German Art History and Scientific Thought Beyond Formalism [Hardcover]

A fresh contribution to the ongoing debate between Kunstwissenschaft (scientific study of art) and Kunstgeschichte (art history), this essay collection explores how German-speaking art historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century self-consciously generated a field of study. Prominent North American and European scholars provide new insights into how a mixing of diverse methodologies took place, in order to gain a more subtle and comprehensive understanding of how art history became institutionalized and legitimized in Germany. One common assumption about early art-historical writing in Germany is that it depended upon a simplistic and narrowly-defined formalism. This book helps to 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 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 W?lfflin - as well as on lesser-known figures, the essays in this volume provide illuminating, and sometimes surprising, treatments of art history's prior and understudied interactions with a wide range of scientific orientations, from psychology, sociology, and physiognomics to evolutionism and comparative anatomy.Contents: Introduction: German art history and scientific thought: beyond formalism, Mitchell B. Frank and Daniel Adler; Body-building: August Schmarsow's Kunstwissenschaft between psychophysiology and phenomenology, Andrea Pinotti; 'Look at your fish': science, modernism and Alois Riegl's formal practice, Margaret Olin; Heuristic constructs and ideal types: the W?lfflin/Weber connection, Joan Hart; The formalist's compromise: W?lfflin and psychology, Daniel Adler; Recapitulation and evolutionism in German artwriting, Mitchell B. Frank; The physiognomics of architecture: Heinrich W?lfflin, lSd