Preface

Summary

Ernst Gombrich must have had a share in creating the cloud that hangs over Hans Sedlmayr and the members of the ‘New Vienna School of Art History’. In his Introduction to Art and Illusion (1960) he declared:

I have discussed elsewhere why this reliance of

art history on mythological explanations seems

dangerous to me. By inculcating the habit of

talking in terms of collectives, of ‘mankind,’

‘races,’ or ‘ages,’ it weakens resistance to

totalitarian habits of mind. I do not make these

accusations lightly. Indeed I can quote chapter

and verse by enumerating the lessons which

Hans Sedlmayr wanted the reader to draw from

reading Riegl’s essays.

Perhaps those were the lessons that Sedlmayr wanted to draw from Riegl. However, his attentive reader will discover that, rejecting Riegl, he explicitly ruled out such explanations as deeply unsatisfactory:

… it is impossible to posit certain timeless,

psychological, or structural types as the

possible vehicles of Kunstwollen … People,

conceived in racial terms, figure just as little as

bearers of the Kunstwollen. The distribution of

styles and their limits does not coincide with

the distribution and boundaries of populations.

Finally, it is also quite impossible to posit

the ‘time’ or ‘spirit of the age’ as vehicles of the

Kunstwollen. For if one took these vague

explanations literally, all works of art of the

same year, of the same era, would display

the same style.

Readers of his ‘Zu einer strengen Kunstwissenschaft’ (1931), so roundly condemned by Meyer Schapiro in 1936, will discover that Sedlmayr described his own notorious distinction between ‘first’ and ‘second’ art histories as ‘theoretically incorrect and admissible only as a hypothetical construct’. He did not need that to be pointed out by anybody else.

Following the lead of Gombrich and Schapiro, subsequent commentators have seen Sedlmayr’s two essays as manifestations of Nazi ideology. While it is certainly true that Sedlmayr had illegally joined the Nazi Party for a year in 1930–1932 and was an active member from 1938 to the end of the war, the time has come for his work to be re-assessed.