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Abstraction and Empathy

Blog: #5 of 58 by Gary Peterson

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It doesn’t seem like a hundred years ago that Wilhelm Worringer published Abstraction and Empathy (Abstraktion und Einfühlung). His thesis on the psychology of style is a primer on modernism that has influenced artists from Kandinsky onward. Written just after Cezanne painted his “Bathers” and a year before Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles,” it marked the shift in the arts from academic towards the primitive and linear styles rediscovered in artifacts like African tribal masks and Japanese woodcut prints. It anticipated Cubism and Art Deco too. It’s a freeze-dried view of the organic nature of things.

This book challenged my perspective on abstract art. I take a scientific view of natural phenomena whereas Worringer opts for intuition and metaphysics claiming that any art which merely imitates the visible world does so to elicit empathy from the observer - an “objectified self-enjoyment,” or what we might today call "wrapping one's head around" something. Supposedly, any society with such a projective world view is complacent in their environment - too comfortable with their own bad selves. He further contends that insecure peoples living in hostile surroundings develop an artistic volition based on a “spiritual dread of space.” This fear leads to an aversion of the third dimension: depth. But certain cultures and civilizations transcend the sensory world by making art that is an “inorganic crystallization” of the spiritual world, one that provides an object with "material individuality and closed unity." Hence, art becomes a rigid simulacrum constrained to a single plane. Wow, I did not see that coming. It’s like we can’t believe our eyes so we iron out our skin into one flat surface and “see” only what we touch.

The dividing line between empathic art (mimesis) and abstraction separates the Western mindset of Classical Greece and Rome (also the Renaissance) from Eastern mysticism as seen in Egyptian hieroglyphics, Gothic tectonics, as well as Christian and Islamic decoration. I suspect Worringer’s views favor the psychological leanings of Jung’s archetypes over Freud’s libido; or the alienated philosophy of Schopenhauer over the logical axioms Wittgenstein. Worringer’s ideas have even been applied to the literature of Proust and T. S. Eliot. I might look for a musical analogy between classical and jazz, but all music is abstract.

Favoring the experiential over the unknowable (a priori), I consider abstract art - the extraction of essence from form - to be an intellectual endeavor. Nuh-uh, says Worringer: It's strictly intuitive. That's always a red flag for me therefore I must report a flaw in his theory. To wit...


...(Read the rest of this essay in The Intellectual Handyman On Art, a new book by Gary R. Peterson from iUniverse.)

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