Strzygowski and Riegl in America (2017)

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 embrace of Riegl since the 1980s be seen, as it usually is, as an aspect of a more general post-structuralist and anti-humanistic rejection of the emigré legacy? Or should it be seen as a sophisticated extension of the Hegelian critical and idealist tradition that in the end leaves the traditional conceptions of form and history in place—this is surely how Strzygowski would see it. The function of Strzygowski finally is to force us into reconsidering the dynamic map of world art he sketched out—a crude diagram in his hands, but a tool perhaps retaining some force in the interminable campaign against the humanist superstition of Mediterranean classicism. For Strzygowski traced paths on the map that upset all the established narratives of European art history inherited from Vasari, Winckelmann, and nineteenth-century philhellenistic art history. The form-paths he found are in many cases the very paths that are still travelled by scholars today trying to complicate the nineteenth-century genealogies of ancient and medieval civilization. A hypothetical critique of traditional art history cannot come from Strzygowski's quarter, for in the end Strzygowski had nothing to say of interest about art, representation, or visuality. Strzygowski was incapable of mounting a theoretical critique of Riegl, or for that matter a self-critique. And yet he stands as a reproof of the ultimate European vice, self-involvement.