Alois Riegl, ca. 1890

Alois Riegl (14th January 1858 in Linz - 17th June 1905 in Vienna) was an Austrian art historian. Riegl studied at the University of Vienna, where he attended classes on philosophy and history taught by Franz Brentano, Alexius Meinong, Max Büdinger, and Robert Zimmerman, and studied connoisseurship on the Morellian model with Moritz Thausing. His dissertation was a study of the Jakobskirche in Regensburg, while his habilitation, completed in 1889, addressed medieval calendar manuscripts. Map of Austria, locating Linz Linz is a city and Statutarstadt in northeast Austria, on the Danube river. ... Inhabitants according to official census figures: 1800 to 2005 Vienna in 1858 Vienna (German: Wien ) is the capital of Austria, and also one of the nine States of Austria. ... Art history usually refers to the history of the visual arts. ... · Franz Brentano Franz Clemens Honoratus Hermann Brentano (January 16, 1838 Marienberg am Rhein (near Boppard) - March 17, 1917 Zürich) was an influential figure in both philosophy and psychology. ... Alexius Meinong (July 17, 1853 - November 27, 1920) was an Austrian philosopher. ... Giovanni Morelli (1816 - 1891) was an Italian art critic and political figure. ... Schottenportal The Benedictine abbey of St James (Jakobskirche) in Regensburg, Germany, was founded by Hiberno-Scottish missionaries and for most of its history was in the hands of first Irish, then Scottish monks. ... Regensburg (also Ratisbon, Latin Ratisbona) is a city (population 129,175 in 2005) in Bavaria, south-east Germany, located at the confluence of the Danube and Regen rivers, at the northernmost bend in the Danube. ... Habilitation is a term used within the university system in France, Germany, Austria, and some other European countries such as the German-speaking part of Switzerland, in Bulgaria, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, and countries of former Soviet Union, such as Armenia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Kirgizstan, Kazakhstan, Russia, Uzbekistan...

In 1886 Riegl accepted a curatorial position at the Austrian Museum of Art and Industry, 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 establishd by his second book, Stilfragen: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik (Problems of style: foundations for a history of ornament) (1893). In this work Riegl followed certain ornamental motifs from ancient near eastern through classical and up into early medieval and Islamic art, 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. Byzantine art was the high art of the Middle Ages and monumental Church mosaics were the crowning glory. ... Islamic art is the art of Islamic people, cultures, and countries. ...

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, a period that was at the time considered merely as the decadent end of the Renaissance. In 1901 he published a foundational study of another neglected period, namely, late antiquity. The Spätromische Kunstindustrie (Late Roman art industry) (1901) attempt to characterize late antique art through stylistic analyses of its major monuments (for example, the Arch of Constantine) and also of such humble objects as belt buckles. The Kunstindustrie followed the lead of an earlier work by Riegl's colleague Franz Wickhoff, 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 controvery between Riegl and Wickhoff, on the one side, and Josef Strzygowski, on the other, concerning the origins of the late antique style. Baroque art is the painting and sculpture associated with the Baroque cultural movement, a movement often identified with Absolutism and the Counter Reformation; the existence of important Baroque art and architecture in non-absolutist and Protestant states, however, undercuts this linking. ... Late Antiquity is a rough periodization (c. ... The Arch of Constantine seen from the Colosseum The arch seen from Via Triumphalis Detail of the arch (southern side, left) The Arch of Constantine is a triumphal arch in Rome, situated between the Colosseum and the Palatine Hill. ... Josef Strzygowski (1862 - 1941) was an influential and controversial art historian. ...

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.^[1] 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.^[2]

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, 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 at the age of 47, and many of his 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, this led to unrestrained formalism and racial essentialism. As a result, Riegl's stock declined, particularly in the American academy, and iconography was seen as a more responsible method. Hans Sedlmayr (1896–1984) was a conservative Austrian art historian. ... The term formalism describes an emphasis on form over content or meaning in the arts, literature, or philosophy. ... Iconography usually refers to the design or creation of images and more specifically to the historical study of art which aims at the identification, description and the interpretation of the content of images. ...

However, in the late twentieth century, Riegl's work was revisited by scholars of diverse methodological persuasions, including post-structuralism and reception aesthetics. 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. To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article may require cleanup. ...

Notes

1. ^ J. Elsner, "From empirical evidence to the big picture: some reflections on Riegl's concept of Kunstwollen," Critical Inquiry 32 (2006), 741-66.
2. ^ Tr. C.S. Wood, The Vienna School reader: politics and art historical method in the 1930s (New York, 2000), 94-95

Bibliography

• 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).

• C.S. Wood, ed., The Vienna School reader: politics and art historical method in the 1930s (New York, 2000).

External links

• Riegl at the Biographical dictionary of art historians