Thursday, February 17, 2011

Psychology of buildings: the tragedy of Heinrich Wölfflin

This is a story about one of the greatest intellectual figures of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Or maybe it's a story about how people today view that time period, and how we choose our heroes. It's the story of a great academic who, caught up in a crazy bloodthirsty world, lost faith in his profession, and gave it all up. Or else it's the story of how intellectual engagement with ideas of the past has been replaced by emotional reactions and a search for people we can feel pity for.

Heinrich Wölfflin was perhaps the greatest art historian of the late 19th century. He sought to use the new science of psychology to explain how art works could encode moods and emotions, and in his dissertation Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture he applied this to the appearance of buildings. In Renaissance and Baroque and Classic Art he sought to explain how the culture of Europe in the Renaissance and early modern periods was manifested in its artistic styles. Wölfflin was instrumental in creating the central idea of art history: that an age has a spirit, and the art of that age manifests its spirit.

But by 1914, the spirit of the age was less comforting to Wölfflin. Germany was increasingly militaristic, Europe was moving towards war, and he was struggling to write another book: "It is hardly even possible for me to muster the minimum, the little bit of composure, scholarly composure, that one can expect. To talk about the influence of Italians on German art, when countless Italians with bayonets are advancing at the border."

Germany was gripped by a wave of patriotism, as much in the highest towers of academia as in popular sentiment. Wölfflin complained, "Why are all of the oldest artists and professors rallying to the flag? Apparently, only the very few feel comfortable with themselves. I can understand it as far as art historians go, but it's the same everywhere! And the speeches that scholars make in favor of the war! So this is the unity everyone's making such a big deal about - everyone losing his mind!" Intellectual debate was dead, and to argue against the popular view of art was tantamount to treason.

When the war started, Wölfflin devoted large sums to the Red Cross; apparently "he was prepared to forego half of his salary to that end". He summarised the declaration of war thus: "At the Marienplatz suddenly a race toward Sendlinger Street (where the newspaper Neuste Nachrichten was headquartered). One hears three short 'hurras.' The first who return cry: 'mobilization!' 'There's a mobilization!' Waited with the crowd for a while, until the printed telegrams are handed out. The people are very calm.- A father, who carries his little boy home on his arm, has tears in his eyes. Two young people: 'Business is ruined!"

In the first few months of the war Wölfflin overcame his writer's block to produce his last major work, the flawed masterpiece Principles of Art History. He now rejected all relations between culture and art; instead he imagined art as driven by its own internal logic, that turns the linearity and symmetry of Leonardo and Raphael into the restless, asymmetrical, impressionistic style of Baroque art. Rejecting the tradition of German art history, he denied that cultural change was behind change in artistic style. It was as if art had its own life, its own logic and movement, regardless of the society that was contemporaneous with it. The book is judged by almost everyone to be a failure. He could not justify the changes in art without reference to external causes. His theories lacked necessity.

When the war ended, Wölfflin found no relief. He was tired of the politics of academia, the competition to get into print, and increasingly came to feel that, as he put it, "works of art are not 'the greatest good'". Writing, "it's true that I ... don't know any more what else there is for me to do as a Professor of Art History", he tried to give public lectures on art to the workers of Munich, but found the audiences were full of middle-class ladies.

His friend Karl Vossler wrote to Benedetto Croce: "Strange case. At the height of his activities, with a full capacity to work, not yet sixty years of age, Wolfflin announces that scholarship no longer interests him and that it is time for him to leave the profession. ... All of his friends and I too have tried to change his mind and have encouraged him to stay and continue his extraordinary service as a professor and scholar, but to no avail."

Wölfflin gave up his job at the University of Munich in 1924. This was the same year and the same city where Hitler was convicted for treason after his failed 1923 putsch. Wölfflin moved back to his homeland of Switzerland; he set up home in Zurich, which until shortly before had been the home of Lenin, Tristan Tsara, and James Joyce, but now we suppose was back to the usual qualities of the Swiss. Before he left, he explained to his students: "I am thought of as a formalist, as cool. I'm not. I wrote the Principles of Art History not in order to mechanize history, but in order to render judgment exact. Arbitrariness, the sheer, uncontrollable eruption of emotion, has always disgusted me".

This story, and the interpretation I give it, comes from Martin Warnke in an article published in English in 19891. Despite admiring Wölfflin's sense of principle, Warnke chose not to defend Wölfflin's ideas.Warnke   concluded: "Since Wölfflin hardly felt himself to be defensible, one hardly does him justice by defending him in the name of some 'culture of seeing' or ascribing to him some role as a forefather. One also hardly does him justice when one confirms, extends, or disproves his teachings. One does him the most justice through a rigorous relativization, perhaps in accordance with one of his favorite maxims: 'Not everything is possible at all times.' Not even Wölfflin".

Today, nobody believes Wölfflin's ideas in Principles of Art History, but they still study it. Wölfflin thought, at least in its earlier years, that when we look at a picture of a person (or even a building) our body unconsciously conforms to the position of the person in the picture, and thus we come to empathise with what the picture is expressing. Looking back in time, Warnke empathises, he feels a common pacifism, and yet he does not know what Wölfflin was thinking. This is a judgment made on sensibility not on logic. Looking at Wölfflin's later years, if not the earlier, perhaps logic is not to be hoped for.




1Martin Warnke, "On Heinrich Wölfflin", translated by David Levin, Representations, No. 27 (Summer, 1989), pp. 172-187.