The “Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte,” the Vienna School of Art History, hardly needs an introduction today, as anyone interested in the history of academic art-history writing will have come across at least some of the recent literature in several languages, mostly devoted to one or other of the school’s chief protagonists, be it Alois Riegl, Max Dvořák, Hans Sedlmayr, or Ernst Gombrich. Julius von Schlosser’s account, still the most useful brief introduction, is now available in English (Julius von Schlosser, “The Vienna School of the History of Art” (1934), translated by Karl Johns, Journal of Art Historiography 1 [December 2009]). More recent works concentrate on the history of the art-historical methods “produced” by the school, with Riegl taking pride of place. Thus, the first quality one might expect in yet another book on the subject would be a fair and consistent referencing of that secondary literature. With The Vienna School of Art History: Empire and the Politics of Scholarship, 1847–1918, Matthew Rampley fulfils this expectation meticulously; indeed the latter quality pervades the work as a whole, deftly managing a large body of information and complex thought within what is not an overly long book.

Rampley begins with the hitherto neglected origins of the school before the decisive step of 1847, when its “father,” Rudolf Eitelberger von Edelberg, became a lecturer in the subject at the university. The net is cast widely to cover many facets of the Vienna art world and the local antiquarianism, as well as Austrian state policies of education, all set within a wider Germanic and European context. This is followed by a chapter on the emergence of distinct art-historical approaches. First of all, art historians must join historians and practice a precise and critical use of all written sources. But central are the pronouncements of the hitherto neglected Moritz Thausing in the 1870s, who principally writes about what an art-historical approach should not be: the art historian must absolutely avoid aesthetics, if that means making judgments of pure aesthetic value. For Thausing art history’s principal pursuit is what would later be classified as strict, objective connoisseurship, with a Morellian kind of attention to detail. In his relatively short but incisive analysis of Riegl’s methodological innovations, Rampley broadly agrees with other recent authors on Riegl, such as Diana Reynolds Cordileone, in delineating a fin-de-siècle turn away from empiricism and toward a new stress on subjectivity, translating Riegl’s elusive term “Kunstwollen” as “art drive” (Diana Reynolds Cordileone, Alois Riegl in Vienna, 1875–1905: An Institutional Biography, Burlington: Ashgate, 2014).

Even though issues of art-historical method are dealt with in most sections of Rampley’s book, they are not dominant. Rather, his principal stress is on a “situational logic and ideological and institutional factors that shaped art-historical practices in Austria-Hungary” (2). The Vienna School of Art History is a book about the cultural politics of the empire as a whole. It appears that German-speaking historians of art historiography have so far not been able to tackle the empire’s Slavic hinterlands; only some English-language articles, recently republished, by Ján Bakoš from Slovakia gave a guidance for the period before 1918 (Ján Bakoš, Discourse and Strategies: The Role of the Vienna School in Shaping Central European Approaches to Art History and Related Discourses, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2013). The major issue in greater Austria was the interweaving of, or, often enough, the clashes between German speakers and one or other of the Slavic people. A major concern was finding answers to the question: does this or that style, this or that group of works, belong to “Germany” or to another nation or ethnicity? Most fascinating is the development of art history in Bohemia, the land of the Czechs; its institutionalization in Prague ran in close parallel with that of Vienna. The scene was dominated by the disputes between the Germans of Prague and the Czechs. In the Galician cultural capital, Cracow, art history was also institutionalized during the 1860s to 1880s. But it was primarily an inner-Polish affair, recognized as such by the Austrian authorities. Since then the Cracow School of Art History has formed a more tightly closed circle than even the Vienna School. Complicating the situation within the Austrian Empire was the fact that Vienna’s cultural-political spokespersons, among them Eitelberger, vehemently opposed purely political forms of nationalism. They saw greater Austria as a state where ethnic diversity could flourish, but it had to stay within the cultural sphere; if it went beyond, there would be the danger of destabilizing the country as a whole. This, in turn, lent further ambiguity to constructions of an identity of the “inner,” German-speaking, Austrian lands (see Magdalena Kunińska, Historia Sztuki M. Sokoƚowskiego, PhD diss, University of Cracow, 2014; Stefan Muthesius, “The Cracow School of Modern Art History: The Creation of a Method and an Institution, 1850–1880,” Journal of Art Historiography 8 [June 2013]).

Rampley deals with these complex debates by concentrating on several major new subfields of art history. The first is Baroque architecture, something that German-language art history had seemingly not been aware of before 1880. In the writings of the Swiss art historians Jacob Burckhardt and Heinrich Wölfflin, the newly foregrounded style appeared firmly embedded in the time-honored Italian art world, while in the Austrian Empire it was immediately instrumentalized by nationalist cultural politics. The second-generation Viennese art historian Albert Ilg constructed elaborate claims of an Austrianness, and in particular a Viennese genius loci, prevalent, he held, under the reign of eighteenth-century Hapsburg Empress Maria Theresia—even though at that time Austria still formed part of the old All-German Empire. This “Viennese Baroque” now appeared as the counterpart to what many Germans in the new German-Prussian Empire held to be “their” “German Renaissance.” In Prague, however, German art historians claimed the rich Baroque monuments to belong to German culture, whereby “German” comprised the whole of Germany, including Bavaria. Initially the Czechs concurred, as for them Baroque was the style which had gone hand in hand with the German, Hapsburg “appropriation” of Czech lands from the early seventeenth century onwards. By 1900, however, younger Czech art historians—nota bene mostly pupils of the Vienna School—had begun to celebrate an “Old Prague” with its rich Baroque and Rococo monuments as genuine Czech heritage. Increasingly, art historians felt certain that by means of a refined formal analysis they could plausibly distinguish between an Austrian, Bohemian, Bavarian, and any other regional version of a style, regardless of whether such labels could then serve political aims.

Rampley’s second example of a newly discovered art form is “folk art,” a much wider complex of issues that take him well beyond the confines of academic art-history writing. The quite sudden, intense liking of abstract and brightly colored patterns on textiles was a Europe-wide phenomenon, first coming to wider notice at the Paris 1867 World Fair. Austria-Hungary became a major player in the propagation of these crafts, especially as far as its Slavic regions were concerned. Decisive here were the collecting activities of another major institution in Vienna, the new Museum of Applied Arts (Museum für Kunst und Industrie), also founded by Eitelberger, as well as numerous regional applied arts museums. Again, the authorities in Vienna were faced with what they feared to be the problem of nationalism. Diversity at the level of “primitive” crafts could be taken as an illustration of a harmonious multi-ethnic state, but any kind of political association would have appeared dangerous. A problem regarding Germanness could not arise here, as Austria’s German population was not seen as engaging, or as having engaged, in a folk art of its own—though, of course, such a constellation fortified the image of Vienna as the colonialist master over its hinterlands. By the end of the century, these arguments were somewhat defused by more strictly economical and new anthropological points of view. Closely related is Rampley’s further section on the way in which these ethnic complexities were seen within a larger and simplified context of “the West” vs. “the Orient.” The “folk art” of the Hungarians and the South Slavs could be seen at least as having partly derived from the “East.” This widened the perspective well beyond the empire, and at this point the bête noire of the Vienna School, the often grotesquely nationalistic and at times anti-Semitic Josef Strzygowski is brought in, with his new essentialism of a “North” and “East” vs. the Classical “West” and “South.”

A further section deals with the very different issue of the Viennese art historians’ relationship to the modern art of their day. Rampley investigates the politics of some of the Secessionist projects as well as the way in which Franz Wickhoff, author of one of the school’s most celebrated investigations, that of the sixth-century manuscript known as the Vienna Genesis, wrote a vigorous defence of a planned cycle of wall paintings by Gustav Klimt in the main Vienna University building. At stake is a parallelism, the way in which the art historian emphasizes purely formal similarities across the centuries. At this point one is not quite sure of the relevance within this too sparingly illustrated book of large photos of Prussian-German Bismarck Monuments, simply because Strzygowski praised them in his, generally speaking, “deeply flawed” 1907 book on modern art (158–64). Rampley’s last section is devoted to heritage protection. It serves as a kind of summary, returning to the issues of nationalism and colonialism in the conservation practices in the regions as well as dealing with Riegl’s and Dvořak’s attempts to systematize what for them were very different and often conflicting elements that make up the definition of heritage.

“To consider the social, political, and national factors . . .” wrote Eitelberger in 1877 (142). The breadth and depth of Rampley’s book seem to bring home the usefulness of precisely this approach for an understanding of how the new art history emerged. To put it explicitly: from its beginnings, the schools of art history were the servants of the state, with all the vicissitudes that arose from the complex Hapsburg rule. But such an approach also constitutes a very specific methodological decision, which can often be countered by differing approaches, and so one could construct here a view that runs exactly counter to Rampley’s. One of the major aims of the much-cited liberalism of Eitelberger’s period after the 1848 Revolution, especially in German-language lands, was to create an independent academic sphere, a realm that was not subject to political whims and was free of the preconceptions tied to the teaching of art. Instead, the institution was wholly devoted to what was defined as the ethos of truth-finding. The chief trajectory for the whole of the period under discussion, whether of an empiricist or a romanticist-idealist persuasion, was to render art history’s methods art-specific, to make them appear distinct and independent from other pursuits in the humanities. It must be remembered that the principal field of investigation, certainly among all German-speaking art historians until the First World War, was Italy, with Netherlandish, French, and German art distantly trailing. “All art by modern cultured peoples stems directly from Greece,” Rampley quotes Wickhoff (166). It was principally around the seemingly supra-national field of Classical art, in the widest sense of that word, that art history’s own new methods were developed. Moreover, by 1900 new art values of pure “Form und Farbe” had been formulated, with even stronger claims to universal validity. In his analysis of the heritage movement, Riegl opposed an ahistorical “pure art value” to “historical value” and “age value” (“reiner Kunstwert,” “. . . Geschlossenheit [completeness/cohesion] in Form und Farbe [color],” Alois Riegl, “Der moderne Denkmalskultus . . .” (1903), in Alois Riegl, Gesammelte Aufsätze, Augsburg-Wien: Benno Filser, 1929, 147, 181). The new Polish School of Art History in Cracow maintained that serious academic study and patriotism do not mix, especially when investigating the history of one’s own country. Dvořák’s “geistiges” element that he sees in later medieval art as well as in the art of El Greco, should be, as Rampley rightly does, translated as “spiritual,” in the sense of an outer-worldly irrationalism, rather than blandly as “spirit.” Lastly, the new widespread appreciation of “folk art,” initiated by connoisseurs and folklorists from many European centers, was based first of all on the pleasure elicited, again, by its forms, by its “simple” geometrical patterns and vivid colors, however much they were then associated with diverse geographically specific “folk” heritages. Twentieth-century art history was to see frequent alternations between a proclaimed autonomy and its instrumentalization. Rampley has contributed very substantially to an understanding of the latter.