Vienna School Reader : Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s

by Christopher S. Wood (Ed.)

• ISBN13: 9781890951153
• ISBN10: 1890951153
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-10-01
• Publisher: Zone Books
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Summary

This book introduces to an English-language audience the writings of the so-called New Vienna School of art history. In the 1930s Hans Sedlmayr (1896-1984) and Otto Pacht (1902-1988) undertook an ambitious extension of the formalist art historical project of Alois Riegl (1858-1905). Sedlmayr and Pacht began with an aestheticist conception of the autonomy and irreducibility of the artistic process. At the same time they believed they could read entire cultures and worldviews in the work of art. The key to this contextualist alchemy was the concept of "structure," a kind of deep formal property that the work of art shared with the world. Sedlmayr and Pacht's project immediately caught the attention of thinkers like Walter Benjamin who were similarly impatient with traditional empiricist scholarship. But the new project had its dark side. Sedlmayr used art history as a vehicle for a sweeping critique of modernity that soon escalated into nationalist and outright fascist polemic, even while Pacht, a Jew, was forced into exile. Sedlmayr and the whole scholarly project of Strukturanalysewere sharply repudiated by Meyer Schapiro and later Ernst Gombrich. After an introductory essay, the book opens with two selections from Riegl. The next section includes two essays by Sedlmayr, two by Pacht, and one each by Guido Kaschnitz-Weinberg and Fritz Novotny, all dating from the 1930s. The book closes with the divergent responses of Benjamin (1933) and Schapiro (1936). The difference of opinion between these two key voices raises again the question of the legitimacy and effectiveness of the method, and reveals the analogies between the New Vienna School project and the antiempiricist cultural histories of our own time. The book also contains an extensive bibliography.

Table of Contents

Introduction	9	(64)
Bibliography	73	(14)
Part One Methodological Foundations: Alois Riegl
``The Main Characteristics of the Late Roman Kunstwollen'' (1901)	87	(18)
Alois Riegl
``The Place of the Vapheio Cups in the History of Art'' (1900)	105	(28)
Alois Riegl
Part Two Structure Analysis: Theory
``Toward a Rigorous Study of Art'' (1931)	133	(48)
Hans Sedlmayr
``The End of the Image Theory'' (1930/1931)	181	(18)
Otto Pacht
Part Three Structure Analysis: Practice
``Remarks on the Structure of Egyptian Sculpture'' (1933)	199	(44)
Guido Kaschnitz von Weinberg
``Design Principles of Fifteenth Century Northern Painting'' (1933)	243	(80)
Otto Pacht
``Bruegel's Macchia'' (1934)	323	(56)
Hans Sedlmayr
passages from Cezanne and the End of Scientific Perspective (1938)	379	(60)
Fritz Novotny
Part Four Contemporary Responses
``Rigorous Study of Art: On the First Volume of Kunstwissenschaftlich Forschungen'' (1931/1933)	439	(14)
Walter Benjamin
``The New Viennese Schos (1936)	453
Meyer Schapiro