Frances to Michael and others... The original 1908 essay and theory "Abstraction and Empathy" by Wilhelm Worringer seems to be continually held in high regard, going through several editions and issues up to at least 1967 despite some flaws noted by many reviewers. It has not however been partially reprinted in most of the leading collections on art and aesthetics. The one popular anthology that has reprinted an extract is the 1973 fourth edition of "A Modern Book of Esthetics" by Melvin Rader, and although there have been at least five editions of this book ranging from 1935 to 1979 only the fourth edition has the essay. My curiosity is why it is missing from the other leading anthologies, and why it was dropped from other editions of the carrying anthology.
In any event, the essay is well mentioned in the 1972 book "Psychology of the Arts" by Hans and Shulamith Kreitler in regard to space and distance and symbol. They attack the theory for wrongly attempting to classify art according to whether works evoke a feeling of empathy or apathy, and for fantastically speculating about the psychical origins of abstraction in art. They do however applaud the theory for emphasizing abstraction as a sound albeit illusory means for introducing law into chaos, and positing control over complexity, and offering relief to tension, and allowing prediction into the unknown, and situating the self as master of a brute world. The book is being read by me now for the first time in some detail. If any worthy observations emerge from me that have not been covered on the list as yet they will be posted with an invitation to correct them. It will be interesting to see upon reading the essay if abstraction in art is well divided into formal syntactic abstraction, and referential semantic abstraction with its figurative distortion being held as a kind of abstraction; and if formal abstraction drifts into "empathetic" geometric abstraction on the one hand that in the extreme can be boring, and "apathetic" biomorphic abstraction on the other hand that in the extreme can be confusing. It is further assumed that any tendency for the theory to drift toward instrumental pragmatic abstraction would deal mainly with aspects of art in history.
