Otto Pächt and Albert Kutal : Methodological Parallels

The relevancy of the evolutionary approachIn 1971, on the 50th anniversary of the death of Max Dvorak, the sixth issue of Umeni published a number of articles in his memory. One of these was a piece by an outstanding Czech medievalist and professor at the University in Brno, Albert Kutal. In it Kutal expressed the belief that 'generally, and on many in-depth research questions, Dvorak's findings are unshaken and remain valid today' and then added 'this relevancy applies to all the stages it [Dvorak's work] has undergone, not just the latter which is generally the focal point today'. Kutal had the following to say about the research method Dvorak employed in the early stage of his work: 'The essence of this method was the genetic interpretation of an artistic event, where the individual plastic phenomenon is simply a link in an evolutionary chain subordinated to the inexorable law of causality ... This principle of evolutionary causality ... was intended to ensure the objectivity of art history and free it from the inadequacies and errors of the cultural historical approach...'1 Three years later, in honour of the centenary of the birth of Dvorak - successor to Alois Riegl at the University of Vienna and the most important Czech art historian - the Austrian journal, Wiener Jahrbuch fur Kunstgeschichte, republished Dvorak's study, 'Uber die dringendsten Methodischen Erfordernisse der Erziehung zur Kunstgeschichtlichen Forschung', which had not been included in the five published volumes of his selected works. Other than that the article had only been published initially in the weekly Die Geisteswissenschaften,2 and then in Czech in Pecirka's selected works of Dvorak, Dejiny umeni jako dejiny ducha.3 In the foreword, dedicated to the republication of Dvorak's study, Otto Pacht stated that the article was of 'the greatest relevance and strategic significance'.4 As is evident, the statements by these two Brno and Vienna based professors of art history display a belief that Dvorak's methodological approach, stemming from an era when evolutionary art history had not yet been superseded by art history as the history of Geist (the history of ideas or human mind), was still highly relevant in the 1970s. Kutal focused primarily on Dvorak's Das Ratsel der Kunst der Bruder Van Eyck, published in 1903, demonstrating the validity of the evolutionary genealogical approach even in cases where the work was generally considered to be a rationally inexplicable, mysterious, completely unprepared, transcendental historical leap by a genius. While Pacht transported the relevancy of Dvorak's work into an era transitioning from a formalistic, evolutionary approach to a conception of art history based on the history of ideas (or worldviews), which Dvorak formulated in full in his Idealismus und Naturalismus in der gotischen Skulptur und Malerei (1918). Indeed, his article, 'Uber die dringendsten Methodischen Erfordernisse der Erziehung zur kunstgeschichtlichen Forschung' tends to span both approaches.There were two common incentives that led the two art historians to highlight the contemporary relevance of Dvorak's work on the pre-'Geistesgeschichte' evolutionary art history: First, the desire to mount a defence in favour of the autonomy of art history, in which the history of art was seen as the development of form, and where the evolutionary genealogical approach to investigation was considered to be a suitable method of art history, if it were to be a 'scientific' discipline. This attempt to emphasize the continued relevance of this position was prompted by pressure at the time for a heteronomous conception, primarily that of iconology, which had ambitions of achieving dominance. However, there was also a trend for the new social histories of art which had just started to take hold in the early 1970s. It is in this sense that we should understand Kutal's emphasis on relevancy, which 'applies to all the stages it [Dvorak's work] has undergone, not just the latter which is generally the focal point today'. …