Page - 257 - in Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, Volume LIX

sedlmayr and schapiro correspond 257 than racial. The distinction between political and racial anti-Semitism, is, however, itself a product of anti-Semitism and is a distinction based on false logic. Sedlmayr himself demonstrates in the letters how pointless this distinction is when he flies into a self-justifying rage at his colleague and friend Bruno Fürst over the mishandling of Schapiro’s es- say, referring to the “tactics of the local Jews.” To Sedlmayr’s racial charge that Jews are ge- borenen ‘bäsen’ Kapitalisten and dass das Judentum seit Jahrhunderten keinen Bauernstand in dem Sinn wie die anderen Völker besitzt Schapiro re- sponds that this is simply nonsense. In self-defense Sedlmayr says that when he terms Jews den ge- borenen ‘bäsen’ Kapitalisten he says so ohne Affekt, rein als Beschreibung Ihrer Methode, frustrated that in spite of his “objectivity” Schapiro throws up his hands because ‘Mit so einem bornierten Reaktionär kann man nicht sprechen.’ Sedlmayr’s patience is tried; he cannot understand why Schapiro’s attitude has changed when his earlier tone “was neutral.” It should be obvious by now that there are numerous aspects of this correspondence that are of interest for the history of the discipline. For historiographers there is a surplus of philological clues about what they were reading, what they thought of their colleagues’ work, substantia- tion of their scholarly views, their collegial net- works and on Sedlmayr’s side preoccupation with the state of various journals (‘Kritische Ber- ichte’, ‘Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen’). With these letters in hand Schapiro’s published and unpublished work, especially around the mid-1930s but also into the 1950s, should be re- examined. It may be that Schapiro was reacting against Sedlmayr (including his post-war work) more than has been obvious.60 The letters sup- port further investigation of a shift around 1933- 34 in Sedlmayr’s work. For instance, I am in- clined to read two essays published in 1934 in this light: in the short article on Della Porta’s con- tribution to the Capitoline Sedlmayr reframes a question he had considered as a pure problem of structural analysis in an article of 1931. He now re-reads the same monument, begun by Michel- angelo and completed by Della Porta, through Croce’s idea of the inseparability of body and soul, a work “von zwei verschiedenen Körpern unter dem oberflächlichen Schein eines und desselben Körpers.”61 I would also consider “Brueghels Macchia” as a personal essay in addition to a cri- tique of (early) modernity: that Sedlmayr’s inter- est in the “spiritual detachment” and “isolation” of Brueghel’s peasant, their inability to “commu- nicate their feelings,” that they “hardly any show any emotional contact with the others” may be, amongst other things, a projection of his own anxieties as he shed his own mask and watched his intellectual community break down. He speaks of a departure from a “natural” way of seeing to one that is “correct” and “cold.” The viewer of Brueghel’s paintings in this essay fails in empa- thy; his experience before the breakdown of the logic of the picture is described by Sedlmayr as an “experience of shock and disturbance, in sensitive viewers even of anxiety and something approach- ing fear.”62 Brueghel’s picture, he says “is wearing a mask”: “Behind the mask is hidden a second face about which the first betrays nothing.” 60 Compare, for instance, Sedlmayr’s account of Cezanne in his 1948, ‘Verlust der Mitte’ (cit. n. 3), pp. 123-127, to Schapiro’s in Paul Cezanne [1952] 3rd ed., New York 1965, 29. Walter Cahn was kind to share these thoughts about the impact of this correspondence many years later: “I myself heard Schapiro express great bitterness when I took his course of Early Christian art around 1960 at Columbia about Sedlmayr’s reinstatement in Munich by the Ame- rican occupation authorities after the war, which was probably the first time I heard his name mentioned. Some of Schapiro’s negative feelings about the reactionary cult of peasantry and the earth also enter into his critique of Heidegger’s article on Van Gogh’s shoes from his later years.” Walter Cahn, email to the author, 25 April 2010. 61 H. Sedlmayr, Das Capitol des della Porta, in: Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 3, 1934, p. 264. 62 There is some resonance in this language also with Ernst Jünger’s “poetical and phenomenological description of the