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

by Christopher Wood

This volume introduces to an English-language audience the writings of the so-called new Vienna School of art history. In the 1930s, Hans Sedlmayr and Otto Pächt undertook an ambitious extension of the art historical project of Aloïs Riegl (1858–1905). Sedlmayr and Pächt 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 Pächt’s project immediately caught the attention of thinkers like Walter Benjamin who were similarly impatient with traditional, cautious empiricist scholarship. But the creativity of the new art history had its dark side. Sedlmayr used his art history as a vehicle for a sweeping critique of modernity that soon escalated into nationalist and outright fascist polemic. Sedlmayr, and by extension the whole scholarly project of Strukturanalyse, were sharply repudiated by Meyer Schapiro and later Ernst Gombrich.

The idea of this volume is to bring the drama of this methodological and political encounter to the attention of English-speaking art historians and reveal the analogies between the Vienna School project and the anti-empiricist cultural histories of our own time.

Genres: Art

Paperback

First published October 1, 2003

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Christopher Wood was Britain's leading writer and broadcaster on the subject of Victorian art. For thirteen years he worked for the London auction house Christie's, becoming director of nineteenth-century paintings.

Reviews

[Jen Mahoney · Rating 2 out of 5]

Christopher Wood is a little dense to absorb, but I'm curious about the context around Alois Riegl. Slow going, this one. I read Wood's intro and the Riegl-related selections.