Page - 260 - in Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, Volume LIX

Evonne Levy260 If we struggle today with what to do with Sedlmayr, Schapiro it seems struggled too, but in the end, came to a judgment. Schapiro’s de- cision to review the ‘KWF’ shows that Schapiro decided for critical engagement, calling attention to the dangers of the work while expressing his personal judgment of Sedlmayr by breaking off their collegial relationship. On Schapiro’s side the letters are most revealing about the attitude he struck towards the work of Sedlmayr and his col- leagues in his 1936 review, “The New Viennese School,” an essay full of ambivalence, praising on the one hand and sharply critical (of Sedlmayr above all) on the other. Wood says that Schapiro may have known of Sedlmayr’s membership in the Nazi party and of his break with Otto Pächt – we now know he knew much more than this. But Wood also says that “he could not have fore- seen the full extent to which the potential for nonsense in Riegl’s syntheticism would return in the later Sedlmayr’s writing, virulent theses on modern art and culture. I would argue that he already had a good sense of this.69 Let us consider why Schapiro would have been sympathetic at all? Later in life Schapiro lamented the “lack of serious questions” being asked in the American academy at the time.70 As a student, in December 1926, Schapiro wrote to his wife from Paris, for instance, that although Richard Hamann’s photographic campaigns in France were impressive, his criteria were weak: ‘In spite of all the detailed studies, and meth- odological investigations, & the contempt for ‘theoretische’ works, his reasons for any solution are usually ‘feeling,’ ‘Stil’, something looks ear- lier, or later, related or unrelated – with nothing more precise.”71 Like Sedlmayr and his colleagues in Vienna, Schapiro was critical of intuitive ap- proaches to style and was engaged in a similar critique of an American school of positivism through a structuralist project that involved close looking without connoisseurship. Linda Seidel has characterized his efforts as being “directed towards systematic analysis of works of art and the formulation of an approach that constructed disciplined strategies in that pursuit.” 72 While Schapiro captured the investigative in- tensity and imagination of the younger Vienna School in his review, he is in the end more intent on pointing out its dangers. There are two main lines of attack of Sedlmayr’s work in particular, and the Vienna version of structuralism in general. First is that it lacks a historical basis: “The school lacks an adequate conception of history to direct their historical interpretations in the sense of that scientific rigor that they require in the analysis of forms.“73 What Schapiro meant by this is laid out in a letter dated 5 May 1936 to Henri Focillon that followed a discussion they had in which Schapiro posed a question informed by the same issue raised in his critique of the Vienna school: When I asked you at Columbia if it were pos- sible to explain the form of a cathedral and the historical emergence of given types by purely plastic intentions, without taking into account the specific institutional uses, the social interests and practices, the stage of material develop- ment, etc., you at once identified my question with “sociological” interpretation in the man- ner of Taine, and you declared, if I remember rightly, that this method was long ago refuted and out of fashion. I am not a disciple of Taine; if there is any social thinker whose views guide me, I would say that he is Karl Marx, rather than Taine; and there is all the difference in 69 Wood, Vienna School Reader (cit. n. 6), p. 36. 70 Ibid., p. 565. 71 Seidel, Meyer Schapiro (cit. n. 16), p. xvii. 72 L. Seidel, ‘Shalom yehudin!’ Meyer Schapiro’s early years in art history, in: Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 27, 1997, p. 559, pp. 563–564. 73 Schapiro, The New Viennese School (cit. n. 11), p. 260.