Josef Strzygowski

Josef Strzygowski (born the March 7th, 1862, with Biala; died the January 2nd, 1941, with Vienna) is a historian of known art especially for its racist ideology and its recourse to a method specialist in comparative literature. It is attached to the school of history of the art of Vienna.

Biography

It is born in Austrian Silesia, in a city now located in Poland. After having contemplated a professional path in textile industry as his father - he is apprentice in a textile factory in 1880 - he is registered in 1882 at the University of Vienna, then with that of Munich: it written there a thesis on the iconography of the baptism of the Christ, published in 1885 under the title Ikonographie der Taufe Christi .

It spends the three following years of its life to Rome, for a study on the painter Cimabue, Cimabue und Rom (1887) which underlines the Byzantine sources of its work. Later in its life, he explains why this work brought it to the question which defines all its research thereafter: “What Rome, what is really the Italian art and European?”

After its Roman stay, Strzygowski travels to Thessalonique, the Mont Athos, Saint-Pétersbourg and Moscow, where it is familiarized with Byzantine and Russian art. In 1892, it is named at the university of Graz, but in 1894 and 1895 it remains with the Cairo to study art protobyzantin and Islamic art: it carries out a catalog of art copte Museum of Cairo. On its return, it enters an intense activity of publication in the field of the Byzantine and Islamic art for which it is regarded as a pioneer.

Its first polemical work goes back to this time: the East Romanian oder: Beiträge zur Geschichte DER spätantiken und früchristlichen Kunst (1901) ( the East or Rome: contributions to the history of the late Antique art and the first Christian art ). Starting from sources as various as art and the sculpture palmyréniens, the Anatolian sarcophagi, the late ancient ivories of Egypt and the fabrics coptes, Strzygowski supports, in terms openly racial and often racists, than the change of style in late Antiquity was the product of Eastern” or “Semitic” influence an “dominant.

Orient oder Rom is an attack explicitly directed against the work on the Genesis of Vienna ( Die Wiener Genesis , 1895) of the historian of the art Viennese Franz Wickhoff, which postulated a Roman origin with the late ancient style, thesis taken again and developed by Alois Riegl in its book Spätrömische Kunstindustrie , also published in 1901. The controversy which followed lasted of the decades, without knowing final solution, and contributed to establish the late Antique art like an academic research field with whole share.

In 1909, died of Wickhoff, Strzygowski succeeds to him the head of the University of Vienna, grace partly to the importance of its work, but also following political operations in which perhaps the archduke François Ferdinand takes part. Its nomination results in a durable schism among the historians from art, Strzygowski opponent with max Dvorak and Julius von Schlosser: the fracture is increased when Strzygowski creates its own research center within the university, the Wiener Institut or Erstes kunsthistorisches Institut .

Strzygowski continues to publish in a large variety of fields, keeping a certain preference for arts Byzantine and Islamic, but also treating Armenian, Scandinavian and Slavic Art. It gives many public conferences to which readily radical students of the Pan-German movement assist. The Pan-German inclinations of Strzygowski have been already known for several years with its work with success of 1907, Die bildende Kunst der Gegenwart ( visual arts of the future ), in which it rents paintings of Arnold Böcklin and invites some with a new German artist-hero to reject the heritage of traditional Antiquity and Rebirth.

It leaves to the retirement the University Vienna in 1933 but founds the following year the Gesellschaft für vergleichende Kunstforschung (Company for the history of art specialist in comparative literature) to put forward its theories. He dies in 1941.

Influence

The work of Strzygowski is characterized because it is based only on comparisons of form, with depends on the historical context, and because it exalte continuously people of “North” and of “the East” by showing a marked scorn for the “Mediterranean culture”. This tendency led it to accept the racist ideology of the Nazis.

If this defective methodology and its racial prejudices largely discredited its work, the width of its centers of interest played a part in the academic development of the history of Islamic and Jewish art secular. It counted among its students of the historians of art such as Otto Demus, Fritz Novotny, or Ernst Diez, which continued successfully their research in these fields without to subscribe to the ideology of their Master.

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