The Domestic Museum: Decorative Exuberance as an Act of Anti-Minimalist Resistance
Here's a claim that sounds backward until you check the art history. Stripping a room bare is not an act of confidence. It's usually an act of dread. Wilhelm Worringer made this argument in 1908, in a doctoral thesis that became one of the most influential books of early modernism, Abstraction and Empathy . His question was why some cultures produce flowing, naturalistic, organic art while others produce rigid geometric abstraction. The standard answer was skill. Worringer said no. It's psychology. Naturalistic art, he argued, comes from a culture at ease with the world, confident enough to take pleasure in its shapes. Abstraction comes from the opposite condition. He described the urge to abstraction as arising from a great inner unrest provoked by the outside world, a need to pull forms out of chaos and freeze them into something that will hold still. Abstraction is what you make when the world frightens you. Modernism read Worringer as a champion. Almost nobody read w...
