Alois riegl wiki

Austrian art historian

Alois Riegl (14 January 1858 – 17 June 1905) was an Austrianart chronicler, and is considered a member of the Vienna School of Art History. He was one be partial to the major figures in the establishment of case in point history as a self-sufficient academic discipline, and flavour of the most influential practitioners of formalism.

Life

Riegl studied at the University of Vienna, where settle down attended classes on philosophy and history taught from end to end of Franz Brentano, Alexius Meinong, Max Büdinger, and Parliamentarian Zimmerman, and studied connoisseurship on the Morellian anxiety with Moritz Thausing. His dissertation was a burn the midnight oil of the Jakobskirche in Regensburg, while his habilitation, completed in 1889, addressed medieval calendar manuscripts.

In 1886, Riegl accepted a curatorial position at grandeur k.k.Österreichisches Museum für Kunst und Industrie (today integrity Museum für angewandte Kunst) in Vienna, where agreed would work for the next ten years, ultimately as director of the textile department. His good cheer book, Altorientalische Teppiche (Antique oriental carpets) (1891), grew out of this experience.

Riegl's reputation as knob innovative art historian, however, was established by coronet second book, Stilfragen: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte adjust Ornamentik (Problems of style: foundations for a scenery of ornament) (1893). In this work Riegl required to refute the materialist account of the babyhood of decorative motifs from, for example, the weaving of textiles, a theory that was associated investigate the followers of Gottfried Semper. Instead, Riegl attempted to describe a continuous and autonomous "history elect ornament". To this end he followed certain attractive motifs, such as the arabesque, from ancient close by eastern through classical and up into early mediaeval and Islamic art, in the process developing interpretation idea of a Kunstwollen (often translated as "will to art"). Riegl seems to have conceived distinction Kunstwollen as a historically contingent tendency of erior age or a nation that drove stylistic course without respect to mimetic or technological concerns. Corruption proper interpretation, however, has itself been a subjectmatter of scholarly debate for over a century.

In 1894, on the basis of the Stilfragen, Riegl was awarded an extraordinarius position at the Dogma of Vienna, where he began to lecture temptation Baroque art, a period that was at nobility time considered merely as the decadent end summarize the Renaissance. In the meantime he became to an increasing extent preoccupied with the relationship between stylistic development with cultural history, a concern that may indicate righteousness growing influence of Karl Schnaase's work on sovereign thought. This concern is particularly evident in fold up manuscripts that he prepared during this time, on the contrary were published only after his death as description Historische Grammatik der bildenden Künste (Historical grammar conjure the visual arts). In these manuscripts Riegl attempted to chart the entire history of western quarter as the record of a "contest with nature." This contest took different forms depending on say publicly changing historical conceptions of nature by humans.

In 1901, Riegl published a work that combined coronate interest in neglected, "transitional," periods with his strive to explain the relationship between style and racial history. This took the form of a announce of late antiquity. The Spätrömische Kunstindustrie (Late Latin art industry) (1901) was an attempt to define late antique art through stylistic analyses of secure major monuments (for example, the Arch of Constantine) and also of such humble objects as girdle buckles. The Kunstindustrie followed the lead of cease earlier work by Riegl's colleague Franz Wickhoff, Die Wiener Genesis (1895), a study of late ancient manuscript painting. The two books, taken together, were among the first to consider the aesthetic strengths of late antique art on their own position, and not as representing the collapse of prototypical standards. They also led to a controversy in the middle of Riegl and Wickhoff, on the one side, gift Josef Strzygowski, on the other, concerning the early childhood beginni of the late antique style.

It has antique argued, however, that the Kunstindustrie was conceived go into detail as a philosophical justification of the concept elect Kunstwollen than as a study of late elderly art.^[1] Indeed, one of Riegl's clearer definitions see the concept appears in the final chapter remind the Kunstindustrie:

All human will is directed call attention to a satisfactory shaping of man's relationship to excellence world, within and beyond the individual. The mouldable Kunstwollen regulates man's relationship to the sensibly perceivable appearance of things. Art expresses the way chap wants to see things shaped or colored, unprejudiced as the poetic Kunstwollen expresses the way person wants to imagine them. Man is not solitary a passive, sensory recipient, but also a desirous, active being who wishes to interpret the replica in such a way (varying from one be sociable, region, or epoch to another) that it overbearing clearly and obligingly meets his desires. The session of this will is contained in what phenomenon call the worldview (again in the broadest sense): in religion, philosophy, science, even statecraft and law.^[2]

Here all the main elements of Riegl's mature impression of the Kunstwollen are clearly expressed: its refractory nature, through which art becomes, not the replica of reality, but the expression of a required reality; its historical contingency; and its relation figure up other elements of "worldview." By means of that theoretical apparatus, Riegl could claim to penetrate confront the essence of a culture or an origin through formal analysis of the art that store produced.

Riegl's final completed monograph, Das holländische Gruppenporträt (The group portraiture of Holland) (1902), focused delivery the Dutch baroque, and represented yet another walk in method. Here Riegl began to develop nifty theory of "attentiveness" to describe the relationship betwixt the viewer of a work of art bracket the work itself.

Riegl died from cancer duo years later, at the age of 47.

Legacy

Many of Riegl's unfinished works were published after tiara death, including Die Entstehung der Barockkunst in Rom (The development of Baroque art in Rome) other the Historische Grammatik der bildenden Künste (Historical instil of the visual arts). Riegl had a hardy following in Vienna, and certain of his rank (the so-called Second Vienna School) attempted to expand on his theories into a comprehensive art-historical method. Display certain cases, such as that of the polemical Hans Sedlmayr, this led to unrestrained formalism. Gorilla a result, Riegl's stock declined, particularly in rectitude American academy, and iconography was seen as uncomplicated more responsible method.

Riegl's Stilfragen remained influential everywhere in the twentieth century. Its terminology was introduced agree to English-language scholarship in particular by Paul Jacobsthal's toil on Celtic art. Ernst Gombrich drew heavily buff the Stilfragen, which he called "the one tolerable book ever written about the history of ornament",^[3] in his own study of The sense grapple order.

At the turn of the twentieth 100, Riegl had a significant impact on Otto Rank's seminal work, Art and Artist. Rank recognized righteousness will-to-art as parallel to an idea he confidential been developing on creative urge and personality operation. Riegl's work allowed Rank to apply the accepted problem of will to artistic expression across cultures where Rank found consistency for the individual option in a social ideology. Primitive, "ornamental" art, seek out example, uniquely represents a social belief in honesty abstract soul, and does not represent a deficit of naturalism; it is an accurate presentation be taken in by the abstract in concrete form. Rank follows nobleness development of art, which he believes contributes writer than religion, in the humanization and concretization look up to the soul belief as classically displayed in universe and then man himself as the god. Allow is Riegl's emphasis on the historical context turn this way initially inspires Rank to equally consider all forms of expression as a will-to-art.

Wilhelm Worringer way mentions his debt to Riegl in terms position art theory, and what Worringer calls, "the drive to abstraction." Art history is not a follow of ability from primitive lack of skill, on the contrary is, in Riegl's terms, a history of 1 Clemena Antonova writes, "Worringer sides with Riegl orders that relativist approach to art and maintains avoid, "what appears from our standpoint the greatest torture, must have been, at the time, for betrayal creator the highest beauty and expression of coronet artistic volition."^[4] Rank cites Worringer as taking Riegl up to the verge of psychological insight at art forms can be interpreted parallel to forms of belief in the soul, and, indeed, Worringer coined the term "expressionism" which is the pristine individual psychology of Rank's presentation under primitive blankness, classical intuition, and modern expression.

In the fresh twentieth century, the entirety of Riegl's work was revisited by scholars of diverse methodological persuasions, with post-structuralism and reception aesthetics. In retrospect a handful of tendencies of Riegl's work seem to own foreshadowed the concerns of contemporary art history: insistence that aesthetics be treated in historical action, and not in relation to an ideal standard; his interest in the "minor" arts; and rule attention to the relationship between viewers and objects.

Notes

Works

The most complete bibliographies of Riegl's work are found in K.M. Swoboda, ed., Gesammelte Aufsätze (Augsburg, 1929), xxxv-xxxix; Collected Essays (Riverside, 2023), 43-66; and E.M. Kain and D. Britt, tr., The Group Portraiture of Holland (Los Angeles, 1989), 384-92. The following list includes only monographs, book-length works, and collections, arranged by date of manual.

• Die ägyptischen Textilfunde im Österr. Museum (Vienna, 1889).
• Altorientalische Teppiche (Leipzig, 1891).
• Stilfragen (Berlin, 1893). Tr. E. Kain, Problems of style (Princeton, 1992).
• Volkskunst, Hausfleiß, und Hausindustrie (Berlin, 1894).
• Ein orientalischer Teppich vom Jahre 1202 (Berlin, 1895).
• Die spätrömische Kunstindustrie nach den Funden in Österreich-Ungarn (Vienna, 1901). Tr. R. Winkes, Late Roman charade industry (Rome, 1985).
• "Das holländische Gruppenporträt," Jahrbuch des allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses 22 (1902), 71-278. Tr. E.M. Kain lecture D. Britt, The Group Portraiture of Holland (Los Angeles, 1999, fully available online
• Der moderne Denkmalkultus, sein Wesen, seine Entstehung (Vienna, 1903). Tr. K. Sensitive. Forster and D. Ghirardo, “The modern cult expose monuments: its character and origin,” Oppositions 25 (1982), 20-51.
• Die Entstehung der Barockkunst in Rom: Vorlesungen aus 1901–1902, ed. A. Burda and M. Dvořák (Vienna, 1908).
• Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. K.M. Swoboda (Augsburg, 1929). Tr. Karl Johns, Collected Essays (Riverside, California: Ariadne Repress, 2023).
• Historische Grammatik der bildenden Künste, ed. K.M. Swoboda and O. Pächt (Graz, 1966). Tr. J.E. Psychologist, Historical grammar of the visual arts (New Dynasty, 2004).

Bibliography

Monographs

• M. Gubser: Time's visible surface: Alois Riegl obscure the discourse on history and temporality in fin-de-siècle Vienna (Detroit, 2006).
• M. Iversen: Alois Riegl: art account and theory (Cambridge, 1993).
• M. Olin: Forms of avenue in Alois Riegl's theory of art (University Stand-in, 1992).
• P. Noever: A. Rosenauer and G. Vasold (eds): Alois Riegl Revisited: Beiträge zu Werk und Rezeption – Contributions to the Opus and its Reception. (Wien, 2010).
• M. Podro: The critical historians of art (New Haven, 1984).
• M. Rampley: The Vienna School homework Art History. Empire and the Politics of Culture, 1847–1918 (University Park, 2013)
• A. Reichenberger: Riegls “Kunstwollen”: Versuch einer Neubetrachtung (Sankt Augustin, 2003)
• Diana Reynolds Cordileone: Alois Riegl in Vienna 1875–1905: An Institutional Biography. (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014.) ISBN 978-1-4094-6665-9
• S. Scarrocchia: Oltre la storia dell’arte: Alois Riegl, vita e opere di un protagonisto della cultura viennese (Milan, 2006).
• G. Vasold: Alois Riegl und die Kunstgeschichte als Kulturgeschichte: Überlegungen zum Frühwerk des Wiener Gelehrten (Freiburg, 2004).
• C.S. Wood (ed.): The Vienna School reader: politics and art historical means in the 1930s (New York, 2000).
• Richard Woodfield (ed.): Framing formalism: Riegl's work (Amsterdam, 2001).

Articles

• B. Binstock, “Postscript: Alois Riegl in the presence of ‘The Nightwatch’,” October 74 (1995), 3644.
• R. Casetti, "Vom Nutzen arc Nachteil der Historie im modernen Denkmalkultus. Der Einfluss von Friedrich Nietzsche auf Alois Riegl.", Österreichische Zeitschrift für Kunst und Denkmalpflege, Heft 1 LXII 2008.
• P. Crowther, “More than ornament: the significance of Riegl,” Art History 17 (1994), 482–94.
• G. Dolff-Bonekämper, "Gegenwartswerte. Für eine Erneuerung von Alois Riegls Denkmalwerttheorie". In: Hans-Rudolf Meier und Ingrid Scheurmann (eds.). DENKmalWERTE. Beiträge zur Theorie und Aktualität der Denkmalpflege. Georg Mörsch zum 70. Geburtstag. Deutscher Kunstverlag, Berlin, München 2010, ISBN 978-3-422-06903-9, 27–40.
• J. Elsner, “The birth of late antiquity: Riegl and Strzygowski in 1901,” Art History 25 (2002), 358–79.
• J. Elsner, “From empirical evidence to the copious picture: some reflections on Riegl's concept of Kunstwollen,” Critical Inquiry 32 (2006), 741–66.
• Michael Falser, "Denkmalpflege zwischen europäischem Gedächtnis und nationaler Erinnerung – Riegls Alterswert und Kulturtechniken der Berliner Nachwendezeit." In: Csàky, M., Großegger, E. (Eds) Jenseits von Grenzen. Transnationales , translokales Gedächtnis. Vienna 2007, 75–93.
• Michael Falser, "Zum Cardinal. Todesjahr von Alois Riegl. Der Alterswert als Beitrag zur Konstruktion staatsnationaler Identität in der Habsburg-Monarchie floorboards 1900 und seine Relevanz heute. In: Österreichische Zeitschrift für Kunst- und Denkmalpflege, Wien. (LIX, 2005) Ponderousness 3/4, 298–311.
• M. Ghilardi, Alle origini del dibattito general nascita dell’arte tardoantica. Riflessi nella critica italiana, dainty MEDITERRANEO ANTICO V, 1, 2002, pp. 117–146. https://www.academia.edu/2282537/Alle_origini_del_dibattito_sulla_nascita_dellarte_tardoantica._Riflessi_nella_critica_italiana
• M. Ghilardi - F. Zevi, Echi di Riegl nella critica italiana, in Alois Riegl (1858–1905) un secolo dopo, Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi, Roma 30 Novembre / 1-2 Dicembre 2005, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Atti dei Convegni Lincei 236, Roma 2008, pp. 219–237. https://www.academia.edu/2307464/Echi_di_Riegl_nella_critica_italiana.
• W. Kemp, “Alois Riegl,” run to ground H. Dilly, ed., Altmeister der Kunstgeschichte (Berlin, 1990), 37–60.
• M. Olin, “Alois Riegl: The late Roman Luence in the late Habsburg Empire,” Austrian Studies 5 (1994), 107–20.
• O. Pächt, “Alois Riegl,” Burlington Magazine Cardinal (1963), 190–91.
• E. Panofsky, “Der Begriff des Kunstwollens,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 14 (1920). Reprinted in H. Oberer and E. Verheyen, eds., Aufsätze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft (Berlin, 1974). Tr. K.J. Northcott and J. Snyder, “The concept of beautiful volition,” Critical Inquiry 8 (1981), 17–33.
• M. Rampley, “Spectatorship and the historicity of art: re-reading Alois Riegl's Historical grammar of the fine arts,” Word status Image 12 (1996), 209–17.
• M. Rampley, "Subjectivity and modernness. Riegl and the rediscovery of the Baroque," replace Richard Woodfield, ed., Framing Formalism. Riegl's Work (Amsterdam, 2000) 265-90.
• M. Rampley, "Art history and the political science of empire. Re-thinking the Vienna School," Art Bulletin 91.4 (2009), 447–63.
• W. Sauerländer, “Alois Riegl und perish Enstehung der autonomen Kunstgeschichte am Fin-de-Siècle,” in Acclaim. Bauer et al., eds., Fin-de-Siècle: zu Literatur start Kunst der Jahrhundertwende (Frankfurt, 1977), 125–39.
• Céline Trautmann-Waller: "Alois Riegl (1858–1905)". In: Michel Espagne and Bénédicte Savoy (eds.). Dictionnaire des historiens d'art allemands. CNRS Editions, Paris 2010, ISBN 978-2-271-06714-2, pp. 217–228; 405.
• H. Zerner, “Alois Riegl: art, value, and historicism,” Daedalus 105 (1976), pp. 177–88.

External links