Wilhelm Worringer

Wilhelm Worringer (13 January 1881 in Aachen – 29 March 1965 in Munich) 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" (which was associated with a more 'primitive' world view) and art of "empathy" (which was associated with realism in the broadest sense of the word, and applied to European art since the Renaissance).

Worringer was influential because he saw abstract art (for example, Islamic 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. (see Rank comment below) 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."

His work was widely discussed and influenced Klee amongst others. He is credited by philosopher Gilles Deleuze in A Thousand Plateaus as being the first person to see abstraction 'as the very beginning of art or the first expression of an artistic will.'

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