Writing German Art History

Abstract

Dan Karlholm: Art of Illusion: The Representation of Art History in Nineteenth-Century Germany and Beyond (Peter Lang: Bern, 2004), 24 b&w illlns, 272 pp., paperback ISBN 3-03910-393-8, £30.70. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann: Toward a Geography of Art (University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 2004), 91 b&w illns, xiv, 490 pp., paperback ISBN 0-226-133122-5, £16.00. Aloïs Riegl: Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts, trans. Jacqueline E. Jung, foreward Benjamin Binstock (Zone Books: New York, 2004), 30 b&w illns, 496 pp., hardback ISBN 1-890951-45-5, £23.95. Read as a group, the three books under review can be said to comprise a short history of German writing on art. Dan Karlholm's Art of Illusion examines the first general surveys of art history and other related phenomena of the mid-nineteenth century that attempted to describe the history of art as a unified field. Aloïs Riegl, in his Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts, attempts to replace the taxonomical approach of the survey texts with a more scientific language that plots the morphological changes in art's development. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann's Toward a Geography of Art updates and reconceptualises Kunstgeographie by both rejecting many of the premises of earlier writing on the subject and regrounding some of the methodological concerns of the German tradition. As we shall see, these three publications investigate in different ways aspects of the narrative structure of art history.