Between the outbreak of World War I and the mid-1930s, the best-selling and most widely read book on the topic of modern art in Germany was written by the art historian Fritz Burger (1877–1916). Burger is now all but forgotten in the art historiography of the period and absent in the English literature. This thesis provides the first English interpretation of Burger's major works and seeks to locate his art historical method in relation to then-contemporary intellectual streams. Trained in the late 19th century, Burger largely rejected the cultural-historical studies and theories of stylistic development and embraced an artistic-critical model forwarded by neo-Kantians like Adolf Hildebrand and Konrad Fiedler. Beginning with Burger's texts Cézanne und Hodler (1913) and Einführung in die Moderne Kunst (1917), I examine the conceptual underpinnings of these works with particular attention to Burger's notions of color, artistic cognition and philosophical speculation. I consider Burger's written output as the compliment to his hands-on pedagogical technique at the University of Munich, his involvement with the Munich avant-garde and friendship with the artist Wassily Kandinsky. Burger's work is a rare and early attempt to write about contemporary art as an historical document but without recourse to artistic biography or cultural milieu as interpretive tools. / text

The dissertation thesis deals with the interpretation of the "beyond-the-man" concept, which is being interpreted, on one hand, as a part of the art-theoretical and art-historical European modernity of the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, on the other hand, as a theoretical and methodological starting point for an interpretation of the transformation of the human image in the painting of the second half of the 1940s until the beginning of the 1960s. The foundation for such an interpretation is an assumption of the necessary transformation of the intellectual concepts after the World War II, as it was postulated by Theodor W. Adorno and how it was researched by Giorgio Agamben and Miroslav Petříček in the political-philosophical discourse. The thesis thus researches the "beyond-the-man" concept in the theory and history of art of the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century in a way of it being as re-formulated art-creative concept after 1945, evident especially in abstract painting. The interpretation of the "beyond-the-man" concept is developed on reading of Fritz Novotny's interpretation of Paul Cézanne's art from the beginning of the 1930s. Novotny in Cézanne's painting described the concept of "beyond-the-man" (Außermenschlichkeit) as a breaking point of the...