Riegl Bearing. - Review - book review

ARTHUR C. DANTO ON THE NEW VIENNA SCHOOL

Alois Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland. Translated by Evelyn M. Kain and David Britt. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999. 448 pages, $55.

The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s. Edited by Christopher S. Wood. New York: Zone Books, 2000. 488 pages, $32.

THE SO-CALLED VIENNA CIRCLE, which flourished in the years before the Second World War, was an informal association of philosophers and scientists dedicated to the overthrow and eradication of metaphysics, regarded by them as nonsense, portentously disguised. Nonsense was understood as whatever could not be verified empirically. This was the notorious verifiability criterion of meaning, which, they believed, the natural sciences exemplified to perfection. Final solutions, of course, were much in the air in '30s Vienna, and such was the ferocity of the Vienna Circle, whose texts bristled with the weaponry of mathematical logic, that anyone in pursuit of scientific credibility was anxious to purge his discourse of metaphysical taint. The New Vienna School, a constellation of art historians that flourished in the same city at the same time, saw itself as practicing Kunst wissensschaft, the "science of art." If Hans Sedlmayr and Otto Pacht were the school's guiding lights, its "real founder," according to the cla ssical archaeologist Guido Kaschnitz von Weinberg, himself a member, was Alois Riegl (1858--1905), curator of textiles and later professor of art history at the University of Vienna. The Vienna School Reader, which brings translations of seminal works by Sedlmayr, Pacht, Kaschnitz, and Fritz Novotny to English readers for the first time, begins, rightly, with two essays by Riegi.

Riegl had attempted to identify certain objective formal structures in the visual culture of a given period, irrespective of any differences between vernacular and fine art, and to explain these structures with reference to the world outlook of those whose art it was. His practice as an art historian presupposed what he termed the Kunst wollen, or "art will"--a notion that could not easily withstand application of the verifiability criterion. Riegl had conducted his investigations in the pre--World War I atmosphere of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and drew freely on the woolly resources of German metaphysics before it came under the Vienna Circle's knife. The Kunst wollen was an application to art of the romanticist idea of Will, understood as among the world's ultimate components. Rousseau, for example, introduced the idea of a general will--a volonte generale--as a deep political reality. Schopenhauer saw the world as will through and through in his masterpiece, The World as Will and Representation. Nietzsche introduced the will to power as what drives the universe. So the art will draws on a rich and, it must be said, pernicious conceptual tradition: Think of how many luckless heads were lopped off during the Ter ror in the name of the volonte generale by those who claimed special knowledge of it, to say nothing of the Third Reich's occasional invocation of the will to power.

Riegi never went into any depth on what exactly constituted the Kunstwollen, but his use of the term allowed him to consider the history of art of a given period as exhibiting a kind of internal drive or purpose, which realized itself progressively through time. The methodological agenda of the New Vienna School was to excise this cognitively embarrassing concept while retaining Riegi 's art-scientific insight, namely, that art history should concern itself with "the manifestations of a certain will of a supraindividual kind, standing opposed as a normative force to the individual," as Kaschnitz phrased it. He proposed to replace Riegl's "art will" with the insufficiently dynamic term "structure."

Riegi's purpose in his last book--The Group Portraiture of Holland of 1902--was to deduce the shape of Dutch art history as a directed whole through a description of the Dutch Kunstwollen. The idea of such an art will directed Riegi's eyes to attributes of Dutch painting that might otherwise have been invisible. However much the Kunstwollen may have fallen afoul of positivist admonitions, it would be difficult to understand Riegl's practices as an "art scientist" without reference to something like it. Indeed, though the term has more or less vanished from the vocabulary of art historians, their writing is tacitly guided by similar organizing principles. Something, after all, has to account for what individuates art in different cultures or traditions, and Riegl believed we achieve this by inferring to the relevant Kunstwollen.

Riegl begins his book with the striking observation that the group portrait is almost unique to Dutch art--that for the most part no one but the Dutch produced or were interested in it. In contrast to family portraits--which have a very long history--the group portrait "consist[s] of completely autonomous individuals who associated themselves with a corporation solely for a specific, shared, practical, and public spirited purpose, but who otherwise wished to maintain their independence." The members of the voluntary group portrait are shown with the exactitude required of individual portraits, but united under a common purpose. Each member of the group is shown with the same degree of detail, which implies, Riegl believed, a "democratic equality" among the individual sitters, who are shown as coordinated with rather than subordinated to one another. So these composite portraits are a window into the spirit of the Dutch people. It is not that the group portrait was itself the purpose of Dutch art history--it w as, rather, the means that the Kunstwollen invented as a way of conveying through art what it meant to belong to Dutch culture.