Prof. Dr. Gregor Stemmrich; Dr. Georg Vasold

In a broadening of our field of investigation, which was previously confined to the years around 1900, we shall now analyse earlier phases of the study of non-Western art as well as those immediately following the turn of the century. Contrary to the often expressed opinion that German-language research into world art only commenced with A. Riegl and J. Strzygowski, preliminary scholarly approaches to Asiatic and Latin American art, in particular, can already be found around the 1850s, e.g. in the work of F. Kugler and A. Springer. Through their attempts to introduce geographical and ethnopsychological approaches into art history, they hoped to launch new methods appropriate for the understanding and description of ‘foreign’ artefacts. These early studies were taken up again after the First World War and correspondingly modified in line with the altered political circumstances. Subproject 1 investigates the “revaluation of art history” (O. Beyer, 1923) postulated at this time and developed in most cases in conjunction with a declared intellectual alignment with contemporary art. This revaluation was linked, among other things, with the demand that art history should no longer remain an essentially Eurocentric, desk-bound discipline. In the 1920s and 1930s this led numerous researchers to countries such as India (e.g. S. Kramrisch), Turkey (E. Diez) and Egypt (H. Zaloscer), where it was their goal to establish an art history that took a new direction insofar as it reacted to local knowledge traditions to a greater degree than in the past and thereby coined new terms.