The birth of modernism out of the spirit of abstraction; a prolegomena of the problem of literary and artistic Expressionism
Abstract
In the atmosphere of secularization accompanied by the powerful experience of rootlessness and estrangement of world reality during the period before World War I, the concept of abstraction, as defined by Wilhelm Worringer, was an attempt to determine modern art in a new, spiritually religious way. Worringer's theory of abstraction had an exceptional influence of the self-apprehension and self-definition of modern art and the artistic creation of the first decade of the 20th century.
From the perspective of Worringer's theory of abstraction art was perceived as a space of "spiritual depth" and transcendence in a period when it was perceived as a crisis of disintegration of reality, the mind and a loss of belief. In this situation "abstraction" becomes a synonym of the quasi-religious "internal necessity" (innere Notwendigkeit) of artistic creation and the "sense of the world".