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Formalism, Disciplinarity and the Future of Art History
In historiography to date, Wölfflin’s formalism has been discussed primarily as a problem of intellectual history, and as a springboard for exploring important methodological questions of art history. However, as the first volumes of the Gesammelte Werke have highlighted incisively, Wölfflin’s project was not purely an intellectual one, but equally driven by strategic considerations about the future of academia. An apostate cultural historian, author of a philosophical PhD, who had also written on Swiss literature and toyed with the idea of writing on ancient art, Wölfflin‘s turn to art historical formalism was a deliberate and strategic move. By focusing exclusively on “form”, Wölfflin (like other scholars of his generation) strove to discriminate “art history” from adjacent fields of study such as History, Classics, or different area studies, who equally claimed the history of art as part of their remit. Wölfflin’s methodology thus was a deliberate attempt at “boundary work” (Thomas Gieryn) that staked the claim for art history as an independent academic subject.
In a first step, my paper aims to reconstruct these debates about disciplinary borders in the 1910s. The situation at the University of Munich (where Wölfflin held the chair in art history since 1912) can serve as an ideal test case for demonstrating the fluidity of disciplinary boundaries at the time: the history of art was not yet the exclusive prerogative of a discipline named “art history”.
In a second step, I aim to use the debates of the 19010s as a starting point for interrogating current discussions about the place of art history. In recent decades, art historians have robustly defended the discipline’s importance in an increasingly visual world; staffing and student numbers have grown as the field branched out into new realms such as ‘Bildwissenschaft’ and world art history. More recently, however, new emerging fields such as environmental humanities or health humanities have made claims for a new “transdisciplinary”, problem-led organisation of research. Increasingly this also affects pedagogies in the humanities, with “domain knowledge” being seen as of secondary importance. For art history, this inevitably leads to crucial questions about whether and to what extent the disciplinary legacies of Wölfflin and others will serve us well in a changing intellectual climate.
Biography
Hans Christian Hönes is Senior Lecturer in art history at the University of Aberdeen. He has published extensively on art historiography since the eighteenth century, and has written and edited books on: Heinrich Wölfflin (Wölfflins Bild-Körper, 2011), eighteenth-century antiquarianism (Kunst am Ursprung, 2014), and Aby Warburg (Tangled Paths. A Life of Aby Warburg, 2024). His work has been supported by numerous grants, most recently a Research Collections Fellowship 2021/22 (on British art historiography) and a Collaborative Project Grant 2024 (on women art historians in Britain), both by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
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