Obscene History. The Two Sedlmayrs

The following article proposes a new interpretation of Hans Sedlmayr’s politics, which thereby achieves a more successful understanding of his work. Seeking to reconcile pro­gressive and totalitarian elements of Sedlmayr’s thought, his stance is characterized as «Na­tional Bolshevist». Consistent with this view, there are two phases detected in Sedlmayr’s outlook, an early cosmopolitan phase and a later more symptomological cultural criticism. Seeking to nuance the complexity of politics in the 1930s, in the end it is nevertheless argued that it is impossible to link tightly Sedlmayr’s historical pronouncements with his politics

The “Second” Vienna School as Social Science

This paper addresses Kunstwollen, not as a historicized concept, but as a social scientific construct open to reinterpretation and input from the evolving sciences. Emphasizing especially the contributions of Hans Sedlmayr in his Introduction to Riegl’s Collected Works (1929) and Otto Pächt’s article on Riegl (1962), attention departs from Riegl to set the stage regarding the meaning of Kunstwollen. Emphasizing its roots in materialistic social history, inspired by evolution, the article undertakes vignettes of paired art historians and social theorists: Dvorak and Karl Mannheim, Sedlmayr and Alfred Vierkandt, and Otto Pächt and Wolfgang Metzger. It can be seen that Kunstwollen is interpreted with the tools of social science as the sociology of knowledge (Mannheim, Vierkandt) with refinements from Gestalt psychology (Metzger). As the career of Pächt progresses, the Austrian art historian looks for ways to stress continuous evolution, historical determinism and compulsion, and the super-individuality of artistic tradition

A Plea for a Cognitive Iconology within Visual Culture

A place is needed for a \u27cognitive iconology\u27 within visual culture. Like Logical Positivism before it, visual culture must reexamine its tacit assumption that conflation of psycho-sociological contributions to visual meaning is an adequate methodology, and that sociologism is a worthwhile overriding philosophy. Cognitive iconology isolates the psychological contribution to the study of images and does not monopolize it but isolates the foundational basis for it on which narrower interpretations must be built. With examples from the work of Titian, it is shown how the cognitive and \u27cultural\u27 contributions must work together to make meaning. Using the philosophy of Maurice Mandelbaum, and the example of Rudolf Arnheim and his analysis of visual art, a foundational approach of cognitive iconology to visual culture is sketched

Space, Image, and Reform in Early Modern Art: The Influence of Marcia Hall

The essays in Space, Image and Reform in Early Modern Art build on Marcia Hall\u27s seminal contributions in several categories crucial for Renaissance studies, especially the spatiality of the church interior, the altarpiece\u27s facture and affectivity, the notion of artistic style, and the controversy over images in the era of Counter Reform. Accruing the advantage of critical engagement with a single paradigm, this volume better assesses its applicability and range. The book works cumulatively to provide blocks of theoretical and empirical research on issues spanning the function and role of images in their contexts over two centuries. Relating Hall\u27s investigations of Renaissance art to new fields, Space, Image and Reform expands the ideas at the center of her work further back in time, further afield, and deeper into familiar topics, thus achieving a cohesion not usually seen in edited volumes honoring a single scholar.https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/mip_smemc/1014/thumbnail.jp

America’s greatest empiricist’. Review of: Meyer Schapiro’s Critical Debates: Art Through a Modern American Mind by C. Oliver O’Donnell, University Park: Penn State University Press, 2019, 272pp, 36 b. & w. illus. ISBN 9780271084640

In this first biography of Meyer Schapiro, C. Oliver O’Donnell presents an account of Schapiro as theorist, to connect him more thoroughly to intellectual trends of the twentieth century. O’Donnell makes his case through a series of well-researched “debates” in which Schapiro engaged, including Martin Heidegger and Sigmund Freud. This review considers the interpretation of these encounters and the profile of Schapiro that we are left with

Vasari’s progressive (but non-historicist) Renaissance

This article examines the meanings of progress and the improvement of the arts in the writings of Giorgio Vasari, arguing that his vision of progress must be understood in a strictly non-historicist way. Using insights of Maurice Mandelbaum and Jörn Rüsen, the characteristics of the (pre-historicist) exemplary mode of historical understanding are clarified, according to which history is spatial, which principles are timeless, and how the past is understood in terms of the present. Taking this paradigm for granted, many aspects of Vasari’s writings can be clarified for their historical meaning and his scholarly techniques, which are pioneeringly modern, can be divorced from his historical consciousness, which is pre-modern and non-historicist. Introducing the idea of ‘ordinal’ history as a way to understand progress in the Renaissance without passing over to historicism, both Vasari’s understanding of his contemporaries work, as well as the structure of his Lives, is clarified

John White’s and John Shearman’s Viennese Art Historical Method

John White and John Shearman were two of Johannes Wilde’s most brilliant students at the Courtauld. Although Wilde did not espouse a method his own concentration on site-specifics of works of art and interest in reconstruction, which was such an important component in his students’ work, can be traced back to Vienna school interests in intense knowledge of the artwork and parallels some of the classic pronouncements of the ‘second’ Vienna school of Hans Sedlmayr and Otto Pächt. By examining Wilde’s method, and various of White’s and Shearman’s studies, this point is demonstrated