Strzygowski and Riegl in America

• Published in: Journal of art historiography 2017-12 (17), p.17-CSW1
• Main Author: Christopher S. Wood
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: formalism; global art history; Riegl; Strzygowski; Vienna School
• ISSN: 2042-4752

This is the English text that served as the basis for ‘Strzygowski und Riegl in den Vereinigten Staaten’, which appeared in Wiener Schule: Erinnerung und Perspektiven, ed. Michael Viktor Schwarz (= Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 53, 2004), 217-34. See https://18798-presscdn-pagely.netdna-ssl.com/christopherwood/wp-content/uploads/sites/2785/2016/05/strzygowski-and-riegl.pdf This essay tracks the reception, reputations, and conceptual accommodations of the Viennese art historians Josef Strzygowski and Alois Riegl in the United States. Riegl, who died in 1905, never visited the New World. His texts, untranslated into English until the mid-1980s, were long regarded as remote and unusable monuments. Strzygowski, by contrast, was lionized by American scholars in the 1920s. He made two trips to the United States, delivered lectures, and published books as well as articles in the Art Bulletin and other journals. Strzygowski had great expectations from American modernity, imagining that American scholars would follow him in his rejection of humanistic “superstition,” his abandonment of historical-philological method, and his disregard for traditional nationalist loyalties and for the institutions of Church and State. He felt sure that Americans would follow him in opening up the history of art to the entire globe. Strzygowski’s relentless sequence of publications had opened up a whole Near Eastern landscape of artistic activity completely unknown to, indeed never seen by, other European scholars, and challenging the idea of the integrity of Mediterranean classical culture. American art historians, especially medievalists, responded with some enthusiasm. Allan Marquand named Riegl and Franz Wickhoff as representatives of the older, Rome-centered view that Strzygowski’s scholarship threatened. Today the embrace of the right-wing ideologue Strzygowski appears naïve. And in the long run Americans did not follow Strzygowski's lead, partly because they sensed the dangerous irresponsibility of his thinking, partly because they were drawn in the end to the mainstream European tradition. The emigré scholars who arrived in the 1930s reinforced these judgments. The emigrés brought with them not only a skeptical and empirical method, but also a deep faith in the intrinsic superiority and exemplarity of European culture and the humanistic tradition. Seen in this light, the later positive reception of Riegl within American art history takes on a new ambiguity. Should the e