Assessment of Riegl’s concept of Kunstwollen in the context of applied and fine arts of the period

Alois Riegl was born in Vienna in 1858, where he died in 1905. Son of an official in a tobacco factory, he completed his studies in Vienna focussing on history and philosophy. He then passed to the Institute for Historic Researches, where he studied History of Art with Moritz Thausing. In 1886 he entered the Austrian Museum of Decorative Arts and the following year he was !appointed as director of the textiles department, where he remained until 1887, the year during which he took over Franz Wickhoff’s chair in History of Art at the University of Vienna. He dedicated the last part of his life to teaching and to the reorganisation of the Central Commission for the artistic and monumental protection and most importantly he started the systematic procedure of filing of the Austrian works of art. He was one of the members of what became known as the First Vienna School; a term that started to be used to indicate the modern methods of art history and the modern approaches to criticism within the Viennese University. The Viennese School of History of Art was an academic institution from which originated a new theoretical approach to the study of the history of art. The term Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte was coined by Julius Von Schlosser in one of his first writings about the Viennese history of art, where he took into account works of art that were created between the second half of 1800 to the 1920s.

Riegl’s contribution to the History of Art was of fundamental importance, due to the vastness of its horizons, to the depth of the method of investigation and for the particular tuning with the products of contemporary art. Riegl attributed the same level of dignity to all artistic products and to each artistic epoch, even to those that were typically defined as “decadent”.The re-evaluation of the so – called ‘minor arts’, which played such an important role within the chapters of the Secession and of the Wiener Werkstaette, finds with Riegl a theoretical furthering of great rigour. Riegl’s aim was that of noticing the fundamental traits of the style of each epoch, analysing the correspondence between the products of the various arts, also by considering the ornaments and decorative patterns. Regardless of the personality or ability of the maker, there is always a common denominator in the production of a given period at a given historical time. Starting from this idea, Riegl coined the term Kunstwollen. The German term is not easily translated into other languages, however we may assert that it fundamentally stands for “the artistic will”; the creative impulse which is nourished by the historical and cultural contexts, mirroring its basic values into a precise stylistic connotation. Riegl’s conservative philosophy of restoration was extremely modern, it postulated the diversity that was present even in the mechanic production of an object. In 1903 the same Riegl curated the exposition of these ideas in a project by an Austrian conservative legislative organisation. A central chapter of this text is the modern cult of monuments, centred on the different historic-aesthetic value attributed by the various epochs to the artistic products and on the irreplaceable role of the spectator that observes, on the man that meditates on the enigma of time that passes.

Kolomon Moser (attr. to) Owls – Detail of the facade of the Secession Building (Vienna, Austria)  

Wiener Werkstaette Pattern, Josef Hoffmann.

Riegl is configured as a totally opposite character to the studious Franz Wickhoff and for this reason he became so important. However, despite their differences, the two formed together the Vienna School of Art Historical Method. Riegl’s ideas are drawn from both the Positivist Historical Method – of which the leading figure was Max Buedinger and that held for the idea that history progresses to ever higher levels, as well as from the Scientific Method of Connosseurship, led by Giovanni Morelli. His interests were in fact in both, theory and interdisciplinary art history.The main characteristics of this new conception of the history of art can essentially be listed as three points: the first point considers the object no longer as a “monument” but as a “document”, and as such strictly linked to the historical period in which it has been produced. Secondly, the direct contact with the artistic object is placed in a way that leaves space to a technical evaluation, as well as of the stylistic and iconographic characters, sourcing from historic and philological documentsThirdly, all artistic objects are to be considered equally; therefore, we can speak of equity between the minor and major arts, removing all the barriers between fine and applied arts and overshooting the concepts of “progress” and “decadence” according to which all epochs bear the same dignity. Riegl and Wickhoff’s method was based on an empirical approach to art and on the denial of the view that particular periods of media of art experienced a degeneration of style. Wickhoff had a notable sensibility for the contemporary events that were happening in the world of art. In 1900, when Gustav Klimt caused ferocious critique with his decorations for the auditorium of the University of Vienna, Wickhoff took his defence; a position that was then explained by the same Wickhoff in a conference by the name Was ist haesslich? (What is ugly?). The author held for the thesis of relativism in the categories of beautiful and ugly in modern terms, that are not to be connected to the classicist vision of harmony and proportion, but to be studied in relation to the culture and the proposal of linguistic innovation of the contemporary artists (amongst which was the same Klimt).

Hygeia (detail of medicine); Gustav Klimt

Jurisprudence; Gustav Klimt

The different methodological approach adopted by Riegl obscured a number of directions that were later embraced by various twentieth’s century art historians as the likes of those belonging to the Formalist or Structuralist circles. In his 1893 Stilfragen (Problems of Style), Riegl accounted for the 1900’s fascination for flattened forms of ornamentation; a horror vacui that he attempted to explain through notions of surface decors and artistic representations that drew back from naturalism.The book historically examines the evolution of some decorative patterns (such as the lotus flower or the palmette) that were visible on the objects of applied art (ie., carpets or carved objects) and in sculptures and monuments within a temporal space of more than 5000 years of history. Symbols, motifs and decorative elements that drive in time. Riegl’s survey in the Stilfragen would look at oriental art, as well as at the Greek, Hellenistic, Islamic and Byzantine ones: in his theory Riegl aimed at demonstrating that the ornamental patterns registered in the works of art examined, were not derived from other technical processes nor from a simple imitation of nature, but they were instead iconographic and stylistic schemes with their own autonomy and independence. Moreover, it was his aim to highlight how these patterns were not the result of mere spontaneity or randomness. These derived from an uninterrupted evolution of the models, characterised in the various historical movements, by precise re-elaborations. These are identified with the impulse of artistic character defined by Riegl as Kunstwollen. In attributing to the ornament a certain potentiality at the same level of the major arts, Riegl put himself in close parallel with some of the ideas expressed by the Viennese Jugendstil; especially for what concerns the importance given to geometric abstraction, non-organic creations and to the devaluation of the narrative contents. He shared with Gottfried Semper the same views about structural symbolism but Riegl, by applying his knowledge about textiles disputed Semper’s theory. This opposition to Semper’s theory (of materialism) resulted in the idea of the Kunstwollen.

Kunstwollen – the Artistic Will – represented the leading drive for the progression of the style, which Riegl attributed to both, the minor and the higher arts. In synthesis, he legitimated and elevated all concepts of applied arts. Consequently, with the Spaetromische Kunstindustrie, Riegl rejuvenated the late Imperial Roman Art that was seen by the prevailing opinions of his time as a stagnating style. Riegl instead, intended the delineation of this art as a progression, a development and a means to isolate the background factors from the subject that stood to the fore. Thus, it may be asserted that with his vision he contributed in what became the modern view of artistic space. Riegl argued that what was being artistically represented was in most cases not the reality, but quite differently what it was being hoped to be the reality. He held that much art was only being produced in a certain way to make it agreeable and readable to the public. For this reason, the more dissipated forms of artistic depictions appeared to him as clear signs of the will of a more spiritual, artistic need; this he named with the terms “optical” and “haptic”. The former is identified with flatness, light and shade while the latter embeds notions of ways of seeing and three-dimensional forms. To bring an example, the haptic is analogue to the sense of touch and it can be traced back in the Egyptian’s pyramids (Riegl’s theory was in fact that people could only recognise three-dimensional things), or associated to the Renaissance buildings; on the other hand, the optical is synonymous with Baroque. Riegl thought that for the studious men it was difficult to get rid of that theory which ordinarily was put in relation with the name of Semper, according to whom the work of art is nothing else than the mechanical product of three factors: the purpose, its matter and the technique that is used. Such theory was rightly considered at the time of its formulation as an important progress in respect to the extremely vague concepts that had been proposed by the antecedent Romantic tradition; but in Riegl’s epoch it would have been about time to archive this into a past chapter of history. Since, like in many other theories of the past century, where we saw the triumph of the exact naturalistic research, even Semper’s theory had essentially proved to be nothing more than a doctrine of the materialistic metaphysic. In contrast to this mechanical conception of the nature of the work of art, Riegl has substituted a teleological hypothesis, in that he saw in the work of art the result of a determined and conscious artistic will, which enlaced, for practical purposes, the matter and the technique (teleology explains referentially a purpose or an end. Instead of accounting for just the efficient causes, it also considers a final casuality. The human behaviour is normally explained in relation to the cause that he pursues or wishes to pursue. By virtue of the same logic, the human thought explains analogously the conduct of other events that occur in nature). These last three factors no longer had that positive creative factor that Semper had attributed to them, but on the contrary they represent now a negative and repressive character.These are the coefficients of friction of the overall work of art.

With the Kunstwollen a predominant factor was inserted into the evolution. The most important consequence that arose from having introduced the concept of autonomy of the art within the study of ancient art – in contrast with the empirical positivism – was the acknowledgment of the validity even of those artistic conceptions that departed from a given classical scheme and in the specific case of ancient art, no longer considered as ‘decadence’, but as a necessary premise to the following development of modern art. It must therefore be recognised that the concept of Kunstwollen had a significant progressive function in the field of such studies in that it introduced in these studies the historical concept of cultural continuity and it recognised the positive expression of a culture that developed towards new forms, acknowledging the autonomy and the justification in themselves.

Palmette Motifs from a Handbook of Ornament by F. Meyer

Egyptian example of decorative patterns.

Byzantine patterns

J. Hoffman, Jugendstil pattern.

Riegl considered the Kunstwollen the real genetic factor of the work of art and of the style. In the brief introduction to his essay Denmalkultus, Riegl accounts for the faith in a great change that seemed to be delineating the beginning of the 1900: a profound change that did involve the culture of monuments (and therefore their conservation), but that was only the reflection of a more general change of the position of mankind within the world and man’s gaze to the past. Such change lies in the passage between the historic value and value of the antique.This is superposable over the concept of the recognition of age as the main glory of buildings. Riegl’s work is a step out towards the emancipation and the freeing of this historicist concept. He wanted to free the history of art from the idea that history is an objective return of the truth in the past, from history as the research of the origin. This freedom bears the potential of healing from the disease of historicism, as Frederik Nietzsche would define it; a disease that derives from the metaphysical illusion that behind things there is a secret, stable and eternal essence, and from the trust on the possibility of reconstructing the totality of the events in their own orthogonal projection. This is, according to Nietzsche, a false love for the past. Similarly, Riegl suggested that we must not research the origins, but to describe the happenings of a new attitude towards monuments, by adopting a perspectival look that changes its view-point. This description must be carried out through the reconstruction of its genealogy, to move the analysis to the level of value that characterises the modern culture of monuments (or the arts in general) and the value of antiquity, emerges in a battlefield and emancipates from the historic value. It is then the focus point of a genealogical view that allows us to respond to the new needs proposed by the new, modern historic conception; the nucleus of such conception is singled out by Riegl as the concept of “development”, according to which everything that has been (in the past) represents the immovable and firm ringlet of a chain of development. In regard to this it is worthy of note Nietzsche’s thought in Human All Too Human that evokes the image of the chain as a metaphor for the cultural development in which every stage – for genetic necessity concatenated to the precedent, represents the element of an overall chain where each ringlet must be equally considered and be necessary to the end of the global comprehension of the historic deployment. Besides, on a totally different field, that is the historic and scientific one, another Viennese, contemporary to Nietzsche and Riegl, Ernst Mach, with his anti-metaphysical and anti-realistic views, offers with his Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwicklung historisch-kritisch dargestellt, a reassessment of the history of mechanics centred on the analysis of its laws starting from their genesis, on the actual experience and on the concept of development, to affirm that the comprehension and judgment of and on the state of modern science cannot prescind from the knowledge of its entire development. Even for Mach then, the consideration of every stage is to be considered as a fundamental part of this chain for the evaluation of contemporary mechanics. Riegl assigns to the central category of development a proper freeing quality, that tends towards the emancipation from a traditional art-historical viewpoint.The emancipation of all historic epochs – even for what concerns the artistic value – happens due to a modern assumption of the concept of development; In the Der Moderne Denkmalkultus, Riegl pointed out that only towards the beginning of the 1900 it emerged the idea of the historic development and the necessary consequences that explain all the creations which are for us irreparably bygone and therefore they are not in any way to be considered as a canon. In her essay, Riegl: Art History and Theory, Marianne Iversen highlights this point:

At the beginning of the twentieth century, most of us have come to the conclusion that there is no such absolute art-value, and that it is a pure fiction to consider ourselves wiser arbiters than were the contemporaries of misunderstood masters in the past.[Riegl, 1929]

Only in an epoch profoundly obsessed with the lack of an own style, as it was the 1800 and in particular its second half, it could have existed such an urgent and aware need to raise an issue like that of the style, which instituted a complex categorical and interpretative mechanism. It was in the German-speaking world that it developed a powerful theoretical and historiographical meditation about the systematic character on the concept of the style. As we have observed, the architect and theoretician Gottfried Semper, due to his insistence on the koennen (German for “can”), on the know-how-to-do and for his attention to questions connected to the materials and technics, he appeared as the great enemy and dangerous materialistic and technicist counterpart, against who were the spiritualistic and teleological theories of the style that developed towards the end of thenineteenth century. Catherine M. Soussloff made an interesting point about this issue in her book The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept; she held that:

 Both textual and historical investigations into the concept of the artist occurred in Vienna from about 1905 to 1934. These were critical years in the formation of the new disciplines of both art history and psychoanalyses. They were crucial years in the formation of the Jewish identity of a group of art historians and psychoanalysts. The inference to be drawn here is that the investigation of the artist by both the discourse of art history and psychoanalyses is not coincidental but historically determined.

First and foremost those of Riegl and Woefflin, both looking at the Wollen, the will as the drive of an artistic flux. If the artistic value is relative, then it may be possible that the works of art of the precedent generations are appreciated not only as witnessing the victory of human creativity upon nature, but also due to their particular and specific conception, form and colour. It exhausts a superior will that brings men, in different epochs and regions, to the artistic production; this will is the Kunstwollen.The work of art that belongs to the past can share with the modern “art-will” only some single aspect: on the other hand however, there are aspects that cannot not differ. If the contemporary Kunstwollen does not coincide with that of the past, the aspects of the work of art that we enjoy affirm themselves with such an intensity that those which are disliked automatically become secondary. Years after the formulation of the idea of Kunstwollen, the term and concept have been reassessed by a number of other art historians, who brought their contribution in the re-shaping and re-definition of such concept. For Erwin Panofsky for example, the Kunstwollen does not consist neither in the individual will nor in the collective one; for him it is the immanent sense of the work. He attempted to integrate this concept within a Neo-Kantian principle in relation to which all works of art could be understood. According to Otto Paecht, an art historian trained by Riegl’s successors, it is instead the direction of the artistic impulse of a people in analogy with another impulse; that for which nature creates and establishes its own laws. Wilhelm Worringer also, driven by the influence of Riegl’s work, would write Abstraktion und Einfuehlung (Abstraction and Empapthy).