Geisteswissenschaft - Journal of Art Historiography

Riccardo Marchi Hans Tietze and art history as Geisteswissenschaft
In her remarkable and ambitious 2006 book, which also offers very original
readings of the broad significance of the modern historiography on art, Catherine
M. Soussloff highlighted Tietze’s role as one of the central protagonists in the
history, theory and art of portraiture in early-twentieth century Vienna, by virtue of
his art historical writings and of his interaction with Oskar Kokoschka, who
famously portrayed him and his wife Erica in 1909, and whom Tietze precociously
defended. 18 The history, theory and art of portraiture are, Soussloff argues, cultural
practices that contributed in a crucial way to the elaboration of the modern notion
of the subject, through the ‘development … of an ethics of representation that
emphasized subjects as socially and historically constructed selves who could only
be understood – and understand themselves – in relation to others, including the
portrait painters and the viewers’. 19
Finally, in 2007, Almut Krapf-Weiler, with the collaboration of other
scholars, edited a most useful annotated collection of articles by Tietze from 1910 to
1954, making available also to the general reader these brilliant pieces, otherwise
obtainable only in specialized libraries. 20 Building on her long standing research on
Tietze, in her anthology Krapf-Weiler also offers a thorough documentary
biography rich with new information, and an updated bibliography of writings on
Tietze. 21
Hans H. Aurenhammer’s scholarship on Max Dvořák, which has appeared
in several important articles since 1996, requires that the relationship between
Tietze and Dvořák be now seen in a light slightly different from the one in which I
had presented it in my article. 22 Then, I had insisted on Tietze’s Methode leading the
18 Catherine M. Soussloff, The Subject in Art: Portraiture and the Birth of the Modern, Durham: Duke
University Press, 2006, especially 37 and 61-82 (for Tietze and Kokoschka, with extensive
bibliography). The portrait of Hans Tietze and Erica Tietze-Conrat was purchased by the Museum of
Modern Art in New York in 1939, soon after the Tietzes’ forced emigration to the United States in the
wake of the Nazi Anschluss of Austria. I have not been able to reproduce the portrait here because of
the impossible, recurring costs of copyright fees that even open access scholarly publications are
charged. At any rate, many color reproductions are viewable on the internet; and a top quality,
zoomable digital image can be accessed by searching the online collection of the Museum of Modern
Art (http://www.moma.org/explore/collection). Interesting observations on the portrait are in Nathan
J. Timpano, ‘The Semblance of Things: Corporeal Gesture in Viennese Expressionism’, PhD diss.,
Florida State University, 2010, 16-18, 203, 287-288.
19 I quote from the back cover of the book.
20 Hans Tietze, Lebendige Kunstwissenschaft: Texte 1910-1954, ed. Almut Krapf-Weiler with the
collaboration of Hans H. Aurenhammer, Alexandra Caruso, Sabine Plakolm-Forsthuber, and Susa
Schintler-Zürner, Vienna: Schlebrügge, 2007. A review of the volume, in Czech, was published by
Jindřich Vybíral in Umění, 57: 2, 2009, 192-194.
21 See also Almut Krapf-Weiler, ‘“Löwe und Eule”: Hans Tietze und Erica Tietze-Conrat; eine
biographische Skizze’, Belvedere, 5: 1, 1999, 64-83.
22 An excellent, updated synthesis of his own work and recent studies is in Hans H. Aurenhammer,
‘Max Dvořák’ in Klassiker der Kunstgeschichte 1: Von Winckelmann bis Warburg, ed. Ulrich Pfisterer,
Munich: Beck, 2007, 214–226. Key articles, with new information on the unpublished lectures, were
‘Max Dvořák, Tintoretto und die Moderne: Kunstgeschichte “vom Standpunkt unserer
Kunstentwicklung” betrachtet’, Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, 49, 1996, 9-39; and ‘Max Dvořák
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