Sedlmayr and Pächt’s project immediately caught the attention of thinkers like Walter Benjamin who were similarly impatient with
“Christopher S. Wood’s long, brilliant introduction to his Vienna School Reader offers a very lively discussion of the complex dynamic between perceptible structures and deeper meanings that one finds in the work of these early-twentieth-century art historians.”
— The New Republic

This volume introduces to an English-language audience the writings of the so-called new Vienna School of art history. In the 1930s, Hans Sedlmayr and Otto Pächt undertook an ambitious extension of the art historical project of Aloïs Riegl (1858–1905). Sedlmayr and Pächt began with an aestheticist conception of the autonomy and irreducibility of the artistic process. At the same time, they believed they could read entire cultures and worldviews in the work of art. The key to this contextualist alchemy was the concept of “structure,” a kind of deep formal property that the work of art shared with the world.

Sedlmayr and Pächt’s project immediately caught the attention of thinkers like Walter Benjamin who were similarly impatient with traditional, cautious empiricist scholarship. But the creativity of the new art history had its dark side. Sedlmayr used his art history as a vehicle for a sweeping critique of modernity that soon escalated into nationalist and outright fascist polemic. Sedlmayr, and by extension the whole scholarly project of Strukturanalyse, were sharply repudiated by Meyer Schapiro and later Ernst Gombrich.

The idea of this volume is to bring the drama of this methodological and political encounter to the attention of English-speaking art historians and reveal the analogies between the Vienna School project and the anti-empiricist cultural histories of our own time.

Christopher Wood
A professor in the Department of German at New York University; he is best known as an art historian.

From 1992 until 2014 he taught in the Department of History of Art at Yale University. At Harvard University he was a Jacob Wendell Scholar and a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows. In 2002 he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and a NEH Rome Prize Fellowship to the American Academy in Rome. In fall 2004 he was Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. In 2011-12 he was a Member of the School for Historical Studies of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; and a Senior Fellow at the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften, Vienna. In fall 2018 he was Visiting Professor at Villa I Tatti.

Wood is the son of Gordon S. Wood, Pulitzer Prize winning historian of the early American republic and University professor emeritus at Brown University. His sister, Amy Wood, is a professor of history at Illinois State University.