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.