Let us look at the historical context, in doing so we will see her book as a political manifestation, because Carola Giedion Welcker presented the contemporary sculptors of the Western World in a global context and did not work with any racial of any other ethnic criteria as the organisers of the Degenerate Art show of the same year did. Although she used a neutral tone in her language, it actually was not neutral at all, because her neutrality came from a highly political effort. In the year before the department of modern art in the National Gallery in Berlin had to close to the public, and that began the prohibition of many artists like Klee and Ernst who subsequently had to hide themselves from the Germans.
We now can sum up why her texts about biomorphism were so important in her early years as an author:
- she was one of the first art historians at all who admitted organic metaphors for plastic art.
- around 1930 she found a great variety of metaphors for the organic style which in themselves could convey many different meanings, such as cells, kernels, corporeal world, primordial question, primordial symbol etc.
- she toned down her poetic potential to a more neutral language around 1930-1932, possibly to be more objective; This must have been on purpose, because, as we know, she was definitely very aware of poetic language and wrote often about it. Her wish to make statements about laws in art was perhaps the reason that she gave no attention to the humour of an art work, as in the work of Arp.
- at her best as an author about art in 1937 she widened her view to works of contemporary sculptors of many countries and compared it with global tribal art and photographs of non-art and images of nature.
- she was not interested in the expressions of energy as a general principle of the world in art, but in the expression of organic growth.
- this might be meant as a continuation of the intention of Minotaure as well as an opposition to its narrow minded aims.
- her book of 1937 has to be seen as an political act against the Degenerate Art show
- her method of writing in objective sentences altered with quotations of the artists created a school of art history after 1955.
- she never compared the biomorphic art with tendencies in science towards drawings like those by Ernst Haeckel.
- artists hardly mentioned in her first articles and in her book in 1937, she went on to write about later, such as Klee, Giacometti and others. This means that in 1937 her work did not stop and she continued to write many important monographs on some of the most famous artists of her time.