The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s

This volume introduces to an English-language audience the writings of the so-called new Vienna School of art history. In the 1930s, Hans Sedlmayr and Otto Pächt undertook an ambitious extension of the art historical project of Aloïs Riegl (1858–1905). Sedlmayr and Pächt began with an aestheticist conception of the autonomy and irreducibility of the artistic process. At the same time, they believed they could read entire cultures and worldviews in the work of art. The key to this contextual...