Riegl Quotes

“The art academies had offered a story of art as the conquest, loss, and finally reconquest of nature through the mastery of illusionistic technology, improved by a grasp of ideal beauty. Romanticism replaced this with the story of art as an acquisition and then loss of wisdom, warning us not to mistake naturalism or technical skill for such wisdom. Historicism proposed that each period expresses its view of the world through its own forms; no art form can be preferred for they are all true registrations of the evolving mind. Materialism, finally, a version of historicism, told the story of art as a series of local responses to conditions, materials, tools, and functions. The immediate purpose of Riegl's teleology was to counter the crass reductionism of the materialist version. He did this by insinuating that there was something animating the history of form, a ghost in the machine, a will to form that overrode pragmatic needs. There is a tension in Riegl's art history between the anthropomorphic concept of Kunstwollen, which locates the motor of history in the individual, and the teleological shape of history, the inexorable dematerialization and intellectualization of art, a schema inherited from Hegel and never justified philosophically by Riegl. For Riegl, all art is naturalistic; it is simply that each epoch sees nature differently. What they see is the true object of art. This transforms art history into a history of seeing, and therefore of thinking.”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History

“Riegl also solved a paradox of academic doctrine, wedded to the ideal: its tendency to summon its own subversion by reality, or by lowly life. Now that the story line is the movement from touch-based art to vision-based art, the future is open-ended, for art can always be further intellectualized without worrying about a surfeit of sublimity or transcendence, just as low subject matter does not threaten to drag art back into the weeds of practical life.”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History