080103 SE Form - The Career and Crisis of Pictorial Composition, Giotto to Greenberg and Beyond (2023S)

"Form" was a central category of artistic practices and art historical discourses of modernism. Emile Zola and Adolf von Hildebrand (the former in an essay on Édouard Manet, the latter in his art theoretical writing "Das Problem der Form", 1893) canonised the concept of the object as a mere pretext for artistic designs - of forms and colour on the surface. Heinrich Wölfflin again referred to Hildebrand and published his "Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe" in 1915. This standard work by Wölfflin has been published in 25 languages to date and was received worldwide as a scientific foundation of a history of styles in the visual arts, but was also criticised as "formalism". Around 1950, Clement Greenberg declared form to be the fundamental problem of contemporary art. While form was postulated and propagated as the central paradigm of modernism before and after 1945, this category is often considered obsolete today - but often plays a central role in "kunsthistorischer Praxis" ("art historical practice").
The seminar will not only deal with the antithesis of form and content, of stylistic history and iconography in (also Viennese) art historiography of the 20th century, but also with the prehistory and aftermath of this (apparent) "schism" (Thürlemann) of formalism and iconography/ iconology.

We will become acquainted with aspects of the ancient word "form", which was and is widely used in many languages, in antiquity and with Early Modern Uses of the concept of form, for example in Cennino Cennini, Leon Battista Alberti, Giorgio Vasari and in inscriptions on pictorial works. Since time immemorial, materials and forms have been distributed across the picture surface and the picture ground - but where and when did a vocabulary for the format-specific composition of forms emerge? Since when was form described as a composition on a surcae, a flat plane? Thus, following the chronological structure of the seminar, we will have arrived at the 17th and 18th centuries and then at the aforementioned discourses on form, style, and formalism in modernism an. Finally, what role do discourses of form play today in post-modern "Retromodernisms" ("Neo Geo" etc.) and in appropriations of "abstract art" in contemporary art?
The question of what meanings can be conveyed through form and pictorial composition, which is central to art historical studies interested in the media-specific, only "bildmögliche" (Max Imdahl) conveyance of meaning through works of art, was discussed particularly in the 1980s, for example by Max Imdahl, Werner Busch, Wolfgang Kemp, Felix Thürlemann - but also before that, for example by Johann Boloz Antoniewicz (1911) and Hanna Levy-Deinhard (1936). The (compulsory) reading of an essay by the literary scholar Renata Lachmann on style versus syncretism opens up alternatives to concepts of form as a norm and "the" style of an epoch or an individual and opens up perspectives on Syncretism, style pluralism, Informel-painting, "Anti-form", "the Formless" (Georges Bataille).

The (compulsory) reading of an essay by the literary scholar Renata Lachmann on style versus syncretism opens up alternatives to concepts of form as a norm and "the" style of an epoch or an individual and opens up perspectives on form quotation and form fragment, style pluralism and "anti-form".