Alois Riegl (1858-1905) is one of the most well-known representatives of the so-called 'Vienna School of Art History', and he belongs to those art historians whose literary production has exerted a ...long-lasting influence on the developments of the art-historical discipline.· 2 He wrote influential works on historical-artistic periods which had until then been marginalised or ignored, as in the case of the Late Antiquity and the Baroque, as well as on neglected historical-artistic genres like the applied arts, which Art Historiography had considered hierarchically subordinate.The collation of these posthumous books with the voluminous corpus of Riegl's manuscripts on Baroque art, which are preserved in the archives of the Department of Art History at the University of Vienna, sheds light on the fact that both Burda and Dvofák, and Swoboda and Wilde decided to publish only a small part of Riegl's manuscripts. Andrew James Hopkins, Arnold Witte, and Alina Payne, the authors of The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome (2010) - the first English translation of the posthumous publication Die Entstehung (1908) - were the first to problematise the discrepancies between Riegl's posthumous publications on the origins of Baroque art and the entire manuscript corpus. This book offers not only an in-depth analysis of Riegl's work on the Roman Baroque and its contextualisation in contemporary Art Historiography, but also paves the way for a more thorough investigation of Riegl's manuscripts on Baroque art. The authors discuss the huge impact of Riegl's published contributions on the development of the historiography of the Baroque, and at the same time they shed light on the differences between published and unpublished texts and the related consequences on the reception of Riegl's investigation on Baroque art.11 Both the first and second edition of Riegl's lecture notes present some changes compared to the manuscript corpus, and some of these changes were probably carried out with the aim of increasing the usability of the selected passages from Riegl's manuscripts
Alois Riegl's self-imposed task of founding the truly modem, properly scientific art history is positioned within Wilhelm von Humboldt's concept of university with its postulate of Bildung durch ...Wissenschaft and Wilhelm Dilthey's discussion and definition of Geisteswissenschaften. All the human sciences, according to Dilthey, have a common subject, the socio-historical reality of humanity in its entirety, that is, everything in which human spirit has objectified itself.1 However, each particular human science studies only a part of that reality. In its formation, it isolates a particular content of that socio-historical reality, and it studies it only relatively, only from a limited perspective.2 Each particular human science should therefore be aware of its connection to other human sciences, of its participation in the great project of Geisteswissenschaften, whose final aim is education and cultivation of human beings.3 The meaning of the human sciences and their theory is 'to assist us with what we have to do in the world, with what we are able to make of ourselves, and with what we can do with the world and it with us'.4Faced with these requirements, constructing his 'historical grammar of the visual arts' as the foundation of 'art history as a scientific discipline', Riegl announced that 'we will be dealing with (1) elements; (2) the developmental history thereof; (3) the factors that determined that development'.5 First he had to establish the proper object for art history as a specific, autonomous scientific discipline. After indicating the five elements - the purpose, the materials, the technique, the motif and the relation between form and surface - that need to be considered when evaluating a work of art, he concluded that the way a work of art is fashioned, the 'how', the relation between form and surface, is the most artistic of the elements and therefore the most specific to the art historical discipline.6 Since all works of art of a certain period are constituted and binded by certain common elements,7 it is the style of a particular period that art history should really concentrate on.
The notion of haptic vision in the thought of Alois Riegl has been extensively addressed by the specialist bibliography on the Austrian art historian.2 One aspect, however, that is still partially ...examined in the critical literature, except the fundamental contributions of Regine Prange and Georg Vasold,3 concerns the reception of Riegl's notion of haptic within the framework of 20th-century art theory, history, and criticism.This contribution aims to shed light on such a reception from a historical-documentary point of view, attempting to define its configuration by examining the Anglo-American side. This paper tries to demonstrate how the penetration of Riegl's thought, even for strictly editorial reasons related to the late publication/translation of his works, constituted a secondary phenomenon concerning the reception, now decidedly more incisive, of the theses on haptic perception elaborated by Riegl's multifaceted compatriots Viktor Lowenfeld and Ludwig Münz, who emigrated to the United States in the last quarter of the 1930s. Starting from a brief exposition on the constitution of the notion of haptic in Riegl and its relation to the parallel science of haptics, established in the early 1890s between German-speaking and English-speaking university laboratories, the contribution focuses on its reception into the thought of Louis Danz, Herbert Read and Clement Greenberg.
'Art history's culminating moment, the years when the project of art history most perfectly realized its possibilities' almost arrived in 1893 with Alois Riegl's first book Questions of Style, ...according to an appetizing formulation in Christopher Wood's critically-acclaimed recent study, The History of Art History. Despite its promise for the project of art history, the Vienna school is ultimately found wanting, like so many other names and movements in Wood's capacious review, nor is any progress evident in his broader history of art history up to the present. As a corollary perspective, this paper proposes to move beyond what Riegl got wrong in order to emphasize the pertinence of what he got right for advancing art history today, specifically in his group portrait study and above all in relation to the riddle of Rembrandt's Staalmeesters. By bringing Riegl's close readings of mostly 'minor' paintings to bear on monuments of world art by Rembrandt, Riegl between 'applied' and 'high' art, or authorless works and one of the world's foremost authors, who was profoundly concerned with his tradition. These concrete examples also demonstrate how Riegl's elucidations of visual particulars are not in contrast to but rather derive from and inform his theory of the broader development of group portraiture. Riegl sought to explain the Kunstvollen or 'will of art' of Dutch group portraits, what they seek to do as art.5 His approach is preferable to and directly applicable to current interpretations, I submit, and can thus serve as a corrective or a means of 'Vienna schooling' Dutch art scholarship. Conversely, situating Riegl's group portrait study, as his last major work and potentially the culmination of his thought, in relation to subsequent approaches can yield new insights into his place within the history of art history, a 'Vienna school' perspective applied to the Vienna school itself. From such a synthetic or cumulative art historiography and history of art history, looking backward in order to move forward, we can more perfectly realize the project of art history.
Alois Riegl’s art history has influenced thinkers as diverse as Erwin Panofsky, Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, Paul Feyerabend, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari. One of the founders of the modern ...discipline of art history, Riegl is best known for his theories of representation. Yet his inquiries into the role of temporality in artistic production—including his argument that art conveys a culture’s consciousness of time—show him to be a more wide-ranging and influential commentator on historiographical issues than has been previously acknowledged. In Time’s Visible Surface, Michael Gubser presents Riegl’s work as a sustained examination of the categories of temporality and history in art. Supported by a rich exploration of Riegl’s writings, Gubser argues that Riegl viewed artworks as registering historical time visibly in artistic forms.
Gubser’s discussion of Riegl’s academic milieu also challenges the widespread belief that Austrian modernism adopted a self-consciously ahistorical worldview. By analyzing the works of Riegl’s professors and colleagues at the University of Vienna, Gubser shows that Riegl’s interest in temporality, from his early articles on calendar art through later volumes on the Roman art industry and Dutch portraiture, fit into a broad discourse on time, history, and empiricism that engaged Viennese thinkers such as the philosopher Franz Brentano, the historian Theodor von Sickel, and the art historian Franz Wickhoff. By expanding our understanding of Riegl and his intellectual context, Time’s Visible Surface demonstrates that Riegl is a pivotal figure in cultural theory and that fin-de-siècle Vienna holds continued relevance for today’s cultural and philosophical debates.
When Max Dvořák's (1874-1921) art history is considered,1 Franz Wickhoff's (1853-1909) and Alois Riegl's (1858-1905) influence is always mentioned in the foreground of the historiographical ...research.2 However, a question that, in my opinion, has yet to be adequately addressed is in what sense and to what extent Dvořák's method of art history was directly formed by his personal relationships with Riegl and especially Wickhoff. This article therefore seeks to show the ways in which Wickhoff and Riegl may have had an influence on Max Dvořák's thinking on art history through their private relationships, which can be reconstructed based on a newly found archival materials, in order to fill in a gap in the historiographic research on the Vienna School of Art History.
The work of Alois Riegl (1858-1905),2 one of the major thinkers of the so-called 'Wiener Schule'3 and of modern art historiography in general, has already been extensively examined, however some ...aspects of his literary production still remain unexplored. This concerns especially the partial publication of his manuscripts on Baroque art and consequently a compromised reception of his idea of 'Baroque,' which remain important issues in current historiography. The project was inspired by the Getty publication The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome (2010), edited by Andrew Hopkins and Arnold Witte.4 This book stands out from the historiography on Riegl's work not only because it offers the first English translation of the posthumous publication Die Entstehung der Barockkunst in Rom (1908)5, but also because of the complexity of approaches by the authors of the introductory essays - Alina Payne, Arnold Witte and Andrew Hopkins - to Riegl's work, analyzed from different points of view.6 Furthermore, their contribution paves the way for a more thorough investigation of Riegl's manuscripts on Baroque art, since it discusses the problematic reception of his concept of 'Baroque' by modern and contemporary historiography. In 1908, three years after Riegl's death, the book Die Entstehung der Barockkunst in Rom was published. Its editors were Arthur Burda, librarian of the Hofmuseum as well as Riegl's former student and friend, and Max Dvořák, Riegl's successor to the chair of art history at the University of Vienna. Die Entstehung offers an almost literal transcription of selected parts of Riegl's lecture notes on Baroque art, which, as indicated by its publishers in the editors' preface, he prepared for his teaching at the University of Vienna between 1894 and 1902.7 In respect to this, at least one question would be appropriate, namely, whether the selection criteria applied by Burda and Dvořák can in fact guarantee a complete understanding of Riegl's idea of 'Baroque.' As explained by the authors of The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome, the collation of the posthumous book of 1908 with Riegl's manuscript notes gets to the heart of the matter.
Alois Riegl’s essay “Die Stimmung als Inhalt der modernen Kunst” (1899) has been one of art historiography’s early attempts to bridge art and science. In this text, Riegl not only presents the ...background of some of his theoretical and methodological premises but he also provides an overarching argument for the way natural sciences af- fect modern spectatorship. In this way, he establishes the basis of a Kunstwollen for the ‘age of the natural sciences’ and describes its appropriate artistic traits. Addressing the intellectual and historical context of the Stimmung Essay, this article shows how Riegl’s ideas work in a subtle and intricate manner, involving the combination of sensual and phenomenological observations to modes of knowl- edge. In this respect, the relation of art and science does not seem to be settled on a fixed contemplative basis but on the combination of the art with cognition and affects.
Fritz Novotny's work on Cézanne was included in Christopher Wood's Vienna School Reader, even though he had been a product of Stzrygowski's Institute and not (the descendant of) Alois Riegl's. Later, ...it was questioned to what degree he ought to be counted in this group. The same issue faces another student of Stzrygowsky: Otto Demus. In the following, I will follow Wood in a qualified way to show how Demus' characteristic approach to Byzantine art emerged indeed from typical issues descending from the work of Riegl. Due to thaws between the two institutes, Demus' teaching with Hans Sedlmayr, and his socialisation with Viennese-trained art historians in London during the Second World War, one can see that Demus had become thoroughly 'Viennese' in his outlook well before he returned to Vienna and in 1963 to occupy a chair. As I will argue, this makes Demus' work fit quite well with the second Viennese school of Hans Sedlmayr and Otto Pächt and to an extant Johannes Wilde, to the degree that his work is focused on an understanding of the work of art or monument as a functional whole. Parts and their relationship are understood, or in the case of a lost work, intuited by way of reconstruction.
In
A Thousand Plateaus
, Deleuze and Guattari offer a description of what they call 'nomad art' by detailing its three primary characteristics: close-range vision, haptic space, and abstract line. In ...an attempt to unpack the significance of this provocative term, this paper will sketch the provenance of the first two of these characteristics, both of which come from Deleuze and Guattari's particular reading of Alois Riegl. Together, close-range vision and haptic space delineate the synaesthetic vision of the artist as well as the space s /he creates in the work. Walter Benjamin will be invoked as a sort of phantom link between Riegl and Deleuze, a link that will both provide the proper orientation towards the central aspect of the haptic - against a Phenomenology of affect - as well as inject the necessary political significance into the discussion of nomad art.
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