Alois Riegl was an Austria

Austria

Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...

n art historian, and is considered a member of the Vienna School of Art History

Vienna School of Art History

The Vienna School of Art History is a collective term used to describe the development of fundamental art-historical methods at the University of Vienna...

. He was one of the major figures in the establishment of art history as a self-sufficient academic discipline

Academic discipline

An academic discipline, or field of study, is a branch of knowledge that is taught and researched at the college or university level. Disciplines are defined , and recognized by the academic journals in which research is published, and the learned societies and academic departments or faculties to...

, and one of the most influential practitioners of formalism

Formalism (art)

In art theory, formalism is the concept that a work's artistic value is entirely determined by its form--the way it is made, its purely visual aspects, and its medium. Formalism emphasizes compositional elements such as color, line, shape and texture rather than realism, context, and content...

.

Life

Riegl studied at the University of Vienna

University of Vienna

The University of Vienna is a public university located in Vienna, Austria. It was founded by Duke Rudolph IV in 1365 and is the oldest university in the German-speaking world...

, where he attended classes on philosophy and history taught by Franz Brentano

Franz Brentano

Franz Clemens Honoratus Hermann Brentano was an influential German philosopher and psychologist whose influence was felt by other such luminaries as Sigmund Freud, Edmund Husserl, Kazimierz Twardowski and Alexius Meinong, who followed and adapted his views.-Life:Brentano was born at Marienberg am...

, Alexius Meinong

Alexius Meinong

Alexius Meinong was an Austrian philosopher, a realist known for his unique ontology...

, Max Büdinger, and Robert Zimmerman, and studied connoisseurship on the Morellian

Giovanni Morelli

Giovanni Morelli was an Italian art critic and political figure. As an art historian, he developed the "Morellian" technique of scholarship, identifying the characteristic "hands" of painters through scrutiny of diagnostic minor details that revealed artists' scarcely conscious shorthand and...

 model with Moritz Thausing

Moritz Thausing

Moritz Thausing was an Austrian art historian, and counts among the founders of the Vienna School of Art History.- Life :...

. His dissertation was a study of the Jakobskirche

Scots Monastery, Regensburg

The Scots Monastery is a Benedictine abbey of St James in Regensburg, Germany. It was founded by Hiberno-Scottish missionaries and for most of its history was in the hands of first Irish, then Scottish monks, whence its name The Scots Monastery is a Benedictine abbey of St James (Jakobskirche) in...

 in Regensburg

Regensburg

Regensburg is a city in Bavaria, Germany, located at the confluence of the Danube and Regen rivers, at the northernmost bend in the Danube. To the east lies the Bavarian Forest. Regensburg is the capital of the Bavarian administrative region Upper Palatinate...

, while his habilitation

Habilitation

Habilitation is the highest academic qualification a scholar can achieve by his or her own pursuit in several European and Asian countries. Earned after obtaining a research doctorate, such as a PhD, habilitation requires the candidate to write a professorial thesis based on independent...

, completed in 1889, addressed medieval calendar manuscripts.

In 1886 Riegl accepted a curatorial position at the k.k. Österreichisches Museum für Kunst und Industrie (today the Museum für angewandte Kunst) in Vienna, where he would work for the next ten years, eventually as director of the textile department. His first book, Altorientalische Teppiche (Antique oriental carpets) (1891), grew out of this experience.

Riegl's reputation as an innovative art historian, however, was established by his second book, Stilfragen

Stilfragen

Stilfragen: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik is a book on the history of ornament by the Austrian art historian Alois Riegl. It was published in Berlin in 1893. The English translation renders the title as Problems of style: foundations for a history of ornament, although this has...

: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik (Problems of style: foundations for a history of ornament) (1893). In this work Riegl sought to refute the materialist account of the origins of decorative motifs from, for example, the weaving of textiles, a theory that was associated with the followers of Gottfried Semper

Gottfried Semper

Gottfried Semper was a German architect, art critic, and professor of architecture, who designed and built the Semper Opera House in Dresden between 1838 and 1841. In 1849 he took part in the May Uprising in Dresden and was put on the government's wanted list. Semper fled first to Zürich and later...

. Instead, Riegl attempted to describe a continuous and autonomous "history of ornament." To this end he followed certain ornamental motifs, such as the arabesque

Arabesque

The arabesque is a form of artistic decoration consisting of "surface decorations based on rhythmic linear patterns of scrolling and interlacing foliage, tendrils" or plain lines, often combined with other elements...

, from ancient near eastern through classical and up into early medieval

Medieval art

The medieval art of the Western world covers a vast scope of time and place, over 1000 years of art history in Europe, and at times the Middle East and North Africa...

 and Islamic art

Islamic art

Islamic art encompasses the visual arts produced from the 7th century onwards by people who lived within the territory that was inhabited by or ruled by culturally Islamic populations...

, in the process developing the idea of a Kunstwollen (difficult to translate, although "will to art" is one possibility). Riegl seems to have conceived the Kunstwollen as a historically contingent tendency of an age or a nation that drove stylistic development without respect to mimetic or technological concerns. Its proper interpretation, however, has itself been a subject of scholarly debate for over a century.

In 1894, on the basis of the Stilfragen, Riegl was awarded an extraordinarius position at the University of Vienna, where he began to lecture on Baroque art

Baroque

The Baroque is a period and the style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music...

, a period that was at the time considered merely as the decadent end of the Renaissance. In the meantime he became increasingly preoccupied with the relationship between stylistic development and cultural history, a concern that may indicate the growing influence of Karl Schnaase

Karl Schnaase

Karl Schnaase was a distinguished German art historian and jurist. He was one of the founders of modern art history, and the author of one of the first surveys of the history of art.- Life :...

's work on his thought. This concern is particularly evident in two manuscripts that he prepared during this time, but were published only after his death as the Historische Grammatik der bildenden Künste (Historical grammar of the visual arts). In these manuscripts Riegl attempted to chart the entire history of western art as the record of a "contest with nature." This contest took different forms depending on the changing historical conceptions of nature by humans.

In 1901 Riegl published a work that combined his interest in neglected, "transitional," periods with his endeavor to explain the relationship between style and cultural history. This took the form of a study of late antiquity

Late Antiquity

Late Antiquity is a periodization used by historians to describe the time of transition from Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages, in both mainland Europe and the Mediterranean world. Precise boundaries for the period are a matter of debate, but noted historian of the period Peter Brown proposed...

. The Spätrömische Kunstindustrie (Late Roman art industry) (1901) was an attempt to characterize late antique art through stylistic analyses of its major monuments (for example, the Arch of Constantine

Arch of Constantine

The Arch of Constantine is a triumphal arch in Rome, situated between the Colosseum and the Palatine Hill. It was erected to commemorate Constantine I's victory over Maxentius at the Battle of Milvian Bridge on October 28, 312...

) and also of such humble objects as belt buckles. The Kunstindustrie followed the lead of an earlier work by Riegl's colleague Franz Wickhoff

Franz Wickhoff

Franz Wickhoff was an Austrian art historian, and is considered a member of the Vienna School of Art History. Wickhoff studied at the University of Vienna under Alexander Conze and Moritz Thausing. In 1879 he received a position at the k.k...

, Die Wiener Genesis (1895), a study of late antique manuscript painting. The two books, taken together, were among the first to consider the aesthetic characteristics of late antique art on their own terms, and not as representing the collapse of classical standards. They also led to a controversy between Riegl and Wickhoff, on the one side, and Josef Strzygowski

Josef Strzygowski

Josef Strzygowski was a German art historian known for his theory on the influence of Early Christian Armenian architecture on the early Medieval architecture of Europe, outlined in his book, Die Baukunst der Armenier und Europa...

, on the other, concerning the origins of the late antique style.

It has been argued, however, that the Kunstindustrie was conceived more as a philosophical justification of the concept of Kunstwollen than as a study of late antique art. Indeed, one of Riegl's clearer definitions of the concept appears in the final chapter of the Kunstindustrie:

All human will is directed toward a satisfactory shaping of man's relationship to the world, within and beyond the individual. The plastic Kunstwollen regulates man's relationship to the sensibly perceptible appearance of things. Art expresses the way man wants to see things shaped or colored, just as the poetic Kunstwollen expreses the way man wants to imagine them. Man is not only a passive, sensory recipient, but also a desiring, active being who wishes to interpret the world in such a way (varying from one people, region, or epoch to another) that it most clearly and obligingly meets his desires. The character of this will is contained in what we call the worldview (again in the broadest sense): in religion, philosophy, science, even statecraft and law.

Here all the main elements of Riegl's mature conception of the Kunstwollen are clearly expressed: its active nature, through which art becomes, not the imitation of reality, but the expression of a desired reality; its historical contingency; and its relation to other elements of "worldview." By means of this theoretical apparatus, Riegl could claim to penetrate to the essence of a culture or an era through formal analysis of the art that it produced.

Riegl's final completed monograph, Das holländische Gruppenporträt (The group portraiture of Holland) (1902), focused on the Dutch baroque

Dutch School (painting)

The Dutch School were painters in the Netherlands from the early Renaissance to the Baroque. It includes Early Netherlandish and Dutch Renaissance artists active in the northern Low Countries and, later, Dutch Golden Age painting in the United Provinces.Many painters, sculptors and architects of...

, and represented yet another shift in method. Here Riegl began to develop a theory of "attentiveness" to describe the relationship between the viewer of a work of art and the work itself.

Riegl died from cancer three years later, at the age of 47.

Legacy

Many of Riegl's unfinished works were published after his death, including Die Entstehung der Barockkunst in Rom (The development of Baroque art in Rome) and the Historische Grammatik der bildenden Künste (Historical grammar of the visual arts). Riegl had a robust following in Vienna, and certain of his students (the so-called Second Vienna School) attempted to develop his theories into a comprehensive art-historical method. In certain cases, such as that of the controversial Hans Sedlmayr

Hans Sedlmayr

Hans Sedlmayr was an Austrian art historian. Sedlmayr was University Professor of Art History in Vienna from 1936 until 1945, then in Munich from 1951 until 1964, and finally at the University of Salzburg from 1965-69, where he established the art history curriculum...

, this led to unrestrained formalism

Formalism (art)

In art theory, formalism is the concept that a work's artistic value is entirely determined by its form--the way it is made, its purely visual aspects, and its medium. Formalism emphasizes compositional elements such as color, line, shape and texture rather than realism, context, and content...

. As a result, Riegl's stock declined, particularly in the American academy, and iconography

Iconography

Iconography is the branch of art history which studies the identification, description, and the interpretation of the content of images. The word iconography literally means "image writing", and comes from the Greek "image" and "to write". A secondary meaning is the painting of icons in the...

 was seen as a more responsible method.

Riegl's Stilfragen remained influential throughout the twentieth century. Its terminology was introduced to English-language scholarship in particular by Paul Jacobsthal

Paul Jacobsthal

Paul Jacobsthal was a scholar of Greek vase painting and Celtic art. He wrote his dissertation at the University of Bonn under the supervision of Georg Loeschcke...

's work on Celtic art

Celtic art

Celtic art is the art associated with the peoples known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient peoples whose language is uncertain, but have cultural and stylistic similarities with speakers of Celtic...

. Ernst Gombrich

Ernst Gombrich

Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich, OM, CBE was an Austrian-born art historian who became naturalized British citizen in 1947. He spent most of his working life in the United Kingdom...

 drew heavily on the Stilfragen, which he called "the one great book ever written about the history of ornament", in his own study of The sense of order.

In the late twentieth century, the entirety of Riegl's work was revisited by scholars of diverse methodological persuasions, including post-structuralism

Post-structuralism

Post-structuralism is a label formulated by American academics to denote the heterogeneous works of a series of French intellectuals who came to international prominence in the 1960s and '70s...

 and reception aesthetics

Aesthetics

Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...

. In retrospect a number of tendencies of Riegl's work seem to have foreshadowed the concerns of contemporary art history: his insistence that aesthetics be treated in historical context, and not in relation to an ideal standard; his interest in the "minor" arts; and his attention to the relationship between viewers and objects.

Works

The most complete bibliographies of Riegl's work are found in K.M. Swoboda, ed., Gesammelte Aufsätze (Augsburg, 1929), xxxv-xxxix; and E.M. Kain and D. Britt, tr., The Group Portraiture of Holland (Los Angeles, 1989), 384-92. The following list includes only monographs, book-length works, and collections, arranged by date of publication.

• Die ägyptischen Textilfunde im Österr. Museum (Vienna, 1889).
• Altorientalische Teppiche (Leipzig, 1891).
• Stilfragen
  Stilfragen
  Stilfragen: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik is a book on the history of ornament by the Austrian art historian Alois Riegl. It was published in Berlin in 1893. The English translation renders the title as Problems of style: foundations for a history of ornament, although this has...
  
  (Berlin, 1893). Tr. E. Kain, Problems of style (Princeton, 1992).
• Volkskunst, Hausfleiß, und Hausindustrie (Berlin, 1894).
• Ein orientalischer Teppich vom Jahre 1202 (Berlin, 1895).
• Die spätrömische Kunstindustrie nach den Funden in Österreich-Ungarn (Vienna, 1901). Tr. R. Winkes, Late Roman art industry (Rome, 1985).
• "Das holländische Gruppenporträt," Jahrbuch des allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses 22 (1902), 71-278. Tr. E.M. Kain and D. Britt, The Group Portraiture of Holland (Los Angeles, 1999).
• Der moderne Denkmalkultus, sein Wesen, seine Entstehung (Vienna, 1903). Tr. K. W. Forster and D. Ghirardo, “The modern cult of monuments: its character and origin,” Oppositions 25 (1982), 20-51.
• Die Enstehung der Barockkunst in Rom: Vorlesungen aus 1901-1902, ed. A. Burda and M. Dvořàk (Vienna, 1908).
• Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. K.M. Swoboda (Augsburg, 1929).
• Historische Grammatik der bildenden Künste, ed. K.M. Swoboda and O. Pächt (Graz, 1966). Tr. J.E. Jung, Historical grammar of the visual arts (New York, 2004).

Monographs

• M. Gubser, Time's visible surface: Alois Riegl and the discourse on history and temporality in fin-de-siècle Vienna (Detroit, 2006).
• M. Iversen, Alois Riegl: art history and theory (Cambridge, 1993).
• M. Olin, Forms of representation in Alois Riegl's theory of art (University Park, 1992).
• M. Podro, The critical historians of art (New Haven, 1984).
• A. Reichenberger, Riegls “Kunstwollen”: Versuch einer Neubetrachtung (Sankt Augustin, 2003)
• S. Scarrocchia, Oltre la storia dell’arte: Alois Riegl, vita e opere di un protagonisto della cultura viennese (Milan, 2006).
• G. Vasold, Alois Riegl und die Kunstgeschichte als Kulturgeschichte: Überlegungen zum Frühwerk des Wiener Gelehrten (Freiburg, 2004).
• C.S. Wood, ed., The Vienna School reader: politics and art historical method in the 1930s (New York, 2000).
• Richard Woodfield, ed., Framing formalism: Riegl's work (Amsterdam, 2001).

Articles

• B. Binstock, “Postscript: Alois Riegl in the presence of ‘The Nightwatch’,” October 74 (1995), 36-44.
• P. Crowther, “More than ornament: the significance of Riegl,” Art History 17 (1994), 482-94.
• G. Dolff-Bonekämper, Gegenwartswerte. Für eine Erneuerung von Alois Riegls Denkmalwerttheorie. In: Hans-Rudolf Meier und Ingrid Scheurmann (eds.). DENKmalWERTE. Beiträge zur Theorie und Aktualität der Denkmalpflege. Georg Mörsch zum 70. Geburtstag. Deutscher Kunstverlag, Berlin, München 2010, ISBN 978-3-422-06903-9, 27-40.
• J. Elsner, “The birth of late antiquity: Riegl and Strzygowski in 1901,” Art History 25 (2002), 358-79.
• J. Elsner, “From empirical evidence to the big picture: some reflections on Riegl’s concept of Kunstwollen,” Critical Inquiry 32 (2006), 741-66.
• Michael Falser, "Denkmalpflege zwischen europäischem Gedächtnis und nationaler Erinnerung – Riegls Alterswert und Kulturtechniken der Berliner Nachwendezeit." In: Csàky, M., Großegger, E. (Eds) Jenseits von Grenzen. Transnationales , translokales Gedächtnis. Vienna 2007, 75-93.
• Michael Falser, "Zum 100. Todesjahr von Alois Riegl. Der Alterswert als Beitrag zur Konstruktion staatsnationaler Identität in der Habsburg-Monarchie um 1900 und seine Relevanz heute. In: Österreichische Zeitschrift für Kunst- und Denkmalpflege, Wien. (LIX, 2005) Heft 3/4, 298-311.
• W. Kemp, “Alois Riegl,” in H. Dilly, ed., Altmeister der Kunstgeschichte (Berlin, 1990), 37-60.
• M. Olin, “Alois Riegl: The late Roman Empire in the late Habsburg Empire,” Austrian Studies 5 (1994), 107-20.
• O. Pächt, “Alois Riegl,” Burlington Magazine 105 (1963), 190-91.
• E. Panofsky, “Der Begriff des Kunstwollens,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 14 (1920). Reprinted in H. Oberer and E. Verheyen, eds., Aufsätze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft (Berlin, 1974). Tr. K.J. Northcott and J. Snyder, “The concept of artistic volition,” Critical Inquiry 8 (1981), 17-33.
• M. Rampley, “Spectatorship and the historicity of art: re-reading Alois Riegl’s Historical grammar of the fine arts,” Word and Image 12 (1996), 209-17.
• W. Sauerländer, “Alois Riegl und die Enstehung der autonomen Kunstgeschichte am Fin-de-Siècle,” in R. Bauer et al., eds., Fin-de-Siècle: zu Literatur und Kunst der Jahrhundertwende (Frankfurt, 1977), 125-39.
• Céline Trautmann-Waller: Alois Riegl (1858-1905). In: Michel Espagne and Bénédicte Savoy (eds.). Dictionnaire des historiens d'art allemands. CNRS Editions, Paris 2010, ISBN 978-2-271-06714-2, p. 217-228; 405.
• H. Zerner, “Alois Riegl: art, value, and historicism,” Daedalus 105 (1976), 177-88.

External links

• Riegl at the biographical Dictionary of Art Historians
• Michael Falser: Zum 100. Todesjahr von Alois Riegl 2005. Der Alterswert und die Konstruktion staatsnationaler Identität in der Habsburg-Monarchie um 1900, Georg Dehio, europäische Gedächtnisorte und der DDR-Palast der Republik in Berlin. Kunsttexte.de (1/2006)http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/kunsttexte/download/denk/falser2.pdf
• Diana Reynolds Cordileone, ‘The advantages and disadvantages of Art History to Life: Alois Riegl and historicism’ Journal of Art Historiography Number 3 December 2010