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A collection of selected works by the German art historian, corresponding member of the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Professor Wilhelm Worringer (1881–1965), whose writings brought about a revolution in the study of the visual arts in the early twentieth century, has been published by the Kyiv-based humanities publisher Dukh i Litera
16.07.2026
The volume, Abstraction and Empathy: Selected Works on Art Theory, was prepared by Corresponding Member of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine and Professor Andrii Puchkov, who rendered into Ukrainian two treatises, Abstraction and Empathy: On the Psychology of Style (1906) and Form in the Gothic (1911), based on Worringer’s authorised German- and English-language editions published during his lifetime.
The presence of multilayered semantic, contextual and factual (micro-, meso- and macro-level) commentary, together with a bibliography of Worringer’s published works and an extensive introductory essay, “Worringer Contemporary: Two Foundational Texts of European Scholarship on Art — Old, New, and Even the Newest,” makes the book an important scholarly and methodological event in the formation of approaches to studying theoretical problems in visual art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Given the lack in Ukraine of professional literature on the theory (rather than the history) of art, the publication of Worringer’s two treatises constitutes a timely and conceptually considered contribution to the formation of the Ukrainian art-historical discourse — alongside Academician Fedir Shmidt’s treatise Art: Its Psychology, Its Stylistics, Its Evolution, prepared and published by Professor A. Puchkov and Dukh i Litera in August 2023.