ToC: Journal of Art Historiography Number 1 December 2009

Editor's introduction

Vienna School:

Agnes Blaha, 'Fritz Novotny and the new Vienna school of art history - an
ambiguous relation'

Abstract: Fritz Novotny was repeatedly described as a member of the New
Vienna School. In my paper I argue that Novotny's relation to this group is
rather ambiguous because Novotny, in spite of all similarities in the
descriptions of formal qualities, had a very different attitude towards the
role of the individual artwork than Sedlmayr and Pächt. Instead of aiming at
a definite decision whether or not to include Novotny in the New Vienna
School, the article demonstrates that opinions on this question can be
interpreted as the result of different academic traditions in the
Anglo-American and the German-speaking scientific communities.

Jonathan Blower, 'Max Dvorak and Austrian Denkmalpflege at War'

Abstract: As was often the case with Vienna School art historians, Max
Dvo?ák (1874-1921) contributed a significant amount to the theory and
practice of monument preservation. This paper considers his reactions to the
precarious situation of artistic heritage during and after the first world
war, which he conceived as a conflict between spiritual and material values.
In writings that betray a less than objective patriotism, Italy emerges as
Dvo?ák's principal antagonist, whilst critical voices in Austria - that of
Karl Kraus in particular - undermined his position by calling for an end to
the so-called monument cult.

Ricardo di Mambro Santos, 'The concentric critique. Schlosser's
Kunstliteratur and the paradigm of style in Croce and Vossler'

Abstract: The essay analyzes the philosophical and methodological premises
of Julius von Schlosser's most important contribution in the field of art
historiography: Die Kunstliteratur, published in Vienna in 1924. It examines
Schlosser's adoption of paradigms drawn from Croce's aesthetics and
Vossler's linguistics in order to understand his radical shift from a
positivistic method of research to an idealistic conception of the critique
as a verbal (repeatable) evocation of the visual (unrepeatable) experience
of art. According to Schlosser, works of art, given their relation to
intuition, should not be considered potential objects of knowledge, but more
appropriately vehicles for an inner, spiritual transformation. Since the
"purest essence" of art cannot be reached beyond the "unique moment" of
aesthetic experience, Schlosser's critique no longer tries to analyze the
"real centre" of a work of art - namely its "artistic" values - but limits
itself to the description of the material conditions closely related to its
creation. By means of a "concentric" approach, Schlosser thus investigates
any element that belongs to the "historical grammar" of a "language", giving
up any conscious attempt to determine the real "centre" of a work of art,
i.e. the untranslatable beauty of its "style".

Dorothea McEwan, ' Aby Warburg's and Fritz Saxl's assessment of the 'Wiener
Schule''

Abstract: The paper is an attempt to locate both scholars' views in the
discussion of the direction and scope of the 'Wiener Schule'. Warburg, who
corresponded with members of the 'Wiener Schule', and Saxl, who was trained
by its teachers, whilst reading the important books of its members, never
wanted to be drawn into their research agenda. Warburg was clear that he
wanted to pursue a different form of 'Kulturwissenschaft', all but
untranslatable into English, possibly approaching a term like cultural
'science'. Saxl, whilst sympathetic to individual proponents of the 'Wiener
Schule', realized that its analysis of artistic production would not be
shared by scholars working in the KBW and/or the newly established
university in Hamburg. The result was friendly coexistence in equidistance.

Kristóf Nyíri, 'Gombrich on image and time'

Abstract: There is a very close, indeed intrinsic, connection between the
notions of image and time. Images are incomplete unless they are moving ones
- unless, that is, they happen in time. On the other hand, time cannot be
conceptualized except by metaphors, and so ultimately by images, of movement
in space. That only the moving image is a full-fledged one is a fact that
was fully recognized and articulated by Ernst Gombrich. Also, Gombrich
entertained, and argued for, a rich and well-balanced view of the
relationships between pictorial and verbal representation. An antidote to
the unholy influence of Goodman, Gombrich deserves to be rediscovered as the
figure whose work is ideally suited to providing a founding paradigm for a
truly successful philosophy of images.

Karl Johns, 'Julius von Schlosser and the need to reminisce'

Abstract: In the present essay of 1936, Julius Schlosser seems to have
originated the term of 'die Wiener Schule de Kunstgeschichte'. After
surviving a period of exasperating rivalry with Josef Strzygowski, seeing so
many colleagues go to their graves before completing their favorite
projects, and possibly since Wilhelm Waetzoldt decided to omit Austrians
from his Deutsche Kunsthistoriker, there were several reasons for a man of
his age, experience and critical vigor to take stock of a development which
seemed to be heading into an uncertain future.

Ian Verstegen, 'John White's and John Shearman's Viennese Art Historical
Method'

Abstract: John White and John Shearman were two of Johannes Wilde's most
brilliant students at the Courtauld. Although Wilde did not espouse a method
his own concentration on site-specifics of works of art and interest in
reconstruction, which was such an important component in his students' work,
can be traced back to Vienna school interests in intense knowledge of the
artwork and parallels some of the classic pronouncements of the 'second'
Vienna school of Hans Sedlmayr and Otto Pächt. By examining Wilde's method,
and various of White's and Shearman's studies, this point is demonstrated.

Jindrich Vybiral, 'The Vienna School of Art History and (Viennese) Modern
Architecture'

Abstract: The essay investigates the way Strzygowski, Dvo?ák and Tietze
interpreted contemporary architecture, and also traces the basic premises of
the Vienna School in their views. Viennese art historians, namely Dvo?ák and
Tietze, shared a critical attitude toward historicism and eclecticism of he
19th century with their contemporaries. They regarded Otto Wagner as the
most influential architect of the generation of 1900, but at the same time,
they protested his belief that architectural form could be based solely on
constructional reason and utility. They defined the notion that art emerges
first from nonmaterial ideals. In opposition against architectural realism,
based on the characteristics of technological society, they hold that
architecture should be a product of imaginative subjectivity. Unlike
advocates of empirical utilitarianism, finding their voice at the time, they
stressed on importance of cultivating artistic tradition.

Robert Williams, 'Das Eine im Wandel: music and Kunstwissenschaft'

Abstract: This essay examines the role of music in shaping Riegl's
conception of Kunstwollen and thus his conception of the history of art as a
whole. Indebted both to Schopenhauer's appreciation of music as an
expression of the ultimate reality, that thing-in-itself which he calls the
Will, and to Hanslick's notion of music as tonal forms in motion, likened at
one point to a moving arabesque, Riegl understood the Kunstwollen to be the
ultimate object of a properly "scientific" art history, that thing-in-itself
which the history of art must assume to exist as the condition of its own
possibility as a science. Immaterial and dynamic, it displaces the focus of
art-historical inquiry from the individual art object; its radical potential
is at odds with the object fetishism of contemporary art history.

German art and philosophy:

Mark A. Cheetham, 'Theory reception: Panofsky, Kant, and disciplinary
cosmopolitanism'

Abstract: One of the most prominent philosophical legacies in the
historiography of art history is Erwin Panofsky's debt to Immanuel Kant.
Structurally and thematically, Panofsky imports philosophy, embodied by
Kant, into the body of the younger discipline. I will argue that it is
Kant's vision of cosmopolitanism governs the relationships between
philosophy and art history for Panofsky. What I call "theory reception" -
how Panofsky received Kant and how art history in the U.S.A. received
Panofsky, however much he may have downplayed the theoretical aspects of his
later work - was in part determined, as it often is, by political factors. I
will also ask what would it mean for art history to be cosmopolitan now? To
approach these questions, we need to move away from both art history and
philosophy to study the re-engagement with the term cosmopolitan in other
contemporary discourses.

Jae Emmerling, 'An art history of means: Arendt-Benjamin'

Abstract: Transmissibility is an essential concept for any discourse on
historiography and aesthetics. In fact, this concept traverses the
contemporary impasse of art historical critical practice. Although
explicitly associated with Walter Benjamin, the entirety of Hannah Arendt's
work on art and history is premised on transmissibility as well. It allows
them to conceive a space of history from within the aesthetic, the world of
artifice. This essay reads Benjamin and Arendt alongside and against one
other in order to rethink art and history without resorting to eschatology
or the histrionics of political theology. In creating this virtual
historiography-Arendt-Benjamin-it conceives transmissibility as an
aesthetic-historiographic concept that renders an openness between past and
future, poiesis and aisthesis. Writing the history of art becomes the
creation of a passage between what-has-been and artifice; it becomes the
opening of history into life, an event of recollection.

Brank Mitrovic, 'Ruminations on the dark side: history of art as rage and
denials'

Abstract: The holist view is that the creativity of an author is the
manifestation of the creativity of the group he or she belongs to; the
individualist view is that the creativity of the group is merely the sum of
the creativities of the individuals who constitute that group. The holist
understanding of human creativity was particularly widespread among
Weimar-era historians and their almost unanimous tendency to adopt holist
historical explanations constitutes a collective phenomenon in its own
right. The paper explores the problems of providing an individualist
explanation of this phenomenon.

Beat Wysse, 'The Schopenhauer-Galaxy'

Abstract: My paper discusses the methodical question of the cultural
unconscious, taking up the concept of "mentalities" by the Annales school of
historiography, and Pierre Bourdieu's notion of "habituality". The scope is
to describe contemporary manifestations in philosophy, literature and
artwork in epistemic terms. Is there a modernist mentality, encompassing
different disciplines, genres, and authors? In a case study, Friedrich
Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, Richard Wagner's Ring of the Nibelungen, and
Kasimir Malevich's Suprematism are subjects of a discourse analysis. Their
common denominator is the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, whose legacy is
paradigmatic for the intellectual field between European Symbolism and
avant-garde.

General:

Allan Langdale, 'Interviews with Michael Baxandall, February 3rd and 4th,
1994, Berkeley, CA '

Abstract: The following interviews with Michael Baxandall were conducted in
Berkeley on February 3rd and 4th of 1994. The content of these interviews
include general responses about developments in art history in the years
between 1960 and 1985, a period of dramatic modifications in the discipline.
Among the issues are the rise of the social history of art and the sources
from anthropology that informed Baxandall's concept of the 'Period Eye'.
Baxandall talks about his own work, his personal intellectual history, and
the scholars of past and current generations who influenced him. Other
topics include Baxandall's professional trajectory, the Warburg Library, and
aspects of cultural history having to do with Renaissance Humanism. These
interviews first appeared as an appendix to the PhD dissertation by Allan
Langdale, Art History and Intellectual History: Michael Baxandall's Work
between 1963 and 1985, U. C. Santa Barbara, 1995.

Allan Langdale, 'Linguistic Theories and Intellectual History in Michael
Baxandall's Giotto and the Orators'

Abstract: This essay examines some theoretical and methodological aspects of
Michael Baxandall's book Giotto and the Orators. Humanist observers of
painting in Italy and the discovery of pictorial composition of 1971. It
includes reflections on the book's reorientations of the scholarly debate
over the relationship between Renaissance/Early Modern humanism and
painting, as well as consideration of the linguistic theories that either
directly or tangentially inform Baxandall's method. Sources such as
Wittgenstein, Cassirer, Ordinary Language Philosophy, and the Sapir-Whorf
Hypothesis are discussed. Some of the book's aims and methods are clarified
by a comparison to Panofsky's Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism of 1951.

Janet T. Marquardt, 'Defining French 'Romanesque': the Zodiaque series'

Abstract: This essay examines the use of the term "Romanesque" as an
artistic style and time period for architecture, sculpture and other arts
photographed and published in a journal and multiple series of books by
monks at the abbey of la Pierre-qui-Vire in Burgundy between 1951 and 2001.
Although the term suggests a coherent body of work with related qualities,
the actual imagery destabilizes our understanding of how one can actually
define Romanesque. At the same time, the artfully composed photogravure
illustrations and inclusive survey of sites strongly influenced art
historians of the twentieth century by reinforcing notions of geographic
workshops, bringing a fresh, modernist aesthetic to well known material, and
publishing photographs of many unknown works for the first time.

Silvina Vidal, 'Rethinking the Warburgian tradition in the 21st century'

Abstract: The present article is divided in two parts. The first one deals
with the contribution of José E. Burucúa's book: Historia, Arte, Cultura. De
Aby Warburg a Carlo Ginzburg to the field of Warburgian studies. The
following aspects receive particular attention throughout this article: (i)
the growing importance of Warburg's thought in relation to the crisis of the
major 20th century historical narratives and the linguistic turn; (ii) the
relevance of certain concepts (such as das Nachleben der Antike, the
Denkraum and Pathosformeln) to the present field of cultural studies, and
(iii) Burucúa's position regarding the current theoretical disputes taking
place among those intellectuals influenced by Warburg's ideas. The second
part reproduces an interview with the Argentinean art historian, in which he
discusses in detail certain cultural phenomena, through a Warburgian
perspective.

Elizabeth Burn Coleman, 'Historical ironies: the Australian Aboriginal art
revolution'

Abstract: This paper examines the Aboriginal Art revolution that has
occurred over the last 40 years in Australia, and in particular, the idea
that we should understand Aboriginal art as a form of contemporary art. Not
only does the Aboriginal arts movement challenge the legitimacy of
Australia's sovereignty through its legal claim to and spiritual connection
with the land, but it challenges broader historical and art historical myths
- the inevitability of the demise of Aboriginal cultures, and artistic myths
about the 'universality' of art. Artistic claims to the 'right to
appropriate', if this is what is required for expression of their artistic
vision, show themselves to be elements cultural hegemony of colonisation.

Translations:

Karl Johns, 'Julius von Schlosser, The Vienna school of the history of art
(1934)'

Abstract: Julius v. Schlosser, The Vienna School of the History of Art -
Review of a Century of Austrian Scholarship in German Including a list of
members edited by Hans Hahnloser. Dedicated to the spirit of Theodor von
Sickel and Franz Wickhoff on the 25th anniversary of their deaths and the
occasion of the 80th anniversary of the Österreichisches Institut für
Geschichtsforschung. A translation of 'Die Wiener Schule der
Kunstgeschichte', Mitteilungen des österreichischen Institut für
Geschichtsforschung Ergänzungs-Band 13, Heft 2, Innsbruck: Wagner 1934.

Karl Johns, 'Moriz Thausing and the road towards objectivity in the history
of art (1883), with a provisional list of his publications and translation
of his inaugural lecture 'The status of the history of art as an academic
discipline''

Abstract: On the basis of their substantial publications and widely
publicized polemics, Alois Riegl and Franz Wickhoff are justifiably
considered the founding figures of the so-called Vienna School of Art
History. The historical accident that specialized journals did not
previously exist, and meetings and public discussions of the methodology of
the history of art did not yet regularly take place, should not however
obscure the fact that a coherent and outspoken tradition already existed.
When Moriz Thausing held his inaugural lecture in 1873, he was delineating a
course of study which linked the history of art to the other disciplines as
he must have himself already have been teaching for nearly a decade. His
discussion of the nature of art and the method of its historical study as
distinct from related subjects and particularly philosophical aesthetics are
worth recalling in the context of the origins of the academic study of the
history of art.

Reviews:

Thijs Weststeijn: Paul Taylor (ed.), Iconography without Texts. Warburg
Institute Colloquia 13, 2008

Nicolás Kwiatowski: José Emilio Burucúa, Historia, Arte, Cultura. De Aby
Warburg a Carlo Ginzburg, 2003

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