Hans Sedlmayr Research Articles

"Internal guidelines" of the rowohlts deutsche enzyklopädie : correspondence between Ernesto Grassi and Hans Sedlmayr about art in postwar Germany

The article explores the hidden influence of Hans Sedlmayr (1896-1984) on the contributions on art in rowohlts deutsche enzyklopädie and on its editor Ernesto Grassi (1902-1991). It reveals Sedlmayr's thoughts on existential philosophers such as Albert Camus (1913-1960) and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), the latter of whom directly influenced Sedlmayr's understanding of art.

Hans Belting and Hermeneutics – Between Unease and Awareness

Beginning with an article by Hans Robert Jauss, which detects in Hans Belting some "unease" towards hermeneutics, this paper claims instead that Belting, in his studies, manifests deep hermeneutic awareness, among other things indebted in many respects to Jauss' reception theory itself. Nonetheless, it is still possible to notice some "unease," which emerges in the way Belting considers hermeneutics among the "methods and games" of history of art. In this regard, Belting's analysis – concerning the relationship between iconology and hermeneutics and between philosophical and art historical hermeneutics – appears densely loaded with meaning but also partial. This is due to the fact that he limits himself to critically discussing only one tendency, well represented, in his eyes, by Wilhelm Dilthey, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Hans Sedlmayr, the latter being the only representative of art historical hermeneutics that Belting takes into account.

New science of art of Hans Sedlmayr

This article provides a brief systemic analysis of the key concepts of the so-called new science of art developed by the Austrian art historian Hans Sedlmayr. The result of Seldmayr’s pursuits are reflected in creation of his own philosophy of art and culture based on a particular worldview. The cognition of the whole, along with individual and unique, underlies this science. Understanding is the goal of scientific knowledge for Sedlmayr. It suggests not only abstract knowledge, but peculiar existential experience as well. Sedlmayr interprets the understanding of artwork as its contemplation, which in turn, is identical to its actualization or presence. In Seldlmayr’s art of science, epistemologies and ontologies merge into each other. He interprets artworks simultaneously as the event and as the social organism, which overcomes the linearity of time and fragmentation of plurality. This artificial complex system, built on the paradoxical identity of the single and plenty, is both finite and infinite. Sedlmayr’s views encompass classical and nonclassical approach towards cognition of the whole. He relies on the principles of monism, seeking to reduce all concepts to a single basis, single point of singularity that designates the synthesis of all the moments of the whole and can be expressed by a single category. The main category, which resembles the center of the opposites, is the “midpoint” (Mitte). The aforementioned ideas are consistent and logical only in such scientific worldview that identifies ontology and epistemology, which implies the unity of contemplation and phenomenon of the artwork. Therefore, in Sedlmayr's constructions, actualization or revival of the artwork is identical with its comprehension. The systemic approach towards the artwork reflected in the theoretical works of Sedlmayr extends the boundaries of art science and converges with philosophy.

“A work of art is an object that necessitates contemplation”. Latency of visual studies within the Vienna School of Art History?

This article investigates a research method of the so-called Vienna School of Art History, mainly its transformation by Max Dvořák around the First World War. The article suggests the possible influence of Georg Simmel’s philosophy on Dvořák in this time, evident mainly in Dvořák’s interpretation of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s art, written by Dvořák in 1920 and published posthumously in 1921. This another view on the Vienna School of Art History is then researched in writings on Pieter Bruegel the Elder by Dvořák’s students Hans Sedlmayr and Charles de Tolnay when Tolnay extended Dvořák’s thinking and Sedlmayr challenged its premises – both Tolnay and Sedlmayr thus in the same time interpreted Bruegel’s art differently, even though they were both Dvořák’s students. The article then suggests a possible interpretative relationship of the Vienna School of Art History after its transformation by Max Dvořák with today’s approaches to art (history), mainly with the so-called visual studies.

Kurt Badt. Verlust der Mitte (On the Question of Modernism and the Anti-modernism in mid-20th Century German Art History)

On the example of the activities of the German art historian Kurt Badt, the article reveals the complex relationship between modern art and contemporary art history. The outstanding and, obviously, underestimated figure of the scholar, who throughout his long life was ready to confront the rest of the discipline unwilling to become a part of the university system, with all his creativity embodied the very idea of freedom that modern artists and sympathizing art critics strove for. Due to the availability of English-language versions of the art historian’s texts mainly on the masters close to modern art — Delacroix, Constable, and Cézanne — his position in the dispute about modernism seems more or less unambiguous. The aim of this article is to show that this is far from the case, discovering the points of contact of Badt with many of his colleagues who have earned a reputation as unconditional conservatives. First of all, it concerns the Austrian art theorist Hans Sedlmayr, an interest for whom, especially in recent times, is predetermined by widespread ideas about the fundamental incompatibility of academic art history with attempts of unbiased consideration of the history of modern art. Moreover, a deep kinship of such research activity with the most reactionary political ideas is also widely discussed, which, as it should be noted, this outstanding critic of the modern culture was not absolutely innocent of. Nevertheless, his clash with Badt, a polemic that took place in the 1950s and 60s, centered on the work of not Cézanne, but Vermeer van Delft, can be considered from the point of view of the attitude of the two scholars to phenomena less distant in time. This makes it possible to raise the question of the paradoxical similarity of the views of these two authors — with such a different creative and human destiny.

Review: Da Gerusalemme a Pechino da Roma a Vienna: Sul Saggio di architettura storica di J. B. Fischer von Erlach, by Marco Folin and Monica Preti

Review: <i>Da Gerusalemme a Pechino da Roma a Vienna: Sul Saggio di architettura storica di J. B. Fischer von Erlach</i>, by Marco Folin and Monica Preti

Против модерности: концепции Эмиля Штайгера, Михаила Лифшица и Ганса Зедльмайра. Часть 2

Objectives of the paper: 1) To analyse Emil Staiger’s theoretical position and to reveal the reason I consider it anti-modern; 2) To compare his position to the one maintained by some ideologists of socialist realism in the same decade, and to outline similarities and differences. I pay more attention to the antimodernist and concept of Michail Al. Lifshitz; 3) To ground my opinion that the ideology of socialist realism in the 1960-ies is also anti-modern; 4) To expand the analysis with a brief introduction of Hans Sedlmayr’s attitude, and to explain why it is anti-modern as well; 5) To give an answer to the question what the social function of the anti-modern attitude is. I use a critical comparative approach to the original sources, asking for the social functions of the analysed concepts. The paper is a part of a monograph in progress on the works of Emil Staiger and on some anti-modern concepts in the reflexion on literature and on visual art in West and in the East of Europe in the 20th century.

Otto Pächt, ‘Hegelian’ Exile in Cold War England

Utilizing documents from his personal Nachlass, I sketch Otto Pächt’s career in Great Britain, from his emigration in 1936 to his call back to the University of Vienna in 1963. As a member of the Vienna School of Art History, who had contributed with Hans Sedlmayr to the elaboration of a methodological viewpoint based on immanent form and real historical processes, Pächt faced difficulties in England, heightened by the rise and hegemony of neo-liberal thought. In Pächt’s case this thinking affected him directly through the institutional role that E. H. Gombrich held at the Warburg and in British intellectual life in general.

Против модерности: концепции Эмиля Штайгера, Михаила Лифшица и Ганса Зедльмайра. Часть 1

Objectives of the paper: 1) To analyse Emil Staiger’s theoretical position and to reveal the reason I consider it anti-modern; 2) To compare his position to the one maintained by some ideologists of socialist realism in the same decade, and to outline similarities and differences. I pay more attention to the antimodernist and concept of Michail Al. Lifshitz; 3) To ground my opinion that the ideology of socialist realism in the 1960-ies is also anti-modern; 4) To expand the analysis with a brief introduction of Hans Sedlmayr’s attitude, and to explain why it is anti-modern as well; 5) To give an answer to the question what the social function of the anti-modern attitude is. I use a critical comparative approach to the original sources, asking for the social functions of the analysed concepts. The paper is a part of a monograph in progress on the works of Emil Staiger and on some anti-modern concepts in the reflexion on literature and on visual art in West and in the East of Europe in the 20th century.

Concept of the "Middle Object" in Works of Hans Sedlmayr and Aristotle

Concept of the "Middle Object" in Works of Hans Sedlmayr and Aristotle

The Genesis ofStruktur: Kaschnitz-Weinberg's Review of Riegl and the New Viennese School

Guido Kaschnitz-Weinberg's 1929 review of Riegl's Late Roman Art Industry of 1901 is almost unknown today, but was a signal event in the field of art history in the 1920s. It represented not only the Vienna School's most conceptually forceful and critical rethinking of Riegl's work, but also its most considered riposte to the major process of reconsidering Riegl that had been undertaken by Erwin Panofsky and Edgar Wind (one that ultimately led to the formulation of the approach to art-historical method that came to be known as Iconology). Moreover, in the course of the review, Kaschnitz offered the earliest call to, and definition of, the fundamental Viennese art-historical method of the 1930s to 1960s, associated above all with the likes of Hans Sedlmayr and Otto Pacht -that is Strukturforschung, the model of analysing the underlying structure of a work of art.

The Concept of Structure and the Work of Art in the Structuralist Art History of Hans Sedlmayr in Comparison with the Structural Aesthetics of Jan Mukařovský

Josef Vojvodík offers a detailed and highly original study of structuralism based on a comparison between the art historian Hans Sedlmayr and the Czech theorist Jan Mukařovský. Both produced theories of general aesthetics developed in a series of three phases ultimately focused on a central concept: the “explicit character” for Hans Sedlmayr and the “semantic gesture” for Jan Mukařovský. Josef Vojvodík explains the key concepts of their works, such as the importance of gestalt theory and of gestalt psychology, the key role of semantics, the Macchia colored spot theory and the process of decomposition, and the significance of noetic understanding. The author concludes his text with an interrogation of Ján Bakoš’s comparison of the Prague Linguistic Circle and the New Viennese School of art history.

Review: J. B. Fischer von Erlach: Architecture as Theater in the Baroque Era, by Esther Gordon Dotson, with photographs by Mark Richard Ashton

Esther Gordon Dotson, with photographs by Mark Richard Ashton J. B. Fischer von Erlach: Architecture as Theater in the Baroque Era New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012, 170 pp., 110 color and 108 b/w illus. $75, ISBN 9780300166682 Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, the imperial court architect in Vienna around 1700, is perhaps the most-studied early modern architect in northern Europe after Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren, but, as the late Esther Gordon Dotson noted in the introduction to this book, his work is still relatively unfamiliar outside of the German-speaking world. Anglophone scholars have encountered it primarily through Hans Aurenhammer’s 1973 monograph and a few scattered articles on various more focused issues.1 For German readers, the essential book is Hans Sedlmayr’s monograph. This began as his 1925 dissertation, which he revised and expanded twice, in 1956 and 1976.2 In its final form, this book discusses the architect’s life and work more fully than any other. Nonetheless, Sedlmayr wrote that there was still much to do, and Dotson takes on some of those challenges. Much of the existing literature is concerned with iconographic aspects of Fischer’s work, and especially the ways in which it is suited to a pervasive imperial program associated with the Habsburg court. In the introduction, Dotson explains her fundamentally different goals. The book is not intended to locate Fischer in a chronology of European architectural history or to resolve historical or interpretive problems with the buildings. Nor, it could be added, is it particularly concerned with the broader artistic or architectural world in Vienna around 1700. Johann Lucas von Hildebrandt, one of Fischer’s main rivals, is hardly mentioned here, and another, Domenico Martinelli, is completely absent. Rather, Dotson is concerned with how Fischer approached his work as an architect in the most basic sense, as someone concerned with creating effective spatial relationships. To make her case, she is heavily dependent on the photographs by Mark Richard Ashton, which are “at least as essential as the text” (3). Dotson’s book is structured in …

Connoisseurship and Its Potential in Matters of Copyright

Among the most persistent and difficult problems in the field of copyright law is determining whether copying has actually occurred. This article responds to this challenge by proposing that judges and juries consider practices used in disciplines revolving around the close and methodical viewing of visual objects. Of special interest is connoisseurship, long employed by art historians, curators, and collectors to adjudicate the origins, provenance, and authenticity of art. Mindful of law’s emphasis on the spoken and written word, this article focuses especially on the visual analyses of Otto Pächt and Hans Sedlmayr, two art historians whose foundational status in the discipline of art history stems from the extent to which they attempted to systematically translate the experience of looking into words. The article concludes with a brief test case drawn from the high-profile 2005 dispute between architects Thomas Shine and David Childs over the latter’s alleged infringement of the former’s design.

On the Problem of Describing and Interpreting Works of the Visual Arts

Except for a few changes, that partly emerged from the discussion, this article presents the thread of a talk, that was given on 20 May 1931, to the Kiel section of the Kant Society. It explores the principles that guide an art historian particularly interested in iconographic interpretation in his practical work. The task of the author therefore is not to examine the problems of such interpretative work systematically but rather to exemplify its methodological consequences. And it should not be taken as sign of his undecidedness that he frequently refers back to his own earlier essays. See Erwin Panofsky, ‘Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der bildenden Kunst’, Logos 21 (1932): 103–19. In our earlier translation of Panofsky’s 1925 essay, ‘On the Relationship of Art History and Art Theory’, Critical Inquiry 35 (Autumn 2008): 33–71, we sought to highlight the rigorous neo-Kantianism of Panofsky’s theoretical arguments by using the English vocabulary of what has become the standard Cambridge translation of Kant’s works. So Sinn was rendered as ‘sense’ and sinnlich as ‘sensible’. Given Panofsky’s attempt, in ‘On the Problem of Describing and Interpreting Works of the Visual Arts’, to accommodate and respond to positions advocated by intellectual opponents from distinctly non-Kantian backgrounds—such as the work of Martin Heidegger explicitly as well, perhaps, as that of Hans Sedlmayr implicitly—and also his undoubted debt to Karl Mannheim’s non-Kantian sociology of Weltanschauung, it would be perverse here to stick rigidly to this model. Moreover, in such parts of the piece that survive in the 1939 and 1955 revisions in English, we find Panofsky himself constantly using ‘meaning’ as opposed to ‘sense’ for Sinn. Of course that Panofsky, or a neoKantian like Ernst Cassirer, or even Immanuel Kant himself, should necessarily be expected to accept the conventions of scholars in the late twentiethand early twenty-first centuries for the translation of Kant into English, is absurd. The translators would like to record their thanks to Richard Neer and Joel Snyder for their comments and suggestions.—TRANS.

The Curator as Arts Administrator? Comments on Harald Szeemann and the Exhibition “When Attitudes Become Form”

In one of the first German language publications on arts management (the Baden-Baden Kunstgespräche, or Art Talks, from 1959) the question was discussed, “Is modern art managed?” The critics implied that the supposed managers of art had “managed” the introduction and dominance of “abstract art” in Germany, which was equivalent to saying that the commercial interests in the art trade had led the managers to offer only this kind of art (in this case, it was Tachisme) in the market, and particularly to have it shown in art institutions. That at any rate was the thesis put forward, for example, at the documenta II by Hans Sedlmayr, who was one of the best known German art critics in the 1950s and a prominent opponent of modernism (cf. Sedlmayr 2006). Among those who rejected this thesis were Theodor W. Adorno, Max Bense, and Daniel Henry Kahnweiler. They argued that before art is sold in the marketplace there is the nonmarket related activity of the artist, focused exclusively on questions internal to art, and that this moment is not endangered by management. In order to simplify this topic somewhat, which from today's perspective seems quite complex, I would like to ask: “Is modern art managed by curators?” And to further restrict the topic, I would like to concentrate on the specific historical constellation around the year 1969. But first, if we are going to be able to judge whether curators manage art, a few comments need to be made on the use of the term “arts administrator.”

Ontica e simbolica del colore. La prospettiva di Hedwig Conrad-Martius

In its first paragraphs the paper aims at presenting the key-concepts and problematic issues of the philosophy of colours developed by Hedwig Conrad-Martius (1888-1966) in her essay Farben (1929). One of the most brilliant pupils of Husserl, Conrad-Martius developed a Realontologie of colours, a sophisticated description of their ontic genesis and structure, according to the realistic interpretation of phenomenology characteristic of the circles of Munich and Gottingen. While deeply indebted to Goethe’s morphological approach, Conrad-Martius’s doctrine was able to influence the “rigorous” Kunstwissenschaft of Hans Sedlmayr and his school. The final paragraphs of the paper show how Sedlmayr, colleague of Conrad-Martius at the University of Munich in the Fifties, tried to make such a phenomenological-ontological perspective fruitful for the interpretation of images belonging to the domain of visual arts, insisting on the ontic roots of chromatic symbolism.

Art Museums, Old Paintings, and Our Knowledge of the Past

Art museums frequently remove old paintings from their original settings. In the process, the context of these works of art changes dramatically. Do museums then preserve works of art? To answer this question, I consider an imaginary painting, The Travels and Tribulations of Piero's Baptism of Christ, depicting the history of display of Piero della Francesca's Baptism of Christ. This example suggests that how Piero's painting is seen does depend upon its setting. According to the Intentionalist, such changes in context have no real influence upon the meaning of Piero's painting, and consequently museums can be said to preserve works of art. According to the Skeptic, if such changes are drastic enough, we can no longer identify the picture's original meaning, and museums thus fail to preserve works of art. Skepticism deserves attention, for such varied influential commentators as Theodore Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, Hans‐Georg Gadamer, Martin Heidegger, Hans Sedlmayr, and Paul Valéry hold this pessimistic view of museums. I develop the debate between the Intentionalist and the Skeptic. Ultimately skepticism is indefensible, I argue, because it fails to take account of the continuities in the history of art's display. But Intentionalism is also deficient because it is ahistorical. In presenting the history of Piero's painting, The Travels and Tribulations of Piero's Baptism of Christ shows that we can re‐identify the original significance of Piero's work and the recognizable continuities that obtain through its changes. It thus makes sense to claim that at least in certain circumstances art museums can preserve works of art.

ユスティニアヌス建築に関するゼーデルマイヤの研究 : ゼーデルマイヤの教会堂建築論2

In this paper, forming part of a comprehensive study on Hans Sedlmayr's theory of occidental church architecture in its historical development from its origins to Gothic, the views and ideas of this art historian as regards the "Justinian architecture" are discussed in an analytical reading of his study: "Das erste Mittelalterliche Architektursystem". The "overlapping baldachin" of this architecture that he postulates as its essential element is considered to be one of the most distinctive characters of the Medieval architecture.' since it contributes to the conservation of the antique columns and their integration into another more comprehensive order, i.e. hierarchy, which sanctions a new non-classical architectural principle.

Evolutionism and the Ontology of the Human Person: Critique of the Marxist Theory of the Emergence of Man

In the preface to his doctoral dissertation Marx wrote: “Philosophy makes no secret of it. The proclamation of Prometheus, 'in a word I detest all the Gods,' is her own profession, her own slogan against all the gods of heaven and earth who do not recognize man's self-consciousness as the highest divinity. There shall be none other beside it.” Now this attitude of defying God goes hand in hand with an attitude toward the world: one who cannot endure the idea of God's sovereignty often resents even the “givenness” of things with specific natures. It is not just that he senses that they would lead him back to God, but also that they, each with its own inner logos which imposes itself on man, are themselves felt to belong to the detested gods. Such a man approaches these things to destroy their givenness, and to make new objects out of them which reflect himself and his powers, and depend on him. The Austrian art historian, Hans Sedlmayr, describes this attitude as follows:Dem Menschen, der sich ganz autonom proklamiert, muss es unertraeglich sein, Kreaturen zu begegnen, die offenbar nicht seine Geschoepfe sind. Es ist ein prometheischer und im Grund narzistischer Traum, sich durch Technik und naturfreie Kunst eine menschliche Umwelt zu bauen, in der man nichts und niemandem begegnet als den Schoepfungen des eigensten Menschengestes.