Preliminary Remarks to the Work of Art between Scholarship and Worldview

Abstract

The essay is based on the conference session “The Work of Art between Scholarship and Worldview,’ chaired by Martin Warnke, at the Twelfth Congress of German Art Historians (1970). The first part comprises his opening statement, explaining the session’s aim to denounce the ideological content and the false claim to scholarly objectivity in German art history before and after 1945. This is followed by a reflection on the need for a reprocessing of art-historical material. Warnke concludes that the “immature” state of the discipline is partly due to the emigration of Germany’s best art historians during the 1930s, and that the “corpse” left behind needs to be examined.

KEYWORDS:

• ideology critique
• German art history
• historiography
• Marxist art history