Heinrich Wölfflin

From the very moment in time human mankind had art, there must have been a way of looking at it (and something of a conscience, something of a notion of it). So far, so easy. Maybe some had a notion of art, and others had’t; and maybe this caused confusion and war, but this is not the issue here.
Now we make a leap in time.
From the very moment in time human mankind had various notions and ways of looking at art, there were – I am imagining – the ways of looking at art of some, that got on the nerves of others. Maybe this caused confusion and war and hostility to art and art-people in general, but in any case: various ways of looking at art did interact.
Now we make a leap in time…

(Picture: Sezession.de)

…but only into the 19th century:
From the very moment in time human mankind had travelling guides that, at the same time as they pointed to places of interest, also pointed to works of art, these guidebooks got on the nerves of others, who were preferring to travel without the help of these books, or, we come again closer to the matter, despised the way of looking at art, apparently instigated by these guidebooks (maybe a more not-looking at art in terms of a mere checking, if a something was still, where it was supposed to be, according to the guidebook, and in terms of a confirmation, one had been there as well). As far as I can see the Baedeker has not been an especially prominent sujet within the pictorial arts, but we point to the movie A Room with a View (1985), and maybe you remember with me the voice of Judi Dench saying, with a mildly critical and educational purpose, the significant words: »No, Miss Bartlett, you will not look into your Baedeker.»

And see also this nice blog entry here: https://shrineodreams.wordpress.com/tag/baedeker

Carl Spitzweg depicting the ambiguity of guides here (but since we are seeing English tourists, probably not that of Baedeker’s)

Now from the moment in time, that human mankind had particular institutions, specializing in looking back and working on the history of art for whatever reason, perhaps also educational, from this very moment things were getting rather complicated. Broadly speaking it is about the age of Baedeker, when these institutions also saw the light of day, and it’s about this moment in time that some people were also beginning to think how these institutions of science were influencing, to the better or worse, the ways other people, the laymen, amateurs – the normal people, were looking at art. This is our issue here and the following is about the suspicion, the fear, or even the diagnosis, that this influencing actually happened, at least to some degree, to the worse and not only to the better. And it does not make things easier, if we notice that some of those, who noticed this, were also speakers of or coming from these very institutions we have just spoken of.

A rather unknown little essay by well-known Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945) is called Über kunsthistorische Verbildung. It was published originally in 1909 in a journal and later included into a collection of minor writings by Wölfflin (which is to say: rather forgotten by the experts), and yet also, maybe significantly, included into a large anthology of German literary essays. And as far as I can see, it has never been translated into English. But if it had, I really would be interested, how the very notion of »Verbildung« got translated. If food is rotten, you may say in German, it is »verdorben«; if someone has education, you may say that this someone has »Bildung« or that he is »gebildet«; and if this someone has too much of education, or too much of the wrong kind, you may say he is »verbildet«. The abstract noun »Verbildung« (miseducation) refers to the abstract fact: to much of education and/or of the wrong kind.
If this sounds somehow familiar, it is because of Friedrich Nietzsche’s well-known essay Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben (1874), which discusses the dangers of a too much and/or of the wrong kind, but also thinks about, what would be the right kind, and if it is about the right kind, the question of the too much rather becomes obsolete, because if history – Nietzsche does mean by history the past as such, but also the knowledge of it – serves to enhance life, one would rather like more of it (although one should also discuss the too much of the right kind; and we imagine that, among other things, this made Jacob Burckhardt feel rather uneasy with Nietzsche’s sparkingly brilliant thoughts in general).
Now if all that sounds familiar, it is because Bernard Berenson was, at some point in his life, an avid reader of Nietzsche. And Berenson’s (we don’t know, if it should actually be called »Berenson’s«) notion of the life-enhancing potential of art, should at least be seen in the light of his reading of Nietzsche. And so should Wölfflin’s essay. Both art historians were influenced by Nietzsche, and particularly by Nietzsche’s provocative question, if there was education to a wrongful purpose and maybe even a too much of science, indirectly and unfortunately being the reason of a wrongful education.
Both Berenson and Wölfflin did obviously take their cue from Nietzsche, both without explicitly saying so, both in shifting from history in very general to history of art, and both to advocate other ways of looking at art than those, they were, in their times, confronted with, critically looking at and challenging by purporting their own views.
Wölfflin represented academic art history and did speak, to some degree, critically of art history as an academic institution (and also critically of what he saw as a caricature of connoisseurship); Berenson represented connoisseurship, and, although or just because he had spent much of his time to instigate order within art history as a whole, recommended to dedicate oneself rather to life-enhancing art. Art, like Nietzsche could have said, that intensified and enriched your own life in a positive way, if you made that kind or art part of your life (and not that kind of art that would not serve that purpose, and, this is Berenson’s indirect criticism of art historical research and education, not that kind of art history that does not help one to have art enfold something of a life-enhancing force within one’s life).

It is interesting to look at Wölfflin’s essay a little bit more in detail. The knowledge of art history is not equal to an understanding of art, this is, for example what he says. To know everything, in some sense necessary for the art historian or connoisseur, cannot be the aim for a layman, avid to learn. And the ambition to know everything, instigated by connoisseurship, oeuvre monographs or travelling guidebooks, Wölfflin sees as a wrongful ambition.
Since we have already spoken of the Baedeker, we skip a section of Wölfflin’s essay here and come to what interests him the most: a sense for the formal, stylistic quality of art, without, however, having this quality associated with the individual artist’s personality or the intellectual cultural context of the artist. It is about the peculiar quality of a hand’s rendering, but not to the purpose of recognizing that particular artist’s hand or style, but to the aim of developing a sense of quality for stylistic quality as such (the hand also in context of the particular work; and the particular work also in context of the whole world of stylistic paradigms). In a certain sense Wölfflin accuses the historian of art of being primarily interested in quality only in neutral terms of individuality and not in terms of something being particulary good (and, if one likes so, life-enhancingly good). Wölfflin differenciates here a looking at art, that focusses on the detail, and one taking the whole work of art into consideration, but after all he is constrained by his own formalistic approach to address individual cultural context only in a very indirect way. And he seems to be implicitly being averse to every looking at art within its cultural context and as something interacting with its cultural context. Averse to introduce art history as a subject matters to the «Mittelschule«, Wölfflin, however, as he says, would be positive to introduce a »school of seeing«, but what he means is still what we describe here as the mere formalistic paradigm of seeing.

(Picture: nationalgeographic.com)

If we would look, for example, at a rendering of a hand by Michaël Borremans, we would lear to appreciate the very rendering of the hand within the work named Man Looking down at his Hand (2007); and we would learn to appreciate not only the formal detail but the stylistic paradigm as such. And we would compare the renderings of hands of artists of all times and compare the stylistic paradigms. Maybe we would even go back to the beginnings, where, according to new findings, apparently women artists experimented with spared shapes of hands (and probably looked down at their hands full of paint).
But we would not discuss Borremans painting, in that it is interacting with our very age, in that it is a rendering of someone looking down at his own hand, and in such a visual rendering of our time’s self-reference, be it narcicisstic or alienated. And we would not discuss why some of us would feel rather uneasy with that painting, while some, maybe, would appreciate it as a life-enhancing work, just because it is adressing the ways our culture is concerned with its own hand or body (just as wanting to read something in it, but what… and trying to read something, in what is considered primarily the tool of human activity… but what activity, and for which purpose… and in looking back, we see that one activity, one most basic activity, once was the creating shapes of hands, by sparing hand-shaped spots of cave walls, maybe once a basic experimenting like we lay our hands onto a scanner or into a copying machine…).

See the named work by Borremans here: http://www.wkv-stuttgart.de/presse/2011/pressebilder/borremans
and see selected works by Borremans here: http://www.davidzwirner.com/artists/michael-borremans/survey ;
see this: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/10/131008-women-handprints-oldest-neolithic-cave-art
and finally compare this: http://jaimecowdry.wordpress.com/2012/03/17/jenny-saville-inspiration-for-painting-hands-within-compositions

In sum: While Wölfflin’s essays questions the merely historical approach to art, it is recommending an almost purely formalistic one (»almost«, because cultural ideals can still be seen in and beyond particular stylistic paradigms, and in consequence, such stylistic paradigms can be seen as expressions of cultural context). And yet it is an remarkable (but still rather forgotten) essay, in that it speaks from inbetween the institutions of science and education; in that it is taking its cue from the fundamental questions Nietzsche had articulated at the age of Burckhardt; and in that it does inspire to adress questions that, within a self-referent culture of academic art history, are all too rarely brought up.

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