Art History ISSN 0141-6790 Vol. 26 No. 2 April 2003 pp.

214–237

Max Dvořák: art history and the crisis of

modernity

Matthew Rampley

In this article I examine the work of the Czech art historian Max Dvořák (1874–
1921) (plate 3.1). Widely known and read during his lifetime and immediately
afterwards, he has, in the anglophone world, sunk into semi-oblivion. Aside
from its impact on students and followers such as Otto Benesch, Dagobert Frey
or Robert Hedicke, his notion of art history as the history of ideas or spirit
(Geist) has been of limited significance for subsequent scholarship.1 This stands
in contrast to the situation of his colleague Alois Riegl, or contemporaries such
as Aby Warburg and Heinrich Wölfflin, who have enjoyed a constant renewal of
critical attention. Dvořák has largely been relegated to the periphery in histories
of art-historical writing, and the translation ‘industry’ of the past twenty years,
which has made many key German-language texts accessible to an anglophone
readership for the first time, has largely passed him by.2 Such neglect partly
reflects the fact that while Riegl and others have provided a catalyst for
methodological reflection within art history, the work of Dvořák has failed to
stimulate a similar level of debate. It also stems partly, however, from the fact
that he is viewed as having contributed to a genre of art-historical writing that
‘verged on the popular, the sensational and the grandiose’, which in its more
extreme forms led to an anti-Semitic and nationalistic suspicion of abstraction
and theory.3 I would like to suggest, however, that such a dismissive summary
constitutes a narrow view. In many respects his writing acts as a barometer of
many of the tensions of early twentieth-century intellectual life, and it is
precisely because of the awkward political and cultural questions it raises that it
merits renewed study. My concern with Dvořák is thus motivated less by a
desire for a simple recovery or restitution than by a conviction that his writing
casts important light on the socio-cultural situation that produced art-historical
discourses in the early decades of the twentieth century.
At the root of my argument are two basic contentions: first, that the work of
Dvořák in particular, and of the Vienna School of art history more generally, has to
be viewed against the crisis of Viennese modernity, and second that Dvořák’s
writing represents an inflection, within art history, of a wider set of discourses of
identity, modernity and culture. The first contention is not, at first sight, novel. A
discursive formation that established its institutionalized forms in French, German
and Austrian universities in the late nineteenth century, the parallels between
academic art history and modernism have long been recognized. As early as 1928

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9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
 MAX DVOŘÁK: ART HISTORY AND THE CRISIS OF MODERNITY

3.1 Portrait of Max Dvořák, from Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte,

Vienna, 1923.

Mikhail Bakhtin had commented on the modernity of the discipline while, more
recently, Elizabeth Mansfield has claimed that, ‘Art history was formed by the
same impulse that created the advertising agency, the department store and even
the labor union.’4 In considering Dvořák, however, I shall be arguing that the
modernity of his writing can best be gauged in terms of its relation to
contemporary social and cultural theory, and in particular that Dvořák was
attempting to produce a theory of modernity through the lens of art history.
Finally, I shall examine the significance of his work for the historical analysis of the
discipline of art history; as I shall suggest, Dvořák and the Vienna School raise
important questions about the scope and aims of the history of art history.

Van Eyck to El Greco: Habsburg allegories

Dvořák was born the son of the archivist and librarian of the Palace of Roudnice
on the Elbe in northern Bohemia, into a family that had for two generations

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been closely linked to a seat of considerable cultural significance – the Ducal seat
of Raudnitz.5 Initially educated in Prague, he came to Vienna in 1895, where he
completed his Habilitation in 1901 on thirteenth- and fourteenth-century
Bohemian manuscript illumination.6 In 1902 he was appointed as a
Privatdozent in the history of art (the most junior academic appointment) and
three years later, on the premature death of Alois Riegl, was appointed associate
professor. In 1909 he became a full professor, although under the problematic
circumstances of a dispute over the succession to the Chair held by Franz
Wickhoff (1853–1909). The post was offered to Josef Strzygowski (1862–1941),
a notorious nationalist ideologue, but, in recognition of his achievements,
Dvořák was appointed to a specially created second Chair.
Dvořák is most frequently known for the collection of essays Kunst-
geschichte als Geistesgeschichte (Art History as the History of Ideas), published
posthumously and subsequently translated into English (plate 3.2).7 This
constitutes only a small part of his output, however, being part of a five-volume
edition of his collected writings which also included two volumes of lectures on
the Italian Renaissance, an early study of Hugo and Jan van Eyck, and a further
collection of essays (plate 3.3).8 In addition, Dvořák made a substantial
contribution to the field of conservation; after the death of Riegl, Dvořák took

3.2 Front cover of Max Dvořák,

Kunstgeschichte als Geistes-
geschichte, Vienna, 1923.

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3.3 Front cover of Max Dvořák,

Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kunst-
geschichte. Vienna, 1929.

over the former’s position as director of the Central Commission for the
Preservation of Artistic and Historical Monuments, in which capacity he
continued his teacher’s groundbreaking work in conservation policy and
practice, including the publication of the Kunstgeschichtliches Jahrbuch der
Zentralkommission für die Erhaltung der Kunst- und historischen Denkmale
(Yearbook of the Central Commission for the Preservation of Art and Historical
Thought) and the establishment, in 1907, of a series of publications –
Österreichische Kunsttopographie – that aimed to form an inventory of the
entire corpus of extant works of art and architecture in Austria–Hungary.9
There remains, too, a substantial body of unpublished lectures and other
writings in the archive of the University of Vienna.
Although he was a popular figure, Dvořák’s career was not untroubled. In
particular it was marked by a feud with Strzygowski (continuing an earlier feud
between Strzygowski and Riegl) that reached a calamitous climax when
Strzygowski formed a breakaway institution, causing a damaging fracture in the
Institute of Art History that was only resolved once he retired in 1933, Dvořák
having already died twelve years earlier.10 While this split is often cast in terms of
methodological differences, nationalistic politics played a significant role. Although
of Polish origin, Strzygowski had become committed to an essentialist ideology of

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ethnic identity and origins, oriented around a Nordic–Aryan axis which, in

addition to prefiguring the political landscape of the 1930s, also ran counter to the
cosmopolitanism of Austria–Hungary, of which Dvořák and, paradoxically,
Strzygowski himself, were obvious beneficiaries. Within the scholarly environs of
the university the cosmopolitan Habsburg empire was already disintegrating.
The Dvořák–Strzygowski affair and its aftermath encapsulated the socio-
political tensions of the declining Habsburg régime, which became evident in an
increasing fragmentation of cultural and political life. Yet while it provided a
particularly striking instance of the impact of such tensions on academic
discourse, a sense of cultural dislocation and disunity had been evident in the
work of Riegl and Wickhoff a generation earlier. Wickhoff was usually
associated with a philological and connoisseurial attention to primary sources
and materials, but his best-known work was an edition of the fifth-century
illuminated Genesis manuscript in the Nationalbibliothek in Vienna, in which he
rehabilitated early Christian art, outlining its distinct narrative principles and
thereby challenging the hegemony of classical taste in contemporary scholar-
ship.11 This critique of the canon of art history was accompanied by a
scepticism towards periodization, which he regarded as a purely heuristic
procedure bearing no relation to any putative history-in-itself of art. As he
argued, ‘All the divisions we make signify nothing other than the fact that faced
with the volume of material, we occasionally need to pause to regain our
breath.’12 In part Wickhoff’s assertion drew on a neo-Kantian theory of history,
emphasizing the notion of history as construct, widespread since the publication
of Gustav Droysen’s influential text Historik in 1858.13 It was also motivated,
however, by a desire to challenge the traditional taxonomies in the field of art
history, in the name of historical and aesthetic relativism.
Riegl also recognized the fractured nature of the history of art, referring
disparagingly to educated lay persons ‘who wish above all to see their need
satisfied for unity in the history of art, without submitting to any doubts about
the accuracy of the insights thereby obtained’.14 For Riegl this essentially
aesthetic, rather than scientific, need was to be resisted, and his interest in
‘peripheral’ or ‘decadent’ eras in the history of art can be linked both to
scepticism regarding traditional periodization and also to the fact that his earliest
concerns were with debates in the history of the decorative arts, in which the
normative values of art-historical discourse were of considerably less importance.
Yet while fully recognizing the apparently disjointed nature of the history of art,
Riegl was ultimately preoccupied with the possibility of establishing the laws of a
deeper underlying continuity. His first substantial publications, Carpets of the
Ancient Near East and Questions of Style, were both concerned to demonstrate
the debt of Islamic and Near Eastern art to classical antiquity.15 As Margaret
Olin has suggested, Riegl openly identified with the ideology of the Habsburg
empire as a multi-ethnic polity, and his attempt to establish a common origin for
a diverse range of artistic practices represented a translation of his wider political
stance into the concerns of art history.16 Thus Riegl celebrated Baroque culture
both for its role in anticipating his own times and also for its mongrel character,
constituting an often contradictory combination of motifs of northern and
southern cultural traditions (plate 3.4).17

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By the time Dvořák was writing a decade and more later, it was no longer
tenable to hold on to such Habsburg fantasies. His work became deeply
immersed in the problematic nexus of national politics and art production, but
Dvořák addressed the issue in a way that diverged from Riegl and indicated the
changed times in which he was working.18 Although standing in opposition to
the nationalism of Strzygowski or Julius Langbehn, whose Rembrandt as
Educator co-opted Rembrandt as a German and set up the explosive opposition
of Germanic ‘Kultur’ and French ‘civilization’, Dvořák nevertheless stressed the
role of national identities in the formation of a plurality of art practices, and this
increasingly becomes evident in the works written from 1914 onwards.19 As a
Czech working in a state that was fragmenting along ethnic lines with the onset
of war, he could hardly not be aware of this issue, and he occupied a complex
position. Although the member of an ethnic minority – Czech was his first
language and he wrote a number of articles and reviews in Czech – Dvořák
nevertheless internalized German national sentiment to the extent that much of
his work was focused on emphasizing and retrieving the specificities of the
Germanic cultural spirit. In Idealism and Naturalism in Gothic Sculpture and
Painting, for example, he argues that the incomprehension with which medieval
and Gothic art was met until the early nineteenth century was largely a product
of the dominance of the Italian aesthetic and historiographic theories of the

3.4 Front cover of Alois Riegl,

Barrokkunst in Rom, Vienna, 1908.

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Renaissance which, ‘stemming from the artistic condemnation of Gothic in the

Quattrocento, survived the deeply-felt historical discovery of medieval art in the
last century and has simply adopted new scholarly guises.’20 Retrieving the
overlooked in the history of art was intimately connected with a contestation of
the hegemony of certain national cultures and the assertion of others.
Dvořák’s work came to be intimately involved in the politics of early
twentieth-century nationalism, and through the course of his career he became
increasingly preoccupied with historical caesuras and fractures. Beginning with a
conception of art history as the study of the evolution of genetic series, an
undoubted nineteenth-century inheritance, Dvořák tended to stress those breaks
that could not be placed in a straightforward developmental series. Such breaks
also came to be read by Dvořák in terms of the differences of national cultural
traditions. In addition, however, his focus can also be seen as a reflection of the
topos of modernity as crisis, in which the idea of regular laws and series was
seen as problematic. History was thus viewed not as a regular process of change
but rather as a succession of jolts, eruptions and displacements.
In his early work Dvořák still held to an evolutionary model of continual
historical change inherited from Riegl. He concludes his Habilitation, for
example, by discussing ‘the great stream of artistic development, a single world-
wide historical course, which, beyond any external historical disturbance, or any
local or temporary influences, is determined by the inner forces and laws of a
given general psychological condition and the fixed artistic problems contained
therein’.21 This view, drawing on Riegl’s concern with the inner laws of art-
historical development, would later reappear as the basis of a critique of the
mythology of original genius. In The Enigma of the Art of the van Eyck
Brothers, published in 1904, Dvořák focused on the puzzle presented by the
apparently enormous gulf between the work of the Netherlandish painters and
that of their Gothic predecessors.22 What was commonly recognized as a central
development in the history of art – the birth of oil painting in northern Europe –
had, since the publication of Karel van Mander’s Schilder-boeck in 1604, been
viewed as a mysterious eruption, explained by means of clichés about the
original genius of Jan and Hubert.23 Dvořák was concerned to counter such
mythification, in line with his general view that ‘A particular culture is not
something that is simply given, like some fairytale bird flying in suddenly from
afar y It is a historical formation that can be neither discovered nor learnt in a
day, nor altered through some act of human will alone, but which is determined
by a long historical development.y’24 Challenging this traditional myth,
Dvořák traced the genealogy of early Netherlandish painting in order to
demonstrate that the ‘new’ naturalism of the early fifteenth century was merely
one development in a continuous sequence of changes, leading from Italian
painting of the Trecento to French book illumination to the work of Jan and
Hubert van Eyck. The apparent originality of the work of the van Eyck brothers
stemmed from their position in a series of reinterpretations of previous artistic
and cultural traditions. As Dvořák concludes,

The basis of the new style both of Jan van Eyck and of the new art in
general was no mystery, which either he, or one of his contemporaries, or

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his ‘era’ had discovered for the first time. Its secret, the secret of the new
art, consists in the development of art by new cultures in central Europe
which had taken over the inheritance of classical antiquity.25

Dvořák’s early work focuses on a close philological reading of individual works

coupled with a painstaking gathering together of historical documents and other
sources. In his later writings, however, he renounces close, stylistic analysis and
connoisseurial attention to individual art works in favour of much broader
speculation about the history of collective cognitive structures and beliefs and
their manifestation in art. He also turns away from his former attachment to the
idea of a continuous and univocal history of art. In an article on the
methodological demands of art-historical research published on the eve of World
War I Dvořák makes a telling comment on the landscape of the discipline:

y a universal history of art is conceivable only in the format of an

encyclopaedia. In place of the untenable notion of a standard either of
perfection or decline, or of consistent development, we must think in terms
of a multiplicity of developmental series that only form a unity in timeless
infinity. Within the finite domain of history, however, these can only partly
be brought together into a genetic relation. Doubtless at various times there
existed points of contact and mutual influence between, for example, the
art of Europe and the Far East. Yet in comparison with these moments of
commonality, that which divides them, and which cannot be brought into
any causal relation, is so great and unbridgeable that the history of art can
only be given some kind of coherence when viewed from the perspective of
one of these two artistic domains. A unified genetic development is not
possible.26

And later he adds that,

Extension of art historical research into ever more areas is a matter of the
greatest necessity y for there is no art which might not in the future
become an important factor, even if in the past its influence was of limited
historical significance.27

In other words, it is impossible to gain a panoptic vision of the totality of the

art-historical field; the traditional idea of the world history of art is broken
down into a plurality of incommensurable practices. In addition, even within
individual cultural traditions, the canon is never fixed; while he holds onto the
idea that a concern with tracing developmental sequences remains a central task
for the art historian, Dvořák puts forward the image of history as palimpsest.
And this relates directly to his own work, in that his scholarly attention to
Mannerism, the Baroque and other anti-classical artistic practices developed in
parallel with an interest in contemporary art, from Impressionism through to
Expressionism. Indeed, in the place of a continuous evolution in the history of
art Dvořák came to see history as shaped by a series of correspondences between
the present and the past. This reflected a complex attitude towards the history of

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art in which historical correspondences served both the construction of an

historical genealogy (and ultimately legitimization) for modern art, and also as
the basis of a critique of modernity. This is evident, for example, in his reading
of Tintoretto and his relation to modern art. The putative optical, painterly
qualities of the Venetian painter’s work led Dvořák to posit Tintoretto as the
ancestor of modernism, which he identified initially with Impressionism.
In lectures on Baroque art in 1905/1906, for example, Dvořák constructs a
genealogy of modernism in which Tintoretto constitutes ‘the point of origin of
the development that led to Velázquez, Rembrandt and to the art of our
times’,28 a history that is then pushed further back to include Titian. In the same
lectures Dvořák refers explicitly to Titian’s ‘impressionism’, adding that Titian’s
works are ‘gallery pictures in our sense of the word, in which the artist could let
himself be led by an artistic idea and by the problems he was concerned with’.29
Thus, in addition to his role as a stylistic ancestor to modernity, Titian also
prefigures the autonomy of modern art. Such a reading was heavily indebted
both to the historiography of Riegl – for whom post-Renaissance art was
characterized by a shift from haptic to optical perception – and to the aesthetic
theories of Konrad Fiedler or Adolf von Hildebrand, who viewed the focus on
opticality as essential to modernism.30 More generally, too, the idea that
Mannerism and the Baroque stood at the origins of modern ‘impressionistic’ art
had become a commonplace at the turn of the century.31 Wickhoff and Riegl
had drawn the connection while, most notably, the Secessionist exhibition of
1903 on The Development of Impressionism in Painting and Sculpture included
the work not only of French artists of the previous decades, but also examples of
the work of Rubens, Velázquez, Vermeer and Tintoretto.32 As Robert Jensen has
demonstrated, this was part of a project to legitimize contemporary art and
hence make it more marketable.33 Yet it was only some forty years earlier that
Jakob Burckhardt had denigrated Mannerism and Baroque art as ‘raw and
deviant’;34 to claim ancestry from a ‘deviant’ artistic form thus remained a
provocative gesture linked to the contestation of a univocal presentation of the
historical development of art.
Ten years after his Baroque lectures Dvořák radically reinterpreted the
meaning of Tintoretto, and this was intimately bound up with his re-reading of
modernity. Impressionism had given way to an emphasis on subjective
inwardness; the optical correspondences between past and present were no
longer the central focus, but rather an enhanced spirituality. In a lecture of 1914
on Tintoretto Dvořák argued that the Venetian painter’s work

y is more than imitation, it is an intensification of the magical interplay

between spectator and the object, and this is the characteristic of the
ultimate style of Tintoretto: a heightening of the means of painterly
expression, to a level of visionary expression, both superhuman and
supernatural, together with compositions which, equally, offer a visionary
representation of supernatural events.35

A similar view of Tintoretto is expressed elsewhere in another lecture on the

same subject; the painter’s work is marked by a dominance of ‘feeling and the

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irrational’.36 Dvořák also refines his earlier impressionistic genealogy for

Tintoretto’s work, for ‘the entire legacy of realistic depiction, formal solutions
and colorific effect that art adopted from its earlier development now receives a
new meaning; it is no longer a self-supporting content, but rather the effect of a
higher spirituality and the expression of immaterial events y’ and Dvořák adds
that, ‘In this, Tintoretto was close to Rembrandt, with whom he shared the
conception and employment of dark and light y for Titian [it was] an element
of impressionistic coloration; but for Tintoretto it became a means for
expressing poetic fantasy and for granting the representation greater spiritual
depth – as later was the case with Rembrandt.’37 Tintoretto is thus the Italian
whose work has the greatest affinities with the art of the North.
This re-reading of Tintoretto represents a wider shift in Dvořák’s work; the
history of art is now marked by ‘the eternal struggle between material and
spirit’.38 Hence Dvořák sets up a series of binary oppositions – idealism vs.
realism, Christian vs. classical, Mannerism vs. Renaissance – in which the one,
seen as a primarily spiritual manifestation, is valorized over the other. The
connection with Impressionism is not entirely lost; he views the catacomb

3.5 Franz Wickhoff, Die Römische Kunst, Berlin, 1912. This edition consisted only of Wickhoff’s
text to the earlier Genesis publication.

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paintings of Rome as examples of ancient impressionism, defined as the goal of

‘depicting things not as they objectively reveal themselves to experience, but as
they appear to subjective perception when transformed into immaterial
impressions’.39 The meaning of such impressionism is changed, however, for
now it signifies a withdrawal from material objectivity into the world of the
inner spirit. Indeed, Dvořák argues that understanding the works of Tintoretto is
dependent on learning ‘to view the development of art not from the perspective
of the imitation of nature and of formal problems, but with a view to the
deepening of the purely spiritual y’.40
The turn to the spiritual becomes an increasingly dominant concern of
Dvořák’s later work. It informs, for example, his interpretation of Dürer’s Four
Horsemen of the Apocalypse (plate 3.6), according to which Dürer’s print
demonstrates the specifically German nature of such spirituality, in contrast to
the art of Italy, which offers no insight into the subjective life of its subjects.41 In
particular, Dürer’s print exhibits the ‘impulse to view the world as a problem of
the inner life, and to see art as a means of engaging with God and the Devil,
with this world and the next, with oneself and whatever motivates others in
general y’.42 A similar frame governs Dvořák’s reading of Michelangelo,
whose work is seen as the expression of a new ‘individualizing idealism’,43
or his interpretation of the post-classical spiritualism of early Christian
catacomb painting, or, most famously, of El Greco, whose oeuvre is viewed as
the visual expression of the heightened religiosity of the Counter Reformation.44
Dvořák’s ‘turn’ to the spiritual has been compared with contemporary
currents in the visual arts – in particular, the theosophic abstraction of painters
such as Kandinsky.45 Such a connection could be read as indicating a shift in his
engagement with modernism, from Impressionism and the Viennese Secession to
Expressionism. His sympathy with the latter is well attested; one of his final
outputs was an essay on Kokoschka.46 Dvořák himself freely admitted the
intimate connection between art practice and art-historical judgement; in the
lectures of 1915–16 that formed the basis of his book on Gothic painting and
sculpture, he suggests that the dominance of classical antiquity within art-
historical discourse of the nineteenth century was a clear reflection of the
hegemony of naturalistic values within contemporaneous art practice.47 He was
also clear about the consequences of such a view for an understanding of the
present; ‘New times bring new themes and the great change that has occurred in
our relation to art and consequently in the entire way we view art, compels
adoption of an alternative perspective to that customarily applied hitherto in
approaching the subject matter of the past.’48
A notable aspect of Dvořák’s writing is the attempt to explain the reception
history of the various phenomena he examines. I have already mentioned his
explanation for the belated acknowledgement of Gothic art. At the conclusion
of his essay on El Greco and Mannerism he goes further, offering an account not
only of changing aesthetic norms but of more general cultural shifts – the rise of
scientific modernity in particular – that led to the eclipse of the Cretan painter’s
oeuvre: ‘Few words are needed to describe how, inevitably, El Greco fell ever
more into oblivion during the following two centuries dominated by the natural
sciences, mathematical thinking, belief in causality, technical progress and the

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3.6 Albrecht Dürer, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 1498. London: The British Museum.

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mechanisation of culture, forming a culture of the eye and the brain, but
definitely not one of the heart.’49 He also scrutinizes the meaning of the Italian
Renaissance in the subsequent history of European culture. In his early study of
the van Eyck brothers he declares: ‘There are anomalies in historiography which
are hard to understand. Amongst these are the cult of the Renaissance and the
overestimation of it as an epoch that divides the history of human civilisation
into two.’50 This comment is then followed by an assertion of the leading role of
northern European art in the fifteenth century, a view which is maintained in the
introduction to the first volume of the Topography of Austrian Art (1907) where
he suggests that the significance accorded to the art and architecture of Italy
stems less from its actual historical importance than from the contingent fact
that a greater number of the monuments of the Renaissance in Italy survived
than did elsewhere.51 Their physical ubiquity led them to be taken as a universal
norm.
His lectures on the Italian Renaissance of 1918–19 reveal a similar
scepticism about the axiological role of the Renaissance in art history; critiquing
Burckhardt and his followers, Dvořák then justifies his topic by arguing that it is
precisely its success that compels a reassessment. His comments merit quoting in
full:

These lectures concern the history of Italian art from Giotto until the death
of Michelangelo, in other words, those 250 years of Italian art history that
have long counted as the high point of the entire development of art since
antiquity – a high point that could only be followed by a deviation from
this line of development, by decline. Today we are far removed from such a
theory of ascent and decline, and one can quickly demonstrate that both
the succeeding period – the Baroque era – and the art outside of Italy were
no less creative or advanced, and that in terms of their significance for the
present they were equal to Italian art between the fourteenth and the
sixteenth centuries. Yet perhaps precisely because this dogmatic attachment
to the Italian Renaissance belongs to the past, it is the object of a new kind
of interest, not only as a particularly striking historical phenomenon, but
also as the source of artistic opinions and innovations that continued to
exercise influence on the entire succeeding period, even into the present.52

Dvořák’s assertion regarding the Renaissance is meant as a deliberate

provocation; the cult of the Renaissance that had emerged at the end of the
previous century had waned, but despite the efforts of Riegl and others, the
Italian Renaissance remained of central importance to art-historical scholar-
ship.53 The founding of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence in 1897 offers
ample testimony to this, as does the centrality of the Renaissance for authors
such as Heinrich Wölfflin, Carl Justi or August Schmarsow, working in the
lengthy shadow of Burckhardt. Indeed, Schmarsow was instrumental in the
establishment of the Kunsthistorisches Institut, while, for Wölfflin, the
Renaissance formed the point around which the rest of the history of art was
organized.54 Dvořák’s comment is thus to be seen less as an observation on the
present state of scholarship than as advocacy of his own position. Coupled with

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his reading of the posthumous reputation of El Greco, it highlights the extent to

which he was engaged in contesting aesthetic norms and in articulating a
critique of more general cultural values. And this was driven, above all, by a
concern with the sense of correspondences between the past and the present. In
the introduction to his lectures on the Italian Renaissance Dvořák acknowledges
the contradiction between absorption in the minutiae of events belonging five
hundred years in the past, and being ‘at a loss in the face of what might happen
now and in the future’. Yet at the same time he sees history as a source of
encouragement to the present, writing in the mid-1920s, ‘y in such periods of
political depression one can find solace in historical considerations, and perhaps
even summon up courage and strength for the future. y’55 This statement also
reveals a further reason for his interest in the vicissitudes of the spiritual in art.
In the introduction to the same lectures Dvořák conducts what appears to be a
purely methodological dispute over the limitations of the social history of art.
Citing the example of the Thirty Years’ War, he argues that the persistence of
significant artistic production during a time of massive political violence and
material deprivation indicates the autonomy of the cultural from the social and
political sphere: ‘in general, the intensity of intellectual and spiritual life is not
dependent on material preconditions.’56 Though ostensibly discussing the first
half of the seventeenth century, he is, of course, talking of his own times, taking
solace in the Thirty Years’ War as a source of possible future hope in the final
grim months of World War I. In this Dvořák prefigured a much more famous
reading of modernity through the lens of the Thirty Years’ War: Walter
Benjamin’s The Origin of Geman Tragic Drama.57 More usually mentioned in
connection with Riegl, Benjamin’s writing, with its emphasis on baroque
modernity and on history as a source of redemption, displays an affinity with
Dvořák seldom acknowledged.
As I have already observed, Dvořák states that the neglect of the spiritual in
art was linked to the dominance of the classical aesthetic. However, he broadens
his perspective to suggest that such neglect is a function of the materialistic
values that have emerged since. His essay on El Greco contains the most explicit
use of history as an allegory of the present, and as an instrument for a critique
of the present. Hence, El Greco’s anti-naturalism is the sign of a broader
shift originating in northern Europe which, ‘like the current movement against
capitalism, went against the worldliness of the Church and against
the materialism which at that time seized the whole of religious life’.58 Clearly,
inasmuch as El Greco stands at the root of a cultural trajectory culminating in
the idealism of Dvořák, so too his specific situation can be read as a figure of the
present. El Greco’s painting was the artistic response to a profound cultural
crisis, ‘an apparent chaos, in the same way that our age appears to us to be
chaotic’.59 In his analysis of the attempts to re-establish some kind of cultural
meaning in the wake of the disruption of the Reformation, Dvořák could equally
well be talking about his own times:

Following the collapse of a world-wide edifice, such as the world views

of the late Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Reformation, ruins
necessarily emerge y Thus we stand before a drama of enormous

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disturbance where, drawing on a colourful mixture of the old and the new,
artists no less than philosophers, literary authors, scholars and politicians
search in different directions for new crutches and goals. Artists, for
example, do this by resorting to aesthetic virtuosity or new formal
abstractions, which they imaginatively work up into academic doctrines
and theories y the range of subject matter increases in all directions, in
relation to their need to gain attention and stress, in other words, the
originality and individuality of their stance towards the world around
them.60

While his own times are referred to here only indirectly, the essay culminates in
a direct assertion of the link between the crisis being worked through in El
Greco’s painting and the contemporary situation during the years 1914–18:

Today this materialistic culture is faced with its termination. I am thinking

here less of an external collapse, which would be a mere outward
symptom, than of an internal one, which has been evident for a generation
in all areas of intellectual life y in that conspiracy of events which seems
to be directing the secret law of human fate in the direction of a new
spiritual and anti-materialistic age.61

The present was, for Dvořák, an era of crisis, which he saw as being resolved in
a deepening of subjectivity, and he established its cultural legitimacy by tracing a
genealogy of the spiritual in art’s history since late Antiquity. He was also
convinced that his own times would lead to a victory of the spiritual, a victory in
which World War I would play no small part. That the crisis of modernity found
its culmination in this war is not mentioned in the essay on El Greco. However,
in a pamphlet on Goya’s Disasters of War published in 1916, Dvořák refers to
the war in exactly the same terms as his wider diagnosis of modern culture.
Indeed, the war is viewed in terms of a deeper conflict of ‘spiritual culture’.
Having already welcomed the war as the occasion of a cultural clearing, as an
opportunity for weeding out the dead and decaying, Dvořák declares at the
conclusion that in the war ‘liberal individualistic materialism was faced with a
socio-ethical imperative, scientific positivism with a philosophical and historical
idealism, and whoever examines this more closely could not doubt which of
these two worlds was destined to victory from the very beginning.’62 When
Dvořák’s collected essays were published posthumously in 1929 this essay,
though included, was subjected to considerable revision; all reference to the war
was omitted, and the essay concluded with a discussion of Goethe.63
Dvořák’s prediction of victory for the Habsburg empire could be dismissed as
crude patriotism were it not for the fact that it fits so neatly into his broader
outlook, his valorization of the spiritual, and his critique of the scientific outlook
of Western modernity. It also draws on an established intellectual tradition – of
which perhaps Friedrich Nietzsche is the most prominent example – that viewed
political and military conflicts in terms of intellectual and ‘geistig’ crises. Indeed,
Nietzsche read modernity as a crisis of values, of which the various
contemporary social and political struggles were merely symptoms. It is worth

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noting in this context that as a young man in the mid-1890s Dvořák was
profoundly affected by the work of Nietzsche, as Dvořák’s older contemporary
Aby Warburg had also been to some degree.64 Although Viennese art history is
usually deemed to constitute the antithesis of the iconological discourse
pioneered by Warburg and his followers, Dvořák shared with Warburg a
concern to locate art-historical scholarship within ongoing debates about the
crisis of contemporary culture. Warburg did not espouse the ‘deep’ subjectivity of
Dvořák, but he held on to a similar Utopia of a pre-industrial Enlightenment. As
for Dvořák, so too for Warburg, the principal cause of the crisis was the impact
of the positivistic culture of the modern sciences and the machine age. This is
expressed most forcefully in the ominous conclusion of Warburg’s lecture on the
serpent ritual of the Pueblo Indians, given in 1900:

y the culture of the machine age destroys what the natural sciences, born
of myth, so arduously achieved; the space for devotion, which evolved in
turn into the space required for reflection. The modern Prometheus and
the modern Icarus, Franklin and the Wright brothers, who invented the
dirigible airplane, are precisely those ominous destroyers of the sense
of distance, who threaten to lead the planet back into chaos.65

The question of modernity

The comparison drawn by Dvořák between his own times and the cultural and
ideological conflicts facing El Greco, Dürer, Tintoretto or Goya raises broader
questions about the place of his writing, and of art-historical writing more
generally, within Viennese modernity. Wickhoff, Riegl, Dvořák and others
maintained strong sympathies with the contemporary art of the time. Indeed,
this interest distinguishes Viennese art historians of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries from their contemporaries in Germany or Switzerland, who
remained ill at ease with contemporary art and for whom the Italian Renaissance
remained the yardstik norm. Riegl’s early professional involvement in the aesthetic
practices of non-Western cultures, together with his promotion of non-classical
artistic forms, undoubtedly underlay his positive engagement with contemporary
art, and the significance of his thought for modern art was soon recognized by
others. As the critic Hermann Bahr stated in his tract on Expressionism,

[Riegl] was the first to recognise that before him all of Art History was
subjective, in that it constantly approached art with a prejudiced eye,
specifically, the prejudice of our taste which, schooled and dazzled by
specific classical works, measures every artwork, from whatever era,
against our memories of them y he also admitted his conviction that in
terms of development there is not only no such thing as decline, but also no
point where development comes to a stop.66

Bahr’s praise for Riegl – followed by an equally laudatory account of Franz

Wickhoff – is only one example of such reciprocal relations between modernism
and art-historical discourse. One further example might be Worringer’s extended

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celebration of Riegl in Abstraction and Empathy; in many respects this

cornerstone of early modernist art theory formed an extension of Riegl’s
conceptual schemata to the analysis of ‘primitive’ and contemporary art.67
Moreover, while Bahr celebrated the impact of Riegl on historiography, it is
equally probable that Bahr’s own prolific output of art and cultural criticism
during the 1890s shaped the writings of Riegl and Wickhoff. Thus Bahr’s
description of decadence in his famous essay of 1894, which focused on the
importance of subjective mood (‘Stimmung’) as a defining characteristic of the
‘neurotic romanticism’ of contemporary art, is echoed only three years later in
Riegl’s essay on ‘Mood as the Content of Modern Art’, an essay that replicates
Bahr’s own diagnosis of the relation between modernism and the modern
sciences.68
Recognition of the interplay of art-historical discourse and artistic practice in
Vienna is important in countering a predominant image of bourgeois art history
as a conservative enterprise. However, it remains focused on questions of artistic
taste and aesthetics, on Riegl’s engagement with the ‘aesthetics of disintegra-
tion’, as Margaret Iversen has put it.69 I would like to suggest that the art-
historical writing of the fin de siècle and immediately afterwards be considered
in terms of its relation not only to contemporary aesthetic practices and theories,
but also to currents in social theory and history that arose out of the attempt to
make sense of late nineteenth-century European modernity. It is already clear in
the writing of Max Dvořák that the history of art reflects much larger questions
of cultural and social history – the spiritual crises of the age – and I would like
to establish an alternative context for interpreting the significance of his
thought. In so doing I shall use as a starting point Fritz Ringer’s celebrated
analysis of the rise (and fall) of the culture of the educated bourgeoisie
(Bildungsbürgertum) in Germany, which Ringer terms, in line with its dominant
role in forming the civil service within Germany, the ‘mandarin’ class.70
Although his account is largely focused on Germany, it is equally applicable,
with some refinement, to the situation of the middle classes in Vienna.
According to Ringer, the ideology of the mandarin intellectuals can trace its
origin to the outlook of the petits bourgeois of the late eighteenth century. In the
absence of the mercantile and industrial opportunities present in Britain and
France, this class found social advancement through education. The prolifera-
tion of absolutist states, with the consequent disproportionately large bureau-
cratic machinery, afforded widespread opportunities of entry into the civil
service, as a compensation for the dearth of other possibilities for bourgeois
advancement. Indeed, the lack of a mercantile class was appropriated as a sign
of the intellectual and spiritual supremacy of German cultural life. The
specificities of the mandarin ideology were also intimately linked to the political
prominence given to universities in Germany, in contrast to the other major
states of Europe. After the humiliation suffered by Prussia in its defeat at the
hands of Napoleon, the university of Berlin came to play a privileged role in the
reassertion of national identity and cultural life; later, during the nineteenth
century, political rivalry between Prussia and Saxony was played out in
the competing claims of Berlin and Leipzig universities to intellectual pre-
eminence.71

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The mandarin ideology placed the educated bourgeois, the Bildungsbürger,

at the heart of national and political life. However, in Ringer’s account the
possibility of this being anything more than a Utopian fantasy became
increasingly improbable. Not only did the failure of the 1848 revolutions signal
an end to hopes for a liberal bourgeois régime, but the gradual industrialization
of Germany, with the creation of large working and entrepreneurial classes, also
meant that the mandarin outlook became increasingly disconnected from the
realities of contemporary social and political life in the second half of the
nineteenth century. Within Germany such disenchantment increased in the
aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and during the creation of the
Reich which, though raising hopes of a rebirth of German culture, only founded
an authoritarian state structure from which the intellectuals in question felt ever
more excluded.
For Ringer the mandarin ideology thus developed into an anti-modern stance
that took issue with both the mercantile basis of capitalist society and the
transformed social structures that were its consequence. The result was a self-
conscious withdrawal from political and social life and the adoption of an
aestheticized distance towards modernity. Social life came to be theorized in
terms of subjective states – understanding, ideas, spirituality – rather than
political praxis, and the very notion of the Bildungsbürger was predicated on the
cultivation of an aestheticized intellectual inwardness. Dvořák’s writings can be
mapped onto Ringer’s account with little difficulty. Where the mandarin
ideology valorized subjective inwardness, Dvořák insisted on the primacy of the
spiritual, and where mandarinism viewed modern society as a debased and
degraded cultural landscape Dvořák inveighed against the materialist values of
the age. Such parallels can be seen most clearly at the conclusion of his article on
Dürer, in which the German artist is seen as introducing a new form of
subjectivity:

There thus arises an artistic type diametrically opposed to that of

contemporary Italy and the Netherlands, a new type of universal, ideal
education [‘Bildung’], a universalism not based on the empiricism of the
natural sciences as was the case with Leonardo, but rather, as with Goethe
300 years later, one grounded in a ceaseless participation in everything that
moves the spirit of man and provides nourishment for the imagination.72

Dürer was thus the prototype of the mandarin bourgeois, and it is significant
that Dvořák chooses to distinguish between the positivistic connotations of
empirical scientific observation on the one hand, and the participatory
imaginative disposition of Goethe. The choice of Goethe is more than
coincidental; in the years around World War I he was foregrounded as the
pre-eminent representative of the superiority of German intellectual culture.
Dvořák’s own social origins in the mandarin class of a local cultural and
administrative centre give added cause to view his work in terms of its class
ideology. In this context it is notable that Riegl shared a similar class identity;
indeed, the latter was often guilty of an exaggerated sense of class loyalty –
demanding proper recognition of both his social status and his correct offical

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nomenclature.73 Ringer’s account needs to be further amplified, however, by

considering the specificities of the fading Habsburg régime. There were, of
course, important parallels in the bourgeois experience of both Germany and
Austria–Hungary; the failure of 1848 inflicted a similarly catastrophic defeat on
the aspirations of bourgeois liberalism. In contrast, however, the liberals came to
power in the constitutional régime in the 1860s, although they retained a
tenuous hold on power. Power was shared with the aristocracy and the imperial
bureaucracy, and within a multi-ethnic empire the liberals, formed largely out of
German nationals and German-speaking Jews, constituted a small minority.
Austria–Hungary remained economically backward in comparison with
Germany, and while this meant that the impact of industrialization was initially
less marked than in its neighbour, its delayed effects were felt all the more
keenly. Between 1880 and 1910 the population of Vienna trebled, with a large
part of the new inhabitants in the city stemming from the outer, non-Germanic,
reaches of the Empire.74 The rise of new industrial classes also led to the
emergence of mass political movements, ranging from pan-Slavism to socialism
and German nationalism, all of which overwhelmed the liberal hegemony from
the 1880s onwards. The culmination of this process is often seen as being the
election in 1895 of the anti-Semitic Christian socialist Karl Lueger as mayor of
Vienna, which Franz Josef II was eventually compelled to ratify in 1897.
The bourgeois experience in Austria–Hungary was thus marked by the
traumatic memory of the recent loss of its tenuous hold on political life, coupled
with the increasing antagonism between a feudal state apparatus and a socially
and politically fragmented population. For Hugo von Hofmannsthal, for
example, the era was best described as resting on multiplicity, indeterminacy
and a universal slipperiness (‘das Gleitende’), 75 a situation of contradictions
that Robert Musil, looking back later, described in all its frequent absurdity:

Officially it called itself the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, but unofficially

was referred to as Austria, a name, in other words, that had been solemnly
and officially rejected, but which it retained y Constitutionally it was
liberal, but it was ruled by bureaucrats. It was ruled by bureaucrats but
people lived freely. All citizens were equal before the law, but not all were
citizens. There was a parliament that made such forceful use of its freedom
that it was usually kept closed; however there was also an emergency decree
thanks to which it was possible to continue without parliament, and
whenever everyone was contented with absolutism, the crown ordained that
parliamentary rule should be reinstated. Such events were frequent, and in
addition there were the national conflicts y these were so violent that
several times a year the machinery of the state came to a standstill y76

In his influential reading of fin-de-siècle Vienna Carl Schorske has interpreted

the modernist culture of the Habsburg capital as a compensatory response to
this condition, privileging an aestheticized subjective inwardness as an
ideological mask that screened off the social contradictions of the age. As such,
it presented parallels with German mandarinism, except that the aesthetic
retreat of, for example, the secessionist art of Klimt and others was

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accompanied by both the Freudian dismantling of the subject, and the

philosophical positivism of Mach and, later, the Vienna Circle. The importance
of Freud hardly needs restating, but it is notable that Mach’s famous dictum that
‘The ego is not to be retrieved’ (‘Das Ich ist nicht zu retten’) offered a counter to
the mandarin ideology of the self, in which the bourgeois subject, no longer seen
as a point of refuge from the disappointments of mass society and its politics,
had itself been reduced to a machine for processing stimuli.77 And it was a
notion that was taken up in cultural criticism, most notably by Bahr. In an essay
on ‘The Irretrievable Ego’ (‘Das Unrettbare Ich’), published in Dialogue on the
Tragic (1904), Bahr declares,

Here I have found an expression for what has been torturing me all these
past three years: ‘The I is not to be retrieved.’ It is just a name. It is just an
illusion. It is a practical aid we employ in order to order our perceptions.
There is nothing but connections between colours, tones, temperatures,
pressures, spaces, times, and to these connections are bound moods,
feelings and desires. Everything is constantly in a state of transformation.
Whenever we speak of continuity this is only because some transformations
occur slowlyy78

In the same collection of essays Bahr also interprets Impressionism in the light of
Mach; the reduction of the image to a manifold of visual sensations leads him to
conclude that Mach’s writing constitutes a ‘philosophy of impressionism’, a view
that ties in with a broader picture of contemporary art and culture, in which
naturalism has come increasingly to be displaced by a new ‘idealism’ (‘the
content of the new idealism is nerves, nerves, nerves y’) exemplified in the
work of Bizet, Maeterlinck, Degas and Puvis de Chavannes.79 Bahr’s choice of
examples appears now as eccentric, but his more general account is an
important constituent of the complex configuration of often contradictory
discourses within which the Vienna school of art history has to be set. Indeed,
his ideas anticipated the much more extended treatment of the topic by Richard
Hamann, whose reading of Impressionism as a general cultural phenomenon
also drew on Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money, interpreting Impressionism
as a direct reflection of the structural form of the monetary economy.80 More
significantly, his Machian reading of Impressionism parallels Dvořák’s early
interpretation of Tintoretto which, in later shifting towards the idealist reading,
encapsulates the shifts and contradictions operative at the time.
Ringer’s ideal–typical account has been criticized for its tendency to reduce
intellectual life in Willhelmine Germany to a conservative anti-capitalist outlook;
it has been argued that many social theorists, such as Ernst Troeltsch, Georg
Simmel or Max Weber, approached the question of modernity with greater
ambivalence than his account would suggest. Nevertheless, Werner Sombart’s
characterization of politics as ‘barren in spirit, mendacious in its ethics and
aesthetically crude’ was representative of a widespread disaffection with modern
social and political life at the turn of the century.81 What is often regarded as
one of the founding texts of modern social theory, Ferdinand Tönnies’s
Community and Society of 1887, was organized around the distinction between

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the pre-modern community (‘Gemeinschaft’), in which all social relations were

based on organic personalized ties, and the modern society (‘Gesellschaft’), which
was structured around a series of abstracted anonymous relations.82 For Tönnies
the latter was the result of an increasing differentiation of social functions leading
to a generalized fragmentation of the social totality. It was a theory that found
echoes amongst numerous other contemporary writers. The effects of increasing
social fragmentation were also recognized by Simmel, whose study, ‘On Social
Differentiation’, published only three years after Tönnies’s book, identified the
analysis of differentiation as the prime task of social science, and clearly saw
social atomization as the principal marker of modernity: ‘the dissolution of the
soul of society into the sum total of the reciprocal effects of its members stems
from the spiritual life of modernity in general: dissolving the constant, self-
identical and substantial into function, force and movement, and recognising the
historical process of becoming underlying all being.’83 In Simmel’s account
modernity comes to be defined by the contradictions brought about by the
dominance of the monetary economy: on the one hand a homogenization of
society through the depersonalization of social relations and, on the other, an
atomization and fragmentation of society through a foregrounding of the
individual.84 Simmel also identified the process of aestheticization as a
compensatory gesture in the face of the overwhelming experience of modernity,
‘for in [art] alone there appears a complete victory of the spirit over the material
substance of existence, or, rather more, we term ‘‘art’’ that activity in which the
being of things, following their own laws and ultimately incomprehensible, has
become fully pliant to the inner movements of the soul.’85
It is perhaps clear from this account that the work of Dvořák, when viewed
within the frame of early twentieth-century social theory, takes on new
meanings. His history of art as the history of ideas becomes one more example
of a wider set of discourses addressing the contradictions of modernity. The
history of art becomes an allegory of the present, with an explicitness
unparalleled in the work of his contemporaries. The question remains as to
what conclusions might be drawn from such an analysis.

Few now regard Dvořák’s work on Tintoretto, El Greco, Michelangelo or

Gothic art as significant for contemporary scholarship. His texts can be read in
an alternative light, however, when considered as examples of modernist
writing, exploring the possibilities of a non-classical history of art in a manner
that parallels other contemporary forms of social and cultural commentary.
From this perspective, while art history emerged from a specific configuration of
institutional sites and discourses, it is limiting to view Dvořák’s work entirely
within such an institutional frame. Rather, it has more in common with other
contemporaneous discursive genres; his art history is an articulation of the
experience of Viennese modernity akin to the fiction of Musil and Schnitzler, the
poetry and drama of Hofmannsthal, the criticism of Bahr, or the psychological
theories of Mach and Freud.
The neglect of Dvořák undoubtedly stems from the fact that in
methodological terms his ‘art history as the history of ideas’ has come to be
seen as theoretically underdetermined and simplistic. In terms of establishing the

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broader cultural, discursive and intellectual frame of the discipline, however,

Dvořák offers important clues to the development of art history as a
heteronomous practice. And to his name could be added those of other
Viennese colleagues whose work, often passed over in embarrassed silence,
reveals the complex ideological commitments of the discipline and its relations
to other discourses. These might include, for example, Hans Sedlmayr or
Strzygowski. While the latter’s ethno-history of art anticipated Nazi ideologies
of ethnicity, he was also fiercely critical of the occidental focus of traditional art
history, pioneering the study of Slavic, Coptic and Armenian art, and putting
forward a model of Western culture as an open, heteronomous configuration of
practices. Thus, critical reflection on origins past of art history has to pass
beyond the canonical ‘founding fathers’ of the discipline, to consider those
marginal, overlooked discourses that equally represent the often complex and
contradictory conceptual, socio-historical and ideological frames operative
throughout its history.

Matthew Rampley
Edinburgh College of Art

Notes

Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders. If for any reason copyright has been inadvertently
infringed, the copyright holder should contact the Association of Art Historians.

1 See, for example, Robert Hedicke, Methodenlehre Riegl, Wölfflin und Dvořák, Mittenwald, 1981, pp.
der Kunstgeschichte, Strasbourg, 1924; Dagobert 85–108; Sandor Radnóti, ‘Die Historisierung des
Frey, Gotik und Renaissance als Grundlagen der Kunstbegriffs: Max Dvořák’, in Acta Historiae
modernen Weltanschauung, Augsburg, 1929; Otto Artium, vol. 26, 1980, pp. 125–42.
Benesch, The Art of the Renaissance in Northern 3 See Wood, Vienna School Reader, p. 30.
Europe: Its Relation to the Contemporary Spiritual 4 Mikhail Bakhtin and P.N. Medvedev, ‘The Formal
and Intellectual Movements, Cambridge, Mass., Method in European Art Scholarship’, in The
1945. Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, trans.
2 A most striking instance of this phenomenon is A. Wehrle, Baltimore, 1978, pp. 41–53;
the recent Vienna School Reader, which omits him Elizabeth Mansfield, ‘Art History and Modernism’,
entirely, providing merely a seven-line synopsis of in Elizabeth Mansfield (ed.), Art History and its
his work in the Introduction; see Christopher Wood Institutions, London, 2002, p. 17.
(ed.), The Vienna School Reader, New York, 2000. 5 On the Czech background to Dvořák see Hugo
The more notable recent literature on Dvořák Rokyta, ‘Max Dvořák und seine Schule in den
includes: Norbert Schmitz, Kunst und Wissenschaft Böhmischen Ländern’, in Österreichische
im Zeichen der Moderne, Alfter, 1993; Mitchell Zeitschrift für Kunst- und Denkmalpflege, vol. 28,
Schwarzer, ‘Cosmopolitan Difference in Max no. 3, 1974, pp. 81–9.
Dvořák’s Art Historiography’, in Art Bulletin, 6 Max Dvořák, ‘Die Illuminatoren des Johann von
vol. 74, no. 4, 1992, pp. 669–78; Irma Emmrich, Neumarkt’, in Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen
‘Max Dvořák und die Wiener Schule der Sammlungen des Allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses, 1901,
Kunstgeschichte’, in Dvořák, Studien zur pp. 35–127, reprinted in Dvořák, Gesammelte
Kunstgeschichte, ed. Irma Emmrich, Leipzig, 1989, Aufsätze zur Kunstgeschichte, Munich, 1929,
pp. 311–59; Momı́r Vanek, ‘L’Ecole Francaise et pp. 74–207.
l’Ecole Viennoise d’Histoire de l’Art: Max Dvořák 7 Max Dvořák, Kunstgeschichte als
et Henri Focillon. Antagonisme ou Geistesgeschichte, Munich, 1923. The essays
Complémentarité?’ in L. Ettlinger (ed.), Wien und contained in this volume were translated as two
die Entwicklung der Kunsthistorischen Methode, separate English-language publications: Art History
Vienna, 1984, pp. 105–115; Hans Busse, Kunst und as the History of Ideas, trans. J. Hardy, London,
Wissenschaft. Untersuchungen zur Ästhetik und 1984, and Idealism and Naturalism in Gothic Art,
Methodik der Kunstgeschichtswissenschaft bei trans. R. Klawiter, Notre Dame, 1967.

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8 Max Dvořák, Das Rätsel der Kunst der Brüder van 26 Max Dvořák, ‘Über die dringendsten methodischen
Eyck, Munich, 1925; Geschichte der italienischen Erfordernisse der Erziehung zur
Kunst im Zeitalter der Renaissance. Akademische kunstgeschichtlichen Forschung’, in Die
Vorlesungen, Munich, 1927–29; Gesammelte Geisteswissenschaften, no. 34, 1913, p. 934.
Aufsätze zur Kunstgeschichte (see note 6). The 27 Dvořák, Über die dringendsten methodischen
study of van Eyck has been republished recently as Erfordernisse der Erziehung, p. 935.
Dvořák, Das Rätsel der Brüder van Eyck, Vienna, 28 Dvořák, ‘Barockkunst’ [1905/1906], cited in Hans
1999. The essays of Kunstgeschichte als Aurenhammer, ‘Max Dvořák, Tintoretto und die
Geistesgeschichte have been republished, alongside Moderne: Kunstgeschichte ‘‘vom Standpunkt
some of the lectures on the Italian Renaissance in unserer Kunstentwicklung’’ betrachtet’, in Wiener
Dvořák, Studien zur Kunstgeschichte. Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, vol. 40, 1992, p. 15.
9 The volume of Gesammelte Aufsätze, includes a 29 Cited in Aurenhammer, ‘Max Dvořák, Tintoretto
bibliography of works (pp. 371–81) published in und die Moderne, p. 16.
Dvořák’s lifetime. 30 See, for example, Konrad Fiedler, Über die
10 For an outline of the feud between Riegl and Beurteilung von Werken der bildenden Kunst,
Strzygowski see Jaś Elsner, ‘The Birth of Late Leipzig, 1876, or Adolf Hildebrand, ‘The Problem
Antiquity: Riegl and Strzygowski in 1901’, in Art of Form in the Fine Arts’ [1893], in Harry
History, vol. 25, no. 3, 2002, pp. 358–79. Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (eds),
11 Franz Wickhoff and Wilhelm Hartel, Die Wiener Empathy, Form and Space. Problems in German
Genesis, Vienna, 1895. Aesthetics 1873–1893, Los Angeles, 1994,
12 Franz Wickhoff, ‘Über die Einteilung der pp. 227–80.
Kunstgeschichte in Hauptperioden’, in Wickhoff, 31 On the Baroque in early twentieth-century art
Abhandlungen, Vorträge und Aufsätze, ed. M. history see my ‘Subjectivity and Modernism: Riegl
Dvořák, Berlin, 1913, vol. 2, pp. 446–54. and the Rediscovery of the Baroque’, in Richard
13 In a well-known passage of Historik Droysen states: Woodfield (ed), Framing Formalism. Riegl’s Work,
‘The hundreds of pictures in a gallery y Art Amsterdam, 2001, pp. 265–90.
History places them in a context they do not 32 See Franz Wickhoff, Römische Kunst, Berlin,
possess in themselves, and for which they were not [1895] 1912, p. 137. See also the Impressionism
painted, and from which there arises a sequence, a exhibition catalogue, Entwicklung des
continuity, under the influence of which the painters Impressionismus in Malerei und Plastik, Vienna,
of these pictures stood without being aware.’ 1903.
Johann Gustav Droysen, Historik. Enzyklopädie 33 Robert Jensen, Marketing Modernism in
und Methodologie der Geschichte, Munich, [1858] Fin-de-Siècle Europe, Princeton, 1994.
1958, p. 35. 34 Jakob Burckhardt, Der Cicerone. Eine Anleitung
14 Alois Riegl, ‘Eine neue Kunstgeschichte’, in Riegl, zum Genuß der Kunstwerke Italiens, Leipzig,
Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. A. Rosenauer, Vienna, [1855] 1925, p. 932.
[1928] 1996, p. 45. 35 Cited in Aurenhammer, ‘Dvořák, Tintoretto und die
15 Alois Riegl, Altorientalische Teppiche, Mittenwald, Moderne’, p. 24.
[1892] 1979, and A. Riegl, Problems of Style, trans. 36 Dvořák, ‘Tintoretto’, in Studien zu Kunstgeschichte,
E. Kain, Princeton, [1893] 1992. p. 149.
16 Margaret Olin, ‘Alois Riegl: the Late Roman 37 Dvořák, ‘Tintoretto’, pp. 141–2.
Empire in the Late Habsburg Empire’, in Austrian 38 Dvořák, Studien zu Kunstgeschichte, p. 75.
Studies, vol. 5, 1994, pp. 107–120. 39 Dvořák, Studien zu Kunstgeschichte, pp. 283–4.
17 Alois Riegl, Die Entstehung der Barockkunst in 40 Dvořák, Studien zu Kunstgeschichte, p. 159.
Rom, Vienna, 1908, p. 2 ff. 41 Dvořák, ‘Dürers Apokalypse’, in Studien zu
18 See Mitchell Schwarzer, ‘Cosmopolitan Indifference Kunstgeschichte, pp. 5–15. Dvořák’s work also
in Max Dvořák’s Art Historiography’, in Art echoes the contrast drawn by Riegl between Italian
Bulletin, vol. 74, no. 4, 1992, pp. 669–78. art, focused primarily on the representation of
19 Julius Langbehn, Rembrandt als Erzieher, Berlin, external human agency, and Northern art, focused
1888. on the depiction of inner subjective states. See A.
20 Max Dvořák, ‘Idealismus und Naturalismus in der Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, trans.
gotischen Skulptur und Malerei’, in Dvořák, E. Kain, Los Angeles, [1902] 1999.
Studien zur Kunstgeschichte, p. 162. 42 Dvořák, Studien zu Kunstgeschichte, p. 15.
21 Dvořák, Gesammelte Aufsätze, p. 207. 43 Dvořák, Studien zu Kunstgeschichte, p. 82.
22 Dvořák, see note 7. 44 ‘Über Greco und den Manierismus’ and
23 Karel van Mander, Lives of the Illustrious ‘Katacombenmalerei. Die Anfänge der christlichen
Netherlandish and German Painters, 6 vols, Kunst’, in Dvořák, Studien zu Kunstgeschichte, pp.
Doornspijk, 1994–99. 59–75 and 269–310.
24 Dvořák, Das Rätsel der Brüder van Eyck, Vienna, 45 See Norbert Schmitz, ‘Max Dvořák – Das
1999, p. 145. Spirituelle in der Kunstgeschichte’, in Schmitz,
25 Dvořák, Das Rätsel der Brüder van Eyck, Kunst und Wissenschaft im Zeichen der Moderne,
p. 215. pp. 255–324.

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46 ‘Vorwort’, in Oskar Kokoschka. Variationen über Kunst’, in Gesammelte Aufsätze, pp. 27–37.
ein Thema, Vienna, 1921, reprinted in H. Wingler Perhaps the best-known example of such advocacy
and F. Weltz (eds), Oskar Kokoschka. Das of contemporary art was Wickhoff’s intervention
Druckgraphische Werk, Salzburg, 1975, pp. 40–2. in the controversy surrounding Klimt’s Philosophy
47 Dvořák, ‘Lectures on Idealism and Naturalism in mural commissioned for the ceiling for the Great
Gothic Painting and Sculpture’, Winter Semester Hall of the University. For an outline of the affair,
1915/16, p. 2. The typescript is kept in the archive see Michael Ann Holly, ‘Spirits and Ghosts in the
of the Institute of Art History of the University of Historiography of Art’, in Mark Cheetham, Keith
Vienna. Moxey and Michael Ann Holly (eds), The Subjects
48 Dvořák, ‘Lectures on Idealism and Naturalism’, of Art History, Cambridge, 1998, pp. 52–73.
p. 1. 69 M. Iversen, Alois Riegl. Art History and Theory,
49 Dvořák, Studien zu Kunstgeschichte, p. 75. Cambridge, Mass., 1993, p. 32 ff.
50 Dvořák, Das Rätsel der Brüder van Eyck, p. 145. 70 Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German
51 Dvořák, ‘Einleitung zum Ersten Band der Mandarins. The German Academic Community
Österreichischen 1890–1933, Cambridge, Mass., 1969.
Kunsttopographie’, [1907], reprinted in 71 On the rise of Leipzig university as an important
Österreichische Zeitschrift für Kunst- und intellectual centre see Woodruff Smith, ‘Intellectual
Denkmalpflege, vol. 28, no. 3, 1974, Politics and Cultural Science in the Wilhelmian
p. 107. Era’, in Politics and Sciences of Culture in
52 Dvořák, Geschichte der Italienischen Kunst, Germany, Cambridge, 1991, pp. 193–218.
Munich, 1927, vol. 1, p. 3. 72 Dvořák, Studien zu Kunstgeschichte, p. 15.
53 On the Renaissance cult in Germany, see Helmut 73 See Olin, ‘Alois Riegl: the Late Roman Empire
Koopmann, ‘Renaissancekult in der Deutschen in the Late Habsburg Empire’, p. 109. Olin also
Literatur um 1900’, in Max Seidel (ed.), Storia suggests that the clash between Riegl and
dell’Arte e Politica Culturale Intorno al 1900, Strzygowski was driven by class antagonism, the
Venice, 1999, pp. 13–24. latter coming from the mercantile classes often
54 On the founding of the Kunsthistorisches Institut, looked upon with considerable disdain.
see Hans Hubert, ‘August Schmarsow, Hermann 74 See Dagmar Lorenz, Wiener Moderne, Stuttgart,
Grimm und die Gründung des Kunsthistorischen 1995, p. 14 ff.
Instituts in Florenz’, in Seidel, Storia dell’Arte e 75 Cited in Schorske, p. 19.
Politica Culturale, pp. 339–58. 76 Robert Musil, cited in Lorenz, Wiener Moderne,
55 Dvořák, Geschichte der Italienischen Kunst, vol. 1, pp. 8–9.
p. 4. 77 Ernst Mach, The Analysis of Sensations, trans.
56 Dvořák, Geschichte der Italienischen Kunst, p. 4. C. Williams, New York, [1886] 1959, p. 24,
57 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic translation slightly altered.
Drama, trans. J. Osborne, London, 1977. 78 Bahr, ‘Das Unrettbare Ich,’ in Bahr, Dialog vom
58 Dvořák, Studien zu Kunstgeschichte, p. 68 Tragischen, Berlin, 1904, pp. 97–8.
59 Dvořák, Studien zu Kunstgeschichte, p. 69. 79 Bahr, Die Überwindung des Naturalismus, Dresden,
60 Dvořák, Studien zu Kunstgeschichte, pp. 69–70. 1891, p. 157–8.
61 Dvořák, Studien zu Kunstgeschichte, p. 75 80 Richard Hamann, Der Impressionismus in Leben
62 Dvořák, ‘Eine Illustrierte Kriegschronik vor und Kunst, Cologne, 1907. Georg Simmel,
hundert Jahren, oder der Krieg und die Kunst’, in Philosophie des Geldes, [1900], in Simmel,
Kriegs-Almanach, 1916, p. 12. Gesamtausgabe, vol. 6, Frankfurt am Main, 1989.
63 ‘Eine illustrierte Kriegschronik’, in Dvořák, 81 Werner Sombart, ‘Die Politik als Beruf’, in Morgen,
Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kunstgeschichte, pp. 42– 26 July 1907, p. 197. On Sombart and politics, see
9. F. Lenger, ‘Die Abkehr von der Politik: Werner
64 See the report by Karl Swoboda in ‘Vortrag zum 30. Sombart und der ‘‘Morgen’’’, in G. Hübinger and
Todestag von Max Dvořák’, in Österreichische W. Mommsen (eds), Intellektuelle im Deutschen
Zeitschrift für Kunst- und Denkmalpflege, vol. 28, Kaiserreich, Frankfurt am Main, 1993,
no. 3, 1974, p. 76. pp. 62–77.
65 Aby Warburg, Images from the Region of the 82 Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft,
Pueblo Indians of North America, trans. M. Leipzig, 1887.
Steinberg, Ithaca, 1995, p. 54. 83 Georg Simmel, ‘Über Sociale Differenzierung’
66 Hermann Bahr, Der Expressionismus, Munich, [1890], in Simmel, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 2,
1919, p. 72. p. 130.
67 Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung. 84 See Simmel, ‘Das Geld in der modernen Cultur’
Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie, [1908], Munich, [1896], in Simmel, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 5,
1919, p. 10 ff. pp. 178–96.
68 Bahr, ‘Décadence’, in Bahr, Studien zur Kritik der 85 Simmel, ‘Rodins Plastik und die Geistesrichtung
Moderne, Frankfurt am Main, 1894, pp. 26–32. der Gegenwart’, in Simmel, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 7,
Riegl, ‘Die Stimmung als Inhalt der modernen p. 97.

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