Parallelism of Opposites. The Pictorial Mythology of Hans von Marées and Its Interpreters: Wölfflin, Rintelen and Worringer
Abstract
At first sight the (seemingly) paradoxical relation between archaicity and modernity has been a distinctive feature of modernism since the attempts at aesthetics of "new mythology" during the Romantic era. The essay is a confrontation between the archaic and the modern, the artistic and the aesthetic status of myth in modernism, tradition and innovation in the work of the painter Hans von Marées (1837-1887) as analyzed by the art historians Heinrich Wölfflin, Wilhelm Worringer and above all Friedrich Rintelen (1881-1926).
These prominent figures in the early-twentieth-century art history wrote about Marées as early as the 1910s (in conection with his retrospectiveexhibitions). Rintelen who belonged to the expressionist generation just as Hans Jantzen and Wilhelm Worringer attracted wide attention with his monograph Giotto und die Giot-toapokryphen (1912) and thus achieved great renown in his field.
In 1914 at the age of thirty-three he suc-ceeded Heinrich Wölfflin to the prominent Chair of Art History, Jacob Burckhardt's heritage, at the Uni-versity of Basel. Rintelen - and Worringer, too - viewed art and artistic production in principle as a set of parallel contrasts.
In 1909 he articulated his artistic-aesthetic credo aptly in his treatise on Hans von Marées's work. This painter sought balance between the fundamental ideas of classical antiquity and mo-dernity.
He developed his own particular (modern) myth of "orange pickers" as a visual metaphor of a real artist.