Alois Riegl, "Mood as the Content of Modern Art" (1899)

Grey Room, 2020

Alois Riegl (1858-1905) was the most influential of the Viennese art historians from the period when the discipline was being defined there as an academic subject. He should not require an introduction to the readers of these pages. Otto Pächt offered a very succinct explanation of his work to a previously unsympathetic English audience.2 References he himself made to his own publications tell us that he considered it to have been his foremost achievement to have refuted the theories put forth by the followers of Gottfried Semper, who derived artistic forms from the material and techniques with which they were made. Riegl succeeded in demonstrating that one artistic form was based on another as the grounds of an autonomous history of art. A less forward looking aspect of his reflections was an interest in universal history which he shared with Wickhoff. This led him into subjects barely remembered today, but considering his lasting influence the entire work should be borne in mind and generalizations not be based on too narrow a selection.

Central European History, 1994

Reviews of Matthew Rampley, The Vienna School of Art History and Diana Reynolds Cordileone, Alois Riegl in Vienna 1875-1905. I argue that Alois Riegl has more to teach current art historians, and others, than these two worthy and quite different books lead one to believe.

Introduction: From Aesthetics to Art History Alois Riegl (1858-1905) in his last published work Das holländische Gruppenporträt (1902) develops a methodology of pictorial analysis which introduces the aesthetics of reception to art history (Riegl 1999: 11). As Wolfgang Kemp and Margaret Olin argue, once Riegl conceives of art history as the "relation to the beholder," he departs from the formalistic approach he took in his earlier work (Riegl 1999: 1,11/Olin 1989: 285). " Aesthetics," Riegl wrote, "[is the] relation of parts to the whole. [The] relation of the parts among themselves. [It] has not taken the relation to the beholder into consideration. The relation to the beholder constitutes art history. Its general principles make up historical aesthetics ." (Riegl 1897/1900, cited in Olin 1897: 286). The term historical aesthetics in conjunction with Riegl's acknowledgment of the historicity of the work-viewer relationship in defining art history reflects Hegel's philosophy, even though Hegel wasn't well received in Austria in the 1900s (Riegl 1999: 11,12).

caa.reviews, 2005

The Viennese art historian Alois Riegl adopted the Hegelian concept that every cultural product, whether in the field of art, philosophy, science, law or religion, was a historical document that instantiated prevailing beliefs unique to its era. Riegl was fully aware that his own ideas were equally captive to the reigning Zeitgeist, noting that all "scholarship takes it direction…from the contemporary intellectual atmosphere." 1 Accordingly, recent postmodernist art historians, sympathetic to Riegl's message of aesthetic relativism, interdisciplinary contextualization, and reception theory, have documented affinities between his theories and late nineteenth-century directions in philosophy, psychology, and history. Scholars have not, however, attempted to position his writings within his scientific milieu, which was dominated by responses to Darwin. This omission has continued despite the fact that Riegl defined his age as part of the "natural scientific world view" and his own work as "scientific art history." 2 Indeed, contemporary art criticism by writers such as playwright Hermann Bahr and Franz Wickhoff, Riegl's colleague at the University of Vienna, was permeated with evolutionary references. As an article in the 1899 issue of the Jugendstil magazine Pan proclaimed: "only to the extent that a modern aesthetics is founded on this theory [Darwinism] will the striving of our age be satisfied." 3 This essay will demonstrate that Riegl's work evidences an absorption of evolutionary theory in its methodology, language, content (man's interaction with the

There are two fields of artistry that Riegl has exhaustively studied and implemented in his visual grammar: the ornament and the art industry. Both are equally representative of the Kunstwollen of an age, to be understood as its “visual regime” . Both are comparable to Kant’s free and adherent beauty. Offering an equal status to ornament and art industry, Riegl blurs the line between accepted high forms of art and artisan creations. The formal attributes of free and adherent beauty display the characteristics of a style.

Translation of Guido Kaschnitz-Weinberg's review of the second edition (1927) of Alois Riegl's Late Roman Art Industry.