'Appreciating the Art of Others: Josef Strzygowski and the Origins of Anti-Imperial Art History’ Seminar

This special joint seminar features a paper by Professor Suzanne Marchand on the subject of ‘Appreciating the Art of Others: Josef Strzygowski and the Origins of Anti-Imperial Art History'.

Professor Neil Gregor will be in the chair.

Professor Marchand is Professor of European Intellectual History at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, prior to which she taught at Chicago and Princeton. Her books include 'Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1970' (1996) and ‘German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship' (2009) which won the George L. Mosse Prize of the American Historical Association in 2010. Professor Marchand is currently the President of the German Studies Association.

Her paper will offer a contextualized introduction to the life and work of the Austrian art historian Josef Strzygowski (1862-1941), Europe's first chaired professor of non-European art history. A product of the Austro-Hungarian periphery, Strzygowski was a leading expert in Byzantine, Coptic, Persian, Armenian, Scandinavian, Croatian, Slavic, and Eastern European art - and a vigorous champion of the non-western origins of European cultural history. He became the hero for an astounding number of anti-imperialist and indigenous nationalist scholars throughout Central Europe and Asia. However, Strzygowski also sometimes employed racist and anti-Semitic language and championed the Nazi party in Austria. His story tells us a great deal about the rise of local antiquarianism and anti-Habsburg sentiment on the Austro-Hungarian peripheries, as well as about some of the (not very savory) origins of non- or anti-Eurocentric art history.