Texts & documents

"In 1795, in the midst of the revolutionary turmoil in France, Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand was named professor of architecture at the newly created Ecole Polytechnique. Durand seized the occasion to propose far-reaching changes for the teaching of architecture. Not only do his lectures emphasize utilitarian and economic values in the practice of architecture, but they also assail the rationale behind the bulwarks of classical architectural training: beauty, proportionality, and symbolism - in short, the entire Vitruvian tradition."--BOOK JACKET.

"Published in 1764 to wide acclaim, Johann Joachim Winckelmann's History of the Art of Antiquity transformed the study of art and its history. Erudite, systematic, historically grounded, and aesthetically inspired, this work by one of art history's founding fathers argued the unique importance of Greek ideals for the modern world, awakening a passion for the classical past that still enlivens the Western cultural imagination."--Book jacket.

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

A collection of essays by the art historian Aby Warburg, these essays look beyond iconography to more psychological aspects of artistic creation: the conditions under which art was practised; its social and cultural contexts; and its conceivable historical meaning.

Few individuals better chart the path of European Modernism in the first decades of this century than Adolf Behne (1885-1948). Before World War I, Behne was active in the German Werkbund. As a critic, he explored differences in high, commercial, and popular culture, publishing frequently in periodicals such as Der Sturm and Sozialistische Monatshefte. In the 1920s Behne went on to become one of the most incisive and eloquent theorists of Modernism and, together with Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius, organized the Arbeitsrat fur Kunst (Work council on the arts). Behne would also become an early critic of both the Werkbund and the Bauhaus. . Written in 1923, Behne's Modern Functional Building clarifies the concepts of German Modernism at their very inception, especially the crucial distinctions between functionalism, rationalism, and utilitarianism. In this text, Behne advocates a functionalism that is not technocentric, but is comparable to the social ideas espoused by Max Weber and Georg Simmel. This broad concern with functionalism signifies a shift from older aristocratic value systems to the everyday and common experience as paradigmatic.