Title & Author:

German art history and scientific thought : beyond formalism / edited by Mitchell B. Frank and Daniel Adler.

Publication:

Farnham, Surrey, England UK ; Burlington, VT : Ashgate, ©2012.

Description:

xi, 194 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Notes:
Essay collection.
Essay collection exploring how German-speaking art historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century self-consciously generated a field of study.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
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 Wölfflin/Weber connection / Joan Hart -- The formalist's compromise : Wölfflin and psychology / Daniel Adler -- Recapitulation and evolutionism in German artwriting / Mitchell B. Frank -- The physiognomics of architecture : Heinrich Wölfflin, Hans Sedlmayr and Paul Schultze-Naumburg / Daniela Bohde -- Materializing Strukturforschung / Ian Verstegen -- Reine Wissenschaft : art history in Germany and the notions of 'pure science' and 'objective scholarship', 1920-1950 / Christian Fuhrmeister.
Dust jacket.

Summary:

"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 Wölfflin - 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"--Pub. desc.

Resources:
Table of contents

ISBN:

9781409440239 (hardcover ; alk. paper)
1409440230 (hardcover ; alk. paper)

Subject:

BMBF-Statusseminar
Art historians Germany.
Art Historiography.
Historiens d'art Allemagne.
Art Historiographie.
Art historians.
Kunstgeschichtsschreibung
Kunstwissenschaft
Methode
Germany.
(fast)Art historians.
(fast)Art--Historiography.
(fast)Germany.

Form/genre:

Kongress Williamstown, Mass. <2001>

Added entries:

Frank, Mitchell Benjamin.
Adler, Dan (Daniel Allan)

Beyond formalism

Holdings:

Location: Library main 279466
Call No.: BIB 215497
Status: Available