DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-675825
title: Kunstwissenschaft and the “primitive”: excursions in the history of art history, 1879–1914

description: During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, artifacts of material culture from non-European sites, newly excavated European material, and examples of applied arts accumulated in European collections, especially in Germany. The encounter with non-classical objects brought the “primitive” into focus in the recently institutionalized discipline of art history, which simultaneously drew into its orbit paradigms from ethnology and psychology. This dissertation examines the intersection of these developments: the growing importance of ethnology and “primitive” objects, the attempt to make German-speaking art history “scientific” and rigorous, and the focus on the psychology of art making and perception. It examines the dynamics of ensuing debates in the works of an interconnected group of art theorists and historians. ❧ During this period, the “primitive” was broadly conceived as encompassing traits and forms typical of “early” or primordial artistic production. Foremost among them was ornament, theorized as one of the earliest products of aesthetic activity. In these “earliest” and “simplest” works, the lawfulness of art and its later development seemed most vivid. It included objects and characteristics from a number of areas: prehistoric artifacts, aspects of the minor arts, so-called Northern ornament, and ornamented implements of contemporary “primitive” peoples. ❧ The “primitive” sharpened problems already important to art historians and to a field in the process of defining its boundaries and methods in conversation with adjacent disciplines. By the beginning of the period under consideration, the concept of Wissenschaft, or rigorous scholarship, had been transformed from an earlier nineteenth-century notion into one increasingly influenced by natural scientific methods, specialized research, and the demands of modernization. By the end of this period, there was a further shift as many art historians promoted a Kunstwissenschaft, or scientific study of art, in which empirical facts were deployed in the effort to discover systematic principles. ❧ Much research on “primitive” art and ornament was conducted by scholars on the margins of art history in dialogue with formally trained art historians. The former examined the “beginnings” of art and asserted “scientific” personae and techniques. They stressed the material and technical origins of “primitive” art and ornament, the importance of symbolic meanings, and mimetic techniques. Art historians also adopted aspects of such techniques and personae as they derived from “primitive” objects laws of art’s coming-into-being and inserted these into an uninterrupted history of its development. They stressed, however, the perceptual worlds of makers and beholders and attempted to endow the making and experience of art and ornament with psychological complexity by foregrounding artistic will. Some posited an empathetic relationship between the art historian and work of art. “Primitive” art functioned as a meeting point of methods and values and highlighted the interface between empirical study and attention to the mental lives of makers and viewers.