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.
The Political Project of Wölfflin's Early Formalism*
OCTOBER 139, Winter 2012, pp. 39–58. © 2012 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. What would it mean to art history if its foundational formalist, Heinrich Wolfflin, also turned out to be a political thinker? In the literature on Wolfflin’s early publications, only sporadic attempts have been made to reverse the overwhelming critique of Wolfflin’s formalism as narrowly visual and apolitical.1 Only one text has addressed Wolfflin’s politics directly: in an essay from 1989, Martin Warnke demonstrated how Wolfflin’s distress over World War I and the slavish service by the professoriat to its nationalistic themes elicited the icy ahistorical formalism of the Principles of Art History published in 1915.2 In Warnke’s reading, Wolfflin’s apoliticism was, para-
Using Skills from Art in Surgical Practice and Research-Surgery and Art
Many aspects of surgery and the arts are inexorably linked together, and the use of artistic techniques or ideas to improve surgical practice is present throughout the history of medicine. In all forms of surgery, throughout the ages, artists have been used to illustrate new ideas, new techniques and to document surgical practice. Some of the most successful art originated from surgeons who were also artists; perhaps due to their innate understanding of what they were portraying. Studying art and developing creative skills can enhance modern surgical practice in many different ways.