The Vienna School of Art History: Empire and the Politics of Scholarship, 1847–1918

Chapter 7: Readings of Modern Art: Historicism, Impressionism, Expressionism

142 The Vienna School of arT hiSTory collapse of the Habsburg Empire in 1918 saw the rise and fall of historicism and its displacement by modernism. The meaning and forms of contemporary art thus underwent radical transformation, yet as Moritz Csáky has stressed, both historicism and modernism were responses to processes of modernization.5 The stylistic pluralism and eclecticism of the middle and late nineteenth century were aesthetic reflexes of the social differentiation and fragmentation of modernity: “In both its content as well as its method, historicism created the preconditions for the modernist conception of life, for which the fragmentation of consciousness and the experience that, as Nietzsche put it, ‘life no longer resides in the whole,’ had become an inner conviction.”6 From Eitelberger onward, therefore, Viennese art historians were concerned to interpret the meaning of modernity and modernization, striving to articulate their relation to the past as seen through the prism of art. It was not only the meaning of art that was at stake, however, but the broader shape and meaning of history itself. eitelberger: Historicism and tHe glory of franz josePH Eitelberger is best known for his ideas of design reform that led to the establishment of the Museum for Art and Industry . An influential voice, he informed the emerging economic policy of the Austrian government, which saw the reform of design education as an important engine of domestic economic growth. He also wrote widely on recent and contemporary art and architecture. Alongside extensive accounts of prominent individuals in the contemporary Vienna art world, such as the painters Johann Peter Krafft (1780–1856) and Friedrich Gauermann (1807–1862), the sculptor Joseph Daniel Böhm, and the architects Eduard van der Nüll (1812–1868) and August von Sicardsburg (1813–1868), designers of the Vienna Opera House, he also wrote numerous articles on the recent history of art in Vienna. These included a short survey, “The Artistic Development of Contemporary Vienna,” a history of nineteenth-century sculpture, an analysis of Austrian art and architecture of the early 1870s, and the politics of German Renaissance revivalism.7 Eitelberger was less concerned with individual artists and artworks than with the role of institutions; as he asserted in one of his few statements of method, it was necessary “to consider the social, political, and national factors,” and with this he meant in particular the way in which these factors could advance artistic life or bring it to a halt, for “many branches of art, especially architecture and sculpture, are dependent on commissions and contracts that are subject to social and political conditions.”8 Eitelberger’s writings constitute an important document of the cultural politics of Austria-Hungary of the 1870s, and they also provide a clear index of the liberal ideology underpinning his approach to the arts, in particular with regard to the role of the state as a patron of the arts and the relation between art and national identity. Eitelberger’s various texts are informed by a consistent Whiggish historical vision that emphasized the rebirth of art since 1848 and the ascent of Franz Joseph to the imperial throne. This formed part of a schematic history of modern art (by which Eitelberger meant art since the mid–eighteenth century) according to which the reign of Franz Joseph readingS of modern arT 143 had followed a period of stagnation, which had itself followed an era of Baroque splendor . Eitelberger valued the latter as the time when Vienna had been the cosmopolitan cultural center of Europe. Artists of all nationalities had been drawn to the city, which consequently had “enjoyed the most intimate connections with the artistic life of all Europe.”9 This was a recurrent theme in his essays, and he highlighted the Baroque era on a number of occasions as “the time when magnificent palaces, churches, abbeys, and gardens were created in the grand style.”10 It was a time of enlightened aristocratic and imperial patronage, he argued, and as a consequence he also valued those contemporary artists whose work was most evocative of the Baroque past, including Hans Makart.11 Eitelberger’s valorization of the Baroque was much like his student Albert Ilg’s in the latter’s essay on “the future of the Baroque style,” and like Ilg’s, it was undoubtedly motivated by a certain nostalgia for the grandeur of the past. However, whereas Ilg saw his own time as an era...