The Vienna School of Art History: Empire and the Politics of Scholarship, 1847–1918

THE VIENNA SCHOOL OF ART HISTORY

The VIENNA SCHOOL of ART HISTORY

Empire and the Politics of Scholarship, 1847–1918

MATTHEW RAMPLEY

The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rampley, Matthew, author.

The Vienna School of art history : empire and the politics of scholarship, 1847–1918 / Matthew Rampley.

    p.  cm

Summary: Analyzes the emergence and development of art history as a discipline in Austria- Hungary. Focuses on the ways in which ideas about art and its history became intertwined with political and social identity, and on the cultural politics that shaped the final years of the Habsburg Empire—Provided by publisher.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-271-06158-0 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Art—Austria—Historiography.

2. Art historians—Austria.

3. Art—Political aspects—Austria—History—19th century.

4. Art—Political aspects—Austria—History—20th century.

5. Art and society—Austria—History—19th century.

6. Art and society—Austria—History—20th century.

7. Austria—Politics and government—1867–1918.

I. Title.

N390.A9R36 2013

707.2’2—dc23

2013018991

Copyright © 2013 The Pennsylvania State University

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Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press,

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It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

This book is printed on paper that contains 30% post-consumer waste.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1

Founding a Discipline: Liberalism and the Idea of Scientific Method

2

Questions of Method: From Positivism to the History of Spirit

3

Beyond Vienna: The Growth of Art History Across the Habsburg Monarchy

4

An Art History of Austria- Hungary? Patriotism and the Construction of National Historiography

5

Baroque Art and Architecture: A Contested Legacy

6

CulturesVernacular Cultures and National Identities: The Politics of Folk Art

7

Readings of Modern Art: Historicism, Impressionism, Expressionism

8

Between East and West

9

Saving the Past: Conservation and the Cult of Monuments

Epilogue: Continuity and Rupture After 1918

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

1.   Sculptural frieze of Pharaoh pursuing Moses across the Red Sea, from a sarcophagus in the Church of St. Francis, Split, 5th century C.E., from Rudolf von Eitelberger, Die mittelalterlichen Kunstdenkmale Dalmatiens in Arbe, Zara, Traù, Spalato und Ragusa, Jahrbuch der k.k. Central-Commission zur Erforschung und Erhaltung der Baudenkmale 5 (1861): plate 18.

2.   Onofrio di Giordano della Cava, The Rector’s Palace, Dubrovnik, 1463, engraving, from Rudolf von Eitelberger, Die mittelalterlichen Kunstdenkmale Dalmatiens in Arbe, Zara, Traù, Spalato und Ragusa, Jahrbuch der k.k. Central-Commission zur Erforschung und Erhaltung der Baudenkmale 5 (1861): plate 19.

3.   Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife, from the Vienna Genesis manuscript (Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, cod. theol. gr. 31), 6th century C.E., fol. 16r.

4.   Richard Moser, The Powder Gate, Prague, 1911, watercolor on paper. Photo: Dorotheum.

5.   Iconostasis from the Greek-Catholic Church of the Holy Spirit, Rohatyn, Ukraine, 1647–50, engraving by Karl von Siegel, from Die österreichisch-ungarische Monarchie in Wort und Bild (the Kronprinzenwerk), 14:743.

6.   Kilián Dientzenhofer, the Church of St. Nicholas, Malá Strana, Prague, 1737–51, from Cornelius Gurlitt, Geschichte des Barockstiles und des Rococo in Deutschland, 275, fig. 85.

7.   Jan Blažej Santini Aichel, the Church of St. John of Nepomuk, Žďár nad Sázavou, Bohemia, 1719–22. Photo: Jiří Matějiček.

8.   Ödön Lechner and Gyula Pártos, front façade of the Museum of Applied Arts, Budapest, 1896. Photo: Rebecca Houze.

9.   Ödön Lechner, interior courtyard of the Museum of Applied Arts, Budapest, 1896. Photo: author.

10.  Stanisław Witkiewicz, Villa Koliba, Zakopane, 1892–94. Photo: Marta Filipová.

11.  William Lossow and Hermann Viehweger, Dresden Heating and Electricity Works, 1901, from Die Architektur des XX. Jahrhunderts: Zeitschrift für moderne Baukunst 25 (1903).

12.  Hugo Lederer, Bismarck monument, Hamburg, 1906. Photo: Janet Hartl.

13.  Reinhold Begas, Bismarck monument, Berlin, 1901. Anonymous photograph.

14.  Ivan Meštrović, Račić family mausoleum, Cavtat, 1923, postcard. Photo: author.

15.  Theophil Hansen, Museum of Military History, Vienna, 1848–56. Anonymous photograph, 1860–90.

16.  The courtyard of the Wawel Castle before the 1905 restoration. Photo: Institute of Art History, Jagiellonian University of Cracow.

17.  The courtyard of the Wawel Castle after the 1905 restoration. Photo: author.

18.  The west gate (Riesentor) of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, Vienna, 1230–45. Photo: David Monniaux.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The intellectual debts of this book are many. My initial interest in the Vienna School arose out of conversation with Richard Woodfield and Paul Crowther. The book itself has benefited enormously from discussion and debates with numerous colleagues and friends, including Georg Vasold, Paul Stirton, Juliet Kinchin, Iain Boyd Whyte, Jan Bakoš, Jiří Vybíral, Hans Aurenhammer, Rebecca Houze, Chris Wood, Rachel Rossner, Pieter Judson, Arnold Bartetzky, Margaret Olin, Diana Reynolds, Stefan Muthesius, Milena Bartlová, Hubert Locher, Damjan Prelovšek, Artur Rosenauer, Robert Born, Wojciech Bałus, Enikő Roka, Andreas Lehne, Joanna Wołanska, Michael Falser, Magdalena Kunińska, Tim Kirk, Malcolm Gee, and Jill Steward. Thanks are also due to Julia Jabłońska and Catherine Cook. Essential parts of the research undertaken here were supported by the British Academy, the European Science Foundation, Teesside University, and the University of Birmingham, and their support needs to be acknowledged. I would also like to thank the staff of the Pennsylvania State University Press, in particular Eleanor Goodman, for her support for the project, and Keith Monley, for his apparently inexhaustible patience in editing my original manuscript. Above all, however, this project is indebted to Marta, who encouraged me to see the subject in a new light.

Earlier versions of parts of this book have been published elsewhere. Chapter 1 was published as The Idea of a Scientific Discipline: Rudolf von Eitelberger and the Emergence of Art History in Vienna, 1847–1885, Art History 34.1 (2011): 54–79. Parts of chapter 4 appeared previously as "For the Love of the Fatherland: Patriotic Art History and the Kronprinzenwerk in Austria-Hungary," Centropa 9.3 (2009): 160–75, while parts of chapter 8 were taken from Art History and the Politics of Empire: Rethinking the Vienna School, Art Bulletin 91.4 (2009): 447–63. I wish to thank the Association of Art Historians, Wiley-Blackwell, Dora Wiebenson, and the College Art Association for permission to republish material.

INTRODUCTION

This book is a study of the practice of art history in Vienna and Austria-Hungary between 1847, when Rudolf von Eitelberger was appointed the first dozent (junior lecturer) in the subject, and 1918, the year the Habsburg Empire collapsed. It traces the emergence of art history, the establishment of norms of scholarly inquiry, and the involvement of art historians in wider debates over the cultural and political identity of the monarchy. It is the product of an extended period of reflection on art history in Habsburg central Europe. One of my first published articles was on Alois Riegl,¹ with whom I had first become acquainted as a graduate teaching assistant at the University of St. Andrews in the early 1990s, when he formed part of a course in historiography that I taught. Since that time the scholarly landscape on the Vienna School of art history has undergone enormous transformations; twenty years ago the literature on the subject was modest, and that available in English was even more limited.² Access to primary sources was a significant problem. Aside from a few reeditions in the 1960s and 1970s, the writings by the major representatives of the Vienna School were out of print and difficult to obtain.³ This was doubly the case with editions in English, which consisted of Riegl’s Late Roman or Oriental? (a critical essay on Josef Strzygowski’s Orient oder Rom), Late Roman Art Industry (a questionable translation of Riegl’s Die spätrömische Kunstindustrie), and an edition of Max Dvořák’s History of Art as the History of Ideas.

The situation has since changed dramatically; a turning point, perhaps, was marked by the publication in 1992 of Margaret Olin’s monograph on Riegl, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art, and of an English translation of Riegl’s Stilfragen (Problems of Style). The importance of Riegl was confirmed the following year, when Margaret Iversen’s monograph on him appeared. The translation of Stilfragen was the first of a number of important English editions of works by Riegl and other Viennese art historians, and new translations continue to appear.⁴ This has paralleled renewed efforts in Austria to publish new critical editions of work by Vienna School scholars.⁵ The advent of online digital libraries and archives, providing access to historic primary texts, has increased still further the availability of primary materials.⁶ The renewed publication of works associated with the Vienna School has been accompanied by an exponential increase in the volume of scholarly research on the subject. At the time of writing, the library of the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich, which has arguably the most extensive holdings, listed sixty-seven items on Riegl alone published since 2000, in languages as diverse as Croatian, German, French, Italian, Slovak, and English.

Despite the appearance of such a volume of commentary and analysis, the literature on the Vienna School remains curiously partial and incomplete. It is partial inasmuch as by far the greatest degree of critical attention has been devoted to Alois Riegl, with other figures, not least the founder of the Vienna School, Rudolf von Eitelberger, languishing in relative obscurity.⁷ In many respects this situation is easily explicable; given his contributions to scholarship on textiles, ornament, the applied arts of late antiquity, monument protection policy and theory, folk art, Baroque art and architecture, together with his methodological innovations, Riegl was by far the most consistently original art historian working in Vienna between the mid–nineteenth and mid–twentieth centuries. At the same time, however, the heightened interest in Riegl—which can at times come close to a fetishism of the author figure—produces a restricted vision of the discursive dynamics of Viennese art history. A prominent example of this phenomenon can be seen in the treatment of Franz Wickhoff and Alois Riegl’s conflict with Josef Strzygowski over the origins of early medieval art. This dispute has largely been viewed in terms of the political differences between the individuals concerned, but this view underplays the fact that they were reprising a decades-long debate over European identity and the place of Austria-Hungary in Europe, a debate that continued long after the personal antagonism between these authors had been forgotten.⁸

This book therefore gives less prominence to Riegl than usual in accounts of the Vienna School. My intention is not so much to rehabilitate neglected art historians, such as Moriz Thausing, Albert Ilg, or even Franz Wickhoff (who is usually only discussed in relation to the dispute with Strzygowski or his part in the furor raised by Klimt’s Philosophy frieze), as to shift the focus away from exposition of the conceptions of individual authors and toward larger-scale themes that preoccupied art historians in Austria-Hungary.⁹

In many respects, therefore, this book diverges from the approaches that have characterized most accounts of the Vienna School. It examines the novel ideas and methods explored by individual art historians, but it is concerned less with method per se than with the situational logic and the ideological and institutional factors that shaped art-historical practices in Austria-Hungary from the 1840s until its demise, in 1918. It is thus primarily a political and social history of the discipline, rather than an account of its intellectual evolution, and stands apart from interpretations by commentators such as Michael Podro, who have located the Vienna School in a discursive tradition preoccupied with the philosophical legacy of Kant and Hegel.¹⁰ Riegl has loomed large in such readings, starting with Stilfragen, which made a decisive break with the legacy and influence of Gottfried Semper. Within this framework, the other significant component of Riegl’s thought was his notion of the Kunstwollen (variously translated as art drive, artistic volition, or will to art), and ever since Erwin Panofsky’s essay on the topic in 1920, commentators have wrestled with the philosophical meaning and scope of the term.¹¹ A similar preoccupation has been visible in the reception of Riegl’s intervention into monument conservation and protection; his famous article on the cult of monuments has been the object of interest primarily due to its attempt to posit a theory of historicity, including an evolutionary typology of treatments of history.¹² This has in turn been taken up and revisited in the light of contemporary concerns with time and with the experience of time in the Viennese fin de siècle.¹³

The originality of Riegl’s thinking is not in question, but such accounts tend to diminish other factors; the essay on the cult of monuments was one of many articles Riegl wrote on monument protection, the predominant themes of which were not the theoretical issues mentioned above but rather the role that monument protection and conservation had to play in the cultural politics of contemporary Austria-Hungary. It has to be seen alongside his critique of the nationalistic ideas of heritage expounded by the German art historian Georg Dehio and the restoration projects undertaken in, for example, Cracow or Split to restore the artistic and architectural heritage of Polish Galicia or Dalmatia in line with local nationalist and religious visions of the past.¹⁴ Riegl’s meditation on the cult of monuments was only one of many other contemporary publications on the same topic, in a state that had long sanctioned historicism as an official visual style but that tentatively supported Secessionism and progressive artistic currents as part of its program of cultural modernization.¹⁵

Much writing by Vienna School art historians thus revolved less around questions of methodology and more around ones of aesthetic, historical, and political value. Viewing art history in Austria-Hungary in this light allows the role of other authors to come into consideration. In comparison with Riegl, figures such as Eitelberger, Thausing, and Ilg, for example, were not pioneers of art-historical method, but they played an equally important role in laying out the parameters of inquiry and in intervening into wider public debates about artistic tradition and the cultural heritage of Austria-Hungary. The same applies to Max Dvořák, who, although one of the most prominent and influential art historians working in Habsburg Vienna, has attracted a surprisingly small body of commentary, having been dismissed by one observer as responsible for a genre of art-historical writing that verged on the popular, the sensational and the grandiose.¹⁶

At the heart of these deliberations lies the fundamental methodological question of how one should write a history of the Vienna School. As Michael Podro has asked, What kind of commentary are we to construct upon a literature . . . if we no longer believe in its theories?¹⁷ One approach has been to identify specific conceptual and theoretical issues with a contemporary resonance and reread them in relation to the interests of the present. Hence, the fact that Riegl had written extensively on the applied arts, for example, led some commentators in the 1990s to mention him when constructing the genealogy of the emerging field of visual studies.¹⁸ However, a number of alternative paradigms that also diminish the focus on the individual author present themselves. One of the most important is institutional inquiry, first explored by Heinrich Dilly.¹⁹ Combining elements of Foucauldian discourse analysis with concrete historical research into specific institutions, Dilly has examined the institutional framework that shaped the emergence of art history as a discipline. Although interest in the author figure has persisted, Dilly’s model has been taken up by a number of important studies, including Lyne Therrien’s analysis of French art history, Hubert Locher’s study of art history in Germany, and Donald Preziosi’s work on the interlinking of art history and the exhibitionary and museological complex of the modern European state.²⁰

This book adopts a broadly similar approach, viewing the emergence of art history in Austria-Hungary in the context of the institutions where it was taught and where research was undertaken. These included, primarily, the University of Vienna and the Museum for Art and Industry in Vienna, where many art historians, most notably Riegl, started out on their scholarly careers. It also considers the role of other institutions. These include the imperial-royal Central Commission for the Investigation and Conservation of Architectural Monuments (k.k. Central-Commission zur Erforschung und Erhaltung der Baudenkmale), the Ministry of Culture and Education, and other museums and societies that formed the institutional matrix that sustained the development of art history as a professional discipline.

While central to the investigation, analysis of the institutional setting of art history is nevertheless limited in scope without an equal degree of attention to the wider political, ideological, and social context of the Habsburg Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although some works have begun to explore this dimension, it remains surprisingly understudied except in outline.²¹ Viewing the Vienna School in the light of its social and political background raises the obvious question of how that background should be constructed. One of the most influential accounts of the culture of the later Habsburg Empire has been that of Carl Schorske, who attributes the extraordinary flowering of late nineteenth-century Viennese intellectual, artistic, and cultural life to the failure of liberalism. Accordingly, Schorske has interpreted Secessionist culture as a form of Oedipal revolt against the material, economic, and intellectual values of the mid- to late 1800s. On this reading the failure of the liberal bourgeoisie to shape the political direction of the Austrian state in any substantial way resulted in either an aesthetic withdrawal from public life or its counterpart, the rise of the right-wing nationalism, populism, and anti-Semitism of Karl Lueger’s Christian Social Party.²² Fritz Ringer’s account of Germany during the same period provides a compelling parallel, in which the political disenfranchisement of the bourgeoisie under the authoritarian regime of the Wilhelminian Reich resulted in a retreat into scholarly learning and culture (Bildung) as a compensatory gesture, accompanied by an aestheticized distancing from social and political life.²³

Schorske has offered a persuasive thesis that could in principle also be applied to the Vienna School; Eitelberger, the liberal father of Viennese art history, who played a central role in the formation of key imperial cultural institutions in the 1860s and 1870s and whose historicist orientations epitomized the artistic and aesthetic values of those decades, was followed by the generation of Wickhoff and Riegl, whose work was much more sympathetic to contemporary art. Moreover Lueger’s art-historical equivalent could be found in the figure of Strzygowski, whose strident ressentiment toward the Viennese scholarly establishment drew from the same ideological and political well as Lueger’s Christian Socialism.

This story of generational and ideological conflict is suggestive, but it presents a partial account. As Pieter Judson has recently emphasized, German liberal culture proved surprisingly resilient, and while the rise of the mass politics of the right and the left clearly challenged its position, it survived as an ideological position till the collapse of the Empire in 1918.²⁴ Moreover, Schorske masks important continuities in political, social, and cultural life. The art historians Eitelberger and his successors, for example, were all united in their loyalties to the Habsburg state; his pupil Albert Ilg explicitly declared his allegiance to the monarchy and berated those of his contemporaries who lacked a sense of Austrian patriotism, while Riegl and Dvořák were highly critical of the nationalist ideologies—German as well as Slav—of the decades preceding the outbreak of the First World War.²⁵ In addition, the putative political alienation of the fin de siècle generation posited by Schorske has to be tempered by the fact that the government gave considerable support to Secessionism. As Jeroen Bastiaan van Heerde has demonstrated, state sponsorship for Klimt and other artists was generous precisely because of the international character of their work, which presented an image of Austria-Hungary as a progressive cosmopolitan state.²⁶

The greatest limitation of Schorske’s study, however, and of the publications that emerged in its wake, is its excessive focus on Vienna. Thus, even if his interpretation is accepted, it arguably applies only to a small cultural elite based in the metropolis; its value for an understanding of the complex cultural dynamics of the wider monarchy is restricted. A similar criticism can be made of research into the historiography of art. Few studies of the Vienna School have paid attention to its place in the wider context of central Europe. Where comparisons have been made, they have mostly been made with art historians in Germany. It is of course undeniable that art historians in Vienna belonged to a larger German-language scholarly community that encompassed Germany and Switzerland, but they were also situated within the multilingual context of the Empire. Specifically, art historians had to contend with the gradual decline of German as the lingua franca of art-historical scholarship and with the rise of scholarly communities writing in Czech, Polish, Croatian, and Hungarian, many of whom studied in Vienna but then later came to challenge its intellectual hegemony. This challenge saw its most extreme form in the bitter exchanges in Prague between Czech and German Bohemian art historians, in which academic appointments and entire institutions were assimilated to wider political disputes, but it occurred elsewhere too.

This study sets art-historical writing against this background, considering how Vienna-based art historians responded to the increasingly fractured intellectual and cultural life of the late Habsburg Empire. In this context, the work of art historians in languages other than German remains woefully underinvestigated, and when it has been investigated, the research has largely been undertaken by scholars writing their own national histories of the discipline in Czech, Polish, or Croatian, which, for linguistic reasons, have hardly reached wider international audiences.²⁷ While not presenting a detailed global account of art history across Austria-Hungary, this study nevertheless explores this broader context and analyzes its implications for an understanding of the practices of Vienna-based art historians.

Foregrounding the larger political and cultural contexts of Austria-Hungary invites the obvious question regarding this book’s methodological and conceptual framework, especially given the limitations of Schorske. One of the most important recent developments in Habsburg studies has been the application of postcolonial theory to the analysis of the relations between Vienna and the peripheries of the Empire and between the Empire’s differing minorities.²⁸ This has proved enormously productive in the interpretation of the Empire’s intercultural dynamics and of the way that a variety of cultural practices and discourses, including art history, sustained the quasi-colonial and imperial attitudes of the Viennese intelligentsia as well as its political class. As one of the great European powers, Austria-Hungary could be compared with France or Britain in its treatment of its subjects. Although it had no overseas colonies, many of its minorities struggled to achieve recognition of their national aspirations; thus, while the revolutionaries of 1848 had much in common with their liberal counterparts elsewhere in Europe, many were also driven by a nationalist agenda that sought greater political and cultural recognition. The most dramatic expression of this impulse was the failed Hungarian Revolution, which embraced the cause of Magyar self-determination and, ultimately, independence.²⁹ Conversely, for many in Vienna the image of the various minorities of the Empire, especially those in the eastern and southern extremities of Galicia, Bukovina, Dalmatia, and Bosnia, differed little from the image those in London or Paris held of the colonial subjects in Africa or India.

The popular travelogue of 1876 From Semi-Asia: The Land and People of Eastern Europe, by the novelist and journalist Karl Franzos, encapsulated the beliefs of many Viennese about the picturesque but backward cultures and inhabitants of the eastern fringes of the Empire.³⁰ For their part, members of many of the minority cultures—including Franzos (1848–1904) himself, born to Jewish parents in the peripheral eastern province of Bukovina—exhibited a complex array of attitudes and identities, ranging from mimicry of Vienna and imperial rule to ambivalence and even clear opposition. These attitudes can also be seen in the writings of art historians of the various minority cultures. Some openly identified with the legitimizing ideology of the Habsburg Empire, while some were strongly committed to an oppositional stance and used art history as an instrument for resisting Austrian (or Hungarian) cultural dominance. Still others remained attached to the notion of a distinctive identity—and to the rediscovery or invention of a separate national artistic tradition—while nevertheless holding on to the Empire as providing the best political settlement possible. Recent work in this area has identified the extent to which many actors saw no contradiction between the promotion of a distinctive national identity, on the one hand, and loyalty to the emperor, on the other, whom they saw as the protector of their rights against the putative predations of other minorities.³¹

Parallels with the other European empires are suggestive, but Austria-Hungary was nevertheless different. Although its peripheral regions functioned as semicolonial territories—the only proper colony was Bosnia, which came under Austrian administration in 1878—the analogy with other European states has to be treated with caution. As Andrea Komlosy has argued, the relation of center and periphery was multilayered.³² After the Compromise (Ausgleich) of 1867, in which Hungary was granted near-autonomy except in military and foreign affairs, the monarchy had two political centers: Vienna and Budapest. Moreover, while Vienna may have been an economic, cultural, and political center, Budapest, and indeed Hungary, were economic peripheries. In contrast, Bohemia, which was a political periphery, was economically and educationally one of the most advanced crown lands of the Empire. Galicia had, after 1868, substantial local political autonomy, and although economically tied to Vienna in certain respects, it also enjoyed a substantial degree of local control over its economic resources, in particular oil.³³

There was also no single dominant national group; German language and culture occupied a hegemonic position, but the monarchy continuously resisted German nationalism. Austro-German liberals dominated the government and the legislative program during the 1860s and the 1870s, but thereafter the government, under Count Eduard Taaffe, ruled by means of support from the so-called Iron Ring, a coalition of Czechs, Poles, and conservative Austro-Germans. While the Empire did not recognize national groups as collective bodies, this did not amount to official systematic discrimination against individuals of particular linguistic or ethnic backgrounds, even if many individual Germans regarded the Slavs or the Romanians as culturally inferior.³⁴

Patterns of cultural, economic, and political influence and dominance were also not uniform, and the three did not necessarily always coincide. Although the Italians were economically privileged, Italian nationalism, dominant in Trieste, was elsewhere suppressed, like all other nationalist movements. In Dalmatia Italians formed the cultural elite, but the monarchy saw itself as protecting the other inhabitants of the region from Italian domination. The Hungarian administration, nervous about the fact that Magyars were a minority in the Hungarian lands, sought to Magyarize its other minorities, with increasing vigor after 1867, but among the Vienna elite there was no shortage of criticism of this policy. It was counterproductive, it was argued, since it fueled grievances and oppositional identification on the part of the minorities.

Such considerations highlight the caution that needs to be exercised when applying a postcolonial framework tout court to the analysis of culture in the later Habsburg Monarchy, but they also point to the complex patterns of belonging, identity, and difference shaping the matrix within which the discipline of art history emerged. This book is an attempt to trace the development of art-historical thought as it was played out against such political and sociocultural factors.

1

FOUNDING A DISCIPLINE: LIBERALISM AND THE IDEA OF SCIENTIFIC METHOD

I was the first one, here in Vienna, to have pioneered art criticism on the basis of scientific study. As a dozent in art history I was the first to give lectures to an audience of more than two hundred men from all kinds of backgrounds on the aesthetics of fine art, in other words, a science that had not yet been included in any compendium and that had no prerequisites other than the study of sources, for which I had no precursors in the literature.

—RUDOLF VON EITELBERGER

The establishment of the Vienna School of art history followed the confluence of a number of social, cultural, and political factors. The most important of these were the emergence of civil society in early nineteenth-century Vienna and the rise of liberalism as a political and social ideology. These were the necessary preconditions for the formation of a bourgeois intelligentsia that embraced liberal concepts of knowledge and professional identity. It is generally recognized that what distinguished the modern discipline of art history from antiquarianism was the idea of professionalism and scientific inquiry in the humanities, but this was, in turn, intimately connected to wider societal shifts. Crucial groundwork for the modern conception of science was also laid by the reforms of Maria Theresa and Josef II in the mid–eighteenth century, although these only bore full fruit a century later.¹ Specifically, they limited the powers of the Catholic Church and advanced those of the state, paving the way for a decoupling of education and the church. This was not completed until 1869, but it introduced secular ideals into educational institutions, which became increasingly aligned with the anticlerical stance of liberalism.

The more direct factors enabling the formation of the Vienna School were related to the aftermath of the revolutionary uprisings of 1848 and the growing rivalry between Austria and Prussia for the political, economic, and cultural leadership of central Europe in the mid–nineteenth century. Although authoritarian rule characterized the 1850s, Austrian intellectual life was not static during the period.² The government in Vienna recognized the need for reform in many areas, including higher education. Indeed, universities and other educational and cultural institutions came to be seen as vital instruments in the furtherance of state political and economic objectives: universities could play a significant role in shaping the intellectual interests of the middle classes while also ensuring that Prussia did not leave the Empire behind scientifically. In this regard an important development during the mid-1800s was the transformation of a number of ecclesiastical and private establishments, such as schools, galleries, museums, and universities, into state-sponsored institutions that were aligned with wider governmental policy objectives.

The key individual in the formation of Viennese art history was Rudolf von Eitelberger (1817–1885), a dynamic figure who laid down the parameters of art-historical research and whose most notable achievement was the founding of the Museum for Art and Industry in 1864. As Eitelberger proudly claimed, he almost single-handedly introduced art criticism to Vienna and turned art into a topic of public discourse. However, he was also fortunate to have embarked on his career at precisely the moment when a sympathetic environment had been created and when his aspirations corresponded to the interests of the state. But before examining Eitelberger, it is instructive to examine the earlier background, the prehistory, as it were, of the formation of art-historical scholarship in Vienna.

VIENNA ART HISTORY AND CRITICISM IN THE VORMÄRZ

In the decades before 1848, artistic and intellectual life in Vienna was restricted by the absolutist rule that accompanied the restoration of the ancien régime following the convulsions of the Napoleonic Wars. The so-called Biedermeier culture that followed the Congress of Vienna has become a byword for bourgeois parochialism, conservatism, and complacency. In part it was rooted in the self-interested outlook of a middle class keen to maintain its material well-being, but it was also a product of wide-reaching and close censorship, including heavy regulation of the arts.³ In Metternich’s Vienna this was particularly notable. Contemporaries visiting Vienna from elsewhere in Germany remarked on the lack of a bourgeois public sphere; the few musical and literary salons that existed were set up in close emulation of the aristocracy, which had a disproportionate influence on cultural life.⁴

The dominant artistic institution was the Academy of Fine Arts, which governed not only the professional training of artists but also exhibitions across the entire Austrian Empire and regulated policies regarding historic monuments. From 1812 until 1848 its director (Kurator) was Metternich, who ensured that its activities and policies were closely aligned with the objectives of the government.⁵ Acceptance of the continuing normative value of classicism framed any debate concerning the arts, thus stifling wider discussion of artistic practice.⁶ Art criticism as a genre hardly existed. The only periodical to treat the subject, the Wiener Moden-Zeitung und Zeitschrift für Kunst, schöne Literatur und Theater (Vienna journal of fashion and newspaper for art, belles lettres, and theater), which began publication in 1816, included reports on notable events related to the visual arts but contained few genuine examples of art criticism. In its first year the journal reviewed an exhibition of work by academicians, but this was a noteworthy exception, both because it displayed a remarkable willingness to criticize the work on display and also because its independent voice was not repeated in subsequent issues.⁷ Indeed, coverage of the visual arts in subsequent issues of the journal was limited to brief notices advertising exhibitions, either by the academy or by private individuals wishing to display works they had recently acquired.

The Austrian art world in 1848 was limited in other ways too. There were no public art institutions or museums comparable to the National Gallery in London or the Altes Museum in Berlin; instead, the major galleries, such as the Belvedere and the Albertina, founded on the collection of Albert, Duke of Saxe-Teschen, were private institutions with restricted access and collecting policies driven by their owners’ interests. The Albertina, for example, had been opened to the public following the duke’s death in 1822, but it remained a Habsburg family possession, bequeathed to them in the duke’s will. While open to scholars and society notables, it could hardly be regarded as a public art institution.⁸

These collections reflected the personal preferences of their royal and aristocratic founders, but such preferences were not arbitrary and uninformed; already in the 1780s the Belvedere collection had been reorganized by its curator, the Swiss engraver Christian von Mechel (1737–1817), as a properly art-historical collection, so that the arrangement as whole, together with its parts, might be instructive and, as far as is possible, a visible history of art.⁹ This organization has subsequently come to be regarded as an important early step in the evolution of modern museological practice.¹⁰ Nevertheless, the primary audience was not some notional art public but a much more limited audience; the success of von Mechel’s reorganization of the Belvedere was gauged not by the extent to which it garnered wider public approval but rather by the response of the empress Maria Theresa.

While the artistic culture of Vienna in the Vormärz period may have been subject to strict political control and was embedded in the conservative social structure of the time, it was not as static as is commonly assumed. During the 1820s and 1830s notions of civic society took root and were linked to the rise in Vienna of liberalism as a middle-class social and political ideology. On the one hand, liberalism is often equated with adherence to laissez-faire ideals of free trade derived from Britain, yet, on the other, it is also associated with beliefs in the attainment of personal and broader social progress through intellectual and cultural improvement (Bildung).¹¹ Consequently, as Robin Okey has emphasized, academics, particularly historians, enjoyed a notable prominence, with the Neue Freie Presse, the leading liberal newspaper, later calling for an opening-up of the upper house to the nobility of the intellectual bourgeoisie, the nobility of bourgeois labour, the nobility of science and art.¹²

Middle-class liberals also played a crucial role in the formation of private associations and societies (Vereine) that sought to achieve economic, social, and cultural advancement without reliance on the patronage of the state. Such organizations—referred to by Metternich as the German plague—made a significant contribution to the cultural development of Vienna and the formation of a public for the arts.¹³ The best-known, such as the Vienna Society of Friends of Music (Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien), founded in 1812, helped establish forms of civic cultural patronage, although it should be noted that Vienna was somewhat belated in relation to the visual arts, for the Austrian Art Society in Vienna (Österreichischer Kunst-Verein in Wien) was not founded until 1858.

Despite the high level of state control of and intervention into cultural life, the climate gradually changed during the 1820s and 1830s, and a bourgeois art world slowly came into being. A significant index of this shift could be seen in the activities of Joseph Daniel Böhm (1794–1865). Director of the Academy of Engraving at the Imperial and Royal Central Mint from 1837 onward, Böhm is widely credited with having played a crucial role in the prehistory of the Vienna School, particularly with creating an environment that prompted the young Rudolf von Eitelberger to take an interest in the visual arts.¹⁴ Originally trained as a sculptor, Böhm became a proficient medalist, but his most important contribution in this context was in his role as an art collector and a teacher; he had begun collecting art in the 1820s and had, most notably—and in contrast to contemporary practices, in which personal taste was perhaps the most important criterion—sought to build up a representative collection that reflected the wider historical development of art. This was in keeping with his didactic intentions, for in his own home he delivered private lectures based on the works in his possession; regular attendees formed something of a Böhm Circle, a group of individuals including the artist Albert Camesina (1806–1881), the archaeologist Eduard von Sacken (1825–1883), the historian Imre Henszlmann (1813–1888), Eitelberger’s contemporary Gustav Heider (1819–1897), who would later become an important figure in conservation in Vienna, and the art dealer Dominik Artaria (1775–1842).

Böhm did not leave any substantial texts that would indicate his beliefs and ideas; the informal nature of the gatherings precluded any extended presentations, and he was not disposed to writing at length. However, the catalogue of the auction of his collection after his death provides an indication of its logic and scope.¹⁵ It included some 2,610 items, ranging from Egyptian, Greek, and Roman gems to Chinese and Japanese bronzes and old-master paintings and drawings. Among the latter were paintings by Bassano, Dürer, Canaletto, Murillo, and Schongauer; drawings by Rembrandt (of which 41 were listed in the catalogue), Raphael, and Rubens; and a large collection of prints, of which works by Dürer (including 23 engravings and 64 woodcuts) and Rembrandt (222 items) composed a significant proportion.

Further information on Böhm can also be gleaned from accounts by Eitelberger and Henszlmann published after his death.¹⁶ Their narratives were intended as celebrations of Böhm’s memory—Henszlmann’s was published the year after his mentor’s death—rather than as critical studies, but they agree on a number of issues, in particular those aspects of Böhm’s thinking that were of significance for the later development of art history in Vienna. First, it appears that Böhm criticized the almost total lack of regard for the history of art in the teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts. Classical models were used for education, and the academy had (and still possesses) an extensive collection of old-master paintings and sculpture, but there was little sense of their belonging within any kind of historical context or having any pedagogical function. Although Böhm’s own understanding of art, judging from Henszlmann’s account, lacked conceptual sophistication, he nevertheless stressed the need for a knowledge of the history of art as the fundamental basis of artistic practice and teaching. Indeed, he criticized much contemporary art precisely due to its amnesiac disregard of history.

A friend of the Nazarene painter Johann Friedrich Overbeck, Böhm was critical of the loss of religious sentiment in contemporary art, since he believed religion to be the indispensable basis of all art and, according to Henszlmann, claimed that if one is not a strict Catholic, one can neither understand nor practice art.¹⁷ Böhm also promoted medieval art. This was linked to his commitment to Catholicism, and it would have an enormous impact on Eitelberger, for whom the Middle Ages was a central topic; his most substantial writings were his topographical surveys of medieval architecture.¹⁸ Indeed, his willingness to challenge existing aesthetic orthodoxy, although partly driven by conservative religious attitudes, laid the foundation for a central aspect of art-historical scholarship in Vienna: the suspension of existing aesthetic norms in the name of the comprehensive study of art history. In this regard it is notable that, according to Henszlmann, he also spoke highly of Rembrandt (an attitude borne out by the large number of Rembrandts listed in the auction catalogue), who, in the 1830s and 1840s, had fallen into oblivion.

For Böhm it was axiomatic that the historical understanding of art had to proceed inductively on the basis of direct contact with artworks; this empiricism was connected to a strong emphasis on the need to understand the role of material in shaping artistic expression and form. Böhm died before Semper’s magnum opus, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten (Style in the technical and tectonic arts), was published, but his stress on the importance of materials laid the basis for the later positive reception of Semperian ideas by others, which played a prominent role in Vienna for much of the nineteenth century.¹⁹ Böhm’s emphasis on direct contact with artworks was to characterize Viennese art history and condition its practitioners until the 1930s; most of the major representatives of the Vienna School were, at some point in their careers, museum professionals. Eitelberger combined the post of university professor with that of director of the Museum for Art and Industry; Franz Wickhoff was curator of textiles at the museum, as was Alois Riegl; and others, including Julius Schlosser, Albert Ilg, Moriz Thausing, and, later, Hans Tietze, spent substantial portions of their careers in the museums of Vienna.²⁰

Böhm’s activity was limited, but it represented an important innovation within the emerging civil society of Vienna. As Eitelberger noted, the only institutions in Vienna where art was studied were the mint, the imperial painting collection in the Belvedere, and the Academy of Fine Arts.²¹ Each of these was dominated by artists who, with the exception of Böhm, had a purely instrumental attitude toward the collections. Tied to the court, they were moreover not public institutions. Böhm’s circle, in contrast, contained the seeds of a bourgeois art world that embraced a wider audience; indeed, in 1846, together with Dominik Artaria and Eitelberger, Böhm staged the first public art-historical exhibition in Vienna.²²

The year 1846 was significant also for the publication of a polemical tract by the painter Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller (1793–1865) attacking the teaching system of the academy.²³ A member of the academy, Waldmüller called for greater attention to observation of nature—the source of truth, the highest, most elevated law of art—and laid down the precepts for a teaching method that, he claimed, could transform a novice into an accomplished painter within a year.²⁴ At the heart of his proposal was