What is a critical historiography, and under what imperatives and compulsions does it emerge?

Ian Verstegen’s book poses the questions that all serious art historical work must address: what must we learn from the past writings of art history? What methods, theories, aporias and problematics insist to challenge our contemporary disciplinary habits, resistances and inertias?

In reassessing the theoretical and methodological innovations, still littlestudied in English speaking scholarship, of key members of the second or ‘new’ Vienna School of art history – Hans Sedlmayr, Otto Pächt, Johannes Wilde and Otto Demus – Verstegen invites us to consider the contemporary urgencies of their provocations. Attending to their integration of formalist analysis with contemporary psychology, their methods of Struckturforschung [structural analysis], their bringing together of disciplinary reflections with close visual and material attention to works of art, Verstegen presents us with these thinkers’ ‘living approach’ to art history. Their goal ‘to make science human’ in an increasingly technological world, the insight that the object of art history is not identical with the physical presence of the artwork, the rethinking of form in terms of the ‘constellation of thought, the social and political ideas that the work indexes’, and the practice of an ‘expansive thinking’ for the humanities that embraces social science approaches – all these are issues with relevance for our age of multimedia practices, digital platforms and globalised horizons.

Verstegen’s book is one that, moreover, courageously reminds us that the confrontation with the apparently discounted, and even questionable aspects of past scholarship, remains a necessary part of any critical study. He exposes the intensive refractions of concepts such as race, Gestalt and Zeitgeist, addressing controversies within this early twentieth-century historiography: Otto Pacht’s approach to national constants; Hans Sedlmayr’s appeal to physiognomic analysis. He demonstrates how critical historiography must undertake such granular reconstructions if it is not to proceed on the basis of tacit assumptions and retreat into common-sense empiricism (or worse still, dogmatism).

In its continual negotiation of the theoretical and the empirical, the work of these pioneers of the New Vienna School is a prompt for how we might today approach the epistemology of art history.