What do you think?
Rate this book
Form in Gothic
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface.
We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface.
We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
- GenresNonfiction
181 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1964
3 people are currently reading
78 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 18, 2022
I will cover both Abstraction and Empathy and Form Problems of the Gothic. While both can be fruitfully read on their own (the later recapitulate much of the former), they form a distinct whole.
The XIXth century typically explained the difference between abstraction and figuration in terms of progress: for Gottfried Semper, or at least for his followers, lifelike figuration was born from the growth of skills and techniques, and abstraction was the result of their absence. This meant that epochs departing from the previous standards of figuration, like Late Antiquity with regard to the Republic, or the Fin de Siècle with regard to Neoclassicism, had to be periods of ‘decadence’, in which skill and knowledge were atrophying. Abstraction stood for atavistic and regressive intermezzos in a cumulative and teleologic art history, perhaps reaching its end with the invention of photography. Germany had no lack of sceptics when it came to progress and its westward march, and historians like Alois Riegl eventually demanded that periods of ‘decadence’ be judged on their own terms. For him technique was not the efficient cause of artistic style, but a limiting factor imposed on each epoch’s Kunstwollen, on their specific taste in forms reflecting the ‘spirit of the age,’ and of the community. The art historian’s duty was to assess and organize those ‘drives’ on the basis of universal, formal antinomies, like tactile and optical, or close and distant view.
Wilhelm Worringer enters the fray in 1906 with his doctoral thesis Abstraction and Empathy, where he builds on his teacher Theodor Lipps’ theory of empathy, who earlier had declared that aesthetic pleasure (beauty) is ‘objectified self-enjoyment’: beauty is the experience of freedom which the beholder encounters when imaginatively projecting himself in an object and following its lines and forms. Ugliness is the experience of the subject when those lines are broken, and the free-roaming is constricted. Lipps’s model was broadly compatible with Semper, and Worringer accept this mechanism of empathy, giving it in his book a more vitalist colouring, but also insisted that it is only half of the picture: the inclination project oneself into the objects of the world (be it landscapes, statues or people), presupposes a ‘a happy pantheistic relationship of confidence between man and the phenomena of the external world’ (Abstraction and Empathy, p. 15), which is by no means universal. In fact it seems to characterise only one civilization, classical Greece, so that traditional aesthetics (culminating with Lipps) is less a universal science of beauty, than the evaluation of all cultures against the standard of the Greek Kunstwollen. Everywhere else, where the climate is less clement and the people more fearful, reigns a terror at the world which dissuade any empathic projection. Space, as cypher for the threatening contingencies of the surroundings, became feared in the world and repressed in its artistic representation. Art thus become ‘a conflict between the man and the natural object which he sought to wrest from its temporality and unclarity’ (Abstraction and Empathy, p. 37). Where man succeeds, this wresting of the object from time and space leads to its schematic geometric reduction, typically to outlines hoped to approximate Platonic forms.
Worringer thus takes up the multiple antinomies of art historians like Riegl or Wöllflin, and bundles them into two overarching drives (Nietzsche came before, and Freud would follow), one immanent and empathetic, the other transcendent and abstract. The reception of Worringer’s dissertation is instructive: it was only published after reaching, haphazardly, the milieu of contemporary art. It was soon turned into a manifesto of Expressionism, and gained thereby widespread popularity; neither this text, nor Form Problems of the Gothic (published in 1911 and expanding on the dissertation), actually mention contemporary abstract art, nor could Worringer have been aware of those movements while writing. His reception among art historians, on the other hand, was rather cold (Richard Hamann, whose distaste of Impressionism and empathy might have made him sympathetic, for example remarks that abstraction and empathy are little more than form and content dressed up for the occasion.) It is tempting to ascribe those hostile reactions to mandarin scorn or jealousy, but both publics evidently also had different expectations: Worringer’s titular binary, tirelessly explicated and reformulated throughout, served well the grandiloquent self-fashioning of an avant-garde addressing themselves to a rapidly broadening, but also less and less educated, art public. It was catchy and bold, and it granted Expressionism those nationalistic credentials that were at the time becoming prerequisites.
The historians instead looked at both methodology and case studies, and that is certainly not where Worringer shines. The very scope of Abstraction and Empathy—from Prehistory to Northern Renaissance in 150 pages—only allow for occasional illustrations of an otherwise highly speculative universal history. Form Problems of the Gothic, appearing at a time of peak Francophobia in Germany and dealing (between the lines) with the vexed question of the French origins of the German national style, is prone to all sorts of contortions to justify its methodological nationalism. Both books attempt to occult the crudeness of their method through derogatory comments on the German Spirit (i.e. ‘peoples of predominantly Germanic character . . . in their heaviness . . . [t]heir dull, chaotic bent remained traditional, remained materially bound’, Form Problems of the Gothic, p. 112), but ultimately, acrobatics aside, each ‘people’ (whose size vary according to the author’s needs) is ‘moved’ by a ‘spirit’, which exists beyond space and time, which is described at length, illustrated very little, explained hardly at all, and not once traced back to its historical causes. Despite the notoriously jingoistic spirit of German art history at the time, Worringer’s ‘cultural morphology’ (as this approach would be called after the war), did not satisfy residual historicist expectations, and colleagues pointed out the narrative’s many holes, which often seemed strategically positioned to obscure obvious contradictions in Worringer's system.
One glaring example is ‘oriental man’: a vague and but ubiquitous character, whose will to abstraction ‘rests upon . . . the one most valuable source, natural instinct [and] stands nearer to primitive man, again, than does Classical man’ (Form Problems of the Gothic, 40). The problem here is not so much that of racial hierarchy—Worringer is actually quite sympathetic to both instinct and abstraction, and if anything deplores their absence in the modern West—not even that of ethnic essentialism (which pervade virtually all scholarship of that period), but rather the reduction of innumerable cultures to one single function of a wonky system; we are never told quite how far ‘the Orient’ stretches: it appears to include Judaism and Christianity, Islam (Abstraction and Empathy, p. 37) and perhaps India (Abstraction and Empathy, p. 129), but sometimes also stretch to all that is neither Teutonic nor classical. Worringer explains away the Norse animal motifs of the Migration Period as references not to nature (which would imply empathy) but to ‘actuality’ (Form Problems of the Gothic, 60). Even if we grant him this unlikely contortion, are we then to assume that the Scythic animal styles, which he does not mention but show evident formal similarities, follow a wholly different ‘oriental’ logic? Or why should Mauryan and subsequent Indian architecture—shaped by Hellenistic architecture well beyond Bactria—be 'world-renouncing,’ while that of the Greeks is life-affirming? And how is atmospheric perspective in Chinese painting 'abstract', while it becomes 'empathetic' in Impressionism? Unsurprisingly, East Asia - broadly ‘naturalistic’ in its cosmology, but doubtlessly oriental in its art - does not figure at all in the book. The oriental lands of abstraction, oft mentioned but never defined, are in fact something of a category error: abstraction should have remained a ‘pole’ in Worringer’s system (as in Riegl’s), an ideal type with a function but no actuality. Worringer could not help himself projecting it on the world map. This is a very German tendency, from Hegel to Spengler, and it reflects a peculiar relationship to space both in modern Germany, and in the age of empires. Here as elsewhere, it demands all sorts of self-indulgent gerrymandering to satisfy both the formal demands of history, and the ideological imperative of an essentialist cultural geography.
Worringer’s prestigious legacy (from Hulme to Deleuze, Joseph Frank to Lars Spuybroek) generally disregard to those muddled developments altogether, to focus on the titular antinomy (Abstraction and Empathy) and sometimes on their Gothic ‘synthesis’ (though Worringer actually insists it is an unresolved juxtaposition rather than a synthesis, in Form Problems of the Gothic, p. 47). Both books were written shortly before the emergence of ‘pure’ abstraction (Malevich, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Kupka, etc. all more or less formulate ‘non-objective’ painting between 1910 to 1915), and attest to the idea being already ‘in the air’. Yet, it is as an alternative to the post-WW2 sterile formalist readings of abstraction that it gained much of its import. Rather than the fulfilment of medium specificity (of art about art, truthful only in its silence), Worringer’s abstraction is a comment on the real: its autonomy from figuration is born from finding nothing worth figuring. This partly explains why Worringer is sometimes cast as the avant-garde alternative to Greenbergian modernism - despite the fact that he himself was more interested in the Deutschrömer than in the Blaue Reiter, or that his politics snuggly fit the conservative end of the design reform. The import of those politics in his theory has been partly charted, but it remain to be analysed among his later followers. Similarly, his notion of a universal but unevenly distributed pulsion to transcendence unsurprisingly influenced both Rudolf Otto and Carl G. Jung, and thus probably the subsequent ‘phenomenological school’ in the history of religions. An analysis of the role which art, and ‘pure’ painterly abstraction in particular, played in the secularisation of religious experience would be interesting. From Kandinsky and Worringer to Eranos and Abstract Expressionism, abstraction’s literal objectification of religious experience was doubtless an important prelude to its repackaging as an ‘anthropological constant’.
On the whole, those are important books: important in the history of European thought, both in and beyond art history. The simplicity of their central antinomy and the scope of its application is what once made them fascinating, and what today make them poor scholarship. Their enduring impact is perhaps what is more intriguing about them, and what is most in need of examination: as formalism has now largely lost its grip, the hyperboles of Worringer appear also less necessary - and more ideological. The imbrication of German modernism (visual, literary, architectural, etc.) and ‘reformist’ German conservatism in the Wilhelmine period are perhaps key to understand where Worringer stood, and why (in England, but also in Germany and perhaps in France), there is nothing quite so modernist as the critique of modernity. Anyone interested in modern art and design will benefit from those books, as would those interested in German history, be that of the Wilhelmine or Republican periods. However those who come to them from more refined studies where Worringer is reverently mentioned, will likely be disappointed: his value seem to me mostly historical.
The XIXth century typically explained the difference between abstraction and figuration in terms of progress: for Gottfried Semper, or at least for his followers, lifelike figuration was born from the growth of skills and techniques, and abstraction was the result of their absence. This meant that epochs departing from the previous standards of figuration, like Late Antiquity with regard to the Republic, or the Fin de Siècle with regard to Neoclassicism, had to be periods of ‘decadence’, in which skill and knowledge were atrophying. Abstraction stood for atavistic and regressive intermezzos in a cumulative and teleologic art history, perhaps reaching its end with the invention of photography. Germany had no lack of sceptics when it came to progress and its westward march, and historians like Alois Riegl eventually demanded that periods of ‘decadence’ be judged on their own terms. For him technique was not the efficient cause of artistic style, but a limiting factor imposed on each epoch’s Kunstwollen, on their specific taste in forms reflecting the ‘spirit of the age,’ and of the community. The art historian’s duty was to assess and organize those ‘drives’ on the basis of universal, formal antinomies, like tactile and optical, or close and distant view.
Wilhelm Worringer enters the fray in 1906 with his doctoral thesis Abstraction and Empathy, where he builds on his teacher Theodor Lipps’ theory of empathy, who earlier had declared that aesthetic pleasure (beauty) is ‘objectified self-enjoyment’: beauty is the experience of freedom which the beholder encounters when imaginatively projecting himself in an object and following its lines and forms. Ugliness is the experience of the subject when those lines are broken, and the free-roaming is constricted. Lipps’s model was broadly compatible with Semper, and Worringer accept this mechanism of empathy, giving it in his book a more vitalist colouring, but also insisted that it is only half of the picture: the inclination project oneself into the objects of the world (be it landscapes, statues or people), presupposes a ‘a happy pantheistic relationship of confidence between man and the phenomena of the external world’ (Abstraction and Empathy, p. 15), which is by no means universal. In fact it seems to characterise only one civilization, classical Greece, so that traditional aesthetics (culminating with Lipps) is less a universal science of beauty, than the evaluation of all cultures against the standard of the Greek Kunstwollen. Everywhere else, where the climate is less clement and the people more fearful, reigns a terror at the world which dissuade any empathic projection. Space, as cypher for the threatening contingencies of the surroundings, became feared in the world and repressed in its artistic representation. Art thus become ‘a conflict between the man and the natural object which he sought to wrest from its temporality and unclarity’ (Abstraction and Empathy, p. 37). Where man succeeds, this wresting of the object from time and space leads to its schematic geometric reduction, typically to outlines hoped to approximate Platonic forms.
Worringer thus takes up the multiple antinomies of art historians like Riegl or Wöllflin, and bundles them into two overarching drives (Nietzsche came before, and Freud would follow), one immanent and empathetic, the other transcendent and abstract. The reception of Worringer’s dissertation is instructive: it was only published after reaching, haphazardly, the milieu of contemporary art. It was soon turned into a manifesto of Expressionism, and gained thereby widespread popularity; neither this text, nor Form Problems of the Gothic (published in 1911 and expanding on the dissertation), actually mention contemporary abstract art, nor could Worringer have been aware of those movements while writing. His reception among art historians, on the other hand, was rather cold (Richard Hamann, whose distaste of Impressionism and empathy might have made him sympathetic, for example remarks that abstraction and empathy are little more than form and content dressed up for the occasion.) It is tempting to ascribe those hostile reactions to mandarin scorn or jealousy, but both publics evidently also had different expectations: Worringer’s titular binary, tirelessly explicated and reformulated throughout, served well the grandiloquent self-fashioning of an avant-garde addressing themselves to a rapidly broadening, but also less and less educated, art public. It was catchy and bold, and it granted Expressionism those nationalistic credentials that were at the time becoming prerequisites.
The historians instead looked at both methodology and case studies, and that is certainly not where Worringer shines. The very scope of Abstraction and Empathy—from Prehistory to Northern Renaissance in 150 pages—only allow for occasional illustrations of an otherwise highly speculative universal history. Form Problems of the Gothic, appearing at a time of peak Francophobia in Germany and dealing (between the lines) with the vexed question of the French origins of the German national style, is prone to all sorts of contortions to justify its methodological nationalism. Both books attempt to occult the crudeness of their method through derogatory comments on the German Spirit (i.e. ‘peoples of predominantly Germanic character . . . in their heaviness . . . [t]heir dull, chaotic bent remained traditional, remained materially bound’, Form Problems of the Gothic, p. 112), but ultimately, acrobatics aside, each ‘people’ (whose size vary according to the author’s needs) is ‘moved’ by a ‘spirit’, which exists beyond space and time, which is described at length, illustrated very little, explained hardly at all, and not once traced back to its historical causes. Despite the notoriously jingoistic spirit of German art history at the time, Worringer’s ‘cultural morphology’ (as this approach would be called after the war), did not satisfy residual historicist expectations, and colleagues pointed out the narrative’s many holes, which often seemed strategically positioned to obscure obvious contradictions in Worringer's system.
One glaring example is ‘oriental man’: a vague and but ubiquitous character, whose will to abstraction ‘rests upon . . . the one most valuable source, natural instinct [and] stands nearer to primitive man, again, than does Classical man’ (Form Problems of the Gothic, 40). The problem here is not so much that of racial hierarchy—Worringer is actually quite sympathetic to both instinct and abstraction, and if anything deplores their absence in the modern West—not even that of ethnic essentialism (which pervade virtually all scholarship of that period), but rather the reduction of innumerable cultures to one single function of a wonky system; we are never told quite how far ‘the Orient’ stretches: it appears to include Judaism and Christianity, Islam (Abstraction and Empathy, p. 37) and perhaps India (Abstraction and Empathy, p. 129), but sometimes also stretch to all that is neither Teutonic nor classical. Worringer explains away the Norse animal motifs of the Migration Period as references not to nature (which would imply empathy) but to ‘actuality’ (Form Problems of the Gothic, 60). Even if we grant him this unlikely contortion, are we then to assume that the Scythic animal styles, which he does not mention but show evident formal similarities, follow a wholly different ‘oriental’ logic? Or why should Mauryan and subsequent Indian architecture—shaped by Hellenistic architecture well beyond Bactria—be 'world-renouncing,’ while that of the Greeks is life-affirming? And how is atmospheric perspective in Chinese painting 'abstract', while it becomes 'empathetic' in Impressionism? Unsurprisingly, East Asia - broadly ‘naturalistic’ in its cosmology, but doubtlessly oriental in its art - does not figure at all in the book. The oriental lands of abstraction, oft mentioned but never defined, are in fact something of a category error: abstraction should have remained a ‘pole’ in Worringer’s system (as in Riegl’s), an ideal type with a function but no actuality. Worringer could not help himself projecting it on the world map. This is a very German tendency, from Hegel to Spengler, and it reflects a peculiar relationship to space both in modern Germany, and in the age of empires. Here as elsewhere, it demands all sorts of self-indulgent gerrymandering to satisfy both the formal demands of history, and the ideological imperative of an essentialist cultural geography.
Worringer’s prestigious legacy (from Hulme to Deleuze, Joseph Frank to Lars Spuybroek) generally disregard to those muddled developments altogether, to focus on the titular antinomy (Abstraction and Empathy) and sometimes on their Gothic ‘synthesis’ (though Worringer actually insists it is an unresolved juxtaposition rather than a synthesis, in Form Problems of the Gothic, p. 47). Both books were written shortly before the emergence of ‘pure’ abstraction (Malevich, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Kupka, etc. all more or less formulate ‘non-objective’ painting between 1910 to 1915), and attest to the idea being already ‘in the air’. Yet, it is as an alternative to the post-WW2 sterile formalist readings of abstraction that it gained much of its import. Rather than the fulfilment of medium specificity (of art about art, truthful only in its silence), Worringer’s abstraction is a comment on the real: its autonomy from figuration is born from finding nothing worth figuring. This partly explains why Worringer is sometimes cast as the avant-garde alternative to Greenbergian modernism - despite the fact that he himself was more interested in the Deutschrömer than in the Blaue Reiter, or that his politics snuggly fit the conservative end of the design reform. The import of those politics in his theory has been partly charted, but it remain to be analysed among his later followers. Similarly, his notion of a universal but unevenly distributed pulsion to transcendence unsurprisingly influenced both Rudolf Otto and Carl G. Jung, and thus probably the subsequent ‘phenomenological school’ in the history of religions. An analysis of the role which art, and ‘pure’ painterly abstraction in particular, played in the secularisation of religious experience would be interesting. From Kandinsky and Worringer to Eranos and Abstract Expressionism, abstraction’s literal objectification of religious experience was doubtless an important prelude to its repackaging as an ‘anthropological constant’.
On the whole, those are important books: important in the history of European thought, both in and beyond art history. The simplicity of their central antinomy and the scope of its application is what once made them fascinating, and what today make them poor scholarship. Their enduring impact is perhaps what is more intriguing about them, and what is most in need of examination: as formalism has now largely lost its grip, the hyperboles of Worringer appear also less necessary - and more ideological. The imbrication of German modernism (visual, literary, architectural, etc.) and ‘reformist’ German conservatism in the Wilhelmine period are perhaps key to understand where Worringer stood, and why (in England, but also in Germany and perhaps in France), there is nothing quite so modernist as the critique of modernity. Anyone interested in modern art and design will benefit from those books, as would those interested in German history, be that of the Wilhelmine or Republican periods. However those who come to them from more refined studies where Worringer is reverently mentioned, will likely be disappointed: his value seem to me mostly historical.
January 15, 2021
It's a classic in Gothic architectural study, but the outdated tone/voice offsets the information.
May 6, 2023
'Biased' and overtly enthusiastic as it might be - I would personally see this instead as a natural curve of Passion, the book is one of the few MEANINGFUL readings I have encountered. Have been reading it with gratitude, wonder, and awe.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews