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Hans Sedlmayr - Art in Crisis: The Lost Center

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The history of art from the early nineteenth century on- ward is commonly viewed as a succession of conflicts between innovatory and established styles that culminated in the formalism and aesthetic autonomy of high modernism. In Art and Crisis, first published in 1948, Hans Sedlmayr argues that the aesthetic disjunctures of modern art signify more than matters of style and point to much deeper processes of cultural and religious disintegration. As Roger Kimball observes in his informative new introduction, Art in Crisis is as much an exercise in cultural or spiritual analysis as it is a work of art history. Sedlmayrs reads the art of the last two centuries as a fever chart of the modern age in its greatness and its decay. He discusses the advent of Romanticism with its freeing of the imagination as a conscious sundering of art from humanist and religious traditions with the aesthetic treated as a category independent of human need. Looking at the social purposes of architecture, Sedlmayr shows how the landscape garden, the architectural monument, and the industrial exhibition testified to a new relationship not only between man and his handiwork but also between man and the forces that transcend him. In these institutions man deifies his inventive powers with which he hopes to master and supersede nature. Likewise, the art museum denies transcendence through a cultural leveling in which Heracles and Christ become brothers as objects of aesthetic contemplation. At the center of Art in Crisis is the insight that, in art as in life, the pursuit of unqualified autonomy is in the end a prescription for disaster, aesthetic as well as existential. Sedlmayr writes as an Augustinian Catholic. For him, the underlying motive for the pursuit of autonomy is pride. The lost center of his subtitle is God. The dream of autonomy, Sedlmayr argues, is for finite, mortal creatures, a dangerous illusion. The book invites serious analysis from art criAbout the AuthorHans Sedlmayr (1896-1984) was a founding member of the New Vienna School of art historians. His books include The Architecture of Borromini, The Revolution of Modern Art, and Austrian Baroque Architecture.

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Hans Sedlmayr
Art in Crisis: The Lost Center

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CONTENTS
Originally published in 1957 by Hollis and Carter limited London Published - photo 1

Originally published in 1957 by Hollis and Carter limited, London.

Published 2007 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14

4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

New material this edition copyright 2007 by Taylor & Francis.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:

Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2006050058

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sedlmayr, Hans, 1896

[Verlust der Mitte. English]

Art in crisis : the lost center / Hans Sedlmayr ; with a new introduction by Roger

Kimball; translated by Brian Battershaw.

p. cm.

Translation of: Verlust der Mitte. Salzburg : O. Miiller, 1951.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-4128-0607-0 (alk. paper)

1. Art, European19 century. 2. Art, European20th century.

3. ArtPhilosophy. I. Title.

N66757.S4413 2006

709'.03dc22

2006050058

ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-0607-7 (pbk)

Publishers Note

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this book but points out that some imperfections from the original may be apparent.

CONTENTS

I NTRODUCTION

The Theme

Limitations of the Thesis

Part One
SYMPTOMS

Part Two
DIAGNOSIS AND PROGRESS OF THE DISEASE

Part Three
TOWARDS A PROGNOSIS AND A FINAL JUDGEMENT

GOYA DRAWING FOR TITLE PAGE OF LOS CAPRICHOS When reason dreams monsters are - photo 2

GOYA: DRAWING FOR TITLE PAGE OF LOS CAPRICHOS When reason dreams, monsters are born. (See page 141.)

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold...

W B. Yeats

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  1. Goya: Drawing for title page of Los Caprichos

  2. Ledoux: Charcoal Kiln in the form of a pyramid

  3. Ledoux: Cube House

  4. Ledoux: Spherical House for a Bailiff

  5. Ledoux: Circular House for a Wheelwright

  6. Boullee: Cenotaph for Newton

  7. Mausoleum in a half pyramid

  8. Stadium for 300,000 spectators

  9. City Gate

  10. Gilly: Design for a Blast Furnace, 1804

  11. Schinkel: Altes Museum in Berlin

  12. 13. Schinkel: Two designs for the Werdersche Kirche in Berlin, 1824-1825

  13. Schinkel: Design for a Department Store, 1827

  14. Horeau: Design for an Exhibition Hall in cast iron, 1837

  15. Paxton: Crystal Palace, built for the Great Exhibition in London, 1851

  16. Semper: Design for the Richard Wagner Festival Theatre in Munich, 1864

  17. Cottancin: Palais des Machines for the 1889 International Exhibition in Paris

  18. Gropius: The FagusWorks in Alfeld on Leine, 1912

  19. Tony Gamier: Design for Central Station, 1901-4

  20. Diagram of an American Warehouse

  21. Leonidov: Design for a spherical building of steel and glass for a Lenin Institute near Moscow

  22. Le Corbusier: Villa Savoye, Poissy, 1930

  23. Le Corbusier: Apartment, 1929

  24. Le Corbusier: Model of a Skyscraper in Algiers set on a steep slope, 1933

  25. Flaxman: Hermes conducting the Shades of the Suitors to Hades

  26. Turner: Storm at Sea, 1844

  27. Goya: Demons in flight

  28. Goya: Chronos devouring his Children

  29. C. D. Friedrich: Mountain Calvary

  30. C. D. Friedrich: The Wreck of the Hoffnung

  31. Daumier: The Washerwoman

  32. Daumier: Pygmalion

  33. Delacroix: Sketch for the Ceiling of the Galerie dApollon in the Louvre, 1849

  34. Grandville: Dream Transformations

  35. Ensor: Insect Family

  36. Elisor: Christ in Agony, 1888

  37. Ensor: Masks confronting Death, 1888

  38. Czanne: Landscape with Bridge, 1888-9

  39. Picasso: Woman Ironing, 1903

  40. Picasso: The Old Guitarist, 1903

  41. Picasso: Street Singer, 1923

  42. Kokoschka: Still life with Skinned Sheep

  43. George Grosz: Draped Figure, 1936

  44. Dal: The Temptation of St. Anthony, 1936

  45. Rodin: The Tumbler

  46. Rodin: Meditation

  47. Rodin: The Cathedral

  48. Maillol: Reclining Figure

[Today] we find a pursuit of illusions of artistic progress, of personal peculiarity, of the new style, of unsuspected possibilities, theoretical babble, pretentious fashionable artists, weight-lifters with cardboard dumb-bells.... What do we possess today as art? A faked music, filled with artificial noisiness of massed instruments; a failed painting, full of idiotic, exotic and showcard effects, that every ten years or so concocts out of the form-wealth of millennia some new style which is in fact no style at all since everyone does as he pleases.... We cease to be able to date anything within centuries, let alone decades, by the language of its ornamentation. So it has been in the Last Act of all Cultures.

Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West

Beauty is the battlefield where God and the devil war for the soul of man.

Fyodor Dostoyevski, The Brothers Karamazov

Among the more remarkable books I first encountered in graduate school was a blistering polemic called (in English) Art in Crisis: The Lost Center. It was already long out of printand mores the pity. There is nothing else quite like it in the annals of conservative cultural speculation. The author was Hans Sedlmayr, an Austrian art and architectural historian whose primary field of expertise was Baroque architecture. Sedlmayr (18961984) was a founding member of the New Vienna School of art historians, a group that flourished in the late 1920s and 1930s and included Fritz Novotny and Otto Pcht (whose book The Practice of Art Historywas one of those omnivorous explanatory concepts that set susceptible academic hearts beating faster for two or three generations. Riegl believed that there was an intrinsic evolutionary logic to the development of artistic styles, one whose career (or careers) he and his successors proposed to trace and ruminate about.

It was a fertile ideafertile, anyway, in the production of papers and books. Sedlmayr edited a collection of Riegls essays in 1929 and, in 1931, published an essay called Zu einer strengen Kunstwis- senschaftToward a Rigorous Study of Artwhich distinguished between two approaches to the study of art. The first, empirical, approach focused on such pedestrian issues as provenance, chronology, influence, and patronage. The second, more exciting, approach endeavored to ride the wave of the Kunstwollen, to intuit the inner organization of the work of art. Both approaches, Sedlmayr said, were necessary to the discipline of art history, but the second (surprise, surprise) was more essential and more valuable than the first.

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