Letter from Otto Pächt to Meyer Schapiro concerning ‘national constants’ (1934) trans. Christoph Irmscher. Originally published in its original German with English translation by Christoph Irmscher in Karl Johns, ‘Austrian Art-Historical Method in the United States: Meyer Schapiro and Emil Kaufmann’, Ideas Crossing the Atlantic: Theories, Normative Conceptions and Cultural Images ed. Waldemar Zacharasiewicz and Christoph Irmscher, Sitzungsberichte der philosophisch-historischen Klasse, Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2019, pp. 385-412.

Abstract

While I was working on the evolution of Austrian Gothic panel painting, I realized that the whole material could be sorted into multiple genealogies, each of which corresponded to a particular (regional) mode of production, and that within these different genealogies there was always one constant factor. This constant factor wasn’t something that could be defined by identifying certain homogeneous, regularly or frequently recurring forms. It wouldn’t do either to characterize this constant factor as a specific attitude towards a particular contemporary style or as a particular mode or point of view, the term ‘constant factor’ also implies a constant reflected in the object that is being made. Of course, we are not talking about something that remains the same externally. Rather, one has to imagine a kind of shared ideal, present to the different artists in a variety of vague formulae, which more or less explicitly guides the process of creation and appears, through a constant flux of viewpoints, in ever new guises but in fact remains the same and has to appear differently (and filled with new content) only because, like any ideal conception, it is only roughly approximated in each particular act of creation, so that some unfulfilled demand always remains, which then serves as an incentive for new developments.