Page - 236 - in Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, Volume LIX

Evonne Levy236 war and openly display an ongoing engagement with authors and ideas that reached prominence under National Socialism.3 The interest of these authors has been, if I can generalize, in the demonstration of the close re- lationship between Sedlmayr’s politics and his art history. And although the question as to whether ideas can be rehabilitated (as a corollary of the post-war rehabilitation of people) is only rarely directly addressed (most notably in Benjamin Binstock’s provocatively titled “Springtime for Sedlmayr? The Future of Nazi Art History”4), it is implicit in every analysis of the work that to put Sedlmayr’s concepts and categories to new use after such a demonstration is to per- petuate the goals of their original use (especially given Sedlmayr’s methodological ambitions).5 In looking closely here at new evidence of Sedl- mayr’s political beliefs, my point is that these documents will beg the question of whether Sedlmayr’s work can be used (rather than dis- cussed) now, whether we believe in such prohibi- tions or not. The work that Sedlmayr published between 1925 and 1933 occupies more of a grey area than the post-Anschluss publications and just in the past decade this early work has been vigorously discussed in light of Sedlmayr’s National Social- ism and its value for art history today openly de- bated. Christopher Wood’s ‘The Vienna School Reader’ (2000), which published the first English translations of two of Sedlmayr’s essays, was, on the one hand, driven by a return to art history of what he calls a “taste” for “the alchemy of for- malism” and, on the other hand provoked by the already twenty-year old debates over the politi- cal dimension of the work of Martin Heidegger and early Paul De Man. If Wood appears to give us permission to read Sedlmayr (not again but in North America really for the first time), his thoughtful and challenging introduction leaves the reader little room to redeploy Sedlmayr’s ideas, at least not without circumspection. For while Wood has helped to draw the line between Riegl and the 2nd Vienna school he foregrounds the fact that Sedlmayr’s work has been “repeat- edly invoked as a cautionary tale about the perils of ungrounded interpretation” and agrees with Joseph Leo Koerner that, “In the end, it is impos- sible to normalize Sedlmayr.”6 But Wood also appreciates early Sedlmayr’s complexity, using a positive remark by Walter Benjamin as an authoritative support for a re- thinking of Sedlmayr and Pächt’s formalism and invoking Adorno’s partial agreement with Sedlmayr’s critique of modernity in ‘Verlust der Mitte’ (1948) in 1951 to allow us to consider the value of Sedlmayr the unveiler.7 If at important 87; A. Ottenbacher, Kunstgeschichte in ihrer Zeit. Zu Hans Sedlmayrs ‘abendländischer Sendung’, in: Kritische Berichte, 29, 2001, p. 74. For a more sympathetic take on Sedlmayr see the biographical essay by his former student from 1935 to 1939, E. Frodl-Kraft, Hans Sedlmayr (1896-1984), in: Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, 44, 1991, pp. 7–46. 3 The opening epigraph in ‘Verlust der Mitte’, for example, is an ideologically neutral quote of Wilhelm Pinder. H. Sedlmayr, Verlust der Mitte. Die bildende Kunst des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts als Symbol der Zeit, Salzburg 1948, p. 7. Previously noted by Justin, ‘Tanz mir den Hitler’ (cit. n. 2), p. 62. It is also troubling that Sedlmayr never addressed his wartime activities. 4 B. Binstock, Springtime for Sedlmayr? The Future of Nazi Art History, in: Wiener Schule. Erinnerungen und Perspektiven (= Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, 53, 2004), pp. 73–86. 5 Nonetheless, Sedlmayr was included in Heinrich Dilly’s small selection of figures in his anthology of Altmeister moderner Kunstgeschichte, Berlin 1999. 6 C. Wood, “Introduction,” The Vienna School Reader. Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s, New York 2000, p. 15. For a brilliant and devastating reading of both Sedlmayr’s Brueghel essay of 1934 and Pächt’s reading of Fouquet see J. L. Koerner, Albrecht Dürer’s Pleasures of the World, in: W. Haug Warning (ed.), Das Fest, Munich 1989, pp. 193–197.