retreat into the world of the inert

[alice wellintown]

In Abstraction & Empathy Wihelm equates Naturalism with Empathy for
the natural world, and Abstraction with a lack of faith in th organic
world. Abstreaction is a retreat into the world of the inert.

 Worringer claimed that the use of abstract line in geometrical
ornament offered comfort to primitive humanity because it excluded all
traces of organic life. Abstract form provided a refuge from the
challenges of the organic world. The primitives stood “so lost and
spiritually helpless amidst the things of the external world”. This
yearning was the volition of the primitives to create abstract art,
style and ornament. Early in his book Wooringer observed a parallel
between primitive and modern society. However, abstract for Worringer
did not mean non representational art, rather abstract was the name of
art he considered anti-naturalistic that could not be explained
through the means of empathy. Worringer therefore placed for instance,
gothic art, primitive ornament, Egyptian relief sculpture under the
same umbrella. Worringer claimed that these styles did represent a
feeling or a movement rather than the actual stylized object. Gothic
architecture was for instance the representation of growing nature and
spiritual fulfillment rather then mean to be a direct representation
of nature. Abstraction was both the ultimate achievement of advanced
civilizations and a basic human urge: exotic and foreign, it remained
the most fundamental form of creativity. Worringer characterized the
urge to abstraction as “the attempt to rescue the single object of the
outside world from its connection with and dependence on other things,
to snatch it from the course of events, to render it absolute”.
Worringer contended that space was the greatest enemy of visual
abstraction.

http://www.liselottjohnsson.com/blog/?p=75

Worringer, Wilhelm

http://www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org/worringerw.htm