art as an expression

ART AS AN EXPRESSION OF THE WILL TO
CREATE
How did the style of aesthetic objects – whether sculpture, painting
or architecture – actually come about? This was a central concern
for the Austrian art historian and art conservationist Aloïs Riegl
(1858–1905). Riegl’s answer was to formulate the idea of ‘kunstwollen’
– understood as the ‘immanent artistic drive’ (Ostrow 2001:
7). This artistic impulse defined the ideas, practices and styles of art,
but it was also culturally specific and not readily transferable in its
original form to other societies. Riegl believed that artistic style
could not simply be reduced to technological cause and effect, but
that it conveyed the actual world-view and attitudes of those who
made it. This idea was initially used to account for changes in decorative
motifs (Problems of Style: Foundations for a History of
Ornament (1893)), but was later extended in scope in Riegl’s second
book, Late Roman Art Industry (1901).
The principle of ‘kunstwollen’ was subsequently adapted by the
German art historian Wilhelm Worringer (1881–1965). In his polemical
study Abstraction and Empathy (1908),Worringer argued that
stylised and geometric art was part of an alienated response by the
people of older civilisations and cultures to their surroundings. By
contrast, naturalistic-looking or classical art, such as Greek or
Roman sculpture, was symptomatic of a relatively harmonious or
empathetic relationship between peoples and their environment.
Worringer’s thesis was widely circulated among the German and
British avant-garde, and was of particular influence on the ideas of
T.E. Hulme (1883–1917), Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) and
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891–1915).