De-Scribing the Language of Looking: Wölfflin and the History of Aesthetic Experientialism

Author(s): Mark Jarzombek

Source: Assemblage, No. 23, (Apr., 1994), pp. 28-69
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3171230
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 I

I I

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-. .J .
1/

MarkJarzombekis an associate professor
in the History of Architecture and
Urbanism Programat Cornell University.
Detail of Roman portrait,
Al Fayyum (Egypt)
23:28-69? 1994by the
Assemblage
MassachusettsInstituteof Technology
Mark Jarzombek
De-Scribing the Language
of Looking: Wolfflin and
theHistory of Aesthetic
Experientialism
What may words say or what may words not say.
SirPhilipSidney,AstrophilandStella
The man does not live whose pen could convey a sense of what
he saw.
H. RiderHaggard,She
But we must do more than merely refer to this exquisite work of
art; it must be described, however inadequate may be the effort
to express its magic peculiarity in words.
NathanielHawthorne,TheMarbleFaun
We can nowhere abandon the notion of empathy.
HeinrichWolfflin,ItalienunddasDeutscheFormgefiihl
I just don't get it up for you any more.
PeterEisenmandebatingRobertKrier
Aesthetic experientialism was one of the great accomplish-
ments of twentieth-century modernism. Though rooted in
Enlightenment ideals and emerging at the turn of the
century with the writings of Heinrich Wolfflin and others,
it flowered in the years between 1930 and 1950 with hun-
dreds of articles and books dedicated to defining its at-
tributes. Yet aesthetic experientialism has rarelybeen
historicized, a circumstance that is all the more amazing as
its ideology of lived experience was championed by phi-
losophers as well as by teachers, by art historians as well as
by artists. It was preached for decades at the University of
29
 assemblage 23

Chicago and other institutions as an essential democratic
value. The event that prompted me to write this article,
however, was the recent publication of To the Rescue of
Art by the eminent Gestalt psychologist Rudolf Arnheim,
a longtime advocate of aesthetic experientialism. Adopt-
ing a new conservatism based on an organic image of
society, Arnheim claims to observe "an unmistakable
fatigue" and "a lack of discipline and responsibility" in
our culture; furthermore, our "unbridled extravagance,"
"vulgarity of taste, and triviality of thought" have resulted
in "the current weakness in our architecture and art."'
All the more reason for us to reconsider the importance
of art; for an intensely felt aesthetic experience, so he
argues, preserves our humanist essence in the face of the
all-too-many challenges to the spirit. At the end of his
book, Arnheim argues that the experience of art could
come close to religion as an ethical principle in a rudder-
less society:
No reception of a work of art is complete unless the viewer
feels impelled to live up to the intensity, purity, and wisdom
of outlook reflected in the work.2
Arnheim's attempt to revive the importance of the aes-
thetic experience was not just a sentimental love for art,
but an essential part of his critique of art historical over-
specialization, on the one hand, and of the complacency
toward art by the person in the street, on the other. To
fight the superficial realities of academe and populism,
Arnheim relied heavily on the modernist, post-Nietzschean
emphasis on lived experience. Art appreciation - for
many an embarrassingtopic - still held for him the old
attraction, as it was the site where scholars and the public
supposedly met on the level ground of their shared hu-
manity. In his chapter "ForYour Eyes Only: Seven Exer-
cises in Art Appreciation,"he claims to address "first-time
visitors to a museum" so as to open their consciousness to
"the visual experience, which is the principal value to be
discovered in the museum."3
The instructormayoffersome eruditefacts aboutthe style of
the workand the socialand politicalconditionsof the period.
Neitherprocedure,however,introducesthe viewerto the visual
experience.... The examplesofferedherewill suggestwaysof
approachingartisticexperienceby whatcan be seendirectly
and spontaneously. Such seeing requiresno scholarship....
When the eyes of viewers come to trust the immediacy of vi-
sion, worksof anystyle, mediumor periodwill let theirvisitors
in on what first looked like a secret.
The compositional schema I presented ... was universal
enough to apply to the arts throughout the world regardless of
place and time; and it deserved to be so universally applied be-
cause it symbolized a sufficiently basic psychological condition.
Whether my discovery lives up to this ambitious claim remains
to be seen.4
Arnheim seems to have believed that since bourgeois
culture is just as distanced from art now as it was a hun-
dred years ago, the theory of visual experience that at-
tempted to address the problem then must still be valid
today. Defining himself as a hero in the war against "nihil-
ism" and "culturaldecline," he is under no compulsion to
elaborate on the history of aesthetic experientialism, its

Notes
1. Rudolf Arnheim, To the Rescue
of Art (Berkeley:University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1992), viii.
2. Ibid., 234.
3. Ibid., 61-62. The pun on James
Bond is clever, but backfires when
one considers that the movie title
suggests exclusion and titillation,
not, as Arnheim wanted, inclusion
and reason.
4. Ibid., 62, 243 (my emphasis).
5. Ibid., viii.
6. Though formalism has been de-
bunked on several fronts in recent
decades, it was, nonetheless, one of
the most influential philosophies
of the twentieth century.It was not
so much formalism as theory that
was impressive, but rather its posi-
tion in the sociology of twentieth-
century textual-intellectual history
and pedagogy. The circularities
and ambiguities that it effected
among artist, critic, historian, and
public at large created a situation
unmatched by any other philo-
sophically grounded discourse. It is
amazing, but understandable, that
no comprehensive, interdiscipli-
nary, and critical history of formal-
ism has yet been written. Not only
did it redefine literary criticism, art
and architectural history, theory,
and education, but it was, more-
over, an international movement,
with proponents in Germany, Rus-
sia, France, England, and America.
In the Soviet Union, it was seen
by early Marxists as an instrument
of communism. In Hungary, as
with Georg Lukacs, it was used to
critique the bourgeoisie. In the
United States, it was promoted as
a tool of democracy and became
the pedagogical backbone of un-

30
 Jarzombek

troubled ideology of "seeing,"its relationship to the
changing tides of formalism, or even its own theoretic
origins, except as it applies to his own experiences, for
cultural salvation, as he wants his readersto remember,
"is the area to which my own work has aspired";he refers
to his earlier writings, to Heinrich Wolfflin, Kurt Kofke,
Heinrich Kurtz, and a few other like-minded psychologists
and writers.5
The tension in Arnheim's book between theory and his-
tory, that is, between his exposition of the cultural impor-
tance of the aesthetic experience and his autobiographic
legitimization of his own work that results from repressing
all forms of historical knowing except "his own" (for they
are confirmedly "authentic"), led me to ask, how would I
write a history of the theory of aesthetic experientialism
and of its great social ideals? By necessity, such a history
would have to be a paradox, for in numerous historically
and theoretically determined ways, aesthetic experienti-
alism denies not only its history but its status as theory as
well. Though it constitutes a theory of "how to see," it
cannot explore its own theoretical roots - except in the
artifice of its own definition- as this could potentially
contradict its mission, which is to presuppose the possibil-
ity of an unalienated world. Alienation through theory is
seen as just as bad as alienation through complacency and
art historical specialization.
The observant reader of Arnheim will note, of course, that
what we are dealing with here is formalism, not the for-
malism as it is popularly known today, but that of its origi-
nators at the turn of the century.6Today formalism is
generally understood as the manipulation of abstract
shapes. In earlier days, it was not about the artist but
about the viewer, and not about nonrepresentational
forms but about the fundamental representationalnature
of reality, a reality that is not only perceived through the
senses but directly linked to our humanistic essence. For-
malism was an attempt to reencounter and reawakenthe
living, human presence in a world stagnating in concep-
tual immobility. "The importance of form," so writes
Wolfflin, "is not the shape, but the breath of life that
brings frozen forms into dynamic motion."7In order to
discuss Arnheim and what I see as his early formalist and
neohumanist revivalismwith its ironic and, I believe,
tragic suppression of history and critique of theory, one
has to look more closely at the question of aesthetic
experience.
The following essay has been divided into three segments.
The first deals with questions of the theory itself, the
second with hermeneutics, and the third with the sociol-
ogy of ideas. The disciplines of art and architecturalhis-
tory have remained mute on the subject. The problematic
origins of experiential aesthetics in perceptual psychology
remain largely unknown. Hermeneutical questions about
the nature of visual/textual discourse are rarelyaddressed,
and there has been little interest in developing a sociology
of the discipline apart from studies of its "greattheorists."
My purpose here is only to sketch out some of problems
relating to these issues. I also feel that since a "history"of

dergraduate education. Formalism
and its theory of aesthetic experi-
ence emerged in the American
scene in the 1920s in the writings
of T. S. Eliot and Thomas Ernest
Hulme, to flower in the decades
between 1950 and 1970 in the
writings of the New Critics, neo-
Aristotelians, art pedagogues, and
art historians. At the University of
Chicago, it was preached with en-
thusiasm for decades. The age of
formalism is far from over. Though
the stone disappeared into the wa-
ter, the ripples continue to move
through time. And these ripples
joined and disrupted by others cre-
ate a vast field of interconnected
discourses that are dependent just
as much on jargon, cliches, hidden
disciplinary ideologies, and intel-
lectual fashion as on original think-
ing. Thus the problematic of
formalism's "history"can never be
captured as history, especially
given its continuing ability not
only to deny that it even has a his-
tory, but also, as in the case of
Arnheim's To the Rescue of Art, to
construct its history in its own re-
vitalized image. One of the main
criticisms of formalism was, very
simply, that its descriptions, so in-
timately based on its notion of an
aesthetic experience, were "inno-
cent," because they failed to take
into account their ideological
rootedness. Terry Eagleton, for ex-
ample, took this innocence to task
in his famous critique of formalist
New Critics, Criticism and Ideology
(London: New Left Books, 1971),
when he explained that "in reality,
art criticism does not arise as a
spontaneous riposte to the existen-
tial fact of the [experience], or-
ganically coupled with the object it
illuminates ... it emerges into ex-

31
 assemblage 23

the aesthetic experience must be written dialectically
against the grain of its claim for an eternal present, the
best we can do is to confront its outer form with its inner
deformations.
Concentration on the Visible: Formalism
as "Exact"Science
Heinrich Wolfflin claimed that he was primarilycon-
cerned with the objective reality of the work of art, but
this was only true because of the central importance he
gave to the observer'sexperiences. As he explained, "we
judge every object by analogy with our own bodies."8It
was for this reason that, when giving his first visual ex-
ample in his KunstgeschichtlicheGrundbegriffe(1915),
Wolfflin chose the Venus in Botticelli's Birth of Venus.
The reproduction of the painting was purposefully
cropped to focus all our attention on her body. And, in a
wonderfully syncopated sentence, Wolfflin elucidated,
"The sharpness of the elbow, the spirited line of the fore-
arm, and then, how the fingers radiate out over the breast,
every line steeped in energy, that is Botticelli."9
This description was an example of Formpsychologie, a
neologism Wolfflin coined to describe what he felt was an
emerging discipline running parallel to and critical of art
history.?0 Art history, W61olfflinargued, had become too
beholden to linear historical designations like late Gothic
and early Renaissance to notice that it could not ade-
quately deal with the intrinsic aesthetic qualities of the
art object.11 These qualities, which emerge in the process
of an art object being seen and experienced, lead beyond
the artifact to an understanding of our humanistic es-
sence. In fact, as he claimed in his dissertation for the
University of Munich, "Prolegomenazu einer Psychologie
der Architektur"(1886), the psychological immediacy of
the art experience was to be the basis for an "exact sci-
ence" of the humanities:
A historythat is obsessedwith linearitycannotreallyexist;it
wouldat anyratedeceiveitself if it wereto thinkthat it wasan
exact science.One can onlywork'exactly'whereone can cap-
ture the stream of appearances in actual form .... The hu-
manitiesstill lackthis foundation;it can be searchedfor only
in psychology.12
We can look back on this statement from our vantage
point a hundred years later and recognize in it the origin
of the numerous baffling paradoxes that we face in our
own history/theorydebates. The opposition inherent in
Wolfflin's statement between linear history and lived
immediacy, and between historical knowledge as a form of
alienation and participatoryknowledge (what some might
call theory) as a form of active and healthy involvement
with art, is still a contentious one. Attempts to under-
stand this opposition as it emerged in Wolfflin's age can
be done only in full awarenessof the ongoing critique of
alienated knowledge as well as of a theory of visual imme-
diacy based not on a deliberate, cautious, and erudite
approach to art, but on the power of art to speak to us
directly through our native sensate capacity of observa-
tion. Empathy, once a hotly debated philosophical and art
historical problem, is now rarelydiscussed by art histori-

istence and passes out of it on the
basis of certain determined condi-
tions" (17). Yet the problems with
formalism, certainly with its philo-
sophical position, were made
known to it almost from the start.
I. A. Richards et al.,The Founda-
tions of Aesthetics (New York:
International Publishers, 1925),
already demonstrated weaknesses
with aesthetic experientialism. But
this did not translate into new
ways of writing history until Erwin
Panofsky introduced the question
of content and Peter Fuller, John
Berger,MillardMeiss, Paul Schorske,
and other cultural historians began
to publish. As an example of a re-
cent critique of formalism, I men-
tion only Jonathan Culler's The
Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Litera-
ture, Deconstruction (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1981). I,
too, have joined in on the critique
of ideological formations that as-
pire to innocence. I do this not to
contrast innocence with the merits
of knowledge, nor to compare
noncontextualism with the merits
of contextualism, nor to make dis-
courses that are ideologically open
superior to those that are closed.
Rather, my aim is to probe the na-
ture of the history of theory and
the history of our discipline, which
especially in this case helps us to
address and critique what I see as
the antihistoriographic nature of
twentieth-century speculation. See
my article "Ready-madeTraces in
the Sand: The Sphinx, the Chi-
mera, and other Discontents in the
Practice of Theory," Assemblage 19
(December 1992): 72-95.
7. Heinrich Wolfflin, Kunst-
geschichtliche Grundbegriffe(1915;
Munich: Hugo Bruckmann, 1923),

32
 Jarzombek

ans and does not even appear as a topic in the Encyclo-
pedia of Philosophy of 1967. The spread of Freudian
psychology, especially in the post-World War II years,
contributed significantly to obscuring art history's indebt-
edness to perceptual psychology. For Freud, external real-
ity was constructed to conceal and repress psychic realities.
Art, in this sense, was a negative, related to fancies and
daydreams. Perceptual psychologists accepted no such
disjuncture between the external and the internal. For
them, visual reality was related not to subconsciousness
but to consciousness and could thus provide an objective
knowledge of culture.13In 1970 Donald Weismann struc-
tured his popular book The Visual Arts as Human Experi-
ence around this argument, when he explained that "the
creative process . .. deals with the manner of seeing and
responding to the world.... It is concerned with symbo-
lizing insights, objectifying [a] particularconcept of real-
ity. ... In fulfilling this aim, [the artist] uses all means at
his disposal: the whole of his personal experience .... The
more vital supersedes the less vital."'4As a result, the his-
torian can reconstitute this process through his or her own
seeing, which is to "discoverthe object, as it were, in look-
ing at it."'5A Jackson Pollock painting, for example, be-
comes an "externalizationof preconscious experience"
that supposedly articulates "the existential engagement of
contemporaryman with solitary torment."'6
The interpretative value of empathetic readings made "in
front of" art objects was probablyby no one better under-
stood than by Heinrich Brunn, professor of archaeology at
the University of Munich, a specialist in Greek and Roman
art and architecture, and a scholar of Renaissance art.
Wolfflin, who wrote his dissertation under Brunn, dedi-
cated his first book, Renaissance and Baroque(1888), to
him. A glance at Brunn's GriechischeGotterideale (1893),
a collection of his lectures from the previous decades,
makes it clear why Wolfflin admired him so much. Brunn
claimed that one should not be afraid to notice the sim-
plest of things and use them as building blocks of an
analysis that could lead to "the psychological reconquest
of the lost individuality of art works."'7 Arguing against
historical linearity and archaeological positivism, he chal-
lenged historians to grasp "the spirit of the whole as ex-
pressed in the individual work of art."'8Brunn did not
engage in long theoretical justifications, however. His
writings were proof enough. The description of the eyes of
the FarneseHera from a lecture given in 1846 is still as
evocative and unforgettable for a readertoday as when it
was first spoken.'9With clear language and elegantly con-
structed arguments, Brunn drew out an inner truth from
the dead stone. These insights, he claimed, are not per-
sonal value judgments, but "teach us that in the ideal
types of Greek art the forms are not arbitrary,but stand in
close relationship to the inner nature of the represented
essence."20And in language that is strikinglymodern,
Brunn argued that one's analysis must be linked to a close
observation of the forms themselves:21
If we don't wantto simplysee the image,but actuallyknowit,
we must translateit into words.This can be accomplished
becausethe imagespeaksa languagethat [withpractice]can
be comprehendedto expressthe highestspiritualideas.But

145. The shift between formalism
as empathetic experience and for-
malism as a play of abstract forms
occurred sometime during the
1940s and 1950s with the popular-
ization in America of abstraction
in both painting and architecture.
8. Heinrich Wolfflin, Renaissance
and Baroque,trans. KatherineSimon
(Ithaca:Cornell UniversityPress,
1964), 77. Severalrecent workspro-
vide valuable insights into
Wolfflin's theories: Meinhold Lurz,
Biographieeiner Kunsttheorie
(Worms:Werner, 1981), Joan
GoldhammerHart, "Heinrich
Wolfflin: An Intellectual Biography"
(Ph.D. diss., Universityof Califor-
nia, Berkeley,1981), Walter Rehm,
HeinrichWolfflinals Literarhistoriker
(Munich: BayerischeAkademie
der Wissenschaften, 1960), and
MarshallBrown,"The Classic Is the
Baroque:On the Principlesof
Wolfflin's Art History,"Critical In-
quiry9 (December 1982): 379-404.
I would like to thank HarryFrancis
Mallgraveand Eleftherios Ikonomou
for allowing me an advance copy of
their introduction, "Empathy,
Form, and Space,"to the forthcom-
ing translationof Wolfflin's disser-
tation to be published by the Getty
Center for the Study of the Hu-
manities and the Arts.
9. Wolfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche
Grundbegriffe,3. Wolfflin's literary
style disappearsin M. D. Hottinger's
translation,wherethe sentence
reads,lamely,as "The sharpelbow,
the spiritedline of the forearm,the
radiantspreadof the fingerson the
breast,the energywhich chargesev-
ery line - that is Botticelli."See
HeinrichWolfflin, Principlesof Art
History,trans.M. D. Hottinger (New
York:Dover, 1950), 2.

33
 assemblage 23

knowledgeof the artworkcan only then be unlockedwhenwe
begin with the points,lines, and planesof the specificforms
out of whichthe imageis composedand out of whichthe syn-
tax of its imageis expressed,resultingin an understandingof
the spiritual idea based on a clear consciousness .... Some still
argue,however,. . . that to base one'sknowledgeon the object
itself is downrightdangerous.22
Brunn, like Johann Joachim Winckelmann, whom he so
greatly admired, was heavily influenced by Johann
Gottfried Herder, whose KritischesWdldchen (1769) laid
out an equation between aesthetics and knowledge that
was to open a space for what we would call modern inter-
pretation. Instead of looking to create a codex of rules to
govern artistic production and criticism, Herder conceived
of aesthetics as a descriptive, explanatoryscience that was
strictly objective in that it claimed to account for the
phenomena of art by means of a studied interaction with
it, not as a work of art but as a perceivable object. As he
explained,
[Aesthetics]choosesthe methodof philosophy,strictanalysis;
it examinesas manyproductsof beautyof everysortas it can;
it attendsto the whole,undividedimpression;it returnsfrom
the depth of this impressionto the object;it observesits parts
individuallyand workingtogetherin harmony;... it bringsthe
sum of the ideasrendereddistinctundergeneralconcepts.23
In other words, aesthetic experiences require an acuity
that is different from rational metaphysics, but not sub-
servient to it, and possibly its equal. Aesthetic analysis, for
Herder, ratherthan a cold science of observation, was an
experience of the "subjective concepts of Being." The
irony, of course, was that "the more certain these con-
cepts become, the more they become inexplicable....
Since aesthetics is closely related to our bosom, since it
deals with the subtlest experiences of sensation instead of
with the principles of reason, its coil is also more difficult
to unwind than that of other, more complex metaphysical
concepts."24
The emphasis of Herder, Winckelmann, and Brunn on
keen observations as brought on by the intensity of artistic
expression paved the way in the second half of the nine-
teenth century for the introduction and popularization of
the term Einfiihlung, which would be used almost as a
code word to describe the mental operation that aims to
link the past and the present, the art object and the ob-
server, into a synthetic, enlightening unity. Certainly, this
was the hope of Wolfflin, who saw empathy as more true
than science itself, as it could give to the study of artifacts
both "exactness" and "humanism," neither of which, he
claimed, art history provides. Formpsychologie was "hu-
manistic," however, because cultural meanings were to be
gleaned directly from art works, not from archival docu-
ments. Wolfflin saw documents as a tool, not as the sub-
stance of art history. The historian - and here Wolfflin
expanded on Brunn - had to take as his direct evidence
the personal interaction between viewer and object.
Though Brunn argued that psychological-visual analysis
could lead to a more precisely grounded cultural history,
he was not a philosopher of Einfuihlung and shied away

10. Wolfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche
Grundbegriffe,3. This article does
not purport to deal with all of
Wolfflin's ideas, many of which
are well known. I discuss the prin-
ciples of aesthetic experientialism,
not Wolfflin's theories.
11. The antithesis between dia-
chronic and synchronic history was
to become a topos in art history.
As an example, one can turn to
Paul LaPorte's attempt to synthe-
size the two methods in his article
on Greek vases: "The explanation
of art in terms of its evolutionary
development is always, to a degree,
contradictory to its aesthetic inter-
pretation. If we hold to the old aes-
thetic idea of the work of art as
organism, that is, to its microcos-
mic completeness and perfection,
the work must implicitly contain
all the possible aspects of the uni-
verse. ... Though the emphasis of
interest is changing in the process
of evolution, one can never lose
sight of the intuitive, aesthetic
wholeness of the single work of
art" ("Attic Vase Painting and Pre-
Socratic Philosophy," The Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 6,
no. 2 [December 1947]: 139-52).
LaPorte, who received his Ph.D. in
the history of art, archaeology, and
philosophy at the University of
Munich and taught at Olivet Col-
lege, follows the basic idea of Max
Dessoir: that one neither
overastheticize nor overhistoricize
art but search for a compromise
between the two tendencies.
12. Heinrich Wolfflin, "Prole-
gomena zu einer Psychologie der
Architektur,"in Kleine Schriften
(Basel: Schwabe, 1946), 45.
13. The bibliography is too vast to
deal with here, but I would just
like to point the reader to the dis-
cussion by John M. Warbeke in
The Powerof Art (New York:Philo-

34
 Jarzombek

from the intricacies of definition.25Wolfflin would even-
tually take a position similar to Brunn's, namely, as a prac-
titioner-theorist, but he made, in his early years, every
effort to understand the theoretical issues associated with
Einfiihlung. With a keen sensitivity to interdisciplinary
connections, he sought out, in particular, the historian
Wilhelm Dilthey, who taught at the University of Berlin,
and Johannes Volkelt, the rising star of the neo-Kantian
philosophy. Both were well known for their interest in the
Einfiihlung theory. The author who paved the way most
directly for his dissertation, however, was Robert Vischer,
whose own dissertation, "Uber das optische Formgefuihl"
(1873), and subsequent essay "Der Aesthetische Akt und
die Reine Form" (1874) set the stage for the emergence of
empathy theory during the last half of the nineteenth
century.26 Vischer differentiated between types of empa-
thy; moreover, he argued - and here we see the origins
of formalist anticontextualism - that we were to hone
our skill to interpret the world of objects by the sheer
observation of pure form.27 When we look at the Swiss
mountains, Vischer explained, we should not say, "There
freedom lives." We must insist on the primacy of an "opti-
cal form-feeling" and put aside cultural associations and
other secondary values.28 And how do we look at objects?
There is nothing more powerful than a one-to-one rela-
tionship between observer and observed object that works
literally through the physiological responsiveness of our
skin:29
The viewing of the lines of a body's form can, in a mysterious
way, combine with one's own bodily perimeter; I can then feel
with my own skin. ... It becomes a feeling of vitality .... My
spiritual-sensual 'I' transports itself into the interior of the ob-
ject and comprehends its form-character from inside out.30
Or, as Wolfflin explained, we must first remember that
"bodily forms can only be discussed because we ourselves
have a body."31This corporeal analogy, in the hands of
Wolfflin, became a powerful methodological tool em-
ployed to observe a vast array of artworks. With his rise to
fame, especially after being called to teach at the Univer-
sity of Berlin, Wolfflin created a veritable revolution that
has infiltrated notions of art and architectural history and
theory to such a degree that some still rely on his ideas as
if they were not a theory at all.32Donald Weismann,
Vincent Scully, Robert Venturi, and Colin Rowe are only a
few of the better known practitioners of empathetic see-
ing. But before we can discuss questions about the dis-
semination of empathy theory and its humanistic ideology
especially in the context of postwar "egalitarianism" -
we should recognize what made it so ubiquitous. It was
conceived, above all, in opposition to metaphysical history
and to neoclassical aesthetics. Against the metaphysicians,
who believed that every activity, artistic included, was
determined by some larger historical necessity, those who
empathized argued that the study of physical artifacts
should not begin with abstract principles, but with objects
themselves. And against the neoclassicists, who saw the
arts as a way to represent ideas, W6olfflin argued that art-
works, precisely because of their corporeal presence, were
not representations, but living entities that provided the
truest means of access to the humanistic essence of past

sophical Library,1951), 449-500.
Warbeke holds strong faith in the
aesthetic object as a source of
knowledge, not a scientific objec-
tive knowledge, of course, but one
related to "the common enjoyment
not only in kindred groups but
among people of different nations,
races and forms of government....
Here is where a chief hope for civi-
lization resides" and the truth of
art in the "high importance of hu-
man life" (475, 478). His critique
of Freud for his pessimistic view of
art, related as it is to our baser
urges, is typical of post-World
War II arguments that emphasize
perceptual immediacy and the
civilizational importance of art, as
will be discussed later.
14. Donald Weismann, The Visual
Arts as Human Experience
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-
Hall, 1970), 307-9. Weismann,
who taught at the University of
Texas at Austin, received his Ph.D.
from Ohio State University in
1950. His thesis, "Experiment with
Language and Visual Form," paved
the way for Language and Visual
Form (Austin: University of Texas,
1968).
15. Ibid., 21.
16. Ibid., 303, 304.
17. Heinrich Brunn, Heinrich
Brunns' Kleine Schriften, ed.
Heinrich Bulle (Leipzig: B. G.
Peubner, 1898), vii. The principles
outlined by Brunn can be clearly
felt even in Benbow Ritchie's ar-
ticle, "The Formal Structure of the
Aesthetic Object," Journalof Aes-
thetics and Art Criticism 3, nos.
11-12 (Spring 1945): 5-14. When
Brunn was writing, art history had
already taken a turn toward real-
ism, namely, toward a form of his-
tory in which the art object was
not placed in some larger idealist
framework,but studied and cate-

35
 assemblage 23

ages. Furthermore,the corporealanalogy enabled art and
architectureto be discussed on the basis of "ordinary
language"freely understandableby everyone, without the
stifling jargonof specialists.33"The column rises in the
wall," Wolfflin wrote, "the dome swells upward ... we
surrender to the rhythm of the changing views . .. the wall
vibrates, the space quivers."34
The body is the medium that affords the grounding of
knowledge. It provides the locus of a universal experience
- thus its "exactness" - that unites object and viewer
around the symmetrically placed axis of experience.
Wolfflin, a master of this interplay, made the words sound
natural and effortless. His "descriptions," appearing sim-
ply to tell the reader "what is there," were filled with
subtle empathetic directives aimed at achieving an onto-
logical unity of mind and object. Phrases like "one cannot
help but feel the weight" or "the beauty it offers us has a
liberating influence" lock his readers into an empathetic
communion with the object before they can notice the
sleight of hand.
By way of contrast, for Friedrich Hegel, works of art could
only inadequately embody the Spirit, the most perfect
manifestation of which was thought itself. History would
end in a situation where art would be totally subsumed
into a dematerialized "spirit." For Wolfflin, the sensual
immediacy of the object embodied the all-important con-
nection not only to corroborative "science" but to living
history. Thus the sentence "Let us look at the marble
screens in the Sistine Chapel in Rome" is followed by the
comment "Again,we experience how the proportions
simply overwhelm us," allowing no time for the mind of
his reader-viewerto wander along irrelevantpaths.35The
renderingof the same sentence in Alice Muehsam and
Norma Shatan's English translation as "We are immedi-
ately awareof proportion"tames these words into an art
historical pleasantry.36For Wolfflin, art objects cannot be
viewed and discussed apart from dramatic experiences,
which, one should remember, are not the product of some
romantic infatuation with art, but the essence of "human-
istic exactitude" that reinforces the experience of life
itself:
In a natural way [the art object] intensifies itself so that it
catapults man to experiences of form in which the narrowness
of his existence is forgotten. All 'form' is life-enhancing.37
The argument that aesthetic objects were the source of
life-enhancing feelings had dramatic implications for the
respective position of the arts. Post-Hegelian idealists
ranked the arts according to the dialect of Spirit and ma-
teriality: architecture, contaminated by concreteness and
practicality, was positioned below sculpture and painting;
music, being the least material, was ranked highest.38 In
rejecting such normative categorizations, the path was
opened for neo-Kantians to interpret all visual expressions
on a more or less equal basis, the most significant factor
being simply the intensity and meaning of the aesthetic
experience.39

gorized in the context of art itself.
Franz Kugler'sHandbookon the
History of Painting (1837) epito-
mized this trend. See Peter Paret,
Art as History:Episodes in the Cul-
ture and Politics of Nineteenth-
Century Germany (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1988),
18-24.
18. Ibid., vii.
19. Heinrich Brunn, Griechische
Goetterideale (Munich:
Verlagsanstaltfur Kunst und
Wissenschaft, 1893), 3.
20. Ibid., 18.
21. John Dewey, who had a tre-
mendous impact on the spread
of aesthetic experientialism in
America, comes close to expressing
the idea when he writes, "Theo-
retically, it should be possible to
proceed at once from direct es-
thetic experience to what is in-
volved in judgement, the clues
being given on one side, from the
formed matter of works of art as
they exist in perception, and on
the other side, from what is in-
volved in judgement by the nature
of its own structure" (Art as Expe-
rience [New York:Capricorn,
1934], 298).
22. Heinrich Brunn, "Archaologie
und Anschauung" ( 1885), in
Heinrich Brunns'Kleine Schriften,
247 (my emphasis). Brunn's last
sentence clearly admits controversy
even then about "readingthe ob-
ject."
23. JohannGottfried Herder,
KritischesWaldchen,in Sdmmtliche
Werke,ed. BernhardSuphan (Berlin:
Weidmannsche Buchhandlung,
1877), 4:21. For an extensive and in-
sightful analysis,see RobertE.
Norton, Herder'sAestheticsand the
EuropeanEnlightenment(Ithaca:
Cornell UniversityPress, 1991).

36
 Jarzombek

Wolfflin's attempts to use the theory of corporealanalogy Chrysoloras.Chrysoloras,ambassadorfrom Constanti-

to break down the distance between viewer and artwork-
conceived as a critique of society's increasing estrange-
ment from art - has its philosophical roots in the classi-
cal theory of mimetics and the famous Aristotelian
theorem that mankind learns through an innate mimetic
compulsion that, in turn, is an essential component of our
ethical development.40 "Even without consciously willing
it," Wolfflin wrote, "we animate the things around us. It is
an ancient force of mankind .... Can it ever die out? I
don't think so, as it would be the death of art.'41
nople, and perhaps one of the greatest minds of his age,
wrote an epistle, Comparisonof Old and New Rome, that,
though little known today, served as the foundation of
the humanist interest in the visual world.42Written for
the Byzantine emperor Manuel II, but intended for a
wide audience of Italian and Byzantine intellectuals, the
Comparisonwas composed in a style of writing called
ekphrasis, which puts the reader in empathetic, sensory
contact with what the author is seeing. Chrysoloras aimed
to convey a sense of immediacy similar to that of a lover:

Wolfflin's argument, in which he seems literally to throw

his body against the mighty weight of dead abstractions,
clearly derived from the legacy of Aristotle's argument and
its own oppositional frameworkof Platonic antisensualism,
which, in turn, was an influential factor in the Middle
Ages, where the body was conceived as a source of sin. The
Cistercian theologian Bernardof Clairvaux, searching for a
world cleansed of anything that would detract from the
divine whole, considered sculptural representations as
dangerous, distracting monks from their theological con-
templations. The human tendency to empathize with the
visible was interpreted not as a strength but as a terrible
weakness and a devilish entrapment against which one
had to wage a continuous struggle.
In the Renaissance, the concept of aesthetic immediacy
returned as a significant factor in discussions on art. Its
first defense came in the writings and teachings of Manuel
Walking through the city, one's eyes are drawn from one work
to another, just as lovers never have their fill of wondering at
the living beauties and gazing intently at them .... Often as I
walk along the streets, I think of the captive kings. ... I hear
the harmonies of musical instruments, the noise of the crowd,
the shouts of praise and applause.4?
Ekphrasis - a forerunner of twentieth-century visual/
textual discourse - was rare in the West before the fif-
teenth century. Specialization in the ars dictaminis in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries had produced a utilitar-
ian and formulaic style unconcerned with wider cultural
issues in which personal experience played a part. Not
only did Chrysoloras fabricate his description around his
personal impressions, he used these experiences to inform
the reader about the intricate relationship between past
and present. The ruins were not mere curiosities, but

24. Herder, Sdmmtliche Werke,
32:61. The difficulty of dealing
with the aesthetic experience is by
now a literary topos. One need
only consider Carl Thurston's in-
troductory comments in The Struc-
ture of Art (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1940), ix-xi.
25. Brunn used the theory of
visual analysis to critique high
school education. He wanted
drawing classes to shift emphasis
from representationalism to "an
education of the eye and thus a
knowledge of how forms work"
("Archiologie und Anschauung,"
251).
26. Both are included in Robert
Vischer, Drei Schriften zum
Aesthetischen Form Problem (Halle
an der Saare:Max Niemeyer,
1927). For a discussion, see
Hermann Glockner, "Robert
Vischer und die Krisisder Geistes-
wissenschaften im letzten Drittel
des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts,"
Logos 14 (1925): 297-343, and
15:47-102; for a more recent and
excellent discussion, see Mallgrave
and Ikonomou, "Empathy, Form
and Space."
27. Empathy, allowing only for se-
curely mastered interaction with
the object, becomes ironically
depersonal in serving as a filter
against distracting information.
One of the most important criti-
cisms of formalism is, of course,
its anticontextualism; but this
anticontextualism must be seen
in the context of its commitment
to humanistic objectivity. Arnold
Hauser drove this point home with
a vengeance in The Philosophyof
Art History (New York:Alfred A.
Knopf, 1959), 124. And for good
reason: for not only contextual is-
sues, but cultural history itself, so
Wolfflin claimed, "contain a good

37
 assemblage 23

"makeour knowledge of history precise, or rather, they
grant us eyewitness knowledge of everything that has hap-
pened just as if it were present."44
Though religious doctrine no longer played a role in the
critique of mimetic empathy, by the nineteenth century
resistance to empathy theory by idealist philosophersfol-
lowed a predictableoppositional pattern;sixteenth-century
neo-Platonism and courtly classicism championed the idea
of irrefutablenotions of Beauty. It was only in the phi-
losophies of David Hume, AlexanderBaumgarten,and
Immanuel Kant that theories that centered on the lived
and experienced world again found their voice. Hume re-
versed the Platonic notion that ideas are more immediate
than sensations when he argued in his Treatiseof Human
Nature (1740) that "nothing is ever present with the mind
but its perceptions," which are "immediately present to our
consciousness"; ideas are not purer forms of sensations but,
on the contrary, merely "the fainter replica of these impres-
sions."45Baumgarten expanded this idea in his still largely
unstudied Aesthetica (1750), in which he transferred the
question of aesthetics from the abstraction of beauty to the
sensual, creaturely realm of life.46 Rather than the lowly
opposite of reason, aesthetics was, for Baumgarten, more
like its "sister,"a kind of feminine analog of reason, the
ultimate expressions of which were not alienated from lived
experiences, but integrally tied to perception. As a result,
aesthetics was not a question of taste or a matter of whim,
but an irrepressible mental activity linked with our physical
presence in the world and thus open to rational analysis.
Kant developed Baumgarten'sideas in his "Of the Ideal
of Beauty,"when he discussed the presence of moral ideas
as visible in bodily manifestation. The aesthetic object
became, for the first time in the history of philosophy,
a potentially more truthful indicator of realities than
mathematics, geometry, nature, or the Bible.47Though
Herder had come close to expressing the actual idea of
Einfiihlung within his own humanist philosophy, it was
Friedrich Schelling who coined the famous phrase "subject-
objectivization," which encapsulated the process of how the
dark, hidden reaches of subjectivity produced unified works
in harmony with the outside world, of which they, in turn,
became representative (as in a style). Schelling had a clear
impact on Vischer and Wolfflin. "The aesthetic," he wrote,
"is the intellect that has objectivized itself"; it constitutes
such an "absolute identity" with its maker that philosophy
in its interest in consciousness fails to grasp it.48This
thought received wide currency at the turn of the century.
Ludwig Klages (whose Seminar fuirAusdruckskunde,
founded in 1905, attracted many notable philosophers,
historians, and psychologists, among them Wolfflin) pre-
sented the idea that contact with the visual products of the
imagination, like a piece of handwriting, could provide
invaluable insight into the personality of an individual.
Handwriting as a visible expression, he argued, could
unlock the hidden reaches of subjectivity.49 Ferdinand
Avenarius, a leading critic, coined the term Ausdruckskultur
to designate the broad spectrum of cultural artifacts, not
simply paintings but everyday things, that externalize cul-
tural principles.50 The idea has long since become a cliche.5

deal that is ridiculous, summariz-
ing long periods of time under con-
cepts of a very general kind ... to
create a pale image of the whole"
(Renaissance and Baroque,76).
Wolfflin had in mind works like
Hermann Weiss's voluminous
Kostumkundeof 1872 and Ernst
Grosse's Kunstwissenschaftliche
Studien of 1900. Identifying differ-
ent styles in the history of cos-
tumes, Weiss looked at questions
of "material, function, and form"
and related them to current events
in architecture and in the arts and
crafts in an idealist attempt to syn-
thesize cultures and artifacts into
organic unities. Grosse, in a differ-
ent vein, wanted to include in in-
vestigations into art, questions
surrounding the artistic personal-
ity. For Wolfflin, it was sufficient
to learn about a culture and about
an artist by concentrating totally
on the objects that were produced.
"What bridge possibly connected
Jesuitism with the baroque?"he
scornfully asked; "What has
Gothic to do with the feudal sys-
tem? . . . Little is gained by enu-
merating general cultural forces"
(Renaissance and Baroque,76, 77).
28. Robert Vischer, "Uber
Aesthetische Naturbetrachtung,"
in Drei Schriften zum Aesthetischen
FormProblem,6.
29. There was considerable debate
about whether empathy, like a
feeling, was an innate property of
the human mind or whether it
could be reduced to another fac-
ulty, such as the association of
ideas, of which it is no more than a
variety. There were also debates
about whether empathy was re-
lated to the physical movement of
the eyes, as along jagged lines and
curved lines, or whether it was re-
lated to overall shapes and colors.
And finally, psychologists debated
whether empathy was put into the

38
 Jarzombek

In its current form, subject-objectivization loses much of
its impact. It was originally intended as a critique of a
society that could no longer comprehend its creative es-
sence. If the secularization of society lay at the heart of
the enlightened confidence in the visual, sensual domain
of art, then it was the overstepping of the bounds of secu-
larization that concerned late-nineteenth-century empa-
thy theorists. Bourgeois society, so they felt, was well on
its way to losing contact with art and with its life-giving
forces, and intellectuals were not helping the matter ei-
ther by stressing rationalism and science. This was a key
issue not only for Wolfflin but also for Wilhelm Dilthey
and Johannes Volkelt, both of whom were instrumental in
helping W6olfflin formulate the ideas of his 1886 disserta-
tion. Wolfflin traveled to lBerlin in 1885 specifically to
study under Dilthey, and he knew Volkelt from Basel,
where he took his seminars on aesthetics and psychology.52
Dilthey and Volkelt were acclaimed neo-Kantians and
instrumental in developing a psychological-scientific basis
for research. Kant had postulated that neither the thing
nor the mind is known in and for itself. Knowledge is the
domain of interaction between subject and object. Late-
nineteenth-century neo-Kantians saw in this a justifica-
tion for perceptual psychology, as it was the study neither
of abstract conditions nor of dead archaeological data, but
of meanings constructed in the context of civilization and
history. Psychology, so Dilthey argued, was the ideal tool
for recreating the past because it gave the historian direct
access to the living, mental processes of a period. In this
sense, there could be no philosophy of history, in the
Hegelian sense. Rather, philosophy and history were
coterminous in an all-embracing "philosophyof life." Re-
flections on life were not the product of a pure knowing
mind. Instead, they had to arise from the study of indi-
viduals living at a given time and bounded by the horizon
of their own age. The philosopher-historian,therefore,
must start with the meanings that historical characters
have given to their world, for that was the process whereby
life becomes organized and known. Dilthey, who attacked
the "autonomy of reason," felt that reality lay in an inner
experience that asserted itself in time not in a linear
fashion but in the form of an eternal return.
Dilthey demonstrated the power of empathy theory in
the service of history, but it was Volkelt who motivated
Wolfflin to consider the study of art. Though best known
for his study of Kant, Volkelt was particularly interested
in questions of ethics and aesthetics and culminated his
investigations with his monumental Grundlegung der
Aesthetik (1927). Volkelt believed that philosophy could
become a science if it abandoned attempts to begin analy-
sis with pure consciousness and, instead, concentrated on
how conscious human beings apply concepts to the data of
sensations in order to produce a phenomenalistic world
picture. In its complex intertwinings of aesthetics, philoso-
phy, and psychology, fields that were at that time closely
related, Volkelt hoped to address a culture that he felt had
become increasingly shallow and superficial (the same
theory-topos that we encountered in Arnheim). Influenced

object by the artist or by the
viewer. The originator of the
Einfuhlung doctrine in France
was Victor Basch, for many years
professor of aesthetics at the
Sorbonne. His principal work con-
tains, besides a detailed study of
the entire Kantian philosophy, a
comprehensive hi.storyof aesthet-
ics with particularemphasis on
Germany. Basch argued that the
aesthetic character of an object is
not a quality of that object, but
rather, an activity of our ego, an
attitude we adopt toward it that
fuses the acts of observing and in-
terpreting. See Victor Basch, Essai
critique sur l'Esthetique de Kant
(Paris:F. Alcan, 1912), 225-311.
See also idem, "Les Grands
Courranats de l'esthetique alle-
mande contemporaine," in La
Philosophie allemande au XIXme
siecle (Paris:F. Alcan, 1912). In
England, a leading advocate of em-
pathy was Vernon Lee (pseud. of
Violet Paget). See her Beauty and
Ugliness, and other Studies in Psy-
chological Aesthetics (London:
John Lane, 1912), 156-239, and
idem, The Beautiful: An Introduc-
tion to PsychologicalAesthetics
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1913). Y. Him, The Ori-
gins of Art: A Psychologicaland
Sociological Inquiry (London,
1900), also took up the cause: "In
aesthetics proper, as well as in the
philosophy of art, every research
must start, not from theoretical
asssumptions, but from the psy-
chological and sociological data of
aesthetic life" (17).
30. Vischer,Drei Schriften,13, 14, 48.
31. Wolfflin, "Prolegomenazu einer
Psychologieder Architektur,"15.
32. Wolfflin's thesis of corporeal
analogy had a dramatic impact on
baroque studies. The baroque was
no longer an era of trivial sensual-

39
 assemblage 23

by FriedrichNietzsche and the socialist Ferdinand
Lassalle,Volkelt believed that not only was the modern
bourgeoisie alienated from aesthetic comprehensions, but
that scholarship,growingever more esoteric, had given the
impression that society was nothing more than a pile of
dead objects without inherent meaning or value.53Empa-
thy and a philosophy based on the power of human sensi-
tivities and emotions was the only way to restore life-giving
meaning to society. In his Der Symbolbegriffin der neueren
Aesthetik (1876) Volkelt analyzed the ways forms become
invested with meaning. The only knowledge we could have
of art, he concluded, was through understandingthe way
the human spirit permeates the world.
It was this basic premise that attracted the young Wolfflin
to the neo-Kantian camp. But Wolfflin was more moder-
ate in his political critique of society than Volkelt. In his
dissertation, he argued that Volkelt, like Vischer, inter-
preted Vitalgefiihl, or that "feeling for life," as a mysteri-
ous inner experience, and this, Wolfflin felt, was too
romantic and "inexact";he advocated a more scientifically
psychological interpretation of the arts. Wolfflin felt that
empathetic immediacy could become a positive force as
long as its potential for irrationalismwas tempered with
the promise of an objective explanation of mankind's
artistic creations. Before he wrote his dissertation, he
toyed with the idea of writing a piece on the psychology of
religion, for such a work,he thought, would be "concerned
with the original immediate manifestation of the general
human religious impulse at a particularplace and time"
and thus could become the basis for "a scientific investi-
gation into the human spirit."54
The worksof Wilhelm Wundt and Theodor Lipps were
instrumental in guiding Wolfflin toward a "science"of
psychology and art perception (a science, of course, that
sees itself in opposition to science itself). Wundt, broadly
interdisciplinaryin his interests, developed a method of
introspection in which researchersinvestigated the sub-
ject matter of immediate experience through exacting
attention to sensations and feelings. Wolfflin alluded to
this method in his dissertation while discussing the orga-
nization of the human body along its vertical axis.55Lipps,
famous for his expression "lost is any art that philoso-
phizes," was, like Wolfflin, highly critical of mechanistic
and idealist worldviews.Though Lipps published in a wide
range of topics including literature, paleobotany, ethics,
logic, optical illusions, and humor, he was best known for
his attempt to categorize the various types of empathetic
responses.56In a well-known metaphor, taken from
Vischer, Lipps argued that what a furniture maker saw in a
log was not passive material, but aspects of size, form, and
shape that inspired him to act. In other words, the forms,
far from dead, were the source of life, excitement, and
creativity.57Lipps explained what he meant by a metaphor
that encapsulated the paradigmaticaesthetic experience,
that of looking at a naked woman:
I experiencein the beautifulwomanlyforman unusualsensa-
tion of life that is powerful,healthy,upliftingand growing.I
experiencea sense of physicalwell-beingthat is nowhereelse

ism, but of an important lesson in
immediacy. In a discussion of
Caravaggio'sSupperat Emmaus
(ca. 1597), for example, Rudolf
Wittkower characterized the ex-
pansive gestures of Christ and his
disciples as, in part, "a psychologi-
cal device ... to draw the beholder
into the orbit of the picture and to
increase the emotional and dra-
matic impact of the event repre-
sented" (Art and Architecturein
Italy, 1600-1750, 2d. rev. ed. [Bal-
timore: Pelican History of Art,
1965], 24). In a similar vein, Erwin
Panofsky saw the baroque as
uniquely modern, in that it opened
up explorations into human emo-
tions and emotional responses.
This was one of the arguments in
Panofsky'sunpublished lecture
"What is Baroque?"read by Irving
Lavin at the Erwin Panofsky Sym-
posium held at the Institute for
Advanced Study, Princeton Uni-
versity, on 3 October 1993.
33. As I explain later, this was one
of the reasons it became so popular
in art appreciationcourses, where it
served in the ideology of humanism.
34. Wolfflin, Principles of Art His-
tory, 63-65.
35. Heinrich Wolfflin, Italien und
das Deutsche Formgefuhl(Munich:
Hugo Bruckmann, 1931), 15.
36. Heinrich Wolfflin, The Sense
of Form in Art, trans. Alice
Muehsam and Norma Shatan
(New York:Chelsea Publishing,
1958), 26; the title should have
been translated as The Italians and
the GermanFeeling for Form.
37. Wolfflin, Italien und das
Deutsche Formgefuhl, 112.
38. See, for example, Richard
Morning, "Ideen zu einer Classifi-

40
 Jarzombek

localized than in the experiences of the forms, . . . an expansion
of the feeling of life over and beyond the real me . . . not a sen-
sation felt by my realbody,but a feelingforlife itself.58
Despite common ground, the debates among aesthetic
psychologists were contentious. Vischer differentiated
among three types of Einfiihlung, Wundt among four, and
Volkelt, while preservingthe importance of anthropomor-
phism, argued that Einfiihlung should be studied through
symbols. Gustav von Allesch defended psychological and
perceptual immediacy, in the manner of Volkelt.59Paul
Natorp, though also a neo-Kantian and concerned by the
"transformationof the world into a single great calcula-
tion," took a more idealist, Platonic point of view in his
aesthetics.60Oswald Kuilpe,a student of Wundt, stood
somewhere in between. In Grundrissder Psychologie
(1893), an exploration of psychological connections be-
tween form and observer,he admitted the limitations of
the experience reduced through emotional intensity: it
can never be discussed outside normative, historical
knowledge and relationships. Qualitative judgments are,
he concluded, an integral part of art.6'Ernst Meumann,
Hermann Cohen, Emil Utitz, Richard Miiller-Freienfels,
and a host of other turn-of-the-century philosophers pur-
sued the polemics well into the 1910s and 1920s.62 But
whatever the variation, psychological aesthetics had by the
late nineteenth century become one of the dominant
strands in German intellectual thought. To demonstrate
the difference between the Germans and their English
counterparts, we need only look at Grant Allen's Psycho-
logical Aesthetics (1877), a book that might, at first glance,
seem closely related to developments in Germany.Allen,
however, adopted a conservative idealist position and
discussed pictorial form from the perspective of absolute
beauty: "We demand that a painter should choose for his
theme beautifully shaped objects, such as human figures,
male or female, in graceful attitude, nude and exquisitely
formed, with round limbs, or clothed in flowing drapery."63
Nothing could be further removed from the work of the
German psychologists, who for the most part rejected
normative aesthetics.
Despite recent attempts to describe Wol1fflin'stheories,
his theoretical position in respect to the numerous strands
of thought that fed into his work are difficult to unravel,
in part, because he purposefullyblurred distinctions and
confused boundaries that were important to the theoreti-
cal debates of the time. His theory was based on neo-
Kantian psychology, but shied away from Wundt's
experimental psychology;it concerned itself with the hu-
manities, but rejected the heavily researchedhumanistic
scholarship championed by Dilthey. It claimed to be a
science, yet it was based not on the irrefutabilityof docu-
ments, but on the supposedly incontestable nature of
personal observations.
Wolfflin's synthesis of ideas (homeless in that it avoids
disciplinaryplacement) created a theoretical platform on
which the descriptions of art objects would rest, and his
descriptions, unmatched in their elegance, carrieda
unique poignancy not just in art, but in the field of archi-

cation und Charakteristikder
Sch6nen Kiinste," Jahrbiicherfur
speculative Philosophie 1, no. 3
(1846): 63-97.
39. Wolfflin was not shy, for ex-
ample, of using a word like "un-
forgettable" to describe the Pisa
cathedral (Italien und das Deutsche
Formgefuhl,5).
40. This theorem was well known
to Wolfflin and was repeated so
many times by twentieth-century
experientialists that some of them
have been labeled neo-Aristotelian.
41. Wolfflin, "Prolegomenazu einer
Psychologieder Architektur,"15-16.
42. Manuel Chrysoloras,Compari-
son of Old and New Rome;discussed
and translatedin Christine Smith,
Architecturein the Cultureof Early
Humanism (Oxford:Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1992), 199-215.
43. Ibid., 212-13.
44. Ibid., 202.
45. David Hume, A Treatise on
Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-
Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1928), 67, 73, 197, 265, 427.
46. See the informed discussion of
Baumgarten in Alfred Baeumler,
Das Irrationalitdtsproblemin der
Aesthetik und Logik des 18.
Jahrhundertsbis zur Kritikder
Urteilskraft (Darmstadt: Wissen-
schaftliche Buchgesellschaft,
1981), 195-96.
47. With Kant's subject-centered
epistemology, knowledge was tied
to the limits of perception, consti-
tuting what Foucault called "the
threshold of modernity." The new
emphasis on subjectivity was re-
flected in a comment by Arthur
Schopenhauer in The Worldas

41
 assemblage 23

tecture as well. Coming to buildings not as a specialist in
construction, as did Viollet-le-Duc, or as a historicist-
advocate, as did John Ruskin, or as a cultural researcher,
as did RichardBorrmannand Joseph Neuwirth, authors of
Geschichte der Baukunst (1904), but as an observerof a
building's "psychology,"Wolfflin swept aside conven-
tional approaches to architecture. Simply and self-assur-
edly, he claimed that once we have understood "the ideal
of the human figure . . . the parallels with architectural
forms are not difficult to see."64 Ignoring questions about
attribution, the history of construction, or the impact
professional practice might have had on the way a build-
ing looks, W6olfflin, true to his claim, discussed buildings
as if they were human bodies. In describing a baroque
fa?ade, he wrote,
This effect of yielding to an oppressive weight is sometimes so
powerful that we imagine that the forms affected are actually
suffering.... One cannot help feeling the weight of the bur-
den. The hard, brittle stuff has suddenly turned supple and
soft; sometimes it almost reminds us of clay .... The love of
fullness and softness appeared in bulging friezes .... The archi-
tectural body as a whole remained tightly pressed together.65
These summary notes served only to demonstrate the
complex historicity and theorizations underlying
Wolfflin's argument. But none of these humanistic, En-
lightenment, neo-Kantian, and cultural-critical debates
was brought to the fore in his publications. None of his
writings contained footnotes that would lead an inquisitive
readerinto the fundamentals of his theoretical edifice
KunstgeschichtlicheGrundbegriffe,and even his last work,
Italien und das Deutsche Formgefiihl,purposefullyignored
rising criticism from Rudolf Odebrecht and Edwardvon
Hartmann,who had both pointed out that though
Wolfflin attempted to criticize abstractions in art history,
his philosophy of observationwas itself grounded in nu-
merous abstractions.66W6olfflin'sdissertation was the most
theoretical of his writings, but even there its author was
summaryin his analysis. He admitted his indebtedness to
Volkelt. But he discussed and dismissed him in a few sen-
tences. "So much for Volkelt,"W6olfflinconcluded.67
Theoretical discussions were not Wolfflin's forte; he saw
himself as a practitioner of theory not a theorist per se,
and was the first to admit it: "Cold abstract thought and
philosophical speculation is not my thing. But ... to rec-
oncile the results of philosophy with the need of the mind,
for that I feel myself well adapted."68This does not mean
that Wolfflin was not a man with an extraordinarymind.
He simply had no wish to be categorized. For a long time,
he remained undecided whether to become a cultural
historian, a philosopher, or a literaryhistorian. To keep
himself from being pinned down even as a Formpsycholog,
he almost never mentioned the word Einfiihlung, even
though he used its principle in one form or another
throughout his career.To have used the word would have
forced him either to define it himself or to use one of the
definitions of Wundt or Vischer.

Will and Representation,in which
he argued that even space might
appear objective when in actuality
it, too, is only a mental product de-
fined by sensations: "Still less can
there enter into consciousness a
distinction, which generally does
not take place, between object and
representation, . . . what is imme-
diate can only be the sensation;
and this is confined to the sphere
beneath our skin. This can be ex-
plained from the fact that outside
us is exclusively a spatial determi-
nation, but space itself is ... a
function of our brain" (The World
as Will and Representation,trans.
E. F. J. Payne [New York:Dover,
1966], 2:22).
48. Friedrich Schelling, Werke,I,
3:62; cited and discussed in Oskar
Becker, "Von der Hinfalligkeit des
Schonen und der Abendteuerlich-
keit des Kunstlers,"in Festschrift
fur EdmundHusserl zum 70.
Geburtstag (Halle an der Saare:
Max Niemeyer, 1929), 38. See also
Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form
(New York:Charles Scribner's,
1953), 373.
49. See Ludwig Klages, Samtliche
Werke,ed. Ernst Frauchiger (Bonn:
H. Bouvier, 1964).
50. See Ferdinand Avenarius, edi-
torial, Kunstwart20, no. 6 (1906):
311; see also 20, no. 14 (1907): 96.
51. EdwardWarder Rannells,head
of the art departmentof the Univer-
sity of Kentuky,used this same
cliche in his theories of art:"These
tensions must be externalized;they
must be objectified or, in the true
meaning of the word,expressed.
And to do this is to compose them
in a new order,to understandthem

42
 Jarzombek

In applying,and in some sense misapplying,the specialized
conceptualizations of psychology,history, and aesthetics,
theoretical issues shifted in a shadowyway from complex
psychologicaltheories to a pseudoscience; but this was,
undoubtedly, Wolfflin's masterstrokeas it excused him in
the name of his "humanistic"mission from all-too-close
philosophical and theoretical scrutiny.69The advantagesto
be gained in crossing the disciplinaryboundarybetween
psychologyand art history from the perspective of creating
a debate not in philosophy but in art history, and then
while still outside of art history - speakingas a scientist of
the humanities - offset weaknessesin the argument from
the disciplinaryperspective of philosophy. Enumeratingall
the complex theoretical implications of empathy would
have burdened the elan of his writing style, which denied
any awarenessof abstracttheoretical issues except those
useful to his critique of art history.70Wolfflin was well
awarethat his attempt to harness connections between
psychologicaland art history gave him a unique position in
art historical discourses.The very power of his writingslay
in the circumstance that as exercises in humanism they
transcendedboth psychologyand art history. In this sense,
Wolfflin's writingswere doubly formalist;not only did they
isolate the objects under discussion from their historical
context in the name of lived immediacy, but moreover,the
texts presented themselves as a humanist practice that
wanted to be isolated from theory (its own as well) lest they
reinforcethe alienation of art and society instead of imple-
menting a reconciliation.
The tension in Wolfflin's writings as to their own status
"as theory"was obliterated when his significant writings
were translated into English beginning in the late 1930s
- all, that is, except his most theoretical work,his 1886
dissertation. The suppression of theory so essential to the
scientific-humanist message of W6olfflin'swritings (it
becomes theory by feigning to be oblivious to theory)
became in the context of the English translations a
simple, powerful, but tragic absence of theory that made
the texts appear ex nihilo, as if they indeed had no
theoretical basis. For American readers,especially in un-
dergraduateart history courses, the texts spoke for them-
selves, as though Wolfflin had discovered his ideas in the
locus of his own mind in direct, uncomplicated confronta-
tion with objects. Discussions focused, as they still tend to
do today, on W6olfflin'sart historical method and not on
his anti-art historical, humanist polemic.7' It is possible
that Wolfflin would have seen this as a victory, for it
meant that art was being "looked at," not studied. The
irony was that a raised consciousness toward art qua art
required turning away from the theoretical underpinning
that made looking so important. Joshua Taylor'sLearning
to Look:A Handbookfor the Visual Arts (1957) and Bates
Lowry'sVisual Experience(1967), representing the end
run of turn-of-the-century visual experientialism, pre-
sented it as if it were not a theory at all, but a method that
was just as appropriateto art as quantum mechanics was
to physics.72These detheorizations worked so well, in fact,
that Wolfflin's, not to mention Brunn'sand Vischer's,

in a new context. Aesthetic expres-
sion opens the way.As a creative
process,it providesa means for
drawingout, and workingout, what
is within the individualand resolving
it, giving it form and coherence in
the process,as art requires"("Aes-
thetic Expressionand Learning,"
Journalof Aestheticsand Art Criti-
cism 5, no. 4 [June 1947]: 315).
52. For the interchange among
Wolfflin, Dilthey, and Volkelt, see
Hart, "Heinrich Wolfflin: An Intel-
lectual Biography."
53. Volkelt contrasted the stringent
nature of Kantianethics with the
attitude of contemporarysociety
that he felt was becomingincreasing-
ly frivolousand business-oriented.
While in Vienna as a young profes-
sor, Volkelt was closely linked to
the socialist-nationalistgroup of
cultural reformersknown as the
PernerstorferCircle. See Johannes
Volkelt, GrundlegungderAesthetik
(Munich: C. H. Beck, 1927); for a
discussion, see William J. McGrath,
Dionysian Art and Populist Politics
(New Haven:Yale UniversityPress,
1974), 48-52.
54. Wolfflin's views were tem-
pered by August Bock's work on
religion. Bock, professor of elo-
quence at the University of Berlin
from 1811 to 1865, published the
Encyclopadieund Methodologieder
philologischen Wissenschaften
(Leipzig: B. G. Peubner, 1877). See
Hart, "Heinrich Wolfflin: An Intel-
lectual Biography,"37-38.
55. Wolfflin, "Prolegomena zu
einer Psychologie der Architektur,"
28. Wilhelm Wundt was professor
of philosophy at Leipzig. The goal

43
 assemblage 23

important contributions in this direction were soon for-
gotten, so much so that until recently attempts to place
Wolfflin in his context often missed the mark.73Looking
became pure practice, without theory.
Today, of course, Wolfflin is viewed as an "arthistorian"
and discussed in the context of other "arthistorians."74
But we have to remember that there were no art histori-
ans on his doctoral committee. From this perspective,
Wol1fflin'sstruggle to theorize in a multidisciplinary field
outside of art history and then detheorize himself when
he became an art historian is simply a non-issue. At-
tempts to "locate"Wolfflin in art history - a type of
disciplinary retribution for his efforts to dislocate art his-
tory - only kept us from understanding his work as will-
fully nondisciplinary, inhabiting a domain difficult of
access as it can be approached only through the warp of
disciplinary perspectives. Ironically,attempts to preserve
Wolfflin's nondisciplinary discourse, such as Weismann's
Visual Arts as Human Experience,are equally troubled.
Weismann, like Arnheim, assumes not only that art psy-
chology is not a theory, and therefore cannot be chal-
lenged as theory, but further, that it is a fundamental
truth engaged in a fight against the stifling aspect of his-
torical knowledge. This type of looking, however, pro-
jected as necessary into our heightened consciousness of
the world, required the suppression of not just historical
but theoretical self-consciousness. If this is humanism,
then it is also hypocrisy.
The Image and the Text:
Triumph and Problems of Living Form
Whereas most twentieth-century theories demand to be
interpreted as intellectual constructs, experiential aes-
theticism is unique in the context of modernity as a
theory that struggled not only against historicity, but
against its very status as theory. This is nowhere more
evident than in the problem it raised vis-a-vis the written
text. "The sharpness of the elbow, the spirited line of the
forearm,and then, how the fingers radiate out over the
breast, every line steeped in energy, that is Botticelli":75to
read this and look at the illustration, and thus tacitly af-
firm the validity of the description, is to fall into a trap.
We would be inhabiting the space of interpretation with-
out asking what that space is. But if we do not "look"at
the image of Venus on the printed page (which is why it is
not reproducedhere) we are violating the text and treating
it as mere literature. Instantly, the split emerges between
textual and physical image. The textual image, in disguis-
ing its inherent literariness, wants to be read not as a text
per se, but as a product of the imagination inspired by
the presence of and controlled by the aesthetic object.
Heinrich Brunn, in demanding of his students, Wolfflin
included, that they possess "an open eye, an unencum-
bered view, and an open disposition," assumed that visual
interpretation was the path to scientific objectivity pre-
cisely because it spoke truthfully "and with full conscious-
ness" in front of the art object.76

of his investigations was to analyze
conscious processes into basic
elements, to discover how these
elements are connected, and to es-
tablish the laws of these connec-
tions. In the first part of the
twentieth century, Wundt con-
cerned himself with the various
levels of mental development as
expressed in language and myths,
art forms and social customs, in-
cluding laws and morals.
56. Theodor Lipps founded the
Psychological Institute in Munich,
where he taught from 1894 till
1911. The aesthetic feeling, he ar-
gued, was grounded in four differ-
ent types of projections of the
observer onto the perceived object:
first, general apperceptive empathy
- the animation of the forms of
common objects, such as seeing a
line as movement; second, empiri-
cal empathy - the humanizing of
natural objects, such as when one
talks of a babbling brook; third,
mood empathy - putting feelings
into colors or music, such as de-
scribing an object as "relaxed
blue"; and, fourth, empathy for the
sensible appearance of living be-
ings. Lipps also wrote, among
other works, Raumaesthetikund
Geometrisch-optischeTduschung
(Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1897) and
Von der Formder dsthetischen Ap-
perception (Halle an der Saare:
Max Niemeyer, 1902). For a brief
discussion and bibliography, see
Niels W. Bokhove and Karl
Schumann, "Bibliographieder
Schriften von Theodor Lipps,"
Zeitschrift fur philosophische
Forschung45, no. 1 (1991): 112-
30. Paul Stern, a theorist and his-
torian, gave a critique of Lipps and
an account of the precursorsof
Einfiihlung in the romantic move-

44
 Jarzombek

Among recent American architecturalhistorians, the
greatest practitioner of visual, experiential writing -
based, as always,on the calculated effect of its fraudu-
lently constructed "humanist"message - is undoubtedly
Vincent Scully. In The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods:
GreekSacredArchitecture(1962) and Architecture:
The Natural and the Man-made (1991), he has turned
the theory of empathetic seeing/writing into a high art.
The hallmarksof his approach are nuanced observations
that take the reader step by step along a path and the
author's own subtle, physiological responses to the envi-
ronment, presumably shared by the reader. Scully need
not articulate the theoretical roots and the historicity of
his argument - its foundations fracturedby decades of
theoretical repressions- for their self-justifying strength
comes from the assumption of its life-enhancing opposi-
tional stance toward dead scholarship.And, indeed, who
can deny the seeming validity of the following "experi-
ence" in the approach to Chantilly as the objects literally
"grab hold of the eye"?
As we approach the statue [in front of Chantilly], it begins to
stand out against the sky and to balance the irregularmass of
the chateau. As we get closer, it stands out even more and
seizes our attention.... Our view is now developing a wonderful
velocity as it is directed rapidly up the slope toward the figure
on horseback.77
The description assumes that the eye is powerful and
autonomous and permits a special type of cognition. This
was explained already by Brunn and Vischer, who argued
that there was an important difference between what one
sees and the creative act of seeing itself, a difference at the
heart of perceptual psychology. A more contemporary
formalist defender explained that "art is located in a
physical medium capable of activating human receptors"
and therefore the impression "can be responded to by any
receiver's conscious focusing here and now, and can be
recalled after it has disappeared from the center of atten-
tion."78 As another advocate of experiential aestheticism
recently explained, "aesthetic objects stimulate and sus-
tain the beholder's undivided, whole and disinterested
visual attention."79 Disinterested is a key word for neo-
Kantian, formalist aesthetics. This theory of an academi-
cally sanctioned beholding became a topos of analysis in
the 1970s and early 1980s.
Here you see a single great curving diagonal holds together in
its sweep nearly everything in the picture. And this diagonal is
not built up by forms that are at the same distance from the
eye. The forms are arranged so as to lead the eye gradually back-
wards until we pass out of the stable into the open air beyond.80
As the three plazas shift to the left, the palace oscillates be-
tween two obelisks, a cylinder, and a pyramid, shifting the eye
to the mountains and the Open Hand monument to the right.
Finally, the dense symmetrical mass of the palace wrenches the
eye to the center, to settle in the curve of the barsati.8'
These experiences are at once open-ended, as all experi-
ences are, and closed, because the authors (and they are

ment, as well as discussing Johann
Gottfried Herder and Jean Paul
Richter and the transition, during
the second half of the nineteenth
century, from metaphysical to ex-
act aesthetics as it appeared in the
work of F. T. Vischer, Hermann
Lotze, Gustav Theodor Fechner,
KarlGroos, and Robert Vischer.
Though Stern agreed with the con-
cept of Einfiihlung, his intention
was to soften the radical position
of Volkelt. See Paul Stern, "Ein-
fiuhlungund Association in der
neueren Aesthetik: Ein Beitrag
zur psychologischen Analyse des
asthetischen Anschauungen," in
Beitrdgezur Aesthetik, ed. Theodor
Lipps and R. M. Werner (Ham-
burg: Leopold Voss, 1898), 5:1-38.
57. Vischer, "Uber Aesthetische
Naturbetrachtung," 63; Erwin
Panofsky in Meaning in the Visual
Arts (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1955), 11, used this
metaphor without, of course,
citing Lipps.
58. Theodor Lipps, Grundlegung
der Aesthetik (Leipzig: Leopold
Voss, 1923), 148-49. I. A. Richards
in his collaborative work The Foun-
dations of Aesthetics helped bring
the work of Lipps to the English-
speaking public.
59. Gustav von Allesch, "Uber
das Verhaltnis der Aesthetik zur
Psychologie," Zeitschrift fur
Psychologie56, no. 6 (1910):
401-536.
60. Paul Natorp, Philosophie, ihr
Problemund ihre Probleme
(Gottingen, 1911).
61. Oswald Kulpe, Grundrissder
Psychologie (Leipzig: Wilhelm En-
gelmann, 1893), 258-59.

45
 assemblage 23

authors) assume they have captured the experience as
envisioned by the painter or architect. The "experience,"
more than just the "description" that it purports to be, is
simultaneously an event in the author's own conscious-
ness and a historical reliving; it collapses present and past.
But what if we are dealing with something as big as a
landscape, as is the case with much of Scully's writings?
Scully demands that one not only read words and look at
photographs, as Brunn and Wolfflin wanted, but look at
the photograph and transpose oneself into the landscape.
The visual and conceptual reorientation involved in seeing
things whole and as they are in nature is not easy to accomplish
on the printed page. It is never possible, for example, to illus-
trate the whole vast landscape clearly enough with the kind of
illustrations that are normally available in books. Nor is it al-
ways evident in a book at those moments in the visual/verbal
discourse when looking is most necessary.82
The hermeneutical ambiguities inherent in visual/textual
writings are compounded by a purposeful confluence in
Wol1fflin's and in Scully's writings between two different
"times": that of the particular here and now in which the
experience is rooted and that of the universal transcen-
dent time that it claims to reveal. The aesthetic object lies
embedded within the unaesthetic everyday world of com-
mon language; the description, however, liberates the
object and places it within the highly controlled domain
of aesthetic appreciation and human history. This paradox
was outlined by Oskar Becker back in 1929, in his influen-
tial, but now-forgotten "Von der Hinfalligkeit des Schonen
und der Abendteuerlichkeit des Kiinstlers":
The aesthetic is the phenomenal presence, it is phenomenon-
as-such, the appearance as appearance.... The aesthetic object
is also the higher, and truer, reality.83
No one will deny that empathetic seeing is important in
evaluating the arts, but we must separate a discussion
that deals with visible things from a theory that privileges
empathetic seeing while refusing to admit that it is an
artifice. The historian (viewer-writer) becomes less a sensi-
tive critic than a conjurer who uses the power to seize and
concentrate on the key features of an experience to evoke
broad historical truths. But attempts to look beyond the
text in a "visual/verbal" discourse obscure the circum-
stance that descriptions work to construct images without
our having to actually look at art at all. In fact, the mental
images Scully weaves are possibly stronger than the very
thing he describes:
There the skyscrapersseem to rush forwardto populate the tip
of the island as it sails out to sea, each one clamoring to be seen
from afar, as if floating on the water .... Between them, far up-
town, the city breathes its fresh green breath in Central Park.84
The whole system [of the Abbey Church of St. Denis] seems to
push the piers of the outer wall outward, so splitting the walls
between them to allow the light of the windows to appear.85
I have chosen particularly poetic passages of Scully's to
demonstrate that "descriptions" often celebrate the mental
image over the physical object. This swerve toward the po-

62. For a discussion of some of the
principal players, see Emil Utitz,
"Aesthetik und allgemeine
Kunstwissenschaft,"Jahrbaicherder
Philosophie 1 (1913): 322-64.
63. Grant Allen, PsychologicalAes-
thetics (London: Henry S. King,
1877), 223. Allen's work should be
seen in the context of Herbert
Spencer and, more specifically, his
(London:
Principlesof Psychology
Longman, 1855).
64. Wolfflin, Renaissance and Ba-
roque, 82.
65. Ibid., 78, 80. In developing his
interpretation of baroque and Re-
naissance forms as analogous to
the body, Wolfflin also drew on a
hotly debated issue about women's
fashion. Women's groups were
agitating for more comfortable
clothes, whereas traditionalists
preached the virtues of the late
Empire style. Promoted by such
organizations as the Rational Dress
Society, a new, looser fashion
swept over Europe in the late
1880s. Wolfflin saw the change as
a return to the principles of ratio-
nality and harmony and as a move
away from the spirit of the ba-
roque. In the following quotation
one almost has to remind oneself
that Wolfflin is talking about a
building, not about a late Empire
dress: "[We see] massive bodies,
large, awkward,. . . with swirling
draperies.... The light-
heartedness of the Renaissance
has disappeared;all forms have
become weightier and press more
heavily on the ground." The
Paxtonesque "steel frame"design
for a hoop exhibited in London in
1883 was praised in an exhibition
catalogue for "its freedom of
movement . . . absence of pressure
... [having] no more weight than
necessary . . . grace and beauty."
How well this compares to

46
 Jarzombek

etic is an outcome of a theory that privilegesonly those
aesthetic experiences that are intensely meaningful.T. S.
Eliot, for instance, saw good writingnot as a mere recording
of emotions, but as the product of a "significantemotion";
likewise, Clive Bell saw the aesthetic act as a response not to
any old form but to "significantforms."86 This ambiguity
enables formalistexperientialiststo exploit, in an unstated
manner, the traditionaldefense of poetrywhile all along
claiming to defend the primacyof the visual over the liter-
ary.Ancient Greekshad debated the pros and cons between
poetry and history,between powerfulinsight and dispas-
sionate fact. Was it the historian'stask to convey the dy-
namic image of a battle or to remain a distanced observer?
The history of this debate must embrace the English pasto-
ral poet Sir Philip Sidney as he preparedthe basis for mod-
ern experientialanalysisin his Apologyfor Poetry(1584).
Rejecting metaphysicalexteriorityof experience, he
explained that the poem "drawsthe mind more effectively
than any other art doth" because it both depicts the mind
and leads it to action.87Sidney'squestioning of objective
realityas a source of certaintyled him to challenge aca-
demic philosophersin a way similarto the critique of aca-
demic jargonby twentieth-centuryexperientialists:"The
philosopherteacheth, but he teacheth obscurely,so as the
learned only can understandhim; that is to say, he teacheth
them that are alreadytaught."88In contrast to the exclusive
language of the philosopheris the imaginativeand judging
powerof the mind, exercisedwhere "thingsare figured forth
by the speakingpicture of poesy."89The experience, embed-
ded in visual potency, not abstractknowledge,revealsthe
fullness of being and actualizes cognition. It is only in this
form of poetic immediacy that reason finds an object
properlyproportionedfor its capacities.The historian, for
Sidney, is someone interested only in the incoherent events
of the past ("he is laden with old mouse-eaten records"),
whereasthe poet, able to concentrate on the modes of un-
derstandingitself, can make sense out of the world.This is
essentially the argumentembedded in the history/theory
debates of the 1980s (theoryas a critique of history) and in
Scully'scriticism of archaeologistswho, in analyzingdispar-
ate pieces from a dig, fail to understandthe "architectural
whole."90
The defense of poetry against stodgy erudition was carried
forwardby William Hazlitt in the early nineteenth cen-
tury. Hazlitt wrote that "poetryis not a branch of author-
ship: it is 'the stuff of which our life is made.' The rest is
'mere oblivion,' a dead letter: for all that is worth remem-
bering in life is the poetry of it. ... Poetry is that fine
particularwithin us, that expands, rarefies,refines, raises
our whole being: without it man's life is as poor as a
beast's."91In 1846 Charles Baudelairemade it clear on
which side he stood in this classic debate. He argued that
"the best criticism" is one that "deliberatelyrids itself of
any trace of feeling," but "that is the painting reflected by
an intelligent and sensitive mind."92
As is well known, such defenses of poetry were met since
the days of Plato with skepticism. The danger lay in the
charm so clearly inherent in the poetic art. But Plato did
accept poets, we must recall, when the poet writes with

Wolfflin's description of Renais-
sance architecture: "The hard fro-
zen forms become loosened and
liberated.... All is pervaded by
vigor, both in its movement and its
static calm. The beauty it offers us
has a liberating influence. Its
arches are pure semicircles; propor-
tions are broad and pleasing."
Conversely, one could use
Wolfflin's language to describe the
"Renaissance"nature of the hoop
that is composed not by masses
but by "the interplay of large and
small pilaster bays. The small ones
are always small enough not to dis-
turb the predominance of the large
ones, yet not so small that they
lose their meaning as individual
forms." See ibid., 156ff.
66. Rudolf Odebrecht,
Grundlegungeiner dsthetischen
Werttheorie (Berlin: Reuther &
Reichard, 1927), 134ff. This work
is an exhaustive analysis of the
philosophical, psychological, and
aesthetic debates of the time. Ed-
ward von Hartmann's Aesthetik der
Gegenwart (Berlin:Junkerund
Diinnhaupt, 1932) provides an im-
portant bibliography of leading
theorists in aesthetic psychology.
67. W6olfflin,"Prolegomena zu
einer Psychologie der Architektur,"
17.
68. Hart, "Heinrich Wolfflin: An
Intellectual Biography,"61-62.
69. One of the criticisms of Erwin
Panofsky, who took Wolfflin's lec-
tures in Berlin, was that Wolfflin's
formalism was not a true science.
Panofsky, in shifting the emphasis
back to content, symbols, iconog-
raphy, and so forth, was attempt-
ing to lay the basis for the true
Kunstwissenschaftthat Form-
psychologie,so he felt, could never
achieve.
70. That W6olfflin'sworks were al-

47
 assemblage 23

knowledge, for then he is rightfully called a "philosopher."
This compromise with poetry was spelled out in modern
terms by Wilhelm von Humbolt in his essay "On the
Historian'sTask" (1821), where he argued that history
writing is not the simple recounting of events and infor-
mation, but merges the best of science with the best of
poetry.93It is scientific in its claims of exactness and in
its foundations in the irrefutableveracity of documents.
It is poetic because it makes history alive with meaning
and gives us the bigger picture, so to speak, that we need
if we are to understand our own condition.94
The special place that "poetic objectivity," to coin a phrase,
has come to have in the visual/textual discipline of art and
architectural history should not be underestimated. In
various incarnations, it resonates in the writings of John
Ruskin, Walter Pater, Adrian Stokes, Erwin Panofsky, Robin
Ironside, Millard Meiss, John Summerson, Kenneth Clark,
and other noted art historians; it was recently defended by
Paul Barolsky, who, in praising Pater, pointed to the "un-
canny immediacy of Pater's pictorial language."95What
must be admired in the style of these writers is the illumina-
tion that their descriptions bring to the aesthetic moment,
intensifying our own sense of heightened perceptions. Nev-
ertheless, the description of the art object comes close to
being an art itself. It matches art with art. As Marc Bloch
has observed,
Human actions are essentially a very delicate phenomenon,
many aspects of which elude mathematical measurements.
Properlyto translate them into words and, hence, to fathom
them rightly . . . great delicacy of language and precise shad-
ings of verbal tone are necessary.96
Thus the very nature of the historian's explorations may
impose on him or her a language that is aesthetic at its
very core. To the extent that historians produce art, how-
ever, they are not artists but conscientious historians
working toward "exactitude." This is what Lewis Bernstein
Namier meant when he compared the historian with the
doctor. The historian, like a doctor, operates in the orbit
of human realities that, to be absorbed and acted on,
require the sensibilities of a diagnostician.97 Are Scully's
descriptions, and for that matter, W1olfflin's, the insight of
a poet or of a diagnostician? Take W1olfflin's opening line
in his Italien und das Deutsche Formgefiihl. With an eye to
Goethe's Italienreise, Wolfflin assumes the perspective of
a literate German traveler, freshly observant of the Italian
landscape.98
To the traveler arriving in Italy from the North, the world ap-
pears all at once more tangible, simpler and more definite. The
first campanile - how clearly its prism stands next to the
church! - how distinctly expressed are the proportions of its
figure!99
Since aesthetic experientialism claims to begin with ob-
jects themselves, rather than in the domain of peripheral
knowledge or academic specialization, the text must be
crafted to rotate image and description so as to allow entry
back into the presence of the image. In this sense, expe-
rientialism strives literally to unite the bodies of image,

most never discussed from within
the then current discipline of aes-
thetic psychology is only further
proof of his status as a "borrower."
71. See Wolfflin's Principles of Art
History, Sense of Form in Art, and
Renaissance and Baroque.
72. Joshua C. Taylor, Learning to
Look:A Handbookfor the Visual
Arts (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1957); Bates Lowry,
The Visual Experience(New York:
HarryN. Abrams, 1967), 14-15, 18.
Lowrylater became director of the
National Building Museum in
Washington, D.C. Recent exhibi-
tions that he has organized reflect
his strong interest in American folk
art and photography.
73. Arnold Hauser's attempt to
understand the historical and
philosophical origins of Wolfflin's
thoughts are pathetically mis-
placed. He sees Wolfflin in the
context of French positivism. See
Hauser, The Philosophyof Art His-
tory, 124.
74. Walter Passarge'sDie
Philosophie der Kunstgeschichtein
der Gegenwart (Berlin:Junkerund
Dfinnhaupt, 1930) is one of the
early attempts to place Wolfflin
within disciplinaryhistoriography.
Michael Podro takes a similar ap-
proach when he discusses Wolfflin
in the context of Kant, Riegl, and
others (Wolfflin, for example, "is
the heir of Semper and Goller"),
as if the history of art history con-
sisted merely of great men.
Though he provides an excellent
summary and critique of Wolfflin's
theories from an art historical per-
spective, he does not attempt to
probe the broader intellectual is-
sues that drive Wolfflin's work.
See Michael Podro, The Critical
Historians of Art (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1982). I am not

48
 Jarzombek

text, and reader. But the question emerges, what does it
mean when we need to read a text to teach us how to see
without a text? That Wolfflin was awareof this paradox is
more than clear from his concern with language. His solu-
tion was as ingenious as it was problematic. In his student
notebook, he wrote that "I cannot experience external
reality except insofar as it is alreadywithin me. Language
gives to me the general forms in which I collect the object
interlocked with its content."'00?? In other words, subject-
objectivization, to recall Schelling's model, requires of
language that it also be a form of objectified subjectivity.
By seeing we know and by words we articulate that knowl-
edge. For this reason, Wolfflin pointed out in the preface
to Italien und das Deutsche Formgefiihlthat one would not
reallybe "reading"but seeing in one's mind a lecture in
which slides dominate the perceptual field. A spellbinding
lecturer, Wolfflin wanted his readersto reexperience a
visual event.?0'
This type of writing - not simply a verbal performance in
print but a verbal performance that takes place in front of
an image - is extraordinarilydifficult to conceptualize.
For the text is neither a dead explanatorycaption nor pure
poetry, but a quasi-poetic encapsulation of a living, non-
verbal event. Brunn's GriechischeGCtteridealewas one of
the first modern examples of what is now an accepted
form of discourse: each lecture centered on one artwork
and there were no footnotes as it was not a "scholarly"
piece but a form of scholarship that forced interaction
with the visual. Arnheim's "ForYour Eyes Only," with its
seven images and seven "analyses,"and Taylor'sLearning
to Look, with all its images at the front, are latter-day ver-
sions of the same. This type of writing, however, has no
name, and there are no hermeneutical studies that inter-
pret it as a class of texts unto themselves. The writings
float outside precise interpretativehistories and disciplin-
ary historiographies.They cannot be discussed as novels,
poems, or even "interpretations,"for this would require
that we judge them as interpretation and forgo asking
what constitutes an interpretative visual/textual analysis to
begin with.
The composite status of descriptions as neither poetry nor
science, yet claiming partiallyto be both, is a product of
their problematic "location"in front of the art object.
Hans-Georg Gadamer has claimed that "we can experi-
ence every work of art 'immediately' as itself, i.e., without
its needing further mediation to us."102I am not one to
challenge Gadamer, but this assertion champions speech-
lessness; at best, we can say, "Wow, was it as good for you
as it was for me?" In Gadamer's terms, descriptions be-
come immediately inauthentic, for language is mediating,
especially if it mediates "the immediate."'03
Subject-objectivization, or "poetic-objectivity,"means
that the text has to fight against itself. Irwin Edman, a
professorof philosophy at Columbia University and a
member of the editorial council of the Journalof Aesthet-
ics and Art Criticism, was one of the few influential writers
to sense the tension that emerged between the text and
the act of looking in his own work in the late 1920s. In a

saying that Wolfflin should be
ignored as an "arthistorian,"
only that there is another way to
consider him, namely, from an
adisciplinary point of view. But
given that there is no such thing as
an Adisciplinary Studies Program,
Wolfflin's position in twentieth-
century intellectual history will re-
main difficult to discuss. That we
lack a scholarly discipline capable
of adequately dealing with the
historical and hermeneutical
issues raised by Wolfflin's non-
disciplinary writings is a problem
that we might want to address.
75. Wolfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche
Grundbegriffe,3.
76. Brunn, "Archaologieund
Anschauung," 17.
77. Vincent Scully, Architecture:
The Natural and the Man-made
(New York:St. Martin's Press,
1991), 268 (my emphasis).
78. JaroslavHavelka, The Nature
of the Creative Process in Art (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968),
104-5.
79. Jacques Maquet, The Aesthetic
Experience:An Anthropologist
Looksat the Visual Arts (New Ha-
ven: Yale University Press, 1986), 5.
80. Roger Fry, French, Flemish and
British Art (New York:Coward-
McCann, 1951), 125 (my emphasis).
81. Alexander C. Gorlin, "An
Analysis of the Governor's Palace
of Chandigarh,"Oppositions 19-20
(Winter-Spring 1980): 161 (my
emphasis).
82. Scully, Architecture,xi (my
emphasis). Dilmar Gotshalk, Art
and the Social Order (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1947),
gave a marvelous example of an
"aesthetic experience" at the scale
of a city: "At the edge of a great
city, one may come upon an im-

49
 assemblage 23

chapter entitled "The Thing, the Eye and the Plastic Arts"
in Arts and the Man (1928), Edman wrote of the special
status of the aesthetic experience that is both contained
in yet transcendent of the everyday:
As Roger Fry points out in Vision and Design, in the ordinary
seeing we do during the day, we do not in any aesthetic sense
use the eyes at all. We see as much of the objects, so to put it,
as we need to get around with.... The first step toward plastic
appreciation is to recover the immediacyand innocence of the
eye, and to live for the moment of observation in what is visu-
ally there.104
But where does this leave the book, namely, something
that is read and that is not art? As he expressed it, "a book
on aesthetics is justified not so much by leading readers to
further books on aesthetics, but rather by returning them
to the arts, a return marked by sharpened and deepened
appreciation."'05 Philosophy, though it might seem to be
"a disinterested, plodding inquiry into truth," is in reality
"the interested passion for beauty."'06 And the highest
philosophical experience is not reading yet another book
on philosophy, but a nonliterary aesthetic experience, one
"that is clear, passionate and intense."'07
Edman was influenced by the poet and philosopher
George Santayana, who claimed that "the recognition of
the superiority of aesthetics in experience to aesthetics in
theory ought not to make us accept as an explanation of
aesthetic feeling what is in truth only an expression of
it."'08In other words, the critic must understand the na-
ture of aesthetic immediacy before it can be translated
into something that merely describes it. Arnheim carries
this theme through into our own day when he defends his
faith in the importance of aesthetic observation because
"perception offers itself to the mind as the carrierof the
given world, while language is merely an artifact of the
mind developed in response to that world."'09His words
have been carefullychosen. Language is "an artifact ... a
response";the art work is neither.
If, in the context of this argument, overintellectualization,
brought on by too much textuality, is a manifestation of
cultural alienation from art, then the book promises to
guide the reader back to authentic life. The text, there-
fore, should not be an abstract conveyance of knowledge,
but an inspirational testament of the author's mind at
work in confrontation with the inanimate world. But the
book is, nonetheless, a text among texts, and thus its
words struggle against their own identity. The hermeneuti-
cal problems associated with this extraordinarily ambigu-
ous notion of "the text" become yet more complex when
we recall that visual/textual discourses were in the 1940s
magnified into an ideology of democratic humanism. In
Louise Dudley's textbook The Humanities: Applied Aes-
thetics (1941), for example, the author, in her attempt to
make the aesthetic experience part of a broad egalitarian
American culture, wrote that
the approach taken in this book is that of confronting the stu-
dent with the art objects themselves as the primarycompo-
nent, not to inform him about theories concerning them nor
philosophical systems into which they can be placed; it aims,

mense park spread out below one,
and the vista - the great space,
the pattern of the trees and paths,
the clear air, the light blue sky -
may seem a marvelous picture of
sumptuous peace after the crowds
and clatter and rank odors of the
great city. The wholehearted
attention to this vast panorama
preeminently for the sake of the
apprehensionof what it offers to
perception - the colors, the easy
movements, the loose rhythms, the
spatial sweep, the light, the air
above - give an instance of aes-
thetic experience"(3, my emphasis).
83. Becker, "Von der Hinfalligkeit
des Schonen," 36.
84. Scully, Architecture,2.
85. Ibid., 133-34.
86. Quoted in Paul Barolsky,
Walter Pater's Renaissance (Uni-
versity Park:Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1987), 16. See
also Clive Bell, Art (New York:
Capricorn Books, 1958), 11-18:
"When I speak of significant form,
I mean a combination of lines and
colour that move me aesthetically"
(12). And, as Ernst Mundt warned,
"The critic will begin to analyze his
impressions, thereby deepening his
understanding. But if he fails to
grasp the meaningful form of these
images, then those analytical ques-
tions will fail to bring participation
closer" (Art, Form, and Civilization
[Berkeley:University of California
Press, 1952], 3).
87. Sir Philip Sidney, Apologyfor
Poetry (Boston: Athenaeum Press,
1890), 26.
88. Ibid., 18.
89. Ibid., 16.
90. Vincent Scully, The Earth, the
Temple and the Gods: GreekSacred
Architecture (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1962), 2.

50
 Jarzombek

rather,throughencouragingexperiencewith the art objects
themselvesto stimulatephilosophicalthinkingabout the cre-
ative perceivingprocessand the worldview reflectedin the art
object."?
The complex textual/antitextual position (we are reading
this in a textbook, after all), going so far as to represseven
its own theoretical premises (because they are rooted in
unacceptable textual realities of their own historicity),
demonstrates the extent to which advocates of aesthetic
experientialism were and are willing to play the game in
which aesthetic immediacy must carrythe day. The prom-
ise was a magical return to life and significance, and what
better group of people to attempt this on than the under-
graduate student population, or in Arnheim's case, "the
young museumgoer." Experientialists have alwayshad to
seek out innocenti to substantiate their claims that being
authentic is better than learning to be so, after the fact.
The film Being There was a magnificent parodyof the
experiential-visual theory. The character Chance, played
by Peter Sellers, could experience things (but in what way
was always uncertain) simply by watching. Emerging out
of his protective environment without predetermined
baggage, he experienced the world "as it is" and with such
success that, in the end, people thought he spoke the
truth with godlike certainty.
Though visual experientialism is a theory inherent in the
twentieth-century longing for a dealienated existence,
theories of the primacy of the visual over the textual
(linked paradoxicallywith theories of the poetic over the
merely historical) can be traced to the eighteenth century,
when John Dryden, Jean Bapatise Du Bos, Robert Anthony
Bromley, and others affirmed the superiorityof the visual
over the literary.In one form or another, they held that
the visual, instead of being a mere copy of the ideal, spoke
a universal language intelligible because of its largerim-
mediacy. Poetry and other forms of writing, in reverse,
were copies and could only evoke incomplete or belated
mental imitations. But in W6olfflin,or in Dudley and
Faricy, an exchange occurs between reading and looking
that is based not just on the theoretical dominance of the
visual (relying on the theoretical dominance of the poetic
against the merely visual), but on the need for cultural
purification, which is what makes it modern. Reading-
seeing, and its impenetrable maze of overlappingtheories,
serves as a protective shield against the terribilita of our
estrangement.
Walter Pater spoke of this search for an authentic aware-
ness of art when, in The Renaissance (1873), he called on
those interested in the arts "to be deeply moved by the
presence of beautiful objects" and to lead "a life of con-
stant and eager observation.""'"To see the object as in
itself it really is ... is to know one's own impression as it
really is, to discriminate it, to realize it distinctly.""2Pater
expanded on this impressionism by tincturing his observa-
tions with nostalgia and regret. W6olfflin,by contrast, con-
centrated almost exclusively on the object and its bodily
presence. Pater made no pretense to science; W1olfflin,in
the guise of Formpsychologie,did. Pater used emotional

91. William Hazlitt, "On Poetryin
General,"vol. 1 of The Complete
Worksof WilliamHazlitt, ed. P. P.
Howe (London:J. M. Dent, 1930), 2.
92. Quoted in Barolsky,Walter
Pater's Renaissance, 93.
93. Wilhelm von Humbolt, "On the
Historian'sTask,"in Leopold von
Ranke,The Theoryand Practiceof
History,trans.Wilma A. Iggersand
Konradvon Moltke (New York:
Bobbs-Merrill,1973), 6-7.
94. Humbolt had a direct impact
on Dilthey and other neo-
Kantians, especially in defining the
cultural-pedagogical meaning that
history can have.
95. Barolsky,Walter Pater's Re-
naissance, 2.
96. Marc Bloch, The Historian's
Craft (New York:Alfred A. Knopf,
1953), 26-27.
97. Lewis Bernstein Namier, Ave-
nues of History (London: Hamish
Hamilton, 1952), 8-9.
98. Goethe was one of Wolfflin's
favorite authors. See Hart,
"Heinrich Wolfflin: An Intellec-
tual Biography,"35, 47.
99. Wolfflin, Italien und das
Deutsche Formgefihl, 9.
100. Hart, "Heinrich Wolfflin: An
Intellectual Biography,"56. Hart's
translation, I believe, misses the
point. The German reads, "Ich
kann von Aussen nichts empfan-
gen was nicht schon in mir war.
Die Sprache gibt die allgemeinsten
Formen, in denen ich d. Obj.-
inhalt auffange." And in the mar-
gin, "Gleiches wird durch gleiches
erkannt."The word Object-Inhalt
is clearly a reference to Schiller
and to the interlocking of subject
and object. The marginal com-
ment paraphrasesAristotle.
101. According to E. H.

51
 assemblage 23

intensity as a form of delight, Wolfflin as a form of scien-
tific rigor. Pater spoke to the nineteenth-century romantic
individualist, Wolfflin to the emerging modern mind.
Pater:Artprovidesthe experienceof a quickened,multiplied
consciousness.... Forartcomes to you proposingfranklyto
give nothingbut the highestqualityto yourmomentsas they
passand simplyfor those moments."3
Wolfflin: Italianarchitectureconsistsof nothingotherthan
the most intenselyfelt life of definite surfaceextension,in
harmony,of course,with the equallyintenselyfelt total
organism.'14
The theme of "aliveness"and emotional transportare
encountered again and again. "When the aesthetic en-
counter is successful," a formalist defender explained, "we
are no longer fully conscious of ourselves as persons sitting
in a concert hall or standing before a canvas .... We be-
come identified with the aesthetic object by which our
attention is gripped and held.""15Susanne Langer,practi-
cally a cult figure in the cause of aesthetic humanism,
tried to explain, paraphrasingOskar Becker,that a work
of art "shows us not the abstraction of life, but its very
centrality via its appearance,"an appearance"that makes
us experience aliveness within ourselves."ii6Thus our
thoughts, when captured by the aesthetic, can focus on
the "living form" that is "the most indistinguishable prod-
uct of all good art, be it painting, architecture, or pottery.
... Such form is living in that ... it 'expresses' life-feeling
growth, movement, and everything that characterizesvital
existence. "117
The aesthetic experience, in addition to removing the
supposedly troublesome distance between readerand
object, can help us tap into the very essence of creativity.
As Joel Elias Spingarnclaimed, "the experience is nothing
more nor less than creative art itself."ii8We need the
artistic object not simply to understand art, but indeed, to
reinvent ourselves. Seamus Heaney explained, in his won-
derfully entitled essay "Feeling into Words," how the
mimetic union of self and artworkcontinues the rebirth-
ing of creativity:
How then do you find [your voice]? In practice, you hear it
coming from somebody else, you hear something in another
writer's sounds that flows in through your ear and enters the
echo-chamber of your head and delights your whole nervous
system.... This other writer, in fact, has spoken something
essential to you, something you recognize instinctively as true
sounding of aspects of yourself and your experience. And your
first steps as a writer will be to imitate, consciously or subcon-
sciously, those sounds that flowed in, that in-fluenced."9
Texts work on the assumption, implicit or explicit, that
we are in danger as long as art and society are separate and
distinct and, further, that aesthetic cognition will revive
the all-important human struggle against a death wish
supposedly inherent in scholarship, history writing, cul-
ture, and even in ourselves. It is when this vitalism leaves
the realm of secular humanistic bravura, however, and
becomes self-fulfilling that its bizarre aspects begin to
manifest. Robert Venturi, taking W1olfflin's differentiation
between the complex and the simple and transforming it

Gombrich: "I remember the high
hopes with which I went to Berlin
University and the impression
Wo6fflin's personality made on me,
the tall Swiss with beautiful blue
eyes and a firm and self-assured
manner of delivery that held the
auditorium maximum spellbound"
(Normand Form:Studies in the Art
of the Renaissance [London:
Phaidon, 1966], 92).
102. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth
and Method (New York:Cross-
roads, 1984), 119.
103. Gadamer draws an analogy
between interpretation and stage
performance. The work of art, in
his view, remains always itself; it is
never that which is constituted in
performance or by the response of
an audience. And yet, he admits,
the work of art in itself is not ob-
jectively accessible. It can nowhere
be revealed as itself, in its own be-
ing, except through the inevitable
distortion of it by the "prejudice"
and the historical estrangement of
the performerand the audience.
Gadamer wishes to preserve the
aesthetic of the autonomous artis-
tic whole. At the same time, he
denies knowing this whole except
through perception. He accepts
the immediacy art has on the
psyche, but points out that "preju-
dice from over-hastiness is to be
understood ... as the source of all
errorin the use of reason." See
ibid., 88, 242.
104. Irwin Edman, Arts and the
Man (New York:W. W. Norton,
1928), 87-88 (my emphasis).
105. Ibid.; quoted on the
dustjacket.
106. Ibid., 152.
107. Ibid.,153.
108. George Santayana;quoted in
Max Schoen, "Walter Pater on the

52
 Jarzombek

into a celebration of complexity, is a case in point.'20In-
stead of seeing complexity as a particularityof the Ger-
man optic, Venturi applied it to anything and everything.
It was as if the vitalist argument within the formalist posi-
tion became autonomous and demanded to be fed more
and more "complexity"as an increasinglyrigoroustest of
its potency - all in the search for "vividness":"Simulta-
neous perception of a multiplicity of levels involves
struggles and hesitations for the observer,and makes his
perceptionmorevivid."'12The result is a disturbing proxim-
ity of enlightened humanism to a predatoryeroticism, a
type of bourgeois interpretation of religious transcendence
that both invites and obscures an underlying sexual real-
ity. The argument assumes that as living beings we want
to connect with other living entities as a form of natural
contact; it is part of the mission of our enlightenment and
essential to our cultural self-definition. But it also assumes
that we will alwaysbe precisely human, that we will be
aroused by physical forms, especially if they are "alive,"
complex, and worthy of the male gaze that continually
has to prove its power of observation. This intimacy and
vividness, seen in reverse, is blamed on the seductive ap-
peal of the art object. "One cannot help feel the weight,"
Wolfflin writes. Just as a rapacious male cannot (it has
been said) resist a woman's sexual appeal, so, too, the
viewer cannot resist the object's urge and lets it run its
course. Writers must, in fact, publicly herald their attrac-
tion to the object as a sign of their intellectual "health"
and creative vitality. The initial "helplessness"of the
viewer trapped by the magnetic power of the object will
then be sanctioned by the lofty humanistic and civiliza-
tional purpose inherent in the literaryand "critical"act. In
describingLe Corbusier'sMillowner'sBuilding,for instance,
Venturisizes up the building, admiresits "complexity,"
moves closer for an intensificationof the experience,and
finallypenetratesit. During penetration,he thinks back
to a previousexploit:
The juxtapositionsof diagonalsand perpendiculars also create
contradictorydirections:the meetingof the rampand stairsis
only slightlysoftenedby the exceptionallylargevoid and by the
modifiedrhythmof the elementsat that partof the fa3ade.But
these contradictionsin the visualexperienceareeven richer
whenyou move closerand penetratethe building.The adjacen-
cies and superadjacenciesof contrastingscales,directions,and
functionscan makeit seem like a miniatureexampleof Khan's
viaductarchitecture.'22
In The Visible and the Invisible, Maurice Merleau-Ponty
vividlydescribed the way we are supposed to be pulled
into the picture in order to establish the magical, quasi-
sexual relationship to it, and what purer and more imme-
diate form of cognition is there than sex?
This concentration of the visibles ... or this bursting forth of
the massof the bodytowardthe things,whichmakesa vibra-
tion of myskinbecome the sleekand the rough,makesme fol-
lowwith myeyesthe movementsand the contoursof the things
themselves, this magical relationship, this pact between them
and me accordingto whichI lendthemmybodyin orderthat
they inscribeupon it and give me their resemblance,this fold,
this central cavity of the visible which is my vision, these two
mirrorarrangementsof the seeingand the visible,the touching

Place of Music in the Arts," The
Journalof Aesthetics and Art Criti-
cism 1, no. 6 (1942): 13 (my
emphasis).
109. Arnheim, To the Rescue of
Art, 242.
110. Louise Dudley and Austin
Faricy, The Humanities: Applied
Aesthetics (1941; New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1960), xvi.
111. Walter Pater, The Renais-
sance (1873; New York:
Macmillian, 1909), xii, 188. For a
discussion and bibliography - al-
beit biased - refer to Barolsky,
Walter Pater's Renaissance. See
also Schoen, "Walter Pater on the
Place of Music in the Arts," 13.
Pater's book was translated into
German in 1902.
112. Pater, The Renaissance, x.
We should remember that Pater,
in the opening section of the essay
"The School of Giorgione," saw
music as the highest form of art
because, unlike all other works of
art, in music it was impossible to
distinguish the matter from the
form. There is no evidence of this
lingering idealism in Wolfflin.
113. Pater, The Renaissance, 190,
274.
114. Wolfflin, Italien und das
Deutsche Formgefiihl, 14.
115. Harold Osborn, The Art of
Appreciation (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1970), 35.
116. Langer, Feeling and Form,
373. See Becker, "Von der
Hinfalligkeit des Schonen," 36.
117. Langer, Feeling and Form, 82.
118. Joel Elias Spingarn, "New
Criticism," in Criticism in
America:Its Function and Status,
ed. Joel Elias Spingarn (New York:

53
 assemblage 23

and the touched, form a close-bondedsystem . . . from which I
cannotdetachmyself.'23
When Peter Eisenman, in a recent debate with Robert
Krier,stated that "I don't get it up for you, Robert,"he
was not speaking of perversedesires, but employing the
sexual metaphor as the indicator of his supposedly honest
(and therefore immune to criticism) aesthetic judgment,
unmediated by discourse and uncontaminated by cultural
alienations and inhibitions.'24Eisenman's statement,
though explicit, is comprehensible within the tradition of
aesthetic experientialism that in its celebration of the
intimate experience barely conceals the sexual tension
linking object and viewer (or more precisely, linking body
and body), and this despite the rationalization of an inti-
macy of a "higherorder."
Because writers can move back and forth between the
realm of the self and that of the workwithout any appar-
ent self-questioning, what we come to miss are indications
of an imbalance between the aesthetic experience and its
purportedlyhigher civilizational mission. In what way is
the description of the aesthetic experience a liberating
event and in what way is it the embodiment of a danger-
ously misplaced fetishism? Does not critical speculation
collapse into a uniquely masculine form of emotive rev-
erie, and understanding into something that defies cri-
tique? Is the vivid experience the functional center of a
transcendent, intersubjective truth or is it merely a dubi-
ous flirtation in a narcissistic discourse?Is this hectic
search for immediacy an immunity against dangerous
metaphysical bewitchments or is it the actual disease? Is it
a protection against alienation in an enlightened, but
troubled world or is it a representation of this very alien-
ation? And, finally, is it a celebration of the human signifi-
cance of art or is it a circularlyconstructed and
self-flattering performance of humanism on its self-con-
gratulatorystage?
American Formalism as a Scientific Discipline
of the Humanities
In the United States, perceptual psychology followed, in
essence, four separate paths. The first of these was sub-
sumed under the designation "formalism,"which in art
history paralleled the rise and decline in literarycriticism
of the New Critics and the Chicago school of criticism.
Largelyindependent of these developments, Gestalt theo-
rists explored issues of perceptual immediacy in the con-
text of newly created psychology departments. Perceptual
psychology also took the form of art appreciation, which
rose to prominence in American universities in the 1940s
and 1950s. A few decades later, a neoauthenticist move-
ment emerged that subsumed the rhetoric of immediacy
under a fashionable Heideggerianism.125
Each of these paths transformedthe original theory in its
own particularway. Formalism redefined its claim as sci-
ence to such an extent that the role of immediacy was lost
behind a tedious methodological structure. Gestalt psy-
chology, under the onslaught of Freudian psychoanalysis,

Haskell House, 1924), 43. K. Burke
made a similar argument: "In the
poet, we might say, the poetizing
existed as a psychological function.
The poem is its corresponding ana-
tomic structure. And the reader, in
participating in the poet, breathes
into this anatomic structure a new
psychological vitality that re-
sembles, though with a difference,
the act of its maker" (The Philoso-
phy of LiteraryForm:Studies in
SymbolicAction [Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press,
1941], 102).
119. Seamus Heaney, "Feeling
into Words," in Preoccupations:Se-
lected Prose 1968-78, rev. ed. (New
York:Farrar,Straus and Giroux,
1980), 44.
120. W6olfflin,commenting and
elaborating on Oskar Hagen's
Deutsches Sehen (Munich: Piper,
1920), intended to demonstrate in
Italien und das Deutsche Formge-
fiihl that the German love for
complexity was an aesthetic as le-
gitimate as the Italian love of or-
der. The German Renaissance was
not a mere "coming into contact
with Italy,"but a different type of
renaissance, one that should not
be measured with the aesthetic
values of the south. Venturi, in ex-
panding on the theme of complex-
ity, interpreted it normatively;
complexity constituted not one of
several aesthetic modes, but a
higher form of aesthetic truth alto-
gether.
121. Robert Venturi, Complexity
and Contradiction in Architecture
(New York:Museum of Modern
Art, 1966), 31 (my emphasis).
122. Ibid., 60-61. W6olfflin'slan-
guage is still marked by a laconic
restraint, as in the discussion of
the town hall of Altenburg: "One
can easily find pleasure in the way
the staircase penetrates into the

54
 Jarzombek

abandoned psychology as a study of culture (the original
purpose of Formpsychologie)to focus on the disturbed
individual psyche, with little relevance to art history. Art
appreciation engaged the ideals of humanism most di-
rectly, but did so in the service of a postwar ideology of
egalitarianism. I shall briefly discuss these three paths,
leaving the last for a separate investigation.
In the 1920s art psychology came under enormous pres-
sure to redefine its claim of objectivity. There were, of
course, those who preservedthe metadisciplinaryper-
spective of Wolfflin's writings, most notably, Othmar
Sterzinger in his Grundliniender Kunstpsychologie(1938).
Largelyunknown in the United States, it emphasized all
the usual advantages:Formpsychologiebrought art closer
to life, exposed academic posturing, and opened the way
for interpretations that made art relevant to our critical
understanding of culture.126 In the United States, aes-
thetic immediacy was still preached by DeWitt Parker,
who provided one of the first handbooks for students, The
Principles of Aesthetics (1920): "We enter the aesthetic
experience through the sensuous medium.... We dis-
a
cover unity in the material . . . [that] enables us to linger
longer and more happily.... The purpose of art is sympa-
thetic vision."127Parker was influential in helping Aram
Torossian shape another early textbook, A Guide to Aes-
thetics (1937), which discussed the basic principles of
aesthetic experience.128 Hannah Closs also made this
Wolfflinian credo the basis for her book Art and Life
(1936). Significantly enough, she defended her "ability to
see" not because it came "naturallyout of the object" as it
supposedly did for Wolfflin, but through the legitimation
of Wolfflin himself:
As the famousdoyenof artcriticismHeinrichWolfflinmain-
tained,understandingof art is bornof the abilityto 'see.'With
this end in view,I havemade individualinterpretationand
analysis of certain works of art a chief feature of my book. ... I
haveattemptedto disclosethe integralnatureof some workof
art belonging either to an individual, a period, or a race.129
But these works were no longer on the cutting edge. Crit-
ics such as Rudolf Odebrecht, writing in the late 1920s,
pointed out that W1olfflin's theories, though claiming to
preach a science higher than science itself, were actually
rooted in an antiscientism that covered up an underlying
subjectivism. Odebrecht, himself a neo-Kantian, wanted
to salvage formalism and its discourse of immediacy from
the "desperadoes" to give it legitimate objectivity without
its having to be measured against the standards of a real
science.'30 Odebrecht's critique was part of a generational
attack on many of the people who influenced Wolfflin.
Edmund Husserl, for example, in attempting to establish
phenomenology as a science, criticized not only Dilthey's
historical science as a sham, but also Lipps's empathy
theory as Psychologismus.3' And among aestheticians, the
key word was no longer Kunstpsychologie but Kunst-
wissenschaft, a move that was led by Erwin Panofsky, who,
as a neo-Kantian objectivist, claimed that content, sym-
bolism, and iconography were just as important to under-
standing a work of art as was aesthetic perception.

mass of the building, contradictory
to all principles of Italian architec-
ture" (Italien und das Deutsche
Formgefiihl, 120).
123. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The
Visible and the Invisible (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press,
1968), 146 (the emphasis is
Merleau-Ponty's).
124. The debate between Robert
Krierand Peter Eisenman was
staged during the annual meeting
of the Association of Collegiate
Schools of Architecture held in
Chicago in 1989.
125. Neoauthenticists disguised
and legitimized their belief in phe-
nomenal immediacy by using,
quoting, or otherwise relying on
Martin Heidegger, who seems to
have been especially popular in
certain architectural theory circles
in the previous decade. And it is
not hard to see why. Truth, for
Heidegger, was not a quality of
knowledge but a quality generated
in aesthetics, namely, in "the
simple, sensory perception of
something." And the something
that is truly perceived (idia) is the
irreducible but intelligible indi-
viduality of the object. In Hei-
degger's terminology, the object
"shows itself" (sich zeigen) as it is
independent of the subjectivity
that processes it, so to speak, so
that it can become "objective."
Speech plays an important role in
allowing something to show itself,
as it "allows it to be seen ... by the
agency of that which it concerns."
See Martin Heidegger, Sein und
Zeit (Halle an der Saare:Max
Niemeyer, 1929), 32-34.
126. Othmar H. Sterzinger,
Grundlinien der Kunstpsychologie
(Graz: Leykamverlag,1938).
127. DeWitt H. Parker,The Prin-
ciples of Aesthetics (New York:

55
 assemblage 23

Panofskydid not challenge the need for an exact science;
on the contrary,he shifted the emphasis in such a way
that it would become, so he hoped, a true science.
Whereas Wolfflin saw art as the highest product of civili-
zation and thus its science as something of greater cul-
tural significance than studies in the physical and natural
world, Panofskysaw the humanistic sciences and the
physical sciences as equal contenders in the sphere of
human understanding. He maintained strong links with
perceptual psychology, but wanted scholars to be more
dispassionate in their love of art. As he explained in Mean-
ing in the Visual Arts (1955),
It is possibleto experienceeveryobject,naturalor man-made,
aesthetically.We do this, to expressit as simplyas possible,
whenwe just look at it (orlisten to it) withoutrelatingit, intel-
lectuallyor emotionally,to anythingoutsideof itself.'32
The search for a more objective experientialism was par-
ticularly strong in the United States, where Ezra Pound's
"How to Read" succinctly captured the paradoxof how to
acquire an authentic experientialism so as better to par-
ticipate in a utopian vision of a communication free of
theory distortion. In the opening paragraphof his essay,
Pound pointed out that one should focus on the object of
study and not allow secondary things to filter in. After all,
those who study physics "arenot asked to investigate the
biographies of all the disciples of Newton who showed
interest in science, but who failed to make any discovery.
Neither are their unrewardedgropings, hopes, passions,
laundrybills or erotic experiences thrust on the hurried
student or considered germane to the subject."i33Cleanth
Brooks'sWell WroughtUrn (1947) has become a classic
example of a "description"that protects itself from dis-
tracting investigations into contingent histories; Brooks
spent twenty pages on the analysis of two pages of poetic
text with hardly a reference to the poet's biographyor to
the historical moment in which the text was written.
With Joel Elias Spingarn, T. S. Eliot, DeWitt Parker,
Hannah Closs and others, formalist experientialism was
no longer a curious interdisciplinaryexercise, but a cat-
egorical methodological truth that claimed to be just as
good as any other science. "Criticism,"wrote John Crowe
Ransom, "must become more scientific, or precise and
systematic and this means that it must be developed by
the collective and sustained effort of learned persons -
which means that its proper seat is in the universities."134
Cleanth Brooksattacked "critical relativism"that ignored
universal criteria of formalist evaluation. William K.
Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley,in their classic article
"The Intentional Fallacy,"argued that the interpretation
of an artifact paralleled claims about the objectivity of
science.i35Walter Abell attempted to transform the psy-
chological approach of Roger Fry and Clive Bell into a
methodological approach that aimed to solve the numer-
ous debates about how we read visual form: "by pro-
ceeding as nearly as possible in a scientific temper, to
formulate any theories, we shall at least have assurance
that our eventual conclusions lie as near the truth as we
are capable of pressing. "136

Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1920),
23, 24,119.
128. See Aram Torossian, A Guide
to Aesthetics (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1937).
129. Hannah Priebsch Closs, Art
and Life (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1936), viii.
130. Rudolf Odebrecht,
Grundlegungeiner aesthetischen
Werttheorie(Berlin: Reuther &
Reichard, 1927), 9.
131. See Bokhove and Schumann,
"Bibliographieder Schriften von
Theodor Lipps," 112-30.
132. Panofsky, Meaning in the
Visual Arts, 11.
133. Ezra Pound, "How to Read,"
in Polite Essays (London: Faber
and Faber, 1937), 55.
134. John Crowe Ransom, "Criti-
cism, Inc.": The World'sBody (New
York:Kennikat, 1938), 329.
135. For a brief discussion of these
critics, see Peter Novick, That
Noble Dream: The "Objectivity
Question" and the AmericanHis-
torical Profession (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988),
541-42.
136. Walter Abell, Representation
and Form (New York:Charles
Scribner's, 1936), 18.
137. Lincoln Rothschild,"The
Problemof Scientific Method in Art
Analysis,"Parnassus7, no. 5 (Octo-
ber 1935): 23. Rothschildauthored
The Arts as Social Expression:An In-
troductionto the Meaningof the Arts
(GardenCity, N.J.:Adelphi College,
1949). Another varianton the objec-
tivity theme, this time in defense of
the autonomy of formalanalysis,was
expressedby Benbow Ritchie in
"The Formal Structureof the Aes-
thetic Object,"Journalof Aesthetics
and Art Criticism3, nos. 1-2 (April
1945): 5-14. Ritchie studied under

56
 Jarzombek

By the mid-1930s the search for analytic objectivity and
art historical legitimacy was in full swing. When the Insti-
tute for Fine Arts was established in New York in the early
1930s, for example, most of its graduate students shunned
the experiential art appreciation courses held at its Wash-
ington campus for undergraduates.They also welcomed
the fact that they no longer had to take courses in archae-
ology and medieval history. Lincoln Rothschild at Colum-
bia University stood squarely in favor of this separation.
Art history, so he explained, had nothing to do anymore
with the "niminy-piminy" aestheticism of Ruskin and
Pater; it was to concentrate on a more scientific analysis
that was not simply about form, but related to develop-
ments and changes in society.'37
Thomas Munro, curator of education at the Cleveland
Museum of Art, in elaborating on the objectivity argu-
ment in Scientific Method in Aesthetics (1928), wrote that
art criticism had to return to "close contact with the works
of art and the experiences of which they speak."'38Yet as
with Rothschild, this "close contact" was not W1olfflin's
"catapulting"experience of form, but the closeness that a
botanist, for example, might feel when workingwith a
plant specimen. In art, though one could, of course,
"makeno claim to scientific exactness," one could still
aim "to be scientific in spirit."'39
To takethe placeof vaguedogmasof idealistaesthetics,thereis
an increasingdemandfora naturalisticanswerto everyproblem
encountered in the arts . . . revealedby science, without the need
of resortingto supernatural
andtranscendental
explanations.140
Individual scholarlyperformanceswere not called for, but
rather academicians workingtogether toward a common
goal. To this end, in 1941, Munro helped found The Jour-
nal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, in which he hoped to
speed up "the progressof aesthetics to scientific status,"
and, a year later, the American Society for Aesthetics.14'
He was also instrumental in bringing foreign worksto the
attention of American audiences; his article "Methods in
the Psychology of Art" (1948) explored European develop-
ments in the field of aesthetics and criticized Americans
for being either too interested in clinical experiments or
too literaryand personal.'42Under Munro's urging, the
work of the Austrian psychologist Friedrich Kainz was
translated into English, and the title of his book,
Vorlesung fiber Asthetik, became, conveniently, Aesthetics,
the Science (1962).143 The central theme of Kainz's work
was Steigerung, the intensification of life through art:
adapting and explaining the thoughts of Vischer, Lipps,
Volkelt, and others, he argued that aesthetic feelings are
not mere sensations but more intellectual and philosophi-
cal than sensual perceptions, even though they are feelings
for the object as object.144 Munro also published one of
the first English works by Arnheim, who has always held
fast to the legitimacy of perceptual objectivity.
The procedure I demonstrated . .. presupposes some trust of
the analyst in his own ability to view certain psychological ap-
pearances objectively and relevantly. His verdict, however, . . .
can and should be subjected to the judgment of other viewers,
professional and otherwise .... Without remorse I have settled

C. W. Morrisat the Universityof
Chicago and at the time of the
article was a graduate student in
psychology at the University of
California.
138. Thomas Munro, Scientific
Method in Aesthetics (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1928), ix. For a
review of Munro's career and a
consideration of his intellectual
contributions, see Max Rieser,
"Thomas Munro's Position in
American Aesthetics," The Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 23
(Fall 1964): 13-20. In this same
issue can be found a bibliography
of Munro's publications (7-11).
139. Thomas Munro, Form and
Style in the Arts: An Introductionto
Aesthetic Morphology(Cleveland:
Case Western Reserve University,
1970), v.
140. Munro, Scientific Method in
Aesthetics, 61.
141. Thomas Munro, "Knowledge
and Control," The Journalof Aes-
thetics and Art Criticism 1, no. 1
(1941): 6.
142. Thomas Munro, "Methods in
the Psychology of Art," The Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 6,
no. 3 (March 1948): 225-35. As an
example of the clinical approach,
Munro might have had in mind
Herman Brandt'sPsychologyof
Seeing (New York:Philosophical
Library,1945). This book summa-
rizes a variety of experiments per-
formed by Brandton vision. His
main contribution was a device
that permitted the precise determi-
nation of points of ocular fixation
and the direction of eye movement
between fixation points. The de-
vice was used to study reading hab-
its and advertising layouts.
143. Friedrich Kainz, Aesthetics,
the Science, trans. Herbert M.

57
 assemblage 23

for the most carefulobservationand descriptionof whichI was
capable,this being my definitionof science.145
Not only was the Arnheimian critic now open to intense
aesthetic experiences, he was simultaneously a "disinter-
ested" scientific professional who refused to get emotion-
ally involved in the subject matter. As Philip Youtz wrote
in an introduction to one of Munro's books, "one observes
with satisfaction that the scientist goes directly to art and
the experience of art for his data. Aesthetics is to be based
on experimentation with art; not on speculation, or books,
or history, or even personal emotion."'46 Experience was
not a thing in and for itself, but tied to rational analysis
and the progressof knowledge. This double standardis
more than clear in Josep Junoy's discussion of Pablo
Picasso. His text exemplifies formalist ambivalence to the
object that at once celebrates and demeans the work of a
"difficult"artist:
In orderto appreciateone of Picasso'sworks,the spectator
must formin his imaginationa properperspective,one that al-
lows him to consider as a whole the series of ideas which are
givenplasticformby meansof simultaneousformulaeand con-
tinuouslymodifiedmotifs and waysof seeing.Once the total
systemin the paintinghas been acknowledged,it is easyslowly
and carefullyto appreciatethe interestingand reasonedwayin
whichthe artist'sfantasyunfoldsthe multiplerelationshipsof
[pictorial] planes.147
Art, a complex, quasi-feminine "fantasy,"needs to be
placed in the "properperspective."Since the author as-
sumes that the art object is totally comprehensible by
means of a discourse of empathetic description revealing
its underlying rationality, the artist in a backhanded way is
interpretedas helpless without the rationalizing,monothe-
tic text. The artist becomes the mindless woman waiting
for the male explanation of meaning. Did Junoy care that
Picasso said that he was struggling "to upset the way of
identifying things ... to make people realize that they live
in a mad world"?148
Though art history began to chart a course in which the
art experience was an important but no longer a necessary
aspect of scholarship, experientialism continued to find its
way through the cracks, usually, however, in stiff and
alienated form. Charles Jencks, in architectural history,
transformed the empathy theory into a rote methodologi-
cal machine that could explain any architecture in the
confidence of a fully rationalized experience. His descrip-
tions reinforced the conviction that only formal - that is,
visual - decisions were comprehensible and that other
types of decisions were basically irrelevant in the attempt
to reconstruct the immediate contemporary condition of
the design. Designing happened quasi-spontaneously ei-
ther through a "form language" or through the "making
use of" visual historical references:
The Faculty Club for the University of California is both a
straightforwarduse of vernacular elements and an esoteric game
in art history. Thus the dining room of the club makes use of
neon banners and stuffed animal heads to both accept and
mock the traditional ideas of a baronial hall, while the refer-
ences to Sir John Soane, Theo van Doesburg, Spanish Colonial

Schueler (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1962).
144. His work contains a good
description and critique of the
German psychology theorists.
145. Arnheim,To theRescueof
Art, 181.
146. Philip N. Youtz, introduction
to Munro,ScientificMethodin
Aesthetics, xi. The whole passage is
worth quoting: "What science will
be able to accomplish for aesthet-
ics is difficult to estimate from its
very tentative beginnings. Already
one notes, however, a grateful at-
tempt to eliminate the vagaries of
aesthetic verbiage through a care-
ful reexamination of meanings.
One welcomes also, a disposition
to hear all schools and shades of
aesthetic opinion without partisan-
ship .... And lastly one observes
with satisfaction that the scientist
goes directly to art and the experi- Tete d'obsidienne(Paris:Gallimard,
ence of art for his data. Aesthetics 1974), 101.
is to be based on experimentation
149. Charles Jencks, Modern
with art; not on speculation, or
Movementsin Architecture (Garden
books, or history, or even personal
City, N.J.: Anchor, 1973), 223 (my
emotion."
emphasis).
147. Josep Junoy, "Picasso'sArt,"
150. William Curtis,ModemArchi-
first published in Arte y artistas
tecturesince 1900 (Englewood
(Barcelona, 1912), trans. Miguel
Sobre (my emphasis).
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1982),
11. The origins of this lie with
148. Quoted in Andre Malraux, La Wolfflin himself. Wolfflin assumed

58
 Jarzombek

Architecture and the shack-style add a certain frisson for the ar-
chitectural pundit.149
Writing history based on the aesthetic experience became
a dubious, tautological historicism that elegantly pre-
served a decontextualized understanding of architecture
and a mystification of the design process. Since the visual
performance alone was discussed, the artist as a creative,
thinking, intelligent, or even political person became irrel-
evant. William Curtis, in his otherwise insightful analysis
of Le Corbusier, can find interest only in the objectivi-
zation of inner creativity. The historian has to wait till
"images float to the surface."
At the right moment, images would float to the surface [of his
mind] where they could be caught, condensed and exteriorized
as sketches. Le Corbusier's vocabulary was composed of ele-
ments like piloti, the ramp, the brise-soleil, and so on, which
govern in their overall disposition by systematic 'grammatical'
arrangements like the Five Points of a New Architecture. At an-
other level there were preferred formal patterns - ways of put-
ting together curves, rectangles and grids, for example, which
would help to channel a solution toward its destination. 150
The search for an objective, aesthetic experientialism -
doomed to flounder in its hubris of claiming to know the
unknowable, and failing to recognize the difference be-
tween art and performance art - was only one of the
paths the theory took in the post-World War II years.151
Another path was in the development, in conscious oppo-
sition to its scientific alternative, of a patently "humanist"
pedagogy. Whereas the objectivists tended to see their
work (which they would also consider humanist, but for
different reasons) in the context of gradualcivilizational
progress,the "humanist"radicalsposed art as struggling
against various forms of "inhumanity,"which ranged from
positivism and linear history (as with Wolfflin) to history
(portrayedas a form of alienated academic scholarship),
to theory (portrayedas a weak literaryErsatz to authentic
creativity), to totalitarianism (portrayedas an absence of
humanism).'52DeWitt Parkerhad alreadyproposed to
move art analysis outside tired scholarlyinvestigations to
"the world [that is] the most magnificent spectacle of
all."i53Joseph Wood Krutch'sExperienceand Art (1932)
paved the way for this humanist exaltation of art. As a
professor in the literature department at Columbia Uni-
versity in the 1940s, he championed the psychological
approach to aesthetic experience as a way to understand
our civilizational mission. Art and the contemplation of
art stabilized our social and intellectual institutions:
Forwhatwe long for is the abilityto functionin this compli-
cated worldas easilyand as freelyas othersseem to havefunc-
tioned in a simplerone; to find life not merelyexciting,but
satisfactoryand meaningfulas well. We wanta philosophy
whichis morethan merelycold and reasonable,a philosophy
whoseultimateexpressionis one of those worksof artwhich
seem not only to sum up but also to justifya civilization.154
Krutch, like his colleague Irwin Edman, was heavily in-
debted to John Dewey, for whom aesthetic immediacy was
a determining factor in the civilizational development of
American democracy. In his important, but now largely

artists to be nonintellectual, inter-
ested only in controlling the visual
arrangement,but not reallyknow-
ing why. The concern being with
the objectified world, Wolfflin
made no effort to explore artistic
subjectivitybeyond the shallow ac-
tivities of how artists "handled . . .
treated . . . tolerated . . . and ban-
ished" certain forms. The roles of
drawings,sketches, and patronal
wishes were never addressed.The
design process was nothing more
complex than deciding what to
wear for afternoon tea: "The correct
tone was achieved [by Antonio da
Sangallo] by eliminating all original
or lively features and reservingfreer
treatment entirely for the interior.
... This system had been discarded
by Bramante,but was brought back
by Sangallo;the greatest example
was the Palazzo Farnese. Com-
pletely unworked,rusticated stones
were no longer tolerated,even on
the ground floor;they were ban-
ished to the less formal country
villa.... One of the later followers
of the first masters was the admi-
rable Soria. He was responsible for
a whole series of church facades.
Their value lies in the severe han-
dling of the mass of travertine
ratherthan in any lively ingenious
composition" (Renaissanceand
Baroque,124-25).
151. I hope my readerswill under-
stand that this is not to question art
historyas a whole or as a discipline.
This questions those historianswho
continue to use dehistoricized,expe-
rientialobjectivityas a historicaland
supposedly"critical"method.
152. Philip Youtz, once again, pro-
vides a straightforwarddefense
of the humanism of objectivity:
"Science might be described as a

59

forgotten text Art as Experience(1934), Dewey argued
that every normally complete experience is, in essence,
aesthetic. Art elevates this general aesthetic experience
into consciousness as part of its mission to cultivate the
development of self-consciousness.155 Thus, he argued, art
plays a critical role in maturing and educating the citizens
of our country. The moral-political purpose "of looking"
was laid out by Dewey when he described how the aes-
thetic experience that "rounds out the experience [of life]
into completeness and unity" understands "the object in
its own qualities and relations" and serves "to remove
prejudice, do away with the scales that keep the eye from
seeing, tear away the veils due to wont and custom, per-
fect the power to perceive."'56 The aesthetic experience,
Dewey went on to explain, "is a manifestation, a record
and celebration of the life of a civilization, a means of
promoting its development, and is also the ultimate judg-
ment upon the quality of a civilization."'57 When a society
is in full force of its creative power, artists work out of
their experiences in culture, but when a society is in decay
and suffers under imperialism, "theories about art take the
place of creativity."'58 Here we have the roots of much of
our current suspicion of "theory" as an inauthentic and
latently immoral expression of cultural life.
In 1922 Dewey became director of education of the newly
founded Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania, to
which he called Thomas Munro and Laurence Buermeyer
to serve as his associates. Buermeyer, a student of Dewey's,
outlined the principles of pedagogical aesthetics for the
foundation in his book The Aesthetic Experience (1924):
humanistic way of looking at expe- 154. Joseph Wood Krutch, Experi-
rience. It is humanistic because it ence and Art: Some Aspects of the
seeks to understand all things ra- Aesthetics of Literature (New York: tinctive feature of anything that is
tionally, which is to say, in human Harrison Smith and Robert Haas,
terms. It is humanistic because it 1932), 211-22.
relies on the joint testimony of
humankind, not on'individual ad- 155. See Dewey, Art as Experience; acting, suffering, enjoying, and
ventures or private revelations" see also idem, "Aesthetic Experi-
(introduction to Munro, Scientific ence as a PrimaryPhase and as an
Method in Aesthetics, x). Artistic Development," Journalof
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 9, no. the lived experience that though at
153. Parker,The Principles of Aes- 1 (September 1950): 56-58. Aes-
thetics, 93. thetic immediacy, for Dewey, is
assemblage 23
"With the lesson taught by experience and reflection upon
experience, comprehension becomes surerand more ad-
equate, and the action which it guides becomes more just,
more generous, and more truly expressive of all that the
man acting wants and is."159Buermeyer, critical of art as
the domain of the privileged and cognoscenti, demanded
that it be viewed within the larger cultural context, which
could only happen, he argued, when experiences with art
objects begin to be valued.'60 The aesthetic experience,
more than merely an experience with art, is a necessary
element in the cure for alienation and in the struggle
against "the paralysis of spirit" and "the monotonous
and servile life."161Similarly, Edman's Arts and the Man
along with his "A Philosophy of Experience as a Philoso-
phy of Art" - which has strong parallels with Clement
Greenberg's famous essay of the following decade, "Avant-
Garde and Kitsch" (1939) - stressed the theme of a phi-
losophy of life rooted in religious and political struggle
against instability.'62 The aesthetic experience was not a
"perceptual thrill ... or a vague impression" but "intelli-
gence embodied . . . and from [its] intensity and order, one
becomes able to decipher with a more clear and affection-
ate apprehension the world of confusions in which we
live."163
Theories of the self-corrective nature of humanism date
back at least to von Humbolt. In "On the Historian's
Task" he wrote, "The more profoundly the historian un-
derstands mankind and its actions through intuition and
study, the more humane his disposition is by nature and
circumstance, and the more freely he gives rein to his
not restricted to a special type of intelligence. An experience be-
experience, but constitutes a dis- comes known as such when a level
of self-consciousness has been ap-
properlycalled "an experience." plied to it that "prevents its dissi-
The primaryunit of life is "an ex- pation." The aesthetic quality
perience, a natural transaction of "roundsout the experience into
completeness and unity" (Art as
knowing." Immediacy is not simply Experience,41). In discussing art
a subjective opinion about a situa- criticism, Dewey critiqued the ex-
tion but a quality that permeates tremism of the absolutist and the
relativist positions. The former he
first may be inexpressible in words characterized as "legalistic criti-
can be reconstructed by the use of cism," as in an attorney establish-
60
 Jarzombek

humanity, the more completely will he solve the problems
of his profession."'64But von Humbolt was speaking to the
advanced scholar. It was a different matter altogether to
position the young, the naive, or the otherwise "uncon-
taminated" as champions of authenticity in a modern
democracy. In Munro's work the gap was elegantly bridged
between those who hoped for a "specialized"discourse of
artistic objectivity and those who advocated a "nonspecial-
ized" discourse as the way of the future. Munro may have
written Formand Style in the Arts:An Introductionto
Aesthetic Morphologyfor his art history graduate students,
but he expressed an equal concern for teaching the value
of aesthetic appreciation to the very young. Cleveland
Museum, for example, became the first American art
museum to permit children to draw in the main galleries
so that they could learn to "perceive and understand as
clearly as possible the form and meaning of the works of
art they see."'65 If these children could "understand" art as
youths, Munro argued, just imagine what they would have
to say as graduate students.166
The transformation of aesthetic experiential humanism
into a corrective ideology was in full swing by the 1950s,
during which time universities across the country restruc-
tured their curriculum around newly constituted humani-
ties and art appreciation courses.'67 As an article in The
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism explained,
If the college student can have his programof arts and sciences in-
tegrated for him by art history,his inner world freed of inhibitions
by art expressions,and his mental life stabilizedby psychologicalin-
terpretationshe will enter the adult democraticworlda citizen
readyto be and to do - an individualwho plays the game.168
The famous humanities sequence at the University of
Chicago, "Disciplines of the Humanities," was designed
with something like this in mind. It was the brain child of
Richard McKeon, who was variously professor of classics,
professor of philosophy, dean of the divinity school, and
professor of history. McKeon, who had collaborated with
Dewey in the public lecture series at the Cooper Union in
the 1920s and 1930s, carried with him Dewey's ideals of
educating the public.'69 Joshua Taylor's handbook of art
appreciation, Learning to Look, was intended for
McKeon's humanities course. As noted, it stressed the
significance of looking: students were "to concentrate on
the expression and construction of the work itself without
reference to historical or technical associations" and then
to expand on the resulting knowledge gained "by taking
into account . . . the creative processes."'70 Bates Lowry's
widely used The Visual Experience reflected its origins in
Taylor's formalist methodology:
Looking and seeing are as different as babbling and speaking.
To look means that our eyes operate only to the extent that
they keep us from being hit by a car .... We can begin to see
only when ... we build up our experience with visual forms -
experiences made up of continually renewed contacts with the
numerous objects around us. Seeing by proxy, that is, through
the eyes of a critic or teacher, will not make us acquire any ex-
perience to rely on .... We can begin to acquire an under-
standing of the visual process if we observe the behavior of our
eyes when [they are] confronted by an object.17

ing principles, and the latter as
impressionist criticism." The true
critic, "if his experience is genu-
inely aesthetic, will not go to
these extremes but prefer a form
of analysis that understands the
object in its own qualities and
relations" (ibid., 311, 316). He
rejected psychoanalytic criticism.
156. Dewey, Art as Experience,41,
325. The use of a philosophy of life
to enhance national ideals (in this
case, those of democracy) was
attempted at the same time by
Herman Nohl and others in Ger-
many in the cause of cultural aes-
thetics. See Herman Nohl, Die
Aesthetische Wirklichkeit (Frank-
furt am Main: Gerhard Schulte-
Bulmke, 1935).
157. Dewey, Art as Experience,
326.
158. Ibid., 328.
159. Laurence Buermeyer, The
Aesthetic Experience(Merion:
Barnes Foundation, 1924), 172.
160. Typically,Buermeyer'sattempt
to make art more accessible is con-
nected with a disdain for a "falsede-
mocracy,"or popularism.In this
sense, he is verymuch like Arnheim.
See also "Artas Insight,"the ab-
stract of a paperBuermeyergave at
the annual meeting of the College
Art Association,2 April 1931, in
Parnassus3, no. 4 (April1931): 21.
161. Buermeyer,The Aesthetic Ex-
perience, 182.
162. Irwin Edman, "A Philosophy
of Experience as a Philosophy of
Art," in Essays in Honor of John
Dewey (New York:Henry Holt,
1929), 122-32.
163. Ibid., 127-28. By Einfiihlung,
he further explained, "is meant
that tendency of the body to expe-
rience in its own tensions and
incipient movements what it per-

61
 assemblage 23

The critique of academic professionalization- taught in
a classroom,no less - was performedin the magnificent
mirrorof self-discovery.But in the process, interest in and
awarenessof the historical rootedness and theoretical na-
ture of the argument diminished. The Open Eye in Learn-
ing (1969) by RichardBassett, an instructorof art at Milton
Academy in the 1960s, provideda clear step-by-step ap-
proachto a purifying,socially responsibleaesthetic experi-
ence that started with initial perception of forms, then
moved to discovery,creation, reason, judgment, religion,
and, finally, communication.'72The book had no footnotes
and did not attempt to historicize the argument, as that
would have been a concession to "theory"and its alienated
nonvisual understandingof the world. IredellJenkinsin his
Art and the Human Enterprise(1958) also abandoned foot-
notes, stating that he did not need them because "theory
should plant itself firmly in the facts and then stand on its
own feet without borrowingprestige from other think-
ers."173Nonetheless, it was the intention of the book "to
develop a theory of the nature of art, and of art in human
life; and to give judgment to this account within a yet more
general theory of man and of man's status in the uni-
verse."174 In other words,writing a theory of art as a human-
istic enterprisedid not translateinto lodging that theory
historicallyin humanistic discourses.This antihistorical
component of experientialhumanism was the key to the
success not only of Andre Malraux'sThe Psychologyof Art:
The Twilightof the Absolute (1950) but also of Lowry's
Visual Experience,where psychologicaltheories and the
debates they elicited vanish altogether.175
Looking was no longer a theory that needed to be dis-
cussed theoretically, but had become an easily dissemina-
table methodology.'76The attempt to institutionalize this
"theory,"within its antihistorical, antispeculative, and
what I would call a radical antihumanist position, was
nowhere better expressed than in Dudley's Humanities:
AppliedAesthetics.'77The intention of this popular four-
hundred-page textbook was, in the good experientialist
line, to critique the "historicalapproach"and the mecha-
nized disassociation from the world in which things are
discussed chronologicallyand to return art to the experi-
ential domain. Art appreciation kept the path to humanity
clear of totalitarian hindrances.
If it is true, as many people are saying, that we have become
caught in our own thinking, that in making the machine the
model of perfection and measuring our achievements in terms
of it we have become automatons disassociated from our feel-
ings and autonomous responses, that we have relinquished our-
selves so completely that we are willing, conspiring victims of
authoritarianism, it is time that we asked: Is there no alterna-
tive for us? Is there no road back? Art is a road back; and like all
roads back, it is a road forward, for it leads us not to a past, ac-
complished somewhere back there, but to the past within us. It
offers a road back to experiencing, to a quickening of the
senses, to a fuller realization of our humanity, and to a whole-
ness, our 'real heritage.'178
Munro provided the broader postwar context in his article
"Art, Aesthetics, and Liberal Education" (1944). Protest-
ing against the continuing legacy of the depression years'
emphasis on the practical and the vocational, he pointed

ceives in external objects.... We
feel ourselves poised in movement
and in rest with the discus thrower,
and our muscles grow tight with
the tensions of some of the figures,
tortured and muscular, of Michel-
anglo" (Arts and the Man, 93).
164. Von Humbolt, "On the
Historian's Task," 8.
165. Thomas Munro, "Educa-
tional Work at the Cleveland Mu-
seum of Art,"Museum Journal40
(September 1940): 169. The cre-
ation of educational departments
in museums was an important de-
velopment of the 1930s and 1940s.
See Thomas Ritche Adam, The
Museum and PopularCulture (New
York:American Association of
Adult Education, 1939), Theodor
Lewis Low, The Museum as a So-
cial Instrument (New York:Metro-
politan Museum of Art for the
American Association of Museums,
1942), Charles E. Slatkin, "Aims
and Methods in Museum Educa-
tion," College Art Journal7, no. 1
(Autumn 1947): 28-33, and Will-
iam M. Milken, "Museum Trends:
The Museum as a Community
Center," Art in America 34, no. 4
(October 1946): 223.
166. In this, Munro was following
Edman's path. Edman was also
editor of the radio program "Invi-
tation to Learning"and an impor-
tant advocate for raising the level
of philosophical and aesthetic
undertanding among Americans.
In this context, I should also men-
tion Carl Thurston. His book The
Structureof Art (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1940), his
many articles and papers, as well as
his popular series Enjoy YourMu-
seum, which he edited, all served
the goal of making the arts acces-
sible and understandable to the
general audience. Thurston was
more of an objectivist-humanist

62
 Jarzombek

out that the strict functionalism and overpoweringur-
gency fostered by years of economic need had left "liberal
With the victory of de-
education fighting for its life."1'79
in he
mocracy Europe, asserted, Americans have to shift
gears and concentrate less on their economic problems
and more on issues of cultural heritage, not merely be-
cause the money now existed to do so, but because art
education is essential to political wholesomeness and to
the suppression of psychological deviancy.
The history of the visual arts alone provides the most extensive
and concrete of all frameworksfor the history of civilization....
It provides a revealing expression of modern culture in all its pe-
riods, and in its leading racial, national and local manifestations.
From a psychological point of view, study of arts is a means of
developing through exercise a set of human functions and abili-
ties which tend to be neglected in our excessivelyverbal, intel-
lectual approachto liberal education .... We can oppose the
tendency of modern life to arrest and atrophy many potential
lines of development, and to produce a mutilated, over-
specialized adult personality prone to fatigue and neurosis.'80
The radical tenor of the aesthetic immediatists, especially
in its erasure of historicity, was covertly and overtly linked
to a nervousness toward "Germantheory." Munro, though
well aware of the German contribution to aesthetic psy-
chology, claimed that "we are the direct heirs of the long
British tradition in the philosophy and psychology of art.
It has been on the whole one of naturalism and empiri-
cism . . . evolution, democracy and liberalism."'81 This was
hardly an accurate assessment and possibly willfully mis-
leading. Philip McMahon, who was at the time chair of
fine arts at New York University, made no bones about his
anti-German sentiments. His Art of EnjoyingArt (1938)
had stressed the humanistic mission of art appreciation
and experiential analysis and, like Taylor, he had put all
the illustrations at the front of the book to emphasize the
ideology of looking. His Preface to an American Philosophy
of Art discussed the theoretical principles of this "human-
ism"; it would, in particular,counteract the great evils
of German idealism: "German theory ... is something
neither logically coherent nor consistent with American
traditions."'82This stereotyped rejection of idealism as
protofascist, extraordinarilypopular in American academe,
circled back onto Wolfflin himself in the form of Arnold
Hauser's caustic and cynical critique of Wolfflin as a
"positivist" unconcerned with the human value of art.183
As time wore on, the psychological connections of
Formpsychologie, though heavily exploited, became distant
and increasingly undiscussed except by Gestalt or proto-
Gestalt psychologists like Edward Bradford Titchener and
Robert Morris Ogden, both of Cornell University.184 Ironi-
cally, it was the Gestalt theorists who had brought the
German ideas to America. Ogden, known today among
psychologists as the father of American Gestalt theory, but
practically unknown in art history circles, defended the
idea of empathy in his influential work Psychology and
Education (1926): "Our ability to empathize our situation
by projecting into its rhythms, affords means of insight far
more direct and more real than any reasoning and delib-
eration can supply."'85 Ogden explained that a direct

than a radical aesthetic humanist
like, for example, Ernst Mundt, au-
thorof ArtFormandCivilization
(Berkeley:University of California
Press, 1952).
167. Marion D. Pease of Skidmore
College discussed the need for the
application of Deweyan principles
in undergraduatecollege education
at the twenty-fourth annual meet-
ing of the College Art Association
in 1935. The abstract was published
in Parnassus7, no. 5 (October
1935): 19-21. As she explained, the
goal of art education at Skidmore
was to create an experience of art
"not considered isolated from other
experiences, but rather, seen to be
related to work in other depart-
ments of the college, and to be inti-
mately related to activities on the
campus and in the outside world.
... The rhythm of experience so
consciously enjoyed through the
four college years, having engen-
dered habits of intelligent criticism,
stimulated sensitive appreciation of
ultimate fineness, introduced the
keen joy of creative effort, will con-
tinue and in some measure become
a vital part of the experience of life.
If it is true, as some discerning
people predict, that we are ap-
proaching a Renaissance of the arts
in America, it will be not merely be-
cause we have found the new lei-
sure, but because we have prepared
large groups of the American
people to use it intelligently and to
make perception and participation
in art experience a vital part of all
experience. It is possible that col-
lege students may be leaders of
thought and creative endeavors in
this new democracy of arts" (ibid.,
21).
168. William Sener Rusk, "Art
and Democracy," The Journalof
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 2, no.
7 (1942): 37 (my emphasis). One

63
 assemblage 23

parallelexisted between the object and the viewer. The
aesthetic object, "appealingthrough the senses as definite
composition, by virtue of its own internal structure, was
capable of arousing in others something of the same sense
of fulfillment enjoyed by the artist."1'86
Similarly,Herbert
Sidney Langfeld, in his Aesthetic Attitude (1920), stood on
the old boundarybetween art and psychology. Langfeld,
the director of the psychology laboratoryat Princeton
University, explained the theory of Einfiihlung and gave
an example in art history:
If we turnquicklyfroma photographof a Gothicinteriorto
one of the Renaissance,thereis an empatheticshock.In the
latter,the horizontalis almostpurposefullyemphasized,and
one feels the breadth and the weight .... We feel ourselves
movedtowardthe earthmorethan we do in the perceptionof
the Gothic.'87
But these voices soon drifted into obscurityand this largely
because, preciselyas art history was strugglingto define
itself as an academic discipline, so was psychology.
Arnheim tried to uphold the old ideals. His "Perceptual
Abstractionand Art" (1947) and "Agendafor the Psychol-
ogy of Art" (1952) tried to bridge the everwideninggap, but
may have only made it worse, for even he emphasized not
art itself but psychologicalexperiments relating to percep-
tion and motivation, experiments that interested art
historiansless and less.'88By 1950, at any rate, most psy-
chologists in the United States no longer taught in philoso-
phy departments,but in newly independent psychology
departments, and the consequences can be clearlyfelt in
the absence of historical awareness.HaroldNewton Lee,
professorof philosophy at Tulane University,in Perception
and AestheticValue (1938) and ElijahJordan,professorof
philosophy at Butler University,in The Aesthetic Object
(1937) were both part of the philosophical-psychological,
neo-Kantiantradition, but their workindicated only the
scantest interest in contemporarypsychologyand in turn-
of-the-century debates.'89Dilmar Gotshalk in Art and the
Social Order(1947) discussed aesthetic experience and
even the theory of Einfiihlung,but also with hardlya refer-
ence to its turn-of-the-centurytheorists. And as recently as
1983 the workof Theodor Lipps was diagnosed as "outside
of scientific, academic interest."'90
It is thus ironic that during this time, "professional"psy-
chologists and radicalhumanities aestheticians were so far
apartand so unawareof their common history that they on
occasion actually saw each other in opposition. Ogden for
example, was attacked by McMahon as representing"con-
ventional academic psychology"and as producingworks
that though valid from a scientific point of view "do little
to stimulate interest in the critical understandingof art."191
Carl Thurston went so far as to claim of him that "you do
not see what makes art tick. You mention few if any of the
intensifiers by which an artist raises the otherwise negli-
gible details of his workto an unforgettable intensity."192
Such criticism must have been painful for Ogden, for he
was partiallyresponsiblefor the spreadof psychological
aesthetics in America. He retaliatedby criticizing Dudley's
textbook not for its attempt to bring arts into the humani-
ties, but because its author in her radicalemphasis on the
art object threw out the traditionalconcept of the humani-

should also study ErnstMundt, Art,
Form,and Civilization (Berkeley:
Universityof CaliforniaPress, 1952).
169. I want to thank William
Swenson, my former professor at
the University of Chicago, for dis-
cussing McKeon's work with me.
McKeon, who died in 1985, is gen-
erally classified as a neo-Aristote-
lian, though he disputed this
categorization. See Richard P.
McKeon, "The Philosophic Basis
of Art and Criticism," in Critics
and Criticism: Ancient and Mod-
ern, ed. R. S. Crane (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press,
1952), 463-545. McKeon helped
draft the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights. For an excellent
summary of many of the points of
the University of Chicago school
of criticism, see Robert Marsh's
"Historical Interpretation and the
History of Criticism," in Literary
Criticism and Historical Under-
standing, ed. Phillip Damon (New
York:Columbia University Press,
1967), 1-24. Dewey's philosophy
of education was, of course, well
known. He was critical of the rigid
approach to education that domi-
nated the practice of most Ameri-
can schools in the latter part of
the nineteenth century, arguing
that such an approach was based
on a faulty psychology that
thought of the child as a passive
creature on which information had
to be imposed. He believed that
the function of education was to
encourage those habits and dispo-
sitions that constitute intelligence.
170. Taylor,Learningto Look,iv.
Tayloralso wroteNineteenth-Century
Theoriesof Art (Berkeley:University
of CaliforniaPress,1987). Published
posthumously,it is a collectionof
texts that he used in his courseon
nineteenth-centurytheoriesof art
at the Universityof Chicago.

64
 Jarzombek

ties, namely, one that was rooted in language, philosophy,
and science. To neglect literae humanitoresand to privilege
the immediacy of art objects, so he argued, could have
serious consequences in our intellectual culture. But
Ogden's ideal of humanism as a form of cultural and liter-
aryerudition, and not as a knowledge of art, was perceived
at the time as strikinglyunmodern.
Conclusion
What was a strategic opening for Wolfflin became a
dangerous historiographicvoid in the making of the
formalist-experientialistdiscourse; dangerous because it
disregarded,underestimated, concealed, and mutated the
historical and theoretical rootedness of its own methodol-
ogy and thus falsely legitimized itself in its opposition to
the stereotyped evils of historicism, totalitarianism, and
dead scholarship. The shorter the historical shadow of the
theory of experiential immediacy became in the various
disciplines of art history, psychology, philosophy, and art
appreciation, the more its humanist mission became a
house of cards. In the end, it was a victim of its precept of
unpretentiousness, especially once its assumptions about
the dealienating power of looking became entrapped in
the ideologies of objectivity, liberation, and democracy.
The price was the poverty of understanding, the conse-
quences of which we have not even begun to pay for.
When "readingthe object" became an exercise in self-
referentiality- sold to the public as a truth vindicated by
the battle against fascism - that radicallyrepressed its
historical and theoretical status, its quest for the meaning
of the visual structures of the made world could be
brought alive only by the strength of the academic and
political illusions that supported it. But fictions like these
make every effort to uphold the integrity of their illusion
and the myth of their intactness with such consistency
that we slip into the habitual and dangerous assumption
that they are reality itself.'93
Given the absence of a historiographicshadow, aesthetic
immediacy can continually play the music of authenticity.
Such is the case with Arnheim's To the Rescue of Art, the
work mentioned at the beginning of this essay. But if
Arnheim represents the survival (an important survival
some would argue) of the theory, Jacques Maquet's
equally anachronistic The Aesthetic Experiencerepresents
an attempt to revive it outright. Maquet, an expert in
African culture and famous for his book Sociologie de la
connaissance (1949), wanted to bring the ideals of experi-
ential formalism to bear in the field of cultural anthropol-
ogy. What Wolfflin tried to do to art history in 1886,
Maquet attempted to do to anthropology in 1986. His
book brought new life to old cliches. Just read the titles of
the chapters:The Aesthetic Vision; The Significance of
Form; Meanings in Aesthetic Objects; Aesthetic Vision;
A Selfless Experience; The Cultural Component in Aes-
thetic Objects. And sure enough, Maquet provides a "de-
scription"of "an intense visual experience" that "is the
kind of experience we can refer to when, as anthropolo-
gists, we want to analyze the particularway one looks at
art objects."194

171. Lowry,The Visual Experience,
14-15, 18. Lowry,who served dur-
ing the 1970s as chairman of the
art department at the University of
Massachusetts, was one of Taylor's
students.
172. See RichardBassett, The Open
Eye in Learning(Cambridge,Mass.:
MIT Press, 1969). Bassett was
heavilyinfluenced by Denmund
Waldo Ross, whom he met while
studying at HarvardUniversity.
Ross, alreadyin his earlywork,was
attempting to bring perceptualpsy-
chology into the teaching of paint-
ing with the hope that its scientific
basis would make painting a mean-
ingful culturalendeavor.
173. Iredell Jenkins, Art and the
Human Enterprise (Cambridge,
Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press,
1958), vii.
174. Ibid., 1.
175. Andre Malraux, The Psychol-
ogy of Art: The Twilight of the Ab-
solute (New York:Pantheon Books,
1950.)
176. The translation of Wolfflin's
writings into English played di-
rectly into this dehistoricizing of
theory. Wolfflin's works, instead of
being studied as a psychological,
interdisciplinarycritique of art his-
tory, were championed in art and
architectural history courses
around the country as examples of
good, old-fashioned empiricism.
On the methodizing, so to speak,
of Wolfflin, see, for example,
Helmut Hungeland, "Suggestions
for Procedure in Art Critcism,"
The Journalof Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 5, no. 3 (March 1947):
189-95.
177. See Dudley and Faricy, The
Humanities: Applied Aesthetics.
Conceived as a textbook for
Stephens College, the book is still

65
 assemblage 23

I vividlyremembermy encounterwith the largeCalderstabile. Though claiming to demonstrate "howcritical knowledgeis

... I first saw it from a distance.... There stood huge nonfigu-
rative forms in black steel plates .... Their presence imposed
on my attention.Movingcloser,I stoppedwhereI couldbest
see the stabileand I lookedat it for some time, not being aware
if the time was shortor long. Later,I did not rememberif I was
standing or sitting: I was just looking .... During the experi-
ence I wasnot in an introspectivemood, and I did not even no-
tice my affectivestate, pleasureor absenceof pleasure.In fact
'I,' my usualself, wasthe experienceof that sculpturefillingall
my consciousness.195
Maquet's "experience"is certainly genuine. But the at-
tempt to make the experience significant has been con-
structed in the context of twentieth-century modernism,
which raised experientialism from psychological science to
historical method to humanist ideology. From this per-
spective, his experience is totally preconstructed and in-
authentic since it is proffered to the readeras if it were
incontestably legitimate. The cracks in the argument be-
come apparent when Maquet, nervous that his readers
might not value his experiences, acknowledges the histo-
ricity of his position. The "experts in the field of art his-
tory and art criticism," so he asserts, know what "his
experience" means in the largercontext of cultural stud-
ies: "Specialists use the term aesthetic for denoting the
specific quality of the perception and experience of art
objects as such."1'96He then proceeds to point to the "lin-
eage" of Alexander Baumgarten,Clive Bell, Roger Fry and
others, all recognized formalist defenders. Maquet makes
no reference to their numerous critics.
interpretedfrom a phenomenologicalperspective,"Maquet
has fulfilled the demand that he act authenticallyon the
stage of scholarshipand has fraudulentlyconstructed a
historicaldefense of "his experience."It is fraudulentin
that he claims to be self-consciousabout his theoretical
mission, but exhibits no awarenessof the historicalcritique
of his position and seems oblivious to the radicalrevisions
aesthetic experientialismunderwentin the 1940s and 1950s.
Were he to assert that this is a mere matter of scholarship,I
would insist that it is a matter of the verysurvivalof hu-
manism itself.197For some, this might be the symptom
ratherthan the disease, but not for Maquet, who, unlike
Weismann, Scully, and other representativesof the
authenticist movements, is not blind to the sociologicaland
ideological determinantsat workin society. In Sociologiede
la connaissancehe discussed the way social and cultural
factors influence mental productions.But in The Aesthetic
Experiencehe acts as if he were - in the context of his own
ideas - above any sociologicaldescription.The suppression
of historicaland theoretical consciousness in the name of
lived consciousness destroysthe humanistic essence of the
experience of art and, sadly,turns it into a joke.
Maquet clearlynever read the novel Nausea (1938) by his
fellow countrymanJean-PaulSartre.In an eloquent passage,
the narrator,Roquentin, becomes awareof certain disquiet-
ing alterationsin the perceptualworld,and to clarifythese
for himself, he resolvesto observe and record.But instead of
leading to a broaderunderstandingof his psychological

being used in revised form in its
introductory humanities course.
Dudley received her Ph.D. from
Bryn Mawr in 1911; her thesis was
published as The Egyptian Ele-
ments in the Legend of the Body
and Soul (Baltimore:J. H. Furst,
1911). Dudley, who began her
career at Stephens in 1919, was
widely schooled in various disci-
plines, literature and drama espe-
cially. Her book was the first fine
arts textbook of its kind to inte-
grate the study of architecture,
literature, music, painting, and
sculpture. See also idem, "An Early
Homily on the Body and Soul
Theme," Journalof English and
GermanicPhilosophy (April 1909),
"The Grave,"ModernPhilology 11,
no. 3 (1914), and The Study of Lit-
erature (New York:Houghton
Mifflin, 1928).
178. Dudley and Faricy, The Hu-
manities: Applied Aesthetics, 408
(my emphasis). Erwin Rosenthal,
exemplifies this humanist ideology
in an analysis of the origins of Re-
naissance painting: "In discussing
the foremost poet and the fore-
most painter of the Middle Ages
together, it is clear that it is not
our intention here to present a de-
tailed treatment of the poetry of
Dante and the painting of Giotto.
It would be particularlydesirable
to make a thorough analysis of
Giotto's painting - of his contri-
butions to the fields of formal
principles and spatial relationships.
Here, however, we will limit our-
selves to examining his art in the
light of medieval art. This ap-
proach will reveal the painter's
problems as an intrinsic element in
the predominant cultural develop-
ment of the age. Thus, the transi-
tion from two-dimensional to
three-dimensional space and the
growth of natural, individual form
are seen as phenomena which arise

66
 Jarzombek

changes in orderto pin them down, his method in fact
exacerbatesthese changes. The progressivedisintegrationof
normal perceptualrealityreduces the protagonistto a state
of ontological anxiety in the face of the sheer existence of
things. Viewinghimself in a mirror,he recognizeshis own
face only through its apparentseparationfrom his body.
Myglanceslowlyandwearilytravelsovermy forehead,my cheeks;
it findsnothingfirm,it is stranded.Obviouslytherearea nose,
twoeyesanda mouth,but noneof it makessense,thereis not
even a human expression .... Brownwrinklesshow on each side
of the feverish swelled lips. ... It is a geological embossed map
... andin spiteof everythingthis lunarworldis familiarto me.
I cannotsayI recognizethe details.Butthe wholethinggivesme
an impressionof somethingseenbeforewhichstupefiesme.'98
This passage brings us to the limits of the aesthetic experi-
ence of "whatis reallythere."The difference between
Maquet and Sartreis that Maquet assumes that the art
object will provide fixed points of knowledge that will ori-
ent investigations into our humanity. As IredellJenkins
expressed it, "the aesthetic object is such an actual thing
envisaged as absolutely concrete and determinate .... Art
transformsthese things into aesthetic objects by concen-
trating its regardupon them as being unique and just
themselves."'99Sartrepushes this act of concentration to
the edge, something no true experientialist (paradoxically
enough) could ever do; and in the process, he demonstrates
how easy it is to disregardthe discourse of certainty that we
ascribe so adamantlyto the aesthetic object. It is here that
we sense how alien we are unto ourselves.
If Sartreserves to remind us of how fragile the claim of
aesthetic certainty can be, I have tried to move in the
other direction, by looking not at the object, but at the
intellectual ideas that legitimate looking. Here, too, it is
important to recognize how alien we are unto ourselves.
The point of this essay, however, has been to suggest that
if there appearsto be a lingering need to deal with the
aesthetic experience as a form of purifyingreflection, there
is also a need to reflect critically- and if necessaryim-
purely- on the boundaries of this need. The originary
status of texts like Renaissanceand Baroque(only partially
fathomable from the perspective of their historicity) com-
bined with the self-contradictorypresence of a survivalist
and revivalistaesthetic experientialism (also only partially
fathomable) reveal the open-ended circularitybetween
experience, text, criticism, and history. Yet a history of the
discipline like Michael Podro'scan deal with these prob-
lems only by reducing them to an analysis of the great and
famous men whose busts line the corridorsof art history.200
Given the philosophical, methodological, and historio-
graphicaltangle that actually surroundsthe question of
aesthetic experience, it would be false to talk about aes-
thetic experientialism as "a theory"or as something with
recognizable discursive boundaries or even as something
with a clearlyunderstandable"past."Despite being land-
marksin art theory, Wolfflin's writings remain ambiguous
in this respect. They cannot be analyzed even as part of
the "historyof theory"since they touch - synchronisti-
cally, diachronistically,and, we must alwaysremember,
anachronistically - a complex fabric of texts in which the

out of the unfolding process of hu-
manization" (The Changing Con-
cept of Reality in Art [New York:
George Wittenborn, 1962], 15).
179. Thomas Munro, "Art,Aes-
thetics, and Liberal Education,"
Journalof Aesthetics and Art Criti-
cism2 (1944):92.
180. Ibid. (my emphasis).
181. Thomas Munro, "Aesthetics
as Science: Its Development in
America," The Journalof Aesthetics
and Art Criticism 9, no. 3 (March
1951): 163.
182. Philip McMahon, Prefaceto an
AmericanPhilosophyof Art (Chi-
cago: Universityof Chicago Press,
1945), 1-2. McMahon receivedhis
Ph.D. from HarvardUniversityin
1916 and was professorof art and
chairof the departmentat New York
Universityfrom 1925 to 1946. A
leading figure in art historyand criti-
cism, he taught courseson Spanish
art, one of his specialties,as well as
on the principlesof art criticism. He
authorednumerous articlesin Art
Bulletin and other journalsand
servedas the book reviewerfor
Parnassus,the official journalof the
College Art Association,whose edi-
tor was his wife, AudreyMcMahon.
183. Hauser, The Philosphyof Art
History, 124.
184. Edward BradfordTitchener,
born in England, was a student of
Wilhelm Wundt at Leipzig. He
spent most of his career at Cornell.
He translated the works of Wundt
into English, authored over two
hundred articles, and had many
books to his credit.
185. Robert Morris Ogden, Psy-
chologyand Education (New York:
HaywardPress, 1926), 156-57.
186. Robert Morris Ogden, The
Psychologyof Art (New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1938), 22.

67
 assemblage 23

location of "theory"lies not on the surfacebut in the form
of numerous forgettings,repressions,absences, borrowings,
and camouflagings.
The history of aesthetic experientialism thus constitutes
an unusual case in historical studies, as it struggles to
erase its own history and so camouflages its eschatological
antihumanist mission. In the various paths I have out-
lined, aesthetic experientialism, becoming autonomous,
preached a corrective, worldlyconsciousness that stood in
opposition to historical self-consciousness.
The historyof theoretical speculations about theoretical
understandingof visual things is, therefore,not about the
interpretationof theoretical texts nor about "significant"
theorists.20'It does not explain how the workor worksare to
be read or interpreted"astexts" (that would instantly put
us back into questions of formalism).Nor is it an explana-
tion of how the text came into being as a particularobject
in history,and it certainlydoes not claim disciplinaryunity.
History,when probingthe history of ideas associatedwith
the visual/textualworld,will inevitablybe cross-disciplinary
in its attempt to scout out both the apparentand the
nonapparentstrategiesby which ideas move in a culture
that is at once academic and populist. TerryEagleton's
investigationsinto the metaproductionof a text are useful
in this respect, but they still function within the discipline
of textuality - that is, texts that are conceived of as litera-
ture - whereasthe historicityof visual/textualdiscourse,
though it, too, concerns itself with metaproduction,points
to a profoundambivalenceof what constitutes "the text."
Are we dealing with writingsthat are recognizedas impor-
tant for a discipline, as Wolfflin's books are generally
consideredto be for art and architecturalhistory?Are we
dealing with discursivepracticeslike those of the late for-
malists, which are based on authorialfiguresof the past,
usuallyonly vaguelyunderstood,but simplified and codified
into a "text"that appearsonly between the lines, as it were,
in the form of a negativity?Dudley's Humanities:Applied
Aestheticsis just as legitimate a "theoretical"text as those
of Wolfflin, but no history of modern theory would ever
include it in a discussion, because it does not fit into the
demand that theory, in following its inherent formalist
ideology, be "new."If we abandon the valorizationof new
theories and linear notions of the historyof theory and look
to historyas a silent removalof itself, then where does that
leave us in assessing our own historicalinquiry?Critical
histories, of which there are severalexcellent examples, are
still too beholden to the experientialmagnetism of the
artifactand to "significant"theoretical statements (Adorno,
Benjamin,Derrida,W6olfflin,Panofsky,Pevsner)to broaden
their investigationsinto the sociology of theory makingand
theory unmaking.Everyart historianhas readWolfflin - if
only because he is said to be significant in the discipline -
but how many have read Lipps, Sterzinger,Odebrecht,
Dudley, and the countless others who have contributed to
the problematicthat is central to the discipline, but for
which there is no history?
In this way, the discipline of art and architecturalhistory
constructs itself "as theory,"and not as "a discipline" with
a history of theory.

187. Herbert Sidney Langfeld, The
Aesthetic Attitude (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, 1920), 132.
188. Rudolf Arnheim, "Perceptual
Abstraction and Art,"Psychology
Review 54 (1947): 66-82, and
idem, "Agendafor the Psychology
of Art,"Journalof Aesthetics and
Art Criticism 10 (1952): 310-14.
189. See Harold Newton Lee, Per-
ception and Aesthetic Value (New
York:Prentice-Hall, 1938). This
work is a rewritingof Lee's 1930
dissertation from HarvardUniver-
sity. In 1925 Lee joined the New-
comb College faculty of Tulane
University, where he taught in the
philosophy department until his
retirement in 1970. See also Elijah
Jordan,The Aesthetic Object
(Bloomington: Principia Press,
1937). Jordanreceived his Ph.D.
from the University of Chicago in
1911. He pursued a distinguished
career at Butler University as head
of the philosophy department until
his retirement in 1944. He was also
a president of the American Philo-
sophical Association.
190. R. N. Smid, "Aehnlichkeit
als Thema der Miinchener
Lipps-Schule," Zeitschrift fur
philosophischeForschung37
(1983): 606.
191. Philip McMahon, review of
The Psychologyof Art in Parnassus
7, no. 10 (December 1938): 35;
also quoted in Robert Morris
Ogden, "The Fine Arts as Human-
istic Studies," Journalof Aesthetics
and Art Criticism 2, no. 7 (1942):
66.
192. Ogden identified his critic as
Carl Thurston but did not give a
citation. See ibid., 67.

68
 Jarzombek

The desire to go out and interpretworksof art and archi-
tecture - to sail the boat of scholarshiptowardthe siren
call of interpretation- is so strongthat we have abandoned
interest in how the discipline was constructedin the nega-
tive context of intellectual history. (The discipline will al-
waysclaim that it is its own intellectual history.) Ironically,
experientialaestheticism, with its shadowlesstheorizations
and problematichistoryof revisionistdehistoricizing,played
an importantpart in this tragedy.As a result, we still have
little scholarshipin the historyof the sociologyof knowledge
and the disciplinarystructuresthat, dislocated and relocated
unto themselves many times over, constitute the making
of modernismin its own image. In discussionsof theory,
investigationsinto the role of mass teaching, periodicals,
institutional policy, and even into how books are read and
published are marginalizedas unglamorous,when in actual-
ity they are necessaryin the attempt to visualizethe fabric
of knowledgethat is so easily repressedin the name of the
authenticity of knowledgeitself.
We must be careful, therefore, in critiquing aesthetic
experientialism in particular,to avoid the hubris of think-
ing that today, given recent critical perspectives, we can
transcend it. We should certainly not relegate it to the
garbageheap of "traditional"modes of history writing,
especially since the problematic of the aesthetic experi-
ence that formalism made the centerpiece of its discourse
cannot be just tossed aside. Given its antihistoriographic
premise - concealed, confusingly, in its falsely historio-
graphic self-legitimizing - it can be revived at any time,
perhaps mutated to adjust to criticism and changed cir-
cumstances. As any gardenerknows, when one pulls out
the dandelion, a fragment always remains that will sprout
forth again. The resprouting of aesthetic experientialism
can be found in A. D. Nuttall's A New Mimesis: Shake-
speareand the Representationof Reality (1983) and Daniel
R. Schwarz'sThe Case for a Humanistic Poetics (1990).
The bizarre continuity of object-experientialism in schol-
arship is indicative, however, less of its potential for rote
survival,than of its very centrality, even if a negative one,
in the quest for meaning.
What I have tried to show is that experientialformalism
outlines the numerous paradoxessurroundingthe legiti-
macy of experience that, born in the interstices of theory,
continues nonetheless to elude categorization.Yet what,
then, is left for us if the recordingof experience can no
longer be considereda thing in and for itself with an innate
value to our self-consciousness,but rather,must be seen as
a humanist conceit rooted in and contaminated by its own
historicityand ideologies?Can we still experience the elu-
sive aesthetic object with the purityneeded for us to func-
tion against the forces of its context, while simultaneously
being skepticallyawarethat the experience itself is a prod-
uct of a contextual discourse in Western philosophy?Does
the "experience"requiretrue innocence or is feigned inno-
cence sufficient?Does the dilemma of representationand
discursiverepression- namely, that it is one of either infi-
nite regressor infinite repetition - allow one to manipulate
it consciously?If so, how do we defend both the mystery
and the didacticism of the experience?How do we defend
both its madness and its civilizing force?

193. See Kendall L. Walton,
"How Remote are Fictional
Worlds from the Real World?"
Journalof Aesthetics and Art Criti-
cism 37 (1978): 20.
194. Maquet, The Aesthetic Expe-
rience, 21.
195. Ibid.
196. Ibid., 32.
197. Ibid., 251.
198. Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea,
trans. I Alexander (1938; New
York:New Directions, 1969), 16-
17.
199. Jenkins, Art and the Human
Enterprise, 145.
200. See Podro, The Critical His-
torians of Art.
201. I apologize for this tongue
twisting, but I feel that words like
"history"and "theory"are, in
today's intellectual climate, far too Figure Credit
static and stereotyped to be used
1. From the collection of the Lou-
as if we knew what they mean. I
vre, Paris. Reprinted from Andre
would have liked to begin this sen-
Malraux,The Pyschologyof Art:
tence describing what I have done
The Twilight of the Absolute (New
as, "Thinking about the historicity York:Pantheon Books, 1950).
and repressed theoricity of theo-
retical speculations about the
'theoretical' understanding of vi-
sual things ..." Decorum, and my
editor, prevented me from writing
in this manner.

69