Alois Riegl

Alois Riegl (14 January 1858, Linz – 17 June 1905, Vienna) was an Austrian art historian, and is considered a member of the Vienna School of Art History. He was one of the major figures in the establishment of art history as a self-sufficient academic discipline, and one of the most influential practitioners of formalism.

Riegl studied at the University of Vienna, where he attended classes on philosophy and history taught by Franz Brentano, Alexius Meinong, Max Büdinger, and Robert Zimmerman, and studied connoisseurship on the Morellian model with Moritz Thausing. His dissertation was a study of the Jakobskirche in Regensburg, while his habilitation, completed in 1889, addressed medieval calendar manuscripts.

In 1886 Riegl accepted a curatorial position at the k.k. Österreichisches Museum für Kunst und Industrie (today the Museum für angewandte Kunst) in Vienna, where he would work for the next ten years, eventually as director of the textile department. His first book, Altorientalische Teppiche (Antique oriental carpets) (1891), grew out of this experience.

Riegl's reputation as an innovative art historian, however, was established by his second book, Stilfragen: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik (Problems of style: foundations for a history of ornament) (1893). In this work Riegl sought to refute the materialist account of the origins of decorative motifs from, for example, the weaving of textiles, a theory that was associated with the followers of Gottfried Semper. Instead, Riegl attempted to describe a continuous and autonomous "history of ornament." To this end he followed certain ornamental motifs, such as the arabesque, from ancient near eastern through classical and up into early medieval and Islamic art, in the process developing the idea of a Kunstwollen (difficult to translate, although "will to art" is one possibility). Riegl seems to have conceived the Kunstwollen as a historically contingent tendency of an age or a nation that drove stylistic development without respect to mimetic or technological concerns. Its proper interpretation, however, has itself been a subject of scholarly debate for over a century.

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