Journal Article

Jewish students in Strzygowski's Vienna Institute and the study of Jewish art: a forgotten chapter in the history of the Vienna School 1

Young, Michael

2023

Overview

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.

• Publisher: Journal of Art Historiography
• Subject: 19th century / 20th century / Antisemitism / Art history / College professors / Historians / Humanism / Jewish art / Jewish people / Reputations / Strzygowski, Josef / Students