Talk:Josef Strzygowski

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[edit] Needs work

Certain points should simply be added to fill in the background: the controversy with Riegl & Wickhoff, and the professorship in Vienna, for example. In addition the link to UVA is broken. These can be easily fixed, and I will do so soon, time permitting.

I open a talk page, not to raise these quibbles, but to question some of the existing statements.

1) "Orient oder Rom (Orient or Rome) argued that Medieval European architecture drew heavily from Middle Eastern traditions"

I recall that the book is focused as much on visual arts as on architecture, if not more so. But it has been some time since I have consulted it, and I could be wrong.

2) "Strzygowski's work on the architecture of Armenia has been particularly influential."

Influential? Rather more controversial, to the point of eccentricity, I should think. Again, I am relying on distant memories, but I thought that Maranci's book argued that Strz. had effectively marginalized the study of Armenian architecture for nearly a century.

3) "The quality of Strzygowski's scholarship has been widely criticized, but even more controversial were the racial and political overtones of his work. He was unabashedly anti-semitic, and his work foreshadowed the ideas later espoused by Nazism."

No problem with the first sentence, nor with the assertion of Strz.'s anti-semitism (although he was also, ironically, one of the first art historians to consider "Jewish art" as a valid field; remarks on this in Stephen Fine's new book.) But to say that "his work foreshadowed the ideas later espoused by Nazism" is so vague as to be meaningless. Foreshadowed how? And which "ideas"? What was Strz.'s actual relationship to the Nazi party? (After all, he died in 1941, so was around for long enough to be directly involved.) I don't know the answers, but the statement strikes me as problematic.

Will await remarks before proceeding. Best, --Javits2000 22:06, 11 November 2006 (UTC)