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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 October 2023
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.
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