Journal of Art Historiography Number 17 December 2017 Strzygowski and Riegl in America Christopher S. Wood This is the English text that served as the basis for ‘Strzygowski und Riegl in den Vereinigten Staaten’, which appeared in Wiener Schule: Erinnerung und Perspektiven, ed. Michael Viktor Schwarz (= Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 53, 2004), 217-34. See https://18798-presscdn-pagely.netdna-ssl.com/christopherwood/wp- content/uploads/sites/2785/2016/05/strzygowski-and-riegl.pdf The United States was the first nation to leap into a post-metaphysical modernity, into a void unstructured by social class or by nostalgia for an antique golden age. At least this is the story the United States told to itself in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Very few Europeans, certainly few European scholars, were impressed. One old-world scholar who did have great expectations from American modernity was Josef Strzygowski. Strzygowski imagined that American scholars would follow him in his rejection of humanistic ‘superstition’, his abandonment of historical-philological method, and his disregard for traditional nationalist loyalties and for the great institutions of Church and State. ‘I have hopes’, he wrote in the pages of a new American scholarly journal, Eastern Art, in 1928, ‘that America will forge ahead of Europe in revolutionizing methods of research, especially if attention be given to my new book Forschung und Erziehung’. 1 He felt sure that Americans would follow him in opening up the history of art to both hemispheres, indeed to the entire globe. We need an ‘objective and scholarly and not merely a European and traditional point of view’, Strzygowski argued in the Art Bulletin in that same year. 2 American scholars responded with some enthusiasm. Medievalists, who dominated American art history in these years, took notice of Strzygowski’s radical theses. Strzygowski’s relentless sequence of publications had opened up a Near Eastern landscape of artistic activity—architecture, sculpture, ornament, carpets, textiles—completely unknown to, indeed never seen by other European scholars. Strzygowski's finds interfered with the organic flow of European cultural history and challenged the idea of the integrity of Mediterranean classical culture. The Princeton art historian Allan Marquand wrote an essay for the Harvard Theological Review in 1910, a year after Strzygowski’s appointment to the chair in Vienna, outlining the Austrian scholar’s ideas, calling attention to his impressive travels in the Near East, unusual in those days, and claiming that his views on the eastern 1 Strzygowski, ‘The Orient or the North’, Eastern Art 1 (1928): 85. 2 Strzygowski, ‘North and South in the History of American Art’, Art Bulletin 10 (1928): 274.