According to one view, collective entities such as cultures or nations are irreducible to the individuals that constitute them; they are to be conceived of as forces in their own right, while the intellectual lives and creativity of participating individuals are mere manifestations of their membership of such groups. According to the opposing view, collective entities are but joint names for sets of individuals and their interactions, while the influence that the social environment exercises on an individual’s creativity can always be described in terms of interaction with other individuals. The dilemma between these two opposing views is impossible to avoid in historiography or social science.

This book describes the history of the debate between the collectivist and individualist understanding of social phenomena in German-speaking context during the period 1890-1947 with a particular emphasis on art history writing. The complex functioning of human visuality produces a particularly wide spectrum of possible approaches to the understanding of human creativity in the visual arts and results in a diversity of historiographical approaches whose implications often by far exceed the field of art history. Human visuality in particular can be believed to result from an individual’s membership in a group such as culture or ethnicity or, alternatively, to derive from cognitive capacities shared by the entire species—a dilemma that necessarily produces very different methodological models in art history. In their turn, the book argues, these models and their reception cannot be separated from wider political and social agendas as well as their capacity to satisfy the self-esteem regulation needs of historians and their public.