0097 Georg Schmidt und die Frage der künstlerischen Werte

Abstract

As a theorist and curator, the Swiss art historian Georg Schmidt (1896-1965), director of the Kunstmuseum Basel from 1939 to 1961, developed a decidedly normative approach to art history, based on a philosophy which measures history in terms of social and artistic progress. This normative axiom also governs Schmidt's theory of realism, a concept he associates with "concern for reality" and progressive, democratic views, but not with formal considerations. His notion of kitsch, directly derived from this theory, broadly corresponds to what Schmidt calls "idealistic naturalism", a varnished depiction of reality which applies the formal devices of naturalism. Unlike contemporaries such as Konrad Farner and Georg Lukács, Schmidt combines a sociological with a psychological perspective, a method reflected in the monograph of 1942 on Ferdinand Hodler.