Journal of Art Historiography (Dec 2019)
Oldřich Stefan’s amplification of the Vienna School of Art History
Abstract
The study interprets the art historical method developed by Oldřich Stefan in the late 1930s and early 1940s as an amplification of the method of the Vienna School of art history. Stefan was professionally an architect, but during his studies in 1920s he also attended art-historical seminar of Vojtěch Birnbaum, a pupil of Alois Riegl and Franz Wickhoff. Birnbaum at the Charles University in Prague developed Riegl’s method of art history, mostly represented by his notion of a ‘baroque principle’ in the history of architecture, published in 1924. The influence of the Vienna School of art history in Prague was elaborated also by Antonín Matějček, a follower of Max Dvořák and colleague of Birnbaum at the Prague University. The tradition of the continuation of the Vienna School in Czech art historiography is widely researched mostly in connection to the conceptions of Matějček’s students, who influenced Czech art history in the second half of the 20th century, unlike Birnbaum’s students. However, beside Růžena Vacková it was Oldřich Stefan who profoundly connected his art-historical thinking to the Vienna School tradition, mostly to Birnbaum’s and also Dvořák’s thinking – the methodological foundations of his own theory Stefan elaborated in connection with the historical disruption of the known world by the Second World War. How the study suggests, Stefan amplified the methodological assumptions of the Vienna School in order to restore the impaired reality of the advanced 20th century.
