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After enduring a prolonged damnatio memoriae, the Viennese art historian Josef Strzygowski (1862-1941) has been twice-born in recent years as a harbinger of global art history. To be sure, in those parts of the globe to whose art he first drew attention his reputation has never waned. At the height of his career before his retirement in 1933, his international celebrity had no equal among any of his colleagues; the Swedish art historian Johnny Roosval nominated him for the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1931 he was invited, along with Béla Bartók, Karel Capek, Henri Focillon, Thomas Mann, John Masefield, Gilbert Murray and others, to participate in a colloquy-debate about zLes Arts et les lettres' at the League of Nations. He was invited to teach in Breslau, Halle, Shantiniketan (India), Abo (Sweden), Leyden, Warsaw, Dorpat (Estonia) and Bryn Mawr. Recent evaluations of his work cleave into roughly two opposing camps. The first distinguishes between a 'good' and creative 'early' Strzygowski, and a bad later one who suffered a marked intellectual and physical decline in the closing years of his life, when he became preoccupied with race and Jewish perfidy, and wrote approvingly of National Socialism.2 The second group sees in nuce and from the beginning elements of those sinister preoccupations to which Strzygowski eventually gave full-throated expression, so vehement that it irreparably damaged his reputation and legacy.3 One aspect of Strzygowski that has received very little attention is the large number of Jewish students he attracted, cultivated and supported, and his promotion of the study of Jewish art. The goal of this study is two-fold: to identify the distinctive character of Strzygowski's anti-Semitism in an attempt to understand why it proved no obstacle to the large numbers of Jewish students he was able to attract, and to examine the work of four of Strzygowski's Jewish students who actually took up his challenge to study Jewish art.

In early 20th century, the art historical institute in Vienna led by Josef Strzygowski (1862-1941) offered the unique opportunity to study the arts of Asia and the Middle East at university level (fig. I).· 1 The rich material repository for the study of 'Oriental' art - consisting of ca. 4000 books, 52.000 photographs and images, and 20.000 lantern slides - was unparalleled in Europe.2 It attracked a large number of students and turned the institute into a hub for Asian and Islamic art. Numerous guest auditors from all over Europe and abroad further enriched the lively community.3 Between 1910 and 1933, more than one hundred students supervised by Strzygowski completed their dissertations on Northern European, Austrian, Persian, Islamic, Chinese, Japanese and Indian art.4 Suzanne Marchand has directed attention to the strikingly Targe number of female students' at Strzygowski's institute, 'who would make careers outside Central Europe and remain relatively free from racist ideologies' The article pursues the twofold aim of combining a historical intersectional study of the Vienna school with a critique of patriarchal patterns of historiography. This study aims to contribute to research of the co-constitutive relation of art and identity markers such as gender and race.The article consists of three parts: two historical studies (part I and III) embrace a theoretical section on patriarchal patterns in historiography (part II). In the first part, Melanie Stiassny's presidency of the Society of Friends of Asian Art and Culture is the centerpiece of the historical investigation. The society was one of the liveliest in inter war Vienna, and Stiassny, as its managing vice-president, organized exhibitions, broadcasts and adult education, edited the journal of the society, and published articles on Chinese art. Knowledge about Stiassny and the infrastructure of the society sheds light on the processes of valorizing Asian art. It furthermore gives insights into how Strzygowskian graduates built networks and professionalized.23 The second part, the theoretical section, draws on feminist, gender and intersectional studies to analyse patterns and conventions of historiography. A close reading of several articles on Viennese art history reveals how androcentric criteria shape historiography to date. The third part adopts some of the androcentric historiographical criteria such as 'success' to comparatively trace careers of 'successful' women and men art historians.24 Interestingly, their migratory trajectories reveal a gendered and raced pattern of migration: Women and non-European men art historians often found their first academic positions at universities in the Middle East or Asia, whereas European men began their careers at museums in Vienna and Berlin. Eventually, most worked in area studies departments at US-American universities.

The history of oriental art historical studies at the University of Vienna provides insights into the academic history of the first half of the twentieth century. It reveals parallelisms with turn-of-the-century modernisms, and it narrates the influence of political and intellectual transformations brought about by nationalism. The field of oriental art historical studies at the University of Vienna does not have a place in the writings on the 'Vienna School of Art History'.1 Nevertheless, the history of the University's Institute of Art History was marked by a pronounced division between 1909 and 1933, which led to the formation of two departments, each of which adopted a topical approach to art historiographies, with the Orient on one side and Roman Europe on the other. The Vienna School legacy is perceived to have continued with the latter; the other department, under the direction of Josef Strzygowski (1862-1941), is either omitted or appears as an anomaly. The divide between the two departments finds voice in Strzygowski's 1901 book, Orient oder Rom, where he contested Rome-centred historiographies and declared his position against the Viennese scholarship, calling it a 'Wickhoff monstrosity of the Roman imperial art' (Wickhoffsche Monstrum der römischen Reichskunst).2 Yet, while Strzygowski appears as a single controversial figure in this divide, the workings of the department that he took over in 1909 present a broader narrative of oriental art historical scholarship and its transformations through its other scholars and the scope of its courses.The present paper takes the standpoint of one of these scholars, Ernst Diez (1878-1961). As assistant of Strzygowski and later professor in Denkmalkunde des Orients (Cultural Heritage Studies of the Orient), his standpoint offers a fresh account of the Strzygowski department. Also, his leave of absence to teach in the United States in 1926 and his return to the University of Vienna in 1939 presents a trajectory of shifting viewpoints on the history of the oriental art historical studies at the University.

Between March 1988 and May 1990 I met Ernst Gombrich on a monthly basis to conduct a series of interviews with him on the topic of his life and work, starting with his teenage childhood in Vienna. This was to form the basis for a critical analysis of his thought, a kind of intellectual biography. Then, at the end of 1991, Didier Eribon published Ce que l'image nous dit, a set of interviews that included much material that had also emerged in our conversations. I saw little point in pursuing the project and subsequently turned my attentions to Viennese art historiography.The following transcript dates from 10th March 1988. There is some overlap with Didier's conversation but also a bit more. I am also adding the two obituaries that I mentioned to Ernst as representing the UK/US view of Strzygowski's work from 1941/2. To illustrate the range of material published by Strzygowski's I. Kunsthistorischen Instituts der Universität Wien I have also added a separate PDF of a sheet tipped into my personal copy of Alfred Karasek-Langer, Verzeichnis der Schriften von Josef Strzygowski. Mit einer Einführung von Karl Ginnart, Klagenfurt: Im Kommissionsverlag Artur Kollitsch 1933. It may be accessed here.The interview is intended to supplement this journal's publication of Karl Johns' translation of Josef Strzygowski, Die Krisis der Geisteswissenschaften (1923). Ernst attended Strzygowski's lectures in his first term at the University of Vienna, October 1928.

Among several publications written by the Vienna School of Art History professor Josef Strzygowski (1862 – 1941) during the first few decades of the twentieth century, “Das Problem der persischen Kunst” (1911), deserves a detailed art-historiographical investigation. Published in the Orientalistische Literaturzeitung, this article is of particular interest as a mirror of stormy exchanges among two of the early 20th-century giants in the emerging research field of what came to be known later as “Islamic art history” – namely the Habsburg art historian Josef Strzygowski and the Prussian archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld (1879-1948).

The paper discusses the ‘discovery’ of Mughal painting at Vienna and the pioneering research dedicated to it from the 1920s onwards by Josef Strzygowski and his circle. The focus is on the so-called Millionenzimmer at Schönbrunn Palace which was decorated in the 1760s under Maria Theresa with collages made of cut-up paintings of the Mughal empire. The dialectics of this unique decoration scheme are unravelled which emerges as a destructive and at the same time emphatic appropriation of the ‘other’. An additional interest is provided by the connection to Rembrandt and Schellinks who copied Mughal miniatures for which the prototypes appear in the Millionenzimmer. The conclusion draws a parallel to Mughal artistic appropriations.

After enduring a prolonged damnatio memoriae, the Viennese art historian Josef Strzygowski (1862-1941) has been twice-born in recent years as a harbinger of global art history. To be sure, in those parts of the globe to whose art he first drew attention his reputation has never waned. At the height of his career before his retirement in 1933, his international celebrity had no equal among any of his colleagues; the Swedish art historian Johnny Roosval nominated him for the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1931 he was invited, along with Béla Bartok, Karel Čapek, Henri Focillon, Thomas Mann, John Masefield, Gilbert Murray and others, to participate in a colloquy-debate about 'Les Arts et les lettres' at the League of Nations. He was invited to teach in Breslau, Halle, Shantiniketan (India), Abo (Sweden), Leyden, Warsaw, Dorpat (Estonia) and Bryn Mawr. Recent evaluations of his work cleave into roughly two opposing camps. The first distinguishes between a 'good' and creative 'early' Strzygowski, and a bad later one who suffered a marked intellectual and physical decline in the closing years of his life, when he became preoccupied with race and Jewish perfidy, and wrote approvingly of National Socialism.2 The second group sees in nuce and from the beginning elements of those sinister preoccupations to which Strzygowski eventually gave full-throated expression, so vehement that it irreparably damaged his reputation and legacy.3 One aspect of Strzygowski that has received very little attention is the large number of Jewish students he attracted, cultivated and supported, and his promotion of the study of Jewish art. The goal of this study is two-fold: to identify the distinctive character of Strzygowski's anti-Semitism in an attempt to understand why it proved no obstacle to the large numbers of Jewish students he was able to attract, and to examine the work of four of Strzygowski's Jewish students who actually took up his challenge to study Jewish art.

In my inquiries neither Josef Strzygowski (1862-1941) nor his followers were mentioned. The damnatio memoriae that Strzygowski and his group suffered in the 1970s in Vienna, and with them their work on Mughal art, can be explained: after World War II Strzygowski, the leading historian of non-European art in Vienna and since 1909 holder of one of the two chairs of art history at the University, had become persona non grata because of his racist ideology, his rigid methodology, and his genius at making personal enemies. There was also a general reluctance to expand art history beyond Europe and take in much of Asian art. The hostile attitude towards everything connected with Strzygowski endured. What one notices in the revisionist considerations of Strzygowski is the failure to observe that the wide range of his interests included Mughal art. Characteristically for his object-based approach his attention was drawn to this area by three outstanding holdings of Mughal paintings in Vienna. One group, about 260 Mughal and Deccani paintings which in the early 1760s were used in rocaille cartouches to decorate the so-called Millionenzimmer, one of the audience rooms of the Empress Maria Theresa in the Schönbrunn Palace, was published by Strzygowski and Glück in 1923.10 The other was a group of sixty-one paintings in a manuscript of the Hamzanama produced some time after the middle of the sixteenth century by the newly formed Mughal court workshop for the young Emperor Akbar (1556-1605). The manuscript originally consisted of 1,400 large pages of illustrations on cloth, each backed by nineteen lines of nastaliq text on paper. The sixty-one paintings were acquired during the Viennese World Exhibition of 1873 and are today in the Museum für Angewandte Kunst or MAK (the Museum of Applied Art). They were first published in 1925 in a monograph by Strzygowski's favourite student, Heinrich Glück (1889-1930).11 The third group consisted of two albums with Indian miniatures in the Handschriftensammlung (manuscripts department) of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (Austrian National Library).12 The three holdings provided the material of the final volume dealing with Mughal paintings, which was written by Strzygowski together with Glück, Stella Kramrisch and Emmy Wellesz under the title Asiatische Miniaturenmalerei im Anschluss an Wesen und Werden der Mogulmalerei (Asian miniature painting in connection with the nature and development of Mughal painting).13 The aim of this volume was to present a synthesis of the two earlier volumes, followed by a study placing Mughal painting in the larger context of Islamic and Asian painting according to the organising principles of analysis that Strzygowski promoted: Kunde (fact and figures, basic identifiers of a work of art - artist, provenance and period), Wesen (nature, essence, formal qualities) und Entwicklung (development, global movement and transformation of art forms), followed by Willensmächte (powers of will) and Bewegungskräfte (powers of movement - in this case, the artistic exchange between India and Europe).

a bibliography of writings by and on Josef Strzygowski (1862-1941)

Josef Strzygowski (1862-1941) is remembered primarily as attracting a Pan-Germanic audience when his early career and most prominent publications actually promoted materials from outside of the classical tradition then being overlooked or ignored. From the list of his students and their topics of study, it is clear that his audience was probably more diverse than most. The list of his publications and his students and their topics of study should give some idea of this. Some of his emphasis was actually typical of his time and place and reflected the growth in popular tourism and travel. His expeditions by camel to photograph remote architecture and sculpture in near eastern areas prone to earthquakes and plagued by armed conflicts have preserved many important examples of art that have since been damaged or lost.