondances between the object as a collection
of signes and aspects of its milieu that determine those signs. While Taines
sociological determinism posited externalized social variables, including
race, which combined, through the agency of the artist, to produce the
artwork, formalist art historians tended to move in the opposite direction,
that is, from a consideration of the artwork to generalizations about style or
period. Nevertheless, Taines racial characterizations were particularly well
received by German-speaking academics, for they not only solidified the
broad, Germanic-Latin (or North-South) distinctions that had philosophical
precedents in the writings of Hegel and Herder, but also lent such distinctions
a status of factual rigor.22 Significantly for formalist scholars, Taines
reduction of the physical world to a system of signs signs that the scholar
literally may take as lawful facts contained an element of speculation that
was highly instructive for Kunstwissenschaft, but did not actually correspond
to much of the most advanced, and purely positivist, empirical research that
was actually being performed during the late nineteenth century in Germanspeaking countries.
As early as the 1920s, the danger that formalism could be co-opted by
the far right were hinted at by Edgar Wind and Erwin Panofsky, who each
expressed their methodological distaste for abstract aesthetic categories.
These art historians argued that the development of formalist categories
was motivated by a non-rigorous, mysticizing essentialism and a morally
questionable mode of transcendental reflection. Wind, for instance, drew
attention to linguistic unclarity and terminological vagueness in his
critiques of Kunstwissenschaft.23 But it was not until after the Second World

Mitchell B. Frank and Daniel Adler

War especially during the 1950s and 1960s, when fears of totalitarianisms
resurgence loomed the largest that formalist methodology began to be
explicitly criticized for promoting an intellectual environment of aesthetic
wholeness conducive to fascist infiltration. Arnold Hauser, for example,
attacked Wlfflins Hegelian tendency to deemphasize the individualism
of specific artists by pursuing an aesthetic of anonymity and collective
volition, which makes concrete history a reflection or a realization or an
articulation of a universal metaphysical principle, of an other-worldly idea,
or of a superhuman power.24
Hauser took offense to the idea of the artist as a mere carrier of a metaindividual mode of perception, and identified Wlfflins art history without
names as a kind of analogue for the totalitarian system in which the subject
submits to the group mind.25 But perhaps the greatest critic of holism in
formalist art history was Ernst Gombrich, who attacked Hegelianism and its
art historical derivatives for believing in the existence of an independent
supra-individual collective spirit.26 Gombrich describes Riegl in a Hegelian
light as reading the signs of the time in order to penetrate into the secrets
of the historical process.27 Gombrich emphasized the hazards of the process
of tracing back to a cultural essence, an operation that may all-too-easily
become a mechanical movement, the product of an exegetic habit of the
mind leading to mental short-circuits.28
More recent art historiographical writing, influenced by deconstruction
and poststructuralist thought, and by philosophers of history such as
Hayden White, Frank Ankersmit and Dominic LaCapra, has also critiqued
formalism, focusing on the rhetorical and political qualities of formalist
truth-claims. Crucial historiographical issues arise when normative claims
are made as the result of projection from visual evidence to the level of the
lawful. Keith Moxey, for example, has sought to bring about an increased
awareness of art history as a constructed discourse that manufactures
binary relationships, including those between artwork and context, and
between the levels of empirical and hypothetical reality.29 Other scholars
like David Carrier, Donald Preziosi, Jonathan Gilmore and Dan Karlholm,
have analyzed the rhetorical, constructed and literary qualities of formalist
scholarship and have deconstructed the position of scientific neutrality in
many different kinds of art historical writing. According to Carrier, we
need to identify and spell out the implicit rules governing admissible
interpretations in artwriting, in order to understand how truth-claims and
standards of objectivity and wissenschaftlich rigor were exercised.30 Mitchell
B. Franks essay in this volume continues in this vein, exploring how
metaphors from evolutionism are used in art historical writing to produce a
seamless argument for historical change.
If the work of Kunstwissenschaft formalists has been discredited for using
racist categories, for assuming a totalitarian perspective and for taking a

german art history and scientific thought

position of scientific neutrality, then why continue to examine this muchmaligned tradition? We think there are at least two important reasons, one
historiographical and the other methodological. There is still much work to
be done to understand what motivated art historians of this tradition, what
they were thinking about when they made their claims, and what sources
they used in their argumentation. The essays in German Art History and
Scientific Thought look specifically at how ideas from a variety of human,
natural and social sciences, including comparative anatomy, perceptual
psychology, evolutionism and physiognomics, played a central role in how
art historians of the Kunstwissenschaft tradition formulated their theories.
The essays, however, do not overlook the criticisms of this tradition, but
rather face them head on in order either to verify or dismiss them. For
example, Daniela Bohdes examination of the influence of physiognomics
on the work of Wlfflin, Hans Sedlmayr and others, affirms, through
textual analysis, the racist character of some of this tradition. Ian Verstegen
studies the work of Hans Sedlmayr and its relation to Gestalt psychology
to establish what can be saved from the art historical method of a Nazi
party member. Christian Fuhrmeister, through archival research, shows
how notions of objectivity were used politically both to bolster claims of
art history as a science and to help art historians, who sympathized with
the Nazi cause, escape punishment after the war. While Fuhrmeisters
contribution differs from the others in the volume in that it is concerned
more with the politics of art history than with its claims, it functions well as
a conclusion to the volume for it highlights the fact that claims to objectivity
cannot be divorced from the political realm, an idea that underlies many of
the essays in this book.
Just as historiographical concerns are central to many of the essays in this
volume, so are current methodological and theoretical issues. The critique
of Kunstwissenschaft, we feel, should be motivated by careful consideration
of texts that are distant but still strongly affect the daily realities of art
historical research, writing and education in the classroom. Andrea Pinotti,
for example, argues that August Schmarsows treatment of bodily perception
as a means to grasp the materiality of objects from multiple perspectives is
still of relevance to phenomenological art-historical approaches. Margaret
Olin concludes her discussion of Riegl and comparative anatomy with the
suggestion that Riegls emphasis on close observation may, perhaps, be the
basis for a re-introduction of a new type of formal analysis into art history.
And Joan Hart, in her comparison of Wlfflin and Webers methods, observes
that there is still something impressive in the way Wlfflin united empirical,
hermeneutical and psychological concepts.
Georges Didi-Huberman has reflected on a continuing lack of interest
in re-reading the ensemble of conceptual demands with which art history
had constituted itself as the avant-garde of thought in Germany, as

Mitchell B. Frank and Daniel Adler

such theoretical reflections are still identified in France with murderous

ideologies. Didi-Huberman calls for the cautious and critical fulfillment of a:
three-fold wish, a triple stake: archaeological, anachronistic, and prospective:
Archaeological, in order to dig across the thick layers of forgetting still
accumulated by the discipline at the site of its proper foundations. Anachronistic,
in order to move back from todays sense of disquiet to those our direct
fathers no longer felt close ties with. Prospective, in order to reinvent, if
possible, a use-value for concepts marked by history concepts which could,
today, invest our debates on images and time with a certain actuality.31

There is already indeed a substantial body of historiographic literature

that works along the lines proposed here by Didi-Huberman. Frederic J.
Schwartz and Karen Lang, for example, have recently mined this tradition
in new and original, if very different, ways to show its relevance both to a
variety of historical contexts and for contemporary theoretical concerns.32
The essays in Beyond Formalism are intended to contribute to this ongoing
debate, reinterpreting and/or critiquing rather than continuing to repress
or wilfully ignore the methodological assumptions and assertions of
art historians of the Kunstwissenschaft tradition. While continuing to raise
awareness of art historical claims to objectivity or scientific neutrality, this
volume supplies a more thorough understanding of historical relationships
between histories of art and science, and the rhetorical leaps that have been
made between empirical objects and abstract aesthetic categories.

Notes
1.

See, for instance, Eduard Dobbert, Die Kunstgeschichte als Wissenschaft und Lehrgegenstand
(1886), in Dobbert, Reden und Aufstze Kunstgeschichtlichen Inhalts, Berlin: Verlag von Wilhelm
Ernst & Sohn, 1900, pp. 120. For detailed discussion of the evolution of the Kunstwissenschaft
movement, see Wolfhart Henckmann, Probleme der allgemeinen Kunstwissenschaft, in L.
Dittmann (ed.) Kategorien und Methoden der deutschen Kunstgeschichte, 19001930, Stuttgart: Steiner
Verlag, 1985, pp. 273334.

2.

On the psychological foundations of Kunstwissenschaft, see Hubert Locher, Wissenschaftsgeschichte

als Problemgeschichte: Die Kunstgeschichtlichen Grundbegriffe und die Bemhungen um die
strenge Kunstwissenschaft, in C. Thiel and V. Peckhaus (eds) Disziplinen im Kontext: Perspektiven
der Disziplingeschichtsschreibung, Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1999, pp. 12962, and Locher,
Kunstgeschichte als historische Theorie der Kunst, 17501950, Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2001,
pp. 37897. The latter volume provides an extensive bibliography on the history of art history in
Germany.

3.

Renate Prange, Die Geburt der Kunstgeschichte: Philosophische sthetik und empirische Wissenschaft,
Cologne: Deubner Verlag fr Kunst, Theorie & Praxis, 2004, pp. 10714. Wilhelm Waetzoldt also
locates the beginning of art history as a scientific profession (Fachwissenschaft) with Fiorillo and
Rumohr. See Waetzoldt, Deutsche Kunsthistoriker, 2 vols (192124) Berlin: Wissenschaftsverlag
Wiener Spiess, 1986, vol. I, p. 287.

4.

Comte, Cours de philosophie positive, 6 vols, Paris: Bachelier, 183045.

5.

Arnold Hauser, The Philosophy of Art History, New York: Knopf, 1959, p. 124. Comtes influence
on art historians is also mentioned in passing in Waetzoldt, Deutsche Kunsthistoriker, vol. II,
p. 184.

10

german art history and scientific thought

6.

For a concise discussion of Comtes importance, see Ferdinand Fellmann, Positivism, in F.

Fellmann (ed.) Geschichte der Philosophie im 19. Jahrhundert, Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt
Taschenbuch Verlag, 1996, pp. 1937. For an indication of Comtes currency during the turnof-the-century period in Germany, see, for instance, W. Ostwald, Auguste Comte: Der Mann und
sein Werk, Leipzig: Verlag Unesma, 1914. The literature on Comte is immense. One survey of
Comtes philosophy, which includes recent bibliography, is M. Pickering, Auguste Comte: An
Intellectual Biography, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. See also Walter M. Simon,
European Positivism in the Nineteenth Century: An Essay in Intellectual History, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1963.

7.

Two good summarizing discussion of positivism in the German-speaking context of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are J. Blhdorn and J. Ritter (eds) Positivismus im 19.
Jahrhundert. Beitrge zu seiner geschichtlichen und systematischen Bedeutung, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1971; and M. Sommer, Husserl und der frhe Positivismus, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985. For
commentary and reflections on the relationship of art history and the natural sciences, see Karl
Clausberg, Im Eldorado der warhen Bilder? Naturwissenschaften machen Kunstgeschichte,
in P. Helas et al. (eds) Bild/Geschichte: Festschrift fr Horst Bredekamp, Berlin: Akademie Verlag,
2007, pp. 1522.

8.

See Wundt, Allgemeine Richtungen der Psychologie, in Grundriss der Psychologie, Leipzig:
W. Engelmann, 1896, pp. 721, esp. pp. 1819. For commentary, see Kurt Danziger, Wundts
Psychological Experiment in the Light of His Philosophy of Science, Experimental Research,
1980, vol. 42, pp. 11320; and Danziger, The Origins of the Psychological Experiment as a Social
Institution, American Psychologist, 1985, vol. 40, pp. 13340. See also Jonathan Crary, Suspensions
of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999,
pp. 29, 389.

9.

Fechner, Elements of Psychophysics, trans. Helmut E. Adler, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1966, p. 7.

10.

Helmholtz, Treatise on Physiological Optics, in Thorne Shipley (ed.) Classics in Psychology, New
York: Philosophical Library, 1961, p. 79.

11.

On art history and the Neo-Kantian movement, see Joan Hart, Reinterpreting Wlfflin:
Neo-Kantianism and Hermeneutics, Art Journal, Winter 1982, vol. 42, pp. 293300. The
German literature on Neo-Kantianism is extensive, although little or no mention is made
of the movements major impact upon the development of art history. See, for example,
Klaus Christian Khnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus: Die deutsche
Universittsphilosophie zwischen Idealismus und Positivismus, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986. A good
source of bibliography is J. Oelkers et al. (eds) Neukantianismus: Kulturtheorie, Pdagogik und
Philosophie, Weinheim: Deutscher Studien-Verlag, 1989. One useful study in English is Thomas E.
Willey, Back to Kant: The Revival of Kantianism in German Social and Historical Thought, 18601914,
Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978.

12.

For discussion of the Methodenstreit, see for instance Marlite Halbertsma, Wilhelm Pinder und
die deutsche Kunstgeschichte, trans. M. Pschel, Worms: Wernersche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1992,
pp. 83127; Hans Schleier, Der Kulturhistoriker Karl Lamprecht, die Methodenstreit und die
Folgen, in H. Schleier (ed.) Karl Lamprecht: Alternative zu Ranke: Schriften zur Geschichtstheorie,
Leipzig: Philipp Reclam, 1988, pp. 745; and Ulrich Muhlack, Historisierung und gesellschaftlicher
Wandel in Deutschland im 19. Jahrhundert, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2003.

13.

Konrad Fiedler, Ursprung der knstlerischen Ttigkeiten (1887), in Gottfried Boehm (ed.)
Schriften zur Kunst, 2 vols., Munich, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1991, vol. 1, p. 175. For commentary,
see Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982;
and idem, The Manifold in Perception: Theories of Art from Kant to Hildebrand, Oxford: Clarendon,
1972, pp. 11120, which includes discussion of Fiedlers relationship to Neo-Kantianism.

14. For a discussion of the pedagogical significance of Fiedlers aesthetics, with reference to
Schiller, Humboldt, and other philosophical sources, see Klaus Mollenhauer, Fiedlers
Bietrag zu einer Theorie sthetischer Bildung, in Stefan Majetschak (ed.) Auge und Hand:
Konrad Fiedlers Kunsttheorie im Kontext, Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1997, pp. 95109, esp.
pp. 1026.
15.

For some mention of Wlfflins Neo-Kantianism and ambivalence towards positivist cultural
analysis, see Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1986, pp. 5056. To some extent, Wlfflin associated his adoption of positivist
tropes with the professionalization and maturation of his work. For further discussion, see
Lorenz Dittman, Stil/Symbol/Struktur: Studien zu Kategorien der Kunstgeschichte, Munich: Wilhelm
Fink Verlag, 1967, pp. 627.

Mitchell B. Frank and Daniel Adler

11

16.

A critical overview of the Bildung tradition may be found in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and
Method (1960), trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall, 2nd rev. ed., New York: Continuum,
1998, pp. 919.

17.

For further discussion, see the survey of different historiographic attitudes to intuitive processes
and the issue of historical reliving in Frank Ankersmit, The Reality Effect in the Writing of
History: The Dynamics of Historiographical Topology (1989), in History and Topology: The Rise and
Fall of Metaphor, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994, pp. 12561.

18.

Dessoir, Systematik und Geschichte der Knste, Zeitschrift fr sthetik und allgemeine
Kunstwissenschaft, 1914, vol. 9, pp. 115. (These were the opening remarks for the Kongress fr
sthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft in Berlin, 7 October 1913.) See also Dessoir, Beitrge zur
allgemeinen Kunstwissenschaft, Stuttgart: Verlag von Ferdinand Enke, 1929, which is a compilation
of Dessoirs writings that includes other general methodological statements. For discussion of the
important role played by conferences in the professionalization of the field, see W. Ranke, Der
deutsche Kunsthistorikertag eine obsolet gewordene Kommunikationsform, Kritische Berichte,
1975, vol. 3, pp. 91105; and Heinrich Dilly, Kunstgeschichte als Institution, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1979, pp. 16172.

19.

On the evolution of Kunstwissenschaft, see Richard Woodfield, Kunstwissenschaft versus sthetik:

The Historians Revolt against Aesthetics, in Francis Halsall, Julia Jansen and Tony OConnor
(eds) Re-Discovering Aesthetics, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008, pp. 1933; and
Emil Utitz, Grundlegung der allgemeinen Kunstwissenschaft (1914), ed. W. Henckmann, 2nd ed.,
Munich: Wilhem Fink Verlag, 1972.

20. Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982,
pp. 34.
21.

On the relationship between Wlfflin and Taine, see Joan Hart, Heinrich Wlfflin: An Intellectual
Biography, Diss. UC Berkeley, Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Press, 1981. For a discussion of Taines
influence, see Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science, New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989, pp. 8890.

22. See Taine, Lectures on Art, trans. John Durand, 2 vols, New York: AMS, 1971, II, pp. 512 (a
lauditory discussion of Germany) and II, pp. 1516 (a discussion of the notion of verification
based on correspondences between art and surrounding influences in Venice and Greece).
See also Taine, History of English Literature, trans. H. Van Laun, New York: Ungar, 1965, I,
pp. 136.
23.

Wind, Zur Systematik der knstlerischen Probleme, Zeitschrift fr sthetik und allgemeine
Kunstwissenschaft, 192425, vol. 18, pp. 4386, esp. pp. 485, 43840; Panofsky, ber das Verhltnis
der Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie (1924), in H. Oberer and E. Verheyen (eds) Aufstze zu
Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft, Berlin: Verlag Bruno Hessling, 1964, pp. 4975. Another
important historical critique is Otto Pcht, The End of Image Theory, in Christopher Wood (ed.)
The Vienna School Reader, New York: Zone Books, 2000, pp. 18194.

24.

Hauser, Philosophy of Art History, pp. 1378.

25.

Ibid., p. 135.

26.

Ernst Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History (1967), Ideals and Idols: Essays on Values in History
and in Art, Oxford: Phaidon, 1979, p. 50.

27.

Ibid., p. 44.

28.

Ibid., p. 47. For more recent critiques of Hegelianism in art history, see Keith Moxey, Art Historys
Hegelian Unconscious, in Moxey, Michael Ann Holly and Mark Cheetham (eds) The Subjects of
Art History, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 2551; James Elkins, Art History
without Theory, Critical Inquiry, 1988, vol. 14, pp. 36068; and Beat Wyss, Hegels Art History and
the Critique of Modernity, trans. Caroline Dobson-Saltzwedel, New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1999.

29.

Moxey, The Practice of Theory: Poststructuralism, Cultural Politics, and Art History, Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1994; and Moxey, The Practice of Persuasion: Paradox and Power in Art
History, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001.

30.

Carrier, Principles of Art History Writing, University Park, Pa.: Penn State University Press, 1991,
p. 6. See also Preziosi, Rethinking Art History; Dan Karlholm, Art of Illusion: The Representation of
Art History in Nineteenth-Century Germany And Beyond, New York: Peter Lang, 2006; and Jonathan
Gilmore, The Life of a Style: Beginnings and Endings in the Narrative History of Art, Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 2001.

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german art history and scientific thought

31.

Didi-Huberman, History and Image: Has the Epistemological Transformation Taken Place?,
in Michael F. Zimmermann (ed.) The Art Historian: National Traditions and Institutional Practices
Willliamstown, Mass.: Clark Art Institute, 2004, p. 138.

32.

Schwartz, Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany, New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005; Lang, Chaos and Cosmos: On the Image in Aesthetics and
Art History, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006.