Alois Riegl in Vienna 1875-1905: An Institutional Biography by Diana Reynolds Cordileone (review)

A central figure of both twentieth-century Western art history and the Vienna School of Art History, Alois Riegl expanded and refined the focus of the discipline, posing questions of materials and objects previously considered unworthy of study and developing a formalist method. His pursuit of a new understanding of the aesthetic and cultural value of objects culminated in his work on historical preservation, a body of work that continues to be the subject of historical study. Published in the 1990s, the monographs of Margaret Iversen, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory, and Margaret Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art, formed a core of major English-language studies on Riegl and contributed to a body of scholarship focused primarily on analyzing and exploring Riegl’s theory of art. In 2010 a shift appears in Riegl studies toward cultural, disciplinary, and institutional politics with the publication of Peter Noever, Artur Rosenauer, and Georg Vasold’s edited volume of essays, Alois Riegl Revisited, as art historian Matthew Rampley notes in his review of the volume. Included in this significant volume is an essay by Diana Reynolds Cordileone in which she introduces previously unknown archival material to show Riegl’s scholarly interest in the Museum für Kunst und Industrie. It is this focus on Riegl’s institutional experience and commitment that also informs her monograph Alois Riegl in Vienna, 1875–1905: An Institutional Biography. Cordileone presents Riegl’s work in the context of national and regional politics of the Museum für Kunst und Industrie as well as in the context of his years as a student and his state appointment in historic preservation.

As the title of Cordileone’s book implies, this study is as much a biography of Riegl as it is of the institutions within which he worked. In the first of three parts of the study, the reader is introduced to the institutional histories of the University of Vienna and the Museum für Kunst und Industrie. Cordileone begins with the Leseverein der deutschen Studenten Wiens, of which Riegl was a member in his early student years, and then explores the theoretical and methodological focus of the Institut für österreichische Geschichtsforschung, where Riegl was trained in historical methodology. Next Cordileone turns to the establishment of the Museum für Kunst und Industrie as a national project in the tradition of the South Kensington Museum. These three chapters allow Cordileone to present the differences in regional and national German-language cultures of higher learning and the politics and marketing of national design.

While this section forms the historical backbone to her work, it is the influence of Nietzsche that shapes Cordileone’s presentation of Riegl’s biography in the next two sections. Cordileone presents the central ideas of Nietzsche’s Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen and Die Geburt der Tragödie via a reception of Schopenhauer, the same order in which the Reader’s Society approached the work of the two philosophers. Thus, Cordileone’s study can later show the Nietzsche-inspired development of Riegl’s historical methodology and cultural criticism as well as trace an underlying irrationalism in his work that, she argues, informs the introduction of the central concept of Kunstwollen into his theory of art. This Nietzschean reading of Riegl is the work’s first major element that contributes to the shift in Riegl studies.

The second section turns to Riegl’s own intellectual development, and Cordileone’s reader finds a comprehensive reading of Riegl’s works with a review of secondary literature, which in combination with Cordileone’s institutional approach of the first section brings the political contexts and undertones to the surface. For instance, the development of networks of schools and the object collection in the early years of the museum and the shifts in policies concerning folk art and national art here function as a backdrop to Riegl’s Stilfragen (1893) and the economic definitions presented in Volkskunst, Hausflei...