Journal of Art Historiography (Dec 2020)
The influence of the Vienna School of Art History on Soviet and post-Soviet historiography: Bruegel’s case
Abstract
This essay looks at the longstanding debates over the influence of the Vienna School of Art History on Soviet and post-Soviet Art History. From the beginning, Soviet Art History vacillated between orthodox Marxism, its materialism and approach to culture as a superstructure, and idealism if not transcendentalism of Russian pre-war art history. Despite the ideological split between Europe and the USSR, personal contacts as well as circulation of books and ideas, encouraged Soviet art historians to reconsider and adopt certain methods of the Vienna School. This process was ambiguous. Firstly, it triggered the emergence of a ‘Marxist’ Bruegel (Nikolai Nikulin, Boris Vipper) opposed to his image of an intellectual and humanist created by the Vienna art historians. And, secondly, it inspired scholars as Mikhail Alpatov and Nataliia Gershenson-Chegodaeva to study Bruegel from the perspective of gestalt/macchia or Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte. In present-day post-soviet Bruegel studies, one can spot how occasional borrowings from Viennese scholars’ writings for interpretation of the separate works replaced the interest for their methodology. Rejection of theory for the purely practical case studies, grounded in Anglo-American publications, often resulted in epigone or insignificant works, deprived of strong argument and novelty.
