Hans Sedlmayr

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Hans Sedlmayr (born 18 January 1896 in Homstein (Burgenland) – died 9 July 1984 in Salzburg) was an Austrian art historian. Sedlmayr was University Professor of Art History in Vienna from 1936 until 1945, then in Munich from 1951 until 1964, and finally at the University of Salzburg from 1965-69, where he established the art history curriculum. He specialized in the study of Baroque architecture and wrote a book on the churches of Francesco Borromini. A founding member of the New Vienna School of art history, which based itself on the writings of Alois Riegl, he wrote a manifesto in 1931 called Zu einer strengen Kunstwissenschaft ("Toward a Rigorous Study of Art"). He is the author of Verlust der Mitte: Die bildende Kunst des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts als Symptom und Symbol der Zeit (1948, "Loss of the Center: the Fine Arts of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries as Symptom and Symbol of the Times"), published in English in 1957 as Art in Crisis: The Lost Center.

He joined the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) in 1932 and following World War II he lost his position at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna as a result of his membership. He moved to Bavaria, joining the editorial staff of a Catholic magazine, Wort und Wahrheit ("Word and Truth"), from 1946 to 1954. In 1951 he became a professor at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich.

[edit] References

Hans Sedlmayr, "Toward a Rigorous Study of Art (1931)," in: Christopher Woods (ed.), The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s (Cambridge, MA, 2000), pp. 131-180. ISBN 1890951145

Hans Sedlmayr, Art In Crisis: The Lost Center (New Brunswick, 2006 [1948/1957]). ISBN 1412806070