Abstract

This dissertation considers the seminal work of the art historian Alois Riegl, specifically his concepts of temporality and history, within the context of the fin-de-siecle Austrian academic milieu. One of the foremost late-nineteenth-century architects of the modern discipline of art history, Riegl helped to establish his field as an autonomous discipline by distinguishing its subject matter, thematic goals, and analytic methods from the parent disciplines of history and aesthetics. His work has attracted increasing attention toward the end of the twentieth century because of its impact on such figures as Erwin Panofsky and Walter Benjamin. ;My dissertation has two primary aims. First, whereas most interpreters of Riegl focus on his notion of Kunstwollen or his theories of representation, I approach Riegl's oeuvre as a sustained investigation of the categories of temporality and history. I examine Riegl's notion of the relationship between time, history, and art as it developed from his earliest essays on calendars through his later work on the Roman art industry and Dutch group portraiture. I argue that Riegl's concept of art was fundamentally temporal in constitution; artworks registered the movement of historical time in a formal manner, rendering temporality in visible forms that were available for the empirical investigations of the historian. Thus Riegl's work can be fit within the methodological debates in the human sciences of the late nineteenth century. ;The second aim of this dissertation is to challenge a pervasive assumption in the recent literature on Austrian cultural and intellectual history, namely, that Austrian modernism adopted a self-consciously ahistorical stance in its investigations of social, cultural, and political phenomena. Faced with political and social turmoil and a nineteenth-century history of decline, so the argument runs, the Austrian cultural elite turned away from history and sought out alternate fields of inquiry that might explain contemporary problems, suggest redemptive solutions, or provide escapes from the social world. By embedding Riegl's analysis of temporality within a broader discourse on time, history, and empiricism that engaged his teachers at the University of Vienna, this dissertation challenges the ahistoricist characterization of Austrian culture. Among the figures discussed are the philosophers Franz Brentano and Robert Zimmermann, the historians Theodor yon Sickel and Max Budinger, and the art historians Moritz Thausing and Franz Wickhoff