Oskar Pollak reconsidered: a Bildungsroman in miniature of late Austrian culture and politics

Abstract

Oskar Pollak (1883-1915), remains a ghostly figure of the Vienna School, partly because of his early death, partly because a considerable portion of his unpublished work was cannibalized and used without attribution by colleagues who survived him. Under the influence and mentorship of Wilhelm Klein in Prague, Max Dvořák in Vienna and Ludwig von Pastor in Rome, he gradually abandoned his earlier German cultural chauvinism for a supranational cosmopolitanism strongly coloured by Austrian patriotism. His emphasis in his scholarship on documentary research and written sources positioned him in the anti-Strzygowski faction of Viennese art historians, and he vastly extended the positive re-valuation of Baroque art begun in the late nineteenth century (which paralleled Riegl's and Wickhoff's rehabilitation of Late Roman art). His scholarly affinities were rooted in his experiences and sympathies as an assimilated German-speaking Jew in Prague during the period of the fiercest conflicts between Czechs and Germans.

Keywords

• oskar pollak
• hans tietze
• ludwig von pastor
• wilhelm klein
• ludwig pollak
• max dvořák
• roman baroque historiography