“The work is only in a moment”: Max Dvořák and the Meaning of the Work of Art

Abstract

This study examines Max Dvořák‘s previously unknown papers prepared for his one-semester lecture series at the university of Vienna in 1913. Dvořák titled these lectures “explanations of Selected Works of Art“ (Erklärung ausgewählter Kunstwerke) and in doing so developed a distinctive method within the art historical research of the so-called vienna School of Art History. The paper interprets the lectures through a close reading of the method as a parallel to the change in the concept of the work of art as it occurred in the philosophy and practice of art at the beginning of the twentieth century, demonstrated in the study by examples from the thinking of the German philosopher Oskar Becker and a transformation of the meaning of painting by the French artist Marcel Duchamp. As the study shows, such analogies allow us to understand the meaning of the work of art in Max Dvořák‘s art history in a new way.