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Art History in German-Speaking Countries: Austria, Germany and Switzerland

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Art History in German-Speaking Countries: Austria, Germany and Switzerland ART HISTORY IN GERMAN-SPEAKING COUNTRIES: AUSTRIA, GERMANY AND SWITZERLAND Charlotte Schoell-Glass A long time ago it was suggested (half jokingly) that ‘the mother tongue of art history is German’, doubtless repeated with a sigh by those whose mother tongue was not German. Today, we all more or less willingly live with the fact that the lingua franca of art history is English. As is to be expected when a global idiom dominates, local languages continue to flourish, as do local cultures, if sometimes completely under the radar of the globalized perspective. This is the case with art history in German- speaking countries, Austria and Germany, as well as the German-speaking part of Switzerland, forming, to a degree, a common publishing and job market. Most importantly, however, they share a common early history: Jacob Burckhardt was born in Switzerland but studied and trained in Ber- lin before returning to his native Basel. Alois Riegl spent his whole life in Vienna but was widely read in Germany and Switzerland. Heinrich Wölf- flin, also Swiss, spent the greater part of his brilliant career in Germany, where he taught in Berlin, as well as Munich, before returning to Switzer- land in 1924. Since then, of course, almost everything has changed. But the fact remains that the university systems and cultural institutions are much alike in them all. Since the early nineteenth century, universities were founded in all three countries on the basis of a common conviction: that cultural education (‘Bildung’) should in principle be accessible to and free for all, and that teaching and research should be accomplished freely, without any pressure from the state or economic constraints. In the last two decades this ideal has been eroded somewhat.1 But even today, his- torical and philosophical disciplines, including art history, in earlier times 1 The concept of ‘Bildung’ is not fully translatable as it carries with it connotations of its late eighteenth-century Enlightenment and subjectivist beginnings (as in Bildungsro- man), as well as its embeddedness in concepts of the history of the German bourgeois class. ‘Bildung’ not only refers to intellectual education but also to a degree to character formation as in ‘Herzensbildung’ (lit. ‘heart education’). The humanities in Germany have been political in the sense that ‘Bildung’, for a long time, had to stand in for political empowerment. There is a substantial body of scholarship on the concept of ‘Bildung’; see for instance: Aleida Assmann, Arbeit am nationalen Gedächtnis: Eine kurze Geschichte der deutschen Bildungsidee (Frankfurt am Main, 1993). 336 charlotte schoell-glass fundamental to the education of young men and, after the First World War, young women as well, are still regarded as important, albeit almost purpose-free, branches of knowledge, and are therefore still supported by society, and thus also by state and university administrations. Institutional History The history of art has been studied in Germany for well over 200 years. Depending on whether one focuses on art-historical scholarship itself or the institutions of researching and teaching art history, one may wish to begin the history of art history with Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s His- tory of the Art of Antiquity (Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, published in Dresden in 1764), or even his Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst) already published in 1754–55.2 In these seminal texts, Winckelmann developed the categories for writing the history of art of antiquity that continued to be influential for the writ- ing of the history of later art throughout the nineteenth century, when art history as a discipline was shaped. If one looks at the institutional structures of the formation of the dis- cipline, its history begins in 1799 in Göttingen, where the first professor for the history of art, Johann Dominik Fiorillo, curator of the art collec- tion of the University of Göttingen, taught art history as well as drawing. There were a number of chairs of art history that predated the founding of institutes and ‘Seminare’ at many German, Austrian and Swiss univer- sities during the nineteenth century. Jacob Burckhardt was professor for art history at the Eidgenössische Hochschule in Zurich between 1854 and 1858, and he held his chair in Basel from 1858 until 1893 both as historian and art historian. Neither of these universities had an Institute of Art His- tory at that time. Those were founded in Bonn, Leipzig and Strasbourg in 1873, in Berlin in 1875, and in Tübingen in 1894. In Vienna, the first chair had already been founded in 1852. By 1891, Franz Wickhoff and by 1897, Alois Riegl held the two chairs that from then on traditionally made up the Viennese institute. 2 Johann J. Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave (Los Angeles, 2006); Winckelmann, Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture, trans. Elfriede Heyer and Roger C. Norton (La Salle, IL, 1987)..
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