The Group Portraiture of Holland. - Review - book review

The assemblage Portraiture of Holland, by Alois Riegl, introduction by dint of Wolfgang Kemp, trans. by Evelyn M Kain and David Britt, looks Angeles, Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities: body s and Documents, 1999; 412 pages, $55

Ninety-seven years following its original publication in 1902 Alois Riegl's The cluster Portraiture of Holland has at last appeared in English translation, after previously being accessible to readers not flowing in German only in brief excerpts(1) Thus it joins several of Riegl's major works that above the past two decades have become available in English,(2) along with critical studies devot to the evaluation and historical contextualization of his achievement.(3) This resurgence of interest in a material part of thought already a hundred old reflects the critical move round in art-historical discourse over the past decades which has inspired reflection on the assumptions, methods and institutional history of the discipline. on the contrary the interest of Group Portraiture is far from simply historiographic. The book was the first effective examination of the part of the viewer in the construction of the fictional world of the picture, and of the picture in the construction of its viewer. As of that kind it is situated squarely in the center of contemporary art-theoretical problematics.

Riegl has been the eminence grise of 20th-century art-historical reflection a presence of pervasive if oftentimes unacknowledged or indirect influence, mentioned with mingled awe and suspicion. on the other hand his ideas have rarely--especially beyond the German-speaking countries--been directly stand over againsted This is not to be attributed sole to the undoubted complexity and difficulty of his works. Riegl was an "untimely" author (to use Nietzsche's expression: unzeitgemass) who pos issues which his immediate posterity was not prepared to address, and which--after a flaw of renewed interest in the '20 and early '30s(4)--were largely shunn in favor of les vexatious paths of investigation. Riegl's influence was left to be propagated--in a form that would have appalled him--largely by means of popularizers such as Wilhelm Worringer, whence it spread beyond the professional confines of art history to cultural theorists of the likes of Oswald Spengler granting it also affected such notable figures as Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin.(5)

Riegl's works were written in the decade spanning the turn round of the last century, up to his death at 47 in 1905 in that Vienna which has been the external reality of so much scrutiny in new years as an incubator of modernist tillage Like Edmund Husserl, he had studied with single of the luminaries of the period, the neo-Kantian philosopher Franz Brentano, and present the appearances to have adapted one of Brentano's central ideas, the notion of intentionality--which Husserl would make single of the foundations of his phenomenology--as the type for his conception of Kunstwollen or artistic volition. None of Riegl's ideas has been the existence of so much controversy and misunderstanding as this--a heuristic device permitting the suspension of like questions as the adequacy of the art work as imitation of nature or its conformity to externally imposed, assertedly "ideal" norms, in like manner as to permit its have internal logic to manifest itself. Riegl was thus enabled to explore and validate the esthetic forms of periods and kinds of art which were not suppos to have any--which were dismissed as "decadent" or simply as inartistic. This was the case with entire centuries-long phases of Western art of the like kind the Late Antique or specific genre like as Dutch group portrait.

cluster Portraiture will surprise readers who know Riegl--directly or by the agency of repute--through Late Roman Art Industry (Spatromische Kunstindustrie), his greatest in quantity noted work. The latter's unprecedentedly rigorous and penetrating analysis of the internal organization and historical unfolding of visual images, conceived as variable compoundings of the mw materials of sensory perception, is largely responsible for Riegl's reputation as a "formalist." on the other hand this is misleading. Riegl's analyses for the first time systematically incorporate the perceiving bring under rule as an essential element in the constitution of the work. In Kunstindustrie the character of this subject is--for the sake of experimental exactitude--narrowly circumscribed. The viewer is a immaculate beholder whose other human attributes are (mostly) abstracted away, "only an eye--but what an eye!" as Cezanne is reported to have remarked contemporaneously of Monet (Riegl implies that this subdue can move--otherwise the distinction between "near vision" and "distant vision" with equal reason important to his argument could not arise--but this issue is left undeveloped) In collection Portraiture, this abstracted beholder is fleshed on the outside as a fully developed historical make subordinate and an active participant in the art work. The work is thus the earliest explicit formulation in a visual arts connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts of the approach now known as "reception theory," which has been of like importance over the last quarter hundred in literary and art criticism.