‘”Hundreds of eyes”: Beyond Beholding in Riegl’s “Jakob van Ruysdael” (1902)’

Journal of Art Historiography

关键词: Reigl;    Stimmung;    mood;    Aufmerksamkeit;    attentiveness;    subjective vision;    visuality;   

DOI  :  

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Alois Riegl’s 1902 essay ‘Jakob van Ruysdael’ is among the strangest and least-understood writings in the art historian’s late corpus. Written in Vienna and predating the Gruppenporträt by mere months, the essay has previously been understood as a précis of Riegl’s later thoughts on Stimmung (mood, atmosphere) and Aufmerksamkeit (attentiveness.) Yet the essay, this paper contends, did not simply distil a method more fully rehearsed elsewhere. For Riegl, Ruisdael prompted meditation upon the beholding act, upon landscape painting as a genre, upon the viewer’s often-irrational role in the interpretation of ‘non-narrative’ subjects and, above all, upon the idea of art historical writing as a creative act. At the same time, the dense and little-read ‘Ruisdael’ essay was deeply engaged with late nineteenth-century models of ‘subjective vision,’ reacting to the theories of Wundt and Helmholtz on perception, anticipating the writings of Carl Einstein, Pavel Florensky, and Walter Benjamin on the destabilization of classical modes of visuality in accelerated capitalism. Riegl’s apparent adaptation– radical, even now – of landscape art as a subject suggesting a creative (and possibly irrational) alternative to pat methodological historicism is the subject of this paper.

【 授权许可】

Unknown