Wilhelm Worringer

Who was Wilhelm Worringer?

Wilhelm Worringer was a German art historian. He is known in connection with expressionism. Through his influence on T. E. Hulme his ideas had an effect on early British modernism, especially vorticism.

His best-known work is Abstraction and Empathy, his doctoral thesis. In it he argued that there were two main kinds of art: art of "abstraction" and art of "empathy".

Worringer was influential because he saw abstract art as being in no way inferior to "realist" art, and worthy of respect in its own right. This was critical justification for the increased use of abstraction in pre-war European art. Worringer coined the term Expressionism. He taught at the University of Bonn, where Heinrich Lützeler was one of his students.

He posited a direct relationship between the perception of art and the individual. His claim that "We sense ourselves in the forms of a work of art" led to a formula, "The aesthetic sense is an objectivized sense of the self." He also stated, "Just as the desire for empathy as the basis for aesthetic experience finds satisfaction in organic beauty, so the desire for abstraction finds its beauty in the life-renouncing inorganic, in the crystalline, in a word, in all abstract regularity and necessity."