A History of Art History

1910–1920

In only a single field of our civilization has the omnipotence of thoughts been retained, and that is in the field of art. Only in art does it still happen that a man who is consumed by desires performs something resembling the accomplishment of those desires and that what he does in play produces emotional effects—thanks to artistic illusion—just as though it were something real.

This is Sigmund Freud in Totem and Taboo (1913), a collection of four essays drawing comparisons between the spiritual life or mentality of “wild” peoples and modern neurotics. Characteristic of wild or prescientific societies, according to Freud, is the confidence that magical procedures carried out properly will relay mental states outward to reality. Modern, civilized peoples have lost confidence in such techniques. Magical thinking survives only in art. Already around 1800 the Romantic poets had asserted their dominion over reality. A century later artists, poets, and composers reasserted that ambition, describing themselves as an “advance scouting party,” an avant-garde, that would show the way forward. In 1910 magical world-shapers faced even longer odds than in 1800, for the illusions generated by art—which are by no means limited to the simulations of appearances created by the painter’s skill, as Freud implied—could hardly compete with the industrial and military technologies beleaguering the minds and bodies of laborers and consumers as well as the wild people visited by Aby Warburg, the under-technologized on the Indian reservations of the American Southwest. Not to mention the ingratiating entertainments devised for the uncultivated and unsophisticated, the popular forms of art mostly, though not always, disdained by the avant-garde artists.

Some artists in France and Germany called themselves “savages”: the Fauves and “die Wilden.” But the vanguard was also labeled, at least in Germany, in the field of literature, a New or Neo-Romanticism (Neu-Romantik). In the manifesto he published together with Franz Marc in 1912, the Blue Rider Almanac, the painter Wassily Kandinsky asserted: “At a certain point the necessities are ripe. That is, the creative spirit (which one could characterize as the abstract spirit) gains access to the soul, later the many souls, and brings about a longing, an inner impulse.” This impulse has “the power to create in the human spirit a new value.” The new value is then given material form. “This is the positive, the creative. This is the good. The white, fertilizing ray. This ray leads to evolution, to elevation.” So art will transform the world through form.

Franz Marc associated the artist with the misunderstood witches and seers of Europe’s past. As an example of a modern unheeded prophet he named, however, not an artist but an art historian: Julius Meier-Graefe, an influential German champion of the French Impressionists, who had tried to introduce “a completely unknown great master” to his contemporaries, the Greek painter of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, El Greco. According to Marc, Meier-Graefe’s rediscovery of El Greco, a painter admired in his own day but ignored in the nineteenth century, was greeted either by indifference or by enraged indignation. Also in this sense artists of the early twentieth century saw themselves repeating the project of the Romantics, who had rediscovered the painters of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance so disesteemed by the ancien régime academies.

The attitude of the avant-gardes to art historians was ambivalent. They relied on scholarship to deliver the overlooked examples from the past, not only El Greco but also the primitive woodcuts of late medieval Germany, as well as the treasures of the wide world. Marc, in a review of an exhibition of the Neue Künstlervereinigung (1910), mentions another recent exhibition in Munich, “Meisterwerke muhammedanischer Kunst,” a huge collation of over 3600 objects, influential on the modern historiography of so-called Islamic art. Marc ventures a comparison that no historicist would make: “It is a pity that one can’t hang Kandinsky’s great Composition [Composition II, 1910, now in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York] and other works next to the Islamic carpets in the exhibition.” Marc believes that no European decorative work can hold its own next to the carpets, yet he is prepared to make the thought experiment of juxtaposing the carpets to a painting by Kandinsky—and not to test the carpets but to test Kandinsky, who did in fact visit the exhibition. The result: “What artistic insight this rare painter contains! The great consistency of his colors is balanced by the freedom of his drawing.” Marc’s imaginary comparison is historically careless, but that was exactly the point. Marc did not fear the reproach of the scholar who would point out that the carpets had symbolic functions in the societies that produced them and that their patterns were not freely chosen like Kandinsky’s forms but handed down by tradition and governed by rules of combination. The Blue Rider artists admired so-called folk art, for example the Bavarian reverse paintings on glass, as samples of a past embedded in the present. Kandinsky and Marc reproduced on the first page of the Almanac a woodcut from the Ritter vom Turn, a profane text published in Basel in 1495, which they had seen reproduced in Wilhelm Worringer’s book on early German book illustration (1912). In the Almanac everything was gathered on the same level, as if pinned to a bulletin board. Page layout was a new museology, new again, new as the early printed books, like the Ritter vom Turn, combining type and image. Marc in an essay of 1912 named Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy one of the two books, alongside Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art, laying the groundwork for a “new dogmatics of the ‘republic of the soul.’ ”

Marc saw the previous century as purely negative. It produced no style of its own. Scholarship had undermined the collective beliefs that sustained powerful styles: “Scholarship works negatively, au détriment de la religion. … Artistic style …, the inalienable possession of the old times, collapsed catastrophically in the mid-nineteenth century.” Bereft of their myths, the creators of the nineteenth century could only rummage through history, trying on styles as if they were costumes. No avant-garde artist wished to produce stylized rebuses of prior art. Futurists, Cubists, and Constructivists were even more thorough than Kandinsky and Marc in their repudiation of the past. The least pious were the protagonists of the various Dada moments. Marcel Janco said that Tristan Tzara was accustomed to begin his morning prayers with the words “I don’t even want to know whether there has been anyone before me.” “We aimed,” Janco wrote, “to make a fresh start, beginning with the babble of infants, and to constitute a new plastic language.” Hugo Ball imagined language starting over again: he said in the Dada Manifesto (1916): “I don’t want words that other people have invented.” In comparison, the destruction of the forms developed by centuries of painting was child’s play. Dada could be interpreted as the effort of art to spring the grip of art-historical thinking, once and for all. Dada exceeds the capacities of the discipline.

The Blaue Reiter artists were still participating in the life of historical form, as were Picasso and Matisse. A Dada artist, by contrast, would have asked what distinguished Kandinsky and Marc’s predilections for the primitive, the vernacular, and the exotic from nineteenth-century eclecticism. The difference was that the historicists of the previous century were interested in alternative systems of art. Gothic architecture had a system; Japanese woodcuts had a system. But Marc and Kandinsky were drawn not to systems but to anarchic representation—the early woodcuts, the folk art—where nothing interfered, supposedly, with the expression of the artist’s intuition of spirit. Kandinsky objected to all rules and blamed art history for sustaining them: “All those rules that were discovered already in the earliest art as well as the rules discovered later, and to which the art historians assign such exaggerated value, are not general rules: they do not lead to art.” Kandinsky is saying, in effect, that modern art-historical scholarship amounted to nothing more than a perpetuation of premodern academicism. The way to escape the rules was to abandon representation. Magic required form. Traditional magic—the Persian carpets, for example—looked to rules to generate the correct forms. The new magic—Kandinsky’s—recreated the form anew each time.

Kandinsky, like the Impressionists before him, and like the avant-gardists in France or Russia, was not intimidated by the loss of an unquestioned collective style. He believed that the nineteenth century lacked a style of its own because it lacked a content of its own. Now there was a content: newness itself, the promise of the new century. That content dictated the style. Kandinsky did not hesitate to designate his own style as the “necessary” style of his time. Each epoch, he conceded, even his own, has at its disposal a limited repertoire of forms. But he was prepared to convert the relativity of style into an opportunity: “Form is always temporal, that is, relative, because it is never more than the medium currently necessary through which today’s revelation makes itself known, sounds forth.” This style did not emerge out of the collectivity, it was his very own style, and yet it was as authentic as the Gothic.

The art of the Blaue Reiter was accessible to many art historians, as was Cubism to the extent that it derived from Cézanne, and as was Picasso’s engagement with African tribal masks. Wilhelm Worringer was well aware of the Blaue Reiter artists’ interest in his writings. In 1911 a group of German artists published a protest against recent critical tendencies, including favoritism of French art and primitivism. Worringer was asked by the Blaue Reiter artists to contribute a text to their formal response, a pamphlet entitled Im Kampf um die Kunst (In the Struggle for Art). In Worringer’s, Riegl’s, and Franz Marc’s schemas, primitives and Orientals play similar roles. Worringer’s repudiation of European naturalism basically repeats Schopenhauer’s invocation of the Vedic and Buddhist concept of the “Veil of Maya” or illusion. The West turns to the East in order to expose Western blindness. The arts of the early Middle Ages or of Asia reveal that the sensible world is a deception. This is a twist on Kantian constructionism. If the world is only our own mind projected outward, then that world is to be rejected—not because it is alien to us, as it was for primitives, but because it is too familiar. Abstraction is an attempt to replace the naïve or Kantian magical thinking of the modern Europeans, who do not even know they are thinking magically, with a sophisticated artistic thinking that is prepared to venture into self-alienation.

The response of Hans Tietze, the Viennese historian of Renaissance art, to the Blaue Reiter is instructive. In a text published in 1912, Tietze gave the Blaue Reiter his blessing but also hoisted a warning flag about the artists’ unscholarly wanderings in the past, which he interprets, wrongly, as their attempt to reassure us that their campaign is not so innovative after all, that they “weave threads that lead back into the darkest depths of mankind.” In their attempt to construct an ancestry, they do not seem to realize that the “overrunning (Überwuchern) of form by expression” in folk art is a result of incompetence. Primitive and Gothic art are connected in myriad ties to spiritual worlds completely alien to modernity. Thus are marked the limits of the historian’s sympathy for avant-gardist sovereignty over the entirety of experience. Freud, too, was wary of regression. In 1917 he said that trench warfare was only possible because the primitive in man had not yet been subdued. But even Freud and Tietze would have agreed with Worringer that the wild seeing graphed by the rebel artists was not the sign of technical deficiency but of a reoriented artistic will.

Hans Tietze and his wife Erica Tietze-Conrat were the most likely of scholars to embrace the new tendencies in art. They were close to the major Viennese modernists including Oskar Kokoschka, from whom they commissioned in 1909 a double self-portrait. Exiled, the Tietzes sold the picture to the Museum of Modern Art upon arriving in New York in 1939. A pupil of Riegl and Wickhoff, like her husband, Erica Tietze-Conrat was the first woman to receive a doctorate in art history from the University of Vienna, in 1905. Of course, no teaching position was open to her. (Not until 1971 was a woman, Renate Wagner-Rieger, appointed professor of art history in Vienna.) In 1911 Tietze-Conrat published an essay on an exhibition of women artists at the Wiener Secession, mostly painters of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Here she reflected on why women had been so long excluded from the history of art, and on why that need not be the case in the future.

The art historians most likely to learn from the new art were those who saw form as the key to art history’s self-differentiation from general history. Form, they believed, is what art history knows. The inquiry into form postpones a decoding of the artwork that would reveal content as merely local. The Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945) put it this way: art history typically understands art as expression. The artist, the society, the epoch express themselves in paintings and buildings and furniture and fashion. Every individual, every nation, every period has its own style. But an art history that understands art as expression or communication will end up depreciating form as mere rhetoric, the clothing of content. The description of historical styles, paradoxically, is biased toward content. To correct this bias, heeding the reproaches of the artists, Wölfflin wrote the Grundbegriffe der Kunstgeschichte (Basic Concepts of Art History; usually translated as Principles of Art History) (1915). Here he concedes that the art historian will be unable to assess artistic quality, which is never a variable of an extra-artistic term. For this reason “it is not easy to interest artists in historical questions about style.” The artistic problem, from their point of view, is always the same. The artists scorn the art historians who compare finished products but do not enter imaginatively into the crisis of the artistic problem and so “cling to the non-artistic side of human nature.” His Principles of Art History is the most influential book by the most influential art historian of the twentieth century.

Wölfflin was converted to art history by the lectures of Jacob Burckhardt at Basel. His dissertation of 1886, Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture, was a brief, urgent meditation on the psychosomatic processing of form, in tune with the empathy theorists of the day. Here Wölfflin cultivated a youthful, “pathetic” mode of writing matched to a disquiet he detected in bodies and forms. Wölfflin’s first full-scale book, Renaissance and Baroque (1888), introduced the theme that structured all his writings, the riddle of the two “high points” on the curve of European art, the early sixteenth century and the mid-seventeenth century, the one disrupting the equilibrium achieved by the other and yet both equally eminent. Wölfflin taught at Munich, Basel, Berlin, Munich again, and finally Zurich, reaching thousands of listeners, including many susceptible students—among them Worringer—as well as a general public. His books reproduced the relaxed, conversational tone of the lectures as well as the strictly formal and comparative approach to the works. These were practical exercises in seeing, expecting of the audience—like Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting—no learning or preparation. Wölfflin’s pages were uncluttered by erudition or exchanges with other scholars. The fantastical, anthropomorphizing descriptions and the notes of anxiety struck in the dissertation are banished. Now the tone is as sovereign and balanced as the very paintings and buildings discussed in Classic Art: An Introduction to the Italian Renaissance (1899). The originality of Wölfflin’s readings of form is masked by the rhetoric of authorial mastery.

The book of 1915, the Principles, calls out five aspects of form, each structured by a pair of opposed terms that chart an irreversible development from relative harmony to relative dissonance, from the tactile to the visual, from rule to freedom. The sets of terms are: linear and painterly, plane and recession, closed and open form, multiplicity and unity, absolute and relative clarity. The book expounds each set of paired terms, one by one, through descriptive comparisons of paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, and buildings. The terms are presented as the “most general forms of representation” or beholding, as if they would serve for any possible art-historical task. The examples, though, are all drawn from the stock of European masterworks, Italian, German, Flemish, Dutch, and French, of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The first term in each pair corresponds to the art of the High Renaissance and the second to the art of the Baroque. Wölfflin expresses few preferences; every work he adduces is a work of high quality.

The Principles of Art History was published in wartime, and in the teeth of an artistic revolution stalled by that war. One might well interpret the two-note melody of Renaissance and Baroque, Wölfflin’s constant narrative theme, as a model of the entire history of post-medieval European art, from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century: once there was harmony, now there is dissonance. The new art of modernity, since Impressionism, would be cast as another unsettled “Baroque” that follows the lengthy career of composed or good form, from 1500 to 1800. The avant-gardes repudiated all closed or balanced systems. The “bad” form they developed was the grimace of a new artwork open to a new society, to new viewers, to new realities. Such a reading would seem to expose Wölfflin as an anti-avant-gardist, for his narrative corrals the avant-gardes within a preestablished narrative schema, so questioning their claims to absolute singularity. But the same reading also supports the avant-garde project, for it reveals apparent bad form to be a modality of good form.

The span of Wölfflin’s own career, beginning in the late 1880s and extending into the new century, embraced the third high point on the curve of art history, even if Wölfflin himself never put it that way. The art of painting in Europe attained its zenith with Degas, Cézanne, Monet, and Renoir (all born between 1834 and 1841), with van Gogh (born 1853), with Wölfflin’s contemporaries Matisse, Munch, Kandinsky, and Mondrian (born between 1863 and 1872), with Picasso, Klee, and Beckmann (born in the 1880s). Wölfflin did not recognize photography as a catastrophe for painting, and understandably so, for the great painters of this epoch, his own, met the threat either by intensifying their own scrutiny of given form, leaving the lens far behind, or by delivering the results of new, nonobjective ways of seeing. Nor was Wölfflin troubled by painterly naturalism, for he saw that success in rendering the look of things was only a surface phenomenon and was more often than not only a reform of content, with no bearing on the underlying modes of representation. Wölfflin arrives finally at a formula recapitulating the premodern academic principle of imitatio, this time not as prescription but as description: “The effect of picture on picture is a much more important factor of style than what comes directly from the observation of nature.” His point is that even a modern artist, no longer academic, no longer respectful of pre-established styles, “finds certain ‘optical’ possibilities before him, to which he is bound. Not everything is possible at all times.”

Wölfflin’s fourth pair, multiplicity and unity, can exemplify the book. In primitive or pre-Renaissance art, he says, the parts do not yet function as free members of an organism. This only happens when the single detail—a feature in a face, a figure in a composition—comes to seem necessary to the whole. Renaissance art gathers the parts into a whole but represents the articulation and separateness of the parts. In Baroque art, by contrast, the individual component “loses its privileges.” If the classic work subordinates the parts, the Baroque work pulls them into an “endless flow.” Wölfflin’s use of these terms acknowledges his debt to Riegl. “All our previous categories have prepared this unity. The painterly is the deliverance of the forms from their isolation; the principle of depth is no other than the replacement of the sequence of separate layers by a uniform movement into depth, and the taste for the atectonic dissolves the rigid structure of geometric relations.”

In Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut of the Death of the Virgin (1510), Wölfflin observes, “the parts form a system in which each in its place appears conditioned by the whole and yet comes across as completely independent.” This “relationship of (relative) co-ordination of independent values” he calls the principle of multiple unity. A Baroque artist “would have avoided or made inconspicuous the meeting of pure horizontals and verticals.” “The component parts, whether the bed canopy or one of the apostles, would have been melted into an overall movement governing the whole picture.” Wölfflin’s contrasting example is Rembrandt’s etching of the same subject (1639):

The play of contrasts does not cease, but it hides itself away. The patently juxtaposed and clearly opposed are replaced by a single interwovenness. Pure oppositions are broken. The finite and the isolable disappear. From form to form, paths and bridges open over which the movement hastens forward uninterrupted.

The local perceptions yield general insights. “Classic art does not know the concept of the momentary, the pointed emphasis, or of intensification generally: it has a leisurely, broad quality. And though it proceeds from the whole, it does not reckon with first impressions.” You can excise the classic figure from its context and it does not collapse, whereas “the very existence of the baroque figure is thoroughly bound up with the other motives in the picture.” Such observations could easily be folded into a history of the functions and meanings of art. The indifference of the classic mode to the momentary and the subjective, for example, could be connected to the persisting alliance of early sixteenth-century painting with painting’s immemorial sacred functions, with chapels, altars, and liturgies. Wölfflin knew that, and as the adviser of dozens of dissertations of every methodological stripe knew that not all histories of art could or should be pure histories of form. Wölfflin was a great reader of art-historical scholarship: he wrote more than 150 book reviews. (Aby Warburg, book-oriented, wrote none.) Wölfflin’s observations also contribute to iconographical analysis. There are many remarks on content embedded in the Principles. Wölfflin points out for example that Renaissance depictions of the story of Susanna show the prurient Elders watching or approaching. Only in the Baroque is the emphasis shifted to the drama of their arrival and address. It was the same with Samson and Delilah: first the hero sleeps in the lap of the temptress, later the attack itself is shown. But Wölfflin understood that the power and reach of his concept of form depended on its indifference to local content. He also knew that a contextual history of art that is blind to form is, finally, of little worth.

Two paradoxes maintain the tension in Wölfflin’s system. Without that tension his book would not have earned the recognition it did beyond art history, among historians of literature and music, for instance, throughout the middle decades of the century. Principles of Art History was translated into Spanish (1924), Russian (1930), English (1932), Japanese (1936), French (1953), Italian (1953), and seventeen other languages. There have been twenty German-language editions. Wölfflin’s unbalanced pairs mark out a theory of art. Yet he himself denied that his book was about art. This is the first paradox. He aimed to resolve the antitheses of expression versus quality, or imitation versus decoration, by taking as his topic not art but modes of representation. His books may resemble histories of art but in fact amount to a history of seeing: “It was not the art of the sixteenth and seventeenth century which was to be analyzed—that is something richer and more alive—only the schema and the visual and formal possibilities within which art had to remain.” This latter sentence is a masterstroke. Wölfflin pretends to hold no special stake in art, as if he had just happened to choose famous artworks to illustrate his history of seeing but could have chosen any depictions. In this way he deflects the objection that he is only offering lessons in art appreciation. To those who do not wish art history to be anything less than art appreciation, meanwhile, he sends a secret signal. The phrase “something richer and more alive” indicates that he is well apprised of art’s rarity, well aware that art is more than the mere reflection of the mental and perceptual habits that his book has been chasing. He defers the real project of art history. For now he is content to assert that “vision itself has its history and the uncovering of these ‘optical layers’ must be considered the most elementary task of art history.” This sentence, too, is a masterstroke, connecting Wölfflin to Riegl and opening a clear path to an historicist scholarship aiming to coordinate ways of seeing with the deep structure of collective life, or what could be called mentality. Wölfflin, classicist and elitist, formulates the basic axiom of a future visual culture studies. He manages to keep faith with the relativism of the nineteenth century even as he recenters art history on beautiful form.

Wölfflin in the Principles was not saying that form is timeless, but neither was he saying that form is bound to the rest of life. He was saying that form is all the content you need; and this is why his art history is the classic art history.

The second paradox structuring Wölfflin’s thought is built on the first. “People at all times see what they wish to see.” In other words, vision is not innocent, like the poor camera lens, but interested, selective, empathic. And yet “that does not exclude the possibility that through all the changes a law remains operative.” In each pair of “modes of representation,” the second mode follows logically from the first. This is exactly what Theodor W. Adorno said in the passage from his Aesthetic Theory quoted at the beginning of the present book. Harmony devolves into dissonance, and never the reverse. This law of the declension of form provides the internal resistance to an expressionist or cultural historical approach to art. It makes no difference whether forms are delivering ideas or stories, picturing lived life, or registering mentality, as a “history of seeing” would have it. Form in each case will march to its own drummer.

In the conclusion to the Principles, Wölfflin notes that the art of the years around 1800 seems to defy the law. He is speaking of the medieval revival as much as of Neoclassicism. Here order—the linear styles of Flaxman, Canova, the Nazarenes—appears to emerge out of disorder. Wölfflin’s answer to this puzzle is that the career of form was interrupted by an unnatural emphasis on content. The art of 1800 was the result of a “revaluation of being, in every domain.” Ethical and political preferences were allowed to shape the assessment of form. “Diderot contests in Boucher not only the artist but also the man. Pure human sentiment seeks the simple.” Wölfflin quotes Friedrich Schlegel, who also favored the “good-natured simplicity … which I am inclined to regard as the original character of mankind: that is the style of the old painting, the only style that pleases me.” Content, or a real principle fetched from a place outside of art, is set up as a rival to the form-creating imagination.

Wölfflin considers historicism, or imaginative sympathy with obsolete forms and the forms of life they register, a distraction from the project of art. The year 1800 was marked by an excess of ambition. The artist-magician believed that he could intervene in reality. Wölfflin’s stance on the art of his own moment is now clearer. One can read his words on the art of 1800 as a warning. The nineteenth century had acquiesced in the claims of extra-artistic content; the twentieth century risked an unconditional surrender. The modern conviction that artistic form could shape reality had just been described by Freud as a neurotic superstition about the magical potency of form. Freud was well aware that the artist, the “man,” as Wölfflin puts it, could persist into the artwork. Leonardo da Vinci’s childhood traumas left traces in his paintings (Freud’s “A Childhood Memory,” 1910). Michelangelo’s biography penetrates upward into his style, giving psychoanalysis a chance to identify the enduring or mythic meaning of his art (Freud’s “The Moses of Michelangelo,” 1914). But Freud was also wary of art’s tendency to confuse reality and unreality. If Leonardo was a neurotic, then he needed to be cured. Freud, like his near-contemporary Wölfflin, was biased toward order and composition: composition of the artwork, composition of the personality. This bias supported a sequestering and marginalization of avant-garde art, whose basic principle was mistrust of composition. But then Freud was not an avant-garde thinker. Like Aby Warburg, he saw the potential for disorder in the human personality but sought to contain that potential.

Heinrich Wölfflin, like Alois Riegl, believed that art realizes its possibilities when ethical and political exigencies are kept at bay. For much of history, reality was encroaching, taking up too much room. Power was assigning imagination its tasks. Liberal modernity cleared out a free zone for the imagination, promising an end to the conflict between content and form. In modernity, the threat of hostile belief systems had been neutralized; superstitions had been scattered; secularization had quenched the last religious wars. Alterity was easily absorbed into the modern European philosophies. To make his point about order and disorder, Wölfflin did not need to summon Romanesque art or Hindu art. One might guess on the evidence of his writings that Wölfflin was ignorant of art before Dürer, or beyond western Europe. His books draw on the contents of the great princely collections of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. But of course Wölfflin was well aware of what he excluded. Historical awareness is written into the aesthetic of dissonance, for only by passing through clarity does one come to value unclarity.

Wölfflin contrasts rule and misrule. But the second term in each of his pairs is only an image of misrule. This is clear with architecture, which must be tectonic if it is to stand up. Atectonic architecture is a fiction. So is atectonic painting. “The tectonic style is the style of constrained order and clear adherence to rule: the atectonic, by contrast, is the style of more or less concealed adherence to rule and of unrestrained order.” Atectonic art “plays with the semblance of lawlessness. It plays, for in the aesthetic sense, of course, all artistic form is necessary form.” The analysis of form takes art offline. The first avant-gardes made the mistake of taking aesthetic play too literally.

This is the moment when art history and art begin to diverge. Art historians will not be able to keep pace with art; artists will drift out of the range of premodern art. The modern artists who forget the history of art are the successors to Diderot and the Encyclopedia. They accept the modern world as they find it and react directly to it. Freud urges the individual to correct her own history; the avant-garde artist wants to correct our collective history.

Wölfflin did not invest in painterly abstraction, but those who did, all around him, believed that abstraction released form into a free flow, from picture to picture, as Wölfflin had written. The painter and writer Roger Fry said as much in his influential essays of the 1910s; so did Clive Bell in his book Art (1914). The literary theorist Roman Jakobson in an essay of 1919, “Futurism,” mocked a critic who misunderstood abstract painting. That critic did not grasp that there is nothing to grasp but perception itself. “For him, perception that is valuable in and of itself does not exist. He prefers paper currency to gold: currency, with its conventionally assigned value seems to him more ‘literary.’ ” Representation is deception, according to Jakobson, while abstraction recuperates real value and restores art to an honest relation to reality. Avant-garde art defictionalizes.

A third and unexpected paradox presents itself. Wölfflin’s formulas would seem to prepare an indictment of modernism—all the art produced since 1915, basically—as a giving way of form in the face of the suddenly more urgent claims of reality. Form defers to content. Art answers non-artistic reality; artistic reality is diminished. But the same formulas also vindicate modernism by supporting the axiom of the irreversibility of the avant-garde rupture. For Wölfflin’s principle of principles is that once there is disorder, order can never be restored. The reverse entropy of 1800 was unartistic. So too would be a twentieth-century return to wholeness and clarity. This paradox is resolved once one recognizes that the declension from discipline to indiscipline has been fatal for the art of painting, but not for art.