Page - 237 - in Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, Volume LIX

sedlmayr and schapiro correspond 237 points he follows or agrees with Meyer Schapiro’s critique of Sedlmayr in 1936, Wood is not the communist and Jewish Schapiro who would try unsuccessfully to fish Benjamin out of Europe and later learn of his suicide; and because Wood wrote in 2000 and not in 1936 he could afford to find Sedlmayr’s pessimism more alive than Panofsky’s idealism (This in spite of his statement that “A normalization of Sedlmayr would entail a painful, even obscene ‘reading through’ of his Nazism”8). Perhaps because Wood had already rehearsed the reasons why a “normalization” of Sedlmayr would be “obscene,” Frederick Schwartz is em- boldened to cast Sedlmayr’s work in a very sym- pathetic intellectual context.9 After all, how many times shall we rehearse the same facts of Sedlmayr’s history? His project focuses on “in- cursions into enemy territory” by the Frankfurt school and thus he is fascinated by “uncanny proximity” of the concerns of Sedlmayr and Benjamin, asking why the brilliant promise of Sedlmayr’s clear vision of art history’s problems lapsed into “nonsense,” or “falls into farce”? He is interested in Sedlmayr as a “fascinating failure” because he finds him so well informed of the art historical debates of the time; because he believes in the rigor Sedlmayr intended to infuse into art history. He is more sympathetic to his work than he knows he should be for the principal reason that he finds Sedlmayr modern. Schwartz does not provide a response to his own question, “Is there anything – anything at all – that can be recouped from Sedlmayr’s project?” while de- ciding that Sedlmayr was a naïve in interdisci- plinary work.10 Between Schwartz and Wood, Aurenhammer and Binstock, there is, in other words, a discussion of Sedlmayr’s early work which takes full measure of the complexities of reading it in the light of his politics. Although there is no dispute over Sedlmayr’s party loyalties, until now there has emerged no explicit statement of his political views that would help us draw the line from his politics to his pre-Anschluss work in no uncertain terms. A cache of letters written by Sedlmayr to the Amer- ican art historian Meyer Schapiro in the period 1930-1935 now allows us to do so. The letters pre- date Schapiro’s largely critical review published in ‘The Art Bulletin’ in 1936 of the second vol- ume of the ‘Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen’ (henceforth ‘KWF’) that has become an impor- tant document in the reception of the work of Sedlmayr and his circle although scholars have not known of Schapiro’s direct contact with Sedlmayr.11 In what follows I will summarize these rich letters and offer some initial thoughts about the significance of this rare epistolary ex- change between a communist Jewish American (Lithuanian by birth) and an anti-Semitic Aus- trian Catholic member of the Nazi party. The papers of Meyer Schapiro, which were gifted to Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library after the death of Lillian Schapiro, have just been catalogued and are now accessible to scholars. The Sedlmayr corre- spondence is comprised by 21 letters written by Sedlmayr and one draft of a letter by Schapiro, about 50 manuscript pages in all. All but one let- ter written by Sedlmayr are in German and they are all typed. The correspondence, which begins 13 January 1930, is likely to have been stimulated by their meeting for Schapiro was in Vienna in 1930 (and again in 1931 and 1933). There are ref- erences in the letters to other Viennese scholars who Meyer Schapiro seems to have met (like 7 Wood, Vienna School Reader (cit. n. 6), pp. 16–17. 8 Wood, Vienna School Reader (cit. n. 6), p. 46. 9 F. Schwartz, Blind Spots. Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany, London 2005, p. 153. 10 Schwartz, Blind Spots (cit. n. 9), p. 162, pp. 168–169, pp. 176–177, p. 194. 11 M. Schapiro, The New Viennese School, in: The Art Bulletin, 18, 1936, pp. 258–266.