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Abstract
This is a critical analysis of “popular” art history written in Germany by professional art historians for the general public after 1945. Drawing on more than one hundred quotations, Warnke identifies a focus on the relationship of “the particular to the general, of the thing to the concept, of the detail to the composition,” which is consistently viewed as one of subjugation and exertion of authority. The artwork is no longer interpreted as an agent of emancipation but as a vehicle of the prevailing order. Militant vocabulary and metaphors of power abound in these texts, revealing an ideological bias within German art history and exposing the discipline’s claim to scholarly objectivity as illusory.