Resumen de Art History and the Politics of Empire: Rethinking the Vienna School
The standard narrative of the Vienna school of art history has cast its authors as cosmopolitan, progressive, and aesthetically liberal. Few have focused on the interrelation of the Vienna school and the cultural politics of Austria-Hungary. An exploration of the school’s engagement with the Hapsburg Empire’s cosmopolitan ideology of “unity in diversity” reveals that Vienna school writings reproduce long-standing hierarchies in which Slav and Romanian art and culture were either dismissed or regarded as backward. Contrary to commonly held views of the Vienna school as progressive, its cosmopolitanism frequently propounded an imperialist outlook comparable to colonial attitudes elsewhere in Europe.
