Hans Sedlmayr, ‘History and the History of Art’, trans. Karl Johns (Independent)

Abstract

In the same year of 1934 as Julius von Schlosser celebrated the eightieth anniversary of the Österreichisches Institut für Geschichtsforschung with his essay ‘Die Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte’, Eberhard Hempel in his essay, ‘Ist ‘eine strenge Kunstwissenschaft’ möglich?’ claimed that the younger generation of the Vienna School had relaxed the connection to historical studies and that a volte-face had occurred. Since Hempel has named me as one of the leaders of the ‘younger generation of the Vienna School’, I am justified in refuting his claim. To avoid giving rise to any new misunderstandings, I speak only for myself as an individual and in the indefinite plural only for those who agree with my views. Hempel, who treats his opponents honourably, believes that in his sentences just cited, he was referring only to my opinion alone. Yet this is certainly not the case. All of my previous essays have in a very definite sense – as I intend to make clear here – originated in the desire to make the history of art more ‘historical’ than it now is. I consider myself from the very beginning to have been aligned with the traditional general historical trend of the entire Vienna School. There has definitely not been a ‘volte-face’. The goals are the same, only the paths and the means are some of them different. As I shall presently demonstrate, the method of ‘structural analysis’, which Hempel correctly identifies as characteristic for our conception of the problems but incorrectly viewing it as ‘psychological’ – is a truly art historical method. Guido von Kaschnitz-Weinberg was correct to identify Alois Riegl as the actual pioneer of structural analysis. This is not merely the view of those who have themselves been trained in the tradition of the ‘Vienna School’, but it has also been recognized by others more distant.