Empathy, form, and space1994

The six essays presented in this volume afford the English-reading public the first serious and considered overview of the uniquely Germanic movements of psychological aesthetics and Kunstwissenschaft.

Written in the last three decades of the nineteenth century - at a time when the proliferation of knowledge and dramatic social and economic change had combined to force the issue of art's exhaustion of its traditional historical themes - these seminal writings helped to redesign the theoretical foundation of modern artistic practice. The earlier metaphysical problem of how we structure and understand form and space in the natural world in essence gave way to the aesthetic problem of how we might appreciate and actually exploit pure form and pure space artistically, in painting, sculpture,...