From Empirical Evidence To The Big Picture: Some Reflections On Riegl's Concept of Kunstwollen

From Empirical Evidence to the Big Picture: Some Reflections on Riegl's Concept of Kunstwollen Author(s): Jas'Elsner Source: Critical
Inquiry, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Summer 2006), pp. 741-766 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/508091 . Accessed: 24/09/2013 02:21
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From Empirical Evidence to the Big Picture: Some Reections on Riegls Concept of Kunstwollen
Jas Elsner
Archaeology and the history of art share one intimate aspect of method about which we tend to be less explicit than we should be. Whenever we make an argument on the basis of visual or material evidence we take something extremely specic, of which the discussion is inevitably a precise and detailed contextual or formal description, and we use this as a step to generate a large generalization. Whether our art history is interested in artists, patrons, or viewers, in sociological context and conditions of production, in strict morphological connections or in high semiotic theory, our generalizations inevitably leap beyond what is strictly provable by the precise analysis of something so particular as a specic object or set of objects. Besides this very direct issue of method is the related problem of how we write the bigger story within which our objects of material culture will gure. What governs or justies the kind of story we decide to tell? Of course, there is a real question as to whether the idealized empiricism by which I have characterized this process is correct. We might say that we begin with assumptions that entail our generalizations (this is always more obvious in previous generationsfor instance, with Marxist art history or with the art history whose instant reex is activated by poststructuralist theory), and we nd our examples to prove our model. The empirical data turn out to be illustrations of the bigger picture rather than its building blocks, and the
A much shorter version of this paper was given at a conference in Vienna in 2005 marking the centenary of Riegls death. My thanks are due to Artur Rosenauer and Georg Vasold for their kind invitation and to the participants for discussion. I am particularly grateful to a number of friends for surviving the iniction of an early draft and for punishing me with useful critiques as a resultespecially Milette Gaifman, Margaret Olin, Joel Snyder, and Jeremy Tanner. I am grateful, too, to the editors of Critical Inquiry for their comments and suggestions.
Critical Inquiry 32 (Summer 2006) 2006 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/06/3204-0003$10.00. All rights reserved.
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Jas Elsner / Reections on Kunstwollen
foundations of the bigger picture lie in a socially sanctioned and currently popular model for how to interpret historical and visual material in academic terms. This way may be the swiftest path to long-term oblivion, but it may also be a quick means to publication. However, my interest here is in the problem of the method itselfthat is, the use of visual material (always a special case, always standing for more than itself) in the construction of a larger argument and the history of that process within the discipline of art history. This complexity of the relations between the particular and the general, between the material exemplar and the great philosophical or historicaltheory, is a special mark of Alois Riegls work in art history and, indeed, is one of his greatest legacies. For not only was Riegl one of art historys most pronounced empiricists, a formalist, and a style art historian of the rst order,1 but his interventionsespecially in late antique arthave come to be seen as fundamental to modern notions of the history of the period.2 The fact that his oeuvre is relatively incomplete and fragmentary has meant that he has been seen as making particular historical contributions to specic moments in the history of artlate antiquity and the Dutch group portrait, for instance. But this disguises the fact that his greater project was the grand attempt to tie formal empiricism and its positivist entailments to a much bigger, general (dare we call it Hegelian?) picture of the development of forms (in the Stilfragen),3 culminating nally in the development of cultures
1. On Riegls empiricism and its entailment in positivism, see Margaret Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegls Theory of Art (University Park, Penn., 1992), pp. xviii, 47, 10311, 13637, and Diana Graham Reynolds, Alois Reigl and the Politics of Art History: Intellectual Traditions and Austrian Identity in Fin-de-Sie ` cle Vienna (Ph.D. diss., University of California, San Diego, 1997), pp. 4699. 2. See Andrea Giardina, Esplosione di tardoantico, Studi Storici 40 (1999): 15780, esp. pp. 157, 16465, and Wolf Liebeschuetz, The Birth of Late Antiquity, Antiquite Tardive 12 (Jan. 2004): 25361, esp. pp. 25455. 3. See Riegl, Stilfragen: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik (Berlin, 1893); trans. Evelyn Kain, under the title Problems of Style: Foundations for a History of Ornament, ed. David Castriota (Princeton, N.J., 1992). On its span from Egyptian ornament via Greece and Rome to Byzantium and Islam, see E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art, 2d ed. (1979; London, 1984), pp. 18094; Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegls Theory of Art, pp. 6089; Margaret Iversen, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), pp. 4963; Paul Crowther, More Than Ornament: The Signicance of Riegl, Art History 17, no. 3 (1994): 48294; and Joaqu n Lorda, Problems of Style: Riegls Problematic Foundations, in Framing Formalism: Riegls Work, ed. Richard Woodeld (Amsterdam, 2001), pp.
J a s E l s n e r is Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in classical archaeology at Corpus Christi College, Oxford and visiting professor of art history at the University of Chicago. His book Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text is forthcoming.
Critical Inquiry / Summer 2006
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and cultural change (in the original program for Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie 4 and in the unnished but hugely ambitious Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts).5
1. Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie: Individual Objects and Grand Narratives Riegls method of close formal analysis of individual objects leading to stylistic generalization might be described as a bravura tour de force of close looking, almost to the point of being obsessive. Take as an example culled almost at random this passage from Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie:
The best material on which to research the development of reliefs during the middle Empire is the corpus of Roman sarcophagi, among which in order to avoid controversy, we will look rst at just pagan examples. These belong almost exclusively to the second half of the second century, the third century and the beginning of the fourth. . . . A sarcophagus representing Achilles and Penthesilea in the Vatican[g. 1]. The gures overlap partially in several rows, presuming the existence of various levels of depth. Yet this does not mean a spatial composition in the modern sense, as is demonstrated on three counts: rst the level ground from which the highest gures are separated even though the level ground does not reach the entire height as it does in the Arch of Titus; second, the placement of gures above one another as opposed to behind each other; third the unequal size of the gures, with some of the smallest occupying the foreground. In spite of being
10733. On Gombrichs debt to Stilfragen, see Gombrich, A Lifelong Interest: Conversations on Art and Science with Didier Eribon (London, 1991), pp. 12931. 4. See Riegl, Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie (Vienna, 1901); trans. Rolf Winkes, under the title Late Roman Art Industry (Rome, 1985); hereafter abbreviated LRAI. For discussions, see Otto J. Brendel, Prolegomena to the Study of Roman Art (New Haven, Conn., 1979), pp. 2937; Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegls Theory of Art, pp. 12953; Iversen, Alois Riegl, pp. 7190; Woodeld, Reading Riegls Kunst-industrie and Andrew Ballantyne, Space, Grace, and Stylistic Conformity: Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie and Architecture, in Framing Formalism, pp. 4981, 83 106; and Jas Elsner, The Birth of Late Antiquity: Riegl and Strzygowski in 1901, Art History 25, no. 3 (2002): 35879, esp. pp. 36170. 5. See Riegl, Historische Grammatik der bildenden Ku nste (189799; Graz, 1966); trans. Jacqueline Jung, under the title Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts (New York, 2004); hereafter abbreviated HGVA. For discussions, see Matthew Rampley, Spectatorship and the Historicity of Art: Re-Reading Alois Riegls Historical Grammar of the Fine Arts, Word and Image 12, no. 2 (1996): 20917, and Benjamin Binstock, Foreword: Alo s Riegl, Monumental Ruin: Why We Still Need to Read Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts, in HGVA, pp. 1136. Amazingly, given the fundamental importance of Riegls work for the history of the decorative arts, and despite chapter 2 being devoted to touching and seeing (Riegls famous haptic and optic), it receives no mentionnot even a footnotein David Brett, Rethinking Decoration: Pleasure and Ideology in the Visual Arts (Cambridge, 2005).
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placed behind one another frequently, the gures are so compressed into a crowd that they remain as close as possible to the level ground and demonstrate their connection with it. Consequently the principal artistic element is composition on the plane, which is centralized as well as being in contrapposto. The gure in the center is dominant, and one might say the other gures seem to rotate about it. All the gures are in movement, and because they overlap, they create an impression of colorful confusion and lack of clarity. A solution is reached by inserting four gures of medium size that are distributed at regular distances from the dominant gure in the center and the mass of small gures lling the plane. This principle of composition denies the spatial unity of modern art, with its mixing of gures of dierent sizes on one and the same plane, but is exactly repeated on a particular type of Persian rug where the gures are replaced with stylistic vegetative motifs of different sizes. The linear composition in particular is still based on the triangular system, which was created during the classical period; but the extremely sharp angles of the legs of the individual triangles, which stun the beholder, lead visibly to the perpendicular triangular system of the Constantinian reliefs. [LRAI, pp. 8283; trans. mod.]6
f i g u r e 1. Sarcophagus representing Achilles and Penthesilea (Vatican, Cortile del Belvedere). 6. The object described here is Vatican, Cortile del Belvedere, no. 933. For recent discussion with date (c. 23040 ad) and bibliography, see Dagmar Grassinger, Achill bis Amazonen, in Achill, Adonis, Aeneas, vol. 12 of Die Mythologischen Sarkophage, ed. Bernard Andreae and Guntram Koch (Berlin, 1999), pp. 25051. Grassingers bibliography, although it goes back to Carl Roberts work of 1890, fails to cite Riegl. Unforgivably, given Riegls descriptive precision, Winkes illustrates the wrong sarcophagus.
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Note the pure formalism of this analysisalmost entirely without reference to iconography, subject matter, or function after the initial identication of the topic depicted. Note also Riegls willingness to spring (without methodological justication) to remarkably distant points of comparisonspatial composition in the modern sense, the spatial unity of modern art, the particular type of Persian rug where the gures are replaced with stylistic vegetative motifs of dierent sizes. Only the reference to the reliefs of the Arch of Titus would seem warranted by contemporary standards of historically justiable comparability. The reduction of all the potential contextual meanings of the objectits funerary functions and subject matter, the likelihood that the central protagonists are portraits of a husband and wife, the mythological content referring not only to the Amazons but also to a tradition of Amazon battles in relief sculpture reaching back to the metopes of the Parthenon and the Bassae friezeto pure and precise formal description both strips the image of historical specicity and allows it a transhistorical comparability with the public art of nearly two centuries before (in the Arch of Titus), the nature of modern composition and spatial conventions some 1600 years later, and the decorative motifs of Persian carpets (this last, of course, a subject of Riegls particular expertise).7 Yet this accountan extraordinarily detailed and narrowly focused formal intervention (which frankly must be applauded as rather a good description of the object)is governed by a chronological determinism (in the dates cited by Riegl, by the ow of his text, and by the range of comparanda adduced) so that the sarcophagus can be said to lead visibly to the perpendicular triangular system of the Constantinian reliefs. The justication for the leap from a Severan sarcophagus of the 230s AD to the early fourth-century reliefs of the Arch of Constantine is never given. In place of methodological justication, Riegl introduces a range of further examples whose equally precise stylistic descriptions are made to lead, by a kind of overwhelmingness of narrow morphology, step by step to the reliefs of the Arch of Constantine (see LRAI, pp. 8395). This is a case of blinding us with scienceadopting a scientic method, empirical formalism, and trusting its positivist adumbration to lead to a predetermined historical result. Already, in a case like this, we can see the strain between the bigger picture and the material objects that are meant to sustain it. But at least we are here within a relatively narrow band of dates and in the face of a broadly
7. See Riegl, Altorientalische Teppiche (1892; Mittenwald, 1979). This is still untranslated and is one of the few areas of Riegls output that the vast modern Riegl industry has not yet mined; see Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegls Theory of Art, pp. 5559. Riegls interest in carpets gyptische Textilfunde im K.K. follows his catalogue of Coptic textiles in Vienna; see Riegl, Die A sterreichisches Museum (Vienna, 1889). O
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accepted problematicthe transformation (most of Riegls antecedents, contemporaries, and successors called it decline) of art from GraecoRoman naturalism to something more like abstraction, at the turning point between antiquity and the Middle Ages. What Riegl does to establish this, his grand historical claim, is to raise a further series of objects (admittedly related ones, in that they too are Roman mythological sarcophagi), transmuted into similarly precise and detailed formal descriptions that purport to paint the transformation of forms to the reliefs of the Arch of Constantine step by step. In each case we move progressively closer, with the Constantinian material repeatedly cited in a rhetorical conrmation of the teleological end of the process. So the so-called sarcophagus of Severus Alexander and Julia Mammea in the Capitoline (g. 2) turns out to exemplify the struggle towards the perfect spatial isolation of the gures as we see it reached in the Constantinian reliefs. . . . The end result of this process we consider to be the Constantinian reliefs. The next two steps can be detected on the fronts of the two sarcophagi to be discussed as follows (LRAI, pp. 8384; trans. mod.).8 These are a Meleager sarcophagus from the Palazzo dei Conservatori (g. 3)9 (dated to the rst decade of the fourth century) and a sarcophagus of Adonis from the Lateran (g. 4)10 now in the Museo Gregoriano Profano, Vatican, of which we are told as far as artistic execution goes, we are here very close to Constantinian art (LRAI, pp. 86; trans. mod.). And so on. At no point is the methodology justied or explained, but rather its painstakingly focused analysis combined with the plethora of examples is meant to stand by itself as self-evidently right. Scholarly concentration on Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie has allowed much to be forgiven in Riegls method, since the text in its nal (but not its originally envisaged) form focuses on a specic period and a specic set of acknowledged formal problems. The Historical Grammar, by contrast, admittedly from Riegls point of view an unpublished (and perhaps unpublishable) sketch, reveals some remarkable general and transhistorical aspirations stretching across all of Western art history from antiquity and the Middle Ages, via the Renaissance and Reformation, to modernity (see HGVA, pp. 5556).11 In this text he is concerned with the notion of hu8. This is, in fact, an Attic sarcophagus found in Rome, with the story of Achilles around its four sides. See Sabine Rogge, Achill und Hippolytos, Die Attischen Sarkophage, ed. Andreae and Koch (Berlin, 1995), pp. 4445, 13638, where it is dated to c. 350 AD. 9. See Meleager, vol. 6 of Die Mythologischen Sarkophage, ed. Koch (Berlin, 1975), pp. 2425, 1023, where it is dated to the turn of the third and fourth centuries. 10. See Grassinger, Achill bis Amazonen, p. 220. 11. This point is exemplied at greater length in HGVA, pp. 57105. For a discussion of the ambition of the Historical Grammar compared with Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie and Das
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man worldview (Menschliche Weltanschauung) (HGVA, p. 55)the quotation marks are Riegls ownas embodied in forms, in dierent periods, each with its rise, peak of perfection, decline, and eventual collapse, as well as its continued reverberation over centuries in outer forms (HGVA, p. 56). While Riegl makes plenty of references to specic works of art and to particular features of art in general at dierent periods (such as linear perspective, light and shadow, aerial perspective) the manuscript has little empirical basis in the kind of close description so characteristic of Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie (see HGVA, pp. 21631). Of course, it is always unfair to judge an incomplete and abandoned project as if it were a nished one. At times Riegl seems committed to trying to create a historical grammar for art on the model of language (see HGVA, pp. 292302); at times he seems to be explicating changing worldviews as adumbrated in three specic (to modern conceptions, perhaps rather arbitrary) periods (see HGVA, pp. 30340). My point here is that in the Historical Grammar we see a much less morphologically or stylistically obsessed Riegl than in Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie ; his concern here is to sketch the big picture in terms of deep cultural meanings. We are presented with Greek art as the improvement of nature through physical beauty rooted in innite polytheism, with Christian art as the improvement of nature through spiritual beauty rooted in monotheism, and nally art as the reproduction of transitory nature rooted in the natural-scientic worldview. This kind of grand scheme pregures the moves that Riegls student and successor, Max Dvor a k, would later make quite explicitly towards art history as Geistesgeschichte.12 And it identies the two fundamental tendencies in tension within Riegls vision of art history: the museum curators instinct to classify and describe objects in their empirical minutiae (in Stilfragen and Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie) and the university professors desire to formulate a grand theory that could accommodate sweeping historical generalizations (in the Historical Grammar). We are back where we started: at the profoundly problematic point of how one can get the objects to tell a storythe big story, indeed, any story and of how empirical observation may compellingly lead to adequate and
Holla ndische Gruppenportra t ([1902; Vienna, 1931]; trans. Evelyn Kain, under the title The Group Portraiture of Holland [Los Angeles, 1999]), see Rampley, Spectatorship and the Historicity of Art, p. 209. 12. I am thinking of Max Dvor a k, The History of Art as the History of Ideas, trans. John Hardy (London, 1984), along with Rampley, Max Dvor a k: Art History and the Crisis of Modernity, Art History 26, no. 2 (2003): 21437. On Kulturgeschichte, see Georg Vasold, Alois Riegl und die berlegungen zum Fru Kunstgeschichte als Kulturgeschichte: U hwerk des Wiener Gelehrten (Freiburg, 2004), pp. 83134.
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convincing induction. Riegls greatness as an art historian lies in his absolutely acute awareness of this problem and his own sense of being pulled in both directionstowards the satisfyingly described single object and at the same time the fully elaborated historical picture. However much we may now reject the specic foundations and assumptions of Riegls various arguments, we remainas practitioners of both art history and archaeologyat the same impasse and before the same methodological conundrum.
2. Kunstwollen as a Methodological Solution It is only in relation to this tension that we can understand Riegls famous formulation of Kunstwollen. His invention of this concept, for all its apparent obscurity (an obscurity probably increased by the quantity of discussion and explication it has generated among some of the most distinguished art historians in the more than one hundred years since it was invented), is designed as a solution to the double impasse of generalizing from the spe-
f i g u r e 2. Sarcophagus of Severus Alexander and Julia Mammea (Rome, Museo Capitolino).
f i g u r e 3. Meleager sarcophagus with representation of the Calydonian boar hunt (Rome, Palazzo dei Conservatori).
f i g u r e 4. Sarcophagus with the representation of the farewell, departure, and wounding of Adonis (Vatican, Museo Gregoriano Profano).
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cic empirical example and making the mute material object speak.13 Among the numerous complications in dealing with Riegls own version of Kunstwollenin addition to having to skirt the pitfalls of the many postRieglian interpretationsis the fact that it was an evolving concept in his work and therefore that all his references to it do not necessarily imply the same thing.14 But from the time it appeared in Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie, Kunstwollenwhich Riegl was to describe in 1901 as the only certain given of a new positivist historiography of art15 and as an original idea16had become the key mechanism in which his entire theory of art was grounded.17 Its genius lies precisely in bridging the aesthetic, cultural, and structural characteristics of any given object (not only high art but any form of craft) from any time with the broader cultural aesthetics of its time. That is, Kunstwollenin the hands of Riegls relentlessly acute formalist analysiscouldtake one from any given object or set of objects (such as the sarcophagi discussed earlier) to the big historical picture. On one level, Kunstwollen is narrowly encapsulated by the struggle between the artist and limitations imposed upon him in the material he works on and his own technical capacities. The work of art here shows the result of a specic and consciously purposeful artistic will that comes through in a battle against function, raw material, and technique (LRAI, p. 9; trans. mod.). This denition appears to apply equally to any given individual work of art (as in all the specic examples Riegl adduces so painstakingly throughout Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie) but also to the work of art in general (or art as a general proposition) and to the generality of works of art in any given period as well. Methodologically, this solves a fundamental problem in art history and archaeology, which is that every case we argue can be seen as a special case. Kunstwollen by reecting a fundamental structure as true to the special case as to typical examplescuts through the problems of arguing from selective instances. This denition enables Riegl, even as early as the programmatic introduction to Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie, to propose the notion of a positive late Roman Kunstwollenas opposed to the decline or barbarization of
13. For a recent discussion, see Andrea Reichenberger, Riegls Kunstwollen: Versuch einer Neubetrachtung (Saint Augustine, Germany, 2003), pp. 1728. 14. See Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegls Theory of Art, pp. 7172. 15. Riegl, Naturwerk und Kunstwerk I, Gesammelte Aufsa tze, ed. Hans Sedlmayr (Vienna, 1929), p. 60. See also Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegls Theory of Art, p. 71. 16. I advocated in Stilfragen, and as far as I know I was the rst to do so, a teleological view according to which I saw in the work of art the result of a specic and consciously purposeful Kunstwollen (LRAI, p. 9; trans. mod.). 17. For Kunstwollen in Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie, see Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegls Theory of Art, pp. 14853.
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Franz Wickho s reading (LRAI, p. 10)and to argue that the late Roman Kunstwollen, by contrast with that of the Flavians and Trajan, constitutes progress and nothing other than progress. Judged by the limited criteria of modern criticism, it appears to be a decay that historically did not exist; but modern art with all its advantages would never have been possible if late Roman art with its unclassical tendencies had not led the way (LRAI, p. 11; trans. mod.). This implies not only period-specic Kunstwollens but their evolutionary relationship with each other so that one can be analyzed as transmuting into another, rather like the evolution of biological species. Such Kunstwollens can, moreover, be comparedsomething Riegl briey attempts to do (still in his programmatic introduction) when he contrasts our modern Kunstwollen with the late Roman one (LRAI, p. 12). Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie is the book in Riegls corpus in which Kunstwollen has its longest and most detailed treatmentto such an extent that the book might be seen as more a methodological and philosophical justication of the concept of Kunstwollen through the specic materials of late antique art than as a book on Roman art.18 The entire volume culminates in a conclusion detailing the main characteristics of the late Roman Kunstwollen (see LRAI, pp. 22134).19 Here, after summarizing the aesthetics of the late Roman Kunstwollen in terms of rhythmic composition and its contrasts with the Kunstwollen of earlier periodscoloristic versus linear rhythm, compositional contrast and contrapposto against uniformity of composition, and so forthRiegl tests his results by turning to the literary expressions of the late Romans on the character of their Kunstwollen and artistic practice (MC, p. 89). Implicitly the Kunstwollen of a period includes all its products (or expressions), not just those in material or artistic form. From this, Riegl rises to a crescendo that is no longer about Roman art as such but about the Kunstwollen itself, that has so far appeared to serve as the means for his account of late antique art but is now revealed to be the main topic of Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie: In every period there is only one orientation of the Kunstwollen governing all four types of plastic art in the same measure, turning to its own ends every conceivable practical purpose and raw material, and always
18. That said, the concept of Kunstwollen is adduced programmatically at the opening of Das Holla ndische Gruppenportra t, p. 4, and towards the end with Rembrandts last group portrait representing the move towards modern Kunstwollen almost more than any other painting of its time (Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, p. 345; trans. mod.). 19. A much better translation of this section exists as Riegl, The Main Characteristics of the Late Roman Kunstwollen (1901), in The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s, trans. and ed. Christopher Wood (New York, 2000), pp. 87103; hereafter abbreviated MC.
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and of its own accord selecting the most appropriate technique for the intended work of art. Our conviction of the correctness of the image of late antique art gained in this way is only strengthened when we realize that the Kunstwollen of antiquity and in particular of its closing phase is completely identical with the other main forms of expression of the human will in the same period. All human will is directed toward a satisfactory shaping of mans relationship to the world, within and beyond the individual. The plastic Kunstwollen regulates mans 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 expresses 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. [MC, pp. 9495] Among the entailments of Kunstwollen implied in this passage one might include the implication that Riegl sees Kunstwollen as suprapersonal and autonomousgoverning . . . the plastic arts, turning to its own ends every conceivable practical purpose and raw material, always and of its own accord selecting the most appropriate technique. It might even be said to be determinist in that it controls the ways things appear at any given time. Built into the concept is the notion of desireso that the human will of which Kunstwollen is the expression, appearing equally in all products or expressions of a given culture, is about the way we want to see things shaped or colored, the way man wants to imagine them. The objective and the subjective are thus rolled together in a dialectic where each may be said to shape the other.20 Finally, Kunstwollen gives rise to Weltanschauung the concept of worldview that was fundamental to the logic of the Historical Grammar and that can now be grounded on an empirical basis.21 Before turning to the critiques of this set of propositions, it is worth not20. For this interpretation, see Erwin Panofsky, Der Begrie des Kunstwollens (1920), in Deutschsprachige Aufsa tze, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1998), 2:1030 n. 16; trans. Kenneth J. Northcott and Joel Snyder, under the title The Concept of Artistic Volition, Critical Inquiry 8 (Autumn 1981): 29 n. 15. Here, Panofsky attributes the development of subjectivism and objectivism in Riegl to The Group Portraiture of Holland. For Riegls awareness of the subjectivism of the art historian looking back at a distant world from a dierently congured set of presuppositions, see Barbara Harlow, Realignment: Alois Riegls Image of Late Roman Art Industry, Glyph, no. 3 (1978): 11821, 12730. 21. See Reichenberger, Riegls Kunstwollen, pp. 9799.
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ing their masterliness. Faced with what I still take to be the fundamental methodological issue for all material-cultural disciplines (not only art history by any means)namely, the way a single object or group of objects may be made to speak, to tell a story within a larger historical or philosophical pictureRiegl confronts the problem head on. He sees it clearly and (unlike the long list of those who have fudged it) he tackles it gloriously. What Riegl proposes is frankly, in terms of a technical methodological solution, probably the most skillful solution ever suggested, perhaps because Riegl saw the problem more starkly than others. Kunstwollen does indeed allow us to transition from objects to big stories.22 Moreover, it frees us from aesthetic hierarchies of objects, since in principle all the arts, all archaeological data, all craft and ornament can serve the same historical purpose in revealing a Kunstwollen, etched by the makers will (itself reecting a collective, historically contextualized will) into the resistance of the material stu on which he or she works. Furthermore, the localized bigger picture of a particular Kunstwollen true for a particular age (and Riegl made serious attempts to adumbrate that of both late antiquity and the era of the Dutch group portrait, as well as leaving notes that would be posthumously edited into a book on baroque art in Rome)23 could be compared with other Kunstwollens to allow for a universal history of the kind to which the Historical Grammar aspires. Within this scheme, a number of other factors are made to work with some panache, notably the interrelations between subjectivity (whether artistic volition, social desire, or larger collective forms of subjective investment, such as perception and attention)24 and the objectively analyzable work of art.25
22. As Otto Pa cht, a Viennese student of Riegls and one deeply sympathetic to his project, put it: The term Kunstwollen, this cipher for the generating and controlling factor in artistic creation, is applied by Riegl equally to an individual work of art, to an individual artist, to an historical period, to an ethnical group or to a nation (Otto Pa cht, Art Historians and Art CriticsVI: Alois Riegl, Burlington Magazine 105 [May 1963]: 19091; hereafter abbreviated AH). 23. See Riegl, Die Entstehung der Barockkunst in Rom, ed. Arthur Burda and Dvor a k (Vienna, 1908). 24. On perception and attention, see Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegls Theory of Art, pp. 12969, and Iversen, Alois Riegl, pp. 93147. In relation to subjectivity, Pa cht writes of the seemingly conicting notions of active volition and passive compulsion which are so ingeniously combined in the double meaning of Riegls Kunstwollen (AH, p. 193). It might be added that Pa cht, a Jewish refugee of the 1930s, is surprisingly aectionate about this ingenious combination given that the mix would have disastrous consequences in the ways the Germanspeaking peoples responded to the more appalling agendas of the reprehensible government that took control (to great popular acclaim) in both Germany and Austria less than thirty years after Riegls death and some thirty years before Pa cht published these comments. 25. The long last note to the last sentence of Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie constitutes a meditation on issues of the subjective and objective in relation to the arts. See MC, pp. 1023.
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3. Intellectual Contexts One important move in the recent Riegl-industrie has been to see Riegls contributions (beyond the specic art history of the Vienna school)26 within their historical context as examples of the political and cultural concerns of late Hapsburg Vienna, of the multicultural and Roman Catholic Austro-Hungarian Empire in its last stages.27 This is actually a very Rieglian form of historicism, since Riegl himself would have had to concede that his own work was the expression of a Kunstwollen particular to his time that was expressed equally in a series of other local cultural products, from the writings of Freud to the paintings of Klimt.28 One form of inquiry along these lines is to examine Riegls interest in the subjective in relation to the innovative philosophical interventions in psychology by Franz Brentano (teaching in Vienna 187495) and by Brentanos student Edmund Husserl (in Vienna 188486).29 Certainly the willingness to confront fundamental intellectual problems with radical boldnesssomething common to Brentano, Husserl, and Rieglwas part of the intellectual zeitgeist of Viennese academia in the late nineteenth century30 and arguably an aspect of Viennas inheritance to its children of later generations, such as Wittgenstein.31 But
26. On which, see Julius von Schlosser, Die Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte (Innsbruck, 1934); Arthur Rosenauer, LEcole de Vienne, in Dix-huitie `me et dix-neuvie `me sie `cles, vol. 2 of Histoire de lhistoire de lart, ed. Edouard Pommier (Paris, 1997), pp. 41541; and Wood, introduction, The Vienna School Reader, pp. 972. 27. Outstanding are Olin, Alois Riegl: The Late Roman Empire in the Late Habsburg Empire, Austrian Studies, no. 5 (1994): 10720, and Michael Gubser, Times Visible Surface: Alois Riegl and the Discourse on History and Temporality in Fin-de-Sie `cle Vienna (Detroit, 2006); but see also Willibald Sauerla nder, Alois Riegl und die Entstehung der autonomen Kunstgeschichte am Finde-Sie ` cle, in Fin-de-Sie `cle: Zu Literatur und Kunst der Jahrhundertwende, ed. Roger Bauer et al. (Frankfurt, 1977), pp. 12530; Iversen, Alois Riegl, pp. 2147; Reynolds, Alois Reigl and the Politics of Art History; Ballantyne, Space, Grace, and Stylistic Conformity, pp. 83106, esp. pp. 98103; and also Elsner, The Birth of Late Antiquity, pp. 36061, 370. 28. See Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegls Theory of Art, pp. 8586, 12627, 14849, and Iversen, Alois Riegl, pp. 3537. On Klimt and Wickho (Riegls fellow professor and ally at the art institute in Vienna), see Michael Ann Holly, Spirits and Ghosts in the Historiography of Art, in The Subjects of Art History: Historical Objects in Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Holly, Mark A. Cheetham, and Keith Moxey (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 5271. 29. On Brentano, see The Cambridge Companion to Brentano, ed. Dale Jacquette (Cambridge, 2004); on his inuence, see Barry Smith, Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano (Chicago, 1994), and The School of Franz Brentano, ed. Liliana Albertazzi, Massimo Libardi, and Roberto Poli (Dordrecht, 1996). On the development of Husserls phenomenology in relation to the inuence of Brentano, see Robin D. Rollinger, Husserls Position in the School of Brentano (Dordrecht, 1999). 30. For more on Riegl and Brentano, with whom Riegl studied in 1875, see Gubser, Times Visible Surface, pp. 53, 6175. 31. See, for example, Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgensteins Vienna (New York, 1973); Janik, Wittgensteins Vienna Revisited (New Brunswick, N.J., 2001); and esp. Ernst Gellner, Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski, and the Habsburg Dilemma (Cambridge, 1998), with an acute critique of Janik and Toulmin at pp. 8595.
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here, rather than pursue this cultural-historical line of local Viennese contextualization, it may be worth placing Riegls project within a more intellectual-historical frame, as one of a series of grand narrativesprogressivist (even evolutionary), empirical, methodologically self-awarewithin late imperial European positivism.32 Quite apart from the various other late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century commitments to formalism, stylistic analysis, and connoisseurship in art historyone thinks especially of Wo lin and Morelli, but also Beazley and BerensonRiegls specicsearch for an essential formal mechanism, an axiomatic base by which to explain the totality of an entire system, has interesting parallels in other equally optimistic and totalizing projects in the rst decade of the twentiethcentury. Throughout that decade, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead were concerned with establishing the philosophical foundations of mathematicsboth the concepts behind all mathematical expression (or construction) and the fundamental axioms from which it can be deduced.33 The culmination of this process was their Principia Mathematica, of which the rst volume was published in 1910, but on which their preface asserts they were already at work in 1900.34 Its aim was to analyse existing mathematics, with a view to discovering what premisses are employed, whether these premisses are mutually consistent, and whether they are capable of reduction to more fundamental premisses.35 The parallels with Riegl are intriguingincluding a close and systematic analysis of a large body of given data in aid of a search for a fundamental and essential explanatory program on which the foundations of the big picture can be rmly establisheda kind of Kunstwollen in all its optimistic positivism. Just as the philosophical pro32. My model for this kind of approach is the classic paper by Carlo Ginzburg, Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and the Scientic Method, in The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce, ed. Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok (Bloomington, Ind., 1983), pp. 81118. 33. The fundamental texts are Alfred North Whitehead, A Treatise on Universal Algebra, with Applications (Cambridge, 1898), and Bertrand Russell, The Principles of Mathematics (Cambridge, 1903). For discussion, see Francisco Rodriguez-Consuegra, The Mathematical Philosophy of Bertrand Russell: Origins and Development (Basel, 1991), pp. 4449. 34. See Whitehead and Russell, Principia Mathematica, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 191013). On the systematization of logic in Principia Mathematica and its anities with formalism, see Rudolf Carnap, The Logicist Foundations of Mathematics, in Bertrand Russell: A Collection of Critical Essays, trans. Erna Putnam and Gerald J. Massey, ed. D. F. Pears (New York, 1972), pp. 17591, esp. pp. 176, 191. For a critique of the inadequacy of Whitehead and Russells formalism, see Kurt Go del, Russells Mathematical Logic, in The Philosophy of Bertand Russell, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (Evanston, Ill., 1946), pp. 12353, esp. p. 126. Generally, on the writing and structure of Principia Mathematica, see Victor Lowe, Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and His Work, 2 vols. (Baltimore, 1985), 1:23194, and I. Grattan-Guinness, The Search for Mathematical Roots, 18701940 (Princeton, N.J., 2000), pp. 269410 and Mathematics in and behind Russells Logicism and Its Reception, in The Cambridge Companion to Bertrand Russell, ed. Nicholas Grin (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 5183, esp. pp. 6173. 35. Whitehead and Russell, Principia Mathematica, 1:vi.
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gram of Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie (to establish Kunstwollen) is initially less explicit than the books apparent topic of analyzing late Roman art, so the philosophical project of Principia Mathematica in relation to the pure workings of logic is less explicit than its claims about mathematics as such.36 Just as Riegls program in Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie is established by example after example of close formal analysis across genres of art (architecture, sculpture, painting, the art industry, including buckles, bulae, and so forth), building to the eect of a dazzling and incontrovertible empiricism, so only the rst eighty-eight pages of volume 1 of Principia Mathematica consist of prose readable by (if not wholly comprehensible to) the layman; the rest consists largely of symbolic annotations and mathematical equations extending for well over one thousand pages in three volumes again, a dazzling empirical performance of the method in practice. Even in relation to the diculties of nding a coherent and all-embracing theory that takes into account subjectivity as well as objectivism, there are parallel self-awarenesses in Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie and Principia Mathematica, though Principia Mathematica was (unlike Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie) an unbridled attempt to establish a wholly objective edice.37 Just as Riegls Kunstwollen would prove a fundamental problem for subsequent art history (eliciting specic interpretative interventions in the 1920s from giants of the generation following Riegl, such as Panofsky, Mannheim, Wind, Kaschnitz-Weinberg, and Sedlmayr),38 so Principia Mathematica was to be the fundamental statement of mathematics for the ensuing decades and the key text to which Kurt Go del would react in formulating his famous the-
36. Whitehead and Russell claim their aim is the greatest possible analysis of the ideas with which [mathematical logic] deals and of the processes by which it conducts demonstrations, and at diminishing to the utmost the number of undened ideas and undemonstrated propositions . . . from which it starts (Whitehead and Russell, Principia Mathematica, 1:1). Writing much later, in the introduction to the second edition of The Principles of Mathematics, Russell is more explicit: mathematics and logic are identical (Russell, The Principles of Mathematics, 2d ed. [London, 1937], p. v). The primary aim of Principia Mathematica was to show that all pure mathematics follows from purely logical premisses and uses only concepts denable in logical terms (Russell, My Philosophical Development [London, 1959], p. 57). 37. See Rodriguez-Consuegra, The Mathematical Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, pp. 21923. 38. In addition to Panofsky, Der Begrie des Kunstwollens, see Karl Mannheim, Beitra ge zur Theorie der Weltanschauungsinterpretation (Vienna, 1923), trans. Paul Kecskemeti, under the title On the Interpretation of Weltanschauung, From Karl Mannheim, ed. Kurt H. Wol (New York, 1971), pp. 858, hereafter abbreviated OIW; Edgar Wind, Zur Systematik der ku nstlerischen sthetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 18 (1925): 43886; Sedlmayr, Probleme, Zeitschrift fu r A Kunstgeschichte als Stilgeschichte, Kunst und Wahrheit (1929; Mittelwald, 1978), pp. 3248 and Die Quintessenz des Lehren Riegls, in Riegl, Gesammelte Aufsa tze, pp. xviii-xx, trans. Woodeld, under the title The Quintessence of Riegls Thought, in Framing Formalism, pp. 1132; and Guido Kaschnitz-Weinberg, Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie, Gnomon 5 (1929): 195213, for a review of the second edition of Riegls text published in 1927.
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orem that the axioms from which any mathematical system is derived can be neither proved nor disproved within that system.39 While later work has confronted the positivistic certainties of both Kunstwollen and Principia Mathematica and found them wanting, a third, early twentieth-century search for the essential minute items that underpin and explain the big picture is still ongoing. Only in 1900 were Gregor Mendels genetic experiments of the 1850s and 1860s rediscovered. But in the hands of the likes of William Bateson, the study of genes would be developed as a solution to the fundamental evolutionary problems of inheritance and variation to which Darwin had no answer.40 In the conclusion to his inaugural lecture as Professor of Biology at Cambridge, Bateson wrote, The facts of Heredity and Variation are the materials out of which all theories of Evolution are constructed. At last by genetic methods we are beginning to obtain such facts of unimpeachable quality, and free from the aws that were inevitable in older collections. . . . The time for discussion of Evolution as a problem at large is closed. We face that problem now as one soluble by minute, critical analysis.41 In the opening to the 1913 publication of his 1907 Silliman Memorial Lectures at Yale, Bateson wrote, It can be declared with condence and certainty that we have now the means of beginning an analysis of living organisms, and distinguishing many of the units or factors which essentially determine and cause the development of their several attributes.42 The parallels with Riegl are again striking. Bateson nds in genes a fundamental axiom of analysis by which the sum of minute, individual examples can render not merely a big picture but a historical one, whose expression is essentially determined by them. The problems of the grand Darwinian story of evolution can be solved through genetics that, like Kunstwollen, provides a methodological mechanism to move between the particular specimen and the grand narrative. Genetics in its Edwardian form sketched the possibility of an essentialist and empirically veriable
39. See Go del, On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems, trans. B. Meltzer (1931; New York, 1992). 40. Among Batesons essays, see particularly An Address on Mendelian Heredity and Its Application to Man (1906), Heredity and Variation in Modern Lights (1909), and The Methods and Scope of Genetics (1908), William Bateson, F. R. S., Naturalist: His Essays and Addresses, ed. Beatrice Bateson (Cambridge, 1928) and also The Problems of Genetics (1913; New Haven, Conn., 1979). For a general account of this period in genetics, see Colin Tudge, In Mendels Footnotes: An Introduction to the Science and Technologies of Genes and Genetics from the Nineteenth Century to the Twenty-Second (London, 2000), pp. 75160. 41. Bateson, The Method and Scope of Genetics, William Bateson, F. R. S., Naturalist, pp. 33233. 42. Bateson, The Problems of Genetics, p. 3.
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model of specic axiomatic items on which the big story of life in general could be founded.43 In the premolecular era, much of the method of geneticsas, for instance, in Batesons Problems of Geneticsconsisted of detailed analytic examination and description of specimensoften with the aid of diagrams and photographsand the comparison of these with other examples in the same species. The aim of this process was to establish both variation as such between closely related examples as well as particular relations within variation, such as inheritance, adaptation, and mutation, all of which may be expressed as a historical narrative of change between descendants and ancestors. Thus, the method of genetics is strikingly close to the systematic morphological analysis of empirical examples by means of description and photography in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art history,not only in Riegl.
4. Critiques of Kunstwollen What I have claimed was Riegls methodological solution to one problem raised a hornets nest of other problems. First, we may ask what sort of story the theory of Kunstwollen was meant to sanction for its practitioners. What kind of art-historical narrative was on oer? It is around this question that the great debates of the 1920s were clustered, with the Vienna school, a group of scholars that included Sedlmayr, Kaschnitz-Weinberg, and Pa cht, oering what has been characterized as a neo-Hegelian line on Kunstwollen as a creative principle enshrined in the structure of art. Meanwhile a group of north German scholars (inuenced by Cassirer and Warburg)most notably Panofsky and Windadvanced what has been described as a neoKantian line that was designed to shift art history away from formalism and issues of artistic creativity towards questions of meaning.44 The problem however is less about Kant and Hegel than about what one wants art history to be. At stake in the debate about Kunstwollen in the 1920s was the very course and direction, as well as the discourse and method, of the entire discipline. So it is of no surprise that the participants would turn out to be among the elds most distinguished (if sometimes controversial) expo43. It may be worth remarking on the Austro-Hungarian investment in each of the elds, all forms of formalist positivism, that I am sketching briey here; Mendel was a Moravian priest, while Go del was Viennese. 44. The key critiques are those by Panofsky, Mannheim, and Wind, while the key defenses are by Sedlmayr and Kaschnitz-Weinberg, all in the 1920s. For the neo-Kantians and neo-Hegelians, see Henri Zerner, Alois Riegl: Art, Value, and Historicism, Daedalus 105 (Winter 1976): 17788, esp. p. 180. For Sedlmayrs insistence that Riegls work could not be read in a Kantian way, see The Quintessence of Riegls Thought, pp. 2627. On the move to meaning, see esp. Svetlana Alpers, Style Is What You Make It: The Visual Arts Once Again, in The Concept of Style, ed. Berel Lang (Ithaca, N.Y., 1979), pp. 13762, esp. p. 148.
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nents, as well as one of the most signicant sociologists of the mid-twentieth century, Karl Mannheim.45 Panofskys response to Kunstwollen, on which much has been written (particularly Der Begrie des Kunstwollens),46 eectively constitutes not only some of his most incisive critical thinking in his German phase but also the genesis of his arguments for emphasizing the meanings of works of art over their forms and styles, a theorization that culminated in the iconology of his American period. It was the rst great critical riposte to Kunstwollen, from which the work of both Mannheim and Wind explicitly drew,47 and was the most aggressive of the three. Indeed, Mannheim, coming from a sociological interest in how to determine the global outlook of an epoch in an objective, scientic fashion (OIW, p. 9), is extremely positive about Rieglcalling the project of Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie methodologically still challenging today (OIW, p. 51) and even heroic (OIW, p. 54). Yet, despite citing all three critiques, Sedlmayrs defense of Riegl in 1929 perhaps rightly focussed primarily on responding to Panofsky as his key opponent. Panofsky saw clearly that Kunstwollen, as a formulation for the structural embodiment of a web of psychological drives both within the artist and in
45. The secondary literature on Mannheim, who has a strong claim to being the founder of the modern sociology of knowledge and culture, is at least as large as that on Riegl himself. It is impressively blind about the Beitra ge, perhaps because its art-historical interests today seem removed from the main thrust of Mannheims achievement. This is a pity since in many ways it is a foundation text for his later works. See Colin Loader, The Intellectual Development of Karl Mannheim: Culture, Politics, and Planning (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 4449, who notes at p. 217 n. 71 the continuity of the term Wollen (borrowed from Kunstwollen) in Mannheims work. Along these lines, see also Dirk Hoeges, Kontroverse am Abgrund: Ernst Robert Curtius und Karl Mannheim (Frankfurt, 1994), pp. 1819. For the place of Mannheims paper within art history and especially its inuence on Panofskys iconology, see Joan Hart, Erwin Panofsky and Karl Mannheim: A Dialogue on Interpretation, Critical Inquiry 19 (Spring 1993): 53466; for more on Panofskys debt to Mannheim, see also Jeremy Tanner, The Sociology of Art: A Reader (London, 2003), pp. 1012. For the afterlife of Panofskys intervention in sociology (born in his and Mannheims responses to Kunstwollen), see Panofsky, Architecture gothique et pense e scholastique, trans. Pierre Bourdieu (Paris, 1967). In particular, in the afterword Bourdieu upholds Panofsky as a paradigm for the rejection of positivism and praises him for introducing the concept of habitus ; see pp. 13565. 46. Especially useful discussions include Alpers, Style Is What You Make It; Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven, Conn., 1982), pp. 17985; Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca, N.Y., 1984), pp. 6996; Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant limage: Question pose e aux ns dune histoire de lart (Paris, 1990), pp. 11934; Wood, introduction, The Vienna School Reader ; Wood, Introduction, Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Wood (New York, 1991), pp. 724, esp. pp. 814; and Iversen, Alois Riegl, pp. 15256. 47. See OIW, p. 33 n. 1, and Wind, Zur Systematik der ku nstlerischen Probleme, pp. 445, 447 n. 1, 448 n. 2, 481 n. 1, 483 n. 3. It may be worth noting that Panofskys later work in the 1920s and 1930s on meaning (Sinn) in art history, which developed into his theory of iconology, is ber das Verha explicitly indebted to Mannheims Beitra ge of 1923. See Panofsky, U ltnis der Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie (1924), Deutschsprachige Aufsa tze, 2:103563, esp. p. 1058 n. 28 and Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der bildenden Kunst, Deutschsprachige Aufsa tze, 2:106467, esp. p. 1074 n. 13.
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the wider cultural context, was untenable in the face of any kind of reductive analytic logic or at least liable to confused interpretation.48 Indeed he reduced the scope of Kunstwollenthe scope of what was valid and interesting in art-historical inquiryto the complexities of meaning residing in a work of art. In art history after World War II, and especially in the sort so powerfully inuenced by Panofsky in America, this led to what Svetlana Alpers rightly characterized as a fundamental change in the basic issues: What Riegl called questions of style are pre-empted by, absorbed into, questions of meaning.49 The Vienna school, partly in response to the challenge of Panofskys reading of Kunstwollen and delving ever deeper into the kinds of formalist description presaged by the model of the empirical examples laid out so systematically in Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie, created a method of Strukturanalyse or structural analysis. In Sedlmayrs version, presented as a reply to Panofsky that takes account of the latters worries about the meaning (Sinn) of Kunstwollen,50 the need was to go beneath the external appearance of art to its governing structural principles: Style is a variable, dependent on inner structural principles.51 Riegls achievement had been to show the way (through Kunstwollen) to these central formative principles (or higher structural principles) that underlie surface appearance and in an essential way expose the cognitive structure of a group of individuals.52 From the forms of particular objects, Sedlmayr develops the nexus of ideas in Kunstwollen to take us to their deep structures, which in turn reveal cognitive structures not only in the individual people who made or used such objects but also in collectives and groups of people. This kind of deep structuralism is suprapersonal;53 an intransitive and yet purposive
48. Iversen, Alois Riegl, p. 153. 49. Alpers, Style Is What You Make It, p. 148. Mannheim eectively supports Panofskys turn to meaning in an interesting passage: [Riegl] seeks to characterize Weltanschauung as a global entity by ascertaining certain common features. . . . All such attempts, however, fail to go beyond abstract, formal analysis. They can only succeed in bringing to light the categories and forms of experience and expression pertaining to a given period before they become fully dierentiated in objecticationsin other words: all they can establish is a typology of initial, germinal patterns of mental life. Such understandings are neither futile nor hopeless. But it will never be possible to derive the wealth of meanings embodied in the actual works from these germinal patterns. This is the weakness common to Riegls method. . . . Complex meanings cannot be adequately grasped or interpreted in terms of elementary concepts. [OIW, p. 54] 50. Sinn is the key term not only for Panofsky but also for Mannheim; see OIW, pp. 1838. 51. Sedlmayr, The Quintessence of Riegls Thought, p. 17. 52. For all this, see ibid., pp. 1618, and Sedlmayrs manifesto Kunstgeschichte als Kunstgeschichte (1931), Kunst und Wahrheit, pp. 4980; trans. Wood, under the title Towards a Rigorous Study of Art, in The Vienna School Reader, pp. 13379. 53. Pa cht uses the term supraindividual (u berindividuallem) (Pa cht, The Practice of Art History: Reections on Method, trans. David Britt, ed. Michael Pa cht [London, 1999], p. 131).
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movement. The Kunstwollen of an individual, school or region evolves it cht, Sedlmayrs great collaborator of the 1920s and 1930s, put it self,54 as Pa in the 1970s. This approach preserved a rigorouseven asceticattention to forms as the raw material that could then be used for the writing of history. At the same time, on the basis of this model, Kunstwollen was set apart from historical conditions and was itself a vehicle for what, already in the 1930s, Meyer Schapiro called a mysterious racial and animistic language in the name of a higher science of art.55 Yet the irony is that Sedlmayrs response to Panofsky in proposing Kunstwollen as the collective and suprapersonal deep structure underlying the specic forms of works of art was to prove fundamentally inuential on Panofskys own developed formulation of iconology. In the introductory chapter to Studies in Iconology, rst published in 1939 but self-confessedly dependent on an article originally published in German in 1932, Panofsky proposes three levels of analysis: (1) the factual or expressional identication of primary or natural subject matter, including form; (2) the secondary or conventional subject matter or iconographical analysis in a wider sense, including the identication of subject matter as opposed to form; and (3) the intrinsic meaning or content, otherwise iconographical analysis in a deeper sense,56 which in the republication of this chapter as Iconography and Iconology in 1955 was reformulated as Panofskysown catchword, iconology.57 Sedlmayrs two levels of structural analysis are now transmuted into two levels of iconographical analysis, themselves founded on a primary tier of formal analysis. Needless to say, Panofsky never acknowledged a debt to Sedlmayr, but the parallels cannot be denied, and it is clear that Sedlmayr devised his Strukturanalyse rst, specically in response to Panofskys early worries about Kunstwollen.58 The move in his 1955 revision to iconology as opposed to iconography in place of iconographical analysis in a deeper sense is interesting and worrying. Panofsky apologizes at length in two paragraphs inserted in 1955 and printed in brackets, where he argues that he conceives of iconology as an iconography turned interpretative (whatever that means) but admits a danger that may
54. Ibid., p. 119. 55. Meyer Schapiro, The New Viennese School (1936), in The Vienna School Reader, p. 460. 56. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York, 1939), pp. 58. For the indebtedness of this passage (and its key theoretical ideas) to Mannheims Beitra ge, unacknowledged here by Panofsky, see Hart, Erwin Panofsky and Karl Mannheim. 57. See Panofsky, Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art, Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York, 1955), pp. 3033, with signicant rewriting of Studies in Iconology at pp. 3133. 58. Eectively I am suggesting that both of the key (unacknowledged) sources of the nal formulation of iconologyMannheims Beitra ge and Sedlmayrs Die Quintessenz des Lehren Rieglsare responses to Riegls Kunstwollen and to Panofskys response to Kunstwollen.
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also have been a desire. The fear is that iconology will behave, not as ethnology as opposed to ethnography [i.e. as an interpretative science in relation to empirical data] but like astrology as opposed to astrography [in other words as the exegetical higher nonsense in relation to empirical data].59 Where Panofskys 1920 paper had deliberately and very eectively deated the excess of potential meaning tending to virtually mystical resonance that had made Kunstwollen so attractive, it is hard not to see his 1955 reworking of Iconography and Iconology as designed precisely to inate iconology with all the mystical baggage he had once resisted.60 In any case, though now upon radically dierent analytic terrain, Panofskys iconology might be seen as a direct descendant of Kunstwollen by reaction, antithesis, and, ultimately, emulation. We might say that there were two main phases of polemic around Kunstwollenthat of the 1920s and that of the 1960s. In both cases, Germanor Austrian-born, German- or Austrian-trained, and German-speaking art historians attacked or at least modied Kunstwollen, only to be answered by the advocates of the Vienna school in the role of keepers of the sacred ame, although the Riegl of Sedlmayrs Strukturanalyse can be argued to be as unlike the original as that of Panofsky. In the twenties the papers of Sedlmayr and Kaschnitz-Weinberg responded to those of Panofsky, Mannheim, and Wind. In the sixties Otto Pa cht (a Viennese and Viennese-trained exile living in England) felt compelled to respond to the attack on Riegl by his fellow Viennese and Viennese-trained exile, Ernst Gombrich. These were very different debates. What underlies the discussions of the twenties remains a series of art-historical arguments about fundamental issues of form, meaning, and subjectivity, as well as the methods and discursive context for their explication. What motivates Gombrichs assault on Riegl is something much more fundamental. In many ways the whole of Art and Illusion is a sustained Popperian attack on all the implications of evolutionism, historicism, collectivism, and determinism that Gombrich saw lurking in the myth-making and mythological explanations in which the Kunstwollen becomes a ghost in the machine, driving the wheels of artistic developments according to inexorable laws.61 Gombrich is rejecting in its
59. Panofsky, Iconography and Iconology, p. 32. 60. For a radical attack on the almost startling tidiness with which everything seemed to t together in Panofskys hands, targeting his work on Sugernotably, his translation of Abbot Suger, On the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and Its Art Treasures, trans. and ed. Panofsky (Princeton, N.J., 1946) and Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (London, 1951)see Peter Kidson, Panofsky, Suger, and St. Denis, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, no. 50 (1987): 117. The core issue is whether Panofskys iconology creates of Suger a credible historical gure or an arthistorical ction in which everything turns on a subtle hermeneutic exercise (ibid., pp. 3, 5). 61. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (1960; Princeton, N.J., 1984), p. 16; hereafter abbreviated AI. See also Gombrich, Kunstwissenschaft, Das Atlantisbuch der Kunst: Eine Enzyklopa die der bildenden
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art-historical form all the ideological potential for determinism and collectivism implicit in Kunstwollen and explicit in its Sedlmayrian reading (see AI, p. 19). Just as Kunstwollen had always been a cipher for more than any concept can reasonably be expected to be (hence its methodological uses when not pressed too vigorously), so Riegl himself (despite his touch of genius [AI, p. 19]) became in Gombrichs account a cipher for all the worst aspects of the Viennese tradition in which Gombrich was himself trained. Here, clearly, World War II and the Holocaust cannot be wholly separated from Gombrichs thinking, and it is this context (the hindsight of what Sedlmayrs art history, not to speak of his Nazi politics, could and did lead to) that makes the sixties debate so dierently pressing from that of the twenties.62 Pa cht responded to Gombrich by commenting that what astonishes me most in all this is the categorical assertion that historicism and kindred views have been nally refuted and are now a thing of the past (AH, p. 192). This is right, but also beside the point (although the implication that Gombrich on Riegl is a bit of a rant frankly remains hard to deny). For Gombrichs real attack is on unreason as such,63 which he saw dangerously embodied by Sedlmayr. This opinion is made clear in his polemical review of the essays published in honor of Sedlmayrs sixty-fth birthday, which he concluded with this passionate statement: failure to speak out against the enemies of reason has caused enough disasters to justify this breach of Academic etiquette.64 In Art and Illusion, Riegl is his target as the fountainhead of the tradition that led from formalism to Geistesgeschichte, inKunste (Zurich, 1952), pp. 65364, esp. p. 658, and his inaugural lecture in the Durning-Lawrence Chair at University College London in 1957, Art and Scholarship (London, 1957), p. 14. Pa chts response is found in AH, p. 192, restated at greater length in Pa cht, The Practice of Art History, pp. 11820. The last part of this latter text might be described as a remarkable attempt to rehabilitate Riegls Kunstwollen; see pp. 268300. 62. For the simultaneous interest of Panofsky and Sedlmayr in the question of the nature of gothic immediately after the war, see Suger, On the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and Its Art Treasures; Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (Latrobe, Penn., 1951); and Sedlmayr, Nachwort als Einfu hrung (1976), Die Entstehung der Kathedrale, 2d ed. (1950; Graz, 1988), pp. 585614, which overtly opposed Sedlmayrian spiritual structure against Panofskys multilayered iconology (Bourdieu, postface to Panofsky, Architecture gothique et pense e scholastique, p. 135). What Bourdieu fails to note is that the signicance of German gothic (the towers of Nuremberg, and so on) to Nazi aesthetics can be considered the underlying and tacit key to these interventions. The general obsession with gothic among German e migre scholars in the aftermath of the war is not pure happenstance; see Otto von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order (New York, 1956), and Paul Frankl, The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretations through Eight Centuries (Princeton, N.J., 1960). 63. Here he was anticipated by Mannheim, who had already worried about the conict of Rationalismus und Irrationalismus in the notion of Weltanschauung; see Mannheim, Beitrage zur Theorie der Weltanschauungsinterpretation, pp. 913. 64. Gombrich, Review of Kunstgeschichte und Kunsttheorie im 19 Jahrhundert, Art Bulletin 46 (Sept. 1964): 420.
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vested style with the essential qualities of an age or race, and by talking in terms of collectives . . . weakens resistance to totalitarian habits of mind cht read Gombrich as taking Kunstwollen to (AI, p. 20).65 Interestingly, Pa be a form of words to which nothing corresponds in reality, an abstract concept put on legs, and then, by a distinctly animistic procedure, endowed with a growth (AH, p. 192). I think this is a fundamental misreading, though it is a view that Pa cht (rightly) attributes to the inuence of Gombrichs own teacher, Julius von Schlosser,66 and that, intriguingly, Sedlmayr played with and then rejected in his discussion of Panofskys account of Kunstwollen.67 Far from being empty, for Gombrich, Kunstwollen was a concept unsusceptible to properly rational analysis with implications that were little short of evil.
5. Epilogue: Coming Clean If art history has a soul, then the polemical debate of the 1920s was about what that soul was and on what grounds it should be located. At stake were huge disciplinary agendas underlying the divide between Viennese formalism and Warburgian meaning, between style art history and iconographical analysis. The polemic of the 1960s was about something even deeper, what might be called the ethical basis of art historys soul. With a hindsight informed by Hitlers rise and fall, the positions of the twenties could be staked out as a politics in which Sedlmayrs structure eectively stood for Nazism (for Gombrich). Pa cht, on the other hand, the Sedlmayrian formalist who was a Jewish refugee, struggled to nd a way out of this impasse. These debates, framing the most fundamental of moral and cultural crises of the twentieth century, have a sharper edge than even the poststructuralist polemics of the 1980s, which may be seen at least in part as an attack on the (heavily ideological) claim from Gombrich to be oering a non- (even anti-) ideological art history. Likewise, the revival of interest not only in Riegl but also in the Vienna school in art-historical circles since the 1990s may be seen as a corrective to the downgrading of form that followed in the wake of the Warburgian ascendancy of the likes of Panofsky, Gombrich, and Wind within the discipline in the three decades after the war. Strikingly, one area of art history has remained largely untouched by Warburgianism (or iconology), even in its American incarnation. This is
65. For more on Gombrich and Riegl, see Woodeld, Reading Riegls Kunst-Industrie, pp. 7176. 66. In 1934, von Schlosser had written of Kunstwollen, the well-known idea (for there is no question of it being a concept)the parenthetical comment surely pace Panofsky and also Sedlmayras a glib catch phrase (Julius von Schlosser, Alo s Riegl [1934], in Framing Formalism, p. 36; see also p. 42 for explicit reproof of Sedlmayr). 67. See Sedlmayr, Die Quintessenz des Lehren Riegls, p. xvi.
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the branch of the discipline closest to Riegls own training, namely, classical archaeology. It has been insuciently noticed that Panofsky, who knew precisely the strengths of his enemy, chooses in his 1920 Kunstwollen article to attack the work of Gerhardt Rodenwaldt,68 who would become the greatest classical archaeologist in the interwar years, hugely inuential both on German classical art history and on such key gures outside Germany as Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli and Otto Brendel (who went to America in the 1940s). Rodenwaldts work throughout the twenties, thirties, and forties constituted in large part an attempt to explain the moves in Kunstwollen from early Roman art to the Arch of Constantine in direct response to the specic challenge articulated by Riegl in Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie.69 We may observe in the more thoughtful formalisms of classical archaeology something of the Rieglian care and Seydlmayrian program to use the empirical weapons of stylistic analysis and formal comparison as something more than the mere basis of a deeper iconographical and iconological inquiry.70 If I had to come clean about my own position, I think I am more nominalist (even, dare one say it now, poststructuralist) about the arbitrariness of meaning in relation to form than any side in these debates. There is much value in treating art-historical discourse in general (whether formalist, iconological, connoisseurial, or any other kind) as ekphrasis. This is to say, it is rhetorical, with the aim of persuading an audience of a point or an argument; it is directed not towards some nal positivist truth but towards a goal situated (consciously or unconsciously) in the art historians desire, whether ideological, psychological, even just tendentious. One benet of the notion of ekphrasis is that it specically enables the reentry of subjectivism as an unavoidable factor (whether as appreciation or interpretation) in understanding works of art. The rhetorical nature of ekphrasis might also
68. See Panofsky, The Concept of Artistic Volition, pp. 22 n. 5, 23 n. 10. 69. On these issues at greater length, see Elsner, Frontality in the Column of Marcus Aurelius, in Autour de la colonne Aure lienne: Geste et image sur la colonne de Marc Aure `le a ` Rome, ed. John Scheid and Vale rie Huet (Tournhout, Belgium, 2000), pp. 25164, esp. pp. 26061. For the explicit nature of Rodenwaldts debt to Riegl, see Gerhart Rodenwaldt, Zur Begrenzung und Gliederung der Spa tantike, Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archa ologischen Instituts, nos. 5960 (194445): 8187, esp. pp. 8182. 70. See, for instance, Brendel, Prolegomena to the Study of Roman Art ; Salvatore Settis, Unarte al plurale: Limpero romano, i Greci e i posteri, in Caratteri e morfologie, vol. 4 of Storia di Roma, ed. Emilio Gabba and Aldo Schiavone (Turin, 1989), pp. 82778; and Tonio Ho lscher, The Language of Images in Roman Art (Cambridge, 2004). On the latter in relation to many of the issues raised here, see my foreword in ibid., esp. pp. xxvi-vii, on questions of the potential intrinsic or essential meaning embedded in forms versus purely conventional meaning attributed to them, a deeply Rieglian and Seydlmayrian theme about which German art history remains inarticulate if not ambiguous.
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be said to eect a parallelism between the discourses we use about art and those of art itself, since, in whatever contexts images are employed, they too are rhetorical. The fundamental grounds of meaning in art or collective Kunstwollenwhether essential or merely historically contextual (and what a crime it is to pair these notions!)are not, in my view, nally attainable. But the desire to attain themto make a lasting contributionis fundamental to art history, if only in spurring such committed and serious contributions as the great, awed works we have been examining here.

From Empirical Evidence To The Big Picture: Some Reflections On Riegl's Concept of Kunstwollen

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From Empirical Evidence To The Big Picture: Some Reflections On Riegl's Concept of Kunstwollen

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From Empirical Evidence to the Big Picture: Some Reflections on Riegl's Concept of Kunstwollen Author(s): Jas'Elsner Source: Critical

Jas Elsner / Reections on Kunstwollen

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2006

Jas Elsner / Reections on Kunstwollen

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2006

Jas Elsner / Reections on Kunstwollen

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2006

Jas Elsner / Reections on Kunstwollen

f i g u r e 2. Sarcophagus of Severus Alexander and Julia Mammea (Rome, Museo Capitolino).

Jas Elsner / Reections on Kunstwollen

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2006

Jas Elsner / Reections on Kunstwollen

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2006

Jas Elsner / Reections on Kunstwollen

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2006

Jas Elsner / Reections on Kunstwollen

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2006

Jas Elsner / Reections on Kunstwollen

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2006

Jas Elsner / Reections on Kunstwollen

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2006

Jas Elsner / Reections on Kunstwollen

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2006

Jas Elsner / Reections on Kunstwollen

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2006

Jas Elsner / Reections on Kunstwollen

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