PAINTERLY POLITICS: WÖLFFLIN, FORMALISM AND GERMAN ACADEMIC CULTURE, 1885–1915
At the turn of the twentieth century, Heinrich Wolfflin, August Schmarzow and other formalist art historians contributed greatly to the formation of their field's institutional identity. Art history, they believed, was falling prey to a ‘spiritless’ (geistlos) condition that supposedly existed among the student population and which was associated with rapid industrialization and the mechanization of society. Expressing themselves in pedagogical treatises – which have largely been unnoticed by historiographers of art history – formalists focused on the ability of the ‘painterly’ (malerische) aesthetic to convey ‘germanic’ moral and spiritual values to a student population that was being wrongly influenced by an ‘elitist’, traditional art history overly preoccupied with philological and contextual research.
Developing the Picture: Wölfflin's Performance Art
Abstract Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945) is credited for having first made use of double projection of lantern slides in lectures on art history in the early 1900s. While this bit of information is often mentioned, if at all, as of anecdotal value, it has arguably gained more weight in our own image-saturated culture. Wölfflin's lecture hall achievement is not only to virtually inaugurate for art history a systematic descriptive system based on photography, but also to perform pictures of art for the audience to understand art in artistic or visual rather than art historical terms. In order to explain and highlight the element of art in art, art is insufficient. The art-less facsimile of black-and-white photography is better suited for this purpose, by transforming the nuanced and materially captivating art object into a flat binary system of formal contrasts. This article reflects upon Wölfflin's pursuit of the aesthetic or “artistic” element in art by considering his very material and embodied laboratory teaching practice. I suggest that rather than treat Wölfflin as a hardcore formalist, he is better understood as a meta-artist, with the ultimate aim of developing the picture of art from pictures of art for all to see.
GRAPHIC VERSUS PHOTOGRAPHIC IN THE NINETEENTH‐CENTURY REPRODUCTION
ion des teintes, il [i.e. the engraver] n'en donne que la valeur': Grammaire desArts du Dessin (Paris, 1867), p. 661. 70 It is true that reproductive photographs of both old and modern pictures were often framed and hung up like prints. Even Gambart dabbled in photographs a little, at least in the case of Rosa Bonheur's The ShetlandPonies with scant success: Photographic News, vol. 7 (11l63), pp. 386-7. Bingham's photographs, plain and