Original scientific paper
Strategien der Ornamentierung : Einfühlungsdrang und Abstraktionsdrang in Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari und in der Grafik von Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Mirela Ramljak Purgar
; Center for Visual Studies, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
Although expressionism in art peaked before the First World War, expressio nist
stylistic practices that have been introduced into film at the end of the second decade
appear to be equally relevant, even revolutionary. In this article we have explored this
analogy with an example of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s prints from the first half of the
second decade of the 20th century on the one hand, and from reconstructed set designs
for the film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) on the other. It turns out that both have in
common – as we have termed it here – a “third ornamental line”, defined by Wilhelm
Worringer in his 1908 essay Abstraction and Emphaty as an urge for abstraction and
urge for emphaty. This would mean that in the works of the two artists, in Kirchner
earlier and in Warm later, a theoretical conceptual ambivalence called “expressive
abstrac tion” (Worringer) appeared at the beginning of the 20th century. In other
words, this means that the ambivalence between the realistic and the abstract – as
mimetic and ornamental – has found its formal expression in temporally and mediawise
rather distant works of art. This is also a reflection of the declarative statement
of Hermann Warm, one of Caligari’s set designers, t hat t he film (in which he was
involved as one of the three scenographers) “must become graphic”. We claim here
that the ornamentation is a paradoxical expression of the abstract pole of this duality.
Keywords
expressionism, empathy, realism, abstraction, ornament, deformation
Hrčak ID:
276028
URI
Publication date:
15.12.2019.
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