Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893

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The six essays presented in this volume afford the English-reading public the first serious and considered overview of the uniquely Germanic movements of psychological aesthetics and Kunstwissenschaft. Written in the last three decades of the nineteenth century - at a time when the proliferation of knowledge and dramatic social and economic change had combined to force the issue of art's exhaustion of its traditional historical themes - these seminal writings helped to redesign the theoretical foundation of modern artistic practice. The earlier metaphysical problem of how we structure and understand form and space in the natural world in essence gave way to the aesthetic problem of how we might appreciate and actually exploit pure form and pure space artistically, in painting, sculpture, music, and architecture. The psychological thesis of "empathy," the more general philosophical search for art's "basic motives," the expansive speculation on the nature of style change: all combined, in essence, to open artistic discussion to the possibility of nonrepresentational expression. Thus these innovations in theory provided support and scientific discipline to the revolutionary visage of early twentieth-century movements of modern abstract art. In a detailed introductory essay, Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou situate these writings within the historical and philosophical context of German formalist aesthetics. They address at length both the insights and intellectual horizons of the six authors and the impelling theories of such related thinkers as Johann Friedrich Herbart, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Johannes Volkelt, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Edmund Husserl.